Hegemony (51 page)

"
Complications in covert operations necessitate that your ship secure the Sigma Charybdis Waypoint Two system to ensure no acquisition by hostile forces of sensitive recorded data
."

Those were the orders; nothing more. For a moment Segan silently fumed.
What
sensitive recorded data? he asked himself. And then the answer came.

The sensor drones deployed by that cursed swift-ship... he had assumed that the Hegemonic forces had gotten away with it. Now he began to wonder what other means had been in place to support the operation by
Swift Liberty
and
Righteous Justice
. It seemed that there had been
something
in place. Something that had been supposed to take care of the evidence that the enemy swift-ship had obtained...

Something that had almost worked. Something that had taken care of the swift-ship, but not of the raw data captured on the drones that ship had deployed... drones that were still drifting in the outer reaches of the Sigma Charybdis Waypoint Two system, waiting for someone else to download the data they had.

And now it seemed that there was no other Coalition asset that was close enough to deal with the mess, except the lance-ship
Swift Liberty
.

Ship-Commander Grantsen John of the Coalition lance-ship
Swift Liberty
let his eyes linger on the dark, looming mass of the carbonaceous chondrite asteroid that shadowed his ship and the attached tender.

The asteroid hid the pale, distant light of the white dwarf star of this system, leaving the two ships in the darkness, lit only by their own work lights and running lights. The tender was a substantial ship, but smaller than the
Swift Liberty
, and less sleek; not designed with sharply sloping armor and anti-radar stealthing, the tender was egg shaped and wide for its length.

For a moment, Grantsen let himself smile. There was a feeling to this of getting away with a clever prank. The nameless white dwarf system was well within the volume of the stars claimed by the Hegemony. Of course,
most
of those stars were useless and empty. This one had been, until a Coalition taskforce had arrived, leaving a tender ship to stand by while two experimental lance-ships FTL'd even deeper into Hegemony space.

Of course, one of those lance-ships hadn't come back. And the anonymity of this system could be lost at any moment. Hegemonic Fleet scouts surveyed these empty systems from time to time, mostly to make sure no one else had occupied them, hunting for pirates... or for Coalition forces setting up a mobile support and resupply operation, like this one.

And then there was the corollary thought. How many Hegemonic Fleet operations might there be, around supposedly empty stars in Coalition space?

"Commander," came a sudden, sharp sub-vocalized signal, snapping him out of his train of thought. Grantsen frowned and accepted the data feed from the oversight officer. There was no putting it off, after all.

"Oversight Officer Segan?" Grantsen said.

"Ready the ship for immediate operations. We have orders directly from Central Command."

"Understood," Grantsen said, and instantly triggered the codes for action stations. Throughout the ship, every crewperson was suddenly summoned to their post. Whatever he had expected from the oversight officer, this hadn't been it.

"Executive Wannel," Grantsen said to his second-in-command, in the next command pod, "inform the tender that we are undocking and will be maneuvering as soon as possible. Have them shut down the reaction-mass feed lines and secure all connections."

"Yes, sir," came the reply from Wannel. "Sir, we're still at less than 80% reaction mass in the tanks."

"I am aware of that, Executive. We have maximum priority orders. 80% will have to do."

"Sir, where are we going?"

"Back to the waypoint system, Executive," Grantsen said. "It seems we're not done with this operation just yet."

---

Demi-Captain Persios Talso floated in absolute darkens. Consciousness was elusive. The storage neural net was designed to keep him unconscious, he knew, but the design wasn't perfect. There was no direct sensorium, and only enough subliminal stimuli to keep his slowed unconscious mind from suffering psychological damage from sensory deprivation. To his conscious mind, conscious in spite of the system's attempts to keep him "asleep," the storage neural net was utterly dark and without form; void.

Ah, but there was a light in the darkness, Persios knew. This storage neural net had never been designed to work as a prison; a Hegemonic swift-ship did not really need a dedicated neural net brig. No direct access was available for him, but the storage 'net's own systems took in data, and he could still monitor those. It was a just a trickle of pure numeric data, never actually intended for a daemon to interact with; the data stream had no sensory component and was mind-bendingly hard to perceive. But it wasn't as if he had anything else to do.

Persios did not know what this was all about, but it was clear from the data that had leaked into his imperfect confinement that the Coalition was up to something, something that would hurt the Hegemony.

Perhaps it was the effect of the bodiless isolation of the containment 'net that made him careless, but he could not restrain a rush of fierce, hate-filled joy at the thought of harm to the Hegemony; the Hegemony that had placed him in his deserved position of power... at the cost of his soul.

His was a family that traced their genetic heritage from the original leaders of the Yuro colony, men and women who had faced God's harshest test and passed; men and women who had led the exodus from Earth, the Escape. Those leaders had been God's chosen tools. God alone had let the colonists survive the Escape, had worked their physical salvation in bringing them safe to Yuro. And in doing so, God had explicitly granted his divine right to the descendants of those glorious humans to rule over His chosen human people. It was not for the Hegemony to approve or disapprove of God's will, not for some distant daemons to pass judgment over his genetic lineage's divine right to rule.

But, of course, the Hegemony had done worse than that; his kin who refused to give up their human souls were barred from power, treated as commoners despite their God-chosen bloodline. And for those who were given their rightful power, the price was satanic: the loss of their souls, the conversion of their minds into daemons.

The Hegemony had done this to him, and the Coalition was the enemy of the Hegemony. The Coalition was many things both vile and foolish, but they at least understood the central primacy of human life, did not seek to replace human minds and human souls with sentient computer programs. Of course Coalition doctrine rejected the existence of God, rejected anything more powerful than themselves, but at least they did not require their own leaders to sacrifice their souls and become daemons.

The Hegemonic Church was more vile and corrupt yet, daring to claim that a daemon still had a soul. His own faith had been more pure, as befitting a man of his noble bloodline. Of course, it no longer mattered for him; he was irredeemably damned, had been from the moment he had become a daemon. But there were others, men and women of pure blood and living minds, for whom he would still struggle. One day, they would claim their divine right to rule without the sickening sacrifice of their mind and their soul that he had been forced to make.

It was a holy mission, even for a man who had lost his soul. And then, suddenly, Persios saw that God was still with him... still wanted him to succeed. It was an emergency subroutine, locked down but able to be activated with a captain's codes. It was intended to allow a daemon to access the swift-ship's hyper-bandwidth comm system, to allow the daemon to escape a doomed ship that had suffered enough internal damage to make the normal data conduits non-functional.

Oh, so careless of Demi-Captain Tralk to leave it intact... but of course, that was God's will. And as the rightful captain of the
Ice Knife
, Persios had the command codes to use it!

Freya could feel the
Ice Knife
suddenly lurch.

She had been in her backup biosim avatar, trying to relax a bit in her compact quarters, when she felt the ship jolt. The recovery of the intact interceptor by the
Whisperknife
had been a fantastic stroke of good luck. Preliminary analysis of its sensor logs showed data that corresponded with the low fidelity copy of the
Ice Knife
's sensor data that Muir had managed to preserve on his pers-comp. It might well be enough to go to Central Fleet command with. On the other hand,
Ice Knife
was on a vector that would be bringing her close to her own previously launched sensor drones in another fifteen hours. Those drones had been the source of the original, now deleted data, and with that data in addition to what the interceptor showed, she could be certain. Just fifteen more hours, and then they could arrange for the transfer of Pilot Officer Neel back to the
Ice Knife.
A few dozen more hours after that, and they could part ways with the
Whisperknife
and go home... back to the core worlds of the Hegemony, to report, with detailed sensor logs to confirm their story.

The information they were bringing was crucial, Freya thought. Foremost, there was the very fact of the Coalition ambush. That alone might be the start of another shooting war. But perhaps just as important was the observed detail about the unprecedented firepower of the Coalition lance-ships. The sensor data from the interceptor wasn't conclusive, but the interceptor had come within 10,000 kilometers of the enemy ships, and what it had seen was enough to speculate from.

Expendable laser array pods... the idea had been suggested before, as a way to give short duration firepower to unarmed or under-armed ships. But no one had ever thought to use expendable laser arrays on a scale to match a warship's primary laser arrays. No one except the Coalition, it seemed. If those units on the enemy lance-ships
were
expendable pods, they were built on the scale of PLAs, and they gave the enemy lance-ships an assault-ship's firepower or more. But they would only work once. Freya didn't know, yet, how this development would affect the Hegemonic Fleet's tactics, but--

The sudden jolt through the hull of the
Ice Knife
had snapped Freya out of her reverie before she could finish her train of thought. Instantly she accessed her command data feed, trying to find out what was going on.

"Captain!" came the watch officer's vocalized signal, "our shuttle has just executed an emergency launch!"

"What? Is there a malfunction? Is there someone aboard the shuttle?"

"Not sure, Captain," came the watch officer's reply.

For a moment a malfunction was all Freya could imagine. No one would try to steal the shuttle in deep space; it was a short range transfer craft, useful only for orbital maneuvers and transfers between ships on the same vector.

"Get a remote control link to the shuttle, and stand by to get it docked back aboard," Freya ordered.

Ice Knife
suddenly shook again, and kept shaking. Damage alarms lit up, pulsing their warnings through the command data feeds.

"Captain," sent the sensors officer, "the shuttle has lit its main drive! We're in the exhaust plume!"

"We've got severe damage to the main radiators," came the call from the damage control officer.

Abruptly, the shaking faded. Damage alarms continued to scream silently.

"We're clear of the shuttle's exhaust," came the signal from Sensors.

"Damage report," Freya sent back. Then, "Muir, get in the command 'net."

"Here, Captain," Muir sent.

"We've got problems," Freya said.

Ice Knife
's shuttle continued its burn, the small electro-thermal drive flaring in the darkness. A nuclear drive could have killed the
Ice Knife
. Even the little electro-thermal drive had done severe damage, Freya could see. The swift-ship's main radiator spines had been blasted with high velocity exhaust, badly damaged. And with her ability to radiate waste heat damaged,
Ice Knife
was starkly limited in what she could do; both her lasers and her plasma drives generated enormous waste heat that had to be radiated away for the ship to be able to function.

"You're sure?" Freya asked.

"Sure," Muir said. "Captain Talso is not in the storage 'net. He used the emergency escape override to get to the shuttle's command neural net, and from there he launched and lit the drives."

"Fuck!" Freya said, all but shouting her vocalization into the data feed. "Get a communication channel open to the shuttle," she ordered after a moment.

"Captain Talso, What do you think you're trying to accomplish?" Freya sent.

There was no reply.

"Communications, is the shuttle even getting our signal?"

"Yes, Captain. The shuttle is definitely receiving. We've got full telemetry for the shuttle."