In the Black

by Patrick S. Tomlinson

  “Just lightening the mood. What do you think they’re up to?”

  “I think…” Susan paused, acutely aware of getting burned the last time she’d tried and failed to anticipate her opponent’s move. “… I think they’re trying to draw us past the Red Line. I think they’re baiting us, trying to get us to rush out to intercept them in free space. Things get murky out there, legally speaking. Why else would they gobble up antimatter in an emergency burn? Just to move up the engagement a handful of minutes? Who’s that eager to die? No, this isn’t about rushing in to meet us with their tanks half-depleted. This is about choosing the place of the encounter.”

  “Swing set, or the warehouse,” Miguel said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Sorry, mum. When I was a kid in Recife, we had rules for different kinds of fights. If you needed to defend your honor, you did it by the swing set during recess where the teachers would break it up before anything got out of hand. If you demanded blood, you met behind the old warehouse after school let out.”

  “Did you meet behind the warehouse a lot, Miguel?”

  “Only once,” he said solemnly. “No one wanted to meet me there after that.”

  Susan realized in that moment that her reserved, polite XO probably had tattoos under his uniform that would break all sorts of fleet regs. “So what’s your advice for our upstart friends here? Swing set, or the warehouse?”

  “Swing set should do. No blood has been spilled. This is all still for the sake of appearances.”

  “So it is. Helm, reduce our acceleration to intercept Bandit One on our side of the Red Line.”

  “By how far, mum?” Broadchurch inquired.

  “Whatever distance you think long enough to hold up under a board of inquiry.”

  “One hundred klicks it is, mum.”

  Susan smirked as she felt the acceleration change as a slight easing of pressure on the balls of her feet. At this distance, the Xre would be aware of any changes they made in course or speed in less than half a second. Susan watched the plot carefully to see if cutting her accel prompted any change or adjustment on the part of her opponent, but they just kept barreling forward, throwing antimatter into the furnaces at their tail.

  It wasn’t just dangerous, it was wasteful as hell. Susan got nervous whenever her antimatter stores dropped below eighty percent and either started looking around for a place to top off her tanks, or call in a fleet oiler for an UnRep. Fortunately, she had a ready supply of both in orbit around Grendel. But the Xre ship didn’t exactly have docking privileges at a CCDF antimatter factory, and the nearest Xre-controlled system was almost three dozen light-years away.

  Either their new supercruiser was built with simply ridiculous endurance in mind, which might explain some of its size, or they had their own refueling ship or even a forward operating depot hiding deeper in the system.

  Or, they didn’t expect to be coming home.…

  Susan swallowed hard. Watching Bandit One’s blinking red icon barreling toward her position, it was a disquieting thought, but it didn’t fit the facts. They’d been hiding at the edges of the system for a month already, at least since the Ansari had lost its first drone. They needed to be thoughtful and meticulous to stay in the shadows. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for the fog machine giving Susan the edge, they’d probably still be prowling the system with hunter/killer drones slowly and methodically eroding her recon platform fleet. And they’d been downright devious in the ensuing escape. That wasn’t the modus operandi of a kamikaze mission.

  But then why the hell were they on an emergency burn now? It just didn’t make any sort of tactical sense. She was missing some important part of their thinking. Or someone else’s thinking. Lord knew ship captains sometimes had to make the best out of bullshit orders from on high. That was probably universal.

  “Why are they still under emergency burn?” Susan finally asked aloud. “It’s obvious now we’re not rising to the bait. Why keep burning A/M?”

  “Maybe they’re holding it a little longer, hoping to call our bluff,” Miguel suggested. “They burn up another couple minutes of A/M pretending to be serious, we second-guess ourselves enough to change our minds and run out there.”

  “Maybe…” Susan crossed her legs and leaned an elbow on her knee. “Or maybe they have a resupply floating around out there and don’t care about the fuel burn. They’re only trying to look desperate.” Her hands absently rubbed at the top of her legs as she chewed on the multidimensional chess moves lying before her. “Cut our accel to zero. Go on the drift. Quick Quiet. We’re passive in five.”

  “Charts, blow out our candles! Scopes, Quick Quiet!” Miguel repeated her orders, then keyed into the 1MC. “All hands, Quick Quiet, Quick Quiet. This is not a drill.”

  Everyone grabbed the crash-webbing built into their chairs and buckled up in anticipation of the disappearance of gravity. Overhead lights shut down, replaced by the green glow of phosphorescent lights. EM dark was only the first level of emissions dampening. It meant shutting down all active sensor arrays and radio communications. Quick Quiet was the next level, and meant cutting power to all noncombat systems to reduce the ship’s electromagnetic signature further still.

  There was a third level. Blackout. Which was exactly what it sounded like. All electrical activity onboard ceased except for minimal life support. The ship became a hole in space, utterly defenseless, its survival dependent entirely on avoiding discovery.

  Nobody ever wanted to go into blackout.

  “Accel zeroed out, fusion rockets at idle,” Broadchurch echoed even as the sensation of weightlessness washed over everyone present. The great nuclear fires at the tail end of the ship died away, leaving her to coast on what momentum she’d already built.

  “Quick Quiet,” Mattu answered. “Active radar and lidar arrays powered down and on standby. Telescopes and receivers only.”

  “Give me a burn to starboard minus five degrees,” Susan said conversationally, “Cold thrusters only, twenty-percent capacity. Just enough to get us out of the way of any railgun rounds they might have just fired against our last known course and heading.”

  “Charts, cold thruster burn to starboard minus five. Twenty percent for thirty seconds.”

  “Cold thrust starboard minus five for thirty ticks at one-fifth, aye sir.”

  At eight points on the outside of the Ansari’s hull, highly pressurized puffs of water atomized into nearly molecule-scale droplets shot into space at many thousands of meters per second, freezing instantaneously before cooling to the ambient temperature surrounding them. Working as they did against the immense mass of the ship, the cold thrusters imparted very little momentum compared to the ship’s arrays of vasimr reaction control thrusters. Indeed, even with artificial gravity compensation switched off, it was difficult to tell they’d adjusted course at all.

  However, what the cold thrusters lacked in horsepower, they made up for in stealth. They neither required much in the way of electrical power, nor left a telltale trail of ionized, million-degree gas for enemy sensors to spot like a shooting star. After thirty seconds of “burn,” the Ansari was several widths away from where she’d been relative to the last course anyone should have seen her on, which would be enough to keep her from getting cored by a railgun projectile, or roasted by a laser beam fired at them in frustration.

  “Warm up a decoy and have it ready to kick out. Just in case,” Susan said without taking her eyes off the plot.

  Miguel cracked his knuckles. “Scopes, ready a decoy. Hold launch until ordered.”

  “Prep and hold decoy bird, aye. Standing by.”

  Susan stared at the plot, half expecting the bandit to bubble out at any moment, but instead it just kept plowing ahead at emergency flank speed, shining like a torch for the whole system to see. Even Grendel’s telescopes would be in on the show.

  “Looks like the governor’s getting her confirmation after all,” she said.

  “Not even half-blind civvy scopes cou
ld miss that plume,” Miguel agreed. “They’ll know in a couple of hours that we’re playing chicken with something big and nasty out here.”

  “That might come in handy, actually.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking they wouldn’t be burning through A/M like a paycheck on shore leave if they didn’t have an oiler hiding in the black somewhere. Grendel can use its telescopes to look for it while we’re out here playing chicken.”

  “With civilian scopes, that’s going to be the proverbial needle in a haystack.”

  She shrugged. “It’s a long shot anyway, and it lightens our workload.”

  Miguel leaned down to Susan’s right shoulder and pitched his voice lower. “Getting a little ahead of ourselves, aren’t we? We still have to survive the next ten minutes. What’s our next move?”

  “Nothing,” Susan whispered. “We wait until they make one, then respond appropriately. Just wish I had a better idea what in the hell they’re thinking over there.”

  ELEVEN

  “What in the Abyss are they thinking over there?” Thuk said to the mind cavern at large as he stared, slack-mandibles, into the tactical display. The Ansari, which had been there only a moment before, had suddenly disappeared from their eyes entirely.

  “What do our husks see? Anything?”

  “Nothing, Derstu,” Kivits said from the husk-monitoring alcove. “They cut their fires and slipped beneath the dark ocean.”

  “There has to be something. They didn’t spin a seedpod. We would’ve seen it.”

  “There’s a slight … fuzziness, Derstu, but it’s dissipating.”

  “What do you mean, ‘fuzziness’?” Thuk took two long steps to where Kivits sat and pushed him out of the way. He’d trained on husks and sniffers before he’d been assigned to the Chusexx and didn’t want to waste the time waiting for a straight answer. One of their husks, unit seven, tracked a small cloud of, judging from its rainbow hashes, what must have been frozen water vapor. Thuk ran the data time-stream backward to the moment the cloud appeared. On the exact course the Ansari had been on before it disappeared.

  “It’s propellant,” he said. “They’ve moved off course.”

  “But there’s no ionization trail,” Dulac Kivits said.

  “Because they aren’t using full-powered thrusters,” Thuk said as if to a child fresh out of their third molting. “They’re using steam rockets.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Kivits said. “They’d have no thrust.”

  “That’s not the point!” The fingers on Thuk’s primehands frantically danced across the interface, trying to extrapolate an approximation of the Ansari’s location by estimating the mass and speed of the vapor cloud and working backward, but there were just too many variables. Getting an accurate read of the mass of the cloud was impossible without multiple husks providing enough vantage points to model it in three dimensions. The closest he could narrow the sphere of possibility down to was more than a hundred markers. Useless for plotting an attack vector for anything but javelins. By the time they actually reached the treaty line, that uncertainty would have grown exponentially.

  Thuk clapped his midarms in frustration and pushed away from the panel. “Am I the only one who’s read scrolls since the last war?” he demanded. “The humans have had these steam rockets in place for thirty years. They’re not meant to be powerful. They’re meant to be silent.”

  “So they can run and hide,” Kivits preened triumphantly. “We’ve scared them into silence!”

  Thuk stared at the dulac for a long, uncomfortable quiet before speaking again. The eyes of the mind cavern all turned instinctively to see what came next. Xre were very patient, but the one thing they couldn’t stand was silence in the company of others.

  “Did the kunji beasts in the rivers outside your mound slip beneath the water because they were scared, Kivits?”

  “You give these humans too much credit.”

  “And you give them far too little. They fought us to a draw for three years using modified transports and bulk freighters.” Thuk pointed a primehand blood-claw at the tactical display running around the circumference of the mind cavern. “And that human has already thrown a light-spear at us. They’re not out here to, what do they say? Fuck around? Their derstu is patient, cautious, persistent, cunning, and eager to fight. What about everything you’ve seen since we arrived leads you to believe they’re hiding out of fear instead of seeking advantage?”

  Kivits clicked his mandibles together twice in annoyed deference. “We will share a song when this is over, Derstu,” he said with a chill. “What are your instructions?”

  “Cut the burn and spin up a seedpod for the far side of the system and try again in a few days. They haven’t taken our lure and they’re not going to. We’re just wasting annihilation fuel continuing this pointless charge.”

  “And our husks?”

  “We don’t have time to fly them back into their nests. Mark them and put them in hibernation. We’ll recover them later.”

  Kivits looked around the mind cavern. “Well? Your derstu has sung. Execute his instructions.” The attendants turned back to their alcoves and busied themselves with the work.

  Kivits leaned close and whispered at Thuk’s sound bristles. “Derstu, I would sing with you. In a duet.”

  “Before the seedpod is sewn?”

  Kivits glanced around the chamber and tapped his abdomen plates with the claws on his midhands. “I think our brave attendants can handle a withdrawal. Harmonize?”

  “As you say.”

  Kivits left the cavern, expecting Thuk to trail behind him, which he did, eventually. In his own flow. Long enough that he had to ask the ship for the dulac’s present location.

  “The dulac is in the clutching chamber.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes, Derstu.”

  “Thank you.”

  By long tradition, every Xre ship had a clutching chamber, because every Xre ship might be called upon someday to participate in a migration to a new colony many stars away. And new colonies would need new builders when they arrived. Ships of conquest like the Chusexx were not intended to be colony ships, but they needed to be equipped to fill the role if the need was desperate enough. A species that had lost its original homeworld never forgot the lesson.

  And although it was prohibited, it wasn’t completely unknown for select members of a harmony on a long-duration campaign such as this to, inadvertently, clutch a brood during the dull periods. Those responsible would be dismissed from the Dark Ocean Chorus at the end of the campaign, of course, but their children should hardly be punished for the sins of their parents. That tradition had died with the queens. Or, more accurately, been killed along with them.

  So Chusexx had in its belly a small, rudimentary, completely unadorned clutching chamber which, naturally, was most often used for secret rendezvous among the adventurously amorous.

  This would not be such a meeting.

  “You walk the path slowly,” Kivits said as Thuk entered.

  “Forgive the delay, Dulac. I wanted to see my instructions carried out.”

  “Your instructions.” The words dribbled past Kivit’s mandibles as if he’d expelled them for tasting sour. “You’re fresh out of a molt, and yet your head has already grown too big for its new skullplates.” Kivits picked at an excess bit of sealant that had been pressed out from between a joint during the chamber’s construction. “I’ve served over other derstus, you know. You are my fifth, my third who was on their first assignment to the honor.”

  Thuk sniffed at his choice of words. Of all the words used to describe a selection as derstu, “honor” was seldom near the top of the list.

  Kivits continued. “It’s not unusual for a first-time selection to forget their purpose and develop quite an ego in a short amount of time. But your transformation has been especially rapid. Which is why I must remind you, Thuk, that you have been picked to facilitate and implement the decisions of
this harmony, our chorus, and ultimately the Symphony itself in the most expedient way. Your judgment is only valued for doing that job quickly and efficiently. You’re not here to lead us. You’re not here to lecture us. The time of tyrants died with the queens in their mounds on the Old World. You’re not going to be the one to resurrect it, no matter how many scrolls you’ve read about the humans or the last war.

  “I’ve come to you because other members of the harmony have begun humming their discontent, and I wanted you to hear it from me privately while there was still time to adjust your path. No one needs to know what we’ve discussed here. A dulac may give any sort of console. Just … just return to your duty, humbled, and maybe you won’t be selected derstu for the next half dozen assignments, or expelled from the Chorus entirely. Do you understand?”

  Thuk understood, all right. He’d pushed Kivits too hard in front of the mind cavern attendants and embarrassed him. In a moment of frustration, he’d forgotten Kivits was labor caste, and held all the old prejudices that came with that heritage. His ancestors had been the ones to unify across the mounds and finally break the back of the queens’ rule as their original homeworld died around them. They were the hands and claws that built the first colony ships, under the guidance of the scholar and administrative sects. Their descendants, like Kivits, carried that history with no small amount of pride.

  It was possible, even probable, that the only member of the harmony who’d objected to Thuk’s … guidance, was Kivits himself. But, that didn’t mean that he was wrong, necessarily. Or that Thuk wouldn’t benefit from an adjustment in his approach.

  “I’ve disrespected you,” Thuk said remorsefully. “You’ve done nothing but try to steer me down the path laid out for me, and I’ve resisted. Out of pride, or arrogance. It’s too easy for us four-hands to fall into the old patterns that … well, you know better than most.” Thuk hinted with a midhand at Kivits’s quadfeet. It was a small gesture. Pointing with midhands instead of primehands was a submissive gesture, because the midhands sheathed no blood-claws.