Wil McCarthy - To Crush the Moon

“That’s once more than anyone else, Governor. You won the fight, correct? You survived, and your opponent didn’t.”

“That’s accurate, yes.”

“Then come with me,” the queen said. And to Bruno: “Is the fax machine ready?”

“It is.”

“Then kiss your husband good-bye,” the queen instructed Xmary. “Your respective duties may keep you apart for some time. I wish I could say how long.”

Conrad reeled. Was this truly happening? Was Xmary being drafted right in front of his eyes? Sent off to fight for her life in the wilds of space?

“I—,” he said, but nothing else came out.

“Don’t,” Xmary told him, turning into his arms, putting a finger to his lips. She looked scared and somewhat dazed, but fully in control of herself. “You know how these things go. All we need is a show of force, then a show of compassion, and then a get-to-know-you coffee in the observation lounge. I’ll see you soon.” She kissed him then as he had rarely been kissed, in a thousand years of life.

“Be careful,” he said, clutching her in his arms, unwilling to let go. But she extricated herself anyway, and answered, “Always.”

She nodded to the queen then, who was kissing her own husband good-bye. Then the two of them—the strongest women Conrad had ever known—stepped into the fax plate and vanished.

What happened next is history, in all the great and small senses of the word, for it is written in the Ballad of Conrad Mursk, “They faxed from the house / the queen and his spouse / and he never saw neither no more.”

The error-correction virus turned out to be merely the first salvo in a battle that would later be known as Eridge Kuipera. The damaging effects on travelers turned out to be incidental to the bug’s real purpose, which was to prop open a small vulnerability in the Nescog, paving the way for further attacks.

The second and third viruses rebounded from a growing thicket of Queendom defenses, but the fourth one—named by different authorities as Heater, Snaps, and Variant Delta—managed to pick its way through the obstacles and squeeze itself into some twenty percent of the Nescog’s scattered nodes. Its effects were rather more serious, being fifty percent lethal to traveling humans and, ominously, to their buffer images and unsecured backups as well.

As a precaution, citizens were advised to back themselves up at their earliest convenience, at any of the Queendom’s thousands of secure, off-network repositories. But with tens of billions of customers flooding in all at once, the Vaults were overwhelmed, and waiting lists quickly grew from weeks to months to well over a decade.

Meanwhile, Perdition continued downsystem on a course that could only be described as belligerent, for its exhaust of coherent gamma rays cut straight through the heart of the Queendom, sweeping dangerously close to the Saturnian system and in fact bathing several asteroid-belt settlements with sublethal but highly obnoxious radiation. Shipping lanes were disrupted; ring collapsiter segments flickered and flashed with secondary Cerenkov emissions.

And unless the starship’s course was altered, that beam would eventually—if briefly—play right across the Earth at much closer range, sickening tens of billions of people on the ground and, in all probability, vaporizing anyone in orbit, where the shelter of a planetary atmosphere was moot. Plant life would not be much affected, but the animal toll on the worst-hit continent of South America would be steep.

Too, the atmosphere itself would heat up in a hurricane-sized bullseye pattern—elevated by ten or twenty degrees Kelvin at the center—and the oceans beneath would warm slightly as well. This would be enough to play havoc with the weather for months, or perhaps longer. And then Perdition itself would ease into a high orbit, from which further assaults on the Earth would be trivially easy.

These Eridanians meant business.

So did the crew of Malu’i , though, and the queen to whom they answered. Tamra had never asked to rule this system, but she’d never shirked from the responsibility, either, and damn if she’d let some gang of colonial hooligans tear the place up, no matter how sad their story might be.

“If we’re forced to target your engines,” Tamra tried explaining to the invaders, “there may be considerable hazard to your passengers and crew. And even if you escape without injury, you’ll be moving through the Inner System at several hundred kps. You’ll fly right through, and back out to interstellar space before we can arrange to decelerate you. A rescue operation could then take weeks to mount, and years to bring you to the park orbit we’ve already assigned.”

“Prick yer five holes, y’all shite-bathed daughter of pigs,” replied the image of Doxar.

Given the length of the Queendom’s history and the size of its population, we can assume that fouler curses than this had been directed, from time to time, at Tamra-Tamatra Lutui. If so, however, no record of them has survived. Certainly, the immediate shock and indignation of the men and women on the bridge of Malu’i suggests that such outbursts were rare indeed.

Nevertheless, Tamra’s response was well measured. “Such language may be commonplace in the caverns of Aetna, Captain, but here in the cradle of humanity we’ve found that mutual respect yields better results. And surely you understand that with the security of our citizens and biospheres at risk, we’re quite prepared to fire on your vessel.”

“And we’m prepared to crash your Nescog, missus. Completely and utterly, I kid you not. Y’all think we can’t?”

“I suspect you can,” she conceded. “Or your agents here in the Queendom can. You’ll find them dangerous allies, I daresay, but they’ve certainly inconvenienced us before.”

“Then give. Because I will not.”

“No one surrenders so easily,” said Tamra coolly. “We’re not inflexible, Captain, but neither are we stupid, nor craven, nor weak. You will alter your course, and divert your drive beam away from populated areas. Then we’ll negotiate. From receipt of this message, you have five minutes to comply. Or rather, the true Captain Doxar does. You, his pale shadow, may fly back to him now with my regards.”

She blanked the hollie, ending any further communication with Doxar’s image. It could hang around if it wanted to, but the real Doxar’s reply would overwrite it in any case. Of course, Perdition and Malu’i were five light-minutes apart, so with round-trip signal time it would be fifteen minutes before anything actually came of this exchange.

“Well played, Majesty,” said Brett Brown.

“Thank you,” she acknowledged, mindful of his pride, his authority before the bridge crew, and indeed before the whole of the navy itself. “I’d like to discuss the matter with you later, if you have time.”

In fact, Brown had nothing but time, and while his strategic and diplomatic skills were not in question, this was unarguably a tactical situation. Still, appearances mattered, for he had been this vessel’s captain for nearly six hundred years, and his sudden replacement by Governor Li Weng—a comparative greenhorn—was bound to raise eyebrows, even if Tamra had promoted Brown to admiral in the process.

Fortunately, the past two weeks had proven Tamra right, for Xmary was a cunning fighter who’d steered Malu’i onto a vector that took maximum advantage of her maneuverability, and minimized the options of the faster but much heavier Perdition . Brown had fought in thousands of simulated engagements, and won the vast majority of them, but bloodlessly. He had never once witnessed an actual permanent death, whereas Xmary had seen hundreds, and personally caused at least twenty. More, if Fatalist ghouls were to be counted. So if it came to blows—and it might!—Tamra figured the safe money was on known killers.