The Killing of Worlds (9 page)

And although they would save Rana Harter’s body, they had proven themselves unfit wardens of her soul.

For twenty-seven years, their clumsy system of wealth distribution had left Rana to her own devices. A borderline depressive, fearful and indecisive, naive in some ways and magnificently savant in others, Rana was a raw, rare, defenseless gem. But they had let her drift, a cog in the Imperial machine. They had exploited what little of her abilities required no training, and given nothing in return. Both systems of the Eighty Worlds—the hierarchy of the Empire and the wild purity of the capital—had one appetite in common: They fed on the weak. The help Rana needed was simple, a mere dopamine adjustment, and the manic depression that had scarred her life had been easily vanquished. But such treatment wasn’t available to the class she had been born into. She was the victim of the most parochial of economic arrangements.

Their barbarism wasn’t even efficient. With her abilities, she would have been a valuable asset. But the Imperials imagined it cheaper and easier to let her suffer.

When h_rd’s internal tirade ended, she allowed herself a rueful smile. Who was she to take the Empire to task? She had kidnapped this woman, drugged her, put her in harm’s way.

Taken Rana to her death.

But at least she had understood the clever, marvelous thing that Rana Harter was.

h_rd pressed her lips gingerly to the back of Rana’s neck, smelled the warm, human complexity of her. Then the commando crept from bed.

A gravity ghost drifted through the command bridge. The shudder described a textbook bell curve, slowly building and receding as if some ancient steam train were rumbling past.

No one spoke until the event was over. The
Lynx
was accelerating at eighteen gees away from the battlecruiser, pushing as hard as its gravity generators could compensate for. The assembled officers knew that if the generators suddenly failed, they would all be unconscious in seconds, crushed by their own suddenly tremendous weight. The
Lynx
‘s Al would recognize the problem and shut its engines down automatically, but by then there would be scores of casualties.

Hobbes cleared her throat as the last tendrils of the event loosened their grip, interrupting the officers’ consideration of the tenuous technologies that stood between them and sudden disaster.

“Are we certain that all these blackbodies are the same? Perhaps those that fired on the master pilot aren’t representative of the whole,” she said.

Floating in the command bridge airscreen were the images recorded by Master Pilot Marx’s remote scout. The first time the
Lynx
‘s officers had watched the destruction of the huge receiver array, they’d cheered. But now the image was paused, the wild storm of sand frozen halfway in its march across the dish. In this single frame, the reflected light of the Legis sun was caught in the dying array; against the bright backdrop, the ranks of blackbody monitors were clearly evident.

Data Analysis had counted 473 of them, and had extrapolated another 49. That made 522. Two to the ninth power: a typical Rix complement.

But not for monitor drones. For the powerful slug-throwers, it was far more than expected; the
Lynx
had been unknowingly hurtling toward a grinder.

“As near as we can tell, the blackbody shapes are the same throughout the complement,” Ensign Tyre said softly. Hobbes realized that this was Tyre’s first time on the command bridge. The ensign was the ranking data analyst now, Data Master Kax having been blinded in the flocker attack. Tyre was speaking in a slow and careful voice, almost timidly, but she had so far answered every question clearly.

“This hump on the dorsal side is the ammo supply,” Tyre continued, windowing an individual blackbody drone. “If any of these drones were fitted for minesweeping or decoy work, that hump would be absent.”

“And they’ve all got it,” Hobbes finished flatly.

Before the meeting, the ExO had gone through Marx’s data frame by frame with Tyre. Hobbes had gotten all too clear a look at the drones that had finally killed Marx’s scout. The deluge of their slugs had passed through the spreading sand cloud, the usually invisible shells illuminated by the medium. Expert software’s careful count had revealed a firing rate greater than a hundred rounds per second.

The blackbody drones were loaded for bear.

In the First Rix Incursion, this class of drone had been used strictly for close-in defense. A few dozen of the monitors would float in front of a Rix warship, picking off attacking drones if they grew too close. But the blackbodies of the previous war were far fewer, and had possessed much lower firing rates; they were designed to kill drones.

But these new monitors, in huge numbers and at short range, Would also be capable of gutting the
Lynx
, or anything else that tried to close with the battlecruiser. The Rix had configured for defense of their huge receiver at all costs, even anticipating ramming by a ship as large as a frigate. The sort of attack the
Lynx
had been headed for would surely have failed.

If it hadn’t been for Marx’s skill and dumb luck—a dead sandcaster drone penetrating the perimeter intact—the receiver array would still be functional now, and the
Lynx
on its unknowing way to destruction.

“No sense in discussing the drones,” Captain Zai said. “The die is cast.”

Hobbes nodded. The moment Captain Zai had seen Tyre’s report, he had ordered the
Lynx
into high acceleration, pushing at a ninety-degree angle from the Rix warship’s approach.

In doing so, he had abandoned any chance of recovering the detached energy-sink manifold. To escape the blackbodies, the frigate had been forced to leave behind its primary defense against energy weapons.

Now, they had to get as far away from the battlecruiser as possible.

“Give us the real-time view,” the captain ordered.

The airscreen switched to the current transluminal returns from the Rix battlecruiser. Its main engine had swung ninety degrees, pursuing the
Lynx
now rather than braking to match Legis XV, letting the black-body drones drift on.

Fortunately, the larger battlecruiser was the slower ship. It could make no more than six gees.

Hobbes regarded the airscreen. The
Lynx
was pushing hard to put distance between herself and the battlecruiser, also headed perpendicular to the original Rix line of approach. They would have nineteen minutes of acceleration under their belts before they reached their closest passage by the Rix warship.

The math was easy: nineteen hundred seconds at twelve gees advantage, and a minute of float. Two hundred and twenty thousand kilometers of breathing room.

The blackbody monitors couldn’t touch them out here. Intended to be absolutely silent, they had no drives—the Rix had effectively abandoned them. But the battlecruiser’s chaotic gravity weapons had a much greater range. And without an energy-sink manifold to shunt the energy into space, the
Lynx
was terribly vulnerable.

The flag bridge underwent another shudder, and the captain’s cup of tea traveled across the table toward Hobbes, rattling as if carried by a ghost who badly needed a night of sleep.

The apparition passed.

“At least she’s not optimized for offense,” the captain said.

The officers nodded. The blackbody drones and their ammo supply must have taken up space normally reserved for offensive weapons. But it wouldn’t take much to hurt the Imperial warship. And the Rix captain knew the
Lynx
had dumped its energy sink. The manifold was still glowing behind them, spreading like an exhausted supernova.

“They could be in turnaround,” First Pilot Maradonna suggested. “With no receiver array, they can’t contact the compound mind. Maybe they’ve given up.”

“So why come after us?” Tyre asked.

“They could be angling out of the system,” Second Pilot Anderson argued. “They’d want to swing away from Legis’s orbital defenses.”

Hobbes shook her head at this wishful thinking. “If they were abandoning the mission, they’d gather those drones first. But they came straight after us. They want our blood.”

“Which is perhaps a sign of our success,” Zai added. “Their array is destroyed. They want the
Lynx
‘s carcass as a consolation prize.”

Hobbes sighed. Captain Zai had never been one to paint success in rosy terms.

“They might be buying time to fabricate another receiver array,” Anderson said.

“They couldn’t possibly,” the first engineer interjected. “The thing was a thousand klicks across! It’d take months and megatons of spare matter.”

“Ten minutes left,” Zai said. The battlecruiser’s gravity weapons would soon be in range. “Perhaps this discussion of Rix motivation can wait.”

His fingers moved, and the real-time view shifted into the future, using current vectors to extrapolate the moment of closest passage. “Very soon, we’ll have less than a light-second between ourselves and a pair of terawatt chaotic gravity cannon,” he said.

“Assuming she’s mounting normal weapons, sir,” Anderson said.

“So far, we haven’t seen the usual mix. Certainly not of drones. The battlecruiser was outfitted for making contact with the compound mind and nothing else. Perhaps it wasn’t equipped with offensive weapons at all.”

“Let us assume the worst,” Zai said.

“We’ve still got all four photon cannon, sir,” Second Gunner Wilson said. “They can do a fair amount of damage even at a light-second’s range. If we get the first shots in, we could disable—”

Captain Zai shook his head, cutting the man off.

“We’re not firing at the Rix,” he said.

Eyebrows raised across the room.

“We’re running silent.”

Hobbes smiled to herself. The
Lynx
‘s officers had committed themselves to the captain’s initial plan for so long—had been so ready to bring their attack to the battlecruiser at any cost—that they hadn’t realized the obvious: With the receiver destroyed, the
Lynx
had completed its mission.

Survival was again a priority.

“Shut everything down,” Hobbes explained. “No sensors, no weapons charged, go to freefall conditions—total silence.”

“The only activity will be coldjets: to keep ourselves aligned head-on with the Rix,” Captain Zai added. “Without a heat-sink manifold, our z-axis profile is less than two hundred meters across. We’ll be a needle in a haystack.”

“Head-on,” Gunner Wilson whispered. “You know, sir, the forward armor is reinforced for meteoroid collisions. Depleted uranium and a microlayer of neutronium. We could even take a hit and survive.”

Zai shook his head. “We’ll eject the forward armor.”

Wilson and the others recoiled. Hobbes had to sympathize. When the captain had first explained this idea to her, she was convinced he had finally cracked. Now that she’d thought about it, his plan made sense. But it still had a … perversity about it that mere logic couldn’t shake.

First, the energy-sink manifold, now their armor. For the second time in this battle, they were throwing away their defenses.

The captain remained silent, as if enjoying the shock his pronouncement had created.

So Hobbes again explained: “That armor is reflective. If they search for us with wide-focus laser fire, they’ll pick us up as a big red spot.”

“We could paint it black,” someone suggested after a moment’s thought.

“Not under high acceleration, and not in time,” the first engineer said flatly.

The logic of the captain’s idea slowly settled over the room, like some dermal drug sinking into the skin.

No weapons. No defenses. Just the blackness of space between the
Lynx
and the enemy. A high-stakes gamble. Hobbes saw the discomfort on the officers’ faces as they struggled to accept the plan. They were safer running silent, it was undeniable, but they would be relinquishing control of their fate to luck alone. It offended their sensibilities. They were the crew of a warship, not passengers on some commercial shuttle.

Hobbes decided to interrupt the frustration filling the room. She had to give them something to do.

“Perhaps we could fill the forward cargo compartments with some protection against chaotic gravitons. Do we have any heavy metals?” Hobbes asked.

After a moment, Marx nodded. “The minesweeper fragmentation drones use depleted uranium. Not much, but it’s something.”

“And there’s the shielding around the singularity generator. If we’re running silent, we’ll be shutting the hole down, so we could move it forward. A little extra hullalloy between us and the Rix couldn’t hurt.”

“Put a team together,” Zai ordered. “Start disassembling the shielding now. Get it moving the moment we cease acceleration.”

First Engineer Frick spoke up, “How long do we have in freefall, sir?”

“A hundred seconds,” Hobbes said. “No more.”

The man shook his head. It wasn’t enough time to move the massive shielding through the corridors of the battle-configured ship.

The captain nodded. “All right, we’ll cut our engines earlier. I’ll give you three minutes of zero-gee before we come under fire.”

Engineer Frick smiled at ExO Hobbes in triumph.

Hobbes shrugged her shoulders. If the captain’s largesse kept the man happy, she was glad to play scrooge. But it was still precious little time for an operation of that complexity. The engineers would still be putting the makeshift armor in place when the Rix started hunting them. But at least the crew would be occupied; better busy than hunkering down in the dark, waiting for a lance of gravitons to tear into them.

Even the hardest work was better than doing nothing.

First Engineer Watson Frick watched a universe disappear.

The pocket cosmos behind the hullalloy shielding stuttered for a moment as its bonds were cut. The black hole at its core, which had strained since its creation against the fields that held it in the real universe, convulsed for an instant, then collapsed.

Away it goes, Frick thought, off to Somewhere Else—a different reality, now utterly unreachable. What a strange way to generate power, the First Engineer wondered: Making pocket universes, the false (?) realms formed whenever a starship bigbanged its drive. How many other realities had humanity created with this process?