James Wittenbach - Worlds Apart 01

by Meridian

  Meridian — The Arco-Tower

  Half a million kilometers below, Lear and Redfire picked their way through the dark upper floors of the arco-tower. “Redfire to Jordan,” Redfire said into his comlink.

  “Jordan, here.”

  “Ex-TC Lear and I have exited the science chamber and are proceeding upward. How long do we have?”

  “Seventeen minutes. Any longer, and we won’t be able to get Basil to minimum safe distance.”

  “Acknowledged, Redfire out.”

  Deep Space - Prudence

  Roebuck ticked off the range. “Closing to 10,000 kilometers… 8,000 … 4,000 …”

  “Holding at four thousand,” Driver read back. Of course, it was impossible to see the missiles from here, but he could not resist looking through the canopy. “I’m going to lock on with passive scanners. If the missiles detect an active lock, they’ll respond with evasive action.” Before Driver could finish the passive scan, the display showed the missiles splitting up, each moving beyond Prudence weapons range. “Mother of us all,” Driver cursed under his breath.

  “What?” Eddie asked.

  “They split up. I can’t take them both out,” Driver said.

  “Aw, slag, we should have taken two ships. Two missiles. Two ships. Why can’t we learn to fraggin’

  add!”

  “Two ships,” Driver said to himself. He thought of the two Accipiters on Prudence’s wing tips and calculated they would not be able to catch either missile. “Right, we’ll destroy one, and when the other one gets to Meridian, we’ll try to squeeze them between us and Desmond. ”

  “Which one do we pick?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Driver pushed Prudence to maximum thrust and bore down on the missile that had dodged to starboard.

  Meridian — The Arco-Tower

  “Are we lost?” Lear demanded.

  Redfire activated his Ambient Lamp. This area had sustained more damage, and they tripped themselves on small piles of rubble. Ahead, he saw a beam of light coming from a hole in the ceiling, the shaft he had come down before. “Neg,” he told her. “We’re almost through.” The tower shuddered and the floor lurched below them, and big pieces started to crack and fall into the level below.

  “Curse!” Lear cursed, as she lifted herself from the ground. Redfire gave her his hand and help her up.

  “Keeler will lose his command for this debacle.” Lear vowed.

  “You disgust me,” Redfire told her.

  “Your handling of the landing team will also fall under scrutiny,” Lear added.

  “I shudder. I am sure when the time comes, I can come up with a pretty good story about acting in the best interest of the mission. I think I’ll call it, the truth.” Lear snarled back. “I followed procedures. I made contact according to procedure and I comported myself according to procedure. I am shielded, Tyro Commander. Shielded!” Redfire said nothing, but focused on finding another shaft that led to the uppermost level.

  “You and Keeler might both be put into stasis for gross dereliction of duty. You might comfort yourself in that the anti-matter annihilation of an entire planet… an entire civilization…. must be the ultimate achievement in your field of art.”

  Redfire turned just long enough to glare at her. “You don’t understand art at all, do you?” Deep Space - Prudence

  Driver had shut down all of Prudence’s systems except for flight controls, navigation, and minimal life support. Holoflage shields dampened any residual energy signature. The cabin was chilled to the minimum functional level.

  Through a complex series of feints and parries, Driver had managed to pull within 12,000 meters of his target. Driver was determined to splash the missile before it reached the little green planet represented by a marble-sized dot in the corner of his display. With a delicate push of the thrusters he moved in still closer.

  “I am on you,” Driver repeated. “I am on you,” he whispered and whispered until it became a chant.

  “Can he see us?” Eddie Roebuck whispered. The enhanced perspective gave an impression that the huge missile was right on top of them, filling the view of space beyond the canopy. Driver had pressed his piloting skills beyond what he would have previously supposed to be their limits to get this close, to get his one chance at taking out this killer.

  The missile was flashing through space at the speed of a lightning strike. Driver and Prudence were faster still, and yet in the vastness of space, it seemed as though they were standing still. “I am on you,” Driver said one last time. “You are mine.” His free left hand, which had been hanging lightly in the air above the weapons panel, descended gingerly. A moment later, his right hand pulled back on the thruster bank.

  Prudence closed the distance in the time between seconds, giving the missile no time to evade. There were eight bright flashes from the forward dorsal weapons brace as Prudence let loose her fury, then flipped backwards and peeled away. Two bolts tore holes in the missile’s shielding, two more tore holes in its armor plating, the four remaining weapons buried themselves in its belly then detonated. The missile exploded amidships, and when the anti-matter cells ruptured, space was rendered with an explosion that tore molecules apart.

  “Crude!” Eddie Roebuck said. “Whoa!”

  “Target negated. Prudence to Desmond, one target negated.” It took several seconds for the message to cross space, and as many for the response to come back.

  “This is Desmond. Prudence, according to our calculations, you are not in an optimal position for intercept.

  We will intercept the remaining missile, then we proceed to landing zone and evacuate all personnel in event we cannot take it out of play. Desmond advises you to return to Pegasus. ” Driver favored the comlink with an irritated look. “Desmond, we have no bearing on Pegasus. ”

  “Prudence, scan along heading 182 by 020.”

  Driver oriented the sensors for those coordinates. Identity codes began flashing in the corner, and the image of Pegasus appeared.

  “There she is,” Roebuck said joyously.

  Driver frowned. “Acknowledged, Desmond.” He brought the ship sharply around. “I am sending a message to Pegasus, but we are going back to Meridian.”

  “Why?” Roebuck asked.

  “Because Desmond can’t intercept those warheads.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The other missile will spot Desmond, it will recognize a point defense and launch its warheads before making orbit.”

  “Whatever that means. What are you going to do about it?”

  “I’ll take Prudence into the atmosphere on the nightside, swing around, come out on the dayside and knock out as many of the warheads as I can when they enter the atmosphere.” He paused, as though having to admit something difficult. “I won’t be able to take out all of them, but we might be able to save at least one of the cities.”

  Roebuck nodded. “I think I know which city.”

  Prudence changed attitude, and bore down toward Meridian at maximum velocity.

  Meridian — Orbital Space

  The remaining missile approached Meridian. Its brother, in the last nanoseconds before it was destroyed, transmitted a report as to what had happened. This missile knew it must now finish its mission alone. Far ahead, it detected another ship of the kind that had destroyed its brother missile, lying in wait.

  The missile slowed to give itself additional time to calculate a strategy. It searched its memory banks and found a solution devised by a military tactician on Republic. The missile calculated the odds and was satisfied it would work.

  Three rows of hatches opened rapidly across the front and middle two-thirds of the craft. It released the warheads from their bays. Momentum kept them in place around the mothership, until a flottila of small, delta-shaped craft surrounded it. The missile plotted the locations of the surface targets they were supposed to destroy. There were ten cities on the planet. It could finish, with two warheads to spare. If it became unnecessary to us
e them, the Nemesis would recall the remaining two warheads and carry them back to Pegasus.

  The Aves was closing, still, but now the Big Damage Missile was an empty vessel. It activated its holoflage shields, broke away from its swarm, and turned to face the Aves.

  Orbital Space – Desmond

  “Target has gone dark,” reported, Specialist Rockatansky, the weapons officer on Desmond.

  Rockatansky was a heavy, cream-skinned woman from Republick, with big hands and dark curly hair.

  Eureka, whose ship had once been scorched by a careless technician named Roebuck, responded,

  “Calculate flight path.”

  “It could go anywhere. Switching to holoflage detection mode.” Eureka thought for a moment. “Hold position here. Set weapons to autonomous targeting mode,” he ordered his weapons officer.

  “Target re-acquired.”

  “Give me the coordinates.”

  The weapons officer shook her head. “You won’t believe this.” Eureka looked at the readings. The Big Damage was bearing down right on them. He instinctively began evasive maneuvers, when suddenly, the Big Dam dropped out of holoflage dead ahead of them and fired its pulse cannons across their wings.

  “Sh–-” Eureka began, as he took Desmond into a steep, evasive turn. The Nemesis dodged underneath him, then roared back into space, knocking Desmond to the side with a full burn of its thrusters.

  “Fire all weapons!” Eureka yelled.

  “It’s reversing course,” the weapons officer called.

  “Reversing course?” Eureka shook his head. He brought his ship around. “Engaging in pursuit.”

  “It’s running away from the planet,” the weapons officer repeated. “200,000 kilometers from surface…

  220,000….”

  “Disregard that,” Eureka ordered. “What is our range from the missile?”

  “40,000 kilometers.”

  That was when the ship’s sensors intercepted a command being sent from the missile to ten of the warheads it had left in space, just outside of the range of Desmond’s sensors. Now, the ten warheads, shielded behind their tiny holoflage cloaks, fired their thrusters to rain down on the unprotected planet.

  The weapons officer realized it first. “I’m reading ten warheads bearing down on the planet.” Eureka was stunned. “The missile lured us out of range. It had already launched the warheads and it used itself as a decoy.” He shook his head, his cheeks burned with rage and embarrassment. He put both hands on the controls. “We have to take them out.”

  “They’re dispersing.”

  Eureka watched the formation of warheads break and scatter, still high above the planet’s surface.

  Without another word, he pressed the thrusters forward and went after the nearest warhead.

  Meridian

  When the Regulators surveyed their world, they did not see green skies or tumbledown megalopoli, or the faces of the people whose lives they utterly controlled. To them, Meridian was a data set, to be manipulated in accordance with their instructions.

  The Regulators were not evil. They were hardly even sentient. They were tools, instruments, with an explicit set of instructions to follow. Their instructions involved shaping the world to fit a design. They did not see the design in social or political term; only a set of specifications to be met. And the Regulators were quite diligent in making sure the specifications were met, even if they neither knew, nor cared, why.

  Even without sentience, in their dark hearts, they knew how to recognize patterns. They recognized a pattern in the data set from the tower that indicated that well-armed persons from the outside were carrying out an assault. They had monitored the arrival of two more of the ships of the type that had come earlier, and had monitored that ship’s violent activities, which had resulted in a number of life form terminations and some minor damage to the structure.

  They had also monitored the approach of two more ships, whose trajectory was indicative of still more assaults to come.

  They had observed further, one of the ships nearing the surface and dispensing a detachment of what readings indicated to be very powerful warheads.

  Finally, at the periphery of its vision, it had detected the double-diamond shape of a huge spacecraft. It had thought to take control of this last craft through carefully directed pulsations in the magnetic field of their planet. This plan had evidently not been successful.

  There was evidence that this large spacecraft was the mothership for the smaller ships that were causing so much damage to the dataset.

  The memory center extracted from the brain of the dissected human specimen had told them that the large ship contained over 6,000 humans and possessed technological capabilities beyond their earlier estimations.

  When the capabilities of the approaching spacecraft were correlated against the probability of an armed response, the Regulators grew concerned. The possibility of prevailing against an armed assault was less than 1 per cent.

  This was a bothersome, potentially hazardous situation requiring defensive action.

  Some kind of memory was triggered, a battle-memory. It had been a very long time since the Regulators had needed to access this memory, but they always had been prepared for their own defense.

  It was determined to strike pre-emptively, and make preparations for emergency evacuation.

  The hundreds of hatches within the long struts that ran down the sides of the towers throughout the cities burst open, and out of them shot silver and black spheres, about six meters in diameter; vicious-looking things, with thick spiked bands along their equatorial lines. The air above the city filled with them, and the sun was blotted out as their small, powerful, intensely radioactive engines burned trails into the sky.

  The radiation would kill a lot of people outside the arco-tower, but this was no concern to the Regulators.

  chapter twenty-one

  Pegasus — Primary Command/Main Bridge

  “ETA to Meridian,” Keeler demanded.

  “Ship Time, twenty-seven minutes,” reported Specialist American. In the forepart of the outer bridge, a turning three-dimensional projection of Meridian appeared the image relayed from the Aves Yorick, pacing Pegasus 100,000 km in advance. Alkema tightened the view further to a close-up of one of the arcologies, from which a swarm of metallic objects was arising.

  “What is that?” Commander Keeler asked.

  Alkema answered him. “Probes detected a massive launch of them from every city just as the warheads from the Nemesis missile deployed. Probably some kind of planetary defense.”

  “They look … fast.”

  “Dilation effect,” Alkema explained. “Pegasus is moving close enough to the speed of light that our time is slowed, but the planet is in normal time. Everything that happens on it looks fast to us.”

  “I knew that,” Keeler muttered. Then he shouted orders. “Alert all stations. Go to Battle Situation Two, repeat, BS2.” He leaned over Alkema once again. “What’s the status of our defense systems.”

  “All defensive shields and pulse cannons are operational.”

  “Good.”

  “… but there’s no central BrainCore to link them. The pulse cannons can’t lock onto a target except the ones with their own sensors.”

  “How many of those do we have?”

  “Only about half. I think it should be enough.”

  Keeler turned. “Specialist American, order Flight Core to get as many Accipiters ready for launch as they can.”

  “Aye.”

  “Alkema, Dave, what’s the status on our communications net?”

  “Internal communications have been restored throughout the inhabited areas of the ship, but they’re at no where near full-capacity, not up to a major battle.”

  “And external?”

  Alkema shook his head. Keeler looked up at the swarms rising from the planet. He looked to Eliza Jane Change, making another plot of the ship’s course and knew there was no way to turn back Pegasus from the li
ne of battle.

  Meridian — The Arco-Tower

  Redfire and Lear were making their way up the shaft, climbing partly with the aid of the rappelling gear, and partly on the handholds the collapse of the structure had created. By the countdown on Redfire’s chronometer, they had eleven minutes to reach Basil and clear the zone. Every upward step was a battle against the swelling doubt that they would make it out in time.

  Redfire was attempting to haul his weight up on a seemingly solid length of pipe or structural frame, only to have it break free of its surrounding material and nearly send him tumbling back into the shaft.

  He caught himself by grabbing onto a broken beam of honeycombed metal. Suddenly, he felt a kind of vibration. He was shaking, and his trembling seemed to be spreading through the structure of the building. He soon realized that the shaking was not coming from him, but from some source outside the tower, which grew in a matter of seconds to a great, constant, thundering roar.

  Suddenly, there were no handholds. The uppermost levels had already been structurally damaged by the backflow of energy from the electrostatic dischargers. This new energy, feeling for all the world like an attack, was too much for the damaged structure.

  Redfire was holding fast to the rail when it gave way, and he and Lear fell to the level below, landing in a heap beneath a rain of crumbled supports and panels. Sure that something heavy was just about to land on top of them, Redfire pulled Lear away from the shaft.

  “Are you all right?” Redfire asked when the shaking stopped.

  “What was that?” Lear demanded, helping herself up.

  “Redfire to Jordan, come in.” He received only static in response. He tried again, and then examined his Spex.

  “What’s going on?” Lear demanded.

  “I can’t reach Jordan.” His Spex showed a massive EM field slowly beginning to dissipate. The intensity would have been enough to interrupt short-range communication. “I think we’ve been attacked.”

  “By whom?” Lear demanded, even louder.