Crisis

by David Drake

  “I am not required to give you more than my name, rank, and serial number.”

  ”Don’t be afraid. I have no intention of torturing you.” Only of leaning hard into your weariness. ”Wouldn’t you like refreshment and conversation?” I can play the good cop, too. “Here we are.”

  We seated ourselves in the bleak little room, on opposite sides of my desk, staring at each other across the computer terminal. The boat throbbed and murmured around us. Now and then a shout penetrated the door. Olson brought coffee and sandwiches. The aroma was like a benediction. “We have stronger stimulants,” I offered.

  Godolphin shook his head. “No, thank you.”

  “Why not? You’ll feel much better.”

  The dulled voice sharpened. “I do not know what else may be in the tablet.”

  Anger tore the smoothness off me. “We have no psycho drugs aboard. I told you, the Fleet abides by civilized canons. Is that too hard for the Syndicate to understand?”

  A flush stained his pallor. “That was a gratuitous insult. It belies your claim.”

  Clearly, the soft approach would gain me nothing. Very well, go tough. Shake him in any way that comes to hand. “Frankly, you deserve worse. We thought the Khalia were monsters, and they turned out to be your cat’s paws.”

  It struck home, but he responded gamely, “We needed that first line of defense while we prepared ourselves. Shall your Alliance swallow us up? We have our own society. We will remain what our forebears were.”

  “Not if I can help it. Considering what that precious society is capable of doing.”

  “I tell you, the Khalia–”

  With more strength behind them, my words trampled his down. “I know what some of those campaign ribbons on you stand for. You’ve been in what your people call the New Sirius theater. It overlaps our sector thirty-seven. Need I say more?”

  He blinked, then squinted, as if puzzled.

  “Adzeta-37,” I pursued. “Or, in Fleet officialese, Advanced Star Base Zeta in the sector. One habitable planet, Verdea. Ten years ago now, though the business goes back twenty-five. Does that refresh your memory?”

  Again the gray head shook. “There is none in me. I do not know which of your bases thereabouts you refer to. Our designations are different. And my time in the region, three years past, was brief.”

  “Still, ranking high, you should have heard–No?” Deliberately dubious-sounding. “Maybe you didn’t.” I tossed off my coffee, wished it had held a stiff slug of brandy, but postponed ringing for more, “All right, I’ll give you the story.”

  I kept my gaze locked on his while I talked.

  “You must recall that twenty-five or more years ago the sector was peaceful, the Khalia and the war against them far off. Or so the Fleet believed. However, they’d struck from unexpected quarters before. A base out in that direction was a wise precaution. It wouldn’t cost much. Adzeta was a G-type sun, Verdea wonderfully Earth-like. That was the name for it, as nearly as humans can pronounce, in the language of the principal nation. For it had sapient natives, friendly, beautiful, creative. Their most advanced countries had gotten to the point of industry powered by fossil fuels, ingenious machinery, and yet not fouling their world much. They were delighted to cooperate with the Fleet, getting knowledge and technology in return for raw materials, labor, eventually supplies and equipment they produced themselves and sold to the humans. Naturally, we couldn’t allow immigration, it wasn’t our real estate, but Fleet personnel and their families made a small permanent settlement, made their homes there.

  “The project was still at an early stage when a Khalian squadron arrived. The Fleet hadn’t tried to keep the work secret, that would have been impossible, but it hadn’t expected attack in those remote parts. Remember, back then we knew little about the Khalia, most analysts thought they were more like pirates than imperialists, encounters were relatively infrequent and seldom large. This incident changed a number of opinions.

  “The Fleet had maintained a guard, just in case, which proved barely adequate to beat the raiders off. If they’d succeeded, they’d have blown us and our installations out of existence. As it was, the survivors of the guard must wait for reinforcements before they could scout the neighbor stars. On a planet of ten light-years off, they found the base from which the assault must have been staged. It had pretty clearly been set up for the purpose after we commenced on Verdea, though it was astonishingly well equipped. The Fleet commander felt constrained by prudence. He allowed only a quick examination before he had it nuked. Too bad; but at the time, how could he have known?

  “Afterward we kept a stronger force at Adzeta and patrolled the region. For the next fifteen years, nothing else untoward happened. On Verdea, I mean; elsewhere, you know, the war grew like an infection. The colony flourished. The natives began producing a surplus of matériel for the fighting fronts. They were dreaming great dreams. A new generation was growing up, trained in the new knowledge, looking outward into the universe. Our human enclave was happy too, also full of hopes for their lives after the war ended, as surely someday it must.

  “Until–”

  * * *

  Luck alone had reigned. A patrol craft chanced to go out of hyperdrive and examine ambient space, in purely routine fashion, at a moment and a place where detection was possible. A few hundred astronomical units farther away, the radio input would have been too feeble to identify against cosmic background and the hurrying light-spot would have gone unnoticed. As it was, the receivers found an anomaly. Since the assignment of the craft was to investigate anything unusual that she might come upon, lest the Khalia spring a new surprise, she drew near. After fifteen years of blessedly boring rounds, her crew was doubly eager.

  She had to use hyperdrive to approach, for the source was traveling near the speed of light. Though small, it rammed a tunnel through the interstellar medium; excited atoms left a wake of long-wave radiation, while X rays and visible photons blazed from the bow shock.

  It was headed for Adzeta. The passage would be close, as such events go, less than two hundred million kilometers. While this posed no obvious hazard, it should have considerable scientific interest–how might such a thing originate?–and in any event fortune had also decreed that the skipper be a cautious man. He abandoned his circuit and went straight back to Verdea to report. Headquarters sent a large ship, properly equipped, to investigate in detail.

  But our luck wasn’t good enough, thought Rear Admiral Simon Berling.

  Viewscreens in the primary control center, the bridge, surrounded him with stars. Adzeta still dominated them, but only as a point of brilliance in their midst, hard by the frosty shore of the galactic river. The dreadnought Celestia swung almost thirty billion kilometers distant, out in the comet cloud; and nothing of that was visible.

  Silence loomed. The breath in Berling’s nostrils, the blood beat in his head, were a tiny clamor beneath it. Slowly, as if his fingers had gone reluctant, he turned a knob on the scanner before him. The scene that it covered expanded.

  First he discerned the brightness, a mere spark. Some fifteen megaklicks away, it crawled from constellation to constellation while he watched. Magnification increased. Beyond a certain point, optics blurred the image, but he saw it through the haze of its shining as clearly as he cared to, an ovoid about sixty meters thick, glow-hot forward, iron-dark aft, where the remains of intricate tubes, frames, and cables still clung.

  Rest mass on the order of a million tons. His mind repeated the estimates his technical staff had given him. Present mass, due to velocity, more than three times as much.

  “Yes,” he said into the hush, “undoubtedly artificial. A weapon.”

  The image crept off the screen. He hadn’t set the scanner to track. Instead, his look traveled the opposite way. The red glint that was Bitch brought it to a halt.

  “Launched from there,” his throat went on. “Where else?”

  Memory flew a half score light-years to the dwarf sun and a plan
et that circled it. In younger days, with lower rank, he had visited yonder world several times, checking up. Nothing greeted him and his mates but lifelessness, thin winds whining across rock and sand, craters gouged by meteorites and three new ones that were human work. Memory spiraled back through time, to the day when the Fleet ships first arrived, found the vacated Khalian base, and destroyed it. For a minute hellflower radiances had overwhelmed the sullen sunlight. ... Our men were wiser than they knew, nicknaming that star. If only we’d gone through the place thoroughly before we loosed our missiles. Then maybe, maybe–

  Too late.

  Berling turned from the screen, a big man, grizzled face furrowed, but with an ursine strength in him yet. “And no doubt, either, who did the job,” he finished. “After the Khalia were repulsed, the remnants of them went back to Bitch. They knew they couldn’t hold it, but they’d have a spell there, unmolested, till our reinforcements arrived and we could go after them. So they built this thing and set it on its course.”

  Captain Matthew McCIellan, his executive officer, stood beside him. The man’s lean frame stiffened, fists knotted at sides. Anguish spoke: “How, sir? How could they?”

  “Quite an engineering feat,” Berling said. His technies had newly briefed him on their findings and ideas. “Put a reactor on an asteroid that converts most of it to energy and thrust mass. Have sensors and control systems inside the body, protected from radiation. They do course corrections in the first years of flight, while acceleration is low. It increases, naturally, as mass is shed, and gets fairly high at the end. The best guess at a mean value is about one-tenth g. That implies some ten years under boost. At the end, when the reaction drive has used up everything it can, what’s left is on trajectory with a speed just under c. It takes another five years to complete the crossing.” He sighed. “A fantastic weapon. A one-shot affair, to be sure. After it struck, the Fleet would soon deduce what had happened, and could never again be caught by this particular trick. It must have been the inspiration of some Khalian genius: and maybe another Weasel became the chief who got the job done. I wonder if they’re alive now, either of them, enjoying the thought of their revenge at last.”

  McClellan shook his head, violently, like an animal beset by venomous insects. “Sir. I don’t believe any Khalian could. They don’t have that kind of brains. This would be cutting-edge technology for us. We’d need to assemble all kinds of specialized workers and apparatus. Would a squadron planning a raid carry that along?”

  “I wouldn’t have expected so myself,” Berling answered. Bleakly: “Nevertheless, it moves.”

  McClellan unclenched his fists and raised the hands, a fending gesture, a final protest. “Sir, nobody could aim a missile that exactly–across ten light-years!”

  “They did,” Berling rumbled. “Navigation even more astounding than the flight itself; but possible, yes, possible. You’d have to know this region very well, true, the exact, proper motions of all your local reference stars, variations in gas and dust density, everything. But given that, your onboard computers could fine-tune the vectors under acceleration, till by the time your weapon was falling free–” His gullet seized up on him. He could only add, “Evidently the Khalia were hereabouts, exploring, surveying, unsuspected by us, for a long while before we came. That doesn’t seem like them, either, but–” The terror surged forth. “But we’ve got the fact here staring at us. We’ve carried out our microfine measurements, we’ve run our computations, and we know. In a little over twenty-four hours, that thing will hit Verdea.”

  White serenity, the snowpeak of Holy Mountain, seems to float in a heaven alive with wings and song. Below, forest crowns ripple, golden-green leaves, shadowy deeps, asough under a wind that they make fragrant. A spring bubbles up in a dell, its water sparkling and chuckling off as a rivulet that tastes of cold and cleanness. A beast whose many-tined horns rake high aloft comes to drink. He does not fear nor disturb the pair who sit moveless among the flowers, a native and a human. They have become such friends, those two, that the first of them is guiding the second toward understanding of the Triple Way whereby the spirit may momentarily become one with beauty.

  “Where?” croaked McClellan.

  Berling shrugged. “Someplace in the northern hemisphere, that being the direction of Bitch. We can’t determine it exactly. No matter. We’re certain of an impact, which’ll be equivalent to collision with a large asteroid. The kind of catastrophe that ends a geological era. Tsunamis, quakes, volcanoes, fires, ash, storms, clouds, unbroken worldwide winter for years on end. Last time on Earth, it did in the dinosaurs and, a majority of other life-forms.” He spoke flatly because he was afraid that if he didn’t, he would scream.

  “The Verdeans–”

  “They may or may not survive as a species. Nearly all are bound to die, but maybe not quite everyone. Any that don’t, though, will be starving savages. No agriculture, no civilization. And so, no support for our base. Its buildings and machines ought to last, unless the strike is nearby. But we’ll have to evacuate. I don’t suppose we’ll ever come back. Conditions will be too hard, too expensive to cope with, for it to be worthwhile.”

  “Christ! In one more day.”

  “That’s how fast the missile is traveling. On the heels of its own light, lurid but weak, as small as the mass is. They cannot see it from the target world until minutes before it is upon them.”

  Night, perhaps. Violet overhead, few stars, for the full moon is up, Ysatha Bay bridged and besparked with silver. The luminance washes the plumage of the Verdeans, turns its daytime azure to a mysterious opalescence, fills their great eyes, where they walk by twos and threes along the shore or in the village lanes. Some humans are among them, also savoring peace. A flute twitters low. Phosphorescent lichenoids growing on shingles outline the gracefulness of roofs. Softened by distance, the windows of homes in the Fleet community shine from their hilltop, by now a part of this landscape and beloved.

  A sudden spark in the sky.

  “Global defenses–” McClellan almost pleaded.

  “You know as well as I do,” Berling told him, “nothing we’ve got will stop so much momentum. Or you should know. Only recall the parameters.”

  “But, sir, this is a capital ship here. Firepower to wipe civilization off a planet by itself, if it can get through. That thing hasn’t any screens or guns. Can’t we vaporize it?”

  “Everybody’s first thought. If we were properly prepared, as we surely will be in future, yes, I can think of several possibilities. But right now–we’d have to go hyperspatial, emerge far enough ahead of it that we’d have time to get out of the way, send a barrage–and the warheads wouldn’t go off. At that speed, impact would derange the triggers before they could function. We might, with luck, manage a blast, close by. But then most of it would be wasted in space, directed charge or no, and the object would outrun nearly all the gas that was headed its way.” Berling scowled. “The technical section has considered quite a few ideas, to no avail. They’re still working on the problem. We can only hope they’ll come up with something practical.”

  “Before it’s too late.”

  “Stop whimpering!”

  McClellan swallowed. “S-sorry, sir. I have a family on Verdea.” And you’re a widower, your children grown and gone elsewhere.

  Berling softened slightly. “I know. Please understand, I’m on edge same as you. But our people’s chances look pretty good. Immediate direct effects won’t likely be too bad in their neighborhood, and the Fleet will take them off well before the ecology crumbles.”

  “We can pray for that, can’t we?”

  “If it makes you feel better. You might mention the natives.” Both men went mute.

  In the background a fusion powerplant and a semiautomated factory stand incongruously sleek amid high old houses and little shops where handicraft brings forth exquisiteness. In the park singing kites cast their melodies on the wind and a poet weaves gold wire into lines that will charm the eye as we
ll as the heart. Two mothers watch their young at play beneath a blossoming tree. “I think,” says Jane, “when they are grown, sharing like this, they will do things and dream things we can’t imagine.” Selana rests quiet awhile before she replies, in her own rippling language, “I think we will understand them. Have we not already begun it ourselves?”

  “Captain’s attention, please.” The intercom voice was jagged. “Technical report.”

  “Seal your circuit.” Berling stepped to the terminal and sat down. McClellan stayed on his feet.

  The nightscape of space burned above the face that appeared in the screen, Commander Picavea’s. “We ... have our evaluations for you, sir.”

  “Well?” Berling snapped, though the haggardness he confronted was easy to read. “Spit it out.”

  “Not a chance, sir.” Picavea ran tongue over lips that stayed just as dry. “None of our weapons can help. For a while the lasers seemed hopeful, but the math shows that they couldn’t pump in more energy, in the time we’d have available, than might partially melt the thing; and the fused material wouldn’t blow off, it’d cling and resolidify. Masses left in its path–all our boats, one after the next, wouldn’t suffice. It’d go through them like a ... a straw in a hurricane through a plank, scatter them in bits without losing enough velocity to miss Verdea. If we had time to bring out a really big mass, like an asteroid–But we don’t. Everything my team thought of–Does the captain want the full report?”

  “Never mind.” Berling’s tone had again gone hard and flat. “You and your computers know your business. What about the extreme tactic I suggested?”

  Picavea drew a breath, a gasp. “Yes, sir. That ought to work. If we can do it within–” He forced eyes down toward his watch. “Within about ninety minutes of this instant. But it requires ... our entire mass. Boats and everything. Plus a contact velocity of at least thirty kps.”

  “And absolutely precise aim,” Berling said. “Have you developed a flight plan?”