The Stone Dogs
You too, my friend, Hiero thought.
"But…" he continued. "Well, something jolly odd did happen yesterday, up on Luna. The Mamba—that's the personal yacht of their Commandant of Aresopolis—did an unauthorized takeoff and is running for the Belt. Continuous boost trajectory for Ceres; should be there in about ten days."
"That quickly?" Johannsen, the Space Force CINC.
"Well, it's got one of their new fifth-generation pulse-drives," the ACI commander said. "And whoever's piloting it isn't leaving any reserve for deceleration, we think. They've got two Imperator class cruisers trying to catch it, and they've been beaming a series of demands that the Mamba stop, and warnings to everyone else to stay clear. We've no earthly idea what it's about, really. The yacht is either unwilling or unable to communicate."
Hiero leaned forward and touched the query button on her desk. "Can they catch it? Can we?"
"No; and yes, if we have something start matching velocities now. Considerably sooner than it might reach Ceres, if we use one of the New America's auxiliaries." A collective wince; that would mean blowing the Project's last line of cover. "Under the circumstances, I'd say it's justified."
"I say we do it," Hiero said.
"Sir?" The ACI man looked to the chairman, who nodded abstractedly.
"Ah, sir?" That was Donatei, the OSS chief of staff; he was looking off-screen, and his fingers were busy. "We do have— yes, we do have something significant, just now. They're… ah, yes. Trying very hard to keep it quiet, but our ELINT is picking it up. They're pulling up their backup comps on… hell, one sector after another. Running some sort of check program on the central comps. Then—they've just put out an all-points to their military, to downline the AV-122 series. That's their most recent battle-management comp."
Hiero's own fingers moved; yes, everyone here was cleared for the fourth layer of the New America project.
"Is that one of the ones we managed to infect?" she said. Chairman Allsworthy's question came on the heels of theirs.
There was a long moment of silence. "Mierda," she whispered. "A leak."
Allsworthy grunted, as if someone had hit him in the belly. "We…" He looked down at his hands. Hiero felt herself touched with sympathy, and a moment's gratitude that the final decision was not hers. The life of the planet lay in those palms. "Recommendations?" he continued.
"Attack immediately; we're already at Defcon 4," Hiero said.
"Attack." Donatei, more decisive than usual.
"With all due respect, Mr. Chairman, that would be premature." The ACI commander's balding head shone. "If… A leak in the Project security would not be enough to put them up to this level of alert. They'd know it would focus our attention; they'd try and isolate the infected comps clandestinely, so that we wouldn't know it's been done. There's another factor here, one we haven't grasped… Maybe the Mamba has the answer. Whatever it is, God, sir, even if we win with the present inadequate level of infection in their infosystems, we're talking hundreds of millions of dead. Everybody, if they use Fenris. We have to play for time."
Hiero sat silent, listening to the debate. This was not a committee, could not be, and she had said what she believed… At last the chairman raised a hand for silence.
"We'll present an ultimatum," he said. "How long until the Mamba is intercepted?"
"Twenty-four to thirty hours, sir."
"I authorize immediate interception. Take whatever measures are necessary. Secretary Ferriera, draft an immediate note to the Domination; their mobilization is an intolerable provocation and threat, and we will consider ourselves in a state of war unless they begin withdrawal by exactly," —his eyes went to a clock—"1000 hours tomorrow. General Mashutomo, all Alliance forces to Defcon 5, and proceed on the assumption that hostilities begin as of the expiration of the ultimatum." He looked around. "Any questions?"
Hiero waited until she was sure there would be none, before she spoke. "No. I disagree with this course of action, but we must have discipline or we are truly lost." A weary smile. "And I very much hope I am wrong and you are right, Senor Chairman."
"Roderigo," she said, as the last of the president's council were leaving. "Wait a moment." When they were alone. "Miguel and the grandchildren are still on Ceres. Send a message, tightbeam, priority. Stay. He will understand."
EAST TENESSEE
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
NOVEMBER 3, 1998
1500 HOURS
"Captain, what the hell is this place?"
The trooper was nervous. They all were, after the sudden Defcon Four and the scramble of orders that had sent them haring off into the hills, away from any news of what was going on.
The Ranger officer looked up from his maps; they had walked the last half-mile, up into the hills. The air was cool here in the high Appalachians even in summer, chill with winter now the steep mountain ridges were thick with oak and maple and fir, the scars of the mines long healed. He had been born not far away, and he remembered the deep woodland smell of it, a little damp and musty, deeply alive. There were few enough left who could call the mountains home. Unforgiving hard country to scratch a living out of, once the pioneers had taken the first richness; the timber companies and the coal-miners had passed through, and then the people had followed, down to the warm cities and the sun.
"It's a disused coal mine, son," the captain said. They're supposed to be independent-minded, he reminded himself. And they're feeling lost, yanked out of their regular units. Most of the Rangers were helping with the last crates, up from the disused road and through the carefully run-down entrance. The shielding started a little way beyond that, and then the storerooms and armories. "You married, son? Close relatives?"
" Nnnno, sir," the soldier answered. He was in his late teens, with a fluffy yellow attempt at a mustache standing out amid the eye-blurring distortions of a chameleon suit that covered his armor. "Not really."
"Nobody here does," the officer continued. "And in that cave there's everything we'd need for a long, long time."
The soldier swallowed. "Yessir. I get the picture." The officer noted with pleasure that he did not ask if there were other refuges like this. I suspect so, the captain thought. But neither of us needs to know. One of the noncoms below called with a quietly menacing displeasure, and the young Ranger saluted and turned to go. That gave him a glimpse of the last contingent, looking unaccustomed to their fatigues and carrying various items of black-boxed electronics.
"Girls?" he squeaked, then remembered himself and saluted again.
"Technicians," the captain said softly to himself, looking up. "Edited out of the comps, like all the rest of us. Unlikely to be missed. Not on paper either, anywhere."
The last chameleon-suited troopers were following up the trail, replacing bent branches and disturbed leaves, spraying pheromone-neutralizers. He folded the map and tucked it into a shoulder-pouch. It was going to create the biggest administrative hassle of all time, getting this set up again when they had been stood down.
"I hope," he murmured. "I sincerely hope."
NORFOLK. VIRGINIA
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
MALVINAS SSN-44
NOVEMBER 3, 1998
1700 HOURS
"Take her down to a hundred meters," the captain of the submarine said. "All ahead full."
Commodore Wanda Jackson glanced around the command center. It was up forward, near the bows of the metal teardrop. Only half a dozen in the bridge crew, a score more in the rest of the vessel. The drive was magnetic, superconductor coils along the length of the hull; most of that was filled with the nuclear power plant, essential life support, and thirty torps. Hypervelocity sea-skimmers with multiple warheads, on a ship that could do better than fifty knots, or dive as deep as the water went, in most places. The finest class of submarine the Alliance had ever built, and the last, nearly obsolete.
"Well, they seem to have found some use for us," she said. "Number Two." The Executive Officer came to stand by h
er chair. "We'll open the sealed orders now." Their squadron were spraying out from Norfolk like a fan of titanium-matrix minnows, each with their own packet of deadly instructions.
"Yes, ma'am."
Her thumbnail hesitated for a moment on the wax of the seal.I'm glad we never had kids, she thought; her husband was in Naval Air, out of Portsmouth. The paper sprang free with a slight tock sound.
The commodore's eyebrows rose. "Make course for the Angolan Abyssal Plain," she said. "Down to the bottom, and wait."
ABOARD DASCS MAMBA
TRANSLUNAR SPACE
NOVEMBER 4, 1998
0300 HOURS
"God," Marya muttered. The new trace on the screen was matching velocities fast.
She was in the pilot's couch of the yacht, where she had been since the takeoff. Never leaving it, except for a few dashes to the head. The floor around her was littered with the wrappers of ration-bars; it was important to keep up the blood sugar. Sleep you could avoid, by popping stim, even when you were accelerating at a continuous 1.3 G. Over forty hours now since the last sleep, and things were beginning to scuttle around the edges of her peripheral vision. The icy clarity of her senses was growing disconcerting, a taunting, on-edge twisting that left you wondering if the information coming in to the brain was accurate. Could she really smell so sour already? Am I thinking straight? The dimmed lights still seemed hurting-bright.
Her eyes flicked back to the board. The Draka cruisers were still there behind her, three of them. Not gaining much; this ship was fast. Grotesquely overpowered, and the hydrogen-boron-11 reaction was fantastically efficient. The first drive that really didn't need reaction mass; all it produced was charged particles for the coils to squeeze aft… Those cruisers were fourth-generation, deuterium-tritium fusion. This much continuous boost was probably doing their thrust plates no good at all, they must be using just enough water-mass to protect the diamond films. Still, eventually they would get close enough to get parallax and bring their beam weapons to bear.
An alarm chimed; one of the warships' lasers was impinging on the Mamba's thrust-plate. Marya's fingers touched the board, and the magnetic fields twisted slightly against the fusion flame. The Mamba skittered sideways… The Draka craft were still light-seconds away, enough to make dodging easy. Missiles and slugs were out of the question without matching or intersecting vectors; not enough sustained boost.
"Oh, shit, no way I can fight this thing," she muttered, looking over to the vacant couches. One untrained person could just barely pilot it, on an idiot-proof minimum time, maximum thrust boost, if they knew the theory and how to stroke computers. A quarter of the screens were dead anyway, the comm systems, all of them down, and no time to check why without getting sliced into dogmeat by the pursuit. In the meantime she was half-delirious and wholly terrified.
She laughed. "And I feel great. Fucking wonderfull." Because she was doing, accomplishing; perhaps only her own death in a quick flare of plasma, but that would be something. It was helplessness that was the worst thing about being a slave. Not abuse, not privation, not the ritualized humiliation; it was not being able to do anything except what they wanted. This was the most alive she had felt in twenty years.
The new trace was still closing. Marya blinked and recalibrated; her eyes felt dry, but the lids slid up and down as if lubricated with mercury. Whatever it was was boosting at 2 G to match velocities, and had been for the better part of a day. Better than the Mamba herself could do. Again she looked in acid frustration at the dead comm screens; there was probably enough information flying back and forth, threats and warnings and demands, to tell her everything she needed to know. I might as well put a secondmessage in a bloody bottle and throw it out the airlock, she thought. 3K klicks and closing at 1k per relative. Soon they would be in visual distance, as something more than a point of light…
"Visual," she muttered to herself, unconscious of speaking aloud. "Maybe, if they're looking —"
Impatiently, she called up the maximum magnification and waited. Presently it appeared, no class of vessel she was familiar with. For a chill moment she thought it might be another like the craft she was flying; the tapered-wedge shape was plainly meant to transit atmosphere. Then she saw the Alliance colors, the Space Force blazon. Even the name: Sacajawea. It was bigger than the Mamba as well, corvette sized, a couple of thousand tonnes payload. Her hand touched a section of the consol.
Airflight mode
CURRENTLY IN VACUUM, the computer replied with electronic idiot-savant indifference to circumstances.
Airflight mode, landing lights, exterior.
OPERATIONAL: ON/OFF (Y/N)?
She touched on. Off. On…
"Sir."
Frederick Lefarge looked up from the plotting console. The Sacajawea was one of a dozen shuttlecraft the New America would carry, mirrormatter powered, equally suited to atmosphere or deepspace work. That was easy enough with a power supply as energetic as antihydrogen. If the New America ever sailed, it would be a one-way trip with not much hope of return, and a long time before a functioning economy could be established at the target star. Her auxiliaries had been designed to last a century, and do everything from lifting Itilotonne-mass loads out of a terrestrial-sized gravity well to interplanetary freighting. This one could cross the solar system and back in forty days, without refueling.
And it could fight an Imperator-class cruiser, quite handily; hence the large bridge crew. Lefarge looked hungrily at the spread of trajectories on the board before him. Those Snakes were going to get a very unpleasant surprise, if push came to shove.
"Sir?" That was the Sacajawea's captain, Ibrahim Kurasaka.
"Sir?" Lefarge said in turn. He outranked the other man, but there was only one commander on a bridge. For that matter, his manning a board here was irregular, but there were times when the book didn't matter all that much.
"Ah… Brigadier Lefarge, I'm getting a damned odd pattern of visuals from that Snake pleasure-barge."
"I'll be glad to take a look," Lefarge said. An image blinked into the center of his screens, and he narrowed his eyes. Not a random pattern… Suddenly, he chuckled harshly.
"You didn't go through the national Scouts, did you, Captain?"
"No, Brigadier, I didn't," Kurasaka said. He was Javanese-Nipponese, and the Indonesian Federation had not been advanced enough for a universal youth-movement back then.
"That's an antique system; Morse, it used to be called. Probably in the datastore; let me… yes." He raised one hand with enormous effort against the drag of acceleration and began keying. After a moment: "Oh, my God."
"Marya, Marya! Ma soeur, ma petite soeur—"
For a moment she was lost, content simply to hold him.
Then she pushed herself to arm's length. There was shock in his eyes, enough that she was startled. Do I look that bad? Forty hours of stim, but still—
"Fffff—" Appalled, she stopped. The stammer she had overcome so long ago was back. Not now, not now! A medical corpsman was floating down the connecting tube behind her brother, crowding along the wall to let the squads of Intelligence types past as they headed for the quick ransacking of the Mamba that was all the available time would allow. She had an injector in her hand, and the single-mindedness that went with the winged staff that blazoned her elbow. Antistim and trank.
"NNnnnnno!" Marya stutterred, pointing. Her brother half-turned, cut off the medic's protest with an angry gesture.
"You need rest," he said. The words were banal, not the tone, and there were… yes, tears at the corners of his eyes.
Tears are for later, she thought, and felt a flat calm return. A deep breath in.
"Lüi-sten," she said slowly. "Therrre is a bbbbiological…"
CENTRAL OFFICE. ARCHONAL PALACE
ARCHONA
DOMINATION OF THE DRAKA
NOVEMBER 4, 1998
0500 HOURS
"So." Eric von Shrakenberg looked around the circle of the table. "Is that the consen
sus?"
Louise Gayner snorted and snapped a thumbnail against the crackle-finish of her perscomp. The others glanced sidelong at each other; the Supreme General Staff representatives, the Directors of War and Security, the Council members. No teleconferencing, not for this. A dozen human beings, and they were all those who must be consulted in this matter.
Silence. Nods. At last the head of the Staff spoke:
"Excellence, we've already lost twenty percent of our capacity to this damned comp-plague, and there'll be mo'. Must be mo'. The Stone Dogs are our only hope. If we lose that there's nothin'. There's no time. Excellence; every moment we wait is a nail in our coffin."
The Archon looked down at his fingers. They're waiting for my decision, my choice. The thought was hilarious, enough so that he did not know whether laughter or nausea would be more fitting. All my life I've wanted to set us free, he thought. free from a way of life based on death. Now my only chance of it is to inflict more death than the combined totals of every despot and warlord in the whole mad-dog slaughterhouse we call human history. My choice. Could it be Yolande's fault? Could it be anyone's fault that it had come to this, the whole of human history narrowing down to this point? Ten thousand generations, living, rearing their children, working, dreaming, going down to dust, and now… He would say the words, and they would be like a sword across all time, no matter the outcome. If there were humans at all, a generation hence, they would call this the decisive moment. The ultimate power, and in his bands.
A leader is someone who manages to keep ahead of the pack, he knew bitterly, feeling the cold carnivore eyes on him. There was exactly one practical choice he could make, within the iron framework of the Domination's logic, and the Draka were nothing if not a practical people. Or he could refuse it, and the only difference would be that he would be safely dead in twenty minutes. For a second's brief temptation he wished he could; it would spare him the consequences, at least.