by A. D. Bloom
The three Imperium warships ascended from the stellar atmo then, rising from where they'd unleashed their fury on the Ekkai homeworld to stream through the million-degree corona leaving fiery wakes that chased them out into the black.
"They're heading towards our task force," Sribiju said.
She nodded. "Get us there."
"There? Back to Hardway? Respectfully, I think we're safer where we are. And without that device your bug had on him we can't decode data from your proxies and we can't see the clam warships if I understand correctly."
"The clams aren't what we have to worry about now. Get us there."
"The task force has been moving our direction, but it's still going to take a couple hours," he said.
"Get me to Hardway. That's an order," said Dana as she turned and went down the tube.
11
SCS Hardway, Bridge
"Diplomatic Console," said Ram over his shoulder. "Get me an update from Ix."
"Bridge pressurization complete," Biko said.
Ram unlatched his helmet in three places at the collar and lifted it off his head. No matter how comfortable they were, the best thing about a helmet was always taking it off.
"Thank you," said Margo as she removed hers.
"You're right. From here on out, it won't be shock waves in our internal atmo that kills us," he said. "Might as while enjoy the luxury of an atmosphere."
"Chief Terrazzi reports she can have this ship moving in five minutes," said Biko. "And pressurization is almost complete across the ship where we could isolate the hull breaches...bow section, forward bays, primary bays, and parts of the command tower all have holes in them, but they're behind hatches for the most part. Redsuits sealed the rest directly."
"The clams on the dreadnought worked the entire task force over when they appeared. Guerrero is down two guns. One of the monitors is out of commission, Doxy got savaged. I'm amazed we're the only ship that took critical engine damage."
Margo said, "I'm just glad they didn't hit the forward bays and Meester's mag-field coil. We're going to need it now that the Imperium has arrived."
"I'm afraid they did hit it. I'm still waiting for Tig Meester's report," said Ram.
Asa Biko said it like it was a given. "I'm going to notify the other ships the task force is preparing to get underway. Did Terrazzi say what our maximum limping speed would be?"
"We're not leaving."
"Three Imperium ships are bearing down on us," Biko said. "We already have an Ekkai surrender. Aren't you going to order the task force to withdraw?"
"Message from Ix," Margo said. "The Ekkai in the 'primary vessel' aboard the disabled dreadnought still refuse to communicate."
"They haven't said a word since the Imperium launched the mass ejection at their planet. And the current status of the Clams' home fleet?"
"They're moving away from us and towards the homeworld, but not as quickly as they could."
"Maybe they're waiting to see how we fare against the Imperium," Pardue said. "Like the Shediri did."
"Did someone give them the mistaken impression that we can take on three Imperium ships?" Margo delivered it like a joke, but the words lingered in the air as his bridge crew's eyes all turned to him, waiting for him to order the retreat from the face of certain destruction.
"We will not retreat. I know three is more than we expected to face, but our method of attack remains valid whether or not there are one, two, or three Imperium warships."
Biko said, "Meester himself admits that monstrosity of a mag field pinch he and the Shediri built can't provide 100% reliable protection. We need to pull back and wait for the Earth invasion fleet to arrive. We've accomplished our mission here. We've secured the surrender we came to get. It's time for us to step back."
"Even if we could outrun those three Imperium warships, we have to fight them," said Ram.
"Your XO is right," Margo said. "The Ekkai's homeworld is lost. The only victory is that it wasn't us that murdered them. We can't do anything more to help. Maybe if our new fleet were here, but it's not here. Not for...at least an hour more than it'll take those Imperium vessels to close to a range where they won't miss us with their salvos. Listen to me, Ram. There's nothing to be gained by facing them now."
"Our chances of victory are still decent - decent enough we have to risk it," he said.
"But we have nothing to gain and everything to lose. If this battle continues from here, then what they're saying is true and this really is your war."
"This fight isn't over yet. Comms, I'm speaking through the ship's squack. Patch it out to the task force ships, every console and helmet, no encryption."
A moment later, Biggs said, "You have the line, Commodore Devlin," and Ram thumbed at the interface set into the arm of the command chair.
"This is Ram Devlin. Chief Terrazzi has informed me that this ship will be capable of travel in a few minutes. Although there may be a chance for this ship and this task force to attempt escape from the incoming Imperium vessels, we will not flee. We will hold this position and face the Imperium warships. I have been asked by my own bridge crew why must we remain and fight when we have accomplished our mission and achieved all that we could in the interest of preserving the Ekkai. The reason is singular and it is simple. Even though the very thing we came here to prevent is happening before our eyes, we have to face those three Imperium ships because this battle we're fighting is fought on a larger field than this one star system and will be fought for decades. This battle we fight today is the same, singular, unending battle in which we have been engaged since we stepped out to the stars looking for allies. Action is truth; that's what the bugs say. Since our first contact with the Shediri almost a year ago, we've been fighting to define what Humanity is through our actions and show them what we are - show them we're more than just the species that murdered the Squidies. And we have succeeded. We have secured Humanity's first alliance and made sure that it will be a true alliance and not a colony in disguise. We have partnered successfully with our new allies and defended their home against Ekkai and Imperium aggression, and shown them Humans are allies that keep our word. Now, if we turn and run, all of that will be lost. The Ekkai homeworld will fall. That is certain now. The plasma ripped from Alcyone itself and hurled by the Imperium vessels will hit the planet in only a few minutes. We are powerless to stop it, but we must still stand and fight the powers that launched it. This fight is bigger than we are. It's bigger than those three Imperium ships, too. If we stand and fight to avenge the Ekkai, then fall or not, victory will be ours. Humanity has committed outrageous acts of barbarism. It is our past. It is likely our future, but if we stand here today, no species will ever be able to look at the record of Humanity's actions and say that savants of war and barbarians is all we are. What is a Human? The aliens will ask each other. The stand we make here and today is their answer."
Nobody on the bridge said anything at first. Ram kept his eyes forward. Now wasn't the time to question whether or not they were with him. They were. They had been all along. Proof of that was the fact that without their belief in him, this task force never would have got this far.
"Five minutes until the plasma storm makes contact with the fifth planetary system," Biko said. "It's going to be ugly."
Ram rose from the chair. He didn't need to see the death of another world and the simple truth of it was that he didn't want to. If there was nothing he could do, then it didn't matter where he was when the atmo and oceans of the fifth planet boiled away. His ready room seemed the best place.
He made a point to meet only Asa Biko's eye when he to told his XO to take the bridge. He didn't want to take a chance his own eyes would betray the defeat he really felt at this moment. Margo followed him onto the lift, and he wished she hadn't.
After the doors closed, she didn't face him. She turned to lean against the wall of the lift next to him so they both faced the door. Then she stopped the lift in the middle of the shaft. "You've gone mad,
I think. I'm surprised it took this long."
"I haven't gone mad."
"Technically, no. What's got you is something that set in a long time ago, actually. A streak that dear old Harry should have seen coming."
"Uh-huh."
She said. "You know...I've had time to read your logs of the brief negotiations with the Ekkai Admiral, the big clam in the primary vessel."
"And?" He reached to start the lift again and she slapped at the back of his hand like he was a boy who'd reached for an undeserved cookie. "Ow."
She said. "Were you aware the Shediri have no word for forgiveness, verb or noun. The whole concept is distinctly alien to them. For the Shediri, there must always be a transactional evening of a score - an eye for an eye, so to speak."
"Ix used that word, that concept. The Ambassador introduced the meme to the Ekkai."
"But do you know where he learned it from?"
Ram shook his head. "You?"
"Ix learned the word from the Hive Regent in his last briefing. She learned of the concept from Hank. Your son taught her that."
"He's not my son."
"The concept came up in a discussion explaining his relationship with you. The Hive Regent knows exactly what Hank is. And that you forgave him for Harry's crimes."
"I forgave a little boy, not the actual Harry Cozen."
"That's close enough for the boy," she said. "You're a good man, Ram Devlin. It may very well be that the time remaining on our collective journey is slim, but you can't sulk in your ready room. Even if you end up leading us to our deaths, do it well. And from the command chair, if you please. And don't act like this is all your idea and they hate you for it."
"What?"
"Your crew. They don't resent the fact that we're not running. They're proud of it - of being what determines Humanity's future in the local cluster. Don't underestimate your crew. You're not the only madman here. Now, come to the bridge and witness the death of a world."
Ram sat in the command chair and squared himself to the view as the front of supercharged, super-heated plasma burned up the last kilometers of vacuum between it and the moons of the Ekkai homeworld. The fiery, cumulus fog about to sweep them away burned cold and bitter and bright.
"Tens of billions," Ram said. "Again."
"This carnage would have happened if we hadn't come here," Margo insisted. "Only it would have been gravity bombs that killed the Ekkai and Privateer or UN ships would have dropped them."
Biko said, "How did they justify that back home?"
"From what I've gleaned," said Margo, "the words 'the Clams have earned their fate' appear numerous times in the Secretary General's speech to the Security Council on the matter, and the phrase has proved popular with the global media spokespeople." The irony of those words added to the bitterness of the spectacle as the Imperium's wrath approached.
The largest of the homeworld's moons was on the sunward facing side along with two smaller iceballs. The plasma front reached out to them with its tendrils, their scale now apparent as they came lashing down on the outermost, 5,000 K wide moon. Its atmo cooked off bright red and blew away behind it on the fiery wind that slammed into the ice moons next. They flared up and he swore he saw them fracture from the charge going through them before the storm blew their cracked silhouettes away into streaks of vapor. "I'm sorry," he whispered.
In the last seconds before the plasma ejection swept through the orbit of the planet itself and ended the Ekkai homeworld, Ram imagined the clams looking up from the bottom of their brackish seas into burning sky above as the layers of their little blue gas planet's atmosphere sublimed and blew away and left whatever part of their oceans that remained naked and freezing against the starry black.
And then, as his heartbeats counted down the homeworld's last seconds, the sky over the planet flashed with brilliance that shone through the hellfire front as the plasma storm of charged particles moving over seven tenths the speed of light broke over the gas planet as if it were a boulder. The plasma crashed over and around it, leaving the delicate, pale blue gas sphere of the planet untouched. The first third of it had nearly passed.
"The plasma isn't touching the planet. It isn't even scorching the atmosphere. Something's shielding the Ekkai homeworld," said Margo.
"From that?" Biko said, "I'd be surprised if the Ekkai could build and power a shield that big."
"Somebody built one. I didn't say it was the Ekkai. Zoom in with the optical arrays."
"A ship? LiDAR and radar show nothing there, just the plasma breaking over the planet."
"Something's there," she insisted. "Zoom in with the optical arrays."
Ram said, "Do it."
When Biko projected the array's direct output over the deck of the bridge, the solar storm was half over. Ram thought he'd see the uncanny ships burning in the fire somehow, but they appeared unaffected by the charged inferno and all the kinetic energy it slammed them with. "Alien ghost ships..." The ten-thousand K wide flames of the storm breaking over their shields showed through their translucent, only half-present hulls.
The same line of thirteen, inscrutable, alien ghost ships they'd seen crossing Beta Tauris now held station in front of the Ekkai's homeworld, shielding it from the Imperium's world-killing salvo. The shield front they projected burned in an impossibly large, hell-buffeted arc extending tens of thousands of Ks, big enough that the entirety of the plasma meant to burn the planet broke around it on all sides. That shield remained until the storm hurled by the Imperium ships had passed and then, the sheer volume of photons coming from the planet overwhelmed the optical arrays with a flash. When they came back, the planet was still untouched, but the immense alien vessels were gone.
He said, "Where are they?!"
"They're back," said Biko. "Over Alcyone-3!" In his excitement, Biko almost slammed the console to shift the projected display. The same line of thirteen impossible ships now appeared low over the third planet where Dana had just been. Its clouds and lakes showed through them as lightning crackled in the atmo under them. "They're going in."
"And they're going in hot," said Ram as the hulls lit up suddenly in the thick atmo, reacting to it as if they were now corporeal and real, as if they were now of this world and on fire.
"They're going straight in," said Margo. "All thirteen."
They weren't just crashing on the planet, they were crashing into it, flying a burning streak of a line almost perpendicular to the planet's surface. Biko said, "Impact in three...two...one..."
There was no flash of impact, no detonations, no plume of fire or dust - nothing. "What the hell just happened?" said Pardue.
"Ghost ships," Margo laughed.
Ram said, "Whatever they are, they're powerful."
"And they're on our side," Biko added.
"Are you sure?" said Margo. "They're on the Clams side, certainly. How they like us is unknown."
"They had the opportunity to attack us. They didn't," reasoned Ram.
Margo pressed her lips together and smiled thinly. "I do hope our new friends are planning on coming back to help us fight. Because three Imperium warships will be here in less than an hour and we could use the help."
SCS Hardway, Bay One
The air in the bay hadn't had a chance to warm up. Hellcat 1-1, aka Strike, saw almost everything through the fog of her own breath. She couldn't feel the cold nipping her face because she was too busy watching for Rabal. She'd doubled down on their wager and lost. Rabal would want his money ASAP, he'd said on comms, so he could maximize the time he spent alive holding that wad in his hand.
From where she stood with the Hellcats and Kodiak squadron on the port side of the briefing, she could see the inside bulkhead hatch Rabal would come in after landing in another bay. Her eyes flicked to it every few seconds. Any moment now, that grinning hyena would open his fat palm and wait for her to fill it with 10,000 Ameros.
The UN battleship captain in his white exosuit came through the hatch first with a pair of
his officers and stood up front with Devlin. Only nods passed between them giving her the distinct impression there was nothing left to discuss. She was at least glad to see they weren't still putting a plan together.
Captain Dana Sellis came in next looking worked over. She carried her helmet under her arm and her exosuit looked like she'd fallen down a burning mountain in it. The armor plates under the outer skin were even visible in places. After Sellis stepped through the hatch into the bay, a Shediri followed her in. All the heads around Strike turned to look after they heard the first murmurs.
"Looks like someone roasted a bug," said Clift.
"What's a Stripey doing here without a suit?" Strike whispered.
"That's no a Stripey. They wear stripes even under the armor. That's an engineer bug. See the extra pair of arms they gave him to do bug-engineering things?"
You could smell it on the gust of atmo that crossed the bay from the open hatch...burned almonds. It stood up tall as it followed Sellis across the bay to Devlin and Chun and waited behind her, swaying its upper body slowly the way the bugs do most of the time. More than one eye was missing.
Strike didn't see what it carried in the claw of the left, middle arm until it stepped forward and stood as tall as it could in front of Devlin, hissed with a chatter-clack at the end of it, and handed what looked like a QC-212 comms unit to the Commodore. It was even more burned than the bug. Strike said, "That's the primary receiver for the whole surveillance network. I'd bet anything that's what it is."
"You don't have anything to bet," said Pill.
It was hard to hear the translator with all the jag-offs making cracks and telling stories about burnt wasps' nests, but she caught a snippet of the conversation going on up front and heard some of the words she expected - 'action' and 'truth' - the bugs always said those words. But there was another word - one she'd never heard before. 'Kr'izit'k' - at least that what she thought it said.