Fear the Future (The Fear Saga Book 3)

by Stephen Moss

  For the Nomadi PM, the choice felt just as impetuous, but its leaders had allowed it perhaps a touch more resource and time to consider the chance of revolution, either of itself, or by its more powerful allies. Even so, it still responded to Shtat’s call to arms more as a reflex than a thoughtful choice.

  For this was not something that could have been actively prepared for. The military units were individually isolated and encapsulated, if only to protect them during the heat of battle. They could be spoken to only by their commanding AMs, and any order to them had, until they declared against the Armada, passed through the Arbite’s hands.

  But all thought of machination, rule, and treaty was irrelevant now as the swords came out. At the knife’s edge, in the shielded pilot’s seat, there was only the instant, all-encompassing battle. For the Skalms, for the minds that inhabited them, this time, this exclamation point at the end of a conversation they had not even been party to, this was a time for action.

  The Mantilatchi and Nomadi PMs, unable to combine their forces from their disparate places in the fleet, instead took the first second of battle to pull inward, dragging themselves into two loose balls of fire, swimming and accelerating around themselves as they launched into a randomized dervish spin that was already lacing the voids around them with fire.

  But the greater numbers of the responding Mobiliei forces were moving as well. At first swimming out and away from the focusing loci of each rebelling sector’s forces, and then forming into squadrons and starting to stab and probe at them, lashes of light whipping this way and that as the two sides danced around each other in the first moments of conflict.

  From only two light minutes out, Banu watched as the first sign of the battle reached her, the wall coming suddenly to violent life. The signal arrived a moment later, bouncing around subspace as the far-reaching eyes of Earth watched the enemy line light up. She screamed at the sight, partially out of delight but partially out of frustration. If she could have redoubled her efforts to close with them, she would have, but like her fellow pilots, she was already giving everything she had, their arrowhead formation, striking out from Earth right into the torrent ahead.

  Banu: ‘they have turned! you have done it, father! he has set his fleet to join us!’

  Her heart was pumping hard, sending out five foils of white-hot impulse as she drove herself outward to join the fray, but there was something between them still. The unfortunates. The sad inhabitants of a no-man’s land that was about to be crossed at speed.

  Mynd:

  Guowei: ‘we are on it, mynd. pilots, i have inputted a thruway. the leading point will open them, while the flanking ships separate the remaining pieces.’

  ‘Thruway’ was an accurate enough description. As a final courtesy to the Yallan raft, a warning was sent, telling them simply to ready themselves, but the chairman did not, in the end, have the PM disseminate it. She watched as her peoples’ end came at them from Earth, as the crematorium’s fires ignited.

  Maybe the Hemmbar will have recorded their story, the chairman thought, but she did not really care anymore. She was, at the end, only sad that she would not know how it all turned out. But her care was only academic. She knew she had no horse in this race anymore, her stable was only knacker’s fodder now.

  The TASC arrow sharpened as it came up, pulling inward as the lead ships redirected some of their stellar power forward, lancing into the dark mass in front of them. The power of the blast rippled throughout the big raft, buckling it instantly, but this was just the first stab of the tantō, a blade that now twisted in seppuku rage as the earthfleet thrust onward, slicing the belly of the Yallan raft and parting it with hot steel.

  The fleet closed with increasing speed, but this final blockade was also moving, and so fell forward onto its destiny now. At the last moment, Guowei untethered his horses, giving them free rein to pursue the final glancing and cut their own swathes. The result was a bloom of white fire illuminating the last instant of the Third Yallans as the arrow past through the disintegrating mass, dissolving it in fire and surging onwards toward their real foe.

  - - -

  Ahead, closer now but still out of range, the job of the rebelling fleets was not so easy. In fact, they felt less like the sword and more like the belly. They had, by steady, violent resistance, managed to stave off most of the Armada’s cuts, but their efforts to move closer to each other and help defend a section of space while the cavalry came up had also been repulsed.

  But this was all just the first swipes, the opening gambit. It was, they knew, only a matter of time before the axe came down. The only question, now, was which force would feel it first. The wall of ships, once united in purpose, had shifted and gathered over the battle’s first minutes, and now resembled a pile of magnetized particles, swimming along unseen lines as they gathered around the two rebelling poles, attracted and spurned by the forces of violent opposition.

  Now, without warning to either side, the order came to push in one direction, to rush one side, and the picture shifted. It quickly became clear that it would be the Nomadi that would be the first to fall, as the six hundred attacking Skalms suddenly veered to one side like a stampeding herd, rushing the Nomadi position with horns lowered. Their shifting and sliding form seemed to stand for a moment, but then the ball of atomically charged Skalm particles broke under the weight of enemy fire and started to unravel.

  For each pilot, the fight now became a tactical imperative, a personal thing as strategy became impossible in the tight space of battle. If any had thought to question why they were now fighting their own, and indeed many had, the question really needed only one answer. Whatever decision had been made by whatever distant leader, they now found themselves hunted, and they must either fight or die, not that the two choices were mutually exclusive.

  Here now, though, another combatant entered the fray. It was not the earthfleet, they were still precious moments out, but the carrier ship, which reintroduced itself to the universe not as an object, but as a source of reignited might, its huge engine instantly blaring as it blinked back into existence, a great spotlight shining its intense beam on the fleeing Nomadi force.

  The blow was a blunt one, a bazooka fired at a swarm of flies, and normally this mammoth blade would have no place in the reflexive subtleness of Skalm battle, but now, in the rush of retreat, not all the Nomadi’s pilots were able to dodge the beam, and knew their end as a final flash of white heat that evaporated them to quick dust.

  The Mantilatchi were not immune to their comrades’ plight, but this stolen moment of respite was going to be brief, and they needed to use it for their own ends. While the one ball of resistance caved, the other now exploded outward, countering and flanking, extracting a stiff toll for the Nomadi’s extinction.

  Banu could not know which were her father’s forces, and she could not know that he was not even among them, but she, like Guowei, saw the momentum they were briefly claiming and called out for it.

  Banu: ‘there, we can …’

  Guowei: ‘i see it! go, suyoil, go! take them into battle. mynd, help m …’

  But Mynd was already doing it, and now language left them as well, as the machine intertwined with Guowei and they sent their final orders pulsing out through the fleet, a series of plans, ideas, and contingencies coming as immediate and potential formations and firing patterns, their last blessing before they released the children upon the wall.

  Chapter 66: Crapshoot

  In truth, O-Pu had no idea what was going on when the battle started. For her, the sudden break in the fleet’s ranks might as well have been a million miles away, like the approaching Earth. All she knew was that the final moment was getting close now, that at some point soon the Armada would engage, and her role would come to a head.

  If Shtat had been able to get a message out to her before he catalyzed events, he would have. But such a message would only have risked revealing O
ther Pulujan’s existence, maybe even her location, while also being entirely unnecessary.

  For the carrier ship would send its own warning, an alarm that caused every repair and maintenance bot in and around the ship to drop, instinctively, to the nearest anchor-points and grasp them with all their considerable strength.

  O-Pu was surprised, even though she had been somewhat expecting this, as nothing could quite prepare her for the sensation of the hulking ship bringing its massive engine back online and warping back into reality at the same time.

  The stars reappeared in the sky for only an instant before the void around the ship exploded with the sunlike glow of the carrier’s thruster. Where it was going or what it was pointing at, O-Pu did not know, but she did know that this meant it was time.

  It was a realization that came with its own share of relief and sadness. If she was going to do this right, she was going to have to get her hands dirty, and given that she was probably doomed anyway, she didn’t know of any good reason not to go the whole hog.

  As the carrier flashed itself back out of reality, protecting its easily targeted form from return fire, O-Pu sent out her last viral kill code into the repair bot’s AI. This was not a temporary distraction code, this was a one-way ticket, and O-Pu smiled as the dumb animal she had lived within for the last year finally bit the bullet.

  “Good … fucking … riddance,” she said with relish, as she took full control at last, and rose to her feet. She didn’t have long. The carrier was reorienting itself, moving under the surface like a U-boat, so that when it reappeared, its enemies would enjoy a brief moment of surprise before they were able to turn their guns on it.

  But it would be the carrier who would be surprised, thought O-Pu, clambering from handhold to handhold as she silenced another AM call for the bot to reinitialize. They would come for her eventually. But she would have her fun first.

  She saw the opening in the hull she sought, one of many that would serve her purpose. A bot was rising out of it, heading out on some mission.

  “Gloves off!” she shouted into her helmet as flung herself at the machine, driving her fists forward as hard as she could into the confused robot’s center and sending it careening away across the wide shell of the carrier.

  It would be back, though, damaged, but no longer blind to her presence as it was quickly directed to seek out whatever rogue bot had just struck it. Other Pulujan did not wait around for it, though; it was not her concern. Swinging inward through the egress the other bot had just come out of, she pulled and kicked her way forward, grabbing at the insides of the ship to draw herself inward.

  Finally, clearing a corner, she pivoted herself on a pipeline and threw herself at a fat conduit ahead. It was a stem, a phloem moving nutrient-rich effluent to waiting processing centers. She hit it and hugged it, letting herself enjoy this crazy moment.

  “Elder,” she shouted to no one, “how do I know you came up with this plan, you crazy bastard!” She laughed maniacally and she set her body to vibrate at a given frequency. She could not know whether her older brother had, indeed, come up with this harebrained scheme, but it did not matter.

  She was genuinely curious about how this was going to go as her mechanical limbs reverberated around the thick pipe and the warbling signal started to echo through the system. It had a certain poeticism, she supposed. The liquid inside the system, while variable in small quantities, had an all-too-consistent consistency en masse, and she used that now. The wavelength now being transmitted through it caused it to oscillate, itself a harmless effect, until it reached the matching wavelength crimps O-Pu had spent the last year putting in pipes all across the ship-wide system.

  Nothing happened for a while, and Other started to worry as she felt the telltale clanking of approaching kin coming to stop her rogue self. But the blockages, once caused, became quickly magnified, and as a thousand capillaries suddenly closed, the pressure began to rocket upward in the system’s heart.

  O-Pu felt it building, felt the fat pipe she was embracing start to shout in protest, and she began to laugh. The tremors became bigger now. The process was taking on a life of its own, unstoppable, as clogs solidified and compounded themselves into dense plugs, and the system, unable to find enough clear routes, threatened to release itself in other ways.

  Other pushed away now, sensing the process had reached critical mass, and thrust herself to one side. She thought about turning to fight the repair bot rounding into the space to seek her out, but knew it would be better to simply hold on as the main artery of the system began bulging outward and then ruptured, like so many others around the carrier’s personnel quarters.

  The bot was reaching out an opened hand to grab O-Pu’s shoulder when the pipe burst, a mega-gallon flow discharging itself into the space and washing the ill-prepared bot away.

  “Eat shit!” laughed O-Pu hysterically, as the wave of effluent filled the space and swam outward.

  She tried to ignore the fact that her own pressure seals were also screaming at the sudden barometric shift, but if they weren’t tested, and, in the end, broken by the pressure, then nor would other systems be. She had known this.

  The vacuum of space was, in many ways, a boon to an engineer. Without gravity, air, or, most importantly, moisture, so many problems that plagued an atmosphere-based machine were inherently moot. Unfortunately for the carrier’s systems, O-Pu had just reintroduced the most troublesome of those factors in the form of a massive hemorrhage of waste, the system voiding itself into the void, indiscriminately frying systems as it went and wreaking a special kind of havoc on the big ship’s nerve center.

  - - -

  The carrier reappeared into space as planned, its military systems shielded from the waste clogging up its crew spaces, but the AMs and PMs that had once liaised between it and its masters were notably silent now, corrupted by the foul flow, or busy trying to save engulfed cryo-units and the people sleeping within.

  With only a portion of the Council now able to instruct its many PMs and AMs, the Arbite took over in earnest, phasing the big ship back into reality. This time, though, it aimed its beam at the face of the arriving earthfleet, if only to pause it just a moment longer.

  It was a moment they were forced to give, and it was an important one, at least for the remaining Nomadi fighters, as the respite they had hoped for did not come and the main strike force was able to finish what it had started, leaving only a few remnants spinning away, damaged or dead.

  The war was only minutes old when the remaining five hundred Mobiliei Skalms bucked anew, wafting in an almost beautifully harmonic form to bring themselves into the shape of a fifty-thousand-mile-long scythe that now came slicing back in, right into the remaining core of Mantilatchi craft.

  The renewed line forced them to part, further dividing their number as the blade now transformed again and encircled the smaller subgroup, washing inward into a focusing point of flame that momentarily shone with a brightness of a supernova, a shockwave of missed fire splashing outward as the larger force flew inward on an apparently suicidal swing that suddenly passed through itself, exploding outward with a force that matched its implosive crush.

  But as it expanded once more, there was only a scattering dust left where the divided core of Mantilatchi ships had once been, a quickly vanishing cloud of debris that marked the graves of that group of rebels, and those of their attackers they had managed to take with them in their last moments.

  Suyoil spoke into the last second before the main battle walls impacted. Their only advantage now was, as Guowei had seen, their ability to close as one on a partially scattered fleet. He had prepared for it as best he could, sending them ever so slightly to one side so they could curve back inward, like a spinning bowling ball coming down a cosmic lane, almost five hundred dynamite skittles getting ready to rebuff their progress with their very lives.

  Wednesday God: ‘our field is set.’

  Banu: ‘good luck, friends.’

  Friday G
od: ‘good glancing, brothers!’

  And so it came to be. The final passing. The moment of truth. Less than two seconds in the end. An eruption of monumental power as the two fleets blared their hearts out at each other, bursting into ecstatic spasm as they lashed their particle whips outward, a sheet of blinding white visible across the solar system as the irresistible force of one smashed into the immovable resolve of the other.

  Chapter 67: Numbers Up

  Quavoce, now but a hushed echo of the Agent he had once been, stared at the sky through Minnie’s eyes while they waited. He was still without his real self’s memories even though he had given his, a poor trade, perhaps, but that had been his devil’s contract.

  He did not care about that now, anyway. His real self was, he imagined, even now being taken apart, mentally at least. A likely end given that they had seen from the Armada’s fracturing that two sectors had clearly turned after the rejoining.

  Good. He had done the right thing. But that would not be much consolation if she was lost. In his desperation to hear what had happened to Banu, he started to turn over scenarios in his mind. What, he asked, if he had betrayed the humans, bargained with his other self for Banu’s life, could he have protected her, could he have saved his daughter?

  But he would not have been able to look her in the eye then anyway. She would never have forgiven him. The question now was would he forgive himself if she died.

  This interminable light minute took an age to pass. The signal had gone cold. The subspace lanes were silent in the aftermath of the strike. But the image came through again, at last, a picture, a haze of space revealing itself after a million lightning bolts filled the heavens. As the sky’s retina recovered, the stars began to reappear, and among them a number of moving bodies resolved, vastly reduced now, the cataclysmic collision of wills having ripped so many of them to pieces.