Stone Dogs, page 35
Yolande grinned. It was a much less pleasant expression than the intellectual interest of a moment before. "To business, then. Can yo' get me retanked on reaction mass? I ran it down somethin' fierce, matchin' velocities here."
"Oh, yes. Trivial. Do you wish water or liquid oxygen?"
"Hmmmm. No, we're rigged fo' 02, we'll go with that. How long?"
"Two days for your ship, and one to rig the stills. A week for the rest of the fleet."
"Do it, then. First priority. We need the intelligence data on that Yankee ship." And an installment payment on the debt they owe me, she thought. A small, small payment on a very large account.
ABOARD TRANS-AMERICAN SHIP PATHFINDER
EARTH-CERES
JUNE 12, 1982
The lounge of the Pathfinder had acquired a certain homeyness in the month and a half of transit, Cindy decided. It was on the second-highest of the eight decks in the pressure section, a semicircle on one side of the core tube, across from the galley and stores. One corner was posted with drawings and projects; she and several of the other mothers held classes for the children there, around the terminal they had appropriated. Young Alishia Merkowitz showed real talent in biology; she really should talk to the girl's parents… There was a big viewer, but the passengers generally only screened movies or documentaries; the sort who moved to the Belt didn't go in for passive entertainment.
There was a group mastering the delicate art of zero-G darts, another arguing politics. The coffee machine was going, scenting the air; it looked odd, but you did have to push the water through here. A courting couple were perched by the sole exterior viewport, but they were holding hands, oblivious to the spectacle of the stars. Two young men were building a model habitat from bits of plastic—scarcely a hobby, they were engineers and had a terminal beside them for references. She could catch snatches of their conversation:
"… no, no, you don't have to use a frame and plating! Just boil out the silicates, inject water, heat and spin and the outer shell will…"
Dr. Takashi moved his piece. Cindy Guzman Lefarge started and returned her attention to the go board.
"Oh, lordy, Doctor," she said. "You're never going to make a go player of me."
"You show native talent," he said, considering the board. It was electronic, and they were using light-pencils to move the pieces; the traditional stones were a floating nuisance in space.
"I'm surprised you don't play the captain," she said, frowning. A quarter of her pieces were gone… which still left her with more than her opponent, who had started with a substantial handicap. But far too many were nearly surrounded.
"Ah." He smiled; Professor of Cybernetic Systems Analysis Manfred Takashi was a slim man, fifty, with dark-brown skin and short wiry hair. "Captain Hayakawa is impeccably polite, but I doubt that he would welcome social contact. Not from me."
Cindy raised her brows. "Well, he is fairly reserved. I would have thought, though, you being Japanese—"
The professor laughed. "Half Japanese, my dear Mrs. Lefarge, half Japanese. Even worse, half black."
The woman winced, embarrassed. Overt racial prejudice was rare these days in the cities of North America, even more so in space. Of course, some of the family in the South Carolina low country were still unhappy about her mother's marriage to a Maya from Yucatan, even a much-decorated naval veteran of the Pacific campaigns back in the Eurasian War.
"Actually," the man continued, "it is an interesting change. In Hawaii it was the Japanese side of my heritage which created problems."
She nodded. The Imperial occupation in the early '40s had been brutal, and the angers had taken a long time to dissipate. Even now some of the older generation found it difficult to accept how important Japan had become in the councils of the Alliance.
"You must be eager to get to work, on,"—she lowered her voice—"the Project." Best to change the subject.
"Indeed." He turned the light-pencil in his hands. "I—"
Trhannnng. The sound went through the hull, like an enormous steel bucket struck with a fingernail. Conversation died, and the passengers looked up.
"Attention!" the captain's voice. "We have suffered a meteorite impact. There is no danger; the hull was not breached. I repeat, there is no danger. All passengers will please return to their cabins until further notice."
"I must get back to Janet and Iris," Cindy said, rising briskly. She forced down a bubble of anxiety; a meteor strike was very rare—odd that the close-in radars had not detected it. "Continue the game after dinner, Professor?"
"I hope so," he said quietly, folding the board as he stood. "I sincerely hope so."
"Distance and bearing," Yolande said.
"100 k-klicks, closing at point-one kps relative," the sensor officer said.
Yolande could feel the strait tension in the ship, a taste like ozone in the air. A week's travel. Overcrowded, since she had dropped off most of the ship's Auxiliaries who handled routine maintenance and taken on another score of Citizen crew from Batu. The main problem with Draka was keeping them from ripping at each other. Constant drill in the arcane art of zero-G combat had helped. And now action. Not that the pathetic plasma-drive soup-can out there was any menace to a cruiser, but they had to capture, not destroy. Much more difficult.
"Bring up the schematic," she said. They would not detect the Subotai for a while yet; her stealthing was constructed to deceive military sensors.
Two screens to her left blanked and then showed 360 degree views of the Alliance vessel, Pathfinder. A ferrous-alloy barrel, basically, the aft section holding a reaction-mass tank and a simple engine. An arc broke the mass into plasma, and magnetic coils accelerated it out the nozzle, Power from solar-receptors or a big storage coil. Thrown out of earth-orbit much as the Subotai had been, then additional boost from a solar sail. That was still deployed, square kilometers of .05-micron aluminum foil, rigged on lines of sapphire filament; but soon they would furl it and begin velocity-matching for Ceres. A long slow burn; plasma drives were efficient but low-thrust.
Would have begun their burn, she corrected herself. It was odd, how vengeance always felt better beforehand than after… Sternly, she pushed down weakness. There was a duty to the Race here, and to her dead. If she was too fainthearted to long for it, then nobody else need know.
Yolande reached out a hand; that was all that could move, with the cradle extended and locked about her. The couch turned on its heavy circular base to put her hand over the controls. The schematic altered: command and communication circuits outlined in color-coded light. Provided this is up-to-date—
"When's their next check-in call?" she said.
"Five minutes."
There were no Alliance warships nearby or in favorable launch windows, but it was important not to give them more warning time than was needful. She wanted to have Subotai back with the flotilla long before anything could arrive; this was direct provocation, and it could escalate into anything up to a minor fleet action. Probably not. Still…
Her fingers played across the controls. "Here. See this rectenna? Throw a rock at it first. Time it to arrive just after they report everything normal."
"Making it so," the Weapons Officer said, keying. "Careless of them, all the comm routed though that dish." A low chuckle from some of the nearer workstations.
"They like to mass-produce," Yolande said. A light blinked on one of her monitor screens, echoing the Weapons Officer's. On the outer hull a long thin pod would be swiveling.
"Monitoring call," the Sensor Officer said. "Standard garbage, messages to relatives." She paused. "Coded blip. Recordin' fo' future reference." A minute passed. "End message."
"Fire," Yolande said. A cold-flame feeling settled beneath her breastbone. The first attack on Alliance civilians since the Belt clashes.
The light blinked red. "Away," the Weapons Officer said. In the pod, two charged rails slammed together. A fifty-gram slug rode the pulse of electromagnetic force, accelerated to ninety kilometers per second. "Hit." The target would have vanished in a puff of vapor and fragments.
"No transmission from target, monitoring internal systems."
"With all due respect to ouah colleagues of the Directorate of Security," Yolande said, "I'm not takin' any chances that they got the plans exactly right. We'll cripple her first on a quick fly-by, then get within kissin' range. Drive, prepare fo' boost; pass at one kps relative, then decelerate an' match at five klicks. Weapons, cut the sail loose, hole the control compartment, wreck the drive." A plasma jet could be a nasty weapon in determined hands. "Cut the connections to the main power coil." There were megawatts stored in that, and if it went non-superconducting all of it would be converted to heat, rapidly. "Then we'll see."
"Odd they don' have no suicide bomb," the assistant weapons officer said, as she and her superior worked their controls.
"Too gutless," the man replied. "Ready to execute."
"Drive ready to execute."
"Make it so," Yolande said.
The speakers roared: "PREPARE FOR ACCELERATION. ALL HANDS SECURE FOR ACCELERATION. TEN-SECOND BURN. FIVE SECONDS TO BURN. COUNTING. "
Somewhere deep within the Subotai pumps whirred. Precisely aligned railguns charged as fuel pellets were stripped from the magazines, ten gram bundles of plutonium-239 and their reflector-absorber coatings.
"BURN."
The pellets flicked out behind the cruiser. Her lasers struck and the coating sublimed explosively, squeezing. Fission flame bloomed, flickering at ten times per second. Nozzles slammed liquid oxygen into the carbon-carbon lined hemisphere of the thrust plate to meet the fire, and the gas exploded into plasma. The superconductor field-coils in the plate swept out magnetic fingers, cupping and guiding the blaze of charged particles into a sword of light and energy, stripping out power for the next pulse. The thrust plate surged forward against its magnetic buffers. And the multi-thousand-tonne mass of the warship moved.
"Burn normal. Flow normal at fifty-seven percent capacity. Point nine-eight G."
"Comin' up on target. Closin'. Preparin' fo' fire mission. Execute."
Needles of coherent light raked across the lines that held the sail to the Pathfinder. The single-crystal sapphire filaments sublimed and parted in tiny puffs of vapor, but no change showed in the giant bedsheet of the sail; it would be hours before the vast slow pressure of the photon wind made a noticeable difference. It was otherwise with the Pathfinder itself. A dozen railgun slugs sleeted through the control chamber, and the steel-alloy outer hull rang like a tin roof under hail. The missiles punched through and out the other side without slowing perceptibly, leaving plate-sized holes; the edges shone red as air rushed past, turning to a mist of crystals that glittered in the unwavering light of the sun. Light flickered briefly within as systems shorted and arced.
Other slugs impacted the nozzle of the plasma drive, turning the titanium alloy to twisted shards. A finger of neutral particles stabbed, cut across the lines that connected the arc to the main power torus. Pathfinder tumbled.
"STAND BY FOR ZERO GRAVITY." The subliminal thuttering roar of the drive ceased, leaving only the quiet drone of the ventilators. "STAND BY FOR MANEUVER." Attitude jets slammed with twisting force, and the cruiser switched end for end. "STAND BY FOR ACCELERATION. EIGHTEEN-SECOND BURN. THREE SECONDS TO BURN. BURN." Longer and harder this time; they were killing part of their initial speed and matching trajectories as well. The sound was duller, more mass going onto the thrust plate.
"Matched, closin'," the Drive Officer said. The attitude jets fired again, briefly. "Stable in matchin' orbit, five-point-two klicks."
Yolande keyed the exterior visual display, switching to a magnification that put her at an apparent ten meters from the Alliance vessel. "Well done," she said to the bridge; it looked precisely as she had specified. "Ah," Flames were stabbing out from parts of the can-shaped transport, and the tumbling slowed and stopped. "Nice of him." She hit the control, and the combat braces folded away from her with a sigh of hydraulics. "Number One, boardin' party to the forward lock. Sensors?"
"She's dead in space, apart from those attitude jets. Internal pressure normal except on the control deck, that's vacuum. Doan' think much damage to internal systems."
"Weapons, connectors away."
" Makin' it so. Off."
Two of her screens slaved to the Weapons station showed a rushing telemetered view of the enemy vessel, as the tiny rockets carried the connectors. Their heads held pickups and sundry other equipment; mostly, they were very powerful electromagnets. The cables themselves were no mere ropes: optical fibers, superconductor power-lines, ultrapure metal and boron and carbon, armored sheathing, the whole strong enough to support many times the cruiser's weight in a one-C field.
"Ah, human-level heat sources in the control chamber. Three, suited. Multiple elsewhere in the hull."
"Very well," Yolande said. "Maintain position, prepare to grapple when the target's secured." That was doctrine, and only sensible. The Subotai and her crew represented an unthinkable investment of the resources of the Race.
She rose, secured her boots to the floor. "Number Two, carry on. Boardin' party, I'll be with yo' shortly."
Janet had been squealing with excitement when Cindy returned to the cabin, Iris solemn and earnestly trying to remember what she had been told about emergency drills. It was still hard to believe, how different twins were; or how complete and yet alien a personality could be at five…
Then they both quieted, sensing her seriousness. She zipped them quickly into their skinsuits; Fred had paid out-of-pocket for those luxuries, rather than rely on bubble-cocoons, and now she blessed the extravagance as she worked her way into her own. These were civilian models, little changed from the original porous-plastic leotards the first astronauts had worn. The fabric was cool and tight against her flesh, with a little chafing at groin and armpits where the pads completed the seal. She helped her daughters on with the backpacks, then checked her own; the helmets could be left off but close to hand, for now. God forbid they should have to use them, but if they did every minute could count.
"Come on, punkins," she said, guiding them to the pallet that occupied most of the stemside wall of their cubicle and strapping them in. "Mommy's going to tell you a story."
They settled in on either side of her; she had just begun to search her memory when the sound came. A monstrous ringing hail, like trip-hammers in a forging mill, toning through the metal beneath and around them, like being inside a bell. The Pathfinder was seized and wrenched, the unfamiliar sensation of weight pulling at them from a dozen different directions, inside a steel shell sent bounding downhill. The locking bolts on the door shot home with a metallic clangor, and even over the ringing of the hull she could hear the wailing of the alarm klaxon and the slamming of airtight doors throughout the ship. Her skin prickled.
"Mom! Mommeee!" Janet shrieked. Iris had gone chalk-pale, her eyes full circles, and her panting was rapid and breathy.
"Meteor swarm, O sweet mercy of God, let it be a meteor swarm!" she whispered under her breath. Their stateroom was the first-class model, with a porthole. The light that stabbed through it into her eyes was like mocking laughter; there was only one thing in the human universe that made that actinic blue-white light, that spearhead-shaped scar across the stars. A nuclear pulsedrive.
"Shhh, shhh, mommy's here, darlings." She used hands and voice and quieted them to whimpering by the time the reaction jets fired and the ship shuddered back to stability. Just in time, she found a moment to think. I'm feeling sick and Iris looks green. They were all on antinausea drugs, and it took some powerful tinkering with the inner ear to override those.
The Pathfinder drifted and steadied. Cindy looked out the port again, blinking against the afterimage of fire that strobed across her sight, against the tears of pain. Then she jammed her knuckles into her mouth and bit down, welcoming pain to beat down the stab of desperation, the whining sound that threatened to break free of her throat. The shape that drifted model-tiny there was familiar, very familiar from the lectures she had attended before signing on with the Project—she was the Commandant's wife as well as a biologist. A Draka cruiser, the third-generation type. A Great Khan, and the only things in the solar system which could match it were a month's journey away.
Cindy Lefarge felt the world greying away from the corners of her eyes, a rippling on her skin as the hairs struggled to stand erect. Bile shot into the back of her throat, acrid and stinging as she remembered other things from those lectures. No. A voice spoke in the back of her mind, a voice like her grandmother's. Y' got yore duty, gal, so do it! She had the children to protect.
"Jannie, Iris, listen to me." The small faces turned towards her, pale blue eyes and freckles and the floating wisps of black hair. "You girls are going to have to be very brave for mommy. Just like real grown-up people, so daddy will be proud of you. This is really, really important, you understand?"
They looked up from where her arms cradled them against her shoulders. Iris nodded, swallowing and clenching trembling lips. Janet bobbed her head vigorously. "You bet, mom," she said. "I'm gonna be a soldier like dad, someday. So I gotta be brave, right?"
She pulled them closer. Twin lights sparkled from the Draka cruiser, seeming to drift toward her and then rush apart in a V. She closed her eyes, waiting for the final wash of nuclear flame, but all that came was two deep-toned chunnng sounds. The Pathfinder jerked again, rotating so that the Domination warship was out of her view. The overhead speaker came to life with a series of gurgles and squawks, then settled into the voice of Captain Hayakawa; calm as ever, but a little tinny, as if he was speaking from inside a skinsuit helmet.
"Attention, please. We have been attacked by a Draka deepspace warship. The engines have been disabled, our communications are down, and the sail has been cut loose. The main passenger compartment has not been holed, I repeat, not been holed. Please remain calm, and stay in your cabins. This is the safest place for all civilians at the moment."
