by David Mack
Standing above the damage he’d wrought, he arrived at a glum conclusion: I still feel terrible, and now my quarters are in disarray. Dejected and feeling not unlike a fool, Saru set himself to work picking up this latest mess of his own making.
3
* * *
Two armed guards in crisp uniforms and a governor’s aide attired in a rumpled suit led Bowen, Omalu, and Chandra down a drab corridor inside the Executive Complex. Like the rest of the settlement on Sirsa III, the seat of the colonial government headquarters was only a few years old. In that time, no one had yet seen fit to decorate it; the only adornments on its walls were generic signage indicating floor numbers and room designations.
Bowen thought it had all the charm of a prison.
The aide opened a door to a conference room and stepped aside. He ushered the trio inside. “Please take a seat. Governor Kolova will be right with you.”
“Thanks,” Bowen said. He led his colleagues into the conference room. The aide closed the door after them. Bowen paused to listen for the sound of a lock being turned, but heard none.
A cheap rectangular table dominated the space. It was ringed by twelve uncomfortable-looking chairs, five on either long side and one at each end. Along the wall opposite the door, a row of windows looked out on the city of New Astana, the capital of the Sirsa III colony. Like most planned colonial cities, it was laid out with the government buildings around its central hub, from which major thorough fares radiated like spokes on a wheel. The majority of its structures were prefabricated units, shipped in pieces and hastily assembled on-site above a network of utility and maintenance tunnels. It wasn’t pretty, but it was efficient.
Omalu eyed the room with suspicion, then with irritation. “They could have at least set out some water.”
“That would require them to care about us,” Chandra said.
Omalu moved to stand with Bowen in front of the windows. “I still think coming here was a mistake.” She dropped her voice, as if she were worried they were being spied upon. “Our first call should’ve been to the company, not the government.”
“Really?” Bowen wondered if Omalu had thought through their current predicament. “You think we’d be better off going mano a mano with the company? Thanks, but no.”
Chandra settled into a chair behind them. “And what do you think Kolova can do for us?”
“If we get her on our side,” Bowen said, “we’ll have a government report that says the rig was sunk by force majeure. That’ll protect us from getting charged with negligence and keep the company from voiding our contracts.”
“I don’t think it matters who breaks the news to the company,” Chandra said. “Once they learn we’ve lost the rig, we’re all as good as blacklisted.”
“Not if Kolova backs up our story,” Bowen said. “We just—” He was cut off by the opening of the door, followed by the entrance of the governor and her retinue.
Governor Gretchen Kolova was a statuesque woman. Her platinum hair was pulled tight into a knot at the back of her head, and her countenance was as sharp as her stare. She walked in proud strides and took her place at the head of the table. Her security detail fanned out into the room as her entourage settled into the other chairs around the table—a collective action that Bowen and his crewmates took as their cue to be seated, as well.
“Mister Bowen,” Kolova said. “Ms. Omalu. Mister Chandra. Thank you for waiting.” She gestured toward an older, balding man sitting to her right. “This is my chief of staff, Tojiro Ishii.” A quick wave toward the younger man sitting across from Ishii: “And my science adviser, Hamid Medina.” Folding her hands in front of her, Kolova leaned forward and fixed Bowen with a probing stare. “If you’d be so kind, Mister Bowen: tell us again what happened to your rig.”
“A little after four this morning, our drill hit something under the seabed.”
Medina cut in, “This was at the drill site you were licensed for last spring?”
“Yes,” Bowen said, eager to continue. “Our drill head became stuck, and we initiated emergency recovery efforts. But before we could free it, something—” He tripped over the outrageous nature of the truth, as if he realized for the first time that saying it aloud sounded more than a smidgen insane. “Something rose up from the seabed beneath us.”
Dubious looks from the politicos greeted Bowen’s report. Ishii asked Omalu and Chandra, “Do the two of you wish to corroborate this account of the incident?”
“It’s what happened,” Omalu said, her tone suddenly defensive.
Chandra didn’t answer Ishii. Instead he told Bowen, “This is a frame-up.”
Only then did Bowen notice that the mood in the room was more confrontational than he had expected it to be. “Hang on just a—”
“Mister Bowen,” Medina said, “when was Arcadia Explorer’s last safety check?”
They had to be kidding. “You’re not trying to blame this on us? Listen to what we’re telling you: something huge, like a giant bug or a reptile, came up out of the seabed, forced our drill shaft up through our superstructure—”
“In fact,” Medina continued, “your rig was three months overdue for a routine safety inspection, wasn’t it, Mister Bowen?”
They were attempting a classic blame shift. Bowen wasn’t having any part of it. “Don’t act like that’s something strange. Your people schedule those inspections, not ours.” To Ishii he added, “And this was no mechanical malfunction. I’m telling you, something destroyed our rig, and whatever it was, it was huge. As in, at least a couple kilometers long. You get me?”
It was clear that Ishii and Medina were not convinced.
The chief of staff sighed. “Look at it from our perspective. Your rig went down ten hours ago and took almost nine hundred people with it. We can’t find its emergency data core, and there are no clear visual records of what happened.” He shrugged and held up his hands, as if to signify his powerlessness. “If you were in our place, what would you think of this?”
Chandra replied, “I’d think that a gravity-based con-deep rig with a mass greater than most starships doesn’t fall over and sink because of a drilling mishap.” He met Medina’s stare. “Use your head. Rigs like the Arcadia Explorer have been hit by icebergs and not budged an inch. They’re made to survive earthquakes. This was no equipment failure. Something hit us—and if I were you, I would be hauling ass to find out what it was.”
Ishii bristled. “Are you threatening us, Mister Chandra?”
Bowen said, “No. If we were threatening you, we’d bring up a rather touchy subject and remind you that if you try to make us take the fall for the rig, a data file full of ugly truth will get sent to the Federation Council.” In unison, Kolova, Ishii, and Medina leaned back from the table and tensed, making clear that they had understood his meaning.
Better than garlic against vampires, Bowen gloated.
“I think it would be best,” Ishii said in a carefully neutral tone, “if we all took care at this juncture not to say anything that would inflame this—”
A distant explosion rumbled the building and shook the windows behind Bowen. He and everyone else faced the windows, through which they saw a small flying craft, one with a bizarre insectoid quality to its design, swoop around the perimeter of New Astana. In the middle of the capital, not far from the Executive Complex, smoke and flames rose from a building that had just been attacked—and the small alien ship was coming back for another pass.
Kolova glared at the fast-moving threat vessel. “What is that?”
“If I had to guess,” Omalu said, “I’d say it was sent by the same thing that sank our rig.”
One of Kolova’s security personnel pressed a finger to his ear, then rushed to the governor’s side and whispered to her. She listened, then replied, “Knock it down.” As he stepped away to relay her order, Kolova told the rest of the room, “It’s a drone. No one on board.”
Outside, the drone shot past in a gray-green blur, laying down a barrage of fire in its
wake. The Executive Complex shook, and the lights overhead stuttered and went dark.
A female security guard announced, “The complex has been hit, and power’s out.” She moved to Kolova’s side. “Madam Governor, we need to get you to the bunker, right now.”
“Fine.” Kolova pointed at Bowen, Omalu, and Chandra. “Bring them.”
The agent nodded. “Yes, ma’am.” Raising her voice, she shouted the rest of the room’s occupants into motion. “Everyone, out! We’re going down the hall to the left, then we’ll take stairwell B down six levels. Hustle, people!”
Herded into a loose single-file line, the colonial officials and the rig survivors scrambled out of the conference room and followed the governor’s protection detail down the corridor to the stairwell. As they navigated the switchback flights to the lowest sublevel, Bowen said to Kolova, “Thanks for not leaving us behind.”
“Don’t thank me,” she said. “This isn’t charity. I need you alive until we find out what the hell that thing is—and what you did to piss it off.”
Chandra was right, Bowen stewed. One way or another, they’ll blame this on us.
* * *
Holy shit, this thing is fast. In the fifteen years Mikki Bo-lander had been flying interceptors for colonial civil air patrols, she had never seen anything that moved like the alien drone buzzing New Astana. The uncrewed ship banked and turned in ways she couldn’t hope to match, not even with the protection of inertial dampers. Every time she started to line up a shot, the drone made an abrupt change of heading and evaded her interceptor’s targeting computer.
She keyed her flight helmet’s transceiver with a tap on its side. “All wings, this is CAP Leader. Anybody got a shot on this thing?”
Outside her canopy the cityscape blurred and the horizon rolled as she chased the drone through a spiraling turn and climb, falling farther behind by the second.
“CAP Leader, this is CAP Three. Almost had a lock, then I lost it.”
“This is CAP Two. I can’t even see you, CAP Leader.”
“We’re in the clouds, CAP Two.” Bolander forced herself to keep her eyes on her instruments. Trying to pilot by visual clues in a cloud bank was a recipe for disaster, even for the most experienced of rocket jockeys. She was out of range for a clean firing lock on the drone. “We’re coming around at bearing three-eight mark four—high on your ten o’clock.”
The drone cut a sharp turn into a dive, and then it and Bolander’s interceptor arrowed out of the clouds, screaming straight toward the planet’s surface.
A storm of charged plasma converged on the drone as CAPS Two and Three both did their best to turn the alien ship into slag. Instead, the agile, beetle-shaped killing machine barrel-rolled through their baptism of fire, then went ballistic, executed a graceful turn during a midair stall, then shredded CAP Two with a flurry of bluish-white energy pulses.
“CAP Two is down,” Bolander said, for the benefit of whoever was tracking and logging the dogfight back at CAP Command. “CAP Three, break hard left, and—” She watched the drone pulverize her second wingman in a high-speed blur.
Time became elastic, stretched by grief and fear, as Bolander watched two jumbles of smoking wreckage twist their way toward the ground and explode on the outskirts of the city.
“Command . . . CAP Three is down.”
Jae Barnes, the flight coordinator, sounded panicked. “Disengage, CAP Leader. We’re launching CAPS Four and Five now. They’ll be with you in three minutes.”
Bolander tracked the drone through another turn and quickly deduced the targets of its next attack run, which was only seconds away. “I don’t have three minutes. And two more wings won’t make any difference up here. Tell Four and Five to stand down.”
“That’s not your call, Mikki.”
“The hell it’s not, Jae. I’m gonna take this thing down, or die trying. But you keep Ling and Sogobu on the ground. CAP Leader out.”
All she heard from Jae before she turned off her interceptor’s comms was, “Dammit, Mikki, don’t—” She knew what the rest would be, and she had no time for a debate.
The drone was lining up for its next pass over the center of New Astana.
Gonna have to eyeball this, Bolander realized. The interceptor’s tactical system was based on computer-assisted targeting of its charged plasma cannons. Any tactic that deviated from that mode was beyond the fighter’s ability to assist.
Several hundred meters below her, and a few kilometers east-northeast, the drone settled into its attack pattern and accelerated to full speed. Bolander made her best guess for the timing of her attack—then she pushed her interceptor into a dive and forced its throttle fully open.
Acceleration crushed her back into her seat. She felt her head swim from the g-force, but she couldn’t afford to relent. If she wavered . . . if she was weak . . . she would miss.
She wasn’t going to miss. She refused to.
At six g she could barely breathe. At eight she stopped trying. At ten she was sure her eyeballs were about to pop inside her skull, and her skeleton was going to shatter.
Then the drone came into view, for just a split second.
It was so close she felt as if she could reach out and touch it.
Ramming speed!
Victory was almost hers—
Then came a burst of blue, and she felt her world rip into shreds, revealing the void that yawned between every particle of being, the great entropic nothing that hid behind the fragile disguise of time and space. Within that momentary flash, Bolander knew she had failed—but she also knew she had kept her promise, and even the darkness at the end couldn’t take that away.
* * *
It was a catastrophe. Smoky spires twisted up from the ravaged streets of New Astana, and Governor Gretchen Kolova felt sick to her stomach. She watched the alien drone make another pass over the capital. The tiny ship seemed unbeatable. There had to be some way to stop it, but none of the defenses at her colony’s disposal had been equal to the task—a fact that left the insectoid killing machine free to wreak havoc.
She aimed a scathing look at her chief of staff. “Dammit, Tojiro, there has to be something we can do.” Together they gazed in dismay at the bank of screens that covered one wall of the emergency bunker. “How do we bring it down?”
Ishii shook his head. “I wish I knew, Governor.”
Medina left a huddle on the other side of the bunker’s command room and returned to Kolova and Ishii. “Governor, we’ve confirmed at least part of Mister Bowen’s report. There is some type of alien juggernaut floating at the Arcadia Explorer’s registered coordinates.”
Kolova latched on to the news, as if it might provide some clue to their salvation. “What else can you tell me about the Juggernaut, Hamid?”
“It’s quite large,” Medina said. “A few kilometers long, give or take. And its general configuration looks similar to the drone buzzing the capital, so it seems likely to be the drone’s parent vessel. Still no idea if there’s a crew aboard the Juggernaut, though.”
The chief of staff struck a dubious note. “Juggernaut? Is that what we’re calling this thing? Officially, I mean?”
“Until we come up with something better,” Kolova said, settling the question. She prompted Medina, “Anything else?”
“It’s emitting a series of pulses on numerous frequencies. Some follow a repeating pattern, which suggests communication, but others have been analyzed and seem to constitute a countdown, which could suggest it’s preparing to launch one or more additional drones.”
From across the bunker’s command center, Bowen, the rig commander, aimed at Kolova an accusatory stare that simply screamed, I told you so.
“I want to know our options, all of them,” Kolova told Ishii.
The frazzled older man shook his head. “I don’t know that we really have any, Governor. Civil Air Patrol admits that it’s outmatched. And the first thing the drone did was neutralize our automated defense batteries. The only reas
on the city hasn’t been reduced to rubble already is that it only seems to fire when it has a moving target or identifies a structure of value.”
“What about handheld surface-to-air defenses? Do we have anything like that?”
“Sorry, Governor,” Ishii said. “That kind of tech is restricted to Starfleet—and we were quite specific in our application for a colonial charter that we didn’t want Starfleet personnel on the surface or in orbit. Which means our defensive options are equally limited.”
Desperate but still hopeful, Kolova looked to Medina. “What about a nonmilitary solution? Can we generate a field that might disrupt the drone’s control systems?”
“You mean like an energy dampener or a weaponized electromagnetic pulse?” The science adviser shrugged. “Maybe, but there’s a good chance we’d frag our only fusion reactor, and no guarantee the drone would even be vulnerable to the attack.”
It was so ridiculous. What problem had no solution? Kolova was determined to reason her way out of this mess, no matter what it took. “How about if we surrender? We wouldn’t have to mean it, exactly, but maybe if we wave the white flag, it could buy us some time.”
Her suggestion attracted the input of Cameron Le Fevre, the capital’s chief of police. The thin, clean-shaven man adjusted his wire-frame glasses. “That’s not a bad idea, Governor, but if I might inject a bit of pessimism into the mix, we’ve no idea if this alien contraption even speaks our language, or if it would respect our surrender if it did. Of course, that’s no reason not to try, mind you. But perhaps we should ready ourselves for a protracted siege.”
Kolova turned once more to Ishii. “How long can the capital hold out?”
“If the reactor and municipal infrastructure don’t fail? A week, maybe.”
“And if we lose the reactor?”
“Then we’re screwed,” Medina interjected. “Reserve batteries will run out in two days. After that, water distribution stops, along with sewage removal. Plus, we’ll lose comms—assuming the drone doesn’t hit the subspace antenna at some point.”