InterstellarNet: New Order Page 20

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.

  Maybe that was the answer! Was he too late?

  “Computer. Liquid gas inventory? Bottled gas inventory? Current rate of oxygen consumption? On tertiary.”

  Data scrolled up the side of the selected display. Lothwer licked his lips in joy. Give thanks to life’s summer: In all things, the herd planned conservatively. Although lifeboats were meant to be operated by AI with crews in cold sleep, the onboard oxygen supply was sufficient for months of wakefulness. There were smaller but ample supplies of liquid nitrogen and carbon dioxide.

  “Everyone in suits. Vacuum in five minutes.” He looked again at the tactical display. “No, three minutes.” Lothwer made it into his own suit in two.

  “Computer. Life support off. Controlled air venting. Reactor at minimum.” Vent what heat we can. Reduce heat sources as much as possible. “Inner and outer airlock hatches open.”

  Weightlessness and his pressure suit slowed his progress sternward toward a cargo hold filled with cryogenic tanks. As he struggled, Lothwer netted to the crew a map of interior hatches throughout the ship. “Immediate action.”

  Hatches were predisposed to swing shut as a defense against pressure loss; there was no good way to keep one open. Entering the cargo hold, he spot-welded its hatch to an interior wall using the small torch from his suit’s utility kit. His attention then turned to the massive liquefied nitrogen tank. Tank stirrer: on. Heating element: on. Emergency pressure relief valve: open. Billowing vapors enveloped him. He moved through the fog to what he remembered was the liquid carbon-dioxide tank. He oriented himself by touch, then used an augmented-reality view to repeat the process. Valorous had four liquid-oxygen tanks; he vented one of those, too.

  Frigid vapors rushed down corridors and out the gaping airlock. The UP vessels that had yet to detect Valorous certainly would not sense the far colder gases now spewing from her. Would the turbulence of gas detoured into open rooms lower their minuscule thrust? It had been easier for the crew to close the doors than to model the problem.

  As small as was the thrust of escaping gases, those large tanks might sustain it for hours. Over time, that lateral acceleration would take them out of the search zone. And for as long as the gases flowed, they also carried away a bit of tell-tale heat from the corridor walls.

  Somewhat cooled. Slowly diverging from its last course. They were token measures. Desperate measures.

  Now, with his hand back on the antimatter trigger, all Lothwer could do was wait.

  A piercing alert brought Mashkith instantly awake. The real-time clock function of his implant showed it was midway through the third watch. His eyes turned automatically to the small holo replica of the bridge’s main tactical display. UP vessels surrounded the indicated search area for Valorous. “Your report.”

  “My apologies, Foremost.” Rashk Keffah seemed more exuberant than sorry. “Contact from Lothwer.”

  In a moment, Mashkith was also exultant. Valorous had escaped.

  CHAPTER 32

  Helmut lay reading in the narrow b
unk of his small cabin. Crew escorted him everywhere he went. Marines probably waited just outside his door. He lacked the network privileges to access the corridor sensors, and he was too proud to be seen opening the hatch for a look.

  A firm knock startled him. He sat up. “Lights up.” And louder, “Come in.”

  The cabin was snug for one. Carlos Montoya was a big man; he could barely close the hatch behind him. “Tight quarters, so I’ll get to the point. Much to my surprise, you’re real.”

  “What do you mean?” Helmut asked.

  The door groaned as Carlos leaned against it. “I’ll save us both time and energy. If Art hasn’t told you already, I’m UPIA. So….

  “Fingerprint match from a water glass you used in the mess. DNA match from a hair in your hairbrush. Your real name is Willem Vanderkellen. You’re the Frying Dutchman.”

  A dozen denials died unspoken. “I can’t refute my own DNA. So now what?”

  It was as though Carlos had not heard the question. “Personally, I’m very impressed. Changing identities is hard. Laying low is hard. Avoiding the kind of people you’ve pissed off, that’s really hard. How much is your head worth?”

  “To me or the mob?”

  The door creaked ominously as Carlos shifted his stance. “I’ll quit playing with you. I’m a spy, not a cop. Best I can see, you acted in self-defense. In any event, Willem Vanderkellen is legally dead.”

  It penetrated that his hands hurt. Glancing down, he was clenching two fistfuls of blanket. Helmut willed his fingers to relax. “Fake IDs. Falsifying flight records on Lucky Strike‘s lifeboat. Money laundering.”

  “I repeat: I’m not a cop. I don’t judge you for what you did to stay alive.”

  Was he terrified or relieved? Helmut couldn’t decide. “So what now?” he tried again.

  “Now I listen to you a bit less skeptically. You’ve proven your smarts.” Carlos wedged himself into a corner; other than climbing onto the bunk with Helmut, that was the only way the door could be opened. “By the way, I’ve had an oblique word about you with the captain. If you don’t disabuse O’Malley of his misimpression you’re UPIA, I think you’ll find yourself free to wander about Actium.”

  Maybe he should leave well enough alone. Helmut found he had to know. “Why?”

  “Why am I so understanding?” In an instant, Carlos’ manner slid from macho to grief. “I had friends and colleagues on Himalia, people who depended on me to keep them safe. People I failed.”

  Who would have thought he and a UPIA agent could have so much in common?

  There had been no announced call-ups, no official calls to arms, no declared maneuvers—but all those actions were quietly underway.

  After an anomalous surge in interplanetary traffic triggered a threshold alarm, T’bck Fwa began carefully sifting the data. There was much to examine: unplanned reserve training exercises; short-notice drills between the UP military and national guards; sudden large, non-competed ordnance orders placed at major aerospace companies; hurried departures of military and police ships throughout the inner solar system; the redeployment of Galilean militia vessels from evacuation duty in the Jovian system. The official UP response to all questions was “no comment.”

  The infosphere was rife with conjecture and supposed government leaks about tensions between the UP and K’vithians over the Himalia disaster. The speculations and innuendo on the blogosphere were starker: The two species were on the verge of open warfare.

  It appeared to T’bck Fwa there had been a falling out among thieves. If only there were some way to exploit that situation….

  Mashkith walked slowly around the main tactical holo. An expanding swarm of UP ships, with most of the small Galilean navy soon to join them, continued to hunt for Valorous. Occasional messages indirectly relayed through stealthed buoys allowed him to follow Valorous on its slow drift beyond the main search volume, but that sphere kept expanding as ships arrived. Lothwer’s luck could not continue indefinitely.

  Many more vessels, presumably warships, were approaching on high acceleration from the inner solar system. As the opposing forces increased, Arthur Walsh, aboard the UP cruiser following close behind, grew ever more insistent in his demands. Those demands had lately progressed from consultation to reversing course. As best Pashwah-qith could explain “material witness,” it sounded like the humans suspected Hunter involvement in the Himalia explosion, but had not yet decided what to do about it.

  Had he erred by guiding Chung to exclude Walsh from the lifeboat cruise? It had seemed so clear: Walsh was the most insightful of the human delegation, the most likely to have suspected something before boarding Valorous. It had seemed safest not to take that risk.

  Now that Walsh had taken charge of local operations, Mashkith found he missed the gullible Ambassador Chung.

  Time favored the other side. The clan would act now.

  Many paths through Harmony now felt like steep inclines. K’Choi Gwu ka walked carefully, panting from the exertion, repeatedly thrown off balance by the ship’s unpredictable wobbles. Her tentacles were muddy to the second joint from wading through ponds and streams overflowing their banks, and most recently from wrestling wriggling rithafish at least half her size back into their wave-wracked pool.

  Mashkith’s guards were due soon to retrieve her. None of the crew-kindred would have questioned her skipping this cleanup—but refilling the aquaculture pond involved a tertiary processing node that controlled associated pumps, valves, and drains. Tapping into that node had gotten her an unscheduled news update.

  T’bck Ra’s latest radio intercepts more than merited a little honest dirt, while leaving Gwu’s thoughts more confused even than her equilibrium. One moon destroyed, and three so exposed to steady bombardment as to be rendered uninhabitable. Unverified but credible rumors of fleets massing. Hints and gossip of imminent conflict between humans and K’vithians. What did it mean? What outcome should she wish? On what basis might she even choose sides?

  Trailing dirt and mud, Gwu reached the communal shower. It was not working. Swee was supervising someone whose head and half his tentacles were deep inside a torn-apart wall. Burst pipe, she guessed. Moistening a rag in an apparently clean puddle, she dabbed at the muddiest of her matted fur.

  “This is how you prepare for the Foremost?” Waves rippled from the tips of Swee’s tentacles to his torso and reflected.

  She laughed back, knowing he mocked Mashkith, not her. No, she laughed because she needed the release. “You could be replaced with a rithafish, you know. I now know several very well.” She laughed again at his eye-blinking amusement.

  She was slightly late to arrive at the dormitory airlock, having taken a moment to change into a clean utility belt. The head guard growled at her, lips curled to bare his teeth. They rode the elevator to the bow in silence.

  Gwu could guess the reason for the latest summons. Mashkith wanted urgently to increase acceleration—after retrieving T’bck Ra’s latest intercepts, she understood why—but that would be catastrophic. Harmony remained configured for spin gravity despite what felt like about one-quarter gravity of acceleration along its spin axis. Much higher acceleration while still spin-configured would rip apart farms and ponds, destroying the ecology that sustained them all.

  To accelerate further, rooms, bays, holds, farms—most of the ship’s interior—had to swing from their spin-mode orientation, parallel the rotational axis, to their acceleration-mode orientation, perpendicular to that axis. Repositioning the interior segments was a complex task that required the most exacting control. Matched regions on opposing sides of the hull must swivel precisely in coordinated pairs, their individual motions continuously fine-tuned whenever any significant mass—such as the contents of a trim tank or fish pond—sloshed or shifted. At the same time, segments that were curved in their spin-mode positions required flexing and straightening into flat decks for acceleration mode. Presently contiguous areas separated; presently disjoint regions reunited; internal braci
ng redeployed. Countless passages and stairways, ducts and pipes, power buses and waveguides telescoped or expanded to maintain connectivity throughout the ship. Even minor imbalances made the whole ship wobble, introducing new forces and making the process that much harder.

  The bimodal interior architecture was conceptually simple but mechanically complex—and never to Gwu’s liking. She had recommended accelerating halfway and then decelerating halfway, all at about one-thirtieth gee. In her approach, the ship always spun. No need existed for interior reconfiguration. But….

  The interstellar drive had yet to be run continuously for years and whole octads on end. No consensus could be reached on putting a crew-kindred at risk with “insufficiently tested” technology. Rather than delay Harmony‘s mission by many octads to wait out a like-distance, crew-less test flight, Gwu had acquiesced. Harmony would accelerate un-spun, coast spun, and decelerate un-spun. Brief high acceleration vs. ongoing low acceleration: The antimatter investments and transit times were similar.

  Vibrations were now so constant that Gwu scarcely noticed them. A tremble that rose to her attention came every few paces. A big tremor struck as they rode the central-core elevator. She stretched four tentacles to brace herself against the walls, but the shaking knocked two escorts from their feet. One “accidentally” bumped her as he stood back up.

  The further aft and inward the curved cylindrical segments pivoted, still spinning, the stronger the lateral component of centrifugal force. Absent compensation, that strengthening force vector would eventually exceed the sticking friction between decking and deck contents. Mud and soil would slide. Shear forces would snap roots, tumbling trees and crops into temporary gaps between decks. Bodies of water would overflow their banks. Nondestructive reconfiguration required a compensating thrust from the stern, with continuously calibrated acceleration by the ship’s main fusion drive.

  Finally, they reached Mashkith’s cabin. He was unusually focused on something; entering, Gwu glimpsed a tactical display crowded with ships. The UP navy, she guessed. Would capture by the humans, if it came to that, change anything?