by Nick Webb
“Why?”
“Because you are the only races that have ever beaten it. You beat it together. And for that the Swarm swore vengeance. They don’t often actually enter corporeally into other universes. But for you that honor was extended.”
Proctor chuckled in spite of the dire situation. “So you were programmed with irony, too.” She held the box up, knowing that the caretaker most likely knew what to do with it. “Can you help me with this?”
“That’s why you are here, after all, is in not? You didn’t figure that part out?”
She smiled politely. “I’m afraid not.”
“Four representatives, one from each race, was required for entry to this room. The programmer knew that when that happened, when your need for cooperation was most dire, you would manage to set aside your differences and work together, and the time would be right for what is to come.” It extended a hand towards Proctor and she placed the box in its palm. It turned towards one of the machines lining the wall and started walking toward it.
Krull followed. “You have reproduction machines in here. Have they ever been used?”
“Only once each.”
At that, Proctor counted. “There are seven.” She fell into step with Krull and the caretaker. Kharsa followed behind. “That’s significant, isn’t it?”
“Of course. One for each member of the Concordat of Seven.” The caretaker said it as if it was common knowledge.
The front of the nearest reproduction machine was transparent above the waist, but somewhat frosted on the inside. Proctor approached and peered inside.
“Tim.”
“No,” said the caretaker.
“No?” Proctor spun around. “I think I know my former captain when I see him. He’s been in my dreams for thirty years.”
“No. It is not Granger yet.”
He placed the box into a slot on the side of the chamber and it locked into place. In an instant the black cover became perfectly transparent and they could finally see inside.
It was mostly air. Or clear liquid—they couldn’t tell. But there was … something, floating in the middle. Krull stooped forward to examine it. “It’s … an Interior child.” She straightened. “It is Skiohra.”
“What?” Proctor too her turn peering inside the now transparent box. “But … it can’t be.”
The caretaker pressed a few buttons. “It is not Skiohra. Nor is it human. It is … a little of both. With a dash of Valarisi.” He turned to Kharsa. “I’m sorry, Vishgane, but no Dolmasi features were needed.”
He growled a low rumble.
The caretaker cocked its head again, in a very human manner. “I apologize. I was programmed to tell that joke. I’m still not convinced, after a million years of mulling it over, that it was even that funny. Rest assured, Vishgane, that certain Dolmasi features were also necessary. Your endurance, longevity, vitality. Without these, the embryo would not have lasted this long.”
He pressed a final button, and the tiny embryo whisked away, out of the box and into the chamber.
“It won’t take but a moment,” said the caretaker. He turned to Krull. “This variety of recombination chamber is slightly different than the rest on your ship, such that integration of the embryo into the host takes but minutes, as the neural pathways of the host were already known and the embryo will find it a very fitting home.”
The seconds ticked by. Two minutes. But before the third minute finished, the light above the chamber flashed green. A lock clicked. The door of the chamber started to disappear into the floor.
Tim Granger opened his eyes, yawned, and took a step forward.
“Hello, Shelby.” He smiled. “It took awhile. A few detours. More battles. Lots of studying. But I finally made it.”
“Tim,” she began, blinking back tears. She was not going to do that again. IDF admirals do not cry, and when they do, they most certainly do not do it twice in a day. “You spent how long making all these preparations, and you didn’t have the foresight to have some clothes waiting for you?”
He looked down. “I knew I forgot something.” And when he looked up he was gaining sheepishly, nodding his head down towards his waist. “And I haven’t had one of these in a long time.”
It took her a moment to understand what he was talking about, and when she did she lowered her face in her hand. “No matter how many billions of years old they get, they still act like thirteen year old boys.”
Granger chuckled a moment, but then his smile faded. His face grew stern. “Shelby, we don’t have much time. The last I remember before you took me off Titan was that the rest of the Swarm force was on their way. They’ve been scattered throughout the local group of galaxies searching for you. They finally narrowed it down to this area of the universe. And with the meta-space detonation over Earth, they finally found it. It’s taken them a few weeks to assemble, but they’re almost here. All of them. All of them. Do you understand my meaning, Shelby? Every last Swarm there ever was or will be, in all universes everywhere, is coming here.”
Nothing she’d ever heard had disheartened her more. It was, in a word, hopeless. They were already about to be wiped out by the handful of Swarm ships that were already here. And they were just the tip of the spear?
“Well, Tim? We’re here. You’re here. What do we do?”
He took a deep breath. And another. And a third. “You know, I’ve actually been dreading this moment. For about two hundred thousands years, I’ve been dreading it. Because … aw shit. I’ll just say it. Shelby, I have no idea.”
Chapter Sixty-One
Bridge
ISS Resolute
Near Earth
The viewscreen on the front wall of the Resolute’s bridge was huge, starting at the floor and extending up to the ceiling. It was at least five meters wide, but it was still not quite large enough to fit every captain’s face on it for the videoconference, even when each face only took up a square only the size of a true-to life head. The rest of the captains had to patch in with audio. Not to mention all the CIDR fleet ships, almost the entire Caliphate Almalak Alharis Fleet, and what looked like most or all of the Russian Confederation fleet.
“And there is another matter we haven’t even discussed yet.” Oppenheimer was leading the briefing and developing the battle plan for the entire fleet. All of them. He didn’t think there’d ever been this many IDF ships assembled in one place, even during the Second Swarm War. “The planet devastator beams are one thing. But we have intelligence of an even greater threat, if you can believe it. Ceres is destroyed, yes. But it was destroyed by an artificial quantum singularity.”
A general gasp and muttering and a few disbelieving cries of dismay. “The same as during the war?” asked Captain Hellend, who’d been a decorated fighter pilot himself in the war.
“Not quite, no. These are of a far higher magnitude. Whereas the devices manufactured by the Russian Confederation back in the day were only powerful enough to absorb a certain amount of material before the in-falling mass rebounded on itself and exploded, these actually keep absorbing. They grow into an actual black hole.”
“Ceres is a black hole?” said Captain Hellend? “Good lord.”
“How do we defend against that?” asked Captain Hannant, the only man on the screen with a mustache.
Hellend grunted. “How else? We’ll just do what Granger did.”
“Hurl starships into the singularities like bricks?” said Captain Amari. She looked incensed. “Some of your crew may be Grangerites, but I refuse to adopt the same tactics as the Bricklayer,” she added, using Granger’s old wartime nickname. “People aren’t bullets and ships aren’t bombs.”
Oppenheimer shook his head. “I don’t see that we have a choice, Sadira. Earth is at stake. We’ll use any tactic at our disposal. If any one of your ships becomes too damaged to continue the fight, then you are ordered to make yourselves available for Omega maneuvers.”
A hush fell over the gathered captains. They knew the grav
ity of the order. Be ready for suicide missions. Entire capital starships. Thousands of crew at a time. It won the war thirty years ago, but at a terrible cost.
“Our first priority is to pinpoint where they are generating those singularities, and take them out if we can. Ground-based defenses will reserve their arsenal of missiles for the singularities as they appear—maybe just stuffing them with enough mass during the generation phase will be enough, who knows.”
“And what is the second priority?” asked Captain Hannant.
“Destroy the rest of the ship, Dave, what the hell do you think?” said Captain Hellend.
Oppenheimer held up a hand to silence them. No time for even friendly jabs. “I have a few other ideas. The Stennis, the Avery, the Oregon, the Angola, and the Louisiana are too damaged to fight because of their recent engagement at New Dublin. Most of their crews have debarked, and the rest have volunteered … for the first Omega maneuvers—”
His own XO interrupted. “Oppenheimer maneuvers. They’ve been uploaded to all your nav computers.”
Oppenheimer waved his commander off. “The maneuvers might not work, but they’re worth a shot. It’s a way around standard q-field shielding surrounding a typical engine. Usually, we can’t just strap a q-drive to a bomb and jump it over into an enemy’s engines because the shielding prevents it, and thankfully neither can they do that to us. But … if the object traveling through the q-field is massive enough … and fast enough….”
“Oh my god. Genius,” said Captain Hellend.
His XO nodded vigorously. “That’s what I told him, but what do I know.”
Captain Hannant finished for him. “So Captain Suzuki here will accelerate the ISS Stennis, probably starting out near the moon or so to use Earth’s gravity as an assist and to get as big a running start as possible, and when they’re close to a Swarm ship, q-jump to coordinates just outside the q-field damping layers outside one of their main engines, and bam? Chieko? Are you really doing this? Tom? Sally? Omar? Martha? You’re all in on this?”
All five of the captains nodded gravely. They were willingly sacrificing themselves and their skeleton crews. The other captains hushed into a respectful silence. “Thank you,” said Captain Amari. “All of you. Your sacrifice will be remembered. Always.” Various other captains voiced their agreement.
“And the Granger moons? Still no sign of them?” asked Hellend.
“None.”
There were a few details left to organize, and he made battle group assignments, and then Oppenheimer wrapped the meeting up and signed off.
He took a deep breath. There would be a lot of death that day. Many of the faces on that screen would not make it.
“Time to weapons range?”
The tactical officer glanced up. “Four hours, twenty minutes, sir.”
“Sir,” began the comms officer. “Receiving a transmission from someone who claims to be Patriarch Huntsman.”
“He has the gall and the balls to show his face around here?” He knew there were at least a few Grangerites among the crew, but he no longer cared about offending them. Their prophet had had a hand in the destruction of Britannia, however unintentional it may have been, and Oppenheimer wasn’t ever sure about that. “Send it to me. In my ready room.”
The door hardly slid shut behind him before he waved a hand to turn the channel on. “Tobey? Is that you? Are you on Earth, or over it?”
“Over it, admiral.”
“Then are you hoping for a torpedo up your ass? Because if I see you, I won’t hesitate.”
Huntsman chuckled. “Admiral, I’m honored you think so highly of me. I am but a tool, nothing more. Tell me, admiral, your plan is to defend Earth. Why?”
He was stunned by the question. Even a fanatical prophet should appreciate the need to defend one’s homeworld. “Are you kidding? Stop wasting my time.”
“It’s a serious question, admiral. You see, years ago, thirty years, in fact, I was not a prophet. I wasn’t even a mormon bishop yet. Hell, I wasn’t even a mormon. I was a Russian Confederation intelligence officer. My name was Oleg Yurovsky.”
Oppenheimer had been walking for his mini-bar to grab a shot of something before he headed back to the bridge. Not enough to get inebriated in the slightest, but enough to relax a hair. But now he stopped dead in his tracks. “Oh.”
“So you understand, then.”
“Do I understand? If you were corrupted by the Swarm? I don’t know. Were you?”
“I was made a friend, yes. I was brought into the Concordat of Seven.”
Oppenheimer’s fists balled up. So many. So many had been led astray by this … imposter. “But the Swarm were defeated. And every human under Swarm influence was rescued. The Swarm virus destroyed. IDF scientists came up with a way to kill it. You should have been cured, Tobey.”
“Oh, they destroyed the virus all right. But what they did not destroy was the wonder. The joy of being part of that grand whole. They did not take those memories from me. The cooperation. The camaraderie. The unity of purpose. And I’ve been working for years to make them reality once again.”
He resumed his walk to the mini-bar and poured himself a shot of bourbon. It stung a bit going down, but not enough. Not nearly enough. “You want humanity to be incorporated into the Swarm. Are you insane?”
“It seems at times I am the only sane one around these parts, admiral. No. What I suggest is, instead of fighting the Swarm, that you lay down your weapons. Power down your ships. Your defense systems. Everything. And beg for mercy. They are angry that we drove them off last time. This time they come to destroy, not to bring us into the family. But … with the proper attitude, that could change. Instead of destroying Earth, they would instead bring us into the fold. Make us part of the family … again. Just like I was. Just like I will be, regardless of what you do here today. But, I admit, it will be lonely there without all of you with me. I intend to bring as many with me into heaven as I can. When I was a mormon, I taught others that heaven would be on Earth. That part, I am making true.”
He poured another shot. “You are insane.” Another swallow, another burn. Time to stop, or he’d be incapable of leading a fleet battle. “And I’m done here. This is my answer: go to hell. Oppenheimer out.”
“Before you go, admiral, a warning. I’ve been working for years to restore some modicum of the mental bond I once enjoyed with others of the Concordat, and I’m pleased to announce I’ve finally succeeded. Many are now linked to me once again, and I’ve managed to link us back to the Swarm. Not nearly of the same magnitude as before, thanks to the Skiohra destroying the Ligature. But a small piece. And for now … it’s enough. Beg them for mercy, Christian, and you can join us too. And live. Huntsman out.”
He waved the channel off, thought for a moment, then tapped the comm to the bridge. “Lieutenant Kander, send an encrypted message to all captains. If they see Patriarch Huntsman’s ship—the one that matches the registry of what he had over Britannia—they are to shoot him out of the sky. No questions. No wait. Just shoot. Understood?”
“Understood, sir.”
“And, one more thing.” He closed his eyes and balled his fists again. “Send a broad-band meta-space message, high power, and with standard IDF encryption. Address it to Admiral Proctor.”
“Yes, sir. And the message?”
“Shelby, things are even worse than we thought. Contact me asap. End message.”
Now to see if she would trust him. No one knew more about Swarm mental control than Proctor. And if what Huntsman said was true, then the situation, as bad as it had seemed before, was now worse.
Chapter Sixty-Two
Recreation deck
ISS Independence
Gas giant Calais
Britannia system
The holographic projectors on the recreation deck were rudimentary—not nearly as comprehensive and advanced as the ones that one could find in any major city within UE—but they were enough.
Proctor gripped
the rifle far, far tighter than she needed to, and fired off several rounds at the target, some fifty meters away. Most of them went wide, but one found its mark, right in the center of its chest.
The creature collapsed into a heap. Holographic blood spurted, and a screech indicated that the thing was about to die. She filled it with another twenty rounds just to be sure. And when it had stopped making any noise whatsoever, she filled it with another thirty for good measure. A low, guttural yell started low in her throat by the fifteenth round, and by the thirtieth she was yelling at the top her lungs.
“I think it’s dead, Aunt Shelby,” said Danny, who was cradling his own assault rifle in his hands, pointing it down and off to the side. He was never one for guns, but Proctor had often taken him to the holo-range as a teen to target practice. Just like she used to do with Carla, her long dead sister. In fact, she hadn’t gone target shooting for decades since her final session with Carla, until one day when Danny was twelve and he begged his legendary war hero aunt to take him. She relented, reluctantly at first, but then rediscovered the joys of the quiet concentration, the patience as the target moved into position, the held breath as you waited for the perfect moment.
“Not nearly dead enough.” She fired off another five rounds, and the blood and flesh sprayed up into the air with in a satisfying red mist.
They had no idea what Swarm physiology was or even if their blood was red. But they’d seen the images that Lieutenant Zivic brought back from his mission inside the Swarm ship he and Ballsy had taken out, and she’d fed the image into the holo-range computer to generate an approximation, at least.