Hegemony (32 page)

"Quite, Captain. This does not make our task any easier. And I agree;
Acro-telestos
Irular does seem to be a likely suspect. But you do realize that 'likely suspect' is not going to be enough; even if we can get somewhere where we can trust the authorities, and report, we have nothing to prove it's him.
We're
not even sure; we certainly don't have enough to convince the Fleet."

"Yeah," said Freya, slowly. There was a moment of silence, only the whine of the skimmer's lift-fans, and Freya went on. "Actually Muir, I agree, but also, I just realized that I don't care. Like you said, for what it's worth I
think
Irular might be the traitor... I could be wrong, I hope I am. Or I could be right. But it doesn't matter, because dealing with him isn't our task."

"What's our task, Muir?" Freya continued rhetorically, not really pausing to let Muir reply. "We know part of what's going on. Maybe enough. And we have some resources to act with."

"All right, Captain, I'll bite," said Muir with a tinge of amusement. "What is our task?" He had served with Freya for long enough to know that there were times when she was just competent, and then there were times when she flashed brilliant like a laser pulse. He had a feeling, and hope, that this was one of the latter.

"We need to do two things, Muir," Freya said. "First, we get that interceptor pilot, Alexzandra Neel, out of local medical custody. Even if we hadn't rescued her in the first place, she was member of our squadron, and that makes her one of 'ours.' I'm not letting them have one of my people, whoever the 'them' is. Hell, we gave her to them, and now they want to kill her. We owe her a rescue."

"And second?" Muir did not bother to ask how Freya expected to manage the  rescue.

"Second, Muir, is that we get that data to someone in the Central Throne Fleet who will pass it on. I don't care
who
the traitor is, because it has really limited bearing. Getting that data back was our mission. We complete our mission."

"And to do that, to do both of those, Muir, we're going need to get a ship. And we can't use the guard-ship I'm in 'command' of; we have to assume that our enemy,
whoever
he is, will have agents in the crew, to the point of it being a death-trap.

"So we're going to have to take back the
Ice Knife
."

---

"Can you stop it?" asked Captain Nas Killick. Despite the unfolding crisis his voice sounded calm, but the utter stillness of his stance gave lie to that. Fury fought to break free inside Nas, but fury would not help right now, and Nas suppressed it with fierce will. The ordinance master was still looking for a hardware solution, but Nas' hope was focused on Ylayn now.

"Maybe..." Ylayn said, at length. "It depends on how it was done. If it's all hardware, there's nothing I can do directly, though I can probably hack the detonation controls and disable the command to detonate on launch. We could jettison them, then."

"The fuckers really got us good," Xulios said, and Nas fought to restrain a fresh spurt of the rage he felt from reaching his face.

The warheads, the military-spec high performance warheads, the warheads he had been paid with, were boobytrapped. It had been done very subtly. The infiltration had been hardware based, using nano-scale smart material modules that had
grown
into place, connecting into the control systems of the warheads, taking them over.

"All right," Nas said. "Here's the deal. Ylayn. You link in and see what you can do. If you can stop the new commands, do it. If not, or if you're not sure, then just disable the detonate-on-launch command and we'll jettison the warheads.

"If we do that, then be ready for FTL. We're going to make an almighty big bang out here, and lots of eyes will be on us.

"And if you can't disable the trap at all, the rest of the crew will stand by the shuttle and the escape pods."

"Right," said Ylayn and plugged in to her data unit. The unit was already connected to the warheads' control systems, and she plunged in to the data environment, perceiving it as a fugue state of sensory information. Not many data experts could read information the ways she could; she knew herself to be one of the best.

This was going to tax her abilities. The little nano-hijackers were linked into the system on a physical level, cutting out much of the control system, ready to deliver short-circuited commands to follow their own deadly agenda.

Despite the captain's orders, Ylayn did not bother to waste time trying to work with the actual command system. Maybe she could have overridden the trap that would detonate the warheads as soon as they were launched; she could have tried to feed false data to the accelerometers and a dozen other systems to do that.

But that would have been pretty risky; whoever set this trap would have probably expected that sort of move, would have set secondary and tertiary traps for it, buried in the command data structure of the little nano-modules that had taken over the warheads. Ylayn didn't really think she had the time to defeat multiple layers of traps, to carefully probe and test every step.

And besides, even if she could make it work, that sort of solution was... inelegant. Defeating the actual infiltrator systems... that would be the mark of a real artist. Of course if she failed, she and the
Whisperknife
might die. But then, high stakes really made the game worth playing. Ylayn suppressed a tingle in her body, concentrating her mind into the link.

The little nano-modules were clever work. Not Hegemonic hardware; the data structure was all wrong. There was no time for her to fully analyze then, to build a virtual simulation and run through all the possible variables. But there was a form-follows-function sort of vibe to them, and she thought that maybe...

Yes. They were almost impossible to reprogram, but not impossible to deceive. There was no way to reset the detonation timer... but what if she ran it forward? Obviously it would go off at zero... what about at negative one? She'd have to advance the clock faster than the cycle rate of the little oversight program, so that it was
never
actually at zero. Did the creators of these little devices imagine that their program might exist
after
the detonation? If they did,
this
would be the very last thing she ever did, Ylayn thought, and triggered the command.

"Got it," she said, with a slow smile, returning her attention to her own senses and looking at the Captain with a deliberately languid expression, to contrast the way her heart was hammering.

"Got it?"

"Oh, yes. The infiltrator systems are inactive, Captain."

"All of them?"

"Yes."

"OK, Ylayn," Nas said. "That was... good work."

"It was
brilliant
work, Captain. And I want my reward," Ylayn said, feeling her heart still beating hard.

"Reward?" Nas' voice held a hint of an edge. His crew didn't speak to him like this, usually.

"Oh, yes," Ylayn said with a smile. "I think we're going to be very busy soon, finding out who did this to us, dealing with them. And I want another hour in bed with you before we do anything else."

The Hegemonic Fleet
swift-ship
Ice Knife
floated silently alongside a docking arm of the Yuro System Defense Fleet Orbital Anchorage Station. The station was a rectangular box, almost a kilometer across its long axis, gleaming bright silver where its alloy structure reflected the light of the world below it. A pair of counter-rotating spin-gravity habitat rings spun slowly at the far end of the station. An array of a dozen rectangular docking arms projected hundreds of meters from one side of the station, designed to hold the majority of the larger warships of the system defense fleet. Each docking arm was an articulated corridor, with runs of conduits and wires running down its length.

The entire length of the station flickered and flashed with blue orbital traffic control lights. Vast white flood lights illuminated ships being worked on by maintenance technicians and automated repair drones. Most of the ships docked at the station were guard-ships; much larger, but slower and not as sleek as the little swift-ship.

It was slightly unusual for a Central Throne Fleet ship to dock at a system defense station, but not unheard of. Fleet swift-ships and even lance-ships on patrol would sometimes come in to Yuro and get support from the System Defense Fleet.

The little ship was tethered to the docking arm, connected with a telescoping pressurized boarding corridor and with power and data lines. Those latter were necessary; the ship had pushed her singularity very hard, making a pair of very high stress FTL transits, and the reactor's femto-singularity had been allowed to safely decay. Now the restart process was underway. It took more than a hundred hours to verify the condition of the singularity reactor, re-form the femto-singularity itself, and then complete all the tests required to assure safe operation. Right now there were maybe eighty hours to go. The ship could have shaved dozens of hours off the restart time if there were pressing need, but there was no pressing need, and the procedure was moving ahead with all due deliberation and care.

Demi-Captain Persios Talso gave the reactor restart readouts a cursory look and leaned back into the padded chair in his new quarters. He had not expected them to be large, there was no room to waste aboard a swift-ship, but their tiny size surprised him. He had commanded a Yuro SDF swift-ship for more than three thousand hours, earlier in his career, and that ship had boasted larger quarters. Of course that ship had been manned mostly by humans. This ship was Fleet, built for daemons; less volume was allotted to habitation space, giving more space for reaction mass and weapons payload.

The tiny quarters were bearable, he decided. After all, they came with command of this ship, and that was a very valuable thing indeed. For an officer of a system defense fleet to be given an exchange duty with the Central Throne Fleet was a mark of distinction. Only the best from the system fleets were even invited to serve a tour of duty with
The
Fleet. Only the best of the best would be invited to serve that tour of duty in command of a Fleet ship. So this was a significant honor, and a distinction that would stand out for him. Of course, he admitted, connections helped. And the fact that he was
aristokratai
helped more; a human would have a hard time serving on a Fleet ship. An assault-ship was large enough that extra command acceleration pods for human passengers could be carried without any real cost in terms of volume, mounted aboard carried aboard just in case. But most other Fleet ships didn't bother. Or couldn't, without significant cost in terms of volume, in the case of a Fleet swift-ship. And of course it would have been an uncomfortable fit for a commoner human, even with the courtesy of military rank, to serve among
aristokratai
daemons. That was no problem for him, of course. Though it
was
odd, he thought, to have
everyone
under his command be
aristokratai
.

But more important than this command itself was where it might lead. A good performance here might see him transferred permanently into the Central Throne Fleet. Then... then he would finally be able to do something notable.

For a moment, his mind wrestled with the familiar feelings this line of thought brought. His eyes darted back and forth, his bio-avatar's breath came short. Then the moment was past. Persios took a deep breath and collected himself. It galled him that he could not control the reaction... helplessness assailed him. But this ship might be the first step on a path away from that helplessness. Abruptly, he blinked and his face was calm again. For a moment he could not recall what had just disturbed him. Well, no matter.

A ping on his communications terminal signaled a new report from his crew. Persios considered for a bit; aboard his last command, a guard-ship, he had let his
demoi
executive officer handle such matters, leaving himself to deal with overall command, strategy and supervision, the proper work of an
aristokratos
. But here...

Persios focused for a moment, opening his mind to a wireless interface data feed; only low-bandwidth unsecured information could be accessed wirelessly, but for this it was enough. The report concerned the return of his executive officer, he saw. The man was of impeccable lineage, Persios admitted. He had come back aboard by data-link, taking up a spare avatar stored aboard the
Ice Knife.
That spoke of some haste. His new executive had been gone quite a while on his expedition to track down spare parts for the ship. Persios supposed that the man was truly devoted to the ship, though there was a chance he might have expected command of her himself. It would be best to watch him closely.

Perhaps it was time to head to the ship's "bridge." The space wasn't actually where the
Ice Knife
was commanded from, that was done from inside a set of command neural nets. But the bridge served as a sort of ward room and meeting place to deal with ship's business when the crew inhabited their humanoid avatars.