The Stone Dogs (58 page)

Perhaps as revolutionary were the spinoffs of this rivalry…

History in a Technological Age

by Andrew Elliot Armstrang, Ph.D.

Department of History

San Diego University Press, 1991

We're never going to win this race unless we trip the fuckers somehow; all this effort isn't doing anything more than bailing out a sieve. We've got to stop playing to their strengths.

Representative Louise Qayner

Minutes of the Long-Range Strategic

Planning Board

Senator Eric von Shrakenberg, presiding

Archona, Archona Province

April 16, 1962

DRAKA FORCES BASE ARESOPOLIS

MARE SERENITATIS,LUNA

MARCH 25, 1998

2000HOURS

Yolande turned her head to scan the other side of the Wasp class stingfigher.
This is what it's like to be
a ghost
, she thought.

She ran her hand through the solid-seeming bulk of a crashcouch, looked down to see her shins disappear into the deck. A Wasp had room for exactly two crew, clamped into their couches for most of the trip.
Or what it's like to be a time
traveler.
The events she was experiencing were nearly a thousand hours in the past. She watched the movements of the pilot's gloved fingers on the rests.

"Coming up on pod," the pilot said. "Twelve kay clicks and closing. Status." The wall ahead mapped trajectories and ran digital displays.

"Locked," her Weapons Officer said, his voice tight but steady.

So young
, Yolande thought.
Gwen will be that old in a few
years. So young.

"Unauthorized craft, identify yourself." That from a resonator film somewhere in the cabin. Flat, grating Yankee accent with the mechanical overlay of a simple AI-interactive system. "You are on an intercept trajectory to within prohibited distance.

Identify yourself or alter course."

"Visual," the pilot said.

"Acquisition," the Weapons Officer replied, and called it up on the screen.

A rough cylinder of slag-surfaced metal, surface pocked with bubbles and lumps from the vacuum-condensation refining process. A pod at one end with sensors and the guidance system, and rings of low-velocity hydrazine steering jets, a minimal course-correction system to send a hundred thousand tonnes of whatever from the asteroid belt to the Alliance smelters and factories, here on the Moon and points inward. These days, a good deal of it might end up on Earth, headed for splashdown sites in the Sea of Cortes or the Cook Strait or the Inland Sea.

"Composition," the pilot was saying.

There was a second's pause and the Wasp's computer replied:

"Iron, fifty percent, nickel twenty-one percent, chromium group, sixteen percent, tungsten ten percent, fissionables three percent, volatiles and trace elements."

Valuable,
Yolande thought. The Yankees were stronger in the asteroid belt; their initial lead in deepspace pulsedrives had given them an opening they had never relinquished. Much cheaper to drop heavy elements down into the solar gravity well than boost them out of Earth's pull and atmosphere, even now that freight costs were coming down so low. The Alliance would trade metals for the water and chemicals the Draka took from the Jovian and Satunian moons, of course, but it was cheaper to hijack where you could. Better strategy, too, since it hampered their operations and forced them to divert resources to guarding their slingshot modules and scavenging the asteroids for scarce volatiles… She had had a hand in formulating that policy.

At least it's been better strategy until now.
A rectangle appeared in the "air" in front of her, an exterior simulation of the two spacecraft. The Wasp drifted, a blunt pyramid tapering from the shockplate at the rear to the crew compartment at the apex. Slim tubes rose from each corner of the plate, linked to the pyramid with a tracing of spars; asymmetric spikes flared out to guide the parasite-bombs riding in station around the gunboat.

The simulation limned the outlines, since like any warcraft this was armored in an absorptive synthetic that mimicked the background spectra.

"Closing," the pilot said. The outside view showed a needle-bright flicker behind the gunboat, deuterium-tritium pellets squeezed into explosion by the lasers. Yolande started, almost surprised not to feel the acceleration that pushed the crew back into their cradles. "One-ninah kay clicks, matchin'."

"Unidentified craft, this is your last warning," the robot voice droned.

"Eddie, shut that fuckah up, will yo'?" the pilot said, exasperated. The man grunted, touched a control surface.

The control chamber vanished, leaving a blackness lit only by the face of the investigating officer in the central portion. "That's it, Strategos," he said, shrugging. "End datalink. The fighter went pure-ballistic from then until we grappled what was left."

Yolande gestured, and the black turned gray, then faded into her office. She motioned again.

"All right," she said, as the rectangle expanded to occupy a square meter above the surface of her desk. "Give me the record of the recov'ry action."

"Well, the Yanks scrambled once they'uns realized what was happenin'," the Intelligence Section merarch said. The three-dimensional image lifted a cigarette to its lips. "Two Jefferson-class patrollers, with six and four gunboats respectively, in position to do somethin'. Thirty personnel, all told."

Yolande nodded: Yankee gunboats were single-crew, and the Jeffersons had ten apiece. The Alliance military relied more on cybernetics than the Draka did. "That was all they had within range."

Space was
large
, and even with constant-boost pulsedrive units it took a long time to get from anywhere to anywhere, compared with on-planet applications. There were times when she thought it was more like the situation back in her greatgrandfather's time, when it could still take weeks to cross an ocean, months to traverse a continent. Then trouble blew up, and the soldier on the spot was left with their ass hanging in the breeze and no way to call for mama.

"Luckily, we'n's had three Iron Limper corvettes on, ah, patrol."
Corsair duty
, her mind added sardonically, using the crew slang. "This's what happened."

The view shifted to points and data-columns, a schematic of the corvettes and their twelve—
no,
eleven
—gunboat outriders, and the machinery's best guess on the Yankees. The usual thing for space combat, a long gingerly waiting before a brief flurry of action. A pulsedrive was sort of hard to hide anywhere in the solar system unless you had something the size of a planet to shelter it, but that told you very little except the past position and a fan of possible vectors. Space-ships were another matter; between stealthing and datamimic decoys, long-range detection had always run a little behind the counter-measures.

"Well, both parties knew they'd have to intersect somewhere along the trajectory of the cargo pod and the stingray." A section of the curve that looped in from beyond the orbit of Mars turned red, the area where either set of warships could match velocities.

"The Yankees went into constant-boost, figurin' to overrun us on the pass, then go back fo' it. We went silent, coastin'; had the advantage, comin' out-system from sunward."

"Ah." She could guess what came next. You could think of a pulsedrive as a series of micro-fusion bombs and field-shielding and reaction mass heated to plasma—or as a sword of radiation and high-energy particles tens of kilometers long.

That was the Staff way of seeing it. Her imagination flashed other images on the inner screen of her consciousness. The matte-black shapes of the Limpers falling outward. A shallow disk perched on a witch's maze of tubing like some mad oil refinery, all atop the great convex soup-plate of the pusher. The dozen crewfolk locked into their cocoons of armor and sensors, decision-making units in a dance of photonics. Units that sweated with fears driven down below consciousness; the ripping impact of crystal tesseract-mines scattering their high-vee shrapnel through hulls and bodies, blood boiling into vacuum.

The pulse of a near-miss and secondary gamma sleeting invisibly through the body, wrecking the infinitely complex balances of the cells. Tumbling in a wrecked ship, puking and delirious and dying slowly of thirst…

Fears carried down from the ground-ape; hindbrain reflexes that twitched muscles in desperate need to flee or fight, pumped juices into the blood, roiling minds that must stay as calm as the machines that were master and slave both. Yolande swallowed past dryness, and used the inward disciplines taught by those who had trained her for war. The slamming impact of deceleration; railguns, lightguns, mine-showers, missile and counter-missile, the parasite-bombs driving their one-megaton X-ray beams like the icepicks of gods. The drives punching irresistibly through fields and shieldings; perhaps a single second for the stricken to know their fate as plasma boiled through the corridors.

Silence. Long slow zero-g fading past, waiting for the sensors to tell you if you were already dead…

She shook her head. "
Hugin
totalled." Sheer bad luck, a parasite-bomb impact just as her drive was cycling out a new pellet. Twelve dead. "Lothbrok mostly made it." If the biotechs could repair tissues so riddled. "
Ragnar,
no losses."

"A successful engagement," the Intelligence Officer said.

"But…"

"
But
we still don't know what the
shit
happened with that-there original intercept."

"Strategos…" The merarch hesitated, then continued.

"Strategos, admitted all we've got is what downloaded to optical storage befo' they bought it… but
somethin
catastrophic
did
happen. Iff'n I didn't know better, I'd say point-blank parasite bomb hit, with a chain-fire in the feed tubes fo' the drive. But there weren't no parasite bombs travelin' with that cargo pod."

"Incorrect, Merarch. There were five."

For a moment the man looked blank, then his eyes widened slightly in shock. Their gaze met in silent agreement:
With the
fighter, its own weapons.
"This is speculation, an' not to go on record. Understood?"

He nodded. They were silent for a moment; his voice was slow and musing when he continued: "Bout' the prisoners… We kept them in filterable-virus isolation an' did a complete scan, as per usual."

Security had gotten even more paranoid of late, now that Alliance nanosabotage capacities were approaching the size level of Draka gene-engineering skills. Not to mention the ever-present nightmare of dataplague contamination; the Alliance's superiority in compinstruction was indisputable. The Domination took what precautions it could—offline back-up systems for all essential functions, manual overrides, physical separation—but there were limits to what could be done in an environment as dependent on computer technology as space.

"Well, somethin' sort of odd came up. Very damn odd. The biotechs
found
somethin' on six of the seven livin' prisoners, some sort of latent… weeell, virus or
somethin
back in the central nervous an' limbic systems. Very tricky, very, they only found it on 'count the discrepancy in the neural DNA analysis was the same on each. Wouldn't have found it say, two years ago; it would have come out as the usual noise-garbage."The cellular codes of any mammal have far more information capacity than they need.

"So we blipped the info to Biocontrol Central." Yolande waited while the man moistened his lips. "Order came back, freeze in place. Then about two hours latah, a priority-one command to wait fo' a courier. One came direct, with orders to turn them ovah to the headhunters. That an' wipe the data an' fo'get we'd ever seen it."

"Castle Tarleton?"

"No; from the Palace. From the Archon's office, an' under his personal code." They exchanged another glance; he had placed his life in her hands with those words. A calculated risk; that Eric von Shrakenberg was her uncle was widely known. That she met regularly with him on more than family matters was not.

"Well." For the first time in the interview, Yolande smiled, a slow cold turning of the lips. "Well, we can't argue with
that.
"

Normally there would have been a bureaucratic bunfight; Aresopolis was War Directorate territory, after all. "Not that I don't love to trip our esteemed colleagues up as much as anyone, but in
this
case…"

She grinned at the thought of the slow disassembling the Security Directorate would use on the prisoners, and the other officer turned his eyes aside slightly. Yolande Ingolfsson's feelings concerning the enemy in general and Americans in particular were well-known, but still a little disconcerting to meet in practice.

The grin faded, to be replaced with something resembling a human expression. "And, Thomas…" the first name was a signal, and he leaned forward, an unconcious expression of attention.

"… "I have an odd feelin' about this. That data had better
really
disappear. Or I think
we
might." What data?" he said.

She nodded. "Ovah. Service to the State."

"Glory to the Race," he replied formally, and the rectangle went blank.

"Fade," she said, and the lights dimmed. "Review, casualties."

Her mouth thinned; this was a disagreeable chore.

Theoretically, the unit commander… No, she had ordered the action. The general policy was set higher up, but she made the operational decisions. It was her responsibility. A figure in the form-fitting vacuum skinsuit blinked into existence before her, turning toward the pickup and laughing, bubble-helmet in one hand. A cat hanging in mid-air beside it, obviously unused to low-G and falling in spraddle-legged panic. The figure was young, with fair hair cropped close. Data unreeled below: Julian Torbogen, born… Very young, only a year older than her oldest. A face with the chiseled, sculpted look the Eugenics Board was moving the Race toward, but an individual for all that. The dossier listed it all: pets, hobbies, grade-evaluations, favorite foods, friends, love-affairs, hopes (…
habitat design is so
complete
an art!
…), hates.