Silent Order: Eclipse Hand Read online

  Cassandra sat in the co-pilot’s seat, her arms wrapped around her chest and her legs pressed together.

  “Vigil,” said March, dropping into the pilot’s chair. “Status.”

  “Diagnostics complete,” said Vigil. “The hyperdrive is functional, but there was indeterminate damage to the components due to...”

  “Oh!” said Cassandra. “Oh, dear. When you came out of hyperspace, your hyperdrive didn’t have time to completely discharge any remaining dark energy before you had to divert power to weapons and shields. If you took any damage to your power systems, the resultant power surge would have caused damage to multiple hyperdrive components.”

  March looked at her. Cassandra wilted again, and March made himself smile.

  “I thought you didn’t know anything about starship repair,” he said.

  “Well,” said Cassandra. She tried to smile and almost did it. “I don’t. But I know quite a lot about dark energy and hyperspace mechanics.”

  “Dr. Yerzhov’s summary is correct, Captain March,” said Vigil. Cassandra did smile at that. “There was indeterminate damage to the hyperdrive. I recommend a visual inspection of the hyperdrive at the earliest opportunity.”

  “Acknowledged,” said March. “But after we get out of here. Do you have the calculations for the next jump?”

  “Calculations are complete,” said Vigil. “Estimated ETA to the jump point from our current location is thirteen minutes at full sublight speed.”

  “Good,” said March, feeding power to the fusion drive. Depending upon the local stellar geography, sometimes it could take a day to transit across a solar system to the next jump location.

  “Is that another crew member?” said Cassandra.

  “Who?” said March.

  “The woman on the speakers.”

  “No, I operate the ship alone,” said March. “That’s Vigil, the pseudointelligence that runs the computer.”

  “Oh,” said Cassandra. “Hello, Vigil. My name is Cassandra Yerzhov. I am pleased to meet you.”

  “And I am likewise pleased to meet you, Dr. Yerzhov,” said Vigil.

  Cassandra smiled. “She’s so polite.”

  “People are rude enough,” said March, watching the navigation and tactical displays. “No reason to put up with rude computers as well.”

  “I always liked pseudointelligences,” said Cassandra. “They’re less cruel than people.”

  March had no answer for that, so he focused on piloting and running through the hyperspace checklist. The resonator coil and the dark matter reactor were both undamaged, but several components on the hyperdrive gave questionable feedback. Vigil was sure that the hyperdrive would function, but computers were not infallible.

  The Tiger reached the jump point, and March activated the hyperdrive. The ship shuddered and then opened its hyperspace tunnel with a surge of dark energy. March looked over the displays once more. The dark matter reactor and the resonator were functioning. The hyperdrive was working, but the diagnostics detected several minor power surges.

  “That looks like crystallization in either the dark energy surge regulator or the main emitter matrix,” said Cassandra, peering at the diagnostic display.

  “Yeah,” said March. At least the dark matter reactor was working. He had paid a lot of money for that new reaction chamber on Eschaton Station. “At least we’ve gotten away from your friends.”

  “They aren’t my friends,” said Cassandra. “I don’t know who they are.”

  “Neither do I,” said March. He got to his feet. “We’ve got five hours until we exit hyperspace. I think it’s time we had a talk. Come with me.”

  Cassandra blinked and got to her feet, arms still wrapped around her. “Do you have an...interrogation chamber?”

  “What?” said March. “No. We’re going to the galley. You look like you could use some coffee. And while we have coffee, you can tell me why you need to go to JX2278C.” He opened the flight cabin door. “This way.”

  Cassandra looked at him, glanced at the pistol on his belt, and then managed her jerky nod again. She followed him down the corridor. The Tiger’s galley wasn’t large since March had converted half of it to the gym, but it had a metal table and a pair of metal benches. March had also made sure to install a good coffee maker. Cassandra sat, still radiating tension. March set down two cups where she could see them, and then poured both cups, steam rising from the coffee.

  “And just to prove it’s not drugged,” said March. He lifted one of the cups and took a sip.

  “Oh. Good.” Cassandra drew the other mug close, hesitated, and sipped from it. “I...kind of wondered if you would slip something into it. I mean...flying at the last minute to rescue a girl from unmarked ships? That kind of thing doesn’t happen in real life.”

  “Look,” said March. “Unless you shoot at me or try to steal the ship or something like that, I’m not going to hurt you. One of the obligations of privateers is to respond to distress calls and help fight off pirates and raiders. If you want, you can fly with me to Constantinople Station, and you can arrange a flight back to Oradrea from there.” She swallowed at that, fingers clutching the coffee cup. The thought of Oradrea seemed to terrify her. “Or I can drop you off someplace along the way. Even JX2278C if you want, though God knows why. There’s nothing there but gas giants and a few airless inner system planets. Assuming the hyperdrive doesn’t melt down first.”

  Cassandra tried to collect herself. She looked so frightened. March wondered if giving caffeine to a terrified woman had been a good idea.

  “I can’t go back to Oradrea,” said Cassandra. “I just can’t.”

  “Stole the shuttle, did you?” said March.

  Cassandra flinched. “How did you know?”

  “I’ve been around,” said March. “I know it when I see it.” He drummed his fingers against the table, thinking. “I don’t care much for the Oradrean government. If you’ve gotten on their bad side, I don’t see any reason to help them find you.” He shrugged. “And if I had wanted you dead, I could have just made an emergency hyperjump when I landed in the middle of your fight.”

  Cassandra thought about it. She seemed overwhelmed, but if she had stolen the shuttle, that meant she had managed to keep a cool head long enough to do it. The Oradrean secret police did not screw around. And everyone had their breaking point.

  “I’ll tell you what I can,” said Cassandra at last, “but it might not be everything.” March nodded. “But first I have to tell you something, and I need to see how you respond.”

  “All right,” said March.

  Cassandra took a deep breath. “The starship docked at Bay 19 at 19:37 hours on the third Tuesday of the month.”

  March blinked, astonished.

  Of everything she might have said, he hadn’t expected that.

  “Say that again, please,” he said.

  Cassandra nodded, enunciating each word. “The starship docked at Bay 19 at 19:37 hours on the third Tuesday of the month.”

  Given the context, it was a totally nonsensical phrase. But March recognized it. Every month, the Silent Order established a different series of code phrases operatives could use to identify each other. Since it was a non-secure form of identification, operatives weren’t supposed to use them for critical tasks. But the sentence that Cassandra had just used was one of the code phrases. It was supposed to be given to a foreign civilian who had requested the help of the Silent Order.

  Cassandra stared at him, waiting.

  “And the cargo was nineteen pallets of machine parts, sixteen cases of life support filters, and two crates of pet food,” said March, answering with the appropriate counterphrase.

  Relief flooded through Cassandra’s expression. “Oh, thank God. Thank God. Thank...wait.” She looked embarrassed. “Um...could you repeat that again?”

  “And the cargo was nineteen pallets of machine parts,” said March, enunciating every word as she had just done, “sixteen cases of life support filters, a
nd two crates of pet food.”

  “Then you are with the Silent Order!” said Cassandra, her face lighting up. “Did Captain Torrence send you? He must have realized that I was in trouble.”

  “I...know Captain Torrence, yes,” said March. Manuel Torrence was a Beta Operative of the Silent Order. Alpha Operatives like March flew around from trouble spot to trouble spot and tended to have a high mortality rate. Beta Operatives served differently, remaining in place long-term in an organization. Torrence was a former Royal Calaskaran Navy officer who had left the Navy and joined Royal Starlines, and last March had heard, he was the captain of a starliner.

  “Then he must have sent you to rescue me,” said Cassandra. “He seemed like a starship captain from a video drama, you know? Last one down with the ship and all that. Very Calaskaran.”

  “I know Captain Torrence,” said March. “We’ve worked together in the past, but I haven’t spoken to him in nearly a year. I’m on my way to Constantinople Station, and until an hour ago, I had no idea that you even existed.”

  Cassandra blinked. “Really? Then...he didn’t send you? It was just a coincidence?”

  “Seems that way,” said March.

  “Oh,” said Cassandra. She looked shaken.

  “If you know that phrase and counterphrase, you’re entitled to the Order’s help,” said March. “If you tell me what’s going on, I might be able to help you.”

  “Okay.” Cassandra nodded and swallowed. “Okay. I was supposed to meet Captain Torrence at system JX2278C...”

  “I think you should start from the beginning,” said March. “If you don’t mind, Dr. Yerzhov.”

  “Okay,” said Cassandra again. She seemed to wilt, and then took a drink of coffee to steel herself. “But I’m not actually a doctor. Well, I am, but I’m not a medical doctor. But I do have a Ph. D.”

  “In what topic?” said March. He didn’t like academics and intellectuals and thought they were more trouble than they were worth. Whenever the Final Consciousness set out to subvert a world, it usually started by corrupting the intellectuals and academics. Which was darkly ironic because intellectuals and academics were usually the first ones sent to the labor camps when the Final Consciousness conquered a world.

  March was honest enough with himself to know that his dislike of academics was a prejudice on his part, but he hadn’t seen much to contradict it. And hard scientists and engineers dealt with reality, so they were generally more resistant to the doctrines of the Final Consciousness than the sort of otherwise unemployable men and women who studied the social sciences.

  “Dark energy mechanics,” said Cassandra. “Specifically, my dissertation was on a mathematical model to predict and detect quantum entanglement rates in tachyons based on dark energy distortion.”

  “I see,” said March, which was a lie. Definitely hard science. “I assume you worked at the Sonari City branch of the University of Oradrea.”

  “How did you know that?” said Cassandra. “If you didn’t talk to Captain Torrence.” Suspicion flickered over her expression.

  “Because your shuttle’s transponder was registered to the Sonari City branch of the University of Oradrea,” said March.

  Suspicion turned to embarrassment. “Oh, yes, of course. I probably should have found a way to disable that. I’ve never stolen a starship and fled for my life before.”

  “You worked at the University,” said March.

  “Yes,” said Cassandra. “Technically I had the rank of Instructor. I did have to teach, but only one section of undergraduate physics. Boring. I could do it with my eyes closed. But my main work was in the research laboratory.” Animation came over her features as she started to describe her work. “The faculty research committee thought my work had promise, so I got a grant from the military to pursue it.”

  “What were you working on?” said March.

  “On finding a way to miniaturize tachyon relays,” said Cassandra. She began to slip into a lecturing tone. Likely she had used that tone while teaching her class of bored undergraduates. “As you know, in the hundred thousand years since mankind left primeval Earth, the only known method of interstellar communication we have ever devised is through quantum entanglement tachyon relays. Quantum entanglement works on the underlying principle that an effect applied to one particle is instantaneously transmitted to a linked particle, regardless of the distance between them.”

  “I’ve heard of that, yes,” said March.

  He thought of Simon Lorre and his damned Wraith machines, of the poor Rustari Citizens who had been transformed into ghost drones, and he started to have a suspicion of why Cassandra Yerzhov might have fled for her life.

  “But tachyon relays are huge,” said Cassandra. “They have to be built planet-side, can’t be carried aboard ships, and have only a limited bandwidth for transmitting information. I wanted to work out a way to miniaturize them.”

  “And you did?” said March. That kind of technological breakthrough could be worth an unfathomable amount of money.

  “Unfortunately, no,” said Cassandra. “All my experiments failed. However, I stumbled on something unusual during my last few rounds of testing. What I wanted was a way to miniaturize a tachyon relay. What I got instead was a reliable method of detecting a quantum entanglement effect.”

  March blinked. Something uneasy started to stir in his mind.

  “I thought that was impossible,” said March. “I thought the only way to detect a quantum entanglement effect was to observe it.”

  Cassandra shrugged. “So did I. So did everyone else. But I hypothesized that a quantum entanglement effect in this universe would cause observable side effects in hyperspace. Like...ripples, for lack of a better term. I thought those ripples could be used for additional transmission bandwidth. I wrote out a mathematical model to detect them, and I built a detector out of off-the-shelf parts. And I was very pleased that the device worked! It passed double-blind testing, it passed all the critical tests, and it passed the research committee. That last one was the hardest, let me tell you.”

  March nodded. “What happened then?”

  “Well, the director thought I had enough to publish,” said Cassandra. “I just had to think up a clever name for my device. I called it the Eclipse since eclipses are my favorite astronomical phenomenon, other than comets. We published the results, and then I forgot about it.”

  “But then,” said March, “strange things started to happen to you.”

  Cassandra blinked. “How did you know?”

  “Because I know part of the story that you do not,” said March. “Go on.”

  “Okay,” said Cassandra. She looked uneasy again. “Well...my paper got pulled. No one would tell me why. Then the military came to interview me. They seemed to approve of the work that I had done. But they told me I couldn’t leave Sonari City, and people were following me everywhere I went. Then I met Captain Torrence. I was sitting in a coffee house near the Sonari City spaceport, thinking about maybe leaving Oradrea for a while, when he sat next to me. He told me that he was part of the Silent Order, even though I could get him arrested by the secret police for telling me that. He said that I had discovered something dangerous to both the Oradrean government and the Final Consciousness, and they would kill me for it.” She swallowed. “I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t tell anyone. Then the next day I met President Murdan. He’s, uh, the President of Oradrea, if you haven’t heard of him.”

  “I have,” said March. “President-For-Life Paul Murdan, I understand. Tell me more.”

  “He was waiting in my lab at the University with his security people,” said Cassandra. “I didn’t know why the President would care about the Eclipse device. But he was friendly. He congratulated me on my work, said I was a credit to Oradrean science. But his security people...they kept staring at me. You know how men sometimes stare at women?”

  “I’m familiar with the idea, yes,” said March.

  She missed the sarcasm. “Men usually don�
��t stare at me because I’m not…you know, pretty,” she was wrong about that, “but they sometimes do. This, though...it was like they were wolves and I was a sheep. I didn’t like it. President Murdan said he would send a car for me to visit the Presidential Palace the next day, and...and I panicked. It was exactly what Captain Torrence had said would happen. And...I know what happens to people who disappear, who get on the bad side of the government. I’ve seen the execution videos the secret police put out.”

  “So how did you get away?” said March.

  “The astronomy department has a telescope in orbit,” said Cassandra. “Every week one of the instructors from the astronomy department takes the shuttle up to the telescope station to do maintenance. I put drugs in his coffee and stole the shuttle.”

  “I’m impressed,” said March.

  Cassandra blushed. “I...well, I was desperate. And the autopilot was pretty good. Captain Torrence said his starliner would be in the JX2278C system in another four days, and if I arrived, he would make sure I got asylum on Calaskar. I headed for JX2278C and jumped to this system...and then those Raptors were waiting for me. You know the rest.”

  “I see,” said March. “That plastic trunk of yours, the heavy one. I assume you’ve got a prototype of the Eclipse device in there.”

  “And the blueprints and technical documentation,” said Cassandra.

  “That’s good,” said March.

  “So...will you help me?” said Cassandra. “Will you take me to JX2278C and Captain Torrence’s ship? I think it’s called the Alpine.”

  “I will,” said March. “If I can.”

  Cassandra frowned. “If you can? Oh, the damaged hyperdrive.”

  “It’s worse than that,” said March. “We’re both in a lot of trouble.”

  Cassandra flinched. “But...but why?”

  “Because I know the other half of the story that you don’t,” said March.

  “Then for God’s sake, tell me,” said Cassandra. “My life has been turning into a nightmare ever since my paper was pulled.”

  “All right,” said March. “You already know some dangerous things, so I’m going to tell you some more of them. I know all about Oradrea, Dr. Yerzhov. I’ve been there a few times before. The government only controls the planet of Oradrea and some outlying colonies and installations in the planet’s solar system, but its technology is advanced enough and its ground defenses are good enough that it would be too costly to conquer. The Oradrean government is a military dictatorship controlled by a crime family. Oh, sure, there are elections, but somehow President Murdan manages to always get 95% of the vote, and the legislature always does what he wants. The Murdan family has controlled Oradrea for centuries, and they’ve got quintillions of credits of money and assets hidden away. Oradrea and the Murdans are officially neutral in the conflicts between the major interstellar powers, but they’ve only been able to maintain their neutrality with the permission of the Final Consciousness. Which means that whenever the Machinists want something done quietly, or if they want some money laundered or something smuggled into their systems, they use Murdan and his goons to do it. And that’s what is going on here, Dr. Yerzhov. President Murdan doesn’t give a damn about you or the Eclipse. But the Machinists want you dead, and he’s happy to do it for them.”