by Stephen Moss
As Gurdy settled himself, though, a thought brushed across his mind for an instant before he banished it. A thought of his coming furlough.
There had always been two schools of thought when it came to pilot isolation, but time had shown that, however tempting it was to lock potential brains away and subsume them in the Skalm’s world, such routes led, inevitably, to disassociation, and with that, came indifference. Indifference to whatever mission was being assigned, indifference to the ideals of the nation that had bred that pilot and built that Skalm, and indifference, in the end, to their own very survival.
A meaningless life was a life more easily forgone, and while they needed pilots who were willing to sacrifice themselves if necessary, they also needed pilots who were committed, and driven, with a will to fight. There was a crucial difference between a willingness to die and a desire to.
So Gurdy was due a furlough. Three days, nine hours, and twenty-three minutes from now. And for one complete cycle. But he had no time now for such thoughts as he focused. Focused on the glance that could happen any moment.
Then, without warning, the flash came.
…1…
The life of Witchypoo was a good one. It met people, it reminded them it was real. This was met with skepticism and often scorn, and then, after they verified the fact with their AMs, the fun began.
Witchypoo was a pet. A mascot. A robust, four-legged animal, with a thick, lush coat, big eyes, a soft, twitchy little nose, and dangling tongue that liked to loll out of its oft-agape mouth.
After hundreds of years of careful breeding, and then more direct manipulation of Witchypoo’s genes, young Witchypoo was riddled with adorable flaws. Witchypoo was inherently fascinated by anything squeaky; a whistle, a bird, a toy, Witchypoo could not resist it. Witchypoo also loved to horse around, tumbling and throwing itself into mock battle with anyone that tried to pry away whatever trinket Witchypoo had taken a fancy to.
And, of course, Witchypoo was incorrigibly ticklish, and that, almost inevitably, was the first thing anyone did when they realized they were in the presence of one of the fleet’s true-pets. Unlike the many simulated pets in the ether, both sentient and less so, the only difference between Witchypoo and her cousins and ancestors back home on Mobilius was that Witchypoo’s body was in hibernation in a cryo-unit, like the Mobiliei colonists themselves, a choice that many had called extravagant, but which few could disagree with when faced with Witchypoo’s big, docile, and patently lovable eyes.
And so Witchypoo waited expectantly while the group of revelers it had stumbled upon confirmed that this bundle of fluff and huggability was, indeed, a true-pet, and then, when one of them looked surprised and then shouted something and leapt forward, Witchypoo howled with elation and bounded away, so they could chase Witchypoo, chase and catch Witchypoo, catch and tickle and hug Witchypoo, as everyone must.
Yes, the life of Witchypoo was a good one.
But now, as this particular group chased the downy beast, something seemed to shudder. They tried to compute what they were seeing, but before they could even ping their AMs to find out what was happening, everything went black.
Everything.
In an instant, a million souls were suddenly cut off from their mindscapes. For many, they would never return.
Interval I: During
The swarm of missile-mines reappeared into the universe as one, synchronized by design, in their very cores, all their history focused on this tenth of a second, on getting up to their current fantastic speed so they could get here, en masse, and give themselves over to their own utter annihilation.
Over the two years since leaving earth, the swarm had reconfigured itself into a cylindrical formation, a mile wide, and two thousand miles long. Spread out along and within this formation they had continued to accelerate with abandon.
Attrition had taken its toll, the slow erosion of the cosmos plucking sometimes one, sometimes more from their midst in fleeting pocks of flame and dust. But they had surged onward, regardless, firing themselves out into the void and hurtling toward the coming Armada.
They did not care for their destruction. They were designed for mayhem, for death, theirs, and anyone who fell across their path. And now, in an instant picked by choices made over decades, by the decisions of two races to go to war with one another, one for a world, the other for their survival, this moment, this fraction of a second, became the very definition of momentous, as vital as a moment could become, as it was suddenly heated by deadly intent into a slice of supernova destruction through the fleet’s heart.
The swarm did not come at the fleet, it appeared within it and about it, a cloud translating into reality all around the massive Armada. The broadness of this stroke was a requisite, a forced thing imposed by the incredibly ephemeral moment of this encounter. Accuracy in such minuscule timeframes was nearly impossible, certainly impossible to guarantee, and so the net had need to be cast wide to have a real chance of striking home.
For many of the component parts of the swarm, the moment of reemergence was already too late even at its beginning, as they appeared already behind the fleet, and were instantly vanishing in its wake, to surge onward and outward for years, maybe centuries, maybe forever. All the work to build and launch them suddenly made pointless as the universe moved on without them.
For tens of thousands of others, those that appeared a fraction of a light second in front of the Armada, their rebirth came straight into the embrace of the fleet’s mighty plume. And so their mass was also lost almost immediately, not to space but to flame, as they were consumed in the buttressing stellar conflagration that had protected the fleet from so many other obstacles during its long deceleration.
But for those that sat between those two extremes, for the center of the swarm’s epic gamble, their journey would not be for ought. They would get the kamikaze end they so single-mindedly sought, and they would plow death and destruction into the heart of humanity’s enemies in the process.
In the framework of a Skalm, at the junction of one of its akas with the main fusion body, a missile warped into existence, fusing as it did so with the very substance of the machine at the molecular level. The forces at play as the missile-mine instantly transferred its opposite but equal momentum into the Skalm’s superstructure were almost beyond measure, and the Skalm, with all its strength and capability, was without answer. In the ensuing nanosecond, the once mighty warship spasmed into nuclear ruin.
As its engines exploded outward, releasing its power in a last throw, it ripped backward from its place at the fleet’s vanguard, crushing all it encountered for the next millisecond, until it had liquefied itself and vaporized its whole being into a streak of gore scratched back through the Armada it had once been proud to protect.
In the core of a Nomadi carrier ship, fifteen meters out from one of the military-grade Accelosphere generators that had once carried this small sector of the fleet safely through the hearts of suns, a missile warped into existence, fusing as it did so with the very substance of the walls that housed the esoteric subspace actuator. From within the core it was like the wall, once solid, once an armored shell around this beating heart of the fleet, suddenly opened up in a ragged, ugly grin, widening as it went.
But the departing missile-mine was not through. Even though it was obliterated in the instant of arrival, the kinesis of its advent continued to ripple outward through the carrier ship’s core, turning infinitesimally complex systems to molten ruin, and in doing so, rattling the core’s thick cage. The pinpoint center of the core, normally sustained at the point between universes, ever ready, warbled at the thought of freedom, as if sensing its prison’s coming riot. As the central framework sang from the missile-mine’s blow, the pinpoint moved, finding the fissure in its confinement as it must, seeking it with inevitability, the truth of its physics manifested in sudden abandon.
Freed, it instantly ballooned outward, destabilizing as it went. Like so many captive animals, its freedom w
as also its doom, and so it vanished almost as soon as it broke loose, not with a roar, but with a pop, sucking a ten-meter-wide section of the center of the ship with it into the beyond, and lobotomizing the essential fleet craft in the process.
Farther back in the Armada’s bulk, in one of many cavities in one of many transport ships, a missile warped into existence, fusing as it did so with a bank of cryo-units. The inhabitants of those units did not know their end. Like every cartoon villain promises, they did not feel a thing as they were merged with the passing comet. Their essence, woven now into the fabric of the missile-mine, struck onward, though.
- - -
Witchypoo, with all its furry softness laid against its skin in the stillness of cryogenic sleep, was five meters away from one such event horizon. The animal met its end by being sucked into the passing tornado, pulled backward and inward into the eye of the storm along with its entire cubby and a thousand other Mobiliei that had maybe once sought solace in the simple animal’s company. They were compressed by the thundering pressure of the passing, as an epicenter formed in the mine’s wake, following it out, screaming at it for the murder it had caused for the microsecond before the munition was lost to molecular disintegration along with all of its victims.
Elsewhere, Gurdy could not find the pattern in the flash. He could not see it. The flash was too quick, even for the best of pilots. These were not glancing speeds, these were interstellar speeds, and no mind, real or artificial, could conceive a single thought in the entire length of this battle. In the moment Gurdy’s brain, eviscerated like all pilots and stored in a cylinder lodged to one side of a Skalm’s core, was lost in a similar blaze of subliming glory with a hundred seventy-five of his one thousand peers.
Even though the chairman of Third Yalla had only just been standing next to Gussy, her feisty young daughter, when she was wiped from existence, the girl’s mother did not even feel a gust of wind as the mine that killed her child passed by. For the chairman, the scene simply went black, as did all sims in the fleet, either because the generating system had been damaged or destroyed, or because the first thing every single Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Mind, and Prime Mind did as the attack etched itself into terrible history was shunt all available processing power to the Arbite, who had begun taking control of the fleet as soon as it sensed it was under attack.
Before a single person was even consulted, the Arbite had precious seconds to balance the remaining decelerating engines, stopping the fleet from tearing itself to pieces, and analyze the shreds of information coming in real-time into its mind. The Arbite was no born thing. It had no AM surrogate, and had never even spoken to a live person. It had grown up in martial confinement, bred and fed by pellets of data from committee after committee of political oversight, military strategy, and legal stricture. It was singularly focused even for an AM, monotone, without an understanding of or need for humor.
It saw only fact, and sought only truth. The truth it found now had implications, both immediate and far-reaching. That they had been attacked became more and more certain with time, though the Arbite did not communicate that likely conclusion, and its ensuing ramifications, for a full eight seconds after the attack, once it had finished bringing the fleet under control.
But as the information swelled in its mind, the truth was plain to see. The aftershock, not of the mines themselves, but of their subspace footprints, proved beyond question that these had been synthetic, and not cosmic in origin, as did the synchronization of their arrival into the fleet’s midst. As the Arbite allowed pieces of its investigation to trickle outward to the Council and each contingent’s Prime Mind, it also started to filter out numbers. Numbers of the dead. Numbers of the unaccounted for. Numbers of ships lost or damaged, though very few members of the fleet’s complement had escaped entirely unscathed.
And its immediate plan, empowered into limited action as it was by universal mandate, also kicked in. They would translate out, temporarily, to protect against further attack.
It would be costly on their systems, but they must assess and regroup. And so, a full twenty seconds after the attack that had taken seven years to plan and execute was over, the Arbite sent out orders to the Prime Minds, felt the Armada’s systems as they shakily climbed to their feet after the holocaust, and once all were ready and synchronized, took the battered Armada back into subspace for the first time since the Alpha Centauri translation five years before, there to nurse its wounds.
Interval J: and After
“Silence!” barked To-Henton, “I will impose martial order on this meeting if I have to.”
The room responded. It took a second, as passions were necessarily high, but they eventually came to some semblance of order.
“In the wake of the attack, and I think we must start calling it that, as no other conclusion seems possible, I have been appointed temporary chair. I think my first order of business, then, should be to acknowledge that we remain unable to reconnect with the transport ship that contained the chairman of Third Yalla. Though she herself is apparently stable, the AM of that ship was seriously damaged when it sustained an indirect hit.
“I am informed that a new representative from the Yallan contingent is being nominated, as the originally named successor was also a casualty of the attack, which hit the Yallan sector particularly hard.” He paused a moment to compose himself, then finished by saying, “I know our thoughts go out to them as they work to stabilize their systems.”
“If I could, acting-Chairman Henton,” said Princess Lamati, and he yielded the floor perhaps a touch too quickly for the taste of some Council members. “While I understand the seriousness of the Yallan contingent’s circumstances, I think we have more pressing matters to discuss. My AM has spent the last hour analyzing the …”
To-Henton surprised all by interrupting the princess, something he instantly regretted, but he did not let his remorse show as he reclaimed the floor. “Of course, Princess, I understand your impatience, and I am getting to the subject of the attack. We have all been privy to the Arbite’s reports, which continue to flow with a regularity that I, for one, find reassuring. But their content cannot be called good, not by any measure.
“For the purposes of this extraordinary meeting of the Council, I have taken the liberty of dividing them into three categories. The first is the attack itself: the extent of the damage and what that means for our force dispositions in what, it would appear, is going to be a much more contested war than some among us, myself included, had really anticipated.”
There were few among them who would deny having been utterly blindsided by the scale of the attack, and the acceleration in technological capabilities on the part of their enemy that it implied. He saw nods, and noted where others merely stared at the space in front of them, either because of an understandable shock, or because their own sector’s AMs were still struggling to get virtual constructs back online.
Even the spartan simulated space that they now met in, black and featureless except for their own floating personages, was more than most of the colonists and military personnel in the fleet yet enjoyed. Most of them were either now in a forced mental hibernation or facing a blank screen that simply scrolled data past them on the fleet’s status, with little or no interaction possible.
And that did not count the tens of thousands that were dead, and the even greater number that were slowly fading as the fleet’s many systems struggled to repair transport ship breaches and return power and intelligence to damaged life support systems.
“The second topic,” went on To-Henton, “is the repair plan, specifically how we will manage the extensive work that still needs to be done, including a fair and reasonable sharing of resources among contingent forces. Of course, we must also discuss how that work will affect the fleet’s resources as a whole, and I envision some tough decisions are going to need to be made.”
He let that point stand for a moment. Everyone thought they knew what he was saying, but few yet u
nderstood the full gravity of the situation. The worst hit sector had been the Yallans, by far. But the Mantilatchi had also been hurt disproportionately badly, compared with the rest of the fleet. Their partition of the vanguard, made up mostly of the most powerful drive ships, had suffered a harsh blow when a carrier ship’s subspace core had broken lose.
Like a decapitated chicken, the ship had gone rogue, and the only recourse of a recoiling fleet had been to kill it before it pulled the entire sector apart. Somewhere during the third second after the attack, they had focused the surrounding ships’ fires inwards and cauterized the wound with a nuclear fusion brand.
“And the third topic?” said the princess, urging To-Henton on with thickly feigned deference.
“Well, my Princess,” said To, trying to sound conciliatory, “the last topic must be, I think, what changes this attack forces us to consider to our strategy. After all, I think we can and must conclude from this potent counterstrike that all is not as we had supposed on Earth, indeed, it would seem something must have gone very seriously wrong with our silent advanced team, conspicuously so, given this shocking turn.”
Here the princess once again spoke up, “I am surprised, acting-Chair Henton, that you chose to put that topic last. For me, at least, that is by far the most important topic at hand, and I have several points I would like to put forward, with more to follow shortly once my war council has finished analyzing the attack.”
To-Henton went to reply but DefaLuta did it for him, a reprieve he was glad for. “Your concern is shared by all, I do not doubt that, Princess Lamati, but let us not forget that many have suffered, and are still suffering, including members of your own contingent, and I would propose that we should get our house in order, as it were, before thinking about how best to repay the humans for their welcome gift.”