by Bodicea
Miller cursed.
“Shall I inform Basil? It’s the only ship inside the planet’s atmosphere?”
“Neg, Basil isn’t equipped for a rescue mission. Have them make a flyover on Concordia and see if they can lock onto them. If necessary, we’ll divert a team of Marines to get them out.”
“What are the going to do to us?” Bridget Armatrading demanded. Unfortunately, none of the people she demanded it from was in any position to tell her. The five from the Prudence landing party had been taken to the top floor of a tower near the Bodicéan Government Complex. a windowless room with a single entrance, guarded on the outside by at least four monitors. Solay had taken Ciel somewhere else. The Tower of Justine was a detention tower where political dissidents had been taken over the past few days since Solay had begun her purge. The intermittent sound of screams in the courtyard, blood-curdling and then suddenly cut short, indicated that the purge had proceeded to its inevitable conclusion.
Everyone but Alkema had been given an electrical shock to the jaw, disabling their communication implants. It could only be surmised that the Aurelians had learned about them from the crew of Hector, as well as an effective, but not painless, method of deactivating them.
They had also been stripped of their jackets, and all the nice communication and defensive gear that was integrated into them.
Goneril Lear sat against the wall in a corner, shell-shocked, with Trajan Lear in her arms.
It was hard to tell who was comforting whom. The shock of Solay’s betrayal, her own failure to avert the attack that was now imminent tormented her much less than the knowledge that she had brought her own child into this place of danger.
Trajan seemed oddly becalmed. He was as frightened as anyone, but he had stared down the hollow face of desperation and despair once already in his young life. Whatever happened, he was prepared to meet it. A sentiment Matthew Driver also understood. Matthew might have given some thought to the prospect of dying without winning the heart of Eliza Jane Change, but he had stared down that vision of Despair already also. He would have been surprised to learn how much alike were the thoughts he and the Executive Commander’s son were sharing.
Armatrading though, was a wreck. Either Solay would have them all executed, or they would all die in the Aurelian attack on Bodicéa. Her soul was not at peace, and so she sobbed in a corner by herself. Nobody had the impulse to comfort her.
David Alkema was having none of it. He quietly paced the wall, slowly working his way around the room. Feeling the stones and more importantly, the seams between the stones. The Bodicéans were obssessed with the use of natural materials in their architecture. The interior and exterior walls of the tower were fashioned from quarried stone, painstaking cut into interlocking trapezoidal and parallelogram shapes.
Suddenly, he paused, and traced his hands backward over the place they had just come.
His eyes grew studious, and he pressed his ear against the spot in the wall. “Here,” he said, indicating the rock and addressing Matthew. Matthew crossed the room and felt the rock David had indicated. He felt the wisps of air escaping around the edges. “There’s an air shaft on the other side,” Alkema whispered. A tower like this with no windows, of course there had to be air shafts.
Alkema went on. “The Bodicéans didn’t use any mortar when they put this building up, there’s no re-bar support to these stone either. If we can get that stone out, and if the air shaft is big enough… at least for Trajan to get through, we have a chance of getting out of here.”
Matthew pressed against the stone. “It seems well-set. If we only had a crowbar.”
“Or a battering ram,” said Alkema. He jerked his head toward Lear, or, actually, the stone bench Lear was sitting on. It was sealed to the floor, but Alkema had a theory about that as well. “This prison was built by women, for women. Our upper body strength is better.
Between the three of us, you me and Trajan, we can rip that bench loose, and knock out this stone.”
“The Guard will hear us.”
“Not if Armatrading really gets into it.
At that moment, Armatrading stopped crying.
“Okay, what part of really getting into it didn’t you understand?” Alkema asked. He picked up Armatrading by the shoulders and guided her toward the front of the room.
“Well?”
“I can’t cry, now.” Armatrading whimpered.
“Somehow, I didn’t think you would.”
“Hey!” Goneril Lear yelled from across the room. “Hey! Hey! Listen, I am the diplomatic representative of the Government of the Planet Republic. You will release me immediately or I will complain to my Government and they will enact swift and certain retribution.”
“Give her something to pound against the door with,” Trajan suggested.
“Good idea!” Alkema searched the room, everything but the bench was tied down. Alkema quickly removed both of his boots and handed them to Lear and Armatrading.”
“Hey! Hey! Who’s out there? Do you think you can take on five hundred Marines with handcannons, because that’s what you’re bringing down on yourselves. I would not want to bring that down. Do you hear me. Hey! Hey! Is anyone listening to me! Hey! Hey!”
Armatrading joined Lear, screaming and pounding, repeating what Lear said, a little behind and out of synch. Matthew, David, and Trajan moved on the bench. They heaved and lifted. The first heft brought nothing. The second brought a little cracking. The third and fourth cracked it further. Finally, on the fifth it broke free. The seat was not that heavy.
Alkema and Driver lined it up against the stone wall, moved back and made a run at it. Then, another run, and another.
“It’s loosening,” Alkema declared, then revised his estimate. “It’s only loosening a little. If we keep smacking the wall the guards are bound to hear us.”
“Keep battering!” Lear called back, then turned back to pounding on the door.
“This looks like moonstone, its been polished to interlock with the other stones. If we moisten it around the edges, it’ll give way easier.”
Matthew shook his head. “How do you propose to do that. We don’t have any water.”
“Let’s put it this way, once again, you, I, and Trajan are the best equipped for this job.”
The women stopped shouting and pounding, just for a second, then turned away while the men opened the front of their pants and moistened the stone.
They took up the stone bench again.
“Yuck, I think I got some on me,” Trajan said.
“That should be the least of your worries,” Alkema told him. “Ready, one, two, … heave.”
The bench swung back. The bench swung forward and connected with the stone. It’s sides now slickened, it slid into the space behind and fell. It hit bottom with a smash. Matthew and David used the battering ram to bash a few more of the stones into the hole. It was big enough now for any of them to get through. Alkema handed off the stone to Matthew and Trajan.
“Jam the door with that, in case they heard anything.” He put his head into the hole and looked around.
“This is a surprisingly large space,” Alkema told them a second later. “I think we can all make it, but it’s at least thirty meters to the ground.”
“Followed by a twenty kilometer hike through the city,” Armatrading said. “We’ll be back here in an hour, or dead.”
“We go up,” Driver said firmly.
“Up?” Alkema questioned.
“Up,” Driver repeated. “How far is it?”
“About four meters but there’s no where to go.”
“There will be,” Matthew promised. He began to climb into the hole.
“The Aurelian World-Ship is firing off these.” Specialist American displayed a tactical scan of what had scared Ponyboy James and the rest of Tripwire Force, a massive launch of thousands of incoming projectiles. Each one consisted of a warhead shaped like a mace - a sphere with pointed spikes protruding from it - attached
to, what looked to Commander Keeler’s non-technical eyes, like a flexible tail of ionized plasma energy that propelled and steered it. In shape and motion, they were not unlike spermatozoa wearing spiked helmets.
“A spiky warhead with a creamy plasma center,” as Miller described it. “It fits the description of the orbital bombardment pattern detected on Medea; forty to sixty kiloton yield, I estimate.”
“But why?” asked American. “The Aurelians agreed to the treaty. Why attack them?”
“Because the Aurelians believe you have to destroy a society before you can rebuild it in your own image,” said Commander Keeler, still in War Room One.
“If our telemetry estimates are correct, at least a hundred of them are targeted on Pegasus.
Quicksilver Angels are moving to intercept. Point defenses armed and ready.”
“Take them out of my sky,” Dead Keeler shouted.
“How’s that gain, commander?” Miller asked.
“I said, do whatever you have to do to protect this ship,” Live Keeler ordered calmly.
“What is the status of the other flight groups.”
“Hellblazers and Doom Patrol are engaging the enemy attack ships. Inflicting heavy damage. Two Aves have been damaged and are returning to Pegasus. Two more flights from those squadrons are ready to launch at your command.”
Keeler sighed. “Launch fighters.”
“How goes the data extraction?”
“Slow, there is an amazing amount of crap,” Keeler told them. “For every point of tactical data Caliph acquired, she picked up two or three hundred points related to …, um, sex.”
“Sex?”
“The Aurelian pornographic database is surprisingly large… or unsurprisingly large… but we think we’ve isolated the tactical code. We’re also looking at navigational data to determine where the ship has been.”
“We can spare some data analysts to help you down there.”
“Neg, we’re all right. We’ll continue sending data to the War Room.”
“Right, Miller out.”
Living Keeler turned to Dead Keeler. “Where were we?”
“I was just about to tell you about the time my ship was boarded by hobgoblins.”
“Oh, za, that’s right. How could I forget?”
“We were burning and adrift off the Fairchild Nebula following a sneaky attack by the Eleventh Legion of the Heresy. The little buggers must have come aboard when they dumped their garbage before entering hyperspace, which was standard procedure for the dark forces.
Anyway,… we wrote a song about it. Want to here it? Here it goes. ‘Hobgoblins! Hobgoblins!
What can you do with those Hobgoblins. They’re over here. They’re over there. Those danged Hobgoblins are everywhere!”
Suddenly, Queequeg arched his back, every hair on end, flattened his ears, and hissed at the data display.
This made Living Keeler nearly jump out of his skin and Dead Keeler nearly jump out of his ectoplasm.
Living Keeler approached the cat first. “I think Queequeg is trying to tell us something.
What is it, boy? Did Timmy fall into the viaduct?”
“Why a duck, why not a chicken,” Dead Keeler said. When Keeler gave him a funny look, he added. “Old joke, sorry.”
“What is it?”
Queequeg calmed himself, his ears perked up until he looked unperturbed. “I found something.”
“What?”
“Something unexpected and frightening, I reckon,” said the Dead Guy.
The cat gestured with his paw in the air. An image appeared, projected above the wall. A beautiful blue planet with four continents, two of which looked like birds, one taking wing, one just about to land.
“Sapphire…” Keeler whispered, incredulously.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The most profound moments of silence are those that result when screaming “Oh, shit!”
would simply not do them justice.
When the holograph of Sapphire was displayed in Caliph’s chamber, such a moment was created, but its half-life was short. It barely had a moment to register before the commander began shouting. “How do they know about Sapphire?”
No one who had an answer for him would dare speak, except for Caliph.
“They know about lots and lots and lots and lots of worlds. They’re going to digest all of them and make everyone into Aurelians.” The words “No Fun” were projected all over the walls.
“Could they have gotten that data from Hector?” Keeler asked Queequeg.
“Negative. No one cracked into Hector’s braincore. I double-checked.” The cat was adamant. “None of the datapoints from the World Ship correlates to anything in Hector’s braincore.”
“What about the crew… their memories?”
“Possible, but not too likely. That isn’t a memory, that’s a map.” Keeler felt his heart plunge from his chest to his testicles. “That can only mean, they’ve been to our world.”
The Dead Guy put in. “They know of our world at least.”
“Maybe they sent probes… Maybe?” Living Keeler suggested. Keeler looked around the room, realized they were standing in the mind of the only probe known to have reached the Sapphire system from outside. “Caliph?”
“Put that thought right back where it came from,” the Dead Guy said quickly. “Caliph is far beyond them.”
Swirling dots appeared again. “Wheee-e-e-e-e-e-e! I am far, far, far beyond them.”
“We would have detected a probe,” Queequeg insisted. “Our system defenses, I mean, back on Sapphire.”
“I am sure if you think about it, you can come up with a way to infiltrate our system undetected,” the Dead Guy said, bitterly and testily. “That is not what matters. That they have been to our world is something to fear. It does not matter how. PSDS Intelligence will figure it out when we send this data to them.”
Keeler looked at the Sapphire image. “Where did you find this? Is it in a list of worlds they know about? Are there others?”
Queequeg pawed away that interface, and displayed the directories where he had found the image. Several other planets and star charts flashed by rapidly. “I found that data point in a directory that I think stores all the original the original data that was provided to the sphere at the time of its construction. This world-ship hasn’t been to Sapphire, but when it was built, this data point was put into its central library.”
“What about Republic?”
“Who cares?”
“Queequeg!”
“Well, … I don’t.”
The Dead Guy asked a more productive question. “Can you plot the origin of the world-ship?”
“I think so. The Sapphire datapoint had the suffix 0000. I think every data point with that suffix was part of the original matrix. If I isolate those, and I then I trace the subsequent navigational datapoints, I can find the system where the ship was constructed.”
“What will that tell us?”
“It might give us the location of the Aurelian home-system?”
“Aurelian home-system?” Keeler asked.
“Za, the planet all the Aurelians come from, but that’s not important right now.”
“This is no longer about Bodicéa,” Dead Keeler said … there was no other way to describe it … gravely. “They know about our world. They will come for us. If they are the new incarnation of the Adversary, they have to destroy us. We were set against them. They have to come for us.”
“So, we find the location of their world and then what? Tell Sapphire?”
“We must send a data transmission to Sapphire, let them know every thing we know about the Aurelians, and pray it isn’t too late. It’s been thirty-two years since we left, by the Sapphirean calendar. They could have done a lot of damage. Presumably, if they have tachyon transmitting capacity, they have already told their homeworld about us. We must go to their home-system, learn everything we can, and if necessary… destroy their world.”
“Destroy t
heir world?” The Old Man nodded solemnly, so Keeler must have heard him correctly. “That isn’t what you expect to hear from the good guys.”
“When you meet the Adversary, you must hold back nothing,” the Old Man repeated.
“Right, of course,” Keeler said.
Caliph interrupted. “I think some people are trying to hurt me. I don’t like them.” The commander turned to Queequeg. “Is she clean?”
“None of the flags I put in has been set off. She wasn’t compromised.” Keeler went to a control column mounted just in front of the cylinder that contained her intelligence. He laid his hand on it, bringing down the barrier that separated Caliph from Pegasus’s braincore. “Caliph,” he said calmly. “Defend yourself.” In the War Room, Shayne American tried to make sense of what her systems were telling her. “Braincore processing has just dropped sixty per cent,” she reported.
“What?” said Miller, stunned. Without the braincore, there was no way to coordinate Pegasus’s defensive systems, or even operate them.
“Autonomous defenses are unaffected,” American reported. “If anything, processing speed has just quadrupled.”
On the Main Display, war scenarios were cycling through in a blur of holographic maneuvers, weapons, and exploding ships.
At the front of the great ship, a cloud of Hammerheads fired off the rails and into the night.
“We’re out of range,” Honeywell barked.
Miller checked his own displays. “She knows what she’s doing,” he said calmly, and a little resignedly.
“Found it!” Queequeg said. He displayed a star map on the ceiling of the chamber. “It’s a system we don’t have a designation for, sixty-two light years from here. That’s where the world-ship was constructed.”
The Old Man looked at Keeler, and his form seemed to diminish to a shadow with fiercely burning lights in place of his eyes. “Now, what are you going to do?”
“I can’t leave this fight. They’ll destroy Bodicéa.”