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  WARBIRD

  They were impossible to classify using Earth’s taxonomy; creatures with insect wings, bird bones and many mammalian features, closer to monotremes like the echidna and duckbilled platypus than placental mammals.

  WARBIRD

  by

  Jilly Paddock

  Warbird

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Cathaven Press

  © 2019 Jilly Paddock

  The moral right of Jilly Paddock to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-9160212-0-4

  Cover Art © 2018 Adam Benet Shaw

  www.abshaw.com

  Frontispiece © 2018 Jim Pitts

  www.facebook.com/fantasticalartofjimpitts/

  For Bev and Sue, who told me that I could, so long ago.

  Also by Jilly Paddock

  Zenith Alpha 4013 (the Anna & Zenni series)

  To Die A Stranger

  With Amber Tears

  StarChild

  The Beauty of Our Weapons

  Afton & Jerome (SF detective fiction)

  The Spook and the Spirit in the Stone

  Dead Men Rise Up Never

  The Dragon, Fly

  (an anthology of short stories)

  No Earthly Shore

  (SF first contact novella)

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Other Books By

  1: Dr Christopher Brennan: Pre-flight cheques

  2: Lieutenant Commander Benjamin Ede: Broken Promises

  3: Captain Quinn Gresham: Assumed Command

  4: Commander Rachel Murray: Harp and Lyre

  5: Kit Brennan: Happy Birthday, Mr President

  6: Rachel Murray: Temporal Lobe

  7: Rachel Murray: Rules of Engagement

  8: Quinn Gresham: Dangerous Liaison

  9: Rachel Murray: Hot Gossip

  10: Rachel Murray: First Contact

  11: Rachel Murray: Rescue, Times Two

  12: Rachel Murray: Puzzle Rings

  13: Rachel Murray: Going Mediaeval

  14: Rachel Murray: Prometheus Unbound

  15: Rachel Murray: Rumours of War

  16: Lieutenant Carla Villeneuve: The Merry Mutineers

  17: Quinn Gresham: Seen in the Shower

  18: Rachel Murray: Molecular Roulette

  19: Carla Villeneuve: God Bless the Libertine

  20: Rachel Murray: Marie Celestial

  21: Rachel Murray: Alien Abduction

  22: Quinn Gresham: Tricking the Trickster

  23: Rachel Murray: Meteoric Fall

  24: Rachel Murray: Assassins

  25: Rachel Murray: Red in Tooth and Claw

  26: Rachel Murray: The Nine-and-Sixty Ways

  27: Rachel Murray: The Nameless One

  28: Rachel Murray: A Winter’s Tale

  29: Dr Lyn Sawyer: The Handsome Cabin Boy

  30: Rachel Murray: Sleepwalker

  31: Rachel Murray: Eighth Circuit

  32: Lyn Sawyer: Plan B

  33: Quinn Gresham: Destroyer of Worlds

  34: Rachel Murray: Lest We Disappointed Be

  35: Rachel Murray: The Distant Triumph Song

  36: Rachel Murray: Star Chamber

  37: Rachel Murray: Honest Woman

  Author Biography

  1: Dr Christopher Brennan: Pre-flight cheques

  A low, leaden quilt of cloud hung over the city, brooding and spitting odd mouthfuls of rain into the wind, a miser of a squall, jealous of its riches, waiting for a wider audience in the streets to savour its ill temper. I was glad to be inside, although the storm within was sure to be fiercer than its elemental brother. A low, wide room this, bright and as shiny-new as if the painters had quit only an hour ago. Aseptic, glossy, smacking of technology.

  God, how I hate these showpieces, these gems of worthless modern architecture with their ritzy, pseudo-stylish decor! This season’s colours adorned the walls, thick crimson and encrusted gold, an opulence that would better suit subdued lighting. Here the wall of gothic arch windows collected all of the thin daylight, tinting it to a cool grey-blue and funnelling it like water into the room. The brilliance was aided and abetted by rows of stark, white luminous panels and the total effect was of dried blood overlaid by scrambled egg, crass and bordering on the nauseous.

  Strange that I should be so disturbed by changing fashions and so-called progress, strange and stupid, but a man needs some stability in his life. How could I construct a craft fit to sail to the stars and yet build my own life on sand?

  “Dr Brennan? Kit?”

  I wasn’t aware of speaking aloud, but Lis was looking up into my face with a helping of concern on her own.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Me? Fine.” I liked Helisa Iolanthe Roderick, not least for her pretty, fanciful name. She had a personality to match it and I don’t think a less assured woman could have carried it as easily, although she was plain old Lis to her friends. This project had thrown us together for the best part of eighteen months and now that it was reaching resolution, I was beginning to feel adrift, although not quite lost, not yet. I planned to ask Lis out to dinner tonight, if we won here today—hell, make that even if we lost! She might even say yes to the invitation. “What was it Wolfe said; I’d rather have written a poem than taken these heights?”

  “Wrong city, Kit. He was talking about Quebec and this is Montreal,” she corrected with a smile. I liked to see her smile and it took my mind from the knot of tension in my guts, but only for a little while. “I won’t verify the accuracy of the quote either, but I do understand what you mean.”

  I turned aside and investigated the spread on the buffet table, an assortment of pretty, trivial snacks with no real food in evidence. Lis was still at my elbow, so I casually dropped the dinner invitation into conversation and although she smiled again, she didn’t give me a straight answer.

  “If we win?” she said. “Do you doubt the outcome of the battle?”

  “Constantly. What’s your gut-feeling?”

  “We ran the simulation eight times, shuffling the parameters on each turn. We won five to Anderson’s three.” Her voice was pitched low, under the hum of idle talk, and she leant so close that I could identify the keynotes of her perfume, jasmine and musk. “If you stick to the briefing notes I sent up yesterday, we can’t go wrong. I had my best psychologist calculate the weightings.”

  “Who’s in the chair?” I decided to ignore the food and settled for a glass of sherry. It was dusty and too sweet.

  “Rhys Tifaine.” Lis nodded towards the tall, heavy-set woman. She was an academic with liberal leanings, a world expert in the diverse fields of xenobiochemistry and pre-20th century poetry. “That’s good for us. Tifaine’s fair and she’ll stand no nonsense from the rest of the committee.”

  “These bunfights were her idea.” I recalled. At the time I’d wondered at such a gentle, feminine notion ever taking shape inside that particular skull. “She thought a touch of socialising might help the military and civilian sections of the Corps’ High Command to mix.”

  “Smart idea.” Lis conceded. “Pity it doesn’t work.”

  The military faction was in uniform as usual, six old buzzards standing stiffly and
muttering in their own ranks, veteran campaigners to the last man. At their heart was one of the Corps’ most influential men, General Jorge Winston Anderson, Commander of the Home Fleet. I’ve always considered his parents to have been prescient in the matter of his christening; they must have guessed their baby was fated to be a leader of men. Maybe he came from a family of generals, soldiers all the way back to Waterloo, so they were on a pretty sound base. I have problems taking the man seriously though—I always find myself trying to imagine how he’d have coped with that worthy name if he’d been a hairdresser say, or an artist.

  The other half-dozen committee members were varied in sex, age and dress, talking with cheerful animation and even, God help us, daring to enjoy themselves. Rhys made our number up to thirteen and if that qualified us as a coven, maybe that was utterly appropriate.

  We suffered another quarter-hour of enforced partying before Rhys called us to the table. What with the protracted scrambling and jockeying for positions, those civilised manifestations of human pecking order, it was another ten minutes before the meeting came to order.

  “Okay, people,” Rhys Tifaine paused, as we settled to business. “You know what’s at the head of our agenda today. I surmise this from the fact that we have no absences or apologies for the first time in months.”

  That earned her a bouquet of hostile stares from our clutch of generals and brigadiers. We even had one lonely commodore today, a man called Dempsey. I’ll be so grateful when the last of the old school retires and we only have to cope with one ranking system.

  “Let’s kick off then,” Rhys was saying, oblivious to the disapproval conjured by her informal handling of the Chair. “Dr Brennan, for those of you who don’t know him, heads up R and D. He has the latest update on the Terran Space Corps Vessel Vienna. Go ahead, Kit.”

  I took in the reactions around the table, seeing expressions brightening and even some friendly grins. Anderson was sitting opposite me with a face as hard as the back wall of a privy. Rumour had it that he never smiled.

  “Behold, I bring you glad tidings of great joy!” I announced, winning over some of the military’s dislike. It wasn’t a difficult task as I’d been a thorn in their sides for so long they’d learned to loathe me. “The good ship Vienna has passed all her flight tests with flying colours. We can’t fault her one iota and there’s no reason to delay her commissioning. We’re handing our baby over to you, at last.”

  The one reaction I hadn’t anticipated from them was a respectful silence. Only now did they grant me a measure of respect and I found it strange after the years of criticism and neglect, hard to accept. Vienna’s labour had been long and tortuous. Five years of painstaking research, design and construction, five years of arse-licking and pimping for funds to keep the project on its feet, a five-year chunk out of my life. Hell, I’d paid dearly, as had others in my department; add to the bill one suicide, four addicted to drink or drugs, a dozen marriages shot down in flames, one of them mine. Yet it was worth all of that and more to see Vienna completed. She was unique, the first craft to be built with the speed, range and payload to make intergalactic exploration not only feasible but practical. Once she’d proved herself others would follow, but she was the first and the hardest to deliver; like an eldest daughter, I’ll always love her the best.

  “In case anyone’s been asleep for the last few years, would you be kind enough to remind us of the Vienna’s attributes.” Rhys requested. “Purely for the record.”

  “She’s the only full-sized cruiser to be provided with the Eveleigh drive. People seem to think it’s just another rehash of the standard FTL drive—I can assure you it isn’t. The ships we have already travel through a subspace dimension outside of the ‘normal’ space-time continuum, which the popular media likes to call hyperspace, and take anything from one to six weeks to cross the gulfs between systems.” I ignored the outbreak of vacant stares and frowns of confusion; this was baby stuff and if they didn’t understand it, they were welcome to access any search engine. “Vienna passes through a different ‘quality’ of space and can traverse vast distances in a scant handful of seconds. Don’t ask me to give you an explanation of how it works, because I can’t. I sat through Brett Eveleigh’s lecture on the theory at the inception of the project; it was full of words like ‘mass-skipping’ and ‘tachyon translocation’, not to mention a whole bunch of concepts I found impossible to stretch my brain cells around. Four dimensional reality as a shadow of seven occult dimensions, superstring theory... that kind of high-powered garbage.”

  I shook my head, remembering how animated Brett would get trying to explain his theories to the rest of us and how our inability to understand what he viewed as simple concepts would irritate him almost to the point of fury.

  “It’s all there, inside my head.” He’d told me once, after one shot of bourbon over the odds. “I can see it, as candy-clear as a kiddie’s picture book, but I can’t seem to explain it to anyone. The words don’t exist, not even in higher mathematics. That’s to be expected, I suppose. Look at the guys who put together the groundwork on quantum mechanics—they had to coin a whole heap of nonsense words to describe the field. Up, down, strawberry, quark... all stupid names to pin down an idea. If I were more of a poet maybe I could invent a new language and everyone could see it as bright and beautiful as I can.”

  “What your drive does is teleport.” I’d decided, inspired by spirits of the material kind.

  He’d denied this with unexpected vehemence. “No, Kit, not that! Think of it as a ladder; we’re all crawling about at the bottom, orthodox FTL is the first rung, my drive is the second one up and teleportation is, or will be, maybe rung three or four. Ah, but the top of the ladder, Kit, think of that! Sometimes I dream of what might lie at the top!”

  I drew my thoughts back from the past, cleared my throat quickly and went on. “We built the prototype drive, installed it on the little scoutship Psychoed and proved it was more than a boffin’s daydream.”

  “I’m surprised Professor Eveleigh isn’t here,” said one of the women. “It would have been appropriate to invite him to this meeting, to celebrate such an historical event.”

  Rhys looked pointedly at me and I avoided her gaze. “Brett died, three weeks ago. Suicide, due to personal problems, unrelated to the Vienna project.”

  That was a lie, mostly. I thought of the note he’d left, characteristically on the screen of his terminal, white capitals on black: ‘WHY? WHY NOT? SURELY IT’S THE ONLY SANE REACTION TO THE MADNESS THAT IS THE UNIVERSE?’ Poor Brett, he was burdened with too much wisdom; only ignorance guarantees a long life. I hoped he’d found out what was at the top of his precious ladder. “After Psychoed’s triumph, we designed a cruiser around Eveleigh’s invention. On Vienna the unit’s been scaled up and had all the teething problems ironed out.”

  “But the drive will work?” That came typically from Anderson.

  “It does. Vienna is state-of-the-art, General, fitted with the latest and most sophisticated systems, hardware and software. She’s intended for a crew of four hundred, although we propose to send only half that number on her maiden voyage.”

  The commodore cleared his throat. “I understand, Dr Brennan, that the vessel is armed?”

  “At the insistence of the Corps’ military wing and against my advice.” I glared at Anderson. That battle he’d won. “She has a fighting capability that equals any of our dreadnoughts.”

  One of the civilians indicated a question. “How soon can the maiden voyage begin?”

  “We suggest July 1st as the date for official launch. That gives us twenty two days to pull in and brief the crew and let them adjust to the ship.”

  “What is the position on crew selection?” Anderson cut in, ignoring the Chair.

  “May I take that question?” Lis chirped up, on cue.

  “By all means.” Rhys nodded and added an introduction. “Dr Helisa Roderick, Director of Personnel.”

  “We’ve placed most of the cr
ew members,” Lis continued. “With regard to the officers, we’ve left the choice on the electronics and engineering side to Dr Brennan and his department.”

  “The chief engineer on the project, Wilder, has volunteered to fly with Vienna,” I added, following my script. I’d been glad to take up Mark’s offer, as it had saved me resorting to blackmail to ensure he went with the ship. “I think that indicates his confidence in her, don’t you?”

  “Medical, Life Sciences and Linguistics have filed their choices and I expect the list from Technical to arrive within a day or two.” Lis frowned along the table at the offending department head.

  “Tomorrow,” the man promised, reddening. “Without fail.”

  “Which only leaves us to decide on the command posts.” Lis took a deep breath. This was it, the crisis. “I take it all of you have seen a copy of the short list?”

  “Of course.” Anderson produced the flimsy sheet with a flourish, while the rest of the committee called it up on their datapads. “Good people, all of them, but when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of it, there is only one choice. For my money it’s a running battle between Fisher and McAllister for captain, with the loser taking second. No question about it.”

  There was a smattering of agreement, mainly from the General’s side of the table.

  “Both in your fleet, General?” I observed tartly.

  Anderson scowled and Rhys Tifaine let out a little artificial cough to break the deadlock. “All of you have seen the list?” She waited until each member had signalled assent. “Thirty of the cream of our officers, a cornucopia of expertise and excellence. Dr Roderick, I take it there is no significance to the order in which they appear on the list?”

  “The number tagged to each candidate is the result of a random shuffle, nothing more.” Lis admitted. “I would like to point out that a great many factors go into our selections, a wealth of varied data on all of the subjects. Qualifications, past record, medical and psychological factors, all are taken into account. We have considerable confidence in our results.”