* * *
“Status please, Minerva.”
“Showing green-green-green all across the board, ten-ten, constant.” There was a brief pause while supercooled circuits spoke to each other, and then: “Why? What else did you expect?”
“Uh, nothing, really. I just . . ”
“Wanted somebody else to talk to. Yes, Roj, dear. I quite understand.”
Roj Malin, lieutenant commander in the Fleet, was old enough and wise enough to know when he was being teased and could take it with the best of them; but he still wasn’t quite accustomed to taking that teasing from his ship rather than from his partners. Even though olympus-class brainship XM-14376, was as much of a partner as any crewman he had served with ... probably more so. Usually the brainships carried only their regular “brawns” as crew, but Roj was working with Minerva on irregular secondment for a whole slew of reasons, some of which they had been told and others which they guessed at. The principal reason, indeed the only one worth noting at all, could be summed up in one word.
Intelligence. His, hers, and Fleet military. They were “acting on information received,” as the jargon had it. Where the information had come from, and who it had been bribed or twisted out of, wasn’t his affair; and Minerva had made it quite plain during their brief shakedown that she didn’t want to know. That the information existed was enough, thank you very much. While Roj had been settling into his quarters, and after she had checked out what his responses might be with a few questions—some subtle and others not—Minerva had spent a cheerful quarter hour grousing about what had been done to her just-completed and not-yet-flown new hull shell during a high-speed refit at Port’s orbital facility.
She had put on makeup. Not feminine, especially, but theatrical, to make her look like something that she wasn’t. The olympus-class ships were cased in ablative armor both for military purposes and to give them full atmosphere capability. That was why they had picked an olympus for this mission: the sturdy subframing which carried the armor enabled Port’s tech squad to fit what Minerva called “all that junk outside.”
Roj had seen it and had known what it was. Makeup, all right. And war paint. She looked, and they both knew it, like a Khalian fencer-class frigate.
That brief, gossipy period while Roj and Minerva took each other’s measure was a crucial one for the mission about which neither of them yet knew. In the first week of their acquaintance, future tasking meant little either to them or to the Fleet rear admirals who were watching the forced relationship. The human mind that was Minerva, with emotions and opinions still present no matter how well she had been schooled in the controlling of them, retained the right to refuse this particular crewman and insist that she be assigned a regular brawn for regular duties. Roj was already a volunteer for CDR, covert deep reconnaissance—occasionally known as NASDAQ, nasty and sneaky, don’t ask questions—and it was only right that his ship, since only a brainship was truly fitted for such a mission, should also be a volunteer and satisfied with his or her partner.
Minerva was satisfied. The brain that had been born as part of a crippled body had been prime controller of three ships now, counting the new olympus. She had seen the retirement of many brawns and had borne the deaths of four; those, and many others, had served to make her cynical. Even judged by the unhuman lifespans of brain ships she was an old lady, although if the thought of age and her own death ever crossed her busy mind, it was dismissed as something not worth wasting time on. She had always survived before. There was no reason why that shouldn’t continue ... until she grew tired, anyway, and chose her own time and place to find rest. But not yet. Not just yet ...
And then came mission briefing, and Minerva was no longer so sure that she would have a choice in her own passing after all ...
* * *
“... and of course you are both already aware of the structural changes made to the XM14376’s outer hull,” said the commodore.
“That’s X-R-14376,sir,” Minerva corrected, and her voice was curt. Roj smiled with unabashed pride. “And yes, I am most definitely aware of the changes. The olympus-class is cumbersome enough, what with all the armor and atmosphere-entry shielding. When the transfer came up I hadn’t anticipated that it would mean being dressed like one of these Khalian barges on top of all else.” Her voice became speculative and thoughtful. “I wonder, do ordinary women feel like this when they’re pregnant ... ?”
Commodore Agato had been talking in vague generalities for half an hour now, and Roj could sense Minerva’s impatience with the way the briefing was being conducted. The commodore had the look of a man whose present duty was making him uneasy, and who was hiding his feelings behind the stiff formality that went with the tabs of flag rank and the impassive face that went with his Nihonji ancestry. Roj glanced at Minerva’s primary lens and winked quickly. Deep within the lens where only he could see it, an iris shutter contracted in response.
“Commodore, given my brawn’s specialization and the quantity of navigational data which Central have been porting to my core memories”—Roj suppressed a smile at the tone of voice Minerva was using—“I have taken the liberty of extrapolating various matters in connection with the forthcoming duty. Feel free to correct any errors in my supposition.”
Agato looked startled for an instant, then gathered himself together again and nodded. “Ahem,” he said. “Very well. Proceed ... and I shall interrupt as necessary.”
There were few interruptions. Minerva’s analysis was more accurate than the Admiralty office had been prepared for, almost certainly because someone much higher up had presumed that a new brain ship meant what it usually did, a new brain as well. They hadn’t taken into account Minerva’s years of experience on other ships or her increasingly cynical view of the Fleet, or ... or any one of a number of things.
“I would presume, firstly, Commodore Agato, that I have been chosen to simulate the Khalian fencer-class vessels because of my own current size, which nonetheless,” Minerva’s voice, initially as flat and dry as that of some Tech-group scientist presenting a learned paper, took on the merest hint of smugness, “belies the power I have at my disposal. Even in my present cumbersome and underequipped form, I am more than a match one-on-one for any but the largest ships likely to be found at the Khalian home world—and those I can outrun.”
“Home world .. .?” The commodore said it before Roj, but only by the barest instant.
“Of course home world. After that debacle at Target, the Fleet is more determined than ever to find where the Khalians come from, then go there and ... pacify them. Come now, sir. Am I not correct?”
The commodore studied his anachronistic printed-paper notes for a few minutes, then folded them and returned them to the equally anachronistic briefcase lying on the flight-deck work top. Whatever information, they contained was evidently of little help right now. “Yes,” he conceded. “You’ll be looking for the Khalian home world. And you’ll have a better than even chance of finding it on your first pass if you leave it to the guidance system presently locked into the onboard INS suite. Let it run, and it’ll take you right to their front door.”
“I would sooner try the back door.” Roj didn’t like the sound of the whole operation, and though he took care not to say so directly, he let the concern come through quite plainly in his tone of voice. “Or an unattended window. If there is one. What say, Minerva?”
Minerva didn’t like what she was hearing any more than her brawn did, and she wasn’t so worried about letting it be known. “What I say is the Fleet seems to have made all necessary arrangements to get us there. What about getting back with the information? What about getting back at all? You haven’t mentioned that yet, Commodore.”
“You’ll be fitted with extended-range message torps,” Agato began.
“Torpedoes, eh? I was half suspecting that already!” There was bitter triumph in Minerva’s voice, and more ven
om than Roj had ever heard directed at a senior officer before. “So this is a one-way mission after all!”
“Let me finish, XR-14376. If you’d be so kind.” There had been times in Roj Malin’s Fleet career when he’d been caught in similar cross fire, and always the reaction was the same: an overpowering desire to be somewhere—anywhere—else straight away, at once and right now. Something of it must have shown, because the commodore’s head came round to face him like a plasma cannon laying onto a target (the man was at least doing Minerva the courtesy of addressing her core, her “self,” rather than just the nearest vodex pickup). “Lieutenant Commander Malin, stand fast!” he snapped.
Roj hadn’t actually moved at all and now had no intention of doing so.
It was a bit much, therefore, when Minerva’s voice told him to “stay put, Roj, right where you are,” especially when that voice had been cranked up to 120 decibels. He stayed put, stood fast, and tried not to exist too obviously.
The commodore shook a few echoes of her blare of sound out of his ears and looked, somewhat shocked, back toward Minerva’s brain core. “Was that entirely necessary?” he demanded.
“As necessary as sending us out on a no-hope mission,” she replied, just as irritably, “although”—and her tone changed imperceptibly—“I doubt that you had anything personally to do with it. But Meier’s department is notorious for that sort of thing.”
“I can assure you that the Admiral of the Red—”
“Does whatever his planners advise him to do. That’s why he has them on staff in the first place.”
“Ahem.”
“As you say, Commodore. Ahem indeed. And amen, too.”
“Minerva ...”
“Keep out of this, Roj. Private fight—nothing to do with you. It’s not the first time that Fleet planning has tried to—”
“It’s got everything to do with me, damn it! I’ll be coming too. Remember? With you? Or did that slip your so-powerful memory banks?”
There was one of those nasty little pauses, when everybody who has said a word in the past hour wants to get up and leave before they’re accused of something, and then Minerva made a multifrequency sound that was much more like the clearing of throats than her studied “ahem” had ever, been. “Ah.” Another pause. “Yes, actually. But if you’d been with me before, and seen some of the things, I’ve had to ... Commodore, you look like a man with something to say.”
“Several things. First, that Lieutenant Commander Malin is not without experience, otherwise we wouldn’t have short-listed him for this assignment. You should have his personnel record on file.”
“I don’t.” Minerva sounded grumpy. “There was an eyes-only restriction on it.”
“That’s soon put right. Open a channel to IntelSec Prime: code clearance Delta Delta. Voice and vision.”
“Done.”
“Patch in all your data requirements; you’ll get them, or I’ll know the reason why.’”
Once Agato had identified himself and expressed a few choice opinions of IntelSec’s personnel, there were no further queries or restrictions.
Minerva was silent for the few seconds necessary to scan the incoming data. The loudest sound on the flight deck after that was the click as she cut the connection to the IntelSec computer banks, and there was a great deal more respect in her voice when she spoke to Roj again, “So you were that intelligence exec. On Stone’s flagship, at Freeborn. I should have found out before this, Roj. You should have told me.”
He shrugged, not wanting to think too much about that bloody business even at this remove from it. He had spent three days in his office aboard the dreadnought’s slowly cartwheeling hulk after she had rammed one ship and then was bracketed by a salvo of plasma torps, her starboard side blown to drifting shrapnel. Three days listening to his carefully husbanded air whistling thinly into vacuum through ruptured seams and the dozen splinter perforations that he hadn’t been able to reach with the emergency sealant. Three days in darkness, because his power could go to light or heat but not both, and there was nothing but space beyond his door. Three days, before the hatch blew—
And a Fleet rescue squad pulled him, sobbing, from the frost-encrusted, stinking cabin ...
* * *
“ ... and isn’t quite the desk warrior that you might have expected,” Commodore Agato was telling Minerva when Roj squashed his ugly memories and came back to the present on the crest of a shudder. “Neither am I, and I know what you’ll need to get out of hostile space with a whole skin. You’ll be carrying rather more than just message torpedoes. We’ve already fitted state-of-the-art electronic countermeasures, but just before you leave the yards the R&D boys are going to install something new that came out of the business at Bethesda.”
“Why don’t I like the sound of this?” Roj heard himself saying, scarcely believing his own audacity. Acquaintance with Minerva was teaching him bad habits; it was already eroding his ingrained respect for anyone with more braid on their cuffs than he had.
“I’m not expecting you to like it, Commander.” The commodore didn’t even look in his direction. “I don’t like it particularly myself. But it’s available for use, and you should take whatever you’re given and be thankful.”
“And what is ‘it,’ if I may make so bold as to ask, since they’re fitting it to me and not him?” Minerva sounded waspish and wary; Roj guessed that at some stage of her career she’d already acted as a test bed for new equipment and hadn’t liked the experience.
“They call it a pulse transceiver,” replied Agato, refusing to let the pair of them needle him any further than they had already. “According to R&D, it’ll be able to analyze the protocols of the new Khalian orbital-defense drones we found around Bethesda and reprogram them to recognize your own IFF/ID blip rather than the Khalians’ vessels. If the situation arises, you’ll have more firepower at your disposal than a task force could carry.”
“If.” Roj sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers, staring thoughtfully at their interlaced tips. “Commodore, I may be sounding petty, but what sort of combat record does this system have? I mean, it was developed after Bethesda, wasn’t it?” Agato nodded agreement. “So where was it tried out in combat?” Agato stopped nodding, and Roj glanced sideways at the lens where Minerva was watching.
“Uh oh.” She didn’t need to say more.
“The lab tests have been very favorable. They were working with genuine Khalian data cores recovered from the orbital platforms.” He stopped, shrugged, grimaced in disgust—in that instant looking more human and less like a uniformed automaton, than he had all day—and then smiled sourly. “It hasn’t been field-tested at all. Of course not. But I’d still recommend that you take it. It looks very promising.”
“And if it doesn’t work, or if it fails deep in Khalian space ...”
“Then, Commander Malin, you and Minerva will be just as dead as if you hadn’t tried the system at all. Except that I think that it will work ...”
“Minerva, what do you, think?” Roj said it to the air rather than to the core, as he might have spoken while avoiding someone’s eyes. Not that it mattered particularly aboard a brainship, since Minerva could see him quite plainly in any direction and was indeed inspecting him in visual, thermal, and ultrasound scan right now. For good manners’ sake she cut the scan when he spoke to her, but she had already formed a fair judgment of what he would say if pressed.
“I think ... I think we should, Roj. Let’s do it ...”
* * *
Three weeks later they entered Khalian space. Roj had left piloting the XR-14376 to Minerva and had concentrated on running repeated checks on the IntelSec survey systems that were more his responsibility than hers. Everything seemed to be working perfectly, even the disguise and the fake Khalian ID that they were running. Indeed, that part was working just a little bit too well, as they discovered when
they were jumped by a formation trio of light cruisers just on the wrong side of the frontier ...
Granted, as Roj said later, the Fleet warships were just doing their job, and granted that the discovery of a fencer nipping back out of Alliance-controlled space must have looked just like a tip-and-run raider heading for home, but even so, being fired on by your own side was a bit much, especially when the weight of metal they were throwing was coming a damn sight too close. There had been a five-second period far too like Freeborn for comfort, when the lead cruiser’s opening salvo straddled them and Minerva’s on-board systems went momentarily crazy. The gravity grids slammed through a jagged ten-g fluctuation maybe a half-dozen times in those five seconds, and even as the restraint harness hugged him tight into his seat, Roj had the feeling he was going to bring up every meal he’d eaten since second grade.
Minerva’s response was instantaneous, ferocious, and typical of any Khalian vessel ever flown. Even as she hit a three-way break that would have folded her small enough to fit in Agato’s briefcase had her hull integrity given way, she emptied an entire rotary autoloader of torps from her ventral tubes and followed up with a vicious spatter of cannon fire from the three turrets that her present incarnation carried. Then, before the startled cruisers recovered from the shock of running into something half their site with a target-acquisition system that could and had just hit all of them, she dropped the hammer on her boosted main drive and streaked beyond light speed with a slick ease that left them gasping.
The Fleet Book Three: Break Through Page 8