His Majesty's Starship (2 page)

“
Come and get us.
” It was a male voice, taunting. Accent impossible to trace. “
We’re on our way down and we’re gonna make a claim, like it or not.
”

“We are empowered to prevent-” Gilmore began.

“
Yeah? How?
”

How indeed? Gilmore thought glumly. And why?

The why was easier to answer: it was his job.

He glanced quickly at the scanners and absorbed their data. At its present rate of fall the scuttler would touch down on the rock in just over five minutes, though before then it would have slowed down. However suicidal the scuttler captain was feeling, the ship would have automatic safeties to stop itself being dashed to pieces-

Safeties. He checked
Australasia
’s heading: the sweep was pointing straight at the rock. Excellent.

“Full burn,” he said. “Take us to one gee-”

Nichol’s eyes were round. “Sir?” he said.

“Full burn, Mr Nichol,” said Hannah, still calm but somehow suggesting torments beyond imagination if the pilot didn’t do as he was told. It was a knack Gilmore had always wished he had.

“Aye aye, sir!” The main engine fired and again weight returned to the flight deck: this time a full one Earth gravity. After so long in micro-gee, it felt heavier.

There hadn’t been time to set this up with the computer – it would have to be manual, relying on Nichol’s reactions. Gilmore outlined his plan to the other two and after that there was nothing more to do but watch Number Three Rock come ever closer. Millions of tons of rock, falling on top of them.

Gilmore’s mind went back to the dispatch in his cabin. “Number One,” he said, as if to make conversation.

“Captain?”

“It appears I’ve been given command of the
Ark Royal
.”

Hannah stared at him but the scuttler’s voice interrupted anything she might have been about to say.

“
It won’t work.
” Was there a hint of uncertainty? If there was it didn’t come close to matching the uncertainty Gilmore felt:
Australasia
was charging on full flame straight at the little ship. “
You won’t ram us and we’re on manual.
”

Gilmore gave a grim smile: they had guessed his game. If the scuttler had been on auto, its collision safeties would have moved it out of
Australasia
’s way and hence away from the rock.

“Now,” Gilmore said. Nichol fired the thrusters-

-and
Australasia
flipped head over tail, engine still burning. A minor correction and again the sweep was heading straight at the scuttler, preceded by an invisible beam of nuclei blasted by the fusion engine directly at the intruder. Thrusters flared on the scuttler and the black little ship fled to one side.

Gilmore grinned. Collision safeties were one thing: there were some safeties that couldn’t be overridden in a hurry, and the safeties that prevented a ship from straying into another’s fusion flame were one of them.

“
You-
” the scuttler’s voice crackled with anger, before someone that end had the sense to break contact.

“Yes!” Nichol shouted. Gilmore and Hannah both scowled at him. “Sorry, sirs,” he said, only slightly abashed.

The scuttler’s neatly planned approach arc had been spoiled and thrusters blazed against the dark as the scuttler crew fought to re-establish an arc to another point on the rock.

“Bring us round as soon as you can,” Gilmore said.

“Aye aye, sir.”

“
Ark Royal
, Captain?” said Hannah.

“So it seems. It means promotion to Commander.”

“Um ... congratulations ...”

“I’ll need a first officer, of course,” Gilmore added.

This time Hannah was spared from answering by the weight as
Australasia
slowed and the flight deck crew were crushed into their couches. The ship’s fusion engine gave her more power than the scuttler but with it came 200 more tons worth of momentum and inertia. She couldn’t be hurled around the heavens the same way as the other ship, which had already re-established its approach. It was coming down to Number Three Rock with a lot more urgency than before and in a few minutes it would be over the rock’s horizon.

Australasia
came round and gave chase. What next? Gilmore thought. The trick wouldn’t work twice. He ran figures through his control desk. If he trusted to the flight computer and Nichol’s piloting they could bring the ship in between the scuttler and the rock ...

He gave the orders and the ship came round slightly, poised to boost again.

“Scuttler is 92 miles ahead,” Hannah said. “Probable touchdown in two minutes.” She frowned. “What’s that? They can’t be abandoning ship.”

Gilmore glanced at the display. A small blip was slowly making its way from the larger blip that represented the scuttler.
Australasia
’s new course meant the blip would miss it by over a hundred miles.

The blip changed direction, to head straight for them, and a silent alarm began to ring in Gilmore’s mind. He had read something about-

“My god, get the laser on it!” Gilmore shouted. “Do it n-”

A blinding flash through the viewports, and all the displays went fuzzy.

“They fired at us!” Hannah said, shocked. “They fired a torpedo at us!”

Glib answers ran through Gilmore’s mind:
A first time for everything ... So it seems.
So the rumours were true. Ships were arming themselves.

“Yes,” he said, “they fired at us. A nuclear warhead, it seems.”

More to the point, he felt, someone had fired a nuclear warhead at
him
. He was in a small ship whose only defences were the standard anti-meteor laser and passive radiation shielding, and he suddenly felt very vulnerable. Even more so, since that ship was now blinded by the electromagnetic pulse of the explosion and heading for a giant mountain in space.

“How long before we can get the systems online again?” he said.

“A couple of minutes, sir,” Nichol said, not looking up as his hands moved rapidly over the controls.

“How long before we hit the rock?”

Nichol glanced up at the viewport. “A couple of minutes, sir?” he said.

After that there wasn’t much to say and no point in saying it, as they worked as quickly as they could to get the ship up and running again. The rock was getting visibly closer.

“We have control,” Nichol said at last.

“Then get us away from that thing!” Gilmore said.

“Aye aye, sir.” The weight came back again as Nichol brought the ship round again and fired the main engine. As
Australasia
slowed, Gilmore called up the display for a last view of the scuttler. It was approaching the rock’s terminator, out of the light of the sun and
Australasia
’s dying flares, and would be invisible again in a few more moments. He glared at the smaller ship in a white fury: okay, they weren’t taking any chances with this maniac who played chicken with asteroids and spaceships, but a torpedo-

Then Gilmore saw it and his eyes widened in horror.

“Scuttler, pull up!” he yelled. “Fire everything and pull up!”

The scuttler saw it too and started to manoeuvre, but too late. The mountain that had been waiting on the rock’s dark side loomed ahead, carried round by the rock’s natural rotation. The yells over the radio belied the apparent calm dignity with which the scuttler ship met its fate. The mountain reached out for the black ship and stroked it with a rough tentacle of rock. Over the radio came screams and the sudden, terrible roar of explosive decompression which stopped just as abruptly as it began.

“Oh, Christ,” Nichol murmured. On the displays, small fragments of the scuttler floated gently out of the cloud of vapour, some moving off into space, some bouncing featherlike off the rock’s surface.

“Match orbits,” Gilmore muttered. “Get a team down there.” Returning to port could wait a bit longer: it was possible, just possible someone on board had been suited up, and their suit hadn’t been punctured by debris, and ...

It wouldn’t have happened, but it was possible.

- 2 -

26 March 2149

The foreshortened perspective of space made UK-1 look only a few feet away from
Australasia
. It always seemed like just some other ship or station and Gilmore still had to make the necessary adjustment with his eyes and senses to appreciate just how big it was. It was the largest spaceship ever built – seventeen massive wheels in space spinning around a common axis. The last redoubt of the exiled House of Windsor.

“Engineer to flight deck. The engines are powered down,” said a voice from the engine room.

Gilmore thumbed the contact to make the return message. “That’s exactly what it says on my display here, Mr Loonat, but thank you for the courtesy.”

“You’re welcome, Captain.”

Australasia
was coasting on its own momentum, a minnow to UK-1’s whale, as grapples reached out to snare it and drag it into its cradle on the stationary docking strake that ran the length of the great ship. Then HMS
Australasia
was safely docked at its home port and another patrol was over.

The satisfied smile vanished from Gilmore’s face as he caught his reflection in the panel in front of him – just a dim image but he knew too well the resigned look of gloom that tended to be his expression of default. A long-ago love had told him that his face was ‘fragile’ and that his eyes seemed larger than usual, which gave them more emotion and hence made his thoughts easier to read. The sad thing was, she had meant it as a compliment. He had been wary of showing his thoughts through his too-large eyes ever since. Thoughts were a dangerous thing to show.

“Ship secured, sir,” said the pilot of the watch.

“Fine.” Gilmore sat back in his couch. “Let’s take a look at our neighbours.”

It was something he usually did, just to see which old friends might be in the vicinity. Several other ships of the Royal Space Fleet was docked as well: two liners, some freighters and a couple of sweeps.

And a Rustie ship – not one of the seven starships of the First Breed that had burst into the solar system nearly two years ago but a smaller, interplanetary job. At first sight it was unremarkable and not obviously alien, but gradually you realised that the proportions were all wrong. It was built for a race that thought humans were too tall.

Gilmore had never caught Rustiemania and privately wished they had never come. They were going to share the secrets of their ships and (everyone else hoped) the rest of their tech. Soon there would be no room for an average ship’s captain like him, raised on the old ways. Sail was giving way to steam all over again.

“The overhaul team asks permission to come on board, sir.”

“Fine.”
Australasia
– Gilmore was still finding it hard to accept – had been fired at with a nuclear weapon: it needed the once-over by a better team of engineers than he had on board to check for damage from heat or radiation.

Even more annoying was that he suspected the Admiralty were delighted one of their ships had actually been fired upon. ‘Torpedo’ was probably too grand a word for it – a nuclear bomb tied to a small booster engine, obviously with thrusters so that it could alter course to a certain extent but still far from being a proper guided weapon. Crude, no doubt, compared with what was to come. If he had been quick enough, he could have hit it with the ship’s laser and that would have been the end of the threat.

But that wasn’t the point. Gilmore had heard rumours of space weaponry being developed in secret, as space gradually lost the neutrality it had enjoyed for two hundred years and human interests took over. And now it had happened. Someone had fired a torpedo in anger. He had been ordered to send on every scrap of data from
Australasia
’s sensors relating to the incident, as well as make a separate report giving his own impressions, and he had no doubt where all that data was going: straight into the Admiralty’s own weapons development programme.

“Dispatches are ready for downloading, sir,” said the comms officer.

“I’ll take them in my cabin.”

“Very good, sir.”

As Gilmore airswam down
Australasia
’s central passage towards his cabin a snippet of conversation drifted out of the wardroom:

“Hey, you know there’s Rusties in town?”

“Come to see His Highness, I suppose-” That was Adrian Nichol. He stopped when he saw Gilmore looking in. “Afternoon, sir.”

“Carry on,” Gilmore murmured. He turned to go. “Oh, and the king is His Majesty, Mr Nichol. Worth remembering.”

*

Gilmore sat in his cabin, but he was looking into infinity and seeing the
Ark Royal
at the end of it.

The ship wasn’t even in service yet and was already a legend in the Royal Space Fleet. State of the art, fast and manoeuvrable, with systems a generation ahead of any other human-built ship in space. Word was that she wasn’t even an official Admiralty project but was funded by the king, which immediately made her ten times more interesting. The king kept a number of privately funded projects going all the time, with varying degrees of secrecy: sometimes they would produce something beneficial and the product would be released into the public domain; sometimes word of the project only got out in the form of rumours.

But what did the king want the
Ark Royal
for? There was one obvious answer, even though it hadn’t been confirmed officially, and if it was true it meant-

“You wanted to see me, sir?”

Hannah Dereshev stood in the entrance to his cabin. Gilmore smiled and beckoned her in. He was holding an aide in his hands, carefully not letting the display point in her direction.

“Yes,” he said. “I mentioned the
Ark Royal
a while back-”

“Yes, sir, I-”

“Please,” Gilmore said, holding up a hand. “I don’t want your decision yet. For a start, I’m convinced they’ve got the wrong Captain Gilmore.”

“There aren’t any other Captain Gilmores in the Fleet,” Hannah said. “I checked.”

“Whatever. Anyway, I want you to see this first.” He passed the aide over and watched her eyes widen. “Congratulations, Number One.”