It knew exactly what it had lost in mass down to the gram, and knew the chemical makeup of its missing constituents. Armed with this information, it turned a spectrograph toward the expanding junk cloud and scanned the particulates. After accounting for all its own damage and removing it from the analysis, all that remained was approximately twenty-nine grams of an unknown tungsten alloy refined orders of magnitude beyond the purity of any naturally occurring meteorite.
A bullet.
Its proximity alert tripped again. Three more threat objects approached, arranged in a perfect triangle, tracking from an identical vector and velocity as the first.
It had been boxed in. Any evasive course it could have taken away from the first projectile had led it inexorably into the path of one of the other three, and with such a paltry volume of chemical propellant left to burn, it couldn’t escape a second time.
In that nanosecond, it knew what had happened to its lost sibling, and knew it was fated to fall to the same unseen enemy. It had failed to spot the intruder, but there might still be time to get word to Mother and its siblings. With the tenths of a second that remained, it warmed up its high-gain radio transmitter, overrode half a dozen communications blackout and security protocols, dumped all the data and telemetry it had collected in the last few seconds into an encrypted burst packet, and maxed out the transmitter’s power output. In a last, desperate act, it relit its emergency thrusters and burned what little reactant it had left.
It managed to broadcast two and a half kilobytes of data before being obliterated.
“Hmm,” Ensign Mattu said from her drone stream aggregation station on the CCDF Ansari’s virtual bridge. “That’s weird.”
Officer-on-Deck Esposito’s avatar turned to face her wearing a quizzical look. “Define ‘weird,’ Scopes,” she said, using the fleet’s term of endearment for their sensor data interpreters.
“We just lost feed from a second recon drone, ma’am.”
“Which one?”
Sitting at the VR chair in her quarters, Mattu pulled up a relative-time situ-map of the 82 G Eridani system, their home for the last three months on this impossibly boring tour of duty. Mattu highlighted the nonresponsive unit and kicked the map showing the assigned positions of the ship’s web of Mk XXVI platforms over to the OoD.
“Platform Thirteen just went black.”
“Lucky Thirteen, huh? Is that one of the birds NorKel serviced? They’ve been having integration problems ever since we pulled out of Proxima. Useless Nork contractors.”
Mattu smirked. The competency of civilian technicians hired and trained by the NorKel Corporation was of no small controversy among fleet personnel, but a quick search of Thirteen’s maintenance records disproved everyone’s favorite scapegoat as a possible culprit. “No, ma’am. Last maintenance overhaul was done right here by our own deck monkeys on the return leg from the Tau Ceti deployment. And it gets stranger.” Esposito’s avatar held out an upturned hand in the VR environment of the bridge in a “Go on” gesture. “Well, Thirteen sent out a burst transmission just before it went off-line, on high-gain radio, not whisker laser.”
“What did it say?”
“It’s only a partial burst. The packet is tiny, not even a megabyte. We only got random shreds of the total file it was trying to send.”
“Error codes? Letting us know what broke?”
“I thought so, too, at first. But if it was just error codes, why did it break radio silence protocols to send it over high-gain instead of the laser? I’ve never seen one of them make that call before. And there’s more…”
“Well? Don’t make me drag it out of you, Petty Officer.”
“I just turned an eye over to Thirteen’s last reported position. There’s a cluster of IR contacts, lots of them cooling off quickly, but none of them big enough to be an entire Mk XXVI.”
“You think that’s what’s left of Thirteen?”
“Probably.”
“Didn’t Eight go out like that, too?”
“Yes’m, three weeks ago. We put it down to a micrometeoroid hit. It’s been known to happen.”
Esposito’s eyes narrowed. “But to two platforms in less than a month?”
Mattu shook her head. “I wouldn’t bet a cup of square dog on that being a natural rate of occurrence, ma’am,” referencing the ship’s coffee supply, which came in square containers and tasted like dog shit.
“That is weird. I want you to pull archive data from the rest of the recon constellation, see if any of them had an eye turned toward their sibling in the final moments.”
“Pull archives from the constellation eye, ma’am. What are you going to do?”
“Wake up the XO and pass the buck to him, God help me.”
ONE
Captain Susan Kamala woke up in stages. After her first drill-filled training deployment in the Combined Corporate Defense Fleet as a lowly E2 banger’s mate, she’d picked up the trick of waking up in the span between resting heartbeats. Twenty-four years later, after going mustang to become an officer and eventually captain, she’d mastered the art of recognizing when that trick wasn’t necessary.
Instead of a blaring klaxon portending some unfolding calamity, the noise that had roused her from a rather pleasant dream about swimming in the Melville Ocean on Osiris was a gentle repetition of the door chime to her quarters.
Susan waved a dangling arm over the side of her bunk to trip the ceiling lights, which came to life and cast their harsh, bluish-white glow. They said the output gave the ideal balance of energy conservation while still delivering the wavelengths necessary to synthesize vitamin D, but nothing beat the sensation of soaking up real sunlight, melanoma be damned.
She unbuckled the straps over her chest and thighs that would hold her to the bunk in the event of gravity loss. She’d been lax about it as a younger officer, as were many other crewmen who’d entered the service after artificial gravity had been perfected. But her first CO came from the old school. He’d run a surprise drill in the middle of third shift where he ordered the gravity
