Heretics (14 page)

Her younger self yanked her away from the comm display. “What?”

She kept dragging Toni II down the corridor. “Move it. We got to get you dressed and suited up before we get the hell out of here.”

“No bureaucracy responds efficiently in a crisis.”

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

“Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.”

—HONORÉ DE BALZAC (1799-1850)

On the viewscreen, Toni watched her home for the last 256 days drift away. Overlaid on the display were three timers, marking the collision times for the trio of wormholes orbiting Sigma Draconis.

Timer one was at eight hours twenty-one minutes. Timer two at nine hours ten minutes. Timer three at ten fourteen.

Toni II sat in an auxiliary seat that folded out from the wall behind the pilot. It was a close fit, as the scout was not intended as a passenger vessel, even though the life-support systems were rated for four people. She could hear her twin breathing, oddly synchronized but with a half-second delay, like a strange echo.

She called up the status of the tach-drive, overlaying the image of the receding platform. Everything nominal.

She looked over her shoulder at Toni II, and they both spoke simultaneously. “Are you okay with this?”

She stared at herself as herself stared back. It was sinking in that the woman behind her
was
her, with all but a little more than a week of common experience. They were more than twins. Ten days ago Toni II was the exact same woman that Toni had been five days ago. Not just identical, but the same individual. And as if they were caught in some sort of spiritual echo chamber, she could read the same thoughts crossing Toni II's face.

“I just thought—” they both said, then trailed off.

“Maybe . . .” Toni paused, but this time it was just her speaking. “Maybe we should take turns talking.”

Toni II waited a few beats before saying, “Not a bad idea.”

“We both might be facing an unpleasant reaction from 3SEC, violating a direct order.”

“Where else can we go in this thing?”

“There's the—”

“Don't say the wormhole. I tried that, didn't work too well.”

“If we tach—”

“—out a light-year then just tach back? We might miss the fireworks, but there are others in the line of fire.”

Toni nodded.

It might be risky to disobey orders and go directly to the 3SEC command platform orbiting Styx, but there was no way for her to bypass the chain of command from her post, and she needed to warn the other stations—or get someone else to.

Even if Styx itself wouldn't be directly affected by the explosions, there were thousands of people who would be killed by the blast.

Then there was the tachyon radiation.

Toni II had told her a bit of what happened—what would happen—after W1 was the first to blow. As they prepped themselves to abandon ship, Toni II described how all the tach-sensors on the platform went crazy, and how the scout's tach-drive was already crippled when she decided to escape the coming impact on W3.

Warning her command had to be their top priority. Too many lives were at stake, and by the time W1 blew, throwing its tach-pulse across the inner system, it would be too late for those in the path of the other two to get out of the way.

What really worried her was if the explosions were going to be powerful enough to endanger people on the planet itself—

“Styx has a decent magnetic field and a dense atmosphere,” Toni II told her. “I'm sure the surface will be safe.”

“Okay, 3SEC it is.”

Toni II watched her younger self plot a course for the 3SEC command platform and forced herself to not reach over the pilot's chair and start entering the course herself. It felt surreal watching the other's hands move a fraction a second after she thought of it.

After the computer confirmed the jump calculations, and after she had reset the overrides that warned her against taching too close to a planet and established traffic patterns, the younger Toni leaned back and whispered, “Here we go.”

Like every tach-jump, this one was instantaneous from the perspective of those in transit. One moment the views-creens showed the burning orb of Sigma Draconis and an enhanced star field behind the navigational overlays. The next moment, half the universe became the slushy gray orb of Styx itself.

The counters that timed the countdown to the wormhole collisions all jumped down five hundred seconds to account for the passage of time in the real universe while the ship was making its short tach-jump.

Immediately, the comm screens lit up with half a dozen flavors of warning at them, flashing like a summer lighting storm on the slopes of the Gehenna range during an eruption. The warnings came from civilian, commercial and military traffic controllers, all squawking that the little scout shouldn't be where it was.

Points started flashing all over the viewscreen, pin-pointing transponders and radar contacts. The tach-drive itself started beeping warnings from being too close to the “wake” of other, more capable drives.

Toni II watched as her other self flipped on the military channel and said, “This is Lieutenant Toni Valentine of the Stygian Security Forces, in Centauri scout craft solo-charlie-eight-seven-six-five-four-nine-zero. I am requesting immediate emergency clearance to dock at 3SEC.”

The radio came alive. “Solo-charlie-eight-seven-six-five-four-nine-zero, you do not have authorization to approach the 3SEC orbital platform. You are ordered to decelerate into a parking orbit.”

“I repeat, I'm requesting
emergency
clearance.”

In the main viewscreen, a small shadow emerged from behind Styx's horizon. It didn't look like much from this distance, but Toni II knew what it was before the heads- up identified it with its own transponder tag.

“What is the nature of your emergency?”

“In eight hours and three minutes, the wormholes in this system are going to start exploding!”

The radio didn't respond immediately.

Across from the communication console, the weapons' station began lighting up with sensor locks from several different orbital defense platforms. Before Toni II said anything to her younger self, she saw her other self plotting in another jump into the tach-drive. Only a couple of AU out, not too far for the standard drives to get them somewhere back insystem, but far enough away to escape any immediate nastiness.

Assuming they'd have enough warning before they were shot out of the sky. Too long, and they wouldn't be able to outrun a laser.

“They won't shoot at us,” her younger self whispered, answering her unspoken thoughts. “I just want out of here if no one talks to us.”

“Do you suddenly feel like an old married couple?” Toni II whispered back.

The eyes widened in her younger self's face. “I was just—” She turned back toward the consoles and nodded. “Yes.”

 

Toni held her course, watching the 3SEC platform grow in the viewscreen. Her hand hovered over the commit button that would fire the scout's dangerously hot tach-drive and fling them an AU further out from Sigma Draconis, away from Styx and the doomed wormholes—and an AU away from being able to do anything.

She had told Toni II that they weren't going to be shot at. She was in an official craft with the right transponder and the right countersigns. They'd know that she was who she said she was.

But that didn't mean they wouldn't blow the scout craft to hell for being where it wasn't supposed to be. And she knew that Toni II knew it just as well as she did.

She didn't like the silence. Seconds were stretching to minutes without a response.

The platform kept growing in the viewscreen, a series of large disks strung along a common axis pointing down at the surface. They were just close enough to see the spaces between the disks, where the docking facilities were.

The countdown timer for the first impact crossed eight hours.

I give them five minutes, then I'm taching out of here . . .
Her fingers shook slightly over the control panel, and a bead of sweat stung the corner of her right eye.

“Solo-charlie-eight-seven-six-five-four-nine-zero, you are to match orbits and dock on level alpha, bay three-seven. Confirm.”

Toni yanked her hand away from the tach controls and radioed back, “Level alpha, bay three-seven.”

“You are to dock, power down completely, and await further instructions.”

Many of the warning lights turned off, and a schematic grid flickered on the viewscreen, showing the approach path. She did some minor manual maneuvering, then synced her onboard computer with traffic control.

From behind her, Toni II said, “You notice that the last guy was different?”

“Yes. We got booted up the command chain.”

“And we're both wondering if that's good or bad.”

“They're not shooting at us.”

“Yet.”

The small scout craft followed traffic control's lead as the mass of the 3SEC orbital station grew to dominate the viewscreen. If she remembered the layout of the place correctly, level alpha was deep into the secured area near the “top,” furthest away from Styx. As they maneuvered, she saw bay thirty-seven, lonely and isolated between the top two disks of the station. The docking bay itself was huge, dwarfing their craft. The gap between floor and ceiling was easily fifty meters.

A spidery robotic arm trailing coils of fuel and power lines extended from the depths of the docking bay to meet them as the scout drifted between the layers of the station. The arm mated with the underside of the scout and there was a subtle, jarring wrench as the scout matched the slow rotation of the orbital platform. Toni felt herself sink a little deeper in her seat as the arm rotated the scout parallel to the station's axis.

The computer helpfully began powering down the ship's systems, and she had to force herself not to start switching overrides on.

She wasn't normally this paranoid, and she wondered where it was coming from. Yes, she was in a bizarre situation, but that shouldn't cause her to mistrust her own command. Even the guy parroting orders at her to sit tight, that was more than likely bureaucratic inertia than anything else. They didn't know how to deal with the situation, which meant the uncertainty got kicked up the chain until it reached someone with the authority to make a decision.

That was rarely a fast process.

She might have disobeyed a direct order, but she was still a lieutenant in the Stygian Security Forces, and she still had a duty. She had been hoping to bypass the command chain, if only to get her opposite numbers at the other two wormholes to get the hell out of there in the seven hours and forty-eight minutes they had left.

Now she had become one of those uncertainties being fed up the chain of command. So instead of talking to someone in traffic control and getting them to radio warnings, she was probably going to be stuck with someone in internal security.

Which would be fine if she could still convince them to act.

As the spidery arm pulled the scout deeper into the cavernous docking bay and the axis of the station became the new “up,” Toni II asked, “Yeah, but beyond telling everyone to get out of the way, what else can anyone do?”

It was probably a good thing that some decisions were above her pay grade.

Fortunately for her nerves, the “wait for further instructions” only lasted another few minutes or so. When the first timer crossed to seven hours forty-two, an air lock extended from one of the walkways crisscrossing the spaces between the docking bays. It attached seamlessly to the scout and she heard the computer beeping as the scout's air lock began to cycle.

She turned the pilot's chair enough to look at the air lock as the inner door slid aside. A man stood in the air lock, wearing a gray and blue uniform that bore the stylized red key sigil of the SEF Military Police on a shoulder patch. The docking arm had drawn them up nearly to the axis of the station, so he stood light on his feet, the rotation barely holding him down.

“You need to accompany me, Lieutenant Valentine?” His tone morphed from command to question as he looked from Toni to Toni II. After a beat, he said, “Both of you.”

“Sometimes explosions are necessary.”

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

“Life is risk.”

—SYLVIA HARPER (2008-2081)

Shortly after Adam gave his one- hour warning, Parvi watched as the small cadre of maintenance techs loaded the dropship. Departure was clearly imminent, a race to beat Adam's deadline off the
Voice
. As one set of the crew loaded the dropship, a trio of the Caliphate mechanics by the main air lock door were engaged in an animated conversation. Looming over their argument, the heavy blast doors held the vacuum outside at bay.

Wahid stared at the trio and Parvi asked, “What's the problem there?”

“Something seems to be blocking the exit.” He raised his hand, quieting her before she could ask another question. After a few more sentences back and forth in heated Arabic, Wahid stood up and took a step toward them. The guard with the gamma laser stepped in front of him, blocking his path.