Refuge

by Glynn Stewart

  “Twenty minutes we’ll buy by risking losses among the part of the fleet that engages without you,” Lestroud pointed out gently. “It will be easier to rearm your bombers if your guardships are with us, too.

  “I understand what you’re thinking and I agree, but the risks outweigh the benefits.”

  “What about the risk of getting the fleet caught between two forces?” she asked. “If we can’t fight six of these ships with three-quarters of our forces, how can we hope to fight twenty-six even with all of them?”

  Lestroud closed his eyes, a gesture she’d learned to recognize as distress amongst humans.

  “We don’t know, First-Among-Singers,” he said, his voice very quiet. So quiet, she hoped neither of their command crews could hear it. “We don’t know if we can beat six without your ships—and I don’t know if I can stop twenty-six with them.

  “That means I want to open this fight with every advantage I can manage. The fewer losses we take fighting these scouts, the better able we’ll be to fight the main fleet.”

  “And if the main fleet jumps in before we deal with the scouts?”

  “That’s the risk we’re taking, yes,” Lestroud replied. “You’re not wrong, First-Among-Singers. None of us have fought this enemy before. Even the Assini have only run from them.

  “I’d far prefer not to fight them altogether, but for this first fight, we need to have everyone together on our side. Anything less is courting unnecessary losses…unnecessary deaths.”

  He shook his head.

  “We’re going to have enough necessary losses that I really don’t want to do that.”

  “And if I disagree with you, Admiral?” Sings snapped. “This is my home you’ve put at risk.”

  “This is your star system,” he acknowledged. “You have gracefully conceded command to me, but you are correct. If you wish to make that an order, First-Among-Singers, I will obey. And you may well be right.”

  Echolocation, especially a computer-simulated version of it created from a visual transmission, did not allow Sings to read Lestroud’s expression. She believed him, though.

  “We’ll do it your way, Admiral Lestroud,” she finally granted. “Together.”

  “That’s the only way we’ll make it through this mess,” he said with a nod. “I’m sorry we brought it to you, Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters.”

  “There was nowhere else to bring it,” Sings reminded him. “So, we face it together.” She paused, listening to the datasong on her bridge.

  “I make it forty minutes to weapons range. We are standing by for any updates.”

  “They have opened fire.”

  None of the weapons in this battle traveled slower than the speed of radiation. The only warning Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters received of the enemy firing was the arrival of their beams…and those beams passing by the ships of the defending fleet.

  “Range is five radiation-seconds,” Swimmer-Under-Sunlit-Skies reported. “Fleet evasive maneuvers are working. No hits.”

  The energy signatures on the beams were causing more than a few disconcerted chirps across Sings’s command pool, though. Most of the Matrices and the Exilium ships had enough energy-absorbing ceramic armor that they could survive a hit from one of them.

  The Vistan ships just had rock…and Sings wasn’t sure that would be enough.

  More zetta-laser beams danced through the datasong. Still no hits, but the range was dropping quickly.

  They’d commenced defensive maneuvers at two million kilometers. Sings had half-expected at least one Captain in the combined fleet to complain, but everyone had complied immediately. Everyone had seen the numbers on the Escorts’ lasers, after all.

  It was somehow different to see those same numbers attached to beams that were coming within a few hundred kilometers of your ships. There were enough weapons cycling fast enough that even straight chance would…

  “Ice Witch is hit,” one of her scanner techs announced.

  The ESF destroyer flashed in the datasong for several seconds, its energy readings fluctuating wildly as her engines stopped, then vanished as a second beam hit the no-longer-evading ship.

  “Ice Witch is gone,” Swimmer said softly. “When do we engage?”

  “Three radiation-seconds,” Sings replied. “Anything more and we’re wasting laser cartridges. The rest of the fleet is holding until our range.”

  Both the Matrices and the humans were far less limited by munition storage than the Vistans were. They could have opened fire at the same range as the Escorts, aiming for the same lucky hits.

  “Order all guardships and bombers to deploy their cartridges,” she ordered, keeping her emotional chirps under control. “Bombers are to fall back to the guardships on firing.”

  The smaller ships had been updated with the ability to “scoop up” cartridges deployed from the guardships’ launchers, allowing Sings to rearm her small craft in the middle of the battle.

  “Cartridges deployed. Designated range in five seconds. Do we hold for an order?” Swimmer asked.

  “No. Fire as designated.”

  She’d barely finished the words when the command was triggered. Hundreds of nuclear bombs went off around her ships—and the rest of the fleet fired simultaneously.

  X-ray lasers, grasers and particle cannons lashed out at the Escort Matrices. By the time the beams arrived, their targeting data was six seconds out of date, their targets over a quarter-million kilometers away from where they had been.

  There were enough beams in play to hit anyway. One of the Escorts took a direct hit from Vigil’s main gun. Armor was torn open, halting the ship in motion and allowing a dozen other beams to strike home.

  That ship disintegrated. Others held on longer, taking dozens of insanely powerful energy beams before their armor failed.

  The full force of the defensive fleet was unleashed on six ships…and two of them survived.

  They tried to run, reversing their vector and causing most of the second salvo to miss. They were fast enough to evade most of the defenders, too…but not quite fast enough to elude their older relatives.

  Six combat platforms lunged after them. They were slower but not enough slower to stop them from bringing their grasers to bear one last time.

  The last of the scouts died almost five radiation-seconds away from Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters’s ships, and she chirped a firm pleasure.

  “Get the bombers back to rearm,” she reiterated. “How many did we lose?”

  “Six of the bombers, and guardship Frozen-Reliance took a glancing hit,” Swimmer reported. “She’s lost half her surface pulse-gun installations, but her main weapons are intact.”

  That was better than she’d been afraid of.

  “Make sure Admiral Lestroud knows,” she ordered. “The real fight is still to come.”

  63

  A litany of damaged ships and dead crew ran down one of the screens on Isaac’s command seat. Ice Witch was their only total loss, but none of his cruisers had escaped the clash unscathed.

  The main holodisplay showed the important result, though: Ice Witch’s LPC turret was the only particle cannon he’d lost. He hated feeling grateful for that, but he had to focus on the oncoming enemy, not the dead.

  Two hundred and eleven ESF crewmen. Twelve Vistans on the bombers and another eighty-six on Frozen-Reliance’s surface pulse-gun batteries.

  He shook away the numbers and names. He’d pay for that later—he knew that price of command now—but he’d pay harder if he failed his people now.

  “Any new tachyon pulses yet?” he asked. “I’m surprised they aren’t here yet. Grateful but surprised.”

  “Nothing yet,” Connor reported. “Detection range on those is wonky as all hell, though. We’ll see them if they enter the system, but picking them up while they’re en route? I’ve bought lottery tickets with better odds.”

  Isaac snorted.

  “We have a lottery on Exilium?” he asked.

  “Well, raffle ticke
ts,” Connor corrected. “I don’t think the Confederacy had any lotteries that weren’t scams.”

  “So are raffles,” the Admiral replied. “In more immediate concerns, let’s get the fleet turned around and headed back to Vista. Something is crawling up my neck, and I think the best way to appease it is to make sure we’re still between the planet and the enemy.”

  He paused, then sighed.

  “Once the bombers are armed, we’ll leave the guardships behind,” he ordered. This time, Sings was right. He might wish he had her ships with him before this was over, but they’d be better off having most of the fleet there sooner.

  “I’ll get the orders going,” Connor confirmed.

  The operations officer focused on that, and Isaac turned his brooding back to the tactical display. They’d been lucky. Othello, the apparently cursed strike cruiser, had lost over half of her pulse guns and had been forced to dump a fusion reactor.

  But without the pulse guns to feed, that wasn’t going to slow her down. She had her engines, her particle-cannon turrets and her spinal graser—and she was the least combat-capable of Isaac’s remaining ships.

  Other than Ice Witch, the destroyers had been untouched. The Escorts had focused their fire on the middleweights of the defending fleet—the guardships and the human cruisers. The lost bombers had basically been accidents.

  The problem now was that he’d got his fleet up to almost five percent of lightspeed, and he needed to lose that velocity before he got them turned around. That would take the same forty-five minutes they’d spent building it if he brought the guardships with him.

  Fifteen, now that he was leaving them behind, but that still might not be fast enough.

  Vista and Shezarim were well defended now, the remote-controlled X-ray laser and graser platforms a deadly threat even to the Escort Matrices, but Isaac was grimly certain that a few hundred glorified mines weren’t going to be enough.

  In the back of his mind, he was starting to suspect he’d made a mistake—he’d engaged a quarter of the enemy fleet, a perfect opportunity for defeat in detail, but without knowing where the rest of the enemy were, he’d left the people he was supposed to be protecting vulnerable.

  “We’re an hour from getting back into orbit,” Connor told him as they continued to slow. “We’ll hit zero velocity at roughly the usual emergence distance for the Matrices. We did think about this, Admiral.”

  Isaac raised an eyebrow at his operations officer.

  “I’ve been on your flag deck since the rebellion, sir,” Connor reminded him. “You’re checking everything every minute or so. You’re good at hiding it, but your eyes are moving too quickly for you to not be worried.”

  Isaac shook his head at the younger officer.

  “Never disabuse the Admiral of his belief that he’s unreadable, Commander,” he told Connor. “I might have to promote you to keep my secrets.”

  “You can do that,” the Commander agreed. “But you’re worried they’re going to punch in between us and the planet, right?”

  “Yeah,” Isaac admitted. “There’s only a few hundred mines around Vista and Shezarim, and we’re a long way out.”

  “We’ve never seen Matrices punch in less than several light-minutes out,” Connor reminded him. “Hell, at this point, some of our warp-drive eggheads have gone through the punch systems. There’s a serious instability factor as you get closer to planetary and stellar gravity wells. They literally can’t jump in that close.”

  Isaac nodded, his gaze glued to the holodisplay at the center of the flag deck. The distance between his fleet and Vista was growing as his fleet continued to shed their original velocity.

  “Except that the Assini had years to work on the tachyon punch after the Construction Matrices were built,” he pointed out. “Do we have data on what their tachyon punches could do?”

  His operations officer was quiet. That thought hadn’t come up in the discussions planning this, probably because the fact that they had access to the Matrices’ designers was still fresh in their brains.

  “We could ask?” Connor suggested.

  “We should have asked twelve hours ago,” Isaac replied. “Right now, it isn’t going to change anything. For now, we keep our eyes open and we get our ships back into Vistan orbit ASAP.”

  “Tachyon pulse!”

  Isaac closed his eyes as the report came in…then opened them as it repeated.

  “Second tachyon pulse. Third tachyon pulse. We have three separate emergences!”

  He opened his eyes, studying the display again. Three red splotches had appeared on the hologram, all of them closer to Vista than the fleet was. The fleet had finally turned around, but they were still over forty minutes from Vista orbit.

  None of the Escort forces were more than maybe twenty minutes from the planet. They’d emerged three light-minutes out, equidistant from each other.

  “What am I looking at?” he said quietly.

  “Designating them as Bogey One through Three,” Connor told him, numbers now attaching themselves to the red splotches on the display as they resolved into smaller icons.

  “Bogey One is directly between us and the planet and consists of eight Escort Matrices. Two and Three are positioned above and below the ecliptic relative to us; each is six Escorts.” Connor shook his head.

  “They know we can take on six of them. Why split their forces?”

  “Because they don’t actually care about us,” Isaac noted, finally realizing the key to this whole fight. “They care about Shezarim. Anything else that gets in their way is going to get wrecked, but they aren’t here to kill us. They literally do not care about our existence.”

  “And the way they’re positioned, Shezarim can’t escape without being intercepted and destroyed,” Connor concluded. “Fuck.”

  “Get me a tachyon com to Reletan-dai,” Isaac ordered. “He coded these bastards. There’s got to be something.”

  The link took a few seconds to set up, but Reletan-dai was clearly waiting for it. As soon as the channel opened the beaked face of the centauroid alien looked up at Isaac.

  “We are cut off,” he said without preamble. “They are less clever than they should be, but they clearly retain an animal cunning. I don’t think they intentionally lured you out of position, Admiral, but there is nothing at Vista to stop twenty Escorts. They will close the noose and destroy my people.”

  “If you let them,” Isaac said. “Shezarim is not defenseless.”

  The big ship’s pulse-gun batteries were intended as purely defensive weapons, intended to be used by the AI to shoot down missiles or obstacles in the colony ship’s path, but they would do serious damage if turned on attacking ships.

  Reletan-dai bowed his head.

  “I cannot,” he whimpered. “It is hard enough, Admiral, for my people to build AIs intended to defend us. I do not think any of us can turn our own hands to destruction. Better for us to die, I think, and let the galaxy be rid of us.”

  “And how does that fix what your people have done?” Isaac demanded. “Tell me, Reletan-dai, are these Escorts going to leave the rest of this system alone once they’ve destroyed you?”

  The Assini was silent, his head still bowed, for several seconds.

  “It is only a thirty-two percent probability,” he finally admitted. “It depends on what pieces remain of their original core intelligence, but they managed to convert their order to protect Shezarim into an instruction to kill her, so…it is most likely they will destroy anyone who may have had contact with us.”

  “So, if you lie down and die, every sentient in this system dies with you,” Isaac snapped. “Your people’s legacy seems to have only ever ended one way, Reletan-dai. Can you change that? Will you?”

  “I don’t see a way, Admiral Lestroud,” Reletan-dai whispered. “I am sorry.”

  “Bogey One is approaching slightly faster than the other two,” Connor reported from beside Isaac. “They’re the closest to Shezarim and will enter range o
f the minefield in the next ten minutes. The others will be about five minutes later, but there won’t be much left of the mines by then.

  Reletan-dai was still staring at the ground, but something had changed in the set of his shoulders.

  “I can not turn my own hands to destruction,” he said flatly. “That is a hypocrisy, yes, but one bred into the bones of my people. But if our wayward creations will hunt me and mine blindly enough to charge into your minefields, then perhaps we have one last part to play.

  “Prepare your fleet, Admiral Lestroud. I believe I may yet see a key to this battle…and that I will be bringing my rogue creations to you.”

  64

  Octavio Catalan wasn’t sure exactly what his role was now. Interceptor was entirely unarmed, and as expected, her warp ring hadn’t survived exiting warped space while shedding ninety-five percent of their velocity.

  There hadn’t been time to deploy her crew elsewhere, though, which left Captain Catalan and his people functionally helpless as the Escort Matrices swarmed toward them.

  The only not-helpless person aboard the ship was D. The Speciality Matrix had taken over control of the orbital weapons platforms as soon as they’d confirmed the new overlay Reletan-dai had provided would let them shoot at the Escorts.

  Now, though…those platforms didn’t look like nearly enough to Octavio. They were just the only thing standing between his unarmed ship and a lot of hostile AI warships.

  “Incoming com from Reletan-dai,” Africano told him. “He’s apparently worked out our priority codes—it’s flagged Priority One.”

  Octavio wasn’t entirely surprised at that. Reletan-dai had continued to astonish him with how quickly the alien had adapted to everything thrown at him in the last few days. The Assini was probably the most intelligent being Octavio had ever met—and he was quite definitely the most adaptable.

  “Reletan-dai,” he opened the channel.