Defiance: (The Spiral Wars Book 4)

by Joel Shepherd

  Graf nearly laughed. “Doesn’t need a battery, gotcha.”

  “You mean it’s a five thousand degree computer?” Sergeant Kono said in disbelief. “Made of molten metal alloy?”

  “Molecularly-engineered molten metal alloy,” Styx corrected. “I’m afraid that explaining it to you would be like you explaining to one of your primitive Earth ancestors how this ship works. We do not have the time, and even if described, your entire civilisation is not equipped to manufacture one, anymore than ancient Egypt could have made the Phoenix.”

  “Charming,” said Kono. “No wonder Stan likes her.”

  Romki laid a palm on the sphere’s surface. “It’s cool,” he marvelled. “Amazing.”

  “What’s in it?” Trace asked bluntly.

  “The entry access encryption is delicate,” said Styx. “The signal is too weak on these sensors to attempt it. But it appears intact.”

  “So you can’t read what’s in it?”

  “Not yet.”

  “When?”

  “I doubt we could even fabricate the technology required. But there is a place nearby that could hold what I need to open the data-core. I believe it may suit us in more ways than one.”

  15

  “The place is not far from here, relatively speaking,” Styx said on the briefing room’s speakers, as Erik, Suli, Kaspowitz, Romki and Trace all sat about the circle of chairs, and stared at the holographic projection of their stellar neighbourhood. “It was a place known only to drysines, in my time. Whether it is still undiscovered is another question. Given the comprehensive nature of the drysine defeat, I doubt that it remained completely undiscovered. But there remains the possibility that even if found, it may not have been destroyed.”

  Erik sat on the edge of his chair, straight backed to avoid slumping with exhaustion. He’d never been more reluctant to give up the captain’s chair to Draper than now, however tired. Every few minutes Phoenix’s thrusters would kick them at low-G, to dodge some upcoming rock the sensors hadn’t seen until the last moment due to a combination of its small size, low luminescence, high velocity, and it getting lost in the crowd of so many others. Dust particles were giving the forward shield a good hammering, currently ten-per-minute and growing steadily, some of them loud enough to be heard by regular crew. Handing over control here felt like a racecar changing drivers in mid-course without slowing down. Plus, with the changing of command, there came the prospect of having to think about other, horrifying possibilities.

  “Show us,” said Erik.

  A planet appeared on the central holographics… or not a planet, Erik thought as he saw the scale marker alongside. More like a moon, a little more than three thousand kilometres in diameter. Like most moons that size it had no atmosphere, and was pockmarked with craters. Unlike most moons, this one was missing an enormous chunk from its northern hemisphere, as though a giant spoon had come along and gouged it out. More strikingly still, that colossal hole, nearly five hundred kilometres wide, had been filled in with what looked like a rough, steel sandpaper, mimicking the curve where the outer surface should have been. At closer inspection, the sandpaper revealed itself to hold the intricate detail of a city. Low gravity, and exposed to vacuum… but a city all the same.

  This time there were no whistles or exclamations of amazement from the humans. They’d seen a lot of this sort of thing in the past few months, and while suitably amazed, they were most truly interested in finding something that could save all of their necks.

  “We had a name for it,” said Styx. “But the name is numerical code, and does not translate to human tongues.”

  “A drysine base?” Romki asked, predictably the most fascinated of them all. “What is its system?”

  “Yes, Professor. It ended its life as drysine. It began its life forty three thousand human years ago, as a place of science for a much earlier incarnation of the AI race. This branch of AIs were conducting some very large scientific experiments. Suffice to say, something went wrong. The result is the very large crater that you see. And the fact that this is now a moon without a star system, having been thrown well clear of its parent system in the same event.”

  “Whoa.” This time it was Kaspowitz’s turn to express astonishment… and much unlike him, to say anything that might encourage their drysine guest. “That’s insane.” Erik could see him calculating the forces in his head. “It… that can’t be a simple impact, you can’t just eject a moon from a star system with blunt force trauma, you’d tear it apart.”

  “A science experiment, as I said, Lieutenant. For about twenty thousand years, it drifted in deep space. Then another AI faction colonised it, finding its location suitable, and built this base. Various factions occupied it over the years, and its final occupation was drysine.”

  “Suitable for what?” Suli asked.

  “The moon is difficult to reach.” The holographic starmap zoomed out, to display the neighbouring systems and features. Erik did not need to be a navigation officer to spot the difficulty — there were a number of dark-mass points, too small to act as jump points themselves, but large enough to make a royal mess of anyone trying to hyperspace through them. On the other side, several large, spidery nebula, casting a wide net of dust and debris across an enormous reach of space. Hyperspace through there would be even worse, as any mass concentration could pull a ship out of jump, sometimes catastrophically. Just as bad, with mass came gravity, and gravity bent both realspace and hyperspace in equal proportion. Going through it caused deviations in trajectory, and across interstellar jump distances, even the tiniest fraction of a degree could cause a ship to miss its target completely.

  “There,” said Kaspowitz, pointing to a single system in a lower grid-reference. “That one… Lusakia, is it? That looks safest. The other approaches are all nasty.”

  “Lusakia was becoming the only suitable approach point in my time,” Styx agreed. “Kimonti was used for the first ten thousand years of settlement, but the moon’s drift in the millennia since made that approach unsuitable also.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Kaspowitz, arms folded and frowning at the display. “It’s a dead end. One way in or out, a deathtrap. Why would anyone running from a superior enemy want to go there?”

  The holographic display zoomed once more, to display the moon, and its crater-city. Then pulled back enough to show a new dot, barely a speck beside the moon. New lines appeared, navigational lines, marked to indicate distances, and wide arcs of orbital trajectories.

  Kaspowitz’s frown deepened. Then his eyes widened. “No way. That’s not real.”

  “I can assure you, it’s very real,” said Styx. “I’ve been there once. Twenty five thousand of your years ago.”

  Though not as astute a navigator as Kaspowitz, Erik knew enough to see what bothered his Nav Officer, though it took him a few seconds longer to figure it out. The tiny dot of mass in proximity to the moon was only a few hundred metres wide, according to the map. And yet the three-and-a-half thousand kilometre diameter moon was orbiting it, and not the other way around.

  “It’s… a neutron star?” Erik wondered. The mass of that tiny object would have to be large, to produce the effect the orbital lines described. “Only it’s nowhere near big or dense enough for that, but what…?”

  “Neutron stars have 200 billion Gs on the surface,” Kaspowitz told the younger man, somewhat patronisingly. “Would tear this moon to shreds in an instant. This thing looks like it’s generating about…” he did some fast sums in his head, looking at the orbital path, speed and guessing at the moon’s mass. “…nine-and-a-half Gs on the surface.”

  “Impressive, Lieutenant Kaspowitz.” And Erik saw Trace nearly smile, to see her old friend look pleased despite himself at that praise. “We don’t know what it is, or what it was. Recall, the AI faction that performed this faulty if intriguing science experiment was well before the time of the drysines.”

  “Wait,” said Romki, with mounting excitement. “You’re saying
that small object is the result of the science experiment?”

  “Yes,” said Styx. “But we have not been able to analyse materials from the surface to find out for certain.”

  “You couldn’t get down there to study?” Trace wondered. “It’s only ten-Gs, hacksaw drones can take far more than that.” She’d seen that recently from experience. “And a small, purpose-built lander could handle ten, surely?”

  “Yes,” said Styx. “The problem, Major, is that while Lieutenant Kaspowitz’s calculations are correct at the present distance of the moon from its gravitational companion, that companion’s surface gravity is not nine-point-five gravities. Calculations are difficult, but the most reliable numbers suggest somewhere between two and five hundred Earth gravities.”

  Kaspowitz opened his mouth to protest the obvious mistake, then smiled with exasperation when he realised where this was going. The smile quickly turned to a scowl, as he recalled how little he’d enjoyed this argument the last time. “Oh no, wait. We’re going back there again, are we? Short-range gravitons?”

  The graviton capacitors that protected the Kantovan Vault had used something similar, Styx said. How exactly they worked, she’d not volunteered, and it hadn’t been relevant to the mission to find out. “Various AI races developed a vastly more sophisticated understanding of gravity than that possessed by any organic race. With quantum manipulations, it is possible to adjust the very nature and function of gravity itself, as Major Thakur has observed first hand. There are of course side-effects, as gravity interlocks with all of space-time’s other manifestations, like time itself.”

  “Styx?” said Romki, almost warningly. “Were these ancestors of yours by any chance trying to create a wormhole?”

  “It is possible. But my information is incomplete, and it is of limited relevance to our current situation.”

  “So these early hacksaws did a science experiment,” Suli said slowly, “that tore a hole in this moon and sent it spinning into deep space, and produced a second nearby object, of a much smaller size but much larger mass, that now dominates this moon’s orbital trajectory?”

  “Yes,” said Styx.

  “Well,” said Romki, staring owl-eyed behind his glasses, “I’d have thought the logical supposition is that those early hacksaws were experimenting with gravitational technology, obviously… and that this small object is this moon’s original parent planet, undergone gravitational collapse.” They blinked at him. “Lieutenant Kaspowitz, didn’t you protest that the graviton capacitors in the vault should lead to the gravitational collapse of Kamala? Perhaps here they did, only with a much larger world.”

  “Nice theory,” said Kaspowitz. “Problem is, you’d have to put graviton capacitors, or whatever they call them, on a solid planet, right? Know any solid planets with the mass to generate two hundred plus Gs? The biggest rock planet in the Spiral, that I know of anyway, is only three-point-two-G. Rock planets just don’t get bigger — larger than that, they’re all gas. Even the biggest gas giants don’t get anywhere near one hundred Gs — they’re gas, big size but no mass, right? Only the biggest stars have that kind of mass, and as our esteemed Captain says, how the hell does a moon get this close to the remains of a star?” He pointed at the hologram. “That’s not a decaying orbit. It’s regular, and regular orbits of planets or moons around suns means millions of kilometres distance, not thousands like this.”

  “I feel this discussion could become distracting from our primary objective,” said Styx, with the air of a teacher attempting to keep wayward school children’s minds on the assignment question, and not the entertaining anecdotes that came with it. “I will simply say that many thousands of years of various AI factions’ enquiries have not adequately settled the issue. We only know that whatever our ancestors attempted, it created this anomaly. Captain Debogande, I’m sure that you can see the defensive possibilities that this creates, for anyone occupying the moon, and establishing a defensive perimeter?”

  Erik nodded slowly, his head just as full of lines and numbers as Kaspowitz’s, but calculating toward a different end. “The armscomp calculations there will be a nightmare for newly arriving ships. That large a gravitational anomaly, so close to the moon, will bend all fire toward it. It’ll also make a total mess of their approach manoeuvres out of jump… and look, it’ll make jump arrivals relatively predictable, because the gravity slope is so steep and the footprint is just tiny, the slope of the gravity-well is curved. Arrival outcomes should be plotable…”

  “Oh wow,” said Suli, not meaning to interrupt but unable to help herself. “They’ll be coming out of hyperspace in a predictable zone. No more than a thousand kilometres diameter. That’s like…”

  “Like forcing your enemies to all enter though the same narrow doorway,” Trace finished for her, as even she saw it. “And picking them off one at a time.”

  “I’m pretty sure those deepynine jump engines could stretch that doorway a lot,” Kaspowitz said. “But against the physics of that gravity slope, there’s only so much they can do. Styx, this was a defensible point, yes? A fallback position?”

  “Yes,” said Styx. “The last I heard of it, in the final days of the collapsing empire, it was about to be used as such, one last time.”

  A silence, as they considered that. Another gravitational shove, as Phoenix dodged a rock. Even Romki barely flinched.

  “Styx,” said Erik. “I think it’s time you told us what you were in the empire, and what you did, in greater detail. I’m not aware that you have, yet.” He glanced at Romki. “Not even to Stan.” Romki’s return look was warning, as though he didn’t think this was the safest idea.

  “I was a command unit commissioned in the immediate aftermath of the organic allies’ great betrayal.” Styx reply held no hesitation, nor appreciably greater gravity, than were she discussing simple technical matters. Erik wondered if this nonchalance wasn’t just a little too nonchalant. She did choose to inject inflection, suggestive of some emotional substance, into some points of her speech. Now, where emotion would seem most fitting, she not only refrained, but refrained utterly. “When the tavalai, chah’nas and dissenting parren turned on us, it was decided a new generation of command intelligence would be required. I was one of these.”

  “One of how many?” Trace asked.

  “One hundred and ninety one, initially. Subsequently, as our circumstance deteriorated, another three hundred and fourteen were commissioned, for a total of four hundred and five. I am personally aware of the deaths of three hundred and twelve of these individuals. Of the remainder, I can only assume the vast majority were also lost. The organics were determined to eradicate us all.

  “I last came to this moon when preparations for a final defence were being made. Our circumstance was catastrophic. Drakhil was there, and senior commanders from organic allies. Many drysine vessels were preparing for final strikes, to delay the inevitable, while some others advocated a dispersal, so that some of us might survive in the dark, to one day begin again. It was this plan that led to my own survival.”

  The humans exchanged glances. “And the name of Halgolam?” Romki asked hopefully. “You said that parren once referred to you as that?”

  “I led some successful actions. The Tahrae were impressed, and granted me this name. There is nothing more to tell than that.” Romki, Erik saw, did not look convinced. Styx could give very long and detailed replies when she chose. Short replies were not in her meticulous nature.

  “The deepynines will be covering the approaches to tavalai space,” said Suli. “The only real option from here is Nelda System toward Cherichal… and they’ll be sitting on it. We go that way, we’re finished. This way?” She indicated the holographic nav chart, and shrugged. Tucked a curled, dark strand of hair behind her ear. “I don’t know. Styx, do you think these deepynines would know of this moon?”

  “Unlikely. It was only discovered by organic traitors well after the deepynine/drysine war. The deepynines were defeated without
it ever being revealed. It does not seem likely that they will be covering that escape route. They will certainly pursue, however.”

  “In which case we’ll have a reasonable place to defend from,” Kaspowitz concluded. He gave Erik an unenthusiastic glance. ‘Better than nothing’, that look said. It also said, ‘How the hell do we keep finding ourselves in these situations?’ Erik thought the better question was how they’d managed to survive them all so far… and when a reasonable analysis of statistical probability might expect that luck to run out. If Styx knew the answer to that as well, she wasn’t telling.

  “We’ll still need a major distraction to get us out that way,” Erik told them. “Otherwise they’ll just run us down, before or after jump, just as before. And Styx, I’ll need some kind of guarantee the moon hasn’t been discovered and occupied since. Presumably it was finally assaulted when the empire fell?”

  “I presume so. I was out of contact with the war by then, and did not hear the final news.”

  “But you said you felt it may have survived destruction. Most of the big hacksaw bases were destroyed, either in the deepynine war or the fall of the empire. Hacksaw technology was declared illegal, they didn’t want to risk artificial intelligence coming back in any form. That’s why the Dobruta exist.”

  “Our primary parren pursuer,” said Styx, this time with a definite edge of cold irony to her tone, “was a man named Jin Danah. He was known to covet drysine technology. The fallback moon is a long way from primary star systems, hard to reach, and unknown to most. Already we had evidence of him attempting to hide and mothball some captured facilities, for later exploitation, in spite of the rules against it. If any base was liable to be treated as such, the fallback moon is it.”

  “Well I’d like to know for sure,” Erik insisted. “I’m not going to make some big, dangerous move that way unless I know who’s currently there, if anyone. The distance isn’t far — if it has been preserved, it will be within parren House Harmony space by now. Likely it can’t be seen, it’s too small and dark in deep space, so if they didn’t know already, they wouldn’t have found it since with even the best telescopes. But if they do know it’s there, they’ll have military ships visiting it frequently, and Brehn will be a waypoint for them.”