A House United Page 21

The collective breaths of everyone—including the smug, physically-perfect Senator Bellucci—were trapped in their lungs during the ensuing seconds as the brilliant operator re-ran his figures.

  “Variance is within tolerances,” he said, prompting everyone to exhale in relief. “Assuming we encounter no bigger surprises than this one—and even assuming this variance scales with each successive layer—we won’t need to bring the backup generators to bear in order to complete the sequence.”

  “Fire up the backups anyway,” Spalding ordered, drawing a nod of approval from McKnight as he did so, “and prepare to shunt primary base power down here if we need it—turbo-lasers won’t do us any good if we fail to crack this thing wide open.”

  “All backups coming online,” Winters reported with a nod. “B1 through B8 will be fully operational in two hours.”

  The reason they had waited to activate the backup plants was simple: their extreme thermal emissions would cause permanent damage to the soon-to-be-taxed heat sinks buried deep beneath the moon’s surface. Activating them earlier would have cut down on the theoretical number of times they could attempt to crack Archie’s shell before their power infrastructure failed entirely.

  The power plants at work here were far larger than those of any mobile structure—including an Imperial Command Carrier’s—which made the sheer amount of power being generated truly mind-boggling. The system, at its current output, was potent enough to power a mid-sized colony with up to fifty million inhabitants—and at its peak it would be enough to power a Core World continent with up to two billion inhabitants.

  “Initiate the second sequence—and unless we receive unexpected feedback, no more interruptions between layers,” Spalding commanded, and once again Archie’s ‘outer shell’—which was obviously the second outermost layer since the outermost layer had already been fully expanded—exploded with riot of looping light beams as the process of digging ever-deeper into its impressive defenses proceeded in earnest.

  Two hours into the process, which had experienced no more unexpected developments since its initiation, McKnight made her way over to Senator Bellucci’s side where she asked, “How did you know about the neutronium pellets?”

  “The Empire opened a Fragment—once,” the Senator replied. “The Fleet which had been assembled for the occasion was vast—over a hundred vessels, more than half of them warships, bearing the crème de la crème of Imperial society—and were there to observe and record the historic occasion. It was conducted in deep space, where local gravity interference was limited, but they encountered a problem when they reached the innermost layers of the shell.”

  “The neutronium pellets?” McKnight asked skeptically.

  “Indeed,” Bellucci nodded, her golden eyes alight with the dancing beams and threads which arced across the Core Fragment’s surface a mile from where they stood.

  “What happened to the fleet?” McKnight asked.

  “The thirty nearest ships were destroyed in the backlash when the pellet exploded,” Bellucci said casually, “the rest managed to survive and flee, but the Core Fragment was thought irretrievably lost in the aftermath. Only a few even know of the event—and fewer still would dare speak of it, since it was one of the lowest moments for the then-budding Imperium of Man.”

  “How could a neutronium pellet explode?”

  “It was not naturally occurring—if such a substance can be said to exist without intelligent interference,” Bellucci smirked. “It was bound together by the layered gravity waves sandwiched between the shell’s inner layers. When those layers were thus destabilized,” she gestured to the handful of visible, wire-thin threads of material near their platform which had previously formed the Core Fragment’s outer shell, “the pellet became unstable and tore a short-lived hole in the fabric of space-time. The event was not truly that destructive, but none of the nearest ships were able to raise their shields before being torn apart by the gravity shock-wave”

  “How can you know how many more pellets are inside this thing?” McKnight pressed.

  Bellucci chuckled, never taking her eyes off the Core Fragment as she replied, “I, and others like me,” she waved a pair of fingers toward Dench—the Archivist who had agreed to supply them with the Elder Protocol Fragment which would come into play only after the innermost layer of Archie’s shell had been peeled away, “devised a method by which the sensor readings gathered during the pellet’s explosion could be parsed for the necessary information. Suffice to say, we succeeded.”

  “No,” McKnight shook her head firmly, “it does not suffice to say it. How did you do it?”

  For the first time since the Core Fragment’s outer shell had begun to peel away, Senator Bellucci’s unblinking eyes turned to meet McKnight’s. She seemed to consider her reply before eventually saying, “We built a Dyson Swarm around a small star near the Rim, and used its harvested energy to power a robust processing system which extrapolated the desired information from the collected sensor readings.”

  “You did what?!” McKnight blurted, drawing several alarmed looks from the various occupants of the platform. “Engineering on that scale is forbidden by Imperial law—not to mention just about every other codex of humanity,” she said in a more measured tone after recovering her composure and processing the weight of what the other woman had just said. But the casual manner in which Bellucci had made the statement was far more unnerving than the statement itself.

  “Hence why we built it out on the Rim,” Bellucci smirked. “This is a species-changing undertaking, Commander—there is no theoretically possible bureaucracy which would condone it, so one must necessarily ignore certain legal strictures if one intends to see such a project through to its conclusion.”

  McKnight shook her head in bewilderment, “You make it sound like nothing at all.”

  “In many respects, that is precisely what it was,” Bellucci said with a bemused look, “since constructing such a megastructure is hardly a challenge in the practical sense. A single self-replicating unit was introduced to each of the twin rocky planets orbiting that star, and after each unit had begun its tireless work the swarm took less than two decades to complete. The swarm granted twenty nine point three percent of the star’s output to be captured, nearly all of which went to powering the calculations of a crude, but effective, data processing unit. When the swarm was finished processing the data, it self-consumed precisely as we had designed it to do—but not before it had focused more energy than a dozen Core Worlds combined during its active interval. After it had self-destructed, we watched each and every piece fall back into the parent star.”

  “You…consumed two entire planets…just to run these calculations,” McKnight concluded, unable to fully process the magnitude of what she had just heard.

  “They were too near to their parent star to play host to any form of life,” Bellucci laughed, clearly enjoying the role of haughty, entitled noble explaining things to a peon like McKnight. “And that star was on a collision course with its nearest neighbor—a collision which would have destroyed their respective orbiting bodies in six thousand years or so. Their sundering and consignment to their parent stars’ loving embrace was no great loss, I can assure you.”

  “Forgive me for being anything but reassured after hearing what I just heard,” McKnight grunted.

  “Then forgive me for placing the importance of this operation highly enough that I was willing to dirty my own hands in order to see it through,” Bellucci retorted, returning her golden-eyed gaze to the center of the chamber where yet another layer of Archie’s shell was peeled back.

  The titanic gravitational forces being exerted upon it by the Key’s vast array of grav-plates—which were being so precisely controlled and modulated that even a variance measured at the eighth decimal place would cause a catastrophic chain reaction—were nothing short of staggering. McKnight had independently confirmed via handmade computations that fusion could be ignited, if only briefly, by those plates if they were d
irected to do so.

  Incidentally, that also meant that the slightest hiccup in the control system would turn every human in the chamber to a puddle of used-to-be-fleshy material before they even realized it had happened.

  “Is the Elder Module ready?” McKnight asked of Spalding after yet another layer of the Core Fragment’s shell was peeled back.

  “It is,” Spalding nodded, gesturing to the small carriage device which had been rigged to the arched, vaguely bow-shaped Elder Module. “All we need to do is activate the module itself by having someone touch it. After that, it should remain active for approximately three minutes.”

  “And the Elder Protocol Fragment?” McKnight asked of Dench.

  “It is prepared,” she replied with her usual, cool demeanor as she sat with the incalculably valuable data slate placed squarely before her on the workstation. “But I must reiterate: when we connect this fragment, it will deactivate every wireless-capable system in this chamber—along with any connected systems located elsewhere. The effect will not be permanent, but it will require a total reboot of any affected system.”

  “We have taken measures to address that eventuality—measures which should enable our system to remain online throughout the process,” Guo replied confidently.

  “And in the event those measures don’t, erm…measure up,” Jarrett’s potato-face blushed a bright shade of scarlet as he fought past the verbal stumble, “we’ve got several contingencies in place.”

  “Good,” McKnight nodded approvingly before activating her wrist link and hailing Corporal Lu, who was overseeing the evacuation efforts. “Report, Lu.”

  “The third group of shuttles is away,” the no-nonsense soldier replied via the link. “The fourth and final group of evacuees should depart in forty minutes, Captain. After that we have three rounds of equipment transfers scheduled, and all gear to be transferred is already on its way to the landing platform.”

  McKnight was routinely impressed with Lu’s linguistic improvements over the last year. Her once-broken, barely-comprehensible Standard was now fluent, and her thick accent rarely even registered.

  “You’re eight minutes ahead of schedule, Lu,” McKnight said approvingly. “Well done.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” the other woman said with her usual stoicism before she snarled and the sound of a wet, cracking came through the link’s speaker loud and clear, “I told you to get back, Phestus—if I had ever wanted your sweaty body against mine I would throw you down and take you for the pig you smell like!”

  “Problems?” McKnight asked warily.

  “No, Captain,” Lu replied after a brief delay, “some of the young Tracto-an warriors from Omega Company are attempting to initiate courtship. I’m confident Phestus will be conscious and mobile again before his assigned shuttle lands.”

  McKnight winced, “Go easy on them, Lu. They’re just kids.”

  “Understood, Captain,” the other woman replied in a decidedly disappointed tone. “Broken fingers only until the shuttles land.”

  McKnight chuckled in spite of the ‘gravity’ of their current situation, “Exercise your best judgment. McKnight out.” She turned to Dench, who had stubbornly refused to evacuate with the rest of the personnel, and insisted, “This is your last chance to evacuate, Madam Librarian. We can deal with the situation here; your part’s over.”

  “Nonsense,” Dench rebuked, “this moment has been more than a century in the making and I am an old woman. Better to see this through than break a hip falling down a boarding ramp—your offer is declined.”

  McKnight nodded, “Understood.”

  A soft series of alarms sounded from the Power Control station, prompting McKnight to give that particular console her full attention. “I’m getting mild fluctuations from Plant Three’s output,” Winters reported, “I’m isolating it and running a diagnostic.”

  “Are all the other plants working properly?” McKnight asked, more impressed than dismayed at Winters’ report. They had expected power grid problems to crop up at least a half hour earlier than they had, and with this first report of instability coming relatively late in the process she considered it as good of a sign as one could hope for.

  “All other plants—including the backups—are online and the draw is being evenly distributed across the primaries,” Chief Winters replied promptly. “We’re currently drawing fifteen percent of max output.”

  “Excellent,” Senator Bellucci interjected before McKnight could do the same.

  McKnight sent a glare the Imperial’s way before connecting with Yide aboard the Mode via her wrist-link, “Yide, is your ship ready?”

  “It is,” the Sundered replied after a brief delay. “Our trillium stores, armaments, reactor fuel and life support stocks are full.”

  “Good,” McKnight nodded, “keep your link on you at all times, but I’d advise you to get some shut-eye for a few hours. We don’t know when you’ll get another opportunity.”

  “Understood,” he said before the line went dead, and McKnight resisted the urge to reconnect and scold the young Sundered for not signing off properly.

  She knew he was tired from overseeing the resupply effort, and the Mode was their only way off the moon after the Imperials arrived—assuming they got off the surface before the Imps’ close-range active sensors came to bear, at which point nothing but an honest-to-Murphy miracle would spare them from Imperial fire.

  Looking out to the center of the spherical ‘Key’ cavern, she suppressed a shudder when the looping beams of light—which were streams of superheated plasma that had been trapped between the sphere’s many layers, and would easily kill any organism in close proximity to them—seemed to momentarily form the image of an eye with a vertical pupil.

  Keep a hold of yourself, Mel, she thought in silent reprimand.

  A sideways glance from Bellucci firmed McKnight’s resolve more than her own silent, self-rebuke could have ever done, and for a moment she was actually grateful to receive the condescending look from the other woman.

  Just a few more hours, she reminded herself, and, one way or another, this will be over and done with.

  Thirty minutes went by before her wrist-link sounded with an emergency chime, and she didn’t even need to look to know what message that particular chime heralded.

  “They are early,” Bellucci mused, keeping her golden eyes fixed on the Core Fragment at the chamber’s center.

  “They are,” McKnight confirmed after checking the wrist-link’s display and seeing that six Imperial warships—all Lupine class Destroyers—had just point transferred into the system.

  “Of all the ‘unexpected’ variables we face,” Bellucci turned from the Core Fragment, “this one was easily the most predictable. I hope you have a viable contingency escape plan.”

  McKnight knew that once the Imps came within turbo-laser range, there was essentially no hope of them running their blockade. So instead of engaging on the other woman’s terms, she flashed a shark-like grin and said, “The best: hard, fast, and straight up the middle—they’ll never see it coming.”

  Bellucci’s mouth formed a moue before she sighed, “There are no superior ways to die, Commander. There are only superior ways to live.”

  “You’re the one talking about dying,” McKnight quipped, turning to the Tracto-an guard and saying, “don’t let her near the control panels without the XO’s explicit orders—and if she gives the impression of anything but a firmly-rooted tree, neutralize her with extreme prejudice.”

  “On my honor,” the grizzled warrior said with a nod of grim determination.

  She activated the wrist-link and connected to Lu up on the landing pad, “Lu, we’ve got incoming. Scrap the last equipment transfers and get everyone crammed into the next shuttles—it’s time for you to leave and head to the rendezvous point. All wireless communication will be cut off after this message,” she said, meeting Shiyuan’s gaze and seeing him nod in acknowledgment.

  “Understood, Captain,” Lu
acknowledged professionally, “we will have all crew aboard the next shuttles in twenty minutes, and aboard the 24 eight minutes after that.”

  “Good work, Lu,” McKnight said approvingly, “we’ll see you at the rendezvous point.”

  “Good hunting, Captain,” Lu said with a measure of respect and camaraderie that only fellow warriors could know.

  “McKnight out,” she said, severing the link and giving Shiyuan the signal to shut down the base’s communications before activating a high-powered, localized jamming field which would extend several hundred miles from the moon’s surface. With any luck, Lu Bu and the rest of the crew would be aboard the 24 and on their escape route before more than one of the enemy Destroyers could put them under their guns.

  “XO,” she said as she turned to leave the platform and make her way back up to the base’s upper levels, “you’re in command here. I’ll go oversee our defensive effort.”

  “Understood,” Spalding acknowledged, and McKnight made her way to the grav-car that would take her back to the base’s upper command levels, pausing for a few seconds at the doorway to look back on the foreboding sight of continuously unfolding shell which protected one of the most terrifying entities in the galaxy’s history.

  Chapter XXVI: Clearing a Path

  “Report!” McKnight barked after stepping onto the command deck of the moon base.

  “The 24 has embarked the last of the shuttles and is ready for our p2p signal. The Imperials are coming in at equidistant approach vectors,” Tremblay reported, having agreed to monitor sensor feeds. “Best ETA to mutual turbo-laser range is one hour and two minutes.”

  “Good,” she said as she took up position at Tactical, “that will give us plenty of time to get the 24 on its way before the rest of the fleet shows up.”

  “Are you really going to use Bellucci’s timeline?” Tremblay asked incredulously, but McKnight detected duplicity in his tone.

  “We both know we don’t have any other choice,” McKnight riposted. “We have to evacuate our people as soon as possible, and every minute the 24 burns for the limit is another minute the rest of the Imps aren’t already here.”