Lacuna: The Spectre of Oblivion (31 page)

Liao moved over. “Can you shut it down quickly enough to prevent that?”

Rowe paused in thought, then gave a brief nod. “Yeah, I reckon so.”

“Good,” said Kamal. “That system’s here in Operations, isn’t it?”

Rowe pushed back her chair, moving over to the navigation console to crouch beside it. Dao shifted his chair back, giving her room to work.

“Yeah. It has tactical maps of the jump point layouts and whatnot, so it’s classified, which means it can only be here.”

A metal sheet came loose with a dull thunk, revealing a plain red box about twenty centimetres cubed. “There it is,” said Rowe, “the tactical IFF computer.”

Liao leaned close, peering inquisitorially. “Okay, so, how do we disable it?”

Rowe casually leaned over and pried open the lid, exposing a complex mess of circuitry. “Pretty simple,” she said, reaching over and grabbing a nearby fire extinguisher. With a woosh and cloud of spray, she emptied its contents into the small red box, creating a billowing, roiling white cloud of vapour that sprayed out over the surrounding deck plating.

“I’d say it’s right fucked now,” Rowe said.

Immediately, Liao heard a buzzing in her ear. “Captain,” said Hsin, “incoming transmissions. Multiple.”

She blinked in surprise. “Put them through.”

Suddenly her ears were filled with voices.

[“
Beijing
,
Beijing
, priority alert.”]

“
Tehran
actual to
Beijing
. You have a technical glitch in your systems. Disable your IFF immediately.”

Vrald’s sarcastic, angry voice cut over the Human speakers. [“What glory and fire in this woman, to feel such confidence in her abilities that she casts her missiles into the atmosphere—too stupid to realise she is being deceived!”]

She squeezed the talk key. “This is Commander Liao. We’ve just experienced a serious technical glitch. It seems as though Ben has been feeding us false targeting information through the IFF computers and played games with our radios.”

“Confirm that,” came James’s exasperated voice. “We all saw it. You’re the last ship to come around.”

Rowe’s whining cut over the chatter. “Are they
serious
? We’re the
last
? God
damnit
…”

Liao ignored her. “Situation report.”

“Ben’s ship is fleeing, Commander. It appears he’s using the chaos to withdraw, and he’s doing it damn quickly, too. The
Giralan
will be leaving effective weapons range momentarily.”

“Lock in a pursuit course,” Liao said, “and prepare rail guns. Load nukes in the chambers.”

The ship’s rail gun system could accept the nuclear missiles as projectiles, dramatically increasing their firepower despite flying slower than ferrous slugs, but it was, in Summer’s words, hilariously unsafe.

Jiang nodded. “Loading rail
gun
, Captain.”

Of course, Liao cursed. They had only one.

“Well, make do with what you have. Fire when ready.”

Ling called out from across Operations. “Captain, the
Giralan
has fired its plasma weapon!”

“At this range?” With a low roar and the groan of stressed metal, a shudder ran from the stem to the stern of the
Beijing
. Liao gripped her console tightly as alarms rang out throughout Operations. “Report!”

“We have a hull breach about the size of a beach ball in our underside. It hit a support structure, and that whole section collapsed internally; the heat’s caused a significant fire in that section.”

“Any casualties?”

Jiang tapped a few keys. “Early reports from that section indicate one confirmed dead, two unaccounted for.”

Rowe leaned forward over her console. “We’re haemorrhaging two kilogrammes of oxygen a second, and that section is near oxygen processing for the deck. If a fire that hot spreads to an oxygen reserve, we’ll lose half the deck.”

There was nothing she could do. The thought of two of her crewmen being unaccounted for tore at her since their location would be clear, but protocol was protocol. “Rowe, seal that section off and vent it. We need to contain that fire.”

Liao looked Rowe in the eye, and she could see her hesitation. Rowe knew, just as well as she did, that her order would kill the two missing crewmen.

“Confirmed, ma’am. Venting initiated.”

She stood up and, without looking at Rowe, moved back to her command console. “Keep up fire on Ben’s ship. We want him to engage us, not run until his jump drive starts working again. Let’s see if we can bring in the rest of the fleet and finish him.”

Jiang nodded. “The
Tehran
is within weapons range, Captain. They’re opening up on the
Giralan
.”

“Good. How about the rest of the fleet? Do they have a firing solution yet?”

“Negative. They’re too far away, but they’re giving chase.”

Liao stopped, glancing at her radar screen. The
Ju’khaali
was losing altitude, slowly dropping into the atmosphere. “Mister Dao,” she said, “set a course for the
Ju’khaali
. The
Giralan
has an armada stuck up its backside. Let’s go help our allies.”

Iraj shot her a curious gaze, but she ignored it.

“Aye aye, Captain. Course laid in.”

She felt the ship turn and head back towards the falling ship. “How far away is the Broadsword
Archangel
?” she asked. “Will they make it in time?”

“
Archangel
is twelve minutes out, Captain.”

Twelve minutes was too long. The ship would be well into the atmosphere at that point; already Liao could see the beginnings of flames licking at its underside.

“Looks like it’s going to have to be us, then.”

Kamal stepped up beside her. “Ma’am?”

“Mister Dao, bring the
Beijing
up to that ship. Prepare our marines for boarding. There might be survivors trapped aboard.”

Dao turned in his seat, facing her with a concerned look on his face. “You’re going to dock with a ship that’s falling into the atmosphere?”

“Correct, Mister Dao.”

Rowe gave a barking laugh. “Fucking hell yeah, Captain. Let’s do this.”

Liao glanced to Rowe. “Your approval fills me with guilt and anger, just so you know.”

“Course laid in, Captain. This is going to take some serious sailing.”

“Just make it happen.”

As Liao watched, the flames billowing from the
Ju’khaali
intensified then with a suddenly flare and pulse of energy. The ship’s wounds opened up like an overripe fruit; great cracks, glowing from the fires burning underneath the ship’s metal skin, spread over it like the tendrils of some monster, and then the hull broke into dozens of large pieces, each chunk flaring to life as it dragged through the atmosphere, little comets falling down towards Belthas.

Liao watched the flaming debris drift down to the planet’s surface, her heart in her throat.

“Captain,” said Rowe, “the jump drive inhibitor is wearing off. Our systems are returning to normal.”

Liao flicked to another camera, staring at Ben’s ship as it was pounded by an endless wave of fire.

“Then we’ve lost.”

*****

Bridge

The
Giralan

The ship was coming apart.

Ben’s mind worked through every conceivable angle, trying to logically find a solution. He couldn’t go up. He couldn’t go down. In all directions death waited for him.

The idea of surrender crossed his mind, but he knew that this was merely delaying his execution. Jurisdiction for his ‘crimes’ would be firmly in the hands of the Telvan, and their law was clear: constructs had no rights. He would be melted down for scrap, and that would be the end of him. Even if he could work out some deal to be tried by the humans, there would be no way the Human courts would show him leniency. His fate would be the same.

Death, everywhere he turned.

Then a flare of hope, like a match struck in darkness. The signal, whatever was blocking his jump drive and stopping it from functioning, suddenly abated. The jump drive’s systems were still scrambled, but the level of entropy was dropping by the second.

Their countermeasures were failing. His trump card was returning, slowly but surely.

His ship shedded debris with every impact, but his courage returned, now the equal to his anger. He focused all his will on the jump drive, applying his considerable mental strength to forcing it, by sheer will, to function. The imperfections would be smoothed out. The stolen Human device, coupled to the stolen Toralii device, would soon be functional again. His ship would retreat, he would lick his wounds, then he would come back. His dream of Zero would remain.

Ben knew that jump drive calculations had to be perfect. The math was intensely complicated and had to be extraordinarily precise, factoring in millions of contributing things, subtle and overt, to create the perfect expression of a location. He pushed past the corruption, past the jump drive’s pain, to reach this single goal. Perfection, like himself.

But Ben was not perfect.

A warning in the jump drive’s subsystems. The device was heating up, far hotter and far quicker than it should have. Ben, just as a Human might move a limb, flushed coolant into the reaction chamber, but for some reason, this seemed to make the situation worse. Cracks started appearing in the jump drive’s outer shell as it reached extraordinary temperatures, the metal expanding and contracting unevenly.

A surge of current, far stronger than he had ever felt, passed over the jump drive, fusing every circuit, overwhelming every electronic part of it, and reducing them to molten slag. Then the jump drive began melting through its restraints, burning a hole through the grav plating below it and dropping through, weirdly suspended in the in-between of floors, hovering in a red, hot hole.

Hotter and hotter it became, and soon the heat began to spill out into the rest of the
Giralan
, a miniature sun building within the core of the device.

Impossible. Ben’s logical mind could not comprehend what was happening to the device. It should not, could not, possess such power. There was only so much mass within it, a physical limit to the amount of energy it could possibly output, even assuming perfect mass-energy conversion.

Yet in the face of this almost heretical impossibility, there it was, hotter and hotter. He felt the ship begin to crack and buckle, the whole deck collapsing in on itself, the metal sheets of the ship’s floor warping and twisting around the sphere as though it had suddenly become intensely magnetic. The metal crumpled, pressing up against the sphere and completely burying it, and low groans echoed throughout his vessel as its superstructure became stressed, bending towards the sphere, the ship slowly turning inwards.

The Human reactionless drive and jump drives were linked in some way, as were the Toralii equivalents. Ben understood this. He knew the maths down to every detail, but there was a difference between knowing a thing and experiencing it for yourself. The terrible truth dawned on him like a hammer in his mind, a sudden realisation in his intricate quantum circuits of a singular, powerful truth.

He had erred. The jump drive was creating a singularity.

*****

Operations

TFR
Beijing

“The
Tehran
is now in effective weapons range of the
Giralan
,” said Ling. “They’ve opened fire with everything they’ve got.”

“Instruct the rest of the fleet to form up directly beside the
Tehran
. Continue to fire until there’s nothing left.” Liao folded her hands in front of her, watching her monitors as her allies’ missiles streaked towards the
Giralan
, little fireflies darting against the black ink of space, each striking the stem of the rusted, dead ship with a blinding explosion that baked its rotten hull and smashed away hunks of its flesh. The once sharp, pointed front was almost unrecognisable as a ship, now just a rounded stump, a severed limb.

“Captain,” came the call from Hsin’s console, “the
Giralan
is signalling us.”

“Are they, now?” Liao pursed her lips, tapping her fingers on her arm. “Funny how the arrogant, the invincible, come crawling on their knees to you when you’ve got them at your mercy.” She inhaled. “Put him through. I think we’ll want to hear this.”

Liao watched as the flames poured out from Ben’s ship, the vessel listing to one side as its propulsion systems gave up the ghost and Belthas IV’s gravity took its toll on the ship, slowly but inexorably pulling the vessel back into its atmosphere.

They did not relent, though, putting rail gun slug after rail gun slug, missile after missile, into the ship, blasting away at its hull piece by piece.