Singularity Sky (35 page)

Without any fuss, the warship’s drive singularity entered shutdown. The curved-space field that provided both a semblance of gravity and shielding against acceleration collapsed into a much weaker spherical field centered on the point mass in the engine room—just in time to prevent two hundred tons of bilgewater, and a twenty-tonne improvised lifeboat, from hammering into the rear of the Lord Vanek’s hull and ripping the heat exchangers to shreds.

In the Green deck accommodation block corridor, a nightmare cacophony of alarms was shrilling for attention. Lights strobed overhead, blue, red, green; blow-out alarm, gravity failure alarm, everything. Lieutenant Sauer cursed under his breath and grappled with an emergency locker door;

“Help me, you idiot!” he shouted at Able Flyer Maxim Kravchuk who, whey-faced with fear, was frozen in the middle of the corridor. “Grab this handle and pull for your life!”

Farther up the corridor, damage control doors were sliding shut; as they closed, struts extended from their inner surfaces and extended bright orange crash nets. Maxim grabbed the handle Sauer pointed him at and yanked. Together they managed to unseal the stiff locker door. “Get inside, idiot,” Sauer grunted. The blow-out alarm, terror of all cosmonauts, stopped strobing, but now he could feel the keening of the gravity failure siren deep in his bones—and the floor was beginning to tilt. Kravchuk tumbled inside the locker and began to belt himself to the wall, hands working on instinct alone. Sauer could see the whites of the man’s terrified eyes. He paused in the entrance, glancing up the corridor. The UN bitch’s cabin was in the next segment—he’d have to secure this one and get breathing apparatus before he could go and find out what she’d done to his ship. It’s not just the skipper who‘ll be asking questions, he thought bitterly.

Sauer clambered into the locker even as the floor began to tilt sideways; but the tilt stabilized at a relatively tolerable thirty degrees. He began to feel light on his feet. Drive must be going into shutdown, he realized. Leaving the door open—it would close automatically if there was a pressure drop—he began systematically to pull on an emergency suit. The emergency suit was basically a set of interconnected transparent bags, with enough air to last six hours in a backpack, no good for EVA but a lifesaver inside a breached hull. “You get dressed,” he told the frightened rating. “We’re going to find out what caused this.”

Four minutes later, Chief Molotov and four armed red-tab police arrived, laboriously cycling through the sealed-off corridor segments; the young Procurator tagged along behind them, face flushed, evidently struggling with the unfamiliar survival suit. Sauer ignored him. “Chief, I have reason to believe there are armed saboteurs inside the next corridor segment, or the third compartment in it. When I give the signal, I want this door open and the corridor behind it cleared. I don’t know what the occupants have by way of defenses, but they’re definitely armed, so I suggest you just saturate with taser fire. Once we’ve done that, if it’s empty, we move on the compartment.

Got that?”

“Aye,” said Molotov. “Any idea who’s inside?”

Sauer shrugged. “My best bet is the engineer, Springfield, and the woman from Earth. But I could be wrong. How you handle this your call.”

“I see.” Molotov turned. “You and you; either side of the door. When it opens, shoot anything that moves.” He paused. “Remote override on the cabin door?”

“It’s locked. Manual hinges only, too.”

“Right you are.” Molotov unslung a knapsack, began unrolling a fat cable.

“You’ll want to stand back, then.” He grabbed the emergency door override handle. “On my mark! Mark!”

The emergency door hummed up into the ceiling, and the ratings tensed, but the corridor was empty. “Right. The cabin, lads.”

He approached the cabin door carefully. “Says it’s open to vacuum, sir,” he said, pointing to the warning lights on the door frame.

“Bet you it’s a pinhole leak she’s rigged to keep us out. Just get everyone into suits before we blow it.” Sauer approached and watched as Molotov attached the cable of rubbery cord to the door frame, running it alongside the hinges and then around the door handle and lock, holding it in place with tape. “I’m going to use cutting cord. Better tell Environment to seal this corridor for a pressure drop-off until we repressurize this compartment.”

“Sir—” It was Muller, the cause of this whole mess.

“What is it?” Sauer snapped, not bothering to conceal his anger.

“I, uh—” Vassily recoiled. “Please be careful, sir. She—the inspector—isn’t a fool. This makes me nervous—”

“Keep pestering me, and I’ll make you nervous. Chief, if this man makes a nuisance of himself, feel free to arrest him. He caused this whole fiasco.”

“He did, did he?” Chief Molotov glared at the Subcurator, who wilted and retreated down the passage.

“I’ll get Environment to seal us off.” Sauer was on the command channel again, as Molotov retrieved some wires and a detonator, and began cabling up the explosives. Finally, he retreated a few paces down the corridor and waited. “All clear,” said Sauer. “Okay. Is everybody ready?” He backed up until he stood beside Molotov. “Are you ready?” The chief nodded. “Then go.”

There was a loud whip crack, and smoke jetted from the sides of the door.

Then there was an unbelievably loud bang, and Sauer’s ears popped. The doorway was gone. Behind it, a rolling darkness dragged at him with icy claws, howling and sucking the others out into the void. Not a pinhole? He tried to grab at the nearest emergency locker door, but it was already slamming shut, and he was dragged down the corridor. Something thumped him hard between the shoulders, so hard that he couldn’t breathe.

Everything was dark, and the pain was unbelievable. A dark cylinder spun before his eyes, and there was a ringing whistling in his ears. Plastic flapped against his face. Must have ripped my suit, he thought vaguely. I wonder what happened to... Thinking was hard work; he gave up and fell into a doze, which spiraled rapidly down into dreamless silence.

Vassily Muller, however, was luckier.

Bouncers

The Admiral sat at his desk and squinted.

Commodore Bauer cleared his throat. “If I may have your attention, sir.”

“Huh? Speak up-up, young man!”

“We enter terminal engagement range with the enemy tonight,” Bauer said patiently. “We have to hold the final pre-approach session, sir, to articulate our immediate tactical situation. I need you to sign off on my orders if we are to conduct the battle.”

“Very well.” Admiral Kurtz tried to sit up in his chair; Robard’s helping hands behind his frail shoulders steadied him. “You have them?”

“Sir.” Bauer slid a slim folder across the polished oak. “If you would care to see—”

“No, no.” The Admiral waved a frail hand. “You’re a sound man. You giveive those natives jolly what for, won’t you?”

Bauer stared at his commander in mixed desperation and relief. “Yes, sir, I will,” he promised. “We will be in lidar range of the planetary surface in another hour, then we should be able to establish their order of battle fairly accurately. Task Group Four will illuminate and take the first blood, while the heavies stay under emission control and punch out anything we can identify after we get within close broadside range. I have the destroyer squadrons ready to go after any fixed emplacements we find in GEO, and the torpedo boats are tasked with high-delta-vee intercepts on anything fleeing—”

“Give the natives what-ho,” Kurtz said dreamily. “Make a hill of skulls in the town square. Volley fire by platoons. Bomb the bastards!”

“Yes, sir. If you’d be so good as to sign here—”

Robard put the pen between the Admiral’s fingers, but they shook so much that his crimson signature on the orders was almost completely obscured by a huge blot, like fresh blood.

Bauer saluted. “Sir! With your permission I will implement these orders forthwith.”

Kurtz looked up at the Commodore, his sunken eyes glowing for a split second with an echo of his former will. “Make it so! Victory is on-on our side, for our Lord will not permit his followers to come to—” A look of vast puzzlement crossed his wrinkled face, and he slumped forward.

“Sir! Are you—” The Commodore leaned forward, but Robard had already pulled the Admiral’s chair back from the table.

“He’s been overwrought for days,” Robard commented, reclining his charge’s chair. “I shall take him back to his bedchamber. As we approach the enemy—” He tensed. “Would sir please accept my apologies and call the ship’s surgeon?”

Half an hour later, ten minutes late for his own staff meeting, Commodore Bauer surged into the staff conference room. “Gentlemen. Please be seated.”

Two rows sat before him, before the podium from which the Admiral commanding could address his staff and line officers. “I have a very grave announcement to make,” he began. The folio under his right arm bent under the tension with which he gripped it. “The Admiral—” A sea of faces upturned before him, trusting, waiting. “The Admiral is indisposed,” he said.

Indisposed indeed, if you could call it that, with the ship’s surgeon in attendance and giving him a ten percent chance of recovery from the cerebral hemorrhage that had struck him down as he signed the final order.

“Ahem. He has instructed me to proceed with our prearranged deployment, acting as his proxy while he retains overall control of the situation. I should like to add that he asked me to say, he knows every man will do his duty, and our cause will triumph because God is on our side.”

Bauer shuffled his papers, trying to dismiss his parting image of the Admiral from his awareness; lying prone and shriveled on his bed, the surgeon and a loblolly boy conferring over him in low voices as they awaited the arrival of the ship’s chaplain. “First, to review the situation. Commander Kurrel.

What word on navigation?”

Commander Kurrel stood. A small, fussy man who watched the world with sharp-eyed intelligence from behind horn-rimmed glasses, he was the staff navigation specialist. “The discrepancy is serious, but not fatal,” he said, shuffling the papers in front of him. “Evidently Their Lordships’ projected closed timelike path was more difficult to navigate than we anticipated.

Despite improvements to the drive timebase monitors, a discrepancy of no less than sixteen million seconds crept in during our traversal—which, I might add, is not entirely inexplicable, considering that we have made a grand total of sixty-eight jumps spaced over some 139 days, covering a distance of just over 8053 light-years; a new and significant record in the history of the Navy.”

He paused to adjust his spectacles. “Unfortunately, those sixteen mega-seconds lay in precisely the worst possible direction—timewise, into the domain within which the enemy occupied our territory. Indeed, we would have done little worse had we simply made the normal five-jump crossing, a distance of some forty-four light-years. A full pulsar map correlated for spin-down indicates that our temporal displacement is some three million seconds into the future of our origin point, when it is extrapolated to the destination’s world line. This is confirmed by classical planetary ephemeris measurements; according to local history, the enemy—the Festival—has been entrenched for thirty days.”

A single intake of breath rattled around the table, disbelief and muted anger mingling. Commodore Bauer watched it sharply. “Gentlemen.” Silence resumed. “We may have lost the anticipated tactical benefits of this hitherto untried maneuver, but we have not entirely failed; we are still only ten days in the future of our own departure light cone, and using a conventional path we wouldn’t be arriving for another ten days or so. As we have not heard anything from signals intelligence, we may assume that the enemy, although entrenched, are not expecting us.” He smiled tightly. “An inquiry into the navigation error will be held after the victory celebrations.” That statement brought a brief round of “ayes” from the assembly. “Lieutenant Kossov. General status report, if you please.”

“Ah, yes, sir.” Kossov stood. “All ships report ready for battle. The main issues are engineering failures with the Kamchatka—they report that pressure has been restored to nearly all decks, now—and the explosion in the waste-disposal circuits of this ship. I understand that, with the exception of some cabins on Green deck, and localized water damage near the brig, we are back to normal; however, several persons are missing, including Security Lieutenant Sauer, who was investigating some sort of incident at the time of the explosion.”

“Indeed.” Bauer nodded at Captain Mirsky. “Captain. Anything to report?”

“Not at this time, sir. Rescue parties are currently busy trying to recover those who were expelled from the ship during the decompression incident. I don’t believe this will affect our ability to fight. However, I will have a full and detailed report for you at your earliest convenience.” Mirsky looked grim; and well he might, for the Flag Captain’s ship was not expected to disgrace the fleet, much less to lose officers and crew to some sort of plumbing accident—if indeed it was an accident. “I must report, sir, that the Terran diplomat is among those listed as missing following this incident.

Normally, I would conduct a search for survivors, but in the current situation—” His shrug was eloquent.

“Let me extend my sympathies, Captain; Lieutenant Sauer was a fine officer. Now, as to our forthcoming engagement, I have decided that we will deploy in accordance with attack plan F. You’ve gamed it twice in exercises; now you get a chance to play it for real, this time against a live but indeterminate foe—”

A bumping on the hull brought Martin to his senses. He blinked, hair floating in front of his eyes, and stared at the wall in front of him. It had slid past his eyes as the cold-gas thrusters tried to yank him into the ceiling, turning from solid gray into a sheet of blackness stippled with the glaring diamond dust of stars. The tides of the Lord Vanek had tried to yank his arms and legs off; he ached with a memory of gravity. Rachel lay next to him, her lips twitching as she communed with the lifeboat’s primitive brainstem. Huge gray clouds blocked the view directly overhead, waste water from the scuppers. As he looked, yellow beacons flashed in it, rescue workers searching for something.