Star Destroyers

by Tony Daniel

  Nor were these the only dangers. Before the drive could be disengaged at the Primary Limit, the velocity—pseudovelocity, really—that it had accumulated in the course of its departure from Sol must be shed, or else the same consequences, possibly up to and including total destruction of the drive, would overtake the ship. The necessary calculations flowed through Jane’s head, meshed as it was with the computer, as she applied the appropriate deceleration. Resolute proceeded on a sunward course that would intersect the fourth planet, where she would switch to photon thrusters and deploy the fighters and the Marines’ reentry capsules, both of which need only be dropped as the ship skimmed New Kashmir’s upper atmosphere.

  The passage wasn’t long, but it gave time for Captain Sharif to politely place himself under the command of the commodore—considerably junior to himself in terms of his permanent rank—in charge of the light Royal Space Navy units already in the system. It also gave an opportunity to scan nearby space for threats. There was, it seemed, a Caliphate ship—equivalent to an RSN fifth rater, what was loosely termed a frigate—in geosynchronous orbit around New Kashmir. This was outside the planet’s Primary Limit, and therefore in the equivalent of “international waters,” although close enough to be provocative. But provocative or not, a fifth rater was eminently ignorable by Resolute. And the rag-heads (a term used even by Muslim RSN personnel, despite prim official disapproval) made no response even as New Kashmir waxed to fill a significant portion of Jane’s view forward.

  “Approaching Primary Limit, sir,” Jane reported as Resolute neared the distance mandated by safety protocols. She did not add that the pseudovelocity had been killed precisely on the instant; Sharif could see that for himself from the readouts, and it wouldn’t do to toot one’s own horn.

  “Very good, Mister Grenville. Disengage drive.” Jane did so, and Resolute came to a virtual halt somewhat outside the Primary Limit. She raised the helmet and looked around her. The bridge was slightly less crowded than usual, for the first officer, Commander Winnifred Rushton, had been called to engineering a while back for consultation on some matter or other.

  “And now,” Sharif began . . . only to be cut off by an ululation from his armrest communicator: the internal-emergency signal. He slapped the controls, and the comm screen came alive.

  For an instant, Jane could only stare, mentally and physically paralyzed by shock.

  The screen was mostly filled by the wild-eyed face of Jared Wilmarth. Behind him, she recognized the engineering spaces where he worked. On the deck were at least two motionless bodies lying in spreading pools of blood.

  “Captain!” blurted Jared, seemingly almost unable to speak coherently. “You’ve got to come to engineering at once! Commander Rushton and Commander Ferguson are dead. They’re all dead—the whole watch. They—”

  “Get hold of yourself, Mister Wilmarth!” the Captain rapped. “What’s happened?”

  But Wilmarth was on the quavering edge of hysteria. “Captain, please come down here! It’s—” He suddenly turned his head and looked outside the pickup. Whatever he saw seemed to horrify him. And at that moment, the screen went blank.

  Sharif grasped his comm mike. “Major O’Hara, I’m on my way to engineering. Have a Marine detail meet me there.” He got to his feet. “Mister Grenville, you have the conn. Beat to quarters.” Without waiting for an acknowledgment from Jane, he rushed out.

  Jane shook loose from her stunned immobility and moved quickly to occupy the captain’s chair. “We will beat to quarters,” she commanded—a very old naval term still in use. “Lieutenant Chatterjee to the bridge,” she added, summoning her relief helmsman. Chatterjee, a fresh-faced young j.g., arrived with commendable promptness and flung himself into the seat Jane had vacated. He was not possessed of interface talent—no ship could hope to get more than one such helmsman—but he prepared the manual controls and turned to Jane, his expression a silent request for orders.

  “Stand by, Mister Chatterjee,” she said in what she hoped was a calming voice. Under the circumstances, it was out of the question to proceed on photon thrusters as planned. For now, she found herself with nothing to do but wait for further word from engineering, while Resolute hung in space just outside New Kashmir’s Primary Limit.

  She had only just come to that realization when the comm screen again awoke . . . and revealed a scene which for a moment her mind refused to accept.

  Once again the screen showed Jared Wilmarth’s engineering station. And once again he was there—but this time his face was set in lines of tense purposefulness. His left arm was locked around Captain Sharif’s neck, holding him half-choked and totally immobilized. His right hand held a standard-issue sidearm—a Webley gauss needle pistol—pointed at the captain’s temple.

  “Jared, what are you doing?” Infuriatingly, she heard her voice rise to a falsetto squeak. She forced it into steadiness and began again. “Jared, there’s a Marine detail on the way—”

  “So it’s you that’s in charge up there, Jane? All right, listen carefully. The Marines are already here—outside the hatch. They can’t break in while I’ve got him as hostage. And for that same reason you’re going to do exactly as I say.” For a fleeting instant, sadness seemed to flicker across his face. “I tried to sound you out, hoping you’d go along with me as a fellow North American. But I could see there was no way.” His features hardened again into a mask of inexorable purpose. “As you probably haven’t had the leisure to notice, the Caliphate ship in high orbit is now maneuvering to rendezvous with us. You will surrender this ship to them. Otherwise, I’ll destroy it. I’ve already rigged an override by which I can cause the antimatter plant to overload with a touch of a button. I can—and will—do it before the Marines can try any tricks, or if I smell a whiff of sleep gas.”

  Jane desperately tried to struggle up from the ocean of nightmare in which she felt she was drowning. “Jared . . . I can’t believe this. You—a Caliphate agent?”

  “No!” Wilmarth sounded indignant. “I belong to the Sons of Arnold.”

  Jane had heard of them—an organization of irreconcilables on New America, chronically under suspicion by the authorities but generally dismissed as all talk. Jane had never heard of them being present in North America itself . . . but she recalled Wilmarth saying he had New American relatives.

  “I don’t mean the gutless old fuddy-duddies who head the Sons,” he went on in a rush, as though unable to resist the temptation to deliver a manifesto to a captive audience. “They’d never dare to do this. But some of us—the younger ones, the ones who represent the true spirit of the old revolutionaries—understand that bold direct action is needed, not hot air.”

  “But Jared, what’s that got to do with trying to betray this ship to the Caliphate?”

  “We take our allies where we can find them, Jane.”

  “What? You’re telling me that your faction has allied itselves with the rag-heads? Their crazy fundamentalist version of Islam is about as far from the ideals of the old North American rebels as it’s possible to get!”

  “Do you actually think we like the Caliphate?” shouted Wilmarth. He took a deep breath and got himself under control. “Politics makes strange bedfellows. Breaking up the Empire by freeing North America is in their interest, so they’re willing to help us. But there are limits to how helpful they can be, given the disparity of military power. Turning this ship—which is far beyond anything they’ve got—over to them will help redress that imbalance. A war will give us our chance.”

  “You know perfectly well it’s been centuries since anybody in North America has wanted to be ‘freed’ from the Federal Empire. You’re mad as well as being a bloody murdering traitor!”

  “Traitor?” Wilmarth’s eyes flared with fanaticism. “You’re the traitor—as much a traitor as Washington was! I’ll be the greatest North American hero since Benedict Arnold!”

  With a sudden, convulsive effort, Sharif unlocked Wilmarth’s grip on his throat just enough to speak
in a croak. “Grenville, don’t obey him! That’s an order!”

  “Shut up!” Wilmarth struck the captain a sharp blow to the side of the head with the barrel of his Webley, and tightened his grip again as Sharif momentarily sagged. He turned back to face Jane, and his voice and his expression both snarled. “Enough talk! Do as I say or I’ll blow up this ship. I’m not bluffing!”

  For a moment, Jane sat frozen in an agony of indecision. Glancing at the tactical plot, she could see that the Caliphate ship was indeed approaching. It hadn’t taken it long, for it could use its drive, since Resolute was still just outside the Primary Limit.

  Just outside the Primary Limit . . .

  An idea came to life in her, begotten by desperation.

  “Well, Jane?” came Wilmarth’s ragged voice. “Stop stalling!”

  It left her no time to talk herself out of the insane course of action that had occurred to her. Resolution congealed.

  “All right. I agree.” She saw the triumph on Wilmarth’s face, and the horrified widening of Sharif’s eyes. She ignored both and continued in a carefully calm and reasonable tone of voice. “I’m going to return to the helmsman’s station, so I can more easily control the rendezvous maneuvering.”

  Wilmarth nodded stiffly. Jane stood up, aware that every pair of eyes on the bridge was glaring at her. She met those of Lieutenant Beaumont, the weapons officer, for a fleeting instant; she winked, and with her chin gave a barely perceptible gesture toward the tactical plot. She hoped he would understand. Then she brusquely motioned Chatterjee out of his seat and took his place. It was necessary. The youngster might not have obeyed a command from her that would have seemed perfect lunacy. At a minimum, he would have hesitated long enough for Wilmarth to carry out his threat.

  And furthermore, she thought as she lowered the neural induction helmet over her head, now she would be able to think that command rather than giving it verbally for Wilmarth to overhear.

  First she activated a special override of engineering’s control of the power supply to the Bernheim Drive. Then, taking a deep breath and bracing herself, she sent a flashing thought to the computer . . . and the drive awoke, on full power.

  At four hundred Gs of insensible acceleration, Resolute surged planetward, past New Kashmir’s Primary Limit.

  “What?” was all Wilmarth had time for. With a grinding crash and the indescribable shriek of rending metal, the drive shut down in a brutal way that was never intended. At once the pseudovelocity dropped to zero and Resolute came to a shuddering halt with which her inertial compensators could not entirely cope. The great ship shook convulsively.

  The entire bridge crew would have gone sprawling had they not been, as per regulation, strapped into their seats while at general quarters. In the comm screen, Wilmarth did go sprawling, losing his grip on the captain, as Jane had been gambling he would. He got off a shot with his Webley, but the electromagnetically propelled fléchette went wide, barely missing Sharif’s head. Then the two men were grappling on the deck.

  In the tactical plot, the Caliphate ship hung in stunned motionlessness.

  “Mister Beaumont!” snapped Jane, “I want a target lock on—”

  “Aye aye, sir!” Beaumont, she thought, must have understood, for he recovered more swiftly than she would have thought possible. His hands flew over his control board.

  “And Mister Beaumont . . . fire at will!”

  Whatever damage the ship had sustained, it clearly hadn’t affected the weapon systems. From all the projectors that could be brought to bear, gigawatt x-ray lasers stabbed out at light speed—virtual instantaneity at this range. The beams were, of course, invisible. But in the outside view, a new star flared into being as the Caliphate ship’s shields and armor failed under an energy transfer beyond what a fifth rater could withstand. It was a star that briefly went nova when the target’s antimatter powerplant went critical.

  Jane sagged back in her seat and turned to the comm screen. Through the acrid smoke that now suffused the engineering spaces, she could see that it was all over. The Marines had broken in and had the screaming, writhing Wilmarth pinned to the deck. A corpsman was examining the captain’s throat.

  She stood up and helped Chatterjee—the only one present who hadn’t been strapped in—up off the deck. “Mister Chatterjee, you may be inserting us into orbit around New Kashmir.” At least she hoped the photon thrusters were still in working order, although she didn’t mention that. “Mister Beaumont . . . good work.” She returned to the captain’s chair and sat down. “I believe I still have the conn.”

  The reports were in. The Bernheim Drive was badly damaged—inoperable for now, in fact—but it hadn’t been wrecked beyond repair. In fact the new engineering officer was confident it could be repaired in fairly short order. Ships carried a full supply of spare components against the possibility of an encounter with a sizeable piece of space junk, which could have the same consequences Resolute had just experienced.

  And now Jane sat in the captain’s private office, looking across a desk at Sharif’s dark, hawklike face.

  “You do realize, Commander, that you violated more regulations than I can call to mind at the moment.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There will, of course, have to be a board of inquiry. However, after the board has heard my testimony, and that of every other officer of this ship, I don’t think you’ll have any worries. In fact . . . when next year’s Honors List comes out . . .” He dismissed the subject as outside his purview. “Tell me, what caused you to think of that stunt?”

  “Well, sir, I’ve heard Major O’Hara quote what he says is a very old Irish saying.”

  “Eh?”

  Jane grinned. “It’s not the fall, it’s the sudden stop.”

  Steve White served as a Naval Intelligence officer in the Mediterranean and in the Vietnam War Zone. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia Law School and an associate member of the Virginia Bar. He is well known for the best-selling Starfire military science fiction series with David Weber and, more recently, Charles Gannon. In addition, he has written a number of popular science fiction adventure novels for Baen. They include the galaxy-spanning adventure Prince of Sunset and its sequel Emperor of Dawn, the secret-history science fiction novel The Prometheus Project, the high fantasy novel Demon’s Gate, and the Jason Thanou series of time travel adventures that began with Blood of the Heroes and continues throughout the current Gods of Dawn. His other solo novels include Saint Antony’s Fire, an alternate-history fantasy set in Elizabethan times. Steve lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

  ANOTHER SOLUTION

  Mark L. Van Name

  Convergence: When absolute power meets unmatched force, the prospect of mutually assured destruction may be unavoidable. Too bad for humanity, if that’s the case! But sometimes the only solution is to rethink the situation from the ground up. Or in this case, from space—down.

  “So, are you ready to make history?” Rios, her crew behind her, stared through the observatory tower’s windows at the enormous bulk of the Solution, her future stretching in front of her for a kilometer in each direction.

  She turned to face the three dozen people waiting with her to board the ship.

  No one spoke. Veterans all, they did not need or want a pep talk, so they had taken her question as rhetorical.

  She aimed to surprise them.

  “I hope you aren’t,” she said, “because I’m sure not. I’m fine with history recording the launch of the biggest man-made vessel ever to move, but I hope we’re no more than a footnote in that story. The ship’s AI can fly it. We’re along only in case it needs authorization to engage in battle.” She looked each person in the eyes, taking the time to make sure each knew she had seen them. “I don’t want to fight. I want to take up our protective position over the Union nations, make it clear to those Republic goons that we could attack but won’t if they leave us alone, spend six boring months in orbit, and go back to Earth.” She looked ag
ain at each person. “Six boring months—not history. That’s our goal. Got it?”

  Most people nodded. The younger ones looked puzzled; she would watch them carefully until they understood fully how much she’d meant what she’d said.

  “Dismissed.”

  The crew split into four groups, one per elevator. She’d follow in a minute, when all were on board. They’d christened the Solution earlier, before everyone not in the crew had ridden the shuttle back to base. She stared at the lunar camp twenty-five klicks away, its five domes gleaming in the light. It had never felt like home, and she was glad to be quit of it. Her house was a home, and her ship, whatever ship, was a home, but everything else was just a place to pass the time.

  “All crew aboard,” the Solution said through her implant. She knew it was technically the constructed voice of the ship’s AI, but the vessel’s computation infrastructure wove through so much of its structure and the AI was so integral a part of it that she thought of the ship and the AI as one and the same.

  “Coming,” she said. It could hear her via subvocalizing, and it would have known she was on the move just by tracking her, but she liked to talk to it as if it was another member of her crew.

  She stepped into a waiting elevator.

  Rios buckled into her chair in the enormous bridge. The three-meter-diameter sphere in front of her displayed a holo of the Solution and its underground dock. The thin layer of camouflage panels that had been covering the ship had already retracted into the walls of the dock. The Solution sat ready to ascend.