Blackbeard Superbox, page 116
Commander Li had made the same comment in reverse, although the Singaporeans’ interest in the range of hair colors among the Albion crew was dwarfed by their fascination with the Hroom. The tall, long-limbed aliens were as exotic to the Singaporeans as animals at a zoo, something Drake found amusing. He’d been around Hroom all his life.
“This is your code, isn’t it?” Drake asked after Koh had studied the console for a few minutes.
“I won’t deny it.”
“Who put you up to this?”
“Nobody.”
Drake fixed her with a hard gaze, but didn’t speak. Most people wilted under that stare, unable to leave the space silent, but Koh didn’t respond. After a moment, she looked down at the console.
“You know it was wrong,” he pressed. “That’s why you kept your work hidden.”
“Not at all. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have gone back in to fiddle with it. That’s what tipped you off, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean, fiddle?”
“I noticed a flaw in my code and fixed it. I saved an instruction by making this function recursive. It doesn’t look like much, but that line executes about fifteen hundred times a second. I sped the whole thing up with that one tweak.”
“Koh, I’m losing my patience. You’d better explain what this is about.”
“It’s exactly what it looks like. I’m not trying to hide anything.”
“You inserted code into the defense grid computer. I don’t care how many bloody times it executes, I care what it’s doing. Ellison tells me you were siphoning off hundreds of gigabytes of data.”
“Like I said, I wasn’t trying to hide anything. If I had been, you’d have never known.”
“If you’re not hiding anything, then why won’t you tell me exactly what you’re up to? Why did you hack into a secure system? Why do you need all that data?”
“First of all, it’s not remotely secure,” Koh said. “You may think it is, but it’s not. Smythe interfaced with the sentinel computers and gave me all the protocols necessary to get into Blackbeard’s defense grid computer. Once I knew that, it didn’t take much guesswork to bluff my way past Dreadnought’s security. It operates on the same principles. No need to ask permission.”
“You didn’t ask anyone, you ‘bluffed’ your way in.” Drake nodded. “Right.”
“Anyway,” Koh said in a false-patient voice, as if explaining something to a small child, “I’m obviously collecting data so I can find out exactly how your systems work. You’ve got a lot of moving parts, and I want to know how they interact. How do the batteries work together, how do you keep from knocking down your own ordnance with countermeasures? How do the Youd mines work? Why don’t they target your own ships? That sort of thing.”
“Why not ask?”
“I did! Manx told me it was none of my business.”
“He did have instructions to keep you out of the system,” Drake said, thinking. “Perhaps he was overzealous in obeying my orders.”
“He wouldn’t tell me anything. Why not?”
“Because you’re not a navy officer. You’re an observer, brought along as a courtesy to Commander Li.”
“Who has promised to show you all of our weapon systems, right down to the eliminon battery. Why does the sharing go in only one direction?”
Because one of us still has a fleet. One of us still has a home world. And one of us does not.
Drake didn’t say this aloud. For one, it was cruel to remind her that Apex was devouring the survivors on her planet. He’d nearly lost his own home world of Albion to a Hroom death fleet trying to irradiate the planet as a sacrifice to their god of death, and the horror of such a fate was still fresh on his mind. It gave him sympathy for her loss.
For another, Drake’s fleet was ostensibly on a mission to destroy the Apex harvester ship and any other forces in orbit around Singapore. Once he’d freed Singapore, the two nations would theoretically be on equal footing. The reality, of course, was that the remnant population on the planet would be no assistance whatsoever in the war. Singapore’s cities lay in ruins, the survivors reduced to subsistence levels, hiding in forests, deserts, and mountains as the buzzards hunted them to extinction.
Any value Singapore had was in Sentinel 3’s weapon systems and those of whatever other battle stations might still be hidden in the sector. Drake intended to take command of them, just as he hoped to direct any surviving Hroom fleets. Only Albion had the strength to take the fight to Apex, and if the others wanted to survive, they must join forces with the Royal Navy.
And that meant join in a subservient position. There could only be one commanding officer. It couldn’t be General Mose Dryz, and it couldn’t be Commander Li. That left Admiral Drake. That was reality, not arrogance on Drake’s part.
“I don’t think you’re working for the enemy,” he began at last.
“Absolutely not.”
“But I can’t have you larding up our network with extraneous code, either.”
Irritation roughened the edges of Koh’s voice. “Now you’re attacking my technical skills. The code is lean, and once I fix this function—”
“No. You won’t fix it. Ellison is going to lock you out and reduce your clearance.”
“What?” Koh rose in a huff.
“That is not a challenge, either. If I catch you trying to hack your way in again, I’ll have you thrown in the brig.” Drake waited for her sputtered protests to die out. “But I’ll instruct Ellison to answer your questions. You can’t dig into the code or mess around in the network, but you can see any high-level technical specifications that you’d like.”
“Hmm.” Koh settled back into her chair. “You could use my skills, you know.”
“I’m sure I could. Will you take a loyalty oath?”
“What’s that? Salute your lion flag and pledge fealty to King What’s-his-name?”
“Something along those lines, yes.”
She shook her head. “No. My loyalty is to my people, to the Singapore Imperium, and that will never change.”
“Then you’ll have to be satisfied with what I give you. For now. Later, maybe we’ll talk.” Drake stood, indicating that the meeting was over. “I’m giving you a second chance, Koh. But I’m warning you, don’t pull another stunt like this.”
#
The fleet picked its way carefully through the Dragon Quadrant for the next ten days, jumping three times on its way toward Singapore. They dropped probes, left a few Youd mines around jump points, and carefully scanned each system as they entered before barreling ahead.
Drake’s goal was to reach Singapore undamaged and undetected. He wanted one fight, and one fight only. Break the siege if he could, but if not, battle just hard enough to show Commander Li that he was serious. Then return to the sentinel base and get his hands on Li’s weapons systems.
By then, he expected to be reunited with Tolvern and Mose Dryz. From there, an aggressive charge at Apex at the head of a massive fleet that would hunt down the enemy and force a decisive naval battle.
All was quiet until they jumped into what the charts called the Padang System. It was crowded with hundreds of ships, and it looked like Drake’s fleet had stumbled into a killing field. Only gradually did the truth come out.
It was a killing field, but not a recent one. The ships were derelicts, gutted and wrecked, flotsam. There were passenger ships, Singaporean war junks, cargo vessels, and destroyed Apex warships. The biggest clusters of wreckage hung around the jump points, but there was also a broad belt in an elliptical orbit that ran from the gas giants to the innermost world of the system.
“Someone had better clean this up,” Drake noted as scans continued to add to the number of known wrecks, “or a star leviathan will discover this banquet and make the system impassable for a hundred years.”
Or maybe longer. A star leviathan would gobble up this debris, feeding on unexploded ordnance and fissile material, then, when sated, lay eggs. The hatchlings would menace the system for generations before they were ready to venture into the deep void.
“On the other hand,” Manx said, “it should be easy enough to pick our way through this mess without being spotted. There’s plenty of cover.”
That was true, and Drake also took the opportunity to harpoon a wrecked war junk and haul it in. Koh protested, saying he had no right to strip Singaporean technology without permission, but he ignored her. The war junk had a curving hull, with wing-like protrusions that provided thrust and maneuverability, and even as a wreck it was graceful in appearance, a thing of beauty. Drake was sorry to order the ship dismembered and hauled into Dreadnought for closer inspection.
Later the next day, Koh joined the admiral in Dreadnought’s massive engineering bay, where they went over the pieces. She’d dropped her objections, and showed him the engines and weapon systems, explaining how they worked. The result was disappointing. There was an interesting tyrillium compound in the ship’s armor that he ordered sent to the lab, but no plasma ejector or eliminon battery. Only standard lasers, missiles, and the like.
“This ship is from the first war,” Koh explained as she ran her hand over the pitted hull of the war junk, now being cut into pieces by grunting, sweating navy boatswains swarming over her surface like ants dismembering a dead lizard. “We hadn’t developed our big weapons yet.”
Not that those big weapons had stopped Apex in the end. Singapore had driven off the enemy, remained on full war footing for years while the economy threw every possible resource at building a new fleet and the sentinel battle stations, and yet the human civilization had been completely overthrown.
But the Imperium had put up a good fight. Tech Officer Lloyd identified the wreckage of fourteen war junks among the derelicts, plus numerous military support craft. And that was just the evidence of fighting in this system alone, and those ships that hadn’t fallen into the sun or been atomized in a fiery explosion.
When he was alone in his quarters, Drake worried.
The more he learned about Singapore, the greater his estimation of their abilities. He’d initially assumed them small in numbers, like the New Dutch, or scattered into various colonies, like the Ladinos. That was the impression given by the battered refugee fleet. Instead, he’d discovered the remnants of a unified nation that had marshaled its people, resources, and technological know-how.
And still fallen. Was this to be Albion’s fate, too?
The warships were only one part of the debris in the Padang System. Most of the other wreckage apparently belonged to the hundreds of thousands of Singaporeans fleeing the planet. From the look of it, most of them had failed to escape.
Drake’s forces traversed half of the Padang System before the action found them. A refugee fleet had apparently been picking its way slowly across the system, drifting along with the wreckage as they eased closer to the jump point. Drake was going in the opposite direction, fully cloaked and quiet, and might have stumbled right past them without either side seeing the other.
But someone had been stalking the refugees, and now appeared. Back on the bridge, Drake stared at the viewscreen as the data came in. Four hunter-killer packs, with a full allotment of spears and lances. They slipped in and out among the refugee fleet, picking casually, destroying some and boarding others.
“Fifteen hours until we cross paths,” Manx said. “The good news is that they haven’t spotted us yet, the bad news is that there’s no way to avoid them. We either move away from the orbiting debris and into the open or we stumble right through the fight.”
“Maybe it will be over by then,” Ellison said. Her words were hopeful, her tone less so.
“Maybe,” Drake said. “But the buzzards look like they’re playing around. They’re in no rush.”
Ellison glanced at Koh, who stood next to her at the communications station. “Then I assume we’ll intervene?”
“Stay on task, Ensign,” Drake told her.
“Yes, sir.” She busied herself with something.
As a communications officer, Ellison had had little to do while they were traveling in silence. Not only had she been unable to send subspace messages back to fleet headquarters or to either Tolvern or Mose Dryz, but Drake had choked off communication to the other ships in the fleet. The three other cruisers—Zealand, Formidable, and Repulse—stayed within a few dozen kilometers, and they often communicated via light signaling, a technology so old that it had been used by the ancient Greeks.
As a result, Ellison had formed a friendship of sorts with Hillary Koh, who was teaching her how to interface with Singaporean vessels. Together with Tech Officers Throckmorton (“Throck”) and Lloyd, they were programming a translator that would allow English speakers to speak Chinese, just like the Singaporeans had done in reverse. One small problem: navy crew would need a brain chip implant to interface with the communicator. So it was all hypothetical at the moment.
Drake consulted with Lieutenant Manx. “I’m inclined to make a fight of it. Woodbury is itching to give his crew some experience. Repulse has never seen battle, and his crew is green. Captain Caites would be keen as well—she’s always up for a fight.”
“I’m all for attacking,” Manx said. “We’ve been out here too long without a scrape. And I’m sure we can take them.”
Manx was old Blackbeard crew, all the way back to when Drake’s former ship was still known as Ajax. And if there was one thing the Blackbeard crew was known for, it was charging into the action.
“But is this the battle we’re looking for?” Drake said. “I love a lopsided fight—assuming we’re not the ones getting lopped—but I need to make a demonstration for Commander Li. Is this big enough?”
“We don’t know how big it is, sir. Not until it’s over. Are we sure these are the only ships in the system?”
“I’ve thought of that. These buzzards are in no hurry. They seem to have been waiting around for easy prey, and found it. Could be two or three other enemy forces in the system, staying hidden until they’re needed. But Manx, we’ve got a fleet. Half the firepower of the Royal Navy is right here. We didn’t come all this way to scout and reconnoiter, we came out to deliver pain to the enemy. And if my fleet isn’t big enough to do it, nothing is.”
Drake looked up as Hillary Koh made her way over. She was scowling. Naturally.
“Admiral Drake,” she began, her tone peevish.
“Now listen to me,” he interrupted. “Before you object and say I don’t care about your people, why don’t you wait to see what my decision is?”
Her response wasn’t what he’d been expecting. “You can’t attack.”
Drake blinked. “What?”
“I know, I feel the same way. There must be ten or fifteen thousand people crammed into those ships. Singaporeans. My people. It makes me sick to think of what they’re going through right now. They’re terrified, and they’re going to die. Some of them will be eaten alive.”
“And you don’t want me to rescue them?”
“You can’t fight this battle, Admiral. Not here, not now. We mix it up in Padang, we’ll give away our location. The harvester ship at Singapore will be expecting our arrival. You’ll risk the whole attack.”
“By ‘the whole attack,’ you mean going through to your home system and assaulting the harvester ship in orbit around Singapore?”
“Exactly. You have to rescue the planet.”
“That’s a fight I’m not ready to have.”
Koh looked back and forth between the two men, her eyes bugging, a flush coming over her face like a fast-arriving fever. “But you promised Commander Li!”
“I didn’t give a timetable, Koh,” Drake said.
“So you’re going to dither around here while my people are slaughtered?”
“I’m not going to dither, I’m going to fight the enemy. I’m going to weaken his defenses of the approaches to your home world so that when we come through with our entire force, there will be nothing to oppose us.” Drake shook his head. “But we won’t be attacking the buzzards at Singapore until the general returns with his thirty sloops.”
“And HMS Blackbeard,” Manx put in. “And Peerless arrives with her task force.”
“Absolutely right,” Drake said. “I need all available forces.”
“That could be weeks! Millions will die before you liberate the planet.”
“Most likely. But if I move too soon, it will never be liberated. They’ll all die.” Drake gestured at the viewscreen, which showed two lances harpooning another refugee ship. “Meanwhile, there are thousands of people right here whose lives we can save.”
Koh stared up at the viewscreen, her expression troubled. She didn’t speak.
“Then you’re decided?” Manx asked.
Drake nodded. “Warn the gunnery, signal our forces. We are going into battle.”
Chapter Fifteen
Tolvern and Capp put on goggles and acoustic earmuffs before entering the foundry. Green fire blasted from nozzles at a square of tyrillium armor being held in an oversize vise. It turned black as it absorbed the heat and hardened. Two men in heat suits dragged another plate of smoking armor on chains in front of water jets. The spray vaporized as it hit.
The heat and humidity was suffocating, and acrid smoke bit the back of Tolvern’s throat. The light was so intense on one side of the room that it was like staring into a small green sun. A man with a forklift hauled in more damaged tyrillium plates to be treated with reagent and remolded. A woman, her face black with soot, gestured angrily for him to move out of the way so another forklift could get by with a load of finished armor.
So many people working all at once, but it wasn’t a very sophisticated operation, not compared to a navy shipyard. This was all cobbled together parts, the plasma nozzles obviously taken from a ship’s engine and not engineered specifically for tyrillium hardening. Five men were wrestling another piece of armor from a mold, a job that should have been done by crane.
