The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III

by David Drake

  “A five-month journey just to travel from planetside to the belt? That seems strangely long,” Commander Deyi objected.

  “Normal procedure for a mining ship. Civilian ships are a lot more stingy with fuel than military craft—plus which they aren’t really built to withstand long periods of constant boost. Most of the time a mining crew spends its transit time in cold sleep. Miners like cold sleep. It cuts a lot of dull spaceflight out of their lives—and gives them a longer effective lifespan. While their bank accounts draw interest, for one thing. And, of course, flying with only a skeleton crew alive and active saves life-support too. The strange thing was the Bear flying to Daltgeld, instead of shaping for Mittelstadt after they found—ah, what they found. But that’s explained by the value of the cargo, and a desire to cut out any middlemen. Especially since we can assume that the helmet was doing its best to exercise some influence over Destin. Maybe it couldn’t control him completely, but it might have been able to give him a nudge, set him on the way that he was going, or thinking of going. Jameson is the evidence that it can control minds.

  “Anyway. As I said, we have standard navigation checks from the Bear for some time after she launched from parking orbit around Daltgeld. Then, just at the time we show up in system, the Bear stops reporting in.”

  “As if someone wanted to be sure we couldn’t find her,” Spencer said. “But why didn’t someone investigate when the Bear dropped off the tracking net?”

  “There are a lot of ships out there,” Peever said simply. “The local tracking net doesn’t have the ships or the personnel to go out after missing ships. Besides, at the last navigation check-in, the Bear was in freefall, precisely on course for Mittelstadt. If the ship lost all power, it would still arrive at Mittelstadt anyway. In the event of a normal, accidental failure aboard ship, all Captain Destin would have had to do was sit tight until his ship arrived at port—and Mittelstadt control knew that. If they then saw the Bear sailing past without attempting to communicate or dock, then they’d send out a rescue party. Even if the ship crapped out completely, the crew could ride it out in their suits, or in cold sleep.

  “But, of course, we must assume that it was the parasites that saw to it that the Bear malfunctioned. If they wanted Destin to vanish, sailing past Mittelstadt was definitely not on the cards, because Mittelstadt control would send a rescue and salvage crew. And remember, Jameson said Destin was ‘not where he’s supposed to be.’ So we can further assume the parasite has forced the ship off course.”

  “Why wouldn’t it just blow up the ship?” Spencer asked.

  “Because we’d have spotted a ship blowing up,” Suss said. “Maybe we’d investigate—and then maybe find a baby black hole where the ship had been. And that would have made us wonder, to say the least. Or perhaps the parasite aboard didn’t want to commit suicide.”

  Peever nodded eagerly. “The same sort of argument applies to boosting the Bear at maximum thrust, throwing it violently off course. The more powerful the thrust, the brighter the fusion plume, and the higher the odds that we’d spot it and investigate the ship. We would at least have radioed her, and received a strange reply. And we’d have a track on the ship, and it would have been brought to our attention. Sooner or later we’d discover the link between Destin and StarMetal—and we’d know just where to look for her. Remember, a big burn like that would take most or all of her fuel, and leave her with little room for additional maneuver. And all of this serves to reduce our search area by—well, if I can put it on the screen, Sir?”

  “That’s what it’s there for, Peever,” Spencer said mildly.

  “Thank you, Sir.” Peever wrestled with an unfamiliar set of portable controls for a minute, and then managed to get a schematic of the Daltgeld system on the main holo screen.

  “Here is the orbital track of the Dancing Bear up until a month ago, when she dropped out of sight,” he announced. The track popped into being alongside Daltgeld and wrapped itself around and around the planet. “No record was kept of where she came from, just that she reached Daltgeld orbit. Here, the Bear breaks out of orbit and heads toward Mittelstadt.” The bright green trace crawled out from the planet and made its way toward the asteroid belt. “And here is where the last velocity and position report was made. Just after we popped out of our jump point.” The track stopped, and a pulsing red dot blipped in the screen.

  “We of course have the specs on the Bear’s ship class. Now, assuming a full fuel load in her tanks at boost from Daltgeld, and empty holds, and allowing for maximum acceleration away from that position and velocity, here is the volume of space the Bear could be in by now.”

  A huge, misshapen red spheroid swallowed up half the inner system. “But that is an absolutely worst-case scenario. If they had boosted at max power to achieve the limits of this volume, someone would have spotted them. If we adjust the boost maximum to keep it under the limits of visibility, while accounting for the Bear’s range from various tracking points, we get a far more promising picture of their likely action radius.”

  The red spheroid shrunk to a tenth its former size, and huge dents and dints appeared in it. “The intrusions into the action radius represent the sensor ranges of various ships known to have passed through this volume of space since the Bear went missing. If the Bear had been within range of those ships, she would have been spotted and reported—to file a salvage claim, if for no other reason. Derelict ships are worth money. Let me throw in the sensor radii of the inhabited asteroids and planets.”

  More huge gaps appeared in the blob of red that represented the volume of space that could contain the Dancing Bear.

  Spencer nodded appreciatively. “Nice work, Peever. Add in another factor: Eliminate any trajectories that will pass through someone’s sensor’s range within the next month or so. The parasite wouldn’t head toward someone who could spot the ship in future.”

  “Yes, Sir!” Peever said eagerly. His hands played rapidly over the controls, his previous awkwardness forgotten. More huge swatches were chopped off the search volume, mostly toward the inner system.

  “Anything else?” Peever asked, looking around the conference table.

  “Us,” Tallen Deyi said. “Have you factored in our sensors? We moved through a large piece of that space on our way in, before we made orbit around the planet—and it seems to me that the parasite wouldn’t want to get too close to Pact warships.”

  “How could I have forgotten—” Peever began, but his voice trailed off as he concentrated on logging in the new factor.

  The huge ball of red was now a crumpled, dented ruin, less than a hundredth its former volume. A quiet murmur of optimistic whispers played around the table.

  “Okay, Peever,” Spencer said, “give me a mean-time-to-search.”

  Peever ran the query, and his face fell. “Assuming use of all three destroyers and all auxiliary vehicles, doing a coordinated sweep search at optimized distance—ah, hell, with all the technical rigmarole figured in—the odds are it will take us three months to find him.”

  “Why so long?” Tallen protested. “The way you were running that constriction of the search volume, it looked like we had a pretty serious detection radius.”

  “We do—if we’re looking for a fusion flame. No one saw the Bear’s fusion drive, and for that to be true she has to be in that volume of space,” Peever said. “If she would relight her drive, we could spot her right now. The trouble is, she’s powered down, basically a cold, inert target—which will be much tougher to spot. It’s the difference between searching for a dark-colored rock and a flame in the darkness. One is a beacon, and the other blends into the background.”

  Spencer sat up suddenly. “Wait a second. If our assumptions are right, the Bear does have a beacon aboard. A very powerful gravity-wave generator. Suss, how long to track that volume of space for a parasite-sized gravity-wave source?”

  “Yes!” Suss said eagerly. “The G-wave detectors we’ve got now should have at least a ten-millio
n-kilometer range. Let me see . . .” She ran the problem and looked up with a grin. “Using all ships, and factoring in all the technical rigmarole—mean-time-to-search should be fifty-eight hours, once we’re in zone. Maybe two days transit time to the search volume.”

  A glint came into Spencer’s eye, and he leaned forward eagerly. “I want us boosting on a fast course for the search volume in thirty minutes.”

  ###

  The little fleet of destroyers raced back across the inner reaches of the Daltgeld system, ranging themselves into a search pattern. As they traveled, technicians aboard the three ships refined and optimized the search plan, finding that the probe volume needed to be expanded in certain dimensions and reduced in others. Chief Wellingham and Dostchem got into an endless series of vituperative and highly productive arguments over the design of the G-wave detectors. By the time the search commenced, they had more than doubled the sensitivity of their long-range gear, and vastly improved the backpack unit used for an interior search of a ship. The fleet arrived in the search volume and began its scan. A mean-time-to-search merely provides a crude statistical guide of the average time it should take to find a given-sized needle in a particular haystack. After all the tweak-ups were cranked into the search plan, the MTTS was down to fifty hours—but in the statistical universe of the MTTS algorithm, it was precisely as likely for the search to take ten minutes, or five days.

  It would take time, to Spencer’s obvious frustration.

  Enforced waiting is hard on everyone—but especially hard on a commander who is feeling a trifle redundant anyway.

  Tallen Deyi was doing a fine job running his ship, likewise the commanders of the other two destroyers. Spencer found himself wondering what they needed a task force commander for—particularly one who had already lost his own ship?

  Spencer had at least come out of his shell. Work was a good therapy, and at first Spencer tried to spend every moment he could on the bridge of the Banquo, making himself useful. It was perhaps fortunate that he rapidly relearned one of his earliest lessons of command: Competent people do not respond well to commanders breathing down their necks; and the Banquo bridge crew was certainly competent. Furthermore, Spencer wanted to avoid even the appearance of second-guessing Tallen Deyi.

  Which led to Spencer spending a lot of time in the captain’s cabin. It was not a good situation for a man who was already feeling lonely and useless.

  Suss likewise found herself at loose ends—but it was more than chance or boredom that led her to call on Spencer in his cabin.

  Aboard a ship in space, security was far more relaxed than on a planet’s surface. A simple knock at the unlocked door and a muffled “Come in,” were all it took to gain entrance to the task force commander’s presence.

  Suss stepped inside and looked around Tallen Deyi’s modest—even dowdy—idea of a commander’s cabin. She smiled to herself, and couldn’t help but think of that ridiculous boudoir aboard the Duncan, where she had dressed—or undressed—in the role of a captain’s courtesan.

  Looking back at that moment, she was shocked at herself—though not for displaying a little skin. Suss had played many parts in her time, in many places, where both local climate and mores dictated more or less display. Nudity as such meant nothing to her. Symbols, feelings, context meant a great deal. Teasing a man, making a joke of him, when his wife had just been stolen from him was unforgivable. And yet, Spencer had never mentioned the incident.

  She looked at him, perched uncomfortably at the edge of his bunk, tense and uneasy, as if the ship’s acceleration was unreliable and might not hold him down. He looked not the confident warrior of the war council, but a bit forlorn, lost and forgotten.

  Those were two sensations Suss knew well. “Hello, Al,” she said at last.

  “Hi,” he said. “Thanks for stopping by.”

  She sat down on a chair as far across the room from him as possible, and watched him. His right hand was working furiously, as if it were straining to perform some reflex action that Spencer didn’t want to happen. He noticed her watching, and smiled sadly.

  “That was my feel-good hand,” he said. “When I’m scared, or upset, there’s still a big part of me that wants to jump back inside myself, get lost in a few millivolts of joy. So I guess I’m scared or upset now, huh?” He tried to laugh, but the attempt didn’t come out too well.

  He sighed and flopped back on the bed in a most unmilitary manner, reminding Suss of a baffled teenager wondering what the world was all about. “It’s just that I feel so damned useless.”

  “Useless you ain’t,” Suss said playfully. She hesitated for a long moment, then stood up, crossed the room, and sat down on the bed on the edge furthest from Spencer.

  “It’s just the waiting. A slight case of command twitch,” she said. “You’ve done your part; you’ve made the decisions, spoken the orders. Now the others have to carry out your decisions. They still have to do their jobs.

  “But you. You’ve done your bit. Now you have to wait and see if you guessed right, wait and think about all the lives that are in the balance.

  “Just remember you have guessed right this time. That much I can tell you. I know it, because you’ve guessed right every step of the way so far. You’re smart. You’re good. Without you, the damned parasites would have won long ago—and we might even have known that we had lost. Not bad for a decoy target.”

  A fledgling smile played across Spencer’s mouth. “Yeah, but that part of the plan didn’t work so well,” he said. “They found time to shoot at both of us, didn’t they?”

  Suss looked deep into his eyes, and knew that if it was ever going to happen, she would have to make the move.

  She leaned over him, and kissed him.

  After a long moment, he responded, wrapped his arms around her, and held her tight. Suss opened her eyes at the same moment he did, and they looked at each other from a handsbreadth away. She could read it in his eyes, the fear that this was some part of her KT training, the thought that perhaps her AID was monitoring his heartbeat, telling her through the mastoid implant how to play him, soothe him, control him and guide him in the best interests of the Pact, or the KT, or the Navy, or the High Secretary, whoever that was by now.

  No, she thought. No. This was her, not them. This was a woman touching a man, and let the rest of the Universe go hang. At least for now, at least for a little while. She rolled over, pulling him on top of her, and kissed him again as she struggled with the buttons of his shirt.

  He seemed to see the meaning in her eyes and suddenly he reached for her, no longer passive, no longer just letting it happen, but eager, willing.

  Even as he touched her, kissed the warm bare skin of her body, he found himself amazed at how much he had lost, how much he had forgotten—how much had been taken from him by the pact. He made the discovery even as he made good the loss. He could never forget Bethany, but now, for the first time, there was something more than emptiness in that part of his heart that had been hers.

  ###

  Idylls do not last, especially on warships. Suss and Spencer both knew that, and they were determined to squeeze every moment available out of their time together. The long wait for the search to conclude suddenly seemed all too short.

  Privacy could not last long either. Banquo’s rumor mills carried the news rapidly. It started with the steward who was ordered to deliver two dinners to the captain’s cabin and leave the meal cart outside the door, though protocol required him to wheel the food in. He heard two voices and high laughter as he made his delivery.

  Mere hours after Suss arrived at Spencer’s cabin, word had traveled down to the lowest-ranking enlisted man and up to Commander Deyi himself: the KT agent, the captain’s woman in name, had become his woman in deed as well.

  It was a comment on how highly the crew and officers regarded their commander, Tallen thought, that the news was regarded as news for celebration, cause for glasses to be raised in toasts to the couple. If there were an
y dirty jokes, any smears, any insults being bantered about belowdecks, everyone was careful that they not reach the upper ranks. That in itself was a compliment of sorts.

  Tallen Deyi knew that a lot of his associates regarded him as a bit of a prig, a prude. Deep in his heart, he knew they had a point. There were a lot of things that he didn’t approve of—and captain’s courtesans were normally high on the list. He was nearly tempted to interfere.

  But this goddamned expedition had cost Captain Spencer a hell of a lot already. Deyi had seen what a handful of the parasites could do—what would happen when they came up across a whole asteroid full of them? In all likelihood, none of them had long to live.

  A prude he might be, but Tallen Deyi was not about to deny a condemned man and woman their last moments of happiness.

  ###

  Ensign Peever looked even more pudgy and nondescript than usual. After being awake for five days straight, his uniform was rumpled as an unmade bed, and his wispy man-child’s whiskers grown out almost enough to be visible. By now about thirty percent of the search volume had been checked. As the remaining search zone was reduced, the odds were going up every second that they were going to nail the Dancing Bear now, this minute. It had to happen soon, Peever told himself. With every passing minute, millions of cubic kilometers were swept.

  He lived in the improvised search control room, barely leaving it since the moment of the war council. Peever was blissfully unaware that he was driving Wellingham, Dostchem, and everyone else assigned to the job half-mad. The ensign’s enthusiasm was not infectious.

  Search Control was a rathole anyway, an improvised operation wedged into a small compartment near the bridge, with cobbled-together equipment jammed any which way, cables snaking everywhere, and too many bodies taking up a too small room. Search Control operated not only the Banquo’s sensors, but those aboard the Macduff and Lennox and the auxiliary craft, keeping the ships linked with each other, ensuring that every cubic meter of the search envelope was swept.