Sharla was also far better than he at politics. Left on his own, he would have settled into obscurity. But now was a good time for moves to power. Somehow he had to make this mess work to his benefit.
Quaelen gazed at the moon-swept garden, silent. Such silences used to agitate Vitrex, spurring him to babble. Then Sharla told him it was a technique meant to have exactly that effect. After that, he learned to employ the technique himself.
When the silence became tiresome, serving no purpose for either of them, Quaelen said, “A son for a son. Bless the emperor’s good fortune. And your esteemed role in it.”
“Indeed,” Vitrex said. Quaelen obviously referred to Althor Valdoria. Still, this business about sons made him uneasy.
“A son.” Quaelen paused. “A brother.”
“A brother?”
“Who descends from the sky like a hammer.”
“A hammer?”
“Skyhammer.”
“Skyhammer?” Vitrex couldn’t see where this was going.
Quaelen rubbed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger. “On SunsReach. You do know the place, don’t you?”
His tone irritated Vitrex. Of course he knew SunsReach, the Ruby Dynasty retreat. It was, after all, the intelligence work of his own people that had led to Althor Valdoria’s capture and the revelation of the Imperator’s location. He almost snapped at Quaelen, then caught himself and simply said, “Indeed.”
“It is a shame it’s so much farther from SunsReach to ISC headquarters than to the Orbiter,” Quaelen commented.
“Indeed,” Vitrex said, confused now. “Although shame or lack thereof depends on your point of view.”
“True. Humiliation for Imperial Skolia may be a blessing for Eube. One worth the attention of the emperor himself.”
“As well it should be,” Vitrex said. Apparently Quaelen knew the emperor planned to follow the battle cruiser Viquara’s Glory in the cruiser Megapolis. Qox wouldn’t go into combat, of course. But if ESComm located and captured the Imperator, Qox would have the glory of taking him prisoner. Vitrex himself had seen to the preparations for the additional fleet required to secure Qox’s safety. Actually, his people had seen to them. He had little talent for intelligence or any other profession. His gifts lay in an ability to identify people who could do what he couldn’t and then take credit for their work.
Of course they had no guarantee ESComm would find Kurj Skolia. Still, Vitrex imagined a triumphant Ur Qox facing the captured Imperator. What a scene! Splendid material for the news broadcasts. As Intelligence Minister, he was well placed to shape what went into those broadcasts, making sure the glory reflected on him.
Quaelen was watching his face. “It will be a great moment when our esteemed emperor returns from his perilous mission.”
Perilous? Vitrex stiffened. What did Quaelen imply? That he, Izar Vitrex, couldn’t ensure the emperor’s safety? It was an insult. Peril, indeed.
Then a new angle occurred to him. The people didn’t need to know Qox was in no danger. It wouldn’t hurt Vitrex’s growing base of support to be lauded as the minister who had helped their courageous emperor return home from his daring mission.
“The people will rejoice in his safe return,” Vitrex said.
“As indeed they should.” Quaelen waited several heartbeats. “Assuming he does.”
Vitrex froze, finally comprehending Quaelen’s intent. The Trade Minister was looking far beyond public relations coups. Vitrex could ensure the emperor returned in triumph—
Or didn’t return at all.
Saying the idea held risk was like saying a sea held water. Vitrex could dare no more than to make the chance of a disaster possible. If any evidence came forward that he had even an infinitesimal part in it, he would suffer a long, ugly death. If Qox died, it would plunge Eube into chaos, particularly with no acting Highton Heir.
But chaos also provided opportunity for Hightons of intelligence to increase their power.
Was it worth the risk?
14
The ISC Anvil dropped out of inversion, hurtling through space in the distorted universe of time dilation and space contraction. Within seconds it slowed to more mundane speeds, along with its escort, the flotilla that had accompanied it to SunsReach plus an additional ten Starslammer destroyers taken off the SunsReach orbital defense system.
Ten seconds later the ISC Rampart, a Firestorm battle cruiser, burst into real space. With it came two thousand craft, in perfect formation, including Starslammers, Leos, Asps, Cobras, Wasps, and Jags. The void suddenly thrived with ships. Most were drones piloted by EI brains; one in ten carried a human crew.
The Anvil and Rampart armadas began their intricate dance of maneuvers as the two fleets rendezvoused. Roca waited in the stardome above the bridge of Anvil, next to the command chair where Kurj sat, the nanohooks in the soles of her boots holding her to the catwalk by grasping complementary hooks in the walk.
With one hand to his ear, listening to his comm, Kurj turned to Roca. “We’re ready to transfer.”
Her voice caught. “Bring him home, Kurj.”
Gently he said, “I will.” He thought of Dehya’s warning to stay on SunsReach. The noise in future calculations was so large that in general it swamped the predictions themselves, making them useless. On rare occasions, a strong enough correlation existed to rise above the noise. Dehya believed she had found one. But what? She thought it could be anything from his death to a victory so great it altered history and his role in it, until he no longer resembled his former self enough to remain consistent in her calculations. Or her findings could be an artifact, with no meaning at all.
He regarded his mother. “If you see Ami before I do, will you tell her something for me?”
She nodded, her eyes glimmering with moisture. They both knew that with Roca headed to the planet Parthonia and he to the Orbiter, where Ami lived, no reason existed for her to see Ami first, unless something happened to him.
Tell her that I love her, he thought.
Her face gentled. I will.
Over the next ten minutes Kurj disembarked from Anvil and boarded Rampart. He installed himself in the command chair above the huge bridge, with its consoles, weapons grids, and comm stations crewed by his best officers. Anvil, now accompanied by a thousand ships from Rampart’s complement, inverted into superluminal space, taking Roca to safety on Parthonia.
Kurj extended his mind throughout Rampart. Prepare to invert.
Accelerating. Rampart’s voice rumbled in his mind like the booming vibrations of a massive metal plate.
An ESComm Stinger hurtled out of inversion, its passing hardly more than a wisp of ions in space.
INVERT! Kurj shouted.
Wasps could reach inversion speed in seconds, using quasis to protect them from the crushing accelerations. Frigates took longer, destroyers even longer. The Rampart needed three minutes. On an astronomical scale, three minutes was nothing.
On the scale of interstellar warfare, it was eternity.
Within the First second after the ESComm Stinger appeared, two more Stingers flashed into real space and released warheads. One exploded an ISC Wasp and the other impacted a frigate in quasis, to no effect. During the next few seconds, fourteen more ESComm drones appeared and engaged the ISC craft.
Within fifty seconds, a Trader fleet nearly a thousand strong had burst out of inversion, preceded by waves of MIRVs, multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles that went after their prey with single-minded ferocity. Most of the ships only had the chance to fire one shot as they raced past their targets. Faster ships had time to reinvert into superluminal space, if they survived the first volley, and come back for another pass.
The entire battle hurtled through space. The larger ISC ships continued to accelerate to inversion speed, the smaller craft remaining behind to defend them. Annihilators turned the void into a maelstrom of gamma radiation and high energy particles. Impactors released swarms of smart missiles that f
used on impact, adding to the plasma. The battle expanded in a cone millions of kilometers long and thousands wide. Relative to the native dust floating in space at mundane speeds, the ships were squashed into flat coin shapes, their crews moving in slow motion.
The quasis shields on the ships began to fail. Klein fuel bottles collapsed, sucking the smaller ships that carried them out of real space and crippling larger ones. Schematics showed a chaos of wildly oscillating fields in space as it became a raging sea of debris and plasma.
Initially far outnumbered by the ISC ships, the ESComm drones died by the hundreds. But they kept coming, wave after wave after wave, their sheer numbers compensating for their lack of cohesion as a fighting force.
Embedded in his command chair, Kurj became part of Rampart. His mind extended throughout the web of a thousand-ship fleet. Indistinguishable from the web itself, he analyzed and responded at speeds far beyond normal human thought, the words becoming rapid-fire numbers and sounds that flashed like sparks in his mind.
Estimate size of ESComm force, he thought. Including ships still in superluminal space.
3,000–10,000 ships, Rampart answered.
Then Viquara’s Glory blasted out of inversion.
Kurj turned his vast array of sensors on the battle cruiser. He “saw” in every wavelength of the EM spectrum, from languid radio waves to killing gammas. Fire Impactors. Dagger patterns 2–6.
Rampart and Glory engaged, two giants flooding each other with enough energy to sterilize a continent. In a fraction of a second, the barrage of missiles from Rampart took out over forty drones attending Glory, forcing Rampart into quasis jump after quasis jump to protect itself. Ions spiraled in a mad dance along magnetic field lines.
Quasis shield on Glory penetrated, Rampart thought. 10 of its 48 inversion engines destroyed.
Fire Impactors, dagger patterns 7–15, Kurj thought.
Quasis jump, Rampart thought. I’ve lost 12 decks.
Kurj absorbed the damage reports and sent out his commands. Within seconds the breach in the hull was sealed and recovery teams dispatched to the damaged area.
Fire tau cannons 26–38, he thought. Whip patterns 1–4.
The taus rocketed out of their cannons. Two of them hit ESComm frigates, exploding one while the other went into quasis. Four taus accelerated to near light speed and detonated against Glory’s shields, weakening the quasis. One tau blew up when its own quasis failed, and the last three taus inverted out of real space. Two of the inverted taus reappeared “on top” their target, an ESComm destroyer guarding Glory’s flank. The combined force of their explosions collapsed the destroyer’s shields and all three craft disappeared in a burst of radiation and debris.
The last tau dropped back into real space within the Glory quasis field. For one millisecond the quasis remained coherent, holding the tau frozen in space only meters above the cruiser. Then the relativistic force of the tau broke the quasis and the missile hit Glory’s bridge at 96 percent of light speed. With a fountain of spewing debris, energy, and particles, explosions ripped through the battle cruiser.
Glory command web damaged, Rampart thought.
How many ships left? Kurj thought. For both fleets.
ISC fleet at 306, Rampart answered. ESComm at 298.
Kurj exhaled. He had lost seven hundred ships in less than three minutes, most of them unscrewed drones. Estimate the probability of successful completion of this engagement in favor of ISC.
Probability is 79–88%.
Kurj controlled his wave of triumph. Activate auxiliary Impactors and Annihilators. They needed victory fast. The longer the battle drew out, the more it favored ESComm, which could leak ships out of superluminal space for hours.
Quasis jump, Rampart thought. Tau hit on my starboard docking bays. At 159 seconds after the battle began, it added: ISC fleet at 228. ESComm at 140. Probability of successful engagement in favor of ISC at 83–94%. Rampart inversion possible in 21 seconds.
Then the Megapolis blasted out of inversion.
The ESComm battle cruiser hurtled into real space with its Annihilators and Impactors firing, a cloud of smart dust and MIRV missiles racing before it, and an antimatter Wasp the size of a Starslammer destroyer.
At 175 seconds into the battle, five seconds before Rampart could invert, it thought, Quasis jump, followed by: Imperator Skolia, the attack from the Megapolis destroyed over 80% of my body and systems. The ESComm ships have also planted quasis generators within my hull, using doctored tau missiles.
Kurj absorbed the disaster: all that remained of Rampart was the bridge, several decks, one inversion engine, and a few Klein containment bottles. The deaths of his people tore through his mind, leaving an agonizing sensation of amputation.
Quasis jump, Rampart thought. ISC fleet at 82. ESComm at 265. Probability of ISC success at 37%.
Kurj focused on his displays. Thirty-seven percent. Still a better than a one-in-three chance. Embedded in his command chair, he was a force unlike any ESComm would have met in other battles, both in the Rhon strength of his mind and in the sheer depth of his military experience. Reaching out with a mental power unmatched by anyone alive, even within his own family, he literally grabbed Megapolis with his mind and submerged into the mammoth cruiser, radiating his consciousness along its conduits and pathways, taking Rampart’s awareness with him.
Fire the remaining 6 tau cannons in whip pattern 7, he thought.
At 182 seconds, two seconds after Rampart could have inverted had all its engines survived, five of its last six tau missiles exploded without effect against the Megapolis quasis shield. The sixth tau penetrated a flaw in the shield and destroyed seven decks on the cruiser. In the process, it destabilized the fields of nine out of the cruiser’s 462 Klein fuel bottles.
Quasis jump, Rampart thought. ISC fleet at 35. ESComm at 253. Then: I have new information. Ur Qox is aboard the Megapolis.
Kurj froze. How do you know that?
The Megapolis web has been sabotaged. Qox wasn’t supposed to go into battle. Combined with the amplification I am receiving from your mind, that damage has made it possible to penetrate their security.
Fools, Kurj thought. The Traders were so busy stabbing each other in the back, they sabotaged their own war effort.
The emperor intends to board this craft, Rampart thought.
Kurj gritted his teeth. Can we invert with only one engine?
At our rate of acceleration, we will reach sufficient speed in 6 seconds.
What is the probability that in 6 seconds we will still be alive, free, and in a condition to invert?
17%, Rampart thought.
Why so low?
Rampart showed him a display of itself, or what remained, highlighting several areas in red. Continued acceleration or inversion may cause structural collapse in these areas.
What about the ESComm quasis generators in the hull? Kurj asked. Won’t they stop your collapse?
They have frozen my self-destruct systems, but there aren’t enough to stop a full collapse.
So they still had an out. Can you invert sooner?
Any sooner and probability of collapse jumps to over 90%.
Kurj exhaled. A 17 percent chance they could invert. One-in-six odds that he would survive to seek vengeance another day.
One in six.
It meant a five-in-six chance of failure. A five-in-six chance he would die for nothing.
Nor was it likely he would ever be this close to Qox again.
How many Klein containment bottles do you have intact? he asked.
41, Rampart answered.
Kurj considered. Since the attack on Althor’s flotilla, ISC had scrambled to counter this new technique of implanting rogue quasis generators. On such short notice, the best the engineers had been able to do was modify the quasis generators for the Klein fuel bottles on Rampart so their fields interfered with the rogue fields. They hoped to make it appear the bottles were under ESComm direction when, in fact, Rampart still con
trolled them. But it was a crisis fix, untested, with no guarantee it would work.
Can you operate any of the bottles? Kurj asked.
18, Rampart thought.
Kurj made his decision. Cut the engine. Play dead.
Four seconds before they could have tried to invert, Rampart cut power. It shot through space at constant speed and Megapolis kept pace, maneuvering into position.
Then came the long process of the hunter taking control of its captured prey.
As soon as Megapolis gained entry into Rampart’s ravaged web, the ESComm cruiser began its captive’s deceleration, dumping Rampart’s velocity over a huge region of space, gently, to preserve the remains of a ship held together by little more than quasis fields. Megapolis used its rogue quasis generators to block the self-destruct toggles in Kurj’s biomech web. Intending to take no chance this time that their prize would try to kill himself, ESComm put Kurj to sleep.
Or so they thought.
ESComm had no real sense of what they faced in Kurj. He watched from every section of Rampart, submerged even into the picoweb of nanobots that repaired the hull. His spinal nodes put him in a trance state that resembled sleep. But he knew all that happened. Saw it all. Heard it all.
The battle took three minutes; deceleration took three hours. After the cruisers came to a sedate drift, Megapolis took another two hours to secure Rampart. Quasis fields, hull integrity, inversion engine, chemical fuel, fusion engines, antimatter drives, navigation, weapons, science stations, consoles, thrusters, shrouds—Megapolis tested it all, verifying the death of its foe. Again and again its probes passed over the Klein bottles, without a blip of warning.
The time came to take possession. Megapolis positioned its great underbelly only meters from Rampart. The ponderous door of a docking bay rolled open, a ten-meter-thick section of hull. Cranes the size of city towers unfolded, lights running along their extent. They closed around Rampart like claws and drew it into the bay.
It took another hour to secure Rampart within Megapolis. Probes locked the quiescent Kurj into his chair, fastening his arms, legs, and neck. By now his mind permeated the very molecular structure of the ship. He checked Rampart’s Klein bottles, smoothed flaws here, fortified camouflage there.