The Mammoth Book of SF Wars (60 page)

Carver had a little time to work out how to deal with the !Cha; before it retrieved the escape pod, the tug spawned dozens of probes and mapped the brown dwarf with everything from optical and microwave radar surveys to a quantum gravity scan. Ganesh Five B was a cool, small T-type, formed like any ordinary star by condensation within an interstellar gas cloud, but at just eight times the mass of Jupiter too small to support ordinary hydrogen fusion. Gravitational contraction and a small amount of sluggish deuterium fusion in its core warmed its dusty atmosphere to a little under 1,500°C. There were metal hydrides and methane down there, even traces of water. Sometimes, its bands of sooty clouds were lit by obscure chains of lightning thousands of kilometres long. Sometimes, when the tug passed directly above the top of a convection cell, those huge, slow elevators that brought up heat from the core, Carver caught a glimpse of the deep interior, a fugitive flash of brighter red flecked with orange and yellow.

And at every tenth orbit the tug passed over the permanent storm at the brown dwarf’s equator, the location of the anomalous neutrino flux that had drawn Dr Smith and the !Cha to Ganesh Five B. The storm’s pale lens was more than fifteen thousand kilometres across; probes dropped into it discovered a complex architecture of fractal clusters crawling and racheting around each other like the gears of an insanely complicated mechanism bigger than the Earth. They also discovered that it was no longer emitting neutrinos, and it was fragmenting along its edges – the tug’s AIs estimated that it would disappear completely in less than ten years.

While the tug swung around the brown dwarf’s dim fires, Carver thought about the !Cha and what he had to do when the tug returned to Sheffield, and lost himself in memories of his dead brother. He and Jarred had been close, two Navy brats following their parents from base to base, system to system. Although Jarred had been two years younger than Carver, he’d also been brighter and bolder, a natural leader, graduating at the top of his class in the Navy academy. The war had already begun when he graduated; the day after his passing-out parade, he followed Carver into active duty.

The last time Carver had seen Jarred, they’d spent three days together in the port city of Our Lady of the Flowers, Persopolis. It was the beginning of Jarred’s leave, the end of Carver’s. The night before Carver shipped out, they bar-hopped along the city’s famous Strand. The more Jarred drank, the more serious and thoughtful he became. He told Carver that whichever side won the war, both would have to work hard at the peace if humanity was to have any chance at surviving.

“War only happens when peace breaks down. That’s why peace is harder work, but more worthwhile.”

“We defeat the Collective, we impose terms,” Carver said. “Where’s the problem?”

“If we won the war and imposed terms on the Collective, forced it to change, it would be an act of aggression,” Jarred said. “The Collective would respond in kind and there would be another war. Instead of forcing change, we have to establish some kind of common ground.”

“We don’t have anything in common with those slavers.”

“We have more in common with them than with the Jackaroo, or the Pale, or the !Cha. And if we don’t find some way of living together,” Jarred said, “we’ll grow so far apart that we’ll end up destroying each other.”

He started to tell Carver about a loose network of people who were discussing how to broker a lasting peace, and Carver said that he didn’t want to hear about it, told Jarred he should be careful, what he and his friends were doing sounded a little like treason. Now, in the cramped lifesystem of the tug, endlessly falling around a failed star, six billion kilometres from the nearest human being, Carver thought about what his brother had said on their last night together. Carver had gone a little crazy when he’d heard about his brother’s death. It had been about as good and noble as an industrial accident – one machine had destroyed another, and Jarred and the rest of the
Croatian
’s crew had been incidental casualties who’d had no chance to fight back or escape. It was a brutal irony that Jarred’s death could help Carver win his freedom.

At last, the tug fired up its motor and slipped into a new orbit, creeping up behind the escape pod, swallowing its black pip whole, then firing up again, a long hard burn to achieve escape velocity from the brown dwarf’s gravity well. It pinned Carver to his couch for more than two hours. When it was over, following Mr Kanza’s instructions to the letter, Carver suited up, went outside, and clambered through the access hatch of the cargo bay.

The pod’s systems were in sleep mode; careful use of a hand-held neutron density scanner confirmed that apart from a !Cha tank it contained nothing out of the ordinary. If Dr Smith and Useless Beauty had retrieved something from the brown dwarf, either it had been lost with their ship, or it was hidden inside the !Cha’s impervious casing.

Carver didn’t attempt to contact the !Cha. He knew that his only chance of escape lay in a narrow window of opportunity during the final part of the return journey; until then, he wanted to keep his plans to himself. He fixed telltales inside the cargo bay in case the !Cha decided to try to break out, locked it up, climbed back inside the lifesystem and sent a report to Mr Kanza, and let the couch put him to sleep.

Carver was supposed to remain in hypersleep until rendezvous with Mr Kanza’s scow, but he’d managed to reprogram the couch while prepping the tug. It woke him twelve hours early, four million kilometres out from Sheffield.

The !Cha’s tank was still inside the escape pod, the pod was still sealed in the cargo bay, and the tug was exactly on course, falling ass-backwards towards the gas giant. In a little over two hours it would skim though the outer atmosphere in a fuel-saving aerobraking manoeuvre; meanwhile, the bulk of the planet lay between it and the Ganesh Five facility and Mr Kanza’s scow.

Carver had less than an hour before Mr Kanza regained radio contact with the tug. While the tug’s triumvirate of AIs threatened dire punishments Mr Kanza had not trusted them to carry out, Carver climbed into his pressure suit, blew open the locked hatch using its explosive bolts, hauled himself to the cargo bay, and took just under fifteen minutes to rig a bypass and crank it open and slide inside.

He’d dropped a tab of military-grade amphetamine (it had cost him fifty days pocket money), but he was still weak from the after-effects of hypersleep, dopey, chilled to the bone. It took all his concentration to plug into the external port of the escape pod, scroll down the menu that lit up inside his visor, and hit the command that would open the hatch.

Nothing happened.

Carver knew then that the !Cha was awake; it must have locked the hatch from the inside. He was crouched on top of the escape pod in the wash of the gas giant’s corpse light with nowhere else to go. Blowing the hatch had compromised the tug’s integrity; if it ploughed into Sheffield’s upper atmosphere it would break up. And in less than thirty minutes, it would re-establish contact with Mr Kanza’s scow. Mr Kanza would have to alter the tug’s course to save it, and then he would torture Carver until Carver’s air supply ran out. So Carver did the only thing he could do: he opened all the com channels and started talking. He told the !Cha who he was, told it about Mr Kanza and Lieutenant Rider, explained why he needed its help. He talked for ten minutes straight, and then a flat mechanical voice said, “Tell me exactly what you plan to do.”

Relief washed clean through Carver, but he knew that he was not saved yet. With the feeling that he was tiptoeing over very thin ice, he said, “I plan to keep us both out of Mr Kanza’s clutches. I’d like to surrender to the Navy, but Mr Kanza partnered up with an officer in the garrison here, so our only chance is to escape through one of the wormholes.”

“But you do not have command of the tug.”

“I don’t need it.”

Another pause. Then the flat voice said, “You have my interest.”

Carver explained that the escape pod’s motor was small but fully fuelled, that with tug’s delta vee and a little extra assist it should be able to get them where they needed to go.

“I hope you understand that I’m not going to give you the flight plan. You’ll have to trust me.”

“You are afraid that I killed Dr Smith. You are afraid that I will kill you if I know the details of your plan.”

“It crossed my mind, but you’re a better bet than my owner.”

“If I wanted you dead, I would not need to do it myself. Your owner will do that for me.”

Carver wondered if that was an attempt at humour. “He’ll kill both of us.”

“He will not kill me if he believes that I have something he wants.”

“If you do have something, he’ll kill you and take it. And if you don’t, he’ll kill you anyway.”

Carver sweated out another pause. Then, with a grinding vibration he felt through his pressure suit, the hatch of the escape pod opened.

Carver powered up the pod’s systems, moved it out of the cargo bay and adjusted its trim with a few puffs of the attitude jets, then fired up its motor. Ten minutes later, the tiny star of the dock facility dawned beyond the crescent and rings of the gas giant. The comm beeped. Mr Kanza said, “That won’t do you any good, you son of a whore.”

“Watch and learn,” Carver said.

“Listen to me carefully. If you don’t do exactly as I say, your brother is a dead man.”

“My brother was killed in action, along with everyone else on his ship.”

Carver had control of the escape pod and was out of range of the shock stick hidden on the tug: he could say whatever he liked to Mr Kanza. It was a good feeling. When Mr Kanza started to rage at him, Carver told him that he was going to have to find some other way of covering his debts, and cut him off.

Far behind the pod, the tug lit its motor; no doubt Mr Kanza was flying it by wire, hoping either to bring it close enough to use the shock stick on Carver, or ram him.

Carver told Useless Beauty what was happening, asked it if the thing it had found at the brown dwarf could be used as a weapon. “And don’t tell me that you didn’t find anything: there’s no longer a neutrino source in that strange storm. You fished out some kind of Elder Culture artefact, and it did a number on your ship.”

“One of the Elder Cultures may have had something to do with it,” Useless Beauty said, “but it was not an artefact.”

The squat black cylinder of its tank was jammed into the space between the two acceleration couches, three pairs of limbs folded up in a way that reminded Carver of a praying mantis. He tried to picture what was inside, a cross between a squid and a starfish swimming in oily, ammonia-rich water, the tough, nerve-rich tubules that ordinarily connected it to puppet juveniles plugged into the systems of its casing. It was even harder to picture what it was thinking, but Carver was pretty sure that his survival was at the bottom of its list of priorities.

He said, “If it wasn’t an artefact, a machine or whatever, what was it?”

“A mathematical singularity from a universe where the laws and constants of nature are very different from ours. A little like the software of your computers, but alive, self-aware, and imbued with a strong survival instinct. Perhaps an Elder Culture brought it through a kind of wormhole between its universe and ours. Perhaps it is a traveller unable to find its way home. In any event, it was trapped within the brown dwarf, and created the storm by epitaxy – using its own form as a template to make something approximating the conditions of its home, just as my tank contains a small portion of the ocean where my species evolved. Dr Smith and I were able to capture it, but it broke free after we brought it aboard our ship. At once, it began to consume the structure of the ship. Dr Smith went outside and successfully cut it away, but by then the fusion motor had been badly damaged, and it began to overheat. When Dr Smith attempted to repair it, the cooling system exploded and ruptured her suit. She died before she could get back inside, and I was forced to use the escape pod. I got away only a few minutes before the ship was destroyed.”

“What about the thing you found? Can we use it?”

“I was unable to retrieve it. Since the neutrino flux is no longer detectable, I must assume that it was unable to return to the brown dwarf. In which case, without a sufficient concentration of matter to weave a suitable habitat around itself,’ Useless Beauty said, ‘it must have evaporated long ago.”

It was a good story, and Carver believed about half of it. He was pretty certain that the !Cha and Dr Smith had captured something – Elder Culture artefact, weird mathematics, whatever – and that it had begun to destroy or transform their ship. It would explain why the composition of the thread Carver had found wrapped around Dr Smith’s arm didn’t match anything in the library of the ship’s lab, but Carver was pretty sure that Dr Smith hadn’t died in some kind of accident. It was more likely that Useless Beauty had murdered her because it wanted to keep what they’d found to itself and that prize was hidden somewhere inside its tank. But because he needed the !Cha’s help, and because it could quite easily kill him if it had a mind to – the casing of its tank was tougher than diamond, and its limbs were equipped with all kinds of gnarly tools; trying to fight it would be like going head to head with a battle drone – he didn’t give voice to his doubts, said that it was a damn shame about losing Dr Smith and the ship; he hoped to bring it better luck.

Useless Beauty did not reply, and its silence stretched as the escape pod hurtled towards the Sheffield’s ring system. Carver sipped sweetened apple pulp, watched the tug grow closer, watched the scow change course, half a million kilometres ahead, watched his own track on the navigational plot. He wasn’t a pilot, but he knew his maths, and his plan depended on nothing more complicated than ordinary Newtonian mechanics, a straightforward balance between gravity and distance and time and delta vee.

That’s what he tried to tell himself, anyhow.

The rings filled the sky ahead, dozens of pale, parallel arcs hundreds of kilometres across, separated by gaps of varying widths. At T minus ten seconds, Carver handed control to the pod’s AI. It lit the pod’s motor at exactly T0. Two seconds later, the comm beeped: another message from Mr Kanza.