It felt to Zai's delicate sense of balance as if the Lynx's bridge were swirling clockwise down some gigantic drain.
Twelve senior officers had stations around the airscreen. The bridge was crowded with them and their planning staffs, and the air was filled with the crackle of argument and conjecture, of growing desperation. The wireframe of the palace was lanced periodically by arcing lines in bold, primary colors. Marine insertions, clandestine ground attacks, and drone penetrations were displayed every few minutes, all manner of the precise and sudden attacks that hostage situations called for. Of course, these assaults were all theoretical models. No one would dare make a move against the hostage-takers until the captain so ordered.
And the captain had been silent.
It was
his
neck on the line.
Laurent Zai liked it cold on his bridge. His metabolism burned like a furnace under the black wool of his Imperial Navy uniform, a garment designed for discomfort. He also believed that his crew performed better in the cold. Minds didn't wander at fourteen degrees centigrade, and the side effects were less onerous than hyperoxygenation. The
Lynx's
environmental staff had learned long ago that the more tense the situation, the colder the captain liked his bridge.
Zai noted with perverse pleasure that the breath of his officers was just visible in the red battle lights that washed the great circular room. Hands were clenched into tight fists to conserve warmth. A few officers rubbed heat into their fingers one by one, as if counting possible casualties again and again.
In this situation, the usual math of hostage rescues did not apply. Normally against the Rix Cult, fifty percent hostage survival was considered acceptable. On the other hand, the solons, generals, and courtiers held in the palace below were all persons of importance. The death of any of them would make enemies in high places for whoever was held responsible.
Even so, in this context they were expendable.
All that mattered was the fate of a single hostage. The Child Empress Anastasia Vista Khaman, heir to the throne and Lady of the Spinward Reaches. Or, as her own cult of personality called her, the Reason.
Captain Zai looked down into the tangle of schematic and conjecture, trying to find the thread that would unknot this appalling situation. Never before had a member of the Imperial household—much less an heir—been assassinated, captured, or even wounded by enemy action. In fact, for the last sixteen hundred years, none of the immortal clan had ever died.
It was as if the Risen Emperor himself were taken.
The Rix commandos had assaulted the Imperial Palace on Legis XV less than a standard day before. It wasn't known how the Rix heavy assault ship had reached the system undetected; their nearest forward bases were ten light-years spinward of the Legis cluster. Orbital defenses had destroyed the assault ship thousands of kilometers out, but a dozen small dropships were already away by then. They had fallen in a bright rain over the capital city, ten of them exploding in the defensive hail of bolt missiles, magnetic rail-launched uranium slugs, and particle beams from both the
Lynx
and groundside.
But two had made it down.
The palace had been stormed by some thirty Rix commandos, against a garrison of a hundred hastily assembled Imperial Guards.
But the Rix were the Rix.
Seven attackers had survived to reach the throne wing. Left in their path was a wake of shattered walls and dead soldiers. The Child Empress and her guests retreated to the palace's last redoubt, the council chamber. The room was sealed within a level-seven stasis field, a black sphere supposedly as unbreachable as an event horizon. They had fifty days of oxygen and six hundred gallons of water with them.
But some unknown weapon (or had it been treachery?) had dissolved the stasis field like butter in the sun.
The Empress was taken.
The Rix, true to their religion, had wasted no time propagating a compound mind across Legis XV. They released viruses into the unprotected infostructure, corrupting the carefully controlled top-down network topology, introducing parallel and multiplex paths that made emergent global intelligence unstoppable. At this moment, every electronic device on the planet was being joined into one ego, one creature, new and vastly distributed, that would make the world Rix forever. Unless, of course, the planet was bombed back into the Stone Age.
Such propogations could normally be prevented by simple monitoring software. But the Rix had warned that were any action taken against the compound mind, the hostages would be executed. The Empress would die at the hands of barbarians.
And if that happened, the failure of the military to protect her would constitute Error of Blood. Nothing short of the commanding officer's ritual suicide would be acceptable.
Captain Zai peered down into the schematic of the palace, and saw his death written there. The desperate, lancing plans of rescue—the marine drops and bombardments and infiltrations—were glyphs of failure. None would work. He could feel it. The arciform shapes, bright and primary like the work of some young child's air drawing toy, were flowers on his grave.
If he could not effect a miraculous rescue soon, he would either lose a planet or lose the Empress—perhaps both—and his life would be forfeit.
The odd thing was, Zai had felt this day coming.
Not the details. The situation was unprecedented, after all. Zai had assumed he would die in battle, in some burst of radiation amid the cascading developments of the last two months, which in top-secret communiqués were already referred to as the Second Rix Incursion. But he had never imagined death by his own hand, had never predicted an Error of Blood.
But he
had felt
mortality stalking him. Everything was too precious now, too fragile not to be broken by some mischance, some callous joke of fate. This apprehension had plagued him since he had become, just under two years ago (in his relativistic time frame), suddenly, unexpectedly, and, for the first time in his life, absolutely certain that he was peerlessly ... happy.
"Isn't love grand?"
he murmured to himself.
EXECUTIVE OFFICER
Executive Officer Katherie Hobbes heard her captain mutter something under his breath. She glanced up at him, tracers from the blazing wireframe of the captured palace streaking her vision. On the captain's face was a strange expression, given the situation. The pressure was extraordinary, time was running out, and yet he looked ... oddly ecstatic. She felt a momentary thrill at the sight.
"Does the captain require something?"
He glanced down at her from the vantage of the shipmaster's chair, the usual ice returning to his eyes. "Where are those damned Intelligencers?"
Hobbes gestured, data briefly sparkling on her gloved fingers, and a short blue line brightened below, the rest of the airscreen chaos fading in the reserved synesthesia channel she shared with the captain. A host of yellow annotations augmented the blue line, the sparse and unambiguous glyphs of military iconographics at the ready, should the captain wish more details.
So far, Hobbes thought, the plan was working.
Master Pilot Marx's squadron of small craft had been deployed from orbit two hours before, in a dropship the size of a fist. The handheld sensors of the Rix commandos had, as hoped, failed to notice this minuscule intrusion into the atmosphere. The dropship had ejected its payload before plunging with a dull thud into the soft earth of an Imperial meditation garden just within the palace. It had rained that day, so no dust cloud rose up from the impact. The ejected payload module landed softly through an open window, with an impact no greater than a champagne cork (which the payload module rather resembled in shape, size, and density) falling back to earth.
A narrowcast array deployed from the module, spreading across the black marble of the palace floor in a concentric pattern, a fallen spiderweb.
An uplink with the
Lynx
was quickly established. Two hundred kilometers above, five pilots sat in their command cockpits, and a small constellation of dust-motes rose up from the payload module, buoyed by the bare spring wind.
The piloted small craft were followed by a host of support craft controlled by shipboard AI. There were fuelers to carry extra batteries, back-up Intelligencers to replace lost craft, and repeaters that fell behind like a trail of breadcrumbs, carrying the weak transmissions of the Intelligencers back to the payload module.
The first elements of the rescue were on their way.
At this moment, however, the small craft were in an evasive maneuver, running silent and blind. They were furled to their smallest size and falling, waiting for a command from space to come alive again.
Executive Officer Hobbes turned back to the captain. She gestured toward the blue line on the wireframe, and it flared briefly.
"They're halfway in, sir," she said. "One's been destroyed. The other four are running silent to avoid interception. Marx is in command, of course."
"Get them back online, dammit. Explain to the master pilot there isn't time for caution. He'll have to forgo his usual finesse today."
Hobbes nodded smartly. She gestured again....
PILOT
"Understood, Hobbes."
As he settled back into the gelseat, Marx scowled at the executive officer's intrusion. This was
his
mission, and he'd been about to unfurl the squadron, anyway.
But it wasn't surprising that the captain was getting jumpy.
The whole squadron had stayed in their cockpits during the break, watching from Oczar's viewpoint as his ship went down. By the time the craft had gone silent, its transmitter array ripped out, an even dozen of the protozoan-sized interceptors clung to it. A dozen more had been taken out by the flurry of counterdrones Oczar had launched. This new breed of Rix interceptor seemed unusually aggressive, crowding their prey like a hungry pack of dogs. The kill had been brutal. But the enemy's singlemindedness had justified Oczar's sacrifice. With the interceptors swarming him, the rest of the squadron should be past trouble by now.
Marx briefly considered assigning Oczar to one of the remaining ships in the squadron. An advantage of remote control was that pilots could switch craft in midmission, and Oczar was a good flyer. But the large wing of backup Intelligencers, flown a safe distance behind by AI, would need a competent human in command to get a decent percentage of them through the interceptor field. Nanomachines were cheap, but without human pilots, they were fodder.
Marx decided not to challenge fate. "Take over the backups," he ordered Oczar. "Maybe you'll catch up with us yet."
"If you're not dead already, sir."
"Not likely, Pilot," Marx said flatly.
Without engine noise, sensory emissions, or outgoing transmissions to alert the interceptors to their presence, the remaining four Intelligencers had been practically invisible for the last minute. But as Marx gave his craft the wake-up order, he felt a twinge of nerves. You never knew what had happened to your nanoship while it was running blind and silent.
As its sensory web unfurled, the microscopic world around his small craft came into focus. Of course, what Pilot Marx saw in his canopy was the most abstract of representations. The skirt of tiny fiber cameras encircling the Intelligencer provided some video, but at this scale objects were largely unintelligible to the human eye. The view was enhanced by millimeter radar and high-frequency sonar, the reflections from which were shared among the squadron's viewpoints. The
Lynx's
AI also had a hand in creating the view. It generalized certain kinds of motion—the thrashing of the interceptors, for instance—that were too fast for the human eye. The AI also extrapolated friendly and enemy positions from current course and speed, compensating for the delay caused by the four-hundred-kilometer round trip of transmission. At this scale, those milliseconds mattered.
The view lightened, still blurry. The altimeter read fifteen centimeters. Marx checked right and left, then over his shoulder. It was strangely dark behind him.
Something was wrong.
"Check my tail, Hendrik," he ordered.
"Orienting." As she banked her craft to align its sensory array with the rear of his Intelligencer, the view began to sharpen.
He'd been hit.
A single interceptor had bitten his craft, its claw clinging to the casing of the stabilizer rotary wing. As the craft unfurled, the interceptor began to thrash, calling for help.
"Hendrik! I'm hooked!"
"Coming in to help, sir," Hendrik responded. "I'm the closest."
"No! Stay clear. It knows I'm alive now." When the interceptor had first attached, catching the silent and falling Intelligencer with the random luck of a drift net, it couldn't be certain whether its prey was a nanomachine, or simply a speck of dust or an errant curtain thread. But now that the Intelligencer was powered and transmitting, the interceptor was sure it had live prey. It was releasing mechanopheromones to attract other interceptors. If Hendrik came in, she would soon be under attack as well.
Marx had to escape on his own. And quickly.
He swore. He should have unfurled slower, taken a look before becoming fully active. If only the ExO hadn't called, hadn't rushed him.
Marx rotated his view 180 degrees, so that he was staring straight at his attacker, and brought his main turret camera to bear. He could see the interceptor clearly now. Its skin was translucent in the bright sunlight that filled the palace hallway. He could see the micromotors that moved its long grasping arm, the chain of segments linked by a long muscle of flexorcarbon. Its electromagnetic sensor array was a thistly crown just below its rotary wing. The wing doubled as an uptake wheel, consuming tiny ambient particles from the air, including dead human skin cells, for fuel.
The interceptor cloud had most likely been deployed from aerosol cans by the Rix commandos, sprayed directly onto their uniforms and in key hallways like insecticide. Specially designed food was usually contained in the same spray to keep the interceptors going, but they could also consume an improvised diet. This grazing strategy left the interceptor lighter for combat, though it meant they couldn't pursue their prey past their deployment area. Marx saw the small fuel cache in its midsection. It probably carried no more than forty seconds of food in reserve.