The Broken Third (Digitesque Book 4)

by Guerric Haché

  “And there’s nothing else? Nothing? ”

  “My records indicate no other ships. Presumably the only reason I was not found by drifters is that I was in secret, high-security storage.”

  There was still a cold in Felisha’s voice. “Under normal circumstances I would be glad there weren’t any more of these. Unfortunately, today is not a normal day.” She heard Felisha sigh, as shouting trickled in from the background. “Another carrier is arriving in the system in half an hour. When it does, we’re going to assault the wormship and whatever Haint fleet is hiding in its veil. We could use your help.”

  Ada nodded. “You know I’m always up for destruction.”

  Felisha briefly paused. “I’ll notify you again.”

  The transmission clicked out. Ada cricked her neck, staring at the barely-visible white smear that was the Haint fleet rising from Chang’e’s gravity well. “Okay, Cherry. Let’s see what we can do to those ships.”

  Passive scanning is difficult. What Admiral Derksen called the veil - the white, cloud-like structures - appears to be magnified quantum fluctuations, a constantly appearing and dissipating foam of non-specific matter. It interferes with radiation scanning.

  Ada wasn’t sure what quantum fluctuations were, but if it stumped Cherry it couldn’t be good. “Is it some kind of cloak? Like a hunter’s meld, but for ship scanners?”

  This seems unlikely, as it is highly visible. I would conjecture it acts as a sort of ablative armour. Weapons of all kinds will impact the quantum foam, which is destroyed in the process but quickly replaced through the fluctuation process. Lasers and rockets in particular may be of limited use, but railguns designed to penetrate solid armour may be more effective.

  She hoped the Union had enough of those. “Well, at least the Union has something. What else can you guess about it? Are they alien? Did humans or mirrans build them?”

  The designs are unlike any known Earth prototypes or proposals, though I cannot rule that out. It is also possible they were built by Mir after the Armistice. They may also be entirely exogenous.

  Too many unknowns. Ada’s eyes sifted through the ethereal words of Cherry’s visual interface that appeared and vanished at will, looking for a word. Warp .

  “This is how you got here from Earth?”

  Yes. The gods enabled my warp drive remotely after your message. I cannot sustain warp travel for more than half an hour without reaching critically low energy levels and needing to recharge. A full recharge from my vacuum cells requires roughly eight hours.

  “How does it work?”

  She felt was a twitch in her mind somewhere, and Cherry spoke up. Where would you like to go?

  “I can’t just fly there myself?”

  Warp speed involves travel far faster than the human mind can comprehend, even in time dilation. You could crash into a star or a planet, or overshoot your target by several light-years. I will calculate our trajectory safely.

  She saw the Haints moving, but they still had days’ worth of hours left. She had a little time. “Let’s go visit the Watersmoke .”

  Very well.

  Each set of three fins on either side of the ship pinched together, and something glowing and translucent, like Isavel’s wings but blue, snapped out. Ada felt the two branches of hard light stretch out from Cherry’s sides and split, up and down, connecting above and below her in a ring of hard light around the ship.

  Warp field stabilized. At your mark, Ada.

  Ada looked out the cockpit at the blue hard light surrounding the ship, and the tiny speck that was the Watersmoke in the distance. “Go.”

  Suddenly, for the briefest of instants, the light of all the stars was smeared against her cockpit in a bluish wash. It was over almost immediately, and she found herself staring at the Watersmoke mere dozens of meters away.

  “I love this.” She smiled as she reached out. “Adrall, can you hear me?”

  Adrall’s voice came back panicked. “Ada? You - that radio burst was you?”

  “I guess so. Just having a little fun.”

  She heard some excited exclamations in the background, and thought she heard Kosk. Then the mirran navigator was suddenly on the line. “You - the radio bursts! Warp travel! That means - that means -”

  There was clearly some commotion, then Adrall was back on the line. “Ada, I’m sorry, but we’re still tending the wounded and preparing to help evacuate. Your… magic is certainly keeping the ship together, but I can’t be letting you in and out all the time in a situation like this.”

  She nodded. The urgency of it hadn’t hit her yet, but she understood there was no time for leisure. “Of course. Gods be with you.” And they were, as long as she was. She let that transmission fall silent and reached out to Baoji’s ship. “Baoji? Elsa? Turou?”

  After a moment Elsa’s voice returned. “We’re here, Ada.” She sighed heavily. “I don’t know what to tell you. You murdered a hundred people in a dozen ships without blinking, and frankly that’s just the kind of thing we need right now. I hope you can help.”

  Ada leaned back into her seat, thinking about it. It didn’t escape her that destruction was not a long-term strategy for making the world a better place, but it would also be foolish to suggest it wasn’t occasionally necessary to keep things from falling apart. She needed to be able to do both. “Of course I can help.” She rolled over in her seat, looking behind her, but behind her seat Cherry’s cockpit was mostly a solid shape that melded into the wider craft. “I can sit one person at my feet, awkwardly, but I’m no transport.”

  Baoji chipped in. “With guns like that, you’re wasted on evacuation shuttling. Let us do that. We’re headed for the Guwenhua campus.”

  She could see the Haint fleet slightly more clearly from here, and could feel its haze just as urgently in Cherry’s sensors. “Where do they come from? If the wormship has a jumpgate, can I just fly through and kill them at the source?”

  Elsa’s voice broke through. “Ada, when I said that was the kind of thing we needed - I meant, you know, with a little more caution and deliberation behind it. You could end up staring down a whole star system infested with the damn things.”

  “Elsa is correct.” Cherry seemed quite keen on participating in these conversations. “In addition, there is no reason the Haints would not shut their jumpgates when they see us approach, to prevent us from identifying their base of operations.”

  “What if we melded? They wouldn’t see us then.”

  “The jumpgates are located within the veil - they would immediately detect our perturbation of the quantum foam.”

  “Ada, did the robot ship just say I was right?”

  Ada smiled. “It’s just politeness. Is Turou there?”

  After a second of clicking, Turou’s voice eked timidly through the speakers. “Ada.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “It’s… I can’t believe this is real.”

  She glanced towards the tiny white claws slowly bursting from the planet’s silhouette. “Focus on helping people. Let dangerous people like me handle the fighting.”

  “Handle?” He sounded tired. “Ada, I know this is difficult for you to understand. But this isn’t like fights on Earth. What happened last time -”

  She ground her teeth. “I’m not just going to roll over.”

  “I know you won’t, Ada, but you’re one woman with one ship. The Haints are… huge. Endless. You don’t understand.”

  “Big ship with big guns brings lots of littler ships with littler guns. I’m not a moron, Turou, I understand the problem.”

  Turou sighed. “The technophage also destroyed a civilization, and you haven’t solved that problem yet either.”

  “I did figure it out!”

  She could almost hear his frown. “But you didn’t actually get rid it, did you?”

  Her lip twitched. Not really. But she could have! Maybe. And then maybe some idiot would have made a whole new one for the same stupid reasons. She grumbled. “Loo
k, they crushed you last time, but in the end you beat them back, right?”

  “We certainly thought so. Apparently not.”

  Fair point. But why had the Haints allowed the Union room to breathe, then?

  Ada, the wormship and its escort have fully emerged from the atmosphere. It is beginning to establish its wormholes.

  She sighed, looking out at the two Union ships, the Watersmoke barely limping along. “I need to go. The wormship is about to bring in more Haints.”

  Turou’s voice cracked a little. “Ada, don’t underestimate them.”

  “ They’re going to underestimate me .” She stretched her neck. “Stay safe. I don’t want you dying on me.”

  She shut down the transmission and banked towards Chang’e. She couldn’t see the wormship at all from this side of the planet, but that wasn’t a problem - space was a minor inconvenience now. Warping across vast distances lacked the visceral, physical feeling she had of flying normally, but it was a small price to pay for incredible speed. She quickly zipped out to entirely empty space and turned towards the enemy.

  The wormship was visible to her naked eyes, but Cherry zoomed the image in even closer so she could appraise the thing herself. A vast plume of white smoke breaking from the atmosphere was capped off by brutish plates shielding two spherical areas, as well as a dense and thick spine-like structure that ran deeper into the quantum veil behind it. Those voids must be the jumpgates. Not only did it create wormholes, but the thing looked like some great, terrible larva.

  “ Empress , any suggestions?”

  “The King will arrive within half an hour.” Isha Derrat did not sound reassured. “I recommend against engaging alone, but I don’t expect that to stop you, and for all I know you might eat through them as easily as you did us. Don’t get killed. We have other things to manage here.”

  Izha clicked out without awaiting a response, and Ada found herself staring alone at the jagged white claw extending from the atmosphere.

  That claw was sprouting new fingers, she realized. More ships were emerging from the jumpgates behind its bony white knuckles, significantly smaller but far more numerous. All of them trailed glowing white veil - at this distance, it looked like the whole formation had burst from the planet’s skull and the gore was slowly smearing out into space. She felt them as tiny pinpricks even more clearly than she saw them.

  “Cherry, do we know how far they can fire?”

  We only have historical estimates from the Union.

  “What about their speed and maneuverability?”

  We know they outclass Union vessels, but it is unclear whether we know their top performance.

  She bit her lip. “I don’t like this uncertainty. I want to see what we can do to them.”

  Without proper data on their combat capabilities, I recommend caution, unless you command otherwise.

  Caution. Hm. Ada wanted to know what these things were capable of, but how could she figure that out without actually engaging them herself?

  She grinned. “Cherry - while you were gone, I invented these things called wraiths. Code structures made from golem sigils. Could we meld and sneak up on the Haints to throw some wraiths at them?”

  As I understand the wraiths from scanning your neural output - yes, this may be a good substitute for a combat probe. Interesting and unconventional, Ada. I can deploy several of them onto a Haint formation without breaking stealth. I recommend waiting until the Haints have other targets to focus on, however. We do not want to be caught off-guard.

  She crossed her arms. “Fine. We’ll wait until the Union fleet starts approaching.” She could subvocalize, but there was something to hearing her own familiar language out loud, for the first sustained conversation in a while, that comforted her. “Until then, can we try to figure out where they’re coming from?

  That analysis will require decrypting their spacetime algorithms based on observational data alone, since the quantum foam limits my ability to directly assess their computations. It could take a great deal of time.

  “We’ve got plenty of time until that other carrier shows up. Give it a try, so long as it doesn’t put us at risk.”

  Acknowledged.

  She cast her attention around the system, trying to get a sense of what was going on. The Haints were the most obvious presence, with the Union fleet hanging back cautiously near the jumpgate, and a string of civilian ships rushing towards the inhabited moon.

  There were also a small number of Union ships coming from another moon around Chang’e Major, though. She couldn’t think of what world that might be. “Cherry, where are those ships coming from?”

  There is a smaller, cooler moon named Yutu that harbours complex native life, but its gravity is too low to sustain the long-term health of animals native to Mir or Earth, so it was never colonized. Records suggest it is primarily the site of scientific research stations, as well as a few tourism hubs. The moon is fully stocked with transportation craft for its few thousand temporary residents, since long-term habitation is discouraged.

  Unlikely Chang’e itself, sadly. The slick of Haints slowly branched out from the wormship, grinding towards the evacuation corridor. It would be several hours before the fleets made contact, and passing out from abusing her coding gift was not a proper replacement for good sleep. It might be best to get what sleep she could now, in anticipation of the next two days.

  “Cherry - wake me up if anything goes wrong. I don’t think I’ll be sleeping much once the Haints get close enough.”

  Very well. I can help coax your brain into a deeper sleep.

  It was not an empty promise by any means. She quickly slipped away, and the next thing she knew something bothered her out of her sleep. Was something touching her?

  That wasn’t it, though - she was feeling the whinge of Cherry’s sensors, and she quickly found her ship’s standards for things going wrong were far too high. The situation wrenched her eyes open. The Union fleet was making an effort to stick together, but small Haint ships, apparently quicker to accelerate, were getting ahead of the main fleet, stringing themselves out towards the civilians as though desperate to start inflicting casualties. Ada swore and, taking a moment to shake herself awake, warped in closer to the evacuation corridor and zoomed in on the Haints.

  Each Haint ship was a small series of segmented white plates oozing that strange fuzzy white cloud; it really was part of their design, no matter how much it looked like the blood of the planet they had emerged from. They ranged in size from outclassing a Union cruiser down to barely any larger than Cherry; she sensed three kinds which she quite bluntly thought of small, medium, and large.

  Only the smallest were making a quick approach, but they were almost at the evacuation corridor. They were faster than Union ships, it seemed, and accelerated more quickly. It didn’t help that the Haints had emerged from the side of the planet closest to the jumpgate, creating an awkward tactical triangle.

  She reached out to Baoji. “Hey, are you on the planet yet?”

  “Heavens no. Ada, there are Haints headed our way.”

  “You specifically?”

  “I don’t know, close enough! Ship traffic is picking up in both directions, and we happen to be in the middle. Any help?”

  Ada looked out to the point of the Haint fleet. Those ships were small, and from what Ada could tell the medium and large ships would collide with the Union military fleet before they could reach the civilians. If she wanted to test herself against their smallest fighters, this would be her best opportunity.

  “Hey, Empress . The little Haints are going to hit the civilians before you can get to them.”

  The voice that clicked back was Felisha’s. “There’s nothing we can do about that. We’re following the best tactical deployment we can.”

  She bit her lip. Of course they were. “I know. I’m going to take them on.”

  The silence on the other end of the line was briefly deafening. “Pull out if you encounter any trouble.”<
br />
  Ada let the transmission go. “Yeah, I don’t want to get myself killed either. Cherry, what’s the first civilian ship they’re going to reach?”

  The Watersmoke is currently closest to the Haint trajectory’s intersection with the evacuation corridor.

  She groaned. The Watersmoke was being held together by magic, scrap metal, and well wishes. “Seriously? Fine. The wraiths should be able to handle some of the defense if I reach out to them, at least.”

  A brief smear across spacetime later, Ada found herself flying alongside the gas transport. “Hey, Adrall, bad news. You’re in line for the Haints to pick on first.”

  Adrall’s response was muted. “I’m currently regretting a great many life choices.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m going to intercept the little ones. My wraiths will keep you together, but I want you to reach out to me if you’re getting into trouble and I don’t notice, you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll do everything I can.” She let the transmission fall, turning to face the increasingly less-distant Haints. “Ready for this?”

  Yes. I will add additional code sigils to the wraiths that may help them cause more damage. They are structurally fragile, however - they will not survive if they are actually struck.

  “That’s fine, even Union lasers can break them. We just need to see what they can do.”

  Acknowledged. The closest incoming formation is a triangle of three small ships, codenamed Hornets in Union databases.

  She pressed forward through space; the white smears against the starlight were still some distance away, but they were clearly visible. “What else do we know about them?”

  According to Union records, they are quadrilaterally symmetrical with four forward-facing guns. Apart from the quantum foam veil, they are not robustly armoured.

  “That’s a problem.”

  For them, yes.

  “No, not that - I mean the Union records. Those are hundreds of years old! We can’t just assume they haven’t changed.”

  True. All I can confirm is that they are identical in appearance and movement profile.