by B. V. Larson
“Zaxby!”
“—the vortex contains enough energy to easily destroy us.”
“Great. Do you think it wants to?”
“You presume it’s intelligent?”
Straker scowled. “I presume the worst case—that it’s malevolent. I need facts, Zaxby, so quit screwing around and get me some, or I’ll put you and your team under Sinden’s command.”
“There’s no need for vulgar threats.”
“With you, there is. Get to work and get me info, dammit!”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Comms, get me Sinden.”
Sinden’s image replaced Zaxby’s. “Sir?”
“Your assessment of the vortex, Nancy?”
“Extremely dangerous, sir. If it’s a temporary electromagnetic phenomenon, it might discharge completely upon touching us, and we wouldn’t survive. If it’s persistent, even alive in some azoic fashion, a discharge of a mere one percent of its available energy would damage us severely.”
Straker turned to Salishan. “Thoughts?”
“Turn around, go around. It’s too dangerous.”
“I agree. Do it.”
“Helm, bring us about.”
The helmsman turned the ship smoothly but tightly through 180 degrees, until she was pointing along a reverse course directly away from the vortex.
“That’s not good,” Salishan said as she pointed at the holotank.
Straker saw the vortex move faster, now chasing the ship and closing. “Might want to—”
“All ahead full, maximum acceleration!”
The deck plates rumbled with the sudden application of full thrust, the dreadnought’s six fusion engines pouring power and reaction mass into a high-energy stream astern. In response, the vortex closed the distance even more, hovering in the ship’s wake, unaffected by the high-energy particles and plasma forming the exhaust plume.
“Do you get the impression it likes fusion drive plasma?” Straker asked.
“Maybe. Helm, cut engines. Impellers only.”
The vortex surged closer.
“Engines to full!”
The vortex stopped approaching, but maintained its distance, now down to short weapons range.
“Sinden, now would be a good time for some new insight,” Straker said.
“Sir, there’s no way to tell if its actions are instinctive or intelligent—or purely mechanistic. We appear to have attracted its attention, and now, if I had to guess, I’d say we’re feeding or warming it, perhaps as a plant turns toward sunlight. If so, this may be good news—it’s unlikely to expend energy destroying something it likes.”
“Or hates,” Straker said. “Remember the ramsharks. We can’t stake the ship on guesses.”
“At least its pursuit distance seems to have stabilized,” Captain Salishan said. “Helm, reduce power to one-half.”
The vortex came closer, to point-blank range.
“Full power!”
The vortex backed off.
Zaxby’s image appeared alongside Sinden’s. “It seems to have a comfort range, much like someone sitting by a fire—not too hot, not too cold. It is absorbing heat, electromagnetic and radioactive energy from our wake.”
Straker said, “If we turn up the heat, it likes it. If we turn down the heat, it tries to get closer. What if we turn everything off? Shut it all down, go EMCON?”
“That is a tactic with highly polarized outcomes, I assess.”
“Meaning?”
“The vortex may depart—or it may touch us in an attempt to ‘revive’ its fuel source.”
Sinden said, “Why would such a powerful vortex be interested in us, though? The proto-stars surrounding us emit far more energy, in all spectra and of all types.”
A mechanical voice spoke from behind Straker. At first he thought it was the ship’s SAI, but then he realized it was Roentgen, in his suit, recently arrived. “It is sentient.”
Straker turned. “The vortex?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“I can see its thoughts.”
The entire bridge gawked at the Thorian. “Ridiculous,” the Sensors officer said. “No information can get through our hull, our reinforcement, our shields... ”
“Stupid person. Straker knows I do not lie.”
“Of course not, Roentgen. The officer spoke out of ignorance. But how can you see its thoughts?”
“Neutrinos… No known shielding can stop neutrinos.”
The Sensors officer clamped his jaw shut in apparent disbelief, but said nothing.
“What’s it thinking?” Straker asked.
“I do not know. Do you know what a human thinks when you scan its brain and detect electrical activity? Yet you know it thinks. It does not seem hostile.”
“Understood. Thanks, Roentgen. That’s invaluable. Can you... can you communicate with it?”
“Possibly. I need tools.”
“Go to Zaxby. He’ll help you with anything you need.”
“I will go.” The Thorian stumped out on its four short legs.
“General,” Salishan said, “we’re burning fuel at a high rate. If the vortex is sentient... ”
“You think it’s smart enough not to kill what interests it?”
“How can we know? Biologists happily kill plants and animals in order to dissect them.”
Chapter 14
Loco on Mechrono-7, in the rhodium mine.
Loco recognized the thickset spacer trying to rise from the rocky debris of the mine floor. “Sylvester? Stay down and take it easy.” He’d have helped the Breaker to his feet, except his chest was filled with the pain of the laser burn, making him dizzy and lightheaded. Instead, Loco found a chair and sat in it while the badgers sorted out Breakers from miners and made sure no more spiders lurked.
He activated his comlink. “Captain Jilani, come in.”
“Jilani here.”
“You got Belinda?”
“Got her. I’m on my way. You all right?”
“We’ll live. We’ve secured the facility and are sorting things out. Stand by.” The gas seemed to be clearing fast—an air filter roared overhead, part of the mining equipment.
“Who’s senior here?” he asked the team.
Sylvester stood unsteadily. “Me, sir, now that Bortmann’s... well, the spiders ate him. Anyway, me. I’m on the Chief’s list.”
“You’re promoted early. Give me a count of your people, Chief.”
Sylvester directed his men into a ragged line and checked them. “Eleven including me, present and accounted for, sir.”
“Any idea where the women are?”
Sylvester turned to the Breakers. “Anyone?”
They shook their heads and murmured. “No, Chief.”
Loco turned to the five miners still alive, all humanoid, sitting zip-tied on the floor under the badgers’ guns. “How about you? Any idea where six of our women might have been taken?”
They hung their heads, denying all knowledge.
“The women were separated from us on the Arattak ship before we got here,” Sylvester offered. “Admiral Engels—they were all alive last time we saw them. Even though Bortmann... ”
“What?”
“Sounds weird, sir, but I think we were lucky we were taken by the spiders instead of the Korven.”
Loco grimaced bleakly. “Probably. You might all be hatching little Korvens out your asses about now instead of working in an Arattak mine.”
“Yeah, that’s what the miners told us. They weren’t such bad guys, most of them.”
Chiara’s voice came from down the tunnel. “Renzo!”
One of the eleven, a young spacer, took three steps toward the voice, then stopped as if holding himself back. “Permesso, Chief?”
Sylvester jerked his head. “Go on, Alfonsi.”
Lorenzo met Chiara as she entered the cavern. They exchanged hugs and cheek-kisses and spoke in joyful rapid Italian. Chiara shoved him playfully back to hi
s shipmates and glanced around, toeing at a piece of spider gore on the floor. “What a mess. Let’s get out of here before our luck runs out.”
Loco nodded. “Agreed. Everyone get moving to the ship.”
“What about these guys, boss?” Brock asked Loco.
“Hey, who’s paying you?” Chiara snapped.
“Sorry, right you are, Captain,” Brock replied. “Your orders?”
She ran her eyes over the facility. “Leave them tied up. If they can’t get free on their own, they deserve to die. Search and destroy any comms gear you find. Are there vehicles? Aircars?”
“No, Captain,” Raj said. “Nothing but ore carts.”
“Where’s the processed rhodium? Anyone?”
After a moment, Sylvester replied, “I’ll show you.”
They found it in a locked storeroom, hundreds of kilos of hard shiny silvery-gray metal ingots. Chiara’s eyes lit with avarice. “Get this aboard. Everybody carry as much as you can.”
Loco moved closer. “Do we have enough lift capacity once we fit all our people?”
Chiara hesitated just enough to make Loco wonder. “Of course. If not, we can always dump something less valuable.”
“How valuable is this?”
“Twenty or thirty thousand a kilo. All we have to do is get to the Living city and we can trade it for credit.”
Loco raised his eyebrows. He was beginning to get a sense of money now, and that was several months’ pay in each one-kilo ingot. Besides, he was hungry, and not in a mood to argue or delay. “Go ahead.”
Belinda lowered the Cassiel’s ramp as the fifteen figures tramped through the thin snow and onto the ship. They stacked their rhodium ingots in cases in the hold, strapped them down, and then shuffled to the two staterooms, squeezing past each other.
“Pack it in, paisanos,” Chiara said. “Sit on the floor against the walls and don’t move around much. We’ll be flying low and fast, so I don’t need the weight to shift. Lifting in one minute.”
After strapping herself into the pilot’s seat—Loco in the copilot’s—she fired up the engines and tilted the ship on her struts to aim just above the nearest ridge. “We’re going zero to full power in one four-G surge,” she said over the intercom. “You have thirty seconds to prep—move anything that might fall on you.”
“What if we don’t make it high enough?” Loco asked.
“Then we’ll never know we failed, because we’ll impact at about 400 KPH. Ten... nine... ”
At zero, the Cassiel leaped upward on pure fusion thrust. One and a half seconds later, the stubby wings began to bite the air and provide lift and control as the nose dipped, aiming straight at the mountainside.
Three seconds later, the nose ticked upward toward clear sky.
Six seconds later, the ship buffeted with compression as they cleared the ridge by at least a good twenty meters. Loco let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding in one long sigh. “I wasn’t sure we’d make it.”
“I dumped all the water and half the fuel to lighten ship,” Chiara replied as they leveled off, skating low over the mountaintops, sticking to the thicker air. “No worries.”
“You could’ve told me that before.”
“More fun to see you sweat, Mikey.”
Loco heard a chuckle and glanced behind him to see Belinda sitting on the floor against the cockpit’s back wall. “Oh, like you two weren’t sweating.”
“We were fine,” Belinda said, and she jerked her head at Chiara. “Us Contract girls have gotta stick together.”
“What?”
Chiara’s face froze. Loco looked from one to the other.
“Nothing,” Belinda said, looking down. “Never mind.”
Loco blinked and leaned his head against the padded rest. In his head, realization was dawning. Chiara had once been a Contract girl? That clarified a few things... and raised more questions. At least he was starting to see the picture. Chiara stolen from her family, her forged Contract sold...
What kind of work had she done? Did this explain her bedroom skills—and maybe her attitude toward relationships? Toward everything, really. That had to infuse her entire world, living like that... he didn’t want to imagine. What scars, what wounds must she have absorbed...
Yet, he knew instinctively she didn’t want him feeling sorry for her, pitying her. Leave it for later, he told himself. “Hey, Bel, hand me a couple nutro bars, would you?”
“Sure.” She retrieved a handful.
Loco stuffed concentrated food into his mouth, quelling his grumbling guts and flooding his bloodstream with relief as the proteins and carbs spread. He was feeling pretty good, was even starting to get drowsy with relief and healing when alarms whooped and shot another spike of adrenaline through his veins.
“Shit,” Chiara cried. “Raj—?”
“Already on it,” the badger’s voice came over the intercom. A shuddering transmitted itself through the deck plates. “Missile destroyed.”
“Missile?” Loco punched at his dashboard, pulling up a rear view. Behind the Cassiel two red icons flashed—Arattak single-seat attack ships, range three thousand meters and closing, the countermeasures computer told him. Two more icons joined them, then another two as the fighters launched four missiles.
“We should be glad they’re unwilling to use lasers with Mechron watching,” Chiara said as green tracers from Raj’s tailgun lanced out, trying to intercept the closest missile. She reached across to Loco’s side and flipped up a cover. “Chaff and flare dispenser. Use it when they get close.”
Loco put his finger on the button. “Got it.”
“Hang on, everyone!” Chiara dropped and rolled the ship into a shallow bank around a mountaintop, trying to put rock between Cassiel and the enemy. One missile followed too sharply and impacted the peak, but the other missiles kept tracking. “Goddammit, they’re fire-and-forget.”
Raj picked off another one before Loco judged them close enough to drop his pods. Flares fell while radar-reflective chaff burst in a flower pattern behind the ship. The missiles lost lock, but reacquired as soon as they passed the floating curtain of metallic strips.
By that time Chiara had reversed her turn and now flew lower and lower, aiming for the gaps between peaks and pushing the throttles forward to the stops. “Keep pumping that chaff,” she said.
Loco did as ordered. “How many in the pods?”
“Twenty-four. Readout just above.”
Loco saw the number stood at fourteen. The missiles continued to follow. “They must have some smart software. They’re not being fooled. Impact in three seconds.”
Chiara muttered something vile and pulled up hard, shooting out into the open in a climbing half-loop.
“Two seconds!”
She snap-rolled the ship like an aerobat and pulled her control stick hard back between her knees. The G-forces jumped to four or five and she screamed—
“Aaauughh!”
—and the missiles flashed past. One detonated with a proximity fuse, shaking the ship, and the other ran out of fuel, vainly trying to turn back before it arced gracefully into the ground with a bright flash.
Recovering the ship, Chiara aimed it back toward the Living city. The ship shuddered, the air buffeting it roughly. “We lost a piece of wing,” she said, holding tight to the joystick and manipulating the throttles, trying to smooth out the ride. “And those fucking spiders still have at least one missile.”
Another trio of icons appeared behind them. “Make that three,” Loco said. At that moment the tail gun improbably picked off a missile from long range. “Okay, two. Nice one, Raj.”
“Thanks.” The tracers continued to fire in bursts.
“Nine seconds to impact.” Loco readied the chaff button again. “Ten more chaff.”
“I can’t maneuver,” Chiara said, “so it’s on you and Raj.” She reached over to flip up another red-striped cover on the console.
“What’s that?”
“Fu
ll-spectrum coherent EM blinder.”
“Sounds high-tech.”
“It is. If we’re gonna die anyway... ”
Loco nodded and held up crossed fingers.
The two missiles bored in, jigging randomly out of the way of Raj’s tracers. The chaff didn’t seem to faze the weapons.
Chiara reached for the EM blinder control. “Tell me when it’s three seconds.”
Loco pumped the chaff helplessly. “... Four. Three.”
She pressed the button.
The missiles veered. One dove into the ground, and the other wandered away.
Loco and Chiara both shouted, startled, as a streak of glowing atmo reached toward them at high speed and stopped dead ahead.
It was a Mechron bubble.
Chiara twisted the joystick aside, shrieking again, trying to keep the ship from crashing either into the ground or the bubble. The bubble tracked in front of them, shifting to stay ahead no matter what she did, until she ran straight into it. By that time, she, Belinda and Loco were all locked into throat-straining screams—
—and they passed through the bubble’s location with barely a shudder. The displays showed a streak where the craft must have departed, up into space at a speed that left air molecules glowing. At the same time, two spectacular explosions marked the locations of the Arattak fighters.
“Gods and monsters,” Loco gasped. “I thought we were dead. But it killed them and not us.”
Chiara eased up and concentrated on flying the damaged ship. “That’s Mechron for you. Sometimes I think it has a sick sense of humor.”
“Yeah. Watch me laugh.” Then Loco passed out.
Loco awoke to the pain of Chiara poking a finger into his half-healed wound. “Hey! Get out of there!”
“Sorry. You weren’t waking up, and you need to get out of that seat, undress and lie down. Bug or no Bug, I want to look at that burn.”
“Yeah, yeah…” Despite the adrenaline from the pain of her prodding, he felt thick-headed, and everything hurt. He climbed unsteadily out of the seat and allowed himself to be led to the empty cabin. It was only then that the realization they were on the ground made it into his consciousness. “Where’s... ”