by Tony Daniel
“I don’t like the sound of that, Chief, and I’m damn sure the old man won’t. Pull everyone you have off everything else—and I mean everything else—and push that curve to the left. We’re too exposed here.”
It would be particularly true when they spun up the singularity set and it began radiating into C-space. Otherwise, a ship that doesn’t want to be found can avoid it pretty easily. Normal space is enormous; ships are tiny. A disabled ship that wants to be found is a difficult target, even if they can make themselves look like a bright spot against the backdrop of space. Most beacons are directional, and if they set a beacon on a slow scan they have to hope that another ship’s fast-scanning antenna is looking in their direction at the right time. The odds are against it, unless that other ship knows just where to look.
Biermann continued, “We’ll have to hold off spinning the baubles much faster until we’re ready to move, or else we’ll shine brighter than Grendel to their detectors. That means sticking with our deployed arrays for now. Hopefully the only thing they have looking this way are coarse star sensors—but since Grendel’s a flare star you know they have some other sort of observations going on. We’ll yaw a few degrees to port before we clear the star, to try to minimize any reflection off the arrays.” He pictured their orbital transit in his mind: They were much smaller than a star spot, but would cross the surface slowly enough that any observer would know they were in orbit and not on the star’s surface. He said, “If we can’t get the drives going in, say, four hours, is there any way you can task a couple of riggers to distribute some of that asteroidal material around, so we look like something natural? It’s okay that we’re three-axis stabilized, it just looks like we’re tidally locked, but we don’t need to show too many sharp edges if we can help it.”
“Only if we stop extractions, sir, which means we won’t be growing any more missiles.”
“That’s okay, Chief,” Biermann said. “We’ll never have enough missiles to take on more than a couple of ships. Just make sure the ones we have are rigged fast and hot.”
“Aye, sir, will do.”
“CIC out,” he said and killed the icon.
That’s when Giordano screamed.
Biermann couldn’t see the port Sensory Enhancement Neural Interface Chamber, or S-E-N-I-C—officially “scenic,” unofficially “cynic,” but shorthand throughout the fleet as just “tank”—because the privacy screen was up. He always appreciated that, because the tank had the same effect on him that particularly good REM sleep had: He came out of it with a rampant erection.
That wouldn’t be what Giordano was screaming about.
She sounded as if she were being doused repeatedly with scalding water: short bursts of pain followed by sharp intakes of breath, over and over. A quick glance at the display confirmed that she’d gone seventeen minutes into the red.
Biermann pulled the privacy screen off its supports and threw it down; expediency trumped modesty. Giordano had her back to him: she was on her knees, hunched over the hatch, and her screams had moderated into full-forced yelling into the tank.
“My legs are in there! My legs!”
“Sully, get—”
She interrupted. “Corpsman’s on the way, Rick!”
Every case of tank psychosis was unique—even the same person had different reactions if they went through it more than once. Back when he was newly assigned to the Vindicator, patrolling the inner edge of quadrant IV of the Kellador Lens, Biermann had come out of the tank with symptoms of steroid-fueled Tourette’s combined with the sure conviction that he had been poisoned and the only antidote was anhydrous ammonia. He didn’t remember any of it, precisely, but he’d seen the log recordings. Not his finest hour.
After a moment or two of sobbing, Giordano straightened up and looked around. She stared at Biermann, and made a mournful tone like a motor straining to turn against a brake. Her eyes filled with tears.
“I forgot to bring the snacks,” she said. “Someone else had brought Merinda berries but no one ate them and I picked them up to keep them away from the ants but while I was watching the ants the birds flew down and got them, got the berries.”
Biermann wasn’t sure how to interact with Giordano, if the spacer even knew where she was or who she was talking to. He held up his empty hands, in hopes that Giordano would know he wasn’t a threat.
“Those birds don’t even like Merinda berries, no one likes them, they’re too sour but they make good pies if you add enough sugar.”
Where’s that corpsman?
Giordano sat down and scooted back, but was blocked by the tank’s mouth. “Nana made the best pies, I liked the apple and cheese, but while she was picking the apples the birds came down, the birds came down, I hate those damn birds . . .” She brushed her hands through the air, slapping at imaginary birds.
Biermann wondered if the birds Giordano was talking about were really the ships that had vectored in. He hoped Sully was watching the screens and Mbali’s outputs.
Giordano turned to her right, to the port bulkhead. “Nana! Bring my gun, bring my gun.” She looked again at Biermann, and seemed puzzled by the corpsman who had just stepped up to Biermann’s side. “A human amoeba,” she muttered, then sighed like a pneumatic tire losing pressure. She looked down and brushed her thigh. “My poor legs,” she said. “My poor legs.”
The corpsman—Malinowski, Biermann saw—snuck up to Giordano’s side. She stuck a dermal patch on her neck and said, almost too soft for Biermann to hear, “Let’s see if we can fix your legs for you.”
Giordano’s head turned in an exaggerated arc, as if she were moving it around some obstacle. “Do you know where they are?”
Malinowski smiled. “Sure I do. Now, up we go,” she said as Giordano collapsed against her. The corpsman was as broad-shouldered as Biermann, and hoisted the spacer with little effort.
Biermann nodded to her and turned away. She had her job to do, and he needed to get back to his.
Sully briefed him while Biermann pored over the status. Mbali was online, and the total traces into the Grendel system now stood at forty-three. Twenty-five had converged on Pyrite, which was bad enough, but eighteen had arrayed themselves into half-AU orbits around Grendel on three different orbital planes—and then gone quiescent.
They had to be doing overwatch of the system, so if Tigris so much as swished her figurative tail in terms of spinning up her singularity set, enough detectors would see her C-space emissions that they would pinpoint her orbit in a flash. Sully had already alerted the engineers to damp their systems down to twenty percent, which left Biermann to assess the strategic situation and their tactical options.
He was not surprised at the next call that came in.
“Well, Lieutenant?” Captain Norris said. “How do you propose to get my ship out of this jam?”
“Run like hell, Skipper, quick as we can,” he said, and scrolled through icons until he found the captain’s favorite book. “I’m pulling up the page while we speak: ‘If unequal in all respects, be capable of eluding the enemy, for a small force is a prize for a more powerful one.’ I don’t have any intention of us becoming a Kellador prize, and we still need to deliver a report to Tristemon. If we can leap before they see us, we have a chance to make it this time.”
Captain Norris’s voice, usually smooth and profound, seemed almost manic over the intercom. “Doc won’t let me come up and play, since I don’t have two feet to stand on, but there’s more you can be thinking about. First, if we’d made it all the way to Tristemon from Descartes we wouldn’t be here and able to observe this buildup—so maybe getting the C-drives knocked out of alignment wasn’t all bad. Second, go back to the Nine Grounds and think about them: The squids are in frontier ground, and if they press on they’ll be in serious ground. Or you might think of Descartes as being the frontier ground, since it’s closer to the Lens, so here in our sphere they’d already be in serious ground. Either way, they’re extending themselves . . . and they’ll eve
ntually reach too far.
“But the fact that we’re here may make this death ground, for us. And if so, remember: ‘Invincibility lies in defense; the possibility of victory is in attack.’ Now, get to it.”
The idea of the Nine Grounds went all the way back to Earth, several hundred parsecs and many more hundreds of years away. Biermann found the chapter and skimmed the text, wishing his memory was as good as the captain’s so he wouldn’t have to look up the references.
Frontier ground was a sally into enemy territory, and serious ground was a deeper run at the enemy: One was advised not to stop in the frontier, and once in deep had to resort to plunder to keep supplied. It was a problem that had plagued invaders from the earliest wars, and the logistics of space had only made the situation worse. Sure, with fabrication equipment a ship like Tigris could catch an asteroid and mine it to make spare parts and components, or skim a gas giant for volatiles, but that was good only up to a point; the piece of apple still in his teeth reminded him they couldn’t plant and grow fresh fruit as quickly, for instance. It meant long supply lines, vulnerable to accident and interdiction, which was why outposts and colonies, and even spacefaring vessels themselves, had to be as self-sufficient as possible and to exploit resources as they came available.
Biermann thought about Salem and Descartes being exploited by the Kellador, about what that meant to the settlers and their families. And if the squids pressed on from here at Grendel they would hit Tristemon, Hefner, even Conmarra itself.
He checked his countdown clock: two hours, fifteen minutes before they emerged from behind Grendel and had line-of-sight with Pyrite.
Biermann knew what death ground was, but he paged over to the entry anyway. In death ground a ship or an army, down to each individual spacer or soldier, could survive only by fighting. No alternative, and no chance of survival short of being the only force alive at the end.
Forty-three to one, and Tigris with fewer than a score of missiles, dropped that chance—of survival through victory—to nothing.
Biermann sighed. He had been proud to tell his family he was joining the Fleet, since his father had served under the Leonine banner for a decade himself. His father had been quiet, almost pensive, at the news, and at one point had pulled Ricardo aside. His father’s words might well have been the captain’s.
“It’s old advice, but you shouldn’t fight a battle you don’t believe in. And you’ll find that battles are only fought when someone believes in them strongly enough.
“What I mean is, every battle has people on both sides who care deeply enough to fight it. Otherwise, they wouldn’t bother—and the side that doesn’t bother will find itself at the mercy of the side that believes in their cause. There must be some minimum level of belief to sustain any war very long.
“But sometimes the only option is to fight. In that case you better develop the requisite amount of belief, and quickly. Otherwise all that’s left is to surrender.”
The intercom icon flashed a moment before Doc’s voice came through. “CIC, Sickbay.”
Biermann checked the timer: a shade over an hour until they came out from behind Grendel. “Who died this time, Doc?”
“Ha, not funny. I did a quick scan on Ramirez, and the Captain thought you needed to know the results.”
He glanced toward the starboard tank, where Mbali was standing in for the chief. “Was it his heart, like you thought?”
“Not exactly.”
Biermann rubbed his eyes. “I don’t have time for mysteries, Doc.”
“His heart’s not damaged like it would be if he’d been in cardiac arrest. But he does show a lot of synaptic degradation. Looks like tank saturation.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Biermann said. “Ramirez was under the line on everything, never showed any effects after a turn in the tank.”
Doc said, “He had a couple of episodes before you signed on here.”
“Severe?”
From the tactical station, Sullivan said, “Negative. The spic was a pro.”
“Sullivan’s right, Ricky—Chief Ramirez’s reactions were always within normal limits, even the brief episodes he manifested.”
“Holy hell, Doc, what are you saying?” He didn’t want to hear the answer, but the obligation came with the billet.
“There’s a good chance our SENIC equipment is corrupt.”
Thirty minutes left before they cleared Grendel and, like the old saying, “no way out but through.”
The projected tracks of the squids’ observation ships formed a virtual cage around the star, but a loose one. Biermann knew the ships were still out there even though they weren’t emitting anything detectable. It was only a matter of time before the Kellador noticed Tigris, no matter how low they spun the singularity set.
He called engineering, and Lieutenant Gaines answered. Biermann asked, “What’s our drive status, JT?”
“We’ve brought the drive alignment a little closer to spec. If we fired up now, we’d be at sixty-two percent.”
“That’ll have to do—and good work. Sully has a juke-and-jive planned and programmed for Mbali to execute, and sixty-two ought to get us to Tristemon even though we’re not in position for the best exit route.” He had made up his mind before he called, but he hesitated for a moment before he said, “We’re going, just as we are, quick like a rabbit. Pull in the arrays now, then spin up on my mark, and not before, copy?”
“Aye, Skip, spin up on your mark.”
Biermann didn’t bother correcting JT, but he wondered if Captain Norris was listening and how much shit they would both catch later—if they made it to later. “Once we’re at minimum drive power, Mbali will fly us the hell out of here. The window’s going to be pretty narrow, and if we miss it . . .” He wasn’t sure what to say.
“Understood.”
Biermann took a deep breath. “Stand by, then.”
He turned his head back and forth across his display. It took only a couple of minutes for the arrays to be stowed and the light to go green, but it felt like a couple of lifetimes.
Biermann turned from his display to Sullivan’s. She must have felt his eyes, because she turned to face him. Her half-melted nose and the burned patch on her right cheek glistened with sweat, so much that under the tactical lighting they looked freshly bloody. She nodded to him and turned back to the tactical station.
“Engineering, CIC. Power up . . . now.”
The singularity set at the center of the ship was shielded and shunted enough that the only sensation was a slight increase in gravity and lighting. Biermann turned his attention to the reports coming from Mbali in the tank.
As expected, within two seconds the Kellador lookout ships above, below and on the system’s ecliptic fired up their own power sources and became, through the higher-dimensional perceptions funneled into the tank and its occupant, beacons as bright as when they entered the system. Almost as quickly they exchanged their languorous orbits for powered flight and began converging on Grendel, because the Tigris itself was so close to the red dwarf. Biermann sounded the klaxon for transition into C-space. The power output ramped up, crossed the activation point, and Biermann readied himself for their convergence—
A clang like a gong erupted from the starboard tank and all the feeds from Mbali went chaotic.
“Brain break!” Sullivan yelled, and hurdled her console to check the tank.
Biermann had never seen anyone have a psychotic episode in the tank. His display quivered as if it were filled with indigo-tinted water frozen instantly solid. With the sure knowledge that the Kellador ships weren’t frozen as the display showed, but were still approaching, he swept the display clear and signaled a medical emergency in CIC.
The tank hatch opened and Mbali breached. His long dark form came up and out in a fountain of scintillating crystals, and he grabbed Sullivan by the shoulders. She twisted free and lunged at him; her forehead smashed his mask and his nose behind it. He flopped backward, arms flailing, and
ended up halfway out of the hatch with Sullivan atop him.
Biermann moved the only direction he could think to move, with an equal mixture of determination and terror. In death ground, fight. He shed his utilities and everything else before he crossed the broken privacy screen, grabbed the facemask and fitted it, and jumped into the portside tank, slapping the activation plate on his way into the dark, freezing depths.
The crystals bit, bite, tore, tear, eat, burrow, nest, hatch, grow . . .
Cool hot flanking warmth, olive pathway, mirror gate, push-pull-spin-reach . . .
Converge.
—The interface phased in and out, and in those instants Biermann’s conscious mind was vomited back into the real world instead of being swallowed in the flood of sensation—
Time-aqua-space-flower, contract-condense, walnut-motion within marble-motion around musk-motion, spin-parallax-inertia . . .
Musk? Proximity-fright-cold.
—A squid ship, boosting in-system barely to port and down—
Anger-plunder-march.
Vector. Emerge. Strike. Strike.
Pain!
—Hull breach around bulkhead fourteen like a sock to the jaw, two compartments bleeding out souls and volatiles like teeth knocked out—
Converge.
Condensed cool clanging molasses waves, distant despairing stars, adjacent rancid not-stars—
—Targets, missiles, trajectories, projections, predictions—
Emerge. Strikestrikestrike. Converge.
Emerge. Strikestrikestrike. Converge.
Emerge. Painpainpain.
—Body blow, broken ribs, bulkheads forty-nine through fifty-six, internal bleeding, last missiles, make them count, run like hell—
Strike . . . strike . . . converge.
Garlic spin. Azure gate. Pestilence march. Starry trumpet harmony, buzzing sewage not-star cacophony—
Many countless innumerable immeasurable incalculable—
