Loralynn Kennakris 3: Asylum (20 page)

If the Doms did decide to get nosy and intercept her bird, that was okay with her—she wouldn’t be in it. That was why she’d had Baz dispatch the tender on that specific trajectory. First, if she failed to detect the fleet by the point of no return, she’d have the option of breaking off and going home—a failure. But that she didn’t see how it was possible to miss a footprint that big. At the ops briefing, Huron had told them to expect shunting that would distort and confuse the gravitic signatures, but that would be directed ahead and she’d be coming up from behind.

Once she had the Doms localized, she’d set her bird on an intercept course and shut down all but the passive sensors. The sensor suite could be programed with a decision tree to regulate when reports would be flashed to the tender, which would be skirting the edge of the fleet’s detection envelope. She’d figured in a nice safety margin there. Once the algorithm was satisfied it had resolved all the major targets, it would launch the drone—sooner, if it detected any craft approaching. That might give the game away, but no matter; they’d have accomplished their mission. Her part in all this was just to set everything up and make sure it was working. Then she’d do the simplest thing of all: step out.

It would be a long drift: twenty hours before she rendezvoused with the tender, twenty-two at the outside. That was pushing it, but not
too
hard. There would be errors in her estimates, of course, and they’d accumulate over time. Chances were good that when she arrived, she wouldn’t be able to close the tender using just suit thrusters. That’s why she’d asked Baz about the specific impulse generated by her sidearm. As a maneuvering device, it was crude, but her calculations showed that it would allow her to make the necessary course corrections during the endgame. Until then, there wouldn’t be anything for her to do, and she could use a nice long nap.

*     *     *

Two hundred and ninety-four minutes into chasing down the long vanished corvette’s trail, Kris was alerted to cloud of phase wakes, just above threshold. Locking onto them and running a swirling filter, she extracted a range and a mass estimate; pretty vague but, for her purposes, good enough. She sent a burst off to the tender, waited for confirmation it was received, and started her algorithms. The point of no return was far behind her, and now she was looking at a twenty-four drift, the not the twenty-two hour maximum she’d counted on.

Dammit
.

There was nothing for it, however—things would only get worse from here. Checking her figures one last time, she uploaded all the data to her xel and mated it to her suit avionics. Reverifying the upload and that her xel was accessible through her visor display, she engaged the autopilot.

The autopilot beeped and flashed up a message to acknowledge the handover. One by one, the bird’s systems took themselves offline. Unmating the suit umbilicals as the cockpit HUD blanked, she sat for a minute, breathing deliberately and watching the countdown timer in the upper-right corner of her visor. When it reached one minute, she cracked the canopy with the manual release.

At forty-five seconds, she levered open the canopy and swung out on the wing spar. Grasping the rim of the cockpit, she checked the countdown timer again. The digits reeled off as she watched with the greatest concentration. In the instant before the timer beeped over her helmet speakers and the sound actually registered in her mind, she let go.

Commodore Shariati faced her intent officers assembled in
Trafalgar’s
CIC. Now that they knew what they were up against, on which axis, adrenaline was running high. The hyperdrone from Kris’s fighter had arrived in the beginning of the afternoon watch, bearing a detailed breakdown of the Dom battle group that was better than anything the commodore, despite her seemingly cavalier manner, had dared hope for. It tallied two fleet carriers, two light carriers, a dozen cruisers (four heavy and eight light) and eighteen destroyers, behind a screen of three frigates and seven stealth corvettes. That was twice their strength in ships, but more critically, if the Doms’ strike groups were at their full complement, they’d bring four hundred twenty fighters into battle, against the one hundred thirty-four in her force. Their best estimate was that those four hundred twenty fighters would be in strike range at 0415 the day cycle after tomorrow.

So much for what the data told them. What it did
not
reveal was the fate of the four young pilots she’d sent out to collect it. None had yet returned. Nominally, they should have followed the drone by no more than seven hours, and it was well past that. But the data
did
show was it had been collected at close range: so close that a fighter probably could not have made it back to the tender, even if the pilot managed to escape. And that was all the answer they were likely to ever get.

She clearly recalled the look in Huron’s eyes as they discussed the mission—a look whose basis was better than she’d thought at the time—and she promised herself that if they lived through this, she'd spend a day reflecting on those four pilots, and most especially on a certain young female ensign who’d made it all possible. But right now what mattered was not wasting the gift she’d given them.

“Sonovia,” the commodore spoke in her clear, cutting voice, “please get me the maximum sustainable sortie rates assuming an op window of twenty-four hours. Deploy our recon assets as far forward as possible, in a two-tier search. I’m posting BATCRURON 9 to here.” She highlighted an outlying position, off the flank of the approaching Halith forces. BATCRURON 9 included
Artemisia
, Shariati’s own battlecruiser, the heavy cruisers
Formidable
and
Reliant
, the light cruisers
Osiris
,
Ares
,
Laconia
and
Agamemnon
, and their destroyer screen.

“Detach
Osiris
and
Minotaur
to here”—selecting a point on the Anju-Ri axis—“as if we had been reinforced and were planning a breakout on that line. Tell Captain Lazaroff she may be somewhat conspicuous in her actions, but she is on no account to risk either ship.” That left them only the light cruisers
Gryphon
and
Nemesis
, and the remaining destroyers, to support
Trafalgar
and
Concordia
.

Commander Harmon held back a frown as she felt her stomach tighten. “Ma’am, that gives us only the bare minimum for picket duty and recovery ops. We won’t be able to maintain an effective area-defense net.”

“I’m quite aware of that, Commander.”

“
Are
we planning a breakout on the Anju-Ri axis, ma’am?” Commander DeCano asked cautiously.

“As of now, no,” Shariati answered with equal care, “but you will plan for that eventuality.”

“Are we to deploy
all
our recon assets, ma’am?” Harmon asked.

“All except Commander Huron’s flight, Sonovia. And the commander himself is to remain on board—I wish that to be particularly well understood.”

“What contingencies are we to consider, ma’am?” asked Captain Bajorat.

“
Sauvé qui peut
, Dirk.
Sauvé qui peut
.”

“Very good, ma’am.” The captain, who was used to his CO’s eccentric sense of humor, still did not find that an especially comforting thought, whatever his cool, calm and collected tone implied.

“There you have it, people. Our work is cut out for us. Report back by midnight. Dirk, please notify the other commands and inform Captain RyKirt he may set Condition 2 Easy throughout the ship.”

Condition 2 Easy
meant that action stations were manned but ship is not fully secured, allowing personnel to move between spaces for head calls, to get coffee, or visit the gunrooms for a snack. The galley was still able to serve hot food, which was not a trivial consideration for people with a hard night ahead of them, and the promise of a much harder day tomorrow.

“Shall I tell them anything else, ma’am?” her chief of staff asked, his manner unchanged.

“You may tell them:
Iacta alea est
, Captain. That is all.”

*     *     *

In all the diminished task force, there were probably only a few dozen people who were conversant in Latin to any degree, and a bare handful that knew a word of French. Armorer’s Mate Second Class Luis Castillo was certainly not among them. So the commodore’s mild jest of having
The die is cast
announced over the all-hands broadcast system in the original Latin was not responsible for Castillo’s look of discomposure as he exited the H-deck ladder well, having skidded down five lift ladders from C-deck, where he’d been standing watch. His post had given him every opportunity to observe the officers coming and going from CIC and eavesdrop on snatches of their conversation, and despite his monoglotism, everything he’d heard during his watch left him with no doubt as to the true nature of what Shariati had said about
contingencies
, no matter which dead language she chose to express it in.

He was still breathing hard as he ducked through the hatch that led to the gunroom just outside the forward berthing area. As expected, it was busy with petty officers gathering up what they could for themselves and their teams to see them through the remainder of the watch. At a table near the back, he saw his crew-second, Senior Chief Petty Officer Gabrielle Wooten, sharing coffee and a sandwich with Machinist Katie Flowers. Wooten looked up as he squeezed through the crowd, noted the high color in the young mariner’s face and retrieved another sandwich from the dumbwaiter.

“Here, Castillo. Eat something—you look pale.”

Castillo took the sandwich automatically. “She’s gone and done it,” he said, low and hoarse, conscious of dozens of attentive ears. “Hoisted the goddamn black flag, I tell ya. Fucking jolly roger, all the way.”

“Now watch your mouth, sailor.” Wooten, who knew the commodore of old and knew well that almost no power of heaven or earth would keep her from going straight for the enemy’s jugular once her blood was up, poured the last of the coffee into Flower’s cup. “We got mixed company here. Now grab a box of donuts and get on down to your action station.”

Being alone
. Drifting through an infinitude with hard vacuum stretching away on every hand as far as time itself. There probably wasn’t so much as single organic molecule for a thousand klicks in any direction. What the fuck had she been thinking . . .

Once Trench had taken her onto the observation deck of
Harlot’s Ruse
. They were in null-gee, as usual, and he activated the omni-displays and suppressed the overhead, bulkheads and deck. It was an old slaver trick, intended to make new girls feel helpless and isolated by introducing them to the never-ending abyss, and maybe giving them a hint of what might be in store if they misbehaved. Generally it worked, provoking anything from profound unease to outright hysteria.

It made Kris laugh.

Whether Trench enjoyed the experience or could merely tolerate it for a few minutes while his property freaked out, Kris never knew. He never repeated it—their subsequent visits to O-deck where strictly conventional—so it seemed pretty likely he actually didn’t enjoy it much. But she did. At odd times, say if she could get away in the middle of grave watch, she’d go there and just float, communing with eternity and tenuous promise of freedom it seemed to hold.

Eternity met with on view screens was one thing. Staring it in the eye out here was another. When she let go of her fighter, her appointed rendezvous with the tender had been a mere number: 5,135,169 ±32 kilometers distant on this trajectory (two-sigma confidence), based on her estimate of how good her inputs were. She now knew they weren’t as good as she had thought. An error as small as not accounting for her offset from the fighter’s centerline when she let go mattered. Just how much, she’d learn very soon.

Her calculations showed that she’d be near enough to try to close the tender with suit thrusters if she could resolve the fore and aft running lights. Dead reckoning from her xel said that should happen in six minutes and she would reach the point of closest approach twenty-nine minutes, odd seconds later. But what really mattered was the last five minutes: at that range, she should be able to resolve all four running lights, and that would allow her to accurately guide herself in—
if
she was on the proper trajectory.

Of course, she wasn’t seeing her actual trajectory or the tender’s, but the mean plot of their respective error volumes. The only way she’d know if she actually on an intercept trajectory was if the tender’s bearing didn’t change. Bearing rate was everything: if it was two degrees per minute or less at the point she could resolve the fore and aft running lights, she had a good chance, but it
had
to be ten degrees per minute or less when she could resolve all four. That’s when the sidearm came in: the total impulse from emptying the clip should give her an extra sixty-nine meters per second leeway in delta V, allowing for reasonable errors . . .

Reasonable errors. She’d been happy with her estimates when she’d constructed the algorithm, even a little proud: ninety seconds to measure the bearing rate to within half a degree per second; 10 seconds to slew and aim, 240 arcseconds pointing accuracy for each shot at a chosen guide-star; 0.3 seconds average reaction time to fire . . .

But now, after a twenty-three-hour drift—the idea that she’d be able to sleep through most of it was sheer fantasy—to be able to aim within a small faction of a degree? Time her shots within three tenths of second? Her shoulders were cramping; her fingers had long ago started to feel thick and numb . . .

What
the fuck
was she thinking . . .

The xel beeped, giving her the 30-second warning she’d asked for and put a red circle on her visor around the bearing where the tender should be. She closed her eyes for a moment, breathed deep of the dregs of suit recycler’s remaining rancid air, opened them and tried to focus.

Yes, it was there. She could just make out the winking red and blue pinprick of light. The wave of relief made her dizzy.
Shit! Focus, goddammit!
Blinking, she zoomed the visor display to 13X magnification and aligned the reticule, then watched the countdown, waiting for the alert. It chimed and she zeroed the tick. Ninety seconds proceeded to crawl by at a glacial pace and the tiny point moved almost imperceptibly across the bearing rings. At a minute, it had moved over two degrees; when count ended, just under three and a half.

Not good. Maybe not fatally bad, but certainly not good. Kris entered the values into her xel. She had allowed a minute to input the bearing rate and angle and get back a guide star from her algorithm—another mistake; it took sixty-five seconds. Her xel highlighted the guide-star and she raised the gun, aimed and fired four shots at three-second intervals. The recoil felt gentle compared to what it would have been in a full gee, but the last one sent a spasm up her arms. She swore savagely at the pain as her xel computed the likely change in her trajectory and offered up new numbers. In three minutes and seventeen seconds, she’d do it all again.

Twenty-three minutes later, Kris was exhausted. She’d gotten through the last twenty minutes on pure adrenalin but it was failing now, leaving behind chills and a dangerous trembling in her extremities.

She’d also expended all but two rounds from her sidearm and seventy-five percent of her thruster capacity. That left her fifteen percent for her final approach maneuver and ten-percent reserve to match velocity when she got close.
If
she got close. The error volumes were shrinking and bearing rate was improving but the last three estimates had jumped around lot a more than she liked so there was still no way of knowing if it was enough. Another minute would tell her that . . .

The alarm sounded and she lined up the reticule on the tender and started her count. She could make out all four running lights now quite well at full magnification, which put the range on the near side of the estimates. The shorter range meant the upper limit on the maximum bearing rate would be higher; ten degrees per minute was nominal, but at the new estimated range, the value was closer to ten and a half.

The counter clicked through fifty seconds as the tender passed the 10-degree tick and her breath stilled. As the fifty-ninth second rolled over it touched twelve.
Twelve
degrees per minute. She dropped her reserve to five percent and ran a new estimate; dropped it to three percent and ran it again. Dropped it all the way to zero and assumed best case for everything just to make sure and . . .

I’m gonna die
.

The thought seeped up like a memory from a nightmare, slowly overtaking her consciousness. She felt it tingle in her cheeks, gather in her chest and roll down to the pit of her stomach—a startling feeling: empty, hollow, cold . . .

Far off, the receding lights of the tender continued to blink—callously, monotonously—rushing towards its own oblivion.

Oblivion, eternity
. . .

Thoughts leaking out to puddle in the vacancy inside her; a trickle at first—

Eternity
: the length of time required for everything that was physically possible to happen at least once, according to her Academy physics instructor. What was his name? It was a joke—had to be a joke—eternity, infinity—the universe was finite, wasn’t it? She wouldn’t
really
drift forever—drift around what? What was she orbiting right now? Not close to any primary . . . The three-body problem: unsolvable, chaotic . . . but on what timescale? Should be Keplerian for at least . . .

Then in a rush—

Why hadn’t she kissed Huron sooner? Or Baz? Good kid, Baz . . . So he was in love with her—stupid, not his fault though—
Shit
. . .
he’s gonna blame himself
. . . He’d get over it—he’d better . . . Good kid but too nice, not killer enough—gonna get him in trouble . . . Huron, his asymmetric smile, the memory of their lips in contact—bright, immediate, tactile—like Mariwen’s laugh and the way she hugged . . . the scent of fresh-baked bread—
how do I know that
? She’d never
had
fresh-baked bread. Mariwen’s perfume—Mariwen in the hospital . . .
oblivion
—Trench—
Stop! Fuckin’ stop!
Hypoxia—signs of hypoxia: headache, cramps, dizziness, nausea, euphoria—the first round of pressure-chamber tests at the Academy—Tanner giggling insanely as the atmosphere dropped towards thirty percent, Minx on the edge of a freak-out until Baz jammed an oxygen mask over her face—death by hypoxia: edema, spasms in the chest muscles, tongue swelling, seizures . . .

Or the gun. Two rounds left. Solids—standard-issue sidearms didn’t fire the light-armor piercing explosive-tipped ammo assault weapons used. But they’d go through the side of a flight helmet okay—through one side. Probably fragment on impact with the other side—pieces bouncing around in her skull while her brains boiled out the entry hole under a full atmosphere of pressure. And then she’d drift and drift, surrounded by an ever expanding cloud of the frozen clots of her own intelligence until—

“I FUCKING HATE YOU!” The gun came up and she fired her next-to-last round at the escaping tender as the scream echoed in her ears. The echo died and everything seemed to go with it: a great searing silent rush and the tears at last began to well and her mouth was so dry the air rasped her throat and—

Don’t cry. You’re gonna freeze and what if they find you someday?

Why the fuck do you care how they find you?

I don’t know I just do
. . .
I just do
. . .

One round left . . .

I can’t—I just can’t
. . .

Almost two hours of oxygen left . . .

Don’t pop the visor—that’ll really hurt
. . .

Two fuckin’ hours
. . .

She shook her head angrily and the tears flew and spattered against the inside of the helmet; tiny globules ricocheting back into her face, her eyes. She blinked and blinked again and caught a glimpse of the tender’s running lights and they were . . . they were—upside down?

They
couldn’t
be upside down.
She
couldn’t be upside down either. What the hell?

I’m wrong
. . .
that’s the way they always were—must be—

And, as if in answer, the lights blinked on and off, with utmost deliberation, three times.

Four minutes later, the tender eased up alongside her with the wing hatches open and suited figure inside, faintly lit by the cockpit instruments. Basmartin’s voice came through her comm, shocking after so long with nothing to listen to but her own heartbeat. “Y’know, ma’am, this is shitty place to try to catch a ride.”

“Baz! What
the hell
are you doing here?” The shout made the helmet speaker crackle and he waved.

“Well, if you’re waiting for someone else, I guess I’ll just—”

“NO!” Her rational mind knew he was kidding, but it had a very tenuous hold right now. She realized how hard she was breathing and tried to stop. “I . . . I’m sorry. Sorry. Just—please—”

“Come aboard, Kris.” He popped the straps and pushed out of his seat on a tether. His outstretched glove caught her wrist and he pulled her inboard with a gentle tug. The hatches closed and sealed and she felt the umbilicals mate as she settled into the co-pilot’s chair.

“How much air you got left?” Baz asked has he engaged thrusters to turn them around.

She gripped the seat hard, feeding on the solidity. “An hour forty-five. Maybe two.”

“I’ll top you off. This thing’s kinda light on the environmentals, but we’ll be back in plenty of time.”

“Thanks.” She felt the acceleration press down on her as he fired the main engines and popped up the nav-display. His gloved fingers tapped rapidly across the console and their course appeared. “First hop in twenty. You okay?”

“Yeah.” Her fingers was starting to ache and she relaxed her grip, sliding her hands toward her lap. “Wh—what about Tanner?”

“Got ‘im in the back—sleepin’. Y’know how he is.” He must’ve set his beacon on a delay timer and gone into hyper-sleep, Kris thought in some free-floating portion of her mind.

“Diego?”—with that same inner unconnectedness.

“No joy.”

The syllables, with their deliberate tonelessness, seem to fall between them. She hadn’t known Diego; she
had
known he was dead. So why did it make her gut lurch like that? Why was she
surprised
it did?

“So . . . how’d you do it?”

“Do what?” Baz leaned over and tweaked the sensor controls. “Didn’t notice any bad guys hereabouts, did ya?”

“How would I know if there were— But—I mean . . . How’d you . . . find me?”

“Well, it would have been a hell of a lot easier if you’d activated your suit beacon. There”—he pointed at the main ESM console—“keep an eye on that, will ya? It’d be bad if anyone sneaks up on us. This thing handles like a pig.”

“Where’s your fighter?”

“Ditched it. All that extra mass made things too dicey—not knowing how far I’d have to go exactly. They can fish for it if they want.”

“So how did you—”

“You had to be somewhere on this line—I just worked the problem backwards from what you told me—plotted out the volume where you’d have any chance of making intercept. Of course, it was about an hour and a half wide since I didn’t know how far you were gonna push things. I was afraid I’d sail right by, but I was hoping if you didn’t engage your beacon, I’d still be able to pick up your suit emissions.”

“So that was it?”

“Nope. Couldn’t get anything. Damn suits hardly bleed.”

“Then . . .”

“Your sidearm. When you fire those things, it produces a transient.”

“A transient?”

“Yeah. Wasn’t sure that’s what it was at first. Then I saw another some minutes later, figured it out and got a bearing. The third one allowed me to get a rough localization, but it was that last one that finally gave me a fix.”

“The last one . . .”

“Yep. Glad you didn’t give up on that idea.”

A violent shudder ran through Kris’s torso and she clenched her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering. “Yeah,” she said after a minute. “Me too.”