The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III (17 page)

He could see it and view it through a camera. That was it. Before he had sealed it in the plastic box, he had poked and prodded it with a straight probe, and the stress sensor had noted resistance to pressure. He had tried to slice off a sample with various cutting tools, but, not surprisingly, it wouldn’t hold still long enough for that to work—or else it would simply ooze out of the blade’s way.

He had chilled the glovebox, and then heated it, trying to see if the parasite had some sort of infrared signature. It had maintained precisely the same temperature as its outside environment. On the theory that it might be linked to some outside entity, he had listened for any sort of signal or background noise emanating from it, using the most sensitive detection gear he had, sweeping over virtually all of the electromagnetic spectrum, from long radio to gamma and x-ray. Nothing. He tested for nuclear radiation: fast neutron, slow neutron, gamma rays, quarks, neutrinos, everything. It got him nowhere. A rock gave off as much radiation. Hell, most igneous rock gave off
more
radioactivity.

But the bristly hair on the back of his thick neck didn’t really stand on edge until he tried to weigh the thing—and the meter stayed at zero. He tried it on three sets of scales, carefully and precisely factoring in the weight of the storage cube, and kept getting the same result. It had no weight at all.

Then why did it settle for creeping around instead of flying? Wellingham growled an obscene something under his breath. If he were left with
that
as the biggest mystery about the parasites, he’d be a happy man.

It didn’t weigh anything. Did that mean it had no mass? Impossible. Flat out, totally impossible. Wellingham glared at the parasite, and wished it would just go away. Instead, it slithered back down to the base of the plastic box, still searching for a means of escape.

Wait a second. He hadn’t proved it had no mass—just no weight.
That
he could deal with. But even a
neutrino
had mass, in currently fashionable theory, and Wellingham was not about to accept that something that appeared to resemble a blob of mercury could be massless. Unless it was some sort of small energy field. But no, how could that be when it gave off no EM radiation except reflected light?

But
did
no weight mean no mass? There were places where it didn’t. In freefall, no material object had weight, but all objects retained their mass. You had to put an object in some sort of real or simulated gravity field—put the object on a planet, or in an accelerator or a centrifuge, say—before its mass was measurable. And of course if the g-field varied, so did the apparent weight. Wait a second. Wellingham sat straight up and stared at the bulkhead.
Vary the G-field . . .

Doctor Peabody looked up in relief as the Chief Engineer leapt up and ran out of the sick bay. Wellington tended to overwhelm whatever room he was in. Now if someone would just come along and clean up that pile of test instruments, things could get back to normal around here.

Peabody’s relief was short-lived. Four minutes later, Wellingham was back, three assistant engineers behind him—and all four of them with their arms full of more gadgetry.

###

Lieutenant Commander Tarwa Chu sat unhappily in the command chair on the bridge, watching a dauntingly disordered ship status board. Her respect for the skills of a ship’s captain was growing by leaps and bounds. The day so far was proving to be an endless and highly educational nightmare. So many people expected her to make
decisions.
There was too much to do. Every one of the blinking, color-coded messages on the status board was indicating a ship function that was non-operational. Even animated advertising systems didn’t dare use such gaudy color.

Captain Spencer had left orders that any effort to repair the
Duncan
be terminated and the ship take off as soon as possible. That sounded straightforward enough, but it was all but impossible to get it done in practice. Too many subsystems were half-taken apart, too many repairs were half-begun or half-finished. There wasn’t time to finish up most of the jobs. Test leads were yanked, and old, worn parts and slapdash repairs done a generation ago were reinstalled. New jury-rigs were found whenever the damage was too far gone to be left alone.

The department chiefs understood the need at first, more or less, and only grumbled to Chu a little bit. The sailors who had been put to work on rush repair jobs understood nothing and grumbled louder to their section leaders, who echoed the complaints to the department heads. The department chiefs, now harried and impatient with the chaos belowdecks, had in the meantime found out just how impossible and frustrating the job was. They reported the comments from their subordinates back to Chu, embroidering them with a few choice observations of their own.

It was understandable that the officers and crew were unhappy over the need to rush just as fast to undo their work, but Chu realized that being understanding wouldn’t do much for morale, discipline, or efficiency.

In theory it was up to her to crack the whip. In practice, she had not much chance of succeeding, not when many of the officers and ratings had daughters—or granddaughters—older than she was. Chu wished desperately she were back home on Breadbasket, where the greatest challenge in life was getting the cows milked on time.

A tone hummed from the right side of the console, on the comm control section, and a section of panel lit up in green—a welcome sight in that sea of reds, ambers, and shrieking bright alert-yellow. Chu punched the green panel. “Incoming landline audio-only call. Word-code procedure identifies caller as Captain Spencer,” the panel announced.

A wave of relief washed over Chu. Maybe now the real captain could come back and take over. “I’ll take it on the privacy headset,” she said, fumbling the headset in place over her ears and adjusting the high-sensitivity mike.

“Stand by,” the comm panel said. There was a moment of scratchiness, and then Captain Spencer’s voice was in her ears. Few things had ever sounded so good to her “Spencer here,” he said crisply. “Ship condition report. Bear in mind this is an unsecure line. There may well be listeners.”

Listeners? Why was the captain worried about that? And if he was, why risk calling on a buggable line? Why wasn’t he using his AID to call in? Was he in some sort of trouble? Never mind. If he had wanted her to know, he would have told her. If he dared, on an unsecure line. “Ah—ah, Lieutenant Commander Chu reporting, Sir. Revised repair schedule proceeding, Sir. I don’t know how much detail you want to hear over this line, though.”

“Just glad to hear you’re still there.”

Chu felt her face flush. “Sir, if you are uncertain of my abilities, you may assign temporary command to any other offi—”

“No, no, Chu, not
you.
I meant I’m glad the ship’s still there. I half-expected to find out that you’d been attacked. A few of the locals have taken some heavy potshots at us. I’m sure you’re doing fine in command. I have every faith in you.

“On our side, if you pick up some news reports about some over-enthusiastic autocops or a wrecked shopping arcade—well, they were after us. They may still come after you, so be on your toes. Bump it up two alert levels from where it was when I left, more if you see fit. But the main thing is I want that ship out of there
now.
Order the tugs alongside, get out into deep water, and launch. Get back into orbit. If need be, you are authorized by me to launch from the populated area of the dock as per service doctrine. Let me make that stronger: I
order
you to carry out populated-zone attack doctrine if the ship comes under attack. Give warning to the locals if you can, but
get the ship away
as soon as possible. Is that understood?”

Chu felt her ears buzzing, and she swallowed hard. Standard doctrine prohibited the launch from a populated zone unless the ship was under direct attack and the populace was therefore at substantial risk already. Who the hell would attack the
Duncan?
How much trouble were they
in?
“I understand, Sir. We are still trying to get put back together far enough for boost. It will be several hours yet. Will you be returning aboard, Sir?” she asked hopefully.

“Not until the ship is actually in space. You’ll have to launch a gig to pick up the other stranded crew and myself. I don’t want any hatches opened or anyone coming aboard until you’re out of atmosphere. I would bet that there are at least half-a-dozen parasites on the hull right now, trying to worm their way aboard, and I don’t want to give them a chance. Not your fault, but I wish to hell you could boost
now.
We’ll be able to handle them better in orbit. Also, they’re still after
me,
and if I head for the ship I’ll probably just draw their fire toward you for no good reason. Besides, I’ve still got some work to—”

“Urgent call from chief engineer,” the comm panel announced in Chu’s ear, brazenly interrupting the captain.

“Patch it into the call with the captain,” Chu instructed, then addressed Wellingham and Captain Spencer when the comm panel tell-tales indicated they were linked. “Captain, the chief engineer is cutting in with an urgent report. Chief, the captain just called in on an unsecured line. I’m patching you in. Bear in mind it
is
an unsecured line. Go ahead.”

“Captain, we’ve
got
the little bastard!” the chief announced gleefully. “I’ve just completed tests on a detector, using the captured subject as a guinea pig. Can you risk hearing about it now on this line?”

“Absolutely,” Spencer replied eagerly. “I doubt you’ll tell any potential listeners anything they don’t know.

“Gravity waves,” the chief said proudly. “Don’t ask me
how,
but the parasite gives off gravity-waves. I got my clue when the thing showed as being weightless. I realized that couldn’t be right, and decided to track for anything that might interfere with the scales. And picked up gravity-wave
s,
if you can believe that.”

“How strong?” Spencer asked.

“That’s the weird part, Captain. If you assume the parasite has a density of equal to H
₂
O, then I’m reading enough G-waves to generate thousands of gravities of acceleration—but there
is
no G-force generated, as if the G-waves were precisely cancelling the attraction between the planet and the parasite. But that can’t be right, either,” the chief said.

“Why not?” Spencer demanded.

“Because if it
were
right, then the parasite weighs just under sixteen metric tons,” the chief said tonelessly. “Which would make it denser than the core of many neutron stars.”

There was a silence on the line. Neither Spencer or Chu could think of anything to say, anything to ask in response to such an outrageous statement.

Wellingham gave them both a chance to digest his findings, and then went on. “I can’t explain how or why it creates or uses the gravity-waves,” he said, “but the G-waves should come in very handy for spotting these things. They ought to stand out like a searchlight after dark in a gravity-wave detector. It’ll take me some time to rig a detector capable of scanning the ship for our other visitor—but we should have the little beast nailed the moment we switch the detector on. Assuming I can get something with enough range.”

“Nice work, Chief. Work fast on that—but be advised I’ve ordered Chu to cast off and get the ship away, so some of your engineers might be busy with other duties. Get that detector on line. Chu, I’ll let you make the judgment call, but if possible, I don’t want the ship to lift until that parasite is neutralized. It doesn’t sound like you could fly safely just yet anyway, and I’d just as soon have that thing out of the control circuits before you fire up the fusion engines. And Wellingham, when you do catch the second parasite, don’t let it near the first one.”

“I’d thought of that already, Sir. God knows if the bloody things can link up with each other—or what would happen when they did. Don’t you worry, I won’t introduce them socially.”

“Excellent. I’m going to sign off now—but I hope to call in on a secure line soon. Spencer out.”

“Duncan
out,” Chu said, wondering why, exactly, she had been so relieved to hear from the captain. He hadn’t exactly eased her mind or solved her problems. She sighed and checked the time. She had been serving as commanding officer for just about six hours. Well, at least it hadn’t been dull, and showed no signs of becoming so.

###

Captain Allison Spencer, Master of the cruiser
Duncan,
stepped away from the antique-looking audiophone feeling the master of nothing at all. He had been driven by events since the moment they had taken Bethany away. He felt like one of the pieces on a game board, trying to play the game by itself, battling against a huge and invisible past-master of the game.

Well, that was no way to win, Spencer told himself. It was time and past time for him to start acting instead of reacting. Time to get ahead of the curve. Spencer glanced out the window. Dusk was coming on, the sun setting on what had already been an exceedingly long day. One that was not yet over. Not while they still had the night to work with.

He turned and walked back into the main room where the others were waiting for him. The first job was to get the AIDs secure.

“Dostchem,” he asked, “can you rig a device to scan for gravity-wave generation?”

Dostchem looked startled, and Spencer indulged himself enough to savor the sensation of being ahead of the Capuchin, throwing her off-balance. Yes, he could definitely enjoy getting in front of the curve instead of behind it.

“Ah, yes, of course. Might I ask for more details on the specification? And why you would need such a device?”

“To locate what is either a device or a creature that seems to act as a parasite inside machinery. Machine or animal, it is wholly beyond anything the Pact has ever seen. If they are machines, they are lightyears beyond us. They resemble small blobs of mercury—and seem able to infiltrate and control any sort of machinery. My chief engineer reports that the parasites produce massively powerful G-waves, enough to support the weight of sixteen tons.”