Cascade Point Read online

  Cascade Point

  Book One of The Ghost Fleet

  Joshua Guess

  ©2017 Joshua Guess

  All Rights Reserved

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  Joshua Guess, Author

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  at JoshuaGuess.com. I also blog there.

  Also by Joshua Guess

  The Fall

  Victim Zero

  Dead Will Rise

  War of the Living

  Genesis Game

  Exodus in Black

  Revelation Day

  The Ghost Fleet

  Cascade Point

  Carter Ash

  The Saint

  Living With the Dead

  With Spring Comes The Fall

  The Bitter Seasons

  Year One (With Spring Comes The Fall, The Bitter Seasons, bonus material)

  The Hungry Land

  The Wild Country

  This New Disease

  American Recovery

  Ever After

  The Next Chronicle

  Next

  Damage

  Black Sand

  Earthfall

  Ran

  Apocalyptica ( Also serialized into multiple parts)

  This Broken Veil

  Misc

  Beautiful (An Urban Fantasy)(Novel)

  Soldier Lost (Short Story)

  Dog Dreams In Color (Short Story)

  With James Cook

  The Passenger (Surviving The Dead)

  This book was made possible by the support of my readers and was originally released a chapter at a time on Patreon. The sequel to Cascade point is being released the same way at patreon.com/joshuaguess right now. You can read it and other stories there for as little as $1 per month.

  1

  Staring out into the vastness of space as he orbited the planet below at a perfectly comfortable eighteen thousand kilometers a second, Grant Stone decided the view was worth getting kicked out of the PA Navy.

  At thirty-five, he was five years without the need to press his pants, bow his head, or take orders from anyone without having a say in the matter. Twelve years of making coffee for senior officers while being ignored because he didn’t have any desire to play the political games needed to climb higher was a small price to pay for where he was now.

  “Cap, you okay out there?” said a gravelly voice over the comm. “Readout says your suit’s soaking up a lot of radiation.”

  Grant toggled the switch nestled between the thumb and forefinger of his EVA suit’s glove. “I’m fine, Batta. Coming in.”

  Grant amended his earlier thought about taking orders. Fredrick Batta might be his engineer, a subordinate, but the husky Indian still managed to mother Grant into doing his bidding more often than not.

  He triggered the automatic recall and let the suit do the work. The tether connecting him to the ship contracted, a tiny electrical charge making the carbon polymers shrink and pull him back into the airlock.

  Grant keyed the mic again as air rushed in around him. “How’re we looking, gang?”

  Relaxed though their small crew might be, practice had taught everyone in his command what to expect. Grant might not sit on formality, but that didn’t mean he was sloppy where it counted. Each member of the crew knew to have status updates ready at a moment’s notice, and unlike most small independent vessels, the Fallen Angel had considerable overlap in crew specialties.

  When you ran stupidly dangerous operations varying wildly in parameters, it wasn’t really an option.

  “Engineering is green,” said Batta. “Which shouldn’t come as a shock since we’ve been orbiting this moon for two days with no problems.”

  Grant smiled. Only Batta, more interested in the newest biocircuitry breakthroughs than space itself, would call that behemoth a moon. Technically it was one, of course, but the damn thing was fifty percent larger than Earth. It orbited an ice giant nearly the size of Jupiter, just a few hundred light years closer to the Core.

  “No radiation problems?” Grant asked. “I know the planet was cooking my suit pretty thoroughly.”

  Batta snorted. “Nothing short of a laser fired by one of the gods themselves would hurt the Angel, cap. You know that.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I just like to hear you say good things about my girl. Ops?”

  Bit-Na Cho, his first officer, cleared her throat. “We’re solid here, boss. The boys are locking down the drones right now. We’ll be ready to break orbit by the time you hit the bridge.”

  “Thanks, Crash,” he said. Cho hated being called by her first name, preferring her call sign. “I’ll be up in five, unless anyone has exciting news to pass on.”

  There was a click on the line, someone opening their mic. “Uh, sir? I have something here. I’m not sure what I’m seeing.”

  Grant broke out into a cold sweat as he squirmed out of the bottom half of the EVA suit. That was Dex Chaplin talking, Batta’s apprentice. The kid was smarter than anyone Grant had ever met, but meek. He never spoke up without a damn good reason. If he was injecting himself into the check-in, something was weird.

  “I was hoping that bit about exciting news was rhetorical,” Grant said, trying to keep the mood light. “What do you have, Dex?”

  “It’s the telemetry, sir,” the kid said, his voice creaking at the edges. “I started copying over the drone memory as soon as we hauled them in, and I noticed some weird data spikes while I was glancing through.”

  “What kind of spikes?”

  Dex took a deep breath, noisy enough for the mic to pick up. “That’s the thing. There was a one-point-two-second blip where a section of space nearly a kilometer across registered bursts of electromagnetic emissions and gravitational distortions. I’d have to look closer, but first glance seems like a correlation in power between the two.”

  “Shit,” Crash said over the channel. “Did someone else Gate in here without us noticing? This was supposed to be a nice, easy survey mission.”

  And it had been. After eight months of taking the Angel through highly profitable but dangerous supply and escort missions between a warring planet and its moon, they’d taken this job at the edge of explored space as a kind of vacation. A way to make money without being shot at.

  “Ah, no,” Dex interrupted again. “No one used a Gate. The readings aren’t consistent with the sort of energy you need to open a hole into the Cascade.”

  “Then what the hell is it?” Batta said.

  This too was probably rhetorical, but Dex answered because, well, he was Dex and that was just what he did. “In practical terms, it’s impossible. Square sections of space/time don’t suddenly give off flares of microwave radiation and register gravitational shimmies for no reason. Everything I know about physics tells me this isn’t possible. Even if this weren’t an order of magnitude below the threshold for gating into the system, we’d still be seeing a ship, right? Our drone was looking right at this patch of sky when it happened, full visuals, and it captured nothing.”

  Grant closed the locker holding the pieces of his EVA suit and slipped his feet into his boots. The boots tightened as he moved, though he almost didn’t give them enough time to react. He darted to the tube set in the rear of the port bay. “Bridge,” he said.

  Gravity in the tube shifted, launching him upward and slowing him down with feather lightness to avoid splattering him against the ceiling a few seconds later. Grant stepped onto the bridge, tugging the hem of his rumpled shirt down over his belt.

  Crash began to rise from the captain’s chair, but he waved her back down. He stood with his gaze fixed on the massive display set in an arc. “I assume you already ordered Spencer to do a sweep?”
/>
  He could almost feel Crash smile when she spoke. “Of course. We’ll have returns in a few seconds.”

  “Good,” he said with a nod. “Dex, are you still there?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I want you to drop whatever else you had on your agenda and start drilling through the data. Abby Spencer is going to shoot you a real-time pipeline from the main array, so keep one eye on the display at your station.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  Grant couldn’t help smiling. Dex had only been on the crew for a year, so the preconceived notions accrued from watching too many dramas about starship captains hadn’t yet broken. For the kid, calling him sir was the most obvious way to show his respect. The rest of the crew demonstrated it in countless other ways. Dex would get there.

  Of course, Grant had done Dex an enormous favor, so maybe he’d keep on regardless.

  “Okay, kids, we’re getting out of here,” Grant said over the ship-wide comm. “The board is green, so no one should have to hold on to anything, but we have an unusual sensor return. Could be nothing, but strapping in is probably a good idea.”

  “We’re ready down here as soon as you give the word,” Batta’s voice said in his ear piece.

  “Just waiting for the main array returns,” Grant said.

  The screen lit up with a complicated field of information stacks imposed over the bit of space being scanned. None of the scrolling readouts were abnormal, from what he could see at a glance.

  “Looks fine to me,” Crash said. “Maybe the drone malfunctioned.”

  Grant shook his head, still scanning the information. “Dex did the diagnostics and programming himself. You think he made a mistake?”

  “The kid isn’t infallible, Grant,” Crash replied, but sounded doubtful.

  “No, he isn’t, but I think it’d be much more likely that he would have made a mistake with all eight of them rather than just one since the same software package was loaded onto each.”

  Crash blew out a breath. “Instrumentation failure, then. I don’t see—”

  The sensors went wild. This time it wasn’t just microwave bursts, but the whole EM spectrum lighting up space like a Christmas tree. The stars in the view screen wavered and rippled as if he were looking at them through a pool of water.

  It was only then that he realized what was happening.

  “We’re idiots!” Grant shouted. “We almost never see it from this side!”

  Crash rushed to her feet and stood next to him. “What—oh. Oh, shit. That’s a ship gate.”

  Space travel through the Cascade, the weird underspace the universe sat on top of like floating pond scum, required a specialized set of equipment: Gates. These were usually sets of high-energy capacitors and energy collectors loosely tethered to each other and the gate mechanism itself by precision gravity generators. Gates were uniform in size, and the portals they created were as well.

  The maelstrom in front of them was much, much larger than it should have been.

  Certain ships were equipped with their own Gate generators, however. The physics was beyond Grant, but it had something to do with the ratio of mass to energy output of the ship in question. Mostly it was capital ships, giant lumbering things with enough heft and fusion power to pry open a hole into the Cascade.

  Those Gates were whatever size they needed to be to let the ship through, and this knowledge was what sent a cold chill over every inch of Grant Stone’s skin.

  “Get us out of here, now!” he shouted toward the helm station.

  The low hum of the Fallen Angel’s own gate pylons extending filled the ship, then grew in intensity until the moment they discharged into space.

  Except they didn’t. There was no crackle of energy, no halo of writhing plasma wrapping the hull. Instead the capacitors wound down, dumping their power back into the main system.

  “Helm?” Grant tried very hard to keep fear out of his voice, with questionable success.

  “I have no idea what just happened, cap,” replied Bastian Krieger. “It’s like something just shut off the system. I got no override message, no errors, just a shutdown.”

  “Do we still have conventional drives?”

  A few seconds of frantic tapping. “Yes, sir.”

  Grant sighed with relief inwardly. “Okay, then. Get us as far away from that patch of sky as possible.”

  Next to him, Crash sucked in a sharp breath. “Too late.”

  Just as Grant had feared, it was the other end of a ship gate. The readings, already hovering on the edge of what the system could make rational sense of, pegged out as space itself flared visibly. A roiling torus of plasma appeared and expanded as the energy within the Cascade met real space, growing as it hugged the exterior of the ship emerging through the opening.

  It was, as Grant thought, a kilometer across. They watched the thing slide from the space beneath into the universe proper, and it just kept coming. The only construct he had ever seen that came close in scale were space stations, and none of them had the raw mass of this beast, which just kept on coming. Whatever it was, one thing was obvious.

  It was made, just not man made.

  2

  Grant threw himself into the Tactical Control Array and let the interface slide itself around his upper body. “Crash, you have command.”

  “Yes, sir. Orders?”

  With a humorless chuckle, he said, “Keep us from all getting killed by whatever that thing is.”

  The few passengers who had seen the bridge in combat invariably commented on the strange division of labor. It was unusual for the captain to give up overall command during times of crisis—unheard of, actually—but circumstances required it. Cho was the executive officer, and as XO she had Grant’s full faith. Since everyone was forced to wear several hats, and there were only three former military on board, it fell to one of those three to interface with the TCA.

  Batta was busy making sure the ship kept working, and while Cho and Grant both had the necessary implants in their brains to control the military-grade defensive and offensive systems, only Grant’s actually worked. Cho, as a heavily trained and experienced fighter pilot, would have been ideal as a gunner had the Navy not scrambled her implants before dishonorably discharging her.

  As Grant’s field of vision faded into a view of the outside, he sub-vocalized commands at the computer. “Give me a passive channel of the entire ship, with volume spikes for combat presets.” The computer played a tone, indicating the program was live. It would play live audio from every duty station in a low background hum, but bringing anything to his attention that fit with the predetermined key words he’d programmed in. “Give me an active link to Dex. I might need to ask him questions.”

  Another soft tone of acknowledgment, then Crash cleared her throat.

  “Yes, Commander Cho?”

  Crash’s voice was muffled—the headset had completely covered Grant’s face but for his mouth and nose. “I’m linking into your channel with Dex.”

  “Yeah, of course.” Why wouldn’t she? God knew she probably needed the kid’s take on what they were seeing more than him.

  Then he realized his mistake. He’d prioritized a communication after handing over command. Which was sort of like telling Crash she was in command but, you know, not really.

  He’d apologize later.

  Data rolled in across the TCA. They were currently moving away from the new arrival at ten gravities, or about a hundred meters per second squared, but Grant had his doubts it would matter if the megaship decided it didn’t want them in its sky. It had finished coming through its gate and revealed itself to be a monstrously huge but weirdly thin vessel. Readings told him it was just over a kilometer in diameter, slightly elliptical in cross section instead of round, and fifteen kilometers long.

  It was accelerating, and while the lack of a drive trail wasn’t shocking since even relatively small ships like the Angel had gravity drives, the other sensor data certainly did catch him off guard
.

  For one, the damn thing was emitting no heat. Oh, their sensors bounced off it just fine. They could see it, but despite the titanic amount of power it took to operate a gravity drive and especially to open a gate through the Cascade, the thing radiated virtually nothing. It was colder than the background radiation of the universe.

  “Why, though?” Grant muttered to himself.

  Dex’s voice crackled across the line. “What’s that, sir?”

  “I was just wondering out loud why that thing isn’t giving off any heat.”

  The good news was that the thing didn’t seem interested in them; the Angel was moving off at an angle to the megaship’s direction of travel. It was the way the nose had been pointed, the fastest and easiest vector available.

  “My first reaction is to say it’s to prevent anyone from knowing how much power they’re producing,” Dex murmured. “But then any race capable of space travel will look at that thing and understand it’s going to be a lot. So if I had to guess, I’d say it’s a heat reclamation system. They’re recycling every joule of energy through capture.”

  Grant’s mouth dropped open. “That’s crazy. Impossible. Even if they could do it...I mean...”

  “Yeah,” Dex said. “One of the hardest things to design spacecraft around is how to vent enough heat to keep us all from cooking. Looks like they’ve solved that problem somehow.”

  The ship continued accelerating, its course popping up on the tactical display. Assuming there were no major adjustments, the thing was heading directly for the local sun. At twenty solar masses, it shined with a brightness old Sol could only envy, if stars were only capable of it. Gravity drives allowed ships to ignore the stellar dance of falling in a wide circle, which the alien ship was taking full advantage of.

  Speaking of which.

  “Dex, is that thing alien? I mean, it has to be, but how sure are you?”