Unstable Prototypes (65 page)

"Silo, dear, you really ought to consider
sprinkling a few profanities into your language. You'll find them
therapeutic."

"Oh, I'm tempted, mister..." she growled.
"You realize that this never would have happened if you'd just
gotten Claymore out of jail instead of me."

"Locked in an ammo crate with Claymore? No
thank
you."

"Seriously, Garotte, why get me instead of
him? The man plots and plans, that's his whole thing. He's just as
good with small weapons, which is pretty much all we've been using.
All things being equal, he's a better choice. Why choose me
instead?"

"Your sparkling-"

"If you make some dumb quip about my looks or
personality, you're coming out of this ammo case with a limp."

"... speaking voice?"

"Quit ducking the question. Do you have an
answer or don't you?"

Garotte looked aside, eyes wandering
slightly.

"Well?"

"... Claymore. Did I ever tell you how he and
I started working together?"

"I think you've told me six times, and they
were never the same."

"Well, here's a seventh, and it happens to be
the truth."

"Oh, well that will be nice."

"There was a splinter state. The name doesn't
matter, it only existed for about eight months. A group of Teekers
on some planet that was being particularly resistant to
terraforming decided that all of the hard work they put into
getting their settlement off the ground wasn't worth giving up.
This was about... probably nine years ago. It was one of my first
independent field missions. The problem was that they couldn't
clear out the lingering radiation. It was low level, and the folks
who'd been working there all their lives didn't seem to realize
that trying to raise a family in a place like that was a pretty
good way to have children with too many fingers and not enough
kidneys. The TKUR government didn't want what was sure to be a
diseased and withering populous on their hands, but the settlement
was a fairly successful trading post with a bustling chemical
industry and a very stubborn population. Basically, they brought me
in to help make sure that things failed and the folks went packing
before a generation of genetic freaks was born.

"I got paired up with an Orionian mercenary
group that had been hired to do some sabotage. They'd work the
infrastructure, I'd work the economy. Nothing deadly, just enough
to tip the scales and scare people off. One of the members of the
crew came up with some fairly innovative ideas to speed the
collapse. All things considered, we ended up getting the job done
in a few weeks, rather than the few months we'd assumed. The two of
us decided that we complemented each other well, so he spun off
from his group and we went into business for ourselves. A year or
so passed, and it became clear that we had a gap in our skill set.
We needed a demo expert."

"And that was me."

"Yes indeed. I finagled my way onto one of
your missions as a liaison. Watched you for a bit, found what it
would take to... liberate you."

"You did that... on purpose..." she
rumbled.

"Yes. I manipulated you. It is what I do.
I've had an awful lot of training and an awful lot of practice. I'm
quite skilled. Then we started working together, and it became
clear to me fairly quickly that you didn't belong with the rest of
us. You did fine work, a consummate professional, but the rest of
us were a bunch of malcontents. Misfits. I was black ops. Claymore
went rogue. Karter is a sociopath. We all were heading for a sturdy
prison or an early grave from the start. You never would have if
not for me. I got you locked up."

Silo began to shake her head and opened her
mouth to speak.

"Say what you want about you not having to go
along and it being just as much your fault as mine because you gave
into temptation, but we both know that I was always the one
exposing you to that temptation. That's why it was you I sprung
from prison instead of Claymore. Because you were the only one who
didn't deserve to be there. I'd actually been trying to break
myself out for some time. I couldn't stop thinking about you
rotting away in that prison. It turns out, while I can pull just
about anything off if you give me time to prepare, I'm more or less
worthless without my contacts. Then Lex showed up with that furry
little computer and I had my chance to get on the outside and get
you out. I had to do it. It was my way of trying to make it up to
you, or at least to say I'm sorry."

"... And now we're stuck in an equipment case
in a crippled space station surrounded by renegade soldiers," Silo
pointed out.

"I've never been very good at apologies," he
said with a weak grin.

#

Now half a station away, Lex managed to find
the so-called "yo-yo coil." It looked like a metallic bowling ball
with a notch cut out around the center which had been filled with
coiled wire. It was easily as heavy as the piece of sporting
equipment it resembled, and didn't appear to have anything
resembling controls or instructions associated.

"Okay, Ma, I've got the... thing. How,
exactly is this supposed to help me?" Lex asked.

"I will explain on the way. Please utilize
the highlighted route to access the nearest airlock. The SOB is
waiting outside," the AI answered.

Lex set off, becoming increasingly aware of
why you seldom see people doing any vigorous workouts in sealed
space suits. They, by definition, do not breathe. At this point his
clothes had the texture of a damp washcloth, and the chafing was
getting bad enough that millions of lives hanging in the balance
were just barely enough to distract him from it. The oxygen supply
was handy, though.

"As previously established, the most
effective way to deal with the CME Activators is low velocity blunt
force to the heat shielding on the tip. The coil can be used to
deliver it. It couples with tractor beams. In order to destroy the
missiles, you will need to match velocity and use the coil as a
flail," Ma explained.

"That doesn't sound too hard," Lex said,
finding his way to the small, single occupant air lock that
probably would have led to an escape pod if this station was being
run by anyone who was interested enough in health and safety to
make sure there was a full complement of them.

"Karter has entered the default route for the
CME Activators into a console, and I have transferred it to your
nav computer. Your Carpinelli field generator has been modified to
permit near-light velocities. Activate navigational pre-set 113
when you successfully deactivate a missile and your ship will jump
to the next," she further explained.

"Right."

"Please try to minimize maneuvering while at
near-light speed. There will be extreme stresses on your ship which
are greatly in excess of standard specification," Ma said. "And be
aware that, if you do not succeed in destroying a CME Activator
with your first attempt, automated defenses will trigger and fire
randomly."

"Wait... so I can't move around too much, but
things will be shooting at me?"

"Correct. Also, you will have approximately
four minutes to disable all six CME Activators."

"Four minutes! You said it would be fifty
minutes!"

"The modified Carpinelli field will not
protect you from the effects of time dilation. At 99.5% of light
speed, time will pass at approximately 10 times the speed for you,
relative to external phenomena. Forty minutes for us will be four
minutes for you."

"Man... I really hate the laws of physics
sometimes..." Lex muttered as he exited to the station and
maneuvered to the waiting SOB.

"They do complicate matters," Ma conceded. "I
have attempted to modify your sensors to function at near-light
speeds, but you will likely be required to target manually.
Exposing even a few square centimeters of the tip of the warhead
will be sufficient to prevent their proper activation. Do only what
is necessary."

"Wouldn't have it any other way," Lex said.
He climbed into the cockpit of his trusty ship and pressurized.
Popping open his suit's helmet, he spat out the now flavorless gum
from his previous flight and replaced it with three fresh sticks
from the stash in the cockpit. He then targeted the tractor beam at
the coil and grabbed on, giving a few practice swings to get a feel
for it. "Okay... Let's do it."

The commands were punched into the computer
and the SOB leaped into action. It began like a normal FTL jump.
The view out the window flared up through blue and out of
visibility, but almost instantly it ticked back down... most of the
way. The sun was a gradually approaching, bright blue dot, and what
little he could see of other stars seemed oddly distorted and on
the blue side of the spectrum as well. He would have investigated
this in more detail, but some of the other effects of this specific
speed were considerably more distracting.

First of all, the inertial inhibitor seemed
to be rather unhappy with him. It hadn't outright failed, or else
he probably would have been reduced to a vague red tint on the
ship's interior that would have been labeled "human remains?" by
investigators. It certainly wasn't working correctly, though. There
was an odd sort of pressure bearing down on him, like he was
walking along the bottom of the ocean in a poorly designed pressure
suit. It was also shoving him fairly forcefully into his seat, and
seemed to amplify side to side motion. It was disorienting to the
extreme, giving the overall feeling that his brain and internal
organs were sloshing around when he moved. He genuinely hoped it
merely
felt
like that, at least. His entire control panel
was flashing with warnings and errors, and at least six audio
alarms were fighting for his attention, but he tuned them out. As
far as he was concerned, a star ship's warning system was the "boy
who cried wolf" of the technology world.

He managed to wrestle his mind back onto the
task at hand. Whether it was the way physics worked, or something
Ma had done, the only thing in his field of view that seemed to be
the right color and undistorted was the CMEA, though it was
exceedingly difficult to make out. It looked to be about a hundred
meters ahead, and its flat gray metal didn't exactly catch the
light well, and the engine didn't appear to be active at all,
beyond the occasional burst and stutter. Lex eased his own engines
up a bit and nudged his ship aside. The maneuver was sluggish, and
accompanied by a rumbling creak that gave him very little
confidence regarding his ship's structural integrity.

"Tha-a-a-at's not a good noise," he said
nervously.

While he did his best to pull up along side
the missile with as few course corrections as possible, his mind,
as minds tend to do, ran itself in circles trying to answer
questions that were better left ignored. It dredged up facts and
lessons from classes that he'd mostly slept through in college and
tried to apply them to the current situation. He seemed to remember
something about things moving at the speed of light being
infinitely massive, and he knew that he was moving at 99.5% of the
speed of light, so that meant he must weigh... 99.5% of infinity.
While that would admittedly explain the ship's poor handling, it
didn't make a whole lot of sense. Finally he was lined up with the
missile, which despite claims of autonomy, didn't seem to know he
was there. He tapped the controls for the tractor beam, pulling
back the coil and then thrusting it forward. His aim was off, the
coil glancing off of the missile just behind the black tiles. It
wasn't enough to break any of them, but it
was
enough to get
the weapon's attention.

Panels along the side popped open and fired
vaguely forward, nowhere near Lex. After traveling a short distance
forward, though, they suddenly dropped in speed, launching back
toward ship and missile alike. In the case of the missile, they
splashed weakly against its briefly activated shield. Lex expected
them to do the same to his own shield, until he noticed about an
eighth of a second before impact that one of those irritating
warning lights was informing him of a complete defensive shield
malfunction. He heaved the ship out of the way, prompting a chorus
of creaks and one particularly unnerving ping. One shot grazed
along the belly of the ship, but when no new warnings joined the
argument the others were having, he went back to work. The ship was
lined up for a second swing the instant the guns had retracted back
into the device. This time the coil hit its target, easily cracking
the protective tiles and sending them tumbling off in two neat
halves to reveal a smooth, pointed metallic nose that wouldn't last
two seconds once it got up close and personal to the star. By the
time the guns had reappeared, Lex had tapped the command to leap to
the next missile.

"That wasn't so bad, and it only took," Lex
began, glancing at the clock. "
Two minutes!?
Oh man. Gotta
pick up the pace."

The world faded back in again, the star a
much larger ball of blue light. He completely ignored the creaking
complaints of his ship now, trusting his loyal ship to hold
together, and muscled himself over to the missile. A hastily aimed
attack went wide, but he managed to drag the coil back across the
tip of the missile on its return, grinding away a tile.

"Good enough," he said, tapping for the next
missile.

The third missile came and went with the same
speed, as did the fourth. With each jump forward to catch up to the
next the star became brighter, the engine rattled a bit more, and
the ship's complaints grew more urgent. He was gaining time,
though. With forty-five seconds left, he had two missiles to go. It
was beginning to look as though he just might manage this crazy
mission. Naturally, the universe heard his hopeful thoughts, and
saw fit to throw a wrench at him.