Persepolis Rising полностью

“Captain on the bridge!” the chief of the watch snapped. The officers who were not actively manning stations stood and saluted. Even the consoles, polished to a spotless shine, seemed to radiate respect, if not for him as a man then at least for his authority. The blue of the wall matched the flag, and the sigil of his command—three interlocking triangles—had been built into the surface. It made him feel a deep, almost atavistic pride seeing it. His ship. His command. His duty.

“Is Colonel Tanaka here?” Singh asked.

“The colonel is in her briefing room with her senior officers, sir.”

A twitch of annoyance troubled him, as much with himself as with his chief of security. He’d meant to have a quiet conversation with her before meeting with Admiral Trejo. He’d heard unofficially that Tanaka and Trejo had known each other before, and he’d intended to get her assessment of the man. But it was too late for that now.

“The con is yours,” said Davenport, his executive officer.

“I have the con,” Captain Singh said, and sat in his chair.

“The Tempest has cut thrust and is awaiting our arrival,” his flight control officer said, pulling up the range map on the main screen. “At current deceleration we’ll make final docking approach in twenty-three minutes.”

“Understood,” Singh replied. “Comm, please send Admiral Trejo my compliments and request permission to dock with Heart of the Tempest.”

“Aye, sir.”

“I’d love to get a good look at her,” said Davenport.

“All right, let’s take a peek,” Singh agreed with a nod.

The truth was, he was just as curious. Of course they’d all been briefed on the configuration of the Magnetar-class battle cruisers, of which Tempest was the first. The old Proteus class had been retired, and this new generation was only now being deployed. He’d seen dozens of concept sketches and photographs of the ships under construction, heard rumors of the new technologies that they would support. This would be his first chance to see one of Laconia’s most powerful battleships flying free and in her element. “Sensors, let’s take a close-up look, shall we?”

“Aye, sir,” said the officer at sensor control, and the main screen shifted from the docking map to a telescopic view of the approaching ship.

Someone let out a quiet gasp. Even Davenport, an officer with nearly a decade in the fleet, took an unconscious half step back.

“Good God, she’s a big one,” he said.

The Heart of the Tempest was one of only three Magnetar-class ships to come out of Laconia’s orbital construction platform. The Eye of the Typhoon was assigned to the home fleet and the protection of Laconia itself. The Voice of the Whirlwind was still being grown between the spars and limbs of the alien orbital arrays. And while the fleet now consisted of over a hundred ships, the Magnetars were the largest and most powerful by far. The Gathering Storm, his own ship, was one of the Pulsar-class fast destroyers, and he was fairly certain the Tempest could fit a dozen of them inside its hull.

The Pulsar-class destroyers were tall and sleek in design. To Singh’s eye they were almost reminiscent of old Earth naval ships. But the Heart of the Tempest was massive and squat. Shaped like a lone vertebra from some long-dead giant the size of a planet. It was as pale as bone too, even where the curves fell into shadow.

Like all ships built by Laconia’s orbiting construction platforms, it had the sense of something not quite human. The sensor arrays and point-defense cannons and rail guns and missile tubes were all there, but hidden under a self-healing plate system that made the surface of the ship seem more like skin than not. Grown, but not biological. There was something fractal about its geometry. Like crystals showing the constraints of their molecular architecture in the unfolding of shapes at higher levels.

Singh wasn’t an expert in the protomolecule or the technologies that it spawned, but there was something eerie in the idea that they’d built things partly designed by a species that had been gone for millennia. Collaboration with the dead left questions that could never be answered. Why did the construction array make the choices it made? Why place the drive here instead of there, why make the internal systems symmetric and the exterior of the ship slightly off? Was it a more efficient design? More aesthetically pleasing to its long-vanished masters? He had no way of being certain, and probably never would.

“Tempest acknowledges,” the comm officer said.

“Remote piloting for dock now,” his helm added, and the main screen shifted from telescopic shots of the battleship to a wire frame course ending at the Tempest.