InterstellarNet 03 Enigma Read online

  “Then stop causing it,” growled someone anonymously deep within the crowd.

  “Then cease your futile resistance,” the Foremost rejoined, her English flawless. “We are in charge here. Make no mistake. Hope the UP naval forces nearby make no such blunders.”

  Donald pressed to the front of the crowd. “What is the endgame here?”

  Glithwah licked her lips: a Snake smile. “We depart aboard the starship, of course.”

  “With us as hostages?” Donald asked.

  “Only in a manner of speaking,” she answered cryptically. “If you would have us gone, you can speed the process.”

  “How is that?”

  “This settlement stocks many valuable supplies. As the clan’s ships have other priorities”—and she inclined her head toward the dance of fleets beyond the window—“we thought to avail ourselves of your shuttles. The sooner we transfer those additional supplies aboard Discovery, the sooner we’ll be on our way. Who are your pilots?”

  “Not a chance,” Donald answered, to cheers. “You’ll have to loot us without our help.”

  As Grace interpreted Glithwah’s words, the accursed Snakes were improvising after one magnificently brave and foolish soul had destroyed their cargo ship. Well, the sad truth was, she needed to improvise, too.

  “I’m a pilot,” Grace called out.

  Donald shot her a dirty look, then turned back toward Glithwah. “That woman is a visitor. She isn’t qualified to fly our shuttles.”

  “Come closer,” Glithwah ordered.

  Grace made her way forward.

  Glithwah studied Grace’s face. “I’ve seen you before, in surveillance records on Ariel. What is your name? What are you doing here?”

  “Grace DiMeara. I flew Corinne Elman from Earth to Ariel, then here.”

  “A short-range shuttle ought not to challenge you.” Glithwah crooked a finger at her. “You’ll do. Come with me.”

  “Traitor,” a man hissed as Grace stepped out of the crowd.

  I’m doing this for all of you, Grace thought. Because, if you only knew, Snakes pilfering supplies are the least of your problems.

  • • • •

  Robots loaded while Grace did preflight checkout on a shuttle’s cramped, two-person bridge. Aboard Discovery, other robots would unload.

  The Snake robots she had seen would not fit on the bridge—and having witnessed three men try to take on a robot, her plan, such as it was, depended on that. And if not on the bridge, she wouldn’t have a robot minder aboard at all. Anywhere but the bridge, a robot would only take up precious cargo space.

  Grace had half expected to share the bridge with an armed Snake. She had steeled herself to attack it. Dial up the bridge lights. Take it by surprise and half-blinded. With her longer reach and twice the body mass, Grace felt confident she could take it.

  Perhaps Glithwah had done the same calculation.

  Whatever the reason, Grace would fly the hop to Discovery solo—ever in the sights of Snake warships and drones. If she were dumb enough to make a run for it, she’d get a missile up her ass.

  She was counting on that, too.

  “Loading complete,” an English-speaking Snake traffic controller radioed. He(?) dictated a flight plan. The Snakes followed familiar standards—not unexpected, because their ships looked human-built. However the Snakes had sunk their claws into those ships, it had happened a while ago. No way could a Snake fly an unmodified human ship. Language issues aside, the tiny aliens had tiny hands. “Do not deviate.”

  “Copy that.” A few taps on her console shut the cargo hatch and released the boarding tube. She gave the tube a few seconds to retract across the little moon’s cracked and cratered surface. “Shuttle six, departing for Discovery.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  As soon as she cleared the low-orbiting combat drones, she flipped on autopilot. She had about ten minutes to work unsupervised.

  • • • •

  Discovery loomed in the shuttle view port before Grace could even half finish surveying drawers and lockers on the bridge for anything useful.

  “The biggest ship ever constructed,” Donald had once boasted, as though by shuffling requisitions and duty rosters he had made a contribution. He had been escorting Corinne and Grace to a tour of the starship. “A klick and a quarter long. About five-eighths klick in diameter. One hundred twenty decks in all, fifty decks devoted to sustaining the onboard ecology.”

  To judge from the ships offloading, room and eco-capacity for a lot of Snakes. A freighter, small only in comparison to Discovery, filled one of the starship’s three hangar bays. Another vessel, too large to dock, held station nearby. As Grace watched, a cargo lighter cast off from the larger freighter, vectored toward the starship. Drone swarms parted to let the lighter through.

  Grace’s radio crackled. “Shuttle six, hold at ten kilometers.”

  “Copy that,” she said, wondering how many drones had her shuttle in their crosshairs. As if she could inflict any damage by ramming this behemoth. It would be like a bug hitting a windshield. But she had to do something.

  She watched the lighter settle into a hangar bay.

  “Shuttle six, proceed to hangar bay three, behind Discovery from your current position. Do not exceed fifty kph on approach.” Left unsaid: or else drones would take her out. “For your own safety, remain inside your shuttle at all times.”

  “Copy.”

  She had hangar bay three to herself. Aft of her shuttle, the massive bay door remained open into space. Two robots ferried crates from the shuttle; a third, guns in hands, kept watch. So, she assumed, did the slowly panning camera mounted above the air lock that led aboard Discovery. Her shuttle’s external cameras saw just the one.

  The robots did their job quickly. Five minutes after docking, with quick bursts from the shuttle’s compressed-nitrogen attitude jets, she lifted the emptied shuttle, then spun it to face outward. With slightly longer gas bursts, she eased out of the hangar bay. Once well clear she lit the main drive, heading back to Prometheus for another load.

  En route to her next delivery, she completed her inventory. She had solvents, cleaning agents, lubricants, and several gas cylinders for an oxyacetylene utility torch. She had flare guns and a box of cartridges. Scavenged from her pressure suit, she had a helmet radio to adapt as a trigger. As robots offloaded the shuttle for the second time, she fine-tuned her plans.

  On her third inbound flight, she completed her preparations.

  • • • •

  You’re a reporter, Corinne kept telling herself. You’re a reporter and this is news. She couldn’t manage to care. She did not foresee ever being allowed to leave this ship, ever seeing Denise again.

  In Discovery’s cavernous and echoing bridge, only Corinne sat—and not by choice. She had been bound into a crew chair. About fifty more chairs stood empty, or had been unbolted and stacked, outsized for the Snakes busy all around her. Most were technicians, laboring at, or inside, consoles, retrofitting the hardware for clan speak, stubby arms, and tiny hands. Other Snakes stood watch.

  High-pitched voices squealed in Corinne’s ears. Through a translator AI—that the Snakes provided a translator and let her listen to bridge chatter only reinforced her fears Glithwah intended never to let her go!—Corinne tried, and failed, to follow even a small part of the action. Beyond that the Snakes’ takeover was running a bit ahead of schedule ….

  Extending from deck to overhead, arrayed all around the vast circumference of the bridge, giant displays added to her mental overload. From cameras in the hangar bays: the ceaseless transfers aboard of Snakes and their supplies. In telescope views and tactical displays: United Planets warships, and the robotic drone swarms that kept the would-be rescuers at a distance. Relayed from cameras on Prometheus: the weary faces, devoid of hope, of hundreds of hostages. She tried, and failed, to spot Grace in the crowd.

  Glithwah, who had departed on an undisclosed errand, came loping onto the bridge, her magne
tic sandals clanging on the deck. With Corinne bound to a chair, they were almost eye to eye. “Enjoying the view?” the Snake mocked.

  As best her bonds permitted, Corinne shrugged.

  “And yet you find my people so interesting,” Glithwah continued. “Like clockwork you’ve shown up on Ariel, every five years on the anniversary of our setback. To gloat. To profit.”

  Your defeat! Corinne ached to correct, but she didn’t trust her voice not to quaver. And to judge by events unfolding all around, setback was the more accurate term.

  “Be happy,” Glithwah said. “This may be your biggest story yet.”

  Having kidnapping her, the Snake meant to let her go? Corinne felt the first stirrings of hope—to have them crushed as Glithwah licked her lips.

  The Snake said, “This ship carries a very powerful transmitter.”

  Corinne looked away. On one of the many bridge displays, a shuttle swooped in for a landing. Two robots stood by, ready to unload. A third—

  Corinne inclined her head. “Why is an armed guard in that hangar bay?”

  “As a precaution against stupidity.”

  As the shuttle’s cargo hatch opened, bots went to work. Corinne had to imagine the boom and clang of magnetized feet snapping to the bay’s metal deck. Stars shone behind the shuttle, through the hangar bay’s gaping outer doors. Something shiny streaked by: an armed drone, she presumed.

  “Let’s hope your friend Grace isn’t stupid,” Glithwah continued.

  “Grace? Why?”

  “She is piloting that shuttle.”

  Why would Grace …?

  Near the shuttle’s bow, the crew air lock began cycling open.

  Glithwah gave a high-pitched snarl that the AI translated as, “Remind the human pilot to remain inside her ship.”

  That warning, presumably, was radioed to the shuttle, even as the guard robot, with guns raised, stomped closer. By now, the shuttle air lock was half open.

  Flame erupted from the lock, engulfing the robot. Small objects sailed out through the billowing smoke. There were muzzle flashes and more fireballs, all the more startling for the eerie silence. Apart from the scattered bursts of light, black smoke hid everything from the camera.

  Did the thick smoke blind the bots, too?

  Glithwah shouted.

  “Put a squad into that hangar bay now!” the translator offered.

  “Not possible,” one of the bridge crew said. “The air lock onto the hangar bay is jammed. An explosion must have—”

  “Unimportant,” Glithwah cut him off. “Seal the emergency bulkheads on that deck. Cut through the hatches. Blow up the lock, if necessary.”

  “At once, Foremost.”

  On the hangar deck, out of the rapidly dissipating smoke, something loomed. It rose. It pivoted. And then, for an instant, before the image dissolved in static, Corinne saw—

  Fierce, blue-white light: the exhaust of the shuttle’s fusion drive! Hotter than the surface of the Sun, it would be melting everything and everyone it touched.

  On a tactical display, the icon of a ship burst from Discovery. The shuttle: accelerating like mad. Making a run for it.

  “Go, Grace! Go!” Corinne shouted, her eyes tearing.

  “Destroy it,” Glithwah ordered.

  The shuttle, caught in the pitiless stare of a telescope, popped onto a wall display. The little ship’s fusion drive blazed. Faster and faster the shuttle fled—

  Two missiles, faster still, burst into the telescope’s field of view.

  “Foremost, hail the shuttle,” Corinne pleaded. “Warn Grace to turn back.”

  “She made her choice.”

  The shuttle zigged and zagged, bobbed and weaved. The missiles, reacting to every maneuver, were closing fast. Closing … closing … closing …

  When this fireball cleared, the telescope display showed… nothing.

  CHAPTER 40

  In an eventful life, using more names than he could easily remember, Carl had been many things. Asteroid miner. Killer, if only in self defense. Fugitive from the mob. Rent-a-pilot. Commando. Jailor. Spy. To that list he had recently added felon, and when his theft of Hermes was discovered, he could expect to add prisoner.

  That the fate of the galaxy might rest on his theft remaining secret for another few days did nothing to encourage sleep.

  Not that sleep seemed possible anyway. Since leaving the Moon, Joshua, in the courier ship’s lone passenger seat, had carped about the unending two gees. That was understandable enough. But most of the nattering was Joshua arguing with Carl’s second passenger. Tacitus, snug in his portable server, could not have cared less about the acceleration. And with petabytes of Xool archive to explore, there was no possibility those two would run out of topics about which to squabble.

  When they took a break from Xool mysteries, it was only to debate matters possibly even more obscure. Were King Arthur or Robin Hood actual people, or purely myth? Carl had heard of more than a few lost colonies, but none was named Roanoke. He gathered that it got lost centuries before space travel. And as for their latest snit …

  “It was clearly a religious site,” Joshua said.

  “A burial site, I’ll concede,” Tacitus replied through his server’s loudspeaker.

  “That’s no concession, considering all the graves nearby. If it were only a burial site, why also construct it to predict solstices and equinoxes? Why put up all those megaliths at all?”

  “Bah,” Tacitus said. “How does predicting the solstice establish a tie to religion? The structure could as well be a solar observatory.”

  Stonehenge, Carl decided. He had seen the ancient stone circle months earlier, among the dozens of earthly sites he’d toured to draw attention away from his stopover in New York. Not that breaking into Grace DiMeara’s apartment had told him anything ….

  “Huh,” Joshua countered, “I could as well argue that maybe it was only incidentally a burial site. From the archives I’ve reviewed, a significant proportion of the interred bodies exhibit deformities. It could just as easily be a pilgrimage site, an early Lourdes, and the graves the resting places of those who failed to find their miracle cures.”

  Lourdes? Neolithic solar observatories? Carl said, “You two sound like an old married couple.” An old married academic couple, in any case.

  “He could do worse,” Tacitus said.

  Joshua ignored them both.

  By the time his friends turned to possible origins of the Atlantis myth, Carl all but tuned them out. He considered, yet again, insisting that they squabble by net—but being alone with his own thoughts would not help him sleep, either. Taking what comfort he could from their arcane banter, he counted the hours till Saturn.

  Until a klaxon wailed.

  “The ship’s okay,” Carl said, slapping the Acknowledge button. “That’s a comm alert.”

  He hadn’t said: we’re okay. Because in all likelihood, they weren’t.

  No one should know where they were. And yet, the alert text flashing on his console indicated a top secret message. It told him the authorities had found them. It told him he had failed. Whatever the unopened message’s precise wording, it had to mean Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go.

  Only the communiqué, when Carl read it, indicated something quite different.

  • • • •

  As improbable as it seemed, matters had gotten worse.

  “We picked up a broadcast,” Carl told his passengers. “Hermes hasn’t been spotted, but we need to respond.”

  And that meant revealing themselves.

  “Why?” Joshua asked. “I mean, you had reasons to be pushing my brain out the back of my skull. Reaching Prometheus unannounced and unexpected. Exploiting your Agency credentials there to commandeer the starship’s big transmitter. Exposing the Xool so universally that their presence can no longer be suppressed. That is the plan, isn’t it?”

  And in the process safeguarding the starship and its crew from the Xool—only all that had been ove
rcome by events.

  “Was,” Carl said. “Was the plan. The broadcast we picked up is a general UP naval recall.”

  Joshua frowned. “Recall from where?”

  “All over. Much of the navy is scattered across the outer Solar System, chasing pirates.”

  “And why is there a recall?” Tacitus asked.

  Carl said, “Snakes showed up in force in the Saturn system. They overwhelmed and scattered the naval detachment stationed there, then seized Discovery.”

  The odd thing was, the news didn’t surprise him. Not really. Because he so distrusted Glithwah? That was a part of it, surely, but there had to be more to it. Because Corinne was nearby, and it would be just her karma to get caught up in a second Snake hijacking? Maybe it would’ve been that, too, had he believed in karma. Because, with vessels going missing all over the outer Solar System, the problem didn’t extend to Saturn system? Maybe.

  The other odd thing was, the takeover had happened a day earlier. Why no naval recall till now? Because the brass had expected to resolve matters with its resources at hand? Or because they hadn’t decided how to spin the fiasco? top secret orders notwithstanding, no one could redeploy that many ships without the situation getting noticed.

  Maybe the news had leaked already.

  Carl aimed Hermes’ primary antenna at Saturn. And from that direction, the transmission preempting or overpowering commercial broadcasts, he saw—

  Corinne Elman, her face ashen.

  • • • •

  The military around Saturn bounced Carl along the chain of command for more than three hours before, at last, putting him through on a secure comm link to the local admiral. Three hours was more than long enough to confirm Carl’s bona fides with authorities on Earth. He doubted that was a coincidence.

  “Make it short,” Admiral Akihiro Matsushita snapped by way of greeting. He had a pencil-thin mustache and close-set eyes like two black marbles. “We have a situation here.”

  “With which you’ll want my help,” Carl snapped back. Hermes was two light-minutes from Saturn, decelerating furiously, and that made real-time conversation—barely—possible. “I’ll venture to guess you won’t find another Snake expert within a billion klicks of here.”