Eleven

The original wave of colonists had been reactionaries evading the grasp of the Cognitive Collectivists of Old Earth, like so many others. In the case of this world, they’d come from a small nation known as Switzerland, or Der Schweitz in their own tongue. Attracted by the planet’s similar geography to their homeland, fifty thousand Swiss colonists had thrived on their new world.

In ancient Switzerland, a land remembered for staunch neutrality and self-determination, the Collectivists had found an indigestible article. Like a great maw, the Collectivists had consumed most of the independent governments of Old Earth within a century, but Switzerland had held out. Like a stone in the monster’s mouth, they had refused to be eaten. At the end of the third century after humanity first left Earth’s surface, however, it was clear that even Switzerland’s independence was in very real question. Before the end, their colony ships had begun something of an exodus. The people of Switzerland reached out to seed several worlds within a cluster of star systems, but the favorite had always been Neu Schweitz, with its skyscraping mountains, icy lakes, green valleys and small stormy oceans.

Just as their Swiss ancestors had done before them, the colonists believed in a strong, personal defense. Every able-bodied person was required to perform two years of service in their youth, giving their time to the militia or other Nexus organizations. Every male was required to maintain personal weaponry in his home, and must be ready to report to a Nexus summons within thirty hours, the length of one local day.

As a consequence to their defensive focus, they had built a variety of military bases, including a major one on Crom, the largest of Neu Schweitz’s seventeen moons. The heavily cratered surface and deep caverns that riddled the moon made Crom unsuitable as a beam platform. Structures built on its surface weren’t given a broad enough field of fire. In simulations there was always some spire of rock sticking up, preventing a laser from sighting on an approaching enemy that carefully chose its angle of attack. But for quiet, ship-construction efforts, the moon excelled. A ship built there wouldn’t require much thrust to escape the minimal gravity. As a bonus, without an atmosphere, ship design required no considerations for aerodynamic niceties.

By Earth standards, Crom was rather small, being a spheroid roughly two hundred kilometers in diameter. But it was large enough for appreciable gravity, which made construction tasks easier to perform. Ships were often built in orbital shipyards, but this wasn’t the ideal arrangement. Working without gravity to push against, men and robots alike had a difficult time of it.

Another advantage Crom possessed as a construction base was its large nickel-iron content, providing significant mining opportunities. Once the automated drilling pits and fusion-powered smelters were operating, basic raw materials for construction were inexhaustible and didn’t require costly transportation to the site. With all these matters carefully weighed, when the decision had been made by the Nexus Senate six years earlier to build a secret shipyard, Crom had been the logical choice.

And so a large group of determined individuals worked in secret in a tremendous cavern beneath Crom’s deepest crater. Many were professional members of the Nexus Fleet. The ship they constructed was a modified copy of the battleships built by the Cognitive Collectivists back on Old Earth. None of them had actually seen such a vessel, but they had digital files describing them in detail.

 Commodore Gaston Beauchamp of Starforce oversaw the construction of the battleship, which had been christened the Zürich. If all went well, he would be her captain when she tore open the flat bottom of the crater she grew beneath and rose up on her maiden voyage.

“Lieutenant,” said Beauchamp, “provide your report.”

“We have difficulties, sir,” said young Lieutenant Karin Minard, who was his executive officer. A curled lock of her hair had slipped out of her cap. She looked flushed, despite the carefully modulated temperature in the command bunker.

“Specify.”

The Lieutenant tapped at her computer-scroll. The thin plastic film shifted, its surface filling with print. “It’s the Orion propulsion system. The bomb chutes aren’t safe—not even to work on. The radiation has damaged our synthetic workers. They can only operate for a day or two without failure.”

“Then repair them.”

“We are out of spare parts. The downtime on the robotic systems is increasing every day. In short Commodore, we are delayed, just as when you asked yesterday.”

Beauchamp drew in a breath. “There will be no delays, Lieutenant.”

“But sir—”

“Lieutenant,” said Beauchamp, softly, dangerously. “Let me be perfectly clear. There will be no delays. Work will continue. The oblation shield is perfectly safe. No radiation penetrates it. The bomb chutes are the only path down below it, and they must be completed and operational. How else can this monstrous vessel lift off? Can you answer me that, Lieutenant?”

“I cannot, sir. But we are simply out of synthetics. They have all broken down.”

Beauchamp tapped at his steel table with a stylus. Almost everything on Crom was built of steel or molded bubble-crete. The automated smelters provided an endless supply of both. One could become quite bored with stark, unpainted surfaces, but military life wasn’t about aesthetics.

Beauchamp stopped tapping idly with his stylus and moved it instead with purpose over his desk. He indicated one wall, which was formed of molded bubble-crete like all the others. It resembled gray Swiss cheese. Some of the bubbles were big enough to stick a finger into them. That wall vanished and in its place appeared a vid screen. He pointed to it.

“I’m going to show you something, Minard. Even though technically, I shouldn’t.”

Lieutenant Minard obediently looked at the screen. Her computer-scroll rattled in her hands.

A scene from the asteroid belt flashed up on the screen. In the foreground was a mining operation made of white shining metal. Dust puffed up from the drilling operations in a continuous plume. In the background were crags of black stone and a startlingly brilliant field of stars. The sound wasn’t turned off, but as the scene was shot in vacuum, there wasn’t anything to carry a vibration to the camera.

“This was shot last night,” said Beauchamp.

As they watched, at first nothing seemed amiss. But then one of the stars in the beautiful sky grew brighter.

The Lieutenant fidgeted. Beauchamp glanced at her and smiled grimly. There could be little doubt to any observer that unpleasantness was about to erupt on that screen.

Soon, a dozen of the stars grew, morphing from stars into silvery specs. These specs moved and expanded with startling rapidity.

“They aren’t using their lasers,” said Minard.

“Just watch.”

The mining base now had warning lights on, flashing yellows all over the complex. A few vacc-suited individuals tottered about, struggling to move quickly in the low gravity environment. One man miscalculated and shot up more than a hundred meters into the air. In a panic, he must have used the full strength of his leg muscles. He wouldn’t be coming down for a minute or two. If his luck was bad enough, he might have achieved escape-velocity.

The Lieutenant fidgeted uncomfortably. Her eyes were slits, as if she wanted to shut out the visions that were soon to come.

“They aren’t slowing down,” said the Lieutenant. “How will they steal anything without landing?” She gasped suddenly, as if coming to a conclusion. “Are those incoming missiles?”

“Just watch,” repeated Beauchamp.

The silvery shapes grew and finally, with almost greater speed than any eye could catch, slipped over the base with blinding velocity. Two green lasers stabbed up at the ships, but no obvious damage was done to the streaking attackers. They watched as flaring blue plumes of gas still vented from every ship.

“They are accelerating as they pass over?” asked the Lieutenant aloud. “What kind of a raid is this?”

A blinding flash filled the vid screen then, making both officers squint.

“What the—” said Minard, but she got no farther as another blinding flash erupted and the video ended a fraction of a second later.

“They bombed the mine?” she asked. Her eyes were wide. The lock of hair that had been threatening to slip out of her cap had now emerged fully. Beauchamp thought she looked better that way. She always dressed too severely, in his opinion. Even if she was Fleet, she could try to look like a woman.

“Exactly,” said Beauchamp, “and I want you to know that vid feed was from a mine in asteroid belt Alpha.”

Lieutenant Minard blinked at him.

Beauchamp knew what she was thinking. Of the Kale star system’s two asteroid belts, the inner was called Alpha, and the outer Beta. The Vlax Romani had never attacked the inner belt. There was no point. If you wanted to steal something, why go twice as far to get it? The outer belt was far closer to their gas giant stronghold, Minerva. But in this case, the Vlax had not been on a mission to steal. They had been out to destroy.

“No lasers. No looting,” she said, in a slow, puzzled voice. “They just blew the place up. Why not simply send missiles, if that was the mission? Why fly all the way out there with ships?”

The Commodore nodded. Inwardly, he smiled. He finally had the Lieutenant’s full attention. He needed this woman on his side. That mining base had been owned by his family. A great deal of Beauchamp wealth had been obliterated last night. He was unsure if the Vlax knew that, but it hardly mattered. The war had become personal now. It had affected him directly. And the Vlax Romani weren’t going to get away with it.

“I couldn’t figure that one out myself, for awhile,” said Beauchamp. “But after careful thought, I’ve come to two conclusions. One of which is obvious: the enemy are no longer content to raid us for spare parts and supplies. They have decided to step up the assaults. They are trying to really hurt us.”

“And the second conclusion?”

“They are short on electronics,” said Beauchamp.

Lieutenant Minard looked at him expectantly.

“You see, the evidence is all right there in the scenario. They didn’t fire missiles, because missiles require computer guidance. They came all the way in and dropped dumb bombs on us. Nukes, of course. Each strike was a dumb weapon, dropped directly. Again, no electronics. No chips were wasted.”

“But they have no shortage of bombs.”

Beauchamp shrugged. “Radioactives and metals are plentiful. Many moons and asteroids have a ready supply, easily mined. Hydrogen for their engines can be drawn in an infinite quantity from their gas giant. But not computer chips. They don’t have a factory that can make them.”

The Lieutenant’s hand was up to her chin now. She had gotten over the initial shock and was thinking hard. Beauchamp nodded in approval. The girl was a problem-solver, but not a deep-thinker. She was just the sort that he needed.

“Now, you see our problem,” Beauchamp continued. “We can’t spread the patrols so thinly as to cover every mine. If we did, they would simply come out of the dark with ten times our number and overwhelm each location.”

“How did they achieve stealth for such a deep mission?”

Beauchamp shrugged. “Perhaps they swung around Minerva a few times and came out coasting all the way.”

“What about our optics? We search every centimeter of the sky.”

Beauchamp laughed rudely. “That’s what we tell the civilians, Lieutenant. No one on Neu Schweitz wants to think the enemy can reach them. They are led to believe the entire Minerva rebellion is some kind of labor squabble. The truth is they’ve been hunting down our spy satellites for the last year or so. We put up new ones, naturally, but they track them down. As soon as we transmit a sighting of one of their raiders, they locate and destroy the source. Space combat is won by offense, not defense. You know that.”

The Lieutenant drew herself up then, almost at attention. “I’ve forgotten myself, sir. I must apologize. I’m sure I’ve drawn you into discussing classified matters. I feel that my rejection of your orders was premature, and I now see that—”

Beauchamp stopped her with a wave of the hand. “No, no. Perfectly natural. These things I’ve shown you are indeed classified. They are not exactly a state secret, but they aren’t public knowledge, either. I must ask that you don’t reveal them.”

“Of course not, Commodore. But may I ask why you showed me these materials?”

Here was the moment Beauchamp had been waiting for. He leaned forward over his featureless steel desk. “Sit down.”

Lieutenant Minard complied, sitting across from him. She did so slowly, almost painfully. She was clearly a woman who didn’t like to break with protocol in any way.

“Lieutenant... I need you to be broad-minded now. You can see why this mission must not be delayed. If the Vlax are blasting our mines, why not our cities? We must end this war as quickly as possible. The only thing in the system that can win this conflict is the Zürich.”

Lieutenant Minard nodded, frowning. “And what exactly do you mean by broad-minded, sir?”

“Just this: we will continue work. If the synthetics break down, we will use conscripts. Or prisoners. Or even Fleet personnel.”

The Lieutenant’s jaw sagged. “You mean...?”

“Precisely. You will issue what shielding we can provide. Each man will spend no more than an hour in the pits. But the bomb-chutes will be completed. The Orion system will work flawlessly. This ship will fly.”

“An hour,” said Lieutenant Minard. She had her scroll out and was tapping at it again. The surface shimmered with numbers and she frowned at them. “Nearly three hundred rems, sir.”

Beauchamp made another off-handed gesture. “Those charts are always overly cautious. A few nose-bleeds. A bit of fatigue and dizziness. They’ll be right as rain soon after.”

“But they’ll be getting double any kind of safe dose. And an hour per man? It would take many thousands of men to complete the project. We’ll have to run them up from Neu Schweitz and back night and day. The transport costs alone—”

“No, no,” said Beauchamp, shaking his head and smiling. “They will be working an hour per day, Lieutenant. At least, until serious health issues show up.”

The Lieutenant looked aghast. She cleared her throat. “How am I to record these—workers?”

“As robots, of course. Human robots.... I said we were going to have to be broad-minded, didn’t I?”

The Lieutenant nodded slowly, sadly. “I believe you did mention it, sir.”

#

Nicu traveled through Minerva orbit with little skill. Every adult among the Vlax knew something about piloting a rook, it was part of daily life. But he had never navigated solo to another base. He was particularly poor at handling the attitude jets. The rook was rolling around, very slowly, in a permanent spin. After the initial blast-off he could have flipped on the automatic stabilizers and allowed the computer to correct his spin, but he had not done so. He feared the aliens might follow him. Any flare of jets would only help give him away. If his ship looked cold, dead and abandoned, so much the better. He would give them no reason to come after him and no trail to follow.

So, once he had launched his rook in the direction of the Vlax stronghold Tyrolia, the massive gas-mining rig that formed the economic core of the Minerva system, he let it fly. He shut down everything except the emergency heaters and passive oxygen recyclers. He wore his spacer suit and put a ceramic-fiber blanket on over that. To any casual observer, his ship was just another chunk of debris in a very dirty system. Naturally, it was a chunk with a higher than average metal content, but hopefully that would go unnoticed. He kept all radar systems and identification systems switched off. He never seriously considered contacting Minerva with any news of aliens. First of all, that might be the signal the aliens needed to find him. Second, Minerva control would probably laugh at him.

Silently, his rook rolled through space. The trip took two days. He could have made it faster, by applying more thrust, but he’d not dared. He spent his time eating and drinking freely—he’d all but starved in that locker. He watched the passive sensors for the first day or so, staring out into the blackness of space with great paranoia. But he didn’t see any signs of pursuit. He relaxed finally, he had gotten away from them. With great relish, he immersed himself in gaming. He played happily, without interruption for once, luxuriating in a dozen levels of his favorite virtual environments.

When a harsh beeping intruded on his fun the second day, he was filled instantly with annoyance. What was it now? The beeping persisted. He finally roused himself from a particularly good session of Rockrat, a game that simulated heroic vacuum-suited combat, and searched for the source of the interruption. It was the proximity alarm. He looked up and out the broad front viewports in surprise.

There, rolling slowly due to his own rook’s spin, was the moon-sized gas-miner, Tyrolia. Anchored in geo-synchronous orbit over Minerva, the mining rig resembled a huge, silent, steel-colored jellyfish. Beneath it, hanging thousands of kilometers down, were the tubes that fed off the various levels of Minerva’s stormy atmosphere. The tubes were ultra-strong, hollow monofilaments. They continuously sipped at the methane and hydrogen, providing fuel and sustenance for everyone orbiting Minerva.

The Tyrolia was alarmingly close. Nicu untangled himself from his game equipment and scrambled into the pilot’s seat. He pushed a button, engaging the autopilot. Jets flared all around the rook, and the ship shuddered. Soon, the spinning image of Tyrolia slowed, steadied, finally stopped. Next, wincing, Nicu flipped on the communications systems.

He opened a hailing channel to Tyrolia, who must have been watching his approach. “Um, Tyrolia control?”

The speakers spit static.

He keyed the transmitter again. “Requesting permission to land?”

“Identify yourself,” a voice snapped.

“This is Nicu, from Gamma Base on—”

“Nicu? This is Commander Loiza. Why haven’t you responded to our signals? Why are your ships coming down silently in an obvious attack formation?”

Ships?

“Um,” said Nicu, trying to think. “There’s been some kind of mistake. My apologies. I’m having difficulties. There were problems back on Gamma.”

“Our defensive batteries are seconds from taking out the lot of you. We’ve assumed you were captured by the Nexus Fleet somehow and this is a sneak-attack. Explain yourself now. Why are their four ships coming in from Gamma without signaling us?”

Nicu’s heart and breath rates increased dramatically. He knew, without having to look, who was on those other three silent ships. If he told Loiza the truth, if he even hinted about alien intruders, they might well decide to fire now and ask questions later. He licked his lips. His eyes were wide and dark.

“Control, we request permission to land and explain.”

“Put Mala on, you idiot.”

“She’s been injured. There was an accident.”

“An accident?” said Loiza. For the first time, there was a softening in the base commander’s tone.

Nicu felt emboldened. Like all masterful liars, he knew when his opponent was taking the bait. His lies were working. He would go with it. “Yes, an accident,” he said in a strong, no-nonsense voice. “Knocked out a lot of our equipment. I didn’t know I was in charge of the landing until I realized the others weren’t answering your summons. I can only hope they aren’t incapacitated.”

“What kind of accident? Specify.”

“It’s complicated. It was all we could do to get away from Gamma. We’ll need medical attention upon landing. I’m sure the others will explain when I get there. Do we have permission to land?”

Silence. Then a sigh. “Get your collective tails down here and report. I’ll have emergency personnel waiting.”

Nicu opened his mouth one more time. He thought about telling Loiza to bring troops as well. But if he did that, more questions would pop up. Ones he could not answer yet. Not until he was safely past Tyrolia’s point-defense railguns and on the ground. He comforted himself with the knowledge that among the Vlax the terms ‘emergency personnel’ and ‘spacers with guns’ were pretty much meant the same thing.

Nicu’s ship was beamed landing coordinates. Smoothly, the rook turned itself so the main engines faced Tyrolia and braked hard. Nicu was crushed with nearly three gees of force as the deceleration sank his body into the padded pilot’s chair.

As he came down, he watched the vid feed from beneath the rook. The great clam-shell opened like a baby-bird receiving a worm. It yawned wide and swallowed his ship whole. When he was down, the shell rolled closed overhead and blocked out the brilliant stars and hanging moons. The blastpan wisped up hot vapor as soon as air was pumped into the chamber.

Loiza herself, the Base Commander of Tyrolia, stood at the bottom of the ramp as it came down. For several seconds, Nicu hesitated inside the ship, just out of sight at the top of the ramp.

“Are you coming out of there or not?” roared Loiza with her hands on her hips.

Nicu appeared at the top of the ramp. He walked with an imaginary limp. He had, after all, told them there were injuries. He didn’t want to disappoint.

“Nicu? Who else is aboard?”

“Just me.”

With a hiss of vexation, she turned to take her team to the next blastpan.

“Wait!” Nicu said.

“What?”

“Quickly, you must close the other blastpans! Close the clamshell domes, get out every armed man you can. The ships following me are full of—rebels.”

“What are you babbling about?”

“Just do it. Just to be safe. Close the domes.”

“But they’ve already landed.”

“They have?”

“The pilots were very skilled. They came in under heavy gee forces. In fact, yours was the last of the ships to dock.”

Nicu opened his mouth, then closed it. He blinked at Loiza, while she eyed him with growing suspicion.

A klaxon went off, somewhere deeper in the base. Another one answered it, like birds calling to each other in the forest. Loiza’s eyes flicked to the yellow flashers that were lighting up everywhere. Then she looked at Nicu. She took two steps forward and grabbed up the nano-cloth of his spacesuit.

“What did you do?” she hissed, staring at him with black eyes.

Nicu saw murder there, in her eyes. He had seen it many times before. She had her other hand on the butt of her hand-cannon.

Nicu shook his head. “We’ve got to go help,” he said, and took several steps toward the corridor that led to the next blastpan.

Nicu staggered aside as she pushed past him. “Get out of my way. If you lied, if you caused this—whatever this is, I’m going to light candles in your skull, Nicu.”

Nicu cringed. A rush of people headed into the corridor. Nicu went with them. But his limp became more pronounced, and he went more slowly than the rest. Very soon, he was in the rear of the group. When the sounds of their boots echoed ahead of him, he stopped entirely and slipped off down a side passage.

Emergency messages blared. From somewhere up ahead, a scream rose up, warbled, and then cut off suddenly. There were booming shots.

Nicu swallowed hard and headed in the opposite direction, deeper into the base. Each time he met a confused, alarmed spacer, he directed them toward the fighting.

“I’ve got orders from Loiza, let me through,” he repeated to anyone who questioned him.

His limp had vanished. In Tyrolia’s light gravity—which was entirely generated by its spinning motion via centrifugal force—he bounded as he ran, with a sprinter’s graceful stride. He ran down stairway after stairway, finding passages that curved up in either direction under his feet, until he reached the outer ring of the base.

Nicu paused when he could no longer hear the klaxons. Yellow lights still flashed warnings, here and there. But he had left the blastpans far behind now. The alarms had not yet radiated out to this section of the base. He put his hands on his knees and his sides heaved, taking in gulps of plastic-tasting air. He had to be nearly half-way around the Tyrolia’s outer ring. If he kept running, he realized he might actually get closer to the landing bays.

He looked back along the curving passages. Then he looked the other way. He didn’t have a map-vid handy, but after fifteen minutes of running, he suspected that he was about as far as he could get from—from the things in those ships.

Nicu felt a pang of guilt over leading the things down to the Tyrolia. It was a small pang, but it was there. Quite certainly, people would die today because he had talked control into letting him land. But, he argued with himself, they would have blown him out of space otherwise and how could anyone expect a person to choose such an option? They could have said, ‘Please land, Nicu. We know you are one of us. But leave those other ships behind.’ But they had not said that. They had not offered him any way out.

He didn’t blame them. No, that was not his way. He could see their point of view. But they should be able to see his as well. Many people had called him a rat during his life. He knew a rat was a small running thing with a long tail, but these monsters were worse than any rat. The Vlax on this station would soon learn. They had never seen these monsters. When they did, they would no longer laugh at Nicu! He had fought the aliens personally. They could call him cowardly names after they faced sucker-covered snakes and men with eyes on waving stalks—if they survived.

He looked over his shoulder and straightened his bent form. His breathing was even now. He felt better. There had to be thousands of Vlax on the Tyrolia. Surely, these monsters would be stopped.

Nicu relaxed. He leaned his narrow shoulders against the outer wall of the corridor. He opened his spacer suit, allowing it to exchange air and freshen up the sweaty interior. That was better. He almost felt human again. His first order of business would be to find a shower station. Then he would head to the central kitchens—after the aliens were exterminated, naturally—and see if he could find some young Vlax ladies to talk to. He had been through quite a lot. He had spacer stories to tell that would fascinate them. He could almost see their smiles, their dark curls and bright eyes.

As he daydreamed, a rumbling came to him. He felt it, through the wall of the corridor he leaned against, more than he heard it. Something had made the wall tremble behind him. The lights in the hallway flickered, died. A puff of vapor gushed out of the overhead vents. Then the rolling sound of an explosion came and roared past him, like a wind on a planet.

Nicu crouched. Had the damned aliens blown something up? Why didn’t they have the decency to simply die? Frantically, he resealed his suit, suspecting decompression. His eyes flicked each way up and down the corridor. He didn’t know which way to run. His eyes rose upward, to the vents that puffed down vapors.

He popped open the largest of them. He wriggled and grunted, managing to climb inside. He closed the vent and lay there in the darkness.

The corridor below him was empty, except for flashing yellow lights and hazy, mist-like vapors.