IronStar (67 page)

She keyed the Drive Standby control.
In the space outside the shuttle’s bow, the shadow of the ghost of a Tubewall
was scribed on the Siderial metric by the ring of Higgs generators. As Kirrah
rolled the Master Drive Control clockwise, phantom particles danced and flew,
precisely anti-phased beams built, cancelled, grew stronger, still perfectly
balanced
yin
and
yang
, mass and not-mass, swelling, looming,
surrounding their tiny shell in the vastness of space.

This board,
Kirrah noticed,
has
exactly the same type of ‘Drive Activate’ key as she’d used on the Arvida-Yee’s
helm
. With a shiver, she set aside the memory of the last time she’d been
about to press this particular control. Then deliberately, she re-opened the
memory, took a good, clear look at her recollection of the last second of her
life as a Survey Service Helm:

  
- The pinging of the proximity alarm…

  
- Doris reaching for something on her board…

  
- Sammy Lee getting the last four missiles off, reaching to reload the
ready-tubes…

  
- the ugly red line stabbing into the main viewtank, like a knife
piercing the heart of her world…

Kirrah looked up, saw Doris looking
back at her, reading her, sharing her feelings and memories. Her lips peeled
back in a feral grin.

“Now where was I, before being so
rudely interrupted?” Kirrah asked the universe, and pressed the Drive Activate
key.
Yang
snapped off like a blown candle. Outside the windows, the
universe went away.

Thousand-one, thousand-two,
thousand-three, thousand-bink!
Kirrah counted, and suddenly the stars were
back.
Sho’ito
was just visible aft, a bluish point among the stars.
Using Tubedrive, Kirrah turned the vessel around, centered the tiny blue spark.
Thirty degrees away to apparent right, the hot and noticeably reduced disc of
the sun shone in isolated splendor. Two of the gas giant planets were clearly
visible, sweeping in their ponderous slow dance around the sun.

“Looks good,” Doris confirmed from
the engineering board. “I make it nine hundred light-seconds right on the nose.
Should be plenty. Here’s a view of the planet. Geez, these are crummy optics!”

Only if you’re used to Scoutship
sensors
, Kirrah said to herself. On the highly magnified view on her
right-side screen, her world was a half-full sphere. Its right hemisphere was
lit by the sun, its left, a star-blotting blackness. The terminator was a
perfect bisector, visually confirming their position far out in space and
directly over the dawn line. Under them, the planet rolled slowly from left to
right. Already its motion had carried the white-dusted mountaintops of the Wrth
homelands into the sunlight. Soon Talameths’cha would follow, then O’dakai
would roll into the light. Doris keyed another signal stream, added a view to
Kirrah’s left-side screen.

“Here’s the tightbeam feed from the
spyfly relay, Kirrah. Another idea to thank our Greenbutt friends for. You’re
really going to need to do something for them, I think. Their future won’t be
worth a politician’s promise if Admiral Dunning gets the full picture.
When
she
gets it. She doesn’t strike me as the least bit stupid, old friend.”

“You’re right, I’ll do what I can.
Let’s cross that lane when we come to it.”

In the view from the tiny spyfly
two hundred seventy million kilometers below and fifteen minutes light-lagged
into their past, the crowd surged against the thin line of palace guards
blocking the exits. Swords flashed in the pre-dawn moonlight, men and women
screamed. More and more fleeing citizens arrived at the gates, pressed the
front lines forward onto the guards’ weapons. People fell. The mob howled,
rolled bodily over the soldiers. The line broke in two places, and the citizens
of O’dakai poured out into the surrounding countryside. Men, women, children,
some running on foot, not a few on carts or horseback. All running as fast as
they could, a whole community fleeing headlong across the endless black plains.
Occasionally someone would fall, climb back to their feet, continue running. To
the spyfly’s night vision, their clothing streamed around them like dark flames
in the pre-dawn blackness.

Where was Akaray?
With a
wash of something like awe, Kirrah recognized the images from her dream of
three nights ago.
Far ahead on the plains, almost hidden in the darkness,
she could see him beckoning. ‘There!’ she shouted, but no sound came. Alone she
swung to the left, toward the promise of sanctuary
…

No, that was the dream!
Kirrah shook her head, felt the presence of Issthe behind her chair, feeling
the almost thirty hours she’d been without sleep. Here, on the sensors, were
visible the real, breathing, running flesh-and-blood people fleeing for their
lives from the results of her dream.

Issthe’s hand touched her shoulder,
lightly, and suddenly she was back in the dream,
at the place Akaray was
calling them to. Two figures pulled to a halt beside her… Captain Leitch, and
Professor Stanglee, panting, looking anxiously around for whatever-it-was
pursuing them. She turned to see Akaray’s face, laughing, as his arm gestured
sharply down. Something tiny and potent flew from his hand, and flames burst at
his feet. Captain Leitch turned and smiled his approval at her in the darkness,
and saluted. With the gesture, his dark cape and clothing fell away like an
empty cocoon, and he was gone like a liberated butterfly.

“It’s here!” said Professor
Stanglee, and smiled shyly, the way he did when someone finally figured out the
solution to one of his trickier assignments. He pulled a black cloth from his
pocket, shook it out like a magician’s kerchief, threw it over his own head and
shoulders. It swallowed him like a Tubefield taking a starship, leaving Kirrah
alone, suspended over a lake of fire.

Not alone, someone was calling,
calling her name…

“Kirrah,
Kirrah
. You in
there, sweetheart?” Doris was shaking her wrist. Kirrah woke with a start.
“Thought I’d let you sleep while we’re waiting for dawn at the target. You
seemed to need a nap.

“It’s time,” Doris said, and turned
back to her own board.

Kirrah shook the wool from her
mind, checked the chrono.
Damn! It’s been a long night
. On her left
viewscreen, the spyfly showed the empty streets of O’dakai.
No, not quite
empty
. A few soldiers scurried to their post in the early predawn light,
two looters ran from a building carrying a large box slung from a pole. In the
next street over, a crowd of people was standing before a robed figure that was
haranguing them. Two streets south, a woman was being pushed and tossed between
three men. She fell. The spyfly moved on, westward over the plains. In the
distance, remnants of the mob still fled toward the horizon. As the spyfly turned
in its automated reconnaissance pattern, the central tower of the palace caught
the first rays of the rising sun.

It’s time
, said the
exultant, glorious darkness inside Kirrah.
Do it now. And let’s get it right
.

She bent over her controls, set up
another run straight back to the planet they’d just left. Her eyes were clear,
her hands steady. Playing the Tubefield like a master musician, she held the
pseudomass precisely, teasing the monstrous black maw of gravity sliding ahead
of them, but never quite embracing it. She dropped them closer and closer to
the FTL boundary, but held back from the brink, husbanded their velocity, kept
them in the same metric as the outside, Siderial universe. On an instrument in
front of her, an eight-centimeter quarter-circle dial, a small arrow moved away
from the twelve o’clock position and started to creep clockwise around the arc.
Outside the front windows, the stars were starting to turn blue.

“Coming up on tau niner five, point
three one two cees, mark,” said Doris. The Tubedrive’s monstrous pseudomass
swept them forward, accelerating. “That piece of Kruss shit massed about one
point two grams, point seven cee will boost it to about forty-two terajoules,
that’s just over ten kiloton-equivalent. Wish we knew what to expect by way of
atmosphere bleedoff. Tau point nine, point four three six cee.”

“Whatever it does in the atmosphere
is going to be over in a millisecond,” Kirrah replied. “That’s all it’ll take
to punch through to the surface from space.”

“Tau point eight six six, point
five cee,” Doris replied. “This may be an old shuttlebus to us Survey jocks,
but you’ve gotta hand it to the Navy, they do keep their gear well maintained.”
Ahead, the stars were noticeably bluer, and the whole sky seemed to be
stretching slightly around the bluer central spark of
Sho’ito
. Stars at
their sides appeared to be pulling toward the stern, stars astern were shifting
to an orange hue and crowding together. The small arrow on the quarter-circle
tau meter had crept around, touched the one o’clock position, a tick farther.

“Tau point eight, point six cee,”
Doris recited.

A moment later Kirrah replied, “Tau
point seven one four, zero point seven cee, Tubefield off. You have the conn,
Doris. The autopilot should keep that crosshairs centered with reaction
thrusters, your screen one. Let me know if there’s any deviance at all.”

“Right,” said Lieutenant Finch.
“We’re just crossing six hundred light seconds, rest-frame. That’s ten minutes
to impact, our frame. I’m giving you eight minutes, then I’m aborting.”

“No guts, no glory,” Kirrah smiled
at her shipmate. She gestured to Peetha, rose in the suddenly-weightless
interior of the shuttle, and guided her friend back through the cockpit hatch
into the forward passenger compartment. Peetha had been making the usual
first-timer mistakes moving in null gee, but made each one only once.
Lieutenant Rash’koi had already unshackled Elizabeth’s ankle from the seat’s
support, and the RegNet reporter followed them avidly as they swam back down
the aisle and through the hatch into the aft compartment.

Kirrah closed the airtight hatchway
between compartments, checked suit integrity for Peetha and herself even as the
pumps evacuated all the air from the aft section. She confirmed that both her
companions were firmly attached by boot magnets and safety lines. The
sha’pluuth
carcass bubbled slightly as the air pressure fell to zero, then Kirrah
touched the controls and the aft door split open. Looking out the back door of
the shuttle, naked space loomed disfigured and reddened, its stars crowded
unnaturally together astern.

“Peetha, you may release the
weapon,” Kirrah said. With the reporter’s camera rolling, Peetha took the
six-by-fifteen millimeter smartshot that had taken the hand and almost the life
of her subordinate, and held it between thumb and forefinger. Delicately,
precisely, in the glare of the aft bay’s lighting, the Wrth warrior released
the object. It floated before her, perfectly motionless in the weightless
shuttle bay, and framed in the cargo door that was wide open to space. Peetha
bent her body back from the small hovering cylinder, crouched down and clear of
it.

“Got it in one, Doris. Activate
M-2,” said Kirrah. The shuttle’s maneuvering thrusters fired briefly,
accelerating the vessel forward at a twentieth-gee. The tiny smartshot
continued on its trajectory unchanged, with all the terrible velocity and
destructive energy imparted to it by the shuttle during Kirrah’s careful
maneuvering. The shuttle and everything on it, including the aft bay and its
open doors, pulled slowly ahead of the small object.

“Two minutes ten, looking good,”
said Doris’ voice over their suits’ comm systems.

“Peetha,” said Kirrah as they
watched the tiny killing device disappear behind them, lost against the lurid
starscape. “When you entered my service, I gave you one of my new arrows, and I
told you it would be the least weapon you would wield in my service. That tiny
plague-of-screams seed you just released, will strike a mightier blow than all
the blows of all the warriors combined, on our entire world, since humans first
walked there.”

The aft doors were cycling closed,
the shuttle was pitching nose-up. Weight returned, the pseudo-weight of
acceleration, as flight plan M-2 ignited the main thrusters and pushed the shuttle
swiftly away at right angles to the path of the deadly speeding mote.

Kirrah continued, “Therefore I
release you from your service to me. You are free, to remain with me as my
friend, or to return to your homeland, or to follow your future wherever you
choose. And thank you, Peetha, for the gift of your trust.” Air hissed and
gusted as the aft compartment repressurized.

Doris’ voice came via the intercom
and suitcomm both. “Three minutes thirty. Kirrah, that trajectory was as close
to dead on as we could hope for with these instruments. I’m going upTube now,
we’re far enough away that our field won’t perturb your bullet. We
don’t
want
to follow it in.” The internal grav field of the Tubedrive resumed, as they
dropped back out of the universe for a few seconds, and re-entered at rest
relative to the planet.

“Kirrah Warmaster is most
generous,” Peetha replied gravely. “Your service has been all that you
promised, and more. Not only do you make mighty weapons from oil, from a river,
from a tiny seed. You remove your enemies - by wit, by friendship, by right
judgement, no matter the cost. You conquered
Marg’ret’s
beamer, by
removing
your armor!

“All my life I have studied war. It
is all I know to follow. I believed my Wrth clan taught me well. It has taken me
a long time to begin understanding your ways. They are not like the Wrth ways I
learned as a child. They are better. I can see I have much yet to learn. I can
also see that Kirrah has further use for my blade. Therefore I choose your
service. But not as
Peetha
.” Kirrah’s eyebrows rose, and the young woman
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