Twinkle, Twinkle, Collapsar

By Dominic Green

Epic space opera from Hugo-award-nominated author Dominic Green.

It took thousands of years to develop faster-than-light drive. So many thousands of years, in fact, that humanity got bored waiting. They spread out across the galaxy in immense slow ships that took generations to reach their destinations, and became a thousand different civilizations orbiting distant stars.

Now the CosmoPolity has the secret of faster-than-light travel, and it's enthusiastically spreading out from Earth to civilize the barbarians on its frontiers. By 'barbarian', the CosmoPolity means 'anyone who isn't us'.

Commander Asher is the captain of the Cicero, a.k.a. the Big Sis, a tribunal cruiser stationed on the frontier. Tribunal cruisers are disliked in the CosmoPolity navy. It's their job to hunt down and kill naval vessels whose crews rebel against the CosmoPolitan state. But something is about to happen that will force Asher and her crew to question their definition of the word 'barbarian', and to swallow their pride and seek help from unexpected quarters in the face of a threat both to their ship and to the state that built her.

Please note - many of Dominic Green's books are suitable for younger readers. However, this book contains bad language and sexual references that would not be appropriate for the very young.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dominic Green
• Release date: Feb 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224710065

Dominic Green

DOMINIC GREEN was born some time ago.  He is so old that he remembers when telephones were attached to the wall with cables.  In 2006, he was nominated for a Hugo award for his story, The Clockwork Atom Bomb.  He has a tetrapod body plan, breathes oxygen, and has a Newfoundland dog who is the world's first life form to consist entirely of drool.

Book preview

What reviewers have said about the Ant and Cleo series:

...absolutely a hoot and the concept really allows for imaginations to run riot.

All in all a very entertaining story, well written and edited.  I would look for more from this author.

I thoroughly enjoyed episodes 1 to 5 and can't wait for the sixth.

...a great story and is told well..good dialogue and characters and a story that has plot, surprises and pace.

...a ripping yarn...I look forward to downloading more in the series.

The author has a dry sense of humour which often had me chuckling out loud.

I highly recommend these books to those who don't take themselves too seriously and like works of imagination.

Praise for Dominic Green’s Smallworld:

...a showcase for Green’s bone-dry satire and deadpan humour...Green’s agile imagination constantly wrong-foots the reader. A delight.

Peter Ingham, The Telegraph

Twinkle, Twinkle, Collapsar

published by

Dominic Green

Copyright 2020 Dominic Green

Table of Contents

1.  Welcome to Cygnus

2. The Land Where The Sun Never Sets

3. They Can Do Incredible Things With Robots

4. On Top Of Old Smoky

5. Still Burning Underwater

6. Very Small Friendlies In The Combat Zone

7. I Need To Eat Less Of Your Momma

8. Attack Ships On Fire Off The Armpit Of Orion

9. To Blaze Like A Star

10. Back Where The Horizon Bends

Addendum - Rank In The CosmoPolity Navy

1. Welcome to Cygnus

Asher found herself automatically double-checking the seals on her flight suit as she walked the ten metres between her cabin and the bridge.  A marine trooper on guard in the companionway straightened as she passed.

At ease.

On the bridge, Singh, who she seemed to remember was on the Cicero’s damage control team, looked up from Asher’s chair.  Ma’am!  Oh wow, ma’am ji!  He bounced out of the chair and stood to attention.

At ease, I don’t need the seat.  Isn’t the XO supposed to be commanding the watch?

If it please you, ma’am, Subcomm Jarrett thought things were quiet enough for me to take charge, ma’am.

Nothing personal, Havildar, but aren’t you, well, kind of a havildar? What happens if you give an order to the WepsCom and she disagrees with it and pulls rank on you?

Singh knew the answer to that one.  He was wearing the tiniest of all possible turbans, almost a bump on the front of a headband.  The bump bore the Tribunal Navy logo of a human hand grasping a fistful of thunderbolts.  The officer commanding outranks all others on the vessel, ma’am ji! he parrotted.

Yes, but in the real world, Havildar, not the one with the magic talking bunnies.  Asher looked round the banks of screens and could see nothing that disconcerted her.  Looks quiet.

Yes ma’am.  There has been no traffic through the fast space manifold in the last three hours.

Good, good.  Something had woken her, though.  Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

Then what’s that?

Singh followed her finger to the Collision Alarm system. 

Uh, that’s clearly a Kuiper object, he said.

"It’s a very fast-moving Kuiper object", said Asher.

It could be an interstellar object.  Its velocity would be outside the common frame of reference of our solar system, ma’am ji.

I thought ThreatSurv had catalogued all objects within fifty a.u. of the station.

Singh smirked.  "Well, ma’am, you know ThreatSurv always say they have, but..."

Okay.  Okay.  Continue to track it.

We already are, ma’am.  It’s on track to miss us by nine hundred thousand and one kilometres.

The door to the bridge opened; a figure in a uniform it appeared to have been sleeping in slouched in.

Ma’am, it said, saluting with a cursory wave.

XO, said Asher.  I’m informed things are quiet enough for you to not to need to be at your post.  Her eyes lit on a Ping Crewman window open on Havildar Singh’s workstation.  The name on the window was JARRETT.

Not a bit of it.  I’m back on station.  The XO settled into the command chair.  Just popped down to sickbay, touch of Space Adaptation Syndrome, better now.  All things bright and beautiful?

Yes, sir, said Singh.  The object is still on track to miss us by nine hundred thousand kilometres, he added, though Asher was prepared to bet the XO had been no more aware of the object five minutes previously than Asher had.

Not nine hundred thousand and one? said Asher.

Say again, ma’am ji? said the havildar, terrified.

I said Not Nine Hundred Thousand And One?  Its course has altered by one kilometre in the time we’ve been talking?

The XO grinned.  These wet-behind-the-ears fast-track officers.  That’s not beyond the bounds of probability.  It’s hardly a two-body problem to predict a trajectory in all this tumbling muck.  There are god alone knows how many gravitational fields involved...

How much is it on track to miss us by now, Havildar?

Uh, eight hundred and ninety nine thousand five hundred kilometres, ma’am.

Go to alert and wake up point defence.  Asher paced round the bridge, hands clasped behind her.  Helm, take us out of dock.

The duty helmsman, a capo who looked like she’d been promoted for being the only one in her training platoon who hadn’t wet the bed, looked startled.  Ma’am?  Taking a first-rater out of dock was a major undertaking, usually involving a detailed comms exchange between the station traffic controller and the entire ship’s crew.  Right now, the Cicero only had a graveyard shift crew on deck.  All through the ship, an alarm was now sounding, bludgeoning troopers awake. 

You heard, now take her out of dock and don’t break her or I’ll break you.

The helmsman swallowed and turned back to her user interface.  Ma’am ji.  She opened a line to Station Traffic.  "Uh, this is Cicero requesting permission to break dock -"

You can override the docking clamps yourself, helm.  Do so.

"Uh, but ma’am ji, there are explosive bolts involved, they cost thousands of calories, there are safety considerations, and the purser’s office -"

Don’t make me repeat myself, helm.

Ma’am ji, said the helmsman weakly, and punched the dock override.  The entire chamber lurched, reminding Asher that this was not some brutalistic windowless office building on a planetary surface but an interstellar warship.  On several of the screens, the dock at Raja Hamsam Station was already falling away.

Turn us nose-on to the threat once we’re in open space, said Asher, and give me point five gees of acceleration toward it, building slowly.

Uh, said the helmsman, the threat?

For the love of Darwin, helm, the object.  Steer us toward the object.  Asher pointed towards the long range collision warning screen.

Brace for manoeuvre, said the helmsman.  Asher took hold of a nearby safety grip.

Only point five G, ma’am? said the XO, smiling faintly.  Shouldn’t we be a little more eager to engage the enemy?

"Any more than point five G and our men don’t get to their stations in time and no-one gets to engage the enemy."

The manual states -

We had a special name for the manual out near Polaris, Mr. Jarrett, and it was Special Field Equipment, Wobbly Table Stabilization Under Gravity For The Use Of.  Point five, helm.

Ma’am.

Singh’s mouth dropped open.  You’ve been up north, ma’am ji?

Asher nodded.  Into the white wilderness.  To your station, Havildar, we may need damage control.

Singh settled to his station.  More crew members were arriving now, summoned by the alert – more experienced ones, sleepy but perfectly tessellating to the grooves their butts had left in their chairs, not bothering with small talk with Asher and Jarrett but instead working through the business of bringing the bridge to battle readiness.

Eyes green, I have the threat, monitoring fifteen further possible threats, feeding to Weps.

Weps green, we have lock on the primary threat with long range systems.  The WepsCom actually yawned as he said this, but nevertheless moved quickly and without complaint.

Damage limitation green, all bulkheads sealed, all crew in exposed stations pressure suited.

Countermeasures ready.

Projected degree to which the threat will miss us, said Asher.

Nine hundred thousand and two kilometres.  There was no ‘ma’am’ on the end of that sentence, and Asher didn’t ask for one. 

The XO shrugged his shoulders and smirked.  Told you so.

I’m mapping surface features, getting spectrography...it’s a moon, ma’am.  The SensCom pointed at the large flat display screen onto which she’d routed a visual.  It looked very like a moon.

Active target lock on that moon.

Again, no hesitation, not even a flicker of a snigger.  Active lock acquired on hostile moon.

Hunterkiller swarm launch on my mark THREE – TWO – ONE – abort.

Aborting, ma’am.

Good.  Asher allowed her pulse to return to normal.  Maintain heightened readiness.  Move shift change forward two hours.  Double crew rations.

Pardon, ma’am?  The XO was still sitting in Asher’s chair, and appeared to be waiting for her to ask him to vacate it.

You want your crew on heightened alert, the least you can do is say thank you.

He still had a smile on his face.  "If you wouldn’t mind telling me what we’re on heightened alert for, ma’am?"

Asher stared at him.  The smile faltered, but it was under heavy pressure.

"We’re on heightened alert, Mister Jarrett, because when I walked in here ten minutes ago I found a havildar acting as OC with the roster OC nowhere to be seen and a bridge crew entirely unprepared for anything more hazardous than a solar flare and this is a fucking warship.  The next time I walk in here unannounced, things will be better.  Am I making myself crystal clear?"

The smile had vanished now.  He had some sense of self preservation at least.

"Now after having yelled at you, and make no mistake of it I did just yell at you, I am going back to my bunk, after which I expect you to pass on the yelling to this ship’s crew.  When someone wakes up the station OC and he comes online looking for someone to yell at, patch him through to my quarters.  And when I issue a direct order to leave dock under alert conditions, I am never, ever again going to hear someone telling me that the explosive bolts on the docking clamps are really fucking expensive."

Everyone she looked at on the bridge dropped their gaze.  She left the bridge.  It was only when the door had closed behind her and she was outside in the corridor that she realized her hands were shaking.

She became aware that the bridge guard was still standing by the door.  He was standing to attention again, but hadn’t snapped to it like a trooper fresh out of training. 

She looked at the black-and-white arrow tattooed on the back of his hand.

Sorry ma’am, he said.  It’s non-regulation.  I’ll have it removed.

She held out the back of her own hand, which bore the same arrow.

How long were you North, she said, reading the nametape on his flight suit, Kawai?

Two tours up in the Bear, ma’am.  Gets cold up there.  Real cold.

Zero Kelvin, she agreed.  Crewman Kawai, when you were on a ship in transit, did you ever know the ship was approaching something big?  Without being told, I mean?

Kawai nodded.  "All the time.  The rest of the payload, they all thought I was crazy.  Hell, I thought I was crazy till two or three of the drivers told me it was normal.  It got so I could call it right every time, and not just with planetoid-sized stuff either.  Big ships put out enough millinewtons to sense, especially when they’re moving fast.  My ancestors, they used to feel islands out beyond the horizon by the way the waves bounced off of them, like living sonar.  I figure I’m just doing the same."

I’m thinking Kawai isn’t a Japanese name, then?  It doesn’t mean you’re cute?

The crewman grinned back out of an impossibly craggy and lopsided face.  No ma’am.  Ain’t never been cute.  It’s Hawaiian by way of Astronesia.  My ancestors took the talent of locating rocks in the middle of nowhere out to the asteroid belt.  He paused a moment.  Are you saying you felt something, ma’am?  Is that why you walked in there just now?

"Did you feel anything, crewman?"

About twenty minutes back?  He made a face.  Maybe.  I figured perhaps a fleet shuttle had left dock.  Something small close in to us.

Or something much bigger or faster suddenly turned up a million kilometres away.  She nodded at her own logic.  Or maybe just something small.  Maybe just something small and really inoffensive.  Maybe a chunk of dust a metre from the aerial.  Fuck.  Yes, fuck, yes.  Maybe I need some sleep.  Good night Kawaii

He grinned.  "That’s ‘Kawai’, ma’am.  It means ‘The Water’."

Okay Kawaii.

***

When she slept, she didn’t sleep soundly.  She seldom did nowadays.

In her sessions with the Post Trauma doctor, she’d started referring to the dreams as re-runs, which was exactly what they were.  The exact battle being re-run varied, but she hadn’t been in enough battles for them to vary too much.  If she’d been in more battles out at Polaris, she wouldn’t have been alive.

The re-runs, she reasoned, were her body trying to wake her up, to tell her she was in pain and needed to be up and running from a threat.  Usually the threat her body thought she needed to run from was the phantom pain she still felt from the ribs, kidney and length of large intestine that had been grown from her own stem cells in a naval convalescent ward and reattached to her in several lengthy operations.  The presence of the new organs didn’t mean that the old ones didn’t still occasionally scream to her that they’d been ripped away.  The re-runs were supposed to take her through each battle right up to the time it nearly killed her, when she would wake up panting and covered in sweat, often reaching for a weapon.  It was for that reason that she’d moved all sharp objects out of arm’s reach of her bunk.

This time she was re-running Convoy 238, three weeks in.  The first thing that hit her was the sheer soul-destroying horror of fatigue.  Before the dreams had started, she wouldn’t have believed it was possible to feel so tired she felt like putting a gun to her head whilst she was asleep.  Her sleeping body was shrieking at her to sleep.  She was having to think about every task three times to check she hadn’t mistakenly warmed up a swarm without opening its firing tube.

They were approaching the manifold exit.  The exit that was the end of the journey, that meant rest, recuperation, relaxation.  A lifebelt to a drowning woman.

Everything was quiet in the control room.  The Unicorn’s bridge had been smaller than the Cicero’s, with the boss man sitting almost shoulder-to-shoulder with the other officers, very little room to manoeuvre under heavy G.  On her first day on a CosmoPolity warship, it had been explained to Asher that big ships travelling under heavy thrust were best thought of as towerblocks in space, the gravity acting downwards in the direction of thrust.  The bridge on the Unicorn had been where the fortieth floor executive lavatory would have been, inside the ship, protected by armour and wet storage, nested within water and halon tanks.  It had been about the same size she imagined an executive lavatory might be, and right now, after three weeks in fast space, it smelled about the same.

There was the Boss, Commander Paine Bashi, a big man like a big dog, hardly knowing his sheer size terrified many of his subordinates.  There was the SensCom, Barbuda, the boss’s exact opposite, a tiny, wiry little guy who had absolutely every mental requirement for being a commander, but who loved puzzling out the reality of a solar system from what a sensor sweep was telling him too much to ever buck for promotion.  And the Point Defence Com was Rashid, a rating who had only been propelled into her current position by the fact that every senior officer in Point Defence was currently either sedated or screaming at the walls in the infirmary – a scared little escapee from some unimaginable sky-slum in Karachi, hoping the big complicated starship wasn’t about to be expected to shoot at anything.  ECMCom, meanwhile, was Han, a Navy woman for ten generations with lithium hydroxide for blood, filling in at the Countermeasures desk because every single crewman with that specialty had fallen sick.  She was swearing at her instruments and had a manual open on one of her workstation screens.

Barbuda was reporting small inconsistencies in the fast space / slowspace watershed.  Those inconsistencies often cropped up around manifolds, he explained.  That much was true.  Five minutes later, he would be dead.

Everything was happening exactly according to schedule.  Any minute now, Rashid would sit up at her screen and say ‘That’s odd’ as a thousand tiny micrometeoroids, far too many for the point defence guns to handle, suddenly appeared on the Space Junk monitor.  She’d turn to Barbuda and point at the screen dumbly like a dog barking at a kite caught in a tree.  Barbuda would tell her it was nothing, and grunt that That ‘Roid Scan Utility Was Fuller Of Bugs Than A Sindhi Whore, knowing full well where Rashid came from as he said it.

Then he would suddenly realize his mistake and shout out -

EVASIVE MANOEUVRES!

- way, way too late.  And everyone would realize that the micrometeoroids weren’t micrometeoroids at all.

She felt fusion bomb bursts hit the unprotected hull, and faced a decision – do I concentrate on my suit seals, or do I try to locate and kill the enemy raider?  And she decided to hit her suit seals.  And it was the right decision, every manual said it was the right decision, she had to ensure she continued to be nominal.  But every time, regardless, she woke up with that image of the Primary Bad Shit fire control, winking untouched and scarlet.  She’d had a chance to get back at them, and she’d let it slip away.  She saw the radial hull buttress bend like taffy back towards the bulkhead under the impact, absorbing millions of calories of heat in a microsecond, buckling back toward her, slicing white hot into the fibres of her suit just under the ribcage -

Then, as she always did, she shot upright gasping for air, covered in sweat.

Everything was quiet, apart from the myriad tiny noises of life on board ship.  The hum of the oxygen recycler.  The WHOOSH of a shipboard toilet.

She flopped back on to the bed.  The severed nerves on the left hand side of her ribcage were hurting.

God damn it, she told the ceiling.

This was the first time she’d opened her eyes in this room in the pitch dark.  On the ceiling, someone had scrawled, in luminous paint, the words:

WELCOME TO CYGNUS, BITCH

WE REMEMBER THE PLOUGH

Yeah, she told the ceiling.  You and me both.

***

Cygnus is one of the interfaces between CosmoPolity and Barbarian space, said the teacher.  She wasn’t a human being, of course, but a holographic expert system pretending to be a sweet little old lady dressed in two-decades-old fashion.  Can anyone else name any other barbarian interfaces?

A small hand went up.  THE NORTH!

The teacher smiled.  She would have smiled even if a pupil had been pissing through her holo-image.  Yes, Cyan, that’s right.  The North is a major barbarian interface.  But does anyone know what we mean by ‘barbarian’?

Nobody knew.  The teacher beamed.  Around the class, a world of three dimensional holographic art squirmed and formed.  They were standing on a mountaintop, looking down upon a ruined temple in the Doric style.

I KNOW!  I KNOW!  A small hand rose. 

Yes, Bolivar?

Barbarians aren’t human?

"Some barbarian nations are not human.  Most in our immediate vicinity, though, are biologically as human as you or I.  We should not get caught up on that rather negative-sounding word, ‘barbarian’.  We call neighbouring human civilizations barbarian because, although they might not yet be civilized, the CosmoPolity has recognized that they have the capacity to become civilized."

What happens to them then, ma’am?

The little old lady smiled again.  Why, then, Felix, the CosmoPolity will absorb them into itself.

"What if they don’t want to be absorbed into the ‘polity, ma’am?"

Bless you, Yan, that would be an impossibility.  If a culture didn’t want to be absorbed into the CosmoPolity, by definition, it wouldn’t yet be civilized.

"Do alien nations get absorbed into the ‘polity, ma’am?"

There was a pause for Difficult Question processing.  This has never historically happened, Bolivar.  But there’s nothing to say it never will.  Alien cultures usually have very different social structures to human ones.  With regard to attaining civilization, they have more of a mountain to climb.  Now, does anyone know how so many different human societies came to exist throughout space?

Another hand rose.  The owner of this hand was more confident.  Sublight drive, she said.

Thank you.  It took human beings from Earth many thousands of years to invent a means of effectively travelling faster than the speed of light.  For all those years, humanity was pent up in Earth’s solar system, massively overpopulated, constantly at odds with itself.  And throughout all that time, elements of the various different societies humankind was fragmented into back then kept attempting to escape.  Using massive, unwieldy, dangerous vessels that took literal human lifetimes to dawdle across the distances between the stars, they colonized adjacent systems.  In the time it took for humanity on Earth to discover Sevenleague drive, in fact, the systems they had colonized grew in population enough to send out sublight colonization missions of their own.  By the time Earth’s solar system was united under one government – our CosmoPolity - and finally happened upon fast space drive, most of mankind’s immediate stellar neighbourhood was already inhabited by humans, and most of those human societies were already thousands of years old.  Now, does anyone know any of the differences between a civilized society and a barbarian one?  The teacher swept her hand out to indicate the temple rubble they were all now sitting in.  These stones should give you a clue as to who first started making these sorts of definitions.

Again, no hands went up.

"Well, ‘barbarian’ is a very old word.  It was invented by the Ancient Greeks, and it originally simply meant someone who didn’t speak Greek very well, or maybe not even at all.  To the Ancient Greeks, barbarians just mumbled like babies, barbarbarbarbarbar.  Of course, that wasn’t very nice of the Ancient Greeks at all – human beings speak many languages.  What the Ancient Greeks really meant, of course, was that the people they called barbarians were uncivilized and unsophisticated, and didn’t share Greek values like democracy, learning, and scientific method.  But those Ancient Greeks weren’t perfect – they were a slave owning society, they were warlike, and they placed virtually no value on women at all.  Around the class, bloody virtual warfare was now going on, as two groups of soldiers with round shields and crested iron helmets battled each other for command of the now unruined temple.  There was blood, there were internal organs, and there was little attempt at concealment of either.  Small voices in the class shrieked and squeaked.  Nowadays we consider ourselves to be a great deal more sophisticated than the Ancient Greeks, and we have very strict rules concerning what we consider to be barbarism.  Can anyone tell us what those rules are?"

Another hand went up.  Democracy! followed a voice, one millisecond after the hand.

That’s right, Nelson, Democracy is one, though that was quite an easy one as I just said it myself a moment ago.  Can anyone name any others?

No-one could.  The teacher smiled her way through the crowd, searching for hands, before saying:

"There are, of course, many others.  She counted them off on phantasmagorial fingers.  One – independent accountability.  There must be an independent branch of the judiciary, accountable to no-one in government but only to the people, whose job it is to countermand the activities of the government if they break the rules of the state.  We call these people the tribunes, and this is a tribunal starship.  Does anyone know where the word tribune comes from?"

Deathly silence ensued.  The teacher beamed happily.  Well, it comes from a society a little younger than Ancient Greece.  It comes from Ancient Rome.  She clicked her fingers, and, although the holosavagery continued, it was no longer men with round shields who were fighting, but men with square tower shields emblazoned with the letters S.P.Q.R.  "The tribunes were officers of the Ancient Roman state, directly elected by the people, capable of halting legal actions and judgements, of preventing laws from being enacted, even of preventing the country from going to war.  The Roman Republic was notoriously corrupt, and the tribunes were needed to act as a counterbalance to men who would have cheerfully sold out the entire nation for personal profit.  Today’s Tribunal Service does exactly the same job, and it’s this ship’s job to make sure the comptrollers of civilized space govern it appropriately, without bribery, corruption or oppression."  The holographic images swam and morphed from a fight scene in the ancient Mediterranean to a depiction of the bridge