by M. D. Cooper
However, Yarnes didn’t quite trust the Marsian numbers. He would be studying his own reports on the Marsian and Jovian mass signatures and engine output in order to verify that each government had provided the forces they promised.
But did it matter? This was all a show of force. In no scenario did it make rational sense for Psion to attack.
Nothing about this operation was rational. It was political. They would face off for a few days, or maybe a week, an impasse would be reached, and they would go home.
That was the historic precedent. This was a cold war, with all the advantages of ongoing tension.
He was here to provide the display and get his people home safe.
For years, Yarnes had heard complaints that the SAIs might as well be aliens. Right now, his job was to limit the collateral damage and to bring his people home safe. They were here to stop the alien invasion, and when it was all finished, he would write commendations and approve maintenance plans and get back to chasing pirates.
He glanced around the command deck, gaze lingering on the fleet status board. For a second, he considered the effects if Psion did attack, wondering how many would survive.
If this is a battle, and Mars and the JC lied, I’m in an impossible situation. I’ll be carrying this weight alone.
Yarnes looked to the far side of the command deck, where General Sickle of the Mars 1 Guard stood talking to one of his lieutenants. The liaison officer had so far proved to be trustworthy and straightforward, but Yarnes knew Sickle could only provide the information he’d been given.
Yarnes didn’t put it past Marsian High Command to mislead their own leaders. Sickle didn’t strike him as particularly duplicitous; the man might not even imagine he was being misled.
He’s here, isn’t he? He’s on the ship of fools.
If Mars betrayed Earth to gain the upper hand between the two human factions, Yarnes didn’t see an outcome where Mars would actually benefit in the long term. For better or worse, like a marriage, all human forces were together in this action.
Despite all the Humanity First rhetoric, no one could deny the threat represented by Psion, which had persisted for too long in what was essentially Earth’s and Mars’ backyard.
Ceres split Mars, Earth and the Jovian Combine, and had arrived like an unwelcome neighbor to destroy the relative stability of the neighborhood.
Without intending to, Yarnes found himself remembering the fiery speeches from the Assembly chambers, where dimwitted senators held up Psion as the bogeyman bent on destroying humanity.
He was more worried about what humanity would do to itself in order to gain the upper hand over each other.
By its very existence, Psion represented the end of human dominance in Sol—if there had ever been any dominance to be had.
“Sir,” the lieutenant at the astrogation display called from across the command deck. “We show movement on the prograde side.”
The command deck went quiet. All eyes turned to the holodisplay where the sea of confetti between Vesta and Ceres had resolved into a wing-shaped swarm. Psion was rearranging their forces away from their defensive pattern.
Yarnes squinted, not believing what he saw. “Why didn’t you pick up the new engine profiles?” he demanded.
“Sir,” the lieutenant stammered. “It just—”
The command NSAI went to emergency condition. Every display in the area showed combat status.
Yarnes looked at the stunned faces around the command deck. “I don’t need to tell anyone what this means,” he barked. “We thought we were here for a show of force. Well, it’s time to make good on our threats. I want updated combat status and all NSAIs synced. Show me the Weapon Born in the holotank. Ready first-wave missiles and get me fleet-wide shield status.”
After two heartbeats of silence, and then Yarnes shouted, “Move!”
Every officer on deck leapt into motion. Commands went out over the battle net and ships began to respond, sending in status updates as they rechecked and recalibrated their sensors.
Yarnes kept his gaze fixed on the holotank. He didn’t trust what the sensors showed even now.
Yarnes pointed at the captain near the holodisplay control. “You,” he said. The captain jumped, realizing the general had fixed his attention on him.
“Yes, sir?”
“Get rid of these icons. I don’t want any more models. I want a spectrographic analysis of all mass signatures one-half AU all the way across Vesta local space. If it’s bigger than a fucking trash can, I want to see it. Understood?”
The captain nodded frantically and shifted the display.
The holotank displayed a rectangular plane with Vesta in its center. Peaks and valleys indicated mass signatures as they were scanned by the thousand arrays reporting back to the flagship. Dots arranged themselves in lines, dancing with each update.
Yarned stood from the command chair and approached the holotank, staring down at the new display. He took a minute to orient himself, working his focus outward from the central peak that was Vesta, to the ridges and points indicating the fleets arrayed on either side. There was a rhythm and pattern to the updates.
The human ships contained, on average, five times the mass of the Psion vessels. Comparing the two battle groups, it was obvious Psion had brought a drone fleet to the fight. Even their Fishbone attack cruisers, used in the Ceres invasion, were only three quarters of the size of the average Terran vessel. These were all smaller. The points bobbed and shifted in space, swarming like insects made from static.
“Sir,” came a report, “all vessels in attack status.”
Psion had moved, but hadn’t opened their attack.
Yarnes frowned, watching the display.
They’re fucking with me, he thought.
Was this just the next phase of their defensive shifting? Psion would bring the humans to breaking point and then… they would wait. The SAIs had more patience. They always did.
Over the course of the next hour, Psion vessels formed a semicircle, holding at the same distance from Vesta as the human ships. It was obvious to Yarnes they were making a statement.
It was just another move in the game.
If he approached, they would do the same.
He maintained an open comm channel in the unlikely event Psion chose to make contact first, and then received no response.
He knew they would be monitoring all the human newscasts hinting and arguing over the possibility of war now that a field had been defined.
Yarnes figured that Psion had probably cracked certain medium-to-high level communications channels within the Sol Alliance itself. In fact, he had planned on it. He had seeded enough misinformation that his intelligence officers might learn which channel had been cracked in the event Psion acted on what they had released.
They hadn’t taken the bait.
Yarnes didn’t expect such a basic maneuver to bear any fruit. He had much higher expectations of the enemy they faced. It was possible Psion had already hacked every NSAI in the fleet. Ships all had orders to shut down AI use in the event of any anomaly suggesting they’d been compromised—that was if a crew would have time to respond in the event a hack actually happened.
Yarnes had his intelligence teams flood the channels with even more bogus data.
He sent communications requests to the Psion fleet.
Still no response….
After two hours of pacing the command deck, grilling every officer in sight, and sending two reports back to SolGov, Yarnes collapsed angrily in the commander’s seat and stared at the holotank.
His intelligence officers had debunked the possibility of cloaking technology. The small size and spread of Psion’s craft meant they could have been amassing ships slowly over the course of months, waiting until the most effective moment to close the distance between each ship and become visible to scans. Such planning indicated Psion was ready for a protracted fight—or a long wait.
Political will was everything,
and the Humanity First factions could only spur the Assembly’s anger for so long before another crisis drew their attention away. The fact that Psion had moved as they had was either a feint, a taunt, or an actual decision to attack.
Knowing Psion didn’t make threats, and didn’t respond with the emotion necessary to want to taunt an enemy, Yarnes felt in his bones this was the attack.
If this is it, then I’m getting a coffee.
As he stood, the proximity alarms went up in the scanning console. The alert spread through the fleet as every NSAI went to battle stations almost simultaneously.
Yarnes turned back to the holotank and barked at the officer to shift the display back to icons. Once again, Vesta glowed blue in the center of the tank, with the closing wings spread on either side. A collection of orange points moved from the Ceres side toward the asteroid.
Psion had launched their attack.
GLITCH
STELLAR DATE: 03.28.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Low Orbit, Weapon Born Fleet Position
REGION: Vesta, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
Psion attacked without warning. The AI drop ships fell on Vesta like black seeds. Accelerating with destructive velocity capable of turning any human vessel into powder, the Psion ships hit the surface and disgorged ground-attack mechs that immediately spread out in battle formations.
Lyssa observed operations as the Psion mechs took stock of their status then started a deliberate march across the surface. They were arrayed in ten-kilometer-wide groups, each composed of ten mechs.
Scan returned with thirty of the ground units covering a three-hundred-kilometer swath. They were located midpoint between Vesta’s equator and the north pole, and moving in an eastward direction that would carry them in a spiral over the asteroid’s surface. They had landed to the east of troughs Davalia and Saturnalia, apparently moving away from those major obstacles.
As the mechs moved along the surface, dipping into craters and climbing ridges at the edge of impact points, destroyers floated behind them, peppering the ground with projectile bombardment. The portions of Vesta that had remained untouched by human development became pitted with new craters and human structures were turned into clouds of floating dust.
After two minutes, Lyssa understood that the enemy meant to raze the asteroid’s surface. For those watching from Earth, Mars, and the JC, it would be apparent that Psion was wiping the presence of humanity from Vesta. This was a political statement after all.
She passed her assessment to Ino and Kylan, and then the rest of the Weapon Born.
Ino immediately asked,
Lyssa paused. He was correct. This was too clear cut. There had to be subterfuge.
She broadened the scope of her awareness to take in the remaining Psion ships arrayed along the equator. Which one of those carried Camaris?
What if Lyssa’s adversary was in a mech on the surface? What if she followed in a destroyer, bombing at will?
Once the mechs had been operating for just under five minutes, one of the orbital dreadnoughts split open, breaking into five new craft. Twenty more dreadnoughts did the same, spreading out along Vesta’s meridian. One came around to the Sol Alliance side of the asteroid, an obvious aggression into human-held space.
Yarnes commanded the counterattack on the main battle net. His voice was heavy with sadness as he gave the order: “Attack.”
The Weapon Born received Lyssa’s orders, and immediately broke into three elements, following her, Ino, and Kylan.
They closed on a nearby sector containing a wing of bombing destroyers first. Lyssa’s plan was straight-forward: Destroy Psion’s ability to defend ground forces or bomb the surface, then sweep back and take out the mechs.
Behind the Weapon Born’s forward assault, Sol ships moved to engage the orbital-support dreadnoughts. They were all too close to the asteroid, and Lyssa quickly predicted that the battle would break into small engagements. There wasn’t enough room to fire missiles on each other. The battle for Vesta would be fought ship-to-ship with projectiles, lasers, and particle beams.
Lyssa dipped toward the surface, moving on an intercept path with her designated bomber group. Thirty Weapon Born spread behind her, establishing attack priority. Lyssa moved to the rear of the formation without completely separating herself. Kylan and Ino did the same.
The Weapon Born attack groups closed the distance to their targets in three minutes. The destroyers continued to bomb the surface behind the mechs with no apparent adjustment to their courses.
It was only when they were within projectile distance that Lyssa recognized their plan. The Psion destroyers each opened with a barrage of particle beams that burned a path through space.
Lyssa barked commands and the Weapon Born split into separate, independent squads. In units as small as two fighters, they darted among the incoming high-energy particles and dove for the cruisers. She led the assault, breaking through to pepper the lead destroyer with depleted uranium dart-rounds.
The Psion vessel didn’t explode; it lost velocity as it fell toward the surface, striking a crater in the path of their own attack mechs. The Psion forces rolled over their fallen ship, grinding it into dust just like everything else.
Lyssa tracked every separate engagement of human and Psion ships surrounding her battlespace. Before the humans could close on the Psion cruisers, the bulk of the bombers broke into separate, smaller vessels, just as the dreadnoughts had minutes before. In seconds, the humans went from overwhelming force to an evenly matched number of fighting craft. Smaller Psion ships danced around the human vessels.
Swooping down just kilometers from the surface, Lyssa closed with three of the new enemy fighters. She tracked their maneuvers as they shifted in response to her approach. Their mass profiles and engine size were comparable to the Weapon Born fighters. In fact, she wouldn’t have been surprised if they carried similar equipment.
Working with a shared mental picture, the Weapon Born had little need of speech amongst themselves. The humans, however, filled their net with chatter, shifting between fear and elation, as they managed to destroy initial swarms of Psion fighters.
General Yarnes’ voice cut through the command net, calm and determined as he brought new resources to bear on the shifting Psion force.
With every Psion combatant destroyed, other ships split into still smaller components, each armed and agile as it maneuvered against the Sol forces. Psion had deployed a Hydra inside a Russian nesting doll. Eventually, SolGov might be fighting nanoparticles. The Psion battle group seemed to shrink and expand at will.
Lyssa’s target darted away from her, moving to strafe a ground facility that looked like a mineral storage point. The human construction went up in billowing clouds of grey dust.
Lyssa zigzagged after the Psion ship, finally catching it with her railgun.
This one didn’t have time to split into smaller components as its fuselage turned into molten slag.
Lyssa pulled away from the surface and shot back around to provide support to other Weapon Born struggling against the swarm. She received status updates from her contingent, then sent update requests to Ino and Kylan.
Ino reported back immediately. He had lost five but had taken out half of his Psion sector. It would have been a near-victory if the remaining ships hadn’t immediately split, spreading their path of destruction even wider than before.
When Kylan hadn’t reported back, Lyssa sent him a nudge over the Link. While she could still see his fighter group in her mind, his ship had gone dark. She wasn’t worried…yet. He might have moved into a comms dead-zone at the bottom of a crater.
Silence.
Lyssa rerouted her request throu
gh Ino, alerting him that she hadn’t gotten a response from Kylan. Both of them sent communications bursts but received nothing in return.
Lyssa studied the visuals from the shared net. Kylan had closed with a line of Psion mechs on the ground, turning them into slag as he dove.
She couldn’t help thinking about Ino’s question. Where was the deception? What did Camaris want?
The Weapon Born in Kylan’s group reported back. Then, following a wave of EM static, Kylan said,
Seconds later, Kylan reported back.
They had nearly swept up the entire group of Psion ground forces when a new wave hit the opposite side of the asteroid. While human forces had been engaged in the space above, Psion had slipped another ground assault through.
They were close enough to Ceres that Lyssa supposed this could go on forever. In order to stop the flow of supplies and reinforcements, she would need to cut off Psion’s communication lines with Ceres and then destroy everything in Vesta-local space.
She saw the Weapon Born were holding their own nicely against the Psion dreadnoughts. If anything, Psion seemed to be giving up positions they would have held if they were trying to maintain a long-term strategy on Vesta.