The Liberty Fleet Trilogy (War of Alien Aggression, box set two)

by A. D. Bloom

  "Doxy is launching her breaching mine," he said. Plasma flared in front of SCS Doxy and showed all the converted carrier's flight decks and raiders in silhouette as the space in front of her turned to a ball of greenish hellfire and then collapsed, opening the transit to the next system.

  The formation of SkyJacks that dived in ahead of the carrier splashed transient firefly particles off the invisible meniscus before they streaked ahead down the waving, fire-lined tunnel.

  Ram said, "NAV, take us in."

  SCS Doxy

  Garlan thought the Ambassador would leave at some point, but Ix stayed on Doxy's bridge from the first transit right up to the last. The Shediri Ambassador to War had made himself at home.

  While his bodyguards waited at the rear, Ix perched on his narrow, offset pyramid of a chair that allowed him to drape all his legs. The bugs' suits were conceptually similar to the new armored and war painted ones his own crew wore, but of course Ix had 58 tiny legs under his bottom segment. Every minute or so, the bug would shiver his whole body in his suit trying to resettle more comfortably. Chitin jaws moved inside the bug's helmet, and the translator voice spoke in their ears. "[Interrogative] Destination reached?"

  Annie snickered from Ops. "He wants to know if we're there yet."

  Singh had the NAV and the best estimate. "Less than two minutes to the Eta Taurus-Alcyone Transit."

  Ix signaled to one of his own using voice comms. It wasn't a transmission meant for Garlan to understand but he still watched the way Ix's jaws moved in his helmet as if he could read them like lips. "Ready to breach space," the translator said. "No delay."

  He didn't hear the hatch or see Bix enter until the 14-year-old powder monkey stood at the starboard side of the command chair. "Why aren't you in engineering with Carnaby?" he asked before the Commodore's son, Hank, stepped into view next to Bix wearing the smallest exosuit he'd ever seen. "You...I thought you went back to Hardway."

  Devlin's boy hissed and clicked like a bug and nodded his helmet to the Shediri Ambassador. Ix nodded back, returning the gesture of respect, but the translator daemon lurking on local comms ignored what Hank said so Garlan didn't think the boy had actually managed to say anything in Shediri and make it truly intelligible. The child turned to Garlan, "My father, Commodore Devlin says he'd consider it a favor if I could stay and watch the last transit from here."

  "Next up is Alcyone," said Garlan. "We're expecting combat. Your father is going to want you on Hardway."

  "I'm not scared," the boy said.

  Garlan didn't have time to argue before Graves' arm shot out from the tactical console, but not to point at the projections of the ships. His extended arm stabbed out the front windows of the bridge into the vacuum, to what no LiDAR or radar array had seen, but was now scant kilometers in front of them, inexplicable, ghostly, and big on a scale that dwarfed the ten K orbital station they'd just left.

  "All stop!"

  "What the hell are those?" said Singh.

  "Are they ships?" Annie said, "I can see right through them."

  "Hardway is ordering all ships full stop..."

  "Uh-huh."

  The uncanny vessels stretched in a line, a procession across their bows, each of them 30km long at least, and almost 18km in diameter, cylindrical in their basic form but for what looked to be some kind of accretion, rough and unexpectedly spiky with growths stabbing out from the skin like stalagmites as if the dust of countless aeons had piled up by columnar charge. The stars twinkled through them as if they were only half there.

  The plasma flares from the F-223 Sky Jacks of Hardway's CAP flew together in tight, buzzing constellations around the line of mysterious mirages. Annie patched the air patrol's comms over their local suit comms. "These things are over 30-kilometers-long and I can't get a radar bounce."

  "Combat Air Patrol this is the Air Group Commander. Do not engage. Do not engage."

  "Engage what?" said Hellcat 1-1. "I'm not even sure they're here. I think they're some kind of illusion. No IR sig. No magnetic field. Not reflecting any energy."

  "Graves, what are we seeing?" said Garlan. "With our eyes, I mean."

  "No extra photons are hitting our arrays. According to all instruments, what you see isn't there.

  "Then how are we seeing those ships?"

  "By all measurable means," Graves said, "we can't."

  "Then what am I looking at?"

  "The procession blocking their path passed across the windows of the Doxy's bridge, silent and immense. "How come we can see right through them?" Bix asked. "That isn't stealth."

  The Shediri guards began clacking among themselves and then Ix joined in. A moment later, the translator in the chest panel of the Ambassador's suit spoke. "Ships of dead aliens."

  Annie said, "Does he mean ghost ships?"

  "No," Garlan said. "He does not mean ghost ships."

  "Alien ghost ships," said Bix, eyes wide.

  "The ambassador absolutely did not mean alien ghost ships," Garlan insisted with confidence. "I'm sure of it."

  SCS Hardway, Bridge

  Margo nodded at the the procession of space-going specters crossing the carrier's bow. "The Shediri name for them translates to 'alien ghost ships'," she said.

  "Ghost ships, my ass," said Biko "that looks like the kind of stealth SCS Boomslang used."

  Ram said, "Are they partially in n-space or maybe shunting energy there like Aragami?"

  "No. This is different. Those vessels we see out there are literally here and not here," she said. "Both."

  "How do you know so much?"

  "They're on the Shediri's list of local species, but no information exists about them except that they only appear with great infrequency - every ninety orbits or so around Shedir. That's about 211 Earth years"

  Ram spoke the order over his shoulder. "Mr. Biggs, greet them via the Diplomatic Console, if you please."

  "Pre-packaged greeting in all known languages going out now...Guerrero is asking for a status report on why we're stopped."

  "If our arrays can't pick it up," Biko said, "then Chun's can't."

  "Tell him to look out a porthole," Pardue said. "If he has one."

  After the last of the uncanny vessels had sailed across the bows of the battlegroup, the whole line of phantasmal ships spun together as if they were doing some kind of turn and burn maneuver to come to a stop in front of the transit point, but the line they took to get there curved in a manner that suggested they weren't leveraging any kind of known thrust.

  "Can they see us?" Pardue said as they lined up again, bow to stern, single file and steamed at the unopened transit point together, coming to speed instantly.

  "The first of them will pass over the unopened transit point in three...two...one...mark"

  One by one, as the specter ships crossed an imaginary point marking the as yet unopened Taurus-Alcyone transit. They vanished meter by meter as if steaming into an invisible hole in space.

  4

  On the surface of Alcyone-3

  Once the equatorial skies of Alcyone-3 darkened, the Ekkai's home planet rose above the jagged horizon like a swollen red star. It blurred as Dana breathed on the inside of her helmet's visor, and the color spread in the condensation. The fifth planet and the enemy home fleet wasn't nearly as far away as she would have liked. She knelt and set the transmission relay at the summit of the little mountain. The bowl-shaped landslide trough in the side of it looked stable enough for now.

  Lippmann hovered nearby. When he was out of the cockpit, he didn't seem to know what to do with himself. The nervousness in his voice buzzed like a fly in her helmet. "Even if they can't find the tiny surveillance proxies we laid on the way here, how are you so sure your network can't be cracked?"

  "It's a q-linked encryption network," she said. "The keys are physical." She fished the QC-212 handheld comms relay unit from the thigh pocket of her exosuit and held it up. "This holds the particles that are matched to the ones in the spy proxies. Can read the data wi
thout the matching key-particles and we have them. If I fall off a cliff or something, recover this QC-212 before you recover my body. It's the key to defeating the Ekkai's stealth and it's more important than any of us."

  Once the task force arrived, she'd be transmitting the network's data to Hardway from the planet. To help the shore party stay alive longer while doing that, Dana set six transmission relays. The network frequency-hopped, but sooner or later, the enemy would find them. When that happened, the enemy would find the relays before they found Aragami. She'd set them on all the low peaks that surrounded the valley forest and now, she held the last of them in place as the 10cm-wide, spiked ball wormed metal tendrils into the cracks in the rock to root itself in place against the winds. After it felt secure, the antennae blossomed from it like cactus flowers, collecting signals from the network of over seventy tiny spy proxies they'd deployed across the Alcyone system.

  "My LiDAR keeps picking up flashes high in the atmo," he said. She looked up into the blue-green sky and let her helmet's lenses soak up the light for a few seconds. "There!" He pointed at something in high orbit over their heads. "You see that? those flashes could be stealth glitches on an Ekkai ship that isn't showing up on our map."

  A peek at the projection in Dana's helmet visor showed the bulk of the Ekkai home fleet remained clustered around the homeworld in a defensive posture. The number of Hunter-Killer squadrons had increased and more than one of the Ekkai's heavy-hitting battleships had sortied in the direction of the inner system.

  Lippmann might be right, she thought. Maybe the Ekkai were eyeballing them from orbit right this second. "We're still alive," she said, "so if the enemy are looking this way, then they don't see us. You should go down the hill and help Dr. Duds collect some more samples."

  "The lad isn't a doctor yet," he said. "But he's braver than I am. I'm not going near those ambling plant-nasties."

  A grove of the indigenous primitives the bugs the Shediri called Freezt had already folded their upper membranes to their trunks like a series of torn umbrella parts and the herd of them had begun to wend their way down the transverse cracks and ridges of the landslide basin below, using them like stepped roads down the slope of the bowl. When they stood still, they were a grove and when they moved on the thick, bark-scaled semi-prehensile roots they used like stumpy legs, they were a herd, like a wandering forest.

  Dudley stood at the lip of a transverse ridge in his blue exosuit. He kept edging closer to the Freezt trying to get a sample of their skin or bark or whatever the heck it was, but this time, like every other time, he got within five meters and the larger ones would whip their thick, low and mid-trunk vines down into the dirt raising clouds of dust and driving Duds back. The crusted appendages were as thick as her thigh and they whipped with the resolute force of a hydraulic limb. "Duds, you be careful down there," she said over local comms. "Maybe they'll drop some samples." Lippmann snickered at that. "Just wait until they pass, Duds."

  "Where are they all going anyway?" said Lippmann.

  The herd all leaned uphill as they walked. She said, "It's dusk so for them it's out of the fading sun and back down under the safety of the forest canopy where the junk is I expect. They made the path we followed to get here."

  "Are they intelligent?" Lippmann's gloves went to a spot below the ring collar of his exosuit where it sealed with his helmet. There was no way to scratch an itch through layers of insulation and flexible armor and the suit liner, but everyone tried. He said. "If we can breathe this planet's atmo, then when are you going to let us take off the exosuits?"

  "This place really deserves a proper exobiologist to answer that question," she said as she watched Duds below.

  "I can hear you over local comms," Dudley said. "And I'm the best exobiologist you've got."

  "So can Lippmann take his helmet off?"

  "I did some cursory air filter scans earlier," said Duds. "It looks safe to me. I mean...We've got another pilot so if you want to be the first to get a breath of fresh air and test the environment for pathogens, be my guest."

  "Here come the bugs," Dudley said. "Click and Clack are coming up the hill to you now...ascending to your left, about twenty meters. You'll see them come round the rocks in a second."

  The humidity cooled to a fog as it drifted out from between their chitin jaws. The black stain they'd sprayed themselves down with to hide their reddish exoskeletons glinted iridescent in the afternoon light. Clack hissed as two of the Shediri's four upper arms arced across the sky and spread wide in a gesture she didn't entirely understand. "Enemy above," it said. "Enemy searching."

  "Told 'ya there was something up there," said Lippmann.

  Dana thumbed the translator daemon and stood. "[Interrogative] Shediri certain?"

  The bug nodded with the gesture it had learned from them. "[Interrogative] Human cannot see?"

  "Right," she said as she looked up at the sky. "The enemy are already looking for us...probably trying to get a fix on sympathetic emissions from our relays." She pictured the turrets up and down the hulls of the enemy ship. Once they triangulated the positions of the relays, the enemy would know where to point those beams to destroy them.

  On the way down from the summit, Dana let the Shediri go first. The bugs had evolved on a planet with 50% lighter gees than this, but apparently the gravity on Alcyone-3 didn't bother them as much as anyone expected. The Shediri used their four, lower legs to traverse the grassy landslide basin twice as quickly as Dana and Lippmann on their human legs. They had technologies and abilities she hadn't expected. She was beginning to think she'd underestimated the bugs. She wondered if she should be more scared of them, more wary.

  All the way down from the summit to the scarps and across the waving, neck-high, low-gee grasses on the hillocks, Dana's mind wasn't on the enemy in orbit. The Ekkai's days as a threat were numbered. Either they'd surrender to Ram when the task force arrived or they'd kill the Commodore for his trouble, after which the newly rebuilt UN and Privateer fleet would exterminate the species as it had the Squidies.

  Dana was already thinking past the Ekkai. Her eyes now followed the Shediri in front of her as they descended. This planet would suitable for Humans or bugs, she thought. Both would want it for their own.

  The rosy light turned the comical gasbags floating over the forest canopy pink, and Lippmann snickered at the sight of them again as they returned. It continued even after Duds pointed out the falling bones of the creatures the boob-shaped gasbags had eaten dropping to the forest floor, stripped of their flesh.

  Before they stepped under the canopy, Clack stopped her and pointed two arthropod arms down at the sandy soil sucked dry between the clumps of alien succulents. The bug appeared to have scraped and dug away the top, light-colored layers of surface with the tip of its claws like a human would draw with a stick. The Shediri gestured to a pair of irregular circles it had drawn, punctuated with dots in the middle of each. "Shediri experiment," it said. "[Interrogative] Funny?"

  Dana looked at Lippmann and Lippmann looked back and neither of them knew what to say. "What is it?" she asked.

  Clack's vertical jaws gnashed out the words in its own language. "Human body part. Breasts."

  Now, Lippmann was laughing. "Those are boobs."

  "Boobs," it repeated. "[Interrogative] Funny?"

  Dana shook her head and kept walking while Lippmann yucked it up.

  "[Interrogative] [negative] Boobs?" the bug said over local comms. Its jaws triple-clicked.

  Lippmann had turned red in the face from laughing. "Keep trying, Bugsy."

  Stepping beneath the ceiling of the thick canopy above was like stepping through a threshold and crossing prematurely into night. The evensong of a hundred alien species there made for an unsettling vespers hymn. If she looked up, her helmet tried to project the location of the individual creatures making the warbling shrieks and waarghs and bellowing camel calls, but all it managed to do was project a peppering of expanding circles across the rolli
ng underside of the canopy above and show her what she could already hear, what she already knew - they were surrounded.

  After Alcyone set, the thin shafts of light that made it down the gap in the canopy over the junk ruled so straight and parallel against the darkness that she could see the jitter of her own eyeballs when she looked at them. SCS Aragami shone uncomfortably bright in the light from the lead-colored moon. It made Dana feel exposed.

  Dudley said, "I wouldn't mind going for a nocturnal nature walk before we go in. I'm not afraid of the wildlife."

  "Good god, Dudley," said Dana. "You should be."

  "There's probably twenty species out there that think you're a meal," Lippmann said.

  "I know, but... I've got a gun. I mean... I know it's dangerous. I'm not stupid. It's just, most of the time, I'm just sitting in Hardway's medbay waiting to get blowed up or burned up like all the people that come there. At least out here, I feel like I have a chan-" He stopped mid syllable and gawked, open mouthed like she did at the display of visible light catching in the alien atmo above.

  Click and Clack froze in front of the airlock when they saw it, too.

  A deep red beam crossed the starry night sky overhead. When it appeared, the color of the lancing shaft had begun so close to the edge of human perception as to make her doubt she saw, but in less than a second, its wavelengths shrank and the deep crimson changed to a bloody sunrise orange and a fleeting gold. "What the hell is that thing?" said Dudley as the beam passed through verdant and azure hues before shifting into violet and beyond, after which they could only see it with the aid of their helmets. "It just went through our whole visible spectrum."

  "And IR and UV," she said. "It's pointing towards one of our relays on the mountainside. The Ekkai ship in orbit must have triangulated its location already."