Rogue Powers (52 page)

The USS
Benjamin Franklin
was killed by a swarm of beetle-like things the size of a man's thumb. Each beetle, as it crawled, excreted a chain-molecule monofilament thread too thin to be seen by the unaided eye, and dragged the thread behind itself. The tail end of the thread was adhesive, and stuck firmly to the first spot of hull the beetle landed on. Two limpets successfully attached to
Franklin,
one amidships and one near the engine compartment. The limpets cut their holes through the hull and the beetles wandered off. Almost immediately, one of them sliced through a hydrogen feed line, and the explosive gas was injected into the cabin air mixture. Fifteen minutes later, another beetle caused a spark as its thread cut a high-voltage cable. The ship blew up.

Europa
pride of that planet's fleet, was wrecked by a cloud of air-borne micro-organisms that metabolized atmospheric nitrogen and oxygen with most sorts of plastic, and left hydrochloric acid and poison gases behind as waste products.

Maxwell,
a supersophisticated heavy cruiser from Bandwidth, was attacked not only by the foam worms, but by a species of spider-things bred to eat human flesh. The latter murdered the crew before the former could wreck the ship.

Conventional armament spread its more familiar sort of horror as well; lasers, torpedoes, exploding limpets—all did their work and League ships died.

Thomas tried to ignore the death, the destruction, and concentrate on the battle itself, the progress of the opposing forces.

It was working, as well it should be. The Guard's Outpost fleet was passing through the League's fleet to link up with the Capital fleet around the baryworld. The Combined Guard fleet was eagerly taking the chance to form into one fighting force. And the Guard fleet seemed to be significantly larger than anyone expected, with any number of smaller and slower ships deployed. After their losses at New Finland and Britannica, it was incredible that they could field that many ships. But then, this battle was for all the chips. If they lost here, they lost altogether. No point in holding reserves. They must have stripped their docking ports clean, must have taken along every space tug and broken-down old rustbucket.

The elderly admiral watched the screens. Yes, the Guards were forming up nicely about the baryworld. It was almost time. "Comm. Raise HMS
Sapper
if you please."

"Sapper
is standing by, laser link ready."

"Very good." Suddenly, the admiral's voice shifted and he spoke in a stern, abrupt tone of voice.
"Sapper,
this is Admiral Sir George Wilfred Thomas. I hereby instruct you to proceed with Procedure A1A in exactly ten minutes from my mark—3,2,1, mark."

"Order received and acknowledged, admiral," said an efficient sounding voice from
Sapper.
"Activation codes to be transmitted in nine minutes, fifty-five seconds. Allowing for speed-of-light delays, you should detect first results in ten minutes, thirty-eight seconds."

"Thank you,
Sapper.
Good luck." Thomas swung around to face the comm officer, and spoke with the same crisp severity in his voice. "Send to all ships. Emergency Priority. Break off any and all engagements with the enemy and proceed at full thrust away from the baryworld. You must be underway within nine minutes. That is an Emergency Priority order. Send it
now.
Clear the tactical view off the main screen and get me the highest magnification you can on the baryworld. Those of you here in this room are about to find out about the closest held secret of the war. Officially, it's called Bannister."

The moment he had given the Bannister orders, Thomas wanted to countermand them. There
had
to be another way. But it was already too late for that by the time
Eagle's
own engines lit, for
Sapper
had sent the start codes, and nothing could bring them back.

The main screen shifted to the view from a long-range camera that was already zooming in on the dark, barren, cold lump of rock. Here and there, tiny sparkles of white flame could be seen as Guard ships maneuvered and lit their engines.

"It will start in a moment," Thomas said quietly. "Unofficially, everyone called it WorldBomb."

The viewscreen was filled by the rough, worn old face of the unnamed baryworld, formed by the slowest and most tedious process of gradual accretion over billions of years. It was a very old, very tired-looking sort of world. Suddenly, there was a bright lance of fire, and then another, and another, across its scarred and cratered face, and then it seemed as if the entire surface of the tiny world was afire.

"Implosion phase," Thomas said. "Hundreds of small explosions, from shaped nuclear explosives placed all over the surface of the planetoid. The bombs shatter the rock, and force Shockwaves in toward its core to concentrate the explosion—smashing the structure of the world."

From equally spaced points around its surface, a dozen huge and terrible tongues of blood-red fire shot out from the baryworld, reaching out far into space, casting a horrible ochre tint across the universe.

"There go the larger nukes, the deep bombs. The flame is jetting back up the tunnels we dug to place them."

And then, in a blast of pure white radiance, the baryworld itself swelled up, expanded, exploded—the little planet shattering into a billion bits of shrapnel that were flung out into space at terrible velocity.

Ninety percent of the Guard fleet was within fifty thousand kilometers of the baryworld when the WorldBomb was detonated. None of them had a chance. A huge pulse of electromagnetic energy, born of the nuclear explosions, flashed through the Guard fleet, scrambling computer banks, throwing circuit breakers, forcing arcs and shorts in electronic equipment. The Guards ships were instantly blinded and crippled. Hard on the heels of the electromagnetic pulse came a virtually solid wall of rock fragments, from mountain-sized boulders down to grains of dust and molecules, all moving at incredible speed. All of it rushed out from the world that was no more, slamming into ships, ripping through their hulls, tumbling ships end-for-end, crashing one ship into another. A large fraction of the baryworld's mass had been vaporized altogether, and expanded out into vacuum as a shock wave of terrible force,
popping hulls and ports and hatches that were meant to hold pressure
in,
not keep it out.

The problem with explosive weapons in space has always been the lack of an atmosphere to carry the shock wave, the absence of debris to be thrown. In short, in a vacuum, an explosion has no mass to throw around. By destroying a small world, the League had solved these problems.

The command center crew watched the screen in stunned silence. Then the comm officer let out a low-pitched wail, and Thomas could hear the sound of quiet sobbing. "That's horrible, that's horrible," a voice whispered over and over, so quietly that at first Thomas thought the chanting was inside his own head. But no, it was the detection officer, his face ashen-white, unable to tear his eyes from the screen as the cloud of dust and debris that was once a tiny world and a proud fleet of ships expanded out into space.

"Even though that is a terrible, terrible end," Thomas said, "at least it is an end. And I shall ask myself if I truly had to do this for the rest of my days. But the war is over."

But Admiral Sir George Wilfred Thomas didn't know about
Starsight.

Captain Romero happened to be watching the monitors when the flaring light that was the baryworld's death blossomed across the dark of space. It took him a moment to realize where and what that terrible light had to be, and he was suddenly afraid. Who had done that, Guard or League? The great battle had begun, and he was here, still days out from Capital, cooped up with aliens he had grown to distrust.

D'etallis was irritated by the human's bothersome nervousness, and once again toyed with the idea of killing Romero immediately. But no, they might need a human face to parade in front of the cameras later on. She could endure Romero's company a while longer. He could die with lots of company, on Capital.

Perhaps there was no practical, rational need for caution anymore. Any fool who could count the number of ships left knew the days of the Guardians were over. After the barycenter disaster, there was nothing much left to oppose the League forces
with.
But Gustav knew warriors were not always practical or rational in defeat. Even
he
burned with a white-hot anger, a new hatred of the League that had smashed so many ships, killed so many young men, humiliated his planet and his nation. Johnson Gustav, who knew the Guards had started this war, who had known all along that the Guards must lose, even Johnson Gustav, who still might be executed as a traitor—even
he
thirsted for mindless revenge against the League for what they had done.

And
Nike
Station was still there in orbit, bristling with weapons that could leave a smoking crater where
Reunion
was. No, there were still plenty of reasons to be careful when talking to the League Contact party and
Reunion.
He waited until
Nike
was below the horizon, and then Gustav went to the comm room and set up the link himself.

He didn't know that
Nike
had deployed snooper buoys in orbit.

Reunions
radio crackled and came to life. "Gustav to
Reunion.
Come in please."

Cynthia looked up from her work at the computer. She hit the right buttons and said, "This is
Reunion.
Wu speaking. Stand by a moment." She shut off the mike for a second and shouted down to the lower deck. "Message coming through from Gustav!" As the others scrambled up the ladder, she kicked the mike back on. "Go ahead, Lieutenant."

"There's some news you ought to know—the League has just plain destroyed the Guard fleet. We pulled every ship we
had
into the fight, and they were all virtually wiped out. It's all over but tidying up the details. The war is over, and—and your side won, in spite of the data that Prigot fellow seems to have given us." Gustav couldn't resist that dig into League sensibilities.

"Prigot fellow!" Mac cried out. "What the hell are you talking about?"

Gustav had assumed that the League people would have heard of Prigot through channels, but he hadn't expected to get that much of a rise out of them. "According to a report I've gotten, a man claiming to be a citizen of Capital, calling himself George Prigot, slipped through both the League and Guard detection systems, and got to a station orbiting Capital. I just got a very brief description of what he had to say, but apparently his information had a lot to do with the timing of the Guard attack on the League—for whatever good it did us."

There was a pause, and then Gustav's voice went on. "In any event, I'm not clear if Prigot claimed to have been a prisoner of the League or if he was pretending to cooperate with you. But he crossed the line the first moment he could, so obviously he was a double agent. I don't know all of what he told us. One thing he
did
say was that the Nihilists would betray us. No one seems to be taking him seriously on that. I take it you've heard of this Prigot?

Mac felt suddenly sick inside. George a turncoat? A double agent? No, it was impossible. It couldn't be. The two of them had risked their lives for each other a dozen times on New Finland, and George had again and again provided information vital to the League war effort. Gustav had to be lying, there was no other explanation. But how the hell could he have known who George was, or that he was with the League fleet? What motive would Gustav have for lying?

And George had changed sides once before. . . .

Joslyn took her husband by the arm, tried to comfort him with a quiet touch. She knew how much George meant to Mac, how responsible her husband felt for his friend.

Mac shook his head and tried to collect his thoughts. "Yes, I've heard of Prigot," he said angrily. "But that's to one side. Lucy has told me time and time again that you want to cut this war short, end it before too many die. It seems to me that this is the time for you to move."

"I quite agree," Gustav's voice replied over
Reunions
speakers. "I called asking for your advice in how best to proceed. The same person who told me about Prigot was primarily interested in getting contact with your side to start some very quiet talks. I believe you have a League diplomat along with you. Is he available?"

"Right here, lieutenant," Pete called out. "My name is Gesseti, Peter Gesseti. Exactly what would the topic of those quiet talks be?"

"Very simply, Mr. Gesseti, we want to kno—"

The speaker went dead.