by J. N. Chaney
Leira stared at the simulation, still frozen on the main display. “It wouldn’t necessarily be a bad trade-off, though, losing those ships if it meant taking out our mechs.”
“Considering those ships wouldn’t likely be able to do it themselves,” Amy said. “So, the question is, would the Deepers have been willing to lose those ships in battle if it meant taking out the Archetype and at least two more of our other big mechs? I think they would.”
Leira nodded. “Especially since they don’t really seem to care about their losses.” She glanced at Dash. “I doubt they’re preserving any of their badly damaged ships as memorials to all the Deepers lost in battle to us.”
Dash raised his hands. “Okay, folks, we’re chasing our own tails here. Basically, we’re still facing the same question we were when this conversation started. Is it worth risking the mechs for this upgrade?”
“I have a possible solution.”
Dash blinked at the voice, precise and cultured. It was one he didn’t hear very often—the voice of Hathaway, the AI that operated Amy’s mech, the Talon.
He saw the others, including Amy, exchanging looks of mild surprise. “Go ahead, Hathaway, please.”
“Might this not be a good time to employ a dummy rather than people who merely act like such from time to time?”
Dash perked up but ignored the admittedly amusing jab. “What do you mean, a dummy?”
“I’m proposing that a mech be constructed, or an existing one adapted, as a test bed. Or, actually, at least two of them, in order to test the link effect. They could be stripped down to a single dark-lance each and equipped with self-destruct measures to be activated in case the Deeper machine code does manage to compromise them.”
Dash looked around. Everyone else was doing the same thing.
“Am I the only one who thinks that’s brilliant? And is now kicking myself because, duh, why didn’t I think of that?” Dash asked.
Leira glanced around. “No, I think that pretty much sums it up for all of us.”
“Good work, Hathaway,” Dash said.
“Of course it was.”
Dash winced and turned to Amy. “Is he always like that?”
Her face turned to stone, a far cry from her usual, bubbly self.
“All. The. Time.”
Dash had been hoping to get the link upgrade completed, tested, and ready for a trial by combat by the time the Deepers came through the gate into League space. Lori had cut loose two Perseids from one of her squadrons so they could be used as test beds. The Perseids were their smallest mechs, mainly intended for scouting, flank security, and other sorts of screening tasks. They were the weakest mechs, and thus, least capable of doing harm if they lost control of them to some insidious Deeper code. Plus they were easier to destroy.
But Dash got the bad news when he arrived in the Forge’s main fabrication bay, where the two Perseids stood, in the midst of their upgrades.
He put his hands on his hips and turned to Viktor, who’d assumed oversight of the project.
“I’m getting a definite vibe here that these things aren’t going to be ready in time to fly tomorrow.”
Viktor wiped his hands on his coveralls. It was, Dash knew, more a habit than any actual need to clean his hands. Unlike human tech, which still employed things like lubricants and hydraulic fluids for some systems, Unseen tech was universally clean and dry.
“Not unless you want to suspend the repairs to the fleet Custodian has lined up for the fabricators,” Viktor said.
“Custodian, what would the implications be if we did?”
“The heavy cruisers Glorious and Retributor would remain out of action, as would the light cruiser Marcus Aurelius and the destroyers—”
“Okay, I get it. Yeah, I don’t want to leave a bunch of warships sitting in parking slots here at the Forge, just so we can experiment with linking these two Perseids. Carry on doing what you’re doing, Custodian. Viktor, I guess you might as well put the Slipwing through her pre-flight, then get some sleep.”
“Sleep? Oh, yeah. I’ve heard about that. It involves closing your eyes and not working, right?”
Dash laughed, clapped Viktor on the shoulder, then headed back to the Command Center, where the final bits of the plan to fight the coming Deeper incursion were being finalized.
Dash watched intently as the chrono counted down. Periodically, he flicked his attention back to the tactical display, then to the threat board, then to the operational display, and finally back to the chrono.
Sometime in the next fifteen minutes, a gate should open right—there. Dash narrowed his eyes at the location marked by an icon in his field of view. Custodian and the AIs had calculated the planned location of the Deeper gate as closely as they could, but some uncertainty remained.
He grimaced. Some uncertainty. This could all be an elaborate ruse. The Deepers might yet be screwing with them, feeding them false intelligence through the Bishops. They’d tried to accommodate that. The program to expand and bolster the minefields around the Kingsport had been accelerated. They’d moved three of the Anchors there, along with the Forge, to provide heavy defensive fire support, while more weapons were feverishly installed on the burgeoning Kingsport itself. The fourth Anchor, Western, protected the Backwater Gate. And that’s where Wei-Ping was, in the Stalwart, with a task force of twenty ships. From there, she could quickly deploy back to the Kingsport, to Jackpot, or to their forward operating base near the Large Magellanic Cloud, wherever she was needed.
Dash glanced at the fleet assembled here. Thirty-seven capital ships, including the Victory and the newly repaired Sabertooth, commanded by Benzel aboard the Herald. Another forty-six escort class ships rounded out the Realm forces. But a combined task force of League, N’Teel, and Hriki ships, all upgraded with at least some Unseen tech, held the spinward flank of their battleline. Finally, they’d brought all five of the big mechs and two squadrons of Orions under Lori. And, as a final hedge against Deeper shenanigans, they’d brought one of the Radiant Points with them. If need be, they could deploy it and, within an hour or so, link it to one of their other gates and quickly move the fleet there.
It was a lot of combat power, probably one of the biggest fleets they’d assembled yet. But, as vital as it was, Dash didn’t just want to drive the Deepers back to protect the League and their other allies. He wanted to send the aliens a message—that their incursions would be squashed, quickly and decisively.
It was all great planning. Unfortunately, it contained one particular instance of some uncertainty, which was actually a huge uncertainty. Leira had summed it up perfectly back in the Forge’s Command Center during a detailed planning session.
“You know, I hate to be that guy, but the Deepers know we have their Bishops. What if they just call the whole thing off?”
Dash had just stared at her. It had occurred to him, too, but he had no real answer to it. Nothing that wasn’t all based on instinct and gut feeling anyway. But Ragsdale had just as succinctly summed up why that didn’t really matter.
“What if they don’t?”
So here they were.
Leira came on a private comm channel.
“Dash, Tybalt thinks the probability of the Deepers actually going through with this is less than fifty percent.”
“That means it’s more than zero that they will, right?”
“I guess. I just—I don’t know. These Deepers scare me, in a way the Golden didn’t. The Golden, as genocidally awful as they were, seemed to at least think much like we do. The Deepers, though.” A pause. “Who knows what they’re thinking? If they’re as old as Elois thinks they are, they might not even be possible for us to understand.”
“Leira—”
“I’m just saying, Dash, that maybe what we need to do is—”
“Leira!”
“What?”
Dash had his eyes on the tactical display. “There’s a gate opening.” He had to work at making sure he didn’t sound too smug.
9
“Okay, I guess the other possibility is that the Deepers are complete morons,” Leira said, watching as the gate formed. It resembled the Black Gate, a shimmering halo on the far violet end of the visible spectrum, spilling over into ultraviolet. “I mean, why would they actually go through with this, knowing that we know?”
“You bet somebody money the Deepers wouldn’t show up, didn’t you?” Dash asked.
“Of course not! How could you suspect such a thing?” She paused. “Oh, on a completely unrelated note, remind me when we get back to the Kingsport that I owe Ragsdale a hundred credits for, um, unspecified reasons.”
Dash watched the gate. Nothing had emerged yet. Leira might still be right. Custodian and the other AIs were still chewing on the Bishops’ encryption and crunching the numbers they uncovered as they did, bit by bit. Their findings suggested some chance that the Deepers wouldn’t be able to stop this gate from opening now, even if they wanted to. Their understanding of gate mechanics was still very much a work in progress. But it did mean this one could remain fallow.
Which was why Dash switched to his comm channel with the Herald. “Okay, Benzel, looks like the gate is as stable as it’s going to get. You can go ahead and send the recon probes through.”
“Don’t think that’s going to be necessary,” Benzel replied. Dash frowned a bit, but it smoothed away just as quickly.
Something was exiting the gate. Somethings. Many somethings, in fact.
“What the hell are those?” Leira asked.
Conover answered. “Kristin has them ID’d. They’re Deeper torps. But they’ve been upgraded, bigger motors, so they’re faster and have longer range.”
“There sure are a lot of them,” Amy said. “Hathaway’s keeping a count. That’s thirty. Forty. Fifty-one. Holy shit. Sixty-eight—”
“All mechs, follow me,” Dash snapped, accelerating the Archetype directly toward the gate. “And get your scattershots warmed up.”
The other four mechs immediately fell into a wedge formation, smoothly matching Dash’s sudden charge into the teeth of the torp attack. Lori swung her two squadrons of Orions in behind to back them up.
“Dash, why are we flying right into these damned Deeper torp things?” Leira asked.
“Because the Deepers are going to try to swamp us with these things. They need to tie us up in a big way so they can bring their fleet through.”
The mechs raced straight into the flood of torps pouring through the gate—more than a hundred now, with no signs of them slackening off.
Dash thought this had to be one of the most confusing battles he’d ever fought, not to mention one of the most demanding. To maintain a spherical field of fire for the scattershots, the Archetype had to whirl and spin, pouring streams of plasma bolts in literally every direction. All four of the other mechs did likewise. The result was a spectacular spray of scattershot fire radiating from five points, which themselves constantly shifted about as the mechs jinked and dodged. Torps detonated around them in an almost continuous ripple of dazzling flashes and crashes of static across the comm.
Dash triggered three dark-lances in raking fire, splitting torps with each impact. As he wheeled hard, then kicked the blur, more rounds went just over his left shoulder—Leira was firing—adding to the mayhem. Space was filled, once again, with the light of dying enemies, as well as mechs of all sizes absorbing stunning punishment to their shields. And armor.
And pilots.
An Orion driver wailed in pain over the open channel, only to be cut off with a sharp click.
“Injured pilot, report!” Dash barked.
“I’m okay, boss. Took some kind of splinter through the leg. Mine, not the—gotta fight. Be okay,” the woman said. It was Vonique, a quiet, intense young woman who’d come aboard after a battle the previous year. A natural pilot, she moved into the mech cradle as easily as walking.
“Good. Carry on,” Dash said, flicking his sword out with a backhand cut that left two torps in four pieces.
The battle formation—and the strenuous effort—was paying off. Only forty or so of the torps had managed to leak through to menace the rest of the fleet, and all but a handful of those fell to Lori’s Orions, or fire from the rest of the fleet.
But the torps just kept pouring through the gate unabated. A brief gap in the ordnance streaking toward him left Dash with a few seconds to catch his breath. He thanked the universal powers that be for the scattershots and the decision to deploy them in all of the mechs. Without them, they would have had to have relied on the big guns, the dark-lances and nova-cannons, and point-defenses to stop the torp barrage. He didn’t need to see a simulation to know that wouldn’t have worked. Far more torps would have made it through to menace the fleet, and that—
“Dash, a large mass is coming through the gate,” Sentinel said.
Dash flicked his attention toward the gate. Sure enough, something big, black, and bulbous was starting to extrude its way into view. Dash had a flash of memory—Eastern coming through the gate at the pivotal moment of the Second Battle of Backwater. Had the Deepers come up with something as potent?
But he dismissed the thought just as quickly. This gate was much too small to have transited something the size of an Anchor. No, this was the prow of a Deeper ship. A big one, too.
A very big one.
“Holy shit, look at the size of that thing,” Amy said, her voice tinged with awe.
The Deeper warship sliding through the gate had to mass at least fifty percent more than the Victory, the biggest ship in the Realm fleet. It seemed to be the source of at least some of the torps because it spat more of them as it slid into view. And it just kept coming, a seemingly endless hull whose bow and forward sections were encased in what had to be the thickest armor Dash had ever seen.
It struck him that this ship was specifically designed to attack through a gate.
The Deeper ship was almost comically long in relation to its beam, meaning it could pass through relatively small gates. And the colossal amount of armor protecting its prow was obviously intended to protect it long enough for it to bring its fearsome batteries of x-ray lasers, burst-cannons, and missiles and torp launchers into action. Fire began to pour from the vast Deeper ship as more and more of those batteries slipped clear of the gate and opened fire.
“I want one,” Dash said.
Sentinel’s reaction was immediate. “Do you intend to try to capture this Deeper ship? Given its size, and the fact that we still have a limited understanding of Deeper technology, I’d recommend against that—”
“No, I don’t want this one. I want to build one of our own. It’s exactly what we need.”
“Perhaps we should destroy this one first.”
“Yeah, that we should,” Dash muttered, accelerating the Archetype directly toward their enormous foe.
Dash had to admit a good design when he saw it. And this Deeper ship was a damned good design, although probably too big. It reached seventeen hundred meters by the time its drive section finally cleared the gate, making it more like a mobile fortress than a ship.
And it was tough.
Dash flung the Archetype at it and immediately attracted a storm of fire. He returned fire with the dark-lances and nova-cannon. Even those weapons, as powered-up as they were by the hexacore and other upgrades to the mechs, proved just able to penetrate the heavy shielding. And as for the forward third or so of the ship, forget it. The massive armor was too difficult to overcome. It wasn’t impervious, but smashing through it would take more time than Dash was willing to spend on it, especially since it could “heal” itself.
He concentrated, instead, on the aft portion of the massive ship, leading Conover and Amy in from one flank, while Leira and Jexin slashed in from the other. In the meantime, Benzel maneuvered the fleet to box in the gate as much as possible, while also pouring fire into the titanic Deeper ship. But now that it had cleared the gate, other ships were charging through—heavy cruisers,
a battleship, and a multitude of escort-class vessels. At the same time, the big Deeper ship began spewing out fighters, dozens of them, adding the weight of their firepower to the fray. Benzel responded by launching the Victory’s fighter wings, as well as two of the three escort carriers accompanying the fleet.
Even with the mechs’ prodigious efforts to take down as many of the torps as possible, the Deepers were managing to push more and more ships through the gate. The big Deeper ship had done its job, absorbing the massed firepower directed at it, in order to gain a foothold on this side of the gate.
The battle evolved into a swirling melee of fighters, torps, and missiles flashing among lumbering capital ships. Weapons pumped out bolts, beams, and blasts, ordnance detonated, ships staggered under impacts, spalling out clouds of debris. Some began to die.
Dash gritted his teeth, powering the Archetype through a tight turn. He locked on a fighter, fired the dark-lances, and destroyed it. Locked the nova-cannon on another and destroyed it. Shifted his fire to a Deeper heavy cruiser, using the dark-lances to saturate its shields, then the blast-cannon to blow it to pieces. Behind him, Amy and Conover snap rolled, dodged, and wove along behind him, finishing ships the Archetype had damaged. It underscored how valuable coordinated fire was and made him that much more determined to implement Sentinel’s plan—
He pulled another high-g turn, whipping past the stern of the big Deeper ship. He got a hard firing solution with all weapons but poured dark-lance fire into one of the massive exhaust ports. It was probably the strongest part of any ship, designed to withstand the ferocious incandescence and flood of radiation from an operating drive. But the dark-lances attacked the substance of the huge exhaust port at the quantum level, blowing open an enormous gash. Drive plasma immediately flared out of the gap, unbalancing the big ship’s thrust and causing it to start a ponderous, slewing yaw to port. But the titanic ship continued firing unabated, doling out punishment as fast as it took it. Dash saw a Realm heavy cruiser reel under the impact of sustained x-ray laser and burst-cannon fire. It swung out of the Realm’s battleline, apparently having lost its steerage way, and nearly collided with the Herald. A few seconds later, a light cruiser was struck by a barrage from the Deeper dreadnought and exploded. And a few seconds after that, a destroyer detonated with a searing flash of lost fusion containment.