by Kalina, Mark
"Are we going to match his maneuver?" Muir asked.
"Negative," Freya said. "I'd like to, but if both ships do it, that inbound SDF ship might figure out what we're doing and fire early. He doesn't have to be able to hit us. All he has to do is launch a few warheads and make us maneuver to evade so we can't go FTL.
"No, we're going to have to do this the hard way. We're going to go to maximum sustained thrust at 90 degrees to our base vector, on a reciprocal vector from the one Whisperknife was on, and hope our inbound SDF ship either follows us and can't keep up with our acceleration, or that he lets us go and goes after the Whisperknife... and that Captain Killick's plan works, at which point we can manage a safe FTL transit easily enough."
"It looks like he's decided to chase us," said Muir, some time later.
The vector lines of the tactical display illustrated his point. The inbound SDF swift-ship was burning hard to maintain the intercept with the Ice Knife. The Central Throne Fleet swift-ship had a small emergency acceleration advantage over the System Defense Fleet ship, but the SFD ship seemed to be willing to burn hard to match the Ice Knife's sustained acceleration, ignoring the discomfort it imposed on the SDF ship's human crew.
"Just as well," mused Freya. "We can win an engagement with an SDF swift-ship; the void-runner probably couldn't."
"Are we actually going to have to fire on them? On a Hegemonic SDF ship?" Muir asked.
"We have to," Freya answered. "If we don't launch warheads, he can maneuver to optimize his own launch vector, hold off his launch till the last moment... that would make our defensive situation pretty bad. On the other hand, if he has to evade our launch to give his point defense lasers a decent engagement window, he'll have to launch his warheads on a suboptimal vector, and they'll be a lot easier for us to defend against.
"Remember," she went on, "we don't need to kill him. We just need to get past him. I don't care if he can avoid our attack, as long as we can avoid his."
"Hell of a situation, Captain," Muir said. "What if we engage with only anti-interceptor warheads? We'll be tasking most of our warheads to go after his inbound anti-ship warheads in any event... leave just enough inbound at him to make him evade... And if we do score a hit past his defenses, he has a better chance of surviving."
"We'll go one better than that, Muir. We'll set the warheads aimed at the swift-ship not to detonate. He'll still have to evade, and maybe even use up some of his own warhead salvo for anti-warhead intercept. And by the time he notices we're firing blanks, we'll be past him and out of the engagement envelope."
"That's a good plan, Captain," Muir said. "I just wish the crew of that SDF ship was going to extend the same courtesy to us."
From her borrowed acceleration pod aboard the Whisperknife, Zandy could see the bright spark of the Ice Knife's plasma drive, boosting the other swift-ship away. Far more distant was the spark of the inbound SDF ship's drive. The Whisperknife's captain had allowed Zandy to access the sensor feeds, so she could see the raw data. Even without access to the tactical data feed, Zandy could calculate the vector lines in her mind. The two Hegemonic swift-ships, the Ice Knife and the SDF ship, were closing towards each other at more than 1000 kilometers per second.
We're hitting the edge of the safe FTL threshold in 380 seconds," came the void-runner captain's vocalization. "Stand by for FTL initiation and get everything ready if it's not there already."
The cadence of commands, spoken aloud, wasn't much like a Hegemonic Fleet ship, Zandy thought. But the crew seemed to get their job done even so. She wondered if the crew was as informal when they had to communicate through their data links, when they were locked into their acceleration pods for high accelerations.
Her data feed showed the two swift-ships, Ice Knife and the SDF ship, closing fast. Abruptly, there was a sparkle of tiny fission drive flares as both ships launched warheads. Zandy couldn't track the spray of inbound and outbound warheads with only the raw sensors data, but she could imagine what was happening. Both swift-ships had launched at least a dozen warheads, each of which had lit its small, short duration fission pulse drive to give a final addition or modification to the vector the launching ship had imparted to it.
Meanwhile, both swift-ships, Ice Knife and the SDF ship, lit up with brief intense flares of thrust as they pushed their drive to maximum emergency power. For a few hundred seconds the swift-ships could push almost 20 gees, and would be. For the human crew of the SDF ship, it would be crushing and disorienting, even in their acceleration pods. For the daemons aboard the Ice Knife, there would be no discomfort, though the force of the emergency acceleration would make the hull of the ship shriek with the stresses and forces imposed on it.
Zandy watched as the sprays of warheads streaked across the space between the two ships. In just seconds the firefly flashes of nuclear detonation laser warheads would flicker across the vacuum...
The sudden, disorienting flash of FTL initiation swallowed Zandy's sensor feed; in an instant the Whisperknife was gone from the Yuro system, instantly transited to the Sigma-Charybdis Waypoint II system instead. For an instant, the sensor feeds showed nothing except the flare of interplanetary dust and hydrogen atoms, suddenly bombarded by the energies of the already collapsing wormhole till they glowed with a flash of multi-spectrum energy.
The emergence flare faded, and Zandy could see the empty, cold space of the Waypoint system.
"Good emergence," said the Captain. "Now let's see if our new Hegemonic friends make it."
20
Whisperknife drifted silently through the cold, empty space of the waypoint system. The sullen light of the dwarf star was just a distant red spark in the darkness of the outer system. The search zone was still more than fifty hours away, but Captain Killick seemed to be worried about reaction-mass; it would have been somewhat faster to keep the drive burning, accelerating at a comfortable one gee, and then decelerating hard and fast when the ship reached the volume of space where the search would commence. It would have used a lot more reaction mass, but Zandy had been told that the Whisperknife had filled her tanks in the Yuro system. Even so, Captain Killick was being economical, letting the ship drift on its vector, content to take more time and conserve his ship's delta-vee.
Since the FTL transit from the Yuro system, Zandy had had nothing to do. The rest of the pirate ship's crew seemed busy enough, and though there was very little room aboard, no one had given Zandy much trouble. She supposed she was a guest, rather than a prisoner; they said as much, and they had made no moves to restrain her or confine her, though they had "requested" that she hand over her captured laser pistol.
The pirates were... not what Zandy had expected. She had never really given much thought to pirates. Void-runners, as far as she had been concerned, were anonymous savages, living on the fringes of the Hegemony. They had figured not at all into her life in the residence zones of Neomiletus, on New Ionia. At the Academy, they were seen, more than anything, as a tactical problem; a target to be engaged, if they could be caught. Zandy had never bothered to think about them as people.
Now these people surrounded her. None of the others were as odd as the cat-girl, Ylayn, but all of them were at least eccentric looking. Some had extensive tattoos, or other body-art; piercings or subdermal display implants that sent patterns of color across the skin of their faces or arms. Most wore flamboyant clothes in styles she was not familiar with. Some carried weapons, even aboard ship. Some wore emblems with unknown meanings, and badges with text written in symbols she couldn't read. They seemed confident, at ease, to Zandy. And all of them had the hard look of people who were used to violence.
They wore no sort of uniform, nothing standard at all, so that there was no way for Zandy to tell who had which rank or role aboard the ship, and she had spent some hours idly trying to figure out the command structure of the swift-ship. Captain Nas Killick was in charge, that much was easy to see, but the rest of it had proved impossible to deduce.
I suppose I shou
ld be more worried, Zandy thought. More scared. But self-preservation seemed like a distant, or perhaps an empty, concern. Everyone she had known, everyone she had cared about, on the Conquering Sun, was dead. So how important could it be for her to stay alive?
Intellectually, Zandy could recognize the thought as dangerous, maybe a symptom of too much time in neural net storage; psychological trauma from being out of her humanoid avatar for too long. That wasn't unheard of for a daemon who had spent as long in storage as she had. Or maybe it was just grief, from a woman who had no one left to care about. But those thoughts didn't change the fact of it.
The escape from Yuro IV had been chaotic and hectic, and even once aboard the void-runners' ship, still exciting. The unfamiliar discomfort of enduring high-gee maneuvers in an acceleration pod, inside her humanoid biosim avatar, had been novel, and also exciting in a way; not much like inhabiting an interceptor body at all.
Even just watching the maneuvers that had allowed the Whisperknife to escape had been fascinating, and Zandy could not help but admire the skill of Captain Killick as a pilot and tactician. Then there had been the waiting, not knowing how the engagement between the Ice Knife and the SDF swift-ship had unfolded. For almost two hours, Zandy had watched the raw sensor data, trying to catch any sign of an FTL emergence, wondering dully if the Ice Knife, and the people she knew aboard her, were dead, or captured, or safe.
At last, the Ice Knife had made her FTL emergence, having succeeded in getting past the SDF swift-ship that had intercepted her. Ice Knife had made it through the inbound fire with only a few out-of-focus hits against her bow-shields; no real damage done. The SDF ship had made it through unharmed as well.
There had been a quick exchange of radio signals with Captain Tralk, a confirmation of the search coordinates and a quick, if time-lagged, conference dividing the enormous volume of the search zone between the two ships.
After that, there had been long hours of constant acceleration, trapped in her biosim avatar, locked into the acceleration pod. The pirates seemed well used to it, and Zandy knew better than to voice a complaint.
And now the two swift-ships, Ice Knife and Whisperknife, were drifting through the search zone, looking for the debris of the battle where the Conquering Sun and the Coaly lance-ship had died, seeking after an intact sensor drone, or an abandoned interceptor whose sensors might have gotten a good, close look at the deadly coalition lance-ships and thus, hopefully, captured the secret of their unprecedented firepower.
Now that the action was over, though, there was nothing for Zandy to do. The discomfort of being stuck in the acceleration pod was done with, at least. But on the other hand, no one was allowing her to plug into anything except a read-only data feed, and being stuck in her still-imperfectly comfortable replacement biosim avatar was getting boring.
It had been too many empty hours, and too many hours were left to wait before there would be anything more for her to do.
None of the crew seemed eager to talk. The cat-girl watched her with a focused look that could have been sexual desire or hostility, or both. Most of the other crew avoided her as much as they could, limiting their conversations to warning her to stay out of their way as they went about their duties. They did not seem overtly hostile, but neither did they make any move to be welcoming.
Except the captain. He looked at her with cold eyes that made her feel like a hostile targeting system was tracking her. Still, of all the pirates, the void-runners, he was the most interesting one. He was a handsome man, blue-eyed, well built, with the sort of unconscious confidence that went with his unquestioned personal lethality. She had seen enough of his moves, laser in hand, as they had left the atrium mall, to recognize the tell-tales of telestraal training. Unless she missed her guess, he was an adept, and maybe even a high-ranking one.
And he was a very good pilot; his maneuver against the SDF swift-ship had been brilliant. Abruptly, Zandy found herself wondering if he would have made a good interceptor pilot; she suspected he would have, had his circumstances been radically different. Maybe it was that thought that had led her to try to talk to the captain.
"Now is not a good time to bother me, daemon," Nas said. His tone suggested that there would never be a good time.
"You don't like daemons," Zandy said, less a question than a flat statement of fact.
"What gives you that idea?" Nas asked, with a hard smile.
"Right," Zandy smiled back, challenging. "Why?" she said. "I mean, is it something personal?"
"What makes you think I'd tell you, daemon?"
"Might as well. Nothing better to do."
"We're done talking, daemon."
There was more to this, Zandy thought. There was something in those cold blue eyes that was focused on Zandy, contradicting his words. She wouldn't get past the words by asking nicely, though.
"Fuck that, meat-brain," Zandy said. "All we've got to do is talk."
Nas' eyes narrowed. The woman facing him was pretty... better than pretty, not that it mattered with a daemon. She might have looked like anything at all, when she was still alive.
"I've killed people who've annoyed me this much before," Nas said, flatly.
"Well," Zandy said. "Sorry, but that's not going to stop me. I'm a 'ceptor pilot. Threatening my life isn't really raising the stakes for me."
"Hah," Nas almost snorted at that. It was hard not to take this girl at face value; the slight grin of challenge, the glint in the pretty artificial eyes... recklessness scabbed over a sadness which Nas could see clearly.
"So you're basically telling me you're a missile guidance unit with delusions of humanity," Nas said. Let her sputter at that.
"Basically. Yup," the woman said.
"Good that it doesn't bother you.
"No one made me do this. I chose it."
"So do suicides. They choose it. Stupid choice, though."
"Not to be insulting, but what do you know about it?" Zandy asked. "You speak Translang like a native, so you were born Hegemonic. That means you had your chance. It's one out of a million, literally, who get the chance. I'd like to see you get it, earn it, and then turn it down."
Nas' sudden laughter surprised Zandy. He laughed in a manner that was both arrogant and totally amused.
"Like to see it? Feast your eyes, then. I was chosen. I was in a Fleet Academy. You're a 'ceptor pilot, right. It was that or a hoplite... either you piloted a missile or a cannon-fodder combat android. Well, Hegemony girl, my scores at the Academy were so high that I was on the command-navigation track. I was that good; they didn't want me in 'ceptors or hoplites."
"I..."
"...Don't believe me, right," Nas said. The woman looked at him, her gray eyes looking right into his. She looked not at all afraid. That alone was novel.
"No... I believe you," she said. "Why didn't you, then? Do you think daemons are already dead?"
Nas was silent for a while. This girl, daemon, aristo, Hegemony officer... every definition of the enemy, she was. Except that she was on the same side, for this run, for this once. Damned if he wasn't thinking of telling this girl things he didn't see fit to share with his own crew, with his own Brotherhood.
She was a 'ceptor pilot; not a job for the fearful. Maybe that was it. Maybe it was the lack of fear in her. It had been hard enough, Nas thought, to earn fear from the Brotherhoods. It was odd how refreshing it was to meet someone who showed none.
"I was in. They kicked me out," he said.
"They?"
"Aristos. Daemons. There were three slots at the Academy for cadets in command-navigation track. Just three. Someone didn't like having a demoi-born meat-brain taking one of those slots. It was... made clear to me, that I should choose interceptors, should put in my time, before I was let into a command-nav posting. Not right out of the Academy. Not for a demoi like me."
"Fuck."
"Oh, they fucked me, alright, Hegemony girl. I was proud, you see. I was proud of my scores, proud of how well I'd done. I wa
s... Well, a demoi shouldn't be too proud.
"They put a data worm into my files; set me up to fall hard. By the time they were done, I had to move fast just to keep out of the crosshairs of the Inspectorate."
"I was demoi myself," Zandy said.
"Guessed that," Nas said. "You don't act like an aristo born."
"Not all aristokratai would act like that," Zandy said. "Not all of them would do what was done to you. "
"So you say. Fuck, maybe you're even right. So what? Not all, but always enough. You... you weren't too proud. You were willing to fly their human-guided missiles. You don't stand out too much, so you can join the undead elite, if you live long enough to get out of 'ceptors."
"Hah," the girl said. "Make up your mind."
Nas frowned.
"Am I undead," Zandy said, "or do I have to worry about living long enough to make it? If I'm already dead, I don't have to worry about shit. If I'm still alive, then daemons are alive... You sound like a Coaly when you say that."
"Fuck. I have killed people for saying less than that to me."
"Sure. I believe it. You're a hard man. You'd have to be, to captain a Brotherhood ship... Maybe I am already dead, so I don't care," Zandy said. Then softly, "If I'm not, everyone else is."
"Right..." Nas said. There was that pain he had seen, raw now, in the lovely artificial eyes. "You lost your ship," he said. "Lost everyone, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"Don't give them the satisfaction."
"Huh?"
"The fuckers who killed your ship, your friends. Your people. They killed them. You lived. Don't give the fuckers the satisfaction of you just dying. Don't do their work for them. Don't quit."
"Does it matter?"
"Yes. Those aristo shits that backstabbed me, they expected me to quit. They fucked me and expected me to take it, just fold up. Fuck that. Never quit. Live, and make them sorry for it. Die, and they win all the way."