The laser struck a glancing blow on the Control Ship, but that glancing blow vaporized entire decks along a narrow cone through the alien vessel, then exploded outward in a fiery wave of transfer energy. As a single shot, it dealt an impressive degree of devastation, but it was by no means enough to put the Patron ship out of commission, not for a race which could reconstruct anything at the nanometer scale with relative ease.
However, LFM-10277 was numbered 10277 for a reason.
Even as the Control Ship rocked and reeled from the mine’s laser, three more beams struck from three different directions. Two imparted glancing blows like that of 10277, but the third cored the alien vessel straight into its center of mass. The beam burned down through a quarter of the ship’s depth, and every joule of x-ray energy was converted to an explosive thermal/kinetic punch. The Control Ship dipped in its orbit and the drive-star itself flared in response.
All over the Patron vessel, systems began to fail.
whiteness pervades
hints of images flash and jump
nathan screams
raging but powerless
what is happening
The moment of stasis ended abruptly, as short and as interminable as any of them had been. Nathan’s suicidal charge toward the door of the mess—toward the Patron who no longer stood there—continued unabated. He crashed into the door frame with nothing to expend his murderous rage upon.
He punched the bulkhead in frustration, and then was slammed against that same bulkhead as the rest of the crew behind him—who had all made the same charge at their one identified enemy—crashed into his back. Nathan pushed back and up, crying out, “Off! Get off! It’s not here any more!”
They all surged off of him as fast as they could. Nathan looked around when they were clear and surveyed the situation in the mess. The Patron was nowhere to be seen, but its avatar still stood rooted to the deck behind them.
Nathan drifted over, approaching the statue warily, looking for any sudden movement from the marbled form. Nothing. He reached out a hand to touch its shoulder, but just before he made contact … .
The mess room suddenly shook and shuddered. The avatar, which had been firmly planted upon the deck, came free and drifted up to bounce off the overhead and float uncontrolled through the room.
Nathan jerked his hand back and then looked around him again, his eyes seeking out Kris and Edwards. “What was that?”
They both, along with the others, looked around carefully. Kris reached upward, pulling herself into contact with the overhead and laid her ear against the metal surface. She looked back at them. “I hear a rumbling or a roaring transmitted through the hull.”
Master Chief smiled. “I think our hosts might be having a bad day today.”
There was another sharp blow, and a couple of the crew cried out. Nathan reached down to the deck and felt the unsteady vibration Kris had described. He nodded. “I think you’re right. Either something’s gone wrong on board … .”
Kris grinned back. “Or something’s been made to go wrong. I wonder how long we’ve been out?”
“Long enough for Earth to build at least one effective defense,” Nathan answered. “Thank God. I was afraid Sykes and his cronies would keep a damper on the programs Lydia had going. I wonder how close to home we are now?”
Edwards grunted. “More importantly, how much time do we have before these art snobs get their acts together and decide to put us back in a still life?”
The ship shook again, this time severely enough for it to affect their own jury-rigged wiring. Compartment lights flickered and they could hear the groaning of the hull as the stresses the Control Ship endured were imparted on what remained of their destroyer.
Nathan grimaced. “Yeah. It would be just our luck to hitch a ride all the way back to local space and then get killed by friendly fire.” He quickly locked eyes with his remaining crew, glancing swiftly from one to the next. “All right, everyone, we’re going to get out of here and, if possible, join up with the home-team. And if we can do a little mayhem on the way out to help our brothers-in-arms, well, all the better.”
Edwards quirked a brow. “Do you happen to have a plan for this effortless egress, Skipper?”
Nathan shook his head. “I don’t, COB, but she does,” he said, gesturing to Kris.
The ship shook again as it took another hit. Edwards glanced back and forth between Nathan and their Chief Engineer. “Oh. Really? I must have missed that particular meeting. Care to share, boss?”
Nathan moved closer to him and grasped him on the shoulder. “Afraid not. I don’t want to inadvertently give away our plans to unfriendly ears,” he said, waving a hand at the slowly drifting avatar. “Just do what she says.”
Everyone turned expectant eyes upon Kris, who, despite everything that had happened to them, managed to blush slightly. “It’s not a very safe plan.”
Mike Simmons, their TAO and Ops Officer who had led them in decimating half the Patron fleet, grunted a laugh. “And waiting here doing nothing is so much safer.”
Kris shrugged. “Okay. Andrew,” she said, addressing the helmsman, Andrew Weston, “The remaining engineers and I are going to be jury-rigging some power. I need you to go to the bridge and set up a program for remote triggering … .”
She went on, handing out assignments, providing little detail, but all of them had worked together for years, and for over a year and a half on the voyage itself. They listened to what she said as well as to what she did not say, filling in the blanks for themselves. A few pairs of eyes grew fearful, but most of the crew began to smile wickedly. They might all die in the attempt, but if it worked, it would be spectacular.
In pairs and groups of three, they all departed—some headed to the banks of batteries and capacitors where their only remaining power was still stored, while others headed to watchstations to set up automated programs to aid their escape, and still others hit the SSTOS Hangar and the weapons locker / armory.
Soon, Nathan was all alone in the mess, just himself and the quiescent avatar. The only sound breaking the tableau was the occasional repeated lightning crash of a strike upon the Control Ship surrounding the destroyer.
He approached tentatively, the fear, nerves, and anticipation built up during the talk of escape falling away to be replaced by renewed feelings of hate and devastation. The captain pushed off the overhead such that he could match the statue’s drift, and he looked upon the frozen white face of his XO.
Nathan gazed into the flat, marbled eyes of the avatar, searching for any hint of awareness, any sign of life or humanity, but there was nothing there. This was simply an inert tool of alien design—a golem cleverly sculpted to mimic a friendly, trusted face.
Despite the resemblance, there was nothing about the avatar’s form in homage to Christopher Wright. This marvel was, if anything, a repudiation of everything that Wright had been, an insult to his life and memory.
Nathan snarled, reached out to grasp the statue by the shoulders, and pushed it back violently. Since they both floated out of contact with the deck, his shove pushed him back in a spin exactly opposite to the one he had given the avatar, but where the statue spun stiffly—striking the bulkhead behind it with a loud crack—Nathan reacted smoothly—tucking in to spin faster, then kicking off the deck and the opposite bulkhead to drive his outstretched hands at the statue like a battering ram.
He slammed into the avatar and pinned it in the corner between the bulkhead and the deck with his momentum. There was a loud crack and the statue broke in half at the waist, casting stone dust out to hang motionless in the air.
Nathan grunted, grabbed the torso by the wrist, braced himself, and swung the upper half of the heavy avatar down onto the table. Another crack and the arm shattered. He shifted holds, swung again, and the torso was rendered armless, with long chips and cracks appearing on the statue’s head.
Nathan breathed heavily, only briefly worrying about the
nano-created stone dust he inhaled. He rested a foot upon the statue’s head and glared down at the broken form. Wright’s face was placid. Nathan shook his own head and whispered, “I’m sorry,” as yet another attack thrummed through the hull.
Holding himself in place with the edge of the table, he kicked out with his free leg and snapped the head from the statue in another explosion of dust. It bounced up and rebounded from bulkhead to bulkhead until it eventually drifted slowly over the deck, bumping along as it spun around, uncontrolled.
Nathan surveyed the devastation one last time with a heavy feeling of regret and self-recrimination, and then pushed off toward the hatchway to join Kris.
There were nearly 18,000 lasing fusion mines distributed along the expected path of the Deltan/Patron convoy, but even with the alien’s course well-predicted, it was unrealistic to expect more than a small percentage of them would actually be in a position to engage the enemy. Space was simply too large, and prudence dictated that the field be spread wide in case the aliens altered their path as they closed with the solar system.
Of the 9500 mines along the primary route, a still smaller percentage were actually within range to make an effective attack. Others were simply too far out or were arrayed elsewhere along the circumference of the drive-star, too far from one of the relatively small alien vessels to make an attack. And not all of those within striking distance were effective. Due to the limitations imposed by their “stealthy” low-power state, many simply reacted too slowly or inaccurately, wasting their one and only shot upon either empty vacuum or the burning hell of the drive.
Therefore, approximately 2000 mines of the remaining field with a decent probability of hit upon one of the actual Patron vessels were distributed uniformly along the fleet’s projected course. This spread the mines out to increase the overall engagement time and to avoid calling attention to the massive field of weapons lying in wait. If the Patrons did nothing, each of these 2000 mines would have the opportunity to slice, burn, and pierce their way through the alien ships—and there was no way for the Patrons to survive, not when each and every shot was individually more powerful than 10 of the Sword of Liberty’s warheads.
Of course, that assumed the aliens would do nothing to defend themselves. This was not the first time the Patrons had faced armed resistance, however. Perhaps it was the first effective opposition in centuries, but these conquerors were not without tricks of their own.
Beneath the embattled Control Ship, the drive-star suddenly fluoresced, radiance boiling out from the knot of energies gathered below the main alien vessel. The orange and purple ropes of light binding the drive-star’s plasma tightened and shifted. In reaction, the photonic thrust blasting out from the pole flashed brighter and widened out, turning from a tight column of light to a broader and broader cone.
Propulsive photons lit up local space, trading thrust for searing reflections. Dust motes, particles, and each and every rock and mine within striking distance shone like a local cluster of microscopic stars. The smaller inanimate flecks were burned away or flung far from the fleet. The larger, more massive mines had their low reflectivity coatings burned off, each one becoming brighter and more noticeable.
As the carefully placed weapons melted and cracked from differential heating under the wide, indiscriminate onslaught, the weapons that had a chance of destroying the Patron ships triggered early, far out of range and position. Fusion explosions and invisible beams of x-rays dappled the vacuum around the fleet, spearing infinity with furious energies, but failing to connect with their true targets.
For the few remaining weapons still close enough to score a hit, the new brilliance of their positions gave their one real defense away. Lasers and nano-particle beams shot out from the Cathedral, the Polyp, and the Junkyard, defending themselves and the Control Ship from further attack. Lasing fusion mines, struggling to wake up and perform their duty, were annihilated before they could fire.
From 18,000, to 9500, to 2000 mines, Earth’s second attempt at battle came to a mere 217 total strikes. The rest either never came into play, failed to fire, missed, or were destroyed before they could make their attempts. The damage dealt by this relatively low number of hits looked devastating, but for a culture capable of rapid nano-scale repairs, it was not catastrophic. By the time the Patron fleet met humanity’s next line in the sand, they would be nearly unmarked, with little sign of the attack but for some missing mass and a higher ratio of replicas to originals in their collections. All mankind would have to show for the hours of battle as the fleet fought its way through the mine-field would be a little information and good deal less assurance that their other preparations might be any more effective.
Within the Control Ship, now safe from the assault of its latest quarry, the Patrons began to re-assert some sense of order. Systems came back online as damage was repaired. Atmosphere ceased to billow out from chasms cut and burned into the hull. Lights came back on and machinery hummed back to life.
And the stasis fields surrounding the Sword of Liberty snapped back into operation, suspending time, interrupting Nathan and the crew, and exposing their every careful preparation for the aliens’ inspection.
The destroyer’s mission hull was again awash in dim golden light, trapped in stasis, but something still moved, an alien form around which the golden radiance of time-almost-stopped shied away, replaced by a blue-white nimbus. The segmented, tentacled Patron moved slowly, remaining carefully within the tight boundary of the anti-stasis bubble conforming to it. If it moved too swiftly, the space-time counter-reaction would not have time to negotiate its motion within the wider stasis region. It would become frozen, or worse, beset by destructive atomic tidal stresses shredding it at the molecular level.
The Patron—the same one who had first made contact with the crew, not that there was individually much difference between the thousands of its species within the fleet—drifted through the human ship, noting with close analogs to interest and consternation that its prize humans were not where it had left them. It seemed that the troubling creatures had been in the midst of mischief-making.
The humans were everywhere, all dressed out in vacuum suits and frozen in place throughout the ship behind makeshift barriers and defenses. Weapons had been broken out from the armory and distributed amongst the crew, as if such simple chemical slug-throwers could ever be effective against an enemy that could cross stars, stop time, and even bend space.
The defenses seemed to center upon the ship’s single shuttle, though how they expected to escape from within their own hull, and then from within the Control Ship itself was unknown. To even make an attempt, they would have to employ some significant ship-to-ship weaponry, but every missile had been expended, and the Patrons had ripped out the railgun and the laser emplacements themselves. Also, the reactor was gone, so they could not even have turned that into a weapon, were such a thing possible.
The alien recalled the fictions Earth had heedlessly and endlessly broadcast out into space, with their repeated themes of succeeding and surviving despite seemingly insurmountable odds against them. Had it been human, it would have grinned and shook its head. This was their last stand.
This … pitiful display actually seemed to indicate that the crew thought they had a chance of winning, of escaping. It surveyed the ship, but found nothing to indicate that this plan was anything but the most forlorn of hopes. It actually made the Patron think less of them, and of humanity as a whole. To think that they would endanger their precarious position on so feeble an attempt, it almost seemed to express a suicidal intent.
The Patron thought briefly of honoring their apparent wish. With them frozen like this, it would be no problem at all to end each of their lives, in any of a variety of ways. But that would almost seem to be a gift.
Better to take their hope from them entirely, to crush even their weak ability to oppose their captors, and then show them the price of their pride, the price of destroying so many irreplaceable treasur
es for their own selfish survival. The Patron went to work.
It and its remotes moved through the mission hull, disarming each of the defenders and destroying the weapons. The crew and the broken remains of the guns were then deposited back in the mess room amidst the shattered pieces of the avatar. After a time, the task was complete, with Nathan, Kris, Edwards, and the rest arranged in a circle facing one another.
When next the Patrons awoke them, they would return to normal time facing each other, powerless, and spared only by the cruel mercy of the aliens. And the next thing to which they would be forced to bear witness would be the murdered Earth, reaped of all its treasures, fated to be forgotten by the universe, except as an exhibit for their captors. Then, at last, these final few humans would know the futility of opposition.
The Patron departed, satisfied and at ease.
19: “FROM DARKNESS—LIGHT”
December 28, 2055; USS Trenton (CA-1), Flagship, CRUDESGRU One, within the Asteroid Belt on approach to Earth
Lydia Russ squinted at the wide screen in front of her in the Trenton’s wardroom, silently cursing the slow assault of age that wore down her senses, despite the sci-fi future she found herself in. It was unfair that after all the pain she and the others had been through, all that she had compromised and wheedled to achieve, and all the impossible obstacles that had nevertheless been overcome—that her savoring of this moment would be diminished by something as pedestrian as an old lady’s eyes.
On the wardroom screen, false color overlays pinpointed every significant rock and asteroid in their quadrant of the Belt. Years of movies and popular portrayals had convinced her inner expectations that the Asteroid Belt would be a jumble of tumbling mountains, filling the night black sky all around. The reality proved much more mundane. In terms of the wide vacuum of space, it was a busy mess, but only relative to the emptiness between planets.
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