In practice it looked like unfettered chaos.
The hounds were three meters tall, when they drew themselves up to their full height—which they almost never did. Ropy constructions of legs and not much else, striped legs that shimmered and danced in the permanent twilight of the moon, legs that flicked out and grabbed at hot gun barrels, legs that twisted around marine arms and snapped them like dry twigs.
It was everything the marines could do to hold them back, to keep them from overwhelming their formation and tearing them all to shreds of meat.
The hounds keened as they ran straight into the line of fire, wailed as the bullets and particle beams tore into their boneless flesh. Sustained fire barely slowed them down, their bodies too limp and fluid to be torn apart by the rounds. It took everything the marines had to even make a dent in their numbers. When they did go down the bodies slumped and rolled across the coral, slick with yellow blood. The ones behind just scampered over the corpses—there were always more of them. More and more, hundreds of them piling onto the marines from every side.
The marines had formed a tight circle, fighting elbow to elbow while surrounding and protecting Valk. In the midst of it Ehta shouted orders she knew nobody could hear, not over the noise of her steadygun. It had reared up on its tripod legs until its barrel was higher than the heads of the marines around it, and now it was burping out a steady stream of explosive shells, tossing them out into the undulating, ululating crowd of hounds. Ehta couldn’t see if it was having an effect at all.
She realized with a shock that she’d fought this battle before.
On Aruna, a moon near Niraya, she had fought drones built by the Blue-Blue-White. Six-meter-tall robotic hunter-killers that were bundles of legs and nothing else, bundles of legs that ended in wickedly sharp claws.
Clearly, just as the bats they’d seen had been the models for the scout drones, these hounds were the prototype of those killer drones. These servant animals of the Blue-Blue-White had been copied and made more deadly by the queenship’s fiendish computer mind.
“Cut ’em off at the root,” she shouted, remembering how she’d fought those killer drones from the back of a motorized rover, a ridiculous little car. “Their brains are between their legs—go for the place the legs come together!”
Somebody must have heard her. A pistol spoke near her, loud and firing in a quick, steady rhythm. Hounds fell with smoking wounds in their nerve clusters, dying in a hurry. She glanced over and saw Valk, his one arm up and held out perfectly straight. He was holding an enormous slug-thrower, an ancient-looking pistol that shot actual lead bullets, aiming and firing with the methodical precision of the machine he was.
“I can’t reload,” he told her. “Not one-handed.” He sounded apologetic.
She grabbed a spare clip off of his belt, ejected the old one from his gun while he was still firing the last round. Slammed the new clip home.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Anytime,” she told him. “You just ask when—when—”
Off to her left, a marine screamed and screamed. She ran over and tried to grab him by the shoulders and pull him back into the circle.
It was already too late. A hound had jumped on him, wrapped its many legs around his limbs. Ehta was close enough to hear his femur snap as the hound tightened its grip. She tried to pry its squirming limbs away from his neck, from his arms, but they were so strong, holding the marine in an iron grip she couldn’t shift. Two more marines stopped shooting to try to help her, to try to pull him back into the circle, while Mestlez fired point-blank into the thing’s nerve cluster. Yellow blood fountained upward in the low gravity, and the hound shrieked out a pulsing cry of distress, but still its legs contracted around the man’s body, slithering underneath his collar ring like a boa constrictor tightening its coils. Ehta shoved her pistol right into the thing’s center of mass and fired three times, not even caring if she hit him in the process.
It might have been a mercy if she had. She saw his face turn red and then purple as the hound strangled him, crushing the bones of his chest until blood poured from his mouth. Ehta shouted in rage and shot until the hound fell limp and loosened its grasp.
The man was already dead. She pulled his body into the circle, then ordered her marines to close the gap, to make sure none of the hounds got inside their perimeter.
More of the damned things were pouring, still, from the cracked domes. There was no point counting them, but Ehta stared around her, trying to get an idea if the marines were holding back the tide.
She stopped turning when an orangish shadow passed over her, dull light tinged by having passed through gelatinous flesh. She looked up and saw twenty-five meters of translucent alien hovering over her, like a malevolent sun.
The Blue-Blue-White was moving. Coming for her.
Candless threw her stick to the side and corkscrewed away from an airfighter that banked hard to follow her, its plasma cannons spitting a steady stream of fire. Her inertial sink pulled her back into her seat as she dove under the thing, her nose pointed at the ground so she could see the network of pylons below. She caught a glimpse of flashing lights over on one side of the construction site and knew, was absolutely certain, that Ehta was meeting resistance down there.
Which meant that she hadn’t reached the site yet, that Valk hadn’t yet gotten to the queenship. “We’re running out of time!” she called.
A BR.9 flashed past her, climbing hard to fire a disruptor into the airfighter’s belly. The big drone stopped shooting and slewed over on its side, until its wing was sticking straight up, perpendicular to the ground. It started to slide toward the surface, fighting against gravity and losing. The Valk twisted around to reach clear air, then sent her a green pearl. “The airfighters are converging on the construction site,” the copy told her.
“On our location, you mean,” Candless said. She’d already figured that much out.
“No, ma’am, not exactly—they’re gathering on the far side of the site, headed toward the location of the ground team. They must understand that we’re just providing support, that the real push is down there. It’s imperative that we stop them or the marines and my original won’t stand a chance.”
“How many? How many airfighters are moving in?” Candless asked.
“Eight of them,” the copy replied.
“Hellfire,” Candless said, because if there had ever been a time to swear, this was it. “We’re barely holding our own against one of these things at a time. Do you have any suggestions as to how we can fight eight of them at once?”
“Perhaps, ma’am. But you’ll have to rescind your order against our taking suicidal actions. That will free us up to perform more risky maneuvers.”
Candless set her jaw. In other words, she had to give them the right to throw themselves away on stupid attacks. “I need you supporting me,” she said. “If you leave me alone out here—”
“Rescinding the order will allow us to buy a few minutes, during which our original might be able to finish the mission. Refusing to rescind the order effectively ensures failure.”
Candless shook her head. “You’ve run the numbers, have you? Very well,” she said. “Do it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the copy replied.
Valk lined up another shot, and another. He could see that they actually were making progress. The marines had managed to eliminate nearly seventeen percent of the oncoming hounds, and while more were still emerging from the domes, the rate of increase had dropped dramatically. He estimated—
“Valk!” Ehta shouted. “Valk, look up!”
Oh.
The Blue-Blue-White they had seen emerging from one of the largest domes was moving, squirming through the air toward them. Valk had been peripherally aware of its presence, but until that moment he’d chosen to focus on the more immediate threat. Now he saw that had been an error.
It loomed over them in its enormous bulk, its fifteen orange tentacles hanging straight down. Some of the
marines had targeted it with their weapons, but to seemingly little effect—their bullets and particle beams easily cut through its thin skin, and a rain of hot liquid was falling from its mass, but the Blue-Blue-White did not appear to be significantly damaged.
“I think,” Valk said, “we might wish to switch to explosives. In fact—”
“It’s got me!” one of the marines shouted. Valk switched his attention around and saw that the marine named Mestlez was down on the ground, the limbs of a hound wrapped tightly around his leg. The animal was dragging him out of the circle, even as the marines on either side of him poured fire into its central mass. They were unable to get a decent hit in on it, however, and soon Mestlez was disappearing from view, being pulled into a knot of the creatures.
The marine did not scream. He had a combat knife in his hand and he was laying about him, trying to free himself. It wasn’t working. Valk made a decision.
He lifted his pistol, took aim, and fired.
His projectile cut through the flowglas of Mestlez’s helmet without difficulty. The combat knife spun out of the dead man’s hand and his body disappeared into the mass of hounds.
“What—what did you just do?” Ehta asked, her voice hoarse with screaming.
“The merciful thing,” Valk told her.
He was confused by the look on her face. She seemed upset, perhaps even angry with him. But then she shook her head and her expression cleared.
“I guess … I guess it was,” she said. “But, Valk—you shouldn’t be making decisions like that. Not for us!”
“Because I’m an AI, not a human?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Yeah.” She shook her head again and it looked like she had more to say. He did not allow her to do so.
He dropped his pistol and pushed her away from him, hard, with his remaining hand. She went sprawling, falling slowly in the low gravity.
The Blue-Blue-White’s tentacles snapped at the air where she had been a moment before, their ends curling up like fronds. Lights shimmered inside its giant body, colors strobing in a pattern Valk understood, even if he didn’t know what they specifically meant. The alien was, in effect, shouting in thwarted rage.
“Explosives,” Valk called. “Someone, please—”
He didn’t get a chance to finish his thought. An enormous wet tentacle wrapped around his waist. Another grabbed his remaining arm.
“Valk!” Ehta shouted. “Valk!”
It happened with incredible swiftness. One moment Valk was standing on the ground, trying to decide what to do. The next he was yanked up into the air, hauled skyward by the Blue-Blue-White’s tentacles. They squeezed him hard and if he’d been human they might well have broken his bones. Valk didn’t have any bones.
The Blue-Blue-White didn’t have any teeth. That fact, perhaps above all others, saved him as the alien crammed him into its enormous mouth and swallowed him whole.
The weapon ring of an interceptor flared to life and it discharged a massive microwave burst into space. But Lanoe was already climbing over the top of the giant drone, planting antivehicle rounds in its glass skin. One just grazed the machine and sprayed superhot metal across its surface. The others burst inside it and its glass panels shattered, jagged spears of glass spinning away into the void.
Three more of them were already converging on his position.
Lanoe corkscrewed up between two interceptors, moving fast so he could get through before their weapons came online.
He raked an interceptor with PBW fire, mostly just to hold its attention. So far the drones had chosen to focus on him, trying to clear the way so they would have unobstructed access to the carrier a thousand kilometers away. He could only pick them off one by one, though—a smart tactician would have pinned him down, trapped him in the middle of a formation, then split their forces and sent a squad forward to take out the carrier. That was one advantage to fighting drones, he thought. They couldn’t play dirty tricks.
The disadvantage was that their reaction times were incredibly high, better than almost any human pilot’s. Even as he twisted around behind one of them, smashing it apart with a disruptor, another swerved into his path with its weapon ring already hot. He blasted the ring with his PBWs and it sparked and burst apart, leaving the drone toothless. But more were on their way.
He punched his throttle and dove fast to escape a pair of interceptors that had caught him in a pincers trap. He craned his head around and saw them just avoid colliding with each other, having to dance around one another in a complicated move that kept them from coming after him.
Then he looked back down and saw the dreadnought. This one only had four blisters sticking out of its coral hull, and was only four kilometers across instead of five. It had twice as many weapon pits as any of the dreadnoughts he’d seen before, though. Maybe this one was a battleship variant. Designed specifically for destroying alien invader spacecraft.
Who knew? Maybe it was still growing, maybe the dreadnoughts started small and got bigger as their coral accreted. All Lanoe knew was that it was going to be a serious problem if he needed to fight the thing while dodging interceptors. Already its weapon pits were heating up, getting ready to shoot plasma balls at him.
“Valk,” he called, then realized he needed to be more specific. He tapped out the address for the Valk flying the cruiser. “Valk, fire at will, the second your coilguns are ready. We need to get this thing off the table.”
“Yes, Commander,” the Valk replied. “Firing in four. Three. Two. One—”
A seventy-five-centimeter round tore past Lanoe, so close and so fast he could feel it warping space. It plunged through the void toward the dreadnought, which tried desperately to maneuver out of the way.
It didn’t need to. The shot went wide, hurtling past the dreadnought without so much as grazing it. The projectile continued onward, carried by its own momentum until it punched through the disk, momentarily disturbing a cloud.
“Valk,” Lanoe said. “Valk, what was that bosh?”
“Sadly, what my new gun crews lack in experience, they can’t make up for with talent,” Valk replied. “We’ll try again.”
This time three of the guns spoke at once, the rounds flying in almost perfect formation. Two of them struck the dreadnought, well clear of its center. The coral cracked and an enormous pale debris cloud billowed outward. One of the blisters collapsed, its pylons fluttering away like confetti on a hurricane-strength wind.
It was something.
“Keep at it,” Lanoe told the copy of Valk. “Keep firing! We don’t need to worry about wasting ammunition anymore.”
While Lanoe had been watching the show, two interceptors had nearly crept up on him. He twisted away at the last minute, pegging one of them with an unaimed disruptor, but it was close.
The airfighters stuck to a tight formation, weaving through the air with their plasma cannons firing nonstop, jets of hot plasma streaming out in front of them. The Valks twisted and darted around them, pulling g-forces that would have killed a human pilot. It was all Candless could do to orbit the periphery of the battle, taking shots of opportunity. She cut through the wing of one of the airfighters and it fell out of the sky—leaving only seven of them.
The Valks moved in fast, making no attempt at defensive flying. One strafed an airfighter so close he shattered glass with his airfoils, sending him into a high-velocity spin no human pilot could have escaped from. Another tried to ram an airfighter, only to have it veer away at the last possible second. Candless was sure the Valk wouldn’t have blinked first.
Another airfighter went down, a disruptor still detonating inside its main fuselage even as it slipped on an air current and nosed down into the cagework below. A third drone came apart in midair, its wings twisting off on their own gliding trajectories. It took a moment for Candless to realize that a Valk’s BR.9 was part of the debris that cascaded from the sky.
Only two of the copies left—and Candless. She readied a disruptor, tried to
get a lock on an onrushing airfighter. Valk called her before she could even bring up a virtual Aldis.
“They’ve made a bad mistake,” he said. “Their formation is too tight. I’d advise that you break off and head for a minimal safe distance.”
“What?” she demanded. “What are you going to do?”
She got an answer—though not a verbal one. Even as she banked away, burning hard to gain distance, the Valk dropped the containment on his fusion reactor.
A ball of perfectly white, superhot plasma blossomed in midair, a visible shock wave racing outward in every direction. Even inside her cockpit the noise and the heat buffeted Candless, made her squeeze her eyes shut as sweat poured down her brow.
When she could see again, she leaned over in her seat to look behind her, to see what was left.
A lot of debris, falling slowly through the thin air of the moon. It was impossible to tell where any one piece of it had come from—whether that jagged shard had been part of an airfighter, or whether that blob of molten metal been the fairing of a BR.9.
“Valks,” she called. “Valks, any of you that are left, any that survived—come in, please. Valks, come in.”
There was no answer.
No more Valks.
Candless checked her tactical board. There were more airfighters converging on the construction site. More drone aircraft to threaten the ground team. And now she was the only one left to hold them back.
“Cover me!” Ehta shouted, as she jumped up on a low dome, then leapt to the bigger one right next to it. The thin skin of coral cracked under her feet and she thought she might fall, thought she might fall into one of the hollow domes, no doubt to be swarmed by the keening hounds inside it. Somehow she managed to keep her footing.
Hounds came after her, swarming up the domes, but her marines had heard her, even over the repetitive thump of the steadygun. Gutierrez poured particle fire into the hounds on the domes and they fell back, their tentacular legs flapping like ribbons in the air. Ehta took three running steps and jumped, flying high in the moon’s paltry gravity, and landed on the highest dome she could find.
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