by Alex Lamb
DEDICATION
For Louis the Inappropriate,
who made it all happen.
NEMESIS
ALEX LAMB
GOLLANCZ
LONDON
CONTENTS
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
0: Prologue
1: Beginnings
2: Gathering
3: Arrival
4: Departure
5: Underway
6: Approach
7: Contact
8: Disaster
9: Rendezvous
10: Failure
11: Compromise
12: Frontiers
13: Justification
13.5: Mark
14: Reversal
15: Descent
16: Despair
17: Rebound
18: Giant
19: Ownership
20: Earth
21: Reckoning
22: Stalemate
23: Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Also by Alex Lamb from Gollancz
Copyright
0: PROLOGUE
0.1: TOM
The end of civilisation looked like two angry red points. Captain Tom Okano-Lark scowled at them as they sat there in the centre of his retinal display, unwelcome and persistent. From the warning tags clustered around them, he knew what they represented – a pair of small gunships racing towards him at about a tenth of the speed of light. Both vessels bristled with cheap tactical weapons showing fire-ready signatures.
It wasn’t the response to his friendly hail he’d hoped for, but after forty-six hours surveying the Tiwanaku System, Tom had all but given up on civilized dialog. Since their arrival and the initial unpleasant surprise, his expectations for the outcome of the mission had darkened steadily, along with his mood.
The settlement on the planet in front of him shouldn’t have existed. The fact that it did was going to make a lot of people very upset for one simple reason: it represented the end of thirty years of interstellar peace.
Wendy Kim, the IPS Reynard’s first officer, broke the silence.
‘Four minutes to engagement radius, sir. Do you want to deploy gravity shields?’
Wendy ran the Reynard’s blunt-sensor ops. Nobody had a more detailed or more disconcerting view of the approaching ships than she did. She lay prone on the crash couch opposite Tom’s on the other side of the Reynard’s tiny central cabin while the other four crew members lay in the bunks stacked below them. None of them dared speak a word.
‘Not yet,’ said Tom. ‘We have to play this exactly by the book otherwise they’ll string us up the moment we get home.’
He hated risking his crew but the face-off had to be done right, which meant waiting and pretending the approach wasn’t threatening until after a legally unambiguous dialogue had taken place. The moment news of what they’d found got back to Mars, the finger-pointing would start. Shooting would follow.
Until Tiwanaku, unregistered squatter settlements – otherwise known as Flag Drops – had always sprung up near well-established colonies, so they could leech off the existing infrastructure and avoid the legal hassles that came with registering a new planet. IPSO law was remarkably forgiving when it came to protecting the inhabitants of an established world, no matter how they had got there. Frontier-jumping, on the other hand, was verboten. The fact that one of Earth’s sects had now established a colony on an independent world without telling anyone implied they were finally ready to forgo the law altogether.
Tom hated how unfair that felt. He’d spent his career in the service of the Fleet, struggling to uphold the delicate balance of power between Earth and the Old Colonies. He’d spent far more of that time protecting Earthers than he had Colonials. Now Earth had gone and ruined it all. And for what? Money, as usual.
Had it been a simple scouting run, Tom would have turned back immediately and headed straight for New Panama, home to the Fleet’s Far Frontier HQ. But the Reynard was escorting families. A modified nestship ark, the IPS Horton, trailed behind them crammed with a thousand coma-stored colonists. And it had just dropped warp about 20 AU out, which meant his time for lying low had ended. Fecund nestships, even human-modified ones, did not arrive quietly. They left a gravity signature like a brick thrown at a pond.
‘Sorry to put you all through this,’ Tom told the others. ‘Stay glued to your displays and wait for my word.’ He knew his crew considered him a stubborn perfectionist. This time, though, they’d just have to humour him. The stakes were simply too high.
As the gunships raced towards them, he tried to get himself into a calm and diplomatic frame of mind. After all, who could blame the Flags for wanting to move here? Tiwanaku Four was a superb planet sitting square in the habitable zone, swathed in salmon-coloured dunes, with a decent level of atmospheric nitrogen and fat, healthy ice caps: a classic Mars Plus. It loomed in his display like a ripe peach. Not to mention the masses of Fecund artefacts drifting in the outer system, the signs of surface ruins on the planet itself, or the traces of non-terrestrial organic activity in the atmosphere.
Fecund ruins meant money. For decades now, mining the remains of that long-dead race for technological marvels had driven humanity’s economy. Treated properly, Tiwanaku could become a thriving research centre and home for millions of Earth’s struggling poor. But onto this gem of a world the Flags had dumped a clump of rickety habitat modules and a couple of thousand people, along with a cheap off-the-shelf industrial base that looked barely usable. Three orbital habitats hovered in geostationary orbit housing at least as many more settlers.
Given how much Earthers hated orbitals, that really said something. Whatever sect ran this place had clearly been shuttling people out here faster than they could put homes on the surface. And all this in the nine months since the last survey pass, when the planet had been registered as ‘colony pending’. The Horton’s passengers were going to be seriously peeved. Presuming they didn’t all die first, of course.
‘Their orbital suntap stations are targeting,’ said Wendy. He could hear the strain in her voice. ‘Even at this distance they might be able to nail us.’
Just the fact that they had suntap weapons here was insane. As far as Tom knew, nobody had been stupid enough to actually fire up a suntap weapon since the Interstellar War. Maintaining half a dozen suntap platforms and two orbital drone-stations for such a tiny colony was like protecting a family-size hab-tent with a squad of titan mechs. The settlers had obviously expected trouble. They’d practically courted it.
Thank Gal they hadn’t noticed the Reynard’s arrival until now, otherwise Tom knew he’d already have a disaster on his hands. Most of the time, he cursed the fact that scouts were little bigger than soft-combat ships. This time, it had probably saved his life.
‘Sir,’ said Faisal Koi from the bunk beneath him. Faisal ran the fine sensors – the Reynard’s most delicate and specialised scanning equipment. ‘We’ve got audio from the incoming.’
‘Let’s hear it,’ said Tom. Close enough to talk meant close enough to kill. He couldn’t stall any longer.
‘IPSO vessel, this is the captain of the war-shuttle Sacred Truth,’ said the voice over the comm. ‘You are in violation of our territory.’
The speaker sounded about fifteen. He had a heavy Earth accent, though Tom couldn’t have guessed from which part. It didn’t make much difference these days.
‘You are instructed to leave this system immediately,’ said the Flag. ‘Failure to comply will be interpreted as threatening action.’ It sounded like he was reading from a pr
ompt screen.
Tom replied on the same channel. ‘Whose territory is that, may I ask?’
‘That not your business,’ snapped the Flag.
‘This is the IPS Reynard,’ said Tom carefully. ‘We are representatives of the Interstellar Pact Security Organisation here in a peaceful escort capacity for the colony ark IPS Horton. We intend no violence. We are, however, legally obliged to give you notice that your settlement is unregistered and therefore illegal. We also note that: A, you are occupying an unexplored alien ruin site in contravention of Social Safety Ordinances; B, you are inhabiting a foreign biome without a licence; and C, you are using suntap technology at an unlisted star. All this will have to be reported. We strongly recommend that you power down your weapons and declare your funding body immediately. If you comply, you will not be held responsible for this settlement’s existence.’
He didn’t expect a reasonable answer but had to try. Flags seldom understood the game they were caught up in. They were suckers a long way from home who believed they’d won a future among the stars. Meanwhile, the real bad guys made a fortune off them. A peaceful outcome would help everybody. Even so, Tom’s finger hovered over the button for the gravity shields.
The reply came fast. The optical lag on comms had dropped to a matter of seconds.
‘This an independent human settlement!’ the Flag shouted. ‘We don’t recognise your IPSO and don’t want your colony ark. If you don’t charge engines in two minute, we open fire.’
Tom glanced at Wendy. Two days of stress had drawn lines on her usually serene oval face. Her dark eyebrows sat knitted together into a single, intense line.
He muted the channel. ‘Can you believe this?’ he said.
‘I think they’ll do it, sir. These Flags are set up for a fight – they’ve been waiting for this.’
‘Send a warning to the Horton,’ said Tom. ‘Tell Sundeep to keep his engines warm and plot a course back to sanity.’
He flicked the channel back open. ‘Sacred Truth, please be reasonable. Consider the consequences of this course of action. We’re not here to make trouble. If you force us to leave at gunpoint, we’ll have to return with a frigate and evacuate all of you.’
Not to mention that the breakdown of IPSO authority would likely kick off a bloody scramble for control of the remaining Fecund stars and the alien riches they sheltered. They weren’t supposed to acknowledge that fact in negotiations, even if everyone knew it.
‘Your words mean nothing, Fleetie!’ yelled the voice over the comm. It trembled with rage. The video remained blank. ‘We know you here to kill us but we defend our home to the last man. Go now and spare yourself a fight. No more talk. I mean it!’
Tom couldn’t remember hearing a man sound so scared. Yet they were the ones pointing all the guns. He’d been told that Flags received a lot of political conditioning but someone had wound this guy up to breaking point.
‘Sacred Truth, we acknowledge your request. As a sign of peaceful intentions, we will remove to a safe distance.’
‘You will leave!’ the Flag screamed.
‘Okay, Sacred Truth, we’re heading out. Please do not open fire. I am legally required to give you the opportunity to make a statement of claim before disciplinary action becomes unavoidable. If you want to keep any rights over the world you’ve settled …’
He let the sentence hang as he fired up the engines.
‘Jawid, buffers to full strength. And quickly, please – we’re leaving.’
‘On it,’ said his roboteer. ‘Casimir-buffers sizzling in five.’
‘Brace for thrust, everyone.’
Throughout the four-kilometre-wide sphere of the Reynard’s mesohull, robots raced to their action stations. Around the tiny central refuge of the ship’s habitat core, a dozen huge rad-shielding machines hummed into life, swaddling the cabin with a protective foam of pseudo-vacuum bubbles.
Their timing made all the difference. Two seconds after the Reynard’s shields saturated, a radiation wave slammed into the buffers just beyond the cabin walls. Red warning icons splattered across Tom’s display like blood spots as warning clangs filled the air.
Tom blinked in confusion. ‘Jawid, what was that?’
‘Buffers at forty per cent, sir! Compensating.’
‘We’ve lost fine sensor function,’ said Faisal. ‘Looks like g-rays. They fried the primary bank. Compensating with secondaries.’
Tom flicked the comms-link back on and set it to broadcast. ‘Unregistered colony, I said do not open fire! We are prepping to depart.’
Silence filled the channel.
‘I don’t think it was them, sir,’ said Wendy nervously. ‘I’m picking up damage signs from their ships, too – that blast fried them worse than it did us.’
Tom selected one of the cameras that still worked and zoomed in for a closer look. Sure enough, both gunships had started drifting. One showed a rebooting engine. The other showed no activity at all.
His brow furrowed. ‘Then who nuked us?’
‘Scanning now,’ said Wendy. ‘Pinpointing the origin of the blast.’ She paused, holding her breath.
Tom glanced across and saw her frowning into her data.
‘Sir, I think you should take a look at this.’ She posted a view to his display.
On the other side of the system, about ten AU from Tiwanaku’s star, a cloud of something twinkled. Whatever it was, at that range it must have fired its blast more than an hour earlier, and with prescient accuracy. Either that or the wave had been broadcast to scour the entire system.
‘Those bursts look a lot like tiny warp flashes,’ said Wendy. ‘And I’m seeing visible growth in the cloud radius.’
In other words, it was headed their way. They could have company any minute.
Tom checked the Horton’s position. Compensating for light-lag, it was still more than half an hour from the blast-wave.
‘Jawid, prep a message drone,’ he said quickly. ‘Overcook its engines and send it to the Horton. If we can give Sundeep even a minute’s warning on that radiation, it’ll be worth it.’
‘On it.’
‘Wendy, Faisal – I want to know what that cloud is.’
‘Whoever they are, they’re sending video on tight-beam,’ said Faisal. ‘We’re getting it and so is the colony.’
‘Patch it through.’
In the video window that opened before him, Tom saw a grainy picture of a young man lying on a concrete floor. As he squirmed backwards away from the camera with panic in his eyes, he raised a desperate hand as if to ward off a blow, then nothing. The video reset and started again. Played over the top of it was a track of warbling, poor-quality audio – the sort you might hear from a broken vending machine.
‘Trespass detected,’ the audio cheerfully informed them. ‘Punishment cycle initiated. Damage imminent.’
The message looped over and over in the same flat, chirpy tones.
Tom’s skin prickled. Their situation suddenly felt sinister. First a colony that wasn’t supposed to exist, and now this? It almost smacked of some kind of prank. But pranks didn’t usually start with a near-fatal radiation blast.
‘Hold on, everybody. I’m putting some distance between us and whatever that is.’
Tom pointed his ship back towards the Horton and fired the engines. The thud of warp kicked them into their crash couches. The slow, steady rhythm of gravity bursts picked up tempo, but not nearly fast enough. While the illegal colony shrank, the twinkling cloud kept growing. Whatever it was, it had to be closing on the star incredibly fast.
Tom stared at the cloud anxiously. ‘Any guesses, people? What are we looking at?’
‘It looks like a munitions burst,’ said Wendy. ‘SAP analysis suggests a classic drone swarm, but it’s way too big for that. I’m seeing warp flashes from more than ten thousand sources and no ship
signature behind them. Just empty space.’
‘So this is a local phenomenon?’ said Tom.
‘Unclear,’ said Wendy. ‘We saw no signs of anything like this from our early system scan. There’d have to be some kind of base for these things to hide in, and we didn’t find one. No moon, no engine signature, no comms, nothing. They just sort of … appeared.’
‘Could they have launched from the Fecund ruins?’
Wendy shook her head. ‘Very unlikely. That cloud came in way above the ecliptic. There’s nothing up there – we looked.’
‘I’m matching the flashes to known drone profiles,’ said Faisal. ‘They’re weird. They don’t look like anything in the book – the radiation spikes are too short and bright. Whatever they are, we didn’t build them. Sir, do you think this is what made the Flags so paranoid?’
‘No idea,’ said Tom. ‘Wendy, are those things following us? Are we clear?’
‘Hard to say. They appear to be focused on the planet. I’m taking a closer look … They’re closing on T-Four now, sir. Orbital insertion in five, four, three …’ Wendy gripped the edge of her bunk. ‘Whoa!’ she shouted.
‘Share it with us, Ms Kim,’ said Tom sharply. ‘Don’t make us guess.’
She posted a view to Tom’s display. It was a drone cloud all right. A huge one. The space around the planet had been filled with some kind of warp-enabled munitions and both colony gunships were already balls of slowly blossoming flame. Beams lanced out from the suntap stations, frantically trying to lock on to the blur of targets. Drones exploded everywhere but there were far too many to fight. Tom watched one station after another detonate, bathing the planet below in scorching light.
‘There are over two thousand people down there,’ he said. ‘Jawid, I want a full record of this event on a secure message drone. Immediate release. Destination: New Panama System, Frontier Fleet HQ.’
‘On it.’
‘Keep a channel open to the drone – I want them to see and hear everything. Faisal, do these profiles match any speculated Fecund drive signatures?’