“Too late,” said Helsingus. “We’ll have ’em in three-two seconds. They’ll be inside the burst radius.”
Rachel shuddered. Suddenly a horrible possibility began to rise to the surface of her mind.
Mirsky cracked his knuckles again, kneading his hands together. “Guns. I want a last-ditch evasion program loaded, activate at closest approach minus one-zero seconds if we’re still here.”
“Yes, sir,” Helsingus said heavily. “Laser grid support?”
“Anything you like.” Mirsky waved a hand magnanimously. “If we’re still here to enjoy the light show.”
Helsingus began flipping switches like a man possessed. On the screen, the outgoing birds passed their main engine cutout points and went ballistic; more enemy missiles began hatching like sinister blue fingers reaching out from the target point.
“Captain,” Rachel said slowly.
“—One-zero seconds. They’re jamming hard, sir, but the birds are still holding.”
“What if Kamchatka is wrong? What if those are civilian mining ships?”
Captain Mirsky ignored her.
“Five seconds! Bird one ready to go—range down to one-zero K. Three. EMP lockdown is go. Sensor stepdown mag six is go. Optics shielded—bang. Sir, I confirm that bird one has detonated. Bang. Bird two is gone.”
“Radar. What do you see?” asked Mirsky.
“Waiting on the fog to clear—ah, got sensors back sir. Incoming missiles still closing. Fireball remnants hashing up radar, lidar is better. Uh, the impact spectroscope has tripped, sir, we have a confirmed impact on the target alpha. Oxygen, nitrogen, carbonitrile emissions from the hull. I think we holed him, sir.”
“We holed him—” Mirsky stopped. Turned to glance at Rachel. “What did you say?” he demanded.
“What if they’re civilians? We have only Kamchatka’s word that they’re under attack; no direct evidence other than bombs going off—which could be hers.”
“Nonsense.” Mirsky snorted. “None of our ships could make a mistake like that!”
“Nobody is actually shooting live missiles at us. The pre-jump briefing warned everyone to look out for enemy missile boats. How likely is it that the Kamchatka ran down a civilian mining ship by mistake and got a bit trigger-happy? And what you’re seeing as an attack is actually just the cruiser screen shooting in the dark at anything that moves?”
Dead silence. Enlisted men and officers alike stared at Rachel disapprovingly: nobody spoke to the captain like that! Then from behind her: “Spallation debris on radar, sir. Target is breaking up. Uh, humbly reporting, Captain, we have distress beacons. Civilian ones . . .”
the lord vanek was going far too fast to slow down, and as flagship and lead element of the squadron, had a duty not to do so. Nevertheless, they signaled the squadron astern; and behind them, one of the elderly battleships peeled off to pick up any survivors from the disastrous attack.
The big picture, when it finally gelled some eight hours later, was very bad indeed. The “missile carriers” were actually refinery tugs, tending the migratory robot factories that slowly trawled the Kuiper-belt bodies, extracting helium 3 from the snowballs. Their sudden burst of speed had a simple explanation; seeing alien warships, they had panicked, dumping their cargo pods so that they could clear the area under maximum acceleration. One of the distant explosions had been the Kamchatka, landing a near miss on one of the “enemy battleships”—the cruiser India. (Minor hull damage and a couple of evacuated compartments had resulted; unfortunately, the cruiser’s chaplain had been in one of the compartments at the time, and had gone to meet his maker.)
“Ser-erves ’em right for being in the way, dammit,” quavered Admiral Kurtz when Commodore Bauer delivered the news in person. “Wha-what do they think this is?” He half rose to his feet, momentarily forgetting about his glass legs: “Simply appalling stupidity!”
“Ah, I believe we still have a problem, sir,” Bauer pointed out as Robard tried to get his master settled down again. “This system is claimed by Septagon, and, ah, we have received signals as of half an hour ago indicating that they have a warship in the area, and it’s engaging us on an intercept trajectory.”
The Admiral snorted. “What can one warship d-do?”
Rachel, who had inveigled her way into the staff meeting on the grounds that, as a neutral observer, it was her duty to act as an intermediary in situations such as this one, watched Bauer spluttering with mordant interest. Can he really be that stupid? she wondered, glancing at the admiral, who hunched in his chair like a bald parrot, eyes gleaming with an expression of fixed mania.
“Sir, the warship that is signaling us is, ah, according to our most recent updates, one of their Apollo-class fleet attack carriers. Radar says they’ve got additional traces indicative of a full battle group. We outnumber them, but—”
Rachel cleared her throat. “They’ll eat you for breakfast.”
Bauer’s head whipped around. “What did you say?”
She tapped her PA, where it lay on the table before her. “UN defense intelligence estimates suggest that Septagon’s policy of building carriers, rather than the standard laser/missile platform that your navy has adopted, gives them a considerable advantage in the ability to cover an entire system. Simply put, while they lack short-range firepower, they’re able to launch a swarm of interceptors that can pound on you from well outside your own engagement envelope. More to the point, they’re frighteningly good, and unless I’m very much mistaken, that carrier, on its own, outmasses your entire fleet. I wouldn’t want you to get the idea that I don’t rate you against the Septagon Navy, but if you’re planning on fighting them, do you think you could let me know in advance? I’d like a chance to grab a survival pod first.”
“Well, we can’t argue with the government of Earth’s defense estimates, can we, Commander?” Bauer nodded pointedly at his executive officer.
“Ah, no, sir. The Colonel is quite correct.” The young and somewhat flustered Lieutenant avoided looking at Rachel; it was a minor slight she was getting plenty of practice at ignoring.
“Damned newfangled inventions,” mumbled Kurtz under his breath. “Blasted many-angled ones don’t want us to succeed, anyway—per-per-perfidious technophiles!” Louder: “We must press on!”
“Absolutely.” Commodore Bauer nodded sagely. “If we press on to Point Two on schedule, leaving the diplomatic niceties to the embassy—speaking of which—Lieutenant Kossov. What of the update? Where do we stand with respect to further information about this Festival, its order of battle and motives? What have we learned?”
“Ah.” Lieutenant Kossov, removed and polished his pince-nez nervously. “Well, there’s something of a problem. The deposition from the Admiralty doesn’t seem to have arrived. We were supposed to be seeing an ordnance beacon, but although we quartered the designated orbital path, there’s nothing there. Either they’re late—or they never planted it.”
“This orbital beacon.” Rachel leaned forward. “A standard target buoy, right? With a diplomatic package containing anything the Republic’s intelligence services have learned about the Festival in the five years since our jump?”
Kossov glanced warily at the Commodore, who nodded. “Yes, Colonel. What of it?”
“Well, if it isn’t there, that can imply three things, can’t it? Either it was there, but somebody else stole or disabled it. Or—”
“Perfidious Septagonians!” Robard hastily leaned over his charge, then looked up and shrugged, eloquently.
“Indeed, Admiral. Or, as I was saying, the second option is that it hasn’t been put there yet—some miscalculation, or they couldn’t determine any useful information about the enemy, or they forgot about us, or something.”
The noise of Kurtz’s snoring cut into her exposition. All eyes turned to the admiral; Robard straightened up. “I’m afraid the Admiral’s legs have been paining him considerably of late, and the dosage of his medication is not conducive to lucidity. He may sle
ep for some hours.”
“Well, then.” Bauer looked around the conference table. “I believe if you would be so good as to return His Excellency to his cabin, I will continue as his proxy and prepare a minuted report of this meeting for him to review later, when he’s feeling better. Unless anyone has any comments that specifically require the Admiral’s ear?” Nobody demurred. “Very well then. Recess for five minutes.”
Robard and an enlisted man gingerly rolled the Admiral’s chair away from the table; then, using the lift just outside the room, disappeared with him in the direction of his quarters. Everybody stood, and saluted, while the snoring officer was wheeled out of the meeting. Rachel held her face expressionless, trying to conceal the disgust and pity the sight pulled from her. He’s young enough to be my grandson. How can they do this to themselves?
Eventually, Bauer, assuming the admiral’s position at the head of the table, rapped his hand on the brass bell. “Meeting will resume. The Terran attaché has the floor. You were saying?”
“The third possibility is that the New Republic no longer exists,” Rachel said bluntly. She continued, ignoring the outraged gasps around the table. “You are facing an enemy about whose capabilities you are largely ignorant. I’m afraid to say, the UN knows little more about them than you do. As I noted, there are three reasons for the New Republic not to have contacted you, and their total defeat in the intervening time is only one of them, but not one it’s safe to ignore. We’re now in the outbound leg of a closed, timelike loop, which will eventually clip itself out of the world line of this universe if you succeed in looping back into our relative past—but the New Republic’s absolute immediate future—and taking the intruders by surprise. This has some odd implications. History reaching us inside this loop may not bear any relationship to the eventual outcome we seek, for one thing. For another—” She shrugged. “If I’d been consulted prior to this expedition, I would have strongly counseled against it. While it is not technically a breach of the letter of Clause Nineteen, it is dangerously close to the sort of activity that has brought down intervention by the Eschaton in the past. The Eschaton really doesn’t like time travel in the slightest, presumably because, if things go too far, someone might edit it out of existence. So there’s the possibility that what you’re up against isn’t just the Festival, but a higher power.”
“Thank you, Colonel.” Bauer nodded politely, but his face was set in a mask of disapproval. “I believe that, for now, we shall disregard that possibility. If the Eschaton chooses to involve itself, there is nothing we can do in any case, so we must work on the assumption that it will not. And in that case, all we are up against is the Festival. Kossov. What did we know about it before we left?”
“Ah, um, well, that is to say—” Kossov looked around wildly, shuffled the papers on his blotter, and sighed. “Ah, good. Yes. The Festival—”
“I know what it’s called, Lieutenant,” the Commodore said reprovingly. “What is it and what does it want?”
“Nobody knows.” Kossov looked at his supreme commander’s deputy like a rabbit caught in the blinding headlights of an oncoming express train.
“So, Commissioner.” Bauer cocked his head on one side and stared at Rachel, with the single-minded analytical purpose of a raptor. “And what can the esteemed government-coordinating body of Earth tell me about the Festival?” he asked, almost tauntingly.
“Uh.” Rachel shook her head. Of course the poor kid had done his best—none of these people could know anything much about the Festival. Even she didn’t. It was a big yawning blank.
“Well?” Bauer prodded.
Rachel sighed. “This is very provisional; nobody from Earth has had any direct contact with the agency known as Festival until now, and our information is, therefore, secondhand and unverifiable. And, frankly, unbelievable. The Festival does not appear to be a government or agency thereof, as we understand the term. In fact, it may not even be human. All we know is that something of that name turns up in distant settled systems—never closer than a thousand light-years, before now—and it, well, the term we keep hearing used to describe what happens next is ‘Jubilee’, if that makes any sense to you. Everything . . . stops. And the Festival takes over the day-today running of the system for the duration.” She looked at Bauer. “Is that what you wanted to know?”
Bauer shook his head, looking displeased. “No it wasn’t,” he said. “I was after capabilities.”
Rachel shrugged. “We don’t know,” she said bluntly. “As I said, we’ve never seen it from close-up.”
Bauer frowned. “Then this will be a first for you, won’t it? Which leads us to the next issue, updates to navigation plan Delta . . .”
a few hours later, Rachel lay facedown on her bunk and tried to shut the world out of her head. It wasn’t easy; too much of the world had followed her home over the years, crying for attention.
She was still alive. She knew, somehow, that she should feel relieved about this, but what she’d seen in the briefing room screen had unnerved her more than she was willing to admit. The admiral was a senile vacuum at the heart of the enterprise. The intelligence staff were well-meaning, but profoundly ignorant: they were so inflexible that they were incapable of doing their job properly. She’d tried to explain how advanced civilizations worked until she could feel herself turning blue in the face, and they still didn’t understand! They’d nodded politely, because she was a lady—even if a somewhat scandalous one, a lady diplomat—and immediately forgotten or ignored her advice.
You don’t fight an infowar attack with missiles and lasers, any more than you attack a railway locomotive with spears and stone axes. You don’t fight a replicator attack by throwing energy and matter at machines that will just use them for fuel. They’d nodded approvingly and gone on to discuss the virtues of active countermeasures versus low-observability systems. And they still didn’t get it; it was as if the very idea of something like the Festival, or even the Septagon system, occupied a mental blind spot ubiquitous in their civilization. They could accept a woman in trousers, even in a colonel’s uniform, far more easily than they could cope with the idea of a technological singularity.
Back on Earth, she had attended a seminar, years ago. It had been a weeklong gathering of experts; hermeneutic engineers driven mad by studying the arcane debris of the Singularity, demographers still trying to puzzle out the distribution of colony worlds, a couple of tight-lipped mercenary commanders and commercial intelligence consultants absorbed in long-range backstop insurance against a return of the Eschaton. They were all thrown together and mixed with a coterie of Defense SIG experts and UN diplomats. It was hosted by the UN, which, as the sole remaining island of concrete stability in a sea of pocket polities, was the only body able to host such a global event.
During the seminar, she had attended a cocktail party on a balcony of white concrete, jutting from a huge hotel built on the edge of the UN city, Geneva. She’d been in uniform at the time, working as an auditor for the denuclearization commission. Black suit, white gloves, mirrorshades pulsing news updates and radiation readings into her raw and tired eyes. Hyped up on a cocktail of alcohol antagonists, she sipped a bitter (and ineffective) gin with a polite Belgian cosmologist. Mutual incomprehension tinged with apprehension bound them in an uncomfortable Ping-Pong match of a conversation. “There is so much we do not understand about the Eschaton,” the cosmologist had insisted, “especially concerning its interaction with the birth of the universe. The big bang.” He raised his eyebrows suggestively.
“The big bang. Not, by any chance, an unscheduled fissile criticality excursion, was it?” She said it deadpan, trying to deflect him with humor.
“Hardly. There were no licensing bodies in those days—at the start of space-time, before the era of expansion and the first appearance of mass and energy, about a billionth of a billionth of a millionth of a second into the life of the universe.”
“Surely the Eschaton can’t have been responsible for
that. It’s a modern phenomenon, isn’t it?”
“Maybe not responsible,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “But maybe circumstances arising then formed a necessary precondition for the Eschaton’s existence, or the existence of something related to but beyond the Eschaton. There’s a whole school of cosmology predicated around the weak anthropic principle, that the universe is as it seems because, if it was any other way, we would not exist to observe it. There is a . . . less popular field, based on the strong anthropic principle, that the universe exists to give rise to certain types of entity. I don’t believe we’ll ever understand the Eschaton until we understand why the universe exists.”
She smiled at him toothily, and let a Prussian diplomat rescue her with the aid of a polite bow and an offer to explain the fall of Warsaw during the late unpleasantness in the Baltic. A year or so later, the polite cosmologist had been murdered by Algerian religious fundamentalists who thought his account of the universe a blasphemy against the words of the prophet Yusuf Smith as inscribed on his two tablets of gold. But that was typical of Europe, half-empty and prey to what the formerly Islamic world had become.
Somewhere along the line she, too, had changed. She’d spent decades—the best part of her second, early-twenty-second-century life—fighting the evils of nuclear proliferation. Starting out as a dreadlocked direct-action activist, chaining herself to fences, secure in the naive youthful belief that no harm could befall her. Later, she’d figured out that the way to do it was wearing a smart suit, with mercenary soldiers and the threat of canceled insurance policies backing up her quiet voice. Still prickly and direct, but less of a knee-jerk nonconformist, she’d learned to work the system for maximum effect. The hydra seemed halfway under control, bombings down to only one every couple of years, when Bertil had summoned her to Geneva and offered her a new job. Then she’d wished she’d paid more attention to the cosmologist—for the Algerian Latter-Day Saints had been very thorough in their suppression of the Tiplerite heresy—but it was too late, and in any event, the minutiae of the Standing Committee’s investigations into chronological and probabilistic warfare beckoned.
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