by Alex Lamb
The vitals on his readout display started to spike.
‘My patient is entering a state of neural strain due to your intervention,’ said the med-bay.
‘What is it, Sam?’ said Zoe. ‘What do you see?’
‘Don’t you recognise her? That’s Meleta Keth, the head watcher we posted at the Tiwanaku System. She was in the League. She had access to our data – battle plans, projections, fallbacks, all of it. She would never have let them take her. If they’ve got her …’
He didn’t need to say more. They all knew what he meant. The League was over.
‘What are you waiting for?’ Sam shouted, his voice deteriorating into static. ‘Go!’
‘No,’ said Zoe. ‘Here’s what we’ll do: we attack digitally. Sam used their comms protocol before. We can use it again. They don’t like changing it, otherwise Nem-cloaking wouldn’t work. That gives us a way in.’
‘Stupid,’ said Sam. ‘If you soft assault the Nems they’ll swap up their security and the evac-ark will lose its cloaking.’
‘That’s the price we’ll have to pay if we want to shut this invasion down,’ said Zoe.
Mark stared at her. ‘How can we do that?’
A weird smile quirked one corner of Zoe’s lips. ‘This is the moment I was born for,’ she said. ‘The Vartian Institute has been planning for this for a long time. The Gulliver has more alien-hacking tools packed into it than a fleet of soft-combat ships.’
‘Where?’ said Mark. ‘They’re not in the ship’s core.’
‘Of course not,’ said Zoe. ‘They’re in me. What did you think all those aug defences were for? For this. Nobody fucks with the Vartian Institute. Nobody. And this is when they learn that. We’re going for a two-phase attack. I need to work on that protocol of theirs. I don’t have enough data to subvert it yet – we need open communication channels for that. So the first thing this ship has to do is act as bait. Mark, I need you to fly us over to that Nem fleet and announce yourself. Without getting caught, of course. As fast as you can.’
Mark nodded. ‘Go to the lounge and strap down,’ he told the others.
‘Use my bunk,’ Ash called after him. ‘Sam sabotaged the top one. I’ll work from the lounge and do what I can to help.’
Mark ran to the bridge, slammed home the fat-contact and opened the link to the lounge while the engines ramped to full power.
‘You’re confident we can do this?’ he asked Zoe as she strapped in.
‘This day has been thirty years in the planning. They don’t stand a chance.’
‘Why now?’ said Citra. ‘Why not at Tiwanaku, when we could have saved Yunus?’
‘Didn’t have enough data,’ said Zoe. ‘I had no idea what I was looking at. Now we have everything Sam’s been hiding. That’s years of research. And the best part is that the Nems have spent this entire time cannibalising our technology, which we know inside out. You can see it screaming from their message signatures. That lack of imagination levels the playing field plenty.’
Mark brought down the gel-sleeves, locking his crew in tight. Breathing support and virtual interface assist kicked in.
‘Hold on, everybody,’ he said. ‘Here we go.’
He threw them into warp. The hammer of the Gulliver’s mighty drive smacked them into their crash couches and kept on smacking. For the next twenty minutes, the Nem fleet slid up to meet them.
Mark flicked open the channel the Nems had used and called them back.
‘Hey there, Photurian Collective,’ he said, his tight-beam transmitter blasting. ‘I was in two minds at first, but on balance, your offer sounds great! Could you sign me and my crew up to join the Collective, please, at your earliest convenience?’
Of the six ships, the three spherical ones changed course towards him as soon as the message reached them. The ovals apparently weren’t interested. They remained doggedly aimed at Carter.
‘Three out of six is a good start,’ said Zoe. ‘Work on the round ones and keep at it.’
With light-lag, the Collective’s response took five minutes.
‘That’s wonderful news, human ship. We will rendezvous with you and commence what I hope will be a very fruitful dialogue.’
‘Terrific,’ Mark sent back. ‘Say, is there some assurance you can give me that I’ll retain my identity after we meet face to face?’
‘Of course you’ll remain you,’ the swarm eventually replied with Meleta Keth’s benign smile. Mark could have sworn she hadn’t been that pretty when they met her the first time. The Photurians had given her a makeover as well as tiger stripes. ‘But you’ll also be so much more. Please power down your vessel and allow us to approach.’
Mark kept moving straight towards them, so the Nems slowed instead. The gap between them closed to a light-minute and kept shrinking.
‘Twenty light-seconds,’ said Mark. ‘In warp terms, this is practically in their laps.’
‘We’re in range,’ said Zoe. ‘Keep them this tight, but don’t let them get any closer.’
Mark swerved around the trio of Nem ships at the last moment, dropping his burst rate to allow them to keep up.
‘Human vessel,’ said Meleta Keth. ‘What are you doing? Why have you not powered down for rendezvous?’
‘I’m having second thoughts,’ said Mark. ‘I’m scared. Can you tell me what it’s like, Meleta, to join the Collective? You don’t mind if I call you Meleta, do you?’
The Nem ships picked up speed to follow him.
‘You can call me what you like,’ said Meleta. ‘Names aren’t important.’
With three ships closing on him from slightly different directions, it was incredibly hard to maintain such a close lead. His every warp-burst created a pocket of dead space that threatened to cut his pursuers’ velocity in half. Mark had to keep shifting course, realigning his field every time. The endless blows of the drive felt like falling down stairs – really big, blunt stairs.
‘Keep up the patter!’ said Zoe. ‘I’m using your signal as an insert carrier.’
‘So you don’t have names?’ Mark said as he darted left. ‘That sounds weird.’
‘We’re free,’ Meleta assured him. ‘That’s all. We can have any names we like.’
‘Can I still be Bill?’ said Mark.
The entire cabin shuddered as he struggled to lock in a rotating warp offset.
‘Of course, Bill.’
‘Do you have memories?’
‘Memories are shared,’ she said. ‘It’s very beautiful.’
‘Do you remember our nights, together?’ said Mark.
‘Of course I do, Bill. But you’re being evasive. As a gesture of trust, I need you to cut warp now. Otherwise I’ll start doubting your motives and may need to disable your engines.’
‘Got them!’ said Zoe. ‘Hand me the comms array.’
Mark slid full control of comms to Zoe with a gasp of relief. Zoe fired a dense burst of data packets at the closest ship.
The raspberry ship dropped warp and burst into its component drones. A cluster of something tumbled out from the space between them. As he cut speed to match them, Mark zoomed the cameras for a closer look and saw dozens of what looked like oddly bloated lander-shuttles tumbling in space.
‘Shit,’ said Zoe. ‘Not what I had in mind. Hang on.’
Zoe grunted as she struggled to reconfigure the drones’ command system with virtual hands. The gel-sleeves had locked her physical ones to her sides.
‘Mark, I’m going to need you,’ she said. ‘I’m inserting pirate guidance SAPs into those drones. You’ll have to drive them on tight-beams like guided munitions. Can you do that?’
‘All of them?’ he said. ‘At the same time?’ There had to be hundreds. ‘It would have been easier to fly the one raspberry.’
‘Not an option, I’m afraid. Can you do it?’
<
br /> ‘Hook me up,’ said Mark.
She started throwing SAP signatures at him – dozens of them. He split his focus as thinly as he dared to juggle them all. He knew that if he thought about it too hard, he’d panic. There were way too many perspectives for him to cover while still managing all the robots in an entire starship, but he didn’t have a choice. From the lounge, Ash had no helm access. Mark was on his own.
While he cemented his control, the other two Nem ships arced back around to meet him. Mark sent drones racing towards both of them. It was like running and spinning plates at the same time.
‘Focus on the closest,’ said Zoe. ‘I’m sending it love letters.’
The leading raspberry approached with apparently little or no concern for the threat its former swarm-mates presented. It hadn’t noticed the hack. Mark threw five drones straight at it. It burst open in a blaze of light. Two seconds later there was only a single raspberry left along with a rapidly expanding shell of ionised debris. Their Casimir-buffers crackled as it hit.
‘Who says we don’t have weapons?’ said Zoe.
The last of the three ships clued in and swapped up its security. At the same time, it broadcast a warning cry, system-wide.
‘Fuck,’ said Zoe. ‘There goes Nem-cloaking.’ She instructed their pet drone-swarm to emit a similar but conflicting message. ‘Kill that ship, Mark. As fast as you can. Before it can stabilise a new protocol.’
Mark sent a second batch of drones tearing towards the raspberry before it could find room to manoeuvre away. At the last moment, the craft tried to break up. It didn’t make it. A second blast-wave tore through the Carter System as the raspberry burst apart.
‘We have a new problem,’ said Ash as the crackling from the buffers subsided.
He posted a video feed to Mark’s sensorium, showing data with an eight-minute light-lag. While he watched, one of the elongated Nem ships sidled up to an empty orbital at Carter’s L5 point. Grappling limbs and a kind of proboscis emerged from one end of the craft in an obscenely organic motion. With these tools on display, the craft suddenly resembled a gigantic bacteriophage. With ponderous deliberation, the legs locked on to the orbital, trashing its axial spin and sending both vehicles tumbling. The proboscis adhered itself to the pressurised wall and started to drill. Mark could see clouds of gas and debris escaping from the join.
Suddenly, the significance of the lander shuttles he’d noticed earlier became clear. The Nems hadn’t come here for a punishment raid as they had at Nerroskovi. They’d come to harvest people.
He shuddered. Had that orbital been occupied, the Nems would have raised their host count already. He quickly checked the approach vectors for the remaining ships. Both were headed for other empty orbitals. But the wave-front of the warning signal the doomed raspberry had sent would hit them in seconds. He could guess what would happen then. The evac-ark, already sitting closer to one of the Nem harvesters than its selected goal, would become the new target.
Mark turned the Gulliver around and sped back in-system, dragging his drone swarm with him. Over the awful seconds that followed, one harvester ship swapped course, and then the other, setting their sights on the ark. Mark watched the ark captain just sit there, apparently not realising that his cloaking had catastrophically failed.
Mark pushed the drones ahead of him, overclocking their engines and driving them into the closest harvester before it could deploy its limbs. The ark juddered from the impact wave. He gave thanks that evac-arks were heavily rad-shielded otherwise the entire population of New Luxor would have gained one hell of a tan.
He brought the Gulliver about and stared down what remained of the Nem fleet. He had two harvesters left to kill, an ark to guard and a thinning supply of drones. He’d thrown too many munitions at the first harvester. What had looked like an abundance of weapons now felt like too few.
By then, both remaining Nem ships had swapped to randomised security settings and shut down inter-ship communication. They turned to face him. His attention to the ark had clued them in to the location of all the tasty humans.
Mark wished the colonists hadn’t bothered to evacuate. By putting all their eggs in one basket, they’d created a tactical nightmare. Guarding the ark from both Nem ships without torching it in the process was going to be nearly impossible. So Mark decided to take the fight to the harvesters instead.
He split what was left of his swarm. The way he saw it, he didn’t have a choice. It was that or leave the evac-ark entirely unprotected. He picked a target to stick with and flew, knowing full well that this would put the other half of his remaining weapons outside tight-beam targeting range and therefore beyond his control. He had to hope that the inherent intelligence in the pirate guidance SAPs would be enough to let him pull the trick off.
He chased down the harvester he’d selected as it arced and twisted to avoid him. Why it didn’t break up into its constituent drones, Mark had no idea. Maybe it couldn’t. Either way, it lacked the manoeuvrability to escape so many drones at once and died in a ball of fire.
Mark turned back to find his remaining unpiloted drones fanned out in a hopeless spray. A channel of empty space led straight from the last harvester to the damaged ark. He knew he’d never get back into submind range fast enough to make a difference.
He opened a communication channel to the last Nem ship. He had no idea if it was still listening, but he had to try.
‘Touch that ark and you’ll die,’ he said. ‘Don’t think I won’t hit you just because you’ve got human captives. You’re not taking them out of here alive.’
At the same time he pointed the Gulliver at the empty space between the ark and the harvester and pushed his speed as high as it could go. This deep in-system, that meant a lousy fraction of the speed of light, but it was all he had. He signalled his drones to converge.
The man Mark had become didn’t want thousands of innocent lives on his conscience, but if it came to that, he was ready to act. He gritted his teeth as he watched the Nems descend on the ark and knew he wasn’t going to make it.
Then, astonishingly, help arrived. The colonists’ two gunboats converged from the other side of the moon, firing g-rays at the harvester with every joule of power they had. The harvester slewed sideways.
A return message from it hit his sensorium. It was Meleta’s face again, this time looking profoundly sad.
‘Why do you resist us, Bill?’ she said. ‘We have so much to give.’
Mark briefly wondered again if they’d somehow misread the Nems’ intentions, despite all appearances. Then the remainder of his drone swarm pummelled into the last alien ship, blasting it into atoms. Meleta’s face vanished.
‘Nice job,’ Mark told the gunboats.
The Carter colonists declined to reply.
As the glare cleared, Zoe spoke up. ‘This is a great start,’ she said. ‘The Nems are dead and Phase One is complete. Now for Phase Two.’
Mark’s brow furrowed. ‘I thought that was Phase Two.’
‘No. Two is where we take control of the jelly-ship that brought them – what Sam called a carrier.’
‘And how in hell’s name are we supposed to pull that off?’ said Mark. ‘It’ll be on rotating security before we get there if it’s not already trying to leave.’
‘Then we’re lucky I have more than one trick up my sleeve. Please, Mark. We don’t have time to debate this. We have to go now. Our survival may depend on this.’
Rather than argue the point, Mark spun the ship and headed out towards the Nems’ insertion point. The further they travelled from Carter’s star the more speed they picked up, but the spatial clutter prevented them from approaching even a single light below the heliopause, no matter how hard they pushed the engines. That meant the raspberry ship’s warning signal was bound to get there before them.
‘What makes you think the carrier won’t just leave th
e moment it gets wind of trouble?’ said Ash.
‘Because there’s a difference between trouble and disaster,’ said Zoe. ‘My guess is that the carrier will hang around until it has evidence that the last Nem ship failed. Then they’ll start gearing to leave. That gives the bad news a very narrow lead on us: two minutes at most. We have to hope that’s enough wiggle room for us to operate in.’
As they closed on the carrier, its rotating jelly-discs began to spin faster.
‘That’s the sign,’ said Zoe. ‘They’re gearing up to leave. I’m taking the comms array again.’
‘To do what?’ said Mark. ‘What have we got left to use?’
‘The one message they can’t ignore,’ said Zoe. ‘The same one the raspberry used – a broadcast security alert.’
She started bombarding the carrier with copies of the Nems’ warning pulse. She tweaked the signal fifteen different ways and used every available broadcast tool the ship had. It didn’t appear to be doing much good. The carrier’s arms just kept whirling.
‘You sure this is going to work?’ said Mark nervously.
‘It has to, doesn’t it?’ said Zoe. Her voice cracked with nervous brightness. ‘Those discs need to keep open comms otherwise how would they coordinate their movement?’
Mark wasn’t so sure. ‘Couldn’t they just send signals down those frond fibres?’
‘Didn’t think of that,’ said Zoe. ‘Let’s hope they can’t.’
Amazingly, the carrier’s security started showing cracks.
‘Denial of service,’ said Zoe. ‘Oldest trick in the book. That’s what comes of borrowing too much from another species – you absorb all their weaknesses as well as their strengths.’
Suddenly, the Gulliver’s processors started shutting down. Mark lost attitude control.
‘Soft assault!’ said Zoe. ‘They’re fucking hacking us and I didn’t even notice!’
‘You were saying?’ said Mark.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Zoe snarled. ‘Nobody’s more paranoid than the Institute. I’ve got this covered. Every time they go for us, we get stronger.’