The Killing of Worlds

"We've got to turn her, sir!" the First Pilot shouted. "We're broadside!"

"Keep us floating, Pilot," he commanded.

If they could turn back to head-on orientation, they'd be a smaller target. But Katherie Hobbes had said another burst from the jets would break the Lynx up. Zai had to believe her. Hobbes wouldn't have given away their position unless she spoke with absolute certainty.

So Zai had been forced into a dire bet--that the Rix warship would miss them just a few more times. They were almost out of range. So close to safety.

According to the bridge chronometer, they only had to survive another ninety seconds and they would drift out of the gravity cannon's perimeter. By their very nature, chaotic gravitons were far less coherent than photons. The Lynx was receding from the battlecruiser at more than 3,000 klicks per second. Under fixed physical laws, the frigate would soon be out of range.

Once they reached safety, Zai could bring internal diagnostics online and find out for himself how hard to push his ship.

Fifteen more seconds passed, enough time for the enemy to charge another burst.

The silent flash came on schedule.

"Another miss, sir! Two hundred meters aft."

"Unbelievable," Zai whispered. It had fallen on the other side of the first miss. They were overshooting!

Luck had smiled on the Lynx again.

Captain Zai leaned back, releasing his white-knuckled grip on his command chair. He sighed with relief.

"We may have made it," he said.

Ten seconds later, a shudder rocked through the bridge, and the high-pitched scream of boiling air filled the ship.

Engineer-Rating

Telmore Bigz could see the Lynx now.

The frigate sparkled against the black of space, the red light of laser fire running up and down its length.

"No!" he cried.

It was at least twenty kilometers away, glowing like an emergency light wand. The frigate's spindly shape seared itself into his vision, like a sun glimpsed with naked eyes. Bigz realized that his vision had finally cleared. Just in time to witness his ship and crewmates dying.

He wished that he were still blind.

Damn!They had almost made it out of range. By Bigz's reckoning, they would be out of the gravity cannon's perimeter in less than a minute.

The engineer-rating looked at the debris around him. It spun alone in the void, the forehull a minor planet with its own satellites, its own hazy atmosphere, even a population of one: Telmore Bigz.

Soon, this lost scrap heap would be all that remained of the Lynx.

A few more sparkles erupted from the frigate over the next seconds. The chaotic gravity beam would be orienting now, marshaling its full power for a final shot, using the laser damage to aim. The Rix might only get one blast before the Imperial warship passed out of range, so they would make sure they had it right.

Bigz squeezed the shockpack on his belt, the last dregs of stimulants giving him a moment of confidence for his decision. There was only one thing to do.

He activated his emergency beacon at full strength, its pulsing light reflecting from the rotating armor plates around him. Then Bigz brought his engineer's torch online, and charged it to hullalloy--cutting temperatures. He aimed it at the armor below him and pulled the trigger.

Light and heat flared from the cutter, and the armor burned a bright white where he swept its flame.

Bigz was now the sun for his tiny system, an unstable star casting hard, flickering shadows on the spinning debris around him.

Glowing bright in the void.

"Keep us dark!" Zai shouted over the din.

"But they have us, sir! We're already lit up like a firewire!"

"Just wait!" Zai yelled. "In another twenty seconds, they can't touch us." The damage control officer was finally silent. The man had wanted to reactivate the ship's internal sensors, to help coordinate repair efforts. True, the Rix already knew exactly where the Lynx was. But emissions from the internals would give the enemy the frigate's orientation, and they'd target the drive; the Lynx would be crippled. Some part of the Lynx was certainly going to fry, but there was no sense giving the Rix their choice as to which.

"Steady. At most they can hit us twice at full power," Zai said.

"Damage reports starting to come in from the aft compoint, sir," someone reported. The epicenter of the laser hit.

"Report."

"No structural damage. The aft processor shaft looks fused. Ten dead and counting."

Damn, Zai thought. More casualties, and more processor capacity lost. All from a range-finding laser. When the burst of chaotic gravity came, it would be hell.

"How long until we're safe?" he asked the ensign at the chronometer.

"Twelve," she said.

"Count it," he ordered.

The bridge grew silent as the numbers diminished. There was nothing any of them could do. A gravity beam worked its deadliest magic against the crew of its target: snapped spines, crushed brains, ruptured internal organs. Without an energy sink to deflect the Rix weapon, dozens, perhaps hundreds of their crewmates were about to die.

Zai couldn't even warn his crew, but at least he could address the bridge.

With five seconds left, he waved the ensign quiet.

But he found his tongue stymied. All the usual Vadan words invoked the Emperor, and that would be too ridiculous an epitaph for Laurent Zai.

"Thank you for your service," was all he managed.

Zai sighed, waiting.

The time passed. It must have.

"The shot missed us," the captain said quietly. The sensor officer stared into his headsdown in disbelief.

"Not an accidental miss, sir. They changed their targeting. Attacked a debris field six kilometers away. Tore it to pieces."

"But. . . whyV Zai stammered.

"It was lit up, sir. Some heat, microwaves, and a high-strength transmission."

"Transmission?"

"An Imperial SOS. A personal beacon."

Zai shook his head. It was too much to believe. A diversion, at the right moment. A member of the Lynx's crew had somehow wound up out there, kilometers away, and had died for the ship. But who?

"They had us, sir," the sensor officer continued. "Why would they go for anything else? It was only a few sparks out there, relative to the hit they'd put on us."

"We were too easy," Zai said. "Too obvious. Hobbes's transmission was too blatant. They must have thought that we were the decoy."

A tremble began in the ship, a low moan that rose and fell.

"They're targeting us now, sir. Switched their fire from the debris to the Lynx. But we're outside effective range. The gravity cannon is at half-charge, wide aperture. Five thousand gravitons per."

Zai sighed. Barely enough to give a man skin cancer. He could feel the weapon's passage with his sensitive inner ear, a mild nausea at worst.

"Give me internal diagnostics," he ordered. "And order the crew to remain in pressure suits." The frigate was unstable, and the low-intensity chaotic gravity bombardment might continue for a while, growing ever more diffuse as the ships drifted apart.

Again, they had survived.

TEN YEARS EARLIER (IMPERIAL ABSOLUTE)

House Over many decades, the house had grown in all directions.

Though perched on a mountain peak, it extended deep enough into the mantle of Home to draw geothermal power. Now that summer had arrived, the views from six balconies revealed gardens and artificial waterfalls all the way to the horizon. The house had littered neighboring peaks with outpost colonies of self-sustaining butterflies, their mirror wings reflecting sunlight to keep plants alive and water flowing, cast artful shadows, and bring the pale reds of the arctic sunset to three hundred sixty degrees of vista. Its processors were everywhere, buried in the rocky passages of the mountain, backed up in rented remote locations, distributed across the snows for a hundred kilometers. Between polar isolation, the senatorial privilege of its mistress, and its vast size, the house was a world unto itself.

And yet a certain anxiety haunted the house today, a sense of inadequacy and self-doubt that ran like a subtle tremor through its ter-aflops. A new situation had arisen, one that it had considered and modeled for decades, but never experienced. For the first time, there were two people here at once.

The mistress had a guest.

The house scanned the underground food gardens, the special supplies brought in by suborbital for the lieutenant-commander's visit, the emergency stores that had lain untouched for a century. It tallied, of course, far more food than two people could eat in four years, much less four days. But the disquiet remained. This visit was the house's chance to show the mistress what it had accomDlished over lonely decades of abandonment, to display the results of its long independent expansion program.

Dinner was already planned, the steamy growing levels just above the geothermal plant raided of produce for a tropical banquet. Fermented plantains had been basted with relish of green tamarind. Cabbage pickled and formed into delicate flower shapes, then flash-fried in a microsecond plasma field. A species of brine shrimp that purified the house water supply simmered for hours in caramel. A pudding of sticky rice and palm sugar blackened with coconut ash to match the lieutenant-commander's naval uniform. And to clear the palette, twenty milliliters of vodka to end each course had been infused with lychee, rambutan, papaya, and mangosteen in turn.

But perhaps this was too much, the house now despaired. The rules of etiquette were clear: The last dinner of any visit should be the grandest, not the first. With Laurent Zai staying longer, it would have to outdo itself four more dinners in a row! And what if the mistress changed her mind again? No amount of processor power, no number of contingency plans, no acreage of machinery--nothing was sufficient to withstand human caprice at its worst.

What were they talking about now?

The house returned its attention to where the mistress stood with the newly promoted Captain Laurent Zai. They were on the western balcony, holding each other, looking out at a trio of small peaks capped with patterns of algae-reddened snow, just now struck with the slowly setting sun. (Quite a composition, the house thought smugly.) The mistress was still smiling from the kiss they'd shared after she had invited him to stay.

"Four days seems so little, Nara," Zai said. (The house disagreed. Twelve meals to create; four sunsets to compose!)

"We can make them last."

"I hope so." His eyes fell to the garden of insect-shaped ice sculptures below. "We've so many technologies for making Absolute time pass quickly. Stasis, relativistic travel, the symbiant. But none to make a few days seem longer."

The mistress laughed. "I'm sure we'll think of something." She moved closer.

"You already have?" "Yes, I have. Perhaps dinner can wait."

The house followed their progress to the bedroom, mutely appalled.

Senator

As the summer's brief night fell across the room, Nara Oxham thought to herself: An entire day without apathy. It had been too long. She needed more of these respites from the capital, needed to set her mind completely free of the drug without the crowd coming in.

She looked at Laurent's dozing form. Perhaps she needed a measure of madness every now and then.

After the rush of the first few minutes, the effects of apathy withdrew gradually, Nara's empathy gaining in strength over the slow hours. Her ability had been active all day, moving and adjusting itself, slowly growing comfortable with the man next to her, settling across the pattern of his thoughts like a blanket of snow over one of the house gardens. Laurent seemed to have recovered his balance in the hours since telling her about Dhantu; she could feel his mind aligned by the sureties of his gray religion, his military discipline.

Although Laurent's touchstones sprang from convictions alien to Nara, there was comfort in anything that took away his pain.

Nara wondered if this was a good idea, letting herself bond so strongly with someone she hardly knew, who was by any measure a political enemy.

Who would be gone so soon, for so long.

Laurent stirred.

"A fire?" she asked.

They left the bed and opened up the north wall to the pink night sky and the arctic chill. Nara loved the high arctic summer. The sun hid behind the mountains but never lost its grasp on the horizon. She wondered what it would be like in half a year, when daylight rather than darkness lasted only one hour in ten.

They chose split, dry logs for the fire, building it high and hot enough to push them back a few meters, counterpoint to the chill night air on their backs.

When Laurent slipped away to maintain his prosthetics, Nara asked the house to salvage what it could of dinner and deliver it here. It responded a bit stiffly. Knowing that grays didn't approve of talking machines, Nara had ordered it to keep silent in Laurent's company. She wondered if the house's conversational package needed more practice than it was getting on her infrequent visits.

When Laurent returned, he was dressed. She wrapped herself in bedclothes.

After a silence, she felt his discomfort. He was unsure what to say. This moment always eventually came with new lovers, in those quiet moments between dramatic turns.

What would the pink senator and the gray soldier talk about?

No point in fighting the obvious.

"Do you really think there'll be another Incursion, Laurent?"

He shrugged, but she felt trouble in him. "Until today, I had my doubts about the rumors. But this posting to Legis, right on the frontier . . ."

"Isn't most of the Navy on one frontier or another?" "True. But I'm to take command of a new kind of warship." He paused and looked at her. "But that's classified, of course." He smiled. "You're not a Rix spy, are you?"

Nara laughed. "Laurent, in a few weeks I'll be on the Intelligence Sub-Quorum of His Majesty's Senate. You'd better hope I'm not a Rix spy."

His eyebrows shot up. "You're on the oversight committee?"

Laurent's alarm flared in her empathy, and turned quickly into reflexive withdrawal. Nara could feel the revulsion that military culture held for civilian interference.

"If that's what you call it in the Navy, yes."

He took a deep breath. "Oh, I didn't realize."

"Did you think Secularists never took an interest in the military?"

"An interest? Certainly. But not necessarily a positive one."

"My interest is very positive, Laurent. The Emperor's military forces benefit from oversight by the living, I'm absolutely sure. We're the ones who do the dying for him, after all."

He grimaced, the phantoms of his lost limbs twisting painfully, and she could almost hear his thoughts. What did she, a pink senator, know of dying?

"My assignment may come before the committee," he said flatly. "Perhaps we should restrict our conversation."

Oxham blinked, marveling again at how politically naive military officers could be. Laurent hadn't even bothered to check her portfolio before coming. Her own handlers wouldn't let her attend so much as a cocktail party without memorizing a detailed history of every person on the guest list. After inviting him here, she'd researched Zai's commanders and former crew, his Academy standings, and had digested reams of Apparatus propaganda about the hero of Dhantu. She'd even dipped into the gutter media, the channels who called him the Broken Man.

Of course, that didn't mean she understood him. In all that detail Nara had missed one salient point: the length of his career in real years. After almost a century Absolute of serving the Emperor, decades passing at relativistic speeds, the man was tired of losing friends and lovers to the Time Thief. And now he would be gone for another twenty years at least.

He had every right to be angry. But not at her. She put a hand on his arm and turned away to look into the fire. "Laurent, I don't want to restrict anything we say to each other. And I don't care about the Emperor's secrets. I just asked because I want to know when you're coming back."

He sighed. "As do I."

They were silent for a while, staring into the flames. Nara wondered why she had pressed him. He was probably right; they shouldn't be sharing classified information across the lines of political and military, democratic and Imperial, pink and gray. But somehow she needed to cross the boundaries of their alien hierarchies now, in these early days. Otherwise they never would.

She wanted to be trusted, even though she was a pink. Perhaps it was as simple as that.

Nara felt the change in him before he spoke. He wanted something too.

"I know you're not a spy, Nara. And I'm sure your committee will hear about it soon enough, so you should hear it from me. They've given me a new kind of ship. A frigate prototype."

"Everyone knew you'd get a command, Laurent. A reward for your faithful service."

"Perhaps. But any prototype wants battle-testing. They wouldn't be sending a ship like the Lynx to the Rix frontier if there weren't some promise of action there."

Nara nodded, feeling the certainty in him. And the dread. She was too young to have lived through the Incursion herself, but could always feel the icy memory of Rix terror attacks in those who had. Whole cities razed by gravity weapons. Planets reduced to pre-terraformation by bombardment from space. Even the gray places of the dead attacked, the bodies of the risen deliberately sundered beyond the ability of the symbiant to repair.

"It's a small, fast ship, with hitting power and range," he continued. "A deep raider, a way to strike back against the Rix."

"I see," she said softly, squeezing his non-prosthetic arm. "That would mean going even farther outward, wouldn't it?"

Her empathy with Laurent remained strong; she felt him sifting thoughts so cold that she couldn't name them. What was he thinking? "Ten more years out," he said. "Plus years of raiding, if it comes to war."

"So you really meant it that you might be gone fifty years?" "Yes. Fifty."

An entire senator's term. Of course, with Nara in stasis most of the year, and Laurent's time frame stretched out by relativity, it might only be a decade subjective for them both. Still a vast separation, given that she'd hardly known him two days. (Why, she wondered, was it always most terrible being separated from someone you'd just met?)

"It's not only the years, Nara."

"The fact that I'm a pink? That I'll be slashing your budget while you're at the front?"

He barely smiled. "No. It's what I'll do out there."

That gray Vadan charm again. "Laurent, I can hardly expect fidelity."

"I didn't mean . . . Nara, I'm talking about what I'll do as a soldier. What the Lynx is designed to do."

"Make war? You've done that before. You served in the Dhantu Occupation, after all. I can't imagine anything worse."

He turned to her, still full of blackness, and spoke with effort. "I can."

She quieted herself, letting her empathy work.

It was very small inside him, hard to see clearly. A dark place.

Then she found a way in, and it hit her. Worse than his memories of the tortures he'd suffered on Dhantu, more sovereign. It was a black abstraction, cold potential, like the mindnoise on a Vasthold street corner in the calm just before a political riot--the kind in which people would die. Nara Oxham's empathy recoiled, her head suddenly spinning, some animal part of her mind knowing ahead of the rest what her empathy would show.

But he kept talking.

"The Lynx is a deep raider, Nara. Long-range killing power, fast and expendable."

Unbidden, true telepathy came, with a glimpse of what he imagined. Rolling satellite imagery: fields and rivers from space, the grid of a city coming into view.

"Against the Rix," he continued, "we won't be hitting shipping and logistical targets. The Lynx is made to do what we never managed in the First Incursion. To take the war to the Rix worlds." "Laurent. . ." This gray man knew the mechanics of it. He understood the horrific details of how it would be done.

"As they brought war to ours."

"Stop." As she said it, Nara's hand went to her wrist, searching for the apathy bracelet. But she'd taken it off when they'd arrived. She was defenseless against his thoughts.

In any event, he said it out loud.

"My ship is for killing worlds, Nara."

She swallowed something acid, stood up and went onto the balcony. The rail caught her hands, and she pulled herself up from stumbling. Breathed deeply.

The cold cleared her head. This helplessness was absurd. "House."

"Yes, mistress?" it whispered in private second hearing.

"Get me my bracelet. Priority."

"Done."

Laurent was beside her. "Nara? I'm sorry. You would have heard anyway."

"It's just withdrawal. From my counter-empathy drug."

"I'm sorry." He held her, pressed close to warm her. She could hardly feel the dark thing in him now. Godspite, where did he hide it?