Storm Assault (Star Force Series)

by B. V. Larson

  “Hold on, let me make sure I’m getting this. You’re saying they’ve displaced a mass equivalent to that of a moon?”

  “Exactly.”

  My mind was racing. There could not be a pleasant reason why the Blues were building something so big. I’d had no idea up until this moment that they were capable of such a technological feat.

  “Marvin,” I asked. “Why did you pick Phobos as your comparison?”

  “Firstly, because the sizes are similar. Secondly, because of the meaning of the term ‘Phobos’”

  “Enlighten me, what is the meaning?”

  “Phobos is related in meaning to the term ‘phobia’. Essentially, Phobos was the Greco-Roman god of fear, sir.”

  “The god of fear,” I echoed, nodding. It all made perfect sense to me now. “Bring up the data you’ve compiled onto my command table.”

  Marvin moved with alarming rapidity. His tentacles rasped and scraped on the control panels and manipulated the screens with software transmissions and physical movements simultaneously.

  A set of images began to collect on the table. They told a terrifying tale, worthy of a Greek god’s namesake.

  A grainy image appeared, looking like a boulder embedded on a much larger flat surface. This thing—whatever it was—was big. It was spherical and looked like the inverse of a crater—like a bubble of rock. There were indentations at either end of this otherwise smooth round object.

  “Some kind of dome, or something,” I said. “All the way down there, at the base of their thick atmosphere? The pressures there must be tremendous. I didn’t even know they could operate that deep down at the core of the planet. Do you think it’s a building?”

  “That has yet to be determined.”

  While he worked, other staffers gathered around. They seemed as surprised as I was at what he revealed. They tapped at his reports and began doing analysis and confirmation immediately. A murmur rose as one told another. Soon they were thronging the table, and I backed away. I’d seen enough.

  “Marvin? Why didn’t you report the existence of Phobos earlier?”

  “I attempted to do so on three separate occasions. You weren’t receptive, Colonel.”

  I wanted to hang my head in shame—but I didn’t do it. No one appreciated a weak display in their commander. Next, I thought about asking Marvin to delete any recordings of our interviews, but stopped myself. I deserved a little embarrassment. What I’d done, I’d done to myself. The unfortunate part was that everyone else in Star Force was going to have to live with the consequences.

  -4-

  I never made it to the big council meeting between all the major players in Star Force. I regretted this later because it would have been good to show them all that I was back and in charge of myself again. But it just wasn’t in cards.

  Immediately after Marvin told me about the strange structure forming on Eden-11, I ordered heavy probing of the planet’s thick atmosphere. Like most gas giants, it was a mix of hydrogen, methane and other compounds. We’d never directly seen a solid or liquid core, but we suspected there was one. Marvin’s readings indicated there was something down there, on the “surface”, which was growing unnaturally large. The conclusion that it was artificial seemed inescapable.

  We didn’t have to wait long before new data came in. Perhaps our probing triggered the events that transpired next, I really don’t know. But what I do know is that in the depths of their soupy world the massive contact began to stir.

  The moment I heard the contact had shifted position slightly, I called an all-hands and ordered the Gatre and two of her sister ships to fly toward Eden-11, the Blues’ homeworld. By the time everyone started obeying those orders, the thing on Eden-11 was moving faster, rising up slowly out of ten thousand miles of atmosphere.

  “Colonel?” Captain Sarin called as she pressed her way through the smart metal hatch and stepped on to the bridge. She crossed the deck to the command table. “Why are we making a maneuver in the middle of the night shift? I like to be informed when drills are being executed.”

  “This is no drill,” I told her without taking my eyes from the table.

  I zoomed in the perspective and isolated the object itself with spreading motions of my fingers.

  “Tell me Captain, what do you make of that?” I asked her.

  She examined it briefly. “It’s some kind of satellite. An asteroid or small moon. What’s it doing? Which planet is it orbiting?”

  “None of them. It is, in fact, lifting off from the surface of Eden-11.”

  I backed up the perspective so the entire sphere of the Blues’ homeworld was visible. The ship—if that’s what it was—took up a relatively tiny portion of the massive disk representing the gas giant. But the fact it was big enough to be distinguishable at all when the entirety of its huge mother planet was onscreen was alarming.

  “That can’t be happening,” she said.

  I looked at her, and her big brown eyes were as wide as I’ve ever seen them. Her smart cloth uniform was not quite all the way on yet, and I could see her left shoulder under her flowing hair. Usually, she kept her hair tied up and her arms covered professionally while on the command deck, but I didn’t think now was the time to bring up regs. She’d rushed right out of bed to the command deck when she’d heard I was giving her crew flight orders without advising her.

  I reached out and tapped the smart cloth over her shoulder, and her uniform sealed itself, covering her skin. I turned back to the images on the command table.

  “It’s a ship,” I said. “There’s no other explanation. I suspect that it’s lifting off in reaction to our probing and increased scrutiny.”

  “It’s too big to be a ship.”

  “We look big to ants. Size is all a matter of perspective. When under low atmospheric pressures, an individual Blue can be a mile or more across. In order to accommodate such a crew, they appear to have decided to go big.”

  “May I interject, Colonel?” asked Marvin. He came closer, his tentacles all aflutter. I hadn’t seen him this excited since he’d asked me permission to resurrect Sandra.

  “Go ahead, Marvin.”

  “This vessel might not have a living crew. The Nano ships indicated in the past the Blues didn’t want to leave their natural habitat.”

  I put up a finger. “But that was because they were under an agreement with the Macros to stay on their homeworld. They stayed there because they didn’t want to start a war. At this point, there are no Macros watching them.”

  “An important tidbit,” Marvin said, “but we don’t really know why they’ve never gone into space personally. After all, they built not one but two species of robot to explore the cosmos in their stead. That seems to be a powerful aversion to spaceflight.”

  “All right, I grant you all that. We don’t know they’re personally flying this moon-sized ship. What’s your point?”

  “What if they’ve developed a third species of inorganic being to man this vessel?”

  I stared at him, and Captain Sarin joined me, sharing my shocked reaction. I couldn’t argue with him—it was a possibility. Jasmine and I took a second to absorb this grim thought. Marvin seemed excited about it, but we were horrified. The Nanos and the Macros had both been invented by the Blues, and they’d caused no end of trouble for Earth and many other worlds.

  “Given their track record on the topic of creating artificially intelligent crews,” I said, “I seriously hope they didn’t take that course again. But I thank you for voicing this disturbing thought.”

  “No thanks are necessary. If, however, I should be proven right…I would like to be given the chance to interact with the new form of machine life. I’ve met numerous biotic species, but my own kind seem to be relatively rare.”

  Jasmine cast me a dark look that indicated she didn’t think it would be a good idea, but I didn’t respond to her expression. Instead, I nodded to Marvin. “You’ll be front and center when it comes to talking to that ship, regardless of
who’s flying it.”

  Marvin churned away happily to check more of his specialized instrumentation. New reports were being processed and transmitted to us by our sensory systems in orbit over Eden-11 every minute. Although we’d always had difficulty examining what was going on down in the depths of the gas giant, we’d set up a large number of orbital probes to scan anything that came near the surface.

  “What if he’s right, Colonel Riggs?” Jasmine asked me.

  I shrugged. “Then we’ll either talk our way out of a fight, or destroy this new monstrosity. We’ve defeated two machine races. A third won’t change the situation.”

  I said this loudly, and with absolute confidence. Internally, I was far less certain. I really hoped that ship was full of talkative cloud-people rather than some kind of new, nightmarish machine.

  Really, the more I thought about it, the more I should have expected the Blues to come up with something like this. After all, they’d built the Macros and the Nanos and had to have spaceships to get them into orbit. Those accomplishments demonstrated an amazing technological capability. No matter who was manning that ship, I had to assume the vessel could wield vast firepower.

  “How long until we reach Eden-11?” I asked the lieutenant manning the helm.

  “We’ll have three carriers there with a full complement within four hours, sir.”

  “Okay then, Marvin, could you stop fooling with that and help me translate?”

  Reluctantly, the robot left his instruments and came nearer.

  “The reports are fascinating Colonel Riggs,” he said. “There’s armament aboard the ship, that much is clear, but I don’t recognize the variety. Something big, with a nozzle—or maybe it’s a projector—at each of the moon’s poles.”

  “The moon’s poles? I thought you said it was a ship.”

  “The composition of the vehicle is largely silicon-based. Since it is made of rock and its big enough to have a significant gravitational pull of its own, I believe it qualifies as both a celestial body and a spacecraft.”

  I grunted. If we did have to tangle with this thing, the matter couldn’t end well. It outweighed my four carriers significantly.

  “How much displacement are we talking, here?” I asked.

  “Difficult to say. But I would hazard to guess the vessel outweighs our fleet by a thousand to one.”

  “All four of our carriers? A thousand to one?”

  “No sir, I mean all the ships in Star Force put together.”

  I stared at the moon-ship, which we’d decided to call Phobos. I typed the tag in on the flashing contact as it exited the atmosphere and rose up into space.

  “What kind of propulsion does it have?”

  “I can’t measure any appreciable energy expenditure,” Marvin said, his tentacles rasping on the command consoles. “There is a considerable amount of disruption in the upper cloud layers of Eden-11, however.”

  I could see that for myself. There was something of a divot in the top layer of the planet—like a depression that was slowly filling back in. I wasn’t up on my fluid mechanics, but I had to assume that the ship’s passage through the thick air had disturbed it.

  “Velocity?”

  “Approximately thirty-six thousand miles per hour now and accelerating steadily.”

  I frowned. Any normal type of propulsion system would require some kind of released energy. But this ship didn’t appear to have any engines, and there was no exhaust—nothing.

  “I don’t like this at all,” I said. “It’s bigger than our entire fleet and we don’t even know how it flies. We have to assume it can blow us from the sky if it wants to.”

  “In that case, maybe we should try diplomacy, Colonel?” Captain Sarin suggested.

  “That’s why the best translation robot in the known universe is right here. Ready a transmission to the Blues, Marvin.”

  “Ready.”

  “Do not transmit until I give you that specific order, do you have that Marvin?”

  “Understood. Standing by.”

  “Record this,” I said, then cleared my throat. “Blues, this is Colonel Kyle Riggs, the commander of Star Force. We’ve had peaceful contact with your species on several occasions, but we’ve also had encounters that were less pleasant. I would like to hear your explanation for the large ship rising up out of your atmosphere. We had an agreement that you would stay on your planet and not attempt to contact the machines.”

  I turned to Marvin. “Stop recording. Do you have that?”

  “Yes.”

  “When you transmit, can you make it appear it isn’t coming from this ship? I don’t want them to pinpoint our command vessel.”

  “Done.”

  “All right, send it.”

  Marvin did so, and we all waited. It was a long wait as we were about ten light minutes from Eden-11. The message had to travel there, the Blues had to generate a response, and then that message had to crawl back. I figured we’d hear something within a half-hour.

  In the meantime, Phobos rose up completely out of the atmosphere but didn’t park itself into orbit. Instead the big ship kept coming.

  I frowned, studying the data. “What’s the escape velocity of that gas giant?”

  “About five times as great as Earth, sir,” Marvin answered promptly.

  “But that ship isn’t moving that fast. It’s accelerating straight up and up, but not going fast enough.”

  “With enough power, you can blast away from any world at any rate of speed.”

  My concerns deepened. What was the vessel capable of? Was attacking it suicidal? I had no idea. I didn’t even know if it was going to attack us if we did nothing or if we could even hope to damage it if we struck first. I began to feel hot in my flight suit.

  “Sound battle stations,” I said, “and get everyone into a vac suit. If you have full battle gear—put it on. Oh, and get ready to scramble the fighters.”

  Sarin stared at me for a moment. “We can’t be in range yet, sir.”

  “Probably not. We’re just taking precautions.”

  “But if we send out the fighters, won’t that look like an aggressive move to them?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t give a damn. I want them out buzzing around for any contingency. Personally, I doubt they know much about carriers and fighters, anyway. They’re unlikely to see the move as aggressive.”

  She relayed the orders. Klaxons rang, and people scrambled over the decking getting their kits in order. The lights changed, dimming and gaining a reddish tint.

  “It’s been nearly half an hour,” I said a few minutes later. “Any response from the Blues yet? Even a blip?”

  “Nothing, Colonel.”

  “Do we even know if they received the message?”

  “The transmission was sent using their own language and utilized channels known to work in the past.”

  I stared at the command table, fuming. Damn these gas-bags. They always made me sweat. They often didn’t answer any signals until forced to. In the past, I’d bombed them to get an answer. I didn’t have that sort of option today. I didn’t want to appear as if I was threatening their homeworld.

  “They’ve changed everything with this move,” Jasmine said next to me. She’d been standing there quietly for quite a while.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They built a fleet. Or at least one monster ship. Now we have to give them respect. We can’t just order them around because today they have the power to strike at us.”

  I guessed she was right, but I didn’t like it. I glared at the screen. The situation could very easily get out of hand. I’d ordered my tactical teams to come up with a strike plan against Phobos, but they weren’t having much luck.

  When dealing with alien ships in the past, we’d targeted either their engines or their weaponry. With this vessel, we were having trouble even identifying a target. There were protrusions at the poles as well as other, smaller structures here and there on the surface, but I had no i
dea if these represented vital systems we could knock out.

  I finally voiced my thoughts and frustrations. “Hell, for all we know this is a colony ship. Or a freighter full of merchandise to trade.”

  “Do you really think that’s a possibility, Colonel?” Marvin asked.

  “No,” I admitted. “But we just don’t know. Marvin, we’re going to send a second message. This one will be more diplomatic.”

  “Ready.”

  “Same deal as before, don’t transmit until I give you the command, and make it look like it came from someplace else.”

  “Still ready.”

  I glanced at him sidelong. Sometimes I wondered if he was a smart-ass or a straight-man. I supposed it was a little of both.

  “Blues, friends, comrades,” I began. Several people perked up and looked at me in surprise. I did my best to avoid eye contact with them. I didn’t want them to distract me from my speech. “In the name of friendship, I ask you to respond. We’re willing to discuss new terms. We wish to change the nature of our relationship with your people and come to a new understanding between our two peoples.”

  I glanced at Marvin. “Did you get that?”

  “Ready to transmit.”

  “Do it.”

  “Message sent.”

  The next half hour was worse than the first one. They’d ignored my first message entirely, and we were getting closer by the second. How much range did they have? Was this a battle or a misunderstanding?

  “We could fire missiles, Colonel,” Sarin said.

  “I know that. But that is a very clear attack. Words of peace followed by a flock of missiles? I know where that will end. With one side or the other destroyed.”

  “Yes sir, but they aren’t talking, and we’re reaching what I’ve calculated to be their maximum possible range.”

  I frowned and went over her figures. I scoffed at the numbers. “That can’t be. Millions of miles? What kind of laser is effective and focused at that range? To the best of my knowledge, these people are blind and might not even understand optics.”

  “I doubt there is any region of basic science they have not mastered,” she argued. “A laser would not have to be focused precisely if it was powerful enough. The beam could be as big as this entire vessel and still vaporize us if it was fired with sufficient power.”