Bria could see only one asset available for her use. She engaged the hyper-radio transmitter. She used an Alliance band, encrypted but perhaps already broken by the Ulltrians.
“Interrogator,” she said.
After a moment, a tightbeam reply came. The interrogator gave away its location by doing that, but only to her.
“Briaathursiasalientiormethesess, prepare for intercept.”
Bria replied with a tightbeam. “Other matters, interrogator.”
“Yessss,” the male hissed. “Ulltrian ship.”
Bria sent a small data packet: the approximate location where she expected the Ulltrian ship to jump.
The pause in the reply was longer than she expected. Finally, the Sussurat replied. “Surrender after battle.”
Bria showed her teeth. She had no choice: saving Neelee-ornor was essential. She had to do whatever would ensure that. But she had made an oath to Gowgoroup, and she meant to keep it. She would have to split the difference.
“Will surrender ship after battle,” she said. The interrogator did not need to know that she would kill herself before he seized her ship.
No reply came. She would have to trust the interrogator. But then, he was a Sussurat. He would not shirk his duty.
_____
“Prepare for thrust,” Captain Shirazi said.
That damned Kirt AI had sent them a new set of instructions and a new trajectory. They had moved the ship, relative to the weapon, and would now have to turn the gun with a burst of thrust. The strains would be violent. “Watch the countdown. Sound an all-stations alarm.”
The incessant background whine of the alarm began. The seconds counted down. Shirazi pulled up an outside visual of what remained of the rings: a broken white band. It shimmered, as if seen through hot atmosphere, or through rippled glass. The unknown weapon—if it was a weapon—still functioned, although only half of the rings remained.
“What the hell is it?” Shirazi wondered aloud. “Is it meant to grind up the planet by making its crust heave? Or would those gravity ripple ultimately strip away the atmosphere?”
Her operations chief shook her head, expressing the same uncertainty the captain felt.
Shirazi sighed and climbed into her acceleration couch. She tightened the straps. The thrust started smoothly and then whiplashed them to the side as the tow cable jerked taught. A scream sounded through the ship. Shirazi cursed violently. This was her ship, dammit, and this mission was tearing it apart. She promised herself for the hundredth time that she would get Amir Tarkos locked up for life when he came back to Earth.
A piece of loose paper fluttered by her head. “Oh no,” she said. An alarm shrieked at a higher pitch than the station’s alarm.
“Decompression!” she shouted.
The blast doors to the bridge slid smoothly closed. The ship alarm was deafening.
“Turn the damn alarm down in here!” she shouted. The sound dropped to a painful background taunt. “Tell me,” she shouted at her ops.
“A… it looks like a structural tear, near the engines. Strain on the hull. It’s too wide for the ship’s robots to seal immediately.”
“Of course,” she cursed. “Causalties?”
“None reported. Everyone was suited.”
“That’s something, anyway.”
“Prepare for radiation exposure,” the AI said.
Shirazi rolled her eyes. The ship’s damn AI was hurting morale, with these constant updates about exposure. They could do nothing more to prepare for radiation. The ship’s shields were at full strength.
A second shudder rocked the ship. Their projected exterior view turned white.
“Weapon firing,” her ops said.
“Let’s hope those AIs can aim the thing.” The weapon stopped before she finished the sentence.
“Well?” she shouted. She was immediately sorry: it would be unprofessional to take out her frustrations on her crew. She took a deep breath, and using her calmest voice asked, “Tactical, what do you see?”
“Secondary gamma radiation source. They got it, Captain.”
“I’d take them apart by hand if they didn’t,” she said. “They had the Galaxy’s biggest gun and a target running right down the barrel. Alright. Are we going to hold together for the last minutes of towing this gun over what remains of the ring?”
“I don’t know, Captain. They’re already turning the gun, though. It’s almost in position.”
“Open a connection to that damn Kirt AI. Tiklik?”
“I acknowledge your message Human Captain of Zoroastrian called Shirazi.”
“This ship is damaged. Give us a trajectory with minimal stress.”
“The path chosen has the minimal stress.”
“Yeah, I was afraid you were going to say that.” She cut the line. “Ops, make sure everyone stays at station and on alert. It’s only going to get worse. Thrust resumes in one minute or so.” Then she whispered under her breath, “Those damn Neelee better come on all four hooves begging forgiveness after we save their damn planet.”
“Captain.” The communications officer looked over her shoulder at Shirazi. “We have a request for emergency medical treatment.”
“From?”
“One of the robots. It says it has Harmonizer Tarkos and he needs help.”
“There’s no way we can get a team down there during this.”
“It’s coming to us.”
“How?”
“It’s climbing the tow line.”
Shirazi frowned. “As soon as the thrust stabilizes, get someone out there to bring them inside. But tell the team to be careful. Don’t do anything stupid. Tethers at all times. We lose someone on a space walk, they’ll fall into the beam before we can save them.”
“Yes, Captain. I’ll be sure to tell them to do it right.”
The engines started with an agonized whine, pushing Shirazi down into her seat. The ship’s hull screamed.
“Hold together,” she whispered. “Don’t make me the first human captain to lose an interstellar ship.”
The ship, not seeming to hear her plea, continued to roar in protest. Radiation alarms started up again.
“The weapon is engaged,” the Ops head told her. “We’re burning the ring.”
_____
The air in the cockpit had fully cleared. Bria could see a complete tactical view now. The cruiser’s environmental systems declared the atmosphere safe, although thin. Bria popped her helmet off, letting the higher pressure in her suit push it free. She pulled it into her lap.
She had reduced her acceleration to a fraction of a Sussurat g. Now she aimed straight at the Ulltrian ship. Behind her, the huge weapon had resumed burning the last pale band of Neelee-ornor’s rings.
Bria hissed at the sight. On the day she had been named a Harmonizer, she had bowed before the Council, her knees on Neelee-ornor, as she was presented with her armor—the armor that had been made for her and which knew her down to the base pairs of her DNA. She rose then, and as her armor stepped forward and embraced her, she had looked up and there above her stretched the ring of Neelee-ornor, like a crown upon her achievement.
Now it was gone. And she had been forced to play a part in destroying it, like a mother forced to burn the body of a plague-murdered child. It infuriated her. And worse was the knowledge that a thousand such atrocities would happen on a thousand worlds, as the Ulltrians waged their war.
The Ulltrians worshipped competitive natural selection, the war of life against life, and everything beautiful and delicate would die in this arm of the Galaxy if they had their way. The Alliance’s task was infinitely harder than the aims of the enemy: to preserve, to foster life, to spread life in the Galaxy while maintaining a balance between the lifetrees of the worlds of the Alliance, so that life propagated without hindering the genetic heritage of other worlds.
The Alliance striking back at the Ulltrians was art facing a hammer, creation facing destruction, cooperation facing competition. The Ullt
rians had entropy on their side. Their task was always going to be easier.
Bria raised her hands and flexed them. Some of the artists have claws, she thought.
Bria instructed the lasers and heavy particle beam that still functioned to target the Ulltrian ship. She had to fire before the Ulltrian ship jumped, which meant she had best fire when the ship still lay beyond optimum firing range. She programmed each gun to fire at will, as rapidly as continued operation allowed, in sixty seconds.
Bria chose a hyper-radio band that she expected the Ulltrian to monitor. Then she turned on the interior cameras and told the cruiser’s AI to obscure anything of tactical significance in the view.
She glared at the camera and said, in slow Galactic, “Ulltrian, I challenge you.”
She did not expect such a thing to work. But she would seize any distraction, any chance that she could slow the Ulltrian or confuse its planning. A delay of milliseconds might mean that she ensured her weapons a hit.
“Am Briaathursiasalientiormethesess,” she said, forcing herself to speak very slowly, making the job easy for the Ulltrian’s translation software. “Harmonizer Commander. Walked on your world, Hurk-ka-Dâk-Ull. Fought last elder Ulltrian that remained behind. Killed it with these claws.” She held up her gloved hands and showed her teeth.
An incoming reply came almost immediately: visual and audio. Bria put it to the screen before her. Immediately a hideous screech filled her ears. A furiously strobing pattern of lights, blinking from deepest blues to hot infra-reds at the lower limit of Sussurat eyesight, flashed and shimmered. A wave of nausea overcame Bria. She trembled, her head shaking involuntarily—
And then the screen went blank and the sound stopped.
“Cognitive weapon targeting Sussurat subcognitive systems deployed in incoming message,” the cruiser’s AI said. “Message terminated.”
Bria shook her head, her mind fogged. The AI’s message repeated, and it sank into her mind a word at a time but the sentence meant nothing to her. She growled. The AI repeated it’s warning again. In a moment, Bria’s mind cleared, and the controls before her came back into focus.
A cognitive weapon. Clever monster, Bria thought. The Ulltrian used her own transparent tactic—her attempt to engage it in individual challenge—against her. It used Bria’s message to get her to accept a reply message, and it deployed a program tailored to induce seizures in a Sussurat brain.
Bria sneered when she thought of how such a weapon must have been developed: the torture dungeons of the Ulltrian homeworld were notorious, where sentient prisoners were disassembled and studied for every weakness, their genetic heritage raped for every opportunity to harm. In such a place some dozens or hundreds of Sussurats would have died slow, horrible deaths, while this weapon targeting their specific brain systems was developed.
The Ulltrian had played her for a fool and won the exchange.
But another thought struck Bria. Five thousand years before, when such a weapon would have been developed, during the last Ulltrian war, an Alliance AI would not have been clever enough to filter out the message in time. The Ulltrians, she and Tarkos had discovered, had done very little to upgrade their AIs since that war. This enemy might well assume that the Alliance also had made no advances in artificial intelligence technology. And so, as far as the Ulltrian knew, Bria still listened and watched the message, and would be having a seizure now, as deep neural systems misfired in a fugue of precisely asynchronized patterns caused by the message.
Bria clacked her teeth. She jogged the thrust twice, then let the engines sputter and fail. She fired three of the cruiser’s steering jets for a few seconds, to make the ship start to tumble. The targeting systems of the cruiser’s weapons would easily be able to compensate for the slow yaw and roll. Then she opened the channel again, but transmitted only a carrier signal, as if she had meant to reply to the Ulltrian but had been unable to do so. She told the AI to also transmit a general alarm.
Bria turned off the automatic firing program and watched the tactical display. The Ulltrian ship accelerated. It shifted course, aiming straight at her, instead of directly for the Neelee weapon. The Ulltrian had taken the bait: it intended to destroy her, before moving on to complete its mission.
Bria opened her mouth wide, showing all her teeth in a predator’s smile. She waited, tense as a tiger just about to leap, her hand over the manual firing control.
The Ulltrian ship drew closer. The cruiser’s weapons targeting systems turned green, then darker green, informing her that the Space Gnasher had come within ideal range. Bria waited, holding her breath.
The Ulltrian fired, a single missile accelerating at thirty S-gees.
Bria howled, and slapped the firing command.
The cockpit’s lights dimmed as all energy rerouted to the lasers. The cruiser’s weapons cycled, firing simultaneously every hundred milliseconds. Bria peered so hard at the tactical images that it hurt her four eyes. The icon tracking the incoming missile flickered, and the ship’s AI announced that a flash of gamma radiation blasted over the sensors. That would be the missile: it had not survived the battery of laser and particle beams Bria had fired.
When the tactical image reconstituted itself, the Ulltrian ship shimmered in place, still aiming for the cruiser. Then it flickered and was gone. It had jumped.
Bria cursed. But a data icon appeared in the place where the Ulltrian ship had been. She looked closely at the data: an array of metal spectra had been detected. She showed all her teeth and growled in satisfaction. She had hit it. She had burned it, before it jumped, ablating hot metal.
She turned on the ship’s engines and stopped its tumble. She dove toward the Neelee weapon below at full acceleration.
The Ulltrian ship blinked into space, the tactical icon appearing as the light delay caught up with her cruiser’s systems. The Space Gnasher had jumped to the limit of its reach. Spectra revealed that it bled atmosphere, leaving a trail of water and oxygen. Hull breach, then. But it still accelerated at the same rate, racing for Zoroastrian and the weapon that it towed.
Bria growled. She would not catch it. It could fire its complement of weapons as soon as it passed through the burnt ashes of the ring below.
An energy spike came from the Space Gnasher. Bria leaned forward. Was it firing energy weapons?
The spectra of nearly all the metals on the periodic table lit up Bria’s tactical view, a complete spread of elements burning in the dark. The ship blazed, ablating its hull in a fury of plasma. As she watched, the Space Gnasher grew hot and exploded, scattering streaks of hot material in every direction.
Bria growled in satisfaction.
The Sussurat ship appeared in her display as it turned off its quantum cooling algorithm, dropping its stealth mode.
“Explosion a disappointment,” the Sussurat radioed to her. “Would have liked to interrogate an Ulltrian.”
_____
Tarkos struggled to wake from a nightmare in which he drowned in a lake of acid. The acid burned his eyes, it burned his mouth and nose, it trickled into his lungs and caused hacking, painful coughs. He could not breath.
Something cold and hard pressed against his mouth. He tried to squeeze his teeth together, but the hard cold metal slipped between his incisors and then wedged his mouth open. He panicked, flailing, as the cold metal shot town his throat. He tried to gag, to cough, but he could not. Cool air flooded his lungs. He shuddered, the coughs continuing but somehow interrupted. Then all went black.
He woke later when he felt an abrupt change in temperature and pressure. His suit had opened.
“About bloody time,” a human woman’s voice. “What took the damn Neelee so long? No. No! Leave that alone. I’ll pull the tube. That can be tricky. Put him there. No, there. Don’t be thick. Strap him. Right.”
His eyes were swollen. He tried to open them but couldn’t. Something cold shifted in his throat, and a tube was pulled from his windpipe. He coughed and gagged.
“Stay still,�
�� the woman said impatiently. He recognized her voice but could not remember from where. British. British English.
He saw dim light, as the coughing had shaken open his eyes. A human face floated nearby, but he couldn’t focus on it. His suit stood in the background, fixed solidly to a floor. Behind it, a thin black form shifted in place.
Tarkos raised his arms. Another coughing fit started.
“Sedate him,” the woman said angrily.
His eyes fell heavily closed.
_____
Bria opened all tactical views, examining the simulation of the local system closely. The bombardment of Neelee-ornor had slowed, and the local communication AIs seemed to have recovered from the initial chaos. Messages began to flood Bria’s data stream. Red icons blinked urgently at the edge of her vision: thousands of pleas for help from the planet surface, transmitted to the cruiser now because the AIs recognized her as a Harmonizer, the warrior of choice for any desparate plea from an Alliance world. But she could do nothing: the cruiser would not survive a re-entry through atmosphere.
She magnified the ring. Only a quarter of it remained, and the wide beam of the weapon slowly ate away at that. Most of the planet’s communication and service satellites were within the orbit of the ring, but some were farther out and had been incinerated by the beam. The communications network shuddered and reorganized every few seconds, as satellites were lost.
“Briaathursiasalientiormethesess,” a voice called out. “Surrender ship.”
Bria growled. The Sussurat interrogator was insistent. A dogged predator. A typical Sussurat.
“When mission assured complete,” she said.
Ice Sky Storm Page 13
