Free Stories 2015

by Baen Books

  Again, Costa’s humorless grin. “Or perhaps they’re confident that they can polish us off in one quick pass. They don’t need to hold this `battlefield,’ so they don’t have much to gain by matching vectors for an extended fight. Besides, their velocity gives them an added defensive option. If things don’t go their way, they can be past us in a matter of minutes.”

  And that, thought Sergei, also decreases our chances of seeing their heavy, gives us less time to look at their mystery weapon. The Arat Kur would make excellent chess-players.

  “Forty seconds,” Korsov’s voice warned. The blue-white motes in the holotank began spreading out, moving more erratically. Sergei double-checked the range—just over ninety thousand kilometers—and activated the tiny remote sensors that had been seeded over the preceding weeks, scattered along the Arat Kur’s inevitable line of advance. Data started scrolling down his monitors.

  The Arat Kur handled the sudden increase of targets—forty-five suddenly-active sensor clusters—with apparent aplomb. Their interceptors split into two groups, the smaller one hanging back slightly.

  “Fifteen seconds.” Korsov’s voice was as hard and sharp as slate.

  One of Sergei’s sensors gave a brief reading of high energy UV—the classic fingerprint of an Arat Kur tactical laser—and then went off line. First blood.

  The Arat Kur’s lead formation opened up with a barrage of laser fire. Four human interceptors were destroyed outright; another was crippled. Then, Arat Kur missiles appeared in the holotank, red needles probing toward the blue motes. Harrison responded by assembling his remaining craft directly along the Arat Kur approach vector. All except for Korsov and Meri. Their motes merged—too proximal to be distinguished separately—and veered away from the main group.

  Meanwhile, Sergei’s sensor clusters were being systematically blasted into junk by the trailing group of Arat Kur interceptors. A moment later, the human interceptors reached their optimum range. Missiles and lasers shot toward the enemy fighters—just as the Arat Kur missiles reached their targets. Blue-white motes winked away in clusters. The combined mote of Meri and Korsov vectored back toward the more distant heavy.

  “Now launching,” announced Korsov’s voice over the intercom.

  Costa almost whispered the order. “Start your sensor run, Lieutenant Meri.”

  Sergei watched the two blue motes separate once again. One of them—Korsov’s—emitted a new, smaller mote: a large missile. If it held its current trajectory, it would pass behind the Arat Kur fighter screen, and well in front of the heavy: apparently a blind miss. The other blue-white speck—Meri—became a smear as the Estonian ignited his interceptor’s detachable solid-core boosters and underwent five gees of acceleration. The sensor cluster mounted on Meri’s interceptor went active and more data started scrolling in.

  Costa glanced briefly at Sergei. “Only ten seconds left in those boosters. Better get something fast.”

  Sergei felt a bead of sweat snake down his neck. “If the sensors read it, I will get it. How long until Korsov’s payload intersects the heavy’s approach vector?”

  “Ten seconds.”

  “Any counter-fire?”

  “Just starting.”

  Sergei frowned. “Korsov, deploy the missile’s payload now. We’ll have to risk it.”

  Korsov’s mutter was barely audible: “Deploying—”

  A second later, Korsov was dead, commingled with the debris that had been his interceptor. But not before the Muscovite had sent the remote command that deployed his missile’s payload.

  Only sixteen thousand kilometers in front of the Arat Kur heavy, Korsov’s outsized missile split apart, trailing a stream of micro sensors. Video images and spectral analyses now occupied a new row of Sergei’s screens.

  Harrison and Matthewson made it through the enemy interceptor screen just as Meri’s visual sensors picked out the Arat Kur heavy. Sergei had a brief impression of a growing blot of starless space—and then the link with the Estonian’s craft was lost. The mote representing Meri’s interceptor vanished from the holotank.

  Costa’s voice was tense. “Got anything?”

  Sergei frowned: “Nothing from Meri, but Harrison has established a targeting lock on the heavy.”

  “Damn right I have,” Harrison confirmed with a satisfied growl. “And now it’s time to give those bastards a—”

  He was cut off by a squeal of static. Then nothing, not even the faint pulse of an active commo link. Sergei checked the holotank; Harrison’s mote was gone, but none of the Arat Kur interceptors had fired. Sergei’s eyes flicked over to his microsensors, watching for any new data that might indicate what had destroyed Harrison’s craft.

  Whatever it was, Matthewson must have seen it. The New Zealander’s voice was low and awe-filled. “Jesus Christ, what was—?”

  A second ominous squeal of static ended the transmission, just as Sergei’s microsensors revealed what had occurred in the instant that Harrison had gone off-line. There had been a sudden surge of neutrinos from the alien warship, followed by a powerful gravitic disturbance, almost as though the Arat Kur were about to engage their shift drive. And then, a beam of X-rays pencilled out from along the centerline of the heavy’s mass. Sergei nodded to himself as he passed the news on to Costa: “X-ray laser.”

  Costa grunted acknowledgement. “Any guess how they’re generating the beam?”

  “None.”

  Costa began aiming the station’s 20-gigawatt laser. “Better send whatever data you have now.”

  Sergei queued the recorded sensor data into a continuous loop and activated the laser link to Tycho 2, then to Mare Crisium, and then to Titan, Himalia, Mars, Ceres—

  The station shook; one of the Arat Kur missiles had hit. The lascom signal lock flickered and blanked. The computer attempted to correct for the station’s change in attitude, to reestablish the commo link.

  “Hull integrity compromised in Module Four,” the intercom warned. “Intruder ETA: two minutes.”

  Costa called Akikawa. “Finish up with that separation system, Kenji. We’re running out of time.”

  “Re-securing the access cover now, Captain.”

  “To hell with the cover. Just get back here.”

  Sergei watched the red motes draw closer, brushing the few remaining blue-white ones aside as they came—

  The world tilted and jumped backwards. Sergei slammed forward against the seat straps, upper teeth piercing his lower lip. He was vaguely aware of a distant crash and metallic groan, and wasn’t sure if he had blinked or the lights had gone out for an instant. A sharp pain bloomed in his temples, dimmed to a dull ache. He knew he was surprised, but he didn’t feel surprised. He didn’t really feel much of anything.

  Except that there was something warm running down his chin. He lifted a wobbly hand to dab at it, stared at the red stain on his glove: blood. From his lip.

  There was another crash, this time of metal slamming together rather than tearing apart. The noise had been very close to his ear, and had possibly damaged his hearing, because sounds seemed dull now, muffled—

  “SERGEI?”

  Costa’s voice—blasting out of the helmet communicator—jolted Sergei halfway out of his post-concussive shock. Pieces of reality began reassembling themselves. The station had been hit. And he was still alive. But dazed. Someone—must have been Costa—had taken the precaution of slamming his helmet shut, momentarily deafening him. Sergei opened his mouth, tried to start an inquiry, gave up; verbalization was still a daunting challenge.

  Costa helped him out. “This time, the X-ray laser went after us. More range than we guessed. Took out the Command Module and smeared the lascom array.” As the American returned his attention to aiming the station’s 20 gigawatt laser, Sergei forced his eyes to focus and then slewed them around to stare at the sensor readouts.

  Several of the screens were lit with gray glowing fuzz; a number of the microsensors had been destroyed. But most of them were still functioning, i
ncluding a number of video relays which offered clear views of the Arat Kur battlewagon.

  The heavy was appropriately named. The mass-scans indicated that the alien warship weighed in at over two hundred twenty-five thousand tonnes. A flat, aerodynamically-optimized oval, the enemy’s non-modular hull broadened out at the rear, flared upwards and outwards at the sides. Its spine was slightly raised, cresting into a sizable hillock at the stern. Sergei checked his active and passive sensors, studied the wavelength results, tracked back along the trajectory of predominant radiance, found that the neutrinos and gravitic anomalies he’d noted earlier had a single point source: they were all coming from the hillock at the heavy’s stern. Sergei nodded: the stern. Pieces of a theory began swirling together, the attractive force of a budding hypothesis giving them order, direction, purpose—

  Costa muttered a terse, triumphant curse: the first Arat Kur fighter to come within range of the station’s laser had been promptly ripped to pieces. Then two more in quick succession. At about the same time, there was a soft ker-thunk from the module behind them; Akikawa returning, probably. But still some distance away.

  Costa was shifting his aim away from the enemy fighters, which were now giving the crippled station a wide berth, and toward the heavy. It would soon be in range.

  But not soon enough, Sergei realized: the Arat Kur warship was yawing slightly, re-aligning itself to face the station dead-on.

  Although everything did not happen at once, Sergei couldn’t process the events separately. His microsensors indicated a sudden upswing in neutrinos and another gravitic disturbance. Then, X-rays were streaming in at a multigigawatt level. Sergei shifted his attention to Hephaestus’ external monitors—just in time to see the 20-gigawatt laser shear away like a scrap of aluminum foil. The module it was mounted on buckled and burst, sending spasms throughout the station.

  Over the rumbling shocks, Sergei heard a faint scraping noise in the module behind. He turned, saw Akikawa towing himself slowly along the wall, his left arm tucked awkwardly against his side. Costa saw him too, tried radioing; no luck. The American reset his communicator, prepared to try Akikawa again—and froze. Sergei followed his gaze back into the adjoining module.

  Behind Akikawa, the module’s corridor was warping. First it shifted to the right, and then bent, trying to twist around its own axis. The angles where wall met floor were distorting, which told Sergei that they had very little time left: each hit had imparted substantial inertia to the station, and each of those inertial vectors were in conflict. Even though it was no longer spinning, Hephaestus station was beginning to tear itself apart.

  Sergei watched the neutrino and gravitic readings climb again, and, mildly surprised at the lack of fear in his voice, he announced, “It’s over for us.”

  Costa was silent for a moment, still staring at Akikawa. Then he turned back to his console; “Not for all of us.” Costa flipped back the safety cover for the module separator system and his fist hit the firing button.

  A shudder went through the Auxiliary Command module. Akikawa, less than ten meters from the intermodule coupler, looked up suddenly. Then the module door slammed shut and the separator charges went off, blowing the Auxiliary Command Module away from Hephaestus station—and Kenji Akikawa.

  The rumble of the blast was still playing itself out when the Arat Kur’s final shot hit the curved spine of Hephaestus. The doomed station broke into a ruin of fragments and half-intact modules, all cartwheeling madly away from the point of impact. Sergei turned to Costa, was about to speak, but saw that the American’s eyes were closed tightly.

  Then the shock waves hit.

  * * *

  “We’ll need another two point four seconds of burn to correct the pitch.”

  “One-half thrust?”

  “Affirmative,” Sergei answered.

  Costa entered the instructions into the program that governed the attitude control thrusters and waited. After a few moments, they both felt a faint tug. Sergei watched the simple gyroscope angle back toward alignment. Closer, closer—

  The tug stopped. The gyroscope swayed once and settled, centered. Sergei leaned back, released a long sigh. Stabilized at last.

  They had endured the post-blast tumble for several hours. As Costa had pointed out, their module’s resemblance to the rest of the spinning junk was probably the only reason that the Arat Kur hadn’t finished them off. As they waited, Sergei had watched the enemy craft sweep “down” across the face of Jupiter, the interceptors and their ROV wingmen retroboosting at two point eight gees constant until they matched vectors with their mothership. As they crossed the plane of Jupiter’s magnetic equator and bore through the very heart of the radiation belts, the smaller red motes merged with the red blob that signified the heavy: the enemy interceptors had returned to their berths.

  Costa guessed that as the Arat Kur moved further into the belts, the aliens’ sensors would become increasingly impaired, would lose the ability to discern minor variations in movement or energy. Accordingly, Costa and Sergei had begun to correct the Auxiliary Command Module’s tumble. It took almost three hours of occasional one- and two-second boosts to stabilize the module in all three axes. Now they were ready to add the final touch: a four rpm roll, which would produce about zero point one five gees of "pseudogravity."

  When Sergei heard the rotational rate, he frowned: “Four rpm is rather high. It will take some getting used to.”

  Costa almost smiled. “You going somewhere in a hurry?”

  Sergei shrugged, watched as Costa brought the thrusters on line slowly: there was a barely perceptible sideways tug as their module eased into a lazy roll. “So, John, which gets us first: anoxia or radiation?”

  “Cheery, aren’t you, Sergei?”

  “A Russian trait. Seriously, I would like to know.”

  Costa sighed. “Air in the module will last about two days. Our suits give us—maybe—one more day. That assumes that we cut our oxygen mixture back to minimum levels.”

  “What about the radiation?”

  “We’re okay as long as we stay in the flux tube. The EM repulsor grids on the module are still functional. But without the big station-keeping fusion thrusters, we’re going to fall behind the flux tube shortly after we start running out of air. So even if we had more oxygen, the radiation would finish the job a day or two later. Of course, all that assumes that we’re not rescued first.”

  “Rescued? Who is going to rescue us?”

  Costa eased the thrusters back. “Units from Ganymede, maybe. They’ve got some EM-shielded ships there, the ones that were used to assemble Hephaestus. If the Arat Kur aren’t patrolling, those ships might risk a rescue attempt.”

  “Why should they try? No one knows that we remain alive.”

  “Not yet. But once the Arat Kur tuck behind Jupiter, we can squeak off a few tight-beam radio distress signals.” He undid his straps, rose into the pseudogravity, tottered to the left. “Watch it when you try standing. You can feel the rpms. And we’d better shut down most of our electronics, just in case any other Arat Kur show up for a look-see.”

  Sergei nodded, reached out to cut power to the relays that were still in touch with his last three microsensors—and stopped, hand motionless as his eyes grazed across the mass-scan readout of the Arat Kur heavy. The battlewagon was lighter, even after her nine remaining interceptors and ROVs had been taken on board.

  “John, take a look at this.” Sergei felt the American sway closer, lean over his shoulder. A moment of silence . . .

  Then: “Jesus Christ, Sergei, are your sensors okay?”

  “Systems are green; diagnostics check out fine. That damn heavy has shed several hundred tonnes of mass.”

  “Could it have dumped fuel?”

  “No. Sensors would have indicated it.”

  “Well, where the hell did the mass go?”

  Good question; where could all that mass go? It hadn’t been dumped, and it hadn’t been carried off into the oblivion of shif
t-space by a pseudosingularity drive. So what could have become of the mass? Or, to rephrase the question, what could the mass have become . . .?

  Sergei blinked as the answer arrived like a conceptual freight train: E=MC2. The Arat Kur hadn’t dumped the mass; they had simply turned it into X-rays. They had burned up several hundred tons of their fuel mix in order to power their weapon. And that meant that the weapon drew its energy directly from the ship’s main powerplant.

  As Sergei blurted out his revelations, Costa leaned back and frowned. “Sergei, even if the Arat Kur could fuse that much deuterium in a few minutes, or hours, how would they be able to store that kind of power?”

  “By using a pseudosingularity as a capacitor. As they generate the power, they sink it into a pseudosingularity. Then when they’ve got enough power built up, they allow their little incipient black hole to unimplode, but at a controlled rate.”

  “Sergei, the magnitude of the field effect needed to control that process would make the engagement of our biggest Wasserman drive look like a gravitic hiccup.”

  “Exactly. That’s the fundamental scientific breakthrough that makes their X-ray laser possible. Consider: even the microscopic, incipient pseudosingularities of the Wasserman Drive are beyond our ability to maintain for more than a fraction of a second. But the Arat Kur have learned how to create a more powerful containment system. With it, they not only create pseudosingularities ten times stronger than ours, they can actually use the field-effect to store the energy for several minutes, at least. They may even be able to release the energy through a containment aperture, which would explain the precision of the beam. That’s also why we saw neutrino bursts and gravitic distortions each time they were preparing to fire. And why they’ve adopted such an aft-heavy ship architecture: to accommodate the increased engineering subsystems.”

  Costa cocked his head, inviting extrapolation. Sergei obliged: “Both the drives and the fusion plant are probably outsized and heavily shielded, so they require extra room. That explains the pronounced hillock at the stern and why it is the point-source of all the neutrinos and gravitic anomalies.”