Klaus looked into the camera and talked as though he were addressing a crowd of thousands. He was perfectly choreographed—pressed, tailored and packaged for mass consumption. He looked like a man who’d been studying vids of every charismatic leader of the last three centuries.
“Dominic,” he said. Shane could hear a sarcastic lilt to the name. “It has been too long since we’ve talked.”
Huh?
“I’m afraid this is a one-way transmission. I suppose it is a shame that I cannot hear you justify yourself. Justice will have to be enough—”
“Do you know what he’s talking about?” Shane whispered, even though no one could possibly overhear them.
“No. He seems to think Mr. Magnus is in here with us.”
“—like my ship? You aren’t going to leave it alive. We can poison the life support. We could pulse a lethal stun field tuned just for your artificial neurons. We could simply let you starve in there. This is the end, brother Jonah. You’ve been dead for ten years—”
“They’re related?” Shane said. She had noticed the resemblance before, but—
“However, I have something to do before I finally dispose of you for good. I know you might have taken comfort in thinking your allies might have escaped.”
The holo transmission shifted and Shane gasped.
On the holo was an up-angled shot of Dom’s secret commune, where she had taken all the civilian prisoners. A truncated white pyramid girded by greenhouses. How the hell?
“We dropped a recon module from orbit just to get footage of this. We have another ship in orbit, Dominic, the Shaftsbury. And we have the location of that valley, down to the meter.”
Klaus chuckled. The recon’s cameras were looking up at the commune and past it, toward the sky. At first the sky was obscured by a holo projection; then the recon module shifted to something other than optical imaging, and the sky outside the rim of the valley turned slate-gray, the stars tiny black points. One of the stars seemed to vibrate.
“Remember ‘pacifying’ the coup on Styx? Or did you forget about it when you washed your hands of the TEC and the rest of your responsibilities?”
“My God,” Shane said, very quietly. The star had swelled to a black blob, and it was growing. Don’t let it be what I think it is.
“TEC called it ‘shredding’ when you wiped Perdition off the map. They’ve changed the terminology since. It’s now called ‘orbital reduction of the target.’ “
It is.
Shane knew what she was about to see, but she couldn’t pull her gaze from the screen.
Dropping large objects from orbit had always been a cheap means of mass destruction. Enough mass and enough velocity can wipe anything off the map. One problem it shared with nukes was the godawful mess it left behind. A big enough rock could make a tectonic wreck of the planet, cause ice ages, evaporate oceans, and do all kinds of other nonproductive destruction.
Needless to say, in three centuries of spaceborne warfare, someone had found a solution to that particular problem. Someone in the last century decided to try dropping a ton of polyceram filaments from orbit. That person discovered two things. First, that this particular brand of monomolecular filament stayed stable during the stress of reentry. The second discovery was that it reduced the surface to gravel to a depth of a hundred meters.
The vibrating black star now looked like a circular cloud.
Klaus kept talking.
“I want you to know that if you had come to me, surrendered, I might not have done this. Just as, had you acted differently, our mother might still be alive.”
The black cloud grew, the growth accelerating. In an impossibly short time it eclipsed the entire sky. Then the camera died.
A few seconds later, as if to confirm the atrocity that had just been committed, a dull rumble vibrated the floor. When Shane felt that rumble, she could feel her stomach fall out. “God save us,” Shane whispered.
Klaus’ face returned to the holo, unfazed. “There went your army, Dominic. You aren’t a special man any more, just some criminal Bakunin flotsam I have to flush from my ship. My only regret is that you’ll be unable to attend your trial.”
The holo died.
“Thirteen hundred people.”
“Shane,” Random said.
Shane leaned her forehead against a bulkhead. Was it her? Had she led that psychopath to all those people? Did she save eight hundred people just so the colonel could mop up the rest of the survivors?
She had just lost any justification she had for being here, fighting her people.
“Shane!”
Mosasa spun her around.
“What?”
“Random just lost life support. You have to turn your suit to full containment.”
Shane flipped a few internal switches and winced at the power-level on her suit. “I only have fifteen minutes.”
“That’s okay,” said Random. “It’s only going to take them twelve to burn through the hatches to us.”
* * * *
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Loose Cannon
“The more complicated the situation, the sooner and more catastrophic the eventual screwup.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Treason is loved of many, but the traitor hated of all.”
—Robert Greene
(1558-1592)
07:35:00 Godwin Local
Despite Flower’s warning, there wasn’t a choice. They had to finish the job.
Finish this, then think of the ground team.
So, after spending a minute burning the security cameras in their section of hallway, the job went on as planned. Levy pointed the huge number one variable-gamma laser at the main safe door. After triple-checking the team’s personal radiation shields, a nervous-looking Levy began firing the laser.
The gamma-ray laser was powerful enough to cut through the door on its own, given unlimited time and power. However, that wasn’t the point. The point was the fact that with the hydraulics drained the only thing holding up the door was the electromagnetic lock buried inside it. The lock’s power supply also ran the field generator that was trying to soak up the energy from the gamma laser.
Levy was watching power readings and occasionally altering the frequency of the laser.
The whole process was invisible, even though Dom could swear he saw some infrared hot spots on the door.
‘Wow,” Levy whispered as he pulled on his goggles.
Suddenly, the gamma-laser beam dropped into the visible spectrum. Despite the automatic compensations of his artificial eyes, Dom was still blinded for a second.
The floor shook with a sound like a massive bass gong. A breeze swept by Dom as his vision came back on-line. When his sight was back, the door was gone.
“We did it,” Dom said.
The immediate shift from gamma radiation down to visible light had managed a microsecond-long overload in the door’s power circuits. That microsecond failure was enough for the weight of the door and the vacuum hydraulics to pull it open far enough to prevent the electromagnets from closing it again.