by Ian Douglas
A very scary thought. How could any species put itself in such a position—living for pleasure and depending on someone else to keep the whole mechanism working?
But, then, Ramirez had known humans who thought like that.
Ramirez risked an electronic glance at the sky above and around the swarm. Without augmentation, he couldn’t see much . . . but an occasional bright and silent flash of light marked alien weapon discharges, and showed that the battle for Galactic Node 495 had been joined.
“Second Platoon, Alfa Company!” Lytton snapped. “Disperse across these two sails.” The target sails lit up in his in-head. “Take cover around the perimeters. Don’t engage the enemy until you get the word.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Mulholland said. His voice sounded tight, a bit higher-pitched than usual, but he was holding it together. Good. “Okay, people! You heard the man. Under the umbrellas!”
Ramirez checked his readouts, and noted that he was closing with the edge of the nearest sail at nearly four kilometers per second. “Decelerating,” he called, and thoughtclicked the icon to reverse his gravitic drive. Other Marines to left and right, above and below and behind, began their braking maneuvers, counting on their suit computers to keep track of so many hurtling bodies and keep them from colliding.
Although the sails described the surface of a sphere, it was far too vast to show a curve. Ramirez had to keep his gaze locked on the nearest edge of the closest sail, because the sheer scope and scale of the entire megastructure was overwhelming. How the hell could the spiders have built something that titanic?
The edge of the sail came up toward Ramirez entirely too fast, but his suit read the closure rate and cut in with a bit of extra thrust. He hit the dark surface at a few meters per second, skipped across a skin that yielded like leather, and then brought himself to a halt with the geckskin grippers in his gloves, knee pads, and boots.
The sail material billowed awkwardly beneath him as he clambered toward the nearest edge. It was thinner than a sheet of paper, but while gentle pressure made it flutter and ripple, a hard blow caused it to stiffen. After a few moments of experimentation, he found that by actually stamping hard against the stuff, he could stiffen it enough to make progress across the otherwise too-yielding surface.
Private Quincy and Lance Corporal Evers watched his approach from the sail’s rim. Though circular, the sail was so vast that the edge, from up close, appeared to be ruler-straight. It was also rotating—quite slow, but there was definite movement. That, Ramirez thought, was reasonable; the rotation probably helped keep the sail deployed and more or less flat.
“Welcome aboard, Staff Sergeant,” Janet Evers said. “Pull up a pile of sailcloth and make yourself comfy.”
“Thanks for the hospitality.” He grabbed the slender metal rim of the sail and hauled himself around. On the other side of the sail, he could see nothing below but a gray haze—the massed array of sails in the next layer down. He looked for the central cylinder, then kicked himself. That structure was only about a hundred meters wide or so, a couple of kilometers long, and it was as far away as the straight-line distance between Chicago and Boston. Beyond and below, for as far as it was possible to see, millions more titanic sails shrunken by distance to specks of dust hung against the deeply filtered glow of the shrouded sun.
Evers and Quincy were readying their weapons, massive M-290–5MW laser pulse rifles. Ramirez unclipped his own ’290 from the side of his armor, cycled the power source, and watched the charge build to full on an in-head indicator. He switched on the targeting indicator, and a red crosshair reticule appeared in his visual field. His weapon was slaved to his in-head, now. Wherever the muzzle of the weapon was pointed, that’s where the reticule would appear, unseen by anyone, save him.
A dazzling flare of light blossomed silently in the heavens. Something big out there had just died.
“Staff Sergeant?”
It was Mulholland, on a private channel.
“Yes, sir?”
“Tell me again about how everyone is waiting for me to say the right thing.”
“Nothing to worry about, sir,” Ramirez replied. “When the balloon goes up, your training kicks in. You’ll say what’s right. You’ll do what’s right.”
“I wish I was as confident about that as you seem to be.”
“After you’ve been through this shit a few dozen times . . .” He hesitated.
“Yes, Staff Sergeant? You were going to say it gets easy? I won’t be so scared I’m shaking?”
“To tell the truth, sir, it never gets easy. And the fear . . .”
“Yes?”
“It never goes away, sir. Never.”
“Holy shit!” Quincy yelled over the platoon channel. “Look at that! Look at that!”
The enemy needles had been invisible with distance. Now they were materializing, a cloud that filled half the sky, points of dimly reflected light spreading out as they fell toward the Marines from what felt like infinity.
“Alfa Company!” That was Captain Lytton again. “Weapons free! I say again, weapons free! You are clear to—”
And then gouts of light appeared against several of the distant umbrellas, snapping into brilliance, expanding, then fading, all in a deathly silence.
“Fire! Fire!” someone yelled . . . and then there was a flash and a scream and everything was radio noise and terror and white light against black emptiness.
And Alfa Company engaged the enemy.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
“General,” Adler said, “I order you to launch the fighters! Now!”
General Frazier could hear the fear in Adler’s mental voice. He could also hear the anger. The man was not going to listen to reason.
Frazier did have an escape, however, a subroutine he’d had Chesty himself write and download to his in-head communications suite. He thoughtclicked an icon, and a burst of static momentarily flooded the connection.
“I’m sorry, my lord?” he said. “I didn’t catch that.”
“I said, General, that you’d damned well better put your fighters out there! The aliens are too close!”
Again, the transmission dissolved in white noise. “Look, my lord,” Frazier said. “We’re getting too much interference on the channel. Probably enemy jamming. Let me get back to you, okay?”
And he cut the link.
Frazier was a strong supporter of the idea of a military subordinate to the civil authority. He had no patience with military juntas; military personnel, after all, were trained to fight, not govern.
But at the same time, he recognized the dangers inherent within civilian micromanagement. If military personnel didn’t know how to govern, neither did civilian leaders know anything about strategy and tactics. If Adler had had any military experience, Frazier might have been willing to at least hear what he had to say.
But listening to the panicky little weasel just as the shooting was starting? Uh-uh. Far better to develop “communications difficulties,” and clean up any political fallout later.
If there was a later, he admitted. The alien needles were drifting toward the Dyson swarm at a few kilometers per second, firing antimatter beams as they came. They did not appear to be targeting the human ships directly, but were cutting up the parasol sails suspending the Kroajid statites above the abyss.
From Frazier’s viewpoint on board the Inchon, over five thousand kilometers above the fuzzy edge of the swarm, the outermost layer of statite sails appeared to be laid out with an absolutely flat geometry extending off to infinity and filling half the sky. The statite sails did not create a solid surface, but were separated, each from the next, by gaps measuring thousands of kilometers; the next layer down appeared as a dark gray haze 8 to 10 million kilometers beneath the first. The Marines, picked out on Frazier’s display by green icons, were deploying across a number of the sails in the foreground, a few thousand kilometers from the Inchon. Larger icons marked several hundred Devil Toads hauling platoons f
arther and farther out to more distant sections of sail. Once they released their payloads of armed and armored Marines, the Toads would switch roles, from landing craft to gunships, flying in close support of the men and women . . . not on the “ground,” exactly, but on the sails?
An interesting problem in semantics, that.
The idea of using individual Marines out there, Frazier thought, was terribly risky, but likely they would have been no safer inside gunships or fighters. The advantage was that the enemy might not even notice them, and, so far, that tactical hope was being borne out. The incoming horde of needle ships was approaching the Dyson swarm perhaps eighty thousand kilometers in the distance, and when they fired, they didn’t appear to be targeting the Marines at all.
Instead, just as they had when they ignored the Tellus, the attackers appeared to be concentrating on the statite sails themselves. In several instances, the hanging statite columns had been cut completely free from the sails and were beginning the long, long fall down toward their sun, somewhere in the depths of the matbrain below.
That rain of falling computronium cylinders, Frazier thought, would be like carpet bombing for the successively lower layers of parasol-sail statites. Those falling structures would cut loose or destroy tens of thousands of other cylinders, many of which housed computer-based virtual worlds or the physical hibernatoria occupied by unknown billions of Kroajids. It was an impending tragedy of cataclysmic proportions.
Or was it? He looked at the numbers scrolling through his awareness. At this distance from the star, its gravity worked out to about 0.006 meters per second. It would take a long time to fall 8 million kilometers to the next matbrain layer . . . though it would be accelerating the whole time.
And those sails were enormous—as big across, almost, as Earth’s moon was wide. The sail material was only a few molecules thick, apparently, and a falling cylinder would probably punch right through if it hit, but it would be a pinprick to a giant; inconsequential. Unless by sheer chance it struck the attachment point for the second sail’s cylinder, it wasn’t necessarily the most effective tactic.
The alien sliverships, though, were a different matter entirely, being fast and maneuverable and armed with powerful antimatter weaponry.
And then the leading alien slivers arrived at the outermost reaches of the Dyson swarm . . . and plunged through into the matbrain’s depths.
ADLER WAS watching the moonrise.
It wasn’t really a moon . . . but one of the 400-kilometer Kroajid spacecraft that the humans now referred to as a moon-ship. It was emerging from the Dyson swarm, moving out through one of the innumerable large gaps in the outer layer of statite sails.
He was struck again by the sheer scale of Kroajid mega-architecture, by billions of solar sails arrayed like multiple shrouds about a living star, sails as big across as Earth’s moon was wide, supporting immense structures that might house trillions of beings. Somehow, space ships four hundred kilometers across seemed to fit right in.
There was plenty of room for even ships as large as the Kroajid planetoids to maneuver between layers, and several were rising now, emerging above the top layer like surfacing whales. The nearest was more than 300,000 kilometers distant, and Adler was delighted at that. Tellus would not have lasted long at the center of the conflagration developing now between the two fleets of alien warships. He still wished that the Tellus was on the far side of the Dyson cloud, though, and invisible to the plunging warships of the enemy.
As soon as the first moon-ship appeared in the open, hundreds of slivership beams turned on it, bathing it in a glaring incandescence as positrons and electrons annihilated one another in a liberation of raw energy, running the gamut from IR and visible light through to intense bursts of hard gamma. The planetoid-sized starships were firing as well, as they surfaced from the swarm, loosing a storm of invisible bolts of plasma energy, striking sliverships one after another . . . then in tens after tens . . . then by the hundreds, a holocaust of devastation burning through the Dark Raider horde. The volume of space above the sail surface grew as dazzlingly brilliant as the surface of a sun.
Adler wondered how any merely organic being could survive beneath that deadly light, even in Marine combat armor. Thousands of Marines were out there already, and the radiation from that ship-to-ship battle must be devastating.
A flight of a dozen sliverships accelerated, then fell like arrows and smashed into one of the Kroajid vessels in what appeared to be an all-out kamikaze assault. Explosions ripped and clawed at the moon-ship until nothing was left but an expanding cloud of hot plasma and thousands of tumbling chunks of partially molten rock.
Why didn’t the damned Marines launch their fighters?
Adler was not used to feeling this . . . helpless.
STAFF SERGEANT Ramirez flinched as the entire sky turned to searing incandescence. There was shelter beneath the molecule-thin sail material, but it made it tough to see what was going on. Hardest was the conviction that if he let go of the dark fabric, he was going to fall . . . fall millions of kilometers into the blackness below.
In fact, the gravity of the local sun, more than one AU below, was weakened by the inverse-square law to a whisper—about one six-thousandth of a G. He could let go of his grip, and it would take several seconds to even recognize that he was falling, and his MX-40’s grav thrusters could easily support him against that weak tug all day. It was even possible that the gravitational tug of the parasol sail next to him was slightly greater than that of the star; the sun was much larger and far more massive, but the sail was much, much closer. He wasn’t going to fall, but several million years of evolutionary honing of his instincts were trying to convince him otherwise.
Steeling himself against that instinct, then, Ramirez pulled at the sail’s rim, propelling himself up and over the edge. Silent flares of light pulsed and strobed in the night above as a flight of three Devil Toads streaked overhead. Using his helmet optics, he pulled up a magnified image of the main body of alien needle ships in the distance, exchanging fire with a dozen Kroajid moonlets. Another brilliant flash of light glared above the sail horizon, and his helmet visor turned opaque, shielding his eyes. Warning sensors chirped in his ear; he was taking a hellish dose of radiation. He and the Marines out here with him were going to need a long stay in the decontamination chambers when this thing was over.
If it’s ever over.
Because what the freaking hell were they supposed to accomplish out here? It was like expecting a flea to affect the outcome of a hand-to-hand struggle between two armored titans. Besides, he couldn’t see any particular reason for favoring one side over the other. What part did humans have in this conflict, anyway? What did the outcome matter to them?
But a part of Ramirez’s sympathies had already been engaged by the Kroajids’s position. If the information the humans had acquired over the past few days was accurate, most of the Kroajids were helpless inside their cloud of city-sized habistats. The Dark Raiders knew that, certainly, and seemed determined to use this weakness to wipe the spiders out. Too, the Kroajids were not the aggressors—at least not in this engagement—and one thing the Marines couldn’t stand was a bully. As the raider slivers rained down on the spider sails, Ramirez felt a measure of sympathy, a desire to help the underdog.
Somehow, though, that desire didn’t seem important enough as a justification for risking what was left of Humankind.
A babble of commands chattered and mumbled over his comm channels, overriding any other thought than do your duty. “Fire! All units fire!”
“They’re getting through! Get some fire on that group at one-five Alfa!”
“Jesus! What was that . . . ?”
Ramirez picked out one of the nearer red and white needles, zoomed in for extreme magnification, took careful aim, and thoughtclicked the firing button. He was aiming at a red band around the sliver’s forward quarter; whether it was paint or a quality of whatever the ship was made of, he didn’t know . . . but h
e knew that the white surface would reflect light, while that dark, almost maroon red would absorb it—absorb at least a lot of the incoming coherent energy.
The laser pulse flashed as it struck the slivership’s nose, but didn’t appear to have caused any damage. Those hulls were tough, he knew. When Ad Astra had tangled with these things earlier, it had taken heavy and concentrated fire to burn through.
He tried again, selecting a slivership, using his magnification optics to zoom in for a close-up, and triggering his weapon.
The M-290–5MW laser pulse rifle fired a tenth-second bolt of coherent light with a total energy delivery of five megawatts. That worked out to the equivalent of four kilograms of a standard explosive like TNT . . . if all of the energy was absorbed by the target. Ramirez was aiming for a dark-painted section, but some of the energy was still reflected away.
And whatever the target hull was made of, even four kilos of TNT simply wasn’t a big-enough jolt to burn through.
“Damn it, Staff Sergeant!” Quincy yelled. “We’re not doing shit!”
“I know, I know.” Ramirez thought for a moment. There had to be a way. . . .
Other Marines were firing across the field of drifting sails, but with the same effect—none. Ramirez heard some of them trying to coordinate their fire, but you needed superhuman accuracy to hit one spot.
His helmet visor darkened. Someone had just fired something very large, very powerful. It took him a moment, working with his armor’s AI, to figure out what.
Apparently the Kroajid had another weapon in their arsenal besides their armed and mobile planetoids. The upper shells of their Dyson swarm, of course, were cut off from the radiation pressure emitted by their sun. Instead, each shell above the lowest was supported by beamed energy from the shell below—a fraction, evidently, of the total output of the star. Those beams, invisible to the unaided eye, crisscrossed the intervening gulfs like a vast web, powering and supporting each successively higher level.