Hegemony

by Kalina, Mark

  "No," said Rilk, his voice flat as he realized what the vector plot showed.

  The crew of Ulia's Flower had watched in horror as the lance-ships accelerated past the point where they would need to begin decelerating to match vectors with their victims, necessary to capture and loot a victim. Instead they were piling on the velocity, burning to generate slashing fast-pass intercept courses, useful only for destruction.

  The death of the two freight-liners had at least been quick. Gold Mine had tried to surrender, sending her intent on all frequencies and even trying to change her vector to give the raider an easier window for a course merge. The raider had simply bored in, making a fast pass to within twenty thousand kilometers. The Ulia's Flower had trained her sensors on the distant motes of the two ship and watched, and at Rilk's command recorded with the best fidelity that the sensors crew could manage, as the raider closed in to the range at which its lasers would be able to focus perfectly, making their effects explosive. The sensors picked up the silent sparkling flashes as the raider opened fire with capital ship laser arrays, converting the freight-liner's hull metal to a plasma shockwave more destructive than any conventional explosive. It had taken less than a minute to destroy the Gold Mine, along with her helpless crew; the ship's reactor must have taken a hit, collapsing the singularity in a violent explosion that turned the freight-liner into expanding vapor. Then the scene had been repeated again with the River of Prosperity.

  River of Prosperity had not tried to surrender, but the raider pursuing it had more than enough margin of acceleration to force the intercept, and the other freight-liner had likewise died under a flail of capital-ship laser fire.

  It was after the death of the two freight-liners that the nightmare for Ulia's Flower and her crew reached its worst. The fast passes made by the two raider had taken much less time than a course-merge would have, and now both raiders burned to change their vectors to intercept the surviving, fleeing liners.

  The sheer disparity of acceleration seemed to doom the two remaining freight-liners. With their cargo holds empty, the huge cargo ships could manage about a half gee of acceleration. The raiders were averaging over four gees, and might be able to push higher than that. That was enough margin to make the 'liners' attempts at evasion meaningless.

  Not that either 'liner dared to try to accelerate to escape. Feeding mass into the singularity, where it would be crushed into fusion to heat reaction mass into plasma in the ship's drive, would mean that the singularity was no longer re-stabilizing. For as long as the plasma drives ran, the ships would get no closer to being able to initiate an FTL transit.

  The raiders' deadly attacks had been much faster than capture and looting would have been; it had taken the raiders less than twenty-eight hours to kill the two ships. Their vectors were highly divergent from the surviving freight-liners, but their acceleration would let them come back around quickly enough. Rilk calculated that they had less than sixty hours before the raiders reached them; that was all it would take for the raiders to kill their outbound vectors and bore in at full acceleration for a killing slash at the remaining 'liners.

  "We've only got one fucking chance, Captain!" Kiril's voice was raw, half rage, half pleading. "We have to go for an FTL transit."

  "The singularity is not stable enough," said Rilk, with no emotion left in his voice.

  "It might work, it might. You can't know it won't."

  "It won't work." N'tasa's voice was calm. She put a hand on her husband's arm and Kiril twitched at the contact, as if she had shocked him.

  "It has to. It's the only chance we have. It has to work."

  "The singularity is not stable enough," repeated Rilk. He was looking at Kuper, the engineer.

  "It's not," said Kuper in a empty voice. His eyes were closed. He would not look at anyone in the compartment. "It's only had ninety-eight hours to stabilize. That would be enough, maybe, coming off of a normal transit, but it... the singularity is still way too unstable; the frequency variation is all over the place. It can't generate a wormhole." His voice, still quiet, grew savage. "That fucked up emergence is going to kill us!" He did not look at N'tasa, but the accusation in his voice was clear; she was the FTL navigator. She had run the parameters of the transit that had gone so wrong.

  "How many hours?" asked Gala. Her eyes were red, standing out like costume makeup in a ashen face.

  "A bit over two hours till the raider makes his pass. He's keeping up five gees."

  "We can't evade," said Kiril. "We have to try FTL. We have to."

  "Diamond Dust is going to try for FTL," said Rilk, almost two hours later. He had just picked up the signal, was still in the interface, though he had willed himself to speak out loud.

  The raider was eight minutes from Diamond Dust, less than two million kilometers away and closing at four thousand KPS.

  "God help them," said N'tasa.

  It was easy to see it all, through the interface. The vector lines of the two ships, the raider, red, and Diamond Dust, blue, were clear and bright, heading inexorably towards a point of contact, after which there would only be one vector line, red.

  "They're going for it," said Kiril. His sensors were doing double duty, a secondary sensor array was locked on the other raider, four million kilometers away; sixteen minutes away, give the closure rate. The main sensors array was watching what Rilk knew to be the last minutes of the Diamond Dust. Rilk tried not to think about it. He was trying not to think about anything, except the plan.

  In his own mind, there was the plan. Only there; if he spoke of it, it might evaporate, like a drop of water in vacuum. A captain always has to have a plan. Was that from his training? No, his first captain had told him that, when he was a junior crewmember on his first ship.

  "They've initiated FTL," said Kiril. Rilk watched the vector lines, and the telescopes that showed a grainy, tiny image of the Diamond Dust. It was still there.

  "The wormhole failed," said N'tasa. "They can't go FTL."

  "They've lost power," said Kiril, saying what his sensors had just showed to everyone plugged into the data stream.

  "Their singularity collapsed," said Kuper. "They pushed it, and it shut down."

  "It doesn't matter," said N'tasa, with tears in her voice.

  Diamond Dust's crew tried to escape; a dozen escape pods erupted from the ship in the seconds before the raider made its blazing closest approach. Rilk and the rest of the crew of Ulia's Flower watched the raider's lasers track and vaporize the escape pods, before ripping open the Diamond Dust, shattering her huge hull in a ripple of silent flashes of laser light and vaporized alloy. The raider swept past the expanding cloud of debris, venting laser coolant, still firing at the wreckage, tearing the largest pieces into smaller and smaller debris.

  The second raider was less than eight minutes away.

  "We have to try the FTL!"

  "It won't work. Damn it, Kiril, it will not work," N'tasa's voice was less than calm now. Rilk wondered if she was upset about her impending death or about her husband's loss of composure.

  "We're going to..." Rilk tried to find his voice. He had given so many orders, routine orders, here. Now was a hell of a time to stumble his words. "We are not going to try the FTL. We are going to try something, though. We've got a shot at this."

  Kiril was still saying that the FTL had to work, had to. Rilk ignored him.

  "I want the lasers ready. Don't open fire yet; we can't do much to that bastard with them, but they can blind some of his sensors."

  "That won't be enough," said N'tasa. Rilk wished Kiril was... wasn't losing it. He'd have the best insight on what sort of effect the lasers would have against military sensors.

  "You're right," said Rilk. "It won't be enough, and it won't be all. The raider is five minutes outbound, and he's coming in at more than four thousand kilometers per second. That is very fast. Too fast. He will have a very limited time to shoot at us. They've used large laser arrays so far; no missiles, no interceptors."
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br />   "Who'd waste warheads on us?" said Kuper, with an edge in his voice.

  "Just as well that they don't. Wait for it. Damn it all, wait for it."

  "Wait for what?"

  "Not now!" said Rilk, trying to ignore everything except the interface, the data stream. He had to start... right now.

  "What are you doing?" said Kuper.

  "He's running the cargo-mover," said Gala.

  "It's too late to dump cargo. We can't vector away."

  "It's a shield," said Rilk. "The ore will disperse, but for a while it's going to make a shield for us. He's going to have to fire through the ore. Now, as soon as he starts firing, lase him back. Blind him. He'll have to compensate at the last moment. He might not have time to adjust for the blinding laser. And stand by for acceleration. I'm going to try to keep the ore cloud between us and him as he passes."

  "It won't work," said Kiril.

  "Shut the fuck up!" said Gala, yelling the last word.

  Two minutes. A single minute. No time at all.

  The inbound ship was clearly visible, a dark spindle of metal and composites with a halo of plasma thrust streaming behind it. The telescopes could see the shape of it, narrow and lean, studded with weapons and radiator spines and sensors. More than four thousand kilometers closer every second.

  A dorsal weapons mount suddenly flared to life, and tons of ore dust became incandescent as an anti-ship laser burned into it. The hull of the Ulia's Flower creaked and groaned with the energy that leaked though the expanding cloud of ore. Warning lights flashed.

  Her own small lasers fired back, trying to blanket the raider's sensors with searing light, trying to blind the raider. The 'liner suddenly rang and boomed as thermal shock ruptured a hull frame. The surface of the hull was vaporizing, melting under the raider's beam, but the ore cloud prevented the full force of the laser from striking, keeping the beam from focusing precisely on the Ulia's Flower with a shattering thermal shock.

  The 'liner's drives lit and thundered, pushing at emergency-maximum power, more than half a gee, as Rilk flew the giant ship to keep the cloud of ore between himself and the raider.

  The raider seemed to be firing forever, venting a trail of laser coolant into space to dump the enormous waste heat of its laser, but keeping the beam on the 'liner. More sections of hull failed. A pressurized crew area blew out with a puff of air, venting some of his crew into vacuum, to be instantly turned into vaporized carbon and water vapor by the laser energy that was lashing the freight-liner. Laser energy was cooking the 'liner, destroying sensors and the 'liner's own laser arrays, surrounding the ship in a cloud of vaporized metal.

  And then it was done. The raider was silent. Out of range, maybe out of coolant, with its laser array on the verge of melting with waste heat. Rilk could see the ship streaking away, drifting now with its drives silent, getting a little over four thousand kilometers further from the Ulia's Flower every second.

  Rilk shut down the drive. There were alarms wailing throughout the ship. Damaged systems were calling themselves to his attention, screaming at him through the interface.

  There was a long time, when no one on the bridge made a sound. Then the screams came, cheers or suppressed fear let go, or just raw sound with no focus.

  Rilk found himself crying. The bridge crew were cheering now. He wanted silence, wanted to just get a second, just a second to figure it all out. But the interface kept sending him data; there was blow-out in the crew quarters. The medical officer was unsure of the casualties; there might be a dozen people gone. The hull was compromised in three places, damaged in a dozen others. The main sensor array was slag. So were the defensive lasers.

  Training kicked in. A few of the crew were veterans of the system defense fleets. Enough of the others remembered their emergency drills. Casualties were transferred to the sickbay. Damage control routines, often practiced but never before used, were put into motion.

  They nearly ran out of supplies in the freight-liner's limited sickbay. Even so, three of the crew had died of burns or decompression injuries before they could be treated. Ten more were just gone.

  Hastily, the crew made what paltry repairs they could to the battered 'liner, wondering how long they had to live, before the raider came back again. Who were these raiders? Why were they attacking to kill, expending a small fortune in weapons-grade laser coolant and rejecting even the possibility of loot?

  But it would take the raider almost sixty more hours to return, Rilk knew, even at maximum acceleration. And that ship had been at maximum acceleration for a long time. The other raider was no better placed to make an intercept. Rilk supposed that it had never occurred to the attackers that they might fail to make a kill.

  It seemed that the days of high gees were too much for the raiders. They came back in at an average of three gees, spending more time at one gee, to spare their crews. They had to be getting low on reaction mass as well; they had been under high thrust for days. No ship could carry enough reaction mass to keep that up forever.

  No one had spoken as N'tasa set up the parameters for the FTL transit. The singularity was stable enough, Kuper said, and N'tasa agreed. The raider was three hours outbound again, coming in slower this time.

  It would be funny and sad if this does not work, thought Rilk, holding tight to his wife's hand. Gala's eyes were closed tight.

  N'tasa sent the execution command, and for an impossibly brief instant, the wormhole opened, unfolding the space surrounding the Ulia's Flower. For a moment measured in Plank time, there was no reality, and then the wormhole collapsed, leaving the Ulia's Flower in the Yuro system, thirty million kilometers from the habitable world of Yuro-IV. It was an ideal FTL emergence.

  5

  Interceptor Pilot Alekzandra Neel sat on the bunk in her quarters and peeled the last tangerine she had managed to smuggle aboard. The peel of the fruit curved away from her hands, leaving the edible segments intact. She was getting good at this. She took one segment and put it into her mouth, savoring the tart-sweet taste.

  Taste was important. When she had become a daemon, leaving her old body and her old life irretrievably behind, she had been afraid that nothing would ever feel right again. She was seeing with new eyes, hearing with artificial ears; every sense was... a bit off, at first. They had explained it to her; there would be an adjustment time to the new avatar, but in her own mind, which was no longer housed in what had been her brain, there was a terrible fear that this was the way it would always be. There was no going back. She would go mad, she thought. After all, not every daemon managed to survive the change.

  In fact, her senses had stabilized, and it was taste that had come back first. Her biosim avatar needed food. Power for the avatar came from a bioreactor, a unit in her abdomen that operated like a streamlined version of a human digestive system, breaking down chemical bonds to produce chemical energy that powered the artificial muscles and neuro-chemical linkages that were her nerves. Her tongue, like a few other parts of the biosim, were actually biological tissue; one of the few parts that were cheaper to clone and implant, or transplant, than to make artificially.

  But though there were social meals scheduled every hundred hours aboard the Conquering Sun that involved real, in fact excellent, food, the default means of fueling a biosim was a bland, very mildly tasty nutrient-fuel paste. So a chance to get tangerines, real old-Earth originated fruit, was not to be passed up. And there was something comical about a ship run by daemons, with no meat-brain humans aboard at all, having restrictions on the crew bringing aboard unauthorized food substances.

  The recall to the ship had taken her by surprise. She had been looking forward to another hundred hours of leave on Yuro IV. The planet, the part she had seen, was pleasant enough. But she had been looking forward to getting out of the cookie cutter Hegemony-style New Capital City and touring the original settlements, where local culture had had almost a quarter-million hours, most of a century in local years, to diverge and move in its own direction
s. Travel to different worlds, after all, had been one of her childhood reasons for wanting to join the Fleet.

  But recalled she was, ordered to get back to the Conquering Sun within four hours, even if it meant breaking in a new biosim avatar aboard ship and leaving her own avatar in storage on the planet. That had not been necessary, but she had been forced to take a priority shuttle to orbit, missing out on a ride up the elevator, which was another thing she had been looking forward to.

  Once aboard, though, the reason for the recall was obvious. The battered, part-melted old freight-liner Ulia's Flower had emerged at Yuro twenty hours earlier, with her radios screaming for help, taking no chances that the raider might follow, to kill the ship before her message and records were sent off. It was, thought Zandy, an odd bit of luck that had placed a Hegemonic assault-ship and escorts at the Yuro system to hear her cries.

  Now the Conquering Sun and her two little swift-ships were boosting away from Yuro at a steady one gee. They could have gone faster, but this close to the planet, their exhaust plumes were a navigational and radiation hazard. As soon as they cleared the planetary system, they would be pushing three gees all the way to the FTL initiation point.

  Jessa walked in as Zandy was about to eat the last segment.

  "Whatcha up to, Zandy?" she asked.

  "Contraband, Pixie," said Zandy, pointing to the tangerine peel and the sole remaining bit of fruit. Zandy hesitated for a second, then asked, "you want the last bite?"

  "Wow, Zandy. You really have fallen in love with me. OK, I'll be greedy and pragmatic," Jessa said, reaching out for the tiny segment and popping it in her mouth. "Thanks. Nice. Yum," she said.

  Zandy smiled at the smaller woman. What they had, she and Jessa, was aboard ship only, but the fact was that Zandy had become very fond of "Pixie."

  "Do you have duty time?" Jessa asked.