Insanity's Children

by Rolf Nelson

  Helton scowled and rubbed his brow. Something wasn’t right. The whole situation totally stunk like a trap, but not one on which they could see the trigger or jaws. They were now decelerating to match velocities with one of the middle-sized private yachts, one that would be the fourth to get scanned. He ordered a more rapid deceleration, so they’d stop at a greater distance. Probe two left the cargo hauler and made a course for the private yacht. It was nearly halfway there when the third probe reached the ferry shuttle and started to scan it intensely from a significantly farther away.

  It only managed to send back one hundred seventeen milliseconds of active scan data before it exploded, with probe systems telemetry indicating heating and damage patterns consistent with multiple beam strikes. Moments later, more damage erupted on the other ships waiting motionless in space, sitting targets for the massed beam weapons mounted on the ferry.

  Taj’s response was near instantaneous, firing all beams and the BFR at the rapidly firing ship.

  Colonel Lag realized what was happening and why first, but his yell to “STOP!” wasn’t fast enough. Laser fire ceased, and the BFR slug was on its way irretrievably, when the others look at Lag in surprise.

  “Damn!” he exclaimed intensely but quietly. “They are not targeting the ship, they are targeting our image.” On screen one of the liners exploded, then a yacht. One after another in rapid succession they get their hulls and systems shredded by detonations. Three disappeared spectacularly in a flash of nuclear fission, others were holed or ripped open by conventional explosions, some by high-velocity slugs impacting, some by beams. The last one to go up was the ferry, hit by the kilotons equivalent energy of the slug they’d fired, followed a few seconds later by a much larger nuclear fusion detonation that utterly vaporized it, leaving no evidence of its armaments or anyone who might have been aboard. In moments it was over, leaving drifting hulks no more alive than the rocks in the distance.

  “Fire detected from the asteroid. Should we take care of that problem?” Taj asked, no longer certain of the target selection protocol.

  “Yes. Oh, bloody hell, yes,” came Helton’s immediate reply, understanding Lag’s insight. “Quiri, aim for a fast and low pass. Vector to loop around the far side of the asteroid, 90% acceleration. Beams only for now, as effective, but slowly. Hold off on kinetic weapons for peak delta-v. Load tanks with shape-charge rounds, remote detonation fusing. They must have a cruiser or something on the far side for control, and a lot of bunkered weapons on this side. Pound this side with tank and railguns. Turn as we pass, hit any far side ships with non-exploding rounds and beams; reserve the BFR for an emergency. We don’t want to heat-limit anything before we get there to see what they have, and grab some prisoners if we can.”

  “Scan carefully for any small observation drones or satellites,” Lag added.

  Allonia’s face clearly shows her surprise and horror. “Why, what, why would they do that? All those people killed for no reason.”

  “They’ve lost numerous ships and entire crew of highly trained people, marines and crews, for no gain. A few thousand losers and criminals scraped out of the gutters for some really good video? Cheap at twice the cost. Old ships, retired captains. Mostly nobodies, possibly a handful of high-profile names the newsies can get excited over. People like that are completely expendable to them.” The cold calculations implied in nearly casual tones by Lag, all too familiar with the minds of his enemies, doesn’t comfort Allonia -or anyone else- very much.

  The sound of laser fire picked up. “Two drones, one o’clock low and eleven high,” Quiritis reported. A blinking light on the weapons targeting console reported two more drones expiring a moment later.

  Lag nodded. “Good. Keep looking. If we can get those, we might limit the video they can receive that they can splice together to make it look like we made an unprovoked attack on those ships, killing everyone, using nukes, missiles, beams, everything. I’m sure they won’t leave any survivors to tell a different tale. The ships were mined or rigged to be nothing but targets, the men aboard fed a story to make them act as bait.

  “And all those medical tanks will make it look like an obvious hospital ship on a mercy mission. It has lots of small holes. I expect the inside is really grizzly, with explosive decompression and all. No telling how bad they were before they got tossed into the tanks, either. Bad, really bad, PR. Damn. We saw it, knew what it was, and walked right into it.”

  “And space around it neatly cleared out, too, so their video and story are the only ones to air,” Helton added. “After we get through this, we’re going to have to figure out a different way to work pickups. Assembly points, hauling multiple ships, time-frames, everything. We’ll have to look at all possibilities to figure out how to avoid this again, and try to repair the damage from it.”

  The nearside beams on the asteroid were rapidly identified, rooted out, and destroyed in a storm of high velocity railgun projectiles, higher-velocity copper slugs from the shape charge rounds that added nearly 3,000 m/s to the already considerable velocity just meters before impact, and beams.

  “Launching the last probe.”

  Passing by the horizon of the drifting space-rock, all eyes and scanners were watching intently to see what was there, one eye on the probe feed, one on organic sensor readouts.

  Nothing. Nothing but rock and more rock…. “There!” shouted Allonia, pointing to a slightly-off-color bit of something sticking out behind an irregular outcropping.

  “Slow,” Helton ordered, second-guessing his initial strategy. “Let’s just creep around. They’ll see us coming regardless. May as will give ourselves as much time as they have.”

  As they maneuvered cautiously around the rough features of the asteroid they saw more man-made items. Active sensor systems rapidly determined were likely high-resolution and powerful camera systems. Tajemnica turned the jamming up to high, and they held their fire, not wanting to give anyone more good close-up footage of them firing than they had to. The steep and deep canyons the low gravity allowed made the search take a while, but eventually they found what they were looking for.

  There were no ships, just a modular bunker which was very well hidden under a towering cliff, buried under a thick layer of loose rock and dust. Between the probe’s sensors and Tajemnica’s organic systems they eventually got a pretty good picture of what was physically present in the bunker.

  When there were no responses to a wide-freq hail, a few “we really do see you” love-taps from the weapons made clear their intention to not leave anything resembling survivors if someone didn’t start talking. It became rapidly apparent that the half-dozen men were all former military, men who had gotten seriously burned out on the slave-like combat conditions and prescription drugs, and had fallen into hard circumstances. They had been offered a (likely unreliable) reprieve and pardon for helping entrap Tajemnica. They knew going in their chances against Taj were slim, but it was less certain than the noose or psychiatric medical testing “duty” awaiting them if they didn’t. The navy or some other contractors had set things up, then left them there to capture what images they could by sucking Tajemnica into their trap and make sure the bait ships didn’t leave prematurely.

  They were nothing but expendable conscripts that gave the government plausible deniability. Blasting the bunker into rubble would do nothing but create more footage because Helton could not be sure they disabled all cameras. But leaving the entrapment crew would allow them to testify publicly about what they saw, and undoubtedly would claim they “heroically tried to stop the dastardly ship from their peaceful and lightly armed observation post,” either voluntarily or under duress. It would make no difference to the cameras, or politicians.

  “Well, crud,” Quiritis grumped succinctly to no one in particular. “Now what? Shouldn’t kill them, can’t leave them alive.”

  “We do the only thing we can do.” The others looked at Helton expectantly as he rapidly thought through a few details. “We take them
with us.”

  Allonia looked more surprised than the rest. “But they are murderers! They killed those people in cold blood!”

  “And going in after them is likely to be very dangerous,” countered Lag.

  “True. But we are not going to go in after them. We offer them a deal, and we can always toss them out an airlock later if they really are that bad. They got squeezed and took the only path that let them live another day. If it wasn’t them, it would be the next group that got picked up. They come out, unarmed, with every piece of electronics in the place. Everything. We can search them using the airlock on the stern ramp as a staging area. They never get on the ship proper.”

  The eruption of objections, problems, counter strategies, possibilities, and issues raged for several long and highly interactive minutes. On balance all the options were bad, but this one seemed to have the fewest downsides and the only potential upside. Helton got on the com to talk to the tense-looking pair of men on the screen, awaiting word of their fate.

  “Everyone get your suits on, and show yourselves on camera at once. No weapons, no tricks, and we don’t have much time before we have to bug out.” He watched as they scrambled to get into their suits, and in a few minutes they were all set and ready to go. “Now grab every bit of memory, storage, electronics, com, or record of anything that you can move, and get your asses into space. You have two minutes before we slag the bunker.”

  The flurry of activity they could see on screen and through the scanners looked convincing enough. It took a bit more than two minutes, but a couple of the systems they grabbed appeared to be hard to dismount while wearing spacesuit gloves. The six of them were assembled in front of the airlock, clipped to a safety ring with lines so they didn’t float away in the microgravity. Hovering before them and glowing faintly, Tajemnica’s hulk nearly filled the canyon the bunker was hidden in, with the ramp lowered and the inner sliding doors shut tight.

  “Gently toss the stuff in” Helton ordered. The six figures, moving carefully and clumsily, unused to space, did so. One of Taj’s mechanical loading arms tossed out a line toward them. “Grab our line, unclip from yours, then pull yourselves in.” Once they were securely in and the ramp mostly raised, the mechanical arm, now with a scanner attachment on the end of it, gave the men and their cargo a thorough search. Everything appeared to be clean.

  “Now, then. Pop quiz, and you get exactly once chance to get it right. We are going to send a guy over there to check out what you left. Maybe even bring back a few things. Is there anything, anything at all, that might be dangerous to us, or useful or interesting for us? If he gets hurt looking the place over, you all get kicked out the back door once we are up to speed. You’ll die slowly in space, alone, headed for the sun. Not sure if running out of O2, decompression, freezing, incidental impact, or cooking will kill you first. Start talking.”

  In short order it was clear there were still several items that might be useful or interesting, and they didn’t think the bunker was mined; they’d been there a week, going in and out several times in pairs, and they didn’t set anything when they left.

  “One at a time, everyone hold up a hand.” After glancing at one another for a quick moment, hands began going up. When the one that appeared to be somewhat less clumsy in his space suit than the others held up his hand, Helton stopped him. “You just volunteered to go back and collect things. Clip the set of mini-cams from the bin off to your right onto your helmet and gloves, then head on back. Hope you were right about it not being dangerous.”

  After an initial sigh and slump of fatalism, the man got unsteadily to his feet and headed back up the ramp toward the narrow opening at the top. After pulling himself through and launching toward the asteroid surface, he “landed” ungracefully on the surface, then bounced off and had to struggle and catch himself on the safety line to keep from flying away. Eventually he got to the bunker and clipped on the safety line to make the return easier.

  Aboard Tajemnica, Helton, Taj, and Lag monitored the camera views while quizzing the man – Otto Teubler – what they were looking at, what they’d been doing, and keeping him talking fast enough that he wouldn’t have time to think or plan ahead much, only react. Others of the crew did the same with the five remaining men in order to pump them for information, gather clues as to what they might want to look for or retrieve from the port-o-bunker, cross-checking the story for accuracy and relevant details, and prevent them from coordinating any problematic plans.

  Otto had to make four trips through the bunker airlock, tossing things out to hands waiting in the ramp area, before they were satisfied that the micro-base was stripped. As he boarded, sensors started lighting up with ships transitioning into space as near to the area as they could. There were at least five obvious clusters – straight out, up, down, spinward, and anti-spinward, but they were widely spaced and loose.

  “So now they spring the trap,” Helton noted, looking at the readouts on the bridge.

  “No. It was sprung when they opened fire on the defenseless ships,” Lag corrected. “They have the video, and now they attempt to ride to the rescue with cameras rolling.”

  “But they are all spread out,” objects Allonia. “They can’t possibly think they can stop us with single cruisers.”

  “Exactly. They lose a ship or two trying to stop us as we pass, the rest come in to find the carnage. They are the heroes, we’re the villains, they have the footage and shiploads of corpses to prove it.”

  “It’s going to be hard to fight that sort of thing. It’s the sort of meme they can push really hard.”

  Nobody looked very happy at the prospect of their version of events being so easily destroyed, and their quiet frustration at getting played was readily apparent on their faces.

  “Unlessss….” Lag said slowly. He rapidly punched up data from the weapons console. “Maybe… video is easy to fake. The corpses that can be inspected, photographed, a few of them identified, and paraded around are the real problem. I hate disrespecting the dead, but the only way we can fight it is to not let them have anything to show that can’t be easily disputed. Pictures of a gas cloud are not very interesting.”

  Seeing what’s he was getting at, Helton nodded. “Nuke them all-”

  “-except the bunker,” Lag corrected. “It might be useful to reveal later.”

  “Then we can point out how convenient it is that they have great video from close up, but no actual evidence. Not a pretty solution.”

  “It might work. The yield is sufficient for vaporization on ships that size. But there are nine ships remaining intact, and I have only six nukes,” Taj countered.

  “Are any of them close enough together that we could-” Allonia started to ask.

  “No, Allonia, they are much too far apart,” said Quiritis. “None of them are even close enough to toast a marshmallow from nuking the nearest ship.”

  “Could we move them closer?” she asked.

  There was a brief moment of high-speed mental calculation about the bridge as they eye the distribution and distances and size. “Almost,” Taj said after letting the humans think a moment, as she calculated the details of all possible reasonable variations on a ten-body three-dimensional motion problem. “There are two pairs of smaller ships that we could easily tug together and use a single warhead. But all variations of courses needed to allow six nukes to destroy them all leave us in the area with the incoming cruisers too close to easily evade heading out-system. It was almost a brilliant idea.”

  “What are the three best almost solutions that leaves us passing by one remaining untargeted ship?” Helton shot back. A set of diagrams appeared on a display. “Play them out one at a time.” One after another, each was animated, each showing the encirclement of cruisers closing like a shrinking net being drawn in on them. Helton pointed to one of them. “That one, what’s the ship mass?”

  “Estimate eighteen thousand tons.”

  “Execute it now.”

  “But our es
cape will be cut off.”

  “No. We accelerate inward. Drag the liner with us directly towards the sun. Set it adrift, then slingshot around the star in whatever direction there are the fewest navy ships. They are left with no evidence, and if they want to attempt to recover the liner, they’ll have to abandon the chase.”

  It took but a moment to understand the logic of the approach. Quiritis, Taj, and Colonel Lag started implementing the details. Ensuring the proper timing of the paired ships approach with a nuclear missile, hitting the single ships, and grabbing the last ship on the right approach would be somewhat ticklish.

  “We’ll want to delay detonation until well after the cruisers are slowing to recover the ships. It will make chasing us more difficult.”

  “I’d like to delay it until they are hooked up!” Quiritis snarled.

  Helton shook his head. “Tempting, but no. We don’t want more bodies. Nothing that can be construed as an attack on navy ships. Leave only plasma clouds. That will make it easier for us to deny their story is anything more than fabrication and conspiracy theory, or empty hulls.”

  “Hmmph. Someone needs to bloody well be killed for setting this thing up, though,” Quiritis replied with feeling.

  “Agreed. But not the guys on the front line that have no idea what’s going on. Save your anger for the decision makers.” Lags voice managed to be gentle and understanding, while also carrying an intense undercurrent of his own anger and desire for vengeance.

  The next few hours were spent accelerating one way, decelerating, grabbing a ship, and dragging it toward another ship very precisely, then repeating the procedure. They could increase their escape margin of error by decreasing their victim-ship placement exactness, but decided that on balance, that really needed to be sure there was no physical evidence remaining, which meant that they’d be cutting it close on fleeing the scene. With warheads placed, and missiles programmed and launched, they finally pulled alongside the last ship, an old liner now punched full of small holes. On close inspection it looked like it must have been a barely flyable hulk before it was brought out here, and it may have needed a tug to move at all.