by Nick Webb
“Yeah. I think. Lost both wings. Sorry, Hold’em, I won’t be available for atmospheric maneuvers anytime soon.”
Farrell grunted through the comm. “That was an irresponsible move, Zivic. You could have killed yourself and Ace both, and endangered the rest of us as we tried to cover you. And I didn’t authorize any Omega maneuvers—”
“Aw come on, Hold’em, that wasn’t an Omega maneuver. I’m still alive, aren’t I?”
“For now,” said Farrell. “Ace? You ok?”
Zivic craned his head around to find Ace. Her bird was shot up pretty bad, but looked intact, for the most part. “Ace?”
She didn’t respond.
“Jamie? Ace? Wake up, lady. Come on now….”
With the heat of battle still unfolding all around them, cruisers exchanging withering fire, other fighter squadrons darting in and out of the space between the capital ships in a deadly game of cat and mouse, all Zivic could do was stare at Ace’s dormant fighter, hoping against hope she was still alive. That all of the rounds from the Dolmasi fighters had somehow managed to avoid her fragile body at the core of the steel-titanium composite shell of her fighter.
Spectrum broke the silence. “I’m reading a steady, active heat signature. Her engine is out, so I think it’s her body. She’s alive.”
“Life support?” breathes Zivic.
Spectrum mumbled. “Tapping into her bird’s system….” The rest of the squadron waited for the diagnosis. “Looks like her life support’s battery is low, but intact. She has atmospheric integrity in her suit. And….” He breathed a short chuckle. “I’ve got a pulse. Definitely alive, but knocked out.”
Farrell grunted. “All right. Leave her. She’ll either wake up and make her way back to the ship, or we’ll send a SAR bird for her later.”
“I’m staying here with her, Hold’em. I got no thrusters. You boys go on without me, I’ll stay here and fend off any vultures looking to finish her off,” said Zivic.
“Roger that. Good luck, Batship.”
Zivic watched his four other squadmates, Hold’em, Barbie, Bucket, and Spectrum, soar off to rejoin the ongoing battle, while he tapped his auxiliary thrusters to position him near Ace’s dormant bird, and set himself into a slow spin so he could visually see around him in all directions.
And not a moment too soon. A pair of bogeys had noticed his auxiliary thruster exhaust, and had changed course, approaching them.
“Well, shit, Ace. Looks like this is our last stand.”
Chapter Eleven
Orbit over Mao Prime
ISS Independence
Bridge
Lieutenant Qwerty’s words sent a chill down her spine. She’d faced the Swarm, thirty years ago, and Granger’s description of their motive had similarly chilled her. For months during the Second Swarm War, they could only guess at the Swarm’s motivations for the war. That they were conquering territory and worlds was a given, but why? Power? Resources? And it was only after Granger had finally tapped into their collective consciousness through the Ligature that he reported that their true motivation seemed to be not power, not wealth or resources, not strategic planning.
It was simply hate. Dominance. They wanted to rule because they loathed other lifeforms. Loathed their freedom and their cultures and any joy they felt. The Swarm was an other-worldly, other-dimensional species that, from Granger’s and the Skiohra Matriarch’s descriptions, lived in an almost hellish parallel dimension—a universe not split off from their own, but rather an entirely separate universe that had got its start from the same expanding soup of spacetime from which their own universe had sprung.
And they hated. They hated and conquered and dominated and subjugated and ruled. And where their rule was resisted, they annihilated.
And they did it under the guise of friendship, or so they called it.
That Qwerty now felt or understood something similar from the Dolmasi was … troubling. They’d always been standoffish, ever since the first contact with them during the Second Swarm War. At first they’d feigned they were still under Swarm dominance, even destroying several of the ships in Granger’s strike force. But then they switched sides spectacularly during a pivotal battle, turning the tide and allowing Granger, Proctor and IDF to fight another day. Ever since then, they’d been coy, unresponsive, and uncooperative. At best, they were hermits. Inward-looking.
And now, at worst, they had essentially become the Swarm themselves. What had caused the sudden change? Was it really just the Sangre de Cristo incident? The meta-space shunt that had channeled all that nuclear energy into the Ligature? Perhaps reprising that meta-space shunt here had been a huge mistake. She should have waited. She should have doubted the information from Oppenheimer.
“Can you speak to them?”
Qwerty shook his head. “Definitely not. I might be able to create an interface where I can reproduce some of the sounds I’m hearin’, but this is … complex, ma’am.”
“Can you at least … do something … say something, that will get their attention? So they’ll open up a channel and actually talk to us?”
Qwerty shrugged. “At this point, I’d be more liable to say somethin’ that will piss them off. There are undertones of meaning here that I’m just not getting. It’ll take me weeks to really flesh this out.”
She almost snorted. Weeks. And he was probably being modest.
“At this point, Mr. Qwerty, pissing them off can’t possibly hurt us even more. They already appear quite … perturbed. Say something. Anything. Get their attention.”
He nodded. “Yes, ma’am. I’ll try to say somethin’ along the lines of, we come in peace. Or … something like that. Might could come out like, take me to your leader and let me shoot him in the face. You never know with these first contact type conversations.” His tone was joking, but the words were deadly serious. Because they were true.
Qwerty paused, typed some, paused again, and typed a few more commands into an ad hoc translator he’d thrown together at the last second. Shrugging, he pressed the commands that would send it though the meta-space transmitter. “Well, that’s that. I’ll put it on repeat—”
“No need. Look.” Lieutenant Whitehorse was pointing up at one of the viewscreens to the side of the main one at the front of the bridge. Near the opposite side of the planet, another ship had appeared.
A massive ship. A hundred kilometers long. It had a hole on one end, shaped remarkably like the late ISS Constitution.
“The Skiohra,” said Proctor. “Let’s hope they’re not going as crazy as the Dolmasi.”
Chapter Twelve
Orbit over Mao Prime
Lieutenant Zivic’s cockpit
“Not good, not good, not good.” Zivic repeated it like a mantra as he watched the two Dolmasi fighters close in. He had nearly zero maneuverability, and zero desire to test whatever that limited maneuverability was against two deadly foes in fully maneuverable fighters.
A quick glance across his controls and the cabin around him yielded nothing. He’d simply run out of options. His luck tank was empty.
But as his dad always told him when he was younger, before they stopped talking to each other, you can only count on the luck you make yourself.
“Let’s make some luck, Batship,” he muttered to himself. His eyes rested on a particular switch far off to one side on his dashboard, and a light went off in his head. “Bingo.”
Carefully, very carefully, he angled his fighter slightly to the right, alternating between the dorsal and ventral thrusters, until the rear of his bird pointed straight at Ace’s fighter. He flipped the switch and initiated the trigger, hoping the tow cable launcher was not damaged.
It wasn’t. With a dull crack he could swear he somehow heard despite his flight suit helmet, the tow cable launched out from the fighter and attached itself magnetically to Ace’s bird.
The two Dolmasi fighters were less than a kilometer away, and closing fast. It was far past show time.
“
All right you little fuckers, time to see why they used to call me Batshit.”
He fired both dorsal thrusters to maximum. The line went taut, and within a second they were rotating, both ships spinning about a common center between them, and quickly picking up speed. The centripetal force threw him down into his seat and slightly to the left—one of the thrusters must be damaged, he thought with the small portion of his brain that was still thinking analytically, cooly, and calmly.
The rest of his brain was screaming, oh shit! He saw a stream of rounds from the nearest Dolmasi fighter stream past them, and he cut the power to one of the thrusters, which sent the rotating pair of birds careening off in a slightly different direction, different enough so that the stream of fire missed them by just a few meters.
“Batship? What … what the hell is going on?”
Good. Ace was finally awake. And if she looked out her window to see what was going on she’d probably kill him. “G’mornin’, Ace!” He looked out at where his tow cable had attached, right on the nose of her fighter. “Say, you don’t happen to have your main drive still online, do you?”
“Yeah…?”
Another pair of streams of fighter fire from the Dolmasi birds, which were now circling them, trying to get a good angle on them. But Zivic kept randomly alternating and adjusting the axis of their dizzyingly fast spin. But one of these times the Dolmasi would get lucky. Or his luck would run out, whichever it was that was keeping him alive.
“When I say go, engage your main thrusters to maximum.”
“But—”
“No questions! And … GO!”
To her credit, she didn’t hesitate. He prepared himself for the whiplash that was inevitably coming, and, sure enough, less than half a second after she’d punched her engines, she’d flown toward the center of their circle and past him with just a meter to spare. When the tow cable went taut again he was moving perpendicularly to her vector, and his bird snapped around. He felt a few joints pop, and he hoped one of them was not his spine.
But the maneuver had done its job—the Dolmasi were completely caught off guard, and right in his sights. He swiveled his gun slightly to correct for his slight rotation leftover from earlier, and let loose a stream of rounds.
One of the Dolmasi fighters exploded.
The other veered off.
And … left. It was gone.
In fact, all the other fighters in the distance were pulling back, retreating towards their cruisers, which themselves were pulling away from the IDF and CIDR vessels.
Retreating?
No. None of them were q-jumping away. And out of the corner of his eye he finally saw it. Massive, in the distance. The huge Skiohra generational ship. “Looks like the big guns showed up.”
“Did you call them while I was out?” said Ace. Her voice sounded faint, like she was half-asleep.
“Don’t like it? Then stop sleeping on the job, Ace.” He added a forced chuckle, but he didn’t feel it—the tone and volume of his voice was troubling to him. And the sudden appearance of that Skiohra ship was … off. Something was up. First the Dolmasi had gone crazy, and now … what the hell were the Skiohra going to do?
“Sleep sounds pretty good right now…” she said. The last few words trailed off, as if she indeed had fallen asleep.
“Ace?”
No response.
“Ace! Wake up, girl.” He fiddled with his controls, desperate to restart his engines. “Ace! Answer me.” The main engine was out. He still had auxiliary thrusters, but they wouldn’t be much help in getting both of them back to the Independence.
Her groggy voice finally pierced the awful silence of the commlink. “Did I miss something big?”
He breathed a sigh of relief. “Ace, you need to stay awake now. At least until help gets here. You doing ok?”
“I feel something wet. All down my back and legs.”
Shit. She was bleeding. One of the bogeys’ rounds must have struck her and she was probably bleeding out.
“Mayday mayday mayday. Pilot down. Request immediate assistance,” he began, practically yelling the words into his comm.
“Roger that, Batship, SAR bird on its way,” came the response from the flight deck. Good. At least she had a fighting chance now.
“Ace? Hang on there, girl. We’re going to get the hell out of here. Just stay with me.” He paused, waiting for a response. Nothing. “Ace?” More silence. “Ace?”
Chapter Thirteen
Orbit over Mao Prime
ISS Independence
Bridge
The appearance of Vice Imperator Polrum Krull on the viewscreen didn’t surprise Proctor. She’d already recognized the ship. The Magnanimity. The same Skiohra ship she’d encountered with Granger aboard the ISS Warrior thirty years ago, and the same one she’d seen two weeks ago near San Martin. The same one with a giant, ISS Constitution-sized hole in it. Other unrepaired marks of battle scarred its hundred-kilometer-long hull, which seemed to fade away into the distance. She’d never get used to the sheer size of that thing, and regretted not developing the relationship with the Matriarch now sulking on the viewscreen to the point where they could exchange more knowledge. Learn about their ship. Their people. Their society.
War had cut short so many opportunities.
“Motherkiller. Why are you here?”
The words sliced her to the core, just as they had last time she’d seen the Matriarch near the now-destroyed moon of El Amin in the San Martin system. They cut even more deeply, now that she’d lost her assistant, Ensign Flay, whom she felt directly responsible for: she died because Proctor was waiting to issue the order to self-destruct Zivic’s shuttle stuck up inside the mysterious Golgothic ship until they’d squeezed as much information out of the sensor scans as possible, and given Lieutenant Zivic more time to get away. That hesitation had cost not only Flay’s life, but that of her unborn child. And four other crew members who’d died during that space of twenty extra seconds.
“I’m here because we’re under attack. And now I see that the Dolmasi have ceased their attack, coincidentally with your arrival. If I didn’t know you any better, Vice Imperator, I’d suspect something.”
“Suspect?” Krull gave her best imitation of a human laugh. The diminutive blueish humanoid looked vaguely like an average human in a blue face mask, but she was unmistakably alien, with different customs, mannerisms, and facial expressions that Procter, after half a dozen meetings over the years, had still not entirely figured out. She supposed it would take xenosociologists generations to really understand them, if true understanding was even a possibility.
And yet Krull spoke English, learned through her long connection to the Swarm via the Ligature. So perhaps understanding was not only possible, but inevitable.
Krull continued. “You need suspect nothing, Admiral Proctor. They disengage from the battle because they recognize in us a greater foe. The Magnanimity alone is more powerful than all their ships here combined, by a factor of fifty, at least. They disengage because they’re waiting to see what happens. Weighing whether they should attack, or pull back and prepare for their next battle.”
“Why? Why prepare for their next battle? Why are they attacking us?”
Krull shrugged. An exaggerated shrug, as if she were mimicking the action, knowing that it was what humans did when expressing a lack of knowledge, and yet so over-exaggerated as to suggest the Skiorha’s ignorance of the subtleties of human mannerisms. “I was hoping you could tell me. Why are you attacking the Ligature? The human attack on the Ligature at Sangre de Cristo nearly destroyed it. It affected me. Even me. Terribly. To say nothing of what it did to my children, especially those within me. I can only suspect what terrible damage it has caused among the Dolmasi. And here you are, attacking it again. Why?”
“I—I’m sorry, I didn’t realize our actions were affecting the Ligature itself.”
“Not just the Ligature, Admiral. You were prodding, barreling, tunneling, directly into the
Dolmasi psyche itself. All of us—all the beings connected by the Ligature for the last several millennia, are now fully integrated into it. For the Skiohra, for my people, it is natural. It is ours. We invented it. We grew with it and evolved with it over hundreds of thousands of years. But the Swarm stole it, and attached the Valarisi to it, then the Findiri and Quiassi, and finally the Dolmasi and the Adanasi—other humans. The ones you call Russians.”
“Are they still connected to it?”
“No.” She almost looked like she was smiling, which made her next statement all the more chilling. “All the Adanasi that were connected to it were … purged.”
A sick feeling washed over her. “I see.”
“Granger alone was connected, and lived. But then he … disappeared. Fell out of contact. Out of range or out of existence altogether.”
“He didn’t die?”
“Depends on how you define death,” she answered, cryptically. “One moment he was there, accessible through the Ligature. Then, he faded. And faded more. Until finally we could only just barely feel him. Hear him. Hear his thoughts like a whisper. Then … nothing. It was too faint. Like a shadow of a whisper, an echo of a whisper. And then … an absence of a whisper, and yet the absence itself was … something.”
Proctor repeated the questions she’d asked the Matriarch earlier, at El Amin. “Is he back? Can you feel him now? Has Granger returned?”
Krull laughed. “Of course not. Singularities are one-way trips, I’m afraid. At least, the naturally occurring kind are. And the Penumbran black hole was as natural as they come. A star gone supernova sixty million years ago. Your artificial singularities, yes, they were truly singularities, but they were artificial. The masses involved were minuscule compared to a star, and consequently, they were traversable. Your people, admirably, have ceased research into them—or at least, that’s what your government claims. But Granger? No. He went into that black hole, and we haven’t felt him since. It took him years, decades, to fall towards that event horizon. Even when he was only detectable by microwaves and then radio waves, we could still feel him. But eventually, the wavelength of his radio waves exceeded the dimensions of the event horizon itself, and he fell beyond our ken.”