by Paul Anlee
If it was from that respected, enemy civilization, it was behaving more like a single lorei—one of the Aelu’s powerfully-armed, spiny, star shaped, explorer robots—than a battle group.
Angels were accustomed to dealing with Aelu combat groups. No 216-strong habnar would ever permit itself to be contained in such a small volume of space without engaging the enemy. A habnar would be pouring out of the asteroid station in attack formation by now.
Perhaps it’s something new!
Mika sent a hundred Angels—a Feather of the Primary Group—inside the asteroid to flush out the intruder. The Wing Commander linked into several perception channels of the vanguard group and followed their progress inside the asteroid.
He watched his Angels shift within corridors and chambers, cutting off physical escape routes. Members of the Feather moved efficiently through the work chambers and connecting corridors toward the last reported position of the intruder.
They passed working Cybrids, who made respectful inquiries as to their unexpected presence. The Angels responded by demanding identification. Lorei wouldn’t hesitate to cast an illusory image in that form if served a purpose; the Angels weren’t taking any chances that the intruder might slip past undetected.
The intruder hadn’t tripped any new detectors in the past few minutes. According to Alum’s reports, it was in the Biodesign Lab. There was a Cybrid in the lab with it, and still no sign it suspected a trap. There was only one entrance to the lab, which led to a service corridor.
Good for pinning down anything that can’t shift, but an easily-defended position, as well—thought Mika.
Feather Leader Jonto moved into the lab antechamber. Dozens of Angels lined the corridor behind him, awaiting his orders. Others staked out the adjoining chambers that shared a common wall with the lab.
Jonto peered around the threshold of the door. An Angel he did not recognize from their Wing stood beside a hovering Cybrid, deep in a conversation. Jonto was confused. He sent a query to Mika, “Is there one of us from another Wing here?”
The reply from his Wing Commander was immediate, “No! Detain him! ”
Three members from his Feather shifted inside the chamber and grabbed at the arms of the unknown Angel. The intruder spilled out of their grasp and flowed like liquid under the Cybrid. The liquid rose on the other side in a new shape.
The Angels were briefly stunned into inaction.
Not a lorei, an actual Aelo, a single member of the species! Mika recognized the tricks of the alien. The three Angels had grasped at a holographic projection, nothing more. “Go to active radar scanning,” he commanded. The Aelo sprang into sharp relief.
Its small elliptical body perched on an articulated tripod. Above the body, three manipulators moved menacingly. It was hard not to be mesmerized by the floating limbs, each one trifurcating into smaller, more refined, appendages, all waving rhythmically. Some of the appendages extended to hair-like filaments, for fine manipulation; others ended more bluntly and were tipped with tools or weapons.
The inky black, homogenous body was otherwise featureless. From past dissections of captured enemies, the Angels knew the creatures had visual and other sensors, but no orifice or sensory organs showed from the outside at any scanning wavelength.
Three bright beams flared from embedded weapons along the lengths of the Aelo’s manipulator stalks. One ripped into the Cybrid, sending shrapnel flying in all directions. The other two beams blasted a hole through the wall and into the adjacent chamber.
Jonto and two others shifted to cover the next chamber. Six Angels confronted the Aelo directly, three behind and three in front. Jonto shifted to within a meter of the alien invader and thrust his sword forward. It struck empty air. The Aelo had shifted away unscathed.
The Feather spread out through the rest of the asteroid. The intruder was spotted in seconds, but continued to shift away from engagement. It was quickly seen in dozens of different chambers throughout the asteroid.
Mika watched with growing frustration as his lead team tried to corral the invader. As long as the Aelo could shift within the warrens of the asteroid, the Angels were engaged in a game of hide-and-seek they couldn’t win. The intruder was too fast and leading the chase.
Mika would have to flood the halls and rooms of the asteroid with the entire Wing to have any real chance of capturing the Aelo inside the intact planetoid. To do that, they’d have to break their shift-blocking network. Then the Aelo could simply escape. The situation was impossible.
I can simplify this game. Clear out—Mika ordered his troops. I’ll remove its hiding places.
The Feather shifted back to outer space, well clear of the hollowed-out planetoid. Mika adjusted the power of his sword, pointed it at the heart of the asteroid station, and activated it.
The asteroid shattered under the intense energy. Thousands of Cybrids inside perished. Only a few managed to escape the blast. The invader would be among them. Aelu were not so easy to kill as Cybrids.
In the debris field, Mika recognized the scattered thruster flares of Cybrid workers trying to escape. He squinted and nodded—Yes, yes. As expected. There were a few longer, brighter exhaust trails from the MAM drives of asteroid miners fleeing the battle. Let them leave.
He had aimed his beam at the center of the asteroid station deliberately to avoid any of the more powerful mining Cybrids that typically clustered at the poles. No need to set off a matter-antimatter reaction and vaporize part of my Wing to stop one intruder. We’re not there yet.
He played his destructive beam through the debris, blasting gigantic chunks into boulder-sized fragments. He could have turned the entire asteroid and everything inside it to dust but, if he did that, they’d have no chance to capture their opponent alive. No, he wanted the intruder to flee the crumbling mountain. In open space, with nowhere to hide, the Angels would get that chance.
Suddenly, the Aelo was in front of him, floating meters away. The Angel deactivated his energy beam and swung his sword to dismember the intruder. The Aelo was gone before Mika connected. No matter; it couldn’t go far. With the asteroid reduced to pebbles, there was nowhere left to hide. And with five layers of entrapping decoherence shield, it couldn’t flee. The Aelo would have to fight its way to freedom.
The lead team of Angels, a thousand strong, split into Barbs of ten each and spread out across the space formerly occupied by the asteroid. Those in the innermost decoherence shell flooded the space they protected with microwaves. Anything bigger than a fist will be visible to all.
Mm, there you are.
The Aelo was revealed, shifting randomly and testing the boundaries of its confinement for any weakness. It knew it was trapped. It rushed at the enclosing shell, weapons firing bursts of coherent energy. The beams were easily absorbed and dissipated by the Angels’ defenses.
One-to-one, Aelo and Angel were evenly matched. However, in greater numbers, the Angels were able to link their energy absorption fields. To defeat even one Angel in a group, the Aelo would need hundreds of times more power, or more cunning.
The Angels’ flaring swords and coordinated energy bursts drove the intruder away from the shift blocking perimeter, and back into the middle of its prison. The inside groups gave chase.
A Barb would shift to wherever the Aelo was spotted and attempt to encircle it with a small decoherence field, a few dozen meters in diameter.
The remaining ninety-nine Barbs shifted close by and waited for the Aelo to jump away from its pursuer and, hopefully, into their midst where they would trap it.
The Aelo shifted continuously, randomly, trying to outrun the hundred determined teams of Angels and their continuous casting of shift-blocking nets. Once it was contained within a Barb, the Aelo would lose to the superior might and number of Angels that would descend upon it.
Neither the Angels nor Aelo would tire soon; this cat-and-mouse game could last for hours, days if necessary. Mika was certain of the inevitable conclusion. It was only a matter of
time before the intruder was theirs.
The Aelo passed near the perimeter, and a few Angels in the decoherence shell wobbled. The shift-blocking lattice in their region wavered. Swords sputtered erratically.
Three Angels in the innermost part of the net deactivated their swords and began spinning. Their arms dropped to their sides and their wings flapped uselessly in the vacuum of space.
The Aelo moved past them, the first imprisoning layer breached.
Nanoverters!—Mika transmitted to his Wing. The Aelo’s earlier fruitless-looking charges at the shell had not been pointless, after all. It had been seeding the Angels with nanoscopic subversion viruses. Such viruses would cling to an Angel’s skin and work their way in along sensor endings or power conduits. Once in the control circuitry, they would overwhelm the individual’s will, tricking their senses and causing them to undertake odd behavior. Fortunately, nanoverters were easily remedied.
We are woefully out of practice—thought Mika. Too many millennia of peace in Alum’s Realm.
With the inner shell overcome, the Aelo earned itself several million cubic kilometers more space in which to maneuver. That freedom, however, came with an additional thousand infuriated Angels who formed another hundred Barbs and joined the ranks of their comrades in the chase.
Faster and faster the Angels sought, found, and tried to encircle the intruder.
Angels and Aelu had played this game many times before, and both knew its inevitable outcome. Try as it might, the Aelo could not outmaneuver so many pursuers forever. Soon, one of them would get a grip on an appendage and rip it off, damaging what little personal weaponry the alien possessed, or strike a lucky blow to the body, hurting its internal shift generators. After that, the chase would be over quickly.
As Mika anticipated his Wing’s victory, a swing of an Angel’s sword cleanly relieved the Aelo of an appendage tip. Mika smiled. One less weapon to worry about.
In the next second, another Angel managed to scratch the Aelo’s carapace, causing it to spew body fluids into the cold vacuum of outer space. The fight was nearly done.
The Aelo changed tactics, dashing to the shattered remnants of the Cybrid asteroid. Nothing bigger than a pebble there—Mika noted, as he monitored the alien and pursuing groups. In a chain of fast bursts, the Aelo jumped through the detritus of the asteroid.
Mika ordered a few hundred of his Wing to activate their swords and clear the debris field. The energy levels weren’t set high enough to kill the Aelo even if it were to get caught in the crisscrossing beams. Soon, the space the asteroid once occupied was filled with cooling dust particles, none larger than a few microns across.
The Aelo emerged inside the dust cloud, and the chase resumed.
The nearest team surrounded the Aelo in little time. The alien must be tiring—Mika thought. Two Angels moved in for the capture.
The Aelo spun on its long axis and its limbs wove in a mesmerizing dance that was too fast to follow. The enclosing circle of Angels exploded outward. In the ensuing confusion, the Aelo fled.
Mika shifted to examine his stricken team members. Every one of them had a hole through the chest, destroying their primary processors. A kinetic weapon? Impossible!
Some quick calculations determined that any reasonably-sized projectile would need to be moving at near light speed to inflict such damage. The Aelu had nothing that could shoot a projectile that fast, as far as Mika remembered. No organic or mechanical being could exert sufficient force to accelerate even a one gram projectile up to 0.95 light speed in half a meter.
Unless...Mika recalled a battle technique invented by some clever Cybrid near the end of the Aelu Wars. The Cybrid had cast a cylindrical mass-neutralizing field from a mountain-sized asteroid, perhaps a few hundred tons in size, out toward the surface of one of the innermost Aelu planets. It was a common enough kind of field that Cybrid miners used to help them move asteroids around. But Mika had never heard of the effect being projected in a long, cylindrical shape prior to that time.
Within the field, objects had essentially no resting mass. A gentle push would accelerate it to near light speeds as long as it stayed inside the field. The Cybrid nudged the asteroid to get it moving toward the planet. As soon as the asteroid hit the field, it accelerated to near light speed. The trick was to extend the cylindrical field almost to the surface of the planet ahead of the moving asteroid. After the success of the first strike, Alum constructed special Securitor Cybrids for the task.
But we never used that on anything smaller than a planet. Even at that, none had ever managed more than one field, and certainly not with the precision the Aelo had just demonstrated.
Mika surmised the alien must have collected pebbles to use as bullets from the asteroid debris before it was pulverized to dust. It’s field management had to be extraordinary. Clever. But the downside of using projectiles is that one always runs out of ammunition.
He wasn’t happy to lose a few hundred Angels before the Aelo ran out of ammo. He contemplated the relative importance of capturing this intruder intact against the losses the Wing would take.
Now that we know the invader is a single Aelo, albeit a resourceful one, how much more do we need to know? It is alone with no accompanying fleet. The residual threat level is practically nil.
Mika imagined Alum’s possible reaction to the loss of this single alien. He’ll be unhappy if many of His Angels are sacrificed for such a worthless target.
The Commander ordered the decoherence blocking shells to shift inward. “Ensure you maintain the integrity of the containment field.”
The Aelo’s prison was closing in. Several Barbs managed to coordinate their efforts, and it became trapped in a volume of space under a kilometer in diameter.
Mika ordered the main shells to tighten up their formations, reinforcing their brethren’s efforts.
Three Barbs of Angels closed in on the Aelo, making it shift at shorter intervals and distances.
Surely, you tire of this game—Mika thought. Let it be done.
After another set of shifts, the Aelo found itself trapped by a group of thirty Angels, with thirty more inside still pursuing it.
It dispatched the five nearest with projectiles. Seconds later, another five stopped moving.
“You’re letting it get away!”—Mika broadcast.
So close to success, so close to finishing the chase, and yet so uncertain of the outcome, they couldn’t lose it now. There was only one acceptable course of action to prevent its escape.
Lord Mika shifted for a better perspective. Mm. Can’t be more than fifty Angels close to the Aelo at this angle. He drew his sword. He could destroy entire planets at this setting. One annoying Aelo and fifty inept Angels would not withstand the destructive beam.
He said a brief prayer of thanks to Alum for the courage of his team, and fired on the tight knot of Angels as they closed in on their prey.
The energy unleashed converted all in its path to plasma, Angels and Aelo alike. Lord Mika took stock of his losses. And blinked.
* * *
When he opened his eyes, Lord Mika stood alone on the Main stage in the Hall of Alum, facing the glorious mini-galaxy at the center.
He dropped to his knees, trembling at the might of his Lord. He was ready to atone for his failure to capture the adversary. Destroying it, along with tens of Angels, was a tactical disappointment.
Alum’s Hall appeared empty and silent but one never knew what kind of magic the Living God might use to isolate one supplicant from another. Mika wept at the majesty of his God and of the miracle that had brought him here across nearly fifteen million light years without a starstep. He had never experienced such a thing.
“Rise, my friend.” The voice was quiet, pitched low, and sounded...pleased.
Mika stood. Alum appeared on the stage in front of him, a simple man in front of the awe-inspiring, single-galaxy universe.
“I am yours to command, my Lord,” said the Angel.
“What i
s your evaluation of the engagement?”
“The Aelo intruder was vanquished with the regrettable loss of two Feathers of Angels and the Cybrid station, my Lord. The creature proved to be an extremely resourceful and skilled adversary. I thought it likely to prove impossible to capture without considerably larger losses.”
Alum said nothing. He stared at the Angel, giving no sign of judgment or emotion on his face. Finally, a hint of a smile formed on his lips. “And how do you think you will fare when you confront our true invader?” he asked.
Mika was confused. “How do you mean, my Lord? Is there another one?”
“This was simply a live test, so to speak. To ensure your Wing was properly prepared. We have lived with peace so long that the strategies and tactics of battle have been largely forgotten.”
Mika knew that anger was pointless. Still, he couldn’t help feeling resentment. “Many gave up their lives for this test, my Lord.”
“That was unavoidable.”
If Mika’s mercurial skin could have blushed with embarrassment, it would have radiated crimson at that moment. He realized his own role in the events of the past hours and felt a wave of humility wash over him. “I am imperfect as ever, my Lord.”
Alum raised his eyebrows. “Oh, no, not at all, my friend! You are not to blame. We shared in the development of this plan to capture or kill the intruder. Our losses were inherent in the strategy, not the implementation.”
He contemplated the miniature cosmos. “It wouldn’t have been useful to provide you with an inadequate adversary for this test. Fortunately, I have kept a small number of Aelu captive in stasis since the conquest. This one was more than willing to challenge your Wing.”
“Why would it do that, my Lord? Surely it must have remembered how thoroughly we dispensed with its people.”
“I promised it that if it could escape imprisonment, it would be free to seek out what remains of its people wherever they are hiding. Apparently, it preferred the odds against it, to being held in timeless imprisonment.”