Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

‘Oh!’ He sat up, heart hammering. ‘Yes, that would be wonderful. Where are you?’

‘We’re all up on the control deck,’ she said. ‘So we’re not breathing down your necks. We can see you through the command table. OK, patching you through.’

Higgins and Johnstone yelled at the same moment. The structure they’d been working on had been displaced by the complex front-end display screen of the Hungry Dragon .

‘I meant to my own comms!’ Lamont shouted.

‘That’s what I did ,’ Carlyle’s indignant voice said in his ear. ‘Wait, let me…’

‘No,’ said the Hungry Dragon . ‘There is no need to do that. Everything is under control.’

It was in all their phones.

Lucinda snatched her hand away as if burned from the comms link Higgins had made in the command table. Sam Yamata glared at her. His face flushed then as quickly paled. She could hear his breath. In. Out. In.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘There is no danger. Whatever has intruded cannot upgrade our ship’s software. But still. We now have’—he paused, paging the display too fast for her to follow—‘an agent program of Lamont’s ship on our side of the firewalls. It is active. Very active.’

Lucinda’s knees shook. Yamata had okayed the transaction, but she felt again responsible. She was still kicking herself when she saw Yamata suddenly straighten up and listen intently to a message in his personal comms. Her own chimed a moment later and she heard Amelia Orr shouting: ‘Lift! Lift!’

In the external visual display, still up on the end of the command table, she saw the two other ships—the Knights’ and the one Amelia had swapped crews into—vanish in the blink of an eye, leaving a wrack of disturbed low cloud.

Yamata reached for the control menu of the command table. ‘Sit down,’ he said.

Armand and Lucinda were barely in their seats when the ship lurched upwards. They were pressed down, then released so that they almost rose out, then were slammed back again. Yamata was more skillful than Higgins had been at compensating for the ship’s damaged controls, but the ride was rough. In the small view of the lab, still up on the table, she could see the three Rapture-fuckers braced under the table at which they’d worked, Lamont’s long arms holding the other two and a stanchion at the same time.

‘What the fuck is going on?’ Lamont demanded.

‘Emergency lift,’ Lucinda said. ‘Apart from that I don’t know.’ The obvious thought struck her. ‘Has this something to do with what your ship did?’

‘No,’ replied Lamont. ‘It succeeded . It cracked into the relic’s control over the war machines. You can call your commander and check.’

Lucinda did just that while watching the visual display. It was already showing the blue curve of the planet below, black above. Kevin’s voice came through: ‘Aye, they’re standing down. But forget about that. The corrupted DK ships are attacking.’

So that was why they’d taken off so fast. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Good luck down there.’

‘We’re heading for the shelters,’ said Kevin, and signed off.

She relayed the information in an undertone to Armand. He frowned, staring at the visual diplay, now all black and blank but for a fleeting glimpse of Orpheus.

‘Fucking useless,’ he muttered.

Yamata was talking quietly, switching seamlessly from Japanese to American as he spoke to the other KE pilot and to somebody called Nardini, the guy flying the Carlyles’ ship. He shot Armand an impatient glance and stabbed a spot or two on the board with his finger. The visual display changed to a schematic. It showed the situation on several scales, from system-wide to local, with tags. Lucinda immediately grasped how it was put together. If the Knights had followed standard practice they’d have sown the system with transceiver sondes on all wavelengths and modes of communication, enabling the ship to build up a picture from radio and FTL comms, gravity-wave detection, reports and, she guessed, wild surmise. There were four ships marked as enemy, three—including their own—tagged as friendly, and named. The ship she was on was the Subtle Conceit , the other KE one the Small Arrangement of Chrysanthemums ; and whatever the now Carlyle-piloted ship had been called originally, it was now hailing as the Stanley Blade . The clutter of AO vessels and uncorrupted DK ones were not in the fight, except as targets: the former location of two DK ships and one AO were shown as fading glows. The remainder were taking fast evasive action—a rapid-fire Cherenkov flicker and, moments later like thunder after a lightning-flash, a rumble of gravity-wave disturbances, showed them fleeing the system as fast as they could fittle.

‘Cowards,’ muttered Armand.

‘No,’ said Lucinda. ‘They’re helping us—clearing the board. Cuts down on chronology tangles, too.’

She watched intently as the Stanley Blade and the Small Arrangement raced to the points that triangulated Eurydice’s gravity well. The enemy ships, millions of klicks away, had formed the corner of a vastly larger enclosing square. Both sides were following well-grounded tactical moves for a starship battle. What came next would be a game of bluff and chance, which could last for hours or be over in seconds. The decisions were up to the pilots, the execution to the computers. But the enemy ships were being flown by their computers, or rather by the combative virus that had infested them. Whether this gave her side an advantage she would soon discover. That was the only outcome she would know in this life; if the opposite was the case, she would be dead.

One of the DK ships blinked away in an FTL jump. In instant response the two other KE-built ships darted away from the planet, while the Subtle Conceit dived towards it, deep into the gravity well. The manoeuvre took five seconds. In less time than that the ship that had vanished reappeared, having fittled a mere two light-seconds. Close enough now to see where they were, but far out of missile or laser range. Lucinda had seen this short-hop FTL capability before; Yamata had not, but he showed no surprise. He tapped a finger; a scatter of nuclear proximity mines were expelled from the ship; and then the Subtle Conceit once again moved fast, to one-tenth light-speed in two seconds. This time, those on board felt no fraction of the ferocious acceleration: Yamata had mastered that problem. The enemy ship fittled again, to reappear close to where they had been. The proximity mines detonated. The enemy ship’s drive exploded. A portion of the screen whitened for a moment.

Yamata allowed himself a small grunt of satisfaction. Armand and Lucinda whooped and punched the air.

The other two friendly ships, having diverged, were again converging. Another of the enemy ships fittled. The Stanley Blade ’s and the Small Arrangement ’s trajectories instantly halted. The enemy appeared, as it seemed on this scale, right beside them, and as rapidly was destroyed.

‘Ya beauty!’ yelled Lucinda.

‘What happened there?’ Armand asked.

‘Chronology Protection trap. It came out of the jump just too far away to hit them, and it couldnae fittle the remaining distance without going outside its own light-cone or back in time. They had a moment while it waited tae catch up wi itself, fired off a nuke, and—’ She clapped her hands.

Both the remaining enemy ships fittled away at the same moment. One of them reappeared between the Small Arrangement and the Stanley Blade , and Lucinda saw something bigger than a nuclear explosion: the deliberate detonation of one stardrive, and the secondary detonation of two more. To anyone looking in that direction from the ground it would have appeared like a supernova. There was no time to respond to the shock. The one remaining enemy ship had not reappeared. It was Armand who guessed its location.