Nemesis (33 page)

‘Welcome to the
Chiyome
,’ she said. She put her hands behind her back and gripped them tightly together. ‘You will remain in our custody and be treated as an honoured guest until you’ve been properly briefed. At that point, you will be at liberty to make independent choices. We will manage the repair of your ship on your behalf.’

Will stared at her. She felt as if he was looking through her eyes at something deep inside her – something unsatisfactory. Shame roiled in Ann’s gut, taking on a physical intensity that hurt like a stab wound.

‘I’m disappointed,’ he said quietly.

Though he sounded exhausted, something about his hands suggested that they itched to kill. Half of Will Monet’s psych reports suggested he’d never properly recovered from the atrocities he’d endured during the war.

‘You’re an officer of the IPSO Fleet,’ he added. ‘Doesn’t that mean anything to you?’

She swallowed back her regret, cleared her throat and tried for a level, commanding tone. ‘You are no doubt appalled by what we’ve done,’ she said. ‘Nevertheless, you’re not in possession of all of the facts. Our actions were motivated by a single goal: that of averting wholesale war. I can assure you that the logic behind our actions was sound. I’m not proud of my choices. However, I am doing what I perceive to be necessary.’

‘Then you’re a fool,’ said Will wearily. ‘Was that mess at Tiwanaku really part of someone’s plan? You’re playing about with alien tech you don’t understand.’

‘As are you,’ she replied. ‘With your every waking breath.’

‘I didn’t have a choice,’ he said, his voice hardening. ‘Now tell me – what kind of assurances can you give me that the
Gulliver
is safe?’ His eyes pinned her while he waited for her reply.

Ann realised then with slowly unfolding horror that they hadn’t seen the
Gulliver
’s signature when they entered the system. It was supposed to have arrived already. Without it, she had no leverage over the man in front of her. And they had no Sam, either, which meant they were without their best strategist, too. Her confidence began to slide like a house on mud. She glanced quickly at the summary at the top of her view to check, hoping he wouldn’t notice. Sure enough, no
Gulliver
. Will’s flexing, superhuman hands suddenly looked that much more menacing.

‘So long as Sam Shah is in control of that ship, their chances are very good,’ she said. ‘I would never have let you come here otherwise.’

‘And if not?’

‘I won’t insult you with platitudes,’ said Ann. ‘However, there’s every reason to believe that he’s in command by now. Chesterford is gone, which means he has full override control for the
Gulliver
’s flight system.’

Will snorted. ‘No, he doesn’t. His keys won’t work. Mark’s interface is backed by my security software, not the Fleet’s.’

Her breath caught at the news. The
Gulliver
must have headed for the Nerroskovi System, then. And with them, inevitably, the Nems.

‘If anything happens to Mark, I will hold you and your conspiracy responsible. Do you understand me?’ Will’s voice had taken on a trembling, unstable edge.

‘That is your right,’ said Ann.

‘I will find all of you, and tear each and every one of you apart with my bare hands.’

She blinked slowly, letting the threat pass through her. ‘An understandable reaction, given your current level of knowledge. I recommend that you spend the trip back to headquarters in coma. It will spare you both frustration and time.’

‘Try putting me in a coffin and see how far you get,’ he said.

Ann shook her head. ‘We do not actually wish you ill, Captain Monet. Please remember that. Everything we’ve done – that
I’ve
done – has been an attempt to restore balance to civilisation. Don’t imagine that any of this has been easy, or that it comes without pain. Also, please don’t try anything rash. We don’t want to have to defend ourselves and your position is weaker than you might imagine. We’ve developed countermeasures that work against your abilities. You won’t be allowed to infiltrate our computers, for instance. And we have weapons capable of either paralysing or killing you.’

‘I am here because I choose to be,’ said Will, ‘not because I’m a prisoner. I didn’t want to look at Nelson’s face any more. I don’t want to look at yours, either. But at least you’re going to lock me up and take me somewhere.’

Ann glanced away. She dearly hoped he couldn’t tell just how much this was hurting.

‘Indeed,’ she said levelly. ‘You may stay in this room if you like. It’s the best we can offer.’ She moved carefully past him to the hatch.

Will was as still as a mantis as she glided past. ‘I wanted to think you were better than this, Captain Ludik,’ he said. ‘I asked you to do one simple thing: look after the
Gulliver
.’

She couldn’t stand it any more. ‘A promise I would have gladly kept had it not already been superseded by the needs of the human race,’ she said quickly. ‘A promise I thought I was going to be able to keep, and would have been able to keep, had it not been for your own actions.’

‘Save your excuses,’ said Will.

Ann found herself nudged to the edge of tears. She couldn’t remember the last time that had happened.

‘I look forward to your briefing,’ she said, ‘and I sincerely hope we can rebuild a relationship based on trust once you’ve been properly apprised of the situation.’

‘Good luck with that,’ said Will.

Ann let herself out and sealed the hatch behind her. She gripped the doorway, unwilling to let the crew see the storm of emotion passing across her face.

‘All clear, Captain?’ said Jaco, his tone cool.

Ann nodded, her face turned away. ‘Captain Monet will be waiting in the privacy chamber during our return to Snakepit Station.’

‘Understood.’

The ice in Jaco’s tone had raised another notch since the
Ariel Two
had tried to make its escape. He’d not mentioned the fact that he’d recommended a second shot, but she could tell he was thinking it. She no longer cared. That phase of the plan was over now, thank Gal. And with Sam and Mark out of the picture, they had bigger things to worry about.

11:
COMPROMISE

11.1: MARK

Twenty-seven minutes after their arrival, the Photurian swarm had complete control over the tiny system. Thousands of drones flickered in waves of synchronised warp light-minutes wide. Embedded in the
Gulliver
’s senses, Mark felt like a fish hiding in the middle of a school of hungry piranhas.

Squads of specialised drones with what appeared to be high-speed engine modifications sat clumped around the most promising exit vectors. Others with sensor extensions swept around the in-system in packs, scanning each rock in turn. The Photurians had even started broadcasting something that looked like a clumsy soft assault, a simple query signal designed to encourage their quarry to announce its position. The mere existence of it suggested that their enemy was adapting its understanding of their machines as fast as it was acquiring language.

Over the two hours that followed, the wave of investigative drones bore down on the
Gulliver
’s hiding place until discovery lay just minutes away. By that point, though, Mark and his team were ready. Their furious efforts had been carefully screened by the
Gulliver
’s exohull. The asteroid beneath them had been quietly excavated, leaving its exterior untouched.

Their decoy, to his eyes, looked clumsy and ridiculous. A shell of badly printed rock overlaid on an engine made from battered drone parts, tacked together with welds and improvised adhesives. Numerous robots from their mesohull had sacrificed parts in order to make it function. The entire assemblage had been sprayed with an alloy-polymer mix to give it a halfway convincing spectrum. There’d been no time to do more.

‘Everyone set?’

‘We’re good to go,’ Sam replied. ‘Let’s make it happen.’

Mark triggered a set of tailored nuclear blasts inside the asteroid. The rock burst apart, revealing the faked-up ship that Sam and Zoe had created. It immediately started making for the edge of the system, trailing a mire of ionic clutter in its wake. The
Gulliver
, meanwhile, tumbled away with the rest of the asteroid fragments, its hull carefully tuned to make it as indistinguishable from the debris as they could manage.

Mark held his breath as their ship turned end-over-end. Their ploy would never have convinced a human observer. The
Gulliver
was simply too large and too symmetrical to pass for an asteroid chunk. They might as well have printed a sign on it, he thought:
Innocent rubble, please disregard.
Still, if the trick only bought them seconds, it might be enough.

He watched with mounting hope as nearby drones raced inwards, only to be trapped in the fake ship’s growing wake.

‘It’s working!’ said Zoe. ‘It’s actually working!’

Photurian robots streaked past them, apparently uninterested in the
Gulliver
, on their way to the lure where they piled up by the dozen.

As soon as he had enough drone traffic to hide in, Mark started pulsing his engine in sync with the swarm, angling away from the decoy as steeply as he dared.

‘We have a safe radius,’ said Sam. ‘Detonate.’

‘No!’ said Venetia. ‘Look, we’re drawing in some of those drones from the exit blockades. Give them a minute. We want to catch as many as possible.’

Mark’s virtual finger itched over the button. He watched the alien weapons close in.

In the end, he didn’t even have to act. Those Photurians with enough conventional velocity hurled themselves against the decoy, triggering the blast themselves. The searing white flare of an antimatter explosion flashed into existence, momentarily drowning out the light of the frail sun beside it.

The Casimir-buffers boomed all around them, as if fending off a direct bombardment. The team on the
Gulliver
burst into cheering as half of the swarm evaporated in a ball of light.

‘Holy shit!’ said Mark. ‘How much antimatter did you put in that thing?’

‘Enough,’ said Sam. ‘And that’s what counts.’

The remainder of the swarm abruptly decohered, their flashes desynchronised, their flight vectors a tangled mess.

‘Now!’ said Zoe. ‘While they’re still stunned. Head for their arrival vector. We need to find that transporter and take it out – it’s the only way to stop them from following us.’

‘On it.’ Mark spun the ship around. ‘Strap in, everybody. It’s going to get bumpy. Zoe, can you give me a vector?’

She slid him a display showing her workings. It revealed an empty patch of space way below the ecliptic that looked no different from the rest of the sky.

‘This is my best guess,’ she said. ‘I’ve extrapolated from their insert point, looking for emergent patterns in their spread. If it’s not there, it should be close.’

Mark headed towards Zoe’s destination, zigzagging like a member of the disorientated swarm.

While he couldn’t see a damned thing ahead of them, he decided to trust in Zoe’s skills. And any route out of the system was good enough in his book.

Before he’d got halfway, though, the Photurians began to reorganise. They started pulsing in sync again, headed towards him. Something about his flight path had clued them in, despite his best efforts.

Mark dialled in a pattern of standard evasives. ‘Okay, everyone,’ he said. ‘Hold still, please.’

This time, he remembered to engage the gel-sleeves on the crash couches before ramping up the gees. Cocoons of protective fluid slid up around each seat, encasing the passengers and supporting their bodies. Hemojectors attached to their arms to minimise the need for lung motion.

The changes came just in time. The drones matched Mark’s evasives perfectly. Pre-emptively, almost. The machines had upped their piloting skills as well, apparently. Either that or they’d simply memorised his tricks from before. Fortunately, Mark had plenty more.

He veered abruptly, diving back on himself and forcing the drones to change course, then threw the ship into a helical slewing path. This deep in-system, the net effect on the passengers was that of being slammed repeatedly against a wall at rapidly changing angles. The effect outside was to carve out a wide channel of dead space behind his ship.

The Photurians had already proved they were clueless about disrupter fields. He’d see how long it took them to clue in to this version. Several hundred swarm-bots dived straight into his wake and hung there, their inducers crackling uselessly.

It won him only seconds. Another team of drones curved in towards him from dead ahead. Mark tacked again, using the same trick. This time, though, the Photurians didn’t fall for it. They streaked along outside the pipe of unusable space, exploiting his helical path to gain on him.

‘Damn. They
are
smarter.’

He handed off everything but piloting to Ash and keyed in another suite of evasives, this time using his full attention to keep inventing new vector combinations. He swapped bursts of conventional acceleration with semi-random surges of warp whenever he had enough clear space to manage it. Faced with unalloyed human creativity, the Photurians lost ground.

Suddenly, Mark’s fine-sensor SAP came back with an image of something ahead, half an AU further out. Two knobbled, matt-black discs hung in space, spinning in tandem and linked by six feathery strands of some impossibly fine fibre. He’d never seen anything like it. It looked like a pair of night-coloured jellyfish joined at the tips of their tentacles, waltzing in space. He forwarded the image to Zoe.

‘I think we found it,’ he said.

‘That’s it!’ she exclaimed. ‘Wait. No. How? That’s not a ship. I don’t get it.’

Mark didn’t hang around for a technical discussion. He recast their trajectory into a Levy flight with an oscillating fractal dimension and stochastically inserted directed jumps towards their goal. With the baffled drones still falling behind, Mark swapped their course out for a straight dive and raced for the mysterious craft at maximum warp.

‘Fuck how it works,’ he said as the drive hammered him into his couch. ‘It’s where you said it would be and it looks fragile.’

‘But this can’t be it,’ Zoe subvoked. ‘It’s too small. How do you fit fifteen thousand drones inside
that
?’

She had a point. Each disc would be able to hold about a hundred at most. If they somehow packed drones in the space between the discs, they’d still have had trouble fitting everything in. The gap between the two ships was only about fifty kilometres wide.

‘Right now, I don’t care,’ said Mark.

As he neared their target he threw the ship around, dropped warp and dumped power into the thrusters, braking hard. The jelly-ships raced up to meet them. At the last moment, Mark rammed the warp back on, deliberately mistiming his bursts with rotating alignment. In effect, his drive became a gravity chainsaw.

The
Gulliver
plunged straight between the discs, mangling the delicate fronds and sending the alien ships juddering apart as the space between them ruptured in a hundred horrible ways. The
Gulliver
shot out of the other side of the gap leaving the tentacles of the jelly-ships mangled. Just two of the slender threads remained. The others drifted in broken tatters.

‘Good enough?’ he said.

Fresh cheering broke out in the
Gulliver
’s lounge. Mark grinned. His enemies might be smarter than before, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t still lick them.

‘That was
awesome
!’ Zoe yelled. ‘I didn’t know you could do that with a starship!’

‘Neither did I,’ said Mark. ‘But it worked.’

Ash passed back control of the ship’s subsystems with a wry smile. ‘Nice flying,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think we’d make it.’

‘You just got used to not having me about,’ Mark retorted. ‘The impossible is my speciality.’

For the first time since Earth, it felt like everyone aboard – or everyone conscious, at least – was on the same side.

They headed on out of the system, leaving a flickering mass of panicked drones in their wake.

‘New Panama, here we come,’ Mark said. ‘At last.’

11.2: WILL

Will waited in the privacy chamber for the kick of the
Chiyome
’s drives to signal that the crew were distracted. They were fools, every one of them. But Ann – Ann was a viper.

He’d respected her. He’d had faith in her. He couldn’t believe how wrong he’d been. When they talked back at Triton, he could have sworn he’d seen something golden there – a kind of honest, ethical pragmatism that he had badly missed. But he’d been projecting, seeing echoes of Rachel because he wanted to. He was disgusted with himself that he’d become so gullible. Andromeda Ludik was a different kind of creature altogether. Nelson had told him as much. In retrospect, his former friend’s words held far more import than Will had realised at the time. The pathetic traitor had actually been trying to warn him.

She and Nelson were alike, apparently. Both were ready to engage in the worst kind of betrayal for some self-aggrandising notion of their own moral duty. Neither had fought in the last war and lacked even the first inkling of what trust meant. Did they not see that they were repeating one of the worst episodes of history? Well, now he was going to make their lives as difficult as possible. Maybe they’d grow up a bit.

When a burst of warp knocked him gently against the wall, Will began. They’d have the wall cameras active, no doubt, but the kind of work Will had in mind wasn’t the sort you could see.

First, he tested the limits of the space with his interface. It had been well screened – exceptionally well, in fact. Three long seconds into his investigation, Will realised he wasn’t getting anywhere. It was as if the
Chiyome
’s designers had built the privacy chamber specifically with him in mind, surrounding it with layers of buffers and cut-offs that no amount of hacking would unpick. On reflection, he thought, they probably had.

A fresh tide of anger threatened to rise up and swallow him, so he reminded himself that Ann had promised as much. He already knew this conspiracy ran deep otherwise they’d never have been able to get him this far. Orchestrating the construction of a single ship was surely a trivial task in comparison to engineering something like the Tiwanaku Event.

Will let his mind fall back to a resting state and breathed deep. His entire body was comprised of smart-cells and he’d not yet met an environment he couldn’t adapt to. He moved to the hatch and pressed his hand against the interface port next to the manual exit stub. Then he extruded a biofilament into the port and started exploring.

Will’s head filled with blinding pain. He recoiled in shock, the filament dangling from his finger like a piece of limp string. He regarded it in bewilderment as the smart-cells within it shrank and died. The necrotic strand snapped off and fell to the floor where it greyed and melted into the padding.

Will examined his fingertip in alarm as his mind scrambled to make sense of what had just happened. Had the Fleet developed bioweapons that worked against him? If so, that was nothing short of astonishing. There’d never been any sign of it. Not a hint that their science was even in the same century as that which made up his new body, despite the hundreds of tissue samples he’d provided for Fleet scientists to examine. For the first time in years, Will started to feel genuinely trapped.

He probed again, this time more cautiously, using tailored dead tissue crammed with inert polymers as a sensing surface. Microscopic surface channels allowed him to get a sanitised taste of what lay beyond. What he found amazed him. If this data port was anything to go by, the room had been sealed against him using something half-alive and wildly antagonistic. It employed a kind of molecular technology he’d never encountered. He could feel a cascade of teasing enzymes rattling against his probe, twiddling the charges on the surface like a hacker prying apart a firewall.

The Fleet had never come up with this. They must have found it down on that planet. Which meant the conspirators had gone and sealed the room using alien bacteria they didn’t understand. Will groaned aloud at the insanity of it. They couldn’t have taken a more suicidal step if they’d tried.