Here Be Dragons (18 page)

How do you know that the threat is false?

Winston Campbell-Azzam aboard Victory.

There was a long pause.

Gabriel, a coup attempt is now underway. HMS Victory is demanding that I arrest Deputy Prime Minister Liang for the creation of a nuclear weapon and giving aid and comfort to the enemy, and that I order retaliatory strikes on all satellites owned by the independent nations. If I do not, they will open fire on civilian and military targets in orbit.

Prime Minister, Gabriel awaits orders.

Elena wondered where Erasmus was right now. There hadn’t been much time at all. He had probably been hustled off the dais just seconds after his installation, into a car, a plane, a bunker. He had spent the first hour of his administration under siege, wondering what in the hell he had got himself into.

Is it possible to eliminate the threat without collateral damage?

She looked around the room. In unison, her staff nodded.

Gabriel has first strike capability.

Then do it.

“How do we know that it is truly him?” Vijay asked.

“Can we have him transmit visuals?”

“Sorry, Chief, it’s a secure phone,” Hassoun said. “No camera for a hacker to remotely access.”

“Any ideas, gentlemen?” Elena asked.

“He’s South African?” Hassoun smiled. “Then let’s try this.”

Prime Minister, answer quickly. How many balls in an over?

The answer came back immediately.

Six.

“He knows his cricket, at least,” Vijay said.

“That’s going to have to be good enough,” Elena said. “And if we’re wrong and there really is a nuke on that ship, then we might as well take it out now.”

“In direct violation of our orders from Solstice,” Vijay said.

“The commander-in-chief outranks headquarters, Mr. Nishtha. But if anyone still wants to step outside, they may do so,” Elena said. “Just be sure to close the door behind you. We need to concentrate in here.”

No one made a move.

Stall him, Prime Minister.

Victory
was watching carefully.

She gave the nearest ships a wide berth. The enormous warship that had emerged from Glenn Station was completely unknown to
Victory
, which almost certainly meant that she was one of the new
Archangels.
She was pitifully underpowered by
Victory’s
standards—no cannons visible anywhere, just a few guns and a pair of missile pods. She must have launched early, without her full armament. But
Victory
would leave nothing to chance—her radar swept the area continuously, and she kept one cannon trained on
Gabriel
at all times. There would be no ambush.

Gabriel’s
attitude thrusters fired gently, and nudged her into a different orbit.
Victory
tensed, but there was no further provocation.
Gabriel
had maintained the one hundred kilometer buffer, and the fingers on the triggers eased off. Nearly an hour had passed since the crisis had begun, and the two ships had traveled from one end of the dark side of the Earth to the other. The first rays of light curled around the horizon, and then the sun exploded into view. It wasn’t until its rays struck
Victory’s
scopes and washed out everything between them that she realized what was happening.
Gabriel’s
orbit would take her across of the face of the sun.

The fingers on the trigger tightened once more, as
Victory
counted down the seconds until the exact moment when the other ship would slide across that disk. The moment came, and
Gabriel
vanished.
Victory
held her breath and counted.

Gabriel
reappeared only a few seconds later, speed and course unchanged, still one hundred kilometers away. There was no rocket exhaust, no missile on a constant bearing. Even a swarm of cannon shells, small enough to evade radar, wouldn’t be enough to bite through her armor.
Victory
relaxed and settled in to wait.

The ballista round slammed into the turret and buried itself inside. It bored a path deep into the tower and trailed a shock wave that blew the turret apart down to the hull, then struck the armored bulkhead and exploded in a flash of heat. The blast shattered the shield like glass, and a storm of metallic fire swooped into the exposed compartment. The plasma vaporized everything and everyone inside, and melted the bulkheads to slag. Those on the other side were burned to death in an instant.

The shock of the impact spread out and rippled through the outer hull like an ocean tide. Cracks in the armor burst open as the pressure wave raced across the equator and shrank to a point on the opposite pole. It blew the turret free of the hull and off into space, exactly one second after impact.
Victory
looked as if the shell had punched a hole straight through her.

But she
was still in the fight, and a moment later her surviving cannons opened fire. Not a single round struck
Gabriel.
Instead they lashed the independent platforms, and a score of satellites died within seconds. Four missile pods were still standing, and all four fired simultaneously. The missiles were so close to the target that they converged and went to hard burn almost immediately. But
Gabriel
had lit her rockets as soon as the shell had hit home, and she drove on
Victory
and opened fire with every gun she could bring to bear.

Streams of bullets whipped past the missiles and ignored them completely. The missiles homed in on target and prepared to burst, but
Gabriel
fired her thrusters and shoved herself up into a higher orbit. All four missiles detonated simultaneously, too low for a kill.
Gabriel
skated over the top of a ten ton cloud of shrapnel and walked her fire onto
Victory
and into her wound.

Each of
Gabriel’s
guns had six barrels, and each barrel fired five rounds every second. Hundreds of bullets tore into the gaping hole in
Victory’s
hull. With no armor to stop them they cut a path through the soft metal sludge that once been the bulkhead and peppered the outer wall of the bridge. The sturdy barrier sagged and shredded under the onslaught. The dam broke, and a swarm of red hot metal rampaged through
Victory’s
heart and cut the bridge crew to pieces.

Gabriel
somersaulted end over end high above the Earth, and fired her rockets once more. Her thrusters touched on and off until she had matched velocity, once more a hundred kilometers away. The guns ceased.
Victory
was dead.

On the bridge, Elena finally felt it was safe to breathe. Vijay broke the spell first.

“It would appear that the ballista works.”

“Damage report,” Elena said.

“Not a scratch on the old girl,” Vijay said. “Which, I must admit, is not what I expected to be saying. I am not certain I expected to be saying much of anything right now.”

“Hassoun, contact the Prime Minister. Let him know that we won.”

“Yes,” Demyan said, quietly. “We killed the enemy.”

Silence fell after that. This had been the first combat for all of them, and
Gabriel
had just earned her first battle star, eighteen months ahead of schedule. It was also the first time in the history of the Global Union that one of its ships had fired upon another. They had just killed dozens of British subjects. Not outsiders, not even independents, but their fellow citizens. Elena hoped that she had not fired the first shots of a civil war.

A black and gold light flashed on her watch screen. Elena didn’t recognize the color combination, and frowned at the familiar symbol that had appeared—an orb, surrounded by three blades.

Vijay brought the warning up on the holo, then traced it to its source. Hyperion-1, launched only five years before, had been Australia’s first orbiting solar power station—designed to gather sunlight and beam it down to a waiting collector hooked into the power grid. It was a triumph of the independent technology sector, and
Victory’s
guns had wrecked it beyond repair. If not for orbital records,
Gabriel
would never have been able to identify it.

But even in death its ashes still shone, strongly enough to trip
Gabriel’s
radiological sensors at a distance. Scattered among the remains were chunks of plutonium-239, weapons grade.

Promised Land

E
lena sank into the darkness, and used the grapple once more to brake her momentum. The beams of light from her helmet mounted lamps wavered wildly as she fell and bounced. Once Elena had settled inside the airlock she aimed them floor, so that the others could see where they were falling.

She could tell it was Rivkah from the clumsiness of the fall. Elena reached out to steady the doctor and helped her to her feet. Rivkah still hadn’t spoken, and when Elena searched for the doctor’s face through the helmet she saw only her own reflection. Any illumination inside their helmets would have reflected off their own faceplates and interfered with their vision.

Ikenna threw the bags in after her, and then hopped down easily and looked around. The door inside the chamber had been sealed with multiple fasteners arranged above and below the handle, and he tested one and found that it released smoothly. Ikenna undid each of the latches, and tugged on the door handle and pulled.

Then he pushed. Nothing happened. He even tried sliding it in every direction, as if it were a pocket door. The compartment on the other side was unbreached, and the air pressure kept the door firmly shut. Elena motioned Ikenna and Rivkah against a wall, and pulled a shaped thermate charge from the toolkit. She fixed it to the center of the door, then armed it and joined them out of harm’s way.

The charge ignited with a dazzling flash. Streams of white hot iron sparks gushed and filled the airlock, and Elena threw her arm across Rivkah’s shoulders and held the doctor against flat against the wall. The three of them were showered with embers that clung to their suits and died slowly. If not for their visors the glare would have blinded them.

The thermate burned for over a minute and started to gutter, and it began to look like a second charge would be needed when the door exploded. A geyser of air erupted through the breach and fogged the airlock. It hissed silently for a few moments, and then exhausted itself. Elena stepped forward and peered through the hole she had cut in the door, careful not to get her helmet anywhere near the white hot brim. She turned the handle, and the door swung easily this time.

The second lock was identical to the first, but for the large metal valve handles on her right, and the pair of spacesuits that hung on the wall to her left. These were not the sleek body armors used by the Agency, but clumsy, awkward pressure suits that brought to mind the astronauts of old, and left her to wonder how anyone could possibly work in them. Each of the garments was at least two meters tall, and the helmets were bulbous and huge.

Ikenna brought up the rear once more, lugging the toolkits. He pushed the door shut, and quickly sealed the breach by filling it with a glut of foam that hardened as it cooled. He slapped a thick patch over the hole, and sprayed it with a thin layer of liquid. The patch began to smoke, and then to glow. It melted onto the breach and created an airtight seal.

They turned to the valves. Above each was a single Hebrew letter, and Rivkah pointed silently to the one at the top. Elena turned the wheel and opened the vents, and atmosphere rushed into the room to replace what had been lost. Her visor indicated that it was about four parts nitrogen to one part oxygen, standard Earth atmosphere.

“Helmets stay on,” she said. Elena didn’t really think that either of them needed the warning. She found the next hatch unlocked, and opened it.

The man was dead. He floated at the center of the compartment, and his arms and legs turned so slowly that Elena could barely see the motion at all. What little inertia he had possessed had been bled from his mass over the past two days by a thousand impacts against the bulkheads, and he had come nearly to rest in midair, too far from the walls to reach them even if he could have tried. Elena had, with a bit of bad luck, gotten herself into this position before. It felt like paralysis, and reminded her of nightmares where she was unable to even scream.

He wore a simple gray jumpsuit, the pant legs bloused into his boots. It would have provided absolutely no protection against a vacuum. Without his heart to beat his blood had flowed out from the center of his body and collected in his skin, and turned his complexion ruddy. He had short black hair that curled over his ear and frost in his heavy beard. There was a cleft in his chin and dark rings around his closed eyes. He was slender and extraordinarily tall, and would have been a giant back on Earth even among her generation, which had been well-nourished compared to the three that had come before. Elena had met some very tall people in the Agency, colonial brats who had grown up on the Moon and Mars, but it would take decades of life in low gravity to produce a new normal like this.

On his left breast was another Star of David, and on his right, two words in Hebrew. Elena reached out to touch him, but Rivkah grabbed her arm sharply. Elena pulled back, and Rivkah drifted closer to read the writing on the man’s chest. Then the doctor touched her bracelet and disabled her comm circuit. Elena and Ikenna shared a glance, but said nothing. They hung awkwardly in freefall while Rivkah bowed her head over the body.

Gabriel’s
corridors were rough and utilitarian, but they were still fit for human habitation. This was a place that had clearly been made for machines first and foremost. The walls were a jumble of wires, pipes, dials and levers, and she saw none of the decorous access panels that hid the guts of Agency vessels. Everything was exposed and crammed together, and there were no computerized screens anywhere in sight—all the work was done mechanically. It was such a mess that Elena wondered how anyone could keep it straight.

Rivkah raised her head, and reactivated her intercom.

“The ship is called
Gideon
,” she said.

Her voice was flat. There was a pause. The intercoms weren’t sensitive enough to pick up on biological white noise—nobody wanted to sit there and listen to their partner breathing for hours on end. So Elena wasn’t sure why she suddenly imagined that Rivkah was swallowing repeatedly inside her helmet.

“And this young man is named Binyamin,” the doctor she said. Then she began to cry.

Elena rushed to her side and tried to peer through Rivkah’s faceplate. Any sort of liquid inside a helmet could quickly pool around the user’s face and suffocate them, and if Elena needed to rip the cover off she would. But her visor, connected to Rivkah’s life support, reported no danger. There were no tears, only dry, heaving sobs that rocked Rivkah again and again. She seemed unable to breathe.

Elena hesitated, and hated herself for it.

She put her arm around the doctor and pulled her in close. Their helmets bumped against each other with a clang, but neither noticed. Rivkah threw her arms around Elena and held tight. She continued to shake, and Elena had to reach out a hand to the wall to steady them, careful to avoid striking Binyamin. They floated there together next to the outsider.

They had to pick a direction, and Elena chose “down,” towards
Gideon’s
opposite face. Even the
Archangels
had sides that had been designated as the top and bottom, and both
Gabriel’s
and
Metatron’s
names had been painted on their hulls at such an orientation to reflect this fact, though the distinction was completely arbitrary. But
Gideon
seemed to be symmetrical and undifferentiated in every direction—up and down had vanished as completely as gravity. Its builders had thought in true three dimensions.

Rivkah had recovered, and was quietly tying Binyamin’s body to one of the walls. It seemed obscene to leave him hanging like a condemned man from the gallows. Elena knew they were on a timetable, but couldn’t bring herself to hurry Rivkah along.

She and Ikenna examined the rest of the compartment. It was a perfect cube, with square hatches in all six of its sides. Every other inch of the walls was covered in piping, wires, and machinery. Elena took pride in the
Gabriel’s
form follows function aesthetic, but her vessel looked like a cruise ship next to
Gideon
. It had made her feel soft and green, as if she’d been playing at a hard life while the outsiders had been living it. And there was no writing anywhere, not even anything that appeared to be a directional sign. The outsiders would need a flawless sense of space just to navigate their own ship.

Rivkah finished, and returned to them silently.

The next compartment was a storeroom. Elena gave Ikenna permission to break open one of the containers, which was packed with dark, dry algae. They cracked a few more, and each was the same. Only the color was different—red, green, yellow. There was nothing else to see, only liter after liter of water, frozen solid inside the jugs. Ikenna opened the next hatch, and went through first.

They had died in their beds. At each of the eight corners of the room was a sleeping bag, just like hers, and each of these had been tied to the walls at the top and bottom by taut cables so that the crew would not drift in their slumber. The sight was so familiar and strange that Elena blinked. Two of the bags were filled, and when Rivkah moved towards one Elena and Ikenna drifted towards the other with unspoken courtesy. A fleck of something bounced off Elena’s faceplate, and she reached out and snagged a tiny black lump, like coal.

Inside the bag was a young woman, not much more than eighteen years old to Elena’s eye. She had short dark hair and big eyes, and her delicate beauty was marred only by the dried blood that clung to her nose and mouth. She must have been touching the outer hull or an electrical circuit when the bolt had struck
Gideon
and run through the ship, and it had electrocuted her and burst the tiny vessels beneath her face. Elena saw that the sleeping bag had been cinched tightly around the dead woman’s neck by a drawstring. Her arms were inside the bag, and there was no way for her to have done it herself. Someone had carried her to bed and tucked her in.

Ikenna drifted to the triangular cabinet which occupied the corner of the room, and Elena loosened the drawstring and looked inside to check the woman’s nametag. The body was nude. She hurriedly pulled the string tight and joined Ikenna.

The cabinet contained three spare uniforms, neatly folded, and a book. Elena pulled it out and found Hebrew lettering on the spine. It was a Torah. She opened to what she knew now to be the first page, and saw a column of names and dates inscribed on the inside of the front cover. They had been written in Roman characters, some in quite faded ink.

Herschel Tenenbaum, Lodz, 1888

Mendel Tenenbaum, Lodz, 1911

Meyer Tenenbaum, Warsaw, 1930

Golda Tenenbaum, London, 1955

Reuven Mazar, Beersheba, 1973

Golan Mazar, Tel Aviv, 1998

Meytal Mazar, Tel Aviv, 2024

Joav Segal-Mazar, Haifa, 2046

Miryam Segal, New Jaffa, 2073

Moishe Segal, New Jaffa, 2095

Yitzhak Segal, Showa, 2125

Esther Segal, Showa, 2152

The first few cities she recognized as belonging to old Europe. And Haifa, at the very northern tip of the State of Israel, had been one of the few communities to escape the fallout of Tel Aviv’s destruction and survive to see the year 2049, if only briefly. But Elena had never heard of New Jaffa or Showa.

Esther had signed her name just the year before.

Rivkah appeared, and glanced briefly at the names in the Torah before looking away. She floated towards the middle of the room and drifted slowly. Elena wondered what the doctor had seen in the opposite corner. She started to put the book back in the cabinet, but turned instead and placed it within Esther’s sleeping bag.

“What was her name?” Rivkah asked. It was the first that Elena had heard her speak since she had arrived on
Gideon.

Elena glanced at Ikenna briefly, a habit that didn’t leave her even when she could no longer see her companion’s eyes.

“Esther. Esther Segal.”

“What is over th—“

Ikenna cut himself off and glanced back at Elena, and though his face was hidden Elena could see from the set of his shoulders that he was embarrassed. Rivkah answered anyway.

“Muhammad al-Araj.”

Elena knew nearly nothing of Rivkah’s culture, but even she could tell that this was not a Jewish name.

Silent now, they moved down another compartment to
Gideon’s
equator, just outside its center. There was actual writing everywhere in this room, and all of it was in Hebrew. But Elena had spent nearly two decades in and around spacecraft, and knew what she was looking at. She recognized the room as a power plant immediately. The outsiders had placed it as deep inside the hull as possible, to protect it.

A cylindrical trunk ran from one wall to the other, and thick steam pipes burrowed into the bulkhead next to it. The control panel was all dials, meters, switches and levers, and like every other room this one lacked computers entirely. Everything was analog. Elena shrugged off her bulky thruster pack and lodged it next to the panel, and turned to examine the fuel cell. She put one finger to the cold metal of the turbine chamber.

Bloody red light flooded the room. All three of them jumped, as much they one could in freefall. Elena cleared the corners, but there was no one but Rivkah and Ikenna inside the compartment with her. She turned back to the fuel cell and ran her hand along what she seemed to be its condenser. The dials and meters remained lifeless. She looked back up at the crimson lights, sparsely distributed throughout the compartment, and guessed that they were emergency illumination only. The fuel cell was still offline, but something else was powering the ship.

There was no longer any reason to continue going down. The innermost bulkhead was rounded and convex, and at its very tip was a bulbous hatch. Elena knew what lay beneath. The heart of a ship was always at its center. They were looking at the top slice of a sphere, and beneath it would be the bridge. Elena settled on top of the bulkhead next to the hatch, and undid the fasteners slowly. She could hear the twisting and grinding of the metal as she worked. They opened the door to the core and dropped inside.