"Yes, ma'am."
"You will stay in this cabin until we reach the pole. Understood?"
"I understand, ma'am."
The woman's precise tone began to calm Rana a bit. Whatever mission the militia wanted her for, they were giving clear enough orders. That was one thing she liked about the militia. You didn't have to think for yourself.
"You are to speak to no one but me on this train, Rana Harter."
"Yes, ma'am," Rana answered. "May I ask one question, though?"
The woman said nothing, which Rana took as permission to continue.
"Who exactly are you, ma'am? My orders didn't say—"
The woman interrupted immediately, "I am Colonel Alexandra Herd, Legis XV Militia." She produced a colonel's badge from the voluminous coat.
Rana swallowed. She'd never even seen anyone with a rank over captain before. Officers existed on a lofty level that was utterly mysterious when viewed from her own small, nervous world.
But she hadn't realized how truly strange they could be.
The colonel pointed at the corner of the room, and a washbasin unfolded itself elegantly from the wall.
"Wash your hair," she ordered.
"My hair?" Rana asked, dumbfounded anew.
Colonel Herd pulled a knife from her pocket. The blade was almost invisibly thin, a shimmering presence as it caught light reflected from the patches of snow passing the window. The handle was curved in a strange way that made Rana think of a bird's wings. The colonel held it with her fingertips, a sudden grace evident in her long fingers.
"After you have washed your hair, I will cut it off," Colonel Herd said.
"I don't understand..."
"And a manicure, and a good scrubbing."
"What?"
"Orders."
Rana Harter did not respond. Her mind had begun to whir, to accelerate into a blur as featureless as the passing landscape. It was her brainbug, going for a quick flight, buzzing toward that paralyzing moment when a host of incoherent, chaotic inputs suddenly resolved into understanding.
She could just glimpse the operations of the savant portion of her mind, the maelstrom of analysanda madly arranging itself, seeking to collapse from a meaningless flurry into something concrete and comprehensible: the curve of the colonel's knife, somehow like an outline remembered from a ship-spotting course in her astronomy training; her strange, placeless accent, the words slow and prompted; the collection of hair, fingernails, skin; the colonel's inhuman eyes; and the woman's avian movements that fluttered like sunlight on bicycle spokes, the smell of lemongrass, or Bach played fast on a woodwind...
With a burst of sensation across Rana's skin—the rasp of talons—coherence arrived.
Rana had been trained to give the results of her brainbugs quickly, spitting out the essential data before they had time to escape her mind's tenuous grasp. And the rush of knowledge was so sharp and clear, so shocking this time—that she couldn't stop herself.
"You're a Rix, aren't you?" she blurted. "The compound mind's talking through you. You want to..."
Rana Harter bit her tongue, cursing her stupidity. The woman remained still for a moment, as if waiting for a translation. Rana's eyes darted around the room, casting for a weapon. But there was nothing at hand that could stop the sudden, birdlike alien across from her. Not for a second.
Then Rana saw the emergency pull-cord swinging above her head.
She reached up for it, yanking down hard on the elegant brass handle, cool in her hand. She braced herself for the screech of brakes, the wail of a siren.
Nothing happened.
Rana fell back into her seat.
The compound mind,
her own brain told her.
Everywhere.
"You want to impersonate me," Rana found herself compelled to finish.
"Yes," the Rixwoman said.
"Yes," repeated Rana. She felt—with a strange relief after trying so hard not to all day long—that she would cry.
Then the alien woman leaned forward, one fingertip extended and glistening, and with a touch, thrust a needle into Rana's arm.
One moment of pain, and after that everything was just fine.
CAPTAIN
The haze of points that represented the Rix battlecruiser and her satellites grew more diffuse as the minutes passed. The smaller cloud that was the
Lynx
changed too, softening, as if Captain Zai's eyes were losing focus.
He blinked reflexively, but the airscreen image of the approaching hosts continued to blur. The two combatant ships deployed still more adjunct craft, hundreds of drones to provide intelligence, to penetrate and attack the other ship, and to harry the opponents' drones. The
Lynx
and the Rix ship became two stately clouds nearing a slow collision.
"Freeze," Zai ordered.
The two clouds stopped, just touching.
"What's the relative velocity at the edge?" he asked his executive officer.
"One percent lightspeed," Hobbes answered.
Someone on the command bridge let out an audible rush of breath.
"Three thousand klicks per second," Master Pilot Marx translated, muttering to himself.
Zai let the cold fact of this velocity sink in, then resumed the simulation. The clouds drifted into each other, the movement just visible, seemingly no faster than the setting sun as it approaches the horizon. Of course, only the grand scale of the battle made the pace look glacial. At the scale of the invisibly small craft within those point-clouds, the fight would unfold at a terrific pace.
The
Lynx's
captain drummed his fingers. His ship was designed for combat at much lower relative velocities. In a normal intercept situation, he would accelerate alongside the battlecruiser, matching its vector. Standard tactics against larger craft demanded minimal relative motion, to give the imperial drone swarm sufficient time to wear down the bigger ship's defenses. Even against Rix cyborgs, Imperial pilots were renowned. And the
Lynx,
as the prototype of its class, had been allotted some of the best in the Navy.
But Zai didn't have the luxury of standard tactics. He had a mission to carry out.
Master Pilot Marx was the first to speak up.
"There won't be much piloting to it, sir," he said. "Even our fastest drones only make a thousand gees acceleration. That's ten thousand meters per second squared. One percent of the constant equals three
million
meters per second. We'll be rushing past them too fast to do any dogfighting."
Marx glared into the airscreen.
"There won't be much we can do to protect the
Lynx
from their penetrators either, Captain," he concluded.
"That won't be your job, Master Pilot," Zai said. "Just keep your drones intact, and get them through to attack the Rix ship."
The master pilot nodded. His role in this, at least, was clear. Zai let the simulation run further. As Marx had complained, the crashing waves of drones had little effect on one another. They were passing through each other too quickly for any but the luckiest of shots to hit. Soon, the outermost edges of the two spheres reached each other's vital centers. The
Lynx
and the Rix battlecruiser began to take damage; the kinetic hits of flechettes and expansion webs, wide-area radiation strikes from energy weapons.
"Freeze," Zai ordered.
"You'll notice that the adjunct craft have started making hits," ExO Hobbes took up the narrative.
"A ship's a much bigger target than a two-meter drone," Marx said.
"Exactly," Hobbes said. "And a battlecruiser is a bigger target than a frigate. Especially this particular battlecruiser."
She zoomed the view into the bright mote that was the Rix vessel. The receiver array became visible, the ship proper no more than a speck against its vast expanse.
Hobbes added a scale marker; the array was a thousand kilometers across.
"Think you can hit that?" Hobbes asked.
Master Pilot Marx nodded slowly.
"Absolutely, Executive Officer. Provided I'm still alive."
Zai nodded. Marx had a point. He would be piloting remotely from the belly of the
Lynx,
which would itself be under attack. The Imperial ship had to survive long enough for its drones to reach the Rix battlecruiser.
"We'll be alive. The
Lynx
will be inside a tight group of close-in-defense drones. We'll railgun them out in front, then have them cut back to match the velocity of the incoming drones," Hobbes said.
"Or as close as they can get," Marx corrected her. The Lynx's defensive drones could never match the incoming Rix attackers at three thousand klicks a second.
"And
we'll be clearing our path with all the abrasion sand we can produce." Hobbes sighed.
"But we'll have our hands full," she finished.
Zai was glad to hear the nervous tremor just audible in her voice. This plan was a dangerous one. The staff had to understand that.
"May I ask a question, Captain?"
It was Second Gunner Thompson.
"Gunner?" Zai said.
"This
collision
of a battle plan," he said slowly. "Is it designed to protect Legis? Or to create a tactical advantage for the
Lynx?"
"Both," Zai answered. "Our orders are to prevent contact between the battlecruiser and the compound mind."
Zai's fingers moved, and the view pulled back to a schematic of the entire system. It filled with the vectors he and Hobbes had worked out that afternoon.
"To make it work, we'll have to accelerate spinward, out toward the battlecruiser, then turn over and come back in. Over the next ten days we'll have to average ten gees."
The command bridge stirred. Zai and his crew would be spending the next week suffering under the uneasy protection of easy gravity. Uncomfortable and dangerous, the high-gee conditions would leave them exhausted for the battle.
"And yes," Zai continued. "As Gunner Thompson suggests, high relative velocity gives us a tactical advantage, given our orders. Our objective is not to engage the Rix battlecruiser in a fight to the death. We're to destroy its array as quickly as possible."
"'Suicide missions thrive on high velocities,'" Thompson quoted.
The bastard,
Zai thought. To cite Anonymous 167 at him, as if this situation were of Zai's devising.
"We're under orders, Gunner," Hobbes snapped. "Preventing contact between the Rix battlecruiser and the Legis compound mind is our primary objective."
She left the rest unspoken: the Lynx's survival was of secondary concern.
Thompson shrugged, not meeting Hobbes's eye. He was one of those more intimidated by her beauty than her rank. "Why can't they just pull the plug on the mind down on Legis?" he managed.
Zai sighed. He didn't want his crew spending its energy this way: trying to think of ways to get out of the coming battle.
"They wouldn't have to give up technology forever," Thompson continued. "Just for a few days, while the battlecruiser passed by. In boot camp, I lived in a simulated jungle biome for a month using traditional survival techniques. We could offer assistance from
Lynx
for any emergencies."
"This is a
planet,
Thompson," Hobbes explained. "Not some Navy training biome. Two billion civilians and the entire infrastructure that necessitates. Every day that's ten billion gallons of liters, two million tons of food produced and distributed, and a half million emergency medical responses. All of it dependent on the infostructure; dependent, in effect, on the Rix compound mind."
"We'd have to somehow disable every piece of technology for four days," Zai continued. "On a planet of Legis's population, there will be two hundred thousand births in that time. Care to use your survival skills to assist with them all, Thompson?"
The command bridge filled with laughter.
"No, sir," the man answered. "Not covered in my basic training, sir."
"How unfortunate," Zai concluded. "Then I'll want your detailed analyses of the current attack plan by 2.00. We'll be under high gravities by 4.00. One last night of decent sleep for the crew."
"Dismissed," Hobbes said.
The bridge bustled with energy as the senior officers went to present the plan to their own staffs.
Hobbes gave her captain a supporting nod. Zai was pleased she'd been able to defuse the trouble that Second Gunner Thompson had started. Attacking the superior Rix ship would be an easier sacrifice if the crew thought of it in terms of how many lives they were saving down below. But why was Thompson confronting him in front of his staff?
The second gunner was from an old, gray family, with as solid a military tradition as the Zais. By some measures, Thompson was grayer than his captain. One of his brothers was an aspirant in the Apparatus; none of the Zais had ever been politicals.
Perhaps Thompson's words were intended to remind Zai that the Imperial pardon was a sham, a way for the Emperor to save face. But it was a graceless pardon, paired with an impossible task, which might yet destroy him, his ship, and his crew.
Clearly, Laurent Zai had not been forgiven.
COMMANDO
Wielding the monofilament knife carefully, H_rd cut Rana Harter's long hair down to a few centimeters.
The dopamine regulators that the commando had injected into her captive's bloodstream were self-perpetuating; the woman would remain acquiescent for days. As the medical records H_rd had unearthed at the library had shown, Harter suffered from chronic low-level depression. Any decent society would have cured it as a matter of course. But the Empire found Rana's synesthetic disorder, her savant mathematical ability, useful. Imperial medicine wasn't sophisticated enough to both heal Harter and maintain the delicate balance of her brainbug, so they let her suffer.
For the Rix, however, the treatment was child's play.
Harter was still feeling some side effects. Her attention seemed to wander now and then, lapsing into short fugues of inactivity, her eyelids shuddering a bit. But when shown the colonel's badge she followed orders; the Imperials conditioned their subjects well. H_rd set Harter to organizing the strands of her shorn hair by length on the cabin's ornate table, while the commando shaved her own head down to the scalp.