Death of a Starship
by Jay Lake
Smashwords Edition by Jay Lake
Copyright © 2009, 2011 Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
Cover photograph copyright © 2006, 2011 Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
Originally published December, 2009 by MonkeyBrain Books, Austin, TX.
This ebook text varies slightly from the original edition.
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Death of a Starship
by Jay Lake
Second battle of 3-Freewall, more than a baseline century past
“Z-flotilla’s gone over to the rebels!” shouted one of the comm ensigns. Sweat beaded on the boy’s shaved scalp. He was still young enough to be excited by combat.
NSS Enver Hoxha’s battle bridge was wedge-shaped, command stations at the narrow aft end, a giant array of displays at the blunt forward end, everything finished out in military-grade carbonmesh and low-intensity gel interfaces. A dozen duty stations were arrayed before and below Captain Saenz, eighteen officers and enlisted laboring wet-backed and trembling in the service of their own imminent death. Everything reeked of panicked men and distressed electronics.
Commander Ulyanov leaned close, his bullet head gleaming sweat bright as the ensign’s. “They’re not firing...yet. With respect sir, we’re done. All the other capital assets have gone over or been neutralized.”
“Neutralized” in deep space meant decompressive death for hundreds or thousands of crew, the survivors scattering like sparks from a bonfire in lifepods which were more likely to be used as ranging targets than ever be rescued within their survival windows. Except in a civil war, when it could also mean officers lined up in boat bays and gunned down by excited sailors acting under mutinous orders.
Captain Saenz stared at the main displays, all shunted to internal status reports. Everything glowed amber or red. The battle bridge shuddered, gravimetrics cycling on a decay curve tending asymptotically toward catastrophic failure. He’d had damage control shut down the alarms, even the strobes. Too many of the Hoxha’s systems were critical or supercritical. If any of the new skippers in Z-flotilla worked up the nerve to open fire on their erstwhile heaviest asset, those systems wouldn’t matter to anyone but an after-action forensics team. Imminent death had become remarkably quiet. “I will not strike my colors,” he muttered.
“Then they’ll strike ‘em for us, Rod.”
“So we withdraw.”
Ulyanov glanced around the bridge. Saenz wondered if his first officer were on the brink of switching loyalties. Was he counting heads? Or sidearms? But no, the exec turned his gaze back to the captain, guile absent from his eyes. “Where to? This is...was...the last Loyalist fleet.”
“Anywhere outside this disaster area.”
“We’ve only got one contingent withdrawal course still open. And the window on that beacon’s getting more and more narrow.”
Saenz chopped a hand down. “Go.”
Ulyanov slid a hand over his console, setting off stored actions plans. “Attention on bridge,” he said. “We are implementing contingency gamma seven, effective–”
Something hit them hard enough to flop the battle bridge’s multiply- redundant, hardened gravimetrics. Polarity cycled several times in rapid succession, bouncing everything that wasn’t strapped down between the deck and the overhead. Lights dimmed and blowers cut out as the Hoxha’s engineering section routed power to the c-drivers.
Larger ships had an inherent advantage in reaching the lightspeed discontinuity, especially deep in stellar gravity wells. Somewhere at the bottom, the equations rested in part on Fnet=m*a, which in turn drove Higgs boson crowding and enabled the c-transition. Larger ships had larger mass, and in c-physics the value of mass in the equation scaled more rapidly than the value of acceleration.
In other words, once Hoxha lurched into motion, for all that her tormentors could literally fly rings around her, she’d make her exit from the battle into the ghostly reaches of c-space long before they could follow the negative energy traces of her wake. As long as her systems were sufficiently whole when she reached transition speed, that was.
Captain Saenz watched his lightpen find a stable resting point in three pieces on the floor. “Think we should have drunk those last bottles of wine in the executive wardroom, Georgi?”
Ulyanov laughed. “There’s always tomorrow. Give us another seven minutes on this acceleration power curve and we’ll live to see it.”
Four minutes and change later, Z-flotilla decided it had new orders and began pouring firepower into Hoxha’s aft ventral armor and shields. Saenz declined to return fire in favor of maintaining shield strength and keeping his ship moving. The battle bridge grew vacuum-quiet, save for the crackling ripple from the gravs. The damage control figures flickered on the main display so fast the human eye couldn’t track any more.
“Still going to make it,” Ulyanov said. It was more of a question, or perhaps a prayer, than a statement.
Saenz watched the numbers toll the death knell of his ship. Forward and dorsal shields were down completely. His crew strength was below thirty-five percent effective. Damage control parties under Commander Poolyard were a hundred and forty-two percent committed. Which meant there were fires and worse raging unchecked in Hoxha’s belly. “Depends on what else they hit us with.”
“Rod...”
Here it comes, thought Saenz. Eyes still on the main screen, his hand drifted to his flechette pistol. “Too late, Commander. We’re too late to do anything else.”
“Listen. Please. I–”
Whatever Ulyanov had been about to say was lost in a blare of navigation alarms. “Not now!” screamed Lieutenant Commander Dürer. “We’ve got a mass moving into our c-transition space!”
Any collision almost certainly meant an extremely violent energy exchange, rendering Hoxha into a minor sun for a few moments.
“Drop shields,” Saenz ordered. “Drop environmental power. All non-engine power to forward batteries. Vaporize it.”
With that, the funereal hush of the bridge imploded, a cascade of shouts in the increasingly stale and smoky air.
“It’s about two percent of our mass, captain!”
“Batteries two, three and seven offline, sir. Six and eight are...they’re...gone, sir! Just not there anymore.”
“Not a rock, it’s altering course.”
“Not one of ours...er, theirs. Nothing we know, I mean. No IFF signature, wrong composition.”
“It’s a fucking self-propelled asteroid!”
“Language, Lieutenant.”
“It’s absorbing over fourteen terawatt/seconds of firepower, sir. And it’s still there!”
In the midst of the chaos, Captain Saenz watched the main screen. It now displayed a simplified diagram of Hoxha’s escape trajectory. The erratic motions of the interfering mass were plotted in an intersecting curve.
“You have anything to do with this, Georgi?” he asked in a few seconds of random quiet.
“I don’t want to die, sir,” said Ulyanov. “Not this way or any other.”
“No one wants to die, my friend.” Saenz found his hand was still on his pistol. “But how many of us get to live forever?”
Then there was more fire pounding the unprotected aft of the ship, and an explosive pressure vent between hull frames 127 and 144, an
d the mystery mass was still inside their escape trajectory, and the purple c-lights stuttered on as the battle bridge gravs shut down completely and a horrendous, tooth shattering wrench overtook Hoxha and her crew as they disappeared forever into a screaming white light.
‡
Menard: Nouvelle Avignon, Prime See
The Grand Ekumenical Basilica towered over a kilometer into the violet Avignard sky. The edifice was a vast, eye-bending twist of titanium and carbonmesh sheathed with glittering spun diamond glass in every color known to man. Red-winged angel-flyers circled it endlessly, security in the air matched by ground-based, orbital, and virtual assets even more fearsome for being inconspicuous. Diamond windows, angels and all, the building was a giant, shouted prayer to the Lord God, a celebration of the glory of creation and man’s place in it. That the Church used that glory to impress the Emperor and his court, not to mention all the pilgrims and tourists, was a collateral benefit to His earthly servants. As if in response from Heaven, lightning played perpetually around the shining crosses that gleamed through every night and were supposedly even visible from orbit.
Not that the Very Reverend Jonah Menard, Chor Episcopos in the ranks of the holy and mid-level functionary of the Church, had ever been able to spot them in his frequent comings and goings.
Once more down the gravity well. As it happened he had business outside the long, glorious shadow of the tower, down amid the featureless warren of offices in which the majority of the functions of the Church were conducted. He was bound for the Xenic Bureau of the Grand Ekumenical Security Directorate – his own department. Like almost all of the Ekumen Orthodox Church’s vast and tentacled bureaucracy, the Xenic Bureau was housed quite sensibly in an underground building out of the public eye. The Bureau’s quarters were a multilayered maze of identical concrete corridors and meeting rooms and cubicles, with a perhaps higher than normal concentration of virteolizer rooms – the Xenic Bureau spent a lot of time working inside its collective imagination.
Chor Episcopos Menard was a short man, not at all like the popular image of either a humble parish priest or one of the grand patriarchs of the Church. He was barrel-chested with an unfortunate run toward fat and knees which ached from a lifetime of kneeling too much. His forehead was tattooed with the three-barred Orthodox cross in a deep green ink that matched the shade of his eyes, his scalp dark with razor stubble. Though he could argue doctrine with all the fervor of his University of Romagrad Th.D., Menard was also one of the Church’s leading experts on xenic intelligences. Such as they were, and such as they might exist.
And while the Church had one set of complex, nuanced views on this topic, the Empire had quite another.
“Jonah.” It was Bishop Antonine Russe, his manager and a reserve commodore in the Church Militant, the Patriarch’s fleet. Russe was every centimeter the spare, ascetic churchman of the popular imagination, affecting the black-and-white robes of the highest formal levels of the Patriarchate. Russe shaved his head, and even his eyebrows, and sported an elaborate tattoo across the curve of his scalp. His pectoral cross was meteoric iron, heavy enough that its chain left a raw circle always visible around his neck.
Menard inclined his head. “Sir. I am reporting in.”
“Skip the log-ins and pop down to conference room Yellow-2 with me.”
The Chor Episcopos suppressed a sigh. “Yes, sir.”
“This one’s big. Worth the trouble. Trust me, Jonah.”
The problem was, Menard didn’t trust Russe. Not one bit.
‡
Golliwog: Powell Station, Leukine Solar Space
Clutching the flint sparker in the palm of his left vacuum glove, Golliwog flew tight and hard along the curve of the hull. The exercise was being conducted in and around the derelict hull of an old quartermaster’s transport bottom – a dead slow pig designed to move enormous amounts of material from one gravity well to another. Dummy or not, it wasn’t a simulation. At some point in training, simulations became meaningless. Golliwog could be killed here, yes he could. Even as he brushed a meter or so above the highest hull protrusions he watched for weaponsign.
The enemy was crafty. Golliwog knew that. He knew the enemy well because the enemy was him.
There...he spotted a flash high on his port flank. The assault sled’s primitive instrumentation began blinking at about the same time. Golliwog flipped over, killed all his power – thrust, instrumentation, comm, everything, and fingered the switches he’d welded onto the panel that morning. They controlled the release valves on eight bottles of high-pressure oxygen welded to the sled frame.
Now he was a ballistic object steered with squirts of O2. His albedo, including sled and weapons, was about one percent. Still high, but it was the best he could do within the training parameters. Bright as nanotrace fog in direct starlight, the sparkle of the oxygen venting would be a dead giveaway, but he’d stayed in the shadowed side of the monstrous ship so long the enemy had been forced to come looking for him.
Golliwog cleared his mind and set most of his internal systems into rest mode. Dangerous, that, but useful, too. Shutting down both his internals and the sled meant he was just a piece of junk, inert mass that had broken off the training hull. Pay no mind to the kilos of protein: on a training sled the enemy’s sensor suite wouldn’t be wired to look for that anyway. He hoped. The enemy was, by definition, as clever as he was.
Froggie never believed in giving up advantages. Golliwog’s combat mentor would beat him blue and senseless for a trick like this, but Froggie wasn’t out here alone in the hard vacuum. Old Anatid, on the other hand, would probably approve of the skewed thinking. Anatid was Golliwog’s strategy mentor, an ancient bione with a cryptic manner who’d befriended Golliwog even beyond the confines of the training rooms.
Unpowered, quiet as an empty airlock, he hurtled along the shadowed side of the hull, twisting the flint sparker in his hand for luck, or nerves. Where was that flash again? Golliwog watched the high port flank, stalking the enemy who was stalking him.
Then the other sled was in front of him, turning under sudden acceleration in a faint glow of ionized exhaust gas. Golliwog flipped the triggers on his starboard oxygen bottles and rolled along his axis just as his own sled took a solid hit of a directed energy lance. The little instrumentation panel flared bright, then glowed dead, even as the shock caused Golliwog’s entire body to spasm. The only thing that saved him was the fact that he was in shut down mode. Shunts and breakers absorbed the invading currents before they could fry the idle cognitive and reactive systems.
Still alive, thought Golliwog. Old Anatid would be proud. The enemy believes me fried to a ballistic lump. He triggered his aft ventral bottle, calculating the pull to vent the escape valve at just the ride speed to flip his sled end over end and send it crashing into the enemy’s sled stern-first, the relatively heavy propulsion unit slamming into the enemy’s fairing.
“Where’s your power now!” Golliwog screamed, breaking protocol. He laughed as he hotstarted his combat mods and popped free from his safety clips, one hand on the sled’s steering bar so he didn’t spin loose. The exercise required him to wear only a skin suit, no combat armor, and he could carry no issue weapons. (And where had the enemy gotten a DE lance? asked a traitor voice in his head.) Instead he had another oxygen bottle strapped to his waist, along with a bottle of liquid hydrogen – each of them with a line rigged to one of his gloves.
Where was the enemy?
The enemy solved that problem by presenting himself, leading with a long handled hook. A deadly weapon in a vacuum fight, that. Golliwog twisted around his own axis with a tiny squirt of oxygen from his left wrist. He grabbed the enemy’s hook just behind the blade, then swung his left leg up for a grip. He brought his wrists together pointing at the enemy, opened the valves on both bottles, and clicked the sparker.
In the blooming light of thrust and fire, Golliwog saw the surprise on his own face within the enemy’s helmet.
‡
Albrecht: Halfsummer, Gryphon Landing
Micah Albrecht had always liked ship models as a child. R-class hunter-seekers, the old pre-Imperial battlewagons, even spin-racing yachts. He’d built them all, filled two rooms until his dad had thrown the ships out, along with him. Which, in a sense, was why he now wandered the too-hot open-air market in Gryphon Landing, too many light years from anywhere he belonged, angry and desperate.
His fascination with ships and all their doings eventually led him to be a c-drive engineer. Well, he had been one, damn it. Albrecht had lost his certification thanks to a witch-hunt and a bought-off tribunal on board the Princess Janivera. They’d needed somebody to take the blame for the environmental crash that had left three paying passengers brain dead. The union steward wasn’t about to let his nephew go down for it, even though the little bastard was rotten as month-old milk – guilty but uncharged.
Albrecht had been lucky to stay out of prison. Of course, if the whole mess had gotten into criminal court, the fix might have been uncovered, so the owners had generously ensured that charges were not brought.
Now he wandered the cramped alleys between market stalls under a powder-blue sky somebody had told him was a dead ringer for old Earth. How the hell they’d known that was beyond him. The market was chaos, of course, crowded and pulsing as any dock, even if this was the last port of call for most of the people and the things they bought and sold.
The booths ranged from a bit of fabric between two saplings all the way to powered cargo containers with their own internal cooling and feelie shows. The merchandise ran the gamut of everything he could imagine finding for sale in a third-rate port town, with the possible exception of human beings. The whole place reeked of machine oil and the ozone-sharp scent of distressed electronics, with a side of the eel curry which seemed to be the ground state of dirtside food.
When all else was done, eat the damned eels out of the recycling tanks. Last rule of survival on a dying station. Eating eel was one step away from death.