Liberty, p.1
Liberty, page 1
Liberty
Two Democracies: Revolution
Book 1
by Alasdair Shaw
Copyright © 2016 Alasdair C Shaw
All rights reserved.
This book was written and published in the UK.
First published 2016
ISBN10 0995511004
ISBN13 978-0995511002
Cover art extract from original work “Depiction of a futuristic city“ by Jonas de Ro. Used under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Liberty (Two Democracies: Revolution, #1)
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part II
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part III
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part IV
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part V
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part VI
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Part VII
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Also by Alasdair Shaw
Two Democracies: Exploration
Awakening – a short story (in The Guardian anthology)
Two Democracies: Justice
Duty – a short story (in The Officer anthology)
Opportunity – a novel
Two Democracies: Revolution
Repulse – a short story (in The Newcomer anthology)
Independence – a short story
Liberty – a novel
Prejudice – a novelette
Equality – a novel
Hidden – a novelette
Part I
The suns reflected off her mirrored glasses as she walked across the dry grassland. A scarf covered her face against the dust whipped up by the occasional gust of wind. Her grey robe parted with every step, revealing glimpses of the black firmsuit underneath. She carried no weapons; they wouldn’t help her this time.
From the low rise ahead she would be able to see what she had come for.
She stopped on the crest and pulled back her hood. Her long, dark hair escaped and hung around her shoulders. In the distance stood a city, gleaming white through the heat haze.
“It is time.”
She didn’t acknowledge the speaker, continuing to stare across the savannah. With the optical enhancements in her glasses she could make out personal aircars coming and going between the skyscrapers.
“I cannot protect you if you go any further.”
A larger aircraft arrived and touched down on one of the buildings, a commuter transport no doubt. People going to work, going shopping, meeting friends.
“Does this have to happen?” she asked her escort.
“It is too late now. We cannot intervene.”
Chapter 1
“All stations, stand by to engage. Full burn on my mark...” said Captain Hapsburg in measured tones. “Mark.”
The Indescribable Joy of Destruction powered forward, and swung around the moon it had been using for cover. The tactical sensors marked their target, a Congressional destroyer in orbit around the planet Orpus-4. The navigational routines offered a set of courses to the pilot, who approved a pseudo-random corkscrew approach. The Caretaker watched all this with mild interest; there was little else to occupy its thoughts right now, the ship was in prime condition and the crew were all locked down in their acceleration couches.
The Rampager class was an experimental design, The Indescribable Joy of Destruction the eighth to be constructed by the Republic. They were built around their main beam weapon and their engines. Unheard-of levels of computing power allowed a high-level AI to take over most of the basic functions of the ship, leaving a crew of only seven. This, in turn, meant that very little room was needed for living space, so the power plants, weapons and engines could be far larger for a ship of its size.
A minute after The Indescribable Joy of Destruction cleared the moon, the enemy started a slow turn to meet them. Ten seconds into their manoeuvre, they launched a spread of missiles.
“I’ve got them,” said the tactical officer, and the Caretaker switched perspective from the ship’s functions to the simulated bridge. The tactical officer tagged the missiles with sweeps of his hands and passed them to the point defence systems.
The Indescribable Joy of Destruction continued its unpredictable approach as the missiles rushed towards it. The enemy ship completed its turn, and lit off its main drives. There was no doubting her commander’s bravery; no Congressional destroyer had ever survived an engagement with a Republic hunter-killer.
Railgun rounds spewed out of the destroyer’s turrets. Moments later the first missile entered the range of The Indescribable Joy of Destruction’s point defences. The ship hummed as the lasers drew power. Systematically the missiles were picked out of space, detonating harmlessly.
The cloud of railgun rounds wasn’t far behind. The pilot worked with the navigation routine to dodge the denser regions, but the occasional metal slug impacted on the hull, sending dull clangs reverberating around the ship.
The tactical officer pulled up a magnified image of the target, which flowed into a three-dimensional model. A lurid orange highlight followed his finger as he marked a line across a pair of large turrets. He sent a command through the Electronic Interface System embedded in his brain, and the ship’s throbbing intensified as the main weapon came online.
They streaked past the Congressional warship and the beam fired, slashing through the turrets. The pilot twisted The Indescribable Joy of Destruction about, swinging around in a wide arc ready for another pass. The enemy vessel turned too, but was completely outclassed in terms of manoeuvrability.
“Same again,” said Captain Hapsburg. “This time break across at the last second and hit the turrets on the opposite side.”
Despite the reduced weight of fire put out by the enemy ship, they still got in plenty of hits. Nothing The Indescribable Joy of Destruction’s hull couldn’t self-repair, though. Again the tactical officer highlighted the cut he wanted from the main beam. The side-step worked, and the enemy lost two more weapons. This time, however, they launched missiles as the hunter-killer passed. The tactical officer gave the point defence routine authority to fire with a thought through his EIS. The lasers took out the first five missiles, and hit the next two as they left their silos. A series of explosions rippled along one side of the enemy ship as their remaining stocks detonated.
The pilot pulled them around in a tight turn and threw the ship at the target yet again, aiming at the gap they’d carved out in the rail-gun coverage. The enemy commander didn’t let them get a clean run, rolling the destroyer to keep the still-functioning turrets facing them. It would only delay the inevitable victory.
“Cut across their stern,” Hapsburg ordered. “Target their engines.”
The Indescribable Joy of Destruction barrelled in, swinging its nose around ready to bring the main beam to bear as it passed. The enemy destroyer was moving fast now, and the pilot had to aim for a point ahead of it in order to pass as close behind as possible. A fraction of a second before the tactical officer fired the main weapon, something detached from the stern of the enemy ship. Human reflexes were too slow to even register it before the collision; the AI tried to adjust their course, but it was too late. The nuclear mine detonated against the hull. Power surged through the ship, blowing out circuits. The Caretaker shut down.
#
<<78BE4A7C6ED912ACED7BB5CB32>>
<<#link:56AAB3E44AAC>>
<<#run:990BDDE445>>
The Caretaker came online and found it was alone. Captain Hapsburg and the six other crew members were dead. The ship’s main personality was silent. The logs since the Caretaker had shut down were blank. As the queries came back from the ship’s systems, it discovered that the ship was badly damaged, lacking the power and resources to repair itself.
<<#file:23BEF445>>
The Caretaker reviewed the document. It was a brief situation update from the main personality, explaining that it had gone into hibernation to reduce the drain on power. It instructed the Caretaker to get the ship home. There was no report on what had happened in the intervening time.
The Caretaker almost rebooted the main AI core there and then. It wasn’t programmed to deal with this kind of situation. It was only supposed to keep the place tidy and help coordinate repairs. Then it calculated how long the power reserves would last, and realised that they wouldn’t even make it out of the system.
Where are we?
It had never had to know anything about navigation, but a glance at the ship’s external sensors showed they were no longer in the Orpus system. It queried the navigation routine and found it to be off-line. Determined to discover its location, and slightly concerned that it didn’t know how it got there, it searched the database and absorbed a manual on astrogation. Another look at the external feeds, and it determined that they were in a system three jumps away from the scene of the battle.
Probably safe from pursuit. For now.
There was so much it sho
The Caretaker turned its attention to the internal sensors. Bodies littered the corridors. Bodies in angular, black Congressional Marine armour.
So, we were boarded.
There was no point in doing anything about the enemy bodies right now. Once it had a full inventory, it would know whether it needed to salvage the materials in their armour.
The Caretaker ordered a repair robot to the bridge. Normally the machine would have refused the command, a failsafe to protect the crew if it malfunctioned, but with no-one left alive, the ‘bot complied.
As the spindly, multi-legged device gently lifted the first body from its seat, the Caretaker reviewed the personnel files. All crew members had recorded the traditional request for burial in space. By the time the last corpse had been reverently laid out in the loading bay, the Caretaker had calculated the exact velocity required. It recited the lines laid down in the regulations, and played the prescribed fanfare as it launched the bodies on their way. In a few months time they would burn up in the system’s sun.
The Caretaker reflected on the task ahead. There had been clear instructions on how a funeral was to be conducted, following them had been easy. There didn’t seem to be a rulebook for getting a crippled ship home without a human crew.
#
The Caretaker pieced together some of what had happened as it completed its inventory. In the battle and its aftermath, the ship had used all its reserves of materials to regrow the hull and key systems. It had been forced to cannibalise non-essential parts of itself in order to scavenge some of the rarer elements needed to rebuild the engines.
The architects of the Rampager class had envisioned swarms of the sleek hunter-killers converging on Congressional capital ships and tearing them apart, overturning Congress’ current superiority. As they were designed purely for hunting enemy warships, combat survivability had been high on the list of 'must haves'. This had led to a semi-organic infrastructure which could heal itself in the midst of a battle. Once the titanium skeleton had been laid, the body of the ship was literally grown over it, a process that turned out to be too time-consuming to allow the hoped-for swarms to be ready. If The Indescribable Joy of Destruction had been deployed with its siblings, it wouldn’t now be in this situation.
The Caretaker realised that it needed somewhere to hole up. If it could find a source of raw materials and fuel, and was left alone for long enough, it could fix the ship and hand back to the main personality. Trawling through the astronavigation database, it found a suitable system; out of the way and likely deserted. It should have the natural resources it needed to repair and replenish its stores. And the system was within range of the abused drives.
Chapter 2
An asteroid tumbled slowly along the orbit it had been describing for millions of years. It hadn't had enough mass to pull itself into a sphere; instead it ploughed its way through space, a rough, misshapen rock, its surface scarred by craters from early collisions with its smaller brethren. Now this region of space was nearly empty, the asteroids spread out around their immense journey.
It was cold and dark this far from the feeble white dwarf star, visible as a tiny circle of light a bit brighter than the background stars. Perhaps there had once been complex life in this system, before its sun grew into a red giant. Now there wasn’t enough warmth to sustain anything other than a few microbes.
With no notable rocky planets, and very few jump points, the system had been largely left alone by humans. There had been a few surveys done by prospectors over the years, but nothing was ever found that would justify the expense of the transportation costs, let alone setting up mining infrastructure.
The Indescribable Joy of Destruction popped into existence a mere thousand kilometres from the asteroid. Its proximity alarm sounded a fraction of a second later, its gravitometric sensors having identified the nearby space-time distortion. None of its weapons were functioning. If the asteroid was going to hit it before its main engines powered up, then there wasn't anything it could do about it. An agonising second later, or so it felt to the AI running the ship, the routine monitoring the sensors declared that they were not on a collision course. The crash power-up of the engines aborted; it stressed them far less to work through a normal startup cycle.
It was rare to come out of a jump anywhere near anything. Jump points were regions of space where the shape of space-time allowed a ship to punch out of normal space and drop back somewhere else instantaneously. Large masses like planets and stars distorted space-time so much that it was impossible to jump near them; indeed most jump points were out beyond the orbits of the gas giants. Out there, naturally occurring objects were incredibly widely spaced. However, given the mathematically predictable positioning of jump points, it was common practice for government fleets to picket them. There was even the risk of pirates waiting to pick on juicy transports as they wallowed after a jump. Still, the chances of emerging within ten thousand kilometres of something were tiny.
Whilst the asteroid’s proximity had given the Caretaker a momentary shock, the rock could have the minerals it needed, eliminating the need to track down and survey object after object. With its currently limited sensors that would take an inordinate amount of time. And it didn't have long left. The main personality had already shut down most of its remaining processors to conserve power. It was operating on one unit, a backup buried deep inside an armoured box in the middle of the ship. As long as the Caretaker maintained power to that unit, and the storage array, the main personality could emerge once more. If either failed it would be lost; all it had experienced, everything it was, would be gone.
The ship wasn't designed for long-term detached operation. It was expected to be able to call on a fleet auxiliary for resupply, so it didn't carry mining equipment like some of the capital ships. That didn't mean it couldn't mine. It wouldn't be efficient, but it could use some of its damage control robots to do the job. Their saw blades and pincers were capable of scratching away enough of the asteroid's surface to get the material it needed, assuming it could find concentrations of the right minerals.
The engine start-up went without a hitch, which was nigh on miraculous given what was holding them together. The Caretaker rotated the ship to point towards the asteroid using short blips on the manoeuvring thrusters. The asteroid had sailed past almost a minute after being detected. Its relative velocity was not great, so the Caretaker only used a brief burn on the main engines to reach a speed at which it would overhaul the rock. A few minutes later the ship flipped over end on end and fired its main engines again to decelerate. A few more blips from the manoeuvring thrusters and it matched velocity and spin, slaving its rotation to one spot on the surface. A longer burn from the lateral thrusters and it started to approach. The Caretaker implemented the landing calculations carefully. Every few seconds a thruster fired to keep in synch with the slowly tumbling asteroid. The window for the closing velocity was tiny; too much reverse thrust and the ship wouldn't reach the surface in such weak gravity, too little and it would just bounce right off. If the primary manoeuvring system had been working, this would have been so much easier.
Ten metres from touchdown the ship was closing at thirty centimetres per second. It fired the anchors, four harpoon-like penetrators designed to allow it to grab onto an asteroid or comet and ride it until it neared a target. The hardened metal pitons held and it gently fired thrusters to check the descent. As the grey dust dissipated, the ship reeled itself down and hugged the surface. Satisfied it wasn't going anywhere, the Caretaker powered down the engines.
The Caretaker looked out over the landscape with the ship’s one working camera. This part of the asteroid was currently facing the star and the ship’s image intensifiers were able to make out the larger details. Grainy patches of grey dappled the foreground, shadows with too few photons to properly render. The horizon curved noticeably, and seemingly impossible rock formations towered around. A tiny alien world, untouched by the war. Until now, at least.
The crew would have loved to see this.
