Profiteer

“Custom-designed, with the addition of a chunk of Random’s own memory core and what software could be lifted from Mosasa’s corpse.”

 

Shane shook her head. “Why—”

 

“Why anything? Survival.”

 

The grille spoke. “Shane, Mosasa, we have a problem.”

 

“What?” Shane and Mosasa said simultaneously.

 

“I just lost the interface between the ship and the rest of the complex.”

 

Shane could feel her pulse throb in her neck, and she tasted copper in her mouth. “Can you get it back?”

 

“No, it was hardware. No warning, someone pulled the plug.”

 

“Could you—” Shane began.

 

“We are in very deep trouble, children,” Random continued, and a few holo displays began to flash scenes of the quad from various ship cameras. The Blood-Tide was surrounded by marines. “I’ve got a dozen invasive software probes attacking right now. I fused the doors and the life-support controls, I’ve lost communications, weapons, flight control— Oh, shit!”

 

After a pause, Random said, “They’ve got me locked back into the secondary core.”

 

Shane kept staring at the holo display from the quad. They’d scrambled all the marines. It was over. The colonel had suckered them in, and now he had everybody. Shane could feel the adrenaline throbbing and desperately wanted a target to shoot at.

 

“They’re piping in a message. I’m putting it on screen. I’m going to see if I can hack my way out of this box they put me in.”

 

One of the holo views of the quad flickered and was replaced by the colonel’s face. He’s changed, Shane thought. His eyes—there’s a shine that wasn’t there before.

 

Klaus looked into the camera and talked as though he were addressing a crowd of thousands. He was perfectly choreographed—pressed, tailored and packaged for mass consumption. He looked like a man who’d been studying vids of every charismatic leader of the last three centuries.

 

“Dominic,” he said. Shane could hear a sarcastic lilt to the name. “It has been too long since we’ve talked.”

 

Huh?

 

“I’m afraid this is a one-way transmission. I suppose it is a shame that I cannot hear you justify yourself. Justice will have to be enough—”

 

“Do you know what he’s talking about?” Shane whispered, even though no one could possibly overhear them.

 

“No. He seems to think Mr. Magnus is in here with us.”

 

“—like my ship? You aren’t going to leave it alive. We can poison the life support. We could pulse a lethal stun field tuned just for your artificial neurons. We could simply let you starve in there. This is the end, brother Jonah. You’ve been dead for ten years—”

 

“They’re related?” Shane said. She had noticed the resemblance before, but—

 

“However, I have something to do before I finally dispose of you for good. I know you might have taken comfort in thinking your allies might have escaped.”

 

The holo transmission shifted and Shane gasped.

 

On the holo was an up-angled shot of Dom’s secret commune, where she had taken all the civilian prisoners. A truncated white pyramid girded by greenhouses. How the hell?

 

“We dropped a recon module from orbit just to get footage of this. We have another ship in orbit, Dominic, the Shaftsbury. And we have the location of that valley, down to the meter.”

 

Klaus chuckled. The recon’s cameras were looking up at the commune and past it, toward the sky. At first the sky was obscured by a holo projection; then the recon module shifted to something other than optical imaging, and the sky outside the rim of the valley turned slate-gray, the stars tiny black points. One of the stars seemed to vibrate.

 

“Remember ‘pacifying’ the coup on Styx? Or did you forget about it when you washed your hands of the TEC and the rest of your responsibilities?”

 

“My God,” Shane said, very quietly. The star had swelled to a black blob, and it was growing. Don’t let it be what I think it is.

 

“TEC called it ‘shredding’ when you wiped Perdition off the map. They’ve changed the terminology since. It’s now called ‘orbital reduction of the target.’ “

 

It is.

 

Shane knew what she was about to see, but she couldn’t pull her gaze from the screen.

 

Dropping large objects from orbit had always been a cheap means of mass destruction. Enough mass and enough velocity can wipe anything off the map. One problem it shared with nukes was the godawful mess it left behind. A big enough rock could make a tectonic wreck of the planet, cause ice ages, evaporate oceans, and do all kinds of other nonproductive destruction.

 

Needless to say, in three centuries of spaceborne warfare, someone had found a solution to that particular problem. Someone in the last century decided to try dropping a ton of polyceram filaments from orbit. That person discovered two things. First, that this particular brand of monomolecular filament stayed stable during the stress of reentry. The second discovery was that it reduced the surface to gravel to a depth of a hundred meters.

 

The vibrating black star now looked like a circular cloud.

 

Klaus kept talking.