CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In Which Consequences Are Weighed and Chosen
The error-correction virus turned out to be merely the first salvo in a battle that would later be known as Eridge Kuipera. The damaging effects on travelers turned out to be incidental to the bug’s real purpose, which was to prop open a small vulnerability in the Nescog, paving the way for further attacks.
The second and third viruses rebounded from a growing thicket of Queendom defenses, but the fourth one—named by different authorities as Heater, Snaps, and Variant Delta—managed to pick its way through the obstacles and squeeze itself into some twenty percent of the Nescog’s scattered nodes. Its effects were rather more serious, being fifty percent lethal to traveling humans and, ominously, to their buffer images and unsecured backups as well.
As a precaution, citizens were advised to back themselves up at their earliest convenience, at any of the Queendom’s thousands of secure, off-network repositories. But with tens of billions of customers flooding in all at once, the Vaults were overwhelmed, and waiting lists quickly grew from weeks to months to well over a decade.
Meanwhile, Perdition continued downsystem on a course that could only be described as belligerent, for its exhaust of coherent gamma rays cut straight through the heart of the Queendom, sweeping dangerously close to the Saturnian system and in fact bathing several asteroid-belt settlements with sublethal but highly obnoxious radiation. Shipping lanes were disrupted; ring collapsiter segments flickered and flashed with secondary Cerenkov emissions.
And unless the starship’s course was altered, that beam would eventually—if briefly—play right across the Earth at much closer range, sickening tens of billions of people on the ground and, in all probability, vaporizing anyone in orbit, where the shelter of a planetary atmosphere was moot. Plant life would not be much affected, but the animal toll on the worst-hit continent of South America would be steep.
Too, the atmosphere itself would heat up in a hurricane-sized bullseye pattern—elevated by ten or twenty degrees Kelvin at the center—and the oceans beneath would warm slightly as well. This would be enough to play havoc with the weather for months, or perhaps longer. And then Perdition itself would ease into a high orbit, from which further assaults on the Earth would be trivially easy.
These Eridanians meant business.
So did the crew of Malu’i, though, and the queen to whom they answered. Tamra had never asked to rule this system, but she’d never shirked from the responsibility, either, and damn if she’d let some gang of colonial hooligans tear the place up, no matter how sad their story might be.
“If we’re forced to target your engines,” Tamra tried explaining to the invaders, “there may be considerable hazard to your passengers and crew. And even if you escape without injury, you’ll be moving through the Inner System at several hundred kps. You’ll fly right through, and back out to interstellar space before we can arrange to decelerate you. A rescue operation could then take weeks to mount, and years to bring you to the park orbit we’ve already assigned.”
“Prick yer five holes, y’all shite-bathed daughter of pigs,” replied the image of Doxar.
Given the length of the Queendom’s history and the size of its population, we can assume that fouler curses than this had been directed, from time to time, at Tamra-Tamatra Lutui. If so, however, no record of them has survived. Certainly, the immediate shock and indignation of the men and women on the bridge of Malu’i suggests that such outbursts were rare indeed.
Nevertheless, Tamra’s response was well measured. “Such language may be commonplace in the caverns of Aetna, Captain, but here in the cradle of humanity we’ve found that mutual respect yields better results. And surely you understand that with the security of our citizens and biospheres at risk, we’re quite prepared to fire on your vessel.”
“And we’m prepared to crash your Nescog, missus. Completely and utterly, I kid you not. Y’all think we can’t?”
“I suspect you can,” she conceded. “Or your agents here in the Queendom can. You’ll find them dangerous allies, I daresay, but they’ve certainly inconvenienced us before.”
“Then give. Because I will not.”
“No one surrenders so easily,” said Tamra coolly. “We’re not inflexible, Captain, but neither are we stupid, nor craven, nor weak. You will alter your course, and divert your drive beam away from populated areas. Then we’ll negotiate. From receipt of this message, you have five minutes to comply. Or rather, the true Captain Doxar does. You, his pale shadow, may fly back to him now with my regards.”
She blanked the hollie, ending any further communication with Doxar’s image. It could hang around if it wanted to, but the real Doxar’s reply would overwrite it in any case. Of course, Perdition and Malu’i were five light-minutes apart, so with round-trip signal time it would be ten minutes before anything actually came of this exchange.
“Well played, Majesty,” said Brett Brown.
“Thank you,” she acknowledged, mindful of his pride, his authority before the bridge crew, and indeed before the whole of the navy itself. “I’d like to discuss the matter with you later, if you have time.”
In fact, Brown had nothing but time, and while his strategic and diplomatic skills were not in question, this was unarguably a tactical situation. Still, appearances mattered, for he had been this vessel’s captain for nearly six hundred years, and his sudden replacement by Governor Li Weng—a comparative greenhorn—was bound to raise eyebrows, even if Tamra had promoted Brown to admiral in the process.
Fortunately, the past two weeks had proven Tamra right, for Xmary was a cunning fighter who’d steered Malu’i onto a vector that took maximum advantage of her maneuverability, and minimized the options of the faster but much heavier Perdition. Brown had fought in thousands of simulated engagements, and won the vast majority of them, but bloodlessly. He had never once witnessed an actual permanent death, whereas Xmary had seen hundreds, and personally caused at least twenty. More, if Fatalist ghouls were to be counted. So if it came to blows—and it might!—Tamra figured the safe money was on known killers.
“I’ll check my schedule,” Brown answered carefully. “Meanwhile, with your permission, I’ll recheck the status of fleet maneuvers.”
“Later,” Tamra suggested. “I prefer your attention to be more tightly focused.” Which was true, for she did value Brown’s tactical opinion. He was without doubt her second or perhaps third choice for the job. And anyway the “fleet” right now consisted of just Malu’i and a pair of lightly armed and largely inconsequential grappleships. There were other assets en route, but the closest of them was still six light-minutes downsystem of here. A really high-powered nasen beam could of course strike from that range, but not with precision. Not without absurdly high risk to the two hundred million human beings onboard Perdition. So for the moment, Malu’i was effectively alone in the conflict, and must act carefully indeed, or else wait two days for backup.
To Xmary the queen said, “Have you formulated a plan of attack, Captain?”
Xmary looked up from the console in her armrest. “Working on it, Majesty.” Then, to Brown’s Information officer, “Where’s that blueprint, Lieutenant? I need to know exactly how much antimatter is in there, and exactly where.”
“That’s difficult, ma’am. I can show you mass concentrations and annihilation signatures, but anything else is guesswork.”
“Deductive guesswork,” said Xmary. “But if you lack the necessary skills, then forward me your data.”
“Aye, Captain,” Information replied, suitably chastened. “My preliminary analysis is also appended.”
“Thank you. Ah. This is good. Your Highness, I propose a three-pronged attack. We can litter the space in front of Perdition with radar-bright proximity mines. We’ll dial them to minimum yield—they shouldn’t even penetrate the aft nav armor—but Doxar won’t know that. He’ll have to assume the worst, and that will tie up his propulsion. He’s flying backwards, right? Decelerating toward the planet he covets. He’ll be juking laterally, and holding the gamma-drive exhaust out in front of him to clear the path. And even so, he’s likely to suffer a near miss or two. Give him something to worry about.”
“Hmm,” Tamra said, considering that. “And meanwhile?”
“Meanwhile, we launch a salvo of ertially shielded grapplets, minus the warheads. At maximum acceleration, they should reach Perdition in under thirty minutes. Targeting the drive section, one hit could slice the magnetic choke clean off, with almost no collateral damage.”
A grapplet was a munition whose only propulsion was a gravity laser. It fell to the target under its own artificial pull, and if the grapplet was ertially shielded then it fell very quickly indeed. Malu’i only had five such weapons in its inventory, though, and could produce no more, for their shields were of collapsium and could not be faxed.
“Those are unstealthed munitions,” protested Admiral Brown. “Their release will give away our position.”
“Briefly,” Xmary conceded. “But we’ll maintain evasive maneuvers throughout the deployment, under full invisibility. The last time I did this I was inside the chromosphere of a star, where heat dissipation and signature management were nearly impossible. This’ll be a lot easier, for Perdition, on her pillar of flame, cannot hide from us at all.”
“Hmm.”
“The third prong is right out of the navy textbook: a nasen beam to the external engine assemblies. We have to be very careful not to destabilize the aye-ma’am plumbing, or the whole ship will go up. But again, it should be possible to take a scalpel to their magnetic choke, after which the failsafes will simply shut down the drive. Uncontrolled reactions should be limited to a few kilotons—hardly noticeable.”
This all sounded plausible enough to Tamra, but just to be safe she turned to Brown and said, “Opinion?”
“Standard doctrine calls for a breaching of the enemy’s hull, Majesty,” Brown replied at once. “However, given the refugee status of this opponent, Perdition’s crew is unlikely to be backed up on any sort of durable medium. Any deaths we inflict will therefore. be permanent. Under these assumptions, then, Captain Li Weng’s plan strikes me as both humane and effective.”
Xmary added, “We’d need to launch the first two waves now, Majesty. There isn’t time for debate—not unless you’re willing to erode our positional advantage.”
“Hmm.” If there was one thing in the universe Tamra hated, it was snap decisions. Still, sometimes they were necessary, and delaying them was itself a snap decision. “Very well. You may proceed, Captain.”
The appropriate orders were given, and within the minute both salvos were away.
“There is one additional danger,” Xmary noted. “There could be spies aboard Malu’i who are capable of revealing our position. This information is of limited value to Doxar, given ten minutes of round-trip signal lag”—She checked a reading, and then amended—“sorry, nine minutes’ lag. But it would give him a fighting chance. With all that aye-ma’am onboard, he’s got a lot of energy to throw around.”
Admiral Brown coughed out a chuckle at that. He was a good man, and a kindly one, but Tamra had the distinct impression he enjoyed catching out his replacement in a statement like that. “You hardly need worry, madam. This crew—this exact crew, save for yourself—has served together for centuries. We’re as much a family as we are a military unit. If there were criminals or Fatalists, turncoats or sympathizers among us, we should know it before now.”
“Of course, sir,” Xmary said.
More was said and done after that, but there was an air of busywork about it, until finally the ten-minute mark drew near.
“Do you suppose they’ll go quietly?” Tamra asked Brett Brown.
“They’re overmatched,” Brown said, as though that answered the question.
“They’re desperate,” Xmary countered. “They’re prepared to die, to kill, to cripple our networks. You can’t imagine the conditions they’re leaving behind.”
And as if in agreement, Doxar’s face reappeared in the hollie. “Y’all seem not to comprehend. Possibly we’m explained it badly. You’re thinking, ‘We can survive without Nescog.’ Maybe so. But we can break it and send the pieces tumbling. Very dangerous.”
“Just divert your course,” Tamra said to him, firmly and reasonably.
But was there time for that message to travel back and forth? She’d given a deadline, and could not now retract it. She killed the hollie and asked Xmary, “Time to nasen beam firing?”
“Ten minutes, Highness. That’s all the grace period they get.”
There was no point wishing it otherwise; the great-grandchildren of Sol had returned, broken and furious, blaming Tamra for all that had befallen them. And shouldn’t they? Who, if not she, had crafted their fate? Who else could possibly have changed it? And now here she was, preparing to punish them—perhaps to kill them—for her own failures.
Her anger vanished in a sudden wash of guilt. Her sense of duty remained as strong as ever, but her sense of what her duty was had come unglued. How did it come to this? What was she to do?
Of Brown and Li Weng she asked, “What are the odds we’ll blow up that ship?”
“Unknown,” Brown said without delay. “The number of variables—”
“Make an estimate,” Tamra instructed. Then wondered: did her people even know how?
“Thirty percent,” said the governor-captain, who was herself a refugee from the stars. A victim of Tamra’s failed policies, of imperfect data and shortsighted advisors. Of simple hubris.
Tamra nodded, absorbing that. “I see. And the chance that we’ll kill at least one person? Permanently, irrevocably? For no greater crime than the seeking of asylum?”
“That’s all but certain,” Xmary said quietly.
Tamra brooded, and would have wept if she didn’t still need her face for negotiating. She’d been fifteen when they made her Queen of All Things. An orphan, grieving for her drunken, foolish parents. Was it any wonder she’d made mistakes? How could she not? She grieved now—she ached for that lonely girl, on whom such burdens were heaped. What a bitter cup to drink from!
To Xmary she said, “Tell me if that ship changes course. If they twitch, if they move at all, I want to know about it. Immediately.”
“Aye, Majesty.”
“Time to nasen firing?”
“Six minutes.”
A while later: “Time?”
“Four minutes.”
Later still, Xmary piped up with a guarded, “Perdition is turning, Majesty.”
“Oh, thank God,” Tamra said, feeling suddenly clammy and limp. “Stand down all weapons and prepare to destealth.”
But Xmary remained rigid in her captain’s chair. “Ma’am, the maneuver could be defensive. It could be offensive. It could mean anything.”
“Yes, yes. Is their drive beam pointed through the heart of civilization?”
A pause, then, “No.”
“Does it impinge on any habitats?”
“No.”
“Then we’ve room to de-escalate this encounter. Stand down all weapons and prepare to escort Perdition into high orbit over Lune.”
“But Majesty,” Brown protested. “The economy—”
“Will muddle along somehow. Stand down all weapons, Xmary. That’s a decree.” Then: “Navywide transmission: Royal Override, all channels, all devices. Cease hostilities and escort Perdition to Lune.”
History records this command as Tamra’s greatest—and final—mistake, and perhaps that is so. But erring on the side of compassion had always been her way, and if nothing lasts forever, then at least a queen should die as she has lived.
Was there a spy onboard Malu’i? A saboteur? Was there perhaps some superweapon onboard Perdition, whose design and function has since been forgotten? In any case, these words were Tamra’s last, for Malu’i exploded three seconds thereafter, in a flash of light so brilliant it was visible to telescopes as far away as Eridani itself.
And then the Nescog fell.
The last official act of the Queendom of Sol was a simple radio message eleven hours later, from a King Bruno mad with grief. “The speed of light is hard upon us, my friends. God forgive us our sins. I cannot rule, with confidence, any region larger than the Earth and moon together. Full legal authority is hereby transferred to the regional governors for the duration of this emergency. Royal Override on all channels, all devices. Be brave, and uphold the ideals for which we’ve stood.”
And so they did, those citizens of the Queendom, for the bravely fought decades it took the shattered Nescog—nearly a trillion miniature black holes, equaling the mass of several Earths—to alight upon the planets of Sol, one by one, and crush them to oblivion.
Accipe signaculum doni Spiritus Sancti.
“A denouement gives flight to mere incident,” Wenders Rodenbeck wrote in the classic Past Pie Season, “freeing us at last from the rigid rail of time. Berries wither, leaves fall, and the mourning dove bows her head, with a song of distant spring beating frozen in her breast.”