Demon Star

by B. V. Larson

“Poor bastards,” I said, looking over damage readouts.

  “You were right,” Hansen told me. “A warning wouldn’t have helped them.”

  “What about your theory concerning a larger attack?” I asked.

  He pointed at a pulsing red icon. “It’s fuzzy, but there’s a Demon fleet out there, coasting in, aimed at Trinity-9. Marvin picked up his missiles from that same outlying squadron of ships. There are at least three hundred big mothers—battle cruisers or battleships I’d say.”

  “Three hundred?” I grunted as if punched in the stomach. “How far out?”

  “A month or more from the Whales, slightly closer to us, on an angle. They’ll pass us some distance away, but it wouldn’t be difficult for some of them to peel off and fly by here—to attack us or at least do a recon in force.”

  “How long until they can get here? To us, if they saw us, I mean.”

  Hansen cocked his head. “You mean if Marvin hasn’t totally screwed us all? At current speed, just over eighteen days.”

  “So that’s not what the Whales were warning us about, I guess. As far as Marvin is concerned, I completely agree with you regarding what he did. It was reckless. But at the same time if it has provided us with intel that could prevent those stealth fighters from getting past our sensors, he may have indirectly saved us all—as much as I hate to admit it.

  “The Whales may know something we don’t, sir. Probably best to be gone before the time limit they gave us runs out. That way we’re safe either way.”

  “Agreed.” I fiddled with the holotank until it displayed the whole system again. “The Demons have been on their way for months, if their speed is comparable to their stealth attackers. Three hundred ships isn’t a fleet, it’s an invasion. They mean to wipe out the Whales or even conquer them.”

  My XO turned to face me fully, looking down on me from his superior height with a frown. “I guess we’ll have to pick a side soon. Either that or let the situation choose for us.”

  -4-

  The next two weeks passed quickly after I ordered everyone to go on double shifts. That not only got things done faster, but it kept everyone too busy to do much more than work, eat and sleep. Marvin’s fly-by with the nuclear missiles, if nothing else, got everyone motivated and working without complaint. We’d flown through the ring right into a war zone, and I was sure that it was only a matter of time before we would have to choose sides—or they would be chosen for us.

  I had Marvin install several new RQTEA units. They were quantum radios, or “ansibles” for short. We placed a unit on Stalker and one on Valiant. We already had matching units on Greyhound and in my suit.

  Marvin grumbled a bit, as apparently certain parts for the devices were made of exotic materials and took a lot of time to produce in his tiny factory, but I insisted. The value of faster-than-light communication devices was obvious. They also might provide backup if normal coms went down.

  With the Whales’ mysterious deadline and the Demon invasion coming up, it was imperative to get going soon. Did I want to get into the fight? Yes and no. I disliked the thought of casualties, but even more, I hated to miss out on a chance to make some allies and do some good in the universe. Despite what I’d said to Hansen, everything we’d observed indicated that the Demons were the aggressors and the Whales were fighting a defensive war for survival.

  The Elladans on the other hand were an enigma. We’d sent a number of messages to them, already translated into their odd language. We even included pictures and vids to show them we were human, but so far we’d received no replies.

  One thing we did observe, however, was the movement of about half the Elladan war fleet to the vicinity of Trinity-9, while the rest spread out around their own planet. That made sense to me. That was the way they should’ve arranged their forces to meet the attack.

  Poring over the data from the aftermath of the initial conflict, I decided they’d taken significant damage to their infrastructure, but it wasn’t enough to cripple them.

  I thought perhaps the surprise attack had been meant to shake their morale and to force them to guard their home and thus send fewer ships to meet the Demons at Trintity-9. If so, it had succeeded.

  We exchanged more messages with the Whales, who sent us details of the Demon ship classes. I spent the day before we were due to pull up stakes and head sunward, looking these over. I carefully modeled the tactical situation in the holotank.

  Generally, Demon ships were shaped like cylinders. They were ugly and graceless, with drive engines of equal size and number at both ends, which I thought was an odd configuration. Still, it would make them quite maneuverable, since they wouldn’t have to flip over to change from acceleration to deceleration. They’d also be survivors. Getting your engines knocked out in combat doomed any spacecraft. If one set of their engines was damaged, they still had the other.

  Their weapons were mounted on the sides, rather like old sailing ships with their cannon broadsides. Weapons placement hardly mattered for missiles, of course, but for the direct fire stuff it affected their tactical employment.

  The largest model they had was a battleship which was easily twice the size of Valiant. This ship mounted a dozen heavy missile launchers and about the same number of big lasers. As one would expect, it was heavily armored.

  Behind the battleships came assault carriers, nearly as large as the battleships, with multiple launch tubes for scores of fighters. Thankfully, they displayed no heavy weapons of their own.

  The third and most numerous type was a cruiser a bit smaller than we were, but much larger than our Nano frigates. This kind of vessel mounted four missile launchers and four heavy lasers.

  “Nasty bastards,” Hansen said as he came up beside me at the holotank.

  “Yes, but do you see what they’re short of?”

  Hansen nodded. “Point defense. Only a few small lasers here and there. They must rely heavily on their fighters.”

  “Fighter cover and dodging,” I said. “With engines at both ends, they can change direction faster than we can. But there’s one other thing I don’t see much of.”

  My XO thought for a moment. “Marines?”

  “Right. Or more specifically, the assault craft that Marines would need. Of course, they’re probably not going to try to occupy the gaseous environment of Trinity-9 with its floating cities. As we know, there are solid-ground facilities on thirty or forty moons that you’d think they’d want to capture intact.”

  “Maybe they decided to simply wipe them out and mop up later,” Hansen suggested.

  “Maybe.”

  “You sure their carriers don’t have landing boats?” he asked.

  “The launch tubes are too big to deploy missiles, but too small for landing craft holding more than a handful of critters. I’m not saying they couldn’t conduct an assault operation, but it would be far smaller than one would expect, given the size of the ships.”

  “What if they have some other way of deploying marines?”

  I shrugged, chewing on that one.

  The com speaker pinged once, and Marvin’s voice spoke. “Captain Riggs, I am detecting a slight increase in the nearby ring’s energy state.”

  “Have you been fiddling with it, Captain Marvin?”

  “I fail to see what a musical instrument has to do with the current situation.”

  “It’s an idiom,” I said.

  “Idioms consume processing capacity.”

  “Not nearly as much as you want me to believe. Marvin, have you done anything to the ring since I told you not to?”

  “Of course not, Captain Riggs,” he said. “Now that I’ve been promoted to the rank of Ensign in Star Force, I would never disobey a direct order.”

  “Sarcasm must consume processing power, too, but you’re using it.”

  “Speaking of processing power,” Marvin said, “I’m running low. Perhaps we could return this discussion to the relevance of the increase in the
rings energy state?”

  “Fine.” I forced myself to quit trying to beat Marvin in an argument and took a deep breath. “What do you think is the significance of the ring’s change?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s it?” I demanded. “That’s all you have to say?”

  “Yes.”

  “Marvin, don’t irritate me pointlessly. Is there anything else that you can tell me?”

  He hesitated. It was a small gap, but a noticeable one. When dealing with Marvin, you had to pay attention to such things.

  “Yes,” he said finally.

  I surmised that he wasn’t going to tell me whatever it was he had to say next without a struggle. “What is it about this ring, Marvin? Out with it!”

  “I can tell you what it is not. It isn’t network resonance communication such as we or others have used before, and it isn’t the energy increase immediately prior to a ring transit.”

  Frowning in dissatisfaction, I pressed on. “Do you have any theories?”

  “I do.”

  I waited for more, but the channel fell quiet.

  Clearly he was going to force me to ask, so I resigned myself to stroking his ego again. “Fantastic. I’d love to hear them, Captain Marvin. No one else understands this stuff the way you do.”

  “Thank you, Captain Riggs. It’s good to hear that you comprehend how vital I am to this mission.”

  I gritted my teeth and said, “Absolutely. Now that we’ve established your importance, what’s your theory?”

  “We know the rings provide transit and communication. If I were designing the network, I would build detection capability into them as well, in order to observe each star system.”

  “So you think the golden machines are taking a peek at what’s going on in this star system? The Ancients?”

  “Or some other entity who has more control over the rings than we do. That’s one possible theory, yes.”

  I looked at Hansen, who shook his head. “I don’t like it, Skipper,” he said. “Feels wrong.”

  “Agreed.” Like him, my gut was telling me to get out of our vulnerable grounded position and into open space, ready for battle. And, if one of the slabs decided to come through, it seemed like raw distance was the only thing that might provide a measure of safety. “Valiant, relay this to all hands and ship commanders: I want to lift off in twelve hours. Marvin, keep me informed about any more significant changes in the ring.”

  “I will do so. Captain Riggs, I would like to attempt to access the ring resonance network. Establishment of communication with Earth or some other known space system could be achieved.”

  I thought about it. “You can do that once we’re underway, Marvin, but not before. Just make sure you know who you’re talking to before you give them any information. No releasing malware into the network!”

  “I resent the characterization of my hacking attempts as malware,” he complained. “No harm was intended.”

  “But harm was done, Marvin. Clearly, the golden slabs were interested in you. I’m still amazed we got out of there at all.”

  The golden slabs were large vessels of unknown alien origin. They tended to sniff around, moving with such speed they seemed to teleport from place to place. Many of us thought the slabs were related to the Ancients who’d built the rings—but that was just conjecture.

  “In the future, I will include larger margins for error in my risk calculations.”

  “You do that,” I said. “Anything else?”

  “Not of significance. Marvin out.”

  Hansen chuckled. “You seem to be handling him better lately.”

  “Don’t count on it. I think he’s just more aware of the many threats in front, behind, and all around us. That makes him more cooperative.”

  “Maybe for the first time it’s sinking into his thick brainbox that he needs us as much as we need him.”

  I shook my head ruefully. “I hope so. Now back to work.”

  Hansen nodded and moved off to manage the command staff. Changing the ship’s routine was always hectic and took four times as much supervision as one would think.

  I was just turning back to the holotank to continue familiarizing myself with the Demon ships when Hoon lumbered onto the bridge in his water-filled suit. I suppose I should be thankful that he was aquatic, or he’d be up here more often. In agitation, he waved his mouth-parts, which served him as hands.

  “Captain Riggs, I object to your sudden change in schedule! I have several delicate processes that will take longer than twelve hours to complete.”

  “Sorry, Professor, but that’s the way it is. We’ve detected a change in the ring’s energy state that concerns me.”

  “Let me see the data.”

  “Marvin has it. Ask him.”

  Hoon shuffled his body and his various appendages. He looked at me with a stance I’d come to recognize as suspicion. “Why did you say ‘we detected’ if it was the robot that actually noticed the anomaly?”

  “Because we’re a team, Hoon,” I said. “We share. It’s what starship crews do. Competition may strengthen us as individuals, but it’s the cooperation of those individuals that has allowed us to survive.”

  “Your cultural and linguistic conventions are of no concern to me, young Riggs. Be more literal with your communications in the future.” With that, the steer-sized lobster scurried off, his motions oddly precise for a creature of his mass.

  For the next twelve hours I continued to deal with my key personnel, mostly stroking egos and getting people to work with each other. Hansen did a good job of running interference for me and resolving things, only kicking decisions upward that he felt were worthy of my time.

  I managed to grab a four-hour nap. When I returned to the bridge shortly before we lifted, everyone had taken their stations.

  “Bradley, launch some more recon drones with active sensors and get half our armed Daggers out there for combat aerospace patrol. It will be good practice for your people and provide us with extra security.” I’d never stopped thinking about the Demons’ stealth ships or whatever had launched the surprise missile attack. No matter how unlikely it was that they’d be able to divert some toward us as far out as we were, the consequences of such a strike made the extra precautions necessary.

  “Aye aye, sir. Launching now.”

  Before long, we had thirty of our sixty Daggers spread out around us, a dozen of them recon versions blasting away with their active sensors in all directions.

  “Valiant, tell the Nanos to lift and hold station,” I said.

  The four frigates rose from the asteroids where they’d been resting. The two new frigates had Raptor command personnel aboard. Sakura had declined to offer up her people after all, apparently deciding better factory utilization wasn’t worth the disruption to the ship’s operations.

  I agreed with her decision. When it came down to it, I’d frankly rather have two out of two-hundred-plus Raptors in the unpredictable Nano ships than a couple of my sixty remaining humans.

  I noticed Marvin had lifted without orders, so next I told Kreel to move Stalker into space. Then I nodded at Hansen, who flipped on the repellers.

  I sighed with relief as I watched our asteroid cluster fall away beneath us. We were mobile again, with all systems near one hundred percent and nothing around us but empty space. I felt much less vulnerable.

  “Set a course for Trinity-9 and easy does it,” I told Hansen. “Let’s not look too eager or show how fast our ships can really go, but get us there well before the Demons do.”

  “Roger, sir,” Hansen replied. “Course laid in. ETA is about a week. We should arrive with several days to spare.”

  “Excellent.” I turned to the holotank. “Valiant, is there anything artificial at all out here within, oh, a couple light-hours? Even a hint?”

  “Nothing anomalous detected. All minor bodies have been identified as natural.”

  I ch
ewed my lip. Something was nagging at my consciousness. “What’s your set percentage threshold for certainty right now, Valiant?”

  “Ninety-five percent.”

  A jolt of adrenaline shot through me. Back in the golden planet system, I remembered telling Valiant to set her certainty percentage lower than the usual ninety-nine percent in order to get her to let me decide about the remaining five percent.

  The flip side of this setting was that if I asked the ship to be sure about something, one out of twenty times she’d be wrong.

  “Change setting to ninety-nine percent and go active on all sensors. Relay to all ships to do the same. Display any objects that don’t meet the new certainty threshold.”

  In the holotank, the sphere of the light speed sensor pulses—radar and lidar of various wavelengths—expanded outward around our fleet, showing me in real time the limits of its range.

  “There!” I exclaimed as a group of yellow icons lit up. Distance and vector data appeared a moment later, showing the bogeys were traveling toward us at the same high speed the Demons’ surprise-attack vessels had been.

  Within one shocked second, I calculated that we were already too close to run from them. The problem was inertia. We were heading toward them and they were heading toward us. You can’t just turn a spacecraft around on a dime—well, not unless you were flying one of the Ancient’s golden slabs.

  “Designate those contacts as enemy!” I snapped.

  Instantly, they turned red. We were soon to be engulfed in a sea of them. I took a moment to curse computers everywhere for all time, then opened the general command channel and initiated the override. Effectively, I was talking over everyone in the fleet.

  “All ships turn ninety degrees from your inbound vector. Take a new heading spinward along the plane of the ecliptic. Apply maximum acceleration while maintaining formation. Bradley, launch the remaining Daggers to form a screen behind us. Valiant, soft-launch a missile salvo and get it moving slowly toward the bogeys for defensive use.”

  In the holotank, I could see Stalker moving to a position lagging Valiant somewhat, covering our six. I didn’t countermand the maneuver because the Raptor battleship was more heavily armored than we were and had a highly effective point defense phalanx in her tail. It was good to see Kreel taking initiative without orders.