Doris replied, “If it’s luck, I’ll take it. Fusion Two is hot. Higgs cycle ninety… ninety-five… one hundred percent. Stabilizing… green light. Ok, ‘Helm’, you have FTL on your board. Do it.”
Kirrah checked the flight parameters carefully. It had been a while since either one of them had worked with the older Tubedrives on the LAS’s. Added almost as an afterthought to the design, the small drive collar was built in under the skin, just behind the flight deck. Intended more as a short-hop convenience than serious interstellar transportation, the shuttles could manage a mere two hundred fifty cees. Enough to coordinate a massed drop against a hostile planet, but nothing one hoped to have to ride all the way home in.
She keyed the Drive Standby control. In the space outside the shuttle’s bow, the shadow of the ghost of a Tubewall was scribed on the Siderial metric by the ring of Higgs generators. As Kirrah rolled the Master Drive Control clockwise, phantom particles danced and flew, precisely anti-phased beams built, cancelled, grew stronger, still perfectly balanced yin and yang, mass and not-mass, swelling, looming, surrounding their tiny shell in the vastness of space.
This board, Kirrah noticed, has exactly the same type of ‘Drive Activate’ key as she’d used on the Arvida-Yee’s helm. With a shiver, she set aside the memory of the last time she’d been about to press this particular control. Then deliberately, she re-opened the memory, took a good, clear look at her recollection of the last second of her life as a Survey Service Helm:
- The pinging of the proximity alarm…
- Doris reaching for something on her board…
- Sammy Lee getting the last four missiles off, reaching to reload the ready-tubes…
- the ugly red line stabbing into the main viewtank, like a knife piercing the heart of her world…
Kirrah looked up, saw Doris looking back at her, reading her, sharing her feelings and memories. Her lips peeled back in a feral grin.
“Now where was I, before being so rudely interrupted?” Kirrah asked the universe, and pressed the Drive Activate key. Yang snapped off like a blown candle. Outside the windows, the universe went away.
Thousand-one, thousand-two, thousand-three, thousand-bink! Kirrah counted, and suddenly the stars were back. Sho’ito was just visible aft, a bluish point among the stars. Using Tubedrive, Kirrah turned the vessel around, centered the tiny blue spark. Thirty degrees away to apparent right, the hot and noticeably reduced disc of the sun shone in isolated splendor. Two of the gas giant planets were clearly visible, sweeping in their ponderous slow dance around the sun.
“Looks good,” Doris confirmed from the engineering board. “I make it nine hundred light-seconds right on the nose. Should be plenty. Here’s a view of the planet. Geez, these are crummy optics!”
Only if you’re used to Scoutship sensors, Kirrah said to herself. On the highly magnified view on her right-side screen, her world was a half-full sphere. Its right hemisphere was lit by the sun, its left, a star-blotting blackness. The terminator was a perfect bisector, visually confirming their position far out in space and directly over the dawn line. Under them, the planet rolled slowly from left to right. Already its motion had carried the white-dusted mountaintops of the Wrth homelands into the sunlight. Soon Talameths’cha would follow, then O’dakai would roll into the light. Doris keyed another signal stream, added a view to Kirrah’s left-side screen.
“Here’s the tightbeam feed from the spyfly relay, Kirrah. Another idea to thank our Greenbutt friends for. You’re really going to need to do something for them, I think. Their future won’t be worth a politician’s promise if Admiral Dunning gets the full picture. When she gets it. She doesn’t strike me as the least bit stupid, old friend.”
“You’re right, I’ll do what I can. Let’s cross that lane when we come to it.”
In the view from the tiny spyfly two hundred seventy million kilometers below and fifteen minutes light-lagged into their past, the crowd surged against the thin line of palace guards blocking the exits. Swords flashed in the pre-dawn moonlight, men and women screamed. More and more fleeing citizens arrived at the gates, pressed the front lines forward onto the guards’ weapons. People fell. The mob howled, rolled bodily over the soldiers. The line broke in two places, and the citizens of O’dakai poured out into the surrounding countryside. Men, women, children, some running on foot, not a few on carts or horseback. All running as fast as they could, a whole community fleeing headlong across the endless black plains. Occasionally someone would fall, climb back to their feet, continue running. To the spyfly’s night vision, their clothing streamed around them like dark flames in the pre-dawn blackness.
Where was Akaray? With a wash of something like awe, Kirrah recognized the images from her dream of three nights ago. Far ahead on the plains, almost hidden in the darkness, she could see him beckoning. ‘There!’ she shouted, but no sound came. Alone she swung to the left, toward the promise of sanctuary…
No, that was the dream! Kirrah shook her head, felt the presence of Issthe behind her chair, feeling the almost thirty hours she’d been without sleep. Here, on the sensors, were visible the real, breathing, running flesh-and-blood people fleeing for their lives from the results of her dream.
Issthe’s hand touched her shoulder, lightly, and suddenly she was back in the dream, at the place Akaray was calling them to. Two figures pulled to a halt beside her… Captain Leitch, and Professor Stanglee, panting, looking anxiously around for whatever-it-was pursuing them. She turned to see Akaray’s face, laughing, as his arm gestured sharply down. Something tiny and potent flew from his hand, and flames burst at his feet. Captain Leitch turned and smiled his approval at her in the darkness, and saluted. With the gesture, his dark cape and clothing fell away like an empty cocoon, and he was gone like a liberated butterfly.
“It’s here!” said Professor Stanglee, and smiled shyly, the way he did when someone finally figured out the solution to one of his trickier assignments. He pulled a black cloth from his pocket, shook it out like a magician’s kerchief, threw it over his own head and shoulders. It swallowed him like a Tubefield taking a starship, leaving Kirrah alone, suspended over a lake of fire.
Not alone, someone was calling, calling her name…
“Kirrah, Kirrah. You in there, sweetheart?” Doris was shaking her wrist. Kirrah woke with a start. “Thought I’d let you sleep while we’re waiting for dawn at the target. You seemed to need a nap.
“It’s time,” Doris said, and turned back to her own board.
Kirrah shook the wool from her mind, checked the chrono. Damn! It’s been a long night. On her left viewscreen, the spyfly showed the empty streets of O’dakai. No, not quite empty. A few soldiers scurried to their post in the early predawn light, two looters ran from a building carrying a large box slung from a pole. In the next street over, a crowd of people was standing before a robed figure that was haranguing them. Two streets south, a woman was being pushed and tossed between three men. She fell. The spyfly moved on, westward over the plains. In the distance, remnants of the mob still fled toward the horizon. As the spyfly turned in its automated reconnaissance pattern, the central tower of the palace caught the first rays of the rising sun.
It’s time, said the exultant, glorious darkness inside Kirrah. Do it now. And let’s get it right.
She bent over her controls, set up another run straight back to the planet they’d just left. Her eyes were clear, her hands steady. Playing the Tubefield like a master musician, she held the pseudomass precisely, teasing the monstrous black maw of gravity sliding ahead of them, but never quite embracing it. She dropped them closer and closer to the FTL boundary, but held back from the brink, husbanded their velocity, kept them in the same metric as the outside, Siderial universe. On an instrument in front of her, an eight-centimeter quarter-circle dial, a small arrow moved away from the twelve o’clock position and started to creep clockwise around the arc. Outside the front windows, the stars were starting to turn blue.
“Coming u
p on tau niner five, point three one two cees, mark,” said Doris. The Tubedrive’s monstrous pseudomass swept them forward, accelerating. “That piece of Kruss shit massed about one point two grams, point seven cee will boost it to about forty-two terajoules, that’s just over ten kiloton-equivalent. Wish we knew what to expect by way of atmosphere bleedoff. Tau point nine, point four three six cee.”
“Whatever it does in the atmosphere is going to be over in a millisecond,” Kirrah replied. “That’s all it’ll take to punch through to the surface from space.”
“Tau point eight six six, point five cee,” Doris replied. “This may be an old shuttlebus to us Survey jocks, but you’ve gotta hand it to the Navy, they do keep their gear well maintained.” Ahead, the stars were noticeably bluer, and the whole sky seemed to be stretching slightly around the bluer central spark of Sho’ito. Stars at their sides appeared to be pulling toward the stern, stars astern were shifting to an orange hue and crowding together. The small arrow on the quarter-circle tau meter had crept around, touched the one o’clock position, a tick farther.
“Tau point eight, point six cee,” Doris recited.
A moment later Kirrah replied, “Tau point seven one four, zero point seven cee, Tubefield off. You have the conn, Doris. The autopilot should keep that crosshairs centered with reaction thrusters, your screen one. Let me know if there’s any deviance at all.”
“Right,” said Lieutenant Finch. “We’re just crossing six hundred light seconds, rest-frame. That’s ten minutes to impact, our frame. I’m giving you eight minutes, then I’m aborting.”
“No guts, no glory,” Kirrah smiled at her shipmate. She gestured to Peetha, rose in the suddenly-weightless interior of the shuttle, and guided her friend back through the cockpit hatch into the forward passenger compartment. Peetha had been making the usual first-timer mistakes moving in null gee, but made each one only once. Lieutenant Rash’koi had already unshackled Elizabeth’s ankle from the seat’s support, and the RegNet reporter followed them avidly as they swam back down the aisle and through the hatch into the aft compartment.
Kirrah closed the airtight hatchway between compartments, checked suit integrity for Peetha and herself even as the pumps evacuated all the air from the aft section. She confirmed that both her companions were firmly attached by boot magnets and safety lines. The sha’pluuth carcass bubbled slightly as the air pressure fell to zero, then Kirrah touched the controls and the aft door split open. Looking out the back door of the shuttle, naked space loomed disfigured and reddened, its stars crowded unnaturally together astern.
“Peetha, you may release the weapon,” Kirrah said. With the reporter’s camera rolling, Peetha took the six-by-fifteen millimeter smartshot that had taken the hand and almost the life of her subordinate, and held it between thumb and forefinger. Delicately, precisely, in the glare of the aft bay’s lighting, the Wrth warrior released the object. It floated before her, perfectly motionless in the weightless shuttle bay, and framed in the cargo door that was wide open to space. Peetha bent her body back from the small hovering cylinder, crouched down and clear of it.
“Got it in one, Doris. Activate M-2,” said Kirrah. The shuttle’s maneuvering thrusters fired briefly, accelerating the vessel forward at a twentieth-gee. The tiny smartshot continued on its trajectory unchanged, with all the terrible velocity and destructive energy imparted to it by the shuttle during Kirrah’s careful maneuvering. The shuttle and everything on it, including the aft bay and its open doors, pulled slowly ahead of the small object.
“Two minutes ten, looking good,” said Doris’ voice over their suits’ comm systems.
“Peetha,” said Kirrah as they watched the tiny killing device disappear behind them, lost against the lurid starscape. “When you entered my service, I gave you one of my new arrows, and I told you it would be the least weapon you would wield in my service. That tiny plague-of-screams seed you just released, will strike a mightier blow than all the blows of all the warriors combined, on our entire world, since humans first walked there.”
The aft doors were cycling closed, the shuttle was pitching nose-up. Weight returned, the pseudo-weight of acceleration, as flight plan M-2 ignited the main thrusters and pushed the shuttle swiftly away at right angles to the path of the deadly speeding mote.
Kirrah continued, “Therefore I release you from your service to me. You are free, to remain with me as my friend, or to return to your homeland, or to follow your future wherever you choose. And thank you, Peetha, for the gift of your trust.” Air hissed and gusted as the aft compartment repressurized.
Doris’ voice came via the intercom and suitcomm both. “Three minutes thirty. Kirrah, that trajectory was as close to dead on as we could hope for with these instruments. I’m going upTube now, we’re far enough away that our field won’t perturb your bullet. We don’t want to follow it in.” The internal grav field of the Tubedrive resumed, as they dropped back out of the universe for a few seconds, and re-entered at rest relative to the planet.
“Kirrah Warmaster is most generous,” Peetha replied gravely. “Your service has been all that you promised, and more. Not only do you make mighty weapons from oil, from a river, from a tiny seed. You remove your enemies - by wit, by friendship, by right judgement, no matter the cost. You conquered Marg’ret’s beamer, by removing your armor!
“All my life I have studied war. It is all I know to follow. I believed my Wrth clan taught me well. It has taken me a long time to begin understanding your ways. They are not like the Wrth ways I learned as a child. They are better. I can see I have much yet to learn. I can also see that Kirrah has further use for my blade. Therefore I choose your service. But not as Peetha.” Kirrah’s eyebrows rose, and the young woman continued:
“Before we met, I commanded a fire of Wrth warriors, and when Doi’tam-fira'tachk killed so many of us that first day we tested Talameths’cha’s walls, the surviving commanders were tested, according to Wyrakka’s ways. That is how I received this,” she touched the brand on her forehead, “and how I lost my name. ‘Peetha’ is Wyrakka’s curse on me for my errors, and today I am free of it.
“I now serve Kirrah Warmaster by choice, two lives balanced. My name is Elagai.”
Chapter 47 (Landing plus one hundred thirty-nine): Retribution
“In tactics, time and space quickly dwindle to their absolute minimum.” - General Carl Von Clausewitz, op. cit.
“Kirrah, you’d better take this call,” said Doris’ voice over the intercom. All three women turned and started forward, through the bulkhead’s hatchway and up the aisle to the flight deck.
The intercom picked up the exchange mid-sentence. “…at do you mean, you can’t latch up, Piersall? We’ve got a load of relief supplies waiting for delivery!”
“Sorry, sir,” the woman bound into the jumpseat replied. “It’ll have to wait. We have a priority mission, direct request from the Talamae head of state.”
From the absence of lightspeed lag in the conversation, Kirrah could tell before she reached the flight deck that Doris had returned them to a point in space near the planet and the Argosy. As she stepped through the hatch and into the cockpit, she could see the planet’s surface filling the forward view. The Sea of the Sun was visible as a complex shape drawn in beautiful shades of blue, dawn’s fingers just now reaching its western shore.
A quick glance at the flight instruments placed them four hundred eighty kilometers above the planet’s surface, about a hundred twenty kilometers west of Talameths’cha and the Argosy, and twenty klicks higher than the Regnum destroyer, dropping slowly lower. Quickly slipping into the pilot’s station, Kirrah glanced at her right-hand screen. It showed two numbers. One read [335], the other read [592]. Both were counting down in one second decrements. God, I’ve missed Doris, she thought, touched inexplicably by this small thoughtfulness on her friend’s part.
“Argosy, Shuttle One. This is Talamae Warmaster Kirrah Roehl. I’m the reason we can’t latch up right now. We have a rescue
mission, the last Kruss on the planet is on that river, with my adopted son as hostage. I think you’d better call your Admiral, sir. I have something to show her.”
[325], the top display read. [582] on the bottom. Another five seconds clocked off as the comm officer pondered her request.
“Ma’am, due respect, the Admiral left word not to be disturbed, unless, and I quote, ‘another nuke goes off’. She’ll be back on duty in about two hours.” On Kirrah’s screen, the man’s face appeared - a young face, strong nose, dark-blond short hair. The numbers continued to march downward, overlaid on the scene in its upper left corner: [308 / 565].
“I believe this qualifies, then, Yeoman Schneider,” said Kirrah, reading the man’s name off the bottom of the screen. “Please call Admiral Dunning immediately, my responsibility, and put your Tac officer on for me while I’m waiting. This is urgent.”
While the startled man began patching her call through, Kirrah turned to Doris and said, “Let’s take that nice hack out of the data feed. It’s time to come clean, including the real internal view of our borrowed shuttle. Remote Latch to Off.” Her finger touched the toggle switch that removed the control of their vessel from possible remote over-ride by the Argosy. A few moments, the display ticked down to [274 / 531], then a round face appeared on the screen, framed in short straight blonde hair:
“This is Captain Sandra Wallace, is there a problem?”
“No, ma’am,” Kirrah replied. “But it’s about to look like there is, so I want to be perfectly clear that our actions are no threat to any Regnum vessel or personnel.”
“Please expla… what the hell!” Kirrah realized the Captain had just noticed the new, truthful data feed. Wonder whether she’s seeing the Marines trussed up in the passenger compartment, or her pilot strapped into the jump seat behind me? Over the comm, she could see Captain Wallace’s hand move, and hear the General Quarters alarm begin blatting on the other vessel. Well, that ought to get me through to the Admiral, anyway.
IronStar Page 50