"No, I don't know where she is," Sir Arthur Keita told the hospital security man on his com screen. "If I did, I wouldn't be calling you."
"But, Sir Arthur, there's no record of her even leaving her room, and none of the outside security people we've talked to so far saw a thing. So unless you can give me some idea where she might've--"
The door hissed open. Inspector Ben Belkassem strode into Keita's office, waving his left hand imperatively and drawing his right forefinger across his throat, and Keita cut the security man off without ceremony.
"May I assume, Sir Arthur, that Captain DeVries has decamped?" Despite his abrupt entry, the Justice man's voice was as courteous as ever, but a strange little bubble of delight lurked within it, and Keita frowned.
"I trust that's not common knowledge. If the local police hear we've lost a deranged drop commando we may start getting 'shoot on sight' orders."
"Somehow I don't think that's going to be a problem for Captain DeVries," Ben Belkassem murmured, and Keita snorted.
"If her augmentation's been reactivated somehow--and, judging by what happened to Corporal Feinstein, it has--it's a lot more likely to get one of their people killed. But why do you seem so cheerful, Inspector?"
"Cheerful? No, Sir Arthur, I just think it's too late for the local cops to worry about her. I suggest you screen Jefferson. They've had an, ah, incident over there."
Keita stared at the inspector, then paled and began punching buttons. A harried-looking Marine major answered his call on the fourth ring.
"Where's Colonel Tigh?" Keita snapped the instant the screen lit.
"I'm sorry, sir, but I can't give out that information." The major sounded courteous but harassed and reached to cut the connection, then stopped with a puzzled expression as he saw Keita's raised hand and furious scowl.
"D'you know who I am, Major?" The major took a second look, eyes widening a bit as the green uniform registered, but shook his head.
"I'm afraid it doesn't matter, sir. We're in the midst of a Class One security alert, and--"
"Major, you listen to me closely. I am Sir Arthur Keita, Brigadier, Imperial Cadre, and one of my people may be involved in your alert." The major swallowed visibly at the name, and Ben Belkassem smiled. Sir Arthur hadn't even raised his voice, but the inspector had wondered what he sounded like when he decided to bite someone's head off. "Now you get Colonel Tigh, Major," Keita continued in that same, flat voice, "and you do it now."
"Yessir!"
The screen blanked, then relit almost instantly with the face of Colonel Arturo Tigh. The colonel looked just as worried as the major, but he hid it better and managed to produce a tight smile.
"I'm always honored to hear from you, Sir Arthur, but I'm afraid--"
"I'm sorry to disturb you, Colonel, but I need to know what's happening out there."
"We don't know, sir. We-- Is this a secure channel?" Keita nodded, and the colonel shrugged. "We don't know what's going on. We had a major security breach two hours ago, and things have been going crazy ever since."
"Security breach?" Keita's eyes narrowed. "What kind of breach?"
"Somebody hijacked a forward recon skimmer--at least we assume it was hijacked, though we haven't been able to turn up a missing vehicle report on it yet--and crashed through Gate Twelve. The automatics gave it a transponder clearance, but then the gate sentries--" The colonel looked like a man eating green persimmons. "Sir Arthur, they say they never saw it. Every alert on the base went off when it crossed the sensor threshold, but ten different people, all of them good, reliable types, say they never saw a thing." He paused, as if awaiting Keita's snort of disbelief, but the brigadier only grunted and nodded for him to continue.
"Well, the inner sensor net started tracking immediately, and the duty officer scrambled a pair of sting ships while the ready skimmers went in pursuit, but that was one hell of a pilot. He never brought his own weapons on line, but we've got fires all over the western ring access route--all from misses from the pursuit force, as far as I can tell--and then the skimmer went straight up like a missile and the stingers nailed it with HVW."
"The pilot?" Keita demanded harshly, and the colonel shrugged.
"We assumed he was still aboard, but now I'm not so sure. I mean, no one saw him abandon the vehicle, so he ought to've been aboard, but then this other thing came up, and I just can't believe it's a coincidence."
"What other thing, Colonel?"
"Something's gone haywire with one of our ships, sir. One of our ships, hell! We've got a brand new alpha synth boosting for the outer system at max without clearance or orders."
"Who's on board?" Keita's strained face was suddenly white.
"That's just it," Tigh said almost desperately. "As far as we know, no one's on board. It wasn't even due to impress until ten hundred hours!"
"Vishnu!" Keita whispered. He wrenched his eyes away from the screen to stare at Ben Belkassem, and the inspector shrugged. The brigadier turned back to the colonel. "Have you tried to raise it?"
"Of course. We're trying right now, but we're getting damn-all back."
Keita closed his eyes in pain, then straightened his shoulders.
"Colonel," he said very quietly, "I'm afraid you're going to have to destroy that ship."
"Are you crazy?!" Tigh blurted, then swallowed. "Sir," he went on in a more controlled voice, "we're talking about an alpha synth. That ship costs thirty billion credits. I can't--I mean, no one groundside can authorize--"
"I can," Keita grated, and the colonel's face froze as he realized just who, and what, he was speaking to.
"Sir, I'll still have to give the port admiral a reason."
"Very well. Tell him I have reason to believe his ship has been hijacked by Captain Alicia DeVries, Imperial Cadre, for purposes unknown."
"A Cadrewoman?" Tigh stared at Keita. "I don't-- Sir, I don't even know if that's possible! Was she checked out on cyber synth?"
"No, and it doesn't matter. Captain DeVries has been hospitalized for observation since the Mathison's World Raid. She's demonstrated . . . unstable and delusionary behavior," Keita's hands clenched out of the screen pickup's field, as if his words cost him physical pain, but his voice held level, "and unknown but highly--I repeat, Colonel, highly--unusual and unpredictable capabilities no one can account for. We have evidence that she's already reactivated her own augmentation without hardware support and despite three levels of security lock-outs, not to mention her apparent ability to hijack the skimmer to which you referred. Given that, I believe it's entirely possible she's somehow penetrated your security and managed to steal that ship, and if she has--" The brigadier paused and steeled himself.
"If she has, she must be considered deranged and highly dangerous."
"Dear God." Tigh was even whiter than Keita had been. "The only way she could even move it is through the alpha synth. That means she must've made impression, and if she's crazy--!"
His voice had risen steadily as the awful possibility registered, and now he spun away from the screen and started shouting for the port admiral.
<I believe they've made up their minds about us,> the AI remarked, and Alicia nodded tightly. The tick still trembled in her blood--she didn't dare waste time vomiting just now--and every excruciating second was an eternity. No one had seemed to notice for perhaps a minute, and the first attempt to do anything about it had been limited to efforts to access the ship's remotes.
Even if the AI hadn't been prepared to ignore them, they would have been fruitless. Tisiphone had wiped the telemetry programming early on in her struggle with the computer, but Groundside hadn't realized that. They'd gone on trying to access with ever increasing desperation for five full minutes, during which the alpha synth's velocity had climbed to over a hundred KPS. Then all access attempts had stopped and silence had reigned for several minutes. By the time the first effort to raise Alicia by name came in, the alpha synth was up to over two hundred KPS--and a visibly-shrinking Soissons lay over fifty thousand kilometers astern.
Alicia had listened to the com without response, perfectly willing to let them dither while she watched through her sensors, wrapped in fascination and a sort of manic delight, and she and her--allies? symbiotes? delusions?--perpetrated the greatest single-handed theft in the history of mankind. But the voices on the other end of the com link were changing as Groundside got itself together, and now a new, crisp speaker was on the line.
"Captain DeVries, this is Port Admiral Marat. I order you to decelerate and heave to immediately. If you refuse to comply, you will leave me no choice but to consider you a hostile vessel. Respond at once."
<They sound a bit upset,> the AI observed. <Ha! Look at that.>
A mental finger guided Alicia's attention to the blue fireflies of a dozen cruiser's suddenly activated Fasset drives in Soissons's orbit and data on their capabilities slotted into her brain. It was an incredible sensation, completely different from an assault shuttle's instrumentation.
<How bad is it?>
<Those hulks?> The AI sniffed, and Alicia bit her lip at the scathing tone. It was like listening to herself in what Tannis called "insufferably confident mode," and she felt a sudden stab of sympathy for her friend. <I've got a ten-minute head start, and they can't come within twelve percent of my field strength, even this close to a planet.>
<What about their weapons?>
<They're some threat,> the AI admitted, <but I'm not too worried. My data on their fire control isn't complete, but I know enough to screw their accuracy to hell. They'll have quite a while to shoot--maximum beam range is about fifteen light-seconds, and half-charge energy torps have about five more LS of reach--but they're going to be lousy shots.>
<Great, but I think you left something out--like missiles.>
<So? Cruisers are too small to mount SLAMs. Their Hauptman coil missiles have an effective range of about ten light-minutes, but the best they can reach before burn-out is point-six-cee. Then they go ballistic, and there's no way one cruiser flotilla's gonna saturate my defenses.>
<You would appear to value yourself highly, Machine.> Tisiphone sounded so sour Alicia almost suspected she'd like to see the ship destroyed just to put the AI in its place, but she continued levelly, <Still, the capabilities you describe accord well with what I have learned of your kind.>
<Thanks for the compliment, even if it did sound like pulling teeth.>
<How long will they be able to engage us?> Alicia asked hastily.
<Well, we've got a quarter LS lead on them now, and we'll go on opening it at forty-three KPS squared till we hit Soissons's Powell limit and I can really start opening up. They'll be point-seven-oh-three LS back when we hit the curb, which gives us ten minutes at thirteen hundred gravities--call it an edge of twelve-point-five KPS squared--while they're still poking along at thirty-one-point-seven Gs, and we'll still better than double their acceleration even after they cross the curb. That means we'll open the range to eight-point-two light-seconds before they get up to half our acceleration and draw entirely out of beam range in another thirteen-point-three minutes. They'll lose energy torpedo range three-point-nine minutes after that. Call the beam envelope twenty-two minutes from now and the torpedo envelope twenty-six, but their missiles'll have the range for two more hours.>
<What about the fixed defenses? They've got SLAMs, and we've got to get past both rings on this course.>
<Phooey on the fixed defenses!> the AI snorted, and Alicia winced.
<I hope you're not being over-confident,> she suggested in her most tactful mental tone, tracing their projected course through the ship's sensors. The AI wasn't even trying to avoid the orbital forts--it was headed straight towards them, directly across the system's ecliptic. The inner ring, the true core of Soisson's defenses, orbited the planet at three hundred thousand kilometers, right on the edge of Soissons's Powell limit. The far sparser ring of outer forts were placed halfway to the star's Powell limit, forty-two light-minutes from the primary--and SLAMs had a maximum effective range of thirty-seven light-minutes. At their projected rate of acceleration, they'd reach the outer works in two and a half hours, and both fortress rings could engage them the whole way. Even after they passed the outermost fort, it could hold them under fire for several hours. That was a lot of engagement time, and Alicia would vastly have preferred to boost perpendicular to Franconia's ecliptic and open the range as quickly as possible.
<You just think that's a better idea, Alley,> the AI informed her, following her thoughts with almost frightening ease. <If I try that, I expose our stern to the fire of every unit in the inner ring while we're still moving slowly, and the drive mass is out in front, remember? It doesn't offer any protection to fire from astern. This course uses the planet to block a good chunk of the inner defenses and interposes the drive against fire from the outer ring while we close. Besides, I'd have to decelerate, reorient, and accelerate all over again to put us on the right wormhole vector for our destination, and Admiral Gomez is out here somewhere on maneuvers. I don't know where, but I'd rather not spend fourteen additional hours mucking around sublight and give her time to work out an interception.>
<Are you sure about that? She's got less firepower than the forts.>
<Sure, but her dreadnoughts all have cyber synths and the legs to stay in range of us for a long time--maybe as long as ten or twelve hours if they hit their interception solution just right. I don't have enough data on her fire control to guarantee I could outsmart that many AIs long enough to pull away from her, but I've got all the specs on the forts' fire control. They're overdue to refit with new generation cyber synths, too, which means their present AIs are a lot dumber than a dreadnought's. They won't even see us.>
<And even if they hit us,> Tisiphone observed, <they will find us most difficult to injure, will they not, Machine?>
<I'm getting kinda tired of that "Machine" business, but, yeah. They don't have anything smaller than a SLAM that could stop me, Alley. Trust me.>
<I don't have much choice. But-->
<Whups! Pardon me, people--and I use the term lightly for one of you--but I'm going to be a little busy for the next few minutes.>
The pursuing cruisers had spread out to bring their batteries to bear past the blind spots created by their own Fasset drives, and the first fire spat after the fleeing alpha synth. The percentage of hits should have been high at such absurdly low range, but the attackers were hopelessly outclassed. Nothing smaller than a battle-cruiser mounted a cyber synth, and even a cyber synth AI would have been out of its league against an alpha synth. Alicia's other half could play evasion games a mere synth link couldn't even imagine, far less emulate, and its battle screen was incomparably more powerful than anything else its size.
Its other defenses were on the same scale, and it deployed decoys while jammers hashed the cruisers' fire control sensors. Lasers and particle beams splattered all about them, but less than two percent scored hits, and the ship's screen shrugged them aside contemptuously.
Energy torpedoes followed the beams, packets of plasma scorching in at near light-speed, and the range was low enough the attackers could overload the normal parameters of their torpedoes' electro-magnetic "envelopes," more than doubling their nominal effect. Not even the AI had time to track weapons moving at that speed, but it could detect the peaking power emissions just before they launched, and unlike missiles, they were direct fire weapons, with no ability to home or evade. The alpha synth's defenses were designed to handle such attacks from capital ships; cruisers simply didn't mount the generators for more than a very few launchers each, and stern-mounted autocannon spat out brief, precise bursts as each torpedo blossomed. It didn't take much of a solid object to rupture the skin of an energy torpedo traveling at ninety-eight percent of light-speed, and the alpha synth's ever mounting velocity left the resultant explosions harmlessly astern.
Missiles were another story.
Every attempt to adapt the Hauptman effect to manned vessels had come up against two insurmountable difficulties: an active Hauptman coil poured out a torrent of radiation instantly fatal to all known forms of life, and unlike the Fasset drive, it played fair with Newton. Despite their prodigious rates of acceleration, Fasset drive ships were, in effect, in a perpetual state of free-fall "into" their black holes, and while artificial gravity could produce a comfortable sense of up and down aboard a normal starship, no counter-grav system yet had been able to cope with the thirty-thousand-plus gravities' acceleration of the Hauptman effect.
But warheads cared little for radiation or acceleration, and now Hauptman-effect weapons came tearing in pursuit. They needed six seconds to burn out their coils and reach maximum velocity, but that took almost two light-seconds, and the present range was far less than that. Which meant they came in much more slowly . . . but that their drives were still capable of evasive and homing maneuvers as they attacked.
Proximity-fused counter missiles sped to meet them, and Alicia watched in awe as space burned behind her. The counter missiles were far smaller than their attackers, and the alpha synth carried an enormous number of them, but its magazines were far from unlimited. Yet not a single warhead got through, for no one aboard it--with the possible exception of Tisiphone--had any interest in counter-attacking. That meant all of its energy weapons were available for point defense, and no missile had the onboard ECM to evade an alpha synth AI in full cry. There were far too few of them to saturate its defenses, and nothing short of a saturation attack could break them.
Captain Morales glared at his display as his cruiser led the pursuit. HMS Implacable and her sisters were losing ground steadily, but their target was in ideal range . . . and they were accomplishing exactly nothing.
The entire operation was insane. No one could steal an alpha synth--only a trained alpha synth pilot could even get aboard one! But someone had stolen this one, and precisely how Admiral Marat expected a cruiser flotilla to stop it passed Morales's understanding. The forts might have a chance, but his ships didn't. The damned thing was laughing at them!
Another useless missile salvo vanished far short of target, and the captain swore under his breath.
"Somebody get my bloody darts!" he snarled. "Maybe they can stop it!"
"You're kidding me!" Vice Admiral Horth told her com screen.
"The hell I am." There was just over a one-second transmission delay each way between Soissons Orbit One and Jefferson Field, and Admiral Marat's expression was less humorous even than the weapons fire in Horth's plot when he replied two seconds later. "We've got a rogue drop commando in an alpha synth, Becky, and she's boosting out of here like a bat out of hell."
"Jesus," Horth muttered, and looked up as Governor General Treadwell hurried into PriCon. Given the governor's lifelong dislike for planets, he preferred to make his home aboard the HQ fortress. Now he leaned forward into the field of Horth's pickup and stabbed Marat with a glower that boded ill for the port admiral's future.
"And just what," he asked coldly, "is going on here?"
<I knew this was a formidable vessel, Little One, but it surpasses even my expectations. What might Odysseus have accomplished with its like?>
<With me in his corner, he'd've owned the damned planet,> the AI put in during an interval between salvos, and the Fury laughed silently.
<Indeed, Little One, I believe the machine speaks truth. It would seem we chose well.>
<Yeah? Well, next time let's discuss things before you come all over larcenous, okay?>
<Very well.> Tisiphone's mental voice was uncharacteristically chastened, though Alicia had little hope it would last. <But-->
<Hang on, Alley,> the AI interrupted. <The forts just came on-line.>
"Very well, Admiral Marat. I believe I now understand the situation." Governor Treadwell turned to Horth and frowned as the alpha synth crossed the inner fortress ring and continued to accelerate. "Do you have firing lock?"
"I'm afraid not, sir." Horth looked as unhappy as she felt. "We seem to be even more affected by its jammers than the cruisers are."
"Indeed?" Treadwell's frown was distinctly displeased, but Marat came to his colleague's defense via the com link.
"I'm afraid it won't get any better, Governor. The alpha synth has full specs on your fire control in its files, and it's designed to defeat any sensor system it can read. It's only going to get worse as the range opens."
"I see." Treadwell tapped his fingers gently together. "We shall have to have a little talk about just what goes into such units' memories in future, Admiral Marat. In the meantime, we can't simply let it go--certainly not with an insane woman at its controls. Admiral Horth, engage with SLAMs."
"It'll be blind fire, sir," Horth protested, wincing at the thought of the expense. Without lock, she'd have to fire virtually at random, and SLAMs required direct hits. Trying to smother a half-seen target as small as the alpha synth would use up prodigious numbers of multi-million-credit weapons.
"Understood. I'll authorize the expense."
"Very well, sir." Horth nodded to her fire control officer.
"Engage," she said.
Alicia bit her lip as the fixed fortifications opened fire at last and hordes of red-ringed, malignant blue sparks shrieked after them. The forts were designed to stop ten million-tonne superdreadnoughts, and the volume of fire was inconceivable.
The Supra-Light Accelerated Missile, or SLAM, was the Empire's ultimate long-range weapon. Close in concept to the drones starships used for FTL messages by starships, a SLAM consisted solely of a small Fasset drive and its power source. The weapon had to be half the size of an assault shuttle to squeeze them in, but they made it, in effect, a targeted black hole, and very little known to man had a hope of stopping one. A starship's interposed Fasset drive mass would take one out, though stories about what happened when the ship's drive was even minimally out of tune were enough to curl one's hair, and not even a SLAM could get through the final defense of a capital ship's Orchovski-Kurushu-Milne shield. Unfortunately, a Fasset drive wouldn't work inside an OKM shield, and no weapon could shoot out past one, either. Both of which points were moot in this case, since nothing smaller than a battleship could spare the mass for shield generators.
The only good thing was that SLAMs weren't seeking weapons--mostly. No homing systems could see around their black holes, and despite the fact that their acceleration was little more than half that of the Hauptman effect, their speed and range quickly took them out of guidance range of their firers. A very near near-miss could still "suck" its way into a hit by gravitational attraction, which was why they weren't used when enemies were intermingled, but what the AI's jammers were doing to the forts' targeting systems meant the chance of any one of them scoring a hit was infinitestimal.
Only they were firing a lot of them. Alicia's thought was a tiny mental whisper as the outer works began to range upon her, and she squirmed down in her couch. It was like driving a skimmer into a snowstorm--surely not all of them could miss.
<On the contrary,> AI told her. <They're just throwing good money after bad, Alley. Watch.>
The AI changed its generator settings, swinging the drive's black hole through a cone-shaped volume ahead of them and dropping its side shields, trading a bit of its speed advantage over the cruisers to turn the drive field into a huge broom that swept space clear before them. Nor did it refocus the field in any predictable fashion. The drive's gravity well fluctuated--its strength shifting in abrupt, impossible to predict increments sufficient to deprive any tracking station of a constant acceleration value--and its corkscrewing mass "wagged" the ship astern like a dog's tail, turning it into an even more impossible target. A cyber synth might have been able to duplicate that maneuver and still hold to its desired base course, though it would have been far less efficient; nothing else could.
The drive was no shield against SLAMs coming in from astern or the side, but the ship's unpredictable "swerves" gave the coup de grace to the forts' fire control. SLAM after SLAM slashed harmlessly past or vanished against the drive field, and Alicia felt herself relaxing despite the nerve-racking tension of the continuous attack.
<Bets on how many they're willing to waste?> the AI asked brightly.
"Governor, we're wasting our time." Treadwell shot Admiral Horth a venemous glance, and she shrugged. "If you wish, I will of course continue, but we've already fired twenty percent of our total SLAM armament. That's four months' production, and there's no sign we've even come close to a hit."
Treadwell's jaw clenched and he started to reply sharply, then shook himself and relaxed with a sigh.
"You're right," he admitted, and glared at the fleeing dot. He didn't have a single ship, not even a corvette, in position to intercept it, and nothing he had could kill it. He turned away from the plot with forced calm.
"Lord Jurawski will be displeased enough when I inform him we've . . . mislaid an alpha synth without my adding that I've stripped Franconia of its defenses. Abort engagement, Admiral Horth."
"Yes, sir." Horth managed to keep the relief out of her voice, but Treadwell heard its absence, and his eyes glittered with bitter amusement.
"And after that, Admiral, you and I and Admiral Marat--and, of course, my dear friend Sir Arthur--will sit down to discuss precisely how this fiasco came to occur. I'm sure--" the governor showed his teeth in what might charitably have been called a smile "--the final report will be fascinating."
Sir Arthur Keita slumped in his chair, watching a repeater of Jefferson Field's gravitic plot on his com screen. His eyes ached, and he hadn't moved in almost seven hours, yet he couldn't look away.
The stolen ship had passed the outer forts four and a half hours ago. Freed of the star's inhibition, it had gone to full power at last; now it was just under three light-hours from the system primary, traveling at over .98 C. He watched in real-time as the alpha synth ship raced ahead under stupendous acceleration, increasing its already enormous velocity by more than twenty-two kilometers per second with every second.
Eight and a half seconds later, the ship hit the critical threshold of ninety-nine percent of light-speed and vanished in the kaleidoscope flash of wormhole transition. It disappeared into its own private universe, no longer part of Einstein's orderly existence as it sprang to an effective velocity of over five hundred times light-speed . . . and continued to accelerate.
The gravitic scanners could still track it, but not on a display as small as the one he was watching, and he moved at last, reaching out to switch off the screen. Just for a moment, he looked like the old, old man he was as he rubbed his eyes, wondering anew what he might have done differently to avert this insanity and the catastrophe certain to follow in its wake.
Tannis Cateau stood beside him, face drawn and eyes bright with unshed tears, and neither of them looked over their shoulders to see Inspector Ferhat Ben Belkassem throw an ironic salute to the blank-faced screen . . . and smile.