The Stone Dogs (45 page)

"Will do, Colonel, sir," she said, smiling and wiping at her eyes with a tissue. She put a hand on the rail and stepped over, pulling herself down the access tube feet-first to keep him in view a moment longer.

"Shit," he whispered to himself, as she passed out of sight.

CLAESTUM PLANTATION

DISTRICT OF TUSCANY

PROVINCE OF ITALY

DOMINATION Of THE DRAKA

MAY 7, 1982

"Well, Myfwany," Yolande began.

The graveyard was empty now, save for the dead and her.

Gwen had come, to solemnly lay her handful of wildflowers on the turf; she was down by the bottom of the hill now, playing with Wulda, their new ghouloon. He had been expensive, but her daughter was entranced; she could hear the happy high-pitched shrieks from up here, see the girl doll-tiny with distance and perched on the transgene animal's shoulders as they romped by the car. For the rest there was silence, and the warm sweet smells of early summer in Italy: cut clover, wild strawberries from the hedgerows. Bees hummed among the banks of trembling iris that lined the flagstone pathways.

"Gwen's growin' like a weed," Yolande continued quietly. She was kneeling by the headstone, a simple black basalt rectangle with name and dates inlaid in Lunar titanium; she thought Myfwany would have liked that. "And gods, she's smart. I love her mo' than I can tell, sweet. Goin' to be tough and fast like yo', but sunnier, I think."

She paused for a minute. You could see a long way from here, between the trunks of the big oaks and cypresses. Over the vale and the morning mist, past the terraced vineyards to the Great House shining in its gardens, into the bluegreen haze of the hills beyond.

"I'm havin' a baby, by yo' brother Billy," she said. "Took Jolene in fo' the seeding yesterday… don't know exactly why she volunteered, maybe she misses yo', too, darlin'." Suddenly Yolande pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. "Oh, gods, I miss yo' so! I try, sweet, I try but I'm not strong like yo'… I wish yo' could tell me what to do." A shaky laugh, and she lowered her hands. "I know, darlin', I'm bein' soppy again like you used to say. Hated hearin' it then, and now I'd give mah soul to hear yo'

rake me over the coals again. I've gotten a new command, though, love."

She rose to her feet. Her voice whispered. "And I swear, by yo'

blood below my feet, Myfwany, I'll make them pay fo' yo'. Pay, and pay, and pay, and it'll still never be enough." Aloud:

"Goodbye fo' now, my love. Till we meet again."

She turned to walk down the hill; there was the flight to catch.
Why don't I cry?
she thought.
Never,
here. Why?

LOW EARTH ORBIT

NEAR LAUNCH PLATFORM SKYLORD SIX

ABOARD DASCS
SUBOTAI

MAY 23, 1982

"… drive systems at one hundred percent," a voice was saying in the background. The last of the checklist.

Yolande leaned back in the big crashcouch. Only the elastic belts were buckled across her skinsuit; the massive petal-like sections of the combat cocoon had folded back into the sides.

The bridge of
Subotai
was dark, lit mainly by the screens spaced around the perimeter of the eight-meter circle. A dozen stations, horseshoes standing out from the walls with a crashcouch in the center, all occupied. Her own in the center portside of the axial tube, surrounded by sections of console like wedge-shaped portions of a disk. Dozens of separate screens—physical separation rather than virtual, for redundancy's sake. Light blue and green from data readouts, pickups, graphs and schematics.

"Subotai
on standby," said the First Officer, Warden Fennore; she had voyaged with him before.

A screen before her flicked to the face of Philia Garren, captain of the other warship. "
Batu
on standby," she said.

"
Marbis
on standby."

"
Sappho
on standby."

"
Crassus
on standby."

"
Alcibiades
, on standby."

Cargo-carriers: the heart of this mission. A substantial proportion of the Domination's fast heavy-lift capacity, originally built for work around the gas-giant moons. She tapped for an exterior view. The Telmark IV flotilla were stationary a bare kilometer from Sky Lord Six and perhaps ten from each other, touching distance in these terms. The armored globe of the launch-station swung before her, with the 200-meter tubes of the free-electron lasers around it like the arms of a spider. The other ships… Yolande allowed herself a moment of cold pride at the power beneath her fingertips.

"Status, report," she said. And there was a certain queasy feeling, before any mission. Like having eaten a little too much oily food—and it was worse this time. This time
everything
was her responsibility…

"Time to boost, three minutes and counting," the First Officer said.

She looked at the other ships. The
Batu
was a twin of her own.

Two hundred and fifty meters from the bell of the thrust plate to the hemisphere dome of the forward shield; most of that machinery space open behind a latticework stretched between the four main keel-beams. The heat dumpers, running the length of the keels and the drive lasers; the long bundles that held the plutonium fuel-pellets; the jagged asymmetric shapes of rectennae, railgun pods, Gatling turrets, launch-tubes. And the cylindrical armored bulk of the reaction-mass tank, with the smaller cylinder of the pressurized crew-zone half embedded in it. The transports were blockier, squat, similar propulsion systems but without the weapons, more reaction mass… A pulsedrive could run on just the fission reaction and the byproducts, but that was bad for the thrustplates and squanderous of fuel.

All of them clamped to strap-on boost packs, of course. It was not very nice to fire off a pulsedrive just outside the atmosphere; the EMP would destroy electronics over half a continent.

"Cleared for boost, Sky Lord Six," she said.

"Guidance lasers locked. All locked. Excitement phase beginning."

An amplified voice, that would sound throughout the flotilla.

"STAND BY FOR ACCELERATION. STAND BY FOR

ACCELERATION. FIVE THOUSAND SECONDS, MAX AT

ONE-POINT-SEVEN-EIGHT G. TEN SECONDS TO BURN.

COUNTING."

She gripped the rests, let the fluid resilience of the couch enfold her. Far behind her back the supercooled oxygen in the strap-on booster would be subliming under the first teasing feathertouch of the station's lasers. A pulse to vaporize—

Whump
. The
Subotai
massed 14,000 tonnes with full tanks; now that moved with a faint surge, growing as the magnetic equalizers between thrustplate and hull-frame absorbed the energy. And another pulse to turn vapor to plasma—

WHAM
whummp
WHAM—too fast to sense, building to hundreds of times per second as the lasers flickered. The exterior view showed long leaf-shaped cones of white flame below the strap-ons, and the ships were beginning to move. Weight pressed down on her chest, building; the acceleration would increase as mass diminished. It was nothing compared to flying atmosphere fighters, but it went on much longer… 5,000 seconds of burn.

Very economical, to save their own onboard reaction mass. It was liquid O and dirt-cheap here near Luna where the mines 2

produced it as a by-product; more precious than rubies out where you needed it, at the other end of the trajectory. Even more economical to save on the tiny plutonium-beryllium-plastic pellets that powered a pulsedrive. Full load for a Great Khan cruiser was half a million pellets, which meant
six tonnes
of plutonium.

The world had been mass-producing breeder reactors for twenty years, to fuel ships like this.

Minutes stretched, and the pressure on her chest increased.

She breathed against it, watching the time blinking on half a dozen screens and remembering. Other launches; her first… only six years ago? Assistant Pilot Officer, then. Not quite a record for promotion. There had been casualties, and a massive expansion program, and not everyone wanted space assignments… Uncle Eric had pulled strings to get Gwen allowed up for the launch, and she had actually been quiet when they showed her the ships through the viewport; there was one who was
definitely
going to go spacer herself.

The stars were unmoving in the exterior view, but the station was dwindling. Dwindling to a point of light, against the curved shield of Earth; that shrinking to a globe. Other spots of light around it, some things large enough to be seen: station powersails, then a real solar sail half-deployed near a construction station. Ten minutes, and the planet was much smaller. The terminator was sweeping over the eastern Mediterranean. Dusk soon at Claestum. Jolene was there, with Yolande's child below her heart; she remembered holding the serf's hand in the Clinic. Pinpoint lights from the darkness over Central Asia; possibly launches from the laserlift stations in the Tien Shan. City lights. Very faint straight lines on the northern and southern edges of the Sahara; one of the few things you could see from this distance were the reclamation projects.

The moon was swelling; they would use it for slingshot effect, about an hour after the burn stopped. Back in… '62, it had been, she remembered how exciting, the first moon landings. Going out with ma and pa on the terrace at home, the servants unfolding the 150mm telescope, ma showing her how to spot the tiny flame. The Yankees ahead—
may they rot
—but only by a few months. Strange-looking clunky little ships, hand-assembled around those first primitive orbital platforms. A dozen figures in black skinsuits and bubble-helmets climbing down the ladders in dreamlike slowness to plant the Drakon banner on the moon; she had stayed up past her bedtime, glued to the viewer, and no one had objected.

"How far we've come," she murmured.
Only a single
generation.
Of course, we had incentive
. Ten percent of GNP for decades could accomplish a great deal.

The First Officer responded to her words rather than the meaning. "Making eight kps relative, Cohortarch," Fermore said.

'Twelve hundred seconds of burn to go; then a quick whip-round and it's a month to Mars. Minimum-burn, for pulsedrives. And you could pick up reaction mass, at the Draka station on Phobos."

She felt the weight of the sealed dataplaque over her breast.

Sealed orders, and there were only six others in the flotilla who knew, of more than six hundred; she would tightbeam the course-change when they were a week out. A profligate trajectory, since it was necessary to deceive the enemy until the last minute, burning fuel and mass recklessly, but the prize was worth it.

BETWEEN THE ORBITS OF EARTH AND MARS

ABOARD DASCS
SUBOTAI

JUNE 18, 1982

The wardroom of the
Subotai
was small and cluttered; it doubled as an exercise chamber, up here just below the bowcap of the cruiser. They would be a long time in zero-G, and the hormone treatments did only so much to slow calcium loss. Just now Yolande and Snappdove had it to themselves, their feet tucked into straps under a table. There was a lingering smell of sweat in the air, under the chill freshness the life-support system imposed.

"Your health," Yolande said, raising her bulb and sipping lemonade through the straw. Flat, but carbonated beverages in zero-G were an invitation to perpetual flatulence.
Such are the
trials we face
pushing back the frontiers of the Race,
she thought dryly.

Snappdove's beard had been clipped closer, for convenience in the helmet-ring of his skinsuit. "Our success!" he said, clinking his bulb against hers with a dull
tump
of plastic. "Not to mention our wealth."

"The news good as all that?" Yolande said.

"The core samples are all in now," the scientist said.

"Definitely an ex-comet, somewhat larger and less dense than we thought… ah, there is so much we do not know! Always we discover theory-breaking facts faster than we can make plausible theories, out here." He shook his head ruefully. "Ex-comet, or at least something that came from the outer system, sometime.

Complex orbital perturbations, collisions… Comet, asteroid—we impose definitions on nature, but nature does not always agree."

Yolande sighed inwardly. She had not had much time to get to know the head of the expedition's Technical Section crew—they had only been here five days and he had been madly busy, but it had been enough to know that he was unstoppable.
A true
natural philosopher, out of time,
she thought.
The facts
entrance him because he can think about them, not necessarily
because they're of any use
.

"Yo' have a theory?" she said. _

"Hmmm. Hmmm. Crude, but… several passes into the zone between Earth and Mars resulted in the loss of the outer layer of volatiles, various ices. The process was fairly gentle—I doubt if the Object ever came within 1.1 AU of the sun—and the solid material, the organics and silicates, were not thrown off. Instead it formed a protective crust; there must have been a truly unusual amount of such heavier materials. This was through many passes, you understand. Perhaps asteroidal material was incorporated. Now, though, we have a fairly complete crust, there may be some sublimation still, but nothing drastic." The slight foreign overtone to his accent became stronger as his animation grew. "We will have to be careful; ammonia or methane could still be present."

"The composition?" she asked, reigning in impatience.

"As favorable as could be hoped!" He spread his hands.

"Carbonaceous outer layer, rock and organic compounds. Under that… ice! Over a
billion
tonnes of ice. Dirty ice at that, many complex hydrogenated compounds. And—an additional bonus—a rocky core with high concentrations of platinum-group metals.

At a guess, the Object did encounter asteroidal material. At some time, the ice softened enough that… well, never mind." He chuckled, and parked the drink in the air to rub his palms. "My so-aristocratic colleague, has it occurred to you that we are now very, very rich?"