The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III

by David Drake

  No matter that the Capuchins knew that their revulsion was irrational, that there were as many social adaptations as physical ones in Darwin’s universe. Human social patterns still disgusted them.

  It was galling to a Capuchin’s brilliant, focused, hunter’s brain that these perverse, slapdash, slow-witted descendants of scavengers and root-chewers ruled the Pact.

  Right now, however, Dostchem was prepared to forget her contempt in favor of outright alarm. She was surrounded by humans locked in fear. Her solitary, stalking carnivore’s mind knew the rational thing to do was to hide from the parasites, and then to develop a logical, methodical, prudent procedure for hunting them down.

  Not the humans. Possessed of far less knowledge than Dostchem, the crew and officers of the Banquo seemed prepared, every one of them, to go charging out, full tilt, against this deadly peril, perfectly willing to make up the plan as they went along. No thought of hiding or secrecy. Even now, the three destroyers were maintaining course and heading along the Duncan’s last course—precisely where anyone would look for them first. The ship’s engines were shut down, and Spencer and Deyi had no destination or plan in mind. They were simply conserving fuel until they knew what they wanted to do. Fine economy move, Dostchem thought, if it results in betraying your ships to the opposition.

  The crew’s surging anger, its inchoate thirst for revenge against an enemy unknown, with no regard for consequences, scared Dostchem silly. Everyone seemed to have a misinformed plan, and an absolute conviction that their leaders were either (a) crafty beyond belief and ready to destroy the menace because they had already come up with the same plan or (b) complete idiots who would doom them all, ignoring the councils of the wise because they hadn’t.

  But every voice seemed to favor charging in with all guns blazing.

  Suss, herself stunned and angered by the disaster, wasn’t very reassuring. It wasn’t much help for Dostchem to be told that chaotic and contradictory calls for action were merely a typical first panic response to catastrophe.

  “There’s a council of war planned for tomorrow,” she said. “By then everyone will be settled down. Right now, they’re all a bit panicky. And for that matter, so am I.”

  So, Dostchem thought, it appears that, in an emergency, humans are guided by panic. Wonderful.

  But there was one other thing, something that frightened her even more than irrational humans: herself. Her behavior over the past day had been nothing short of madness. What had possessed her to enter the StarMetal Building? The potential profit from repairs to a ship that now no longer existed? Her own pride and self-importance making her determined not to be outthought by a pack of baldies?

  She should never have permitted Suss to drag her along back to the rescue—though Dostchem could not see what choice she might have had. No matter. The whole episode was one of madness. And now she was trapped on this ship, but what was she to do? What possible benefit could be gained from all this? She shivered and wrapped her tail around her body. She could keep those damn helmet creatures from getting out into the Pact. That ought to be motive and benefit to motivate anyone.

  Dostchem forced herself to calmness and struggled to get back to her work. She had a lot of data to examine, from several sources: Spencer’s AID, Suss, Santu, Chief Wellingham’s research, and the remarkable results from her own instruments, especially when tracked against the reports on the Dancing Bear pulled out of the late Sisley Mannerling’s computer.

  By the time the council of war was called, she wanted to have her information straight.

  Straight enough for even these panicky, semi-intelligent scavenger apes to understand.

  ###

  Captain Allison Spencer had once embarrassed Tallen Deyi, chiding his new executive officer for taking over the captain’s cabin aboard the Duncan. Now the Duncan’s captain’s cabin was lost, along with the rest of the ship, and Spencer was aboard the Banquo, with the roles reversed. Tallen Deyi had surrendered his rightful captain’s cabin to his superior officer and doubled up with his own XO.

  Spencer noted dully that he was too far gone to appreciate the irony. He wondered how worried he should be about that.

  But it was nearly time for the council. He got up from his borrowed desk, moving carefully in zero G. He picked up the action report and glared at it. He flipped open the document and went over the summaries one last time. The young ensigns and officers who had prepared it had done their best and meant well, but that was no comfort. Couching the horrible truth in bland officialese did not make the realities easier to accept.

  He felt his anger rise, and a strange, detached part of himself knew he was going to be all right. Anger was reasonable, constructive, healthy under the circumstances.

  Far better focused rage than mind-numbing despair. The loss of Bethany and his descent into feel-good hell had burned away part of his capacity for joy. He had worried for a time that the loss of the Duncan, the overwhelming shock, had burned away something more, some other part of his soul.

  He looked again at the report title.

  Preliminary Findings

  on the Loss of Pact Warship Duncan

  to Enemies Unknown

  Unknown? Spencer asked himself. No, that was simply sophistry, a mealy mouthed legalism. Enemies Unknown was the term used in such reports when no one dared admit that the real “enemy” was incompetence, when the real goal of the report was to hide the facts and evade punishment.

  Spencer had no intention of avoiding responsibility. Besides, he knew this Enemy all too well to call it unknown. He had met it, face to face, in Jameson’s office.

  Or had he? Did he truly know that Jameson’s helmet was the adversary here? Was it not far more likely that the helmet/creature was itself controlled, even as it in turn controlled Jameson?

  Controlled by something larger, deadlier, more powerful—something aboard that damned asteroid Destin had found? Spencer pulled a pen from his pocket, scratched out the last word and inserted a replacement.

  “Enemies Unseen.” Yes. That was far more accurate.

  Spencer suddenly felt himself trembling. He grabbed for his chair, pulled himself into a seated position, clumsy in weightlessness.

  Enemies Unseen. It struck him that he had been battling that sort, and no other, since the day the High Secretary had sent the Kona Tatsu to snatch his bride away. All his enemies unseen. The far-distant General Merikur, himself a victim of political scheming. The invisible, insidious temptations of the Cernian’s pleasure palaces. The string-pulling schemers in the Guard, the Navy, and the KT who had put him in command of the Duncan to see what sort of fire he could draw away from their agent. The shapeless anger of the whole task force over Kerad and her debauches. The righteous and illegal fury of the mutineers. McCain’s murderers.

  The deadly assaults of the autocops, the inexplicable attacks on Suss and Sisley and himself, when every machine in the city seemed to be trying to kill them, controlled by an unseen hand.

  Then, at last, the destruction of the Duncan by a few blobs of silvery metal the size of his fingertip. Always, a fight against an enemy far away, against an opponent who would not reveal itself, who would not come out in the open for a battle on even ground. Always against the dark, the hidden, the insidious—the unseen.

  Not anymore. Not this time. This time they would force the Enemy out into the open. Where it could be seen.

  Where it could be destroyed.

  He got up again, more calm and confident than he had been in a long time, and left his borrowed office. The meeting was about to begin.

  ###

  Suss looked about the assembled faces uneasily. By rights, Dostchem should have been standing before this group, but both Dostchem and Suss knew that naval officers were more likely to listen to a human KT operative than an alien technician. Besides, Suss knew that Dostchem was perfectly happy to avoid this duty.

  “You have all seen the preliminary report on the loss of the Duncan,” she began. “That repo
rt glosses over several points, is understandably vague on several problems we haven’t quite figured out yet, and perhaps tries a bit too hard to say that it was no one’s fault that the cruiser died. I can tell the authors that the KT will get a much tougher report, and that the Navy brass back home will see both documents—and wonder about the differences. So you might want to rethink your version just a bit.”

  There was some awkward shuffling of papers and whispers at the junior end of the table and Suss noticed Spencer’s steel-edged grin. “For all of that, we can at least take the report as a first step. It does relate what the parasites can do.

  “The Capuchin Dostchem and myself, using information secured at the cost of more than one life, have put together a picture of what the parasites are, and where they come from.

  “Regarding the parasites themselves, we learned something vitally important about them when Lieutenant Commander Chu activated the self-destruct device: We learned that the parasites can be destroyed. At the moment that fusion blast went off, every G-wave source on the Duncan vanished.

  “Chief Wellingham and his crew detected the conjoining of the parasites aboard the Duncan. The Duncan’s parasites were apparently forming themselves into a new helmet-type creature. At the time it was destroyed, the new creature only had one outlying parasite. But, once again, that parasite was not an independent creature. A better analogy might be to think of it as a temporary hand, a pseudopod extruded from the main body of the beast for some purpose.

  “Dostchem believes all the bits of a given helmet-creature/parasite are truly one—and all of them are hooked into this universe from some other continuum. Call the entire creature an ensemble, for want of a better word. The parasites are extremely massive creatures, with densities perhaps on the approximate order of neutron stars. They must counteract their own gravitic potential by propagating the gravity-waves we have all heard about. I have heard a number of objections, to the effect that using G-waves that way violates conservation of energy. True enough—unless you can pump energy back and forth across a dimensional barrier, for example dumping waste heat from this side into the other universe. However they do it, the fact remains that they do it.

  “In any event, without the shielding G-waves, the parasites could not poke themselves into our universe without inflicting huge disruptions on their surroundings—and on themselves. Without the gravity-wave shield, they would literally suck in all the matter around them, at massive accelerations—with the same effect on the parasites as dropping rocks from twenty kilometers up would have on one of us.

  “The Duncan ensemble did collapse in on itself. All the way. There was absolutely no debris left behind by that explosion. There are no further modulated G-waves being produced out there. But there is a single, incredibly powerful gravity field out there. And nothing else.”

  Chief Wellingham swore out loud, using a few combinations the junior officers had never heard before. “Just a minute there, Miss. Are you telling me that the fusion explosion disrupted the parasites and they collapsed into a black hole?”

  “A small one,” Suss conceded. “Much smaller than current theories say should be possible. But we are tracking a singularity, a miniature black hole, moving on the Duncan’s last course.”

  “Wait a second,” Wellingham objected. “You said they were all one interconnected creature, no matter how distant the components were. Does that mean that if we kill one parasite in an ensemble, that entire ensemble collapses?”

  “No, it doesn’t—otherwise Daltgeld would be caving in on itself even now. Remember, the two parasites you captured were still aboard when the Duncan blew up. Those were the two found aboard the ship, and in McCain’s AID. They were still in isolation at the time the ship died. They never linked into the new ensemble that formed aboard the cruiser. That means they were still part of the Jameson helmet ensemble—and we are still picking up dozens or hundreds of G-wave sources on Daltgeld, all of them presumably part of that ensemble.”

  There was a dead silence around the table, one that lasted a long time. “In other words,” Tallen Deyi said slowly, “if the creatures were completely interlinked, the planet would have fallen into a black hole by now.”

  “But look, we’ve killed the thing. Isn’t that worth something? And we did it in space, where it didn’t threaten anyone,” another voice offered.

  Suss looked at the speaker and recognized him as Ensign Peever, the Banquo’s assistant intelligence officer. No, wait, her only intel officer. His boss had been killed by the mutineers.

  Good God, herself excluded, Peever was the senior surviving intel officer in the task force. Neither of the other destroyers had carried any intel staff.

  “It was lucky we didn’t hit the parasites while we were planetside,” Peever was saying. “If we’d killed them there, the helmet would have dropped into itself and started sucking matter. Daltgeld would be collapsed down to the size of a grapefruit. Now the planet is safe.”

  “No it isn’t,” Spencer said, his voice deadly cold. “Think about it, Ensign. We have scotched the snake, not killed it. There are still parasite creatures on the planet, and we cannot let this horror spread. Every one of them must be destroyed, at any cost. If we are forced to choose between Daltgeld on one side, and the entire Pact, and all the worlds beyond, on the other—”

  He left the thought hanging.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Search

  Spencer started talking again after a moment, his voice alarmingly calm. He was every bit the task force commander coolly laying out his orders to his command. “None of the improved sensors we have now can detect the helmet itself on the planet, which we should be able to do at this range. We can assume Jameson is headed back to the command asteroid where Destin found the helmet in the first place, wherever that is. Our ultimate objective therefore must be the asteroid this Captain Destin found. It seems extremely likely that there, we will be able to learn more about these things. It is likely that the things are using that place as a headquarters. Once we have learned enough, we will destroy them. I define ‘learning enough’ as being certain they cannot spread beyond this solar system. Suss, can we detect the command asteroid directly from its gravity-wave signature?”

  Suss shook her head. “Not at this range. The asteroid belt is a toroid hundreds of millions of kilometers across—and we don’t really know for sure that the command asteroid is in the main body of the belt anyway.”

  “But you’re able to monitor G-wave emissions back on Daltgeld, and we’re a pretty fair piece from it by now,” Ensign Peever objected.

  Suss sighed. The kid had a big mouth, and he had the further annoying tendency to raise worthwhile issues. No doubt the same point had occurred to older officers about this table—and none of the oldsters had the nerve to look stupid by asking.

  “We know where Daltgeld is,” Suss said gently. “We can focus our instruments directly at it. The command asteroid could be anywhere in the sky—and at a far greater range than the distance to Daltgeld.”

  “But we can’t see the asteroid. That settles it, then,” Spencer said. “If we can’t spot that asteroid on our own, we have to find Destin’s ship, and hope there is data aboard that can lead us to the enemy. Peever, what have we got on Destin and his ship?”

  The ensign’s eyes suddenly bugged out, and he seemed to lose his voice for a minute. “Um, ah, very little, Sir. What we have so far is based on your data from Mannerling’s computer terminal. We’ve been able to track his reported ship movements. He is master of the Dancing Bear, and at last report was aboard. I think we can assume that we will find him with the ship. There were normal tracking reports, navigation updates, and message traffic back and forth from the Bear until just about the moment we arrived in-system.”

  Peever looked nervously around the table. “Just how far can I go with this, Sir? I mean, securitywise?”

  “Speak openly. Everyone here is clear,” Spencer said.

  Peever swallowed hard
and launched into his report. “Let me start at the time the KT first discovered its agents vanishing, about four months ago. At that time, the Dancing Bear—Destin’s ship—had just put herself in parking orbit around Daltgeld. The helmets must have arrived on the planet then. The parasites must have gotten to work immediately, flushing out the KT operatives once they arrived on-planet. I would assume the parasites did that in hopes of keeping this star system isolated until they had consolidated themselves. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Once the Bear was in orbit, her auxiliary vehicle, the Cub, started shuttling back and forth between København Spaceport and the Bear. We can assume that the meeting between Destin and Jameson, as described by Jameson, took place during that time. Shortly thereafter, the Cub returned for the last time to the Bear, more than likely carrying a parasite.”

  “Why do you assume that, laddie?” Wellingham demanded. “Why wouldn’t the helmet simply have left a parasite aboard when it left?”

  “I don’t think the helmet was really functional until it arrived on-planet and got to Jameson. There’s no sign in the Bear’s log of machinery being taken over, or anything like that. And Jameson was last seen in public the day after the Bear arrived in orbit. He went into seclusion after that. Maybe the thing needs to be on someone’s head to work, and Destin didn’t put it on. Anyway, since it fits in with the way the enemy seems to do its work, we can assume that a parasite got aboard the Bear at some point. And, ah—as we are all aware, even one parasite can do a lot of damage.”

  There was a painful moment’s silence, and then Peever went on. “Now, at this point, about four months ago, the Dancing Bear put herself in a very long, slow orbit back to the belt, intending to arrive at the asteroid Mittelstadt about a month from now.”