Relentless tlf-5

by Jack Campbell

  “I didn’t do it alone. It couldn’t have happened without the efforts and courage of every one of those men and women. But thank you. You give me strength when I need it the most.”

  “You’re welcome.” Her hand rested very briefly on his arm near the mourning band, then Desjani left without another word.

  He stayed there a little longer, watching the capsules recede on their journey to the star. Several hours later, the Alliance fleet jumped for Padronis, the cities and planets of Heradao still convulsing in civil war in the fleet’s wake.

  ANOTHER star system abandoned by humanity, Padronis held nothing the Alliance fleet could use. Geary shook his head as he took in the assessments of the fleet’s sensors on what the Syndics had left behind at one small rescue station when they abandoned this star. There couldn’t be anything there for which it would be worth slowing down any of his ships.

  Not that they’d expected anything else. Padronis was a white dwarf star, glittering alone in the emptiness of space, unaccompanied by the array of planets and asteroids that usually orbited stars. Like other white dwarf stars, every once in a while Padronis would accumulate too much helium in its outer shell and go nova, ejecting the outer shell and brightening a great deal for a short time. These occasional novas hadn’t been beneficial for anything once near Padronis. Any worlds or rocks had all been long since smashed and hurled into the darkness between stars, leaving only the relatively recent and now-abandoned Syndic facility orbiting Padronis. Someday, Padronis would go nova again, and that facility would be blown away as well, but the fleet’s sensors had analyzed the star’s outer shell and concluded that the date of that event was still comfortably distant in the future.

  “Imagine having to be the crew on that thing,” Geary remarked to Desjani, indicating the abandoned Syndic facility on his display. “They needed an emergency station here when lots of ships had to pass through using jump drives, but those on it must have felt murderously isolated. This is as close to nothing as any star system can be.”

  She grimaced and nodded. “The only thing worse would be getting stuck in a black-hole system, though no one but science geeks would be likely to do that. I’ll lay you odds they crewed the station here using criminals. Go to a labor camp for years or go to Padronis. I wonder how many chose the labor camp.”

  “I think I would’ve.” Geary was about to add something else when his display flickered, then vanished completely as the lights on Dauntless’s bridge dimmed.

  “What happened?” Desjani demanded of her bridge crew, punching her own nonresponsive controls to try to get status reports.

  “Emergency system shutdown,” a watch-stander reported, his voice startled. “As far as I can tell just about everything on the ship has gone off-line except for the emergency backups.”

  “Why?”

  “Cause unknown, Captain. I—Wait. Engineering is using the sound-powered comm system to update us. They say the power core did an emergency crash. They’re running evaluations on everything before bringing it back online.”

  Desjani clenched her fists. “What could have caused the emergency crash?”

  The engineering watch-stander looked pale under the dimmer emergency lighting. “Unknown as yet. Thank the living stars the core managed to shut itself down, Captain. Anything that would trigger an emergency crash would be as serious as it gets.”

  Geary spoke into the silence that followed that report. “We just narrowly avoided a power-core failure?”

  “Looks like it. A catastrophic power-core failure.” Desjani’s face was grim as she turned to her watch-standers. “I want full status reports from all departments as soon as possible and an estimated time from engineering to restart the core whenever they can provide one.”

  “Do we have any communications with the rest of the fleet?” Geary asked.

  “Emergency systems are online, sir. Voice only, no data net.”

  “Notify the rest of the fleet what happened to us.”

  “Yes, sir.” The communications watch paused, then drew in a shocked breath. “Sir, we have a message from Daring reporting that Lorica suffered a power-core failure at the same time as our system shutdown. Lorica was totally destroyed. No signs of survivors.”

  One such failure in routine circumstances would be a rare but-not-impossible event. Two at the exact same time could only mean sabotage. Whoever had been planting worms in the fleet’s systems had struck again.

  “Bastards,” Desjani breathed, her jaw muscles standing out. Raising her voice, she spoke with what Geary thought was amazing control. “Inform engineering that the likely cause of the emergency crash of the power core was a worm in the operating systems.”

  All of the watch-standers stared back at her, their expressions horrified, then the engineering watch hastily nodded. “Yes, Captain.”

  “Captain Geary,” the operations watch-stander called. “Daring is asking what instructions to relay to the rest of the fleet. Should they maintain station on Dauntless even if she drifts off course and speed?”

  That had the virtue of being a relatively simple decision. Maneuvering one ship back into position would cost a lot less in fuel than having the entire fleet trying to match anything Dauntless did while her own propulsion and maneuvering systems were shut down. “Tell Daring to assume role as fleet guide until Dauntless gets power back.”

  It was less than twenty minutes before Dauntless’s systems-security officer called the bridge, but it felt like the longest twenty minutes of Geary’s life. It was easy to overlook how accustomed he was to being able to scan a display and see everything he needed to see, easy until that display was gone and nothing could be seen in front of his fleet command seat but the part of Dauntless’s bridge visible from that angle. There weren’t any physical windows, of course, not here deep within Dauntless’s hull, and not on the outer hull, either. That arrangement made a great deal of sense in terms of maintaining hull strength and integrity, but at times like this even a single small window would have been a welcome connection to the rest of the fleet.

  “We found it, Captain Desjani,” the systems officer reported, his voice sounding oddly distant across the voice-powered emergency circuit. “The worm tried to induce core overload failure, but our safety backups managed to crash the core first.”

  “Do you have any idea why Lorica’s safety backups didn’t manage to save her?” Desjani asked.

  “I can only guess, Captain. Operating systems are hugely complex, so every ship’s operating systems are subtly different even when they’re supposed to be identical. Lorica’s safety backups may have been just enough dissimilar to add up to a critical difference. Or maybe the attempted overload instructions came during the right portion of the millisecond when our backups were watching for something like that, but not when Lorica’s were. I don’t want to imply carelessness by the dead, but it’s possible that Lorica’s systems people hadn’t tweaked their safety backups recently enough. There’s just no telling, and we’ll probably never know since I assume there’s not enough left of Lorica to tell us anything.”

  Desjani closed her eyes momentarily, her lips moving in a brief prayer. Geary understood how she felt. Dauntless’s survival had been a near thing. “Are you certain,” she demanded of her officer, “that there’s nothing else lurking in the systems?”

  “We’ve found nothing else, Captain.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “Yes, Captain! I mean, no, Captain! If there were any other worms, we’d have found them. I’d bet my life on it.”

  Desjani’s lips curled upward at the edges in a humorless smile. “That’s exactly what you’re doing. Make certain that worm is completely eliminated and keep looking for other threats in our systems. Notify me when you and the chief engineer feel comfortable with restarting the power core.”

  “Yes, Captain. Estimated time is another fifteen minutes.”

  She slumped back in her command seat, then looked around the bridge. “At ease
, everyone. It’ll be another fifteen minutes. Be ready to hit the deck running when the power comes back on.”

  Geary stared at the nearest bulkhead, lacking the welcome distractions of dealing with the immediate problems Desjani and her crew had to address. “We have to find the people responsible for this,” he finally muttered to Desjani out of frustration. “This time they’ve succeeded in destroying one of our ships.”

  “But why Lorica?” Desjani asked in a very quiet voice. “Do you have any idea?”

  “Yeah.” Commander Gaes, Lorica’s commanding officer, had been the one to warn him about the first worm in the fleet. She’d known something, and apparently that something had been too much for whoever was behind the worms.

  Desjani nodded, watching Geary. “Gaes went with Falco, but since Lorica rejoined the fleet, she’s been a supporter of yours. Her contacts with dissident officers must have been useful to you.”

  “They were. Apparently I wasn’t the only one to think so.”

  “We’ll get the ones responsible for this, Captain Geary,” Desjani promised. “Someone will know who did it and they’ll surely talk now.”

  He wasn’t so certain of that. Worms designed to directly destroy Alliance ships would have aroused protests if knowledge of them had been spread to more than a very few people, and those few people were now aware that exposing themselves would guarantee firing squads. They waited silently after that. With everything except emergency systems down, the few working lights dim, the bridge began to feel claustrophobic. Geary wondered if the temperature was getting as warm as his imagination insisted, whether the air was becoming fouler. He knew emergency backups would power essential functions for much longer than it had been since the core crashed, though, so Geary made an effort to relax and look unconcerned.

  “Power-core systems have been scrubbed,” the welcome report finally arrived. “The worm responsible for the shutdown is confirmed gone. Request permission for restart of power core.”

  “Do it,” Desjani snapped. A few minutes later the lights on the bridge brightened, and the vent fans hummed a little stronger. Less than a minute after that, the displays reappeared floating in front of everyone. “Get us back where we belong,” she ordered the maneuvering watch. “We probably drifted a little out of position relative to the other ships. Take station on Daring and we’ll reassume guide duties for the fleet.”

  The reappearance of his displays helped a lot. Geary had been fighting down an irrational worry that more ships had been lost, and he just hadn’t been told. Now he could confirm that only Lorica was gone. As if that was good news. Checking the reports from the ships closest to Lorica when she’d exploded, Geary grimaced. “No survivors.”

  “If there had been survivors, they would have had to have ejected their escape pods prior to the core overload,” Desjani pointed out. “They wouldn’t have survived for long after that once the rest of the fleet realized what that implied.”

  She was right, of course, but that didn’t help much. Taking a deep breath, Geary called up a communications window and broadcast to the fleet. “This is Captain Geary. Dauntless and everyone on her are safe. We’re investigating the cause of the core overload on Lorica and the core crash on Dauntless. Anyone with any information regarding either incident please forward it to me immediately.”

  Investigating. A big word for something unlikely to produce any results. If the ones responsible for this worm were as diligent as they’d been with earlier worms, there’d be absolutely no identifiers that could be used to trace the worm back to its origin. Knowing that, Geary had to restrain himself from walking to the nearest bulkhead and punching it in aggravation.

  Instead, he brought up his message queue, not expecting to see the answers he needed but still looking for distractions. Geary frowned as he noticed all of the high-priority messages already blinking in his queue. They must have all been put into the fleet net while Dauntless’s systems were down, meaning they wouldn’t be answers to his request for information. It would take forever to get through all of them, and most were probably just variations on “what happened” and “are you all right?”

  Then he stopped and stared.

  One of the messages was tagged as being from Lorica.

  “Captain Desjani, can you confirm the time of Lorica’s destruction for me?” Geary asked. She gave him a puzzled glance, clearly wondering why that information was important at the moment.

  “Our own power core did its emergency crash at 1412. According to system records we received from the rest of the fleet, Lorica blew up at… two point seven seconds past 1412.”

  Geary checked the message again. “I have a message in my queue from Lorica with a transmission time of 1415.”

  “Sir?” Desjani stepped over beside him, leaned over Geary’s shoulder to view his display, then tapped some controls next to his hand. “The fleet communications net sees the message as having been received for transmission after 1414. It was sent on the next full minute.” She straightened and glared at her communications watch. “How could the communications system see a message as having been received from Lorica well after that ship was destroyed?”

  “It wouldn’t have, Captain. Even if it was delayed in delivery, the system would log when it was actually sent.” The watch-stander looked briefly baffled, then nodded as understanding came. “The message had to have been parked and hidden in the system. People aren’t supposed to do that, but there are several ways to manage it. Lorica, or somebody on Lorica, sent that message out at some earlier time into the comm-system net but had it concealed under a protocol that wouldn’t make it visible to the system until something happened, like a certain time arrived.”

  Geary shook his head. “Why would Lorica have done that?” He could think of a number of reasons why someone who had screwed up would want a message time to be different from when it was actually sent, but couldn’t understand what might have prompted someone on Lorica to set that up. Calling up the message, Geary scanned it. It wasn’t actually a message, but a big dump of code. “Captain Desjani, who can tell me what this is?”

  She eyed it, then tapped some more controls. “With your permission I’ll get an assessment from my systems-security officer before we send this anywhere else, sir. We don’t know what might be in it.”

  He felt a momentary surge of fear and anger at himself. “This could be the worm that almost destroyed us?”

  “Not sent that way,” Desjani replied with a shake of her head. “The filters and firewalls in this part of the comm system don’t let anything active through. Trying to send the worm this way would be like shooting a picture of a missile at us instead of the actual missile. If that’s what this is. My systems people should be able to tell.”

  The response came fairly quickly, the face of Desjani’s systems-security officer appearing in small windows on both her and Geary’s displays. The lieutenant commander seemed stunned. “Sir, Captain, I mean, uh… that message from Lorica. It’s the coding for the first worm, the one that would’ve messed with every ships’ jump drives.”

  “That worm came from Lorica?” Geary felt a deep sense of disappointment. He’d trusted Commander Gaes, given her a second chance, and yet—

  “No, sir. The message is a copy of the first worm, with the system-tracking information and originating ship’s identity still on it. I have no idea how Lorica got a copy of that.” Dauntless’s systems-security officer swallowed nervously. “According to what’s in Lorica’s transmission, that worm originally came from Inspire, sir.”

  EIGHT

  Geary felt a coldness spreading through him. “You’re certain? There’s no doubt?”

  “Not if that message is real, sir. It could’ve been faked, of course, though it’d be very hard to construct a false system-tracking record that authentic-looking. But to me it looks like someone on Lorica discovered where that worm came from and had a message containing the information planted in the comm system under a dead man release, so if the c
ruiser registered as destroyed, the message was sent.”

  So Commander Gaes had known who was responsible but had kept that information close for reasons that would never be known now. But she had also made certain that if she was silenced, then the truth would come out.

  Desjani’s face was flushed with rage. “This is good enough cause to get Kila into an interrogation room and see what she really knows about it.”

  “Yeah,” Geary agreed, thinking of the dead on Lorica and already mentally phrasing his orders to a firing squad for Captain Kila, but as he reached for his controls to order the Marines on Inspire to act, another hand came down on his, and Victoria Rione’s voice spoke intensely.

  “Wait. You want to make certain you get her.”

  Geary rounded on Rione, wondering when she’d arrived on the bridge and gotten close enough to overhear his and Desjani’s conversation. But before he could speak, Desjani did.

  “If we want to be certain we get her, then we do it as fast as possible!” Desjani whispered vehemently.

  “That woman tried to destroy my ship!”

  “I know what she tried to do!” Rione whispered back angrily. “Listen to me! Kila has done a magnificent job of covering her tracks. Her actions clearly include contingency plans for eliminating evidence and potential witnesses against her, as we saw in Lakota when the shuttle carrying those two officers was destroyed. If we don’t lay a careful trap, she might already have some plan in place for dealing with something like this.”

  Geary fought down his own desire for instant vengeance, recognizing the truth in Rione’s advice. “What do you suggest? We can’t let her keep operating.”

  “No.” Rione paused in thought. “One hour. That’s enough time to set up our own trap. Call a fleet conference in one hour. Kila will believe that means you still have no idea who’s responsible for what happened to Lorica and almost happened to Dauntless. She’ll be expecting another ineffective appeal for anyone who knows anything to come forward. If we can keep her in ignorance of this evidence until then, we can prepare a trap she won’t be able to avoid.”