by Alan, Craig
“Estimated distance, thirty thousand kilometers.” Demyan read off the six-digit string that represented its location relative to Gabriel.
“Are we coming out of the sun?”
Demyan shook his head.
“We’re a degree or two out of line,” he said. “The corona might hide us for a while. But only for a while.”
“Burn duration was six point six seconds,” Hassoun said. “Exhaust temperature, three thousand Kelvin plus.” The rocket plume had been hot to enough to boil steel.
“Doppler study,” Demyan said. “Estimated velocity, ten kilometers per second.”
“Firing solution ready, weapons hold,” Vijay said. He would fire only upon order or attack. Gabriel would get only one chance.
“At that speed and that temp, it masses about ten thousand kilograms,” Elena said. Demyan and Hassoun briefly looked up at that—at the number itself, or the fact that she found it mentally.
“Bantamweight,” Vijay said.
“Decoy,” Elena said. She shook her head. “That burn was way too hot and too long.”
“I agree. A ship that small should need only a nudge.”
“That’s our index point,” she said, jabbing a finger at the holo as it zoomed out. The distance between Gabriel and the enemy was so great that the two ships were mere pinpricks in the air. “We start at the center, and work our way out.”
She clicked her keysticks quickly, and numbers shimmered at the center of the bridge. 3:12:00. It began to count down.
“Three hours to the border,” Elena said. “Start the music.”
Ten thousand kilometers to either side of Gabriel, angels began to sing.
The Global Union had never dared to challenge the outsiders directly, or to take their warships off the home front. And even if they had wanted to, the decimated Earth nations of the Solstice era had been in no shape to raise an armada and send it to battle. Most Agency warships were drone carriers, built to ferry robotic soldiers to and from the battlefield. Elena had begun her own career in drone fabrication, before becoming an operator.
The Archangels had been built to finally take the war to the enemy, but Gabriel had brought her squires with her. Humans still built aerodynamic craft out of habit, and Cherub and Seraph were as sleek and avian as their mother ship, though only one ten thousandth her size. The first of their kind, they were the most expensive, most advanced unmanned combat vehicles that the Global Union had ever built. And today they were the most dangerous, though they carried no conventional weapons at all.
“Key of E today, I think,” Vijay said.
The radar emitters in their noses energized and sounded off, and Cherub and Seraph began to volley invisible pulses into space. The signals were low power and narrow beamed, and they hopped frequencies with each new salvo. The two drones had been spaced out far enough that they could angle their signals around the lagrange point, and bounce them off Jupiter and back through it and into Gabriel. At this distance, it would take over five minutes for the signals to make the round trip. And on the ricochet, the weakened pulses would sound like radio thunder from the electromagnetic storms in the atmosphere.
Thirty minutes passed. The two drones fired thousands of pulses per second, but fewer than one in a million would hit. Or not hit, rather. If one of the signals failed to return, it was because it had struck an outsider and rebounded.
“Multiple contacts,” Vijay said.
He spoke softly, as if the outsiders could hear him through hull and space. The holo zoomed out to show a map of the lagrange point, and speckled the image with red dots which hung like motes of dust caught in the beam of a setting sun. Each dot was a radar contact. Vijay began to calculate potential trajectories, and thousands of even tinier specks appeared and swirled around the original contacts. Each of these specks represented a new potential position—the redder the blip, the higher the probability that it represented the enemy. Soon the holo was fogged with crimson clouds. But at the center of the mist was a black hollow, the eye of a bloody storm. The lagrange point itself was empty.
An hour passed as Cherub and Seraph tracked their prey like bloodhounds on the trail, or bats in a cave. All they needed was a second hit, a second point of the triangle, to home in on the target.
Gabriel’s approach was meticulously planned. The initial rocket burns had been timed so that she had been aimed not where the Jupiter was at the time, but where it would be six months hence. She had fired her engines only when the gas giant had been eclipsed by a planet, moon, or asteroid, and relied on her avram the rest of the way. As she closed she presented only the blades of her sails, not the flats. With the fuel cells in cooldown, the temperature of the hull had plunged below freezing and was still dropping. And now she was flying out of the sun.
But it wouldn’t matter, unless the drones could find the enemy. No human craft, manned or unmanned, large or small, warm or cool, had ever crossed the border unseen. And Gabriel, all hundred thousand tonnes of her, would not be the first. She would have to fight her way through—but she couldn’t fight what she couldn’t see.
“Sixty minutes,” Demyan said.
Reports from every station poured onto her screen and demanded her attention, but Elena kept an eye on the holo at all times. Cherub and Seraph searched one hiding place after another, a few thousand at a time, and the holographic clouds ebbed. Half an hour again later they had burned away completely and left only thirteen red embers behind, each tagged with a red numeral. These were the outsider sentinels, and her targets.
“Firing solutions ready, Captain.”
“Resolve all contacts, get me visuals,” Elena said.
Gabriel was outnumbered thirteen to three, and her two companions couldn’t fight. Even if she fired every missile and the ballista simultaneously and scored a kill with every shot, which was impossible, there would be four opponents left to counterattack. Information was strictly need to know in combat, and only Elena, Vijay, Demyan, and Hassoun would see death coming. For the rest of the crew, it would simply end. They would never know what mistake their captain had made.
Vijay shouted.
“Shots fired!”
“Hit!” Hassoun said. “Seraph is taking fire.”
“Weapons hold! Helm, keep her steady.”
“Seraph is down, Cap’n,” Hassoun said.
The drone had run headlong into the fire. The closing speed was murderous, and a few bits of steel, no larger than billiard balls, had demolished ten tonnes of aluminum in an instant. Elena bowed her head briefly, and fought the absurd urge to cross herself.
“Thirty minutes,” Demyan said.
“Do we have visual?”
“Not yet, Captain,” Vijay said. “Which contacts should I prioritize?”
“Same as before, start in the middle. But skip the original.”
Elena pointed again, though she knew the gesture had no use. The holographic projectors displayed the same image to everyone, at the same angle, no matter where they sat. Vijay began to identify the targets individually.
“Cap’n, should we power up the guns?” Hassoun asked.
“We can’t risk the heat.”
“If they picked up Seraph—”
“Qué le vamos a hacer? If the outsiders had Seraph on infrared, they had Gabriel an hour ago, and we’re already dead.”
“Then how was she detected?”
“Did any of the signals hit a drone out of the air?”
“No, Captain,” Vijay said. “The only hits were on rebounds.”
“Did Seraph register any radio noise before she died?”
No one had quite figured out how the outsiders had maintained a perfect record of finding and killing the drones—but if Elena had to guess, they were doing the exact same thing that she was doing to them.
“No more than usual, Cap’n,” Hassoun said.
“And the bearings don’t match.”
“They must have followed her trail,” Elena said. “Traced the signal to Jupiter, and then back out into space.”
“Our ploy did not fool them for long,” Vijay said.
“Es lo ques es,” Elena said. “We knew they weren’t stupid. And it could only work once anyway.”
“Let us hope that it did,” Demyan said.
“Excuse me, Cap’n,” Hassoun said. “But if the outsiders can triangulate the signal’s source, can’t they find its destination also?”
She never got a chance to answer.
“Vampire! Vampire inbound,” Vijay said.
It was an outsider missile, hunting for something to kill. Elena leapt forward, and her straps bit into her stomach and chest. The missile streaked away from Gabriel and fell upon her companion instead. A single bright explosion bloomed on the holo, and then another. Both faded quickly into the darkness. A thousand chunks of shrapnel had wiped Cherub off the face of the sky.
“Twenty minutes,” Demyan said.
He wiped his brow, and as if on cue Vijay and Hassoun did the same. All of Gabriel’s compartments were carefully air conditioned and ventilated, and the crew’s uniforms were moisture wicking, designed to regulate their body temperatures. Elena rubbed her own forehead and found it dry.
“Where’s my visual?”
“First image coming now,” Vijay said. As one the four of them looked up at the holo, and waited for their first glimpse of the enemy.
It reminded Elena of a dragonfly. Gabriel, with her graceful hull and tall sails, resembled a four winged bird of prey in flight. But the outsider ship was spindly and insectile. Its tiny metallic body, a dull brick red on the thermal camera, jutted with long legs and slender antennae. Elena could see solar panels, infrared telescopes, and radar dishes. Everything about it looked weak and frail—except for the trio of sturdy missiles ringing the hull. The outsider craft was no larger than a whale, and Gabriel outclassed it by such a laughable margin that Elena had to remind herself that one of these things had surprised and killed Archangel. As far as anyone knew, she had never seen it coming.
“A drone,” Vijay said.
“No que no?”
“Who could live inside that machine?”
“Machine?” Elena asked. “For all we know, that’s what they look like.”
In forty years, there had never been an official contact. No one had ever seen or spoken with an outsider. Their signals had never been intercepted, as radio communication was next to impossible around Jupiter. Even their hardware had never been recovered in anything but pieces, and the debris had been free of organic compounds. The outsiders had appeared during the dark days after the Storm, when humanity’s back had been turned, and claimed the outer solar system as their own. No one knew who the outsiders were, or what they looked like, or where they had come from. They were a strange noise coming from a darkened room—one that had been empty just a moment before.
“Your orders, Captain?”
The outsiders had found Cherub and Seraph faster than anyone had anticipated. Gabriel could continue to run cold and try to cross the border at a gallop, disarmed and defenseless. Or she could start the fight now, against hopeless odds. Hassoun met her gaze, and searched her eyes for the plan that he knew she must have ready. He hesitated only briefly before returning to his station when he found nothing within them.
“Tell Okoye to heat up the ballista,” Elena said.
“Captain,” Vijay said, “we do not have a target.”
Elena stared at the gridwork of red dots on the holo. She had always been terrible at recognizing constellations as a child, and her father had spent countless evening hours on the mountaintops trying patiently to demonstrate the hunter, the swan, the dragon. Elena felt then as she did now. She saw no pattern, only points, perfectly alike. The telescopes identified a second drone as she watched, indistinguishable from the first. They even radiated at the exact same temperature.
She saw at a glance that all thirteen shared a single infrared signature. The outsiders had rigged their craft to look identical, to disguise those that were truly different. In order to match the drones’ output, a larger vessel would have to do exactly what Gabriel had done—power down almost completely and leave itself defenseless. Elena took over the holographic projector and backtracked through the flight log. The crew glanced up from their stations, but she said nothing. Instead she watched Cherub die, and waited to see how the enemy had reacted.
Twelve of the thirteen appeared to shift in their orbits, nudged aside by their maneuvering thrusters. Elena recognized the behavior from the unmanned vehicles she had handled as automatic evasive maneuvers—the drones had sensed danger, and gone into flight or flight mode. A human operator could take over unmanned vehicles and issue commands directly, but otherwise they relied on autonomous routines that told them how to react in any given situation. They were machines, and had no choice but to follow their programming.
But the thirteenth hadn’t tried to evade at all. It had made a choice.
“That one,” she said, and illuminated it for Vijay. “Number seven. That’s our target.”
A single fuel cell ignited in the engine room and poured energy into the coils at the front of the ship, and Gabriel’s hull temperature began to climb.
Vijay computed the firing solution, and handed it off to Demyan. The helmsman went to work with the gyroscopes embedded in the hull throughout the ship, and torqued Gabriel and swung her around so that she appeared to be flying slantwise, her nose aimed off course.
“In position,” he said.
Elena nodded once to Vijay, and spoke.
“Fire mission.”
Vijay pulled the trigger, and a second timer appeared on the holo and began counting down from ten.
He had merely confirmed the order. At this distance, and these speeds, the shot had to be calculated down to the millisecond, entirely by computer. Fighting a battle in space was like shooting a speeding bullet out of midair—even a thousandth of a degree of error would result in a clean miss. Elena kept her eye on the target for every tick of the clock. This would be only the second time that Gabriel would fire in anger, and this time she would enjoy it.
The countdown hit zero, and the ship shook so violently that her teeth rattled in her jaw.
“Payload is away,” Vijay said.
The steel ball that had erupted from the massive barrel in Gabriel’s bow was instantly the fastest manmade object in history. The power needed to propel an object at that speed could have destroyed the ship had the safeties failed. If the ballista had been fired on Earth, it would have melted its own barrel.
“Shut it down, now. Demyan, new target. Go deep.”
Her helmsman powered up the gyroscopes again, and swung the nose of the ship around so that she was once more pointed forward along her trajectory, towards a drone that waited ten thousand kilometers behind the line. Gabriel carried none of the midsized cannons that armed other warships—there simply wasn’t room for them—and the ballista’s barrel was so long that there had been no choice but to build it directly into her skeleton. It could be aimed in no direction but forward, which ensured that Gabriel would always face the enemy. Other ships were made to fight, but she had been built to kill.
“Fuel cell shut down,” Hassoun said. “Auxiliary power, vital systems only.”
Gabriel had made her move. The ship’s temperature had risen several dozen degrees during those five minutes, and would now drop as rapidly as radiation could manage.
“Stand by for power.”
Elena watched the round race away. Ten kilometers opened up between it and Gabriel every second, and the holo zoomed out to keep both of them on screen. The round passed the halfway mark, and Gabriel disappeared from the frame as it and the holo closed in on the target. Elena silently willed the out
sider captain—whoever or whatever that was—to keep his nerve and not change course.
The enemy ship went hot, and she could see it bright and clear. Elena felt her heart slam against her chest.
Just before he had died, Commander Anwar Azzam had sent home a final image from his infrared telescope. It had been a ruby hanging from the night sky, two crimson pyramids joined together at the base. Each line, each face had been geometrically perfect, and there was no sense at all of up or down, or port and starboard. It had been built by those who called space their home. The ship that had torn the Solstice and its crew apart a few moments later had looked just like this one.
The ballista round struck the outsider ship. It burrowed into the hull, and a gout of flame leapt from the hole and into space. The shell turned white hot and sliced through the ship, and tore an exit wound in the other side. A spray of plasma erupted like blood from an artery. The shockwave blew the ship apart at the middle, and twin explosions shattered both halves a half second later.
All this happened in less than a second. Elena breathed as the debris flamed out and went dark, and left behind nothing but black space.
“Power up, now. Demyan, ignition on my mark, all hands prepare for acceleration.”
All four fuel cells ignited and poured energy into the combat systems. Gabriel’s temperature skyrocketed, but Elena no longer cared. The outsiders knew she was here. The thrusters came online first, and the magnetic coils inside the guns energized as the ballista recharged and reloaded.
“Vampires incoming.”
“Hold fire!”
Both missiles accelerated and went terminal, and dove on their target. They raced through empty space, then flipped and retrofired their rockets to try and come around for a second pass. Neither of them had seen Gabriel, and they chased shadows until they exhausted their propellant. The drones had tried to bluff her.
A minute later, twelve search radars activated, and six more missiles ignited.
“Hard burn, weapons free!”
The four massive rockets at the stern ignited, and Gabriel surged forward. Elena felt an invisible hand press down on her body, and she sank into the water filled cushions of her chair. A chill came over her as the air wafted over her body towards the rear door. Her eyes turned pink as delicate capillaries burst inside them.