Chapter 4. Admiral
Xandarga Space Elevator, Earth, c . 55,680,000 years ago
Alien they seemed to be
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history
Thomas Hardy—The Convergence of the Twain
First, the sky froze. And then, it boiled.
Which was a pity, he thought, as all breath was sucked out of him, followed by his guts, and then his brain, and all that just before his skull imploded. The sky had been such a nice color. And the air, so fresh. These were his very last thoughts of all, as his skin peeled away, his limbs were ripped from their sockets, and his eyeballs sublimed into the vacuum. But something inside told him that he was not, in fact, dead.
An absence of pain.
He was not, however, sufficiently conscious to realize that having these thoughts at all was in any way peculiar. Not yet.
Ah, me. She’d always said that the whole expedition had been ‘me, me, me,’ and he’d have to admit that she’d been right. After all, a couple of Brontops-class star destroyers should have been all that was necessary to put down an insurrection of the Slunj in that fractious volume the other side of the Rigel sector. The Slunj being what they were—thin films of loosely aggregated bacteria—were barely organized enough to keep their own bodies together, let alone put up any kind of coherent rebellion.
“Send a couple of gun-boats,” the Senior Under-Secretary for Colonial Defense had said, flashing cat-like eyes at him. “The natives respond to that. But don’t do any more. If we send too many ships, they’ll think we’re scared. That their rebellion amounts to any more than a fly that we’d swat, but only if we were really bothered. And, besides, there is such a thing as elegance. Oh, you know, Admiral—economy.”
Elegance. Economy. But no, he had to play the Big Boy, and try out his Big-Boys’ toys. A small scuffle with the Slunj would be an excellent opportunity to give the 17th Rigel Fleet a much-needed trial in extended battle formation.
All of it.
All those millions of cruisers, each one seventeen kilometers of ceramic ellipsoid terror with three hundred kilolights under the hood, together deploying a quite eye-watering exatonnage of armament.
All those destroyers, too—tens of thousands of them—each one the size of a continent, and for which the term ‘destroyer’ could be read as wanton understatement.
The hundreds of planet-sized capital ships, each one loaded with rail guns capable of accelerating a nickel-iron asteroid from rest to point-oh-five lights by the time it got to the muzzle, and then dropping it to within five hundred meters of its target from a light-month’s distance—and doing this again and again, hundreds of times an hour.
And the jewel in the crown—and his own, personal, fiefdom—the Sorceror, a spaceship that looked like a planet in every way, because it was one. With oceans, continents, deserts, forests, atmosphere, and life: yes, a synthetic planet, and all his own, for all that its mantle was a caul of the most muscular machinery that his engineers could contrive—continuum flux generators that would allow trans-spatial velocity of almost half a million light-years per hour.
Anywhere in the Galaxy at the flick of a switch.
Taking with it, of course, a retinue of moon-sized outriders that both illuminated the spaceship (giving a pleasing reality to the old canard of the Sun in orbit about the Earth) as well as toting the kinds of System-Superiority weapons that could turn gas-giants to fog.
And while the 17th Rigel Fleet was one of hundreds of such forces, it marked the pinnacle of Earth’s Imperial might, which had been mighty for time immemorial, it seemed, and looked every inch eternal.
What the Senior Under-Secretary for Colonial Defense seemed unable to understand was that fleets need to be deployed, even in times of relative peace. Fleets as complex as the 17th Rigel needed constant testing. All those hundreds of millions of troops couldn’t spend all their time just hanging about. And, anyway, who really cared about the messages, psychological or political, that one might send to a few scuts of piratical pond scum?
But there are other things in space besides sentient slime, soon-to-be ex-Admiral Ruxhana Fengen Kraa.
So that was his name, was it? It sounded familiar, of course it did. But also as if the words were freshly minted, their potential yet to be dulled by utterance. His mind directed his tongue to rehearse this new syllabary.
Answer came there none.
In any case, what was all this ‘soon-to-be-ex’ business? Pulse rose. Body fluids changed their conductivity.
What’s that? Panic?
Alarms ripped. Lights pulsed. He woke. Parts of him (he wasn’t sure which parts) started to shake. But something else forced him down.
He opened his eyes. The blur, agonizingly bright at first, resolved, pixel-fashion, into a face he thought he’d seen before. But where?
Frustration. Blood surge. Restraint.
“Please be calm, Admiral,” said a voice. “You are gravely injured, As yet you are unable to move, owing to the absence of many of your essential parts. To tell the truth, they had to scrape what was left of you off the inside of the escapod. Woof! Twenty-five gees and even the pippiest Admiral is no more than a few blobs of strawberry jam.”
Oh, very amusing. Just what the Slunj looked like, even in the peak of health. Poetic justice. “However, all parts necessary will have been supplied, tested and bedded down by the time we get there. You’ll be a new man!”
“Get... there? Where?” He was not aware of having made any sound, but the doctor did not seem to think this a problem. She (so she was a she) laughed. The memory of that voice flitted like cheeky shoals through the holes in the ragged net of his mind, and into the void beyond.
“Of course, you won’t have known, what with everything that’s happened. You’re in an autopod. Don’t worry. We’ll fix you up as soon as we can.” The doctor looked distractedly to the side, out of view. Perhaps she was taking a reading from some machinery. Perhaps she was, in fact, an illusion and had vanished completely. It was hard to tell.
“But where?”
“Sorry! Counting stitches. We’re on the El: eight thousand kilometers up, falling slowly, arrival Xandarga Station in... well, let’s not worry about that yet.”
“Earth?”
“Where else? Just lie back and think of Gondwanaland.”
Soon-to-be-ex-Admiral Ruxhana Fengen Kraa realized that his homecoming might be sufficiently painful that atomization somewhere the other side of Rigel might have been a wiser choice.
The first sign of trouble had come not long after the fleet regrouped three lights out from the disputed system and started to scan for Slunj. The primary was an M-type dwarf that could offer no more haven than a couple of pallid ice-giants; a scree of disconsolate pebbles; and, close in, an absolute jewel of a blue planet, a little smaller than Earth, currently home to several Discotex colony hives.
The billion-year Discotex civilization was a notable beneficiary of the Pax Terrestris, which had all but driven its traditional enemies, the savagely asocial Flux Fiddlers that infested stellar atmospheres, to extinction. But Discotex colonies had since proven vulnerable to Slunj infestation, necessitating the current exemplary show of force.
The interchange hadn’t all been one way. Now peaceful and given to exotic collectivist philosophies, the Discotex had learned much in their eons-long conflict. Especially about some of the more imaginative uses of hypertransuranic elements, now incorporated into several of the more assertive armaments of the 17th Rigel and many similar fleets, and whose use had proven decisive in several conflicts that might otherwise have dragged on much longer.
The bottom line was that Earth was indebted to the Discotex. The Senior Under-Secretary should have understood that, too. ‘A couple of gunboats,’ indeed.
Admiral Ruxhana Fengen Kraa had felt the skin on the back of his neck tingle even as the f
irst messages trickled in—spare, disconnected and puzzling. He should have acted then, on instinct, pulling his immensely powerful, but delicate and (as the Senior Under-Secretary constantly reminded him) very expensive fleet away, away from danger. But no, he had deployed his forces and wasn’t going to pull back now. And also because the earliest signs that things might have gone awry piqued his curiosity. They were so odd: he had to find out more.
The first message was less about annihilation than astrogation. An advance battle group of cruisers and destroyers had reported a systematic error. They had, through no fault of their own, ended up of the far side of the system, relative to the main fleet. Doppler ranging confirmed this, but no explanation could be advanced. The continuum flux generators of the vessels concerned were working within 99.9% optimal spec, and, anyway, what could have happened to have affected the whole group simultaneously? It made no sense.
These messages were relayed to the currently favored Bridge of the Sorceror, a ginkgo-shaded sun-terrace of a faux-ruined lamasery, perched on the edge of a volcanic crater-lake so huge that one could hardly see from one side to the other. Admiral Kraa mused on a sun-lounger, drink in hand, watching some of his younger female staff playing volleyball on the brilliant white beach below. This gentle slide from reality into mildly erotic fantasy was interrupted by a sharp ping from his AI core. The glass fell from his hand and shattered on the terrace.
One flick of the mind and he was in uniform, on the VR Command Deck. It was in uproar. Staff were sweating at their consoles; barking through comms ports and at one another; his younger female staff, now coolly and crisply uniformed, were deep in VR gear, or shuttling glittering icons in 4-D battle maps. There were engineers on the deck in conclave with his officers, huddled over displays. That engineers were present at all on the Command Deck showed that something had gone very wrong. Very wrong indeed.
No sooner was his presence noted than he was assaulted with status updates. He bounced them to his AI core for a shakedown, and this is what he learned: that thirteen minutes after broadcasting their initial inquiry, the advance battle group, all seventy-eight thousand vessels, had disappeared.
Worse, this was not an isolated case. Destruction seemed to be spreading through the fleet like a contagion, affecting ships first in small groups—ships that would flash in and out of existence around the system and then vanish altogether, leaving no more than a smear of atoms and hard radiation.
Small groups became larger groups, until the whole fleet found itself ploughing into a storm-front beyond which the regular laws of the Universe had been suspended. He felt the thrum and screech of rending rock and metal. Standing at the bridge but powerless to command it, Admiral Ruxhana Fengen Kraa queried his AI core. The Sorceror was large enough to register and triangulate significant local gravitational anomalies. His AI told him that near-space was full of them—localized gravitational disturbances so intense that the continuum itself had, in places, warped in on itself, enfolding any nearby matter—including his fleet—in shrouds of nothingness. And then, just as suddenly, unfolding, spitting out the pips. It was as if the 17th Rigel was being peppered with rapidly moving black holes, tossed in their wakes as they passed by.
He flipped back to the sun terrace to see the crater-lake in a confusion of spume, noise, and coral grapeshot that raked his flesh like razors. The ground shifted beneath his feet, but he could not move: his feet were so heavy they might have been nailed to the flags. This was, he reflected, unhelpful, as a rogue gravitational pulse was trying to rip his head off.
He must have passed out. Either that, or his AI core did the decent thing, winking him out, squirting what was left of him into an escapod, and blasting its way out of the killing zone. Very few among the six hundred and seventy-three million souls in the 17th Rigel would have had access to such a luxury. But he was the Admiral, and in cases of disaster, whether natural or caused by some almighty hubristic cock-up, somebody had to face the music.
The recovery of soon-to-be-ex-Admiral Ruxhana Fengen Kraa was slow, yet steady. At each stage his local environment appeared to become richer. When he was well enough to sit up in bed and go through some light eye-brain calibration exercises with the doctor, he seemed to be occupying a spare but comfortable room not unlike the rustic beach cabana next to the crater-lake on the Sorceror. The keen memory of the loss of his fleet made him wish for some other quarters, less emotionally loaded.
His wish was granted, as soon as he was well enough to walk around on his new legs, if haltingly, and with the help of a frame. His quarters had transmuted to a stateroom straight out of the era of the great Trans-Arcturus luxury spaceliners a few tens of millennia earlier: all cut glass, fluted brass, and plumped-up crimson velvet.
Propping himself up on the back of a mahogany fauteuil, he decided to try, once again, the latest exercise the doctor had set him: to navigate the six steps between chair and breakfast bar without support of any kind. Those six steps might have been six light years. About three steps in he’d always had to grasp his walking frame.
Now for it.
One... two (slight wobble, overcome)... three (that frame looked so tempting)... four.... five... and, unbelievably, six. He’d made it to the bar, where he stood, shaking, not daring to move further. He turned to see the doctor, standing in the open door.
“Congratulations,” she said.
And that was when Soon-To-Be Ex-Admiral Ruxhana Fengen Kraa realized where he’d seen her face before.