by Ian Douglas
“Put us between Tellus Ad Astra and the Bluestar,” Wilson directed.
The Vera Cruz changed vector, and began angling toward the oncoming alien, and a fleet of Earth fighters kept pace.
“Let’s see who blinks first,” he muttered.
“What the hell is the Cruzer doing?” St. Clair demanded.
“Sir,” Vincent Hargrove, Ad Astra’s senior comm officer, replied. “Vera Cruz’s C3 reports they’re going to try to get between the Tellus and IO-1.”
“Undock us from the Tellus, ExComm,” St. Clair said. “We need freedom to maneuver.”
“Aye, aye, my lord. Beginning undocking sequence.”
The Vera Cruz approached the Bluestar object, fighters and armored Marines spilling from her drop tubes and hatchways. Particle beams snapped out, reaching for the alien world-ship, but St. Clair could see no indication that the enormous mobile world was being hurt. But the Bluestar did slow . . . then stopped. Perhaps Vera Cruz’s tactical gamble was paying off. . . .
The sky in every direction was filled with fighters and armored Marines, a swirling explosion of vacuum-mobile forces deploying to meet the alien world. Ebon-black slivers emerged from the Bluestar in clouds so thick they resembled smoke.
Captain Greg Dixon dropped into emptiness and accelerated clear of the Vera Cruz. There’d been no time to lay plans, no time for strategies or battle plans. With the Bluestar’s new advance there’d been time only to get off the Vera Cruz. Those, like Charlie Company, who’d already been suited up and on Ready-one—meaning they needed just one minute to launch—definitely had an advantage over the Marines still clambering into their suits aboard the Cruzer.
Please, God, let them all get out. . . .
At least out here they had a chance.
His suit AI was tracking a group of needleships vectoring toward his position. He swung his M-290 laser to bear on the nearest alien craft and triggered a pulse of phase-boosted photons. The lead needleship exploded in a spray of white-hot debris, and he targeted the next in line . . . and the next . . . and the next. . . .
For a stark, brief nightmare of a moment, General Wilson thought he was going mad. The First Division command center around him was twisting oddly, distorting as he watched it . . . and things were beginning to ooze from the Cruzer’s bulkheads.
Exactly what those squirming things might be was hard to determine. Wilson could see obviously organic shapes there, merged into a ghastly amoebic mass. There were eyes in that mass, hundreds of them staring and blinking and shifting back and forth . . . and things like arms and things like tentacles and things like bloody internal organs pulsing with an animation that defied conventional ideas of what might be alive and what could not possibly be.
Wilson’s neuronic implants were jacked directly into ship systems or a communications network, so even as the nightmares came boiling onto the C3 deck, he was sending out a call for help while simultaneously drawing his sidearm.
With a thoughtclick, he engaged his infrared vision . . . then took a step back. That didn’t make sense. As he fired his M110 pulse laser into the surging mass, his IR vision picked up the flares of heat on the bulkhead where the bolts of coherent light were striking it . . . but no heat at all from the organic mass.
It was as though the things weren’t even there.
But something was inside that compartment. He could feel it through his link with the Vera Cruz’s communications network, a sharp, ice-cold and terribly aware presence crawling through the link and directly into his brain.
Deladier was nearby, firing his own laser into the crawling mass, bolt after bolt . . . and then the ship’s captain was shrieking as he clawed at his own head, as nightmares squirmed in through the electronic connections to the ship.
Was there anything there, any solid manifestation of the crawling horrors? The mass reached Wilson’s legs and he held his ground. He couldn’t feel anything, despite what his eyes were telling him. Maybe the extradimensional horror was some kind of illusion, something fed by the Andromedan Dark into people’s minds to panic or immobilize them.
Whatever was clawing into his brain, however, was absolutely, undeniably real. He could feel it, could feel it moving, could feel the pain, could hear his own screams as the pain grew swiftly worse. The comm channel was still open, and Wilson kept feeding it his impressions. Maybe someone analyzing this attack back on board the Ad Astra could make something of it, something useful.
A Marine sentry stood nearby, his M-290 laser rifle at his shoulder as he squeezed off vortex-twisted bolts of light. Interesting; those bolts were having an effect, unlike the non-twisted photons from his pistol. Something that might once have been a human pilot, still clad in the remnants of flight utilities, flared like a tiny sun and came apart in bloody chunks. Something next to it, like a two-meter insect with paddles instead of legs, writhed and burned.
What the hell was going on? Why could rifled laser fire hit the things, and ordinary lasers not?
There was no time to think about that. Four irregularly flattened spheres appeared in midair. Wilson had seen recordings of this, and there was no doubting their rock-solid reality. Something—something very large—was reaching “down” from some higher dimension and intersecting with Wilson’s normal 3-D world, the same as if he had shoved his fingers through a two-dimensional plane or a sheet of paper to create five separate holes, five two-dimensional zones of interpenetration. The four spheroids briefly merged into a single mass, separated again, then swept through the air with stunning suddenness, closing about Deladier’s body. Deladier gave a brief, despairing shriek, then vanished with the alien hand . . . if a hand it truly was.
The C3 compartment was rapidly filling with the illusory mass of amoebic chaos. Horribly, there were human bodies in among the alien appendages and forms, bodies and pieces of bodies all squeezed in together with alien things and bits no human had ever before seen. The mass, Wilson could now see, was interpenetrating his body. Either it was a complete illusion, or it was someplace else, hidden away in a different set of dimensions.
But if that was the case, how could he even see it? Light, surely, was constrained by the geometries of sane dimensions that said that if you could see a thing, you could touch it . . . or it you.
But the pain in Wilson’s head was by now too sharp, too penetrating for him to think. If he could not feel the alien monstrosities surging around him, he could definitely feel the bubbling, gibbering rush of insanity rising up inside him, flooding his brain, drowning his mind. He tried shouting a final warning to whoever might review his recordings, but what came from his raw throat was unintelligible even to him.
And finally . . . finally, the darkness took him and dragged him down. . . .
The Ad Astra slid clear of Tellus’s side-by-side hab modules, then accelerated gently, gliding just beneath the immense, slow-turning cylinders before emerging into the harsh sunlight.
“Vera Cruz reports they’re under attack,” Hargrove reported. “Extradimensional attacks on board, several locations. We’ve lost touch with General Wilson and his staff.”
“They may just be busy, Vince,” St. Clair replied. “Stay linked.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Weapons!”
“Hot and ready, Lord Commander,” Subcommander Webb replied. “Any particular points you want to target?”
One of the displays open in St. Clair’s mind was from the Vera Cruz, showing the Bluestar alien from a steadily dwindling range of now less than one hundred thousand kilometers. The hyperdimensional object continued unfolding over and over again in a stomach-churning twisting of sane and normal space. There were no markings, nothing obvious like doors or entranceways, nothing that St. Clair could point to and say “hit it there.”
Without a clear target, he could only order all batteries to fire at a single point. “On the equator,” he ordered, “at the longitudinal median, dead center. All units, concentrate your fire there and let’s see what happens.�
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High-energy weapons fire lashed out at the Bluestar object from the Ad Astra, from the three Marine transports, and from some thousands of fighters and armored Marines filling the sky ahead. An intense point of blue-white light appeared at that central focus . . . but the constant dimensional shifting meant that different portions of the object were constantly cycling through the aim-point. It was clear almost immediately that concentrating their fire on one point was not going to create a breach in that thing.
The clouds of needleships, however, were closing on the Marine transports, shouldering their way past the sheltering Marines and fighter craft in ever increasing numbers and focusing their antimatter beam weapons against all-too-vulnerable terrestrial hulls. Missiles reached out from the human line, twisting and turning among the alien vessel swarms before detonating in vast, fast-swelling blossoms of sun-hot nuclear plasma. But it was only a matter of time.
St. Clair had Newton open the channel to the nearby Cooperative world-ships. “If you don’t get in here and help,” he told them, “we are pulling out! You will fucking be on your own!”
In fact, St. Clair wasn’t certain they would be able to pull off a retreat. Thousands of Marines were spaceborne now, and it would take hours to pick all of them up. The only viable alternative was for the human forces to attack with everything they had . . . and pray to God that the Kroajid, at least, joined in.
The threat might just possibly force their hands . . . or, rather, their manipulatory members; Kroajid graspers didn’t look much like human hands.
“Anyone see any response from the Coops?” St. Clair asked his bridge crew.
“Nothing yet, my lord,” Symms replied. “I don’t think they want to get their hands dirty.”
“They don’t want to get killed,” St. Clair said.
“Can’t say I blame them,” Subcommander Webb added.
“Helm!” St. Clair was watching the light show arrayed across the Ad Astra’s bridge, showing worlds and ships and the stab and flash of combat.
“Aye, Lord Commander.”
“Take us across the rings and swing around the far side of that gas giant. Let’s see if we can do something unexpected, here.”
“Aye, aye, my lord.”
Ad Astra began picking up speed, sliding swiftly above the vast plane of the Ki Rings. The Bluestar was still well beyond Ki, over 5 million kilometers distant. The local gas giant, by contrast, was much closer, just over 680,000 kilometers. The distance between the two was still too great for St. Clair to use the planet for cover, but he did expect to pick up some extra velocity by using a gravitational slingshot around the giant world.
“Sir!” Symms called suddenly. “The smaller world-ships are following us!”
“Outstanding. There’s hope for the sons of bitches after all. What about the Wrath of Deity?”
“No change, my lord.”
“I didn’t really expect them to jump in and help.” But he’d had hopes.
And then . . .
“My God!” Webb shouted. “The Cruzer! Look at her!”
The Marine transport had slewed to the side as though in the grip of some titanic, invisible force. The Bluestar accelerated, looming huge, a solid, shifting wall behind the dust mote of the transport.
The Vera Cruz twisted, then crumpled . . . dwindling . . . collapsing in upon itself.
“What are we seeing?” St. Clair demanded.
“It appears that IO-1 has used some kind of gravitational weapon, Lord Commander,” Symms replied, her mental voice flat. “Possibly a micro-black hole launched extradimensionally. Or a projected singularity. They might have the technology to force a gravitational collapse on a target at a distance.”
The Vera Cruz was gone, now, with no trace remaining but a sparkling spray of fragments. Marines and fighters were accelerating to get clear.
And then the Bluestar swept through that volume of space, and there was nothing remaining of the human vessel at all.
Captain Dixon watched the destruction of the Vera Cruz with shock and mounting horror. “Pull back, Charlie Company!” he yelled. “Pull back! We can’t hold that thing by ourselves!”
Marines, Dixon thought, were by both nature and training combative, tough, and to all outward appearances, at least, utterly lacking in fear . . . but they were not stupid. Two entire divisions of Marines had no more chance of stopping that oncoming world-ship ahead than they had of turning back time or putting out the local sun. To stand and fight here meant to stand and die . . . and dying for no useful purpose. Too many Marines had already died in the past few moments, vaporized by blasts from those damnable swarms of needleships, and while the Tellus First Division had cut huge swaths through those clouds of enemy fighters, for every ship they destroyed it seemed like ten more were there to take its place.
“HQ is gone!” Staff Sergeant David Ramirez called. “Who the fuck is giving orders?”
With General Wilson and the entire division command staff gone, half of the Marines engaged with the Bluestar would be falling back on regimental, battalion, and company commanders. It would take a few moments for the various AIs involved to stitch together a new and coherent command structure . . . and moments in combat could be the equivalent of forever.
“I’m giving the orders,” Dixon snapped. “Everybody fall back toward . . .” He hesitated. The Ad Astra was 5 million kilometers away . . . far beyond the range of MCA suits. What was his company’s best option? Scatter in the face of overwhelming enemy strength? Or pull back to one of the other transports and try to make a stand?
“Everyone fall back on the Inch!” he ordered. The Inchon was fifteen thousand kilometers distant. She would make a convenient rally point. “Move it!
“Move! Move! Move!”
Dixon didn’t join the retreat immediately. He hung there in space, loosing a chain of six M-90 Shurikin shipkillers. Flares of white plasma blossomed across his field of vision, growing a wall of devastation blocking the oncoming needleships from the Marine retreat.
“Newton?”
“Yes, Lord Commander?”
“Put me back in that meeting.”
“Most of those in attendance have already disconnected.”
“Let me talk to whoever is left. And if the Kroajid Speaker has left, get him back!”
His surroundings shimmered, and then he was standing in the cavernous space that existed as a virtual room somewhere within the Wrath of Deity. Na Lal was still there, as was Speaker, along with the Thole and a few others. All of the Xam, he noticed, were gone, as was the far larger bulk of Gudahk.
“Our moon-ships,” Speaker said, “are at your disposal.”
“I appreciate that, Speaker. How long will it take for you to evacuate one?”
“I . . . do not understand. Why do you want it empty?”
“I’m not going to explain and I’m not going to argue. I need control over one of your moon-ships, and I need it now, before that damned Dark monster out there manages to wipe us all out of the sky!”
The Kroajid considered this for a moment, and St. Clair had the impression that it was engaged in a hurried mental conversation with someone else.
“I have given orders,” Speaker told him, “to evacuate the Heavenly Light. The minds on board are being transmitted electronically to the ring.”
“And how long will that take?”
“A few minutes. Even the Rings of Ki do not have the bandwidth to receive all 200 million of us immediately.” Speaker’s image shivered, then became blasted through with white static.
“Speaker? Does that mean you’re on the Heavenly Light, too?”
But the image of the Kroajid was gone.
“Not anymore,” Newton told him.
“Newton . . . can you put my consciousness on board the Heavenly Light? And more important, can you show me how to control that thing?”
“I don’t know, Commander.”
“Well find the fuck out!” He was mentally screaming now.
&n
bsp; Newton maintained his usual, studied calm. “It will take time to build an appropriate virtuality for you.”
“Do it!”
The conference room was beginning to fade and ripple. Now what?
“We are moving out of range from the Wrath of Deity,” Newton told him.
“Are you still here?”
“A part of me is. I am using a small clone of myself to speak with you, while simultaneously I am entering the Heavenly Light.”
“Okay. I’m sorry I . . . shouted.”
“Understandable, under the circumstances. I suggest we let the Wrath of Deity simulation go.”
“Agreed.”
The cavernous room vanished. For a moment, St. Clair was adrift in an endless black, and he stifled a sudden surge of panic.
“I can put your consciousness back on board Ad Astra if you prefer,” Newton told him, “but it might be more efficient if you can tolerate . . . this.”
This was a new space, a new world of dizzying heights, of crystal walkways and towering spires, of white clouds far, far below and the sonorous clang of bells or chimes on a keening wind. He was standing in a circular, open structure of some sort that appeared to be at the nexus of dozens of bridges, but the bridges were individual cables of what might be spun glass. Within the central well of the structure was a glowing, holographic image, but St. Clair was having trouble making out what the image represented. It wasn’t simply that he couldn’t read the words—if those swiftly appearing and vanishing chicken’s-tracks were words—it was that the images he was seeing, blobs of shape and color and texture that moved in irrational ways, had been designed by minds completely alien to his, were being projected for minds and senses completely alien to his. The projection, he realized, was buzzing, and rather than being an electronic artifact of some sort, a sign of faulty design, the buzz shifted and flowed with the flowing, abstract images. It sounded like it was somehow supposed to be a part of the complete image.
Then he remembered how the Kroajid communicated with one another—by vibrating patches of stiff hair covering their thoraxes and heads, creating a deep-toned buzz.