by Joshua Guess
“How many ships are they growing, do you think?”
Jax had of course been taking measurements and making approximations, so a range of answers popped up in my HUD. “From what we’ve seen so far, each one of those things has thirty ships on it. Maybe more, but we can’t see through the water very far.”
The implications hit home. Everyone did the basic math in their head, then reconciled those numbers with what we knew of this facility and others like it. The main passage served as an artery to feed the branches, and reached out a hundred kilometers. We had only covered a fraction of is length, and it was only one of several dozen such facilities on the planet. Tens of thousands of ships being formed, shells only needing to be filled with power plants and other fabricated parts.
It was the fleet meant to wipe out human life on Earth. Oh, the Gaethe might not have meant to take it so far when they invaded, but the pressure put on them by the siege of their other worlds made the Earth the only real springboard for any future expansion.
It made me feel a little better about the bomb we left at the joint between the coast and the tunnel.
***
We could have stolen any ship, given how small our team was. Gaethe size being what it was, even a scout ship would have carried all of us and our gear, including the reactor still trundling alongside. That would have meant leaving behind most of the Sand, though, which was a deal breaker.
Instead we waited inside the loading bay of a ship attached to a supply dock ten kilometers from the coast. It was massive in human terms, and reasonably large as a heavy supply ship for Gaethe use. Those people don’t make anything capable of flight without installing weapons, so it wasn’t defenseless, and its oversize engines meant we could load a lot of Sand into it.
Jax took forever to get the agreed-upon amount on board, and I couldn’t help smiling as the normally random grains organized themselves into perfect cubes. They were very dense cubes, too, forgoing the careful architecture making the Sand lightweight for its volume in favor of moving as much of it as possible.
When the last of our load was on board, Jax surprised me by sending out a bunch of small spheres to every corner of the ship. I recognized them as miniature versions of the central manufacturing plants that produced first-generation Sand. I hadn’t even known Jax brought any of them along, but it made sense. Better to have the means to make the stuff in case shit went sideways.
The team then had nothing to do; Jax was in control of the ship. The others sat in the comically oversize chairs while I stood at the secondary sensor terminal, a large screen showing me the full array of data captured from the rear of the ship. Unsurprisingly, the ship operated well underwater, including its sensors. The image was as clear and far-reaching as anything captured in open air. As we moved away from the shipyards, I saw the thing from the outside for the first time.
It reminded me of the beanstalk Jack climbed in countless comics and films. It wound back and forth, flexing in the ocean currents, branches swaying in time. There were so many ships laid out in front of me, so much potential death waiting only for the installation of equipment through newly-grown airlocks. The importance of what we were doing had never been more real, more clear, to me than in that moment. None of those weapons could fire a shot without the exotic matter forged in the warseed.
Rinna stepped up beside me. “We can detonate any time.”
I nodded. “I know. I just want to give those engineers time to evacuate.” Jax had released their bonds after we broke the docking seal, sending an alert for all personnel to get to escape vessels.
We watched the pods spring away with bursts of air bubbles. They looked like sunflower seeds, pointed ends aimed at the surface. “Can’t they just swim out?” I asked as the number of jettisoning vessels thinned. “They can still breathe underwater, right?”
“Just not our water,” Rinna said. “Not for more than a few minutes. Too much salt in it. They absorb some nutrients through their gills when they submerge. It would be like you or me eating a burger with half a cup of salt poured on top.”
After thirty seconds with no more escaping Gaethe, I gave Jax the all-clear. From our stationary position two kilometers away, the view of the explosion was excellent. I could actually see the shock wave rushing through the tunnel, its energy fading with distance and the open branches. Water displaced air and the strained draas gave up the fight as the shipyard flooded, breaking off where the bomb sheared off three quarters of its diameter.
“Hated to do that,” Rinna said.
I turned to her, surprised. Our face plates were currently clear, making the sadness in her eyes easy to see. “Really?”
She nodded. “I’ve known other Gaethe, not just Shuul. You don’t work in the defense forces for long without making a few contacts. EDF isn’t big on regulations the way the old military was, but we have a few. Not supposed to socialize with alien assets.”
“But you did anyway,” I said.
She flashed me a smile. “And I’m not just talking about you. Yeah, I’ve spent my share of nights talking shop with Gaethe engineers. Heard them geek out over some aspect of our technology they never considered because they’ve always done things a certain way. It’s easy to just hate them for invading. It’s a lot harder to listen to them talk about how terrible they feel about it.”
Rinna turned to me and met my eyes. “Have you considered the fact that the overwhelming number of them were born on this planet? This is their home, but they’ve got enough of a sense of right and wrong to want to change things. Can you imagine?”
“I mean, I knew that, but…”
She nodded in understanding. “But you never looked at it that way. I get it. Give me a choice and I’d take tinkering with machines and designing new things over fighting any day, no contest. It’s hard to avoid appreciating the elegance of something like that,” she said, waving a hand at the broken, sinking shipyard. “More so when you know the weird mix of pride and shame the people who built it lived with.”
I grimaced. “Won’t stop you from doing what we have to do, though.”
“Nope,” Rinna said without hesitation. “No more than Jax staying away from your neurochemistry will stop you.”
I raised my eyebrows, and Rinna chuckled. “I’m your commanding officer, Mars. There is no privacy on this mission. I know every stat these suits are recording and every command you give Jax. That was part of the deal.”
I wondered briefly if that included the contents and flow of my catheter, then decided it didn’t really matter. Embarrassment was something I’d be happy to live with, so long as the living part persisted.
Twenty-Eight
We stayed underwater for most of the trip. Instead of going in a straight line, we took advantage of the fact that, only a few hundred kilometers from the coast, the Gaethe had no capacity to detect a submerged threat. It was an ironic security flaw, one we were happy to exploit. An advanced species capable of colonizing distant systems worried about the threat from above, not from below.
The ship moved along at a shockingly fast pace on its long underwater parabolic arc, but in that space Jax did a truly impressive amount of damage to our ride. Nothing structural—I hoped—but everything inside that didn’t provide power, protection, guidance, or sensors was stripped down into raw material by the Sand and fed into the replicator spheres. Even the chairs went, leaving everyone standing or sitting on the deck.
“For the record, I am not a fan of this,” Reid said. “I like my ships, you know, not being slowly eaten around me, especially when it’s underwater.”
Durham snorted. “Better than when it’s ten thousand feet in the air, isn’t it? At least here we could swim to the surface.”
“I assure you,” Jax said over the ship’s PA system, “that the ship is in no danger.”
Williams glared at the other two men and ignored me. “How’s it looking, then?”
“I have added approximately fifteen percent more mass to our stores
,” Jax replied. “The fabrication units are very efficient.”
Rinna, sitting across from me, hissed a sharp intake of breath. “Fuck me. Jax, push that update through to the guys.”
Her face plate was still transparent, allowing me to see the light flickering across her features and the rapid movement of her eyes. A second later my attention was just as rapt as the report she had been sent populated my feed.
It was a view of a warseed, rendered by what I assumed was sensor dust blown over the wall by some unit in the EDF. More specifically it was our warseed, our target, and the damn thing appeared to be in the process of disengaging from its century-long parking space. The video was low res and distant, but the scene was clear enough. The defenses arrayed around the edge of the warseed’s massive perimeter were scattering, ships lifting off to hover a safe distance away. Soldiers marched north or south to gain distance from it as building-sized jets of gas erupted from the seam connecting the warseed to the city around it.
It wasn’t moving yet, but the accompanying text made it clear exactly what was happening.
“Jax, how far away are we?” I asked, letting my eyes refocus on the team. Faces were grim across the board; our plan was boned.
“How fast can we get there?” Rinna asked.
“That depends wholly on how alive you wish to be when we arrive,” Jax said. “I can raise the ship and take flight at any time, but doing so will reveal our location and leave us vulnerable to long-range weaponry.” He paused, the machine equivalent of a frustrated sigh. “I should also mention that several of the orbital weapons platforms have been reoriented to point down the gravity well.”
“How many?” Durham asked.
“Seventy percent,” Jax said. “Worldwide, there are one hundred and forty aimed at the ground. This includes coherent particle beams and kinetic strike weapons, though the former will be severely attenuated by the atmosphere.”
“So the beams will fade,” Durham said. “The bullets won’t.”
“Correct,” Jax said.
I glanced at Rinna and found her furiously twitching her fingers in small movements, allowing her to scan through the data on her screen and communicate via text. The light on her face flashed faster and faster.
“Boss?” Williams said, putting a hand on Rinna’s upper arm. “We have a plan yet?”
“Not a good one,” she said, keeping her eyes on her HUD. “The sensor dust is reporting all external access ports are closed with blast shields in place. She’s definitely going to take to the air, probably just go into space, and wait there until this is all over. Takes a while for something that big to charge up its systems, though. We have time before the warseed is even capable of taking off. Lots of checks to go through, batteries to top off.”
“We just don’t have a way in,” I said.
“Not yet,” Rinna snapped. “I’m working on it.”
Reid, who had begun to pace, stopped suddenly. He faced the cargo transports we brought with us. “Jax, you have specs on the warseed, yeah?”
“What Shuul was able to give us, yes.”
“Okay,” Reid said. “Tell me whether it would be possible to cut a hole through the hull if we used everything we have with us. All the bombs at once.”
“Unlikely,” Jax said. “The warseed is fifty kilometers long, requiring its hull to be much thicker than—”
Durham jumped to his feet, shouting. “What if we used a much bigger bomb?”
I glanced at our mobile reactor. “I don’t think we could focus the plasma from that thing.”
“We don’t need it to be perfect,” Durham said. “I used to help break up ice with my dad up at the Great Lakes. We’d weaken it first, then hit it with something big.” He spread his arms wide, spinning in place. “If we can just make a crack, this ship might be able to do the rest.”
There was a strange few seconds where everyone in the room tried to look at everyone else to gauge exactly how insane this sounded. Williams finally made the call by stepping forward and picking Durham up in a massive bear hug that had the smaller man’s armor creaking.
“It’ll be suicidal,” Rinna said, making the statement a question.
“Five of us—sorry, Jax, six—against an army never had great odds,” I said. The others nodded in agreement.
“Alright, then,” Rinna said. “Let’s do the math.”
***
Our ship broke the surface of the ocean and shot over the tops of waves as fast as our bodies could handle. The g-forces were intense even for me, and the others didn’t have a reinforced biology to better handle the load.
Timing was critical. With smaller ships—you know, not the size of a fucking mountain range—the bubble of gravity used to make them fly wasn’t big or strong enough to affect much outside the ship itself. The warseed was so massive that the initial formation of its gravity bubble would, for a few moments, create a dangerously powerful field around it as wide as the ship was long. The strength of that field would warp space itself in unpredictable ways, potentially rupturing hulls, power plants, and the bodies of soldiers. Hence the evacuation.
We were heading right for it, because apparently we shared a profound lack of common sense.
The nose of the warseed was dead ahead. The gravity disruption, according to Jax, would be spherical and centered on the seed itself, which meant it wouldn’t extend very far past the nose. Relatively speaking, anyway.
“There it is,” Rinna shouted, as if we could miss it.
The sea undulated and writhed in shifting, complex geometric patterns. It looked like someone pressed down into the water with an invisible glass bowl, displacing everything around the massive vessel.
“Making corrections,” Jax intoned. “Clench your abdominal muscles, this will be rough.”
Our ship tilted upward, shoving us into the Sand cushioning our bodies. My lungs compressed in weird ways, feeling like they were going to collapse and explode at the same time. The sensation lasted about ten seconds before mercifully easing.
“What the fuck was that?” Rinna gasped beside me.
“The field fluctuated,” Jax explained. “We brushed the very edge of it. Prepare for descent and evacuation.”
Without changing our orientation, the ship began to fall. The outside view winked into existence on my HUD. Jax helpfully added a visualization of the now-stabilizing gravity bubble, which we passed through on our way down. This time it wasn’t nearly as bad, though it still made my teeth rattle.
“Five seconds,” Rinna said.
The ship slowed suddenly, and every bit of hell the warseed could muster broke loose. The outside feed became an actual view of the outside as we were dumped onto the warseed’s slowly-ascending hull. Sand wrapped around our cargo, protecting it and lowering it safely, as suits formed on each member of the team.
External guns tracked and fired, point defense rounds and beam weapons crisscrossing. The only factor keeping us from being cut in half instantly was the sheer size of the ship. Any given acre only had so many guns, and the Sand was already attacking the nearest units.
“We’ll have company soon,” Rinna said over the com. “Get your game faces on. We have to defend this section at all costs!”
The four seasoned veterans made a ring around the point where the DPF bombs were being clustered, the reactor in the center. Though the others kept moving to avoid the turret fire, they stayed in formation. I didn’t.
I ranged further out, attacking gun emplacements with wild abandon. I lunged from one to another, jamming my suit’s fingers beneath barrels and between motors and tearing them apart. When I went for the first beam gun, I noticed my left fist shift to a pearlescent white as I threw a heavy punch at the emitter. The particle beam flashed into existence for a moment as I struck. Instead of pulling back a molten lump, the white hand only smoked. I pulled it close to my face, which was dumb because every surface of my suit was suffused with sensor dust.
“Is this draas?” I wondered al
oud.
“Of course,” Jax said in my ear.
“Awesome.”
I was destroying my tenth gun when the first Gaethe showed up, coming through a port half a kilometer away. I rushed toward them, hoping I could reach the airlock before it closed, but they opened fire on me in a big way. Probably wouldn’t have worked. These people weren’t stupid enough to leave the other side of the lock open anyway.
The front of my suit shifted, grains of white Sand interlocking to form a thin barrier. I silently thanked Jax for harvesting the material from the ship.
“We need thirty seconds, Mars,” Rinna said. “Keep that group busy. We have incoming ships.”
I didn’t dare turn to look or even bring up a rear display. Ahead of me were twenty Gaethe, every one pissed off and either shooting at me or closing to knife-fight range. A few glancing beams tagged my armor, overwhelming the thin draas in a couple small places, but they were last-ditch efforts. Once the other Gaethe drew close, the shooting stopped. Just as in that first mission, rays of basic decency shone through. They might be my enemies, but they weren’t raving monsters. They didn’t risk hurting their fellow soldiers.
It was a weird dissonance to have in my head as twenty different harmonic war cries sang out. I respected their restraint in protecting each other while also being really happy that I didn’t have any teammates close by.
That let me cut loose.
Twenty-Nine
The electronic whine and thunderous crack of rail gun discharges filled the air behind me, the shouts of my team over the com in my ear blending with them. I screamed as my massive legs ate up the last few meters between me and the small horde of Gaethe before me. I drew back my right arm as if to deliver a blow capable of breaking an enemy in half.