by Jake Elwood
"Bring us about!"
Eddie and Hal reacted immediately as chaos swirled outside the windows. Hammett had a glimpse of tumbling rock, the gleam of metal, a blue-white glow as an engine flared. There was no time to take it all in. You'll have plenty of time to see it all in a moment, he told himself. You're stuck here now.
"I want us stationary relative to that Gate," he shouted, then made himself stop and take a breath. Eddie and Hal were barely out of arm's reach. There was no need to raise his voice. "Bring us in close," he said. "Not in line with the opening. But close."
A corvette came through the Gate, not the Tomahawk, an EDF ship trailing smoke from her port side. A bulky supply ship came through behind the corvette, a dozen holes gaping in her hull, none of them critical. Hammett looked around, eyes hunting the Tomahawk, and he felt a rush of relief as he spotted the little ship dropping into its familiar position just aft and above the Theseus.
Closer and closer the Theseus drifted to the Gate. Eddie braked, and the ship drifted to a stop no more than a hundred meters from the nearest side of the big triangle. More ships flashed into existence, another corvette followed by a strange-looking ship Hammett didn't recognize. It was painted Spacecom blue, but it was built like some strange cross between a cargo launcher and a warship.
"Point us at one of those pyramids," Hammett said, and the top pyramid seemed to slide down as the Theseus tilted.
A trio of Hive ships came through the Gate, one of them tumbling end over end. A destroyer came through next, and then Hive ships in a terrible wave.
"Fire!" Hammett bellowed, and Eddie echoed his command, speaking into his implants. The deck trembled as every forward-facing rail gun fired at once, and a storm of metal crashed against the Gate. The pyramid seemed impervious to the assault, one round after another striking it and bouncing away, spinning off to vanish into the darkness. A thick canister slammed into one of the bars extending down from the pyramid, though, and tore a great crack in the pale metal. An instant later a second round hit the same spot, and then a third, and there was an eruption of searing white light.
Hammett brought a hand up to shade his eyes, and when he lowered it, the pyramid, still glowing along the seams, was drifting away from the rest of the Gate. Two chunks of column jutted from the pyramid, the ends jagged and torn.
No more ships came through the triangle. The Gate was destroyed.
Small shapes darted among the battered ships of the human fleet. A dozen, two dozen …. The rest were gone, left stranded in the Naxos system, and Hammett felt a twinge of regret. I've left you a nice surprise, Carruthers. You'll have to cope without me.
He pushed the colony and its defenders from his mind. Focus on the problems you can solve. Or at least address. He turned away from the Gate. It was irrelevant now, so much scrap metal. "Who's left?" he said. "And where are we?"
"I count six EDF ships," Sanjari said, "plus the Tomahawk, and us." She glanced around at the windows. "It looks like the last of the Hive ships are pulling back."
The small cloud of alien vessels that had come through the Gate were having a rough time, suddenly surrounded by vengeful human warships. A last few survivors retreated out of easy rail gun range, twisting and dodging as they pulled well back from the little fleet.
"That was expensive," Sanjari said softly. "It looks like three corvettes, a destroyer, a supply ship, and that new ship made it through. And us and the Tomahawk. Nothing else."
Made it through. Hammett shook his head. Made it through to where? "Does anyone recognize any stars?"
"I see Orion," Hal said.
Well, that's a relief. We aren't half way across the galaxy. He turned, staring out through the starboard window.
Metal gleamed in the distance, thousands of kilometers away. Maybe tens of thousands. He saw a strange conglomeration of metallic shapes interspersed with massive chunks of stone. Without knowing the range he couldn't tell the size of the distant structure, but he sensed it was huge. Not planet-sized, but hundreds of kilometers across. By the look of it, the aliens had started by colonizing drifting chunks of stone. Eventually they'd linked the chunks together, probably to reduce collisions. They'd turned an asteroid field into a single massive settlement, a city of stone and metal drifting in space.
The whole mad structure was brightly lit on one side, and he turned his gaze in that direction. A blue-white star blazed in the sky, bigger than Sol looked from Mercury. If there were planets in this system, he couldn't see them. Had the aliens evolved here? Among the rocks, without a world of their own?
"Could this be it?" he said. "Could this be the Hive?"
"They're moving," Hal said, his voice high with alarm, and Hammett's head whipped around, searching for the little cluster of ships that had come through the Gate with them. They were, indeed, moving, retreating slowly from the human fleet. That couldn't be what had Hal so concerned. He scanned the sky, searching for enemy activity.
"Where are they going?" Sanjari said. "Admiral? Should we follow?"
"What?" Hammett looked at her. "Follow who?"
She pointed. The EDF fleet, all six ships, was in motion. He looked past the little fleet, trying to discern where they were headed. A cluster of asteroids floated in the distance, and the stars glittered bright and cold behind them. He could see nothing to attract the EDF ships.
He shrugged. If that's where everyone is going, I guess we'd better go too. "Signal the Tomahawk," he said. "Tell them to keep up." Not that Kaur needed to be told, but it was courteous to tell your allies what you were doing. A courtesy prominently missing from the EDF fleet. To Eddie he said, "Follow those ships, if you please. Let's not get left behind."
CHAPTER 7 - CARRUTHERS
The satellite's deployed, Sir."
Carruthers nodded without turning his head. He stood facing the port window on the bridge of the Indefatigable. A shape floated beside the corvette, a lumpy sphere more than two meters across. It contained a miniature hydrogen fusion plant, a variety of electronics enclosed in nested Faraday cages, maneuvering thrusters for aiming, and a thermal cannon.
Most people called the alien weapon left behind in Garibaldi Plaza the "death ray", but Carruthers was trying hard to make "thermal cannon" catch on. He figured the planet needed a hundred or so of the cannons to be properly protected, some on the ground and some in orbit. The satellite floating on the other side of the window, the third weapon in orbit, brought the total to eight. He shrugged inwardly. It would have to do.
Every last cannon was vulnerable to missile fire from EDF ships. They were probably vulnerable to the alien EMP weapon, too, despite the Faraday cages. No one really understood how the aliens were frying electronics. Even systems with strong EMP shielding had failed. This hastily constructed and completely untested satellite might never get off a shot.
Of course, the aliens seemed to have abandoned the EMP attacks during recent encounters. That was good, but it was maddening not to know why. Was the attack expensive to launch? Did it use up a valuable resource? Were they blowing up chunks of plutonium every time, and now they were out? Or were they simply discouraged, because the Alexander and the relief fleet had taken an EMP pounding and kept on fighting?
It was one more exasperating puzzle in a long list, and he pushed it from his mind. Dealing with things he actually knew about was enough to keep him plenty busy. He had no time for pondering the unknown.
"I found them."
The speaker was Chavda, his tactical officer. She was doing her best to track Hammett's progress. With every jump, though, the fleet became more distant, the ships more impossibly tiny. It was harder to spot them each time.
"That's odd," said Chavda. She glanced at Carruthers, then touched her screen. "Let me show you."
A screen by the captain's chair lit up, and Carruthers walked over. He dropped into his seat, then blinked, not sure what he was seeing.
Ships swarmed in the display, tiny vessels no bigger than specks. Little text labels appeared
as the scanners picked up transponder data. 'Gideon' flashed briefly beside one speck, then 'Tomahawk'. Carruthers didn't know he was holding his breath until 'Theseus' appeared, and he suddenly exhaled.
The other specks showed no transponder signals. They had to be the Hive, then, and he grimaced. There were so many of them!
Another text label appeared, then another. 'Adamant'. 'Kontos'.
"It's the EDF fleet," he said. "But …"
"There's too many of them," said Chavda.
Carruthers felt the blood surge fiercely in his veins. His gamble was paying off, better than he could have hoped. He had worried that he was selling out his old friend, sending the EDF after the little fleet. By the look of it, though, things had worked out perfectly. The two fleets had joined up, just in time to battle the alien swarm.
And it was working, too. One alien ship after another vanished from the display. He started to smile, until a sudden fear froze the expression on his face. He tapped at his display. "Come on, show me the Theseus."
No text label appeared. The freighter was gone. He searched for the Tomahawk next. It was gone as well.
"Oh, no." More tapping. He found the Gideon, her transponder still functioning, but she wouldn't last much longer. The Adamant was gone as well. It was a disaster.
"Maybe it's the EMP weapon."
Chavda looked up. "Captain?"
"Frying their transponders," he said. "Maybe they're not destroyed." But he could still see the signal from the Gideon, so that wasn't it.
"There goes the Mercer," Chavda said. "The Gideon's gone too." She looked up at Carruthers, her face bleak.
We can't actually see what's happening. The screen shows nothing but a bunch of little dots. We don't know that they're all dead. He knew, though. The Hive had adapted too well. The combined fleet had never stood a chance, not against so many ships.
"We should do something. We should go after them."
Carruthers wasn't sure which of his bridge crew had spoken. It's didn't matter. There was nothing to be done. That distant battle was over, and all those brave sailors were dead.
A different voice intruded. "I think I should tell him."
"You're crazy, man. It's the bridge! You can't just talk to the captain."
Carruthers looked up, glad for the distraction from the dark spiral of his thoughts. Two young men stood in the bridge entrance. They were young, barely out of their teens, and although they wore the same uniform as the rest of the crew, they were clearly not experienced sailors. They were gangly and awkward-looking, one with red hair and freckles, the other dark-haired and swarthy.
The redhead saw Carruthers looking at them and blushed incandescently. He hissed something to his companion and edged back.
The dark-haired man, however, held his ground. His fingers twitched and plucked at the seams on his uniform trousers, but he straightened up and said, "Captain. I've had a message."
Carruthers stared at him for a moment, trying to place him. The man shrank under his scrutiny. There were only a handful of colonists among the crew, and he wasn't one of the ex-crewmen from the science ship, so … "Rigoberto, isn't it?" It took another moment for the last name to rise up out of his memory. "Sorry. Sailor Ramona."
Rigoberto nodded, apparently struck dumb by all this attention.
"Well, don't just stand there blocking the door. What's the message?"
Rigoberto took a hasty step into the bridge, clearing the doorway, then froze for a moment, clearly wondering if he'd taken an inappropriate liberty. Finally he blurted, "Vicente called me."
Carruthers waited, trying to keep amusement from his face. It was a long, long time since he'd been brand new to Naval life, but he still remembered those exciting, terrifying days.
"I was in the comms room," Rigoberto said. The ship had a tiny communications room on the lower deck so messages could be sent and received without disturbing the bridge crew. "Vicente called." For a moment he squeezed his eyes shut. "He said there were EDF ships, and there were Hive ships, hundreds of them. He said there was lots of shooting. And then he said they were going through a Gate."
Carruthers felt his head jerk back. "What?"
"He said it was an alien Gate. He said they were going through. And then he just went silent."
Carruthers stared at him, processing the ramifications.
Rigoberto turned, took a step toward the corridor, then froze. "Oh. He said one more thing." His face scrunched up. "I'm sorry, Sir. I almost forgot. It's the most important part."
He stared at Carruthers in such misery that Carruthers didn't know whether to shake him or comfort him. Finally he just said, "Well? What is it?"
"He said they're going to blow the Gate from the other side. They're leaving all those alien ships on this side. He said we should get ready."
For a moment the two men stared at each other. "Is that all?"
Rigoberto nodded.
"All right. Thanks. You're dismissed."
Rigoberto nodded again and fled. Carruthers sighed, raked a hand through his hair, then looked at Chavda. "What are the Hive ships doing, Lieutenant?"
"Several ships have disappeared," she said, peering at her screen. "There go several more." She looked up. "More than half of them have vanished."
They might have followed the Theseus through whatever alien Gate she'd fled through, if she had indeed escaped. Or they might be opening wormholes and making smaller jumps.
And there weren't many places to go in the Naxos system.
"Contact Mr. Faraday," Carruthers said. "Tell him he should round up his gun crews. We might have company coming."
CHAPTER 8 - BLOCH
Position is confirmed, Sir."
Bloch, who had been leaning over the yac officer's shoulder, straightened up and looked at the navigation station.
"We're about forty light years from Earth," his nav officer said. She had to be rattled by that fact, but her voice was even, and he nodded his approval. "Thirty-five light years from Naxos," she added. "We went almost straight down. A few degrees toward the core."
That would be priceless information if he could bring it back to Earth—a possibility that looked painfully unlikely. "Signal Spacecom," he said, and she nodded. Forty years was a long time, but you never knew. Someone might actually still need the information by the time it arrived.
He turned his attention back to the tactical station. Scanner data was pouring in from every ship remaining in the fleet, and the map of the system was becoming clearer every moment. "Horowitz," he said. "Give us a summary."
Lieutenant Claude Horowitz nodded. He was a bulky man in his fifties, a career lieutenant who had accepted EDF oversight without a murmur. If anything could fluster Lieutenant Horowitz, Bloch had yet to see it. The man had let himself go over the years—he was hardly the picture of a fit military man, prepared for any crisis—but he was solid and utterly reliable.
"We've scanned pretty much the whole system," Horowitz said, pitching his voice so the entire bridge could hear. "There are no planets, although we've seen some distant objects large enough to qualify as dwarf planets. They're quite far out."
He leaned back, making his chair creak, and gathered his thoughts for a moment. "The volume of debris in the system suggests some kind of planet-forming activity in the distant past. The rubble is not a proper asteroid belt, like we've got back home. It's more like the Jupiter field. Close to a sextillion tonnes, not counting really small stuff. Most of it's in a field with a radius of about ten million kilometers." He gestured at the forward bulkhead. "We're heading for the thickest part, but the field is all around us."
Bloch nodded, waiting for him to get to the meat of the report. The rest of the crew just listened.
"We've catalogued more than a thousand separate alien artifacts," Horowitz continued. "Most of it is concentrated in the settlement we saw, about fifty thousand kilometers from here." He shrugged. "We assume it's a settlement."
Bloch made an impatient gesture.
>
"There are ships," Horowitz said, unperturbed. "Over two hundred vessels. Some are grouped into composite ships. The computer is analyzing the composite craft and counting the component vessels." He glanced at his screens. "There are also objects with designs we haven't seen before. Some are ships. We can tell from their movement. Others are stationary; they could be habitats, or cargo pods, or ships that just don't happen to be moving right now."
With luck, Bloch thought, they'd be able to disregard the unfamiliar ships. Surely the aliens had passenger transports, cargo vessels, other craft that weren't equipped for war. Lord knew, he had plenty to deal with already.
"We've also detected nine more Gates," Horowitz said. "There's no way to tell where they lead, of course. Some of them we can absolutely confirm are Gates, because we've seen ship traffic move through. The rest?" He made a gesture with one thick arm, like a half-shrug. "They're built exactly like the Gate we came through. I suppose they could be decoys, or they serve some purpose we can't imagine. It's a safe bet they're Gates, though."
"Monitor those Gates," Bloch said. "Tell me instantly if traffic increases." He imagined reinforcements pouring through, making things even more difficult than they already were. "What are the rest of the enemy ships doing?" As Horowitz started to speak, Bloch added, "Start with the warships."
"They're gathering near the settlement," Horowitz said. "I'm calling that big structure with the rocks the settlement." At Bloch's curt nod he said, "I think they're protecting their home from us. I think they're scared to attack."
Or they're waiting for reinforcements. He looked at the forward bulkhead, imagining the thickest part of the asteroid field, still a good fifteen minutes distant. Reinforcements would be a disaster. And if this is truly the Hive itself, the home of the aliens, then every ship we can strand far from home is a victory.
