The Killing of Worlds (19 page)

And it would all be meaningless to Zai unless he saw his love again.

He wanted his ship back in fighting shape.

“Captain?” Hobbes interrupted his thoughts.

He turned to look at the woman. It was good to have her back on the bridge, as good as being able to move his artificial limbs again.

“Report.”

“We’re seeing more acceleration flares from the battlecruiser.”

Zai shook his head. The Rix were at it again. Two hours ago, they had launched two long-range drones after the
Lynx
. They were remotes that could make six hundred gees, and they had closed with the frigate in a little over an hour. Gunner Wilson had powered up the dorsal lasers and destroyed them at thirty thousand klicks. As defenseless as the frigate might be, it couldn’t be threatened by a pair of scout drones. The two craft had managed to sweep the
Lynx
with active sensors, however.

The tenacity of the Rix was surprising. Her mission had failed, yet the battlecruiser’s captain was still in pursuit, still sending valuable drones to harass and probe the
Lynx
. True, the frigate had humiliated the larger warship, but it was not like the Rix to seek revenge.

Zai wondered if there were something he was missing. Some unresolved aspect of this engagement.

“Hobbes.”

“Captain?”

“What sort of active sensors are we running?”

For a few seconds, Zai watched his executive officer’s eyes drift in the middle distance of the ship’s infostructure.

“We’re focusing all the transluminals on the battlecruiser, sir. And we’re still operating close-in-defense sensors at battle level. There are also a few scout drones running point, sweeping for meteoroids basically.”

“Is that all?”

“Captain?” Hobbes couldn’t hide her disbelief. “Three-quarters of our sensor personnel are in hypersleep, sir. They went on alert six hours before the rest of the crew.”

“When can we wake a few up, Hobbes?”

“Right now, if you want, sir.”

“I mean, when can we reasonably wake them up? I don’t want to psych anyone.”

“We’re running hypersleep cycles of two hours, sir. I can get you a crew of four in forty minutes without interrupting any dreams.”

“Very good. When you have a full crew, refocus some transluminals onto the Rix approach path.”

“Their original path into the system, sir?” *:.

“Yes. I just want to make sure that we haven’t missed anything.”

Hobbes blinked, clearing her secondary vision. Her expression sharpened, eyes widening.

“Missed another Rix ship, Captain? I certainly hope we haven’t.”

“I do as well, Hobbes. I do as well.”

Zai turned back to the airscreen. He wondered if he were simply getting in the way of his ship’s healing process: waking up what few of the exhausted crew were able to rest, rattling his ExO’s nerves. Perhaps he should put on a hypersleep helmet himself. The airscreen blur had gotten worse over the last hours, and Zai didn’t think it was just the
Lynx
‘s processor shortage. It was his brain getting fuzzy, and it took considerable fatigue to blur secondary sight.

Zai wondered if he might be tending toward paranoia.

“Hobbes, belay that order. Give anyone you can a full two cycles of sleep.”

“Yes, sir. But we’ll take a look once we’re at full strength.”

“Certainly. In the meantime, I’ll be taking a cycle myself. Be ready to take one when I wake up.”

“But we still have twenty repair crew who haven’t had a chance—”

Captain Zai reached out and touched the bandage on Hobbes’s arm. Their was still blood on her uniform; Hobbes hadn’t even had time to change. He could feel the flechette pistol she now wore strapped to her wrist. It was pulled from the captain’s stores; only the two of them knew she had it. There might be other mutineers seeking revenge.

“Two more hours awake, Hobbes. Then sleep,” he commanded.

She nodded in defeat.

Before retiring, Zai called up the Legis system picture on his personal visual channel. The Rix had sent an assault craft across the light-years to take the Empress, and a battlecruiser with a crew of a thousand to follow up. A considerable commitment to a mission that had failed. Had they sent anything more?

Alexander felt the infinitesimal prick in its awareness, and exalted.

The repeater’s senses were terribly limited. It could see only in a low-grade, four-bit grayscale, its four eyes giving it a mere 180 degrees of peripheral vision. But this narrow, shadowy view was sufficient to find others of its own kind against the snowy background.

The compound mind moved its new appendage clumsily across the grainy terrain, closing on another of the repeaters. The ten-meter journey took ninety seconds, the little creature’s mobility generally limited to finding sunlight for power and maintaining even distribution of the colony in the event of heavy damage to its numbers.

When it reached the other machine, the repeater stepped up onto its back, an armored insect initiating a mating ritual. The device had actually been designed to make such a maneuver impossible; the necessary calculations for complex motion were well beyond the machine’s limited internal software. To make the repeater follow its will, Alexander had to swap out the entire contents of its accessible internal memory a thousand times per second. The gargantuan computational power of the compound mind barreled down the bottleneck of the dim machine’s mind like an ocean tide forced through a drinking straw. The mind succeeded, however: The insectoid repeater wrapped a leg around the other’s power pack, and pulled it fast to the correct position.

Now Alexander was two.

The little machines set off in opposite directions, each looking for more converts. The compound mind’s will propagated like rabies, with each victim compelled to spread it further. Gradually, more and more of the field moved into motion.

But Alexander left the software blocks in the civilian network intact, preventing the little machines from receiving any data from the Legis infostructure and passing it on to the entanglement facility.

Let the Imperials be surprised.

The compound mind waited for the process within the wire to complete itself, biding its time and watching the maneuvers in space progress.

Tide and sunset were elegantly matched.

The last red arrows of light struck out from the descending sun, lancing through the waters that tugged gently at Jocim Marx’s bare legs. The outflow from the tidal pool grew stronger, widening the sandy channel that connected it to the bay. Jocim felt his motionless feet slowly disappear, subsumed by gradual accumulation, buried by a waterborne drift of sand.

He stood utterly still.

Jocim did not react when the first few glimmers of light slipped past him. Like floating candles, blurred slightly by a few centimeters’ depth, they were borne by the quickening current. He waited as a few more drifted by. In the growing dark, he could see a faint luminescence over the large tidal pool, a collective glow from its ample population of torchfish, which had lain all day in the shallow water, storing the sun’s energy.

More drifted by. Then he chose one.

The fisherman lofted his spear as the torchfish took its curved path, tugged to one side by the eddies encircling his legs. It moved past Jocim and away, meter by meter, heading for the deeper waters of bay. At ten meters, he threw.

The spear flew from his hand quickly, but slowed as it neared the end of its tether field. It penetrated the water without a splash, barely reaching its glowing target, then began to accelerate back toward Jocim as if attached to him by a long, elastic cord. At the spear’s tip a cage of metal fingers held a wriggling form, the fish sparkling in its surprise at being torn from the water.

Jocim caught the returning spear, fluidly reversing the motion with which he had thrown it.

He regarded the fish: bright and evenly lit, edged with blues and gently pink at the dorsal fin. He held the spear-end out to the edge of the tidal channel, where a glass bowl of sea water waited. The spear’s terminal claw released the torchfish with a plop, and it fluttered within the bowl, spinning in angry little circles.

The fisherman turned from his catch and raised his arm to throw again. The torchfish were flowing out of the tidal pool in small groups now. It had grown almost completely dark, only a few tendrils of deep red lay upon the horizon. He would have to work quickly to fill his bowl.

Suddenly, the sky cracked.

A long, bright fissure opened, daylight pushing through the broken night sky. The water dried up below Jocim’s feet, the white noise of nearby surf sputtering down to a dead-signal hum. The burning blue of the sky turned to a familiar cerulean, the signature color of a blanked interface.

Someone had woken Master Pilot Jocim Marx up, untimely bounced him from a hyperdream. He’d been deep in the rhythms of hypersleep, and his carefully designed arch of mental recuperation had been shattered. His head rang with the chainsaw noise of torn reality, and his body was racked with the heartburn of incompletely digested exhaustion.

“This had better be important,” he managed groggily.

“It is,” came Hobbes’s voice.

The executive officer gave him a few more seconds, then restarted his primary vision. Marx blinked his gummy eyes. Hobbes was standing here, physically present in his cabin.

He couldn’t remember ever having seen her off the bridge before.

“What is it?”

“An occupation,” she answered.

“A what?” :

“On the approach path. There may be another Rix ship.”

Hobbes could see how they had missed it for so long.

No drive signature. No easy graviton emissions. No active sensors of its own. Even now, all they had was an occultation: a milliseconds-long dimming of a few background stars. Whatever it was, the object was invisible to transluminal sensors, and was too far away for the
Lynx
‘s active sensors to tell them very much.

But it was big.

“At least fifty kilometers across,” Ensign Tyre repeated.

“It’s a spare receiver array,” Engineer Frick said. “An extra, folded down and trailing the battlecruiser.”

“Why so far behind?” Hobbes asked. The object was too distant from the battlecruiser for an easy rendezvous. As it was, the
Lynx
could easily reach it before the larger Rix ship.

“Perhaps they wanted to keep it invisible,” the captain said. “It’s running absolutely silent. If it weren’t so damn big, we’d have missed it.”

And if the captain hadn’t been so paranoid, Hobbes thought, they’d have missed it at any size. The last thing anyone else had expected was another Rix vessel coming into the system.

“It’s not necessarily running silent, sir,” Tyre softly added. “It could simply be inert matter.”

“When will we know its mass?” Zai asked.

Tyre looked into the air. “The Master Pilot’s drone should be within range to tell us that in fourteen minutes.”

Hobbes looked across the table at Marx, and wished again that the captain hadn’t insisted on waking the master pilot in mid-sleep sequence. The man looked exhausted, his drowsy absence of mind animated with a bad case of the shakes. All his piloting skill would be meaningless if he couldn’t think straight.

The recon drone had been launched almost immediately after the first occultation had been spotted. The drone launch rail was useless, unable to give the drone a magnetic shove, so they’d had to launch it at zero relative. The craft was the
Lynx
‘s last surviving fast recon drone, and could sustain six hundred gees for an hour. It had already turned over, and was close to matching velocities with the object.

The drone was under automation now, but the captain wanted Marx at the controls when it made its approach.

“Don’t lose that craft, Marx,” Hobbes said. “We’re short enough on drones as it is.”

Marx rubbed his eyes. “No, ExO Hobbes. But I’d better get to my canopy.”

He rose slowly. “Sir,” he added shakily, giving a small bow to the captain before he left the command bridge.

When the master pilot was gone, Gunner Wilson spoke.

“Sir, it can’t be a warship. It’s too big. It would dwarf anything we’ve seen from the Rix before.”

“It’s bigger than a Laxu colony ship,” Hobbes said. “And that’s the biggest powered craft the Empire’s ever encountered.”

“It might be nothing,” Captain Zai admitted. “Part of a lightsail from their original acceleration. Even a section of the receiver array, something that was damaged and removed years ago.”

Hobbes nodded. It could be a planetoid for that matter, its course purely coincidental. But that seemed unlikely.

The object’s approach course almost perfectly bisected those of the battlecruiser and the assault ship that had attacked the Empress’ palace.

Whatever it was, the object had to be Rix.

h_rd felt a tapping on her face.

She pulled off the hood of the ablative suit and raised her head above the surface, shaking snow from her head. The repeater that had summoned her scuttled away as she sat up.

The cold had thoroughly penetrated her body. Rix commandos felt pain, but rarely longer than was necessary for their bodies to deliver a warning. After the long fall through frigid air and the hours buried in the snow, however, h_rd felt ice and agony in every muscle. The cuts on her face had scarred, and her broken nose felt bloated. Even her hypercarbon joints were stiff.

She let her body temperature rise. An increase in heat would return some of her flexibility. The Imperials’ thermal imagers might find her more easily, but her whereabouts would be obvious soon enough. The summons from the little repeater meant that Alexander was only a few minutes from effecting its takeover of the entanglement facility. Therefore, h_rd was about to be rescued. A host of small craft under the compound mind’s control waited on the other side of the wire, ready to assist in her extraction. The commando’s rescue wasn’t a humanitarian gesture on Alexander’s part, however. Her exit would merely be a diversion.