Lanoe lifted an eyebrow. He’d never heard of a planet that wasn’t run by some bureaucracy or another. He supposed if you were small enough it wasn’t worth it for your poly overlords to micromanage everything you did. Interesting.
“Sounds like a nice place to get lost,” he mused.
The old woman touched her keyboard and the holographic globe began to rotate.
“Twenty-seven days ago, a spacecraft entered orbit around Niraya. We weren’t expecting a freighter for weeks, so we didn’t notice until it was almost upon us.” A mote of light appeared above the globe, spinning around it in a tight polar orbit. The kind of orbit a weather satellite might use—or a reconnaissance probe. An orbit like that would eventually cover the entire surface of the world. “This vehicle did not attempt to contact us, nor did it respond to any signal we sent it,” the elder said. “It made thirty-one full orbits. Then it released a lander, a craft massing about one and a quarter tons, which entered our atmosphere here and touched down here nine minutes later.”
The mote of light split into two. The dot representing the lander came down in the midst of an empty patch of Niraya, far from either of the main craters.
“We have no video of the descent or landing, I’m afraid. Niraya doesn’t have much of a satellite network and we had no cameras anywhere near this area. It’s just a wilderness. We dispatched ground vehicles as soon as we knew where it had come down, but they didn’t arrive for another three hours. In the meantime, the lander had moved. It progressed immediately to the nearest livestock station—just a ranch in a deep canyon, a couple of farmers and two hundred meat animals. Birds. By the time our ground vehicles arrived, nothing remained alive at the station. Three minutes later our response team was dead as well.”
She turned and stared at Lanoe with a bleak expression. “We do have video of that,” she said.
Roan had not seen the video before. Almost nobody on Niraya had seen it—the elders had decided not to share it publicly, for fear of starting a panic. It didn’t take long for Roan to see why that was a concern.
The file the elder brought up was grainy and the color balance was off, an automatic recording from a camera mounted on the dashboard of a ground vehicle. At first it showed nothing but the inside of the vehicle’s sealed cabin, just a shot of two grizzled men in heavy quilted jackets. One of them looked a little like Roan’s father. They were talking but the audio quality was too low to make out what they said.
One of them tapped a key on the dashboard and the camera switched to a forward view. Roan saw two more vehicles rumbling up ahead, big utilitarian half-tracks that fishtailed and swerved as they raced across an unending landscape of slickrock and scrubby yellow vegetation. They kicked up a lot of dust as they dove into a high-walled canyon, a defile full of the haze you got in the low-lying areas where the atmosphere was thick enough to breathe.
As the vehicles headed down into the canyon Roan saw the first of the dead animals, a smear of reddish gore on the side of a narrow track. One of the men shouted something and the camera automatically panned to record the body, but the vehicle was moving so quickly it was only on-screen for a second.
The view jumped and smeared as the vehicles roared down into the canyon, hurtling around a tight curve and then braking hard as they approached their destination. For a while Roan could make no sense of the video but then it wobbled back to something approaching clarity, though the dust was still very thick.
There was more red—more blood, a fan of it sprayed across a canyon wall. The camera swiveled around to focus on the bodies of more animals. They looked like emus. Big flightless birds were the preferred meat animals on Niraya, since they could thrive in low-oxygen environments. Roan had seen plenty of emus and ostriches in her life, but few of these animals were intact enough to resemble anything but butchered meat.
Then Roan noticed that one of them had hands. Human hands.
She fought back a wave of nausea.
The men in the trucks were all shouting now. Some had jumped out of their vehicles. She saw the tubes of respirators flopping from their collars, saw their heavy boots. They could be anyone she knew back on Niraya. Two of them headed down into the canyon with long rifles in their hands while a third gestured at the camera, shouting for one of his people to make sure it was recording. Roan could see his face quite clearly. There was dust in the fine wrinkles around his mouth and his hair was the color of new iron.
“Elder Mosaddeq,” she said, unable to control her voice.
In the video, he grabbed one of the men by the arm and shoved him forward, deeper into the canyon. He didn’t want to seem to go. There was a noise that Roan thought at first must be an artifact of the recording. With a shudder she realized it was the sound of someone screaming in agony.
The dust that obscured the view wouldn’t settle. The view of the canyon ahead showed nothing, just dark shapes moving fast. The camera was smart enough to know it wasn’t recording anything useful so it switched back to focusing on Mosaddeq’s face. Roan wished it would look elsewhere. Mosaddeq looked terrified, and she knew he had good reason.
Roan looked up at the people in the casino. Elder McRae had turned away from the view—she’d seen it before. Lanoe sat forward with his forearms resting on his thighs, only his eyes moving as he took everything in. Valk sat nearby, fidgeting, his hands clenching and unclenching in his lap. Maggs was wholly absorbed by the view in the display. He had the decency to look appalled.
In the video, Mosaddeq began to speak.
“All dead,” he said, “all of them. Tell—tell Elder Young, tell—”
The camera jumped back to the dust in the canyon. There were fewer shapes moving in there now, in fact it might just be one big one.
“—made contact at seventeen forty-nine local time, I think. Our weapons had no effect. Repeat, weapons had no effect. Garner and Ionescu are dead. We’re going to try the explosives, just give me—”
The camera focused on the dust of the canyon but this time there was something to see. The lander had emerged from the murk and shown itself clearly for the first time.
It stood nearly six meters tall, towering over the vehicles. It looked like a cluster of long segmented legs with nothing resembling a head or body, just dozens of limbs that ended in sharp points. It was smeared with blood everywhere. One of the legs dragged behind it and Roan gasped when she saw it was still impaled on the body of one of the men from the trucks.
Mosaddeq didn’t run. His training as an elder would keep him there, Roan knew, where he might do some good. It would keep him even from saving his own life, if there was still something he could achieve. He kept shouting orders, though Roan couldn’t see anybody else in the camera view.
“Get those explosives up here! The blasting gel—get those tubes up here! Tell Elder Young—tell her we couldn’t—we tried, weapons had no effect, we couldn’t get—what? I can’t hear you, say that again. I can’t—”
The camera focused on him as his last words turned into a gurgling scream. One of the lander’s legs was visible, emerging from a red hole in Elder Mosaddeq’s stomach. He tried to grab the leg, maybe to try to damage it with his bare hands, maybe just because he was falling and he wanted something to hold on to.
Roan thought the camera had gone out of focus, but then water splashed on her hand and she realized she was weeping. She fought to control herself—the elder’s sacrifice deserved better—but the tears kept coming.
The lander walked over his corpse, its shadow passing over his face. It didn’t even slow down, just kept moving. Roan could hear every pattering crunch of its footsteps as it trod the dusty rock of the canyon floor. The camera followed it for a while, providing a good view of the thing walking away.
The camera’s computer must have recognized that the action was over. That there was nothing more to see. Its facial recognition software took over, and the view snapped back to Mosaddeq’s face, lying in the dust, the eyes turning to lifeless glass.
Eventually Elder McRae reached over and switched off the video.
Lanoe felt for the people he’d just watched die, but in an abstract kind of way. He’d been a warrior far too long, he thought. He knew he should be more moved, more horrified. All he could think of, though, was how to kill that damned thing. Bullets didn’t harm it. He hadn’t heard any explosions in the video. Did they try explosives on the thing or not? Maybe—
But Elder McRae was talking. He snapped himself out of his thoughts so he could listen to her, because she had more data for him.
“The lander moved immediately to the next livestock station and repeated what you saw there,” the old woman said. “It left nothing alive. It worked its way through six more stations before it was stopped.”
Lanoe grunted. “The rifles in that video—they had no effect.”
“No,” the old woman said. “Nor did the explosives—blasting supplies from our mining operations. As I said, Niraya is a place of peace. We’re far from the wars, and there are no predators on our world. We have few weapons, and nothing particularly advanced.”
“But you did kill it, eventually,” Valk said.
Lanoe shook his head. Weren’t they listening? “She didn’t say they killed it. She said it was stopped.”
The old woman nodded. “It was headed directly for Walden Crater, the place where the vast majority of our people live. Before it could arrive, it had to pass by one of our fusion plants, and we made a very difficult decision. The temperature inside the reactor averaged about a million degrees. We…dropped containment.”
She tapped at her keyboard again and a new video popped up to hover in the air over the faro table. The camera view showed a stretch of canyon land where nothing moved—it could have been a still image except for a high streamer of cloud ribboning by overhead. The lander wasn’t visible—the video must have been taken from a significant height, perhaps from orbit.
Without warning, brilliant scintillating light filled the image, bright enough to make Lanoe wince and look away. When he looked back the landscape had changed. Rivers of molten rock twisted across a blasted plain, the entire view shimmering under a red sky.
“There were…environmental consequences,” the old woman said. “We may have set our terraforming efforts back by a few years.”
Roan piped in from the other side of the room, in a small voice. “You can’t pump that much heat into an atmosphere—even one as thin as ours—without causing storms. Our weather patterns are going to be unpredictable for a generation.”
The old woman looked down at her keyboard. “It had to be done.”
“I’m just saying it’s going to cause problems,” Roan insisted.
“It had to be done.” The elder stared the girl down. Eventually she turned away and went to sit down in a corner.
“What about the orbiter?” Lanoe asked, maybe to clear the air.
“The orbiter?”
The old pilot arced his hand through the air as if she were asking what an orbiter was. “The vehicle that originally entered your space. It dropped its payload—this lander—but you said that part of it remained outside the atmosphere.”
The old woman nodded. “Yes. Yes.” It looked like she needed a second to gather her thoughts. “The orbiter was…just a shell. We sent up one of our shuttles to investigate it but they found little to report on. An empty pod, with very primitive thruster elements mounted on its exterior surface. There were no life support facilities because there was no pilot. No significant computers onboard. Clearly it was designed simply to bring the lander to us. Furthermore there was no indication where the vehicle came from or who sent it. The only thing we found inside was a communications laser.”
“To control the lander, maybe?” Valk suggested. “That thing looked like a drone to me. Maybe it was taking its orders from the orbiter.”
“The laser wasn’t pointed at the ground,” the old woman said. “It was pointed outward, toward space. That’s how we discovered that our nightmare wasn’t over.”
Roan rubbed at her face with her hands. She still had trouble believing that it wasn’t going to stop. She’d put so much hope in Lieutenant Maggs, in his promises. None of it had been real. No help was coming.
Niraya was doomed.
The elder was still talking, though Roan barely listened. “The communications laser was pointed at an empty patch of space. No planets in that direction, not even any stars for hundreds of light-years. When we reached the orbiter it was active, sending a coherent signal. Frankly, our people were too terrified of the thing to even switch it off, at first. They didn’t know if the orbiter was booby-trapped. They did eventually cut power to the laser, but not before it sent its message.”
She tapped at her keyboard to open a new video file.
“The message was encrypted, and we could make no sense of it. There was one thing we could do, however. Niraya has an orbital telescope—normally we use it to track the movement of terraforming impactors and as an early warning system to watch for incoming asteroids and comets. This time we used it to track the communications laser to its destination. We found there was something out there, something that was awaiting that signal. I apologize for the poor resolution of this image, but I believe it speaks for itself.”
She expanded the display until a still image filled the air above the faro table, spilling over the sides and stretching up to the ceiling.
The Navy men, including M. Maggs, got up to walk around the image, studying it from all sides.
A collection of blobbish gray shapes hung in the air there over the faro table. Some bigger than others. In general they were spindle shaped and they were all pointing in the same direction. They were fuzzy at the edges and tinged a distinct blue.
There were hundreds of them. Strung out in a loose cloud formation, the smaller blobs cluttering the front of the image, one very large shape loitering toward the back, where the resolution broke down and the image turned to fog.
A scale indicator floated near the bottom of the image. Even the smallest of those blobs was huge compared to the ton-and-a-half lander.
Roan had seen the image before, though she didn’t claim to understand it. She didn’t know what the Navy men were looking for as they bent under the image to look inside it or circled around it, pointing out details to each other. As far as Roan could tell there were no details to scrutinize, no profiles or silhouettes to make sense of. Her studies in planetary engineering hadn’t prepared her to interpret this kind of image.
“They’re all pointed the same way,” Valk said. “Moving on the same trajectory. I’m thinking that rules out a meteor swarm or anything natural.”
Lanoe nodded. “Moving too fast, anyway. Look at the blue shift.”
“I assumed that was a color error in the image,” Maggs said. “Now that you mention it, though…”
The other two turned to stare at him until Maggs backed away from the faro table, huffing in indignation.
“How fast are they moving?” Valk asked. “About half light speed?”
Elder McRae nodded. “A little less than that. Currently they’re decelerating.”
“That definitely rules out anything natural,” Valk said.
“How far away?” Lanoe asked.
“Roughly five hundred billion kilometers,” the elder said.
Lanoe tilted his head to one side, then the other. “Twenty light days, give or take. So forty-some days until they arrive. When was this image taken?”
“Twenty-six days ago,” the elder said.
Valk spread out his arms to indicate the whole image. “Lanoe, am I wrong about what this is?”
“I doubt it. That first lander, the killer drone—that was an advance scout. Gathering intelligence for…” He waved at the display of bluish-gray blobs. “For this.”
He glanced over at Maggs, who just nodded.
“It’s a fleet,” Lanoe said. “An armada.”
“We believe there will be more landers like the
one in our video. Or perhaps worse things. As I said before, I dislike conjecture,” Elder McRae said. “I can’t help but believe that this fleet intends us harm, however.”
Roan pulled her legs up to her chest and hugged them. “They’re going to kill us. All of us.” The elder glared at her but she didn’t care.
“You can’t know that,” Valk said. “Listen, if this is just DaoLink opening a second front, they’ve already made their point. Maybe that’s even why Centrocor is dragging their heels. Maybe they know DaoLink is laying a trap and they don’t want to just rush into it.”
“It’s not DaoLink,” Maggs said.
Roan glared at him. He’d already dashed their hopes. Did he have to make things worse?
“You know that for a fact?” Valk asked.
Maggs shrugged. “I’d wager money on it. The war between them and Centrocor—any war between two polys—is one of propaganda as much as arms. That means everyone has to know it when you make a move. If they intended to seize Niraya, even as a ruse, they would have already issued a proclamation and half the galaxy would be talking about it. They would want to provoke Centrocor into action, and that means getting this story in the public eye.”
“Okay, so maybe it’s pirates or something,” Valk said.
“Technically, pirates attack ships in space,” Maggs pointed out. “The word you want is raiders. And why anyone would raid a place like Niraya—”
Valk lifted his arms and let them drop again. “Raiders, whatever! Have they tried to contact you? Maybe demanded money so they’ll go away?”
The elder shook her head. “There’s been no communication from the incoming fleet, of any kind. We’ve tried to contact them several times but there was no response.”
Roan couldn’t look at them while they talked about the fate of an entire planet like it was a puzzle to be solved. Instead she looked over at Lanoe. The old Navy man was still staring at the telescope image of the fleet, as if it would start moving.
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