Only half a dozen in the bridge crew, a score more in the rest of the vessel. The drive was magnetic, superconductor coils along the length of the hull; most of that was filled with the nuclear power plant, essential life support, and thirty torps.
Hypervelocity sea-skimmers with multiple warheads, on a ship that could do better than fifty knots, or dive as deep as the water went, in most places. The finest class of submarine the Alliance had ever built, and the last, nearly obsolete.
"Well, they seem to have found
some
use for us," she said.
"Number Two." The Executive Officer came to stand by her chair. "We'll open the sealed orders now." Their squadron were spraying out from Norfolk like a fan of titanium-matrix minnows, each with their own packet of deadly instructions.
"Yes, ma'am."
Her thumbnail hesitated for a moment on the wax of the seal.
I'm glad we never had kids,
she thought; her husband was in Naval Air, out of Portsmouth. The paper sprang free with a slight
tock
sound.
The commodore's eyebrows rose. "Make course for the Angolan Abyssal Plain," she said. "Down to the bottom, and wait."
ABOARD DASCS
MAMBA
TRANSLUNAR SPACE
NOVEMBER 4, 1998
0300 HOURS
"God," Marya muttered. The new trace on the screen was matching velocities
fast.
She was in the pilot's couch of the yacht, where she had been since the takeoff. Never leaving it, except for a few dashes to the head. The floor around her was littered with the wrappers of ration-bars; it was important to keep up the blood sugar. Sleep you could avoid, by popping stim, even when you were accelerating at a continuous 1.3 G. Over forty hours now since the last sleep, and things were beginning to scuttle around the edges of her peripheral vision. The icy clarity of her senses was growing disconcerting, a taunting, on-edge
twisting
that left you wondering if the information coming in to the brain was accurate. Could she really smell so sour already?
Am I thinking
straight?
The dimmed lights still seemed hurting-bright.
Her eyes flicked back to the board. The Draka cruisers were still there behind her, three of them. Not gaining much; this ship was
fast
. Grotesquely overpowered, and the hydrogen-boron-11
reaction was fantastically efficient. The first drive that really didn't need reaction mass; all it produced was charged particles for the coils to squeeze aft… Those cruisers were fourth-generation, deuterium-tritium fusion. This much continuous boost was probably doing their thrust plates no good at all, they must be using just enough water-mass to protect the diamond films. Still, eventually they would get close enough to get parallax and bring their beam weapons to bear.
An alarm chimed; one of the warships' lasers was impinging on the
Mamba's
thrust-plate. Marya's fingers touched the board, and the magnetic fields twisted slightly against the fusion flame.
The
Mamba
skittered sideways… The Draka craft were still light-seconds away, enough to make dodging easy. Missiles and slugs were out of the question without matching or intersecting vectors; not enough sustained boost.
"Oh, shit, no
way
I can fight this thing," she muttered, looking over to the vacant couches. One untrained person could just barely pilot it, on an idiot-proof minimum time, maximum thrust boost, if they knew the theory and how to stroke computers. A quarter of the screens were dead anyway, the comm systems,
all
of them down, and no time to check why without getting sliced into dogmeat by the pursuit. In the meantime she was half-delirious and wholly terrified.
She laughed. "And I feel
great.
Fucking wonderfull." Because she was doing, accomplishing; perhaps only her own death in a quick flare of plasma, but that would be something. It was helplessness that was the worst thing about being a slave. Not abuse, not privation, not the ritualized humiliation; it was not being able to
do
anything except what they wanted. This was the most alive she had felt in twenty years.
The new trace was still closing. Marya blinked and recalibrated; her eyes felt dry, but the lids slid up and down as if lubricated with mercury. Whatever it was was boosting at 2 G to match velocities, and had been for the better part of a day.
Better than the
Mamba
herself could do. Again she looked in acid frustration at the dead comm screens; there was probably enough information flying back and forth, threats and warnings and demands, to tell her everything she needed to know.
I might
as well put a
secondmessage in a bloody bottle and throw it out
the airlock,
she thought.
3K klicks and closing at 1k per
relative
.
Soon they would be in visual distance, as something more than a point of light…
"Visual," she muttered to herself, unconscious of speaking aloud. "Maybe, if they're looking —"
Impatiently, she called up the maximum magnification and waited. Presently it appeared, no class of vessel she was familiar with. For a chill moment she thought it might be another like the craft she was flying; the tapered-wedge shape was plainly meant to transit atmosphere. Then she saw the Alliance colors, the Space Force blazon. Even the name:
Sacajawea.
It was bigger than the
Mamba
as well, corvette sized, a couple of thousand tonnes payload. Her hand touched a section of the consol.
Airflight mode
CURRENTLY IN VACUUM, the computer replied with electronic idiot-savant indifference to circumstances.
Airflight mode, landing lights, exterior.
OPERATIONAL: ON/OFF (Y/N)?
She touched on. Off. On…
"Sir."
Frederick Lefarge looked up from the plotting console. The
Sacajawea
was one of a dozen shuttlecraft the
New America
would carry, mirrormatter powered, equally suited to atmosphere or deepspace work. That was easy enough with a power supply as energetic as antihydrogen. If the
New America
ever sailed, it would be a one-way trip with not much hope of return, and a long time before a functioning economy could be established at the target star. Her auxiliaries had been designed to last a century, and do everything from lifting Itilotonne-mass loads out of a terrestrial-sized gravity well to interplanetary freighting. This one could cross the solar system and back in forty days, without refueling.
And it could fight an Imperator-class cruiser, quite handily; hence the large bridge crew. Lefarge looked hungrily at the spread of trajectories on the board before him. Those Snakes were going to get a very unpleasant surprise, if push came to shove.
"Sir?" That was the
Sacajawea's
captain, Ibrahim Kurasaka.
"Sir?" Lefarge said in turn. He outranked the other man, but there was only one commander on a bridge. For that matter, his manning a board here was irregular, but there were times when the book didn't matter all that much.
"Ah… Brigadier Lefarge, I'm getting a damned odd pattern of visuals from that Snake pleasure-barge."
"I'll be glad to take a look," Lefarge said. An image blinked into the center of his screens, and he narrowed his eyes. Not a random pattern… Suddenly, he chuckled harshly.
"You didn't go through the national Scouts, did you, Captain?"
"No, Brigadier, I didn't," Kurasaka said. He was Javanese-Nipponese, and the Indonesian Federation had not been advanced enough for a universal youth-movement back then.
"That's an antique system; Morse, it used to be called.
Probably in the datastore; let me… yes." He raised one hand with enormous effort against the drag of acceleration and began keying. After a moment:
"Oh, my God."
"Marya, Marya!
Ma soeur, ma petite soeur—
"
For a moment she was lost, content simply to hold him.
Then she pushed herself to arm's length. There was shock in his eyes, enough that she was startled.
Do
I look that bad?
Forty hours of stim, but still—
"Fffff—" Appalled, she stopped. The stammer she had overcome so long ago was back.
Not now, not
now
! A medical corpsman was floating down the connecting tube behind her brother, crowding along the wall to let the squads of Intelligence types past as they headed for the quick ransacking of the
Mamba
that was all the available time would allow. She had an injector in her hand, and the single-mindedness that went with the winged staff that blazoned her elbow. Antistim and trank.
"NNnnnnno!" Marya stutterred, pointing. Her brother half-turned, cut off the medic's protest with an angry gesture.
"You need rest," he said. The words were banal, not the tone, and there were… yes, tears at the corners of his eyes.
Tears are for later
, she thought, and felt a flat calm return. A deep breath in.
"Lüi-sten," she said slowly. "Therrre is a bbbbiological…"
CENTRAL OFFICE. ARCHONAL PALACE
ARCHONA
DOMINATION OF THE DRAKA
NOVEMBER 4, 1998
0500 HOURS
"So." Eric von Shrakenberg looked around the circle of the table. "Is that the consensus?"
Louise Gayner snorted and snapped a thumbnail against the crackle-finish of her perscomp. The others glanced sidelong at each other; the Supreme General Staff representatives, the Directors of War and Security, the Council members. No teleconferencing, not for this. A dozen human beings, and they were all those who must be consulted in this matter.
Silence. Nods. At last the head of the Staff spoke:
"Excellence, we've
already
lost twenty percent of our capacity to this damned comp-plague, and there'll be mo'.
Must
be mo'.
The Stone Dogs are our only hope. If we lose that there's nothin'.
There's no
time.
Excellence; every moment we wait is a nail in our coffin."
The Archon looked down at his fingers.
They're waiting for
my decision, my choice.
The thought was hilarious, enough so that he did not know whether laughter or nausea would be more fitting.
All my life
I've wanted to set us free,
he thought.
free
from a way of life based on death. Now my only chance of it is
to inflict more death than the combined totals of every despot
and warlord in the whole mad-dog
slaughterhouse we call
human history. My choice
. Could it be Yolande's fault? Could it be anyone's fault that it had come to this, the whole of human history narrowing down to this point? Ten thousand generations, living, rearing their children, working, dreaming, going down to dust, and now… He would say the words, and they would be like a sword across all time, no matter the outcome. If there were humans at all, a generation hence, they would call this the decisive moment. The ultimate power, and in his bands.
A leader is someone who manages to keep ahead of the pack,
he knew bitterly, feeling the cold carnivore eyes on him. There was exactly one practical choice he could make, within the iron framework of the Domination's logic, and the Draka were nothing if not a practical people. Or he could refuse it, and the only difference would be that he would be safely dead in twenty minutes. For a second's brief temptation he wished he could; it would spare him the consequences, at least.
No. At seventh and last, I am a von Shrakenberg, and I have
my duty.
Besides that, if nothing else it would give Gayner too much pleasure.
"Activate the Stone Dogs," he said; his voice had the blank dispassion of a recording. "Force Condition Eight. Service to the State."
"Glory to the Race," came the reply. There was another brief pause, as if the men and women gathered around the table were caught in the huge inertia of history, the avalanche they were about to unloose. Then they rose and left, one by one.
Gayner was the last. Eric watched her with hooded eyes as she snapped the perscomp shut; time had scored his old enemy more heavily than he, for all his extra years. Only traces of red in the gray-white hair, and there were spots on her hands.
"Happy?" he said, at last. There was a curious intimacy to a perfect hatred, like a long marriage.
"Not particularly," she replied, straightening her cravat. Their eyes met. "The Yankees… that's not personal. They're cattle."
Then she smiled. "Yo', on the other hand. Ahhh, come the day,
that
will make me happy."
"Nice to know Ah can afford anothah human being such satisfaction," he said. There was no particular hurry now; neither of them was much involved in implementation. The snow was moving down the slope. Still glacial slow, but there was no stopping it. "Headin' fo y' bunker?"
"No." She looked up at the wall. "I've got a transsonic waitin'.
I'll sit this one out in Luanda. Home." Gayner looked at him again. "But don't worry. I'll be back."
DOMINATION SPACE COMMAND PLATFORM
MOURNBLADE
LOW EARTH ORBIT
NOVEMBER 4, 1998
0900 HOURS
The commander of the battle platform looked up sharply.
"That's the code," he said. His second nodded, confirming. They were in the centrum of the platform, and the Chiliarch allowed himself a moment's pride; this was the newest and best of Space Command's orbital fists.
"Initiate Zebra," he said.
There was a heavy tension on the command bridge, but no confusion, no panic. This was what they had trained long years for; if any of the operators at their consoles were thinking of homes and families below, it made no difference to the cool professionalism of their teamwork.
"Preparin' fo' launch," the Weapons Officer said.
The commander touched his screen.
[Detonation sequence activated]
"What the
fuck
—that's not the launch protocol." There was controlled alarm in his voice. "Weapons, pull that sequence!"
Frantic activity. "Suh, it's not respondin! The central comp's not acceptin' input."
[Ten seconds]