by Rick Partlow
That seemed to shut the woman up, and bring her to her feet. She pushed herself up off the table, exhaustion in her posture, and stepped around to a position just a meter from Priscilla.
“And what’s the other reason?” she demanded.
“Your world,” Pris said, not flinching from the elected leader of the Consensus. “I believe we can still save it.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“What the hell am I looking at?”
Brecht stared at the huge wall display, peering intently at the series of parabolas Pris had drawn between the orbits of Earth and Mars, intersecting the trajectory of the ramship. Sam recognized the symbols from his cross-training in navigation, but he had no idea what they signified in this context, and Pris had been close-mouthed as she drew on the tablet. Telia and Fellows wore almost identical skeptical expressions, while Gage watched with keen anticipation.
“These are the radiation arcs of active Teller-Fox warp units,” Pris explained, tracing the parabolas with her finger. “Not the giant gate assembly we were building, just the ordinary warp units in a ship like the Raven or one of your own military vessels.”
“The wormholes from a normal warp unit wouldn’t be large enough to affect something the size of the ramship,” Gage said, a slight question in his tone, as if he was hoping to be proven wrong.
“Individually, no, they aren’t,” she admitted. “And when we were planning for the Gate, the thought was to subsume the ramship entirely into Transition Space, and we scaled accordingly. However, something Captain Avalon said earlier,” she went on, nodding to him, “made me start thinking about something, and a bit of number-crunching confirmed it. Transition Space eats momentum. It’s part of the physics of the dimension and we take it for granted. I got a first-hand, ringside seat for the effect when the antimatter explosion inadvertently activated some of the warp units in the Gate a month ago.”
She waved at the representation of the ramship, overlain on the actual images of the thing taken by remote drones.
“Just one ship couldn’t create a wormhole big enough to absorb that kind of momentum, but if you could synchronize enough of them and open say, two hundred gates at once?” She shrugged. “It wouldn’t shunt the thing into Transition Space, but it could rob it of enough momentum that at the very least, it’ll be a survivable hit.”
“Two hundred ships?” Brecht hissed the words out as if they were blood pouring from a wound. “And what do you think will happen to those ships when the weapon hits their warp fields?”
“I can’t be certain without a complete computer simulation run,” Priscilla admitted, “but I’d say the likelihood is, the fields will overload and they’ll be destroyed.”
“They wouldn’t need to have crews,” Sam put in, feeling as if someone had to say it. “You could remote-guide them into place, set the timing up with a laser communication linkage, working the lightspeed delay into your calculations…”
“You’re a Patrol Captain, Avalon,” Brecht said sharply, in an accusatory tone. “One would hope you know approximately how many Transition-capable ships the Consensus military has in service.”
“The last report I heard was over three years ago,” Sam told her, “but back then, it was around three hundred in active rotation at any one time.”
Brecht nodded, then turned to John Gage.
“Tell them how many it is now, Minister Gage.”
“The same, more or less,” the older man admitted. His demeanor was reluctant, as if he didn’t want to give her argument any ammunition.
“And you know why the number hasn’t gotten any higher?” the Prime Minister asked. “Because warp field generators are damned expensive!”
“More expensive than five billion lives?” Priscilla wondered. “Or a habitable planet? Your homeworld?”
Brecht’s face screwed up in anger at the other woman’s impertinence, but she sighed the emotion away and rubbed at eyes reddened from lack of sleep.
“We’re at war with the Belters and the Jovians. And before you say it, yes, I know it was stupid and short-sighted; but unlike your computer overlords, I am not an absolute ruler and I can’t be seen as ignoring this sort of attack in Consensus space.”
She staggered back a step and leaned against the table. Gage made the slightest of motions, as if he wanted to go over and support her but had stopped himself out of respect for her office.
“I can’t pull two thirds of our fleet off the line and throw them in a damned bonfire. Losing Earth to this weapon is death for us all, but losing it to the Belters and Jovians is just as permanent.”
“It wouldn’t have to be just your ships,” Priscilla told her. “If I can get back to Aphrodite with evidence there was Resolutionist involvement in this plot, I know Mother will send help, whatever the cost.”
“And how do you expect to get that evidence?” Gage wanted to know.
“She’s here. The woman who sent the signal to hack the barge boarded a flight to Earth immediately after. If you can help us track her down, we’ll bring her in and…well, it’s your territory, your right to justice, but it would be easier for us to convince our government to help if we took her back.”
“Do you have biometric data on this woman?” Gage wondered.
“We do.” Pris pulled a data spike from a pocket of her jacket and handed it off to the older man.
“Can we run a search for her from here, Adrian?” Brecht asked Fellows.
“Adrian,” is it? Sam cocked an eyebrow. Fellows was more important than he’d thought.
“Sure,” the Guardian said, shrugging casually. “If she’s been through any of the ports, the system will have picked her up.”
He held out a palm and Gage slipped him the spike and he took it to the data input console, shrugging aside the clerk. The flabby-jowled functionary frowned, but didn’t bother to argue, pushing his wheeled chair away and sitting with his arms crossed. Fellows slipped the spike into a reader, muttering in disgust at the obsolescent computer systems as he accessed the files.
Jeddah Valley’s face slid up onto the main screen, along with a series of data points detailing her height, approximate weight, the gait of her walk and everything else the Martians had provided for them. A series of typed commands and a passcode later, the system was hooked up with the surveillance drones and security cameras from every major city on the planet, running the parameters against their stored records.
Seconds passed and Sam clucked with impatience; the systems back home would have delivered the results almost instantly.
“There it is.” Fellows grunted as if he’d pulled the data out of the computer physically.
A map was showing on the screen, a location blinking, and beside it a video clip with footage of the woman disembarking from a lander at a port on the North American west coast, a city they called Trans-Pacifica. The locator program blinked fitfully until it caught up with her again, boarding a public bus out of the port to the city’s transportation hub. She gazed out the window at the ships landing and taking off, as comfortable as any of the other tourists coming down from Fortuna or across the ocean from Asia.
She’s a mass murderer. Contempt swelled in Sam’s chest. How can she be so cool?
Fellows was reading the smaller display at his terminal while the video playback filled the overhead screen.
“We lose her at the hub for a few minutes,” he droned, sounding to Sam like one of the narrators of the nature videos he’d watched in school, tracking some elusive predator across the plains of Aphrodite’s northern wilderness. “Until we get just one shot of her from a safety camera on the side of a rental cab out at the private flyer landing pad just outside the port grounds.”
Another short video clip, grainier and less clear than the previous ones. It was hard to make out the woman’s face, but the computer had managed it from her biometrics, apparently. She was clambering up the boarding steps into the cabin of a small VTOL flyer, the sort which were ubiquitous on Resolution
colony worlds but not seen as much on a planet as settled as Earth.
“Is that a government plane?” he wondered. “Or a rental, maybe?”
“Private,” Telia replied, pointing at the ID number stenciled on the side of the fuselage. “That prefix is for privately-owned aircraft.”
“Who can afford to own their own flyer?”
He hadn’t meant the words to sound envious, but he realized they did. No civilian on Aphrodite could have afforded the taxes and penalties for owning and operating their own aircraft.
“There are a few thousand of them,” Fellows said, shrugging as if it were a small matter. “Business executives, some who just put everything they make into buying one for the fun of it…they’re nuts, but some good pilots. And then…” He trailed off, turning back to them, face split with a broad, evil-looking grin. “There are a few really important politicians working from their family fortune.”
Sam didn’t recognize the man in the picture at first; it was a still from a government ID, and it was as bad as those photographs always were, no matter what the technology. Then he read the name beside it and everything made sense.
“Tejado,” Brecht spat the word out as if it were poisonous. She glanced around like she expected to see the man in the room with them. “Where the hell is he, anyway?”
“He said he wanted to stay in the Ministry building,” Gage informed her, “as an example to the others that we shouldn’t give in to panic.” The last spoken so dryly a single spark would have set it afire.
Fellows was already switching one of the smaller screens to another program; from the looks of the interface, Sam thought it was a tracker.
“His issued health monitor says he’s not there,” the Guardian declared. “Matter of fact, it’s off-line.” That smile again, an expression Sam thought he might see in his nightmares. “I’d bet you a week’s salary he’s on that fucking flyer right alongside this Resolutionist bitch.”
If the man’s rough language offended Brecht, she gave no sign. She was staring intently at the ID photo, as if she could read the Naturalist’s mind in those dead eyes.
“Where the hell are they going, Adrian?”
“Looks like…”
The heavy, reinforced metal door to the chamber slammed open, interrupting whatever Fellows had been about to say. Armored Guardians tromped through, weapons at the ready, led by the NCO Fellows had talked to before, the one named Blumenthal.
“What the fuck’s going on?” Fellows barked.
“There’s been an actionable threat to the Prime Minister,” Blumenthal told them, his voice distant and distorted through the external speakers of his helmet.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Brecht snapped, standing up straight from where she’d been leaning on the table and taking a step toward Blumenthal. “I’m in the most secure facility in the Consensus! Who could possibly threaten me here?”
“Ma’am,” the NCO told her, “we think there’s a threat from someone inside the bunker. Please come with us.”
“No.”
That was Fellows, and the flatness of the word brought Sam’s eyes around to the blocky gargoyle of a man. He was staring at Blumenthal the way a scientist might examine a new species of insect.
“This is the safest place in the whole facility,” he declared. “If there’s a threat, you all should stay outside, guard the approach, and seal the room.”
“Sorry, sir,” Blumenthal said, “but that won’t work.”
He levelled his pulse rifle at Brecht and fired.
Time slowed, the tachypsychia of an adrenalin rush dragging each second a frame at a time, exquisite, excruciating detail in each image. Sam felt like he could actually see the energy pulse transform the slug into a plasma at the muzzle, could see the accelerated bolt of super-ionized gas as hot as the interior of a star crawling across the room, the air in front of it distorting from the heat. It seemed as if he should be able to step in front of it, to push Brecht out of the way, but it was as much a mirage as the heat distortion; his mind was feeding him the data microseconds after the events, altering his perception rather than actual time.
The perception intercepted real time with a bang when the plasma struck Carlotta Brecht in the chest at several thousand meters per second. The Prime Minister’s hair was tied into a braid down her back, sandy, salt-and-pepper strands fraying loose with the length of the day. It whipped around with a jerk of her head as she pitched backwards, and Sam smelled hair and flesh and fabric burning. Inside her torso, the plasma was flash-heating bodily fluids to vapor, expanding outward, turning her organs into so much charred jelly.
She was dead before she hit the floor.
And by rights, all of them should have been; but there was just the slightest delay, as if it took a moment for the conspirators to realize the magnitude of what they’d done and let it sink in before they could move on to the rest of their dirty job. Into that split-second Telia Proctor and Adrian Fellows moved.
On an intellectual level, he knew Telia Proctor was dangerous; he’d seen the video of the gunfight back on the station. It still hadn’t prepared him. One moment she was a still-life, standing with her shoulders squared, her arms crossed, and the next she was three meters across the room, her metal fists pounding into the chest armor of one of the Guardians like a trip-hammer. Cracking bone battled with cracking ceramic for supremacy, and the loser was whoever was inside the armor. The Guardian flew backwards, flopping with mortal finality.
Fellows’ motions were a ballet by comparison with Telia’s sledgehammer. The man went low, one leg bent as a fulcrum and the other swinging through the air almost faster than Sam could follow, catching Blumenthal behind the knees, sweeping him off his feet backwards.
Inertia had been pinning Sam’s feet to the floor, keeping him a spectator, but the impact of Blumenthal’s back on the bare concrete seemed to flip a switch inside his head and he lunged for another of the armored figures, the one who had both gun-belts slung over her shoulder. No longer watching the action, trapped inside the bubble of his personal struggle, he thought he heard the crack-snap discharge of a pulse rifle from somewhere---it seemed far away, but that could have been the auditory exclusion which came as a package deal with the tachypsychia and the tunnel vision of an adrenalin rush.
He knew the Guardian was female, and he knew she didn’t have the benefit of cybernetic enhancement or a boosted musculature because the Consensus wouldn’t have permitted her to be stationed on Earth with the former and didn’t allow the latter at all. But she was damned strong and he’d been working in a space station for nearly three years. She jerked the barrel of her pulse rifle back and forth, taking him with it, then aimed a kick at his groin; he barely shifted his hip around to block it and it still hurt like hell.
More shots, more shouting, and an alarm klaxon blaring right in his ear and he simply wrapped his hands around the barrel and receiver of her rifle and threw himself backwards, bringing his feet up into her chest. She was strong, but not strong enough to hold up a hundred kilograms of him and another hundred of herself, her armor and her weapon. He felt a bit of the air go out of him when he landed on his shoulders, but he was already shoving her over his head, his feet planted in her gut, rolling on top of her, the rifle under his control.
The sling still secured it to her harness, but there was enough slack for him to yank the pulse rifle a meter up, then slam the receiver down into the visor of her helmet. Once, twice, three times and polymer cracked, then splintered, then the face beneath it did the same. The woman stopped moving and Sam finally looked around as something white-hot flashed by the corner of his vision.
Fellows had a rifle propped on the conference room table, using it for as much cover as it was worth as he pumped shot after shot at the armored troops clustered near the door, firing back at him. The table was on fire in places, charred and smoking nearly everywhere else, but Fellows seemed more or less in one piece.
Off in the corner to Sam’s right, Te
lia Proctor was breaking a man’s neck with her bare hands, and there were already two others down within arm’s reach of her, unmoving and presumably dead. As he watched, a pulse round impacted her in the left leg and she stumbled backwards, her fatigue pants charring away over her thigh, revealing bare metal. She yanked the rifle off of the man she’d killed, the straps snapping off of his harness at her tug, and ducked to one knee, returning fire.
Pris…where the hell is Pris?
Then he saw her, off to the side of the table, covering Minister Gage’s body with her own, her teeth clenched as if she were waiting for the round with her name on it. Plasma blasts were striking the wall just behind her, coming way too close as the remaining Guardians sprayed and prayed, panicked at the opposition they hadn’t expected. He had to do something.
Sam groped around the neck and shoulder of the trooper he’d…killed? Incapacitated? He didn’t want to know. He found one of the holsters which had been hanging off her shoulder and ripped the pistol out of it, hoping to Gaia the thing didn’t have an ID chip like Resolution weapons. If it did, he was going to look pretty damn stupid, though at least not for long, since he’d be dead.
He knew where the safety was, at least; Telia had showed him the basics of how the gun worked up on the station, but he’d never had the chance to fire it and never bothered to ask about built-in security features. He raised it to shoulder level, aiming through the pop-up electronic sight, and squeezed the trigger. The gun kicked in his hand and he nearly dropped it in surprise; Resolution laser weapons had no recoil and he’d nearly forgotten this was basically an electromagnetic slug shooter, even if the slug was turned into a plasma.
The first round splashed against the wall near the door, succeeding only in drawing some of the attention from the troops there. Some were already out the door, and he was deathly afraid they might shut it and lock all of them in the room with no way out, but they seemed more interested in finding a place to shoot from behind cover. One of the…four? Five?...left swiveled the emitter end of his pulse rifle toward him and Sam imagined he could see the heat radiating off its cooling jacket.