John Adams - Federations

“Doesn’t look like the kind of touchdown you walk away from,” Yarrow said.

“Think they ejected?”

“No way.” Yarrow sketched a finger through a holographic enlargement of the ship, roughly cone-shaped, vaguely streamlined just like our own thickship, to punch through the Swirl’s thickest gas belts. “Clock those dorsal hatches. Evac pods still in place.”

She was right. The pods could have flung them clear before the crash, but evidently they hadn’t had time to bail out. The ensuing impact—even cushioned by the ship’s manifold of thick—probably hadn’t been survivable.

But there was no point taking chances.

Quackheads would have finished the job, but we’d used up our stock. Mouser carried a particle beam battery, but we’d have to move uncomfortably close to the splinter before using it. What remained were the molemines, and they should have been perfectly adequate. We dropped fifteen of them, embedded in a cloud of two hundred identical decoys. Three of the fifteen were designated to dust the wreck, while the remaining twelve would bury deeper into the splinter and attempt to shatter it completely.

That at least was the idea.

It all happened very quickly, not in the dreamy slow-motion of a neurodisney. One instant the molemines were descending toward the splinter, and then the next instant they weren’t there. Spacing the two instants had been an almost subliminally brief flash.

“Starting to get sick of this,” Yarrow said.

Mouser digested what had happened. Nothing had emanated from the wreck. Instead, there’d been a single pulse of energy seemingly from the entire volume of space around the splinter. Particle weapons, Mouser diagnosed. Probably single-use drones, each tinier than a pebble but numbering hundreds or even thousands. The defector must have sown them on her approach.

But she hadn’t touched us.

“It was a warning,” I said. “Telling us to back off.”

“I don’t think so.”

“What?”

“I think the warning’s on its way.”

I stared at her blankly for a moment, before registering what she had already seen: arcing from the splinter was something too fast to stop, something against which our minimally armored thickship had no defense, not even the option of flight.

Yarrow started to mouth some exotic profanity she’d reserved for precisely this moment. There was an eardrum-punishing bang and Mouser shuddered—but we weren’t suddenly chewing vacuum.

And that was very bad news indeed.

Antiship missiles come in two main flavors: quackheads and sporeheads. You know which immediately after the weapon has hit. If you’re still thinking—if you still exist—chances are it’s a sporehead. And at that point your problems are just beginning.

Invasive demon attack, Mouser shrieked. Breather manifold compromised… which meant something uninvited was in the thick. That was the point of a sporehead: to deliver hostile demons into an enemy ship.

“Mm,” Yarrow said. “I think it might be time to suit up.”

Except our suits were a good minute’s swim away, into the bowels of Mouser, through twisty ducts that might skirt the infection site. Having no choice, we swam anyway, Yarrow insisting I take the lead even though she was a quicker swimmer. And somewhere—it’s impossible to know exactly where—demons reached us, seeping invisibly into our bodies via the thick. I couldn’t pinpoint the moment; it wasn’t as if there was a jagged transition between lucidity and demon-manipulated irrationality. Yarrow and I were terrified enough as it was. All I know is it began with a mild agoraphilia: an urge to escape Mouser’ s flooded confines. Gradually it phased into claustrophobia, and then became fully fledged panic, making Mouser seem as malevolent as a haunted house.

Yarrow ignored her suit, clawing the hull until her fingers spooled blood.

“Fight it,” I said. “It’s just demons triggering our fear centers, trying to drive us out!”

Of course, knowing so didn’t help.

Somehow I stayed still long enough for my suit to slither on. Once sealed, I purged the tainted thick with the suit’s own supply—but I knew it wasn’t going to help much. The phobia already showed that hostile demons had reached my brain, and now it was even draping itself in a flimsy logic. Beyond the ship we’d be able to think rationally. It would only take a few minutes for the thick’s own demons to neutralize the invader—and then we’d be able to reboard. Complete delusion, of course.

But that was the point.

When something like coherent thought returned I was outside.

Nothing but me and the splinter.

The urge to escape was only a background anxiety, a flock of stomach butterflies urging me against returning. Was that demon-manipulated fear or pure common sense? I couldn’t tell—but what I knew was that the splinter seemed to be beckoning me forward, and I didn’t feel like resisting. Sensible, surely; we’d exhausted all conventional channels of attack against the defector, and now all that remained was to confront her on the territory she’d staked as her own.

But where was Yarrow?

Suit’s alarm chimed. Maybe demons were still subjugating my emotions, because I didn’t react with my normal speed. I just blinked, licked my lips, and stifled a yawn.

“Yeah, what?”

Suit informed me: something massing slightly less than me, two klicks closer to the splinter, on a slightly different orbit. I knew it was Yarrow; also that something was wrong. She was drifting. In my blackout I’d undoubtedly programmed suit to take me down, but Yarrow appeared not to have done anything except bail out.

I jetted closer. And then saw why she hadn’t programmed her suit. Would have been tricky. She wasn’t wearing one.

I hit ice an hour later.

Cradling Yarrow—she wasn’t much of a burden in the splinter’s weak gravity—I took stock. I wasn’t ready to mourn her, not just yet. If I could quickly get her to the medical suite aboard the defector’s ship there was a good chance of revival. But where the hell was the wreck?

Squandering its last reserves of fuel, suit had deposited us in a clearing among the graveyard of ruined wasps. Half-submerged in ice, they looked like scorched scrap-iron sculptures, phantoms from an entomologist’s worst nightmare. So there’d been a battle here, back when the splinter was just another drifting lump of ice. Even if the thing was seamed with silicates or organics, it would not have had any commercial potential to either side. But it might still have had strategic value, and that was why the wasps had gone to war on its surface. Trouble was—as we’d known before the attack—the corpses covered the entire surface, so there was no guessing where we’d come down. The wrecked ship might be just over the nearest hillock—or another ten kilometers in any direction.

I felt the ground rumble under me. Hunting for the source of the vibration, I saw a quill of vapor reach into the sky, no more than a klick away. It was a geyser of superheated ice.

I dropped Yarrow and hit dirt, suit limiting motion so that I didn’t bounce. Looking back, I expected to see a dimple in the permafrost, where some rogue had impacted.

Instead, the geyser was still present. Worse, it was coming steadily closer, etching a neat trench. A beam weapon was making that plume, I realized—like one of the party batteries aboard ship. Then I wised up. That was Mouser . The demons had worked their way into its command infrastructure, reprogramming it to turn against us. Now Mouser worked for the defector.

I slung Yarrow over one shoulder and loped away from the boiling impact point. Fast as the geyser moved, its path was predictable. If I made enough lateral distance the death-line would sear past—