by Tony Daniel
“Distance to the Mao,” she demanded from Ivan Massif.
“Six kilometers and closing fast,” said Massif with just a slight quaver of fear in his voice. Whether the fear was caused by the approaching behemoth or by his own captain, even he wasn’t sure.
“Captain,” said Carr, “they’re sending a comm.”
“Let’s hear it,” said Ramos. The comm spit out a long string of angry Chinese gibberish.
“They sound pissed off,” said Kish.
“I would be too if I was them,” said Ramos. “Ivan, how close are they tracking to our pipeline?”
“They’re right on top of it, ma’am. Closing fast. Four clicks now,” said Massif.
“Perfect,” said Ramos. Massif gave Carr a worried look while Kish remained focused on his board. “They’re going to want that pipe, it saves them a bunch of development time. They’ll hug it all the way up to the drop hole. If we get there first and hook it up to our release valve they won’t be able to take us out. They can’t fire on us with a live nuke or they risk igniting the whole pipeline, hell, maybe all the way back to the shelf. So they’ll have to back off. How close to the hole now?”
“Just three minutes out, Captain,” said Massif. Ramos smiled.
“We’re too close. They can’t nuke us now. Take us up that drop hole, Mister Massif,” said Ramos with a smile. That made everyone on the bridge relax a bit.
Massif guided the Morant to the hole and inside, where the grappling hooks started pulling her up the hole. The Mao continued to send out threatening comms, but she had stopped her ascent four clicks below the Morant.
“Sir, the Mao is now starting to drop away from us. She’s heading for the pipeline!” said Massif.
“She’d rather risk cutting the pipe than losing it to us,” said Ramos.
“Won’t that set off the gas?” asked Carr.
“It won’t if she’s able to clamp off the pipe with her forward claws and seal the line. Then she could take it anywhere she wants and just attach a new valve pump,” said Kish.
“We won’t let that happen. Let me know when they start to cut the line, Mister Kish,” said Ramos. She turned to Mischa Carr.
“Technician Carr, prepare to release Berta.”
“What?” said Kish. “Are you mad? Without Berta we can’t get spaceborne again!”
“I’m well aware of that, Mister Kish,” said Ramos with an icy stare. “There will be a tanker here to rescue us in four days. We will survive.”
“Just on batteries? Without Berta we’ll freeze well before they get here!” said Kish. “Is this why you killed Aleks?”
Ramos responded by pulling her sidearm again and leveling it at Kish.
“I can do this myself, Mister Kish. Now do you plan on following my orders or not?” she said. Everyone was frozen with fear. Kish said nothing more. “Technician Carr, you will follow my last order.”
“Yes, Captain,” she said. Ramos checked her board. The emergency release for Berta was glowing red on her command panel.
“Thank you, Mischa. Now step away from your console. Mister Kish, activate the long range comm.” Kish did as ordered, then also stepped away from his console. “Mister Massif, status of the Mao.”
“Steady at ten clicks distance now. She’s clipping the line, Captain. Preparing to clamp the line,” said Massif.
“How long will that take?”
“Approximately four minutes,” said Massif. Ramos waved him away from his station. The three remaining crew of the Morant stood together in the center of the bridge. Massif put his arm around Carr while Ramos leveled her gun at the three of them.
She checked the comm uplink. They were locked with the relay satellite. Everything was ready.
“What I do now, I do for all of us. Our names will live in history,” she said, then she hit the release button.
Berta disconnected from the Morant and dropped down the hole and back into the Europan ocean, heading straight for the Mao.
Ramos watched as Berta did her intended work, falling ever closer to the Mao. Ramos looked one last time at the detonator button on her display. Then she pressed it.
Ten kilometers below the Morant, Berta exploded in a nuclear fireball that quickly engulfed the Mao and ignited the gas line. Red-gold flame seethed through the gas line off into the distance, heading for the gas field in a chain reaction of burning liquid fuel. Upward the blast wave came, striking the Morant and melting the ice shelf around her. The crew were thrown around the bridge like toys. Ramos held onto a support pole with all her might. Once the initial blast wave was over, she was the only one conscious on her burning bridge. She struggled to her feet and hit the comm uplink, getting a green light on her panel. The comm was linked to the relay satellite. She opened the comm channel.
“This is captain Diane Ramos of the Icebreaker USNS Morant,” she said in a halting voice. “We sunk the Mao Zedong. Repeat, the Morant sunk the Mao!”
Then she slumped over the railing and dropped to the floor of her bridge.
Outside, the scaffolding holding the Morant melted and fell inward through the drop hole, the Morant following in quick succession.
Back into the briny depths of the Europan ocean.
Dave Bara is the author of The Lightship Chronicles series (Impulse, Starbound, and Defiant) published by DAW Books in the US and Del Rey in the UK and Europe. He was born at the dawn of the space age and grew up watching the Gemini and Apollo space programs on television, dreaming of becoming an astronaut one day. This soon led him to an interest in science fiction on TV, in film, and in books. Dave’s writing is influenced by the many classic SF novels he has read over the years from authors like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Joe Haldeman, and Frank Herbert, among many others. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.
TRY NOT TO KILL US ALL
Joelle Presby
Sometimes, you have to scavenge to get by. That’s always been true, and it’s not likely to change just because the technology improves. Only what you’re scavenging gets a little shinier. When the survival and well-being of the planet means stealing a priceless energy source from alien-controlled space . . . you do what needs doing. Joelle Presby brings her experience with real-life submarines to this game of cat and mouse.
Senior Chief Luther Albro intended to save the world today. With a slender build and a balding head, he was the best hope humanity of A.D. 2318 had, at least in his own opinion. The officers always had other perspectives.
Amusement sparkled in Captain Michael Knupp’s blue eyes when Albro finished his operations brief. Even Petty Officer Rodgers noticed, and of the three junior shinerrite technicians, the young man seemed least observant. Li and Morales wore those careful blank faces most spacers learned in boot camp.
“Thanks for the brief, Senior Chief,” Commander Jules said. She was the ship’s executive officer, and had been a shinerrite tech herself once before going officer. The respect on her warm brown face, at least, was calming. She understood how challenging his job was. Shinerrite retrieval missions could easily get them all killed. Or even see Earth annihilated, if the screw-up were big enough.
The aliens, annoying, egotistical super beings that they were, mostly viewed humanity as mildly cute wilderness animals. But the aliens left behind the shiniest bits of space trash, and humanity had come to love the stuff. God only knew what the material did for the aliens, but for humanity shinerrite was better than gold, hydrocarbons, and reprogrammable nanofiber all rolled into one.
The spaceship, which Senior Chief Albro would be running tactical control for during the retrieval mission, had a power system running on just one cubic meter of the stuff. The rest of the mass of their enormous spaceship existed to shield that power system. And of course they needed vast tanks of rocket fuel for puttering around on stealth.
Albro imagined spacecraft engineers of ages past sneering at the idea of rockets serving any sort of stealth role. Those futurists of a few centuries ago would have been right if the
ship were hiding from other humans or even from intelligent aliens. But—Petty Officer Morales jogged his elbow. The polite tap pulled his attention back to the present.
“And that’s all we’ve got from engineering.” Commander Jules finished her part of the report. “And all divisions reported in reconfirming secured for rocket operations. We’re ready.”
“Two planets, one sun, and a bunch of masses that might be shinerrite and might be alien killer bots.” Captain Knupp grinned as he summarized Albro’s situation report. He turned to Albro and winked. “Try not to kill us all.”
“Will do, sir.” Albro refrained from adding anything caustic about it being officers who got ships killed and not the shinerrite techs.
Too much outspokenness in his past might be why squadron had elected to have him cross-decked to this ship when Captain Knupp’s last senior shinerrite tech suffered a mental breakdown at the beginning of their outbound deployment. Nobody seemed to care that Albro had just been about to return home to Earth after eight months and three days outside Sol System. The master chief from squadron who’d been sent out on the little parts-and-repairs ship to retrieve Knupp’s prior senior shinerrite technician and drop Albro off in his place had even had the nerve to suggest this extra deployment was exactly what Albro needed to brush up his record for the master chief boards—as if Albro needed any help when he already had one of the best shinerrite retrieval records in the fleet!
Still, it was nice to have a captain willing to take a course directly through a new system only recently abandoned by the aliens. Albro hadn’t expected to have his recommendation accepted. Most ship captains were too cautious to enter a system like this one.
In a few moments, their powerful shinerrite drive would reverse to slow the ship and then turn off. Orbital physics would continue their ballistic momentum straight through the system where their sensors could figure out in detail what was out there and where the deadly bots could also counterdetect the ship if he did something stupid like turn on the shinerrite drive or allow flecks of shinerrite from a passing mass to smear across the ship’s hull.
There would be more shinerrite available here, but there’d also be more of the aliens’ automated trash clean-up devices.
Commander Jules sent everyone off to their stations before Albro could decide if this new ship’s captain was an improvement over the one on his last ship or not. It seemed a solid enough crew, but something about Captain Knupp made the back of Albro’s neck twitch.
The captain of his last ship had been terrified of everything, always second-guessing, always delaying the mission when a few quick tactical decisions could have had their cargo bay full of shinerrite and ready to head on home after only weeks away instead of dodging around system after system always looking for an easier collection.
“Captain Knupp is descended from one of the Centauri System survivors,” Petty Officer Morales said as she strapped in.
“So am I,” Albro admitted. There weren’t a lot of them. Humanity had started collecting shinerrite before fully understanding the dangers of the aliens’ cleaner bots.
The things were stupid, so it wasn’t completely unreasonable for the early explorers to have misjudged the situation. And back then ships had not returned for a lot of reasons, so understanding hadn’t made its way back to the populated stations in Sol System until a truly massive disaster had hit humanity’s first long-term outposts in the Centauri System.
Even now the recruiting posters made fun of the aliens’ cleaner bots as Space Roombas from Hell, but the things the aliens left orbiting their playground systems were nearly indestructible and would track a bit of stolen shinerrite across the galaxy if they were ever allowed to catch a sniff of a spaceship carrying it.
The things were dumb but tough. The bots’ programming sought out the alien trash which degraded into shinerrite. The massive machines compacted and vaporized the stuff, breaking apart any other matter that might be splattered with trace amounts of shinerrite, be it a spaceship, a station, or, in humanity’s nightmares, a planet. A single bot had followed a ship home to the once-thriving human space stations in the Centauri System. It had destroyed them all. Only the oldest ships without shinerrite drive tech had been able to escape. The Sol System Navy could not allow that to happen to Earth.
Too much shinerrite had been used and spread around the old home world to be gathered up and jettisoned out into the beyond now. Besides, it was so extremely useful that not even the cultists who worshiped the unresponsive aliens as gods seriously wanted to stop exploiting it.
Thankfully the aliens had made the bots only as hellish space Roombas. They looked for shinerrite and only shinerrite. Sufficient thicknesses of matter shielded the signals the bots used to find the next blob of shinerrite. The cleaner bots didn’t attempt to smash through planets or fly into suns only because the large celestial bodies blocked signal transmission.
The bots didn’t reason, didn’t extrapolate, and didn’t plan. They were dumb and deadly.
“Prepare for system entry,” Captain Knupp’s voice sounded over the shipwide announcing system.
Albro double-checked his straps and noted that Morales, Li, and Rodgers had all secured themselves properly as well. On the shinerrite drive, they had no need of the careful padding and belts, but on a ballistic course with only rockets available to readjust, things could get bumpy.
“I hope we find some shinerrite this time,” Rodgers said. “Last deployment we coasted through a system three times and only tracked bots.”
“The first pass is for intel. The second for collection.” Li parroted the manual.
Why would a ship captain make a second, let alone a third pass through a system with more bots than collectable shinerrite? Albro frowned. “We’ll see what we see.”
Their sensors rewarded him soon enough.
They entered as planned on a course to pass near the large gas giant where a few masses too small to be bots would be in rocket range for a pickup if they proved to be shinerrite and not ordinary space debris. The system’s sun hid the smaller planet from them, but it had a fast orbit and would swing around the sun’s horizon early enough in their course to give them a good long look at anything around it.
The one object Albro had been certain was a bot—based on size and trajectory changes seen from their telescopic view outside the system—had merged with another large mass before they began their ballistic insertion. That would be a bot busy consuming a shinerrite mass, and it would soon pass out of the range of their sensors as it orbited, with the mass it worked to consume, around the far side of the gas giant from them.
Everything worked out as Albro expected—except for Captain Knupp.
Commander Jules was responding to Albro’s small course corrections from engineering like a good textbook executive officer. But Captain Knupp wasn’t hanging over his shoulder like any reasonable nail-biting ship’s captain would.
Albro took a deep breath, cleared his mind, and focused on the tactical plot. The precision radar and navigation had a corner in the far side of the central control room and repeater screens on the bridge. His team: Morales, Li, and Rodgers were the sensor operators who would identify all the shinerrite and all the bots, and he’d be the one adjusting the ship’s course to keep them all hidden and alive.
Navigation plots were limited to celestial bodies like the two planets orbiting this distant star and the various comets passing through the system. The aliens and all things related to them were best tracked with shinerrite sensors. Regular orbital bodies obeyed the laws of astrophysics just fine.
Things that were made from shinerrite—especially things like bots and the alien debris that hadn’t quite finished decaying all the way into raw shinerrite—didn’t. Or at least didn’t always. The bots followed their programming. The masses decaying into shinerrite deposits were unpredictable: sometimes acting like a space rock of any other material and sometimes sluggishly moving under power. Shinerrite required special senso
rs. The bots could send out active pings, but that would get a ship detected and destroyed. So shinerrite technicians used passive detectors. They recorded the bearings to the shinerrite masses and moved their own ship to get more bearings and calculate ranges. Precision, caution, and training kept them alive. “Hide with pride” was the shinerrite tech motto for a reason.
Albro’s own master plot of the shinerrite and all identified or suspected bots in the system could be mirrored on the captain’s and executive officer’s consoles at whatever stations they wanted to use. The empty commanding officer’s seat just over Albro’s shoulder gave him unpleasant images of Captain Knupp storming into central control battered and bleeding from being slammed into bulkheads during one of the many rocket accelerations they’d be making during the pass through the system.
“Bridge, Central,” Albro called over the ship’s comm system. “Anyone seen the captain?”
“Right here, strapped in and ready to go,” Captain Knupp answered.
Albro paused. Captain Knupp was on the bridge and not coming to central control at all. Surely not. He’d make a polite recommendation. “We have a little time before we need to thrust, if you were going to come down to central, sir.”
“I like the bridge,” Knupp replied. “Better view of the stars on the big repeater screen. Don’t worry, I’ve got your shinerrite overlay pulled up too, so I’ll be following along just fine.”
But what about the poor crew on the bridge? Most captains started to sweat pretty badly when the bigger shinerrite deposits got close, and Albro didn’t see a reason to waste rocket fuel on evasions when the sensors showed only a near pass and no actual threat of hull residue. Captains shouldn’t cry in front of non-shinerrite techs. The other crew didn’t expect it and wouldn’t know how to deal. But even senior chiefs don’t tell captains that over an open circuit. So Albro settled for: “Aye, sir.”
The petty officers were giving Albro nervous glances, so he did what his own senior chief used to do.
