Here Be Dragons (12 page)

Elena’s wrist vibrated three times in quick succession, and she raised it to her eyes. Alejandra looked over, and spoke for the first time in thirty minutes.

“I should have known that I wouldn’t get you to myself today.”

“Just be glad that I didn’t check it during lunch,” Elena said.

She tapped the bracelet, and the holo projector sprang to life. Elena had to tilt her wrist so that she could see the image—if the projector wasn’t aimed directly at her eyes, the display was invisible. She studiously ignored the unread mountain of routine communications, and concentrated on the latest message from
Gabriel
.

20/09/2152 live fire exercise. Trajectory attached, HQ approved. Request permission to fire.

The image showed a single red line that shot from
Gabriel
and lanced through Overstar-12, an old military satellite that hovered near the end of its life, approved for destruction. Elena had chosen the target herself—if the round missed, it was guaranteed to disappear safely into oblivion. But
Gabriel
would not miss.

“Anything important?” Alejandra had stopped pretending to ignore her daughter’s bad manners.

“No,” Elena said. “Just a budget thing.”

“All that money you people throw around, and my company still can’t get a government contract.”

“When I’m Director, mama, the Agency will eat algae three meals a day. Would that make you happy?”

“Only if you buy it from me,” Alejandra said.

She began to wander along the outer edge of the bubble, and Elena trailed behind her. The two of them came to the opposite of side of the observation deck. Elena sat down and motioned for her mother to join her, and Alejandra sat down stiffly.

There was no easy way to do this, so Elena jumped right in and took her mother by the hand. Alejandra started, but did not pull back.

“Mama. I’m not going to command
Gabriel
.”

Alejandra nodded slightly. She had no more fight in her.

“I may not even get to take her on the trial cruise. And I will never get another chance after this. I’m not saying this to argue with you, it is just a matter of fact. There are things beneath the surface here that you do not see, because I cannot tell you about them. But I promise you that it will make sense one day soon.”

Alejandra nodded again.

“Me entiendo, nina.”

“I know you weren’t expecting me to come all this way to tell you something like that. But I thought that if I was going to disappoint you, I should at least have the courtesy to do it in person.”

Alejandra squeezed her daughter’s hand.

“You have never disappointed me. I know hard you’ve worked to put everything behind you. You don’t need a ship to prove yourself to me, or to Anne. We’ve both lost so much over the years, you and I, but I have always had my daughter. I just wanted you to have something that would make you as proud as I am of you.”

“And what if I lost her?”

“You made her,” her mother said. “She’ll always be yours.”

Elena smiled and squeezed back. Then she replied.

Permission granted.

The Agency had a protocol in place for the discovery of fissile material, and if she followed it a cleanup team would arrive within the day. They would collect the sample, wipe down the site, debrief the crew, and vanish. And that would be the end of it. Everyone knew that nuclear accidents happened occasionally, but no official reports had ever been filed, and no one ever spoke of it openly—the topic was as dangerous as the substance itself. The plutonium would just disappear, like a dream at sunrise.

There had been no one else aboard
Gabriel
that night, and only she and Arnaud had heard the alarm. Overstar-12 too was alone in its high orbit, far from the crowded equatorial regions, and
Gabriel
would not fire unless there were no ships within a hundred kilometers of the line of fire. Elena had made sure that the plutonium shell was the first on the rack.

“It’s over,” she said to no one in particular. Whoever had filled that steel ball with a nuclear pit would know exactly what she had done. She could only hope that they would burn with her.

Alejandra opened her mouth to say something, but Elena never learned what. The din of conversation crescendoed and drowned her mother out. A wave ran through the crowd as people hurried to their feet, pointing to the ceiling. High in the sky above them, an enormous slice of bright blue cut through the darkness and began to swell. The field of azure spreading in the sky was huge, nearly four times the size of a full moon, and its soft light fell upon a gray sea of upturned faces. The Earth had risen.

Elena felt her mother’s hand slide into her fingers. It was warm and soft, softer than her daughter’s hands had been in many years. Elena smiled and squeezed briefly and began to drop her mother’s hand. She found that she couldn’t, and instead it remained clasped tightly within her own.

She looked at her mother, but Alejandra did not look back. Instead she remained with her face skyward, towards the home she had not seen in over fifteen years. Even now, Alejandra Estrella couldn’t bear to look her countrymen in the eye. She would always be Alejandra Gonzales to them.

The crowd gasped again. A second star, as bright as the sun itself, had flourished above the Earth. As one they brought their hands to their eyes, but it was already over. The star had died, and left only blue seas and white clouds. The ball of plutonium-239 inside the shell had smashed itself flat against Overstar-12 and gone critical upon impact. Just as intended.

Elena squeezed her mother’s hand once more as they stood together in the earthlight, remembering what they had left behind.

Lost Souls

M
ore than a week had passed since the death of Pascal Arnaud, and the debt was still unpaid.
Gabriel
had now entered Jupiter’s moon system, the most distant of which was a rock about a mile across, orbiting at a distance of thirty million kilometers. Soon enough she would pass into Jupiter’s shadow, and still the outsiders were nowhere to be seen. The
Archangels
were built to strike quickly and quietly, and kill from the shadows. But there had been no reaction, no reinforcements. The outsiders had pulled back into the darkness, where she couldn’t find them, and she couldn’t kill what she couldn’t see.

“Minus fifteen minutes,” Vijay said from his seat at the watch station.

And now a new danger had found
Gabriel,
one that couldn’t be harmed by guns or missiles. The solar flare that had struck the Earth ten days before had reached Jupiter.

He brought the spectral image up on the holo, and in false color the waves of high energy particles bearing down on her looked like a gentle breeze. Elena watched the tide creep closer. In its own way, this was almost worse than the battle. At least then she could fight back.

“Hassoun, tell Chief Gupta to begin cooldown.”

Humans had feared the sun for longer than they had feared the outsiders. The massive solar explosion that had rocked the Earth one hundred years earlier had killed every satellite in orbit and every human in space, scorched the ozone layer, and wrecked most of the world’s power grids and computer networks. Billions had been left without electricity, and petabytes of data had been lost. The aurora borealis that evening was so powerful that midnight at the equator had been bright as an autumn evening. There had been twenty four hours of daylight, followed by a half century of darkness—the wars had begun the next morning.

In the hundred years since, there hadn’t been a solar flare a tithe of the size and power of the Storm. It was as if the sun had poured out all her wrath and had none left to spare. But every time a sunspot appeared on its surface, the Earth flinched.

“Minus ten.”

“Chief Gupta reports ready, Cap’n,” Hassoun said. “Cooldown on your mark.”

Without an atmosphere and magnetic field for protection, a solar flare could swamp a ship and disable it. There were two strategies for survival when caught in the open. The first, the most preferred, was to activate the avram and rely on it to shield the ship. But to leave the avram on for too long this close to Jupiter would throw
Gabriel
off course and force her to resort to firing thrusters to get back on track. And avramatic physics could backfire spectacularly inside the radiation surge, and cause the very disaster they had been meant to prevent—blind a ship’s
telescopes and squelch her radios, or even short out her power grid completely and leave her to drift.

The nearest rescue and salvage vessel was in the Asteroid Belt, and Elena wasn’t going to take that risk. She would lie ahull—turn off most of the electrical systems, leave just enough battery power to run the computers and the air processors, and wait out the storm.

“Minus five minutes,” Vijay said.

“Shut it down,” she said.

Gupta cut the fuel cells moments later, and the status indicators for the ship’s systems went from green to blue, just like they had at the border ten days before.
Gabriel
was running cold.

“Ten seconds.”

The flare and the field collided, and a shock wave detonated at the leading edge and spread to the poles. Even this far out there was more energy in the flare than in an entire day’s worth of sunshine, and the tide of radiation broke through and crashed against
Gabriel,
silently, invisibly
.
If Vijay hadn’t reported the impact, Elena would have never known that her ship had just been buried by a seething ocean of ionized gas hurled halfway across the solar system.

“The outer hull is charged,” Vijay said. “There is quite a bit of sensor interference. Radiation levels within safe limits.”

There was a downside to Elena’s strategy. Every time a charged particle struck an atom of lead in the innermost radiation shield, it emitted a burst of high energy gamma and X-rays that could poison the crew. The lead shield had been wrapped with an aluminum sheath and water jacket to catch the particles before they reach the lead, but it was physically impossible to stop all of them—and worse, the outsider missile had left a hole in
Gabriel’s
defenses.

“Dr. Golus will be busy for the next few days,” Elena said.

Nausea and vomiting would be epidemic. Every member of the crew would undergo a white cell count in the next forty eight hours, Rivkah would force feed them antibiotics for a week, and their stem cell therapy would have to be accelerated. Elena had factored all this in to her decision, and calculated that a day or two of discomfort—and a slightly abbreviated lifespan—was preferable to lying crippled and helpless in enemy territory.

“The flare has reached Jupiter,” Vijay said.

Solar wind washed over the planet. Within seconds
Gabriel
had been swept up into an enormous ion storm, with Jupiter at its eye. The trail of sulfur dioxide that Io left in its wake erupted, and firebolts danced between the planet and the moon, each one powerful enough to wreck her ship with the slightest touch. Magnetic whorls flooded the radio band and blinded the scopes. It would be almost for
impossible for
Gabriel
to detect another ship inside that gale until it spent its fury and died out.

Elena took some comfort in knowing that outsiders would not be able to find her anymore than she could find them. She could see nothing in the gale but Jupiter itself, enormous auroras blooming above its poles.

“Can you get me visual of the planet without straining our power requirements?”

“Realtime is not possible at this range, but I can give you frames.”

“On the holo.”

Elena had seen pictures of Jupiter from before the Storm. She had thought it strangely beautiful, a pearl wreathed in cloudy red and gold bands, flecked here and there with black and white spots like imperfections in a gemstone. And its southern hemisphere, just below the equator, had been marred by an enormous red bruise, which astronomers claimed had been a cyclone three times the size of the Earth.

But this place hadn’t looked like that for a long time. The Storm had left its mark on Earth, but on Jupiter it had never ended. It had raised a hell terrible enough to still be burning after a century. The atmosphere’s gentle bands had disappeared, and in their place was a whirling kaleidoscope of hydrogen hurricanes, as if the atmosphere had been stirred to a froth and left to boil.

For added effect Vijay enlarged the hologram beyond normal limits, so that its foaming surface seemed to touch their consoles, and Elena watched as lightning bolts long enough to straddle continents coursed beneath the clouds. She wondered how the outsiders could look up every day at that ball of rage in the sky, a hundred times larger than the Moon from Earth, and stay sane.

“Flash alert, warning red! Vampire inbound!”

Elena barely had enough time to register that the alert had been sounded by Hassoun and not Vijay before her eyes and mind were fixed to her own watch screen. There was a blaze of energy on a bearing almost directly ahead of
Gabriel
—bright enough to be the plume of a rocket missile. But without full sensor capability, she had no way to what it really was.

“Helm, steady as goes,” she said. “Watch, threat profile.”

“Flash alert!” She had never heard Hassoun shout before. “Weapons free!”

“Disregard that! Weapons hold.”

Elena reached out to her watch and helm screens with both hands, and with a few taps she locked Hassoun out of both stations.

“Cap’n—”

She turned to Hassoun.

“Mr. Masri, shut the fuck up or get the hell out. Vijay, where’s my profile?”

“Threat unconfirmed, warning yellow. Resolving now.”

New telescope exposures came in—the flare was already dimming. If it was a missile, it was throttling its rocket nozzle.

“Warning green, Captain.”

Vijay pursed his lips—he knew what was coming next.

“End alert status.” She struck her chair with the heel of her hand, hard enough to send a bolt of pain up her arm even in zero gravity. “Mr. Masri, what was that?”

“Captain, I had a positive reading.”

Elena threw the sensors record up on the holo. Now that it had multiple exposures to work with, the computer could triangulate the surge’s position. A bright, jagged bolt of plasma lanced across the holographic display, from Jupiter to a point within Io’s orbit—the moon itself was on the other side of the planet. The lightning bolt had been millions of kilometers distant, and almost as long.

“Does that look like a missile to you, Mr. Masri?” Elena asked.

“Captain.” He seemed to be searching for his words and finding none that he liked. “At that distance, the intensity, it looked like…I’m sorry, ma’am. I misidentified the reading.”

“Distance, three million kilometers. You think the outsiders are stupid enough to fire a missile at us today and hope to hit us tomorrow?”

“I’m sorry, Captain,” Hassoun said. She could see from his face that he was fighting the compulsion to close his eyes.

“What if we’d lit the fuel cells and Chief Nishtha had opened fire? Or if Officer Yukovych had tried to evade? I can guarantee you that you would have seen your missile then.”

“Yes, Captain.”

Elena sighed and ran her fingers through her hair. A private message arrived at her station.

Ease up.

She looked at Vijay, but he didn’t look back at her.

“Mr. Masri, please tell Officer Lamentov to report to the bridge.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“She’ll serve as your relief for the rest of the shift.”

Hassoun swallowed, then bent over his desk.

“Aye, Captain.”

“And while you remain on the bridge, you are to leave the scopes alone. I think the officer of the watch can handle his job for the next few minutes without your help.”

“Yes, Captain.”

Elena turned away so that he could let out a breath without her seeing.

Vladlena Lamentov arrived from forward weapons control in only a minute. Elena could see that she was carefully avoiding looking Hassoun in the face as she relieved him. He left without a word.

The changeover was scheduled for a few hours later, and one by one the second shift entered the bridge and took over for their counterparts. Elena turned her chair over to Lamentov, who by happenstance had drawn this week’s rotation at the flight station—Ikenna, in addition to his alert station in forward control, was the permanent third shift flight officer.

Elena exited into the interlock compartment, Vijay behind her, and made no effort to go anywhere once the bridge doors were closed.

“Go ahead.”

Vijay tapped his bracelet a few times, and each of the other four hatches closed and dogged themselves.

“Was that necessary, Captain?”

“Don’t tell me you agree with his call.”

“No, and dressing him down was appropriate,” Vijay said. “But breaking him is not.”

“You haven’t seen me break someone.”

“And I do not wish to. But please understand, Captain. Hassoun blames himself for Arnaud.”

“Well,” Elena said, “he’s not the only one.”

“He wants to make up for it.”

“He’s not going to do that by pretending to be officer of the watch. And certainly not by doing it badly.”

“Yes, but there is a little something to be said for being wrong for the right reason.”

“Very little.”

“But not nothing.”

Elena sighed and made her way to the topside hatch.

“Tell Mr. Masri that I expect him to report at 0800 tomorrow to the communications desk.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“Put some emphasis on that last part.”

Vijay smiled.

“Excellent. Shall I accompany my commanding officer to her stateroom?”

“I was about to do an inspection, if you’d like to come.”

Vijay checked his bracelet.

“Oh, look at the time. Must be off.”

He pushed off the wall towards the bottom hatch, but turned back when he got there.

“And Captain? Whenever a public lashing is in order, respectfully, delegate it to your executive officer. That is why you have one.”

“Si.”

“My thanks, Captain.”

Elena knew he was right. Respect was one thing, fear was another. Hassoun didn’t need to think that he had enemies onboard
Gabriel
to go along with the ones outside
.

She began her inspection, pulling off access plates and vent covers at random to check the wiring and filters. Marco Montessori never minded the captain poking around his work—on the contrary, he enjoyed having someone for which to show off. Elena floated from compartment to compartment, squinting into the jungle of machinery that lined the throat of every corridor. Machines were easy. If there was something wrong with one, she could find it and fix it. And if it couldn’t be fixed, she didn’t have to think twice about replacing it.

Elena concentrated so closely on her work that she never heard the door to the medical office. They bumped into another. Though Rivkah was the larger woman, Elena sent her flying. She reached out and grabbed the doctor by the arm to keep her from bouncing off the bulkheads. Rivkah gripped her wrist, and Elena reeled her in—the doctor was upside down and must have been wondering what the hell had happened. It was hard to tell who was more embarrassed.

“I am so sorry, Doctor,” Elena said. “I didn’t see you there.”

“Quite alright, quite alright,” Rivkah said. Her eyeglasses were askew on their chain, and she brushed them out of her face before she grabbed the doorjamb with one hand and flipped herself upright. It was a maneuver that took surprising strength and agility. “I had been hoping to run into you, anyway,” she said.

Elena wasn’t sure if that was a joke, and so stayed prudently quiet.

“Captain.”