"If you're sure—" Already the police drone was moving off. He glanced back uncertainly at her hunched form, then followed the insect away through crowded, human-smelling partition-runs, runs that were already deteriorating into a high-tech slum patrolled by bees with stun guns.
Something about their departure, perhaps the final grim reality of dispossession, had snapped a band of tension that had held everyone together through the dark years just ended, and the solid ground of depression was giving way to a treacherous slurry of despair, hysteria, and uncertainty about the future. Dangerous times.
Wednesday was waiting at the meeting point just as the bee had said. She looked alone and afraid, and Morris, who had been thinking of harsh words, suddenly found himself unable to speak. "Vicki—"
"Dad!" She buried her chin in his shoulder, sharp-jawed like some young feral predator. She was shaking.
"Where've you been? Your mother's been going crazy!" That wasn't the half of it. He hugged her, firmly, feeling a terrible sense of hollow unease ebb away. His daughter was back, and he was angry as hell at her—and unspeakably relieved.
"I wanted to be alone," she said very quietly, voice muffled. He tried to step back, but she refused to let go. A pang: she did that when she didn't want to tell him something. She was no good at dissembling, but her sense of privacy was acute. An old woman behind him was raising a fuss at the harassed constable, something about a missing boy—no, her pet dog. Her son, her Sonny. Wednesday looked up at him. "I needed time to think." The lie solidified in a crystal moment, and he didn't have the heart to call her on it. There'd be time for that, and to tell her about the official reprimand later: trespassing off-limits on board a ship wasn't the same as exploring the empty quadrants of a station. She didn't know how lucky she was that the Captain was understanding—and that unusual allowances were being made for stressed-out adults, never mind kids leaving home for the first time they could remember.
"Come on." He turned her away from the desk, rubbed her shoulder.
"Come on. Back to our, uh, cabin. Ship's undocking soon. They'll be widecasting from the bridge. You don't want to miss that?"
She looked up at him, an unreadable, serious expression on her face. "Oh, no."
IMPACT: T plus 4 hours, 6 minutes
Two hundred and forty-six minutes after the Zero Incident, the freighter Taxis Pride congealed out of empty space, forty-six degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic, six light hours away from its final destination. Brad Momington, skipper, was on the flight deck, nattering with Mary Haight, the relativistics op. Taxis Pride was a three-point shuttle, connecting Moscow to Iceland Seven station, thence to the Septagonese transshipment outpost at Blaylock B. Brad had made this zone transfer eighteen times in the past seven years, and it was as routine as the mug of strong, heavily sugared coffee that Alex placed by his elbow before the jump countdown commenced, which was just then cooling down enough to drink.
Brad put out the standard navigation squawk and waited for a detailed flight path. In the meantime he pondered the food situation: the kitchen was getting somewhat monotonous, and the downside ferry would give him a chance to stretch his legs and reacquaint himself with clouds and sky again.
Taxis Pride was a fast freighter, built to carry time-critical physical mail and perishables. The extremal singularity in her drive core let her accelerate in real space as rapidly as some warships: six light hours was a one-week cruise for her, not the painful odyssey an old hydrogen burner would have to endure. Mary concentrated on a backup star fix—routine, in case the traffic controllers were on strike again, just to keep her professional certification up to date. In her spare moments she was wondering if there'd be time to drop in on an old friend while they were docked for their cargo load cycle.
Then the bridge screamer went off.
"What the—get that!" Brad's coffee went flying as he scrambled for the comm terminal. Mary jolted upright, whey-faced.
"Got it. That's not traffic—"
"Hello, this is flight Echo Gold Nine Zero responding to broadcast squawk from, ah, Delta X-ray Zeus Seven, we have handshake. What's the—"
"Something flaky here, boss—"
Red flashing lights blinked on the conference circuit. There was a thirty-second delay while they waited tensely for a reply.
"Echo Gold Nine Zero this is Delta X-ray Zeus Seven, emergency relay service. Admiralty signal blue four, authentication follows message. This is a systemwide military emergency. Moscow is under quarantine—the whole system is under lockdown, no exceptions. Evacuate immediately. I emphasize, get your kernel spun up and get out of here immediately!
Please acknowledge."
Brad flushed, furious. "This is some sort of fucking joke!" He waved off the authentication code and punched in the waypoint series for Moscow.
"When I find the asshole—"
"Brad. Come here." He looked round sharply. Mary was leaning over the repeater from Wang's crow's nest downstairs. She looked sick.
"What is it?"
"Here." She pointed to a plot that had just shown up. Taxis Pride was a fleet auxiliary, liable for mobilization in event of war: it carried near-military-grade passive sensors. "Gamma plot, classic proton-antiproton curve, about two AUs out. It's redshifting on us. I got a fix on that relay service buoy, Brad: it's at the origin point for that … burn."
"Shit!" The screen swam in front of Brad's eyes. All of a sudden he remembered what it was like when he was nine, when his father told him his dog had died. "Shit!" Positronium was an unstable intermediate created during some matter-antimatter reactions. Redshifted, it was moving away from the reference frame of the observer at some fraction of the speed of light. Out from the star, it could mean only one thing—slower-than-light antimatter rockets, relativistic retaliation bombers cranking up for a kamikaze run on someone's home world. "They've launched. They've fucking launched the deterrent fleet!"
They were a long-practiced team: he didn't have to tell Mary what to do.
She was already bringing back up the gravitational potential maps he'd need for the jump. Brad canceled his half-planned course and fed in the return journey jump coordinates. "Hello Delta X-ray Zeus Seven, this is flight Echo Gold Nine Zero acknowledging. We are preparing to return to Iceland Seven soonest. Can you clarify the situation for us. Other shipping may be in the queue and need warning off. Do you need assistance?
Over." Then he got on the blower to Liz, down in kernel monitoring, explaining to her that, no, this wasn't a joke, and yes, he was going to overrun the drive maintenance cycle, and yes, it was going to put the Pride in the dock for a month and there was a good reason for it all—"Echo Gold Nine Zero, departure cleared. This is Delta X-ray Zeus Seven, relaying through NavServ buoy six-nine-three via causal channel. Situation as follows: inner system exterminated by surprise attack using weapons of mass destruction approximately two-seven-zero minutes ago absolute time.
Your range three-six-zero light minutes considered marginal for survival: the star's gone. We're assuming one hundred percent fatalities on Moscow, repeat, one hundred percent. V-force has launched, but we've got no idea who did it. As of two hours ago, Moscow system is under complete interdict.
Wait—" for a moment the steady voice wavered. "Oh. Oh my! That felt weird." A pause. "Echo Gold Nine Zero, we've just taken a core radiation pulse. Funny, two kilometers of rock shielding outside us. Ah, shit. Off the scale. Neutrinos, has to be. Echo Gold Nine Zero, this is Delta X-ray Zeus Seven, there's—I don't think there's anything you can do for us. Get the hell out while you still can—warn everybody off. Signing off now."
Brad stared at the comm status display without seeing it. Then he mashed his palm down on the general channel glyph. "Crew, captain speaking." He glanced at Mary and saw her staring back at him. Waiting. "We have a situation. Change of plan." Glancing down at his panel he blinked and dragged the urgent course correction into the flight sequence. "We're not going home. Ever. " Taxis Pride was the first ship to leave Moscow system after the explosion. Another two ships made it out, one of them badly damaged by jumping into the tail of the shock wave. Word of the explosion filtered out: several freighters were saved from jumping into a fiery grave by dint of a massive and well-coordinated emergency alert. Over the next few weeks, the inhabitants of the Iceland Seven refinery station—a mere eight light months from Moscow—were evacuated to Shenjen Principality, and as the shock wave rolled outward, more vulnerable habitats were evacuated in turn. The nearest populated planetary system, Septagon Central, was far enough away to be saved by the heavy radiation shielding on its orbital republics. Meanwhile, years would pass before another starship visited the radiation-scarred corpse of Moscow system.
IMPACT: T plus 1392 days, 18 hours, 11 minutes
"What's your finding?" demanded the Captain.
The three dogs grinned at him from their positions around his cramped day cabin. One of them bent to lick at a patch of blue foam sticking to its left hind leg. The foam hissed and smoked where saliva ran. "There is nothing to report on the first incident, the customs officer. We regret to inform you that he must be classed as missing, presumed dead, unless we subsequently learn that he boarded one of the other ships. The second incident was a juvenile delinquent escapade committed by an asocial teenager. No trusted subsystems appear to have been compromised. I have no direct access to the cargo carried in the security zone, but you have assured me yourself that none of the black manifest packages are missing. The recorded history of the delinquent is consistent with this event, as is her subsequent behavior, and a search of the documentation corpus pertaining to socialization of juvenile adults in prewar New Moscow society indicates that territorial escapades of this kind are a not-infrequent response to environmental stress."
"Why did she get in there in the first place?" Mannheim leaned forward, glaring at the lead hellhound with a mixture of anxiety and distrust. "I thought you were supposed to be guarding—"
"In my judgment her actions are compatible with typical human adolescent dysfunctional behavior. This search-and-rescue security unit is not authorized to use lethal force to protect bonded cargo, Captain. A secondary consideration was that her absence had been noticed by familial parties and formally reported after she was officially transferred aboard the evacuation ferry. Remanding the delinquent into the care of her parents, with subsequent monitoring and supervision for the duration of the voyage, will prevent repetition and will not invite further attention."
The dog that had been talking jerked its head pompously. One of its fellows padded over and sniffed at its left ear. Mannheim watched them nervously.
Police dogs, incredibly expensive units bought from some out-system high-tech polity, programmed for loyalty to the regime: he'd never even seen any before this voyage, was startled to learn the government owned any, much less that they'd see fit to deploy them on something as mundane as an evacuation run. And then, one of them claimed to be a Foreign Office dog, loaded onto his ship along with orders—sealed orders handwritten on paper for his eyes only—to be turned loose on the ship. Uplifted dogs designed for security and search-and-rescue, a pack hiding one member capable of killing. Exotic sapient weapons. "Did you carry out your mission?"
Number one dog looked at him. "What are you talking about?"
"Eh?" Mannheim straightened up. "Now look here," he began angrily, "this is my ship! I'm responsible for everyone and everything on it, and if I need to know something I—"
The dogs stood up simultaneously, and he realized they had him surrounded. Gun-muzzle faces pointed at him, a thousand-yard stare repeated three times over. The FO dog spoke up: the others seemed to be under its control in some way. "We could tell you, Captain, but then we would have to silence you. Speculation on this matter by parties not authorized by the Ministry of War is deemed to be a hostile act, within the meaning of section two, paragraph four-three-one of the Defense of the Realm Act. Please confirm your understanding of this declaration."
"I—" Mannheim gulped. "I understand. No more questions."
"Good." The number two dog sat down again, and unconcernedly set about licking the inside of its right hind leg. "The other units of this pack are not cognizant of these affairs. They're just simple secret police dogs. You are not to trouble them with unpleasant questions. This debriefing is at an end.
I believe you have a ship to run?"
IMPACT: T plus 1393 days, 02 hours, 01 minutes
Wednesday watched the end of the world with her parents and half the occupants of the Rose Deck canteen. The tables and benches had been deflated and pushed back against one wall while the ship was under boost.
Now a large screen had been drawn across the opposite wall and configured with a view piped down from the hub sensor array. She had wanted to watch on her own personal slate, but her parents had dragged her along to the canteen: it seemed like most people didn't want to be alone for the jump. Not that anybody would know it had happened—contrary to dramatic license, there was absolutely no sensation when a starship tunneled between two equipotent locations across the light years—but there was something symbolic about this one. A milestone they'd never see again.
"Herman?" she subvocalized.
"I'm here. Not for much longer. You'll be alone after the jump."
"I don't understand. Why?" Jeremy was staring at her so she grimaced horribly at him. He jumped back, right into the wall, and his mother glared at him.
"Causal channels don't work after a jump outside their original light cone: they're instantaneous communicators, but they don't violate causality. Move the entangled quantum dots apart via FTL and you break the quantum entanglement they rely on. As I speak to you through one that is wired into your access implant, and that is how you speak to me, I will be out of contact for some time after you arrive. However you are in no danger as long as you remain in the evacuation area and do nothing to attract attention."