Hegemony (9 page)

And then it was done. The raider was silent. Out of range, maybe out of coolant, with its laser array on the verge of melting with waste heat. Rilk could see the ship streaking away, drifting now with its drives silent, getting a little over four thousand kilometers further from the
Ulia's Flower
every second.

Rilk shut down the drive. There were alarms wailing throughout the ship. Damaged systems were calling themselves to his attention, screaming at him through the interface.

There was a long time, when no one on the bridge made a sound. Then the screams came, cheers or suppressed fear let go, or just raw sound with no focus.

Rilk found himself crying. The bridge crew were cheering now. He wanted silence, wanted to just get a second, just a second to figure it all out. But the interface kept sending him data; there was blow-out in the crew quarters. The medical officer was unsure of the casualties; there might be a dozen people gone. The hull was compromised in three places, damaged in a dozen others. The main sensor array was slag. So were the defensive lasers.

Training kicked in. A few of the crew were veterans of the system defense fleets. Enough of the others remembered their emergency drills. Casualties were transferred to the sickbay. Damage control routines, often practiced but never before used, were put into motion.

They nearly ran out of supplies in the freight-liner's limited sickbay. Even so, three of the crew had died of burns or decompression injuries before they could be treated. Ten more were just gone.

Hastily, the crew made what paltry repairs they could to the battered 'liner, wondering how long they had to live, before the raider came back again. Who were these raiders? Why were they attacking to kill, expending a small fortune in weapons-grade laser coolant and rejecting even the possibility of loot?

But it would take the raider almost sixty more hours to return, Rilk knew, even at maximum acceleration. And that ship had been at maximum acceleration for a long time. The other raider was no better placed to make an intercept. Rilk supposed that it had never occurred to the attackers that they might fail to make a kill.

It seemed that the days of high gees were too much for the raiders. They came back in at an average of three gees, spending more time at one gee, to spare their crews. They had to be getting low on reaction mass as well; they had been under high thrust for days. No ship could carry enough reaction mass to keep that up forever.

No one had spoken as N'tasa set up the parameters for the FTL transit. The singularity was stable enough, Kuper said, and N'tasa agreed. The raider was three hours outbound again, coming in slower this time.

It would be funny and sad if this does not work, thought Rilk, holding tight to his wife's hand. Gala's eyes were closed tight.

N'tasa sent the execution command, and for an impossibly brief instant, the wormhole opened, unfolding the space surrounding the
Ulia's Flower.
For a moment measured in Plank time, there was no reality, and then the wormhole collapsed, leaving the
Ulia's Flower
in the Yuro system, thirty million kilometers from the habitable world of Yuro-IV. It was an ideal FTL emergence.

Interceptor Pilot Alekzandra
Neel sat on the bunk in her quarters and peeled the last tangerine she had managed to smuggle aboard. The peel of the fruit curved away from her hands, leaving the edible segments intact. She was getting good at this. She took one segment and put it into her mouth, savoring the tart-sweet taste.

Taste was important. When she had become a daemon, leaving her old body and her old life irretrievably behind, she had been afraid that nothing would ever feel right again. She was seeing with new eyes, hearing with artificial ears; every sense was... a bit off, at first. They had explained it to her; there would be an adjustment time to the new avatar, but in her own mind, which was no longer housed in what had been her brain, there was a terrible fear that this was the way it would always be. There was no going back. She would go mad, she thought. After all, not every daemon managed to survive the change.

In fact, her senses had stabilized, and it was taste that had come back first. Her biosim avatar needed food. Power for the avatar came from a bioreactor, a unit in her abdomen that operated like a streamlined version of a human digestive system, breaking down chemical bonds to produce chemical energy that powered the artificial muscles and neuro-chemical linkages that were her nerves. Her tongue, like a few other parts of the biosim, were actually biological tissue; one of the few parts that were cheaper to clone and implant, or transplant, than to make artificially.

But though there were social meals scheduled every hundred hours aboard the
Conquering Sun
that involved real, in fact excellent, food, the default means of fueling a biosim was a bland, very mildly tasty nutrient-fuel paste. So a chance to get tangerines, real old-Earth originated fruit, was not to be passed up. And there was something comical about a ship run by daemons, with no meat-brain humans aboard at all, having restrictions on the crew bringing aboard unauthorized food substances.

The recall to the ship had taken her by surprise. She had been looking forward to another hundred hours of leave on Yuro IV. The planet, the part she had seen, was pleasant enough. But she had been looking forward to getting out of the cookie cutter Hegemony-style New Capital City and touring the original settlements, where local culture had had almost a quarter-million hours, most of a century in local years, to diverge and move in its own directions. Travel to different worlds, after all, had been one of her childhood reasons for wanting to join the Fleet.

But recalled she was, ordered to get back to the
Conquering Sun
within four hours, even if it meant breaking in a new biosim avatar aboard ship and leaving her own avatar in storage on the planet. That had not been necessary, but she had been forced to take a priority shuttle to orbit, missing out on a ride up the elevator, which was another thing she had been looking forward to.

Once aboard, though, the reason for the recall was obvious. The battered, part-melted old freight-liner
Ulia's Flower
had emerged at Yuro twenty hours earlier, with her radios screaming for help, taking no chances that the raider might follow, to kill the ship before her message and records were sent off. It was, thought Zandy, an odd bit of luck that had placed a Hegemonic assault-ship and escorts at the Yuro system to hear her cries.

Now the
Conquering Sun
and her two little swift-ships were boosting away from Yuro at a steady one gee. They could have gone faster, but this close to the planet, their exhaust plumes were a navigational and radiation hazard. As soon as they cleared the planetary system, they would be pushing three gees all the way to the FTL initiation point. 

Jessa walked in as Zandy was about to eat the last segment.

"Whatcha up to, Zandy?" she asked.

"Contraband, Pixie," said Zandy, pointing to the tangerine peel and the sole remaining bit of fruit. Zandy hesitated for a second, then asked, "you want the last bite?"

"Wow, Zandy. You really
have
fallen in love with me. OK, I'll be greedy and pragmatic," Jessa said, reaching out for the tiny segment and popping it in her mouth. "Thanks. Nice. Yum," she said.

Zandy smiled at the smaller woman. What they had, she and Jessa, was aboard ship only, but the fact was that Zandy had become very fond of "Pixie."

"Do you have duty time?" Jessa asked.

"Not for a couple of hours," answered Zandy. "It's silly, really. We have a briefing to do, in these avatars, but they're waiting till the ship is under three gees to do it. They should be meeting now, especially for the bio-avatars. Three gees is tough on them.

"I think you peon pilots have to wait while the Interceptor Commander meets with the Captain and the Executive Officer, all comfortable at one gee," said Jessa. "Anyway, I have some ideas of what we can do."

"God, Pixie, do you ever think about anything except sex?"

"I didn't even mention sex. You did. Why, you want to have sex?"

"Right..." said Zandy with heavy patience, but she was smiling and reaching for the other woman.

"What do you think?" asked Jessa a little while later.

"I think you're demented, Pixie. Strawberry flavored?" said Zandy, rolling over and looking back at her lover.

"You liked it," said Jessa, sitting up and leaning over to kiss Zandy's breast.

"Maybe I was just being nice to you," said Zandy.

"That too, but you liked it. I can tell," Jessa kissed Zandy's mouth. "Yum, strawberries. I was going to call you up on leave and get you to get the same modification, except maybe a different flavor."

"I'm not sure I'm into that. Anyway you're not complaining, are you?"

"You never know what you're into. A few thousand hours ago, you told me you weren't into girls," Jessa said, starting to kiss her way again down Zandy's body, as the taller woman leaned back with a soft moan...

"It's just ironic that we're an assault-ship. This is not what the
Conquering Sun
was built for," said Zandy.

The two women were dressed again, sitting back in chairs made to accept their weight under high acceleration. Zandy would be making her slow way to the briefing room soon, dealing with three gees of acceleration. It was possible, but not easy, in a biosim avatar, but the crew who wore real bio-avatars would be moving around in cushioned acceleration chairs.

Jessa nodded. It was basically true; pirate hunting was not an assault-ship's job. Slow compared to darting swift-ships and quick lance-ships, the
Conquering Sun
could do little more than chase fast raiders off. Her kind was designed to deliver crushing blows, to inexorably approach an enemy's worlds until there was no choice except to surrender or to put ships into the assault-ship's path and fight. Pursuit and raiding was the job of smaller, swifter craft. The
Conquering Sun
was built for ponderous destruction.

"Yeah, but we can be there at least a couple hundred hours before any lance-ship could get the word and make the transit," replied Jessa. "Besides, who'd pass up a chance at pirate hunting? Even Captain Ari-Kani has got to be eager to get a chance at some action."

"Right. Two hostile lance-ships. Serious stuff."

"They'll still be totally outgunned anyway."

"True, but we'll also have no chance to catch them, unless they're out of reaction mass, or their singularity reactors give out. They'll just scatter and run," said Zandy.

"Itching for battle? You want to hurry up and run out of your already very short expected life-span?"

"I'm an interceptor pilot. I want a chance to do my job."

"Great. I knew I never should have shacked up with an interceptor pilot."

"Now you tell me."

Someone in authority had a flash of sanity, Zandy thought, and canceled the "live" meeting. The meeting was done in a low-grade VR, with the pilots still in their humanoid avatars, linked in by direct interface. For a daemon, there was not much difference between a direct interface link to a VR and a transfer into whatever neural network was running the VR. It felt the same.

It felt fake, was the truth of it. Zandy and the other interceptor pilots were sitting in reclining silver couches, arrayed in a stadium-style circle around a central platform. All of the ship's interceptor pilots, all eight waves, forty-eight pilots, were 'here.' Interceptor Commander Shank stood on the platform. The VR was low-end enough that he didn't look quite right; everything had a vid-screen quality to it.

That didn't really matter. This wasn't for recreation, and the low grade version of reality would be perfectly adequate for this briefing.

Shank spoke. "All right, boys and girls. Here we are, and here we go. We're about ten hours from FTL, and from that moment on, four waves will be on full alert at all times. Ten hour rotations. The word from the 'command deck' is, this may take some time, checking out all the hidey holes in the system, so get used to it.

"OK, next topic. Post-mortem on the last simulation, and tactical thoughts on what we all hope is going to be our next mission: taking out two hostile lance-ships.

"Post-mortem first. We've gone over this before, but since there's a chance it's going to count for real, I want your takes on the last simulated exercise..."

"Where First Wave all decided to defect to the afterlife, all at once?" asked one of the Second Wave pilots. There was a soft ripple of laughter.

"Yup, that one," said Shank.

"Perhaps we shouldn't have committed both of the waves we launched to the anti-ship attack?" said Rhea Gepard, the Third Wave leader. Her image was of a small, intensely dark skinned woman, to match her biosim avatar. Zandy did not know her all that well.

"If one of those waves," Gepard went on, "say Second Wave, had tasked a few interceptors to anti-interceptor escort, First Wave might have made it past the enemy interceptors somewhat more intact."