Contagion

by David Ryker

  I banked and followed them, turning my dorsal and ventral turrets to aim behind me and throwing several long bursts at the pursuing formation.

  The computer told me I scored several hits. I might as well have been shooting spitballs for all the good they did.

  We honed in on the sphere. Several of those clam-shaped fighters detached themselves, ready to sacrifice their lives to protect the power supply. Once again I wondered if there were living, thinking pilots sitting inside those living ships. Were they really ready to die just for the extraterrestrial equivalent of an oil tanker? If they valued their own lives so little, that would explain why they didn’t value our lives at all.

  To my upper right I saw more Centaurian fighters shearing off from the main fight to intercept us. We would get there first. Just barely.

  A flurry of energy bursts from behind reminded me that one enemy formation was already on the scene. They had finally gotten close enough to me to start firing.

  A ball of energy swept by with only a couple of meters to spare. My readouts flickered. A warning light came on, then disappeared.

  “It is estimated that a near miss of closer than 50 centimeters would be enough to temporarily disrupt all ship’s systems,” my computer informed me.

  “Fucking great,” I said through clenched teeth as I continued to fire my turrets backwards at them. The others in our formation followed suit.

  I didn’t bother to ask how long “temporary” would be. Anything more than a second’s paralysis in this melee would be fatal.

  A Centaurian fighter spun out, but the others kept on coming. One of the Dri’kai took a direct hit. His ship kept moving, the lack of friction in space keeping it at the same speed as before, but he had stopped firing and either his ship was dead or he was.

  Or both.

  Then we were on the sphere. Missiles flared from the wings of Qiang’s and the Subine’s ships. The remaining Dri’kai, having already expended all of his, dove in closer with his autocannons going full bore.

  I swung around to take care of our pursuit, ending up flying right between them. They hadn’t expected that and for a moment they couldn’t fire. I took the chance to focus on one of them, smacking the weird ship time and again with explosive slugs.

  I never knew if I killed the thing or not, because the next instant everyone got caught in the shockwave of the red sphere exploding.

  My ship was farther from the detonation this time, and facing away, so even though I wasn’t blinded and my systems didn’t go down, I felt it enough. It was like being on a dingy being pulled in by the tide and suddenly getting hit by a big wave.

  Actually I had only felt that in a VR game. Nobody back on Earth went to the beach anymore. Too polluted.

  I tumbled along with the Centaurians, all of us out of control. My gut tried to wrench its way out of my body as the edges of my vision darkened. Desperately I struggled to right my ship as the readouts flickered. I was sure those clam things were trying to get it together so they could blast me just as I planned to blast them.

  I won.

  As my ship leveled out, I found a Centaurian ship right in front of me at point blank range.

  I let the bastard have it. Chips flew off its smooth black surface. It did not fire back.

  None of the others did either. They were all moving away.

  I kept firing until I was sure my target was neutralized and then looked around. All of the Centaurian ships were pulling back. A screen of other fighters had moved up from the depths of their fleet and hung stationary to cover their retreat. Our fighters, too depleted and scattered, did not follow.

  The drones did, though, from both the human and Chordatid fleets. Not many were left, but they took out a few more retreating fighters and then retreated before they got in range of the Centuarian covering formation.

  The surviving red spheres had already retreated to safety.

  As soon as they got out of range behind the screen of fighters, the entire Centaurian fleet began to move away.

  They didn’t go far, maybe a couple of hundred kilometers. Then the sky lit up as every fighter, and every large ship, connected in a shimmering curtain of green.

  My breath caught. I stared in awe. What weapon was this? It was like the planet killer but a thousand times bigger.

  The entire fleet blinked out of existence.

  One second it was there. The next it had vanished.

  “What the hell just happened?” I whispered.

  “The Centaurian fleet has gone into warp,” my computer said in its bland monotone. I hadn’t been asking it, but I was glad for the answer. It meant that I wasn’t about to get destroyed along with the entire human race.

  “How?”

  “By means unknown.”

  “Where to?”

  “It is impossible to determine with current technology.”

  “Come on, just analyze their entry vector into warp!”

  Yeah, like I could do that. A sophisticated computer could, though.

  “It is impossible to determine with current technology.”

  “But why the hell did they retreat?” I murmured. “They weren’t losing.”

  “It is impossible to determine with—”

  “Shut up.”

  The computer shut up.

  I radioed back to the Nansen.

  “Did you catch where they were going?”

  “No,” came Iliescu’s confused reply from the command deck. “They’re using a different kind of warp.”

  “What do you mean a different kind of warp? I thought there was only one kind of warp.”

  “So did I.”

  Oh, great. The engineering genius is as clueless as I am. That’s just peachy.

  I surveyed the remains of battle. The red sphere we had attacked had turned into a dead gray husk, shriveled and deflated. The other one hung a few hundred kilometers away, equally lifeless and deflating fast. The wreckage of countless fighters and drones floated in the air. My computer was making automatic adjustments to avoid large chunks of debris. As close as I was to the main battle area, it was pretty thick, and moving plenty fast.

  I picked out the burned-out hulls of the Centaurian fighters. There were far fewer of those. But there were some, and we had taken out two of those spheres, whatever the hell they were.

  Is that why they retreated? Were the spheres too valuable to lose? Did they act as their fleet’s power supply to cross the galaxy? If so, they hadn’t guarded them very well.

  I could ask these questions all day and never learn the answers. The important thing was that we knew these ships could be destroyed. The Centaurians were not invulnerable.

  I turned my fighter around and moved slowly through the remains of my little part of the battle. The deflated balloon of the sphere still had several of those clam things stuck to it. They looked as dead as the sphere. Had its death caused them to die too?

  Not far off I spotted the shattered remains of one of our Shadow Fighters. A Dri’kai had been at the helm, bearing down on the target with his autocannons at close range because he had run out of missiles. He had helped win the fight at the cost of his own life. Further out floated another Shadow Fighter with another Dri’kai at the helm. He’d been hit by one of those green energy pulses. There was no sign of life from him.

  I hailed him and got no response.

  An order came from the main Dri’kai battleship. I recognized General R’kk’kar’s voice. Strange I could distinguish individual alien voices now. A man can get used to anything.

  I surveyed the waste of life around me. Used to anything except this. Never this.

  “All fighters and drone control ships return to close support of the fleet,” General R’kk’kar ordered. “Do not attempt rescue or recovery missions unless risk to life is critical within a few minutes. Dri’kai shuttles are being sent out for those tasks. The exception is disabled or destroyed Dri’kai Shadow Fighters. They will be recovered immediately by the nearest Shadow Fighter
manned by a Dri’kai.”

  Of course they would. The Dri’kai wanted to keep their secrets. I could already see a couple of Shadow Fighters heading in our direction. There would be Dri’kai at the helm. No doubt about it.

  “You heard the man,” I said, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice. “Let’s back back into position.”

  Our fighters headed out. Qiang passed slowly by the inert Dri’kai fighter. I didn’t say anything, hoping no one would notice.

  There was a dead Centaurian fighter not far off my route, so I took it slow and passed by it as closely as I could without being too obvious, scanning with every instrument I could.

  What I saw baffled me.

  Up close, the thing looked even more like a clam. The ship, if that’s what I should call it, was slightly bigger than my fighter. I wondered how it could contain so much energy in such a small space. Its surface, which looked smooth from a distance, had concentric ridges on it, much like a shellfish from Earth. I’d heard, although I didn’t know if this was true, that these were growth rings like on trees. There looked to be hundreds of them, no more than a finger’s width apart. The black surface was marred by chips and craters from a bunch of autocannon hits, and near the back about a tenth of its mass had been blown off by a missile.

  None of the smaller chips revealed anything, just the same black substance I could see on the surface.

  When I got to the back of the thing, however, I got a surprise.

  The big chunk out of the back revealed some wiring. It started perhaps half a meter below the surface, a maze of gold filaments in strange patterns within the black substance. And, right at the deepest part of the breakage, was something else …

  “All ships return to covering formation immediately,” General R’kk’kar repeated.

  I jumped in my seat like a schoolboy caught doing something naughty.

  I hit the thrusters and headed back to the fleet.

  But I knew what I saw.

  At the center of the shell, surrounded by a latticework of wiring, had been a clear casing, like a cyst inside the clam.

  Inside had been flesh, gray and wrinkled in a regular pattern.

  I couldn’t be sure, but my gut told me I was right.

  It was a brain.

  19

  A couple of hours later, we were all back on the Nansen. After waiting for an attack that did not come, our fleet had gone into warp, heading for the Chordatid homeworld. It was a bit closer than the Vrimjlen homeworld and we figured the invaders might make for it. It also had fewer planetary defenses than the Vrimjlens had set up for their own planet, not that we thought either planet was protected enough to face up to that fleet.

  We were in the meeting room off the command deck. Ensigns had brought in dinner and we were doing a damage assessment while we ate. We had too damn much to do to take any time off.

  The situation was not good. We had lost a third of our drone fleet. More importantly, of the ten human pilots in my squadron, we had lost two, including Shelly Avram.

  Damn. We had lost an entire sport, a sport with centuries of history, just to fight a battle to a draw.

  What else had we lost? The other pilot, a guy named Rasmus Tamm, had been from Tallinn. A quick check told me they spoke Estonian there. Not a major language. I bet he was the only Estonian speaker on board the Nansen. I could check the crew manifest, there was a column for language ability, but I didn’t want to know.

  We’d lost gymnastics and Estonian, and who knew what other skills. We’d also lost two brave, dedicated individuals.

  Every time we went into battle, the human race got poorer.

  Compared to the other races, though, we had gotten off easy. The Chordatids had lost four-fifths of their drones and one of their base ships. I hadn’t seen, but an enemy flanking maneuver had hit the Chordatids pretty hard. One ship was taken out and two more badly damaged before a Subine destroyer had intervened and chased the enemy fighters off.

  The Subines had lost several fighter pilots and that destroyer had taken some bad hits that caused some casualties.

  The Dri’kai came off the worst, having contributed the bulk of the fighter pilots. You wouldn’t know it looking at them. They’d all been cheering and celebrating their “great victory” back in the fighter bay. It hadn’t been a victory, and it hadn’t been great. The fight had been a draw and we took more than we gave.

  The one thing none of us could figure out was why the Centaurians had left so quickly. They hadn’t engaged more than a fraction of their strength and had hardly even brought their big guns to bear.

  “I think they’re testing our capabilities before committing to a major fight,” Iliescu said.

  “Then they know we can beat them,” blustered Foyle. The battle had given him some of his confidence back. Fair enough. I’d seen some of the video from his sector of the fight. He’d been an ace.

  “They didn’t hesitate before attacking the Ofran home world,” Barakat said, not even looking at Foyle.

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Valeria said. “We only have that one recording. They could have had several battles with them.”

  “There’s just so much we don’t know,” Iliescu grumbled. The chief engineer wasn’t used to not knowing things.

  We all looked to Commander Loftsdóttir, who sat grimly at the head of the long table. We needed answers, and we all automatically looked to her for them.

  “While we can’t know why they retreated,” she said slowly, thinking through her words, “those energy spheres are vulnerable and obviously an important target. Initial results from the science teams show that the Centaurian fighters that had docked, for a lack of a better word, on the surfaces of those things had been healing their shells as well as charging up.”

  “Self-healing ships,” I said, feeling a mixture of fear and awe, “just like the ships the Dri’kai lent us.”

  “Maybe,” the commander said, “or maybe they needed to go to the spheres to get healed like they needed to go to them to recharge. We’ll have to await the results of the scientific and engineering teams before we can tell for sure.”

  Valeria and Iliescu gave each other an uncomfortable look.

  “That might take some time,” Valeria said. “We’re dealing with a lot of unknown factors here. And with the Centaurian technology displaying undoubted similarities to the Dri’kai Shadow Fighters, I’m not sure our allies will be entirely forthcoming with us.”

  Well, that was reassuring. Silence descended around the table as everyone digested this new piece of bad news.

  “Do the best you can,” the commander said at last. “We have a few days before we get to the Chordatid home world. Let’s get back to work, people.”

  I took a final hurried bite of my dinner and headed to the simulators. I was going to put my squadron through some simulated fights, feeding in the information the ship’s AI had gleaned from videos of the battle.

  Foyle caught up to me in the hall.

  “Saw some of the action your squadron was in,” he said. “Those fighters are something else.”

  “Yeah, they sure are,” I said, not slowing down. “You did good too.”

  “Hell, yeah. These Centaurians aren’t so tough.”

  Tell that to the people we lost, I thought.

  When I didn’t reply, he said, “How about getting me into one of those fighters?”

  “Someone has to lead the drone fleet and your two wingmen.”

  Yeah, that was a lame response. I was leading a squadron of ships more advanced than anything any human pilot had ever dreamed of, and he had two underqualified wingmen in battered Earth fighters and a depleted fleet of drones.

  “Give the job to Qiang. I could do more good in one of those Dri’kai babies. You could still be in command.”

  “That’s not my decision,” I said through gritted teeth.

  It was the commander’s decision, and she had given him the bum job as punishment for angering our allies. Hell, w
e hadn’t even asked if he could continue flying a Shadow Fighter. We just assumed he was out. If the humans didn’t want him in, I’m sure none of the species he compared to zoo animals did.

  “I bet if you put in a word with Commander Lost Daughter she’d listen to you.”

  Stop calling her that.

  A crowd of technicians passed by. Did we really have to have this conversation in public?

  “I don’t think so,” I mumbled.

  Foyle got in my way, forcing me to stop. I looked him in the eye, trying to keep my expression neutral. This was a superior officer, after all. A superior officer who had been humiliated and desperately wanted to compensate.

  “Make it happen,” he said. It came out as an order.

  “I can’t,” I said, stepping around him and walking off.

  “You will,” he called after me. “One way or the other, you will.”

  My next stop was Medical, because of course Dr. Stark had ordered me in for a checkup.

  “What just happened?” he asked as I entered. “You heartrate jumped a few minutes ago.”

  After seeing Foyle I’d felt it. My face had flushed, I’d skipped a few beats, and I felt a bit lightheaded. I was grateful the elevator was working for a change. It gave me a few moments to get my shit together.

  “Stressful meeting,” I said.

  “This happened after the meeting,” Dr. Stark said. As part of the high command, he’d been there, but had hurried out as soon as it was over to get back to work. He was dedicated, I’ll give him that. Dedicated to the point of being really annoying.

  “I had a meeting after the meeting,” I said.

  “Is there friction with another member of the command structure I should know about?”

  Damn, was this guy a psychic or something?

  “I’m fine,” I snapped. “Just do the checkup, all right?”

  He studied me for a moment with a clinical eye and then, without another word, started taking my vitals. Only after he told me to take my shirt off did he speak.

  “You have two new injections.”

  “That battle was stressful enough I’m surprised the ship didn’t give me three.”

  “Whatever this medicine is, and we still haven’t managed to replicate it, it only lasts for a short duration. You only got out of the battle a few hours ago and you are already responding to stress in a dangerous way.”