The aliens were not so numerous here but plenty enough that Conway didn’t bother counting. They remained still, like inkblots on the rock.
“They came for life and now it’s gone,” he said.
“Yes, human. During my return for the pickup, I saw them everywhere, as if the whole of Dominion suddenly became populated by these creatures.”
Conway’s brain was turning, leading him along a road he didn’t want to follow. His thoughts wouldn’t be denied.
“Which means the rifts are everywhere under the surface.”
“Or?”
“Or perhaps they are all part of the same rift, connected to the widest one which runs across the planet.”
“We suspect that something powerful wishes to force its way through. If the main rift is in fact much larger than we first thought, the coming foe may be more terrible than our worst imaginings.”
It wasn’t something which Conway wished to dwell on. He’d done his part and he couldn’t do any more. The situation had moved on and the necessary action was beyond his expertise. It was time for others to have a turn.
The return journey to the Nullifier was longer than the outward, since the shuttle had no benefit of inherited velocity and was obliged to rely wholly on its own propulsion to get up to speed. Eventually, the battleship appeared on the forward sensors. Isental made easy work of matching speeds and he flew the shuttle straight in through the open bay door.
When the transport landed, Conway didn’t know if he felt relief or anxiety. He led the soldiers once more towards the bridge. To Kemp’s dismay, he was ordered into the middle of the squad in case the Raggers were anywhere nearby.
Once they made it to the protected area of the bridge complex, Conway listened to Lieutenant Atomar’s report. Everything had been quiet, with no sign of hostiles. Now the relief came. Conway resumed command and waited to see how the rest of this would play out.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Waiting for the outcome of the surface mission was tense. Griffin and his crew maintained their vigilance over the Dominion facility and tried their hardest to unearth whatever information might be of assistance. Despite the criticality of the mission, Griffin’s time wasn’t fully occupied and he spoke with the battleship’s control entity, hoping to learn something about the enemy. It wasn’t going to plan.
“Damned computers,” he swore, after five minutes of getting nowhere.
“Is it holding back the intel, sir?” asked Jackson.
“Not exactly. It’s answering my questions, but I’m beginning to wonder if I’m asking the right ones.”
“We’ve got teams in the ULAF who are trained for this kind of thing,” said Kroll. “Shame that doesn’t help us now.”
“I’ve got a copy of the first encounter guidelines in my suit computer,” said Kenyon. “I can send you the file.”
“Wasn’t that written like a hundred years ago?” asked Shelton.
“The first edition is older,” Kenyon agreed. “It gets updated every so often. I guess the basic principles don’t change.”
Griffin was vaguely familiar with the text and recalled it to be several hundred pages in length and focused on ensuring no misunderstandings occurred in a hypothetical situation where humanity came upon a new alien race. “Thanks for the offer, Lieutenant. You can keep the book.”
“If talking about the present isn’t getting you anywhere, try talking about the past,” said Shelton. “Build up from there.”
“That’s a good idea, Lieutenant,” said Griffin. “Thanks.”
“No worries, sir.”
Griffin still wasn’t exactly sure how it worked, but he could reliably call up the control entity simply by focusing when his hand was holding the neural link bar. The entity returned.
GRIFFIN> Tell me how the Hantisar found themselves fighting the Sekar.
NULLIFIER> Rudimentary teleportation technology weakens the fabric. The Sekar came through rifts where teleportation was used.
GRIFFIN> You said the Hantisar had mastered teleportation.
NULLIFIER> Their development of the technology reduced the weakening but did not heal the damage. The advancement came centuries after the Sekar first appeared – there was much harm already done.
GRIFFIN> How long did it take the Hantisar to realize the cause?
NULLIFIER> Too long. When enlightenment came, the fabric was weakened across the entirety of their territory.
GRIFFIN> What was the result of this weakening?
NULLIFIER> The Sekar could open rifts of their own.
GRIFFIN> Everywhere the Hantisar lived?
NULLIFIER> Almost everywhere. It was enough.
GRIFFIN> Where do the Sekar come from?
NULLIFIER> The Elsewhere.
GRIFFIN> That’s what the Hantisar called it?
NULLIFIER> There are more scientific descriptions. I thought you would prefer the basic term.
GRIFFIN> Thanks. What is this Elsewhere?
NULLIFIER> The Hantisar did not know.
GRIFFIN> They must have had theories, right?
NULLIFIER> It is a place of negative energy. The opposite of this universe. Another universe. A different plane of existence. A holding place for the sins of our forebears.
GRIFFIN> Which one did most people believe?
NULLIFIER> When science cannot explain a phenomenon, people turn to superstition.
GRIFFIN> How do the Sekar know where to find life? The universe is a big place with lots of gaps.
NULLIFIER> If the Sekar are the opposite of life, it is logical in a way to believe they are always there, on the opposite side of the fabric, mirroring our every action, trying to break into our universe. Or perhaps the Sekar hunt eternally and once they find life, they wait for that species to advance far enough to experiment with teleportation.
The words sparked something in Griffin’s mind.
GRIFFIN> Is it only teleportation that weakens the fabric?
NULLIFIER> The Hantisar believed the tharniol which powered their teleporters was responsible for the fabric’s decay.
GRIFFIN> Didn’t they ever use tharniol for lightspeed travel?
NULLIFIER> Yes, until they discovered how to purify it into vantrium.
GRIFFIN> Why not use vantrium for the teleporters if it’s so much better?
NULLIFIER> That is precisely what happened. The tharniol teleporters were decommissioned. By then, it was too late.
GRIFFIN> Our spaceships have begun encountering lightspeed turbulence. Is this caused by the Sekar?
NULLIFIER> Yes – they can follow the decaying tharniol particles.
GRIFFIN> How come they don’t break through?
NULLIFIER> The quantity of particles is enough for the Sekar to follow, yet insufficient to weaken the fabric. They follow the scent, hoping to find life.
GRIFFIN> The lightspeed turbulence only started recently.
NULLIFIER> That is when the Sekar discovered your existence.
GRIFFIN> Can they ever be defeated?
NULLIFIER> The Hantisar believed so.
GRIFFIN> And?
NULLIFER> We have discussed this and you learned the outcome.
GRIFFIN> You told me about weapons the Hantisar developed.
NULLIFIER> Tharniol missiles, tharniol bombs, tharniol repeaters. Rift bombs, disintegration cannons.
GRIFFIN> Which I assume kill the Sekar at the same time as they weaken the fabric?
NULLIFIER> Partially correct. The dark cannon and the Nullifier’s emitter are powered by vantrium.
GRIFFIN> Not every warship has one?
NULLIFIER> The fleet on Dominion predates the technology.
GRIFFIN> If these spaceships are armed with weapons which do more harm than good, what use are they?
NULLIFIER> They predate vantrium weaponry, not vantrium propulsion.
GRIFFIN> We could modify the fleet.
NULLIFIER> It is a possibility, should your species live long enough.
GRIFFIN
> Your databanks hold schematics for everything.
NULLIFIER> Even with the schematics, your Unity League may not have time.
GRIFFIN> That’s something I’ll have to speak to my superiors about.
NULLIFIER> Your superiors can halt the passage of time?
GRIFFIN> That’s not what I meant. We’ve got a problem here and now at Dominion. We need that fleet and we need to prevent some huge asshole of a Sekar escaping from the Elsewhere. Once that’s done, we can deal with the next step.
NULLIFIER> The next step in saving yourselves from extinction.
GRIFFIN> Stop repeating it.
NULLIFIER> I am telling you the facts.
GRIFFIN> Let’s move on. If we get this fleet in the air, how many of those 934 warships have weapons which can damage the rift?
NULLIFIER> Every battleship. Sixty-one.
GRIFFIN> Is there any point in the others sticking around?
NULLIFIER> Numbers.
GRIFFIN> I don’t understand.
NULLIFIER> The Sekar have weapons of their own. How else would they defeat a species capable of bombarding them from the air?
GRIFFIN> What kind of weapons?
NULLIFIER> Decay burst. The dark cannon was modelled on the effect, without functioning in the same way.
GRIFFIN> So the Sekar will fire this decay burst at the fleet once we begin our assault on the rift?
NULLIFIER> Yes. We will rely on numbers to improve the odds of a successful rift bomb and emitter deployment.
GRIFFIN> Let me deal with the tactics. I’ll pull up the data files on these weapons and think about our approach.
NULLIFIER> I await the outcome of your study.
Conversation with the control entity was peculiarly draining and Griffin spent a couple of minutes gathering his thoughts. As soon as he was ready, he informed his crew what he’d found out.
“The more you learn, the more you realize how little you knew,” said Kroll. “Here we were with our tharniol drives and our spaceships, shooting a few dogs and thinking that was the worst the universe had to offer.”
“Worst of all, we’re left cleaning up the mess left by the Hantisar and the Ravok,” said Shelton.
“We’d have got to the same place in the end, Lieutenant.”
“Not if we figured out how to make a vantrium drive. Maybe we’d never have bothered with teleportation if we had limitless lightspeed travel.”
“Yeah, but the Raggers,” said Jackson. “Whatever we do, they seem determined to screw things up.”
“I suppose.”
“We’re going to close this rift and we’re going to take the Hantisar fleet back home,” said Griffin. “From the sounds of it, we’re about to leapfrog the Raggers in terms of technological capability.”
“Tharniol gauss repeater,” said Jackson. “I haven’t seen one in operation, but it sounds like it’ll kick Ragger ass.”
“If those skinny bastards get to thinking we’re better than them, they’ll request another truce,” said Shelton.
“How come?” asked Kroll. “After what happened at Glesia, they’ve got no chance.”
“They’ll come up with some bullshit story about how Hass-Tei-112 was a rogue and how nobody in the Ragger high command knew what he was planning.”
“I don’t think I wanted to hear that,” said Kroll.
“We’ve got to face the realities, Lieutenant,” Shelton replied.
“I face them when I have to.”
While his crew exchanged thoughts, Griffin pondered the coming hours. Updates from Captain Isental indicated that Conway and his squad were inside the flight control building, though comms were now lost. More worrying was the appearance – seemingly out of nowhere – of the Sekar on the Dominion base. Isental said he had the situation under control and Griffin was keen to believe him since he didn’t want to commit the Nullifier to the engagement yet.
Time passed, during which Griffin interrogated the neural framework and the Nullifier’s data arrays. He gradually built up a picture of what was coming, though it didn’t help much with tactics. The control entity had mentioned it came down to numbers and Griffin wondered if it was said in mockery after the computer had spoken of its own limitations when it came to predicting the future. He swore and wished he was back in charge of a plain old dumb spaceship that behaved exactly like he wanted it to.
Eventually, Kenyon received a message from Conway to say that the override codes had been successfully injected. Griffin instructed the Nullifier’s battle computer to issue a fleet-wide command for the Hantisar warships to begin warming up their engines. Given the time they’d spent dormant, he expected a significant delay, vantrium drives or not.
Then, later, Conway arrived on the bridge, bringing news of Private Kemp’s miraculous immunity to the Sekar life drain. It was a monumental discovery and Griffin was suddenly torn between getting Kemp and the Hantisar fleet home safely and staying at Dominion in order to finish the job they’d started.
Once Captain Isental told him about the Sekar rifts which seemingly infested the entire planet, Griffin knew beyond doubt that his first duty was here. Whatever was happening at Dominion, it was worse than anything even the Nullifier had encountered before.
With his decision made, Griffin watched the progress of the Hantisar fleet. Their battle computers were active and they had accepted the command authority of the Nullifier.
GRIFFIN> How long until they can fly?
NULLIFIER> Five minutes for the earliest and eleven for the last.
GRIFFIN> I have flight patterns and weapon deployment tactics I wish them to follow.
NULLIFIER> You must control them through the neural link.
Griffin blinked in surprise.
GRIFFIN> I can’t handle 934 spaceships.
NULLIFIER> Fine. I will pass on your instructions.
GRIFFIN> Was that meant as a joke?
NULLIFIER> Yes. Did you like it?
GRIFFIN> This really isn’t the time.
He broke the link and unleashed a string of expletives.
“Sir?”
“This is getting crazier by the minute. I want to get this over so we can hand this spaceship on to someone who appreciates a warped alien sense of humor.”
“You may regret saying that, sir,” said Shelton. “Take a look at what’s happening on the Dominion base.”
Griffin looked. Where previously the edges of the chasm around the Sekar rift were merely fragmenting, now the planet’s surface was leaping towards orbit in a maelstrom. The opening widened visibly with each passing second.
“It’s happening,” said Dominguez.
“We’ve got to get down there,” said Griffin.
“The fleet isn’t ready, sir.”
“It will be by the time we arrive.”
Griffin’s hand was still on the neural link. In fact, it seemed like it was permanently stuck there. Refusing to succumb to emotion, Griffin brought the battleship’s vantrium drive to full power. The propulsion whined and hurled the alien spaceship towards Dominion.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The Nullifier’s vantrium drive made short work of the million-klick distance. The density of rocks increased and Griffin was required to keep maximum focus.
“If we don’t go too close to the rift’s edge, we should be safe from those boulders once we get nearer to the surface,” said Shelton.
“Good thought,” said Kroll. “But if the emitter is going to stand any chance of sealing the rift, we’ll need to fly right over it.”
“Maybe we should fly in six thousand klicks south, where it’s narrower,” said Jackson. “We might avoid the worst of this crap.”
“We’ll be out of comms sight from the Hantisar fleet if we do that,” said Griffin.
“I hope you have a plan, sir.”
Griffin didn’t answer and concentrated on the approach. Five minutes was up and several dozen of the larger Hantisar ships signaled their readiness to lift off. The Nullifier’s cont
rol entity initiated communication.
NULLIFIER> Warships ready. Types: battleship. Armaments: rift bombs, tharniol gauss repeaters, tharniol bombs…
GRIFFIN> I know – I read the spec sheets. Get them off the ground and order them to fly two hundred klicks from the rift.
NULLIFIER> Acknowledged.
The battleships were impressively large in comparison to most vessels in the ULAF, though nothing like the Nullifier in size. They lifted off and flew directly away from the rift.
“Sixty-one battleships,” said Shelton. “We are going to kick the crap out of the Raggers if we get home with all of these.”
The Nullifier was over the Dominion facility before any other spaceships were warmed up for take-off. Seeing the devastation from so close made Griffin angry. The Sekar had no purpose that he could imagine, unless they’d been created by an all-powerful deity to cleanse the universe or some other crap that made no sense. Doubtless there’d be plenty of scholars in the Unity League debating the subject.
“Are we waiting for the other ships, sir?” asked Jackson. “I can fire the dark cannon at these ground targets if you want.”
“Hold. I’d rather our primary weapon wasn’t recharging if we run into something that requires us to use it.”
Griffin flew the Nullifier in amongst the Hantisar battleships. They moved in a randomized pattern, never coming closer than a thousand meters to one of the others. The Nullifier was equipped with the same automated facility and Griffin activated it.
“Come on,” he muttered, urging the other spaceships to finish their warmup.
“Here come some others,” said Dominguez.
Another 180 of the fleet rose as one from the ground. They climbed steeply in the direction of the battleships.
“Did any come from the chasm?” asked Griffin.
“Yes, sir – two of them. They mustn’t have fallen into the rift.”
“What would happen to them if they did that?” asked Shelton.
NULLIFIER> Exposed materials decay within seconds.
GRIFFIN> Except tharniol?
NULLIFIER> Indeed.
GRIFFIN> What about our energy shield?
NULLIFIER> I have never tested the result. Don’t be in a hurry to do so.
Nullifier (Fire and Rust Book 6) Page 21