The Killing of Worlds (7 page)

She watched Marx’s data stream—the images of the battlecruiser being gathered by his drone. It was the best intelligence they’d received so far on the enemy warship. Tyre searched for weaknesses, clues to its configuration, signs that anything the
Lynx
had thrown at it had managed to do any damage.

Damn. Marx was so close, yet the images were blurry, not much better than distant transluminal returns. Ensign Tyre wished he would go to active sensors. Of course, the scout wouldn’t last long once he did. The battlecruiser’s close-in defenses looked pretty solid.

Tyre gestured, bringing her second sight closer to the blackbody monitor drones that had just appeared and begun firing on some of Marx’s subservient drones. The blackbodies were normally almost invisible, but against the sunlit background of the receiver array she could make out several more of them. The three that had opened fire had turned up at just the right place; either the Rix had guessed lucky or had enough of them to cover every approach. She wondered how many of the dark, silent monitors coasted in front of the Rix warship.

She felt the hands of her superior on her shoulders. Kax stood right behind her seat. There were five crew crowded into the tight confines of Data Analysis. In battle configuration, their usually large space had been annexed by the two adjacent gunnery stations. Kax’s hands clenched as the
Lynx
maneuvered, its slow coldjets pushing them with the sway of an oceangoing vessel.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Kax asked.

She nodded. “They’ve configured for heavy defense, sir.”

“See if you can get a count. The captain will want to know how many blackbodies are out there before the
Lynx
gets too much closer.”

“Yes, sir, but I’ll bet you right now there’s at least a hundred.”

“A hundred?”

“If you take a—”

Suddenly, a rush of noise exploded through the room. A searing wind struck Tyre, throwing her from her webbing to the floor. Her exposed skin—hands and cheeks—were being scoured. Her mouth and eyes clenched instinctively shut. Her ears popped as the air pressure plummeted.

A burning sound reached her ears through the thin air, and she felt heat on her hands and face.

Ensign Amanda Tyre, like every recruit to the Navy, had gone through dozens of decompression drills. She knew well the expansion of the chest, the screaming pain of ears and eyes. But this was her first time to experience the event in battle.

It felt as if some demon were astride her, crushing the breath from her body. Tyre remembered the symbol on the academy’s decompression drill room door: the Asphyx, the spirit that visits the dying to steal their last breath. Through the haze of synesthesia, she had a sudden vision of the Asphyx—the blank eyes, the yawning mouth hungry for her life.

Then she command-gestured, clearing her data mask of all synesthesia, and saw that it was Kax’s face before her. He had fallen to the deck next to her. But even in primary vision, his face remained horrifying, burned and bleeding, the flesh peeling from it as if stripped by hungry insects.

“Class,” he said, his voice ravaged.

Tyre rolled out from under him. As her hands sought purchase on the tilting deck, she felt the grit of tiny bits of broken glass cutting into her palms. Her pressure uniform was torn and felt invaded with some sharp presence, like the insinuating fingers of fiberglass against the skin.

The other three in the DA room were stunned, their faces and arms cut with thousands of tiny nicks. The phosphorus fire had burned itself out too quickly to hurt them.

Rating Rogers, still in his webbing, coughed as he spoke.

“It’s glass. From the optical core next door.” He pointed to the access tube, from which coiled a bright, heavy mist, half vapor and half dust. Of course. Data Analysis was adjacent to one of the
Lynx
‘s processing towers, a column of dense optical silicon and phosphorus. Tyre hadn’t been following the
Lynx
‘s defensive status, so she brought up the diagnostic channel in synesthesia. A number of projectiles had plunged through the vessel.

That explained the momentary blaze. The quantum computers of the
Lynx
used phosphorus atoms suspended in silicon as q-bits. Free, the phosphorus was flammable, even in what little oxygen there’d been for the agonizing seconds of decompression.

Tyre covered her mouth with a loose flap of uniform to ward off the glass vapor hanging in the air, looked again to Kax.

His eyes were clenched shut and bleeding. He’d been the only one in the station without full-strength headsups covering his upper face. And his body had shielded hers from the blast of glass and burning phosphorus.

“Medical, medical,” Tyre said, her voice gritty and plaintive from the glass dust she’d inhaled. “We need major medical in DA Station One, deck fourteen.”

She heard the background murmur of other stations begging for medical assistance.

Data Master Kax reached out a bloody hand and clenched Tyre’s ankle, coughing. She knelt beside him.

“Don’t try to talk, sir,” she said.

“The blackbodies, Tyre. Keep looking,” he managed.

She glanced around at her crewmates, realizing that the
Lynx
was still in battle. With Kax out, she was in command now. The data from Master Pilot Marx’s scout was invaluable, and he was far too busy flying to grasp its tactical implications.

“Rogers, try to help the Data Master,” she commanded. “You two: Back to your stations.”

Still in shock, her crewmates moved numbly to follow her orders. Tyre sank into her webbing, and flipped back to second sight. She gestured with bloody hands, and adopted the scout drone’s viewpoint again.

Master Pilot Marx was under fire.

Marx discovered that he was still alive.

A small cleaning robot moved beneath his feet, sucking up the thin, acid bile on the floor with a gurgling sound that set his stomach flopping again. His hands were shaking, and his ears rang from some nearby decompression.

The
Lynx
had been hit all right. But somehow Zai had kept them alive. The strike certainly hadn’t numbered five thousand flockers. It had sounded like only ten or so. Marx scanned the icons of internal diagnostics. There were no more than twenty crewmen dead. He turned his eyes from the display before he could recognize any names. Later.

What mattered most was that Marx’s control hardware—the trans-light array that connected him with the drone complement—was still functional. He could still see from the scout drone’s perspective, if only fuzzily. He checked the clock. Another thirty seconds remained before his foremost drones passed the Rix battlecruiser and became irrelevant to the battle.

There was still a chance.

But the question remained: How to disintegrate the dead sand-caster?

Marx considered his remaining assets. Only four drones were left inside the Rix defenses that could respond to his orders. The scout itself, tumbling with no reaction drive. The two stealth penetrators, smaller than dribble-hoop balls. And the decoy, weaponless. And if any of them switched on active sensors or accelerated noticeably, the Rix monitor drones would shred it within seconds. He could see the sentinels now as the scout neared the hot background of the receiver array: rank after rank of blackbody monitor drones, dark spots against its reflective surface.

Good god, Marx thought. Other than a few thousand flockers and hunter drones, the battlecruiser’s drone complement had been committed almost entirely to defensive weaponry. The Rix captain had prioritized the receiver array above everything else.

He shook his head. The
Lynx
had never had a chance.

Looking at the ranks of fearsome monitors, Marx envied their firepower. If he could just take over a few of the blackbody drones and turn their weapons back on the receiver…

Then the master pilot realized what he had to do.

It was simplicity itself.

He watched the trajectories of his four drones as they converged, growing nearer to each other as they drifted toward the Rix battle-cruiser. The decoy was in front. The little drone was designed to burst a wide range of EM every few minutes, drawing fire away from more vital targets. When it wasn’t screaming, it was stealthy, with passive sensors and line-of-sight transmission. Marx had kept the decoy silent so far, but now he saw what to do with it.

The stealth drones were the only thing he could move without detection. They were equipped with coldjets, slow but radiation-silent. He eased one alongside the decoy drone, bringing the two into soft contact. His view might be blurry and vague, but at under ten meters per second, Marx could have rammed a hummingbird.

The master pilot shoved the decoy with the stealth drone, pushed it on a new vector toward the sandcaster. He cursed, pushing the plodding coldjets to their maximums. In another twenty seconds his little formation would be hurtling uselessly past the battlecruiser.

Marx waited until the decoy was a bare kilometer from the sand-caster, then fired its reaction drive. It barreled in toward the sand-caster drone in decoy mode, screaming bloody murder.

Suddenly, Marx could see.

The decoy was flooding the area with EM, painting everything within light-seconds across the whole spectrum. To the Rix, it must have seemed as if a fleet of drones had popped up from nowhere.

The blackbody monitors wasted no time responding. Ripples of their slugs arced beautifully across space, lit like tracer bullets by the decoy’s sensory howl. The rain of slugs swept across the stealth penetrator first, then found the decoy, and things were dark for a moment. But seconds later Marx saw the blast of the sandcaster being hit, pulped, shredded by the depleted uranium slugs.

“
Perfect
“ he whispered as a sequence of explosions flared in synesthesia. The blinded sandcaster was still loaded with reaction mass! The drone blazed with the dirty fuel of its self-propelling canisters.

It popped again and again like a sackful of fragmentation grenades.

The Rix had done Marx’s work for him.

The sand cloud expanded into a huge, misshapen ball, a time-lapse amoeba festooned with reaching pseudopods. It was almost 4,000 kilometers across when it struck the receiver array, at a relative velocity of 3,000 klicks per second. The hail of slugs had also imparted lateral velocity to the cloud, and it swept across the array like a sirocco.

Marx switched on his scout’s active sensors, letting the
Lynx
‘s computers record the damage in maximum detail. He leaned back to savor the light show, the vast receiver array flickering from end to end, a mica desert struck by the morning sun.

The huge object began to fold, a giant piece of fabric twisting in the wind.

Then fire from the blackbody drones found the pulsing scout, and Marx’s view snapped to dead-channel blue.

He brought up Hobbes’s line.

“Master Pilot reporting mission accomplished,” he said. “The Rix receiver array has been destroyed.”

Tyre prioritized Marx’s signal, recording at maximum resolution.

Finally, a good look at the enemy battlecruiser.

It only lasted a few seconds. The projectile fire from a dozen black-bodies raked across Marx’s forward drones, tearing them to pieces. The sand canister exploded. Tyre watched with her mouth agape as the sand tore across the Rix receiver array.

“He got it!” she cried.

Then the arc of fire moved inexorably toward the scout drone itself. In the seconds before the signal was extinguished, the tearing mega-structure caught the light of the Legis sun, and an awesome sight was revealed. Ensign Tyre’s ragged breath halted as she took it in.

She had assumed that Marx’s drones had hit a concentration of blackbodies, a random clumping of firepower. Even the largest Rix ships only traveled with a few dozens of the blackbody monitors; the heavy-metal ammunition they carried was bulky, they were difficult to maintain, and were primarily a defensive weapon.

But revealed against the bright background of the crumpling array was a host of monitors. They stretched across its shining expanse in a vast, hexagonal pattern.

Hundreds of them.

Then synesthesia went dark; Marx’s drone had finally died.

Ensign Tyre heard a gurgle from Data Master Kax at her feet, but she ignored the grim sound. Tyre rewound the scout’s viewpoint stream a few seconds, and froze it on a frame in which the Legis sun had revealed the monitor drones.

Ensign Tyre blinked as she looked at them.

They were short-range weapons, primarily for defense. They had no drives and little intelligence, just lots and lots of projectile firepower. If a small warship like the
Lynx
were to stumble amongst hundreds of them, it would be torn to pieces by their collective kinetic attack.

And the
Lynx
was headed straight for the battlecruiser and into the intervening field of blackbodies, unaware of their deadly, silent presence.

She had to alert the captain.

Tyre opened a line to Hobbes. The executive officer did not immediately respond; there were probably a dozen crew of superior rank clamoring for her attention.

Tyre waited, the seconds ticking away, the
Lynx
hurtling toward the deadly blackbody drones, three thousand kilometers closer every second.

“Priority, priority.”

The priority icon appeared before her in second sight. The icon was for “extreme emergencies” only, a term that held awesome power here in Data Analysis. Kax had never used it. Tyre had certainly never thought to invoke it herself; it was the data master’s prerogative. And if she were wrong about what the vast array of drones meant, misuse of the priority icon in battle would be a terrible mark against her forever.

Tyre stared at the frozen image again. Hundreds of them, she reminded herself. The data were unambiguous.

She switched to the diagnostic channel again. There were casualties all across the ship, hull and equipment damage, even fatalities. It could be minutes before Hobbes responded to a lowly ensign.