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  “Not yet,” Philately replied. “But we will.”

  Fourteen

  NEPTUNE SYSTEM

  E-STANDARD 18:03, THURSDAY, APRIL 3, 3017

  CLOUDSHIP AUSTEN

  High above Neptune, fifty Sciatica-class attack ships were swarming the left spiral and fifty parallel versions of Cloudship Austen’s core personality were determining coordinates, taking fixes, and powering up the exterior surface to fire on the invaders. Each attacking ship carried a squadron of soldiers who operated the weaponry and ship systems. Ships shot through space like little pitchforks.

  Or viruses, Austen thought, set on infecting me. Have to disinfect the area, and that’s all there is to it.

  Seeing a targeting solution, she twitched her skin—on a quantum level—and shot out another beam of antiparticles. One of the ships flashed from existence in a noiseless, bright ball of utter annihilation. But there were so many more of them. And these little buggers were distracting her from the far greater menace of the two big destroyers on her tail.

  She hated to do it, but if she was going to have a chance against those big guns, the battalion of soldiers inside her was going to have to go out there and get these gnats off her.

  The Sciatica-class ships were designed for planetary operations. Some of their close-order weaponry wouldn’t work in space. That would give her soldiers a better chance against them.

  She quickly asked for and received permission from the command center to deploy. She contacted the troop hold.

  “Captain Allsky,” she said, “I’m afraid I’m going to need your help after all.”

  Fifteen

  NEPTUNE SYSTEM

  E-STANDARD 18:11, THURSDAY, APRIL 3, 3017

  ALLSKY’S COMPANY B

  Twenty thousand soldiers came swarming out into space like hornets from a thwacked nest. Austen had aimed her catapults as precisely as possible. The rest was up to the Army.

  Some were settlers from Triton and Nereid. Some were refugees from the fall of Saturn.

  Most were from much farther away.

  They were from places where the spoonful of sunlight that fell on Triton was as the bright glare of noon on Earth would be to someone from Neptune. They were miners, sorters, and loaders from the Kuipers and the Oorts. They were shipping clerks from Charon and stevedores from Pluto—and from every port and way station in the outer solar system. The most common occupation in the outer system was moving around great chunks of rock and ice.

  Most of them had become space-adapted as children and had spent more time in the vacuum than they had in an atmosphere. Many of them had never been on a moon before they signed up for the Army and got shipped to Triton. None of them particularly liked the moon. The thought of walking on a planet’s surface filled them with dread.

  They liked space. It was their native element.

  They understood the mechanics of dealing with objects much larger than themselves.

  They spoke the language of tethers. Of nets. Of hooks and pulleys and come-alongs.

  Though they were speeding through space at a thousand kilometers an hour, they were at rest relative to one another.

  One group of specialty squads shot out eight hundred-meter-long tethers, one soldier to another, and the remainder of the squad quickly wove them into nets. Other groups manned platforms that looked sophisticated, but were really nothing more than giant harpoon guns. The remaining platoons readied their grappling hooks and checked their weapons.

  It was as simple, and as complicated, as any pirate boarding would ever be.

  None of this had ever been tried before in combat.

  Within half a minute, they were upon the clouds of attacking Sciaticas. Within seconds they were inside the battle group.

  Harpoons fired, fixed themselves to enemy ships. The opposite ends of the tethers attached to them were clipped to the newly woven nets. The ships tried to move off, but were held fast, two billiard balls attached by a rubber band. These were no ordinary tethers. They were made of the same material as the Met itself. As with a rubber band, the harder the ships pulled, the more strongly the elastic responded.

  Nets were suspended between two, three, or four attack ships from a harpoon in the hull of each ship. As the ships moved away, relative to one another, the nets were pulled taut.

  Behind the harpooners and the net squads, the infantry screamed in—and directly into the nets. As they had a hundred times in practice, the soldiers found a purchase, clipped in.

  It was as if a sticky glue full of red ants had suddenly materialized about the squadrons of DIED fighter ships.

  Wasting no time, every soldier fired his or her grappling hook at the hull of an attacker. Most hooks found no purchase, but when one did, the entire platoon swarmed up, reeling themselves along with special ascenders attached to the grappling hook cable.

  It didn’t quite work like a charm, however. Some harpoons missed. Some nets failed to deploy. And many soldiers—over a thousand—missed being netted at all.

  They shot ever outward from Cloudship Austen. Unfortunately, because of an accident of alignment with the DIED attackers, she had catapulted them out toward Neptune itself. The lost soldiers could use their maneuvering thrusters to slow themselves a pittance, but they were going far too fast to self-arrest. Within hours, they would plunge into the atmosphere and die. That is, unless they were rescued by victorious Federal forces. Even then, the likelihood was that not everyone would get picked up in time.

  Each soldier had been briefed. Each knew in his or her head what might go wrong.

  And now it had. It wasn’t an intellectual possibility anymore. Their fates were completely in the hands of their brothers and sisters in arms. All they could do was look behind themselves and hope for the best.

  They were lost in space.

  Sixteen

  NEPTUNE SYSTEM

  E-STANDARD 18:57, THURSDAY, APRIL 3, 3017

  CLOUDSHIP AUSTEN

  Austen turned her attention to the two destroyers, which she now knew were the Aguilla and the Mediumrare. She’d gotten the biologicals out of her system, and had new options for both defense and offense.

  First, she reconfigured the profile she was exposing to the two ships. Then she energized vast sections of the ship that she could not use before because of the human bodies present.

  Cloudships might seem to be ponderous, galaxy-shaped masses, but they were also quite nimble when it came down to it. And quite precise. The basic element of cloudship operation was, after all, as tiny as could be.

  It was called quantum fluctuation, and the action it produced was known as the Casimir effect. The principle was ancient—discovered and named in the twentieth century:

  Two mirrors a very short distance apart and facing one another in a vacuum will move toward one another of their own accord. This occurs because there is greater pressure on one side of the mirrors than the other—even though the mirrors are in a complete vacuum.

  Where does this pressure come from? There is literally nothing on both sides of the mirrors.

  Virtual particles. According to quantum theory, space isn’t a continuum; it’s a foaming broth. Particles of every sort—in pair-antipair combination—are continuously being generated and annihilated. Everywhere. All the time.

  Empty space can be polarized, and you can make a particle out of nothing.

  You do it with the tiny mirrors made possible by the grist. Space is a string on a guitar. Pluck the string. Normal space is a very long string and its “vibration” corresponds to the lowest energy state there can be. Now fret the string. You play a different tone. When you fret a string, you exclude certain vibrations. This is how a guitar string produces different notes, and how, in a sense, it contains all notes.

  You can “fret” empty space. How? With those tiny mirrors. Particles are not actually particles, after all, but wave-particle entities. Wavicles, if you like. You can now play different tones—different wavicles—depending on the distance between
those mirrors. You can play a photon, for instance, if you want to shine a light on something.

  Or you can play an antiproton, if you want to annihilate ordinary matter utterly.

  Put these antimatter wavicles in contact with matter, and you have a propulsion system more potent than many thousands of nuclear reactors. Shoot them into space, and you have a weapon of awesome, terrifying power.

  A cloudship can enact this process anywhere on the ship where there is grist. There are no engine rooms. There are no guns or cannon. It is like blinking an eye or moving a finger for the cloudship. If you are watching from space, it appears as if a bolt of raw energy has erupted from the ship’s surface (provided, of course, that there is something along the bolt’s path that the energy interacts with to become visible). It is like watching lightning leaping from a storm cloud.

  But lightning with an intelligence behind it.

  A fully energized cloudship is a magnificent sight to behold.

  Unless the cloudship is aiming at you.

  Austen fired full bore on the Aguilla. Met ships had defenses against antiparticle beams, of course—the chief of these being the isotropic coating each ship possessed. But there was only so much the DIED ships could handle. Austen, fully energized, brought the firepower of at least ten Met destroyers to bear. She concentrated on the rotating tines at the forward end of the DIED ship, where the command and control structures maintained centrifugal gravity for the naval officers. In many ways, a large DIED ship resembled a kilometer-sized pitchfork spinning along its handle’s long axis.

  The blast sheared off one of the Aguilla ’s tines. The spin continued for several revolutions before the ship’s systems could shut it down, however. The sudden change in angular momentum, combined with the thrust from its rear engines, set the DIED ship into the wicked spin, like a wobbly top.

  The Mediumrare moved quickly away, its captain evidently frightened out of his socks. Austen chuckled to herself (a resounding bassy boom, had there been ears to hear it within her interior) and ignored the healthy ship. She zeroed in on the crippled Aguilla.

  The other ship attempted to fire back, but it had no chance. Its random bolts dissipated into space. Several hit Austen, but she was not centrally constructed, and a shot or two would never take her out. Austen spread herself thin and arched over the crippled ship, like an amoeba preparing to engulf a bacterium. Or a hand encircling a bug, preparing to squeeze.

  Both ships were still in orbit around Neptune. She estimated the moment when the planet would be directly between her and the Federal troops she had deployed from her hull to deal with the Sciaticas.

  The planet moved into a shielding alignment.

  She squeezed. Not with mechanical pressure, but with energy. She squeezed hard.

  The Aguilla ’s isotropic coating stood no chance against such a blast. Antiparticle met particle and transformed one another into pure energy. When it was all over, there wasn’t a piece of the Aguilla left that was larger than a silver atom.

  The blast flung Austen outward into space, as she’d planned, and away from the planet. She had hardened the surface behind her “skin” to withstand the explosion as best she could. Still, she took damage. A goodly chunk of her right spiral arm was blown away—someday to accrete and join Neptune’s ring, perhaps. She couldn’t worry about that now. As quickly as she could, she recovered herself and scanned for the Mediumrare .

  It was nowhere in sight. But there was another of the DIED ships. The demolition specialty ship. The Martian Dawn. Directly behind it was Cloudship Twain, furiously concentrating fire upon its tail. At that angle, the fire was engulfed by the engine exhaust of the DIED ship and had little effect.

  The Martian Dawn was headed directly for the Mill.

  Seventeen

  PLUTO SYSTEM

  E-STANDARD 07:05, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9, 3017

  FEDERAL FLAGSHIP BOOMERANG

  The Boomerang and Cloudship Tacitus were doing it—they were holding five destroyers and a carrier at bay. Of course it helped that the entire surface batteries of both Pluto and Charon seemed to have taken a schizophrenic turn and were firing on everybody who came within range.

  Sherman had been dipping in and out of this fire zone depending on how threatened he was at any given moment. Tacitus was staying well clear of the ground weaponry, but Sherman’s maneuvering was keeping the cloudship and the remaining troops aboard him intact. So long as he braved the antiship flak from Pluto, he could emerge at any given location in the orbit to challenge attackers of the cloudship.

  They were completely surrounded. The carrier, which had dominated the local system for the past two e-years, was now joined by seven other DIED destroyers diverted from the attack on Neptune. The local command (Sherman assumed it was still Kang Blanket, a general who had, years before, passed Sherman up in his rise up the ranks) was playing for time.

  They figure they’ve got me cornered, Sherman thought, and they don’t want to risk me slipping away if they try an all-out assault. Instead, a group of four or five ships was swooping in, while the remainder stayed a good hundred thousand kilometers out to serve containment duty.

  Sherman wondered how things were going at Neptune. The merci blocking was still in effect, and he could not communicate with Theory. But Sherman wasn’t particularly worried in that regard. There was no one he would rather have trusted the system with than his former adjutant.

  Another group of attack ships headed toward Tacitus. This time the group was four…no,five strong. Two of the ships had deployed their contingent of Sciatica small attack craft. Good riddance. These could have little effect on the Boomerang, and they would be decimated quickly if they swooped in too close to the planetary defenses.

  No, it was the big ships Sherman was concerned with.

  The DIED ships were three and two strong, approaching on two separate tangents. Some quick calculation from Sherman’s astrometric officer predicted that the group that was three strong would arrive first. These Sherman would let Tacitus take on directly. He would concentrate on the two-ship group, which his bridge-op chief informed him were the Calcio and the Rewire.

  A wave of Sciatica craft arrived first, and Tacitus blasted away at them as if he were zapping flies. One by one, they either sizzled or exploded. The unlucky ones dodged his fire only to be caught by a barrage from the planetary surface. Then the big ships arrived, and Tacitus concentrated his fire on those three targets.

  In the meantime, the Boomerang made a manic dive under Tactitus’s bulk, and through the kill zone of Pluto. The ship took ground fire, but, once again, avoided any crippling damage. Sherman emerged, guns blazing, on an intercept course with the other approaching DIED attackers.

  During his swoop underneath the cloudship, Sherman had deployed a scoop and gathered (with Tacitus’s permission) some of the accreted matter from the cloudship’s belly. It consisted mainly of ice and silicate masses, with a few heavy metal meteors thrown in for flavor. After firing his antimatter salvo at his DIED targets, Sherman catapulted the gathered detritus in their direction as well. He swung into a hard parabolic curve back toward the cover of the cloudship. His slingshotted rocks careened outward at great speed. One of the attackers managed to take evasive maneuvers and dodge, but the other caught the rocky projectiles broadside. There was a satisfactory explosive venting from the cruiser’s hull.

  The breach could be sealed, but it would take some time, and would remove the Calcio from immediate action. Sherman turned his attention to the undamaged ship. Theoretically, the Boomerang and this ship were exact matches. But since its capture, the Boomerang had undergone a series of upgrades. Its grist matrix, in particular, was far more sophisticated, thanks to the ministrations of Gerardo Funk and the Forward Lab on Triton.

  The ship had a full complement of free converts manning the navigation and control systems. Because of this, she was sleeker and faster than her counterpart. At least Sherman hoped so.

  “Time for more cat and mouse, C
hief,” Sherman said to his bridge-op. “Think we can fool them again?”

  “Not a problem, sir,” the chief answered. He turned to the ensign at the helm. She was a free convert, and thus a woman who only existed in the virtual portion of the bridge. “In and out, Helm,” said the chief bridge-op. “And up and down, and around and around.”

  “Aye, aye, Chief,” the helm replied. “And, General,” she said to Sherman. “Recommend that you hang on to your skin and bones, sir.”

  Eighteen

  PLUTO SYSTEM

  E-STANDARD 15:33, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9, 3017

  CHARON

  Pluto. Of all places—Pluto! He’d overshot by a hundred million miles. And now, instead of meeting the fremden in pitched battle, as everyone in his platoon had expected, Leo Sherman was racing downward toward Charon in a badly damaged Sciatica that the pilot was attempting to steer into a controlled crash on the surface. At the moment, it didn’t look like the “controlled” part of that equation was going to work out.

  Leo’s platoon were strapped into the back of the little craft. They were supposed to be a boarding party on one of the Federal ships—that is, after the ship had been subdued or otherwise taken out of commission.

  That had not happened.

  Instead, the DIED occupation’s own fortifications were turning against them. Against everyone, it seemed. But that distinction didn’t matter much when you were staring down the barrel of an antimatter cannon.

  A bolt of energy from below had blown through their craft’s isotropic coating and turned the pellicle of the ship into so much fried grist. All control structures, except for one set of attitude rockets, had been lost, and gravity had finished off what the ship’s trajectory had started: They were now in a nosedive toward Charon’s sunward side. The only hope was to use one of the attitude rockets to thrust feebly against the fall and slow them down enough to survive the inevitable smack into the moon’s surface.