by Nick Webb
“Erratic? How?” Proctor watched the viewscreen, studying it, tracing out the movements of the ships and fighters. In the foreground their own pilots were blazing towards the main melee.
“Just little things. Veering right when they should go left in a fighter dogfight. One of their gunships started drifting in a slow circle. They’re still fighting of course, ferociously, but it’s … it’s a little different.”
Captain Volz had approached Proctor from behind while she stared at the screen. “Do you think we should risk doing it again?”
“I don’t know.” And a risk it was, she knew. By blasting out that meta-space pulse—even though it was billions of times weaker than the massive pulse generated by the shunt in the Sangre de Cristo bomb, she was playing with fire, just like she’d warned Oppenheimer. Like poking a sick bear with a stick. Would the bear run? Would it fight? Or would it just become terrifyingly unpredictable?
Volz pointed at the Independence’s squadron of fighters that was now nearly upon the Dolmasi. “We’re out of time. It’s either now or never.”
Trust the data, Shelby. “No. We have no baseline. We have no idea what we’re doing to them with that pulse. In fact, it might even be the meta-space pulses that got us into this mess in the first place. Let’s hold off until we’re out of options.”
“What about Oppenheimer’s orders? And I don’t know if I like being in a position where we’re forced to fight with one hand tied behind our backs. I’d rather be taking the initiative.”
She finally turned to look at him. “Me too.” She motioned to Lieutenant Qwerty at comm. “Lieutenant, still nothing from the Dolmasi?”
“Nothin’, ma’am,” he said, his drawl thick and unhurried.
She stood behind his chair, watching him scan the comm channels. “They say you’re a polyglot, Qwerty. How many languages do you know?”
“All of them, ma’am.”
She looked at him, then did a double take. “I’m sorry? Did you say all of them?”
“Well, believe it or not, I have a little trouble with Basque, even though I’ve got distant Basque relations. And sometimes I miss some of the subtleties between Quechua and Aymara. But, yes, ma’am, all of them.”
She stretched for a miracle. “Dolmasi?”
“Sorry, ma’am, we just don’t have enough examples of their language for me to do anythin’ with it. From the records of the Second Swarm War, I think we’ve got five lines total of verbal communication, from which I think I know how to say hello, and die Swarm scum, die.
“Well get on the horn and blast those two things out with everything you’ve got, Qwerty. That’s your new job: learn their language. If, somehow, the meta-space pulse from the Sangre incident disrupted their normal mental processes, then it may also have disrupted their connection to the Ligature, and possibly even corrupted anything they ever learned through the Ligature. I won’t pretend to understand how that process works, but the way Granger described it to me, it was like … knowledge transmitting directly to your brain and imprinting upon it.”
Thinking about Granger, she’d trailed off, getting momentarily lost in thought. Where the hell had Mumford gotten on that research? He was supposed to be examining the data from the scans of the Golgothic ship, that had yielded the image of the hull plate deep inside the alien vessel that bore the letters I-S-S V-I-C.
“Ma’am?” said Qwerty.
“What I’m saying is that the Dolmasi may have … forgotten English, since they learned it through the Ligature. And if that’s the case, you, Mr. Qwerty, are the most valuable officer in all of IDF. Understood?”
“So….” Qwerty swiveled around to face her. “What I’m hearin’ is that you want me to learn Dolmasi? An entire alien language, in just a few days, with no documentary evidence or examples of their grammar, morphology, no comps to other languages, no rosetta stone, no evidence whatsoever that there is even a single Dolmasi language much less fifty regional dialects, and no native speakers I can shoot the shit with?”
“Correct.”
He rubbed his hands together. “Sounds like fun. One Dolmasi language comin’ right up.”
“Admiral,” began Lieutenant Whitehorse from tactical. “Our squadrons have engaged the Dolmasi.”
She nodded, and sat back down in her chair. “Move us in. Target the capital ships. Relieve some of the pressure the Mao Prime fleet is facing.”
She breathed deep, her eyes flashing as the shooting war between her fighters and the Dolmasi began to heat up. “And God help us.”
Chapter Eight
Orbit over Mao Prime
Lieutenant Zivic’s cockpit
Zivic barrel rolled. Then swerved. Then looped. He had two bogeys on his tail, but they were persistent. More persistent than any sim fighters he’d faced in the simulators, and more aggressive by far. How was it that a computer training program designed by IDF fighter pilots a generation ago—pilots that had actually been in real dogfights with Swarm bogeys—wasn’t realistic enough? Had they intentionally designed the program to treat the pilots with kid gloves, so that when they did eventually face the enemy, they’d be so shocked that any trace of dangerous overconfidence would be laughably unlikely?
Or were Dolmasi pilots just that good? Many times better than any sim Swarm fighter he’d ever faced?
It didn’t matter. All that mattered now was surviving.
Hell, not just survive. Dominate. He didn’t know his enemy, but he knew enough. He knew they wanted to win, but he also knew he wanted it more. He swerved, then punched the opposite thrusters to spin out in the other direction before cutting those and applying the dorsal thruster to flip around and blast the nearest trailing bogey.
“Bet you’ve never seen anything like this, shitwads.”
“Cut the chatter, Batship,” said Hold’em, the squad chief. “Ace, you’ve got a tail. Bucket, move in to take the pressure off him. Barbie, back him up. Spectrum, you’re with Batship and I—let’s take out that squadron at three o’clock.”
A chorus of yes sirs, and moments later Ace’s tail was destroyed and she joined the rest of them as they bore down on the squadron Hold’em had indicated. They’d sidled up uncomfortably close to a Dolmasi cruiser, but luckily its guns seemed to be preoccupied with a CIDR cruiser off its port bow, and the two ships were exchanging a hail of fire between them.
“Nothing fancy, folks, but let’s see if we can’t knock a few of these fighters right into their own cruiser. Two birds with one stone. Maneuver Batship One.”
Zivic smiled. It was one of the maneuvers he’d taught his squadmates during their training sessions. Hold’em—Lieutenant Farrell—had grumbled a bit, but even he recognized they were genius moves. Hell, it was Ballsy that had taught them to him. Why the maneuvers had never made it into the manuals he didn’t know. Probably because they were as reckless as Ballsy himself. And, to a greater degree, Zivic.
He’d show them.
“Batship, take bait position.”
“Gee, thanks.” But he was grinning. Taking bait position was fun, in the sense that in the Zivic One maneuver, it was the position most likely to result in a fiery death, as it involved being, quite literally, bait. He shot forward and positioned himself between two bogeys and the Dolmasi cruiser they’d been shadowing. As expected, they darted after him, raining fire down on his bird, though thankfully most of it missed and hit the Dolmasi cruiser behind him. Two birds with one stone indeed.
All the shots missed, except for one, which punctured his port window. He could almost see the spark of a round sail right past his nose through the cabin and out the other window. Within moments all the air in the cabin had been sucked out. Thankfully, his flight suit maintained pressure, and before the rest of his bird got shot up, he erratically looped around, changing directions every split second, in a maneuver that, if he had a co-pilot, would have made him vomit.
“Fellas, if you were thinking of springing the trap, now would be a fabulous time….”
“Nice shot, Bucket,” Zivic breathed into his comm. He couldn’t keep the relief out of his voice.
“What, Batship? Sounds like your panties got bunched up a little there,” said Bucket, laughing.
Zivic wondered if that’s what it was like for the others, thirty years ago. For Ballsy, and Spacechamp—his parents. For all their squadmates, both those that lived and those that died. If they joked and laughed and horsed around even in the thick of battle, with death all around them. On his tactical screen he saw that out of the Independence’s seventy-two fighters, they’d already lost four. Four of his fellow fighters, people with hopes, dreams, bright futures, just gone. Snuffed out by a brief fire and the long relentless cold of space.
Of course they did. How else do you cope? Can’t drink in the cockpit. “Well at least I’m not vaginally challenged, Bucket. When’s the last time you had any?”
Ace snickered, her higher voice easily cutting over the cross chatter from Bucket. “Please. You’re all vaginally challenged, fellas. Now sit back and watch this.” She’d strayed a kilometer or so from the squad and had zeroed in on a lone Dolmasi fighter that looked like it was damaged, slowly rotating as if its engines were cut.
“Ace, I’m not so sure about…” began Hold’em.
And Zivic saw it. From below her, planet-side, two other bogeys had been hiding amongst the debris field of a destroyed Dolmasi cruiser, and now shot upward towards her. “Shit.” The Dolmasi were essentially mimicking maneuver Batship One, using one of their own fighters as bait. He pressed on the accelerator and shot towards them, firing a storm of rounds, hoping against hope that even at that distance he’d luck out and get in a hit or two.
No such luck.
The two bogeys closed the distance between them and Ace, and soon they were pelting her with their own rounds. Luckily, she’d finally seen them and managed to circle around the disabled bogey. The previously dormant fighter now engaged its engines and swiveled around to face Ace.
“Well this don’t look good,” she said, before all three fighters caught her in a crossfire.
Chapter Nine
Orbit over Mao Prime
ISS Independence
Bridge
“Shelby, our pilots are taking a beating out there. We’ve already lost seven, with half a dozen others too damaged to do anything other than hobble back here,” said Captain Volz, scanning through the damage reports from the fighters and the ship itself.
“What about us? Damage report.”
From his expression, the news didn’t look good. “Those green beams they’re firing at us? Yeah, you guessed it. Same tech the Swarm used.”
“But the Swarm got it from the Dolmasi, didn’t they?”
He shrugged. “Yes? No? I can’t remember. Does it matter? But it’s the same anti-matter ion and gamma ray mix. Frothy stuff, this beam. It just cuts right into us wherever it hits. Luckily the hull breach tech they installed on this bird is pretty effective, or half our decks would have vented by now. But those force fields are extremely power intensive.”
The deck rumbled again as another Dolmasi cruiser nearby hit them with the anti-matter beam. The green light flashed deadly on the viewscreen.
“Rayna, you there?” Proctor called down to engineering through the comm.
After a few moments, she replied. “Yeah? What is it? Kinda busy here, Shelby.”
“How’s the power plant, Rayna? How long do we have with our hull breach patch fields?”
“Right now? Maybe thirty minutes. But they keep hitting us at this rate, and that number drops every single time. Our power consumption will match the main power plant output in about five minutes, and our batteries will be tapped just five minutes after that. Whatever you got planned, I’d do it quick, Admiral.”
“Just get me those ten minutes, Rayna.” The deck rumbled again.
“That’s all assuming nothing else goes wrong. They hit a coolant line? Our five minutes goes down to five seconds, real quick-like.”
“Understood. Bridge out.”
“Admiral,” drawled Lieutenant Qwerty, “I’m just not readin’ any Dolmasi transmissions. There’s no way to decipher a language I can’t hear.”
Proctor tapped her armrests, weighing their options. The battle was even, and assuming it continued to its finale, would result in a standstill, with both sides destroyed or damaged beyond repair. Before her eyes she was watching years of starship construction get blown away. It would take Wellington Station at Calais near Britannia weeks to repair all the holes that had sprung up in just the Independence alone. Holes could be temporarily patched in a few hours, but the damage left behind was severe and systemic. Power systems. Life support. Luckily the computer cores were distributed throughout the ship, but with every battle and every hit sustained, her ship’s effectiveness slipped even further.
“Scan meta-space transmissions. See if you can tap into the Ligature.”
Qwerty looked up. “Ma’am? I don’t know the comm protocols for their meta-space links. Or, at least, our computers don’t understand it.”
“Treat the link itself like a language, Lieutenant. From what I understood from Granger, it was like a language all its own. Not Dolmasi. Not English. It was a language he felt rather than spoke. It was intuitive. I … I’m not sure if that will help you, but we’ve got to try. If this battle continues, we’re all dead. Dolmasi included. And, I think, that will be to no one’s benefit.”
Qwerty shrugged, but plunged into the analysis. He nodded. “Yeah, there’s meta-space transmissions goin’ on, all right. And yeah, it’s gibberish. Let me see….”
He pressed an earpiece in, as if he was going to listen to the meta-space transmissions. Between IDF ships, meta-space messages were always text-based. The bandwidth was far too low to handle even a simple voice transmission. But maybe Qwerty thought that whatever language the Ligature was mediated by was something that could be interpreted audibly.
He closed his eyes. The deck plates rumbled again and the ceiling panels shook. On the viewscreen one of the CIDR carriers exploded in a blinding flash as its core went critical. The fire extinguished almost immediately, but the glowing slag of the debris expanded outward, engulfing the nearest Dolmasi cruiser than had been firing on it. Wreckage and carnage littered the space all around the Independence and the remaining CIDR vessels and their Dolmasi opponents. The fighters flitted in and out of the capital ships, occasionally erupting into brief fireballs as a pilot slipped up and allowed himself to get pummeled by the enemy.
“Admiral, I—I think I’ve got something.”
She spun around to face him. “Really? What is it?”
“You’re right. It’s aural. Verbal. Well, not verbal. Not words. But, I think I get it. Well, on the verge of getting it. You’re right, this language is nothing like Dolmasi—at least, the six words that I know are nothing like this. And obviously not English, or Russian for that matter. It’s … intuitive and contextual. Hard to explain. Give me a moment, ma’am.”
“Lieutenant, you’ve got exactly one moment to figure this out. Longer than that, and we’re fried.”
For thirty or so agonizing seconds, Qwerty’s eyes glazed over as if he was lost in concentration, listening to the digital buzz that he was playing over the bridge’s comm speakers. It wasn’t a voice, but a series of tones. Not a song, but it had rhythm and tonality. Frequency variations, pulse durations, wave interference—both constructive and destructive—seemed to contribute to what Proctor could only call a soup of noise.
But it wasn’t static. It definitely, without a doubt, was an intelligent communication.
Qwerty opened his eyes.
“Admiral, I—I think we’d better get o
ut of here,” he mumbled.
“Why?”
“I—I don’t know. I can’t translate word for word. But I feel like I understand them—their intent.”
“What are they saying?”
“To us? Nothin’. To each other?” He swallowed. “Blind, rage-filled bloodlust. There’s no intelligence there. At least, no reasonin’. Just pure, unbridled anger and … hate.”
Chapter Ten
Orbit over Mao Prime
Lieutenant Zivic’s cockpit
Zivic didn’t have time to think. No time to reason or weigh the consequences. He only had time to act. “Ace, hold on, girl.”
The accelerator depressed to maximum, he pushed his bird forward faster than the inertial cancelers could keep up, and the g forces squashed him back into his seat. The distance between them closed faster than a blink. And then he did something very, very stupid.
With a jarring collision, he clipped his port wing against the wing of the nearest Dolmasi bogey, shearing it clean off. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his port thruster break off and tumble away behind him. “Didn’t need that anyway….”
A split second later he punched the starboard and dorsal thrusters to maximum to spin around and boomerang into another of the three bogeys closing in on Ace, and with another screeching grind, his starboard wing clipped the bogey’s. He must have dug into the fuel tank and oxidizer simultaneously, since the entire ship exploded in a fireball. Zivic, thankfully, now wingless and without main thrusters, was already clear of the explosion, tumbling end over end towards the third fighter.
It veered out of the way, but a moment later it too exploded in a cloud of debris, and Bucket’s fighter sailed through the glowing cloud of slag with a triumphant whoop. “Batship, you alive in there?”