by Tony Daniel
“We’re at almost point oh six c.”
Even with a modern, well-tuned forceline drive, that took enough energy to power one of Earth’s continents for a year only a couple of centuries before.
Werner said, “Three more launches. Tracking five. On your display.”
Metzger looked. The five all showed as colored marks, vectored toward their own tag.
None of them had carets in the green zone. None of them could reach Malahayati.
“We’re clear,” he said. “Barring something our intel didn’t find, farther out than anything else they have, we’re clear. Sir, I request permission to secure and sleep until phase entry.”
“Granted. Well done, Astrogator. You are relieved. Don’t worry about phase entry. Second Astrogator Yukat and I can handle it.”
“Thank you, sir. And all of you.”
He rolled painfully out of his G couch and staggered aft. The surgeon assisted him to his cabin and onto his bunk.
With battle damage, short power, and massive velocity to counter, they barely made it. Malahayati precipitated rather farther from the base than Metzger intended. They were four light-hours out. It would be ten days on minimal power and half rations before anyone would reach them.
Four hours was 1.5 divs. It was that long again before a response came to their report and request.
“Fuel and drinks on the way. Welcome home, Hate. Congratulations on your mission.”
That nickname seemed to fit perfectly.
Captain said, “Mister Metzger, I saved one bottle of sake for such an eventuality. Will you do me the honor of serving the command crew and yourself?”
“Yes, sir!”
Michael Z. Williamson is variously an immigrant from the UK and Canada; a retired veteran of the US Army and USAF; a best-selling and award-winning writer of SF and fantasy; a consultant on disaster preparedness and military matters for TV, movies, government agencies, and occasional private clients; and a bladesmith. He’s best known for the “Freehold” universe.
THE STARS ARE SILENT
Gray Rinehart
With its shifting waterscapes, terrifying weather, and utter exposure to the elements, the sea has been known to drive some sailors—we won’t say most—a little batty. How much more might faster-than-light travel warp the human mind? And if, to push a big ship through the gulfs between the stars, an astrogator has to simultaneously be aware of multiple realities that exclude one another and yet must exist in the same moment, who could blame that sailor if he senses a psychotic breakdown around every corner. He had better pray to the space gods, however, that the break doesn’t come in the midst of battle. In that case, there might be no pulling back from the brink of insanity itself. In fact, when you have no choice, it might even help to go a little wacko.
We spun—spinned? span? spen?—no, spun. Words, grammar, symbolic thought were, are, hard to come by in the tank, where all is, was, has been, will be, sensation . . . inside-outside-beyond-before-during, always during. We strode across our corner of the galaxy and we spun—twirled? revolved?—and knew we spun, know we spin, because the screaming stars move around us.
The stars roar out their colors, shout their X-rays and radio, proclaim their presence in the universe, and we march between them in time to their music . . .
Changeover was nominal, logs and operations in order as expected—Khalid was an excellent deck officer—but the lack of any replies from Fleet twisted Biermann’s colon almost as much as the slow progress repairing the drives.
Damn the C-drives, anyway.
If they got them retuned they could make for Tristemon with all haste and report in person. From there, the word would get to Hefner and Conmarra and the whole fleet.
Likely their distress calls and reports hadn’t been received yet. The depths of C-space were sometimes hard to reconcile with the passage of normal space-time. A mind could guide a ship through its secret portals and down its narrow alleys, but messages and data and other ephemera often evaporated or arrived all out of time or place. He’d spent the worst nine months of his career on a stint in Comm/Intel, trying to make sense of jumbled, jangled message fragments that floated up from the condensate.
Of course, it could be as simple as that the regional headquarters at Conmarra was collating theirs with other reports. Whatever the case, he was glad Khalid was on his way to break the news to Captain Norris that, in addition to C-transit still being down, engineering had fabbed only sixteen missiles from the asteroid they’d commandeered upon entering the Grendel system—a fraction of the number they’d spent at Descartes. The old man was already cranky enough, being trapped in sickbay while the grafts took on what were left of his legs.
Biermann switched on a confident attitude as he climbed the ladder down to the CIC. He would have found the expression easier to manifest had he been going up to the main bridge, but with the bridge blown all to hell . . .
Biermann knew he shouldn’t fret—at least not publicly. Drives and weapons rated a lot higher than starting to grow a new bridge. At least it smelled a bit less like hot metal and melted plastic in the CIC than it did in the rest of the ship.
“Good morning, Tac,” he said.
“Good morning, XO,” said Sullivan.
That would be the limit of formalities for both of them.
“All clear in our sky?” he asked.
Sully spoke without turning around; after the Descartes incident she preferred to be heard and not seen. “An in-system ripple, toward Pyrite, just as we rounded Grendel. Earlier ones were outbound, and all at system’s edge.”
“Who’s in the tank?” he asked. He knew it was Giordano, but wanted to see what Sully said.
“The Italian.”
Sully was a fine officer, but not known for her subtlety. Doc had done a great job on her face, but the burn scars called for more regen capacity than Tigris had to offer right now. What burned the XO was that the captain had denied his request for a brevet promotion for her—
But that had to wait. Biermann played a quick-sim of all the C-space ripples Giordano had reported. They were hard to see in the display, the multiple dimensions flattened so—observed rather than experienced the way they were in the tank. If only that experience could truly be articulated.
Sully was right: Most of the ripples were tangential to the Grendel system, following the vector from Tristemon toward Descartes—probably traders who hadn’t gotten word of the Kellador attack and wouldn’t have the push to change their headings before they emerged in normal space and found themselves facing the squids.
But the last one, right before their orbit took them behind the red dwarf Grendel, was directly in-system. It was so new, it had come in while Khalid was briefing him.
Biermann breathed out slow as he noted the trace. Tigris’s orbit was tight around Grendel, and out of sight of its planet for now, but the chance was small that the new arrival was a human ship. Pyrite, the flare star’s only companion, was aptly named: It was a little larger than Earth but of dubious value. The ripple might be a smuggler or pirate, but the only easy systems from here were Tristemon, Descartes, and KX-31, which was more-or-less off-limits since it was a Kellador system. And this track came from the general direction of Descartes . . . it might be another ship that escaped the attack, but it planted, watered, and tended a seed of paranoia in him. Had one of the squids’ ships trailed them?
Pyrite might actually interest the Kellador. As amphibians they had a preference for watery planets, and Pyrite was a little over eleven percent water by mass. But it was several parsecs inward from the convex “edge” of the Kellador Lens, the volume of space that marked the intersection between the human and Kellador spheres of influence. The squids had never encroached that far into human space before. Then again, they had never attacked human settlements like they did around Descartes, either.
The Tigris’s orbit around Grendel was so close and fast that the star would eclipse them for only a little over six hours; he set u
p a holographic countdown timer and hung it above the main display. The watch had just become much more interesting.
“Who’s next in the tank?” Biermann asked. Everyone reacted a little differently in the sensorium, and some were more coherent than others.
“The spic.”
“Ensign Sullivan, is that a term of endearment?”
Sully snorted. Her close-cropped red hair waved an impolite salute and settled down. “Not a chance.”
He chided himself briefly for not enforcing a higher standard of discipline on his watches, but he needed to have done so four months ago when he first came aboard at Conmarra. Still, he was content as long as everyone did their duty: Loyalty and competence were more important than decorum.
Biermann turned the display to a more convenient angle. He worked his tongue at a piece of dehydrated apple skin stuck between his molars while he swept through various options. They should be fairly well hidden from whoever had just entered the system; they rode less than five radii from the star, and even this dim star’s output would mask some of the power their singularity set produced. Engineering was holding its output at thirty percent, enough to run fabricators and regular systems but not engines, and was supplementing with solar power even though their arrays were optimized for different wavelengths than Grendel produced.
He was glad to know that Ramirez was next in the tank; they needed a clear head synched in if ships were starting to vector in to their position. But at the moment Biermann and Sullivan were the only two souls in a CIC that usually held a half dozen, since Giordano in the port tank didn’t really count. Descartes had left holes in every duty roster, controls were slaved together in sometimes awkward ways, and the only upside was that the steely sphere seemed more spacious than usual.
“Where is Chief Ramirez?” he asked.
Giordano’s time in the tank was . . . Biermann pulled up the spacer’s cumulative tank time to see how far she was from the limit. Her total was low enough—unlike Biermann’s own, which officially precluded him from diving in for another month—but her shift time was already deep in the amber zone. Biermann frowned. Tigris ops were short staffed enough after Descartes; they didn’t need to risk losing someone to tank psychosis. And it wasn’t like the chief to be late. By now he should be stripped, masked, and getting in the starboard tank, ready to take the next rotation.
Sully said, “No idea, Lieutenant. I don’t have a tracker on him.”
The ship did. Biermann swept the display clean and brought up personnel traces. He imagined his own chip vibrating as Tigris queried it and verified he was in the CIC. He chose alphabet, it was just as quick as sorting by duty section: R . . .
“What’s he doing still in the rack?”
No answer; Sully knew the question was rhetorical. She was astute like that.
An incoming intercom icon flashed in the air above the screen. He touched the pip before the caller spoke. “CIC, Biermann.”
“Ricky, this is Doc.”
Brief panic surged in him, but Doc wouldn’t sound so calm if he were calling about the captain. “Beacon” Lyles had been making progress, though; had she . . .
“I need to report a loss.”
Biermann caught himself in time to sigh rather than moan; another condolence message to draft.
“Can you pipe the details up here in writing, Doc? Right now I need to find someone to roust Ramirez. It’s his turn in the tank.”
“No, Ricky, it is the chief.”
Time seemed to stop for Biermann, the way it did when he was in the tank. He physically shook himself, from his shoulders down through his hips like a wet dog, to snap back to realtime/realworld.
“Sully, find me a duty officer for the starboard tank, now. Doc, what the hell are you playing at?”
“No games, Ricky. Chief Ramirez was found unresponsive in his bunk, oh, call it twenty minutes ago, and pronounced by me right before I called. Rough estimate, he’s been dead two hours or more. Maybe heart, but I won’t be sure until I take a closer look.”
Biermann wiped his forehead and his fingers came away wet. “Do you have what you need for that?”
Doc coughed out a quick, sharp laugh. “Everything but time and space, with patients everywhere. But I’ll make time and find space, at least for a quick assessment, then we’ll wrap him up and put him in the freezer.” He left unsaid what Biermann already knew: with the others. A lot of provisions had had to be thawed, and Tigris had many fewer mouths to eat them.
“Does the skipper know?”
Doc paused—long enough for Biermann to grasp that Doc had called the CIC because he, Biermann, effectively was the skipper while Captain Norris was incapacitated. Before Biermann could say anything to correct that impression, Doc said, “I haven’t told him yet, but he probably knows. He knows I got called down to crew quarters. I’ll give him the rundown when I bring Ramirez into sickbay.”
“Good. You need me to get a detail to make room in the freezer?”
“No, I’ll take care of that. I’ll send you a report as soon as I have it. Doc out.” The intercom icon flashed once, went gray, then shrank to nothingness.
Biermann vaguely registered that Mbali had come into the CIC and was talking to Sully, when another ripple entered the system. This one came in high in reference to Grendel’s ecliptic plane, roughly from where KX-31 should be, and angled down toward Pyrite’s orbital position.
“Shit,” Sully said from the tactical station.
Two incursions in the span of . . . less than an hour? Both headed toward the only planet in the system? It smelled like a rendezvous to Biermann. And a rendezvous smelled like trouble.
He dialed in to Giordano’s perception as best he could with the shallow-depth screen. He considered overlaying the automated C-space detection grid, but it never captured the same nuances that a person did—the programmers built it to relay the sensorium’s output, but the multiphasic layers always blended together in odd ways. No one fully trusted the machine to make sense of the signal compared to the noise.
Biermann’s interface plate, on the back of his neck right over the fourth cervical vertebra, itched. The liquid trail running down his back from it was imaginary, but Biermann shivered nonetheless as he glanced toward the starboard tank.
Mbali stood above the tank’s open mouth like a child at the end of a high dive: He hadn’t raised the privacy screen, and sweat glistened on his naked back and legs as he looked down, tentative, into the iridescence. The crystals glowed pale green from Biermann’s tangential viewpoint, like the shallow water of some tropical lagoon, but looking straight down they would drink in light and fade to deepest black. Mbali stepped gingerly over the hatch rim, retreated from the initial shocking cold, then climbed down the ladder with slow, measured steps.
“Get in there, M-B!” Biermann snapped.
Mbali glanced behind him, the clear mask over his nose and mouth fogged slightly with his exhalations, then faced forward again and lowered into the crystals with more dispatch.
“Get him dialed in, Sully, we need him online—”
Another ripple vectored in, reported from Giordano’s perception. Like the last one, this came from KX-31.
God, this is Descartes all over again.
At Descartes, of course, they had been in a powered synchronous orbit around the largest moon of Homeawayfrom, the system’s innermost gas giant, not in a tight freefall orbit only a few radii away from the star.
They had come in clean, received welcome messages from the capital and from the Uljas, and slipped into an assigned slot. The skipper had sent the standard courtesies and invitations for delegations to join him aboard Tigris to toast Captain Gustafsen and Uljas before they dropped into C-space en route to Salem, their next port in the “Conmarra Circuit” rotation pattern. Captain Gustafsen wanted to delay the Uljas’s departure, because Descartes was a better port of call than Salem. As a joint human-Kellador world, nine parsecs inside the lens-shaped zone of contention, Salem was les
s a symbol of peace as the name was meant to imply and more a source of friction.
Captain Gustafsen’s launch had barely moored back at Uljas when the ripples of Kellador ships started coming in.
Now Uljas was lost, Descartes was lost—presumably Salem had been lost some time before—and Tigris had barely made it out, crippled, on a run back to warn the rest of the Fleet. Who knew what Uljas might have found at Salem, but their delay and the fight they put up were probably all that allowed Tigris to escape.
The display convulsed in front of Biermann. Was Mbali locked in yet? Giordano should be emerging, but . . .
“That’s not a ripple,” Biermann said, “that’s a wave.” The traces were so numerous that the system now positively identified them as Kellador.
Sullivan whistled, as if she admired what they were seeing. She crossed to the port tank, waiting for the green light to activate the extractor. “What is that, a flotilla?” she asked.
“No,” Biermann said. “It’s an armada.”
He verified that the tracks were converging on Pyrite, and double-checked Tigris’s position against the planet’s. The ship would come out from behind the star in less than five hours now. He pulled up an intercom icon and activated it as several traces broke away, high and low. He held his breath for a moment, wondering if they would come in toward Grendel.
“Engineering, CIC,” he said through the tightness in his chest.
“Engineering, Chief Ollecki.”
Biermann spilled the situation as concisely as he could. “Any chance of getting C-drive back before we come around Grendel?”
The pause might have been diplomatic, or dramatic, but was probably just checking status. “Not completely, sir. We verified good alignment through most of the lattice, but we haven’t applied anything other than token power yet. We have to spin up the singularity set for that. Lieutenant Gaines estimates we’ll have the C-drives at fifty percent in about six hours, and eighty percent in twelve. Ninety percent will take the better part of a day.”
