The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [21]
He sighed, went to the Marauder’s open hatch and climbed in alongside the last squad of Vox Humana troops.
‘That’s it,’ he told the waiting sergeant. ‘Time we were leaving.’
The Roug Qabakri had already left in one of the Marauders, bound for the Roug ship, the Syroga. Kao Chih, however, was being taken to the Viteazul, where Admiral Zhylinsky was awaiting his report.
The ascent from the planet’s gravity well was as swift as the descent and marginally less comfortable. Enclosed in the Marauder’s stuffy compartment, without any exterior feeds, Kao Chih sat back in his couch’s embrace and tried to wind down, closing his eyes just to relax. The next thing he knew he was being awoken prior to docking with the Viteazul.
Unlike the Marzanna and the Nestinar, the Viteazul was a purpose-built military transport vessel with an 18,000-body capacity as well as several capacious dropship bays and cargo holds. Once through the scan and decon chambers, Kao Chih was escorted by a female lieutenant to an elevator which deposited them at a small lobby in an upper admin level. She took him past two checkpoints to a metallic door decorated with the Vox Humana symbol, a string of worlds in a figure of eight. The lieutenant opened the door with her palm print and they entered.
The bridge was a long room with two narrow archways separating it into three distinct areas. In the darkness the glows of occupied workstations lined the walls. The first two areas seemed to be dedicated to sensor and engineering systems, their holoplanes full of datastreams and glyph-algorithms. The last section had a circular lower level at its centre, almost a pit, where operators in visored headgear and interface gauntlets sat in a ring of back-tilted couches. Angled holoscreens were projected above them, opaque windows busy with images and symbol patterns, a blurring datadance. And on a raised dais by the edge of the virtual operators’ pit was a low-backed swivel chair flanked by more holoscreens. Its occupant turned as the lieutenant led Kao Chih over.
‘Welcome to Bridge Operations, Envoy,’ said Admiral Zhylinsky. He was a burly, grey-haired man with terrible searing on the left of his face and an ocular implant where his left eye had been. According to Kubaczyk, he lost it twenty years ago during one of the many system battles then fought against Earthsphere attempts to disrupt governance of the Vox Humana worlds.
Kao Chih gave a short, polite bow of the head and Zhylinsky waved the lieutenant away with one hand. The other held a pointer device.
‘Captain Kubaczyk speaks highly of you,’ the admiral went on. ‘He says that your comm-link coordination was crucial to the smoothness of the evac, and that without your negotiation skills several misunderstandings could have turned ugly.’
‘The captain is too kind,’ Kao Chih said. ‘But there are others who easily put in as much effort as I who also deserve praise.’
‘I saw mention of other names,’ the admiral said. ‘But due recognition of their part will have to wait. Right now, we have a potential situation developing.’
‘A serious situation, sir?’
‘Our Roug allies seem to think so. Three ships are heading this way from well outside the system, moving in Tier 1 at high transit kinesis. Our sensors don’t have that kind of reach so we are relying on a feed from the Syroga.’
Zhylinsky used his pointer to highlight a schematic on the main holoscreen before him, bringing it to the front. It showed the local star system, the sun and its four orbiting planets, one of which was tagged with four familiar ship names. The perspective then zoomed