“Maybe,” she said. Then, meeting his accusatory glare: “But now the Starfish have lots of targets. They might not be able to get to all of them at once.”
“Do you honestly think that?”
“I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t,” she said, then returned her attention to the incoming messages. Most of the voices sounded puzzled and scared, but there were plenty among them that were berating her for her idiocy. Oh well, she thought, I did tell Gou Mang that I didn’t care what they said.
The activation of the Congress and her assumption of control via her engrams and the UNESSPRO traitors had caused a wave of outrage, but the truth was slowly spreading, all the same—and she was effectively in charge. There was nothing anybody could do for the moment to wrest that away from her. Gou Mang was silent for the time being, getting the evacuation under way. If the Starfish followed the transmissions to Sirius too quickly, they would find a large percentage of the human survivors still putting their boots on.
“What are you going to do if—?”
“Be quiet, Peter,” she cut him off sharply. “I’m trying to think.” That was a lie. If anything, she was trying desperately not to think. There was no point in thinking about it at all now. Everything was in motion, and all she could do was sit back and watch and marvel at the scale of the endeavor unfolding around her.
The Mantissa was evacuating in dribs and drabs, breaking into fragments and beginning an exodus to a location she hadn’t been told about. Some of the liberated hole ships disappeared straightaway. Others joined working gangs engaged in dismantling the large amount of infrastructure that couldn’t be transported in one piece. Larger conglomerations of hole ships appeared to be acting as ftl cargo haulers, while others combined to form mass movers in real space, using globular alien thrusters to nudge the large chunks into position. She was slowly becoming accustomed to the Various sizes and shapes of the Yuhl vessels, although at times their uniform color and textures made it difficult to tell them apart.
Triumvirate itself had merged with a fourth hole ship to create a new vessel that had the double advantage of being both an elegant regular tetrahedron as well as armed with the best weaponry and defenses the Yuhl had to offer. The Praxis had granted her that much, along with a pilot skilled in the use of the alien technology.
Ueh stood with his feet firmly planted on either side of the base of an organic-looking stalk growing out of the smooth cockpit floor; its summit, shoulder height for a human but at a comfortable reach for the taller Yuhl, sprouted numerous twigs and contact points. She didn’t know whether the Praxis had implanted the skill in Ueh’s mind biologically or electronically or if he had known how to use the attack systems all along, but he wielded the controls with both delicacy and quiet confidence.
Watching the breakup of the Mantissa, she saw many of the four-way hole ships mingling among swarms of single craft and dubbed them tetrads. When choosing a new name for their own tetrad, she had quickly opted for Quadrille, which meant either a dance or card game for four participants. Given that what was about to unfold was both a dance and a game, depending on whose point of view she took, it seemed oddly appropriate.
Some game, she thought wryly. The fate of thousands depended on so many factors beyond her control: how long the Starfish took to respond to Axford’s call, how distracted the Starfish would be by the multiple signals flooding surveyed space; how able the Yuhl would be to repel the attacking vessels. Even en masse, she couldn’t let herself expect too much, although for her sanity’s sake she had to. She had seen the destructive power of the Starfish firsthand, as well as through many of her engrams’ eyes. But she had to have some reason to hope, too. If the Yuhl couldn’t do it, then no one could. Everything was riding on this gambit.
“When the battle begins,” said Ueh, at the same time directing Quadrille in a smooth, sweeping arc around the fragmenting Mantissa, “I will be subsumed by the Praxis, which will over/coordinate the defense of the Mantissa. I will retain a degree of self, for I will need full access to my reflexes should the Praxis’s prove not immediately tenable, but I might seem distracted. Please be encouraged to contribute to what I am doing. I am not like the Praxis; I cannot see in many directions at once, and I cannot think many things at the same time. It relies on my judgment as well as my senses, and you can be part of that.”
“We will,” said Alander. “I for one don’t want to sit here watching while you do all the work.”
“Should things go wrong,” Ueh went on, “this vessel is programmed to fragment into unspace and remove you to a safe location.”
“Will it have time to do that?” Hatzis asked, remembering the lightning-fast ferocity of the Starfish.
“If it doesn’t, we will not know.” Ueh’s attention was focused on the task before him, which seemed to be nothing more than putting Quadrille into formation. She wondered how much of his mind had been taken over by the combat pilot he had become and what he had lost in the process.
“If Axford was lying...” Alander began, letting the sentiment go unexpressed.
“Either way, I’m going to wring his fucking neck,” Caryl said. Even if Axford had been lying, the Starfish would still come, attracted now by her own ftl message. But it would at least give them a couple more hours to play around with, which would be plenty of time for the Yuhl to escape. That would be a relief, but it would still annoy her. The entire exercise would have been for nothing, and it would do nothing for human-Yuhl peace.
The worst thing about it was that it could have so easily been prevented. The Yuhl, she had learned, had been keeping an eye on Axford. After Alander and Ueh had left for Sothis, three days before, he had left almost immediately—for Vega, Hatzis assumed. Barely a day later, Mercury had returned. The Yuhl had watched him as he lurked about the system, studying their activities. They’d regarded him to be no real threat, so they had let him be. But had they known the stunt he was capable of pulling, they could have destroyed him or at least forced him away. Clearly they had assumed that no one in their right mind would have actually summoned the Starfish.
Hatzis agreed with them. It was a tactic she had seen used only once before, in the recording Axford had shown them, supposedly of the Yuhl raiding a human colony. Now she was far from sure. It wouldn’t surprise her at all if Axford and his private army had conducted at least some of those raids. It would certainly explain away the mystery of his extra hole ship, and he had quite openly wished for more.
She stood up and started pacing the cockpit again. The wait was killing her. She was beginning to wish she hadn’t volunteered to stay around to see what happened. So what if the Yuhl would have thought her cowardly? At least she would have been spared the waiting, as well as the possible death.
Then a new voice joined the babble through the ftl communicator, and Ueh’s posture changed slightly.
“Someone is knocking on our door,” the Praxis announced. It spoke in English for her benefit, but she assumed it was communicating with Ueh in other ways. “Tighten those sphincter muscles. This could be it.”
She forced herself back onto the flight couch, and realized as she did so that she was trembling. From her seated position she studied the information pouring around and down the screens. Much of it was in the Yuhl language, but the diagrams were universal. On the far side of Beid was a winking light that signaled a new arrival in the system. As she watched, it split up into more than a dozen individual lights and spread out in an expanding disk. Many of them vanished in midflight—to jump closer to the Mantissa, she assumed, from there to attack.
Then another voice came over the cockpit speakers.
“This is Kingsley Oborn of Juno,” it said. “Caryl, are you anywhere among this lot?
Ueh raised an arm to indicate that she should reply.
“Right here, Kingsley,” she said. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Thought you might need some reinforcements,” he returned. “I know it’s not much compared to wh
at you’ve got here, but...”
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said softly, sincerely. It didn’t ease her inner trembling, but the rallying together of both Yuhl and humans did fill her with a sense of hope. “Listen, Kingsley: the Praxis will give you instructions. Do as it says. If things get too rough, or if you’re told to leave, then get the hell out of here fast, all right? I don’t want you wasting the precious little resources we have.”
“I understand, Caryl,” he said. Six hole ships traveled in formation, their cockpits modified in ways quite different from the Yuhl’s. She could hear something like relief mingled with fear in Oborn’s voice as he said, “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, though.”
Then, suddenly whispered into her mind, the Praxis said, “Thank you, Caryl Hatzis.”
She frowned. “For what?”
“For the contribution of your people,” it replied. “It might make little difference to the outcome, but we appreciate the gesture. It is a significant one.”
She didn’t know what to say in response to the alien’s gratitude, so she said nothing at all. Instead, she just nodded pensively to herself. I know, she thought.
* * *
The wait was interminable. It was all she could do to sit still as the Mantissa slowly unraveled. Ueh took Quadrille along a gentle, reconnoitering spiral around one of the largest agglomerations of the alien hole ships, while Alander stared at the screens with a tightly focused expression. The simultaneous broadcast from every available human ftl communicator continued, blaringly loud and utterly meaningless. She was just beginning to wonder if boredom and unresolved tension were the worst they were going to face this day when something flashed across the face of Beid system’s primary. Her heart sank as her worst nightmare was suddenly realized.
“We have confirmation of contact,” announced the Praxis. Light blossomed, and dozens of spinning silver shapes burst through it. “Abandon all remaining facilities. All noncombat personnel should commence final evacuation immediately.”
Quadrille abruptly changed course. The starscape rotated around them, but Hatzis felt no shift whatsoever in momentum.
“What about us?” she said. “Are we going to fight for what’s left, or are we escaping, too?” Neither the Praxis nor the Yuhl had made it entirely clear what their intentions were.
“We will attempt several defensive maneuvers,” said Ueh. His hands were buried up to the wrists in the stalk growing out of the floor of the cockpit; the muscles of his triangular thighs flexed agitatedly. Every time the hole ship performed a particularly striking swoop or roll, his wing sheaths snapped restlessly.
“We’re not on the front line, are we?” she asked.
“It is not our intention for you to be,” returned the Praxis.
On the screens, the enormous and impossibly fast Starfish vessels blinked into view, then out again, no doubt using something similar to the Spinner relocation drives to move to places in the system with greater tactical advantage. Once they had gone, there was no way of knowing just where they would reappear again.
Hatzis felt as though dry ice was evaporating in her gut.
“Tell them to spread out,” she said. “The more locations they have to attack—” She stopped when she realized this was precisely what the hole ships were doing. Light-speed delays were already making it hard to follow the battle. The Praxis had given its orders via the ftl communicators the moment the Starfish arrived, but only now were the effects of those orders being seen. Hole ships blinked out of sight throughout the crumbling ring of the Mantissa. For a moment, the battlefield seemed almost empty, as both aggressors and defenders leaped to new positions.
Then the Starfish were back, and space across the system was suddenly full of light.
Alander’s gasp of surprise covered her own as the screens around them blazed white with energy. The Starfish vessels were knife-slim but kilometers across, and spun at relativistic velocities around their edges. Red darts and strange, curving lines of energy whipped through the hole ships and other structures that remained where the bulk of the Mantissa had been. Thousands of tapered blue lances, ten times thicker across than a single hole ship, issued from the underbellies of the giant Starfish vessels, engaging anything that fought back. They in turn emitted tiny yellow dots that blinked in and out as they traced through the space between combatants. When they struck, they, too, exploded, bursting with a spray of energy that belied their size.
Hatzis couldn’t believe what she was seeing. It was carnage, pure and simple. Wherever the Starfish appeared, they left only destruction in their wake. The Yuhl had erected defensive screens around some of their installations that deflected the red darts, but the whipping lines and yellow dots cut effortlessly through them. Single hole ships and tetrads could only avoid the weapons by relocating elsewhere, and that left the installations they were trying to protect open to attack.
Only when the initial wave of relocations was over and the Yuhl numbers tripled in size did the carnage momentarily ebb.
Hole ships in ones and fours and larger configurations appeared all over the system, all wielding the very best weaponry the Yuhl had at their disposal. Invisible beams cut sporadically visible lines through dust clouds and debris, painting black lines on the sides of the blue lances that interfered with the snapping of the destructive whips. Quadrille danced through a close encounter between one of the yellow dots and a large Yuhl contingent. The screens clearly showed the dot blinking in and out of space as it zoomed in toward its target. When it struck, the Yuhl were blown apart. Half were destroyed completely; the rest were either were left drifting, presumably damaged, or managed to relocate to safety.
Safety? she thought. Such a concept didn’t currently exist in Beid system. The Yuhl were fighting a losing battle.
It was only then, as the possibility of her own death began to look dismayingly real, that she thought to send a message to Gou Mang. they’ve arrived, the starfish are here! if i don’t make it, you’re in charge.
Barely had she sent the message when something strange happened: clear spaces began to form in the map of the system as energy levels ebbed. Fierce pockets of conflict still burned around the Starfish vessels, but in other places, where the fighting had previously been just as intense, there was now a relative calm and stillness.
A new tactic? she wondered nervously. Perhaps the Starfish were about to employ a weapon that had the potential to wipe out everything in a volume of space in a single, horrible flash.
Then it occurred to her: this had nothing to do with any new weapon, or even a change in strategy. The Yuhl were still in those spaces. She could see single hole ships and tetrads re-forming and jumping elsewhere, battered, perhaps, but definitely willing to fight on. No, this was something else altogether.
“We have confirmation of withdrawal,” said the Praxis, voicing her own realizations. “We have a seventy percent reduction in aggressor presence. It looks like they’re heading elsewhere.”
A cold feeling of joy swept through her. The plan had worked! The number of ftl transmissions blaring through surveyed space had distracted the Starfish. They had split their forces in order to deal with them, and that left—
Her joy was short-lived.
Oh, shit, she thought. That still left 30 percent of the initial strike force.
A total of nine giant Starfish ships remained in the system. The Yuhl forces had been reduced to barely half, and they had yet to make a significant dent in the Starfish. For every blue lance damaged, ten more took its place. And what made it worse was the fact that the missing Starfish had to be heading somewhere...
HEADS UP, GOU MANG. IT LOOKS LIKE OUR PLAN WORKED. A NUMBER OF THE STARFISH COULD BE COMING YOUR WAY. IF PEOPLE WANT TO STOP BROADCASTING NOW, I’LL UNDERSTAND, THEY’VE HAD THE EFFECT WE WERE LOOKING FOR.
Ueh relocated Quadrille to a position closer to the nearest battle. Hundreds of singles and tetrads appeared all around them, some of them shifting into a loose formatio
n, others blinking out of existence to go elsewhere.
“We are regrouping our forces/were spread out too thinly before,” said Ueh. Clearly distracted by the ensuing battle around him, he spoke hurriedly, lapsing into his species’ normal double-streamed speech.
“You think a more focused response will make a difference?” asked Alander. Hatzis was about to warn the alien that having such an obvious concentration for too long might not be advisable when suddenly the Starfish were among them, breaking the loose formation apart with a flurry of energy. Quadrille bucked beneath her, and she clutched the arms of her flight couch. Its cushioned arms and seat automatically wrapped around her, keeping her safe, as Ueh ducked and wove through the wild energy storm around them. Sheets of light flashed and vanished. Soundless explosions rocked them from side to side. She didn’t know if they were fighting back in any way, but she found herself grateful for every second she remained alive.
Then something yellow loomed large in the screen: one of the spiky balls the blue lances fired. Instinctively she pulled back into the seat with a cry of panic.
Quadrille relocated into absolute silence just in time. Ueh sagged at the cockpit stalk, his wing sheaths limp.
“We do not know how to hurt them,” he admitted solemnly. “The Ambivalence will surely destroy us if we continue to fight.”
Alander took a deep, shuddering breath. “I hope Axford can see this,” he said. “I hope he can see what his stupidity has done.”
“He should be here,” Hatzis snarled. “He should be the cannon fodder, not us.”
They reemerged into real space at a relatively safe distance from the battle. From their new position they could see the numerous battlefields at some remove. The perspective was illuminating. It looked like several small asteroids were exploding, and taking a long time about it. Apart from that, all resemblance to an asteroid belt had vanished. The Mantissa was in pieces.
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