The Killing of Worlds (5 page)

But then a flechette, favored by its initial position and relative velocity, plumbed the last dregs of its acceleration and struck the generator. The tiny drone only managed to make contact at a few hundred meters per second, but its impact had some tiny effect: The strength of the gravity hill wavered for a millisecond.

And in that opening the rest of the flechettes slammed home.

The sphere of artificial gravity convulsed once, expanding. Finally, a toy balloon inflated too far, it burst into nothingness, a wave front of easy gravitons lighting up the sensors in Marx’s scout. Then space flattened itself impassively before him.

Marx took his scout drone and its growing retinue through the resulting hole in the Rix perimeter. The master pilot smiled exultantly. He was going to get his chance. He was going to do some damage.

If only Zai could hold the
Lynx
together.

“Just give me five minutes,” he muttered.

“Contact in four minutes, sir,” Hobbes reported.

The captain’s eyebrows raised a centimeter. The flockers were arriving ahead of schedule.

“They’re kicking, sir,” Hobbes explained. Kick—the increase of a rate of acceleration. “Maybe they suspect what we’re up to.”

“Perhaps they simply smell blood, Hobbes. Can we have separation in time?”

Hobbes refocused her attention to the heated conversations among the engineers working below. They were attempting to eject the energy-sink’s main generator, to separate the
Lynx
from its own defensive manifold, which was now glowing white-hot from the point-blank pounding of the frigate’s four photon cannon. The manifold was designed to be ejected, of course; warships had to shed their energy-sinks when they grew too hot from enemy fire. But usually the generator remained on the ship while the manifold was discohered, allowed to fly apart in all directions. Captain Zai’s plan, however, demanded that the manifold remain intact, retaining its huge shape as the
Lynx
pulled away from it.

Therefore, the gravity generator that held all the tiny energy-sink modules in place had to leave the frigate—in one piece and still functioning.

The engineers didn’t sound happy.

“Slide that bulkhead now!” the team leader ordered. It was Frick, the First Engineer.

Godspite, Hobbes thought. There was still an exterior bulkhead between the generator and open space.

“We’re not at vacuum yet,” a voice complained. “We’ll depressurize like hell.”

“Then strap yourselves to something and depressurize the bitch!” Frick countered.

Hobbes checked the rank-codes on the voices: Frick of course was head of engineering; the team clearing the obstructing bulkhead came from Emergency Repairs, regular Navy filling in. A chain-of-command problem.

She cut into the argument.

“This is ExO Hobbes. Blow the damn bulkhead. I repeat: Don’t bother matching the vacuum, don’t waste time sliding—blow it.”

Stunned disbelief silenced both sides of the argument for a moment.

“But Hobbes,” Frick responded, his line now restricted to officers’ ears only. “I’ve got unarmored ratings down there.”

Damn, Hobbes thought. The ratings had been pulled from other sections: maintenance workers, low-gee trainers, cooks. They wouldn’t have been assigned armored suits. Their pressure suits could stand hard vacuum, but weren’t equipped to survive an explosion.

But there wasn’t time. Not to get the ratings out of danger, not even to get the captain’s confirmation.

“The flockers are kicking on a steep curve. Time’s up. Blow it,” she ordered, her voice dry. “Blow it now.”

“Does the captain—” the other team leader began.

“Now!”

The situation beacon guttered magenta in her second sight—an explosion aboard ship. A fraction of a second later, the actual shock wave of the blast rippled through the bridge.

Hobbes closed her eyes, but cruel synesthesia didn’t permit escape. She could see it: low on the engineering wedge of her crew organizational chart, a row of casualty lights turned yellow. One swiftly flickered to red.

“What was that?” Zai asked.

“Separation in twenty seconds.” Hobbes couldn’t bring herself to say more.

“About time,” Zai muttered. The captain ran far fewer diagnostic displays than his executive officer. He must not have seen the casualties yet.

The engineering teams said nothing as they completed their work. Only grunts of physical labor, the hard breathing of shock, and the background sounds of shrieking metal as the generator began to move.

When she was sure that there would be no more delays, Hobbes expended a moment to order a medical response team to the blown bulkhead. The ship would begin acceleration in a few seconds to pull itself away from the manifold, and the medtechs would have to struggle through the pitching corridors in pressure suits. The
Lynx
was about to run stealthy as well, shutting the artificial gravity and other nonessentials for the few seconds until danger passed. It would take the medtechs minutes to reach the stricken crewmen.

Another of the engineering casualty lights shifted to red. Two lives gone.

Hobbes forced her attention back to the bridge’s main airscreen display. The long wedge of the
Lynx
‘s primary hull slid back from the radiant circle of the energy-sink manifold, pulling back to interpose the effulgent manifold between frigate and approaching flockers. To conceal the maneuver from the flockers’ sharp-eyed sensors, they were running on cold jets, spraying water from the
Lynx
‘s waste tubes, using their own shit as reaction mass. The ship moved with painful slowness. The primary hull would be a mere two hundred meters out of position when the drones hit—barely its own girth.

At least Zai had his shield now, Hobbes thought somberly. Two dead, three grievously wounded, and a hull breach all before a single Rix weapon had struck the
Lynx
. But the blazing manifold now floated between the flockers and their target.

“We’re ready, sir.”

“Impact in ten seconds,” the watch officer said.

“Well done, Hobbes.”

Hobbes felt no flush of pride at the rare praise from her captain. She just hoped her sacrifice of the two young ratings would pay off.

The flocker democratic intelligence noticed a change in its target.

The enemy prime was close, a hair over three seconds from contact. Absolute time was moving very slowly, however, compared with the speed of the squadron’s thought. The laser pulses with which the flockers exchanged data—the connections that formed their limited compound intellect—moved almost instantly up and down the tightly spaced formation. Squadrons were often spread out over thousands of cubic kilometers, distances which slowed the mechanics of decision making. But this flocker group was so compact that thought moved at lightning speeds; the intellect had plenty of time to observe as the situation evolved over these final, luxurious seconds before impact.

Despite their quick intellect, the flockers couldn’t see very well in this formation. The straight column lacked a parallax view, and the intense radiation from the enemy prime’s energy-sink manifold had almost blinded the forward flockers, making the center of the manifold—where the prime must be—a dark patch against a vibrant sky.

But why was the manifold already expelling energy? Of the Rix fleet, only the battlecruiser itself could have delivered this much energy to the target, and it was more than eight million kilometers out of range. The flockers suspected that the enemy prime had fired upon its own sink. A bizarre occurrence, this early attempt at self-destruction, sufficiently strange that the squadron’s hardwired tactical library offered no answers as to what it might mean.

The flocker formation felt blind, and yearned to spread wider. Without parallax, it had no multi-viewpoint reconstruction of the target to call upon.

The flockers voted. Laser flashes of debate and decision flickered up and down the line for almost a full second before they decided to expend a few more milligrams of acceleration mass per individual. This close to the enemy prime, there appeared to be little sand left to avoid, after all. The squadron broke its tight column, expanding to a few meters with width over the next half second.

With this new parallax view, the squadron’s group intelligence realized that the manifold was shifting.

The glowing disk—4,500 kilometers away and rushing toward the flockers at 3,200 kps—had accelerated less than a pitiful five meters per second. But the change was detectable, the tiny push forward propagating through the energy sinks like a ripple expanding in a pond.

The flocker squadron pondered: Why would the enemy prime bother with an acceleration of such small size? Had they fired a projectile rearward, resulting in the forward push? Perhaps the Imperials had realized their own imminent death and launched a deadman drone. But after a close reading of the ripples in the blazing energy sinks, the flocker intelligence calculated that the push had been gradual.

The squadron quickly decided to expand its view again, and a few dozen flockers shot outward at fifteen hundred gees. This burst of acceleration would drive them uselessly into the burning manifold, but in the remaining one second before impact, their sacrifice improved the squadron’s view dramatically.

The flockers saw it then: The enemy prime had shrunk to a shadow of its former size.

Even against the blinding glare of the manifold, they could now see that the prime’s characteristic radiation signature was greatly reduced. The easy gravitons were still coming in abundance, but the evidence of charged weapons and drive activity had disappeared. Mass readings were reduced to a hundredth of what they should be.

A half-second before the first flockers were to reach the position where their target should be, the squadron realized the truth: The energy sink manifold had been disconnected from the enemy prime.

The target had disappeared.

This was a problem.

Master Pilot Marx found that his scout was still alive.

A Rix hunter drone had burned him seconds ago, spraying Marx’s vessel with its very dirty fission drive as it flew past. The canopy had snow-crashed for a few seconds, but he was back inside now, his senses dramatically reduced.

Marx swore. He was so close to the Rix battlecruiser. This was no time for his machine to fail. Another 150 seconds and he would be able to hit the enemy. With what exactly, he wasn’t sure. His retinue of conscripted drones had been reduced to a few craft. But at this range he could see the reflective expanse of the Rix receiver array spread out before him, fragile and tempting.

So close.

He checked his craft’s condition. No active sensors. The drive was out, the reaction process lost and irreparable. The scout’s entangled communications supply was damaged, and with all the error-checking the craft responded sluggishly. But he could still control it, and send light-speed orders to other drones in the vicinity.

Marx ejected his fusion drive, and jogged a small docking jet, forcing the scout drone into a tumble. His view spun for a moment, then stabilized as expert software compensated for the craft’s rotation. With its active sensors offline, the scout should appear convincingly dead.

He counted his assets. A trio of expended ramscatter drones, two stealth penetrators with almost no reaction mass left, a decoy that had miraculously survived everything the Rix had thrown at it, and a careening sandcaster whose receiver had failed. The sandcaster drone was tantalizingly useless. It still had its payload, but the last order it had received before going deaf had put it in standby mode. Now it ignored Marx’s pleas to launch its sand or self-destruct. He wondered if repair nanos inside the caster were working to bring it back to life.

The master pilot waited silently, watching as his tiny fleet converged upon the enemy battlecruiser. Just before shunting him from the bridge, the captain had mentioned sand. True, it was the perfect weapon against the Rix receiver array; it would spread over a wide area, and at high speed would do considerable damage. But the Rix had swept the Imperials’ salvos of sand aside with their host of gravity repeater arrays, protecting the huge receiver. They had anticipated Zai’s attack perfectly.

Marx and his tiny fleet were within the gravity perimeter, however. If he could only get his remaining sandcaster to respond. It was barreling toward the huge receiver array on target, but intact. The drone itself would punch through the thin mesh of the receiver, leaving a hole no more than a meter across. Useless. He needed it to explode, to spread its sand.

Marx cursed the empty ramscatters. Why did those things invariably launch all their flechettes? With even a single projectile, he could destroy the failed sandcaster, unleashing its payload.

Perhaps he could ram the sandcaster with one of his other craft.

The scout itself was without maneuver capability, the damaged fusion drive ejected. The decoy drone was too small, and its mass wasn’t sufficient to crack the tough canisters of sand. The stealth penetrators were even smaller, with only their silent but achingly slow coldjets for movement. They couldn’t ram the sandcaster at anything faster than a few meters per second. The empty ramscatter drones were Marx’s only hope.

He opened up a narrowcast channel to the two ramscatters, and gave them trajectories as precise as his expert software could calculate. But these were weapons that thought in kilometers, not meters. The ramscatters themselves were not designed to ram, but to launch flechettes, and their onboard brains weren’t capable of tricky flying. Marx knew he would have to fly them in himself, from the remote perspective of the scout drone, with sufficient precision to strike the meter-wide sandcaster.

With a three-millisecond light-speed delay, this was going to be tricky indeed.

Marx smiled quietly.

Truly, a task for a master pilot.

The squadron intellect found itself cut in half.