The Killing of Worlds (10 page)

And would there one day be other thinking beings inside them, in the small realities born of humanity’s hubris? Then those, making pocket universes of their own …

Frick shook his head. There was no time for philosophical digression. In 500 seconds, the
Lynx
would come under fire. The singularity generator’s shielding was needed at the front of the warship.

“Two minutes until freefall,” Frick shouted. “Let’s get this metal broken down.”

The crew—his best men and women—worked quickly, disassembling the huge armored plates as easily as if this process were among the standard drills, which it most certainly was not. Frick put his own hands in, running a controller down the starboard seam of the shielding. The controller sent out focused FM waves, a tight field that activated nanos buried throughout the armor. The nanos sprang to life and began breaking down the shielding into movable sections.

Sweat slid into Frick’s eyes as he moved the heavy controller in a careful line. Normally, the device would be lightened by its own easy gravity generator, but with the
Lynx
still running flat out, spot sources of gravitons were too dangerous. At eighteen gees acceleration, the random fluxes coursing through the ship were already deadly. Frick remembered the arduous trip out to intercept the Rix ship, a week under ten gees. A few days in, he’d seen a line of bad gravity go through a rating’s legs, one of the man’s kneecaps shattering like a dropped saucer.

Frick tried to keep the cut steady.

Taking the shielding apart was easy, of course. But doing it the right way was tricky. The
Lynx
would need the singularity generator quickly back in one piece again on the other side of danger. The black hole powered the ship’s photon cannon, artificial gravity, even life support. With the generator offline, the captain was running the batteries down just to give Frick these minutes for disassembly.

The heavy plates across from Frick shifted as they were cut apart.

“Slow it up over there!” he shouted. “You wanna be crushed? Save your final cuts until we hit freefall.” The largest of the sections massed five tons.

As the words left his mouth, a shudder went through the ship. A gravity ghost, reminding them all that the ship’s artificial gee was a very shaky proposition. For a moment, there was a nervous silence as the ghost passed.

Heat was building in the cramped space around the singularity generator. The nanos’ furious activity within the shielding walls had turned them red-hot.

“Environmental, environmental,” Frick said.

“We’re on it, sir,” came the response in his second hearing.

A tepid wind blew across his face, hardly sufficient.

“A little more?” he inquired.

“We’re on it, sir,” the woman repeated with maddening calm.

Frick scowled and lowered his cutter. He had cut as far as he safely could in one gee. The heat was unbearable.

He walked around the generator’s perimeter, checking his crew’s work. The giant sections loomed over him, seeming to hang by threads.

“Fine. Fine. Stop there!” he rasped. “Wait for f reef a 11.”

Suddenly, a panicked cry came from just behind him.

“Sir!”

He spun on one heel to face the cry.

“It’s cracking, sir!”

Frick’s eyes scanned the wall of shielding next to the yelping crewman. A spiderweb of fissures appeared, spreading even as he watched.

For a moment, he couldn’t believe it. The specs for singularity shielding were the most demanding in the Navy. No captain wanted a black hole coming loose in the middle of battle. And they’d calculated these cuts to the micrometer.

But something had gone wrong.

Then Frick’s eyes spotted the epicenter of the cracking. There was a small hole in the shielding, a centimeter across.

“Godspite!” he shouted. “One of the flockers hit the generator!”

Fissures spread from the tiny hole, like too-thin lake ice cracking underfoot. The hullalloy cried out, a screaming sound to wake the dead as it began to collapse.

“Priority, priority!” the engineer yelled, his hand whipping through the priority icon even as he invoked it. “Cut the engines and the gravity, Hobbes! I need zero-gee!”

But the shielding was already falling, coming down on them. The metal howled as its own weight tore it from the generator. Frick grabbed the crewman who’d spotted the fissures by the collar and pulled, planting his feet against the grabby surface of the deck. For a moment, he merely yanked the man and himself off-balance, but then the sudden bowel-clenching feel of freefall descended around them.

The ExO had heard.

Frick threw the suddenly weightless man out of danger, the ensign spinning toward safety.

But he had pushed too hard, he realized. The Second Law put Frick himself in motion, hurtling back under the shielding. His grabby boots left the floor, and he found himself helpless in the air.

The free piece of shielding floated inexorably toward him. The First Law now: It retained momentum from when it had been falling. With the engines and artificial gravity cut, the shielding was weightless… .

But it was still massive.

‘ It floated slowly toward him, no faster than a feather falling, less than a meter away. Frick’s hands clawed at the deck behind him, but the metal slipped under his fingers.

Why wasn’t he wearing grabby gloves? There simply hadn’t been time to suit up properly as he’d rushed to prepare this operation. No gloves! Frick had demoted ratings for this sort of idiocy. Well, justice would be served. The first engineer was about to be worse than demoted.

The shielding moved toward him, as slow and buoyant as some huge water craft gliding to bump ponderously against a dock.

Ratings’ hands reached for him. They’d all be crushed. “Clear off!” he shouted.

“Engineer?” came Hobbes’ voice. “What’s—”

“Give me one-twentieth-gee accel, flush starboard for one second!” he screamed as the giant fist of metal closed upon him.

He hoped his numbers—arrived at by pure instinct—were correct. He hoped Hobbes wouldn’t ask what he was screaming about. In the time it took to say ten words, he would be flattened.

The huge vise closed on him. Without logic, Frick pressed against it, all his strength against five thousand kilograms. He saw his crew’s hands grip futilely at the metal’s edges. The tons of hullalloy pressed relentlessly against him.

A cracking sound came from Frick’s chest, but then the slight bump of acceleration struck.

The shielding’s course fluidly reversed, as if some affectionate but massive metal creature had hugged him too tightly.

“Thank you, Hobbes,” he muttered.

The shielding moved away, only a hair faster than it had closed on Frick. Half a meter of space opened up, and hands—grabby-gloved hands, he noted ruefully—reached underneath to pull him out.

He took a deep, painful breath. Something popped in his chest. A few ribs had succumbed to the shielding’s tight embrace. A small price to pay for an idiot’s mistake.

“Hobbes,” he managed.

“What the devil’s going on down there?”

The shielding was still floating back toward the generator. Slowly, but still inexorably. They had to get it stopped.

“Loose metal,” he said, measuring the shielding’s speed with his engineer’s handheld and calculating. “One more acceleration. Opposite direction, at point-oh-two gees.”

Hobbes sighed with exasperation. She and the captain must be livid. They were supposed to be fleeing a Rix warship at eighteen gees, not nudging around the
Lynx
with tiny squirts of coldjet.

But the bump came, Frick’s grabby boots holding him firm. The metal edged to a near-halt in midair. He smiled at his calculations. Not bad for an old man.

“Hold in zero-gee,” he said. They couldn’t resume acceleration with the heavy shielding floating about. “We have loose tons.”

“Loose tons?” Hobbes exclaimed.

“Yes, ma’am,” Frick answered, holding his throbbing side. “Definitely tons.”

“All right, Frick, get that metal into the bow,” she said. “We’ll be within range of the Rix primaries in four hundred seconds. And thanks to cutting our engines for you, we’ll be at barely half a light-second range.”

Damn, the first engineer thought. The loose shielding had cost them two minutes of acceleration. Damn those flockers! How had he missed the damage?

He just hoped the armor would be worth the lost distance from the Rix gravity cannon.

“Crew, we are going dark early,” came the captain’s voice. The old man didn’t sound pleased.

“Ten seconds,” Hobbes began the count.

“All right!” Frick shouted to his crew. “We’re doing this in the dark: no second sight, no com, no gravity!”

“Five …”

“Cut all the pieces out. But we’ll be in microgravity once the cold-jets start,” he shouted. “You and you, get this piece of tin moving toward the bow. And watch out. I happen to know it’s heavy.”

A few of the crew laughed as they sprang to their work. But the boisterous sound dropped off as the ship went dark.

The heads-up status displays, the hovering symbols that marked equipment, the chatter of ship noise and expert software, everything in second sight and hearing disappeared. The ship was left dim and lifeless around them, a mere hunk of metal. All they had to see by was unaugmented work lights, making the generator area a shadowy, red-tinged twilight zone.

Then the coldjets started, pushing the
Lynx
to orient it bow-first toward the Rix battlecruiser. The microgravity shifted the loose plates of shielding again, but by now the crew had attached handholds and stronglines to them, and they soon had the beasts under control. But in the dim light and swaying microgravity, it felt like the below decks of some ancient warship on a pitching sea.

Frick looked reflexively for a time stamp, but his second sight held nothing. The fields that created synesthesia were highly penetrative and persistent—the Rix would be looking for them in their hunt for the
Lynx
. Second audio was out of the question as well; only hardwired compoints were to be used. He’d gone over this with Hobbes, but it hadn’t seemed real before now.

Frick damned himself for not thinking to bring a mechanical chronometer. Had there even been time to fabricate such an exotic device?

“You,” he said, pointing to a rating. “Start counting.”

“Counting, sir?”

“Yes. Counting out loud is your job now. Backwards from … three hundred eighty. Count slow, in seconds.”

A look of understanding crossed the rating’s face. She started in a low voice.

“Three hundred eighty, three hundred seventy-nine …”

Frick shook his head at the sound. He was using a highly trained crewman as a clock, for god’s sake. They would be running handwritten notes next.

His angry eyes scanned the dimness of the generator area. Everywhere, huge and unwieldy pieces of metal were beginning to move with agonizing slowness. Each was supported by a web of strong-lines. The cables were packed with stored kinetic energy, windup carbon that would contract when keyed. This purely mechanical motive force was invisible to the Rix sensors, but it was capable of pulling the weightless if massive sections of hullalloy through the ship.

Frick looked about for a rating with free hands.

“You,” he called.

“Sir?”

Frick held up his bare hands. “Get me some gloves.”

In 370 seconds or so, the Rix might turn them all to jelly, but damned if Watson Frick was going to be crushed by some piece of dumb metal in the meantime.

Katherie Hobbes had never heard the battle bridge so silent.

With the synesthesia field absent, most of the control surfaces had turned featureless gray. She seldom appreciated how few of the screens and controls she used every day were physical. It looked as if the frigate’s bridge had been wrapped in gray, grabby carpeting, like some featureless prototype. The few hard icons that remained—the fat, dumb buttons that were independent of second sight—glowed dully in the red battle lights. The big airscreen that normally dominated the bridge was replaced by its emergency backup, a flatscreen that showed only one level of vision at a time, and fuzzily at that.

Trapped in the dim world of primary sight, the bridge crew moved in a daze, as if synesthesia were a shared dream they’d all just awoken from.

Not that their confusion mattered. There wasn’t much they could accomplish with the
Lynx
running in its near-total darkmode. The frigate’s pilot staff were handling the coldjets, nudging the ship through a very slow arc—ninety degrees in eight minutes—to keep the bow directly lined up on the Rix battlecruiser. The
Lynx
was like a duelist turned sideways, keeping the smallest possible area oriented toward her opponent. The pilots spoke animatedly among themselves, out of Hobbes’s hearing. The executive officer instinctively made the control gesture that should have fed their voices to her, but of course second hearing was gone as well. Hobbes knew why they were frustrated, however; for their calculations, the pilots were using a shielded darkmode computer hidden behind the sickbay armor. The machine had about as much processor power as a robotic pet.

At this range the Rix sensors were very sensitive. Only the most primitive electronics could be used.

Hobbes turned her mind to Frick’s engineering team. They should have the impromptu armor plating in position by now. She rotated an unwieldy select dial at her station, trying to find the team. The usual wash of sound from below decks had been reduced to a smattering of voices; the only dialogue that reached Hobbes came through the hardwired compoints at key control points on the ship. The low-wattage handheld communicators they’d broken out were to be used only on the captain’s orders. At this range, Rix sensors could detect the emissions of a self-microwaving food pack boiling noodles. Even medical endoframes had to be shut down. Captain Zai’s prosthetics were frozen; he couldn’t budge from the shipmaster’s chair. Only one of his arms was moving; the other was locked in a position that seemed painfully posed.