Imperative - eARC

by Steve White

  Knight nodded at the fleeing ship. “And there’s Amunsit’s covert watchdog, running home to report that the gate is standing wide open.”

  The small ship arrowed toward the warp point and disappeared.

  Wethermere ground his molars for a moment before ordering, “Schendler, raise the acting flagship of the 92nd, using my clearance code. Lubell, coordinate with the Arduan pilot aboard the Fet’merah about entering the fleet’s formation. He won’t be familiar with our protocols for approaching and maneuvering in the van of one of our fleets. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  David Nanmin liked being in charge, probably because he had always stood on the sidelines while being passed over for leadership positions. Even during the resistance on Bellerophon, where he and his fellow graduate student Toshi Springer had provided crucial observation of Arduan orbital elements during the war, he was always the guy who was a “valued member of the team.” Never the superstar; just another player. That this, in part, might have reflected his own deeply denied self-image, was another possible truth that he had been successful at suppressing.

  But the war was over, and his doctorate—with honors for his service during the war—was well behind him, as was his brief, abortive attempt to strike up a relationship with Toshi. (When relating the story to others, he called his embarrassing attempt to turn an ill-advised New Year’s tryst into a relationship a “break-up.” Any external observer over the age of seven would have more correctly labeled it a mortified rejection. Toshi had extricated herself as rapidly as possible, since either David had been unwilling or unable to discern certain subtle signs that she was distancing herself from him—such as her relocation to another city.)

  But there had been consolation in the many well-funded assignments that had followed, and, since his involvement in the Bellerophon resistance garnished his basic competence with a faint nimbus of fame, he was never without important and lucrative work to do—or without some easily impressed graduate student to share his bed. At least for a while.

  His current assignment in the New India system, two warp points beyond Zephrain in the direction of Bellerophon, had an unfortunate dearth of such graduate students. But that lack was adequately compensated by both the money and the prestige of the job: he had been retained by Rim Federation Joint Services Intelligence to plan and deploy a phased array to study the earlier astrophysical phenomena that many suspected of being the drive flares of subsequent Arduan Dispersates. This had necessitated a two year commitment overseeing a professional staff that all had high clearance levels and considerable experience. Even with David Nanmin at the head of the room, the only stars that were going to be in any of his coworkers eyes were the real ones they had come to study. But two years of saving a generous salary (because there was no way to spend it out at a secure facility orbiting the gas giant in the system’s sixth orbit) meant he would emerge from this post with a prime assignment on his résumé and enough money to make up for the lost time he had spent in this recreational wasteland.

  Which was proving more frustrating all the time. “Do you have the sifted observation data for track 17b?” he asked the phased array’s scheduling guru, Alessa Leming.

  She sighed. “Yes. More nothing.”

  David wasn’t surprised—147 telemetry projection searches had come up empty-handed already—but he was not immune to another pulse of frustration. He shook his head, put his hands on his hips. “Well, damn it, where the hell is the source of that signature?”

  Alessa threw her bird-thin fingers up in dismay. “There is no logic to these negative results. The first observers traced this particular flare for weeks before it faded. We had reasonable parallax plottings, which should have given us the source’s trajectory to within two degrees of error. We saw no further flares, so there should not have been any acceleration or course changes possible. And we have scoured every segment of the sky which it might logically be located in now, given that information. Yet, nothing. Something is wrong. Perhaps there is an error in the original observational data.”

  David frowned. Alessa was both correct and incorrect. She was correct in asserting that something was wrong: the New India phased array was so powerful that it should have been able to detect not only marginal reflections from the surfaces of one of the immense Arduan colony ships, but, just as certainly, should have detected the way its passing occluded the stars behind it, rather like a torpedo of shadow moving through the otherwise illuminated heavens.

  But Alessa was incorrect in suggesting that the error might lie in the original observation data. Unknown to all but four of the other top specialists on the New India detection project, the confirmatory data base was several times larger than advertised. This particular flare had been seen not only by half a dozen official and academic observatories, but by almost five dozen naval and covert assets whose contributions could not be acknowledged in the generally shared data set. Dreadnoughts on long-range patrol, deep space cachement sites, stealthed listening and warp point monitoring posts inside Tangri space: these and many more facilities had observed and recorded the flare, which only deepened the mystery for David. Because whatever was, in fact, wrong, it wasn’t the observational data. There were simply too many completely independent and yet corroborative sightings that had been reported with professional-grade precision.

  So what was wrong? The trajectory of whatever had emitted the flare sign had been estimated to approach within 0.1 light-years of the New India system. That was why Joint Services Intelligence had chosen it as the site for the phased array: it would get the closest possibly look at whatever was approaching. “Too close for comfort,” one of the admirals in the planning sessions had quipped.

  Wait: too close for comfort…?

  No. It’s not possible. No.

  David ignored the chill on his palms as he aimed a none-too-steady index finger at Alessa’s forehead. “Dr. Leming, I need you to bring all available array components to bear on grid-field coordinates m17 by q12.”

  “Dr. Nanmin, granted that you have the authority to—”

  “Dr. Leming, this one time, just do as you’re asked. No debates. If I’m wrong, you can tell me—over lunch, if you like—just how much this unplanned retasking of the array has set back our observational agenda. But if I’m right—well, if I’m right, we’ll have bigger concerns.”

  Leming might have heard something she had never heard before in David’s tone: unambiguous resolve, not undermined by even the faintest tone of social insecurity. Or she may have begun to realize what that section of the starfield—the grid comprised of quadrants m17 by q12—meant in terms of searching for the source of the flare. “Attitude alteration under way in all relevant array elements, Dr. Nanmin. System is recalibrating—”

  David looked outward along the new search parameters, which essentially followed a corridor that led straight into the New India system itself. If the telemetry at the time of the flare was correct, then the only possibility is that the source changed trajectory after it was observed, that it has new telemetry—

  He heard Alessa Leming gasp. “Dr. Nanmin—there are—look!” She patched her readouts into the control-room’s main display. A bright array of contacts were virtually on top of them, the stream of bogeys stretching halfway back to the heliopause. “Why didn’t anyone see them before? What about the Navy—?”

  “The Navy didn’t see them because they are at the other end of the system, with a minimum presence, minding the warp points. As to why no one saw them—this system has almost no population, and we’re as far away from those small settlements as we can get. That’s pretty much standard operating procedure for a secret project: to put it where nothing, and no one, is present to observe you.”

  “Those objects—they are moving so fast.”

  “No faster than we estimated the source of the flare was moving, I’ll bet. Send a coded warning to the naval station near the warp point, and put another one in the cle
ar over the civilian channel. Rig each relay along the line to record and repeat as long as possible.”

  “You mean—?”

  “I mean we can’t be sure we’re still going to be here to transmit, Dr. Leming. But until then—”

  Leming stared at the screen, rigid. “But how—how did the source—?”

  “We didn’t think through all the variables, Alessa,” he murmured through a sad smile. David Nanmin had a momentary sense of his life since Bellerophon coming full circle. His rise to modest fame had started by detecting the approach of Arduan artifacts, and it was likely to peak and end with him doing exactly the same thing. “Yes, the flare telemetry data was perfect, but it was a ruse. It set us looking along that trajectory. Because the moment the thrust—the flare—was over, they began changing course. To trick us.”

  “It is the Arduans again, after all?”

  David did not say what he wanted to—isn’t that obvious?—but simply nodded. “Of course. And we neglected to consider this: they already had inertialess drive when we first encountered them. Then they found and adopted the Desai drive very quickly during the early phases of the war. If they had any way of transmitting that discovery to a later Dispersate…”

  “Yes, I understand.” Leming looked as though she might vomit. “If they built a large enough Desai drive, they could have pushed their space arks into a new vector without our ever seeing it, since those drives have no exhaust signature.”

  David nodded, noted that the approaching haze of contacts was now overlapping the icon denoting their array control station and the gas giant it orbited. “With forty percent cee at their command, they were able to shift to their real target: this system.”

  “But why here—why us?” Leming choked out.

  David shrugged. “I don’t have the faintest idea. I’m a scientist, not a military—”

  The datafeed from the most “trailing” sub array in the network went dark the same instant that a small sphere of white light bloomed in its approximate position, almost a full light-second “behind” their control station.

  “But nothing hit it,” Leming protested in the direction of her sensors.

  “Nothing our sensors could detect,” David corrected. “At 0.66 cee, a single screw would be devastating. A chair would be catastrophic. A chunk the size of this station might very well—”

  The gas giant that no one had ever bothered to give a name of its own—New India Six—sported a sudden, core-probing glare, like an acetylene torch burning its way down into a fog bank. For a fraction of a moment, the striations of its upper reaches of hydrogen spun into a fractal ruin of whorls cascading away from a widening hole left in the torch’s glowing wake: a slow-motion view of cyclones traveling at many thousands of kilometers per hour. Then, as if striking the bottom of a blue-black well—which David glimpsed as a ball of frozen methane and water and solids that were New India Six’s core—the subrelativistic chunk that had cut through the gas giant’s soupy atmosphere emitted a blinding flash, part of which emerged from the opposite side of the immense planet.

  David had an impression of the upper reaches of the atmosphere destructuring into gaseous arms of glowing plasma, of lightning racing out from the equatorial belt like an actinic spiderweb, and of immense fragments blasting up out of the tube the impactor had carved to the core of the planet. He had just enough time to turn to a white-faced Alessa Leming and observe, “We have seen an event—and a planetary core—that no humans have seen before us. Are you relaying this live?”

  She nodded, eyes riveted to the images of outrushing debris, some pieces the size of moonlets, but had nothing to say in reply.

  David was glad the images were being sent to the Navy picket units as a long stream of uninterrupted video, glad that posterity would remember him for being the name most associated with relaying this truly unique data before he—

  An eight-kilometer long chunk of tumbling planetary core struck the New India phased array control station with such force that it effectively vaporized upon impact.

  *

  Lieutenant Commander William Chong stared at the main view screen. It was cycling again and again through an accelerated replay of the last two minutes of the existence of the New India phased array. The bridge of his ship, the fast attack carrier Tibor Peters, was silent.

  Lt. Bonnie Pinero, at the sensor station, murmured, “Sir, you knew the chief researcher out at New India Six—Dr. Nanmin—didn’t you?”

  Chong shrugged. “I knew him in passing. More by reputation than personally. He watched the sky over Bellerophon when we had no satellites left. He did his job. And he’s died doing it again, giving us not just the sensor data, but the crucial information that reveals its significance.”

  “With respect, sir,” asked his adjutant, Ensign Guy Bock, who was still staring at the data, “what information is that?”

  Chong was disappointed that Bock hadn’t interpolated the obvious significances of the data, hadn’t realized Nanmin’s deepest purpose in sending his sensor readings as long as he could. “First, Mr. Bock, Dr. Nanmin’s sensor sweeps tell us that we are in fact under attack by the Arduans, that this system was one of their targets all along, and that the newly arriving Dispersates must have the Desai drive, since it would otherwise have been impossible to redirect them from their trajectory so late in their flight path.”

  Bock swallowed. “I see, sir.”

  Chong believed that he might—now. “Furthermore, it tells us that the Baldi—Arduan selnarm can now be used to communicate over interstellar ranges—they would be unlikely to have the Desai drive, otherwise—and that they are now here to fight a very different kind of war.”

  Lt. Steve Adler at Weapons drew more erect. “In what way, sir?”

  Chong nodded at the mustard-colored navigational haze traveling across the system at two-thirds the speed of light. “The Arduans could only have generated that density of material traveling at those speeds in one way: they destroyed their colony ships to create a cloud of subrelativistic kinetic kill vehicles. Because that’s exactly what every button, bunk, and bulkhead on those behemoths has become: megaton-level impactors. In some cases, a lot more than megaton-level. Lieutenant Pinero, any sign of gravimetric destabilization following in behind Dr. Nanmin’s communiqué?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m getting—a strange reading from the general region of New India Six.”

  “More precision, Ms. Pinero. Strange in what way?”

  “The readings are—well, diffuse, sir. And a little weak. As though the gas giant’s effect on the system’s entire gravitic plane has spread over a wider area and is beginning to diminish in its cumulative force.”

  “That’s because it has, Lieutenant Pinero. I think we can safely presume that New India Six has undergone core destabilization.”

  “Which means—what?” Pinero wondered aloud at the sensor playback that showed the last moments of the research station’s existence.

  Chong exhaled slowly. “I’m not an astrophysicist, but if the gas giant’s core was hit with sufficient energy to break it apart, the planetary atmosphere is probably diffusing into an elongated ellipsoid of charged plasma. Even if the planet reconsolidates, the time scale of that process will likely be measured in hundreds of millennia. Meaning that the gravitic equilibrium in this system is compromised. Keep recording all data, including astrophysical, Lieutenant Pinero: the experts back home are going to want to run simulations of the navigational sequelae.”

  Bock sounded embarrassed, but determined to learn—which Chong could respect. “What kind of navigational sequelae are you anticipating, Commander?”

  “In the most general of terms, Ensign, I am anticipating that this system is about to become a nonstop train wreck. The largest gas giant has been destabilized—possibly shattering in the process. The rest of that hailstorm of impactors is approaching along the ecliptic, meaning that its next contact point is with the asteroid belt just starward of New India Six.”

  �
�Sir, there’s a lot of open space between asteroids. A lot.”

  “Mr. Bock, I am familiar with the density of common asteroid belts. However, look at the density estimate of that cloud of debris and the almost incalculable number of discrete contacts within it. It would be freakish if there weren’t at least—at least—a thousand asteroid impacts. Each of which is going to generate thousands of more highly energetic stone fragments, while barely affecting the course of the impactor which destroyed it. And then those fragments will start feeling the pull of New India Prime, getting drawn in toward the inner planets.” Chong leaned back, repressed a sigh. “Within two months, this entire system will be a navigational nightmare. Any ship coming through either of its warp points will have only one piece of reliable data: that they are taking their lives in their hands. Which is why we can be sure that this is part of a larger strategy.”

  Adler’s speculation was almost sotto voce. “You mean, that the Arduans wanted to interdict this system. To cut the only pathway connecting Zephrain and the Bellerophon Arm.”

  Chong nodded. “Precisely. Which is why we have to get back, in good order, with as much data as possible. Mr. Bock, you are to oversee the evacuation of the warp point monitoring station. I do not want to try to tow it back through the warp point: this is not the moment to engage in time-costly operations, and it does not look like that death-cloud is going to come close enough to harm it. But inform the skipper of the frigate R. J. Hassala—Lieutenant Pio Canlas—that he’s drawn the short straw: he’ll run sensors and record until best estimates show he has thirty minutes left before any stray subrelativistic impactors might reach this point.”

  “Aye, aye, sir. Any message for New India Two, sir? Send them details, warn them?”

  Chong wanted to hang his head—more because of the fate of the civilians than Bock’s lack of perspicacity. “Ensign Bock, how far off is India Six?”

  Bock glanced at the plot. “Approximately fourteen light-hours sir, on the other side of the system.”