Piloting transports or scout ships would never have offered her the rush of diving at 0.3mms through space in an inverted spin. It would never have enabled her to command weapons in the form of fighter jets with a thought or outmaneuver foes through asteroid fields or skim the buffeting edge of an atmosphere. It would never have allowed her to become so integrated with her ship that the ship may as well not exist at all.
She knew what others called her when they thought she wasn’t listening—adrenaline junkie, speed addict, bat-shit cracked—but she had never cared. Even if they were right, it was what she wanted. It was what she was alive for.
Now, staring at the list of fallen colonies in utter shock, for the first time in her life she felt brazen, primal outrage against an enemy. She felt a profound, elemental yearning to protect all the people out there from these invaders, from these monsters stealing their worlds and their lives.
“We’re in a fair bit of trouble, I’d say.”
She jumped, then hurriedly turned to find the speaker.
Field Marshal Eleni Gianno—the Supreme Commander of the Senecan Federation Armed Forces—stood next to her, arms crossed over her chest.
Morgan snapped her feet together and hand up in a hasty salute. “Ma’am. Marshal Gianno. Commander Morgan Lekkas, 3rd Wing, Southern Fleet.” Clueless as to what to do next, she glanced back at the map. “I had no idea it was this serious, ma’am.”
“Few do. It became this serious very rapidly. Far faster than we’ve been able to react.”
“Ma’am…Brython is less than a kiloparsec from Seneca.”
“Yes, it is. I suspect the aliens can be here in hours if they so choose. The one factor acting in our favor is as they advance, they reach more worlds—and larger ones—in need of destruction. Slaughtering entire planets takes time.”
The two of them stared silently at the map for a while longer. Finally Gianno looked to her. “Thank you for coming, Commander. We’re at last beginning to piece together data on the aliens’ capabilities and tactics. I’d like to review some of the analyses STAN has generated with you.”
She frowned hesitantly, not at all clear why the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces wanted to review anything with her…then arched an eyebrow in spite of herself. “STAN?”
“Strategic and Tactical Artificial Network, the military’s state of the art synthetic neural net.”
“But…STAN?”
Marshal Gianno shrugged. “The Alliance is calling theirs ‘ANNIE.’ The warenuts in Tech weren’t about to be outdone and spent two weeks coming up with an acronym that resulted in a silly name. So what do you think?”
“I’m glad to help, ma’am. But may I ask why me?”
“Word is you’re the best fighter pilot in the Federation, possibly in the galaxy. You’ve refused promotion three times in four years, ostensibly because you didn’t want to give up the cockpit. And in my mind with good reason, because your superior officers insist you control the battlefield like no one else. Your biosynthetics and personal ware are bleeding edge, and that’s just the upgrades we’re aware of.”
Morgan started to protest that she wasn’t hiding any gray-market ware—which of course she was—but Gianno held up a hand to silence her.
“It doesn’t matter. In fact, you’ll probably need a few more upgrades before long. Whether in days or weeks, these aliens are going to come for Seneca and we have to be ready for them. There are numerous pieces to the puzzle of doing so, but one of them is determining how to take out their multitude of small interceptor ships.”
They had reached a cloistered space containing three separate screens, two control panels and a circular table. Two of the screens looped footage of what appeared to be an engagement by a military force of the alien ships above a planet. The vid focused on the sea of strange insectile vessels swarming the region.
She dropped her hands on the table and leaned in to study the screens, forgetting she probably should still be standing at attention. “That’s a lot of ships. Far too many for frigates to destroy. They’d be decimated before taking out a tenth of them, assuming frigates could take out that many. The alien vessels are larger than fighters but faster and more maneuverable. Still, our fighters are the only craft which stand a chance of going toe-to-toe with them.”
She eyed the Marshal beside her. “Ma’am, where is this? Are we engaging the aliens somewhere? New Riga, or Lycaon?”
“New Riga and Lycaon are gone. This is from Messium, yesterday.”
“Messium? The Alliance sent us this data?”
Gianno gave her a mysterious smile. “As I said, events are moving very rapidly.”
“How did their fighters do against these ships?”
“Better than the frigates, but at too high a cost. Three times as many fighters were lost as alien ships destroyed.”
“In a war of attrition, we lose.”
“Quite. We have analyses of their structural weaknesses, minimal though they are, as well as their flight patterns and tendencies. Commander, I’d like you to study it and work with the Artificial to devise a strategy for besting them.”
“I’ll need full-sensory immersion for the data and a remote interface with the Art…uh, STAN.”
Gianno motioned toward a door on the left wall. “If you’ll follow me, everything is set up for you.”
56
SIYANE
UNCHARTED SPACE
* * *
FOR THE SECOND TIME IN a month, the Siyane rose to carry them away from an inhospitable planet which shouldn’t exist. As before, the ship would carry them home as bearers of vital information which could well mean the difference between the survival or destruction of humanity. But not yet.
“Before we leave this space, I’d like to try to find the other portal. If this is a ‘lobby,’ there’s another gateway here somewhere.”
Beside her Caleb swung his chair around to face her, his expression unreadable. “Okay.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me why?”
“I don’t need to. You want to find it because it’s unknown and thus enticing. Also because you want to understand this place and these aliens.”
She shifted away from him, a little unnerved. He hadn’t been joking when he said he was a master at reading her. “Something like that. I realize we need to hurry—believe me I do—but I feel like it may be important.”
“I agree.”
Her gaze jumped back to him. “You do?”
“Absolutely. I suspect Mnemosyne—Mesme—was largely honest in what it said but there was a prodigious amount it didn’t say. We ought to gather as much information as we can before we return. I doubt we’ll get a second chance.”
She smiled, relieved. She hadn’t relished arguing with him and would probably have relented if he had disagreed with any fervor.
The rumble caused by the atmospheric traversal vanished as they cleared the last remnants of the planet. She arced the ship one hundred eighty degrees and stood to examine the scene outside the viewport.
Nothing. Nothing but the pervasive, empty blackness.
Caleb came to stand beside her. “Alex, how did you know the planet was there? It doesn’t seem possible.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t know a planet was there—I only knew something was there. I wish I could explain it better, more concretely than an inherent sense of how space should and should not be. Not sure I’ll ever be able to, though.”
She found the TLF wave on the spectrum analyzer, pulled in navigation and set a course. “The system will tell us as soon as it picks up anything. Come on, let’s get your eVi back up and running.”
He laughed lightly. “That would be outstanding. I find the quiet has worn out its welcome.”
They had barely finished rebooting his eVi and confirming it was operational when an alarm rang out.
“Shit.” Alex bolted to the cockpit and magnified the radar. It displayed ten large red dots approaching. “I guess we get to learn whether the proje
ction shield works sooner than we expected.”
It quickly became apparent the craft were not the smaller squid-like ships but superdreadnoughts.
As the vessels approached, their trajectory never altered. She withdrew to maximum visual distance and watched as ten of the ships flew single-file toward the portal into the Metis Nebula.
Only after the last ship had passed beyond sight did she let out the breath she had been holding. “So that worked.”
He squeezed her shoulder. “Damn straight it worked.”
She appreciated the vote of confidence but still frowned. “When we got here the portal was closed, as though they weren’t planning on using it for a while. I wonder why they’re sending additional ships now.”
He leaned against the half wall of the cockpit and crossed his ankles, much as he used to do before he had a chair. His eyes flickered to the radar, then the blackness outside the viewport. “Because we’re fighting back. These are reinforcements. The aliens realized it’s going to take more firepower than expected to subdue us.”
“Then we definitely need to hurry. All our ships can use this new cloaking shield—let them find out how much firepower it takes when they can’t see us.”
Her voice had risen in growing excitement; she wrangled it back under control. One hurdle at a time. “They may be building these ships here in this space, in which case I can extrapolate the location of the shipyard from their trajectory. We should try to determine how many ships they can field and how fast they can crank them out.”
Once underway she leaned back in the chair, though it couldn’t be called a relaxed position. She toed the chair in increasingly wider oscillations. “I’ve been thinking.”
“I can tell.”
She winced. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be. And what have you been thinking about?”
“The code the aliens use for the cloaking shield.”
“Again?”
The retort earned a look from her. “More. It’s written in a peculiar, distinctive style which is very different than the way we design code. But though it’s highly sophisticated and not solely because it’s written in ternary, it felt rigid. Formulaic. Now, maybe that’s because it’s performing a rote, repetitive function, but….”
She considered the next part a final time before voicing it aloud. “Mesme said the attacking ships were unmanned, run by AIs. What do you suppose the odds are they’re running on the same underlying type of code as the cloaking shield? I don’t mean using the same functions, but written in a similar manner?”
He gave it some consideration as well. “Based on what little we learned about them, I’d say it’s likely. The aliens seem to view machines as built for a specific purpose or to do a specific task. I bet they long ago developed specific methods of implementing both.”
She chewed on her bottom lip while she decided whether she was ready to make the claim. “By studying the code, someone—I doubt I can do it, but a quantum specialist, or if they fail an Artificial—might be able to figure out ways to exploit it. If the code running the ships is designed the same way perhaps we can develop electronic attack routines to disrupt the programming. And should we have the opportunity to interact directly with it there’s a good chance we can corrupt it.”
She shrugged. “It’s just a thought. I’m almost certainly overestimating our capabilities. And we’ll have to get the code to someone who’s legitimately intelligent and not a bureaucrat and they’ll have to get approval—”
“It’s a brilliant idea, Alex.”
Her nose scrunched up. “You think?”
“I do. In fact, if you’re able to pull off what you’re talking about doing—” The beep of the long-range scanner cut him off.
“Did we reach the shipyard already?” She swung to the HUD and magnified the scanner. It displayed a monolithic structure as well as multiple smaller objects. The edifice grew in size until coming into visual view.
“Holy hell.”
The facility stretched ten kilometers in length and six in width. Modular units connected into larger sections until they joined together in a single assembly line dwarfing the ships themselves.
The chambers weren’t fully enclosed, and hundreds—possibly thousands—of mechs bustled around inside. Forty squid patrolled the perimeter in defensive formations. Guarding against them?
Two complete superdreadnoughts hovered outside, presumably waiting on the ship currently being assembled and some number thereafter. It appeared they moved in packs.
“More reinforcements.”
“Afraid so.”
The hull of the ship under construction materialized as they hovered there, the mechs working at a level of precision and speed she had never witnessed. Twelve minutes after their arrival the superdreadnought slid out of the chamber and joined its brethren to wait.
“So a lot, and quickly.”
“Yep.”
“Caleb, if the aliens can produce ships this fast we won’t stand a chance. Even if the cloaking shield provides us an advantage, the aliens will simply replace whatever we destroy within hours.”
“Maybe we can shut down the portal somehow. Prevent them from coming through or blockade it.”
“I doubt we’ll be able to spare the ships. But it’s a problem to tackle after other problems.” She kneaded her temples, then waved at a faint blip on the screen behind the facility. “Want to bet this is the aliens’ portal?”
“No way am I betting against you.”
“Smart man.” She leveled a final dark glare at the shipyard and pulled away, giving it a wide berth as she eased past.
“Ni khuya sebe….”
“That is one way to put it….”
A portal hung suspended in space before them. Easily ten times larger than the one leading to the Metis Nebula, the scale defied comprehension.
It differed in several other respects as well. The ring alone spanned over a kilometer in diameter, comprising nearly a quarter of the structure.
Woven into the ring were multiple threads of white luminescence. She hazarded a guess they represented artifacts of a power distribution or operating system.
The material filling the ring was the glacier blue hue of Mesme and Hyperion. Also, the material wasn’t plasma exactly but more akin to a throng of lightning leaping among conductors.
Her fingertips drummed on the dash. The initial shock was beginning to wear off and her mind raced in a jumble of tangled loops. “So Mesme’s universe is through there.”
“I expect it is.” His hand landed atop hers on the dash, halting the erratic rhythm. “Alex, we cannot go through it.”
She stared at the flashing, dancing plasma lightning filling the portal. It sat there, open and inviting. “I know.”
“We have to get home. Galaxy to save and all?”
“I know.”
“People are dying.”
Dammit. She didn’t want to be the savior of humanity. She never had. She didn’t want to be the vanguard—of destruction or salvation. What she had really wanted was to be a girl whose father lived to show her the stars. Instead she had been left to wander them alone. Until she discovered someone who saw the stars as she did.
“I know. Okay, we’ll…hang on.” The incredible phenomenon in front of her was forgotten as she zoomed the spectrum analyzer. She filtered out the noise and decreased the band to measure the lowest tenth of the spectrum. “No fucking way.”
“Is this what I think it is?”
“Depends on what you think it is.”
“I think it’s our TLF wave being sent out on multiple trajectories.”
“Then no, it isn’t what you think it is.”
“Wait, it isn’t?”
“No. It is fifty-one unique TLF waves fanning out in three semicircles, vertically spaced 45° apart and horizontally every 10°, each one shifted 0.001 Hz up or down the spectrum. Except for the final signals on each end of the fundamental plane, which repeat our 0.0419 Hz frequency.”
The TLF wave they had followed from the Metis portal continued in a direct horizontal line to the middle of the far more colossal one. She was unable to measure the signal beyond this point, so she couldn’t say whether it continued on. Her instincts told her it was being generated by the ring itself. This was its origin point. Especially considering it also served as the origin point for fifty additional TLF waves.
“I admit this changes things.”
Attempting to understand the phenomenon better, she fidgeted with various settings. “Yes, it does. Why didn’t I pick these up when we first came through? Do the signals not extend very far?”
She reached for the controls. “Let’s follow one, see where it ends.”
Caleb leaned in beside her to study the readout “The first horizontal one, on the far right. We should be methodical about it.”
“But the first one’s the same frequency as ours. We might end up caught in an infinite loop or something. Let’s follow the second one.”
She swung the ship around, again briefly awed at the scale and complexity of the immense ring as they passed by, then lined up on top of the selected TLF signal and followed it….
…until it vanished.
Nothing but unending blackness in all directions. The signal simply terminated. Which, of course, was impossible.
“You don’t suppose….”
“Hell yes I suppose.” She centered the ship and sent the gamma wave which had opened their portal.
A ring identical to their own sprung forth to fill with luminescent golden plasma.
She took a deep breath and blew it out through pursed lips, giving her brain time to rearrange not only its notions of space but the nature of the cosmos itself.
“We’re not the only ones.”
“No, it appears we are not.”
“I don’t….” Her hand rose to work at her jaw. “Caleb, do you have any idea what this means?”
“I have several, of varying degrees of nefariousness and amorality. A couple swing the opposite direction to inspiring, bordering on transcendental.”
Vertigo: Aurora Rising Book Two Page 37