“Son of a bitch!” Nuke wheezed, spitting blood and crawling away from the sphere. “I lugged that mother all the way through the stinking jungle, and it’s broken!”
Nuke had no way of knowing the antimatter explosion was trapped inside a supergravity sphere. If Dr McInness had seen the black emptiness, he might have recognized it as an artificial black hole, although he would have thought it impossible to stand so close to its event horizon and not be torn apart by its gravitational force. He would have known nothing could escape its grip, not a bullet, not the sound wave of a bullet striking metal, not even the shockwave of an antimatter explosion in full bloom. The antigravity bubble enclosing the black hole would, however, have confounded him for he would not have understood how the pull of the black hole and the inward push of the antigravity bubble could be so perfectly balanced as to localize the black hole’s influence. Dr McInness would never have believed such an effect could be artificially created, let alone projected from orbit.
To Beckman, it was simply incomprehensible. A weapon far more powerful than a fusion bomb had just detonated in front of him, and yet its massive destructive force had been neutralized. He couldn’t guess how. He didn’t care. Instead, an old lesson screamed at him from memory. It was why they’d never really had a chance. It was a lesson he’d been taught over and over again, about how infinitely advanced technology would look like magic to primitives. It was a lesson that had never really sunk in, until now.
And it was wrong.
It’s not like magic, he thought bitterly. It is magic!
Throughout the great ship, sirens sounded as a high pitched computer generated voice announced something unintelligible in an alien language. Beckman and his companions exchanged confused looks, then the mothership began to shudder continuously as if struck by a series of giant hammer blows.
An orbital bombardment had began.
* * * *
Hooper slumped to the ground, exhausted. He dropped his .50 caliber pistol with just one round left and wiped blood and sweat from his face. Liyakindirr crouched beside him, aiming the fatboy special back the way they’d come, looking for the metal beast that hunted them.
“I don’t see it,” Liyakindirr said, wiping the trickle of blood from the side of his mouth.
Hooper gasped for air. “It’s close.”
Liyakindirr glanced at the sergeant. The burn on Hooper’s right side was a hideous mass of blood and sweat and dirt. Beneath the blood and grime, Hooper’s face was deathly pale. Liyakindirr had never seen such a wound, but he knew what the tropics did to injured men and he was sure Sergeant Hooper didn’t have long to live.
“Can you walk?” he asked gently.
Hooper sighed, feeling his strength ebb away. “No,” he croaked, looking up at the sky, seeing clear blue firmament. It took him a moment to realize the shield dome was gone. “She did it! Give me . . . the radio.”
Liyakindirr slipped off the backpack, placing it close the Hooper’s good left hand. The sergeant pulled open the backpack with feeble fingers, then reached inside for the short wave. Off to the right, they heard the familiar whipping of plants being smashed aside by speeding metal, warning them the seeker was circling around for another attack. Liyakindirr turned toward the sound, his finger hovering over the fatboy’s firing surface. He’d learned quickly that when the seeker circled, it was too fast for the bulky silver weapon to fire, but Hooper had told him several times, if it came straight in, the weapon would work. Liyakindirr didn’t believe him, although the strange power it had to push his hands to the side proved it was alive.
Hooper pulled the radio’s aerial to full length, checked the frequency, then spoke into the mike. “This is Charlie Tango Alpha. Enact citadel, repeat, enact citadel. Acknowledge.”
A flash of super heated, relativistic particles tore through the foliage and struck the radio, blasting it away through the trees and tearing the mike from Hooper’ hand.
Liyakindirr sighted back along the shot’s flight path and touched the surface. The weapon pulled to the left, but refused to fire as the seeker swerved away at high speed. “Did they hear?”
“Don’t know,” Hooper said, glancing at the melted wreckage of the radio. In the few seconds he’d been listening, the radio had been strangely silent. No static, no jamming. as if nothing was getting through. How could that be, with the shield down?
The armored seeker swept out of the forest at an oblique angle. It closed on Liyakindirr with dazzling speed while he pressed down hard on the special’s firing surface. The weapon stubbornly refused to fire, as the seeker had precisely computed the angles and velocity needed to confuse the weapon. Liyakindirr, seeing its twin cannons spin toward him, leapt sideways as it fired. The twin blasts felled a tree behind him with a crack, sending branches and birds flying. Liyakindirr ran, lifting the fatboy over his shoulder like a club as the seeker swerved toward him. He jumped sideways as it fired, swinging the fatboy down as if it were a nulla nulla, but the seeker anticipated his move. One of its shield arms deflected the blow, while the other one sent him crashing against a tree. Liyakindirr crumpled as his body slid limply to the ground, unconscious.
Hooper reached weakly for his hand gun, but the seeker was on him fast. It planted a metallic foot on his forearm, crushing bone, pinning his hand to the ground. He groaned with pain, as the seeker magnetized one of its circular shield emitters to its torso, freeing its hand, and tore the pistol from Hooper’ feeble fingers. It held the pistol in front of its sensor disk for analysis, its artificial intelligence curious how such a crude weapon could be so effective. Hooper looked up at the seeker as it examined his gun, glimpsing the azure blue sky through the canopy above, and the fiery meteors streaking toward the earth. Distant thunder began to roll over the land and the earth trembled with each impact.
Something’s attacking the ship?
The seeker dropped the .50 caliber pistol, turning its attention on him. Hooper relaxed as he stared at the cannon aimed at his head.
“Fuck you, tin head,” he growled defiantly.
Three white hot blasts flashed through the trees from the left, tearing the seeker apart and sending its twisted remains flying. Hooper blinked, confused, then turned toward the source of the attack. Floating ten meters away were three diminutive bipedal forms, each two thirds the height of a man. They floated effortlessly through the trees toward him in white deep diving suits. Plants in their way swayed aside as they approached, never coming in contact with their suits, yet no branches were broken, ensuring they left no trace of their passing.
More machines? He wondered apprehensively, his fear tempered by the knowledge that they’d just destroyed the seeker. He glanced up at the meteor storm, pounding the grounded mothership to the west, then realized the three were coming from the east. They were waiting outside the shield? Waiting for it to go down!
The three forms had arms, but no hands. Where the left hand should have been was a weapon mount, while the right hand had a device the purpose of which Hooper could not guess. When they floated past him, only one turned towards him. It aimed its device arm at him, obtaining a full analysis of his physical condition and equipment. The data was immediately sent to the orbiting fleet, which instantly relayed it to a command center six thousand light years away. It was just one of trillions of pieces of information the center received every second from forces scattered through thousands of systems covering a third of the galaxy. By the time Hooper’s heart had beaten ten times, the information had been fully analyzed and integrated into the theatre view, translated into dozens of languages and dispersed to allied civilizations up to thirty five thousand light years away.
To Hooper, it had been no more than a vague gesture.
The second camouflaged figure floated over the destroyed seeker, studying it with its sensor arm. The third drifted a short distance toward the west, aiming its device arm in the direction of the mothership, gathering ground based intel on the progress of the bombardment. Hooper noti
ced how they turned toward each other, as if they were talking. It was not a machine like movement, but communication between living beings in personal contact.
They’re wearing helmets! He realized. Oversized by human standards, but definitely helmets. None of the machines he’d encountered had needed helmets, just sensor disks.
From the left shoulder of the humanoid floating in front of Hooper, a blue cone of light enveloped the sergeant. Hooper felt a cold shock drive away the haziness which had been weighing him down, then his pain vanished. The agony of his burned right side, the sharp tearing of his broken left arm, the draining weight of tropical infection, all vanished in an instant.
The leader moved to the west, then turned toward his two companions, summoning them. They were on a strict timetable and had to be in position when the bombardment ended. The two floated toward the leader, then all three sped off through the trees toward the mothership. The white of their suits vanished, taking on the color and texture of their surrounds. It was not invisibility, but camouflage so sophisticated, they could barely be seen, even when moving. Hooper watched them go with the eye of a professional soldier. He didn’t know who they were or where they came from, or that he stood more than a million of years behind them, yet he knew with complete certainty what they were.
Infantry!
* * * *
Flaming meteorites rained down over the ship.
The Command Nexus quickly realized, they were neither meteorites nor flaming, but highly focused energy sources that ionized the atmosphere on contact. One such source expanded to a four meter sphere as it struck the gun emplacement Beckman and his team had repelled from. It left an empty hemisphere precisely cut into the ship’s outer hull, where moments before a heavily armored particle cannon had stood. There was no trace of heat, radiation or antimatter, although there was a mysterious spacetime shockwave felt throughout the ship that triggered an alert the Command Nexus had never before received.
It was being attacked by a technology it could not identify, even in theory!
The attack had a precision and power far in excess of the clumsy nova weapons that had crippled the ship, yet even the attacker’s energy source was ominously obscure. The mothership’s sensors briefly detected a disturbance in spacetime, suggesting a baffling phasing anomaly which simply added to the confusion. The Command Nexus tried firing defensive weapons, but inexplicably, no defense system would activate. When it directed a maintenance drone to manually fire a point defense weapon, the drone acknowledged the order, then promptly shut itself down.
The ship shuddered from multiple impacts while combat drones patrolling the ship’s perimeter were annihilated. When a seeker or battloid tried to evade, the incoming weapons changed course on the way down, pursuing their targets and varying their destructive impact according to the size and strength of their objective. The Command Nexus quickly realized the focus of the attack was to destroy its weapons and external sensors, while noncombat systems and maintenance drones simply ceased to obey its instructions.
Following behind the meteor storm, twenty silver elliptical craft streaked down toward the mothership. The Command Nexus recognized the technology and design of these craft, and extrapolated a conclusion. It had been disarmed by a far more advanced, unknown enemy, and now that it was helpless, it was being attacked by its known enemies. The outcome of such an uneven contest was immediately apparent. With no hull shield, defensive weapons that refused to fire and no mobility, the mothership’s surviving armaments and battle sensors were rapidly eliminated.
When the elliptical ships neared the surface, they decelerated rapidly until they hovered over the mothership’s hull and above the ridges surrounding the valley. Armored infantry passed through the sides of the shining silver craft without any hatches or doors opening, then the elliptical craft seemingly vanished as they shot skyward under hyper acceleration.
The armored infantry on the surrounding ridges swept down to secure the perimeter, while those floating above the ship flew into hull ruptures with a speed that told of their urgency. Special operations infantry, having flown overland toward the ship when the shield dome had gone down, were already inside providing real time tactical intelligence to the assault team. All force elements raced to their objectives, conscious of the limited time they had to achieve their goal. They knew their great partner was containing an antimatter explosion with a technology unknown to even the most advanced members of the Alliance, and that such massive energies could not be held in check for long. Once the matter annihilation wave passed the artificial black hole’s event horizon, its destructive powers would be released in full.
If that happened, a great opportunity would be lost.
* * * *
Vamp and Virus watched helplessly as their weapons twisted like soft plastic against the collapsing door. The center of the door ballooned into the corridor beyond as the walls and ceiling buckled, filling the control room with the wail of rending metal. The bubble in the door peeled away and flew back several meters, striking the magnetic field generator’s rectangular emitter with a clang, and stuck fast.
Dr McInness sat in the command chair, his broken ankle elevated, looking over his shoulder through the shattered hatch. “They’ll have to turn it off for the machines to get in here.”
“Do I kill fishman now?” Bandaka asked, pressing his spear tip against the alien’s throat.
Vamp glanced at the unconscious alien and slowly shook her head. “No.” She was not about to murder a helpless life, even if it had just killed Timer.
A white flash flooded through the wrecked doorway into the control room. Many rapid flashes followed, coupled with the beat of multiple shockwaves. The crushed metal caught by the magnetic field generator clattered to the deck as the generator shorted out in a shower of sparks, then a battered seeker torso, missing an arm and with both cannons destroyed, bounced through the open doorway and skidded to halt in front of them.
They stared, surprised, at the smoking wreckage as the flashes and shockwaves ended. Vamp took a cautious step toward the doorway, glimpsing dismembered seeker and battloid parts littering the deck outside. A moment later, a squat bipedal form whose camouflaged surfaces made it appear to melt into the metal walls, floated into view.
It glided past the magnetic field generator, into the control room, scanning them with its sensor arm. Without stopping, it approached the unconscious alien lying on the floor. The amphibian’s personal defense shield still distorted the air and Bandaka resolutely held his spear’s point to its throat. The armored warrior turned slightly to Bandaka, aiming its device arm at him. The aboriginal hunter “listened” briefly, then stepped back, completely at ease, yet absently wondering what had possessed him to move.
A golden sliver of metal barely a millimeter thick emerged from the warrior’s armored suit and floated toward the unconscious amphibian. There was a hint of electrical distortion as the tiny golden needle passed through her shield, then glided down toward her forehead. It penetrated her streamlined skin, then slid effortlessly through thick bone into her brain. There was no sign of a puncture wound, for the sliver had simply passed between the cells of her body without touching them. It quickly took control of her implants, ending her self-induced coma.
Nemza’ri awoke, relaxed and unafraid. An irresistible thought appeared in her mind, which she immediately obeyed by switching off her personal shield. She stood up with an overwhelming sense of well being and a desire to obey any request. An eagerness to hear the next instruction and a certainty of the immense pleasure she would feel with every act of obedience filled her consciousness. Absently, she knew she was under the control of a capture technology, but it made no difference. Nothing mattered, but the intoxicating joy of obedience.
To Vamp, the alien appeared to stand docilely before the armored warrior. Its arms hung limply by its side and its deep blue eyes stared blankly ahead as it listened to a voice no-one else could hear. The alien’s demeanor had changed d
ramatically, from frenzied fighter to passive observer. After a moment, the alien walked out of the control room unescorted, for no guard was needed.
“What’s going on, Doc?” Virus asked warily, careful to make no sudden movements.
Dr McInness watched the alien walk past the gravity field generator and head off down a corridor before replying. “Our amphibian friend was just taken prisoner.”
“Fishface didn’t put up much of a fight,” Vamp said, surprised at how submissive their former adversary had become.
“From the size of his suit, he’s clearly a different species.” Dr McInness raised his hand, trying to attract the armored warrior’s attention. “Excuse me, could you tell us what’s going on?”
The armored warrior floated along the line of consoles until it reached where Vamp and Virus stood. When it turned toward them, they felt compelled to step aside.
After Vamp had moved, she blinked, regaining her self control. “What was that?”
“Hypnosis?” Virus suggested, then he brightened in surprise. “Hey, the pounding in my head is . . . gone!”
The armored warrior continued moving along beside the control consoles, its camouflage effect rippling with the colors of the active screens it passed. It stopped at the fifth console and extended its device arm.
“That’s ship status,” Virus said, peering at the symbols. Now that the headaches had vanished, the forced memories were now easily within reach. “My god, I can read it.” He looked from one console to the next, eyes wide with astonishment. “I can read them all!”
The console and the wall mounted screen in front of the armored warrior came to life with symbols and characters. They changed so fast, they blurred into each other. Dr McInness sat up, straining to see. He gasped when he realized the flow of information would have overwhelmed a super computer, yet the armored warrior had no trouble absorbing everything it was seeing, even as it fed in instructions.
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