The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III

by David Drake

  “Why clean?” Suss asked.

  “The parasites want to get out of this system. They’ll be smart enough by now to know we can detect the parasites, and won’t allow them aboard these ships if we can help it. They should know that grabbing a pod would be a longer-odds proposition than sticking with the ship they’ve already grabbed.”

  “It sounds good,” Suss agreed.

  “But I’m not taking chances. Dostchem, get moving. Shoemaker, go with her as escort. The crew is going to be jumpy, not too thrilled about letting aliens wander the ship.”

  Shoemaker nodded, unwilling to speak. Horror was in his eyes. Suss looked at him and knew that he would carry his part in causing this nightmare to his grave. Dostchem, too, chose not to speak.

  Suss waited for the others to leave the small craft before she turned to Spencer.

  “Aren’t you going to go aboard yet, Captain?”

  “No, not yet,” he said quietly. “You go ahead.”

  Suss rose and left, with infinite reluctance. She stole a glance at his face before she stepped through the pressure lock. He was looking up, through the gig’s forward port, staring at a hole in the Banquo’s hull, as if he could see through the blank hull metal into space, into the sky where his ship was dying.

  How could anyone who had not felt the duty of a ship understand? The lives, the treasure, the power that was a major ship, all under your control. How could anyone who did not understand the mere command of a ship dream of understanding what it felt like to lose a ship? The death of a child, a family wiped out, it must be like that.

  She could read the loss in the set of his chin, the barren sorrow of his eyes. It was there, clear and unmistakable. Loss, pain, failure, guilt shrouded his dark-skinned face. She shivered, much unnerved. In some strange way, his wooden, unmoving expression was more chilling, more frightening than tears or howls of anger or hysterics would have been.

  Suss looked again at her friend. There was an emptiness in his eyes, a blank spot in his soul burned away and left naked to the world, made visible. It was a look that she had never seen before, and one hoped never to see again.

  She hurried out the hatchway and into the Banquo.

  Tallen Deyi watched his display boards with a fierce determination. They were not going to lose a single goddamned escape pod, and that was final. Even if they were still at extreme range—Hold it just a second. On the tactical screen. “Communications, was that a—”

  “Yes, Sir, a pod. We weren’t expecting to see any this soon. This one must have launched before the abandon ship order.”

  “Can he get to us under his own power?”

  “Should be able to. We can adjust our acceleration to match—”

  “Do it. And keep doing it for every pod we can see. Coordinate with the other ships so we don’t waste effort trying for pickup on the same pods.”

  The thrust levels aboard Banquo surged and pulsed once or twice, and Deyi watched on the screen as the pod’s engines matched boost with the big ship. They were forced to shut down the engines long enough for the pod to dock, but by the time the engines were powered back up, the team working the rescue port was able to report an infuriated Chief Wellingham was aboard, being needlessly poked and prodded by a medic.

  Then, radar began to detect the first full waves of capsules streaming away from the Duncan. There were too many of them to allow maneuvering the destroyer to make each pickup. Tallen Deyi ordered the Banquo to shut down her engines at a good average velocity match, and allow the auto-homing thrusters aboard the pods to do their job. The other destroyers followed suit, each at a slightly different velocity and range from the Duncan, thus increasing the chance that a given pod could reach a ship.

  Even so, some pods could not reach Banquo or the other destroyers under their own power. The destroyers deployed their auxiliary craft to go out and haul in those survivors. None would be left to the civilian ships if Deyi could help it,

  Aux vehicles reported an awkward moment when a crew went aboard the Malcolm in order to use her in the rescue plan. Captain Spencer was still aboard her, staring into nothingness. He came to himself in a start, apologized, and retreated to the Banquo’s wardroom, still dressed in the ill-fitting flightsuit he had found aboard the Malcolm, still barefoot, his many minor injuries untended.

  Tallen Deyi knew that strict protocol required him to invite Spencer to the bridge, but he knew this man needed to be left alone. He had commanded Banquo for even less time than Spencer had commanded Duncan, and Tallen could not even imagine the depth of his own shock and sorrow, his own sense of loss, if luck had decreed that his ship had been the one to die. He gave strict orders to vacate the wardroom.

  The man had to be alone in spirit. Let him be alone in goddamned fact.

  ###

  The pods in the first wave were full of the badly injured. More than one pod docked with a destroyer or an aux ship with none but the dead aboard to rescue.

  At last the destroyers relit their engines and boosted again, continuing their long stern chase of the renegade cruiser. Twice more they shut down their engines and pulled in more escape pods. The smaller ships were beginning to get overcrowded.

  Banquo was in worse shape than the others, as she still carried the Duncan’s full complement of marines, standing in guard against a second mutiny that had never come close to happening.

  But sod the overcrowding, Deyi thought. They can stand on each other’s shoulders if it came to that. Banquo was picking up every pod possible.

  Besides, he told himself bitterly, there weren’t all that many pods coming in.

  Duncan would have many brave companions escorting her into the land of death.

  ###

  No one was left.

  Tarwa Chu stood on the be-gloomed, smoke-filled deck, alone. Battery-powered emergency lights lit the compartment in murky red, giving the place the feeling of an unhappy dream. But things were not as bad as they might be. All of the bridge crew had gotten away. As best she could tell, virtually every surviving member of the Duncan’s complement had escaped.

  You call that success? she asked herself. Tarwa knew herself, knew that she would always chase after hope. It was hard not to lie to herself, hard not to seek after a non-existent chance for victory. Tarwa could nearly convince herself that the abandon ship order had been needless after all. The parasites had ceased their attacks on the crew. Maybe the parasites were tired, maybe whatever they used for a power source was weakened, or their power over the ship’s circuitry was fading.

  And maybe the legendary Easter Bunny would come to Duncan’s rescue.

  No, the parasites had stopped the battle because they had won, because they had driven off the crew and there was no need to further damage the ship that would carry them to a new world, a wide-open universe.

  She heard a distant rumbling double thunk shake through the deck, and knew another pod had got away. She wished them well. There would not be many more. Too many good men and women had died. With most power out, and intraship communication spotty at best, she had no way of knowing who was still aboard, or where they were, or what their circumstances were. Whoever was still aboard was nearly out of time.

  She checked the bridge instruments and had to blink once or twice, struggling to read them, wondering why she could not understand them. Then she recalled that all bridge power had been cut hours ago. She shook her head in dismay. Her mind must be soaked with exhaustion if she was trying to read blank screens. She shook her head and checked her suit’s chronometer. Half an hour until the jump point, at best estimate.

  But that would be too long to wait. Perhaps the parasites could find a way to boost faster, or jump sooner.

  She had wanted to delay the inevitable as long as possible, but now the time for the inevitable had come.

  She sat down, for a weary last time, in the command chair and felt a wave of hatred for the damn seat wash over her. How could she ever have imagined it a thrill or an honor to sit there? What
pleasure was there in this sort of power? For a long moment, the bright clear plains of Breadbasket, of the homeworld she would never see again, swept through her mind.

  But there was no longer time for that.

  She punched in a code and flipped open the emergency control panel. She had entered the preliminary codes from another panel hours before. Now she shut down all the fail-safe devices. It only remained to activate the destruct switch. She set the dial to fifteen-minute delay and shoved home the plunger. Locked away, deep in the bowels of the ship, matched canisters of matter and antimatter emptied their contents into magnetic bottles. In fifteen minutes, the magnetic fields would die.

  In theory, there was now no physical way possible to keep the ship from exploding. She stood up, wearily amazed that she felt so little. Perhaps because she had so little faith in the theory, or so much in the parasite. No doubt it had long ago found its way into the destruct circuit and deactivated it. Pushing the button was an empty, meaningless charade. She could push it until doomsday and the ship would never blow.

  But perhaps the charade would serve as a diversion. Alarms suddenly hooted and recorded voices warned whoever remained aboard of the imminent explosion. Chu felt, more than heard, two more pods blast away. Well, if the destruct system succeeded in convincing whatever crew remained to get the hell out, then it served some use. Still, it was all but certain that somewhere aboard men and women lay alive, injured or trapped by ruined equipment, unable to get to a pod.

  And there was not a damn thing she could do about it.

  Her heart full with loneliness, sorrow, and anger, she stood up and made her way down the emergency accessway, heading for the forward armory.

  ###

  The construct had absorbed something of human ways. It felt like laughing when the destruct system was activated. The part of itself wrapped over Rozycki’s forehead tried, experimentally, to control her face directly, make her face smile and laugh. The attempt failed and instead the woman’s unconscious body let out a strangled cough.

  But, like the sadism of a little boy trying to pull the wings off a fly, it was not success or failure that mattered, merely the pleasure of cruelty. The construct was not skilled yet, but already it could control a human directly. Yes, indeed, its forebear had downloaded much knowledge of humans.

  How could these foolish creatures—what paltry few of them were left—even dream that such a crude device as that destruct system could threaten the construct?

  Casually, almost leisurely, the construct guided the smaller part of itself nestled among the circuitry, examining the plans and wiring, tracing the links that controlled the supposedly independent system.

  Simple. Utterly simple. With a reshunting of this system here, and a simultaneous overvoltage there, the system was overloaded, burned out. The magnetic bottle would never break open.

  With a calm pleasure, the construct turned its attention back toward other matters. The jump system was novel to it, and would require careful examination. The control of a human, either by pleasure center manipulation or direct motor-nerve control, was also novel, and needed much study.

  It turned its attention back to its work, reflecting on how incredible it was that the humans would attempt to destroy the ship with a system they knew the construct could control. It had a low opinion of human intelligence, but surely it would occur to them to use other means, some sort of manual device.

  But if the humans had, how could the construct tell?

  The construct, a creature shaped for the control of electronics, of minds, had but the haziest notion of physical, macroscopic reality. It could not easily envision anything outside its universe of electron gates and neurons. The construct perceived even the Duncan herself most hazily, not wholly appreciating it as more than a massive maze of wiring, controls, and power sources. It did not really think much about what lay beyond the massed linkages of gadgetry.

  But, it suddenly realized, that left it with a massive blind spot. It had been assuming what it could sense was all there was of the ship, assumed that what it could not sense was not there. But it knew that was not true. It activated the main ship’s reference computer and compared what it “saw” of the ship against the ship’s plan stored in the computer.

  With an emotion of cold terror—something else it had learned from humans—the construct discovered there were gaps. Dangerous gaps. Pieces of the ship were missing from the construct’s internal image of the ship. Most of the missing ship’s territory it could account for through recent damage or minor modifications never properly logged in. In those cases, knowing where to look was enough of a clue. It found backup circuits, found sensing work-arounds. It quickly filled the most of the missing territory.

  Except for the two forward armories. Those had been cut out of the loop far too thoroughly for it to be an accident. The humans had deliberately hidden those places. Those places full of massive weapons.

  It backtracked from the blocked-off areas, searching for the closest cameras. And spotted a human moving away from one camera, heading straight for forward armory one. In a desperate panic, it slammed shut every power door in the ship, trying to cut the human off from her goal.

  But all the doors between the bridge and the armories were jammed open. How had it missed that? Could it send a carry-all roller? No! There were rubble piles and wrecked corridors blocking the way for the ship’s powered remotes.

  Its human! Its captive human. She could get through, climb through the wreckage and get forward, carrying the construct along. Straining at the unaccustomed task, it forced Rozycki’s body to stand, to take a halting, lurching step toward the exit. It snapped open the hatch of the compartment—and remembered a millisecond too late that humans need air, that the next compartment was in vacuum.

  The construct, deeply linked into the nervous system it was trying to control, shared most unwillingly in the young woman’s death agony. It survived her death, but not for long.

  ###

  Tarwa Chu stepped into the armory chamber, and regarded the deadly thing bolted to the test stand in the center of the room. The sleek cylinder of a ship-to-ship missile, an access cover opened up, wiring leading from the missile interior to a crude breadbox control arrangement. A sloppily painted red arrow on the control box pointed toward what Tarwa needed no help in finding. A pair of simple push buttons, each with a safety cover. She pushed back the covers and placed a thumb over each button.

  She stood there, poised over her own doom, for a long moment, tears streaming down her face.

  And then she plunged in the buttons.

  In the skies of Daltgeld, a new star, terrible and bright, bloomed lovely in the night before it guttered down to darkness.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Council

  The Banquo was in shock, in chaos, in turmoil. The corridors were crowded with stretcher-bound survivors of the Duncan, while the ambulatory wounded and uninjured seemed scarcely less immobilized. Their world, their home, all their possessions and everything that marked their lives—all that was gone for the Duncan’s men and women.

  The Banquo’s crew was every bit as scared. Garbled rumor and scuttlebutt had reached the destroyer, and wild stories swept the ship. An infectious disease had wrecked the cruiser, one that was carried by the survivors, and it was only a matter of time before the Banquo caught the bug. Or else a saboteur had blown the Duncan—and likewise escaped to the Banquo. The Daltgelders had some secret weapon they couldn’t resist testing against a capital ship. Alternately, there was some corrosive agent in the waters of Daltgeld’s oceans. It had come through the hull once Duncan was in space and eaten the ship from the inside.

  There was just enough of a tinge of reality behind each of the rumors to make them impossible to stop.

  Commander Tallen Deyi struggled to get his ship in order. Captain Spencer was alone in the wardroom while the overcrowded ship that threatened to burst at the seams all around him.

  Dostchem Horchane was glad
that no one was paying any attention to her. One of the first things the Navy did, almost by reflex, in a crisis, any crisis, was to get aliens and civilians politely, but firmly, out of the way. In the midst of crowded chaos, she and Suss were summarily shown to an empty stateroom and told to stay there.

  For once, Dostchem appreciated the Pact’s curt, overbearing way of dealing with non-humans. Bundling her off that way gave her the chance to study the raft of new information that had come from a bewildering array of sources. It would require much study to achieve a synthesis of it all.

  But there was another reason Dostchem was glad to be out of the center of things. She was scared. Frightened not only of the parasites—though they were a bone-chilling terror all by themselves—she was scared by the humans around her.

  Though Capuchins bear a close physical resemblance to the highly gregarious monkeys, apes, and hominids of Earth, socially they are quite different creatures. They are far closer in temperament to Terra’s moody, solitary carnivores—the tiger, the jaguar, the grizzly bear. In fact, Capuchins had evolved from solo hunters and a large part of a Capuchin’s traditional contempt for humans stemmed from annoyance at humanity’s overbearing, endless socialness.

  In every circumstance when a sensible creature would want to be alone, humans seemed to gather together. When they ate a meal, when they traveled, when they sought out schooling or settled into a household, when joy or tragedy struck—humans scuttled together, in larger or smaller groups, and thought it quite natural. They had no real sense of territory, no strong urge for privacy, no need for the patience and pleasures of solitary contemplation and study.

  No ship with this many Capuchins aboard could ever launch without a dozen murders being committed the first day. Humans, on the other hand, actually seemed to like being together, not merely endure it. They truly liked each other’s company. It did not take the mating season, drowning male and female in sex and reproductive hormones, to draw a breeding pair together.