Stony silence was the only response.
“You don’t understand! We are artists, creators, following our unique visions. Maybe we went too far, but it was in the name of aesthetics!”
Fromm tightened his grip on the sword hilt as he and the other Marines stepped forward.
What happened next was not artistic at all.
Fifteen
“We can’t leave,” General Gage said.
“I concur, General. We have seized Xanadu after its people engaged in acts of war against the United Stars of America. This system now belongs to our nation by right of conquest.”
Secretary Goftalu’s declaration made it official. Heather felt a rush of satisfaction. All the bloodshed had accomplished something after all.
“Glad to hear we’re all in agreement,” the Marine general said. “For one, this is a major strategic asset. For another, and this is going to sound mercenary as hell, holding this warp nexus is a major financial coup.”
“You can say that again,” Heather said. “Among other things, I’ve secured the Tah-Leen treasury after downloading the access codes from the Hierophant’s database. Transferring the electronic currency to the US is going to take some doing, but when we do it will triple our Galactic Credit Unit holdings.”
“Triple?”
She nodded. “At least. I haven’t gone through all the accounts yet. The Tah-Leen banking system was rather primitive, and they spent money like drunken sailors on leave, but compound interest over millennia still adds up. On top of their cash reserves, the transit fees the Snowflakes collect are equal to twenty percent of our GDP, all in hard currency. And that’s a conservative estimate.”
“That’s… Well, I suppose if we must be piratical, we should strive to be successful pirates,” Sec-State said. “The question remains, however: can we hold the system? How long before we can expect help to arrive?”
“The message we sent back should reach Third Fleet in three days,” General Gage said.
The diplomatic mission had brought along about a thousand bytes of quantum-entangled particles, heavily shielded so they could survive FTL travel, just for this sort of eventuality; QE-telegrams allowed for instant communication across interstellar distances, albeit at great expense. Unfortunately, they’d discovered the Tah-Leen had rendered the QE-system inert somehow. They’d been reduced to using one of their six destroyers as a courier instead.
“Which means we have to hold this system on our own for at least six days.”
“Ten days is a more realistic estimate., Madam Secretary,” Captain Naomi Benchley said. “I’m sure that the Navy will rush forward to occupy Xanadu as soon as it is made aware of the current situation, but deploying a force that size takes time. Five to seven days at a minimum to get ready, after the courier reaches them.”
“We could dispatch another destroyer to the Hrauwah Kingdom and appraise the Puppies of our situation,” Heather said. “They can send ships here faster – probably five days from the moment we send the message – but that has its own risks. The Kingdom might decide to take over Xanadu as their price for defending it.”
“Which would severely strain our relationship with our best friends in the galaxy,” Secretary Goftalu concluded. “Best to not lead them into temptation. Now, assuming we can maintain the charade that everything is normal in Xanadu until Third Fleet arrives, will it be enough to defend the system?”
“Probably. It would depend on who tries to take it from us,” Benchley said after getting a nod from General Gage, who was senior but a ground-pounder by trade. “Most polities wouldn’t even consider an invasion. Xanadu’s reputation is a big deterrent.
“If they knew only Third Fleet stands between them and Xanadu, that would change things, however. The Lamprey’s Middle Quadrant Armada is the nearest enemy formation. I’d say their odds of beating Third Fleet are less than fifty-fifty. But if the Imperium sends a couple hundred of the thousands of ships they have been hoarding for some unknown reason, then we are all in trouble.”
“Nobody knows what happened here, fortunately,” General Gage said. “All space traffic occurs between one and two light seconds away from the habitat. So far we’ve been able to maintain the illusion that the Tah-Leen are still running things.”
“That was easy enough to do,” Heather added. “Most traffic control is automated, and those systems weren’t damaged during the takeover.”
In the past twenty-four hours, a dozen vessels had arrived to the system, paid their tolls as usual, and departed for their next port of call. That portion of Xanadu was working just fine. The rest of it was still utterly screwed up.
Heather had won the cyber-war, but it had been a near-Pyrrhic victory. The Master Conduit had several safeguards in place to prevent an ambitious Snowflake from seizing control of the habitat’s weapon systems. The struggle to seize the base had triggered those safeguards, locking access to several key components. Both sides had also destroyed much of what they couldn’t control. The Tah-Leen’s robot army was a case in point. When Heather was about to take it over, the Hierophant had send a self-destruct command. Thousands of war machines now were little more than fancy metal sculptures, their internal components burned out beyond repair. Only a few hundred combat robots remained, partially built or damaged automatons that hadn’t been linked to the Conduit at the time.
“Of course, if we had access to the Tah-Leen’s weapon systems, we could fly the Stars and Stripes and hold the system even without Third Fleet,” General Gage said. “We all saw what they did to that Lamprey dreadnought. And if we can use and implement that technology elsewhere, we might have just won the war, right here and now.”
“Two big ‘ifs,’ I’m afraid,” Heather said. “I’m still locked out of the habitat’s Battle Conduit, which controls all its weapon installations, but I have been able to read their specs. As it turns out, they were in a terrible shape even before we took over.
“Originally the habitat fielded thirty-two super-heavy graviton cannon, each as powerful as the one that destroyed the Lamprey task force. Over the last several millennia, however, most of them have been rendered inert. Only one main gun is in working order. Half a dozen others might be salvageable, but not quickly or easily. The Tah-Leen apparently were too lazy to do more than basic maintenance, mostly the sort of things their robots could take care of. Over the time frames we’re talking about, that wasn’t nearly enough.”
“That’s insane. They were down to a single working gun?”
“Not exactly. The base also has a hundred functional secondary weapons, much smaller but still powerful enough to take out anything smaller than a cruiser with a single shot. Unfortunately, those weapons are also locked out. From the records I’ve been able to salvage, they’ve been relying on their single main gun and the secondary emplacements for the last five thousand years. They were good enough to deal with the last few incursions, so they never bothered repairing the rest of them.”
“Insane,” General Gage repeated.
“On some level, I think they all wanted to die,” Heather said. “They’d been trapped here for some eighty thousand years, and their civilization had been terminally decadent for longer than that. They were taking insane risks, possibly in the hopes that someone would do what they weren’t strong enough to do to themselves.”
“Well, they got their wish, then. Glad we could oblige them.”
“In any case, we hope to eventually restore the habitat to a fully functional state, but right now most of our efforts are focused on keeping the lights on, and only in selected areas at that. We don’t have the manpower to do much else. Removing the weapon locks is going to take time, mainly because we can’t spare the time and personnel to do it quickly. Not if we want life support and other basic systems to remain operational.”
“So we are basically helpless here.”
“Not exactly, Madam Secretary. Offensive systems remain offline, but we can bring up about fifty percent of the habitat’s shie
lds, which as we saw are beyond anything in the known galaxy.”
“For one, they are big enough to cover my entire task force, as long as we bunch up within their fifty-kilometer radius,” Captain Benchley said. “My destroyers don’t have a lot of throw weight, but right now they are the most heavily-defended ships in the US Navy.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“Our current plan is to keep up the façade that the Tah-Leen are still running the show while we wait for reinforcements to arrive. Our technical team will continue trying to unlock the habitat’s weapon systems.”
Said technical team consisted of Heather, anybody who could be spared from the naval force’s Administration and Communications departments, and a handful of civilians with IT experience. Mario Rockwell, the former RSO, had run a CIC during his time in the Navy, and he was now her second in command. Without its controlling intelligence, however, keeping the station running would take at least a hundred skilled personnel. She had about twenty, none of them really trained for the task. Shutting down every nonessential system helped, but at a price. Over ninety percent of the habitat was now without power, life support or robotic upkeep. Before very long, things would start breaking down. They needed help.
“Speaking of weapon systems, what is Major Zhang’s status? I see she is still listed as a casualty.”
“She suffered severe neural damage during the takeover, unfortunately. A medical team placed her in an induced coma for the time being.”
“I read her report, or rather the report you wrote for her,” General Gage said. “That skeleton thing is an actual warship?”
“The remains of one, yes. It currently lacks life support and secondary weapons.” And it runs on hoodoo and sorcery, she didn’t say out loud.
“We’ll put some chiefs to work on making it space-worthy, just in case.”
“I cautiously agree,” Secretary Goftalu said. “From what I read, that… thing is probably too valuable to risk in combat, but if things go wrong it may become a matter of using it or losing it. Making it ready seems like a sensible precaution.”
“Of course, the only pilot we have is in a coma at the moment,” Captain Benchley noted.
“And if needs must, I’m sure Major Zhang will do her duty. She is a Marine, after all.”
* * *
The Snowflakes are dead.
The thought should have made her feel satisfied, or even overjoyed. Lisbeth had gotten to know the Tah-Leen as she hunted them down one by one, and to know them was to loathe them. Most of them didn’t believe anybody outside their species was truly real. They’d spent so much time living in a fantasy world populated by copies of themselves that they were less in touch with reality than the worst warp-madness sufferer. They were dangerous, evil in just about every meaning of the word, and beyond redemption. They needed killing, in other words.
Problem was, the dead lived on in the Starless Path.
They were chasing her, and their leader was the nameless thing that had plagued her nightmares for so long. But now it had plenty of help. The Tah-Leen she’d killed wanted revenge, and knew just how to get it. If they caught her, her screaming would never end.
She ran, and they followed.
Fear. It was always there. Under the bravado, the stubbornness, the overachieving. She’d done the craziest things just to prove she wasn’t afraid, but when she was dreaming or inside the living nightmares of warp space, she always ended up running away. Like she was doing now. Here, she didn’t have an audience to impress. It was just her and her fear. She’d abandoned Deborah Smith and left her to die because she’d been scared. Maybe she should just let them catch her. She deserved whatever they did to her.
Wake up.
She did. White light blinded her eyes when she opened them. There was something stuck down her throat and for a second she thought it was a tentacle. Just as she reached for it in a panicked motion, the sensors in the breathing tube realized she was conscious and the invasive device contracted and withdrew, leaving her sitting up and coughing.
“Welcome back.”
The speaker handed her a cup of water, and she downed half of it in a few gulps. The frenzied drinking triggered another coughing fit.
“Easy there, Major. Try small sips.”
She obeyed.
Lieutenant Browning, the Brunhild’s medical officer, eyed her warily as she drank.
The last thing she remembered was killing the ninety-third Tah-Leen. It’d been the Hierophant; she’d saved it for last, waiting until the Marines had taken its bodies apart before going in and shutting down its Prime Core. She’d been on her last legs by then, and as soon as she knew her job was done she’d stopped fighting the overwhelming need to let go and let the darkness in. She’d passed out, expecting never to wake up again.
“You gave us quite a scare, Major,” the Navy doctor told her. “We had to repair several brain lesions, two of which resulted in edema. Things were touch and go for a while, but you’re out of the woods. We decided to take you off the induced coma and see how you’d fare. So far, so good.”
“That’s good to hear.”
“The swelling is gone, and it looks like there was no permanent damage. At least, no obvious damage.”
“But my brain is still all messed up, right?”
“Not how I would put it, but yes. The scans show a number of abnormal formations in your neocortex. I would hesitate to call them tumors, however, since they don’t seem to be damaging or irritating the surrounding tissue. I don’t know what to call them, to be honest.”
“I do,” Lisbeth said. “But I think it’d be best if you keep these findings to yourself, Lieutenant. I have a hunch that all my brain scans are going to become classified as soon as higher is made aware of them.”
“Oh.”
Lieutenant Browning looked none too happy about that. Stumbling into some secret project wasn’t good for one’s career. While the government didn’t go around killing people like in your typical crappy movie, people who learned things they didn’t need to know often ended up posted somewhere remote, the kind of place where an email to Sol System would take a couple of months to get there, after being examined and vetted by a team of humorless censors.
“As long as you are discreet about the scans, you should be okay,” she told him.
“Thank you. In any case, you seem to be fully recovered. I would recommend light duty for the next week, however.”
Lisbeth nodded, knowing that her chances of getting a week off were slim to none. A few hundred humans were squatting on one of the most important crossroads in the galaxy. Sooner or later, someone was going to try and evict them. If it happened before reinforcements arrived – a quick check showed her they hadn’t done so yet – then Lisbeth might have to do something crazy.
Crazy. She’d been downright nuts even before she went on her killing spree, and gotten even nuttier afterwards. But she felt fine right now. No urge to giggle, or to spout off nonsense. Progress.
I’m feeling much better now, said the madwoman, she thought, and had to suppress the urge to laugh. Uh-oh.
“I have to make the rest of my rounds, but an orderly will be here shortly with some food,” the medical officer told her.
“Thank you again.”
Once she was alone in the compartment, Lisbeth checked her messages. General Gage had standing orders for her to report as soon as she was able to; she figured he could wait until she ate her breakfast or lunch or whatever meal she was due for. There were a few messages from Captain Orlov. Richard. Pretty sweet of him, considering they’d just had a couple of rolls in the hay before the trip started. Their duties kept them well away from each other for the rest of the cruise. She should give him a call, but probably wouldn’t. She read a long email from Heather giving her a rundown of the current situation. A team of machinists and repairmen were looking into get the Corpse-Ship running again, just in case. When the Navy decided to put some time and effort into recommissioning a
prehistoric ship, you knew the situation had become truly desperate.
“We’re all in big trouble,” she told the giant three-eyed alien that only she could see.
“That we are, Christopher Robin,” said her guardian angel. It still looked like Atu, mostly, but it didn’t sound anything like it. The lecturing tone had been replaced with a cartoonish voice. “That we are.”
* * *
Machinery Repairman Rodolfo ‘R&R’ Rodrigo had never known what falling in love felt like. Until now.
“Look at it,” he said. “Just look at it!”
“Keep it in your pants, R&R,” Chief Hong said, but without much heat. The Chief was just as awed by the sight below them as Rodrigo. As everyone in the team tasked with examining the fabricator and, if possible, making use of it.
“A Level Six fabber. Fucking-A. Biggest one I’ve ever seen,” Rodolfo went on. He all but ran across the walkway surrounding the five-hundred-meter long structure to get a better look at it. “We’ve got, what, four of them in the entire US?”
“Five. Two on Earth’s shipyards, two in the orbitals around Wolf 1061, and one that just went online at Drake. This one is damn big,” the Chief admitted.
“I think this is an NAD-7, Chief.” Rodolfo said.
“There’s no Level Seven, R&R. A Level Six can make anything in the galactic inventory, including other Level Sixes, if you don’t mind spending fifteen years having it reproduce.”
To the average citizen, a fabber was a fabber, a matter-printing machine that could create anything from a penknife to a plasma gun by putting it together molecule by molecule or, for the more sophisticated stuff, subatomic particle by particle. Thing was, most Nanoscale Assembly Devices couldn’t make plasma guns, or even the plasma-tipped bullets that the US used as a poor-man’s substitute. To build anything beyond pre-Contact tech levels, you needed a Level Two. For even basic gravity-wave circuitry, a NAD-3 was needed. And most vital components in a starship required a Level Four.
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