Hunter Legacy 11: Home Is Where the Hero Is (19 page)

Back in my office, I demanded Thirteen show
himself. I'd done a lot of thinking on the way back, and practically choked on
lunch.

"You needed me for something?"

"Yes. I want to see the trigger event
for letting loose the Darkness. One said we did it. I want to see it."

"How do you know it's already
happened?"

"I don’t know for sure. All the same,
I want to see it."

"I doubt she'll show you."

"Let her tell me that."

One appeared as I thought she might. If
things were as they were claimed, she'd be watching everything closely,
especially me.

"No need," she said. "I've
been waiting for this particular penny to drop. So Admiral, you think you
know?"

"You tell me."

"Give me one word to convince me
you're ready."

"Battleship."

Thirteen looked confused.

"You are indeed ready."

She waved a hand, and an image appeared on
the wall. BigMother down jumped into the New Hope system, with Prometheus
docked to her front. A Battleship fired on her, and then jumped out. The image
followed the Battleship. It collided with the huge asteroid on the other side,
bouncing off with some obvious damage, but continuing on in system above the
plane of the asteroid field. The image sped up to save us time and boredom, as
the ship moved towards the next jump point. Then it froze.

One looked at me.

"What do you think happened at this
point?"

I thought back. Twenty-twenty hindsight is
a wonderful thing.

"They disabled their ship ID."

"Correct. Why?"

"They hoped we'd think they'd been
destroyed by an asteroid and so we wouldn't come after them?"

"Correct again."

The image moved forward again at an
accelerated pace, and the ship jumped again. We followed it across the Famine
system, and into Pestilence. Something changed, and the image froze again. One
looked at me.

"Fuck!"

"Probably a fair comment, if
crude."

"I don’t understand what I'm looking
at," said Thirteen.

"He does," said One, indicating
me.

"They brought the special shielding
online. The new version which Magnus developed, and they took from her ship when
they dismantled it, before we arrived there."

"Correct again."

The image moved rapidly across the
Pestilence system, and jumped into Death.

And it ended.

"What happened then?" I demanded.

"I can't show you that," said
One. "There are places where even my avatar cannot go. The system you call
Death is one such. Very few beings can survive there, and it includes
constructs such as our avatars are. To find out what happened next, we will
need to call someone else here."

She vanished. And reappeared moments later
with a small dark withered looking man, with a long white beard, who had the
look and feel of the Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime about him. He wasn’t just
old. Even the word ancient didn’t do him justice.

"This is Death," said One.
"Or at least he is the pulsar's avatar. His name is a fairly large number,
which would be pointless to use. Just call him Death."

"Can you show us what happened to the
Battleship in your system?" I asked him.

"I can. But it won't tell you
much."

He waved to the wall, and the image
continued, showing us the ship crossing the system, giving the pulsar a lot of
distance. Sped up as it was, we could still see the shields as they slowly
deteriorated. But before they failed, the ship jumped out.

One thanked Death, and he vanished.

"That’s what happened to the
Battleship."

"What happened to it next?"

"FORBIDDEN!" boomed the voice of
Kali, seemingly echoing around the room.

"Why?" I demanded.

"You are not ready to know more,"
answered One.

"Why not?"

I was getting angry now.

"Any more would violate the rules
about knowing anything to do with your own future," said Thirteen quietly.

"Fuck that," I responded.
"Throw me a bone will you? How am I supposed to fix things when I don’t
know how they got broken?"

"You do the best you can with what you
do know."

I had to make a serious effort not to hit
her. I could feel myself losing it again. The inner caveman was warring with my
spiritual side.

"Do you understand?" she went on.

"Yes."

And I did. There was only one scenario
which fit. The Darkness was somewhere on the other side of Death, and whatever
they were, they lacked the shielding to come through that system. The
Battleship had taken what they needed to them. I had to assume this was
unwittingly, but who knew? I turned on Thirteen.

"Did you know?"

He looked sheepish, giving me my answer.

"Not immediately. When the Battleship
jumped into War, I was curious and followed it. By the time it jumped into
Death, where I couldn’t go without your ship to protect me, I'd guessed. I knew
nothing about the special shielding though. As far as I knew, they all died on
the other side like Prometheus' crew."

"And you didn’t think to tell
me?"

"I couldn’t."

"You couldn't?" I yelled at him.
"You knew. We could have gone back after it and destroyed it, and stopped
this whole Darkness thing before it began."

"Ah. No."

I rounded on One.

"What do you mean no?"

"I mean no. Yes you could have
destroyed that ship. But it wouldn’t have solved the problem."

"Why not?" I interrupted her.

"Magnus and her people had the designs
for the shielding. Within a year, they would have sent another ship. It would
have crossed Death, and jumped through to the other side like the Battleship
did, with the same result. Even if you had blockaded the system, someone would
have run it eventually, and succeeded in going through. But in all likelihood,
you wouldn’t have blockaded the system until too late, and not known you'd
already missed."

I stared at her, trying not to believe her.

"And besides," she went on,
"in all the versions of these events, while humans were the trigger more
often than not, it wasn’t always the case. Regardless, someone triggers the
Darkness, and human space is affected immediately. Always until now, resulting
in the extinction of your species, and every form of life you know about."

I sighed heavily.

"Isn't there something we can do to
stop it?"

"Nothing. This timeline must proceed
as it is."

"But we could have used more
time."

"Time is not important. Only life is
important."

"And you think we have enough time?"

"We will see."

This time I did hit her.

I called Aline out of her training session
at boot camp, and she spent the next hour massaging me on our bed. While she
eased the tension out of me, I pondered it now being our bed. She'd become
quite good at massage, and knew exactly where I needed it and how. Of course,
she wanted to know what had set me back so badly, but for now at least, I'd
decided there was no point in anyone knowing what the trigger event was. Things
were bad enough without people seizing on it as a mistake, and wanking away on
the issue to such an extent it interfered with what needed doing.

The following hour was lost to
reciprocating, but had little to do with formal massage. We were in the shower
after, when the invitation to dinner at the Australia Militia Officer's Mess arrived.
I countered with a meeting immediately with Walter, and the heads of the weapon
development teams, in the conference facilities in the Hunter tower.

Aline went back to her training schedule.
Angel was nowhere to be found, and Jane informed me she was at a playdate with
the other station cats in Cat Zone.

The next two hours was intensive. It was
mainly for the development team heads, but I was delegating supervision of them
to Walter. I hadn't asked him, but it was obvious it was fine with him as soon
as I started talking. I outlined the situations we needed counters for.

All we really knew was that something was
coming, sufficient to turn empty space into black. Now this might seem silly,
since space is black, but it really isn’t. Space is alive in colour, depending
on where you are, and the direction you look. Each nebulae is unique. Each sun
breaks up the black of the void.

We had no idea what was coming. I started
them thinking across the whole spectrum. I had them think as the Captain of a
ship, facing what was coming at them. If the threat was fifty thousand missiles
all coming at once, we needed a response which didn’t end with the ship
destroyed. If it was fifty thousand small ships, we needed another response. If
it was one hundred really huge ships, we needed something else. At the moment,
any of these scenarios would end with toast, or more likely, burnt crumbs.

Space combat games had always had some sort
of torpedo designed to kill really big, really well protected ships. There were
also huge area affecting missiles, where anything in the detonation range would
be destroyed or damaged. We didn’t have either. We'd never had anything big
enough, or in numbers enough, to warrant needing such killer torpedo or
missiles. Now we did. At the very least, we needed a torpedo which could
destroy BigMother with a single hit. And I was talking about something much,
much, bigger.

There was fiction out there where ships
fired tens of thousands of small missiles all at once. So far, we could fire
thousands at once in one hundred batches. But the point was, if someone did,
how could we prevent them killing us through sheer numbers? Or sheer speed? Or
impact damage we could not actually conceive of now?

The possibilities were endless. And we
needed to cover all of them. At the end of the meeting, all eyes in the room
were glazed over, but I saw some glimmers of ideas. We did have the specs now
for the faster and harder hitting missiles we'd encountered in the Gaia system.
We also had examples of how to do non-ship launcher systems.

Walter and I left them to light fires under
their teams, and we headed to the Officer's club.

My father was waiting there for us. We
updated him on the progress of the meeting, and we kept talking tactics and
strategy until late into the evening. One of us would throw out a problem, and
the others would come up with a counter, or tear apart the problem into smaller
problems.

It gave me an idea. Once back in my office,
I opened a new vid.

"Greetings," I said. "Nothing
new to report. But I have a suggestion for everyone. I'd like each of you to
think up the worst possible scenario you think we could face, and outline it to
everyone. Each of us would then respond to it, with anything which comes to
mind. The more possibilities we think of which could confront us, the more
counters we can come up with. By all means bring in trusted juniors. By all
means tell us why something won't happen as it was proposed. But try and
counter it anyway. We need ideas, we need people working on countering all the
bad things which might happen, and we need it all as soon as possible."

I sucked in a breath. And stopped the vid for
a moment.

"Jane, find me a bit of vid. Third
original Matrix if I recall rightly. The machines break into Zion. I want the
section where what comes through totally overwhelms the defense."

"Found it."

It popped up on a side screen. It was
exactly what I wanted. I restarted the vid.

"Let me start. I'm including a vid
from a very old bit of entertainment. But it’s a perfect representation of one
of our problems. The analogy is a water pipe, full and flowing rapidly,
suddenly sliced open so the water flows out freely. How do we stop every last
drop from coming out of the pipe?"

"We can have a fleet at a jump point,
and fire everything we have at what comes through, but watch this vid of it
being done. The defense fails because of volume and diminishing returns as
casualties mount. My question is, how can we handle this? And not just when it
happens, but for as long as possible after. At the moment, I don’t believe we
can. An enemy in sufficient numbers would quickly overwhelm our largest fleet.
Think black across a system. Either the ships are huge, or the numbers are
huge. Maybe both. How do we bottle up a jump point?"

"I don’t have an answer for my
question, but I have people thinking along these lines. Now is the time for
technical and tactical genius to come among us. All thoughts are welcome. Sorry
if I just ruined your day. Misery needs to be shared."

I grinned at them, but there wasn’t any
warmth in it, and they would know that.

I had one last thought.

"Murphy's Law tells us to expect the
worst possible thing, at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way. We
need to know what all of them might be, and have plans and tech in place to
counter them. We don’t have much time. Hunter out."

I sent it off, and pinged George to meet me
on Gunbus.

The thing I hadn't said was one of the
corollaries. Even if you thought of all the possible ways things could go
wrong, and countered them, something new would promptly happen. Murphy, whoever
he was, must have been an excessively depressing person to have been around.