“Get ready for a torpedo attack!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN: RUN THROUGH THE JUNGLE
The fierce gunfight in the Limb continues. A deafening crackle reigns on the radio air, as both sides desperately seek to blind and stun the other, using the full power of electronic warfare. A hundred and thirty kilometers on the starboard side is another nuclear explosion, a direct hit.
“Torpedo tubes one and two—fire!”
Coal-black arrows of nuclear torpedoes slip out of Eastwood-Gamma, paving their way between the fragments floating in the void. The thermal traces of the squadron, which has gone to the South Pole, are gradually dissipating; the trade caravan is approaching the fairway.
“Contact!”
The trading station and the cutting plant disappear in the nuclear explosions. After a second, the third blow strikes the caravan, sweeping aside the broken raider and the tugboats that were dragging him. The transports survive the impact but lose speed—boarding torpedoes pierce them and burn the electronics with hard radiation.
“Drop the hull!”
Twenty-three charges detonate simultaneously, splitting Eastwood-Gamma and throwing away the workers in yellow suits crawling across its surface. The dead colony splits into pieces, freeing the Bolshevik hidden in the core.
“Slow ahead, boarding teams forward!”
The blaze of explosions is not yet extinguished, and from the ruins of Eastwood-Gamma, the assault boats rush to the caravan. Severov covers them with short bursts of laser guns, knocking out a few surviving unmanned fighters and control satellites; Olga accelerates Buran, blocking any possible distress signals.
“Sixty seconds!”
Without encountering any resistance, the assault boats cut the distance to the crashed caravan and throw away the boarding team, reinforced by the Bolshevik’s Marines. Knocking down the hatches with directed explosions, the Marines and paratroopers rush forward, overcoming the desperate resistance of the surviving traders, who are fighting to the last drop of blood, like any of Boddicker’s soldiers.
Forty-nine seconds later, a signal light comes to life on the main transport, confirming the successful completion of the mission. Two vehicles and one tugboat are successfully seized; emergency repairs have been started on board, and they will soon be able to move. The rest of the ships in the caravan are hopelessly broken; the Marines hastily mined their engines. Urgent medical aid is being requested—the Marines found a seriously wounded navigator, the surviving brain of which could still be extremely useful.
“Why won’t they let an intelligent person sit quietly on her butt?” Chernova smiles, dressing in a personal combat suit. At the gateway, Lobo meets her and hands her a small sealed container, labeled with a symbol for the maximum degree of danger.
“Use with extreme caution; we won’t have a second attempt!” Voronov says.
“Don’t preach Buddha, Olga!”
Having thrown off the Eastwood-Gamma ruins, the cruiser comes close to the head merchant; Chernova boards the captured ship.
“So, where is my genius required?”
The repair of the transports and tugboat is almost over, Olga is reinstalling the software, and Twins are warming up the engines.
The Bolshevik also has a feverish job: the Marines are working on the cruiser hull, rapidly changing its appearance. A dead colony can’t pass through a narrow channel, which means that they need to change their mask once again, using the fragments of Eastwood-Gamma. Granddad developed a new reinforced bulwark before their last exit into the void, and now the Marines need only to connect the parts in the correct sequence and pull the camouflage net over it. A few more seconds, and the Bolshevik turns into a standard medium-tonnage transport, just like the ones in the crashed caravan. One of the assault boats carefully reads the radar and thermal signature, confirming the completion of the work; everything is in order—just a plain old transport and nothing more.
“Captain, we can move!”
“Go!”
The three transports and the tugboat are anchored, leaving behind the burning ruins of the cutting plant and trading station, along with the ships frozen motionless. It is 290 seconds from the beginning of the attack.
“Entrance to the fairway straight ahead!” Natasha confirms.
At first glance, the empty area in front is no different from any other—several garbage reefs, leisurely soaring in a vacuum, and nothing more. But the entrance is here somewhere; the squadron of warships passed this way, and the transports were sent here, carrying out orders to arrive at the base in the depths of the cluster.
It seems that the invisible gate could easily be rounded from both side and fly at full speed forward, but this impression is deadly deceptive; the only true road is covered by minefields and laser cannons from all sides; torpedoes are also waiting for them somewhere nearby.
“Beacons are ready!”
They don’t expect to return by the same road, but it’s necessary to designate a safe fairway—this path may still be needed. Olga hides in the garbage the beacons of her own manufacture, ready to respond to the first true call.
“The safety distance has been reached.”
“Fire in the hull!”
The mined ships explode, completing the destruction of the station and the plant. Now, from the outside, it will look like a border outpost was crushed by a torpedo attack, without any attempts to penetrate. Any witnesses who would be able to say otherwise didn’t survive—the Marines methodically shot all workers who survived the explosion.
“We are entering the fairway!”
Successfully operating on the navigator from the captured merchant, Chernova opens access to Olga and Uncle Joe in his brain, through which it’s possible to penetrate the Tartar’s internal Matrix, at least to the part that is open to the crews of the merchant ships. Olga looks at the pirate network with unconcealed interest, trying to see and remember as much as possible; she hasn’t encountered such architecture before. The dimensions of Tartar's Matrix are impressive, as well as having a clear structure similar to the military networks of the Union and Supernova. But there are also some fundamental differences, which are understandable only to the leaders of the pirate Reich.
At the moment, the Matrix is buzzing like an aspen hive that has been attacked. Coded traffic is skyrocketing, simultaneously with the closure of the auxiliary sectors and the maximum strengthening of the security systems. Not wanting to deal with search engines and fighter angels coming out on the hunt, Uncle Joe sends a short message to the nearest dispatching office on behalf of the already dead navigator: The border outpost was crushed by a torpedo attack, most of the caravan was destroyed, the flagship transport was shot down along with the crew, and the navigator has taken control of the surviving ships and awaits instructions. The cause of the message delay is understandable; the weakness of the radio signal passing from the periphery to the center is affecting them, especially now, when all attention is focused on the battle at the South Pole.
“Confirmation; we have been given a green light!”
The dispatching office orders the navigator to bring the surviving ships to one of the transshipment bases, opening the fairway for 2,900 kilometers ahead. It’s not the center of Tartar, it’s still quite far to the Citadel, but they will be able to travel most of the way unnoticed, without a fight.
Assault boats are hiding in the holds of the captured transports. Granddad is gradually increasing their speed; they must move without jerks now. Three transports and a tugboat enter the narrow fairway, traveling at a speed of just seven kilometers per second. The Limb, with the battle going in the outer radius, quickly disappears behind them. The detachment follows the central areas of the cluster.
Having disconnected the Buran, Olga turns into eyes and ears, watching what is happening in the Tartar’s network and simultaneously looking around. The numbers of small and large objects increase with every hundred kilometers behind the stern; around them are thousands of pieces of debris, fr
om fist-size pieces to the gigantic skeletons of entire ships and colonies. Throughout this endless chaos, fake stars gleam, beyond which they can’t see any real stars at all. Jammers hidden in the wreckage and reefs reliably clog the signals of space navigation systems. Elizabeth is right—it is quite simple to stray off the path, lose sight of the right direction, and then die on the reefs and minefields.
“Halt!”
Before traveling three hundred kilometers to the transshipment base, the detachment is forced to stop and hang in the emptiness with their positional lights turn on; another squadron is moving along the fairway. Executing the order of the dispatching office, Klimov presses the caravan to the surface of a large reef; Natasha turns on the beacons, according to the scheme suggested by Olga.
That’s the enemy squadron—another destroyer with five raiders, followed by a link of military transports. They are traveling at a rapid pace, sending a flock of unmanned minesweepers forward; the pirates are in a hurry to get reinforcements to the South Pole, where the battle is intensifying.
“We can move!”
Again, a slow acceleration. The enemy squadron turns into the bypass tunnel, getting immediately lost in the interlacing of the minefields and debris. Two more leisurely turns, and here they are at the threshold of the transshipment base—a large, old-fashioned orbital station, judging by the contours, built even before the war.
“Wait for your turn!”
No one can easily dock here. Escaping from the battle on the borders, many other transports and coasters have already come to the station; the piers are almost all occupied, and they must wait. In addition, minelayers are methodically strengthening the defenses, exposing new minefields around the transshipment station.
The caravan freezes motionless, waiting for the passage through the minefields to open. Turning on radars without permission is prohibited here, and the Bolsheviks again have to rely only on telescopes and infrared receivers, trying to find the right way. Where to go next is completely incomprehensible; the old orbital station hovers in the void, like the center of the universe, surrounded on all sides by hundreds of large reefs. The only open road is the one that brought them here; all the other ways are hidden. Undoubtedly, there are other roads. The transshipment base should be surrounded by roads from all sides, like an old railway station, but so far, no open fairway has been observed, and where they are exactly is known only at the local control center.
On one of the piers, a place is vacated. Signal lights order the flagship to approach, and the rest of the ships are directed wait their turn. The main transport is slowly approaching the transshipment station when an order comes to shut down their engines. The same order is given to all ships, and they are also ordered not to use radio communication and to instead use only an optical channel—the pirates needed a clean, interference-free channel. Olga again notes the explosive growth of the coded stream. All signals are coming from the south side; apparently, there is something extraordinary going on.
“Big Brother came to the rescue!”
At the South Pole, an unprecedented battle has begun—the Union Navy has moved from bombing and torpedo strikes to a landing operation. After defeating the frontier outposts, the cruisers and destroyers landed the Marine Corps, sending forward a multitude of unmanned minesweepers, methodically gnawing at the enemy defenses while they landed in the Limb, already getting to the neck of the fairway, clearing the passage through the minefields and garbage reefs.
“Get off my road!”
Transports diverge, opening the road for the huge military convoy. The warships are going at full speed; immediately after they pass the transshipment base, they dive into the next fairway, which they don’t even bother to close. Apparently, the open gate will soon be needed again; Boddicker’s Navy hurries out of the core, preparing to meet the invading enemy.
But the Bolsheviks are more interested in the ship that passes at the head of the convoy. They have seen destroyers and raiders from Tartar in a fair amount, repeatedly engaging them. But here for the first time they see a cruiser—a heavy warship, the deadweight of which exceeds the Bolshevik by almost fifty percent. The fact that Boddicker has such ships of his own construction has long been rumored; now, finally, they have managed to see the enemy cruiser with their own eyes.
The ship is new, built after Grond. They were unaware of such a project, but it resembles the new ships of the Supernova Corporation; apparently, Elizabeth wasn’t mistaken when talking about close cooperation between space capitalists and pirates. It was built in a military factory, and Boddicker clearly has more than one cruiser here; he wouldn’t leave the Citadel without powerful warships. But, nevertheless, he has to withdraw part of his squadrons to meet the enemy, gathering strength from everywhere. The Bolsheviks benefit from this; urgently transferring the squadrons to different parts of the cluster, Boddicker is forced to keep several main roads open, keeping them clear of reefs and minefields.
The cruiser is hiding in the distance; the light comes to life again, ordering the head transport to take its place, get a certain military cargo, and immediately depart. The rest of the ships wait their turn.
“There is contact; there is a docking!”
The flagship transport now stands at the end of a long pier, slowly revolving along with the transshipment station. The hatches are opened, and the loading of ammunition begins, but Olga isn’t interested in that right now. The main focus is that the dispatcher threw the protected cables on the truck, preparing to transfer new data to the navigation system, primarily the coordinates of the destination and a new set of passwords.
“We are getting it!”
Direct access to the control room and through it in Tartar’s Matrix is now open. Now comes the turn of a small black suitcase that the surgeon carried aboard a captured truck and, with the utmost caution, connected to the brain of the dead navigator.
The small black suitcase all this time was lying in Commander Severov’s personal safe, in the arsenal, the heart of the Bolshevik. Obtained together with a full set of nuclear projectiles, it’s also a weapon—a weapon based on other physical principles, but no less lethal.
If the nuclear projectiles were received by the armorer of the Bolshevik, then Olga personally answered for this suitcase. The deadly device was manufactured for her, on the special order of the Captain.
Sergeant Voronov learned about the gift quite recently and learned to work with it over the previous five days, first of all learning to restrain the destructive power concealed inside. Having thoroughly studied the accompanying materials and having gone through millions of lessons in the simulator, she nevertheless didn’t dare approach the suitcase, confining herself to a brief visual inspection before Severov personally locked it in a specially shielded weapon safe.
Unprecedented security measures have their own reasons. Inside the small black suitcase lurks a single unique super-powerful autonomous tempest, a computer virus of unprecedented destructive power.
Legends about the existence of such systems have been around for a long time, at least since the seventies. But these were the legends, and Olga, during her last years at the High House, carefully studied all types of electronic weapons without finding any evidence of the veracity of these legends. For the absolute majority, autonomous tempests were nothing more than a legend, like rebel robots. But rebel robots were real; one of them taught Olga for many years. And the reality was autonomous tempests; the evidence of their existence she found on the cruiser, having access to secret naval archives. And now she has the opportunity to get to know this electronic destroyer.
An autonomous tempest is a hybrid of a classical implementation program and a particular kind of artificial intelligence system. In essence, it’s a living organism, whose habitat is a virtual space created by humans. There, it plays the role of the dominant predator, artfully pursuing and destroying its victims. But unlike Uncle Joe and other intelligent machines, the autonomous tempest has no real mind: it isn�
�t an artificial thinker but an electronic serial killer capable of effectively performing one single action—tearing and devouring. A strong set of reflexes and instincts reliably replaces its own mind, allowing the tempest to effectively resist standard methods of protection, and gives this digital madman absolute unpredictability of actions; it’s extremely difficult to track and destroy such a network predator.
In view of the enormous power and small vulnerability, autonomous tempests require maximum caution in their creation, storage, and use. This is a one-time weapon for special operations, which engineers of the Union and the Supernova Corporation developed in secret laboratories, as if nurturing lions and tigers in the dungeons of the Colosseum before releasing them to the arena. Fearing the escape of the dangerous beasts, a self-destruct program is built into their electronic code, which will burn the primitive brain of the tempest after a certain period of time. But before this moment comes, the predator will destroy and tear everything around, everything it reaches, without deciding who is an ally and who is an enemy.
With regard to the early usage of autonomous tempests, there are no exact data, only rumors, assigning to them numerous heavy disasters and unexplained network accidents. They were first used in battle earlier this summer, during the Supernova Civil War, when former business partners dropped their electronic war dogs on one another. The damage from their actions wasn’t much inferior to nuclear bombing; the tempests destroyed entire sectors of civilian and military Matrices, nullifying the consciousness of millions of enemy operators.
It didn’t only happen to the enemy: that's how the Ronald Reagan died, the largest warship of the Earthmen, which could cause enormous damage to space capitalists with its nuclear arsenal. Preceding the nuclear attack by attacking a whole flock of autonomous tempests, the Reagan’s crew lost control of one of them, and the electronic monster that had broken loose from the chain began to destroy its own ship, dealing with anyone who tried to stand in its way. The burnt skeleton of the Reagan still lies on the northern shore of the Ocean of Storms, and, looking at him, Olga once again becomes convinced of the need to observe the strictest security measures and extreme caution. This is the only way, when another identical monster, which the girl dubbed Joker, slumbers inside a small black suitcase.
A King Word And a Gun Page 21