by Tony Daniel
“What—” He snapped his mouth shut, thankful that he hadn’t keyed the mic to transmit the partial question.
He turned to his petty officers. The officers knew what was going on from the plot lines, but he’d forgotten to update his own team. “The two bots from the moon are going to collide and at least partially disable each other, maybe explode.” He pushed his predicted tracks to their screens. “We could have used the collision flare to get out of the system on full-power drives without being detected.”
“Could have?” Rodgers repeated.
“Prepare for heavy maneuvering,” Commander Jules announced. Echoes of her words sounded down the passageways from the shipwide announcement. That was right, but nothing else was.
The captain was up to something.
The ship did hold steady in the mass shadow between the uncollected shinerrite and the planet, but the thrum of the rockets weren’t cycling down for a transition to shinerrite drive and a smooth high-speed transit out.
“We’re going to miss it,” Morales muttered.
Albro shook his head even though the petty officer was right. He had delivered the report. Sometimes officers chose extreme caution, but this made no sense.
Instead the flurry of reports from engineering to Captain Knupp announced all drives were ready for max power on his order.
“Mark,” Albro whispered half to himself, but all three petty officer froze in sudden focus on their screens.
A doubled Doppler scream worse than any training audio file shook central control. The two bots streaked down the plot lines at their target. Their own fragile ship hid just beyond. If he’d been wrong and the bots didn’t slow, would the combined mass of bots, ship, and shinerrite crash into the gas giant’s surface? He was certain, or almost so, that the collision wouldn’t leave one of the bots functional enough to attack and tear their ship apart.
“Mark,” repeated Morales in wonderment.
The blindingly fast acceleration only shinerrite drives could manage had hurled the two bots off the moon and across the inner system. Before the end of petty officer’s word, the bots were a roiling mass of collided debris.
Physics had its sweet revenge, but the programming in the things fought back. Drives reformed and fought to continue their core programming. Even while shattering against each other, the two-bot mass slowed to avoid a similar collision with the deposit they’d never reach intact to clean.
Albro breathed relief.
A familiar grating noise accompanied the executive officer’s voice saying, “Cargo doors full open. Main drive’s shielding removed as ordered, Captain.”
“Now!” the captain shouted.
Albro and his team floated in their restraints as the ship powered on shinerrite drives not to flee out of the system, but to zip around the remaining deposit to hurl their entire cargo bay load of shinerrite at the two-bot mass. And just as quickly, Captain Knupp scooted them back into the deposit’s sheltering shadow.
Warnings flashed everywhere. Hull surface coverings around the cargo doors alarmed for high shinerrite levels. Inability-to-stealth warnings blared. Automatic counter clocks for the two bots on the inner planet and the one on the far side of the gas giant flashed new urgent countdowns alarming about how soon they’d be able to detect and tear apart the ship.
And Senior Chief Albro stared at the master plot instead. The masses that had been bots were gone.
A mere blob of shinerrite hurled at speed without any programming to slow it down had cracked the indestructible. His sensors showed a fine mist of shinerrite expanding outward in a hemisphere wave shape flaring out away from the impact. Mass pulls from the sun and two planets began to deform it immediately with no evidence of any bot programming remaining.
“He did it.” Albro blinked. Then he looked at the clocks. “Shit. We’re still screwed.” He slammed down the button for emergency sweepers and ripped his straps off.
“Come on,” he yelled at his blinking petty officers, “we’ve got to get the skin cleaned now!”
There were already running behind him when the executive officer’s announcement caught up with reality.
“Secured from shinerrite drive. Shielding restored. Shinerrite spill in cargo bay aft! Hull splatter warning.” Commander Jules announced, “Red alert—sweepers, sweepers, all hands report to cleaning stations.”
Albro had no time for niceties. The engineering repair team was on the hull when he arrived. They flung the contaminated surface panels off the ship as fast as they could be identified. Albro scrambled out onto the hull himself with a handheld sensor and spacewalked his inspection with all three petty officers trailing behind.
“All surfaces clean,” Albro reported, “I say again all ship surfaces clean.”
“Very well, Senior Chief,” Captain Knupp replied. “Our fine engineers will have replacement retrieval arms installed in an hour or so. When the inner planet’s spin puts those other bots back out of detection range for a bit, let’s get that last deposit collected and get out of here. We’ve got some things to report to squadron.”
Albro and his team did as ordered. They collected the second deposit during the next inner planet rotation. Captain Knupp again used shinerrite drive in system to kick up their speed while hidden by the gas giant’s mass on one side and the inner planet on the other. Then with shields locked tight into place, they flew out of range into the outer system with a full cargo bay and a smug ship’s captain.
Albro tracked down the ship’s captain for a chat during the out-system wait. Doctrine required coasting along on exit velocity after leaving a system. A ship had to ensure they’d escaped undetected with no bots following along behind.
Nothing was coming but they had to be sure.
He found Captain Knupp outside the chief’s mess looking for him.
“Good job, Senior Chief.” The captain’s eyes still sparkled. He poured Senior Chief Albro a cup of coffee. “Very well done,” he said, “And try not to kill us tomorrow either.”
“Same to you, sir.” Albro accepted the coffee. “Same to you.”
Joelle Presby’s latest novel, co-written with David Weber, is The Road To Hell, which continues the Multiverse series.
Joelle graduated from the Naval Postgraduate School where she studied how to find and kill submarines and also met a charming submarine officer. During her military career, nations with significant submarine fleets stubbornly refused to go to war with the United States. But even though she was neither a war hero nor cannon fodder, she did still get the guy.
Joelle’s book collection has survived fifteen household moves and three hurricane-induced floods. She’s lived in France, Cameroon, the United States, and Japan. She and her husband, the submarine officer, live in Virginia and prefer living with hurricanes to moving again.
In addition to loving science fiction and fantasy, she is an avid fan of storm-surge prediction models, evacuation routes, and keeping personal libraries in easily portable ebook form.
SKIPJACK
Susan R. Matthews
Battleships are loaded with weapons by definition. But to take the battle to the enemy, sometimes the ship itself may be used as a weapon—or even the crew. Yet no matter how far we venture into the galaxy, there will always be a place for honor, at least for the thoughtful among us. And even though the democratic ignominy of death lies at the end of the star road for every man, some ways to die are definitely more elegant than others.
Tension in the top ops room of the central command bridge had been growing watch by watch, so when Flaxon on monitor station alpha invoked an inset image on one of her screens, Hoppo—station XO, and duty officer on deck—was at her side even before she spoke. “Now, where did that come from?”
Everybody was newly alert at once, a keen edge of focused curiosity to the military standard of watch awareness. Nobody knew why they were all feeling it. In the closely confined station community, body language as much as anything broadcast its own signal, even when t
he person transmitting had no clue that a secret—that there was a secret—had been revealed.
“Track trace?” Hoppo asked, leaning one shoulder up against the hard outer curve of the monitor station’s clamshell. Flaxon was seated, but the station itself was raised; he and Flaxon were eye to eye, as well as side by side. She shook her head, her frustration clear from her expression. “First time we’ve scanned that slice this shift. Between the moons, and the cloud. Low traffic area.”
Enemy ships inbound for their base slips at Parnel Station generally snuck around the edges of Mohund’s disk, using the fierce ion storms in its upper atmosphere to fuddle the sensors of remote observer stations and cloak their presence. That was hazardous enough, but Skanda Republic forces and Hamstead Vrees alike had refined their tactics over the years of this war—raiding into unfriendly territory, hunting each other’s supply convoys—and risks had to be taken. As far as Hoppo knew, though, Skanda was the first to stage a ship trap this close to a Vrees base of operations.
“I haven’t seen one of those old hulks since—” Mull on stats had called up shipcode, was watching screen images pop up on his display. Hoppo could see his point. It was a heritage-model ship raider, a relic of the early days of the war when everything had been going Vrees’ way and the sinister smile of the ship’s projectile nests had grinned into the nightmares of honest ship-service crews large and small. He’d recognized the type right away, but he wasn’t about to admit it.
Years ago. “Any teeth left?” Hoppo asked. This was getting interesting. “Can we catch traffic?” Vrees not only wasn’t making old-model class-nine commerce raiders any more, they weren’t even making the armament. The manufactories had been starved out for lack of material. No sense dedicating any of Hamstead Vrees’ increasingly scarce war materials resources to arming obsolete raiders: it was all Skanda’s war, now.
Lacquin on comms was working his whisperers, scanning for information hidden in the noise. Flaxon had dropped a peeper, state-of-the-art, undetectable to all but the newest and best of the Vreeslanders—which were beautiful war machines, nobody grudged them that. Skanda ship service’s research and development branch could hardly wait to get their hands on any that survived to the end of the war, when they’d be duly handed over under the terms of the unconditional surrender that Skanda demanded.
“All tubes but one empty so far as I can see, DO.” That was him, Hoppo; duty officer. XO, too. “One stuffed with scrap rock.” The peeper generated a three-dimensional report, in miniature. Hoppo reached out his hand to flick one of the projectile nests with an experimental forefinger: empty, all right. And somebody—to judge from what Lacquin was kludging together on comms—was having a party.
“So what’s on, do you think?” Hoppo asked, looking over to Mull’s station. Mull pushed away from his boards; Hoppo thought he was within a hair of actually clasping his hands behind his neck and leaning back in satisfaction to put his feet up on the rim of the plot shield. “Old-old, DO,” he said. “In pieces and patches, core like a rat’s nest. Propulsion’s got to be soaked. Index sit for happy-gas poisoning, and the ship’s scrap. Hardly worth the trouble of pulling it in.”
So the crew would be dead anyway, before too much longer. Happy gas meant that ship’s propulsion had started to self-cannibalize. It would keep pumping its toxic mix of atmospheric contaminants into ship’s atmosphere until there was no breathable oxygen left. People with happy gas were already too far gone to climb into their environmentals: or they wouldn’t still have the happy gas.
And yet he had his orders. The civilian spooky crew that was hiding out deep within this ship-trap station had issued clear instructions, if by word of mouth: something was expected. Captain Wircale, the station commander, hadn’t been told what it was; only that they were to pull in everything they could reach, effective yesterday, duration of protocol to be communicated at a future date.
“We can at least try to save some crew.” The orders were ears only, so Hoppo reached for a good cover. “Bring them in.” By the looks of the scarred old scow heading blithely toward them, nobody in Vrees’ headquarters would think twice if it fell silent. “Smell for self-destructs and scuttle protocols. Hope it can still dock, without taking too much of a new technician’s trim.”
That was a standard joke, the inexperienced pilot driving a ship too far to one side and colliding with the bumper wings of a docking slip. In this case it was serious. That crew was clearly impaired: but if ship’s autos were still on line, Hoppo’s watch could braid signals together and guide the ship safely in. “Yes, sir,” Mull said. No relaxing now, square to his plot shield, pulling in data.
Lacquin on comms hit a muter, cutting out any background noise. They’d done this so many times now that any one of them could have recited the script in their sleep.
“Ship on approach, this is Lorent Havens,” Lacquin said. The home base the ship would be seeking, sanctuary, safety. “Identify yourself, and transmit your ident codes. So we can welcome you back.”
Hoppo waited. Time passed. Had they heard? Were they too deep into the happy gas? Lacquin tried again. “This is Lorent Havens. Identify yourself.”
Still nothing. Just as Hoppo turned his head to call for a boarding party to be put on immediate alert, something came back. “Shifflack!” the ship said, and giggled. “Vreeslander Shifflack. Aren’t we a little close to Perdition still? Moved the borders? We’ve got a story to tell.”
“Perdition,” the dangerous route through Mohund’s asteroid belt and its moons, constantly changing, constantly evolving. Lacquin put some juice into the signal; and it clarified. Skipjack. Vreeslander Skipjack.
“Had to shift, attack destroyed base, limited capacity.” That was their story. A ship trap was a false haven, luring Vreeslanders into Skanda hands for the diminishing of Vrees’ fighting strength and the salvage of goods, and human intelligence, from ship and crew. “Can you dock on ship’s power? Clear to come in, but we’d better hurry. Before Skanda gets a fix and sends unfriendlies.”
“Confirmation codes,” Skipjack said; and Hoppo grinned. “Coming at you. And good news. Oops! Didn’t say anything. No news. No news at all.” Skipjack might be all but dead of the happy gas, but they were still the crew of a ship of war.
“Transmitting.” Could they match codes in time? Yes, Vrees had finally realized that Skanda had captured its encrypt programs and the newest keys. Vrees changed their secure sequences on a random generator: did Skipjack know that? Or was Skipjack still operating on a generation encrypt prior? “I get clear pingback, Skipjack, can we initiate acquisition? We can have a party meet you, you’re leaking happy gas, all due deliberate speed advised.”
Silence. Hoppo knew he wasn’t the only one here holding their breath. When Skipjack spoke he let his breath out gratefully. “Oh. Yeah. Right. Codes confirmed, Lorent. Open-ing-ning-ning pull lines for passive transit.” In the background Hoppo could hear the giggling, and confused chatter. What. Happy gas? Where are we? Lorent. Made it. Heroes.
“Me down to the dock slip,” Hoppo said. “Medical teams on full alert, there’s what, twenty people on board? If I remember my briefings?” If he remembered from his childhood passion for the Vreeslander commerce raiders, that was to say. He’d had to turn his romantic passion into a more socially acceptable pursuit of a career with Skanda ship service, as he’d grown older. “Tarleton. You have the watch.”
“Very good, DO,” Tarleton said. With a nod and a wave Hoppo left top ops to hurry down and meet the Vreeslander commerce raider Skipjack.
He picked up a Security escort on his way down to the ship’s bunkers. He found Infirmary staff assembling for mass casualty, in light of the number of crew probably aboard; Mull’s data indicated eighteen souls. Within the corridor leading on to the ship’s bunker, Hoppo and his Security changed into clothes that mimicked Vrees’ uniforms in design and color, though without any rank markers or station identification. The lie direct in person, face to face, was one step furthe
r than Hoppo was willing to go.
The loading ramp that led up into the ship’s cargo vault was deployed, and an environmental team was already there, working on flushing Skipjack’s contaminated atmosphere. It would take time to do properly, but in the meantime a limited exposure to happy gas was no threat to a healthy soul.
Skipjack was a short, squat, massive monster with its weapons carried like lane domes on a landing field across the manta-ray sweep of its flattened outer flanges. It was too unbalanced of aspect to be graceful; but Hoppo remembered the Vreeslanders of the previous generations fondly for all their lack of elegance. He’d studied the specs for hours, when he’d been a child.
“Stand by for station management and medical teams.” Lacquin’s voice echoed within the ship’s bunker. “Please prepare to evacuate the ship, quarters are open to accommodate.”
A woman came stumbling to the head of the loading ramp from the interior of the ship; her speech was slurred, her uniform undone, one trouser leg bloused and the cuff of the other flapping around an unaccountably bare ankle. “Come on,” she called, steadying herself against the leftmost flange of the ramp. “Made it. C-come on. Hurry, think the banks have been leaking, but it worked. We won, we won.”
Hoppo tapped the piplink at his collar. “Party proceeding by invitation,” Hoppo told top ops. A double meaning, there, though he hadn’t intended it. “We’re going in. Wish us luck.”
The corridors were claustrophobically narrow, cramped, low ceilinged; Hoppo was a tallish man, himself, and his head almost brushed the top tiling. It was the trade-off for the armament carrying capacity; once the propulsion systems had been adjusted for the mass required for a stable firing platform, there wasn’t much room left for crew amenities.
It was going to be a tight fit getting the medical litters through here, but they’d make it work. Handing the woman off to medical as he passed, Hoppo moved into the cargo vault with his team, transit glims coming up along the perimeter walls as they went. The woman must have been camped out in the cargo vault, waiting for them; for how long?
