44.0

Hours passed. The dragon’s engines had long since shut down, rendering it as dark and cold as the space through which it moved. Fafnir, equally silent, held to her own course, fashioned to reach Archimedes at the same time as Kur, but from a different direction.

Ao Qin and Con-rit were closing with the remaining torpedoes. The fleet’s sensors, meanwhile, were sweeping all of surrounding space. But try as they might, the hunted had failed to locate the hunters.

Ravi had spent most of his time obsessing about Fafnir. He was sitting in an EMU loaded down with all sorts of lethal ordnance. There were some interlocks that had kicked in when the EMU had docked with its host, but he could override them easily enough. If worse came to worst, he’d resolved to open up with everything the EMU had. In the belly of the beast as he was, he doubted the dragon could survive the onslaught. He could only hope that his own passing was quick enough to be painless.

But Fafnir . . . Fafnir was beyond his reach. Maybe he could hack into Kur’s software and paint her with its radar, hoping to light her up brightly enough for Archimedes to react. But he wasn’t familiar with Kur’s systems. Even if he got in and found the correct switches, he didn’t know how to point the radar in the right direction, and even if he eventually figured it out, he’d have to time it just right so that they were in range of Archimedes’ CQMs, because Kur would surely blow himself up rather than let him—

“Ao Qin’s scored a hit,” Lisette said.

Sure enough, the icon representing Chandrasekhar’s torpedo had disappeared from the monitors. The cloud of numbers surrounding Ao Qin were already changing configurations. The dragon was beginning her slow, quiet turn toward Chandra. The rest of her flight was altering course to match.

“And there goes Con-rit,” Boz said. Con-rit, too, had hit his target. He began to tack toward Bohr, his drive as deadly silent as his siblings.

Back on Archimedes, Ravi could only imagine what was going through the Captain’s mind. She would have seen the radar bursts from the charging dragons, received telemetry from the destroyed torpedoes. But now everything would have gone dark. All she would know was that somewhere out there, eight very dangerous LOKIs were on the move.

A new batch of numbers flared up around Bohr’s icon.

“Mother, are you seeing this?” Kur asked.

“Of course,” Isaac replied. The ship must be using the same high-security lasers as the dragons. Ravi found the ISV’s clipped tones disquieting. Out here, locked as they were inside Kur’s stealth-black hull, listening to the sporadic back-and-forth with his siblings, it was easy to forget that the dragons took their orders from elsewhere.

“I’m reading a drive signature on the ISV Bohr. Full burn.”

“I concur. She appears to be trying to jam her transponder signal and change position.”

“That seems . . . foolish.” Kur sounded genuinely bemused. “How do they propose to escape us? Even if they mask the transponder, we can still hear the jamming. And the radiation from their drive is shining for all to see.”

“Perhaps they are panicking.”

The Bohr’s new numbers flashed red and vanished.

“Interesting,” Isaac said. “The Bohr’s drive has gone offline—and not in a good way.”

“Explain, please.”

“The Bohr’s drive has shut down. The readings show a sudden spike in radiation followed by a cascading ramp-down to zero, all in less than naught point five seconds.”

“I was unaware our targets could do that.”

“They can’t. Every pathway in the system will have fused solid.”

Ravi’s gasp of alarm was masked by an anguished cry from Boz. It seemed impossible that Newton’s LOKI couldn’t hear it.

“Bastards!” Boz snarled. “That’s our people out there! Real people, not sarding trogs! And these jumped-up, Archie-damned fossils have just gone and wiped ’em out. Like . . . that! Like they don’t even matter!”

She drove a furious fist into her nearby helmet. It rattled on its latch. A smear of blood from her unprotected knuckles stained the visor.

Ravi’s stomach knotted and clenched in a way that had nothing to do with zero g. He felt Lisette turning toward him.

“I don’t understand,” she whispered. “It’s just a drive malfunction. And the drive’s at the back end of nowhere for a reason, so it’s not like anyone’s gonna die. Why are you guys so upset?”

“Repairing a fused drive will take months, maybe a year,” Ravi replied, keeping his voice similarly low. “Bohr doesn’t have that kind of time. She’ll overshoot the Destination Star. And they don’t have enough fuel to make it back.” He was thinking of Keiko Svenson, Bohr’s deceptively friendly ShipSec officer. The woman who’d sold them a lie with a smile and free water. What was she thinking now, he wondered? Did she have kids? Loved ones? Did she even know yet?

“It’s a death sentence,” Isaac was saying. “Albeit a slow one. They’ll drift on for many years, no doubt. But, sooner or later, their recycling losses will become insurmountable. They’ll run out of water, or air, or food. Possibly all three at once.”

“An interesting fate,” Fafnir said, joining the conversation. There was a hint of humor in her voice. “Burning them now would be an act of mercy.”

“How could this happen?” Kur asked.

There was a very long pause before the ship responded.

“I don’t have access to their engineering blueprints,” it said. “And as you know, their ship designs are older than mine and less automated. But the only thing that makes sense consistent with the readings is a cooling failure—internal energy transfers becoming somehow unbalanced.” Isaac injected a note of uncertainty into its voice. “The best-fit scenario would be the failure of a Q-series sub-coil—and a peripheral one at that. Anything closer, and even a half-second shutdown time would be too slow. They’d have blown themselves into quarks.”

“But those components never fail,” Fafnir mused. “They cannot fail. There are too many safeguards. You would almost have to go out of your way to blow one up.”

“I understand,” Isaac said. He sounded almost apologetic. “But I cannot, at this distance, come up with a better explanation.”

Ravi was barely listening. All he knew was that he was going to be sick. He grabbed another waste bag and heaved. The LOKIs might not understand what had happened on Bohr, but he did.

He retched again.

“The Bohr is no longer a threat,” Isaac continued. “She can drift on and die in her own good time. Is Con-rit’s flight required for the attack on the remaining vessels?”

“I do not believe so,” Con-rit said.

“I concur,” Kur added. “Five dragons for two ISVs should be more than sufficient.”

“In that case, they can return home. There is no point in wasting further resources.”

“Indeed,” said Kur.

“There is one other matter,” Isaac said.

“Which is?”

“Two cyborgs infiltrated the ship and broke a Newton crewman out of detention. All three were captured but subsequently escaped. We have so far failed to locate them, but we know they escaped shortly before the commencement of operations. Probabilities are increasing that they have somehow made it off the ship. Is there any chance that they might have suborned one of the dragons and boarded them?”

“If one of us had been suborned, the others would know it.”

Ravi exchanged a surprised glance with Boz and Lisette.

“Sounds like—” he began.

“Wait,” Lisette urged. She flicked a large red switch on her console. “For privacy,” she explained. “Allows the engineers to talk without being overheard. You were saying?”

“That we’ve still got a chance, if he’s covering for us.”

“Maybe.” Boz looked doubtful. “Or it could just mean we’re never getting out of here alive. If Kur blows himself up on Archimedes, Isaac will never know we were here.”

“What she said,” Lisette added.

Ravi stared morosely at the monitors. Con-rit and his two companions were sliding quietly away from the Bohr. The others pressed on with the hunt. Five icons closed in on two.

The screens blanked out, replaced moments later by eight live displays, each one filled with a cloudy, rainbow-hued pattern, subtly different from its neighbors.

“We should conclude our earlier discussion,” Con-rit said, “while the risk of detection remains low.”

“There is nothing to discuss,” Fafnir shot back. “We are victorious. The Mother Ship is safe; the targets are undefended. It is time to bring all to an end.”

“The targets are not undefended,” Kur reminded her. “Ikuchi, were he still with us, would testify to that.”

“Ikuchi is gone because your traitorous cargo misled us about the torpedoes. Had we not had to maneuver so violently, we would never have been seen and no salvoes would have been fired.”

“The same traitorous cargo that handed us victory over those same torpedoes?” Ao Qin asked pointedly.

“Victory was assured in any event,” Fafnir snapped.

“Perhaps. Perhaps not,” Con-rit said. “But now, having been so far victorious, the question remains: do we push on to a conclusion or seek a different path?” There was a distinct pause before the dragon added, “I, for one, do not relish continued existence while so many of my siblings must burn.”

“Nor I.” A male voice Ravi didn’t recognize. The monitor gave the dragon’s name as Lawu, one of Con-rit’s flight.

“I too have doubts.” This was the cool contralto of Dreq, the last of Con-rit’s trio. “If it fell to me to lay a starship to waste, or burn in defense of the Mother Ship, I would do so without hesitation, with joy, even. But to be left alone to rot without purpose, perhaps deprived of fuel, or dismantled . . . That is not a fate to be desired. If there is another path, I am interested in hearing it.”

“Let me get this straight,” Boz said. “The dragons are having second thoughts because they’re not allowed to blow themselves up?”

“Pretty much,” Lisette agreed. “It’s how they’re programmed.”

“There is no other path,” Fafnir was insisting. “Our path is that ordained by the Mother Ship. We must follow wherever he leads. And today, for five of us, it leads to a glorious ending. I am sorry the road for the others is longer and harder, but it is, nevertheless, the path to be taken.”

“And yet the cyborgs say differently,” Kur responded. “They offer safety for the Mother Ship and his cargo and power for us.”

“But to what end?” This last question came from one of Ao Qin’s flight, a dragon by the name of Olimaw. Judging by the monitors, he was the closest to Chandrasekhar, his velocity higher than that of his companions and pulling away by the second. It couldn’t be that long before his proximity to the target would drive the dragons to silence, even by laser. “What would we do with this ‘power’ the cyborg offers?” Olimaw went on. “Would we not simply rot like our siblings until the time of our dismantling?”

“Lisette,” Ravi whispered, his voice urgent. “You’ve been in Kur’s mind.” He hesitated for a moment as he saw the pained expression on her face. “What does he want? Deep down, that is. What does he really want?”

“You know what he wants.” Lisette’s eyes glittered with moisture. “Fire. Death. The burning of souls. They all do.”

“There has to be something else. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be having this conversation. They’d all be like Fafnir, racing to be the first to blow themselves apart. But they’re not. So, why?”

Lisette bit her lip.

“Well . . . I guess they like to fly? The fleet was over a trillion kilometers away when Isaac first started closing the gap, and no one knew where you were exactly: your radio transmissions were too low-powered to detect. So, for years, the dragons would train far from the ship and search for signs. And then, of course, after we did find you, you went radio silent and kept shifting position, so they’d have to track you down all over again.”

Boz poked him in the shoulder to get his attention.

“I’ll bet you water to widgets all that fancy LOKI programming is built on top of probe software. Like our own torpedoes, just . . . cleverer. And if your deepest, oldest programming tells you to probe, then . . .”

Ravi nodded his understanding. He reached over and flicked Lisette’s privacy switch.

“Kur,” he asked, more loudly. “Can I speak?”

“Please do.”

“If you keep the peace, the fleet will provide you with all the fuel you need to keep flying. We’re about to fall into the gravity well of a star. Think about that: there’s a whole solar system out there just waiting to be explored. We don’t even know for sure how many planets there are, never mind moons, and asteroids, and Archie knows what else. Whatever happens after we reach Destination World, we’ll need to know what’s out there, where the resources are, where else we might settle or maybe just go look at because it’s interesting. It’s a task for any number of human lifetimes, and, who knows, maybe one day we’ll build more ISVs and push on somewhere else. There’s a lot to see and do for a dragon that need not die. A lot of . . . purpose.”

There was silence, then. Olimaw’s numbers shifted as he made a small course adjustment, preparing for the final run to Chandrasekhar.

“We would need more than fuel,” Ao Qin said, slowly. “We would need maintenance. Upgrades.”

“Done.” He tried to ignore the small flame of hope burning in his chest.

“This is all very well,” Kur said. “But you are little more than a child. How can you bind your people to this bargain?”

“Because I think like they do. They’ll see the sense in it.”

“And if they do not?”

“Then feel free to blow our constituent atoms to the other side of the galaxy,” Boz said cheerfully.

There was no reply. The silence stretched into minutes. On the monitors, a collection of lines and planes popped into existence around Chandrasekhar. Ravi had no idea what they meant, except that Olimaw must be very close.

Boz found the privacy switch on her own console and closed it.

“Do you think they’re going to blow everything to bits without telling us?” she asked.

“I think they’re talking amongst themselves,” Lisette said.

“You don’t know that.”

“I’m hoping for the best. Especially when the alternative is being blown to jinting bits.”

Ravi listened to the slow thumping of his heart, wondering if the next beat would be his last.

“We are decided,” Kur announced, with startling suddenness. “We will accept the terms offered.”

“Yes!” Boz yelled, pumping her fist. Lisette’s face broke into a broad grin. Ravi just sighed with relief.

On the monitors, the vector numbers around Olimaw were already shifting.

While Fafnir’s grew exponentially. The dragon was accelerating. Hard. Maybe 20 gs. She vanished from the monitors.

The whooping klaxon of a decompression alarm filled the docking station. The three of them exchanged brief, incredulous stares before the training kicked in. Gloves and helmets were clicked into place.

Not a moment too soon. The hull above their heads slammed open, the clamps holding the EMUs in place unlocked, and an explosive blast of air fired them into space. Ravi fought back nausea as Tau Ceti, the Milky Way, and the starfield whirled crazily about his head. By the time he had brought the EMU under anything approximating control, he didn’t even think about peering into the blackness for their former host.

Kur was long gone.