Ragnarok 03 - Resonance (29 page)

‘What's wrong?' she asked.

The lines on his face were deeper than ever.

‘Your niece Ursula,' he said, ‘must've been further
enceinte
than I realised. Apparently you've had a great niece for the past two months. I had no idea Ursula had given birth.'

‘Oh, no.' Gavriela made a guess, hoping she was wrong. ‘The baby's ill or even . . .'

She did not want to say it.

‘Missing,' said Rupert. ‘The baby is missing.'

‘How could that happen?'

What kind of mother was Ursula if she could not even—?

‘—from the house,' Rupert was saying. ‘At least three men were involved, in addition to the female decoy. Even I might have opened the door to her, because by all accounts she sounded convincing.'

Some tale of woe, whose details Gavriela could not process because in her mind she was wondering how bloody stupid she could possibly have been, ignoring a clear warning that an enemy was near, almost certainly Dmitri Ivanovitch Shtemenko, who seemed to have some inhibition against killing
her – given the opportunities he had passed up – but clearly possessed the capacity to be monstrous.

‘One of the men was thin and not young according to other witnesses. Sounds like Shtemenko, though Ursula did not see him, so our people can't be sure.'

Would he have killed the baby out of spite?

It was horrible, but Dmitri might be evil enough to do such a thing.

‘The woman,' Rupert added, ‘was identified by Ursula from a photograph as one Daniela Weissmann, a young Stasi officer under Shtemenko's command. One rumour says she's his lover also, but that's not known for sure.'

‘He's taken the baby,' said Gavriela. ‘Taken her home with him.'

‘Not even a KGB colonel would mount a team operation purely to snatch a two month old relative,' said Rupert. ‘He must have been here for something else.'

Of course he was, but there was no likelihood of SIS or Five finding out, and if they did, surely there was no reason to divulge the information to a retired spymaster or the equally retired cryptanalyst who shared a house platonically with him.

But Rupert had influence still, it seemed.

‘You know the Chester Terrace out-station?' he asked.

‘Vaguely heard of it,' said Gavriela. ‘I've never been there.'

‘Nice place. Georgian mansion, overlooking Regent's Park, ideal for eavesdropping on the Soviet embassy. Stank to high heaven last time I was there, but that was because they were re lacquering the parquet flooring on the top floor, and half the rest was dug up.'

Gavriela glanced at her notebook.

‘They've invited us over,' Rupert went on. ‘To talk to Ursula's watch team and find out what went wrong.'

‘I had a sense of the darkness yesterday,' she said. ‘Not exactly the kind of information I can share with them.'

‘No, I suppose not. Maybe
we
need protection.'

Gavriela thought about it.

‘I don't think so,' she said. ‘But it can't do any harm.'

Rupert would act on his own suggestion, faking a story that suggested the KGB might know his private address and have reason to perpetrate personal vengeance, so that he obtained a permanent watch team to safeguard him and incidentally Gavriela. Whether that was unnecessary, or whether it was the presence of the watch team that prevented the enemy from making a run at Rupert, they would never find out.

Not for as long as Rupert lived, at any rate.

FORTY-TWO

MU-SPACE, 2607 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)

Roger was promoted to captain, with a hint of fast-track advancement to come, on the basis of his intelligence report concerning the dark matter star (to use the newly revived archaic term) that sat at the heart of the realspace galaxy. Roger's ultra-hellflight had become an unofficial legend; and unlike his father, he had not needed to die in order to achieve success. It felt undeserved.

But it was the entire squadron's analysis of the renegades' base, not just Roger's report, that was of immediate interest to the battle planners. Linguistically, the base was again labelled Target Shadow, which gave more than a hint of how they saw it. The combined telemetric data of thirty-eight ships produced a reasonable model not just of defensive resources and their disposition, but also the residential deep-space modules and the massive devices under construction, whose purpose and mode of operation remained conjecture.

This was war, officially so, which meant that personal secrets could not be kept private if germane – hence Roger providing a sealed addendum to his report, the heart of it related as a personal reminiscence of his father's memories: ‘After using my tu-ring to defeat the locking mechanism, I opened Greybeard's case to reveal a fist-sized device, purpose unknown. All this while, Greybeard remained in delta-coma, but he wasn't going to stay that way, because his closed eyes were flicking from side to side.

‘But when I tried to pick up the device, small though it was, I failed. It was so massive I could not shift it. Yet when Greybeard awoke, he was able to lift the thing easily.'

There were more details, but that was the salient portion, as he pointed out in the covering metadata, in which he also explained the addendum's provenance: ‘These are my father's memories, that is Carl Blackstone, from a covert operation conducted nearly twenty standard years before I was born – memories inherited from his ship by mine, but inaccessible to my father due to targeted amnesia applied during debriefing.'

Such treatment prevented memory retrieval during conjunction trance, effectively repressing the ship's memory also . . . unless that ship gave parthenogenetic birth to a daughter, in which case the daughter's Pilot might uncover those buried memories, as Roger and his ship had done.

In the final comments, he added his own analysis of the reported memory, highlighting its importance as he saw it: ‘Since my father underwent amnesia induction, and since his original report remains archived beyond my clearance level, I cannot tell which details are on record and which were lost. It might be that certain facts which are obviously relevant today, in the light of actions taken by former Admiral Schenck and the other renegade Pilots, would not have seemed significant at the time.

‘I note that the human criminals coerced Zajinets into taking them to the galactic core, probably in order to deliver the device to fellow humans living there. That seems to have been their main objective. However, it is the device itself, although I have no insight into its purpose, that I would urge our analysts to consider.

‘In particular, I would note that the device appeared alternately massive and light, depending on who touched it. The device was clearly constructed of ordinary baryonic matter. My conjecture is that it was able to interact with
non
-baryonic matter or non-gauge forces under controlled circumstances, a scientific achievement normally considered impossible.

‘Could the renegades be using this technology to affect the galactic jet emanating from the core? Or could they be
preparing the locale in some other way – perhaps the jet is a side effect – in either case to construct a bridgehead for the enemy we know is coming eventually?

‘My recommendation is covert research into the device's origins. However, Greybeard indicated he had covered his traces by murder, so there may be no trail to follow.

‘Infiltrating the renegades' base would be highly dangerous, and in any case the base should be considered a primary target for overt, massive assault, with an objective of obliteration rather than capture.

‘End of report. Captain Blackstone out.'

The report was professional and he was proud of it; but he had just suggested the violent extinction of probably two thousand people – one in four being Pilots, renegades like Schenck – which under other circumstances would be termed an atrocity. When exactly had he become capable of thinking this way?

It bothered him, too, that his fellow Pilots thought so highly of him, because his ultra-hellflight had been hard but not heroic, more like desperate; and again it was all about ideas more than reality, because it seemed to him that what he had broken was a psychological barrier.

Perhaps it had been physically possible for the last few generations of ships to survive a flight through the mu-space turbulence that matched to the realspace galactic core. Perhaps the real barrier had been sociolinguistic hypnosis, due either to the real limitations of earlier ships or deliberate thought-sabotage by some previous member of the Aeternum language institute.

If this were true, Roger's example would have broken the inhibition, and other Pilots would match the feat soon. Except that there was a war to concentrate upon, fought on two fronts or three, depending on whether you separated the Anomaly from the darkness. While Roger and the rest of his SRS squadron obsessed on the renegade base they had seen, the Admiralty planners had a different view of things, since the
Zajinet numbers were far greater than that of the renegades, and their attacks were growing in frequency and ferocity.

Or so Roger deduced after attending the highest-powered meeting of his career so far.

Admiral Whitwell said: ‘Thank you for coming, Captain. I wanted you to see the battle plans, so that you understand why we're asking you to take such a risk.'

A vast array of holos filled the war chamber. Some thirty people, most outranking Roger by far, stood among them.

‘Understood, sir,' said Roger.

Commodore Max Gould highlighted a holovolume. What it showed was a simulation, not a recorded image, of something like the renegades' realspace base, but nowhere near the galactic core: it was floating in a region where stars were sparse and space appeared black.

‘The segments are under separate construction,' he said. ‘In mu-space. Transfer and assembly will be fast, and the location will be here.'

Another holo gleamed. The dummy base would lie on a familiar line, heading outwards from the galactic centre to a distant void: a line on which Earth also lay, at least on a map of this scale.

‘Why would Admiral Schenck . . .' Roger's voice trailed off. ‘Zajinets?'

‘Exactly, Captain. They're the enemy we plan to break first.'

Roger examined the dummy base.

‘It's convincing,' he said. ‘Provided they know what the real Target Shadow looks like, but why should they?'

Whitwell's voice fell flat.

‘Certain recordings from your squadron's mission have fallen into the hands of Zajinet agents. The data makes it hard to determine the exact location, but obvious what kind of installation it is. Therefore a new, similar base with known co ordinates should form a tempting target.'

‘But how could—?'

Max Gould shook his head, as a comment on Roger's naivety. Roger nodded.

So how many poor bastards died this time?

Or ended up in torture chambers, like the one that Clara and Clayton rescued Max Gould from four years ago. Because the best way to leak information to an enemy was to allow it to be captured, in the hands of sacrificial goats who had no idea their own masters had betrayed them.

A senior officer unknown to Roger said: ‘Petra Helsen was killed by your friend Jed Goran, or rather by Goran's ship.'

Roger blinked. ‘When did this happen?'

The officer frowned while a few other mouths twitched: special forces had a different view of discipline, and lacked subservience when addressing their seniors. Plus Roger had entered SRS from the intelligence service, not the regular fleet, and so had never picked up the protocols of command. Roger had already said
sir
to Whitwell, which as far as he was concerned was more than enough for the sake of politeness.

‘During a recent mission' – the officer had clearly decided to ignore Roger's attitude – ‘to backtrack shipping route data being passed on to
Zajinet
agents, or so everyone thought, on the basis of earlier attacks on our Pilots.'

‘So either the attacks were faked to look like Zajinet weapons-fire,' said Roger, ‘or Helsen really was helping Zajinets to attack our people, stirring things up. In either case, a known agent of the darkness' –
the bitch is dead
– ‘actively wants us to engage with the Zajinets. My question is, given it's what Helsen wanted' –
dead at last
– ‘why would we even consider it?'

And it was Jed who had taken out Helsen! That was excellent news . . . although a younger Roger might not have celebrated a friend killing for the second time.

‘The easiest way to physically unbalance an untrained person,' said Whitwell, ‘is to shove their chest—'

‘—and then catch their reaction and whip them forwards. Or pull them and throw them backwards when they jerk
back.' Roger smiled at the analogy. ‘That's a neat idea.'

‘I'm glad we meet with your approval, Captain,' said Max Gould.

It would suit the darkness – assuming the phenomenon could be anthropomorphised that way – to disperse Labyrinth's forces against the widespread Zajinet attacks. But to draw out the Zajinets
en masse
, apparently going along with the intention of the darkness, was like taking an enemy's momentum and subverting it to cause their downfall. If they could cripple the Zajinet fleets in one massive action, there would be less distraction from pursuing Schenck and his renegade force.

‘It's a large target that we hope they can't resist,' said the unnamed officer, ‘and which they can't attack in the piece meal way they've been operating in so far. Our xenopsych specialists believe that Zajinets will attempt to operate collectively, possibly to the extent of committing every ship to one massive fleet in order to attack.'

Pinning one's hopes on anticipating Zajinet thinking was risky, but there was no point in Roger's saying so: everyone in the room would know that.

‘We want you to aid in planning a series of deception raids,' said Whitwell. ‘Counter-strikes that you'll take part in.'

‘I see.' Roger glanced at Max Gould.

‘And you'd better survive, Captain Blackstone. Because we expect you to lead the enemy to this location.' Whitwell stabbed a finger at the holo showing the decoy base location. ‘You understand the objective?'

‘I do.'

And it would be subtle in the execution, or it would be unsuccessful, because at every stage the Zajinets had to believe in what they were seeing and learning. Plus there was the possibility of counter-bluff: Zajinets mounting a deception strike of their own against the decoy, while targeting Labyrinth whose forces were committed elsewhere.

Speaking of which . . .

‘If the decoy is here in realspace,' asked Roger, ‘what is the congruent mu-space location? Is it—? Oh.'

Smiles around the war chamber matched his own, as he examined the infinite twists and whorls in the holovolume he had picked out.

‘Mandelbrot Nebula,' he added. ‘That is very nice indeed.'

The perfect hiding place for a battle fleet mounting an ambush.

It'll need more than good topography.

There was also the matter of leading the fleet to victory, and while Roger would have had little idea on how to start organising a fleet, none of the people in the room, not even Max Gould – master of the decades-long covert operation and always as ruthless as he had to be – struck him as being a war leader, a simultaneous strategist, tactician and messianic figure that others would follow.

But this was a personal perception based on incomplete data, and there were limits to what even a special forces captain dared say to senior command. If they must mount this operation, then the primary requirement was to do it right, or they really would be playing into Helsen's hands, even though the bitch was dead.

Later he would realise he had forgotten someone, despite having talked to the legend's own mother in person. Perhaps the battle planners were more astute than Roger had imagined, or perhaps this was simply the unravelling of fate, and sometimes you got lucky.

He could only hope.

Twenty-seven days later by mean-geodesic time, two days before the operation was due to commence, Roger was in a hangar deep within Ascension Annexe, looking over his beautiful black ship, her powerful form webbed with lines of scarlet and shining gold, her newly grown weaponry impressive, actually frightening. She was fantastic, and if anyone could get through the dangers to come, it was her.

A pulse signal indicated an authorised visitor approaching. Roger strode across the deck, his beloved ship behind him, and stared at the area of hangar wall about to open. Soon it liquefied and drew apart, revealing a wide-shouldered, strong-looking adventurer. And suddenly Roger thought they might succeed in this insane venture against the Zajinets.

‘Admiral,' he said. ‘Sir.'

Formality might not be SRS's strong suit, but this was a legend walking towards him with an arrogant grin and easy muscularity.

‘Dirk McNamara.'

‘Roger Blackstone.'

As Roger held out his hand, an unwelcome image flitted through his mind's eye: Dirk's twin, Kian, face disfigured by the Molotov cocktail, one hand a claw, a mysterious figure who was rumoured to appear from time to time on realspace worlds and nudge people towards peace; while here was Dirk, the twin who had taken immediate vengeance on the mob, left them with eyeballs smoking, and made a daring escape from custody that led eventually to his centuries-swallowing hellflight. Son to Ro, the First Pilot, and in his own right a deadly fighter who could take action while others were only starting to assess the situation.