The Killing of Worlds (27 page)

Kax overheard the shouting on the bridge, watched as Tyre spun from one drone’s viewpoint to another, replaying the vanishing again and again as the captain demanded answers. Had the thing discorporated itself? Tyre searched vainly for radiation and debris. Teleported? DA software plunged into the chromographs leading up to the disappearance, looking for signs of some magical substance emerging from the object’s depths.

The blind man stayed calm. He let the visualizations of Tyre’s wild speculation fall from his false sight, and returned his view to the empty space where the object had been. He moved from drone to drone in real-time, staying in the spectrum of visible light. Watching.

The empty space seemed perfect.

Background stars shone through it, shifting slightly due to the drones’ mismatched velocities with the object. The drones could see each other through the now-empty space; one of them had a view of the
Lynx
that had been blocked by the object before its disappearance.

“Tyre,” Kax said.

She didn’t answer for a moment. Overwhelmed by the captain’s demands for answers, she hadn’t time to spare for a noisy, blind ghost. But the old reflexes of command eventually compelled a response.

Yes, sir? she handsigned.

“Ask the drone pilots to move Recon 086. Just a short acceleration.”

Heading?

“It doesn’t matter. Just as long as it’s sudden.”

The blind man watched carefully from the indicated drone’s point of view, training his mind on the familiar shape of the frigate.

Ten seconds later the image jerked as the drone accelerated in a short, clean burst. The
Lynx
was still visible, still there in the right place. But Kax saw what he had been watching for, a subtle imperfection that lasted less than a tenth of a second, an almost subliminal tear in synesthesia. The frigate had distorted for a moment, then the shape had re-formed even before the drone’s acceleration ended.

The image was false, a mere feed coming from something between the drone and the
Lynx
.

Data Master Kax reserved the image in a high-definition buffer of the frigate’s short-term memory, and carefully cut the few dozen frames that showed the distortion. He sent them to Ensign Tyre, marked priority, and leaned back with satisfaction, smiling to himself.

Invisibility meant nothing to a blind man.

“Invisibility,” Captain Zai muttered.

“Controlled refraction, sir,” corrected Ensign Tyre.

Hobbes glanced sidelong at the young woman. Despite her proficiency at data analysis, Tyre hadn’t acquired a knack for spotting the captain’s moods yet.

“Not transparency, however,” she continued. “The object doesn’t move the radiation straight through itself. It calculates observer viewpoints, and its surface acts like a large, highly directional hardscreen, emitting imagery appropriate to their positions.”

“I believe the ensign suggests, sir,” Hobbes offered, “that in the heat of battle, the unpredictability of dozens of accelerating viewpoints would make this ‘invisibility’ useless.”

“It’s playing with us, Hobbes,” he said. “Testing its abilities against ours.”

She thought for a moment.

“It’s possible that it’s trying to buy time, sir. The battlecruiser is less than an hour away.”

The captain nodded. By stripping the bridge of armor, the
Lynx
had made six gees on the way here. But the Rix vessel hadn’t turned over; it wasn’t bothering to decelerate in time to match its velocity with the
Lynx
and the object. It was still barreling madly toward them, cutting its transit time to a minimum. The battlecruiser would pass by at a high relative, almost twice as fast as the first pass. The Rix had abandoned almost their entire drone complement, but Hobbes didn’t doubt it could destroy the wounded frigate in the minutes it would be in range.

“That’s likely, Hobbes. So let’s see if we can hurt this thing.”

“Happy to, sir.” Hobbes interlaced her fingers. “Tyre, give me a target.”

“May I suggest random parallax and a complex background, ma’am?”

“You may.”

Tyre signaled, and the recon drones accelerated into action, whipping themselves into a froth of zigzags about the object. A decoy drone spat out chaff, light metals that the
Lynx
‘s close-in defenses illuminated with jittering arms of laser light. The object became visible against the background stars and shimmering chafe, a blur of inconsistencies as it struggled to keep up its illusion.

Zai nodded. “Gunner, fifty terabits, dead center.”

“Yes, sir.”

The thin lancing beam of the laser was visible for a moment as it burned through the chaff, a flashlight in a dusty attic. The object appeared for a second, revealing its new configuration …

Spheroid, with a huge lens cut from it, concave and mirrored: a lens focused back toward the
Lynx
.

The blinding image was burned into Hobbes’s eyes: that brief moment when the beam split in two, the sharp point of a very acute angle. As the laser’s reflection raked across the frigate, the two rays of the angle closed to a single line.

The aft gunnery hardpoint—which Hobbes had stripped almost entirely of its armor—was silenced, and the beam winked out.

“Medical, medical!” cried the first voice, from a station a hundred meters from the stricken hardpoint. Hobbes responded with wooden hands. She tried to raised the cannon crew, but they didn’t respond. More voices called for medical.

A decompression alarm sounded. As one, the bridge crew reached to seal their pressure hoods. Casualty icons sprouted from across the ship. Still nothing from the hardpoint that had fired: The crew there were vapor, Hobbes realized.

“Heat sink failure, sir! The beam went straight through us.”

“Hobbes,” the captain said.

“Bulkhead 2-aft is holed, sir. The foam’s not holding. And—”

“Hobbes!”, Zai shouted.

His cry brought her to a halt. “Yes, sir?”

“The singularity generator. Is it intact?”

Hobbes shook her head to clear the anguished voices that clamored for her attention. The hull was breached again, and the
Lynx
‘s bulkheads had been stripped to the bone. Crew were dead and wounded. Why was the old man worried about auxiliary power?

She plumbed internal diagnostics.

“Yes, sir. It’s fine. But main drive is bleeding—”

“Run it up to critical,” he ordered.

“What?”

“Run the hole up to critical, Hobbes. I want a singularity self-destruct ten seconds after I give the order.”

“Yes, sir,” she said. Her second sight fell into the hadean colors of self-destruct protocols. She gave the gestural command, a twist of the thumbs and shoulders that was intentionally designed to hurt.

Then she realized what the captain meant to do.

Cod, Katherie thought, he’s going to kill us all.

Katherie Hobbes stepped into the observation blister with her jaw clenched. She was careless of vertigo; there wasn’t time left to worry about up and down.

“How many casualties?” Zai asked before she had a chance to speak.

“Forty-one, sir,” she reported. “Thirty burned and eleven gone in hull blow-outs. Only twelve are able to receive the symbiant.”

There was a silence for the dead. Hobbes was loath to break it, but events were closing in on the
Lynx
. Perhaps she would never be as gray as her crewmates and captain. Ritual seemed so often to stand in the way of efficiency.

“Sir,” she said. “The Rix battlecruiser will be in range in twenty minutes.”

Laurent Zai nodded. Facing away from Hobbes as he was, the blackness of space almost swallowed the gesture.

She started to speak again, but then she saw the object.

Hobbes had never seen the thing with naked eyes. In primary sight it was much darker than she expected. They were very far from the Legis sun, and she couldn’t see the details that the enhanced, telescopic views of synesthesia provided. But the undulations were still visible; the crests of rolling dunes caught sunlight, igniting like white-caps on a moonlit sea.

Surrounding the object was a squadron of recon drones. They played green spotlights across its surface, low-power lasers searching for data, for weaknesses.

She gathered herself. “If we plan to take action against the object, we should do it now, sir.”

“Hobbes,” the captain said tiredly. “What exactly would you suggest?”

She swallowed. “Nuke it, sir.”

“The ramdrones had nukes in the mix, didn’t they?” he asked.

“Only low-yield fission, sir. I’m talking about a fusion warhead in the thousand-megaton range. No imaginable substance could withstand a surface temperature of a million degrees.”

“Ah,” he answered.

She waited as he watched the sinuous thing below them.

“Any other ideas?” he finally asked.

“Yes, sir.” She’d come with several options, in case he’d managed to think of an answer to a nuclear strike.

“We can use the three remaining photon cannon in tandem, sir. And keep the
Lynx
under random acceleration. The reflective lens on the object was twenty Wicks across and very rigid. DA thinks it couldn’t track us.”

“But could we damage it?”

“We only hit it with fifty terabits, sir. With three cannon at maximum, we could easily do five hundred.”

“It won’t work,” he said.

“Sir!” she said. “Either of those options would create a surface temperature adequate to vaporize neutronium. Nothing material can withstand those energies.”

“Hobbes, what if this thing can achieve perfect reflectivity?”

“What do you mean, sir?”

The captain turned to face her.

“What if it can become a mirror so perfect that it could drift through the core of a type-G star and not gain a single degree?”

The image appalled Hobbes. It was an engineering fantasy, the sort of thinking that had led her to reject Utopianism, with its promise of universal prosperity. “That’s impossible, sir.”

“We don’t know that. Our own energy shunts can protect us from nuclear explosions.”

“The shunts are a field effect, sir. They’re energy, not matter. We’ve yet to see the object do anything except change its crude elemental makeup. It hasn’t created any complex devices or emitted any coherent energies. And our shunts aren’t magic; a direct hit from a decent fusion warhead and the
Lynx
would be vapor.”

“The
Lynx
is the
Lynx
, Hobbes. This object is something rather more. But it is inexperienced, and every time we attack it, we educate it.”

Hobbes shook her head.

“If we hit it with nukes or lasers, it will adapt,” the captain said.

“Sir, it must have structural limits—”

Zai took a step toward her, waving her silent.

“This object is not a spacecraft, Hobbes. We can’t treat it like an engineering problem. For a moment, think like the Rix. To them it’s not an artifact at all.”

Hobbes took a breath. What was the old man on about? The object was huge, certainly, and a creation of unknown science. But the Empire had fought strange and superior technologies on every front for centuries.

Had Laurent Zai ceased to believe he could win this fight?

“If it’s not an artifact, sir, then what is it?”

“It’s a living god.”

Hobbes swallowed. Had the old man gone daft?

“That doesn’t mean we can’t kill it, Captain.”

He smiled.

“No, indeed. We have the power to destroy it. But our solution must be absolute. Not mere energy, but a tear in the fabric of space-time. A black hole. Self-destruction is the only honorable choice.”

“Captain, I have other options—”

“Silence, Hobbes. It’s time.”

Zai brushed past her, tersely ordering the blister to fold when they were out. Hobbes realized it was pointless to argue. The man was fixated on death. That was why he had returned here to the blister, to resume his mordant meditation on his own doom.

Poor Laurent, she thought. His failure to take the blade had consumed all his strength; his finest moment had broken him inside. And he Vadan man’s lost honor was now embodied in the object, within reach again: one final chance to die for the Risen Emperor.

As she followed her captain up to the bridge, Katherie Hobbes felt the flechette pistol strapped to her wrist, and wondered if it had been a mistake to save Zai from the mutineers.

“Ten minutes, sir.”

A thousand seconds, and the Rix would be in range again. Hobbes shook her head. Having survived one pass by the vastly superior warship, it seemed insane to face another. But it was too late for these thoughts. Even at maximum gee, the frigate could no longer put itself out of harm’s way.

“What’s the light-speed delay?” Zai asked.

“Sir?”

“Between ourselves and the battlecruiser.”

Hobbes changed her scale markers to light-seconds. Was the captain thinking of communicating with the enemy? “Nine seconds round-trip, sir.”

“Then we wait,” Zai said.

For what?
Hobbes wondered.

A hundred seconds ticked by. The Rix craft approached, decelerating now, as the object writhed before them.

Hobbes focused her mind. She tried to recall the way she had seen Zai ten days ago: a paragon of honor and competence. She would have died for him without question. Why were there doubts in her mind now?

She reviewed the situation. The
Lynx
‘s orders were clear: to prevent contact between the compound mind and the battlecruiser. This was the only way to be absolutely sure. Perhaps self-destruction was the honorable choice. But Laurent seemed to relish the thought of death. And he had been blind to other options, even when there had been time.

Of course, the time for options had run out.

Katherie wondered if her doubts stemmed from the foolish affections she had allowed herself to develop for her captain. Had Zai’s rejection lessened her loyalty? Hobbes tried to feel the sense of duty that had compelled her to join the Navy: The Utopian world she had left behind was an empty place of pleasure and safety. Here at the verge of death she should find meaning. That was the axiom of Imperial service: The Old Enemy gave life value.