Hostile Takeover: A Space Opera Adventure (Luminous Void Book 3), page 48
“The equipment aboard the vessels that made the recording isn’t equipped to observe the full effect of the weapon,” the pilot said. “The energy beam contains some unusual electromagnetic frequencies, but nothing that would account for the implosion.”
“Is that what it did?” Dhana asked. “Implode?”
“More accurately,” the pilot said, “it ceased to be detectable in a three-dimensional universe.”
“Some other universe?” she asked.
“Based on the nature of the process, it seems unlikely to have arrived elsewhere in a viable configuration.”
“Not pinchless travel then. At least not yet. They may not have figured out how to make it work, and they have to be stopped before they do.”
“What do you think we’ve been trying to do?” Ronska snapped.
She ignored him. “Uzal, as you said, we would have gotten them anyway if they hadn’t had allies. Waysend Sstation helped them. That wasn’t out of kindness. Claudianus, you need to get someone onto the station and find out what the AIs want from Luminous Void. It has to be energy. That’s what the station wants more than anything, and we’ve seen that Luminous Void has it. Someone on the station must have noticed something out of the ordinary about the ship.”
D’Emilio was livid with rage at her peremptory tone. He opened his mouth, but Gant cut him off. “Would you be so good as to make those inquiries, Claudianus?”
All D’Emilio could do was nod and say, “I’ll take care of it.”
Dhana went on. “Uzal, with that weapon, it won’t be possible for anyone to come at them head-on unless we can be absolutely sure of having enough firepower to vaporize them instantly. We’ve failed at that twice now because they’ve been adapting to us faster than we are to them. If you can come up with a strategy to deal with that, good, but don’t count on it. This has to be an information war. Claudianus, it’s been too easy for them to find allies. Why? And how?”
Ronska sneered. “I thought you said Jones had some magical power to make people do what she wants.”
She continued tapping her fingertips on her lip. “Trace everyone they’ve come in contact with. Find the connections. Track down that J-class Warhammer; find out where it came from and how it’s connected to Luminous Void or Cheerful Singularity. And find the pilot’s family. Don’t approach them this time. They’ll be on guard, but they’ll have some way of contacting Luminous Void, and we can trace those communications. And get me everything you can learn about the crew, including the former captain. Every visual, every person they’ve ever spoken to. I don’t care how inconsequential it seems to you.”
Dhana dropped her hands to her desk. What had she left out? What was she assuming these people would know to do without being told? She realized they were staring at her—Ronska and D’Emilio furious and resentful, Kazmi indifferent, Gant with his courteously bland expression.
“Is that all, Madam Secretary?” Gant asked.
She held onto her composure. He wouldn’t end her just for being right, and she was right. “I’ll know more when I see the information I’m asking for.”
He nodded once. “We will provide you with everything we have at the moment, and Claudianus will pass you everything he learns as it comes in. As will anyone else.”
The others might ignore Dhana, but they were as terrified of Gant as she was.
Gant ended the meeting, and Dhana looked down at her shaking hands, her palms pressing into the polished wood. That weapon had been like watching a cluster of serpentoids squirming in a burrow—something utterly alien to the workings of the human eye or brain. The W-class had been defenseless. A warship—armored against almost anything—defenseless against a tiny Narrow Boat. She tried to imagine a hostile takeover with two fleets, both armed with those beams, and the mental picture made her sick.
The holoprojector built into her desktop came alive, projecting a streaming data field. As promised, the other three had sent her all their data files. All those they were willing to share, at least. She didn’t fool herself that they wouldn’t keep anything back. Everyone had secrets—stupid, stupid secrets that could spell the end of galactic civilization—but it was what she had. She would begin with the clones. She knew she had seen that line before. It was an untried angle that might give her a wedge into the crew.
GUILD PILOT
The pilot ended the communication with the straight-time conspirators and “sat” in his capsule orbiting Tanarive for an endless nanosecond. The pilot was ancient, more than 600 years straight-time, too many millennia to count in pinch-space, and he had never reset. He had bought out his linchpin centuries ago. His wealth was incalculable, but he had no interest in returning to straight-time. The real power in the galaxy was here, with the guild.
Something was shaping up in the game space. Someone had started an old, old scenario, one that had been played thousands of times if not millions: Beat the Guild. It was meaningless–disaffected pilots, resentful of guild control, venting their resentment, but there was something different this time. Pukas had been spotted. Pukas with ships. And a rumor: a Narrow Boat with blue skin. It needn’t be the ship he was looking for. Someone else could have seen audvid recordings of Luminous Void and decided to tease the guild by pretending to be a tawdry galactic hero, but if it was? If it was the pilot of Luminous Void, a girl child not yet three years in pinch-space? She would give herself away eventually. She had nothing like the cunning of centuries.
The pilot scanned his game files and selected a ship. He had long since ceased to experience himself as a human body. The ship was himself—an amorphous mass the size of a planetoid, reflecting no light. He manifested in the game sector where the blue-skinned ship and the Pukas had been sighted. He would watch and scan. The girl child would reveal herself. He would trace her link to the pinch net, and he would find her. There were ways to get into a pilot’s databank, and if she had hidden the coordinates in her own brain, there were ways to get at that too.
The great black mass began to move.
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Victor Evans, Hostile Takeover: A Space Opera Adventure (Luminous Void Book 3)
