The house figuratively raised its eyebrows. This was a fine little warship. Perhaps it was intended to serve as a roving ambassador, showing the flag, equipped for crisis management and gunboat diplomacy.
As the house expected, the AI component of the warship was woefully insufficient for its range of possible operations. Imperial design tended toward underpowered artificial intelligence. (The house had recognized long ago that its own distributed processing was at odds with strict Imperial AI regulations. Some sort of damage at the beginning of its existence had allowed it to expand without the usual self-governors. The mistress had always approved, however, as long as it was discreet. There were advantages in being down here at the end of the earth, and it was pleasurable to be illegally smart.)
The house took care to note Zai's reaction, wondering what he would think of his new ship.
Captain Zai and the mistress were together on the western balcony, overlooking a few ice sculptures of aboriginal Home insect life that the house had attempted in the dead of winter, smoothed to abstraction now by the arrival of summer. Zai hadn't even accessed the entire missive yet, but he seemed upset by what he had read so far.
"Ten years out," he said. Was it pain in his voice? Or just the cold? "Ten years back."
The mistress stepped toward Zai, put a hand on his shoulder. He looked at her and laughed sourly, shaking his head.
"I'm sorry to react this way," he said. "You hardly know me, after all."
The house scanned the missive and spotted a section it had ignored. The newly promoted captain had been assigned to the Rix frontier, to a system called Legis, ten light-years away, for a tour of indeterminate length.
"I'm sorry too, Laurent," the mistress said.
Zai placed his hand on hers, blinking from his eyelashes the first flakes of a light snow. He spoke carefully.
"I know we've just met. But to lose you already—" He shook his head. "I sound foolish."
"You don't, Laurent."
"But I thought I'd be here on Home for at least a few months. I was half hoping they'd stick me on training staff."
"Would you want that, Laurent?"
"A staff position? My ancestors would wail," he answered. "But
twenty years.
And facing the damned Time Thief again. I suppose I've grown tired of his tricks."
"How long has it been, Laurent? Your career, in Absolute years?"
"Too many," he said. "Almost a hundred."
Nara shook her head. "I didn't know."
"And now another thirty, probably," he said. "Fifty, if there really is a war coming."
"A senator's term of office," the mistress observed.
The man turned, his expression changing.
"You're right, Nara. We may both lose the next fifty years. And you senators have your own Thief. You're frozen half the time, aren't you?"
"Much more than half, Laurent."
"Well," he said, meeting her eyes, "that's hopeful, I suppose."
She smiled. "Perhaps it is. But I'll still be older than you, subjectively. I am already."
"You are?"
She laughed. "Yes. Give me another decade in subjective, and you'll notice."
Zai straightened himself. "Of course I will. I'll notice everything."
"Is that a promise?"
He took both the mistress's hands.
"We have four days to make promises, Senator-Elect."
"Yes, Captain."
"Four days," he repeated, and turned back to the ice sculptures.
"Stay here with me," she asked. "Give us those days."
The house became alert. The mistress had only announced a weekend stay; never before had she extended a visit unexpectedly. Meals had been planned in excruciating detail, supplies obtained in exact amounts. Despite the vast resources of the estate—the underground gardens, the caves full of food and wine, the cargo drones ready to launch from a hundred high-end stores on the Imperial homeworld—a surge of anxiety almost resembling panic swept through the house's mind. This was all so
abrupt.
And yet, the house wanted Zai to agree.
It waited anxiously for the man's answer.
"Yes," he said. "I'd love to."
The house took its attention from their sudden kiss. There was so much to do.
EPILOGUE
CAPTAIN
The
Lynx
exploded, expanded.
The frigate's energy-sink manifold spread out, stretching luxuriant across eighty square kilometers. The manifold was part hardware and part field effect, staggered ranks of tiny machines held in their hexagonal pattern by a lacework of easy gravity. It shimmered in the Legis sun, refracting a mad god's spectrum, unfurling like the feathers of some ghostly, translucent peacock seeking to rut. In battle, it could disperse ten thousand gigawatts per second, a giant lace fan burning hot enough to blind naked human eyes at two thousand klicks.
The satellite-turrets of the ship's four photon cannon eased away from the primary hull, extending on hypercarbon scaffolds that reminded Zai of the iron bones of ancient cantilever bridges. The
Lynx
was shielded from the cannon's collateral radiation by twenty centimeters of hullalloy. They were removed on their spindly arms four kilometers from the vessel proper; using the cannon would afflict the Lynx's crew with only the most treatable of cancers. The four satellite-turrets carried sufficient reaction mass and intelligence to operate independently if released in battle. And from the safety of a few thousand kilometers distance, their fusion magazines could be ordered to crashfire, consuming themselves in a chain reaction, delivering one final, lethal needle toward the enemy. Of course, the cannon could also be crashfired from their close-in position, destroying their mother ship in a blaze of deadly glory.
That was one of the frigate's five standard methods of self-destruction.
The magnetic rail that launched the
Lynx's
drone complement descended from her belly, and telescoped to its full nineteen-hundred-meter length. A few large scout drones, a squadron of ramscatters, and a host of sandcasters deployed themselves around the rail. The ramscatters bristled like nervous porcupines with their host of tiny flechettes, each of which carried sufficient fuel to accelerate at two thousand gees for almost a second. The sandcasters were bloated with dozens of self-propelled canisters, whose ceramic skins were cross-hatched with fragmentation patterns. At the high relative velocity of this battle, sand would be a Zai's most effective weapon against the Rix receiver array.
Inside the rail bay, great magazines of other drone types were loaded in a carefully calculated order of battle. Stealth penetrators, broadcast decoys, minesweepers, remotely piloted fighter craft, close-in-defense pickets all awaited their moment in battle. Finally, a single deadman drone waited. This drone could be launched even if the frigate lost all power, accelerated by highly directional explosives inside its dedicated backup rail. The deadman was already active, continuously updating its copy of the last two hours' log-files, which it would attempt to deliver to Imperial forces if the
Lynx
were destroyed.
When
we are destroyed, Captain Laurent Zai corrected himself. His ship was not likely to survive this encounter; it was best to accept that. The Rix vessel outpowered and outgunned them. Its crew was quicker and more adept, so intimately linked into the battlecruiser's systems that the exact point of division between human and hardware was a subject more for philosophical debate than military consideration. And Rix boarding commandos were deadly: faster, hardier, more proficient in compromised gravity. And, of course, they were unafraid of death; to the Rix, lives lost in battle were no more remarkable than a few brain cells sacrificed to a glass of wine.
Zai watched his bridge crew work, preparing the newly configured
Lynx
to resume acceleration. They were in zero-gee now, waiting for the restructuring to firm up before subjecting the expanded frigate to the stresses of acceleration. It was a relief to be out of high-gee, if only for a few hours. When the engagement started in earnest, the ship would go into evasive mode, the direction and strength of acceleration varying continuously. Next to that chaos, the last two weeks of steady high acceleration would seem like a pleasure cruise.
Captain Zai wondered if there was any mutiny left in his crew. At least two of the conspirators had escaped his and Hobbes's trap. Were there more? The senior officers must realize that this battle was unwinnable. They understood what a Rix battlecruiser was capable of, and would recognize that the
Lynx's
battle configuration had been designed to damage its opponent, not preserve itself. Zai and ExO Hobbes had optimized the ship's offensive weaponry at the expense of it defenses, orienting its entire arsenal on the task of destroying the Rix receiver array.
Now that the
Lynx
was at battle stations, even the junior officers would be able spot the ill portents that surrounded them.
The boarding skiffs remained in their storage cells. It was unlikely that Zai's marines would be crossing the gulf to capture the Rix battlecruiser. Boarding actions were the privilege of the winning vessel. Instead, the Imperial marines were taking up positions throughout the
Lynx,
ready to defend it from capture should the Rix board the vessel after pounding it into helplessness. Normally under these conditions, Zai would have issued sidearms to the crew to help repel boarders. But after the mutiny this seemed a risky show of faith. Most ominously for any crewman who chose to notice, the singularity generator, the most dramatic of Zai's self-destruct options, was already charged to maximum. If the
Lynx
could draw close enough to the enemy battlecruiser, the two craft would share a dramatic death.
In short, the
Lynx
was primed like an angry, blind drunk hurtling into a barfight with gritted teeth, ferally anxious to inflict damage, unconscious of any pain she might feel herself.
Perhaps that was their one advantage in this fight, Zai thought: desperalion. Would the Rix try to protect the vulnerable receiver array? Their mission was obviously to communicate with the compound mind on Legis. But would the dictates of saving the array force the Rix commander to make a bad move? If so, there might be some slim hope of surviving this battle.
Zai sighed and grimly pushed this line of thought aside. Hope was not his ally, he had learned over the last ten days.
He turned his mind back to the bridge airscreen and its detailed schematic of the
Lynx's
internal structure.
The wireframe lines shifted like an oriental puzzle box, as walls and bulkheads inside the frigate slid into battle configuration. Common rooms and mess halls disappeared to make space for expanded gunnery stations, passageways widened for easier movement of emergency repair teams. Crew bunks transformed into burn beds. The sickbay irised open, consuming the zero-gee courts and running tracks that usually surrounded it. Walls sprouted handholds in case of gravity loss, and everything that might come loose in sudden acceleration was stowed, velcroed, bolted down, or simply recycled.
Finally, the coiling, shifting, expanding, and extruding all came to a halt, and the schematic eased into a stable shape. Like a well-crafted mechanical bolt smoothly sliding into place, the vessel became battle ready.
A single claxon sounded. A few of his bridge crew half-turned toward Zai. Their faces were expectant and excited, ready to begin this fight regardless of the ship's chances. He saw it most in ExO Hobbes's expression. They'd been beaten back on Legis XV, all of them, and this was their chance to get revenge. The mutiny, however small and aborted, had shamed them as well. They were ready to fight, and their bloodlust, however desperate, was good to see.
It was just possible, Laurent Zai allowed himself to think, that they would get home.
The captain nodded to the first pilot, and weight gradually returned, pressing him into the shipmaster's chair as the frigate accelerated.
The
Lynx
moved toward battle.