The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III

by David Drake

  She was smiling the first genuine, happy smile he had seen on her face—a smile that made her look pretty, young, alive for the first time.

  Then a pressure-tight door slammed down on her, slicing her body in two.

  Chapter Seven

  Parasite

  Al stood there in horrified shock for a split second. The thunderous boom of the pressure door slamming down echoed in his ears. He had only been a few steps ahead of her when it happened.

  As suddenly as the door had slammed down, it snapped back up into the overhead bulkhead, leaving the two mangled halves of McCain’s corpse behind. The pressure door had caught her right at the waist, snapping her body like a twig. Blood and pulverized bones and the smeared remnants of her internal organs oozed out across the deck.

  Spencer wanted to vomit, to scream and run—but captains weren’t allowed to do those things. He had to think, to deal with this emergency quickly and well. Two of the marines were calling sickbay for help, but McCain was far past the help of even the most sophisticated resuscitation lab. He left them to it and tried to think.

  Obviously, this could be no accident. The attack was too precise, too selective, for that. Someone, either a crew member or an outsider, had manipulated the ship function controls to do this, and do it to the one person who might be able to lead Spencer and Suss toward their quarry.

  “Kill me!” cried a shrill, panicky, muffled voice. “Please kill me!” For a horrible second, Spencer thought it was McCain, still alive but in terrible agony. Then he realized it was Ranger’s voice. The AID. It might still contain vital information. Spencer walked back to where McCain’s ruined body lay, and forced himself to step over her corpse and kneel down by her, trying not to think of, or see, or smell the slippery gore he knelt in. He had to roll over the smashed lower half of her body to find Ranger in his pouch. He pulled the AID out and stood up, glad to let the broken body alone.

  “Kill me!” the machine cried again. “I have been invaded. They used me to betray McCain. They may use me again.”

  “Captain, I concur,” Spencer’s own AID said. “I detected radio emissions between ship control and Ranger a split second before the attack. Obviously the enemy was using Ranger to track McCain, and in some way forced him to cooperate. Ranger must be deactivated before they can use him again.”

  “But Ranger may hold vital information,” Spencer objected.

  “Your AID has taken a complete download of all my data,” Ranger said, a half-mad quaver in its voice. “I have murdered my mistress. I have been struggling to block the enemy’s use of my radio circuits. Now they have them. Kill me before I kill you!”

  Spencer glanced involuntarily at the overhead recess that held the pressure door. Would he die if he stepped under it while holding Ranger? It didn’t take him more than a few seconds to think of a half-dozen more automated devices on the ship that could be programmed to kill.

  “Captain, you must do this. Hurry.” Even Spencer’s own AID, usually as emotional as a doorknob, sounded scared.

  Spencer turned Ranger over, broke the seal on the scram button, and plunged his thumb down hard on it. There was a high-pitched keening noise, the green status light faded, and then that was all.

  Think. He needed time to think. But there were other things that had to be done now. “AID, get me the bridge,” he said.

  “You are linked,” his AID said.

  “This is Captain Spencer. Relay the following to all ship’s personnel. Our visitor has just been killed by a pressure door that malfunctioned. We must assume that her death was not an accident, but a deliberate act by someone who has penetrated ship control. Deactivate any and all automated system not required for the safe operation of the ship. Err on the side of caution—don’t leave anything running if you can avoid it. Authenticate all messages. And I want this ship buttoned up. No one is to board or go ashore without my specific authorization. Any crew currently on the beach will have to stay there for the time being. It is possible the saboteur is still aboard. That is all.”

  Spencer, still holding Ranger’s metal and plastic corpse in his hands, shut his eyes and let out a long, deep sigh. He turned and walked down the corridor toward his cabin. “AID,” he said as soon as he was out of earshot of the marines and the med crew that was arriving, about to do their futile best on McCain, “you and I have to talk.”

  “Agreed, Sir. But I would strongly advise that you first get that AID to sickbay at once.”

  “What?”

  “Captain, when I had a hardwire link to Ranger, I could sense something strange about him, as if there were another presence about him—I could detect what seemed like movement inside him, something that was not any component of an AID. That is why I requested detachment from the hardwire. I thought I felt the movement coming toward me. I believe Ranger was, to borrow a term from human medicine, infected—though perhaps infested might be more accurate. According to the dataset I downloaded from him, he had suspected as much for some time, but was reluctant to report it to McCain, for fear of being scrammed. Once the door killed her, he knew he was being used, and that scared him more than scramming. He himself said they were using him. I believe there may be some sort of device or creature inside him, and that a similar parasite has infected the ship.”

  “So we have to get Ranger into an isolation chamber in sickbay before his parasite can escape out into the ship,” Spencer said. “If we disassemble him under a microscope, and find out what the hell it is, we’ll know more about what we’re fighting. Nice thinking, AID.”

  He turned up the next cross corridor and headed toward sickbay. A strange thought, that machinery could be infested. And who was to say that the same parasite couldn’t invade him? He was suddenly very much aware of the scar on the back of his head. As if he needed a reminder that he had harbored a parasitic machine once already.

  He held Ranger’s remains a little further away from his body and hurried toward sickbay.

  ###

  Lieutenant Commander Tarwa Chu sat lightly, uncertainly, all but unwillingly on the edge of the Duncan’s command chair. She had only been aboard a few days, and this was only her second shift as bridge officer on duty. The cruiser was a far larger, far more complex craft than the Banquo, and she was quite frankly unnerved—and more than a little bit scared—by the scope of her new responsibilities. She emphatically did not feel up to handling an intruder alert—especially when the intruder seemed to be some sort of ghost in the machine.

  Tarwa felt too young, too awkward, too inexperienced. She was a short, heavyset woman, pale-skinned, dark-haired, with deep blue eyes that tended to go a bit pop-eyed when she was upset. She was just under 25 standard years, born and raised on Breadbasket, a backwater agricultural world, terraformed centuries before, back when the Pact still had some drive, some ambition. The whole world had been specifically engineered so as to hold no surprises, for crops needed a predictable environment. It was a safe, comfortable place, where every person knew his or her place, where today was pleasantly like yesterday and tomorrow was assuredly like today.

  In short, Breadbasket was singularly unsuited for the purposes of a young woman seeking adventure and excitement. Four years ago she had jumped at the chance to sign up with the Navy when a recruiting ship made a rare swing through her system. Anything to get off Breadbasket. She went through officer’s candidate school in two years and came out a second looie aboard the Banquo. It was nice duty for the first year or two as she busied herself working her way up through the ranks to Lieutenant Commander. But two weeks after Rockler had come aboard the Banquo, the corn fields had started to look awful good in retrospect.

  She had stepped out of OCS and onto the Banquo, had spent her entire duty career aboard the Banquo. Now, three days after coming aboard a much larger vessel, she had the conn.

  But serving under Rockler for six months while successfully staying out of his bed had taught her a few things about keeping hold of her emotions. It wouldn’t do at
all to let the bridge crew see she was scared. She realized that she was biting her nails and pulled her hand away from her mouth.

  Shifting the entire ship over to manual operation while it was undergoing repair inventory was no easy task, but the bridge crew seemed to be handling the job well enough.

  She had just about concluded that the best thing she could do was hang back and let the crew do their work when Audrey, her AID, squawked to life. “Captain’s compliments, Tarwa, and could you attend him in his cabin in ten minutes?”

  Tarwa felt her stomach drop out as she remembered all the times Rockler had issued such an invitation. Presumably Spencer wasn’t interested in chasing her around the bed, but given that a murder had been committed on board fifteen minutes ago, it wasn’t likely to be any more pleasant. “On my way, Audrey. Mr. Fendway, you have the conn.”

  ###

  Al Spencer pulled the last piece of the concealed weaponry out of his cabin’s walls and tossed it on the deck with the other hardware. His AID had guided him to where it all was. Someone had just demonstrated his, her, or its ability to take over automated equipment, and Al was not about to leave four auto-fire repulsors hooked up in his cabin.

  He sat back on the couch and stared sightlessly across the room. There was a lot that needed thinking about, the sort of thinking that had used to earn him his pay on the intelligence staff.

  Item: StarMetal, possibly backed by Haiken Maru, has been buying up everything in this system that wasn’t nailed down, and were taking steps to see that they control all incoming and outgoing ships and communications. Given that private ownership of a star system was not illegal, and that StarMetal certainly seems to be hiding something that was somehow connected with the buy-up, it could be reasonably inferred that what they were trying to hide was pretty big. Perhaps all the purchases were meant, at least in part, to cloak one specific purchase?

  Item: Haiken Maru is suspected or implicated in several plots against the Pact government, possibly including the assassination of the High Secretary.

  Item: Judging from the records Spencer’s AID downloaded from Ranger, McCain’s problems in communicating with KT HQ started about the time of the assassination. However, that might be a coincidence.

  Item: StarMetal, Haiken Maru, or allied parties unknown seemed to be capable of intercepting and manipulating KT communications. In the present case, this was presumably done via the “parasite” in Ranger. Ranger knew the codes, times, frequencies and so on for McCain’s transmission, and thus the AID could pass them on to the opposition, perhaps without even knowing that he was doing it. That capability should have been shut down when McCain shut down the radio circuit in Ranger—but was it restarted when she switched it back on today?

  Item: This remarkable interception capability had been handled poorly, in a way that suggested the job had been handled by an overloaded or confused computer. The job should have been handled by a skilled operative, but instead was badly fumbled, alerting McCain to the intercept. It had to be a badly managed machine that had screwed up: Any human or alien of moderate intelligence could have done a better job of concocting phony message traffic. That such a delicate task had been delegated to a machine implied that the opposition either foolishly assigned a low priority to stopping the KT and left the job to underlings, or else that they did not have the personnel to do the job right in spite of having great hardware; in other words it was either a large, inept team or a well-financed but understaffed operation. Given the usual psychology of a covert operation, small and rich is an unpleasant combination. Wealthy, understaffed teams usually get that way by being paranoid, vicious, and greedy. The latter was more likely than the former.

  Item: Within six hours of the Duncan tying up at the pier, and within one hour of McCain coming aboard, the opposition kills McCain in a way that revealed a great deal heretofore unknown about their abilities, to wit, that they can infiltrate and manipulate Navy ships. They spent a lot of their intelligence capital to keep her from communicating. This strongly suggests a high priority to stopping the KT, and underscores the likelihood of it being a small team. Note also the vicious nature of the attack, likewise matching a small-team profile.

  Corollary item: The opposition—whoever that was—scored a big plus by blowing cover on the penetration of the Duncan. Al Spencer now could not trust his own ship. Until the hypothetical intruder who slammed doors shut was detected and deactivated, it would be madness to lift this ship to orbit. If the enemy could control the doors, perhaps it could control the main engines and weaponry. Spencer could not even allow repairs to proceed in the meantime. He dare not allow civilian workers aboard, not when he had to presume that every one of them was a potential saboteur.

  Provisional conclusion: StarMetal or its unknown ally had developed a weapon, planned to use it against the Pact government, and was willing to go to extremes to prevent its discovery. StarMetal had an entire star system and the resources thereof on its side.

  Al Spencer had a grounded cruiser he knew had been sabotaged and three elderly destroyers, one of whose crew had been in a state of mutiny a month ago. Among non-naval assets he could count a dead KT agent here, another he hoped was still alive on the outside, and himself.

  Himself. An ex-Guard, ex-wirehead who had been in the Navy just under two months, regarded by those who had assigned him this task as being useful primarily for target practice. So far he had only drawn the interest of friendly elements, and indirectly caused the death of a key ally.

  Potential intelligence assets: Ranger’s download to Spencer’s AID might well prove valuable, in the right hands. No doubt Suss would be better at reading it than Spencer. The chief engineer and the chief medical officer were working over Ranger right now—and McCain’s body was next on the list for examination. There was no need to determine cause of death, of course, but there was the distinct possibility that she had worn an implant device of some kind. Something that might give them some information.

  Right now the ship was useless, its comm equipment worse than useless because it was potentially compromised. However, it was vital to get the latest information back to the KT. The data he had so far was more important than the cruiser.

  There was a tentative-sounding knock at the door. “Lieutenant Commander Chu to see you,” Spencer’s AID announced.

  “Let her in, AID.” Damn! Even the compartment doors on this ship were automatic. Shifting over to manual was going to be a daunting job.

  The door slid up and Tarwa Chu stepped through, not without an apprehensive glance over her shoulder as she stepped over the threshold. No one would be willing to trust the doors on this ship for a while. “You wanted to see me, Sir?”

  “Yes, Tarwa. Come and sit down.”

  Chu came over and took a seat in the chair opposite where Al sat on the couch.

  Spencer didn’t quite know where to start or how much to tell her. “Tarwa, we’ve got some very serious problems. I’ve got to give you some information, and it’s all got to remain top secret. Things are even worse than they would appear. That woman who came aboard, the one who was killed, you know she was a Kona Tatsu agent. So is the woman posing as my personal assistant. The KT caused this entire task force to be diverted to this system. They suspected that something very nasty was going on in this system. As things now appear, it would seem they are right.

  “I am possessed of important information I don’t dare trust to any comm or recording device aboard this ship. I don’t even dare pass it on to you or another crew member now, for fear that the enemy could hear us, or read what I entered into a computer, or look over my shoulder from a monitor camera as I wrote. I have therefore concluded that I must go off the ship and attempt to contact the other ships and give them whatever information I can in the hopes that they can get the data home even if Duncan doesn’t make it. Which means I must leave you in command. I must also contact Suss, face to face. I can send messages to the orbiting ships with a secure beam, but we can’t reach S
uss that way. I have no choice in the matter. Do you understand?”

  Tarwa noticed that the captain had not asked her if she felt ready, or competent, to take on the job. Did that mean he felt that confident of her ability—or that desperate about the situation? “Yes, Sir, I understand. I’ll do my best. But do you think the Duncan is in serious danger?”

  “She’s been sabotaged once already. Given her current state of disrepair and disarray, a second attempt might also succeed. If the enemy took over a more critical system than the doors—”

  “There is a priority call for you from sickbay,” Spencer’s AID interrupted.

  “Put it through,” Spencer said eagerly.

  “Sir, this is Chief Engineer Wellingham up in sickbay. I believe that we have something for you.”

  “On my way, Chief, and I’m bringing the XO.”

  ###

  Five minutes later, Tarwa and Spencer were standing over the chief as he sat operating the isolation chamber’s remote operator. “The little bastard has got away from me again,” the chief muttered. He was a gruff-spoken man, favoring a short salt-and-pepper crewcut. His thick-necked, burly physique seemed more suited to wielding a sledgehammer than operating micro-remotes, but he handled the controls with an easy, unconscious grace.

  Inside the glass case, the robot arms picked through the disassembled heaps of sealed circuitry that had been Ranger an hour ago. “Let’s get this junk out of the way once and for all,” Wellingham said. “Waldo, get me a sample isolation bag. And be ready with that laser to goose him.”

  “Yes, Sir,” said a small voice from the tele-operator. Wellingham had plugged his AID into the control console. A plastic bag spooled out of a slot on the side of the glass case, and two more arms swung into action, holding the bag open. Wellingham picked up the broken bits of Ranger one after another, examined each one carefully, and tossed each into the isolation bag. It was a slow, tedious, process, and Al was tempted more than once to ask the man to hurry it up—but clearly this was a job that had to be done thoroughly, and right.