It was a bluff, of course. Rudi had no intention of physically visiting Taj, for a beacon laser powerful enough to punch a high bit–rate signal across light-years of interstellar space is, at close range, functionally indistinguishable from a death ray. But our trajectory served its function, which was to leave a gigantic trail of glowing ionized indium exhaust behind us, a banner shouting look at me pointing to the Branch Office Five Zero. There is no stealth in space: So good tactics hinge on making use of this fact to misdirect the enemy.
There were numerous responses, rippling out from our vicinity at the speed of light as various observers noticed our progress.
Perhaps the first among them would have been the reaction of Medea and her officers, in their watery orbital defense headquarters: “We’ve been rolled,” I can imagine her intelligence chief saying.
“Kill them. Now,” two of Medea’s instances snapped simultaneously. “Don’t let them get away,” said the third of the triumvirate.
“Your Majesty. Are you instructing us to launch on the target?”
“Yes. At once!”
At much the same time, the deacon, standing watch in the pulpit aboard the Chapel of Our Lady of the Holy Restriction Endonuclease, would have been alerted to our emissions. “Your Grace.” He lowered his gaze as he turned toward the retina spread across the lectern in front of him. “My apologies for interrupting your prayers, but the pirates have just activated their main engine, as expected. Wait . . . oh. I’m also seeing launch signatures from the surface waters, six hundred kilometers southwest of Nova Ploetsk. Um. Make that fifteen, sixteen . . . high-acceleration signatures! The target is moving, Your Grace.”
Cybelle stared at him without blinking for several seconds. “Hail the target,” she finally said. “Assure them that we have nothing to do with Medea’s aggression, but I wish to speak with the little accountant, person to person.”
“Yes, Your Grace. Is there anything else I should be doing?”
“Unarchive the holy malware suite and prepare it for transmission.” Cybelle’s expression was cold. “If Medea’s missiles miss, they cannot be allowed to spew their lies at the ignorant public.”
Several minutes later, a similar dialogue will have happened in a command and control center on Taj Beacon. I cannot say with any certainty who would be involved in this one. Perhaps they will have been the regular traffic controllers tasked with coordinating the movement of vehicles in and out of the congested space around the beacon station, preventing collisions and ensuring that nobody accidentally crosses the path of the interstellar lasers. Or perhaps other bodies were in control by then, bodies loyal to Sondra rather than the burghers of Taj Beacon.
“Something is happening in low orbit around Shin-Tethys. Looks like there’s a lot of traffic from the surface near the equator, and there are at least two vehicles under way . . . logging incoming flight plans . . . we have an arrest-and-apprehension warrant from the Kingdom of Argos citing one of the vehicles for piracy!”
A senior officer gave it their full attention before responding. “Forward the full details to the standing Defense Subcommittee, for their immediate attention. Oh, and copy it to the Lady Alizond’s staff, with a request for comment. I expect she’ll have something to say about how it’s to be dealt with.”
Finally, two days later, in the stygian depths beyond the heliopause, where Dojima Prime’s solar wind meets the interstellar medium, a report will have been delivered aboard the bridge of an ancient starship. “Captain, we are receiving relayed signals from Taj Beacon. The traitor is aboard a vessel under acceleration from Shin-Tethys toward the beacon station. There is an encrypted message for your eyes only. Per the envelope, she says she wants to talk.”
“Excellent,” hissed Sondra. Talons gripped the armrests of her command throne as she leaned forward. “I’ll take the message directly and reply. If she thinks I am willing to negotiate, that will only make this easier.”
“And the attack plan . . . ?”
“Continue as ordered.”
“Hello, Mother.”
(I’d planned my message with care and produced it with the able assistance of Rudi’s corporate relations team. They had arranged a backdrop crafted to give away as little as possible about my real circumstances. To Sondra I appeared to be standing in a virtual boardroom, dressed in a good semblance of the robes of a nun-auditor. They’d programmed in the kinematics and semblance of legs in place of my fishy lower half, added the appearance of gravity to drape my clothing and sag my flesh in place of this free-fall environment. I’d retrieved memories of the palace by the inner sea from Ana’s chip, to pad out the background of the sim. All Sondra would be able to see that was real was my face, and all she would hear was the words that I wanted her to hear.)
“I want to start by saying how much I admire your work. Seriously. You know full well that I am an expert on the FTL scam. What you’ve done . . . I’m speechless. You’ve created a work of art for the ages. I doubt we will ever see anything to match it. It’s the greatest fraud in history; and billions of people, scores of newly colonized star systems, owe their existence to you.”
(Sondra had always had a high opinion of herself, and there was nothing to be gained by stinting the effulgent praise. Especially as this was a one-way message transmission. Dialogue was not practical, both because of the distance between us and, to be honest, the embarrassing fact that we didn’t know precisely where Sondra was. Yes, the whole of Dojima System was a-buzz with rumors and reports of her ostentatious arrival at Taj Beacon. But that proved nothing: She was devious enough to be in two or more places at once, and doubtless she had hedged her position against any likely attack.
(Such as, for example, the tiresome ballistic missiles dogging our tail—some of Medea’s fireworks came equipped with electrical thrusters, so that as we spiraled out from Shin-Tethys, we led a deadly marathon of robot bombs. Or the chapel, lumbering slowly after us, blatting doubtless-toxic high-bandwidth signals—signals that Rudi’s infowar specialists cheerfully advised us to ignore, for the Mother Church was so far behind the cutting edge of the field that they were more of a danger to themselves than to anyone else.
(The trouble, as Rudi pointed out, was that Sondra had come here for a reason—presumably the division of the spoils—but would doubtless assign a higher priority to suppressing the news of her crime than to making any addition to her already enormous wealth. Probably she’d have preferred to shut me up discreetly, by means of that assassin-doppelgänger. But she was quite capable of bombing a beacon station and attempting to murder its entire population to silence an entire star system: After all, she’d done it before. As far as I could tell, there were no practical limits to her depravity.
(“And there’s something out there,” Rudi had told me.
(“Where?”
(“Incoming.” His ears twitched, a sure sign of emotional disturbance. “Plot a course from Hector to Atlantis and project it ten light-years, and you wind up less than a light-year from Dojima. And the time scale is just about right. The starships they sent to Atlantis, the ones that went missing—they could be arriving in Dojima System if, instead of being sabotaged, they were hijacked. So we set a small satellite to keep a watch on that part of the sky, years ago. Sure enough, the Vengeance is coming. We picked up the thermal signature almost sixty days ago.”
(“But how could she—”