Extremis (54 page)

“Last month, in the Agamemnon system, during the fight near Myrtilus—the Baldies clearly wanted one of our fighters.”

“I recall this.”

“Then what if we gave them one?”

Kiiraathra’ostakjo paused, making sure he had understood the human correctly. “You would purposely give them an intact model of one of our fighters? You would propose to sacrifice our entire fleet’s advantage in fighter technology?”

Wethermere shook his head. “Firstly, we give them an older fighter with a tuner three marks out of date. That might help them a bit, but not much. Their problem is that they don’t know how to best miniaturize their tuners.” Wethermere looked to Zhou, who nodded in confirmation. “A model three marks out of date is only going to give them marginal improvements. Instead of throwing off five times our rads, and burning out their engines ten times as fast, they might manage to reduce those rates to three times and six times, respectively.”

“Hmm—not so great an advantage to them, but still too great a price for a brief interruption of their advance.”

“I agree. That’s why, if the plan actually works, their technical intelligence services will never get a chance to surgically dissect the fighter at all.”

“Oh, and how do we ensure that?”

Wethermere smiled. “I thought you’d never ask.”

* * *

So,
mused Kiiraathra’ostakjo,
here I sit, without a single fighter left on board, my squadrons and even my hull in dangerous proximity to a massively armed and armored heavy superdreadnought, a body missing from the lockers of the burial detail, and everyone’
s
life depending on the outcome of an utterly insane scheme.

The fighter squadrons’ main command channel crackled. “
Celmithyr’theaarnouw,
this is Polo Two, over.”

The Orion equivalent of the commander, strike group, a particularly taciturn male named Threk’feakhraos, replied, “Receiving. Status?”

“Polo One is KIA, but we still have control over Medicine Ball. We have handed it off to Polo Three, with backup remote control transferred to Polo Six. Rugby and Ak’kraastaakear flights are still on my flanks.”

“Has the enemy begun using flechette missiles?”

“Nothing but, for the last twenty seconds.”

“Standby for orders and activation of Medicine Ball, Polo Two.” Threk’feakhraos looked to Wethermere. “Tactical?”

Wethermere glanced at Kiiraathra’ostakjo, who nodded.

Wethermere grinned and said loudly enough for Threk’feakhraos’s pickup to register it, “Toss out the Ball, Polo Two.”

* * *

“You heard the man, Polo Three. Time to put the Ball in play.”

Polo Three—otherwise known as Vera Demetrikos—responded crisply to Polo’s brand-new flight leader, Jakub Varshov. “Throwing in the Ball now, Polo Two. Don’t you guys be too far behind me.”

“I’m right on your tail, Polo Three.”

True to form, Jake
, thought Vera, who could hear the subtle leer in her flight leader’s voice. Vera steered her fighter off to the relative left and down with two jerky twitches of the controls, as if a malfunction—or panic—had compelled her to fall out of formation. Her apparent wingman—Medicine Ball—followed her faithfully; Polo flight was a bit farther back, being protectively screened by the still more distant Rugby and Ak’kraastaakear flights.

The Baldies pounced, reacting to the break in their enemy’s formation by firing a torrent of flechette missiles. Moments later, large swathes of space became impassable due to the expanding clouds of those lethal, mite-sized darts.

Spaceside flechette munitions were, fundamentally, misnamed: their resemblance to the lethal in-atmosphere flechette munitions was purely superficial. In space, and among craft using reactionless drives at relativistic pseudospeeds, a flechette missile’s method of operation recalled ancient caltrops more than it did a modern shotgun. The warhead of the flechette missile detonated a fraction of a second before its drive burned out: in that fraction of a second, the warhead sent a sleetstorm of hard, grain-sized projectiles out in every direction. While within the missile’s drive-field—which bubbled out in a final overpowered and self-annihilating pulse—the projectiles kept their relativistic velocity. But when the missile was destroyed, and the drive field with it, the flechettes fell back into normal space-time. The result: a
sphere of mite-sized tetrahedrons, which, if hit by a fighter at pseudorelativistic speeds, was sure to destroy or at least disable the small craft.

Within seconds, the volume of space around Vera was filled with just such globes of flechettes. Some were peppering the area around Medicine Ball as well.
Perfect.
She called up Medicine Ball’s remote-control system on her dynamically reconfigurable board and tapped the virtual button labeled “RPV match-course autopilot: OFF.” The green button lost its color, became gray. Then she hit the button beneath it, labeled “Demo Command Circuit,” and whispered, “Godspeed, Sven.”

* * *

From a distance of 32,162 kilometers away, Polo Twelve—redesignated Medicine Ball for its last flight—swerved erratically, its pilot’s hands still on its suddenly undirected controls. A second later, the fighter quaked—first from a blast back near its fuel tanks and main bus, and then again when a small, externally mounted explosive charge blasted in the exposed glassteel portside cockpit panel. The hard vacuum pulled the air out in a single cyclonic blast, sucked out papers, tugged at the pilot’s hands, attacked the flesh of his face—which had been exposed by the shattered faceplate of his flight helmet. But the form of the pilot remained motionless—even as Medicine Ball tumbled out of folded space, suddenly motionless since its drive field was gone.

Already many light-seconds away, Vera Demetrikos brusquely wiped a tear off her cheek; Sven Pugliotti had been a nice guy, a quiet guy, a brave guy—and she hated leaving one of her own behind. But, safely bracketed by the survivors of Polo flight, and further protected by Rugby and Ak’kraastaakear squadrons, she followed the last orders of the mission:

Return to the barn.

* * *

On the bridge of the
Celmithyr’theaarnouw
, the CSG growled through the tally of his squadrons’ losses. “We lost eleven fighters.” He cut his eyes quickly at a blinking silver-white icon in the tacplot. “Not counting Medicine Ball, of course.”

Lubell leaned forward over the ops board to peer into the holotank. “The question is, have the Baldies seen it?”

As if to answer him, the red gnats in the tacplot—the Baldy fighters—quickly split into two separate groups: one swarmed around the bright white icon that marked the position of Medicine Ball; the rest formed a wall between that position and the
Celmithyr’theaarnouw
’s retreating squadrons.

Lubell leaned back, still watching. “Well, son of a bitch.”

“Sensors,” commanded Kiiraathra’ostakjo, “report.”

“Half of the enemy fighters surrounding Medicine Ball have shut down their reactionless drives. The SDH has altered course toward those same coordinates. Now she is slowing, slowing…and she has shut down her drives as well.”

“Helm, best speed to rejoin the rearguard of the Fleet’s van. Execute immediately.” Kiiraathra’ostakjo leaned back with a look at Wethermere. “As you humans say, ‘so far, so good.’ ”

Wethermere, still focused on the data readouts, simply nodded and told Zhou, “Start the clock.”

Zhou hit the timer, glanced at the clock, and read what it showed. “Ten minutes. And counting.”

* * *

In the space surrounding the motionless Medicine Ball, Baldy fighters adopted postures that were both aggressive and protective. Sensor-equipped shuttles approached, measured, scanned, scanned, scanned again: no sign of power emanations. No sign of computer activity. No sign of mechanical movement of any kind. And no signs of life.

When Zhou’s operations clock on the bridge of the
Celmithyr’theaarnouw
showed eight minutes, two heavily modified Arduan shuttles came forward and reached out with robotic arms and tentacles that secured the human fighter in their steely clasps. Using standard fusion-impulse rockets, they began towing the crippled remains of Medicine Ball toward their looming mothership: the Arduan heavy superdreadnought, its back, belly, and sides bristling with scores of pinnaces. A brightly lit vehicle bay opened in the warship’s immense side: altering course slightly, the two shuttles dragged their precious cargo unceremoniously in that direction.

When Zhou’s clock hit seven minutes, and just before Medicine Ball was drawn inside the SDH, the
Celmithyr’theaarnouw
focused one last, wide-spectrum, high-gain active scan upon its opponent, with particularly strong pulses in the radio and microwave frequencies. Indeed, those pulses were not only strong, but unusually repetitive.

At six minutes, the bay doors began to close and the SDH’s reactionless drive reinitiated. She had lost ground in her pursuit of the Orion carrier, and would still have to lose a bit more, since going straight from cold drives and full stop to hot drives and full speed would severely damage, and possibly destroy, her engines’ tuners and coils. However, as the superdreadnought picked up speed, her outreaching sensors detected small new signatures: the
Celmithyr’theaarnouw
was depositing mines, a few at a time, as she gave ground before the stern-chasing leviathan.

At five minutes, the SDH’s reactionless drives had folded space enough so that the Arduans were no longer falling behind the Orion carrier. They swept the first cluster of mines out of their way with defensive lasers and pressed on, bold and direct.

Four minutes. In the vehicle bay of the SDH, an all-clear buzzer—both audial and
selnarmic
—pulsed to announce that the vast cavern had been repressurized and that the final set of chemical, thermal, and radiation scans indicated that the human wreck was truly inert. However, as the commander of the technical-intelligence cluster waited for the doors to open so he could inspect his prize, he noted that the “Emergency purge” override control remained illuminated. The hangar’s senior manip, who stood ready at the controls, pulsed (regrets) but, “At the first sign of trouble, I must purge the whole bay.”

“I understand.”

Three minutes.

The last of the carrier’s mines out of its way, and its engines now warmed to be able to attain maximum speed, the Arduan SDH pushed its tuners to the limit. The carrier continued to speed away but was now slowly losing ground.

Meanwhile, the access hatchways into the heavy superdreadnought’s bay opened at last. The entirety of the ship’s technical-intelligence cluster swarmed out, leaping around and past the withdrawing sensor bots and converging on the human fighter.

Eager and sinuous, the Arduans surrounded the vehicle, sweeping it with more reliable, individual sensors. Still no sign of any threat. But it was not the prize that the cluster-commander had been hoping for: in addition to the damage done to the vehicle, it was also a very old model of fighter—the oldest still used by human formations. But its tuner and entire engine were still far beyond what the Children of Illudor had at their disposal for small craft.

Two minutes.

The human-biology junior group leader sent a pulse to the cluster-commander, signifying that he had something (interesting) to report.

“What have you noted?”

“The pilot is—was—a human male. The effects of the explosive decompression seem to have been very severe. The flesh is more desiccated than I would have expected.”

“Did the cockpit lose all air?”

“Yes, and his suit was breached in multiple locations, including the faceplate.”

“Well, does it present any danger to us? Is the body some kind of ruse? Are they trying to infest us with a geneered virus?”

“I seriously doubt it, Commander. If anything, the extreme desiccation makes it unlikely that any biot would have survived to be capable of infecting us—that is, if we were so stupid as to bring the human’s remains out of the hangar.”

“Very well, then. Remove the remains to the sealed med module for analysis, once its jettisoning charges have been primed. Are any identifiers attached to the body?”

“Yes, Commander, it has a name patch. Sven Pugliotti.”

“Record it, and put the remains in storage.”

“Yes, Commander.”

One minute.

The engineering prime who entered the bay with the disassembly team was new to the operation; she was a last minute replacement from Fleet, arriving earlier that day. She quickly found and inspected the high-gain fuel cells that were used to start the reactionless engine system. She looked up at the cluster-commander. “Excellent news. The engine and its starter are completely intact. Should I begin to remove them?”

“Do not touch the engine components! That is for sequenced technical analysis, one piece at a time, in the lab clean-rooms. Just uncouple the power leads and make sure all the controls are inert.”

Thirty seconds.

The engineering prime, unseen beneath the savaged belly of the human fighter, signaled, “Group Leader, this craft’s systems are damaged—and unfamiliar. It is a very old model, and it has been extensively modified.”

“Yes? And the significance of these facts?”

“It is hard to tell exactly what needs to be removed, Group Leader. In the places where it is most severely damaged, I cannot always tell if those systems were original or modified prior to being hit.”

“Well, let us be maximally cautious. Start by removing anything with live or residual electric potential. Other than the power core itself—that is part of the engine.”

The engineering prime sounded cautious. “Could the power core be weaponized?”

“Impossible. Their reactionless drive is fundamentally the same as ours, so the power core only retains a starter charge for the drive. It cannot discharge as anything other than a brief gigawatt pulse. Just disconnect it from the fuel cells and the master controls, to be safe.”

“Yes, Cluster-Commander.”

Fifteen seconds.

“The electrical systems have been neutralized, Cluster-Leader.”

“Excellent. I will signal the ship prime that the human fighter has been secured.”