Ghost Ship

Maria

It was not a thermonuclear blast. No one knew precisely what it was, or what caused it. Antimatter explosions were ruled out when the analysis of the discharges' spectra was completed and found to contain no gamma rays. This was doubly interesting: the temperature of the explosion was measured to be several million Kelvins, and the law of blackbody radiation said a copious amount of hard radiation should have been generated.

But it wasn't. The energy discharges consisted of several trillion candelas worth of visible light. No UV. No infrared. Not even any microwaves. (These were all generated later as the surroundings absorbed the energy, of course, but none came from the light itself.)

It was assumed, in the hush that followed the destruction of the Peruvian Andes and the Egyptian desert, that these blasts were the product of an alien species, far more advanced than the human race. Later, as the data were reanalyzed by a small research facility in southern California, it was discovered that the light contained a sequence of modulated waves: a transmission.

The altered wavelengths were a compressed squirt several microseconds long, with a standard polarization modulation. It was determined that the primary waveform precisely matched an opening code sequence-- an obsolete one-- used five to ten years previously as a combat channel by the Imperial Knights.

The researchers were unable to decode the sequence. The transmission, while recognizably of human origin, was completely alien to even the most skilled communication theory specialists. For one thing, the transmission contained millions of distinct, separate waveforms, in a complex array. Someone suggested that the transmission was similar in structure to the multiphase emissions of the human brain. The theory was confirmed when the transmission was fed through a captured supercomputer designed to initiate the Methuselah Transfer, a machine "lifted" from the Brotherhood by certain TDF elite forces just after the Starsiege. Without knowing the original source of the message, and indeed, without having the person's synaptic patterns, it was impossible to decode it. The ultimate cipher.

The blasts, centered on two of the TDF's most likely positions of the Emperor Petresun's hiding place, were disturbing. If the Emperor was indeed where the TDF thought he was, he was certainly dead. A flyby of the Egyptian site showed a haunting image of a vast, glassy crater smoking with the heat of the Earth's mantle. A fraction of a kilometer deeper, and the crater would have exploded with the power of a Richter nine tectonic event, likely triggering a chain reaction of quakes in the area and blowing Egypt itself off the map. As it was, the scientists studying the discharge gazed at their screens in horror as their calculations showed just how close the blasts had come do doing catastrophic damage to Earth.

Whatever set them off had to be deliberately testing the limit.

The Peruvian site was not much better. It was a vast crack in the mountains near Nueva Lima, a crack filled with boiling lava that poured down river channels and out into the Pacific. The explosion displaced a slab of rock hundreds of kilometers long, weighing untold trillions of tonnes. The block sank deeper into the continental lithosphere underlying South America, and other parts of the continent showed measurable uplifting. The tsunami that resulted sent a wave several dozen meters high rolling across the South Pacific, and did significant damage to the islands of Tahiti and New Zealand, continuing on to rip chunks of ice off the Antarctic glaciers.

Again, the force that had set the explosion off skirted dangerously close to the edge of the ice shelf's tolerance. If the explosion had been ten percent more powerful, the Ross Sea's unstable ice would have collapsed, raising a tsunami kilometers tall, wiping out half the world's population in one big splash.

A week later, the variable star eta Carinae, after centuries of imminent destruction, was seen in Earth's skies to go supernova. The human race looked up to the dying star as for several weeks it shined nearly as bright as Earth's full moon. After a few months it faded from sight, leaving astronomers with the first record of a nearby supernova since the 4239 Sagittarii explosion of 2653.

The researchers in California, still without results in their research of the explosions on Earth, fed some of the spectrographic results from the supernova scans into the Methuselah Transfer program, and were shocked to find a fifty percent correlation between the visible-light spectra of the supernova and the unexplained explosions.

But one thing made it seem impossible: the speed of light. For Earth to detect the distant supernova meant that the unstable star had exploded six thousand years ago, well before the Devastation that marked the beginning of recorded history. If it had anything to do with the explosions, they could only be some mysterious side effect traveling on the neutrino wave, undetected, before the main energy shock hit.

What could cause such a thing completely baffled the scientists.

They struggled to find another explanation: what force could set a star to supernova, and then six thousand years later wreak such havoc on Earth?

And what should be made of the sudden reappearance of the long-lost Long Patrol torchship Farsight, burning sunward at an insane rate after being lost for decades in the darkness of the Oort Cloud?

-----

"The Farsight? Nae bloody way!" Captain Ralpha McInnis, of the interceptor Stiletto, said disbelievingly as his scan officer made the report.

"Sorry Cap, checked it already. Three times. The bird's inbound to inner Sol sys at acceleration... hmm."

"Out with it!" McInnis was not a patient man, and now his face was nearly as red as his hair.

"Accelerating at about ten times lethal limit. It's gotta be on autopilot."

"Eh. Vector?"

"Seems to be a Jovian slingshot with an ultimate destination... Earth itself, apparently."

"Eh. Threat analysis?"

"It's a threat. And we can't even do anything about it. The thing's going at one hell of a cee-fractional, and even if we were to call the Jovian defense systems they'd not receive the message in time to mobilize. The thing'll loop around Jupiter, barely bending course, then either blast by Earth at point five cee... or into it."

"Armageddon."

"Warn Earth?"

McInnis scowled. "Yeah. Get on the horn to the Naval command, as secure as you can get it then encrypt a few more times. Let's hope they have the bloody brains to keep it to themselves."

"Don't think they're so stupid as to want to cause a panic."

"You never know, with the Navy..."

"And should I also try to get in touch with the Jovians?" "Who's even there these days?"

"Um... the Tarazedi Alliance is mixing it up with the remnants of that Io glitch force and some new Cybrid revival movement, the Exemplar Guard... they have quite a substantial force there."

"Well hail them too."

"Alright... I have the main frequency for the Navy on. Ready to record."

McInnis nodded, cleared his throat. "Naval One, this is ISS Stiletto. Advise inbound bogey on Earth approach, vectors enclosed, at substantial cee-fraction velocity. Acceleration rules out human crew. Respectfully suggest blowing the thing out of space before it smacks Earth outta the solar system. Out."

"I think I have the main Tarazedi frequency... records for them are very erratic..."

"Put it through. We don't have the option of fiddling with the tuner dial."

"You're on, sir..."

"Jovian space forces, this is ISS Stiletto. Advise inbound bogey on Jupiter approach. Vehicle is traveling at extreme velocity and acceleration, data enclosed. If you can intercept the thing when it reaches Jovian space and boot it into one of your stupid little moons, you'll save Earth a lot of trouble. Out."

The tactical officer spoke up. "The Farsight? Where have I heard that name before?"

The captain grunted. "The thing was an outer-system torchship. Very distinguished record in the Cybrid-monitoring ops field. Last time the captain brought it home, half the crew were dead, and she died a few weeks later in a duel or something. Then the ship launches outta Madrid spaceport at full speed, on automatic, outruns the Orbital G interceptors, and bugs outta Earth space altogether. Titan spaceport tracks it powerless in a cometary orbit, heading to the outer Oort cloud way above the ecliptic. With the speed the thing was going, it had to have got a couple thousand AU out..."

"And now it's back."

"Yeah, and I don't really want to see this ghost ship blast into Earth. See if you can find a way to intercept it."

"How fast do you think we are, Cap'?" the tactical officer muttered, bent over his console, and set to work on the futile task.

-----

"Stiletto. Jovian Defense Perimeter. We were unable to intercept the rogue vessel with any of our chasers. We were able to nick the vessel with a blast from our [untranslatable] but the hit appeared to do nothing besides knocking the vessel slightly off course. Vectors embedded herein.

Thank you for the warning and we apologize for not being able to do more. Hail Tarazed."

And the message winked out. The vectors seemed to indicate the vehicle would shoot by Earth at a perigee of about a hundred thousand kilometers, close enough to frighten but not damage.

But the vehicle could very easily shift its vector and enter an impacting orbit.

"Untranslatable?" McInnis scowled.

"Linguistics AI thinks it means 'very, very big gun'," the communications officer said dryly.

"I thought I heard rumors of that... the Tarazedis built something in Jupiter's atmosphere, a big fusion cannon that they blew the glitches off Io with a few years ago... hmm."

"Well, what do we do? The thing is blue shifted clear off the spectrum. It's coming just about directly toward us, and it'll close to less than a light-second in about two hours. This mother is fast."

The captain sighed heavily. "If we cannot find a way to stop it, we will have to intercept and collide with it. We can't let something going at that velocity collide with Earth."

His crew did not comment, did not protest the death sentence he had just read them. Fifty percent cee? There wouldn't even be bits of them left. Perhaps a free-floating cloud of hot plasma. The tactical officer grimaced. "I'll work out our intercept burns. But it'll be quite difficult to accurately plot something moving at such a speed. The sensors were not designed for it."

"Right..."

"And furthermore, the computer will have to take over for the last minute. If we have to intercept this thing, we decide a minute in advance and then let the computer take us to our deaths. There will be no turning back."

"Understood. Plot it and feed it into my console."

"Yessir." The tactical officer wiped beads of perspiration from his forehead, then bent over his console again.

"You know something?" the captain asked the bridge at large. When no response came, he answered. "This bites."

While no one spoke, the bridge still reverberated with heartfelt agreement.

-----

"Farsight to Stiletto," the call came in less than ten minutes before the vessels closed their final kilometer. "Please remove yourself from our path."

The captain leapt to his feet immediately. "Stiletto, Farsight," he snapped. "Shift orbit and identify yourself at once!"

"I cannot."

I? The speaker was a woman, with a calm, quiet voice. There was no way a single person could run a torchship. Of course, there was no way a torchship could escape from its berth and blast off to the Oort Cloud by itself either...

"Call up the records for the ship. See if that voice matches--"

"Already done," the communications officer said, shaking his head with a puzzled expression. "Captain Maria Perez, the vessel's commander. But she's dead."

"An Immortal," he spat.

"More likely a voder," the reply came. "Doesn't seem to have the full harmonics of a human voice. We're listening to a recording."

"That responded?"

The officer shrugged. "If it has a good computer system it's possible..."

"Or maybe it's a bloody ghost! Kill the channel. If the thing is on computer control, it will not back off. We have to stop it."

"The intercept program is keyed into your console."

"Sorry folks, but our mission here is clear... anyone who wants to grab a lifepod, better get moving..."

No one stirred.

The captain smiled grimly. "Let's do it. Initiating primary burn--"

And the crew were slammed back into their seats at the interceptor's powerful engines blasted at a hundred ten percent rated capacity, hurling the small vessel into the larger ship's path.

The apparent mismatch in size would count for nothing at these speeds. The torchship would blast the interceptor into a cloud of plasma instantly, and that cloud would rip directly though the incoming ship, reducing it as well to disorganized molecules several microseconds later.

At least it would be quick. And they would not even see their death coming before the ship appeared as if out of nowhere and hit them.

"It has been an honor serving with you," the captain said softly a minute before collision, as the computer beeped its shrill warning."

"The torchship has not changed course," the tactical officer said softly twenty seconds before impact. "We will impact. I've always wanted to be a hero..."

McInnis smiled grimly, faced the viewscreen where his enemy would soon arrive. "Eat this, Farsi--"

The world went white.

-----

Maria smiled as the Farsight, robbed of its momentum, decelerated to a more sane velocity and continued on its way past the asteroid belt. As no one would be looking for the thing to arrive in weeks rather than hours, the Navy would stand down. When the vessel did finally arrive and settle into a standard geosynch orbit over Nova Cincinattus, there would be consternation but not terror. The rebuilt Orbital Guard platform at L-5 would send over a team to investigate, find nothing out of the ordinary, and berth the ship under tight guard at the navy base in Cincinattus.

She shifted focus.

Blue shifted crazily, a small interceptor appeared at the edge of the Ghost Star system, driving sunward at nearly fifty percent cee. Over the next few days they would decelerate as hard as possible, arrive at Mercury, and wonder just what the hell was going on.

She smiled, and gazed past the Ghost Star, at the spreading nebula that was once Eta Carinae...

/ < / << /