Extremis (14 page)

“Too bad they don’t know our comms are out.”

“They probably do. They’ve been following right along our vector, which means they’ve passed what’s left of our commo mast. They’ve encountered our ship class before, so that wreckage tells them which part of us they just amputated. So they know we’ve got no laser comms. And if we still had a transmitter and juiced it up—”

“They’d get a strong active signal from us, and send a homing missile right up our—nostril.”

“Er…yes. So even if we had the radio left, we couldn’t use it—and they know that.”

“Okay, so they’ve got to kill us. And they’re going to. And soon. But how, if they can’t get lock? Of course, we can always fight back.” Zhou’s sarcasm became a sneer. “I say we wait until they’re at point-blank range and then use our anti-missile lasers to take some paint off their hull—if we’re lucky.”

Wethermere visualized the anti-missile lasers—and suddenly stopped hearing Zhou. Instead, he slowly (so it seemed) realized how the SD was going to try to destroy them—and why it needed to get well within a light-second to do so. He turned to Ensign Vikrit. “Nandita, when we returned to Admiral Yoshikuni’s fleet in Beaumont, didn’t we relay a lot of technical intelligence on the wrecks the Baldies left behind after the First Battle of Raiden?”

“Sure, plenty.”

“And did we keep a copy of that in our data banks?”

“Yes. We were slated to escape and retransmit it back in Achilles and beyond if the fleet was defeated.”

“Okay. I need you to dig up any data on the targeting range of the Baldy PDF systems.”

“Oh, at least ten light-seconds, maybe more like—”

“No, I mean the terminal-targeting arrays.”

Vikrit, who had emerged from NOTC just in time to welcome the Baldies to human space, responded with an uncertain echo. “Terminal-targeting arrays?”

Wethermere explained as he looked over her shoulder. “When threat forces come really close to a hull, the main sensors usually hand off the target tracking to a smaller, dedicated point defense fire array. That array is specially designed to maintain lock on targets that, due to their speed and proximity, present the defense batteries with rapid changes in telemetry.”

Nandita was poring over her screens. Wethermere turned to Lubell. “Enemy range and rate of closure?”

Lubell had it immediately. “Range: eight light-seconds. Closing at just under one light-second per minute.”

Nandita leaned closer to her screens. “Just a moment, just a mo—here. Yes, their PDF batteries are supported by a ‘hull-dispersed grid of independent targeting arrays.’ Approximate hand-off range of zero point five light-seconds.”

Tepple whistled. “That’s close.”

Wethermere shrugged. “The Baldy systems were designed as much for navigational path clearance as defense, I’m guessing. The SD chasing us was one of their original, multipurpose hulls—only their newest generation of SDH are purpose-built warbirds.”

Zhou looked pale now, but tried to sound brave. “So, we have accumulated a wealth of fascinating data that tells us—with great precision—the manner in which the Baldies are going to target and destroy us at point-blank range. Now what?”

Ossian Wethermere looked up and smiled. “Now we’re going to use that data to destroy them—and save ourselves.”

* * *

Because the fumes were not as bad in Engineering’s auxiliary control room, Wethermere and Zhou entered there. The two technicians that had been waiting for them saluted. Wethermere returned the salutes. “You’re relieved. Report to your pods.”

“Yes, sir.” They needed no encouragement.

Zhou looked at Wethermere. “You sure you want to do this?”

“You sure you want to live?”

Zhou nodded. “Okay, so what sort of control do you need?”

“A timer would get the job done, but a remote controller will maximize our chances of survival.”

“So you need a remote controller. And a backup, too. Fine.” And Zhou started changing control settings on the master board. “Care to explain the plan in a little more detail? Blowing up a drive is not going to create a big enough explosion to hurt the Baldies at half a light-second, sir.”

“I’m not planning to use our drive failure as a bomb.”

“No? Then I’m really in the dark, sir.”

“Funny—you were the one who gave me the idea.”

“Me, sir?”

“Absolutely. What did you say? When the engines fail, they’re going to shake the ship apart—literally shake it apart?”

Zhou frowned. “Yes, sir, I said something like that.”

“And why does the ship shake apart instead of explode?”

Zhou actually leaned back and adopted a slightly professorial tone. “Well, you see—”

Wethermere held up his hand. “How long is this lecture going to take?”

“I dunno. About ten minutes?”

“We’ll be dead in five. Give me the short version.”

“Yes, sir. Look, it’s like this—every reactionless-drive field has a stability limit that defines the amount of energy it can handle safely. Combat damage reduces this limit, which is why running a damaged drive at full power is pretty dangerous. When the engines reach their stability limit, the drive, and everything in the ship, begins to experience something that feels and acts a lot like aerodynamic drag. What’s happening is that as the drive exceeds its safe limit, the pseudo-velocity envelope—the field that shifts the ship forward through ‘bent space’—begins to unravel.”

“And so the field’s ability to suspend the physics of normal space begins to become less than absolute.”

“Yeah—more or less. Most ship systems can’t take much of this drag—not more than a four or five gee equivalent, because at that point the phase distortion and interruption is so severe that it compromises the operation of the drive and the power plants. That leads to stresses and loss of coherence, which produces multiple, but not simultaneous, failures. The ship does not explode in a single spasm. It literally shakes apart in a cascade of smaller explosions and a shower of debris.”

“Good.”

“Uh, yes, sir, but how does that help us?”

“Mr. Zhou, when a ship with a reactionless drive is destroyed, and its drive field is annihilated, what happens to its wreckage?”

“Well, sir, the wreckage would go from a near-relativistic velocity to a dead stop. Instantly. Pseudo-velocity doesn’t involve inertia.”

“So I thought. Meaning that, from the perspective of another ship that’s still being propelled by a reactionless drive, this wreckage would drop behind in a near-relativistic rush—so fast that you wouldn’t have the time to see or scan it. Is that about right?”

“Yes, right.” And then the light came on somewhere behind Zhou’s eyes. “Oh, I get it.”

Wethermere smiled. “Yes, I think you do. And now we’ve got”—he checked his watch—“about two minutes to get into our pods.”

“Yes, sir—and sir?”

“Yes?”

“I think you’d better rethink that business about you taking a compromised pod, sir. Because you’re carrying the remote, and if your pod goes pear-shaped—”

“You’re right, Zhou. Whoever carries the remote controller has to be in a reliable pod. But I’m not going to be the one carrying the remote.”

“No, sir?”

“No. You are.”

Zhou looked like he’d swallowed his tongue. “
Me
, sir?”

“Yes, you. You’re the engineer, you know the tolerances, and you’ve got a belly-feel for the ship’s drives, even when you’re at the other end of her. Or even from inside an escape pod, I’ll bet. We’ll give the backup unit to Lubell, if you think he’s the right officer for it.”

Zhou considered. “Absolutely, sir. He’d do fine. Better than me, probably—”

“That’s bullshit, Zhou. Don’t start getting heroic on me. Now get into your pod, and give me the backup controller. I’ll drop it off with Lubell on my way.”

* * *

Ossian let the escape pod’s automated system dog the outer hatch, and then the inner hatch, before he tested the seals. Seemed tight—not that he could tell.

He waited for the automatic harness to snap into place around him: it didn’t. Malfunction number one: a bumpy ride at least, hopefully not lethal. He pried a few straps out of the packaging and secured himself as best he could.

His watch chirped. Approximately twenty seconds now.

The small overhead monitor came on. Zhou had linked the screen into a graphical representation of the engine readouts. They were all deeply in the red. A tremor started behind Wethermere and then worked around to the front.

The stability of the drive’s pseudo-velocity envelope hovered just below the failure line.

Lubell’s voice—tinny and incomplete over the damaged internal comm system—announced. “Range to bogey, 0.7 light-seconds.”

Zhou juiced the engines a bit. The pervasive tremor became a violent and irregular quaking.

The envelope gauge hopped above the stability line for the briefest moment, then settled right down on the limit marker.

“Range to bogey, 0.6 light-seconds.”

A hiss from behind; Vikrit had remotely primed the pod’s thrusters and clearing charges. At least those seemed to be functional.

Zhou pushed the reactionless drives a tiny bit more—and then the shaking became wild, brutal, unpredictable, as if Ossian had fallen into a continental fault line during a tectonic shift. The red indicator hopped over the limit marker—and started flashing black and orange.

“Range to bogey, 0.5 li—”

The pod’s ejection charge slammed Ossian forward against the straps: the eight-gee push of the solid boosters double-cracked his head against the pod’s monitor even as they kicked him farther away from the
Bucky Sherman
.

And, as his vision blurred and objects seemed to bleed into and across the now-cracked monitor, he saw the flashing engine readouts wrench mightily—and go blank.

Somewhere behind him, in the belly of the crippled courier, a tug of war—waged between real space and folded space—broke the rope that was the containment wall of a fusion reactor, then the coils of a primary drive capacitor, then the drive itself.

The
Bucky Sherman
came apart in a shuddering cascade of flame, star-white fusion plasma, and ferociously tumbling shards of titanium, composites, electro-bonded superdense armors—

Which dropped from 0.11 c pseudo-velocity to the paltry speed imparted by the explosive forces of its destruction, which scattered the pieces wide across space.

The enemy superdreadnought was at 0.51 light-seconds range when the human ship went from being a near-relativistic target to a stationary debris field.

The Arduan ship’s passive arrays detected the savagely spinning wreckage 0.51 seconds later. Computers interpreted, assessed, sent a collision warning. At that same instant, the alien ship plowed into the debris field at almost 36,000 kilometers per second.

The behemoth’s destruction was instantaneous.

4

Trivial Causes

In war, events of importance are the result of trivial causes.
—Caesar

Punt City, New Ardu/Bellerophon

Lentsul watched as a large truck turned the corner and approached. It was articulated into three blocky sections, each with an independently powered set of wheels. The lead section—a command cab—was topped by pulsing red, yellow, and
murn
lights: an emergency vehicle. Behind it, Arduans—mostly members of the
Destoshaz
caste—were riding in or atop the other segments of the truck, protective suits on and already half-sealed.

Another, similar vehicle emerged right on its tail, similarly crewed. The boxy vehicle had evidently stood unused since its off-loading on to New Ardu: each wheel hub still had expandable wheel-spikes in place. The remote-deployable spikes had been included to help move bulky loads across the rough surfaces of the uninhabited planet that they—the Star Wanderers—had thought to find.

Instead, the planet they had journeyed many generations to reach, and which they had optimistically labeled New Ardu, was already inhabited. The world—named Bellerophon by its denizens—was teeming with combative, restive bipeds who called themselves
humans
and styled themselves as sentient, even though they lacked the faintest trace of a
selnarmic
awareness. And here, abutting and partially arrogating one of their harsh, angular, concrete cities, the Children of Illudor had established their own city of Punt.

A dividing line—six of the human “blocks” in width—had been evacuated to create a depopulated zone between the urban complexes of the two races. And today, alarms—and satellite imagery—indicated that two fires were now raging closer to the human side of that zone. The work of local arsonists, no doubt.

Lentsul watched closely as an Enforcer defense sled—hovering about three meters off the ground—followed the second truck into the street, keeping at least ten meters distance, defensive blisters turning restlessly. Then the two of the blisters on the left side of the almost featureless airborne ovoid snapped around and rotated their weapon-sensor clusters skyward, back in the direction of Punt. Two small, vaguely cruciform specks had appeared overhead, their flight having apparently originated in the human precincts that were to the immediate right of the column.

As if they knew they had been detected, the specks began corkscrewing about, doubling back, swooping, climbing and all the while, buzzing like a pair of overgrown
zifrik
worker-drones. The defense sled’s left-hand defensive blisters tracked them carefully, watchfully, through their chaotic aerial ballet: in other circumstances, the blisters would simply have brought down what were now obviously remote-controlled toy planes. However, since the artist roundup three weeks back, orders had changed. Far more provocation was now required before discarnating the
griarfeksh
or discharging weapons in or around their areas of habitation. These little planes pushed the very limit of those new rules of engagement, but the decision was not to fire unless they came within 200 meters. So far, the airborne toys had remained at about 350 meters.

When the planes were spotted, a warning had evidently been passed up the line—by
selnarm
link, since that was fastest. The lead truck obligingly slowed as the Enforcer sled tracked the two specks through their snarling aeronautical display, the second truck thus compelled to stop fully to prevent bumping its leader. A moment passed while, evidently, the defense-sled sensors confirmed that the little planes were nonthreatening—for now. Then the
selnarmic
order to resume driving to the scene of the fires was obviously given: the first truck’s immense engines growled, and it heaved forward—