The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III (31 page)

Spencer noted dully that he was too far gone to appreciate the irony. He wondered how worried he should be about that.

But it was nearly time for the council. He got up from his borrowed desk, moving carefully in zero G. He picked up the action report and glared at it. He flipped open the document and went over the summaries one last time. The young ensigns and officers who had prepared it had done their best and meant well, but that was no comfort. Couching the horrible truth in bland officialese did not make the realities easier to accept.

He felt his anger rise, and a strange, detached part of himself knew he was going to be all right. Anger was reasonable, constructive, healthy under the circumstances.

Far better focused rage than mind-numbing despair. The loss of Bethany and his descent into feel-good hell had burned away part of his capacity for joy. He had worried for a time that the loss of the
Duncan,
the overwhelming shock, had burned away something more, some other part of his soul.

He looked again at the report title.

Preliminary Findings

on the Loss of Pact Warship
Duncan

to Enemies Unknown

Unknown?
Spencer asked himself. No, that was simply sophistry, a mealy mouthed legalism.
Enemies Unknown
was the term used in such reports when no one dared admit that the real “enemy” was incompetence, when the real goal of the report was to hide the facts and evade punishment.

Spencer had no intention of avoiding responsibility. Besides, he knew this Enemy all too well to call it unknown. He had met it, face to face, in Jameson’s office.

Or had he? Did he truly know that Jameson’s helmet was the adversary here? Was it not far more likely that the helmet/creature was
itself
controlled, even as it in turn controlled Jameson?

Controlled by something larger, deadlier, more powerful—something aboard that damned asteroid Destin had found? Spencer pulled a pen from his pocket, scratched out the last word and inserted a replacement.

“Enemies Unseen.” Yes. That was far more accurate.

Spencer suddenly felt himself trembling. He grabbed for his chair, pulled himself into a seated position, clumsy in weightlessness.

Enemies Unseen.
It struck him that he had been battling that sort, and no other, since the day the High Secretary had sent the Kona Tatsu to snatch his bride away. All his enemies unseen. The far-distant General Merikur, himself a victim of political scheming. The invisible, insidious temptations of the Cernian’s pleasure palaces. The string-pulling schemers in the Guard, the Navy, and the KT who had put him in command of the
Duncan
to see what sort of fire he could draw away from their agent. The shapeless anger of the whole task force over Kerad and her debauches. The righteous and illegal fury of the mutineers. McCain’s murderers.

The deadly assaults of the autocops, the inexplicable attacks on Suss and Sisley and himself, when every machine in the city seemed to be trying to kill them, controlled by an unseen hand.

Then, at last, the destruction of the
Duncan
by a few blobs of silvery metal the size of his fingertip. Always, a fight against an enemy far away, against an opponent who would not reveal itself, who would not come out in the open for a battle on even ground. Always against the dark, the hidden, the insidious—the
unseen.

Not anymore. Not this time. This time they would force the Enemy out into the open. Where it could be seen.

Where it could be destroyed.

He got up again, more calm and confident than he had been in a long time, and left his borrowed office. The meeting was about to begin.

###

Suss looked about the assembled faces uneasily. By rights, Dostchem should have been standing before this group, but both Dostchem and Suss knew that naval officers were more likely to listen to a human KT operative than an alien technician. Besides, Suss knew that Dostchem was perfectly happy to avoid this duty.

“You have all seen the preliminary report on the loss of the
Duncan,”
she began. “That report glosses over several points, is understandably vague on several problems we haven’t quite figured out yet, and perhaps tries a bit too hard to say that it was no one’s fault that the cruiser died. I can tell the authors that the KT will get a much tougher report, and that the Navy brass back home will see
both
documents—and wonder about the differences. So you might want to rethink your version just a bit.”

There was some awkward shuffling of papers and whispers at the junior end of the table and Suss noticed Spencer’s steel-edged grin. “For all of that, we can at least take the report as a first step. It does relate what the parasites can do.

“The Capuchin Dostchem and myself, using information secured at the cost of more than one life, have put together a picture of what the parasites
are,
and where they come from.

“Regarding the parasites themselves, we learned something vitally important about them when Lieutenant Commander Chu activated the self-destruct device: We learned that the parasites can be destroyed. At the moment that fusion blast went off, every G-wave source on the
Duncan
vanished.

“Chief Wellingham and his crew detected the conjoining of the parasites aboard the
Duncan.
The
Duncan’s
parasites were apparently forming themselves into a new helmet-type creature. At the time it was destroyed, the new creature only had one outlying parasite. But, once again, that parasite
was not an independent creature. A
better analogy might be to think of it as a temporary hand, a pseudopod extruded from the main body of the beast for some purpose.

“Dostchem believes all the bits of a given helmet-creature/parasite are truly one—and all of them are hooked into this universe from some other continuum. Call the entire creature an
ensemble,
for want of a better word. The parasites are extremely massive creatures, with densities perhaps on the approximate order of neutron stars. They must counteract their own gravitic potential by propagating the gravity-waves we have all heard about. I have heard a number of objections, to the effect that using G-waves that way violates conservation of energy. True enough—unless you can pump energy back and forth across a dimensional barrier, for example dumping waste heat from this side into the other universe. However they do it, the fact remains that they do it.

“In any event, without the shielding G-waves, the parasites could not poke themselves into our universe without inflicting huge disruptions on their surroundings—and on themselves. Without the gravity-wave shield, they would literally suck in all the matter around them, at massive accelerations—with the same effect on the parasites as dropping rocks from twenty kilometers up would have on one of us.

“The
Duncan
ensemble did collapse in on itself. All the way. There was absolutely
no debris left behind
by that explosion. There are no further modulated G-waves being produced out there. But there is a single, incredibly powerful gravity
field
out there. And nothing else.”

Chief Wellingham swore out loud, using a few combinations the junior officers had never heard before. “Just a minute there, Miss. Are you telling me that the fusion explosion disrupted the parasites and they collapsed into a
black hole?”

“A small one,” Suss conceded. “Much smaller than current theories say should be possible. But we are tracking a singularity, a miniature black hole, moving on the
Duncan’s
last course.”

“Wait a second,” Wellingham objected. “You said they were all one interconnected creature, no matter how distant the components were. Does that mean that if we kill one parasite in an ensemble, that entire
ensemble
collapses?”

“No, it doesn’t—otherwise Daltgeld would be caving in on itself even now. Remember, the two parasites you captured were still aboard when the
Duncan
blew up. Those were the two found aboard the ship, and in McCain’s AID. They were still in isolation at the time the ship died. They never linked into the new ensemble that formed aboard the cruiser. That means they were still part of the
Jameson
helmet ensemble—and we are still picking up dozens or hundreds of G-wave sources on Daltgeld, all of them presumably part of
that
ensemble.”

There was a dead silence around the table, one that lasted a long time. “In other words,” Tallen Deyi said slowly, “if the creatures were
completely
interlinked, the planet would have fallen into a black hole by now.”

“But look, we’ve killed the thing. Isn’t that worth something? And we did it in space, where it didn’t threaten anyone,” another voice offered.

Suss looked at the speaker and recognized him as Ensign Peever, the
Banquo’s
assistant intelligence officer. No, wait, her
only
intel officer. His boss had been killed by the mutineers.

Good
God,
herself excluded, Peever was the senior surviving intel officer in the task force. Neither of the other destroyers had carried
any
intel staff.

“It was lucky we didn’t hit the parasites while we were planetside,” Peever was saying. “If we’d killed them there, the helmet would have dropped into itself and started sucking matter. Daltgeld would be collapsed down to the size of a grapefruit. Now the planet is safe.”

“No it isn’t,” Spencer said, his voice deadly cold. “Think about it, Ensign. We have scotched the snake, not killed it. There are still parasite creatures on the planet, and we cannot let this horror spread. Every one of them must be destroyed, at any cost. If we are forced to choose between Daltgeld on one side, and the entire Pact, and all the worlds beyond, on the other—”

He left the thought hanging.

Chapter Eighteen
Search

Spencer started talking again after a moment, his voice alarmingly calm. He was every bit the task force commander coolly laying out his orders to his command. “None of the improved sensors we have now can detect the helmet itself on the planet, which we should be able to do at this range. We can assume Jameson is headed back to the command asteroid where Destin found the helmet in the first place, wherever that is. Our ultimate objective therefore must be the asteroid this Captain Destin found. It seems extremely likely that there, we will be able to learn more about these things. It is likely that the things are using that place as a headquarters. Once we have learned enough, we will destroy them. I define ‘learning enough’ as being certain they cannot spread beyond this solar system. Suss, can we detect the command asteroid directly from its gravity-wave signature?”

Suss shook her head. “Not at this range. The asteroid belt is a toroid hundreds of millions of kilometers across—and we don’t really know for sure that the command asteroid is
in
the main body of the belt anyway.”

“But you’re able to monitor G-wave emissions back on Daltgeld, and we’re a pretty fair piece from it by now,” Ensign Peever objected.

Suss sighed. The kid had a big mouth, and he had the further annoying tendency to raise worthwhile issues. No doubt the same point had occurred to older officers about this table—and none of the oldsters had the nerve to look stupid by asking.

“We know where Daltgeld
is,”
Suss said gently. “We can focus our instruments directly at it. The command asteroid could be anywhere in the sky—and at a far greater range than the distance to Daltgeld.”

“But we can’t see the asteroid. That settles it, then,” Spencer said. “If we can’t spot that asteroid on our own, we have to find Destin’s ship, and hope there is data aboard that can lead us to the enemy. Peever, what have we got on Destin and his ship?”

The ensign’s eyes suddenly bugged out, and he seemed to lose his voice for a minute. “Um, ah, very little, Sir. What we have so far is based on your data from Mannerling’s computer terminal. We’ve been able to track his reported ship movements. He is master of the
Dancing Bear,
and at last report was aboard. I think we can assume that we will find him with the ship. There were normal tracking reports, navigation updates, and message traffic back and forth from the
Bear
until just about the moment we arrived in-system.”

Peever looked nervously around the table. “Just how far can I go with this, Sir? I mean, securitywise?”

“Speak openly. Everyone here is clear,” Spencer said.

Peever swallowed hard and launched into his report. “Let me start at the time the KT first discovered its agents vanishing, about four months ago. At that time, the
Dancing Bear
—Destin’s ship—had just put herself in parking orbit around Daltgeld. The helmets must have arrived on the planet then. The parasites must have gotten to work immediately, flushing out the KT operatives once they arrived on-planet. I would assume the parasites did that in hopes of keeping this star system isolated until they had consolidated themselves. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Once the
Bear
was in orbit, her auxiliary vehicle, the
Cub,
started shuttling back and forth between København Spaceport and the
Bear.
We can assume that the meeting between Destin and Jameson, as described by Jameson, took place during that time. Shortly thereafter, the
Cub
returned for the last time to the
Bear,
more than likely carrying a parasite.”

“Why do you assume that, laddie?” Wellingham demanded. “Why wouldn’t the helmet simply have left a parasite aboard when it left?”

“I don’t think the helmet was really functional until it arrived on-planet and got to Jameson. There’s no sign in the
Bear’s
log of machinery being taken over, or anything like that. And Jameson was last seen in public the day after the
Bear
arrived in orbit. He went into seclusion after that. Maybe the thing needs to be on someone’s head to work, and Destin didn’t put it on. Anyway, since it fits in with the way the enemy seems to do its work, we can assume that a parasite got aboard the
Bear
at some point. And, ah—as we are all aware, even one parasite can do a lot of damage.”