Its other defenses were on the same scale, and it deployed decoys while jammers hashed the cruisers' fire control sensors. Lasers and particle beams splattered all about them, but less than two percent scored hits, and the ship's screen shrugged them aside contemptuously.
Energy torpedoes followed the beams, packets of plasma scorching in at near light-speed, and the range was low enough the attackers could overload the normal parameters of their torpedoes' electro-magnetic "envelopes," more than doubling their nominal effect. Not even the AI had time to track weapons moving at that speed, but it could detect the peaking power emissions just before they launched, and unlike missiles, they were direct fire weapons, with no ability to home or evade. The alpha-synth's defenses were designed to handle such attacks from capital ships; cruisers simply didn't mount the generators for more than a very few launchers each, and stern-mounted autocannon spat out brief, precise bursts as each torpedo blossomed. It didn't take much of a solid object to rupture the skin of an energy torpedo traveling at ninety-eight percent of light-speed, and the alpha-synth's ever mounting velocity left the resultant explosions harmlessly astern.
Missiles were another story.
Every attempt to adapt the Hauptman effect to manned vessels had come up against two insurmountable difficulties: an active Hauptman coil poured out a torrent of radiation instantly fatal to all known forms of life, and unlike the Fasset drive, it played fair with Newton. Despite their prodigious rates of acceleration, Fasset drive ships were, in effect, in a perpetual state of free-fall "into" their black holes, and while artificial gravity could produce a comfortable sense of up and down aboard a normal starship, no counter-grav system yet had been able to cope with the thirty-thousand-plus gravities' acceleration of the Hauptman effect.
But warheads cared little for radiation or acceleration, and now Hauptman-effect weapons came tearing in pursuit. They needed six seconds to burn out their coils and reach maximum velocity, but that took almost two light-seconds, and the present range was far less than that. Which meant they came in much more slowly … but that their drives were still capable of evasive and homing maneuvers as they attacked.
Proximity-fused counter missiles sped to meet them, and Alicia watched in awe as space burned behind her. The counter missiles were far smaller than their attackers, and the alpha-synth carried an enormous number of them, but its magazines were far from unlimited. Yet not a single warhead got through, for no one aboard it-with the possible exception of Tisiphone-had any interest in counter-attacking. That meant all of its energy weapons were available for point defense, and no missile had the onboard ECM to evade an alpha-synth AI in full cry. There were far too few of them to saturate its defenses, and nothing short of a saturation attack could break them.
Captain Morales glared at his display as his cruiser led the pursuit. HMS Implacable and her sisters were losing ground steadily, but their target was in ideal range … and they were accomplishing exactly nothing.
The entire operation was insane. No one could steal an alpha-synth-only a trained alpha-synth pilot could even get aboard one! But someone had stolen this one, and precisely how Admiral Marat expected a cruiser flotilla to stop it passed Morales's understanding. The forts might have a chance, but his ships didn't. The damned thing was laughing at them!
Another useless missile salvo vanished far short of target, and the captain swore under his breath.
"Somebody get my bloody darts!" he snarled. "Maybe they can stop it!"
"You're kidding me!" Vice Admiral Horth told her com screen.
"The hell I am." There was just over a one-second transmission delay each way between Soissons Orbit One and Jefferson Field, and Admiral Marat's expression was less humorous even than the weapons fire in Horth's plot when he replied two seconds later. "We've got a rogue drop commando in an alpha-synth, Becky, and she's boosting out of here like a bat out of hell."
"Jesus," Horth muttered, and looked up as Governor General Treadwell hurried into PriCon. Given the governor's lifelong dislike for planets, he preferred to make his home aboard the HQ fortress. Now he leaned forward into the field of Horth's pickup and stabbed Marat with a glower that boded ill for the port admiral's future.
"And just what," he asked coldly, "is going on here?"
I knew this was a formidable vessel, Little One, but it surpasses even my expectations. What might Odysseus have accomplished with its like?
With me in his corner, he'd've owned the damned planet, the AI put in during an interval between salvos, and the Fury laughed silently.
Indeed, Little One, I believe the machine speaks truth. It would seem we chose well.
Yeah? Well, next time let's discuss things before you come all over larcenous, okay?
Very well. Tisiphone's mental voice was uncharacteristically chastened, though Alicia had little hope it would last. But-
Hang on, Alley, the AI interrupted. The forts just came on-line.
"Very well, Admiral Marat. I believe I now understand the situation." Governor Treadwell turned to Horth and frowned as the alpha-synth crossed the inner fortress ring and continued to accelerate. "Do you have firing lock?"
"I'm afraid not, Sir." Horth looked as unhappy as she felt. "We seem to be even more affected by its jammers than the cruisers are."
"Indeed?" Treadwell's frown was distinctly displeased, but Marat came to his colleague's defense via the com link.
"I'm afraid it won't get any better, Governor. The alpha-synth has full specs on your fire control in its files, and it's designed to defeat any sensor system it can read. It's only going to get worse as the range opens."
"I see." Treadwell tapped his fingers gently together. "We'll have to have a little talk about just what goes into such units' memories in future, Admiral Marat. In the meantime, we can't simply let it go-certainly not with an insane woman at its controls. Admiral Horth, engage with SLAMs."
"It'll be blind fire, Sir," Horth protested, wincing at the thought of the expense. Without lock, she'd have to fire virtually at random, and SLAMs required direct hits. Trying to smother a half-seen target as small as the alpha-synth would use up prodigious numbers of multi-million-credit weapons.
"Understood. I'll authorize the expense."
"Very well, Sir." Horth nodded to her fire control officer.
"Engage," she said.
Alicia bit her lip as the fixed fortifications opened fire at last and hordes of red-ringed, malignant blue sparks shrieked after them. The forts were designed to stop ten million-tonne superdreadnoughts, and the volume of fire was inconceivable.
The Supra-Light Accelerated Missile, or SLAM, was the Empire's ultimate long-range weapon. Close in concept to the drones starships used for FTL messages by starships, a SLAM consisted solely of a small Fasset drive and its power source. The weapon had to be half the size of an assault shuttle to squeeze them in, but they made it, in effect, a targeted black hole, and very little known to man had a hope of stopping one. A starship's interposed Fasset drive mass would take one out, though stories about what happened when the ship's drive was even minimally out of tune were enough to curl one's hair, and not even a SLAM could get through the final defense of a capital ship's Orchovski-Kurushu-Milne shield. Unfortunately, a Fasset drive wouldn't work inside an OKM shield, and no weapon could shoot out past one, either. Both of which points were moot in this case, since nothing smaller than a battleship could spare the mass for shield generators.
The only good thing was that SLAMs weren't seeking weapons-mostly. No homing systems could see around their black holes, and despite the fact that their acceleration was little more than half that of the Hauptman effect, their speed and range quickly took them out of guidance range of their firers. A very near near-miss could still "suck" its way into a hit by gravitational attraction, which was why they weren't used when enemies were intermingled, but what the AI's jammers were doing to the forts' targeting systems meant the chance of any one of them scoring a hit was infinitestimal.
Only they were firing a lot of them. Alicia's thought was a tiny mental whisper as the outer works began to range upon her, and she squirmed down in her couch. It was like driving a skimmer into a snowstorm-surely not all of them could miss.
On the contrary, AI told her. They're just throwing good money after bad, Alley. Watch.
The AI changed its generator settings, swinging the drive's black hole through a cone-shaped volume ahead of them and dropping its side shields, trading a bit of its speed advantage over the cruisers to turn the drive field into a huge broom that swept space clear before them. Nor did it refocus the field in any predictable fashion. The drive's gravity well fluctuated-its strength shifting in abrupt, impossible to predict increments sufficient to deprive any tracking station of a constant acceleration value-and its corkscrewing mass "wagged" the ship astern like a dog's tail, turning it into an even more impossible target. A cyber-synth might have been able to duplicate that maneuver and still hold to its desired base course, though it would have been far less efficient; nothing else could.
The drive was no shield against SLAMs coming in from astern or the side, but the ship's unpredictable "swerves" gave the coup de grace to the forts' fire control. SLAM after SLAM slashed harmlessly past or vanished against the drive field, and Alicia felt herself relaxing despite the nerve-racking tension of the continuous attack.
Bets on how many they're willing to waste? the AI asked brightly.
"Governor, we're wasting our time."
Treadwell shot Admiral Horth a venemous glance, and she shrugged.
"If you wish, I will of course continue," she told them, "but we've already fired twenty percent of our total SLAM armament. That's four months' production, and there's no sign we've even come close to a hit."
Treadwell's jaw clenched and he started to reply sharply, then shook himself and relaxed with a sigh.
"You're right," he admitted, and glared at the fleeing dot. He didn't have a single ship, not even a corvette, in position to intercept it, and nothing he had could kill it. He turned away from the plot with forced calm.
"Lord Jurawski will be displeased enough when I inform him we've … mislaid an alpha-synth without my adding that I've stripped Franconia of its defenses. Abort engagement, Admiral Horth."
"Yes, Sir." Horth managed to keep the relief out of her voice, but Treadwell heard its absence, and his eyes glittered with bitter amusement.
"And after that, Admiral, you and I and Admiral Marat-and, of course, my dear friend Sir Arthur-will sit down to discuss precisely how this fiasco came to occur. I'm sure-" the governor showed his teeth in what might charitably have been called a smile "-the final report will be fascinating."
Sir Arthur Keita slumped in his chair, watching a repeater of Jefferson Field's gravitic plot on his com screen. His eyes ached, and he hadn't moved in almost seven hours, yet he couldn't look away.
The stolen ship had passed the outer forts four and a half hours ago. Freed of the star's inhibition, it had gone to full power at last; now it was just under three light-hours from the system primary, traveling at over .98 C. He watched in real-time as the alpha-synth ship raced ahead under stupendous acceleration, increasing its already enormous velocity by more than twenty-two kilometers per second with every second.
Eight and a half seconds later, the ship hit the critical threshold of ninety-nine percent of light-speed and vanished in the kaleidoscope flash of wormhole transition. It disappeared into its own private universe, no longer part of Einstein's orderly existence as it sprang to an effective velocity of over five hundred times light-speed … and continued to accelerate.
The gravitic scanners could still track it, but not on a display as small as the one he was watching, and he moved at last, reaching out to switch off the screen. Just for a moment, he looked like the old, old man he was as he rubbed his eyes, wondering anew what he might have done differently to avert this insanity and the catastrophe certain to follow in its wake.
Tannis Cateau stood beside him, face drawn and eyes bright with unshed tears, and neither of them looked over their shoulders to see Inspector Ferhat Ben Belkassem throw an ironic salute to the blank-faced screen … and smile.
Chapter Forty-Six
My remotes could do that a lot faster.
"I know they could, Megaira." Alicia had developed the habit of speaking aloud to her electronic half-and Tisiphone-more often than not. Not because she had to, but because the sound of even her own voice, was a welcome anodyne against the silence. She wasn't precisely lonely with two other people to "talk" to, yet too much quiet left an eerie, empty sensation in her bones. "But I prefer to do this myself, if I'm going to be wearing it."
Indeed, Tisiphone put in, I have never known a warrior who truly cared to have another tend to his personal weapons.
I know that, the AI huffed, but they're my personal weapons, too, in a sense. And I want to know they're in perfect shape if she needs them.
"Which is why you're watching me like a hawk, dear," Alicia said, grinning at the interplay while she concentrated on her battle armor.
The AI and the Fury had come to a far better mutual understanding than she'd originally hoped-indeed, it was Tisiphone who'd suggested the perfect (and, she thought, inevitable, under the circumstances) name for the AI-but there was a tartness at its heart. Megaira remained wary of the Fury, mindful of the way she'd imposed control on Alicia during their escape and suspicious of her ultimate plans, and Tisiphone knew it. Knew it and was wise enough to accept it, if a bit resentfully. Fortunately, prolonged exposure to a human personality had waked something approaching a genuine sense of humor in the compulsive Fury. She wasn't immune to the irony of the situation, and Alicia more than suspected that both of them rather enjoyed sniping at one another-and she knew each was jealous of the other's relationship with her.
And it's a good thing I am watching you, Alley. You're overloading that tank. You'll jam the ammo chute if you put in that many rounds.
"I was doing this before you were a gleam in your programmer's eyes, Megaira. Watch."
Long fingers manipulated the belt of three-millimeter caseless with effortless familiarity, tucking it up into the ammunition tank behind her battle armor's right pauldron. She wasn't surprised by Megaira's warning-she'd heard it from every recruit she'd ever checked out on field maintenance. Like the computer, they were fresh from total submersion in The Book and hadn't learned the tricks only experience could teach. Now she doubled the linkless belt neatly and cheated the last few centimeters into place with an adroit twist of the wrist and a peculiar little lifting motion that slid it up into the void created by a few minutes' work with a cutting torch.
"See? That upper brace is structurally redundant; taking it out makes room for another forty rounds-as we've told the design people for years."
Oh. That's a neat trick, Alley. Why isn't it in the manual?
"Because we old sweats like to reserve a few tricks to impress the newbies. Part of the mystique that makes them listen to us in the field."
And it is listening which allows a young warrior to become an old one. That much, at least, has not changed, I see.
"Neither has the fact that some of them never live long enough to figure that out, unfortunately." Alicia sighed and closed the ammo tank.
She moved down the checklist to the servo mech that swung her "rifle" in and out of firing position. There'd been a sticky hesitation in the power train when she'd first uncrated the armor, and isolating the fault had been slow, laborious, and irritating as hell. Now she watched it perform with smooth, snake-quick precision and beamed.
It was a tremendous help to be able to watch it in all dimensions at once, too. She'd taken days to get used to the odd, double-perspective vision which had become the norm within her new ship, but once she had, she'd found it surprisingly useful. The perpetual, unbreakable link between herself and the computer meant she saw things not only through her eyes but through the ship's internal sensors, as well. It was better than 360° vision. It showed her all sides of everything about her, and she no longer lived merely behind her eyes. Instead, she saw herself as one shape and form among many-a shape she maneuvered through and around the shapes about it as if in some complex yet soothing coordination exercise.
Learning to navigate with that sort of omniperceptive view had been an unnerving experience, but now that she had, she loved it. For the first time, she could truly watch herself in real-time during workouts, seeing the flaws in her own moves and correcting herself as she went, without video recordings or outside critiques, and being able to watch the servo mech from front, back, and both sides at once was enormously helpful. Not only could she examine any portion of it she chose, but thanks to Megaira, she could analyze its movement "by eye" in all three dimensions with the accuracy of a base depot test rig. It was a remarkable performance, whenever she paused to think about it, though she seldom did so any longer.
Indeed, she often found herself smiling as she recalled her earlier panic. To think she'd been terrified of what the alpha link might do to her! She'd been afraid it would change her, depreciate her into a mere appendage of the computer, yet it was no such thing. She'd become not less but ever so much more, for she'd acquired confidante, sister, daughter, protector, and mentor in one. Megaira was all of those, yet Alicia had given even more to the AI. She'd given it life itself, the human qualities no cyber-synth AI could ever know. In every sense that mattered, she was Megaira's mother, and she and Megaira were far more than the sum of their parts.
Yet for all that, she suspected her alpha-synth-link wasn't what the cyberneticists and psych types had had in mind, and Megaira agreed with her. It could hardly help being … different with Tisiphone involved, she supposed. Megaira had never impressed before, and Alicia couldn't provide the information a trained alpha-synth candidate would have possessed, so they couldn't be certain, but everything in Megaira's data base suggested that the fusion should have been still closer. That they should have been one personality, not two entities, however close, with the same personality.
All in all, Alicia rather thought both of them preferred what they'd gotten to a "proper" linkage. There was more room for growth and expansion in this rich, bipolar existence. Already she and her electronic offspring were developing tiny differences, delicately divergent traits, and that was good. It detracted nothing from their ability to think as one, yet it offered a synthesis. As she understood the nature of the "proper" link, human and AI should have come to a single, shared conclusion from shared data, and so she and Megaira often did. But sometimes they didn't, and she'd discovered there were advantages in having two different "right" answers, for comparing them produced a final solution better than either had devised alone far more frequently than not.
She returned the rifle to rest and shut down the servos, then turned to drag out the testing harness, but Megaira had anticipated her. A silent repair unit hovered beside her on its counter-grav to extend the connectors, and she took them with a smile and began plugging into the access ports.
"Go ahead and set up for a sensor diagnostic, would you?"
Already done, Megaira replied with a certain complacency Alicia knew was directed at Tisiphone.
Even Achilles allowed servants to pass him his whet stone, the Fury riposted so deflatingly Alicia chuckled. Megaira opted for lordly silence.
Alicia made the last connection and stood back, monitoring the tests not with her eyes but through her link to Megaira. That was another pleasant surprise, for it was a link she ought not to have had, and its absence could have been catastrophic. She'd never received a proper alpha-synth receptor, which meant her hardware lacked the tiny com link which was supposed to tie her permanently into her AI.
The flight deck headset was intended for linkage to all of the ship's systems, providing direct information pathways to her brain without requiring the computer to process all data before feeding it to her. It was a systems management tool designed to increase bandwidth and spread the load, but an alpha-synth pilot remained in permanent linkage with her cybernetic half. Even brief separations resulted in intense disorientation, while any lengthy loss of contact meant insanity for them both; that was the reason for the com link Alicia didn't have. It was also, she knew now, why alpha-synth AIs inevitably suicided if their human halves died. And because she had no built-in link, she should have been unable to tie into Megaira without the headset, which ought to have left her perpetually confined to the flight deck. She shouldn't have been able to go even to her personal quarters, much less to the machine shop, without some cumbersome, jury-rigged unit to replace it. And, of course, no alpha-synth pilot could ever move beyond com-link range of her AI.
But Alicia had something better. Tisiphone still couldn't access Megaira's personality center without the AI's permission (and, Alicia knew, Megaira watched her like a hawk whenever she was allowed inside), but she formed a sort of conduit between her and Alicia. It was, Alicia suspected, something very like telepathy, and all the more valuable because she didn't even have to ask Tisiphone to maintain the link. It was as if having once been established the immaterial connection had taken on a life of its own, as much a part of Alicia as her own hands. She rather thought it might continue even if she somehow "lost" the Fury, and she wondered if she was developing some sort of contagious ESP from association with Tisiphone.
Whatever it was, it wasn't something human science was prepared to explain just yet, for Megaira's tests had conclusively demonstrated that it operated at more than light-speed. Indeed, if the AI's conclusions were accurate, there was no transmission delay at all. They had no idea how great its range might be, but it looked as if she and Megaira would be able to communicate instantaneously over whatever range it had.
The diagnostic hardware announced completion of the test cycle with a sort of mental chirp, and Alicia nodded in satisfaction. This was the first time her armor had passed all tests, and it had taken less than five days to bring it to that state. Tisiphone had been dismayed to find it taking that long, since she'd ordered the armor prepped before it was loaded aboard the Bengal, but Alicia was more than pleased. Whoever had overseen its initial activation had done an excellent job, yet no one could have brought it to real combat readiness without having her available for fitting. Battle armor had to be carefully modified to suit its intended wearer, tailored to every little physical quirk with software customized to allow for any mental idiosyncrasy, and she'd looked forward to the task with resignation. It had been five years since she last even saw a suit of armor, and considered in that light, she'd done very well indeed to finish so quickly.
"Okay, ladies, that's that," she announced, racking her tools and coiling the testing harness. "Put it back in the closet, please, Megaira."
A tractor grab lifted the empty armor from the table, then trundled back towards the storage vault, and Alicia followed to make a personal visual check as Megaira's remotes plugged in the monitoring leads. If she ever actually needed her armor, she was unlikely to have time to repair any faults which had developed since its last maintenance check. Since she didn't have a spare suit, that meant this one had to be a hundred percent at all times, and the monitors would let Megaira make certain it was.
I am relieved to have that finished, Tisiphone remarked somewhat acidly as the vault closed. Perhaps now we can turn to other matters?
Oh, horsefeathers! Megaira snorted. You know perfectly well that-
"Ah, ah! None of that!" Alicia chided, stepping into the small lift. "Tisiphone's got a point, Megaira. It is time we got started."
You still need more time to acclimatize, the AI objected. You're doing well, but you're still not what I'd call ready.
"We don't have time for me to 'acclimatize' as thoroughly as you'd like. Let's face it-I'm a hopeless disappointment as a starship pilot."
That's not true! You've got good instincts-I should know, I've got the same ones. It's just a matter of training them.
Perhaps and perhaps not, Megaira, and Alicia is correct about the pressure of time. We have been out of contact too long, and I am certain more has happened since we fled Soissons. As for her instincts requiring training, is it not true that you are fully capable of translating them into actions?
It's not the same. Alley should've been completely trained before we ever impressed. She's the captain. That means she makes the decisions, and she could be a lot more effective if she knew my capabilities backward and forward. She's not supposed to have to think things through or ask questions, and it slows us down when she does.
"No one's suggesting I shouldn't continue training, even if I am coming at it backwards. But there's no reason we can't do that after we start wherever we're going to start. And Tisiphone's right; our information's getting colder every day."
You're ganging up on me again.
Which ought, perhaps, to suggest that you are in error in this instance. I second Alicia's agreement that training must continue, but not even I can stop other events while she does so.
Hmph. Just where did you have in mind to go?
"MaGuire, I think. How does that strike you, Tisiphone?"
MaGuire? I should have thought Dewent or Wyvern would be more fruitful ground, Little One.
"I don't disagree, but I still think we should start at MaGuire." The lift stopped outside Alicia's quarters, and she stepped out and sprawled across the comfortable couch. "We've got to have some sort of cover before we move in on them for real, and MaGuire's a good place to begin building one."
"Cover"? The Fury sounded faintly surprised.
What did you plan on her doing? Busting down doors in battle armor to ask questions at plasgun point? Ever hear of something called subtlety?
"Hey, give her a break, Megaira! She never had to put up with these kinds of limitations before."
I am not offended, Tisiphone said, and somewhat to Alicia's surprise, she meant it. The Fury felt her reaction and chuckled dryly. As you say, I am unaccustomed to mortals' limitations, but that does not mean I am unaware of them. What sort of cover did you have in mind, Little One?
"I've been thinking over all the intelligence you pulled and looking for an angle we could follow up without simply duplicating everyone else's efforts. It looks to me like Colonel McIlheny's people are doing a much better job with overt intelligence gathering than we could. He's got tonnes more manpower and far better communications than we do, and unlike us, he's official. He doesn't have to hide from both sides while he works. Agreed?"
Alicia paused, then shrugged as she felt the others' joint agreement.