The Mammoth Book of SF Wars

by Ian Whates

  The pod’s systems were in sleep mode; careful use of a hand-held neutron density scanner confirmed that apart from a !Cha tank it contained nothing out of the ordinary. If Dr Smith and Useless Beauty had retrieved something from the brown dwarf, either it had been lost with their ship, or it was hidden inside the !Cha’s impervious casing.

  Carver didn’t attempt to contact the !Cha. He knew that his only chance of escape lay in a narrow window of opportunity during the final part of the return journey; until then, he wanted to keep his plans to himself. He fixed telltales inside the cargo bay in case the !Cha decided to try to break out, locked it up, climbed back inside the lifesystem and sent a report to Mr Kanza, and let the couch put him to sleep.

  Carver was supposed to remain in hypersleep until rendezvous with Mr Kanza’s scow, but he’d managed to reprogram the couch while prepping the tug. It woke him twelve hours early, four million kilometres out from Sheffield.

  The !Cha’s tank was still inside the escape pod, the pod was still sealed in the cargo bay, and the tug was exactly on course, falling ass-backwards towards the gas giant. In a little over two hours it would skim though the outer atmosphere in a fuel-saving aerobraking manoeuvre; meanwhile, the bulk of the planet lay between it and the Ganesh Five facility and Mr Kanza’s scow.

  Carver had less than an hour before Mr Kanza regained radio contact with the tug. While the tug’s triumvirate of AIs threatened dire punishments Mr Kanza had not trusted them to carry out, Carver climbed into his pressure suit, blew open the locked hatch using its explosive bolts, hauled himself to the cargo bay, and took just under fifteen minutes to rig a bypass and crank it open and slide inside.

  He’d dropped a tab of military-grade amphetamine (it had cost him fifty days pocket money), but he was still weak from the after-effects of hypersleep, dopey, chilled to the bone. It took all his concentration to plug into the external port of the escape pod, scroll down the menu that lit up inside his visor, and hit the command that would open the hatch.

  Nothing happened.

  Carver knew then that the !Cha was awake; it must have locked the hatch from the inside. He was crouched on top of the escape pod in the wash of the gas giant’s corpse light with nowhere else to go. Blowing the hatch had compromised the tug’s integrity; if it ploughed into Sheffield’s upper atmosphere it would break up. And in less than thirty minutes, it would re-establish contact with Mr Kanza’s scow. Mr Kanza would have to alter the tug’s course to save it, and then he would torture Carver until Carver’s air supply ran out. So Carver did the only thing he could do: he opened all the com channels and started talking. He told the !Cha who he was, told it about Mr Kanza and Lieutenant Rider, explained why he needed its help. He talked for ten minutes straight, and then a flat mechanical voice said, “Tell me exactly what you plan to do.”

  Relief washed clean through Carver, but he knew that he was not saved yet. With the feeling that he was tiptoeing over very thin ice, he said, “I plan to keep us both out of Mr Kanza’s clutches. I’d like to surrender to the Navy, but Mr Kanza partnered up with an officer in the garrison here, so our only chance is to escape through one of the wormholes.”

  “But you do not have command of the tug.”

  “I don’t need it.”

  Another pause. Then the flat voice said, “You have my interest.”

  Carver explained that the escape pod’s motor was small but fully fuelled, that with tug’s delta vee and a little extra assist it should be able to get them where they needed to go.

  “I hope you understand that I’m not going to give you the flight plan. You’ll have to trust me.”

  “You are afraid that I killed Dr Smith. You are afraid that I will kill you if I know the details of your plan.”

  “It crossed my mind, but you’re a better bet than my owner.”

  “If I wanted you dead, I would not need to do it myself. Your owner will do that for me.”

  Carver wondered if that was an attempt at humour. “He’ll kill both of us.”

  “He will not kill me if he believes that I have something he wants.”

  “If you do have something, he’ll kill you and take it. And if you don’t, he’ll kill you anyway.”

  Carver sweated out another pause. Then, with a grinding vibration he felt through his pressure suit, the hatch of the escape pod opened.

  Carver powered up the pod’s systems, moved it out of the cargo bay and adjusted its trim with a few puffs of the attitude jets, then fired up its motor. Ten minutes later, the tiny star of the dock facility dawned beyond the crescent and rings of the gas giant. The comm beeped. Mr Kanza said, “That won’t do you any good, you son of a whore.”

  “Watch and learn,” Carver said.

  “Listen to me carefully. If you don’t do exactly as I say, your brother is a dead man.”

  “My brother was killed in action, along with everyone else on his ship.”

  Carver had control of the escape pod and was out of range of the shock stick hidden on the tug: he could say whatever he liked to Mr Kanza. It was a good feeling. When Mr Kanza started to rage at him, Carver told him that he was going to have to find some other way of covering his debts, and cut him off.

  Far behind the pod, the tug lit its motor; no doubt Mr Kanza was flying it by wire, hoping either to bring it close enough to use the shock stick on Carver, or ram him.

  Carver told Useless Beauty what was happening, asked it if the thing it had found at the brown dwarf could be used as a weapon. “And don’t tell me that you didn’t find anything: there’s no longer a neutrino source in that strange storm. You fished out some kind of Elder Culture artefact, and it did a number on your ship.”

  “One of the Elder Cultures may have had something to do with it,” Useless Beauty said, “but it was not an artefact.”

  The squat black cylinder of its tank was jammed into the space between the two acceleration couches, three pairs of limbs folded up in a way that reminded Carver of a praying mantis. He tried to picture what was inside, a cross between a squid and a starfish swimming in oily, ammonia-rich water, the tough, nerve-rich tubules that ordinarily connected it to puppet juveniles plugged into the systems of its casing. It was even harder to picture what it was thinking, but Carver was pretty sure that his survival was at the bottom of its list of priorities.

  He said, “If it wasn’t an artefact, a machine or whatever, what was it?”

  “A mathematical singularity from a universe where the laws and constants of nature are very different from ours. A little like the software of your computers, but alive, self-aware, and imbued with a strong survival instinct. Perhaps an Elder Culture brought it through a kind of wormhole between its universe and ours. Perhaps it is a traveller unable to find its way home. In any event, it was trapped within the brown dwarf, and created the storm by epitaxy – using its own form as a template to make something approximating the conditions of its home, just as my tank contains a small portion of the ocean where my species evolved. Dr Smith and I were able to capture it, but it broke free after we brought it aboard our ship. At once, it began to consume the structure of the ship. Dr Smith went outside and successfully cut it away, but by then the fusion motor had been badly damaged, and it began to overheat. When Dr Smith attempted to repair it, the cooling system exploded and ruptured her suit. She died before she could get back inside, and I was forced to use the escape pod. I got away only a few minutes before the ship was destroyed.”

  “What about the thing you found? Can we use it?”

  “I was unable to retrieve it. Since the neutrino flux is no longer detectable, I must assume that it was unable to return to the brown dwarf. In which case, without a sufficient concentration of matter to weave a suitable habitat around itself,’ Useless Beauty said, ‘it must have evaporated long ago.”

  It was a good story, and Carver believed about half of it. He was pretty certain that the !Cha and Dr Smith had captured something – Elder Culture artefact, weird mathematics, whatever
– and that it had begun to destroy or transform their ship. It would explain why the composition of the thread Carver had found wrapped around Dr Smith’s arm didn’t match anything in the library of the ship’s lab, but Carver was pretty sure that Dr Smith hadn’t died in some kind of accident. It was more likely that Useless Beauty had murdered her because it wanted to keep what they’d found to itself and that prize was hidden somewhere inside its tank. But because he needed the !Cha’s help, and because it could quite easily kill him if it had a mind to – the casing of its tank was tougher than diamond, and its limbs were equipped with all kinds of gnarly tools; trying to fight it would be like going head to head with a battle drone – he didn’t give voice to his doubts, said that it was a damn shame about losing Dr Smith and the ship; he hoped to bring it better luck.

  Useless Beauty did not reply, and its silence stretched as the escape pod hurtled towards the Sheffield’s ring system. Carver sipped sweetened apple pulp, watched the tug grow closer, watched the scow change course, half a million kilometres ahead, watched his own track on the navigational plot. He wasn’t a pilot, but he knew his maths, and his plan depended on nothing more complicated than ordinary Newtonian mechanics, a straightforward balance between gravity and distance and time and delta vee.

  That’s what he tried to tell himself, anyhow.

  The rings filled the sky ahead, dozens of pale, parallel arcs hundreds of kilometres across, separated by gaps of varying widths. At T minus ten seconds, Carver handed control to the pod’s AI. It lit the pod’s motor at exactly T0. Two seconds later, the comm beeped: another message from Mr Kanza.

  Carver ignored it.

  The tug was changing course too, but Carver was almost on the ring system now, falling towards a particular gap he’d chosen with the help of the escape pod’s navigational system. He watched it with all of his concentration – he was finding it hard to believe in Newtonian mechanics now his life depended on it.

  But there it was, at the edge of one of the arcs of ice and dust: a tiny grain flashing in raw sunlight, a shepherd moon. In less than a minute, it resolved into a pebble, a boulder, a pitted siding of dirty ice. As it flashed past, the pod’s AI lit the motor again. The brief blip of acceleration and the momentum the pod had stolen from the moon made a small change in its delta vee; as it swung around the gas giant, the difference between the trajectory of the pod and the tug widened perceptibly.

  The tug didn’t have enough fuel to catch up with the pod now, but beyond Sheffield, Mr Kanza’s scow was changing course, and a few minutes later a Navy cutter shot away from the dock facility, and the comm channels were suddenly alive with chatter: the salvage company’s gigs and tugs; a couple of ships in transit between the wormholes; the Navy garrison, ordering both Mr Kanza and Carver White to stand to and await interception.

  Carver couldn’t obey even if he wanted to. Less than a quarter of the pod’s fuel remained and it was travelling very fast now, boosted by the sling-shot through Sheffield’s steep gravity well. With Mr Kanza’s scow and the Navy cutter in pursuit, it hurtled towards one of the wormhole throats. Carver had no doubt that the scow would follow him through, but he believed he had enough of an edge to make it to where he wanted to go, especially now that the Navy was involved. Someone in the garrison must have discovered Rider Jackson’s deal with Mr Kanza, and that meant the cutter would be more likely to try to stop Mr Kanza’s scow first.

  The wormhole throat was a round dark mirror just over a kilometre across, twinkling with photons emitted by asymmetrical pair decay, framed by a chunky ring that housed the braid of strange matter that kept the throat open, all this embedded in the flat end of a chunk of rock that had been sculpted to a smooth cone by the nameless Elder Culture that had built the wormhole network a couple of million years ago. The pod hit it dead centre, the radio chatter cut off, light flared and the pod emerged halfway around the galaxy, above a planet shrouded in dense white clouds, shining pitilessly bright in the glare of a giant F5 star.

  The planet, Texas IX, had a hot, dense, runaway greenhouse atmosphere – even Useless Beauty’s tank could not have survived long in the searing storms that scoured its surface – but it also had a single moon that had been planoformed by Boxbuilders. That was where Carver wanted to go. He took back control of the pod and reconfigured it, extending wide braking surfaces of tough polycarbon, and lit the motor. It was a risky manoeuvre – if the angle of attack was too shallow the pod would skip away into deep space with no hope of return, and if it was too steep the pod would burn up – but aerobraking was the only way he could shed enough velocity.

  Like a match scratching a tiny flare across a wall of white marble, the pod cut a chord above Texas IX’s cloud-tops. Carver was buffeted by vibration and pinned to the couch by deceleration that peaked at eight gees. He screamed into the vast shuddering noise; screamed with exhilaration and fear. Useless Beauty maintained its unsettling silence. Then the flames that filled the forward cameras died back and the pod rose above the planet’s nightside.

  The stars came out, all at once.

  Useless Beauty’s affectless voice said, “That was interesting.”

  “We aren’t down yet,” Carver said. He was grinning like a fool. He believed that the worst was over.

  The escape pod fell away from Texas IX, heading out towards its moon. It was almost there when Mr Kanza’s scow overtook it.

  Soon after it had formed, while its core had been still molten, something big had smashed into Texas IX’s solitary moon. It had excavated a wide, deep basin in one side of the moon, and seismic waves travelling through the crust and core had focused on the area antipodal to the impact, jostling and lifting the surface, breaking crater rims and intercrater areas into a vast maze of hills and valleys, opening vents that flooded crater floors with fresh lava. That was where the escape pod came down, a thousand kilometres from the moon’s only settlement, a hundred or so hardscrabble ranches strung along the shore of a shallow, hypersaline sea.

  The scow, shooting past at a relative velocity of twenty klicks per second, had cooked the pod with a microwave burst, killing the pod’s AI and crippling most of its control systems. Although the pod’s aerobraking surfaces gave Carver a little leeway as it ploughed through the moon’s thin atmosphere, it smashed down hard and skidded a long way across a lava plain; despite the web holding Carver to the couch and the impact foam that flooded the pod’s interior, he was knocked unconscious.

  When he came around a few minutes later, the pod was canted at a steep angle, the hatch was open, and Useless Beauty was gone. Carver was bruised over most of his body and his nose was tender and bleeding, possibly broken, but he was not badly hurt. He clawed his way through dissolving strands of impact foam and clambered out of the hatch, discovered that the pod lay at the end of a long furrow, its skin scarred, scraped and discoloured, and radiating an intense heat he could feel through his pressure suit. Big patches of spindly desert vegetation burned briskly on either side, lofting long reefs of smoke into the white sky.

  Useless Beauty’s tank stood on top of a ridge of overturned dirt, its black cylinder balanced on four many-jointed legs, two more limbs raised as if in prayer towards the sky. Carver was surprised and grateful to see it; he’d thought that the !Cha had taken the opportunity to make a run for it.

  “This is only a brief respite,” Useless Beauty said, as Carver clambered up the ridge. “Your owner’s ship has swung far beyond this moon, but it is braking hard. It will soon be back.”

  “Then we can’t stay here,” Carver said. We have to find a place to hide out until someone from the settlement comes to investigate.”

  The tank’s two upper limbs swung down, aiming clusters of tools and sensors straight at Carver, and Useless Beauty said, “This is the part of your plan that I do not understand. This moon is owned by the Collective. You are a runaway slave. Surely they will side with your master. And if they do not, they will claim you for themselves.”

  Here it was. Carver
took a breath and said, “Not if you claim me first.”

  After a short pause, Useless Beauty said, “So that is why you needed me.”

  “As we say in the Alliance, one good turn deserves another. I rescued you; now it’s your turn to rescue me.”

  Throwing himself on the mercy of the !Cha was the biggest risk of the whole enterprise. Carver had never felt so scared and alone as he did then, waiting out another of Useless Beauty’s silences while hot sunlight beat down through drifts of smoke, and Mr Kanza’s scow grew closer somewhere on the other side of the sky.

  At last, the !Cha said, “You are very persistent.”

  “Does that mean you’ll help me?”

  “I admit that I want to see what happens next.”

  Carver supposed that he would have to take that as a “yes”. Low hills shimmered in the middle distance. The ruins of a Boxbuilder city were scattered across their sere slopes like so many strings of beads. He pointed at the ruins and said, “As soon as I’ve gotten rid of this pressure suit, we start walking.”

  The !Cha’s four-legged cylinder moved with easy grace through the simmering desert. Carver, wearing only his suit liner and boots, a pouch of water slung over his shoulder, had to jog to keep up. The air was thin, and the fat sun beat down mercilessly, but he revelled in the feeling of the sun’s heat on his skin and dry wind in his hair, in the glare of the harsh landscape. Everything seemed infinitely precious, a chain of diamond-sharp moments. He had never before felt so alive as he did then, with death so close at his heels.

  As Carver and the !Cha climbed towards a ravine that snaked between interlocking ridges, a double sonic boom cracked across the sky. The scow had arrived. But Carver wasn’t ready to give up yet, and there were plenty of places to hide in the ruins. Chains of hollow cubes spun from polymer and rock dust climbed the slopes on either side, piled on top of each other, running along ridges, bridging narrow valleys: a formidable labyrinth with thousands of nooks and crannies that led deep into the hills, where he and Useless Beauty could hide out until sort of rescue party arrived from the colony. For a little while, he began to believe that his plan might work, but then he and the !Cha reached the end of a chain of cubes at the top of a ridge, and found Rider Jackson waiting for them.