In Fury Born (ARC)
Page 64
The ship's electronic senses reached out, perceiving gravity and radiation and the endless sweep of space, and converted the input into sensory data she could grasp. She could "see" cosmic radiation and "taste" radio. The ship's senses were hers, keener and sharper than those of any shuttle she had ever ridden, and Tisiphone's own wonder lapped at her, as if, for the first time, she saw what the Fury might have seen at the peak of her powers.
They watched in a triple-play union—human, Fury, and computer—as their Fasset drive woke. The radiation-drinking invisibility of the drive's black hole blossomed before them, swallowing all input and creating a blind spot in their vision, and they fell towards it. But the generators moved with them, pushing the black hole ahead of them, and they fell more rapidly, sliding away from Soissons with ever-increasing speed. This close to the planet the drive could produce no more than a few dozen gravities of acceleration, but that was still more than a third of a kilometer per second per second, and their speed mounted quickly.
Chapter Forty-Five
"No, I don't know where she is," Sir Arthur Keita told the hospital security man on his com screen. "If I did, I wouldn't be calling you."
"But, Sir Arthur, there's no record of her even leaving her room, she's not on any of the security scanners, and none of the outside security people we've talked to so far saw a thing. So unless you can give me some idea where she might've—"
The door hissed open. Inspector Ben Belkassem strode into Keita's office, waving his left hand imperatively and drawing his right forefinger across his throat, and Keita cut the security man off without ceremony.
"May I assume, Sir Arthur, that Captain DeVries has decamped?" Despite his abrupt entry, the Justice man's voice was as courteous as ever, but a strange little bubble of delight lurked within it, and Keita frowned.
"I trust that's not common knowledge. If the local police hear we've lost a deranged drop commando we may start getting 'shoot on sight' orders."
"Somehow I don't think that's going to be a problem for Captain DeVries," Ben Belkassem murmured, and Keita snorted.
"If her augmentation's been reactivated somehow—and, judging by what happened to Corporal Feinstein, it has—it's a lot more likely to get one of their people killed. But why do you seem so cheerful, Inspector?"
"Cheerful? No, Sir Arthur, I just think it's too late for the local cops to worry about her. I suggest you screen Jefferson. They've had an, ah, incident over there."
Keita stared at the inspector, then paled and began punching buttons. A harried-looking Marine major answered his call on the fourth ring.
"Where's Colonel Tigh?" Keita snapped the instant the screen lit.
"I'm sorry, Sir, but I can't give out that information." The major sounded courteous but harassed and reached to cut the connection, then stopped with a puzzled expression as he saw Keita's raised hand and furious scowl.
"D'you know who I am, Major?"
The major took a second look, eyes widening a bit as the green uniform registered, but shook his head.
"I'm afraid it doesn't matter, Sir. We're in the midst of a Class One security alert, and—"
"Major, you listen to me closely. I am Sir Arthur Keita, Brigadier, Imperial Cadre, and one of my people may be involved in your alert."
The Wasp swallowed visibly at the name, and Ben Belkassem smiled. Sir Arthur hadn't even raised his voice, but the inspector had wondered what he sounded like when he decided to bite someone's head off.
"Now you get Colonel Tigh, Major," Keita continued in that same, flat voice, "and you do it now."
"Yessir!"
The screen blanked, then relit almost instantly with the face of Colonel Arturo Tigh. The colonel looked just as worried as the major, but he hid it better and managed to produce a tight smile.
"I'm always honored to hear from you, Sir Arthur, but I'm afraid—"
"I'm sorry to disturb you, Colonel, but I need to know what's happening out there."
"We don't know, Sir. We—Is this a secure channel?" Keita nodded, and the colonel shrugged. "We don't know what's going on. We had a major security breach two hours ago, and things have been going crazy ever since."
"Security breach?" Keita's eyes narrowed. "What kind of breach?"
"Somebody hijacked a forward recon skimmer—at least we assume it was hijacked, though we haven't been able to turn up a missing vehicle report on it yet—and crashed through Gate Twelve. The automatics gave it a transponder clearance, but then the gate sentries—"
The colonel paused with the expression of a man eating green persimmons.
"Sir Arthur, they say they never saw it. Every alert on the base went off when it crossed the sensor threshold, but ten different people, all of them good, reliable types, say they never saw a thing."
He paused again, as if awaiting Keita's snort of disbelief, but the brigadier only grunted and nodded for him to continue.
"Well, the inner sensor net started tracking immediately, and the duty officer scrambled a pair of sting ships while the ready skimmers went in pursuit, but that was one hell of a pilot. He never brought his own weapons on line, but we've got fires all over the western ring access route—all from misses from the pursuit force, as far as I can tell—and then the skimmer went straight up like a missile and the stingers nailed it with HVW."
"The pilot?" Keita demanded harshly, and the colonel shrugged.
"We assumed he was still aboard, but now I'm not so sure. I mean, no one saw him abandon the vehicle, so he ought to've been aboard, but then this other thing came up, and I just can't believe it's a coincidence."
"What other thing, Colonel?"
"Something's gone haywire with one of our ships, Sir. One of our ships, hell! We've got a brand new alpha-synth boosting for the outer system at max without clearance or orders."
"Who's on board?" Keita's strained face was suddenly white.
"That's just it," Tigh said almost desperately. "As far as we know, no one's on board. It wasn't even due to impress until ten hundred hours!"
"God!" Keita whispered. He wrenched his eyes away from the screen to stare at Ben Belkassem, and the inspector shrugged. The brigadier turned back to the colonel. "Have you tried to raise it?"
"Of course. We're trying right now, but we're getting damn-all back."
Keita closed his eyes in pain, then straightened his shoulders.
"Colonel," he said very quietly, "I'm afraid you're going to have to destroy that ship."
"Are you crazy?!" Tigh blurted, then swallowed. "Sir," he went on in a more controlled voice, "we're talking about an alpha-synth. That ship costs thirty billion credits. I can't—I mean, no one groundside can authorize—"
"I can," Keita grated, and the colonel's face froze as he realized just who, and what, he was speaking to.
"Sir, I'll still have to give the port admiral a reason."
"Very well. Tell him I have reason to believe his ship has been hijacked by Captain Alicia DeVries, Imperial Cadre, for purposes unknown."
"A cadrewoman?" Tigh stared at Keita. "I don't—Sir, I don't even know if that's possible! Was she checked out on cyber-synth?"
"No, and it doesn't matter. Captain DeVries has been hospitalized for observation since the Mathison's World Raid. She's demonstrated . . . unstable and delusionary behavior," Keita's hands clenched out of the screen pickup's field, as if his words cost him physical pain, but his voice held level, "and unknown but highly—I repeat, Colonel, highly—unusual and unpredictable capabilities no one can account for. We have evidence that she's already reactivated her own augmentation without hardware support and despite three levels of security lock-outs, not to mention her apparent ability to hijack the skimmer to which you referred. Given that, I believe it's entirely possible she's so
mehow penetrated your security and managed to steal that ship, and if she has—"
The brigadier paused and steeled himself.
"If she has, she must be considered deranged and highly dangerous."
"Dear God." Tigh was even whiter than Keita had been. "The only way she could even move it is through the alpha-synth. That means she must've made impression, and if she's crazy—!"
His voice had risen steadily as the awful possibility registered, and now he spun away from the screen and started shouting for the port admiral.
the AI remarked, and Alicia nodded tightly. The tick still trembled in her blood—she didn't dare waste time vomiting just now—and every excruciating second was an eternity. No one had seemed to notice for perhaps a minute, and the first attempt to do anything about it had been limited to efforts to access the ship's remotes.
Even if the AI hadn't been prepared to ignore them, they would have been fruitless. Tisiphone had wiped the telemetry programming early on in her struggle with the computer, but Groundside hadn't realized that. They'd gone on trying to access with ever increasing desperation for five full minutes, during which the alpha-synth's velocity had climbed to over a hundred KPS. Then all access attempts had stopped and silence had reigned for several minutes. By the time the first effort to raise Alicia by name came in, the alpha-synth was up to over two hundred KPS—and a visibly-shrinking Soissons lay over fifty thousand kilometers astern.
Alicia had listened to the com without response, perfectly willing to let them dither while she watched through her sensors, wrapped in fascination and a sort of manic delight, and she and her—allies? symbiotes? delusions?—perpetrated the greatest single-handed theft in the history of mankind. But the voices on the other end of the com link were changing as Groundside got itself together, and now a new, crisp speaker was on the line.
"Captain DeVries, this is Port Admiral Marat. I order you to decelerate and heave to immediately. If you refuse to comply, you will leave me no choice but to consider you a hostile vessel. Respond at once."
A mental finger guided Alicia's attention to the blue fireflies of a dozen cruisers' suddenly activated Fasset drives in Soissons's orbit and data on their capabilities slotted neatly into her brain. It was an incredible sensation, completely different from an assault shuttle's instrumentation.
she suggested in her most tactful mental tone, tracing their projected course through the ship's sensors. The AI wasn't even trying to avoid the orbital forts—it was headed straight towards them, directly across the system's ecliptic. The inner ring, the true core of Soisson's defenses, orbited the planet at three hundred thousand kilometers, right on the edge of Soissons's Powell limit. The far sparser ring of outer forts were placed halfway to the star's Powell limit, forty-two light-minutes from the primary—and SLAMs had a maximum effective range of thirty-seven light-minutes. At their projected rate of acceleration, they'd reach the outer works in two and a half hours, and both fortress rings could engage them the whole way. Even after they passed the outermost fort, it could hold them under fire for several hours. That was a lot of engagement time, and Alicia would vastly have preferred to boost perpendicular to Franconia's ecliptic and open the range as quickly as possible.
The pursuing cruisers had spread out to bring their batteries to bear past the blind spots created by their own Fasset drives, and the first fire spat after the fleeing alpha-synth. The percentage of hits should have been high at such absurdly low range, but the attackers were hopelessly outclassed. Nothing smaller than a battlecruiser mounted a cyber-synth, and even a cyber-synth AI would have
been out of its league against an alpha-synth. Alicia's other half could play evasion games a mere synth-link couldn't even imagine, far less emulate, and its battle screen was incomparably more powerful than anything else its size.
Its other defenses were on the same scale, and it deployed decoys while jammers hashed the cruisers' fire control sensors. Lasers and particle beams splattered all about them, but less than two percent scored hits, and the ship's screen shrugged them aside contemptuously.
Energy torpedoes followed the beams, packets of plasma scorching in at near light-speed, and the range was low enough the attackers could overload the normal parameters of their torpedoes' electro-magnetic "envelopes," more than doubling their nominal effect. Not even the AI had time to track weapons moving at that speed, but it could detect the peaking power emissions just before they launched, and unlike missiles, they were direct fire weapons, with no ability to home or evade. The alpha-synth's defenses were designed to handle such attacks from capital ships; cruisers simply didn't mount the generators for more than a very few launchers each, and stern-mounted autocannon spat out brief, precise bursts as each torpedo blossomed. It didn't take much of a solid object to rupture the skin of an energy torpedo traveling at ninety-eight percent of light-speed, and the alpha-synth's ever mounting velocity left the resultant explosions harmlessly astern.
Missiles were another story.
Every attempt to adapt the Hauptman effect to manned vessels had come up against two insurmountable difficulties: an active Hauptman coil poured out a torrent of radiation instantly fatal to all known forms of life, and unlike the Fasset drive, it played fair with Newton. Despite their prodigious rates of acceleration, Fasset drive ships were, in effect, in a perpetual state of free-fall "into" their black holes, and while artificial gravity could produce a comfortable sense of up and down aboard a normal starship, no counter-grav system yet had been able to cope with the thirty-thousand-plus gravities' acceleration of the Hauptman effect.