by Rick Partlow
"Tipping point," Kara supplied, her face paling slightly. "The phrase you're looking for is 'the tipping point,' I think."
"Yes," Tyya acknowledged. "This may be at a tipping point where it doesn't need a leader anymore, it's just feeding off of itself. I knew this would happen, sooner or later. It's why I agreed to be their leader, so that I might have a hand in which way things would go instead of just being carried along with the rest of the masses."
"Yeah," Deke muttered sourly. "And how's that working out for you?"
"What would you have done, soldier?" Tyya asked, and Cal thought he saw a flash of anger behind the words. "What would you have done when your world belonged to another race, when their troops patrol your streets and their laws control your courts? What would you do when you continue to pay the price for a war your fathers and grandfathers started?"
"Your fathers and grandfathers," Cal said quietly and somberly, feeling a chilling remnant of a hatred he'd nearly forgotten he ever possessed running through him, "killed my parents, my sisters, my brother, my friends..." His voice rose in volume and in pitch without him intending either. "They killed a third of the population of my fucking planet. Pardon the hell out of me if I don't have sympathy for you having to put up with an occupation after that." He snorted. "Believe me, our occupation of your world has been a hell of a lot more gentle than yours was of mine."
"Cal," Rachel said from behind him. He let his eyes slip off Tyya-Khin and find his wife. Her eyes were slightly downcast, as if they were seeing something else, from another time. He thought of everything she had lost personally to the Tahni invasion, of her young child dead in the initial attack, and he felt the air go out of him. This wasn't just about him.
"Sorry, honey," he said softly, facing forward again, his cheeks warm.
"I know you hold this against us," Tyya admitted. "But our ways are different, and our people don't understand. I still do not fully understand, though I hear your words and speak your language. Kah-Rint understood though, from his time among you. He understood the hatred you have for us still, and how he might use it."
"And he could still win," Kara pointed out, to her own people as much as to him. "Captain Einarsson is the ranking officer insystem, and the last thing he heard was his ship being stolen by insurgents. When the warships arrive, he'll convince them to open fire from orbit to prevent the base from being overrun. We have to get there before they do."
"Right," Cal said, his voice louder than he intended in the enclosed cockpit as he tried to bluster past his previous outburst. He linked with the ship's computer and called up the course he'd laid in earlier for Tahn-Skyyiah. "Everyone get ready for Transition, then."
He caught Kara's eye and shook his head doubtfully. "Do you really think we can stop it, even if we get there in time?"
"Honestly?" she answered, grabbing Deke's hand and squeezing it, as if she was seeking comfort from the touch. "I'm just hoping General Murdock knows what to do."
"Great," he muttered. "And on that note," he said, passing a hand over a control, "we're out of here."
Their drive ripped a hole in the universe and they slipped through into the unknowable.
Chapter Twenty-Six
"Negative, Aurora," the disembodied voice from the Fleet traffic control center said emphatically. "We are not allowing any unauthorized landings near populated areas. There's no orbital support, no air cover and we know the Tahni have some cobbled-together assault aircraft. You'll have to touch down near the ecological research base at Rhabana Point and wait till the cruisers arrive tomorrow..."
Cal looked as if he was about to argue with the harried-sounding young officer when Kara broke in. "Fleet traffic, this is Major Kara McIntire, DSI. I'm carrying authorization from General Murdock to land pretty much anywhere I damn well please. Just give us some ground cover and shut up."
She cut the transmission before the man could reply, then nodded to Cal. "Take us down."
Cal was in the pilot's position rather than Deke; they tended to switch out the role, as if on some agreed-upon schedule, though she'd never heard them discuss it. From what she'd seen, they were both excellent pilots, though perhaps Deke was a bit more instinctive. Or maybe she was playing favorites.
Cal guided the cutter expertly down into Tahn-Skyyiah's densely clouded atmosphere over the equator, and she could see the string of large islands there where one of the Ecological Research facilities had been constructed a few years after the war. They had been built by the Commonwealth, of course: the Tahni weren't much into conservation and had hunted or driven many of their larger animal species into extinction as they built their technological civilization. Trying to convince them of the wisdom of preserving their ecology had been just as frustrating as trying to convince them there was no shame in disbanding their military.
Heading northward, Cal fed power to the atmospheric jets, the turbines in the delta wings sucking in air and using the heat from the ship's reactor to expel it at hypersonic speeds. Blue-green ocean passed thousands of meters below them, interrupted only by the occasional mining platform, until the blue-green abruptly ended in the green and yellow and brown of the planet's northernmost continent, what the Tahni called Jhan-da-brint. Rhabana Point, the Eco Lab to which the Fleet traffic control had tried to send them, was at the far northeastern edge of that continent, on a peninsula that extended a hundred kilometers out from the main land mass.
Mountains rose beyond that peninsula, jagged things stretching over six kilometers high in places and capped with snow, finally softening into rolling hills until they reached a broad inland sea. Tahn-Khandranda was only one of the cities on the shores of the sea, but it was by far the largest, visible even from their altitude as sunrise glinted off of its buildings. Also visible were the smoke trails as a flight of missiles launched from somewhere deep inside the city, heading their way.
"Oh shit," Deke murmured under the instantaneous eruption of alarms echoing through the cockpit.
"Hold on to your lunch," Cal said with a grim smile. Kara tightened her stomach muscles, knowing what was coming.
Cal took the ship off of computer guidance and grabbed the physical controls, then threw the Aurora into a steep downward spiral. Kara grinned slightly to herself when she heard Rachel's muffled screech behind her.
"Don't throw up on my ship," Kara said flatly, as if the gut-wrenching multi-g maneuver wasn't making her nauseous as well.
"What about the shields?" Pete Mitchell asked, his voice a groan sounding as if it was coming from between clenched teeth.
"No good in atmosphere," Kara told him.
"Just be glad they don't have Gauss cannons," Deke said, sounding even less affected by the evasive maneuvers than Kara. And he probably was, she reflected. He had some serious augmentation that included inner-ear implants to keep him from getting vertigo or nausea.
She tied her neurolink into the ship's computer and used the connection to withdraw from the stomach-twisting ride.
You haven't launched thermal decoys? she asked Cal over her neurolink.
The missiles are laser-guided, he told her. Someone down there's spotting for them with a laser designator.
They're accelerating faster than we can, she pointed out. I doubt you can outmaneuver them. So what's your plan?
I'm taking us the one place I know they have anti-missile systems, he said, and she could almost "hear" his grin. As fast as possible.
Before the words had echoed in her head, Cal had pushed the Aurora into a ninety-degree dive, the ship's nose pointed directly at the ground, drives flaring behind them and pushing her into her seat with probably six g's of acceleration. The abrupt maneuver was enough to jar Kara's concentration away from her link to the ship and she found herself staring at the viewscreen with very wide physical eyes as the city below them grew with truly frightening speed.
There was no way in hell they could pull out of a dive like that in time, she was sure of it. If he tried, the wings would rip right off
the structure of the ship. Except, as it turned out, he didn't use the wings, or the atmospheric control surfaces of the ship at all. Only two hundred meters from impact, according to the altimeter, he throttled back the main engines and fired a long burst from the maneuvering thrusters in the nose of the ship, spinning her around ninety degrees on her axis, sideways so he wasn't exposing the entire wing surface to the atmospheric drag...and then he fed every erg of power the reactor had to the atmospheric drives.
Kara felt like God was sticking his foot up her ass and she knew that Rachel, Pete and Tyya-Khin had to be unconscious from the g-force of the burn. She gritted her teeth and tied into the feed from the base's exterior cameras, so she could see the Aurora coming straight down over the spaceport's mostly-empty landing field, her atmospheric drives flaring like a miniature star. Dust and smoke wafted off of the field in dark billows that climbed hundreds of meters into the air, distorting the image of the ship as her fall slowed to nearly a hover. Suddenly the force crushing her against her seat lifted and the ship's nose dipped down just far enough for Cal to activate the landing jets.
The cutter's landing gear were still swinging down when she saw the incoming anti-aircraft missiles explode one by one only a hundred meters or so out from the base as the defense lasers touched each of them for a split-second. Then they touched down with a jolt that ran through her hard enough to make her teeth click together and she could hear the dying whine of the turbines as Cal cut power to them.
There was an exhalation that was too loud to just be her own, and she realized that she, Deke and Cal had all let out a held breath at the same time. She heard groans behind her as she unstrapped from her seat and turned to see Rachel, Pete and Tyya-Khin returning to consciousness; she wrinkled her nose as she saw a wet stain going down the front of Pete Mitchell's jacket.
"I said no throwing up in my cockpit," she chided, releasing the locks on her acceleration couch and turning it far enough to stand up and stride past them.
Cal paused to check on his family and Deke took charge of Tyya, but Kara went straight back to the utility bay and hit the control to open the boarding ramp. The dust had mostly cleared from their landing by the time she walked to the foot of the ramp, but the sky was still full of black smoke. Fires were burning all around the perimeter of the base and when she tapped into the security feeds she could see they were trash fires, fed by wreckage from buildings of local wood and filled in with refuse made of polymers and other things not meant to be burned. Young Tahni males and females fed the fires at intervals, hanging together in groups segregated by sex, some of them chanting something she couldn't understand. Many of them were armed, with everything from lasers and missile launchers to slug shooters and flechette guns, but none of them were firing. Yet.
"Are you Major McIntire?" The question had the tone of a demand, the voice behind it female and pissed off. Kara turned towards it and saw a woman in the uniform of a Fleet officer striding towards her purposefully from a small groundcar, dust still rising behind it from the abruptness of her stop. Her hair was brown and cut short and her round face was pinched into a frown. Kara read her name and rank off the ID chip in her collar.
"That's me, Commander Chiang," she confirmed, her voice even and calm. "I see the situation here has deteriorated in the last few days."
"The 'situation' is in the shitter," Chiang snapped, hands on her hips as she confronted Kara. "As our traffic controller tried to tell you before you landed. That was irresponsible and reckless!"
"And yet necessary," Kara replied with a casual shrug. "We're bringing back intelligence that will change the game here, as well as the former leader of the insurgency, who voluntarily surrendered to us and wants to try to stop the violence."
That stopped the Commander in her tracks and she eyed the DSI agent dubiously. "If that's the case," she said slowly, "then we need to get him on a full-spectrum broadcast talking to those people." She waved at the perimeter to indicate who "those people" were. "Because I don't know how much longer they're going to be waiting before they storm this place."
"Just what I was thinking," Kara agreed. "If you can set things up, I'll get him ready to go."
Chiang nodded slowly and almost unwillingly, as if she wasn't quite through being mad yet. "All right, I'll get my people on it. We can take my vehicle back to the communications center." She half turned before she stopped, suddenly remembering something. "Oh, and there's someone here who needs to talk to you. He arrived a couple days ago and claims to be working with you. Some executive bodyguard named Nakamura."
* * *
"General Murdock is dead?" Deke asked, disbelief heavy in his voice. He stepped backwards from where Reggie sat at the corner of the office in a folding chair, feeling his legs come up against a desk and leaning back against it for support.
"Yeah," Reggie said, subdued and still sounding numb. He was huddled in the little chair, head in his hands, like he was having to relive the experience telling it to them.
Deke looked over to Kara, saw her face slack with shock and reached out to take her hand in his. She squeezed it gratefully, clarity returning to her eyes. Cal's face looked grim, but not as emotionally affected as either of them.
Well, they hadn't ever been that close, Deke reflected. Even though I think Murdock liked him.
Rachel and Pete seemed fairly indifferent; he thought Rachel might have been relieved, actually. Tyya-Khin, the only other person in the small office, was trying to ignore their interplay, as was polite by Tahni social mores. Commander Chiang had told them to wait in the side office while her people prepared an all-spectrum broadcast for Tyya.
"The last target we took out on Inferno was Admiral O'Brien." At a wide-eyed look from Kara, Reggie nodded. "He was the 'old friend' Cutter called 'Red.' But he was waiting for us, and he'd rigged his whole house to blow when we came for him. General Murdock stayed there to delay him and gave me a Command Imperative to run."
"Holy shit," Deke murmured, shaking his head. He wouldn't have figured the Bulldog as the type to throw himself on a grenade.
"You ran?" Kara demanded, taking a half step forward, anger in her voice.
"He didn't have any choice, love," Deke told her, rubbing the back of her hand with his thumb soothingly. "A Command Imperative locks an action into our headcomp, lets it take control of our implant nerve fibers and byomer muscles. It was a fail-safe in case one of us got out of hand."
She hissed out a breath, clearly still angry but not willing to push it, and relaxed. Deke slipped an arm around her shoulder, mostly to restrain her in case she decided to launch herself at Reggie Nakamura. He wasn't sure which one he was protecting though.
"Did you get all the duplicates?" Cal asked him. Deke eyed him sidelong, wondering if he'd ever forgiven Murdock for his part in the business with the Corporate Council a few years back. Murdock had kept Cal in the dark about his plans and backup plans during that operation, which had put his life and Rachel's in danger. Then he'd used Trint as leverage to get Cal to agree to work for him in the future.
"All the ones on Inferno," Reggie said, looking up at him. "There's one more here though."
Deke was about to ask who it was when the door to the office opened and Commander Chiang leaned in.
"We're ready for him," she said, eyeing Tyya-Khin.
"Let's go," Deke said to the Tahni and he stood from his chair and followed Deke and Kara out of the office. Reggie, Cal and the others stayed behind.
"How did things deteriorate so quickly?" Kara was asking Commander Chiang as they walked down the hallway to the Communications center. "When I left, there were daily Marine patrols and things seemed to be quieting down."
"When the Thaddeus Moore was taken, it was like someone sent out a signal," Chiang explained grimly. "There started being IED attacks every single day on the patrols. Finally, Captain Einarsson pulled everyone back inside the perimeter to reduce casualties until reinforcements arrived. He even emptied the detention centers, on the t
heory that we didn't have enough people to guard the Tahni prisoners in the event of enemy action."
"He's in charge then?" Kara assumed.
"In theory," Chiang said very quietly, checking around to make sure there was no one else in the hallway. She leaned closer to Kara, but Deke could still hear her murmured words. "In practice, pulling everyone inside the wire is the only damned decision he's made since the ship got taken. I've served with him for a year, but he's been...different since then." She shook her head sadly. "I've been running things as much as anyone."
Kara was saved from having to comment by their arrival at the Communications center, a large door conveniently labeled in English at the end of the hallway. Chiang palmed the ID plate and it read her DNA, matched it to her ID chip and slid the door aside for her. Netdivers sat at stations across the far wall and Deke couldn't help but shudder at the face jacks visible on their shaved heads, cables attaching them to their computer consoles like pieces of machinery camouflaged in human form, while a dozen small holotanks arrayed along the wall perpendicular to them displayed the video feeds from the various Tahni networks as well as the news reports from the system's Instell ComSat.
Deke saw an image of two Fleet cruisers passing through a star system and wondered if those were the ones on their way to Tahn-Skyyiah.
"Come this way," Chiang said to Tyya, gesturing to a platform near the center of the room, surrounded at ceiling and floor level by rings of optical inputs for holographic recordings. "Stand in the center and we'll get started."
"What the hell's going on in here?"
Deke had heard the door open, but hadn't bothered to look back, assuming it was just normal personnel entering the chamber. At the basso bellow, he did turn and saw a shaven-headed, florid-faced giant of a man in a Fleet uniform storming into the room with a pair of Security troopers at his heels, outfitted with grey body armor and carrying pulse carbines.
