In the Black

by Patrick S. Tomlinson

  “Well? What were they?”

  “That’s the thing, mum. They’re encrypted. Heavily. And not with any mil-spec encryption Ansari’s AI can recognize.”

  “What are you saying, Scopes?” Miguel pushed.

  “You want my speculation?”

  “Yes, out with it.”

  “I think that skip drone was told to pop bubble inside Grendel’s safety margins and deliver that message, whatever the hell it is, as close and as quickly as possible and damn the consequences.”

  “What kind of out-of-system message can’t stand a second of light-speed delay?”

  “Whose drone is it, Scopes?” Susan asked.

  “I don’t know, mum. It’s a standard Marathon unit, but it’s not squawking ID. Could be fleet, could be one of the transtellars, or even a UN boat. No way to know.”

  “A skip drone running dark, flouting safety protocols, and throwing around non-CCDF message encryption?” Miguel held his palms up. “Who does that?”

  Susan returned to her full height. “I don’t know, but I’m sure we won’t like the answer. Call for Condition Two.”

  “Condition Two, aye mum,” Miguel said, then opened the 1MC. “Attention all personnel. Set Condition Two. Condition Two. This is not a drill.”

  The unease in the CIC ratcheted up with the order to GQ, which was only natural. Nesbit, cleared for duty after their little … misunderstanding, would doubtlessly be along shortly. Susan was actually glad for it. He was the proper intermediary between her command and Grendel’s planetary governor, after all.

  “It’s all right, everyone,” Susan cooed. “Governor Honshu just needs a few minutes to digest whatever message she received and her staff will send us an update. You know how much those pampered autocrats in their boardrooms like to play at being secret agents.”

  This was met with a round of laughs from the bridge crew, but in point of fact, it was another hour before they got any sort of update for the situation on Grendel, and it wasn’t from a coms laser or high-gain radio transmission.

  “Surface launches,” Mattu shouted. “Multiple signatures. Counting eleven … scratch that, seventeen. No, twenty-nine civilian boats burning for Grendel orbit.”

  “What the actual fuck?” Warner cursed from the weapons station.

  “Where do they think they’re going?” Nesbit asked. He’d turned up eventually, but had remained quietly in a corner up until then.

  “How many boats does that leave?” Susan asked, trying to get ahead of the news.

  “None, mum,” Mattu said. “That’s every registered transport on the planet. They’re evacuating.”

  “In an hour?” Miguel said. “They organized a colonywide evacuation in an hour?”

  “Whatever that skip drone had to say, I don’t think they took much care packing.”

  “Charts,” Susan said. “I want to know their heading as soon as they settle into a course to bubble out. Extrapolate and—”

  “Contacts!” Mattu shouted. “Three contacts just popped bubbles three AU out from the system primary. Confirmation by recon platform seven. Wait one. Second platform concurs. Verified three bogeys in system.”

  Susan’s nostrils flared. Someone was throwing a party in her backyard and didn’t bother to invite her. “Scopes, talk to me. What are we looking at?”

  “Can’t tell, mum. They’re running low emissions and their adaptive camo and jammers are hot. I have approximate mass on two of them from their bubble energy. Four hundred thousand tons and…” Mattu swallowed. “Million-and-a-half-ton range. Plus or minus a hundred thousand. Best I can do. Designating the big bastard Bogey One, the heavy-cruiser range Bogey Two, and the frigate Bogey Three.”

  Susan refused to let a single muscle in her face move lest she betray her emotions to the crew. Someone had sent an entire offensive task group into her system. There was a planetary assault carrier out there. And she had no idea whose flag it was flying.

  “XO. Action Stations. Right fucking now.”

  “All hands. Action Stations. Action Stations,” Miguel yelled into the 1MC without bothering to remind everyone it wasn’t a drill.

  “I want four dozen ship-killers on the float toward those bogeys at max EM dark burn,” Susan said unfeelingly.

  “Weapons, launch four-eight ship-killers at maximum clandestine burn on a direct intercept heading for Bogeys One through Three. Target priorities to be assigned.”

  Warner was already three screens deep as she echoed the order. “Launch flight of two-four kill birds for dark burn for the bogeys, aye sir!”

  “Scopes,” Susan continued calmly. “The heavy cruiser, is there any chance it’s the Chusexx?”

  “No, mum. Our Xre friends are in the opposite direction, but still closer than the bogeys. If they’d bubbled out to go deeper in system, we’d have seen it six minutes ago. Unless they can travel through time now.”

  Of course, Susan admonished herself, feeling stupid for having asked the question in the first place. The deck swayed underfoot as two dozen seventy-ton missiles ripple fired out of their launch rails.

  “Do we warn the Chusexx?” Miguel asked, surprising her. “They’re still making repairs.”

  “Are you quite mad?” Nesbit said. “They’re still an enemy ship, even if they did sing you some pretty songs.”

  “I have to agree with our CL,” Susan said. “Besides, warn them of what? We don’t know what this is. For all we know, they sent a hidden skip back to base and this is their task group come to finish us off.”

  “That doesn’t explain the mystery Marathon drone.”

  “No. I suppose it doesn’t.” Susan bit her lip. “If Thuk is at all competent, which he is, he’ll have a recon drone or two shadowing us. They’ll know as much as we do in a few minutes. And warning an enemy vessel, even a hospitable one, could be construed as treason. So I think we have to let the Xre connect their own dots on this one.”

  “Agreed, mum.”

  “Scopes, transfer your drone network feed to the main plot, please.”

  “Done.”

  In the blink of an eye, the entire star system’s tactical situation sprang to life between the deck and the ceiling, everything the Ansari’s multilayered, overlapping shells of recon drone platforms saw from one side of Grendel’s treaty line to the other, pinned with IFF icons, range, relative velocity, heading, and light-speed-delay figures highlighted next to them.

  The neighborhood had gotten crowded. A cluster of two and a half dozen blue civilian icons huddled in low Grendel orbit as they sorted themselves out for a departure order. Each one would need to be at least five hundred klicks away from the rest when they bubbled. With that many ships sharing an orbit and launch window, the jockeying would take a while.

  Then there was the trio of unidentified warships between Susan and the civilians she was tasked with protecting, warships whose intentions she couldn’t begin to guess.

  Then there was Ansari, the only green “friendly” icon on the board. Further out still was the blazing red icon of the Chusexx, which under any other circumstances would unquestionably be the most serious threat, but thanks to the events of the last few days, actually concerned Susan the least. Strange times.

  “Has the bogey task group made any moves toward the civilian ships?” she asked.

  “No mum. They’ve spread out a bit, and Bogey Three is burning harder than the others, but they’re not heading down-well for Grendel. If anything, it looks like they’re starting a search pat—” Mattu stopped. “Hang on, those are CCDF jamming frequencies and rotation algorithms.”

  “Are you sure?” Warner said from the weapons station.

  “Spot me on it. Transferring feed from Platform Seven to your station.”

  Warner dug into a fresh screen to inspect the raw data. Mattu was officially responsible for managing the Electronic Warfare suite aboard ship, but it was Warner’s job to defeat the enemy’s EW capability with her beams, bangers, and booms, so both women had an excellen
t working knowledge of the systems and could back each other up in a pinch. Skill set redundancy was always a good thing to have on a ship of war.

  “I’ll be whipped, she’s right,” Warner said. “Not only that, but that little frigate piece of shit is running the old K-7 suite. It hasn’t been in for refit yet. Probably a Zephyr.”

  “So they’re friendlies? Confirmed?” Susan pressed.

  “Yeah, they’re CCDF hulls all right.”

  “Oh thank God,” Nesbit said from his corner.

  “Well, then why the hell are they running dark and throwing out jamming in the first place?” Miguel said.

  Susan rubbed her chin. “This is damned peculiar.”

  “Wait one,” Mattu said. “They’re dropping stealth systems. Okay, getting IFF ID on the bogeys and receiving challenge codes now.”

  Susan looked back to the plot. Bogey One’s icon flipped green to the CCDF Paul Allen, a Mjolnir-class planetary assault carrier and one of the newest, baddest ships in the inventory. It was flanked by the Mosaic-class heavy cruiser CCDF Carnegie and, just as Warner had said, a familiar, venerable Zephyr-class fast frigate, the CCDF Halcyon, serving as a screening element.

  “We’re getting a coded hail from Admiral Perez on omnidirectional. She’s asking us to drop our stealth and send our coordinates, heading, and velocity. She wants to rendezvous as soon as possible with urgent new orders.”

  Susan leaned back in her chair and glowered at the main plot. A hand rested on her shoulder. “Centi for your thoughts, mum?” Miguel whispered.

  “I think the map I’m looking at makes no goddamned sense.” She pointed at the two clusters of ships. “An unscheduled, unannounced, planet-wide evacuation begins an hour before an unscheduled, unannounced PAC task group shows up in my system. No one dirtside bothers to tell us anything, and the task group which you would assume is here to give cover to the mystery evacuation takes no notice of the civvy ships at all and instead pokes around dark for a while before deciding it wants to chat. I mean, what the hell? How many regulations and procedures were just ignored? Eight, nine?”

  “Eleven, mum.”

  “See, that doesn’t sit super well with me.”

  “It makes sense if we’re the objective,” Miguel said just above a whisper.

  “Veering into tinfoil-hat territory there, XO,” Susan said. “It’s probably just an overabundance of caution. They know Chusexx is around here somewhere. They’re probably just spooked.”

  “Then why tell the civilians but not us? The skip drone could’ve sent us the same coded burst. We were deliberately kept in the dark.”

  Susan had to admit, she didn’t have a good answer for that.

  “Regardless,” Nesbit inserted himself, “we have to answer the hail, unless you want to make it twelve?”

  “Quite right, CL.” Susan turned to Mattu’s station. “Scopes, send the Paul Allen our current coordinates, heading, and velocity in a coded omnidirectional burst.”

  “Yes, mum. Burst away. They’ll have it in”—she checked the distance—“eighty-seven minutes.”

  “Excellent. Charts?”

  Broadchurch perked up in her chair. “Yes mum?”

  “In ten minutes, go to flank speed until we’ve added twenty-thousand kph to our delta-v, then throttle back to standby and flip the ship to face opposite our current heading.”

  “Wait ten, flank speed, add twenty k, Crazy Ivan. Got it.”

  “Ah, mum?” Mattu said. “Do you want me to update the Allen with our, er, course correction?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Understood.”

  “Cap,” Miguel leaned in. “What are we doing?”

  “We’re putting a respectful distance between us and our guests. Admiral Perez’s command is brand new and I wouldn’t want to scuff her paint. It hurts the resale value, you know.”

  “Ah, okay. Because it sounded to me like you just ordered your navigation officer to put thirty-thousand kilometers or so between us and where our newest flagship expects us to be an hour and a half from now, which just happens to be outside its effective weapons envelope, but too close to make a safe micro jump, forcing them to close the distance with fusion rockets before they could engage, and then casually told your drone integration officer to lie about it.”

  “You have a very suspicious mind, Miguel. Has anyone ever told you that?”

  “It’s been mentioned, yes. So we’re not standing down from battle stations, then?”

  “That’s a hard no.”

  “Aaaaand I’m not recalling the flight of missiles we just floated,” Warner posited.

  “I don’t see the need. Spin them around and put them in a parking orbit at zero-zero relative to our current position. We’ll come back and get them after Admiral Perez has finished.”

  “Right.” Miguel stood up to address the rest of the CIC. “Somebody get a pot of square dog going. We’re going to need it.”

  “I’m going to need something stronger than coffee,” Nesbit said.

  TWENTY-THREE

  “Another husk update, Derstu,” Kivits called from his alcove. “The Ansari is burning, hard. At or near maximum normal acceleration for the class.”

  “Toward what?”

  “Along its original orbit. It hasn’t changed heading.”

  “That doesn’t flow.”

  “It all flows perfectly, Derstu. The exodus from the planet, the arrival of these new human warships. They’re preparing for a battle, limiting the exposure of their civilians and drastically increasing their forces. They’re coming after us. We have to leave. Right now.”

  Thuk scratched at an itch between two plates. Kivits wasn’t wrong, exactly. Indeed, it was the most obvious explanation for the highly unusual movements within the system. Still …

  “Why save us and let us go only to swoop back in a few days later? We were on the wrong side of the treaty line. They were within their legal rights to destroy us then. Now it would be an act of war.”

  “That didn’t save our reservoir,” Hurg reminded him.

  “True, but that was unoccupied.”

  “I know you’ve developed a fondness for the Ansari’s captain,” Kivits said, “but these new ships aren’t hers. Her superiors could easily have disagreed with her decision to let us escape and are here to correct what they see as a mistake.”

  Thuk had to admit, that would go a long way toward explaining what they’d seen. But then why was Susan accelerating away from them? Where was she going? Thuk flipped it around inside his skullplates for a few turns to no avail. It would have to wait.

  “Hurg, connect me to Attendant Lynz, please.”

  “Go for Lynz.”

  “Attendant, it’s Thuk. Can you spin me a seedpod?”

  “I still have a coil pulled out of service for integrity tests.”

  “Can you divert around it?”

  “Yes … but that will take almost as much time as completing the tests, and we’d still have to finish them later.”

  “We’re in a time crush, Lynz. Can you skip the tests and put the coil in service right away?”

  The mouth went silent for a beat before Lynz returned. “That’s against protocol, Derstu.”

  “Whoever wrote the protocol wasn’t staring down the spears and javelins of an entire human strike group. Do you vouch for your group’s work installing the coil?”

  “Of course, Derstu.”

  “Then that’s good enough for me. We’re skipping the integrity test for now. I’ll give you a chance to pull it for inspection as soon as possible. I take full responsibility for any failures that result. Is that satisfactory?”

  “Yes, Derstu.”

  “Good. Get that coil back in service as fast as you can. The harmony’s survival may depend on your speed.”

  “So glad I took this ascension,” Lynz said with just enough good humor in his voice to avoid discipline for insubordination. “It will be done.”

  “I know it will,” Thuk cut th
e link. “Now, Tiller Attendant, move us gently seven points off our present bearing.”

  “In what direction, Derstu?”

  “Doesn’t matter, any direction, just get us off this heading without giving the humans’ husks a light show. Then, we’re going dark as the ocean around us.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “Flip complete, mum,” Broadchurch announced. “We’re flying inverted along our heading. Fusion engines throttled back to standard debris-clearing thrust. We’ll lose a half meter per second until we’re pointed the right way again.”

  Susan grimaced, but there was nothing for it. The magnetic constriction nozzles of the Ansari’s four fusion rockets were made of incredibly tough stuff, but they were optimized against heat and radiation, not armored against kinetic impacts, unlike the heavy ablative plating on her nose and forward edges of her rings, which were meant to take a few stray dust grains moving at hundreds of thousands of kph. Without the plume to deflect them, the incredibly sensitive innards of the rockets would be a few rice-sized impacts away from failure.

  “Aft CiWS platforms warming up to pick off anything too big to be swept away by our fusion plume,” Warner added from the tactical station.

  “Warm up the rest of them,” Susan said.

  “For the rocks coming at us from behind?”

  “Of the tungsten variety.”

  “Understood, mum. Bringing up point defense now.”

  “And Scopes, put our monocles in the mix, quietly.”

  “How many, mum?” Mattu asked.

  “All of them.”

  “Aye, queueing up ship’s complement of monocle drones.”

  Susan studied the plot for the twentieth time in the last hour and a half. The civilian ships in orbit around Grendel had beaten themselves into something resembling a departure line and had begun bubbling out, but that was well outside of her immediate sphere of concern. Further out in the system, the only outward changes in that time had been their relative velocity and position, and the Chusexx had dropped off from their recon drone’s passive sensors after going EM dark themselves.