Event Horizon (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  The analogy was stinging. Travers watched, fascinated, horrified, as the spearhead drove into the midst of a swarm it could not even see. He counted seconds as the ships plowed on, and then the first was gone; and the second. His belly turned over and he stopped counting.

  “Swarm 4 has acquired the super-carrier,” Etienne reported.

  “Any change in the London’s vector?” Travers watched Vidal fumble for a pack of Mountain Mists, which he was not supposed to be smoking. A lighter flicked several times before the sweet scents of kip grass and roses wafted on the too-warm, too-still air of the Ops room. When Mick offered Marin the pack and lighter, he accepted them. Like Travers he rarely smoked, but kip grass had its time and place. Marin took a deep drag on a cigarette and passed pack and lighter on to Travers.

  The navtank was looking sparse. Only a handful of marker icons remained. Two cruisers, a frigate, the London itself, plus the two non-combatants. The medical and engineering vessels were well back now, falling deliberately further astern as the displays refreshed, relaying data pulses across a distance comparable to the spaces between planetary orbits. And those ships had to be loaded with Confederate observers, Travers thought as the kip grass dulled his raw nerve endings. Perhaps even a senator from Earth would be aboard, like Charleston Aimes Rutherford, expecting to witness a glorious victory, a punitive strike against a colony world.

  “Etienne, does the swarm have target lock on the non-combatants?” Jazinsky wondered.

  “Negative,” the AI said calmly. “They remain out of range.”

  “Did we want a hospital and a workshop imploded?” Jon Kim’s voice was hoarse. Travers passed him the Mountain Mist, and he lit one with a grimace of gratitude.

  “Of course we don’t want non-combatants destroyed,” Rusch told him. “In fact, it’s very much to our service if they make a survival run and carry the intelligence back to the Middle Heavens.”

  “They’ll form up with the Avenger, without any doubt,” Shapiro went on. “Someone like Colonel Carvalho – or like Andrew Grimes, if we’re incredibly lucky – will dissect the data. Based on the analysis, the Avenger should be recalled to the homeworlds, for their defense.”

  “Just in case,” Vidal finished sourly, “we decide to go assault Mars and Earth with a weapon they can’t see, can’t shoot out of the sky, and sure as hell can’t understand.”

  “Oh, they can understand it,” Jazinsky argued. “They’re wicked, not stupid. Military scientists will know a gravity weapon when they see one. They’re going to run the visual and gravimetric data backwards and sideways, they’ll see implosions, not explosions. They’ll assume we stumbled over something Resalq and reverse-engineered it.”

  “They’re only a little wrong.” Vaurien rubbed his palms together, still intent on the tank. “Not Resalq. Zunshu. But then again, the Confederacy never believed the Zunshu exist. They were just the bogeyman a lot of spineless, avaricious colonials tried to use to scare the Earthers out of the Deep Sky –”

  “And in the end it may actually work.” Travers plumed dragon’s breath from both nostrils. “It’s Zunshu tech they ought to be running away from right now.”

  “They … might be,” Vidal said slowly. “At least, the tender just vamoosed.”

  A blue exclamation point tagged with time and positional coordinates had replaced the red marker icon. It was the label for the site of a Weimann jump, and Marin lifted a brow at Rusch.

  “Any chance what’s left of the battle group might bug out, now they’ve been hurt badly?”

  But Vaurien’s head was shaking slowly. “Ten to one, that was just the messenger boys making their run. The carrier’s not coming about. Carvalho’s going to push it. What a surprise.”

  “They’re splitting up,” Vidal added sharply.

  The remaining vessels, including the London itself, had spread apart. The medical ship was holding well back while the small ships dropped under the super-carrier to protect her belly. The next data pulse inspired flocks of gold and blue sparkles around the tank’s icons as the London opened up with every chain gun and railgun she possessed.

  The power of a super-carrier was overwhelming, appalling, exhilarating, unspeakable. It was all too obvious what Carvalho was doing. Like any old Fleet warhorse, he assumed a knowable, human enemy was skulking in the shadows, sniping like a coward; and he would punish that coward.

  “They’re in the swarm.” Jazinsky’s voice was a hoarse whisper.

  “Are their gunners hitting anything?” Queneau asked. “Do we know if they’re taking out any of the mines?”

  “I’m seeing gravity spikes here and there.” Vidal dove a hand through the threedee haze, calling fresh data to the display. “I’d estimate they’ve hit eight, maybe ten, by random chance.”

  “How many mines in the swarm?” Rabelais asked tersely.

  “You mean, are there enough left to stop the London?” Jazinsky dragged her shoulders square. “Plenty. Here at Jagreth, we had the Mako lay down about 700 in each field. Back at Velcastra, we seeded about half that many, and we saw a number of duds. Mines that never woke up, some that came online but failed to acquire a target. They’re delicate little bastards. We learned from what we saw at Velcastra – we don’t want to take unnecessary chances, so we bulked up the number here to compensate for the predictable duds.”

  The red arrowhead marking the position of the cruiser winked off. Marin took a sharp breath but before he could speak the marker belonging to the frigate was gone. The London was still firing, but the last frigate had stopped.

  Travers came closer, leaning on the tank. “This one’s quit.”

  “Disabled,” Marin guessed. “Say, a near miss. They nailed a mine too close to their own hull for comfort, it implodes too far off to take the ship in one bite … they’re drifting, waiting for a couple more to latch onto them.” Shadows gathered in his face. “It just delays the inevitable, gives the poor sods one more minute of useless, paralyzing fear.”

  His eyes closed and Travers saw him physically wrestle with some old Resalq discipline which might banish his personal goblins. Neil took a step closer, set a hand on his arm, though he said nothing.

  “They could call the tender back,” Queneau whispered.

  “They could, but if the tender skipper’s got a shred of sense, he or she won’t make a move.” With a sweep of his hand, Vidal indicated the swarm. “To reach whatever’s left of the frigate, they’d have to fly clean through the minefield. They’d never even get close.”

  And a moment later the question was academic. The frigate’s marker icon winked off, leaving the London completely alone. A whisper in the background, Shapiro gave Prendergast a terse update while Marin forcibly dragged himself back to the present. He looked up at Travers with a minute nod: I’m all right. Travers lifted a skeptical brow at him before they both returned to the tank.

  “The President would like to know,” Shapiro asked, “if the London is quitting Jagreth space.”

  “She’s certainly changing vector,” Vidal said shrewdly. “It’s starting to look like Carvalho wants to cut across the system, come in again from another shipping road.”

  “Can he do that?” Rabelais looked from Jazinsky to Vidal and back.

  “He can try. If he does, he’ll fly right into another swarm.” She was running numbers in a handy, analyzing the apparent flightpath.

  Vidal made bitter, cynical noises. “He’s not going to get the chance. He’s in this swarm – he’s been in it for almost three minutes now, he just doesn’t know it.”

  “But surely he should be gone,” Jon Kim muttered. “Why isn’t the London gone, if it’s in the swarm?”

  “A super-carrier has the most powerful Arago fields in the business.” Marin glanced across at him through the mauve haze of the display. “They’re just overdriven repulsion fields, the exact opposite of tractor function. Carvalho was expecting to be physically fired on, so he’s had his Aragos at max. The smaller ships would also be Arag
o shielded, but they don’t have the sheer brute force of a carrier.”

  “Weaker Aragos won’t do the job,” Travers said quietly. “We didn’t see any ship actually get into the swarm at Velcastra, because the Chicago stayed well out of the fight; her battle group made its own decision to self-destruct. The Chicago was the only ship with the power to hold off the swarm for a while. Mick?”

  “Right,” Vidal agreed. “You’re Ulrish, Jon. You didn’t serve a Fleet hitch, so you missed all this fun stuff. Missiles and shells get thrown away by shearing forces off the fields. The London has energy to waste – from what I’m seeing, she’s running Arago fields six layers deep.”

  “Like the Wastrel,” Jazinsky added, “when we go knocking on the door of a big Hellgate storm. The fields are holding the mines off the London, the way they’d block an incoming flight of missiles. The trouble is, those mines are on her like fleas. There’s no way to shake them off.”

  They were around her like gnats, Travers thought, surfing on the micro-gravities of her immense mass, while no sensor the London possessed was calibrated to detect objects under a meter in diameter. Even if Carvalho’s technicians glimpsed some hint of the truth and were able to adjust their equipment to register the swarm, they were powerless to get out of it now.

  “Complex Aragos,” Shapiro was saying thoughtfully, “might hold off the mines, but eventually Colonel Carvalho will throttle the generators back when the ship is assumed to be safe. They consume so much energy at maximum, even a super-carrier can’t sustain maximum cover for long.”

  “And Arago generators scram,” Travers added with a sudden chill, “before the Weimann drive activates.”

  Jazinsky’s face could have been carved from granite. “They’re mutually exclusive. The flux off competing Arago fields causes distortion in the e-space conduit before it can form properly. Ships get ripped open like tin cans. The London’s already dead, Jon, even though Carvalho has no way to know the swarm’s got him.”

  “But the mines can be deactivated,” Kim reasoned. “At Velcastra the Mako ran a patrol to make sure they’d gone dormant after the battle, and if any hadn’t, Captain van Donne had a deactivation code to shut them down. If the London surrendered, the swarm could be deactivated, couldn’t it?”

  “You’re up against the signal lag.” Vaurien looked speculatively at Shapiro. “Comm couldn’t reach him in time from here. If you want to do this Harrison, we need to jump the Wastrel out there, fast, warn him again … and pray he doesn’t shoot the messenger a second time. We can be in a slugging match before we know it.”

  “No law says we have to stand and fight,” Rusch said pointedly.

  Shapiro’s voice was grim indeed. “If Colonel Carvalho makes it away from Jagreth,we’ll only fight him again, and again, till somehow it’s over. Let him go today, and he’ll be back here, or he’ll try his luck at Borushek with another battle group, and another. The death toll will be horrifying before he’s done. This kind of carnage was never part of any plan.”

  “But the London techs might know about the swarm by now,” Jazinsky mused. “If they’re smart enough, someone on that ship should be configuring sensors right now, if they haven’t done it already. Even Carvalho might be forced to listen to reason, if he knew the score.”

  “Four thousand souls at stake,” Vidal added in a whisper.

  Marin’s head came up. “We can do this. Give Carvalho the warning. At least give him the option – surrender, and we deactivate the mines. Yes?”

  Vaurien’s tonguetip traced his lips as he looked at Shapiro. Travers held his breath, and a moment later Shapiro nodded. Neil took an involuntary step closer to Marin as Richard said, “All right. Just remember the signal delay. What we’re seeing now happened ten minutes ago. We don’t actually know where the London is at this moment. Tully?”

  “Yo. I been listening,” Ingersol assured him. “Sublight’s cranking up right now – Weimann ignition in 108 seconds.”

  “Yuval, plot a micro-jump solution,” Vaurien said levelly. “Just be bloody sure you put us out of range of the London’s guns.” He gave Jazinsky a dark glance. “The instant we drop out, confirm our IFF is transmitting, and the swarm is recognizing and ignoring us. We pick up any of those mines, and we’re history, same as them.”

  “Oh, I know it. They were my pet science project, remember?” She had pulled a chair up to the nearest workstation and her right hand flew over a keypad.

  The ship was driving hard even then. The deck thrummed with a heavy vibration suggesting Ingersol had taken the sublight engines out to a ten percent overrun factor, which was safe for a short, calculated period. A clock in the navtank was counting down to the jump.

  The AI’s voice was the only constant in the Ops room. “The London is turning to assume system exit vector.”

  “Christ,” Travers murmured, “he’s trying to leave. The swarm’s still on him, Mick?”

  “Like soldier ants all over your boots. I’m sure Carvalho doesn’t know they’re there. If he did, he’d be firing, trying to hit targets that’re so small, a super-carrier doesn’t own a gun that’ll do the job.”

  “He’ll know soon enough.” Jazinsky gestured vaguely. “If he drops his Aragos for a Weimann transition, it’s all over.”

  And no way existed under the laws of anyone’s physics, Travers thought feverishly, even for boosted comm to reach the London in time – even supposing Colonel Carvalho believed a word of the warning. More than likely he would assume an elaborate hoax and drive on out of the Jagreth system as his Weimanns cycled up to ignition.

  Ponderously, with three-second data refreshes, the London’s scarlet icon had turned, in company with the medical ship. Travers held his breath and hissed it through his teeth as the familiar blue exclamation point marked the exit of the small, cruiser-sized hospital.

  “The medical ship’s out.” Marin turned away from the tank. “That was a clean Weimann transition.”

  “They were just dead lucky.” Rusch’s face was haunted, almost gaunt, but she could not look away from the tank. “She was right on the fringe of the swarm, the mines didn’t get a lock on her.”

  And Ingersol: “Micro-jump in ten seconds. Standby … four. Three. Two. One.”

  The Wastrel gave an uncharacteristic lurch, seemed to pivot in freefall for several elongated moments and then lurched again. The plot in the navtank wheeled around and stabilized, displaying the new location, and Travers swallowed on a moment of nausea as Jazinsky said,

  “Our IFF is screaming … and we’re well out of range of the swarm, Richard.”

  “Be sure,” he insisted. “Be very, very sure.”

  “I am, goddamn it.” Her fists clenched on the workspace. “I see the little bastards, and they’re ignoring us. I also see the London. She – she’s wallowing like a hulk. Christ, Richard, it looks like she’s taken some major damage already. I’m reading some weird-ass energy signatures off her. Half of what I’m seeing makes no sense.”

  Vidal was working with the tank, and as Travers watched the threedee display switched from the familiar graphical representation to a compilation of long-range vid feeds. He was looking at the ship itself and Jazinsky was right, she was wallowing. If she was under power, Travers saw no evidence of it. Their view of her was from far astern and a little above, and her sterntubes were almost dark, just a hint of dull red still glowing deep within.

  Even now her guns were quiet. It was Roark Hubler who said, “If I was on that bucket, and I knew there was a bunch of ticks on me, shit, Mick, I’d be scratching hard enough to take my skin off.”

  “So would I.” Vidal looked back at Rusch and Shapiro. “They either don’t know about the swarm yet, or they don’t have enough power to run both Aragos and guns.”

  “And they’re pumping so much power into their fields, the generators must be close to melting down. They know they’re in deep bloody trouble, even if they don’t know what kind,” Jazinsky said tersely.

  As she spo
ke the energy signatures resonating off the London shifted, fluttered, and Vidal took a fresh set of readings. His voice was a hoarse whisper. “Shit, Richard – keep your distance. You saw that?”

  “The fields are going intermittent,” Jazinsky warned.

  “They’ve let at least one mine get too close,” Vidal added. “The generators’ll start to scram soon.”

  “Yuval,” Vaurien called into the loop, “safe distancing.” He turned toward Shapiro. “All yours, Harrison.”

  Shapiro was ready for it. “Commander London, this is General Harrison Shapiro. Commander London, acknowledge.”

  He called again and again, but the London did not respond. She was listing, drifting, and as she tumbled in space she turned enough to present a clear view of her starboard bow quarter. Travers felt his mouth fall open. There was no starboard bow quarter.

  “Mother of God,” Vidal murmured. “At least one mine got through the fields.”

  “One would do the job,” Jazinsky said gravely.

  “They probably had a field generator go on the fritz,” Ingersol said into the loop. “They’ll do that to you, if you run ’em too hard, too hot, for too long.”

  The implosion had erased a large part of the ship, and as Travers began to make sense of the confusion of data he saw that most of her was open to space. She was twisted along the spine, and the highband comm arrays had collapsed when the hull and frame rippled like the surface of a pond with the unspeakable forces of the implosion. The engine deck was intact but the drive was shut down. If any survivors were left aboard, they were quarantined in the high and aft decks, running the Arago generators at dangerous levels. Radiation levels were lethally high across most of the vessel and still rising.