Comms buzzed at her brain. “Weapon range in ten. After that, five to impact. Fire on intersecting Haint ships to clear the way. Once the hulk is destroyed, grab any lifepods you can, but maintain course for the orbital assist. The auxiliary fleet will cover the evacuation corridor.”
Cherry, is there anything we can do for massive effect here? Can we build a bomb or something? What about what we did to send Elysium into orbit?
We could create a large muta-energetic explosion, but that would require significant quantities of matter and code present at the desired epicentre of the blast. As it stands, the Haints could destroy the code before it reaches their fleet, or us before we manage to code it in their midst. Unfortunately, the best we can do is continue to intercept starfire heading for the King .
She sighed and zipped ahead of the carrier’s pitted nose cone as it hurtled through space. Playing point defense against starfire was perfectly doable. It was no a crippling blow or a grand stand, but nobody else could do it effectively - Union point defense seemed incapable of bursting starfire, and wasting rockets in the effort was, well, wasteful.
She steadied herself in her seat, wondering what exactly was going to happen next. Much of the Haint escort had already swerving to intercept the Union fleet, curving towards her like the sun-bleached ribs of something long dead. Ada knew, by now, that knocking out a ship’s engines wasn’t enough to stop it from being a threat.
“Weapon range in five.”
Hm. Five minutes. Maybe could make a difference in those minutes.
“Cherry, can we damage the Leviathan thrusters? Throw them off-course?”
Her ship’s responses weren’t very encouraging these days. Doubtful. Leviathans could potentially destroy our shields at close range with weapons and certainly with a self-destruct. We cannot get behind the vanguard without being exposed to fire from the rear. And their veil is thick enough that we may simply be unable to penetrate critical systems.
She brought up a floating display of the fleets in front of her, frowning, puzzling over it, looking for some kind of angle. Then, all of a sudden and well before she was ready, the Haints lashed out, starfire zipping around her towards the Union fleet.
She slowed time and started firing, six fins each independently adjusting to find their targets and cut down the largest bursts of incoming starfire. Webworks of firing angles snared her eyes as she picked target after target. She filled the field with glittering shards that burst into splinters of light, and packets that ran through enough of the stuff were destabilized and burst into coils of cooling gas.
But Cherry’s fins moved in realtime, along with the hexes and starfire, so she could only do so much. Shots inevitably pelted through, more and more as the full fleet came into range. Ada narrowed her focus around the carrier itself, lighting up the darkness with dense clouds of disintegrating shrapnel, but she couldn’t stop everything. With every quickening heartbeat her eyes darted faster and faster, looking for something she couldn’t imagine.
“Two minutes to impact.”
The wormship was getting closer a lot faster than she had expected. Cherry traced the mathematics of Haint trajectories, and it didn’t look like they were going to be able to intercept the carrier directly. The final few klicks would happen incredibly quickly. She would need to disappear fast.
A colonial cruiser exploded, flinging shreds of hull sideways that scraped through a frigate. The Leviathans were approaching along a curve, slightly to the carrier’s right side. A small ship burst into fire. They would probably miss the carrier, and it wasn’t like they could just -
Oh shit.
She warped sideways out of the fleet. Broadcast to every ship in the area.
“The Leviathans are going to detonate! Get out of there!”
There was a buzz of comm traffic, but only one response registered with her brain.
“What do you expect us to do about it?”
They were right. These ships - each was set in its path, forced to carve glacial deviations through space over minutes or hours. Ada sat out about two klicks behind the carrier, and for ten agonizing seconds, she watched the lead trio of Leviathans get closer and closer.
At the moment when they looked like they were going to overshoot the carrier, she watched them all suddenly explode in unison. She watched a massive wave of debris and energy rip the carrier apart, tearing into the explosives cached into the rear, scattering its hull and contents across the void. She watched the wormship’s cannons suddenly start pounding the cruisers and frigates all at once with individual fireballs as big as Cherry, tearing them to shreds.
She watched most of the debris that had been the Union fleet fly close past the wormship’s massive bulk, set off-course by the impacts. The fleet passed around the Haints to swing around Chang’e back to the jumpgate, but not many would be doing so intact. Debris from the carrier and other ships that didn’t outright miss struck veil, flashing briefly but having no appreciable effect on the wormship.
She breathed quietly.
After a long moment, a transmission clicked through. “This is Chieftain . Everyone riding the gravity assist, watch your backs on retreat. The jumpgate will be detonated when the Haints close the distance or when the last ships are through. They may be decelerating into stationary orbit now, but that could change at any time.”
That was it. They were abandoning the system.
No, no, that couldn’t be it. They couldn’t just… leave.
She had to do something . She was Ada Liu, First Sorceress of Earth. She could do something.
Wraiths wouldn’t work here - starfire would burn through the code immediately, she didn’t know how to armor them, and in any case they couldn’t pierce the veil.
Cherry couldn’t take out the wormship - the thing was enormous, heavily veiled, and even if she could dodge most shots there would be the occasional smack to her shields that could get her killed.
What else was there?
She had a ship, and she had code, both ineffective. She had allies, equally ineffective.
She had a brain. A decent brain, all things considered. Was that ineffective too?
“How long till the wormship reaches firing range on Chang’e?”
Ninety minutes, roughly.
“Okay. I don’t think we can destroy it.”
I agree.
“We need to be able to get something from this, though. You said you can’t actively scan their systems? What if we grabbed a Hornet, ripped it apart, figured out how it works, and you could send some kind of transmission to the other Haint ships to start firing on the wormship? You know their targeting algorithms, right? You know their communications procedures.”
It is possible, but I cannot promise anything. I have been scanning their transmissions for some time and I do not believe they coordinate attacks directly.
“What? They’re obviously coordinating, just look at them.”
I believe they are each separately running an identical, deterministic algorithm for fleet maneuvering that results in each ship calculating its place based on observational knowledge of their surroundings and their fleet. Coordination through active transmissions would be vulnerable to the kind of information warfare you are proposing.
“Shit. Can we at least try?”
Of course.
She quickly cast her mind through the system, looking for a lone Hornet somewhere. There were several small formations gliding towards the evacuation corridor - easy pickings for her. She snapped across the void towards a trio of them, blasting two and closing in on the third as it swiveled to fire at her.
“How do we do this?”
We will need to pry off a veil plate.
Just like eating crab. The plates generating the protective veil were visibly segmented on the smaller ships, not quite covering the dark metal internals, so that seemed easy enough. She pinched the tips of her right flank fins together and swept down alongside the Hornet, whirling around it as it tried to face
her. At a choice moment she rammed sideways into one of the gaps between the veil segments, her shields whingeing on contact with the veil, and ripped the fins open again.
Miraculously, the veil armour popped off, corkscrewing through space at the head of its glowing contrail and leaving the upper half of the Hornet exposed, cold metal and machine made vulnerable. She maneuvered Cherry over the exposed portion of the Haint, circling it as the Haint tried to lock onto her, and dug into it with the two lower fins, pinning it in position relative to her.
“Can you scan it?”
Yes; without quantum interference, active and passive scanning is fully effective.
Ada looked out the window towards the evacuation corridor, civilians fleeing Chang’e in an ever-rectracting column. There was no more help coming, but maybe she could get one last punch into the fight.
“Cherry, please, gods, tell me something good.”
I am happy to report their systems are based entirely on quantum computing.
“Why is that good? I thought you said the Union barely had any quantum computing. This means they’re more advanced.”
More advanced than the Union. My own systems are built entirely with string computing; quantum computing is an older, intermediary computational paradigm. It is unlikely the Haints will ever match Earth computational capabilities unless they are upgraded by their creators.
She frowned, but allowed herself to smile too. Her ancients were still in the lead. “Okay, good, but how do we stop the wormship?”
I am decoding and simulating the algorithms they use for coordinating warfare and fleet movements, but it will take a little time.
“Wait, you said their creators. What do you know about them?”
Unfortunately, the Hornet does not appear to contain any strategic intelligence. Aside from complex behaviour algorithms and hardware interfaces, it contains only log files, which I can use to determine where it has been and what it has done. Based on the structure of the code, I believe individual ships only ever have access to general algorithms that determine how to respond to their broad orders.
“So you know where this Hornet came from?”
Assuming its logs were never wiped, which I cannot say for certain. The earliest records are from star system over a hundred parsecs from here.
“Can we somehow get the wormship to warp back? Give it new orders?”
The wormship would need to traverse a jumpgate - it cannot warp or sustain an exterior wormhole. I do not believe we could make it retreat.
She flexed her fingers. “Any reason to keep this Hornet?”
No. I have stored all raw scan data and can analyze it at any time.
“Good.” She splayed the ship’s fins out, blasting downwards and shredding the Hornet apart. Debris fanned out into space as she spun around towards the wormship. She kept her distance, watching, waiting, desperately trying to think.
“Can we broadcast as though we were a Haint? Confuse their fleet algorithms?”
Potentially, but this would result in a benign fleet repositioning at best and won’t affect their objectives. I cannot determine a way to use their fleet positioning algorithms to damage or interrupt the wormship. We have one hour remaining.
She thought and she thought, but nothing came to her. She skipped up and down the evacuation corridor, blasting small Haint excursions, hoping that with distraction ideas might start to grow in the back of her mind. That happened, sometimes - but not this time. Nothing was coming to her. Cherry had no ideas either. But they had to do something. Something! Anything!
As a Vulture careened off-course, dead and whirling, she slammed the sides of her seat. Even the little victories felt like failures. “Damn it, we have to stop them! Think of something!”
I am simulating exotic warfare tactics, Ada, but the wormship is simply too large and well-protected for anything I am able to suggest, and we have no more assets to call upon.
“And even if there was something else on Earth, it’s hours and hours away.”
Yes. All my records, even the classified ones, indicate there are no other ships with comparable capabilities to mine, nor any production facilities or blueprints to create new ones. Ada, we have twenty minutes -
Hundreds of klicks from Chang’e, a spinal core in the wormship started glowing.
For a brief moment, there was an orange pulse of light along its length. It must be starting its attack sequence. They had almost no time -
A fiery pillar of orange light slammed from the wormship to the dark side of the moon. Instant, quick, unstoppable. Chang’e’s atmosphere burst into fire around the point of impact. An angry orange-white ring tore across the atmosphere. Fire across oceans and mountains, lighting up the night, crossing into the day and outshining the distant sun. It reached the opposite end of the moon, found nothing left to burn, petered out and fell dark.
Ada had held her breath for all the time it took to end a world.
What hung there now was a blackened ball of ash. The atmosphere had been burned, leaving only a blackish haze of smoke curling around the planet. Seas had boiled shallow and grey, land had turned molten and was cooling into volcanic glass, the polar ice caps were completely gone.
There was nothing left.
Millions of people. Dozens of massive cities. Billions of plants and animals. A thousand years of history. All wiped out by a ring of fire that barely took thirty seconds to cross the entire globe.
It appears Union records underestimated the ship’s firing range by several dozen kilometers.
Ada couldn’t speak. She stared at the ashen ruin and saw nothing but a void made so much emptier by just how full it had been minutes earlier.
Gone. Chang’e was gone.
A transmission clicked through from the fleet, which she could see was still swinging around the dead moon’s gravity. They had been awfully close. “All ships, enter the jumpgate as soon as possible. Do not wait on specific destinations. We need to detonate the jumpgate. We’re done here.”
Chang’e was gone.
What could they possibly do to stop this?
Ada, your vitals are spiking. How are you feeling?
“They glassed a whole fucking world full of millions of people! ” She slammed her palm into the sides of her seat. “How the fuck do you think I feel?!”
Cherry remained quiet for a moment. Ada watched the Haints, clenching her fists and huffing, their cloudy white veils following them through space as they took up orbit around the husk. New ships started jumping in from the wormship, and they streamed downwards towards the moon. What were they even doing? They had already destroyed everything down there.
They had to stop the Haints. She had to stop them. How? She slammed her fist against the cockpit glass.
I have intercepted a transmission from the wormship into deep space. It appears to contain coordinates for the Union’s other jumpgates, as well as additional information that may include access algorithms. This wormship and any other Haint jumpgates have the ability to send ships through Union jumpgates.
Gods. They were fucked. They really did have to shut down the gates. She clutched her head in her hands, squeezing her brain, thinking.
“What… where did that transmission get sent?”
The transmission beam appears to include the same star system the Hornet’s earliest jump logs refer to.
She blinked. “Is that their home system?”
Possibly. We cannot be certain that was the target system.
She watched the new set of Haint ships jump in from the wormship’s twin gates, weird ships that she had not yet had the displeasure of seeing. Ships headed straight for the planet.
“Cherry.”
After a moment. Yes, Ada?
“The Union has to shut down its jumpgates.”
This seems the prudent course of action. If they do, the wormship will need to travel for approximately seventeen years at sublight speeds to reach the nearest Union system, Vesta.
“Se
venteen years? That’s it?” She gripped her skill. “They can turn off their entire civilization and it will only buy them seventeen years before they get glassed again anyway?”
Yes.
“How are they supposed to survive?”
I do not know. Military assets are insufficient. Information security is too weak to disguise secret interstellar evacuations. Spaceflight technology will not support viable populations long enough to survey and colonize new worlds the Haints are unfamiliar with.
“Why didn’t the Haints come back and glass them all a thousand years ago? Why did they wait for…” She hesitated, swallowed. “For us?”
I do not know. But Hornet targeting algorithms include provisions for planetary combat, presumably in the event that a planet cannot be outright destroyed, and these algorithms are instructive. They prioritize interstellar shipbuilding capabilities and scientific infrastructure when not under immediate tactical threat.
“Wait, scientific infrastructure?”
Yes. They perform scans to pinpoint chemistry and energy expenditures associated with industrial engineering, as well as electromagnetic signatures characteristic of complex material information processing.
Ada thought about it. The Haints weren’t just trying to kill people - they were consciously trying to set the Union back to a more primitive level of development.
Which, on reflection, they had achieved admirably. The Union was pathetically primitive compared to what a thousand years of development should have achieved. Part of that might be direct Haint attacks, but another part was that virus Elsa had talked about - Umbra Ex Machina. The shadow from the machine. From the Haints.
And Earth…
Venshi’s Human Protection Project idiots had help building the technophage, help from the colonies. Umbra Ex found a group of humans all too willing to self-destruct, and manipulated them to its own ends. Gods only knew what they had done to Mir, but the effect was the same.
“Cherry, it’s like they’re trying to keep everyone in check. To manage us.”
Cherry was silent for a moment. Several possible understandings of your sentiment are compatible with the data, but I do not see -
The Broken Third (Digitesque Book 4) Page 33
