Edward M. Lerner (25 page)

The graphic told Art nothing. “Helmut, is this what you expected?”

“No.” Helmut softly drummed fingers on the tabletop. “I’m missing something.”

Was Helmut imagining things, or was Mashkith yet again a step ahead of them all? The latter would not surprise Art. He considered himself a decent amateur chess player. Maybe a month after he had made a gift of a chess set, the Foremost visited Callisto. Art had offered a friendly game; Mashkith had mated him in twenty-three moves. How many moves ahead had Mashkith plotted the visit of
Victorious
?

Dammit, this was no time to lose confidence. It might not be too late to save Eva and the others! “Call the lifeboat with our people A. Helmut, you think the Snakes dropped off a stealthed lifeboat, call it B. That at some point the Snake crew took over A, stealthed it, and destealthed B. B returned to Himalia, remotely operated or on autopilot, to trigger the explosion on its final approach. The mystery ship you spotted is A, and our people remain on it.”

Helmut nodded agreement.

“I begin to understand your interest in scoopships,” O’Malley said. “Lifeboat B must have been sneaked into position. Once
Victorious
was in the neighborhood, no ship could leave it without risk of being seen. Nor could B have been prepositioned in deep space, as lifeboat A was. B approaching from deep space would have meant major deceleration, too much time at risk of being spotted on IR. But couldn’t
any
of these scoopships have ejected a stealthed, transponder-less lifeboat? What is this traffic-control download telling us?”

“Fair question. Any ship meant to be kept secret must avoid chance discovery by passing human ships. Stealth and lack of a transponder would help, but as you say, there’s no disguising an in-use fusion drive.” Helmut pointed at the holo spark of the distant, stealthed ship on which Eva and Corinne and Chung might still be alive. “Drive exhaust is how we spotted this. Somehow they needed to deposit B directly in the right place to begin….”

Helmut felt himself grinding to a halt. How many days had it been since he had slept longer than a catnap? Fear of being sold out by Rothman; a hasty flight, interrupted by the Himalia catastrophe; the evacuation run to Leda and back to Callisto; overtaking
Actium.
…

Stay on task, and think sneaky. “Sorry. I’m slow today. Captain, can you add something to the display? Close approaches made by our lifeboat to any moon.” A new icon appeared in the holo. On the inbound leg of its flight, Lifeboat A passed close by the minor and very inner moon, Adrastea. It orbited deep inside Jupiter’s magnetosphere, a very hard radiation environment where people never went.

Maybe, thought Helmut, I’m
not
hallucinating. “Okay, here’s a new UPAA query. Show ten closest approaches by Snake ships to Adrastea.”

Coffee and doubt gnawed at his gut while this time thirty minutes passed. At a chime, the final wall lost its faux paneling. In its place, a gray blob hung in space surrounded by the red arcs of passing ships. Adrastea was twenty-six klicks along its long axis; that provided a sense of scale. The red flybys were close, some only a few hundred klicks away. “That’s it.”

“Very clever.” O’Malley tipped his head from side to side, studying the newest holo. “One of these flybys ejects lifeboat B, some time when no human ships are around. B waits on Adrastea. Eventually, lifeboat A coasts by with its active transponder. B takes off and matches course. At the appointed time, A goes stealth and turns off its transponder. B destealths and mimics the transponder on A. There’s never more than one drive running. From a distance, no one could tell.”

“But what if a human ship … oh, I see. That’s why A followed such a corkscrew course. Killing time because some human ship might otherwise have been too near Adrastea when it arrived. We thought it was flight training.” Art laughed softly to himself. “No wonder Mashkith trounced me in chess.”

Helmut could feel the final pieces falling into place. “Lifeboat A is diving towards Jupiter when B takes its place. So A continues its dive, only it uses its engines to alter course a bit. Jupiter slings it out of the ecliptic. And there,” he pointed, “it is.”

Spacers help spacers. First of all, they help shipmates. “I say we go get them.”

The first hint of danger came perilously late.

Arblen Ems Rashk Lothwer was quietly reveling in the satisfaction of his own command. His crew was handpicked. The ship was well engineered and well built, and he had proudly named it
Valorous
. They were necessarily flying semi-blind, making lidar sweeps ahead for space junk in their path, but emitting nothing behind that might reveal them. Nothing but their undisguisable exhaust.

Lothwer’s only complaint, as they slipped stealthily away, was with the low acceleration on fusion drive. The herd designed for efficiency, not fast getaways. As a lifeboat, a few more days exiting a solar system by fusion drive hardly mattered since years under interstellar drive would follow. On this mission, though, the small fusion engine meant that much longer before they safely exited the zone of likely detection.

Caution was appropriate, but it did not distract from the facts. This operation,
his
operation, had gone smoothly. The Foremost was stingy with his approval; the recognition due this mission—due
him
—would be all the more precious for that. Naught remained of this operation but a triumphant rendezvous a few days hence.

Four brilliant heat sources suddenly flaring in his passive IR sensors shattered Lothwer’s complacency. They had to be ships in pursuit, flipped to decelerate. Their presence disclosed, one broke radio silence. “Unidentified K’vithian ship, this is the UP frigate
Nelson
. Destealth immediately and maintain course.”

No harm now in a lidar scan backward. Blue-shifted echoes showed his pursuers moving at three times his speed and closing fast. To get secretly as close as possible, they would have waited to the last moment to apply the brakes. The math was simple; they would be upon him within hours.

His sole advantage was the value of his prisoners. Had those giving chase not wanted to capture
Valorous
, the first hint of their approach would have been a flyby, close-range laser attack. Cursing softly as he sorted options, Lothwer added a second complaint to the short list of the ship’s deficiencies. Its only weapons were anti-space-junk lasers.

Valorous
could neither outrun nor outfight the enemy. It had to evade them. The good news was his stealth gear could fool more ships than had been sent after him.

Lothwer cut the fusion drive, disappearing for now from the enemy’s IR sensors. Projecting his course was a simple exercise in ballistics—but
Valorous
remained distant enough that extrapolations would be imprecise. The uncertainty would grow until they found him optically. It was a weak ploy, he admitted to himself: Four pursuit ships could share data and triangulate bearings. Once the first UP vessel got close, the hull of
Valorous
would be warm enough to betray them.

As tactics officer, he had drilled and drilled—assuming the use of Hunter ships. His reflexes and instincts were off for this encounter. And while he did nothing, the enemy ships crept closer and closer in the tactical display

Valorous
must try to leave its projected course, and his adversaries in the other ships knew it. He could conceivably flip and change course. Whatever way he turned, some pursuers would have an oblique view of his fusion exhaust. Triangulation would make plain where and when he was coming. And almost certainly there was a second, slower tier of ships waiting just for that, still in stealth mode. Maybe a third set.

What could he change?
Valorous
had chemical attitude rockets. Fired in proper sets, they would nudge its course rather than pivot it about its center of mass. Would that be detected? If only he knew the capabilities of UP military sensors. If only he had brought decoy rockets.

Thoughts of things he did not know and did not have were unproductive. What
did
he have to work with? An interstellar drive that would be suicide to activate this deep in the solar system. The antimatter, explosive beyond belief, to power the presently useless drive. A simple timer or detonator to deactivate containment would make the fuel canister a powerful bomb. Too powerful, even if he could improvise a way to deliver it, because it was all in a single canister. The eruption of radiation from that large a matter/antimatter annihilation event would kill
Valorous
as surely as its pursuers. And yet, Lothwer thought—

If he could not contrive an escape, extravagant destruction would be their mutual fate.

Long ago and far away, Mashkith’s grandfather had taught him b’tok. Those times were among his earliest and fondest memories. Grandpa had been thoughtful and patient, yet totally engaged until each lesson was mastered. Wringing every bit of potential advantage from any situation. Enduring, when no other option presented itself, until prevailing becomes possible. Discerning the distinctions between swiftness and haste, between thoughtfulness and indecision. Anticipating countermoves by his opponent, and his own counter-countermoves, before making his own move.

At first he and Grandfather played in the small central plaza of their habitat. Grandpa insisted it was important to learn to concentrate despite distractions. Eventually, Mashkith noticed people often whispered as they passed, or gave them sidelong looks. Grandpa would not explain. After Mashkith questioned him too many times, Grandpa moved their games into the small family apartment. Mother always told him proudly how Grandpa had been a great leader, Foremost of the clan; Mashkith imagined
that
was why people acted as they did.

Mother and Grandpa had sheltered him as best they could, but that protection ended when Mashkith entered clan academy. Classmates were cruelly quick to tell him the whole story. His grandfather had disgraced the clan, had cost Arblen Ems its rightful place among the Great Clans, had doomed them all to exile and desperate hardship. Didn’t he know? Amid their endlessly inventive acts of harsh and sadistic revenge, through the cold indifference of the teachers and officers, Grandpa’s lessons in concentration and will sustained him—even as he could not help, in his innermost thoughts, from raging at Grandfather for his shortcomings.

If b’tok was a metaphor for life, then the aim in life was winning. Mashkith had endured, because for a long time no other option presented itself. He had endured until prevailing became possible.

With concentration Grandpa would have admired, Mashkith relegated to a distant background the purposeful motion and conversation on the crowded bridge. In the secondary tactical display, Lothwer’s peril was obvious. Besides the four closest pursuers, those that would now be visible to Lothwer, from the vantage point of
Victorious
four more ships could be seen giving chase.

Someone on the human side knew his business. Backtracking showed the converging UP vessels had begun their pursuit hidden behind Jupiter. Given that head start, the armed Hunter ships aboard
Victorious
could do nothing in time to help. Likely more ships were stealthily en route from the inner solar system, waiting to exploit any hasty move the clan might make. A sortie right now from
Victorious
could be such a mistake.

As Mashkith watched, the icon representing the lumbering lifeboat Lothwer had named
Valorous
flickered before fading to the dim sphere representing an extrapolated position. Lothwer had cut the fusion drive. It was the correct move—but insufficient. The sphere slowly swelled to match the growing uncertainty in the ship’s no longer trackable position. The sparks representing the enemy ships in chase edged ever closer.

Mashkith could not help thinking: Grandpa, had you not overreached, I could have crippled the UP military at will. The trapdoor hidden in for-export biocomp was for just this sort of emergency.

Grandpa’s ghost had an answer: Had I not been ambitious, you would not now command this fine vessel, poised for greater glory than anything I ever imagined. Now do as I taught you. Focus on the problem.

Nothing
Victorious
could do would help the fleeing lifeboat. But Lothwer was crafty. What if little
Valorous
evaded pursuit? What then? Mashkith’s thoughts began evaluating actions Lothwer might take, options he could exercise. If he did
that
then the UP forces might do
that
….

The next move, right or wrong, was in Lothwer’s hands. The countermove was in the hands of the humans. But as for the counter-countermove….

Thank you, Grandpa
.

The four ships stalking the still invisible
Valorous
continued to narrow the gap. A newly revealed second tier followed. The humans were
serious
.

They had cause, Lothwer was willing to admit. What was the death toll from the Himalia explosion?
Valorous
‘ outbound path had sometimes passed through human media broadcasts, both 3-V and unencrypted infosphere. Each time, the reported havoc was worse. Lothwer told himself Himalia itself and the picket ships had been military targets. He could construct no such rationale for the hundreds more who had died on the co-orbiting moons, or in accidents among the evacuation ships. Surely thousands, total, and mostly civilians.

Would the humans be any less vengeful than any clan would be? Instant death by antimatter explosion would be merciful.

Reconciliation with his fate strangely calmed him.
I have nothing to lose now; only the humans do. Why not be bold?

Bright points shone in the holo, taunting him. They would soon surround the sphere of uncertainty representing limits to the probable position of
Valorous
. People and computers aboard each of those ships surely already scanned for a faint heat signature.