Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  What a coincidence, Moira thought. Almost as if it was planned that way.

  Kalder continued, “As fleet commander, my first order is to declare Taka-Renault sacred ground, brothers who need our protection. Myself and the Visquain will conduct the Crusade Fleet in this war. We cannot evacuate all the Takans, so we will fight. We will defend them.”

  “You want us to fight the Brood?” asked Captain Donovan. “In a standing fight, not like on Kennit when the only mission was get in, get the Queen of Mothers, and get out. You want us to stand and fight to the last man. I just want to be clear.”

  The room fell silent. Everyone felt Donovan’s incredulity, especially Moira, who, as a Navy pilot, had never seen much action, and as a stellarpath had only ever seen the Brood from a distance, always watching her scanners and giving the behemoth ships light-years of berth.

  Then, so as to leave no question of his intent, Kalder said, “We will prosecute the enemy until there is not a single one of them left, or until our last ship is slagged.”

  Donovan sighed. “They have…strange technology. Every time they’ve been encountered, some new type of tech is used against whoever they’re fighting. The Isoshi are said to be able to vanish into bulk space, the Midway, using quantum tunneling. The reports from Darvishtapotyx seem to support that the Brood can travel to the Midway, too, that they and the Isoshi fight battles in between dimensions. With that level of tech…” He trailed off, at a loss to describe how woefully outclassed they were.

  Captain Fee nodded. “He’s right. It was madness to go into Kennit in the first place, it’s a wonder anyone survived at all.”

  “Fuck them,” Trepp put in. “Let’s fight them.” The captain of Miss Persephone was a taciturn old woman who liked to hit things with her ship, Moira had come to learn. During the Battle of Phanes, she had apparently harassed the Ascendancy ships by flying relentlessly and suicidally towards them.

  Desh pointed at Trepp, and smiled. “I like the way this broad thinks.”

  “Then let’s kill some things,” Trepp said. “It’s been a while since I did anything stupid, and I’m starting to get the itch.”

  “I will personally lead Task Force Mahl in whichever way you see fit,” said Zane, speaking for the first time, her voice augmented by the Face of Mahl.

  They all looked at the High Priestess. Moira realized it was actually the first time she’d heard the woman speak since Kalder’s livid rebuke.

  “It’s settled, then,” Kalder said, looking at all the captains. “Confer with your command coteries, and ready your crews. I and the rest of the Visquain will confer on strategy. The rest of you are dismissed.”

  LYOKH COULD BARELY envisage a moment when he would willfully disobey an order. He had always done what he was told, taken orders from whomever was in charge, accepted promotions when his betters insisted, and swallowed his doubts about any tactics or strategies. But here was a moment that tested him. Kalder, a senator with only some distant experience in war, was now commanding a fleet of naval officers, soldiers, Tamers, pilots, wyrms, ’screamers and ’rakes, and he was directing them at a foe that was unbeatable. Absolutely unbeatable.

  As they sat in the War Room, hashing it all out, Lyokh found himself casting more than a few glances in Moira’s direction. The stellarpath seemed to be willfully ignoring him. The two of them rarely ever spoke privately. In their last conference she had refrained from divulging her suspicions about the Crusade before—suspicions he now believed she had included in her latest message.

  She’s as reticent as I am.

  Kalder, Desh, and Donovan were all hovering over the main tactical display, looking at the position of the planets. Moira was chiming in here and there with reminders about other, smaller cosmic bodies in Taka-Renault that they were neglecting. Lyokh gave little input, his main job was to understand deployments, and tell the rest of them what was and was not feasible with the fighting force they had available.

  “I think we’ll keep it similar to how you worked it in Phanes,” Kalder told Donovan. “With some changes, of course, since the system has far more planets. I liked what you did with the three separate task forces taking on three different major tasks, then divvying up smaller objectives like the moons and such within each task force, and trying to set up a barrier around Widden. Very clever.”

  “It was General Quoden’s call, ultimately,” Donovan said. “I only followed orders and suggested slight changes.”

  “Still, it was executed to perfection, so I don’t see why not try it again.”

  “We’ll be spread more thinly here,” Desh said, gesturing at the largest gulf between planets, which was a thin, almost nonexistent, asteroid belt called Tsu-tsu. “A lot of dead space, but looks like there are two sectors with a god-awful amount of rocks to hide behind. That could benefit us or them, depending.”

  Donovan sighed. “That’s what’s got me concerned. We’re still having glitches with QEC comms. Right now, it has only affected our long-distance communications, probably an attempt by the Ascendancy to cut us off from our leadership. We can still communicate instantaneously ship-to-ship, but if the problem gets much worse, and if it gets worse while we’re trying to evacuate Deirdra and evade the Brood…” He let their imaginations fill in the rest.

  If the QEC comms failed, it would be a total communications meltdown, a blackout, with twenty-eight ships scattered all over the solar system, unable to coordinate, unable to inform the others of where they were going if they retreated, leaving no chance of a rendezvous.

  “We’ll find a way, Captain Donovan,” Kalder said. “Captain Lyokh, what are your thoughts on insertion points?”

  Lyokh waved his hand desultorily at Deirdra, and the planet swelled, then unfolded like a page, a coordinate map. Diogenes automatically created a longitude-lattitude system for it, and a latticework of lines encircled the planet. “If you’re going to try and evacuate civilian leadership, the capitals that Ortimeyer mapped out ought to work just fine, especially if the UCP is obliging. The others…we can’t really help them, since they’re paranoid enough to shoot us as we enter atmo, and they still have nukes, so that would just be a wasted attempt.”

  “Agreed. And what about boarding parties?”

  Lyokh looked at him. “Boarding parties?”

  “Yes, for the broodlings.”

  It took a few seconds for him to realize what it was the senator was saying. “You’re planning on sending my people inside a Brood ship?”

  “If it becomes necessary, yes,” said Kalder. “We must plan for every eventuality. It may be that we wound one of the ships, enough to insert a small tactical team to go in and sabotage, perhaps even take control of the ship. I’ll need you to come up with your best team for such an operation.”

  “Broodlings are often several miles long,” he said. “We’ve never been inside one, we don’t know what’s in there, we wouldn’t know what to dismantle or destroy.”

  “Energy signatures.”

  “What?”

  “Follow the major energy signatures. That will undoubtedly be their drive core, or whatever engine they use for propulsion. Destroy it. If possible, take the ship a prize, but only if it seems feasible at the time. As Donovan said, the Brood have a means to do battle inside the quantum slipstream, and if possible, I would very much like to reverse engineer such technology for humanity’s sake.”

  Lyokh glanced at Desh, who stared flatly back. Donovan seemed to notice some discomfort in the room, but made no mention. Lyokh looked over at Moira, and, as was her custom, she looked away quickly.

  “You expect me to commandeer a broodling vessel?” Lyokh said.

  “I don’t expect you to, no,” Kalder replied. “Hope for? Yes.”

  “Then, if there’s nothing further, Senator, I’ll go rally the Knights of Sol for their final suicide mission.”

  The room went silent again as he turned to leave.

  Kalder said, “Excellent. Speak with Dolstoy before you go.”
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  Lyokh paused at the door. “Dolstoy?”

  “Yes, she’ll have a speech prepared for you.”

  “Excuse me? You already have a speech planned for this occasion?”

  “I’ve asked her to have speeches ready for many occasions,” said Kalder. “She’s very good at playing to audience.”

  Unintentionally, Lyokh’s voice dropped an octave. “Audience?”

  “Yes, it’ll be broadcast to the rest of the fleet, and a recording will eventually be sent back home.”

  “Do I get a say in this?”

  “You don’t,” Kalder said.

  Lyokh looked over at Moira again, hoping to get her backup with what he said next. To Kalder, he said, “You sent a woman named Besandra to look into this sector of space. The whole of Trevor’s Cluster. Particularly Taka-Renault.”

  Kalder just looked at him.

  “You knew all this already, didn’t you? You knew about the UCP, the wars, the Decay that took place there, everything. You probably even knew about the broodling.”

  Kalder said nothing.

  “What is it you’re trying to achieve in all this, Senator?”

  Everyone looked at the old man.

  Kalder gestured towards the door. “Your Knights await you, Sir Captain.”

  AS HE WATCHED Lyokh leave, Kalder sensed he was coming near to the end of the captain’s patience.

  I can hardly blame him. In his position, I would probably feel the same.

  It could very well present a serious problem. So far, Kalder had managed to wrangle himself a fleet, with captains and even members of the Brotherhood of Contrition and the Phanes government, and had worked out a way to elect his own Visquain, effectively making him a kind of roving warlord with a powerful fleet. What he had created, with all these ships and disparate souls, was a new ecosystem, a thin film of life—lethal, but thin—pushing through the stars. There wasn’t one like it anywhere else in the galaxy, except where pirates could be found, perhaps.

  And any ecosystem can be quickly thrown out of balance if the caretakers aren’t responsible, if they don’t communicate effectively.

  Thinking on that, he looked over at Moira, who was decidedly focused on something on the table.

  He pushed the problem aside for another time, and gestured to Donovan. “Let’s hear it.”

  Captain Donovan tapped a few keys on the tactical display’s console, and a voice filled the room. “Ante pachu presidente, we have mucho aggresanti de vuror peace process, that is what we would seekti.”

  “That’s their language?” Desh laughed.

  “It’s a language of theirs,” Donovan said. “One of about three hundred in Taka-Renault.”

  “Sounds like a translation bot having a breakdown.”

  “Diogenes did well enough to translate it all, and Ortimeyer was able to speak to them.”

  Kalder nodded. “And the state of the planet’s surface? I would like to see those images.”

  Donovan tapped other keys, and up came a number of images. They were from different planets and moons, most of them showing a yellow sky with bold white clouds. There were lots of towns and cities overrun by vegetation, buildings collapsed, vines covering everything. A few flying machines could be seen, but most of the Takans appeared to be using ground-based vehicles, all of them on wheels.

  “Ramlock’s probes took these,” Donovan said. “Most of what you see is the surface of Deirdra, with a few from the other Takan planets and moons.”

  A slideshow revealed the faces of the Takans. Human, certainly, but five thousand years of separation had adapted them to other gravities and climes. Some of their faces were pocked with sores. Possibly radiation sickness, or just the way their skin looked now. They generally wore variations of simple robes, tunics, and shifts, with some ornate pallas and veils here and there. Interestingly, the men seemed to wear open-air leg covers, like large kilts, while the women tended to wear baggy pants.

  “The fashion varies from continent to continent, as you would expect,” Donovan continued. “But most of the shots they took from ground level were in the UCP’s sector. You can see the fear on people’s face when they looked into each probe’s lens.”

  Indeed, their faces varied from surprise to alarm, while all around them the world crumbled.

  “The Decay,” Desh said, speaking the word in the ominous tones that many modern-day scholoars used. “It always seeps in, doesn’t it?”

  The scene was familiar to anyone who had seen a recently abandoned world, or a world ravaged by globe-spanning wars. Decay. Places left behind, abandoned in the vain attempt to avoid exposure to radiation and nuclear fallout.

  Decay was relentless. Even around roofs that were waterproofed with the latest polymers and formaldehyde, water slipped in around the screws, bolts, and nails, bearing spores that turned into mold. That mold compromised trusses, which then, finally, failed their lifelong mission of holding everything up, from roofs to walls. The roofs collapsed. Sagging walls caused windows to crack, inviting more corruption.

  In places where it froze—which was most places in the universe—the pipes burst. Water spilled onto the floor. With more mold came small filaments of hyphae that released enzymes that broke down lignin and cellulose, making it into fungi food. The fungi spread. Decay increased. Small animals and insects found their way inside, carving holes and nests. The factory dyes that made everything so colorful faded, the works of Man became a dull gray and brown. Plasticizers that kept vinyl solid degenerated, leaving it brittle, cracked, broken.

  Bacteria feasted on the vegetable matter of the wood, leaving only minerals behind. The gypsum of sheetrock dissolved in the water that leaked in from all sides. The chloride in plastic plumbing pipes transformed to hydrochloric acid, dissolving itself.

  Insulation was eventually exposed. Any vegetative debris on a terraformed world built up. Leaves, vines and branches eventually ignited from lightning, and without fire-preventive systems, whole cities burned until the fires were spent.

  Bridges weren’t painted, so rust settled in. The expansion joints, which allowed bridges to flex, became a weakness without regular maintenance. Ice, rust, and debris got inside those joints during winter. Collapse happened in a couple hundred years, no more.

  Wildlife began to take over.

  In the images Kalder was seeing of the terraformed worlds, there were familiar species of vegetation that had survived from Earth, and some had probably traveled by accident as seeds in the cargo holds of the first ships to occupy the Taka-Renault System. Not unlike how vegetation had crossed oceans on the wooden hulls of ancient ships, from China to North America. The images were highlighted with details, the names of trees growing wild in every building. There were Chinese royal paulownias, American chestnuts, Persian ironwoods, Lebanese cedars, hemlocks, and one or two jagged huk’basa trees that had somehow made it from Faedyan worlds. All of it was blanketed by networks of poison ivy and Virginia creeper.

  A few desultory buildings stared out at them, crumbling sadly, what few skyscrapers remained had trees growing in their busted windows, and curtains of vines dangling from every rooftop. Some vast stretches were filled with nothing but dust, vehicles abandoned and rusted, with newer, primitive cars being driven by a veiled Takan.

  Moira said, “Do we have any indication of who started the last war, and who won it?”

  Kalder looked over at her. His own little leak, who might just rust his plans, bringing Decay to all his works. He had shared words and secrets with her, and she had proven his assessment right. She leaked it all. But that was expected, even necessary. For how else could he control all of them if they thought they knew him so well? He could not allow them to become too familiar with him, he could not let them become complacent. Kalder knew he had a sickness in him that often required checking.

  The Buddha man once told him, “Every good leader requires good people around him to check him, to remind him of his weaknesses. Good friends must be your harshest cr
itics. Learn to cultivate these people, do not begrudge them for testing you, and listen to their counsel even as you outwardly show stoicism.”

  But Kalder had not always agreed with the Buddha man. Like he’d told Lyokh, a lot had changed about Holace Kalder in his long life.

  “It’s debatable who started the war,” Donovan said, answering Moira’s question. “But it’s clear the United Congress of Pelgotham won it, along with a coalition force.”

  “What did it concern?” asked Kalder.

  “A mix of things. Territory rights over a section of the innermost asteroid belt, shortage of platinum, all of it lightly seasoned with religious strife over a thousand-year period.”

  “But it is the UCP that is the most powerful of the governments?”

  Donovan looked at him. “As far as we know.”

  “Then we need to be thinking about a more appropriate introduction. I’ll confer with Julian and Captain Desh here, and we’ll work out a plan of contact for when we get there.”

  “You’re going to talk to them?” Moira said. Something in her voice was challenging. It was the most openly contentious she had been yet.

  “Is there a problem, Miss Holdengard?” said Kalder.

  “Well, you’d be acting alone, for one. You have no way of contacting the Senate, or having the support of any other fleets. You’re going into a war without backup, and making contact with a lost colony without the necessary team of diplomats to assist you.”

  “We have an obligation to help our lost brothers and sisters, Miss Holdengard. Time is of the essence, and if we don’t act swiftly, everything could be lost.”

  “Let’s be honest,” she said, “we know they’re going to die. All of them. And by throwing ourselves at the Brood, we doom ourselves.” She shook her head, and stabbed her index finger on the table to make her point. “I’m a civilian here. As are a few others. We’re not warriors. The Orphesians and the vorta aren’t even enlisted military, yet all of us are being sent into a war we didn’t sign up for—”