Contagion

by David Ryker

  “Nice to see you up and about,” I said, my throat feeling dry.

  He returned a genuine smile. “It’s nice to get out of Medical,” he said, his words lilting in an Italian accent. “The doctor has released me and I am back in my own quarters.”

  “That’s great!” I managed to say. Somehow his positive attitude made my guilt worse. He didn’t know it was my shot that got him, and if he did, he’d probably accept that with a smile too. He was just that kind of guy. It was strange, but I would have preferred him to curse me, hit me, spit in my face.

  Instead he had helped figure out what had happened to me.

  “Dr. Stark and I have analyzed the compound that was discovered in your bloodstream. It is made up of various previously known molecules, linked together into something completely new and unknown to medical science.”

  “We were stumped as to its purpose,” Dr. Stark said, “until I remembered you reporting no heart troubles during your flights through the shattered moon. At first I thought that was your usual blustering, but your monitor showed no aftereffects of stress. That got us thinking. We ran some simulations and discovered the compound has excellent properties for soothing arrhythmia and general cardiac stress.”

  “Someone injected me with heart medication? But hardly anyone knows about my condition.”

  Dr. Conti nodded. “That is true. We analyzed the metabolization of this compound in your bloodstream to estimate when you were injected, and found that you were given the compound at roughly the time you were taking your second test flight in the alien fighter. We suppose that the first injection happened on your first flight, but that has all been metabolized by now.”

  “It’s that ship,” I whispered. “It adjusts to my body, it can practically guess my next move, and now it’s analyzed my physical state and given me medication to keep me going.”

  “It has indeed,” Dr. Conti said.

  “We’re trying to replicate the compound,” Dr. Stark said. “It’s well beyond what we have. This could revolutionize heart medicine.”

  “Not to mention keep me going through the battles we’re about to face.” Then I realized something. Where was everyone else? The alien fighter ships and my heart condition had been regular topics of conversation among the high command. How come they weren’t all here?

  “We will keep analyzing you after every visit to the space station, no matter if you use one of the fighters or not,” Dr. Stark said.

  Commander Loftsdóttir leaned forward a little and fixed me with those crystalline eyes. “And we’d like you to keep this quiet. We’re not sure what our allies are up to, and the fewer people who know about this, the better.”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  Did she mean Foyle? I couldn’t think of anyone else in the high command who had lost her trust.

  But if she didn’t trust him, why the hell was he still second in command?

  I didn’t get any answers to my questions. I simply went back to work. Over the next few weeks, we did several more test runs in the fighters, and several strategy meetings at the space station. As Conti and Stark suspected, it was that mysterious fighter ship that was injecting me. I didn’t get any injections when I went over to the station and didn’t use the ship, and the fighter didn’t jab me unless I did something stressful. When I woke up some colonists as potential pilots and put them through their paces, the fighter didn’t give me an injection during their first lesson because I only had them do maneuvers in open space. When I took them through that insane run inside the shattered moon, then I got a dose.

  I probably needed a dose more from the stress of training those people than from the meteors. None had any real experience. I had chosen them for their high marks in their agility tests during training, sharp visual acuity, that sort of thing. One was a top video gamer. The son of a bitch made five times what I did fighting for real. No, he wasn’t any better than the others. In fact, he barely made the cut.

  Gradually I weeded out the candidates who couldn’t hack it and ended up with a full contingent of ten pilots. Some were excellent like Mabaso, who had become really chummy with R’kk’kar and some of the other Dri’kai. Others I wasn’t a hundred percent on. Sadly, I didn’t have the luxury of being a hundred percent on much of anything these days.

  Everyone else was busy too. The little factory churning out attack drones had given us a full complement, and Foyle went out on maneuvers with them in one of our own fighter ships. We had two other fighter ships and another still in repair. The repairs should have been done by now but most of the qualified engineers had been taken out in the initial Biospherist attacks.

  I didn’t even want to think about how many shortages we had in staff.

  The science and engineering teams of all the races got together to analyze the data the Ofrans had sent us. It wasn’t complete because those poor folks had gotten rubbed out so quickly, but there was enough for us to make a preliminary assessment of the threat and think up countermeasures.

  The linked energy fields the Centaurians used between those little ships were the main problem. It seemed each ship had an amazing repository of power and they linked up to make an even greater force of energy. The obvious countermeasure, of course, was to focus on taking out an individual ship. We’d seen the Ofrans do that and the Centaurians had to change their formation before they could link again. That left a few seconds before they could power up.

  The problem was, those ships were tough. Unbelievably tough. The Ofrans had been using more firepower than most of the ships available in our fleet and they had only destroyed a few of the formations. The Centaurians had both numbers and strength on their side.

  The other issue was the design of the ships themselves. Spectral readings showed them to be carbon based. Not including carbon, like steel, but carbon based. It took some time for our scientists to wrap their heads around it, but finally they realized that these ships hadn’t been built, they had been evolved. These were living creatures, enslaved with a system of electronics embedded into their nervous system to do the pilot’s will. No doubt these clam-shaped ships had an early natural predecessor on some planet in the Scutum–Centaurus Arm. The Centaurians had put it in a lab, sped up and manipulated its evolution, and came up with something that could withstand a vacuum and be fitted with a warp drive and powerful generators far beyond our capabilities.

  It was hard not to react with despair when faced with an enemy that was so obviously superior, but I forced myself to remember that every enemy has their weakness. The insurgents in the rebellious oil-producing regions had realized we relied too much on our drones for air cover and reconnaissance, and they found a way to hack into them. When they did that, they caught us with our pants down.

  We needed to do the same.

  The thing is, tricks like that generally only work once. You use it and put your best effort forward to defeat the enemy right then and there, because chances are they won’t be caught napping again.

  “It’s like the first uses of poison gas in World War One,” Qiang told me after one meeting. “The Germans didn’t know if it would work or not and even though they put a bunch of R&D into mustard gas and other gases like phosgene and xylyl bromide, the generals weren’t convinced. They first tried it on the Eastern Front against the Russians, and discovered that cold weather made the gas less efficient. Then they tried it in warmer conditions on the Western Front against the French and Canadians. Wiped out large sections of the line. Problem was, they hadn’t massed troops to take advantage of the gap and they lost their chance.”

  “Why didn’t they just try again the next day?” I asked.

  Qiang grinned. “They didn’t have enough gas.”

  “So the moral of the story is, have enough ammo for your new wonder weapon and be ready to take advantage of it when it works.”

  He nodded. “Pretty much, yeah.”

  “You forgot one thing, Qiang.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We don’
t have a wonder weapon. We have no fucking idea how to deal with these ships.”

  He shrugged. “Then we’ll just have to find something.”

  “You plan on pulling a weapon out of your ass? At this point I’m up for anything.”

  Qiang grew more serious. “We have to gauge our enemy first. Fight a battle or two with them and get a better look at their strengths and weaknesses.”

  “We’ll get our chance soon enough. They’re due to show up any day now.”

  And the Centaurians did show up, right on schedule.

  16

  We were alerted by a fast probe sent from the very edge of Vrimjlen territory. We had assembled a light year ahead of the Vrimjlen home world, drawing in all available warships from the sentient species. Large transport ships had arrived to evacuate as many civilians from the planet as possible, but with a population of nine billion, only a tiny fraction would get away.

  The Nansen was on the front line as a warship. There had been a lot of debate over that. Foyle, Barakat, and Stark, in an odd coalition, had pressed for us to be used as an evacuation vessel.

  “We’re holding the last viable population of humans,” was their argument. “It would be irresponsible to put them in harm’s way.”

  And that was totally correct, except for the fact that the entire Orion Arm was in harm’s way. The Centaurian fleet was much faster than our colony ship. We couldn’t even outrun a middle-grade Vrimjlen transport ship. We were the primitives in this crowd, and if the battle turned against our coalition, there would be no running or hiding for us.

  We had to add our strength to the balance and hope for the best.

  So they were overruled, and we floated in deep space between a Dri’kai battleship and a Vrimjlen missile ship when the news from the fast probe came in.

  The Centaurians had taken out a small colony world on the edge of Vrimjlen territory. The video brought to us showed a grimly similar scene to that of the Ofran home world. Several formations of those little clam-shaped ships flew in the vanguard, creating hexagrams and pentagrams and blasting the few colonial defensive ships to nothing.

  Next came the planet killers, long rows of clam-shaped ships that ran a curtain of energy along the colony’s one town and wiped it out, then moved out and destroyed the surrounding agricultural district and a couple of small villages. In the last few seconds of footage, we even saw them target individual outlying farms.

  The Centaurians were making sure no one was left alive.

  Of the 20,000 inhabitants, only 7,000 had managed to get out in time, and were on transport ships heading back to us.

  Everyone knew they’d never make it. The Centaurian ships, which had achieved the unheard-of journey of passing from one galactic arm to another, would catch them soon enough.

  Actually, given the time it had taken for the messenger probe to reach us, those people had likely been dead for days.

  At least the probe brought us some vital intel. The Vrimjlen colonists had rigged some fast messenger probes with scanners to act as spy ships and had gotten a look at the Centaurian fleet at cruising speed. They were going at 50 times the speed of light, more than twice what the Nansen could do, and they had been decelerating. The Vrimjlens estimated that the fleet could probably cruise at 100 times the speed of light.

  So they had passed from one arm to the other in a century.

  Even if their home world was on the outer end of the Scutum-Centaurus Arm, that was a hell of a long trip. A Subine scientist pointed out that a century was at the very top of the estimated lifespan of any known intelligent species. Most lived 80 years, give or take a decade, just like humans. Valeria told me it had something to do with the growth and maintenance of a complex brain. The conversation descended into a lot of technical babble between scientists, but what I took from it was that the Centaurians weren’t invading, they were migrating.

  That’s why they were wiping planets clean. They wanted to colonize them, and they didn’t want to share their new home with anyone else. They hadn’t even tried to talk with us.

  We’d also gathered some other interesting intel. Those clam-shaped ships with the linked power weapons always flew in the vanguard, with others as flankers. In the center of the fleet flew several much larger vessels—wide, bulbous gray things that looked a bit like bloated whales. The colony ships? There were also large reddish spheres that, while much larger than the attack ships, were dwarfed by the whaleships.

  While the probe hadn’t been able to scan the entire fleet, we had counted ten of those spheres, three large colony ships, and scores of the attack ships.

  We had no idea how many more there were. For all we knew, those “colony ships” might be battleships that they hadn’t used yet. This whole fleet might be the vanguard, or even a small recon in force.

  As everyone argued back and forth about how to meet this threat, more messenger probes came in—from scientific installations, from colony worlds, from merchant stations. One by one they had been obliterated with almost no loss to the Centaurians.

  Morale was given a minor boost by the arrival of a huge fleet of attack drones sent by the Chordatids, the other race whose home world was in the line of fire from the opening phases of the invasion. A sentient water race looking a bit like dolphins with prehensile mouths, they didn’t get off planet much thanks to the expense of lifting large volumes of water into orbit, so they had become expert at making drones do their exploring and fighting for them.

  The drones, which numbered in the hundreds, came accompanied by several spherical ships with transparent hulls made of something similar to glassteel. The Chordatids were accustomed to the crystal clear waters of their home world and couldn’t stand being boxed in, so they sped through deep space surrounded by the stars. They literally swam in the galaxy.

  I would have envied them if their home world hadn’t been threatened with annihilation.

  They arrived just in time. The Centaurians hit us the next day.

  We had estimated their arrival down to within a few hours, with no precise way to know when they would drop out of warp and attack.

  So we stood sentinel until they suddenly appeared a few hundred kilometers from our position.

  They knew precisely where we were, sitting in open space in a sphere formation, ready to fend off attack from any direction. They could have bypassed us, gone straight for the Chordatid or Vrimjlen home worlds, but they decided to take out our combined fleet first.

  Why not go for the easy kills first? Ruin our morale and scatter us? Why the frontal confrontation? We had positioned ourselves at equal distance between the two homeworlds, ready to rush to the aid of either one, but instead the Centaurians decided on a frontal assault at our point of strength.

  Arrogance, or confidence?

  No time to think. From a days-long vigil staring an empty space, we had to leap to the controls of our ships in an instant.

  I was standing on the command deck of General R’kk’kar’s battleship when they appeared, and immediately sprinted for the fighter bay. We had transferred the fighters from the space station to the fleet, but the Dri’kai still wouldn’t trust us enough to have them aboard the Nansen. After what Foyle had pulled, I couldn’t blame them. He was on the Nansen, ready to launch with his tiny fleet of human fighter ships and array of attack drones. He’d lead that group. Even though he was second in command of the Nansen, he would take a risky forward position. He was too good a pilot to be left standing on the command deck. Despite everything, I wished him luck.

  I wished myself luck too.

  We’d all need it.

  I joined a stream of Dri’kai, human, and Subine pilots rushing to the fighter bay. The Subines on their pad of cilia couldn’t exactly run, and I gritted my teeth in annoyance as I had to dodge around them in my headlong sprint to battle stations.

  With their segmented brains and dozen tentacles, they made some damn good pilots. Far better reflexes that any normal species. Pain in the ass to try and c
ommunicate with in combat conditions, though.

  I came into the fighter bay at the same time as Mabaso, Avram, and several Dri’kai I recognized.

  The fighter bay was a massive thing, almost too long to see from one end to the other. The mysterious black fighters we had been given stood in the center, the ten we’d trained on and another twenty manned by nonhumans. Flanking these were dozens of regular Dri’kai fighter ships, much inferior to the black ships but still damn good.

  Qiang was already climbing aboard his fighter right next to mine as I got there.

  Giving me a thumbs-up and a grin, he jumped into the cockpit without a word.

  I got in my own cockpit, checking systems and making contact with the squadron leaders. I led this squadron of ten human-piloted Shadow Fighters. There were two more squadrons of the same fighters, and a bunch more squadrons of regular Dri’kai fighter ships.

  The Centaurians came in fast. A red warning light urged me to check the external visuals of the battleship. The lead enemy ships were already moving to engage with the Chordatid drone fleet, which had rushed out to buy us some time.

  Time was sure what we needed. The fighter bay airlock was still cycling through thanks to the Subines getting to their ships so damn slowly.

  I kept my eyes on the external view. The Centaurians were coming at us in a wedge shape, their lead fighters in formation and already linked with lines of that strange green energy. Well behind came those reddish spheres, and behind those, dim in the distance, were the huge whale-like ships we assumed carried the Centaurian population.

  Our own formation spread out, our sphere turning into a diffuse line. We had decided to keep a good distance from one another in case those lines of Centaurian fighters tried to sweep us with those curtains of energy they had used to wipe the planets clean of life. We hadn’t seen them use that weapon in space, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t. We knew almost nothing about them.