Attacus blinked, returning his full attention to the viewscreens. He’d seen the slender white ship swell, open, surround the Fergunakil ship, then seal up and continue on her way, all in less than half a second. It had been like watching an amoeba surround a piece of food, but accelerated to blinding speed. The Fergunakil ship was gone, the Flesh Eater was not noticeably larger for absorbing her – and the rest of the Fergunakil ships seemed to decide, even in their confusion and rage, that it wasn’t worth going after her.
Attacus looked back down.
-–- M’stero Dash / Mayhem + arc direction towards 3 Fergunakil ships + IDs / prob. trajectory incoming–- -
-–- All ports + laterals 3 sec if copy–- -
“M’stero Dash…” he frowned.
“Captain?” Baadan asked.
The pulse came again, swifter, some of it a more complicated alphanumeric mode that the computer had to decipher. At least the signal was still simple enough to be translated without the need of a full computer-mind. The pulse concluded with a notation in the private shorthand Attacus and Sergio had arrived at over years of missions together.
-–- Goodbye–- -
Attacus straightened in his seat once more. “Midkins,” he said, “W’Fale, sweep for Fergunakil ships, three of them, they’re likely to be forming up and circling around into the vicinity of this heading,” he tapped the trajectory estimate across to the helm and comms. “Baadan, Tate, ramp up the relative toruses for a full field. Disengage the safeties.”
They knew better than to argue, or to point out that the relative drive was shot most likely beyond their ability to repair it unaided.
“Torus containment will last about three minutes,” Tate was nevertheless obligated to report for the log, “unless we direct the field energy overflow somewhere.”
“Bring the emitters up and prepare to route the overflow through the dorsal hull plate, and make sure the safety buffers are active up there,” Attacus said. “Then flick the docking ports and purge the lateral airlocks for three seconds.”
Again, the bridge crew were professional enough not to question this bizarre series of orders, although Attacus suspected their faith would extend only so far. They’d learned to trust the Captain and XO and their unique, unorthodox methods, but with the Captain gone and the XO now in command, the situation had changed. Unorthodoxy may have taken a back seat to random, grief-stricken flailing – Attacus had, after all, already tried to relative-ram the enemy ship once. Had it been luck, or tactics that had made that move a success?
The ports and airlocks were incidental, a movement Attacus was certain Malachi intended only as a signal permitting Attacus to show his understanding of the manoeuvre they were about to coordinate, since he was unable to send return pulse signals to whatever source Sergio was transmitting from. The very use of the pulse, in fact, combined with the abrupt way his last giela contact had been severed, suggested to Attacus that Malachi was no longer supposed to be in touch with them at all, and was using a quieter method to send messages. Even this seemed unlikely to pass unnoticed by the Flesh Eater, of course, but without context Attacus hoped the ancient weapon would be unable to figure out the meaning of the communications anyway.
Opening the docks and lateral airlocks would make it look as though they were preparing to disastrously test – and in doing so finish the job of destroying – their relative drive, the equivalent of battening down the hatches prior to a storm.
Always, Attacus thought with hopeless fondness, the old maritime approach.
The M’stero Dash was another matter entirely. It was at once illegal, against code, and dangerous – and not just because of the potential torus overload. What it meant, in simple terms, was that a ship with a damaged relative drive could release all her safety protocols and buffers, angle her field emitters and try to go to relative speed. She would, of course, fail, and the resultant field would have nowhere to go and would instead burn up the drive itself. The Dash, however, vented that energy. It was pointless, achieving nothing more than safely releasing energy that should never have been set to build up in the first place … unless another ship dived down the beam and activated her own relative drive.
This, in turn, would do nothing for a ship with an operational drive. But if her field generation sequences had been corrupted, a smaller ship could use the field energy from the larger torus to kick her relative drive into operation.
In theory.
It had been done, to Attacus’s knowledge, three times in the history of AstroCorps military engagements. Always with Fergunak at the helm, and always in situations of grave departure from the Six Species charter. It was illegal, not just for the danger posed by the vented field energy and the deactivation of safety measures, but for the fact that it really only benefited Fergunak who were about to be brought down for turning on their allies. There were really no other situations where it might work. Only Fergie ships could ride the beam. Only a damaged and desperate ship could vent the energy in the first place.
And Sergio’s reference to Mayhem could only mean …
Attacus knew that, during the disaster in the Mayhem system half a century before, Sergio’s uncle had perished in the Mercury Triumphant when opportunistic Fergunak turned on the ship. What was less widely-known was that towards the end of the attack some Fergunak in damaged gunships had attempted to use the M’stero Dash to ride the final dying breath of the Mercury’s relative torus to the comparative safety of the Mayhem Hades line. The edge of the system had been the best they could have hoped for, because the Mercury hadn’t been blasting out relative field energy in an optimal manner. Her crew hadn’t been trying to assist in the performance of the Dash. And in any case, it hadn’t worked. A desperate reactivation of the dorsal hull safety buffers had shifted the field to a lower register, rendering the energy overflow and the gunships’ field emitters incompatible.
The Draka’s relative drive was totalled in one way. The Fergunakil clippers’ drives were totalled in another. In theory, both kinds of damage were in keeping with the principles of the M’stero Dash. The Draka could give three Fergie clippers a boost into soft-space. And the Mayhem variation could change the nature of that boost, dramatically.
Attacus just had to trust that Sergio knew what he was doing, and that the brilliant, erratic man was really telling Attacus to do what Attacus thought he was telling him to do.
“The Po Chane are crash-docking with the civilian ships,” Baadan reported. “The Flesh Eater is approaching the great grey. Captain, we’re in position and ready to vent our field overflow through the dorsal hull, but if we don’t move on one of our targets soon, the game is going to change under us.”
“Vent on my mark, Baadan,” Attacus said.
There were flinches, and more than a few superstitious and fearful exclamations, as the Flesh Eater arrived at the great grey leviathan again, and returned to her original fully-extended configuration as quickly as she had abandoned it previously. Now, unlike the last time, the Draka’s crew were in a position to witness the shift even though it once again happened too quickly for the unaided eye to follow. Suddenly, shouldering aside the great crags and chunks of ice and debris, the nine-mile monstrosity returned to the combat volume, ballooning out of the darkness at a sharp angle across the bridge viewscreens and temporarily blocking the Linda Gazmouth and the Rotten Ivan from view. Before anyone could speak, she’d begun to pull slowly away from them.
“She’ll be at safe distance before we can unload our torus overflow at her, Captain,” Tate said, “if that was the plan.”
“Hold steady,” Attacus said, watching the great pallid object sweep away into the upper left quadrant of the viewscreen, departing the sweep of their lights like some impossible giant squid of the deeps. “Hold.”
“Something just fired from the Flesh Eater,” W’Fale said sharply. “Three objects – too small to be Fergunakil vessels, though. Are they–?”
“Don’t worry about them,” Attacus
said. Sergio, don’t be wrong about this.
“Two of them appear to be heading for the civilian ships,” W’Fale said, despite Attacus’s admittedly substandard reassurance. “The third is heading right for us. I’m not getting any sort of readings.”
“Sensors are detecting similar compositional accents to the ones initially taken from the Flesh Eater,” Head of Science Alani Ka said. “If the ship has atomic-level fabrication capacity, they might be … seedlings, new copies of the Flesh Eater built from the materials she’s been–”
“There she goes,” Baadan said. Already practically invisible in the darkness, picked out only by the viewscreen enhancements, the Flesh Eater engaged the great grey leviathan’s relative drive and plunged away into soft-space. She’d still been close enough, Attacus noted, to draw a couple more warning lights from their own engine sections … but evidently not close enough to damage herself. Her mass, he reminded himself, would have been little more than the great grey’s at this point. “The Flesh Eater is gone, Captain.”
“Malachi–” Tate murmured.
“Captain,” W’Fale interrupted, a fact for which Attacus was profoundly grateful, “Fergunakil clippers. Three of them. On an intercept course with the three unidentified objects.”
“Ready to vent as soon as the clippers have entered beam range,” Attacus said.
“Copy that, Captain,” Tate said tensely.
They watched, on the magnified and enhanced displays, as the three clippers moved with uncharacteristic focus. These, Attacus was quite sure, were some of their Fergunak. Each one collided smoothly with one of the objects spat out by the Flesh Eater, snapping them out of the vacuum using the quick-and-dirty grabber-locks Fergies built into their ships to perform the duties of mouths. Without faltering, they swept on into the path of the Draka’s torus overflow.
Just before they vented the full force of the warship’s relative drive onto the clippers, Attacus thought he saw each one beginning to falter, lose control, the minimal external lights and features going dead as if the ships were being destroyed from within. The grabber-lock of one of them, he was almost certain, began to buckle and sag as though being hammered from the inside …
There was a flash. When they all opened their eyes again and squinted at the viewscreen, the clippers were gone. But not, Attacus thought, into soft-space. Not for long, anyway, and not whole.
“All three clippers suffered critical field failure and interface-decompression,” Baadan confirmed bleakly. “Relative speed for a femtosecond, then total particle dispersion along whatever their flight path would have been. The hull buffers shifted the field profile, making it incompatible with their drives.”
“I’m picking up trace elements of relative-charged debris,” Alani Ka confirmed, “along with traces of the same unidentified compounds – probably whatever the Flesh Eater dropped, and the three clippers picked up before attempting to jump.”
“They weren’t attempting to jump,” Attacus said. “They were taking out the three Po Chane clan leaders the Flesh Eater left here to finish us off. In the only way they could.”
Baadan whistled through her fangs. “If that’s true,” she said, “we should enter their idents into the log for official commendation.”
“We’re not likely to ever know if it’s true,” Attacus said, “but I concur,” he made a note on his console. “Start bringing us in towards the civilian – the Po Chane ships,” he went on, “and prepare to initiate controlled intercept. We’ve got some negotiation to do … but only if our Fergies keep the Children of the Bluothesh under control. Keep weapons locked and live. And let’s start working on getting Charlie back online.”
“The Captain – Malachi’s body was still inside that thing,” Tate returned stubbornly to what he’d been saying before the clippers had sacrificed themselves. “Assuming Drakamod was telling the truth–”
“She was,” Attacus replied, “and we will be entering his name on the logs as well. Captain Sergio Malachi is dead.”
XXIV
Sergio didn’t feel it when they entered soft-space. He would have been surprised if he had, since the majority of his body and nervous system was gone. He still knew, however, in a combination of possibly-psychosomatic sensation and the signal-sense he was picking up from the Fergunakil machinery they’d picked up.
“We’re underway,” the Flesh Eater said unnecessarily. “I appreciate your insights into the Fergunakil cybernetic system. I hope it wasn’t too uncomfortable for you.”
“Oh, no more so than getting too deep inside a Fergunakil’s head is at the best of times,” Sergio quipped. He’d spent the time leading up to their departure sliding back and forth between organic and machine processing speeds, the main result being that he wasn’t certain how many minutes had elapsed. He’d also been focussed quite intently on establishing connections with the gridnet – not only to enable the Flesh Eater to use the great grey leviathan, but to enable his own fleeting, hopefully-fruitful communication with Alpha Drakamod. This was the reason she’d swallowed the first gunship for him.
It had been quite literally alien and deeply unpleasant, but they didn’t let you wear the Captain’s uniform for nothing.
The concentration required, as well as the processing speeds, had naturally sapped his peripheral awareness and sense of time. Now, however, he let himself drag back into the organic register with a sense of conclusiveness. At least for the time being they would be at relative speed, plunging through the grey for who knew how many weeks or months. He didn’t relish experiencing that at accelerated consciousness.
The looming shape of Bluothesh Po Chane slurred back into motion on the other side of the bubble that seemed to house the majority of Sergio’s awareness. “…aaaaaaaaave gone to relative speed,” he accelerated, “although our precise heading…”
“We are heading back to the bonefields,” the Flesh Eater declared. “I have reached an agreement with Captain Malachi, and he has helped me repurpose the Fergunak technology to facilitate.”
Bluothesh took this well. “I assume,” he said, “the expulsion of three of my people was an additional insurance measure?”
“Yes,” the Flesh Eater replied. “I have instructed them to make certain that the crews of the Draka, the Linda Gazmouth and the Rotten Ivan do not repair their drives and sneak away while we are conducting the next vital round of negotiations. We may be absent for some time, and I would much prefer not to have to go hunting for the involved parties on our return. We have, so far, managed to avoid full-scale incursion into an interstellar union that has proved unprepared for us,” she paused, then went on in a peevish voice. “Actually, according to the calculations I’m getting from the Fergunak, the trip back will take considerably longer than the trip out. Why is that?”
“Beats me,” Sergio said calmly. “If I had to guess, I’d say that tweaking the navigation parameters to minimal hard-space distance efficiency was their last chance to mess with you, so they took it.”
Bluothesh gave a hollow laugh. “That certainly sounds like Fergunak.”
“Even so,” the Flesh Eater complained, “the wasted time…”
“We could probably pull us back into normal space and try to get them to recalculate the flight path,” Sergio offered, “but I can’t guarantee they haven’t got any other surprises ready for us. At the moment, we can keep the surviving Fergies locked out of their ship’s systems, so they can’t interfere anymore. Stop, though, and try to tweak the navigation systems, and we risk letting them back in to cause mischief. And that’s before we even consider the possibility that the great grey’s relative drive is just about burned out. The damage from the fight, and the code-violating jumps–”
“It’s fine,” the Flesh Eater grumped. “There is no great rush. My secondary weapons will keep your people in one place for as long as we need. I can’t promise that, as time goes by, they won’t respond to escape or repair attempts with … unforeseeable prejudice, but as long as your crew
follows your order to sit tight–”
“They’ll do as they’re told,” Sergio confirmed. “They’re well trained, and they trust my orders. Just remember, I’m accompanying you now to evaluate whether the Destarion is stable and safe enough for recommissioning–”
“Yes yes,” the Flesh Eater interrupted airily. “Your concerns are baseless. You’ll see. You’ll beg her to take your Elevator Person friend as her new Captain. In the end.”
“I’m curious,” Bluothesh said, “will Captain Malachi succumb to the same defensive measures we did when we first attempted to enter the bonefields? I believe that, technically, it ought to already have occurred, since it most likely kicks in when the would-be intruder crosses some sort of no-return threshold in the process of violating the bonefields’ borders.”
“No traumatic memories of floating bones yet,” Sergio said, and was unable to resist adding, “unless you count whatever must have happened to my skeleton, when you guys turned me into a protein shake.”
“You really shouldn’t joke about it,” the Flesh Eater, Sergio was coming to realise, genuinely seemed upset by reminders of what had been done to him – although he strongly suspected it was less to do with remorse or regret, than it was embarrassment at the degree to which he had accidentally been integrated into her systems. He wasn’t an Elevator Person, so he supposed their merging might be the sentient-weapon-ship equivalent of marrying beneath herself. Or worse – some kind of bestiality. That her own flaws and the unexpected independence and interference of her Blaran-based secondary weapons had led to this state of affairs was evidently something she felt quite keenly.
“Sorry,” he said. “Seriously though, I wouldn’t be surprised if my integration has changed me at least partially into a ship component. The defences around the Destarion probably wouldn’t work to keep her own small arms from returning with useful information, would they?”
“Who knows?” the Flesh Eater replied, still sounding hurt. “What happened with you was really unprecedented.”
Deadshepherd (Tales of the Final Fall of Man Anthology Book 1) Page 32
