by Cam Daly
“That sounds worthwhile. Changing course.”
The gravitic nodes in her limbs subtly altered the symmetrical ring of attractors a few meters ahead of her. At this speed, their positions created a near-vacuum for her to ‘fall’ through. If she altered course too quickly, atmospheric particles would abrade her reflective skin.
After a few seconds of silent focus, Shadow looked over to see that Kery was staring at the Horseplay status screen again.
“It’s weird, watching myself fly like this. I feel disconnected.”
“I’m pretty sure the old Keryapt Zess wouldn’t say things like that.”
“I hope you can get used to the new one. You’re stuck with her.”
“Assuming that she can survive a full spectrum exotech conflict with almost two hands worth of comparable antagonists, and get the information we need from an intractable enemy bent on our annihilation.”
“There isn’t anything proving that Broaalg is ‘bent’ on that. I’m betting that he sold the decoherence-human field data to his government, trying to get rich.”
“That’s possible, but-“
An alarm sounded. Trajectory plots appeared in the War Room, showing new activity above Earth.
“Keryapt…”
“Ormlan really doesn’t want me meeting Broaalg, does he.”
The plot showed a short dotted line of objects heading into the atmosphere. Very fast objects, aimed ahead of her location.
“No gravitic pulse was detected, so it must be a stealth mass driver in high orbit. Spectral analysis of re-entry shows projectiles are primarily inert iron, maybe five meters in diameter. Kinetic strike. In three minutes, Las Vegas is going to become this planet’s third largest smoking hole in the ground.”
#
“You’re dropping meteors on Las Vegas? How can you be sure that you'll only kill Broaalg and his Tumorish?” A few minutes ago, Connor had thought that his part in the immediate drama was coming to an end. He had infiltrated the collider base, delivered Keryapt’s cranial pod to Horseplay, protected Sousa from Mason and managed to survive the entire ordeal. But events had conspired against him.
DeVries looked vaguely annoyed as he replied. “They are called ‘meteoroids’ in the air. If they reach the ground they are ‘meteorites’. But ‘meteor’ is-“
“I don’t give a damn what they’re called! ‘Lice’ and ‘human field’ and meteoroids. You sound more like one of them than one of us.”
“That’s why Ormlan revealed himself to me in the first place. A small group of us at VSE suspected some of our technology was coming from an outside source, but I’m the only one who knows the whole truth. The young Molu in Farley really like to talk. They want to make Earth’s oceans a Molu vacation destination some day.”
Connor blinked. He had still been expecting that at some point he would discover that some group of aliens or other would want to invade, but had never imagined that his home planet would be a resort. He rubbed his eyes so hard that he saw stars. “Enough. I just need a few minutes without any more weirdness. Can you be not weird for a few minutes?”
DeVries stared at him, then looked away. “I’m not trying to antagonize you. I can’t help being the way I am. Even before they came, you would have called me weird.”
Connor fell into a guilty silence.
“So - how does Keryapt power her flying remotes?”
“She said if anyone asked, to tell them it is ‘singularity frame dragging’.”
DeVries’s bark of laughter made Connor jump.
“What the hell’s so funny?”
“That’s…why are you looking at me like I just grew another head?”
“Sorry. I’ve never heard you laugh before.”
“To be fair, Mister James, I’ve never heard you be funny before. But anyway, singularity frame dragging is their equivalent of perpetual motion. The Molu have a whole list of impossible things they wish a planet like ours would invent.”
“Kery didn’t tell me…let’s get back to Vegas. The meteor…oids.”
“Oh, right. You were asking about targeting. The unfortunate reality is that there will definitely be collateral damage. At around thirty kilometers up, the heat from reentry will cause the meteoroids to break into several hundred tons of iron shrapnel. A second later, it will impact a city block sized area at hypersonic speed.”
“What if they are shot down before then? Or miss?”
“They can’t be ‘shot down’. They are falling down. Maybe the Lice will get lucky and deflect one or a few of them, but even if Broaalg survives the first wave, the Molu have more.”
Connor sagged into a seat. “I understand. Kery said that none of the ‘equivalent technology’ races live on planets any more. They’re too vulnerable to attacks like that.”
“Like that? Oh no, that’s nothing! If you’re a big slow target like a planet and Fleet decides they don’t like you, they put a gradient drive on an asteroid a thousand times bigger and ramp it up to near light speed. And if they really, really don’t like you then they put a hundred kilograms of antimatter at the core. Of course it takes them decades to do all that, and you can see them coming from light years away. But it will wipe out a planetary population.”
Connor was trying to figure out the next question when Doctor Meade knocked at the door. “Hey in there. Jason, we picked up a few more of your people. Two of them were in the same state as your Dr. Park, so we are preparing to put them under as well.”
“Go away.” Connor turned back to DeVries. “Would the Fleet do that to Earth, if the Tumorish go exponential?”
DeVries thought for a moment. Seemed to weigh different options. “I don’t think they would really care about Earth at all after that happens. But like I said, something like that takes a long time to put into motion. Whatever they have here will be simpler. Mezerello once mentioned something called Stopgap, but she didn’t know exactly where or what it was. I was hoping that you might be able to tell us.”
The tall man put a friendly hand on Connor’s shoulder. “You may not realize it, but you and I are on the same side. That’s why I’m telling you everything I know. We should be working together.”
#
The 25 winglets with her were rearranged into groups of 5, each with approximately the same silhouette and gravitic signature as Horseplay. That would give the Lice six separate targets of equal weighting to choose amongst. The two damaged winglets were laboring a few minutes behind her, weighted down by cargo they had acquired at the collider complex just before it was destroyed.
Keryapt triggered a more aggressive randomization of bob and weave maneuvers, slowing her forward progress but theoretically making it harder for an enemy to target her from long range. Shadow didn’t seem to agree. “Even if they have long range weapons, they will probably wait until atmospheric-“
Pain exploded from Keryapt’s left side and she screamed, rolling violently away from the scything beam of an x-ray laser. She barely noticed a blast ten meters to her right in a group of winglets.
An instant later, the almost invisible lines of energy flickered out before they could touch her again. Her body suppressed the pain of the hit and backtracked the beams to the pair of Lice. Her left hip was marked by a black groove almost a centimeter deep from her waist down to her thigh. One winglet had been obliterated and two others now spiraled up and out of control.
Shadow didn’t waste time apologizing. “Get lower.”
Kery sent Horseplay and the winglets slaloming into the maze of low hills and rock formations in her path. “Damn. I was hoping they didn’t have anything with that long of a range.”
“I told you to follow the river.”
“I know. You were right. At least the rest of the Lice are heading up, going for the orbital strike.” After a moment without a response, she glanced at Shadow’s status and realized her daughter’s cranial temperature was approaching red line. “You’re heating up.”
“I think that you might be
right about something you said earlier.”
At another time, Kery might have laughed. “That’s a first.”
“That’s…what? What is?”
“Never mind. I’ve got a few seconds until open ground.” Keryapt forced herself to trust Shadow’s prioritization. There wasn’t time to demand an explanation. “War Room assist - get me a standoff firing solution on the closest Louse.”
Horseplay and its winglets raced westward, alternating rapidly between graceful curves and abrupt turns. Five seconds after the initial X-ray laser blasts, the Craven mechs fired again. She could just barely see which apertures on the Lice were responsible. Another winglet was vaporized as the attack targeted two of her decoy groups, sparing her.
She started a countdown clock for the recharge time on the Lice’s lasers. If they kept destroying her winglets at this rate, she would have none left by the time she reached Las Vegas. Without them, Horseplay would be vastly less effective. She had wanted to conceal her body’s full capabilities for as long as possible, but she had little choice left.
“Switching to standoff firing mode. Keep your fingers crossed.”
Shadow was pulled from her task by the announcement. “Umm…okay. Wait - what? Are you sure?”
“Yes. Inscribing target data on projectile now.”
She had 60 subjective seconds before the Lice could fire again. She slowed abruptly and rose above the dust storm caused by her own flight. She made sure to put herself directly between the rising sun and the Lice.
The winglets scattered from their decoy formations and streaked forward in groups of three. The ones with the fewest micromissiles left raced farthest ahead.
“Kery, if these Lice are as heavily armored as the one in Dallas…”
“Their armor had to have been made in zero G, and the only one we noticed deorbiting recently went to Dallas. These units have been with Broaalg since he arrived here. ” The first third of her status indicators on the Stage went green. “Proximity scan shows clear firing conditions.”
She brought her cannon around as the winglets stacked up in front of her. Each group of three came together, wingtip to wingtip, to form a short triangular tunnel. The group closest to her was fifty meters away, and each successive group after that was exponentially farther.
“If you’re wrong-”
Shadow and the entire War Room froze in place as Labworld Command verified Horseplay’s targeting calculations. All her indicators turned green.
“Conditions optimal. Releasing fire control to automatics…now.”
Two real world seconds had passed since the Lice last fired at her.
“Please let this work.”
A half second later, the gravitic drives in the winglets all jumped to full power. Each trio accelerated forward, creating a singular point of focused gravitation just ahead of the center of their formation. A very precisely calculated instant after that, her cannon fired. The projectile passed into and through the tunnel created by the first triad of winglets, dragged forward by their combined field. The instant it was past the optimal point their gravitic drives deactivated, leaving the projectile to rush on to the next group.
Her electronic warfare package fired off a burst of laser and radar energy, hopefully blinding the enemy sensors to her attack. This particular trick would probably only work once from this range.
Each of the seven winglet groups had slightly more time than the previous one to speed themselves up before the projectile passed through their fields, but its ever increasing velocity meant that it spent less time under acceleration. The final group was almost ten kilometers ahead of Keryapt when the projectile reached them. It spent just a fraction of a second in their gravitic embrace before hurtling onward to its target.
Two seconds later and ninety kilometers away, just as the armored cover of its laser irised open, the projectile struck the nearly stationary Louse. The shot was perfect. A tremendous explosion blossomed from the side of the Craven machine and it shuddered, then started to fall. The other Louse fired again but she was already in motion, leaving no clear target for it.
With the incredibly complex calculations of the standoff shot complete and no longer filling her data connection, Shadow and the War Room surged back into motion. Cheers echoed as secondary detonations within the damaged Louse blew it entirely out of existence and sent its partner reeling.
Kery rearranged the winglet groups again. She was down to four groups of five intact winglets each, with one spare and the two just recently damaged ones tethered to her back. Once she got within twenty kilometers or so of the remaining Louse it would open up with missiles, energy beams and perhaps remotes of its own. She was starting to think about the next step, entering Las Vegas, when Connor’s phone reported that it heard something. Something that was supposed to be secret.
#
“Stopgap? What’s that?”
His phone squawked, then Kery’s voice sounded. “Take me off speaker.” Connor half-turned from DeVries and brought the phone to his ear. “Can anyone else hear me or you?”
“Give me a second.” He left DeVries for a moment and went into the washroom next to the ER with a rising sense of guilt. “DeVries can’t hear you.” He expected a reprimand, but what he got instead surprised him.
“Our Factory in the asteroid belt gathers resources and flings the valuable ores to the smaller Factory near Earth. It builds things we need like the Observatory, and bodies and weapons for Actives. But all the fissile material was processed and sent to Stopgap. Forty years worth of asteroid mining produced a lot of uranium, which is now housed with a few micrograms of antimatter in the warheads of a missile launcher a few light seconds from Earth.”
“But…why?”
“In case we lost control. In case humanity created something which we couldn’t let fall into the hands of our enemies.”
“Like the decoherence…’human’ field.”
“Yes.”
He paused. He wasn’t sure he wanted to ask the question.
“Are you going to use it?”
“I am trying to prevent that from being necessary.”
Some part of his brain noticed that she had used ‘I’ instead of ‘we’.
“Why are you telling me?”
“Just in case.”
“In case…what? You have to use it on us?”
“No.”
She disconnected. He stared at the phone.
#
Who- or whatever was controlling the remaining Louse hadn’t opened the port on its x-ray laser again as she approached Las Vegas. The six Lice high above the city were firing their own weapons towards the incoming hail of meteoroids, but Molu defensive systems either placed on or falling with the iron rocks were stopping most of the Craven missiles.
“Kery, I think I’ve figured out…wait. Your capacitors have recharged enough for another standoff shot. Why aren’t you using it?”
“Even if I take out this Louse, there isn’t enough time to find Broaalg and get him out of Eternal Night before the orbital strike. I’m saving it so that he thinks I can shoot him down if he tries to leave.”
“The old Keryapt would have taken the shot, and tried to win the race.”
“Then she was an idiot. We have no idea what his escape ship is capable of. The abstract threat of my standoff weaponry is much more effective.”
The Louse confronting her released its own group of remotes. Twenty of her winglets used the rocky hills between Las Vegas and Lake Mead to the east as cover, dogfighting enemy units and popping up to fire off volleys of missiles. Anyone watching from the city could easily see the locomotive-sized Louse and flashes of detonating ordnance.
“Then why did you get so close to….oh, I get it.” With her head out of her own simulation, Shadow could see the tracking and prediction plots that the War Room assist group had come up with for Horseplay. “Am I the only one who questions your plans?”
“Apparently. Everyone else in the War Room thinks I
am the infallible Keryapt Zess, so they assume that I know what I’m doing.”
“I get distracted for five subjective minutes and you have a new plan. You’re going to give me planning whiplash.”
“Lucky for you that you aren’t in charge of me any more, then!”
“Ouch.”
“Sorry. Trying to lighten the mood and I haven’t had time to make more -active jokes.”
“We’re better off without them. Focus on getting to Broaalg and his lab."
Bit by bit, Kery poked and teased with her forces to lure the Louse closer to the edge of the city. It had advantages in size, armor and raw firepower but Advanced Perfection’s winglet design was optimized to rely on cooperation amongst their gravitic control. They could yank each other out of the way of incoming fire and use their fields to accelerate and redirect each other’s missiles to attack from unexpected directions.
She backed away from the heart of the battle and looped lower, barely above the surface of the large lake to the east of the city. Twenty seconds to meteoroid impact. Broaalg must be terrified, and desperate to get out. Kery issued a preplanned command and the winglets retreated from their battle line and started to form the array for the standoff attack around her.
“Come on Broaalg, this is your chance to get rid of me. Take the bait.”
The Louse rocketed forward, a storm of missiles coming from it. If it was armed like its brethren above, some would be nuclear-tipped. Keryapt fell back, winglets collapsing into a mirrored phalanx around her.
Shadow was monitoring every step of Kery’s plan. “You might not be the same Keryapt, but you still take chances like her. Just different ones.”
“I know everything she did. Rather, everything I did. But not why, or how she decided. So I have to force myself to trust my own choices.”
The Craven mech continued lumbering forward, trying to destroy her before the meteoroids hit. Her tight cluster of winglets retreated backwards with her across the surface of the lake and then they leapt upwards, leaving a vortex of churned water and spray behind. Her cannon fired repeatedly from the center of the winglets, destroying approaching missiles and tagging the Louse itself. Beams of various energies and wavelengths scored the winglets but the formation held as it raced out of range of the attack.
