In the Black

by Patrick S. Tomlinson

  “Situation!” Thuk shouted above the din as his forgotten tray clattered against the floor. Liberated gim scurried for cover in every direction.

  “It’s the Ansari, Derstu,” someone shouted back. “They’ve peeled their seedpod.”

  “How far?” Thuk demanded.

  The sniffer-reader blanched, frozen in place. Kivits pushed the hesitating member to the side of their alcove to read the sniffer data for himself. His face turned to Thuk, the bravado suffusing their earlier conversation forgotten. “Twenty-three hundred markers. Derstu, we’re already in range of their light-spears. Their claws are around our throats!”

  Thuk grinned. Bold humans. Foolhardy humans. They had no idea what kind of predator’s den they’d just jumped into. But that was the thing about them. Even if they did, they’d probably jump in anyway.

  “Well, the humans would never—” was the first half of a sentence that had gotten a lot of very experienced, very capable harmonies killed in the last war.

  “How did they see us?” Kivits shrieked. “We’re hundreds of thousands of markers outside their husk’s eyes.”

  “Obviously we need to revisit our estimates,” Thuk said dryly. “Or did you think the humans were in a fugue since the war?”

  Kivits stared at him. “You asked about our rings. How did you know?”

  “I didn’t. Just—had a strange itch was all.”

  “They’re singing to us!” the recorder alcove’s attendant shouted.

  “Put it to the mouths,” Thuk ordered.

  “Unidentified [Xre] warship,” a human voice crackled over the mind cavern’s mouths—female, if his ear was attuned. A translation played out in text on the panoramic displays. “This [Derstu] Susan Kamala CCDF cruiser Ansari. We corner and destroy one your [predator husks]. You violation treaty. Surrender instant and we will—”

  Thuk cut the connection from his seat’s controls. “Eject three decoys. Now. Burn them hard to our sides and vent.”

  “And us, Derstu?” Kivits asked.

  “Forward, Dulac,” Thuk said with as much calm as he could force. “We burn straight forward.”

  FIVE

  “Xre warship, sixteen thousand klicks dead ahead, mum!” Warner shouted. “Class unknown, but it’s big.”

  The right corner of Susan’s lips curled up into a crescent that creased her cheek. “That’ll be a hundred nudollars, Mr. Nesbit,” she said.

  “I don’t recall wagering on it, Captain.”

  “It was implied in your tone, Mr. Nesbit,” Susan said. “Coms, hail the vessel.”

  “Mic’s hot, mum.”

  Susan leaned forward in her chair and turned her shoulders as if she was on camera, which she wasn’t.

  “Unidentified Xre warship. This is Susan Kamala of the CCDF cruiser Ansari. We have intercepted and destroyed one of your armed drones. You are in violation of the treaty. Surrender immediately and we will hold fire. Refuse to surrender and we will be forced to—”

  “Link’s been cut at their end, mum. They’re no longer receiving.”

  “Sounds like an answer to me,” Warner said from the weapons station.

  “Agreed.”

  “Do we really want to fire first?” Nesbit asked.

  “We didn’t,” Susan snapped back. “They did. Naval law is clear. A shot fired from a drone is a shot fired from its mother. We’re on defense here.”

  “I think they’ve already made the call,” Mattu said. “They’re rigging for silent running. Detecting three fusion plumes, designating bogeys Alpha, Bravo, Charlie. Wait one … I’m seeing back scatter and particle wake interference off Bravo contact moving away. Possible fourth contact.”

  “Boomers?” Susan asked.

  “No, accel is too low. Probably decoys.” Mattu’s fingers moved in a flurry across her display. “Confirmed, now showing four mirrored contacts of identical radar signatures moving apart at two-point-three gs at ninety-degree intervals. Bogey four designated Delta. Delta’s headed straight for us, mum.”

  “Ignore it,” Susan said. “And ignore the one moving dead astern, that’s too obvious. This one’s sneaky. Focus your active scans on the contacts moving to port and starboard.”

  “Yes’m.”

  “And kick out a decoy of our own. Send one straight at contact Delta. Make it loud, like we fell for their feint. Then switch to passive sensors and make like a hole.”

  “Decoy running hot and loud for contact Delta. Switch to passives, aye mum.” Mattu hit no more than a half dozen points on her display before something deep inside the Ansari’s bones groaned. “Decoy away. Clearing minimum safe distance in three, two, one … deploying.”

  In the open space a few hundred meters from the Ansari’s outer hull, three tons of sodium azide and potassium nitrate reacted in the blink of an eye to inflate the decoy’s ballute. In seconds, the Kevlar-reinforced mylar film expanded into a one-to-one scale, seven-hundred-meter-long, parade-float copy of the Ansari’s silhouette.

  Its surface reflectivity across the EM spectrum was calibrated to be identical to its mother to all but the most powerfully invasive active scans above the X-ray range. It would even hold up to a cursory pass by visual telescopes if they were more than a couple thousand clicks away. Robust transmitters in its drive module mimicked its mother’s active EM emissions for a limited duration. On the beat of zero in an internal countdown, the decoy’s fusion rocket lit off and piled on acceleration toward its designated target.

  “Fusion plant’s burning,” Mattu reported. “Plume looks good.”

  “Good.” Susan took a breath to consider her options. “Move or die” had been drilled into her from the first day of naval combat tactics during officer candidate school. “Ships at rest rest in peace,” her favorite instructor had been fond of saying. But moving in the wrong direction, piling on delta-v that Newton didn’t let you just wish away, could be just as deadly.

  The two most likely candidates for her quarry were moving away from each other on opposing bearings. The parabolic radiation shield mounted ahead of her ships’ fusion drive section not only kept her crew from being microwaved to death, but also provided a thirty-five-degree cone in the Ansari’s frontal aspect where an opposing warship couldn’t detect the gamma ray emissions from her hybrid antimatter/fusion rockets.

  It was the same reason why Mattu could only deduce the existence of contact Delta from the interference patterns its rockets had on the plume of the decoy moving in the opposite direction. The trouble was, with the two most likely contacts moving away from each other on mirror headings, if Susan ordered pursuit of one, it would give the game away to the other one. Even if she picked the warship, the decoy would have to be completely blind not to see her drive plume and alert its mother.

  Her own decoys mounted only a rudimentary sensor and coms suite, but they weren’t blind, and Susan couldn’t imagine the Xre would be so incompetent.

  She couldn’t afford to reveal herself now that her decoy was in the sky. So, going against years of training, she settled on the least-worst option.

  “Maintain position. XO, I need spreads of six cold boomers port and six starboard in the vac and ready to track. Laser array on standby.”

  Miguel nodded. “Yes’m. Weapons, prep VLS cells A1-S and A1-P. Launch six Mk IXs from each, cold drives. Designate flights Alpha and Bravo and link their telemetry into our passive sensor stream. Await orders to fire once target is resolved.”

  Warner sat up straight in her chair. She didn’t say it, but Susan knew it was the first time the young lieutenant had put ship-killer missiles in space in anger. Indeed, the first time anyone had since before anyone aboard had been born.

  Shooting down a drone was one thing. Firing on another proper warship filled with other sentient beings, no matter what naval law said, was quite another.

  “Launch flights of six Mk IXs port and starboard, cold drives, awaiting target acquisition for order to fire. Yessir.”

  Unlike the drone and decoy launc
h bays in the engineering section, the Ansari’s complement of offensive missiles were located in the four outer faces of the forward hull in four Vertical Launch System modules divided into ten cells of six missiles each, for a total of two hundred and forty missiles. The deck swayed under her feet as twelve of the seventy-ton monsters ripple-launched into space on electromagnetic rails, one from each side at one second intervals to make sure they didn’t collide.

  “Flights Alpha and Bravo in the black and cleared for maneuvering. Data links established, telemetry looks good. Drives on standby.”

  Susan considered the plot. They were within laser range, if only just, but the two bogeys were inching out of it with each passing moment and there wasn’t time to get monocle drones in place. Besides, no matter what she’d said to Nesbit, she wasn’t sure she wanted to draw first blood on a Xre mother out here when she was on one side of the treaty line and they were on the other. Lasers were functionally instantaneous; there was no way to know they were coming until the transfer energy was already boiling away armor.

  But missiles, they not only had the legs to reach both bogeys, but the Xre captain would know they were coming and would have time to reconsider her order to surrender. She could call off the attack at anything but the last fraction of a second. Susan had half a mind to light them off and see which target started firing point defense. That would answer the question simply enough.

  “Aspect change on contact Delta,” Mattu shouted. “Angling twenty-three degrees away from our decoy, I think they fell for it, mum.”

  “Or they’re just going through the motions,” Susan said. “Any tells on bogeys Alpha or Charlie?”

  “Nothing yet. They’re … wait one.”

  Automatic alarms sprang to screeching life through the CIC. “Bubble blowing!” Broadchurch shouted over the wails.

  “Alpha or Charlie?” Susan barked.

  “Neither mum, it’s Delta. Repeat, Delta!”

  An electric shock of panic ran from Susan’s scalp to her tailbone. The one she’d ignored, because it was too obvious. They’d hid right in the middle of her assumptions. “How far?! Are we in the gooey zone?”

  “Negative,” Broadchurch replied. “We’re safe, barely.”

  Susan relaxed the death grip on her chair’s armrests. “Are they inside the treaty line?”

  “By twelve klicks, mum.”

  “XO, laser free, target their rings.”

  Miguel turned his head toward Warner. “Weapons, laser free. Full power. Target rings for a mobility kill. Repeat. Mobility kill only.”

  “Lasers hot. Mobility kill, aye sir.” Warner tapped a few icons, refined her targeting lock, and pressed the button.

  For an almost imperceptibly short moment, the lights and displays in the CIC dimmed as the ship’s power system adjusted to the sudden, violent depletion of bank after bank of capacitors as the laser array gobbled up every spare electron.

  A beam of coherent light energy only forty-five centimeters across, yet powerful enough to supply electricity for an entire continent, raced out into the night at Einstein’s speed limit, covering the fourteen-hundred-and-seventy-kilometer distance between the Ansari and the raider in a span of time scarcely worth mentioning.

  And it was still too late.

  “Do we have a hit?” Susan pleaded, almost leaning out of her chair.

  “Negative,” Warner said, dejected. “The beam bent. Their bubble closed before we got the shot off.”

  “Shit!” Susan pounded her armrest with a fist.

  “And now they’ve jumped,” Broadchurch reported. “They’re gone, mum.”

  “If we had a window, we could’ve stuck an arm out and waved at them,” Miguel said before thinking. Susan shot a glare his way. “Sorry, mum.”

  “And,” Mattu tagged in, “our decoy was caught in the gooey zone. I’m sorry, mum, but it’s slag.”

  Susan’s teeth ground against each other. She felt a migraine coming on. “All right, it could have been worse. Another few hundred klicks and we would’ve been the decoy, and there’s still three enemy decoys out there we can recover for the lab rat to tear apart for intel. Charts, set course to—”

  As she said it, three fusion bottles let go simultaneously, adding a trio of incredibly short-lived stars to the history of the universe.

  “Er, sorry, mum,” Mattu said, “but the Xre decoys have all self-destructed.”

  “Of course they have.” Susan stood up from her chair. “XO, you have the Com. Recover our missiles, then jump back and grab our drones. Let me know when you’re done.”

  Miguel nodded. “Understood, mum. Where will you be?”

  “In the pool. And the rest of you, take your relief already. You all look like hammered dog shit.”

  Susan stalked out of the CIC, her head filling with proper butterfly stroke form and lap counts, anything to push the thumping she’d just taken to the background. She shoulder-checked Nesbit as she passed him to get to the hatch.

  In a rare moment of self-awareness, Nesbit had the presence of mind not to say a word.

  SIX

  “Tyson!” called out the matronly voice from near the back of the restaurant. He locked eyes with Valeria Sokolov as she waved from a small booth in the left corner by the wall. The CEO of NeoSun beckoned for him to join her.

  Paris had only received her lunch invitation fifteen minutes earlier. Tyson had to reschedule two calls and cancel a crisis response meeting to accommodate the impromptu rendezvous, but not even he could afford to decline a meeting with the leader of the second largest transtellar in human-controlled space. Especially when he was running a joint project with her company.

  Tyson nodded to her and moved toward the booth, grabbing a napkin from an empty table as he passed to wipe a bead of sweat from his brow. He’d had to run from the pod to arrive in time. He’d not exercised in ages. Muscle-toning retro-virals made it unnecessary. Of all the improbable sights people on the sidewalk could have seen that afternoon … Actually, watching him duck into a casual-dining chain restaurant might be even more ridiculous.

  Tyson slid into the booth opposite from Sokolov, the imitation leather of the bench seat feeling strange under the silk of his trousers.

  “Thank you for coming, Tyson. I realize it was short notice.”

  “A trifle.” Tyson waved away her concern. “Just juggled some things around, you know how it is. But, Valeria, I have to ask…” He waved an arm to encompass their surroundings. “Really?”

  Sokolov chuckled. “Don’t be rude, Tyson. It’s quaint; besides, it’s good to remind ourselves how the other half lives now and then. There’s joy to be found in simple pleasures.”

  “Like the joy of two-for-one appetizers that made a fifteen-light-year trip a few degrees above absolute zero only to get reheated in a microwave?”

  “Salt and saturated fat taste delicious no matter how far they’ve traveled.”

  A young woman, wearing a uniform, wholesome in a not overly attractive way, slid up to their table with a small data pad on the back of her right wrist. Her left wrist and hand were decorated in a delicate lattice of traditional henna designs that she probably thought made her seem exotic or cultured.

  “Hello, folks. My name’s Cassidy and I’ll be taking…” A flicker of recognition passed over her features as she glanced at Tyson, but it passed in an instant. “… care of you. Can I get you anything to drink besides water?”

  “Just green tea for me, please,” Tyson said. “Hot.”

  “I’ll have a vodka press with a twist of limon. Make it a double,” Sokolov said.

  “Okay.” Cassidy entered their drinks into her pad. “I’ll be right back with your drinks and to take your order.”

  “Oh, and dearie, could we get an order of those exquisite southwest egg rolls? Two cups of dip.”

  “Of course. Comin’ right up.”

  As their waitress skittered away, Tyson folded his hands in his lap. “Southwest egg rolls? Southwest relative to what?”


  “The old American Southwest, I believe,” Sokolov answered. “Although the last franchise on Earth closed almost thirty years ago. Still, they do great business among nostalgic expats out in the colonies.”

  “How do you know so much about a chain? Do you have one on New Vladivostok?”

  “What, this place? Heavens no. I denied the permit myself. We have to maintain our exclusivity.”

  Tyson almost took the bait. He almost rose up to defend the presence of a Chili’s in his capital city when a moment ago he was ready to order it torn down. Sokolov was notorious for twisting her opponents into emotional pretzels during negotiations, causing them to lose sight of their own interests and endgames to go chasing after some rabbit that had inexplicably been laced up to their pride. As a result, NeoSun had jumped three ranks in the transtellar hierarchy under her twenty-seven standard years of leadership.

  Tyson had experienced it himself during the talks over NeoSun’s involvement in their recent joint venture. He’d assumed it was an artfully crafted performance, like a carefully choreographed dance where only one partner knew the steps. But now, sitting in a Chili’s booth during lunch rush, Tyson wondered if it wasn’t something that came naturally to her.

  “Well, we’re a frontier town here in Methuselah, and our cowpokes need a watering hole,” he said instead. “Speaking of my city, I didn’t know you were in it. Not until twenty minutes ago, that is.”

  “That’s because I’m not in it.”

  Tyson’s left eyebrow inched up ever so slightly. “Ah, my mistake. Because I could have sworn I was sitting across from you in this booth on an unannounced lunch meeting.”

  “That’s also not happening.”

  “Mmm,” Tyson purred. “A conspiracy.”

  “Nothing so grandiose, I assure you. We’re just here for a friendly chat between colleagues.” She quieted down again as Cassidy reappeared with their drinks.

  “Are we ready to order?” the waitress asked in a hopeful tone.

  “I think the appetizer will be enough, thank you dear.”