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

by A. D. Bloom

  Ix inserted two of its six hands into the projections and gestured in circles and stabs.

  "Is that a translator?" Lucy said.

  Ix spoke next. He allowed them to hear the full hiss and clack and whine and chirp of his 'words'. The translator consulted the conceptual language matrix, but much of what it made of Ix's dialog with the Ekkai Admiral didn't translate to more than a few words that made any sense to Ram. "Surrender." was all he understood, but the flashes of light that came out the side of the 'scroll' device placed up against the window seemed meaningful to the Ekkai.

  Ix repeated what it had said and after the ambassador bug's device flashed a rapid series of pulses in IR at the clams, the ones close by fluttered with responses while fainter glows deeper in the murk echoed them.

  The clam in front, what Ram assumed to be the thing in charge waved and flashed a long sequence then that spiraled around its outstretched wings. At the end, the brightness of the message rose along with the frequency. The Shediri words Ix heard in his helmet came over local comms, and Ram's translator said flatly, "Revenge." The clam flashed with something that included 'we' and 'victory'.

  Ram showed it then. He gestured in front of the chestplate of his suit and showed it a projection of its system in a wavelength he guessed it could see. The scale was off, but it recognized its planet, the system, and the representations of the Human and Ekkai ships.

  The clam repeated the same sequence claiming it had won. As far as it knew, it had. As far as the things inside this tank knew, they'd successfully delayed the task force and now it couldn't run from the Ekkai home fleet any longer. So Ram showed it a representation of the newly completed Privateer and UN fleet invading through the Draconis-Alcyone transit.

  It watched the projected images of five new carriers and full air groups streaming into the system with the UN fleet. "Soon," Ram said. It didn't twitch until it saw the representations of three more ships just like UNS Guerrero. The wings flinched and spasmed then. The sphincter mouth grimaced and the stalk of fifty eyes swayed slowly. It pulsed a fast and bright pattern at him and stopped. "Ekkai negative victory," said the translator. "Ekkai defeat." The display from Ram's suit showed the Earth fleet sweeping aside the Ekkai and destroying the fifth planet, their home. The thing in the tank fluttered its wings again and flashed. "Ekkai death all."

  "Alternative," said Ix. The Shediri offered the Ekkai Admiral a word that was foreign to the Ekkai. As far as Ram knew, it was foreign to the Shediri, too. It was a human word. "We forgive."

  The word flashed into the murk and the clams inside flapped and went dark. Only the one in the front showed any light at all then, pulsing in blotches rapidly and regularly like his beating heart. "Define," the translator said in Ram's ear.

  Ix clacked and made a sound like a broken reed instrument. "Human word. Meaning is [negative condition] seek revenge."

  The clam flashed out, "Why?"

  Why not kill them all is what it was asking...

  Ix said, "Surrender to Shediri forgiveness."

  The lights flashed. "[Interrogative] Human forgive?"

  Ix said, "Shediri ally of Human, therefore [transitive logic] Ekkai ally of Human. [Conditional] Alliance against Imperium."

  The Ekkai Ambassador flashed his response quickly and brightly.

  SCS Hardway, bridge

  Asa Biko thumped at the arm of the command chair with the meat of his fist. All he wanted was to get up and monitor the Ekkai home fleet closing in on the task force himself, but he was supposed to be in command and sitting in the chair.

  Young Lieutenant Demery could read the tactical display's details as well as he could, but that didn't stop Biko from watching the enemy out the corner of his eye looking for any change in the net closing around them. He looked for an escape, but it was too late for that. If Ram didn't get the response he was looking for from the Ekkai, thought Biko, then the endless horde of warships closing in around them would finish them off. This time, they'd all come together.

  "Commander Biko," said Biggs, "I've got the Commodore on encrypted comms."

  "Ram?"

  Devlin said, "I'm going to send a signal to you. I want to you to relay it omnidirectionally on the same frequency and relay it exactly as you receive it. It's an Ekkai signal. It isn't encapsulated in any translation protocols; it's not meant for us."

  "Standing by," Biko said. He didn't know what else to say. "Biggs, have you got this?"

  "He's already sending and it's already going out through our main antenna."

  Within seconds, Demery pointed to his tactical display and the enemy ships that were closest around the task force. "They're decelerating."

  "Which of them?" Biko said. "Which of them are decelerating? The battleships?"

  "All the closest squadrons of Ekkai. The enemy ships are decelerating."

  "Signal repeating now," Biggs said.

  "They're slowing and holding position as they hear the signal crossing the system," Margo said. "It must be a ceasefire message from their Admiral. Ram succeeded."

  "The enemy ships are maintaining a roughly 23,000 K radius on all sides of the task force."

  Biko sat back in the command chair with some relief. "Looks like Ram made a deal with the clams," he said. "Now comes the real fight. Mr. Demery keep your eyes on Alcyone. Watch the star's corona and photosphere. If you see anything out of the ordinary, speak up immediately."

  "What am I looking for?" Demery said, but from the tremble in the man's voice, Biko thought he knew.

  "Imperium warships," Biko said. "They should be arriving any time now."

  10

  High orbit over Alcyone-3

  Chester and Piggy flew the F-223 escort for Blackstone on the mission to Alcyone-3.

  Even at 100,000 Ks the enemy ship in orbit didn't look right. When it was stealthed, the anomaly that Chester's helmet showed him didn't warp the atmo and the clouds below it the way that Ekkai lensing stealth should have. What he saw was more like a shadow, a region that sucked up light. As they neared, it didn't send out any transmissions, not a single call for help, and when it dropped its stealth and opened fire on the surface below again they saw it clearly. The shape of the hull was right - it had the anvil shape and the vertical fins in the proper place for the lensing stealth, but the surface was all wrong somehow. It didn't reflect the light the way it should have.

  "They'll open up on us with those small beams soon," Piggy said. Kodiak 2-6 pulled forward so the nose of his F-223 was even with Chester's.

  As the alien fired another salvo at the surface, he saw how the hull caught the light with a touch of iridescence. "I swear that looks like chitin."

  "Whatever it is, we're going to blow it to hell," said the pilot on SCS Blackstone. The junk had already begun to edge up on the fighters ahead of it. "They didn't say anything about returning these torpedoes when they loaded up this boat for the mission."

  "Wait until we make a pass, Blackstone. Otherwise, those smaller turrets are going to pick off the torps."

  "I know. This isn't my first flight, zoomie," said the junk pilot as he continued nosing up their tails.

  Chester flipped off the junk's pilots and accelerated hard enough the stupid brick had no hope of keeping up. Nobody had to tell Piggy to stay with him, and the pair of Sky Jacks closed on the enemy making themselves generally hard to hit, but there were none of the expected flashes from the small beam turrets and no dazzle of focused gammas crisscrossed the vacuum over the planet. Not a single, enemy battery opened up on them.

  He zoomed in with his helmet's optics and saw the small turrets were just domes and had no batteries to fire at them. He realized they were dummies in the same arrested moment he saw the incoming missiles.

  "Shediri missiles! Light 'em up!" This close, the active LiDAR pulse showed the sneaky things clearly. Chester thumbed the triggers and let loose with the Sky Jack's nose-mounted cannon. The six, 140mm autocannon's HE, range-det shells budded and bloomed with the alien missiles th
ey detonated in a rolling front as the frame of the fighter shook. "Follow me, Piggy!"

  Chester broke to port and rolled over to fire enfilade up the line of sneaky, little bug missiles now making for SCS Blackstone. Piggy opened up before Chester did on that run did and stole a few before they hosed the swarm of them down. After they confirmed clear space with a quick LiDAR strobe, they turned back to the strange ship in orbit.

  He said, "You cheeky, sneaky roaches."

  "Why are they shooting bug missiles at us? Is it a bug ship?" said Piggy.

  "I don't give a damn what it is; that thing shot at me. Most of those turrets are fakes. Hit with the warspites." Chester slammed the launch button. The Mk 3's engines lit and after it cleared the underside of the 223, the torpedo blew plasma exhaust all over the canopy. In a second, the blowtorch was gone and he was able to follow the path of his warspite and Piggy's as the pair corkscrewed in. On comms, the pilots aboard Blackstone bitched about stolen kills.

  The unidentified craft in orbit fired that one huge beam it had used to bombard the planet three times trying to intercept the incoming torps, but the turret was slow moving, and the beam didn't catch either warspite. The pair detonated against the enemy hull so close in time and distance that if you asked him, he couldn't have told one det from the other. The whole midships of the strange alien craft was lost, engulfed in the flash.

  When his helmet let him see again, the intersecting 25 meter wide holes the fission torps had vaped out of the alien hull vented firestorm into the vacuum. The plasma and burning gasses got sucked back around it by the ship's own artificial gravity just before it gave out. After that, the alien keeled towards the atmo, as if propelled by the jetting flame.

  Less than 10 kilometers over the planet, it winked with a burst of exotic particles and cooked off like a bomb.

  Surface of Alcyone-3

  The detonating warspites in orbit were impossible to miss. They flared together at the very point overhead from which the last salvo of beams had lanced down. "Hell, yeah!" Dice shouted, pointing at the expanding cloud of plasma and debris in the sky. "Hell, yeah!"

  For Dana, Lippmann, Dice, Click, and Dudley on the scorched surface, the sight was joyous. The wreckage burned brightly in the atmo after the last detonation. That one must have been internal because the main hull got blown to smithereens. Thousands of fragments rained down in a gentle and silent shower across the alien sky.

  Clack's friend Click pointed a pair of arms at the sky. "Humans descend. Friendlies."

  The junk from Hardway was lining up to come down on its artificial gravity alone and without any plasma exhaust, it was hard to spot. She received the transponder signal in a few seconds. "Blackstone, Blackstone, this is Captain Sellis. Come in."

  She heard only agitated static on the line, spiking with the kind of rough, broad spectrum swell she knew was interference from the fission dets in orbit. That radiation would take time to clear. "I don't think they can hear me," she said. "It's still too hot where they are."

  The junk's belly glowed coming down that fast. "She'll be coming down close," Dice said. "That's Sribiju piloting Blackstone. He knows enough not to attempt any serious endo-atmo maneuvers in that thing. He'll be coming straight down. Gimme a couple more seconds and I can tell you where."

  "Other side of the ridge, it looks like," said Lippmann. "Should we hoof it over there?"

  "I'm staying right here," Dana said. "I finally found a comfortable rock to sit my ass down on. They'll hear us calling."

  "What about Clack?" said Dudley.

  "I'm hoping that's where they're going," Dice said. "I can't raise him on comms."

  Five minutes later, the flat and blocky, anti-aerodynamic bow of Blackstone broke the line of the ridge against the dawn sky. The pilot flew the spacecraft cautiously in the atmo. It was shaped like a brick and only the gas thrusters worked outside the vacuum of space. The junk left billowing trails that blew away behind it as it came in to land on the flat of the charred flood plain.

  The fused soil cracked from the junk's artificial gravity before it even set down, and the fissures radiated outwards like imitation blast marks when the landing gear made contact with the surface.

  Dana saw him through the porthole of the airlock before it cycled to let them in. Clack, aka Ein Kai Kesik was out of his suit. It lay next to him like a half-burned husk he'd molted. She remembered his exoskeleton being rosy like a cooked lobster and whether it was sooty or actually charred black now by fire she couldn't tell, but the domes of two of his compound eyes now sank concave where they'd burned out. He sat against the bulkhead, belly to the floor with all his legs carelessly splayed like a spider washed up in the gutter after a rainstorm. The QC-212 primary decoder comms relay for the surveillance network, the one she'd entrusted to him, was right there in his claws, half melted, but intact.

  Dudley peered through the porthole. "Is he alive? He isn't even twitching."

  As the hatch opened, Click darted forward first. Ein Kai Kesik pushed his upper body from the deck of the junk and reared his thorax and head up vertical, but his legs never pushed his lower body more than a few centimeters up. He swayed a little as he rotated himself on slow scuttling limbs.

  After they'd stepped inside and removed their helmets, he took Dana's helmet from her without a word in one of his right claws and took Dice's helmet from him with one of his left claws. The bug moved slowly and jittered a little as he raised the two helmets to his thorax, his chest and held them there like mock breasts. His alien face maintained a deadpan expression. "Shediri experiment," he said.

  Dice and Lippmann and Dudley gave the bug the laughs it wanted instantly, but something caught in Dana's throat and made her eyes wet before she could smile and get the word out. "Yes," she lied as she laughed. "Yes."

  SCS Blackstone, 300,000 Ks from Task Force Liberty.

  Only minutes after they broke orbit, Sribiju called her to the cockpit to see it for herself. "I didn't see any need to alarm you all down there in the personnel compartment, but I thought you'd want to see this. Hostilities haven't resumed with the Ekkai, but the last NAV update we got from Hardway included this."

  The pilot called up a broad image projection of the system to give Dana orientation and while she floated between the pilots, he zoomed in on the system's star, Alcyone, enlarging the image until the gargantuan plasma waves of the stellar atmo were all she could see. He zoomed in further, to a cooler region where a tangle of magnetic lines herded smaller convective cells. There, among the segmented burning seas of Alcyone, she saw the kilometer-high spires breaking through the waves and scattering plasma off their shields. The contacts had been wire-framed already by the computer, but even if they hadn't she'd have know that vessel from only seeing a tenth of its queer hull. That was an Imperium warship, a spire ship.

  "We knew they'd be coming," she said.

  "Uh-huh." He zoomed out then and reoriented the image to another spot 17.5 degrees south of the Northern pole. He barely had to enlarge it before she spotted the second Imperium warship and then a third. "Did we know they'd send three?"

  "Three Imperium warships." She knew Ram had plans to defend against one, but not three. That was more firepower than the task force had ever faced and it was defended by shields powerful enough to protect it from the stellar atmo.

  The swollen star rotating above the console flared with a tremendous release of energy as the representations of its twisted and gnarled magnetic lines gathered around the Imperium ships snapped all at once. It was as if the vessels themselves had somehow severed them, and the cool plasma surrounding them superheated with the energy erupting from underneath. The piece of the stellar atmo now unleashed jetted from the surface of the sun in an arm of superheated, super-charged plasma that extended outwards across millions of Ks with alarming rapidity, taking a chunk of the corona with it.

  "My god," she said. "Did the Imperium ships do that?"

  As the mass ejection unfurled across the inner system i
t seemed to beckon like some alien limb with a burning hand extended. The navcomp drew the track of the million-K-wide storm as a wide red band indicating hazard. It crossed directly over the fifth planet, home of the Ekkai.

  "Adios fifth planet...adios Ekkai," said Sribiju's copilot.

  She said, "There's no stopping a mass ejection. That thing is a planet killer and it's aimed right at the clams."

  "How the hell they live on a gas planet anyway?"

  "They live in the ocean around the core," said Dana.

  "Not anymore they don't."

  "How far out is the fifth planet?"

  "They've got an hour and a half until it hits," the pilot said. "Maybe a little more, maybe a little less. That thing actually launched off the star's surface some ten minutes ago. Photons from the wave we're seeing with the arrays haven't even made it halfway to the Ekkai homeworld yet."

  "If they got warning by q-link..."

  "They know. They enemy has FTL comms. But how many can you evacuate in 90 minutes?"

  "I thought the Ekkai and the Imperium were pals," said the co-pilot.

  "Not anymore, they're not," Dana said.

  "The clams aren't shooting at us anymore? That's great, right?"

  "Not so great for the clams." It wouldn't be Humanity that murdered them, but the Ekkai would still be destroyed.

  Sribiju's co-pilot said, "Is there any way at all to stop a solar mass ejection?"

  Next to him Sribiju snorted out his nose. "That's a million-K-wide front of supercharged plasma moving at .71 cee. Nothing could stop that. In less than 90 minutes, that wave of hellfire is going to break over the Ekkai's homeworld and blast and burn away the layers of their little gas planet's atmo until their freakish ocean is exposed to space."