by Webb, Nick
It was supposed to be daytime. The sun hung low on the horizon, but it was far darker than it should have been. That’s when he noticed the rest of the sky. Instead of a bright blue atmosphere, he saw the deep yellow-orange disc of Titan. It was otherworldly—something you have nightmares about and wake up drenched in sweat, where the world is all wrong, up is down, the sun rises in the north and then turns around, backtracks, and sets in the north. It was deeply unsettling.
“Titan is about to collide with Britannia in just a few minutes,” said Captain Scott, her voice dropped to a solemn murmur. “Sarah? Is this it?”
“Five more seconds, ma’am.”
They watched, counting down.
There was a bright flash of light, and what was clearly a violent explosion. The camera jostled and shook as the shock wave arrived, and when the debris cloud settled, the camera revealed—
“Oh my god,” breathed Sepulveda. “Is that . . . ?”
“A miniature Swarm ship? The same kind that attacked Earth thirty years ago, but from the looks of it scaled down a bit? Yeah. It sure is, Mr. President.” Captain Scott was stroking her chin, as if looking at a particularly interesting data set. “It displaced all the air. And Avery’s house, for that matter. It’s a wonder the ship didn’t explode from materializing partly inside. But now that I think of it, wood and stucco aren’t a match for whatever ungodly metal composite they used in their hull design.”
“Wait. What’s that?” Sepulveda pointed to the screen. “There, at the tail end of the ship. There’s something behind it. Goddammit!” The video ended, right as another massive flash oversaturated the camera. “Is there more?”
“No, sir. That’s where the data stops,” said Sarah, the data tech.
“And I imagine the final flash is when Titan finally collided with Britannia,” said Captain Scott. “And there is the source of our extra Swarm universe matter. Problem solved. I’m going to bed.”
Sepulveda turned to face her, dumbfounded. “Problem solved? Former President Avery summoned a Swarm ship from their universe in the moments before her death? Problem solved?”
Captain Scott shrugged. “Well, I mean the technical problem, that is. The rest is just politics. You figure out the motivations of the former president. I’m just here to tell you how she did it.”
Senator Cooper, who’d remained uncharacteristically silent, finally spoke. “We need to go to Earth.”
Sepulveda glanced at Tapper, who, of course, shook his head. “No.” He didn’t think she’d heard the Secret Service assessment of him returning anytime soon. “There’s no need.”
She clicked dismissively. “No need? You’re the fucking president and Earth is under attack. Everyone’s going to wonder where the hell their leader is.”
Which was exactly what he’d said to Tapper. “Madam Senator, if Earth ever has the misfortune of calling you Madam President, I hope you’ll learn that once you’re in that office you don’t just get to decide when and where you put your life at risk. No. We’re going to . . .”
And he didn’t have an alternative queued up. She sprung. “Don’t tell me you haven’t got the balls.”
He clenched his fists and turned to her. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Do I look like it, Mr. President?”
“I just came from dodging bullets in a vac-suit while running upside down under a rotating space station a million kilometers from a swirling cloud of hell. And you ask if I have balls?”
Even as he said it, he could hear the words, President S.! He’s pretty good!
“And yet you’re worried about what might happen if you return to Earth? Pff.”
“And why the hell should we return to Earth now? It’s under imminent threat from the Findiri.”
“Because you’re the president, that’s why. And we need to get this new information to people that can do something with it. Oppenheimer. Proctor. Granger. The Joint Chiefs. My Senate Armed Services Committee. Someone. Anyone. Something besides sitting out here and twiddling our thumbs.”
He glowered at Tapper again. “See? Tell Danforth to fuck off.”
Danny Proctor stepped in. “Uh, sir? We’re headed there anyway—we had, uh, to make a delivery. No reason we can’t deliver you too.”
Saved by the admiral’s nephew. Perfect. “Thank you for the offer, Mr. Proctor. Let’s ride.”
Let’s ride? Did he just say that? President S.! He’s pretty good!
“Don’t worry, John, your secret is safe with me,” taunted Cooper, following him off the bridge. “I’ll tell everyone you commanded the situation back there.”
“Go choke on a filibuster.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Il Nido Sector
Paradiso, High Orbit
ISS Independence
Bridge
“Nearly within weapons range, Admiral,” said Ensign Destachio.
“Have they powered up their weapons yet?”
“Hard to tell, ma’am, I’ve never seen this ship design before.”
Proctor nodded. “Most weapons systems are the same, Ensign,” she said. “Look for power buildups in capacitor banks. No matter what weapon it is, it’s going to need a lot of energy all at once—that’s what makes them weapons.”
“Aye, ma’am,” said Destachio. “Nothing yet. And we’ve now crossed into range for accurate railgun targeting.”
They were still pointing directly at the largest ship, speeding toward it, flanked by the ISS Copenhagen and the ISS Kobe. The ISS Hammer was on the far side of the planet, where she hoped Commander Shin-Wentworth was ready and already on his way to intercept and flank from behind. They’d run through several tactical scenarios together, and he seemed to catch on fast.
“Angel Wing, formation Angel One. Copenhagen, take the lead. Kobe and Stennis to Independence’s port and starboard. Winthrop and Malawi diverge from orbit fifteen degrees and z-plus two klicks, then orbit parallel to us.” She paused. “They still haven’t powered up weapons?”
“No, ma’am, not that I can tell,” said the ensign.
“Why?” she asked, to no one in particular. “That’s damn peculiar. What are you up to, my friends?”
“Ma’am!” said Ensign Sampono from the comm station. “We’re receiving a transmission from the Findiri vessel!”
“Huh.” Proctor stroked her chin and crossed her legs. “So now they want to talk?” After the experience with the Eru and translating—after a rudimentary fashion—their first message of we want to talk to Granger, and the difficulty involved with understanding their peaceful ways of saying hello, she wondered how they’d have the time to even begin a dialogue with these monsters. Zion’s Haven lay in ruins. Hundreds of thousands dead. And who knew how many alien worlds lay in ruins that had the misfortune of being in the Findiri’s path as they swept toward Earth?
“Apparently so, ma’am. It’s an audio transmission only. No video.”
“Can we run it through the translator first? I doubt we’ll get anything on the first few passes, but maybe if we can get the linguistics team out from their work with the Eru we can begin to—”
“Uh, ma’am, it’s in English.”
The pit in Proctor’s stomach that had been forming began to blossom into a feeling of uncanny dread. Something was not right. A new alien race, one they’d never had any contact with, suddenly invading, and speaking English?
Her eyebrows leapt up. “Put it through.”
A voice. Male, from the sound of it, with a strange accent, growled from the speakers. She couldn’t place it. “Human fleets. This is Director Talus.”
Proctor stood up, listening to the voice. It was . . . familiar? Or was it that the whole experience was deja vu? She’d just had a battle with the Eru, who’d turned out to be only acting in self defense and were by nature peaceful and only wanted to talk. She prayed history would repeat itself.
The voice continued, in its strange accent she couldn’t place. Like old, old British, but with differ
ences that reminded her of Russian, French, even Scandinavian. “I am the Hegemon of the Findiri Empire, and you have one choice only. Surrender immediately, and send the legendary traitor Granger to our ship. You have five minutes to comply, or you will be destroyed.”
“The transmission has ended, Admiral,” said Sampono. The blood had drained from her face.
Proctor stayed still for a moment, then sat back down.
“Ma’am?” said Sampono. “A response?”
Proctor leaned forward. “Commander Urda, do we have a target lock?”
His voice sounded faint. “Aye, ma’am.”
“Fire.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Sol Sector
Earth
ISS Defiance
Bridge
Granger stared at the planet on the screen. His home. Humanity’s home. Green and brown land, crystal blue ocean, dappled with waves of clouds, vertical cumulonimbus clouds rising up over the tropics releasing their torrents of rain below.
How long would it be this way? How long would it last? Would the Findiri destroy it all? He racked his brain, struggling to remember their motivations, their tactics, their way of subduing enemies, but still came up blank.
“Got him, sir,” said Commander Rice from the XO’s station. “Found the director of rare collections at Yale.”
“Excellent. Forward it along to Mr. Qwerty in the astrometric lab.” He’d assigned the man a home base of operations, as it were, a nerve center for all the information he hoped they’d bring in regarding the translation of the manuscript they had, and the locations of the missing three.
“Done, sir.”
The comm speaker blared to life next to him. “Uh, Cap’n Granger?”
“Yes, Mr. Qwerty?” he replied up to the air.
“I think it would be a good idea to go talk to the director in person. That would give me a chance to make some scans.”
“Scans?”
“Yes, Cap’n. See, this manuscript is either the original one from Earth, or it belongs to the alien race from that floaty cannon world. Either way, this has a very faint meta-space signature imprinted upon it, as if it had had some interaction with a temporal-spatial q-field. And if I can scan the library and see if I can pick up this same signal, well, that might tell us something.”
“Very well, Mr. Qwerty. Talk to the director and ask. Granger out.” He thumbed off the comm and glanced back at Commander Rice. “And now we wait.”
“Aye, Captain.” Rice got to work directing some ship repairs, and Granger settled back into his chair.
My god. He felt useless. His friends and fellow servicemembers were most likely having the fight of their lives, light-years away, and he was tracking down old books, for hell’s sake.
He needed to do something. Anything. Something more useful than sit like a geriatric in his swivel chair being treated half like a legend and half like a hospice patient.
But his mind was blank. Nothing. He was useless. Old, tired—that much hadn’t changed since his days on the Constitution, but now it was different. Like the world had moved on without him. Like he was left in the past, a relic, a revered senile that everyone still respected out of habit, but that secretly wished would head off gracefully to retirement.
The thoughts of the past, of the Constitution, made him nostalgic. So many of his friends, his comrades, sacrificed on the altar of saving humanity. Of saving home.
“Prepare a shuttle. I’m heading down.”
“Aye, sir,” said Rice. “Destination?”
“I need some advice. I need to talk to an old friend.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Il Nido Sector
Paradiso, High Orbit
ISS Independence
Bridge
There were just too many of them. The Findiri fleet, Proctor discovered, was not invincible. They were not all-powerful and unstoppable.
But there were just a fuck-ton of them. And their energy weapons, almost identical to the Eru’s, packed a punch.
“Damage report?” she yelled out. The distant rumblings from explosions in the lower decks were occasionally overwhelmed by explosions and impacts just a few decks above them, collisions that nearly knocked Proctor out of her chair each time.
“Power plant output down to twenty percent. At least fifty dead. Seven of twenty railgun turrets gone. All lasers gone. PDC cannons still firing, but they’re all occupied with those tracker mines.”
That had been a surprise. From the moment she said fire, each of the Findiri ships had disgorged a cloud of tiny projectiles. Thousands of them. Each painted black with some sort of special coating that could hardly be seen with passive scanning, rendering them nearly invisible to active scans. Each outfitted with micro-thrusters that pushed them along faster and faster until they were nearly impossible to pin down.
“Can the PDCs track them yet?”
“Negative, ma’am. Those micro-thrusters are giving the projectiles random course changes every few dozen milliseconds, in addition to speeding them up. It’s just enough of a course change to make our PDC cannon projectiles miss by a hair. We introduced a similar random jitter on our target lock and that helps a teensy bit, but lots are getting through.”
Another explosion as one of the tiny projectiles collided with the Independence’s hull.
“That took out our t-jump drive, ma’am! Like, out out. The emitters are gone.”
She glanced at the tactical status board of the IDF fleet. She’d lost the Copenhagen. The Malawi was limping along on half power. Shin-Wentworth’s Eagle Wing task force was getting pounded by a combination of the main guns on the Findiri vessels and their clouds of micro-thrusted projectiles. They’d only managed to destroy one Findiri capital ship. And it wasn’t even the flagship.
“Still no fighters,” she said. That was their only saving grace, for now. Their own fighters were strafing the surfaces of the Findiri ships, taking out gun turret after gun turret, sensor packages, meta-space dishes, even a few engines. But a dozen fighters were not going to take out a capital ship by themselves, and they had the micro-thrusted stealth projectiles to deal with.
“There goes another one of ours, ma’am,” said Destachio, as they all watched the Fairbanks explode in a brilliant flash from its engine going critical. “We’ve lost eleven fighters now. Forty-nine left. Four Eagle Wing ships, four Angel Wing ships.”
“That Findiri ship—at twenty-nine mark four. Its port side has gone dark—no energy cannons on that side. Get us in there and beat the hell out of it.”
“Aye, aye, ma’am,” said Destachio.
The Independence darted away from the two Findiri ships that were closing in on it from opposite directions and aimed straight at the third ship she’d indicated. Their main guns started blasting away at it, tearing chunks of hull away and exposing vast internal sections of the ship to space. Debris and bodies streamed out amidst the gouts of quickly-extinguished flame.
“Destachio, zoom in. I want to get a good look at our enemy. Show me a dead Findiri soldier.”
The viewscreen at the front of the bridge adjusted, zooming in on one of the great gashes in the side of the Findiri ship. It was bleeding air, and the occasional body shot out, most still flailing their limbs as they were still alive.
“Admiral! Life support is out! Main coolant lines are irreparably cut, and backups are overloaded!”
They had to get out of there, fast. This was not supposed to be a one-way trip for the Independence.
But not until I get to see the face of my enemy, she thought.
The camera zoomed in further and further, finding a body tumbling out of the Findiri ship, somersaulting end-over-end. They needed to leave. To live to fight another day. To get to Earth and defend humanity’s homeland in a last-ditch desperate battle. To warn Tim of what her Valarisi companion had told her and Director Talus had confirmed: that the Findiri were coming for him. But first . . .
She wanted—needed—to see her enemy
. The beings that had already cost humanity so much, in so short a time. The camera zoomed in more, finally centering on a face. There. She’d waited long enough. “Okay. That’s enough. Q-jump us out of here, Ensign Destachio.”
The familiar churn in her insides indicated the q-jump initiation, and the view screen shifted from the tumbling dead alien to a view of calm, clear, empty space, with the blue orb of Paradiso just a tiny marble on the screen.
“Ensign Sampono. Go back to the video. Still screen shot of that face, if you don’t mind.” But the image she’d seen had both unnerved her, and terrified her.
That face. It was not an alien face.
Though the eyes were as red as fire, the hair an otherworldly platinum, and the cheeks and ears and nose studded with a handful of sharp metal spikes. It was most definitely not alien.
It was a human face.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
Sol Sector
Earth
Virginia, North America
Arlington National Cemetery
Granger noted the changes at Arlington National Cemetery with a mixture of sadness and grim satisfaction. The last time he’d been here—over thirty years ago, before Swarm War Two—it had been holy ground, housing the sacred remains of soldiers from the United States—and later, the soldiers from United Earth who’d lived in the former United States—across dozens of conflicts, starting with America’s Civil War. World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Afghanistan, Iraq, Venezuela, the First and Second Pan-Middle-Eastern Wars, World War III and IV, the Alpha Centauri Affair, the Sirius Conflict, the New Dublin-CIDR War, the First and Second Interstellar Wars, a dozen other petty regional conflicts, and, most recently in his memory, Swarm War One, over a hundred years ago.
