Sir Arthur Keita stood on the flag bridge of HMS Pavia, flagship of Admiral Mikhail Leibniz, and watched the visual display as the task force formed up about her in Alexandria orbit. Like the Cadre strike team it was to transport, its units had been drawn from far and wide-a three-ship division here, a squadron there, a single ship from yet another base. Its heaviest unit was a battlecruiser, for it had been planned for speed, yet it was a powerful force. Like Keita himself, its commanders hoped there would be no fighting; if there was any, they intended to win.
"Departure in seven hours, Sir Arthur," Admiral Leibniz said quietly, and Keita nodded without turning. He hoped Leibniz wouldn't construe that as discourtesy, but he didn't like this mission.
He sighed and concentrated on the gleaming minnows of the ships, half eager to depart into wormhole space and get this ended, half dreading what might happen when he reached his destination. And that, he knew, was why he disliked this operation so. Somewhere at the far end of his journey he would find a traitor, possibly-probably-more than one, and treason was a crime Sir Arthur Keita simply could not understand. The thought that any officer could so degrade himself and his honor made his skin crawl, and knowing that someone sworn to protect and defend had murdered millions made him physically ill.
He wanted that traitor unmasked and destroyed. There was, could be, no trace of mercy in him, but there was sorrow for the shame that traitor had brought to everything Keita himself held sacred.
"Excuse me, Sir Arthur, but you have a priority signal."
The voice broke into his reverie, and he turned to find it belonged to a youthful communications officer who extended a message chip to him.
Keita took the chip and frowned as he recognized the Cadre Intelligence coding. None of the flag bridge's readers could unscramble it, so he excused himself and made his way to Tannis Cateau's command center. The major started shooing the staff away from the com section at sight of the message chip, but he waved for her to remain when she started to follow them. She sat back down at her desk, keeping her back to him while he inserted the chip, only to look back up with a jerk as a voice spoke.
"Well, I will be goddamned," it said softly, and her head whipped around in astonishment, for it belonged to Sir Arthur Keita, and he was grinning as he met her startled gaze.
"Something new has been added," he announced. "This-" he jerked his chin at the reader screen "-is from the team we placed on Ringbolt. It would seem our missing O Branch inspector arrived there two days ago and put on some sort of Pied Piper performance."
"Pied Piper?" His eyes were positively glowing, Tannis thought.
"Our people couldn't get all the details-they're isolated from our official presence there, and the locals are playing their cards mighty close-but it seems Ben Belkassem turned up aboard a tramp freighter named Star Runner, or possibly Far Runner, for a personal meeting with Admiral Simon Monkoto."
"He did?" Tannis' eyes narrowed in speculation, and Keita nodded.
"He did. And six hours later the Monkoto Free Mercenaries, the Westfeldt Wolves, O'Kane's Free Company, the Star Assassins, and Falconi's Falcons were under way. Not some of them-all of them."
"My God," she whispered. "You don't think he-?"
"It would seem probable," Keita replied, "and please note that he appears to have gone directly to the mercenaries; not the Fleet and not the El Grecan Navy. Not to anyone who might have reported back to Soissons. He didn't tell us, either, but then he didn't know we were out here. If he's avoiding Soissons, he may have starcommed Justice HQ, but it'll take Old Earth another four days to relay to us if he did, and in the meantime … ."
He began feeding numbers into his terminal, and Tannis frowned.
"I know that tone of voice, Uncle Arthur. What are you up to?"
"Our people may not have gotten everything, but they did find out where all those mercenaries are headed and when they're supposed to get there, and unless I'm mistaken-aha!" The result of his calculations blinked before him, and his grin became savage with delight. "We can get there within forty-one hours of their ETA if we move our departure up a bit."
"But what about Clean Sweep?"
"Soissons won't go anywhere, Tannis, and-" he swivelled to face her, and she saw the hunger in his eyes, heard it in his voice "-this little detour may just tell us who, because only one thing in the universe could have sucked Simon Monkoto away from Ringbolt!"
Chapter Sixty-Two
"Well it's about damned time," Commodore Howell muttered to himself.
He glared at the gravitic plot and reminded himself-again-that he wasn't going to climb down Alexsov's throat the instant he saw him. He suspected it wasn't going to be an easy resolve to keep.
He turned his back on the plot and interlaced his fingers to crack his knuckles. Alexsov was at least twelve days late, which would have been bad enough from anyone else. From the obsessively punctual chief of staff it was maddening, and vague visions of horrible disaster had haunted the commodore, only just held at bay by his faith in Alexsov.
He drew a deep breath and summoned a wry smile, wishing-not for the first time-that "pirates" weren't cut off from the Empire's starcom network. This business of relying solely on starships and SLAM drones wore on a man. And, his eyes narrowed again, speaking of SLAM drones, just why hadn't Gregor used one to explain his delay? His eyes lit with a touch of real humor as he realized he had at least one perfectly valid reason to tear a long, bloody strip off his chief of staff … and how much he looked forward to it.
Well, unless they're stone blind they've got us on their gravitics by now, Megaira commented.
Alicia only grunted in response. She sat in her command chair, clasping her hands in her lap to keep from gnawing her fingernails. She'd smelled enough fear on Cadre strikes, but drop commandos were passengers up to the moment they made their drops. Whether or not their targets would be there when they arrived was something their chauffeurs worried about, and she'd never realized how tense the final approach must be for Fleet personnel. She was blind, unable to see out of wormhole space. She couldn't know if an ambush awaited her, or even if the enemy were there at all, but if they were, they could see her just fine.
Calmly, Little One. We will find them and perform our appointed task.
She heard Tisiphone's tension, but it was a different sort of strain. The Fury never doubted they would find those they sought; eagerness sharpened her tone, not uncertainty.
"Yeah, sure," Alicia said, and twitched in surprise at the saw-toothed anticipation quivering in her own voice.
She felt Tisiphone's answering start of surprise-and something like concern behind it-and looked down with a frown. Her clasped hands were actually trembling! Confusion flickered through her for just a moment, a vague sense of something wrong, but she brushed it aside and reached for a thought to distract her from it.
"Think they'll bite, Megaira?"
Sure they will. I admit this is a bit more complicated than being Star Runner, but I can handle it.
Alicia nodded, though "a bit more complicated" grossly understated the task her cybernetic sister faced. Pretending to be a freighter was complex yet straightforward for an alpha-synth's electronic warfare capabilities, but this time the deception was multi-layered and far more difficult. This time Megaira was pretending to be a battlecruiser pretending to be a destroyer-and failing. The "pirates" were supposed to see through the first level of deceit, but not the second … and if they pierced the first too soon, Monkoto's entire plan would come crashing down about their ears.
"Definitely a destroyer drive," Commander Rendlemann announced several hours later, and Howell allowed himself an ironic smile. Of course it was a tin can. Arriving at this godforsaken star on that heading it could only be Harpy. No one but Alexsov and Control knew where to find them, and any dispatch boat from Control would have come in on a completely dif -
"Still," Rendlemann murmured to himself, "there's something odd about it."
"What?" Howell twisted around in his chair, eyes sharpening.
"I said there's some-"
"I heard that part! What d'you mean, 'odd'?"
"Nothing I can really put a finger on, Sir," Rendlemann frowned as he concentrated on his link to Procyon's AI, "but they're decelerating a bit slowly. There's a slight frequency shift in the forward nodes, too." He rubbed his chin. "Wonder if they've had drive problems? That could explain the delay, and if they had to make shipboard repairs it might explain the frequency anomaly."
Howell reached for his own headset. Unlike Rendlemann, he couldn't link directly with the dreadnought's cyber-synth, but a frown gathered between his brows as he studied Tracking's data. Rendlemann was right. Harpy was coming in faster than she should have-in fact, her current deceleration would carry her past her rendezvous with Procyon at more than seven thousand KPS.
His frown deepened. Harpy was well inside his perimeter destroyers, little more than ninety minutes from Procyon at her present deceleration, and she hadn't said a word. She was still 17.6 light-minutes out, so transmission lag would be a pain, but why hadn't Alexsov sent even a greeting? He had to know how Howell must have worried, and … .
"Com, hail Captain Alexsov and ask him where he's been."
The message fled towards Megaira at the speed of light, and she raced to meet it. Eight hundred seconds after it was born, Megaira's receptors scooped it out of space, and Alicia swore.
"I wanted to be closer than this, damn it!" Her own displays glowed behind her eyes, and thirteen light-minutes lay between her and Procyon. She was already in the dreadnought's SLAM range … but Megaira mounted no SLAMs. She had to close another sixty-five million kilometers, fifteen more minutes at this deceleration, before her missiles could range upon her enemy-and seventy-two million before she could "break and run" on the vector to Monkoto's rendezvous.
"Can we steal enough delay, Megaira?" she demanded.
I don't think so, the AI replied unhappily. No reply will be the same as answering, unless this Howell's a lot dumber than we think, and battlecruiser three's in position to cut us off short of course change.
Better to answer, Little One. We are more like to gain time by tangling him in confusion, however briefly, than by silence.
A corner of Alicia's mind glanced at the clock. Eighty seconds since the signal came in, and Megaira was right; if she delayed much longer, her very delay would become a response … .
Something hot and primitive boiled in the recesses of her mind, something red that smoked with the hot, sweet incense of blood, and her lips thinned over her teeth.
"Oh, the hell with it! Talk to the man, Megaira."
Transmitting, the AI said simply.
James Howell's fingers drummed on the arm of his command chair, and he frowned in growing, formless uneasiness. That had to be Harpy, but Gregor was taking his own sweet time about replying.
He glanced at the chronometer and bared his teeth at his own thoughts. Barely twenty-seven minutes had passed since he sent his own signal; a reply could scarcely have arrived this soon even if Gregor had responded instantly. He knew that, but …
He bit the thought off and made himself wait. Twenty-eight minutes. The range was down to eleven light-minutes. Twenty-nine. Thirty.
"Sir," his com officer looked up with a puzzled expression, "we have a response, but it's not from Captain Alexsov."
"What?!" Howell rounded fiercely on the unfortunate officer.
"They say they have battle damage, Sir," that worthy said defensively. "We don't have visual, and their signal is very weak. I think-Here, let me route it to your station."
Howell leaned back, glaring at Harpy's blue star. Battle damage? How? From whom? What the hell was go -
His thought died as a faint voice sounded in his ear bug.
"… nal is very faint. Say again your transmission. Repeat, this is Medusa. Your signal is very weak. Say again your trans-"
Medusa?! Howell jerked upright in his chair with an oath.
"Battle stations!"
His shocked bridge crew stared at him for an instant, and then alarms began to howl throughout Procyon's eight million-tonne hull.
Howell snapped his chair around to face Commander Rendlemann across his own battle board. The ops officer's eyes were almost focused, despite his concentration on his cyber-synth-link, and questions burned in their depths.
"It's not Gregor," Howell snapped.
"But-how, Sir?"
"I don't know how!" Yet even as he spoke, Howell's mind raced. "Something must have given Gregor away to a regular Fleet unit." He slammed a fist against his console. "They took him out and reset their transponder to bluff their way in, but they can't have taken Harpy intact. If they had, they'd know the Medusa transponder codes were bogus."
"But if they didn't take her intact, how did they know to come here?"
"How the hell do I know? Unless-" Howell closed his eyes, thinking furiously, then spat another curse. "They must've picked him up leaving Wyvern, before he wormholed out of the system. Damn the luck! They got a read on his vector and extrapolated his destination."
"Extrapolated well enough to hit us dead center?"
"How the hell many other stars are there within twenty light-years?" Howell snarled. "But they can't've known what they were heading into. If they knew, they wouldn't have sent a single tin can to check it out." He glared at the blue dot again, yet a grudging respect had crept into his angry eyes. "Those gutsy bastards are decelerating straight toward us, and they're already inside sensor range. They can't see us on gravitics with our drives down, so they're hanging on as long as they can to get a full count for their SLAM drones, and if they do-"
He cut himself off and bent over his board. That destroyer was still outside its own range, and no destroyer could stand up to the SLAM salvos of a dreadnought. He glanced at his plot, at the two escorting battlecruisers tying into Procyon's tactical net as his ships rushed to battle stations. A third battlecruiser was far closer to the intruder, already wheeling to close her jaws upon her prey.
Here they come, Alley! Megaira warned, and Alicia watched the battlecruiser rounding upon her.
The initial surprise must have been total, but the battlecruiser's weapons were ready at last. Megaira's sensors read her as HMS Cannae, and Alicia felt a sensual, almost erotic shiver as her/their targeting systems reached out and locked. Unlike Procyon, Cannae was barely three light-minutes from Megaira … yet she, too, thought she faced only a destroyer, for the alpha-synth's ECM still hid both her identity and the shoals of sublight missiles deployed about her on tractors. Their maximum velocity was going to be slightly but significantly lower without the initial boost of internal launchers, but pre-spotting them more than tripled the salvos Megaira could throw.
Alicia felt them through her headset, felt them like her own teeth and claws, and hunger fuzzed her vision like some sick delirium. A part of her stood aghast, stunned by her own blood-thirst. This was wrong, it whispered, no part of Monkoto's plan, but it was only a tiny whisper. She hung on the crumbling brink of a berserker's madness … and embraced its ferocity.
"Take her!" she snapped.
The gravitic plot showed it first. Its FTL capability could see only the gravity wells of starships, SLAMs, and SLAM drones, but unlike Procyon's light-speed sensors, it gave a virtual real-time readout at such short range. Howell was watching it narrowly, waiting for the blue stars of Cannae's first SLAMs, when the battlecruiser's Fasset drive disappeared.
Megaira's missiles erupted into Cannae's face, and the battlecruiser's cyber-synth had too little time to react to the impossible density of that salvo. It did its best, but its best wasn't good enough.
Battle screen failed, Cannae vanished in a boil of light and plasma, and Alicia DeVries' eyes were emerald chunks of Hell. The orgiastic release of violence exploded within her, brighter and hotter than Cannae's pyre. It took her like a shark, snatching her under in a vortex of hate, and her madness reached out like pestilence. It flooded through her link to Megaira, engulfing the AI as it had engulfed her, and Tisiphone stiffened in horror.
This wasn't Alicia! The fine-meshed precision and deadly self-discipline had vanished into a heaving chaos of raw bloodlust. There was no reason in her, only the need to rend and destroy … and the Fury realized almost instantly from whence it sprang. She'd set a wall about Alicia's loss and hate to make that distilled rage her weapon, but this mortal was stronger than even the Fury had guessed. She would not be denied what was hers of right, and somehow she had breached that wall.
Alicia DeVries forgot Simon Monkoto's plan. Forgot the need to survive. She saw only the fleet that had murdered her world and family, and her madness locked Megaira close as they charged to meet its flagship.
James Howell went white as light-speed sensors finally showed him the details of Cannae's death. God in Heaven, what was that thing?! The one thing it wasn't was a destroyer-and whatever it was had stopped decelerating. It was accelerating straight towards him at seventeen KPS per second!
SLAMs raced to meet Megaira, and Alicia dropped the Fasset drive's side shields. The black hole's maw sucked them in, and she snarled, shuddering in the ecstasy of destruction, as she flashed past Cannae's four escorting destroyers and her/their weapons wiped them from the universe.
Procyon's engineering crew broke all records bringing her drive on-line. They completed the fifteen-minute command sequence in barely ten, and the dreadnought began to accelerate. But the intruder simply adjusted its course, charging straight for her, and James Howell swallowed terror as he realized the other's suicidal intent.
Tisiphone battered uselessly at the interface of human and machine. If she could have broken Megaira free, even for an instant, the two of them might have reached Alicia, but the AI was trapped in her mother/self's blazing insanity. Yet Tisiphone had sworn to avenge Alicia upon those who had ordered her family's murder; if she allowed Alicia to die here she would stand forsworn. She would have betrayed the mortal who had trusted her with far more than her life, and so she gathered herself.
The strength of Alicia's mind had already made a mockery of her estimates. It might even be enough to survive … this.
Alicia DeVries shrieked as a white-hot guillotine slammed down. There was no finesse; Tisiphone was a flail of brutal power smashing through the complex web that bound her to Megaira. Another part of the Fury invaded her augmentation, goading the heart and lungs shock had stilled back to life, and she writhed in her command chair, screaming her agony.
Somehow Tisiphone held the impossible balance, forcing Alicia to live even as she killed her, but then the balance slipped. She felt it going, and screamed at Megaira like the tocsin of Armageddon.
And suddenly Megaira was free. The Fury reeled as the AI slashed back in a blind, instinctive bid to protect Alicia, but only for an instant. Only long enough to realize what had happened and hurl herself into the struggle at Tisiphone's side. For one incandescent sliver of eternity Alicia's madness held them both at bay, and then it broke at last. Megaira surged through the maelstrom to gather her in gentle arms, and Tisiphone was a shield of adamant between them both and the hatred. She faced it, battered it back, and Alicia jackknifed forward in her chair, soaked in sweat and gasping for breath.
But there was no time, and she jerked back erect as the Fury triggered her pharmacope and lashed her shuddering system back from the brink of collapse. Reason returned, and she raised her head, her eyes no longer pits of madness, to discover she had committed herself to a death-ride.
James Howell stared helplessly at the display. The accelerating intruder's Fasset drive devoured his fire, and it was barely four light-minutes away, tracking Procyon's every desperate evasive maneuver. Rendlemann and the dreadnought's AI fought desperately to escape, but they simply didn't have the velocity. His ship had eighteen minutes to live, for there was no way those charging madmen would relent. They couldn't. If they broke off their suicide run now, Procyon and her consorts would tear them apart to nothing as they passed.
Horror and disgust reverberated somewhere inside Alicia, sickening her with the knowledge of what she had become, but there was no time for that. The tick flooded her system, goading her thoughts, and Megaira and Tisiphone snapped into fusion with her, a three-ply intelligence searching frantically for an answer. The enemy capital ships were spreading out, and their own velocity was back up to ninety-two thousand KPS and climbing. They were barely seventeen minutes from the dreadnought, but one or both of the battlecruisers could bring their weapons to bear around the shield of Megaira's Fasset drive within twelve.
Thoughts flashed between them like lightning. Decision was reached.
Commodore Howell winced as no less than six SLAM drones flashed away from the intruder. A battlecruiser. At least a battlecruiser, to carry that many. But if it was a battlecruiser, where had its own SLAMs been this long?
It didn't matter. He was about to die, but stubborn professionalism drove him on. The drones were charging directly away from Procyon, and he snapped an order to his com officer. A light-speed signal flashed after them, and he bared his teeth in a death snarl of triumph. Unless those bastards were clairvoyant, they couldn't know he had the authenticated self-destruct codes. Their precious sensor data would die with their ship … and his own.
Alicia monitored the signal as it burned past her, and bared her teeth in an icy smile of her own. Monkoto's plan was back on track. Now if only Megaira could get them out of the trap she'd shoved them all into ….
The AI named Megaira gathered herself. What she was about to try had been discussed in theory for years, but only in theory. No opportunity to attempt it had ever arisen, and most Fleet officers had concluded it wouldn't work, anyway. But none of them had expected to try it with an alpha-synth AI.
It had to be timed perfectly. She had to get in close, cut the transmission lag to the minimum, yet launch her attack before the hostile battlecruisers could engage her, for what she/they planned would reduce her defensive capability to a ghost of itself, but there was no other way.
She felt Alicia's warm, supporting presence and the Fury's hungry approval pulsing within her, and the chance of failure scarcely even mattered. They were together. They were one. Live or die, she knew no other AI would ever taste a fraction of the richness that was hers in this moment, and she waited while the seconds trickled past.
The accelerating SLAM drones exploded in spits of fire, but Howell hardly noticed. It was down to the final handful of minutes. Either his battlecruisers would stop the onrushing hammer of that Fasset drive by destroying the ship which mounted it, or Procyon would die.
Megaira struck.
The "pirates" had used their ability to penetrate Fleet security systems to kill her own SLAM drones, but it had never occurred to them that a Fleet unit might pierce their systems in return, and she was into their tactical net before they even realized she was coming.
The battlecruisers' AIs were slow and clumsy beside Procyon's; by the time they could respond, she had slashed them from the net with a band saw of jamming. This was between her and Procyon, and the dreadnought's cybernetic brain roused to meet her, but she had a fleeting edge of surprise, for she had known what was about to happen.
And she wasn't alone; Tisiphone rode her signal into the heart of the enemy flagship.
Howell lurched back in his chair as chaos exploded in his synth-link. Cries of anguish filled the flag bridge, hands scrabbled to snatch away tormenting headsets, and one high, dreadful keen of agony rose above them all as Tisiphone left Megaira to her battle. She sought a different prey and stabbed out, searching the net for a mind which held the information she needed, and Commander George Rendlemann screamed like a soul in Hell.
Procyon's AI was more powerful than Megaira, but it was also more fragile, and she was far faster. She was a panther attacking a grizzly, boring in for the kill before it brought its greater power to bear, and she drove a stop thrust straight to its heart. She made no effort to oppose the other AI strength-to-strength; she went for the failsafes.
Those failsafes were intended to protect Procyon's crew from the collapse of an unstable cyber-synth, not to resist another AI's attack. They didn't even recognize it for what it was, but they sensed the turmoil raging in the systems they monitored, and they performed their designed function.
Procyon's entire control net crashed as Megaira convinced it to lobotomize its own AI.
Procyon writhed out of control, systems collapsing into manual control, leaving her momentarily defenseless as Megaira rampaged through them. Circuits spat sparks and died, backup computers spasmed in electronic hysteria, and Howell did the only thing he could. His hand slammed down on the red switch on his board. HMS Procyon vanished into the security of her shield, and he wondered if it was enough. In theory, nothing could get through an OKM shield-but no one had ever tested that theory against a battlecruiser's full-powered ramming attack.
If she'd had even a moment longer, Megaira might have stopped the shield before it activated, but she didn't have a moment. There was barely time to snatch Tisiphone out of the dreadnought's circuitry before the shield chopped off her access, and even that delay was nearly fatal.
She'd cut her margin too close. HMS Issus opened fire with every weapon, and Megaira was locked into too many tasks at once. Her defenses were far below par. She was too close for SLAMs, but at least six sublight missiles and three energy torpedoes went home against her battle screen.
The alpha-synth writhed at the heart of a manmade star. Screen generators screamed in agony, local failures pierced her defenses, and elation filled Issus' captain. Nothing short of a battleship could survive that concentrated blow!
A battleship … or an alpha-synth. Megaira staggered out of the holocaust, blistered and broken, trailing vaporized alloy and atmosphere. A third of her weapons were twisted ruin, but she was alive. Alive and deadly, no longer distracted, as she turned upon her foe.
Her holo projector was gone, and the battlecruiser's captain had one instant to gawk in disbelief as Megaira stood revealed. Then answering fire slammed back. A direct hit wiped away Issus' bridge. More fire ripped past her weakened defenses, and panic flashed through Howell's squadron. Their flagship had been driven behind her shield. Cannae and her escorts had been destroyed. Issus was a shattered, dying wreck … and now they knew their enemy. Knew they faced an alpha-synth which had carved its way through the very heart of their battleline.
Only the battlecruiser Verdun stood in her path, and Verdun refused to face her. She spun away, interposing her own Fasset drive, and Megaira screamed past at thirty-six percent of light-speed.
Chapter Sixty-Three