The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III

by David Drake

“Now then, you claim to be from the Duncan. I require proof of that before I can help you. While I assume first of all that you know you would not leave Undertown alive if you do not satisfy me on this point, and secondly assume that you are therefore prepared to convince me, no wise being ever relies on assumptions.”

  Spencer pulled out his Pact ID card and tossed it on a low table in front of Dostchem. “Any ID card can be faked,” he said, ‘but I think you’ll find that authentic, and properly identifies me as Duncan’s master. This woman is not Pact military, but is working with me.”

  “I will ask you to remain in this room while I examine this ID with my own devices. As you say, any ID can be faked. But few fakes can fool me. I will return shortly.”

  Spencer waited until Dostchem had closed the door to her inner room, then leaned back and sighed in relief. The chair creaked once more, a bit ominously it seemed, but it held.

  They were safe, and they could count on being safe tor more than the next thirty seconds. Dostchem was not going to betray them—not while there was a chance of her making a profit on the deal. There seemed little chance of the autocops tracking them here. They were even clear of the murderous parasites aboard the Duncan.

  It was time to talk. Suss, Spencer, and Sisley began to compare notes. Spencer wasn’t quite surprised to find the two women had trouble believing in the parasites at first, until they realized the parasites would explain the autocop attack. No rational police controller would have handled the cops with a tenth that level of violence—but put a parasite into the central autocop command computer and you didn’t need a human controller.

  Far more disturbing to Suss was the news that McCain’s AID had been infested, and had killed its mistress. Clearly, she would have to operate without her AID for a while—and Spencer decided he would have to do the same. If the baddies were able to track them, maybe they had had a chance to drop a parasite somehow. It seemed unlikely, but clearly they did not understand much of anything about the parasites.

  But dammit, there were too many things that didn’t make sense, that they needed to figure out. He sat and thought while Suss and Sisley talked together, trying to come to grips with the idea of the parasites.

  Spencer found that it was gradually sinking in that they had stumbled into a much higher-stakes game than they had bargained for. Getting a parasite aboard the Duncan and into McCain’s AID was one thing—but good lord, if the parasites could take over the autocops what else could they control? Every machine on the planet? In the entire star system? It seemed the parasites had to be in direct physical contact with a machine before they could control it. That ought to limit the spread for a while—but what happened if one of them was carried aboard a ship and out of the star system? Good God, could the things breed? How big was this?

  And how could one semi-functional cruiser (that might still be sabotaged) and three overage destroyers stop them? Especially as Spencer did not dare take his own ships out of the system for fear of carrying one of the damn things along. Hell, could the Duncan even be trusted to fly? How close was Tarwa to boosting the big ship out into orbit?

  He could not send a message out of the Daltgeld system without using a ship, as the enemy (whoever that was) had demonstrated that it controlled the faster-than-light comm links. None of his ships carried Hyperwave sending gear—the hardware was too big to fit in anything smaller than a monitor-class vessel.

  Which left him with the planet’s Hyperwave comsat gear. StarMetal controlled it, and McCain’s problems had shown it to be contaminated.

  He could not send a ship, or a message. He could not send for help, or call for it.

  He was on his own.

  Another thing to worry about: if he were commanding the enemy forces, he would not be happy with the Duncan sitting where she was. She was a threat. Sooner or later, the baddies were going to neutralize that threat. And a capital ship was a sitting duck in port. She couldn’t use her primary weapons—or even lift for orbit direct from the port—without vaporizing half the city.

  Damn it, if he had elected to land one of the destroyers instead, they could have landed her at the spaceport, on dry land, in the middle of clear open spaces designed for a ship to boost from. But the Duncan was just too damn big for even the local spaceport to accommodate.

  He had to get her out of harm’s way. That might be the opposite direction a warship was supposed to go, but Allison Spencer told himself he was not fool enough to endanger his command for the sake of his ego. He had made a mistake in landing the cruiser. Now he had to rectify it.

  Spencer took a deep breath. “I don’t think there is a large conspiracy here,” he said. “A very small group in the StarMetal hierarchy—”

  “Or one man,” Suss said.

  “And he or they are using self-operating or remotely controlled machinery. Power doors, autocops—”

  Suss smiled grimly. “Especially autocops. Which shouldn’t be able to use deadly force without a pair of human supervisors in the circuit.”

  “He—or they—controls the parasites,” Spencer concluded. “And the parasites control everything else.” He swallowed. “I need to warn the Duncan.”

  Dostchem reentered the room. “Yes, Captain, you are you. That ID is no fake or I’ll hang up this robe for good.”

  “Good. I’m glad you’re satisfied. Now, I need to get in touch with my ship; and I don’t trust AIDs or radios of any sort. Those means of communication would be monitored. But I’ll bet that your phone line is untraceable, isn’t it?”

  Dostchem blinked in surprise and her tail curled up out of her kimono to wrap itself around her neck. “Astonishing,” she said. “I’m not used to a human smart enough to do its own thinking. My apologies, Captain. Yes, of course. Very few of the phone lines in Undertown are what they seem to be. Your opposition will not be able to track my line to its point of origin—and my instruments would immediately detect any such attempt. Is there a hardwire line from the pier into the Duncan?”

  “Yes, there is,” Spencer replied—wondering if it were another way in for the parasites.

  “Then if I may lead you to the phone?”

  “Good.” Spencer thought of something else, and unholstered his AID from its hip pouch. He tossed it to Suss. “Let’s play it safe,” he said. “Put our two clockwork pals on ice, and keep them out of contact with each other.”

  Suss caught the AID in mid-air and grinned at Spencer. “Will do,” she said. “But it’s a little late in the day to start playing it safe. You should have just stayed in bed.”

  Spencer smiled wearily. “Now she tells me. Come on, Dostchem, show us to the phone.”

  Chapter Ten

  Contacts

  Chief Engineer Wellingham glared at the parasite as it undulated across the bottom of the sealed plastic cube, slithered up the side of the box, crept over the inside of the lid, then back down the side, endlessly seeking a way out.

  Wellingham had concluded some hours ago that there were too many hiding places in the glovebox itself—too many nooks and crannies, too many access doors, too many handling arms and other devices in the glovebox that damn thing might be able to take over. The whole glovebox unit was sealed from the outside environment, of course—but Wellingham didn’t like the idea of the parasite slithering up into the workings of the glovebox and commanding the air lock to open.

  So he had used the air lock himself, putting a clear plastic storage cube inside the glovebox. He urged the parasite into the cube, and sealed the thing in by using the laser to melt the box’s lid on. For good measure, he kept the sealed box inside the sealed glovebox. It made some of his tests harder to run, but that little bastard wasn’t going anywhere.

  Which was but faint comfort. There was another of these wee beasties loose in his ship, and they had no way to catch it, no way to detect it. About all they knew was that it wasn’t still on the door controls, either central or local—those Wellingham had ordered searched with a microscope.

  So
even if they had this one caught in a box, Wellingham didn’t regard himself as having made much progress. The captain had ordered him to find a way to detect the little bastard that was still skulking around inside the Duncan. So far Wellingham hadn’t even found a way to make the parasite inside the plastic box show up on any remote-sensing instrument.

  He could see it and view it through a camera. That was it. Before he had sealed it in the plastic box, he had poked and prodded it with a straight probe, and the stress sensor had noted resistance to pressure. He had tried to slice off a sample with various cutting tools, but, not surprisingly, it wouldn’t hold still long enough for that to work—or else it would simply ooze out of the blade’s way.

  He had chilled the glovebox, and then heated it, trying to see if the parasite had some sort of infrared signature. It had maintained precisely the same temperature as its outside environment. On the theory that it might be linked to some outside entity, he had listened for any sort of signal or background noise emanating from it, using the most sensitive detection gear he had, sweeping over virtually all of the electromagnetic spectrum, from long radio to gamma and x-ray. Nothing. He tested for nuclear radiation: fast neutron, slow neutron, gamma rays, quarks, neutrinos, everything. It got him nowhere. A rock gave off as much radiation. Hell, most igneous rock gave off more radioactivity.

  But the bristly hair on the back of his thick neck didn’t really stand on edge until he tried to weigh the thing—and the meter stayed at zero. He tried it on three sets of scales, carefully and precisely factoring in the weight of the storage cube, and kept getting the same result. It had no weight at all.

  Then why did it settle for creeping around instead of flying? Wellingham growled an obscene something under his breath. If he were left with that as the biggest mystery about the parasites, he’d be a happy man.

  It didn’t weigh anything. Did that mean it had no mass? Impossible. Flat out, totally impossible. Wellingham glared at the parasite, and wished it would just go away. Instead, it slithered back down to the base of the plastic box, still searching for a means of escape.

  Wait a second. He hadn’t proved it had no mass—just no weight. That he could deal with. But even a neutrino had mass, in currently fashionable theory, and Wellingham was not about to accept that something that appeared to resemble a blob of mercury could be massless. Unless it was some sort of small energy field. But no, how could that be when it gave off no EM radiation except reflected light?

  But did no weight mean no mass? There were places where it didn’t. In freefall, no material object had weight, but all objects retained their mass. You had to put an object in some sort of real or simulated gravity field—put the object on a planet, or in an accelerator or a centrifuge, say—before its mass was measurable. And of course if the g-field varied, so did the apparent weight. Wait a second. Wellingham sat straight up and stared at the bulkhead. Vary the G-field . . .

  Doctor Peabody looked up in relief as the Chief Engineer leapt up and ran out of the sick bay. Wellington tended to overwhelm whatever room he was in. Now if someone would just come along and clean up that pile of test instruments, things could get back to normal around here.

  Peabody’s relief was short-lived. Four minutes later, Wellingham was back, three assistant engineers behind him—and all four of them with their arms full of more gadgetry.

  ###

  Lieutenant Commander Tarwa Chu sat unhappily in the command chair on the bridge, watching a dauntingly disordered ship status board. Her respect for the skills of a ship’s captain was growing by leaps and bounds. The day so far was proving to be an endless and highly educational nightmare. So many people expected her to make decisions. There was too much to do. Every one of the blinking, color-coded messages on the status board was indicating a ship function that was non-operational. Even animated advertising systems didn’t dare use such gaudy color.

  Captain Spencer had left orders that any effort to repair the Duncan be terminated and the ship take off as soon as possible. That sounded straightforward enough, but it was all but impossible to get it done in practice. Too many subsystems were half-taken apart, too many repairs were half-begun or half-finished. There wasn’t time to finish up most of the jobs. Test leads were yanked, and old, worn parts and slapdash repairs done a generation ago were reinstalled. New jury-rigs were found whenever the damage was too far gone to be left alone.

  The department chiefs understood the need at first, more or less, and only grumbled to Chu a little bit. The sailors who had been put to work on rush repair jobs understood nothing and grumbled louder to their section leaders, who echoed the complaints to the department heads. The department chiefs, now harried and impatient with the chaos belowdecks, had in the meantime found out just how impossible and frustrating the job was. They reported the comments from their subordinates back to Chu, embroidering them with a few choice observations of their own.

  It was understandable that the officers and crew were unhappy over the need to rush just as fast to undo their work, but Chu realized that being understanding wouldn’t do much for morale, discipline, or efficiency.

  In theory it was up to her to crack the whip. In practice, she had not much chance of succeeding, not when many of the officers and ratings had daughters—or granddaughters—older than she was. Chu wished desperately she were back home on Breadbasket, where the greatest challenge in life was getting the cows milked on time.

  A tone hummed from the right side of the console, on the comm control section, and a section of panel lit up in green—a welcome sight in that sea of reds, ambers, and shrieking bright alert-yellow. Chu punched the green panel. “Incoming landline audio-only call. Word-code procedure identifies caller as Captain Spencer,” the panel announced.

  A wave of relief washed over Chu. Maybe now the real captain could come back and take over. “I’ll take it on the privacy headset,” she said, fumbling the headset in place over her ears and adjusting the high-sensitivity mike.

  “Stand by,” the comm panel said. There was a moment of scratchiness, and then Captain Spencer’s voice was in her ears. Few things had ever sounded so good to her “Spencer here,” he said crisply. “Ship condition report. Bear in mind this is an unsecure line. There may well be listeners.”

  Listeners? Why was the captain worried about that? And if he was, why risk calling on a buggable line? Why wasn’t he using his AID to call in? Was he in some sort of trouble? Never mind. If he had wanted her to know, he would have told her. If he dared, on an unsecure line. “Ah—ah, Lieutenant Commander Chu reporting, Sir. Revised repair schedule proceeding, Sir. I don’t know how much detail you want to hear over this line, though.”

  “Just glad to hear you’re still there.”

  Chu felt her face flush. “Sir, if you are uncertain of my abilities, you may assign temporary command to any other offi—”

  “No, no, Chu, not you. I meant I’m glad the ship’s still there. I half-expected to find out that you’d been attacked. A few of the locals have taken some heavy potshots at us. I’m sure you’re doing fine in command. I have every faith in you.

  “On our side, if you pick up some news reports about some over-enthusiastic autocops or a wrecked shopping arcade—well, they were after us. They may still come after you, so be on your toes. Bump it up two alert levels from where it was when I left, more if you see fit. But the main thing is I want that ship out of there now. Order the tugs alongside, get out into deep water, and launch. Get back into orbit. If need be, you are authorized by me to launch from the populated area of the dock as per service doctrine. Let me make that stronger: I order you to carry out populated-zone attack doctrine if the ship comes under attack. Give warning to the locals if you can, but get the ship away as soon as possible. Is that understood?”

  Chu felt her ears buzzing, and she swallowed hard. Standard doctrine prohibited the launch from a populated zone unless the ship was under direct attack and the populace was therefore at substantial risk already. Who
the hell would attack the Duncan? How much trouble were they in? “I understand, Sir. We are still trying to get put back together far enough for boost. It will be several hours yet. Will you be returning aboard, Sir?” she asked hopefully.

  “Not until the ship is actually in space. You’ll have to launch a gig to pick up the other stranded crew and myself. I don’t want any hatches opened or anyone coming aboard until you’re out of atmosphere. I would bet that there are at least half-a-dozen parasites on the hull right now, trying to worm their way aboard, and I don’t want to give them a chance. Not your fault, but I wish to hell you could boost now. We’ll be able to handle them better in orbit. Also, they’re still after me, and if I head for the ship I’ll probably just draw their fire toward you for no good reason. Besides, I’ve still got some work to—”

  “Urgent call from chief engineer,” the comm panel announced in Chu’s ear, brazenly interrupting the captain.

  “Patch it into the call with the captain,” Chu instructed, then addressed Wellingham and Captain Spencer when the comm panel tell-tales indicated they were linked. “Captain, the chief engineer is cutting in with an urgent report. Chief, the captain just called in on an unsecured line. I’m patching you in. Bear in mind it is an unsecured line. Go ahead.”

  “Captain, we’ve got the little bastard!” the chief announced gleefully. “I’ve just completed tests on a detector, using the captured subject as a guinea pig. Can you risk hearing about it now on this line?”

  “Absolutely,” Spencer replied eagerly. “I doubt you’ll tell any potential listeners anything they don’t know.

  “Gravity waves,” the chief said proudly. “Don’t ask me how, but the parasite gives off gravity-waves. I got my clue when the thing showed as being weightless. I realized that couldn’t be right, and decided to track for anything that might interfere with the scales. And picked up gravity-waves, if you can believe that.”