“Sounds good. I wish there were some way to tell those guys that we’re supposed to be running away from the fight… oh, my God.”
The sudden shift of gravitational forces made the first two swerves seem like gentle maneuvers during a stroll through a park. Cora found herself simultaneously pressed against the back of the seat while the right arm of the headrest buried itself into her temple. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t even breathe, and wondered how the hell the guy in the cabin was maintaining control. The ship groaned and creaked and, like any good marine, Cora was convinced that it would disintegrate at any moment. She would face down a thousand blob troops alone in her suit, happily feeding them high-caliber rounds until her ammo ran out, and then bludgeoning a few to death before they overran her. But being caught in an overgrown tin can, relying on a pilot she knew nothing about while highly maneuverable aliens fired on them, was not what she’d signed up for.
Suddenly, the pressure on her side subsided and the groaning stopped, to be replaced by even greater pressure from behind. When the pressure finally subsided, she gasped in as much air as she could. “Fuck,” she said.
“Slingshot maneuver, I think,” Tina said calmly. Cora gave her a hard look, but was somewhat mollified to see that the other woman was sweating profusely and looked as bad as Cora felt.
“Bullshit. I’ve been in slingshot maneuvers. You cruise by a big planet and use the gravity to change direction. It’s a gentle thing that takes hours, or even days to do.”
Tina shrugged. “That’s not the way surveillance pilots do it, I guess.”
“I just hope we didn’t lose the dropship.”
“No way. Those clamps could hold a…” her voice faded away and all the color drained from her face. It was clear to Cora that she was listening to something disturbing over the fleet’s communications system via the earpiece she was wearing. “Oh, God.”
“What happened?”
“We just lost the Ismala.”
***
The admiral watched his last carrier disintegrate. Impelled by the force of small arms impact, pieces large and small drifted from the dead hulk of the Ismala. The screen of fighters meant to defend the ship had long since been overwhelmed by the sheer number of attackers.
His own ship wouldn’t last much longer, but they would hold out for as long as possible. Maybe the time he gave them, combined with the speed of the spy ship, would give Tina a chance to get out of range. Of course, they’d only be able to mount the rescue mission if the swarm lost interest in them. He hoped that was the case. There were some good marines down there, and the survivors of that operation, plus anyone in the Lapland who made it to safety, might conceivably be the last humans anywhere in the universe. He didn’t know what might have happened to the species over the past two hundred thousand years.
He turned to his bridge crew. “Is anyone in contact with the Minstrel?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Tell them to pull out now. There’s nothing they can do to help us, and they’re sitting ducks. Order them to accelerate towards the nearest star. They’ll have to risk stasis. They can wait for us there, no more than ten days, and then find somewhere safe.”
“Yes, sir.”
He watched as the troop carrier pulled away from the fray. An arm of red dots split off from the main body of the swarm and set out in pursuit.
“Power up the Central Cannon,” the admiral said.
Silence fell over the bridge. “Are you sure, sir?”
“Yes,” he responded in a tone that brooked no argument.
The Central Cannon was the weapon that defined Heavy Gunship class battle fortresses. It was designed to pierce any armor, to pop buried planetary bunkers—and the cities around them—like overripe blisters and to disintegrate any major vessels in the path of its beam. The entire ship had been designed around this gun, the most powerful destructive force ever designed by humanity.
Unfortunately, firing it meant rerouting all of the ship’s energy into the attack. Navigation, smaller weapons, even the light and air ventilation systems everywhere but in the bridge. For ten seconds after the weapon was used, the Heavy Gunship IV would be completely vulnerable, defended only by the thickness of its armor.
“Set the beam as wide as possible. Aim for the machines pursuing the Minstrel.”
“Yes, sir.”
He watched in satisfaction as hundreds of red dots disappeared from his screen. Only enough of the enemy remained around the troop ship to harry it, nowhere near enough to bring it down. He breathed a sigh of relief. The Minstrel would survive.
The same couldn’t be said about the HGIV. As if sensing the vulnerability, the vampires advanced in a swarm. He felt the bridge shudder around him as the enemy’s small shells set off secondary explosions.
Power returned. “Full forward thrust and reroute all power to the bow cannons. Let’s see if we get through their ranks.”
His plan was simple. The one huge advantage he had against the myriad smaller craft was that his ship could take large impacts and keep right on going. That, combined with the fact that they were coming towards him, might be enough to allow the HGIV to punch through the swarm and make a run for it after coming out the other end.
It was a desperate ploy, but his only other option was to sit tight and watch as the enemy whittled away at his defenses, and eventually, inevitably, killed them.
The ship jolted forward and the swarm on the screen actually seemed to hesitate for a second before they knifed into it. The general imagined he could feel the thud of a vampire not quite fast enough to get out of the way before it was crushed against the hull.
The second one wasn’t his imagination. The ship was vibrating to the beat of enemy fighters being destroyed in droves. It wouldn’t do the armor in front any good at all, but that didn’t matter. It should probably hold. It was designed to take a beating.
And then they were through the swarm on the other side. For a tantalizing moment, it seemed like they were going to be able to use the confusion of their enemy to build a bit of a lead, maybe enough to try a fighting escape.
The vampires were milling around in confusion, all semblance of organization lost from their ranks. The individual units each seemed to be finding their own independent path with absolutely no coordination.
But then, mere seconds later, much quicker than it should have been possible for that many units to communicate, much less decide what to do, they coalesced again and assembled themselves into a tight formation that dove, spear-like, towards the HGIV’s rear.
Moments later, the status reports began to pour in.
“Number three engine critical, sir.”
“Aft cargo hold breached, sir. We’re sealing blast doors against further penetration.”
“Number three engine down. One and four critical.”
He needed to act fast. “Turn us around. We need to face them. Most of our weaponry is on the front.”
“Actually, sir, most of the forward-facing weaponry is damaged due to impact.”
The die was cast. The admiral felt a lump form in his throat as he watched his bridge crew using their last breaths to give him bleaker and bleaker reports. There was no sense of panic, no breakdown of discipline.
A lieutenant named Catherine, blonde, freckled and far too young, told him that the hull had been breached in four more places and that the containment doors were struggling to cope. Loss of atmosphere was imminent.
He already knew it. In fact, he could tell that the report was out of date. The breeze caressing his grizzled cheeks was the sign that, somewhere, air was escaping. He knew that the breeze would soon become a gale and then the gale a hurricane.
The cold vacuum of space would freeze-dry Catherine’s tears.
“Tina,” he said to himself. “Please take care of yourself. You’re all I have left, and you might soon be a part of all that humanity has left. Goodbye.”
The wind got stronger.
***
It was moot. There had been no survivors.
The discarded earpiece hung from the woman’s head as she sobbed once, twice. And then, much more quickly than Cora expected, she straightened up.
“Thank you,” Tina said, wiping away the vestige of a teardrop. “And I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have made such a display of myself. I promise it won’t happen again.”
“I understand. You lost your father.”
“You probably don’t. I’d made peace with losing my father a long time ago. Hell, I didn’t cry when I heard my mother had died. Not a single tear. I wasn’t expecting it to hit me like this. Maybe I thought that I’d be next to him when he died.”
“Better this way. You’d be dead now if you’d stayed. By being here, you’re helping us save a bunch of stranded soldiers. Maybe some of us will survive this fiasco.”
“Even if we do, where will we go? Two hundred thousand years is a long time. Even if we get back, everything will be so different that we won’t even recognize it.”
Cora chuckled. “I think we can safely put that off to one side as a bridge to cross when we get to it. First, we need to get to the planet and get the troops onto the ship, and then we have to get past the swarm again. If we do all of that, we can worry about where to go.”
Tina laughed with her. “I guess you’re right.”
“Now I want to see whether the swarm is coming after us. If they are, this rescue might be a hell of a lot more interesting than we’d like.”
“I’ll come with you.”
The pilot looked up at them. He caught Tina’s eye and said. “I’m sorry about your father.”
Tina acknowledged his words with a nod. “Was there anyone in the fleet that didn’t know who I was?”
“I doubt it. Word always gets around quickly.”
Cora stepped in. “What’s our status?”
“Right now, it’s better than I could have dreamed. The slingshot caught them by surprise, and once we were out of the combat zone, the vampires behind us lost interest and went back into the furball around Ismala. We have a big head start, even if they decide to come after us.”
“How long until we reach the planet?”
“Maybe four hours.”
“Wow, that fast?”
“Yeah. You should see what we could do without your tin can of a landing craft strapped to the side of my beautiful ship.” He was clearly proud, but there was also a note of worry in his voice.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” Cora said.
The man sighed. “Reactor is overheating and the control valves are pretty much shot. We could have done maintenance, but everything seemed to be working and no one checked—we spent all our time fixing the stuff that was obviously broken after the long trip. So now we’re heading for meltdown, and there’s nothing we can do about it… in about ten hours.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Yeah, that just about covers it. We’re going to need to ditch on the planet.”
“I thought you weren’t rated for atmosphere.”
“We aren’t, but we can probably get to the ground before breaking up. It’s not like I’ll be able to use the ship again after a meltdown.” He looked at Cora. “You should suit up and descend in the dropship in case the rest of us don’t make it. Your pilot is already inside—said he wanted to be able to fend for himself if I screwed up.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll get the rest of us down safe and sound. Trust me,” the man replied with some of the swagger back in his voice. “And you’ll have to buy me dinner. There’s just one thing…”
“What’s that?”
“I hope the troops on the ground have found a cozy place to dig in. We’re probably going to be there a while.”
Chapter 17
Tech number one—Irene had never bothered to learn their names—looked up from his welding. “I think we’re ready to connect this one to the computer.”
“Excellent. Turn it on.”
They’d selected a piece of electronics that, as far as they could guess, was a processor unit. They’d painstakingly tested the input and output ports—being careful to use the smallest current possible—and had decided that the processor was of a quantum type.
That wasn’t good. If this was a quantum computer, it made the best of humanity’s spintronics look like a steam tractor. The density was beyond belief.
They’d shrugged it off. Finding advanced computers was not terribly shocking when dealing with spacefaring civilizations. The big surprise had come when they tried inputting data into the broken flying machine’s circuits using the best quantum equipment on the ship.
When they sent in test signals, they found the supposedly broken computer responding to them. Unfortunately, the experimental computer they were using was not powerful enough to maintain a conversation, so they’d decided to plug the fragment into one of their regular computers, using the quantum device as a translator.
It had taken a while to hook everything up, but now they were ready to flip the switch.
The tech made the connection and the portable monitor they’d wired to it—the computer they were using was a spare that wasn’t networked into any of the ship’s systems in order to avoid possible contamination—blinked to life.
Irene sat at the terminal activated a program that they used to analyze unknown technology. It worked on several parallel strategies. On one side, it began to throw bit and QBit patterns representing constants and Fibonacci sequences to see if it made the alien technology respond. On the other, and at Irene’s specific request, it also attempted a brute force approach in which it sent commands in different software at the interface to see if anything made it blink. Almost immediately the system started spewing error messages.
“I guess we’ll need to get to work on it, now,” she said, checking which language had caused the reaction. “I wonder if I can get anything but gibberish out of it.”
The tech was staring at the screen. “We shouldn’t be getting error messages. We shouldn’t be getting anything at all.”
“Why so surprised? We already knew that their tech was compatible with our quantum computer. All we need to do now is to figure out which bits work together.”
“But that’s impossible. Nothing should work together. This is an alien technology. All the protocols, the compiler, and the base software should be utterly different. We should be getting static. Nothing else.”
“Well, then, we should revise our assumptions.”
“What, that aliens would use different structure when they write code? I think that’s a pretty solid assumption.”
“Try a different one. I postulate that the bits we’re looking at are actually based on human tech. No aliens involved at all.” She saw that the man was about to speak so went on before he could derail her train of thought. “Logically, if they’re based on human technology, they should operate on some evolution of syntax developed by us.”
“It’s utterly preposterous.”
She sighed. “Not in the least. You need to remember that more than two hundred thousand years have passed. It would only have taken a few decades to develop ships that could move faster than the ones we have in the fleet. In a trip that long, human beings could have reached this system millennia before we did. That would have given them enough time not just to get here, but for entire civilizations to flourish and disappear.” Irene glared at him, challenging him to contradict her. “And that’s not even taking into account that we already had fold technology when we left. Granted, no one had figured out how to put a living creature through a fold without tearing it to shreds, but that was an engineering problem, not a question of theoretical
physics. So they probably solved it ten years after we left, and arrived here maybe eleven years after we left. You should think things through.”
The tech gave her an awed look. “But how could you possibly have imagined that? The circuit didn’t give us a single clue.”
She chuckled. “I just didn’t think that anyone but a human would have designed a fearsome fighting machine to look like a black bat.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes.”
“But what if you’d been wrong?”
“Then we’d have lost a little time. Do you have anything better to do? Besides, I wasn’t wrong, was I?”
“No. You weren’t. It’s amazing.”
Irene sighed again. This one was never going to be much of a scientist. “Wrong again. All we know so far is that we’re getting a signal triggering error messages. That doesn’t automatically mean that the systems are talking to each other… only that some kind of signal is getting through and causing errors.”
But, deep down, she’d known as soon as the wing was delivered to her, that it had been built by human hands, or at least thought up by a human mind. The kind of mind whose primal fears caused half of humanity to always be at war with the other half could easily channel those same fears to create this. She hadn’t doubted the results for a second.
She was almost afraid to find out what the thing had to say for itself.
***
“I hope they found something to eat. I’m starting to feel faint,” Melina said as she brought the flyer in to land.
“Don’t bet on it,” Ian said. “Nothing has gone right since we got out of stasis. Why should it start now?”
“You’re not much of an optimist, are you?”
“I started out as one. You should have met me three years ago. Hell, I might even have volunteered for this jaunt back then.”
“What happened?”
“Life happened. And the past few days haven’t helped at all.”
They walked across the strange flat stone to where the marines were gathered. The sergeant nodded to them. “You’re just in time. Jenkins here was about to try to eat a piece of one of the plants. From what we’ve seen, there are only two different kinds of trees around here. The short cane-like ones have pulpy insides, so we’re starting with those.”
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