Defiance: (The Spiral Wars Book 4)

by Joel Shepherd

  “I copy Phoenix, can you give me an estimate of their marine capacity?” She selected a featureless, flat steel expanse, cutting thrust to let the jets cool as gravity brought her in.

  “We’d only be guessing, Major,” came Shahaim’s reply, strained with Gs that were nonetheless now low enough that she could talk. “But they’re all about thirty percent larger than Phoenix — some of that is engines, the rest is Midships.” Which, in any school of ship design, with ships this large, meant deployable forces. Trace did some fast calculation — Phoenix had more than two hundred marines, but she’d have guessed a deepynine drone didn’t require as much space or resources, given they didn’t need to eat, recreate or use the bathroom. Three hundred per ship? And there were five of them coming, with three more behind. Dear god.

  “Phoenix,” she replied, “what is the damage likely to be on those first five ships? I could be looking at fifteen hundred deepynine drones, and if that happens, our odds aren’t great. Sard, we can handle. If you could take one or two of those first five before they arrive, it would give us a chance.”

  Shahaim’s reply did not arrive as fast as the minimal lag suggested it might. Trace hit thrust before grounding, and bounced instead, as Command Squad came in behind and followed.

  “Hello Major,” came the reply at last. “I’ll see what we can do. We hear that Styx still has no idea what the moon’s defences might be?”

  “That’s what I hear as well.” Trace bounced again, lined up an exposed dome a kilometre ahead, and hit thrust again, burning into the star-strewn sky. “She tells me the defensive forces gave the city a name, however. It’s stencilled on their armour, in an old parren tongue. Translated, it means Defiance.”

  “Fitting,” said Shahaim. “Good luck to you Major. Correct assault ETA now twenty-one minutes and eleven seconds.”

  “And good luck to you, Phoenix.” She cut thrust as her visor calculated the trajectory would end on her target, and sailed for a moment, watching the deployments spreading about the geofeature and burrowing out of sight. She’d just told Phoenix to attack the most dangerous option, she knew. If Erik chose to do that, instead of taking the less dangerous three sard ships, Phoenix might be destroyed. But if he didn’t, and her two hundred marines and five hundred parren found themselves outnumbered two-to-one against deepynine drones from the first wave alone… well, she’d give them half-an-hour, at best. The survivors, without hope of ship or shuttle resupply, would run out of air well before they ran out of water or food. If the city were alive and powered, there might be hope to find technology or power-run recycling systems for air and water… but there was no hope of food, and with no one else in parren space even knowing this moon existed, no hope of rescue, either. Most of her marines, she suspected, would rather go down fighting.

  “Major,” said Lieutenant Zhi. All her lieutenants had been listening. “We’re not going to do groundfire?” It was tempting, Trace knew, because the deepynines would never be so exposed as when they were on final approach.

  But… “Approaching targets are exposed but at least capable of manoeuvre,” she reminded them all. “If we’re on the ground, firing upward, we’re the sitting ducks, not them. I don’t know what armaments and targeting their shuttles have, but I’ll bet it’s good. If we line up for them on the ground, we could all be dead before they even land.”

  A familiar icon blinked, and she opened it. “Major, it’s Dale. More geofeatures here, like we thought, but they’re sealed at multiple levels. The history lesson is that it looks like there were tavalai, parren, even some chah’nas, all fighting with the drysines, if you can believe that. It wasn’t just Drakhil and the Tahrae, it was lots of them.”

  Even with the current situation, Trace found a moment to be astonished. Of all the history-upending things they'd discovered of late, this had to be right at the top. Drakhil had always been a figure of hate not only for parren, but for organics everywhere — a traitor not only to his own people, but to all organic life in the Spiral. Now Dale said he hadn’t been alone, and that other, non-parren species had been here too? Fighting until the end, on a lost and gravitationally-improbable moon, half-filled with a city called Defiance? And now, here was Phoenix Company, in the middle of history repeating.

  “That’s great Ty,” she said, as the ground came hurtling up once more, and she hit thrust to brake fast and bounce. “Meanwhile, we’re ETA twenty-point-five and it looks like there could be fifteen hundred of them. Less history and more rapid movement please.”

  “Dammit Major,” Dale growled, “we don’t need an entire platoon down here, let alone another platoon of parren, just to guard the damn queen…”

  “Yes we do, because I can guarantee they will go straight through us like a knife through butter. If we try to hold a line we’ll die in droves. We’ll make them come through us and take losses on their way, but they will contact you, in force, whether we win up here or not. Protect the damn queen and her data-core, or everything we’ve been through up to now will have been for nothing. We’re all counting on you, Ty.”

  A flash somewhere above caught her eye, and she glanced in mid-bounce. Immediately the visor polarised to deep-black, to save her vision from the brilliance that followed. Exclamations followed on coms, human and parren alike. It came directly from the hitherto invisible singularity, half-a-million kilometres away, and barely as big as a starship.

  “Take a wrong turn, assholes?” Jalawi remarked.

  “I copy that, Major,” came Dale’s unhappy reply, unable to see the fireworks on the surface. “We’re moving.”

  The flash nearly blinded all of Phoenix’s sensors, and Erik saw molten fragments of singularity exploding away from that brilliance, most even now halting and falling rapidly back the way they’d come. Phoenix hurtled, now pulling Gs just from the direction change — the only time in Erik’s starship career he’d ever changed direction this sharply without firing engines to do it. The gravity slope here was insane and frightening, and if they slowed down even a little bit, they’d plunge straight down to a fate identical to that of the deepynine.

  “A little sharper than we thought,” Kaspowitz informed them, staring at his screens with laser-like focus. “We’ll come out facing oh-three-one by three-one-one, we can transition to intercept either the first or the second group.”

  “What will those impacts do to the singularity?” Erik asked, watching a few thousand bits of escape-velocity debris streaking past them. Any one of them would kill a ship, and all were travelling too fast to dodge.

  “Minimal,” said Kaspowitz. “The ejecta’s just a fractional percentage of total mass. The odds of a strike are small, and the core will liquefy and absorb the next two impacts without as much ejecta.” His fingers danced on the displays. “I’m getting much better data on surface gravity now, it looks like five or six hundred Gs down there, there’s not much escaping that.”

  The next flash blinded Scan for a second time as he spoke, a second deepynine vessel hitting that high-density core at nearly one percent the speed of light. The temperatures in that explosion would far exceed the core of a G2 sun, Erik knew — but the outward forces of expulsion would still not be enough to shift most of that mass from its present position. Quickly enough, the liquefied remains of each vessel would settle onto that perfectly spherical surface, and the singularity would grow by one minuscule fraction of a millimetre.

  “Captain, I just spoke with the Major,” said Shahaim, running engines and systems check as she spoke, absorbing the reports from Engineering that Erik had no time to read. “She wants those first five deepynines hit, not the trailing three, she thinks there could be fifteen hundred drones on that lot and she can’t handle them all.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Erik agreed. Tactical common sense said the trailing three were the better target — Phoenix had Talisar and five more capital warships spreading wide behind them, hurtling through the slingshot approach. Seven against three made much better odds, con
sidering what they were facing. But if those first five deepynines put all their drones down on the moon, they were looking at losing not only Styx and the data-core they’d just gone through everything to acquire, but losing all of Phoenix Company in a ground fight they could not possibly win.

  Erik knew he couldn’t allow it, and was pleased that in this hyper-focused state, the shocking unreality of what he had to do did not hit him so hard. The deepynines were locked into a massive deceleration approach, and if they went evasive to dodge Phoenix, they might actually miss their interception of the moon. They were target-fixated, which gave Phoenix the edge, targeting and firing along predictable lines of approach. They were also bow-to-target, while the deepynines were unavoidably side-on, presenting the largest possible profile to Phoenix’s smallest. The three sard ships were wide of that approach, nadir from Phoenix’s current angle, and only ‘trailing’ in the sense that they would arrive at the moon considerably later, given their less powerful deceleration and arcing approach trajectory. Picking between them was an equal choice, in terms of manoeuvre. But tactically, there was no choice at all.

  He blinked on the command icon, and got a reply from the Captain of Talisar. Tobenrah was on that ship. The actual head of House Harmony, leader of many billions of parren. Would the Captain agree to such a manoeuvre, with that cargo aboard?

  “Hello Talisar, our ground forces require strikes on the first five deepynine ships. Our estimate is that they carry the most formidable ground forces. Phoenix will engage, we expect the trailing three ships to engage us in turn. We will require cover.”

  “Hello Phoenix, Talisar will engage. Primary targets are the forward five vessels, parren ground commander gives us the same assessment. Harmony aligns, Phoenix.”

  The translator probably mangled that, Erik thought, but he knew what it sounded like. “Good luck to you, Talisar. It has been an honour.”

  The third detonation hit the singularity, the most brilliant of the three. Phoenix and the six parren were approaching high-V out of that glare, the gravity slope dropping away far more rapidly than the physics books said possible, and that combination of twisted space and sensor-blinding glare had to be playing hell with even deepynine armscomps. Against targets whose ability to counter-manoeuvre was limited by their approach, they’d never get a better chance than this.

  “Arms is green and clear!” Karle announced from Arms One. “Mains aligned, full spread on the front five!”

  “Secondaries online!” Harris added from Arms Two. “Defensive all forward, good to go!”

  “I have incoming!” Geish said loudly. “All marks are laying down their spread! Volume looks a little light, stand by!”

  But it was a wide spread, Erik saw. The deepynines were firing at all of them, human and parren alike. Better yet, as Geish said, the volume looked light, meaning that it did not appear that all available guns were firing. And here lay Phoenix’s final advantage — in a heavy-G push, some weapons simply didn’t fire, and even the highest technology didn’t always fix the problem. Mechanisms disabled under high-G, or swivel mounts lost their mobility, or a myriad of other problems. And now, it looked as though even these super-advanced ships hadn’t entirely overcome that problem.

  The lines all matched up on Erik’s display, and he felt so detached, so lost in the overwhelming rush of data, that he nearly managed a smile at his own optimism. So many advantages. Against these opponents, all it added up to was a chance — of success, at least. Of survival, he gave them only one chance in five.

  Lisbeth took the ten metre fall easily enough, the floor approaching so slowly that she simply bounced clear, giving the marines behind her a clear landing, a steady rain of armoured bodies. She looked immediately for Skah, and found him waiting for her, even checking his air and systems on the arm-display that was easier for children to use than the visor. Her own suit told her the air remaining was ninety-nine point three percent, suit filtration recycled most CO2 back to oxygen once more, with only a small total loss. Of all the problems she’d find down here, running out of air wasn’t going to be one of them for a long time yet.

  The new space was an engineering level once more, and the flitting glance of helmet lights caught strange, alien machinery in the middle-distance that might have been cargo haulers, but looked more like specifically designed machines to service power systems. Again the floor was enormous, and this time without visible battle damage. The far walls looked strange, as though molded from the thick conduits of some kind of insulated material. As low-vis light caught it from a multitude of angles, it seemed to fracture and shimmer, like the chitinous surface of a beetle shell.

  “It is here,” said Styx, to Lisbeth’s relief. All of that fast bounding seemed easy at first, but quickly became exhausting in the heavy suit, and now she was breathing hard, the suit’s environmentals pumping in cooler air, monitoring her respiration. She took Skah’s hand and skipped to where Styx was now circling what looked like an elevator car atop a shaft leading into the floor below. Behind the car, a wall of many overlooking windows, like some sort of control function. Immediately surrounding it, six strange, concentric rings linked to form what would look from above like a hexagon.

  “Are those rings some sort of scanning function?” Lisbeth wondered, as Sergeant Forrest dispersed the Alpha Platoon marines in defensive formation, while Dale examined the car.

  “Yes Lisbeth,” said Styx. “Even AIs need security functions about the most sensitive installations.” She was peering now at one of those rings, and Lisbeth found it nearly mesmerising to see how much precise sentience there was in the motion of this animal-looking machine, the forelegs running along the circle’s rim while the single eye and head darted this way and that, examining every detail.

  “Well the damn car’s blocking the shaft,” Dale observed. “Can you make it move, or do we have to blow it?”

  “These systems are independent and built to last,” Styx replied. “I am getting no response from network functions, but I believe the master switch should be here somewhere.”

  “You believe?” said Dale. “How does the smartest brain in the Spiral not know this stuff?”

  Styx ignored him, which was not typically her style, finding communication so effortless. Lisbeth thought that might mean she was annoyed. “Styx?” she ventured. “Would you like some assistance?”

  “That would make a nice change,” said Styx. In another circumstance, Lisbeth might have laughed. “But presently unnecessary.”

  She’d found something, Lisbeth saw. At the base of one of the circles, she’d removed a small panel. The very tip of one foreleg opened to reveal little manipulators, smaller and more precise than human fingers, tapping a code into some mechanism within. Then stopped, and waited.

  “Are you sure an independent battery could last this long?” Lisbeth wondered. As though in answer to her question, a deep hum began from somewhere beneath the decking.

  “Never sure, Lisbeth,” said Styx, backing away to consider her work. “Certainty is a sign of inferior intellect.”

  The deep, underground hum was joined by another, then a higher pitch, as though independent functions were somehow resuming after so many millennia of slumber. She could hear it, Lisbeth knew, because of her boots on the decking… and she jumped a little, to marvel at the sudden disappearance of sound. Then its resumption when she touched down once more, only now much louder, as the smaller systems combined to fire up something much larger again.

  Suddenly there were lights blinking, then a cascade of new light, like a wave sweeping across a beach. Lisbeth’s suit vision deactivated, as inbuilt light filled the engineering level… but broken and spotty, she saw, with many sections not working, making a pattern of bright and shadow. Within the surrounding rings, the elevator car was now blinking, wide doors opening. Lisbeth thought it looked large enough to fit ten… but one of those would surely be Styx, so perhaps nine?

  “Lieutenant,” said Styx, “you will wish to accompa
ny, as this will involve command decisions. A parren representative also, of course. Lisbeth, an organic engineering brain could prove useful, and you are the only one of those.”

  “Styx, I have to stay and watch Skah,” Lisbeth explained.

  “Skah will be useful also.”

  Lisbeth blinked. “What? How?”

  “Trust me.” It was perhaps the oddest two words she’d ever considered whether to take seriously, coming from a metallic, alien dinosaur perched before the entrance to an ancient elevator car, about to plunge them into the bowels of the city. “And Gesul is the closest organic here to being an historian, and will be necessary also. Come, we have little time.”

  Lisbeth grasped Skah’s hand and went, knowing that in this, as with so many things, none of them had any real choice but to do what Styx said. This was quite literally her world, and everyone else, human and parren alike, were the aliens. Dale left Sergeant Hall in charge of Alpha, with instructions to listen to the parren commander as the ranking officer, but not necessarily to obey him, then followed Lisbeth in with First Section. Timoshene accompanied Gesul, and they all squeezed in, suited and armoured shoulders pressed together, with Styx back on her hind legs, forelimbs splayed above them to keep her body clear and make room.

  Skah found that sight especially fascinating as the doors closed, and the car began to hum, then to move. He tilted his whole body back, as the helmet had limited mobility, and leaned on Gesul’s leg to look upward. Styx gazed down at him with her single unblinking red eye, from up by the ceiling.

  “You have an uplink connection to the car?” Lisbeth asked her.