The Commanders' Mate. Grace Goodwin
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woman or innocent child in our search. It seemed the warriors who called this ship home had managed to get their families off the vessel but how that was even possible remained a mystery. Fuck, this entire situation had endless questions yet to be answered.
We walked the corridors of Commander Varsten’s battleship. Not my ship. Not my people. Not my sector of space. But they were all mine now. The dead lining these corridors and floating in the cold emptiness of space just outside the ship were my people. This barely-functioning craft was now under my control.
They were mine. With their commander missing, the survivors who’d lived through the direct attack on this ship, as well as those in the battlegroup who’d been sent to safety, were my responsibility. And there were a shocking number of Varsten’s people packed into the remaining cargo and support ships hiding on the other side of the nearest planet’s star. It was as if Varsten had known the attack was coming and ordered all his people and half of his fleet out of danger right before the Hive could strike.
But that made no sense. Why would he evacuate non-essential personnel and knowingly move an elite class battleship into a trap? Why sacrifice a battleship and multiple support crafts? Leave Sector 438 open to Hive occupation? This area of space was neighbor to mine. Varsten and I had spoken often over comms, discussed strategy and Hive activity. He had been a patient male with two decades more battle experience than I. A wise commander. He wouldn’t have done anything without reason. Finding out what had happened here was my first priority.
As was hunting and destroying the Hive attack fleet that had caused such destruction. I’d been transported here from Battleship Karter, along with an entire squadron of medical, military and support personnel, after receiving the distress call from those sent to safety. But they had not called during the Hive attack, but after it was over.
Hours after. We still had no explanation for that.
Seven hours, to be exact. We’d received a comm call from those who had been hiding on the other vessels. Unfortunately, there were no high-ranking officers among them. No one seemed to know what had pushed Commander Varsten to make such radical and inexplicable decisions.
Nothing made sense. Nothing.
“Where is the command crew?” I asked.
“We don’t know.” Our boots echoed with each stride as he answered me. “Those who are left of Varsten’s battlegroup remain on the other side of the star. The star’s radioactive field is interfering with our short-range comms and they are refusing to activate their quantum comm links.”
“You’re telling me he cleared his entire battlegroup of people, minus the command crew, into hiding, into… what, safety?”
He nodded. “It appears exactly that.”
“Do we have ships in Sector 437 available to come here and escort them safely through a manual evacuation? The Coalition will not want to abandon these vessels.” The other cargo and support vessels—the ones that had remained clear of the attack—had transport technology, but they were not equipped to handle the transport of nearly five thousand people.
The main battleship housed one-thousand four hundred warriors and family, as well as acted as the landing base for smaller assault ships. The ship itself was heavily armored and loaded with blaster technology in order to defend the smaller ships around it. Each commander of a battlegroup was in charge of one battleship and ten to twelve smaller support ships. Each group, referred to as a battlegroup, was named after their commander and responsible for one sector of space. Fully staffed, a complete battlegroup, all ships, held nearly five thousand people.
That was too many to transport in a short amount of time. Short-range attack ships from Battleship Karter would not be able to make it all the way to Sector 438 without assistance, and the ships still here in the dock of Battleship Varsten were all but destroyed.
The best option was to transport as many people as possible to Battlegroup Karter and send the remaining cargo and support vessels from Varsten’s fleet on a direct course to intercept with the Karter and her ships as quickly as possible. But that would mean the smaller ships from Varsten’s group would be unescorted and vulnerable to attack. And even that was assuming Prime Nial and the other fleet commanders would be willing to surrender this sector of space.
Not likely. Odds were Prime Nial would command me to split my fleet and resources and hang on to both Sector 437 and 438 until Commander Varsten’s fleet and personnel could be replaced. Prime Nial would commission a new battleship and assign a new commander to this area. But that would take time.
Time the Hive might not give us.
Bard sounded as grim as I felt. “A few. If the survivors left now, they would rendezvous with our support ships in about thirty-six hours, but Varsten’s pilots are refusing to move. They said they are under strict orders from Commander Varsten not to move yet, but they don’t know why.”
“And where the hell is Commander Varsten?” That was the question I most needed an answer to. Where was my old friend, and what the fuck had he been thinking?
Bard’s lips pressed into a thin line. “Dead. They found his body in the pilot’s seat of an attack shuttle. He was flying support, protecting the main ship. And he was alone.”
“No co-pilot?” He was dead, and so, it seemed, were my hopes of getting some answers.
“No one. No navigation. No comms. He was running solo.”
Another mystery I had no time to solve. Almost five thousand people were currently stranded on ships meant to sustain half that. And their battleship was gone. Well, we stood on what was left of it. Non-functioning and uninhabitable. Even if the rest of the Varsten’s battlegroup moved out from behind the star, they would have no battleship to protect them. If they returned… if we left them here, alone and unprotected, they’d be ripe for Hive capture. That would mean five thousand new Hive drones, soldiers, breeders.
No.
“How many survivors on the other forward ships? Do we have a body count?” I asked. Only a handful of dead warriors littered the corridors. I hated to think the Hive had taken the rest. It didn’t seem possible, but then, I’d seen worse things.
Bard looked down at the tablet he carried. “Only three survivors so far. We’ve counted twenty dead, including Commander Varsten, but we haven’t searched the entire ship.”
“What the fuck was he thinking?”
Vice Commander Bard didn’t respond to my question. I knew he didn’t have that answer. Instead, he said, “Two members of his command crew have been transported to ReGen pods back on the Karter.”
Gods be damned, maybe they would know what was going on here. “And the other survivor?”
When my second didn’t speak immediately, I stopped walking, forcing him to do the same. He was a strong Prillon warrior, and I trusted his judgment and his instincts. In this instance, his silence sent alarms through my system. As if the annihilation of almost an entire battlegroup wasn’t bad enough. Battlegroup Varsten had been protecting Sector 438 since I was a boy. The devastation around me was unthinkable. As was Varsten’s death.
“He’s I.C. and he’s not talking.”
I closed my eyes for a moment, let that extra level of insanity sink in. I.C. Intelligence Core. The dark side of the fleet. “Fuck. Where is he? I’ll make him talk.”
Bard arched a brow. “Should we get a message to Commander Phan?” He grinned, his copper skin and bronze eyes narrowing with anticipation. “I’m sure she would love to take a pound of flesh from one of her own.”
A few years ago, that would have been true. Now, the Earthling was a mother. A mate. And permanently under my command. She had saved my entire battlegroup not long ago, she, a human named Kira, and the contaminated beast she’d shown up with had worked together to dismantle a network of invisible mines the Hive had placed in space. Those mines had been trapping my entire group of ships. “She’s too valuable. I won’t