The Stone Dogs (51 page)

Fifty seconds. Snappdove had thought she was insane, for a while.
Maybe I was. Dammit, they are
pressing home their
pursuit.
The Alliance wanted to damage her; the only way to do it was to chase her cruisers off far enough that they could do a firing pass at the asteroid and its workforce as they turned and fled themselves. A two-body problem with only one solution.

Ten. Five. The pursuers maintaining position with beautiful precision; those were good ships and well-trained crews. Three.

Two. Past.

"Now!" she shouted, superflously.

"DECELERATION," the speakers sounded. It wrenched at her, throwing her to forward against the combat cocoon. Reaction mass was being vented from the forward ports, run through the heat dumpers to vaporize. Not nearly so powerful as the drive, but enough to check their headlong flight. The main drives of the Alliance craft lit in a brief blossom of flame, just enough to match.

And the asteroid was
turning
. A mass of billions of tons is very difficult indeed to move out of its accustomed orbit; it had taken dozens of fusion weapons to spend that much energy. It is much easier to pivot such a mass about its center of gravity; while the hydrogen-bomb flare had hidden them, the cargo vessels had nestled their bows into holes excavated in the rock and ice of the asteroid's crust. A cruiser could not have done it without self-destruction, but the haulers had been modified to act as pusher-tugs at need. Now four drives flared, and the lumpy dark potato-shape pivoted with elephantine delicacy.

Toward
Subotai's
pursuer, blinded by its own drive for the crucial seconds. Fusion blossomed behind the rock's assigned stern, and the products of it washed out tens of kilometers; charged particles, gamma radiation striking metal and sleeting through as secondary radiation and heat. Through shielding, through the reaction-mass baffles around the command center; tripping relays, overloading circuits, ripping the nervous systems of the human crew as well.

"MANEUVER."
Subotai
flipped end-for-end.

"DECELERATION" The main drive roared, a deeper thrumming note as it poured reaction-mass onto the plate and spat out fission pellets at twice the normal rate. The cruiser slowed with a violence that stressed the frame to its limits, as if the ship were sinking into some yielding but elastic substance. Crippled, the Alliance vessel overshot. Weapons lashed out, at ranges so short that response-time was minimal. From both directions, for the wounded ship was not yet dead.

"Overheat, disperser three."

"Gatling six not reporting."

"Penetration! Pressure loss in reaction baffle nine."

"Wotan, get that missile, get it,
get it
." Rising tension, until the close-in Gatlings sprayed the homing rocket's path with high-velocity metal. It exploded in a flower of nuclear flame, and the radiation alarms shrilled.

Yolande felt the cruiser shake and tone around her, like a vast mechanical beast crying out in pain. Sectors flicked from green to amber to red on the screens; but the Alliance ship was suffering worse, its defenses shattered.

"Hit!" Railgun slugs sleeted into the
Washington's
heat dispersers. "Hit!" Parasite bombs dropped away from the
Suhotai's
stern, into the neutron flux of the drive; their own small bomblets detonated, and the long metal bundles converted energy into X-ray laser spikes.

"She's losing air," the Sensor Officer reported. "Overheat in her reaction mass tanks—pressure burst—losing longitudinal stability—she's tumbling!"

Lasers raked across the enemy; armor sublimed into vapor, and the computers held the beams on, chewing deeper. The particle guns snapped; sparks flickered along the cartwheeling form of the Alliance cruiser. Then the exterior screens darkened.

"Something got through," the Weapons Officer said softly, and consulted his screens. "Secondary effects… her fuel pellets just went."

A cheer went through the
Suhotai
, a moment's savage howl of triumph.

"Stow that!" Yolande snapped. "Sensors, report."

"The
Bolivar's
breaking and runnin' fo' it, ma'am." Only sensible; with two ships to her one, the Draka could bracket and overwhelm her.

"Damage Control?"

"Ship fully functional. Missin' one Gatling turret. Three dead, seven injured." Yolande winced inwardly. Shit. "Slow leaks in two sectors of the reaction mass tank. Seventy-one percent nominal, Drive full, remainder weapons systems full."

"Number Two, shape fo' pursuit." There was a momentary pause in the drive, and it resumed at normal high-burn rates.

Stars crawled across the screens as the attitude jets adjusted their bearing. "If
Bolivar
gets back within the orbit of Luna, they'll do it with dry tanks an' scratches on that shiny new thrust plate." A pulsedrive ship could move on fuel pellets alone; the first generation had, using vaporized graphite from the lining of the plate as reaction mass. It was neither recommended, good for the frame, nor safe.

"Oh, and all hands," she said, switching to the command push. "Well done."

DATE: 12/11/82

FROM: Arch-Strategos Stephen Welber Assignments Board Supreme QHQ Castle Tarleton, Archona

TO: Cohortarch Yolande Ingolfsson Commandant Task Force Telmark IV Trans-Lunar Zone

RE: Further Orders:

You are instructed, upon the arrival of the relief force hereinafter specified, to return with DASCS
Subotai
to Qeosynch Platform Padishah-One. You will there select a roster for skeletal watch-standing while the cruiser
Subotai
undergoes necessary repairs and consider yourself at liberty until 01/10/83, when you will report to this office for further assignment.

Please convey to all officers and crew of your command the warmest congratulations of the Supreme General Staff.

Postscript under personal code:

Dear Cohortarch: I, the Staff, and—I might add —your uncle, are extremely pleased with your performance. Not least the visible rage and frustration it has caused the Alliance; let certain parties accuse us of being soft on the enemy now! Still, it would be better if things were allowed to simmer for a while. Your request for a permanent deep-space command Is accordingly denied, and in line with what the High Command has in mind for you, following debriefing you will be assigned for the next year or two to the Astronautical War College here in Archona.

Then—perhaps—a Staff appointment in the Mars-Jupiter sector.

Oh, you're getting a medal and a promotion; do try to act surprised.

SPIN HABITAT SEVEN

CENTRAL BELT

BETWEEN THE ORBITS OF MARS AND JUPITER

JANUARY 4, 1983

Habitat Seven was the latest and largest of the Project's constructs, half a kilometer across and two long; nickel-iron was cheap, and easy to work with big-enough mirrors. Now the former lump of metal-rich rock was a spinning tube, closed at either end, with a glowing cylinder of woven glass filament running down its center. There was atmosphere inside, and part of the inner surface had already been transformed; gravity was .5

C, as much as was practical or necessary. Grass grew in squares of nutrient-rich dust, and hopeful flowers. Individual houses were going up, foamed rock poured into molds; there were dozens of different floor-plans.

"Goddamn circus," Frederick Lefarge said. "We're running this like the bloody Los Alamos bomb project, back in the '40's.

Everything and the kitchen sink."

"Not really," the man beside him on the polished-slag bench said. "In the long run, the actual construction will go faster if we spend the time to get the infrastructure in place." A sigh. "And even the… fourth Project will require a good deal of preliminary groundwork. We are going to miss Dr. Takashi very badly, as the years go by. I am more for the crystals and wafers and wires, me; he was the instruction set genius."

"Yes." He looked aside at Professor Pedro de Ribeiro: a vigorous-looking forty-five, with the usual Imperial Brazilian goatee in pepper-and-salt and an impeccable white linen suit; the cane and gloves were, the American thought, a little much.

Very competent man, but… "I'd have thought that was less so for the final Project than for the rest of the New America enterprises. It's basically a set of compinstructions, isn't it?"

"Nao." De Ribeiro's English was impeccable, but it slipped now and then. "I have been thinking much on this matter, since I was contacted… and have concluded that we must almost reinvent the art of information systems here, if we are to accomplish what we wish." He rested his hands on the silver head of his cane and leaned forward. "Abandon our assumption that because we have always done things one way, that is the inevitable path. Another legacy of the struggle with the Domination… Tell me, Senhor Lieutenant Colonel, what would you say to the idea of writing compinstruction procedures on a perscomp?"

Lefarge blinked, taken aback. "That's… Well, it would be like using a shovel as a machine-tool, wouldn't it?"

"Bim, but only because we have made it so." He tapped the ferrule of the cane on the ground. "Perhaps computers could only have started as they did, large machines used for cryptography, for the handling of statistics. Precious assets, jealously guarded.

They have grown immensely faster, immensely more capable, even rather smaller—that first all-transistor model in 1942 was the size of a house! —but not different in nature."

"Well, how could they be?"

"For example… it is certainly technically possible to build central processing units small enough to power a perscomp. Yes, yes, quite difficult, but the micromachining processes we have developed for other purposes would do… if there were a strong development incentive. But our computers were always, hmm, how shall I say, limited in access. Perscomps were developed from the other end up, from the machinery intended to run machine tools, simulations, deal with the real world; only their instruction storage and the interfacers are digital, and the rest is analoge. We build them for a range of specific uses, and then develop the instruction-sets on larger machines; they are loaded into the smaller in cartridges. Complicated machines such as space warcraft have a maze of subsystems like that, linked to a central brain."

Wild speculation combined with restatement of the obvious,
Lefarge thought. Then:
No, wait a
minute. We've been too
narrowly focused on immediate problems. The Project's going
to need real
ingenuity, not just engineering.
"But if we'd gone the other way… Jesus, Doctor, it'd be a security nightmare! Even as it is, we have to throw dozens of people in the slammer every year for illegal comping. There might be… oh,
thousands
of amateurs out there screwing around with vital instruction sets.

The Draka could scoop it up off the market! Then think of the problems if you could copy embedded corepaths and instruction sets over the wires between perscomps, Lord…"

The Brazilian nodded. "Exactly! And who would find it more difficult to adjust to such a world, us or them? We must be radical, on our Project. That is an example."

He laughed, as the younger man rocked under the question's impact. "Also, one of the reasons I have come here. Here we will be relatively free of the security restrictions—if only because we are already imprisoned, in a sense! For the first time, a completely free exchange of ideas and data."

Another tap at the metallic pebbles of the walkway. "The thing we wish to devise, it must be more than a set of hidden compinstructions. It must be a self-replicating, self-adjusting pattern of information, a… a
virus
, if you will. One able to overcome all the safeguards the Draka place on their machines; the redundant systems, the physical blocks, the many interfaces.

We will have to reinvent many aspects of our art. Takashi agreed with me; it is better to start with a majority of younger men…

and women, to be sure—ones free of the rather bureaucratized, specialized approach of other research institutes. And less dominated by us old men, who are so sure what is possible and what impossible! The
New America
, the starship, that is engineering. Wonderful engineering, many tests, unfamiliar challenges, but development work. In our Project, we must learn new ways to
think
. Ah, the senhora your wife."

She was walking now, with care and in this half-gravity. The forgetfulness was diminishing, and the crying fits; there would be no need for more transplants. The doctors were quite pleased… Something squeezed inside his gut, as he looked at her.

She looked… a well-preserved forty, and moved with slow, painful care. Her face had filled out, a little, and she had gained back some of the weight, if not the muscle tone. The hair was cropped close, and only half gray; her teeth were the too-even white of implanted synthetic. Professor de Ribeiro rose and bowed over her hand.

"A salute to one so lovely and so brave," he said formally, bowing farewell to them both.

Cindy sank down with a sigh, and leaned her head against his shoulder. He put his arm around hers, feeling the slight tremor of exhaustion.

"Should you be up, honey?" he asked gently.

"I'll never get any better if I don't push it a little. I was with the girls," she said. "God, they're doing great, darling. Just… I get so
tired
all the time." He looked down, and saw that slow tears were leaking from under closed lids, made wordless sounds of comfort. "And I feel so old, and useless and ugly."

"You're the most beautiful thing in the solar system, Cindy,"

he said with utter sincerity. "I've never doubted it for a single instant."

She sighed again. "I like the professor. He's on whatever-it-is that's being hidden behind the
New
America
, isn't he?"

Cindy laughed quietly, without stirring, as he tried to conceal his start of alarm. "Don't worry, sweetheart, I haven't been steaming open your letters… Honestly, I'm sick, not stupid. And I've had plenty of time to think, and anyway, we're all here for the duration. I do like the professor; he reminds me of Dr.