“My question is how are we going to get home?” She asked the question in Chinese, and her words sounded abrupt and angry, but the truth was Chinese always sounded that way to Sam.
“The short answer is, we’re still working on that,” he said. He heard groans of disappointment and looks of irritation and disbelief. That made sense. It was easier for them to think he was holding back than that there was no better answer. “What I can tell you is what we know, where we’re going, and what we’re going to do when we get there.
“Here’s what we know. The jump drive we’ve always thought was made by the Varoki was invented by the Guardians a long time ago. We don’t know how the Varoki got hold of it, but that’s why the Guardians were able to reprogram our jump drive. We think they did it because one of their Guardians was missing—the one who had the jump drive all of ours appear to have been copied from—and they were trying to get him back, not us.
“Where are we going? We’re currently coasting out toward the system’s largest gas giant. We’ve matched course with an automated bulk carrier and are hugging it very closely to mask our signature. We’re also running in low-emission mode with our thermal shroud deployed and faced back toward the largest remaining source of communication and spacecraft traffic, which is Destie-Three. For those of you unfamiliar with a thermal shroud, it is a hemispherical parasol of light composites, honeycombed with coolant lines filled with liquid helium. It traps all of our thermal emissions in that direction, pumps the heat back to our aft radiators, and discharges it there. It is an effective means of reducing our thermal signature to nil, at least in that one direction. As near as we can tell, they’ve lost us. We are off their scopes.
“What are we going to do? It will take us about three weeks to get to the gas giant. There are two inhabited moons. From our Guardian prisoner we know the smaller of the two moons is the administrative center controlling the facilities which build and maintain spacecraft in this system. We intend to land Marines there and take control of the complex. If they knew enough to screw our jump drive up, somebody there has to know enough to unscrew it.”
“Do you trust that Guardian you took prisoner?” someone shouted.
“No,” Sam said. “So far, we’ve confirmed everything she’s told us, to the extent we can double-check it. That doesn’t mean we’re letting our guard down.”
“Madamoiselle Sophie Apollinaire, I think you’re up,” Ensign Day said.
Younger than many of the passengers, Sam thought, perhaps mid-twenties, casually but expensively dressed. Not an established professional, but perhaps the daughter of one.
“We’ve been hearing about the Varoki stealing the star drive,” she said, “and that is why we’re in all this trouble. Why can’t we just give the Varoki we have to the Guardians and ask them to let us go? We didn’t do anything wrong.”
Sam saw nods of agreement, heard a low mutter of assent and some anger.
“This thing about the jump drive is big news alright,” Sam said. “It’s going to mean big changes back home, once we get there with the word. I don’t have any idea how it will all shake out, politically, economically, militarily. I don’t think it’s going to be easy or pretty, but we’ll get through it somehow.
“But I’ll tell you this: the Varoki passengers on this ship aren’t any more responsible for what’s happened to us than you are, ma’am. Just like you, they were told a lie from birth, and just like you and me and everyone standing here, they believed it and lived their lives accordingly.
“No one’s turning any of my passengers or crew over to the Guardians, not while I’m alive. Next question.”
“Mister Mahaan Singh is next,” Ensign Day said.
Singh was dressed a lot like the Chinese lady, business formal—most of the passengers were prosperous, successful artists or businesspeople. He also wore a turban and the tightly wound beard of a Sikh. Singh had a lean and particularly polished look, his face carefully blank.
“Is it true this was all just a misunderstanding? You already said they weren’t interested in us but some missing Guardian. Could we have avoided violence with a better negotiator?”
“Are you a negotiator, sir?”
“Yes I am, and I am a very good one, too.”
“Well, we’re actually short a negotiator at the moment. Perhaps you will volunteer to accompany the next landing party which tries to communicate directly with them.”
Some of the color drained from his face and he leaned back. “Well, it’s all different now that you went ahead and started a war.”
“Yes, it is, but that’s the situation we have to deal with. To answer your original question, no, sir, this was not just a misunderstanding. We’ve learned the Guardians routinely eat what they call offerings. They did not tell us of their so-called custom, not as an oversight, but because they do not care whether we understand or not. They think we are no more noteworthy than livestock. Mister Singh, I’ve never heard of a negotiation between a pig and a butcher ending well for the pig. Have you?”
“I think you’re oversimplifying,” he said.
“Well then, come along next time and show us what you got.”
“Or just shut the fuck up,” someone shouted from the crowd. A murmured ripple of agreement was met with scattered angry pushback and then a rising swell of voices made inarticulate by too much pent-up fear and frustration.
“That’s enough!” Sam shouted. “I’m not here to argue, I’m here to answer questions. Who’s next?”
Lieutenant Koichi Ma sat for the second time with the alien prisoner, this time on his own.
Yesterday’s session had changed everything he knew about the political and scientific order of things in the Cottohazz. He’d never been much interested in starships. Sure, he’d gone the Naval ROTC route to help with college, and then got called back to active duty when things started heating up, but his heart had never been in crewing a starship. Jump drives belonged to the Varoki. Humans could lease them, use them, but never study them, understand them, re-engineer them. Ask an engineer to operate a machine but forbid him from making it work better and you will have an unhappy, frustrated engineer, and none more so than Koichi Ma. Just a waste of his time.
But now . . . now he wanted to go back and pull the jump core—his jump core—open and see what made it tick. He couldn’t, of course, but he could do the next best thing.
“I’d love to talk about the star drive your people invented,” Ma said to the alien, “but there’s something else we need to cover first. The captain has asked me to figure out everything I can about the weaponry we’re facing. We got hit by a beam weapon from the planet we call Destie-Four.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Fortunately for you it seems to have done very little damage.”
“It killed eight people,” Ma said. Te’Anna simply looked at him as if he’d agreed instead of contradicting her. As Ma thought about it, eight people dead probably was not very much damage from her point of view. Hardly worth mentioning.
“Our instruments tell us it was fired from the far side of the planet,” he said, “fired through it. Are our instruments wrong?”
“I know nothing of your instruments, Lieutenant Ma.”
That was literally true but not what he was asking. He couldn’t tell if she simply misunderstood or was deliberately prevaricating, playing with him.
“Is it possible the weapon fired at us passed through Destie-Four?” he asked.
“I do not know what was fired at you, but we do have a weapon which matches your description. Yes, it can be fired through a planet.”
“How does it do that? Does it damage the planet?”
“No, of course it does not damage the planet. What sort of a defensive weapon would that be? Really, Lieutenant Ma, you seem intelligent and yet sometimes your questions are very foolish.”
“Perhaps you mistake my ignorance for foolishness,” he said.
“No, I never make that mistake. What do you call the subat
omic particle which transfers the nuclear force between elements of the nucleus?” she asked.
“Do you mean the strong or weak nuclear force?”
“There is only one. What you call the weak force is simply a special case of electromagnetism. What particle transfers what you call the strong force?”
“We call that particle a meson,” he said.
“Ah, yes. The weapon which fired at you is a meson accelerator.”
A meson accelerator, he thought. That didn’t make any sense. Sure, a meson could go right through a planet, or anything else, without affecting it. So how could it damage them? For that matter, how did it even get to them? Mesons only lasted a couple microseconds before decaying, and when they did they mostly produced photons.
Photons. Light. That streak of light they saw—that’s probably what a stream of mesons would look like when they decayed.
Ma looked up and saw Te’Anna’s unblinking gray eyes focused on him. Was this a test? Maybe some sort of a red herring to confuse him? He could just ask her, but if this really was the weapon . . .
Okay, accelerate a beam of mesons. As long as they’re still mesons they go through anything, but when they decay they decay into photons, and what was a laser but a coherent stream of photons? If they could control the wavelength of the decaying photons, make that light stream coherent, they had a real weapon.
But if the particle only lasts two or three microseconds, even at the speed of light you couldn’t get much more range than a kilometer. That weapon hit them from a lot farther away than that, thousands of times farther. How could it, if you only had a couple . . .
“Oh!” Ma said out loud. “Relativistic velocity.”
Te’Anna cocked her head to the side for a moment.
“Elastic time velocity, we call it,” she said.
At that close to light speed, the subjective time of the meson stream slowed way down. As far as it was concerned, the mesons still only lasted a couple microseconds. From the outside, though, it seemed as if they hung around a lot longer, long enough to reach out and smack Cam Ranh Bay. How do you determine where the mesons decay into a shaft of photons? By varying the speed of the particle stream, and so slowing the decay.
“Huh,” Ma said. “That’s pretty smart.”
“I imagine it appears so to you,” Te’Anna replied. “You are easily impressed.”
Koichi Ma laughed, and he saw it caught her by surprise. Maybe she could crawl around in that poor Varoki assistant envoy’s head and mess him up, but Koichi had grown up with a crazy Filipino mail-order bride for a stepmother, and he’d come through that experience reasonably intact. This Guardian was going to have to bring a lot more game if she wanted to fuck with his head.
“For the decaying mesons to produce a laser—a coherent stream of light—they all have to decay to photons of exactly the same wavelength. How do you manage that?”
“I doubt you would be capable of understanding,” she said, looking away with her chin raised in disdain.
Then Ma remembered something, and he grinned. “Ah, but you can’t get them all to decay to exactly the same wavelength, can you? If you could, there would be no visible signature in vacuum, same as any other laser. But there’s that glow—some of the photons come out noncoherent. You’re not quite the hotshot engineers you think, are you?”
She held her pose for a moment and then looked down. “I do not know. I do not remember those details of the design. Weapons have never interested me very much, at least not that I can recall.”
“Okay, Te’Anna, maybe you’re foggy on the weapons but you seem to know a lot of physics. Now why don’t you tell me how your interstellar drive works?”
She sat motionless and then spoke.
“But you are the engineer. Do you mean to say . . . you do not know?”
“Varoki trade secret,” Ma answered.
She shivered and then ran her fingers up through the feathers on her neck and head, fluffing them so they stood out from her head in wild disorder. Then she leaned forward and down so her face was level with his and quite close.
“Oh, Lieutenant Ma, I will very much enjoy telling you that!”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Seven days later, aboard USS Cam Ranh Bay, running dark,
outbound to Destie-Seven
26 April 2134 (sixty-nine days after Incident Seventeen)
“Captain’s on the bridge,” Quartermaster First Ortega called out as Sam floated through the bridge hatch.
Sam took in the scene with a glance: Lieutenant Bohannon in command chair, Ortega at the helm, Sensor Tech Second Laghari at Tac One, the other bridge stations empty. The three looked tense and alert but without any sign of panic. Bohannon, the White Watch OOD, hadn’t sounded general quarters; she’d just called him to the bridge, so the news might not be that bad.
“Sorry to disturb you, sir,” she said as she unbuckled her restraints, “but I thought you should see this.”
“No need to apologize, Ms. Bohannon. Fill me in.” He shoved off toward the command chair.
“Sir, the ship is at Readiness Condition Three, Material Condition Bravo, on course for Destie-Seven in low-emission status. Power ring is at sixty-three percent charge, reactor cold, thermal shroud deployed, sensors passive. No acceleration or course change this watch. At 0237 Zulu we detected a jump emergence signature and seven minutes later began picking up broadcast communication from it, all in Destie, or I guess it’s the Guardian language. Anyway, it’s one of theirs.”
“Very well, Lieutenant, I relieve you.”
“Captain has the bridge,” she said as she pushed herself up and then to the left to settle into Comm One. Sam strapped himself into the command chair and looked around. He was again reminded of how different the Bay’s bridge felt from Puebla’s. A destroyer’s bridge was small, cramped, and with a lot of dark, dingy corners that looked like they might harbor spiderwebs if there had been such a thing on a spacecraft. Even though the Bay’s bridge wasn’t that much bigger, it felt roomier, more open. Usually it was brighter, but all the working spaces were at reduced lighting levels to save power, and the crew’s faces were lit mostly by their instrument displays.
“How far is that ship from us?” Sam asked.
“Forty-six million klicks, sir,” Bohannon answered, “closer to the system primary than we are, probably aiming to match orbit with Destie-Four and assess the damage.”
That last bit was guesswork, but it made sense to Sam.
“I take it these comms were not directed at us.”
“That’s right, sir, but they’re about us. Somebody wants to know what the hell is going on here, what happened on Destie-Four. They’re getting a lot of confused chatter back, some from Destie-Four itself, some from the other inner worlds, and some from the two inhabited moons of Destie-Seven. It’s going to take them a while to sort everything out, and it will take us a while to sort through all that comm chatter, but we’re capturing everything we can.”
“Aside from our Buran friend Abanna Zhaquaan,” Sam said, “you’ve listened to more of these people than anyone. What do you think?”
She huffed out a sigh and pursed her lips in thought before replying.
“I think they’ll switch to tight beam pretty soon, and we’ll lose the thread of the conversation, but from what I’ve heard so far, it sounds like someone has shown up to kick ass and take names.”
Sam thought so as well. “Well, at forty-six million kilometers, we’ve got a pretty good head start on them, even if they do figure out where we are and what we’re up to.”
“They could do an in-system jump, sir,” Bohannon said. “Like the Varoki did in the last war. It’s risky, but it could get them to Destie-Seven way before us.”
They could, indeed, Sam thought. But would they? He thought about it and then shook his head.
“We’ll see, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen, Comm. For us, for the Varoki, for anyone in the Cottohazz it’s a risk, but, in some circu
mstances, it’s justified. Jumping in or near the plane of the ecliptic could have you come out in the same space as some little rock, and then you get an annihilation event. But if the stakes are big enough, maybe it’s worth the risk.
“But if you’re immortal, Bohannon, it’s a little different. See, for them the risk is actually higher, because if you decide to use this as a tactic, and you keep doing it for a couple thousand years, you’re pretty certain to find that little rock eventually. Immortality is definitely a two-edged sword.”
“Our prisoner took a pretty wild risk letting us capture her, sir,” Bohannon answered.
“Yeah, that’s absolutely true, but I think there are two kinds of Guardians: the ones desperate to find something to make life interesting enough to be worth living, and those who already have it. Our Te’Anna is one of the desperate variety, but I think this P’Daan guy know exactly what he wants.”
“Active sensor radiation!” the sensor tech in the TAC One chair called out, voice rising in alarm.
“Sir, should I begin evasive maneuvers?” Ortega called from Ops One.
“No!” Sam shouted. “Everybody calm down. We’re hugging this bulk cargo carrier for a reason. TAC, what’s the signal strength like on the incoming sensor radiation?”
“Very weak, sir. I’d say it’s pretty range-attenuated.”
“Okay. Lesson one, folks: if you’re playing possum, don’t twitch. If we maneuver now they’ll see us for sure. If we stay put, hopefully we’ll blend into the return echo from the cargo carrier, or look like a false echo. If they detect us, we’ll see them react soon enough. For now, stay cool.
“TAC, have you got any sort of read on the size or configuration of that new ship? Lieutenant Ma says that meson accelerator they use as a planetary defense weapon is probably too bulky to mount in a ship. Says it needs a really long accelerator tunnel.”
“Sir,” the sensor tech said, “the bandit has his reactor lit up, so I’m getting pretty good data on his configuration. He looks to be over a kilometer long.”
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