Lacuna: The Sands of Karathi (11 page)

[“You waste your words, construct. Captain Liao has asked that I treat you as any member of her crew, and I shall, but in my mind you will always be just another machine.”]

With that, Saara gave Liao a curt nod and departed. Ben looked as though he might leap after the Toralii and tear her to pieces with his claws, but Liao sat in her chair and gestured for him to sit as well.

She was concerned by his behaviour, but she needed Saara and the construct to work together. Human history was full of examples of people working together who would otherwise be at each others’ throats. “Let it go, Ben.”

“But—”

“She has so many years of Telvan thinking behind her, opinions shaped from birth that are very hard to change. Humans may not know everything about the galaxy, but we know this–cultural attitudes have a way of sticking around for longer than they’re welcome. Saara means well, and I know her heart is strong and her moral compass well-aligned, but this is one area where she is wrong.”

Ben slowly returned his gaze to Liao, bobbing his head with a whir-click of his articulators. “I know, but that doesn’t make what she said any less hurtful, and now she gets to just walk away. That’s hardly fair.”

Liao felt for him, but she didn’t have a way of displaying it without compromising the emotionless wall she had to project as the ship’s captain.

She leaned forward. “Want to know something else Humans learned over the years?”

“Mmm?”

Despite herself, Liao felt a sad smile tug at the corners of her mouth and she folded her arms. “Life isn’t fair.”

Ben chuckled, a thin, raspy noise coming from the thin slit that functioned as his speaker. “I know that
much.”

“I understand you’re angry about being left on the planet, but I’ve recently had a loss, too. Before we arrived here, Captain James Grégoire, a Human man I—” she hesitated, “have strong feelings for, disappeared during a battle between the Toralii Alliance and humanity’s fleet. His ship collided with the Toralii who came to attack us and, in a great flash, both vessels disappeared.”

Her voice saddened. “Most believe him to be dead, but I hold out hope that he still breathes—somewhere.”

Ben reached out gently with a freshly painted claw, resting it on Liao’s knee. His British accent softened a little. “A collision between spaceships is pretty rough business, my friend.
Yep. Not good at all. Ships travel at such high speeds and just aren’t built to take that kind of punishment. Nor are the fleshy little meatbags inside. Still, if he’s gone, it would have been quick.”

That didn’t make Liao feel any better, but she forced herself to smile. “I suppose it would have.”

Ben nodded, his optics turning to look up at Liao. “Trust me, it’s better than ending up at Cenar. Brr. That place gives me chills.” The robot’s metal framework shuddered slightly, but Liao barely noticed it.

She fixed him with a curious stare.

“Cenar?”

“Yeah, Cenar. The giant prison fortress the Alliance throw their undesirables into, never to be heard from again. Cenar means
The Howling Wind,
and it’s basically this massive metal structure floating out in the void between solar systems–impossible to find without coordinates–and they defend it with all manner of vicious things: worldshatter devices, energy cannon batteries, mines, ships, fighters, you name it. The Toralii take their prisoners there, and they very rarely leave. Those that do
survive, well, let’s just say they don’t recall the place as being particularly pleasant. As in, a lot of torture happens there. A lot. Heh. That’s basically the point of it all. Terrible place.”

Liao reached out a hand, resting it on Ben’s claw. “You’re saying that if the Toralii ship
did
jump away, and James
did
survive the collision, then he’d be at this fortress?”

“He’s either there, or being transported there right now. For certain.”

“And you could tell me how to find it?”

Ben pondered, comically scratching the underside of his ‘chin’ with his other claw. “’Course I could! Everyone who’s had access to the Telvan networks knows where Cenar is, and they also know just how impossible it is to attack. It’s never been successfully assaulted, even though many species have tried. The Kel-Voran–those war-loving bastards–believe death in combat against overwhelming odds is the most
honourable way to die, and even they
avoid it because attacking Cenar is not combat. It’s just you presenting your arse as a target and letting the Toralii’s biggest and heaviest guns blast it to atoms. It’s
suicide
.”

Glancing up at Liao, Ben took in her expression, his optics widening. “Oh, no, no, no,” he moaned, shaking his head in dismay. “I don’t like the look of that smile.”

Captain Liao’s Office

TFR Beijing

Energy filled her, a force of hope so powerful and raw that she felt she could burst.

If James was alive, he'd be taken to Cenar. At the very least, they'd know where he was.Since the moment Ben had told her about the giant space fortress she had been filled with a wild surge of pure emotion that threatened to overwhelm her; the only way she could control it was to channel those energies into something productive, which turned out to be the rescue effort.

Drawings and diagrams were coaxed out of a somewhat reluctant Ben. Maps of every level of the massive structure, detailed schematics of every gun, every missile, every energy weapon for the whole defense network. The location of the station’s impound yard, where confiscated ships were taken and studied.

It was all in Ben’s digital brain—everything. All the information about the Toralii Alliance’s defenses, laid bare and presented to Fleet Intelligence as though it were Christmas.

Summer had mentioned that the Toralii didn’t appear to encrypt or obfuscate their computers and technology. The datastore they’d found in the
Seth’arak
’
s wreckage wasn’t encrypted or protected, the Forerunner–a kind of Toralii scout they’d captured months ago–was easily reprogrammable, and it seemed, they gave out their military secrets to constructs they left lying around in the desert.

They had asked Saara about it and she said the concept of data encryption was not entirely alien to her, but the Toralii believed in simplicity and interoperability over data protection. It was a tradeoff. Everything plugged into everything else and worked frequently, with no compatibility issues, and they would usually destroy sensitive information to prevent it falling into enemy hands. Since Ben’s datacore was too massive to destroy completely without high explosives, and nobody was coming looking for them, the
Giralan
survivors just assumed Ben would rust away in time.

Liao and Summer had privately asserted the opinion that it was arrogance
that kept the Toralii information unencrypted. Since they so rarely lost a battle, there were few who would challenge them, so there was no need to think about who might be picking through the bones of the wreckage of their ships.

From what the construct had told Liao, Cenar had been around for nearly two centuries in its current form, although it had undergone a major refit almost a hundred years ago. The station was constantly upgraded, constantly kept to the bleeding edge of technology. It was so heavily armed that, for at least several decades, no unauthorized ship had even approached it.

It wasn’t much, but Liao took some comfort in knowing that if they did attack Cenar, no matter what else they accomplished, that
record would be broken. But looking over the schematics Ben had provided, Liao doubted they could do any more than that.

The station was surrounded by gravity mines mixed in with high-yield nuclear warheads that tracked heavy ship hulls and automatically moved towards them, so even getting close to the minefield would be devastating. Because the jump drive required low gravity to function, the Toralii had positioned their gravity mines so there was only one jump location they could use. Their only other option was to jump to a nearby part of the void and travel via conventional engines, which would take almost a year. This solitary jump point was locked down harder than Liao had ever heard of. Every kind of weapon was pointed directly at that point, and there was a failsafe, too; a sphere of fusion bombs surrounding the jump point which, Ben informed her with chilling certainty, would utterly vaporize her ship if they were detonated.

It was an unwinnable mission. The moment the
Beijing
appeared in the jump point, the Toralii had any number of ways to destroy them. They would have to be invisible to radar, optics, thermals, and magnetic sensors. They’d need a lot more firepower so they could knock out the Toralii batteries in an alpha strike, then enough speed and armour to survive fighting to the station. Then they’d need to dispatch their Marines in the Broadsword gunships and give them enough cover to make sure they made it.
Then
they’d have to sit there with their asses hanging out until the Marines could search the entire station, find the
Tehran
’
s crew, and load back aboard their craft and get back to the
Beijing
.

They needed an invincible, fast-moving stealth ship with a huge amount of weapons, and they needed it immediately.

Jolting Liao out of her musings was a
rap-tap-tap
at the door of her office, as though a metal hand were knocking on the steel hatchway.

“Come in.”

The door was pushed open and Ben stepped into her office, his claws clacking together excitedly.

“Captain Liao! Wotcha, ’ey? Still working on your impossible plan to attack the fortress of horrible doom?”

Liao was amused, as always, by the AI’s comically overdone English accent.

“I’ll find a way,” she promised, gesturing to the stack of notes all around her, “even if it takes me the rest of my life. No fortress is unassailable, no defense complete. There’s a way to manage this. I know it.”

“Really? Well, if you’re that
dedicated to finding him, I’m sure you’ll find a way. Chin up.”

She gave a rueful smile. “It’d be much easier if we had a way to jump in somewhere other than right into their killbox. As it stands, though, I don’t know. There’s a reason nobody attacks this place.”

Ben nodded. “Oh, yeah. That’s the trick, isn’t it? I mean, look at those worldshatter devices. Just like the ones that devastated your home planet, except, well, except there are
eight
of them. And even one of the lesser ones, the ship-mounted ones, was able to almost completely disable the
Sydney
during the last battle.”

“I know.”

The AI bobbed his strange little metal ‘head.’ “It’s funny, you know. I mean, the voidwarp technology–I mean, uh, the jump drive–completely changed every civilization that discovered it, including your own. But it has this strange limitation. You can only jump when the region you’re leaving has barely any gravity at all.”

Liao rolled her shoulders, glancing down to the stack of paper in front of her. “Yes, well, it seems as though the Toralii are further along than we are. How the
Seth’arak
escaped, taking the
Tehran
with them, when they were surrounded by gravity mines is a mystery for the ages.”

“Gravity mines?” The little robot stared at Liao, its synthetic lenses opening and closing rapidly. “But I thought the
Tehran
jumped away from a Lagrange point.”

“It did, but we arranged a set of gravity mines nearby that would pulse waves of gravitational energy. We had hoped that would stop them from jumping out, but no such luck.” A
t least that’s what we hope happened.

Ben stared at her. “Fascinating! The same gravity mines you have stowed in Engineering Bay Two? The ones next to my datacore?”

“That’s correct, why?”

Ben mused, scratching his chin with his claw. “Well, that should
have done the trick. Maybe those crackpots on Velsharn have finally figured it out?”

“Velsharn?”

Ben bobbed his head. “A research facility deep in Telvan space, well out of the way of anything of any value or significance. They’re tasked with looking at a whole great big bunch
of technologies–new thrusters, advanced composite materials, weapons, and a side project to look into ways of jumping inside gravity fields. They were just starting their research when I was trapped on Karathi, so I have no idea how it turned out or if it even works. Some of those who founded that facility were the same research team who created the original voidwarp technology.” He winked at her. “In fact, I uploaded their original schematics to your people years ago.”

A way to jump inside gravity fields.
Although immediately intriguing, Liao tilted her head at that last bit. “Wait, what?”

Liao swore Ben’s artificial face was grinning at her. “The voidwarp technology, the reactionless drive. They’re actually Toralii technology, more or less. All these technologies I gave to the Americans who were manning the radio telescope, who passed them along to your governments. Of course, from what Rowe was telling me, the Australian Space Agency was working on something similar, so really I just provided the last few pieces which the Australians stole off the Chinese, who in turn shared them with the Iranians. Pieces which were then stolen by the Europeans and reverse engineered by the Chinese again, all with the ultimate result being that nobody knew who invented what. Oh, what a tangled web we weave.”

Liao stared at him. “So it seems,” she admitted. “I
did
think it odd that such advanced technology appeared out of nowhere. I just assumed it was highly classified. Secret research and all.”

Ben raised his claws helplessly. “Maybe that’s what everyone
on every side thought. I knew it would all go to pot anyway, giving such an undeveloped species–uhh, no offense–such advanced stuff.
It was a risk, but I wanted to be found, and I wasn’t picky about who found me. Whoever did the rescuing would need voidwarp technology, so…”

“So you helped out poor, little, stupid Humans.”