‘That thing could murder billions of creatures! Don’t tell me those orders are legal!’
No pause this time; Perry wasn’t going to take argument from a junior.
‘We’re not being ordered to do it, just not to interfere. Follow orders, Lieutenant McCallum.’
‘Aye aye, sir,’ Donna said sullenly. The display showed Perry’s legs turn and walk away; then there was another blur and Donna was back on. ‘Did you get that?’
‘I got it. What else is happening?’
Donna looked away again, then back. ‘Ten . . . twenty Rusties just came in. Some of them are armed . . . the human engineers are being sent off the hangar deck.’
Gilmore closed his eyes. The Rusties were going through with it. They really were.
Then he had another, horrible thought. ‘Lieutenant, can you put an armed guard on Captain McLaughlin in the sickbay?’
Donna shrugged, taken by surprise. ‘Sure. Why? You think he’s in danger?’
‘Maybe, maybe not. I do think, I do
know
that he’s the only one on board who can legitimately countermand Sand Strong. And I know this whole thing has been engineered by a woman whose employers weren’t afraid to use violence during the Roving Mission to get their way and who is prepared to wipe out millions of alien lives to protect her own. One human life isn’t going to be a problem.’
‘I’ll see what we can do.’
‘Thanks.’ Gilmore looked her in the eyes. ‘Lieutenant, the vibes I’ve got from you are that you’re a person who likes to do what’s
right
.’ He remembered her comments when she attended the debrief of the lifeboat pilot. He had heard the emphasis in her voice when she said
right
. Not what was technically correct, not what was approved or acceptable but what was
right
. ‘Using Device Ultimate isn’t.’
She smiled, but not with her eyes. ‘Nor’s mutiny, Mr Gilmore.’
‘I’m not talking mutiny. It would be mutiny if the crew of
Pathfinder
got involved . . . but you’re not in the crew.’
She looked at him shrewdly. ‘I’ve got duties to attend to. Meet me in the canteen in half an hour’s time.’
Gilmore sat in the canteen and poked at the bits and pieces on the tabletop in front of him. Several small gas canisters and an item of electronic equipment. The canisters no doubt contained pheromones, the last piece was a holo projector. Gilmore had paid a visit to the Commune Place and found them secreted in vents, under the troughs, behind the décor – probably planted on the observers’ tour of the ship and all part of the plot to let March Sage Savour sway the First Breed. On his second appearance, in the Commune Place, the One Who Commands had used not just mouthtalk, not bodytalk, but fulltalk; words and gestures and pheromones all in one persuasive package. The First Breed hadn’t stood a chance.
Very, very clever. Bakan had known this was going to happen. She had planned it. It had been an ambush. Well, for what it was worth, she wouldn’t be influencing the Commune Place again.
Someone was standing over him. He looked up and recoiled slightly. He had expected a single marine lieutenant, not a delegation of grim-looking Navy personnel.
Nguyen was at their head. ‘Say the word and we’re with you, Commodore,’ she murmured.
‘I beg your pardon?’
Nguyen pulled out a chair and sat opposite him. The others clustered around, turned their backs, kept an eye on the rest of the canteen.
Hello, world, we’re
having a secret conspiracy
, Gilmore thought.
‘We don’t want to use Device Ultimate, sir. We know Sand Strong was got at. We can’t accept orders like that . . .’
‘You can accept orders from your superior, Lieutenant.’ Gilmore’s face and voice were cold.
‘Sir, all the humans will follow you. You can . . .’
‘That will do!’ Gilmore snapped. ‘If you don’t like taking orders from the First Breed, you shouldn’t have joined the Commonwealth Navy. When we get back to the Roving I’ll be glad to pull what strings I can to effect your transfer to one of the Earth fleets, humans only.’
Nguyen looked as if he had slapped her. ‘But sir . . . but . . . I mean, they want to commit another xenocide . . .’
‘There won’t be a xenocide.’ Gilmore’s voice was quiet and level.
Not in the Navy that I founded
. ‘Now, you and your friends return to your posts before I’m forced to raise my voice and tell you in public that I won’t be a party to mutiny.’
The look in her eyes was of pure condemnation. She slapped her hands on the tabletop and stood, which spoiled Gilmore’s brief fantasy of yelling at her and perhaps leaning forward and grabbing her hair and punctuating every syllable by hitting her head against the table.
Why can’t you see it? If we go back to
the Roving with the news that the human half of a crew
mutinied against the Rustie half then the Commonwealth
dies
, there and then
. ‘Of course . . .’ he said. She paused, looked back. ‘I can’t order you all to remain in good health. I can’t order you to press the right buttons. I can’t order you to do anything on the double. Things like that really are up to the conscience of the individual.’
She didn’t look like she got it; well, maybe she would eventually. Some of the others obviously did because they looked a bit more approving as they left.
Gilmore put his head in his hands. ‘Yi yi yi yi yi,’ he muttered.
‘Problems with the workers?’ Donna McCallum sat down opposite him with two cups of coffee and pushed one of them towards him. ‘If you’re going to have a conspiracy in the canteen, you should at least look like you’re engaging in canteen-compatible activities.’
‘It’s not a conspiracy yet,’ Gilmore said.
Donna nodded at the equipment on the desktop. ‘Counter-conspiracy, then. Is that what dunnit?’
‘It’s the culprit,’ Gilmore said. ‘Look.’ He pressed a key; a miniature March Sage Savour appeared on the tabletop. ‘His second speech, in the Commune Place, was pre-recorded with fulltalk bells and whistles. Very persuasive.’
‘There’s no way of manipulating it? Making the image say something else?’
‘If we had time we could manipulate the image and get the chem labs to knock up some fake pheromones for us. But we don’t have time.’
‘So if we stop this at all, we target Device Ultimate.’
‘Exactly.’ He leaned forward. ‘We need to—’
‘Plan, think ahead, work out what to do. Done it.’ She was smiling over the rim of her cup. It was an infectious smile, full of mischief; Gilmore felt she was enjoying this not so much because it saved millions of XC lives as because it would stir things up. And it wasn’t the smile of someone who has exhausted all the options. There was cold steel in the blue eyes behind the smile that showed just how seriously she was actually taking this.
‘And . . .?’ he said, as was plainly expected.
‘I did a run-through of the whole operation in my head,’ she said. ‘The device will be loaded into one of the ship’s boats and a course will be hardwired into its nav computer to take it into the sun. Not hackable by remote means, so scratch that option if you were considering it.’
Gilmore had been considering, and obediently scratched it.
She took another sip. ‘Device Ultimate is in kit form and will take hours to assemble. A provisional launch time has been fixed for 07:00 tomorrow. That Bakan woman has the code required to activate it, so the key thing is that the data gets from Bakan to Device Ultimate. The crystal is vulnerable exactly twice. Once is when it’s sitting in her cabin. If you’ve got any ideas of how to get into her cabin without anyone seeing, I’d like to hear.’
The ship’s ventilation system chose just that moment to waft a gentle breeze across the table. An air vent opened into the canteen just above them and their combined gazes crept up to the grill in the ceiling. It was all of twelve inches wide. They looked down again.
‘When’s the second time?’ he asked.
Donna smiled again and put her coffee down. Gilmore stifled the urge to throttle her. ‘Did you do drama at school, Commodore?’
Fourteen
Day Nineteen: 21 June 2153
‘This, First Son, is when I could really use the presence of Oomoing,’ Barabadar said.
‘Indeed, My Mother,’ First Son commented. ‘She is duly mourned.’
‘That wasn’t what I meant,’ Barabadar said.
‘As My Mother pleases,’ he said complacently. First Son didn’t even aspire to understanding his mother’s thoughts. Officially he was meant to be in mourning for his younger brother but he didn’t seem that upset. Perhaps he was still jubilant at the successful conclusion to the Ritual of Contested Land. They had challenged, they had fought and the outlanders had withdrawn; the contested land was clearly theirs.
But it’s not just about the Ritual, First Son. The
outlanders are still
here . . .
Barabadar and First Son were in their space armour and they surveyed the busy scene in the cavern, the same hole in the rock that had previously held the outlander’s escape craft. It had seemed large and empty after the craft took off, but now it was rapidly filling up again. Armoured Kin jetted hither and thither, each bearing tantalizing scraps of outlander technology. It all looked chaotic but presumably made sense to someone.
The outlander ship had been seriously damaged by the sacrificed assault craft, and large chunks had been knocked off in the fighting that followed. Space around the rock was aswirl with bits of outlander technology and Barabadar was having it all brought in for examination. Unfortunately she badly needed a good scientist or three to study it all and deduce what it was actually
for
. The bits ranged from unidentifiable fragments, probably part of the hull, a few handbreadths in width to . . .
‘What is that?’ she said. It was the first truly interesting thing she had seen. A team of engineers was manoeuvring what looked like an intact piece of machinery down into the cave from the open, spaceward end. It was a cube, each side twice the height of a Kin, attached to some kind of gantry.
‘Team Three!’ First Son bellowed. Barabadar winced; he was still on their shared band. ‘Hold it right there! That thing might be dangerous. My Martial Mother will . . .’
He stopped as he realized his Martial Mother was no longer standing next to him. He glanced up and saw her jetting up towards the object. ‘My Mother!’ he yelped.
Barabadar ignored him. The cube filled her vision and her thoughts. Team Three had jetted to a halt at First Son’s command and they hung in space, just inside the cavern entrance, while Barabadar jetted slowly around the thing.
Barabadar took it all in. The gantry it was attached to was jagged and shattered at one end; it must have been shot off the ship, or severed in an explosion. Thick, rugged cabling snaked from the object, down the gantry, and ended abruptly in a cluster that reminded Barabadar of some very large beheaded worms.
‘What are you doing, My Mother?’ First Son had caught up with her.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘Deduce what you can from this.’
First Son looked. After about a minute, Barabadar began to wonder if she shouldn’t just say it out loud.
‘It was mounted externally?’ First Son finally offered.
‘Brilliant!’ Barabadar snapped. ‘Yes, it was mounted externally. But look at these cables, First Son. Would you say they were power leads?’
First Son peered close. ‘That looks like optic cabling, presumably how the thing interfaced with the ship’s systems. But the rest of it . . .’ There was indeed one thin cable that looked like fibre optics. It was outnumbered and outmassed by the rest. ‘Yes. It seems to have required an immense amount of power for . . . whatever it did. Some kind of weapon?’
‘If it is, it wasn’t used during the fight.’ Barabadar resumed her jetting. The cube rotated in front of her. She was only putting half her mind into the conversation, the rest was occupied with far more important thoughts. ‘They only used lasers and torpedoes, like us. This . . .’
A prodigious amount of energy
, Oomoing had said.
Outside the ship
, they had both agreed.
She made her decision.
‘Well, I know who could tell us what it was for.’
‘And I mourn her loss,’ First Son agreed dutifully.
‘I wasn’t talking about Oomoing!’ Barabadar snapped. Once again her thought processes had jumped to a parallel track and First Son had still to keep up. ‘Get me a status report on the last two assault craft, First Son. We have unfinished business.’
Fifteen
Day Nineteen: 21 June 2153
’Going somewhere, Donna?’
Donna looked up. Her vision was obscured by targeting solutions and data feedback from her armour playing on the inside of her visor – and Bill Perry. On the far side of the hangar deck, rust-coloured, four-legged forms swarmed over the landing boat that was being modified to carry Device Ultimate on its one-way journey. It was the pinnace that Michael Gilmore had come aboard in – not part of the ship’s complement, therefore surplus to requirements and safely disposable.
She reached up and lifted off her helmet, and the data display vanished. She stood there in her otherwise complete space armour and smiled brightly at her superior officer. The smile wasn’t returned. Perry wasn’t in a smiling mood.
‘I thought some of my auto-aim was a bit glitchy during the fighting. I want to polish up its precision targeting,’ she said.
‘We do have people who could tweak it for you.’
‘They don’t have to wear this suit, do they?’
Perry shrugged. He probably felt she was making work for herself, but he also knew she was using the same principle that made skydivers pack their own chutes. If you want a job that could save your life done properly, you do it yourself. ‘OK. Let me know if you come up with anything that can be shared.’
‘Will do.’
‘Might do some polishing myself,’ he muttered as he turned away. He probably thought her activity was a coping mechanism, a way of taking her mind off what the Rusties on the other side of the hangar deck were about to do.
Donna put the helmet back on and the data displays swarmed back over her vision. She grinned and eyeballed the
target acquire
icon, then looked at Perry’s receding figure. A pair of cross hairs appeared side by side over his kidneys, then merged into one over the small of his back. She heard the whine of the mini-servos that controlled her suit lasers as they treacherously targeted the vital organs of a superior officer.
Then Perry stepped out of the way, and the lasers were pointing straight at the pinnace.
Gilmore was back on the hangar deck, representing the Co-Seniors of the Commonwealth, just as Rhukaya Bakan was representing the President of the Confederation of South-East Asia and the rest of the observers represented their own leaders. Gilmore hadn’t trusted himself to speak to any of them but he sensed that not all of them shared Bakan’s blood lust. Still, they weren’t going to miss this.
Bakan led the way like a shepherd leading her flock, Sand Strong padding along beside her. She strode confidently over to the chief Rustie engineer, who stood at the airlock to the bomb boat.
‘Do you have it?’ the engineer said.
Bakan delved into her pocket and produced the crystal. ‘Right here.’
And, as promised by Donna, the data had become vulnerable. Device Ultimate was pre-human technology, built on the Roving’s old protocols. Human systems couldn’t interface with it. Instructions had to be downloaded from an old-style data crystal. And there it was.
Gilmore made his move. He lunged forward and grabbed the crystal.
‘Stand back!’ Sand Strong bellowed. Gilmore ignored him, turned to face Bakan. He was taller than her and he did his best to loom.
‘I’m begging you, please, reconsider,’ he said in a low voice. He had rehearsed it; low equals earnest, sincere, desperate.
‘Give that crystal back, Mr Gilmore,’ said Sand Strong. ‘You are seriously out of order.’
Gilmore held the crystal up between thumb and forefinger. ‘What’s on this could murder millions. Billions. You once told me about your brothers – what would they think?’
He hadn’t expected an answer; it was just something he thought someone playing his role should say. But Bakan did answer.
‘One of them had gone over to the rebels; the other had gone across the lines to talk him into coming back,’ she said. ‘One of them died a traitor and the other died for his country. They made their choices, Mr Gilmore. I accepted that long ago. Now, this is my choice.’
Gilmore stared at her. The woman was a . . . a pit, he thought. A pit into which every scrap of remorse, of decent human feeling, had been dropped years ago.
‘You don’t have to provide it, though!’ he said.
‘We’ve already been into the mathematics.’
Where
had that gun come from?
It was small, easily concealable; it fitted neatly into Bakan’s small hand and it was pointed straight at Gilmore. ‘The death of a lot of XCs for the lives of even more humans and First Breed. I could add you to the first half of the equation and it really wouldn’t make much difference. So, hand it over.’
Gilmore stared down the barrel. A dark, cold circle that swelled to fill his vision.
Come on, Donna, come on,
come on . . .
And, finally, he felt the crystal suddenly grow warm between his fingers.
He let his hand drop, put the crystal into Bakan’s outstretched palm. She bowed slightly and handed it to the engineer.
‘Thank you,’ she said. The gun disappeared back into her coat; Gilmore made a note of exactly where, for future reference. The engineer turned and climbed up into the pinnace.
A minute passed. Another minute.
The Rustie engineer climbed slowly down again. ‘The crystal’s corrupted,’ he said, and he glared full at Gilmore as he said it. Gilmore looked blandly back, then remembered that under the circumstances he could hardly be blamed for showing some satisfaction. He gave a broad smile.
‘That’s a shame,’ he said, and he sensed a wave of relief flow around the observers as well. It would take a very lucky guess to work out that the data on the crystal had been scrambled by a low energy laser pulse from Donna McCallum, standing the other side of the hangar deck.
‘Isn’t it,’ Sand Strong said. He gave Gilmore a long, appraising look. ‘How fortunate that March Sage Savour provided us with a copy as well. I’ll go and get it; and you, Mr Gilmore, will remain exactly where you are until I get back.’
‘Bloody hell.’
The Kiwi-accented words murmured in Gilmore’s ear. He had backed away slightly from the group and was standing there with folded arms. Donna had come forward, her helmet tucked under one arm, apparently to watch the proceedings. She was over the halfway line that divided the marines’ half of the hangar deck from the rest, but no-one seemed to care.
‘I know,’ Gilmore muttered.
‘I can’t pull the same trick twice.’
‘You’ve done what you can.’
‘Bill,’ Donna said, more loudly. Perry was standing a short distance away, the proper side of the line. A crowd of marines stood behind him watching in silence. ‘We can stop this,’ Donna said. There was a murmur of assent from the others.
‘It’s not our affair,’ Perry muttered. Like many others, he couldn’t take his eyes off what was happening with the pinnace.
‘Like hell it’s not! You really want to get back home and tell your girlfriend you let a new xenocide happen? Bill, we outnumber them . . .’
‘Lieutenant . . .’
‘And we outgun them.’
‘Quiet!’ Perry snapped. He glanced at the marines around him. Officers shouldn’t argue in public. ‘Don’t make me . . .’
Gilmore shut his ears to their bickering. In his mind’s eye he saw the pinnace coasting through space, a red glow appearing on its silver skin; the glow turning to yellow, to white, and then plasma streaming around it as the fields came on and helped it on its way into the heart of the star.
And then what? His mental gaze drew back a few million miles, a far-off view of the burning ball that gave life to this system. Maybe a slight darkening, a contraction . . . maybe no sign at all. But suddenly, the topmost layer – on the scale of his mind’s eye it would only appear as a thin dusting of gas, but in reality a deadly blast – expanding outwards in all directions. A cocktail of super-searing plasma and hard radiation. The first planet of the system shredded to a burnt cinder in seconds. The occasional XC ship in close orbit; the crew torn apart by the radiation a few seconds before the blast reached them and they disappeared into the infernal glare and heat.
And then the prime target, Homeworld. The atmosphere rippling and streaming away from the planet, like a puddle of water blown away by a jet of warm air. Again, on this scale, quite innocuous; nothing to suggest the mega-hurricanes down below, tearing away the topmost layers of the planet. The cities razed to nothingness, individual XCs smashed against the hurtling debris and then flashed into vapour.
The blast carrying on from Homeworld, the atmosphere perhaps returning, the few dazed survivors picking themselves up from an assault a thousand times worse than the one their forebears had perpetrated. The shockwave carrying on, reaching the Dead World . . .
Which was already dead so it hardly mattered, except for the two lifeforms that might be down there. They would have a fifty-fifty chance, depending on which side of the Dead World they were at the time. A fifty-fifty chance on his son’s life was not acceptable odds.
Gilmore jerked his head up, snapped out of the reverie. Sand Strong was approaching, a crystal held in one of his graspers. An escort of Rusties surrounded him until he reached the engineer, and the engineer held it cupped in both graspers as he climbed up into the pinnace. No, that crystal was safe. They weren’t going to sabotage the plan that way. Only one other way presented itself. If he stopped to think about it, he knew he would consider it madness, so he didn’t. His heart pounded but otherwise he felt strangely calm.
‘Thanks for your help,’ he said. ‘It was really appreciated.’ Then, more loudly so that everyone could hear, ‘No. No, I’m not going to watch this.’
He strode away and didn’t look back.
Last minute nerves?
Donna thought as Gilmore strode away.
I wouldn’t have thought it
. She looked back at Perry. His arms were folded, his face was colder and he seemed to be breathing heavily.
Enjoy your
conscience, Captain
, she thought with disgust.
She turned back to the pinnace. The airlock was sealed, the power leads disconnected. The Rusties and the observers backed away to a safe distance as the engines whined into life. A power trolley rolled up with a Rustie at the controls and hooked onto the pinnace’s front landing wheel, then pushed the little boat backward onto the boat elevator.
This is it, this is
it . . .
Perry’s breaths were getting shorter.
She was still in her armour, the only marine who was. She could pick off the driver of the trolley, she could—
Perry filled his lungs. ‘Marines will stand to!’ he bellowed. A microsecond’s pause, then the marines leapt for their rifles. ‘Sergeant Cale, Able Platoon will form a barrier in front of the pinnace and prevent anyone from getting near. Secure the remote controls and disable them. Lieutenant McCallum, Charlie Platoon will secure the pinnace, board it and deactivate all systems.’
The Rusties and the human observers stood transfixed at the sudden burst of military activity. ‘You can’t—’ Bakan said, before she and the others found themselves surrounded by a wall of armed men and women and herded away from the pinnace.
Perry stood before her, teeth bared and a deadly glint in his eyes. ‘And one more word from
you
and I’ll—’
A crackle of plasma fire behind him and Perry convulsed, then fell into her arms. She staggered under the weight and fell backwards to the deck. Donna had time for one horrified, tragic look at the blackened and smoking pit between his shoulders before Rusties, marines and observers dived for cover as more plasma fire blazed out. And the fight was on.
‘Ready, Lieutenant.’
‘
Good luck, Mr Gilmore
,’ said Nguyen.
Gilmore stood and looked at the outer door of the airlock. He felt his suit tighten around him as the air was pumped out.
In the ship’s present state of emergency, someone using an airlock would immediately set off a variety of attention-seeking alarms on the flight deck . . . unless there was a sympathetically inclined lieutenant there, operating the system for you.
The outer door slid aside and Gilmore stepped out into the rich velvet black of space. Suit thrusters carried him away from the ship and into the dark. Only a light second out from SkySpy, half the distance between Earth and its moon, the Shield was still big: a glowing green ball that dominated the sky. SkySpy itself and its attendant XC vessels couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. In the other direction was just deep, bottomless space.
‘
Mr Gilmore, fighting has broken out on the hangar deck.
Do you want to abort?
’
Fighting? Gilmore didn’t know whether to weep or rejoice.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep going. Thanks.’ Fighting could resolve things . . . but he didn’t yet know in which way.
The thrusters cancelled his outwards movement from the ship and blazed in a different direction. Gilmore moved up the length of
Pathfinder
, past the hideous gash of the wound in the ship’s side and on up to the boat bay. Thrusters slowed him again and he drew level with the wide, rectangular opening in the ship’s side that was the boat entrance. He moved in and waited.
‘Stop this! Hold your fire!’
Sand Strong was hovering on the edge of the field of fire, hopping up and down with agitation, not daring to get any closer to the fighting. The hangar deck was smoky and plasma trails streaked through the air. A handful of Rusties, including the one that had shot Perry, were holding the marines off. Sand Strong was dangerously exposed as he tried to get one side or the other to lay its weapons down. No-one was shooting at him but no-one was paying him any attention either.
The armed Rusties were sheltered behind the pinnace and there was no cover between the marines and them. All both sides could do was exchange pot shots whenever someone showed. The marines were handicapped; the Rusties could shoot wherever they wanted, but the marines had to make damn sure they didn’t hit a vulnerable part of the pinnace. An exploding fuel tank within the confines of the hangar deck wouldn’t serve the interests of either side.