by Chad Huskins
“Knights of Sol, listen to me now! Captain Lyokh, hear this! Something incredible is about to happen…” He searched for the words to define it. He had tried to understand it himself, when it had first happened to him. “You are all about to enter a field of warped space. I cannot tell you how I know this, but trust me when I say the warp field is strong. It will distort spacetime by a wide margin.”
“This is Captain Lyokh speaking,” came the Knight’s tense voice. “What are you talking about?”
“You are about to pass through an invisible bubble of warped spacetime,” Kalder repeated. “Once there, time will seem the same for you, but it will pass differently for us outside of it.”
“What does—”
“Each minute for you will mean a day for us out here, perhaps more. My guess is the Brood developed the weapon so that any enemy that boards them suffers communication failure with the starships that brought them. That’s why they don’t seem concerned with you right now, they will fight you once you’re on board, and you will fight at a slower rate of time, while we outside—”
“What are you talking about?” Lyokh repeated, more vehemently and angrily.
“If you fight for days inside,” Kalder said, tensely, but more slowly, enunciating each word, “it will be years for us out here.”
There was a pause. A short one, yet tense. “How do you know this?” asked Lyokh.
“How do you think? I suffered it myself. I don’t have a secret supply stock of regens, Captain, and I’m not immortal. I’ve been on such a ship before, marooned for a second time.”
Lyokh went silent. Everyone else in CIC just stared at him.
“When it happens, Captain, it’ll happen quick. You’ll look back at us and see battle happening at an accelerated rate, it will appear strange to your eyes, it will look like a vid put in fast-forward. For us, you will appear as a vid put in slow-motion. But remember what I said! You have to find the main energy source to the worldship, and destroy it! I may be able to send something that can help you, but it will take time. Do you understand everything I’ve said, Captain?”
Lyokh didn’t respond.
“Captain?”
“Senator,” said Desh, pointing at the forward view.
Kalder looked up at the viewscreen, and saw twenty Novas and dozens of ’screamers and ’rakes approaching the worldship. They were doing so at a snail’s pace, perhaps one-twentieth their previous speed.
“It’s already happened,” Kalder said. “They’re cut off now. On their own. And so are we.”
It took him a moment to reel his mind back in, and reassume control of his wits. When he did, he used his holotab to dial up Julian, whose face appeared at once. “Julian, where is Trix?”
The apprentice hesitated a moment. “He’s…taking care of the thing you needed taken care of, sir.”
“Find him! Both of you get to the Voice of Reason, and get the Tablet. I have a mission for him.”
FEELING FAINT, MOIRA sat at her console, bleeding, watching the holopanes that showed the feeds from her ship’s external cams. The Trix was stalking around her ship, looking for a way inside, pulling at this and tearing at that. Once, it climbed up onto one of her wings, and began tearing at one of the exhaust vanes. Doubtless, the bot was looking for a way to sabotage her ship so that she could not safely depart.
When she saw Pritchard arrive in the cargo bay carrying a box in his teeth, Moira spoke on a private channel, transmitting to the comm implant inside the dog’s ear. “Pritch, the waste chute.”
The Vac Hound didn’t hesitate, she watched through the forward viewport as he changed directions, heading aft. She opened the waste chute, which could be vacuum-sealed for chucking urine and feces into space. The Trix caught sight of the dog, and Moira’s heart froze as she watched the bot leap down and chase after him. It almost got Pritch, almost snagged his tail, but as soon as he climbed inside the chute, Moira slammed the button to close it. The bot pounded furiously against the hull.
“Here comes help,” said the med bot standing right behind her. It was true, some medics had apparently gotten suspicious of the dog’s delivery, and, knowing how smart Vac Hounds were, had followed him to the danger.
Moira felt cold and numb, and barely got the words out, “Go get…Pritch. Bring him…bring him here…”
While the med bot went to retrieve the dog and the O-negative blood, Moira continued cycling up the ship. Her piloting imtech allowed her to interface quickly with her ship and open a channel with space-traffic command. “Lord Ishimoto space-traffic command, this is Series Seven shuttle A-R-C-one-niner-niner-alpha-theta-six-seven-four-two-eight-seven, requesting immediate departure. I have an emergency. One of my fuel cells has ruptured, very dangerous, could blow…could blow…” Her head was spinning, blood had pooled in her seat. “…at any second…”
“Series Seven, A-R-C, what seems to be the—?”
At that moment, the Trix leapt onto her forward viewport, and began punching at the window.
“Just open the goddamn cargo doors! This is Moira Holdengard, one of the Visquain, ordering you to open right fucking now!”
“I cannot assign you a docking claw—”
“I don’t need one, just vent me the fuck into space or we’re all dead!”
A second later, it was done, the bay door behind her opened. Her engines had already been cued up, and as she switched the autopilot on and commanded it to get her the fuck out of there, she turned, stood, wobbled on her feet, and fell flat on her face. Distantly, she was aware of Pritchard licking her face.
“KALDER, ARE YOU there? Kalder? Captain Donovan? Come in! Anybody on Ishimoto listening? Come in!”
Lyokh cast around at his fellow soldiers, their eyes visible only through their visors. They were all looking at him quietly, even as the Nova shook and jumped. On his HUD, Lyokh looked at the Nova’s external cam feed, and saw that they were almost at the hole that the UCP’s nukes had opened.
“Doyen,” Artemis said in his ear, speaking from somewhere at the back of the shuttle. “Have you looked behind us?”
“No. Why?”
“Take a look.”
Lyokh switched views on his HUD, going from the shuttle’s forward cam views that were looking at their point of ingress on the worldship, to the battle happening behind them. What he saw defied everything in his experience, and his mind fought to deny it. He saw the planet Deirdra beneath them, spinning quickly—far too quickly. And out from the planet, moving fast as light, was Task Force One. The ships were racing here and there, adjusting their positions. One or two ships from Task Force Two suddenly appeared, and started dancing around the space between the fleet and the Novas.
Lyokh opened a channel with the shuttle pilot. “Pilot, what’s going on with our cameras?”
“Nothing, doyen,” a woman’s voice said. “All show clear.”
“Then why am I looking at vids all sped up?” Lyokh still didn’t want to believe the last words he’d heard Kalder say before breaking off.
“I…I don’t know, doyen…but what you’re looking at is what the cams are really seeing.”
Lyokh looked at the lasers and particle beams lancing out from the worldship, still battering the s’Dar Watchtower, which seemed to still be growing in size, and much faster than it had been when Lyokh had viewed it before.
Each minute will mean a day. That’s what Kalder said. It’s a means to separate landing forces from the starships that sent them out, break up communication, deal with each in their own time, rather than simultaneously.
It made Lyokh wonder what power the Brood had learned to tap into, how Kalder how known about it, and what other god-like manifestations were they going to encounter once inside the ship.
“Passing inside now!” the pilot hollered. “Hold tight, sensors are picking up a flat deck with arti-grav just inside. It’s near a large energy signature, maybe a piece of the reactor core. I think that’ll be our LZ, Sir Captain.”
“H
oy up, Knights!” Lyokh called, the confusion of the moment leading to his anger, and then to his utter conviction. The deathlust was upon him. He felt it. They all could. “Forward! Always forward!”
“UNTIL THERE IS NO MORE FORWARD!” they cried as one.
“Twenty seconds to landing!” the pilot hollered. “This is it! Get ready for a fast dispersal!”
They entered a giant tomb-world, with a ceiling a mile above their head, metallic decks that stretched for leagues, and walls that pulsed with dark energies. The cylindrical ship they entered was made like a colossal curved city, with buildings, factories, storage units, and generators climbing alongside walls that were far, far in the distance, passing into a foggy horizon, illuminated only by irregular discharges of lightning. Gravity was registering as .7 g. A light smog filled the air, one that also appeared to be alive with occasional bursts of pink lightning.
They were on but a single platform, just one of hundreds or even thousands, most of them in the dim distance, only trackable by the Nova’s infrared, radar, sonar, and neutron-imaging. The name worldship was no euphemism, the whole damn thing was indeed a world unto itself, bottled inside an immense hull. A few Isoshi had been inside them before, and described it, but that had been long ago, and that information was basically rumor among Primacy Intelligence. Words utterly failed to capture its grandeur.
One by one, the Novas landed on the decks, their ramps lowered, and their captains led them out. Their armored footsteps were the thunder of war. As soon as the soldiers were out, the warhulks came trudging behind them. Then came the Ravagers, half trundling, half crawling. Behind them were the Mantises, skittering across the ground and walls and already disappearing in search of higher vantage points to protect the troops. The Tamers screamed as their wyrms came leaping out of the Novas. Thirty of them, all led by the veteran Thrallyin. Even Rabastiik followed behind.
Once the Novas had emptied their load, they took off again and pushed ahead, sweeping the area with sensors.
Lyokh looked behind them, at the mile-wide hole that the nukes had made, tearing through miles’ worth of redundant hull layers. Coming in through that hole like an infection were two hundred starscreamers and about a hundred skyrakes, roaring overhead and heading deep into the megalopolis, which was two-thirds the width of North America. ’Screamers and ’rakes started their scanning, relaying their findings back to Lyokh and his people.
The first thing Lyokh noticed was that there was sound. They could hear each other, and the roaring of engines. A check of his HUD showed there was atmosphere, though one a little too high in nitrogen for continued human existence. Some mechanism was keeping that atmosphere inside, instead of being lost to the vacuum like it should.
The whole place defied Lyokh’s brain.
Structures of indeterminate purpose heaved toweringly all around them, with vines of techno-organic material climbing up the sides, pulsing in regular intervals with bursts of blue and purple light. The ground was made of some hard alloy, but even it heaved occasionally, like the chest of some slumbering colossus. A thin mist crept slowly across the floor, about six inches off the ground, while a much swifter mist swirled overhead. The rumble of distant machinery quaked the ground, and occasional gouts of lightning spewed from the ground and touched the dome overhead.
There was a flash of light from above. He looked up. High above them, through the transparent dome, the ships of the Crusade were still zipping about, and one of them even exploded in fast-forward. Lyokh couldn’t tell which one. Didn’t care. Not at the moment. In that moment, all that mattered was the mission.
“Ziir!” Lyokh called over the open channel. “All SIGINT operatives, start zeroing in on that energy source.”
“There’s lots of them, doyen,” Ziir said. “From far away, the Nova’s sensors were probably picking them up all of them as one big unit, but there are at least a dozen separate ones here, all very large, very powerful, scattered across an area as big as Kentucky.”
“Lock it in, Ziir. We need a clear destination and fast.”
“Yes, sir,” Ziir said.
“For Eulekk!” Lyokh cried, using the name that had, for no other reason than the dead soldier’s obscurity, had become a rallying cry.
“FOR EULEKK!” they screamed.
“For Heeten!”
“FOR HEETEN!”
“The wall!”
“THE WALL!”
: The Campaign of Lost Days
It had been eight hours since they watched the Novas finally make their landing. Eight hours of watching their slow, slow approach. Eight hours of sending out testing shots at the two new broodlings that had appeared beside the worldship, but well outside of its time-warp field. Eight hours of coordinating with the UCP, with a couple of other governments coming around to negotiations, now that they looked out their telescopes and saw the war happening in the space above them.
Kalder had watched in mounting dismay as the Novas had moved agonizingly slow. From this side of the time-warp field, they had looked like ants caught in molasses. The worldship continued to fire upon the Watchtower, its own energy beams moving quite fast through the time-warp field—since they moved at the speed of light—and once they were beyond the field, the beams pretty much smashed into the Watchtower instantaneously.
Most of Lord Ishimoto’s torpedoes had no effect on the hulls of the broodlings, and Sikorskiy and Shatterstar hadn’t had much luck, either. Pacifier shots had made a difference, though, smashing against the broodlings’ energy shields and causing some real damage along their hulls. However, the sensor room was reporting signs of self-healing hulls, interstitial spaces being filled in, kind of like the Rescue Foam of a human-made starship, only polymorphous and seriously load-bearing and reinforced.
To make matters worse, Voice of Reason had been obliterated, after the broodlings had all turned their full focus on it. Soon to be next was the Brotherhood ship Abandon the Ego, which was now the sole focus of the broodlings.
“They’re going one by one,” Desh said, nodding to himself as his hands danced across the tac display. “Just like they did to me before. They don’t bother swatting flies, their strategy is always to concentrate on one, let all the other Republic ships nip at their heels, score a few hits, while they focus all their power on one capital ship and take it out, then move on to the next one.”
They all stared as more chains of white-hot tracer fire lashed against the broodling that was attacking Ego. Ramlock fired her Pacifier, but then reported a malfunction. A coolant leak. Their Pacifier’s battery became overheated and shut off. Still, it did enough damage to tear off two of the broodling’s aft tentacles.
Tao of Piety and Shatterstar had formed a slow orbit around the three-mile-long adversary, and were launching torpedoes and firing railguns, only some of which made it through. Tiny drone fighters were being launched from the broodling, engaging with two wyrm flocks.
“Conn, Comms One.”
“Go ahead, Comms,” Desh answered, having assumed total command. There had been an incident between Desh and Donovan about six hours ago, an argument over battle formations, and in order to have clarity of leadership, Kalder had dismissed Donovan from the bridge. Donovan had returned an hour later with an officer carrying a sidearm, and two MPs, attempting to formally relieve both Desh and Kalder of command. Heated words had been exchanged, Kalder keeping his cool, reminding Donovan of his duty, coercing one of the MPs to stand down. Once that happened, Donovan’s own will began to falter. He left CIC cursing them both, but Executive Officer Vosen had remained, so Kalder counted that a good sign.
“Conn, I’ve got a message from Task Force Mahl. The High Priestess is coming in with all three of her ships, she says she’s been briefed on what’s happening within the time-warp field and she’s coming to assist the Knights of Sol.”
“Conn, sensor room,” said the man named DeStren. “I can confirm. I’ve got three Faulkner fields incoming, I believe she’s on her way.”
Kalder stepped forward. “Comms One, tell Governor Zane to remain patrolling where she is. Tell her we need her task force to keep sweeping the outer system for any surprises we might—”
“Too late,” said Helmsman Cortez, pointing at the viewscreen. “She’s already here.”
They all looked up to see Prophet, Malphos, and Zanus den Uta come streaking out of their FTL bubbles. They didn’t even pause, they made directly for the worldship, passing right by Ego as she was being bombarded, not offering a shred of help.
To Comms One, Desh said, “Send her a flash-message! Tell all captains in her task force about the time-warp field.”
“They already know, sir,” said Comms. “We’ve been keeping them apprised.”
“What is she doing?” Desh said, almost laughing. “Is the woman trying to get herself killed?”
“Her god demands defilement,” Kalder said. “If her own body is defiled by alien weaponry, or if her people’s bodies are defiled and tossed into the void, it matters not to her. But if she can have the chance of obtaining some alien power for herself, or achieving some glory that the thanes of her homeworld will see as heroism and fear her, then it is worth it.” He nodded. “She goes now to defile the enemy.”
LET ME SEE Mahl’s will be done. Thessa had assembled her honor guard, who defiled their bodies for her with blades, opening wounds and spilling their own blood on the bridge of the Prophet. While Myelic garbed her, two officers of the Vastill Privateer Marine Consortium gathered the spilled blood from the floor and smeared it across her white robes, while two others pierced bone blades through her exposed breasts.
The ritual complete, Thessa pulled on the Face of Mahl, and touched the robe at her side to ensure she had the Item of Power with her.
Prophet gave a little shiver, like a whore shaking off her shift in anticipation of her debasement. Captain Ta stepped up beside her, her own intricate scarification rippling across a brow furrowed in deep consternation. “High Priestess, we have passed through the time-warp field.”