Orphans of Earth

by Sean Williams

  “I’ve been watching the weapons they’re using,” Alander said, rising from the flight couch. “They seem to travel through unspace a lot more than we do. Whenever we get too close to them, they disappear and reappear somewhere else.”

  “Astute observation,” Hatzis said sarcastically. “But it doesn’t really make our job any easier. We’re not designed to think in terms of three-dimensional conflicts—let alone more than that!”

  “The Yuhl/Goel are accustomed to three dimensions,” said Ueh. “But even for us this is too much.”

  Alander brought his attention back to the battle in the distance. “Have you noticed those little yellow bombs?” he said. “I think they’re using unspace as well, blinking in and out until they hit a target.”

  “Wait a second,” said Hatzis, herself standing now. “What would happen if we materialized inside something?”

  “The hole ships are designed to push matter aside,” said Ueh. “They start off small and grow large.”

  “Exactly. They reenter the universe as a point smaller than the Planck length and expand from there.”

  Alander shrugged, confused. “So?”

  “So what would happen if we were to lob some dead matter into the heart of one of those big ships?” she asked.

  Alander nodded his understanding. “That might be how the yellow bombs work.”

  “It is a technique we could not emulate,” said Ueh. He straightened at his post and seemed to regain some of his lost vitality. “The Praxis calls. We must return.”

  “Couldn’t we attack that way?” Alander refused to let go of the idea. “Jump into the big ships, drop some explosives or whatever, and get the hell out of there before they blow?”

  “I shall convey your thoughts to the Praxis when we return,” he said.

  “But what happens if we can’t think of anything else?” Hatzis asked. “Do we just fight until we die?”

  “We will retreat and rebuild the Mantissa elsewhere,” said Ueh, as though the answer was an obvious one. “Then our journey will resume.”

  “Much reduced, obviously,” said Alander.

  “There was no warning,” the alien said, his wing sheaths snapping slightly in what might have been the equivalent of a human facial twitch. “Losses could be as high as fifty percent.”

  “I suppose that rules out the Species Dream for a while,” Alander said.

  Ueh turned to look at Alander, then Hatzis. “Tell me,” he said. “Did you really not know about Axford’s plan?”

  “I swear, Ueh,” Alander said soberly, “we didn’t know.” He returned to his seat, then, settling wearily into it with a tired sigh.

  Hatzis couldn’t blame the Yuhl for doubting their word, but she was at a loss to know how she could prove their innocence in the face of Axford’s treachery. In the end she simply nodded at the Yuhl and said, “It’s true. We honestly had no idea what Axford had in mind,”

  It was difficult to read the alien’s expression as he looked at both her and Alander in turn. Possibly satisfied, he turned again to the ship’s screen.

  They relocated on the edge of the main battle. The activity was furious, and Ueh was hard-pressed to dodge a shower of strange new missiles fired their way. They looked similar to ones that had attacked Arachne in Sol, but these flew with less coordination, as though so many targets overloaded whatever guided them. For a dizzying moment, she felt as though she was scuba diving in a brilliant sea, swimming through the midst of a shoal of darting, silver fish that exploded at the slightest touch.

  The fear of dying was still great in her, but a new one was quickly rising. Gou Mang was silent. She hadn’t replied to any of Hatzis’s transmissions since setting their plan in action. Either she had been ousted from power on Sothis or...

  That was an or she didn’t want to think about right then.

  “We are disengaging to attempt your maneuver,” Ueh said after sending Quadrille back into unspace for a short distance. “The Praxis will give us a target when we are ready.”

  Hatzis had seen the alien’s larger vessel briefly during the last skirmish. It had been in the process of evading crossfire laid down by three of the blue lances.

  “It’s still alive, then?”

  “Yes. It will join us shortly.”

  They emerged in a pocket of empty space above the system’s ecliptic. They were alone, but only for a second as more than fifty singles and tetrads blossomed around them, painting the starscape a brilliant white. A few of them, she noted with pride, were from Juno, but she didn’t have a chance to find out if Kingsley Oborn was in any of them.

  “We won’t have long before the Starfish notice us,” Alander said.

  “The Praxis is aware of this,” said Ueh.

  Hatzis felt Quadrille shudder beneath her. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “I have volunteered to take part in the attack,” Ueh said. On the screen, the numerous hole ships surrounding them began to divide. But they weren’t dividing into singles. The white circles blossoming out of the void didn’t become as large as that. They were much smaller, some of them barely three meters across.

  “I don’t understand,” Alander began, staring dumbly.

  “You have discovered that hole ships can join,” Ueh went on, “but you may not have guessed that they can divide, as well. A single hole ship can split itself into three parts, and each part can support life. Some of their capacities are reduced, but they should have more than enough for what we intend to do.”

  “Which means they can be armed, I’m guessing?” said Alander. “Or at least fitted with automatic mines?”

  The Yuhl hesitated for a moment, almost as if concentrating, then moved its head slowly up and down in a manner that approximated a nod—a human affectation the alien was consciously trying to emulate. “All we have to do is hold out long enough for them to get in place.”

  “Inside one of the Spinner ships, you mean?” Hatzis said.

  Ueh nodded again. “The weapons have been programmed to arrive in different sections of the vessel. They will explode on arrival.”

  Hatzis flinched as something painfully bright burst at her out of the screens. Quadrille jolted beneath them. Ueh tugged at the controls and urged the vessel into a desperate spiral, away from whatever had attacked them. The space they were moving through was suddenly boiling with energy. Through it, visible only in glimpses, was the razor-edged hull of a Starfish disk. It blocked out half the universe, its surface blurred by rotation. The distortion in space-time it dragged around with it seemed to impart a vibration on everything nearby. Even through the inertia-dampening fields of the hole ship, she felt its presence as much as saw it.

  Single hole ships and tetrads exploded when struck by the powerful weapons of the Starfish. Among them, she noted, were the smaller spheres they’d intended to attack this mighty ship with. They hadn’t even left yet.

  “Where the hell is the Praxis?” Alander asked anxiously, his voice raised. “Has it called the attack?”

  “It hasn’t arrived yet,” said Ueh, clearly fighting to remain calm.

  “Has it been destroyed?” Hatzis asked.

  “I do not know.”

  Hatzis’s stomach sank at the thought that the Praxis, the only creature capable of coordinating the Yuhl’s attack, may have been blown out of the sky.

  “Then hadn’t you better launch the attack anyway?” she said. “This could be our last chance!”

  Ueh stiffened at the controls.

  She didn’t hear him say anything, but a second later, the hundred or more smaller spheres vanished from the space around them. There was no way to monitor their progress. All she could do was cross her fingers and hope for the best.

  Then her attention was taken by a new assault from the blue lances. Dozens of the things appeared from nowhere to attack the formation Ueh was flying within. The formation broke apart, and flash after flash of furious energy followed them as they raced away from a concentration of enemy fire, Ueh
doing everything he could to dodge in three directions at once. Hatzis clutched the sides of her flight couch and wished there was something she could do other than just watch. She felt impotent, useless.

  They evaded the lances only to fall foul of the red darts. One of them came so close that the screens went entirely red for a moment. A second came closer still. Hatzis only had enough time to think that a third might finish them off when it very nearly happened. A yellow bomb blinked into life directly in front of their tetrad and exploded with such force that Hatzis blacked out for a moment. She fought the blackness, fearing it was death, and dragged herself back into full consciousness. I will not die here, she told herself. I will not die!

  When her eyes had recovered, she saw that the cockpit was filled with a white, powdery mist.

  “I have sustained damage,” she heard the voice of Quadrille announce quietly.

  Ueh emitted a grating, close-pitched whistle as he fought controls that didn’t respond as they were meant to. A close-hatched weave of red darts seemed to wrap itself around them as three of the blue lances closed in.

  Something struck Quadrille a hammer blow, wrenching her seat onto its side and throwing Ueh across the room. Atmosphere boiled around her as one whole side of the cockpit disappeared in a single chunk. In the vacuum, she couldn’t hear Alander shouting, but she could see him gripping his flight couch as it hung over the yawning void, exposed to the furious energy fire filling the space around them. She wanted to help him, to take his outstretched arm and pull him back to safety, but her couch wouldn’t let her. It wrapped itself around her like an ameba, trying to keep her safe but in effect pinning her down. But for their I-suits, both of them would have been killed instantly. That was simply delaying the inevitable, though. They were exposed to the battle around them. There was no hole ship to protect them, no Ueh to fly them to safety. It wouldn’t take a red dart or yellow bomb to finish them off; a single piece of shrapnel or a radiation flash would be enough, no matter how much she willed it to be otherwise.

  This is it, she thought hopelessly. She would have laughed at her predicament (160 years old and a casualty in a battle with aliens!) had she not been so terrified.

  Then, suddenly, everything went quiet. The blue lances stopped firing; the yellow bombs blinked once and disappeared. The whipping arcs of energy snapped and went out. There was a brief salvo that lasted a few seconds, then faded as the hole ship pilots realized that no one was firing back.

  She craned her neck to find the massive Starfish craft. It hung in the sky over her left shoulder. Violet light boiled around its edges, and its previously spotless surface had acquired a black line encircling the center of its rotation.

  Damage? She almost didn’t dare hope. But a sickening new variability to the vibration rippling the space around her suggested that all was not well with the alien vessel. The purple light intensified until it became too blinding to stare at directly. She looked away and felt a violent pulse flex through space-time, like a shock wave radiating out from the center of an explosion. She gasped as a second followed the first, only this one much more powerfully. There was a flash so bright that even its reflections were blinding.

  Quadrille began to tumble, and for a moment the Starfish vessel was lost to sight. When it hove back into view, the light had ebbed and the vibration was barely a stutter. It was still spinning, but it had lost its disk shape. Enormous chunks had been torn from its edges, and the newly uneven mass distribution was tearing the rest of it apart, piece by piece. Within a minute, more than half had been torn away, leaving just the vessel’s central hub and a small percentage of the surrounding disk, from which chunks were still flying. “My God,” Hatzis muttered. At the same time, the flight couch eased its grip and she slid from it to help Alander. Her movements were slow and cautious in the gravity-free environment, but she managed to make it over to him safely. His couch was still hanging in space, barely attached to the remains of the cockpit floor. He clutched her gratefully as she pulled him back to safety.

  In the volume of space around them, the battle appeared to be gradually stalling. The Yuhl hole ships moved among the wreckage, absorbing damaged hole ships and collecting survivors. The Starfish lances appeared to be dead, killed along with their mother ship.

  Quadrille was dead, too, and Arachne along with it, but that was no reason to give up hope. They’d survived this far, and there was no reason to think they wouldn’t continue to do so.

  Together, she and Alander took Ueh and put him onto her couch. He was unconscious and bleeding yellowish blood from various wounds across his body, but at least he was still alive. She was surprised by how little he seemed to weigh.

  She waved to attract the attention of the nearest tetrad, but it flew past without seeing her. She didn’t notice the shadows shifting around her until Alander tapped her on the shoulder. She turned, and he silently pointed to a blaze of light blossoming behind her.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “Whatever it is,” he said, “you can bet it’s not going to be good.”

  It wasn’t. Out of the glaring light flew three more of the enormous Starfish vessels relocated from elsewhere in the system. The Yuhl contingent scattered before them like krill confronted by a pod of whales. The destruction of the Starfish ship had only postponed their defeat, not avoided it entirely.

  Still, they had destroyed one of the Starfish vessels. It didn’t make up for the destruction of the Vincula and all the colonies, but it did give Hatzis a measure of satisfaction. Even though her ship had been incapacitated and three more of the huge craft were bearing down upon them, she would die knowing that with the destruction of that one Starfish ship, there was a chance that humanity would survive. The aliens could be hurt.

  Her anger and frustration, however, quickly became puzzlement when the three disk-shaped cutters swept by the Yuhl contingent without so much as hesitating and gathered around their crippled comrade.

  Comrade. The word came to her automatically and seemed increasingly appropriate the longer she watched. The two nearest swung into position above and below the damaged vessel, as if they were building a stack of giant pancakes, spinning in opposite directions. They docked with the damaged craft and gradually slowed its rotation. Where only minutes before there had been nothing but a blur, now she could make out strange chambers and tubes, all torn and distorted by the breakup of the vessel.

  Light began to pulse around the three docked cutters as well as the one standing guard nearby. All of them seemed to vanish into the light, as though traveling down an endless corridor. When the light faded again a minute or so later, they were gone.

  “What was that?” she muttered to no one in particular. The behavior of the giant vessels was perfectly explicable if she imagined them as living beings, tending a wounded fellow. But living beings kilometers across? It wasn’t possible.

  “We frightened them away,” she said, breaking from her unlikely musings.

  Alander emitted a guttural sound that might have been a laugh. “The ant biting the anteater on its nose, Caryl?”

  “Well, how else do you explain it?”

  “I don’t,” he replied. “I’m just glad to be alive.”

  She laughed uneasily as her hand found his arm and gripped it tightly. Unbelievably, they’d made it—against the odds, defying her expectations, and with a great deal of luck. But they’d come through it alive, and that was all that mattered.

  They waited for what seemed like an interminably long time before a hole ship swooped in over the dead Quadrille, its cockpit swinging around to face them. They pushed Ueh through the open airlock first, then quickly followed. Inside, they found two Yuhl pilots who spoke to Alander in their native language. The ability to translate had gone with Quadrille, but he seemed to understand them well enough despite this. One of them indicated that they should take Ueh into one of the side quarters, where they laid him on a long, curving mattress.

  Alander stood up when they were d
one and wiped his hands on his shipsuit. His expression was distant for a moment as he listened to a voice that Hatzis couldn’t hear. For once, he was the better accessed of the two of them, plugged into some sort of Yuhl communications network she wasn’t privy to.

  “The Starfish have gone,” he told her. “The Yuhl are gathering up what remains of the defense fleet and getting it out of here. There’s not much left of anything else, though. What the Mantissa didn’t take with it has been destroyed.” Then he smiled with something approximating satisfaction. “They have a survival rate of forty percent. That’s the highest ever recorded in a direct skirmish with the Ambivalence—I mean the Starfish.”

  She nodded, barely hearing his words and unable to respond emotionally to them anyway. There was nothing but emptiness inside of her right now. Yes, they’d hurt the Starfish, but her initial joy at that fact had quickly faded. She could no longer see it as the victory that Alander obviously thought it was.

  He put a hand to his ear, listening again. “And they’ve found the Praxis,” he said. “It was hit, but not fatally. It’ll be at the regrouping point when we arrive.”

  “They’re taking us with them?” she asked.

  “You expected them to leave us here?”

  “I... No, of course not,” she stammered. “I just thought we’d get a lift with someone from Juno, that’s all, and...”

  She stopped, not knowing what came after the and. She could feel the ringing of ftl communications all around her, but it was less strident than before. Whether people had given up broadcasting or been destroyed, she couldn’t tell. Either way, she dreaded finding out.

  “Did anyone survive from Juno?” she asked after a few moments.

  “I’m not sure, Caryl,” he said.

  A commotion from the cockpit sent a look of alarm across Alander’s face.

  “What now?” He was out of the room at a run, and she followed right behind him.

  The pilots were agitated, pointing at the screens and screeching in their own language. At first, Hatzis couldn’t tell what they were pointing at. She saw something that looked like a giant, metallic claw hanging against the stars—but a claw that had been stretched impossibly thin, so that it looked more like a long, narrow rib tapering to a point at each end. There were three crossbars of irregular size toward the middle of the thing, and a faint glow surrounding one end.