Ruler of Naught (19 page)

Ng started at a sudden crunching noise nearby. She stared at
the blood dripping unnoticed from Commander Krajno’s hand, clenched around the
ruins of one of his pod’s arms. His face, seen in profile, was calm, only a
ridge of muscle around his mouth betraying his emotions.

Ng found her voice. “General quarters. Engineering, teslas
to threat-level three, rig engines for max-tac maneuvers. Fire Control, charge
skipmissile, ready all ruptors. SigInt, pop that tacponder.”

A flare of light pinpointed it on the tactical plot as she
shifted momentarily into eyes-on mode; a glyph indicated less than twenty
seconds until its returning squirt reached them.

“Alerts on multiple widecasts, no link found.” Ammant’s
voice was flat with strain, his beautiful rosewood complexion blanched to the
shade of old cheese. “Captain, you’d better see this.”

At Ng’s nod, he fumbled at his console. A thin, mewling
shriek filled the bridge, overlaid with the raucous laughter of a mob and
broken by transmission losses that the enhancers couldn’t eliminate. The sound
clenched at her throat, but worse was the image. Two seconds was all she
endured before she slammed down a hand and cut it off.

“Rifters, in the Archonic Enclave,” Ammant continued, his
voice thin as he continued to watch on his console, the shriek still faintly
audible to the bridge at large. “It’s the Archon.” He choked. “O Telos—” He touched
his console with one shaking hand and then bent swiveled his pod away and was
rackingly ill.

Ng’s breath caught as the fiveskip burred momentarily.
“Skip-pulse, Captain,” Wychyrski said, snapping her head back from a horrified
glance at Ammant. SigInt’s voice was tight, but under control as she chanted, “One
light-minute out. ID processing, signature was corvette-class.”

Moments later the same skip pulse echoed from SigInt. Tenno
updates rippled across the screens.

“Signature matches
Noisy Girl
, last reported as part
of Eichelly’s fleet,” finished Wychyrski.

Now they know we’re here.

“Navigation, as soon as SigInt relays the squirt from that
tacponder, take us in to one light-second. Communications, on emergence scan
for life-signs, full noetic enhancement.” That would normally be SigInt’s
function, but Ammant, now recovering, needed distraction.

The hoarse summons of the klaxon had seemed to breathe life
into the bridge, but Ng could see the rigidity of tension in the movements of
the crew. She tabbed her console and signaled the Environmental officer to bias
the tianqi toward stress relief and cut the subsonics. They needed no
additional cues to key them up.

The hatch hissed open, and a medic moved to Krajno’s pod.

The klaxon fell silent. The atmosphere of rage seemed to
thicken as the seconds dragged on. The horror slid out of sight as Navigation
brought the ship around for the next skip. Then the communications console
bleeped.

”Tacponder responding... monitoring was engaged.” Ensign Wychyrski’s
fingers tapped nervously at the keypads. There was a faint squeal from her console
as the discriminators shifted into search mode, then the fiveskip engaged with
a brief subsonic burp. After that, silence.

The Tenno overlaid on the main viewscreen told Ng almost
instantly what SigInt reported in bridge cadence, rounding off the numbers, but
she knew that the crew needed the distraction of duty.
And what will I
distract myself with?

“Tacponder recorded four skip-pulses over a period of about
a thirty seconds, destroyer and frigate. Then a fairly large EM burst and
particle shower at about minus 31.6 hours. At that point the nav beacon ceased
radiating and there were two more skip-pulses, followed by just one 11.7
minutes later. Then a skip pulse and interrogation at about minus thirty-point-eight
hours. 10.7 minutes after that, another skip pulse, then another a minute later
followed by a gravitational disturbance consonant with ruptor-tractor
activity. Ten seconds after that a skip-pulse, followed by skip noise—most
likely a skipmissile—then a very large burst of EM and gravitational radiation,
followed by a particle shower. Seventeen minutes later, two more skip-pulses,
nearly simultaneous. Finally, a skip pulse at minus 30.6 hours.”

“Tactical?” Taken by themselves, each of the events was easy
enough to interpret in the context of a beacon-bashing response, but they
didn’t add up.

Rom-Sanchez was staring at the blank screen. Then he shook
his head. “Doesn’t make any sense. We’ve got two Rifter ships, but it was the
frigate that took up station in the k-zone after the destroyer blasted the nav
beacon. Judging from the timing of the interrogation, the
Shiva
responded less than twenty minutes after the signal stopped at Treymontaigne. SOP
would have been watching from a light hour out—that last pulse. He did a quick
re-check of the target’s position from a light minute out, following up with a tractor
attack, confirming that the target was a frigate, and then—”

He stopped as the screen flickered and the disintegrating
hulk of the
Prabhu Shiva
sprang into full clarity. At this distance the
resolution was on the order of centimeters. The image expanded, giving Ng the
dizzying feeling that she was falling into the hellish pit of energy that
burned at the heart of the shattered battlecruiser. The broken edges of the
hull were strangely smooth: there was no spalling, no twisted petals of hull
alloy. That was the unmistakable signature of the impact of something moving so
fast that no material could propagate a shock wave.

“Continue, Lieutenant,” said Ng. The bridge crew needed more
time to recover.
So do I.

“Ten seconds after
Prabhu Shiva
grabbed the frigate,
the destroyer returned and fired a skipmissile. The
Prabu Shiva
blew
up.” He shook his head, his voice dropping out of report cadence. “Why weren’t
the shields up? How did the destroyer find
Shiva
so quickly?”

It was impossible that Harimoto would have left his shields
down. No captain in the Navy would have done that, not even one of the
Aerenarch’s silver-polishers. The phrase brought recognition that she was in
danger of losing her emotional balance.

Then a memory bubbled up.
There’s something wrong with
that skipmissile impact.
Wychyrski’s voice in her mind blended with
SigInt’s real-time report. “Debris analysis consonant with skipmissile impact.”

There was a pause, long only in her perception, before
Ensign Ammant spoke, his voice rigidly controlled. “Noetic scan negative. No
survivors.”

“Navigation, take us ten light minutes down and inward.”

This was not a typical Rifter incursion. That widecast would
not have reached them had the planetary shield still been up, and the invaders
were already down on the planet.

Ng damped down the swirl of speculation that threatened to
overwhelm her. Nothing made any sense, so the first priority was more
information.

She turned to Krajno. “Commander, prepare to deploy a VSA,
with whatever resources it will take to see what happened here, and afterwards
the initial Rifter attack on Treymontaigne. Relay the proper coordinates to
Navigation.”

“Captain!” Krajno’s voice was raw. “At least part of the Rifter
force is downside. If we follow up immediately we can take them out. We still
have the advantage. Let’s use it.”

That’s exactly what that transmission was designed to
provoke.

With her peripheral vision Ng noted the focus of the entire
bridge, but she kept her gaze on Commander Krajno. “Harimoto no doubt thought
he, too, had the advantage, Commander Krajno.” She saw her formality strike
home. “Kindly execute your orders. You may post a formal objection in the log
if you so desire.”

Krajno gave his head a slight shake: Ng knew he was back in
control of himself.

“It’s less than 33 hours since that action,” she continued,
“and the Rifters have already taken the planet. I want to know how before we go
in all ruptors blazing.” She raised her voice slightly to a more formal
cadence. “I assure you,” she added, as much for her XO as for the bridge crew,
“we will not leave this system without dealing with Eichelly.”

The crew was busy at their tasks. Ng hesitated, ready to
replace Ammant, but he’d pulled himself together, his shoulder blades working
the back of his uniform tunic as he rapidly scanned for more coms. Pleased with
his mettle, she thought,
I’ll have to keep them all busy, not just Perthes.

But her XO was well taken care of now: deploying a virtual
sensor array capable of resolving useful details at a distance of nearly
one-and-a-half light-days would involve some or all of the
Grozniy
’s
corvettes, each linked to the ship via laser to create a sensor array hundreds
of kilometers across. The proper size of such an array was a trade-off between
resolution and signal-to-noise ratio, and although they’d drilled the evolution
twice during their out-octant patrol, it hadn’t been for an event this far in
the past. Perthes would have to push the crew—and himself—hard now, for every
minute that passed before deployment would cost them another light-minute of
distance from the action, reducing further the detail they would be able to
see. Just the sort of task that Krajno needed right now.

“Communications.” When Ammant looked up, she said, “When we
skip to VSA distance, shift your compute priority to discrimination of what
you’ve recorded up to that point, until we shift focus to Treymontaigne.” The
ensign’s sculpted cheekbones flooded with color. He was still obviously
regretting his lapse as he bent over his console.

“SigInt,” she said, “at Wolakota you reported something
strange about the skipmissile impact we witnessed. I’d like to see your report
now.”

Too little to go on, so far
, Ng thought, and winced
at the memory of the Archon’s torment.
There’s nothing we can do for him.
She felt she at least owed it to him to view more of that record. But not now.
First
we watch the death of
Prabhu Shiva
and plan our response.
One thing
was certain: when they faced Eichelly in the inner system, there would be no
mercy.

“Lieutenant.” Rom-Sanchez looked up sharply, the puppy
utterly gone. “I want every bit of tactical information we can squeeze out of
that array. Consult with Commander Krajno and make sure it’s set to grab
whatever you need.”

The rear hatch opened as the Marine guard admitted a swabbie
with a mop, reminding Ng of one more responsibility. One of the first lessons
of command was that the truth was easier to deal with than rumor. She brought
her finger down decisively on the ship-comm, and the traditional twitter of the
pipes filled the air, alerting every station in the ninety-two cubic kilometers
of the
Grozniy
and carrying her voice to every one of the five thousand crew
aboard.

”This is the captain...”

o0o

Less than two hours later, Krajno reported, “Deployment
complete.” His voice was flat, his eyes red-rimmed. “Twelve Raven-class
corvettes with 150-meter arrays, in a one-thousand-kilometer virtual array.” He
paused. “Laser links established, tractors engaged. Stabilization will take
about a minute.”

Ng calculated briefly. That would give them nearly
fifty-meter optical resolution, and even better at higher frequencies. It would
be enough.

“I specified an hour ahead of the action,”
said Rom-Sanchez. “Commander Krajno and I agree that we can’t afford to miss
any tactical preparation on Eichelly’s part, and this way we’ll see what
Prabhu
Shiva
saw if Captain Harimoto followed SOP. A light-hour’s loss of
resolution won’t make enough difference to matter.”

Ng nodded. That had been her conclusion as well.

“I want the optical portion of the action piped into General
Access,” she said.

The viewscreen wavered as the array came on-line; a small
targeting cross blinked near the center, marking the position of the
navigational beacon.

“I have a ship trace, battlecruiser signature, plus 34.6
light-hours. No ID.” Another positioning cross appeared near the first; the
trace was nearly between them and the beacon, normal to its position from the
ecliptic as was standard naval practice.

“That’d be the
Prabhu Shiva
,” Rom-Sanchez stated,
showing his usual eagerness. “Watching the destruction of the beacon from a
light-hour down.”

“Harimoto ran a taut ship.” Commander Krajno’s voice rumbled
in his chest. “Fast and by the book.”

The unspoken question occupied them all: so how had a Rifter
destroyer annihilated a battlecruiser conned by a competent, experienced captain?

For several minutes after that, nothing happened. The
tension on the bridge grew. Ng distracted herself by reviewing SigInt’s report
on the skipmissile attack at Wolakota, but through no fault of Ensign Wychyrski
it was basically an expansion of the term “insufficient data” and didn’t hold
her attention for long.

Finally a small red pulse of light bloomed near the beacon.
Rom-Sanchez’ hand twitched, overlaying it with another cross. The Tenno rippled
as data began to build up.

“Signature indicates an Alpha-class. No ID,” Wychyrski
reported, scowling at her console as if she could bring the mystery ship in by
will.

Nothing more happened for another several minutes, then
another emergence pulse blossomed some distance from the destroyer.

“Frigate, possibly a Scorpion. No ID.”

A fierce spark of light bloomed near the destroyer and
faded. The faint background chirping of the beacon ceased. Seconds later the
destroyer skipped again, moments before the frigate also skipped, emerging in
the nearest sunward k-zone about twelve light-minutes in from the beacon’s
position.

“No emergence detected for the destroyer.”