23

Universal Solution

“You have to set your blasting charge in the right spot,” says Bjorn Warnoc, setting the drill against the green-black surface of the Snark. “Deep enough to cut off a slab, but not so deep or so central that you break it apart at all once.”

“It's dangerous to break it apart all at once,” says Leela, her miniature figure perched on my father's shoulder, “Because it's bigger on the inside, see? You don't want to let them out.”

“Let who?” I try to ask, but the explosive charge, the one I didn't even see her pack into the hole, goes off, and the Snark unfolds, and unfolds, and unfolds, fractal technicolor recursion, and swallows us all up.

I fall into its green-black depths, patterns spinning around me, after the vac-suited figure of my father. He falls faster than me, receding into the distance.

“You can't catch him,” says Leela, and she is not beside me, not falling with me. She is nowhere and everywhere, her hooded Asian eyes reflected back from every glossy pane of green-black surface as it spins past. “It's too big in here, and you have to be both too fast and not fast enough.”

Oh, can't I? We'll see about that. I can try harder.

I pull my arms in and concentrate, flying faster through the unfolding depths. But when I catch his body, it splits apart, a dry paper puppet, shedding dust and flaking away into white ash, and the butterfly emerges, spreading her iridescent blue and purple wings.

“Do you like them?” Miranda asks. “You'd better. We're partners now. We're going to be spending a lot of time together, you know.”

She's naked and pink and perfect, hovering at eye level with slow beats of her wings, the steam of the shower room swirling around her in gusts.

“You should get out of those wet clothes,” she says, and suits actions to words, fluttering forwards to take me in her arms and the sodden shirt melts away and vanishes as she strips it from my shoulders. She wraps her legs about my waist, and as I cup her hips in my hands, she lifts her lips to mine. Her scent surrounds us in the mist, vanilla and tropical flowers and spice, and her lips taste of honey and chocolate and cinnamon and a million more things I cannot name.

I'm so hard it almost hurts, and I fumble at the waistband of my pants, but stop. Hesitate.

“C'mon, Marcus,” she purrs, kissing my neck, “Don't be a tease. I want you inside me.”

But she's so tiny. What if I hurt her?

“Don't worry,” she says, smiling up at me, answering my thoughts, “I'll be fine. Everyone's bigger on the inside.”

The drawstring knot finally yields, and I drop my pants in a sodden heap, kick them away. She looks up at me with big liquid purple eyes and I grasp her by the hips, to lower her onto me. “I just need one thing from you,” she says. “Your heart. Cut it out for me, will you?”

She's holding a chef's knife, pointed and shining silver, beaded with warm water and clouded with the steam of the showers.

Something's odd about her request. Can't quite put my finger on it. I don't want to give it to her. She'll probably eat it or something. Can't we just get on with what we were doing?

“Not too deep, or too central,” says Leela, peeling my hand from Miranda's hip, pressing my fingers around the hilt. “It's bigger on the inside, and you don't want to let them out all at once.”

Together, they guide the knife not to my chest, but to Leela's, moving my arm between the two of them. I do not resist, cannot resist, cannot muster the willpower to tell my muscles to move, my body to act. I am watching three of us from far away through the clouds of stream, and the sound of water.

When the knife touches her chest, touches it, not even enough to pierce, Leela bursts apart, her wet bathing suit falling to the tiled floor as she separates into shapes, birds, the silhouettes of a thousand thousand crows, flapping away with raucous cries in all directions.

They are black and green and glossy.

“Kiss me,” purrs Miranda, staring up at me with shining eyes. “We're going to be together all our lives, so we don't have that much time left…”

I lift her in my hands again, lower her onto me, warm and wet and welcoming. I gasp with the sudden shock of pleasure and she purrs against my chest, “Yes, Marcus, yes… wake up Marcus…”

“What?”

“Wake up!”

Snap.

I'm in my bed, sheets twisted around me, damp with sweat. Miranda, the real Miranda, looms over me, one hand on the side of my face, shaking me gently. She doesn't have any wings.

“Wake up,” she says, again.

I curl my legs up, trying to hide an erection that's heavy and solid as a bar of lead. She looks enough like dream-Miranda to provide an odd sense of—continuity. I squash the impulse to reach out to her, gather her into my arms again.

She doesn't want me. She thinks I'm ugly. She said so, remember?

“What's up?”

“I think we're in trouble. Leela wanted to me wake you; your neural interface wasn't taking calls. Leela?”

The miniaturized avatar floats in the air between us, suddenly, without a flicker of transition. “They've found us.”

“Who?”

“Everyone.”

And just like that, I'm not hard anymore, which is good, because I'm up, and right through Leela's avatar and out the door, brushing Miranda aside. By the time I put my hands on the ladder, I've already called up displays, and can survey our situation as I fumble upwards towards the bridge, half-blinded by data.

Leela is right. Everyone has found us. And I mean everyone.

The sky is full of fusion-drive tracks, burning bright, pumping out visible light, radio noise, neutron radiation, rapidly decaying neutrinos. And every single one of them is pointed at us.

Straight at us. With pinpoint accuracy. Except more so. In space, “pinpoint” accuracy is kinda shabby. Shift your aim by the width of a pin, and by the time you've gone any real distance, you're a couple hundred kilometers off. Or a couple thousand.

Anyway, they're pointed at us real good. They shouldn't know where we are.

“Leela! Do you see this?”

“If it's on the map, I see it, but what do you mean?”

“They're pointed straight at us. Not on an intercept course.”

“Actually, they're pointed at where we were a minute and thirty-two seconds ago. But if they'd seen us—”

“—then they'd be able to calculate our trajectory. They must have gotten one location update, and one only. But how does that happen?”

“Maybe we leaked some emissions of some sort. I'm looking at the logs now. But they'll have us pretty soon, their search space is tiny now.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it,” I snarl, “I'm spinning up the engine now. Miranda, you have a few minutes to get up here and strapped in, but the sooner we get going, the better.”

“Stet. Coming.” Her voice is all business.

I'm strapping myself in, and the drive is halfway through its boot sequence, when Leela comes back to me with an answer. “It's the Snark, Captain.”

“How did I just fucking know that? What's it doing this time? Thought we locked the network down pretty tight.”

“It's not using the network. It's just broadcasting directly. Big radio pulse about five minutes ago, and another one just now.”

“Radio pulse? Through the shipping container and the hull?”

“It seems to have found an antenna to use.”

“Through the hull?”

“Ah… not quite,” Leela says, sounding a bit sheepish. “Sort of 'on the hull'. Or maybe 'in the hull.'”

“Leela, that makes no sense.”

“Okay, the antenna it's using is the hull.”

“It can do that? How can it do that?”

“I don't know! I'm not the Oracle of Fucking Delphi! I'm just a big box of hardware simulating a human brain, okay? Your guess is good as mine.”

“Speaking of guesses, there's something I want to know,” says Miranda, from behind me, as she climbs into an acceleration chair almost as tall as her shoulders. She's still wearing a lacey nightgown that looks designed less for comfort than sex appeal. Not that she needs any help… I'm getting flashbacks to that weird dream. I really need to get off this ship, somewhere with friendly natives.

“Yes?” says Leela.

“If this gadget has the technology to electromagnetize our entire hull at will, at a distance, with no electrical connection, why is it still using radio for any signal it considers important? That doesn't make sense.”

“Yeah,” I say. “She's got a point. We seem to have kidnapped a god after all. Except he's chopping at the door of his prison cell with a stone axe. Which he made by miraculously summoning a matter replicator. I think “sense” is out to lunch today, unless Leela's seeing something I'm not.”

I'm already feathering the stick, firing attitude jets to cancel our spin gravity, get us pointed away from the mass of the swarm.

“Actually,” Leela says, “I do have a few ideas, if you've got a moment—”

“I don't. Tell me later. You strapped in, Pixie?”

“Yes. Go.”

And I go, familiar acceleration slapping us back into our seats. It's still the same fight, I suppose, thirty-plus of them and one of me, but it's my kind of fight.

Dead alien civilizations, juvenile wisecracking AI, high finance, getting blackmailed, sex dreams about a woman with the shape of a fairy and the morals of a cat, cantankerous xeno-tech boxes that are bigger on the inside and filled with who knows what…

At least for this moment, I'm back in my comfort zone. I'll take that.

Miranda lets out a low whistle when I call up the nav display. I think she's starting to understand some of the basics of astrodynamics, just watching me. Smart girl.

“Am I seeing things?” she asks, “Or did we finally have a bit of luck?”

I think I already know what she's seen, but I scan again, eyes squeezed shut, studying flight history tracks, burn rates, projected trajectories, signal maps.

“Luck's got nothing to do with it, but yes, I think the, ah, mob dispersed a lot, searching for us. Mostly in the wrong direction. We're near the edge of the crowd.”

I don't mention that, further away, other tracks have turned towards Sedna, the swarm, and our location. The cry of “Stop Thief!” has well and truly gone out, probably with a big enough bounty to quash any questions about the definition of “stealing,” or who owns what. But the newcomers are a problem for whole hours away. My horizon of care has shrunk to the next minutes.

“The bad news is—”

“Yes,” she replies, cutting me off. “I see them.”

Ahead of us, squarely between the White Cat and freedom, a handful of fusion drive tracks make a tangle across the void, loosely woven, but tight enough to form a wall of overlapping fields of fire—missiles, flak, railguns, anything they have. Already they are boosting hard away from us, trying to match velocity and stay ahead, maximize their time in firing range. One, two…. hell, there's six of them.

That ain't good. Last time I counted, there was one of me, with one railgun I bashed together from a parts kit, and I don't like what the ammunition counter is telling me. But it's either that or drop back into the pursuing swarm, which is the same, only worse.

“Pixie, you all secured?” I ask. I seem to have settled on that instead of “Princess.” “Put your mask on, I'm about to punch this thing hard.”

“I'm ready,” Miranda says, without complaints or preambles, and we both grunt in unison as I take us straight to five gravities as fast as the drive will ramp up. We can only take this for so long, even with the masks forcing an oxygen-rich mix into our lungs, but I mean to get the rest of the swarm as far behind me as I can before I hit that wave of screening craft.

“Marcus, can we—” gasps Miranda through compressed lungs.

“Punch through? Probably not. They're matching course.”

“So what are you… are we… going to do?”

Good fucking question. They're already in firing range, at least a long-ish sort of firing range, with lots of shell flight time… but that margin of safety is shrinking by the second. I really do wish I had a clever move right now, but in space there's only so many directions we can go, and none are clear.

The only way out is through.

“I think it's time… for the universal solution… to every problem… ever.”

“What's that?” she gasps. Her high-g breathing technique has gotten better.

“Violence.”

I expect her to protest, push back, fight me, call me a big dumb ape who thinks with his muscles. I almost wish she would. But she doesn't say a word. And I haven't heard a peep out of Leela since I got in the chair.

I line up angles, mark targets, prioritize firing solutions. With a startled jolt, I notice there are extra tracks and angles lining up in my tactical plotter, marked in a hypothetical gray.

Leela.

I'm not sure she's trained on tactics, but super-fast physics and math, well, yeah. Some of her solutions are good, and I go for a mix, coding for a spread of five shells. Need a pause after that for the cooling system. Don't wanna melt the rails.

Steady the helm. Wait for it. Hold fast…

Now.

The Cat jolts as my first spread flies, and I vector thrust, hit the attitude jets hard, slew our tail around, changing directions, moving. No one can see those shells moving, arcing out toward their targets, but the magnetic pulse of the shots propagates out at the speed of light. Lines on the nav display start to curve as the closest pursuers react, go evasive, tumble across the sky.

Three… two…. there it goes. On the display, the narrow tracklines of my SPAM shells blossom into expanding red cones of fragment spray. Still ten seconds out from their targets, but I'm not waiting up—I'm sending more shells. Never wait in a fight. Shoot, move, communicate. Anything else is a waste of time.

Not that I have anyone to communicate with.

I'm all alone out here, outnumbered fifty-plus to one. And if I can't punch through past these six fast, the rest will all be on me.

Wait a second. One of the dots just went out.

“Leela, we just lost a drive signature! Get on the telescopes and—”

“Already found them, sir.” No creatively decorated avatar appears, just Leela's voice, all business here, and the 'sir' doesn't sound ironic. “Still active, but they're at low thrust, and I'm seeing some flickering. No radiation leaks that I can see.”

“Lucky hit, maybe. Keep tracking them on visual, I'm not getting a good drive sig.”

“Yessir, looks like they're limping off, but I'll keep an eye on.”

On the nav plotter, the other five are forming up, coming at me. Already my displays are full of railgun pulse warnings, and I'm disabling audio alarms as fast as they come up. Yes, they're trying to kill me, I know, I know already.

Time to fight.

No song of glory this time, no symphony of flying skill. I'm not fancying myself Hendrix on the guitar or any other sort of poetic crap. The tungsten shrapnel is all too real, the stakes are all too high, and I'm all too fucking tired. I'm not laughing. This is not a game. I'm not enjoying my fucking self. I just have work to do.

I weave through my assailants, fast and unpredictable, ducking around the shots I know they'll make. We're all stuck into each other, dead close with little relative velocity to spare, even though the whole battlefield is sailing away from the plane of the ecliptic at about one percent lightspeed. It's a knife fight in an airlock, where quick savagery and aggression beats grace every time.

The magnetometer is flickering flux readings in the red, scores of tungsten shards ripping past us at close-shave distances. Indicators scream audible warnings as a chemical engine lights up… someone's fired a missile.

I track it, bide my time for five short seconds, then dive towards it head on and roll aside at the last moment, missing by mere kilometers, and Leela lets out a low whistle at the audacity of that. Seconds later, I lay rail fragments into it, and it cooks off, its high explosive chemical warhead spraying more shrapnel into the void.

Okay, whoever threw that, you just became my number one pet project. Now, which one are you?

There. Trailing out in front of the pack towards me. The textbook says I should bracket you with shells, try to cover any random move you might make, but you aren't going to go evasive, are you? You're going to back off, try to get more distance so I can't dodge the next missile so easily.

Let's put some shells on a slow fuse, open them up behind you.

I fire another salvo, watch, wait, thrashing madly in a spiral of semi-random evasions. Sure enough, he turns away, burning his drive for distance, then his drive signature… separates into two signal sources. Another missile launch?

No, three sources now. Four. Spectral signature of metal. Plasma containment failure, shedding big chunks of hull. No nuclear explosion, but if he's still even alive, he's all the way out of this fight.

Two down, four more screaming in on my tail. Cut thrust, pivot, and burn hard, maxing the drives for a punishing twenty seconds, legs straining, teeth clenched, don't dare take a breath lest I collapse my lungs.

Hold fast…

Then I'm waking up again, and the Cat is swinging around burning through a turn at two gravities. Leela's stepped in the moment I blacked out, carried out my plan or something close to it, anticipating me without a word. My four pursuers are lined up, in each other's way, scrambling to repair their formation. She got it right.

Scary clever. Maybe humans aren't obsolete yet, but someday all our kids are gonna be made of silicon and fullerene.

“Thanks,” I whisper, firing more shells. “How's Miranda?”

“Still out. I think she's coming to. Better take it easy for a few minutes.”

“Yeah, right, I'll just call a timeout, then?”

Leela doesn't answer, just fills my display with possible attacker trajectories. She's colored them by probability estimates. Wow. From somewhere deep in her possible lack of a soul, she's dredged something very like a top-notch battle computer.

We wheel and tumble in the sky, separating from our attackers, jockeying for position. The airlock stab-fight has opened up again, and we're dancing partners now, Leela and I, communicating faster than words through the medium of nav plotter, target systems, throttle, stick. Everything I do, she can do backwards and in heels, so long as I'm leading.

Together, we are grace under pressure. I've flown with this kind of skill before, but never this wealth of information, of insight. Where before I had to invent, now I have only to analyze, distinguish, choose.

This, I realize, is the future of warfare. Power. Precision. Insight. The marriage of machine and man. Autonet systems are impressive in many ways, but working with a true AI…

Different. Another world.

Fifty-two seconds later, a third torchship limps away, breached and trailing fire. The rest hang back, separating, hammering at me with high-dispersion rail shots. My sensors are going crazy, and the threat is real; dodging focus fire is a matter of anticipation, guesswork, and skill. But now they're filling the void with spread fragments and relying on luck.

And Lady Luck is not my biggest fan. The fucking whore.

Not going to play that game. Time to change the equation.

Fanning out, as a tactic, has weaknesses all its own. Finally, for the first time in the days… weeks… I don't know how long… since this chase started, there is no one, no drive signatures at all, directly between me and free, clean, empty space.

I punch the drives again, drilling for the opening, straight and fast. If I'm predictable for too long, they can intercept me with more concentrated fragment fire, but I don't mean to give them time. With just a few minutes of high thrust… I think the numbers work.

I hope the numbers work.

More craft from the pursuing swarm are after me now, almost on me, close behind my three attackers, in a blizzard of magnetic pulses as their railguns hammer at me, and finally, someone gets good or lucky, and I'm caught in a wash of fine shrapnel… tungsten rain on my hull, loud as thunder.

Miranda yelps with alarm, and I snarl in frustration. In my display subsystems flare and die—antennas, cameras, my primary long-range com laser, the number two telescope, one of my attitude thrusters. That's going to make life difficult, but it won't matter if I don't get out of this. Whoever fired this thing miscalculated, set his dispersion too fine, he must have—I'm not hearing any hull breach alarms, but I can't count on him making that mistake again.

Cut the drives, spin the Cat, punch the drives again, straining not to black out, cut, spin, thrust again. Back and forth, like one of my ancestors' wooden ships, close-hauled, tacking into the wind. Sawing at hostile space.

Change directions again.

Fire another spray of shells at my pursuers.

Hold fast. Try not to black out. Hold fast.

When I eventually do black out, twice, Leela takes over seamlessly, understanding my plan, riding the ragged edge, extracting every dribble of velocity she can without killing us.

High and steady acceleration is hard enough to bear. Pulses of it, accompanied by rapid spins, are like being beaten with a fist the size of your entire body. I think, from somewhere far away, I hear Miranda whimpering, and I don't blame her. I wish I could reach back, lay a hand on her, squeeze her shoulder to tell her to hang in there, to hold fast, but I can't. My arm must weigh almost as much as my whole body right now.

I think I've bitten my tongue or something, 'cause my mouth is full of the copper taste of blood. Gray mist keeps trying to swallow my vision, and the helm is mostly Leela's, now. We've switched roles, her steering, me laying in course plans, visualizations, insights, whenever I can breathe and think straight.

Forwards and in heels, now, with me whispering directions to her. God, what a pilot I'll make of you, with a little more training, if somehow we both manage to live. She's murmuring in my ear over the auditory nerve interface, encouraging, coaxing, I can't make out the words, but I don't think I'm meant to… it's the tone that matters.

Hold fast.

Almost free. Just one of them close on us now, but, whoever he is, he's masterful, smooth and sharp as diamond, always right where he needs to be, never making a mistake. Leela can't shake him. I'm pumping rounds into the sky, but the railgun won't move fast enough on its track, and somehow he's always behind me, in the shadow of my tail where I can't get a fire angle on him.

And he's not setting his fragment dispersion too small. Tungsten shards tear away another antenna, glancing blows scar my hull, and then the void is filled with a sparkling plume of metallic hydrogen dust, dozens of kilometers long, as one of the fuel tanks clustered behind the hold is ripped open like a packet of algae snacks. If there were any oxygen out there, we'd be nothing but an expanding fireball now.

Pretty soon, one of those shots will find our drive spindle, and we will be. Or it'll punch right through the bridge and tear us apart in a welter of flying blood.

This can't go on. But there's nothing for me to do here, no angle to take, no clever tricks to try. I just have to wait for him to make a mistake.

But he doesn't make mistakes. He's right there with me, every time.

Right there. With me.

Oh, wait.

That's his mistake, isn't it?

Not his flying. Not his tactics. He's seamless, almost as good as me. Hell, maybe better. But he's arrogant. Impatient. A predator caught up in chasing his prey. Forgetting that the goal is to capture and loot. A hunter. Not a pirate.

Pirates like me, we keep our eyes on the prize.

That's why he doesn't expect it, can't expect it, when I cut the engines, spin and burn back. Towards the swarm. Towards him.

Leela doesn't expect it, either, yelps something that sounds like a question as I take control, but I haven't the time or breath to explain. Just follow my lead, backwards again in those heels. You'll see it when you see it.

He sees it first, before Leela, fast, almost too fast. I can tell by the way he cuts velocity, casts about trying to reacquire me, but it's too late, far too late, the laws of physics won't bend for him no matter how smart and fast and experienced he may be.

And I'm back towards him, tumbling in freefall, spraying shells. Five of them. Seven. Ten. Gun temperatures in the red, warnings screaming, and just have to hope those rails are tougher than the spec makes them out to be, because I only have one shot at this.

He's too far ahead of his allies. He stayed with me too well, hung too tight on my tail, and now it's just him and me for a few precious seconds…

My railgun hammers, hammers. He twists and gyrates, understanding me now, fleeing as his prey turns at bay to savage him. I'm trying to guess his moves, but he's good, so fucking good, unbelievable, and Leela's trying to help, she's seen it now, understands.

But he's dodging both of us. Together. A swarm of tracks tick towards us on the plotter display. Running out of time. Who is this guy?

I'm going to have to turn and run again. Have to bug out.

Just a few more seconds.

Hold fast.

One more spray of shells. Bracket him, then turn, and—

Fireball.

He's so fucking close when his drive core goes up that I don't even need the telescopes… my external hull cameras catch the wash of actinic white light across our hull. An involuntary yell of triumph escapes my lips, or tries to, but it can't, not at four gravities. It just comes out as a strangled gurgle.

“Wow,” says Leela's voice inside my head.

But I don't have time to answer. The electromagnetic pulse of his drive detonating is on us now, a wash of sensor static, eradicating drive signatures in the display, radio signals, everything.

Blindness. For us and everyone else.

Opportunity.

But I don't hide this time. I run.

I cut the engines, swing us around, and point our nose up, away from Sedna, away from the sun, away from our swarm of dogged pursuers, at those clean and unobstructed stars, that beautiful clear patch of sky.

Thirty seconds, maybe a minute, of total concealment is plenty of time to pick a vector and go. I pass the helm to Leela again, let her burn the drives, ride that ragged edge again, make the most of the time and space I've bought us.

She murmurs something to me, something about amazing again, but I'm pretty beat up already, and she's crushing us back in those seats without mercy, buying us every kilometer per second that she can, so I just clench my teeth around my oxygen mouthpiece, try to keep my lungs inflated, and hold fast.

It's ten minutes before she scales the drive back to a more sustainable pace. Or maybe ten hours. Ten months. Ten centuries. I can't tell. You'd think a man with a clock in his implants would know, but I haven't been able to pay attention to anything but pain.

The display tells me it was worth it, though. She's made the most of the window I tore for us. They're behind us now, still firing rail rounds, but we started accelerating full minutes before they did, and there's nothing they can do about the distance opening up. We're going faster, and so long as they don't out-accelerate us, we'll get further away all the time.

On a straight course at this punishing acceleration, there's little for me to do but lie back, close my eyes, focus on my breathing, and watch the traces of drive signatures flare bright and turn toward us, to wind time back and forth in simulated projection, and watch them gather behind us in a tapering cone.

We're going to have to scale back the thrust eventually, probably on cue from Miranda, who sounds recovered enough to monitor our vitals with a close eye. But we're free. And the longer we can hold out, the more distance we can put between us.

My brain begins to plan. If I start sending some emails now, there might still be a few favors I could call in, get us somewhere to run to. Burnell Station, maybe. The Kvitka Dredging Enterprise. Somewhere they don't care about the news, or at least don't spit at the sound of my name. Once we get these assholes further behind us, we might be able to buy ourselves some backup with promises of profit, or at least get enough people involved that no one will want to come after us, not when they might be firing the first shot in another Artifact War.

Assuming I haven't done that already.