Your Dagger ship has your six, your twelve, your whole sphere of existence. It blasts anything that means you harm. It can smell trouble in a vacuum. Not literally. Well, literally it could smell your fear in the cockpit. Intuitive scientists had programmed a fine imitation of intuition into these machines, which was how John Henry figured out in time that someone had fed him false directives.
The Daggers were far from the Intersection now. Their trusty—supposedly trusty—ships constantly scanned all around for anything else coming in. Not that anything could track them through a warp.
The Rutogs also traveled by means of warps, so you might not see them until they were on you. Your Dagger ship was meant to detect them first and carry you out of harm’s way.
Your Dagger was your shelter, your steed, your medic, your best friend. It would die for you, but you don't risk anything on its account. The Dagger ship is just a machine. It exists to let you do your job—to defend these United States against all threats anywhere anytime.
And they really meant any time.
Your ship is a tactician. You are the strategists. You give the objective. The Dagger ship will make it happen.
Your Dagger will disobey a self-destructive order unless you give it a good reason for your sacrifice. It can read your physical state, and has some clue of your emotional state, but it’s not a mind reader. It will never spend your life without a superb reason.
They guard, guide, watch over you with singular devotion. It was easy to think that they love you though you know it's just elegant programming.
You can't help but love it like a brother, a mother, a wife, a dog, a horse, a magic dragon. Your own ship is always a he or a she, never an it.
She carries you and always gets you home. (Mel Rittenhouse named his ship Sherry). But he has your back, your up, your down, your sideways. (Zack named his John Henry). Your Dagger ship will die before he or she will let anything get you—and you'd better let him die for you.
You get yourself civilian real quick if you start protecting your ship.
Zack heard clicking. Someone was coding a report with his com un-muted.
Zack spoke into the open com. “Never known Rutogs to be this smart.”
“You and me,” Ix Chel said back.
Normal Rutog behavior was to fly en masse into human space and blunder into the mines. They’d been doing it for decades. The aliens had never showed any ability to consider how their enemy might be thinking. “Rutogs aren't supposed to be able to anticipate,” Morris Umber said, taking it personal.
"Yeah. Make sure to include a message to Intelligence that they need to re-assess that shovel-load," said Gretch.
"Roger Wilco," Umber muttered.
It was pretty clear that the Rutogs had conceived the concept of Otherness.
They'd been at this for forty years now. "They're learning," Zack said.
"They're not supposed to do that,” Gretch said, the irony in his voice heavy as a brick. “The experts said so."
"The experts left out the time element. Over time the Rutogs learn. Why wouldn't they?” Umber said. “They're space travelers, not the village idiots. They figured out how to corrupt our machine controls.”
“That's not ever what you want an enemy to do, now is it," Zack said.
Umber came back, "What I’m saying is that counting on an enemy's ineptitude will quickly get you dead."
The Daggers' auto-logs had recorded every aspect of their assault, including their own ships’ betrayal. Morris Umber loaded the assembled reports into a data dart. He sent the dart over to Lieutenant Paul Rittenhouse who composed a scathing epistle to the Intelligence section and shoved the report ungently into the data dart. Then he transmitted to the team, "Last call for mail. Anyone want to say Hi Mom?"
They all did. They transmitted their messages over to Rittenhouse's Dagger. Rittenhouse loaded the messages, closed up the data dart, checked that its tracer was active, and shot the dart back toward the Intersection.
The report and the Hi Moms wouldn't arrive back through the Intersection into the Sirius star system for five years.
But the only other choice was to send nothing.
2.
The first Dagger units had been formed during the Rim Bloc conflict, back when normal space was the only space anyone knew, and the Milky Way was the only galaxy humankind ever explored, and Rutogs were beyond anyone's worst tequila-washed nightmare.
Dagger Teams One through Four had been surgical strike teams, trained to get in stealthily, retrieve data or hostages or enemy persons of interest without incurring civilian casualties and get out.
There was little stealthy about the modern Daggers.
This alien conflict was a different kind of fight.
The United States and the other human nations were not sending an army into enemy space. They didn't know the ground and they had no interest in capturing territory. Dagger Team Nine was over here to neutralize the alien threat with extreme prejudice. Kill the enemy. Destroy the alien war machine.
Each of the six Dagger ships carried six missiles armed with a Stodolsky metananovirus. The metananovirus spread rapidly through the aliens to infect all contiguous parts of the alien and solidify the gaseous Rutog into a dead solid. The boffins had tested it on the Rutogs which infested the ruined space stations of the Sirius system. The results had been stellar.
The Stodolsky metananovirus was species-specific and self-limiting. When the virus ran out of Rutog, the virus went inert. The resultant compound was dense. Removal became a mining operation, but that was a small trade off.
The Daggers hadn’t deployed the metananovirus at the chokepoint. They had orders to deliver it to a strategic address only.
As Gort put it, "Don't spend it on the little shit. Use it to win the war."
There were other ways to kill Rutogs. Rutogs burned easily enough. But hitting them with flamethrowers was like bailing out an ocean. There were too many of them.
Dagger Team Nine had orders to deliver the metananovirus into major battle groups and to release it into the atmosphere of the Rutog homeworld. That meant finding the Rutog homeworld.
The leader of Dagger Team Nine was Lieutenant Paul Rittenhouse, the only officer in this unit. Ritt came from money. He was a gentleman and always made sure his opponents, other than Rutogs, got medical attention when he was done with them. Even though Ritt was a lieutenant, he sirred everyone—enlisteds, officers, janitors, the bum in the alley, and the rats who claimed to work for a living. Rittenhouse had bailed out of divinity college in North Carolina to go forth and read the Book of Revelation to all enemies of the United States.
Pilot Calvin Gretch flew in the second spot. Everyone called him Retch. How could you not? Gretch was at the upper limit for height for a pilot. Had arms like an orangutan. Guys didn't come any whiter or blonder than Gretch without having red eyes to match. Gretch's eyes were pale ice-chip blue. He was a natural shot. If you're on the ground and all your computerized systems are AWOL you just give Gretch an antique weapon—a rock, a spear—and he'll find the target. That talent was kind of wasted in a space battle, but the instant shoot-don’t shoot instinct wasn't.
Pilot Morris Umber was the one holding the brain for the group. He had a science and technology background, but no degree to show for it. University was a bore. Umber was going to get rich inventing stuff in the private sector when he got too slow to pilot a Dagger ship.
Pilot Ix Chel Parras was the only she-Dagger to date. The he-to-she ratio in the regular Space Corps was about half and half. Endurance, lightning reflexes, and quick thinking were more important than brawn in conventional space fighters. A regular Space Corps pilot wasn't meant to ever come out of his cockpit in the course of duty. Dagger jocks were expected to be brutes in or out of their machines. Dagger pilots needed to be able to run carrying their heaviest teammate and load his injured self into his cockpit.
Ix Chel had the brawn. She had a majestic face, like something that ought to be car
ved into a cliff. Zack supposed you could call it a good looking face, but looking at it you just don't think about her having any girl parts. And she wasn't thinking about using them around this lot either. Just to make that clear early on she came swaggering into training with a salami hanging from the crotch of her pants. She fit in just fine and it didn't surprise most guys that she made it all the way to full fledged Dagger jock. It didn't make no nevermind if Ix Chel was an innie or an outtie. She could bench press Zack. Zack knew that for a fact, because he'd dared her do it.
Pilot Gort Neumann was built like an armored assault vehicle, and you had to ask yourself, what did Gort really need a ship for? Gort had hauled himself up from nothing, became a pro bare knuckle fighter, and soon enough Gort was pissing money, collecting race cars, and procreating with actresses. Gort was an adrenalin addict. He got bored easy. The ring was too safe. It didn't mean anything. And he really wanted a job where he could shoot bad guys and blow shit up.
Pilot Zack Cade. If he had to define himself in one word it would be Patriot. Zack's Dad had done his best to discourage Zack from the military. That backfired about as hard as anything ever blew back at a man. Zack landed in the most elite of all military cadres, the Daggers, the most admired, feared, envied, storied, imitated, and impersonated unit in the US armed forces.
Zack wondered what Dad would think if he'd lived to see this day.
Living to the end of this day was Zack's immediate challenge. He was deep down Alice's rabbit hole now.
It was a different universe over here. On this side, the Intersection wasn’t in the Sirius system. It sat in the middle of astronomical nowhere. It wasn't near any planets. It wasn't in a star system unless you counted those two planet-sized black spheres that orbited the Intersection like heraldic charcoal bricks.
The first Rutogs had come through the Intersection into the Sirius star system before anyone knew the Intersection was there.
It was some forty years ago now that the first gaseous aliens came out of nowhere, opened up the space stations in the Sirius system and let all the people out. The aliens took up residence in the hollowed-out space stations like squatters in a ruined shanty town. No one knew where they were coming from. People just assumed they were dropping out of warps from some other part of the Milky Way. Only when huge scintillating red orange masses of Rutog cloud ships came pouring out of absolute nothingness did anyone locate the two-dimensional Intersection. The Intersection was visible from only one angle. No one was sure how long the Intersection had been there or if the Rutog created it or if the Rutog just stumbled through it.
The B star of the Sirius system had gone supernova in recorded human history. The Dog Star shone so bright in Earth day skies that the ancient Greeks thought it added heat to the August days. That was how they got the name the Dog Days. Sirius had shone big and red in the Earth sky in the time of Ptolemy.
That nova had since collapsed to a white dwarf. Sirius B was Earth-sized now but with the mass of a sun. No nuclear reactions were going on inside it. Sirius B was just a big old campfire.
The collapse of Sirius B may have had something to do with the formation of the Intersection inside the Sirius system, but that was just a guess without any data behind it.
Human science was long familiar with forming warps to cross interstellar distances, but the Intersection was in its own class of this-is-not-happening.
A consortium of human planetary nations set up a blockade around the Intersection with a mandate to kill everything that comes out of that hole.
The enemy kept coming.
Decades ago the US resolved to take the battle to the enemy.
Dagger Team Five advanced through the Intersection and vanished. The Daggers were meant to assess the battleground and fire at any target of opportunity while collecting data of what was there, then turn around and report home.
The sortie was meant to last twenty minutes. The Daggers failed to show.
The ships’ programmed auto-return failsafes failed.
Twenty minutes stretched into months.
Candles were lit and hymns were sung on the anniversary of the Daggers’ crossing, when it appeared to a certainty that they'd gone to angels. Dagger ships didn't carry air, food, fuel, and supplies for a one-year tour.
Scout drones were sent through. Someone should've sent those in first. The scout drones were programmed to collect data for five minutes, turn around, and report back. Those failed to return, too.
That was the end of sending anything through the Intersection.
It was to be a defensive war after all. Massive towers and many space fortresses bristling with weapons sprang up around the Intersection under the flags of many nations, all their guns pointed at the anomaly. The whole international lot of them altogether were called the Citadel.
The Americans were putting out flags and rehearsing the hymns for a five-year memorial service to honor the tragic Dagger Team Five.
Then Dagger Team Five came back.
The lead ship broke through one of the ice garlands positioned in front of the Intersection.
The Citadel fortresses nearly shot them. The fortresses tried to, but their firing mechanisms balked on detecting the Friendly signal from the Daggers' onboard tracers.
The six Dagger ships leapt out of the Intersection wearing scorch marks on their spent firing platforms. Their magazines of space poniards were exhausted. Their flamethrowers were out of gas.
From the perspective of space normal, Dagger Team Five had been missing just about five years—exactly four years, three hundred fifty-eight days, thirteen hours, five minutes and eighteen seconds. Close enough to say five years.
The Dagger ships' internal chronometers had only clocked twenty minutes. The pilots didn't need to shave.
The ships reported that the laws of physics operated the same over there as they did here. It was only the Intersection itself that appeared to defy the law.
The pilots reported that their weapons and ships also functioned the same over there as they did here. The Daggers had shot a lot of Rutogs. They reported the presence of gaseous structures guarding the pass on the other side. Rutog weaponry was ineffective against the Dagger ships. Rutog clouds ships burned as easily on that side as Rutog cloud ships burned on this side.
After the Daggers' debriefing, the pilots were hot to go back in. They'd had no idea how long they'd been gone. They were massively unhappy to find that they'd skipped over the last five years of human events and that their mothers had cried.
They were mortally embarrassed at the decorations on their graves. Last thing you want to see on coming home was your own boxed flag on your mom and dad's mantel.
Soon after the return of Dagger Team Five, the drone scouts started returning as well—five years from the time they left. The drones brought only sixty minutes worth of observations from the other side. They'd spent sixty minutes worth of fuel. Their onboard tracers kept them from being annihilated by the guns of the Citadel on re-entry.
It became apparent that the length of a man's or machine's stay over there in Rutog space had zero effect on the duration of the traveler's absence from real spacetime.
Anything that crossed the Intersection returned five years from when it left.
What lay beyond the Intersection wasn't any place inside the Milky Way. You couldn't even find the Milky Way on the map that the scouts had assembled on the other side.
From the military standpoint, the major fact to come out of Dagger Team Five's return was that crossing to the other side was survivable. The return trip was also survivable. A defensive war wasn't the only option any more.
Humanity really could take the war home to the Rutog.
According to the terrestrial calendar, Dagger Team Five's tour of duty was up. It was past up. Their enlistment period was up. Space Corps Command asked if the team would go back in for a four-month tour, understanding that there was a hard possibility that they would miss another five years here in real space. Da
gger Team Five agreed to go. They demanded to go.
Zack Cade understood that. Those guys had to get away from all the wreaths and memorials, and from that damned song. Crap, someone had composed a song for them.
Dagger Team Five flew through the Intersection at the head of a computerized, unmanned invasion force.
Dagger Team Five re-emerged from Rutog space five years later, aged a few minutes but broken and battered this time. A mass of Rutogs had been waiting at the chokepoint and slammed them the instant they crossed into Rutog space. The whole battle had taken minutes. The pilots hadn't been bleeding long when they arrived in real space five years later. The passage through the Intersection lasted the blink of the only conscious eye. The rest of the team was comatose. Their ships had made the decision to turn around and come home.
The medics were able to save all the injured pilots. The Dagger ships were repaired.
Earth and her colonial allies bulked up the fortifications around the Intersection. The Citadel guns mowed down anything that came through the Intersection not carrying tracers.
Dagger Team Six failed to accomplish anything that computerized forces couldn't.
For decades no more manned craft were sent through.
No nation was going to commit armies to the other side without timely recon.
When an accumulation of data collected by drones pointed to a strategic target, Dagger Team Eight was sent in to destroy it. It was the first human assault in decades.
Months later, here was Dagger Team Nine arrived with a major mechanized force, which had immediately joined the other side.
Team Nine had survived the initial disaster. They were here to kill Rutogs.
Deep into Rutog space and still traveling, the Daggers circled the wagons.
The six Dagger ships joined up, gunside out, connecting their sternside panels to form a hexagonal space among them with a flat floor. The ships extended a tented overhead, sealed the enclosure and pumped in a shared atmo. Gravity was supplied by the steady acceleration of the six docked spacecraft in the direction of their communal topside. Earlier Dagger teams had named the shared enclosure their space yurt.
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