In the Black

by Patrick S. Tomlinson

  “All right, you crazy bitch!”

  “Who are you calling a ‘bitch’?” Okuda demanded, but Susan put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Small victories, Sarge. We have what we want.”

  “Right. Sorry, went a little sixth wave for a second there.” Okuda resumed the ‘negotiation.’ “Slide your weapons out onto the open deck, hands in the air, come out where we can see you.”

  A handful of assault rifles and PDWs scattered against the deck, followed in close succession by sidearms and three remote detonator rigs. Susan had to hand it to them; for a small squad with zero prep time, the Halcyon’s marines had come to play.

  “Awesome, now let’s see you,” Okuda commanded. “And no grabby-grabby for the pew-pews. I’ll grant you might be as fast as us. You’re not faster, clear?”

  Reluctantly, the three remaining members of the Halcyon’s marine detachment walked out onto the hallway, hands in the air, right into the line of fire of Okuda’s team. If any of them so much as sneezed, they’d all be turned into hamburger.

  They didn’t.

  “Excellent. Now, we’re new here, so I need someone to be my captain’s tour guide of your CIC. Volunteers?”

  “Kamala’s alive?” the voice from the other end of the link said. It belonged to a young PFC, Korean ancestry if Susan was any judge. She stepped into the corridor in full sight of everyone.

  “Yes, I am. And I’d like to have a cup of tea with your CO, if you don’t mind.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  “Splash one,” Warner called out as a penetrator rod from one of Ansari’s counter-missiles connected with the nose cone of a ship-killer missile gobbling up the space between them. “CM reserves down to twenty-four percent. Wait, splash two. Caught another in the debris. Six still incoming.”

  “See, Warner, you’re not the only one to bunch her birds too close together.” Miguel scanned the plot. The system-spanning display had shrunk down to a sphere only a few light minutes across, a tactical map that contained only the Ansari, Halcyon, Carnegie, Paul Allen, and all the missiles, recon drones, and decoys they were currently throwing at each other. The civilian fleet over Grendel was almost certainly gone by now, and had no interest in joining a fracas between proper warships anyway. The only X-factor not on the current plot was the Chusexx, and last they’d seen, Thuk’s harmony was burning away from the melee as fast as they could. Lucky bugs.

  “Angle Decoy Two away at positive thirty degrees from the eclectic under full accel. Make it look like we panicked and bolted. Maybe draw a couple of those birds off us.”

  “Decoy Two helm no longer responding to commands, sir.”

  Fuck, Miguel cursed internally. They were burning through resources at an unsettling pace. They were still alive, but more than two hours into the fight, they weren’t inflicting enough damage to stay that way for long. Wars of attrition favored those with the most crap lying around to lose. There was a lot of crap on a planetary assault carrier.

  “Move to Decoy One, then.”

  “Too late. Incoming birds entering terminal phase!”

  Miguel punched a finger on the stud that opened the 1MC. “All hands, Brace! Brace! Brace!”

  Three of the incoming ship-killers fell to the combined last-ditch efforts of their CiWS turrets, and another to an overpowered shot from the Ansari’s main laser array, which had been co-opted momentarily from offensive operations by the ship’s onboard defensive AI network, which was just as motivated to continue existing as any of the human occupants. Missile number five turned out to be a dud, wasting its nuclear warhead with a malfunctioning implosion trigger.

  The last, however, had sharper teeth.

  A funny thing about nuclear weapons and the vacuum of space was, absent the atmosphere necessary to carry the thermal shock wave, nukes weren’t nearly as destructive. Instead of mushroom clouds, their megatons created a powerful EMP effect, which all modern combat warships were well-shielded against, and an intense burst of gamma rays, which they were less so. The spike plate that redirected the gamma radiation created by a ship’s M/AM reactor kept the crew alive, but also carried one of the highest mass penalties onboard. Coating the entire ship in that degree of armor plating would make it so slow and cumbersome as to be useless in combat. The ancient calculation of mobility versus safety was as alive as ever.

  But while enough gamma rays were of concern to the squishy components of a ship’s crew, they posed very little danger to its hardware. That is, unless it’s concentrated. Which was why when the hydrogen bomb at the core of the Carnegie’s missile detonated, its energies were, for an almost imperceptible moment, partially constrained and directed through a uranium outer casing that channeled nearly a third of the energy into a coherent stream, most easily understood as a gamma ray laser, even though that’s not what it was at all.

  For one hundred and thirty-nine microseconds, this stream of gamma rays poured out of their dying mother and streaked across the short distance separating them from the Ansari before crashing into their target at ninety-nine-point-nine-repeating-percent light-speed. The effect was immediate and devastating.

  Warning klaxons and flashing red error codes filled the CIC like a Finados Day parade marching through Rio. “Damage report!” Miguel shouted over the din.

  “Still coming in,” Warner answered. “We have a main electrical bus fused, J-12 coupling. Rerouting. Probably an overloaded circuit. We can’t have been hit in the hulls or we’d be venting.”

  “Beta ring is cored,” Broadchurch announced. “Totally dead. Safeties have already kicked in and purged the negative matter stores from the entire ring.” They switched their feed to an external camera. “Damn. A whole ring segment is slag. Direct hit.”

  “No chance of repair?” Miguel asked, despite knowing the answer.

  “Not without a yard berth.”

  “Doubt we’re in line for one of those anytime soon. Jettison it.”

  “Jettison beta ring, aye.” Broadchurch swiped through two screens and entered a command code to satisfy a system prompt that they really did want to cut an entire ring loose. At the push of a virtual button, explosive bolts at three points in the beta ring and in the three struts that connected it to the engineering hull detonated, sending the remains of the ruined ring tumbling away from the Ansari. Lose another, and they’d be unable to blow a bubble, effectively stranding them in system. But they had more immediate problems now, and slimming down the ship’s mass by almost ten thousand tons meant just that much more speed and maneuverability for whatever fight was still ahead.

  Miguel refocused on the task at hand. “Scopes, how long until we get another monocle shot lined up on Carnegie?”

  “Seven-three seconds, if they don’t do anything clever. Wait one … what the shit?”

  Miguel held his hands outstretched. “In your own time, Scopes!”

  “We’re getting whisker laser telemetry from our shuttle on Halcyon,” Mattu said, tears forming at the corners of her eyes. “They’re streaming us realtime updates on the birds coming from Carnegie and Allen. Weps, check this shit out.” Mattu shunted the new data feed over to Warner’s station.

  Warner pumped a fist in the air. “I’ve got their birds’ entire flight profiles. I can shoot them down like wounded ducks!”

  She did it, Miguel realized. The crazy puta did it. Susan is sitting in their CIC, feeding us all the data a forward observer would be tasked with handling. They’d just evened up in the unit count, two to two. Nevermind that each of their ships were out-massed. They were faster, nimbler. He pounded a fist on the armrest of his captain’s chair, then stood. “Kamala is alive, people. She’s taken Halcyon with a shuttle-full of angry jarheads and she’s giving us everything we need to stay in the fight for a few more minutes. Don’t waste it. Warner, let some strays through. Don’t give away that we have access to their network or they’ll figure it out and turn that ratty old tin can into recycling with a salvo.”

  “Should I move on Halcyo
n, sir?” Broadchurch asked. “Make it look like we’re charging her for an attack run, but actually bring her into our defensive envelope?”

  “That’s some devious double-think bullshit, Charts. I love it. What does that do to our monocle shot, Scopes?”

  “Adds seventeen seconds before alignment and burns up another twenty-three percent of the drone’s fuel stores.”

  “And is there any chance we get a second shot out of that platform?”

  “None, sir, unless our flagship is supremely incompetent.”

  “As I thought. Charts, execute your bullshit.”

  “I could throw a couple of missiles at Halcyon, sir,” Warner said. “Make it look like we’re attacking them, but then hand off the fire control links and let them redirect them. They don’t have very deep magazines on that tin can.”

  “Beautiful. Do it. Make sure Halcyon understands the plan before launch.”

  “Roger that.”

  Miguel fell back into the command chair. Not his, he was keeping it warm for Susan, but it’s where his butt was planted for the moment. His ship was alive, against all projections and every simulated exercise the CCDF had ever run in seventy years. He was running like a squirrel from a diving falcon, but by God, in that moment, he’d never been more alive.

  * * *

  “Will you please either stop pacing the deck, or take it into the hallway?” Elsa demanded. “We have another two days in this bucket and I’ve only got another couple hours of self-control left.”

  Tyson stopped midstride at the center of their … modest accommodations. “Sorry. Didn’t realize I was doing it.”

  “You were doing it for twenty minutes. Don’t you travel well, a bubbler like you?”

  “I don’t go off-world as often as you might think, and my travel quarters are usually a bit more well-appointed.” Tyson spread his arms to encompass all four square meters of their berth’s floorspace, including the narrow bunk beds, the single hot plate and coffeepot with the gall to call themselves a “kitchenette,” and the sink built into the tank of the compartment’s toilet, that last detail being the cause of Tyson’s current dehydration headache.

  “What, this ore-hauler doesn’t have a luxury C-level suite you could’ve conned your smuggler friend into handing over? Maybe rent out an entire deck so the plebs don’t trouble us?”

  “That would rather defeat the purpose of traveling incognito, don’t you suppose? And no, there’s no lavish suite.”

  Elsa returned her attention to the reader in her palm. Tyson was telling a fib, of course. He happened to know for certain that the Praxis-flagged bulk cargo ship they’d arranged passage on had a very nice C-level suite, because he’d stayed in it some fifteen years earlier when it had still been the Belmont in Ageless’s merchant fleet. Now rechristened the Taipei, it was the same class and layout as the Preakness that was still under quarantine in Lazarus orbit, only a few years older.

  The shared history of the two ships had not been a coincidence, but part of Daryl Cooper’s devious little plot to get them out of the system undetected. Or at least undetected long enough to no longer make a difference.

  The Taipei had been scheduled to depart for a return trip to Proxima, just a short four-light-year hop away from the Sol system. Daryl had arranged forged travel documents for Tyson and Elsa aboard the ship that would put them tantalizingly close to Ceres and the man they suspected was connected to the attacks on their persons. But the forgeries were intentionally sloppy, containing a few flags that would reveal their fake nature to a skilled investigator once someone got around to looking at them more closely.

  In the meantime, the Taipei maneuvered herself into a mutual orbit with the Preakness, their approaches coming so close that their radar signatures merged and Lazarus Space Traffic Control had to issue an official citation against the Praxis Corp. crew for violating minimum safe clearance and generally sloppy ship handling.

  What LSTC didn’t know was in that six-second window, the two nearly identical ships had executed a very illegal transponder code handoff, made very slight preprogrammed changes to their drive signatures, then burned hard enough to swap courses under the guise of last-ditch collision-evasion maneuvers.

  Thirty minutes later, the “Taipei” broke orbit and bubbled out for her appointment in Proxima, while the “Preakness” lazily circled the planet for another sixteen hours until the forged travel documents were discovered by a sharp eye in Customs and Immigration and the news broke in the underground that Tyson Abington had “fled” onboard the Praxis ship. Fifteen minutes after that, a small pleasure yacht, little bigger than a skip drone, filed an emergency flight plan for Proxima and bubbled out several hundred klicks short of the safety line, incurring still more fines for LSTC’s coffers.

  At which point, “Preakness” registered a new flight plan for the Teegarden system where it would ostensibly deliver relief supplies to the colony while they recovered from the plague. In reality, the Taipei only bubbled out a few light-weeks away from Lazarus, then plotted its true course for Grendel.

  Daryl’s ruse had unfolded even better than Tyson could’ve hoped. Not only had they gotten away undetected, but they’d managed to flush out a new lead in the registry of the yacht that chased after what they’d thought was Tyson’s evacuation route. It was registered to a pair of fake accounts and run through at least one shell corp, but tracking down its true provenance was only a matter of time.

  Not that the minor miracle had come cheaply. Again, Daryl Cooper hadn’t asked for money. Instead, he’d negotiated for the eventual share of NeoSun’s percentage of the Grendel project’s profits while he had Tyson over a metaphorical barrel.

  Tyson couldn’t help but feel a swell of admiration for the smuggler’s mind. He’d underestimated the man, in no small part because of Praxis’s position in the transtellar pecking order. Now, he wondered just how much of that was a calculated ploy, and just how deep Cooper’s fingers reached into how many pots. They’d pushed him down the ladder because he wasn’t established money. He was uncouth and unrefined, a junker scrambling for castoffs. Not really “one of them.” But instead of bristling at the insult, Daryl had taken to the role and thrived in the unique ecosystem he found himself in.

  “You’re not very good at waiting, are you?” Elsa said out of the blue.

  “Hmm?”

  “You were mumbling to yourself.”

  “Was I?”

  “Yes. You pace, you fidget, now you’re talking to yourself. Do you not know how to wait?”

  Tyson considered this. “I suppose not. People are usually waiting on me, not the other way around. Most of my days are full from the moment I set a foot on the floor to the moment I collapse back into bed. I’m not used to this much down time.”

  “We wait in the lab all the time. Wait for cultures to grow. Wait for sequencing to finish. Wait for the centrifuge to stop. Wait for batch results. Always waiting on something.”

  “What do you do?”

  Elsa waved her reader. “Catch up on the pro journals. Scan data sets on other experimental runs, anything to keep connected and busy.”

  “Is that what you’re reading now?”

  “Now I’m reading about a young heiress who seduces a summer intern to get back at her parents. They’re currently being gymnastic in her daddy’s yacht, but corsairs just showed up. He’s naked and fighting them off swinging a sword at the moment.”

  “Further reinforcing my decision not to have children.”

  “Oh come on, it’s a romance novel.”

  “Exactly. It’s fiction. Believe me, it’s tame compared to the reality. There’s hardly a hereditary C-level family alive that aren’t complete head cases after a few generations.”

  “Including yours?”

  “There’s a reason I’ve elected to keep it small. Dealing with my board members’ families is more than enough most days.”

  “Christmas must be lonely.”

  “The company Christmas party hos
ts almost twenty thousand people.”

  “That’s not the same and you know it.”

  “Do you have children, Doctor?”

  Elsa shook her head. “No, not yet. But I play auntie to six, no wait, seven kids now. My siblings have been busy.”

  Tyson forced himself to sit in the cabin’s only chair. A small, hard affair that encouraged anyone that sat in it for very long to stand and walk around again.

  “You’re right. I’m not good at waiting, mostly because I’m crap at not having any influence over events. I could go harass the bridge crew, but that won’t change the laws of physics and get us to Grendel any faster. And whatever is going to happen there is probably happening right now, and there’s not a damned thing I can do about it until it’s all over.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  On Ansari’s outer hull, the protective cover on one of the eighteen laser array emitters slid open, exposing the focusing lens to space. It fired, invisibly discharging quadrillions of photons into the vacuum.

  Downrange, two pinpricks thousands of kilometers apart, neither visible to the unassisted human eye, drifted into alignment for the barest of moments. The stream reached the first pinprick, which adjusted its angle ever so slightly to compensate for the superior resolution its sensors provided being so close to the target.

  Milliseconds later, those same photons reached the second pinprick, which had grown from a speck to the three-hundred-and-thirty-thousand-ton heavy cruiser CCDF Carnegie. The beam sheared through one of the three pylons supporting the cruiser’s alpha ring with hardly a pause before burrowing into the engineering hull, shattering ablative ceramoplast armor before tunneling through three machinery compartments and two drone launch tubes.

  “Solid hit!” Okuda shouted from her new assignment at Halcyon’s tactical station. “Ansari just took a chunk out of Carnegie.”

  “Are we still getting damage updates?” Susan asked from her second command chair in as many hours. The Halcyon’s previous CO had been presented with an option between ordering her ship and crew into self-destruct to prevent Susan’s takeover, or surrender. They’d elected for the latter. Except no one else in the enemy task group knew that just yet. Susan wanted to keep that particular bit of bad news under wraps as long as possible.