Heretics

by S. Andrew Swann

  Now she had become one of those uncertainties being fed up the chain of command. So instead of talking to someone in traffic control and getting them to radio warnings, she was probably going to be stuck with someone in internal security.

  Which would be fine if she could still convince them to act.

  As the spidery arm pulled the scout deeper into the cavernous docking bay and the axis of the station became the new “up,” Toni II asked, “Yeah, but beyond telling everyone to get out of the way, what else can anyone do?”

  Yeah. What?

  It was probably a good thing that some decisions were above her pay grade.

  Fortunately for her nerves, the “wait for further instructions” only lasted another few minutes or so. When the first timer crossed to seven hours forty-two, an air lock extended from one of the walkways crisscrossing the spaces between the docking bays. It attached seamlessly to the scout and she heard the computer beeping as the scout’s air lock began to cycle.

  She turned the pilot’s chair enough to look at the air lock as the inner door slid aside. A man stood in the air lock, wearing a gray and blue uniform that bore the stylized red key sigil of the SEF Military Police on a shoulder patch. The docking arm had drawn them up nearly to the axis of the station, so he stood light on his feet, the rotation barely holding him down.

  “You need to accompany me, Lieutenant Valentine?” His tone morphed from command to question as he looked from Toni to Toni II. After a beat, he said, “Both of you.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Fire and Brimstone

  “Sometimes explosions are necessary.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “Life is risk.”

  —SYLVIA HARPER (2008-2081)

  Date: 2526.6.5 (Standard) 75,000 km from Salmagundi-HD 101534

  Shortly after Adam gave his one- hour warning, Parvi watched as the small cadre of maintenance techs loaded the dropship. Departure was clearly imminent, a race to beat Adam’s deadline off the Voice. As one set of the crew loaded the dropship, a trio of the Caliphate mechanics by the main air lock door were engaged in an animated conversation. Looming over their argument, the heavy blast doors held the vacuum outside at bay.

  Wahid stared at the trio and Parvi asked, “What’s the problem there?”

  “Something seems to be blocking the exit.” He raised his hand, quieting her before she could ask another question. After a few more sentences back and forth in heated Arabic, Wahid stood up and took a step toward them. The guard with the gamma laser stepped in front of him, blocking his path.

  Wahid snapped something at the guy, and after a moment’s hesitation, the guard nodded and reluctantly stepped aside. Wahid waved her forward.

  “What did you say to him?” she asked as she followed him toward the massive doors sealing the bay and the arguing techs.

  “The obvious: either they need our help or not. It isn’t like we’ll sabotage our own escape, right?”

  Parvi thought of the woman she had left dead outside the interrogation room and simply grunted an assent.

  The trio by the doors stopped talking as they approached. “So,” Wahid asked them, “what’s blocking the way out?” Parvi suspected he spoke English out of deference to her.

  At least one of the three understood. The dark- haired woman who appeared in charge snapped, “You two, what are you doing over here?”

  “I pointed out that, since we’re going to fly you out of this mess, you might use our help getting that ungainly little boat launched out of here.”

  One of the two men flanking her snorted, and the woman glared at him.

  “What’s the problem?” Parvi asked. “Debris from the neighboring bays?”

  After a moment’s thought, the woman answered, “I wish it were that simple.” She waved at a kiosk next to the massive doors. “You can take a look for yourself.”

  Parvi walked over to the kiosk. The panels around it were open, revealing a massive amount of rewiring. She suspected that they worked to bypass the main ship’s systems and connected it directly to whatever external sensors were local to this bay.

  Looking into the holo, her first thought was that the wiring was unsuccessful. The screen looked blank.

  Then she realized that it wasn’t a dead screen. A few subtle highlights in the black revealed that she looked at an undulating wall. Along the side of the display scrolled numbers and graphs all labeled in Arabic. She couldn’t understand all of it, but she gathered she was looking at densities and thermal profiles, radar cross section, spectroscopic analysis . . .

  “Wahid?” she called out as she backed away from the display.

  Wahid walked over to the display and let out a low whistle.

  “You see the problem?” asked the woman.

  Parvi nodded. The barrier floated barely a meter from the skin of the Voice.

  “It’s about three meters thick before the density drops off,” Wahid said. “Mostly carbon, but traces of just about everything else. Fine particulate matter, discrete particles shaped probably by some sort of electrostatic field, fluid. You could fly through it.”

  The woman laughed.

  “What?” Wahid looked up from the screen.

  “Do you know what that is?”

  “Tell us,” Parvi said. “What is it?”

  She said something in Arabic for a few moments, and Parvi saw Wahid stare at the woman and shake his head. The look on his face was as close to pure horror as she’d ever seen, and she’d been on the Eclipse’s bridge with him when the ship started breaking apart.

  “What is it?”

  “The word in English—” the woman began.

  “Nanomachines,” Wahid said. “We’re surrounded by a cloud of nanomachines.”

  “What? That’s . . .” Parvi was about to say the idiotic phrase, “That’s illegal.” If there was any scrap of unity left across the universe of human politics, it was that. Everyone from the Centauri Alliance to the Caliphate to the counterrevolutionary Federal government on Rubai would agree on the bans on heretical technologies. Self-replicating nanotech most of all. Whole planets had been sterilized because of it.

  But they were eighty light-years away from the Centauri Alliance, the Caliphate, and whatever scraps of the Rubai Federals had been left in exile.

  The woman glared at Wahid. “You see why we cannot ‘fly through it.’ ”

  One of the others spoke in halting English. “Before cameras lost, we see bridge. Adam. And it . . . it . . .”

  He broke down fumbling for words, and the woman in charge finished for him. “Our people, our soldiers went forward to fight, but each one who came in contact with this thing, they changed.”

  “Changed?” Parvi asked.

  “This Adam calls for servants. And should it touch you, you become his servant, or something else crawls into your skin.”

  Parvi shuddered, thinking of millions of tiny machines crawling inside her, stripping her body apart and reassembling it from the inside out.

  Wahid frowned and looked back at the jury-rigged holo. “Then why are we still here? That thing’s only a meter from us. It could take apart that bulkhead and make short work of us whenever it wanted.”

  “If it’s been speaking truth,” the woman said, “in forty-five minutes it will.”

  Parvi rubbed her face and tried to recall what history she had learned about the suppression of nanotech during the Confederacy. All the historical incidents she could remember involved hitting some infected ground-based target with a lot of energy all at once. Antimatter bombs, orbital linear accelerators firing near-light-speed projectiles at a planetary surface, and in one case dropping an asteroid from orbit large enough to punch through the crust of the planet and render the surface uninhabitable.

  She couldn’t remember anything about dealing with this kind of thing close range or outside a ground-based planetary environment. AM-bombs would probably sterilize the cloud outside, but even the smallest one would vaporize e
verything in a hundred-meter radius. A high-powered laser would destroy part of it, but only along the laser’s path. It made about as much sense as firing a slugthrower at a swimming pool.

  Plasma could cover a broad area, but it would probably diffuse its energy too quickly. Again, like the swimming pool, the cloud out there could probably soak up more radiant energy than they could hope to produce without so much as a splash.

  A splash . . .

  Wahid and the woman were arguing about attack methods. “If we time a missile to concuss in its midst, we’ll be caught in the blast.”

  Parvi said, “We can’t destroy it, probably can’t damage it, but we can push it out of the way.”

  “What do you mean?” the woman asked.

  Wahid looked at Parvi and slowly broke into an evil smile. “We don’t want to be caught by the blast. We want to be the blast.”

  Parvi looked back at the dropship. “She looks like she’s rated to do heavy atmospheric breaking.”

  “Yes . . .”

  “Then get me the specs on her performance envelope, and show me the environmental controls for this bay. We’re going to get out of here.”

  In less than fifteen minutes, the crew was strapped in the back of the dropship, the ship itself buttoned up as if they were due to make a steep atmospheric insertion into a hostile environment. Parvi sat strapped into the pilot’s chair, and Wahid was strapped in at the weapons console.

  Sitting to her left, at the currently useless communications console, was the English-speaking woman, Technical Sergeant Abbas. Sergeant Abbas had been the highest ranking person trapped in the maintenance bay, which meant that she was the closest thing they all had to someone in charge.

  To reinforce that point, she was the only armed person in the cockpit.

  The dropship was completely fly-by-wire. There wasn’t even a window. Parvi looked out at a bank of holos that showed a compressed fish-eye view of the maintenance bay. She suspected that there were probably about six or seven meters of aircraft between them and the outside.

  “Here we go.” Wahid switched on the plasma cannons.

  “This is insane,” Sergeant Abbas whispered, then muttered a short prayer in Arabic.

  Insane or not, Sergeant Abbas had bought in to her prisoners’ crazy idea.

  Outside, at the lower edge of the holo, Parvi saw a distorted view of plasma streams coming from dual cannons set below the dropship’s nose. The plasma broke against the massive external doors like a hellish tide.

  In the surrounding maintenance bay, everything flammable ignited in a flashover that lasted half a second. Then, for a few seconds, plastic and synthetics—which included everything from packing crates to small motorized supply carts, to computer hardware—flowed and turned black before flaring in microsecond combustion that left nothing but microscopic ash behind.

  The walls and blast doors held tight despite turning rainbow colors, then black, under the heat. The environment sensors on the console in front of her started showing the effect of the plasma venting. Atmospheric pressure had trebled, and degrees Kelvin were shooting by too fast to read.

  The exterior temperature hadn’t reached critical levels yet, but the weapons caused massive drains on the dropship’s power plant. This was a military craft, and the power reserves were incredible, easily twice those of the heavily modified Eclipse, but the plasma had already sucked through a third of it.

  “We’re losing power quickly,” Parvi said.

  “Give it a few more seconds,” Wahid said.

  The holo showed the maintenance bay, now nothing more than a metal box. Everything outside the insulated skin of the dropship had vaporized. The air had a sick yellow-orange tint from the light of the plasma jets, rippling as if she was looking through a viscous liquid. The pressure indicator started flashing yellow.

  “Wahid?”

  “A couple more seconds.”

  The temperature sensor joined in flashing yellow. Other warning indicators started flashing. “We have stress warnings on the starboard control surfaces—”

  “Damn it, that’s where the repairs—”

  “Wahid! We’re going to breach!”

  “Hit it now!”

  Parvi slammed the button on the remote control next to the pilot’s station. It was a simple RF signal to the control system on the main door to blow the explosive bolts holding the whole mechanism in place.

  In response to Parvi’s trigger, the entire ship resonated with a gigantic crashing thrum that was too deep and violent to be considered a sound. Suddenly, forward was down, and the massive doors fell away from the nose of the dropship in a explosive outgassing of boiling atmosphere.

  The ship followed the doorway even before Parvi kicked on the engines to accelerate the craft out of the bay. Around and in front of them, the superheated atmosphere billowed out in a powerful shockwave. The dropship accelerated through the midst of the explosion, racing out after the door.

  The explosion had the desired effect; the force of their blast had blown a hole through the cloud of matter surrounding the Voice. In the edges of the fish-eye holo, Parvi saw the black surface ripping outward from them, oscillating like the surface of a pond after being struck by a rock. She also saw the substance, rushing back in to fill the momentary gap.

  The dropship cleared the cloud before it filled in behind them.

  “Parvi!”

  Wahid’s voice brought her attention forward. They had caught up to the door, and she had to pull a fancy half-roll to starboard to avoid it. She goosed the maneuvering jets and rolled back to keep her vector a straight line away from the Voice.

  “Shit!” Wahid whispered.

  Sergeant Abbas muttered something, the only word of which Parvi could make out was “Allah.”

  Hanging in front of them was the vast curve of Salmagundi, a blue-green sphere filling half the universe. Sunlight came from behind and above the dropship, carving out every swirl of cloud in stark white relief—

  Except for a dark line bisecting their view of the planet. The line was so dark and sharp that for a moment it appeared to be a defect in the holo projection. At least it did until she saw that the layers of clouds below gave an undulating topography that broke up the edges of the line. It wasn’t an artifact, it was a shadow, a shadow that girdled the planet from horizon to horizon.

  Parvi adjusted the sensors to give a view from behind them.

  Behind them, and above the planet, another line was just eclipsing Salmagundi’s sun. As they passed into shadow, both edges of the object were briefly haloed.

  It was a black band ringing the planet. Something that was definitely not present when the Eclipse had tached into this system.

  “The Voice is in that thing,” Abbas’ voice hovered between a statement and a question.

  “Parvi, watch your angle!”

  The dropship was at a steep insertion orbit, and Parvi tried to angle the ship up. The maneuvering jets were sluggish and didn’t want to respond. Worse, the power reserves were dropping too fast.

  “We must tach out of here,” Abbas called out.

  “Tach? Where?” Wahid shouted.

  “Sorry, Sergeant. We need to land this,” Parvi said.

  “No,” Abbas said, yanking her side arm out and pointing it at Parvi. “We need to return to the Caliphate.”

  “Are you insane?” The shaking of the dropship gave Parvi’s voice a vibrato. “Do you see the same indicator I do? I don’t read Arabic, but I’m pretty sure that half that orange-red bar means that our powerplant’s at fifty percent and dropping. Fast. That means damage, a leak, and you really want to try firing the tach-drive with an unstable power plant?”

  “Bring this ship back up into orbit!” Abbas yelled at her.

  Parvi shook her head and turned her attention back to the controls. “Wahid, do you remember the mapping directions we got from groundside for the Eclipse’s descent?” she asked as she struggled with the sluggish maneuvering jets to flatten the drops
hip’s angle of attack from the suicidal to the merely ludicrous.

  “You are not going to land this ship!” Abbas yelled.

  “And you’re not going to shoot me!” Parvi yelled back. The dropship shook as Salmagundi’s atmosphere tore by, clawing at the too-fast invader, trying to slow it. The temperature sensors started climbing again.

  “Sergeant, you may not have noticed, but we just pushed a damaged ship way past its design specs. This thing needs the once-over from your techs before it goes anywhere. At the very least we need to recharge the power plant,” Parvi said.

  The edges of the holo began glowing with the superheated atmosphere sliding over the hull. Wahid had turned his chair to face the nav console and was typing in coordinates.

  “I’m in command here,” Abbas said.

  “Even if you were going to fire a tach-drive in a planet’s upper atmosphere with a damaged unstable power plant, how far can this thing go on less than fifty percent reserves? Two light- years? Ten? How far from the Caliphate and any way to fix or refuel this thing?”

  “I found it,” Wahid said.

  “Forty,” Abbas said, lowering her side arm.

  “What?”

  “Nominally these drives can jump forty light-years on a half-charge.”

  Parvi wasn’t sure she’d heard right. “How many jumps?”

  “One.”

  “What?” Wahid said.

  “One jump,” Parvi repeated. “You’re telling me that this crate has a tach-drive that can effectively jump twice as far as anything else?”

  “Four times,” Abbas said. “With a full charge, the drive can push out at least eighty light-years.”

  “Holy shit,” Wahid said, “this crate can get us home.”

  “All the more reason,” Parvi said, “to get this thing on the ground, repaired and refueled.”

  Around them, the violence of atmospheric entry had begun to smooth out. There wasn’t much the pilot could do right now. The ship’s maneuverability was severely limited during the descent into the atmosphere. Once they were in the pipe, they had to rely on the design of the craft’s body and the laws of fluid dynamics to determine its course. Any human intervention right now could turn a stable descent into tumbling chaos.