Stardust

by Edward W. Robertson

  Yet she knew how much could change with time. They all knew that. There was nothing at all silly about the idea that if they just gave themselves five hundred years, they would reemerge to find that everything had changed again.

  "We can't." Her voice was almost a whisper. "This feels wrong. Like giving up."

  Winters cocked his head and left eyebrow. "What's the alternative? Fly off into a fight you know you can't win? That's exactly what you just damned Admiral Vance for doing. Are any of us better off because he threw his life away?"

  "This isn't what our ancestors would do. The ones who survived the Panhandler and fought off the Swimmers would have done more." She began to lift her hand toward him—she didn't know why or what she meant to do—then balled it into a fist and pressed it to her side. "I can't make this decision right now. I need time to think."

  Winters nodded and moved toward the door out of the bridge. "Our ancestors fought because they didn't have a choice. In that sense, we have it tougher than they did. For we have the power to make a choice—and to be wrong."

  ~

  "For me," Toman said from her screen, responding to the footage she'd sent him just after receiving it herself, "Vance's death changes little, either numerically, strategically, or philosophically. The situation on Earth only strengthens the premise that we have to strike now.

  "It's just simple math. Our odds are currently terrible. My sims put them at around 1 in 160, and I think they're being generous. Every day, those odds get a little worse. Say a week from now it'll be 1 in 170, and a week after that, 1 in 180. Now, you might look at those odds and say, 'Wow, those are awful, it's not even worth it to try when we've got less than a 1% chance of victory. In fact, I bet if we pull back and take our time—to forge a new strategy or set a cunning trap or whatever—then the advantage we'll gain will more than overcome the relatively small additional advantage the Lurkers will get as we delay.'

  "Here's the problem: our odds aren't an arithmetic progression. At some point, there's a phase transition where the Lurkers' advantage grows so overwhelming that our odds collapse to zero. The sims believe we are already very close to bumping up against that point. They show that if the Lurkers take and hold Earth, our defeat is inevitable.

  "So that forms the backbone of the logical argument to attack now, even with Vance gone. But here is the argument I actually care about: I want to attack them now. I want to feel their blood on my hands. I want to spike their heads on our spears and make them wail in regret for the day they ever crossed into our lands. I waited out on Titan for too long. Now, I fight."

  She didn't know if DS had told him about the cryogenic option. She still didn't know if she would take it herself. But if the odds were as poor as Toman's sims thought they were, how crazy would it be, really, to go to sleep, and to dream for one year after another until the day came that they could all wake up in a better world?

  The burned-out rock of Athena hung twenty minutes of flight time ahead of her, tumbling alone in the endless night. An alert came in from the drones that had slipped away—or been deliberately allowed to escape—from Vance's final stand. A little under an hour ago, the half of the Lurker fleet that had put an end to Earth's navy, which had previously been flying in random zigzags between the Belt and Earth, had swung about to make full speed for the Belt. Then, just minutes later, it had broken off and resumed its zigzagging course out in the middle of nowhere, where it would be able to intercept anything headed toward Earth or fall back to the planet as necessary.

  A stillness came over Rada. Somehow, she was looking down on herself. She lay beneath a cover of transparent plastic. Her eyes were open and she was frozen as hard as a glacier.

  Her head had been shaved down to a tight black stubble. She was dressed in a white jumpsuit. Everything was as clean as surgical steel and as well-cared-for as a lord's garden—her jumpsuit, the cryo box she rested in, the dozens of other boxes around her and the well-lit room they rested in—yet her face was as twisted and panicked as the citizens of Obold who had been flushed out into the vacuum and huddled together for warmth and safety until the indifference of space had suffocated them dead.

  Hands shaking, she went for her device, calling up timestamps. She triple-checked them against the lag involved, then took control of the Silence and began to execute the sharpest U-turn the ship could handle.

  Winters appeared on her comm. "What do you think you're doing?"

  "I know it's a pretty advanced maneuver, but I'm doing what we pilots call 'turning around.' 54 minutes ago, the Lurker fleet started to come back toward the Belt."

  "I saw that. I also saw that just a few minutes after that, they reversed course and returned to their original position. So what?"

  "54 minutes ago, I was approaching missile range of Obold Station."

  "I don't follow you."

  "Just stay next to me. And be ready to dash."

  They flew on across the sparsely pebbled space of the Belt. Obold appeared directly ahead, expanding in size every minute. They entered combat range. Rada queued up a single rocket and let fly. The weapon sizzled across the darkness toward the dead rock.

  "Now what are you doing?" Winters said. "Defiling the dead? That ought to bring the Belters racing back to our side!"

  "Shut up and watch."

  "For what? You to be attacked by ghosts?"

  "You're not watching."

  The missile carried on, uninterrupted, until it was abruptly and permanent interrupted by the surface of the asteroid. It exploded with a white flash, little more than a dot against the expanse of the rock.

  Rada curved the Silence to keep her distance from the smashed habitat. She had four cameras trained on Obold at various levels of zoom, but the only thing they were picking up was the dust rising from the blast to hover in the microgravity. Infrared showed a very hot crater and a very cold asteroid. Bio scans brought up nothing and the only trace of e-sigs in the area were the ones she and Winters had left on their first trip past the rock.

  "Just what are you trying to do?" Winters said. "Rouse the rock spirits to come fight for us?"

  "Just watch."

  She launched a second missile, waited five seconds, then fired off a third. They struck a few hundred yards to either side of the crater left by her first shot.

  "I'm watching." Winters' voice was getting impatient. "But the only thing I'm seeing are the actions of a woman who has finally snapped under the pressure and is now completely insane."

  "You'd better hope so. The alternative is that you're too lazy to figure it out—or too dumb."

  "You think they set up weapons platforms to ambush passersby to sow fear and confusion. Or do you think they boobytrapped them, so that if we tried to hide out in the dead rocks, we'd get blown to pieces?"

  "I wouldn't put that past them."

  She had always wanted to do what she was about to do, but outside of the sims, which didn't count, she'd never had the chance. Smiling to herself, she queued up her order—and launched every single missile in her batteries. A river of rockets flooded toward the lifeless habitat.

  On infrared, a circle of low heat appeared near Obold's southern pole.

  The missiles drew closer. When they were just seconds from impact, Rada tapped her device. Converging into a single flock, the missiles broke course, skidding away from Obold and flying back toward Rada. As they neared, they turned their tails toward her and braked. She dispatched her drones to go out and collect them.

  "54 minutes from now," Rada said, "we're going to get another transmission from the drones dogging the Lurkers. And we'll see that they started flying this way again."

  "Are you ready to tell me how you know this?"

  "Soon. Right now, I have to prepare a message for Toman."

  She clicked off her comm, set a new course, and started recording. Though the Silence was pulling well out of combat range, she kept one eye on Obold anyway.

  Exactly 54 minutes later, a transmission arrived from the
drones. The Lurker fleet hadn't budged—not all of it, anyway. Instead, six task forces diverged from the larger formation and charged in the general direction of the drones, scanners on full blast. It wasn't long before they located their prey and shot down the drones one after another until the last camera went black.

  "Right," Winters said. "How the hell did you predict that?"

  "They've been hiding right under our noses all along," Rada said. "And now that I've found them, their fleet is coming for us."

  16

  "We are looking," Loris said softly, "at complete and utter disaster."

  Webber tilted his head. "Then what was the mass bombing of the entire planet? Just a temporary setback?"

  "Do you not understand the significance of what you've found?"

  "The Lurkers are manufacturing war machines right here on Earth. And it looks like they're doing it really fast. So why don't we just drop a bomb on their factory?"

  The old woman scrunched her eyes half-shut like she was looking at something foul. "The presence of a weapons factory isn't the bad part. What's really scary is how they built the factory: from very small pieces that assemble bigger pieces that in turn assemble the actual weapons. What we're looking at is essentially a factory for factories."

  MacAdams ran his palms down his face. "They put the first one together in no more than a month. That means they'll have a second one up and running another month from now. And a third a month after that. This will be going on as they're also cranking out new jets and weapons that are better than anything we got. Our only real chance to hold Earth is to dig in to the jungles and the mountains and guerrilla war them until we grind them down to nothing. But that's not how it's going to go, is it? They've already bombed us back into feudalism. They can just keep replacing their losses while we get a little weaker with each fight."

  "That was my assessment as well, which is why you will excuse the grog on my breath. We are up against a ticking clock. Every hour we wait for a better solution makes it that more likely that we will never be able to execute any solution."

  They had one of those moments where you sit there and your back hunches a bit and it feels like there's no point in saying anything more because there's just nothing else you can possibly do. Or maybe MacAdams was just tired: after they'd sent their transmission to Dark Solutions, he'd hurled his device back toward the hidden canyon, then started running downhill as fast as he could. A micro-missile struck his device less than ten seconds later.

  A team of drones had come in to scan the wreckage. Obviously they hadn't liked the lack of gore, because they'd spent a long time circling around the jungle. The only reason MacAdams, Webber, and Rohan had half a chance was that they still had a baffler on them. That and a lot of luck allowed them to get down to the palm trees lining the shore.

  Which left them in hostile territory with hundreds of miles of water between them and any hope of escape. They talked about going back to hijack a jet, starting a fire to send up a smoke signal, or even building a raft, but fortunately everyone had been too tired to actually start executing any of their dumb plans, because a fist-sized drone had flown in from the ocean just before dawn and used its tinny speakers to tell them to find cover and stay put.

  Eighteen of the most stressfully tedious hours of MacAdams' life later, the drone returned to lead them to shore, where an unpiloted dinghy awaited. They climbed in. The dinghy burbled them ten miles out into the open ocean. Just as MacAdams started to think it might be a perverse Lurker prank, the sub arose from the waters beside them like a black whale.

  Loris had immediately brought Rohan to the bridge for questioning. MacAdams knew the opportunity for a nap when he saw one, but a generic-looking DS trooper in a black uniform had shaken him awake forty minutes later. And now here they were.

  "So let me get this straight," Webber said. "We're in deep trouble if we sit around and do nothing? Then can I suggest we employ the ancient technique of bombing the living shit out of them?"

  "You may," Loris said. "But it would be rather redundant at this point."

  She made a flourishing gesture toward the bridge's largest screen, which somehow made it turn on, bringing up an image of a very large and extremely fast rocket skimming over the surface of the ocean. Its nose was painted with a lightning bolt under a skull.

  MacAdams grunted. "Don't tell me Dark Solutions has nukes, too."

  "None on Earth. You might say this one was loaned to us."

  "By who? The nuke fairy?"

  Loris took on the self-satisfied look of someone who has no intention of telling you their secrets, then reconsidered. "What remains of the government of Ralania. The president went missing during the bombardment, leaving the vice president in charge. By sheer coincidence, the vice president is the close friend of one of our ambassadors."

  The missile raced on, a vortex of steam tailing from its wake. Webber sniffed. "So stuff like nations and vice presidents still exist out there? Everything hasn't been reduced to a pile of radioactive ash yet?"

  "Only through sheer luck. The conflict between Sveylan and New Mongolia has escalated drastically. When it looked as though Sveylan would fold rapidly, its allies threw in with it, which in turn provoked others to enlist with New Mongolia. The fighting has spread across half of the continent. There have been three nuclear exchanges already."

  "They're really nuking each other? Are they crazy?"

  "The missile that was dropped on Khent was like the opening of a jar—or the releasing of a genie. It's also possible that one or more of the leaders responsible for the launches is actually a Lurker in human skin. Regardless, to date, the participants have restricted themselves to tactical nuclear weapons, but there is no reason to believe they will remain restrained for long. Not once one side begins to lose."

  Loris gestured to the screens again. On four separate displays, footage of fighting sprang to life. Jets tussling in the skies. Self-piloted tanks blasting at each other across the snowy wastes. A city burning, men dashing through the smoke-clogged streets only to disintegrate under high-explosive fire. A second city husked and abandoned. And three empty craters in the middle of nowhere, shredded vehicles strewn across the ground like black scraps of rotten vegetables.

  "The balance of power is already tilting toward the Sveylani Alliance. We believe that the delivery of just one more wing of Lurker-produced jets could be enough to push what remains of the UDL into collapse. It's at that point that we expect them to deploy their full nuclear capability. Tens of millions will die and the entire remaining military capacity of the Grasian continent will be exhausted. We are about to step out onto the edge of the knife."

  Webber grimaced. "Then let's hope your nuke does what nukes do best."

  "There have been fleet actions as well. There was a theory among those who are supposed to give us theories that the Lurkers had brought a handful of logistical ships—we have been calling them carriers—that were vital to the occupation, and that if these ships were destroyed, the enemy might retreat from the System.

  "Our people put this theory to the test in the Asteroid Belt. In the battle, they were able to destroy the remaining Lurker carriers. Needless to say, this did not put a stop to the invasion, which has been taken as a heavy rebuke of the theory.

  "We suffered heavy losses in the battle. Afterwards, what remained of the Earth navy made way for home, meaning to put down the Grasian war. The Lurkers ambushed them en route. There were no survivors."

  MacAdams laced his fingers, popping the knuckles of his thumbs. "Guessing that means we can't rely on any space support."

  "Not from Earth, no. There may be relief from the Belt, but it is at least five days away, and in any case would likely be intercepted by the Lurker fleet. We are on our own to stop what is happening here."

  They lapsed into silence. The screens tracked the missile as it screamed across the sea. A vague blue lump appeared on the feed from the nose-mounted camera.

  "That would be Tandana," L
oris said. "In another eight seconds, we—"

  Red light flashed from the base of the island. All three camera feeds flared white, then went dead.

  Webber swore, slapping his palm on the table. "Was that a laser?"

  Loris clenched her fists, knobbed with bony knuckles. "I was afraid of this."

  "Can you contact your vice president in wherever? Ask him to fling another nuke?"

  "There would be no point in launching a single missile. Our only chance is to launch a volley and hope that it is enough to overwhelm the defenses at Tandana."

  MacAdams and Webber were shown to a cabin while Loris opened up a line to her contact.

  Webber stared at his bunk as if it would be too much effort to roll into it. "Where do you think this is headed?"

  "You were there at Tandana. If they keep it up, it won't be long before their military's bigger than anything Earth can muster."

  "Well that's a comforting thought."

  "That ain't the worst of it. If I were them—and they're a lot meaner and more low-down than I am—as soon as I'd taken out the conventional military, I'd switch production over to drones. People-hunters. Then I'd kick back in orbit as my drones hunted down every last man, woman, and child on the planet."

  "They wouldn't even have to fight us in person. Wouldn't have to nuke the planet to death, either. Damn, MacAdams, next time I need to pacify a hostile populace, remind me to invite you along."

  They caught another nap. MacAdams had just started to dream when a sailor woke them and brought them back to the bridge. On the screens, a spread of twenty missiles skimmed over the empty blue water.

  Loris looked as bereft as the trunk of a tree that's shed its last leaves. "That salvo represents the last capabilities of Ralania. The launch triggered a retaliatory strike from its neighbor Taijin. Ralania's remaining missiles—and government—have been destroyed."

  MacAdams nodded in sympathy. It had been ages since a bored teacher had run him and his classmates through basic Earth history and the names of its lesser nations meant about as much to him as the names of mountain flowers meant to the fish, but he knew one thing: even if DS had another official with a hand on the nuclear controls, nobody was going to launch another spread at Tandana. Not if it meant getting nuked in return by a trigger-happy world.