Murphy’s Law
*****
Operations
TFR Beijing
Belthas system
THE BEIJING APPEARED IN OPEN space at the Belthas IV L1 Lagrange point surrounded by the dust of the Toralii Alliance fleet, the ghosts of so many ships ground up and distributed in an ever-expanding sphere. The dust had mostly dissipated from the jump point, so their arrival was as ghostly and quiet as typical jump arrivals, with no indication from operations that anything had happened at all.
Liao’s feet kissed the floor as the gravity was restored. “Report.” She glanced at Ling expectantly.
“Jump complete, Captain. No vessels in our immediate vicinity. Launching strike craft and gunships.”
“Good, now get us the hell out of here. Clear the jump point so the Tehran can come in behind us.”
Dao was already on it, his fingers working over his console before Liao had finished speaking. Immediately, the ship moved forward, sliding out of the jump point and into the faint dust of the Toralii fleet’s remains.
Liao watched the waves of the radar system slowly reach out over the planet, its moon, the debris field of the best of the Toralii Alliance, reduced to powder.
The radar found nothing bigger than wreckage the size of a car.
“Captain,” said Ling, “the Tehran has appeared in the jump point. They’re clearing the jump point now. Still no contacts.”
“Any sign of the Sydney?”
She hopedd, somewhat fruitlessly, that the Sydney would be waiting for them in the Belthas system.
“Negative, Captain. No sign of the Sydney within radar range.”
Liao nodded to Ling. “Very well, looks like we’re doing this one on our own. Keep an eye out for them. If Ben doesn’t want to show his face, I guess we’ll press on to Belthas IV and wait. He’s bound to appear at some point.” Liao tapped her foot impatiently. Where the hell was Ben?
The radar waves moved beyond the planetary system. Nothing bounced back at them except the Kel-Voran fleet appearing at the L2 Lagrange point and the Telvan fleet at L4.
The L5 Lagrange point, where the Toralii Alliance fleet was expected to appear, was completely empty.
“Mister Ling, confirm that there are no contacts at L5.”
“Confirming that, Captain. Nothing at all.”
The worried feeling she had in the pit of her stomach grew stronger. “Well, there goes over half of our attacking force, straight off the bat.”
Iraj frowned, looking at his monitors. “Maybe they are just delayed.”
“They were supposed to jump out right after us, what could be keeping them?”
He shrugged. “We won’t know; let’s just hope they show up.”
Liao frowned darkly, looking back at her own set of monitors. “We’re doing far too much of that for my liking.”
The ships journeyed on, and Liao continued to study the long-range radar. After a time, Jiang glanced over her shoulder, catching Liao’s attention.
“Captain, I was thinking. It’s possible the Giralan’s hiding in the shadow of the planet or possibly behind the moon.”
“Then it’s a double-blind situation. We can’t see him, but he can’t see us.” It was a pretty large assumption, but Humans were a species evolved to find patterns in everything: a tiger in the bush, causes of rain, reasons for natural disasters, or why the sun rose every day. This pattern-recognition device allowed Humans to see in things patterns that were difficult to otherwise spot, but the device was flawed. The rate of false positives was absurdly high, because the penalty for incorrectly identifying a pattern, such as tiger stripes against bamboo, wasn’t high, but a false negative meant that you died. So an incentive existed to favour false positives over false negatives.
Liao suddenly remembered what Ben had told her, how he valued this mechanism, the one that allowed Humans to be wrong, to err, and through their mistakes to discover something new.
Was there a pattern she had missed here?
The Tehran and the Beijing moved into formation, side by side, drifting across the empty void towards Belthas IV.
“Mister Hsin, patch me into the strike fleet.”
A few taps on the keyboard, and it was done.
“This is Captain Liao. Status reports as follows: the Beijing and the Tehran have arrived and are en route to Belthas IV. No sign of the Sydney as of this time.”
After a significant delay as the message was relayed to the L4 Lagrange point and back, someone responded. [“This is Nalu. Captain, we see no sign of the Toralii Alliance. The L5 is clear.”]
“Perhaps the Alliance ships misjumped. Can you relay a message to Vrald’s ship? See if they can see them?”
The Kel-Voranians were out of direct communication with a planet between them. After some time, Vrald snarled into the line. [“More likely those cowards turned tail and ran!”] He bellowed with laughter, the noise loud enough that Liao’s ears hurt. [“Magnificent! More for us!”]
“Has anyone made contact with Ben’s ship? Our scope is clean.”
[“We have not,”] said Nalu. [“We thought he might be using the mass of the planet to conceal his presence. But if you cannot see him, it is unlikely he is there.”]
“Maybe Ben has disabled the L5 jump point and is using it to hide out there. There’s a significant amount of debris in that region from the Toralii Alliance fleet. It’s not much, but it might be enough to throw our long-range radar for a loop.” She glanced at Iraj, releasing the talk key. “We can’t use the device until we see him. If he’s not near Belthas IV, we’ll waste our shot.”
“Agreed,” he answered. “Press on to the planet. Murphy’s law applies. Besides, no good plan survives contact with the enemy.”
“Well, we haven’t even seen the enemy yet.”
Iraj folded his arms. “Yeah, well, Murphy was a grunt. What the hell did he know?”
The pair of ships sailed towards Belthas IV, closing on the planet from three directions, the Humans on one side, the Kel-Voran on the other, and the Telvan coming in on the flank.
“I am so bored; you have no idea. None. I feel like I’m being sucked into a boredom black hole, only to be crushed to the size of a boredom atom in a massive outpouring of cosmic boredom energy.”
Liao didn’t even look at Rowe. “You’ve made your entertainment situation perfectly clear, Miss Rowe. Please, just… try to focus on the ship’s systems. We’ll be there in an hour.”
“An hour is, like, way too long.” Rowe folded her arms and pushed back her chair. “I just wish Ben would show up and kill us. Getting blown to atoms would make a nice change.”
Liao reached upward, stretching her arms. “Master at Arms?”
The marine guard stepped forward from the door. “Captain?”
“If I took my pistol and shot Miss Rowe in the head, would you tell anyone?”
“Hey!” said Rowe, scowling.
He snorted slightly. “No, Captain.”
“Noted. Thank you.”
Rowe grudgingly turned back to her console. “Yeah, you wouldn’t shoot me.”
“Probably not,” admitted Liao. “It’d be a waste of a perfectly good bullet. That’s what we have airlocks for.”
The time passed, and the spectre of Belthas IV loomed larger and larger in their monitors. Their ships, two of the three original Pillars of the Earth, were filled to the brim with the devices of war. The major powers of Earth had all contributed in some way. They had German special operations units, South Korean marines, American Rangers, soldiers from the People’s Republic of China and the Islamic Republic of Iran, all fighting together.
Liao found it a heartening sight, seeing the armies of the world united under one banner, fighting together to preserve their species. National boundaries still existed, and old hatreds still burned strong, but this was a step, one of many tiny steps to try to shift the identity of people away from nationalities and towards a species, to truly become the Human race. Liao felt intensely proud of this moment even as she worried about the outcome. No sign of Ben, no sign of the Toralii Alliance…
Finally, the two ships drew close enough to the planet to form up with the rest of the fleet, moving together as a massive wedge in low orbit of Belthas IV’s gravity well. Ling, Dao, and Jiang coordinated the fleet’s combined sensor network while Iraj pulled up the tactical overview.
“Captain, the fleet is commencing long-range scans of the surface.”
Liao touched her own screen, overlaying the data the Telvan had provided on the planet. “Excellent. Coordinate with the maps we have. See what we can determine are the key areas we need to take.”
“Very good, Captain.” Iraj gave her a meaningful look. “Still no signs of hostile ships.”
“I don’t like that either,” Liao said, “but it’s possible he’s just watching us for now, seeing what our plans are before he makes his move. But rest assured, Commander… Ben is out there.”
They spent a moment examining their maps.
“This facility,” Iraj pointed at a white-hot spot on the thermal camera, “is marked by the Telvan as being the main factory complex. It’s almost certainly where the majority of the drones Ben’s been making have been created. Irrespective of whether Ben shows up or not, if we take that facility, there’s no way he can grow his army anymore.”
“There’s a lot of heat in that area,” Liao observed thoughtfully. “How’s it getting power?”
“Built-in reactor. The Kel-Voranians on the surface indicated it was still active, working day and night.”
She nodded. “Good, well, let’s make that our ground force’s primary objective then.”
With a few taps of her console, Liao transmitted the maps to the marines and soldiers throughout the fleet, including objectives, tactical information, and terrain readouts. The new tactical IFF computer was a very useful asset, it seemed. She could send her battlefield plans to the whole fleet in seconds and update them in real time.
When it was all done, she reached up and touched her headset, giving the word.
“All units, commence ground operations.”
Like a pack of dogs suddenly cut from their leashes, fighters and gunships packed with men and equipment belched forth from the Beijing’s hangar bay. From the radar screen, Liao could see the same happening with the Tehran. The Telvan cruisers, identical to the Toralii Alliance cruisers in outward appearance, opened their underbellies, unleashing a tide of smaller craft down onto the planet like the yolk of a broken egg.
But the approach of the five Kel-Voran dreadnoughts was the most interesting to her. The ships completely broke up. Each ship disintegrated into nearly two hundred smaller pieces, each seemingly with their own power. They flowed down towards the surface in a swarm.
Liao remembered how Garn had told her, before his death, that the Kel-Voran approach was to build ships that were extremely modular and that the commander of the vessel could be anywhere and still command his ship. Now Liao could see just how far they took this philosophy; the ship was less a cohesive unit and more a swarm of lesser ships that could, if occasion warranted it, act independently. Their ships had more surprises than simply the ability to break into halves. She wondered which pieces contained the jump drives.
“Captain, the Kel-Voranian fleet is… well, I’m not sure exactly how to report their status, but they’re landing.”
“Good,” she said, “let’s get this done then.” She glanced down at the long-range radar, at the large amounts of nothing filling the Belthas system, at the emptiness all around the system, devoid of any ships or sensors or systems. “Where the hell are you?”
The Giralan
To see with a vessel’s eyes was difficult for biological creatures to understand, but for Ben, it was second nature, even when the vessel was not his own.
Through his thrall, he saw the universe as an infinitely calm lake, its surface like a pane of glass. Each pulse of the radar, an omni-directional sphere that expanded out from the origin point, was like the ripple from a stone; it would slowly move ever outward, getting weaker and weaker until it dissipated to nothing or bounced back off an object. He did not see the waves but the reflections, the waves returning.
The time it took from origin to return betrayed its distance. The compression between the waves gave its direction.
The machines of the Humans had to translate, to dumb down the information so a man could see it. A single dot, a blip on a tiny screen, was all they would see.
Ben could see so much more.
Every facet of the contact, every tiny distortion in the return pulse was analysed, compared, pored over. Everything about it was instantly passed through the intricate quantum mesh he called a brain and processed, and all information was extracted. He could see the reflective index of the ship, tiny variances in its shape and composition, even information about the subtleties of the intervening space, as clearly as a Human seeing a photograph.
And he saw much: the Kel-Voran ship breaking into parts and assaulting his world, the Telvan bastards deploying their dropships loaded with troops, and the humans, their primitive and simplistic, but rugged and over-engineered, vessels trudging down through the upper wisps of Belthas IV’s atmosphere.
Belthas IV. Such a clinical anti-name for a planet. The thought occupied a thread in his datacore, and he allocated numerous processors to the task. Every important planet in history had a name. A proper name like Earth or Evarel, not simply the star’s name followed by a number. That was far, far too petty for a world with such potential. His world.
He ran his mind through a database of all known planets with names and found none to his liking. Although he would admit, in another thought-thread, that his criteria for judging the worthiness of a name was what most biological creatures would consider strange. They seemed to focus on the phonetic beauty of it, something he did not truly understand, or the mythological significance of the name. Ben’s “society” was only months old. It had no mythology, nor likely would it ever have. Mythology, gods, were generated by error, misunderstandings of the natural world falsely attributed to acts of the divine: rain during summer, a lightning strike, meteor strikes.
His inability to find a suitable name immediately, he mused, was good. It would force him to think more creatively.
As he watched the tiny swarms of invading ships glow as they lit up with the fire of reentry through Belthas IV’s atmosphere, he asked himself what mythology his people would have. A purely synthetic race of biological creatures, augmented with prosthetics and cybernetics, a perfect fusion between the living and the machine, flesh and steel, error and precision, thoughts and binary.
Binary. The word lit up his circuits as he processed the mythology of binary. The on and the off states, the absolutely most fundamental building block of logic. Binary wasn’t the answer, but it was a hint, a strong hint.
Perhaps he could go higher. Mathematics, with computers being simply an expression of mathematics, the most pure application of logic. Mathematics, numbers, counting.
Ben could feel the connections being made in his mind, linguistically. His ability to know and understand the precise nature of his thought processes often proved valuable to his introspective moments.
Numbers. Counting. Ben dipped into his stored database of knowledge on humans, something he had been wanting to do of late. Various counting systems, each designed to display a useful set of rational numbers and show their structure. Base ten, from the metric system. Base twenty, from the Mayans.
The Mayan system stood out to him. Most Human numbers were base ten, but the Mayans apparently knew how to count on their toes, too. Aside from that, though, it included the concept of zero as a number, a relative rarity amongst ancient Human number systems.
That was a concept he and the Mayans shared, zero as the first number in the numerical order. Computers began counting from zero.
The answer was right in the forefront of his mind. The first of all things. The beginning.
Zero. The perfect name for the very first world his new society would forge out of the remains of the old.
The thought energised him, and he knew then, with his newly christened world under assault, the time to act had come. With barely a thought, he drew power to his rusted ship’s jump drive, and Ben used his thrall’s eyes to jump exactly where he wanted to go.
TFR Beijing
Belthas system
“Captain, radar contact! A ship has appeared directly below us in the atmosphere of Belthas IV!”
“No prizes for guessing who that could be.” Liao straightened her back. “Mister Ling, altitude of the Giralan?”
“He’s low, Captain. Ten kilometres from the surface, eight hundred kilometres from our location.”
Jiang spoke up. “He’s firing on the assault team with conventional weaponry. Reports of casualties from the ships as they descend. The Vulture is reporting engine out.”
“Eight hundred kilometres, that seems close enough then.” Liao glanced to Iraj, who reached for the internal radio.
“Lieutenant Au, this is Commander Iraj. Drop the Faraday cage and use the Toralii device. I say again: engage the Toralii device.” Iraj looked at her. “Suggest we try to buy some time. We don’t know if it will take effect immediately.”
Liao touched the talk key on her headset. “Ben, let’s talk about this.”
“Oh, Captain Liao, how very nice to hear your voice again.”
“I agree. We’re old friends now, Ben. We should chat more often.”
“My definition of friendship does not include one friend setting their dogs on the other friend’s planet, Captain, and forcing me to destroy them.” His mocking laughter filtered down the line. “Such a foolish and impetuous decision on your behalf. Did you think I’d simply watch as you landed troops on my world? Did you think I’d forgive this trespass? Watch, now, as I burn them alive; your soldiers flee like startled ants, scurrying around, trying to avoid their inevitable demise.”
Liao dialled down the volume on her headset and looked to Summer. “What’s the status of our jump drive?”
Rowe stared in bewilderment at her console. “It’s fucked, Captain. I mean it. I’m seeing power surges all over the place. We’ve got distortions and errors and all manner of crazy shit happening in the core. We won’t be jumping anywhere.”
“Good. That means he won’t be either.” She turned to Jiang. “Lock missiles on that ship. Lower the yield to minimise damage to the forces below. Ben’s only using conventional weapons, correct?”
“Confirmed, Captain, no sign of the worldshatter device yet. He must be keeping it in reserve.” Jiang tapped on her keyboard. “Weapons locked.”
Liao stared grimly at the monitors on her command console. “Fire.”
“Missiles away, Captain. Impact in two, one, mark.”
Ben spoke again. “Quaint, Captain, but damage to my ship cannot be forgiven. Excuse me while I destroy your Telvan allies to show you how petulant your actions are. Observe the power of my weapon and despair.”
The time had come to find out if the Iilan had come through for them. Liao inhaled and moved over to Ling’s console. “Status of Ben’s ship?”
He pointed at his monitor, at the solid blip that remained on his screen. “Unchanged, Captain.”
A slow, triumphant smile spread over her face. “Good. Mister Jiang?”
“Ma’am?” Jiang said.
“Target the Giralan’s weapons systems. Avoid their engines if you can. Keep them busy so they don’t shoot our soldiers or dropships.”
“We’ll have to be careful with our weapons fire, Captain. A miss will hit the ground forces below.”
Liao nodded resolutely. The landing soldiers had been fully briefed on their part of the mission; they knew the risk of fratricide was remarkably high. “Then don’t miss.”
The Giralan
Ben felt a very real, very tangible pain as though a limb were being severed.
The jump drive was no less a part of his ship, and his ship was no less him than the metal body perched in its bridge. He saw its systems writhe in agony, its circuitry screaming as some undetectable, raw energy scrambled the finely tuned balance with overwhelming, raw, static force.
Ben immediately attempted dozens of diagnostics. Reducing the power to the jump drive did not seem to measurably reduce the effect; neither did increasing it to try to overpower the interference. It was stubborn and resolute in its presence, impossible to ignore or filter, like trying to calculate with a voltage irregularityl.
The Giralan’s eyes saw the fleet above him, the lights of their weapons fire falling down on him like a gentle rain, each drop concluding with a silent, beautiful burst of exploding energy as it tore through the ship’s rotting hull, blasting away turret, armoured hull plate, and sensor array.
But for each weapon torn away, others replaced it. His ship might have been rusted and derelict, but it was entirely focused on the business of war. No passive life support systems, no lights, no monitors or readouts, nor any systems of any kind. Everything filtered through his datacore. Every other available space, every joule of energy, was focused on weapons, defensive systems, the jump drive, or sensors.
He returned fire, the rain falling upward now, and he saw the satisfying, faraway twinkle of their splashes through the thermal cameras. He had firepower enough to split between ships and did so, organising his barrages efficiently and timing them so they hit in the most efficient locations.
Through the maelstrom, he saw something that gave him a microsecond’s pause. A contact, too large and moving too slowly to be a missile, racing down towards his ship. One of the Human gunships, a Broadsword, and he could guess its purpose.
The Humans were going to step into his parlour. To try to raid his vessel and steal back the jump drive that had given him so much power.
Power was a tricky, nebulous thing, though. His datacore rumbled, dedicating an inappropriately high number of processor threads to this particular problem. The jump drive was an awe-inspiring weapon, to be sure, and with it he had caused almost impossible damage… But without it, how strong was he?
How much power was truly in an element? Could one claim to be powerful by one single, overwhelming factor alone?
Of course not. And Ben, seeing through his thrall vessel’s eyes, had more cards to play.
But that did very little to quell his rage.
TFR Beijing
“Betrayer.”
The dark, edged whisper of Ben’s voice filled Liao’s headset, rich and full of fury, with emotion woven into the very fabric of every syllable. Just by listening to him, Liao could tell that Ben’s anger was total, complete, and unyielding.
“You forced our hand, Ben, but it’s not too late. We can still talk about this.”
Ben laughed, his English voice echoing over the line, a thunderous roar that crackled her speakers and pained her hearing. “The time for talk is over. After all the kindness I’d shown you, the gratitude, you find some way to stab at my jump drive, to cut out my beating heart?”
“You mean my jump drive? The one you ripped from the guts of my ship after murdering thirty thousand civilians? For a computer with a photographic memory, you sure do have a tenuous grasp of history.”
Ben’s voice practically hissed at her. “I will destroy you for this, Commander Liao. I swear it. Withdraw from this system… now. Recall your troops… now. Return your Broadsword to your hangar bay. You are to offer your unconditional surrender immediately or face oblivion.”
“A bold proclamation, but I’m afraid that’s not an option, Ben. You are beaten. Your jump drive is deactivated, and even now, your ship is surrounded and being bombarded on all sides. You have no hope of escaping. Power down your systems, surrender your jump drive, and I’ll offer you the same thing I offered you after Velsharn: a fair trial.”
“I spit on your trial.” The line cut out with a hiss of static.
Ling called out to her. “Captain, Ben’s gaining altitude.”
“His underside batteries have ceased firing at the landing parties,” said Jiang, “and he’s turning those guns, too, on the fleet.” The woman’s voice faded out. She muttered something Liao didn’t catch and then said, “We are… not being targeted. At all.”
The shuddering force of weapons impacts faded away, shrouding the operations room in a strange quiet, broken only by the chatter of voices and the relaying of orders across the floor.
“Good,” answered Liao. “Rowe, ensure that our hull remains charged. Jiang, weapons free, return fire. Instruct any strike craft not covering ground forces to engage Ben’s ship. Dao, bring us out of orbit. Let’s see if we can lure Ben into open space.”
“Missiles away, Captain. Ben’s higher now, so we can use a greater yield.”
“Good. Keep at him, but be careful of fratricide. Our Broadsword is getting close.”
Dao called to her. “It’s working, Captain. He’s following us.”
Liao’s headset crackled. The voice of Alex Aharoni, the head of her strike group, filled her headset. “Beijing actual, this is Jazz. Broadsword Warsong took another hit. I’m pulling them out. We need more support down here. The ground elements are fully defensive. We dropped right into an ambush, and we have way too many ground targets for our air elements to engage.”
“Do your best. We’re trying to draw fire from the Giralan, which should help you guys out some.”
“Much appreciated, Beijing.”
“Status report on the Vulture?”
Aharoni hesitated momentarily before answering. “They’re all dead, Captain. The whole ship is a fireball. No chutes.”
She bit on her lower lip and nodded. “Copy. Divert Archangel to go pick up wounded ground elements instead. Let’s save the living before we start collecting corpses.”
“Captain,” said Hsin, “the Tehran reports that Ben’s ship is targeting them with some kind of directed plasma weapon. Their defensive systems can’t dissipate the incoming energy properly, and it’s cutting their hull to ribbons.”
Liao stepped over to Jiang’s console, resting her hand on the back of her chair and leaning over her shoulder. “How do you mean?”
“The charged hull works by taking incoming directed energy and spreading it over a larger area, decreasing the kilojoules per square metre, but this heat is stickier. It’s not being transferred far at all, which means they’re burning through the hull.”
“Damn,” said Liao, “he knows this ship, probably better than we do. He’s seen the blueprints… read everything about it. He knows how to hurt us.”
Rowe’s voice cut over the chatter in operations. “Captain, we got a problem! Ben’s charging his worldshatter device. He’s targeting Nalu’s flagship!”
Nalu’s ship, where Saara was. Liao felt a sudden, intense spike of fear in her belly matched only by the equally fierce feeling of helplessness that swept over her as she stared at the ship on her monitor. “We can’t do anything to help them. Jiang, keep up the fire and target the emitter. See if we can’t knock that weapon offline.”
“He’s firing!”
Liao’s radar display on the command console lit up as the energy wave from the worldshatter device leapt towards Nalu’s ship, the Ju’khaali, passing through it and out the other side. The thermal camera lit up, a bright flare of flame leaping from both sides of the ship as the vessel slumped forward, listless and without guidance, its atmosphere spilling out and fuelling the raging conflagration.
She stared in shock at the catastrophic damage. In the battle with the Seth’arak, the Sydney had suffered a direct hit from the cannon, which had crippled it, and it was significantly less powerful than a Toralii cruiser. The Seth’arak had seemed to focus the weapon’s deadly blast on their strike craft, and post-battle analysis of the conflict led to heavy speculation that the worldshatter device would have little effect on capitol ships.
However, she had just seen the fiery lance of Ben’s worldshatter device not only pierce the hull of a battle-ready Toralii cruiser, but travel through the core of the ship and penetrate the other side. The device was an order of magnitude more powerful than previously observed, and it changed the tempo of the battle dramatically.
Also, Saara was on board the burning, crippled vessel.
“Captain,” said Mister Hsin, “we’re receiving a distress call from main engineering on the Telvan flagship Ju’khaali. They say their bridge has been destroyed and their primary reactors are offline. They’re evacuating the surviving crew.”
Mentally, Liao compared the layout of the Telvan cruiser with the Giralan. The bridge, the Toralii equivalent of operations and the central core of the ship, would be in the same place. Ben’s targeting had been perfect, a fiery lance straight through the heart, killing the command centre with surgical precision. Nalu would have been there. Where would Saara be during all this? On the bridge, too? Almost certainly.
She put that thought out of her mind for now, focusing on her next course of action.
“Mister Jiang, how long until our marines dock with the Giralan?”
“Two minutes, Captain.”
“Good,” said Liao, “coordinate with the Tehran. That ship may not be packing life support, but it’s made of metal. Just keep shooting. Dig as deep into that hull as we can. Get them as close to the bridge as possible. Ben’s in there, and we can dig all the way to its rotten core if we have to.”
“Confirmed coordinates, Captain. Executing strike package…”
Liao turned to her command console expecting to see the tiny streaks of flying missiles strike home, but as she watched them, the pencil-thin lines all veered away and tumbled into Belthas IV’s atmosphere. “Mister Jiang? The strike package?”
“I… I executed it, Captain. The ship accepted the command. I don’t know what went wrong.”
Liao twisted, looking over her shoulder. “Summer?”
Rowe tapped furiously on her keyboard. “I don’t get it! The command was lodged successfully. It was executed. Commands were dispatched to the launch tubes and onto the missiles themselves… That volley should have hit! They can’t all be duds!”
“Find out what went wrong,” said Liao, “and fix it. Right now.”
Rowe frowned, staring at her screen. “Wait. Wait, that doesn’t make sense!”
Liao stepped over to Rowe’s console. “Talk to me, Summer.”
“Look.” Rowe jabbed a finger at her engineering console. “Take a look at this. It’s the log of the launch. Something is really wrong. The missiles launch code sequence was interrupted.”
“You mean… jammed? How?”
Rowe shook her head, stabbing her finger at the screen, at a scrolling piece of text that went past far too fast for Liao to read. “No, not jammed. Look. Interrupted. Very, very quickly, but it left a line in our log. The command came from the IFF targeting computer, using the Tehran’s IFF code.”
It didn’t make any sense. “Ben has the Tehran’s IFF code?”
“No!” Rowe gave an exasperated growl. “I’m trying to tell you that the Tehran is patched into our systems using the shared IFF. Right before we shot that last barrage, our IFF screwed up our missile batteries by flagging Ben’s ship as friendly.”
“Why the hell would they do that?” She scowled. “And why the hell do they have remote access to the IFF computer?” Saara had told her nothing had changed except the new piece of technology, but this was a serious issue.
“Fucked if I know. I can only tell you what the screen says, and it says that the order to deactivate our missile batteries came from the shared targeting computer, which is linked to the Tehran’s systems. It’s how we share tactical information.”
“Mister Hsin,” said Liao, “get the Tehran on the line and find out just what the fuck is happening.”
Hsin immediately went to work, then gave her a curt nod when the channel was open.
Liao jammed her headset onto her head. “Tehran, this is Beijing actual. Request priority channel to Tehran actual immediately.”
James’s voice filled her headset. “Beijing, this is the Tehran. Send it.”
“James, what the fuck? What are you doing with our systems?”
“Systems? No idea what you’re talking about, Captain.”
Liao glanced at Rowe to confirm it. The redhead nodded in a frenzy, so Liao touched the talk key again.
“Summer tells me the Tehran is using our tactical computer to flag hostiles as friendlies.”
“We’re not doing anything of the sort, Captain. Why would we interfere with your ship’s capabilities?”
James’s distance in the heat of battle was off-putting, but Liao tried very hard to keep her composure. “I don’t know, Captain. You tell me.”
“Have Summer check them again. We would never interfere with the Beijing’s systems. She’s as safe as she ever was.”
She?
Liao narrowed her eyes ever so slightly. “Is she now?”
“Of course, Captain.”
Liao inhaled slightly. “James, can I ask you something?”
“Now might not be the best time, Captain.”
“It’s important.” Liao looked at Kamal, speaking slowly and deliberately. “I’ve been thinking about our apartment in New York. I was thinking of converting the den so that Tai doesn’t have to sleep on the couch anymore.”
“Can’t we discuss it after we’re done, you know, shooting at Ben?”
She gritted her teeth, grinding them together so hard it hurt and ignoring the strange looks she was getting from around the room. “James, I just want to make it perfectly clear what I’m asking; when we get back to Earth, is it okay for me to renovate the spare bedroom so that Kang Tai, my bodyguard, can sleep there?”
“Melissa, I don’t care. We’re a little busy over here.” James gave an exasperated sigh down the line. “Yes, you can renovate the room. Goodness knows Tai could use a proper bed every now and then.”
She reached up and clicked the button on her headset to close the line. She stared at the readouts on her command console, watching the exchange of fire between the Giralan and the rest of the fleet.
Ben was in their ship.