Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  “No, sir. It’s right behind us, about a thousand AU away.”

  Donovan’s brow furrowed. “That’s in the Oort cloud.”

  “Yes, sir, it’s…sir, we’re detecting a large vertical structure. Size and profile matches…” He trailed off.

  “What is it, DeStren?” said Donovan.

  “Sir…I think it’s the Watchtower. The s’Dar Watchtower has entered the system.”

  Kalder nodded approvingly. “And so it begins.”

  WITHOUT THINKING, OPERATING on equal parts fear, reflex, and improvisation, Moira flung herself away from the Trix’s slashing blade. It ripped through her stomach’s flesh as she tumbled over the railing, falling, smacking her head against one gantry, slamming her ribs onto another, which sent her fishtailing through the air, until she landed in a boneless heap on the scaffolding used to mount and dismount weapons from the wyrms.

  When she landed, all the wind left her lungs, and she passed out for two, maybe three seconds. She came awake, watching the world spin as she touched her head. Her fingertips came away with blood. She looked up at a loinclothed vorta, who had been cleaning the scaffolding, and stared down at her vexingly.

  “Help,” she said. The word came out muddled, but she was sure the vorta got the hint. He got the hint so much that he fled.

  Vorta didn’t like getting involved. They cleaned, they took care of the ship, but they did not get involved with the problems of others.

  “Help me!” she shouted as she staggered to her feet. But no one could hear her…because there was a roar. A loud roar, coming from everywhere. It took her a moment to realize that it was the combined roar of all the Nova ships, starscreamers, and skyrakes revving up their engines.

  Engines…

  The thought connected with something in her brain. Ship…I have a ship. In her addled mind, it was an epiphany. I have to get out of here. She had to keep telling herself that so that she didn’t forget. So that she didn’t fall down and give up. Now. Right now. I have to get out of here. She didn’t look behind her as she ran down the scaffold’s stairs. She knew that if she looked behind, she would see the Trix somewhere.

  Besides a few vorta and bots scuttling about, and the auxiliary craft getting ready to deploy, the deck was empty. If Moira didn’t get herself out of here, she would die here. No one was coming to help.

  She bumped into a bot that was working to pull away the coolant hoses from a Nova, tripped, fell to her knees, stood back up, and kept running. Distantly, she was aware of a cold-hot feeling on her stomach. She looked down at the dangling flesh, and the pools of blood falling down her lap, down her leg. A dark red trail was being left behind her.

  She shoved aside a maintenance bot that was plugging itself into the wall to recharge, and felt along the wall of a dark corridor, looking for the right way to the bay that held her Series Seven.

  Behind her, she heard the thump-thump-thump of the security bot’s footfalls.

  TEN MINUTES HAD passed since they had sent their message to the UCP’s Chief Presider. Kalder was about to send them another message, reminding them that time was short, when finally they received a response.

  “Lord Ishimoto,” the translater program spoke for the Chief Presider, “we have come to a decision, and we will be escorting the nukes into space as you have instructed. However, many of our ships will be keeping some for themselves, should we need them—”

  Desh looked at Kalder. “Their ships won’t have the tactical abilities ours have to deploy the nukes efficiently, especially against a Brood worldship.”

  Kalder waved him off. “It’s something. It gets the ball rolling. If it makes them feel better to withhold a few for themselves like a blanket they can pull over their heads to hold the monsters at bay, let them do it.”

  “More likely there are elements in their government that don’t trust us,” Donovan put in.

  “You’re not wrong about that. But like I said, it gets the ball rolling. And that ball will keep rolling once that worldship eclipses their sun. Send a reply of message received, and let them know we will be sending a couple of ships to scoop the leadership up.”

  Donovan did as he was told, and when he was finished, he looked at Kalder and said, “You don’t act surprised that the s’Dar Watchtower has somehow jumped into the system with us. For all you know, it could be part of the Brood’s design, all part of a trap.”

  Kalder shook his head, and tapped a few keys on his holotab. “It’s not their trap.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “Because it’s mine,” Kalder said. Adding, “Only, I did not anticipate a worldship of such size…”

  “What are you talking about?” Donovan demanded. “What trap have you set?”

  “Make the jump to Deirdra, Captain.”

  “Are you a fool? That’s exactly what they’re expecting us to do! This was a trap laid for us, perhaps a million years ago! God knows how they can see the future, but they knew we’d be here, and they planted that broodling in the Oort cloud for us! It’s giving away all our tactical information, all our positions. We cannot win this!”

  “Move in-system, Captain.”

  Kalder could see the two sides wrestling inside of Donovan. The duty side, and the sane side. Duty often compelled rational men to conduct themselves irrationally, and here was that moment of truth. In the end, Donovan did what Kalder had predicted he would. He took his seat, tapped a few keys on the tac display, and said, “All stations ready for jump.”

  INSIDE HIS SHUTTLE, Lyokh heard the alarms go up. They were prepping the A-drives for some kind of evasive maneuver if necessary. Something was going on, all right. His HUD was alive with new tactical data every second, updates from strategists and deck officers.

  All around him, a hundred pieces of armor clattered next to each other, soldiers hanging on to overhead handholds, warhulks standing like gargoyles waiting to come to life, Ravagers as silent as tombs, Thrallyin coiling and uncoiling in anticipation. No one was talking. This was it, the last breath, the moment before everything changed for them again. They had enjoyed one another’s camaraderie, but now much of that would come to an end.

  They heard the final warning chime, then felt the lurch of the A-drives and the inertial dampeners engaging simultaneously. Felt the thrum of the Faulkner field generator activating.

  Lyokh brought up Ishimoto’s belly cam feed on his HUD, and watched as the stars returned to normal and the planet hove into view.

  Deirdra came racing up at them. There it was, a green and blue planet, with vast stretches of brown along its largest northern continent, and even patches of dark gray. Heinous storm clouds ravaged the planet currently, with pulses of silent lightning flashing within. Deirdra’s lone moon was a dichotomy of harsh black and swirling yellow, pocked by enormous craters, and with a volcano currently erupting into space, its ejecta cloud reaching beyond its thin atmosphere and mushrooming outward.

  “When you find something worth living for, you find something worth dying for,” said a soldier standing beside him. It was Ziir, smiling over him.

  “Sorry?” Lyokh said.

  “It’s just something my father used to say. He said there would come a moment when you finally found the thing worth living for, and it would be the same thing you’ll die for. And I found it.”

  “Just now?”

  Ziir nodded. “Just now.”

  “Care to share it?”

  “It’s you,” Ziir said. “And this cohort. And this Crusade. And Man. It was all worth living for, doyen. And that makes it worth dying for.” He clapped Lyokh on the shoulder, and smiled a most eager smile. “The wall.”

  Lyokh nodded. “The wall.”

  “TWO MORE BROODLINGS coming in from the Oort cloud!” shouted a man from the sensor room. “About half the size of the one that was dead, but each one is swarming with drone fighters.”

  Donovan turned to Kalder. “Now, Senator. You must see it now.”

  “See what, Captain?�
�� said Kalder, looking down at the green, blue, and brown planet.

  “The futility of it. We are doomed. You have to see that. If we extract only civilian leadership and leave quickly, we may avoid—”

  “Just give it a minute, Captain.”

  “Give what a minute? We don’t have time for any—”

  “Conn, sensor room! The s’Dar Watchtower is advancing, moving in-system! Heading directy towards us! Speed is sublight, but picking up quick!” There was a few seconds’ hesitation. “And looks like we’ve got those nukes coming up to us, a few hundred UCP missiles hitting low-orbit vectors.”

  Desh stepped over to the captain’s seat, and Donovan watched, incredulous, as he began responding as though he were Ishimoto’s captain. “Send what drones we can spare to scoop them up,” he said. “Have Miss Persephone, Tao of Piety, and No Forgiveness store them for now.” He looked over at Donovan. “You’ll want your Chief Political Officer up here quickly, so that you two can activate Pacifier together. I believe his name is Mosier?”

  Donovan started to say something, but Kalder gave him a look, and Donovan moved to obey.

  Suddenly, the man in the sensor room shouted, “Conn, we’ve got—”

  Before he could finish, the worldship materialized in front of them. A 2,000-mile-long behemoth, like something extracted from a nightmare and made solid. Silvery in places, blackened in others, like charred metal, with runnels of red energy that pulsed like veins of magma, it looked almost like an elongated moon. The cephaloi majors extended outward, groping silently and slowly at the darkness. The tips of those slithery fingers flashed red and orange as they skirted Deirdra’s atmosphere.

  It straddled the planet’s terminator line, the back half emerging slowly from darkness like a predator from its hiding spot. Its cephaloi minors undulated as if in a breeze.

  Donovan shouted across CIC, putting Kalder on the spot this time, for all to see. “Senator! We cannot stand against this! There can be no more waiting, we must turn back before—”

  “Right on time,” Kalder said, pointing at the main viewscreen as the s’Dar Watchtower, almost twice as big as when they left it, arrived in a shower of lights.

  The thing was now a forty-mile-tall, diamond-shaped structure with many branches and wings, and each of those had branches and wings and platforms. It parked itself a mile away from Task Force One, and gave out a series of brilliant flashes. Those flashes expanded beyond all ships, connecting, interweaving, and forming a wide bubble around all of Task Force One.

  “You see?” Kalder said to Desh. “Just as I told you.”

  “What…the hell…is that?” Donovan breathed.

  “Deploy all Novas and fighters now,” Desh commanded, exuding both a calm and an intensity that, to Kalder, made him seem like a benign cloud that was considering transforming into a full-blown storm. “Truman Horowitz maneuver, swarms up front.” He keyed another channel. “Comms One, conn. Send a message to the other task forces, advising them of our situation. Tell them to stand by for the moment. Use both local QEC and tightbeam, in case one of them fails.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” said the comms officer, who didn’t seem to have noticed the change in captains.

  BY SOME MIRACLE, Moira stumbled into a med bot on its way on some errand to the medical bay. She grabbed it by its arm, and said, “Help.” It was the one word that all med bots were programmed to acknowledge forthwith. The speaker took precedence, all other things were forgotten. It reached out to her with spindly arms, steadying her, and said, “We must get you to med bay.”

  “No,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. Down the ill-lit corridor behind her, maybe twenty steps away, she could see the Trix’s single glowing eye. “Not safe here…my ship…this way.”

  The bot followed after Moira as she found a new burst of energy. Still bleeding profusely, she followed the signs on the walls to the cargo hold, to the bay where civilian shuttles were allowed to dock. For the Crusade, Kalder had requested a team of archaeologists, paleontologists, geologists, dendro- and radiochronologists, biologists, and paleoecologists. Moira hadn’t met any of them yet, but their crafts were parked alongside hers, and she stumbled past them, leaning against their hulls and leaving bloody smears as she made it over to her Series Seven. She punched in her code on the keypad, hands shaking, knowing she was about to go into shock soon. The ramp opened, and she rushed inside, the med bot quick at her heels.

  Moira slipped and fell as soon as she entered, but managed to smack the button to close the ramp. Less than a second later, she heard the TRX banging against the hull.

  Barely made it.

  Now she had another problem.

  “You’ve lost a lot of blood,” the med bot said, giving voice to it. “The blood banks are in the med bay, on Deck Two—”

  “Got you covered,” she said, reaching into her bloody pocket to pull out her holotab. With fingers growing numb, she searched for the private link to the intercom in her room. She activated it, and said, “Pritchard, come to Mama.” From the tab’s speaker, she heard the Vac Hound give out a bark as he nosed the release switch on his cage. “Deck Two. Med bay. Blood packet retrieval. Say four packets, just to be sure. Go.” A bark came in answer, and she could hear him leaping at the door, using his nose to hit the unlock switch, and stepping out.

  No one knew how Vac Hounds did it. They had been specially bred for space travel, though, and old sailors had used them to deliver messages through winding corridors, back when ship communications on large starships had been questionable, or likely to be on the fritz after a punishing battle. Vac Hounds memorized corridors better than most humans could, without even having to be taught. Some believed that a combination of gene-splicing and cellular augmentation on canines had taken place a thousand years ago on some world or other, and had resulted in the superb space travel companion.

  Moira looked at the med bot. “Type O-negative. Call the med bay, tell them to be ready for a pickup. Tell them…tell them a Vac Hound is coming for it…”

  “Am I to understand that that was a dog?” the bot said. “Will a dog be picking it up? Because, if so, med bay staff will not just hand over—”

  “Then have one of your bot buddies do it, goddamn it! And have them put it all in a box with a strap so he can carry it in his teeth.”

  “Ma’am, this is most unusual. While I do have many tools in my chest cavity kit, it would be better if we could—”

  “I don’t have time for this,” she said, struggling to her feet. The bot helped her, even as he advised her to rest. “I have to cue up the engines. We’re getting the fuck out of here.”

  “Ma’am, where are you going?”

  “I gotta be ready to go when Pritch gets here. We’re leaving Ishimoto.”

  “Ma’am, it is incumbent upon me to remind you that there is a war about to be waged outside.”

  “Somehow, I think I’ll be safer out there than in here,” she said, listening to the clanging of the TRX, searching for a way inside.

  : Deployment

  They all felt the drop as the Novas deployed. Seconds later, they joined almost a hundred other Novas, all deploying from the ten ships of Task Force One. Miss Persephone’s bloated belly released the most compristeel beasts into orbit above Deirdra. Sikorskiy, Ramlock, and Shatterstar were at the lead, though, their own drop ships fanning out with a complement of starscreamer squadrons.

  Lyokh watched on his HUD, as they all probably were, with a mixture of awe and trepidation, as the Brood worldship unleashed hell on the s’Dar Watchtower, which shimmered like a rotating chandelier of prisms. Chains of red and blue-green particle beams lashed against the Watchtower, but appeared to halt just short of it. Some got through, smashing into the Watchtower’s hull, but the energy seemed to be absorbed across its bulk.

  There were still nuclear missiles being sent into space by the UCP, and some of them were already being directed at the worldship, whose sole focus at the moment was the Watchtower.

&n
bsp; It’s not even looking at us, Lyokh thought, amazed at how close they were getting to the immense ship without even a single bullet, laser, or particle beam being turned on them. All it cares about is the Watchtower.

  Lyokh watched six or seven massive detonations along the worldship’s hull, the flashing light of the atom being split and causing a chain reaction. A hole was ripped into the side of worldship. Not as large as one might hope, and it was discouraging to see half a dozen nukes have so little effect, but at least it was something.

  The closer they got, the more certain Lyokh became that now, after all that nuking, the worldship would at last turn its attention to them, and they would be annihilated. But that didn’t happen. Closer and closer they got, shaking off the gravitic effects, the Nova’s hull rattling.

  Then, a voice spoke into his ear. Kalder’s voice. It was urgent, almost…frightened?

  “Knights of Sol, listen to me now! Captain Lyokh, hear this! Something incredible is about to happen…”

  KALDER HAD SEEN the readings from the sensor room, heard a scream from someone in engineering. Desh started talking about some type of invisible energy wave that was buffeting them. Lord Ishimoto began to shake like it was in an earthquake. Then, the sensor room hollered that they were detecting a wave flux, something that was distressingly similar to a black hole, as well as Hawking radiation. It was all emanating from the worldship.

  It’s happening again, Kalder thought, recalling the event that had had happened to him ages ago. It had been at the forefront of his mind ever since he saw the size of the worldship. No one had ever seen one its size before. No one alive, that is. No one but him.

  Kalder recalled it clearly, but he had hoped it wouldn’t come to this. His heart sank now, in a way he hadn’t felt since before he had become a Zeroist.

  Everything else has fallen into place until now—the Watchtower, the Crusade, my appointment to Visquain, everything but this.

  While everyone else was shouting and scrambling about, marveling at the Watchtower’s ability to draw such fire from the worldship and take it, or else panicking about the new energy signatures, Kalder moved quickly to the captain’s seat, and tapped a few keys to open a channel between him and the Knights of Sol.