The Memnon Incident: Part 3 of 4 (A Serial Novel) Page 4

  The RMN machines had come in at very high speed. Most likely they had been the complement of a light carrier given the boring and thankless task of deep-system patrolling. Then word must have come of the presence of RHN interlopers, and the Memnonian pilots, whiling away their days flying obsolescent fighters in empty corners of the system, had been set upon the hunt.

  In the current scrap, their smaller and nimbler machines had the edge. Once they had bled off the excess speed they had built up during the hours-long chase back to the Steadfast, the Memnonian fighters could out-turn and out-accelerate the comparatively lumbering Wildcats. The F-243's still had excellent speed, but most of this had been drained by the about-face that Imagawa and Percy had executed. The velocities of all the fighters involved in the battle were now nearly equal, and the superior acceleration of the lighter Memnonian craft made them quicker in making moves against the Wildcats.

  "What's left, Hammer?" Imagawa demanded after they had made another pass through the enemy.

  "I read three K-76's, one Typhoon, one F-215, four K-75's, two Barracudas, and the Wyvern," Percy counted. "Not so good for us."

  "The leader will be in the Wyvern," Imagawa said with confidence. "My scope has him hanging on the edge of the fight."

  "He's waiting for the killshot," Percy said as he swung his machine out the path of a Barracuda that screamed past him disgorging blue-white streaks of plasma. "That was close!"

  "It's only a matter of time before they draw a bead on us," Imagawa said. "They'll send in three or four for each of us, get us to maneuver, slow down, and then there will come the assassin." Imagawa hooted. "Let's not make it easy for them. Let's go vertical. Give them something else to think about."

  "Copy that Witch."

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Aboard Morrigan

  With a quick bit of remotely-controlled wiring, Jenkins had linked the drone targeter to the transcendent shipbrain that was Morrigan. Chandler stood over the lieutenant and Howell and appraised the rudimentary coupling between the little device and the warship. "We tried something similar, with more sophisticated equipment, you know," he said. "We got nowhere."

  "Thanks for the encouragement," Jenkins said.

  "What kind of message are you sending?" inquired Chandler. "We used every form we could think of. Morrigan was just too far gone to hear us."

  "She's obviously not so far gone as to not be around, in some form or another," Jenkins observed. "Besides, I'll bet you didn't try this message."

  "And what would that be?"

  "In the Time Before, back when there was still an Earth, ships in distress would send out a coded message requesting assistance. It was a simple 'save our ship' pulse blast. It could sent by radio and picked up by anyone who was listening. Coordinates would also be transmitted and ships in the vicinity were bound to respond."

  Chandler was incredulous. "I've heard of such things. I didn't think you would try something so silly. Why would that work and not any of our own techniques?"

  "We can't say it will work," Howell answered. "Do you have a better idea with the Memnonians surrounding us?"

  Chandler blinked. "No, I do not. It just seems too simple to succeed."

  RHS Steadfast, Memnon system

  More closed his eyes. There had been no bright spots to this mission. There were likely to be none once it was concluded. "Ready missiles for launch, on my command," he ordered.

  "The assault boats are accelerating," Cassandra Feeney reported. "They're going in hot."

  "They'll be looking to board before we decided to shoot them," Vince Vokey chimed in over the comm from aboard the Golden Lion. "My birds are ready to fly."

  "Mine too," called out Augustine.

  "Ready," said Carey.

  "All set," reported Rahal.

  "I'm good," said Bill Calder.

  "Whatever," grunted Matt Heyward.

  Aboard Morrigan

  "Anything?" asked Venn. The chief medical officer of the Steadfast wore a worried expression. "She can't be sleeping too deeply. She was awake just hours ago."

  "Not yet," Jenkins said, shaking his head. The targeter was still connected, and a small light flashed with intermittent pulses. "This is the equivalent of a tickle. Maybe she'll wake up, maybe she won't."

  'Being 'awake' and 'asleep' are just metaphors in any case," Howell added. "I'm not sure what Morrigan is experiencing."

  "An ancient shipbrain such as Morrigan would have been among the most advanced AI's ever made," Chandler noted. "Her neural architecture followed but did not slavishly copy the functionality of the human mind. She never needed to sleep, as we do, but she could put herself into something like a dream-state, a low-power condition in which the basics of her ship functions would be handled automatically."

  Venn was skeptical. "You know this for a fact?"

  Chandler nodded. "Cordelia and Lady of the Lake function largely in the same way. It's safe to assume that Morrigan would have had similar functionality."

  "Why would a machine need to dream?" asked Venn. "I thought they never grew tired or needed to sleep."

  "Morrigan's mind is not like most other machine intelligences," Chandler said. He tapped his wristcomp to bring up a projection of the neural architecture of Amelia, the shipbrain embedded within Steadfast. It was a tangled web of glowing dendritic threads. "This is Amy," he said. He tapped again, and two additional projections came to life beside that of Amelia. "Now Lady of the Lake and Cordelia." The Lady's mind was larger by a wide measure than that of Amelia, and Cordelia's was even bigger. Both writhed with luminous energies. "Here is our educated guess as to what Morrigan would have been like in her undamaged prime." Above his wristcomp hung a flaming globe as big as his head, dwarfing the others next to it.

  "She makes Amy look like a pea," Howell said.

  "She does indeed," Chandler agreed. "And Amy is one of the more advanced AI's we have today. Whatever techniques went into Morrigan's construction, we have long since lost. It is true antiquakraft, a technology that's been gone since before Cordelia's time, almost certainly. A mind like this, the emergent intelligence of a physical brain of immense complexity, needs to keep itself occupied, or else it will grow bored and atrophy. Much of what we think that a shipbrain did was not directly related to overseeing the ship, but instead to problems of greater import."

  "Such as?" Venn asked.

  Chandler shrugged. "We can only conjecture. It's likely that a shipbrain such as this one acted as a counselor to her captain. Amy can say and do some surprisingly intelligent things, but Captain More would never ask her for advice. Something like Morrigan, on the other hand, was far more capable than any human mind could ever be unaided."

  'I could see that happening," Howell said. "Cordelia was always one to offer her suggestions even when unsolicited. Morrigan's captain would have listened to whatever she had to say."

  "Could she be dreaming now?" asked Venn. "Perhaps she is here but popping in and out of consciousness?"

  "That's what I think," said Chandler. "What Julius said is true, however. Being awake, asleep, or dreaming, are metaphors when it comes to Morrigan and other shipbrains. They aren't biological entities themselves, and so I can't be certain how far to stretch the analogy with regard to Morrigan."

  Jenkins seemed suddenly distracted. He head his hand to his earpiece. "That was Steadfast. Morrigan has stopped jamming us."

  "That must be a good sign," Howell said.

  "I'd like to think that. Let's hope that we can open up a more than metaphorical channel to this ship," Jenkins said. "But we have more bad news. The RMN is sending assault boats with their own marines to board Morrigan. Our stay here is going to get unfun very soon."

  RHS Steadfast, Memnon system

  "The Memnonians are about to come within five kilometers of Morrigan," Feeney announced.

  "Lieutenant Del Rio," More said. "Status?"

  The Steadfast's weapons officer, Lieutenant Matteo Del Rio, checked his console once agai
n. "All systems nominal, Captain," he reported. "Six birds, ready for launch."

  "Commence countdown, twenty seconds," More said.

  Aboard Morrigan

  Morrigan's deep, feminine voice emanated from seemingly all around the bridge. "I have received your message."

  Howell exhaled in relief. "We haven't gotten off to a good start, but please, stay with us. We need your help, right away."

  "There is a ship in trouble?"

  "There is," answered Lieutenant Jenkins. "You."

  There was a long silence of several seconds duration. To the crew inside the ruined bridge, it felt like an eternity.

  "I see the problem."

  RHS Steadfast

  Lieutenant Del Rio let his finger hang above the launch button on his console. "Permission to launch, Captain?"

  "Permission granted."

  "Aye, Captain." Del Rio leaned forward in his blast couch. He quickly drew back his hand from the launch controls. "Do you see what I am seeing, Cassie?"

  "Captain," Feeney cried out. "Morrigan's shields are going up all around her!"

  "All missiles, go to standby!" More barked. "Squadron chiefs, go to standby!"

  The captains of the Halifaxian ships all confirmed the launch delay order. "Feeney, what's happening?"

  "Morrigan's put up her shields. Extremely high energy output."

  "What's happened to the Memnonian assault boats?"

  "They are trying to pull away."

  Aboard Morrigan

  "We will defend you," Jenkins promised Morrigan. "We are not allied with the people who are coming to board you."

  "That will not be necessary," Morrigan said.

  RHS Steadfast

  "The Memnonians are decelerating hard," Feeney said. "Twelve g's at least. That will be eight or nine felt g's in boats like those."

  More looked to Ensign Tan, the Steadfast's defensive systems' officer. "Stay sharp, Teddy, this is going to get ugly."

  "Put this on holo, Amy," More ordered.

  Holograms of the six assault boats streaking toward Morrigan materialized above the heads of the Steadfast's bridge crew. One by one, the flickering, red-orange little boats were clawed from the void surrounding the ancient warship by its awakened defensive guns, each vessel shattering instantly into millions of irradiated particles.

  Around the hull of Morrigan these blossoms expanded noiselessly until the blazing particulate impacted like an angry rain on the shields of the battleship and were extinguished in the hyperdimensional defensive screen that carved a submolecular chasm through spacetime. The moving mass of sizzling debris was sucked into the spatial rift, disappearing forever from realspace.

  "Admiral Wu is hailing us!" Garand called out.

  "Put him onscreen," More ordered.

  Wu's livid face appeared on the vidscreen at the front of the bridge. His voice quaked with rage. "You did this!" he shouted. "You are responsible for opening fire on our boats!"

  "It wasn't us!" More protested. "Whatever happened, it was Morrigan herself who did it."

  "I think not! You have crew aboard the ship! This is an act of war! You have brought this on yourself!"

  "Morrigan definitely does not recognize you as her owner," More observed. "She is not yours, and never has been."

  "Turn her over to us right now!" Wu demanded. "If you do not, there will be a state of war between your nation and Memnon. We will spare none of you if you do not depart immediately."

  "Cut the link, ensign." Wu's face disappeared from the vidscreen."

  "Heat signatures building up on Royal Alfred and several other Memnonian warships," Amelia announced. "Indicative of imminent intent to fire on us."

  More swallowed hard. "Things are now officially ugly," he said over the squadron comm. "We will have to beat them to the punch. All ships - new targeting orders. Morrigan is now off limits for weapons fire. All missiles previously to be launched against her will instead target the Royal Alfred. After that, fire at will at any target of opportunity. Weapons free."

  Retargeting an antiship missile was a quick and easy process. New coordinates were inloaded, or if the target was moving, the general coordinates of target was supplemented by all tracking data, including radar, gravdar, electromagnetic spectral emissions, and if available, visual images of the intended victim. Forty-two fusion-warhead equipped SIM-99B Sledgehammer antiship missiles emerged from the Halifaxian ships within the next thirty seconds. These tore through the intervening hundred-thousand kilometers of space between their launching platforms and the Memnonian flagship. These were answered by a flurry of hundreds of giant Firestorm antiship missiles flung from the Memnonian warships that hung in the volume of space around Morrigan.

  "Transmission from our exploration teams - it's Howell, captain," Garand announced. "Morrigan is back and in control of the ship."

  More watched the holograms of hundreds of nuclear missiles cut across space, swarms of small red-orange images representing Memnonian weapons meeting and then passing by Halifax's blue-white ones. Each weapon possessed enough destructive power to vaporize a large city.

  "It's about time."

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Memnon system

  Imagawa rolled her Wildcat and dove steeply to avoid a flurry of laser fire shot at her by a trio of K-75's. In zero-gavity, there was no true up or down except where arbitrarily defined, so she could no more 'dive' than she could 'climb.' It was common, however, as a matter of easy reference, for 'up' and 'down' in a star system to be set according to the plane of the orbits of the system's planets, which typically circled their star within a few degrees of one another. What was the accepted top or bottom of the plane was again arbitrarily set by the inhabitants of the system, and usually followed the preference of the dominant world, which most often decided that the north pole of said planet was lying on the top of the system plane. Such directional terminology had no scientific validity, but it did give transiting ships a rough and ready means of orienting themselves around the system primary, and served well as a mode of common positional understanding for ships that were often moving along vastly different trajectories in three-dimensional space.

  Imagawa, now well into her dive, was hurtling below and perpendicular to the plane, her engines flaring as incandescent white plasma spewed forth from them. The K-75's followed, each launching a spread of Poison Darts at her ship. She was all out of decoys. Her Wildcat had already taken some light damage when a F-215 had peppered her ventral fuselage with grapeshot pellets. She began to rue the day that the RHN had ever bothered to teach Memnon the art of space fighter combat. The Darts screamed closer, the threat warning receiver switching into a high pitched whine as they came within lethal range. She slammed on her brakes, the gravitic vanes slowing her machine by 5,000 kilometers per hour within a few seconds. The compensators brought the felt g-forces of such hasty deceleration down to just six g's, almost enough to induce lost of consciousness, but not quite. The Darts tumbled past her as they frantically sought to reacquire her machine.

  She pulled herself out of the dive, and then looped upward once more so that her guns were brought to bear on the nearest of the trailing K-75's. She stitched a jagged pattern of searing bolts into its upper wing, tearing it off at the root. The Serpent, suddenly finding itself with its center of mass radically altered, spun crazily as its gravitic brakes tried to reassert control over the craft.

  "You still with me, Hammer?"

  Percy's voice was strained. He was grunting as he pulled out of his own high-g dive. "I'm here, Witch. I'm going to have to have a talk with my mechanic in Hell. These compensators aren't as effective as I remember them."

  "It's a rare thing for us to pull so many g's. It isn't every day that we fling our Wildcat's around like this."

  "I've never practiced these maneuvers quite so hard," Percy said. "Not so pleasant. I think the blood is coming back to my head now."

  "You may be getting old too," Imagawa said.

  "I'm not
going to get much older, Witch. We can't keep this up forever. Our energy position is poor relative to theirs. We can expect to be driven again and again into waiting fighters by those pursuing us."

  "We're close to the end," Imagawa acknowledged, banking her gray fighter to avoid a string of tracer-lit gauss rounds. "I'm not going to spend my days in a Memnonian prison. We'll be tried as pirates if they catch us. We're not at war, so the Convention does not apply."

  "I won't think of giving up," Percy assured.

  "I know, Hammer. I wouldn't blame you if you did, though. They might spare you and exchange you in the future. I got you into this. I want you to have the chance to survive it."

  "Such silly talk! We'll write our legends in their burning debris!" Hammer spat.

  Imagawa laughed. "Okay, too bad for Memnon today. We're not going quietly."