Ruler of Naught (20 page)

The Tenno glyphs flickered uncertainly, blinking through a
series of impossible configurations, then settling into a simpler readout that
no longer tactically connected the two ships. Ng rubbed her eyes.

“Confirm that, Tactical. Non-coincident light cones?”

“The frigate emerged twenty-two-point-five light-seconds
from the beacon. The destroyer skipped eleven-point-two seconds after that.”
Rom-Sanchez looked up at her in consternation. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

At that distance, and in that brief time, no communication
could have passed between the ships.

“Coincidence,” said Krajno, looking up from his fierce
concentration on his console. “They rendezvoused outside the system.”

But why did the destroyer wait, then?

“That may be, but their actions still make no sense,”
insisted Rom-Sanchez. “Where’d that destroyer go? Why’d they leave the frigate
to watch, rather than the Alpha?” Rom-Sanchez sounded querulous, as if he
resented the apparent irrationality of what they had witnessed so far.

They had little time to consider the questions. The
Prabu
Shiva
skipped again less than a minute after seeing the frigate emerge.

“Looks like Harimoto was asking the same questions,” said
Krajno. “He waited for the destroyer emergence that didn’t come.” Krajno’s eyes
widened, his teeth showing. “Now we wait to see what really happened.”

Her XO’s idea of waiting was a rather active one from the
perspective of the bridge crew. Ng tuned out the flurry of reports and
consultations. It would be an hour or so, so she turned inward.

What would Nelson have made of this situation? She thought
of his long pursuit of Napoleon’s fleet in the Mediterranean, and the later
search for Villeneuve before Trafalgar. Amusement flickered briefly at the
irony: that an admiral from the age of wooden ships would probably understand
her frustration much better than later surface navies, accustomed as they had
been to real-time communications.

Still, what would he have made of relativistic tactics,
where the order of events depends on where you watch them from? Of being able
to watch an action a day and a half after it happened? Or of being able to skip
out of a battle, watch your enemy’s tactics again from a different angle, free
of battle pressure, then return to the fray with a new plan? Or using the
fiveskip to attack the same ship from three different positions simultaneously?

Reluctantly, she abandoned the pleasant fantasy of a conversation
with the admiral, showing him her ship, and windowed up her reports queue. End
of tour still loomed...
battles have an end, good or bad, but paperwork is
forever.

Just under an hour later Wychyrski reported the emergence of
the
Prabhu Shiva
a light-minute out from the position of the frigate
hiding in the k-zone.

“Long-ranging.” Rom-Sanchez’ voice had roughened with
gathering stress. “And the target’s making it easy—it isn’t even
drunk-walking.”

The big ship skipped again in seconds. A minute later the
reddish spark of an emergence glowed near the position of the frigate.

“He’s less than a light-second from the target,” Rom-Sanchez
reported.

“Ruptor signature, modulating to steady-state gravitational
activity,” Wychyrski sang out.

“Tractors. He’s got them.”

Less than ten seconds later, another emergence pulse bloomed
near the battlecruiser and its victim.

“Emergence, eight light-seconds out. Alpha-class.”

A thin thread of light, visible only as a computer artifact,
speared from the destroyer to the battlecruiser. A flare of light grew slowly
from the position of the
Prabhu Shiva
, faded, was gone.

“Give me a close-in replay of that last,” snapped Ng.

The stars fled outward as the image zoomed in. The familiar
egg-shape of a battlecruiser appeared, grainy and shimmering with processing
artifacts as the computers struggled to create an image across a 38-billion-kilometer
gulf. From off screen the chain-of-pearls wake of a skipmissile smote the ship,
converting its stern almost instantly to a flaring inferno. Slowly, now turning
end over end, the hulk passed out of their field of view.

“SigInt.” Ng’s throat ached. “Can you extract shield status?”

At SigInt, Wychyrski rubbed her eyes, then pulled her hands
down with a fierce movement. “No, sir. We’re too far out. But the spectrum of
that skipmissile impact is similar to the one we recorded at Wolakota.” She
looked back at her console. “Destroyer skipped,” she reported. “Frigate’s still
there.”

Rom-Sanchez turned to Ng. “Impossible light cone again.” He gestured
at the Tenno glyphs overlaid on the screen, which were pulsing wildly again,
cycling through impossible configurations. “The Alpha seemed to know exactly
where
Prabhu Shiva
was.” He hesitated. “As though the frigate summoned
it.”

His hands froze above his console, his gaze distant. Then he
resumed tapping at his console, more slowly now.

“I’m going to have to purge the tactical computers and sandbox
the recent action,” he continued. “They can’t deal with it.” The Tenno lapsed
into quiescence. Ng supposed that as a tactician, Rom-Sanchez was having more
trouble than most dealing with the apparent relativistic violations they’d
witnessed.

Interesting that Wychyrski and Ammant seemed aware of
Rom-Sanchez’s abstraction. Then both glanced her way, and snapped back into
concentration on their consoles. What was that about?

Never mind. Time to move on.

“Commander, refocus the array on Treymontaigne. We’ll watch
what they did next.” That took only moments, across very little more than a
degree given their distance from the inner system.

When Treymontaigne swung into view, the planetary Shield was
already up, and cis-lunar space was marred with ship-to-ship actions. As they
watched, Ng ordered the dispatch of cutters with centrifugal-foil arrays at
four-light hour intervals inwards to build up the tactical picture.

The Rifters easily overcame the local defenses, and it was
less than an hour later that a destroyer in cis-lunar space fired on the
Shield, aiming at the planet’s south polar magnetic pole, where the tesla
effect was weakest. Then again, and again, in slow, metronymic rhythm.

Even through the processing artifacts of great distance, Ng
could see the auroral excitation flaring with each impact, something that
should not have been visible for days.

“SigInt, what’s going on with Treymontaigne’s Shield?”

Wychyrski tapped at her console. “Cross-sensor correlation
indicates those impacts are an order of magnitude beyond Alpha specs.” She
shook her head, her face a mix of wonder and horror. “Beyond
our
specs.
At that energy level, the Shield would have held out about eight hours, maybe
less.”

Ng drummed her fingers on one of the pod arms, staring at
the screen. She felt Krajno’s gaze on her, and wondered if he was feeling the
same sort of relief that she did. Given skipmissiles that powerful, there was
no reason to think Harimoto had failed to raise his shields. The pieces of the
puzzle began to assemble themselves in her mind even as she issued her next
orders.

“Tactical, prepare a digest of the action with
Prabhu
Shiva
. SigInt, Communications, keep the array on Treymontaigne and feed
Tactical whatever correlates you can add. Get it to us in the plot room.” She
tapped at her com tabs.

“Engineering, GPT Addison,” came the response.

“Have Commander Totokili report to the plot room.”

“AyKay, Captain.”

Another tap.

“Armory. Navaz here.”

“Lieutenant Commander Navaz, please report to the plot
room.”

“AyKay, Captain.”

Another tap. The tab flared blue: boswell access.
“Lieutenant Commander Nilotis,” came the response, with the flatness of neural
induction.

“Please report to the plot room.”

“AyKay, Captain.”

She stood up.

“Commander, please join me in the plot room. Navigation, you
have the deck.”

o0o

Rom-Sanchez barely noticed as the captain and XO left the bridge.
He’d already run the anomalous data through the Tenno again, with the same
results. The coordinated action of the two Rifter vessels was impossible.

But so was the destruction of
Shiva
by a single shot
from an obsolete destroyer, not to mention the impossible battering they were
watching Treymontaigne endure.

“…sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible
things before breakfast.”

Nausea twinged as he remembered that awful story from Lost
Earth, whose surreal plot had greatly disturbed him as a child. Even then he’d
known a story had to make sense, and for him that’s what Tactical was all
about: making sense of a story whose plot was coming at you way too fast. Like
now.

Well, I’m only being asked to believe two impossible
things
,
and I’ve already had breakfast.
His mood veered wildly
between laughter and excitement and... terror.

Three impossible things.
The third was that a game
would be the making or breaking of his career, and possibly of everyone else
who’d defiantly adopted the derisive sobriquet of “L-5 Loonies” bestowed on
those who’d found Nefalani Warrigal’s strange version of Phalanx so compelling.

He looked up. Wychyrski and Ammant—the only other members of
the Loonies on the bridge, who stared back at him with what he suspected was a mirror
image of his own excitement and terror. He tapped his console to bozlink the
three of them together, a necessary preliminary in any case, to prepare the
digest ordered by the captain. But what he said launched them into uncharted
territory.

(You could parse those ship actions in some of Warrigal’s
scenarios.)

(We have,)
came Ammant’s boswelled voice on top of
Wychyrski’s
(Too bad Warrigal isn’t here.)

The excitement hardened to resolution. They’d seen it, too.

(She will be,)
said Rom-Sanchez. Before either
could reply, he turned towards the navigator and spoke in formal cadence.
“Lieutenant Mzinga. Request permission to bring Ensign Warrigal to the bridge
for consultation on the digest ordered by the captain.”

The quiet background murmur of the other crewmembers at
their consoles ceased abruptly.

The older officer regarded him gravely. Mzinga had never
joined in the joking about L-5, and had even quietly watched a game several
months back, before declining to participate.

“You sure about that, Lieutenant?”

Rom-Sanchez took a deep breath. Would his bars have time to
tarnish, or was he about to terminate his career? He glanced again at the
subscreen replaying the fatal attack on
Prabhu Shiva
. It didn’t matter.
Duty left him no choice.

“Yes, sir.”

“Permission granted.” One corner of Mzinga’s mouth twitched
slightly. “When you and she are finished, best you two take the report to the
captain in person. Petty Officer Dimones can take your console.”

“AyKay, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Well, now he was committed. Rom-Sanchez tapped up a comlink
to Warrigal, wondering if she’d thank
him
for this.

“...the frigate obviously had its fiveskip shut down,”
shouted Krajno. “You said yourself that’s the only way they could have managed
to show up back at Treymontaigne just seventeen minutes after a ruptor attack!
They were ready for it! They were bait!”

“Enough!” Ng snapped.

The single word cut through the angry voices in the plot
room. Even the orderly paused in the act of pouring coffee as Commanders Krajno
and Totokili sat back, radiating tension.

Middle-aged, grandmotherly Lieutenant Commander Navaz, the
armorer of the
Grozniy
, exchanged a pained glance with Nilotis.

Rifters with FTL communications?
Nilotis felt a
headache building: he’d gone through the anomalous actions in the tac-holo in
the center of the plot room repeatedly while the XO and the Head of Energetics
quarreled. It was the only explanation, and it made the Tenno impossible to
use. Worse yet were the strategic implications. With FTL comms, Rifter
reinforcements might even now be on the way to Treymontaigne. If so, they had
only four days to act before the first such might arrive.

Ng released the invisible hold by making an apologetic
gesture at the orderly that didn’t hide how exasperated she had to be feeling.
Nilotis was certainly feeling that, and half a dozen other emotions. The
orderly finally reached him, but even the smell of real coffee—ground while the
senior officers were still staring at that impossible holo—did not provide its
customary comfort.

“Commander Totokili, your objections are noted,” Ng said,
her tone conveying the calm of habitual self-discipline. Nilotis was willing to
wager that not one of the five thousand aboard was calm right now. “Unless you
can explain the action we witnessed without reference to superluminal
communication, that is the assumption we will be working on.”

Commander Krajno nodded in agreement. Now Nilotis was
certain that Ng had let the argument go on as long as she had in part just to
give Krajno an outlet for his emotions. There would be no time for authentic
grief over the death of his spouse, no time for the grief all of them felt at
the loss of the
Prabhu Shiva
, until the killers had been dealt with.

“AyKay, Captain.” Totokili stared at the tac-holo with a
sour look, ignoring the viewscreens on the walls that were displaying various
excerpts from the action. His jaw worked as if he were chewing on something
unpalatable, making the stiff brush of hair above each ear ripple like
caterpillars.

Accepting that their Rifter foe was armed with some
unprecedented ability to communicate faster than light without a fiveskip—some
sort of superluminal EM analog—was difficult for all of them, but especially
for one whose entire education and experience was grounded in the science of
Energetics.