Dyson's Drop

by Paul Collins

  ‘You ‘re sure?’

  ‘We can read the decoded coordinates. They contain internal validations. There is no doubt.’

  ‘How did Enigma crack it?’

  ‘Ingenious,’ said the Envoy, as if speaking to himself ‘They used quantum time entanglement. Paradoxical, but it appears to have worked.’

  Black closed his eyes. Of course. In another universe somewhere, the Enigma team had cracked the code the hard way. That information had then been retrieved by this Enigma team, creating - spawning - a new universe entirely.

  Did that mean there was a universe in which Black did not succeed?

  Well, who cared? He was stuck with this one. And it was stuck with him.

  ‘Good work,’ he said. ‘Make sure Mika, Karl - andjeera- are rewarded.’

  ‘You do not intend to kill them?’

  ‘No. I gave them my word.’

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘That I keep my word?’

  ‘No, that you gave it in the first place.’

  ‘Did you check in on Kilroy?’

  ‘The degeneration has accelerated.’

  ‘Dammit, why isn’t it working? The equations predict ninety-three per cent chance of success.’

  ‘And a seven per cent chance of failure.’

  ‘Thanks for reminding me. I’d almost forgotten.’ Black turned back to the view of Lykis, pondering the new data. ‘We must get to Kanto Kantoris,’ he murmured, almost to himself ‘There is still unrest here. Not everyone has accepted you yet. Remember, you won the military leadership by one vote only. They expect you to act.’ Black turned back, his face somehow darkened.

  ‘Act? Haven’t I done enough for them? Haven’t I turned their dreams into a reality?’ He raised his arms, then let them fall helplessly, as if the stupidity of humans was too much for him. ‘We have to keep our eye on the main prize, Envoy. The second set of lost coordinates. Nothing else matters.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I do. Start prepping a team. We leave for Kanto at once.’

  ‘It will not be easy.’

  ‘Don’t you think I know that?’ Black said. ‘Kanto Kantoris just happens to be one of the most ruthless and massively over-militarised dictatorships in the galaxy. They say every third person is in the pay of the secret police. Infiltration will be extremely difficult.’

  ‘That is an understatement.’

  ‘Very good, Envoy,’ Black said off-handedly.

  ‘Undoubtedly Anneke will endeavour to find some way to circumvent my travel interdiction.’

  ‘She is resourceful, as a nemesis should be.’

  ‘Please, spare me the destiny speech. Just for tonight?’

  The Envoy turned on his heel and left.

  Black lingered on the battlement. Above him, a meteor shower streaked across the sky. It was only when the shower suddenly changed course that he realised they were under attack.

  A warning horn blared stridently.

  A young sublieutenant by the name of Jinks Heller, a Quesadan foot soldier, gave the alarm. He happened to be stationed on the eastern-most battlement in a symbolic role. Quesada had far more canny ways to detect attack than relying on human senses. Yet those cutting edge detection systems failed to identify the meteor shower as an attack by cloaked Myotan warships.

  Heller, on the battlement, put through an emergency call to Control.

  ‘What is it?’ said a lazy voice. ‘Insects biting tonight?’

  ‘We’re under attack! Right now! Get a priority alert out. Now!’

  The voice chuckled. ‘Look, it’s a meteor storm, okay? Didn’t they teach you anything in officer school? Besides, there’s nothing on our screens.’

  ‘Listen to me, sir ... because your life depends on it. We are being attacked. If you do not send out an alert this instant, I guarantee that the new Military Capo will de-capo you.’

  There was something in the man’s voice, a steely sureness that unnerved the other. ‘If this is some kind of joke-’

  ‘No joke. Send the alert. It’s Sublieutenant Jinks Heller. I’ll take full responsibility.’

  ‘Fine. On your head be it.’

  The duty shift controller took a deep breath and sent the alert. He’d recorded the whole conversation, as per protocol. The young sublieutenant had, in all probability, dug his own grave, which was perfecdy fine with the controller.

  Moments later, the first pulses struck.

  By that time, Black was racing towards his personal command centre, shouting orders into his communicator as he went. The Envoy appeared from nowhere, joining Black in the command centre as he scanned reports.

  ‘Myoto. Blast them!’

  ‘They’re using the old deathward against you to prevent the other Companies and Clans from coming to your aid. You should have bought up the kill rights yourself’

  ‘Well, it’s a litde late for that advice, don’t you think?’ Black snapped as another detonation rocked the entire tower. He wondered how safe they were this high up.

  An urgent dispatch came through.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Myoto has landed ground troops, sir,’ said the guard. ‘There’s fighting on eight - make that nine - levels.’

  ‘Why isn’t it showing on my screens?’

  ‘We think a disruptor virus has been introduced into the system.’

  ‘Into the “incorruptible” system?’ The dispatcher did not reply.

  ‘How close are they to my office?’

  The dispatcher gave him the coordinates, then signed off.

  Black scowled. ‘So we can’t rely on any of this.’ He waved his hand at the readouts and screens. ‘Cleverly done. An inside job, perhaps. Well, I’ll attend to that afterwards.’ There was a sharp explosion near at hand. Black felt the air in the office shift. ‘They’re coming here. For me.’

  ‘Naturally,’ the Envoy said. ‘One always strikes at the head of the enemy first.’

  ‘How very reassuring of you. For the record, that’s sarcasm, not a compliment.’

  Black went to a cabinet in the wall, and selected several weapons, including a disruptor and a vibroblade - a dagger-like instrument that would slice through almost anything.

  ‘Shall we?’ He gestured towards the door.

  The Envoy bowed slightly. ‘It is always better to take the fight to the enemy.’

  ‘You’re just a fund of pithy little statements.’

  ‘Sarcasm,’ said the Envoy.

  Black scanned the other side of the door, making sure no one lay in wait, but it appeared that the fighting was still a hundred metres off, though - by the sounds of it - coming in his direction. No doubt his foot soldiers were valiantly laying down their lives to protect their venerated leader.

  More fool them.

  At this thought, Black grinned as he and the Envoy moved silently and carefully down a long corridor. This was more like it. He had been thirsting for a fight; he just hadn’t known it. Now he felt his heart pumping. The adrenaline shocked through his limbs like electricity.

  He felt vividly alive.

  The din was deafening as they reached a confused knot of combatants who were tearing at each other with fibro blades and lasers.

  Black licked his lips. ‘The game’s afoot, Watson.’ Before the Envoy could query this statement,

  Black hurled himself around the corner and into the fray, howling an ancient war cry. Two Myotans died before they knew what was happening. The others realised they were being attacked from the rear. Some spun, the rest closed ranks, moving into a gladiatorial defensive fighting position: back-to-back, hacking at anything that came within range.

  How odd, Black thought in a suspended moment of clarity. We fight with modern blasters, devices that disrupt the atomic lattice, and with weapons that replicate the o
ldest known instruments rif death: swords and knives.

  Black turned his attention to two other Myotans who, when they realised who they were fighting, howled with glee.

  ‘You will see Hell this day, Brown!’

  The cry was taken up. The mythical reference made Black think of his destiny and in doing so he nearly lost his chance at it.

  He parried a sudden undercut, sliced off the thrusting hand, and drove the vibroblade deep into the man’s chest, so that for a moment they were almost nose to nose. The man coughed blood, but managed a scowl. ‘I will see you on the other side, Brown.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Black. ‘But not today, I think.’ He gave the vibroblade an extra twist and the man fell back, only to be replaced by his enraged companion. A moment later he too lay dead and Black was covered in blood, none of it his own.

  The fighting continued fiercely. In the thickest and deadliest of it, Black noticed a young sublieutenant running interference for the squad. He was a fierce fighter, driving back three opponents at once, though he seemed to hesitate on the kill stroke. Not yet blooded, Black reckoned. Just out of officer school.

  Well, no time like the present.

  Black lunged forward, but the Envoy stepped in front of him, dragging him from the fray.

  Black shook him off angrily. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘My internal sensors are not as corrupted as yours. They show a large force heading for your command centre.’

  Black stared. ‘They’ll hack my personal mainframe. Follow me!’

  They raced back the way they had come just in time. Managing to reach the corridor leading to Black’s office by a narrow lead, they encountered a sizeable force pounding up a side passage.

  Black and the Envoy took up strategic positions. Black called for reinforcements, but there was a lack of cover there. They found an empty office and activated deflector shields. The shields were attuned to Quesadan not Myotan weapons, and although this didn’t neutralise the pulse beams coming their way it turned kill shots into treatable wounds. lf they were to make it to an infirmary, which Black doubted.

  ‘Come on,’ said Black. ‘There’s a back way.’

  ‘No. You go. I will delay them.’

  ‘Your choice.’ Black fled, scuttling through back passages and conjoined offices. Behind him, he could hear the hiss and vaporising sizzle of blasters and wondered if the Envoy would make it out alive. Black felt he would. And if not, what did it matter? One of the Envoy’s hatchlings, with identical memories to its ‘parent’, would turn up within a few days and resume his post, as if nothing had happened.

  Nice trick that, Black reflected, wondering if it could be replicated in human beings. Might be worth investigating. Imagine, never having to die.

  Black reached his office, scanned to make sure it was clear of hostiles, and entered by an emergency door. He then launched full shielding and moved the office: there was a faint rumble as gravitors seized the office suite and rotated it along with three other identical suites that sat on a huge revolving disk. By the time full shielding was in place, his command centre - still fully functional - was not where it had been, nor where any architectural plan or sensor readout said it should be.

  He pinged the Envoy a special microburst code, too fast for anyone else to pick up. The Envoy would know where he was.

  A moment later the entire floor rocked.

  According to his sensors, his fake command centre, situated where his office had been only moments before and complete with a human biometric readout that matched his own, had just been atomised.

  Black put out a call to the other clans for reinforcements. He did not expect many. This was a personal matter, a colossal duel allowed for under the rules of fatwa, and one he should have foreseen. But it would be interesting to see who came, and who did not.

  Black spent the next thirty minutes coordinating the battle. At that point, storm troopers from Ekud and two other clans showed up and the tide of battle turned. Two hours later it was all but over. Mopping up squads prowled through the Quesadan complex, and repair crews, protected by fighters, had begun work.

  Black called in his heads of security, demanding an explanation.

  His Captain of Security, Nepth Argus, was visibly nervous. The attack had gone down on his watch. Tough luck. Another thirty minutes and it would have been someone else’s shift.

  Argus said, ‘The meteor shower was used as a cover. It worked because our system was infected with a simple-minded virus. Its sole duty was to “read” an attack coming in at a specified orbital angle as a meteor shower. It was so simple our diagnostic algorithms missed it.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Black, eyeing the man over steepled fingers.

  ‘And of course we thought Myoto was a spent force.’ There was a slight accusatory emphasis on the word ‘we’. Well, the man had brass. Good for him. Argus went on: ‘But the orbital attack was also a cover. One we were meant to buy.’

  Black leaned forward, eyes suddenly gleaming.

  ‘They came in by jump-gate, didn’t they? Let me guess. Unanchored portals?’

  Argus nodded. ‘As you say, sir, unanchored portals.’

  Such portals were theoretically possible; indeed, they had been demonstrated time and again in laboratory conditions. But not in the real world. A Dyson jump-gate opened a door into n-space attuning itself to another gate, anywhere in the universe. It did not involve matter transmission: atoms were not disassembled and then put back together again. One simply stepped through a doorway bypassing a large intervening space, often light years.

  But it had been shown that, with enough raw power, one could use a jump-gate to open a portal almost anywhere, without the benefit of having an existing jump-gate device already there and waiting.

  It was dangerous. It was foolhardy. And it was incredibly smart.

  ‘I take it they didn’t go back that way?’

  ‘No, sir. The unanchored portals couldn’t maintain stability for long. That’s what the orbital fleet was for.’

  ‘What was the cost? On both sides?’

  ‘Ah, we think we took out about sixty per cent of the invading force, including some transport vessels. As for our people, we lost over four hundred, and sustained severe infrastructural damage.’

  ‘Yes, but what was the political cost?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  Black scowled. ‘Never mind. Why was no alarm given?’

  ‘Er, well, as I said, sir, the orbital shower was a fake and a feint at the same time. But one of my men did send a warning. Thanks to him we managed to mount some defence.’

  ‘And who was this?’

  ‘A relatively new foot soldier recruit, s1r. Sublieutenantjinks Heller.’

  ‘Is he here?’

  ‘Heller?’ The young officer Black had noted earlier stepped forward and saluted. There was a fresh wound on his face, and, like many there, he was soaked in blood.

  Black nodded. ‘Good work, Heller.’ He turned to Argus. ‘Captain, you’re relieved of your command. I’m promoting young Heller here. He will assume command of Security. I will decide what to do with you in due course. Dismissed.’

  Argus swallowed hard. He had too much sense to argue. With any luck, events would take Brown’s attention away from the personal fate of one lowly captain.

  In that, he was right.

  When they were alone, Black turned to the Envoy.

  ‘I have been stupid and short-sighted,’ he said. ‘I have allowed my obsession with the lost coordinates to blind me. I should have dealt with Myoto when I had the chance, finished them off once and for all.’

  ‘It is not too late.’

  ‘We must take Dyson’s Drop. What I could not do with this new technology. Imagine. Unanchored portals, opening wherever you wanted them. Even on Kanto Kantoris.’

  ‘Kanto
Kantoris is not far from Dyson’s Drop.’

  ‘That has occurred to me. Perhaps again there is a way to kill two birds with one stone.’

  ‘There is always a way.’

  IT was too weird. Peeing standing up. Who had designed human plumbing this way? Anneke finished at the urinal, zipped up, and moved to the washbasin, pausing to eye herself in the mirror.

  The face that stared back wasn’t her own.

  It was the face of Sublieutenant - no, Captain - Jinks Heller. Anneke ran a finger along her jaw line, poked her cheek, and prodded her nose. It never ceased to amaze her. She’d had renovations before, some more thorough than others, but this was something different. She felt like a stranger.

  She was shorter, broader across the chest, more muscled, and hairier, too. Her breasts were gone. The first time she had gazed at her slab-like flat chest she’d almost cried. She’d never been renovated as a man before, except cosmetically, wrapping her small breasts to make herself appear even flatter. But she’d never before lost her womanhood.

  It was disquieting. Profoundly so.

  That, and having an extra appendage. She’d had to make a huge effort to avoid communal showers.

  Fortunately, as a captain, she now had her own bathroom, a blissful luxury.

  Suddenly, the whole room lurched. She grabbed for a stanchion and managed to stop herself cracking her head on the wall of the tiny washroom.

  Must have hit some turbulence, she thought. Even n-space wasn’t free of snakeholes; occasionally, entire ships disappeared into the higher dimensional realm, itself one big anomaly.

  A scientist called Ernst Kobol had discovered n-space. He’d been investigating time travel, but discovered instead a place where space and time collapsed in predictable ways. He had gone on to develop the jump-gate technology that had revolutionised transportation and travel throughout the galaxy. In its own way, it helped unify the galaxy, heralding an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity. The world on which Kobol had made his discoveries was a planetoid called Dyson’s Drop, which circled a rogue F-type star that had been making its way through Orson’s Drift for the last million years.