Hecate

by J. B. Rockwell

  “Still dicey as hell,” Sikuuku told her. “Huge set of brass balls on whoever completed that jump.”

  Thousand ways for that to go sideways. Made Henricksen’s stomach clench up just thinking about the disastrous consequences of an off-target jump.

  Science station my ass. No way they’d take that kind of risk for a simple science installation.

  “Hanu. What’s the status of those scans?”

  A pause as Hanu pulled a last bit of data onto her panel, parsed the information and merged it with what she’d already captured. “Sir…” She trailed off, gesturing at the station outside. “I ran a hull penetration scan so I could get a look at the guts of that thing.”

  Henricksen threw a surprised look at Scythe’s camera. “You can do that?”

  “The engineers gave us really good sensors.”

  “Apparently,” he said, lips twisting sourly.

  Black Ops and its toys. He wondered what other tech they’d created that no one else seemed to know about.

  “And what do these extra special sensors with their hull penetrating scans have to say?”

  Hanu snuck another look at the camera, as if searching for reassurance. Bowed her head over her panel and rattled away, shunting a series of overlapping, three dimensional diagrams to the front windows. “This,” she said, when the last diagram was done.

  Henricksen took a look—eyes flicking between those diagrams on the windows and the reality of the station outside. Studied the information there for quite some time, risking a bit of wobble in the ship’s flight path to give the structure of the thing a thorough examination. Noting the compartments and bracings, the huge energy source at the station’s center surrounded by…something. Some kind of machinery, if he had to guess, though the scans—as good as they were—showed them as somewhat amorphous blobs.

  Mostly he saw metal. Huge masses of it. Entire compartments filled with it, turning sections of the diagram dark.

  Dead ships and a station stuffed full of composite metal. I have a bad feeling about this.

  “Run the scans again, Hanu,” he said faintly. “Sweep the sensors across those ships out there while you’re at it.”

  She looked up, helmeted head tilting in question. “Scythe says they’re dead, sir.”

  “I’m aware of that, Hanu.”

  She stared a moment, fingers resting on her panel. Nodded and touched at her station, programming the sensors for a second set of hull penetrating scans.

  “Something in particular you’re looking for?” Sikuuku toggled his helmet comms to a private channel, keeping the question between the two of them.

  “Maybe. A hunch, anyway.” Henricksen pulled the live feed of the sensor data onto his panel, ignoring the station scans for now, focusing only on those ships. Tapped into that first set of scans, laying the three dimensional model of the manufactory alongside the hull penetrating scans Hanu ran on its ring of ships.

  Stared at the results for a long, long time, feeling cold all over before shunting the data to the Artillery pod and letting Sikuuku take a look himself.

  “It’s a match,” he said quietly. “A match to the station. Same composite metal signature sitting inside each of those ships’ bellies.”

  Hanu turned, looking from Henricksen to Scythe’s camera. “This isn’t a science station, is it, sir?”

  “No, Hanu,” Henricksen said quietly. “I don’t think it is.”

  “Then what is it?” she asked, voice hushed. “What’s in there?”

  “Remember those nannites Kinsey showed you?”

  She nodded and then froze, sitting up straight. “No,” she breathed, shaking her head.

  “Inside the station,” Henricksen told her, highlighting the repeating metal lumps. “Inside those ships as well.”

  “What does it mean?” Hanu whispered, still not getting—scared, as she should be, but not enough. Not realizing what all this was about.

  “It’s a manufactory,” Scythe told her, soft voice stepping in. “They’re building nannites in there, Hanu. Building them inside that station, and then stuffing them inside those ships.”

  Twenty-Eight

  “What do we do?” Ogawa twisted, looking from Henricksen to Hanu, to Sikuuku in his Artillery pod. “I mean, this changes things, doesn’t it? All of our plans?”

  “Not everything. Still gotta find that can.” Henricksen glanced at Ogawa, nodded to her station. “What’s the word from the other Ravens?”

  A check of the channels—helmeted head bowed over her station’s panels, multi-colored lights reflecting off the darkened visor covering her face—and Ogawa turned, shaking her head. “Nothing, sir. Not yet anyway. Shriek and Snicker-snack are barely a quarter of the way through their search pattern, Sever and Sharp slightly less.”

  “This is taking too long.” Sikuuku kicked at the pod’s foot controls, turning it a few inches more. “Rate they’re going, we could be here for hours.”

  “Not like they aren’t trying.” Ogawa’s head pivoted, turning his way. “Lot of rocks out there to pick through. Lot of places for a canister to hide.”

  “And us stuck here in the middle,” Sikuuku grumbled. “Asses hanging in the wind.” He shucked over and leaned out of his pod, setting a hand on Henricksen’s shoulder. “What are we doing, Captain?”

  “Not sure yet.” Henricksen chewed his lip, thinking hard. “Figuring that out.”

  Couldn’t leave without that canister—information retrieval was their primary objective, station scans a distant second. But the Brass would want to know about this. The ships, the manufactory, the mines littering the asteroid field.

  None of it in the mission plan. Science station supposedly, hiding inside these rocks. No mention of nannites, much less those ship-killing mines.

  Shoddy-ass intel, he thought. Way too shoddy for a supposedly experienced spook.

  Bothered him. Everything about this mission bothered him.

  “Doesn’t make sense. None of this makes sense.”

  “Captain?” Ogawa raised a hand, waving to get his attention. “I’m picking up a communication.”

  “Inbound or outbound?”

  “Both,” she said, puzzled. “And it’s…Sir.” Ogawa turned her head, visored face showing blood red in the bridge pod’s lighting. “It’s us, sir. It’s coming from us.”

  Henricksen raised his head, staring right into Scythe’s camera. “Mind explaining that?”

  “I had orders,” she told him, voice wooden, mechanical, devoid of any emotion. Any semblance of personality gone.

  Two-Six speaking now, not Scythe. Two-Six watching from that camera at the front of the bridge.

  Pissed Henricksen off something fierce, having her retreat like that. Fall back on just being some nameless, faceless AI. “We had orders, remember? Team, Scythe.” He waved at the crew around him, thumped a fist against his chest. “We work as a team. That means sharing information. Telling each other what’s going on.”

  Scythe said nothing, just watched him from above, silent for a long, long time. “I’m sorry, Henricksen,” she said quietly, once she finally found her voice. Her real voice, not that bullshit, anonymous AI thing she’d dragged out earlier. “This isn’t my choice.”

  “Isn’t your choice?” Henricksen frowned in annoyance. “What the hell—?”

  “Jump signature!” Hanu leaned forward, panel lighting in front of her. “Looks like it’s outside the asteroid field. Pingers are picking it up.”

  “Where?” Henricksen asked her. “How far out?”

  “Three o’clock.” Hanu consulted the data, pushed a marker to the schematic on the front windows to show the buckle’s location. “Twenty thousand kilometers out.”

  “Any data come through? Any idea who—?”

  Klaxons kicked in filling the bridge with noise. Scan went crazy, alerts popping up everywhere, flashing insistently for Hanu’s attention.

  “Scythe! You’re killin’ me here!” Henricksen yelled.

&nbs
p; “Sorry.”

  Scythe silenced the audible alarms while Hanu sorted through half a dozen windows, examining the data on the fly.

  “What’ve we got, Hanu? What new and terrible thing has suddenly gone wrong?”

  Hanu leaned close to her panel, examining the data from the sensors. “It’s the station, sir. Jump drives are powering up.”

  “Shit,” Sikuuku swore, pod pivoting. “They’re gonna jump it. We’re gonna lose it again.”

  “Weapons signatures!” Hanu’s fingers fairly danced across Scan’s panels. “Armaments are coming on-line.”

  “Armaments?” Sikuuku flicked at switches, flipped his targeting visor over his eyes. “Thought you said the scans didn’t show any goddamn armaments, Hanu.”

  “Missed it,” she told him, head shaking. “I must’ve missed it somehow.”

  “Movement!” Ogawa warned, as the ships outside shifted, engines flaring bright blue as the station’s tiny minders came to life.

  “What the hell?” Sikuuku pulled data onto his panel, feeding it to the Artillery pod’s targeting system. “Lotta targets out there, boss. Boss?”

  “How long?” Henricksen asked quietly. “How long before that station jumps?”

  “That much mass?” Ogawa ran a few calculations. “Six minutes, give or take.”

  “Five minutes, thirty-seven seconds,” Scythe corrected.

  Ogawa shrugged her shoulders, hooked a thumb at the camera. “What she said.”

  “Shit,” Henricksen breathed, staring at the station outside. “Shit, shit, shit!” He punched the panel in frustration, slapped at Comms, opening a ship-to-ship channel to Shriek and the other Ravens. “Scramble, scramble, scramble. Mission is blown. I repeat, mission is blown. We’ve got ships inbound, target is live.”

  “Friendlies?” Janssen sent back.

  “Hanu?” Henricksen looked a question at Scan.

  Hanu checked the sensor data, shook her head hard. “Can’t tell yet, sir. Energy signature’s coming through, but I can’t get a clear fix. Could be it’s our guys out there. Could just as easily be DSR.”

  “Great. Just fucking great. Peel off,” Henricksen ordered, feathering the controls, moving Scythe away from the station. “Clear the asteroid field and head back to Dragoon.”

  “Sir.” Janssen again, voice worried. “We jump in here and the distortion field will set off those mines.”

  “Fuck.” The mines. He’d almost forgotten. Henricksen’s eyes flicked to the schematic, the bright red dots marking the mines infesting the asteroid field around them. “Thrusters and maneuvering jets only until you clear the asteroid field.”

  “Faster if we jump it,” Baldini argued.

  “And more likely you’ll end up dead. Jump too close to one of those mines and you’ll set off the explosives. Take the mine out and yourself with it.”

  “Oh.” Baldini was quiet a moment, properly cowed. “Helluva a way to go out, though.”

  “Rather keep livin’,” Henricksen told him. “Now go. Get. Scythe and I will be right behind you. We’ll meet up—”

  “What about the payload?” Baldini cut in.

  “Goddamit, Baldini. Forget about the payload. We’ll come back—”

  Perimeter alarms activated again, shrieking bloody murder as the situation changed. Data windows overwhelming Scan’s panels as some new complication appeared.

  “Ship inbound,” Hanu called, sorting through the reams of data on her panel. “Buckle’s resolving.”

  “Go, Baldini. Get out!” Henricksen cut the comms to the other Ravens, keeping one eye on the schematic on the front windows as the stealth ships’ signatures moved away. “Ours or theirs, Hanu? Ours or theirs?” he repeated, when Hanu just shook her head.

  “I don’t—I’m not—Gogmagog! Gogmagog’s coming through!”

  The schematic on the front windows shifted, data tag appearing, adding a ship’s beacon next to the hyperspace displacement marker showing twenty thousand kilometers outside the asteroid field.

  “Gogmagog.” Henricksen slid his eyes to Scythe’s camera. “Brutus’s butt buddy? That’s who you called?”

  “I’m sorry, Henricksen.”

  She sounded it—she truly did. Henricksen wished to hell he knew why she’d done it. What was going on.

  “Multiple signatures, Captain.” Hanu shunted more data to the front windows, adding a mass of Titan and Aurora signatures, a couple of sleek-sided Valkyries joining soon after.

  “Weapons fire!” That from Ogawa, piggybacking off Hanu’s panel, trying to help her out. “Fleet ships’ armaments are live!”

  “Fuck!” Henricksen hit the thrusters, shoving Scythe toward the asteroid field’s edge. Rolled around a rock, skipping neatly by a mine, sensors recording detonations—plasma rounds from the Dreadnought’s cannons pounding away at the asteroid field’s outer edge—and a whole lot of chaos: asteroids exploding, broken rocks smashing into each other, the entire formation of the asteroid field shifting as Gogmagog’s weapons chewed their way toward the center.

  Henricksen stared, watching the schematic shift and shift again. Adjusting and readjusting as the asteroid field’s integrity shredded. Its millennia old pattern disrupted in mere seconds by the awesome power of Gogmagog’s guns.

  “What the fuck is he doing?” Sikuuku demanded. “We’ve got ships in here!”

  “Ogawa,” Henricksen called. “Message the Fleet. Tell Gogmagog—”

  “He knows,” Scythe said softly. “Gogmagog has his orders too.”

  Henricksen frowned at the camera, turned his eyes to the windows, looking from the DSR manufactory to the asteroid field collapsing around it. “The station,” he breathed, finally getting it. “He’s here to destroy the station before it can get away again.”

  And the Ravens with it if they didn’t get the hell out of here. And soon.

  A ripple outside and Scan went haywire again—alerts popping up everywhere, painting Hanu’s helmet in multi-colored lights. “Jump signature. Close one.” Hanu scanned the panels in front of her, searching the sensor data. “I count two—correction, three of those DSR ships moving away.”

  “Show me,” Henricksen ordered, slowing the ship, easing around a cluster of mines.

  Hanu shunted a video feed to the front windows, Scythe’s cameras tracking the DSR vessels at the asteroid field’s center as they spun up their jump drives and short-hopped away.

  Sub-minds on the pingers picked them up again, sending broken snippets of video back to Scythe as the droned ships dropped out of hyperspace, landing smack-dab in the middle of Gogmagog’s armada.

  The lead ship missed—overjumped its target, streaked right past the Meridian Alliance vessels and into deep space—but the vessel behind it struck true. Intersected a Titan’s flight path and exploded on contact, destroying both ships in an instant.

  A flash of blue as a third ship appeared, dropping out of hyperspace just under five kilometers from Gogmagog’s position—far enough out to do some real damage, close enough in that anything in front of it had almost no chance of avoiding its strike. Jump momentum flung it forward, hurtling headlong through space. Henricksen watched it—one eye on the carnage, the bulk of his attention on the rocks around him—cringing as the droned ship hove in on a Valkyrie, scraping along her side.

  Photovoltaic cells peeled away, dents appearing in her superstructure, holes opening in her sides. The droned ship sideswiped her and rebounded, slamming broadside into two Auroras, hull splitting open on impact, releasing the nannite payload packed inside it.

  The Auroras disappeared, subsumed by a silver-sided swarm. A diamond dust cloud that multiplied, feeding on the remains of the Auroras to create more of itself—a second cloud, large as the first that jumped from the dying Auroras, reaching for the Valkyrie nearby.

  Gogamaog’s weapons intercepted it before it touched her, plasma canons slicing and dicing, burning the nannites to dust. A flare of energy as he loaded radiologicals—huge missiles, Scan went nuts when
those signatures appeared—and launched them at the source of the contagion, nuking the droned ship and both Auroras at once.

  And all the while his cannons kept firing, chewing away at the asteroid field, drilling a tunnel toward the station at its center.

  “Scythe.” Henricksen glanced at the camera, nodded to the schematic on the front windows, the situation playing out against the stars. “What’s the math on this say?”

  She ran some calculations—split second factoring of mass and energy, the rate of Gogmagog’s fire—and built a simulation. Shunted it to the front windows for Henricksen and the crew to see.

  “They won’t make it.” Henricksen twitched the ship to one side, maneuvering around a mine. “Gogmagog’s not gonna get through in time.”

  Lot of energy required to shift that station through hyperspace. Lot of time needed to spool up its engines and create a buckle large enough to accommodate it. But Gogamagog’s guns had several kilometers of asteroid field to chew through. And no matter how many times he ran Scythe’s simulation, the station always got away before the Dreadnought’s guns found it.

  We can’t lose it. Not again. Not knowing what it is.

  Henricksen slowed the ship, turned Scythe around.

  Comms clicked, Sikuuku’s voice speaking directly into his ear. “Tell me you’re not doing what I think you’re doing.”

  “Math doesn’t work. Figured we’d give Gogmagog a little help.”

  “One stealth ship against a whopping big station?”

  “Not asking you to destroy it. Just asking you to help me slow it down a bit.” Henricksen fired the thrusters, working his way back to the asteroid field’s center.

  Sikuuku leaned out, examining the situation outside the windows. Shrugged his shoulders and ducked back into his pod. “Hanu. Give me those station scans.”

  “Got it.” She pushed the data to the Artillery pod. Added the same information to the schematic on the front windows. “Something you’re looking for?”