Death of a Starship

Death of a
Starship

by Jay Lake

Smashwords Edition by Jay
Lake

Copyright © 2009, 2011
Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

Cover photograph copyright ©
2006, 2011 Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

Originally published
December, 2009 by MonkeyBrain Books, Austin, TX.
This ebook text varies slightly from the original
edition.

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Death of a
Starship

by Jay Lake

Second battle of 3-Freewall, more
than a baseline century past

“Z-flotilla’s gone over to the
rebels!” shouted one of the comm ensigns. Sweat beaded on the boy’s
shaved scalp. He was still young enough to be excited by
combat.

NSS
Enver Hoxha
’s battle bridge was
wedge-shaped, command stations at the narrow aft end, a giant array
of displays at the blunt forward end, everything finished out in
military-grade carbonmesh and low-intensity gel interfaces. A dozen
duty stations were arrayed before and below Captain Saenz, eighteen
officers and enlisted laboring wet-backed and trembling in the
service of their own imminent death. Everything reeked of panicked
men and distressed electronics.

Commander Ulyanov leaned close, his
bullet head gleaming sweat bright as the ensign’s. “They’re not
firing...yet. With respect sir, we’re done. All the other capital
assets have gone over or been neutralized.”

“
Neutralized” in deep space meant
decompressive death for hundreds or thousands of crew, the
survivors scattering like sparks from a bonfire in lifepods which
were more likely to be used as ranging targets than ever be rescued
within their survival windows. Except in a civil war, when it could
also mean officers lined up in boat bays and gunned down by excited
sailors acting under mutinous orders.

Captain Saenz stared at the
main displays, all shunted to internal status reports. Everything
glowed amber or red. The battle bridge shuddered, gravimetrics
cycling on a decay curve tending asymptotically toward catastrophic
failure. He’d had damage control shut down the alarms, even the
strobes. Too many of the
Hoxha
’s systems were critical or
supercritical. If any of the new skippers in Z-flotilla worked up
the nerve to open fire on their erstwhile heaviest asset, those
systems wouldn’t matter to anyone but an after-action forensics
team. Imminent death had become remarkably quiet. “I will
not
strike my colors,” he
muttered.

“
Then they’ll strike ‘em for us,
Rod.”

“
So we withdraw.”

Ulyanov glanced around the bridge.
Saenz wondered if his first officer were on the brink of switching
loyalties. Was he counting heads? Or sidearms? But no, the exec
turned his gaze back to the captain, guile absent from his eyes.
“Where to? This is...was...the last Loyalist fleet.”

“
Anywhere outside this disaster
area.”

“
We’ve only got one contingent
withdrawal course still open. And the window on that beacon’s
getting more and more narrow.”

Saenz chopped a hand down.
“Go.”

Ulyanov slid a hand over his
console, setting off stored actions plans. “Attention on bridge,”
he said. “We are implementing contingency gamma seven,
effective–”

Something hit them hard
enough to flop the battle bridge’s multiply- redundant, hardened
gravimetrics. Polarity cycled several times in rapid succession,
bouncing everything that wasn’t strapped down between the deck and
the overhead. Lights dimmed and blowers cut out as the
Hoxha
’s engineering
section routed power to the c-drivers.

Larger ships had an inherent
advantage in reaching the lightspeed discontinuity, especially deep
in stellar gravity wells. Somewhere at the bottom, the equations
rested in part on F
_net
=m*a, which in turn drove
Higgs boson crowding and enabled the c-transition. Larger ships had
larger mass, and in c-physics the value of mass in the equation
scaled more rapidly than the value of
acceleration.

In other words, once
Hoxha
lurched into
motion, for all that her tormentors could literally fly rings
around her, she’d make her exit from the battle into the ghostly
reaches of c-space long before they could follow the negative
energy traces of her wake. As long as her systems were sufficiently
whole when she reached transition speed, that
was.

Captain Saenz watched his lightpen
find a stable resting point in three pieces on the floor. “Think we
should have drunk those last bottles of wine in the executive
wardroom, Georgi?”

Ulyanov laughed. “There’s always
tomorrow. Give us another seven minutes on this acceleration power
curve and we’ll live to see it.”

Four minutes and change
later, Z-flotilla decided it had new orders and began pouring
firepower into
Hoxha
’s aft ventral armor and shields. Saenz declined to return
fire in favor of maintaining shield strength and keeping his ship
moving. The battle bridge grew vacuum-quiet, save for the crackling
ripple from the gravs. The damage control figures flickered on the
main display so fast the human eye couldn’t track any
more.

“
Still going to make it,” Ulyanov
said. It was more of a question, or perhaps a prayer, than a
statement.

Saenz watched the numbers
toll the death knell of his ship. Forward and dorsal shields were
down completely. His crew strength was below thirty-five percent
effective. Damage control parties under Commander Poolyard were a
hundred and forty-two percent committed. Which meant there were
fires and worse raging unchecked in
Hoxha
’s belly. “Depends on what else
they hit us with.”

“
Rod...”

Here it
comes
, thought Saenz. Eyes still on the
main screen, his hand drifted to his flechette pistol. “Too late,
Commander. We’re too late to do anything else.”

“
Listen. Please. I–”

Whatever Ulyanov had been about to
say was lost in a blare of navigation alarms. “Not now!” screamed
Lieutenant Commander Dürer. “We’ve got a mass moving into our
c-transition space!”

Any collision almost
certainly meant an extremely violent energy exchange,
rendering
Hoxha
into a minor sun for a few moments.

“
Drop shields,” Saenz ordered.
“Drop environmental power. All non-engine power to forward
batteries. Vaporize it.”

With that, the funereal hush of the
bridge imploded, a cascade of shouts in the increasingly stale and
smoky air.

“
It’s about two percent of our
mass, captain!”

“
Batteries two, three and seven
offline, sir. Six and eight are...they’re...gone, sir! Just not
there anymore.”

“
Not a rock, it’s altering
course.”

“
Not one of ours...er, theirs.
Nothing we know, I mean. No IFF signature, wrong
composition.”

“
It’s a fucking self-propelled
asteroid!”

“
Language, Lieutenant.”

“
It’s absorbing
over fourteen terawatt/seconds of firepower, sir. And it’s
still
there
!”

In the midst of the chaos,
Captain Saenz watched the main screen. It now displayed a
simplified diagram of
Hoxha
’s escape trajectory. The
erratic motions of the interfering mass were plotted in an
intersecting curve.

“
You have anything to do with
this, Georgi?” he asked in a few seconds of random
quiet.

“
I don’t want to die, sir,” said
Ulyanov. “Not this way or any other.”

“
No one wants to die, my friend.”
Saenz found his hand was still on his pistol. “But how many of us
get to live forever?”

Then there was more fire
pounding the unprotected aft of the ship, and an explosive pressure
vent between hull frames 127 and 144, and the mystery mass was
still inside their escape trajectory, and the purple c-lights
stuttered on as the battle bridge gravs shut down completely and a
horrendous, tooth shattering wrench overtook
Hoxha
and her crew as they
disappeared forever into a screaming white light.

‡

Menard: Nouvelle Avignon, Prime
See

The Grand Ekumenical Basilica
towered over a kilometer into the violet Avignard sky. The edifice
was a vast, eye-bending twist of titanium and carbonmesh sheathed
with glittering spun diamond glass in every color known to man.
Red-winged angel-flyers circled it endlessly, security in the air
matched by ground-based, orbital, and virtual assets even more
fearsome for being inconspicuous. Diamond windows, angels and all,
the building was a giant, shouted prayer to the Lord God, a
celebration of the glory of creation and man’s place in it. That
the Church used that glory to impress the Emperor and his court,
not to mention all the pilgrims and tourists, was a collateral
benefit to His earthly servants. As if in response from Heaven,
lightning played perpetually around the shining crosses that
gleamed through every night and were supposedly even visible from
orbit.

Not that the Very Reverend Jonah
Menard, Chor Episcopos in the ranks of the holy and mid-level
functionary of the Church, had ever been able to spot them in his
frequent comings and goings.

Once more down the gravity well. As
it happened he had business outside the long, glorious shadow of
the tower, down amid the featureless warren of offices in which the
majority of the functions of the Church were conducted. He was
bound for the Xenic Bureau of the Grand Ekumenical Security
Directorate – his own department. Like almost all of the Ekumen
Orthodox Church’s vast and tentacled bureaucracy, the Xenic Bureau
was housed quite sensibly in an underground building out of the
public eye. The Bureau’s quarters were a multilayered maze of
identical concrete corridors and meeting rooms and cubicles, with a
perhaps higher than normal concentration of virteolizer rooms – the
Xenic Bureau spent a lot of time working inside its collective
imagination.

Chor Episcopos Menard was a short
man, not at all like the popular image of either a humble parish
priest or one of the grand patriarchs of the Church. He was
barrel-chested with an unfortunate run toward fat and knees which
ached from a lifetime of kneeling too much. His forehead was
tattooed with the three-barred Orthodox cross in a deep green ink
that matched the shade of his eyes, his scalp dark with razor
stubble. Though he could argue doctrine with all the fervor of his
University of Romagrad Th.D., Menard was also one of the Church’s
leading experts on xenic intelligences. Such as they were, and such
as they might exist.