Allied Powers, page 17
“Can we just blow them up and get it over with?” Quinn asked.
God knows I wanted to. But I couldn’t take the chance that Graham hadn’t been honest with us.
“Take us lower,” I said to Julie. “I want to confirm this is the place. We need to be close enough for visual identification.”
“Admit it,” Julie said, shooting me a glare. “You just want to get us killed out here so we don’t have to go back and deal with that huge fucking mess back home.”
“I want to make sure when we do go back, I can tell them we did the job.”
Her snort showed me what she thought of that, but she pushed the flight controls forward, sending us into a breakneck descent toward the planet, fast enough that my hindbrain instincts, born in a world run by Newton’s laws, screamed at me we’d never decelerate in time. We did, of course, much closer than I thought we’d get, and much faster, because there was no atmospheric friction to worry about. The Bellerophon ignored gravity, having mastered it millions of years ago in another timeline, and we stopped abruptly, hovering at what would have been cruising altitude for a jetliner…if there’d been any air or jetliners or people.
There was none of the above. This was the ultimate contradiction, a dead world full of activity. No air, no biological material, not a drop of water, not so much as a patch of water ice, yet the surface was boiling hot, heated from below by the gigantic fusion reactor Graham had told us about. The temperature was displayed on the main screen, in Fahrenheit, even, because I’d told it to use Imperial measurements.
The black liquid oceans covered most of it, but there were rocky patches of land here and there, and where the land pushed out of the blackness, Bugs crawled onto the land and into waiting drop pods. The pods closed around them, not like a hinged door snapping shut but more a time-lapse photo of an insect pupa forming. And when enough of the pods were full, something a little larger than one of our Hammerhead shuttles broke free of the nanite ocean and hovered just above them, pulling them into its hold through some means I couldn’t make out this far away.
“He sure named this place right,” Quinn whispered as if afraid the Bugs would hear. “It’s a Hive. Can we get the hell out of here now?”
“I think we’ve seen everything we need to,” I agreed. “Take us up, Julie.”
Our ascent was just as abrupt as our descent, the planet falling away below us as if it had been yanked downward by some prankster god pulling the rug out from beneath us.
“Oh, damn,” Julie said mildly. “I think they finally noticed.”
She pointed at the edge of the screen but I’d already seen it. Two of the motherships had broken off from the formation in orbit and were heading our way, not in any special hurry, though. Not as if they were on an intercept course, just like something had triggered a subroutine that told them to go check out the source of our drive signature. In fact, they were still in a fairly low orbit.
“Fire,” I told her. “Target the center of the planet and fire.”
“This thing doesn’t exactly recharge like a coil gun,” she reminded me, bringing up the targeting screen despite her protests. “And we can’t use the drive and fire the weapon at the same time, so we’re going to be sitting here like a bunch of idiots waiting for those motherships to blow us to dust for almost a minute. Hope you didn’t have any plans.”
“Maybe we should just, you know, take off?” Quinn suggested. “We could hop out and come back in from the other side?”
“If we do that,” Julie said, a distracted note to her voice as she calculated the shot, “whatever computer programming is telling the Bugs to go investigate us right now is going to put them on high alert. Genius Andy here had to go down and take a closer look. Couldn’t just do things the easy way…”
She was just joking. I hoped.
“Sorry,” I offered, trying to match her light-hearted tone. “When our only source of intelligence is a million-year-old, genocidal, time-traveling computer, I just have the urge to get a second opinion.”
“Well, you can explain that to the Bugs. They’ll probably be in weapons range in about thirty seconds.” Julie made a slashing motion down through the control display. “Firing.”
The effect of the beam wasn’t quite as obvious this time, since the world beneath was almost entirely black, with very little light reflecting back to feed the distortion. The faint rumble was the only sign, like distant thunder vibrating the windows back in Tampa when I was a kid.
“How fast does that go?” Quinn asked, peering at the screen as if there was more detail to be had if he could just look closer. “Speed of light?”
Julie looked at him askance.
“How the hell would I know? We’re seeing spacetime distortion, but that doesn’t mean the actual beam is going slow enough to see, just the effects.”
I ignored the interplay, concentrating on the planet. For a few seconds, nothing was visible—no explosions, no crackling lightning, not so much as a ripple in the nanite ocean.
“Maybe it’s not big enough.” The words didn’t quite come out as a moan of despair, but it was close. If this didn’t work, we were royally fucked…all of us, not just the three in the ship.
“Wait,” Julie said, nodding at the right-hand corner of the screen, the tactical display. “We’re getting a thermal spike.”
That was an understatement. The nanite ocean had been somewhere close to 300 degrees Fahrenheit, but now, it was heading north of a thousand and showing no signs of stopping.
“What are we hoping for here?” Quinn asked. “Is the whole planet going to collapse in on itself like when the hyperdrive on a cruiser overloads?”
“I don’t think the singularity is big enough for that,” I told him, eyes fixed to the screen, attention split between the thermal spike and the incoming enemy ships. “But Graham said the center of this planet is a huge fusion reactor powering all that production. If we set off a collapsar bomb right in the center of it…”
“A what?” Julie asked, turning to stare at me in disbelief. I shrugged by way of reply.
“I had to call it something,” I said, maybe a little defensive. I brightened, and so did the ash-black surface of the planet, the light of a star shining through at a point far below. “Hold on a second, there we go. Something’s happening.”
“Something else is happening,” Julie informed me. “Those damned Bug ships are in firing position.” She swept her hand through the controls and a polychromatic bar graph lit up the bottom of the display. “We have less than ten percent drive field propagation, so we’re still not going anywhere fast.”
“Just wait,” I said, a chant that was almost a prayer. “Just wait.”
A jet of starfire hundreds of miles across shot upward from the core of the Hive, a plasma blast like one of the Helta assault guns if the maw of the gun had been the size of an asteroid. And even with that sort of power behind it, the inverse-square law meant it spread out as it ascended, until it was close to two thousand miles wide when it hit orbit…and hit the Bug ships.
I’d been worried it would attenuate too much by the time it got to their position, but luck was with me, or God, or the Force, and the blast of ionized gas and atomized rock passed through the space where the motherships had been and didn’t slow down on its way toward interstellar space. The exhale of breath was mutual for all three of us, a tension going out of the bridge like someone had let off a pressure seal.
“Thank God,” Quinn hissed.
“It’s not over yet,” Julie said, pulling the flight yoke toward her, the drive field finally working again. “That planet’s about to explode and we need to be long gone before it does.”
She was right. The glowing starburst where the fusion reaction had burned through the crust was growing, spider-webbing a pattern of fissures, swallowing up the black, nanite seas, and a shimmering cloud of ejecta was forming a ring in high orbit. The Hive was coming apart at the seams. As the drive field grew in strength, our distance from the impending cataclysm grew as well, until what had once filled the main screen, as big as the entire forward bulkhead, had shrunk to a cracked and broken basketball hanging in space.
“I think,” Julie said, swiveling her chair to face me, “that it was big enough.”
“My God,” Quinn said softly, still watching the planet slowly breaking up. “You’re right, sir, there’s no way we can hand this over to the government. Any government. Is this the end of it, though? The Hive is gone…there won’t be any more of them, right? Besides the ones still out there, I mean.”
“Maybe,” I allowed. “Maybe not. They could have created another Hive, closer to us.”
“Where would they have done it?” Julie wondered. “It’s not like we wouldn’t have noticed them transforming a whole planet…” She trailed off, face paling.
“Yeah.” I nodded, knowing her thoughts matched my own. “Take us to Chamblisi.”
“Hyperspace doesn’t make any fucking sense,” I declared, waving at the navigation screen.
“And this is the first you’ve noticed of it?” Julie asked, chuckling as she traced lines in the star map with a finger.
“Seriously,” I went on, a month on the ship having made me even more talkative than usual. “It took us nearly a month to get out to the Dyson sphere from Earth. It only takes like two weeks to get to Chamblisi from Earth, but now it’s only taking us a week to get back to Chamblisi? How does that even work? Why didn’t we just go to Chamblisi first on the way out and save weeks of travel?”
“Because it doesn’t work like that, Clanton.”
She slid out of the chair and joined me on the deck, her lotus position matching mine. I’d gotten tired of the chairs a few days ago, and all the yoga I’d been doing on the boat had made me as flexible as I’d been back in my twenties, when sitting on the floor hadn’t involved a major engineering operation to reverse. Julie grabbed my hand and held it between hers.
“We aren’t following the same gravito-inertial paths back as we did on the way out. They’re one-way.”
“What?” I blurted, getting angry now, not at her but at the universe. “Is there a fucking Spacetime Cop waiting out there to give us a ticket for going the wrong way?”
“No, it’s just not possible. Every path we take out just isn’t there on the way back. Most of them are similar, but the farther the distance through realspace of the two points, the bigger the variation there can be. Like when we came back on the Jambo, it took us basically the same way we’d gone, just slightly different. This time, the variation was greater, maybe because we didn’t stop as many times.” She let my hand slip out of hers and rubbed thoughtfully at her chin. “You know, given what Graham said about hyperspace travel and closed, time-like loops, I bet it’s because of causality. You go back the way you came…well, time works all weird in hyperspace. There might be a possibility you could actually run into yourself if you took the same path back, do all kinds of really bad things to the universe.”
“You’re making it sound intentional. Are we talking a universe created by an intelligent designer?” Which I hadn’t ruled out, mind. Not with my upbringing. But the idea that it could actually be proven was somehow…unsettling.
“Maybe.” She shrugged. “Or…there’s an idea I heard about that every black hole has a universe inside of it and the universes that survive are the ones who are able to reproduce by making more black holes. Like a cosmic version of evolution. If a universe allows for a causality violation, maybe that causes it to end prematurely and not reproduce?”
My eyes narrowed in a skeptical frown.
“That has more assumptions than just saying it was God.”
“No hypothesis is perfect.” She smiled and leaned over to kiss me. Her breath tasted stale and I knew mine did, too, but I didn’t care. We were heading back into the shit, and if these next couple weeks were the last ones, at least we’d spent them together.
“Eww,” Quinn said, coming back to the cockpit, rubbing a towel over his damp hair. He’d just finished a sponge bath and I’d been hoping it would take longer. “Get a room, you two.”
“We had one, but you had to come back here and spoil it, Junior.” I shot him a scowl, though I didn’t mean it. “Have a seat. We need to talk.”
“Are you gonna tell me I have to get a job and move out?”
He fell into a cross-legged position a lot easier than I had, and I told myself that was mostly psychological.
“We’re coming out at Chamblisi in a few minutes. No matter what we find there, the next stop is Earth, and we need a plan. We can land this thing anywhere we want, up to and including the fucking White House, but once we get out, they’ll be on it like stink on shit and we won’t be able to get to it again.”
“After what we saw at the Hive,” Julie suggested, perhaps only half-serious, “I’m thinking we could use the Bellerophon to blackmail Vanlandingham and the others into giving up the president and turning over power. Just put on a little demonstration somewhere in the asteroid belt and tell them that the next one goes into Beijing or Moscow.”
“But we couldn’t do that!” Quinn said, his expression horrified. “That could like, blow up the whole planet!”
“They don’t have to know that.”
“No,” I declared, shutting the whole conversation down, whether it was a joke or not. “The only hope Vanlandingham and Harrel have is to convince the public that we’ve gone rogue, that we’re trying to take over the government in a military coup. To paint us as the bad guys. If we even threaten to hit targets on Earth with a weapon of mass destruction, we’re playing right into their hands.”
“What about Pops and the others?” Quinn asked. “They’re supposed to be trying to find General Olivera and break him out. If they have the General, all we need to do is get him to the Jambo.”
“Not all we have to do, but yeah, at least then, Mike would be in charge and I wouldn’t have to be the one with the fate of the world resting on my shoulders.” I sniffed, pretending to be embarrassed. “Oops, did I say that out loud?”
“Stop kidding yourself,” Julie told me, smacking my shoulder lightly. “You’re still going to think it’s all on you even if Mike or the President himself takes over. That’s why I love you.”
A warning beeped from the control panel and Julie hopped up and took her place in the pilot’s seat.
“Coming out of hyperspace in ten,” she warned me. “Might want to strap in.”
Chamblisi had once been a watery world, not incredibly different from the avianoid planet where we’d taken our half-day vacation. The oceans were shallower, the islands bigger, but this had been a home for intelligent octopods and it had looked it. They’d lived near the shore, half-in and half-out of the sea, and if I’d found them arrogant and exasperating, they had, at least, been honorable and true to their word.
Now, returning months after the invasion, I could have mistaken the planet for a lifeless rock. Everything was ash, dry and charred…and where once had been blue oceans circling the globe was now a sea of blackness. Like the Hive, though, this planet wasn’t just dead…it was undead, a zombie version of its former self. Bug motherships circled it, waiting on their fellows to rise from the roiling nanite sea, big enough that they were visible even from high orbit.
“They did this in a few months,” Julie said, a combination of awe and horror in her voice.
“They were designed to kill off the gods,” I reminded her. “To take down a civilization hundreds of thousands of years old.”
“We don’t have to go down there like last time, do we?” Quinn asked, grimacing at the sight of a dozen Bug motherships arrayed like communications satellites over the planet. “This is close enough, right?”
“It’s hard,” I admitted, staring at the place. “This was a living planet. I feel like a murderer.”
“Don’t,” Julie said. She already had the targeting screen up and, without being told, she fired the collapsar bomb.
The beam sank beneath the black wave with a ripple that went around the planet, the biggest stone ever cast into the biggest pond. We waited longer this time, nearly a minute before the glowing fissures appeared in the crust, the first signs of the planet losing cohesion, its core crumbling in on itself as the singularity ate it away.
“No point in staying to watch.” I was grateful Julie had done it on her own. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to pull the trigger. “Take us home.”
“Straight back to Earth? Or should we come out somewhere in the belt and take a look at what’s going on?”
I thought about that a second. Where could we go to get the lay of the land that was beyond the reach of the government? Any government? A smile spread slowly across my face.
“No, not back to Earth. I have a better idea.”
20
All the traveling I’d done in the last couple years and I hadn’t actually been to Mars. It seemed strange. When I was a kid, a manned mission to Mars was one of those things that all incoming presidents talked about supporting, then forgot about when it came time for budget cuts. I’d have thought that the first thing we’d do when we got cheap space travel was go put a base on Mars.
But it was a lifeless hunk of rock and we had habitable worlds filled with aliens to deal with, some of them hostile, and if we had to go to the Moon and the asteroid belt to get raw materials, well…we didn’t have any real reason to go to Mars.
We didn’t, but Daniel Gatlin did. Before the whole business with the Selene meeting the Helta in trans-lunar orbit, before he’d become the head of the aerospace division of the new industries springing up to use Helta technology, Gatlin had been famous—or perhaps infamous—for his obsession with living on Mars. Reading the interview where he said he wanted to die on Mars had very nearly made me say no to his invitation to ride on the first privately-funded trip around the Moon. I hadn’t because…I mean, shit, it was a trip around the Moon. But nearly.
