by Paul Anlee
They’d have about a tenth of a second before the returning echo traversed the distance to the asteroid and alerted defensive forces to their presence.
“Fire,” she commanded.
Fifty battle-Cybrids opened gateways into an alternate universe and channeled its young, exotic energy into collimated beams of destruction centered on a single bright point thirty thousand klicks away. The burst of energy traveled a millisecond behind the returning radar pulse.
It’s enough power to destroy an unprotected gas giant, and they won’t even see it coming. The array element won’t stand a chance.
Mary followed up with a directional pulse of her own to confirm the array element was destroyed. She needn’t have bothered. The asteroid erupted in a blinding flare as its energy absorbers were overwhelmed by their blasts. She reported the strike and listened in as thousands of other array elements were similarly destroyed.
After so much intense planning and preparation, the operation itself felt anticlimactic, more like casual cleanup than the opening salvo in a war.
Did I dampen my emotional responses too much before battle or is the mission truly this easy?
Before she had time to answer her own question, reports from other attack groups started pouring in: the array elements were fighting back. Blaster beams and near-light speed kinetic weapons greeted each new deployment of battle-Cybrids. Double Feathers of Angels, two hundred strong, shifted into place on top of the next thousand Cybrid teams Darak deployed.
The man-God returned and shifted Mary’s team to the next array element.
The Angels struck before Mary could pick out her target from the star-filled background. She watched in shock as the first of her team members’ shields and absorbers became overwhelmed by coordinated blasts.
As they’d practiced, the battle-Cybrids shifted together in a group directly into the midst of the attacking Angels, spewed coherent energy beams outward in all directions around them, and launched RAF-assisted, hyperkinetic weapons at the closer targets.
The surrounding Angels made easy marks, whereas the rapidly-shifting Cybrids clustered in their midst were impossible to attack without taking on significant friendly casualties.
The Angels switched to hand-to-hand combat.
The Cybrids’ hardened carapaces successfully deflected blows from the Angels’ adamantine swords. Their razor-thin tentacles sliced through Angelic limbs and detached heads from winged bodies.
When any Angel managed to get off a close-range shot from the tip of their gleaming swords, the Cybrids’ absorbers easily handled the single blasts.
Even at that, for every five Angels Mary’s team of battle-Cybrids destroyed, she lost one of her own. Similar numbers were coming in from the other teams.
The Angels changed tactics again.
While a shift-blocking shell of twenty Angels temporarily constrained a single Cybrid, five more Angels focused planet-destroying energy beams on their captive. The discharge often took out one of their own from the surrounding shell along with their prey, but it worked. If they continued like this, the Angels could triumph by numbers alone.
While the Angels’ maneuver sometimes managed to dispatch two or more battle-Cybrids at a time, those Angels that formed the containing shell were left momentarily vulnerable. The Cybrids took quick advantage of the tactical error and focused their fire on those outermost Angels.
The Angels fought on relentlessly. As fast as their casualties rose, fresh replacements arrived.
Alum was devoting a large portion of His fighting force to defending the Deplosion Array. Maybe all of it.
Despite their enormous losses, a simple calculation demonstrated Alum’s Angels would eventually be victorious.
* * *
Darya listened to her soldiers’ reports from eight light years above the galactic plain. They’d only destroyed a tiny percentage of the total array before Alum responded. She calculated that two million Angels were involved within five seconds of the initial attack.
The suicide attacks we orchestrated eons ago were much more successful.
She chided herself for even considering that option again, however briefly, and stuck with the new plan. She hoped Alum wouldn’t be able to deploy enough Angels to protect every single targeted array element. If they were lucky, the substantial attrition of His forces would make Him withdraw.
Darya sent a message to Darak via the trans-universal QUEECH comms. “I’ve been wondering,” she began, “how is Alum responding so quickly when we pop up near some random array element?”
Darak could think of only one plausible explanation.
“He must’ve seeded the area around the Deplosion Array with entangled microdust particles. It’s the only way this many Angels could arrive so quickly at so many asteroids all at once.”
“So why doesn’t He just send a Wing to attack each battle-Cybrid squadron?” she asked. “Why would He draw out the battle at such heavy cost to His Angels? This doesn’t make sense.”
Darak had no answer for her.
“And why hasn’t He arrived in person to finish us off or at least come to oversee the battle?” Darya added.
“It does seem strange,” Darak agreed. “He could just as easily shift in several of his own mind-nodes and sweep your battle-Cybrids away with a thought.”
“You’re the expert on Gods and their thinking,” Darya said. “What do you think He’s planning?”
Darak replied with an encrypted shrug. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
* * *
Darya ordered a consolidation.
Let’s not call it a retreat. Not yet—she told herself.
But that point was drawing painfully close.
The Angels were responding faster and faster to the battle-Cybrid intrusions. Her last thousand squadrons had barely targeted the assigned array elements before the Angels showed up and defended it with unbridled ferocity.
She asked Darak to extract the first deployments from the now mostly-destroyed asteroid posts and reposition them in groups of five hundred. A small subset focused on blasting the new targets while the majority fought off the Angels that were now appearing even before her soldiers could aim their weapons.
Both sides suffered heavy losses as Alum continued pouring resources into the battle.
Darya’s “consolidations” grew larger and larger but saw decreasing return. Soon, no more than one in fifty array elements were destroyed before the Cybrids found themselves fully engaged in simple survival. Array element casualties tapered to zero.
“Well, I’m not about to roll over for You and make it easy,” Darya muttered. “Let’s see if we can’t deliver a little sting to set You back a bit.”
“Form groups of ten thousand each,” she ordered, “Let’s see how Alum’s Angels deal with that.
The tactic worked beautifully.
Alum’s forces were accustomed to dealing with less effective opponents. Even the Aelu had never managed to consistently outfight His Angels despite being closely matched in technological prowess by the end of the War.
Angelic losses doubled, and kept rising. Soon, for every battle-Cybrid they killed, a hundred Angels died.
In an attempt to overwhelm their opponent, the Angels sent four full Wings against every group of ten thousand battle-Cybrids.
* * *
Timothy enjoyed killing Angels more than he thought he would.
It feels good to be on the side of Justice. And I finally found something I’m skilled at, something beyond my basic programming.
Or maybe I just like how the odds aren’t stacked against me for a change—he thought, recalling the futility of his early sword training with Darya and his many narrow escapes from Trillian.
Comparing this battle to those he’d previously studied, Timothy was pleased with the strategic and tactical elegance displayed by Darya’s army.
His team made up the Command and Coordination Center for one of the consolidated groups of battle-Cybrids.
Though doing so gave away their positions, both sides continuously transmitted from their transponders. Coordinating attacks and defense and not getting blasted by friendly fire was more important than being invisible to one’s enemies.
Timothy’s team fought at speeds that would have been inconceivable to the ancient tacticians he’d studied, wizened Generals of Origin who’d only ever envisioned space fights taking place between lumbering vessels, crewed by frail humans, engaging at close proximity in the dark depths of space.
Would they be amazed to see how far we’ve come? What we’ve become? Would they be pleased with our technological developments? Or would they be depressed to see that we’re still fighting?
Using QUEECH comms, his team coordinated group shifts and popped into existence in the midst of clusters of Angels. Energy blasts speared outward along vectors carefully calculated to avoid their own people, while destroying whole clusters of Angels before they could shift away.
Slower MAM missiles on proximity fuses arced out from Cybrid body-ports, anticipating where Angels might retreat and cluster. Their matter-antimatter explosions sparkled against the starry background of the central Milky Way.
* * *
Darya ordered ANOTHER CONSOLIDATION.
The Angels tracked the new consolidations and followed suit, merging twenty Wings into a single, imposing force.
Darak watched the new patterns for a few seconds.
“I’m worried,” he sent on the encrypted line to Darya.
“Why? This is working well.”
“Too well,” he replied. “Why isn’t Alum responding in person?”
“Good point. It’s not like Him to sit back and not react when things don’t go His way. What if we try two more large-scale consolidations and leave the other groups separate for now? Wait and see what He does?”
“He can’t do too much from a distance,” Darak replied. “He’d have to shift one of His mind-nodes here, a major one equipped with a large RAF generator.”
“That would require something the size of a small asteroid,” Darya replied. “If you see any sign of a significant component of His mind appearing anywhere near our people, shift our forces out of there immediately. Can you still do that?”
“Yes, the instant Alum appears, I’ll detect it. We can get away before He launches an attack or blocks us.”
“What if He doesn’t bring in a major node?” Darya challenged. “What if He’s trickier than that? Could He be assembling a bunch of smaller nodes in a cloud around us? They’d be almost undetectable. Maybe that’s why He’s sacrificing so many Angels, as a ploy to keep us busy while He slides into position bit by bit?”
“I doubt He has any useful subcomponents that small anymore,” Darak said.
“You have been out of touch for a while!”
“True. Maybe He’s developed some new tactics, but I’ve seen no sign of it. I’ll dust the area around the consolidated battlefields to give us more of an edge, though I’m not sure that’ll give us enough warning. If Alum can coordinate RAF generation among millions of tiny CPPUs….”
“It’ll have to do,” Darya replied. “In the meantime, we’re decimating the Angels’ ranks.”
“But hardly touching the array, and we’re taking significant losses. We don’t have the numbers to keep playing this game,” Darak pointed out.
“We can make the Angels pay a little more. I’ll order two more consolidations, huge ones, and see what happens,” Darya decided.
“Aye, aye, Commander,” Darak replied and sent an image of himself snapping a smart salute.
In spite of herself, and in spite of the fierce battle raging around them, Darya laughed.
* * *
Timothy’s group joined the first massive consolidation. Within striking distance of a pair of Deplosion Array elements, they and forty thousand other battle-Cybrids took on nearly two hundred thousand Angels.
The war raged silently across several light seconds of space. Ruthless energy beams crisscrossed the war zone, slicing through the exhaust trails of hyperkinetic missile volleys. They were just as likely to harmlessly pierce the curtain of blackness beyond and disappear into the vacuum as they were to hit one of their rapidly-shifting targets.
The battlefield was a swirling, living entity with individual cells—teams of a few hundred Cybrids or Angels—moving, shifting, forming, and reforming to gain any microsecond of advantage.
Timothy refused a command position. He preferred to kill alone, hovering outside of the main fray with his transponder on silent, tracking potential targets by their locator signals. He watched quietly from a distance, risking hits by stray kinetic or energy blasts from both sides.
Space is big and mostly empty; that puts the odds in my favor.
I hope.
By the time he identified a transponder signal, the individual had already moved, but that didn’t trouble him. He was playing a longer game.
He was tracking and analyzing the ebb and flow of the battle, and comparing that data to the tactics and applied knowledge he’d gained in the month leading up to battle. He’d learned a lot by poring over historical Aelu battles and Angel tactics. After devouring the public records, he’d turned to pestering Darak for everything the man-God could tell him.
Darak had patiently withstood Timothy’s incessant questioning. After telling him again and again that no amount of analysis of ancient Angelic battles would help in the present attack, Darak became exasperated.
“Enough!” he shouted.
“If you want to waste your time poring over irrelevant history that’s up to you. But, please, for the love of the cosmos, leave me in peace!” he begged, and promptly dumped the records of thousands of Angelic encounters with the Aelu into Timothy’s memory.
“Here! This should keep you busy for a while,” he muttered and turned back to review the latest battle-Cybrid simulation performance.
Timothy scrutinized the Aelu War records. He painstakingly analyzed the movements of each battalion and combatant.
And, just as he’d suspected, there were patterns in the chaos.
Over thousands of years of military history against the Aelu, the Angels had employed one particularly cautious, patient strategy with remarkable consistency. They engaged jump-blocking fields to isolate small bands of the enemy, positioned five of their own just inside the perimeter, and blasted into the midst of the trapped Aelu. The very same tactic as they’d been doing here.
Except that the Angels’ eons-old tactics weren’t working nearly as well against the new battle-Cybrids, and Timothy knew why. For one thing, the Cybrids acted more independently than the ancient Aelu; they flitted in and out of normal space too fast for the Angels to trap them. And, second, by all outward appearance there was little or no pattern to the Cybrids’ attacks, no formations, and precious little discernible coordination to lend itself to predictability.
Summarizing what he’d learned, Timothy had advised Darak and Darya to orchestrate complex movements that would give the appearance of chaos. It was brutally effective.
As it played out, Timothy watched, analyzed, and relayed minor tactical modifications to each of the Cybrid groups. He directed small, agile teams to draw the Angels tantalizingly close to trapping entire tight-knit formations. But as soon as the predictable five or ten Angels arrived to blast their trapped Cybrids, a larger group of Cybrids would materialize, annihilate the snipers in a si
ngle blast of MAM missiles and energy beams, and rip a wide hole in the outer shell of Angels that had tried to trap them.
Timothy observed the success of his suggestions with pride.
Right up until the tactic stopped working.
The Angels have stopped following their usual pattern.
Entire tracks of transponder signals were disappearing from the battlefield. Before he could make sense of it, a glaring light stabbed his sensors. He dimmed his optical sensitivity. He watched while more transponders of both Cybrids and Angels winked out, followed by a blinding cylindrical burst of light where combatants used to be.
“Something’s happening,” he sent on the Command channel, and shared a video clip.
“What is it?” Darya asked.
“Extremely high-energy bursts,” Timothy replied. “I’ve been tracking movements for the last twelve seconds. This is the first time I’ve seen it. It’s off the charts.”
“Something’s blasting through the engagement lines,” Darya said.
“Whatever it is, it’s destroying both Cybrids and Angels—Darak added. “I don’t like the looks of that.”
“Me, either. Do you think it’s Alum? Is He finally weighing in?”
“Just a millisecond,” Darak replied, sounding more calm than he felt.
It was seventeen full milliseconds before he spoke again, long enough for Timothy to wonder whether he and Darya had switched to a private channel.
“Retreat, One-Alpha-Six,” Darak barked to all of the Cybrids at once over the Command channel. “Pull back to muster-point four. Prepare to exit battle zone.”
Against orders, Timothy took a moment to think.
But we were winning! He watched his people in full and instant retreat, shifting through prearranged entangled particle connections to a safe intermediary spot a few light days away and, from there, back to Eso-La.
How did we go from certain victory to imminent defeat?
He reviewed his recordings of the battle, searching for some detail he might have misinterpreted.
The recordings only confirmed what he already knew.
We were winning. Clearly winning.
He watched as half of the battlefield went dark.
