Borderlander

by Joshua Guess

  A small, warm hand touched his shoulder. Crash’s voice was soft in his ear. “Don’t get stupid, Grant.”

  He smiled. “I’m not the one about to fly off by herself in a prototype.”

  She gave him a gentle squeeze and then was gone. Among the many technical schematics given to them by Child Blue were several pieces of technology Batta had been sure he could reproduce with the ship’s fabricator. Letting him toil away with integrating them with Crash’s Ravager seemed a reasonable solution to the man’s increasing solitude since Dex’s abduction.

  The rest of the bridge crew made their way down toward the belly of the ship. Iona, using her link to Seraphim, would seal every bulkhead once they were in place. Being forged from a single enormous piece of steel made the ship incredibly durable, but not invulnerable. Locked in the center, everyone would be as safe as Grant could make them.

  “On your command, sir,” Iona said.

  Grant took a breath and slowly let it out. His eyes were the ship’s eyes. He glanced at the corner of his display, showing the weapons systems under his command. For the first time since leaving the navy, the list was not a complete summation of all available systems. With all the added firepower, it only made sense to let Fen and her people manage some of the extra.

  “Do it, Iona. Take the fight to them.”

  On his display, an estimated time before the enemy fleet reached a safe jump point counted down. At maximum warp, it would take them only a few seconds to cover the distance. The timer just clicked over to two minutes when the space outside the ship vanished as Iona beat them to the punch.

  Everything happened very quickly after that.

  *

  It would have been safer to time their jump so as to arrive at their destination seconds before the enemy fleet made their own jump. It would have been too late to abort, giving Grant a golden slice of time when power in the enemy vessels would be diverted to the gravity drives. Unable to fire back with heavy weaponry, he might have taken two or three ships out in as many seconds before the rest jumped away and regrouped.

  Safer did not necessarily equal better. It all depended on your goal.

  Grant decided he didn’t give a shit about anything but the Smith. He knew the modified ship could maneuver as if it were a tenth of its actual mass—less, even—and dart around like a startled fish. He was loathe to put his crew in more peril than absolutely necessary, but stopping that ship was priority one. So like many leaders before him, he took a leap of faith in between breaths. His worry vanished, letting his trust in the strength of the Seraphim’s armor and the skill of the additional gunners guide his actions.

  The ship exited the warp bubble two hundred kilometers from the fleet and a few dozen below the plane they traveled on. Iona, with her constant feed of information from every system on the ship, could easily read Grant’s interactions with the tac array. She knew where his eyes focused, how the system interpreted signals from his brain, what his next move was going to be almost before he did.

  Not that she needed it. Grant was explicit in his intention to shoot the Smith out of the sky.

  The extra energy capacity needed to run a system as power-hungry as the gate pylons gave them a tactical advantage: Grant didn’t need to wait to fire his weapons. The rail gun was hot and ready to go as soon as the bubble dropped.

  In the span of a single second, he acquired the target and fired. The shots weren’t direct, of course, but timed with a host of variables in mind. The velocity of the ships as they closed the distance, the motion of Seraphim herself, likelihood of changes in direction based on discovery. The system analyzed and reacted in concert with Grant’s mind as the center of focus, a hybrid of human skill and ingenuity guiding thousands of computations per second.

  Between the surprise appearance and the rapidly closing distance between the ships, the Smith never had a chance of avoiding the shots. Short of a prescient helmsman, there simply wasn’t enough time to react. Grant’s triad of slugs tore through the front left quarter of the massive ship, the specialized rounds disintegrating into a cloud of relativistic shrapnel upon impact. To say they left an exit wound would understate the damage to a ludicrous degree; the top section of hull in that area essentially evaporated.

  But, primed as they were to fight, the enemy wasted no time firing their own weapons.

  The Seraphim rolled and changed direction milliseconds after the shots were away, her stealth systems keeping all other weapons ports locked closed to maintain full coverage of the coating that was her skin. The gravity systems kept Grant and the other crew from being turned into slurry from the momentum shifts, but his view of the outside gave dizzying proof to the stress she was putting on the frame of the ship.

  Space twisted as Iona repositioned, firing thrusters one second, bursts of the main conventional engines the next. His display lit up with a number of weapons radar contacts so large that it made him laugh in a low, maniacal way usually reserved for people about to die horribly.

  PDC rounds slapped into the hull, dozens and then hundreds of them, but thankfully their vector change was enough to keep enemy rail shots from landing. Grant watched as their own PDC cannons, under Iona’s control, whirred in minute arcs of staggering efficiency, bursts of three or four rounds all it took to pick off the incoming swarm of torpedoes and missiles.

  In most space-based warfare, a single pass was enough to decisively win the fight. In this case the numbers were in no one’s favor. The speeds involved were too great; seconds after the initial burst of fire, momentum carried them past each other.

  Iona had already begun moving the ship along a new course, a wide arc to maintain as much velocity as possible while moving for another pass, but physics was not on their side. The Smith had no such restriction thanks to its enhanced engines, coming to a dead stop a bare handful of seconds after having a sixth of her bulk turned into metallic vapor.

  The other ships in the fleet were as limited as Grant’s own, but also began the long process of circling around. Now that they were exposed, there was no point holding back. Iona freed all the safeties and port after port opened, modular pods on the outer hull configuring themselves for rapid release.

  The Smith blurred into motion, moving at impossible speed without the use of a warp bubble or conventional drives. Grant’s threat assessment display showed the sudden lurch of motion to be a tenth of the speed of light, which was close to the maximum Blue had calculated the system would be capable of.

  That incredible, ferocious velocity again came to a halt as the nose of the Smith erupted into a series of explosions. They weren’t small blasts; even from a distance the ribs of the ship’s fore section could be seen like bones in an X-ray.

  He could almost see the reactions of her crew, wondering what the hell had just happened to them.

  “Gotcha, fuckers,” Crash said over the comm. “Cap, the presents have been dropped off. Every one of ’em.”

  Grant smiled, the toothy grin of a satisfied predator. “Iona, the honor is all yours.”

  “Enemy vessels,” Iona said over the comm. “Your lead ship has been mined with explosives. It is crippled. Power down to standby levels or we will detonate them.”

  Grant held his breath. It was a risk, separating the Ravager during a high-g maneuver, but the new systems inside the smaller ship made it at least physically possible. There was no way to integrate the advanced engine upgrades into the Seraphim without major overhauls, but the Ravager was a different matter. Batta had put in the work, and between the ability to reduce her mass to almost nothing, bend space without creating a warp bubble, and stealth coating, Crash effectively piloted a ghost ship. Grant thought it appropriate considering the fleet they were part of.

  The gamble was in whether or not the crew of the Smith would notice the signature of the Ravager’s new engines. That was why Grant had made sure to do as much damage as possible first. The distraction was the only chance they had to get Crash in place to dust the space betwee
n them with self-guiding mines.

  It had worked like a charm.

  Except...

  “They’re not surrendering,” Iona said.

  Grant grimaced. “Looks like Krieger might have been right.”

  26

  “Search what’s left of the tent,” Dex said as he pulled away the fallen panels. “Things are going to get a lot more ugly around here really soon.”

  Ari bent to help him sort through the wreckage. “What do you mean?”

  With a tilt of the chin, Dex pointed at the corpse. “He’s a proctor. From Threnody. Every one of them has a monitor embedded in their chest. The ships in orbit will know he’s dead, and I think they’ll finish this experiment once and for all shortly after.”

  James chuffed out a laugh. “Weren’t they already doing that with the mercenaries?”

  “That would have been a nice fringe benefit, but mostly, no,” Dex said. “I think they wanted to calibrate their retrovirus or whatever it is. See how well we worked in combat. If I’m right, they want people to lose control of themselves. Turn into monsters, basically. The mercs are here to try wiping us out, and to measure how the DNA changed us. I think they have what they need. Killing the overseer is going to change things.”

  They sorted through the debris as rapidly as possible before giving up. The only items of any interest were a compact communications array, useless thanks to a biometric lock, and a small personal terminal broken by the fight. Dex knew how closely information was guarded among his people. There would be no hand written records. Every time the screen on that terminal closed, its data would be encrypted, uploaded to a satellite or remote station, and wiped from the device.

  “We’re done here,” Dex said. “Let’s search the ships for anything useful, then get out of here.”

  Omar straightened, an excited expression on his face. “Why don’t we take them?”

  James looked at him, dubious. “What, the ships? Can you pilot one? Because I hate to tell you, but I’m a clerk at a bulk goods storage facility.”

  “I can,” Dex said. “Drop ships like this have simple controls, made to be used by anyone with basic training in a pinch. But we won’t be able to fly one of them anyway. The controls will be locked by software.”

  Instead of the expected disappointment Dex expected to find on Omar’s face, the other man’s grin broadened. “Well, I’ve been a programmer for ten years, two of those working on navigation systems for the navy. I’m pretty sure I can find a way in. These things are coded as cheaply as possible. There are bound to be one of the more common weaknesses I can exploit. This one time—”

  Ari put up a hand. “How long will it take you?”

  Omar shrugged. “Won’t know until I look at it. Some methods, a few minutes. Others could take longer.”

  Dex glanced up at the sky as if new enemies should be pouring down on them already. “You have ten minutes.”

  Left with little else to do, Dex searched one of the other ships for anything useful. He came up with a few things, but when Omar called him over a short while later, his contribution easily won the day.

  As it turned out, they couldn’t take the ships. Which was not the same thing as not finding a use for them.

  *

  They returned to camp to find a weary group of fighters and a lot of corpses. Most of the dead appeared to be mercenaries, though a handful were prisoners. Dex stumbled when he recognized Penn, his chest a ragged mess, eyes open and fixed on the sky.

  “Any luck?” Fatima asked as she trudged her way toward the returning group.

  “Depends on your definition,” Ari said. “You hear those ships come in a minute ago?”

  The earsplitting howl of vessels skating through the atmosphere couldn’t be missed, and Dex thanked the universe for giving them enough time to at least return to camp. Fatima nodded.

  “We’ll have a little while before they come for us, maybe an hour,” Dex said. “We need to get everyone mobilized.” Everybody from both prisoner camps was here now, and the work Dex had discussed with Fatima before leaving was well underway. “Pretty sure the people coming down in that next ship will have power armor and guns. We don’t stand a chance.”

  Fatima let loose a string of curses in three languages. “If they’re coming to wipe us out, they won’t give us an hour.”

  Omar grinned. “Oh, I think they will. It’s going to take them that long just to find another landing site.”

  Fatima cocked her head. “What do you—”

  Just then, a blinding flash of light in the far distance lit up the sky more brightly than the local noonday sun. A chorus of startled cries filled the camp. Just as everyone was beginning to recover, a monstrous noise rent the air, as if god himself was beating on a piece of steel.

  “What the fuck was that?” Erin shouted as she pelted toward the group. “Did they just try to bomb us?”

  Omar shook his head. “Other way around. The drop ships had many security measures, so we couldn’t steal them. Too many, even. One of which was a self-destruct fail safe. I couldn’t get past it, but I was able to break the safeties and make sure the next person who brought up the admin panel triggered the fusion plant to overload.”

  Dex winced at the words. Not for the loss of life—because honestly, fuck those guys—but from a professional sense of discomfort Batta would have been proud to know he’d ingrained in his student so well. He spent half his time checking or tuning the fusion plant in the Seraphim in order to avoid this very situation. He imagined it was a similar feeling physicians went through when giving that last dose of medicine to help a terminal patient cross the invisible line between life and death.

  “Anyway,” Dex said, interrupting Omar before he could spiral into babble, “it should buy us a little time to scatter. I’m pretty sure whatever monitoring equipment they use on us is local to this area. If we want to live, we need to split up and hide in the forest, caves, whatever.”

  “Yeah, I know the plan,” Fatima said, sweeping a hand at the people packing supplies at breakneck speed. “You think it’ll work?”

  Dex smiled grimly. “Like Ari said, depends on your definition. Having to search us out in small groups will slow them down a lot, and I don’t think they’ll use a scorched earth campaign. They’ll want this place usable for the next group of kidnap victims. At the least, it’ll give us time for my people to find us.”

  There was a momentary silence in the small group, during which the sounds of consequences washed over them all. Moans of pain mixed with fearful mutters and a few terrified or grieving sobs. Dex pointedly did not look toward Penn’s still form. He barely knew the man, barely knew any of them despite all the time they’d spent together here. Solidarity had grown, even some affection, but every interaction was tempered by the harsh truth that any of them might die or lose their mind at the drop of a hat.

  “Where are you going?” Erin asked, her eyes locked on Dex’s with a fevered intensity. “Gonna hole up and hope for the best?”

  “I think you already know the answer to that,” Dex said. “I don’t like it, but for better or worse, right now I can’t just sit idly by. These people took my childhood from me. I’m gonna fight until I’m back with my crew or I’m dead.”

  27

  Crash moved through space as she never had before. Using the designs given to them by Blue—as well as a donated probe for the more exotic materials—her Ravager was a tiny but deadly needle the other ships could only barely detect before she was already past them.

  How the Children, which were created by human beings after all, were able to develop an entirely new branch of technology in a mere hundred years was a mystery. She hadn’t had a chance to ask Blue and had no idea if it would have told her in any event.

  She’d gotten the feel for the new system quickly. It took more effort than usual, but that was to be expected when the thing could move hundreds of times faster than it once had and do things like come to a dead stop in space without having
to expend any propellant.

  Crash used these capabilities with lethal efficiency. The Ravager hummed around her, almost alive and in tune with her giddiness. Its responses and maneuverability were magnitudes beyond their previous limits. She felt like a self-taught fiddler being given a priceless violin and rushed on stage to play with an orchestra. It felt like too much machine for her, at least in the sense that time to practice and familiarize herself with its idiosyncrasies and capabilities was short.

  But by god, she’d never yet found a ship she couldn’t tame and there was no damn way Crash was starting now.

  Dusting the space in front of the Smith with mines was child’s play. She dropped them on a run just over the mammoth freighter during which the Ravager almost scraped its hull. The targeting computer, thankfully reprogrammed by Iona, had no trouble launching more as she passed over it.

  And yet when the moment came, the other ships refused to surrender. The Smith was in bad shape, and all the information they had pointed to it being something like the flagship of the entire operation. Why wouldn’t its support vessels stand down?

  Crash went for full acceleration, silently giving thanks for the gravity systems preventing her from becoming red slush at the rear of the cockpit. The Ravager went straight up relative to the plane the rest of the ships moved on, stopping five thousand kilometers away and waiting for more information from her feed.

  Her own imaging systems were far less able than the ones on the Seraphim at this distance, so she ignored the fuzzy pictures in favor of the crisp incoming feed. The Smith listed in space, decompression sending its vast bulk slowly spinning. The incoming ships were already firing weapons, though the only true dangers were the rail guns. Torpedoes and missiles would almost certainly be shot apart by the PDC network, but the kinetic energy of a successful rail strike would pierce even the thick steel hide of the ship that had become her home.