The City Who Fought

by S. M. Stirling

“Why?” she asked. “It’s stopping.”

  “Slowing, yes, but if it so much as kisses me on the cheek, it’ll breach the station and you’re on a one-way trip to the nebula. We need you here, so shaft me baby.”

  “Shaft yourself,” she said. “It has come to a complete cessation of forward movement.”

  A final flare of energy left the aft third of the intruder’s hull slumping and melting, the drive cores and conduction vanes white-hot and misting titanium-rutile monofiber.

  “So it has,” Simeon said mildly.

  Channa gave a giddy whoop and slumped against the central shaft, trying to wipe at the sweat that filmed her face. Her glove clacked against the faceplate of her helmet.

  “Dead, stock still,” he said, feeling intense relief. “Relative to the station, that is.”

  With a glance at his column, Channa hit the disconnect switch and the red warning lights stopped flashing. Simeon began to announce stand-down to Condition Yellow in dulcet, paternal tones. Channa took off her helmet and began to confer with the Lethe leader, reestablishing the usual formal relations.

  When at last they disconnected from their various crucial chores, Channa looked at her incoming electronic messages and laughed. “By God, but we’re a resilient species. Look at these.”

  Simeon scanned them and laughed, too. “I haven’t even finished flushing the excess adrenalin from my system and they’re already complaining about lost cargo and insurance. I love the human race. We’re consistently more concerned with trivia than serious threats.”

  “And we’re not even out of danger, are we?”

  “Out of mortal danger. That thing could have totaled us. The ore will cause a lot of trouble and expense, so let’s maintain Condition Yellow for a while.”

  That would keep nonessentials out of the exterior compartments, mostly industrial areas anyway, and everyone in suits with helmets in reach and within sprinting distance of the shelters. Megacredits of money were being lost, of course, most of which would be paid by Lloyds’ Interstellar.

  Channa was examining the strange ship on a close screen.

  “Next question is who, or what’s, aboard.”

  “And if there’s anything left of the pilot captain,” Simeon added, “who’s broken regulations I didn’t know existed till now. I sent out a dozen probes to secure available information on what’s left. Ah! Input!”

  The main screen blanked, and then displayed a schematic of the strange craft, shifting to a three-dimensional model as the computers extrapolated.

  “So that’s what it looked like before it started hitting things and melting down its drives,” Simeon murmured as brain and brawn surveyed an elongated sphere amid its tangle of extensions. “And now I’ll subtract what doesn’t appear to be part of the original construction.”

  The resulting model didn’t look much like the slagged ruin tumbling slowly through space in the real-time image that Simeon kept up in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. Channa leaned forward and frowned at such an unfamiliar design. Huge it certainly was. At least eighty kilotons mass, with extravagant ship-bays and airlocks, old-fashioned cooling vanes around the equator . . .

  “That looks like human construction,” she said thoughtfully, “Just not any model I’ve ever seen or heard about.” Human civilization had been unified at the beginning of starflight and their ships bore a family resemblance.

  “It does look vaguely human-made,” Simeon agreed, “but I can’t even find a match in historical files of Jane’s All the Galaxy’s Spaceships for the last century. The composition is odd, too; metal-metal fiber matrix. Ferrous alloys. No comparable design for the last two centuries. Hmmm.”

  “Something?”

  “This.” He called up an image beside the reconstructed ship.

  “Close but no cigar,” Channa said.

  “That’s the last of a line of heavy transports—that one was a Central Worlds space-navy troop-transport. Designers were Dauvigishipili and Sons. They used to make a lot of military craft, operated on stations out of the New Lieutas system. See, there is some use to being a military historian. Ah, here.”

  The image changed and now there was a virtual one-to-one match.

  “Colonial transport,” Simeon said. “They stopped building them about three hundred years ago, so it could be up to four hundred years old. Original capacity was ten thousand colonists, in coldsleep of course, with a crew of thirty. There were a lot of odd little colonies back then, people looking for places where they could practice as weird a religion as they wanted and not have the Central Worlds bugging them. The few that survived are still pretty flaky. Are you surprised to learn that the ship-class was called the Manifest Destiny vehicle? A few of the later models had brain controllers before Central Worlds put a stop to that practice on humane grounds. Some of those minor cults were—” he made a brief pause to consult his lexicon “—aberrant! Hmm, and I’d bet this one got transmogrified into an orbital station. Look at all that stuff!”

  “Your kind of ‘stuff’?” asked Channa ingenuously.

  “Gadgetry,” he amended in a firm, this-is-serious voice, “plastered on the exterior: observation stuff, transmission stuff, the usual. And intended to be used in orbit. I mean, who would try to fly any ship with all that crap sticking out? For starters, the thrust axis wouldn’t be through the center of mass anymore, so for starters, it’s unbalanced.”

  Channa scanned through more probe transmissions, including some views taken by the perimeter sensors as the hulk barreled in, so they could see the havoc caused by collision and too-rapid deceleration.

  “They may have had cause for their precipitous intrusion,” she said, and froze a view of the stubs of the radar and radio antennas. “Those look like battle damage to me.”

  “Hmmm.” Simeon did a rapid close-scan and match with the naval records in his files. “You’re right, Channa-mine. Transmission antennae sheared off so they couldn’t have responded to our hails. Whoever shot those darts knew his stuff, and their most vulnerable points. See the long star-shaped ripple patterns in the hull? And those long sort of fuzzy distortions clustered in the rear third of the hull? Those are beamers at extreme range, I’d say. Hard to tell ‘cause it’s so messed up.” He spoke more slowly, in an almost somber tone. “Hell, Channa, beamers like that are naval ordnance weapons. The real thing.” Oh, boy, this is not like a simulation at all. “Somebody was trying to destroy that ship.”

  “While the victims were desperate enough to fly close to blind and totally deaf,” Channa said. That was not a safe thing to do, even in the vastness of interstellar space. “My next intelligent question is, did they escape? Or are they still being pursued?”

  “Ahead of you there, partner,” Simeon replied, feeling slightly smug that he had anticipated her. “I can’t detect anything coming in on the same vector.” He heaved an audible sigh of relief that coincided with hers. “Or . . . no, they were blind. The pursuit could have dropped off long ago, and they wouldn’t have had any way to tell. But we’d better establish who and why. If, and it’s a big if, there’s anyone alive in there now to tell us the facts. I’m not inclined to be charitable. For all we know, they could be pirates or hijackers, and they were running from Central Worlds’ naval pursuit. Either way, they came within centimeters of smashing us to a smithereen.”

  “Smithereens,” Channa said thoughtfully, “because it’s fragments they are and they have to be plural to be dangerous. I rather discount their being illegals. Something real deadly must have pushed them to run in a craft that unspaceworthy. Something that came to their planet suddenly. Why else wouldn’t they take the time to cut away that mass clinging to the ship? Maybe their sun went nova. Anyway,” she said briskly, “if there are people on board, they’re in bad shape and what have you been doing to rescue and/or apprehend them?”

  “Ahem, Channa-mine. You’re the mobile half of this partnership. Remember? So go be brawn for me. And be careful!”

  Channa paused
. “Ah, yes, so I am. Thank you for reminding me of that!” Her tone was brightly brittle. “Somehow this wasn’t the sort of duty I thought came along with this assignment.”

  “Well, it has!” he said, making his voice lilt. “Hate to have caused you to get into that clumsy suit for no reason at all.”

  She lifted her helmet.

  “Thatta girl!” Simeon said rather patronizingly. She ignored him. “Oh, and Channa?”

  “What?”

  “Before you lock your helmet, do switch on your implant.”

  “Ah!” She touched the switch grounded in bone just behind her ear, the contact responding only to her individual bio-energy. “Are you receiving?”

  “Check.”

  “Can I go now?” she said rather patronizingly.

  “Check.”

  “And mate, Simy baby.”

  “Got it,” Joat muttered to herself as she rescued the computer from the shadowed ledge and turned it on, fingers clumsy in the space suit gloves. Joat had become well-acquainted with the station’s drills but, with survival skills as finely honed as hers were, she had put the suit on when the klaxon sounded Red Alert. Besides, she’d had a chance to time just how fast she could get into the flippin‘ thing.

  “Wow!” was her reaction to the activity the computer duly reported. “Fardling A wow!” The system was taking in some heavy data, converting it and feeding it to Simeon the way it transferred data from the pickups, though never in this density or complexity. “Heavy read!”

  Joat did her best to follow, but the speed was too much. Then, “Got it.” Now the main computer was also encoding it for her little friend. She fiddled to get a finer tuning, get rid of the drivel, giving her the visual and aural stuff. She reared back in surprise, hitting her head on the metal bulkhead but ignoring the pain as she realized what she now had.

  Hey, this is from Channa. Strange, heavy strange—I’m getting what she’s seeing. She must have an implant to input directly to Simeon like this. And what Channa was seeing made Joat feel a little more charitable towards her. Channa wasn’t squishstuff, her private term for organic tissue.

  “Beats hacking in to the holo system any day,” Joat muttered, eyes glued to the miniature screen. She squirmed into a more comfortable position, plopped down a purloined pillow so she wouldn’t slam her head again, braced her feet against the roof of the duct, plugged the earphone into the helmet outlet, and absorbed the action.

  “Real-time adventure holo!” Perfect, apart from a wavering line down one side of the picture-cube that must represent breathing and life-signs and stuff. “Go, Channa, go!”

  Chapter Six

  Station-born and bred, Channa had gone space-walking as soon as she was old enough to fit into a juvenile suit. But there the difference between her Hawking Alpha Proxima Station days and now ended.

  Theoretically, she knew that SSS-900-C was at the edge of the Shiva Nebula. Trade routes crossed here, carrying processed ores essential for drive-core manufacture. As the ship which had brought her had approached the dumbbell-shaped station, she’d watched the process on her cabin’s screen with great interest. But theory, and that shipboard view in complete safety, had not prepared her for the great arc of pearly mist that filled her vision plate; mist glowing with scores of proto-suns in a score of colors.

  “Spectacular, ain’t it?” Patsy asked.

  Channa came to herself with a start. “What are you doing out here?”

  “This tug’s my emergency station,” she said, grinning broadly inside her bubble helmet. “The algae’ll keep right on breedin‘ for a while without me, randy little bastards. An’ I’m a right good tug pilot, too.”

  “Believe you, ma’am,” Channa said, throwing a salute from her bubbled temple. What’s Simeon on about? He’s got a fleet—of sorts—to command. “Let’s go.”

  In turn, they slid down into the cramped cabin of the tug and plugged suit feeds into the ship system. The tugs were stripped-down little vessels, just a powerplant and drive with minimal controls; wedge-shaped, with grapnel fields and an inflatable habitat for taking survivors in their dual role as rescue vessels. The docking bay and the cabin itself were open to vacuum, but she felt a low whining as Patsy brought the drive up and lifted them out. There was the usual disorienting lurch as they passed out of station gravity. Now the only weight was acceleration, and the barbell shape of the station was a huge bulk below them instead of behind. Her senses tried to tell her she was climbing vertically in a gravity field, then yielded to training as she made herself ignore up and down for the omnidirectional outlook that was most useful in space.

  “Vectoring in,” Patsy said into her helmet mike.

  Other tugs were drifting motes of light, fireflies against the blackness. The analogy remained in force as they circled the drifting hulk of the intruder; it was big. Forward was a frayed mass of tendrils, and the rear still glowed red-white, heat slow to radiate in vacuum.

  “Readings?” Channa asked. Her nose itched; it always did when she had a helmet on.

  Simeon’s voice answered her. “Main power system went out when they burned their drive,” he said. “Be careful about that, by the way—it’s radiating gamma, real museum piece. Main internal gravity field’s down. There are localized auxiliary systems still operating amidships, and traces of water vapor and atmosphere. There might be a chamber in there still running life-support.”

  Channa scanned the bridge section of the ship again. The instruments available in the cockpit of the tug were basically little more than sophisticated motion detectors.

  “I can’t get a thing,” she said in frustration. “Am I missing something?”

  “Not much,” Simeon told her. “There’s too much dirt out there, which’ll confuse readings. See if you can get aboard.”

  “Right,” she said, and looked down the hull toward the equator where the shuttle bays should be located. “Bring us in there, Patsy.”

  Channa flicked an indicator light on the hull. They sank gradually, until the ancient ship filled half the sky.

  “Don’t build ‘em like this anymore,” Patsy said as they beheld shuttle bay doors which were easily two hundred meters long, big enough to accommodate a small liner.

  “They don’t have to,” Channa answered absently. Drive cores were a lot cheaper and safer nowadays, which made ships this size obsolete. “Somebody did not like them.”

  This close in, the scars on the hull were enormous, metal heated to melting with a slagged look around the edges of the cuts, but miraculously there didn’t seem to be much structural damage as they swung further into the bay.

  “They have to be alive,” Channa murmured. “Nothing could kill people this lucky.”

  “Except running out of luck,” Simeon said grimly.

  “There is that.” She came at last to a smaller shuttle bay and attempted to open the portal with several standard call codes. “Simeon, what does the library suggest we use for a ship this old? I’m not getting any response with the usual ones.”

  “Three one seven, three one seven five?”

  “Tried it, nothing.”

  Simeon relayed several more codes.

  “Nothing’s working,” she said in disgust. “Could they have locked them?”

  “Hard to say until we’re sure they’re crazy or not. Try another bay. That one might just be inoperative.”

  She had Patsy fly out and down the massive ship’s side until they came to another shuttle bay. It, too, refused her admittance.

  “This is ridiculous,” she said in exasperation. “They got in, so there has to be an operable entrance!”

  “Considering the visible damage, maybe you’d have more luck with a service hatch. There’re close to a hundred of them and only six shuttle bays. Try something midship.”

  “That’s a good idea,” she said, feeling more optimistic with such odds. “Just in case, what do we use for a can opener? We don’t want any survivors dead of old age before we reach them.”

/>   The very first hatch they tried opened, about half a meter. Channa looked at it, Simeon looked at it through her eyes via the implant which connected directly to her optic nerve.

  “You’re not that big, but you’re also not that small,” he said with a wistful note.

  “I’m putting us down,” Patsy said. “Contact.” A faint clunk came through the metal of the tug as the fields gripped the big hull.

  “And I’m going to try and effect entry. I think it’s wide enough.” Channa told Simeon.

  “Just you be very careful, Channa-mine . . .”

  “For Ghu’s sake, Simeon, I’ve been space-walking since I was five. I’m a stickfoot.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think your station ever experienced a hostile attack. And there’s all that flying junk! Could knock you right off the hull . . . or smear you across it.”

  “You do know how to give a girl confidence. I’m going, Simeon, and that’s that.” She muttered to herself about titanium twits and agoraphobic asses as she prepared to leave the tug. Patsy Sue at least gave her a cheerful grin and a thumbs-up. “We need to know what or who’s in there.”

  “No problem,” Patsy cut in, reaching into the toolbox under the pilot’s seat. Her hand came out with the ugly black shape of an arc pistol.

  Channa looked around, her jaw dropped. “Aren’t those illegal?”

  Patsy waggled the pronged muzzle. “Not on Larabie, they ain’t.”

  Channa shook her head, then picked up where she’d left off. “You know, Simeon, they do give us brawns training. I’ve done search-and-rescue before.”

  “How often?”

  “Once. My inexperience will only make me more cautious. I can do this, Simeon. Once I’m inside maybe I can do something to widen the hatch opening. Direct some of the other tugs this way so I’ll have reinforcements nearby, if I need them.”

  Patsy waggled the arc pistol, apparently accustomed to the weight of the weapon.

  “Assuming it’s needed,” Channa added cheerfully. “Have you got any positive life readings, partner?” she asked as she eased herself with practised care out of the tug. With one hand on a hull bracket, she let herself drift to the hull where the stickfield of her boots held her safely.