The Fleet tacticians had been positively cruel about this dinosaur of a ship. A vanity piece, they called it, an Idiot Aboard! sign hung round the neck of the enemy fleet. Every space-faring species that built warcraft quickly found out one way or another - often the hard way - that big ships just didn't work except as a hideously expensive way of impressing the more credulous type of native. Flexibility, manoeuvrability, low unit risk-cost, distributed inherent damage resistance, fully parsed battle-space side-blind denotation control grammar . . . these and other even more arcane concepts were what really mattered in modern space warfare, apparently, and a Really Big Ship just didn't sit too comfortably with any of them.
The tacticians pretty much spoke their own language, were mostly very intense, and blinked a lot.
'So a strong point that's really a weak point,' Taince had suggested at one of their briefings.
'That would be a viable alternative definition,' one of them said, after a moment or two's thought.
Since just a week ago, though, relatively little evidence of further activity.
Well, the Discon invaders had arrived later than anticipated, and the Summed Fleet forces were arriving earlier. Deliberate, on their part, of course. The invaders would have quickly found out when Ulubis had been told to expect the Summed Fleet's arrival, and it was always prudent to keep the enemy off balance, to upset their assumptions. Let them think they had so much time and then arrive early before they'd got everything prepared.
Smiting. It was all about smiting. That was one of Admiral Kisipt's favourite words. The Voehn Fleet Commander knew it in several hundred different languages, including Earth Anglish. Be ready at all times to smite the enemy. Strike with speed, decisiveness and weight.
Taince found herself lightly smitten with one of the junior male officers, discovered it was mutual and took part in some invasive tussling of her own.
The time displays ticked down steadily towards the point where they'd have to get back into their lonely little individual pods again for the deceleration burn that would bring them down from near-light speed to something close to Ulubis-zero, for the start of the attack.
*
The Cineropoline Sepulcraft Rovruetz spun very slowly beneath the Velpin, still gently accelerating for its distant target system and its unburied cargo of the long-dead. The Velpin was tracking round the outer rim of the giant craft, senses primed. Fassin and Y'sul were back aboard. They had been shown to the lifeless body of Leisicrofe, ice-welded to the side of the great dark corridor in the company of a half-dozen other dead Dwellers.
- Very well preserved, as you see, Duty Receptioneer Ninth Lapidarian had pointed out. - I hope you feel this setting is appropriate. The Ythyn officer had still been upset at the earlier misunderstanding.
- So he just died, then? Y'sul had asked.
- Very suddenly, apparently. We found him drifting – rolling along in his esuit, actually - a few days after he arrived. He had expressed an interest in mapping the distribution of bodies of different species and species-types while he was here. We saw no reason not to allow him to do so.
They weren't permitted to use reaction motors inside the Sepulcraft. Y'sul had used his esuited spine-arms to push himself over to the side of the tunnel. He'd landed awkwardly by the Dweller's body, which was naked save for a small hub-cloth.
- I have no idea whether this is this Leisicrofe guy or not, frankly, Y'sul had said. - But it is a Dweller, probably from Nasqueron and he is most certainly dead.
- Any sign of ... anything? Fassin asked.
Y'sul had inspected the body, using lights and radar-sense, finding nothing. He'd unclipped the corpse's hub-cloth and shaken it. Fassin had sensed their Ythyn host preparing to object, but a moment later Y'sul had replaced the hub-cloth and was looking round the back of the body where ice attached it to the tunnel wall.
- Nothing, he'd sent back.
'There,' one half of Quercer & Janath said.
On one of the Velpin's screens, a flickering outline appeared around one of the abandoned ships littering the carbuncularly irregular outer hull of the Sepulcraft.
Fassin looked at the craft. It was a simple black ellipsoid, maybe sixty metres long. Deep-space cold, lifeless.
'That it?' Y'sul asked. 'You sure?'
'It's a Dweller Ail-Purpose, Single-Occupancy Standard Pattern SoloShip,' the truetwin told them. 'And it pings recent.'
'Can you wake its systems?' Fassin asked. 'Find out where it was last, where it came from?'
The travelcaptain looked at him. 'Doesn't work like that.' 'Pay attention.'
They got permission from the Ythyn to lift the SoloShip and join it to the Velpin. They warmed it up and introduced a standard gas-giant atmosphere. There was just about enough room for Y'sul and Fassin to board together. Quercer & Janath had already laser-synched the little ship's closed-down computer matrix to that of the Velpin. The screens, tanks, surfaces and other displays flickered, steadied and shone. The craft beeped and clicked around them. It still felt cold.
Y'sul knocked and tapped a few of the more obviously delicate-looking bits of machinery with his hub-arms.
'You getting anything?' he asked. The truetwin was staying on board the larger craft.
'There's stuff in the log,' one half told them. 'That's sailor-talk for diary.'
'No saying!' Y'sul said.
'Truly. But it's not accessible from here. You'll have to input from there.'
'How, exactly?' Fassin asked.
'How should we know?' 'Not our ship.'
'Experiment.'
They experimented. The correct technique involved Y'sul pressing in to a Dweller-shaped double-alcove sensory nook and pressing four glyphboard icons on four different glyph-boards at once. The main screen stopped showing stars and the darkly glittering hull of the Sepulcraft and started showing what looked like the interior of a small library instead. Y'sul reached out into the virtual space and pulled down a book whose spine said Log. He opened it.
A motionless Dweller hub faced them in close-up.
'Well,' Y'sul said, 'that certainly looks like the stiff in the big space hearse.'
'We can see him. Should be a Play button.' 'Try hitting it.'
'Gee,' Y'sul said. 'Thank fuck you guys are there.' He hit Play.
*
Taince Yarabokin woke from a light sleep to a low-level alarm, telling her not even to think about instigating a pod-quit regime. She swung to the exterior fore-view display and looked out. Ulubis glowed sharp and blue ahead, a tiny sun amongst the surrounding scrape of stars, at last. The blueness was a function of the ship and the fleet's colossal speed, hammering into the light waves, compressing wavelength. Taince switched from LR Sensors to ship-state. A fierce and terrible force pulled at everything. They'd started their final deceleration burn. The majority of the fleet was losing speed hard, piling up a hundred or more gravities as it braked for the approach to and arrival at Ulubis system, still over a month away.
Another group of ships - one full squadron of sixty vessels -was not decelerating so rapidly. A dozen were not slowing at all and would maintain full speed all the way to and most of the way through the system, their crews and systems trained over hundreds of simulations for an ultra-high-speed pass across Ulubis planetary system which would last for less than four hours. In that time, less than twenty days from now, they would have to collect and evaluate all the data they could on the then-current state of the system and then both signal their intelligence back to the ships behind and choose a suite of attack profiles from a vast menu of possibilities they carried in their data banks before loosing all the munitions they could against whatever hostiles they had identified. They hoped the pickings would be rich for them. They'd be arriving with little warning only a month after the Starveling fleet had struck. With luck the situation would be fluid and the E-5 Discon forces wouldn't have had time to organise their defences properly.
Then, even before those advance ships were all th
e way through the system, they would begin their own still more violent deceleration, to come to a stop a light month beyond, and get back to Ulubis weeks after the main fleet had arrived: at best to help with the mopping up, at worst to deliver a retaliatory hammer-blow.
The remainder of the Advance-attack Squadron would pass through the system in small groups of ships, their arrival staggered, unpredictable, distributed, their tactics in part defined by whatever the high-speed craft had discovered. With luck, with what they hoped and trusted was a good battle-plan, the waves of war craft, each able to spend more fighting time in the system than its immediate predecessor, would deliver a succession of softening-up blows against the enemy: rocking it, unbalancing it, confusing and bloodying it. The main body of the fleet, arriving like a bunched fist, would just provide one final massive knockout punch.
Their drive light would precede them, of course. There would be no complete surprise.
The Starveling invasion had given the defenders of Ulubis even more warning, not that there was much they could have done with it. The E-5 Discon fleet had slowed right down, shut its drives off almost as one while still a few days out, well within the system's Oort shell, then slowed further as its lead ships crossed the boundary into the planetary system.
For the next few weeks after the drive signatures meshed with the Ulubis system and shut off, when the invasion must have been at its height, there had been a lot of weapon-blink. Much of it had been around the planets Sepekte and Nasqueron.
*
'My name is Leisicrofe of Hepieu, Nasqueron equatorial. This is my last testament. I will presume that whoever you are you have followed me for the data which I carried on behalf of my fellow Dweller, the scholar Valseir of Schenehen. If you have not, and this recording has fallen to you in what one might term a casual manner, it may be of little interest. If, however, you do seek the data I held, then I must tell you now that you are going to be disappointed.'
Something in Fassin seemed to break and fall away.
'Uh-oh,' Y'sul said.
'This may seem unfortunate and may make you angry. However, I have most likely done you a considerable favour, as it is my sincere and firm belief that what I was asked to carry was something I should not have been, and something that nobody should have been or should be asked to take responsibility for. It was not something I was supposed to know about, of course, and it was not really Valseir's fault that I came into possession of the knowledge of what it represented.'
'Talks a lot, doesn't he?' Y'sul said.
'To my shame, I think I must be more shallow than my friend Valseir gave me credit for. He gave me the data sealed in a safe-keep box and asked me not to open it. I said I would not. He did not even ask me for my word, thinking, I am sure, that simply asking a friend and fellow scholar such a thing, and receiving such an assurance, was guarantee enough. However, I am not like Valseir. I am inquisitive by nature, not as the result of an intellectual fascination with any particular subject. I resisted the urge to open the safekeep box for many years while I was on my travels, but eventually I surrendered to temptation. I opened the safekeep, I began to read what was inside, and realised its importance. Even then I might have stopped reading, closed the box and put it away again, and had I done that I would still be alive. Instead, I carried on reading - and this has resulted in my death. I can only claim that perhaps I was in a sort of trance of disbelief at the time.'
'More likely taken some recreational substances,' Y'sul snorted.
'And so I came to hold within myself the knowledge, the meaning of that which I had been asked to keep safe, rather than just having charge of the medium containing it. Realising what I now knew, and comprehending that it was of inestimable value, I came to the conclusion that I could not be trusted with it. While not entirely understanding what I had read, I could not forget it. I could tell others, and it was not impossible that I might be made to tell what I knew through the use of drugs or more direct intervention with my brain and mind.' 'Nutter,' Y'sul said.
'What's that?' one of Quercer & Janath said distantly over the open link to the Velpin.
'Hmm. Don't know.' It didn't sound like they were paying attention to what was being said by the recording of Leisicrofe. 'I will not pretend that I had not been thinking of my own death for some time. However, it was habitually within the context of having completed my studies into the many differing forms of the Cincturia and publishing a learned - I had even hoped an at-the-time definitive - work on this, my chosen and beloved field of study. Knowing what I now know, I have thought it best, however reluctantly, to curtail my studies forthwith and kill myself as soon as may decently be achieved. I shall do so here, in the Ythyn Cineropoline Sepulcraft Rovruetz, where my death will at least appear to have a fraction more meaning than it might have had elsewhere.'
'- Looks like, or . . .' Fassin heard over the open channel.
'Ping it?'
'No! Are you . . . ? Shut off that—'
The open channel closed. Fassin looked back to the access hatch and the short ship-to-ship connecting them to the Velpin. Leisicrofe was still speaking.'... Will forgive me. You should. If you know what it is you are looking for, then all I will say is that it looked more like a code and frequency, not what I believe was expected. But it is quite gone now. Destroyed, along with the safekeep box itself, thrown into the sun called Direaliete. I know of no other copy. If none of this makes any sense to you, then please respect an old, and - as it turns out -foolish, Dweller's last wish, and leave him here in peace.' The recording froze and an end-message signal flashed.
Fassin stared at the image of the dead Dweller. It was over. He'd failed. Maybe now there was no way ever to find out whether the Dweller List meant anything or even had ever meant anything.
'Totally mad,' Y'sul said, with something like a sigh. He fiddled with the glyphboard controls. 'Looks like that's our lot.'
He turned to Fassin. 'Doesn't sound too hopeful, does it, young human-me-lad?'
The open channel from the ship clicked on suddenly. 'Get out!' Quercer & Janath screamed. 'Ten seconds to get off there and back in the Velpin!’
'Being attacked! Must run!'
Fassin shook himself out of his shock and started backing towards the open hatch leading to the Velpin.
Y'sul pulled out of the sensory-nook, began to follow, one hub-limb scratching at his mantle. 'This madness is obviously contag—'
'Fucking Voehn ship! Out, now!' 'Engines in five, four, three . . .'
SIX:
THE LAST TRANSFORM
. . . Sssss 1000101011001010101 on\ symcheck ssscheck syt - sytser syst - syst - fail reboot livel livl lev - levl -level 001 hup gethup paramarametsr woop! woop! check check check system check run ALL cat. zzero sssum-check postcrash full allowablesss rebot rubot reOot lbit cat. zero sumcheck postcrash fullabables ints. postcrash (likely antagonistic external hostile agency cause) full All reboot restart: starting mem. lang. sens. full int. . . . bip bip bip . . . Bang! Wo!
Hnnh? You all right?
I'm all right. Now. You all right? I'm all right. Happened? This:
'Closing hatch!'
The hatch at the end of the ship-to-ship joining the Velpin and the Dweller SoloShip started to close before Fassin got to it. Y'sul was still behind him, moving quickly along the exit. Fassin swung through, flipped, turned and grabbed the hatch's moving edge with his left manipulator.
The closing hatch nearly took the manipulator off. Fassin was swung around by the force of it and found himself having to brace with his other manipulator against the lock interior, struggling to keep the hatch - grinding, mechanism humming mightily - from closing.
'Somebody holding that hatch open?' one half of Quercer & Janath shouted indignantly.
'Out the way, Fassin!' Y'sul yelled, rising fast straight out of the ship-to-ship and colliding heavily with Fassin's gascraft, sending the two of them tumbling through the lock a
nd into the Velpin's interior. Errorfailure messages from the gascraft's left manipulator arm crowded against one edge of Fassin's field of vision. The hatch slammed shut behind them. Immediately, a great force smashed them against the compartment's sternward bulkhead. They were stuck there, unmoving, the arrowhead snagged over the Dweller's tipped left discus until the increasing acceleration and a series of sharp vibrations made Fassin slide off one edge of Y'sul's carapace and whack down onto the carbon bulkhead by his side. The ship roared around them.
'Engines are on, one takes it,' Y'sul said, wheezing. Fassin could feel the apparent gravity building still further. They were at something over twenty gee already. A young, fit Dweller with no esuit protection stuck on his side against an inelastic surface could take about twenty-four, twenty-five gees continuous before their carapace just collapsed and turned their insides to mush. The Velpin's acceleration topped out at twenty-two gees.
'All right back there?' their travelcaptain asked.
'Not really,' Fassin said. 'You're kind of near crushing Y'sul.'
'Acknowledged.'
'Not outrunning the fucker. Can't.'
'Cut off and come about. Surrender.' 'Agree.'
The acceleration snapped off. Fassin and Y'sul were instantly weightless, rebounding fractionally from the bulkhead just by the released compression in the hull of one and the carapace of the other.
'Get up here, you two,' Quercer & Janath told them.
The Voehn ship was a klick-long needle spined with swing-guns and weapon tubes. It came quickly up on them and was alongside by the time the human in his gascraft and the Dweller Y'sul got to the Velpin's control space.
'Since when do the Voehn choose to attack Dweller craft going about their—?' the travelcaptain began to ask.
'Be quiet,' said an imageless voice. 'Make yourself ready for boarding.'
The Algebraist Page 48
