by B. V. Larson
She laughed quietly. “Yes.”
“Good,” I told her, “because you’re damned well going to need all the help you can get.”
After that, I made my move. My patience had paid off. She was ready and interested. We soon moved to her apartments and made love there.
All the while, with the window open, we could watch a nighttime view of the overly-bright stars near Arcturus. The sky made our love-making surreal, like we were embracing in open space itself.
-57-
The next morning, I awoke alone. Arcturus was blazing in the heaven on a rare, cloudless day. I immediately had a sinking feeling, like I’d overslept on Easter Sunday.
Bouncing out of bed and pulling on my boots, I soon went searching for breakfast and Floramel, in that order.
I found her about an hour later working below ground in the dark labs. She looked at me with a pale, worried face.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her. “Your people won’t talk to me.”
“They don’t entirely trust you,” she said, going back to her work.
“They don’t? Well… what about you?”
She looked at me, troubled. “I don’t know,” she said. “Your people invaded our world. You take what you want, you kill, and you bed me like a captive.”
“Now, hold on!” I said. “Did I misunderstand last night? Was I in the wrong?”
Floramel heaved a sigh. “No,” she said. “I’m sorry. But the battle fleet has arrived, and it’s not cooperating.”
That froze my mind over. My mouth hung wide, and I spun around on the heel of my left boot.
There was a monitor displaying deep space nearby. It showed blank stars.
“I don’t see them,” I said.
“No, you’re not meant to. They’re not optically visible yet.”
That was a stunner. Sure, we’d never seen the battle fleet except for that one day they annexed Earth. But they’d been very visible in the skies during that dark time. Every vid from a century back showed countless ships—plain as day.
“Are they stealth ships?” I asked.
“They have that capacity, yes,” she said. “But they’re also hanging back, far from our planet. They’re at the very fringe of the Arcturus system, where our two gas giants orbit.”’
“Floramel?” I asked, turning back to her.
She looked up from her work, and I took her hand in mine.
“Come with me,” I said. “Just you—or everyone. We can get aboard the Nairb transport. There’s plenty of room. You don’t have to stay here and die. There’s no point in that.”
She looked at me with those perfectly shaped eyes, and I could see I’d gotten through to her. At least part of her wanted to go with me.
“Where will we go?” she asked. “To Earth? We won’t be welcome there.”
“There are lots of planets in the universe,” I told her. “The battle fleet has a weakness—it can’t be everywhere at once.”
After a moment of tortured thought, she pulled her hand out of mine.
“No,” she said. “We’ll fight.”
“Girl…” I said, flummoxed. I’d given her the best shot of James McGill charm I had in me, and she’d shrugged it off. “You can’t win. What’s the point?”
“We don’t know that. Not yet.”
“Well, I know it. The Mogwa aren’t running a quarter of the galaxy because they’re a bunch of chumps. You might hurt them a little, but all that will do is piss them off.”
“We’ll see.”
My eyes turned back to the monitors. They were still blank, as far as I could tell.
“How do you even know there are any ships out there?”
“We’re using gravimetrics. No radar, visual or other light spectra will work to detect them—but they have mass they can’t hide.”
“I see… How many are there?”
“About four percent of this planet’s mass was just added to this star system. That works out to… About a thousand large ships? It’s a guess, I admit, but an educated one.”
“A thousand ships?” I groaned. “Come on, girl. Let’s run while we can.”
“No, I’m sorry.”
She’d left me in a tough spot. I eyed the others in her team. There really weren’t a lot of people on this planet, but they’d done amazing things. It would be a shame to lose them all.
“I’ve got an idea,” I said. “Have you got a data core? Something with all your knowledge stored?”
“Of course.”
“Well? Give it to me. That way it won’t be lost if the battle fleet wins.”
They looked dubious, but logic won out after a few seconds of thought.
Floramel nodded, and her minions didn’t argue. I’d gotten a weird vibe from the lab techs over the last few days. They weren’t normal in the head—not by human standards. I got the feeling they were clones, but they didn’t look like clones. Whatever the case was, by birth or conditioning, they followed Floramel around like she was their mother duck.
They gave me a copy of their data core, which was an organic thing in a box. It sloshed when I carried it, and smelled like a dirty fish tank.
“How can we interface with this?” I asked.
“I’ll put an app on your tapper,” she said, and she did so quickly.
Taking the data core back to Nostrum, I was confronted by Carlos and Natasha.
“Centurion?” Natasha asked. “Are you alone?”
“That’s right, Specialist. They’re not coming with us.”
“Fools,” Carlos said. “They don’t stand a chance when the battle fleet gets here.”
“I’ve got bad news on that front,” I said, handing the data core off to a couple of wide-eyed recruits. “Handle that with care,” I told them. “It’s got a copy of their research on it.”
They got a power cart and hauled it away like it was the Arc of the Covenant itself.
“What bad news?” Carlos asked me.
“Oh… just that Battle Fleet 921 is already in this star system and approaching. They detected it using gravimetrics.”
Natasha turned white, and even Carlos looked concerned.
“How long do we have?” Natasha asked.
“Until they decide to start shooting? Who knows?”
She looked at me and bit her lip. “Should we run?”
“We can’t run,” I told her. “It’s too late for that.”
“Why?”
“Think about it. The Galactics have been in the system observing us for some time. They’re probably trying to figure out what’s wrong with this ship. Maybe they’re sending us secret messages in code, and we’re not answering.”
Her eyes darted from side to side. I could almost see the wheels turning in that pretty head of hers.
“I should have thought of that. I should recommend action—but, I don’t know what to do, James.”
“We’re screwed,” Carlos said, throwing up his hands. “It’s as simple as that. We’re just screwed. Sometimes it’s easier to accept death and hope for a revive back on Earth. Let’s make something up, then transmit it home. If they get it in a few years, maybe they’ll revive us.”
“Hmm,” I said. “I like part of your idea, Carlos, but it needs work. Natasha, check every channel to see if the Galactics are transmitting to this ship.”
She looked at me oddly. “We’re really not going to run?”
“They’ll know this ship isn’t controlled by a Nairb crew if we do.”
“How are they not going to know that anyway, James?” she demanded. “We can’t just slip into their ranks silently without making some kind of report.”
“Normally, that’d be true. But we’re about to see a battle. In the heat of battle, things can get confusing and protocols might be broken.”
“Oh yeah,” Carlos said. “I can see where this is going. Excuse me while I go inject myself with a quart of morphine, okay?”
“Stay at your post, Specialist,” I told him without a glan
ce in his direction. “Natasha? Can you hook me up?”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll try—but you’re crazy, James.”
“Always and forever,” I agreed.
Natasha began her work, but she didn’t finish before the battle started. About an hour after I’d first been shown the enemy ships by Floramel, the fireworks began. The Empire ships revealed themselves in all their glory—honestly, I wanted to crap my pants just a little.
Grabbing the comm gear and connecting to Floramel, I saw she looked relatively calm, if distracted, on the big screen.
“They’re coming for you!” I told her. “Transport up here right now!”
“I’m sorry James,” she said. “Win or lose, we’re not leaving this place.”
“Win or lose?” I asked incredulously. “They’ll blot out your sun when they reach orbit. There are too many of them for your robot ship to handle, no matter how smart it is.”
“You can watch, but you must stay quiet,” she told me. “I can’t afford to be distracted now.”
I slapped the top of my helmet with a gauntlet. I didn’t know what else to say to her.
The fight unfolded in an unusual way. It was a scary battle—if you could call it a battle. It was among the strangest operations I’d yet to witness.
Truly advanced technology is akin to magic—at least, that’s what they’d told me back in officer training school at Central. This battle seemed to prove out the logic of that statement.
First off, Floramel and her lab people began to play some really cool tricks once the enemy fleet approached and revealed itself. A series of mines lit up in the middle of the Galactic’s formation. How they got there, how they’d gone undetected—I didn’t know. They weren’t even explosions, exactly.
“Masers,” Natasha told me in awe. “They’ve got functioning maser weapons, and they’ve deployed them right in the enemy fleet’s core.”
“What the hell is a maser?” I asked, but she didn’t answer right away.
Violet streams of light came out of these pinpoints of origin. Like spines from a sea anemone, these beams lanced out in a hundred random directions at once. Many of them missed all targets—but some landed.
The enemy fleet was tightly bunched. They took hits to scores of their sleek vessels. The beams punched through hulls and ripped right through the skin of a stricken ship and out the other side. The masers didn’t burn for long—only a split second before burning out forever, but in that time they were like landmines in a marching formation of troops. Ships were torn apart and destroyed. Dozens of them.
“Holy shit!” Carlos called out. “We are dead. We are so, so dead. We’re so dead that they won’t even be able to—”
“Shut the hell up!” I ordered, and he fell to muttering darkly.
“Masers are theoretical weapons,” Natasha told me. “They’re an older tech—developed before lasers on Earth. But this kind of power… They might be using fusion bombs to power them briefly.”
“How’d they get them out there into the middle of the fleet?” I demanded.
She shrugged. “Maybe they were sitting out there all along.”
More masers went off, but the Mogwa ships had shielding now. Either the Galactics hadn’t had their shields in place before—or, more likely, they’d focused them all forward expecting a more traditional attack. Whatever the case, their ships stopped dying to the masers and they advanced steadily.
“Why didn’t they use these masers on Nostrum when we approached?” I asked Natasha.
“You said yourself they didn’t want to. Isn’t that what Floramel told you? That they could have wiped us out, but they didn’t take us seriously.”
“Well…” I said, “I can now see why they—”
“The Mogwa are firing back,” Natasha said, leaning over her instruments and making adjustments to our optics.
Now that the fireworks had begun, neither side announced itself or made any declarations of doom. Battle Fleet 921 slid forward, advancing despite their losses. They seemed powerful, implacable. Just watching them made me want to freak out a little, like Carlos.
The Galactics opened up with some kind of freaky attack that had explosions popping all around the AI ship—which was still parked in orbit over Rogue World.
“What the hell are those strikes?” I demanded.
“T-bombs,” she said calmly. “The Mogwa are trying to teleport bombs inside the ship. The AI ship must have good shielding, though, as it’s not working.”
“T-bombs…?” I said, my mouth hanging open again.
Thinking it would be a good idea to record this, I tapped the record-all button on my tapper and streamed it to the data core. There was a faint hope we’d see Earth again before we were snuffed out, and I wanted to take home a gift of intel.
Seeing as how we were probably doomed as a species, I figured it was the least I could do for those clueless bastards sitting home at Central.
-58-
The AI ship just sat there, like spider in a web, waiting for the approaching Galactics to get closer. It was ominous.
“Pull us back around to the far side of the planet,” I told Natasha.
“It won’t help,” she told me. “If they lay just one of those T-bombs on us, we’ll be wiped out.”
“I didn’t ask for advice, Specialist. Retreat out of sight pronto.”
She did as I’d ordered without anger or much in the way of hope in her face. Our big transport ponderously looped around the planet and slid behind it, out of direct sight from the approaching fleet. Naturally, we still had drones and the like reporting back visuals and other forms of data, so we could watch the battle unfold.
The Galactics seem to have given up on the T-bomb approach. They were moving closer to bring their main guns to bear.
The AI ship, however, wasn’t cooperating. It had started acting oddly. Instead of being in one fixed location, it looked like it was blinking around into random spots every second or two. Even the timing on the movement was randomized.
“Look at that…” Natasha breathed. “It’s phasing—shifting in time and space. It’s got to be almost impossible to hit.”
“They’re sure trying,” I said, watching the approaching fleet open up with their main batteries.
The big guns were going off. Much of the back-and-forth assault utilized radiations that would normally be invisible to the human eye, but our computers compensated when displaying the situation optically.
The AI ship was firing back, too. It had missiles at first, X-ray types like the ones it had used on us. But those were failing to penetrate now, so it shifted to a single, bright beam that was depicted as a lavender line on our screens.
This line stretched out with what seemed like a languid pace, but it was really moving at the speed of light. The distance between the two opposing forces was great enough to take several light-seconds to traverse.
But what I didn’t understand was how this lavender beam was slicing laterally through the Galactic fleet.
“How’s it doing that?” I demanded. “It looks like a sword cutting through space from one point to another…”
Natasha nodded. “The effect seems to be related to the random jumps the AI ship is making. It’s slashing that beam in random lateral directions with each shifting of its position. Absolutely fascinating technology.”
I glanced at her, thinking it was just like Natasha to get excited about tech, even when it was terrifying.
The AI beams were scoring hits as the Empire ships came closer. It slashed and danced, cutting apart enemy cruisers and battleships each time. It almost always got one, sometimes two. Once I even saw it kill three in one shifting sweep.
But the battle fleet was reacting, responding and taking countermeasures. I had to wonder if even those smarty pants, Galactic Core-dwellers had ever encountered anything like this. They weren’t running yet, so maybe they had.
“They’re widening their formation,” Natasha said. “They’re r
ealigning their shields—there, see that? The AI ship jumped and slashed—but the beam didn’t knock out the last battleship that was attacked.”
I watched the ship in question. It had been hit hard, its shield sparked and dulled to a flickering orange color. That ship immediately pulled out of formation and retreated.
This became the new tactic. Each ship that was hit survived, as often as not, and immediately fled to the back of the line. As they became more scattered the AI vessel could only hit one at a time, and it was only getting kills rarely now.
“They’re down to eight hundred ships,” Natasha said. “There were over a thousand to start. The AI ship has performed magnificently.”
“If one gets through, it will be too many,” I said.
We watched tensely, and the battle shifted again. The Empire ships were no longer targeting the dancing phantom in orbit. They turned their weapons instead on the blue glass dome the ship was protecting.
“No…” I said, seeing beams lash down from space and strike the dome. “It can’t hold, can it?”
Natasha shrugged. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t have thought the ship could have held out this long.”
Bombs were falling now. Not all the way down from space—that would have taken hours. Instead, they were being teleported into the atmosphere itself and allowed to fall down near the dome by the attraction of gravity.
“Get Floramel online!” I ordered.
Natasha did so quickly, and I stared at the glare and looming mushroom clouds that now obscured the dome itself.
For a minute, I couldn’t hear anything other than static. Then the explosions ceased and the EMP effect dispersed.
“Floramel?” I demanded. “Can you hear me?”
“James?” she said, her voice scratching due to static. “You should leave here. This can’t last much longer.”
“You have to gate up to our ship. We still have the poles set up here. Come through, and save yourselves.”
“We can’t do that, James.”
“If you won’t do it to save yourselves,” I said, feeling desperate as more and more Empire ships came into range, “come along to save us. We need you. Earth needs you.”
“No,” she repeated. “The gateway transmission—even the fact we’re in contact right now—it’s all being documented. Earth could be expunged for that alone, James.”