The Killing of Worlds (24 page)

The marine private sighed and raised his right fist, three fingers up. After a moment, Squad Three rose slowly to their feet, glancing at each other for confirmation. Akman extended his arm forward, palm flat and parallel with the tundra. Squad Three moved forward.

He smiled thinly in the bitter and wind-blown cold. For the first time, this signal thing was working.

The marine private brought Squad Three to a halt and dropped them again. Then he moved Squad Two back a bit, just to see if they understood the pullback signal as well. For a few more minutes, Akman shuffled the elements of his command around the target area aimlessly, like a chess player wasting moves against an immobilized opponent. The militia soldiers were getting slightly better. And as far as Akman could tell, the Rix commando wasn’t even aware of the surrounding force yet. The incessant howl of the wind covered the sound of their footsteps, and the attackers were hardly lighting up the EM spectrum. Perhaps Akman’s stone-age communications had actually given the assault group a momentary advantage.

Of course, Private Akman would have traded all the surprise in the world for a few rotary-wing gunships. Puma class, with Imperial pilots.

It was time to go in.

Akman moved slowly down from his hilltop perch. He knew that after the first shots were fired, all organization would crumble unless he were visible to his troops. Hell, it would crumble anyway. But at least from down here Akman could get off a few shots of his own. In the palace rescue, he’d lost a few friends to those seven Rix defenders. If he personally made the kill-shot here at the pole, it would bury some of the shame of that failed assault.

He slid on his belly toward the cave mouth, pausing to signal forward Squad One on his left. A few competent techs were in One. He stuck his thumb up, and the squad leader, a young woman called Smithes, sprayed a bright mist of monofilament-dissolving aerosol over Akman’s head and into the cave mouth. No snares showed.

Akman moved forward again, staying in front of his troops. With everyone to his rear, he could set his varigun to the widest possible spray pattern. The sawed-off shotgun effect might not kill the Rix-woman, but she would feel it. If he could stun her even for a moment, one of the thousands of rounds guaranteed to fly from his panicked troops might get lucky.

The cave was dark. Akman paused to adjust his visor, although the cold-blooded Rix were notoriously hard to see with night-vision. He crawled inside, the sudden silence of the cave eerie after the constant moan of wind.

Then Private Akman heard a sound. It came from within, echoing from the smooth, laser-carved walls as if they were marble.

It sounded like retching, or coughing.

Akman had never imagined a Rixwoman getting sick. Perhaps it was the hostage. There was a hollowness to the sound, an anguish that sounded human and somehow heartbroken.

He mentally shrugged. Whatever it was, the noise covered his approach.

Akman raised a fist, signaling Squad One to hold until they heard fire, and crawled alone farther into the cave.

A light shone before him now, glinting from the icy walls. The coughing sound and glimmer of light seemed to come from the same direction, and Akman followed them. He knew he should spray for monofilament snares. Even crawling at a snail’s pace, the molecule-thin wires could cut through a limb before he would notice the microscopic incision. But something about the wracking, animal sound impelled him forward without due caution. Instinctively, Akman knew he had the advantage here.

The marine rose to his feet. The sound came from just around a sharp-hewn corner of ice. Akman swallowed. He was going for it: the lone kill of a Rix commando.

Akman moved before he had time to reconsider this insanity.

He stepped lightly into the small room, gun leveled. A light squeeze on the stud would hit everything in the room.

The Rix commando sat before him, her head in her hands.

Godspite, she was a mess! Hair remained only in singed patches on her scalp. Her hands and face were red and blistered, every exposed centimeter of skin smeared with soot and dried blood. Her nose was swollen from a bad break. She wore a fire-blackened ablative suit that had melted onto her hypercarbon joints, hanging in tatters from them like shiny, sloughed skin. Half-frozen blood pooled on the floor below where she sat, and Akman could see at least three abdominal wounds.

There must have been a lung hit as well. The wracking cough shook her whole body.

Private Akman had a sudden realization. He could actually capture this Rixwoman. For the first time in a century of warfare, the Empire would take a living prisoner of the Cult. And Sid Akman would be the one.

With shaking fingers he switched the varigun to a riot setting, which fired a suspension of steel pellets in plastic goo. A laughable weapon against a Rix commando, but the woman seemed so hideously wounded already, it just might be enough. He aimed the gun at her bloody stomach.

Perhaps he wouldn’t have to fire at all.

“Don’t move,” he said evenly, trying to hide his fear. The commando was believed to speak Legis dialect quite well, having carried off an impersonation of her hostage for several days.

The commando looked up, startling Akman with her beautiful, violet eyes.

By the Empire, he thought. She’s been crying.

Surely this was some maintenance procedure, some repair-nano medium for fire-damaged optics. Some crocodile trick.

Surely not tears.

Another sob wracked the commando. Then she pulled a monofilament knife from her clothes.

Akman fired instantly, the recoil from the heavy projectile pushing him off balance. He staggered to remain upright on the icy floor of the cave. The suspension of steel balls bounced harmlessly from the Rixwoman’s upraised hand—she had blocked it!

She coughed and threw the knife aside.

“I am unarmed now,” she said in a perfect local accent.

Her burned and scarred head dropped back into her hands.

The rush of adrenaline and fear that had caused him to fire passed quickly, and Akman gained control of his breathing. This Rix commando was really surrendering. The Imperial marine lowered his weapon, wondering if everything he had been taught about the Rix could be false.

The ungainly sounds of Squad One moving up came from behind him. They must have heard the varigun’s report. He turned and waved them back.

The first Rix prisoner ever. He wasn’t about to let some yokel burst in and shoot her to death. Her body convulsed again, and Akman grew concerned. He didn’t want her dying, by god.

“Are you … ?” he began. Sick? Dying? Weeping?

Keep it simple. “What’s wrong?”

The commando looked at him again with her stunning violet eyes, the only feature of her face that was not grotesque with injury.

“I am mourning Rana Harter,” she said simply. “Who died today.”

And then she wept some more.

The
Lynx
began to move.

Almost a full four hours after the captain’s deadline, First Engineer Frick finally cleared Hobbes to give the order. The frigate shook as the main drive engaged, a rattle sweeping through the bridge, tinged with a metal shriek. The
Lynx
‘s artificial-gravity generators, which usually maintained zero apparent inertia, were showing their over-stressed condition. Hobbes felt herself pressed rudely back into her chair, feeling about half the frigate’s four-gravity acceleration.

She saw the captain scowl as the crushing weight released them.

“Hobbes?”

“Sir, the AG is doing double duty,” she explained. “It’s keeping us nailed down and the ship together. We’ve prioritized inertial dampening on the portions of
Lynx
where structural integrity is in doubt.”

“Yes, Hobbes. But surely that tremor wasn’t good for the fissured hullalloy in the bow.”

“No, Captain. It wasn’t good at all for the fissured hullalloy in the bow.”

She returned to her tasks, ignoring Zai’s look of surprise at her tone. Hobbes had enough to do—coordinating the continuing repair, dispensing zero-gee to crews with heavy objects to move, making sure the
Lynx
didn’t break up—without explaining the obvious to the captain. Another few hours of repair in freefall, and the ship would have accelerated without a hitch.

But orders were orders, and time was limited.

The Rix battlecruiser was accelerating at its maximum. Even assuming the vessel turned over, it would reach the object in just over seven hours. The
Lynx
couldn’t sit around forever. As it was, the wounded frigate would be hard pressed to match velocities with the object before the battlecruiser arrived.

Hobbes wondered why the Rix had placed the object fifteen million klicks behind the battlecruiser, and without an escort. Had they assigned a hundred or so of the blackbody drones to it, the object would be able to defend itself.

She wondered grimly if the thing were already capable of fending off the
Lynx
. Its powers of alchemy were an unknown quantity. The now-animated object (Did it really contain the Rix mind, or was the captain crazy?) could change itself into practically any substance.

But how would it defend itself? Turn into a working starship? A giant fusion cannon? Or would it clam up, giving itself a carapace of hullalloy? Or even neutronium?

ExO Hobbes shook her head, correcting this last supposition. Neutronium was collapsed matter—a non-elemental substance—and so far all the object’s transubstantiations had involved elements. There was no need to exaggerate its powers, Hobbes reminded herself. Data Analysis’s current theory was that it could call arrangements of virtual electrons into being, but not protons and neutrons. Therefore the object’s substance, despite its chemical properties, would never have the mass, radioactivity, or magnetism of its true-matter analogs. The object’s alchemy was a bit like that of an easy graviton generator: The particles it created were amazing at first, but upon closer examination they paled in comparison to the real thing.

Katherie Hobbes pushed these thoughts aside—speculations on the object were DA’s concern—and refocused her attention on the
Lynx
‘s repair woes. The biggest drain on stores had been the singularity generator. The bigbang mechanism was in fine shape, but to replace the generator’s shielding, armor had been stripped relentlessly from the rest of the frigate. The generator’s jury-rigged shielding was sufficient to protect the crew, but lacked the necessary countermass to keep the hole in place under heavy gees. It took a lot of matter to keep a pocket universe from breaking free under the inertial stresses of maneuver. With every ton Frick added to the shield, Hobbes got another fraction of a gee in safe acceleration, but that armor had to be pulled from some other part of the ship. The frigate’s fissured bow also needed reinforcement. Frick had made do with a patchwork of plates drawn from armored drones, combat stations, and even decompression bulkheads. Half the hardpoints on the ship—gun batteries, the main drive, and critical targets like sickbay—had been stripped of armor. Facing a half-assed volley of flockers or some other kinetic weapon, the
Lynx
would be swissed.

The executive officer wished fervently that she could call up a hundred tons of hullalloy from an alchemist of her own.

Hobbes simulated their approach to the object under the frigate’s current configuration. At four gees for seven hours, they could slow down to make a first pass at a relative velocity of about three hundred kilometers per second, a respectable velocity for an attack. But if she could squeeze out another gee, they would come in neatly matched to the object. It would be invaluable for the Empire if they could study the thing before they destroyed it.

Ideally, Hobbes thought, she could get two more gees out of the wounded
Lynx
. Then the frigate would be able to match the six-gee maximum of the Rix craft, making an eventual escape at least feasible.

If Frick stripped every hardpoint on the ship, it might just be possible.

Hobbes rubbed her head, which had begun to spin around the combinatorial tree of possible tradeoffs. The mental focus that two hours of hypersleep had bestowed upon her was starting to slip again. She decided to ask the captain for advice.

The shipmaster’s chair was empty. She raised Zai in synesthesia.

His voice came back without visual, a sure sign that he was in the captain’s observation blister. Zai had ordered the blister resurrected as soon as it could be after the battle was over. Over the last few hours, he had returned there again and again, staring into the void as he had before rejecting the blade of error.

Hobbes wondered if he were having second thoughts.

“Yes, Hobbes?”

“I think I can get us up to five gees, sir.”

“Only five?”

Hobbes sighed quietly, glad that her expression was hidden from the captain.

“There’s not enough heavy metal to keep the hole in place at higher accelerations, sir.”

“What have we stripped?”

“Everything, sir. Hardpoints. Sickbay. Drones. As much of the main drive shielding as we can spare without another round of cancers.”

There was a pause.

“What about the bridge?”

“Sir?” The battle bridge was the
Lynx
‘s hardest point, wrapped in a cocoon of hullalloy and structured neutronium. There was good reason for this precaution; the frigate had no chain-of-command provisions if the captain and all the firsts were killed.

The Empire didn’t want ensigns running starships. Especially not this one.

“I believe there are forty tons of matter available in the bridge hardpoint,” the captain said.

“Forty tons may be present, sir. But I’m not sure they are available.”

The captain chuckled. “Give me six gees, Hobbes. Whatever it takes.”

“Sir—”

“The object may devise any number of ways to attack us, Hobbes. But I have a feeling that it would be disinclined to use a kinetic weapon. Think about it.”

Hobbes considered the captain’s words.