After her coup, Sula kept the second-class room she shared with Spence. She used the room only for sleeping when she wasn’t on duty, and the punishing schedule of accelerations made the pleasures of first class inaccessible anyway.
So Spence was on the bunk below when Sula woke screaming and clawing for the pistol under her pillow. Three gravities had torn tears out of her eyes and tracked them down her face. She felt the fading touch of hands on her throat. Her forearm, where the Torminel had bitten her, throbbed with pain. The scent of blood filled her senses.
“My lady!” Spence called. “My lady! It’s only a dream!”
Sula gave a gasp and let gravities push her back into the bed. The dream faded, and she struggled for words.
“It’s been a long time since I had one of those dreams.”
“Me too.”
“Not since I was on Terra.” And her mind, then, had regularly replayed the bloody scene of Ermina Vaswani dying in her arms, and Tari Koridun’s snarl as she tried to tear out Sula’s throat.
“I had forgotten what war was like,” said Spence.
Sula thought about that and decided that Spence was right. What Sula needed to do was become even more paranoid.
Lord Mehrang, Vijana, and others had nearly wiped out the Yormaks, and they’d been richly rewarded for their actions.
Maybe, she thought, Lady Tu-hon and her clique were intending to reward themselves in a similar way. Make the Terrans disappear, or a lot of them anyway, then redistribute their wealth.
Wholesale murder might be Lady Tu-hon’s way of recovering any fortunes lost in the economic debacle.
Sula cut acceleration entirely just before the next wormhole transit, having decided to enter the Contorsi system dark until she could complete an inventory of the ships in the system and assess them for threats. Transports appeared, and little mining settlements. And Corona with its transponder pinging away like a songbird.
And mere minutes behind and closing the distance fast, a warship.
A cold shimmer went up her spine as she realized that trouble had found Martinez, and that he and his merry band of yacht pilots were about to be faced with an enemy they couldn’t fight.
If we stay dark, Sula thought, maybe they won’t see us.
Maybe, she thought, they would be satisfied with killing Martinez and leave Striver alone.
Corona had entered the system of Contorsi, a small, pale yellow sun. None of the eleven planets were inhabited, but many of their satellites were being exploited for mineral resources, water, gases, or chemicals. Corona was en route from Contorsi Wormhole Two to Wormhole Three when a bright engine flare appeared from the direction of Wormhole One.
Corona was still twenty-five days from Harzapid and was decelerating at 1.2 gravities, hard enough to make a significant difference in transit time without overly inconveniencing the passengers, who grew used to carrying 20 percent more weight. Three of the racing yachts were hurling themselves into maneuvers with much higher gravities, as their captains trained for war. A racing yacht was very like a Fleet pinnace, a small boat with a big engine, and training in a yacht was the best way of preparing crew for the stresses of battle.
The message came as soon as it could, given that the newcomer had to find Corona in the system before delivering its dispatch. Vipsania, already in the communications suite, viewed it, then summoned Roland and Martinez for a replay.
The Lai-own captain glittered in her viridian dress uniform with its double row of silver buttons. She spoke quickly and formally, fixing the camera with her golden eyes. “Carrier Corona, I am Captain An-sol of the cruiser Conformance. I order you to continue your current course and maintain your current rate of deceleration. Conformance will maneuver to a rendezvous, and you will be boarded and searched.” The orange end-stamp filled the screen.
“Well,” Roland said. He frowned at the screen. “That was perfectly clear. And unexpected.”
Martinez looked at Roland in silent fury. At least your daughter isn’t here. Whatever happened to Conformance, Young Gareth would be a witness.
To the execution of his father, very possibly.
Vipsania replayed An-sol’s message, then viewed the Lai-own captain’s frozen image on the screen. “She put on a full dress uniform for a message of only a few seconds,” she said. “Call that a compliment to Gareth—she’d hardly put on full dress to send a message to some civilian captain.”
“She knows we’re on board, then,” said Roland.
It wouldn’t be hard to find out, Martinez thought. There would be records of who came up the skyhook to Zanshaa’s antimatter ring, and video of people moving on the docks. And since the Martinez family had all been named Terran criminals, people in the security services might have been keeping track of them anyway.
“I’ll call Captain Anderson,” Martinez said, “and have him tell Conformance that we will comply with their directives.”
He did so. Pneumatics sighed as Vipsania lowered herself, and her 20 percent extra weight, into one of the office chairs. “What do you know about this Captain An-sol?”
“A protégée of Squadron Commander Esh-draq,” Martinez said. “Was his first officer in the Judge Solomon during the war. I’ve met her a few times, but we’re not friends.”
“Is there anyone we can”—Roland searched for words—“approach to bring pressure on her?”
“Esh-draq, possibly, but he’s serving under Do-faq in the Third Fleet at Felarus, and it would take ten or twelve days to get a message to there and back.”
Martinez could see hard calculation cascading somewhere behind Roland’s eyes. “And Conformance will catch up to us sooner than that?”
“I haven’t plotted our courses, but I’m going to assume so.”
“Why don’t you make the plot, and we’ll consider other alternatives.”
Martinez seated himself at a terminal and called up a navigation display. Corona didn’t have the sensor suite of a warship, let alone a trained crew to operate it, and for that reason hadn’t been tracking Conformance, or for that matter any other vessel in the system. Martinez didn’t have much data on the cruiser’s movements, so he called up a multispectrum telescope and told it to track the cruiser. While he waited for new data to appear, an idea struck him, and he realized his mind had been quietly working on another problem altogether.
“I can tell you what this means,” he said. “It means that Michi’s succeeded in taking the Fourth Fleet. Or most of it, anyway.”
Vipsania and Roland looked at him in surprise. “Yes?” Roland said.
Even as stories of rebellion and mutiny had flooded the news services, there had been no word from Harzapid. Amid all the ranting, riots, and denunciation, and with so many stories of mutiny at other Fleet posts, the Fourth Fleet hadn’t been mentioned at all—Harzapid seemed to be a singularity in the new government’s story, a black hole from which no information emerged. As the days passed Martinez had found himself itching to use Lord Chen’s code to contact Michi Chen, but he’d always argued himself out of it. If the situation was delicate, he didn’t want to give the opposition evidence that Fleet Commander Chen was in contact with conspirators.
But now it seemed clear. “If the Fourth Fleet were under government control,” he said, “we’d fly right into their arms, so there would be no need to send Conformance after us. But Conformance was sent after us precisely because our welcome at Harzapid would be friendly. The government is trying to keep Harzapid from getting reinforcements. I’m sure they looked at their tracking data and saw Corona, and then they wouldn’t have to do too much work to guess who’s aboard.”
“That’s encouraging, I suppose,” Roland said, his eyes fixed on the screen frozen with An-sol’s image. “But I’m guessing you don’t expect that Michi’s going to charge to our rescue with a couple dozen warships.”
“I’m not counting on it,” Martinez said. “She may not know where we are, depending on whether the government’s cut communication with Harzapid.”
“In the last war,” Vipsania said, “the government and the Naxids were in communication all the time.”
“But that didn’t mean that you and I could chat with the Naxid high command,” Martinez said. “All messages from unauthorized personnel stopped at the censors, or at the wormhole relay stations.” And he sighed. “We might as well send a coded message to Michi now. It probably won’t go through, but it’s not likely to do us more harm than has already been done.”
Roland nodded. “If she’s our only hope of rescue, then do it.”
They watched while Martinez coded the message on his hand comm and sent it to the relay station this side of Contorsi Wormhole Three. In the silence that followed, Roland looked at the comm unit in his brother’s hand.
“You need to get rid of that before Conformance arrives,” he said. “If they find that code on you, that’s evidence.”
“I know,” Martinez said. He’d chuck the hand comm out a port and let it be burned to atoms by Corona’s radioactive tail.
Vipsania had been staring with a fierce expression at the exotic fish, as if they were an enemy she planned to overcome. “What if we run?” she asked. “Turn the ship around and start piling on acceleration?”
“A carrier isn’t built to stand the kind of acceleration you’d see in a warship,” Martinez said. “And even if we could accelerate at the same rate as Conformance, we can’t outrun a missile.”
“And there’s no way to knock the missile down?”
Martinez spread his hands. “With what?”
Roland cleared his throat. “I don’t suppose we could build a laser?”
“Again—with what? It would have to be a damned powerful laser, and there’d have to be some way of mounting and aiming it, and tracking the incoming missile, and even if we blow up the missile, Conformance has thirty missile launchers and plenty of reloads . . .”
There was a dark, morose moment of silence. “Any other ideas?” Martinez said. He could stick knives in his belt, as he had at the Corona Club riot, and maneuver the carrier to try to take Conformance by boarding. That would surprise Captain An-sol, and then she’d burst out in coarse laughter and fire the missile that would end his pirate days once and for all.
There was a chime from the navigation display, and Martinez turned to find that it had gathered enough data on Conformance’s speed and trajectory to make a prediction about its future movements. Laying the plot against that of Corona, he saw that the cruiser would intercept the carrier in three to three and a half days, depending on how close An-sol chose to fly past the star Contorsi when making a course change. Corona would fly past Contorsi a few hours earlier and intended to use a gravity assist and a burst of acceleration to put her on a direct course for escaping the system at Wormhole Three.
Not that this plan was even viable now.
He looked at the plot, and suddenly his despair vanished and was replaced with a growing sense of wonder. He saw how he might save Corona.
Or get everyone killed, including his wife and son.
He decided not to mention his revelation, at least for now.
Martinez walked into his suite and found Terza waiting for him on a chaise. She rose to greet him, elegant in an ankle-length dress of midnight-colored jersey, as if she were about to go to a formal reception—and that, he remembered, was what she had intended, before the appearance of Conformance had smashed everyone’s plans. She’d made arrangements to play her harp during a cocktail party hosted by Ari Abacha. Now the party would be replaced by a very sober meeting of all officers to discuss their options for somehow fending off Conformance.
He approached, embraced, and kissed her cheek. Vetiver, the heart notes of her perfume, smoothed his senses. “Where’s Chai-chai?” he asked.
“Drawing lessons with Lieutenant Garcia.” Young Gareth had been taken out of his school at midterm, and his parents and a series of volunteers were making sure his education progressed on schedule. Martinez had done his part—at lunch he’d been pleased to hear his son use the word deracinate.
“It’s good Chai-chai’s elsewhere, because—” His mouth turned dry. “We need to talk.”
Her jersey dress rustled as she took him by the hand and led him to a sofa. He looked at her face, lovely, framed by the black waterfall of hair, her impeccable serenity marred only by a slight hint of concern.
Martinez was still sorting through his ideas when Terza spoke. “You’re afraid of being arrested,” she said.
“I’m worried about being arrested,” he said. “I’m worried about being executed. What I’m afraid of is interrogation.” He tightened his hands around hers. “No one knows whether they’ll hold up under torture,” he said. “I could name your father. I could name Lord Oda, or Vipsania, or anyone. I could name you.”
She absorbed this, and he saw himself reflected in her dark eyes. “You haven’t done anything illegal.”
“That’s why they’ll have to make something up, and force me to admit to it.” He shook his head. “The best solution might be for Roland and me to commit suicide before we’re boarded. That way they might leave you alone.”
“No.” The word wasn’t spoken in shock, or surprise, but as a confirmed resolution, as if she’d thought this out well ahead of time. “No. We won’t consider that. If we have life, we have a chance.”
“I could kill us all,” Martinez said. Again he saw in his mind the solution that had flooded his thoughts as he looked at the navigation plot. “I could kill us all in more ways than one.”
Something like a smile briefly touched the corners of Terza’s mouth, as if he were confirming something she had already known. “You have a plan,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “But it’s very dangerous. If it goes amiss, Captain An-sol could decide to fire a missile, and we’d be defenseless against it.”
This time, when the slight smile appeared, it lasted a little more than a fraction of a second. “A missile strike is very sure, and very quick,” she said. “It’s better than suicide, and it’s better than torture.” She took his arm, rested her cheek against his shoulder, and looked up at him. Her body’s warmth prickled his cheek. “And we’ll be together.”
Her courage took his breath away. She had been bred to rule an empire, and here she was, at the very tail end of hope, willing to roll fortune’s dice and let them fall where they may. If it was a performance, it was brilliant. If she had given him a glimpse of her true self, it was even more impressive.
Martinez put his arm around her. “Yes,” he said. “Whatever happens, we’ll be together.”
The officers’ meeting was held in the pilots’ ready room, near the shuttle docks, a clean white space with clean white tables and chairs, a white counter with snacks and beverages served in clean white tableware, and excellent video and holographic displays, fortunately in a wider variety of color. When Martinez entered, he saw Chandra Prasad and Sabir Mersenne in an animated conversation at one of the tables, while a glum Ari Abacha sat by himself at another table contemplating a cup of coffee. Vonderheydte stood at a holographic display of Corona’s decks, making mysterious marks at various intersections. He saw Martinez arrive and braced to attention.
“Captain on deck!” he called. The others braced.
“As you were,” Martinez said. He looked at Vonderheydte’s marks on the Corona schematic. “What is this?”
“Resisting any attempts to board, Lord Captain,” Vonderheydte said. He pointed to the marks he’d been making on the display. “We can block certain corridors to channel the boarders into kill zones covered by our small arms, or booby-trapped with homemade explosives.”
Martinez viewed the schematic with interest. Vonderheydte seemed to have made an excellent start on his project, if it weren’t for the rather large factor he’d omitted from his calculations.
“Don’t you think an antimatter missile might trump all that?” Martinez asked.
Vonderheydte shrugged. “We work with what we’ve got, Lord Captain.”
“I suppose we do.” Martinez went to the café and got a cup of coffee and a pastry made fresh that morning, topped with cream and dotted with raspberries. By the time he’d finished his pastry, Garcia, Husayn, and Dalkeith had arrived, completing Corona’s roster of Fleet officers. Martinez walked to an unused display and faced the others.
“If I may have your attention,” he said. The officers straightened to a more alert posture, all save Ari Abacha, who continued to stare at his cold, half-empty coffee cup. Martinez looked from one to the next.
“Lieutenant Vonderheydte just said that we fight with what we’ve got,” he said. “Conformance has missiles armed with antihydrogen. We have antihydrogen as well, but it’s confined to Corona’s propulsion units and to the yachts.” He spread his hands. “We don’t lack explosive punch, we lack a means of delivery.” He stood square to his audience and tried to maintain a posture of absolute confidence as he spoke the next words. “Therefore I thought I’d call you here today to discuss turning one of the yachts into a missile, and using it to destroy Conformance. Any ideas?”
For a moment they just stared at him, all but Abacha, who absorbed the idea into his solitary, all-encompassing gloom without changing expression.
“Lord Captain,” said Sabir Mersenne. He was a plump man, with yellow-brown skin and short crisp hair that came down his forehead in a widow’s peak. His attitude was normally jovial, but Martinez’s idea had sent him into a state of alarm. “Lord Captain, they’ll see it coming, and they’ll blow it up.”
“We’ll hide it,” Martinez said. “We’re scheduled to perform a deceleration burn around the star Contorsi in three and a half days. Conformance will do its own burn around the star later that day. We’ll hide our improvised missile behind the star, then send it on an intercept course.”
On their faces he saw brief flares of hope, followed by looks that seemed more thoughtful, more troubled, as they mentally calculated trajectories and probabilities.
“We’ll work out the details of that later,” Martinez said. “But right now I’d like to discover if we can actually turn one of the yachts into a weapon with a proper warhead.”
Mersenne still seemed dubious. On Illustrious he’d been the propulsion officer, and antimatter drives were his specialty. “The yachts’ power comes from the Howe DM-5 unit,” he said. “It’s a very old, very reliable design. But—”
Chandra Prasad jumped to her feet. “If we try to breach containment, the Howe will kill us!” she said. “The unit is protected by diamond/graphene armor and operated by an autonomous program that can’t be altered without a visit to the factory. If the program detects any threat to the integrity of the containment vessel, it will respond with a controlled radiation burst. Our equipment will be destroyed, the operators will be irradiated if not killed outright, and if we use enough power to try to break containment, the resulting explosion might well destroy Corona.”
“I know,” Martinez said. He forced a smile onto his face. “That’s why we’ve got to work out a way of getting around it.”
“Lord Captain,” said Mersenne, “it’s not as if people haven’t thought about this sort of thing. If rebels or terrorists could get their hands on antihydrogen, they could destroy a city. But it’s never happened.” He waved a hand. “Because units like the Howe DM-5 were designed not only to prevent such misuse, but to kill anyone who tried it.”
“I admit it’s a challenge,” Martinez said, then mentally gave himself an award for understatement. “But what other ideas do we have?”
The response was silence. Martinez turned to the video display and put up a schematic of his own yacht’s engine compartment. “This is my Laredo,” he said. “And this is what we’ve got to work with.”
Chandra stepped closer to the display and gave the image a ferocious look, as if she were trying to obliterate the problem by sheer force of will. “How can we reach the software?” she said.
“Some kind of proprietary coupling available at the factory,” Mersenne said. “And if you jury-rig a coupling, you still have layers of security to dive through, and if you fail, you get fried.”
Martinez was getting a little tired of Mersenne’s insistence that his idea was a nonstarter.
“I have an idea, Lord Captain,” said Lord Ahmad Husayn. He was a blade-thin man with a pencil-thin mustache and had been a weapons specialist on the Illustrious. “Not about the power source, but the triggering mechanism. We’re going to need to rig a proximity fuse of some sort to make sure that the weapon goes off when it’s supposed to. If we ever find out a way to create a warhead, we’re going to want it to go off at the right time.”
Martinez was deeply relieved that someone had offered a useful idea. “Very good,” he said. “Let’s look at the problem.”
Husayn called up a display and began a sketch, while Martinez and Vonderheydte watched with interest. Garcia and Elissa Dalkeith joined Mersenne and began a discussion in low tones. Chandra continued to stare furiously at the schematic of Laredo’s engine bay.
Ari Abacha continued to gaze at his coffee. Then, sighing heavily, he rose to his feet, walked to the coffee dispenser, and filled his cup. He walked carefully, as if his feet pained him. He put a pastry in the microwave oven, warmed it, then took the plate as he began a return to his seat. As he passed Martinez, he muttered, “Just go around it.”
“Sorry?” Martinez said.
“The DM-5 is armored. Don’t go through the armor, go around it.”
Martinez was bewildered. “Go around it how?”
Abacha only shook his head, then shuffled back to his table. But Mersenne had heard, and he turned around, his eyes wide.
“Quantum tunneling?” he said.
His words hung in the air for a moment, and then Chandra turned from the display. “The cladding on the DM-5 is too thick,” she snarled. “Quantum tunneling works on far too tiny a scale—you can’t jump a barrier that wide.”
She was right, damn it.
“Good idea, though,” Martinez said. “We’re on the right track. A conventional approach won’t work for us. As Lieutenant Mersenne has pointed out, all that’s been anticipated.”
Lieutenant-Captain Elissa Dalkeith raised a hand.
“Yes, Lady Elcap?” Martinez said.
Martinez was still surprised nearly every time by Dalkeith’s voice, which had the high pitch and lisping tones of a child. “It seems to me that the DM-5’s software is our problem,” she said. “We have to breach containment faster than the software can react.”
“And the software operates at the speed of light,” Husayn said. “So what can we use—a great big laser?”
Dalkeith pushed gray strands back from her forehead. “We already use defensive lasers to destroy missiles,” she said. “Why can’t we do the same here?”
Vonderheydte looked blank. “Do we have a laser large enough to destroy a missile? This is a civilian ship.”
So far as Martinez knew there were no powerful lasers on board, but he was willing for the sake of argument to assume that such a laser could be cobbled together.
“Let’s for the moment assume we’ve got a laser of sufficient power,” he said. “What happens if we use it?”
“We can’t put it at sufficient distance to be safe,” said Garcia. “It’ll be right there in the engine bay, and within a tiny fraction of a second of it firing on the container, there will be a release of energy sufficient to destroy the laser, and the engine bay, and the yacht as well.”
“But the container will remain intact,” Martinez said. “As will Conformance.”
Garcia shrugged. “I’m afraid so, Lord Captain.”
Oh well, Martinez thought. We didn’t have the laser anyway.
“A big damn mortar,” Vonderheydte said. “Fire a great shaped charge at point-blank range. Breach the cladding, flood the container with plasma, the plasma will melt the chips and set them off.”
“I’m afraid not,” said Mersenne. “The container is covered with sensors, and the software possesses enough situational awareness to detect when a projectile is on its way. There will be a release of energy sufficient to destroy the projectile.”
“Stick to the electromagnetic spectrum,” Martinez said. “We’ve got to be faster than the software.”
“The antihydrogen’s in silicon chips,” Dalkeith said in her lisping voice. “Held by a charge of static electricity. What can destabilize that, and quickly?”
“A blast of gamma rays,” Husayn said, as if reading from a mental list. “X-rays. Any kind of ionizing radiation, really.”
“No,” Garcia said. She swiped a strand of her bushy hair out of her eye. “The other end of the spectrum. But we’d need a colossal burst.”
Martinez felt he needed clarification. “A burst of what, exactly?”
Garcia blinked, then turned toward the snack counter and silently pointed at the microwave oven.
“There,” she said. “That’s what you want, only a million times more powerful.”
“Where do we get the power?” Dalkeith asked.
Garcia gave a little laugh. “Well,” she said, “we’ve got more than one yacht, don’t we?”
“What’s the matter, Ari?” Martinez asked as they left the ready room. “You seem . . . less than invigorated.”
Now that he’d set things in motion, Martinez was feeling utterly reawakened. He’d created teams to deal with aspects of the problem: Garcia, Mersenne, and Dalkeith to breach the DM-5’s cladding, Husayn and Vonderheydte to work out the fusing, and Chandra Prasad to work out ways to bypass Laredo’s safety mechanisms, the mechanisms that might prevent the boat from doing exactly what Martinez intended to do with it.
Ari Abacha had volunteered for none of the groups and had abandoned his coffee and pastry and shuffled out of the ready room as soon as the others had begun working at their tasks. Martinez had followed and intercepted Abacha in the corridor.
“Less than invigorated?” Abacha repeated. “Well, I suppose I am.”
“Is it the business with Chandra?” Martinez asked. “You’ll get over that quickly—take my word, as someone with experience. There will be plenty of girls on Harzapid.”
Abacha touched his perfectly groomed mustache. “Chandra? Oh, possibly, that’s a part of it.” He sighed. “I’m suddenly feeling very old, Gare.”
“But you’re not old. You’re only a couple years older than me.”
Abacha paused and passed a hand over his balding forehead. “I think I’m in mourning for my world,” he said. “It’s all gone, isn’t it? Or going?” He turned to Martinez, his dark eyes looking past Martinez into a shadowy future. “From now on it’s all battle and killing and looting, and us trying to turn a device that provides power and light into a bomb. That’s all we have to look forward to, isn’t it? Until the last one of us stands on a heap of corpses and proclaims himself king?”
“We don’t have kings,” Martinez said. Amid his infinite surprise it was the only response he could manage.
Abacha’s eyes shifted from the indefinite future to focus on Martinez. “We will,” he said. “Whatever they call themselves, Megalords or Supreme Commanders or Sublime Potentates, they’ll be kings.” He touched Martinez’s arm with his knuckles. “You’re suited to this new world. You’ll do well—you’ll build all the bombs you want. You might be king yourself. Or Roland. Or maybe you’ll cut each other’s throats over it.” He blinked and touched Martinez’s arm again. “Sorry, Gare. That was uncalled for.”
“I’m not offended.” Martinez was far too surprised to be hurt, surprised not only at the bleak view of future history that Abacha had presented, but at a side of Abacha he’d never seen before. So far as he knew his friend’s attention had never extended beyond the good life, beyond drink and good company, pretty women and sport.
Abacha’s eyes glistened. “I’m going to drink some of Corona’s excellent liquor now, Gare,” he said. “I’m going to mourn the world that’s dead.” He turned away and began to walk down the corridor. “Join me later if you want.”
Martinez watched him shamble away, then returned to the ready room to help his officers build a missile.
Martinez sat in the custom seat of his simulator, lights and displays surrounding him in a semicircle, a fan purring somewhere behind his head. Chandra’s voice came out of the speakers.
“I’ve disabled the code where I could find it,” she said, “but I’m not convinced I’ve located everything.”
“You could run the simulation yourself,” Martinez said.
“I’d rather you do it.” Irritation showed in her voice. “You’re the damned yachtsman. You know which buttons to push.”
Martinez was in place to help remove recent innovations intended to preserve the pilot’s life. After Captain Blitsharts had gone spiraling off into the dark under full acceleration with his dead hand on the throttle, another element had been added to the software that allowed a third party to take command of the boat and return it safely to its berth. Martinez would use that to provide guidance to Laredo once it detached from Corona. The only problem was a second element of the new safety program, which flat forbade Martinez to accelerate the boat at a rate that would kill a human.
Martinez had assigned Chandra to the duty of altering the software because she had a diabolical talent for corrupting code and turning it to her own purposes. On Martinez’s last command, Illustrious, he’d discovered that Chandra had given herself database superuser privileges and rewritten her own personnel evaluation to make it more flattering.
Top marks for ambition, Martinez thought, as well as subversion. It was high time that she used her powers for good.
A tuneless, breathy whistle came from the speakers. As she worked, Chandra voiced whatever tune was running through her head. This might take some time.
Martinez relaxed into the acceleration couch that had been custom-molded around his body. Except that he had been wearing a vac suit at the time, as he would have in Laredo, and now that he was in his Fleet uniform, he fell into the couch as if it were an overlarge bathtub. At least the simulator had a pleasant smell, some kind of citrus-scented disinfectant, whereas fully suited in Laredo he could smell only his own suit seals.
The breathy tune came to an end. “All right, Gareth,” Chandra said. “Launch when ready.”
Martinez took the controls and shoved the throttle all the way forward. His couch shifted on its pneumatic supports to provide a convincing and somewhat exhilarating simulation of acceleration—the difference being that if the boost had been genuine, Martinez would have been mashed flat, and unconscious within a matter of seconds. Instead he watched the gauge that marked the gee force that he would have endured had his journey not been simulated, and then watched as the engine cut out at 21.3 gravities, in response to a programmed safety feature that Chandra had missed.
“Right,” he heard Chandra mutter. Then, “I found it. It’ll take me an hour or two to make sure I can disable it without also removing something we need.”
“Very good,” Martinez said. “Page me when you need me.” He hoisted himself out of the simulator and went down the stairs to the boat deck. There Laredo sat amid a scattering of components deemed no longer necessary: the acceleration couch, radiation shielding, much of the life support. The access hatches to the engine compartment were all open, and Garcia and Mersenne were involved in a discussion concerning how to attach new hardware to the DM-5 fuel source. Dalkeith watched while jotting notes into her hand comm.
“Get close enough,” Mersenne said, “and it’ll perceive it as a threat.”
“It’ll give us a warning tone if the Howe doesn’t perceive the threat as imminent,” Garcia said. “That’ll give us a good idea how close we can get.”
“At some point the warning tone turns into hard radiation,” Mersenne said. “Do you know where that point is? Because I don’t.”
Martinez saw that Dalkeith was standing on a drop cloth, and that she shared the drop cloth with magnetrons, waveguides, capacitors, diodes, and high-capacity transformers, all looted over the cook’s objections from the large, industrial-sized microwave ovens in Corona’s kitchens. She looked up as Martinez approached. “I’m generating some theoretical maximums,” she said in her child’s voice. “If we set up a proper magnetron array, we can generate a surprisingly large microwave burst before everything burns out.”
“How surprisingly large?”
Dalkeith showed him the calculations on her hand comm display. They were surprisingly large.
“What’s the range?”
“That depends. A microwave oven is a steel box that reflects the microwaves and contributes to heating the target, but we won’t have time for the microwaves to reflect even once. We’ll get a fraction of a second before either we succeed or the Howe unit destroys our array. So I’d like to do some experiments and find out exactly what the ideal range might be.”
“Carry on,” Martinez said.
Alikhan entered with a tray of cups and a vacuum flask of coffee. Martinez thanked him and poured himself a cup.
Garcia and Mersenne, in the meantime, had come to some kind of agreement to resolve their problem through experiments, and he urged them to coordinate their trials with those of Dalkeith.
“You know,” Martinez said, “if this works, we can’t tell anyone.”
Garcia looked up at him from her crouch near the scavenged electronics.
“We don’t want anyone to know this is even possible,” Martinez said. “So if we succeed, we have to hold this a complete secret. We don’t want to show terrorists a way to blow up cities.”
Dalkeith seemed relieved. “Thank you, Lord Captain,” she said. “That had worried me, also.”
Carrying his coffee, Martinez then went in search of Husayn, whom he found in the ready room.
Husayn, designing the proximity fuse, had the easiest task of all, because racing necessitated an impressive sensor array for Laredo, and all that was necessary was to define which sensor inputs would trigger the explosion. Husayn had essentially finished his work, but still needed to check it.
Martinez rolled his shoulders, undid a button on his tunic, and allowed a feeling of satisfaction to roll over him. The technical issues were being addressed and the project had a chance of success. He decided to go for a stroll to clear his head.
He took the elevator up to the dining hall with its spectacular waterfall. The air was filled with the tang of the sea. Crew were setting up the tables for supper, laying out crystal and porcelain. He saw Young Gareth standing on the lip of the fountain, staring down at the bright fish beneath the rippling water and touching a stylus to an oversized hand comm. He waved the stylus in greeting as Martinez approached.
“Hello, progenitor!” he said. “I’m trying to draw the fish, but it’s hard. I wish Lieutenant Garcia were here to help.”
“She’ll be free in a few days,” Martinez said. If we aren’t all dead.
“Are you working?” Young Gareth asked. “You’re all so busy all of a sudden.”
“My day has been good,” Martinez said. “I’m blithe, perhaps even jocund.”
Young Gareth was impressed. “Jocund? Really?”
“Yes,” Martinez said. He plucked at the knees of his trousers and knelt by his son. “Now why don’t you show me your picture?”
Two days later, Martinez was back in the Laredo simulator, the hatch closed, the fan behind his head humming. He wore a virtual reality rig, and so a virtual navigation plot seemed to float in the air in front of him, with the yacht’s virtual controls just beyond.
He didn’t actually need to be in the simulator, but he preferred to be alone.
The weight of expectation was growing too heavy for company.
He breathed in the scent of citrus, and of gun oil. He had taken his sidearm into the simulator with him.
Corona was swiftly approaching the small yellow star Contorsi. Captain Anderson had asked Conformance for permission to do a course correction burn around Contorsi to place them on track for Wormhole Three, and Conformance had responded in the affirmative. The burn would have been the expected thing.
So far, so routine.
Martinez knew that Conformance would be doing its own burn around the small yellow sun to fall into Corona’s wake, but he couldn’t predict its track for certain. It might swing wide so as not to pile on too many gravities, but Martinez was inclined to think of Captain An-sol as the sort of smart, efficient officer who would welcome the opportunity for testing her ship and crew with a precise hard-gee burn.
But because he couldn’t be certain, his intended course for Laredo was a compromise, accelerating at a rate that would kill any human passenger, and intersecting a number of courses that seemed plausible for Conformance.
“Three minutes to course correction.” Vonderheydte’s voice came over the speaker.
“Acknowledged,” Martinez said. He really hadn’t needed the reminder—he had one eye on the chronometer.
Everyone on the ship was strapped into an acceleration couch for the burn. The fountain and waterfall had been drained, and all the fish and water tanks were secured for higher gravities. The crystal and porcelain had been placed in intelligent storage units that would provide them with exactly the amount of support necessary to survive any plausible acceleration.
“One minute.”
He could feel eddies in his inner ear telling him that Corona was yawing slightly, more precisely aligning the engine for the burn.
“Fifty-one seconds.” Half a Shaa minute.
Martinez enabled the automatic controls and kept his eyes on the plot.
“Nineteen seconds.”
At zero the engines increased their burn, and Martinez felt gravities increase. He took strong, deliberate breaths. Darkness pulsed at the edges of his vision. Corona, the ship, now traversed the actual corona of the sun, drawing a burning line through the outer envelope of the star. And then, as the sun passed between Corona and Conformance, he saw the signal that Laredo was away, its track separating from Corona until it reached a safe distance and its own powerful engine could ignite. Martinez’s eyes shifted to the virtual cockpit as he watched displays shift to the telemetry coming in from Laredo.
The pressure on his chest gradually eased as Corona flashed past Contorsi. Laredo was decelerating at a furious rate, the gees building—six, nine, fifteen. He knew that the jury-rigged system in the engine compartment had been braced against such accelerations, but he felt worry gnaw at him. Something could break loose, some wiring come undone . . . twenty, twenty-two. Always keeping the star between Conformance and the yacht.
Nothing went wrong, and the yacht continued along its programmed course. Martinez felt his anxiety decrease by what seemed a microscopic amount. There were still so many places where it could go wrong.
In a half circle around Laredo’s antimatter container was the jury-rigged array of microwave emitters, all ready to be powered by another Howe container scavenged from Captain Kelly’s racing yacht. If any of the improvised gear broke under the stress of acceleration, the mission would fail.
If Laredo’s guidance failed, or contained an error, the mission would fail with it.
If Conformance chose an unconventional path around the sun, and Laredo failed to intercept, the mission would fail.
If the improvised proximity fuse didn’t perform as expected, the mission would fail.
When the proximity alert gave the signal, the DM-5 scavenged from Kelly’s yacht would fire a great burst of energy through the microwave array. If the DM-5 failed to trigger, or if it had been hooked improperly into the system, or if it flooded the microwave array with too much energy and blew it apart, the mission would fail.
The microwave array aimed at Laredo’s DM-5 might not work, or it might be misaligned. In which case the mission would fail.
And last, if the microwave burst was insufficient to destabilize the antihydrogen chips in the DM-5, then the DM-5 would assume it was under attack and release enough radiation to wreck Laredo. There would be no enormous release of energy, and the mission would fail.
But if everything went right, a strong overload current would destabilize the chips, and the antihydrogen flakes would hit the silicon wall and all their energy would be released at once. Which would be enough to destabilize the antimatter in Kelly’s power unit, and the two would go off together.
And then, if Conformance was within range of the blast, it would be destroyed, and the mission would succeed.
It would be the better part of an hour before Conformance began its own burn, and during that time Martinez stayed in the simulator while anxiety gnawed at his insides, and he played every failure mode over and over again in his mind. He could smell the sweat that was soaking his armpits and sousing his back.
He looked at the pistol he’d brought into the simulator with him. If the improvised missile failed, he thought he might record a few last messages to his family, and then kill himself before Conformance caught up with them.
Assuming, of course, he could actually pull the trigger. He could use radiation weapons to destroy ships and their crews between the stars, but he didn’t know whether he had the nerve to put the gun to his head.
He watched as Conformance vanished behind Contorsi and reappeared a few seconds later, its engine pointed directly at Corona and burning brilliant white. He had to keep reminding himself that what he was watching had happened nearly four minutes ago, and that whatever was going to happen had already happened.
Laredo was no longer decelerating, but accelerating along its intercepting course. And then there was another white flare, and Martinez felt his heart stop.
The confirmation was in the radiation counter, a double spike—the two Howe units on Laredo going up simultaneously, and then a tiny fraction of a second later all the fuel on Conformance detonating, creating a nova flare that for a brief instant burned brighter than the star, a flare that marked the death of a ship and its nearly three hundred crew.
Martinez felt his heart lurch into motion. He let out the breath he didn’t know he’d been holding, and took in air.
“Well,” he said aloud. “Now we really are the Terran criminals.”