A House United Read online

  The alarms ceased just before Spalding made his way to Pen’s station, and when he arrived he saw precisely what she had predicted would happen had happened.

  “Plants Nine and Fourteen are off-line,” she said tremulously, “and Plants Six, Seven, and Ten are in emergency shutdown mode. I…I...” she stopped, literally slapping herself across the cheek—hard—before continuing, “I think I can get them back online in twenty minutes. I’ve activated the backups; the grid is stable.”

  “What the blazes just happened?” Spalding demanded, more upset with himself than any of his people.

  “We survived,” Bellucci said matter-of-factly, gesturing to the cavern’s center as the light slowly began to filter through the shield surrounding the platform.

  Spalding looked out to the Core Fragment, uncertain what she was pointing to until he saw it. Clustered around the equatorial line of the Core Fragment’s still-intact shell were loops of light which were not loops at all, but were instead pouring into a brightly-glowing object that seemed fully twice as large as the Core Fragment itself.

  “I can’t believe I’m seeing this…” Spalding muttered, knowing even as he said those words that he was seeing a plasma storm which surrounded the previously-neutronium pellet.

  “The pellet was relatively small, which is why we survived its sudden expansion,” Bellucci remarked casually, “but it seems to have served as a target for the Core Fragment’s previously-indiscriminate plasma defenses.”

  “Incorporate these readings into our calculations, Guo,” Spalding instructed.

  “I am already doing so,” Guo assured him, “integration of this data should be complete in twelve minutes.”

  Over the course of the next few seconds, the spherical storm of plasma shrank until it was no larger than a fist—and then even that vanished entirely, leaving behind nothing but minute sensor readings that registered an object which had, a few seconds earlier, been an infinitesimally small pellet comprised of pure neutronium.

  “Fascinating,” Guo breathed as he scanned through the sensor feeds, “it seems to be a predicted form of near-neutronium—a form which, ostensibly, has never been recorded in human history.”

  “Well someone put it there,” Tiberius said grimly, “and it seems we’ve got three more to dig through before making our date with destiny.” He straightened his shirt as he stood to his full, upright posture, “All stations: resume full-speed operations.” His people seemed to steel themselves all around him, so he threw in for good measure, “Let’s unlock this son of a bitch.”

  “We’re still here, so they’re still digging,” Tremblay said after several long, tense seconds had passed following the bizarre burst of radiation which had caused several of the Upper Base’s systems to reflexively go down.

  “Agreed,” McKnight nodded, watching the 24’s icon on the tactical plotter as the streaking transport made for the hyper limit. The two Imperial Destroyers which had previously sought to flag it down had abandoned that pursuit after it had become clear the 24’s acceleration was not a temporary burst, which meant that all five remaining Imperial warships were once again bearing down on the moon base.

  Twenty minutes later, the 24’s jump engines flared and she skirted space-time itself to reach the first of many stops on the way to the rendezvous point.

  “Second pellet neutralized,” Jarrett reported with a measure of relief shared by everyone on the platform—except possibly the Senator.

  “Good work, team,” Spalding said approvingly. It had been nearly an hour since the previous pellet had been extracted from its place within the Core Fragment’s shell, and this second pellet had been several orders of magnitude easier to safely circumvent than the previous one. “Let’s keep digging.”

  “Power draw is at sixty three percent of maximum,” Penelope reported, “we’re still down two plants total, but the others are back online and running near capacity.”

  “How are the data feeds, Guo?” Spalding asked, popping his ears as a mild wave of vertigo came over him. He had expected the vertigo to start affecting them at this point in the operation due to the unthinkably complex gravitational waves being propagated within the spherical chamber.

  “All feeds are still online with one hundred percent data capture,” Guo replied.

  “Let’s hope the pictures end up being worth the trouble,” Spalding said grimly.

  “To complete an unknown deed is of less value than to make known a false achievement,” Guo said smoothly.

  “Yeah…until they find out you’re a liar,” Spalding retorted.

  “Everyone lies, Mr. Spalding,” Guo chided. “But not everyone is known for achieving great deeds. Posterity will forgive embellishments—or even outright false claims—regarding one’s specific achievements if he is, in fact, the author of other great deeds. Why do you think people purchase merchandise whose promoter knows no more about that merchandise than the customers do?”

  “You’re a strange one, Guo,” Tiberius said with a shake of his head.

  “Thank you, Mr. Spalding,” was the other man’s surprising reply. “Coming from the son of Captain Moonlight, that is indeed high praise.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be a compliment.”

  “Perhaps not,” Guo shrugged as he continued to fine-tune the sensors and recording equipment, “but all communication is comprised of three elements: transmission, medium, and reception. How a message is transmitted is, usually, less important than how it is received.”

  Spalding shook his head in a vain attempt to clear it of the other man’s philosophical ramblings. “As you were,” he muttered, suspecting he saw the hint of a smile at the edge of Guo’s mouth as he turned and focused on his own workstation.

  Chapter XXVIII: An Angry God

  “The Destroyers are maintaining a perimeter near the edge of turbo-laser range,” Tremblay confirmed. “They’ve taken up roughly equidistant positions and seem content to wait us out.”

  “They’re waiting for their big guns to arrive,” McKnight mused, “but I would have expected them to test our defenses first. Odd…”

  “Could they have tasked a Command Carrier to this operation?” Tremblay asked, apparently less-than-concerned at the possibility of the fiercest engine of war ever built by human hands arriving on their doorstep in the next few hours.

  “Our best information says no,” she shook her head. “The Invictus Rising is apparently still back in the Spine, and the locations of the other Command Carriers are—at least according to the official sources—too far for them to have made it here in time.”

  “Let’s hope they crack the Core Fragment on schedule,” Tremblay mused. “I want off this rock as soon as humanly possible.”

  Waldo made a sound that made clear he was unimpressed, “As if humans are the titanium standard to which all other actors are to be measured. Most of you are lucky if, after a lifetime of training, you can focus on a single virtual task for more than twenty seconds. I must say,” he shook his head in mock bewilderment, “I find it astonishing that such primitive organic creatures could ever—even by accident—give birth to the eminently superior form that is the synthetic. After examining your species’ history, one must invariably conclude that your only truly great achievements were either by accident or, more usually, in spite of your prior aims. Really, would a modicum of foresight and planning inflict permanent grievous harm to your corporeal forms?”

  “Says the droid who failed to successfully fake his own death—twice,” Tremblay retorted, “who then went on to serve as the one thing he truly despises—a comm. droid, which just so happens to be what he actually is—while the most dangerous AI ever known to existence sits directly beneath his feet where a bunch of ‘organics’ are furiously trying to bring it back to life just long enough to kill it. Oh,” Tremblay finished with a flourish, “and I think you meant to ask: ‘would a little planning kill you?’ Really, Sparky, you’ve got to work on your verbosity.”

  Waldo made a bl
eeping sound that seemed the equivalent of a huff, but thankfully remained otherwise silent.

  The sensor screens lit up with a short burst of activity, and McKnight straightened in her chair. “They’ve located and are firing on torpedo launchers Six and Seven—returning fire.”

  The pop-up torpedo launchers snuck above the surface of the moon just long enough to launch their payloads, which streaked off toward the nearest two Destroyers. Unsurprisingly—but still impressively—the Imperials’ turbo-lasers scoured Launcher Six before it could retract into its armored bunker. Thankfully, Launcher Seven managed to duck down before counter-fire could scrub it off the board as had just happened to Six.

  “They must have been trying to locate the other launchers,” McKnight mused as the time-to-impact clock began to wind down, starting with three minutes remaining.

  “Is there any way to know for certain if they found them?” Tremblay asked.

  “No. On a warship we could isolate incoming active scanning beams and determine what the enemy was looking at,” she explained, “but here, they can scatter their beams in a random pattern which keeps us from triangulating on what they’re looking at. There’s just too much area to cover, even with this base’s impressive sensor suite, to determine whether or not they successfully located the other launchers.”

  “What about the turbo-lasers?”

  “Those we can be more certain of,” she said with a nod, “and I’m confident they don’t know where they are—yet.”

  “But when they finally do,” Tremblay cocked his head dubiously, “how many shots do you think you’ll get with each one?”

  “Before they scrub them?” she clarified, to which he nodded. “Three…maybe four shots from most. But any commander worth her lytes will limit our possible firing arcs by assaulting the same facing with the entire task force. At that, we’ll only be trading fire for a few minutes—at most—before they’ve neutralized our arsenal completely.”

  “Let’s hope they serve their purpose,” he said with a lighthearted shrug that left McKnight more uncomfortable than anything else the Intelligence Officer had done in weeks.

  “Third pellet neutralized,” Jarrett reported, but Spalding’s primary focus was on Pen’s workstation—where the power draws had increased significantly more than they had expected them to during the last few layers’ work. “One pellet remaining at three layers down—four total layers remaining.”

  “Pen…” Spalding urged, “can I help?”

  “Go get me a blueberry milkshake or shut your yap!” she snapped as she worked frantically—but under total control—to load balance the primary power grid as it passed eighty percent capacity. The backups were online and connected, but as yet they weren’t contributing much to the effort. “I need to get rid of some of this EM buildup,” she said in frustration, “or we’re looking at a cascade failure when we hit the last layer.”

  “It’s just the radiation beams causing the problem, correct?” Tiberius asked with forced calm.

  “Of course it’s just the beams!” she snarled, never taking her eyes off her console. “But with each layer we pull back, those beams get more powerful and more precisely-targeted—it’s trying to stop us and, from this seat, it looks like it might succeed if we don’t get rid of some of the ambient charge.”

  “How much do you need to get rid of?” he asked as a thought came to mind. He performed some quick mental math and confirmed that his idea should buy them some precious time.

  Of course, the downside was that it would cost them at least one more of their reactors—along with a quarter of their heat sinks—but they’d already passed the PNR on this operation. With the extra mass of the formerly-neutronium pellets now suspended in the Key chamber, there was no way the Key—or the people within it—would survive the sudden contraction of Archie’s shell if they had to abort and restart the procedure.

  “If we could shed a third of it, I can probably squeak us by,” she replied tersely, “but I’d rather have half.”

  He re-ran the numbers in his head and asked, “Can you live without two more generators and a quarter of our thermal sinks if I knock the interference down for you in the next ten minutes?”

  She opened her mouth—probably to rebuke him—before snapping it shut. The color ran from her face, telling him that she understood what he aimed to do, and she nodded, “If you can get rid of half the EM, I can finish with two fewer plants—but make it Nine and Fourteen since they’re already below-capacity due to the damage suffered from the first pellet.”

  “You’ve got it,” Spalding nodded as he returned to his own workstation and disengaged nearly every safety interlock on his access subroutines which directed the power grid’s various activities. He worked as fast as he could for the next five minutes, preparing the system to vent as much of the EM buildup as possible via his unorthodox ‘solution.’

  “I’m about to take Nine and Fourteen off-grid,” he called over his shoulder.

  “I’m ready,” Penelope acknowledged, and he prepared to withdraw Plants Nine and Fourteen from the Key’s power grid. But first, he needed to cause a rupture in the heat sinks which had been buried deep beneath their present level. After bleeding off thermal energy from the grid for several hours, those sinks were all filled with a superheated medium which would turn into a gas during its initial expansion following a rupture of the containment system—a rupture precisely like the one he initiated by overloading a quarter of the heat sink system with a clever little trick he had learned back in the Caprian naval yards.

  Since the heat sinks were buried into nickel-iron rock, and since there was only a tiny gap between the rock and the heat sinks’ radiator pipes, the superheated fluid would boil out in a deadly cloud of gas which—if he did it right—would come into brief contact with the local power grid at several key places. That contact should be enough to bleed off a significant chunk of the EM buildup, but only if he created a circuit to a viable anchor point for the energy’s discharge to target.

  A pair of fully-powered fusion reactors which were about to have their polarities reversed would serve as that ‘anchor point.’ At the exact millisecond the coolant gas made contact with the isolated patch of the power grid to which those reactors were still connected, he would reverse the plants’ polarities and—essentially—ground some of the EM build-up out of the system.

  “Ready when you are,” Penelope said after several seconds’ hesitation on Spalding’s part.

  He watched the internal pressure gauges continue to rise until, at the optimum reading, he detonated a pair of relatively small scuttling explosives built into the heat sinks’ upper bodies.

  “Now!” he yelled as soon as he received the first glimmer of feedback confirming the heat sinks had ruptured.

  For a moment absolutely nothing happened—and then he realized he’d shut his eyes, so he forced them open and ground his teeth so hard he chipped one of them. A quick look at his console confirmed that the EM buildup had been diminished by nearly half.

  “That’ll do, boss,” Penelope replied shakily. “We should be able to get through the rest of it now…that’s odd.”

  “What is it?” he asked, moving to her side as quickly as he could where he scanned her information streams.

  “The radiation beams…they’ve stopped,” she said ominously, and a quick check confirmed to Tiberius that she was correct.

  “Of course they did,” Dench said with a knowing smirk. “Did you really think we were dealing with something that is incapable of intelligently acting in self-defense?”

  Tiberius cocked his head and looked out at the Core Fragment, “I guess I’d hoped it wouldn’t be able to interface with us through the remaining layers of its shell.”

  “As did we all,” she demurred as she lightly drummed her fingers beside the Elder Protocol Fragment-bearing data pad. “But we came prepared for other possibilities.”

  He shook his head, “The soonest we can use that thing is when we breach
the innermost layer. We don’t have to fully-expand the inner layer first, we just need to crack it open enough to insert the Elder Module. But once you use that thing,” he gestured to the Protocol Fragment, “all interconnected information processing equipment on this level of the base will be shut down to prevent the Core Fragment from spreading—meaning the grav-plates will be unable to advance any deeper into the shell.”

  “That is well understood,” she said serenely.

  For a moment, Tiberius envied the woman her calm in the face of apocalyptic danger. If they screwed up any part of this process, the absolute best outcome was one which saw everyone in the Key chamber killed outright and the Core Fragment buried under miles of rock.

  The worst outcome was one where an AI Core Fragment was unleashed upon an unsuspecting galaxy.

  Refocusing on the tasks before him, he quickly fell back into the frantic rhythm which had filled the previous hours of effort to unlock Archie’s shell.

  “Footprints confirmed,” Tremblay said grimly, “thirty two new contacts detected at the hyper limit.”

  “They’re early,” McKnight deadpanned. She had already come to terms with the fact that, after the first neutronium pellet had been successfully extracted from Archie’s shell, the operation was past the point of no return. One way or another, the mission’s success hinged on the engineers’ and technicians’ efforts several miles below her feet.

  “Best guess is we’ve got two Battleships, eight Cruisers, and twenty two Destroyers to reinforce the remaining five Lupines,” Tremblay reported as the hyper footprint data came streaming in. “A few of the Destroyers have unusual footprint signatures, but we’ll get eyes on them soon enough.”

  She nodded as she confirmed his estimates. Her job now was simple: she needed to make sure her people at the Key got all the time they needed to complete their important task—and she also needed to make sure she kept an escape path clear for them when they were finished.