perfidy

The USS Constitution, flagship of task force 14-9, is mostly quiet. Quiet because it is nighttime according to the ship clocks, clocks now running faster than at any time in the last two (or six) years since the ship finished breaking down to non-relativistic speeds on a torch of antimatter. Quiet because it is a warship. Quiet because it is following the wake of four relativistic kill vehicles that, though they left three years Earth time after the fleet, they arrived here only two weeks ago, local time. They didn’t have to slow down gently. They would go from within a loud shout of C to nothing in a fraction of a second, imparting all of their energy of motion in a cataclysm more ferocious by far than the asteroid which once, long ago, ended the dinosaurs on far away Earth.

In the cold depths, just outside the cometary halo, the three suns of the Centauri were bright pinpoints of yellow, yellow and red. Long, needle-like and black, the RKVs had exhausted all but a tiny fraction of their antimatter fuel accelerating out from Earth’s fractured moon to travel twenty-four trillion miles at 92% of the speed of light. Half a year out, the shipminds absorbed the sensor take from the starwisp probes that preceded them. The probes, in their hundreds, had wafted into the system months earlier. Only hundreds of grams in weight, their gossamer wings brought a simple payload, a fabricator seed enveloped in bardo cone insulation. The solar wind of the destination stars slowed the wisps to manageable speeds, so that when the seed hit a useful body the fabricator seed would survive the impact. Once planted in a cometary body the seed, powered by a small subcritical isotope pile and informed by a carbon matrix library of designs, set about constructing a small but powerful observatory from the dirty ice.

On the Constitution, the crew and the shipmind's military intelligence sub-agencies analyze the fresh data and compared it with the picture generated by Big Eye, the carefully hidden, extremely long baseline interferometer observatory in the Oort Cloud four light years behind. Many emission sources had gone dark, others were dramatically dimmer. The enemy attempted to hide, no matter how impossible it was to hide a system-wide information and industrial ecology.

The four killers divide and divide again, fissioning into 256 needles, every one of which harbored a fragment of the shipmind, a reservoir of antimatter for terminal guidance, and a target. Each mirv moved through the darkness at 92 percent of the speed of light. Each mirv headed was for the most populous inhabited bodies orbiting the three stars of the system. Each mirv had, by right of its fantastic momentum, enough kinetic energy to sere a continent to ashes, or break to pieces a medium sized asteroid. The mirved RKVs jockey for position as final orders are ansibled to the killers. The minds of the ships, weak AI inhabiting a nucleus of quantum foam around which orbited a constellation of submolar processors, intend only destruction.

***

The world seemed small as Captain Sely left command space and settled into the confines of his mind. Agencies and voices clamored for attention at the edges of his consciousness, but he pushes them aside. For now, coffee is the top of the agenda. Caffeine to restore alertness, and to dull the pain of living a wider life than God intended.

Sely unfolded his wiry frame from the acceleration couch he had occupied for the last seventy-two hours. The last dribbles of shockgel disappeared into the fabric of the couch as he floated toward the desk at the opposite side of the cabin. Looking around the spacious cabin, he smiled at the thought that despite years in the vastness of interstellar space, space was what he would miss most when in a few hours the ship would collapse in on itself, hollow spaces mostly disappearing to make the ship ready for combat. The easy days of the long passage were almost gone.

Work-ups for the coming weeks were going well – a quick inner glance and training information scrolled across his vision for a moment before flicking away – the crew was tight. As well they should be, he thought, after two years of unending practice in the simulation spaces. Fleet two-shop had digested the intel dump from the probe network, and had fed the final targets into the killers. His own intel group even now was cataloguing targets, and working with ops to spin up a target matrix for 14-9's area of responsibility.

For now, though… Coffee. Sely opened a small cabinet and removed something that looked like a large syringe. Which in a way, it was. Almost a century of hard-won experience had shown that a French press was the only traditional method of coffee preparation even remotely suitable for freefall. Filling a bulb with coffee, he drifted over to his desk.

He could never avoid looking at the old-style photograph clipped to the top of the desk. A picture of woman and child, his wife and daughter. Dead since the invaders dropped some very, very large rocks on his home. And on the homes of almost two billion others. Sely and his son had been in the moon. Not that they escaped anything save death there.

A redness flicked at the edges of his vision. Sely's medical automation asking permission to adjust his cognition to dampen out anguish, and replace it with calmness and focus. Sely brushed this aside as he always did. Only in combat would he accept that sort of meddling. In combat, he never needed it.

Sely looked about him and contemplated the small bubble of air and light and heat that encased him. I've had two years of respite from horror, he thought. And used it to plan the visitation of horror. Now the planning is nearly done. Soon, it will be killing time.

***