by Alex Lamb
‘Release drone salvos two through nine,’ said River. ‘Carol, go to full guidance assist.’
‘Captain, hold!’ said Ara. ‘The nestships are dumping disrupters.’
River zoomed his view to watch. The Nems weren’t just dumping a few. They were dumping thousands. Long streams of disrupter buoys were jetting out of the Fecund hulks, weaving between the attacking ships at full tilt.
‘Reversing thrust,’ said River.
It wasn’t easy. Other ships had already arrived behind them. They didn’t have a clear exit vector, and so many warp arrivals had made an ungodly mess of the local curvon flow. All at once, the disrupters activated, locking the battle in place. No one was going anywhere.
‘Fuck!’ said River. ‘Still, this hurts them more than it does us. There’s no way they can reach the major worlds now. Concentrate on the attack. We’ll finish these bastards off.’
As the words left his mouth, a radiation blast-wave hit them from behind. Warning klaxons filled the cabin.
‘What the hell was that? Ara, status report.’
‘Sensors down to seventy-one per cent, sir. It’s a new arrival burst, just like the other one. This time near Neptune. I’m seeing a new cloud of foreign warp signatures.’
River held his breath as he reassessed their situation. With a cold, sinking feeling, he realised that maybe the battle wasn’t going quite as well as he’d thought.
20.4: ANN
Ann arrived to chaos. The outer reaches of the home system sparkled with bright flashes of warp and the even brighter flashes of g-ray fire. Confused warnings and alerts crammed the public channels. Dense, overloaded bursts of Fleet tactical data filled the encrypted ones. Despite herself, she groaned with relief. Chaos meant life.
Ann had used both Will’s data and the League’s to compute the Nems’ likely attack time and then overclocked the Ariel Two’s engines to try to beat them to the punch. Nevertheless, she’d half-expected to find either a mass graveyard or a pulsing hive of alien activity. As it was, the Nems had arrived mere hours ago. She’d made it in time – just.
[Nems are attacking at four sites,] said her shadow.
It brought up a map in her sensorium revealing the probable insertion points and the clusters of Nem activity around each. Three of the sites had targeted the major out-system population centres – Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. At Neptune and Uranus, fighting had been underway for a while. At Saturn, all Ann could see was the flash of ships moving to intercept each other. However, that action had a light-lag of over three hours. For all she knew, the battle for Saturn might be over already.
It was the last site, though, that scared her most. Three nestships and a huge cloud of Fleet ships lay snarled in a vast smear of disrupter chaff just five AU from Sol. When she looked for Fleet signatures elsewhere in the system, she saw hardly any.
She realised immediately what must have happened. The Nems had used the League’s expectations against them. Sam’s people had anticipated a direct attack on Earth from a single carrier, so that’s what the Nems had provided. But they’d raised the game by using old nestship hulks to make sure the Fleet couldn’t possibly avoid the threat. Then, with the Fleet’s efforts effectively mired uselessly close to their parent star, they’d begun their real assault. Why they’d chosen to attack the relatively tiny populations in the out-system, she still didn’t understand. But either way, it was clear that the Nems’ intelligence had caught up with their own.
[I want full tactical impressions of the out-system battles,] she said.
Her shadow dropped her into a full-immersion sim, overlaying knowledge into her head as it did so. Ann still wasn’t used to seeing things and visiting places inside her own skull. It made her squirm despite the intensive training Will’s ghost had provided on the flight home. She doubted she’d ever accept it the way a born roboteer would, but feelings were for later. First, she had a war to win.
‘I’ve filtered out the human traffic,’ said Nelson from the other side of the habitat core. ‘There’s a standard Nem arrival message being pumped out system-wide. They’ve adapted again. You’re not going to like it.’
‘Show me,’ said Ann.
She frowned as she took in the sight of Yunus Chesterford spouting his new doctrine.
‘I can think of people who’d buy this,’ she said. ‘The Nems have to die here, today, or we’ll never finish them.’
She fired off the information burst she’d prepared for Ira Baron and weighed her options.
[Target Neptune,] Ann told her shadow. [The Fleet needs Triton intact.]
The Ariel Two pivoted and dived, squashing her against her couch. In the primary habitat core beneath Ariel Two’s bulk, her crew groaned under the strain. They’d already suffered over three weeks at two-point-six gees of warp-load to make up the time. Now it was about to get worse.
Ann’s tactical display zoomed in to show her the frantically warping cloud of ships spattered around the ice giant. There were three raspberry ships larger than human battle cruisers, over two dozen mid-sized Nem ships and hundreds of small munitions. Yet the Nem craft made up less than half of the action.
[What am I looking at here?] she said. [If only half of these ships are invaders, what’s everything else?]
[Scans suggest mercenary drone fleets,] said her shadow. [The Nems are targeting the private worlds in Neptune orbit. The owners are defending with their own weapons.]
Ann reeled as she took in the implications of that. The sect leaders must have been hoarding drones in anticipation of war and they’d amassed an astonishing number. If the Nems had expected all the Earth’s defences to be drawn by their initial feint, they’d misjudged the sects’ capacity for self-interest. For the first time in her life, she found herself relieved that the sects were a bunch of secretive, warlike scumbags.
Then, as she watched, one of the giant raspberries opened up with a massive parallelised barrage of g-ray fire, vaporising hundreds of sect drones at once. Warlike they might be, but the sects weren’t geared up for all-out slaughter. The Nems had taken advantage of their in-system distraction to give them time to acquire suntap links.
Ann dived on the closest behemoth, scanning her target as she came. As soon as she had range, she fired her primary boser, aiming dead-centre. It was the wrong choice. When her beam hit the raspberry, it simply came apart into its constituent drones. She’d killed less than ten per cent of them while putting a serious drain on her own power reserves. The scattered automata rejoined the fray as independent munitions without a second’s hesitation, leaving a small patch of superheated slag spinning in space.
[Looks like they’ve lost suntap capability, at least,] her shadow pointed out. [That’s a start.]
[How long till we get ours?] After the painfully hurried flight home, the Ariel Two already needed recharging.
[Over two hours. This fight will be done before the channel opens.]
Ann muttered to herself. She hoped they’d hold out long enough to make a difference.
‘Tactical update,’ said Nelson. ‘It’s bad.’
He sent her a video window showing a knot of activity involving some of the smaller ships. In the middle of the fray hung a few large Nem craft much like the ones she’d seen at Snakepit, only these had grappling arms and docking probes on them. They were latching on to the private habitats and drilling their way in like giant aphids. Only it wasn’t sap they were sucking. It was people.
‘We’ve got this all wrong,’ said Ann with horror. ‘This isn’t an invasion. They’re trying for a population grab!’
Suddenly, the entire pattern of the assault made sense. The Nems had never intended to hit the Earth. They hadn’t even come for revenge – just bodies. And there were plenty of them to be found in the outer system where the Nems could easily strike. The suntap ships provided cover while these aphid-ships did the dirty work. She
reassessed the threat. There were thirty aphids at this battle site alone. Not to mention the other two attack points in the out-system.
She experienced a moment’s panic. There were too many targets and half of them were probably already filling up with innocent people. Even with a ship like the Ariel Two, she wasn’t going to be able to save them all.
Even while her mind raced, a wave of attack drones flashed towards them and battered themselves against the Ariel Two’s shield.
[Slow and steady wins the race,] said her shadow. In that moment, it sounded a lot more like the real Will than a semi-sentient echo of him. [If we make those aphids defenceless, the sects can take care of themselves.]
Ann nodded. It was a sound approach – take care of the big threats first. While the aphid-ships were backed by g-ray batteries, they were unbeatable. She could do something about that.
Ann fired as they bore down on the second raspberry. This time she didn’t bother with the boser. She used her own g-rays. The space between her and the Nem cruiser became a searing dead-zone hotter than the surface of the sun. The raspberry briefly tried to split up as her beams hit, but this time Ann was ready and her firing spread widened as the drones detached. They burst like popcorn.
Ann brought her ship about and aimed for the last major threat. The raspberry saw her coming and made rapidly for the far side of Triton on conventional thrust. It couldn’t afford to warp. It was only useful while its suntap-link was intact, and gravity bursts would break it instantly.
‘Some of those spider-drill-ships are disengaging and heading for their insertion points,’ said Nelson. ‘The carriers may be ready to make a move.’
Ann cursed wildly. The Nems had come for hosts. Now that they had them, they were leaving already. On her virtual bridge, she clutched at her hair. The fight was way too spread out and too complex for a single large ship like hers to make a decisive difference. They were losing and there wasn’t a single thing she could do about it. Still, she wasn’t going to let them leave without a fight.
‘They’re not getting away this time,’ she snarled. ‘We’re changing course. I want that carrier dead.’
20.5: MARK
Mark dropped warp at the home system in an eye-scorching burst of hard light. Nobody paid the slightest bit of attention. The largest space battle in human history had been underway for hours. Zoe performed a rapid battle analysis.
‘Four carrier sites,’ she said. ‘I’m seeing targeted drops for Uranus, Saturn and Neptune, plus one outlier. The Uranus carrier site has harvesters reconverging on it already. They’re pulling the same trick as they did at Carter. We have to cut off their escape.’
‘Agreed,’ said Mark. ‘Then we can deal with the rest of this shit.’
He didn’t drop spin for an instant. Instead, he slammed them back into warp and brought the ship around to the Uranus arrival site as fast as he could in an arc that tested the limits of the vacuum-drive. The luminous shell around them sparked and wobbled as he pushed the envelope to the brink of tearing. Fast they might be, but vacuum-drive ships didn’t handle corners well.
He signalled the armada hovering behind him.
‘Overcaptain Tak,’ he said. ‘We’re moving to intercept an enemy exit point. They have human hostages. On no account can the enemy carrier be allowed to depart. I recommend immediate deployment of one-third of your task force on my mark.’
‘Understood and agreed, Gulliver,’ said Tak. ‘You have my consent.’
Mark dropped warp just light-seconds from the Nem convergence point and spun down his fronds just enough to let a part of their armada boost away in radial formation. At the same time, Zoe tight-beamed an info-dump of their situation to Fleet Command. The battle cruisers surged forward, fired warp-drones and blasted the carrier into atoms. With their exit cut off, the cruisers set about boxing in the harvesters.
Mark knew he couldn’t afford to stop to watch things play out. He pushed their spin rate back up, threw them into warp and arced around the system again, the drive straining badly as he headed as close to Saturn as he could reasonably get. He wished he could have flown straight across the system but he didn’t dare try. Like all forms of warp, the vacuum-drive was hopeless in dense space. The ionic clutter was simply too thick. It was actually faster to fly out and around, even though that meant distorting the warp field in ways it was never meant to be used. For the better part of an hour, they watched the envelope strain and flicker and prayed it wouldn’t crumple.
By the time Mark reached the second carrier, harvesters were already prepping to depart and this time they had a cloud of drone defence to back them up. Behind them, unmarked gunships traded fire with Nem raspberry-ships armed with g-ray batteries. Mark dropped the second portion of his armada straight into a fire-fight.
As soon as he released the ships, a wave of Nem drones headed straight for him.
‘Tak!’ Mark warned. ‘We can’t let our carrier be damaged.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Zoe. ‘I’m on it. These ships are still running vanilla Nem-cloaking. They’re mine.’
As he watched, the drones’ flight patterns changed. Instead of impacting, they slid inside the carrier’s envelope like willing sheepdogs. The other Nem-ships immediately started pumping out protocol-change warnings but by then the Nems had lost their edge.
One of the raspberries spontaneously split. The gunships hammered at the stuttering drones, cutting lanes of explosions through their ranks like chains of firecrackers. The remaining raspberries started gouging space with intersecting talons of g-ray fire.
‘Now get us out of here,’ said Zoe. ‘Unless you want to die.’
Mark piled the power back on and slipped away before the fight could trap him there.
Making it around to Neptune took another ninety minutes of nail-biting flight. He watched the third battle arena evolve in ridiculous fast-forward as the light-lag shrank and held his breath as the last carrier spun up to escape.
‘We lost,’ he said. ‘They’re getting away.’
Then, out of nowhere the Ariel Two surged upwards, blasting harvesters and drones alike in a frenzy of high-energy violence. Raspberries and Nem drones from all across the home system had already started converging on it.
‘Overcaptain Tak, do you see what I see?’
‘I see a capital ship in need of supporting fire,’ said Tak. ‘Preparing to deploy on your mark.’
Mark dropped warp as close to the fray as he dared. Tak’s ships dived out and fell on the enemy like feeding sharks. Nevertheless, two of the harvesters made it into the waiting arms of the carrier. Its fronds became a blur and the weird luminescence of the false-vacuum began to slide down across it.
Just when Mark felt certain their cause was lost, the Ariel Two’s boser lanced up, carving across the spreading vacuum-field in a blast at least half a second long.
The carrier’s envelope splayed open, unravelling across space, and the mutant space–time it contained spilled out. For a brief moment, something surreal and vaguely organic sent questing tendrils into the void, offering glimpses of an impossible geometry within. Then it flickered and was gone.
In the silence that followed, Mark messaged the Ariel Two.
‘Nice shooting,’ he said with a grin. ‘Nice to have you back on the team … Dad.’
Ann Ludik appeared in the reply window, her expression grave.
‘Wasn’t Will,’ she said, ‘but thanks anyway.’
Mark’s smile dropped. He felt a lurch of confusion and worry stabbed at him unexpectedly.
‘I’ll explain later,’ said Ann. There was something a little like pity in her eyes that made Mark scared.
‘No time for reunions!’ said Zoe. ‘We have one more carrier, remember?’
Mark dived back into helm-space. ‘Where is it?’
‘Calculating now,’ said Ash. ‘I’m extrapola
ting from the flight paths of the remaining harvesters.’
Mark’s battle visualisation lit up with a set of converging lines. The Nems weren’t wasting any time. From all across the system, harvesters were fleeing for their one remaining exit point.
‘Shit,’ he said. ‘That’s practically back where we started.’
‘Better get busy, then,’ said Zoe.
Mark reopened the channel to Ariel Two. ‘Ann, I need weapons support. We’re going after that last carrier. You coming?’
He sent her flight data, showing how to park the nestship inside the spinning array.
‘On it,’ said Ann.
Mark spread his skipping ropes wide, dropping spin almost to nothing. He needn’t have bothered. With a burst of surprising agility, the Ariel Two danced inside, leaving the fronds wobbling from gravity distortion.
‘Are we going or what?’ said Ann.
Mark ramped the spin up and headed out, cutting above the ecliptic and down again. As he dropped away from Sol faster than light, the harvesters all appeared to slide backwards on their flight paths. As he returned, they all rushed forwards, manoeuvring to leave with a manic ant-like deliberation. He counted down the seconds, watching the final carrier spin up. Most of the harvesters weren’t going to make it. However, nine of them already had.
Mark dropped warp just in time to see the carrier wink out. He bellowed his frustration, slamming the roof of his bunk.
‘They got away,’ said Ash.
‘Under the circumstances, this is not a fail,’ said Zoe. ‘The home system is intact. The number of lives lost is minimal. This is where we count our blessings.’ She flicked open the channel to the Ariel Two. ‘Sorry to bring you out here for no reason, Ann. With the carriers gone, the rest of the Nems can’t get out. But this entire system still has to be cleared otherwise the drones will swarm and build another.’