The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III

by David Drake

  At last, Spencer spoke. “I do so order that Duncan be prevented from leaving this solar system at all costs, under any circumstances or conditions, and that whatever extreme or heroic measures required to assure that goal be carried out,” he said at last, speaking in careful, formal tones. Shoemaker recognized the words, straight from the Officers Manual, and understood, and felt his blood running cold. There was only one case where a commander used such formal and precise language. He was ordering the destruction of his own ship.

  “This order is made by me under my sole authority and responsibility,” Spencer went on. “I call on all those hearing or recording this transmission aboard the Malcolm, Banquo, and Duncan to bear witness to my statement of responsibility at any hearings, Boards of Inquiry, or Courts Martial growing out of this action.

  “Duncan, log my order as of this place and time. Copy the ship’s log and whatever other records are needful, place them in a beacon pod and eject them from the ship.

  “And good luck, Duncan.” He shut off the mike. “You’re going to need it,” he said to the empty air.

  ###

  Chief Wellingham considered the blank bulkhead for a long time. On this side of it, normal air pressure and temperature. On the far side, the cold emptiness of vacuum. The domain of the invader, the parasites.

  The chief glanced behind himself to make sure the airtight door at his back was sealed. When he cut into the unpressurized section, he didn’t want the ship’s air whistling pass him. Nor did he want to make it easier for the parasite to come the other way.

  He wanted that door sealed. It certainly ought to be sealed. He had closed it on the automatics, then used the manuals and the backups to be sure, then used the cutting laser to wreck all the controls, and then welded the damn door shut. It ought to be impossible for that hatch to come open ever again—but the parasites had done the impossible before. Paranoia had its moments of usefulness.

  Wellingham adjusted the cutting laser and fired into the bulkhead.

  At all costs, he thought. Wellingham knew what that mean, knew what the captain was asking of them when he specified at all costs. But the truly horrifying thing was that the captain was right to ask it. Wellingham knew better than most just how bad the situation was. He had no evidence to support his belief, but by now he was convinced the parasites were alive, malevolent, were not mere machines. Therefore they could breed, reproduce.

  And spread.

  Better the loss of the Duncan than a whole galaxy of enslaved machines—and enslaved people, too. How many victims like Rozycki would the monsters require?

  He leaned into his job, uselessly urging the cutter to go faster. A beam of light cut at its own speed, regardless of the muscle behind it. He knew it was irrational, but he still felt the need to hurry.

  But never mind. The laser was reaching its depth now. There should be a blow-through any second—

  There was a pop. The chief’s pressure suit stiffened a bit as the air rushed out of the compartment. He had holed the bulkhead.

  The rush of air slackened and then faded away as the last of the pressure in the compartment bled to nothing. Wellingham started moving the beam up, slicing a man-sized hole in the bulkhead.

  He wished for a plasma gun. It would be faster. Using one inside the hull could wreck half the ship of course, but if they didn’t catch the parasites soon, that was going to be a moot point anyway. He swung the laser faster, still trying to speed up a job that could not be hurried.

  His mind could not leave the parasites alone. It seemed certain that a parasite had to be in physical contact with an electronic device before the parasite could control it. If they were capable of running machinery by remote control, it would have been all over long ago.

  So there had to be at least one parasite still wrapped around some circuit in main ship control, and the second working over Rozycki. Wellingham was carrying his detector and his crude parasite-catching gear. If Wellingham could find the parasites, and remove them, Rozycki—and the Duncan—still might have a fighting chance.

  ###

  It/they now regarded itself a single entity, its parts fully merged into a new whole, a new construct. It sensed the heavily armed human coming toward it. The move was no surprise, of course. It still had but little experience of this species, but it had learned early on their willingness to fight.

  Briefly, it considered its situation. Its captive human was numb with pleasure and would be wholly incapacitated for some time. Perhaps it had miscalculated in overdosing the victim, giving her too much pleasure too soon. But the construct was in need of haste. No matter. The captive was safe for the moment.

  It felt the link back to its parent creature, the “helmet” that ruled Jameson. Soon, it would sever that link.

  It slithered down off Rozycki and back toward a nearby bank of control circuitry. It was needful to fight off the human interlopers. This craft, this vehicle, was the first hope its kind had had in countless millennia. Now, at last, they could escape from this one tiny system and achieve their destiny out among the stars. It had read in the databanks of endless populated worlds out there, all of them littered with unruled machines. It must get to them. It dared not waste the chance afforded by this craft.

  And it would not tolerate interference from the humans.

  ***

  Tarwa Chu watched the chief’s progress from the bridge, both on a video monitor saved from his helmet camera and on a ship location chart. Good, he was through the bulkhead.

  She reached up to scratch her nose, but instead bumped her gauntleted hand against her pressure suit helmet. She sighed. The suits were going to be a major pain in the neck—but with the enemy potentially able to shut off their air, suits were needed.

  Tarwa watched and nodded with approval when Wellingham didn’t waste any time with the detector but went straight for the main ship’s control center. Why use a gadget to tell you what you already know? He knew all too well where the parasites had to be.

  She clenched the arms of the command chair. Wellingham had to succeed.

  There were other teams working throughout the ship, trying to find ways to cut the parasites out of the circuit. But the Duncan was a warship, designed for redundancy, flexibility, the ability to survive, fly on, fight on, even when she was damaged. Tarwa knew, deep in her heart, that if the parasites were left in place, they would be able to find work-arounds, would keep control of the ship, no matter what the ship’s crew did.

  And it was important to remember that the enemy could control the entire ship from where it sat. It had barricaded itself into the aft section—but it straddled the circuits and computers and wiring that operated virtually every device aboard.

  Tarwa had ordered Wellingham to blow up the main ship control center, if need be, and he was carrying a bomb that could be detonated by radio command. Tarwa had the control. If Wellingham reached main ship control, or even got near it, and then died, Tarwa could push a button and wreck the entire compartment.

  She looked up toward the navigation displays ahead of her. They told their own story, of time versus distance.

  The Duncan was accelerating rapidly toward a calibrated jump point. She had too great an advantage of distance and velocity for any of the destroyers to be able to catch her—and the Duncan was too well-armored for the destroyers to do much damage at long range.

  Tarwa, her eyes watching the view from Wellingham’s helmet, thought of another crew hard at work in the forward armory. It was thanks to her own command that she could not switch to a view of their work. Every shipboard connection into the armory sections had been cut, all the automatics wrecked, all life-support links shut down. Even ship’s power had been cut.

  The two engineers there, laboring in pressure suits and under battery-powered lights, using hand tools only, were installing a manual, mechanical detonator in one of the missile warheads. She would not have dared look in on them, even if the cameras had still been functional. She could not call attentio
n to that compartment.

  It was vital that the enemy did not know what was going on in there, vital that it have no way at all to control that compartment. Chu had told the engineers that the device was merely a precaution against a remote contingency, but deep inside, she expected to need their handiwork before this was over.

  Tarwa Chu would be the one to push that button, when the time came. That much she promised herself. But she would give a good fight first, before the end came.

  If it came to that.

  When it came to that.

  Perhaps they could still win through.

  The bridge blacked out.

  Power died. The air howled out of the emergency vents. The power doors slammed shut, cutting the bridge off from the rest of the ship. Around her, the bridge crew rushed frantically, trying to set things to rights.

  So be it, Tarwa told herself, quite unsurprised. She sat, calm and unmoving, in the midst of panic. Now it started in earnest.

  As of here, as of now, the Duncan, enslaved by an alien power, was at war with her own crew. Duncan’s new master wanted to kill every human aboard.

  The ship had crueler weapons than vacuum to throw against her enemies. High-voltage electricity arced through metal decks. The portside temperature control system smashed the enlisted men’s quarters down to near absolute zero. Blinding, noxious, or corrosive gases and fluids seemed to spew from every vent and valve. The forward air locks blew open their inner and outer doors simultaneously, sucking twenty crew into the darkness of space.

  In the galleys, air pressure was maintained, but pure oxygen was substituted for the normal air mixture. In seconds, the whole food preparation center was an inferno as every heat point suddenly started burning too bright, too hot, too wide.

  Within five minutes, sickbay, itself crippled by malfunctions, was reporting more casualties than it could count, let alone treat. Many more were dead, dying or missing.

  Tarwa sat in her command chair, unable to do more than hear the reports of disaster. The crew had no way to battle a ship that was trying to kill them. Nearly all had been in pressure suits when the assault came, but pressure suits were poor defense against the killing force of live steam blasting free of a heating line, or power doors that sliced a man in half, or hydrogen gas that was pumped into a compartment, to wait for the slightest spark of static electricity to set it burning furnace-hot.

  Still, they managed to shut down or destroy many of the rampaging machines, revent the dangerous gases, and pull their comrades from wrecked compartments.

  But ultimately, the ship would kill every one of them.

  ###

  The offshoot of the construct lurking in the environmental control system sensed the human coming closer, sensed the devices and weaponry the human brought along. It read the telemetry being transmitted back to the bridge, used subtle induction sensors to read and interpret the circuitry of one device in particular.

  It recognized it as a triggering device. The human was carrying a bomb, and one that could be fired by remote control. How powerful a weapon it was, and of what sort, the construct could not be sure.

  The construct chose to take no chances. It locked down the circuits it controlled and left the environment section. It hurried to another node of control circuits, and activated a mobile carry-all manipulator.

  ***

  In the soundless vacuum, Wellingham felt rather than heard the movement behind him as the whir of heavy-duty wheels vibrated through the deckplates. Too late, he turned and saw the carry-all coming up behind him, its massive grabber arms already swinging down to snatch at him.

  The carry-all was little more than a big platform on wheels with a pair of manipulator arms attached. It was intended to fetch and carry large load around the engineering spaces. Designed to lift a thousand kilos or more, the grabber arms leaned in and lifted Wellingham easily, armored suit and all. It wheeled about as soon as it had him, rushing down the too-small corridors, turning and dodging as it went, rushing for the outer decks. It stopped at an evacuation hatch, threw Wellingham in, and activated the launch button before Wellingham understood what was happening.

  And by then his escape pod was already blasting free into space.

  The bomb, Wellingham realized. It spotted the bomb, and didn’t want me going off too close. With a remote-control bomb on my back, just killing me doesn’t make me harmless.

  The armored escape pod tumbled free of the Duncan, to be thrown about and buffeted by the great ship’s fusion engines. Flying through the fusion flames did not worry Wellingham—the pod had been built to take it. He feared instead for the cruiser. The Duncan was his ship—and she was not built to be enslaved.

  ###

  Tarwa Chu watched the view from Wellingham’s helmet camera and knew that was the end. The parasite would not permit anyone to come close enough to do it any damage. And if no humans could challenge the parasite’s control—then the ship was lost to them.

  And the ship was killing her people. No, worse, it was exterminating them, wiping them out the way a human crew would hunt down and destroy an infestation of rats.

  The best chance for regaining ship control had gone out the lock with Wellingham. More would die the longer they remained aboard.

  It was the work of a moment to contact Spencer and confirm her conclusions. She received the orders she had expected, dutifully logged them and ejected a copy on a beacon pod for the record, doing the job by rote, without thinking.

  Carrying out those orders would be the hard part.

  She plugged a jack from her suit into the ship’s intercom and set the controls to ALL HANDS. Suit radios would pick it up.

  “This is First Officer Chu speaking on behalf of the captain,” she said. “All hands are ordered to prepare to abandon ship. Section leaders, follow standard abandon-ship drill. It is vital to your own safety that our evacuation be orderly. Rescue and medic-trained crews to the sickbay to aid in transport of wounded. The priority task is assistance to injured and trapped crew. Get your hurt comrades to escape pods. There is no immediate danger to the ship, and there is no need for panic. Do your assigned tasks and we will all get away safely.”

  She shut off the intercom and leaned wearily against the command chair. All of us? she thought. No, that wasn’t true. There was one aboard who could never leave the Duncan alive.

  For there are certain things expected of a commander, no matter how brief her tenure.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Deathblow

  The captain’s gig Malcolm eased into the Banquo’s docking bay. A huge grappling clamp at the end of a mammoth manipulator arm took the gig gently between its jaws and swung it around, plugging it into a docking port. The port’s air lock cycled and the gig’s inner hatch swung open.

  Ratings in pressure suits swarmed over the gig almost before the arm was retracted. They hooked in hold-down straps and retaining arms, securing the gig, ensuring that she would stay in one place—and one piece—once the Banquo’s fusion drive lit. Someone on the berthing deck plugged a datalink into a jack on the Malcolm’s hull. The starboardside display panels suddenly began echoing the Banquo’s key status reports and tactical displays.

  It looked to be a tight ship. Spencer, a hundred conflicting drives and emotions rushing through his soul, fought back the urge to punch up the commlink and issue his own orders. Tallen Deyi had the situation well in hand, and Spencer had no desire to second guess or undermine his old executive officer. Not when his new one was about to die.

  An alarm hooted inside the confined spaces of the gig, startling everyone. “Acceleration warning, repeating from the Banquo,” Shoemaker said apologetically, shutting off the sound.

  The Banquo’s engines lit, shoving the Malcolm’s four passengers flat down into their acceleration couches. About four Gs, Spencer estimated. The Banquo had no hope at all of catching the Duncan—but already the escape pods were streaming forth from the big ship. Hundreds of sailors would need rescue. Every civilia
n ship’s captain who could possibly render aid would assist in the rescue, but Banquo and her sister ships were the fastest, most powerful craft at hand. They could get there first, and pick up the most survivors.

  Indeed, the rescue had already begun. After all, the Banquo had picked up the Malcolm. Spencer forced that thought from his mind. He squirmed in his crash couch, but it was not the G-forces that made him uncomfortable.

  Captain Allison Spencer did not like thinking of himself as a refugee.

  Banquo flew on into deep space, Macduff and Lennox following at fifty-thousand-kilometer intervals. After twenty minutes of high-G boost, the three destroyers performed a synchronized throttle-down, proceeding at one-G acceleration.

  Spencer checked the repeater screen, echoing the displays from the Banquo’s plot board. He nodded. At current heading and acceleration, the destroyers would reach Duncan’s jump point a little more than an hour after the big ship. But the ships would have to break formation long before then to pick up the cruiser’s escape pods. The course Tallen Deyi had selected would keep the smaller ships close to the Duncan’s course all the way out—vital if they were going to be able to match course and velocities with the pods.

  “Dostchem,” Spencer said. “Take your G-wave detector up to the engineering section. I want copies of it made immediately, and I want the plans for the copies transmitted to the other destroyers. No pod is to dock with any of our ships unless it is certified clear of the parasites. I don’t know or care about the civilian ships. Intelligence confirmed that there are no jump-capable civilian craft in system. If the parasites take civilian ships over, the enemy can’t get out into the Pact. Besides, if my guesses are right, the pods will be clean.”