by Mel Keegan
“Barb, deactivate the mines,” Vaurien said simply. “We’re looking at a hulk full of the dead. Etienne, scan for escape pods.”
Jazinsky’s hand extended, touched a single key, and in numerous displays one of the three red status bars returned to amber. “Survivors?” She looked up and back at Vaurien. “It’s hot as hell in there, but somebody could have gotten into armor.”
The AI said in its infuriatingly calm tone, “No escape pods are in sensor range. Swarm 4 is returning to dormancy.”
“The crew didn’t have time to punch out,” Travers guessed. He was cold, right through to his bone marrow, just short of shivering. “It would’ve been like trying to get off the Intrepid, when the Echo gunship ... no time.” He could say no more.
“Etienne,” Vaurien said tiredly, “launch a gang of survey drones. I want a vid feed of the interior, as soon as the Arago fields collapse.”
“Commander London,” Shapiro was saying gravely, “the weapon has been deactivated. You may shut down your Arago generators at will.”
No response. Travers had expected none. Marin’s face was white in the backwash from the navtank and Neil laid an arm across his shoulders, pulled him closer as Etienne reported,
“Drones deployed. Monitoring Arago shielding. Standby.”
The energy patterns issuing from the London fluttered wildly as Jazinsky got to her feet. She shoved the chair away. “There goes a generator … and another.”
“If anyone’s alive in there, they’re not receiving comm.” Marin forced his tongue around the words. “The Aragos were probably left on automatic … the core AI would have scrammed, and it didn’t reboot.”
It was a safe bet. Travers’s limbs felt leaden and he leaned on the side of the tank, merely listening as Etienne reported, “Arago activity has ceased. Survey drones are inserting. Standby for internal vidfeed.”
“Send it to the tank.” Vaurien’s face had settled into a mask through which no expression showed. He beckoned Travers closer. “Neil, Mick … nobody knows the inside of a super-carrier better than you do. Wrangle these drones. If there’s survivors, find them.”
The Ops room settled to a bleak quiet into which the loop whispered sporadically. Ingersol had the Weimanns cycled back up to readiness and the tug pilots were merely waiting for orders. Travers and Vidal watched the feed from a gang of ten drones which streamed in through rents in the crumpled hull. The images were harsh, grainy, sheeted out by the distortion of dangerous radiation levels. The dead were everywhere; Travers saw nothing alive.
Alexis Rusch swore softly, the first time Travers had heard an expletive from her. “Time,” she murmured, eyes closed, “to make an end. Please gods, tell me there was nothing we could do for them.”
“Nothing.” Shapiro set a hand on her shoulder. “Colonel Carvalho signed the death warrant for this ship. We knew he would. And even if we could have discouraged him here, she’d have flown into another swarm at Borushek or at Omaru, or right back here at Jagreth in a week or a month. I don’t believe Carvalho would ever have accepted the alternative – strategic withdrawal, cease fire, negotiation. His bone-headedness was the reason the Confederacy sent him here. Andrew Grimes would have backed off after the first couple of casualties and run home with reports of a terror weapon. Carvalho? In his mind no such weapon existed, Alexis, just as the Zunshu are a fraud and we colonials are a rabble of inbred, craven mutineers who deserve punishment.”
One screen was still displaying battlefield tactical data from the perspective of the Wastrel. Alone in it, swamped by the vastness of it, the icon marking the position of the London extinguished.
“Intruders neutralized,” Etienne said unnecessarily and without a hint of emotion.
Shapiro passed a hand over his eyes. He turned toward Vaurien and Jazinsky with a hard, bitter expression. “Have the Mako replace the mines that were destroyed.”
“Sergei is already under contract,” Vaurien assured him. “Pay him enough and you can trust him.”
“And who’s paying him now?” Vidal wondered.
“President Prendergast is picking up this particular bill,” Shapiro said wearily. “It might be the first time Captain van Donne has performed legitimate work for legitimate pay.”
The vid feed rolled on, and on, ten images from ten drones hunting through the wreck for any sign of a sealed compartment, a figure in armor, a distress call, even a flashlight in the gloom of the dead hulk. There was nothing, and the longer the drones searched, the less Travers expected to see any sign of life.
From the bow quarter the drones were working their way steadily aft to the engine deck, and with every minute the radiation levels climbed until they were too high even for man-portable armor to protect living tissue. Few compartments were even worth searching; most were collapsed, depressurized, so sizzling hot, human life would have been extinguished long before. The drones were still working, but one by one they were becoming more unpredictable as Travers watched, until two went offline altogether. Two more began to stutter.
“Rick, we lost the survey drones,” Ingersol warned. “They’re way too hot to bring them back home now. It’s not even worth trying to decontaminate ’em.”
“Bill me,” Shapiro whispered.
“Bill Prendergast.” Vidal turned his back on the tank and rubbed his eyes hard enough to leave them bloodshot.
“Are we done?” Vaurien looked up from the handy where he was running routine Wastrel data.
“We’re done.” Travers could not look at the vid feed any longer.
“Then, we’re leaving,” Richard said in a tone brooking no argument.
“If we’re not heading back in to Jagreth, give me two minutes,” Shapiro said with an uncharacteristic grimace. “Fortunately, the signal lag here is too long to chat – I’ll message Prendergast: engagement over, London destroyed, no escape pods, no survivors. She might have been attempting a Weimann jump when she was overtaken by the weapon.” He drew a long deep breath, held it, exhaled it as a sigh. “This could have been better.”
“You hoped to save the carrier?” Marin was surprised.
“Perhaps I hoped to salvage some … human souls.” Shapiro looked away. “It’s a crass waste of life, and it shouldn’t be happening.”
An odd numbness had overtaken Travers, as if he had smoked the whole pack of Mountain Mists two at a time, in the space of a few minutes. He blinked at the tank, which was empty now save for the markers denoting the civilian comm beacons, an emergency refuge platform, an infectious diseases lab parked on station keeping in the middle of a billion square kilometers of empty space.
Silence settled over the Ops room, punctuated by the AI, the chatter of the techs’ loop, the whisper of cooling fans on countless machines. Travers’s mind seemed to resist any attempt to function properly and his eyes were hot, sore, as he looked into the void of the navtank. If there was supposed to be some sense of elation in the victory, he felt none of it. He might have been hollow inside and was grateful for Marin’s arm, which slung heavily across his back.
At last it was Tully Ingersol who said from the engine deck, “We’re still primed for Weimann ignition, Rick. Can we, uh, get out of here?”
And Vaurien stirred with a supreme effort. “Yeah.” He glanced at Shapiro, who answered with a mute nod. “Yuval, Tully … take us to Alshie’nya.”
Chapter Ten
Alshie’nya
If Travers did not know better, he would have assumed the Carellan Djerun was being gutted as if she were on her way to a ship breaker’s yard. Nothing could be further from the truth, but five of her labs were stripped bare to the bulkheads and four of her staterooms were so empty, they might never have been occupied.
Equipment and personal effects were trundling away on innumerable Arago sleds, headed aft to the cargo hatches from which a squadron of freight handling drones made the short crossing between the Carellan and Lai’a. They would shuttle back and forth until the Resalq were done and the habitation m
odule aboard Lai’a was loaded; and from everything Travers was seeing as he and Marin made their way through the science vessel, Lai’a must be close to loaded already.
An odd shiver rushed through him. The Mercury would be in the same last-minute frenzy of preparations, and the moment the Wastrel had left the Jagreth system, Jazinsky began to pull the equipment out of her labs, ready for transport. By now the stateroom she and Vaurien shared was reduced to a pile of cases, and freight drones began their shuttle service within minutes of the Wastrel and the Carellan docking. Travers had never seen either ship in such disarray. He and Marin still needed to pack, but a mention of this to Curtis inspired only a shrug. Like Vidal, Rabelais, Queneau, even Tonio Teniko, they possessed too little for packing to be a challenge.
In fact, the Resalq ships were already on standby to leave. Etienne had synched itself with the core AIs aboard the Carellan and the Mercury, and it had touched base with Lai’a minutes before the Wastrel’s drive engines shut down. A query from Marin, and Etienne briefed them without drama. The Sherratts were passing command of Mark’s ships to trustees from Riga and Saraine, just as the Wastrel would be under Tully Ingersol until Lai’a returned. One of the Resalq vessels was assigned to stand by the Freyana, which Emil Kulich had taken out as a colony ship, while the Carellan herself maintained a subtle, whisper-quiet surveillance on Saraine. Like the Wastrel, their priority was to keep themselves out of trouble.
And Lai’a, Travers realized, was waiting. It was keeping no explicit countdown to launch – if such a countdown was in progress, the status boards on the Wastrel would have shown it – but the habitation module was finished, fitted, and a squadron of freight drones never paused. The hull of the old, wrecked Fleet cruiser Apollo was fully cocooned in Zunshu armor, snug against the belly of the big ship; a web of Arago fields would spin about it, guarding it against the appalling gravities of the passage through a Hellgate event, and also from the hot, acid fallout of its own engines. A glimpse of the naked, seething hyper-Weimann drive made Travers’s skin crawl. For every skerrick of respect he felt for the work done by Mark Sherratt, Jazinsky and Teniko, he acknowledged another skerrick of healthy dread.
“Everything’s disappearing,” Marin said quietly as they stepped aside, flattened out against a bulkhead to let another Arago sled go by, laden with equipment torn out of someone’s lab.
Probably Dario’s lab, Travers thought, since several of the code-sealed cases looked shock proof, blast proof, as close to indestructible as a machine case could be while still wearing arrays of stickers proclaiming it fragile. The contents would be half-dismembered Zunshu tech, the last segment in a lifetime’s work. Lai’a was shipping out before the Sherratts were finished. And Marin was right. Everything Travers knew seemed to be in the process of being dismantled, sent away, and it was small comfort to know it would all be reassembled aboard Lai’a.
“If you want to know the truth, it sets my teeth on edge. It …reminds me.” Mark Sherratt’s voice was sharp with a little humor, but it was a rueful sound.
“Reminds you?” Travers wondered as the sled went by and he and Marin unpeeled themselves from the bulkhead.
“Of the time when every Resalq ship was an overstuffed chaos,” Curtis said thoughtfully, “always running, never a chance to stop long enough in one place to unpack before you had to bug out and vanish.”
“Yes.” Mark was standing in a doorway, six meters further forward, arms folded on the breast of a familiar burgundy and green shirt, the lion’s mane of dark gold hair loose around his shoulders. “This is very like the years we spent as fugitives. Save that these ships are in excellent repair!” He gave Marin a thoughtful look. “A very young Resalq, not yet twenty years old, recently asked me, during the years of the Car’am anha, why did we ‘ancients’ not just load up a ship and head out across the unexplored vastness of the galaxy, far beyond the reach of the Zunshu, and simply found a new homeworld.”
“It’s a good question,” Travers allowed. In fact, the same had occurred to him.
“And if we’d been able to do it, we would have,” Mark told him – the same answer he would have given the child. “But our ships were close to broken, Neil. The big ones were destroyed. Anything the size of the Wastrel or the super-carriers soon went the way of the London, prey to the same breed of gravity weapon. What we had left were civilian vessels that didn’t possess the range, and exactly five freighters which would certainly have made a long-haul voyage, if they were set up as colony ships … and this was actually the plan, for many years.” He shook his head over the memory. “Much of the work we did in those early days – prospecting, mining, taking on water, food, raw materials – was invested in the idea of heading out.
“Needless to say, we lost the freighters one by one. The Zunshu took two of them; another was crippled by structural failure beyond our ability to repair without a dockyard, especially since we were on the run. She was abandoned. The fourth was contaminated, every part of her, in an industrial accident aboard. She was refining fuel to keep the rest of us flying. Her machinery was overworked and under-serviced; the inevitable happened, and a lot of technicians perished, taking with them vital skills and experience. The fifth ship was the Raishenne, of course, and she’s still out there. Emil Kulich hopes to find her, and I hope he does, though I’m afraid he’ll find an epitaph written in wreckage.”
“The story you just heard sounds simple,” Marin said fatalistically, “but it spans many decades. It doesn’t make pretty reading.”
“We couldn’t do the long hauls, but we could hop from system to system, trying to outfit a colony ship as we went.” The memories were haunting. To Mark, Travers realized, with the phenomenal memory which was a product of the different brain structure, once he accessed these memories, the Car’am anha must seem like yesterday. “We did actually limp our way out of the most dangerous space,” he said at last, “which is the reason enough of us survived to keep the gene pool viable, and also to let the Deep Sky settle down into the absolute quiet that made the Zunshu lose interest in it for long enough for humans to colonize these worlds. But as for having the resources left, or the skills, to launch a colony ship?” He favored Travers and Marin with a rare smile. “If our ships had been bigger, better, we’d have been long gone when humans arrived in these worlds. Your people would have been alone in the Deep Sky.”
But the Zunshu would still be striking, Travers thought, and without benefit of the elder technology, humans would have gone scuttling back to the Middle Heavens, telling of a demon who lived in the dark near Hellgate. Mark knew this as well as anyone, there was no need to say it.
He had been looking tired for some time, careworn, Travers thought, but at least he seemed relaxed this evening, as if he had enjoyed ten hours of sound sleep. A few of the shadows had left his face and he was smiling as he embraced Marin, kissed his cheek in passing.
“Are we late?” Marin was asking.
“I don’t think you could be late,” Mark said easily. “There’s no schedule to be kept now – not for me, anyway. I’m done.”
“Done?” Marin looked up at him. “Meaning…?”
“Nothing left to do.” Mark stepped aside, beckoning them into the compartment he had opened up – an unoccupied cabin. “My labs are all in crates, my data is transferred, my AI has been installed aboard Lai’a. My kids are still working their tails off to shove their whole lives into boxes, but I finished two hours ago. A few experiments are still running, a lot of data is cooking, but as for me? A loaf of bread, a jug of wine...”
“A book of verse and thou beside me, singing in the wilderness,” Marin said enigmatically as he stepped into the compartment, which was dim, lit by a dozen fat, smokeless candles and smelt sweet, woody, with the incense the Resalq liked best.
The reference was too obscure for Travers. He lifted a brow at Marin, but Curtis only smiled. “Only a poem … not quite a soldier’s poem.” He glanced around the room with appreciation. “Nice, Mark.”
“Best I can do at short notice. Even these ought to be packed.” Mark was fingering a candlestick, very old, very precious, hand-worked in some clay that fired black and bright as obsidian. It was a Resalq figure, naked, arms uplifted to hold the candle.
“I’ll help you get it all together,” Marin promised, “afterward … speaking of which, we’re missing someone. He decided to postpone?”
“Or just not do it at all?” Travers examined the rich embroidery on the cushions strewn on the two couches in the candlelight. A carpet was unrolled between them. On a little antique table stood an incense burner, heavy, bronze – a dragon pluming smoke through both elaborate nostrils; and that smoke had begun to buzz in Travers’s head. “What is this stuff?”
“Charab,” Marin told him. He had taken one long look at the contents of the table, and then deliberately turned away as if too many memories pressed in on him, too close for comfort. “A Resalq ‘spice’ – and mild by comparison with the crap you’ll breathe in any danceshop, much less a sexshop. But it’ll get to you. It’s very old, and fortunately it affects the human brain too.”
“Hallucinogen?” Travers asked with all due caution.
“Oh, it’ll inspire dreams,” Mark allowed. “It’s a soporific, actually; most people need something to make them relax, unwind, before they’re capable of even admitting they have some kind of psychosis, much less being able to grapple with it, wrestle it down.”
“How’d you like to be phobic about big hairy spiders,” Travers said thoughtfully, “and then be asked to cosy up with a bunch of them.”
“Exactly.” Mark adjusted the candles, trimming this one, that one, lighting another, and tripped an audio track.
Travers might have been expecting some kind of ambient music but at first he heard nothing at all. Then he felt it, a vibration through his bones. Big, bass speakers were issuing sub-etherics; together with the charab, they would shift brainwave patterns. He could feel it himself, a ‘drifty’ sensation, the inability to focus on any specific thought while memories he had not recalled in years came swimming back.