“But that’s illegal! Not even Earth would resort to warship AI! When the people hear about it…”
What are they going to do? Clarke thought. Tal-Kader’s the one enforcing the rules.
“I’m positive, Commander. Look at their course. They’re investing in a parabola course, so they get to rake our engines when they come up. That’s not a collision course.”
Of course, that course would put them in range of all of Hawk’s auxiliaries, but what did that matter to the software that ruled them?
Alicante cursed bitterly and ordered his crew to switch targeting patterns from interception to engagement. Clarke’s internal organs inched toward the back of the g-seat as Hawk accelerated and showered the AI ships with targeting lasers.
“Clarke,” Pascari’s voice reached him, “what’s going on?”
“Vortex is carrying unmanned ships,” Clarke said. He had his gaze glued on the targeting map. Sure enough, someone in the bridge updated the map’s readouts and changed the triangles to ship’s dots.
“What? So Tal-Kader’s committing war crimes in broad daylight, now? Fucking cowards aren’t brave enough to face us themselves!”
“I figure they’re pulling all the stops to slow us down,” said Clarke. “Sentinel must be real close, and Erickson doesn’t want to be the guy who has to explain that he lost Isabella Reiner.”
After all, Clarke knew the Defense Fleet didn’t take failure lightly. He had avoided the firing squad on a technicality, ten years ago. He figured Tal-Kader’s lawyers had plugged those bugs since.
“All Erickson’s going to get is a bullet to the head, either from me or his bosses,” Pascari said.
That’s what’s worrying me, Clarke thought. A desperate man in Erickson’s position might resort to desperate tactics.
Like shooting at Dione.
A kinetic round aimed at a populated planet meant nothing short of mass extinction. A crime so horrible that its mere possibility had surrendered Jagal when Mississippi bypassed the planet’s defenders. So far in the history of the Edge, no one had actually made good on that threat.
No one had launched AI warships either.
As if directly commanded by Clarke’s will, Hawk invested all his point defense weaponry in saturating the unmanned ships’ possible courses with firepower, sparing no thought for saving ammunition. Tiny blue lines shot from Hawk’s dot and spread toward the enemy ships like strands of a web. At once, the ships began evasive maneuvers.
Too close, Clarke thought, before the blue lines had reached them. Fast or not, you’re too close to us.
How deep could the layers of armor go in ships that size? Hawk’s rounds were designed to penetrate the shells of ships of the line.
Most of the lines passed the ships without harming them. Enough found their target.
Clarke closed his eyes. He could imagine the path of the bullets as if he rode them. First, he pierced the outer hull, traveled through a thick composite of ablative materials designed to withstand both weaponry and small meteors, swam through a vacuum, and dove inside a coat of ballistic gel. Second to last, a layer of ceramics whose function was to slow a bullet—or a very fast rock. This entire trip past the outer hull would be the first armor layer in a ship of the line. A corvette-sized ship had only this one layer to protect itself against hundreds of years of mankind perfecting the art of accelerating tiny projectiles at things it didn’t like.
In the race between attack and defense, attack was the favorite contender.
After the ceramics came the ship’s skeleton. Pure metal composite, the last barrier between him and the ship’s precious, fragile entrails—mechanical or human, it didn’t matter much at this point.
One of the AI ships crumbled as Hawk’s targeting patterns stopped trying to keep them away and instead focused on out-firing them. The red dot disappeared, eight minutes away from the destroyer.
AI or not, fast or not, a corvette-sized ship lacked the range, computing power, and weaponry of a destroyer.
The surviving ship scored a single hit before its dot disappeared. The hit stopped at the third armor layer, halfway through its ballistic gel. Had it kept going, it would’ve speared the bridge.
“All ships, ten minute acceleration break. Combat’s arrived faster than we thought,” Clarke said. “Everyone, don your pressure suits.”
He filed the AI ships as a new threat in Vortex’s hand. There would be time to deal with the political implications later after Sierra picked Hirsen and Isabella up from Dione.
The ETA on Dione blinked in bright green letters. Thirty hours to go. It wasn’t much, and if his suspicions on Sentinel proved correct, Clarke doubted they’d have much time to wait for Hirsen to appear.
And there was still the threat of Vortex and the other two destroyers to consider.
“Commander,” he said to Alicante, “what’s the word on Hirsen? Has he responded to our hails?”
Pascari had given Communications the private encoding that Hirsen had used to communicate with the EIF in the first place. When—if—the man contacted Sierra to coordinate Isabella’s extraction, he’d do so using that same code.
“Negative contact, Captain. NavComm hasn’t picked up anything,” Alicante answered. “Another tick on your list of worries, isn’t it, sir?”
“Yes,” Clarke said. His gaze was still glued on the map, but now the thirty hour countdown clamored for an equal share of his attention.
“I figured,” said Alicante. His voice dripped with gallows humor. “Know what, sir? I would hate to be in your shoes right now. I’ll thank Pascari, later, if we survive this.”
Thirty hours, and the clock ticked. Clarke and Sierra—hell, the entire EIF, had bet with their lives that, down below on Dione’s surface, a man named Daneel Hirsen waited for them with Isabella Reiner in tow. For all Clarke knew, Hirsen had lay dead in a gutter for the last year, and Antonov chased his phantom.
Where are you, Hirsen?
25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
DELAGARZA
“You come at an inopportune time,” Nanny Kayoko’s holo said.
Delagarza shot a tense look at the armed rebels flanking him. Their fingers close to the trigger guards of their rifles, and the muscles of their necks taut under the augmented strain of their partial power armor. “I realize that. But we can’t just wait until things die down to have a happy chat, can we?”
Kayoko laughed hoarsely. Her artificial face may be young, but that laugh belonged to a person who has outlived entire generations. “Is that your attempt at humor? To laugh at me while my rebellion crumbles? I could have you shot, you know.”
Delagarza thought of the urban tanks rolling down the streets, the amphibian infiltration squads pouring down into Alwinter’s sewers, the security squads methodically cleansing alleys and mansions of gangers and the mob alike.
“To be honest, Kayoko, that sounds like the least of my problems.”
That laugh again. Perhaps those anti-aging surgeries weren’t as infallible as the hired medics liked to preach. After all, there’s only so many lifetimes a brain can live before checking out. Perhaps Kayoko was at her limit. She sure as hell didn’t look healthy, with her disheveled hair and those deep bags under her eyes.
“Who am I talking to?” she asked. “Hirsen or Delagarza?”
“At this point,” said Delagarza, “it doesn’t matter. We need to talk, Kayoko.”
“So we do,” she said, still smirking, the very image of a woman who’s not used to people talking to her that way. “You know that, as we speak, a squad of enforcer-led amphibians are approaching my compound, right? Come meet me, and you may not come out again.”