by Nick Webb
Chapter Three
Britannia Sector
Britannia
Outskirts of Whitehaven
Nile Holdings Inc. Warehouse
Chris Keen had a hangover, but next-day shipping schedules waited for no man, half-drunk or otherwise. Groaning, he hauled the crate up onto the cart and pushed it along the aisle to the next stop in the vast storehouse. Britannia’s sun was a little hotter than Earth’s, and Keen felt it, especially amplified by the aluminum roof of the warehouse. He’d lived here for three years now, and he wondered when he’d get used to it. Would he? And worse, the AC was out. Piece of shit AC.
His radio buzzed. “Irish? You there?” His supervisor had called him Irish his very first day on the job based on his thick accent, and it had stuck.
He tapped it. “Yeah. What do you want, ya wanker?”
His supervisor grunted a laugh—their friendship thrived on locker-room insults. “Listen, dipshit, when you get done with that order, we’ve got a special package to put together for a customer.”
Did that really require calling him on the radio? “Got it, boss. I’ll be there in an hour or so, I’ve just gotta—”
The supervisor cut in. “No, Irish, I mean a customer wants a special order. A customer. Like, an actual person is here and wants some shit.”
An actual, in-person customer? “Huh. I thought we were a shipping warehouse. Wholesale. All electronic. Do we still take customers? Haven’t seen one of them in … forever.”
“Looks like it. I guess someone didn’t want their order electronically tracked, so they showed up in person. Whatever it is, they’ve got cash, and we love ourselves some cash, so get your ass back to the office.”
Cash. Keen did love cash. And in-person, paying customers, as rare as they were, tended to tip unless they were assholes. And they tipped because if they were there in person, it meant they wanted to be discreet. And customers wanting to stay under the radar tended to ingratiate themselves with the grunts doing the actual work, because it was always the grunts that knew what was actually going on, how to actually make things happen. And if the media or the UE investigators ever come knocking, you want the grunts on your side, staying all quiet-like. Ergo, tips. Big tips.
“Be right there, wanker. And if we make bank this time, drinks are on you at the nudie bar tonight.”
His supervisor grunted another laugh. “Irish, if this order pays as much as I think it will, you can buy your own nudie bar tonight.”
Chapter Four
Orbit over Mao Prime
ISS Independence
Bridge
Even with the new trans-quantum drive on the ISS Independence, it still took twenty minutes to t-jump across the hundred lightyears out to the Mao system. The journey afforded Proctor the chance to reminisce about the time, thirty years earlier, that the ISS Warrior had made a similar mad dash out to Mao Prime to stop an unfolding Swarm attack.
They had arrived too late.
The Swarm had so utterly devastated Mao Prime that there was hardly anything left. It stood as one of the most destructive incidents of the Second Swarm War. Two billion dead. Only a few million remained on the entire surface, scattered across the backcountry, hiding in the hills and mountains, and the habitats in the oceans.
And yet, in spite of the unthinkable destruction, Mao Prime was also the foremost example of the resilience of humanity. The Chinese Intersolar Democratic Republic—the governing body responsible for Mao Prime—had done a remarkable job rebuilding the cities and encouraging refugees from other devastated worlds to resettle there. A billion people now called it home. It was the shining, cosmopolitan jewel of the CIDR.
And a billion people were now under siege, according to the meta-space distress signal.
“Final t-jump into Mao Prime,” said Ensign Riisa.
Proctor nodded, and secured her seat restraint in preparation for battle. On the main viewscreen the blackness of interstellar space gave way to the blue, cloud-dappled orb of Mao Prime. The planet’s sun was dawning at the horizon.
And a fireworks show lit up the skies on the dark side of the planet’s terminator. Several dozen CIDR cruisers, assisted by a handful of IDF ships, were facing off against a horde of smaller, but deadly, Dolmasi gunships, each like a vicious arrowhead sprouting dozens of eruptions of green weapons fire.
“Tactical status?” she said, gripping her armrests.
Lieutenant Whitehorse scanned her console. “Reading thirty-one CIDR cruisers—that’s well over half the Chinese fleet. And IDF’s planetary defense fleet out of Cadiz has responded. Ten cruisers and frigates. Captain Pennock is commanding the IDF fleet. Fleet Admiral Sun himself is commanding the CIDR fleet.”
Proctor, nodded—that made sense. The CIDR had relocated its fleet headquarters to Mao Prime several years ago, she remembered. “And the Dolmasi?”
“Fifty-eight Dolmasi gunships. Each is smaller than any of ours or the CIDR’s, but they pack a punch.”
Proctor winced as she saw a CIDR heavy cruiser break apart, then convulse with massive explosions erupting from its core. Three Dolmasi ships pounded into the wreckage with green anti-matter beams. The same main offensive weaponry the Swarm had used. In fact, if she correctly remembered her Swarm history gleaned from limited contact with the Skiohra, that same green anti-matter beam was originally developed by the Dolmasi, only to be later appropriated by the Swarm as the Dolmasi fell under their influence.
“Open a channel to Admiral Sun. And patch Captain Pennock in—he should know what we’re planning.”
Lieutenant Qwerty drawled a four-syllabled “yes, ma’am,” before Ballsy called over from the XO’s station.
“And what exactly is our plan, Shelby?”
She shrugged. “At this point we’ve only got two options. First, get in contact with the Dolmasi Vishgane commanding that fleet, and talk him down. There’s got to be a reason they’re attacking, and if we can get at the root of the problem with him, then maybe we can stop a war before it even starts.”
Ballsy’s goatee contorted with a look of good luck with that. “And plan B?”
“The usual plan B. Beat the shit out of them.” Proctor eyed Qwerty, who gave her the thumbs up, indicating the channel was open.
Half of the main viewscreen filled up with the face of Fleet Admiral Sun, the leader of the CIDR’s military and space fleet. “Admiral Proctor, thank you for responding to our time of need,” he began, his accent thick. “But is this all you brought? I fear Dolmasi will overwhelm our defenses soon.”
“More is on the way, Admiral Sun. Admiral Oppenheimer has ordered our entire Third Fleet out of New Dublin to Mao Prime’s defense in addition to what’s already here from Cadiz, but it will be an hour or so before they arrive. I was hoping to find a way to get the Dolmasi to stand down first. If nothing else, that will give us some time before the Third Fleet shows up. Have you had any success communicating with the Dolmasi?”
“None. They refuse all hails. And I have not time to attempt further communication. I have already lost three ships, and several more are damaged beyond repair.” His voice took on a dangerous tone. “Thousands have died already, Proctor. Do not risk more. I forward tactical plans to you—please assist as you see fit.”
The half of the screen showing his face resumed displaying the live feed of the unfolding orbital battle. Proctor swore at the CIDR fleet admiral under her breath, then turned to Commander Mumford at the science station. She didn’t want to do what she was about to do. Every instinct inside her said it was wrong, but order were orders.
Damn you, Christian Oppenheimer.
“Are you ready?” she asked Mumford.
“As ready as we’ll ever be, Admiral. I haven’t had a chance to do live testing—not that I’d know how to do live testing without every being who’s attached to the Ligature aware of it.”
Proctor nodded. The Ligature—the meta-space mental link shared by every race, every individual who’d ever been controlled by t
he Swarm—was the only way they knew to catch the Dolmasi’s attention, without just killing them. Weeks earlier, a meta-space shunt attached to the nuclear device detonated over Sangre de Cristo had channeled an untold amount of energy into a meta-space spike, which, according to IDF Intel, had had an effect on the Dolmasi: ever since that point there had been unusual fleet movements within Dolmasi space. And Fleet Admiral Oppenheimer had ordered her to use it against them again, intentionally. She’d directed Commander Mumford, the tactical science chief on the Independence, to come up with a make-shift meta-space shunt that would let them reproduce the effect, albeit on a much attenuated scale. Perhaps they could catch their attention, or at least distract them long enough to gain a tactical advantage.
It was worth a shot, Oppenheimer had said. She’d protested. But he’d directly ordered her to do it, should there ever be an engagement with the Dolmasi.
That was after his orders to go off on a vain search for the Quiassi and Findiri in some ill-advised attempt to determine their threat status. They were the only two races missing out of the original “Concordat of Seven” of the Swarm, and in all her years in IDF Proctor had seen neither hide nor hair of them. She assumed the orders were meant to simply get her out of the way, and so she appropriately ignored them. “Fire me,” she’d said, daring Oppenheimer to get rid of her, just weeks after bringing her back.
But she couldn’t ignore two orders in a row.
“Let’s try it.”
Mumford nodded. “Power level?”
“As high as we can without burning anything out. Even at our highest power we’ll still be several orders of magnitude below the Sangre de Cristo incident, correct?”
“About a billion times lower, yes, Admiral. We’d need another nuclear weapon with a meta-space shunt attached to reproduce that level.”
She turned back to the screen. Her fingers tightened around her armrests, which she supposed were going to have permanent indents from her grip by the time her tenure aboard the Independence was over. On the screen, another CIDR cruiser convulsed with explosions as the Dolmasi fleet tore into it.
“Then let her rip.”
Chapter Five
Sector 52-1267a
Skiohra Generation Ship Magnanimity
Matriarch’s Command Center
Vice Imperator Polrum Krull detached the neural interface glove from her right hand, before ripping away the left as well. The rush of voices within her had reached a crescendo, a volume that even she, a grand matriarch of her people, was ill-equipped to handle.
Her children within her body were crying out. Not in unison, as they often would do when presented with an existential threat—which seemed to be happening far more often this century compared to her previous millennia of existence—but as a frantic, disjointed roar. Like white noise. Like static. Each individual voice, each person, each mind within her was most insistent, but combined with the tens of thousands of other equally-insistent voices the conglomerate effect was too much for her.
Something had happened.
“Motherkiller, what have you done?” she whispered to herself. To herself, and to her sixty-two thousand, five hundred and twelve children, each of them living the Interior Life within her body, and who could each hear her every word, her every thought. The mathematicians within her calculated odds of the Ligature failing entirely, the physicists modeled ways to shore it up with focused graviton emitters, the philosophers speculated what existence without the Ligature would even mean, and the lone theologian was convinced that the human god was real and fighting against them. But all of them, to a single person, cried out.
The meta-space pulse had come from the human world of Mao Prime, and she knew, based on her ship’s intelligence service tracking, that the Independence, Proctor’s new warship, had just gone there. And with the pulse had come another rush of madness, of momentary, disjointed, unmanageable and unnameable disunity that tore at the bonds within her. The bonds between her children—between her and them.
It was nothing like the terrible, catastrophic avalanche that had come from the human world of Sangre de Cristo a month ago. She marveled at the irony. A small contingent of her children within her had devoted themselves to studying human history and culture, and she found it almost humorous that a world named after the blood of their Christ had become the epicenter of what she was sure would turn into a galactic struggle. A galactic war. Her theologian child had told her that the original blood of humanity’s Christ had been intended to bring unity and peace. This time it brought confusion, division, and war. Plowshares into swords, her child kept repeating, over and over.
This pulse, from Mao Prime, was smaller, but its effect was the same. Disunity. Ripping the bonds between her and her children. As the guardians of the Ligature—not just guardians, but the creators of the link that bound all of them together, both Skiohra, Dolmasi, and every other creature that had been linked to the Swarm—her people were less affected by the trauma of the pulse.
The Dolmasi would not be so lucky. And, even now, through the Ligature, she felt their rage. Their terrible anger.
She felt their lust for revenge.
“Believe me, my children, it will not go unanswered,” she said out loud, and through the Ligature, directed the helmsman in the command center to set a new course.
Chapter Six
Orbit over Mao Prime
ISS Independence
Fighter Bay
“Zivic, you’re late.”
The fighter bay, still half construction zone and half disaster zone thanks to the suicide bomb detonated by that GPC loyalist deck hand, was a hive of activity, made even more hectic since now they had to maneuver around all the construction equipment.
Zivic bit his tongue and tried not to glare at his squad leader. “Was in the simulator. Got here as fast as I could.”
His squad leader adjusted the seals on his flight suit and waved them towards the fighters, where the other two pilots in their squad were already waiting. “Got here as fast as I could … sir.”
Just count to ten, Zivic. One. Two. Three….
Luckily, Ace, one of his other squadmates, saved him from saying something he knew he’d regret. “What’s the sitch, Hold’em?” she said, clicking her air seals shut on her gloves.
Hold’em—Lieutenant Farrell, the squad leader—ran a finger along the wing of Ace’s fighter, as if checking it for dust. As if dust would matter in a life-or-death fighter battle. Zivic wanted to grab him by the ears and shake realistic sense into him. “Dolmasi cruisers are attacking Mao Prime. They’ve deployed fighters. We’re ordered to engage the fighters targeting the IDF cruisers and defensive platforms.”
Out of the corner of his eye Zivic saw the scene repeated a dozen times over across the frantic fighter deck: squad leaders running their crews through the tactical situation before they were ordered to deploy. Each answering questions from their squad members that they likely didn’t know the answers to. Like Zivic’s question. “Do we know anything about the Dolmasi fighters? No IDF pilot has ever engaged one before.”
Farrell’s face remained stoney. He clearly liked having control of a situation, and not knowing the answer to something—well, in the short time Zivic had come to know his new squad leader, he’d learned that Lieutenant Farrell always knew the answer to something, even when he really didn’t.
“Correct. We’ve never engaged them. But I think we can assume that they’re more intelligent than the Swarm fighters we’ve trained against in the simulators, which display more of a hive-mind mentality. As a whole, the Swarm acts together in ways we can’t, but it also makes their individual actions and tactics far more predictable and easier to defend against. I doubt the Dolmasi fighters will be anything like that. So for now, we fly like we’re fighting human pilots. We’ve trained against Ruskie fighters in the simulators, so we’ve had plenty of experience.”
Zivic snorted, and immediately regretted it.
“Problem, Zivic?” Farrell
pierced him with a glare.
“Well, sim experience is one thing. Actual live-fire experience? That’s something else entirely.”
Farrell folded his arms. “Do you have a suggestion? Some other way to approach this?”
That caught Zivic flat-footed. He opened his mouth, then closed it, then shook his head.
Farrell looked around the circle at them all. Ace—a small, bony young woman with cold gray eyes (and perky boobs he wanted to squeeze); Bucket—a cheesily-grinning young man who looked just over twenty, but whose goofy grin belied his deadly accuracy and grit in a cockpit; Spectrum—a quiet Thai kid who looked like he belonged in a science lab instead of a fighter cockpit; and Barbie—a tall, lanky, mustachioed man who now raised his hand politely.
“Yes, Barbie?”
“And what if we’re wrong? What if those bogeys out there are nothing like Russian pilots? Or Swarm pilots? What’s the plan if that’s the case?” His thick Australian accent quivering ever so slightly with latent fear. This was a first for them all: live fire with the enemy. And it was showing on all their faces. Bucket and Ace especially—they seemed to wear their emotions on their sleeves more than the others.
Farrell shrugged. That was a rare gesture for a man who always acted like he knew the answer. “We’ll find out. Let’s move.”
Chapter Seven
Orbit over Mao Prime
ISS Independence
Bridge
“Did it have any affect?” Proctor leaned forward in her seat, staring intently at the ongoing battle on the screen. Mao Prime hung in the distance providing a verdant background, seemingly oblivious to the intense hell that was unfolding far above it.
“Reading … interesting things from the Dolmasi fleet, ma’am,” said Lieutenant Whitehorse. “Right after we transmitted the pulse, there was momentary … blip, or a pause, in all the Dolmasi movements and tactics. It’s almost like each pilot just went haywire for a brief moment before resuming their courses. And after that, their movements became more erratic.”