Tales From The Edge: Emergence

by Stephen Gaskell

  Isco rocked back on his heels as the truth sunk in.

  The ships would get neither the cold orchestrating hand of the cloud, nor the inventive guidance of a human pilot.

  They'd be on their own.

  "Sir," Ensign Adair said, his voice hesitant. "I'm picking up some confusing signals."

  Isco marched over to his subordinate's side, trying to maintain the illusion of composed command. On Adair's screen, countless blips of white light flashed off and on like glistening sparkles on a moonlit ocean. Each point of light represented what the software predicted was an enemy contact, but unless the Broken had some kind of cloaking technology the flashes should've remained as an unblinking swarm.

  "Instrument failure?"

  "I've run diagnostics--"

  "There's nothing wrong with the hardware," Kopak said, stabbing a finger at the screen. "Look where those signals are coming from. The ring systems." His eyes met Isco's in the reflection off the screen. "They've been hiding in the rings."

  And now they're coming out to play.

  "Scramble the drone fighters," Isco ordered, voice trembling. "And give me tactical on the command grid."

  Sixteen dark shadows struck out from the basalt, their icons a wedge of cyan triangles on the grid. The view zoomed out. On the other side of the board, a ragtag of enemy icons blinked into dependable existence as they left the camouflaged safety of the rings. Isco tallied five, then ten, then twenty, then stopped counting as the whole side thronged with contacts.

  "What are we up against?"

  He stared out of the viewing window, watching the sleek wings of the drone fighters recede as they moved to intercept their attackers, the backdrop a confusing swirl of smouldering wreckage, shards of ice, and hundreds of enemy craft, all growing larger.

  Kopak answered, "Everything and anything."

  Ensign Adair added the details. "I'm seeing everything from two-man skiffs to stretchship tankers. Ednotech cruisers, mining transports, moon hoppers, solar trawlers, but most of them are typical prospecting vessels--"

  "No military craft?"

  "Don't be fooled," Kopak said, "Broken insurgents will outfit their craft with any weaponry they can get their hands on, co-opt industrial tools for combat purposes. Some will simply be flying timebombs, stuffed to the rafters with explosives, electromagnetic chaff, whatever."

  "What are you doing?"

  Kopak had moved to the Handler cradle, something like a dentist's chair with a surrounding cage of sophisticated electronics, and was punching commands into the floating keyboard. The cradle hummed into life, the CPU blazing through its start-up routines.

  Isco asked again. "Kopak?"

  "Somebody's got to marshall the drones."

  "The interference. You might get cut off--"

  "Which is why I need to project now, before transfer becomes impossible."

  Any handler whose robot or drone under his command received irreparable damage could easily suffer brain damage if they didn't extract themselves in time. Most cases that meant death.

  They were the lucky ones. The unlucky ones spent the remainder of their lives in psych facilities, drooling shells of their former selves.

  "Alright, we need you out there." Isco nodded, understanding. "But come back safe, okay?"

  Kopak climbed into the cradle, donning the immersion mask.

  Isco turned to Ensign Adair. "How long until they're in range?"

  With all the interference the missile systems would be next to useless, but Black Rock could still use its laser batteries and flakk cannons to swat the enemy from the skies--when they were close enough.

  "They're minutes away, Sir."

  Landra turned from her station. "We're being hailed."

  "Open a channel."

  "Commander Isco," László Fischer's bloated face occupied the majority of the corner of the command grid that Isco had apportioned for the feed, heavy distortion twisting his features, swallowing some of his words. "How does it ------- to fire upon a freighter ------- innocent civilians?"

  "I wouldn't know," Isco lied. "Your ship was empty."

  After a short time lag, László smiled. "Did you --------- out before or after you or----- their murder?"

  Isco ignored the cold hard feeling in the pit of his stomach. "What do you hope to achieve here, László?" He hoped his eyes didn't betray the uncertainty he felt about his next line. "Your rabble, no matter how numerous, is no match for our defences."

  "I hope it doesn't come to that, Commander." László's face hardened. "Surrender your post, and no harm will come to you or your men. You have my word."

  Isco shook his head, sadly. "I can't do that."

  He killed the connection.

  In the Handler cradle, Kopak's body twitched, his nervous system aligning with the perceptual signals incoming from the drone fighter into which he'd projected his awareness. On the command grid, the two opposing forces had almost come together, the blue of the drones an arrowhead about to plough into the Broken swarm. Already, blooms of weapon fire punctured the sky.

  "We're being hailed again, Sir," Landra announced.

  "I'm done with that man."

  "I don't think it's him. It's others. Many of them."

  Isco let himself hope. Maybe they were defectors, civilian crews looking to cut some kind of deal for their withdrawal. Anything to improve the odds in the Epirian's favour would be welcome. "Open multiple channels."

  A quiltwork of grainy video feeds checkerboarded the command grid, and Isco knew immediately he'd made a mistake. The same desperate eyes he'd seen staring out from the freighter's depths, stared out anew, only this time they were scattered across a whole raft of spacecraft interiors; cramped cockpits, cruise lounges, a tanker bridge, any and every nook and cranny of the tinpot vessels in which they travelled. There were no more than ten or fifteen in each frame, and among their numbers Isco saw brothers and sisters, parents and their children, friends and lovers, people who'd seen a lifetime together, the bonds too apparent to dismiss out of hand.

  An army of innocents.

  "Please," they pleaded in a dreadful polyphony. "Please."

  His greedy eyes drank them in, unable to make himself look away. His gaze caught on a pair of faces on a dimly lit flight deck, and he did a double take. I recognise them. A mother and her son. A dusty headscarf hid the woman's hair, her eyes small and frightened, while her boy sat in her lap playing with toy Epirian figures, the paintwork flaking off the plastic but the grey and orange insignia still recognisable. Where do I know them from?

  His mind drew a blank.

  The babble of imploring voices drilled into his skull. "Enough!"

  The grid reverted back to the tactical battlemap, a jumble of red and blue icons engaged in a swirling dance in the middle of the holospace, but all Isco could see were the ghosts of the refugees' faces.

  His mouth felt dry as sandpaper. "Ensign Landra, instruct the drone fighters and the base defenders to incapacitate rather than kill." He leaned on the side of the command grid, his legs shaky. "I repeat: incapacitate rather than kill."

  Who was that woman and her child?

  "Sir--"

  "Relay the order, Ensign."

  "Yessir."

  He wouldn't gun down innocents who were only trying to escape a terrible fate. Not again. He'd been given a reprieve the first time, and he'd learnt his lesson. Of course, the risk of Black Rock falling into Broken hands would be much greater with this course of action, but he judged that a better path than history branding him a butcher.

  He needed to see the battle firsthand.

  He picked up a pair of observer spex, the smartglass reflecting the light of the battle, weighing them in his hands. He put them on, blinked rapidly three times.

  The world flipped.

  The broadside of a gun-metal star tanker loomed perilously close, the letters of its designation stamped on its hull too near to parse, and Isco flinched. When he opened his eyes again, Kopak's fighter was ban
king hard, the tanker dropping away to the right, replaced by a stunning vault of stars. The telltale red-purple tinge of the Edge wheeled into view, and then Kopak was back amongst the action, dipping and spiralling and diving, pulses of grass green laser fire issuing from his dual-slaved DCLS cannons. The other drones followed Kopak's lead, staying in tight formation like a flock of birds, their own cannons glowing red hot.

  Broken craft pinwheeled in a chaotic dance, mass-based armaments twitching on their pockmarked shells. They fought dirty and reckless, aiming for head-to-head collisions, glancing blows, anything to disrupt the pattern of their enemy. One vessel self-destructed a fraction after Kopak had dodged past, the explosive bloom momentarily enveloping his craft before dying away into the vacuum.

  Have I been taken for a sucker?

  These didn't seem the actions of a band of crushed and despairing people. These were the brutal tactics of hardened fighters, the bare-knuckle brawlers of space warfare.

  The ground shook hard, jolting Isco from his train of thought. The combination of the hyper-kinetic visuals and the physical motion of the floor gave him a sudden feeling of nausea, and he ripped the spex off. The sudden stillness of the command hub didn't help much, and he almost threw up, but he sucked back the bile, wiped a hand across his mouth.

  Landra screamed, "That was too close!"

  Through the viewing window he could see that the fight had come to Black Rock, the night sky ablaze with defensive fire meeting wave after wave of Broken attacks. They're trying to flatten the base. He realized that they would be happy to secure the gate, even if it was in its dormant state. They must be confident they can get it spun up in situ.

  "Concentrate defensive fire on protecting the base," he said, loud yet controlled, and the battle raged over Black Rock.

  Slowly, Isco thought he could detect the tide of the battle turning in the Epirian's favour. Several of the enemy's fleet were mangled wrecks, the occupants dead, but many more drifted powerless through the blizzard of fighting and debris, engines disabled. As his Eradicator fighters glided in lockstep across the viewing window, he counted three short, but that was still good odds for overall victory--provided the base didn't get pummeled.

  Another reverberation shook the foundations of the structure, nearly knocking him to the ground. Arms outstretched, balancing himself in case of aftershocks, he twisted his head, and watched something extraordinary happen.

  Kopak's fighter spun one-eighty, fired upon one of its own.

  Isco blinked, numb.

  Too late to make any evasive manoeuvres, the attacked vessel exploded in a bright starburst that illuminated the ragged battlefield in stark white light, every scruffy craft of the Broken's jumbled fleet and every Eradicator fighter momentarily frozen like elements of a still life.

  A fraction later, the battlefield was all chaos and motion again, time cranking once more in the stunned silence of the command hub. Kopak's fighter broke from its siblings, headed for the rings where more Broken craft were still incoming.

  Electronic warfare was Isco's first thought.

  "Give me information, people," he barked. "Is he compromised?"

  Even with the space equivalent of a sandstorm's worth of interference, the fighters exchanged brief packets of information with each other and the base via signals encrypted with the near-impregnable ELISE cipher. It seemed inconceivable that the enemy--a rabble of the impoverished who scrabbled a living at the margins of the system--might possess the technical knowledge, not to mention the powerhouse rigs, necessary to crack the Epirian codes in such a short space of time.

  He swallowed, glancing at Kopak's ragdoll form in the handler cradle, trying not to dwell on the man's likely fate if the Broken had cracked his fighter's decryption codes.

  His body might be here, Isco thought, but his mind isn't.

  Until he comes back, all we've got is a zombie.

  "No sign of any enemy interventions, Sir," Adair reported. "Lieutenant Kopak appears to be acting of his own volition." He grunted, surprised. "There's something else. He received an enemy communication shortly before he attacked the drone fighter."

  "Let me hear it."

  "Not possible," Adair said. "I can only ascertain that he accepted the message."

  Isco turned back to watch the fray, frustrated.

  What the hell was happening?

  "Call him."

  With the effective loss of two more of their number, including their human-controlled lead, the fighters struggled to contain the Broken fleet. Thirteen became twelve, and soon enough that became eleven. The battle teetered on a knife edge.

  "Adair?"

  "I can't get through. He's moved too far into the debris field."

  Think, man! Think!

  For a moment he watched the red and blue glyphs of the command grid intermingle, the drone fighter's tactics devolving into an every-man-for-himself turmoil, each one getting sucked into a one-on-one encounter--

  A shiver skated Isco's spine.

  "What was the drone fighter doing immediately before Kopak attacked it?"

  Adair began tapping on his keyboard, but before he could answer the question the whole command hub shook. A heavy fixture crashed down from the ceiling, almost crushing Ensign Landra, and Isco hustled over, ready to shield her should anything else fall.

  Adair shouted, "The drone fighter was targeting a distant Broken vessel." A few more taps of the keyboard, and an ugly, run-of-the-mill prospecting craft pulsed into shimmering existence over the command grid. "This one."

  Why would Kopak protect--

  Enlightenment blossomed.

  "László's on that ship," Isco whispered. "As is Kopak's family."

  And Kopak will be escorting them.

  His second-in-command kept a tatty-edged photo of his wife and son in his uniform's breast pocket. He'd shown Isco the picture once, months back, when Isco had interrupted him without warning in his digs. He didn't need to, but he fished the photo from Kopak's near-still body, comfirmed what he already knew. They were much younger then, but it was the same two faces he'd recognized from among the medley of refugees.

  No wonder Kopak had argued so hard against firing on the freighter. He must've thought his wife and son were aboard. Isco wondered how long Kopak had been planning on smuggling his family out-of-system like this.

  Isco's hands tightened.

  He could end this now.

  Instruct every unit at his disposal to train its sights on that ship, and within minutes László's broken body would be tumbling through space like so much other debris. Without a leader, Broken resistance would crumble.

  But it wouldn't only be László's body sent spinning into infinity.

  It would be Kopak's wife.

  It would be Kopak's son.

  It could've been Lena and Amelie had they still been alive.

  "Hail that vessel," Isco said, straightening his uniform. "We're surrendering."

  *

  The spun-up gate was a sight to behold.

  Brilliant white lights studded the dark halo of complex machinery, while the strange energies of the tunnel walls could be seen writhing through the gate's gaping maw. Below, the remains of the Broken's ragtag fleet snaked upwards from Black Rock's landing platform, a motley assemblage of those craft that had survived the battle or been easily repaired in its aftermath.

  Isco imagined the spaces inside crowded with frightened refugees, many probably wondering if their craft would endure the violent motion of travel through the network, or whether their craft's navigation systems would fail. If either happened they would be bucked from the tunnels, marooned, likely light years from a habitable system. Starvation or dehydration or asphyxiation would inevitably result--if the Edge didn't swallow them first.

  Others following in their wake might be pitched from the network too, turbulent currents spreading from the point of rupture like panic through a crowd.

  No wonder they jockeyed for position on their upward flight to the g
ate.

  Isco tapped the glass. He pondered on how he would explain his surrender to his superiors. They'd be livid. He could expect to be court-martialled.

  He watched a small prospecting vessel nip in front of a more ponderous Kalman Industries mining rig, slipping into the network with an accelerating blur as the gate's loop magnetic fields gave the craft a helping hand.

  "You should come with us."

  Isco turned.

  László stood beside the inactive command grid, hands clasped.

  Only himself and his small inner circle remained on Black Rock, and soon they would depart too. No doubt they had much to discuss as they plotted their escape from the Edge. A battle had been won today, but they fought a war.

  Kopak had left with his wife and son a few hours earlier.

  Isco bore him no grudge.

  Of the Epirians manning the base, most had been conscripted into the Broken Collective, their knowledge and skills highly valued. Isco could tell that many were relieved to be escaping, but a few were leaving behind families on Merida, and for them he felt sorry. He was glad that Ensign Landra had been deemed surplus to the Broken's requirements.

  He would enjoy her company while awaiting his punishment.

  "I don't think so," Isco said.

  "It must've taken courage to surrender."

  Isco shrugged.

  László looped a packed bag over his shoulder. They'd commandeered most of the material of the base too. "The Broken could do with more leaders like you."

  "My commission is here," Isco said. "Gods willing, plenty more souls will pass through that gate in time. If anything fails--" He cut himself short, not wanting to remind the man of the dangers he faced. "We will need to make sure it’s in the best condition it can be in when they depart."