Star Destroyers

by Tony Daniel

  Defeatist talk. Punishable by death. No worries, then, because Fenroth clearly expected to die. Hoppo didn’t want to, though he was increasingly—almost serenely—certain that he was going to, soon. “Surrender’s unconditional,” he reminded Fenroth. “Your research program will just be taken over.”

  Just like last time. That hadn’t worked out so well, really. There’d been a ferocious appetite to make Hamstead Vrees pay for the suffering that Skanda’s citizens had endured, but the punitive sanctions Skanda had imposed had only made Vrees the more determined to express their reinforced resentments in material form.

  “There will be no such program found, XO, not with people like Ratine holding it so close to their chests. All the actual documentation is in his people’s custody, under personal supervision at all times, at an undisclosed location. Here. This station.” Fenroth drained his glass and refilled it. Hoppo declined a refill with a polite shake of his head, and Fenroth leaned back in his chair, still talking.

  “Aika Lynn will be gone.” There was too much quiet certainty in Fenroth’s voice for Hoppo to doubt his sincerity. And when a man like Fenroth was certain, and sincere, the odds on his being mistaken were not encouraging. “Any knowledge remaining will be within our ship service, and mostly in people’s heads, and nobody needs to know how conceptual the whole thing is. We gain leverage. It won’t be much, but it will be a start.”

  It was quiet in the room. Fenroth drank; Hoppo drank. Fenroth spoke again. “And if nothing else, death to all traitors,” Fenroth said.

  Hoppo wasn’t satisfied. “You sound sure of yourself.” Altogether too sure. “But you haven’t explained how it’s supposed to happen.”

  Fenroth squared himself to the table, holding his glass in both hands. “Like this. You heard your research director say they knew about the habharite? Our research suggests your people have gone one better. They’ve got hold of some actual gregor particles. They’re using it in their research, here, at Aika Lynn.”

  Suddenly Hoppo could see it, and it was beautiful in the abstract, the inexorability of it all, the power of the explosion, the inevitability of detonation. “It’ll be shielded.” He was thinking hard, trying to remember everything he’d been instructed not to notice about selected traffic from undisclosed points of origin carrying undisclosed cargo. “If there’s anybody who knows what could happen, wouldn’t it be scientists?”

  “Shielded, yes.” Fenroth’s glass was empty again. Maybe he was a little nervous, after all. Strangely enough that didn’t make Hoppo feel any better. “From cross-contamination in the laboratory. Not from habharite decaying through the walls. Existing facilities, right on top of your sickbay, not quite top of the line. And habharite travels fast.”

  Fenroth standing in the corridor outside the sickbay, his head raised to feel the breeze from the ventilation shaft. Starting off in the correct direction to return to Skipjack, as if by pure chance. Slowly, reluctantly, Hoppo nodded his head.

  “Your crew. They’re the detonator.” Habharite exposure masked by happy-gas poisoning, Fenroth had said. In the infirmary, which was shielded for biological contaminants but not arcane and transient subatomic particles, and beneath the quarantined spooky-crew floor. “Nobody pushed you into the wall without your leave. Setup from first rough.”

  No. This was too careful a plan. Fenroth nodded; sadly, it seemed. “So long as there was somebody to talk to, you’d wait to talk to them. We needed the time for your infirmary to be adequately contaminated, to give the habharite its chance. And it needed to look good enough for you to believe it.”

  Bed neatly made. That was why it had caught Hoppo’s attention, he realized. Fenroth had known he wouldn’t be sleeping there again. He’d left it shipshape, in the best sense of the term. He’d known the assault was coming. They’d all been working to plan; and it was a beauty.

  That didn’t mean he’d toast Fenroth, “Finnie” Fenroth with the Egret Plume and Wheat-Ear Clasp, or his crew, or his mission, or his ship. There was something they could probably agree on, however. Hoppo lifted his glass. “Winning the peace,” he said. “That much I’ll give you, Captain Fenroth.”

  He could reach Captain Wircale, he could reach top ops, his piplink was active. But there was nothing anybody would be able to do. What had Fenroth said? It was too late to outrun the explosion. He’d only be contaminating the last minutes, however many there were, with terror and panic, rather than the sudden and immediate annihilation that would come.

  There was plenty left in the bottle. After a moment’s silence, Hoppo refilled both glasses; it was Fenroth’s bottle, but Fenroth didn’t seem to mind. “Well,” Hoppo said. “While we’re waiting, then. Tell me about it. Natalise, with the refugees and the intercepts and the Skanda delaying action. Tell me everything. Take your time.”

  “Finnie” Fenroth. Decorated commerce raider captain. Here, sharing a bottle with Hoppo, knowing he was about to die, and everybody on this base with him. Nobody else needed to know; that was a decision, a responsibility, that Hoppo took on himself.

  He wasn’t going to live to be another day older. But from this moment until the end of his life he could be happy, listening with a child’s heart to a true story of duty—honor—adventure from the man who’d lived it, and given it to the world.

  Susan R. Matthews has run out of interesting things to say about herself, but one basic fact remains: she’s been living with protagonist Andrej Koscuisko of her Under Jurisdiction series for a very long time (in a manner of speaking). Her wife is getting pretty tired of it, too, but he was there first. Maggie and Susan have only been married for thirty-seven years.

  Although her own branch of service during her two-year stint on active duty was Medical Administration (where being constantly mistaken for a nurse just because she was a female officer was a constant irritation—tells you how long ago that was), she has recently immersed herself in the history of German U-boats in World Wars I and II. In the absence of new English-language books on the subject she considers that her next logical step is to learn to read German.

  HOMECOMING

  Robert Buettner

  It’s a given that capital warships of their day become technological scrap as time passes and systems advance. If the spirit of a ship can be said to live on, perhaps it is in the hearts and souls of its officers and ratings. And where there is a spark, there is the will to defend what remains—as well as the will to protect the bright future that such old, great ships were built to secure.

  Patricia Reisfeld floated forward, along the cruiser’s half-mile-long centerline passageway, as she left behind the engineering space that comprised the rest of the mile-long ship’s length. She propelled herself by self-taught, gentle pulls on the handholds that lined a steel tunnel five times wider than she was tall.

  Her heart pounded, but not from exertion. A short-for-her-age eleven-year-old already weighed zero in the centerline passageway. Her heart pounded because each handhold grasp dislodged still-wet blood from her fingertips. In zero G the blood coalesced into crimson spheres that drifted forward beside her, in formation with her teardrops.

  The Bastogne forward of the engineering space was a cylinder of layer-caked decks that rotated around the ship’s centerline, and were presently packed with six thousand civilians like her, who sought refuge from the rebellion that had destroyed their homes on Weichsel.

  When they had all been upshuttled to the great ship nine weeks earlier, Captain Hicks had stood before them, his hands on his hips, atop a platform erected in one of the cruiser’s echoing, empty cargo bays. Blond, young, and with the know-it-all confidence that annoyed Outworlders about Trueborn Earthmen, he had announced that the deck rotation rates had been adjusted to Weichsel normal. So everybody’s weight would remind them of home until they returned.

  But a weeping, malodorous old woman dressed in rags, crowded in alongside Patricia, had shaken her fist and shouted that he knew as well as they did that for them there would never be a home
coming.

  Now, seven hundred yards forward from that cargo bay, and from the no-go line that separated the engineering space from the rest of the ship, Patricia arrived at the Airtite door that led away from the centerline passageway and eventually to the ship’s bridge. She stopped herself there by clinging to the door’s handhold.

  Like most of the ship’s doors, it was usually open but now was sealed. It didn’t have a palm-print ID plate like the engineering space’s armored door did, just a round, glowing red press to open plate that anyone could use. But when she pressed her free hand’s palm to the plate the door stayed sealed, just like every other door she had tried as she moved forward.

  She pounded the plate with her fist, so violently that her body drifted away from the door into the passageway’s center. But the door didn’t budge. “Farts!”

  Patricia tugged herself back to the panel labelled intercom above the door open plate, and depressed the press-to-talk switch. “Hello? Is anybody there?” She repeated it three times, but again nothing. “Farts!” This time she screamed it so loud that it echoed up and down the empty passageway.

  The echo died and she glanced over her shoulder toward the engineering space. She couldn’t go back there. So she propelled herself forward again.

  In the rest of the ship as it rotated around her, beyond the steel tube that confined her, she assumed that the grown-ups, whether passengers or crew, hadn’t missed her. They were still ignoring a kid who, despite a 136 IQ, both asked too many questions and thought she knew too many answers. Being ignored annoyed her. But the possibility that no one else remained alive to ignore her terrified her.

  By the time she reached the cruiser’s nose, where the centerline passageway dead-ended, her blood and tears had dried. The passageway widened out, forming the forward observation dome. When she saw that the circular door that separated the dome from the centerline passageway was wide open, she sobbed and pumped her fist. “Yes!”

  The transparent dome beyond the door was, as described by the ship’s library channel, a flawlessly transparent hemisphere seventy-five feet in inside diameter and sixteen inches thick, machined from a single Weichselan quartz boulder. Once the Bastogne had deorbited Weichsel there was no view for grown-ups to gawk at, just blackness sprinkled with a few stars that didn’t even twinkle. So for weeks the dome had been her empty play space.

  For hours she had relieved boredom teaching herself to somersault in zero G and watching the red numbers change on the big time-to-destination and current-speed display.

  But as she pushed off into the dim-lit dome today she sucked in a breath and widened her eyes. “Wow!”

  A week earlier the Bastogne had emerged from its last jump, popped out into the Mousetrap, and begun decelerating from one-third light speed. The Mousetrap wasn’t really a trap, just as the ship’s bridge wasn’t a bridge. “The Mousetrap” was just the name applied to a volume of empty space into which emptied dozens of Temporal Fabric Insertion Points, through which C-Drive ships like the Bastogne jumped, and thereby shortcut physical space. The Mousetrap was the Human Union’s principal interstellar hub, even though only one star within the Mousetrap’s emptiness possessed a planetary system, and that “system” consisted of a single, uninhabitable gas-giant planet, Leonidas.

  So today, instead of star-pricked blackness, she saw Leonidas’s vast disk, glowing orange and striped with ochre and lavender storms that eddied across its surface.

  Two tiny shadows dotted Leonidas’s animated glow.

  The first, distant beyond the dome, had to be Leonidas’s sole satellite, the forty-mile-long black spindle that was the hollowed-out moonlet named Mousetrap. As the only habitable space within The Mousetrap, the library described the moonlet as “the universe’s costliest real estate.” Because the shipyards and port facilities inside Mousetrap had been purchased and repurchased with human blood throughout the Pseudocephalopod War’s decades-long surges and ebbs.

  The second shadow was inside the observation dome, a lone person anchored by one hand to the grab rail that ringed a person-sized transparent tube that protruded from the great dome, and formed the ship’s forward-most point.

  The library said the observation dome and its protruding tube, called the navigation blister, were vestiges carried forward from the earliest ship designs. She thought they looked like a giant boob with a giant nipple. Not that she had anything to compare them with yet.

  As Patricia floated toward the person her heart leapt. She was not alone. Better, the man wore a ship’s officer’s gray coverall.

  She drifted up behind him in the silent dimness, touched his sleeve. “Sir?”

  He grunted and stiffened, but stared ahead, ignoring her like all grown-ups did. His hair was gray, his eyelids drooped as though he was very tired, and his cheeks were as gray stubbled as her grandfather’s.

  He said, “I’m not a sir. Not anymore.”

  She squinted at the epaulet on his shoulder. Where ship’s officers had a gold insignia of rank sewn there was just a rectangle of snipped white threads. “Oh. You got demoted?”

  He nodded. “Busted so far I resigned my commission.”

  She pointed at his bare epaulet. “What did people call you before you resigned?”

  “Chief engineering officer.”

  “What do they call you now?”

  “John. But you can call me Mr. Dahlquist. I came up here to avoid people calling me anything. So do you mind?”

  “Listen to me! I—” She paused, furrowed her brow. “Did you get demoted for drunkenness?”

  He snorted. “What?”

  “You stink of whisky. My grandfather—”

  “Don’t tell me. Drinks because of you?”

  She said, “He’s not even here. He and my mother stayed on Weichsel and sent me to live with my aunt.”

  “Lucky them.” He tossed his head at the blackness beyond the dome. “Why don’t you go play outside?”

  Patricia narrowed her eyes. “That’s a stupid joke.”

  “Who said it was a joke?” He puffed out a breath, turned to look at her, and his jaw dropped as his body stiffened. “What the hell?”

  She peered down at her blood-soaked coverall as she spread her arms, bloody palms up. “I’m all right.” She blinked as the tears returned. “It’s not my blood. It’s the Marine’s.”

  He frowned. “Marine?” Then his eyes widened and he reached out and grabbed her shoulders. “One of the Marines who guard the engineering space door? Or the bridge door?”

  She nodded as the tears burned her eyes. “The engineering space. I went back there today like I usually do. That painted line that if you cross it they shoot you? I stand behind it and try to make the guards laugh while they stand at attention. Most of them pretend I’m not even there. But he shushed me once, then smiled, and gave me a fist bump.”

  The old man called Dahlquist squeezed her shoulders tighter, his fingers trembling. “What happened to him?”

  “It was a Tribal. A Sep. He wasn’t wearing a Tribal shawl, just a Colonial singlet. But under his singlet he was carrying one of those curved bone Tribal knives. He—” She choked on the words and instead drew a finger across her throat.

  Dahlquist’s brow wrinkled. “Sep? You’re saying a Tribal, a Weichselan separatist, was embedded among the refugees?” He turned his face away from her and muttered something that she suspected was a very bad word, because her grandfather had said it only once, when he stuck himself with a hypodermic by accident.

  Dahlquist turned his face back to her. “The Marine’s dead?”

  She nodded as she wiped tears. “No respiration. No pulse. Not that I needed to take one.”

  “How the hell do you—?”

  “My mother’s a surgeon. I tried to stop the bleeding. But both carotid arteries were severed.”

  “Why did his buddies let a pipsqueak like you—?”

  She shook her head again. “The Seps already killed them all.”

  “Seps? Not jus
t one?”

  “Twenty. But you let a lot more than twenty Seps board this ship, you know.”

  “I didn’t let anybody board this ship. The chair commandos at CentCom diverted us to Weichsel.”

  “I’ve heard them talking to each other ever since we all came aboard. The Seps speak Standard now, just like everybody else on Weichsel. Just like you and Captain Hicks do. Only somebody like me, who was raised outside the Iceline, would recognize their accents. I told crew members. I told other passengers. But grown-ups just tell a kid to go play in vacuum. You being a case in point.”

  Dahlquist cocked his head. “They let you get away?”

  She shook her head. “They ignored me because I’m a kid. They held the Marine commander’s palm to the door’s ID plate, so the door opened, before they killed him. Then they all ran into the engineering space and locked the door behind them.”

  Dahlquist turned and squinted at the big digital display on the information panel alongside the navigation blister. It advertised the ship’s casino, but also showed in red numbers the ship’s speed and its distance to destination. The speed number stayed constant at 96,000 miles per hour, but the distance-to-destination number was decreasing so fast that it blurred.

  Dahlquist ran his fingers across the sealed hatch that led ahead into the navigation blister, then rubbed the wrinkled skin on his forehead.

  He asked her, “Why’d you come all the way forward? Anybody would’ve helped a kid in your shape.”

  “Every other door off the centerline passageway was sealed. The emergency intercoms are all dead, too.”

  He muttered the bad word again, this time through clenched teeth. He peered out again at Leonidas and Mousetrap, both of which already looked bigger. Then he turned away, pushed off, and drifted toward the wide door through which she had entered. The old man moved so fast in zero G that she barely kept up. But then he probably had more practice.