by J. N. Chaney
Benzel’s gaze fixed on a sturdy bank of panels, firmly attached to a bulkhead. “That might give some cover for the self-destruct blast. And I’m sure they’ve set one.”
So Wei-Ping’s eyes went wide behind her faceplate at the idea of the ship actually self-destructing. “How can you be sure?” she asked.
“Because it’s what I’d do if I were one of these assholes,” Benzel snapped. “Everyone spread out, check these consoles, see if they can tell you anything. Custodian, can you hear me?”
“I can, yes.”
“Can you tell if this ship is rigged to blow up? Because I’m sure it is, but—” He stared at the unfamiliar consoles, those still intact glowing with displays and characters he didn’t understand. “But I can’t tell, because I can’t read any of this bullshit.”
“I am detecting a growing harmonic instability in the ship’s fusion core,” Custodian replied. “If it is not compensated for, there will inevitably be a containment breach.”
“Let me guess—part of the control system has been deactivated.”
“You are correct. The real-time compensators are offline. How did you know this to be the case without a specific scan?”
“Like I said,” Benzel muttered, “It’s what I’d do if were them.” He turned from console to console, but he might as well be trying to read—well, an alien language, which is exactly what it was. The Friends who’d been examining the displays turned to him, one by one, and shook their heads. Hard looks tightened their faces, all of them only too aware of their danger.
The wrenching flutter in Benzel’s gut mirrored their expressions. He forced himself to stay grimly on task, though. “Don’t suppose you can reboot the compensators, eh, Custodian?”
“No. The relevant system is invisible to me.”
“Shit. Okay, how long until we go poof?”
“The harmonic instability will reach criticality in no more than five minutes, with an approximately two-minute margin of error.”
Benzel looked at Wei-Ping. “Guess we’d better stop this ourselves then, huh?”
“Yeah, but—how?”
Dash came on the comm. “You guys need to get the hell off that ship.”
“In three or four minutes? We’d barely make it back to our entry points,” Benzel replied.
“Shit. Okay, how about I bring in the Archetype, punch through the hull, and just rip the core out?”
“An active core? Come on, Dash, you know better than that. You’d just be doing the Brights’ work for them.”
“I know. I just—”
“Dash, just let us work the problem,” Benzel said, tense and distracted. He understood why Dash wanted them off the ship—he didn‘t want them to die, either from a need for their skills or genuine caring. Maybe both.
“Okay,” Benzel said, looking at Wei-Ping. “If Custodian can’t see the system, it must be physically disconnected somewhere. If that’s further down the line, then we’re screwed, and it was nice knowing you guys. But if we assume the Bright did it from there, then the physical break must be somewhere in here, right? Am I making sense?”
“Yeah, you are, boss,” Wei-Ping replied, then pointed. “Which means you’re probably talking about something like that, right?”
He looked where she pointed. From under one of the consoles, a broken length of optical cable dangled. A dead Bright sprawled beneath it.
“Yeah, something just like that.” He crouched and looked at the damage. Sure enough, the loose cable had obviously been deliberately pulled free, because several other cables exposed under the console hadn’t. That left only one port into which it could plug. Taking a breath and hoping that this was it—because otherwise they were all already dead, and were just waiting for it to be made catastrophically official—Benzel grabbed the cable and plugged it back in.
“Custodian?”
“The harmonic instability has reached ninety-five percent of criticality. Regretfully, this means—”
“Damn it, save the stats and just tell me if you can see the compensator system now!”
“I can, yes.”
Silence.
Benzel sighed. “Well?”
“The compensators are back online. Containment integrity is stable, but a risk of failure and breach remains.”
Benzel sat back and indulged himself in a longer, slower sigh. “A risk is better than it’s gonna happen any second, believe me.”
Wei-Ping knelt beside him, a tired smile on her face. “Well, that was fun.”
“Hey, we call these parties for a reason,” Benzel replied, even managing to echo her smile as he did.
Benzel stomped down the Slipwing’s boarding ramp, yanking off his helmet and savoring the sensation of not being in a vac-suit. He’d made sure he was the last off the Bright ship, only stepping aboard the Slipwing when he was sure no other Gentle Friends remained aboard. Now, they gathered in tight knots roughly corresponding to their squads, chattering among themselves.
The exception was the squad to which Taro had belonged. Fortunately, he’d been their only fatality—two more of the Gentle Friends had been wounded, but would recover—but fatalities among them were actually rare. And fatalities from enemy action were even rarer. Mostly, when Friends died, it was from accidents. Benzel moved to join Taro’s squad, but Dash, who’d just dismounted from his big mech, intercepted him.
“Benzel, that was awesome work,” Dash said.
Benzel smiled back. “You expected any less?”
“No, of course I—” Dash began, then stopped, smiled ruefully, and shook his head. “Actually, truth be told, I wasn’t sure what to expect from you guys. For all I knew, you could have been—”
“A bunch of bumbling idiots.” Benzel held up a hand. “No, that’s okay, I get it. We get a new recruit in the Friends, and they’ve got to prove themselves, too.” He narrowed his eyes. “So, have we proven ourselves?”
Dash gave a firm nod. “Yeah, I’d say you have— “
“Messenger,” Custodian cut in. “I have completed scans of the wrecked Bright ships. They do not, unfortunately, contain more than small amounts of Dark Metal, probably from incidental components of Golden technology.”
Dash shrugged. “Ah, well. Can’t have everything, I guess. Can you still use them for raw materials?”
“Yes—”
Custodian abruptly cut off. Dash frowned at Benzel. “Custodian, everything okay?”
“Two of the Bright ships just exploded.”
“Oh. Core failures, I guess.” Dash glanced across the docking bay at the Bright ship the Gentle Friends had taken. “At least we got one of them more or less intact. Custodian’s powering its core down now, so we should—”
“They were not core explosions,” Custodian said. “Or rather they were—but there was another component to the destruction of each ship.”
Benzel frowned. “What the hell is he talking about?”
“No idea,” Dash said. “Custodian, what do you mean, another component?”
“Each explosion generated a broadband, omnidirectional signal, which is essentially identical to that generated by the Harbinger shortly after its arrival in the system, prior to its attack.”
“Still not following,” Benzel said.
“What it means is that those ships sent out a death call when they blew,” Dash said. “The one you stopped from exploding would have done the same thing.”
“Oh. They’re letting all their comrades know that they’ve died,” Benzel said.
“Exactly. That means we didn’t surrender the way the Bright and their Purity Council demanded. And that means they’re going to assemble an even bigger force now to attack the Forge.”
“Just as well we showed you what we can do then, huh?” Benzel said.
“You got that right,” Dash replied, then excused himself and headed for Leira, who had just entered the docking bay from wherever she’d landed her own mech.
Benzel resumed his way toward Taro’s squad. Bet
ter get used to this, he thought, because there stood to be a lot more parties like this one in the Gentle Friends’ future.
16
Dash crossed his arms and watched as a chunk of a wrecked Bright ship slid into what Custodian called the forage bay—a large, empty space similar to a docking bay but outfitted with all manner of giant claws and gantries and derricks. Raw materials, whether scrap or unrefined ore, would be brought here by the Forge’s system of tractor fields, then broken down as feedstock for the fabricators. The Bright ships had turned out to yield only minor amounts of Dark Metal, but their shattered structural members could still be smelted down and used to make other things. Outside the forage bay, suited figures waved and jetted away to ready another broken chunk of ship for processing.
“I swear, the Gentle Friends would rather be out there, floating around in space,” Leira said.
Dash smiled. “They do seem pretty at home in hard vacuum, don’t they?”
“Weirdly so, yeah. I’ve spent most of my life in space, and I do everything I can to avoid putting on a vac suit.”
“I hear you.” Dash nodded, then he turned as someone walked up behind them.
“There’s another half-dozen big chunks out there,” Benzel said. “My people are getting them lined up so Custodian can bring them inside for processing with minimum fuss.”
“You know, I think Custodian can probably handle this without your folks having to go outside,” Dash said, but Benzel shook his head.
“Not disagreeing. But it keeps them busy and makes them feel useful. Believe me, you do not want to let the Gentle Friends get bored. Idle hands, and all that.”
“Good to know—” Dash replied, but a heavy, grinding racket cut him off.
Massive claws had descended, grabbing and lifting the fragment of the Bright ship that had been brought aboard. More articulated arms unfolded from the ceiling, plasma cutters flaring and slicing into the metal. Watching the process reminded Dash of the nasty but adorable little creatures called chompers that he and Leira had encountered during the retrieval of a power core for the Archetype. Basically nothing but cuteness and teeth, they’d been similarly brutal and efficient in tearing apart and picking over a carcass. In just over a minute, the chunk of broken Bright hull was gone, rendered down to fragments and whisked away by conveyor fields to the fabricators. The next slab of hull was already framed in the entrance to the forage bay, ready to come aboard.
“That is absolutely freaking amazing,” Benzel said. “Kind of chilling, too.”
“The total yield of usable material from the Bright ships is approximately four thousand tonnes,” Custodian said. “There is also approximately one hundred kilograms of Dark Metal in seventy-two different fragments. These, however, are too small and too distant from the Forge for the tractor systems to retrieve them.”
Dash looked at Leira. “We really don’t want to let that much Dark Metal go to waste. Care to take the Swift out for a spin?”
“Sure. You don’t want to let me get bored, after all. Idle hands, and all that.”
Benzel’s laughter echoed after them as they headed for their mechs.
“Leira, I’m seeing a fragment of Dark Metal, two kilograms, about ten kilometers off to your right,” Dash said. “Sentinel’s sending the data over now.”
“Yup, I see it too. On my way.”
The Swift smoothly veered toward the Dark Metal signature, then deftly plucked it out of space and stowed it.
“You’re flying the Swift like you’ve done it all your life,” Dash said. “I think I bumbled around with the Archetype for quite a while trying to figure it out.”
“Your performance as the Archetype’s pilot was much less than optimal for a considerable time. You finally reached an acceptable level of performance only after—”
“Did I ask you for a performance assessment?” Dash asked. “Because I really don’t think I asked you for a performance assessment.”
“To be fair, Dash, I got to work with Tybalt for hours in the simulator before I even first strapped into the Swift,” Leira said. “You had to pretty much learn how to fly the Archetype—well, on the fly.”
“Even now, your performance remains less than optimal,” Tybalt said. “I estimate that you will require—”
“Echoing Dash here, Tybalt,” Leira said, cutting her AI off. “I don’t recall asking you to grade me.”
“Judgmental AI’s are judgmental,” Dash said.
A short while later, they retrieved the last piece of Dark Metal that was worth chasing down. Dash hesitated before turning back for the Forge. Instead, he simply stared at the stars in the heads-up.
“Dash, everything okay?” Leira asked. “We’re not detecting anything—”
“No, you wouldn’t,” he said, breaking himself out of his reverie. “I was just thinking.”
“Uh oh.”
“Laugh it up, woman,” he said, but went quickly serious. “I’m just looking at the stars. The Golden are out there somewhere. Not the Bright, or Clan Shirna, or any of their other minions. The Golden themselves.”
“That’s true,” Leira replied. “Where are you going with this?”
“It’s those Death Calls put out by the Bright ships when they exploded. Sure, they signalled the Bright themselves, told them that we’d kicked their fleet’s butts. That’s bad enough. It means they’ll be coming back, in force, and they might not be alone next time.”
“Okay…”
“But the Golden have to be receiving these Death Calls, too. So they sit out there, somewhere, and just send in the next wave of their nasty little followers, and then the next, and the next after that. They don’t care if they die, because they’ll just send more. And we fight them and kill them—but that’s just doing the Goldens’ work for them, isn’t it? I mean, I can’t believe that if they get their way and exterminate all sentient life, they’d spare the Bright or Clan Shirna or anyone else.”
“Maybe we can convince them they’ll be spared,” Leira replied. “Pull them over to our side.”
“I considered the same thing myself,” Dash said. “But imagine the Bright saying they’ve decided to join us. Could we actually trust them? Would you trust them, Leira?”
After a long pause, she said, “No, because if they’ll do it with you, they’ll do it to you.”
“Oldest story in the universe.”
“I highly doubt that that is the oldest story in the universe, Messenger,” Tybalt said, practically ending on a haughty sniff. “Indeed, even the most cursory review of available historical archives demonstrates—”
“It was just a figure of speech, Tybalt,” Dash cut in. Damn, that AI had been tailor-made to best complement Leira’s personality? What did that say about her? Or what these Unseen AIs thought about her?
“I’ve said it before,” Leira added. “Welcome to my life now.”
Dash grinned, but it didn’t last. “Anyway, we have to assume they’ll be coming back for another round—they being the Bright for sure, maybe some Clan Shirna as well, maybe some others we haven’t even met yet.”
“And maybe the Golden themselves,” Leira said. “Imagine having to fight a fleet of ships like we just did, plus one…hell, maybe several of those Harbingers all at once.”
“I’d rather not, thanks,” Dash replied. The truth was, he had imagined exactly this, a true nightmare scenario.
“They will assuredly return,” Sentinel said. “It really is only a matter of when.”
“Exactly. And that brings me back to my point about the Golden just lurking somewhere out there, sending attack after attack at the Forge. That’s us playing their game, just reacting to what they do.” He stared at the starscape on the heads-up. “I never really got good at poker until I met a guy on Passage named Rostov.”
“Darien Rostov?” Leira asked. “I know him. Hell of a courier. Heard he died, though, in some sort of accident.”
“Yeah, he did. He accidentally forgot to hand over the profits
to some gang on Celestus for a bunch of chems he ran for them once. Then he accidentally got shot in the head.”
“Oh. Ouch.”
“Anyway, Rostov cleaned me out in poker. More than once. But we kind of hit it off, and he showed me a bunch of ways to get better at the game.”
“You mean cheating,” Leira said.
“It wasn’t all cheating. Anyway, my point is that what he basically taught me was that I had to take control of the game. I couldn’t just keep reacting to my opponents. I had to make them react to me. Once I took that lesson aboard ship, I started losing a lot fewer credits.”
“Losing fewer credits? That’s success?”
“What can I say, I suck at cards,” Dash said. “As for our current situation, the Golden are Rostov, sitting out there across the big table. And they’re controlling the game. We’re reacting to them. It’s time for that to change. We need to get ahead of them somehow.”
“Messenger, if I may,” Tybalt said. “I believe that you are correct.”
“You don’t have to sound quite so surprised.”
The AI ignored him. “I believe that in order to begin forcing the Golden to react, we should begin by making their approach to the Forge more complicated and costly than simply arriving in this system and attacking it.”
“Making the Forge a more problematic target for the Golden would, indeed, be a good first step,” Sentinel said.
“Okay, how would you suggest we go about doing that?” Leira asked. “I mean, we have the Silent Fleet. Maybe we could deploy it in some sort of defensive arrangement.”
“I’d rather keep that fleet mobile,” Dash said. “I don’t want to tie it to static defensive duties. Right now, in fact, it, plus these two mechs, are our only real way of taking any sort of initiative.” He narrowed his eyes at the stars. “But when we found the Silent Fleet, we also found that mine aboard one of them, remember? If we had more of those…” Dash trailed off, mind suddenly racing.
Custodian’s smooth baritone cut in. “I have evaluated the mine you’re speaking of. It was a prototype, not made operational or put into production by the time the last clash between the Creators and the Golden ended. Accordingly, it was stored aboard the Silent Fleet against the possibility it would eventually prove useful.”