Further: Beyond the Threshold (40 page)

::Do it,:: I barked, and then thought to add, ::please.::

::My pleasure.::

Suddenly, another panel of the wall before me reconfigured into a new display, and I could see the wicked shape of the Iron Mass houseship hulking against the sea of stars, the curve of the pulsar planet just visible at the edge of the image.

::OK,
Further
,:: I said, taking a deep breath. ::Fire!::

Space rippled and rucked, and while I watched, the Iron Mass houseship seemed to shimmer and flex. One end of the ship suddenly collapsed in on itself, like an aluminum can crushed underfoot, and from the other side of the hull, a stream of debris jetted out. It was working!

But then, without warning, space smoothed back out, and aside from the visible damage done to the houseship, everything seemed normal again.

::I’m sorry, Captain Stone,:: the
Further
said. ::I was able to produce the field and invert it, but as I indicated, the drives lacked power to sustain it. We clearly inflicted some damage on the Iron Mass vessel, but I’m not sure if it was sufficient to disable it.::

::Well, they haven’t fired their big shot yet,:: I said, cautiously hopeful. ::Maybe we can—::

“RJ!” shouted the voice of Amelia from the display, her eyes wide and frightened. “I’ve been listening in on Radon while trying to keep ahead of his network defenses. It isn’t the
ship
that’s going to fire on the
Further
. It’s the
platform
!”

“What?”

“They’re loading the mass launcher with enough fissionable material to blow up a planet!”

::
Further
?:: I called out.

::We are completely immobilized, Captain,:: the ship answered. ::Firing the inverter used up virtually all our stores of power. We’ll be able to maintain limited life support within the Atrium and the bridge, but it will be the better part of a day before we can move again, much less mount any kind of defense.:: “Damn!” I slammed my fist against the arm of the command chair, my teeth gritted.

::If it comes as any consolation,:: Zel said, ::we appear to have incapacitated the Iron Mass ship. If that had been the sole danger presented to us, your plan would have apparently worked.:: ::You’ll forgive me if I find that pretty cold comfort, First,:: I said.

“RJ,” called Amelia, “I may be able to help.”

I spun around in the chair, turning to face her image on the display.

“What is it, Amelia?” I said eagerly, desperately. “Anything at all?”

“Well, I’m still working out the specifics of the platform’s mining operations, but it appears that the mass launcher is controlled by two separate command systems. It’s essentially just a big electromagnetic catapult, like a giant gauss gun. One system controls the electromagnets that accelerate the payload to escape velocity.”

She paused meaningfully.

“And?” I said.

“And the other controls the gimbals that are used to aim the launcher.”

She fell silent for another moment, her mouth drawn into a tight line, and I recognized her expression. This wasn’t the Amelia who stayed up late nights with me, telling stories about her brothers or her favorite graphic albums from childhood or the names of the characters in the fantasy novels she loved. This was Amelia the soldier. This was the Amelia who’d been trained to kill with her bare hands and who’d piloted warships and exchanged fire in border wars all across the solar system. This was the Amelia you didn’t want to meet.

“I can control the one, not the other,” she went on grimly. “I can’t stop it firing, but I can control what it’s aimed at.”

“Bless you,” I said, and blew her a kiss.

Radon was still on the other display, though his attention was elsewhere, shouting orders at someone off-screen. I toggled the audio channel back on and interrupted.

“Atari,” I said, a force of habit. I had him boxed in now, though he didn’t know it. “It’s time to stand down, Radon. You’ve hurt us and we’ve hurt you, but it’s time for this to stop now.”

“Do you mock me, unbeliever? When I have the advantage in my hands?”

“You don’t, though, Radon,” I said, no trace of warmth or humor in my voice. “This doesn’t end well for any of us if you don’t stop right now. Leave us be, and we’ll go on our way, and you can keep mining to fuel your crazy crusade across the stars. But if you fire that mass launcher, it’ll end in tears.”

“Your tears,” he shouted, sounding unreasonable, manic. “You’ll bathe in your tears as you watch your ship blow to atoms above you, and then you’ll beg for release before I end your meaningless existence.”

“No,” I said simply, shaking my head. “You won’t, and I won’t. Stand down, let me and my ship go, or you won’t like what happens next.”

“I tire of your misbelief and madness,” Radon raged. “This ends—now.”

He turned to someone out of view, and raised a spurred fist.

“Fire!”

I opened my mouth to shout for him to wait, but by then it was too late.

The projectile from the mass launcher shot up with a tremendous amount of force, enough to reach escape velocity and still be moving fast enough after shedding speed-overcoming gravity that it impacted with considerable inertia. It wasn’t the impact that did the damage, but the fissionable material inside the ferric shell, arranged into an incredibly powerful nuclear bomb. When it exploded, it far outshone the dim light of the dead star overhead, blinding bright.

The Iron Mass vessel never stood a chance.

On the display screen, Radon sputtered, looking with disbelief as he watched his spacefaring home go up in a ball of nuclear fire.

“Divine Ideal!” Radon cursed.

The
Compass Rose
had slipped the bonds of the planet’s gravity and was well away as the Iron Mass ship began to plunge downward toward the planet’s surface.

“Amelia?” I said as I watched the houseship drift ever lower, until finally it exploded in a fiery conflagration that reached for kilometers in every direction.

The mining platform was far away from the blast, and had the leading edge of the shock wave not hit the refinery, they’d likely have been able to weather the storm. But it did, and they didn’t.

The refinery, triggered by the impact of the exploding ship, quickly approached a runaway meltdown.

“Good-bye, RJ,” said the image of Amelia on the display, and then was gone.

A second new sun raged from the planet’s surface as the refinery went up in an atomic holocaust that consumed Radon and Amelia, the mining platform and the cairn forest, the bodies of Bin-Ney and Zaslow, and everything else for a range of dozens of kilometers.

Maruti and Xerxes weren’t happy about having to ride back to the
Further
affixed to the bottom of the
Compass Rose
, and less so that they had to wait even longer while the ship’s generators built up enough power to open the hangar bay doors. But once we were back on board, with the solid deck beneath us, all was forgiven.

Xerxes was unable to properly communicate, having devoted a large part of eir intellect to storing and sustaining the uploaded gestalt of crash survivors from the planet below.

Maruti, as much as he wanted to talk, was kept busy helping Jida to grow a new arm, fabricating new bodies for Zaslow and Bin-Ney and decanting their consciousness backups into their new homes, and integrating the backup of Amelia’s mind with the compressed memories that her previous incarnation had sent me from the mining platform.

Amelia remembered nothing of the final moments on the mining platform, her final memories being those of contacting me on board the
Compass Rose
as Jida and I were making good our escape. She knew that her previous iteration had sacrificed herself for us, but until I told her about changing the mass launcher’s aim, she’d had no idea that she’d been responsible for saving the entire crew of the
Further
as well. As I described the events to her, though, with her projected in holographic miniature on the palm of my hand, I could tell that she was grateful not to have any memory of those final deeds. For all that Amelia the soldier was necessary from time to time, Amelia the good-hearted friend was no more comfortable around her than I was.

Jida was happy to be rejoined with the rest of her mind, as small as it was, and I could see the looks of shock, fear, and pride as they flickered across her other two faces as the memories spread throughout the legion fragment. Jida, speaking in three voices in unison, thanked me for my part in sparing her another death at the hands of the Iron Mass, and then waited patiently for me to thank her for her part in sparing me the same. After sufficient thanks had been passed around, the three Jida bodies crushed me between them in a massive hug, and then she wandered off, talking to herself about the possibilities of fabricating a new body for herself, perhaps one a bit better adapted for adventure.

And that was that. Everyone was restored, wounds were licked, and we had nothing to do but wait until the ship’s drives accumulated enough power for us to move on. Fortunately, by the time we’d all gotten squared away, the
Further
had generated at least enough power to turn on life support in the rest of the ship, so I could at least go back to my quarters for some much-needed rest.

After taking a well-deserved nap, I showered and dressed, and wandered down to Maruti’s quarters. I felt bad about having been so short with him through much of our recent misadventure and wanted to apologize for being so curt.

I needn’t have bothered, I suppose. Maruti was so caught up in his most recent discovery that I doubt he even noticed the slight in the first place, much less my apology after the fact.

“Oh, Captain!” he said as I entered his rooms. I noted that he’d taken the opportunity to clean and groom himself, and was now wearing a purple velvet tuxedo, a yellow flower in his lapel, with a huge cigar smoldering at the corner of his wide mouth and a martini glass in his hand. “I was hoping you’d stop by!”

He waved me over to a large, flat, table-like object he’d erected at the center of the room. As I approached, I could see that its surface was configured as a display and that a strange, low-resolution kind of virtual environment could be seen within.