Then the wall of what had been an inner cabin came up at him more quickly than he had expected and he had to spend yet more thruster fuel to stop himself crashing into it. It dissolved into plasma and he jetted to one side to get out of yet another outlander’s line of fire. He sheltered behind a cluster of cabling and fired back.
Stormer prided himself on being able to get around in freefall; that near-crash had been inexcusable. The only reason could be that the outlanders were finally getting their ship under control, cancelling out the spin. And of course the outlander troops would have their suit computers (he sprayed fire at three more of them, killing one and hitting a second, sending it spinning out of control and maybe killing it) tuned into the ship’s computers, so that they could adjust to the changed motion without even thinking about it.
All in all, the advantage was with the outlanders.
An explosion right by his head threw Stormer back out into the hull space again; a gale of fragments and expanding gas knocked him against the outer hull. His grip weakened for a moment and another blast shocked his gun from his hand. It span away down the length of the dim cavern that was their battlefield; back towards the bow, if his sense of direction didn’t fail him. Stormer set his suit to follow it but the explosion must have damaged something. It could only manage a couple of desultory bursts that carried him away from the fighting, before the thrusters failed altogether.
Away from the fighting!
Rage flared within him. They were his people, he should be leading them; he should be in their midst, to die proudly.
For die he would; he knew that now. The Martial Mother had issued the ritual challenge and, for all their strangeness, the outlanders had responded well. He, Stormer, had failed. The outlanders were on their home ground and they were fighting for their lives. They fought like . . .
almost
like Kin, he grudgingly admitted.
‘Martial Mother, this is Stormer.’ Even to his own ears, his voice sounded weak. Was he losing air? He couldn’t tell. His suit’s diagnostics had packed in too. ‘I ask permission to withdraw my people.’
No answer.
‘This is Stormer. First Son of the Family Dadoi. Can anyone hear me?’
Suit radio also gone. Stormer wondered how far back up the hull he had drifted. It wasn’t important.
He had one weapon left to him. He would have to do it manually.
The fingers of his feeding hands plucked feebly at the access plate over his suit’s thruster controls. He couldn’t look down at what he was doing but he could do it by feel. He found the nozzle of the main fuel tube and opened it. Then he located the nozzle of the reactant feed – the added element that made the fuel combust.
Normally the two chemicals met in small quantities in the suit’s mixing chamber, and the exploding gas was channelled into the thrusters. Instead he plugged the two nozzles together, connecting one reservoir straight into another.
His last regret was that though he had left a Sharing behind him, it had of course been before this last battle. His family would know nothing of how he had died, but perhaps they knew him well enough to guess.
His last act was to send a final thrust command to his suit.
The explosion blasted a hole in both hulls.
‘
This is Perry
.’ The marine captain’s voice was grey with fatigue and a singular lack of triumph. ‘The XCs
are withdrawing
.’
Tension on the flight deck dissolved into whoops of joy, humans thumping each other and the Rusties on the back.
‘Well done!’ said Sand Strong. ‘All marines pull back into the ship. Damage control parties make your reports.’
‘Sand Strong,’ Gilmore said, his eyes on one of the displays.
‘Medics report to the flight deck.’
‘Sand Strong . . .’
‘Ops, get reports from all ship modules.’
Gilmore gave up on Sand Strong. ‘Pilot, extend the drive field to include all marines and get us out of here!’
Sand Strong did finally register that someone else was giving orders. ‘Mr Gilmore, you must—’
Gilmore grabbed the Rustie’s head and thrust it in front of the display. ‘Look!’
Sand Strong looked. ‘Pilot, do as he says! One light second distance, go now.’
Pathfinder
had been damaged by the sacrifice of one XC transport ship. The XCs still had two more in reserve, and one of them was manoeuvring.
It fired its main engine and darted towards
Pathfinder
just as
Pathfinder
’s own drive engaged.
Pathfinder
hung in empty space. The Shield was a green globe in the dark; SkySpy and its attendant XC ships could only be seen with the telescope that was trained on them.
Sand Strong, Gilmore and the ship’s officers were gathered together on the flight deck. Perry and McCallum had joined them, helmets off but still armoured up. Andrew McLaughlin and the other injured were in the sickbay.
Pathfinder
’s captain had yet to wake up.
‘We’ve done what we came to do.’ Perry’s face was tired and drawn but his voice was steady and hard. ‘Even though it cost us half our people dead and the ship almost blown in two, we’ve done it. We can step-through back to the Roving and send in a squadron. Or, what the hell, just leave them alone, why not? They know we exist but there’s nothing they can do about it.’
‘We have reason to believe there are two survivors on the Dead World,’ Gilmore said, staring at the desktop, not looking up at the marine. ‘We can’t go yet.’
Pathfinder
had shown it could manoeuvre. It could still get to the Dead World. It could still retrieve Joel . . .
‘Sure we can. We step-through home, another ship steps right through into Dead World orbit and picks them up. And what are you doing here?’
‘I asked him to stay,’ Sand Strong said. ‘Mr Gilmore has proved most useful so far.’
‘Thanks for telling us about the hatch,’ Donna added.
‘That was you?’ Perry said. He still glared at Gilmore but there was almost a tinge of respect as well. ‘Good advice. Thank you. But you have to see—’
‘We are Navy, my son and Boon Round are Navy, we owe it to them to get them,’ Gilmore said. A dispassionate, professional stance that surely no-one could argue with, he thought. ‘You’d do it for your marines.’
‘And I am really sorry about your son, but I lost half my men!’ Perry shouted. ‘Have you ever taken casualties in the line of duty?’
‘Yes,’ Gilmore said. Perry really, visibly, hadn’t expected that answer.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, more quietly. Still with great control. ‘But you’re incorrect. I wouldn’t do it for my marines, and they wouldn’t expect me to, if I didn’t think we were up to it. And we are not up to it.’
‘Captain Perry,’ said Sand Strong, ‘with respect, this is a ship matter. Orders were to cede to your judgement in matters concerning SkySpy. In your opinion, has the SkySpy aspect of this mission been completed?’
Perry glowered. ‘Well, we’ve established that the memory banks were destroyed and we retrieved what we wanted. So yes, we completed it.’
‘And we have a good idea where the survivors are . . .’
‘The big momma said they crashed,’ Perry pointed out.
‘Then you are right. We’re in no state to go after them.’
‘But . . .’ Gilmore said, aghast.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Gilmore. Using Captain Perry’s method, a fully functional ship can be with them within days. An undamaged
Pathfinder
could get to the Dead World in much less time, but we still don’t know how much damage the ship has taken; we still have no idea how spaceworthy we are. We have to get back to dock; that is our priority. And we know that we can step-through straight away.’
Gilmore simmered, but . . . He was gratified to see a look of sympathy from Donna McCallum. In fact, she really looked like she was sharing his pain. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Right.’
‘Nav,’ Sand Strong said. ‘Scan for a step-through point along the nearest line direct to the Roving. Power up main drive, all hands stand by for manoeuvre . . .’
‘Um.’ The Nav officer looked over from his desk. ‘No response from the step-through generator.’
It took an external inspection to confirm that the step-through generator wasn’t there. It was usually mounted on the outer hull, ready to be flown out on its sled ahead of the ship to open a step-through point. But it wasn’t there now.
At some point in the battle, an explosion between the hulls in the vicinity of deck three, quite some way from the fighting, had knocked holes in both directions. The explosion had been beneath the gantry that held the generator sled. The remains of the gantry, with the generator attached, were back at SkySpy.
There was silence on the flight deck as the report was digested.
‘So, how long until the Commonwealth sends another ship anyway?’ Perry said.
Gilmore’s question was more urgent. ‘Is the generator returning a signal?’
The generator was indeed returning a signal. It was returning the fact that apart from not being attached to the ship it was otherwise in one hundred percent working order.
The XCs had one fully functioning example of the prize of Commonwealth technology, a step-through generator that could take them anywhere, and it was defended by an almost unscathed warship that could probably match anything the crippled
Pathfinder
threw at it.
Pathfinder
wasn’t leaving.
Twelve
Day Eighteen: 20 June 2153
‘And that,’ Gilmore finished, ‘is the situation.’ He paused for questions.
The observers had been invited up to the flight deck, at Gilmore’s suggestion in a rare moment of observer empathy. He knew how it felt, being kept cooped up in the granny annex, out of the way and out of the dataflow. They stood in one corner with himself and Sand Strong. Behind them the watch crew hunkered around the central command desk, co-ordinating the repair crews that were working flat out all around the ship.
Rhukaya Bakan was the first to speak. ‘So, they have a step-through generator.’
‘They have
our
step-through generator,’ said Peter Lardner, the Euro observer.
‘The one we were going to use to get home with.’ The Pacifican, Toshio Shintani.
‘Correct,’ said Gilmore, who had spent the last five minutes explaining exactly that. He forced a smile. If the great game of life had dealt him the hand of a diplomat, he would handle it.
‘I’m impressed you take it so calmly,’ said Bakan. ‘Perhaps worry about your son is clouding your judgement. We, on the other hand . . .’
Gilmore stared at her.
You bitch!
‘Listen—’ he said through his teeth.
Sand Strong spoke. ‘Ms Bakan, please! There’s really no cause for alarm. It’s highly unlikely that the XCs will be able to use it.’
‘Oh?’ Something in Bakan’s tone rang an alarm at the back of Gilmore’s mind: it was the ‘oh?’ of an advocate who is giving a hostile witness rope to hang himself. But Sand Strong would not have picked up on it.
‘For a start, a step-through point requires enormous power,’ the Rustie said. ‘The ships used by the XCs are similar to the Earth ships of ten years ago, pre-contact. Their fusion reactors could never provide enough energy.’
‘UK-One came to the Roving using its own power,’ Bakan said.
‘But it required the output of all its reactors, working in series.’ Gilmore added his support to Sand Strong. ‘The XCs have nothing like that many out here.’
Lardner cleared his throat. ‘Doesn’t SkySpy get its power from vacuum energy, like this ship?’
‘Yes,’ Gilmore said.
‘And supposing they get SkySpy’s power back online . . .?’
Bakan shot him a satisfied smile, as if to say, ‘exactly’.
‘That is very unlikely,’ Sand Strong said.
‘But possible?’ Bakan insisted.
‘Not impossible,’ Sand Strong agreed.
‘They’d be starting from scratch.’ Gilmore had never had any patience for remote hypotheticals; he despised the mentality which said that cleverly playing with words could alter the facts. ‘It took us years to copy First Breed technology, and that was when the First Breed technology had been deliberately left lying around for us to find. They’re not going to twig step-through any time soon.’
He could see that he was getting home, at least to most of the observers. A few faint smiles, less hunching of shoulders and crowding forward. They were being reassured.
Most of them. Bakan opened her mouth, no doubt to lay down another clever legalism, so Gilmore got there first.
‘And there’s much, much more to step-through than just opening a point,’ he said. ‘You know the two ends have to be at equivalent gravitational potentials, along a line straight out from the nearest star. Starting in our current position, even if they could open a point then they’d end up in deep space somewhere thousands of light years from Earth or the Roving. To be a threat to us, they’d have to establish the co-ordinates of our worlds, then position themselves along a step-through line and—’
‘And they don’t have those co-ordinates?’ Bakan said.
‘Of course not.’ Gilmore gestured angrily over at the navigator’s position. ‘
There
are the co-ordinates. The generator takes instructions from here, the flight deck. The nav computers.’
Something about Bakan’s expression told him he still hadn’t made his point. ‘The generator has no computing power of its own? No memory?’
‘No, it—’
‘Actually . . .’ Sand Strong sounded apologetic and he glanced up at Gilmore. ‘There is an in-built memory buffer, of course.’
‘And would that retain the co-ordinates?’ said Bakan.
‘It would . . . yes. It would retain the co-ordinates of the last five or six step-throughs.’
Bakan’s voice was smooth and deadly. It was almost fascinating to watch as she held up her hand and ticked off a count on her fingers. ‘The last step-through was to this place. The one before that was from the Roving to rendezvous with the lifeboat. So the Roving’s co-ordinates will be in the buffer. The one before that will have been from when
Pathfinder
last entered the Roving system. Where did it come from then?’
‘From an observation station on Sample World Seven. We were bringing in some researchers from . . .’ Sand Strong paused.
‘Do go on,’ Bakan said, very pleasantly.
‘From Earth.’
‘So Earth was four step-throughs ago?’
‘Yes.’ Gilmore almost expected Sand Strong to add, ‘Your Honour’.
‘So Earth’s co-ordinates will be in the buffer too?’
‘It is not impossible.’
Two minutes ago the observers had been showing signs of relaxing. No more.
‘So,’ Bakan said. She crossed her arms and looked at Sand Strong. Then Gilmore. Then Sand Strong again. ‘What are you going to do about it?’
‘Where the hell did she learn so much about
Pathfinder
? Or about step-through?’ Gilmore muttered as the little party made its way for’ard, to the hangar deck. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Bakan had engineered the whole conversation, to make it reach the point where it seemed a reasonable assumption that the XCs were poised on the verge of step-through. It was disorienting; even more so, when he thought how with a few choice words, she had gone from a sympathetic, pleasant individual – someone who understood about Joel, someone who could share his feelings – to being about as welcome as a leaky spacesuit. The woman still refused to admit that action wasn’t possible and she had insisted on speaking to Bill Perry.
Well, good luck to her. Gilmore knew what Perry would say. Unfortunately, Sand Strong’s orders were to be co-operative with the civilians so they had to waste time actually bothering the marine captain.
‘Our voyages weren’t classified. She could have found details on the public net,’ Sand Strong said by way of answer. They came to the lift doors and waited. ‘As for the technical details of step-through generators, I believe they were made public in your tenure as commodore.’
Gilmore ground his teeth all the way up to the hangar deck.
The smell of fuel, the noise of charging generators – all comfortable and homely to a spacer. Gilmore and Sand Strong led the observers around the landing boats and over to where the marines were checking and stripping their equipment.
‘Captain Perry, could we have a word?’ Sand Strong called. Perry said something to McCallum – it didn’t look like an expression of joy at being summoned from his tasks by a group of civilians – and came over to them.
‘Sand Strong?’ he said, curt but polite. The Rustie was after all his superior officer. Perry had never expected to take orders from a non-human but he would do it properly.
‘Ms Bakan would like to know—’
‘Ms Bakan wants us to recapture or destroy the step-through generator,’ Gilmore said. ‘Preferably before the XCs turn Earth into another Dead World.’
‘I would value your military assessment of the situation,’ Bakan said with a bright smile. ‘Please.’
Perry frowned at Gilmore, at Sand Strong.
I was
interrupted for this?
Gilmore did his best to say ‘I know, but what can you do?’ by means of a shrug.
‘I expect my military assessment matches what you’ve already been told,’ Perry said. ‘If we were closer, within range, we could pick it off with the ship’s guns and wait for the Commonwealth to rescue us. But we’re way out of range, so we stay put. Ship’s gunnery isn’t my specialty but I know that much.’
‘A retrieval mission?’ Bakan said. ‘You and your people go out in your armour?’
Perry snorted: he had yet to learn even to try and be polite to civilians and for once Gilmore was one hundred percent behind him. ‘We’re, what, a light second away from SkySpy? It’s a little out of our armour’s range.’
‘How much by?’
‘Oh, about a couple of years. A light second is a long way on thruster power.’
‘Well, we do seem to be exhausting the possibilities . . .’ Bakan said.
‘Indeed,’ said Sand Strong. ‘Please trust my professional judgement. The chances of the XCs successfully operating the step-through generator are minimal—’
‘But not non-existent.’ Bakan looked back up at Perry. ‘Captain, please can you tell us all about Device Ultimate?’
Time seemed to stand still. Gilmore, who had no idea what Device Ultimate was, still felt as if the air around him had frozen. Perry had instantly grown a layer of composure that Gilmore was certain hid a core of deep shock.
Even Sand Strong was surprised. Gilmore knew enough Rustie body language to tell that.
‘Device Ultimate?’ said one of the observers. ‘Is he a Rustie?’
‘It’s not a First Breed name,’ Sand Strong said. ‘It is . . . where exactly did you hear about it, Ms Bakan?’
Not on the public net, I’ll bet
, Gilmore thought.
‘It’s what Captain Perry and his people retrieved from SkySpy,’ Bakan said. ‘Tell us about it, Captain, please.’
Perry looked at Sand Strong. ‘Your orders, sir?’
Even Gilmore was hanging on every word. He of all people should have known what was on SkySpy and he was sure Device Ultimate had never featured in any briefing.
‘It’s a bomb,’ Sand Strong finally said.
The observers breathed again. ‘Well, what good is—’ someone said.
‘It’s more than that, surely,’ said Bakan.
‘Why don’t you tell us?’ Gilmore challenged.
Bakan blinked innocently at him. ‘And spread classified information around?’
‘It was a safety device installed by the Ones Who Command,’ Sand Strong said. ‘We learnt of it from Captain McLaughlin’s sealed orders that came from Admiral Chase. Where Admiral Chase found out about it, I don’t know.’
There was a long pause. He obviously wasn’t going to volunteer more.
Bakan sighed. ‘Oh, all right. I expect my government and the admiral had the same informant. This is what we’ve been told by March Sage Savour.’
Another of those sudden temperature changes. Sand Strong, Gilmore noticed with a sinking feeling, had suddenly become much more attentive. Rusties had been created as servants by genetic manipulation, before the Ones Who Command wiped themselves out, and old habits died hard. March Sage Savour in his time had been Senior of the Roving. March Sage Savour had spent the four years since the Roving Mission in exile on an island in the Roving’s tropics, while his comrades died around him. But March Sage Savour still clung onto life and apparently he still knew how to shove his oar in.
‘March Sage Savour was on the mission that discovered the XCs,’ Bakan said. ‘He witnessed the xenocide at first hand, and a worst case scenario for him was to have fleets of XC ships pouring through step-through points onto the Roving. He and the other Ones Who Command therefore devised the worst case solution. Device Ultimate contains a highly powerful grav controller. A miniature black hole that can be turned on and off at will. It could be put on board one of your landing boats operating under automatic pilot. It could be shielded and flown into the sun’s interior. At full boost, the process could be accomplished in days. The grav controller would cause sufficient fluctuations there to destabilize the sun and cause it to explode.’
No-one spoke; everyone’s mind was taken up with the vision. Bakan continued, almost as an afterthought: ‘Naturally it has a lot of safeguards, it requires authentication codes and all that to operate, but March Sage Savour gave them to me before we left.’
Gilmore had once unexpectedly found himself in command of a ship armed with nuclear weapons. That experience, he now found, was far down the scale of possible surprises.
‘It . . .’ he said. ‘I mean, I . . . they never told us about it. It was on SkySpy all this time and they never told us.’
‘No,’ Bakan agreed. ‘They wouldn’t, would they? They weren’t going to trust a device like that to the First Breed or to humans.’
‘Isn’t it a bit . . . drastic?’ said Lardner.
‘It won’t cause a nova,’ Bakan said. ‘The XC race will survive. What will happen is the top one percent of the sun’s outer layer will erupt. There’ll be a blast of plasma and radiation and a magnetic pulse that will wipe out the XC civilization. Knock them back into the Stone Age.’
‘And us?’ Gilmore said.
‘We shelter behind the Shield, appropriately enough. The planet would take a knocking but we’d be safe. Then we stay put and await another rescue attempt by the Commonwealth – one is bound to come. I have the exact specs to show you, Sand Strong, if you’re interested.’
‘Millions of XCs would die. All the ones in space and on the day side of Homeworld, for a start,’ Gilmore said. He was so caught up with the horror of the vision that it even took a moment for the additional thought to register:
Joel, too
.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Bakan shouted. Her composure, the calm and quiet lawyerly tones, were suddenly gone. ‘They could be studying the generator right now, working out how it works, sending its details back to Homeworld. Even if we recapture the physical item, the knowledge will have spread and they’ll . . . they’ll . . .’
She caught herself abruptly, took a breath, let some colour return to her cheeks. Gilmore studied her in fascination.
‘My God, you’re terrified, aren’t you? The Commonwealth has always had a healthy respect for them but you . . . you are honest to God, pants-wetting
terrified
.’
‘Half the XC population or the entire Earth,’ said Bakan. ‘It’s no contest.’