by David Adams
But she had just seen the fiery lance of Ben’s worldshatter device not only pierce the hull of a battle-ready Toralii cruiser, but travel through the core of the ship and penetrate the other side. It was an order of magnitude more powerful than previously observed, and it changed the tempo of the battle dramatically.
And Saara was on board the burning, crippled vessel.
“Captain,” said Mister Hsin, “we’re receiving a distress call from Main Engineering on the Telvan flagship Ju’khaali. They say their bridge has been destroyed and their primary reactors are offline. They’re evacuating the surviving crew.”
Mentally, Liao compared the layout of the Telvan cruiser with the Giralan. The bridge, the Toralii equivalent of Operations and the central core of the ship, would be in the same place. Ben’s targeting had been perfect, a fiery lance straight through the heart, killing the command centre with surgical precision. Nalu would have been there. Where would Saara be during all this? On the bridge, too? Almost certainly.
She put that thought out of her mind for now, focusing on her next course of action.
“Mister Jiang, how long until our marines dock with the Giralan?”
“Two minutes, Captain.”
“Good,” said Liao, “coordinate with the Tehran. That ship may not be packing life support, but it’s made of metal. Just keep shooting. Dig as deep into that hull as we can. Get them as close to the bridge as possible. Ben’s in there, and we can dig all the way to its rotten core if we have to.”
“Confirmed coordinates, Captain. Executing strike package…”
Liao turned to her command console expecting to see the tiny streaks of flying missiles strike home, but as she watched them, the pencil-thin lines all veered away and tumbled into Belthas IV’s atmosphere. “Mister Jiang? The strike package?”
“I… I executed it, Captain. The ship accepted the command. I don’t know what went wrong.”
Liao twisted, looking over her shoulder. “Summer?”
Rowe tapped furiously on her keyboard. “I don’t get it! The command was lodged successfully. It was executed. Commands were dispatched to the launch tubes and onto the missiles themselves… That volley should have hit! They can’t all be duds!”
“Find out what went wrong,” said Liao, “and fix it. Right now.”
Rowe frowned, staring at her screen. “Wait. Wait, that doesn’t make sense!”
Liao stepped over to Rowe’s console. “Talk to me, Summer.”
“Look.” Rowe jabbed a finger at her Engineering console. “Take a look at this. It’s the log of the launch. Something is really wrong. The missiles launch code sequence was interrupted.”
“You mean… jammed? How?”
Rowe shook her head, stabbing her finger at the screen, at a scrolling piece of text that went past far too fast for Liao to read. “No, not jammed. Look. Interrupted. Very, very quickly, but it left a line in our log. The command came from the IFF targeting computer, using the Tehran’s IFF code.”
It didn’t make any sense. “Ben has the Tehran’s IFF code?”
“No!” Rowe gave an exasperated growl. “I’m trying to tell you that the Tehran is patched into our systems using the shared IFF. Right before we shot that last barrage, our IFF screwed up our missile batteries by flagging Ben’s ship as friendly.”
“Why the hell would they do that?” She scowled. “And why the hell do they have remote access to the IFF computer?” Saara had told her nothing had changed except the new piece of technology, but this was a serious issue.
“Fucked if I know. I can only tell you what the screen says, and it says that the order to deactivate our missile batteries came from the shared targeting computer, which is linked to the Tehran’s systems. It’s how we share tactical information.”
“Mister Hsin,” said Liao, “get the Tehran on the line and find out just what the fuck is happening.”
Hsin immediately went to work, then gave her a curt nod when the channel was open.
Liao jammed her headset onto her head. “Tehran, this is Beijing actual. Request priority channel to Tehran actual immediately.”
James’s voice filled her headset. “Beijing, this is the Tehran. Send it.”
“James, what the fuck? What are you doing with our systems?”
“Systems? No idea what you’re talking about, Captain.”
Liao glanced at Rowe to confirm it. The redhead nodded in a frenzy, so Liao touched the talk key again.
“Summer tells me the Tehran is using our tactical computer to flag hostiles as friendlies.”
“We’re not doing anything of the sort, Captain. Why would we interfere with your ship’s capabilities?”
James’s distance in the heat of battle was off-putting, but Liao tried very hard to keep her composure. “I don’t know, Captain. You tell me.”
“Have Summer check them again. We would never interfere with the Beijing’s systems. She’s as safe as she ever was.”
She?
Liao narrowed her eyes ever so slightly. “Is she now?”
“Of course, Captain.”
Liao inhaled slightly. “James, can I ask you something?”
“Now might not be the best time, Captain.”
“It’s important.” Liao looked to Kamal, speaking slowly and deliberately. “I’ve been thinking about our apartment in New York. I was thinking of converting the den so that Tai doesn’t have to sleep on the couch anymore.”
“Can’t we discuss it after we’re done, you know, shooting at Ben?”
She grit her teeth, grinding them together so hard it hurt and ignoring the strange looks she was getting from around the room. “James, I just want to make it perfectly clear what I’m asking; when we get back to Earth, is it okay for me to renovate the spare bedroom so that Kang Tai, my bodyguard, can sleep there?”
“Melissa, I don’t care. We’re a little busy over here.” James gave an exasperated sigh down the line. “Yes, you can renovate the room. Goodness knows Tai could use a proper bed every now and then.”
She reached up and clicked the button on her headset to close the line. She stared at the readouts on her command console, watching the exchange of fire between the Giralan and the rest of the fleet.
Ben was in their ship.
Chapter XII
“Their Lives, As They Will Be”
*****
Operations
TFR Beijing
“Captain, that sounds a little nuts.” Iraj moved up beside her. “Are you saying that our sensors are being jammed?”
Liao growled and thumped her fist against the unyielding metal of the console. “No. I’m saying that our systems have been completely compromised from the inside. Ben’s feeding us bad sensor data, bad radio communications. Who knows what else.” She stood up straight, facing Iraj directly. “That wasn’t James on the line.”
Iraj affixed a sceptical, confused stare on her. “It wasn’t? It sounded exactly like him, coming through on the secure frequency…”
“It wasn’t him. Lieutenant Kang Tai is dead. James and I both watched him bleed to death right before we were recalled.”
Kamal raised an eyebrow. “That’s hardly compelling evidence, Captain…”
“And he called the Beijing a she.”
He paused for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders. “Guess that settles it. Miss Rowe?”
“Yeah, Commander?”
“We’re going to un-fuck this situation, and we’re going to do it right now. You said that the orders to block the missile launches were coming from the newly installed IFF transponder. Right?”
“Right.”
“How do we disable it?”
Rowe shrugged. “Well, we can just shut it down, but it takes time. If there’s a virus or something in it, there’s no reason to suspect it won’t move to another system, prevent the shutdown, or even trigger the scuttling charges or something.”
Liao moved over. “Can you shut it down quickly enough to prevent that?”<
br />
Rowe paused in thought, then gave a brief nod. “Yeah, I reckon so.”
“Good,” said Kamal. “That system’s here in Operations, isn’t it?”
Rowe pushed back her chair, moving over to the navigation console to crouch beside it. Dao shifted his chair back, giving her room to work.
“Yeah. It has tactical maps of the jump point layouts and whatnot, so it’s classified, which means it can only be here.”
A metal sheet came loose with a dull thunk, revealing a plain red box about twenty centimetres cubed. “There it is,” said Rowe, “the tactical IFF computer.”
Liao leaned close, peering inquisitorially. “Okay, so, how do we disable it?”
Rowe casually leaned over and pried open the lid, exposing a complex mess of circuitry. “Pretty simple,” she said, reaching over and grabbing a nearby fire extinguisher. With a woosh and cloud of spray, she emptied its contents into the small red box, creating a billowing, roiling white cloud of vapour that sprayed out over the surrounding deck plating.
“I’d say it’s right fucked now,” Rowe said.
Immediately, Liao heard a buzzing in her ear. “Captain,” said Hsin, “incoming transmissions. Multiple.”
She blinked in surprise. “Put them through.”
Suddenly her ears were filled with voices.
[“Beijing, Beijing, priority alert.”]
“Tehran actual to Beijing. You have a technical glitch in your systems. Disable your IFF immediately.”
Vrald’s sarcastic, angry voice cut over the Human speakers. [“What glory and fire in this woman, to feel such confidence in her abilities that she casts her missiles into the atmosphere—too stupid to realise she is being deceived!”]
She squeezed the talk key. “This is Commander Liao. We’ve just experienced a serious technical glitch. It seems as though Ben has been feeding us false targeting information through the IFF computers and played games with our radios.”
“Confirm that,” came James’s exasperated voice. “We all saw it. You’re the last ship to come around.”
Rowe’s whining cut over the chatter. “Are they serious? We’re the last? God damnit…”
Liao ignored her. “Situation report.”
“Ben’s ship is fleeing, Commander. It appears he’s using the chaos to withdraw, and he’s doing it damn quickly, too. The Giralan will be leaving effective weapons range momentarily.”
“Lock in a pursuit course,” Liao said, “and prepare rail guns. Load nukes in the chambers.”
The ship’s rail gun system could accept the nuclear missiles as projectiles, dramatically increasing their firepower despite flying slower than ferrous slugs, but it was, in Summer’s words, hilariously unsafe.
Jiang nodded. “Loading rail gun, Captain.”
Of course, Liao cursed. They had only one.
“Well, make do with what you have. Fire when ready.”
Ling called out from across Operations. “Captain, the Giralan has fired its plasma weapon!”
“At this range?” With a low roar and the groan of stressed metal, a shudder ran from the stem to the stern of the Beijing. Liao gripped her console tightly as alarms rang out throughout Operations. “Report!”
“We have a hull breach about the size of a beach ball in our underside. It hit a support structure, and that whole section collapsed internally; the heat’s caused a significant fire in that section.”
“Any casualties?”
Jiang tapped a few keys. “Early reports from that section indicate one confirmed dead, two unaccounted for.”
Rowe leaned forward over her console. “We’re haemorrhaging two kilogrammes of oxygen a second, and that section is near oxygen processing for the deck. If a fire that hot spreads to an oxygen reserve, we’ll lose half the deck.”
There was nothing she could do. The thought of two of her crewmen being unaccounted for tore at her since their location would be clear, but protocol was protocol. “Rowe, seal that section off and vent it. We need to contain that fire.”
Liao looked Rowe in the eye, and she could see her hesitation. Rowe knew, just as well as she did, that her order would kill the two missing crewmen.
“Confirmed, ma’am. Venting initiated.”
She stood up and, without looking at Rowe, moved back to her command console. “Keep up fire on Ben’s ship. We want him to engage us, not run until his jump drive starts working again. Let’s see if we can bring in the rest of the fleet and finish him.”
Jiang nodded. “The Tehran is within weapons range, Captain. They’re opening up on the Giralan.”
“Good. How about the rest of the fleet? Do they have a firing solution yet?”
“Negative. They’re too far away, but they’re giving chase.”
Liao stopped, glancing at her radar screen. The Ju’khaali was losing altitude, slowly dropping into the atmosphere. “Mister Dao,” she said, “set a course for the Ju’khaali. The Giralan has an armada stuck up its backside. Let’s go help our allies.”
Iraj shot her a curious gaze, but she ignored it.
“Aye aye, Captain. Course laid in.”
She felt the ship turn and head back towards the falling ship. “How far away is the Broadsword Archangel?” she asked. “Will they make it in time?”
“Archangel is twelve minutes out, Captain.”
Twelve minutes was too long. The ship would be well into the atmosphere at that point; already Liao could see the beginnings of flames licking at its underside.
“Looks like it’s going to have to be us, then.”
Kamal stepped up beside her. “Ma’am?”
“Mister Dao, bring the Beijing up to that ship. Prepare our marines for boarding. There might be survivors trapped aboard.”
Dao turned in his seat, facing her with a concerned look on his face. “You’re going to dock with a ship that’s falling into the atmosphere?”
“Correct, Mister Dao.”
Rowe gave a barking laugh. “Fucking hell yeah, Captain. Let’s do this.”
Liao glanced to Rowe. “Your approval fills me with guilt and anger, just so you know.”
“Course laid in, Captain. This is going to take some serious sailing.”
“Just make it happen.”
As Liao watched, the flames billowing from the Ju’khaali intensified then with a suddenly flare and pulse of energy. The ship’s wounds opened up like an overripe fruit; great cracks, glowing from the fires burning underneath the ship’s metal skin, spread over it like the tendrils of some monster, and then the hull broke into dozens of large pieces, each chunk flaring to life as it dragged through the atmosphere, little comets falling down towards Belthas.
Liao watched the flaming debris drift down to the planet’s surface, her heart in her throat.
“Captain,” said Rowe, “the jump drive inhibitor is wearing off. Our systems are returning to normal.”
Liao flicked to another camera, staring at Ben’s ship as it was pounded by an endless wave of fire.
“Then we’ve lost.”
*****
Bridge
The Giralan
The ship was coming apart.
Ben’s mind worked through every conceivable angle, trying to logically find a solution. He couldn’t go up. He couldn’t go down. In all directions death waited for him.
The idea of surrender crossed his mind, but he knew that this was merely delaying his execution. Jurisdiction for his ‘crimes’ would be firmly in the hands of the Telvan, and their law was clear: constructs had no rights. He would be melted down for scrap, and that would be the end of him. Even if he could work out some deal to be tried by the humans, there would be no way the Human courts would show him leniency. His fate would be the same.
Death, everywhere he turned.
Then a flare of hope, like a match struck in darkness. The signal, whatever was blocking his jump drive and stopping it from functioning, suddenly abated. The jump drive’s systems were still scrambled, but the level of
entropy was dropping by the second.
Their countermeasures were failing. His trump card was returning, slowly but surely.
His ship shedded debris with every impact, but his courage returned, now the equal to his anger. He focused all his will on the jump drive, applying his considerable mental strength to forcing it, by sheer will, to function. The imperfections would be smoothed out. The stolen Human device, coupled to the stolen Toralii device, would soon be functional again. His ship would retreat, he would lick his wounds, then he would come back. His dream of Zero would remain.
Ben knew that jump drive calculations had to be perfect. The math was intensely complicated and had to be extraordinarily precise, factoring in millions of contributing things, subtle and overt, to create the perfect expression of a location. He pushed past the corruption, past the jump drive’s pain, to reach this single goal. Perfection, like himself.
But Ben was not perfect.
A warning in the jump drive’s subsystems. The device was heating up, far hotter and far quicker than it should have. Ben, just as a Human might move a limb, flushed coolant into the reaction chamber, but for some reason, this seemed to make the situation worse. Cracks started appearing in the jump drive’s outer shell as it reached extraordinary temperatures, the metal expanding and contracting unevenly.
A surge of current, far stronger than he had ever felt, passed over the jump drive, fusing every circuit, overwhelming every electronic part of it, and reducing them to molten slag. Then the jump drive began melting through its restraints, burning a hole through the grav plating below it and dropping through, weirdly suspended in the in-between of floors, hovering in a red, hot hole.
Hotter and hotter it became, and soon the heat began to spill out into the rest of the Giralan, a miniature sun building within the core of the device.
Impossible. Ben’s logical mind could not comprehend what was happening to the device. It should not, could not, possess such power. There was only so much mass within it, a physical limit to the amount of energy it could possibly output, even assuming perfect mass-energy conversion.