Major Antinomian: Half the army is taken prisoner, sir. One million soldiers.
C. Mencken: What’s that you say?
Major Antinomian: Half the army is taken, and Ganymede as fallen!
Seven
C woke with a start, somewhere in the recesses of La Mola. It only took him a moment to realize what must have happened.
Amés was standing over him.
“Oh, dear,” said C. He sat up. It was the same body as before, a cloned copy.
“I am afraid that you badly underestimated the partisans,” Amés said.
“Yes. Obviously.”
“I am going to have to punish you for that,” said Amés. “No more visits to the memory box for a while.”
“I understand,” C replied. “Do you know what happened?”
“You were murdered. Execution style.”
“Oh.”
“I want you to pay special attention to the partisan terrorists,” said Amés. “I want their threat eliminated. Now we both have reason for it.”
“I agree.”
Amés helped C to his feet. C was a little shaky for a moment, but quickly had control over his new body. In a strange way, he felt refreshed.
“Come on,” said Amés. “You have work to do.”
Eight
Roger Sherman was tired, but awake. He had been tracking the Montserrat for hours now, using the most slapdash, jury-rigged remote sensing apparatus any commander had ever employed in space—of that, he was sure. The merci was out, which prevented a great many methods of detection, but it also provided the clue he needed to find his quarry. For the range of the jamming had proved very specific. It was broad in places, but ceased in others. They had even managed to listen in on some vinculum broadcast and get some Met news when they’d gotten outside the jamming area. Sherman had also immediately contacted Tacitus, and learned that he was in the midst of a constitutional congress. He had signed off quickly and promised to let Sherman know how it all came out. Sherman wanted to limit how much was broadcast by his troops over the merci, so he had severely limited his time with Tacitus, as well. Contact with army troops at Jupiter, and Sherman’s immediate superiors, had been impossible.
But they had slowly, methodically mapped out the effectiveness area of the jamming, and had found that it was shaped rather like a dumbbell, with a big globe at each end, and a narrower shaft down the middle. And at the moment, Sherman and the Boomerang were groping down that shaft. He wasn’t sure, but it was a good bet that the jamming device—which might be on the Montserrat herself—was at the epicenter. In any case, he wasn’t taking any chances. The troops in the hold were on full alert, ready for instant deployment. And Sherman was using every stealth measure he could remember from his study of warships and space battles.
There wasn’t a lot to go on. Mostly war games and practice maneuvers. There had never been a major battle in space, after all, not in the over a thousand years humans had been outside Earth’s gravity well. With the Boomerang’s isotropic coating, they were effectively masked from electromagnetic means of detection. Well, of course, the drive could not be so masked, but unless the Montserrat were sneaking up behind him—a possibility that he was fully taking into account—no one would see his ship. What he was more worried about were the grist-detection pockets. Any competent commander would have strewn them all about his position, setting up, in effect, a series of three-dimensional membranes to which only he would have the map. There was really no effective way to avoid these, but Sherman was taking the gamble that the jamming would jam those defenses, as well, and he was staying within the “bar” of the dumbbell partly for this reason.
He suspected that the jamming would taper to a point at the ship or jamming device location. He seriously doubted that they would allow their own communications to be compromised in such a way. But the technology was new to him, and he had no idea how it actually worked. And nearly fifteen hundred lives depended on his guessing correctly.
They moved onward through the void, nearly a million kilometers from Neptune, Pluto-ward. The Boomerang would top out at one-one-hundredth the speed of light, but he was going nowhere near that fast. In the first place, such speeds required millions of kilometers of run-up. But the object here was to be as sneaky as a fox, not as fast as a jaguar.
Working with his free-convert officers, Sherman had devised a gravimetric detection system that just might work. Light would pass through the DIED ship, but it would be slightly bent by the ship’s mass in the process. The bending was extremely small, but it was present. Using grist astrolabes that were specially modified by a team of engineers on Titan led by Gerardo Funk, Sherman was attempting to use the light of the stars and planets to “see” the enemy ship. Funk had seemed confident, but such a thing had never been done before—had never been attempted. It was thought that the gravitational lensing effect was so infinitesimal as to be utterly impractical. It could be that they were right. The Third Sky and Light would know soon enough.
There was also the idea, put forward by Theory, that they might detect extremely small bursts of Hawking radiation from the ship. The isotropic coat acted, in many ways, like a black hole, and the “virtual particles” that the vacuum was continually generating might be affected. The idea was that a virtual positron-electron pair would spontaneously generate next to the coating, and one particle be instantly shunted around the ship by the quantum processes involved in the weak force that the coating employed. The other particle would then shoot off into space—and be detectable.
It was all guesswork, hopes, and prayers—and Sherman always assumed that his opponent would be praying, too, to negate that advantage.
“Anything, Theory?” Sherman said. There was a wall display, and Sherman could instantly go into the virtuality if he really wanted to have a look. Why the jamming device cut off communications but did not shut down the local action of the grist was another mystery yet to be solved, but Sherman was thankful for that small blessing. Without it, he would have lost his free converts, and navigating the ship would have been impossible.
Sherman went into the virtuality and checked in at the hold with his captains. Every space-adapted soldier in the brigade was standing in full readiness. Nine hundred seventy-eight soldiers, with another four hundred six in pressure suits. Against what? He knew that the Montserrat had deployed the rip tether, so could not have the full complement of troops a destroyer was capable of carrying. But perhaps they had packed in five or ten thousand. He was estimating the highest odds, ten to one against him, just to be prepared.
What was he overlooking? What had he forgotten?
“Quench, where is that man we pulled out of space? Our young hero?”
“Sergeant Neiderer, sir? He’s on knit channel V9.”
“Neiderer?” Sherman said, and then realized he’d neglected to make the mental switch over to the correct channel. Getting jumpy, Sherman. Stand fast. Quench, tactfully, said nothing about his colonel’s mistake. Sherman changed channels. “Sergeant Neiderer?”
“Yes . . . Colonel, sir?”
“I want your thoughts, son.”
“My thoughts, Colonel?”
“Come into the virtuality for a moment.”
Neiderer, appeared before him, and Sherman realized that this was the first time he’d ever seen the man. He hadn’t realized that he was black.
“You’re the only one of us who has faced the enemy face-to-face.”
“I only faced a tether, sir.”
“Yes. Well. Tell me anything you’ve thought of. Any ideas or gut feelings you have.”
Neiderer immediately reached up and scratched his nose. “I don’t know anything in particular, Colonel. I wish I could help you. Just a grunt, sir.”
“Just a grunt with two weeks of k.p. duty if you don’t cut it out with the false modesty, son.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now just talk to me for moment.”
“All right, sir. I . . . I’ve been thinking about Charon. I used to work there, in a warehouse out on the surface. Um, I had a girl. She split . . . we broke up, I mean. But I’ve been thinking about her a lot for the past couple of hours. It was my last girl who wasn’t . . . well, she was my last girlfriend, sir.”
“Go on, Neiderer.”
“Her name was Carol. Erased the only picture I had of her, damn it. I lost my job at the warehouse, and I, uh, hit kind of a low point, Colonel. Real low. Lost just about everything, including my mind.”
“But you snapped out of it?”
“Yes, sir. I joined the army, sir!”
“Uh-huh.”
“I was thinking about hauling those barrels around on Charon. It was low-gee, so we could pick up some really big ones. Made me feel like an ant carrying a big moth or something. Not that I’ve ever seen that but on the merci. Anyway, the big problem wasn’t the weight, but the inertia, sir. An object at rest likes to remain at rest, my team boss used to say. And one in motion likes to stay that way. So we had these tethers.”
“What?”
“These pieces of elastic. We’d hook two of those barrels together and move one of them, and the tether would stretch out, then the next one we had to move wasn’t nearly so hard to get going.”
“But you put the same amount of energy into it, either way.”
“I don’t know about that one way or the other, Colonel,” Neiderer said. “All I know is that it was easier. But what I was going to tell you was that, after work or during break, me and the others would get to playing with those tethers and sling ourselves all over the place. You could do some fancy gymnastics when two people were roped together that way. It was fun as hell, sir. I was thinking about those days.”
Sherman sighed. “Sounds like a good time, soldier,” he said. He was a bit embarrassed that he had called Neiderer away from his mental preparations for battle for such a silly conversation, but, of course, Sherman did not let his embarrassment show. “Well, stay ready.”
“I will, Colonel.”
“Dismissed.”
Neiderer returned to his awareness in the hold. Sherman returned to the bridge.
He sat down and considered the stars in the viewscreen.
Long stretches of empty night winding a body in, Myers had written. And the stars pinpricks in a shroud.
Nine
TB was working on a poem. Then he wasn’t.
“I can’t,” said TB. “I don’t know what to say about it, except that it hurts.”
Was this Ben talking, or Thaddeus? Who was he to say?
TB crumpled up the paper he was working on, then, recalling the shortage of energy to make another one, carefully unfolded it from the ball he’d crushed it into.
He thought he might get a drink, and had gotten up to go and find some alcohol, when there was a knock on his door.
It was Bob. He invited himself in and sat on the shabby couch that also served as TB’s bed. Bob had brought along his fiddle.
“Why don’t we go out and get drunk?” said TB. “I was just going to.”
“Good idea,” said Bob. “But I got to practice first.”
“Practice?”
“This fiddle’s getting rusty.”
TB was a little irritated. He liked Bob’s playing quite a lot, but he had been intent on getting that drink.
“Why can’t you do that at home?” TB asked Bob.
“Home,” said Bob. “Where would that be?”
Shit, thought TB, with all these things happening, I haven’t thought to ask where Bob is staying.
“You don’t have a place?”
“Oh, I have a place,” Bob replied. “Everywhere’s a place.”
“Where are you living, Bob?”
“You sure talk a lot more than you used to,” said Bob. “But that’s okay, I guess. I just thought I’d practice a bit, is all.”
“Well, I’m not stopping you.”
Bob made no further reply. He smiled and put bow to fiddle. What came out was not one of Bob’s usual dancing jigs, but something slower, more stately.
“Where the hell did you learn to play like that?” TB asked him after he was done with the piece.
“I used to be the best musician in the solar system,” Bob said. “But I got tired of that.”
TB laughed for the first time in many days. Maybe Bob was telling the truth. You never could tell with him.
“What’s your real name, Bob? Would I recognize it since you were so goddamn famous?”
“I didn’t say famous. I said good.” Bob gestured with his bow at the paper on TB’s table. “They used to call me Despacio, back in the days of yore.”
TB took a good, long look at Bob.
He had to be lying like a rug.
Didn’t he?
“Why don’t you let me practice a little more, and you go on back to what you were doing?” the fiddler said.
TB returned to the page with a sigh, and Bob began to play. It was a lovely tune, but sad—sad and stately, with only a little hope in a few bright notes. Somewhere in the middle of it, TB began to write.
He began to write a new poem about his time among the wounded and dying.
Ten
And a million kilometers from Neptune, a red light flashed.
“We have them, Colonel,” Theory said. “Gravitational and virtual-particle confirmation and correlation. It worked.”
From the sound of Theory’s voice, Sherman thought the major didn’t even believe it himself. Sherman was in the virtuality instantly, floating in the Boomerang’s virtual bridge, which was the counterpart of the regular bridge, except that this one gave Sherman readouts graphically, represented in the air about him, a clear view of the space around the Boomerang, and instant control of all ship’s weaponry. What it felt like was growing into a giant and hanging like a wraith over his spaceship, ready to grab his victim.
The Montserrat was several thousand kilometers away. And then the ship began to acquire form and substance as Sherman and his ship drew nearer.
“Anti-grist deployed?”
“Yes, Colonel.”
“Give me my captains.”
“Quench here, sir.”
“Machination, Colonel.”
“Sleighthand, Colonel.”
One by one the companies reported in, and Sherman then went to officers’ broadband. “We’ve located our adversary,” he told them. “Maximum readiness, ladies and gentlemen. We’re closing on them. Everyone in catapults. Weapons fired up. All pisses taken.”
“Yes, sir!”
He returned to the bridge.
“I don’t think they see us, Theory.”
“Not yet, Colonel.”
“Stay in that jamming range as long as possible. I think it is our best friend right at the moment.”
“Yes, sir.”
They closed further.
“Colonel, the jamming field is tapering. Part of the ship will be exposed in five minutes, if the current rate continues.”
“Have we got the range for a torpedo?”
“Checking. No, sir, not yet. A few ten-klicks short.”
“I want to come out of this field with all guns blazing, Major. Doesn’t matter if we haven’t quite reached optimal range.” Sherman rubbed his stubbled face. “In fact, I want to emerge from a nuclear explosion.”
“I’ll arrange it with Captain Trigger, sir.”
Sherman waited. A dead calm descended on him. He’d never felt so still in his life. Focused. Ready to kill.
“Almost there, Colonel.”
“All weapons to forward.”
“Yes, sir.”
Dead. Calm.
“We’re in unjammed spa
ce, sir.”
“Fire.”
The Boomerang erupted like a supernova.
They sped toward the foe.
“Report!”
“Three torpedoes away. All cannon forward. Nuke to the aft, as ordered . . . sir, we have a hit. Torpedo three . . . no, sir. It’s gone through grist five klicks from the ship and ignited.”
Then Sherman saw it—the familiar blossom of antimatter combining with matter and both furiously annihilating one another. The pressure wave hit the Montserrat.
Most of the killing radiation was shunted by that ship’s isotropic coating, but something got through. The Montserrat was rocked, and suddenly torqued at least forty-five degrees.
“Hello,” said Sherman. “We’re here.”
“Sir, we’re cutting through several layers of grist outriders with the cannon.”
“More torpedoes,” said Sherman. “When?”
“Ten seconds, sir.”
“Right. Are my rocks ready?”
“Standing by in the materials catapults, Colonel.”
Sherman had selected some prime specimens from Neptune’s ring to arm his rock thrower with. Each rock was coated with the nastiest grist he had available, as well. Even if they got blasted apart they might still do some damage as pebbles.
So, their vinculum transmissions have just doubled.
So, they know we’re here and are calling in to report.
A thought struck Sherman. “Theory, do we have full merci use at the moment?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Broadcast this fight—broadband across the merci. Shoot me off a camera or make use of some grist.”
“Yes, sir. Transmission is activated, Colonel. Unless they find a way to block it, everyone in the Met can tune in . . . torpedoes armed, sir.”
“Off with them!”
“Yes, sir.”
More streaks through the darkness, homing in. But not to go home.
“Colonel, we are closing on fire-down range.” If the Boomerang did not turn around and apply the engines in the opposite direction at that point, she would overshoot the Montserrat. Can’t have that happening, Sherman thought.
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