Status Quo Read online

  Ahead the ad-boards loomed. These ads were everywhere nowadays. They seemed to spring up almost overnight. The Your-Ad-Here company was backed by a huge cartel and seemed to have completely taken over the market. Rebecca could see one with the lurid advertising for the Pulsar, another board proclaimed some new book that had just been published. She squinted at the text as it blurred past her, the author's name seemed oddly familiar.

  Serge had been forced to reduce speed to swerve in and out of the boards, these too were protected by powerful shield generators. A collision would have dire consequences. Rebecca kept the throttle at full, gracefully swerving, rotating and turning her Krait through the spinning boards. She passed him on the last turn, the station now directly ahead.

  She saw the Hatchling's engines flare back up to full power and it roared past as they made the turn towards the spinning station.

  'Launch in progress! Reduce speed and obey docking protocols! Launch in progress! Reduce speed and obey docking protocols!' an automated voice droned at them as they passed the outer marker.

  The station loomed quickly in their forward views. It was horrifyingly large thing to be next to. Given its size, its outer rim was rotating at a dizzying speed, the grey duralium a blur of motion. Both of them pulled up at the last minute, the station’s docking bay lights flickering past them.

  'Witchout in one minute thirty.'

  One of the Tianve Tourist Liners emerged from the docking bay directly in front of them. They were so close Rebecca could see the characteristic Murgh manufacturing ident plates.

  Rebecca broke left and Serge broke right, directly into each other. The Krait and the Hatchling bounced off each other’s shields, still on a direct collision course with the Liner. Streams of sparks from the interacting shields showered around them, illuminating the station front in a harsh actinic light. The Liner captain saw them, and stared horrified. The Liner couldn’t navigate yet, still on auto-pilot as it cleared the dock. The passengers aboard on the starboard side got more than they bargained for as they looked out of the huge panoramic side panels of the Liner. They panicked and leapt away, screaming, as the trail of sparks headed by the two racing ships shot directly towards them.

  'Stupid Goid, Worm boy!' Rebecca yelled, rolling and flipping the Krait over the Liner and then back down again. The Hatchling also just managed to avoid hitting the Liner by ducking to one side. Then the Liner was behind them, accelerating away to the safety of open space.

  'Frakin' boy racers!' yelled the Liner captain over wideband. 'I’ll get your idents next time!'

  The delay had dropped Rebecca behind.

  Ten metres was very close, almost close enough to scrape shields, and if you went beyond that you could kiss your ass goodbye in short order, iron or otherwise. Serge ploughed in recklessly but soon lost his nerve and decelerated. Rebecca closed the gap. They finished crossing the front surface of the station and dove round the side, beginning to thread through the spinning struts. The enormous station completely dwarfed the two tiny ships.

  'Witchout, one minute.'

  Serge weaved past the first strut of the station, rolling his lithe little ship around to match both course and the rolling surface of the station. Having made the first loop, his confidence returned and he pushed the throttles as far forward as he dared. Another strut was approaching, tilting crazily towards him due to the rotation. He chanced a glance in the aft cam.

  'Match that,' he shouted gleefully seeing the view was empty. He’d smoked the smug little bitch.

  'That the best you can do?'

  Serge looked behind him again, and then off to the right and left. The Krait was alongside him. He pushed the throttles back up to full power. The Hatchling screamed ahead once more.

  He was more careful this time, reducing speed before taking the turn across the second strut. He still overshot a little, the Hatchling class being particularly prone to yaw in the tight turns. It cost him speed and time, again. The third strut was dispatched in the same fashion. Yet each time the Krait was right next to him.

  As they came out of the shadow of the third strut the two craft were side by side. The station seemed to be rotating even faster now.

  Rebecca could see that the fourth and final strut of the station was sweeping towards them. Neither had an obvious move, they were blocking each other. It was a game of chicken: whoever cut thrust first would lose. It all came down to nerves and cojones.

  Serge rolled and turned his Hatchling, trying to cut Rebecca up. Their shields touched again, sparks flying, illuming the darkened rear face of the station as the two generators fought each other. The Krait was the more massive ship and it stood its ground, but the Hatchling inched slowly ahead.

  'Witchout in thirty seconds. Rebecca, where the frag are you? You’re off scanner!'

  'Give it up!' Serge shouted. 'You’ve lost!'

  'Not me,' Rebecca whispered. The strut was close now; both of them were in danger of being splashed across deep space. Rebecca saw an opportunity and took it.

  She cut thrust, twisted and turned, then hammered back to full throttle.

  Serge whooped in delight. She’d bottled it!

  The Krait nosed behind the Hatchling, Serge saw it and tried to block across, thinking she was trying to sneak past on his port side. His movement was too jerky and he was going too fast.

  Serge’s astrogation console lit up with warnings.

  Excessive yaw! Abort manoeuvre! Excessive yaw! Abort manoeuvre!

  Serge tried to correct, and the Hatchling yawed back the opposite way, the computers automatically trying to reduce power. He’d overcompensated, way overcompensated. The Hatchling went into an uncontrolled spin. That was the thing about Hatchlings: the handling was marginal to start with and those additional chromed exhaust ports might look good but they ruined completely what little handling there was to start with. The ship was way too twitchy. The back end flipped around, engines stuttering. Rebecca’s Krait roared past.

  Serge saw the huge strut of the station flicker past the side view.

  'Oh prak!'

  The Hatchling almost got away. But the spin put the rear end of the ship a few centimetres into the rotational path of the station's fourth strut. The strut rolled past, slicing through the Hatchling’s shields and overloading them immediately. Then it slammed into the engine housing, neatly trimming off the custom chromed exhaust housings that had cost a small fortune to put on. They span indolently off into the void, glittering in the sunlight.

  Serge was lucky. The Hatchling’s engine shutdown immediately to prevent a complete reactor blowback. Fortunately the ship had enough inertia to carry the Hatchling away from the immediate environs of the station.

  Rebecca was waiting for him.

  'Give me my credits, Worm boy.'

  'Prak off!'

  Rebecca had expected that. She targeted a missile on the tumbling Hatchling and locked it on. Serge’s console lit up like a solstice celebration.

  'Witchout in fifteen! For prak’s sake Rebecca, get your ass over here!'

  'You want me to use this?'

  'You can’t. I heard your Dad say you can’t kill me!'

  Rebecca could hear the fear in his voice.

  'Oh…' she breathed, putting on her sweet and innocent voice, 'you’re right; so he did… But in ten seconds he won’t be around to know, will he?'

  'You’ll be marked as a fraggin' fugitive!'

  Rebecca had worked it all out,'You fired on me first, remember? I got legal on you. Kiss your little Worm goodbye, racer boy.' She tweaked the attitude of the Krait, bringing it around to an optimal firing position. There was no way she could miss.

  'Goidson bitch!' Serge realised he’d been set up, 'All right, all right! Don’t fire!'

  Rebecca watched as her credit balance credited by a thousand.

  Another step closer to my own ship! Another step closer to freedom! Another six months at this rate and I'll be free! My own boss! Stuff Dad and Red. They'll never be more t
han barrel-bottom traders. I know I can do better. I want more, I want money, the best that life can offer…

  'Sweet. See ya, Wormy.' She turned and headed away at full thrust. She couldn’t afford to get left behind. The Krait had no hyperdrive subsystem.

  'Hey! You’ve got to help me back to the station!'

  'Says who?'

  'I could be stuck out here for hours! I’ll miss my educlass!'

  'And this concerns me how exactly?'

  'You bitch! It’s open season on you now, you got that, bitch!? You’re fraggin’ storage meat. I’m going to hunt you down and —'

  Rebecca switched the frequency on the comlink. 'Yeah, whatever.'

  She tilted the Krait around and headed back behind the station to where the Boa and its escorts were readying for the hyperspace jump.

  'Dad?' she called, switching back to her girly voice, 'I’m in the clear.'

  'Where the prak were you?' Reet yelled,. 'We couldn’t scan you at all. Where’s the wide boy?'

  'He’s taken a tumble.' Rebecca replied smugly.

  'Get over here, we’re witching out in… now!'

  Rebecca watched as a blue flash obscured the Boa and it vanished, leaving behind a witchspace wormhole. She saw the two Sidewinders and the Cobra enter it and vanish, leaving circular turbulence marks in the flickering sphere.

  She set the autopilot and ranged in. The Krait flickered, dropped into witchspace, and was gone. The witchspace wormhole flickered and collapsed in on itself behind her.

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 3

  The system operative checked the logs. It was a dull job, but someone had to do it. Today it was his shift; fifteen more minutes and this ten-hour period of tediousness would be over. A cold beer awaited in the null-gee bar.

  The standard automatic backup of all data in the research wing had completed slightly behind schedule. There was more data than expected. The operative frowned and checked the integrity of the backup files.

  It all seemed to be in order.

  Maybe some important work had completed today, but who cared? More importantly, it would look good on his record if he dispatched this data to the archive on time, making up for the delay. He flagged it for immediate transmission to Faulcon headquarters on Reorte. Job done.

  The lab explosion proved to be a turning point in Jim Feynman’s life, and not a particularly auspicious one. He sat, looking dejectedly out of the window of his apartment, watching Onrira rotate silently outside.

  Gardening leave.

  Two words no professional ever wanted to hear.

  He could imagine some of his colleagues, jealous over his meteoric rise up the ranks, laughing up their sleeves at his sudden failure. Jim, the ‘golden boy’, had failed. Failed to create a better injector, blown the contract with Galcop, and had nothing to show for his efforts.

  That was the official version of events, of course. Naturally, it wasn’t true.

  It turned out both Geraint and he had been very lucky during the lab explosion. They’d stumbled across a previously unknown and unique property of Quirium isotopes. A very dangerous one. When combined with normal fuel at the correct ratio, pressure and temperature, the isotope reacted in an unexpected fashion, causing a gravimetric explosion.

  The gravimetric bomb had been another project Galcop had given up on years ago. They had been trying to find a replacement for the aging Energy Bomb, which was losing effectiveness as shield strengths and ship capabilities continued to increase. Thargoid warships, in particular, were shrugging off multiple energy bomb deployments without harm. A gravimetric bomb would penetrate current shield technology with little difficulty, theoretically at least. But no one had ever managed to make one.

  Until now.

  'Not much of a bomb. It’s not going to cause much damage by making two foot holes in things.' Geraint had initially observed.

  They had postulated that the gravimetric effect had a self-limiting radius, but this turned out not to be the case. They had calculated fairly quickly that the size of the destruction circumference was proportional to the amount of Quirium available. Fortunately the test lab was only using miniscule quantities, otherwise the boundary might have been a lot bigger.

  That was bad enough, but that wasn’t the half of it.

  To figure out what had happened they ran some more wireframes. The first thing they encountered was the staggering power of the gravimetric effect. Unlike the inefficiency of the injector test, at best five percent, the gravimetric explosion showed a ninety four percent conversion rate. The explosion had converted almost all the Quirium available directly into gravimetric shock waves, ultraviolet and high-spectrum blue light. There was virtually no residual after-effect or waste product. Quirium really liked to go off in a one big hit.

  But it was worse than that.

  It turned out that the gravimetric shock wave did something odd to ‘natural’ Quirium and normal Hydrogen fuel. It denatured it, turning it into more of the very same isotope, now dubbed the C64 isotope. This, to be poetic, added fuel to the fire. This is what they had seen as the faint sparkling in the engine flux.

  C64 was further heated by the passage of the shockwave, reaching and exceeding the critical temperature and resulting in further gravimetric explosions, thus expanding the gravimetric envelope further. Every time the shockwave hit more Quirium or condensed Hydrogen the process repeated. It had a name now.

  Jim had dubbed it, the ‘Quirium Cascade’.

  They had been luckier than they knew. Had more Quirium been available in the lab, the shockwave might have been much bigger than two feet: it could have breached the Quirium canister they had been using to fuel the prototype injector. The canister was standard ten-litre barrel about five feet from the gravity sled. If that had been affected, they calculated that it would have made a gravimetric shockwave about five hundred yards in diameter, big enough to obliterate a huge section of the Tori station. The rest would have disintegrated due to the structural stress of losing a huge part of its hull. Six hundred billion credits worth of space station, four and a half thousand life forms.

  Even then it wouldn’t have been over.

  The calculations had pretty big error bars by this point, but in worst case all the docked ships and the fuel stores aboard the station would have been within the sphere of effect and added to the cascade. The shockwave might have propagated still further out into space, encompassing ships in and approaching orbit and potentially even hitting the planet’s surface. Condensed Hydrogen fuel was used planet side to power virtually everything. It was possible that the entire surface of the planet could have been erased by the chain reaction. The loss of life could have been incalculable and complete.

  The entire Onrira system could have been purged within fifteen minutes.

  The wireframe sims continued to replay their simulation of the effect. As they terminated, the original programmer’s personal in-joke marking the end of the sequence appeared in subtle and bitter irony.

  GAME OVER. Press space, Commander.

  Jim and Geraint had stared at each other for a full five minutes whilst the enormity of what they had discovered sank in.

  A planet killer.

  A doomsday device.

  An über-bomb.

  A device powerful enough to obliterate the entire population of a planet, deployable from orbit by a small ship.

  Neither Jim or Geraint was a weapons specialist; that was handled by a different team in Faulcon. But they could immediately see the potential for destruction that this technology presented.

  'We can’t let this happen.'

  'Jim, this is big, this is significant!'

  'We mustn’t develop this. We cannot, must not allow it to be created.'

  'What? Jim, we could be famous! This bomb could annihilate the Thargoids! Close down piracy forever, give Galcop the power it needs to stand against the Federation and the Empire. It would make us the significant military power in the galaxy!'

  'Y
es it would.'

  'Well, your problem is?'

  'Any culture given this kind of power will use it to conquer and subjugate. It’s inevitable. It’s history.'

  'Nonsense! We can trust Galcop!'

  'Can we? Maybe today, maybe tomorrow. But organisations change, people are replaced, age, move on. History teaches us that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Yes, we might defeat the Thargoids and that might be a good thing…'

  'No pish!'

  '… But how long would be it be before Galcop realised they can hold unaligned worlds to ransom? Embargo space lanes through the anarchies? Make strategic gains across Federation and Empire Territory? This bomb would totally change the balance of power. It would be all out war within days of the first deployment, everyone vying to possess the technology. Billions will die on all sides, on their tombstones the words ‘We can trust Galcop’.'

  Geraint looked shocked. 'Prak. I didn’t see it like that.'

  'Karella-Feynman. It could be the worst swear word on a thousand systems. Cursed names, remembered for the destruction we allowed.'

  Their conversation halted again and they stared out of the windows. The view outside was calm and tranquil. How different it could have been.

  'Some one else will stumble on this one day, you know,' observed Geraint.

  'Yes, but not for years. The C64 isotope is beyond the capabilities of anyone outside this lab. We know that. We can surreptitiously contact our peers in the Federation and Empire. We can take this to the President, maybe even the Federation Council and the Duval Dynasty. Get unilateral agreement for this technology to be banned.'

  'And in the meantime?'

  'We can’t allow this to be created. This knowledge must be hidden. Our choice today affects the lives of untold millions of people, races, planets, even whole systems and civilisations.'

  'Taking the secret to the grave and all that? How will we explain this?'