The Killing of Worlds (11 page)

“How are they doing, Hobbes?” the captain asked. His voice seemed so soft, so human now, absent the usual amplification of the captain’s direct channel.

“I …” Hobbes continued to scroll through the various compoints on the ship. The primitive interface was maddening. Ten awful seconds later, she was forced to admit, “I don’t know.

sir.” Hobbes wondered if she had ever said those words to her captain before.

“Don’t worry, Hobbes,” he said, smiling at her. “They’re probably between compoints. Just let me know when they call.”

“Yes, sir.”

Despite losing his legs and one arm, the captain seemed hardly bothered by the blindness of darkmode. Zai was actually working with a stylus—on paper, Hobbes realized.

He noticed her gaze upon the ancient apparatus.

“We may need to use runners before this is over, Hobbes,” he explained. “Just thought I’d practice my penmanship.”

“I’m not sure I know that last word, sir,” she admitted.

He smiled again.

“On Vada, you couldn’t graduate from upper school without good handwriting, Hobbes. The ancient arts always come back eventually.”

She nodded, recognizing the ancient root-word. Pen-man-ship. It made sense now. As always, the Vadan emphasis was on the male gender.

“But perhaps old ways aren’t a priority on Utopian worlds, eh, Hobbes?”

“I suppose not, sir,” she said, feeling a bit odd that the captain was conversing with her only moments before the
Lynx
would come under fire. In darkmode, of course, there was not much they could do other than chat.

“But in lower school I did learn how to use a sextant.”

“An excellent skill!” the captain said. He wasn’t kidding.

“Though it was hardly a requirement for graduation, sir.”

“I just hope you remember how, Hobbes. If the Rix hit our processor core again, we may need you at the hard viewports.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, sir.”

“Twenty seconds,” announced a young ensign, raising her voice to be heard across the bridge. Her eyes were fixed on a mechanical chronometer someone had dug up from stores. Captain Zai had also produced an ancient Vadan wristwatch from among his family heirlooms. He had examined the two timepieces, determined that they ran on springs—making them undetectable to the Rix—and synchronized one to the other with a twist of a minuscule knob.

As the ensign counted down to the point when the Rix could begin firing, Captain Zai handed Hobbes the writing instrument and paper.

“Care to have a go?”

She held the stylus like a knife, but that didn’t seem right. She tried it like a pointer.

“Turn it around, and slip the business end between your index and middle fingers,” the captain said quietly.

“Ah, like a fork almost,” Hobbes replied.

“Five,” said the ensign. “Four…”

Hobbes made a few marks. There was a certain pleasure in the pen’s incision of the paper. Unlike air drawing, the friction of pen against paper had a reassuring physicality. She sketched a diagram of the bridge.

Not bad. But writing? She crossed two parallel lines to make a crude H. Then formed a circle for the O.

“Zero,” said the ensign. “We are in range of the enemy prime’s capital weapons.”

Hobbes tried the other letters of her name, but they dissolved into scribbles.

The chief sensor officer, leaned over a headsdown display, spoke in a loud, clear voice, as if addressing an audience from a theatrical stage.

“She’s firing. Standard photon cannon. Looks to be targeting along our last known vector.”

Hobbes nodded. The Rix would have tracked the
Lynx
until 450 seconds ago, when they’d dropped into darkmode. But the coldjets had pushed the
Lynx
onto a new vector.

The captain had taken a risk with that. The coldjets used waste water and other recyclables for reaction mass, and Zai had shot half the frigate’s water supply, and even a good chunk of the emergency oxygen that was kept frozen on the hull. The ship had gotten an additional bit of kick from ejecting the reflective bow armor with high explosives. They were now thousands of kilometers from where the Rix thought they were, but they had almost no recyclables to spare. If they lost their main drive to enemy fire, it would be almost a year before the low-acceleration rescue craft available on Legis could make it out to repair and resupply them. A single breakdown in the recycling chain—bacterial failure, equipment malfunction, the slightest nano mutation—would doom them all.

And despite herself, Hobbes wondered if the Navy would prioritize rescuing the
Lynx
. With a war on, there’d be plenty of excuses to delay chasing down a stricken warship that was flying toward Rix space at two thousand klicks per second. Laurent Zai was still an embarrassment to the Emperor. They would all make good martyrs.

“Short bursts: one, two, three,” the sensor officer counted. “Low power lasers now; they’re looking for reflections.”

“What are their assumptions?” the captain asked.

Ensign Tyre, who had been moved up to the bridge from Data Analysis, struggled with the limited processor power and her heads-down’s unfamiliar physical controls. The silent-running passive sensor array was basically a host of fiber optics running from the hull to the same small, shielded computer the pilots had been complaining about.

“From where they’re shooting, they seem to think we’ve doubled back on them … at high acceleration.”

“High acceleration?” Hobbes murmured. “But we obviously aren’t under main drive.”

“They’re being cautious,” Zai said quietly. “They think we may have developed a stealthy drive in the last eighty years, and that we’re still bent on ramming them.”

Of course, Hobbes thought. Just as the Rix evolved from one war to the next, so did the Imperials. And the
Lynx
was a new class of warship, only ten absolute years old. It had nothing as exotic as full-power stealthy acceleration, but the Rix didn’t know that.

Katherie Hobbes turned the page of the captain’s writing tablet, giving herself a clean piece of paper. With a few long strokes, she drew a vector line of the
Lynx
‘s passage through the battlecruiser’s gravity-cannon perimeter. Writing letters was difficult, but her fingers seemed to know instinctively the curves of gunnery and acceleration.

Over her career, she’d traced the courses of a thousand battles, imagined or historical, on airscreen displays. Her tactical reflexes seemed to guide the pen, rendering the Rix firing pattern as the sensor officer called it.

The two ships’ relative velocity was still roughly 3,000 kps—it would take hours of acceleration to change that appreciably. Thus, the
Lynx
‘s course was practically a straight line running nearly tangent through the sphere of the gravity cannon’s effective range, like a bullet passing through a dribble-hoop ball at a shallow angle. While they were inside the sphere, the Rix could hit them. But the frigate would pass out of range within minutes.

“They’ve gone to higher power, with a wider aperture,” Tyre said.

The Rix weren’t firing to kill now; they had reduced their laser’s coherence to increase the area they could cover. They were hoping that a low-energy hit would reflect from the
Lynx
, or cause a secondary explosion that would give her position away.

In effect, they had replaced their sniper’s rifle with a flare gun.

“They’re picking up the pace. I can see a pattern now: a spiral from our old course,” Tyre said.

“How fast is the spiral expanding?” Hobbes called, her pen frozen above the paper.

“Outward at about a thousand meters per second.”

Hobbes looked at the captain, her spirits lifting. The Rix were sounding a vast area. They had assumed the
Lynx
was still under heavy acceleration, at multiple gees rather than the micromaneuvers they were actually making.

“The enemy seems to have overestimated us, Hobbes,” Zai said.

“Yes, sir.”

Hobbes turned to another fresh page of paper, filled it with a line spiraling outward and dissected by radials from the center: a spiral grid.

Thinking that the
Lynx
was still under her main drive, the Rix were casting a wide net. But the firing rate of the battlecruiser’s laser would have an absolute limit. In order to search such a huge volume, they necessarily had to reduce the grain of their search grid; the Rix net had wide holes in it. If the
Lynx
were broadside to the battlecruiser, the low-res search might have picked up the two-kilometer-long craft. But the frigate was bow-on, her hull only two hundred meters across from the Rix’s perspective. And with the bow armor ejected, only naked black hullalloy remained to reflect the laser.

Hobbes drew a small circle in the circular grid, a minuscule gnat slipping through the web of a spider looking for fat flies.

“They’re going to miss us, sir.”

“Yes, Hobbes. Unless they’re very lucky.”

“One hundred ninety-nine. Two hundred.”

“All right, shut up!” First Engineer Watson Frick shouted to the dogged ensign. “Keep the count going, but silently. Let me know when you get to eight hundred.”

Frick’s skin tingled as if he were under a sonic shower. The ensign had been in positive territory—counting up—for two minutes. No matter how imprecise the count might be, the
Lynx
was certainly within range of the enemy’s capital weapons by now. At any moment, a gravity beam might swing across the ship and mangle them all. They had at least another six hundred seconds before they were out of danger.

Frick’s side still throbbed—yes, a few ribs were definitely broken— as he regarded the hastily assembled armor plates.

The last piece was in place. The hullalloy shielding was spread across the cargo area to maximize coverage of the ship. There were seams, even naked gaps, but he couldn’t seal those without using cutting torches rated for hullalloy. And that would show up on the Rix sensors like an
SOS
beacon.

The problem was, the plates were practically floating free, held to the bow hull only by stronglines and monofilament. Engineer Frick had counted on using the recyclables stored in the cargo area to pack the hull sections into place. But the containers were all empty, the water ejected.

If the captain ordered any serious maneuvers, the hullalloy plates would tear from their uncertain moorings and crash through the ship like a runaway maglev.

And there was no hardwired compoint here in the cargo bay, no way to reach the captain. Apparently, the designers of the
Lynx
had never imagined that the bow cargo area would become a prime tactical station. Frick realized now why Navy ships seldom even drilled in true darkmode; doing without second sight was frustrating, but losing communications could be deadly.

“Pressure hoods up,” Frick ordered his team. If the plates got free, decompression was a high probability. And it was cold here, this close to the hull. The ship was running on minimal life support, nano-rebreathers for air, insulation to maintain internal temperature.

“You,” he said, pointing at Rating Metasmith. The woman was the best athlete on the engineering team. In gravity, she was a dribble-hoop demon, and had the highest freefall workout scores on the
Lynx
except for a few marines. “Get back to the forward gunnery station and use the compoint. Warn the captain not to accelerate above one-twentieth.”

“Understood,” she said, and sailed toward the open hatchway with an effortless shove. Frick flinched as she soared through, missing collision with the hatchway’s coupling fringe by a few centimeters.

The first engineer sealed the hatch behind Metasmith. If the plates did get loose, his team might do some good here in the cargo bay. They could attempt some sort of damage control.

“Pick an armor plate and tether yourself,” he ordered. “And if you smell something cooking, it’s you.”

Frick pushed himself toward the central armor plate. The plates weren’t grabby, so he employed his pressure suit’s magnets. He settled against the hullalloy, feeling its reassuring mass between himself and the Rix gravity cannon.

Five minutes to go, as near as he could figure.

The silence of the
Lynx
was awful. At least on the bridge they could watch the incoming fire, judge how close the shots were falling. But here in the bow, he and his team were hiding deaf and blind, not really knowing if their silence protected them at all.

h_rd soared to meet the cloud-seeding dirigible, the rendezvous only a hundred kilometers from the entanglement facility’s wire.

The recon flyer was at the upper limit of its altitude. The fans whined pitifully, and the craft’s electromagnetics stretched tenuously downward, a swimmer’s toes searching for solid ground. The air was thin up here, but breathable for a Rixwoman.

The dirigible came down to greet her, operating at the lower extreme of its functional altitude range. Thus the two craft formed a precarious and narrow union of sets. h_rd rose slowly to a standing position on the recon flyer’s armored carapace. The straining flyer reacted to every shift of her weight with the jitter of a tightrope. Alexander’s piloting would be tested by this maneuver. h_rd had removed the military governors, giving control of the craft to the compound mind. She would have to go very high to approach the entanglement facility undetected.

The dirigible, also under Alexander’s control, came nearer, its sphere of emptiness looming like a black hole in the dark sky. The airship’s tiny props tried to steady it, fighting the strong winds of this high place. h_rd’s sable coat spread out from her, black wings against the stars.

It was twenty-five degrees below freezing. For the first time in her life, the Rixwoman felt her fingers grow numb.

h_rd steadied herself, and reached for the dirigible’s payload basket. She stripped the scientific instruments to lighten the craft, replacing them with the pack she had prepared for this mission. Then she removed the sable coat, which was too heavy to take with her, and sadly let it fall. She locked the muscles in her hands, leaving them arched like a pair of hooks. There was no provision for a person in the dirigible’s small payload basket. She would have to hang from the airship until it reached the proper position.