“But it’s a put-on. A magician’s trick of distracting the audience. You guys aren’t really covering up insecurities. Under the distraction is the real you, but because no one sees it, no one can guess what you’re going to do next. It’s the perfect shroud for negotiating contracts as soldiers-for-hire.”
“And what do you suppose I’d say if this pile of shit reasoning was right?”
“You’d try to confuse me by telling the truth for once, that I’m on to something.”
“You’re right.”
She laughed, but it was a short, nervous thing.
“You ever been on a dreadnought?” she asked.
“Mongrels fly off of carriers,” he said. “No use for a mongrel on a dreadnought. We’d just piss on the floor. Why? You going chicken again?”
“I’ve never chickened out of anything. I’ve been on Congregate warships. They’re powerful. The guns on a dreadnought are a whole ’nother level.”
“They don’t dick around.”
“You getting chicken?”
“Shit no.”
“Bullshit. Even the Union crews must be getting cold feet. You’ve got to be scared of a dreadnought. We’re going to get fried insidethe Union warships before we even have a chance to get shot outside.”
“Look, I know you think you’re fancy ’cause you don’t shit where you swim an’ all, but it’s in the first three verses of the Way of the Mongrel,” he said. “‘You were born dead under the tomb of an ocean. It’s never going to get any better. And you’re fucked.’”
“That’s reassuring.”
“You and me, Phocas, we don’t get pats on the head. We were always the hired muscle in this clusterfuck of a con job. Unlike Arjona, Cassandra or Del Casal, we got shit for brains. Unlike Iekanjika, we don’t wear officer bars. We’re the grunts. Our job is to keep our heads down, eat shit and crack the skulls of whoever we’re pointed at.”
“You want to be a grunt your whole life?”
“Maybe you can dream of bein’ something different, Phocas, being princessy and human and shit, but I’m mongrel. All ambition can do for me is change the wallcoverings. I got fuck all to lose, so I’m gonna bite every hand on my way out.”
Chapter Sixty-Three
HARD THRUSTING AND braking by Saint Matthew brought the tug around Hinkley. The Puppet fire was both fierce and uncertain. The big guns on the port were avoiding hitting Hinkley directly. Hinkley was not only a military installation, but an industrial one. Too much damage to the asteroid might cripple not just the port, but the entire Federation of Puppet Theocracies. But the Puppets seemed not to know what to do with the Union who had so quickly reduced the defenses of the far side of Hinkley, and now used the asteroid as a shield.
The Union couldn’t advance any closer against the withering fire, but the Puppets had no way to dislodge the invaders. In the tug, Belisarius and Iekanjika listened to the buzzing of radio instructions, questions, orders, and counter-orders while civilian shipping tried to get clear of the assault.
As they rounded Hinkley, the sight of the Sixth Expeditionary Force was breath-taking. The twelve Union ships were lit with full running lights, cannons free of tactical blisters, and eerie Cherenkov radiation spilling from the great tubes running through their centers.
Belisarius did not believe in fate, but a sense of it hung in the air. The twelve warships had launched four decades ago, had wandered the wastes of space, staying hidden in that cold vastness, had discovered a treasure and now sailed home, against all who stood in their way. Their actions suffused the moment with meaning, bracing him, even though he knew the universe had no meaning.
“Which one is the Fashoda?” Belisarius asked.
Iekanjika pointed at one of the warships at the center of the Expeditionary Force.
“And the Gbudue?” he asked.
Iekanjika indicated another warship. They followed the contours of Hinkley toward it. Ancient, coal-black regolith dust lay still and unblemished in places, but was pocked by deep craters of lighter grays and shiny white ice where Puppet defensive positions had been obliterated by Union weaponeers. They passed beneath the Omukama. Laser burns scored its underside, where a Puppet cannon must have gotten lucky. Longer or deeper or luckier and the Sixth Expeditionary Force would have only been eleven ships.
Marie suited up as they came beneath the Gbudue. Belisarius took out a pair of his silvery pins. He gave one to Marie.
“Let us know when you’re through,” he said.
“I just hope we don’t get blasted to shit. How are the Union ships going to get past the dreadnought?”
“As soon as you’re out, it’s not your problem. Get out of the fire zone. You’ll be too small for the dreadnought to worry about. And if they suspect the new Union drives, they’ll be trying to capture rather than destroy.”
“We’re doing some crazy shit, Bel,” Marie said.
“That’s why I got you.”
She gave him the finger, moved on magnetized boots into the airlock and shut herself in. With practiced movements, she cycled the lock and was outside.
“Go ahead!” Marie’s voice said on the intercom. “I can get to the Gbudue without babysitters and we’re on a schedule here.”
Belisarius made for the Fashoda. Iekanjika moved to the hold while he docked the tug with it.
“Now can you tell me?” Saint Matthew whispered while Iekanjika was in the hold. “What are we doing?”
“Some Union crew are moving Stills to the Fashoda. The faster we get it done, the better.”
“Why?”
A clank sounded from the stern hatch and Iekanjika yelled forward. “We’re clear.”
Belisarius set them moving again. The Limpopo was one of the three big flagships, accompanied by a squadron of three cruisers. A row of closed bays nestled behind its command structure. Iekanjika sent a code and one of the bay doors slid open. The edges of the bay yawned above them like the lips of a grave. Excitement lit Iekanjika’s eyes. She’d come home to ride to war.
“Let’s get you to Epsilon Indi system, Major,” Belisarius said as the bay doors closed over them.
They passed through the umbilical and into the Limpopo. Two hard-faced military police escorts floated in the corridor, along with Lieutenant-Colonel Teng, the warship’s executive officer. Iekanjika saluted him. He snapped back a salute and handed her a belt and webbing with a side arm.
“Welcome to the Limpopo, Mister Arjona,” Teng said.
Belisarius introduced Cassandra.
“We need to begin,” Belisarius said.
“Major Iekanjika can show you to the bridge,” Teng said, indicating the corridor leading up-ship, towards the bow.
The major leapt ahead, born and trained in zero gravity. Cassandra followed, with no misplaced hands, her legs and body balanced perfectly, not from training, but of a brain that thought most easily in geometric terms. Belisarius followed, hand-over-hand, slower, but not losing his balance or control.
The bridge was deep in the dorsal superstructure. The somber metallic sarcophagi acceleration chambers were full, winking status lights at each other. Two military police in light armor stood by. A holographic tactical display shone in the middle of the bridge.
Belisarius’s brain absorbed the geometries at a glance. One hundred thousand kilometers away floated the Puppet Axis, enwebbed in the fortifications of Port Stubbs, supplemented by the majority of the anemic, but still dangerous Puppet fleet. The Union tactical displays were better than the Puppet ones they’d hacked into.
Forty-two Puppet ships floated in formation to defend Port Stubbs, less than a quarter of the fleet. The arrival of the dreadnought had spooked the Puppets and blown some of Belisarius’s plan to have most of the Puppet fleet around Port Stubbs.
Cassandra stepped on magnetized boots to the middle of the bridge, where a wide display of holograms shone before her, showing ship placements, local magnetic fields and most importantly, the systems and status information on the coi
l system of the Limpopo.
“I’m ready to control of the coil systems,” she said. The curtness in her voice sounded like she was already in savant.
The Brigadier-General and Iekanjika exchanged a glance and then the general gave a hand signal. The holograms before Cassandra greened. Cassandra’s fingers twitched with precise movements as she tested the systems. She was in the fugue.
“Whatever plan you have, you can’t have thought it a good idea to increase the fortifications of Port Stubbs,” Saint Matthew said.
“This is exactly the plan,” Belisarius said. “They’ve pulled some reserves from the Puppet Free City to reinforce the port.”
“The Free City is three hundred and twenty light years away, with a Congregate dreadnought sniffing nearby,” Saint Matthew said. “Are we helping the Congregate seize the Puppet Axis?”
“We’ve focused on distracting the Puppets and the Congregate,” Belisarius said, “to make them misunderstand our intentions and to maneuver them into committing to the con.”
“Perhaps you would have made a good strategist, Arjona,” Major Iekanjika said.
It was the nicest thing she’d ever said to him, and it was given grudgingly. She was fair. She was also wrong.
“This is good old-fashioned gambling, major, playing the player, not the cards. The Puppets and the Congregate have their insecurities and their greed. The Sixth Expeditionary Force is the most tempting thing either have seen in decades. The Puppets are obsessed with being strong enough to never lose the Numen. The Congregate is obsessed with maintaining its primacy and doesn’t believe half of what its spies are telling it. It’s moving to uncover the hoax and slap down opposition in a way that will demoralize potential rebellions for a generation. The Puppets believe that nothing can force their Axis. Both believe they’re holding unbeatable hands.”
Chapter Sixty-Four
THE CASSANDRA SUBJECTIVITY extinguished on the bridge of the Limpopo; the quantum intellect congealed in the absence. Perception expanded beyond the hull. Tangled particle and wave interactions rippled in the ambient magnetic field, pressing against millions of magnetosomes embedded in the cells of the Cassandra physicality. Waves of interfering probability built a picture of layered quantum states in the region around the Limpopo. Within point three one seconds, the mouth of the Port Stubbs worm hole began affecting the probabilities reaching the quantum intellect. And the darting movements of Puppet ships showed themselves by the way they bled small amounts of energy into the pulsar’s magnetic field. The Puppet fortifications showed in outline, mixing their electrical emissions into the faint press of magnetism.
Twelve ships floated around the intellect, shielded from direct energy and particle weapons by the asteroid that sputtered electrical short circuits, radio alarms and hot plasma. The intellect constructed mathematical filters to subtract all these effects from the sensory input of a zone now two light seconds across. The quantum intellect needed this shielding from the ambient environment to perceive the ephemeral probability trails of entangled particles.
The Belisarius subjectivity possessed two buttons on his person, linked to buttons held by the Stills and the Phocas subjectivities. Fine threads of entanglement connected the persons and the ships no matter the distance.
The quantum intellect itself had ten buttons containing entangled particles. In the faintest of signals amid the quantum noise, four of them reached through space, across three hundred and twenty light years, to the ocean beneath the icy crust of Oler. Through these thin quantum links, the intellect was able to locate the dwarf planet Oler in space and time. The six other buttons were linked by threads of probability to the tiny machines left by the Saint Matthew AI in the Puppet Axis.
Like an array of radio telescopes emulating a single large telescope, these tiny threads of entangled probability created an image three hundred and twenty light years across. The quantum intellect perceived the region around Port Stubbs, the region around the Free City, and the tunnel connecting them through hyperspace, as one great region of space-time, knit by quantum entanglement. The observations, the knowledge, the perspective, were transcendent.
And while it peered at the world, the quantum intellect began ordering the Limpopo’s systems to induce the wormhole that would open in the throat of the Puppet Axis.
Chapter Sixty-Five
MARIE SQUIRMED AGAINST the chafing harness in the first inflaton racer. The bay around the ship went dark. They were going into an induced wormhole. A prickle of fear ran up the back of her neck. Her stomach itched like she was going up a roller coaster, waiting for the summit.
She liked being in control. Instead, she was riding in someone else’s ship that had to not only reach the Puppet Axis sideways, but slip through the fortifications at the Free City, to run into some lethal Congregate hardware. She wasn’t chicken. She’d done dangerous things her whole life. But this was a new level of crazy. Deep breaths.
You were born in a watery tomb. It won’t get better. You’re fucked. Stills’ philosophy wasn’t very comforting, but she’d be damned if anyone called her chicken. Her display was patched into the secondary bridge. She saw the same thing as the executive officer, which, in an induced wormhole, came to squat. Lots of time to fidget.
Congregate naval hardware was serious stuff. She’d done two tours in the elite Congregate marine corps, on cruisers and even a couple capital ships. They were big and scary, but dreadnoughts made them look like training equipment.
Lights and acceleration resumed. Her display lit up, showing the layout of the ship. Around it, strange abstract lines that webbed to form a tube. They’d emerged from the fragile induced wormhole into the Puppet Axis.
Acceleration pressed Marie against her seat. Eighty meters per second. Slow by orbital standards, but plenty enough for a ship underground.
The display showed weapon blisters folding open and cannons swivelling into position. Most pointed slightly forward, the rest perpendicular to the warship itself.
Marie exhaled heavily enough to steam up her faceplate. Gonna get ugly... She’d seen the Puppet defenses on the way in. If the Union weaponeers intended to fire on the angles they had, they were firing at point blank range. Lots of chances of blow back and catching the Gbudue in some of the blast. Little chance of missing though.
Marie gripped the armrests of the pilot seat more tightly, wishing she were piloting this hulk, or at least manning a cannon. She liked pulling triggers. In the display, a mouth appeared at the top of the wormhole throat, and indistinct shapes beyond it. Thrust pressed her back against her seat. A hundred and twenty meters per second.
And then everything rumbled. The holographic display showed the bow of the Gbudue emerging from the mouth of the Puppet Axis, into normal space, into the great chamber above the wormhole. The forward batteries fired at the ceiling, blasting the thick steel doors into plasma only moments before the warship raced through. Dorsal and ventral batteries soaked Puppet cannon emplacements with particle fire, melting equipment and crews.
Three layers of defensive doors separated the mouth of the Axis from the surface of Oler, two kilometers above. The forward batteries of the Gbudue knit a tapestry of laser and particle melt into the next shield doors just as the bow rammed through.
The last barrier of steel was the thickest, designed to resist nuclear strikes from orbit. Lancing particle beams and streaming rockets leapt ahead of the Gbudue, hammering and denting. The beams kept firing as the hard bow of the cruiser slammed into the steel barrier. The last door burst, shaking the warship. The flanges of steel, torn sharp as knife edges, carved great furrows into the sides of the Gbudue and tore the upper decks of the superstructure from the hull. Her holographic displays winked out.
The bridge was gone.
The bridge crew was scraped away. Brave bastards.
Merde! She was trapped in a dead target.
Then, new displays appeared in new colors, showing different views. Hot red alarm icons sprouted all over th
e Gbudue’s schematics. Odd waves of acceleration and free fall cascaded across the displays. Something was driving them forward. The ship wasn’t dead. That was really good news, until she realized that it wasn’t. The executive officer and auxiliary weaponeers had control, but they were steering straight toward the most dangerous piece of equipment in the solar system: the Congregate dreadnought in station-keeping orbit above the Axis.
“Oh crap,”she said.
A series of alarms sounded as a low thrumming seized the ship. The sensors in the inflaton racer came alive too. Readings on holographic dials she didn’t recognize began measuring inflaton field strength. They weren’t changing course. This wasn’t a feint.
Were they crazy?
Did they seriously think that ramming a dreadnought would do any good?
It’s modular, you idiots!
She toggled internal comms.
“Gbudue command, this is flyer one,” she said. “Welcome back to the dance. Requesting permission to disembark. I can see you’ve got another dance partner in mind and I don’t want to get in the way of passion.”
“Flyer one, get off this channel,” came a quick reply. “Opening bay doors. Get out.”
The tactical display she’d been fed from the second bridge abruptly stopped and she was left with what the racer could see. The bay doors opened and the clamps on the magnetic landing gear released. She cold-thrusted out. Her inflaton dial, whatever it was good for, was edging into yellow. Once she’d cleared the bay, little knocks sounded all over the cockpit. Alarms lit on the schematic. Collision sensors were confused.
Pellets. Or bullets.
From below.
What the hell?
The Puppets were focusing lasers and particle weapons on the Gbudue, but were throwing metal bullets at her.
What the hell?
One of those could hit her! Fucking Puppets!
She spun the racer away, her own inflaton drive coming online, throwing her ship forward too fast for the old-fashioned firing control systems to follow. She brought a tactical display online and pulled up visuals on the scene behind her. The stupid Gbudue was still accelerating.
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