by Alan, Craig
“Situation?”
Ikenna answered from the flight station.
“All due respect, Captain, but I think we should wait for the rest of the staff to arrive.”
“This is an alert! Are we taking fire?”
“Not at all, Captain,” Ikenna said. He rose from the chair, and she slid in behind him. “In fact, enemy fire might be the last thing we need to worry about right now.”
Vijay hit the bridge next, with Demyan just behind him.
“You three are dismissed,” Vijay said. “Get to your alert stations.”
“Stay here, Mr. Okoye,” Elena said. He hovered next to the bulkhead behind her, with nowhere to sit. “I want you to explain why the hell you sounded alert stations if there’s no threat.”
“I actually think that Mr. Masri can explain that better than I,” Ikenna said.
“I spent the evening, as ordered, working with the scope record of the energy burst we saw yesterday,” Hassoun said. Elena nodded. Neither mentioned that she had ordered him out of this room less than twenty four hours before. “It was a single pulse, duration two hundred forty two milliseconds. It originated some five million kilometers away from our position at the time, and terminated within Io’s orbit, at more or less the same distance. Full-spectrum analysis indicates that it was a…lightning bolt, for lack of a better term.”
Hassoun brought up a video image of black space. Surrounding Jupiter, and now only half a million kilometers distant, was the enormous red band of the Io plasma torus, plowed up by the moon as it sizzled through its orbit. The energy within it seethed, even though the flare had passed. The Agency had always assumed that the outsiders avoided flying within it whenever possible, just as humans steered clear of the Van Allen radiation belts in Earth’s orbit.
A thin bolt of red, millions of times hotter than anything else in sight, gathered within Jupiter’s atmosphere and shot into space, as if it knew exactly where it was going. It pierced the torus just as Hassoun paused it the image, and the jagged lance hung frozen in the sky. This was the energy discharge that had led him to issue a false alert the day before.
“It hit something.”
He zoomed in, and the entire holo became a wash of red. The heat and radiation inside the torus were dazzling, and hid everything within it from view—except for a cool black spot at the very tip of the lance, much cooler than the space around it. The hollow was shaped like a gemstone, its lines straight, its proportions perfect. It was an outsider ship, and it was cold and dead in space.
“What were you saying about building a brig?”
The rest of the shift had proceeded without incident, and she and Vijay were back in the stateroom. Ikenna had joined them this time, but Vijay hadn’t complained. If ever they needed a tactical officer, it was now.
Elena made coffee for herself and Vijay—Ikenna had refused—and thanked God that she had shut off the avram when the flare hit. As far as they could tell, the derelict had kept its own avram active, and turned itself into a lightning rod for the charged plasma in orbit of Jupiter. The solar flare had provided the spark.
“The incident was over twenty four hours ago,” Ikenna said. “If they lost power, then their life-support system have been offline for an entire day. Unless their crew is very small, they would have exhausted their air supply by now.”
“Oxygen gardens?” Vijay asked.
“Useless in zero gee without forced ventilation,” Elena said. “There’s no way to clear your own carbon dioxide from your nose and mouth. They’d be poisoning themselves with every breath.”
“And without power, their ship will continue to radiate heat until it freezes,” Ikenna said.
The derelict had drifted out of the ring of fire, and Gabriel’s sensors had confirmed the presence of gossamer thin cooling sails that projected from the edges. They gave the outsider vessel an uncanny resemblance to a masted sea ship soaring in three dimensions.
“Auxiliary power?” Vijay tapped the glow tube, filled with mildly radioactive gas. “We use isotopic batteries, after all. They could still have heat and life support, even if they whatever they use for a power plant has been knocked offline.”
“Our batteries run on plutonium,” Elena said. “Do they have even have nuclear reactors? Or the uranium to feed them?”
“We have never found any traces of nuclear material in recovered debris,” Vijay said. “Let alone a detonation.”
“The Avram Corporation landed automated survey vessels on all the Galileans, in the 2040s,” Ikenna said. “Precursors to colonization. It’s possible some of the moons may contain ore, but most of the company’s records disappeared after the Storm.”
“Along with Avramovich himself,” Elena said. “And we’re sure that ship never broadcasted?”
“I went over the data a dozen times,” Vijay said. “It has been cold and quiet ever since the discharge.”
“Could someone else have spotted it?”
“Not from the moons,” Ikenna said. “We timed our approach well, they’re still on the other side of the planet.”
“The Galileans are on the other side,” Elena said. “But what about the others? Jupiter’s up to how many moons now, seventy five?”
“Most of those are no bigger than an asteroid,” Ikenna said.
“That never stopped us,” Vijay said.
“We just assumed that they colonized the Galileans because that’s what we would have done if we had gotten there first,” Elena said. “Just like we’re assuming that they breathe oxygen, or can freeze to death.”
In her head, the outsiders nearly always had two arms and two legs, and stood conveniently between five and seven feet tall. It was easier to imagine what she already knew. But Elena had no reason to believe that they looked anything like that. They could be amphibious creatures from the oceans of Europa, or silicon-based life from the lavas of Io. Or a race of intelligent plants, or self-aware machines. The derelict, sixty meters from point to point, could be the personal vehicle of a single outsider, or a colony ship housing millions.
They knew absolutely nothing about the outsiders. And she could change that.
“What’s our ETA?”
“We should rendezvous and match velocity in less than six hours,” Vijay said.
“Then in six hours, we board it.”
If either of them realized that history had been made yet again, they didn’t show it. Perhaps they had become too used to it.
“Who shall go?” Ikenna asked.
“Dr. Golus.” Vijay raised an eyebrow, and Elena continued. “If anyone over there is still alive—or whatever they are—then maybe she can help.”
“I don’t believe that the Geneva Conventions apply, Captain,” Ikenna said.
“Maybe not. And they’re probably all dead anyway. But she’ll know what she’s looking at better than anyone else will.”
“We should want a technical expert, I imagine,” Vijay said.
“There’s none better than Marco,” Elena said. She turned to Ikenna. “Please debrief them both.”
“I presume that Chief Nishtha will lead them?”
“No. You will.”
She had expected Vijay to fight her, but he nodded and sighed. Ikenna saluted, and left.
“I was afraid that you would nominate yourself,” Vijay said, once the door had closed.
“If I thought you would let me get away with it again, I would.”
“Ironic,” Vijay said. “We came all this way to blow those things to hell. Now we have a sitting target, and we hold our fire.”
“This is the intelligence coup of the century, Vijay. Whatever we can get from that ship is more valuable than killing its corpse,” Elena said.
“More valuable than this ship? Than the lives it carries?”
“Yes.”
Vijay stood and f
loated over the her desk, and stared at the prints above it. He put his finger on Jupiter and let it linger. The star map was so old that the Galilean moons had yet to be charted.
“What would we do, if one our own ships were disabled but not destroyed, and all hands were lost?”
“Recover it,” Elena said. “Tow it. Give the dead a proper burial.”
“And if it were lost on the outside? Would we attempt a salvage?”
“Perhaps not. It might not be worth the risk.”
“I would leave it,” Vijay said. “As bait.”
“You think the outsiders are lying in wait?”
“I know is that if my enemy were near, but I could not find him, there would be no better way to draw him out. Destroy that ship, Captain. That is what we came here to do.”
She stared over Vijay’s shoulder to the map on the wall behind him, with its heavenly figures and hellish monsters. Gabriel had come to hunt dragons, and found nothing but their bones.
“Not until we’ve picked it clean.”
Elena had stood the crew down for a few hours to get them some rest, but they were now back at alert stations. Demyan hunched over his desk on the bridge, across from her. He hadn’t looked up from his screens in well over an hour, and she wondered if he ever remembered to blink. Gabriel needed to shut down her avram at precisely the right moment to synch their orbits. The computer would do most of the work—the window of opportunity was measured in microseconds—but Demyan was watching carefully for any slight variation in either body’s velocity that would throw off the calculations. Elena felt the urge to look over his shoulder, but trusted him to do the job right. She watched his face instead.
At exactly the right moment, he broke into a grin.
“Pyaty ballov! It’s done!”
The bridge staff applauded as Demyan beamed. Elena had never known him to look so happy.
Vijay put the visual up on the holo so that they could see the derelict clearly. It hung in space like a teardrop that had crystallized at the exact moment it fell. Elena could tell that it had once been white, but transit of Io—and the tons of sulfur that the moon belched out of its atmosphere and into orbit every day—had stained it a dull gold. The tarnish made it look to be very old indeed, and she wondered if this had been the ship that had killed Anwar Azzam and the Solstice.
“Maybe they were Egyptian,” Demyan said quietly, as if he had heard her thoughts. No one laughed. The ship bore an odd resemblance to a golden obelisk.
“Should we try to talk to them?” Hassoun asked.
“Does anyone aboard speak outsider?” Vijay said.
“Give them a few laser pulses, evenly spaced,” Elena said. “Let’s see if they can talk back first. Then we can move on to the digits of pi, or whatever the protocols call for.”
Hassoun sent the signal. There was no response.
“They’re all dead,” Demyan said.
“Or bashful,” Vijay said.
“They’re going to socialize whether they want to or not. Tell Ikenna it’s time.”
She watched from the bridge as her boarding party leapt the gap from Gabriel’s port hull to the outsider ship. They were laden with tools, and once there they would hunt for an airlock door to cut through. But it was over a kilometer between the two hulls, and the journey took several minutes.
“Impact in ten seconds,” Hassoun said.
A trio of tiny shapes appeared at the edge of the image, and Vijay zoomed in on the landing party as it hurtled towards the outsider hull. They struck one after another and bounced off, but not far. Her crew jerked to a halt a meter or so above the hull, and slowly descended once more until they could grab hold of the ship.
“Clean landing,” Hassoun said.
“Give me their visor feeds.”
The holo split into three, one view for each of the boarding party. Elena tried to keep track of all three simultaneously, and found that she had one too few eyes for the task. Lines of static drifted across the screens, and clouds of yellow dust drifted past the cameras. Their feet were stirring up the sulfur caked to the hull.
“Vijay, how’s visibility?” She did not mean the visors.
“Beg pardon, Captain, but it is damned bad.” Gabriel and her ghost ship were in Io’s orbit, just outside the torus, and the interference was raising hell with her systems.
“Try squinting.”
“I shall. On a totally unrelated note, Mr. Masri, I have a last will and testament I would like to transmit.”
“Ignore him,” Elena said.
As Vijay opened his mouth to speak, an indicator light flashed rhythmically on her watch screen. Someone was tagging Gabriel with laser pulses.
“Jesucristo, are they talking back?”
Vijay traced the pulses back to their source. Gabriel appeared on the holo, facing the derelict. The laser beams fired from behind her, from what they had thought was empty space.
“Flash alert, warning red!”
“Firing solution, now!”
Elena damned herself for not destroying the derelict from afar, and braced for an impact that never came.
“Shots fired?”
“Negative, Captain,” Vijay said. He sounded as confused as she felt. “Laser lock only. Firing solution ready.”
Her ship was still in one piece. Harmless laser pulses bounced off her hull at a staccato rhythm. Someone had gotten the drop on Gabriel, locked her in, and held their fire.
“Weapons hold,” she said.
Even Demyan looked up at that, but Vijay held his fire. Elena saw now that the pulses it fired were of the exact wavelength and frequency used by Gabriel’s own rangefinders. But these were irregular and graceless, not the continuous beam characteristic of a targeting system. And they were coming on a constant bearing. Whoever this new ship was, it was making no effort to evade. Vijay could just aim along the beam and shoot.
“Resolve, target visual.”
She waited for the telescopes to punch through the interference. Hidden in the turbulence, the target continued to zap Gabriel with low power lasers, in the exact manner that she had tried to communicate with the outsiders. But Gabriel’s pulses had been regular and evenly spaced, while these followed no pattern at all that she could see. They were strangely punctuated, with long pauses followed by sudden strikes—
“Madre de dios.”
It was Morse code.
Greetings, Gabriel.
“Target visual,” Vijay said.
The ship on the holo was the perfect mirror image of Gabriel. She was an Archangel.
They rendezvoused at the derelict and turned sideways in their orbits to face one another, mere kilometers apart. The two Archangels were so close that, if not for the shadowed bulk of Jupiter blocking the Sun, Elena could have gone outside and seen it her with her own eyes. At this distance, either ship could kill the other in between eyeblinks. And Gabriel’s landing party was still stranded between the two of them. The message repeated endlessly.
Greetings, Gabriel.
“Vijay, turn over the lasers to Hassoun. Keep an eye on the boarders.”
Unknown vessel, identify yourself.
This is Metatron.
Elena looked around the room and saw nothing but blank looks.
“Not in any Bible that I have read,” Demyan said.
“Could that be Michael?” Hassoun asked.
“She’s not due to be completed for another three months,” Elena said. “Even we couldn’t have finished her that quickly.”
We have no record of a vessel by that name.
That is what we intended.
“Black ops,” Hassoun said. “Completely off the books.”
“And built entirely in secret?”
“We did it,” Vijay said.
State your intention.
It is the same as yours.
“Why send two ships on the same mission?” Hassoun asked. Thanks to Jupiter’s bulk standing between them and Earth, the question could not be put to Control.
“That was the plan, Mr. Masri,” Vijay replied. “Gabriel and Archangel were intended to attack the outsiders together.”
“Together,” Elena said. “Not separately. And if the Agency had sent another Archangel in ahead of us, I would have been told.”
“All due respect, Captain, but are you quite certain?”
“Trust me.”
You are interfering with a vital Agency mission.
We mean you no harm.
“Mierda.”
“Captain, if she had wanted us dead, she would have killed us.”
Then disarm immediately.
We cannot disarm in the face of the enemy.
“Not an unreasonable position,” Vijay said.
“You’re supposed to be on my side. How’s visibility?”
“Beg pardon, Captain, but I cannot see a bloody thing. There is absolutely nothing to stop an outsider from doing exactly what she did.”
You should depart for Union territory immediately.
We cannot do that either.
“But we can,” Elena said.
“What about the boarders, Cap’n?”
“What boarders? How would she know anything about them?” Unless a telescope focused minutely, there was no way to spot an object as small as a person through the static.
Then we shall. Good luck.
We cannot allow that.
“Now we’re getting down to business,” Elena said.
You said you mean us no harm.
And we do not. But we cannot allow you to leave. Not yet.
Elena kept the corner of her eye on her watch screen. If the other ship fired its ballista, she would have only a second to see it before she died. And if the outsiders fired, she would probably never know.
The outsiders are approaching. If we stay here, we will die.
We know.
At the helm, Demyan crossed himself slowly, right to left.