by M. D. Cooper
At this point, Svetlana’s battlegroup was fully engaged with the Orion Guard defenders, their numbers almost evenly matched—though half the Transcend ships still possessed functional stasis shields.
“Breaking free!” Lorelei called out as her boarding craft pulled away from the protective shields offered by the escort ships, and turned to brake, slowing for their final approaches to the Alpha and Omega stations.
As the assault craft neared, beams lanced out from the stations, hitting the ships and destroying one, before the escort cruisers took out the station’s final line of defenses.
Svetlana was about to breathe a sigh of relief, but it turned into a gasp when the deck lurched under her feet as the Cossack’s Sword veered to port, banking around the Trumark-Alpha station. Svetlana saw a volley of missiles pass just off the starboard bow, picked off one by one as the ship’s point defense systems engaged them.
“Nice flying,” she said to the pilot, who nodded mutely in response.
“Desperate measures,” Merrick muttered.
Svetlana surveyed the battlespace and saw that one of the shipyards was far enough around the S2 moon that the DMG couldn’t hit it. Of all her wings, six had not yet suffered any damage, and every ship still had functional stasis shields.
The DMG had fired again, and by some undeserved luck, its beam lanced out through empty space, not connecting with any ship. It made another shot, attempting to hit the Nimbus Light, but the cruiser danced out of range, avoiding what would have been a devastating shot.
“Now, Jula,” Svetlana whispered. “Now.”
As if on command, the heavy cruiser fired its maneuvering engines, sliding across the face of the moon, pivoting so its forward guns faced the DMG’s main firing aperture.
The cruiser lurched backward as all its rails and energy weapons fired at once, the volley followed by a full spread of missiles.
Svetlana tasted blood from her cheek as she waited to see if the massive weapon would shoot again, if the Nimbus Light would clear its angle of fire before it—
Her worries were interrupted by a smaller beam shooting out from one of the secondary firing apertures, the shot clipping the Nimbus Light, taking out the cruiser’s stasis shields.
The woman’s words were cut off, and Svetlana’s eyes widened as she saw part of the moon’s surface leap up, ejecta from an interior detonation flying directly toward the Nimbus Light.
Engines flared as the cruiser shifted vector, attempting to outrun the debris.
Svetlana met her father’s eyes for a moment before they looked back toward the holotank, which showed a clear view of a thirty-kilometer-wide chunk of the moon slamming into the fleeing cruiser.
“Fuck,” Merrick whispered, shaking his head.
“The collision wasn’t that fast,” Svetlana said quietly. “They might still be alive.”
“Look!” Scan called out, switching the main display to a view of the moon.
Large cracks were beginning to appear across its surface, widening as sections of regolith began to fall into the crevasses.
A glance at Lorelei confirmed what they both knew. When the black hole that had powered the DMG fed on the moon, it was going to fire relativistic jets of energy out of its poles. If one of those swept across the station, it would be destroyed.
Along with all the troops that had just boarded it.
“I gave the fallback order,” Lorelei said, her tone grim. “Fighting’s intense in there.”
“Stupid,” Merrick shook his head. “Fucking stupid. Everyone knows you don’t use black holes in war.”
Svetlana couldn’t help but wonder why the Oggies had built a DMG in a moon orbiting a planet in a nowhere system in a nowhere section of the Perseus Expansion Districts. That they could have anticipated an attack by the Transcend on this location out of hundreds of thousands of possible targets seemed too unlikely to be even remotely possible.
Even if the TSF had a leak, there was no way the enemy could have built such a facility in the time available.
Stars…they had to have begun construction on this years ago. It might predate the war.
As she considered the DMG’s provenance, light began to glow brightly as matter was torn apart along the inner edge of the black hole’s accretion disk, the point where atoms passed beyond the event horizon.
Twin beams shot out from the surface of the moon, and Svetlana heaved a sigh of relief. Not only were the black hole’s poles nowhere near Trumark-Alpha, there was little wobble; the thing’s rotation seemed to be stable.
“Nice to catch a break,” Lorelei muttered.
While the black hole devoured the moon, Svetlana turned her attention back to the conflict in space.
Seeing their superweapon destroyed, the Orion ships began to break away from the engagement. Though they still outnumbered the Transcend ships, they were taking a beating from the vessels still possessing stasis shields.
“And that’s that,” Merrick said, folding his arms across his chest. “They put up a hell of a fight.”
“That they did,” Svetlana replied, looking over the damage and loss reports that were compiling.
Nine ships had been utterly destroyed, and another twenty had suffered severe damage after their stasis shields had failed. She directed Wings Five, Seven, and Eight to pursue the Orion ships, while ordering the others to begin search and rescue operations.
“We’re going to blow Trumark-Alpha,” she said to Lorelei. “Once those breach teams get free, direct them to hit Epsilon instead. Alpha’s too close to that big chunk of nothing.”
“I hear you there,” Lorelei replied. “There’s just one platoon left on Alpha. Five minutes, and we’ll be clear.”
Svetlana nodded, rocking back on her heels.
The battle was won, but at a cost far higher than she’d anticipated. Losing half her fleet’s stasis shields was something she’d never considered, and the engineering teams had no idea yet if they could be repaired.
“Dammit,” she muttered, shaking her head.
Svetlana laughed, not caring that the captain had lost her ship if her people were still alive.
Svetlana realized she’d have to destroy that rock too—and dozens of others—before it fell to the planet and killed everyone down there.
Shit. And here I was hoping for a simple smash and grab.
PART 3 – WATCHERS
A WALK AND A RESOLUTION
STELLAR DATE: 10.05.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Lunic Station
REGION: Aldebaran, League of Sentients Space
Iris walked through the ruins of the concourse on Lunic Station, where Bob had destroyed X
avia with his shadow particle beam.
Next to her, Amavia held a scanner capable of finding miniscule concentrations of shadow particles as they searched for any remains of the ascended AI before re-opening the section of the station to the public.
“It’s one in a billion that she survived,” Iris said, as she reached the edge of the hole blown through the station and peered down through the three-kilometer shaft that the beam had cut, before looking up through the few hundred meters to the view of space, atmosphere held in at the hull by grav shields.
“Bob’s one hell of a shot, isn’t he?” Amavia said as she leant over the hole and peered up into the void as well. “He didn’t hit a single person in the station—other than Xavia, of course. But that doesn’t mean a bit of her didn’t get away.”
“Hey, I’m here searching, too.” Iris glanced at Amavia while hefting her shadowtron. “Just doubting that I’ll need to use this thing.”
The alabaster-skinned woman gave Iris a narrow-eyed look. “You just wanted to come to this site again.”
“And you didn’t?” Iris asked.
Amavia laughed. “OK, it’s more than a little epic. Bob pulled so much power through the CriEn modules that spacetime noticeably bent around the I2. The effect was even visible on visual wavelengths.”
“Total ‘do as I say, not as I do’, kinda guy, isn’t he?” Iris asked with a laugh as she turned to survey the empty concourse, her gaze pausing on the deformed deckplates where Tangel and Xavia had battled. “Does this shit scare you?” she asked the woman who was as much her mother as a friend. “I’ll admit, I’m not at Bob’s level or anything, but I’m also not down with the L2 AIs, either. Yet I’m having a hard time understanding what is really going on anymore.”
Amavia lowered her scanner and turned to face Iris.
“I don’t know if ‘scared’ is the right word. It’s intense, and it’s stretching our understanding of what reality is, that’s for sure. But the existence of these dimensions isn’t new—we just never imagined that beings could manipulate the energies there as easily as I manipulate the matter in my hand in our dimensions.” As she spoke, Amavia wiggled her fingers, and Iris couldn’t help but shake her head.
“Shredding atoms for raw energy is a bit more than what we do to move our hands,” she argued.
“Yeah, but that’s why people like Tangel are special,” Amavia said with a bemused shrug before lifting her scanner once more and turning to sweep it across the empty concourse.
A recent update to the shadowtrons had added a mid-powered electron beam and pulse emitter. Something that had proven necessary when taking down remnant-occupied people.
Iris took her meaning. Either there was no one there, or whoever was sneaking up on them wasn’t from Aldebaran. Or likely even the Inner Stars.
Amavia spun in a slow circle, talking about the fight in the assembly chamber while taking readings with her scanner. Iris turning in the opposite direction, searching for any signs of a hidden enemy.
With a slow nod and a response about how the assembly chamber was so radioactive that they were removing it entirely from the station, Iris stepped around the hole in the deck, deploying her own nanocloud to add coverage, and to scan the decks below and above.
She was about to ask Amavia if maybe they were just being paranoid, when a pulse wave slammed into her side, sending her sprawling.
In an instant, Iris rolled to her feet and saw a figure light up on her HUD, covered in the nanocloud. The person, thinking they were unseen, was advancing with their weapon held level.
Iris didn’t hesitate to fire the electron beam on her shadowtron, catching the figure in the chest. She glanced at Amavia just in time to see her take a pulse blast as well. She went down, immediately beginning to struggle with an invisible figure at the edge of the hole in the deck.
Turning her attention back to her attacker, Iris was amazed to see that the enemy had shrugged off the electron beam shot—though a blackened chestplate now hung in the air, denoting at least some damage. Iris fired twice more, hoping that whoever she was facing didn’t have armor to match their stealth tech.
With the second shot, the attacker’s stealth systems went offline entirely, and Iris realized who they were facing.
“They’re Lisas!” she called out to Amavia, while signaling both Bob and Lunic Station Security for aid, only to find that there was no response on the Link.
“Surrender,” the figure before Iris said in her lisping hiss.
“Like hell,” Iris muttered, about to fire once more, when another pulse blast hit her, this time from the side.
Her HUD lit up with two more attackers closing in.
“I’ve got—shit!” Amavia cried out from across the hole in the deck, as she wrenched free from her invisible assailant only to take two more pulse shots.
The blasts bowled her over, rolling her toward the hole torn through the deck. She stopped right on the edge, and then wavered for a second before another pulse blast hit her, sending her down through the gash in the station’s hull.
“Not gonna ha—” Iris began, when a web shot out from a boxy weapon the Lisa held.
It wrapped around Iris, the bindings tightening until she couldn’t move a centimeter. Then a large bag was produced and rolled out beside her while she fought against her bonds.
She pumped out every bit of nano she could, setting it on the strands of the web, when suddenly, multiple pairs of hands grabbed her and pushed her into the bag. The zipper was pulled shut, and then the whatever was inside the bag solidified, holding Iris immobile—just in time for a series of EMPs hit her and everything disappeared into a single point of light.
* * * * *
Tangel sat on the deck swing that hung from the ceiling in her lakehouse’s porch. She gazed out contentedly, looking over Ol’ Sam’s rolling hills and low clouds. After Bob’s healing aid, she felt whole again, but the mental aftereffects of the confrontation with Xavia were still with her.
“How many times do I have to get the ever-living shit kicked out of me?” she asked quietly as she picked shapes out of the clouds that were trailing past.
Though she’d told herself she was still ready for action during those long years in New Canaan, Tangel realized that she’d grown complacent, come to think that her struggles were in the past.
But then the fight on Scipio, then Pyra, then in Corona Australis, and out in the LMC had taught her otherwise—no, should have taught her otherwise. But then she went traipsing into danger down on Lunic Station and risked her Marines’ lives, and the lives of Iris and Amavia, just because she thought she could take all comers.
Every time I think I’m finally equipped for the fight ahead of me, I find out how wrong I am.
A footfall sounded on the path, and Tangel looked up to see Faleena strolling through the woods.
The AI still wore her dryad-inspired frame, which was just as well, given how aptly it suited her. Long red tresses trailed past light green skin, long elfin ears poking through the locks.
In a way, we all just wear shells. Even humans can change them, if they like. Just look at Malorie; the woman’s spent five cen
turies as a mechanical spider, of all things.
That the body was a nothing more than a temporary capsule was even more apparent to Tangel. The body she’d spent her whole life in was becoming more and more of a vessel, and less ‘her’. Her mind was still rooted in the sliver of ‘normal’ space she’d spent most of her life within. A presence there was something she didn’t plan to forsake, even if maintaining it was a risk.
She’d promised her family that she wasn’t going to go drifting off into the ether.
Another part of that worry was the tendril of thought that reminded her of the distance it would create between herself and everyone she cared for, were she to separate herself from the corporeal world.
Like you always do, she told herself. Everyone she cared about was here with her. Not to mention, excepting Bob, so far as she could tell, every other ascended being was a raging asshole.
“Where are Cary and Saanvi?” Tangel asked, as Faleena reached the steps and skipped up to the porch.
“Doctor Rosenberg wanted to look over Cary to make sure that nothing was missed, out in the LMC, and Saanvi went with her for moral support.”
Tangel laughed. “She must be pretty tired of patching up the Richards women.”
Faleena shrugged. “In the grand scheme of things, you only seem to get seriously injured every couple of decades—barring Pyra and Lunic.”
Patting the seat next to her, Tangel nodded slowly. “Yeah, you’re right about that. Maybe this means I’ll get a good long reprieve.”
Her AI daughter settled gingerly on the swing and folded her legs up under herself.
“You really think so, Moms?”
“No…no, I don’t.”
They’d rocked gently in companionable silence for a few minutes when Faleena asked, “What’s it like, Moms?”
“Ascending?” Tangel asked, unable to think of anything else that she could be referring to.
Faleena turned her head to meet Tangel’s eyes. “Well…being ascended; less the actual getting there part.”