“No: I have something better in mind. But Plan B does require in-person intervention . . . if we shoot her without resolving the fundamental problem, we would merely make everything worse.”
“I think I see: If you shoot her, she respawns from backup and denounces you as an outlaw. But if you can leave her adrift with no fuel, exposed and completely discredited, it would be far better for everyone.”
“Yes. But we have to disable her beacon laser and ensure that she doesn’t have an opportunity to escape—or to suicide, or to murder our witnesses.” The witnesses aboard the gaggle of small low-acceleration squidcraft dispatched by the People to monitor our negotiations with Sondra and hold her to account, cunningly misidentified as missiles by the allies behind the palace coup that had silenced Medea shortly after their launch. It was a devastatingly risky task: If Sondra realized they were anything other than derelict warheads, she could kill them in an instant and claim self-defense.
“I think we are going to have to cut this short,” Rudi continued. “The delta vee for an intercept is just barely manageable, thanks to the extra fuel we took on board—and as long as she’s got her main engine burning and pointing our way, her drive flare will make it very difficult to tell the difference between the Five Zero and a decoy drone.
“So, Krina. How do you feel about boarding actions?”
Boarding actions are situations where the crew of one space vehicle physically transfer aboard another craft in flight, hijacking it by force.
It’s a dangerous maneuver at the best of times, usually conducted by armed privateers against the likes of a defenseless freighter or a semidisabled chapel. The idea of a privateer boarding an interstellar dreadnought armed with a gigawatt laser and a portable military-industrial complex tuned for the rapid manufacture of thermonuclear weapons is . . . well, the word “suicidal” springs to mind.
However, as previously noted, Rudi had palmed a trump card: the teleportation engine. In addition to which, we had taken on board nearly two tons of weapons-grade enriched uranium in aqueous solution, stored in narrow, cadmium-walled tanks: about the most energetic rocket fuel imaginable. And he had a plan.
“We’re going to set up a jump that puts us a couple of hundred kilometers behind her starship. Which is decelerating toward a rendezvous with our current vector. We’ll leave a radar decoy behind to hold her attention. Once we’re in place, we’ll be screened from direct observation by her ship’s frontal shield. We’re going to make a continuous acceleration run straight down her throat, using more than half of that bang-juice you asked me about.” Rudi bared his teeth. “We’ll be all over her in less than ten minutes. And then we’re going to board her by force, detain the crew, disable their weapons, and open it to public inspection by neutral witnesses.”
Reader: Space battles are boring. But boarding actions are terrifying.
I had been on the receiving end of one, aboard the Chapel of Our Lady: Now I was to find out what it was like from the other side.
We crouched in the open front of the Five Zero’s payload bay, clad in a motley array of armor, plugged into whatever weapons we were most proficient with. I was armored, but not really armed (unless you count my spreadsheet and the contents of the hollow cylinder strapped to my chest): I was along as supercargo, in the care of an experienced team of raiders. We sat strapped to the open top of a short-range load carrier, ready for the jump. Before us, the fixed stars burned pitilessly: One star in particular strobed with a violet glare, its real motion still barely visible at this range. It was Sondra’s warship, fusion torch lit, backing toward us on a gust of gamma radiation and neutrons. “Stay back,” Li reminded me.
“Yes. Stay behind, and we’ll be able to protect you,” Marigold added. We spoke via encrypted electrosense—an augmentation the ship’s surgeon had installed on my head barely an hour ago. It still tingled, and my jaw felt numb.
“Jumping in ten seconds,” Marigold added. I tightened my grip on the straps that held me to the load carrier, unsure what to expect. “Brace yourself for acceleration immediately afterward.”
I tried counting, and got to fifteen seconds without anything happening. I was about to ask how much longer we’d be waiting when the stars flickered into new positions. Then a momentary tug in my vestibular sense told me that we were turning: And an invisible half-ton weight landed on me. Bright lines scrubbed across the edges of my vision, signaling an alarmingly high radiation flux. I couldn’t move. The acceleration felt as high as anything I’d felt during reentry on Shin-Tethys. (It wasn’t, not by an order of magnitude, but I didn’t have antishock gel packed around and inside me, either.) Stars drifted across the open front of the cargo bay, and a juddering sawtooth-buzzing roar shivered my bones. I strained, but try as I might, I couldn’t get a glimpse of our target. It was, after all, still hundreds of kilometers away.
Not only was it over two hundred kilometers away, it was receding from us at twenty kilometers a second, albeit decelerating, its drive torch pointed away from us and toward the vector we had been following seconds earlier. At ten gees, it would take us close to four minutes to stop the gap from widening further—but then we would close it extremely rapidly, before flipping end over end for the final dive. The starship itself was decelerating constantly, but at less than a thousand milligees: Even though it had prodigious amounts of power on tap, if it tried to sustain any higher acceleration, its crew would find themselves roasting in the fusion reactors’ waste heat. Our main hazards were threefold. The antimeteoroid point-defense devices behind the starship’s frontal shield might mistake us for a snowball on a collision course; Sondra might attempt to bring the beacon laser to bear on us; or she might do something really unfortunate with her drive torch if she realized what was going on. My greatest hope was that she would continue to pursue the radar decoy, which was obscured to her optical sensors by the fiery plume of her rocket exhaust. So I endured several minutes of deepening dread and growing terror as I waited for the circle of sky at the front of our cargo bay to flash brighter than a million suns and melt my face.
I waited, and waited. And then, without warning, the invisible weights holding my limbs down evaporated, and the static in my vision cleared. I jolted forward in my harness, then hung sideways in it as the stars rolled across the cargo opening. The bone-conducted roar of acceleration resumed, but this time I knew we were backing toward our target, slowing, closing for the final transfer.
“Ejecting in twenty seconds,” Marigold said quietly. “Hang on.” And I did.
I retain only confused impressions from the boarding operation: the hollow darkness to every side, icy cold. A cylindrical metal fabrication the size of a skyscraper looming out of the darkness, studded with inexplicable nozzles, scarred by ancient microimpacts, a glaring pinpoint light burning holes in the cosmos at one end. Shoving and bashing and jolting as our crude lash-up cargo carrier rocketed across the gap, closing on one of the many blisters that studded the ship’s side. A crazy rocking motion and a brief glimpse of another, smaller vehicle in the distance, sitting atop another glaring knife-bright line of radiation: then a bone-rattling impact.
I remember standing in a hole in the side of a room, surrounded by the murdered chrysalids of ancient warriors, looking out into the abyss, and wondering: I’m still alive! Then a voice rang in my ears despite the vacuum all around, “Krina, get down!” And moments later, glimpses through a blur of terror, the flashing of thruster-driven knives jousting overhead.