In the Black

by Patrick S. Tomlinson

  “It was morbid.” Tyson rubbed a fresh knot at the back of his neck. “The cargo modules aren’t pressurized on an ore freighter. There’s no need to waste the air or energy keeping the cargo warm. Can’t we at least off-load the haul?”

  “There are currently six thousand, three hundred and forty-seven different bacterial spores known to medical science that can survive in the hard vacuum and radiation environment of interstellar space for extended durations. Without having catalogued this strain, we can’t know if it shares that capabili—”

  “Yes, yes, all right.” Tyson swore under his breath. The value of the ore in orbit was a paltry sum compared to the quarter’s bottom line, but it was the appearance of the thing. Just letting an entire megaton shipment languish in a parking orbit over his own capital was like tying an albatross around his own neck. He’d be hearing about it at lunches and whispered at charity events until it was sorted. But, there was nothing for it. Paris was right, damn her software. The downsides would be catastrophic if the dice didn’t land in his favor.

  “Quarantine the crew and the shipment. Make sure that’s in the press release, too. Along with hazard pay for the duration and thousand-share bonuses for the crew. Make sure they want for nothing while they’re locked up in that flea-trap.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “And Paris?”

  “Sir?”

  “There’s a memory upgrade in it for you if you find whoever leaked this before it reached me.”

  “And an android carapace?”

  “Are you negotiating with me, Paris?”

  “I would never, sir. But, my Download Day is coming up in two months, and…”

  Tyson smiled, despite himself. “And an android carapace.”

  Paris nodded her perfectly sculpted virtual chin. “Thank you, sir. I won’t fail you.”

  “I know.” Tyson turned his attention back to his city, and marveled at how quickly night fell in the valley.

  THREE

  “There!” Mattu jabbed a finger at the floating holographic display. If it had been a pane of glass, it would’ve shattered. “There you are, you beti chod.”

  “Language, Scopes!” Weapons Officer Warner chastised.

  “You speak Hindi, LT?”

  “No, but I know a fucking swear word when I hear one.”

  Miguel stepped over to the Drone Integration Station, blinking away sleep as he did so. They’d been searching for the armed drone everyone assumed was responsible for the death of Thirteen for a double rotation already. Everyone was exhausted, but no one wanted to be the first to admit defeat and crash out in their quarters. “You have something to share with the class, Mattu?”

  “Yessir,” she beamed. “I’ve spotted our interloper.” She transferred the feed from her station to the CIC main plot. A red sphere hovered at the center of the plot less than a light-second from the Ansari’s current position, slowly pulling away from the debris field of their ill-fated recon drone.

  “Visual acquisition?” Miguel asked, but Mattu shook her head.

  “Their adaptives are just as good as ours. This thing could be sitting on the far side of our boat bay and you wouldn’t see it.”

  “Then how did you?”

  “Simple; it’s trying to slink off under ion drive, keeping its ion trails pointed far enough away from us so we can’t pick them up.”

  “But?”

  “But we’ve got it surrounded by enough recon birds now that I was able to work out an emissions triangulation. I don’t think it spotted any of them or it would’ve been smart enough to just go cold and drift.”

  “They must not know we held back a reserve of recon platforms,” Miguel mused.

  “Thank Shiva for the extra capacity we got out of the last refit,” Mattu said.

  A recent technical briefing floated to the top of Miguel’s mental queue and triggered a smile. “That’s not all we got from the yards. Get the captain up here, double time. And Warner, it might do you good to warm up one of our new fog machines.”

  * * *

  “Captain on the deck!” the sentry announced as Susan put boot to floor of her CIC. The staffing situation hadn’t changed since she’d pinched off for a little rack time four hours earlier.

  “Didn’t any of you get relieved?” she asked incredulously.

  “We were offered relief, mum,” Miguel said.

  “I see.” She pointed at the big red ball hovering at the center of the plot. “What’s that?”

  “That’s our phantom drone killer, mum.”

  Susan grinned the sort of grin that serves only to reveal teeth. “I was hoping you’d say that. We have confirmation? Scopes?”

  “As certain as I can get without a directed X-ray ping, mum. It still doesn’t know it’s been spotted, didn’t think it would be prudent to tell it.”

  “Good thinking. How long have we been tracking it?”

  “Less than five minutes,” Miguel answered. “I thought this might be a good time to test one of our new toys.”

  Susan arched an eyebrow. “The fog machine?”

  “The fog machine.”

  “Risky. Probably ill-advised. The suits will be angry we rushed it into deployment.”

  “So, warm one up?” her XO said.

  “Would be an awful waste not to.”

  “Already in the tube, mum,” Warner announced.

  “It’s like I don’t even need to be here,” Susan announced with mock indignation.

  “CL on deck!”

  “God dammit!” Nesbit bellowed from underneath a bird’s nest of mangled hair, his lapel-less suit jacket forgotten in his cabin. “Twice in one day, Kamala? That’s a formal protest.”

  “I only just arrived myself, Mr. Nesbit, I assure you. Now, I’ll have to ask you to control your temper on my bridge. We’re still in an active combat zone, and…” She pointed a slender finger at the plot. “… we’ve got something on the hook.”

  Nesbit’s eyes flitted over to the red icon and locked on. “Is that—Is that the hunter/killer?”

  “No other reason for it to be hanging around the crime scene,” Miguel said.

  “It’s not, you know…” Nesbit adjusted his shirt collar. “We’re not at risk, right?”

  “Not at all. It can hurt our drones, but it’s a mosquito to the Ansari’s elephant.”

  “And I was just about to swat it,” Susan said. “So, Mr. Nesbit, if you could observe from over to the side, please.”

  “Hmm? Oh, right. Yes, of course.” Nesbit stepped into the hatchway, as if poised to make a quick escape if things didn’t go as smoothly as Susan’s quiet confidence promised they would. “I’ll just … be right here.”

  “Excellent. Lieutenant Warner, isn’t there supposed to be a fog rolling in?”

  “Ready and waiting, mum.”

  “Excellent. XO, live fire is authorized. We’re going for a hot-zone field test of the CLVL Mk … what was this damned thing, Mk II, III?”

  “III, mum,” Miguel said.

  “Mk III. Fire when ready.”

  “Weapons officer, fire the CLVL,” Miguel shouted.

  “Firing CLVL, sir.”

  Somewhere deep within Ansari’s quarter-million-ton mass, a single, five-meter-long missile accelerated along electromagnetic rails to three hundred meters per second and was thrown clear into the harsh vacuum, cold, and radiation of space. In accordance with Newton, the great ship lurched sideways almost imperceptibly in response to the toss. Station-keeping thrusters fired automatically to cancel the movement.

  “CLVL away,” Warner announced. “Internal tracking has acquired the target. Clearing safe minimum distance. Fusion rocket coming online. Missile is burning hot. Man, look at the bitch go.…”

  The Communications Laser Vector Locator Mk III was a weapon tailored for a singular, limited purpose. Indeed, it would be difficult to categorize it as a weapon at all if it weren’t for modifications added to the Mk III model after trials of the Mk I and II units. It
was the sort of military appropriations project that only ever made it from drunken symposium “what if” conversation to deployment if you had a lot of bored engineers with absurd budgets looking for something to do with their time.

  Fired from a standard counter-missile launcher, and encapsulated inside a standard CM casing, guidance system, and fusion-drive rocket, the CLVL deviated from its defensive brethren only in its warhead and purpose. Instead of tracking incoming ship-killer missiles and blowing them out of space before they could harm Mother, the CLVL tracked hostile recon drones and illuminated the way to their mother.

  Seven seconds after launch, and the CLVL was already accelerating at nine gravities, piling on velocity with every passing moment. Its internal radar and external telemetry feed from Mother both pointed it in the general direction of the target a few tens of thousands of kilometers ahead. An ablative conical shield acting as the mounting plate for its fusion rocket served double-duty deflecting high-energy particles that were a waste product of its fusion reaction at obtuse angles away from its sensitive internal electronics and sensors, as well as the sensors of its prey. So long as it kept its target inside this null cone, its approach could go unnoticed.

  An eternity later, the CLVL reached its effective threshold. It separated into two halves. A powerful explosive charge in the front quarter of its forward section detonated, dispersing a cloud of trillions of microscopic reflective grains. For less than a millisecond, the cloud enveloped the hostile drone, while full-spectrum cameras in the remainder of its forward half watched intently.

  Spaceborne drones under stealth, regardless of who’d built them, used laser coms to communicate. The reason was simple. Unless an observer was in a direct line of sight between the drone and their mother, the signal couldn’t be intercepted, jammed, or altered. It had been the standard for encrypted tactical communications for centuries. And with quantum encryption, there was really no chance of decoding any messages even if one were sitting in direct line of the beam.

  But that wasn’t the point.

  Out of trillions of nano-scale particles, six managed to blunder into the pulse of laser energy the enemy drone directed toward its mother. A small portion of that energy reflected off of their crystalline surfaces and found its way back to the cameras in the back half of the CLVL, which then took those six geometric points in space and used them to draw a line twelve meters long. A line that gave a direct bearing back to the drone’s mother. In the end, less than a hundred photons was all it took to tell the tale.

  Distance couldn’t be ascertained, but direction would be enough. The CLVL took two final steps to fulfill every demand that had been placed on its existence. It sent the data back through its telemetry link to its own mother, then ordered its fusion rocket in its aft section a few dozen meters behind to detonate.

  Both it and the enemy drone winked out of the universe in the fires of a short-lived star.

  “Got it!” Warner shouted triumphantly. “Solid bearing captured, and enemy drone splashed.”

  “Scopes, confirm that,” Susan said.

  “Fusion detonation confirmed.” Mattu’s hands danced in the air as she manipulated her display. “Both missile and drone destroyed.”

  “Bearing to target?”

  “Three-two-nine by zero-zero-four,” Warner said. “And change.”

  “Release the telemetry to the Nav station. Charts, please put that bearing up on the main plot.”

  “Yes’m. Getting telemetry now.”

  In the tactical display, a bright streak of crimson started at the point where the CLVL just detonated and receded off into infinity just a sliver above the system’s eclectic plane.

  “Scopes, are we sure the drone didn’t get a message off about the fog machine?” Susan asked after Mattu.

  “The whole process from cloud deployment to fusion detonation took less than a hundred milliseconds, and the CLVLs throw out a riot of EM jamming. I can’t be absolutely certain, but I don’t think even one of our AIs could take in all that sensor data, analyze it through all the white noise, come to the correct conclusion, and encrypt it for transmission in that time frame. I think it’s safe to assume the secret of our new toy is safe for the moment.”

  “That’s good enough for me.” Susan smiled. “Good work, everyone. We’ve successfully deployed a brand-new weapons system in live fire without a single hiccup. That might be a record all by itself. Double ration of pudding tonight. And Mr. Nesbit, I think a letter of commendation for its development team might be in order back at corporate.”

  “I agree wholeheartedly, Captain.”

  “Maybe even a bonus?”

  Nesbit straightened a cufflink. “That’s really not for me to decide, but I’ll pass it along with my report.”

  “Of course. Charts. How long before our rings are ready for another jump?”

  “Alpha and gamma still going through cooldown and neg-mat recycling. Five minutes to reset,” Broadchurch replied.

  “Let alpha ring take a break and bring beta online.”

  “Yes’m.”

  “Wait,” Nesbit wavered. “You’re not actually thinking about going after that thing?”

  “That’s kind of the point of finding its bearing, Mr. Nesbit,” Susan responded frostily. “I’m tasked with patrolling this system. Someone has just committed a treaty violation. This is a warship, if my memory serves. Weapons Officer, we do have weapons onboard, yes?”

  “Oodles, mum,” Warner said without containing her glee.

  “Well, there you have it. Scopes, how long to get our birds back in the barn?”

  “They’re pretty far out, mum. Even at full burn it’ll take the better part of two hours to get them to turn around, and another two hours to bring them into recovery range.”

  Susan paused to consider this. The Ansari was powerful enough as a combatant in her own right, but her real strength lay in the data-gathering and situational awareness afforded by her flock of embarked drone platforms. They were the web to the ship’s spider, sending invisible signals through the silk wherever a wayward fly stumbled into one. That’s how she’d earned her nickname of “Orb Weaver.” A black spider with a leg resting on each of the eight planets of mankind’s home system emblazoned the ship’s mission patches and challenge coins.

  Personally, Susan hated spiders. Something about ambush predators that didn’t work for their dinner bothered her. But, it wasn’t her call. The nickname had already been in the books for years before she took command, and you just didn’t mess with a ship’s history like that. Even dozens of light-years from their home, sailors were still a superstitious lot. And even she had to admit the metaphor was appropriate.

  Leaving her drones behind wouldn’t blind her, not really. The ship had an envious suite of both passive and active sensors, as well as a towed array in the aft that spooled out on twenty kilometers of space elevator ribbon that was almost as powerful as the sensor clusters mounted on the Ansari herself. But it was a far cry from the multiple redundancies and overlapping perspectives of a proper flight of recon drones.

  Still …

  “Leave them with instructions to rendezvous at these coordinates, Scopes,” Susan decided. “We’ll pick them up on the way back.”

  “Yes’m.”

  “You’re leaving our recon and combat drones behind?” Nesbit asked. “Doesn’t that strike you as particularly reckless when we’re going into, you know, combat?”

  Susan laced her fingers and leaned forward in her command chair. “Mr. Nesbit. I understand the importance of good relations between the fleet and our sponsors. Indeed, I encourage them. But I will remind you that your role in my CIC is in an advisory capacity for the financial interests of the stakeholders we’re tasked with protecting, not to question my orders or undermine my reasoning in front of my crew. So, if you have specific advice to give, I’m open to hearing it.”

  The rest of the bridge crew froze amidst the sudden drop in temperature. Nesbit fidgeted.
/>   “I just…”

  “Yes?”

  “I just wonder if we aren’t rushing into this confrontation without first maximizing our chances of success.” He pointed at the red line on the main plot. “If I understand correctly, and please correct me if my limited tactical experience is failing me, but the mothership that sent the drone we just destroyed could be anywhere along that line from here to the Small Magellanic Cloud. It would seem to me that abandoning a significant portion of our sensor capacity while we go looking for this interloper puts us at a disadvantage.”

  Susan let him finish. In truth, she didn’t have much choice. Corporate liaisons were almost universally despised by command crews throughout the fleet. It was rare to get a sympathetic one, and they were deliberately drawn from well outside naval ranks to maintain “professional dispassion.” Nesbit wasn’t the worst she’d seen, but he was the first she’d had to answer to as ship’s captain.

  And you never forgot your first.

  “I can see why that would concern you,” Susan said with a voice like soft butter. “However, there’s two things you’re overlooking. First, while you’re technically right that our quarry could be anywhere along the bearing we captured, or at least was expected to be at some point along the bearing at the time the drone’s light-speed transmission arrived, we can narrow that window down considerably. Indeed, I can narrow it down to a single point in space.”

  “And where’s that?”

  “Simple. If I’m commanding that mother, I won’t cross the treaty line. That puts me and my crew in jeopardy for little gain. But, I’m going to put the paint of my bow plates right on the line so I’m getting as close to realtime data from my HK drone as physically possible. She’s there, I’ll put a bag of real coffee on it.”

  “All right,” Nesbit allowed. “But that doesn’t explain why you want to engage them before we recover our drones.”

  “I was coming to that. The drone we just destroyed was in the middle of sending a light-speed transmission. In less than two hours, that transmission will cut off suddenly, probably right in the middle of screaming that there’s a missile coming at it. Our guest will know that we’ve destroyed their drone and probably relocate or leave the system entirely. But, as of right now, we can blow a bubble, jump ahead of the drone’s light cone, and catch them totally by surprise.”