Earth Song: Etude to War

by Mark Wandrey

  “I hope we’re not hurting the little guy or gal by doing things like that,” Aaron added, looking sheepish.

  “Oh dear, that child is nestled away, nice and safe.” At least as safe as any of us ever is, she thought but didn’t say out loud.

  “How long before we should get back to the CIC?”

  “Oh,” she said and rolled to embrace him,” we have enough time.”

  * * *

  The three points of light had grown to dominate the virtual displays on the wall of the CIC. Just like the first trip, the stars fed off each other with thousand kilometer thick tendrils of million degree plasma arcing across the void.

  Minu, Aaron, and Kal’at all joined Lilith in the space to watch the show. Cherise was aboard, as Minu ordered, though she’d mostly avoided the others, especially her boss Minu, which was fine with her. The redheaded Chosen understood what had happened, but she was having difficulty forgiving it.

  The displays showed the stars in both real time and a hybrid scientific/tactical view as Lilith analyzed the patterns of swirling lethal plasma. A graphic showed the location of the venerable power station the People had set up eons ago.

  “Has the station’s condition deteriorated?” Kal’at asked.

  “Yes,” Lilith confirmed and everyone tensed. “However not as much as initially predicted.”

  “Well that’s good news,” Minu spoke with a sigh.

  “The conditions of the stars are too unpredictable for a reliable curve to be established. My current estimates suggest between five and ten years.”

  Minu nodded and watched her daughter work, plotting their course. Unlike the first time they had visited the station, this time they weren’t using a shuttle. She wanted them to get in and get out as fast as possible. Space seemed to be getting smaller and smaller by the day, with alien starships popping out of the woodwork.

  An hour later, Lilith floated like an underwater dancer, her body’s motions helping to guide her ship around the deadly eddies of plasma and x-ray flux from the three dueling stars.

  They were all observers, their work stations established as backups should something happen to Lilith. But Minu knew that if something happened to her, there was simply no way all of them could ever get the ship out of the stars’ influence alive.

  It was always impressive to watch the thin girl hovering in zero-gravity, her limbs swimming through space and curving as she controlled the ship. This time there was sweat on her brow and her face scrunched in concentration.

  All the walls of the CIC were like a transparent window looking out around them making the rest of the crew feel like they were naked and exposed to the deadly display outside. Minu realized she was holding her breath.

  A tendril of star stuff separated from a huge swirling column feeding one of the smaller primaries and splashed against the Kaatan’s shields. Lilith jerked as if she’d been physically hit by the plasma and cursed silently. Minu winced at seeing her daughter in pain, remembering Pip describing what it was like when the ship he was linked with took damage.

  The Kaatan accelerated on reaction thrusters, not using the gravitic drive in order to avoid pulling even more plasma onto its shields, and cleared the danger zone. A few minutes later, they were passing through the shield barrier of the station and everyone was breathing again.

  “Good job dear,” Minu whispered. Lilith looked over, brushing sweat from her eyes, and nodded in thanks.

  The actual docking was over quickly, the station handling the operation automatically once Lilith exchanged codes. It was a little precarious because the station had never been intended for docking with starships. Luckily the Kaatan was about as small as starships came. In no time they were snuggled in next to the sprawling power generating station.

  Minu followed the column of crystalline bots into the station as they turned towards the power module handling area. Her new squad of guards, led by Sergeant Selain, shadowed her movements as she strolled down the hall towards the control room.

  Only days ago they’d discovered the four suits stored in the Kaatan hold thanks to Pip’s creative mind. Once again she was forced to wonder how they would go on without his genius. She didn’t look forward to telling his uncle Bjorn about the man’s death.

  The control room was unchanged, the vast vista of the interior space still showed untold thousands of huge EPCs used for starships, any one of which could power the entire planet of Bellatrix for weeks. Just as before, there were no holes in the vast array of power units. The base continued to quietly prepare for an offensive planned many millennia ago that would never come.

  As she watched, the computer came alive and outside robotic handling systems started to move. EPCs were selected and moved to one of the several handling areas where they would be turned over to Lilith’s waiting bots.

  “This is amazing,” she heard the sergeant whistle under his breath.

  “Lilith says the People made dozens of these kinds of installations all over the galaxy.”

  “So it’s sucking power from the stars?”

  She nodded.

  “What happens when the stars run low on power?” he asked.

  “The stars will shift spectrums and destroy the station,” Lilith said, drifting into the room in her zero gravity bubble.

  Like the Kaatan, she could control the station’s interior conditions as well. The men fell back to make room for her, not out of fear, but respect. Lilith had long earned that after her rescue of them on Planet K.

  The last time they transferred power modules had necessitated an improvised use of the small crystalline bots from the Kaatan. This time Lilith had had time to formulate a better plan. She'd modified some of her bots into lumbering platforms shaped to carry the massive barrel-shaped ship EPC.

  Minu watched the process for a time as Lilith worked with the station’s computers. After about an hour, her daughter tapped her on the shoulder. Minu turned to see her standing in the gravity.

  “You okay?” she asked, a little surprised to see the still very thin girl standing in full gravity.

  She looked a little strained, but smiled in her not-quite perfected way and nodded. “It is tolerable for short times. I thought you would want to know, there has been recent activity from the station’s stores.”

  “That's interesting.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I thought the station was secured with codes only you knew.”

  “That was my assumption, since this is a power station of the People.” She glanced at her mother. “Of course, your father accessed this station.”

  Minu thought for a minute, turning her head to watch the robots deliver another charged EPC to the loading deck where Lilith's modified bots waited. “You are still certain no other surviving ships like yours are operating?”

  “Unless they have been appropriated by another species, no. And even then, they wouldn't have access to the codes that I do.”

  Minu nodded in acknowledgment. “Then it must be the Squeen.”

  Lilith cocked her head.

  “They're the only ones that have shown they can penetrate these sorts of secure codes.”

  “You're theory has merit,” Lilith agreed. “This may well be how they are supplying their own fleet of ships, by stealing from stations like this.”

  “Should we stop them?” Lilith looked at her uncertainly so Minu continued. “I guess the question is actually can we stop them?”

  “I could probably alter the station’s protocols to only allow us to take power modules, but considering the Squeen’s ability to override codes...”

  “Yeah, I get the point.” Minu glanced up as another pair of modified bots accepted the bulky cylinder of a ship's power EPC. But her thoughts drifted off to wonder where her father might be. Where was Chriso Alma?

  Chapter 60

  June 15th, 534 AE

  Dervish Star System, Galactic Frontier

  The Kaatan gingerly pulled back from the ancient power station, Lilith spinn
ing it on all three axes with only meters to spare as it oriented its drives away from the fragile structure and pushed off of the nearest star’s gravity well. Everyone held their breath in the CIC as she performed the maneuver.

  Everyone except Minu and Aaron, who both knew their daughter’s ability. The maneuver wasn't bravado, she was just that skilled with her ship. Joined together since her birth, the hundred and forty-five meter long vessel was like a part of her body.

  The ship accelerated without the least bit of sensation inside the CIC. Minu watched the chaotic interplay of the solar prominence between stars as Lilith analyzed their patterns, then made her move.

  The Kaatan rocketed forward with blinding speed, propelled by its gravitic drive and passing outside the star’s influence in only a spare few minutes.

  “That always scares the shit out of me,” Aaron said under his breath. He was a first rate pilot himself, but playing chicken with million degree star-stuff was not his idea of a reasonable challenge.

  “Nothing I can't handle,” Lilith said and winked at her father, just as the ship was hit with multiple hammerblows.

  Minu had never until then heard her daughter scream. The artificial gravity failed, sending everyone in the CIC cartwheeling against the luckily padded walls as the holographic displays all splashed with crisscrossed data and fell dead.

  Years of martial arts training as well as familiarity with zero gravity acrobatics saved Minu from the worst. She managed to tuck into a ball and roll slightly, slamming against the padded wall flat against the small of her back. An instant later one of her new bodyguards, not as versed as her in how to handle the sudden gravitic onslaught, crashed into the pads next to her with a loud snap of bone and a sharp cry of pain.

  “Lilith!” Minu yelled as the ship was hit yet again.

  The darkness was all-encompassing inside the CIC without the artificial lighting, and she felt a growing sense of panic as she could hear the hull ringing from impact after impact. Worse, there were sharp and frightening mechanical sounds she'd never heard on the ancient ship before.

  “I am here, mother,” said a strained voice a few meters away.

  Minu tried to crawl towards her daughter but the gravity spun radically, sliding all the space’s occupants along the wall like a howler in an exercise ball. Minu scrambled for purchase and found herself rolled across a familiar masculine form.

  “I got you baby,” Aaron grunted as he nabbed her easily and arrested her slide. A nominal tingle ran across her body as they stabilized. Some amount of artificial gravity had returned.

  “What's happening?” Minu called out in the darkness.

  “We are under attack.”

  “What can we do?” Aaron asked.

  “Shut up, please?” Her answer wasn't terse, it was a plea for silence. In a second, all there remained were the moans of the injured, and Lilith’s gasps as she struggled under the gravity of her ship.

  There wasn't enough available power, or concentration, for Lilith to summon even the most elemental holographic environment to operate within. Worse, she was unable to interface in one of her favorite manners, that of a creature born to deep space, swimming within zero gravity and using her every gesture to run the ship.

  She lay painfully against the CIC's pad, almost certain that a couple of her ribs were broken, trying desperately to operate the ship only within her mind.

  The attack had come from behind a pair of solar prominences, just as she had been emerging from between the stars. Far too much interference existed for her to detect the ships, and there was no reason to suspect they were there.

  The enemy, on the other hand, had obviously been expecting her to emerge and had timed their attack perfectly. If Lilith hadn't been running under full shields against an accidental impact of a solar prominence, the Kaatan would surely have been instantly destroyed.

  Lilith maneuvered as hard as she dared, knowing that if she pushed too hard she and every living thing in the ship would die. The gravitic drive also controlled inertial compensation mechanisms that kept everyone alive under many hundreds of gravities of acceleration.

  Massive energy beams missed narrowly just astern of the Kaatan, two glancing off the horribly weakened shields as well. In the instant’s respite she scanned for her adversaries. Two T'Chillen battlecruisers and one dreadnought.

  “Oh no,” she whispered. The three ships had maneuvered to cut off her escape from the star’s proximity.

  Another beam caught her squarely in the stern, crumpling shields there and splashing energy across the hull. Ancient reinforced armor plates spread and dissipated the energy, but at a cost. The armor weakened, subsystems overloaded, damage done.

  She tried to hand off the gravity compensators to a portion of the computer, and found it unresponsive. The enemy dreadnought was trying to bracket her between the stars and its two lighter warships. She did the only thing she could at the moment. The only thing that allowed her to fight and save the lives of her friends.

  “I'm sorry mother,” she said quickly.

  “Lilith, what?” Minu asked and was then pinned against the wall like a fly on paper. She tried to speak and found her mouth wouldn't work. The gravitic systems had pinned her to the wall, only allowing her heart and lungs to work as if suspended in place!

  “Now come to me,” Lilith snarled. She was pinned against a wall as well, but her mind was now free of the necessity to protect the ship’s human passengers.

  The three T'Chillen ships paused their attack as the Kaatan suddenly spun and came alive, ship-killer missiles and energy beams erupting in a deadly swarm from the dodging needle-like form. In five seconds she dumped half of her remaining ship-killers.

  The T'Chillen ships were caught unprepared for the sudden and savage counterattack. As the missiles split up and accelerated at the enemy ships at more than a thousand gravities, the ships redirected themselves and prepared all of their defensive lasers. However, unlike conventional ship-killer missiles such as the T'Chillen used, the ones employed by the Kaatan were much more sophisticated.

  Of the three enemy ships, it was pure accidental luck that placed one in just the right position so that when Lilith triggered the missiles’ guidance programs, they all instantly altered course and homed on only one battlecruiser. Surrounded by a fury of near-fusion detonations, it was itself turned into a tiny star. Its shields overloaded, and the ship was consumed by hell.

  The second battlecruiser came around, trying to withdraw, and Lilith fell on it with a fury of energy bolts. She pushed on its rear shields, pounding them hard, forcing a breach to strike at the vulnerable engines – until the dreadnought bracketed her with a spread from its planetary bombardment weapons.

  It was a tactic she’d never expected. Those weapons weren't designed for fighting spaceships; they were intended to devastate planetary surfaces. Packets of incredible energy barely contained inside a decaying field of muons. They were not fast, but they were large and there were too many. One struck the Kaatan's shields, only a glancing blow really. But the field holding the energy in check instantly ruptured, exploding against the Kaatan.

  The concussive force crashed against the already reeling defenses of the Kaatan and sent it rounding, back directly into the area between the dueling stars.

  Lilith gasped and jerked from the impact. The improvised stasis field kept her or anyone else on the ship from being killed by the massive forces of the Kaatan being thrown back towards the stars. The overload feedback through the systems nearly killed her though. It did knock her out.

  The Kaatan drifted back into the titanic gravity well of the trinary stars. Solar prominences continued to swirl and well outwards, some missing the disabled ship of the line by mere thousands of kilometers as it fell ever faster towards the largest of the three stars. The two surviving T'Chillen warships held their distance and their fire, watching as their prey fell towards its death. And then, in a swirl of distortion, it was gone.

  * * *

&n
bsp; Singh-Apal Katoosh watched as his sensor techs worked feverishly to analyze the data, trying in vain to find the ship. One or another would occasionally look back to the rear of the dreadnought bridge where the fleet admiral was coiled around his command pedestal watching them with unblinking eyes. The bridge was filled with the scents of fear tinged with panic.

  “Results?” he hissed eventually when none of his subordinates proved willing to come forward.

  The command staff held a brief and heated conference in which a junior sensor operator came forward. Singh-Apal watched with interest, curious how this one had been chosen as the sacrifice.

  “Fleet commander, the enemy ship utilized a portal jump.”

  The details on the Lost technology of using Portals to move starships interstellar distances was provided to Singh-Apal by the Grent some weeks ago. Included among the data was a detailed tactical briefing on how best to defeat portal equipped warships.

  This involved forcing a conflict in close proximity to high gravity bodies such as binary or trinary star systems, black holes or neutron stars. Within a certain range (general numbers provided) to such bodies, the Lost vessels could not speed away, and could not use their ‘tactical drives’.

  “That is supposed to be impossible this close to a star.”

  The technician looked back that the others of his ilk who all looked confused, and then turned back to his commander. “We agree it is impossible.”

  Singh-Apal uncoiled from the pedestal and came forward to within a meter of the technician, who tensed and lowered his head for the inevitable. The fleet commander slithered past without moving towards the technician, and into his ready room behind the bridge.

  All the normal operations on the bridge continued in near silence as the technician who’d volunteered to inform their leader slowly looked up and began to realize he would live.

  In his private room, Singh-Apal looked out the super dense moliplas viewport to where the three stars were locked in a death struggle and thought.