Ричард Бейкер - Valiant Dust

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About the Author

Copyright Page

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FOR DAD.

I think you would’ve liked this one a lot.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to my lovely wife, Kim, for keeping me going these last few years. The road’s a little twisty but I think we’ll like where we’re going.

My first-draft readers helped me to make this a better book. So, my thanks to Cormac, Luke, Darrin, Chris, Chris, Ryan, and David. You guys rock.

A special thanks to my agent, Richard Curtis, and my excellent editor, Jen Gunnels, for their hard work in bringing this project to fruition.

And, finally, thanks to Alex and Hannah for sharing my appreciation for nerd culture. It’s a lucky man whose daughters read Lovecraft.

For heathen heart that puts her trust

In reeking tube and iron shard—

All valiant dust that builds on dust,

And guarding calls not Thee to guard—

For frantic boast and foolish word,

Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!

—Rudyard Kipling, “Recessional”

1

New Perth, Caledonia System

Lieutenant Sikander Singh North leaned forward in the shuttle’s right-hand seat, eager to catch his first glimpse of the light cruiser Hector. The shuttle climbed slowly into low orbit, only four hundred kilometers above the feathered white cloud tops and gray-green dayside of New Perth. The white glare of Caledonia’s sun illuminated dozens of freighters and tugs going about their business in the planet’s busy approaches. Sikander quickly spotted the huge mass of New Perth Fleet Base—hard to miss, really, since the orbital structure was the size of a small city—and narrowed his eyes, peering in turn at each of the ships moored to the station’s long arms. To his disappointment, the hulls of the Aquilan warships all looked the same at this distance; he felt he should have been able to spot his new ship as easily as he might pick out a pretty girl’s face from a crowd. He’d certainly spent enough time memorizing every detail of CSS Hector ’s lines and armament over the month and a half since he’d received his new assignment.

Beside him Petty Officer Second Class Robert Long, a pilot in Hector ’s Flight Department, smiled. He’d guessed exactly what Sikander was doing, and he pointed out the docked cruiser for him. “Left-hand side of Fleet Base, sir, the second berth from the top. We’ll be there in just a minute.”

“Thank you,” Sikander replied. He looked where the pilot pointed, and there was the Aquilan Commonwealth starship Hector, hull number CL 88. She was not the newest or largest of the ships moored at New Perth’s orbital dock, but she was a handsome vessel nonetheless. He tapped the visual controls for the shuttle’s viewports and zoomed in for a good look. Two hundred and sixty meters long, the Ilium-class cruiser (so called because all of her sisters were named for Trojan heroes from Homer’s ancient epic, or so Sikander had read) had a graceful teardrop-shaped hull and powerful drive plates in sleek fairings aft. Her deadly kinetic cannons were housed in large, dome-like turrets that dotted her spine and keel, and the round ports ringing her bow concealed her potent torpedo battery. Hector might have been nothing remarkable by Aquilan standards, but she would have been the most powerful warship several times over in Sikander’s native system of Kashmir, and it would be at least another generation before his homeworld could build a ship to match her.

“The Old Worthy’s a fine-looking ship, isn’t she?” Long observed. “Captain Markham is a stickler for appearances. She isn’t happy unless the paint’s still wet somewhere on the hull. But that’s the way it ought to be.”

Sikander agreed with the sentiment. If Hector ’s captain took pride in her ship and wanted everyone to know it, he wouldn’t argue. Of course, the Commonwealth Navy didn’t actually use real paint on their warships, or at least not the sort that went on wet and dried into a coat; it was more of a nanoengineered polymer designed to stand up to the rigors of vacuum while displaying a handsome color scheme. Some star navies, such as the Dremish or the Nyeirans, favored all-black paint that made them a bit harder to spot with visual detectors, but stealth was generally pointless in normal space; simple physics dictated that ships couldn’t hide their heat signatures. The Aquilans recognized that and chose colors designed to evoke a little institutional pride from their ships’ crews. Accordingly, CSS Hector boasted a gleaming white hull, with buff-colored upperworks and beautiful red piping around the bow and the drive plates.

The shuttle continued its approach, while Hector seemed to swell up to fill the cockpit’s viewports. Sikander dialed back the viewport magnification, and leaned over to call down to the shuttle’s passenger area. “Come have a look, Darvesh,” he called. “We have a few minutes yet before we dock.”

“I am certain I shall see enough of Hector over the next two years, sir,” Darvesh Reza replied in a carefully neutral tone. He generally disapproved of the fact that Sikander continued to serve in Aquila’s star navy instead of returning to Kashmir to assume the proper duties of a North. Despite his reservations, the valet unbuckled his restraints and came forward to the cockpit, ducking through the low hatchway and steadying himself with a hand on the back of Sikander’s seat. In deference to the requirement of being able to don a helmet in case of catastrophe, the tall Kashmiri wore a small round pakul instead of his customary turban. Darvesh functioned as Sikander’s security detail, secretary, and general minder as well as his body servant. The impassive valet’s eyes widened just a little as he took in the size and lethal beauty of the Aquilan cruiser.

“Impressive,” Darvesh admitted. “And she is only a light cruiser?”

“Still three times the size of anything we can build back home,” said Sikander. The Commonwealth of Aquila was a first-rate power, by some measures the foremost among the multisystem states that formed the core membership of the Coalition of Humanity. Decades or centuries ahead in technology and industrial capacity, the great powers far outclassed single-system backwaters, even populous and economically valuable ones such as Kashmir. Sikander’s home system was merely a client state—or a colonial possession, more accurately—to Aquila. Building a fleet of large, modern warships remained out of reach for Sikander’s people, but he hoped to change that someday. Until then, he wore an Aquilan uniform.