by M. D. Cooper
“All hands, abandon ship!” Chan bellowed into the intercom at almost the same moment, remotely releasing their crash restraints.
Then there was a howl of air escaping as a bulkhead to the right dissolved.
The picoswarm was so numerous now, it could be seen with the naked eye, a cloud of tiny locusts tearing consoles, hulls, and spacers into molecular particulates.
Sini, along with Chan, instinctively raised an arm as a shield.
Then the hand at the end of that arm disappeared.
There was no blood: it was disassembled by the swarm as fast as their heart pumped it. Only then did searing pain strike up their arm, seconds behind the ravenous swarm of microscopic robots.
Sini/Chan died screaming as the flesh was stripped from their bones.
Only the [ERROR: UNEXPECTED END OF FILE] that suddenly blinked on her HUD reminded Sini it was a recording.
She barely made it to the toilet in time.
“Paska,” she mumbled, before retching again.
CHAPTER FIVE
STELLAR DATE: 11.03.8927 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: HWS Imperatrix, approaching Aurora
REGION: Bollam’s World System, Bollam’s World Federation
Sini jerked awake, gasping in her bed, frantically checking to make sure her arm, her body was still there.
Three days on, and the nightmares wouldn’t go away.
She glanced at the clock. 0530. Too late to get any more sleep, too early to start her shift. So she showered and pulled on a clean working uniform, and munched on a bowl of rice porridge she’d ordered from the galley as she reviewed paperwork.
Tried to.
Five of ten battle squadrons in all had checked in, not counting Imperatrix and BatRon 66, giving her seventy-seven dreadnoughts, plus nine formations of smaller vessels—seven consisting of destroyers, two of cruisers. Stationed as it was along the Eridanus Frontier, the contested rimward edge of the Hegemony of Worlds, the Fifth Fleet had in the last twenty years been bulked up to twice the usual size of a space force battle fleet, shipping almost triple the population of Sini’s hometown of Tissikukkulat on Ahti.
And it's not enough, she couldn't help but think.
Sini realized she’d been reading the same page for five minutes, and frustratedly clicked the screen off. She then noted that she hadn’t even tasted the now-empty bowl of riispuuro, and it was her favorite—so much so, she’d made sure the galley on every one of her ships carried the ingredients.
She pressed a palm to her face, still picturing Chan’s death in her mind.
The ISF. A bunch of temporally displaced colonists, probably outnumbered four-to-one in manpower alone, had defeated all comers in a battle that would be armchair-quarterbacked for centuries. This Tanis Richards fought with a brand of brilliant ruthlessness, and her people were highly motivated.
There was the Intrepid, still fleeing ahead of her own squadron of twelve dreadnoughts. She'd arrived so much sooner than the rest of the fleet, but at such an inconvenient jump point…
There was that fuel planet, Aurora. The Intrepid would enter its atmosphere by 0730.
Two fish, one spear.
* * * * *
Sini strode into CIC, jaw set with grim determination.
This unleashed an all-too-familiar controlled pandemonium. Klaxons howled throughout the ship, and the officer-of-the-watch announced over the intercom, “Action stations, action stations. Set Condition One throughout the ship. This is not a drill, repeat, this is not a drill.”
Senator Ceres, Fleet Captain Jaumet, and Sini’s aide-de-camp Captain Lasse burst into the CIC about five minutes later.
“Admiral, are you nuts?”
“Well, that didn’t take long,” she remarked to no one in particular. “Captain, shouldn’t you be on the bridge?”
Jaumet growled and put a projection of the battle plan up on the main holotank. “You’re trying to destroy Aurora, right? You do it this way, you’re going to cause a thermonuclear explosion that’ll make that Erewhon clusterfuck look like a firecracker!”
“Which is exactly the point, Captain,” she shot back, taking back control of the holotank with a thought and highlighting the graviton generators. “Thea, care to explain?”
“They’re enlarging the planet and enhancing the convection currents with the generators,” her AI explained through the speakers. “You blow them up in some random order, you’ll get an explosion, but you’ll get an uneven plasma plume that will shoot off into space—”
“So we destroy the resource but minimize civilian casualties,” Lasse agreed.
“Not this time,” Sini retorted. “I want that brown dwarf to go up like a nova, because of this.” She highlighted an icon on the hologram, that was approaching Aurora’s upper atmosphere.
“…the Intrepid? You’re trying to—”
“Yes. It’s the only way we have to bring that monster down.”
“Bring it down? I thought our orders were to capture it!” Ceres cried.
“My orders, Mr. Senator, read ‘capture or destroy’,” she snarled, “ ‘by any means deemed necessary by the Commander, ASTSF 5th Fleet’. Who, in case you forgot, is me.”
“You can’t—”
“I can, and I will. You, on the other hand, Mr. Senator, are aboard this ship as a guest, and I respectfully remind you that you are not in my chain of command and you do not have authority to issue orders, either to myself, or to any other officer of the AST Space Force aboard this vessel.”
“My constituents paid for this ship, and they pay your salary! I won’t sit here and—”
“Master Sergeant!” she barked to one of the NCOs, cutting Ceres off.
“Sir!” the dark, big-boned woman said.
“I’m afraid the good senator has become quite exhausted; would you be so kind as to escort him to his quarters?”
“Sir! Yes, sir!” The NCO took the senator firmly by the arm and frog-marched him to the door.
“You can’t do this! I’ll have all your commissions—”
Sini triggered the blast door with a thought across the Link, and the senator’s protests were abruptly cut off.
“You shouldn’t have done that, sir,” Lasse remarked.
“Probably not. But you all saw the simulations,” she said, looking around at her staff. “We concentrate enough fire, we can kill their fighters, maybe even their cruisers. But to board and capture the Intrepid? Nine out of ten scenarios that don’t give the damn thing those shields show us taking sixty percent casualties or worse, just from the pico. And if they do have those shields, we can pound on it until they kill every last one of us and… ei tule lasta eikä paskaa!” she finally snapped.
She swallowed, leaning against the holotank. Jaumet and Lasse looked at e
ach other and at Thea’s avatar, projected in smaller form off one of the consoles.
“You’re sure there’s no other way?” Jaumet asked.
Thea put in, “I have to agree with the admiral on this one, Jaumet. I don’t think it’s worth trying to take that ship intact. But if we can collapse the planet all at once, the explosion should destroy it.”
“You’ve done the math?” Lasse asked.
“Backwards and forwards.”
Sini pushed herself upright. “I won’t risk all our lives for a snowball’s chance in Hell. We kill the graviton generators, we kill the planet, we kill the Intrepid.”
Jaumet submitted. “Sir. Yes sir.”
“Dismissed.”
Lasse took his seat as the flag captain turned on a heel and smartly stalked out.
Sini didn’t dignify that with a response.
Thea did, though.
* * * * *
“The Intrepid is entering the planet's atmosphere now, sir.”
“Thank you, Commander.”
Sini accepted a cup of coffee off a tray proffered by a petty officer. She checked the timer. The entire Fifth Fleet, save the lost BatRon 171, was now on the battlenet, but only a quarter were nearing Aurora.
They needed twenty-nine more minutes to get enough ships in position.
One of the junior officers—Lieutenant Abizaid, that’s his name—put some music on. Old Earth classical, Chávez’s Symphony No. 3.
With little else to do, Sini listened quietly. It wasn’t her favorite; she preferred the Ahtian folk rock scene. But it took her mind off second-guessing herself.
The minutes ticked by. The ships were straggling. They’d make it, but it would be a near thing.
“Admiral, we’re reading activity in the cloud layer,” an officer announced, zooming in the screen onto a patch of gas that even now was starting to roil harder than its surrounds.
That ancient beast of a ship surfaced from the yellowy-orange gas patch like one of the great baleen whales that roamed Ahti’s oceans. Up close, the Intrepid was actually quite beautiful: four great thrusters, each the size of a terrestrial city, pushing a long hull featuring two cylindrical habitation sections. Over those, the retaining frame peaked on the dorsal surface like the roof of a cathedral. Its length was spanned above and below by great flying arches from a castle-like structure atop the engine section, like the poop deck of a seafaring ship.
They didn’t build ships like that anymore. Next to that, the boxy, dark gray slab that was the Imperatrix seemed almost boring.
“She’s accelerating.”
We’re too late.
“Ready in ten seconds!”
Sini switched to her Link for speed.
The firing tones for all six missile launchers sounded in unison once, twice.
Even as the salvo of preprogrammed RMs belched from the Imperatrix’s launch rails and accelerated away on their blindingly bright fusion torches, seeking their targets, Sini knew she’d failed. By the time the gas giant blew, the colony ship would already be too far away.
The first half of the salvo struck three of the gargantuan platforms. The range was too close for kinetics, so Jaumet had loaded nukes. Megaton-range blasts shredded the platform’s gravity shield.
The second half, riding the tail of the first, struck a fraction of a second later, punching into bare hull with a hardened armor-piercing shell before blowing.
It wasn’t quite the single unified blast across the planet that Sini had planned, but it was close enough. The wave of explosions crossed its surface in milliseconds, and the roiling clouds below grew even stormier.
Thea made a strangled sound.
Sini mentally gave the AI’s avatar a quizzical look.
The planet was collapsing as predicted. The upper layers were starting to slam closed on the more compressed lower layers, like Ilmarinen’s hammer against an anvil. And Sini realized their mistake as the Imperatrix’s AP thrusters lit up to climb back out of the gravity well.
So much mass.
So much gravity.
So much potential energy.
The world exploded.
The portals to the dark layer that had been opened by the graviton platforms were feeding on the energy and staying open.
The core of the planet, fed by the wisps of dark matter passing through, compressed below the schwarzschild radius.
Amid the chaos, HWS Mikasa and Scharnhorst moved to pursue the fleeing Intrepid. The shockwave of the exploding planet caught the two dreadnoughts broadside an eyeblink before it whipped across the Imperatrix and BatRon 66. Their gravity shields held, barely, but now the monster was awake, and it was hungry.
Sini could only watch, helplessly frozen to her seat, as the two dreadnoughts lost their battle with gravity and started to fall. One of Aurora’s moons, a nearly Earth-sized rock, went next. Eighteen hapless cruisers and destroyers and five dreadnoughts fighting the black hole were caught below it, struck down by a steamroller of sextillions of tons of pulverized stone.
Damn me, I’ve killed us all.
The sheer incongruity of the AI personating a DI broke through.
<‘Ranger’? I’m an admiral now.>
The dead. So many dead, following her orders.
But the ships that hadn’t reached the planet were breaking off, staying clear. Some of the ships that were higher were slowly but surely climbing out, and the Intrepid was already well away.
We need more thrust, Sini thought. “Bridge, CIC. Rear RM tubes, load thermonukes.”
“Dammit, why didn’t I think of that?!” Jaumet cried over the audible comms. “Felix! Disengage missile safeties and reinforce aft shields! Load high-yield nukes, sequential launch!”
“Fire, aft tube!”
A single relativistic missile belched out of its tube and was immediately caught by gravity, the gunport in Imperatrix’s gravity shield barely opening fast enough as it fell, and then closing behind it just in time to take the brunt of a ten-megaton blast. Then another one, and another right behind it. It was an impromptu Orion drive.
It still wasn’t enough. Their altitude was increasing too slowly, and below them, more ships were starting to fall in. If they kept this up, they’d run out of warheads long before they were clear.
Sini overrode the blocks that restricted the AI’s actions outside her head, and felt Thea’s presence reach out tendrils to join up with the Imperatrix’s shipboard AI.
How many processor cycles it took between the two AIs to crack the factory lockouts and rewrite the controller firmware, no human could know, but they passed almost imperceptibly quick for Sini.
“All hands, brace for acceleration, repeat, brace for acceleration,” Jaumet announced over the intercom.
Sini felt a whale land on her chest.
She couldn’t move a bit. It felt like at least eight gravities, but they weren’t accelerating anywhere near that fast, which meant….
Their efforts began to bear fruit; slowly but surely, the Imperatrix and BatRon 66 gained altitude, meter by meter, klick by klick. The digits rose lazily at first, then with increasing speed. Other ships were clawing their way out of the gravity well, too.
Somehow, Sini didn’t feel the relief she thought she would.
Aurora had started with a rather heavy axial tilt, over fifty degrees, and the spin of the black hole was causing the axis to wobble. And with the axis wobbled the relativistic jet, carving a swathe of destruction through space. The stream of particles and radiation whipped across the remnants of the Fifth Fleet like the fist of a drunken god, narrowly missing the Imperatrix and reducing her companions Shaka Zulu and the Defiant to a fine powder.