Rogue Powers

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by Roger MacBride Allen




  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE January, 2115 Aboard LPS Venera

  CHAPTER TWO Aboard G.O.S. Ariadne

  CHAPTER THREE June, 2115

  Ariadne

  On Approach to Outpost's Surface

  CHAPTER FOUR March, 2116 Navy Castle On The Planet Kennedy

  CHAPTER FIVE March, 2116 Guardian Contact Base on Surface of Outpost

  CHAPTER SIX April, 2116 The Planet Bandwidth

  CHAPTER SEVEN Chralray Village: the Current Nihilist Camp

  CHAPTER EIGHT Guardian Contact Base, Outpost

  CHAPTER NINE Guardian Contact Base, Outpost

  CHAPTER TEN The Planet Bandwidth

  CHAPTER ELEVEN Aboard Ariadne

  CHAPTER TWELVE Aboard HMS Impervious, in Orbit of Britannica

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN Aboard Impervious

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN Deep Space, Britannic Star System

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN Survey Service HQ on Columbia, Kennedy's Natural Satellite.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN Survey Service Base, Columbia

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Guardian Contact Base, Outpost

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Survey Service Base, Columbia

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Aboard Far Shore, En Route to Columbia

  Survey Service Base Comm Center

  CHAPTER TWENTY Ariadne

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE On Outpost, Eight Hundred Kilometers North of Guardian Contact Camp

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Nova Sol System Barycenter

  Aboard G.O.S. Ariadne

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Outpost

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Outpost, Nihilist Encampment

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Bary center

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Aboard RKS Eagle

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Eagle, Hangar Deck

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Aboard the Sick Moose

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Outpost

  CHAPTER THIRTY Outpost, Refiner Camp

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Aboard Ariadne

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO Outpost, Refiner Camp

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Aboard Reunion, En Route from Outpost Orbit to Refiner Camp

  Ariadne

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR Guardian Contact Base

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  RKS Eagle

  Zeus Orbital Command Station, Circling the Planet Capital

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Captain's Cabin, Aboard the Eagle

  Eagle

  Aboard GSS Adversary, the Guardian Fleet Flagship

  TFCC, Eagle

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN Barycenter Battle Zone

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Starsight

  Ariadne

  Reunion

  Nike Station, Orbiting Outpost

  Reunion

  Task Force Command Center, Eagle

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE Aboard Starsight

  CHAPTER FORTY Reunion, Surface of Outpost

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Zeus Station, Orbiting Capital

  Aboard Reunion, En Route from Outpost to Capital

  Starsight

  Reunion

  Starsight

  Reunion

  Starsight

  Reunion

  Starsight

  Reunion

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO Eagle

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Back Cover

  Cover

  To Table of Contents

  CAPTAIN TO THE BRIDGE!

  RED ALERT!

  ALL HANDS TO BATTLE STATIONS!

  THIS IS NOT A DRILL!

  CAPTAIN TO THE BRI—

  The first impact was felt more than heard, a booming, shaking roar that knocked them off their feet. The lights died, and, through the bulkhead that led to Hangar One, they heard the horrible sound of air whistling away into space, of screams and cries and alarm bells dying off when the air that carried them had vanished into space.

  "Oh my God, they've hulled Hangar One," Sir George said, his voice deep with shock. "They're all dead in there. My God."

  Joslyn climbed to her feet. The gloomy red of the emergency lighting system flickered on, and she saw Sir George striding purposefully across the deck, toward the airlock at the aft end and the nearest way to the bridge.

  ROGUE POWERS

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1986 by Roger MacBride Allen

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises 260 Fifth Avenue New York, N.Y. 10001

  First printing, September 1986

  ISBN: 0-671-65584-1

  Cover art by Alan Gutierrez

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by SIMON & SCHUSTER TRADE PUBLISHING GROUP 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10020

  Scanned and proofed by eBookMan version 1.0

  Dedication

  For Mom, who shared her love, taught me self-confidence, and gave me the world's greatest middle name.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE January, 2115 Aboard LPS Venera

  CHAPTER TWO Aboard G.O.S. Ariadne

  CHAPTER THREE June, 2115

  Ariadne

  On Approach to Outpost's Surface

  CHAPTER FOUR March, 2116 Navy Castle On The Planet Kennedy

  CHAPTER FIVE March, 2116 Guardian Contact Base on Surface of Outpost

  CHAPTER SIX April, 2116 The Planet Bandwidth

  CHAPTER SEVEN Chralray Village: the Current Nihilist Camp

  CHAPTER EIGHT Guardian Contact Base, Outpost

  CHAPTER NINE Guardian Contact Base, Outpost

  CHAPTER TEN The Planet Bandwidth

  CHAPTER ELEVEN Aboard Ariadne

  CHAPTER TWELVE Aboard HMS Impervious, in Orbit of Britannica

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN Aboard Impervious

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN Deep Space, Britannic Star System

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN Survey Service HQ on Columbia, Kennedy's Natural Satellite.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN Survey Service Base, Columbia

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Guardian Contact Base, Outpost

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Survey Service Base, Columbia

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Aboard Far Shore, En Route to Columbia

  Survey Service Base Comm Center

  CHAPTER TWENTY Ariadne

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE On Outpost, Eight Hundred Kilometers North of Guardian Contact Camp

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Nova Sol System Barycenter

  Aboard G.O.S. Ariadne

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Outpost

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Outpost, Nihilist Encampment

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Bary center

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Aboard RKS Eagle

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Eagle, Hangar Deck

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Aboard the Sick Moose

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Outpost

  CHAPTER THIRTY Outpost, Refiner Camp

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Aboard Ariadne

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO Outpost, Refiner Camp

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Aboard Reunion, En Route from Outpost Orbit to Refiner Camp

  Ariadne

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR Guardian Contact Base

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  RKS Eagle

  Zeus Orbital Command Station, Circling the Planet Capital

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Captain's Cabin, Aboard the Eagle

  Eagle

  Aboard GSS
Adversary, the Guardian Fleet Flagship

  TFCC, Eagle

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN Barycenter Battle Zone

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Starsight

  Ariadne

  Reunion

  Nike Station, Orbiting Outpost

  Reunion

  Task Force Command Center, Eagle

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE Aboard Starsight

  CHAPTER FORTY Reunion, Surface of Outpost

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Zeus Station, Orbiting Capital

  Aboard Reunion, En Route from Outpost to Capital

  Starsight

  Reunion

  Starsight

  Reunion

  Starsight

  Reunion

  Starsight

  Reunion

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO Eagle

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Back Cover

  CHAPTER ONE January, 2115 Aboard LPS Venera

  The ship stank.

  The Venera s ventilation system had been shot up two days after the hijacking, when the Survey Service students had tried to get the ship back. The students had failed, of course: They were armed with only a few side arms the Guardians hadn't found, and the Guards controlled the ship, had all the heavy guns, had all the advantages. The Guards had killed a few more Survey personnel, taken the side arms, spaced the bodies, confined the survivors to their cabins, and that was that.

  But the Guards were stupid enough to fire heavy ammo through life-support equipment. Now, twenty-one days after the hijacking, the air pumps wheezed and shuddered instead of humming. The scrubbers weren't working properly and the whole ship was rich with the smell of bodies and fear and burned-out machinery. Everyone had a headache, which probably meant that the carbon dioxide count was going up. And the water was starting to smell like the bottom of a pond. The few members of Venera’s crew who were still alive could probably have patched things up, but they were confined to quarters, two to a cabin, like everyone else. Either the Guards couldn't do the repairs or they didn't care how bad things got.

  The Guardians were human and spoke English. But no one in the League had ever heard of them. Somewhere, somehow, out among the uncharted stars, the Guardians must have gone off to settle their own world and hide from the rest of humanity. At least that was one theory that made sense. The Guards themselves didn't explain anything.

  Lieutenant Lucille Calder, Royal Australian Navy, was locked up in her cabin, but she was a good enough pilot to feel the clumsiness in the way the Guards handled the Venera's controls. She knew how much fuel the Venera had carried. She carefully timed the burns the Guards made and estimated how many gravities of thrust they used. She kept a rough running account in her head of how much fuel this thumb-fingered crowd of barbarians was wasting as they corrected and over-corrected and re-corrected their errors. Bad piloting wouldn't kill them just yet—there was still a fair amount of fuel left. On the other hand, the fouled air and water might be enough to do them in very soon. For the sake of Guardian and prisoner alike, Venera had to get somewhere fast.

  But Lucy and the other survivors of the hijacking had no idea where Venera was being taken. The viewscreens were shut off, so there were no stars to look at—whatever good that would have done—and there was no real way of telling if they had remained in normal space or made one or more jumps into C2 space, where the ship's velocity was kicked up to the square of the speed of light. Lucy knew nothing, could do nothing, could see nothing. She didn't like it.

  She stared across the tiny cabin at her bunkmate, Cynthia Wu. Ensign Wu was from High Singapore's tiny Defense Force, an outfit with little more to do than track the endless stream of cargo ships that called on the huge Earth-orbiting city. She was used to waiting, to dull patches. Lucy wasn't so lucky. The deep-space fleet of the Royal Australian Navy had trained her for command, for quick decisions and independent action. She needed to be in control, to have some effect on what happened to her. She needed a viewport to see out of, an idea of where they were going, an idea of why they were being taken there. She wanted to know who these surly men were who called themselves the Guardians. She had to know what they wanted with the Venera—and whether or not she would live through this.

  And she wanted a shower. Lucy's mother was an Australian aborigine, and her father the descendant of British stock. They had raised her on a huge range station, a sheep ranch, at the edge of the desert, where the Sun baked down and made a person sweat and smell. Both Mom and Dad had come from families where you weren't allowed to bring that odor inside. That's why there was a showerbath outside. And now Lucy had been indoors with the smell of many unwashed bodies—including her own— for the better part of a month.

  Lucille Calder was a short, stocky woman, dark-complexioned with short-cropped, brownish-blond hair. With a pug nose and a hint of a double chin, she would never be called pretty, but she didn't much care about that. Pretty wasn't her job.

  For the thousandth time, Lucy looked across the cabin and watched Wu calmly turn over the page of her book and continue reading. For the thousandth time, Lucy overcame the urge to grab the book out of Wu's hand and heave it at the bulkhead. But even at the moment she was ready to commit mayhem against her cabin-mate, Lucy knew Cynthia Wu was probably the best person she could have been locked up with. Wu had patience, and faith in the power of logic and the careful examination of possibilities. Those were things Lucy had to learn from somewhere.

  Lucy wished the ship was under spin so she could at least pace the deck. It was hard to expend nervous energy in zero-gee without literally bouncing off the walls. She undid the restraint line that held her to her bunk and pushed herself toward the hatch. There was a peephole in it that let you see out into the corridor. Not that anything was ever out there but another gray bulkhead. Floating in mid-air, she sighed and peered out the hole. Nothing there—

  Quite suddenly, she found herself pasted to the deck, a roaring noise filling the cabin. The goddamned Guards had fired the main engines without any warning again. Lucy swore to herself and got up off the deck. She hit the stopwatch function on her wrist-aid and began timing the burn. It felt like a shade under a standard gee and a half this time.

  Wu didn't even look up from her book. Lucy wondered which of the two of them was being more foolish: Wu, for doing nothing at all, or she, for fussing over thrusts and burn times that wouldn't really tell her anything useful.

  But this burn went on a long time. By Lucy's timing, the engines fired for twenty minutes and a few seconds. In the ringing silence after the roar of the engines, she worked out the resulting acceleration in her head—about eighteen kilometers a second. That meant something. No reasonable flight between two points in a star system would require such a big change in velocity. On the other hand, eighteen klicks a second was a fairly modest relative motion between two stars.

  It had to mean that the Venera had indeed made a C2 jump. Venera must be matching velocity in a new star system. "Cynthia," she said quietly. "We're here." Wu looked at her sharply. "How do you know?" "That was a burn to match velocity between two star systems, and if you're trying to hide where you're going, you do that after you get to the new star. Besides, that burn must have just about emptied the tanks. They wouldn't risk running out of fuel unless they were in range of their own people." Wu closed her book. "God, Luce, I think you're right." The two of them waited in silence, listening, attentive, for an hour or more. Then, suddenly, there was a series of bumps and jumps as the Guardian pilot used the trim thrusters to fine-tune his course. For a long time, there was no sound but the complaints of the overstrained ventilation system. Finally, more bumps and stutters from the trim thrusters and then, far-off and faint, a series of dull thunks and clanks.

  "Docking collar," Lucy said.

  There was a series of sharper clacking noises. "And there go the capture latches," Wu said.

  They could hear voices now, bellowing, yelling, the sounds of every gangway crew that had ever brought a ship
into port and secured her in a berth. The air changed, became cleaner, sweeter, as die ship's air mingled with the atmosphere of whatever it was they had docked to.

  They heard the rattle of keys and the sound of angry, urgent voices. Finally, the hatch to their cabin slammed open, and a man in battle armor hung in the hatchway. "Get your stuff and move," he barked, his voice made deep and booming by the suit's speaker system. "Head to the main sternward hatch and through the airlock into the station. Do what any Guard tells you to do and you might not get hurt." He turned, grabbed at a handhold, and pulled himself down to the next cabin without looking to see what Lucy and Cynthia did.

  Lucy had a mad impulse to race after him, to smash the faceplate on his suit, to demand an explanation, to run like hell, to do something, anything—and then she turned to see Wu calmly packing up her few belonging into her duffle bag. Lucy pulled herself to her locker and did the same. She would have to learn patience, if she wanted to live.

  The stern airlock was a knot of chaos. Guardians in battle-armor took no nonsense, answered no questions, did nothing but grab at their prisoners and heave them through the hatch and down a connecting tunnel. There was a viewport by the airlock, and Lucy managed to get a quick peek through it. She caught a quick glimpse of a fair-sized orbital station of some sort. The Guards were still grabbing anyone who didn't move fast enough to please them. Lucy decided that she didn't need some metal-clad goon groping her, and got through the tunnel unassisted.

 

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