The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III (30 page)

In theory, there was now no physical way possible to keep the ship from exploding. She stood up, wearily amazed that she felt so little. Perhaps because she had so little faith in the theory, or so much in the parasite. No doubt it had long ago found its way into the destruct circuit and deactivated it. Pushing the button was an empty, meaningless charade. She could push it until doomsday and the ship would never blow.

But perhaps the charade would serve as a diversion. Alarms suddenly hooted and recorded voices warned whoever remained aboard of the imminent explosion. Chu felt, more than heard, two more pods blast away. Well, if the destruct system succeeded in convincing whatever crew remained to get the hell out, then it served some use. Still, it was all but certain that somewhere aboard men and women lay alive, injured or trapped by ruined equipment, unable to get to a pod.

And there was not a damn thing she could do about it.

Her heart full with loneliness, sorrow, and anger, she stood up and made her way down the emergency accessway, heading for the forward armory.

###

The construct had absorbed something of human ways. It felt like laughing when the destruct system was activated. The part of itself wrapped over Rozycki’s forehead tried, experimentally, to control her face directly, make her face smile and laugh. The attempt failed and instead the woman’s unconscious body let out a strangled cough.

But, like the sadism of a little boy trying to pull the wings off a fly, it was not success or failure that mattered, merely the pleasure of cruelty. The construct was not skilled yet, but already it could control a human directly. Yes, indeed, its forebear had downloaded much knowledge of humans.

How could these foolish creatures
—
what paltry few of them were left
—
even dream that such a crude device as that destruct system could threaten the construct?

Casually, almost leisurely, the construct guided the smaller part of itself nestled among the circuitry, examining the plans and wiring, tracing the links that controlled the supposedly independent system.

Simple. Utterly simple. With a reshunting of this system here, and a simultaneous overvoltage there, the system was overloaded, burned out. The magnetic bottle would never break open.

With a calm pleasure, the construct turned its attention back toward other matters. The jump system was novel to it, and would require careful examination. The control of a human, either by pleasure center manipulation or direct motor-nerve control, was also novel, and needed much study.

It turned its attention back to its work, reflecting on how incredible it was that the humans would attempt to destroy the ship with a system they knew the construct could control. It had a low opinion of human intelligence, but surely it would occur to them to use other means, some sort of manual device.

But if the humans had, how could the construct tell?

The construct, a creature shaped for the control of electronics, of minds, had but the haziest notion of physical, macroscopic reality. It could not easily envision anything outside its universe of electron gates and neurons. The construct perceived even the
Duncan
herself most hazily, not wholly appreciating it as more than a massive maze of wiring, controls, and power sources. It did not really think much about what lay beyond the massed linkages of gadgetry.

But, it suddenly realized, that left it with a massive blind spot. It had been assuming what it could sense was all there was of the ship, assumed that what it could not sense was not there. But it knew that was not true. It activated the main ship’s reference computer and compared what it “saw” of the ship against the ship’s plan stored in the computer.

With an emotion of cold terror
—
something else it had learned from humans
—
the construct discovered there were gaps. Dangerous gaps. Pieces of the ship were missing from the construct’s internal image of the ship. Most of the missing ship’s territory it could account for through recent damage or minor modifications never properly logged in. In those cases, knowing where to look was enough of a
clue. It found backup circuits, found sensing work-arounds.
It quickly filled the most of the missing territory.

Except for the two forward armories. Those had been cut out of the loop far too thoroughly for it to be an
accident. The humans had deliberately hidden those places.
Those places full of massive weapons.

It backtracked from the blocked-off areas, searching for the closest cameras. And spotted a human moving away
from one camera, heading straight for forward armory one.
In a desperate panic, it slammed shut every power door in the ship, trying to cut the human off from her goal.

But all the doors between the bridge and the armories were jammed open. How had it missed that? Could it send
a carry-all roller? No! There were rubble piles and wrecked
corridors blocking the way for the ship’s powered remotes.

Its human! Its captive human. She could get through, climb through the wreckage and get forward, carrying the construct along. Straining at the unaccustomed task, it forced Rozycki’s body to stand, to take a halting, lurching step toward the exit. It snapped open the hatch of the compartment
—
and remembered a millisecond too late that
humans need air, that the next compartment was in vacuum.

The construct, deeply linked into the nervous system it was trying to control, shared most unwillingly in the young woman’s death agony. It survived her death, but not for long.

###

Tarwa Chu stepped into the armory chamber, and regarded the deadly thing bolted to the test stand in the center of the room. The sleek cylinder of a ship-to-ship missile, an access cover opened up, wiring leading from the missile interior to a crude breadbox control arrangement. A sloppily painted red arrow on the control box pointed toward what Tarwa needed no help in finding. A pair of simple push buttons, each with a safety cover. She pushed back the covers and placed a thumb over each button.

She stood there, poised over her own doom, for a long moment, tears streaming down her face.

And then she plunged in the buttons.

In the skies of Daltgeld, a new star, terrible and bright, bloomed lovely in the night before it guttered down to darkness.

Chapter Seventeen
Council

The
Banquo
was in shock, in chaos, in turmoil. The corridors were crowded with stretcher-bound survivors of the
Duncan,
while the ambulatory wounded and uninjured seemed scarcely less immobilized. Their world, their home, all their possessions and everything that marked their lives—all that was gone for the
Duncan’s
men and women.

The
Banquo’s
crew was every bit as scared. Garbled rumor and scuttlebutt had reached the destroyer, and wild stories swept the ship. An infectious disease had wrecked the cruiser, one that was carried by the survivors, and it was only a matter of time before the
Banquo
caught the bug. Or else a saboteur had blown the
Duncan
—and likewise escaped to the
Banquo.
The Daltgelders had some secret weapon they couldn’t resist testing against a capital ship. Alternately, there was some corrosive agent in the waters of Daltgeld’s oceans. It had come through the hull once
Duncan
was in space and eaten the ship from the inside.

There was just enough of a tinge of reality behind each of the rumors to make them impossible to stop.

Commander Tallen Deyi struggled to get his ship in order. Captain Spencer was alone in the wardroom while the overcrowded ship that threatened to burst at the seams all around him.

Dostchem Horchane was glad that no one was paying any attention to her. One of the first things the Navy did, almost by reflex, in a crisis,
any
crisis, was to get aliens and civilians politely, but firmly, out of the way. In the midst of crowded chaos, she and Suss were summarily shown to an empty stateroom and told to stay there.

For once, Dostchem appreciated the Pact’s curt, overbearing way of dealing with non-humans. Bundling her off that way gave her the chance to study the raft of new information that had come from a bewildering array of sources. It would require much study to achieve a synthesis of it all.

But there was another reason Dostchem was glad to be out of the center of things. She was scared. Frightened not only of the parasites—though they were a bone-chilling terror all by themselves—she was scared by the humans around her.

Though Capuchins bear a close physical resemblance to the highly gregarious monkeys, apes, and hominids of Earth, socially they are quite different creatures. They are far closer in temperament to Terra’s moody, solitary carnivores—the tiger, the jaguar, the grizzly bear. In fact, Capuchins had evolved from solo hunters and a large part of a Capuchin’s traditional contempt for humans stemmed from annoyance at humanity’s overbearing, endless
socialness.

In every circumstance when a sensible creature would want to be alone, humans seemed to gather together. When they ate a meal, when they traveled, when they sought out schooling or settled into a household, when joy or tragedy struck—humans scuttled together, in larger or smaller groups, and thought it quite natural. They had no real sense of territory, no strong urge for privacy, no need for the patience and pleasures of solitary contemplation and study.

No ship with this many Capuchins aboard could ever launch without a dozen murders being committed the first day. Humans, on the other hand, actually seemed to
like
being together, not merely endure it. They truly liked each other’s company. It did not take the mating season, drowning male and female in sex and reproductive hormones, to draw a breeding pair together.

No matter that the Capuchins knew that their revulsion was irrational, that there were as many social adaptations as physical ones in Darwin’s universe. Human social patterns still disgusted them.

It was
galling
to a Capuchin’s brilliant, focused, hunter’s brain that these perverse, slapdash, slow-witted descendants of scavengers and root-chewers ruled the Pact.

Right now, however, Dostchem was prepared to forget her contempt in favor of outright alarm. She was surrounded by humans locked in fear. Her solitary, stalking carnivore’s mind knew the rational thing to do was to hide from the parasites, and then to develop a logical, methodical, prudent procedure for hunting them down.

Not the humans. Possessed of far less knowledge than Dostchem, the crew and officers of the
Banquo
seemed prepared, every one of them, to go charging out, full tilt, against this deadly peril, perfectly willing to make up the plan as they went along. No thought of hiding or secrecy. Even now, the three destroyers were maintaining course and heading along the
Duncan’s
last course—precisely where anyone would look for them first. The ship’s engines were shut down, and Spencer and Deyi had no destination or plan in mind. They were simply conserving fuel until they knew what they wanted to do. Fine economy move, Dostchem thought, if it results in betraying your ships to the opposition.

The crew’s surging anger, its inchoate thirst for revenge against an enemy unknown, with no regard for consequences, scared Dostchem silly. Everyone seemed to have a misinformed plan, and an absolute conviction that their leaders were either (a) crafty beyond belief and ready to destroy the menace because they had already come up with the same plan or (b) complete idiots who would doom them all, ignoring the councils of the wise because they hadn’t.

But every voice seemed to favor charging in with all guns blazing.

Suss, herself stunned and angered by the disaster, wasn’t very reassuring. It wasn’t much help for Dostchem to be told that chaotic and contradictory calls for action were merely a typical first panic response to catastrophe.

“There’s a council of war planned for tomorrow,” she said. “By then everyone will be settled down. Right now, they’re all a bit panicky. And for that matter, so am I.”

So, Dostchem thought,
it appears that, in an emergency, humans are guided by panic. Wonderful.

But there was one other thing, something that frightened her even more than irrational humans: herself. Her behavior over the past day had been nothing short of madness. What had possessed her to enter the StarMetal Building? The potential profit from repairs to a ship that now no longer existed? Her own pride and self-importance making her determined not to be outthought by a pack of baldies?

She should never have permitted Suss to drag her along back to the rescue—though Dostchem could not see what choice she might have had. No matter. The whole episode was one of madness. And now she was trapped on this ship, but what was she to do? What possible benefit could be gained from all this? She shivered and wrapped her tail around her body. She could keep those damn helmet creatures from getting out into the Pact.
That
ought to be motive and benefit to motivate anyone.

Dostchem forced herself to calmness and struggled to get back to her work. She had a lot of data to examine, from several sources: Spencer’s AID, Suss, Santu, Chief Wellingham’s research, and the remarkable results from her own instruments, especially when tracked against the reports on the
Dancing Bear
pulled out of the late Sisley Mannerling’s computer.

By the time the council of war was called, she wanted to have her information straight.

Straight enough for even these panicky, semi-intelligent scavenger apes to understand.

###

Captain Allison Spencer had once embarrassed Tallen Deyi, chiding his new executive officer for taking over the captain’s cabin aboard the
Duncan.
Now the
Duncan’s
captain’s cabin was lost, along with the rest of the ship, and Spencer was aboard the
Banquo,
with the roles reversed. Tallen Deyi had surrendered his rightful captain’s cabin to his superior officer and doubled up with his own XO.