The Hunt for the Halifax Fox, page 22
Rox didn’t believe in miracles, just brains and luck, and their luck was just about out. The ship quaked violently as it coasted in. This time the sudden quiet did nothing to inspire calm or awe. Rox imagined the immense power of the spacetime tunnel bearing down on them, straining to reach the mass at its center.
It was possible that the diaxite boundary would hold the port open. It was about as much of a chance as the Martians had of winning the Inter-World Series, but a chance, nonetheless. Their ship had been damaged by the rail guns and was almost out of ammunition. If they managed to reach Lir, the mad scientists would board them and try to take her and Ashrael by force. She raced through the scenario, planning their defense, visualizing where she’d advise Hachi to position the crew.
Then there came another alert Rox had never heard: a klaxon, warning that Caballus was showing signs of collapse. Rox stared at her readout. They were about to experience every spacefarer’s worst nightmare. They were going to be crushed to death inside a gravity port.
Brains and luck be damned. She begged her kin’s matron saint for a miracle.
The klaxon grew in volume, finally transitioning to the blaring alarm announcing imminent collapse. The numbers and stats in every display spelled out the verdict. There would be no miracle today. Even if they fired the remaining thrusters to max velocity, they were still too far inside to make it out in time. Rox turned off the alarm. They coasted in silence.
Mosi opened a private comm. “Captain? I’m not coming up with a way out of this. If we still had that thruster, we could flip and fire the drive to try and accelerate out, but...” She trailed off. "Why did they do this?"
Rox had never considered that Mar-Sadiqa might be more than just a privileged rich kid with a talent for flying. Yet scared as her young pilot was, she was still showing up, trying to fulfill the dual command of port protocol. “I don't know why,” said Rox. “Just fly steady. You’ve done your job.”
Rox thought about Val, sitting alone in engineering. She’d never asked them much about themself. She’d never taken the time to apologize to Jos, for everything. She flicked open the crew comm. “Halifax crew... I've led you into a lot of trouble over the years. I can't lead you out this time." She cleared her throat and spoke the universal words of a ship’s captain to their doomed crew. “In courage and kinship, we face the end together."
Belatedly she remembered it was supposed to be “as one,” but the crew echoed, "Together." She swallowed and busied herself with her display. She received text from Hachi:
I’m sorry.
She looked over at him, but he had busied himself with his display, too. If anyone on this crew had regrets that equaled her own, it was him. She sent back,
Y’aught sra’inye firgefid.
He smiled sadly. It was another phrase reserved solely for the end of one’s life, a sweeping away of sins in the Callic tradition. He returned,
Y’aught sra’inye firgefid.
Jos believed in redemption, and had believed it possible for her. Would he still feel that way if he knew her whole story? She closed her eyes, focusing on the comfort of darkness behind her eyelids. Y’aught sra’inye firgefid.
One name kept invading her mind. She told her mind to shut up and let her die in peace. Her mind being her mind, of course it didn't.
The name was Isak Varga. She’d never even met the man. She didn’t remember what had been in the crates they’d been trying to deliver to him on Belenus that day, or in any of his deliveries over the years. All of it fed into his murderous project. Five bullet wounds didn’t pay that debt, and neither would this end. The Cangali phrase was a balm for fools. Death was not absolution from sin.
Convergence flowed in like a gentle river, and with it, a part of Ashrael. The two of them, existing in one place, at one time. Together.
Her calm gave way. Survival electrified her every nerve. “Y’one ger rangret,” she whispered. Make it right.
She felt the need to live build in her like a scream, unable to release, and this strangled desire grew in pressure with each inward breath of the strange, charged air. She imagined the diaxite walls bulging inward with a force that yearned to meet itself in the middle. Death wasn’t going to be a calm release. It would be grinding and hard, imbued with the thwarted need to help this one Drifter.
Convergence was growing steadily to a thick, hurricane churn. Rox felt the Drift reaching into her, into them—she and Ash were two interlocking parts of the same machine. Rox felt whole; she felt right. She couldn’t bear it.
She waited for death. Then she realized that death wasn’t happening. Something was happening, though, right behind her on the command deck of the Halifax. Jos yelled. The sound of his voice warped in her ears as he yelled at Ash, telling her to get back to her seat.
Rox turned to see Ashrael in a deep crouch on the deck. She had one mag boot locked to the deck and the other leg tucked under her, with her palms flat against the floor. She looked up and met Rox’s eyes, and the churn inside Drifter and Tachuri condensed into something new. It was the moment at the top of the swing, stomach in throat, weightless.
It was a threshold. Ashrael brought them over.
The command crew fell silent as they watched the same thing Rox was watching. Beneath Ash’s hands, the floor was changing. It was the red-lit decking, but it shivered in and out, seeming to fight for space with something else—a glaring brilliance, the same golden yellow as a diaxite boundary. The inside of a port. The surface Ash touched flicked arrhythmically from one space to another. Decking, port... port decking port... decking. Two points in spacetime, superimposed.
Hallucination, said Rox’s brain.
Nope, replied her eyes. She closed them and shook her head, but when she looked again, the effect continued. Ash’s hands now joined the party, the image of them twitching minutely left, right, left as they appeared in each space.
Her face grew taut, and her teeth bared with effort—and anger. What was she fighting against? Convergence surged. The switch between decking and port surfaces was flashing faster, faster, now so fast it looked like vibration. Rox felt the vibration. The movement of Ash’s hands mirrored that vibration, moving so rapidly they appeared to still. Then, Ash’s entire form fluttered. It blinked out and back so fast it could have been missed, but Rox’s genest eyes never lied. Ashrael had, for the briefest moment, disappeared.
It was known fact that the first Drifters had been genetically coded by the AI beings known as the Scout. They were humanity’s first and only non-human extrasolar visitors, and the only other known sentient life in the universe. They created a handful of people so powerful they could bend spacetime, they called it a gift, and they disappeared. No warranty, no returns. The Drifters’ continued existence was tolerated because even after they created the shakers, the ports needed alterations. They were still too erratic. But people got scared. A Sollan coalition bioengineered genest soldiers, ostensibly to rein the Drifters in. But the Drifters saw this for what it was: enslavement. They turned.
At the end of the Drifter War, the last of the truly powerful Drifters had been put in deep lockdown facilities or escaped the roundup and died out on their own, hiding in the most remote parts of the systems. Some had ended their own lives. Some were stalked and killed in their sleep. They were gone a hundred years ago. Their children and grandchildren could do nothing more than parlor tricks.
A shaker port, moments ago buckling under the force of mind-staggering gravity, held in place halfway to collapse. A Drifter who could vanish from sight.
The collapse countdown hovered at seventeen seconds, as if stuck in time. As the Halifax coasted closer to the end of the port, the Lir System's spot of darkness grew larger in the center of the diaxite boundary's dusky yellow glow.
Caballus Landing. Thick beams of metal bent outward. Calls for help from beneath the wreckage.
“Two incoming,” said Hachi. He used the last of their deck rounds to take out one torpedo, the last rail gun ammunition to destroy the other. The ship shuddered from the close-range explosions, and convergence flared anew as Ash stabilized the port’s damaged boundary wall.
That was wrong. It wasn’t just Ash. It was both of them, together. The port, the Landing... Clearwater. Rox’s breath shuddered through clenched teeth. She forced herself not to fight their convergence.
“Brace for shrapnel,” called Mosi. Tank-sized pieces of the boundary’s damaged pylons had broken free of Ash’s hold. Rox was vaguely aware of a reverberant boom, the crew's shouts as they were thrown against their straps, the scream of rending metal. The Halifax went into a roll. An alarm and the AI both announced an outer hull breach. Distantly, she knew that the Halifax sealed the inner hull. When it came out of its roll and stabilized, her body registered the shift.
Roksani and her captain, raising a glass to her elevation in rank. Jehan with a look of grudging pride in her eyes.
Jehan with fear in her eyes, holding her protege as blood soaked the decking. The planet Belenus receding behind them. Hold on, Dahar. Stay with me. The one time she went back.
Ashrael had used Rox to bring that atrium decking down.
“You son of a bitch.” Hachi’s voice cracked with desperation. The destroyer had fired another torpedo, and the Halifax had nothing left in its arsenal.
Hold on, Dahar.
Her captain, broken and bloody and lifeless.
Hachi yelled, “Mosi, it's targeting Main Three at forty-five lateral, coming in at—”
“I see it,” Mar-Sadiqa shouted back. Val began to pray.
Abruptly, convergence lifted. The imminent destabilization and torpedo proximity alarms flashed, and the countdown to collapse resumed. Sixteen. Fifteen. In the live display, the port's golden walls closed in rapidly, shrinking the dark shape that was their escape. Rox heard Mar-Sadiqa yelling at the Halifax to adjust for post-impact stabilization, then felt the movement of the ship as it obliged. The piloting AI would maneuver again the moment before the strike. “Prepare for hard decel and maneuver,” Mosi yelled. The ship delivered a warning to each station, and Rox’s seat tilted in preparation, so her back would take the full press of braking g’s as they rolled.
The swift motion, and the collapse-distance-velocity math in her display stating that they were going to make it out, snapped Rox out of her haze. "Halifax, record an emergency broadcast."
"Recording."
"Mayday, mayday. This is the Halifax out of the United Provinces of the Americas, exiting the Caballus Port with an armed and hostile ship on our back and no defense. Requesting rescue and medical assistance. End recording. Halifax, send it as a general broadcast the moment you can get it through into Lir space.”
Mosi yelled at Ash to get in her seat. The Drifter crouched on the deck, distortion still rippling over her. She lifted her hands from the floor. They curled into fists. Her face was filled with pain, and poison. Ashrael Eli knew exactly what she was doing.
Eight. Seven. Six. Still kneeling, Ash reached out for her station. Someone shouted. Rox lost sight of Ash when she got slammed back—the AI had fired the drive in a hard brake—then was thrown against her harness as the ship maneuvered to minimize the impending torpedo hit. Time slowed to a crawl as events ran together. The lights went out, plunging the command deck into darkness. The crew’s muffled panic gave way to the loud, violent shaking of the port’s Lirish doorstep. The crushing g-force of deceleration was suddenly gone, and instead of struggling for breath, Rox was now holding back vomit from the abrupt velocity change.
She didn’t know why it was dark, nor did she know why the drive had quit. But she knew they were free of the shaker, unlike Varga’s people, still too far in for the math to be on their side. Rox finished the port collapse countdown in her head, ticking off the final moments of life for Eidalen Bauer, the ship’s captain, an entire crew.
Three, two, one, gone.
Rox thought, Some parlor trick, and the dead ship’s torpedo hit the Halifax.
14
the rime of the trav’ler
in space adrift
The Offlands Syndicate had the Cavaticus surrounded. The two ships lateral were larger than the Raq vessel, a corvette build typical of the dockyards of Saturn, builders known in the two foreign systems for their fast, deadly, expensive ships. The Jeffries Salintas, cruiser class, even larger and carrying stronger weapons, had taken up the aft position, looming from behind in a threat display.
The squadron captain aboard the Jeffries Salintas sounded bored. “We’re going to give you the benefit of the doubt. Let's assume your attempt to extract information from our ship was a glitch in your AI. Tell us who you are and why you’ve intercepted us, and we can end this without killing you.”
“Captain,” said the Runner, “the squadron has primed another two missiles and the corvettes have again adjusted course to close in.” Basrehi nodded acknowledgement of the report. The enemy had repeated the tactic it appeared to favor, prepping torpedoes with a delay in loosing them, presumably so the Raq captain could clearly see the threat. The squadron captain had so far allowed the corvettes to carry out the attack. “Warning shots,” he’d called them.
The Cavaticus could have swatted the enemy torpedoes away like sluggish flies on a hot day. It would have liked to, but Basrehi had instructed the ship and gunner to defend with minimal firepower and their most basic ammunition. He'd even allowed several torpedoes to slip past missile-to-missile range and come close enough to be destroyed with deck guns. Until now, the Runner had not understood why most of its own weaponry lay hidden beneath its outer hull, and why its surface guns were so very outdated. According to local databases the Homelanders had a phrase that fit the Raq captain’s tactic.
When the Cavaticus pulled out the big guns, this mafia trio wouldn’t know what hit it.
The Runner continued to pore over its stream of new information about Lir and Sol, details that hadn’t been available in its accessible Azraq databases. It prioritized and filed the data like Earth’s ancient winnowing of grain. It spent eternities inside of nanoseconds at the enjoyable task of choosing what it liked from a vast multitude of new terms and phrases in the foreign systems’ thousand-plus different languages and dialects, such as swatting away flies, and pulling out the big guns. Sifting these bits like wheat from the chaff, it stored them away in itself to rebuild the mind it had lost. There was an archaic Sollan joke latent in the idea of having lost its mind, which the Runner stored in a non-priority back file.
The corvettes sent out their two torpedoes, and this time the lead ship at their aft primed and loosed two of its own. The Runner gave the captain and gunner the specs on the cruiser’s bigger, faster torpedoes, clarifying for them that “bigger” and “faster” were only relative terms.
As it waited for the humans’ slow brain function to process what it had told them, the Runner considered its situation. It had enough knowledge to be a functioning Watch. What it needed were the things that form a personality. New experiences, likes and dislikes. Language peculiarities were fun, and it suspected human jokes would be too if it could feel the kind of amusement humans enjoyed. This was a source of disappointment. Some human-Watch collaborations involved an integration of organic and Watch neural networks that allowed the collaborators to share each other’s distinct experiences. What was it like to partner in this way? How would it feel to return to solitude when the organic life form died, or the symbiotic relationship otherwise came to an end? How did intimate collaborators find and choose each other?
The Runner would not choose anyone in this crew. With them, it reluctantly shared the most basic of brain interface for faster communication. It wondered if the discomfort it felt was loneliness. There was no way to know. These humans couldn’t understand or explain the Watch experience, even if it wanted to ask. It had asked such questions before, which was how the Runner learned it didn’t like being laughed at. It lacked contact with a more experienced Watch to help it learn. From its accessible knowledge and its experience with homo sapiens, it knew more about sentient organic life than it knew about its own species.
“Cavaticus, have we extracted the information we need from their AI?”
The Jeffries Salintas AI had, in fact, just been allowed to perform a scan of what lay beneath the Cavaticus’s facade. Now, in a private transmission stream, it said,
“Yes, Captain,” said the Runner. “Varga’s squadron also knows that the asset’s ship exited the port. But the squadron is still five days’ travel behind us, even at their top sustainable velocity. The Jeffries Salintas AI doesn’t know if Varga himself is traveling with his squadron.”
“First we retrieve the asset and the captive, then we deal with Varga,” said the gunner, Esthev.
The captain gave a nod. “His ships will come right to us. The situation with the port may be unexpected, but it has saved us some trouble. But Esthev, we’ve been rude. Shall we introduce ourselves to this little mafia?”
Esthev narrowed her eyes, smiling. “Let’s...”
While the Runner waited for Esthev to finish voicing her thought, it adjusted the temperature on the command deck to cool the sweating captain, and sent out another broadcast to any nearby Watch, again receiving no answer. It learned the history of the planning and building of Brigid’s Earthlike recreated ecosystems. It wondered what those ecosystems might look like to its own visual sensors. It was disappointed that they wouldn’t get to orbit the planet.
“...show...” continued Esthev.
The Runner devised another method for how a ship could rid itself of its captain and crew. Hypothetical, of course. This led it to contemplate the quandary of not having access to its own species’ moral code in the context of potentially unethical decisions like killing people. This thread of thought inspired the Runner to add another verse to the ballad it was creating.
