Event Horizon (Hellgate) (9 page)

The pilot shrugged eloquently. “Five to ten. Long enough to get a gunship in the air and go chase a handful of smoke.”

The data was fluctuating wildly, as if Etienne were trying to get a firm image on a body of water which was changing from moment to moment. Marin was half mesmerized by the warp and ripple of something that looked like a solid object one second and like a high-frequency energy signature the next. “Like bouncing a light off a spinning glass ball,” he mused, “and sometimes the light passes through, and sometimes it bounces off.”

“Exactly.” Jazinsky pointed out a peak and a trough in the data. “
Here
, it’s solid enough to be an object.
Here
, you’d swear it was just an energy pulse. Look at the velocity – whatever it is, it’s cruising at a fraction under a million kilometers an hour.”

“Not much under light speed,” Vaurien said thoughtfully.

Perlman came closer, intent on the flatscreen. “They’d drive you nuts, doing this. They come in on a heading from Naiobe or one of the gravity wells of the supergiant stars, so fast, a gunship had to fly an intersect course, we’d never catch them. Then they
stop
, the sort of brutal braking maneuver that’d pulp any living pilot. They taunt you, make you follow, before they just
vanish
. One time, I followed one of these handfuls of pixie-dust right into the dark zone behind Ulkur. Jesus, Neil, d’you remember?”

“I’ve spent a year trying to forget,” Travers muttered. “Thing is, Barb, I never saw a Hellgate ghost
outside
of Hellgate. Gill?”

“Never,” she agreed. “But don’t ask me how this adds up.”

“They cruise on momentum at this speed,” Vidal said quietly, “like they got a slingshot off the gravity well of the black hole. They stop dead in space, and on a whim they vanish back into the cracks.” His brows arched at Jazinsky. “This is a lot like how it felt like to fly transspace. Surfing gravity tides and temporal currents – and there’s no shortage of those in this neck of the woods.”

With one hand flat in the small of her back, Jazinsky straightened. “Etienne, bring a probe online. Intercept, fast as possible.”

“Probe 215, launching,” the AI responded. “Time to intercept, 150 seconds.”

A graphic depicting the probe appeared in the navtank, and the overall scale of the image shifted to accommodate probe and target. Oberon was on the extreme rim of the display, while a plot of the ghost’s trajectory winked on in soft green lines.

“Where’s it going?” Travers wondered. “You said it’s holding a set course?”

“If it’s an energy pulse, it would,” Marin said thoughtfully. “They can’t deviate after transmission.”

“And if it’s an object,” Vidal added, “it’s going
somewhere
.”

The observation was intriguing and it was Vaurien who said, “Etienne, extrapolate on the trajectory plot. Give me an evaluation of this thing’s probable destination or target.”

They might have expected some small delay before the AI had the information, but Etienne pulled it directly from standard navigation routines. “Destination is Borushek. Departure vector is identical to that of the
Tycho
.”

Every head in the Ops room came up, and Vaurien’s brows knitted into a frown. “A handful of pixie-dust wouldn’t assume an exact heading for Borushek, or anywhere specific. It’s an object. Your imaging data is being screwed up Barb. Cloaking, or deliberate jamming. And since it’s an object we don’t recognize, it’s a safe bet it’s Zunshu, probably arrived via the same event that brought the automata.”

“And
it
,” Vidal whispered, “is on its way to Borushek.”

“
It
,” Hubler corrected, “is on its way right into the middle of the minefield Asako and me just seeded.”

“The smart question being, will the mines react to something that doesn’t even look like an object most of the time?” Vidal’s fingertips drummed on Jazinsky’s workspace. “What the hell is it, Barb? Time to make a judgment call while we still have the chance.”

“A cloaked object,” Jazinsky said slowly. “I’ll tell you more in …” She flicked a glance at the chrono. “About 80 seconds.”

Vaurien touched his combug. “Tully, do we have sublight?”

From the engine deck Ingersol said without hesitation, “Yeah, no problem. Why, we going somewhere? I thought we were getting a Weimann tow back to Alshie’nya.”

“We are … eventually.” Vaurien leaned on the side of the navtank, on both palms. “Pilots, confirm.”

“Still on station,” Yuval Greenstein’s guttural voice said from the flightdeck, “and eavesdropping on you guys. You want to take off after the probe?”

“Yeah.” Vaurien frowned deeply into the tank. “Yeah, I think we’d better. Keep a discreet distance, Yuval, but put us in strike range.”

The words seemed to galvanize Vidal. “Let me take Tactical again.”

And Hubler was moving, addressing his combug and Rodman, who was back on the
Harlequin
. “Askao, power up. We’re undocking.” He stomped away across the Ops room, slightly ungainly on the biocyber legs which infuriated him, and was framed in the doorway when he turned back to glare at Vaurien. “Where do you want us?”

“Use us for cover,” Richard said slowly. “Just in case.”

“In case of what, exactly?” Rodman’s voice demanded over the comm.

“If I knew that, we’d probably be heading for Freespace with our tail feathers on fire.” Vaurien gave Hubler a wink. “Like I said, use us for cover. See what we get from the probe.”

“Twenty seconds to intercept,” Jazinsky muttered as she pulled up a chair.

“And the forward railguns are armed,” Vidal added. “Automatic targeting can’t even find a lock on this thing, so we’ll do it manually.”

The airframe gave a telltale shiver as the tug began to maneuver. Marin registered the momentary falling sensation in the pit of his belly and looked into the tank. Etienne reconfigured the display in an instant as the ship came up close on the probe. At this range the datastream was instantaneous, no time lag, and Jazinsky pored over it while the tank switched over to a dizzying visual.

“Barb?” Vaurien’s eyes never left the image in the threedee.

“Definitely an object,” she said levelly. “Twenty meters or so … Zunshunium power source. I’m seeing split-second glimpses of stuff we can recognize among a torrent of gibberish – it’s just sensor jamming, but very, very sophisticated. Any of this look familiar, Gill?”

Perlman had come to the side of the tank, but her big shoulders only shrugged. “We never got close enough to get a good look at them.”

“Whoa … energy spike,” Jazinsky warned. “Power’s going off-scale. If I had to make a guess –”

“Drive engines?” Vidal asked sharply. “Shit, Richard, if it’s getting ready to vanish into the cracks, you can bet your pension the next place it’ll show up is Borushek.”

And this, Marin thought with stone cold rationale, was
exactly
the way so many of the Resalq homeworlds had been destroyed. This was what Mark Sherratt had been afraid of for a long time – the reason Saraine was dormant now, while for months Riga and Harrison Shapiro’s staff had lived poised on a five minute evacuation alert.

“Richard?” Vidal’s voice was sharp. “We’re going to get one chance. Catch or kill?”

“Catch,” Jazinsky said quickly. “Please – catch. We need this thing! Damn, you know what it is, don’t you?”

It was almost certainly what the Resalq had come to term a planet-killer, Marin knew. A world-wrecker. Without much real doubt, this was the device intended for Borushek. It was the first time the Zunshu had targeted a major colony world, and the first high-intensity strike since the destruction of Albeniz.

“Pilot, take us out to maximum distance for effective railgun strike, and then – Michael, hit it.” Vaurien did not hesitate. “Let’s see how it likes the guns. If you see it stagger, bring a geocannon to bear.”

The railguns began to stream blue-white lightning while he was still speaking, and Marin held his breath. He was watching the display where Jazinsky continued to monitor velocity, heading and the object’s distinctive energy signature. Zunshunium was as unique as a fingerprint.

“The energy spike is subsiding,” she mused. “Looks like it doesn’t care for being hit. Energy levels are almost back down to the point where they began, and still falling.”

“We might have hurt it.” Michael Vidal paused to recalibrate his weapons. “The geocannon is primed. Say the word, Rick.”

“It’s powering down.” Jazinsky’s fists were clenched. “It’s going dormant, Richard.”

“You’re guessing, and you can’t afford to,” Vaurien warned.

She pushed away from the workstation and sent her data to the navtank. “
Look
at it. What’s this look like to you?”

She made a good point, Marin thought. If the object had been any machine built according to human or Resalq technology, one would have said it was damaged, perhaps even badly damaged. If nothing else, the comprehensive cloaking that had made it close to indistinguishable from the background noise of Hellgate was dwindling away, leaving the Zunshu
thing
very obviously a machine.

But Vaurien was less sure. His eyes skimmed back to the weapons display, where the geocannon firing solution had resolved into a firm track since the jamming shut down.

“Richard?” Vidal was waiting.

“We need it,” Jazinsky insisted. “You know
exactly
what this is – we’ve never even seen one of these before, and we might never see one again! We can catch it in Aragos.”

“It can turn on us,” Perlman rasped. “It can self-destruct and take this ship with it. The time Bravo chased a Hellgate ghost into the dark zone behind Ulkur –? We must have cornered it, or else the thing was damaged, like this one might be. It destroyed itself. Ask Neil. It sent itself to hell with the kind of blast you’d expect if a Prometheus generator fell so far out of line, it blew. Ask Neil!”

The question was asked with a slight lift of one brow as Vaurien’s dark eyes turned to Travers, and Marin watched as Neil simply nodded, a mute response hinting at memories too horrible to be clearly recalled. Jazinsky was still determined, and Marin guessed she would make every argument about
Wastrel
and Resalq tech being far superior to anything Fleet possessed. Vaurien stalled her with a soft word. It was never more obvious that he was the captain of this ship, and command was not a democracy.

“Deep image it,” he said quietly. “If its cloaking just failed, you can image it right down to the molecular level.”

“Theoretically,” she said with forced calm. “To get down so deep would take ten, fifteen minutes at minimum safe distance. It’s not going to give us that kind of time.”

“Get what you can, Barb – use the probe’s deep imaging platform and do if fast, because we’re about to back way off. Tully?”

“Right here,” Ingersol responded from the engine deck. “You’re going to want the big handling drones.”

“If you’ve got four operational, launch them all.” Vaurien reached into the threedee, sorting through menus, fishing for data.

“We’ve got four,” Ingersol assured him. “They’re on the ramps … it’s going to be bloody tricky. The velocity of this thing –? Shit, Rick, you’re not asking for much.”

“I know. Get the drones close enough to lock tractors on the
object
, and not one centimeter closer.” He gave Jazinsky an almost apologetic look. “And I know we need it, but I’ve a nasty feeling … as soon as it registers the pull of tractors, it’s going to self-destruct with the kind of implosion that was intended to leave smoking wreckage where Borushek used to be. Tully, make full thrust available to the sublight engines. Yuval, standby to move us the hell away from it, soon as Barb’s done imaging it.”

“You got it,” Greenstein called from the flightdeck.