The Death of Wisdom Read online

  Thanks to an ear infection, I wasn't flying high guard that day. Instead, I was posted to Alnitak's CIC, watching for trouble as the cruiser dove into the clouds of Carlyle VII and opened her intakes to refuel.

  The inside of a gas giant is terrifying—there's no two ways around that—but I wasn't at the conn and I didn't let myself think about the crushing death below if our thrusters gave out. That was Captain Michelson'sjob, four decks above me on the bridge. Though he wasn't an academy graduate, he'd kept us alive behind the Solomani tines for a month, and that was all I needed to know about his competence.

  Anyway, I had enough work to keep me busy. Alnitak's CIC was fairly large, with five sensor workstations—two against the starboard bulkhead, two against the port bulkhead, and a watch commander's station facing them from the forward bulkhead—but we were down to a skeleton crew, and I was obliged to man the watch alone, scrutinizing the methane/ammonia murk on passive EMS with on eye toward flagging possible hostile bogies. It was tedious, and a helluva lot harder than blasting away with active sensors, but this was war, and doing that would have been just plain stupid.

  But I didn't flag any definites that watch, and that was fine by me. Carlyle VII might have been packed with SDBs, but we weren't going out of our way to run into them. After six hours, our tanks were full and we were ready to scoot.

  "CIC," Michehon sent, "fueling complete. Stand by for orbital watch."

  "Aye, sir."

  "How's the ear, D'Esprit?"

  "Much better, sir."

  "Glad to hear it. Hope we have you back on CAP soon."

  "Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. "

  "Bridge out."

  Minutes later, Alnitak cleored the dark lower atmosphere, and the importance of my station diminished accordingly. Before, I'd been a vital assistant to Sensor Chief Calukin on the bridge—looking out for hostiles on our flanks while he scanned ahead for navigation obstacles—but new we were moving into the open, and he wouldn't need as much assistance. Soon we would bring our high guard back aboard, dash to jump point and take refuge again in jump space—where sensors of any kind were useless.

  The only problem was...our high guard wasn't there.

  Over my headset I caught the first inkling that something was wrong—Comm section unable to raise the two scout/ couriers we'd posted above. Neither Calukin nor I could verify their absence at first, since the planet's atmosphere might have been fouling our long-range EMS, but once we hit space it was clear they were not on station.

  "CIC to Bridge. I've lost sensor contact with Blue Jay and Swift."

  "Roger, CIC. Sweep forward quarter zones for debris."

  "Roger. CIC out."

  That was the last time I would ever speak to the captain—outside of a few choice nightmares. Even as I reconfigured my holographic panel to concentrate on scans forward, the computer chimed a sudden proximity alert.

  "Contacts astern, "Calukin reported, "bearing 195, range 45 K."

  Instantly, I spun my scan around to view the location. Whoever they were, they weren't scout ships.

  "What the hell?" Michelson said. "Those are cruisers! Good Gaia! Helm, steer—!"

  Whatever came next I didn't hear. I only registered the double flare of spinal weapons firing, and silence as every display panel in the CIC went black. Then the world exploded around me.

  * * *

  When I joined the Scout Service I was 18, and the Third Imperium was 1113. The latter had just about three years to live.

  But I didn't know that—hell, none of us knew that. Ail I knew as a little girl on Terra was I liked ships, and I'd get to fly them a lot foster in the Scouts than I would in the Navy. The Field Service didn't give a hoot for your social standing, and they didn't hove any ranks either; all they cared about was that you did your job effectively. Within three years I was flying scout/couriers on routine missions, and I thought I was on top of the world.

  Then came the Rebellion.

  Why it happened, how it happened—hell, who knows ? AII I knew was that one day we heard the emperor was assassinated, and within weeks we were preparing for invasion by the Solomani. On Dingir, I was transferred to the survey cruiser Alnitak, and Ainitak in turn was attached to a Navy fleet moving out to meet the enemy.

  Alnitak didn't have any business in battle, though. While the Navy planned to use her as a reconnaissance platform— a roving base for 10 scout/couriers—she was so pathetically slow and under gunned that she was withdrawn after her first mission. The hapless cruiser become a glorified freighter and we, her surviving flight crews, were reassigned to courier duty.

  If I'd stayed at our fleet HQ I might have believed that things were going well, but couriers hear a lot more than they're supposed to. What it all boiled down to was that the Imperial nobility—our leaders—were carving up the Imperium amongst themselves, and consuming our naval reserves trying to destroy each other. Without those reserves, we had nothing to hold the Solomon': back.

  Eventually, after years of fighting, what was left of the fleet controlled no more than a tiny pocket around Muan Cwi, If it were up to me, I would have withdrawn into the Imperium, but it wasn't up to me. Instead, the admirals decided to stay, and buck up the morale of the fleet with a mission to summon reinforcements. It was all nonsense, of course—there were no reinforcements to summon—but I guess they thought it was the gesture that counted to the troops. Anyway, they couldn't risk a proper warship for the mission—one they'd actually need later—so they chose Alnitak instead. Her entire escort would be two scout/ couriers: Blue Jay and Swift Since I knew what was going on at the front, I didn't volunteer for that mission—I was given orders and I went. Since Emperor Lucan's officers had a tendency to shoot dissenters rather than jail them, I didn't even consider refusing to go.

  As it happened, that mission saved my life. But if you ask me what I think about those Imperial nobles—those paranoid thugs who died along with everyone else when Virus wiped out everything—I'll tell you this: Those bastards got what was coming to them.

  > • *

  Explosions shattered Alnitak's hull, but none of us knew what hod happened at first. Personnel on the lower decks— mostly engineers surrounded by flames from shattered fuel tanks—assumed that the ship was about to explode, but they were actually the lucky ones. Top decks I and 2— Bridge and Navigation—had been completely blown away.

  I didn't know that though, at first, just after my screens went blank, a whipping shock wave—propagated through the hull—snapped me from my seat. Flying through the air, I expected to hit the floor with brutal force, but instead of falling I bounced against the starboard display panels; gravity hod failed. Then, as if this weren't bad enough, emergency power overloaded the circuits of the starboard workstations and they exploded, singeing the hair on my head and hands with gushing sparks and flames.

  If I had to rely on my native skill with zero-G maneuvers I might have been burned much worse, but a sudden return of gravity snatched me away from the fire and wrenched me to the floor. Smocking the floor on my side, I was saved from cracked ribs by the rubberized floor but still had the wind knocked out of me; for a moment I thought I was dead, but then my diaphragm relaxed to let me draw a gasping breath and I knew I was pretty fortunate—I could just as easily have landed on my head.

  The time it took for me to reach the fire extinguisher after that, at the port hatch aft, was probably seconds, but it felt like minutes as I raced against the likely recharging period of A heavy spinal mount—minutes at most. Air, light, gravity, and the reactivating sensor stations forward and port told me some of our major systems must have survived—auxiliary power and at least one of our three flight computers— so I wasn't going to abandon my post just yet. Rather, I spared
a few seconds to foam down the starboard panels (whose power had already been cut by circuit breakers), and a few more seconds to seal my duty vac suit with the soft bubble helmet and gloves in my pockets (as a precaution against smoke and future decompression), before sitting down at my toward station to evaluate the situation.

  My first clue that things weren't so good come from the ship's intercom system—it didn't work. Instead, huffing and gasping damage control parties were squawking all over the frequencies of our helmet radios, reporting fires throughout the fuel storage areas and massive radiation casualties on the upper decks, What I didn't hear was even one familiar voice from the bridge.

  Passive EMS—whose antenna was spread across a large area of our hull—gave me a view of the situation outside. The cruisers—clearly Solomani by configuration—were standing in closer now, plinking away at us with their secondary batteries. Lasers were systematically depressurizing our exterior compartments, and sawing chunks out of the EMS grid, whittling away my view of the outside world.

  Not that it mattered whether we had sensors or not. The general damage report—available at any workstation in the ship for the benefit of roving damage control parties—told me that maneuver drive and communications were out and the bridge was gone. I stared at that report for longer than I should have in a crisis—trying to accept the implications of the report. Michelson, Calukin, Chief Engineer Pregl—all of our senior staff on decks 7 and 2—were probably dead.

  Then a radio transmission snapped me out of my reverie. I didn't recognize the man's voice, but he had o composure that suggested comfort with command.

  "CIC—this is Engineering. Do you copy?"

  "Roger, Engineering. go ahead."

  "Thank God I remembered you were up there. Are your systems operational?"

  "Roger. I've got sensor control here, but all communications are dead."

  "CIC, listen. We're blind down here—we don't know what the hell's going out there—but we've got trouble. Our HEPIaRs are heavily damaged and I'd like to know how much time we've got to repair them."

  What he meant, of course, was how much time we had before Carlyle Vli dragged us back into its crushing depths. Since I was a pilot by profession, I didn't need a computer to know the answer was "not enough."

  "Oh, Gaia, let me check...assuming you con get us 1g, maybe 10 minutes."

  "Ten minutes? Good Lord, it'll take on hour just to dig through the wreckage."

  "Sorry, those are the facts."

  On the other end of the channel I heard an exasperated gasp, overlaid with the distant hiss of cutting torches. Ten minutes would, at any rate, be more than enough time for the Solomani to finish us off three times over.

  if i we were ploying it by the book, this would have been the time to boil out in lifeboats. Through my sensors, though, I Saw what the Solomani did to the only lifeboat that launched to that point; probably sending mayday signals continuously, it was caught in converging fire from the cruisers and disintegrated in a flaring fireball. Whatever value we had as prisoners was obviously outweighed by the Solomani desire to see us dead.

  "CIC, I advise we abandon ship."

  "Negative, Engineering. They'd just pick us off as we lounch."

  "CIC, we do not have a choice. If we can't fix the HEPIaRs, we're dead anyway."

  "Engineering, am I correct that the jump drive is still on line?"

  "The jump drive? Are you out of your wiggin' mind? We must be way too close—"

  "To the planet for a safe jump—yes, I know. Is it on line? "

  "Power's nominaI. Lord knows if we've got enough fuel to keep her cool, though."

  "Engineering, prepare for jump. I can crank out a jump plot from my end, but you'll have to engage the drive manually when I download the data."

  "Lady, this is insone. Are you even a navigator?"

  "A scout/courier pilot," I answered, not daring to lift my eyes from my computer-aided number crunching, "will that do?"

  "Hoo boy, " the engineer said. "All right, we're standing by."

  "Got it!" I said, flashing the jump plot to Engineering the instant the lost numbers fell into place. Passive EMS, meanwhile, sounded an alarm I had programmed it to offer the moment the cruisers prepared to discharge their spinal batteries again.

  The Solomani gunners did not have the satisfaction of a coup de grace, however. On their screens we disappeared as if we'd never been, though considering our depth within the hazardous jump zone of Carlyle VII, I'm quite certain they were willing to declare us dead.

  God knows I didn't expect us to live.

  The point I had selected as our objective was Futok, because a jump plot for Futok had already been programmed by our late navigator. What I had done, basically, was rewrite the jump plot from one initiated at a safe range of 100 diameters from Carlyle VII to one initiated at less than 5. It was utter lunacy.

  Yet the crew, 40-odd survivors from a complement of 100, were overjoyed to be alive, and their joy tended to concentrate on me. Since Dorien Hayes—the young engineer whose composure had impressed me during the battle— was constantly occupied tending the jump drive, I took it upon myself to look after the damage control parties, repairing what could be repaired and cataloging our supplies in the event of a long misjump. Perhaps because I had already commanded starships (albeit starships 100 times smaller than Alnitak), the damage control teams were comfortable with that and started calling me Captain D'Esprit where before I'd just been Coeur. That was good, because the only senior officer alive was surgeon Danielle Chang, and she wouldn't have cut it in the disaster I was leading us into.

  Almost all the fuel we had went to cooling the jump drive, but then the jump lasted more than the week it should have, and our fuel reserve went into maintaining a jump that we knew had gone wrong. As a practical expedient we shut down heat, gravity, and most of our lights to conserve power, but we didn't dare shut off the flow of liquid hydrogen to the jump drive. If we did, the odds were best we would land in open space, parsecs from the nearest system and unable to maneuver or even summon help.

  So we kept the fuel poured on, until finally another week later the jump drive signaled that we were ready for precipitation into normal space. Imprudently, perhaps, I let a goggle of crew stand around me as I manned the makeshift emergency bridge—the CIC—and scanned the area around us after the jump was complete.

  It was Nicosia Subsector, coordinate 0538.

  Open space.

  * * *

  When meson fire destroyed decks I and 2, it took the officers' wardroom with it, the most natural location for sensitive discussions, in its stead we—Alnitak's "command crew "—took to using the engineer's mess, well abaft the CIC but close to Darien's work area. That was best, for our survival hung on his skill.

  In that room, perhops five meters by five by three, floated myself, Darien Hayes, and three other individuals—Dr. Chang, Gunnery Tech Ivan Sturm, and Flight Deck Chief Tanora Velsen—as senior a group os I could muster. Like the rest of the crew we were fully encased in our vac suits and breathing individual air supplies, but even so the biting chill of the ship compelled us to float with arms crossed close across our chests. A thin atmosphere of one-third standard pressure was still maintained throughout the inhabited decks—in case someone's life support malfunctioned—but one straining draft of that icy air discouraged a second; mostly, we took very good care of our personal life support.

  "People," I said over my suit radio, its power tuned low to remain inside the room, "we're going to have to face facts. As of this dote, it's 18 days since we come out of jump, and the number of consumable supplies is not going to last another month, even with quarter rations. Our only choice is the low berths."

  "Captain," Chang said, "I thought we'd gone over that. There are 40 of us, and only 17 functioning low berths."

  "A fact," I answered, "that we've done a good job of keeping from the crew. But there's no choice anymore. Hayes?"

  "The captain's right. We're just
a half a light-year from Gresham, but the HEPIaRs and commo suite are completely fried, so we don't have any way to accelerate or call for help. How long will it take us to reach Gresham, skipper?"

  "Sixty-five years."

  "Right. So it's either some of us live, or all of us die together."

  "Oh my God, " Velsen said flatly.

  "Wouldn't more time help?" Sturm asked. "Perhaps we could salvage more parts..."

  The engineer, however, shook his head sadly.

  "Negative. The doc and I have already ransacked primary life support for ports, and I'm not going to disassemble auxiliary life support, too. At any rate, there's no guarantee any of the berths will work—even the ones we fixed. It's just a better option than certain death."

  "Amen," Velsen said. "But who decides...who will live?"

  "I do," I said. "Though nobody's going in the berths until I explain my plan to the crew. The reason you're here is I want to run it by you before i run it by them."

  "jeez," Sturm said, "do you suppose they might riot? I mean, when they find out who won't live?"

  "Would you?" Velsen osked him.

  "Cool it," I said, "We don't have time for that crop. Here's the deal: All of the low berths look like they work, so there's no need for anyone to know who's got a good berth and who doesn't. I will instruct the computer to assign each one of us to a berth at random, and we'll all go under together. Since only Hayes and the doc will know which ones work, there won't be any need for a riot—assuming they can keep from spilling the truth about which berths are which."

  "Sensible," Hayes said. "I like it."

  Velsen and Sturm likewise nodded, after a moment of reflection.

  "Well, I don't like it," Chang said, "i didn't become a doctor to murder people."

  "Fine," I said. "Then all of us die."

  Four icy stores drilled into the surgeon, and after a few seconds she threw up her hands in resigned acceptance.

  "I didn't say I wouldn't do it," she said. "I just said I didn't like it, If the crew is all right with it, I'll keep quiet."