by Alex Lamb
Their reference frame boosted astonishingly with every micro-burn she invoked, even while her antimatter reserves sent her usage warnings.
‘Supposed … to use … burst … once,’ Clath gasped.
Ann kept flying.
As soon as she was through the far side of the cloud, she released another round of flares, this time on warp and packed with incredibly expensive q-chaff. She lit up the space around them. Another two hundred and eighty-three drones revealed themselves, despite their cloaks. Ann ramped power to the grids and took out her bogeys, fragments of her mind managing every targeting SAP with unwavering attention.
Where was the armada she’d expected? It simply wasn’t there yet, she realised. The Photes had been racing to catch up with them. They’d invested an effort-surge into spreading a disrupter trap to slow the Dantes down while the main firepower caught up. The drone-to-disrupter ratio on its own suggested heavy backup close by.
‘I’m looking at the vector field for those drones you just torched,’ said Palla, her simulated voice glitching under the gravity strain. ‘I’m seeing a clear mean trajectory. We know where those bastards came from. Scanning that region now.’
‘I’m quite capable of doing that, thank you,’ said Ann, taking Palla’s scan.
She followed the vector, dived under warp and flared again. This time, their burst of radiation revealed a large raider ship in the process of rapid disassembly.
Phote ships only separated when they had no further interest in taking live hosts. Their goal now would be to kill the Dantes. And these drones would be the smart ones with clusters of live ex-human brains embedded. Ann deployed a swarm of her own munitions, releasing a small fraction of the horde tucked within the ship’s hull. With the rest of her attention, she kicked on the shield.
The enemy drones spread out before they attacked, grouping themselves into tight self-defending squads that forced Ann to split both her attention and her fire. She simply fragmented her mind into as many shards as necessary. It wasn’t as easy as on the Ariel Two, where she had thousands of kilometres of distributed neuronal support to rely on, but still well within her abilities.
While dangerously smart in aggregate, isolated Photes were terrible tacticians and prone to repeat behaviours. Each of Ann’s subminds had a vast database of prior Phote attacks to draw on, many built from her own memories. Destroying all but one of the squads took her eleven-point-six seconds. The last squad scattered. If just one enemy drone survived, word of the Dantes’ clever engines would get back to the approaching fleet. Ann commenced mop-up operations.
Ragged cheering erupted from Clath and Palla as the battle turned into a rout. It sounded like they were having a party in the helm-arena that Ann wasn’t bothering to use.
‘We’re in with a chance,’ said Mark. ‘But we have to assume that messengers went out the moment we hit that cloud. We should release silencer drones now and chase them down, otherwise they’ll have our position.’
‘I veto that,’ said Palla. ‘That’s what we want. The more the merrier. I’m glad we’re not dead, but we need to draw more fire.’
‘Then we fire message drones,’ Ira put in. ‘Make it look like being found was a big deal and we need to tell someone.’
‘Grandpa has an idea for once,’ said Palla. ‘I love it!’
‘I’m on it,’ said Mark. ‘Ann, give me messaging control. You handle mop-up. Prepping phoney messages.’
‘No,’ said Judj. ‘Use encrypted viral payloads.’
‘Veto!’ said Palla. ‘Load a request to swap to backup rendezvous coordinates.’
‘Will you all just shut up and let me clean here?’ Ann roared. ‘I’m nearly finished!’
‘What vector?’ said Mark.
‘Here,’ said Palla.
Ann muttered curses as she swooped like a falcon to execute the final drone.
‘I recommend we use a decoy exit vector,’ said Mark.
‘I’m loading one already,’ Ann snapped.
‘Veto,’ said Palla. ‘From this point on we drop all attempts to conceal our flight path. We have to look like we’re making a run for it.’
‘Isn’t that what we’re doing?’ said Clath.
The primary external cameras on one side of the ship all shorted at once as the arrival blast of a carrier blinded them. Reinforcements. Millions of them, painfully close.
‘Fine!’ Ann shouted. She threw the Dantes onto a straight-line path and pushed the warp engines to maximum. Pseudo-gravity pummelled their organs. But compared to the conventional thrust bursts they’d experienced earlier, it felt like gentle tickling.
As they gathered warp, Ann flushed the battlescape and dropped them back onto the yacht. All six of them stood on the bridge with its brass fittings and a commanding view of the bullshit artificial sea.
‘You all need to back off the next time we do this,’ she told them. ‘Until we hit the Zone, this is my ride.’
‘Whatevs,’ said Palla.
‘You, girly,’ said Ann, rounding on her. ‘Try to think for a minute. As a lure, our job is to buy Galatea adequate time to save the Earth Ark. As it is, our lead is now measured in minutes and we’re still light-years from the Alpha Flaw. At this rate, we won’t buy them shit. I know your little head is full of technical cleverness, but your fucking ruse needs room to play out.’
Palla gave her a cold, level look. ‘This has been factored, Supergran. Just do your job.’
Ann held up a finger and pressed on the shadow-mediated virt with the weight of the alien software inside her. The air buckled. On the other side of the bridge, Palla slammed up against the wall, breathless and astonished.
‘Don’t think for a second that because I’m locked in a box I can’t mess you up,’ Ann growled. She looked at each of them in turn. ‘No backseat driving,’ she said. ‘This was your warning.’
With that, she strode off in the direction of her cabin to update her threat models. The rest of them didn’t seem to get it yet. They’d been sacrificed already. They were dead. Ann had run the numbers fifteen million different ways since coming aboard and hadn’t yet found a single reason to believe that Mark’s plan could work. There were too many assumptions. It was pure improvisational bullshit, like everything else he came up with.
All that mattered was making their last few days count. Ridiculous notions about flying into the Zone would only reduce their effectiveness. You couldn’t fight worth a damn in the Alpha Flaw. And if the Autocratic Academy honestly believed that the Photes were going to follow them in, then they were bigger fools than she’d taken them for.
The earnest, innocent faces of Poli’s kids loomed in her mind’s eye. After all she’d tried to do for the people she loved, she was not about to see her capabilities expended on a failed feint. She was determined to take an army of Photes with her when she went. Nothing else would make her sacrifice worth it.
[She’s not going to fuck up my final battle for me!] Ann roared at her shadow.
[No, she’s not,] it replied, [so keep your hair on. You’ll get to make your stand. It won’t be long. But right now, we need to hurry. From this point onwards, every hound in hell is going to be after us.]
4.4: MARK
Two days later, they reached the Bock Science Station hanging five light-minutes outside the Alpha Flaw. Their warp-velocity had been slowing inexorably for the last eight hours as the curvon density dropped. While the paucity of local space undoubtedly impacted their enemy’s ember-warp drives just as much as their own, Mark remained astonished that they weren’t dead already. They’d actually made it to the end of humanity’s domain without hitting another trap.
Bock Station was little more than a tethered pair of can-shaped evac-arks spinning in space about their shared centre of gravity like a set of bolos cast in endless flight. A clumsy polyhedral mass of scientific equipment had been attached at the midpoint between the cans, studded with various dishes and antennas. In all directions around the station lay a thoroughl
y unremarkable starscape. The closest sun was over a light-year distant. As picnic spots went, there wasn’t much to recommend it.
That was through a standard visual display. Through a curvon filter, a very different picture emerged. Here, the normally exuberant rainbow sea of untapped spatial potential thinned out and ended at a black wall that stretched to infinity in every direction.
Bisecting that wall was a flickering river of ghostly colour – the Alpha Flaw. It formed a narrow seam right in front of them, like a gloomy chasm between two infinitely high obsidian cliffs. The station’s shadow hung in front of that view like a grey speck, making it clear how obscenely vast the phenomena before him actually were.
Not for the first time, Mark felt a vertiginous rush contemplating that view. Gas giants weren’t big. Even stars weren’t big in galactic terms. The Zone, though, was genuinely, unavoidably huge. The scale of it was beyond a mind’s ability to fathom. Yet it was a phantom – a quirk of space–time invisible to any society without warp-drive at its disposal. Unless you were trying to fly a starship through it, you couldn’t see it, couldn’t feel it, couldn’t even guess it was there.
Palla signalled the station. As representative of the Academic will, that grim responsibility was hers. She stood beside Mark on the circular glass platform of their helm-arena, the faint rainbows from the route ahead casting curious shadows on her elfin face. Her expression was unreadably hard. On the far side of the disc, Ann stared coldly into space.
‘Bock Station, this is Autograd Palla Muri, SAO for the GSS Edmond Dantes,’ said Palla. ‘You are instructed to evacuate immediately. We are being pursued by a Photurian force of unknown size supported by at least one fully distended carrier. You are to flee into the Zone as per Contingency Plan Jackrabbit. Please acknowledge.’
Mark waited in the starry darkness of helm-space for their reply. The scientific crew of Bock Station, a facility he’d campaigned to establish, would now have no choice but to fly their evac-arks into the dead mass of the Zone’s bulk. There they’d hide with their albedo dropped and hope that the Photes didn’t bother coming after them under conventional thrust – a time-consuming operation.
Theoretically, the Galatean government would send a rescue crew to bring all two hundred and fifty residents back from the Zone’s edge once the coast was clear. Mark doubted they had ever been informed that their lives might be sacrificed in a tactical gamble.
Response took several painful minutes.
‘This is Coordinator Amelie Nunez,’ came the reply. The face of a thin, anxious woman appeared in a video window before them. ‘Your message and authority codes have been received. But what about our equipment? Complete detachment will leave the experimental cluster drifting with critical experiments uncompleted.’
Palla’s eyebrows rose in disbelief at the woman’s priorities. It was the only emotion she let show.
‘The cluster is to be abandoned,’ she said. ‘This is an Academic Order. Please be advised that you may have only minutes to get out of here. You are also instructed to send us a full download from your data cores for navigation purposes. We’re going in.’
‘Understood,’ said Amelie, her brow twitching in distress as the stakes finally dawned on her. ‘Sending now. Nunez out.’
While they watched, the arks separated and began their burn, abandoning who knew how many scientific careers’-worth of work. The expensive jumble of the experimental cluster tumbled slowly away, embarking on a multi-million-year drift towards human space.
The arks’ thrust built slowly. Mark could only guess at the panicked activity inside as every member of staff scrambled to find a crash couch in which they could endure the multi-gee burn to come. Even this close to the Flaw, it would still take them hours to reach the relative safety of dead space – long, dangerous hours.
‘Okay, Ann,’ said Palla.
Ann didn’t move.
‘Did you hear me? It’s handover time.’
Ann marched up to where they stood and stared down at them through Valkyrie eyes. The closer to the Flaw they’d travelled, the more remote she’d become. Her own success at running away appeared to have disappointed her intensely.
‘Requesting SAO permission to alter the mission profile and make a stand here at the edge of the Zone,’ she said. ‘To go any further is to participate in fantasy and waste.’
‘Request denied,’ said Palla.
Ann stood silent for several seconds.
‘I repeat my request,’ said Ann. ‘Threat models indicate that there is no tactical value—’
‘Request denied,’ said Palla again, more firmly.
‘Fine,’ Ann said eventually.
A large steel ring appeared in Ann’s hand – the helm-space’s visualisation of the ship’s executive key. She slapped it into Mark’s palm and walked away.
‘Mark,’ said Palla, ‘you’re up and we have no idea how long our lead is. Please be quick.’
Mark slipped the steel ring over his wrist and dropped himself into merged awareness with the ship. The cameras became his eyes. His subminds raced out to replace Ann’s as his consciousness reached into every corner of ship function.
He signalled Clath, who’d been waiting for his call in the yacht’s lounge. ‘Doctor Ataro to helm-space, please. I’m running out the feeler-drone loops.’
He opened the Dantes’ prodigious hangar doors and let long lines of warp-drones rip forth from them, burning ahead of their ship and into the river of rainbows on machine-gun bursts of light.
The Flaw was known to be at least two light-years deep but only about as wide as Sol. It did not sit still, but oozed and meandered according to complex feedback patterns, which meant that even at one light, you only had about two seconds to react if it kinked in front of you. It was a navigational nightmare – famously so.
The upshot was that if you were travelling through the Flaw slow enough to tell where the dead space ahead of you was, you’d never reach the other side in your lifetime. And if you were going fast enough to get through it, you were effectively blind. The moment you hit the edge of whatever rivulet of curvon flow you were surfing on, you were glued. A ship’s last bursts of warp tended to carry it so far into the bulk that getting back out was nearly impossible.
From that point on, you were free to accelerate conventionally, for all the good it would do you. Without warp, just re-entering the flow you’d left moments ago could take anything from days to years. As a young man, Mark had experienced that effect first-hand.
The feeler-loops were Galatea’s solution to that conundrum – a system of shuttling drones programmed to scan local space for usable curvons. Outgoing drones tried to stick to clean space. Returning drones passed information back to the parent ship about successful routes. Cunningly timed laser bursts enabled the drones to collectively infer losses in their number and adapt flight paths with minimal cost. In effect, they functioned like tentacles on a blind octopus, allowing a ship to find its way through the Flaw by touch.
As soon as he started receiving packets, Mark kicked on the ship’s prodigious thrusters and pushed them after the drones, into the Alpha Flaw. Fortunately, the boost Ann had given their conventional velocity back at the raid site now worked in their favour. Mark barely needed to touch the engines to leave the arks trailing to pinpoints in his wake.
As they dived into the river’s narrowing mouth, Mark’s gravity display stuttered into darkness. The flow was too intermittent to pad out a vanilla visualisation. He swapped to the dynamic, SAP-inferred model being built by the feeler-loops and received a multidimensional barrage of rapidly oscillating expectation vectors straight to his sensorium. It was like trying to drink out of a crowd-suppression hose. He reeled.
‘Can’t we make that a little more … usable?’ he said.
‘On it,’ said Ann tersely from somewhere down in helm-space. ‘Initialising now.’
She took hold of the feed and started reducing it in real-time, passing him a drip feed of course-
corrections. Mark grunted in relief, brought the warp engines back online and took them gently into the throat of the Flaw.
It worked perfectly, but within five minutes Mark was already frustrated. Ann’s corrections barely let him travel faster than a single light and her updates weren’t getting any more frequent. Meanwhile, if their threat predictions could be trusted, dangerous company lay just minutes behind. That was the problem with FTL chases. You had no idea who was after you or how close they were until they’d already arrived and started shooting. Given how quickly the Photes had shown up last time, Mark was assuming the worst.
‘This is great, Ann, but it’s taking too long,’ he said. ‘At this rate, they’ll be on top of us in seconds.’
‘This is what I can give you,’ she replied.
‘Mark has a point,’ said Palla. ‘It’ll take us years to get through the Flaw at this rate. If we even make it past the first bank.’
‘Then maybe we shouldn’t be bothering,’ Ann snapped. ‘Our feelers are still deploying. If we go too fast too soon, drone attrition skyrockets.’
‘We can slow later,’ Mark pointed out. ‘Right now we need to put enough distance between ourselves and the Phote fleet that they can’t just ride our warp-trail in after us. Clath, any ideas?’
‘Nothing that doesn’t bump our risk profile,’ she said.
‘Facing imminent death is a risk, Clath. See what you can do. Ann, I have to ramp our warp. Please get ready to up your feed rate. Anything you can give me would be great.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said. ‘I’m doing everything I can already. If we lose warp, we’ll be sitting ducks when the Photes hit. I’m trying to maintain a viable defensive position.’
Mark breathed deep before replying. ‘The whole point is to avoid the Photes,’ he said, ‘not to plan how to die gloriously when they show up.’
‘Battle is inevitable,’ she snarled back. ‘If we insist on deferring it, at least let me do that properly. I assure you, this is not easy.’
Mark glanced over at her in concern. She stood in helm-space with arms outstretched, a haze of inscrutably dense data mappings twisting around her head. He flicked across to the threat-assessment models and sucked air as he watched their capture probabilities climbing through orange into red.