Weaponized, page 38
‘Near-c fucking railgun slug,’ said Manseur.
‘Sure was,’ Ursula replied. She tried to pluck up some enthusiasm. ‘Generator ejection worked . . . are we calling them generators or projectors now?’
‘Oh I think it’s up to us to choose,’ said Manseur. ‘They generate and project hardfields. Pretty fireworks.’
Behind the target spread tails of fire from disintegrating hardfield projectors. Ursula noted some fires actually in the target – the ejection routine had not been a complete success.
‘We’re loading the second slug now,’ said Manseur. ‘Should be a few minutes. Try not to get too bored.’
Ursula noted an edge to Manseur’s tone that she’d heard before. She shook her head and dismissed it – it seemed like dangerous territory to think about why. She knew she wasn’t allowing herself to think of something. Concentrating on her instruments, she went through the so-called ‘attack plan’. Everything was nailed down in tactical integration but she felt sure she could see some leeway, ways to get creative.
‘The second shot will be at full power,’ said the voice she was still sure was that of an AI. ‘This shot will be near-c. The previous one was not, despite what some have been saying.’
‘And fuck you too,’ Manseur muttered over com.
‘Second test firing in twenty seconds.’
The count actually started at ten and Ursula braced herself for the dropbird to detach. The Bragnorak did its stretching act again, then fired. The flash of impact was almost instantaneous and the blackout lasted longer than a second. When exterior view returned, she saw the target in 3D puzzle pieces tumbling down into atmosphere, and a flame of plasma reaching right down from the point of impact to the surface of the planet, where a cloud of fire rose up.
Spectacular, she thought, but with not much feeling.
She looked at the Bragnorak and only now saw that the rear cob had disappeared, a plasma trail marking its destruction far out into space.
‘Manseur?’ she enquired, but got no reply. A second later a crump issued from above and her dropbird detached. She felt a momentary surge of outrage and anger. It wouldn’t surprise her at all if these games, all this make-work, all this pointless weapons development and testing had got her friend killed. But as she engaged fusion and hurtled towards the planet, the anger slid away, like a fire sputtering out from lack of fuel.
The dropbird hit atmosphere with an audible thump, its wings beginning to radiate. Ursula shut down the fusion engine and went over to thrusters and ailerons. She targeted one regularly shaped chunk of debris and fired a missile. The thing streaked in and blew the piece to smithereens, even as she targeted the next. Rote work: target and fire, target and fire, down and down deeper into atmosphere. Then on to use the particle cannon. This time she pursued one chunk, lining up the weapon by flight. The beam lanced out and hit the thing, splashed and burned, the chunk flying apart in a molten spray as the beam passed through it. Boring. She mapped and tracked, chose a deflection surface on one chunk, and fired a missile with a delay on impact detonation, then fired another shortly afterwards. The first missile bounced off the chunk, sending it on a new course to impact with another. Her second missile hit both and blew them apart, while the first continued on its new course to another. She watched it, seeing another dropbird tumbling on full thruster burn to get out of the way.
‘Oops,’ she said, as the missile hit home on its target.
‘What the fuck are you playing at, Treloon?’ said Macannan over com.
‘Saving ammo, sir!’ she replied.
‘We need to talk. Return to dropship. Now.’
‘Certainly, sir.’
She switched over to multiple targeting – an available option they’d been told not to use without command approval. The course of the debris integrated in her mind as she mapped and tracked again. Some birds would have to move out of the way sharpish, but she had every confidence in her fellow marines. She fired.
All her remaining missiles streaked out. She saw bird thrusters firing as the others got clear, as she’d predicted. One clipped a smaller piece of debris and went out of control. She saw the pilot eject in the cockpit bubble just before the bird broke up. Well, they were playing war games, weren’t they supposed to be dangerous? Her missiles closed on their targets and one after another took them out . . . except for one. The missile bounced away and exploded too far from it to harm it. She felt that sick surge of rage again and had hit fusion again before it waned. Should she bother? The debris was heading towards the bottom-out level below, which they weren’t supposed to stray into. Fuck it.
She hurtled down, pursuing the chunk. She had no more missiles now, so she needed to line up the particle cannon. Low winds and greater atmospheric density were jolting the bird about, making targeting difficult. The ground loomed, the immensity of the strip mines now visible to her. There, she had the fucker.
She fired the particle beam, flaring and blurring in the dense atmosphere. It hit home but wasn’t as effective at this low elevation. She had to keep it on target longer. Another hit. Hold on target. Molten materials spewed past her. She realized at the last moment that she really should have cut fusion at this point. The debris exploded into molten threads and her bird went straight into them. Red lights everywhere and seat clamps closing on her body. Explosive acceleration hit and she glimpsed her bird falling apart just seconds before losing consciousness.
Consciousness came back again. No way to measure the time. The ground streaked along below, then the chain-glass and armour-braced bubble that was wrapped around her hit it, in the first of a long series of bounces. She screamed, not sure if in fear or hilarity, as she blacked out again.
Ursula remembered the madness of her final year in the military, the intervening time of ennui between then and now, the reestablished search for purpose, and finding it. Now she was deep into the nuts and bolts of bringing that purpose to life.
The shuttle sat up in orbit, with crews working to make changes to her specifications before being transported to the Line world of Kalonan, while Ursula occasionally gazed at the large hole in her finances. It got bigger every time she found other gaps in her planning and ordered further equipment. Most of her purchases were on auction sites where she could pick up stuff from colonization projects that had not quite made it. Her list of colonists was also fining down. Further equations she’d requested from Cantho, upon finding out that even the much-reduced list was . . . difficult, were doing their work weeding out thousands more people. She was even building up a list of those she did want and had sent out some tentative queries. Month upon month slid by as she got into Polity survey reports on extremophile worlds. Pursuant to those, she put in some research on the various forms of adaptation. She’d begun making enquiries about this too, to various experts across the Polity, when she received a reply from the military asteroid. It had just been an idly sent message of some months past, while she made her preparations.
‘Hello, Ursula Ossect Treloon,’ said the disembodied head that had appeared in her control hologram. ‘Long time no speak.’
‘Hello, Manseur. I’m surprised to see you there.’
‘Life moves on and we move on, and it would be Major Manseur now,’ the black-haired woman replied.
Having been a runcible technician before joining the military, Manseur had been pushed by her commanders into military logistics using runcible transport. She’d been reluctant to do this initially because she’d gone into ennui while a technician and, apparently, done something very dangerous with the technology. Part of the reason for their friendship was that Manseur had recognized the signs of ennui in Ursula and decided to take her under her wing. Manseur never spoke about what she’d done, beyond saying, ‘You should never piss about with that tech. Spacetime can sometimes be fragile.’
‘You’re testing weapons out there,’ Ursula had stated.
‘We are and apparently you want to come and take a look.’
Ursula had shrugged. ‘I bought the shuttle you were going to use as a target and wonder why such a test required sensor heads that can detect U-space stuff.’
‘Then come and take a look. The Port Ensolon runcible AI has been notified and will send you directly here.’
‘As easy as that?’
‘Seems the AIs want you to see. I heard about Macannan calling you in and I reckon they still want to recruit you.’
‘Okay,’ Ursula had said.
Now she was standing in the containment sphere of the Ensolon runcible. The thing was an old design, with what looked like giant bull’s horns standing on a black glass dais. Between them stretched the shimmer of the meniscus – the ‘spoon’ as it was called in the parlance of runcible technicians, since the whole nomenclature of runcible technology had been based on the ‘Owl and the Pussycat’ poem by Edward Lear. No one quite knew why that was, beyond the fact that the inventor of the technology – Iversus Skaidon – had been hard-linked to the Craystein computer, with his mind dissolving as he invented it.
Over to one side, a man touched his aug briefly and stepped up onto the dais, walked to the meniscus and disappeared through it. In personal time, he would arrive at his destination just a moment later, be that light-years away at one of the other planetary runcibles, or even the military asteroid. She looked down at the screen on her wristcom, not bothering to raise a control hologram. Ten names were on the list before her and, while she watched, they stepped one after another through the runcible. Her turn came as she moved onto the dais with her name blinking red. She stepped through and out into a similar chamber below a transparent dome. Grav was the same on the dais but, as she walked forwards, it gradually dropped to about half. Technicians in familiar blue overalls were working here, with floor plates up and optics strewn about. She felt a shiver run down her back and, glancing round, saw that the meniscus had disappeared.
‘Safety protocol,’ said Manseur, walking towards her.
Ursula studied the woman. She wore twinned augs now. Her overall was two-tone: runcible-technician blue along with the khaki favoured by the military for centuries. Around her waist she wore a tool belt hung with all sorts of devices and carried a shoulder bag that seemed stuffed too.
‘Really?’ Ursula enquired.
‘Come with me.’ Manseur gestured and set off smartly towards a far door.
Ursula fell in beside her and soon they were negotiating the corridors of the base, which sprawled over the asteroid like a fungus. It was busy, technicians and military personnel walking as fast as Manseur, obviously deep in augcom or otherwise checking tablets as they walked. She and Manseur took a dropshaft and, by the duration of travel in it, Ursula suspected they’d gone right through the asteroid and out the other side. Finally, they walked into a bubble structure up on the surface, windows all around with views across the regolith.
‘Take a seat.’ Manseur directed her to one of a row of acceleration chairs. Even as she sat, and wondered if she needed to put across the straps, others came in and took seats. They weren’t talking much, just the occasional muttered comments about technicalities that flew straight over Ursula’s head, and seemed very worried and serious.
‘The one-shot is three-point-five,’ said someone.
‘Galactic upside on that transverse vector, so add another two,’ said another.
‘Bastard working those vectors,’ said yet another.
‘If you want out of this, speak now,’ Manseur announced, walking in front of them. ‘You know the risks – if we’re just one point out on those calculations, we get a photonic spray.’ She shrugged. ‘We’re not out on them, I’m sure.’
Ursula felt the urge to raise her hand and point out that she wasn’t aware of the risks and had no idea what the hell was going on, but a moment later the bubble structure detached from the asteroid with a jerk and, under a surge of grav, shot out into vacuum. She suspected it was now too late to voice her concerns.
They fled out and out and soon two objects came into sight. One of these was an asteroid with some kind of netlike structure spread over its surface. The other was just a series of rings held in a framework. She peered at this, trying to figure out what else she was seeing there, then got it: each of those rings had a meniscus across it – they were runcible portals. Manseur took the seat beside her and strapped in. Others were putting their straps across, so Ursula did the same.
‘Perhaps some explanation?’ she muttered to Manseur.
The woman pointed at the asteroid. ‘We were going to use that old shuttle since it would have given us better impact telemetry and told us whether or not grav-motors might interfere. Fuck knows why ECS decided to drop their bid on it and let you buy the damned thing.’ Manseur shrugged. ‘We’ve rigged the asteroid with grav-engines and sensors instead – should be interesting.’
‘Still not understanding,’ Ursula pointed out.
Manseur said, ‘Begin count,’ her voice issuing through the PA here and doubtless back at the asteroid base.
‘Two minutes,’ said another voice.
‘All runcibles in the Polity network are buffered,’ Manseur explained. ‘They’re mostly sited on planets and large objects so there is some method of draining off excess energy – local power grids, heat sinks in the sea, giant laminar storage and so forth. They also need a stable platform and a relatively predictable location, else the maths gets complicated quickly. Do you know why?’
‘One minute fifty seconds,’ said the voice.
‘Of course: relative velocities. A man stepping into a runcible is still travelling at the speed of the planetary surface he’s on. He could arrive at his location travelling at thousands of miles an hour.’
‘His vector too. He could be travelling at thousands of miles an hour in any direction. And it’s not just the planetary surface, because everything is on the move. But these are all minor.’
Ursula nodded, now getting an intimation of what the others here had been talking about. ‘Minor?’
Manseur continued, ‘The buffers take out that energy and deposit our traveller so he’s stationary relative to his new location. Without them you get a right mess.’
‘One minute thirty seconds,’ said the voice.
‘Splat,’ said Ursula.
Manseur shook her head. ‘No, not splat, because there’s also the energy of transit. That man has, relative to realspace, been travelling faster than light. If he comes through unbuffered, Einsteinian physics applies its laws. He will come through just below the speed of light as photonic matter.’
Ursula gaped at her. She didn’t know this and wondered why. Surely this little gem should have been known about all across the Polity?
‘One minute twenty seconds.’
Seeing her expression, Manseur nodded and said, ‘That’s not information that’s generally shared. The few runcible disasters that have occurred are always put down to buffer failure – stored energy getting released in one hit – or alternatively, the action of “Separatists”.’ Manseur looked sour when she said that.
‘One minute ten seconds.’
‘You’ve made a runcible weapon,’ said Ursula.
Manseur nodded. ‘You would think what we call photonic matter would be very effective, yes?’
‘Of course yes.’
‘Sixty, fifty-nine, fifty-eight . . .’
‘It’s no more effective than the particle beams we’re still developing.’
‘Really?’
Still developing?
Ursula had her experience with such weapons. Even though the range had increased, they were still only effective over a few tens of miles in atmosphere and, despite the coherence tweaks, still tended to self-disrupt in vacuum. Supposing the weapon even survived one or two firings.
‘The key to an effective runcible weapon is to actually shoot a projectile out of the gate at a speed low enough for its atomic structure to remain intact. This is not easy.’
Ursula sat back and watched now. Others all around were also falling silent as the count went down and down.
‘Ten, nine, eight, seven . . .’
When the count zeroed, she caught a brief bright light before the glass of the vehicle turned completely black. She half expected some blast wave to hammer into them, but none was evident. Slowly the glass lightened again to show them the scene ahead. The asteroid was gone, but from where it had been, swirling plasma stretched in a line far off in vacuum to a vanishing point.
‘Damn,’ said Manseur.
‘What?’
‘The weapon.’
Ursula looked to where the weapon had been but there was no sign of it.
‘That recoil is a bitch,’ said Manseur.
18
Present
Ursula ran fast through the tunnels, soon coming to a pipe that led to the surface. The cacoraptor she now controlled landed with a thump behind her and stood upright as she ran on. Over cacocom, she shunted instructions and heard its knees crack as they inverted. And did she imagine the almost hydraulic sound of its bones transforming to different lengths? Sometimes, with the wide spread of her senses and the vast input from them, she found it difficult to know where data arose. Other transformations ensued in its body, as it used formats she transmitted to give itself a more human form. Or, at least one that matched the colonists.
She kept running, rounding a corner as she followed the map in her mind. Her tactical integration and planning ramped up, but she also allowed one portion of her mind to focus on the cacoraptor running behind her. She began to open its com to that of the colonists, slowly including it, damping down the alien and injecting an eclectic selection of thought processes from the colonists themselves. A glance back showed her its nightmare head collapsing and she could tell what the end result would be: a face similar to Callum’s. Armour began to reshape on its body, on his body. Perhaps she should give him an identity from one of the missing colonists – that would make his inclusion easier. But she decided not to, and that the time for the truth had come, having been subject to such a long-running lie. The cacoraptor – the man – ran up beside her without her having instructed him. The slowly humanizing face shifted and the mouth moved, but he had yet to grow vocal cords.
