by Steve White
“Exactly. How far is India Two?”
“Six light-hours, sir.” Then: “Oh.”
“Yes. It took the results we’re seeing now fourteen hours to reach us at the speed of light from India Six. The debris that savaged everything there was traveling at two-thirds the speed of light. Which means, over the same fourteen hours, it has traveled about 9.4 light-hours. Which means it reached New India Two about an hour and a half ago.”
Chong looked up at Bock, whose unusually pinkish face was now quite red. He no doubt anticipated a mention of his singular failure to track time properly when his next performance review came round. Chong would regret including it in his file, but would not flinch from doing so: a naval officer had to be able to keep constant and unerring track of various mission and event timelines. This might have been Bock’s only serious gaffe in this regard, but it was singular enough to freeze his progress for years. “Dismissed, Mr. Bock. Helm, commence evolution into withdrawal formation Mike Delta Seven. Time to head home with news that no one will want to hear.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The conversation with the senior intel officer on the acting flagship of the 92nd Reserve Fleet was neither so swift nor easy as Wethermere had hoped. After overcoming the officer’s intrinsic (and inherently self-important) assumption that fleet intel would have been apprised of any and all covert operations undertaken in or near their strategic theater, there followed the unavoidably convoluted explanation of how it was that a Federation spec ops transponder code was being emitted by an Arduan bulk carrier named the Fet’merah. The concept that there was a human Q-ship in the belly the comparatively whalelike Arduan hull required no small number of proofs. It also required several tedious rehashings of how and why Wethermere had elected to his hide his craft inside the alien ship.
But at last, the necessary explanations had been tendered, received, and (mostly) understood, and Wethermere’s small flotilla was allowed to form up with the 92nd Reserve. As part of its rearguard. Ossian protested this, citing the criticality of his mission. He was asked to explain why it was so critical. Naturally, he could not provide that explanation without violating a dozen secrecy protocols. So ultimately, Wethermere was not allowed to depart the system sooner than the rearguard itself.
Which did not seem so worrisome a delay until Engan looked up in alarm from her sensors, announcing: “The Zarzuela warp point is active, sirs.”
“Do we have any visuals?” asked Knight.
Engan glanced sidelong at Ossian. “We do, if Captain Wethermere allows us to send our covert code to get an automatic tap in to the microsensors lying doggo near the warp point.”
Wethermere nodded. “You have authorization. Show us what’s going on.”
After a few moments delay, the bridge’s primary screen showed a veritable cascade of Arduan super-heavy dreadnoughts gushing out of the Zarzuela warp-point with less than two-second intervals between them. Thirty were already in system and there was no intimation of a break in the pace. And as they formed up, they began heading for the M’vaarmv’t warp point at best speed. Smaller, faster craft fanned out from their flanks, leaping ahead toward the same destination.
“Well, damn,” breathed J.T. Ross at the weapons console.
“Indeed,” agreed Commander Knight. “ETA of their fastest ships?”
“Assuming constant course and speed, thirty-eight minutes. About fifty minutes for their battlewagons.”
“Time to our transit, given current intervals?”
“About twenty minutes, sir.”
Knight nodded, glanced at Wethermere. “Doesn’t get much closer than that.”
“No, it doesn’t. And it doesn’t get much more worrisome.”
“You mean because this Arduan plan is running like a well-oiled machine?”
“That and—”
“Captain Wethermere, Councilor Ankaht on secure two.”
“Put her through to the con, Ensign Schendler.”
In the small screen nestled between Wethermere’s and Knight’s chairs, Ankaht’s face was very still, her voice very calm. “You have, of course, seen Amunsit’s fleet emerging.”
Wethermere couldn’t help smiling. “It’s kind of hard to miss.”
“Yes.” She paused. “You do not seem surprised by these attacks.”
“Well, I wasn’t expecting them, but in retrospect, there were some warnings.”
Knight frowned. “Oh? Like what—sir?”
“Like that recent series of flare anomalies that astronomers speculated might be new Dispersates decelerating prior to arrive in certain of our systems. I always wondered if the lack of more intensive news investigation into those phenomena was the result of official suppression. I’m not wondering about that anymore.”
“But wouldn’t your superiors tell you if they had strategic concerns? I thought you have sufficient clearance for that sort of intelligence, Ossian.”
“Well, yes and no, Ankaht. I have the clearance level, but any classified military analysis investigating a connection between those flares and new Dispersates would not be in my pipeline, so to speak. This sort of intel is ‘need to know,’ and I didn’t need to know. It’s purely strategic intelligence: big picture stuff. Admiral Trevayne would have full briefings on it, maybe Admiral Yoshikuni.”
Knight frowned. “And what about the Arduan Admiral, Narrok? He’d almost certainly have some info—or might have been consulted, even.”
Ankaht was the one to answer. “No, not Narrok.”
Knight did a good job suppressing his surprise. “You seem very certain of that, Counselor.”
Ankaht paused. “Our fleet is not part of the PSU or Rim Federation command structures, although its existence and operations are subject to the approval of both. Neither admiralty has reason to share such intelligence with us.”
Wethermere looked at Ankaht; her two smaller eyes blinked once, rapidly. “But that’s not why you’re so sure.”
“No. It’s not. But I may not say why.”
“You don’t have to say: I think I know why.”
Ankaht’s voice was wry. “I suspect you do.”
Knight’s eyes flicked sideways at Wethermere. “But I don’t. How does Councilor Ankaht know who’s in the intel loop and we don’t? Particularly if the Arduans are supposedly further outside that ‘need-to-know’ network you were talking about?”
Ossian shook his head. “Sorry, Skipper, but if my guess about that is correct, then openly speculating on how Ankaht knows about Admiral Narrok’s exclusion from the intel on the flares would be a practical violation of the compartmentalization of that information.” And an indicator of just how many secrets stand between Ankaht and me, he added silently. Of course she’d be aware of who was in the know and who wasn’t, because if fleet intel thought, for one second, that the drive flares we saw earlier were from subsequent Arduan Dispersates, who would they have tapped to be their primary subject matter expert? Ankaht, of course. Even more than Narrok, she had access to the big picture, was already keeping various human secrets as part of her cooperative intelligence work with me, and was one of the few Arduans who had a long personal perspective on her race’s scientific advances as well as its social evolution during its long exodus.
And Wethermere would not have been informed of any of that because he had no need to know that such a debrief had even occurred, much less be apprised of its contents. His rank was far beneath the higher echelon command grade, so—other clearances notwithstanding—he had nothing to do with the top brass that set strategy for the entirety of the PSU. And now it was time to change the topic. “Ankaht, you said you had a breakthrough regarding the intelligence that Amunsit’s agents were exchanging through the selnarmic drones?”
“Yes, although the breakthrough is in the structure of the messages, not their content.”
Knight, who was still catching up on the details of the earlier phases of the investigation, asked, “I’m sorry, what exactly does that mean, Counselor?”<
br />
“It means we have found the signals they were swapping secretly, and have been able to record them. As we suspected, they were embedded as part of the selnarmic data.”
Wethermere nodded. “Logical. That ensures that we humans couldn’t make sense of it, or so much as detect it. So, what kind of data is it, do you think? Numerical, lexical, visual?”
Ankaht closed her eyes slowly, opened them again. “It is difficult to explain. The data is related to sensory reproduction streams within the broader selnarmic message.”
Wethermere nodded but said nothing.
Ankaht studied him carefully. “You don’t have the faintest idea of what I meant by that, do you?”
“Nope, not a clue.”
“Ah. So, I will try an analogy. You are familiar with your own species’ organic poems, are you not?”
“Yes: poems where the form was an implicit part of the content, was supposed to be more evocative of sensory experience than mental experience.”
“Yes.” Ankaht seemed surprised. “I was not aware you had much familiarity with poetry.”
Wethermere’s smile was faint. “I am a man of many surprises. So, go on: these selnarmic data packages are like an organic poem?”
“There is a crude similarity in that they are sensory, but these, I think, are not audial or visual. Unless I am much mistaken, they resemble the structure of our taste, olfactory, and tactile selnarmic impressions. But their content is—garbled.”
“Garbled in what way?”
“Again, I propose an analogy. Consider a poem. Your more formal traditions arrange them into stanzas which, within the same poem, all follow identical or near-identical formats of meter, rhyme, line length. Now imagine if you saw that same structure but there were no recognizable words in it. Not merely nonsense verse, but characters of all sorts—including numerals and punctuation marks—arranged in stanzas, and with some characteristic line-ending repetitions. But you saw no words: just random characters arrayed in the pattern of words. You would know you were looking at the form of a poem, but would perceive none of its content. That is analogous to the mystery this data presents.”
“Captains,” Lubell announced, “looks like we’ve just been moved up in the transit rota. Estimating five minutes.”
“Thank you, Mr. Lubell,” Knight said.
Wethermere, smiled, nodded, looked back down at Ankaht. “We’ll be heading back to Mvaarmv’t soon, I’m told.”
“This is good. I would ask you to consider one recommendation from me, Ossian.”
“Certainly. What is it?”
“When we get through the warp point, do not stop to converse further with the officers of the 92nd Reserve Fleet, do not stop to consider the alternatives or the next step we should take. Run. Run as far and as fast as you can, back to Zephrain, maybe back to Bellerophon. It is a formidable strongpoint, particularly if all the fleets of the Rim Federation are behind it.”
Wethermere stared. “Ankaht, that is—interesting advice. I don’t know how to ask this except directly: are you making this recommendation based on confidential information to which I am not privy?”
“No, Ossian. I am making this recommendation because I am fairly sure that the significance of our investigation is now past. Whatever events were to be effected by the data exchanged on the selnarmic couriers has, in fact, been effected. We are living in the midst of its consequences. I suggest, therefore, that we have a new mission.”
“And what is that?”
“To survive.”
*
After Wethermere’s detachment passed through the warp point and started angling sharply away from the 92nd Reserve, the hails started coming in thick and fast. After five minutes, the comms finally became still—but only for a moment.
Schendler turned to Wethermere, slightly pale. “Captain, Rear Admiral Kolenski of the 92nd Reserve is on the line himself. He is not merely asking that you reply. He wants you on the carpet in his ready room within the hour.”
So much the worse, then. “Schendler, you are not to acknowledge that communiqué.”
“But sir, the admiral expressly ordered that you—”
“You have my orders already, Ensign. If you feel you cannot carry them out, I will place you in hack, albeit without prejudice.”
“Yes sir,” answered Schendler, who turned to readdress his comm console with considerable rigidity.
Knight muttered out of the corner of his mouth. “Captain, you know regulations. I don’t have to tell you that you are cooking your own goose, but good.”
“Commander, you are right: I do know regulations. But I’ve also worked with Ankaht for six years. You know the way a master statesperson can read the mood of the people, almost foresee the general trend of coming events? She’s like that with her people. And she told us to run. Run like hell. And that’s what we’re going to do. So right now, the choice is between blind regulations, or Ankaht’s instincts—which match what my gut is telling me, too. This whole op is bust and we’ve now got less than thirty minutes before those Arduan super-heavy dreadnoughts come through that warp point from Amadeus.” He leaned forward. “You didn’t survive your posts by not developing some gut-feelings of your own, Commander, probably better ones than either Ankaht or I have. So: what’s your gut telling you?”
Knight frowned, then turned to Lubell. “Lieutenant, I’m going to need best speed away from this warp point and the van of the 92nd. I presume that Captain Wethermere is going to order the skippers of Fet’merah and Viggen to do the same.”
Wethermere nodded. “Just did it.” He turned to his long-time helmsman. “Put our backs to the gale and as much canvas as she’ll take, Mr. Lubell.”
*
Kolenski of the 92nd was clearly in the process of organizing a pursuit—fighters were launching, pinnaces forming up on them—when literally and figuratively, all hell broke loose.
Advanced mark Arduan SBMHAWKs—self guided missiles capable of traversing warp points independently—came through the warp point into Mvaarmv’t in waves, many of them destroying each other as they materialized in the system, their atoms rushing headlong into the same impossibly small volume of space and canceling each other out in violent, actinic spasms.
But for every one that was lost, nine or ten more made it—and there were hundreds upon hundreds of the hunter-killer devices swarming among the only partially reorganized echelons of the 92nd Reserve Fleet. Rusty crews and old ships dotted the blackness with the brief flashes of their passing. The heavies of the mixed-species fleet—supermonitors, mostly—managed to patch their datalinks together and deliver a withering counterfire that burned down the torrent of missiles like flamethrowers clearing a field of wheat.
Commander Knight watched without comment as Kolenski’s pursuing fighters swept back around to arrow toward the desperate fight for the warp point. The two rather outdated forts that were the sentinels against this unthinkable eventuality were already sitting in debris fields of what had been their own armor, weapons, powerplants, crews. They fought on, but their outgoing fire diminished in inverse proportion to the mounting incoming fire that was gradually turning them to junk. Knight’s jaw muscles bunched.
“We can’t go back, can’t help.” Wethermere said quietly.
Knight nodded. “We’d get crisped just by coming too close to the secondary explosions from the real heavies.”
“That, too,” assented Wethermere. “But the fact of the matter is that our job is to report what we saw. With our Arduan contingent, and having bigger and better sensors than we ought to, we might have picked up some useful intel for a debrief.”
Knight nodded. “Speaking of Arduans, should we really remain inside the Fet’merah, given what’s going on out there? We don’t exactly look like we’re playing for the home team, if you know what I mea—”
Schendler looked up. “Captains, Cluster Leader Temret on secure two. He says it’s urgent.”
Wethermere nodded, spoke as soon as he hea
rd the different hiss of the new channel’s static. “Report, Temret.”
“Captain, a number of the other ships that are already converging upon the next warp point, the one to Ahaggar, are focusing active scanners on us.”
“Getting a cross-section of our hulls?”
“It would seem so. They are using ladar sweeps.”
Wethermere saw Knight about to give orders to Zhou, who was also in charge of flight ops. Ossian shook his head. “No time to cut Woolly Impostor loose from Fet’merah’s belly, anymore, Skipper. If you saw an Arduan vessel start to deploy some kind of surprise package, what would you do?”
“Vaporize them. Posthaste.”
“Me, too. So we’re going to have to stay inside the Fet’merah and talk our way out of this one.”
Temret’s vocoder voice was both rueful and wry. “You may need to commence talking soon, Captain. Look at the relay from our holoplot.”
He and Knight glanced at their own holoplot, which hazed for a moment as it was updated by the one on the Fet’merah’s bridge. At the farthest range of detection, and along their current line of advance, three large blips were moving in their direction now. Away from the warp point into Ahaggar—and on an intercept course.
“Temret, do you have any type and class data on those newcomers? And where did they come from?”
“I may answer your second question while my sensor operator completes the scans necessary to reply to your first. These ships are several of a small detachment of what seem to be warships, all of which were apparently already under way to Ahaggar when we entered the system. These three turned about shortly after the other fleeing ships started their detailed scans of us. They are all Orion hulls: a destroyer, a light cruiser, and a cruiser, respectively. Specific class identification within those types remain uncertain at this range, but their drive emissions and maneuver characteristics all point toward older marks. In the case of the destroyer, a very old craft indeed.”
Wethermere forgot and rubbed his hair for a moment. Snatching his hand away, he observed, “This could be tricky.”
