by Nick Webb
He took a deep breath. “You got it, admiral.” He glanced offscreen and nodded to someone, likely the comms officer. “Ok. I think we’re ready.”
A moment later, she knew her face, along with Oppenheimer’s, Sepulveda’s, and Granger’s, appeared on every viewscreen in the fleet. Including down in IDF HQ on the surface, and likely every government building.
“Captains, this is Admiral Shelby Proctor, here with Fleet Admiral Oppenheimer, and the commander in chief, President Sepulveda, to lead the final battle for Earth against the Swarm. There’s been a change of plans. I’m sure you all notice the gentleman to my left. This is Captain Timothy Granger. It’s a long story, too long to tell here, but he’s returned from the black hole he fell into, and he’s brought a plan that he’s spent decades perfecting to save humanity. And save all sentient life in the universe, frankly.”
She supposed they’d be far more receptive to a grand plan from the Hero of Earth prepared over decades, than an ad hoc patched together with duct tape series of actions a bunch of junior officers had come up with and hoped might work.
“Listen. The Swarm is almost here. But they are just the tip of the spear. We need to destroy all of them, right here and now. Each of you, expect a mining shuttle to arrive in your docking bay. A member of my crew will disembark, and begin an inoculation process to safeguard you against Swarm mental control. Follow their instructions precisely. Captains, you will then assign that mining shuttle an escort of at least four fighters, and follow the pilot’s instructions for how to link to the Independence for optimal navigation and targeting during the battle. At a certain point, one or two of the Granger moons will appear, and you are to proceed, every ship, down to the surface and fly into the weapon shaft. There you will wait until the moon T-jumps to Penumbra, where the real battle will begin. And people—” She slowly shook her head. “It will be the fight of our lives. Hundreds of ships. Thousands, maybe millions of fighters, all while falling towards the event horizon of the black hole there.”
She took a breath, letting them absorb the barrage of information. “And then, your mission. Keep the Swarm occupied, distracted from the shuttles flying over the surface of their ships. Link your q-jump computers to one of the computer cores on the Independence, and that will allow you to q-jump away at the last second before being hit by a Swarm beam. It’s not fool proof, but it may save some of us. And then, when the shuttles have done their work, we all q-jump away, and pray to god above that that is the last we see of them, for good.”
Silence over the channel. She wondered what was going through all their heads.
“Admiral Proctor?” She recognized the voice of Captain Hellend. “Sounds fun. I think I speak for everyone when I say, let’s get this shit done and home in time for dinner.”
She glanced up at the clock. Thirty minutes and change. But, against all her fears, they were on board, and it had taken less than five minutes. “Yes, captain. Dinner when we have the time. And time is the one luxury we don’t have at the moment. Let’s move.”
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Bridge
ISS Independence
High Earth Orbit
It was show time, and Captain Whitehorse was ready.
She hoped the rest of the fleet was ready too—it was a huge leap of faith on their part. On her part, too. On Proctor’s part, for having faith in her.
And they would all know, within a few minutes, if the Swarm would take the bait. Tal Rishi and Ampera Raya, the two moons that Granger chose for the job, had left just minutes earlier, on their way to Penumbra with the entire United Earth fleet stuffed down their giant weapons shafts.
“Sir, the Defiance has T-jumped away. They should be at the Penumbran black hole in a few minutes,” said her former deputy, now tactical officer.
“And the status of the gravitational eddies? Have the Swarm revealed themselves yet?”
It was just the Independence, alone, that stood in the way of the Swarm and Earth. If they didn’t take the meta-space bait that Admiral Proctor and Captain Granger were about to lay, then the battle for Earth would be very, very quick.
“The eddies are just a few minutes out. And, no, sir. They are still not visible.
She paced for a few steps, then caught herself. No sense in letting the crew see her nervousness.
“Sir! They’re now in view!”
Every head on the bridge snapped towards the viewscreen. Off towards the left was Earth’s distant moon. But dead center, wavering and shimmering into existence, appeared five gargantuan Swarm ships.
They were almost within firing range.
“The ship in front is starting to rotate it’s main weapon spire towards the surface.” The tactical officer grimaced. “And it’s charging. Firing in less than a minute.”
She paced back to her seat, the captain’s chair, and sat down. “Come on, come on, come on,” she repeated.
Commander Mumford at the science station whooped. “Thar she blows. Just read a massive meta-space spike. Point of origin was likely the Penumbra system. And the spike was off the charts.”
Again, every head snapped toward the screen, in nervous expectation, hoping, some praying, that the bait would be taken. That the Swarm would notice the meta-space pulse, and head there, like they always had. What the reason for that, Whitehorse could not even guess. Maybe their universe had some kind of meta-space property such that it was like light to them, and like moths, they were attracted to it. But the Swarm seemed more intelligent than that.
She hoped she never had to find out why.
Cheering erupted across the bridge, and, she knew, all across the planet below.
The Swarm ships disappeared.
She breathed the air out she’d been holding in, and gripped the armrests of the captain’s chair. “Don’t cheer yet, people. That was the easy part. Ensign Riisa? Take us to Penumbra.”
Chapter Seventy
Flight deck
ISS Independence
Black hole
Penumbra System
Zivic sat in his fighter, hands on the controls, eyes closed. He imagined he was in the simulator. Shooting bogey after bogey after bogey. Not only reaching his dad’s record, but demolishing it. Hundreds. Thousands of kills.
The voice in his head laughed at him, a strange reaction for what was essentially a few teaspoons of alien goo coursing through his veins.
“What?” he said.
The voice spoke, but without words. Instead, it produced feelings that his own brain attached words to. You’re too methodical. You don’t feel it. You don’t anticipate. You can’t, because you don’t empathize. Without empathy, you can’t know the enemy. And without true knowledge of the enemy, you will always be held back from your true potential as a warrior.
“Huh. Ok. What does a pile of Valarisi goo know about flying, anyway?”
I flew the first Swarm vessel that assaulted Earth. I’ve flown for thousands of years. And when Granger destroyed my ship, I fell, flying through the atmosphere. Just like Danny.
“Oh.” It was still so weird. So foreign to him, to be talking out loud to a voice in his head. He didn’t suppose he would ever get used to it. And just how much did it know, anyway? Did it feel the relief when he took a piss? Wait … was it watching when he jerked off? Dammit!
Why do you do that before flying, anyway? I don’t understand the biological need for it. What does it accomplish?
His face turned red. “Uh … um … so you are watching … everything. Right. Could you, uh, maybe give me some privacy sometimes? We might be spending a lot of time together, and we’d better start off on the right foot.” He shook his head. The voice was silent, as if waiting for an answer. “It relaxes me before a battle. Helps me focus. Keeps my mind right where it needs to be, and not wandering to under the bra of the last girl I … you know.”
Ah. A chemical reaction then. I noticed the endorphin rush, and the subsequent regulation of your motor neurons and dopamine receptors. What an interesting way
to—
“Hey, look, time to get moving,” he said. Indeed, the warning lights had begun to strobe, indicating the bridge was counting down to a T-jump. “Look, I don’t know how exactly you can help me during this thing, but at the very least, shut up and don’t distract me, ok?”
I will help you. You’ll see.
“Oh. Neat.” He smiled, trying to be polite. An alien stream of goo was promising to help him shoot bogeys. To think he’d lived to see the day. “Ok, hold on. Here we go.” He glanced out the cockpit window at Ace, Moonshine, Barbie, and Spectrum, and flashed a thumbs up, then pounded his chest with a fist. He tapped his comm and connected to his father, down in the Sword of Justice docked at the shuttle bay. “See you on the other side, dad.”
“You too. Don’t let me get killed, or I’ll never invite you to Thanksgiving ever again.”
“Agreed.” He smiled. “I’m glad we get to be together. Here at … what could be the end.”
“Son, don’t you remember that door with the message?”
“You weren’t there dad.”
“No, but my dear friend here was. It opened at the end. And the end is the beginning. Just you watch.”
“Copy. Batshit out.”
The ship made the T-jump, and almost immediately he felt … strange.
That is the effect of being so close to the event horizon. With me inside of you, it affects your sense of temporal reality.
“Oh. That would have been more helpful to know before you camped out in there.”
Don’t worry. It will fade. I’m adjusting now.
Sure enough, the feeling faded, and he returned to normal. Better than normal, in fact.
He felt serene. More calm and yet more focused and alert than he’d ever been in his life. “You know? I’m feeling good about this.”
Me too, Ethan. I think the Swarm will be surprised what happens when not just two, but four species combine their strength into one.
Suddenly he felt sharp jab in his brain, so strong he almost yelped. “What the hell was that?”
That was the Defiance detonating the anti-matter bombs. The shunts channeled most of the energy into meta-space, which we are intimately connected to. Don’t worry, that won’t happen again.
“It sure as better hell not.”
The bay doors opened, and like that, he was out.
And for the second time that day, he gasped.
Dozens of Swarm ships were winking into existence all around them, and they immediately started disgorging fighters. Thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands. They filled the space around them like a cloud.
At the same time, he felt the inertial compensators start to strain as he noticed a slight pull downward—the effect of the thrusters on the ship automatically firing down towards the maw of the black hole far beneath them, in an effort to accelerate away from it at maximum power.
A few seconds a later, the moons Tal Rishi and Ampara Raya both appeared a few tens of thousands of kilometers of the Independence’s port bow. He squinted, and noticed a stream of capital ships begin pouring out of their surfaces.
He barely had time to register that, when several more flashed nearly blinded him, as between them and the nearest gargantuan Swarm ship, the Benevolence appeared. And, in the distance, the Magnanimity. And three more Skiohra generation ships—apparently Krull was able to bridge the rift with at least some of her people. Weapons were already firing in a fantastic light show, punctuated by explosions dotting the surfaces of ships and the space around them as the multi-cored Independence began targeting the thousand of Swarm fighters massing around it.
And just like that, the battle was joined. A sight the likes of which he’d not only never seen before, but could never have imagined.
It was hell.
It was beautiful.
It was … distracting. “Hey. Have … you been flying my bird this whole time?”
You seemed distracted.
“Yeah. Uh, thanks.” He scanned his sensors and found his father’s ship. “Ok boys and girls, get down to the Sword of Justice and let’s do ourselves some escort duty.”
He and his squadron dodged in and out as he wove through the cloud of Swarm fighters, shooting where he could but mostly trying to get to the Sword of Justice as quickly as possible, and then let the cores on the Independence do their job and let him focus on shooting. Before long, they made it, but not before Barbie ate it. A snuffed explosion marked his death.
“Dammit,” he whispered. “Ok, folks, we’re at the Sword of Justice. Link up to your respective computer cores, and … there. Looks like we’re a go.” He let go of the navigation controls and switched to the dedicated gun controls. Now he could focus on his favorite part.
Killing Swarm.
The UE fleet had finally arrived from the insides of Tal Rishi and Ampara Raya, and now more ships flashed into existence. Soon, dozens—no, hundreds—of Dolmasi ships were weaving through the tangle of fighters, UE ships, Skiohra generation ships, mining shuttles burning like mad towards their targets, and the targets themselves: fifty odd massive Swarm ships, each hundreds of kilometers long.
The battle stretched on as far as his eyes could see in all directions, and he knew, in the back of his mind, that the whole tangled mess of ships and fireworks and explosions and debris from the already destroyed vessels and the dead crews that had manned them, were all falling inexorably into the maw of the black hole, at a speed that would soon become a significant fraction of the speed of light.
It was breathtaking. In a deadly, this-is-going-to-kill-everything kind of way.
Are you going to focus on the shooting or not, Batshit?
“Hey, someone has to appreciate the firework show out there, calm down.” Unnerving as it was to suddenly find himself a Valarisi host, Zivic had to admit that right now, in the midst of the most horrific displays of death, chaos, and desperation that he had ever witnessed, he appreciated the companionship. He’d just spent the last ten seconds staring at the incomprehensible sight all around him, and all along he’d been shooting like mad, taking out … he checked his kill counter … oh. One hundred and fifty-two already. He’d just smashed Ballsy’s record in less than fifteen seconds. Damn. He tapped the comm. “I’m sorry to say this, pops, but your record is long since dead. About ten seconds ago.”
“Save it, son. A little busy here.”
Indeed. Their tight formation of four fighters surrounding Ballsy’s frigate was flying down the spine of one of the Swarm ships, and out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of the two marines strapped to the hull—their torsos just poking above one of the dorsal edges of the Sword of Justice—reaching into mesh bags and occasionally hurtling objects down at the Swarm hull below. And it was at that moment, seeing the sheer absurdity of it, that he couldn’t believe he’d suggested such a thing. But there’d been no time for any alternative.
Vaguely, at the edge of his awareness, he could hear the background noise of the general IDF comm channel, voices coming in and out, almost like they were narrating the battle, most of which he couldn’t see.
“Requesting backup support for the Independence. We’ve lost the two Dolmasi escorts.”
“All ships of Alpha group, run interference for the Benevolence. It’s going to attempt to draw the fire of those four Swarm ships clustered a few dozen kilometers down the gravity well!”
“The Tennessee is going down! Commencing Omega maneuvers! Oppenheimer maneuver one, targeting the Swarm ship at five-nine mark eight-two. All ships stand clear.”
That caught his ear, and as he continued firing at any Swarm fighter that got near enough to target, he craned his neck in the direction of the vector the captain had called out.
“Holy shit.”
It had accelerated, using the intense pull of the black hole below them as an assist, straight towards one of the drive cones of a Swarm ship. It flashed in a q-jump and disappeared, and a second later, a quarter of the Swarm ship erupted in a massive explosion.
“So that’s an Oppenheimer maneuver. Granger would be proud,” he said into his squadron comm line.
“You think that was impressive. Have you seen the Independence?” said Ace.
“No. Why?”
“Its PDC cannons are routed through the computer cores and Qwerty’s predictive algorithm. Take a look.”
He scanned the fierce fighting all around him, squinting through the flashes and explosions and clouds of Swarm fighters shooting at anything that moved. And he found it. “Oh … Oh wow!”
The Independence was currently spinning on not just one axis down its length but also around its Z axis, moving downward towards the event horizon like a corkscrew. Except the corkscrew was spitting out hundreds, perhaps thousands, of flashing PDC rounds. And it seemed that each round caught a separate Swarm fighter. “Damn. Whitehorse is going to take them all out by herself and not leave any for us.”
He watched his kill count pass a thousand, and quietly thanked his new friend for holding down the fort while he was distracted.
It was a brawl. Off to his left he saw a Swarm ship discharge its main massive beam towards an IDF capital ship, which disappeared in a q-jump flash and reappeared just a few kilometers away, out of the path of the beam.
But the Swarm was learning: a second ship had discharged another beam just seconds later, before the IDF cruiser had time to recharge its q-jump drive.
And just like that, a thousand souls were gone in a flash. The debris field from the cruiser expanded outward, pelting the two Swarm ships on either side, mostly harmlessly. He glanced at his sensor schematic. The ISS Lincoln. Gone in just a few seconds.
More voices over the general comm channel.
“The shuttle assigned to the Swarm ship at twelve mark twenty-two has been destroyed. ISS Stennis, your move.”
He recognized the voice as that of Admiral Oppenheimer. And if the shuttle attaching the interdictors on that Swarm ship had been taken out, the ISS Stennis’s mission was obvious to him, after seeing what happened earlier.