Refuge

by Glynn Stewart

  “So rather than trying to fix us, they just ran?”

  “Apparently. I’m sure there was more to it than that.” He felt like he was reassuring the AI, which was fair. D was both centuries old, in that he had been split off from XR-13-9’s own intelligence and memories, and barely months old.

  “That can only be speculation,” D objected. “Though I also find it disturbing to assume that our Creators were so callous.”

  “You don’t remember anything, huh?” Octavio asked.

  “Fragments at best,” D confirmed. “The tachyon punches continue to cause damage with every jump that we have to repair. The verification process only drives home how much we must have lost over the years before we implemented it.”

  Octavio was an atheist, but he was still tempted to thank the unknowing forces of the universe that the Matrices had had the tachyon communicator to go along with the tachyon-punch drive.

  Without it, all of them would have gone crazy—and the evidence suggested homicidally crazy—long before.

  “We’ll see them soon enough,” he promised the AI. “Far sooner for us than for anyone not aboard Interceptor, that’s for sure.”

  53

  “We have a contact.”

  Das’s voice was very quiet, but something about Interceptor’s bridge seemed to be lending itself to moments of silence as the crew waited for the critical moment.

  “Is it the right contact?” Octavio asked.

  “I think so,” she replied. “Distance is under three thousand kilometers. Relative velocity is…one hundred KPS. Daniel?”

  “I’ve got her,” the helm officer confirmed. “Adjusting acceleration and course. Fifty seconds to contact from…now.”

  They could barely make sense of the outside world at this point. This close to lightspeed, they were experiencing time at less than one and a half percent of the speed of the “real world.” A hundred kilometers per second might seem huge under normal circumstances, but it was point zero three percent of lightspeed. They were already at three nines of lightspeed and accelerating.

  And somehow, they’d got the angle and speed right. That felt impossible, but they’d done it.

  The fifty seconds it was going to take them to match velocities would consume an entire hour in the real world. Everything they did until they brought the warp bubble up was costing time…time that Octavio had to hope didn’t include news they needed to hear.

  There was nothing Interceptor’s crew could have done to help if, say, Vista had come under attack again. But they were hours past the point where even tachyon communicators could provide undistorted communications with Vista or Exilium. Probably at least a week past, according to the real world.

  “Tran, D, what’s the status on the warp ring?” he finally asked. That would take ten seconds to extend…and those would be the riskiest ten seconds of this whole operation. Interceptor was carefully designed to survive at these speeds. They couldn’t design the warp ring to survive this, so it was currently collapsed against the ship’s hull.

  “Ready to deploy,” Tran confirmed. “D can give you whatever details you want, but I’m sitting by a big red button, waiting for your order.”

  “We need to deploy before contact,” he told her. “How long is it going to hold up? D?”

  “Uncertain. Seventeen plus minus five point four seconds.” The AI paused. “The ring will only be wide enough to fit around the target in the final one point one seconds of the unfolding.”

  Octavio closed his eyes for a precious few seconds—three or four minutes of real time.

  “Activate at intercept minus ten seconds,” he ordered. “We’ll take the risk. Warp space as soon as we have hull contact. Tran, do not wait for my order, understood?”

  “Understood. Expansion in twenty seconds.”

  “Contact in twenty-nine.”

  He exhaled and laid his hands on the arms of his seat. That was the last order he would give until this phase, at least, was over. Everything was down to his crew, their programs, and the insanely complicated AI controlling the final timing.

  “Expansion.”

  He felt the ship shift as Tran reported. Suddenly less streamlined, the unavoidable turbulence of their velocity shook the ship, sending tremors rippling through the hull. The holographic image of Interceptor in the main display lit the connecting structures up in orange immediately—as soon as the warp drive started extending, the systems were already sending structural integrity alerts.

  A second shape appeared in the holographic display, the approaching Creator ship. Their relative velocity was minimal now, only the amount that Daniel was allowing to make this maneuver even possible.

  Octavio mirrored Daniel’s screen to the screens on his own seat. He didn’t want to jog the helm officer’s elbow, but given the circumstances, he was certainly willing to virtually watch over her shoulder.

  The screen was a mess of vector diagrams that he could only half-read. Interceptor’s shape was on there, and the vector diagrams were cutting into the gap in the warp ring intended for the big slowboat.

  Seconds ticked by like eternity, and Octavio realized he was holding his breath. He started to release it—and then inhaled sharply as the final vector lines converged on Daniel’s display.

  “Got him!” the Lieutenant shouted. “Vectors match; we have them inside the ring. Making final contact in three…two… Contact!”

  Interceptor shivered again as she touched down on the immense colony ship she’d wrapped the warp ring around. Before Octavio could even be tempted to give an order, D and Tran activated his last set of orders.

  Power flared along the warp drive ring, energizing the strange negative-mass exotic matter that made up its core arrays. They’d held together this long against the radiation of traveling at near-cee velocities, but if they were going to fail, now was the time…

  “Exotic-matter angular velocity at seventy percent of target; warp bubble forming,” D said calmly into the near-silence of the bridge.

  “Seventy-five percent. Ring structural integrity is at sixty percent…warp bubble still forming.”

  Octavio was still holding his breath when a familiar sticky feeling descended onto his skin and the ship’s trembling stopped.

  “Angular velocity at eighty-three percent of target; warp bubble formed,” the AI announced. “Ring structural integrity is at an average of fifty-six percent, and multiple hull breaches are being reported by the automated systems.

  “Nonetheless, we have a stable ring and bubble.”

  The bridge was silent in shock. They’d done it.

  “Exotic-matter angular velocity at target. Current estimated pseudo-speed is twelve times lightspeed. Our destination is the Hearthfire System, ETA…six months.”

  Octavio took a breath of the sticky air of warped space and let it go.

  “Get the ring-inspection robots and teams in there,” he ordered. “I’d like us to be able to get to Hearthfire a little faster than that if we need to.”

  Interceptor was fully capable of hitting two hundred and fifty six times the speed of light, but he’d want to go over the ring with a fine-toothed comb first. The last thing they wanted to do at this point was break the bubble. That would see both Interceptor and her target scattered across several light-years in pieces.

  “Inform…” Octavio trailed off and shook his head. He tapped a command on his seat arms.

  “Lieutenant Chen Zhou, this is Captain Octavio,” he said calmly into the opened channel. “We’ve made contact and are locked on to the Creator vessel.”

  “My lead team is ready to go, sir. Holding back a reserve of twenty-five Marines and forty Vistans, but I have sixty troopers standing by with five of D’s remotes in support.”

  “You are cleared to commence boarding operations at your discretion, Lieutenant,” Octavio told her. “I’ll be riding your shoulder virtually, but I promise to keep my mouth shut unless something damn important comes up.”

  “You’re th
e Captain, Captain. Marines are moving out. Oorah!”

  54

  The interface Octavio had access to wasn’t designed for the ship’s Captain to watch over the Marine CO’s shoulder. It was actually the setup created for a higher-level Marine officer to keep an eye on their subordinates.

  Right now, he had it focused on Chen herself, so her helmet’s view of the boarding gear was front and center. A display to the left of that view showed him the location of all hundred and twenty-five Marines and Spears. Right now, they were spread across the five “boarding bays” built into Interceptor’s flank.

  A low-level AI was choosing the most important half-dozen other helmet-cams to show him at once. Currently, it was showing the squad leaders for the five teams of fifteen—five Marines and ten Spears apiece—scheduled to make the first breach.

  “Initiating cut,” Chen said calmly. A new set of reports automatically inserted themselves onto Octavio’s screen: five sets of plasma drills, one for each bay, were now active and trying to cut into the Creator ship’s hull.

  Initially, that hull resisted. It was made of the same energy-absorbing ceramics the Matrices—and the ESF, now—used to armor their ships.

  That had been expected, though, and the drills adjusted to a higher-intensity mode with tighter focuses and faster pulse sequences. The system was, after all, a modification of the same technology as a starship’s pulse cannons.

  It took about twenty seconds for the drills to establish the correct frequency and intensity and about the same amount of time to burn their way through the hull.

  “We’re through; airlock plugs inserting.”

  There was no chance anyone was going to risk merging Interceptor’s air with whatever atmosphere was on the strange ship. Octavio guessed that the Creators breathed the mix that had been artificially installed on Exilium and Refuge and the rest of the Constructed Worlds, but that didn’t mean the colony ship’s air was currently breathable.

  “Lead elements, advance,” Chen ordered. Marines were through the airlocks moments later, twenty-five Exilium Marines crossing into a strange ship without hesitation.

  “I’m reading the standard Constructed World air mix,” the lead Marine reported, confirming Octavio’s suspicion. “Nothing’s registering as toxic.”

  “Don’t even think about it, Marine,” Chen barked. “We’ll let the big D make the call on that for the next wave, but we have power armor and we are not breathing unknown air; am I clear?”

  “Oorah, sir!” There was a pause. “Gravity appears to be similar setup to ours. Suit is reading point nine gravities. Lighter than any of the Constructed Worlds I’ve been to.”

  “Sounds like the Matrices don’t carve chunks off the planets to adjust the gravity. Given everything else the robots do, that’s kind of reassuring,” Chen replied. “Any lead team, flag your issues.”

  The interior of the ship was dimly lit by human standards, and Octavio couldn’t pick out any lighting fixtures from the video feeds he was seeing—the entire ceiling seemed to be gently glowing.

  The Marines had cut through into general exterior corridors, most likely maintenance accessways that wouldn’t see much traffic. Part of him expected the corridors to be dirty, but the dull gray metal was perfectly clean.

  “No contact,” each team confirmed. “Moving in to secure entryway.”

  “Rest of wave one, move in,” Chen ordered. “D, your remotes stay in the middle. You’re the only one who can talk to their computers.”

  “I understand,” the AI confirmed. The five remotes attached to this project were under Chen’s command, but they were extension of D’s intelligence and will. They weren’t particularly intelligent on their own—which was probably a good thing, to Octavio’s mind.

  He trusted D completely…which made D the only AI he was willing to let control armed robots near his people.

  The Marines found the first body five minutes later, still in one of the exterior maintenance corridors.

  “Move in and get a good look,” Chen ordered. “This is our first chance to see what the crew looks like.”

  The assumption that the Matrices’ remotes were built in the image of their Creators appeared to be panning out. The mummified creature slumped against the wall had the same centauroid shape with a long four-legged main torso and a secondary set of shoulders above the main torso that held the arms and the bird-like head.

  The being had had a sharp beak and large side-facing eyes. It was hard to tell much of its color or anything similar, though, as it had clearly been dead for a long time.

  “Lieutenant, do your people have the gear to date the body?” Octavio asked, a direct transmission to the Marine CO. He was not going to give direct orders to the Marines. He was an engineer, not a Marine, but that didn’t mean he was completely lost as to how this needed to work.

  “We can do some testing, but it won’t be accurate without more detailed analysis,” Chen replied. “We’ll get on it.”

  An icon told him Chen had swapped channels.

  “Corporal, get a sample and run it through your suit’s analysis suite,” she ordered. “It won’t get us much, but it should give us an estimated time of death. Hold your team with you.

  “Teams one and five, hold position as well. Two and four, continue your sweep. Hold and report if you find any forks or signs of life.”

  Or death, Octavio finished silently.

  It only took a few minutes for the power armor’s limited suite to run its scans and bounce back an answer. Octavio was still glad they had shifted into warped space for this project. From a relativistic perspective, they had no velocity there. Even the velocity they’d entered with had become tied up in the energy levels of the warp bubble.

  That meant they were operating on objective time and they could spend minutes—or even hours or days—without them turning into days or weeks.

  Of course, their tachyon communicators didn’t work through the warp bubble. D was using them to maintain instantaneous control of their remotes, but they weren’t in contact with anyone in Exilium, Refuge or Hearthfire.

  “Got an estimate on time of death,” the Marine Corporal finally reported. “Confidence interval is about two months, but the suite is estimating our friend’s been dead for about three years.”

  “With time dilation, that means over two centuries,” D pointed out. Unlike Octavio, the AI was speaking more broadly. The Captain had to trust that the AI was keeping his comments to the relevant people, since D was also in control of the remotes on the scene.

  His monitoring algorithm brought up a camera feed from the remote next to the corpse as Octavio was thinking.

  “Look.” The AI zoomed in on certain segments. “They were killed by a single laser beam. Targeted directly on the primary circulatory organ.”

  D was silent for a second, presumably running some kind of analysis.

  “Hard to identify wavelengths after this much time, but evidence suggests focused high-frequency beams on the edge of the human-visible spectrum.” The AI made a noise that Octavio could only interpret as uncomfortable.

  “My remotes carry weapons of very similar design and targeting software capable of this level of precision.”

  “Well, fuck me,” Octavio breathed.

  Before anyone could say more than that, a shouted report came in from Team Four.

  “Contact! We have contact!”

  The camera feed switched automatically even as the Marines were reporting in. Five dog-like robots were charging toward Team Four. Shoulder-high on a human and lacking the extra secondary torso of the Matrix remotes Octavio was familiar with, they were the same black material as the colony ship’s outer hull.

  “Contacts are hostile; fire at will!” Chen barked—but she was too late. The drones fired first, invisible lasers only seen by their terrible effects.

  Against the unarmored Creator whose body the team had found, the drones had used a precise beam that had burned out the heart without signific
ant secondary damage. Faced with armored targets, they unleashed the full power of the same ultraviolet combat lasers the Matrices equipped their remotes with.

  Armor exploded as the invisible beams connected, each hit equivalent to several kilos of conventional explosives. The leading Marines and Spears went down hard.

  There were still ten Marines and Spears left, and they returned fire instantly…and ineffectively. The drones ignored their counterfire, letting the fléchette rounds and light plasma bursts of the default loadouts wash over their starship-grade armor as they continued to move implacably forward and fired again.

  They didn’t miss. The part of Octavio’s mind that wasn’t gibbering in shock and fear registered that. The drones didn’t have enough data to perform precise lethal surgery on his people, but they had the sensors and mobility to make sure they didn’t miss—and the firepower to make certain what they hit died.

  There was nowhere for the survivors to run, and they didn’t even try. A new fusillade of fire answered the robots’ second attack. This one was armor-piercing grenades and super-focused plasma rounds.

  Two of the robots went down, then a third. Two shots took down the last Marines in Team Four—and then one of the drones that had been blown backward by a Spear grenade rose unsteadily to its feet and fired again.

  That shot was intercepted, the oversized bulk of D’s remote interposing itself in front of the surviving Vistans.

  “Withdraw,” the AI barked. “The remote can’t take many hits like that.”

  Unlike the drones, D’s remotes weren’t armored in energy-absorbing ceramics. Their armor was more conventional but still heavy and thick. The remote shrugged aside another hit and returned fire.

  The wounded drone might have managed to fire despite its injuries…but it didn’t get another shot. Three ultraviolet lasers hammered into the robot with the same surgical precision they’d turned on the crew, severing its legs.