The Price of Conquest

Kressa awoke to a dull pain in her left side and the detached lassitude brought on by the lingering effects of painkillers. She pried open gummy eyes and looked around. She was lying on a high bed in a small room. Medical equipment crowded but did not cramp the chamber in a display of traditional Teneian efficiency. By all outward appearances, she was in a ward in Stingray One's sickbay.

The Stingray…

The bright glow, the shadow ship, they must have been dream-fantasies of her fading consciousness. She breathed a relieved sigh, and then continued her inspection of her present situation.

She was naked beneath the thin blanket that covered her bunk. A medical cuff enclosed her left wrist, silently beaming her vital signs to a bio-monitor near her head. She craned her neck to study the displays that adorned the front of the machine, but could make little sense of the readings. She turned to a more reliable source of medical information: herself.

A dull line of pain ran across the left side of her chest where her fighter's safety harness had bit into her skin. She rolled back the bedcover and sat up slightly to inspect the injury. A dark bruise traced a path from between her breasts to the base of the left side of her ribcage. A paler bruise bisected the first to form a vague X. The injury was tender to the touch, but it could have been much worse.

Served her right for trying to come to a sudden stop at the speed she'd been flying. Of course, she hadn't had much of a choice. She only wished she knew what happened to her ship to cause its sudden failure.

She set aside her questions for the moment, pulled the blanket back into place, and proceeded with her self-diagnosis. Her lungs and throat felt raw, and a remote sensation of discomfort encompassed her body, its full impact undoubtedly masked by pain-killing drugs. But there appeared to be no critical damage, and except for a slight drowsiness, she felt ready to get up and begin working the soreness from her body.

An older, brown-haired woman in a Teneian medical uniform entered the room. She flashed the well-practiced smile all medical personnel used.

"How are you feeling, Ensign?" the woman asked, and then checked the bio-monitor's readouts.

Kressa started to answer, but her throat was rough and parched. Her words came out a hoarse croak, and she abandoned the effort.

The medic smiled in understanding and offered her a cup from the stand beside the bed.

"Drink this." She raised the head of the bunk with the touch of a bedside control.

Kressa gingerly adjusted to the new contours of the bed, and reached for the cup with a grateful smile. But her smile faded when she noticed the details of the woman's insignia. She was assigned to Stingray Two.

Kressa glanced around the room again. Her second inspection revealed the slight differences she should have noticed earlier.

Stingray Two. She was aboard Two. What had happened to One, to Jonathan…?

She turned to the woman and started to question her.

The medic frowned and steadied the cup Kressa held.

"Take it slow," the woman admonished softly, obviously assuming her patient's behavior to be a physical aberration rather than an emotional one. "Drink this and you'll feel better." She helped Kressa sit up and raise the cup to her lips. "Not too fast now."

The drink was cool, sweet, and slightly syrupy. Kressa felt its soothing effects on her throat almost immediately.

"You finish that," the woman said. "I'll be right back." She stepped from the room for a moment, and then returned to take the empty cup from Kressa and set it on the bedstand. "The captain will be here in a moment." She removed the monitor cuff from Kressa's wrist and set it on the bio-unit. "He's been waiting to talk to you."

"But—" Kressa's voice cracked hoarsely.

The medic raised a silencing hand. "I'm sure he'll answer all your questions." She smiled her medic's smile again and left the room.

Kressa collapsed back onto the bed with a ragged sigh and closed her eyes. The woman said "the captain" was coming to talk to her, but which captain did she mean? Westlex or Mathan? She was aboard Stingray Two; she was afraid she knew the answer.

"Kressa?"

She started as the unexpected voice called her back from the twilight edge of sleep.

"Kres?" the wonderfully familiar voice called again.

It's a dream, she thought, not daring to open her eyes. But the soft touch on her cheek was real, and the strong hand in hers…

"Jonathan." She looked up with a relieved smile.

He looked tired, his eyes red-rimmed and bleary with the effect of stimtabs, but he was alive, apparently unhurt, and smiling down at her.

"Are you all right?" Her voice was smoother now.

"I'm fine." He squeezed her hand and brushed a wayward strand of hair from her eyes before leaning forward to give her a gentle kiss. "How do you feel?"

She managed a nonchalant shrug without grimacing. "A little sore, but time will take care of that. How long have I been here?"

"Aboard Two? About eight hours."

"What happened?"

He almost laughed. "That's an ambitious question, Kressa. Care to narrow it down a bit?"

"What happened to Stingray One? I saw the explosions, and the—glow, but…" She shook her head, unsure how to continue. "How is she?"

Jonathan leaned against the bedstand, Kressa's hand held loosely in his. "She'll make it. Those explosions were Gaunis's planet-buster bombs, like the ones he used on Taas."

"He was trying to destroy Calton?"

"I doubt it. Those bombs were meant strictly for us, although I don't think he'd have hesitated to use them against the planet. Fortunately, we weren't completely unprepared for them. I had Lieutenant Satra working on an explanation for those fighter clusters before I gave the order to attack. She made quite a few conjectures, but none of them seemed to link up with what was happening. Then you guessed that some of the ships were drones. After that, it all came together. We rolled the ship so her less-damaged side would face the explosions, and set the hull's energy converters on that side to share their burden with the darkside modules. Then we turned up the radiators and discharge units to full emission, and hoped for the best."

"Why didn't you just move the ship?"

"And give Gaunis the opportunity to drop those bombs in your father's lap?" He shook his head. "We came here to prevent that. Anyway, what we did was enough to keep the hull intact, but the nelux is shot. I doubt there's enough left to power a transfer to Teneia for a refit, but we won't know for sure until we get her cooled down, and that will take some time. Right now, the techs are working on getting enough systems back on line to take her down to Calton where we can use the atmosphere to help radiate some of the energy stored in her hull."

"Then she's still at Calton?"

Jonathan nodded. "So are we."

"But what about Gaunis? If he disabled Stingray One, why didn't he take back the planet?"

Jonathan gave her a wry smile and pushed a hand through his hair. "Because Captain Mathan asked him to leave."

"I thought you ordered Mathan to keep out of the Calton business."

"I did. Fortunately, while you were here at Calton, Mathan and I had a talk about following orders." He looked at her with another smile. "Mathan is a very apt pupil."

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

"He disobeyed your orders?" Kressa started to laugh, but a twinge in her ribs made her stop. "That must have been some talk."

"Oh, it was. It was quite an eye-opener—for both of us."

Kressa realized suddenly that the shadow ship she'd thought to be an after-image of Stingray One's glowing form must have been Two arriving at Calton.

"So Gaunis backed off when Stingray Two showed up?"

Jonathan hesitated. "Uh—Stingray Two didn't show up. Stingray Five did."

Kressa gave him a quizzical look.

"Mathan figured Gaunis would be less willing to try anything drastic against him if there were three other Stingrays waiting to track him down, so he announced himself as Five."

"I don't believe it."

"Neither did I, but it worked. Gaunis left so fast he didn't have time to pick up all of his fighters."

"Too bad we can't chase him down and finish the job."

"Unfortunately, he ran straight for Eminence, and despite what he may believe, we have only one functioning Stingray. That's not enough to take on the forces at Eminence."

She nodded and gazed around the room. "When can I get out of here?"

"Anytime. They've done all they can to fix a couple of cracked ribs and too many lungfuls of bad air. But, I warn you, you're going to be sore when you start moving around."

"I can feel that. But why? What happened to my fighter? Everything went up all at once."

"EMP," Jonathan said. "Electromagnetic pulse from the bombs. Remember the toasted equipment in the emergency shelter on Taas? Same thing, only worse. Gaunis seems to have rigged his bombs to throw out extra EM radiation, presumably as a way to damage the Stingrays. The radiation from the explosion hit your fighter, and then propagated on your hull and fried every circuit and component it could find. I can't even begin to tell you what it did to the Stingray's systems where it got through her hull."

"But her hull absorbs electromagnetic energy."

"It can only absorb so much before the converters overload. The remainder of the pulse energy had nowhere to go but into the ship's systems."

"Wasn't there anything you could do about it?"

"We did all we could. If the hull had been intact and the bombs detonated one at a time, we might have been able to discharge between pulses. But Gaunis had the bombs set to detonate simultaneously. I'm just grateful we were able to destroy three of them before they went off."

"What happened to the other ships in the area?" Kressa asked. "Did the pulse knock out their systems too?"

"It did. But you got it worse. Did you know you were flying without a full set of back-ups?"

She nodded grudgingly. "I didn't think I'd have a complete system failure. What are the chances—?"

He stopped her with a frown. "Obviously the chances were good enough. I should put you on report. Or, better yet, I'll just tell Reese about your—"

"Reese!" Kressa interrupted, remembering the commander's fighter engulfed by the fireball. "Is he all right?"

"He will be. His ship got hit a little harder than yours. But he was flying with a full set of back-ups."

"All right, Jon, you've made your point. But I took that hit before we even reached the Patty squadrons. If I turned back then, who would have figured out about the drones for you?"

"I'm sure someone would have put it together. Still, it was you who figured it out first. I suppose that balances the fact that you were flying an unfit ship. So… I won't tell Reese." He paused to lean close to her. "But when he reads it in the report and has you scrubbing out exhaust tubes for a month, don't come crying to me." He gave her a playful smile, and then moved around the bed to a narrow closet. "Are you ready to leave?" He reached into the closet to withdraw her uniform. "I need a bodyguard."

She began levering herself into a sitting position. "Where are we going?"

"Downstairs, to the Governor's Base. I have a meeting with Shaw, but Commander Aerhom insists I take someone along for protection. You're elected. If you feel up to it, that is." He placed the clothing on the bed, and then looked at her.

She was sitting up now, the blanket fallen down around her hips.

One eyebrow crept up Jonathan's forehead in an amusingly carnal look. "Nice bruise, Kres—but you really should do something about that swelling."

She glanced down at her injury, baffled. She didn't remember any swel—

"Jonathan!" She looked around for something to throw at him as she realized what "swelling" he referred to.

He ducked to avoid the cup that came sailing in his direction, and then straightened with a grin.

"Oh, I almost forgot—" He reached into the closet again and removed a gunbelt with a Teneian stunner and pulse gun. "I had these delivered for you." He laid the belt next to the uniform.

She leaned forward and pulled the weapons to her. "I thought I wasn't supposed to take guns in to see the governor." She pulled the pulse gun from its holster and checked the charge.

"You're not supposed to take concealed weapons, but you'll be wearing these in plain view. Won't you?"

"Whatever you say, Captain."

"Good. Now hurry up and get dressed. There's a shuttle waiting for us."

* * *

Nearly half an hour later, the shuttle delivered Kressa and Jonathan to the landing field at Calton's Governor's Base. It was only a few minutes past noon, local time, but it could just as easily have been early evening for all the sunlight making its way through the heavy gray clouds overhead.

Kressa looked dubiously skyward as she stepped through the shuttle's airlock onto the landing ramp. She did not know much about Calton's weather, but she recognized an approaching tempest when she saw one. Already, the wind was starting to blow, bringing with it an icy bite that hinted at oncoming winter.

"A car will be here to pick us up in a minute," Jonathan said as he stepped out of the shuttle beside her.

She started down the boarding ramp, carefully favoring her left side. She paused halfway down to glance across the landing field at three nearby ships identical to the one that brought them: Teneian shuttles bearing the insignia of the Confederacy and of their mothership, Stingray One.

"Why are they here?" Kressa asked, nodding toward the shuttles.

Jonathan followed her gaze across the windswept field.

"With most of One's systems down, we didn't want to risk treating our wounded on board. Two's sickbay is filled with pilots, so Shaw's letting us use the base hospital to treat the overflow."

She continued her descent to the landing pad. As her booted feet touched the field, she caught sight of a Patrol groundcar approaching from the direction of the base's buildings.

She gave the vehicle a suspicious look, allowing herself to relax only after it pulled up and a Confederate soldier stepped from the driver's-side door.

The man saluted, and then opened the back door. "Good afternoon, Captain, Ensign," he said, inviting them into the vehicle and out of the gusting wind with a gesture.

Jonathan motioned Kressa into the car ahead of him. She ducked inside, too uncomfortably aware of the circumstances surrounding her previous ride in the back of a Patrol groundcar to enjoy the service or the shelter from the cold wind. Jonathan seemed to sense her uneasiness and gave her an encouraging smile as he settled in beside her.

The drive across the field took less than a minute, but it seemed much longer to Kressa as she concentrated on ignoring the myriad warning voices that kept yammering in her head, trying to tell her that everything she was doing was dangerously, perhaps fatally, wrong. Unconsciously, her right hand rested on the grip of the gun at her side.

"Relax, Ensign," Jonathan whispered, forcibly removing her hand from the gun. "You're a bundle of nerves."

"I'm your bodyguard. I'm supposed to be nervous."

He glanced out the front window as the car began to slow in front of the administration building.

"Take us to the hospital first," he told the driver, and then looked at Kressa as the car picked up speed again, its windows beginning to spot with heavy raindrops. "We're a little early for our meeting with the governor," he explained, "and I'd like to visit some of our wounded."

A double complement of armed soldiers guarded the entrance to the base hospital. Half of them were Shaw's men, wearing white Patrol uniforms with the United Galaxy insignia removed; the others wore the tan and maroon uniforms of the Confederate Navy. As one, they came to attention and saluted when Jonathan stepped from the groundcar. He returned the salute briskly, and then made his way through the rain to the double doors that led into the hospital lobby. Kressa accompanied him in attentive silence.

"Still nervous?" he asked once they were inside.

"I don't know," she said, scrutinizing their stark white surroundings. "There seems to be an awful lot of guards around."

"This is a military hospital," he said, and then leaned close to whisper, "You're a soldier now, Kressa; the people in uniform are the good guys."

She sneered. "I'll try to remember that."

"Sir," he said.

"Huh? Oh, right. I'll try to remember that, sir."

"Come on," he said with an amused grin, motioning for her to follow.

Kressa soon realized this was not Jonathan's first visit to the hospital. He knew his way around, which rooms his people were in, and even referred to several of the staff members by name.

After the first few visits to Confederate patients, Kressa found herself beginning to relax and enjoy the lighthearted banter that was Jonathan's way of showing his gratitude to the people who worked with him. She had just started wondering why he'd bothered to take Commander Aerhom's advice to bring a bodyguard when they turned a corner to find three armed Patrol soldiers standing in their path.

Kressa's guard came up instantly, and she placed a protective hand on Jonathan's arm, keeping him from moving closer.

Her gun was halfway out of its holster before she realized that the white-uniformed men had only looked up at their arrival, and then one leaned in the open door of the room they were guarding.

Jonathan looked at Kressa, one eyebrow raised at the hand gripping his arm.

She smiled apologetically and released her hold, but she did not relax.

Jonathan started for the door, but stopped when Richard Shaw and Aidan Terling stepped through the opening.

"Admiral, Mister Terling." Jonathan's surprise at seeing the two men was evident in his voice.

"Captain Westlex," Shaw said, looking a trifle guilty. "I'm just… uh, visiting some of your people. To thank them." His eyes strayed past Jonathan to Kressa and his expression changed from guilt to amazement.