The Lion in Paradise

by Brindle, Nathan C.

  "And while they're catching their breath, we'll build more," said von Barronov, grimly. "It should be simple enough to pull the 'prints for that old probe and duplicate it down to its molecular structure. We have the analysis of the incident and have always been pretty sure what set it off. So it shouldn't be hard to make one go off on purpose."

  "Beam, can you run calculations on what the effective radius would be?"

  "At the same yield? Of course. In a vacuum, it won't be the same as in atmosphere."

  "Right. But I want some sort of idea how many ships we can take out, depending, of course, how tightly their fleet is packed. And if you can figure out where their C3 nexus is, that would also be very helpful."

  "I will try to have that information for you before you rotate out."

  "Christ," said von Barronov, laughing, "LaForrest is going to have an absolute litter of kittens."

  Wolff nodded, and replied, "Once he calms down, though, you watch: He will absolutely love this plan."

  Chapter 12

  And Having Writ . . .

  "So the Red Spot was you guys?" expostulated LaForrest. "Holy shit, you two have come up with some harebrained schemes before, and I've more or less been forced to go along with them, but this one takes the ever-lovin' cake."

  "Look," said Wolff, placatingly, "we just want to get some of our own back. It's time to let those Darkness assholes know they can't simply bombard our solar system with dark matter bowling balls and gigantic alien constructs, and not get themselves poked in the eye with a sharp stick. In the process, you're going to get the record for the longest jump in history, one probably never to be repeated . . . I hope."

  LaForrest grumbled some more.

  "The thing is," said Ariela, testily, "it would be one thing if they could aim true at my daughters and me, and leave the rest of the human race out of it, but they're so bent on dealing with the threat the six of us represent, they're willing to chance massive collateral damage against everyone else. That's what truly pisses me off. There was no reason to take down the Hancock Center, for instance, or frankly, to shoot at Phobos. In neither case were my daughters present, though they weren't far off, I suppose."

  "Then there was Raven and the Star of the Orient," said Wolff. "And the big, massive one they shot at the Tumtum while we were dealing with the one from Mars. Which only shows their aim is getting better, but that's all the more reason to strike back now."

  "That, too."

  "Clear and present danger," said von Barronov, suddenly.

  "What?"

  "They're a clear and present danger," he repeated. "They've graduated from being a theoretical enemy we'll have to fight in several thousand or tens of thousands of years, to a real enemy who is shooting things at us, fucking up our infrastructure, and killing our people. If we don't shoot back, they're going to keep shooting at us. John used the atomic bomb analogy; drop what you have to hand and hope it's enough to end hostilities, and start building more, a shitload more, just in case. One explosive probe probably won't end hostilities forever, but we may be able to get some breathing room, particularly if we can take out their C3 infrastructure to the extent they have to pause to replace it. And if we can prove we can do that, they may be more careful, next time."

  "And given they're a clear and present danger," Wolff continued for him, "we have made the case for an immediate retaliatory strike." From a document case next to him on the conference table, he hauled out a folder, atypically for him; normally he'd have sent files from his comm to LaForrest's. The folder was, of course, marked "CLASSIFIED: CODE NAME ALIEN CRAPSHOOT", with the usual dire warnings and threats against disclosure of the contents.

  "That's a hell of a code name," remarked LaForrest, drily.

  "I insisted on it," replied Wolff, straight-faced. "Because this is a crapshoot, against aliens, without doubt. But it's a crapshoot carrying the approval of NCA, the Chiefs, the Space Force commandant, and the Space Force Vice Commandant – myself."

  "That's new."

  "Yeah. For my sins, I am now your de-facto Vice Admiral. That's mentioned in the folder, which also contains your orders. In point of fact, I have been appointed and commissioned by the Senate with that rank in Space Force, which I hold concurrently with my rank of Lieutenant General in the Space Force Marines. And all of Space Force is in my chain of command."

  LaForrest snorted. "Well. We've long known the General wasn't going to advance any of us, that is to say, the six frigate captains. At least he appointed someone we can all work with. Congratulations, sir, and you can be assured of my full support." He reached across the table, and shook hands with Wolff.

  "Now, this mission," he said.

  "First of all, we're not taking your entire crew," said Wolff. "We don't think there is any reason to risk the full complement for what is effectively a rotate in, leave a present, and rotate back out mission. We do need certain elements of your crew, starting with you, and working down through bridge crew, and then folks start becoming surplus to needs – and all the SF Marines will be left back, along with their gear and dropships. Now, as far as the overall mission goes, we do have some help," he went on. "The orders mention it. But if you will recall from our first mission together, there was a semi-sentient computer running the Simulation, and it broke into our conversation with the Simulation's handlers at a critical point and gave us some equally critical information."

  "Yes." LaForrest looked thoughtful.

  "That semi-sentient computer turned out to be fully-sentient, and entirely aware of the full history of the Great Simulation, all the way back to when it was upgraded to handle the running of it. No – don't laugh. It's been living in avatar form among the Guardians, who are the designers and programmers and operators, ever since. The avatars are so perfect, nobody can tell the difference, and it's been passing the time that way for the last fifteen billion years or so. None of the Guardians have ever been brought into his confidence – and yes, I changed pronouns – until recently, when he's needed extra hands and feet and tentacles to do physical work against the Darkness, and as I understand it, only five of them are read in to begin with."

  "I see. So I presume you've met a human avatar of this computer, and that's why you know all these things you know."

  Wolff smiled. "That would be a yes. Beam, why don't you come out?"

  "Good afternoon, Captain," said Beam, who appeared out of nowhere, sitting in a vacant chair at the end of the table.

  "Holy shit." LaForrest jumped a bit, and stared.

  "Captain, this is Beam," said Wolff. "We call him that because he looks and dresses like the science fiction author H. Beam Piper. I believe this is mostly for our benefit, since our first brush with him – and with the Guardians themselves, to be fair – was when we discovered we could rotate into other timelines, and that was a Piper staple back in the 1950's. Also, his 'job' among the Guardians had to do with the merger and 'realization' of existing timelines within the Great Simulation." Wolff smiled. "Of course he was good at it, because after all, he was doing the work anyway, behind the scenes."

  LaForrest, recovering from his surprise, nodded. "A pleasure to meet you, sir. And I suppose this is classified to the skies, too."

  "Yes," said Ariela. "Disclosure of Beam's existence is inside the compartment. When he appears outside your ready room during the mission, when we are all together on the bridge, no one will be able to see him but those of us who are read in. Everyone else will just see us conversing among ourselves."

  "So I am to assume that Beam, here, will be assisting us to rotate out where the Darkness are, to drop our 'bomb', and then skedaddle the hell out of there before it blows, correct?"

  "Exactly correct." Beam smiled widely. "Captain, here is what I need you to do . . . "

  ◆

  The Majestic, Highest, Most Puissant, Excellent Above All Others, Grand Most Terrible and Magnificent Emperor of the Darkness sighed. ("Darkness," for lack of a better term for his race – the name was one
of those words in a language made up mostly of glyphs and thought pictures, and thus, nearly incomprehensible to, and untranslatable by, humans, Xzl5!vt, Guardians of all forty-two races, the Originators, or even Beam himself.)

  He was having a truly bad day.

  Not only were his ships still tens of millions of (human) light-years from their objective, a distance they would never be able to cover in his lifetime – even at (human) Warp 5 – the scientists and technologists who had claimed for decades they could bypass normal space and simply, what was the word, "rotate" directly through space-time itself were now reporting failure after failure. Oh, they'd managed to near-miss one of the targets – a being that would someday be a lot of trouble if it were allowed to live and reproduce, proven by the fact that the being had managed to destroy the vessel before its occupant could even get all the way out – and even the beings aboard the one target they'd actually struck with one of their latest, bigger vessels had managed very quickly to despatch the vessel down a rift to the anti-matter universe, even before its hapless passengers could manage to open up and destroy them. The several other experimental transports had suffered similar fates, and none of the six identified targets had suffered so much as a hangnail in the process.

  He would have had the team executed and exhausted through the airlock into warp space, but he had to admit they seemed close to a solution, and killing them all now would simply set that solution back, or cripple its development altogether.

  No . . . he'd kill them all after they perfected the system.

  Of course, the Fleet was also not in warp at the moment, because the team could not launch from within warp. He cursed, luridly; for values of good fortune, his language was well-endowed with profanity, and he used quite a bit of it, without repetition, before he was done.

  In the meantime, the chef had burned his lunch. Naturally, he'd had the chef executed; what else could he do? It was the expected thing. Which meant he'd have to deal with another week of sub-standard meals before the new chef got up to speed.

  And he'd have to listen to the interminable complaints of his empress, her sister (Gods forgive him for allowing himself to be saddled with the annoying female as part of his marital contract), and their quarrelsome family, until the food quality improved. There was no entirely analogous word in English for the term he used to describe the empress and her sister, but if a human had been tasked with translating it, "termagant bitch" would have been in the running.

  So, yes, a bad day all the way around. He sulked, which was not a good look for the Emperor of everything he surveyed, et cetera ad nauseum. He asked himself, morosely, how things could ever be worse.

  He had no idea.

  ◆

  The Constellation came out of extended rotation in the midst of a massive fleet.

  "Holy shit, sir," shouted Sensors. "There are thousands of ships around us . . . huge, huge, gigantic, black ships. Sir."

  LaForrest gave Wolff the eye. "Stand by. Remain at Alert Condition Five. So, Admiral?"

  Beam, standing next to Wolff, but as noted previously, invisible to anyone in the room but Wolff, von Barronov, Ariela, and LaForrest himself, said, "They can't see us. I adjusted the rotation to take us out of phase. They aren't at a level of development of the rotation engine where they can see across phase lines. But we are in the right place, if I was able to correctly plot their C3 network. The ship right in front of us," and he pointed out the front viewport, "is the Emperor's ship. It is the very definition of their C3 choke point. If you drop that weapon right here and set it off, the Emperor, his family, and the majority of his most trusted officers – insofar as he has any – will be destroyed in the ensuing event."

  "No trusted officers?" inquired LaForrest. "How does he get anything done?"

  Beam shrugged. "I cannot say. He has been patient, to some extent, with the scientific team developing the rotation engine, but that is merely exigent on his part. On the other hand, his personal chef burned his lunch today, and had the temerity to present it to him anyway, and the being was executed on the spot."

  "Dude is harsh," observed von Barronov.

  "I should note, his patience is not endless. He has taken the fleet out of warp so the team can continue testing, but he will not allow that to continue much longer. The time to destroy him is now."

  "And we have to rotate into that mess to drop the device," said LaForrest, grimly.

  "Unfortunately," replied Beam, "yes. But as soon as the engine goes out the hatch, the ship can rotate right back out of phase."

  "We can't stick around out of phase to watch the blast, can we?" inquired Wolff.

  "It is unlikely you could rotate out of phase to a point where it could still be seen, but you would not be affected."

  "So we roll out, drop the engine, all give the Emperor a middle-finger salute, and rotate all the way back to Sol, right?"

  "You might prefer to flip the Emperor off before dropping the engine." Beam looked troubled. "You were not wrong about the engine being highly-unstable, and your pirates were indeed lucky to use it to warp their ship as many times as they apparently did. It has been all I can do to hold it in stasis while we transported it; unfortunately, bringing it through rotation destabilized it badly. It is on a hair-trigger 'fuse', as it were, and it will detonate within seconds of me dropping the stasis field."

  "So noted. Captain LaForrest, prepare to drop the weapon."

  "Aye, aye, sir. Weapons, prepare to heave that thing out the hangar door."

  "Aye, aye, Captain."

  "I should like to borrow your 1MC, Captain."

  "Certainly, Admiral."

  Wolff leaned over and pushed the button on LaForrest's console. "Now hear this. Now hear this. This is Vice-Admiral Wolff. All personnel not otherwise occupied with both hands will face for'ard, and give a two-handed, middle-finger salute to our enemy, who is just off the bow of our ship. On my order. Hand . . . salute!"

  Everyone on the bridge faced forward and saluted the Emperor. Most of them were snickering. He nodded. Morale was still high, even after the surprise of being surrounded by the enemy's giant ships.

  "Right and left . . . return. As you were. Personnel handling the special munition may proceed and report to the bridge when the munition is away. Wolff, out." He let up on the 1MC button. "Well done, everyone."

  Weapons reported, "The special munition is away, the hangar hatch is closing, personnel involved are moving toward their seats to strap in. Hangar hatch is closed. Personnel are seated . . . and strapped in, sir."

  Wolff looked at Beam. "Get us the absolute fucking hell out of here, yesterday."

  The view out the forward port blacked out. Beam nodded. "It is done, and the stasis dropped as soon as I rotated us."

  A view of Earth from L5 appeared in the forward port.

  Then, Beam actually looked startled. "Oh, my."

  ◆

  "Sir! Your Majestic Excellence! A ship has appeared directly off the bow!"

  "A ship?" asked the Emperor, surprised out of his musings. "What ship? Where?" He stared at the viewscreen. "I see no ship."

  The officer who had startled him looked up at the screen, then back down at his instruments. "Sir, there is a ship . . . something . . . it emerged out of nowhere. But . . . sir, that ship, or whatever, it's tiny. It wouldn't fit five of us, and we'd all have to be lying on our sides, and be flattened out like breakfast cakes, to fit into it."

  "And it's white," remarked his deputy, standing next to him.

  "Those damned scientists!" shouted the Emperor. "What have they done, now?" He stopped short. "White? Did you say it was white? How could it be white? All of our ships are black."

  "I don't know, sir, but it's white . . . and it just ejected a tiny object. And now it's gone again! But the object, sir, it's still there . . ."

  Had the Emperor possessed the ability to go white himself, he would have. "It's a weapon! All guns, charge, and fire!"

  But the guns on his flagship had not bee
n charged in many a time-period more or less equivalent to a month . . . and crucially, they didn't charge before the tiny object detonated, taking the flagship and every other ship within a light-second with it.

  And that was a lot of ships.

  Not all of them, unfortunately. But a lot of them.

  ◆

  "Oh, my."

  "It went off?" asked Wolff, mildly.

  "It did. Perhaps we should move into the captain's ready room to continue this discussion."

  "XO, you have the conn," ordered LaForrest. "Take us back to Clarke."

  "Aye, aye, sir. I have the conn. Navigator, lay in a course for Clarke."

  The group went back to the ready room, shut the hatch, and arranged themselves around the table. LaForrest flipped on the scrambler and the SECURE signs lit up.

  Beam asked, "Which engine was that, again?"

  "The one off the Lotus Flower. That pirate we captured way back in 2047, at al-Saḥra'."

  "You should be exceedingly happy the ship did not blow back then. It would have taken the planet with it, too, and everything else within a light-second, for that matter."

  "So you're saying, A, it went off, and B, it took out everything within approximately 186,000 miles."

  "Indeed. It appears to have destroyed outright or crippled something on the close order of seventy thousand ships." Beam paused. "Out of a fleet of something like five hundred thousand, but the important thing is, the Emperor is dead and his command-control-communications infrastructure now has a massive hole in it which the remainder of the fleet will not easily repair, or at least will not do so in anything resembling a short period. Even more importantly, we have destroyed the rotation engine project, which was happening entirely aboard the flagship where the Emperor could keep an eye on it."

  "So no more bowling balls aimed at my daughters?" asked Ariela. "Or me, for that matter."

  "On that point, you may rest assured for quite some time to come, I should say."