Interlude: Alexis and Friede

Edge of Knight and Kindred Lancer did not rendezvous at Archon Waystation with the rest of the Sunless Fleet. Before they entered the system, they slipped away from the main fleet and departed for a debris field at the edge of the system. They had one final job before they earned shore leave of their own.

Friede folded a silver coin between her fingers. She flipped it, passed it between her hands, and rubbed the dent in the middle where a bullet had struck the coin instead of her.

“Friede,” Alexis’s voice boomed over the intercom. “Edge of Knight is approaching the debris field.”

Friede stowed the coin in her chest pocket. Videos above her command console, feeds from her espionage probes, showed Alexis’s warship coming into view, surrounded by hunks of metal and ice and rock.

“We see you,” she said. “Good hunting, Alexis.”

“Easy for you to say when I’m the bait.”

“Blame the imperials for that, not me,” she said. “I’m not the reason you’re out of weapons. Disobey their orders next time or something.”

“Hmm…” was the reply after a brief pause.

“You wanted to say something, Alexis?”

“No. Nothing. Starting sweep now.”

Edge of Knight lit up like a holiday city. Criss crossing beams flashed across the debris field. The probes helped with the search. They scanned illuminated parts and broken bits of twisted metal. Two hundred year old shipwreck here. Two week old shipwreck there. This place was a graveyard.

“No visuals. Thermals coming up negative too,” Alexis said. “Hmm…”

Friede clicked her tongue.

“Oh spit it out already.”

“It’s just… have you noticed we don’t call them dogs when we speak privately?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The imperials.”

“What about them?”

“You know,” Alexis started, then started again. “Okay. Hear me out. You know how when we’re deployed together. It’s always ‘you imperial dogs’ this. And, ‘you imperial dogs’ that.”

“I don’t sound like that.”

“But you do use the phrase ‘imperial dogs.’”

“So?”

“Just now, you said ‘blame the imperials.’ You didn’t use the word.”

Friede reached into her pants for a cigar. She chewed on the butt of it.

“For fuck’s sake,” she grumbled between bites. “What’s your point?”

“I’m the one asking you that!” Alexis said over the comms. “What do you think it means? Do you think there’s a reason why we do that?”

“I don’t know,” Friede replied. “Maybe we don’t feel the need to insult them when we’re alone? We call them that to remind them who they are. What’s the point of that when they’re not around?”

“I don’t know,” Alexis sighed. “You know I was reading this book. Apparently, back during the Terran days, they had these people who sat in this little room. And you laid down on a couch and you told them about your life. And then they diagnosed you with what they called a mental disorder based on what you told them.”

“Isn’t that just a brain scan?”

“Mental disorder,” Alexis stressed. “Anyway, the practice allegedly died a few millennia ago, but it got me wondering. Do you think we need to see someone about this? Talk to someone?”

“Are you paying attention to the scanner or not?”

“There’s nothing there, I promise you,” Alexis said. “But you have to admit it’s a little strange that we insult them to their face and then embrace this kind of faux adoration in private. ‘Disobey their orders next time or something?’ Did you listen to yourself? Do we hate them or is this just us externalizing the bullying we endured when we were kids?”

“You need to see someone,” Friede said. “You’re starting to sound like that one with the eyepatch.”

“Who, Stephen?”

Friede almost dropped her cigar.

“Alexis. You know their names?”

“You probably know them too and you’re pretending not to,” Alexis rebutted. “Especially that new one. The exiled princess from Caerleon. She’s been all over GalactaNet.”

“Not a princess,” she scoffed. “She’s from a dying royal house.”

“See what I mean, Friede? You do know.”

An alarm rang from the back of the bridge and Friede snapped her eyes to her video feeds. One of her probes in the field trembled and the screen burst into static.

“Target’s on the move, Edge of Knight,” Friede tapped the terminal. “Downed a probe last seen at these coordinates.”

“Scanners are picking up a radiation spike,” Alexis replied. “Fuck. It’s trailing off. I think it’s trying to bug out of the debris field. We’re moving to intercept.”

“The other probes are converging on you. Care for enemy fire. Target’s packing heat. Everyone else, we’re firing up the Lancer. Get us in position.”

Kindred Lancer trembled as the Phalanx came online. A high frequency whine swarmed the room. Apart from the bridge and the crew quarters, almost everything else aboard the Lancer served two jobs, to house the primary weapon and to house the ammo.

Edge of Knight, on the other hand, in spite of her size, moved quickly through the debris. She crushed through chunks of asteroids and made for the explosion on the other side of the field, where Friede’s probe had met an abrupt end. Lights swelled the area.

Friede saw it, a shimmering corvette cruising beneath the shadow of several dead ships, its stealth generator masking its exhaust.

“Get me a firing solution from the probes, someone,” Friede called. “Alexis, you see it?”

“Barely. It’s fast.”

“Try to keep up,” Friede muttered. “What’s Lancer’s status?”

“Ready to fire,” a faceless voice on the bridge called out. “The probes have a preliminary firing solution. Tracking error is less than one percent.”

That’s not zero, Friede thought to herself.

“Thermal readings rising, Lancer,” Alexis yelled. “It’s priming its LH drive.”

“Tracking error?” she asked.

“Still less than one percent.”

Friede was stuck. The target was slipping away. She could chance a shot, but “virtual certainty” was a nightmare calculus. She had seen it before, the moment when near certainty failed, when the margin for error no longer became a matter of statistics but a torrent of fire and tears.

She bit her bottom lip and bled out her demons. Ulysses and the Sunless Fleet demanded too much for her fears to keep her captive. More importantly, if she backed away now, Diane would never let her live it down.

“Fire!” she cried.

Kindred Lancer trembled at the recoil. Its ferrous round snapped into subspace from a cluster of planets and reappeared in the debris field. No human could have reacted to a near instantaneous strike, but the corvette banked hard to its starboard side in an attempt to evade. Too late, the Phalanx smashed into the hull, ripped apart its rear engine, and rendered it immobile.

“Moving in to capture,” said Alexis. “Good shot Friede. Damn good shot. Did you see that veer to the right? That ain’t human. What’s a Federation ship doing all the way out here?”

“Not good enough,” Friede murmured.

She leaned back in her chair. She would have missed if that was Nightwing. Federation ships moved faster, it was true. The AI commandeering those ships reacted in ways humans never could, but Nightwing was not human either, not entirely. Nightwing was humanity’s weapon against the artificial demons that lurked the depths of space, the monster that gave up its humanity to challenge the supremacy of the machines.

“Fuck,” Friede cursed. “Not good enough."

Small victories, Friede told herself. The Edge of Knight’s magnet locked the corvette to its underbelly. Friede and Alexis would return and would report to Ulysses the success of their mission. Friede would feel useful having secured valuable intel, and would feel like she deserved a well earned shore leave. That would be enough for now.