Hegemony (7 page)

No matter. There was work to do, and few crew to do it; swift-ships were not overstaffed by any means. It was time to get back to it, thought Freya, and unspooled an optical cable from a socket in the wall. With a practiced motion she plugged the cable into its receptor behind her ear and closed her avatar's eyes. The link was clearly present in her mind, and she transferred herself, sending her daemon into a neural net within the main control system of the
Ice Knife
, becoming a part of the ship. Data flooded her mind. The static tests were almost done and the telemetry looked correct. She could
feel
the reactor working properly, parameters all neatly within designated benchmarks, power ready and waiting to flood the ship at her will. Just another few hours and the tests would be done, and it would be time to depart.

"Captain Rilk,"
said a voice in Hans Rilk's mind.

"What is it, Kiril?" Neither of them were actually speaking. Direct interface connections turned disciplined thoughts into words. The interface would not pick up or act on just any thought; that would be impossible to control. Instead, the interface tracked the thoughts that would have actually formed spoken words or activated physical movement. "Inside" the virtual reality projected into the user's mind, one could "see" information, and react by "saying" commands or "touching" controls. Skilled users could learn to "feel" data and "will" a response, but that skill took time to develop.

"What is it?" Rilk repeated, surprised that he had to ask the sensors operator twice, but refraining from taking a "look" at the sensors data stream. He had his own command data stream to deal with.

"Contacts, Captain. I have two contacts. They just showed up, really bright. Looks like two ships going for high acceleration burns."

"I'll take a look," said Rilk.

The two unknown ships were too far to actually see, especially in the glare of their own thrust, but the hundred kilometer long plumes of plasma fire from their drives were clear as new stars in the sky. Doppler shift and triangulation gave a range, less than two hundred million kilometers, and a projected vector, headed for an intercept with the convoy of four freight-liners. Others sensors gave other data; spectral analysis showed the plasma to be ionized carbon, a common reaction mass. Thermal sensors gave an estimated energy output; enormous. Simple observation gave acceleration, almost five gees. And that data together with the energy output told of the two ships' mass: almost five hundred kilotons each.

"Those have got to be some sort of warships," said Gala Rilk, first mate and captain's spouse. "Their acceleration is just too high for anything else."

"Could be void-runner ships," said Kiril Navov, the sensor operator, nervously.

The entire command crew, six people, were in the ship's conference room, trying to make sense of what they were seeing.

Two ships were making a high gee vector change to intercept the convoy. They were fast, and very large for the acceleration they were showing.

"It's not void-runners," said Hans Rilk. "There is no way those sub-human pirates could have ships that large."

"No way that we know of," said N'tasa Navov, Kiril's wife and the FTL navigator. Her voice was tight and controlled, but her large eyes flickered. "That doesn't help us. I don't think those are Hegemonic ships; they would have responded to our communications."

"Their acceleration pattern already implied that. Hegemonic ships wouldn't have staged their acceleration like that," said Gala. "They went from five gees to one point two five for an hour, and then back up to five gees, repeated in a five hour pattern. That's an acceleration profile for biologically manned ships; they're giving the crew an hour outside of their acceleration pods for every four hours of high acceleration."

"Or that's what they want us to think," said Rikard Kuper, the chief engineer. His broad features showed no particular strain, but his voice was nervous. "What if it's some system-archon's fleet that's rebelled? They could be pretending to be non-Hegemonic."

"That's too much of a stretch. I don't think any system defense fleet in this region has two lance-ships to spare, especially a rebel..." said Kiril.

"There's been no rumors of any rebellious moves from any of the local system-archons," said N'tasa. "That sort of thing doesn't just happen out of the black."

"What about that rebellion, about a hundred thousand hours ago, ten tenkays, in the Kesult system..." said Kuper.

"That wasn't just random; it was a plot by the Okonor clan for almost half a million hours..." The babble of voice was growing.

"They must have been drifting with minimal internal power. We never spotted them."

"It's not like we were looking," said Kiril. "We saw them right away once they lit their drives."

"How did they get so close to us?"

"Bad luck."

"Or some sort of inside job."

"That's ridiculous!
We
didn't even know where we were going to emerge."

"...We have to do something!" exclaimed Kuper, speaking over the other voices.

"What the hell can we do!?" said Kiril, his tone now bordering on shrill.

"All right," said Rilk, loudly. "We have the situation as it is. I'm going to be talking to the other captains in about five minutes. Here's what we have. We have two ships that
are
going to intercept us. They mass about the same as lance-ships and they accelerate like lance-ships, so let's call them lance-ships.

"Now, no one in the convoy has ever heard any reports of void-runners having ships that big, or of any of the outlaw,
anomic,
colonies." Those were worlds on the periphery of the Hegemony but outside of the Hegemonic law, the
nomos
, and also unaffiliated with any other interstellar multi-system government.

"So they're someone's military ships," said Kiril.

"If they are, they're not acting like it. They have no active transponders and have made no response to anything we send," said Rilk.

"Unless there's a war..." said Kiril.

"There was nothing... nothing about any war warnings in any of the navigation update services when we left," said N'tasa. "If there were even hints, rumors like that... at least one of the nav-update networks would have posted something."

She went on, "And I don't think a military fleet would send lance-ships to capture civilian freight-liners. It's overkill. Military swift-ships would be enough..."

"Then who?" Kuper said.

"Whoever they are," Rilk said, "at current rate of closure and with their acceleration, they will intercept us in less than thirty-six hours. We need at least another hundred hours of stabilization time to even try risking an FTL transit."

"We have no chance of outrunning them as a convoy; they have ten times our top acceleration even if we dump all cargo. And we have to assume hostile intentions."

Rilk paused for a second, watching the faces of his command crew, seeing nerves and fear and uncertainty there. He kept his own face still. The captain can't afford to look nervous, he thought.

"I'm going to see if the other ships have come up with anything else," Rilk went on. "Meanwhile, you are going to get working. Check all systems, make sure the cargo mover is ready if we do have to dump the cargo, and then take the time to talk to your department teams and see if any of them have a bright idea. Don't lie to them, but don't encourage panic. You people are ship's officers and department leaders. Act like it, please. After I talk to the other captains, I'll brief the entire crew."

"We're going to split up and run for it," said Captain Hans Rilk. He was on the bridge, speaking into the voice pickup of his command pod, his words transmitted to the entire crew of the
Ulia's Flower.
"The plan is, we scatter. Each ship will make a maximum acceleration burn at ninety degrees from our base vector. The raiders can follow two of us. This means that two ships will have a chance to get away."

"It will take the raiders about thirty-five more hours to match vectors with the two ships they aim for first. From there, we will have however long it takes them to capture the ships, plus another forty hours or so, to match vectors with the other two. That's going to be at least eighty hours, maybe more, depending on how long the... capture operations take."

He could feel the looks of the bridge crew, could imagine the expressions of the rest of his crew as well. If the raiders split up, and each went after one ship, the plan would be a lottery; 50% odds of escape, 50% odds of...

The fate of the ships that did not escape would depend on who these raiders were. Brotherhood pirates, so-called "void-runners," would be bad; some of the Brotherhoods were savage to a degree that almost taxed the imagination. Prisoners might be tortured to death or killed in religious rituals, or kept as slaves, or no prisoners might be taken to begin with. Other Brotherhoods were more pragmatic; prisoners would be ransomed or sold as slaves to one of the lawless
anomic
colonies that dealt in slaves; there were several that were rumored to. Or it might not be void-runners. It could be something else all together.

If the raiders stayed together, Rilk thought, then three ships would have a chance at escape. But that was unlikely. There was no reason Rilk could think of for the two ships not to split. If those were lance-ships, or some near equivalent of the type, they would be heavily armed. Lance-ships were large, powerful front-line combat vessels, designed to raid against heavy, military defenses, or to quickly respond to powerful enemy raiders. The whole convoy's combined defenses would not be enough to face off even a single lance-ship.

It would be very tight, for the ships that "won" this "lottery." The four ships had been in formation, drifting, for only forty hours when the raiders showed themselves. Their singularity reactors were not fully stabilized, would not be for almost two hundred more hours. A risky FTL transit could be chanced sooner than that... would have to be, if the two ships that were not initially pursued were to have any chance of escape.

And, maybe, maybe the ships that lost this lottery might not be doomed. Perhaps the raiders would only loot them of cargo. Even if the ships were taken, it was possible that the crews would be spared. Some pirates were known to leave crews alive, to encourage the next surrender. Once the raiders merged vectors with their prey, the freight-liners would not try to resist.

---

It had been no surprise when the two lance-ships split up and chased down the much slower liners.

"Two of us'll get away," Gala, his First Officer and wife, had observed in an inflectionless voice. Her face showed something between hope and despair.

Only two hours; the first two hours that the
Ulia's Flower
had accelerated at almost half a gee, pushing her drives to their safe maximum, the crew almost mutinied.

Her cargo hold had been all but emptied of ore; the crisis had come when Rilk ordered ten percent of the cargo kept aboard; the extra mass was going to cost them about 0.02 of a gee of acceleration, which, Rilk had to admit, might be the margin of escape or failure. But Rilk suspected that it would be closer than the margin that an extra fiftieth of a gee would give them, and in his mind there might be some use for the cargo... something he had heard of from other ships who had escaped attacks by void-runner pirates.

For two hours, sensors could not be sure which of the four freight-liners were being pursued, and which might escape. And then, as Kiril had adjusted and monitored, and with trembling effort simply willed his instruments to higher resolution, the vector lines had become clear and, one after another, the bridge crew had shut off their neural interface links and an involuntary cheer had swept the bridge.

The raiders were pursuing the
Gold Mine
and
River of Prosperity
, leaving the
Diamond Dust
and the
Ulia's Flower
free to run.

For Rilk, there was more guilt than joy. But much as he hated it, there was a glowing sense of relief as he watched the two raiders move onto vectors that would, he thought, pursue and merge with the vectors of the two other fleeing 'liners. The horrible thought of himself, his crew, his wife, in some pirate's hands was pushed aside. Now that awful reality had sped and struck two other captains, two other crews. Were those ships, after all, void-runner ships? Even "lenient" pirates, stopping short of the murder or blood-sacrifice that the hard-core void-runners were rumored to practice, might not hesitate to rape and pillage.

"Captain, there's a signal from one of those fucking raiders." The young communication officer's voice still held more than a trace of giddy relief. Her fate as a captive would not have been kind.

"Well?"

"Its just a single pulse of Translang text. They demand that all four ships surrender and vector to match course with them. No repeats either, just the one comm-pulse."

"Bloodsucking lazy shits," Rilk said, balanced between guilt and fear for his comrades on the other ships, and sheer anger at the pirates. "They'll at least have to catch the ships they take!"