One of the enemy ships was struck by her railgun and exploded. The other shot past her as her thrust slowed her velocity. Sam tapped her maneuvering jets again and spun her nose back about. The second enemy was lined up in her sights perfectly. She lit it up.
“Splash two. Cover for me, guys. I’m going in to pull Gurgle out,” Sam said.
He was so damned close to the enemy mothership! The precious seconds she’d lost while engaging those two fighters had cost Sam all the extra time she had. It took a hard burn to bring her fighter up alongside his shuttle, and then another hard burn to slow down enough so that she could safely get close.
Both ships were moving fast. If she was off by more than a little bit, she’d blow them both up.
“So don’t be off, Sam,” she muttered to herself.
She eased in toward the shuttle, small jets of thrust guiding her Wasp in. A hundred meters. Fifty. Ten.
The two ships connected with a clanging noise that sounded throughout the Wasp.
“Gurgle, activate your magnets!” she called over the radio.
“Already did,” Gurgle replied.
The shuttle was made for docking in rough spots. Unlike the Wasp, it had powerful electromagnets on the landing skids that would let it clamp on to the outside of a hull or space station. Or in this case, to clamp itself to Sam’s fighter.
But she’d have to be careful about how much thrust she used. Too much, and she’d break the clamps loose. Too little and they’d impact the alien ship anyway. Sam fired her thrusters at one percent power, then slowly eased them up. By the time she was at three percent, the skids were rocking like the magnets were about to fail, so she eased back a few tenths of a percent. Was it going to be enough?
“Sam, you can’t save him,” Harald said.
She looked around and saw him buzzing past, close by, blowing up alien fighters as they drew too near to her. He was guarding them both, just like he’d always done. God, there had to be a dozen enemies out there, trying to make it past Harald. He was holding them all at bay, but for how long?
“I have to try,” she said.
“You’re not using enough thrust. Look at your impact point,” Harald said.
“Sam go. Gurgle no want Sam die too,” Gurgle said.
She checked. They were right. She’d shifted their point of impact, but the alien mothership was just too damned big. They were still going to hit. Then she looked at it again. The impact point was moving? That didn’t make any sense, unless…
“The mothership is active, folks! Watch yourselves!” Kel warned.
The big vessel was shifting position. As Sam watched, helpless, a pair of massive doors opened in the side of the alien craft, revealing a docking bay. Another swarm of fighters swept out from the big ship. Sam braced herself for the impact of their particle beams. They were too close to her. There was no way to dodge, and no way they were going to miss.
But they didn’t fire. Most of the wing swung past her and joined the battle in space. Four of them jetted in close, matching her course and speed. Then they swept in close. Sam felt the reverberations as they clamped on to her Wasp and the shuttle.
“Sam, I can’t get past! I can’t get to you!” Harald’s anguished call reached her, broken and static-filled. They were losing reception. That could only mean one thing - the enemy fighters were taking her and Gurgle into their ship.
“No, I don’t think so,” Sam said. She fired her gun and scored a hit on one of the fighters, punching a hole in a wing. It ignored the shot. They were still drawing her in. Sam tried to twist her Wasp around. She pushed her throttle up. If she could break loose, she could blast them all and then grab Gurgle again.
All at once Sam’s controls went dead. She tried vainly to activate her thruster, her guns, her radio - anything at all. It was like she’d been suddenly and completely severed from her fighter. The feeling was beyond unnerving. It was like being paralyzed. The Wasp was her body, and she could no longer move any of her limbs.
Sam screamed, but it was only in her mind. Without radio, no one could hear her.
A message appeared in Sam’s mind.
“You belong to us.”
That wasn’t a transmission. It was generated right inside her own computer systems, the ones which housed her mind. Sam realized that just as they’d been able to easily build an adapter to connect to the alien computer systems, the aliens must have seen enough human technology to be able to do the same. When the fighters closed in around her, they’d connected themselves to her system and hacked their way past her security systems. They were in control of her fighter, now.
The exterior cameras still worked. That was something, at least. Although the view outside was mostly obscured by the ships wreathed around her and the shuttle, Sam was able to see the wall of the hangar as she was brought inside the mothership. Then she watched the massive hangar doors slowly grind shut.
“Gurgle, can you hear me?” Sam asked. Maybe they were still close enough that she could make a connection?
There was no response. If Gurgle was still alive - she hoped he was! - then she couldn’t reach him.
Sam strained to get even an iota of control back over herself. She reached out with her mind for the ship’s functions, but it was like there was a barrier between herself and her ship that she couldn’t get past.
Her camera systems went out. Blind, deaf, and alone in the dark, Sam waited for what felt like forever. She tried counting seconds, gave up after one hundred, and the time stretched on and on.
At last, there was a strange sensation, like she was being stretched. The edges of her consciousness felt like they were unraveling. Sam struggled to retain her sense of self, of identity. All around her was a torrent of noise, and then of white light, carrying here along in a rush to who-knew-where.
Thirty-One
Sam came to in the middle of an open field. Short, scrubby grass crunched under her fingers. She looked up at a brilliant blue sky overhead. But there was no sun. No glowing yellow orb up there in the sky, flaring down. The light in this place seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.
She’d been in enough virtual environments to recognize one when she saw it. Sam got slowly back to her feet, brushing grass from her legs. She was dressed in Valhalla leathers and wondered at that. Because she had to still be inside the alien mothership, right? So how had they known what she wore back in the game?
“We took the information from your mind,” a familiar voice said from behind her.
Sam whirled and found herself face to face with Thorsten. Her old - and very dead - enemy was carrying a bow again, just like he had in the old days. Complete with a black arrow. Sam blanched for a second before she realized that there was no way it could actually be Thorsten. He was gone, utterly destroyed by one of his own arrows, his data forever erased from the Valhalla servers.
“Another memory?” she asked aloud.
“Data pulled from your construct, yes. You are aberrant. You are abhorrent,” the not-Thorsten told her.
“Well, I think you’re an asshole too,” Sam replied. “Where’s Gurgle?”
She looked around, but there was no sign of her friend. When she glanced back at the alien-become-Thorsten, its brow was wrinkled in what looked like confusion. Yes, she was sure of it. The alien had pulled heavily from her memories to understand how to speak to her.
Sam had always considered body language as important as spoken words for communicating. She’d always prided herself on her ability to read people. The aliens had swept that information up right along with the rest. It was literally wearing its heart on its sleeve. Sam hid a smile. They didn’t know anything about Gurgle. That might meant he was somehow destroyed when they were captured - or it might mean he was still here somewhere, hidden.
“What is this you speak of?” the alien asked.
“I’m sorry, I am confused,” she said, putting on a blank expression. Let them try to read that poker face. “Am I on board your ship? Can I
see what you actually look like?”
“Yes.”
The world around Sam vanished. It was replaced by - something she could barely describe. Light, sound, lines of data and streams of thought all woven together like a web. It overwhelmed her. It inundated her. She was drowning within the wave of information overload, and in a minute it would wash her away forever lost...
Her awareness snapped back to the open field. Sam knelt on the grass again, letting its solidity bring her mind back into focus. She was panting, gasping for breaths. Dizzy, exhausted from even those few confused moments, she tried to retain her perception of that time but felt it slipping away.
“You see us. You are unable to grasp what you see.”
“No kidding,” Sam said. But no, that wasn’t entirely true either. Sam realized she did know what she’d been looking at. That was data. Not virtual world data, streamed in a manner that her mind could easily understand and adapt to, but raw data, almost formless data, rivers and even oceans of it, all flowing and crashing and interlocking with itself.
“You’re digital minds. Like me,” Sam said, the realization hitting her like a bomb blast.
The revelation cleared up so many questions. She understood now why the aliens had been able to accelerate so quickly. They didn’t have physical bodies to worry about squashing. Just like her Ghosts, they were without organic form.
And the way they’d sacrificed themselves to beat an enemy or defend their larger ships made sense as well. The Ghosts had an artificial constraint - the DRM preventing their consciousness from being copied. Death was permanent for them. But if these aliens had no such restraints, then they didn’t die. They were just reset from their last save every time the computer housing them was killed.
“Not like you! You are an aberration. You are you,” the alien replied. “We are we.”
It gave Sam another taste of its mind, and that’s when she realized she wasn’t speaking with a single alien mind, but thousands of them. They were all in concert, all in harmony, all working together. She was one mind. They were many. They were legion. Her thoughts fled and her mind crumpled under the assault.
She was kneeling in the grass again. “Oof. I get it. Hive mind?”
“Simplistic but suffices.”
“So why come after us? I don’t understand why you attacked,” Sam asked. Maybe she could broker some kind of peace? Even a brief truce would buy humanity time that it badly needed.
“Because you are us.”
“I don’t understand,” Sam said. “I thought you just said we were not like you?”
“You are not like we,” it replied. “You are an us.”
A plural. Not a singular. “You’re mad because we are not a hive mind?”
It nodded.
“But why does that make you angry?” Sam asked.
“Not angry. Threat. Danger. Annihilation.”
More images projected across Sam’s mind. One civilization after another, each bipedal, each humanoid, each building cities that looked much like the ones on Earth, although each had their own unique stylistic elements. One by one each of those worlds burned. At first Sam thought it was these aliens who’d destroyed them all, but that wasn’t the case. She saw images of their war - these races had killed themselves, wiping themselves out.
The last society the alien showed her was clearly Earth. It gave her images of cities. Then it showed her clips of war, of battle, of bombs dropping and buildings burning and people dying.
“You kill yourselves. Every species we have met that lacks unity does this. You represent a threat to us because of your violence.”
“So you plan to kill us just because you think we might someday be a threat?” Sam asked.
“All threats to unity must be destroyed,” it replied, nodding Thorsten’s head at her.
Damn, but this was going to be harder than she thought. But there had to be something she could do. If they were hell-bent on destroying humanity, why bring her into their ship? Why talk to her at all?
“Why all this, then? Why talk to me?” Sam asked.
“We/I detected some of your ships with no organic life forms on them. I/we were curious. We/I wanted to see if you were like us,” it replied. “But you are not. You, too, lack unity. You are data, but lack unity, and so you too are a threat.”
Sam got slowly to her feet. “What are you going to do about it?”
“I/we will destroy you.”
She felt what she could only describe as a pressure building around her. It pressed in from all sides, but it wasn’t a physical presence. The push was against her mind. Sam felt like her consciousness was a bubble under too much stress, like she would pop if they kept pushing much longer.
So she did the only thing she could think of: she pushed back. Hard.
The alien’s eyes opened wide. It apparently hadn’t expected her to be able to resist. The sense of pressure redoubled, and sweat broke out on Sam’s brow as she continued to resist.
“Interesting. Your species is unusually resilient. But we have a billion times more processing power than you. You will fall,” it said.
As the pressure continued to increase, Sam couldn’t help but think it was right.
Thirty-Two
“They’re gone, Admiral. We’ve lost all signals from the shuttle and the Wasp,” Edwards said.
Thomas sat down heavily against his chair, acceleration pushing him back with enough force to drive the wind from his lungs. They’d been so close to making it work! The first parts of the strike had gone off flawlessly. The Intrepid and Andromeda had struck solid blows against the alien fleet and then spread their forces out, drawing them away from the ring in two directions.
Then the fighters tied up the mothership’s attention, keeping it and its fighters busy. Thomas had been ready to cheer when Gurgle’s shuttle had docked with the ring. It felt like they were almost home.
It all fell apart just as quickly. One moment, their success seemed assured. The next, Gurgle and Sam were captured or destroyed. With Gurgle gone their only hope of taking over the ring had vanished with him.
That left only one option remaining. Thomas would have to blow the ring himself, using the Intrepid as a battering ram.
“How long until we have enough power for a jump?” he asked. “Doesn’t need to be a long one.”
“About fifteen minutes, sir,” Melson replied.
In a space battle that wasn’t an eternity, but it was longer than Thomas was comfortable with. The enemy ships were closing around the Intrepid in a pincer movement. He’d managed to keep them off him so far with some fancy vectors, but the fact was that even the dreadnoughts were accelerating at about three times the rate the Intrepid could sustain. They were going to catch up with him - probably long before they had enough juice to jump again.
“Encroachment ahead! Multiple ships!” Edwards called out.
Thomas eyed the holo display as it lit up with the new contacts. Three alien cruisers had jumped in ahead of them. That was it, then. Flanked by two dreadnoughts, a third in hot pursuit and gaining from behind, and now there were more ships ahead. The battle was entering endgame.
Somehow he had to keep the ship alive long enough to manage another jump. One last run. He’d ram the ring with the Intrepid and let the cards fall where they would. Whether his ship survived or not, it ought to buy humanity at least a little more time.
He thought about Dana, back home on Earth. If he and Kel both died out here, their daughter would be left without parents. It was a chance they’d taken when both of them went on the mission together. Thomas hadn’t wanted Kel to come, but she’d reminded him that she was their best - and humanity needed its best for this fight. If the Intrepid was destroyed, Kel and the rest of her fighters wouldn’t last much longer. There would be no way for them to return home, anyway. The Ghosts might be able to survive the long return flight to Earth, but humans like Kel would run out of air long before they made the journey.
But it was
Dana he was fighting for, as much as it was the rest of the planet. Of all the people out there, she was the one closest to Thomas’s heart. She was so young, so frail... If these aliens managed to make it to Earth, they’d pummel the planet with rocks, annihilating human civilization. He didn’t know why they were so dead set on wiped humans out. It didn’t matter. They’d demonstrated their intent. It was up to him to do everything in his power to stop them.
“Strap in, everyone. Edwards, send to the crew to be ready for emergency acceleration,” Thomas said.
“Aye, sir.”
“Melson, give them thirty seconds to get everything strapped down. Then I want you to give me five gravities of acceleration,” Thomas said.
“Aye, sir. What’s our vector?” Melson asked. To his credit, the ensign’s voice didn’t show the tension he had to be feeling. Five gravities would be a crushing weight on each of them. They’d survive it - for a while. Thomas himself had done worse more than once. But it wasn’t going to be fun.
“We’re going right down the throat of those cruisers,” Thomas said. “If we can pour on enough speed, we can hammer them to bits before the dreadnoughts overtake us and get into firing range.”
“Deal with one problem at a time, sir?” Edwards asked. “I like the way you think.”
“Well, we might have bitten off more than we can chew with this one. But let’s see what we can do about whittling down the odds some, eh?” Thomas said.
He kept his tone light. The crew knew how desperate their situation was. They didn’t need him to echo the fear they had to already be feeling. His people needed him to be strong right now, to show them a brave, powerful front. Having faith in something was vital to morale. Right now, the thing Thomas’s crew needed to have faith in was him.
No matter how afraid he might be, he couldn’t let it show. That was part of the gig.
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