by Wil McCarthy
“#Some of we/our ships are damaged#” He said, after a pause. “#Stupid-lings fight against these They fight so hard But Soon they will all be gone#”
Marshe continued to stare at the screens. Yes, she saw, Josev was right. The colors had begun to make sense to her, the odd, purplish lines clearly marking human ships. Presently, two of them winked out. Silently, she continued watching.
A pattern seemed to emerge, after a while: the human fighters and gunboats were continually diving into the thick of the armada, the Waister ships continually buzzing away from them. Afraid? No, she realized, just pulling back enough to fire disintegration beams at the humans, without risk of hitting each other.
But two Waister ships hung unmoving against the sky, and angry clouds of human ships surrounded these, drawing slowly inward. Eventually, one of the two exploded, expanding outward as a sphere of brilliant light.
A few of the fighters got away in time.
Chapter Fourteen
“Lock it down!” Hiro Vestan shouted as he hauled the fighter through another deep niner.
“Check.” Said Miyr, from the seat behind. His voice was calm, professional. Miyr, like Vestan, had spent long years waiting and training for this day, and wasn't going to palsy himself now that the safeties were finally off.
Little more, Vestan told himself, straining at the controls. Little more... The stars scrolled down on his forward holie, precisely as they would in a simulator run. The gee loading... Well, there was nothing simulated about that, but the augies on his hands and feet let him stay on the panel, tweaking and fussing, and the umbilicals pumping clear fluid into his temples kept his vision and his thoughts in spec. He was part of the machine, Vestan was. He was the component whose job it was to produce cussedness, malice, bloody-mindedness. He was the part that caused the machine to seek its destruction, to skirt the edges of it and withdraw.
“There,” he said, easing up. “We're out of it.”
His holies showed them far from the stylized cones that represented Waister disinto rays. Suspected disinto rays, he corrected. Computer's best guess.
“Come around to one-ten by three-twenty-five,” said Miyr.
“One-ten by three-twenty-five,” Vestan echoed, spotting the hole and going for it.
He scarcely noticed the casualties around him. On the holies, other fighters were visible as dots, or else not visible at all, their positions marked only by the stylized green triangles and serial numbers the computer cast up. And when a fighter was destroyed, there was a tiny flash, and the green triangle went away.
The gunboats, though more distant, were easier to spot. And when the disinto rays found them, they announced their deaths with bright detonations that the holies filtered down to smooth, expanding spheres. But it was all rubbish to Vestan. His eyes were trained, very specifically, to look through such displays without distraction.
“One-ten by two-thirty,” Miyr droned as the angles changed.
Vestan grunted his acknowledgment. “One-ten by two-thirty.”
The Waister fleetship drifted in onto his forward holie. Light brown, it was, the color of oxidized metal. Little bit redder than the simulators always showed, but otherwise nearly identical. Ribs circled its body. Three spines, equally spaced, ran down its length. Looks a bit like a dried up string bean, he thought, then chided himself for being frivolous when he had a job to do.
Portions of the fleetship's hull glowed red-hot. In other areas, iconified purple lines radiated outward, denoting gamma-ray leakage. The red was distributed more or less evenly, but the purple seemed concentrated toward the rear of the hull, toward the inactive drive motors. Good, he thought. Whatever was happening in there, he was sure the bug-eyes weren't liking it.
“Charge up the gun,” he told Miyr. “We're going in closer.”
One of the slim, white disintegration cones swept toward them.
“Wait!” He called out. “Lock down!”
Five gee's, the indicator said as he hauled on the control yoke and slammed the throttle. Tighten your bowels, squeeze the blood upward, upward. Nine gee's. Six. He eased around the menace as it swept off toward other targets.
“Charge up the gun?” Miyr asked.
Vestan worked over the controls, locking in an inertial course. “Yeah,” he said. “Go ahead.”
The holies dimmed. The lights on Vestan's console went out.
“Charging,” said Miyr.
Vestan made fists of his weightless hands, gritted and ground his teeth. He loved his job, had always loved it. He'd pounded his way through school after school, relentless, determined, his goals set and target known, until he had landed here. Then, he had made sure he was the best, the fastest, the most determined pilot of the Neptune wing. But this waiting, literally powerless... This was his least favorite part.
Eyeing the port holie, he said, “Beam coming up on three-eighty by five. Be ready to disengage.”
“Check.”
“Be ready... Be ready... Full power! Now!”
The ship lanced forward, gee forces shoving Vestan back in his couch. Turning, diving, he evaded the beam. In control, he thought, a little wistfully, knowing he must soon yield power again. The white cone was past them.
“Okay,” he said, easing off the motors. “Charge up.”
“Charging.”
The lights dimmed again.
“How close are you going to get?” Miyr asked calmly.
“Close enough,” Vestan told him.
On the wide screen of the forward holie, the fleetship was swelling rapidly, and spinning. Like we're falling toward it. Like it's got its own gravity.
“Charge?” He asked impatiently.
“Point eight.”
Vestan refused to fidget. The charging sequence could not be hurried, and the laser could not be fired without a full charge. The fleetship hull stretched before them like a wall, like a plain upon which they would smash themselves. But he would not fidget.
“Charge?” He asked again.
“Nine-six. Nine nine. Full charge.”
“Firing,” said Vestan.
The beam was invisible, he knew, but the holie traced a bright line from the fighter's nose to the red-brown wall ahead of them. At the point where the laser-line touched, the fleetship hull flashed, bubbled, formed an orange and brightly glowing spot.
“Hit,” Vestan said. “Pulling out.”
He slewed the ship around and kicked the throttle all the way down. They slowed, stopped, shot away like a projectile.
“Get ready to charge up again,” he said.
“Check.”
Vestan dove for a few seconds toward one of the sweeping disinto rays, into the very teeth of the enemy. Teasing, testing. Only a human pilot, he thought, would do this. Not that a remote couldn't perform the same maneuver, of course, but it couldn't want to. The armed forces had learned, over the centuries, that no matter how good their remotes were, there would always be human pilots who could outfly them through sheer, stubborn anger. Such a one was Hiro Vestan.
There were remotes out here, he knew, most of them hanging close to the moons, playing duck and cover with horizons and atmospheres, firing to keep the fleetships at bay. Dull, precision work, like traffic control.
He pulled away from the beam again, headed out for empty space.
“Okay,” he said. “Charge up.”
Anxiety in the dimness. The charging sequence seemed longer than ever.
“Full charge,” Miyr said when it was complete. The lights came back up. “Come around to two-three-niner.”
“Two-three-niner, check.”
The ship, smaller now, swung back into view. Vestan kicked in and dove for it.
“Seems like a lot of gamma,” Miyr commented, sounding a bit concerned.
Vestan eyed the purple lines standing straight out, jumping and crawling on the hull of the fleetship. There did seem to be an awful lot of purple.
“Yes,” he said.
The ship grew, no
t an object in their view any longer but rather the view itself. Ribs and spines stood out like gigantic cables over fifty meters thick. Dodging disinto cones, heading in toward the stern of the fleetship, Vestan threw the fighter into a roll for the sheer, bleeding hell of it.
“Ready to fire,” he said, letting the spinning view grow larger still. “And... firing.”
The cartoon beam shot forward again, burning and blistering the alien hull. Suck on it, Vestan thought maliciously. He started to pull them around.
“Look at the gamma!” Miyr cried out. “Something's happening!”
On the aft holie, Vestan could see purple lines shooting out like water from a showerhead. More lines, more every second.
“God's names,” he muttered. “Getting us out.”
“Hurry,” Miyr advised. But Vestan had already maxed the throttle, and they were mashed back into their seats. They stayed that way for several minutes.
“Oh,” Miyr gasped, finally, in the heavy gee. “Watch the b—”
The holies all went white.
When Vestan opened his eyes, they were still driving hard at nine big ones. The rear holie was blank, burned out. So was the port, but on starboard he saw a cloud of cooling, expanding plasma. The remnants of the Waister fleetship.
“Got one,” he said weakly.
“Good job,” Miyr said, as if it had been their shot alone that had done the deed.
“Yeah. You okay?”
Lighter: “Still breathing.”
Vestan let a breath in and out. “Run a full diagnostic.”
“Check.”
The sound of Miyr's fingers on the panel behind him. Air hissing from the rebreathers.
“Okay,” Miyr said after a while. “Portside radiators are down. Aft fusion shunts are down. Aft radiators are down. Power couplings are... Oops. One is offline. The others are running hot.”
“That all?”
“No. We've got some graying in the cables due to gamma-ray tracks. Transparency down thirty percent, so uh, watch your reaction times, I guess.”
Vestan's mouth felt dry, all of a sudden. “Graying of the cables? How much gamma did we take?”
“A lot, I guess,” Miyr said.
“Enough?”
“Maybe. I don't know. It's not like we can check into the hospital when this is over.”
“No,” Vestan agreed, through leathery lips. “I guess it doesn't matter. Can, uh, you plot a vector to the other cripple?”
“Already did,” Miyr said. “Ninety-eight by ninety-three, hard under.”
“ETA?”
“Two hours.”
Two hours. Uh. “You heard any good jokes this week?”
Miyr said nothing. Vestan shifted their vector and locked it in, and settled down for the ride.
~~~
The Triton flyby was sickening. Miyr's course sailed them past the moon at barely a hundred thousand kilometers' range. At first, Vestan had thought he was looking at some other body, some other moon, but as they came closer, that hope faded. The... object was simply too big to be anything other than Neptune's largest moon.
Sweet names of God.
Nothing was familiar in the topography. Vestan couldn't find a single crater or mountain range he recognized. The textures were wrong. The colors were wrong, the dusty pink and blue of methane ice having somehow been made to look rock-dust gray.
Something came visible on the limb of the moon as he swung past, something large and black. Some... Oh. Oh no. The blackness was space itself, viewed through a deep pit in Triton's crust.
Like an apple with a bite taken out of it.
Vestan had once spent a week in the casinos of Liga City, and had found it expensive but very clean, its people surprisingly friendly, honest and hardworking.
He wondered what had become of them, and then he wondered if he really wanted to know.
He decided he didn't, and switched off the starboard holie so he wouldn't have to see any more.
~~~
“Rendezvous course?” Vestan inquired when the ship had become visible as an object, rather than a brown speck against the blackness.
“Uh,” Miyr said. “Uh. Come around to three-thirty by three-oh-nine, and give it three point two kilometers per second.”
Vestan grunted. “Six gee's for fifty seconds okay with you?”
Miyr did not reply.
“Hey!” Vestan called back. “Is six and fifty okay?”
“Wait a minute.” Said Miyr his voice faint, gravelly.
“Hey, are you okay?”
“Uh, no. Sick, I think. It's... hard to...”
Nervously, Vestan rapped his knuckles on the control panel. “Names,” he cursed. “Fucking names. Are you functional back there?”
“Yeah,” Miyr said. “I can... Six and fifty is no good. I don't... We haven't got the fuel for a rendezvous. Not if we want anything left to shoot with.”
“Oh. God. You serious?”
“Yup. I'm... sorry, Vestan. I wasn't...”
“Stow it,” Vestan muttered. “Have we got enough to intercept?”
“Yeah,” Miyr replied. “But you won't be able to... shoot...”
“I know,” Vestan said. If their current velocity, relative to the target, was three point two kilometers per second, the fighter's gun wouldn't be able to track fast enough, at close range, to lock on a single point on the fleetship hull. Best they could do was trace a warm line down the structure as they zipped past.
Vestan sighed. “Maybe the time for that is past.”
“Going to ram?” Miyr asked, his voice faint but reasonably steady.
“Pilot in at nine gee's, ducking the disinto's? Maybe so. Maybe so.”
“Call... Call it two gee's. Remember the fuel.”
“Right. Course?”
“Where... do you want to hit?”
“Right up its asshole, if we can do it.”
Miyr made a retching noise. “Uh! Come around to eighty-six by two-seventy-five.”
“Two gee's?”
“Right.”
“Thanks, Miyr. It's been, uh, good working with you.”
Silence for a few seconds, and then Miyr's voice again: “Yeah... whatever. Watch your... trim on the way in.”
Vestan pulled to the new course, locked the throttle at two gee's. The fusion motors whined, fluttered. Running out of sync, he thought. Have to fill out a maintenance order.
Centered in the forward holie, the fleetship grew larger, and larger still, a target even remotes couldn't miss.
Vestan watched his trim on the way in.
Chapter Fifteen
Ken watched the battle morosely, half-heartedly. In the past hour, human ships had vanished by the dozens, and the Waisters had turned their weapons, at last, against the surfaces of Neptune's moons, against the planetesimals in her spidery ring. Millions of Sol's citizens were dying before his eyes.
And yet, he couldn't concentrate.
The second crippled Waister exploded, succumbing finally to the humans' ceaseless and withering attacks. Its demise was spectacular, the best light show yet. It took the last of the human ships with it.
That held Ken's attention, briefly, but soon his mind wandered off again.
Other Sixes!
How could Marshe just sit there, calling out comments for the outliner to record? These other Sixes, these dolphins and computers, represented newness, they cried out for action, for confrontation!
One of the smaller moons, an irregular lump of rock perhaps forty kilometers wide, withered on the screens as Waister drive-beams pinned it. The moon's surface boiled away like ice hit with welding torches.
Ken looked down at his feet, which were wiggling and fidgeting like fish in the bottom of a boat. Other God-damn Sixes! How could he possibly think about anything else?
He began to understand the obsession, the need that had driven the Waisters across twelve hundred light years of empty space. He imagined an entire race, gone twitchy with the anxiety of new and
alien voices, waiting, waiting, waiting while their war fleets were assembled.
A thought struck him: perhaps Marshe didn't feel the same way. Could he be the only one in the Six who truly understood?
He looked up at his captain, his Queen. “#Newness is/does Requires confrontation#” He said. “#Queen These other Sixes reek of newness I/We must confront them#”
Marshe turned, glared at him with the rust-brown blankness of her goggles. “#I/I am aware#” She said.
She was tapping her fingers on the armrest of her chair as she spoke, and when she turned back to face the holies, he saw that she continued to tap. He leaned forward, slightly, studying her. She twitched, squirmed in her chair. Her gaze flicked from screen to screen, too restless to absorb any single image.
Perhaps she truly did understand.
He looked at the other Aggressors and found, to his surprise, that they were also fidgeting uneasily. Could it be? Could they finally understand? Had they become the enemy? He watched Shenna rise to her feet, pace back and forth for a few moments, lie down again. Her lips quivered, as if she longed to draw them up into a snarl of rage.
He sighed. If Shenna could be patient, ball of fur and energy that she was, then so could Ken. Possibly.
He turned back to the holies and tried to concentrate.
“It's finished,” Josev said, in Standard, after what seemed like a long, long time. “They're leaving. Neptune is sterilized. Final score: Waisters two hundred thirty-eight, Humans eight.”
“Next target is us?” Marshe asked, also in Standard.
“Look at the charts, Your Highness. Yes. The next target is us.”
That got Ken's attention. He looked at the Sol system tactical display, and saw that, indeed, if the Waisters continued on the same straight line they would practically collide with Saturn. Funny he hadn't noticed that before.
The smell of recycled sweat. The quiet chattering of wireguns, like the sound of insects on an Albuquerque night.
His heart beat faster, his breath quickened, deepened.
“How long?” Marshe asked.
“Fifteen hours,” Josev told her quietly. “This deep in a system they have to cut slow. Lots of debris and such. I s'pose they'll visit a few icebergs and things along the way.”