Nemesis (2 page)

Tom pointed his ship back towards the
Horton
and fired the engines. The thud of warp kicked them into their crash couches. The slow, steady rhythm of gravity bursts picked up tempo, but not nearly fast enough. While the illegal colony shrank, the twinkling cloud kept growing. Whatever it was, it had to be closing on the star incredibly fast.

Tom stared at the cloud anxiously. ‘Any guesses, people? What are we looking at?’

‘It looks like a munitions burst,’ said Wendy. ‘SAP analysis suggests a classic drone swarm, but it’s way too big for that. I’m seeing warp flashes from more than ten thousand sources and no ship signature behind them. Just empty space.’

‘So this is a local phenomenon?’ said Tom.

‘Unclear,’ said Wendy. ‘We saw no signs of anything like this from our early system scan. There’d have to be some kind of base for these things to hide in, and we didn’t find one. No moon, no engine signature, no comms, nothing. They just sort of … appeared.’

‘Could they have launched from the Fecund ruins?’

Wendy shook her head. ‘Very unlikely. That cloud came in way above the ecliptic. There’s nothing up there – we looked.’

‘I’m matching the flashes to known drone profiles,’ said Faisal. ‘They’re weird. They don’t look like anything in the book – the radiation spikes are too short and bright. Whatever they are, we didn’t build them. Sir, do you think this is what made the Flags so paranoid?’

‘No idea,’ said Tom. ‘Wendy, are those things following us? Are we clear?’

‘Hard to say. They appear to be focused on the planet. I’m taking a closer look … They’re closing on T-Four now, sir. Orbital insertion in five, four, three …’ Wendy gripped the edge of her bunk. ‘Whoa!’ she shouted.

‘Share it with us, Ms Kim,’ said Tom sharply. ‘Don’t make us guess.’

She posted a view to Tom’s display. It was a drone cloud all right. A huge one. The space around the planet had been filled with some kind of warp-enabled munitions and both colony gunships were already balls of slowly blossoming flame. Beams lanced out from the suntap stations, frantically trying to lock on to the blur of targets. Drones exploded everywhere but there were far too many to fight. Tom watched one station after another detonate, bathing the planet below in scorching light.

‘There are over two thousand people down there,’ he said. ‘Jawid, I want a full record of this event on a secure message drone. Immediate release. Destination: New Panama System, Frontier Fleet HQ.’

‘On it.’

‘Keep a channel open to the drone – I want them to see and hear everything. Faisal, do these profiles match any speculated Fecund drive signatures?’

‘Sir?’ said Faisal. He sounded confused.

‘I want to know who the Flags pissed off. Is it possible that someone was living here already? Someone the original survey flights missed?’

‘Sir, the Fecund went extinct ten million years ago.’

‘I know that,’ Tom snapped. ‘Check anyway. And look back over those scans you did on our approach – is it possible that the out-system ruins actually belonged to someone else?’

‘N-no, sir. The match was very tight. And no, Fecund warp wasn’t that different from ours, sir. If anything, it was messier. Though if they’d somehow survived for ten million years, who knows what they’d have by now?’

Tom knew he was clutching at straws. ‘Maybe another human colony that was here before us, then? One with its own weapons tech?’

Even as he said it, he knew that answer wasn’t right, either. For a start, colonies with weapons this advanced wouldn’t have any trouble with Flags. But still, the threat had to be human, didn’t it? Otherwise how had they sent a message in English, no matter how cryptic?

‘Give me a matching tight-beam,’ said Tom. ‘I’m going to talk to them.’

‘Sir!’ said Wendy. ‘I have to point out that we don’t even know if there’s a pilot guiding that swarm. It could be autonomous. If it is, you may trigger target awareness.’

‘They might not spot us without help, Lieutenant, but they’re sure as shit going to notice the
Horton
. That ark lights up like a Christmas tree every time it warps. Which means we either assess the threat now or get ready to defend the
Horton
against whatever those things are.’

He thumbed the comm. ‘Unidentified drone swarm, this is Captain Tom Okano-Lark of the Interstellar Pact Ship
Reynard
. We are unaware of the political situation in this system but know that there are civilians on that planet. Please end your assault. If there has been an injustice here, rest assured that the full weight of IPSO law will be applied. We will assist in making whatever amends are necessary. I repeat: please end your assault.’

He waited for the message to creep at light-speed towards the swarm, his heart in his mouth. Next to him, Wendy shifted uneasily on her bunk. Meanwhile, the message kept repeating.

‘Trespass detected. Punishment cycle initiated. Damage imminent.’

‘Sir!’ said Wendy. ‘Some of the drones have changed course. They’re headed this way. I recommend immediate retreat.’ Her tone said what she didn’t need to:
told you so.

Tom spat curses. ‘Hold on, everybody – we’re repositioning to defend the
Horton
. Wendy, let Sundeep know we’re coming. Engaging combat mode.’

The
Reynard
was a small ship, but a tough one. It had been designed for two things: environmental scanning and punching well above its weight when necessary. Changes rippled through the vessel from the tiny cabin kernel right out to the exohull surface kilometres above them.

Tom’s arms went numb as his simulated replacements came online and his skeletal reinforcements kicked in with a jolt. He felt a sudden flush on his cheeks as the micromesh around his augmented heart started pumping. Elsewhere in the cabin, his crew sank back into their couches as similar machinery buried in their bodies woke up and flexed.

Tom boosted the engines, throwing as much power at the drive as he could without giving someone a concussion. It was like piloting a road-driller.

‘Deploy countermeasures,’ he ordered. ‘Disrupters at maximum spread.’

‘Already on it,’ said Jawid.

‘We have company,’ Wendy said grimly. ‘Sending you the bearing.’

The Casimir-buffers snapped like the jaws of dragons.

‘Shields at twenty per cent, sir,’ said Jawid.

‘Engaging evasives.’ Tom picked a program at random and fired it. Better to live with broken limbs than not at all.

The cabin filled with the clamour of alarms.

‘Faisal, I want g-ray scatter. Lots of it. Don’t spare the juice.’

‘On it.’

Tom grimaced as he watched the horrid blur of action outside his ship. The drones jumped around like crickets and were nearly impossible to hit.

‘Drones headed for the
Horton
, sir,’ said Wendy. ‘No sign they’ve been able to manoeuvre and they’re not responding to hails. The radiation wave might have hit them.’

‘Shit,’ said Tom. ‘Diving to intercept.’

His virtual hands flashed over the keyboard, modifying their tumbling flight onto a course that would head off the threat. He struggled to breathe as gravity pulses hurled him from side to side. Outside, the drones from nowhere flashed ever closer. The growl of the drive became a deafening roar as the ship’s autopilot SAP struggled to compensate.

‘Deploy everything,’ said Tom, his artificial breath labouring. ‘Jawid, recondition gravity-shield buoys for self-destruct. Release them all. We’re going to buy the
Horton
as much time as we can.’

Tom watched the buoys tear away from his hull in dizzying arcs.

‘Fuck you,’ he told the drone swarm. ‘Leave my colonists alone.’

Space lit up with a cascade of eye-searing nuclear blasts.

The closest drones popped and died like soap bubbles but hundreds more raced up to replace them, apparently undeterred. They winked and flashed like a cloud of fairy dust closing around the
Reynard
.

It was the last thing Captain Tom Okono-Lark ever saw.

1:
BEGINNINGS

1.1: MARK

In a grubby rec room smelling of cabbage and bad coffee, at the top of a New York supertower, Mark Ruiz sprawled in a beanbag chair. A beaker of lukewarm stimmo hung in his limp right hand. His glazed eyes stared emptily into the middle distance. An idle passer-by might have mistaken him for a drug addict or a student taking an unscheduled nap; it had happened before. Mark, however, was a roboteer. He was working late and hating it.

He barely perceived the rec room. The body his mind currently inhabited hung in the air eighty kilometres away in the form of a struggling Wheeler Systems aerolifter about thirty seconds from being dashed to pieces against the ground. He wrestled with the New Jersey weather, edging the lifter back towards the tower while the air around him screamed and threw itself at the vehicle like an army of crazed angels. The jagged peak of the Princeton Environmental Sampling Station jutted dangerously below, visible as a streak of smeared yellow light in the storm studded with flashing warning beacons. The ground beneath lay black as pitch. A greasy charcoal-grey sky glowered overhead.

The lifter was, at the end of the day, a blimp. And the weather outside was, whatever they liked to call them these days, still a hurricane. No matter that the blimp in question had nuclear engines with more thrust capacity than the average orbital shuttle, or that its dynamically flexing frame was studded from end to end with near-indestructible air-sculpting microfins. Dealing with two-hundred-kilometre-per-hour winds in a glorified balloon required attention.

Unfortunately, the people trapped in the sampling station weren’t going to rescue themselves – either from the storm or the approaching rebels. It would all have been a lot easier, and a lot less frustrating, if Mark hadn’t been doing it to a deadline.

The NoreCorr regional government, under the auspices of the FiveClan Cooperative, had finally given in and sold the rights to the now-defunct Philadelphia District. With the city’s remaining housing modules air-shuttled to New York at last, control had been scheduled to turn over at midnight. The buyer: the Barrio Eighteen Corporation – the only eco-speculator crazy enough to bother.

FiveClan, predictably, wanted to get as much high-end equipment out of the area as possible before the site changed hands. In true NoreCorr style, they’d ignored the meteorological reports and sent a team of engineers into the tower to remove the quantum processing cores: by far the most valuable items inside.

Equally predictably, Barrio Eighteen wanted them to fail but couldn’t be publicly seen to object. So when rebels from the Shamokin Justice Movement had arrived unannounced to try to prevent the removal of staff and equipment on cultural grounds, nobody had been particularly surprised. The Shamokin had a very elastic sense of cultural priorities and a history of taking on dodgy contracts. Less than an hour after the engineers entered the tower, the Shamokin shut down all ground transportation, forcing evacuation by air.

FiveClan had sent Mark in to resolve the problem and now the Shamokin were taking potshots at him from the ground to try to prevent him from docking. He could see them in the infrared, stomping over the remains of the abandoned kudzu plantations in exosuits, angling against the weather, bolt rifles cradled in their ceramic arms.

Mark hated exosuits. Nothing smacked of the abuse of human labour like an exosuit. Why put a person in a dangerous situation when they could just teleoperate a robot? Only people who cared more about money than human lives.

In his mind, Barrio Eighteen and Shamokin Justice were as ridiculous as each other. What was the point of a land-grab on Earth in this day and age? Particularly in NoreCorr. This was the third supercyclone this month and by far the worst. Most of Earth’s sects had enough sense to focus their energy on planets that weren’t dying.

A sudden shift in the storm threw the lifter sideways just as Mark closed on the tower for the fourth time. He twitched in his beanbag chair and diverted a little more of his focus to the SAP running the struggling engines. The SAP doing aerosurface sculpting complained wildly at the sudden neglect. Fortunately, Mark was an Omega, genetically engineered to handle as many Self-Aware Programs as it took to run a full starship. Splitting his mental focus to guide multiple pieces of equipment came naturally to him, so long as he didn’t push it too far.

Ricky B called him from the tower. ‘It’s no use, Mark. I think those Shamokin bastards have cracked door security. Don’t worry about us. Just get out of here.’

‘I’m not leaving you.’

‘Don’t be a fool, Mark. It’s not worth it.’

‘I’m going to get you out,’ Mark insisted.

‘Why?’ Ricky snapped. ‘What’s the fucking point? It’s just a couple of weeks in a Shamokin shelter and a ransom demand. We both know FiveClan’s good for it.’

Mark snarled to himself. For a team of trapped engineers about to be kidnapped at gunpoint by armed rebels, Ricky and his people sounded surprisingly blasé. But then, that was Earth for you these days. Life was cheap, loyalty expensive.

‘Can you get the dockbot back online?’ said Mark. ‘If I had some help from your end on the tethering arm, we could nail this.’

‘I’ve told you,’ said Ricky tersely. ‘The dockbot refuses to work under these conditions and there’s nobody down here who can persuade it to accept an override. If you can’t make the join to a static arm, you might as well call it a night.’

‘Fine,’ said Mark. ‘Just send me an address, then. I’ll talk to it myself.’

‘Why? You can’t run the fucking arm and the lifter at the same time, so what’s the point?’

Mark gritted his teeth. It had been enough of a pain in the ass to come out here tonight. No way was he going home empty-handed.

‘If you don’t think I can do it then you won’t mind sending me the address.’

Ricky muttered curses at him. ‘Don’t be stupid. Nobody can do shit like that.’

Ricky was right, of course. Nobody with normal modifications could. But Mark seldom had to worry about the limits of his handling skills. Thanks to Will Kuno-Monet, his genetic editor and erstwhile mentor, all he had to worry about was being discovered.

‘The address, please,’ said Mark, ‘or I’m putting this in the report.’

‘Whatever!’ said Ricky. ‘It’s your funeral, buddy.’

The tribunal-mandated nanny-SAP running in the back of Mark’s head sent him a warning jab. [
Exposing the extent of your abilities jeopardises Fleet security,
] it reminded him. [
Remember that your interface is the exclusive, classified property of the IPSO organisation.
]

How could he ever forget?

‘Fuck you, and fuck Will Monet,’ he told it. The SAP had heard it before.

The secure link appeared in Mark’s sensorium. With significant effort, he calved off a share of his attention and pointed it at the dockbot. Immediately, his mind flooded with a wave of terror. For a moment, it looked like he’d get leak-back to the other SAPs under his command, but Mark brought the dockbot’s mood under control just in time. Giving the lifter a panic attack would undoubtedly send it crashing into the tower or the ground or both: not an ideal outcome.

He reached out mentally to understand the dockbot’s problem. Three of its sensor plates had been left exposed after the last storm and it could no longer feel its second elbow. Consequently, the weather was freaking it out. It was convinced it was going to break. The tiny software minds installed in equipment like the dockbot seldom had enough sentience to think rationally in situations like these. They responded reflexively, like all simple machines. It took a human handler to instil enough logic to overcome their basic programming.

Mark pressed cool reason into the dockbot’s tiny mind, reassuring it that everything would be okay. He ignored the plaintive warnings from the aerosurface SAP and coaxed the tethering arm out of the lock position. At the same time, he nudged the lifter closer to the ground, while stray bolts fired from below bounced off its armoured hull. He brought the tethering arm up to kiss and bind.

‘We have a link,’ he told Ricky with satisfaction. ‘Get everyone into that transit pod. We probably have a minute, tops.’

‘You’re fucking crazy, you know that?’ said Ricky. ‘Fucking moddie roboteer. You’re not normal. Fine. We’ll all get in the transit pod in a
hurricane
and crawl up a docking arm into your blimp while they shoot at us from the ground. Sounds great. No problem at all.’

Mark smiled to himself and let his mind surf, spreadeagled between the various SAPs he was managing. It was a little like juggling on a unicycle, he decided. Hard, but not impossible.

A minute slid by while Mark watched the rebels mass near the base of the tower fifty storeys below. The last group brought an antique siege-walker with a mounted rail gun. Not good.

‘Are you coming or what?’ said Mark.

‘Yes, we’re fucking coming. We’re getting the cores in.’

‘
What?
Why are you still bothering with the cores?’

‘Because management will skin us if we show up without them,
retard
. Or didn’t you figure that out? They’re worth more than we are.’

Mark rolled his eyes. Classic NoreCorr reasoning.

‘Okay,’ said Ricky. ‘Loading the pod now. You’d better be ready.’ His voice oozed reluctance.

The transit pod full of engineers began its climb up the tethering arm, motors squealing. The rebels chose that moment, of course, to fire their rail gun. A depleted-uranium shell tore up through Mark’s lifter envelope at three kilometres per second. The aerolifter lurched as ten per cent of its lifting capacity vanished. Every SAP in the vehicle screamed at him simultaneously.

Mark had less than a second to react. Fortunately, his machine-assisted reflexes could handle that. He shot out a command to the tethering arm to blow its rear emergency bolts and the arm snapped with the transit pod still climbing up it.

A cry of terror issued from the engineers inside the pod as they swung free. The arm dangled from the lifter, spurting sparks and hydraulic fluid into the rushing air. For four uncomfortable seconds, the pod ground its way up the arm before the airlock mandibles could seize it. Mark released the top bolts and dropped the arm. Several hundred tons of steel plunged towards the rebels below and he felt a moment’s satisfaction watching them scramble. The arm landed squarely on the siege-walker.

‘Are you
out of your fucking mind
?’ Ricky yelled. ‘Some of us are physically fucking
here
, you sonofabitch. Did you forget that?’

Mark pulled the lifter up, gaining altitude and turning back towards New York.

‘The airlock to the cabin is now open,’ Mark told his passengers. ‘Please find a seat and make yourselves comfortable. ETA at New York Terminus is approximately twenty minutes, weather permitting. Thank you for flying FiveClan.’

He switched off the comms, silencing Ricky’s shouting, and stretched out on the chair. He’d spilled his stimmo, he noticed with a wince. Still, rescued engineers: check. Rescued data cores: check. Seriously annoyed Shamokin rebels: check. All told, it wasn’t a bad end to a night’s work. He might even make it downstairs before the bars closed.

1.2: ANN

At the Plaza Café in Stichin City on the planet Yonaguni, Ann Ludik sat with a cappuccino and a touchboard, hard at work like the dozen or so white-collar types around her. Her two heavies, Carl and Mimi, lounged under the fruit trees a few seats away, dressed as students and chatting over some interactive magazine. In their flickering vid-smocks and gel-boots, they looked for all the world like a pair of nice, ordinary kids. Overhead, somewhere in the deep mauve sky beyond the habitat bubble, the IPS
Griffin
lurked, ready for action. From where she sat, Ann had an excellent view across the pink marble plaza to the entrance of the presidential offices – a nine-storey block of open-fronted levels carved into the canyon wall.

Unlike the government workers around her, the data light flickering in Ann’s contact lenses did not show spreadsheets or code-maps. Instead, it displayed a video feed of the aerial drones her crew were tracking from orbit – drones she suspected were laden with chemical explosives. The UAVs in question had already flown just over two hundred kilometres from Stichin City and were racing towards the Flag settlement of Pyotor’s Dream. There could no longer be any doubt about their intended destination.

The touchboard in front of Ann contained the passive end of a state-of-the-art quantcomm device that gave her an untraceable, instantaneous data link to her crew. Ann spoke in a subvocal mutter which the implant in her throat dutifully turned into complete speech that only her crew could hear.

‘Ara, drop the stealth-shield, please,’ she said. ‘Carol, bring the spectroscopy SAP to full awareness, and River, a low-intensity X-ray on target three, if you wouldn’t mind.’

A lance of invisible energy spat out from the
Griffin
’s hull, skewering one of the drones. It ballooned into a sphere of yellow flame, littering the surrounding desert with debris.

Ann surveyed the blast site with grim satisfaction. ‘Do we have a signature?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Carol. ‘Trace presence of naznite confirmed.’

‘Disappointing but expected,’ said Ann. ‘Carol, can you land those other drones at this point?’

‘On it. I’ve still got their drone security cracked – they haven’t even tried to cycle it yet. I’ll take control and land those puppies now.’

‘Excellent. And please download a copy of their flight plan. Make sure it tallies with the information our crawlers provided.’

‘Of course, ma’am. Correlating … We have a match. Confidence is one hundred per cent.’

Ann sighed to herself. After more than a week of waiting, the entire grubby episode was finally at an end. She hadn’t enjoyed the mission. Her cover as an SAP sanity inspector had bored her. She disliked the bland Frontier-fare that Yonaguni offered for food and entertainment and found the smug attitudes of the colonists downright objectionable. The fact that the kind of plot she’d witnessed here could unfold at a colony a mere three light-years from New Panama struck her as a worrying sign of the times. Three light-years was practically next door. How long before the unrest reached the regional capital itself?