The Killing of Worlds (15 page)

He was alone, master of this tiny domain.

Suddenly, Bigz heard a message, a transmission pumped past his ruined ears into second hearing.

“Priority, priority” came a clear voice.

Shit! he thought. Who the hell was broadcasting? The Rix would localize the transmission in no time.

“Do not coldjet. We’ll break up. Do not accelerate at all. Hobbes out.”

The ExO? Didn’t she realize that she was jeopardizing the ship?

Bigz brought up his suit’s line-of-sight receiver, trying to determine where the transmission had come from. The device gave him a general direction, and he squinted into the blackness, searching for the
Lynx
.

But his eyes still failed him. The frigate was nowhere to be seen.

He squatted on the slowly spinning shield, hoping that the Rix hadn’t heard the transmission. He decided to count while he waited, marking the minutes until they would all be out of danger.

“Enemy pulse fire has ceased,” the sensor officer reported.

Captain Laurent Zai swallowed. The Rix laser had been firing at a high rate, searching for traces of coldjet reaction mass. But now they had stopped looking.

The enemy had heard Hobbes’s message.

“They must be charging up, sir.”

“Indeed.”

The firing rate of the Rix ranging laser was variable. It could be fired several times a second at low power, or more infrequently with greater effect. If they had given up pulse fire, then the Rix knew where the
Lynx
was. They were preparing a high-intensity punch, one sufficient to light up the Imperial frigate so that they could track her the rest of the way.

Once the frigate was glowing from a laser hit, the Rix gravity weapons would begin the work of destroying her.

At least ten seconds’ charge for the first shot, he guessed.

Zai braced himself.

The big flatscreen flashed, lighting up the bridge as if a flare had bounded into the room.

“A miss, sir. A hundred meters off.”

Zai nodded. The Rix were off by ten meters per second squared, roughly the push the
Lynx
had managed with the drone launcher.

That kick had pushed her hard, enough to throw Zai out of his shipmaster’s chair. And perhaps the loss of the cargo bay had resulted in a few more precious meters per second.

“We’ve got to turn her, sir!” the First Pilot shouted. “We’re broadside!”

“Keep us floating, Pilot,” he commanded.

If they could turn back to head-on orientation, they’d be a smaller target. But Katherie Hobbes had said another burst from the jets would break the
Lynx
up. Zai had to believe her. Hobbes wouldn’t have given away their position unless she spoke with absolute certainty.

So Zai had been forced into a dire bet—that the Rix warship would miss them just a few more times. They were almost out of range.

So close to safety.

According to the bridge chronometer, they only had to survive another ninety seconds and they would drift out of the gravity cannon’s perimeter. By their very nature, chaotic gravitons were far less coherent than photons. The
Lynx
was receding from the battlecruiser at more than 3,000 klicks per second. Under fixed physical laws, the frigate would soon be out of range.

Once they reached safety, Zai could bring internal diagnostics online and find out for himself how hard to push his ship.

Fifteen more seconds passed, enough time for the enemy to charge another burst.

The silent flash came on schedule.

“Another miss, sir! Two hundred meters aft.”

“Unbelievable,” Zai whispered. It had fallen on the other side of the first miss. They were overshooting!

Luck had smiled on the
Lynx
again.

Captain Zai leaned back, releasing his white-knuckled grip on his command chair. He sighed with relief.

“We may have made it,” he said.

Ten seconds later, a shudder rocked through the bridge, and the high-pitched scream of boiling air filled the ship.

Telmore Bigz could see the
Lynx
now.

The frigate sparkled against the black of space, the red light of laser fire running up and down its length.

“No!” he cried.

It was at least twenty kilometers away, glowing like an emergency light wand. The frigate’s spindly shape seared itself into his vision, like a sun glimpsed with naked eyes. Bigz realized that his vision had finally cleared. Just in time to witness his ship and crewmates dying.

He wished that he were still blind.

Damn!They had almost made it out of range. By Bigz’s reckoning, they would be out of the gravity cannon’s perimeter in less than a minute.

The engineer-rating looked at the debris around him. It spun alone in the void, the forehull a minor planet with its own satellites, its own hazy atmosphere, even a population of one: Telmore Bigz.

Soon, this lost scrap heap would be all that remained of the
Lynx
.

A few more sparkles erupted from the frigate over the next seconds. The chaotic gravity beam would be orienting now, marshaling its full power for a final shot, using the laser damage to aim. The Rix might only get one blast before the Imperial warship passed out of range, so they would make sure they had it right.

Bigz squeezed the shockpack on his belt, the last dregs of stimulants giving him a moment of confidence for his decision. There was only one thing to do.

He activated his emergency beacon at full strength, its pulsing light reflecting from the rotating armor plates around him. Then Bigz brought his engineer’s torch online, and charged it to hullalloy—cutting temperatures. He aimed it at the armor below him and pulled the trigger.

Light and heat flared from the cutter, and the armor burned a bright white where he swept its flame.

Bigz was now the sun for his tiny system, an unstable star casting hard, flickering shadows on the spinning debris around him.

Glowing bright in the void.

“Keep us dark!” Zai shouted over the din.

“But they have us, sir! We’re already lit up like a firewire!”

“Just wait!” Zai yelled. “In another twenty seconds, they can’t touch us.”

The damage control officer was finally silent. The man had wanted to reactivate the ship’s internal sensors, to help coordinate repair efforts. True, the Rix already knew exactly where the
Lynx
was. But emissions from the internals would give the enemy the frigate’s orientation, and they’d target the drive; the
Lynx
would be crippled. Some part of the
Lynx
was certainly going to fry, but there was no sense giving the Rix their choice as to which.

“Steady. At most they can hit us twice at full power,” Zai said.

“Damage reports starting to come in from the aft compoint, sir,” someone reported. The epicenter of the laser hit.

“Report.”

“No structural damage. The aft processor shaft looks fused. Ten dead and counting.”

Damn, Zai thought. More casualties, and more processor capacity lost. All from a range-finding laser. When the burst of chaotic gravity came, it would be hell.

“How long until we’re safe?” he asked the ensign at the chronometer.

“Twelve,” she said.

“Count it,” he ordered.

The bridge grew silent as the numbers diminished. There was nothing any of them could do. A gravity beam worked its deadliest magic against the crew of its target: snapped spines, crushed brains, ruptured internal organs. Without an energy sink to deflect the Rix weapon, dozens, perhaps hundreds of their crewmates were about to die.

Zai couldn’t even warn his crew, but at least he could address the bridge.

With five seconds left, he waved the ensign quiet.

But he found his tongue stymied. All the usual Vadan words invoked the Emperor, and that would be too ridiculous an epitaph for Laurent Zai.

“Thank you for your service,” was all he managed.

Zai sighed, waiting.

The time passed. It must have.

“The shot missed us,” the captain said quietly.

The sensor officer stared into his headsdown in disbelief.

“Not an accidental miss, sir. They changed their targeting. Attacked a debris field six kilometers away. Tore it to pieces.”

“But…
why
?” Zai stammered.

“It was lit up, sir. Some heat, microwaves, and a high-strength transmission.”

“Transmission?”

“An Imperial
SOS
. A personal beacon.”

Zai shook his head. It was too much to believe. A diversion, at the right moment. A member of the
Lynx
‘s crew had somehow wound up out there, kilometers away, and had died for the ship. But who?

“They had us, sir,” the sensor officer continued. “Why would they go for anything else? It was only a few sparks out there, relative to the hit they’d put on us.”

“We were too easy,” Zai said. “Too obvious. Hobbes’s transmission was too blatant. They must have thought that we were the decoy.”

A tremble began in the ship, a low moan that rose and fell.

“They’re targeting us now, sir. Switched their fire from the debris to the
Lynx
. But we’re outside effective range. The gravity cannon is at half-charge, wide aperture. Five thousand gravitons per.”

Zai sighed. Barely enough to give a man skin cancer. He could feel the weapon’s passage with his sensitive inner ear, a mild nausea at worst.

“Give me internal diagnostics,” he ordered. “And order the crew to remain in pressure suits.” The frigate was unstable, and the low-intensity chaotic gravity bombardment might continue for a while, growing ever more diffuse as the ships drifted apart.

Again, they had survived.

Over many decades, the house had grown in all directions.

Though perched on a mountain peak, it extended deep enough into the mantle of Home to draw geothermal power. Now that summer had arrived, the views from six balconies revealed gardens and artificial waterfalls all the way to the horizon. The house had littered neighboring peaks with outpost colonies of self-sustaining butterflies, their mirror wings reflecting sunlight to keep plants alive and water flowing, cast artful shadows, and bring the pale reds of the arctic sunset to three hundred sixty degrees of vista. Its processors were everywhere, buried in the rocky passages of the mountain, backed up in rented remote locations, distributed across the snows for a hundred kilometers. Between polar isolation, the senatorial privilege of its mistress, and its vast size, the house was a world unto itself.

And yet a certain anxiety haunted the house today, a sense of inadequacy and self-doubt that ran like a subtle tremor through its teraflops. A new situation had arisen, one that it had considered and modeled for decades, but never experienced. For the first time, there were two people here at once.

The mistress had a guest.

The house scanned the underground food gardens, the special supplies brought in by suborbital for the lieutenant-commander’s visit, the emergency stores that had lain untouched for a century. It tallied, of course, far more food than two people could eat in four years, much less four days. But the disquiet remained. This visit was the house’s chance to show the mistress what it had accomplished over lonely decades of abandonment, to display the results of its long independent expansion program.

Dinner was already planned, the steamy growing levels just above the geothermal plant raided of produce for a tropical banquet. Fermented plantains had been basted with relish of green tamarind. Cabbage pickled and formed into delicate flower shapes, then flash-fried in a microsecond plasma field. A species of brine shrimp that purified the house water supply simmered for hours in caramel. A pudding of sticky rice and palm sugar blackened with coconut ash to match the lieutenant-commander’s naval uniform. And to clear the palette, twenty milliliters of vodka to end each course had been infused with lychee, rambutan, papaya, and mangosteen in turn.

But perhaps this was too much, the house now despaired. The rules of etiquette were clear: The last dinner of any visit should be the grandest, not the first. With Laurent Zai staying longer, it would have to outdo itself four more dinners in a row! And what if the mistress changed her mind again? No amount of processor power, no number of contingency plans, no acreage of machinery—nothing was sufficient to withstand human caprice at its worst.

What were they talking about now?

The house returned its attention to where the mistress stood with the newly promoted Captain Laurent Zai. They were on the western balcony, holding each other, looking out at a trio of small peaks capped with patterns of algae-reddened snow, just now struck with the slowly setting sun. (Quite a composition, the house thought smugly.) The mistress was still smiling from the kiss they’d shared after she had invited him to stay.

“Four days seems so little, Nara,” Zai said. (The house disagreed. Twelve meals to create; four sunsets to compose!)

“We can make them last.”

“I hope so.” His eyes fell to the garden of insect-shaped ice sculptures below. “We’ve so many technologies for making Absolute time pass quickly. Stasis, relativistic travel, the symbiant. But none to make a few days seem longer.”

The mistress laughed. “I’m sure we’ll think of something.” She moved closer.

“You already have?” “Yes, I have. Perhaps dinner can wait.”

The house followed their progress to the bedroom, mutely appalled.

As the summer’s brief night fell across the room, Nara Oxham thought to herself: An entire day without apathy. It had been too long. She needed more of these respites from the capital, needed to set her mind completely free of the drug without the crowd coming in.

She looked at Laurent’s dozing form. Perhaps she needed a measure of madness every now and then.