Interlude E

  The last flagship of the Hawk, the Bridge Burner had been travelling empty, abandoned and forgotten through the empty blackness towards the system of Nutexas. Aimed as a last defiant gesture by what was left of its crew before they abandoned ship, its battle-damaged main engines failed shortly after reaching ten percent of the speed of light and the directional thrusters failed shortly afterwards but not before the onboard AI had made all the directional corrections required. It's course set, the AI sent one last message, then settled down to wait.

  ***

  Almost a century later, a rogue object was detected by the Nutexas system’s outer sensors, five light hours or roughly 5.4 billion kilometres away from the garden planet of Nudallas and the huge orbital Habitat that was the powerhouse of Nutexas industry, banking and the only rejuvenation serum manufacturing facility left in human space. Initially, this was regarded as a sensor error. Nothing that big had ever been recorded going that fast so the team monitoring the sensors wasted a couple of hours recalibrating them. In that time the object travelled nearly 216 million kilometres and the outer system’s secondary sensor array picked up the object confirming that this wasn’t an anomaly.

  The upper management of both sensor arrays held an hour-long meeting, eventually deciding to inform the Director of Sensor Array Control. Their message took six hours to reach Sensor Array Control in Nutexas Habitat, and by the time it got there, the Director, the only person to whom the message was addressed, had gone home for the day. Another twenty hours passed before the Director returned to work and deigned to look at their messages. In that time the rogue ship advanced 2.916 billion kilometres closer to its target.

  Another hour was wasted as the Director discussed their response with the team and it was decided to request the assistance of the Director of the Main Defensive Sensor Array. This was run by the military, not Sensor Array Control and relationships between the two separate sensor arrays weren’t at their most cordial due to an argument over funding. That said, a direct call from the Director of Sensor Array Control to the Director of the Main Defensive Sensor Array got things moving and after another two hours, the staff at the Main Defensive Sensor Array found the ship exactly where the Outer Sensor Array had said it would be.

  This prompted a call to the Commander of the Nutexas Fleet, Admiral Bridget Collins, a three-hundred-year-old veteran, the liberator of Centauri Commander of the fleet that had finally broken the Hawk a century ago. She was pulled out of a meeting discussing the latest Galactic Court approved diplomatic assignments from Jeckon and immediately ordered the fastest ship in his fleet, the Scout/Courier Flash in the Pan, to intercept whatever it was.

  The Flash in the Pan’s Captain made an emergency micro-jump to where it was estimated the ship would pass, urgently preparing his ship for action. The Flash in the Pan came out of the wormhole unprepared for battle less than a kilometre away from the rogue object as it passed. Such was the speed the rogue object was travelling at, the Captain was unable to target the rogue object, let alone intercept it. Instead, after changing his underwear, the Captain analysed the data he’d collected, identified the rogue object as a ship, recognised which ship it was and sent that information directly to the fleet’s flagship.

  The Admiral wasted a whole five minutes swearing and in that time, the rogue ship passed the invisible line for safe jumping within the solar system. Her entire fleet was on their yearly exercises on the other side of the sun and utterly unable to respond. She set her crew to analyse the situation. It was bad. Very bad. If the rogue ship wasn't diverted or destroyed it would hit the centre of the main industrial complex of the habitat in a little under sixteen hours and the death of the station's estimated 1.5 million inhabitants which also included most of Nutexas’ senior board members.

  If the ship wasn’t deflected enough there was also a danger of it hitting the planet of Nudallas which, not only would it leave an ugly dent in the mantle, it would make the garden planet effectively uninhabitable and require evacuation of what remained of the planet's two billion inhabitants that managed to survive the initial impact. There were no naval vessels close enough to intercept the ship. All the Admiral had to work with were the, admittedly formidable, station and planetary defences but given the difficulty the Flash in the Pan had in targeting the rogue ship, she couldn’t rely on them having any effect.

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  The Admiral immediately declared martial law, calling an Emergency Board Meeting and ordered her fleet back to the station, setting a course that cut dangerously close to the sun. While waiting for the meeting to commence, she ordered what Naval staff she had in the vicinity of the station to commandeer a couple of suitable vessels to knock the rogue ship off course, to seize the strategic points along the 144,000km long space elevator to the planet, and prepare for the evacuation of the station.

  The few board members who bothered to attend the Emergency Board Meeting refused to believe the threat to their nice comfortable existence and saw the Admiral’s efforts to save the station as an attempt at a coup. Because of the time lag, they took a whole two hours to tell the Admiral this and then they retreated to the executive end of the space station and locked themselves in with their bodyguards.

  The Admiral shrugged her shoulders and called the Director of Station Security. They had a brief conversation. The Director of Station Security was no idiot and immediately saw the wisdom of doing whatever the incandescently angry Admiral who just happened to command the largest fleet in Corporate space wanted, which in this case was to prepare to evacuate the entire station.

  While the Admiral was gritting her teeth in the futile board meeting, two commandeered heavy mining vessels were manoeuvring into the path of the rogue vessel on autopilot. By the time the Admiral was leaving the meeting, the first of them was nearly in position. It never made it. Seconds before it was due to make its final manoeuvring thrusts, the rogue ship powered up and fired its main lasers, ripping through the unarmoured mining vessel’s engines, leaving it drifting, helpless and unpowered. The same happened minutes later to the second vessel.

  The Admiral gave the order to evacuate the station, commanding every vessel in range to assist. Every lift car in the space elevator, even the ones reserved for Executives, was filled to its maximum capacity and the lift speed increased beyond comfortable limits.

  Then all anyone could do was wait for either a miracle or the worst to happen. Over the next fifteen hours, a consortium of shipping companies attempted to block the path of the rogue ship only to have every ship they sent into the path of the rogue disabled. When the rogue ship was an hour from the station there was a brief and educational long-range exchange of laser fire between the Nutexas static defences. The rogue ship utterly annihilated what had been regarded as one of the best defence systems in the Galaxy with no visible effect on the rogue’s integrity or course.

  The Admiral spent the last hour staring at a century-old intelligence analysis she’d commissioned on the Bridge Burner, sweating as the heat of the star warred with her flagship’s cooling system while the fleet made all speed towards the doomed station.

  Seconds before the rogue ship was due to hit the station, the Low Orbital section of the space elevator detached from the upper section as it was designed to do in circumstances such as this. 144,000km of space elevator falling to the planet would cause a horrific environmental disaster all of its very own. Then the remains of the static defences opened up, failing miserably to deflect the rogue ship from its course.

  Then it hit. There was no drama, no massive explosion. One second, a huge space station dominated the skyline of the Northwest Hemisphere of Nudallas as it had for nearly a thousand years, the next, there was a fast-expanding cloud of debris.

  Afterwards, it was estimated there were fewer than fifty thousand people left on the station when the ship hit. The majority of them were those who’d refused to leave including every one of the Board Members. This was regarded as a silver lining by the majority of the population. Despite the huge loss of life and the annihilation of the Corporate leadership, the evacuation was deemed a success, albeit a cathartic one.

  Over the next few days, there was a great deal of damage caused by debris falling to the planet or colliding with the lesser space stations, space vessels and satellites. By the time the Admiral finally arrived the worst of the physical damage caused by the disaster was over, although due to the amount of debris around the planet no spaceships could land there.

  The governments of Nudallas were just about coping with the massive influx of refugees due to the emergency powers made available by the Admiral’s declaration of martial law, even if, at some point, everything was going to have to be paid for. After all, this wasn’t some idealistic Free System where all resources belonged to the ‘people’, this was Nutexas, the richest, most powerful of the Corporate powers and if Nutexas couldn’t pay their bills, the whole system was just a house of cards. They would rebuild, the suddenly powerful middle management said. Bigger and better than before… They just needed access to the Corporate accounts, stuffed with the plunder of a thousand planets over a thousand years. That money couldn’t just disappear. Could it?

  The Admiral left the increasingly panicky wannabe Corporate leaders to the virtual equivalent of searching for a rich relative’s lost bank book, gathered her fleet and went to bring the person who’d caused all this chaos to justice, hopefully before her crew realised there was no money to pay their wages.

  Kim Stanley Robinson.