Chapter 7 - The Negotiator.
Laura. 8
She supposed she shouldn't have been surprised; a person's luck only stretched so far, and Commodore Hillman's hostile appearance in orbit - considering the size of the ship that had just torn a gouge out of the planet's surface, not to mention Guardian Wu's requisition of an Imperium Destroyer - seemed to be almost an inevitability. She wondered, for a moment, what could have happened if her Ancient companions hadn't shown up on the Atlas, leaving her and her Mariner brethren to scour the ship alone. She wasn't naive enough to think that a caravan of Mariner scientists being shuttled to the surface would have gone unnoticed, nor the constant stream of supplies that would be needed to keep them functional for however many... well...
decades
it would have taken to get a handle on the tech that this ship possessed. Then there was the matter of trying to get it all out. The chances of doing that undetected, let alone the long-term support effort by what was essentially an enemy of the Imperium in Imperium space, was so far-fetched as to be dismissed out of hand. Eventually, the Empire would have caught on to something happening, and this fleet would have shown up.
She had said before that, ship-for-ship, the Mariner fleet was among the most powerful of any known species in this part of space. The reason for that was two-fold. Most obvious was the technological boon reaped from the Primus. Even though Wu called the reverse engineering of vital ancient components "crude," he also called them effective. There was no way to replicate the materials or the power source needed to make a faithful like-for-like recreation of Ancient tech. Still, suitable alternative materials and power requirements produced better shields, improved sensors, upgraded engines, and more powerful weapons. It made a Mariner ship a force to be reckoned with. The second element of Mariner superiority came from the Mariners themselves. Generations in space had taught them to think in three dimensions, taking roll, pitch, and stellar conditions into account for almost everything as a matter of course, they navigated and flew by instinct, not by training. Humans manned imperium ships, and as skilled as they may be, they were simply not equipped to think in those terms, at least not instinctually. The things that came naturally to a Mariner pilot were part of a chain of processes to an Imperium officer, something they had to tick off a checklist that most of them didn't really understand. If two ships of equal size came face to face, the chances of an Imperium victory depended almost entirely on how much the Mariner crew fucked up.
It was, after all, a universal fact that wars were not necessarily won by the strongest side but by the side who fucked up the least and learned from their mistakes when they did.
However, the simple truth in this situation was that the Mariners would not have been facing Imperium ships head-on. The Imperium would have - and indeed
had
- sent an entire fleet. One mariner ship could take out an imperium ship with ease. Taking out
seven
Imperium ships was an entirely different proposition. Her eyes flicked to the sensor screen on the right side of the bridge. She still couldn't read the language scrolling across the display, but the extraordinarily detailed schematics of the ships in orbit made it very easy for her to identify their classifications. The Karachi was a light cruiser, a formidable ship on its own, and attached to it were four destroyers and two frigates. It would take a fleet of at least five Mariner destroyers to combat this fleet, and seeing five Mariner destroyers, the Imperium would have just called for reinforcements.
As unskilled as the humans were in terms of stellar navigation and combat, they made up for that with staggeringly high numbers of ships. The entire Mariner fleet would eventually have been dragged into the conflict to hold this position for any prolonged period of time, more and more of it being required to counter the increasing number of ships being thrown at them by the Imperium, and even then, it would eventually be destroyed by the endless waves of Imperium reinforcements. Imperium naval doctrine essentially boiled down to wars of attrition, which their almost bottomless pool of ships and personnel could always win. Saying that the Home Fleet could destroy Imperium forces at a rate of ten to one was not idle boasting; it was true, but in a large-scale battle like this one could turn out to be, they wouldn't be fighting at a ratio of ten to one; the imperium would outnumber them at something closer to thirty to one. Those were odds that not even Mariner superiority could overcome.
The Mariner high command would have known that, and the effort would have been abandoned long before it got that far, meaning the Atlas would have been abandoned, too. Understandably curious as to why a Mariner expedition was on the planet to begin with, the Imperium would have launched its own investigation, possibly found the Atlas for themselves, and even if they hadn't been able to recover it, their scientists would have started the same reverse engineering efforts the Mariners had carried out on the Primus, and the Mariners technological edge would have been wiped out practically overnight. More than that, the Atlas has something the Primus never did... Power! With those systems fully functional, it wasn't a massive leap of imagination to think that the Imperium's reverse-engineered components would be superior to the Mariner's simply because the technology they had studied had been in full working order.
Realistically, unless enormous and prohibitively counter-productive measures were taken to ensure secrecy, there was no feasible way for the Mariners to have benefited from the discovery in any meaningful way, not in her lifetime, at least.
It was starting to become more and more obvious why Lycander, the Commander of the Home Fleet and de facto leader of the Mariners, had been so eager to deal with her Ancient companions. If they could get the Atlas out of the ground - which they very clearly could - and were willing to trade for technical information, the whole problem could be neatly sidestepped, allowing both parties to benefit enormously.
But then, of course, Guinevere Hillman and her fucking fleet showed up.
Seven Imperium ships may not have sounded like something to be afraid of, at least not compared to the tales of battle groups consisting of hundreds of ships, but Laura knew how potent a force this could be. The two frigates were fast and would attempt to cut off flight vectors. One of those destroyers doubtlessly held a large-area interdiction device, and the rest would close in quickly to pummel an enemy ship with broadsides while the cruiser engaged with heavy weaponry from range. They were long-practiced, well-established, and highly predictable tactics, but there was no denying their effectiveness. The only way to really combat such a fleet maneuver was with brute strength and very few - if any - Mariner vessels were capable of standing against it single-handedly, at least not without taking severe amounts of damage.
But the Mariners weren't in the Atlas.
The casual way that Elijah had dismissed Commodore Hillman was as astonishing in its bravery as it was in its facetiousness. It was a level of insolence Laura doubted the commodore had ever experienced in her life. The only way he could have made it
more
disrespectful, dismissive, and flippant was if he had yawned at her.
It would have been funny, though.
Laura had known these two men for barely twelve hours, nowhere near long enough to establish anything like a trusting relationship with them. Yet, she found herself taking comfort in their confidence. They knew what this ship was capable of, at least in theory if not in practice, and seemed absolutely convinced that the threat from the Imperium fleet posed no danger. Considering where she was, there was only really one of two possibilities available to her: either they were right, or they were crazy. If they were right, she didn't have anything to worry about, and if they were crazy, she wouldn't be alive long enough for it to matter, so there was no point fretting over it.
With a shrug, she leaned back into the
ridiculously
comfortable chair and looked out of the main view screen. Having spent all her life in space, she'd had more experience with bridge chairs than any person should have, and this particular bridge chair had no business being this fucking comfortable. She wondered, for a moment, if she could convince the two men to let her take it to her ship to act as her new bed.
She chuckled to herself at the absurdity of her thoughts. She was currently in an Ancient Battleship, ascending through the sickly brown atmosphere of an Imperium planet, and about to potentially go into combat against a fair proportion of the 23rd Defence fleet. Not all of it, of course, but enough of it to normally make her very, very nervous. Not only was she
not
nervous, she was thinking about chairs. Under normal circumstances, she would be questioning her own craziness at that moment, but her normal circumstances must have been left in her other pants, or at least in that fucking atmospheric suit that was still laying in a crumpled heap by the outer hatch.
Before her eyes, banks of clouds zipped past the Atlas as it gained more and more altitude; the sky was starting to leak its brownness as the heavier compound - like air - grew thinner the higher they got. After only a minute or so of climbing - a feat that should have been simply impossible for a normal ship with engines this big, considering the speed that the compound cloud typically clogged them up - the sky resumed its natural azure hue, and the brilliance of the sun lit up the heavens in a way that only a Mariner could genuinely appreciate.
The brilliance of daytime, while annoying to things like body clocks, was a natural wonder that simply couldn't be replicated in space. It was light and heat, distorted and spectrally broadened by the Ozone layer, colored by nitrogen particles in the air it passed through, reflected inwards by the atmospheric bubble around the planet to make it seem more vibrant, and it bathed the planet in the most magnificent shades of blues. In space, it was a ball of fire in the center of a star system; it rarely provided enough light or warmth for anything and functioned as little more than an identificational or navigational marker for the system it sat in and the source of stellar winds and gravity fields. Laura hated being planetside for a whole host of reasons; not being able to see the stars was very high on that list. But occasionally... just occasionally... she withdrew her cynicism and sense of discomfort just long enough to be able to appreciate the astonishing beauty possible in an infinite universe. It was, after all, the dream of countless generations before her to watch that glorious blue sky slowly fade away to blackness as they finally left the planet's atmosphere, just as she was seeing now.
And then the moment was ruined by the bright red beam of an Imperium focused-laser cannon shot racing just above their bow.
Laura blinked away the sear of color on her retina, flashing a worried glance over to Wu and Elijah. "I believe that was a warning shot," Wu said glibly.
"Think we should respond?" Elijah chuckled back.
"I think it would be rude not to," the older man shrugged. "But you're in command."
The entire bridge suddenly flashed white, a glow that seemed to blind her for a few seconds before fading away, but this one didn't come from outside the ship as the first laser had; this one seemed to come from everywhere around her. She blinked again, this time in confusion, and looked around for a second before her eyes fell on the viewscreen.
It was different. The view of the outside had been broad and obstructed only by the very small amount of hull between the bridge windows and the vast expanse of space, maybe only a hundred feet or so. Now, however, there seemed to be miles of glossy gray hull between their vantage point and the front of the ship. "Err, what was that?" she asked cautiously.
"He transported us to the tactical bridge," Wu answered for a busy-looking Elijah.
