In the Black

by Patrick S. Tomlinson

  “It’s not unknown, that’s the bloody Chusexx!” she shouted triumphantly. Then, a very scary thought occurred to her. “Open a channel to the Xre cruiser.”

  “What?!”

  “Just do it!”

  Culligan’s face looked down in disbelief at her hands as if they were moving of their own volition. “Channel open.”

  “Derstu Thuk! This is Captain Kamala onboard the Zephyr-class frigate. Repeat, aboard the frigate. We’ve taken her over. The Zephyr is a friendly. Do not engage. Please acknowledge.”

  Susan’s breath caught in her throat as she waited for a response. Finally, the speakers crackled. “Susan Captain. How did you respond ‘Forked Path Lament’?”

  Her brain raced. It was Thuk’s voice, probably. She was as sure as she could be with such limited experience with the species. He was testing her. But forked path? What the hell was he talking about? Forked path, different paths, taking different roads, splitting up. Ah! The song they sang when they parted ways.

  “A twenty-one-gun salute,” she yelled into the mic.

  “Much well. Move frigate and Ansari to side. We salute enemy.” The line went dead.

  “Captain,” Culligan said. “They’re charging their rings again.”

  “Oh, shit. You heard him, get out of the way. Tell Ansari to follow our lead, questions can wait.”

  The nimble little frigate answered the helm and dove hard to port to clear the path for the newcomer to engage the Paul Allen. Ansari followed suit more slowly, owing to her larger mass and the grip Newton continued to have over objects in motion.

  “Chusexx, we’re clear. You are free to maneuver.”

  No one was prepared for what came next.

  * * *

  “Two sling bolts are in position, Derstu,” Kivits announced. “The weapon is charged.”

  “Nearing alignment with the target,” said the tiller attendant.

  Thuk watched the display with both excitement and something like sympathy. The enormous human assault ship, the Paul Allen according to Susan, continued charging forward heedlessly to close the range and engage the new threat without a care in the world. And why shouldn’t they? Even outnumbered now three-to-one by the Chusexx, Ansari, and Halcyon, one of those behemoths could be reasonably confident of victory in any normal engagement.

  What no one outside of Thuk’s harmony knew was just how abnormal this fight was going to be. Provided everything actually worked.

  “Alignment achieved. Ready to loose.”

  Thuk looked at Kivits, then pointed at the icon of the Allen. “You wanted something to test it on. We could hardly ask for a better target than one of their newest assault ships running straight for us.”

  “Agreed.” Kivits rubbed a mandible. “I wouldn’t have guessed it would be while coming to the rescue of a human ship, however.”

  “The universe is infinite. Dulac, you may loose the weapon.”

  As had happened hundreds of times in the past, and would hundreds of times more in the future, warfare changed with the pull of a trigger. Outside, in the small rings built into the Chusexx’s main rings, a “sling bolt” the length of five adult Xre was enveloped inside its own miniature seedpod and given a push. It was not a javelin, what the humans called a “missile.” It had no onboard propulsion. Indeed, from its vantage point, it never moved at all. It had no warhead of explosives, either conventional or nuclear, because it didn’t need them. It had no guidance system, because it couldn’t maneuver even if it wanted to. It had no AI to help it identify decoys and defeat countermeasures. It scarcely had a computer at all. Instead, its entire interior was filled with spool capacitors and a tiny amount of negative matter to let the bolt pierce the seedpod, tripped by a very clever proximity sensor built to detect the slightest changes in the seedpod’s shape that would indicate it was interacting with a mass outside.

  And that’s all it needed to be.

  What happened next occurred in a space of time so brief as to defy description. Traveling at many hundreds of multiples of light-speed, the bolt covered the distance between the Chusexx and the Paul Allen near-instantaneously. The moment the seedpod contacted the hull of the carrier, the sensor inside tripped and tore open the seedpod. There was no explosion in the conventional sense, at least not at first. Instead, the collapsing seedpod warped and distorted a small area of local space with such violence that anything within the field of effect was torn apart down to nearly the molecular level.

  This occurred between the Allen’s gamma ray shield cone and its first tier of antimatter containment vessels, rupturing them and releasing an apocalyptic amount of energy, instantly destroying the fusion rocket cluster, AM and He3 storage tanks, and shattering the great ship’s keel. Usually, even a loss of antimatter containment wasn’t enough to destroy an entire ship, as the shield cone was designed to direct the force of the explosion away from the engineering and primary hulls, leaving half a ship unable to fight or maneuver, but still with reserve power for life support and communications.

  But a third of the shield had been ripped apart by the seedpod collapse, channeling the force of the blast deep into the engineering hull, setting off secondary explosions as drone platforms, probes, counter-missile magazines, and eventually shuttle fuel reserves and ground support munitions all added to the cascading carnage.

  In the span of a breath, all that remained of the Paul Allen, the most powerful warship humanity had ever put to space, was a gutted, drifting shell of armor plating and melted structural steel.

  There were no survivors. There was no reason to loose the second bolt.

  * * *

  The stunned silence in Ansari’s CIC was total. Long faces stared at the tactical plot, at each other, or at nothing at all. Miguel was the first to compose himself. “We still have birds incoming, everyone.”

  That snapped them out of it. There were indeed still seventy-three orphaned missiles from the Allen coming their way. But with their mother’s datalinks now silent and reverted to autonomous control, they quickly lost cohesion and became easy prey for Warner as her fingers danced across the CiWS and counter-missile controls. She stopped the last missile a few hundred meters short of optimal detonation range. The only injury they sustained was from missile fragments peppering the hull like birdshot.

  “Damage report,” Miguel requested calmly.

  “We’re down a lidar array portside forward. And one of our CiWS modules took a hit to its independent radar, but we can tie it into the rest of the sensor net. Minor damage to half a dozen compartments, showing loss of pressure in four of them, but slow. Holes can’t be very big, they’ll be easy to patch. One casualty reported, a boomer tech took shrapnel to the calf. Headed to the infirmary now, not life-threatening.”

  Miguel shook his head in disbelief. By rights, he should be surrounded by fire and screaming and alarms, if he was still alive at all. Instead …

  “Sir, Halcyon Actual on the line.”

  “Put her through.”

  “Miguel?” Susan’s voice said through the room. “Are you seeing this?”

  “Seeing it. Still not sure about believing it.”

  “I know what you mean. We’re showing some light venting coming from your hull. How’s the damage?”

  “Minimal. All hands accounted for. We made it. Now I’d just like to know how we made it.”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Susan asked. “Our new Xre friends were holding out on us. Those little rings in their rings weren’t for FTL maneuvering. They’re an Alcubierre railgun.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Forty-eight hours later, Susan found herself sitting at a conference table onboard Ansari, surrounded by the most improbable company imaginable. Warner, Mattu, and Okuda sat to her left. To her right, acting captain of the CCDF Halcyon Miguel Azevedo and his newly minted XO, Lieutenant Francine Culligan. Across the table from them sat, or in two cases knelt, Xre Derstu Thuk, Dulac Kivits, Attendant Hurg, Attendant Lynz, and visibly unsettled corporate liaison Jav
ier Nesbit, only because there weren’t any more chairs on the human side of the table for him to occupy.

  After the dust settled from the battle, Susan pulled rank to get her ship back, but Miguel got to keep a command, so he couldn’t complain much. On her suggestion, he’d picked Culligan as his first officer in recognition of her service during the battle against what had begun as her own task group. Much to everyone’s surprise, she’d managed to talk another half-dozen of her shipmates into crossing the line as well, easing the number of billets they’d have to fill from Ansari’s ranks to keep the fast frigate operating.

  The last two days had been a blur of activity, dominated by rescue operations onboard the crippled Carnegie, stripping the carcass of the same, and shuttling survivors down to the recently vacated civilian facilities on the surface of Grendel. Carnegie had suffered significant casualties and quite a few KIA during the battle, primarily from the sucker-punch delivered by Halcyon before they’d realized it had been commandeered. Several of the wounded were still in Ansari’s infirmary in critical condition and would have to remain there for the foreseeable future. The walking wounded were transferred down to the planet’s surface with their shipmates.

  “Where are we on integrating our salvage from Carnegie?” Susan asked.

  “Nearly finished,” Warner answered. “We’re still running updates on the older Mk VIII birds we lifted to bring them up to spec with our AI network, couple bugs to code out, but nothing insurmountable. They’re a little slower than the Mk IXs, but we’re back up to seventy-eight percent magazine capacity. Counter-missile and CiWS ammo is even better. We’re topped off with room to spare between both us and Halcyon.”

  “Throw the rest in a cargo bay. No idea when we’re going to lay hands on more of it.”

  “Agreed, mum.”

  “How about the rest of our consumables? Water, provisions, fuel?”

  “We’re in the green on all of it,” Okuda, who had been coordinating flight ops to and from the surface answered. “Water tanks are full, He3 at ninety-three percent, and antimatter stuffed to the rafters with enough left to tank up our, um, new allies.” Okuda glanced across the table to Thuk, whose mouthparts moved into such a position it could, charitably, be assumed to be an approximation of a smile.

  “Grateful,” the translator matrix provided. “Easier if our reservoir not blown up.”

  “I said I was sorry,” Susan replied. “But in fairness, we were technically still enemies at that point.”

  “Artistic done.”

  Susan laughed. “Thank you, I was rather proud of it. How long until the machine shop finishes that adaptor collar so Chusexx can hook up with the AM factory?”

  “Another day, mum,” Mattu said. With Miguel on detached duty, she’d gotten a field promotion to XO and was busy juggling a dozen time-critical projects. Everything was time-critical. They’d sent Halcyon back to Grendel in time to disable the task group’s skip drone before it automatically bubbled out for the Admiralty House with everything it had seen, and the system was already on a civilian travel lockdown, so they had three days left before anyone would realize the Allen was overdue, and another five before any reinforcements dispatched to investigate would arrive.

  It was the first time Susan had felt any sort of gratitude for being assigned to such a far-flung outpost, but every day they lingered was a day lost on the lead they had over whatever would eventually be sent to finish them off. And if a Planetary Assault Carrier task group hadn’t done the trick the first time, she didn’t even want to think about what the response would be this time, from either side.

  She looked across the table to Thuk’s people. They’d been betrayed by their own as well. Someone from within their “Symphony” had sabotaged the Chusexx, hoping to cause a flashpoint for war. And Susan was absolutely convinced someone on her side of the Red Line had intended the Ansari to be the spark. When that failed, the system’s civilians were evacuated and the Paul Allen sent to make sure they could spin whatever story they’d wanted the public to hear.

  Unsurprisingly, the news hadn’t sat well with either of them, and Thuk’s act of gratitude solidified into a more permanent alliance on the spot. Which, while an immense relief, carried its own unique challenges and obstacles.

  “Thuk, have you found any of our food that you can use yet?”

  The Xre’s face made a strange gesture that, if she had to guess, was probably some permutation of disgust. So, he’d been subjecting himself to the food trials. Susan imagined herself diving into a plate of live bugs and had a similar reaction, so she could relate on some level.

  “Search continue,” Thuk said politely, as diplomatic an answer as any.

  Susan nodded sympathetically. “We’re prioritizing staple foods for deep storage, survival bars of simple proteins, sugars, and carbohydrates. They should work in a pinch, even for your physiology. Sorry they’re not … wriggling.”

  “We endure,” Kivits said. Susan hadn’t heard enough out of the four-legged worker caste to get a feel for his inflections, but he sounded resigned to his fate.

  “We endure together, one … mound,” she said, borrowing the Xre word for community, hoping it came off as genuine and not appropriation. “Anyway, we have some breathing room for the time being. But we need to start thinking about what our plan is going forward. Where are we going next? What are our objectives? We’re adrift without a compass here. We need to decide on—”

  The 1MC erupted in an alert. At the same time, an urgent message flashed red in Susan’s AR field.

  CAPTAIN TO THE CIC.

  “Set Condition Two,” Susan snapped off as she got out of her chair. “We’re moving this meeting to the CIC. Double time.”

  Three decks up and a short jog down the main corridor later, Susan’s strange retinue approached the hatch to the CIC, where a now-veteran-but-still-junior private saw them and snapped his PDW to a low ready position and held out a hand quite obviously directed at the Xre.

  “Halt!” he commanded.

  “They’re with me, Culligan,” Susan barked in annoyance. “We’re friends now, remember?”

  Culligan turned white and let his weapon dangle at his side as he moved his hand for a hasty salute. “Yes, mum. Sorry, mum. Old habits.”

  “Adapt,” she said as she crossed the threshold.

  Miguel thumped him on the forehead as he passed. “Hope your sister got the brains.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  To their credit, the Xre said nothing. The CIC settled into a cramped, surreal scene. Thuk, without knowing it, took over Nesbit’s worry corner, sending the CL to the other side of the compartment.

  “What’s the matter, Thuk? First time in a human CIC?” Warner poked.

  “Obvious. Dream it different,” Thuk shot back to everyone’s amusement. “Still, much like mind cavern. Lights different.”

  Susan dropped into the familiar contours of her chair. “Sit rep?”

  “Platform Six picked up a bubble burst on the far side of Grendel,” Mattu answered as she relieved the crewman manning her station. “It’s big. Seven hundred fifty thousand tons.”

  “Action stations,” Susan ordered. “Cut us loose from the station and warm up the—”

  “Hold up,” Mattu cut in with just a bit more confidence than she might have before they’d all committed to a course best described as legally gray. “Civilian transponder. Bulk cargo hauler, that’s why she’s so big. Preakness, flagged under Ageless Corp.”

  “Verify that,” Susan said.

  “Visuals confirm it, mum. Triple drive plume, standardized containers strapped to a skeletal keel. It’s an ore hauler or I’ll eat my enlistment contract.”

  Susan considered the updated plot, and still didn’t like what she was seeing. Any incoming civilian traffic would’ve been waved off before the Allen’s task group set course. If they were actually civilians, whomever had just bubbled in knew damned well they weren’t supposed to be in Grendel space. Mattu uttered someth
ing in Hindi that Susan could only assume was a vicious curse.

  “Well, Scopes? Are you going to share with the rest of the class?”

  Mattu turned from her station with a haunted look. “The Preakness was last reported in orbit around Lazarus under medical quarantine for a bacterial outbreak it was involved in on Teegarden. It’s a plague ship, mum.”

  Susan’s eyes went wide as soup bowls. “Beg pardon?”

  Nesbit raised a hand from his new corner of the CIC. “Ah, Captain? I’m getting a connection request from Preakness. Except it’s not really the Preakness.”

  “You’re what?” she blurted. “How are you getting a connection request?”

  “Because I’m the damned corporate liaison on this ship and I have a direct channel in my head for C-level transtellar execs.”

  “And you mean to tell me there’s a goddammed C-suit ringing in your brain right now?”

  “Yeah,” Nesbit nodded emphatically. “And you really need to take this call.”

  Susan rubbed the bridge of her nose, simultaneously hoping and failing to cut off the budding stress headache. She’d had weird days in service of the CCDF. She’d had weird days as a civilian. But this, this one took the blue ribbon by a light-year.

  “Okay, what the hell? Mattu, if you’ll release permissions to Mr. Nesbit to access the main display so he can put his important call through?”

  “Permissions granted, mum.”

  All eyes, of both species, turned to face the … face that appeared in the tactical plot. A fit man with a square jaw and blue eyes that looked just south of gene-spliced and a shock of straight hair losing the battle against graying. Susan guessed he was within a handful of years of her own age. Which direction, she couldn’t say.

  “This is Captain Susan Kamala, commanding officer of the CCDF cruiser Ansari and acting … spokeswoman of the combined Human/Xre task group Christmas Truce.” They hadn’t actually agreed to the name. She’d just pulled it from memory and decided it had some emotional gravity to it. “Whom am I addressing?”