Ship of Destiny

by Frank Chadwick

  “When M’Eetos left, P’Daan changed. He became darker, harder. Finding M’Eetos became his new obsession, his new reason for living. Avenging the devastation which you visited on the New People may be another. He should be grateful to you for providing it, for only these passions keep us alive. He may in fact understand that, but I doubt it. He has never been terribly introspective, at least by our standards. His lens seems directed entirely outward.”

  She paused and ruffled the feathers on her neck and the side of her head.

  “Do you find me attractive today?”

  “You look very nice. Why would he need a new reason? Wasn’t his old one enough?”

  “What is it you find most alluring in a human female?”

  Most alluring? Most? The sensation of a tongue on his neck, and the knowledge that it delighted in what it tasted?

  “The willingness to answer questions,” he said.

  She expelled air sharply and clicked her teeth together, which he took as an expression of frustration.

  “Why would he need a new reason?” Sam asked.

  She turned away and raised her chin before replying.

  “He searched for M’Eetos for so long, I think actually finding him would have been a terrible anticlimax, at least were M’Eetos alive and content somewhere. Now, if he were dead, perhaps slain by your Varoki . . . ahhh, that would be an act worthy of revenge, a revenge lasting for centuries, perhaps longer.”

  “You mean revenge against the entire species?” Sam asked. “Maybe the whole Cottohazz?”

  “Possibly, but not necessarily. Did you know a sacrilegious cabal of the New People conspired to kill one of us a long time ago? It is true. They were unsuccessful, of course, but to even contemplate such a thing . . . Well, P’Daan’s vengeance on those very conspirators continues to this day.”

  Sam sensed the conversation wandering off track, but where it was going seemed important, although he wasn’t sure how yet. “How is that possible? I thought he left this star system a couple hundred years ago. New People don’t live that long, do they?”

  “Not much more than fifty years, as I recall,” she said. “Perhaps twice that. I’ve never paid much attention to them. But P’Daan had K’Irka, the most gifted gene sculptor we have here, make the criminals unaging, like us, so he could go on punishing them forever. She can do that. I am told the process takes some time, as the body replaces the original genetic material with the new, and the cells are replaced throughout the body. It is excruciating, as well. Once the criminals were altered, he gave them to H’Stus, who was the object of their plot, and who torments them still, those who have not managed to kill themselves over the years.”

  The Guardians could make other organisms immortal? Well, why not? If they could make themselves that way, why not any organism? From what Däng had said, though, any other organism would pay the same price: inability to reproduce naturally, and that was only the physical price. What about the psychological price? He wondered what the Guardians had been like before they lost the ability to age and die naturally.

  The ability? Strange that he was thinking of it as a lost ability instead of a permanent reprieve from a death sentence.

  “How long has this punishment been going on?” he asked.

  “Oh, I forget. Five hundred, six hundred years perhaps. I wonder . . . will he do something similar to you, the architect of the attack on his pet New People?”

  “He’ll have to catch me first,” Sam said.

  Te’Anna simply looked at him.

  Yeah, it sounded lame to him, too. Trying to get inside P’Daan’s head was getting him nowhere, and he wasn’t sure he really wanted inside one of their heads. Alexander was right—they needed something more to go on if they were going to put together a battle simulator that was worth anything. There was something else bothering him, though.

  “Here’s one thing I don’t understand. This system has some defensive weaponry, but there’s not much evidence they’ve ever had to use it. There’s also no sign of combatant spacecraft in the system, at least not originally. Now here comes P’Daan with a squadron of battleships. Near as we can tell, each one of those long ships must mass between a half million and a million tons. Where did they come from? Is there a grand fleet you draw on in case of trouble?”

  “Trouble? I wonder if we have ever had the sort of trouble you mean. I don’t believe we have. No, nothing like that,” she said and waved her hand as if brushing away insects. “P’Daan always had a fascination with war. I wonder where he even learned of such a thing, but he was always more interested in our history than was I. When he left here and did not return for so long, I suspected his absence suggested either a great spirit quest or a time spent with the Hobbyists.”

  “Who are the Hobbyists?”

  “Well, I don’t know why we call them that. So many of us have hobbies of one sort or another, but for some reason they are so . . . singleminded, I suppose, that they have captured that term.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “Oh, I am sorry, Bitka. Sometimes I forget and think of you as my intellectual equal. The Hobbyists raise species to sentience, adapt them to war, and then match them against one another.”

  “Like gladiators?”

  “I do not know what that word means, but if it means individual combat, then no. Each group of Guardian Hobbyists—think of them as a team or faction—develops a single star system, raises up a species, creates an industrial culture for them, builds a fleet, and commands it against another faction.”

  How long would that take, to create an entire species, develop their technology and culture? And for . . .

  “You mean, an interstellar war game?” Sam said, hardly believing it as he said it.

  “Yes! A war game. Exactly. But you understand it is a game only for the Guardian Hobbyists.”

  Same as admirals and presidents, Sam thought.

  “For the raised species, it is a deadly struggle for survival,” she continued. “Sometimes the wars go on for generations. The losing species is enslaved, sometimes exterminated.”

  How different was this from the way ancient humans saw the world? The gods struggle, back different nations, fight out their battles by proxy, and the mortals pay the butcher bill. Those who understood the Iliad as history instead of imaginative poetry would know exactly what Te’Anna meant.

  “So, these new ships . . . ”

  “They must be from one of the Hobbyist fleets. Their crews were bred for war, and have probably survived many battles.”

  “And the ships themselves?”

  “The ships were bred for war as well, Bitka. War and nothing else. Their only purpose is to kill ships.”

  Bred for war—Sam thought that was an interesting way to think of design intent. Almost poetic.

  “We haven’t seen any evidence of use of nuclear warheads or explosive power generation, the sort we use in our intercept missiles. Is it something we just haven’t run into yet?”

  “No, we never use such things. The residual radiation is bad for the ships, the crews, everything. There are limits, Bitka. You use these terrible things, and the damage they do . . . horrible! The damage to the ships which survive—they are never the same. And what you did at the world you call Destie-Four—oh! Those poor satellites!”

  “Poor satellites? You talk as if they were alive.”

  She simply looked at him, and then he knew. When she said the ships were bred for war, she meant it literally.

  “I keep forgetting,” she said, “how inanimate your technology is. This ship is just dead metal, isn’t it? And yet you refer to it as ‘she,’ which is curious. Still, it has no life of its own. That must be why you have such large crews. Even if you could do the work with fewer people, would you? It would be very lonely with no ship to talk to. On the other hand, you never need to persuade the ship to seek danger, do you? It has no sense of self, and so no sense of self-preservation. That must be convenient at times.”

 
“The satellites . . . you mean they were all alive? Self-aware? Not machines?”

  “What is the difference between an organism and a machine?” she said. “The satellites were organic constructs designed to a specific purpose. They were alive, and they were machines.”

  She hadn’t answered his question as to whether the satellites were self-aware, whether they were conscious. He didn’t press the point.

  “Okay, so what are we facing in those killer starships?”

  “Well, as your Lieutenant Ma has already surmised, their principal weapon is a meson accelerator. I do not recall ever being a Hobbyist myself, so I have no clear knowledge of the details of their other weapons, but we use neutral particle accelerators quite often. I assume they would have a number of those for closer work, and a thick carapace to protect against their effects.”

  “Acceleration?”

  “Oh, much less than your ship, at least on a sustained basis. They are probably capable of brief bursts of high thrust, but they cannot sustain it for very long.”

  “Why not?”

  “In part it is a question of reaction mass, but the greater problem is the ships themselves. They do not like prolonged high acceleration. It hurts.”

  “It hurts? Why would you build the capacity for pain into a starship?”

  “Without pleasure and pain, Captain Bitka, there is no consciousness, no mind, no self-awareness, because there is nothing to demand awareness. It is not what you would call an optional feature.”

  Sam wasn’t sure he bought that explanation, but if those long ships really weren’t capable of sustained high-gee acceleration, that was really something. It meant he could avoid a fight most of the time. He probably couldn’t avoid one forever, though. If he had to fight, he might at least be able to pick the time and place. The question was what he could do against those long ships, even if he caught one by itself.

  “Why don’t you use lasers?” he asked.

  She tilted her head to the side and looked at him before answering. “Well, most of them do so little damage.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Five days later, aboard USS Cam Ranh Bay, running dark, outbound to Destie-Seven

  7 May 2134 (thirty days after the commencement of hostilities with the Guardians, eighty days after Incident Seventeen)

  As his department heads made their way into the briefing room, Sam pretended to read the statistical summary of the last simulated battle. He’d already read it and it didn’t tell him anything he didn’t know from experience. He’d commanded the long ship from the auxiliary bridge while Brook commanded the Bay from the main bridge. He, Brook, and Alexander had traded roles in exercise after exercise, seventeen times so far. The summary simply quantified, made numeric, the reality of their repeated simulated destruction.

  For four days they had run different permutations of the drill: Cam Ranh Bay versus one Guardian long ship. Once they could beat one ship, they’d begin running drills against two, or at least that had been the plan. So far, they had yet to beat one long ship, or even come close.

  The Guardians still hadn’t located them. The ruse of hugging close to a slow cargo ship was working, so they still had some time, but not endless. Sooner or later they would have to break away, start accelerating, to get to Destie-Seven-Echo, the moon that held the system’s spacecraft construction complex.

  Sooner or later.

  It would need to be sooner. The bulk carrier’s course would take eight months to get out to the gas giant, even if it were headed for the right one, and they didn’t have eight months of food—less than half that, and they still needed to get home if their drive ever got repaired. They could jump twice a day on the return trip, push the reactor and power rings, cut the return trip down to ten days—say two weeks to give them a safety margin. Acho’s hydroponics rooms were working. That helped. They could go on half rations or less for a while without much health risk, stretch their food out quite a bit.

  But all that meant nothing if they couldn’t get the jump drive fixed, and they couldn’t be sure just getting to the shipyard would accomplish that. How much extra time would they need? How close could he afford to cut this?

  And none of that mattered if they couldn’t stand up to a single Guardian long ship. In theory, they could outrun any one ship, but Sam recalled what the twentieth-century philosopher Berra had said: “In theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice they’re different.”

  Lieutenant Ma, the last to arrive, entered the briefing room and took a chair. Sam looked around the table and didn’t like what he saw. Brook the XO: uncomfortable and irritated. Alexander the TAC Boss: depressed and discouraged. Bohannon, who had moved up to Ops Boss: uncomfortable, uncertain of her position. Acho, logistics: attention on her data pad where Sam could see a spread sheet displayed. Ma, engineering: distracted and preoccupied. He’d been coming along well, but now he was back to his old habits. Why? At the end of the table, Haykuz, the Varoki bureaucrat, his expression unreadable. Sam still wasn’t sure how he felt about his presence, but he didn’t see a good way to avoid it.

  “Okay,” Sam said. “We’re all here. Mister Haykuz, at his request, is joining us as an observer and in an advisory capacity as the senior Cottohazz official on the ship. I have not involved the other civilian members of the strategic advisory panel as our concerns here are entirely operational and tactical, not strategic.

  “We’ve got several items on the horizon: when to make our burn for Destie-Seven-Echo, how to approach the moon, and our tactical plan to assault and secure the orbital complex. But we can’t address any of those until we face the two-hundred-kilo gorilla in the room: how to beat a long ship without sustaining crippling damage to the Bay.”

  “Or how we beat one at all,” Alexander said quietly. Bohannon and Brook both nodded in agreement.

  Sam suppressed his first impulse to snap at the tactical officer. Showing anger would just look weak, emphasize how badly they’d been repeatedly beaten.

  “If I may, Captain?” Brook said.

  “Go ahead, XO.”

  “Maybe we should change the simulation parameters.”

  “What do you mean?” Sam said. “Have you figured out something about those ships we’ve missed?”

  Brook shifted in his chair and did not look directly at Sam when he answered.

  “No, sir, but crew morale is becoming an issue. Those alien ships keep killing us in the drills over and over . . . we’re going to have some problems soon.”

  “Jesus!” Alexander said, but Sam held up his hand to quiet him.

  “What are you suggesting, XO?”

  “Rig it so we win one. Give the crew some hope.”

  “How about figuring out how to actually beat the damned things?” Alexander demanded, his voice rising.

  “TAC, dial it back,” Sam ordered. “But he’s right, XO. We need a real solution, not a lie. If we rig the simulator and beat the ship, the crew will think whatever tactic we used will work. They’ll expect our training to concentrate on that from then on. Are we going to train them to execute tactics we know won’t work? And if not, they’re going to wonder why not.”

  “We could work something out,” Brook said, still looking away, “make up some excuse.”

  “No, we’re not going to do that, but it is time to take a harder look at what’s going wrong.” Sam looked around the table, included all of them in his next question. “There has to be a tactical approach that will work. What are we missing?”

  “I don’t think we should wrap up the discussion of the simulator yet,” Brook said. Again he didn’t make eye contact but Sam was surprised to hear a sort of mulish stubbornness in his voice, and defiance as well. Acho looked up from her data pad and glanced at Brook as if she’d missed part of the conversation and wondered how it had gotten here.

  “We weren’t having a discussion, XO. I was explaining my decision. We don’t need a fake solution; we need a real one. There has to be one, but we’re miss
ing something. What do we do about that?”

  “Go back to the start,” Alexander said, and then Acho added, “Work the problem.” They said it as dutifully as students repeating the lesson he’d drilled into them for almost three months. Well, they had the words right. The question was whether it would do them any good.

  Brook said nothing, did not move, continued to stare at a blank spot on the wall.

  “That’s right,” Sam said. “Go back to the start and work the problem. TAC, what’s the heart of the problem, in one sentence?”

  “I’ll give it to you in one number, sir:” Alexander answered immediately, “thirty-eight thousand. That damned meson gun of theirs has a range of forty-three thousand kilometers, plus or minus, and we’ve got to get a missile within five thousand kilometers of their ship before it can do any damage. That means we have to get it through a kill zone of thirty-eight thousand kilometers. So far we can’t.”

  Sam heard the murmur of agreement from the other officers.

  “Our coil gun spits out a Mark Five at four klicks a second,” Alexander went on, “which is less than their design velocity, but that’s as good as we can manage with our lash-up. Assuming a closing rate between the ships of eighteen klicks a second, that missile still takes twenty-nine minutes to cross that kill zone. We’ve got decoys and some jamming, but . . . twenty-nine minutes?” He shook his head and leaned back in his chair.

  “Not to mention the fact that half the time the bandit kills the Bay before the missile would get there anyway,” Bohannon added. “Most of that closing velocity is from the Bay, not the coil gun. Pretty hard to get out of the way of that meson gun once we fire the missiles.”

  “That is the insurmountable problem,” Brook added. “To get the missile velocity up, we must increase our own velocity before launch, and there is then insufficient time to decelerate, so we enter their kill zone before out missiles can engage them.”