Dark Matter

by Ian Douglas

  Delgado had explained them to her. When the Grdoch had taken over on Vulcan, they’d relied on nanotechnology to create a quick and dirty fence. Floaters, alien vehicles drifting just above the ground, had circled the perimeter, planting rice-­sized seeds that had immediately begun converting dirt and rock into a wall. Once the wall was fully grown, smooth-­sided and sloping like the interior of an immense bowl, they’d cut a five-­meter gap in one section and installed the gate.

  There’d been no need for watch towers or guards. The curving wall reached varying heights around the circle, but nowhere was lower than seven meters, and the manufactured surface of the barrier was so smooth that it looked like polished stone. There was simply no way that the prisoners, naked and without tools or weapons of any kind, were going to get up that.

  But now they had weapons—­three of them. Connor called Delgado and another man, Siegfried Koch, to her side. Koch appeared older—­perhaps in his sixties, though with anagathic treatments, nowadays, it was impossible to accurately judge anyone’s true age. He’d picked up the third Grdoch weapon moments ago and been unwilling to relinquish it. “I have experience,” he’d told her.

  “Tell your ­people to move well back,” she told them. “If the wall explodes, we don’t want ­people getting hit by hot gravel flying at high speed. Now . . . you see how these things work?”

  “Point . . . and squeeze here,” Koch said. “Seems simple enough. A maser?”

  “I think so. Whatever it shoots, it focuses intense heat on or in the target. I suggest we fire together from a prone position.”

  As the crowd edged back, the three of them lay down in the yellow moss, aimed at a single point in the wall half a meter above the ground, and fired. The resultant explosion was sudden, sharp, and remarkably satisfying: a flash and a crack of shattering material that did indeed send fragments of stone hurtling above their bodies.

  Two more shots were necessary to widen the gap enough, and then Delgado shouted “adelante,” and the crowd surged forward.

  “Watch the sides!” Connor yelled as they passed. “Don’t touch them! They’re hot!”

  She, Delgado, and Koch waited as the crowd streamed through the opening. A runner arrived, breathless, to tell them that Grdoch, a lot of Grdoch, were entering the compound now at the gate in the east.

  “How many, Peter?” he asked in German.

  The boy shook his head, answering in the same language. “I don’t know, Governor! But many! Many! And with weapons!”

  “Responding to a call for help from those three, do you think?” Connor asked. “Or did we trigger an alarm when we blew the wall?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Koch said. He was staring toward the southeast, looking for some sign of the approaching threat. “They’re coming . . . and we can’t hold them off, just the three of us.”

  “No,” Delgado agreed. He raised his voice, addressing the fleeing civilians. “Faster, ­people, faster!”

  A tall and muscular man separated from the crowd and approached them. “How can I help?” He was holding a crudely fashioned spear.

  “You are . . . ?” Connor asked.

  “Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Weirton, ma’am. USNS Intrepid.”

  “Governor?” Connor said. “How about you giving your gun to this man, and you get the hell out of here.”

  Delgado hesitated, then shook his head. “No, ma’am. I am responsible for their safety. I will stay.”

  “Herr Koch?”

  “No, Lieutenant. I was Wachtmeister in another life, long ago . . . Pan-­European army. Then I retired and emigrated here. I will stay and fight.”

  Connor was about to make it an order . . . then changed her mind. There was something about the expression in Delgado’s eyes, in the set of Koch’s jaw. “Care to join us, Gunnery Sergeant?” she said. “Even without a weapon?”

  “Semper fi, ma’am,” Weirton told her, using the ancient motto of both the U.S. and the USNA Marines. “And there are other Intrepids here who want to fight.”

  “Round them up, Gunnery Sergeant. If we can’t give you weapons now, maybe we can take them.”

  The Marine gave a wolfish grin. “My thought exactly, Lieutenant.”

  She looked at the sharpened point of the Marine’s spear. “How the hell did you ­people carve these spears, anyway? Were you able to smuggle knives in here?”

  “No, ma’am. We tried . . . but . . .” He gestured at his own nakedness. “They didn’t let us keep anything. But there are rocks out here. Nothing like flint, unfortunately, but there are other kinds of quartz. We experimented, hammering them together, and there were some that flaked off in nice, sharp shards. We also got sparks, and were able to use them to set fires.”

  Connor’s eyebrows went up. “I’m impressed, Gunny.”

  “Adapt, improvise, overcome.” It was another ancient mantra of the Corps. “Anyway, ma’am, we got enough of those flakes sharp enough that we could whittle with them.” He shook the pole in his hand. “And this stuff is growing all over the south side of this fucking place. We were able to break them off, sharpen them, and harden the points in fire. Never did figure out how to make stone spear points and attach them to the stick . . . but then we only had a ­couple of weeks to work on it.”

  “You were planning a break-­out?”

  “Abso-­damn-­lutely! Trouble was, we kept trying to attack individual Grdoch with these things, but their skins were just too tough. Had to wait until you came along with your laser pistol before we could do the bastards some real damage. Hey!” He turned, waving at someone in the streaming crowd. “Callahan! Get your ass over here!”

  A young man separated from the moving crowd. With his spear and shaggy beard, he was the perfect image of a prehistoric hunter. A woman joined them, also armed. These had been some of the ­people who’d rushed the armed Grdoch a few minutes before, facing maser fire and horrible deaths in an attempt to kill their foes. It was, Connor thought, nothing short of astonishing.

  Minutes passed, with a small but quickly growing group of armed men and women forming a rough perimeter around the opening in the wall. The civilians kept moving through, faster now as the number of ­people still inside the compound dwindled.

  “I feel,” Delgado said after a while, “like Moses at the Red Sea. And the Egyptians are very nearly upon us.”

  Connor had to search her in-­head for the reference . . . and frowned when she found it. The ­people she’d interacted with here, Delgado and Fuentes and some of the others, were unusually free in their use of religious terms and expressions. At first, she’d dismissed it as a cultural affectation. Colony worlds far from Earth and the Confederation’s central government, might be expected to be lax in the enforcement of social mandates like the White Covenant. Others, like the handful of colony worlds established by the Islamic Theocracy, had been established in direct opposition to the White Covenant doctrine.

  But Fuentes, she remembered, hadn’t been part of this culture.

  It was, Connor thought, a good example of what had been called the foxhole mentality: there are no atheists in foxholes. It didn’t mean a particular doctrine or church, but an overall conviction that someone had to be in charge in a universe of unreasoning and irrational violence, fear, and chaos. Without God, that universe swiftly became far too large and far too threatening for the human mind to hold; combat—­or the nightmare horror of something like the Grdoch—­was guaranteed to bring out the religious impulse resident within every human, an impulse that might well define what Humankind really was.

  Like most ­people who’d grown up in the shadow of the White Covenant, Connor felt mildly embarrassed when someone else invoked God . . . but she was more than willing to overlook such social gaffes if it made fearful ­people less fearful, despondent ­people hopeful, or broken ­people able to function.

  Besides, she thought as she watche
d the last of the crowd feeding through the gap in the wall . . . Delgado was right. It was an exodus . . . maybe not one with divine help, but it was an exodus from slavery and fear and nightmare all the same.

  The last of the former prisoners vanished through the gap. “Okay,” Connor said. “The rest of you start falling back. Out the hole and scatter.”

  “Too late,” Weirton said. He gestured with his spear, looking for all the world like a grim-­faced Paleolithic hunter. “The bastards are here. . . .”

  USNA CVS America

  40 Eridani A System

  1615 hours, TFT

  “I think that’s it over there,” an electronics technician said, pointing.

  “Get in here closer, Anderson,” Gutierrez said. “I can’t see.”

  “How’s this, ma’am?”

  “Better . . .”

  “If we can get power in there at that junction,” Kepner said, “we should be able to get at least partial use of the ship’s netlink.”

  “How about the battery for the door?” Gray suggested. “It should be behind that panel over there.”

  “Might work,” Gutierrez said. “Conway! Johansson! See if you can get that cover open! Anderson, give them some light!”

  The ship’s netlink was essentially a ship-­wide Internet run off an auxiliary server. Even with the main power down, it should have remained functioning, but the power surge when the X-­ray beam had burned through the main power module had fried several key junctions, despite circuit hardening. With the netlink operational, anyone with the usual military-­standard hardware inside their heads could connect with anyone else on the net, with voice communications, up-­ and downloading files, or using personal secretaries and avatars to share information. If they could get it running again, they should be able to communicate freely with everyone on board America.

  There’d been seemingly endless minor problems and frustrations. Panels were closed by self-­turning screws; you touched the head with a thumb and it would unscrew itself if it was already in place, or screw itself in if it was not. The power, however, came from the ship’s reserve battery power . . . and that had gone with the power surge that had burned out the server connections. The screw heads were designed to use old-­fashioned screwdrivers, but there were none of those relics on either bridge.

  Vonnegut, however, spotted the centimeter-­wide strip of metal trim on Gray’s command seat, and a few minutes’ worth of cursing and hurt fingers got it peeled off. The strip was flat enough that the corner of one end fit inside the screw head slot; it was awkward, but they were able to back the screw out. A few more minutes, and the panel was off.

  That gave them access to the door battery, which Macy, a computer/electronics tech, began wiring into the netlink server. She snapped home a final connection, the server purred to life, and Gray felt the inner click, saw the cascade of data, and knew they were back on-­line.

  It was, he reflected, decidedly old tech . . . ancient tech, in fact. For culture with nanotechnology and gavitics it was very nearly on a par with chipped flints and the fire bow. He was fiercely proud, however, of the way his bridge teams had pulled together, improvising, adapting, and finagling to make it work.

  “Damage control!” he thought, opening the channel. “This is Admiral Gray. What’s our status?”

  “Not good, Admiral,” came the reply. “But help is on the way!”

  “What help?”

  “Can you download visuals?”

  “That’s affirmative.”

  “Have a look, sir. . . .”

  A window opened in Gray’s mind, and he saw America from the outside, a scene relayed in through a battlespace drone, most likely. The carrier had lost perhaps two hundred meters off the ass end of her tail. From the look of it, a missile or high-­energy beam had sliced right through the ship’s spine and cut the aft power tap assemblies free. He could see the jettisoned fragment in the distance, tumbling end for end in a sparkling haze of hit plasma and free-­floating bits of molten metal from the hull. As he watched, what was left of the power assembly was crumpling in upon itself, folding its ungainly mass into a tighter and tighter space. The rogue singularities—­they would no longer be micro—­were crushing the spine fragment under unimaginable gravity.

  “That would have been us, Admiral,” the damage control officer told him. “But a fast-­thinking fighter jock used a Krait to blow the assembly clear.”

  “What about the Grdoch?” he asked. “Are we still under fire?”

  “We haven’t been under fire, sir, but I don’t know what’s been happening. We’ve . . . kind of had our hands full, y’know?”

  “Understood. What’s the bill?”

  “Main taps are gone, of course, and a lot of the secondaries got fried by the power surge. We have crews fighting fires in Sections Red-­One through Red-­Five, but it looks like we have them contained okay. I don’t know about casualties. There might have been three or four hundred ­people in the power tap assembly structure, though . . . and we have some serious radiation casualties here. You guys got knocked off the netlink channels, but the netlink is still functioning most other places. Commander Fletcher took command and is getting things organized.”

  “Excellent work,” Gray said. He could hear the urgency in the man’s voice, and decided it was better not to question him further. “Carry on.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  He’d forgotten to ask what the man had meant by help being on the way, but it didn’t matter. Through the drone’s eye, he could see easily enough. The Constitution, America’s sister ship—­immense and ponderous and proud—­was angling in alongside. Less than half a kilometer off America’s starboard side, now, she was turning slowly to put herself exactly parallel.

  And smaller ships—­repair transporters and SAR vessels and even a captain’s gig were spilling from her launch bays and closing with the America.

  “I think,” he told the officers and enlisted personnel with him, “we’re going to make it.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  13 March 2425

  Himmel-­Paradisio Camp

  Vulcan

  40 Eridani A System

  1615 hours, TFT

  Connor lay stretched out flat on the hard ground, clutching the alien weapon in both hands. A line of Grdoch were advancing across the meadow in an open formation, moving slowly but steadily toward the gap blown in the perimeter wall.

  “We’ve got to buy our ­people some time!” she told the others. The escaping prisoners had only just slipped through the gap.

  “Maybe we won’t have to,” Weirton replied. “What the hell is going on over there?”

  North, a series of blinding flashes walked along the horizon, the sound arriving long seconds later. “That’s the Twin Cities,” Delgado said. “They must be under attack!”

  “Our fleet,” Connor said. “We must have grabbed local space control! But it may take the good guys a while to get out here. Don’t count on a rescue!”

  “Maybe they don’t know that,” Weirton replied.

  The Grdoch appeared to be confused—­possibly fearful, certainly hesitant. Some were rolling away now, back toward the main gate. Others seemed inclined to keep advancing.

  Connor argued with herself for a moment. Should she order the armed members of the group to fire? Or might that make the Grdoch currently retreating turn around and attack? Grdoch psychology was still not well understood. Certainly, it was more complex than the simplistic choice between flight or fight suggested by the pre-­mission briefings.

  She decided to wait. Had the Grdoch even seen them yet? No one knew how good their eyesight was. They could see in every direction, yes, but what kind of resolution did they have? If they hadn’t seen the humans lying on the ground near the gap yet, it might be better to surprise them.

  And some of thei
r number were definitely fleeing.

  “Hold your fire,” she said, her voice low. “Let them go. The fewer there are . . .”

  “. . . the fewer we have to kill,” Weirton said, grinning. “You think like a Marine, Lieutenant.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “It was meant as one.”

  There were still twenty or twenty-­five of the scarlet horrors rolling toward them.

  “We’re not going to be able to kill them all,” Delgado said.

  “Kill enough of the bastards,” Connor said, “and maybe the rest will run.”

  She hated this: the waiting, out in the open, not moving. For a fighter pilot, speed was life, and lying on the ground watching alien horrors advance on your position just didn’t cut it.

  Connor didn’t think they were going to get out of this. Delgado was right. There was no way in hell they could drop all of the approaching Grdoch. She remembered how hard it had been to kill just three of the things . . . and that had been with an angry and suicidal mob with spears helping out. There were twelve of them there, holding the perimeter, and only three with high-­tech weapons. Not enough . . . not enough by far . . .

  The nearest Grdoch were a hundred meters away, now, and the group was picking up speed.

  “Okay, ­people,” Connor said. “Drop ’em!”

  She squeezed the firing bulb on her weapon. Two of the Grdoch staggered and writhed as a column of earth and smoke exploded in front of a third. One of them had missed. “Watch your targets, damn it! Don’t waste your shots!” She didn’t know how long the weapons would keep firing, and it was vital that they make every shot count.

  Rather than continue to hammer at one Grdoch, she shifted her aim back and forth. If enough of them were hurt, they might break and run quicker than if only a ­couple were actually killed.

  All of them were still coming. Damn, but they were hard to kill!

  Connor was firing and firing and firing, her hands and wrists painful . . . then numb . . . and still the three of them were firing into the advancing line. The Grdoch were firing as well, now. An Intrepid enlisted man nearby shrieked and jumped up, his skin blackening horribly, and the ground began exploding in and in front of the human perimeter.