by J. N. Chaney
Dash leaned back and put his feet up on his desk. The three Bishops used up essentially all of the available space in the Iron Gate. He thought back through the intricate process of excavating down into the chamber where they’d been found and retrieving them to lug them back through the gate and stash them on the Iron Gate. The whole time, he’d lived in fear of the things coming to life and proving to be horrific in some way they’d never expected and couldn’t counter. He’d accordingly watched the whole process with caution from aboard the Archetype, Conover and Leira keeping station nearby. But the three enormous constructs had just remained inscrutably dormant.
He glanced back at the first summary report Elois had prepared on the Bishops. So far, they’d been able to determine that buried deep inside each was a biological core, perhaps a separate organism. Each also emitted weak signals, suggestive of ongoing information processing, with the emanations constantly changing. Even isolated aboard the Iron Gate, heavily shielded and with virtually no external stimuli, the signals kept shifting, albeit in a way that seemed unique to each of the Bishops. Conover had examined them and saw hints of a pattern, but so far they hadn’t been able to discern anything useful.
Another report, further down the list, caught his attention. It was the closing SITREP from the Stalwart’s marines, signed off by Wei-Ping. It had listed mundane stuff, like the amount of ammo expended and the number of sets of vac-armor that needed to be repaired or replaced, but Dash’s thoughts went back to the casualty list. Two marines had died, and five more had been seriously wounded. The latter included Denson who, according to Custodian, would require extensive therapy before he’d even be able to walk again.
Dash thumped his feet to the floor, stood, and strode to the viewport. Part of him just wanted to pull the Absolute Zero away from the Iron Gate, then obliterate the ship and the Deeper Bishops aboard it with the Archetype’s blast-cannon. He let the dark fantasy play out in his thoughts. In it, the Deepers woke up just before he fired, so they knew what was coming, what was happening to them—
“Messenger, can you come to the science labs adjacent to the fabrication bay?” Custodian said, truncating his violent imaginings.
Dash took a deep breath, counted to three, then eased it out. “Problem?”
“No. Rather, I believe we’ve gained more insight into subject Lavarovna.”
Dash frowned, drawing a blank on the name. He couldn’t place anyone named Lavarovna.
“Who’s that?”
“The Old Earth astronaut who you recovered during your extra-galactic flight several months ago.”
“Oh. Right.” Dash hadn’t thought about her in weeks, which was pretty remarkable in itself. How an astronaut, as spacers were once called, who’d been exploring the Sol System could end up light-years outside the galaxy was as big a mystery as any they confronted. How the hell had he forgotten about it? Was he that overworked?
“On my way,” he said, sticking his feet back into his boots. At least it was just an intriguing mystery and not, as far as they knew, a dire one with potentially lethal or disastrous consequences.
As far as they knew.
S. Lavarovna lay on a table, her corpse shrunken into leathery desiccation. She’d been literally freeze-dried by centuries of exposure to the frigid vacuum of space. Even so, she still possessed a quiet sort of dignity. She’d been an explorer in an era when most spaceflight tech had been a mishmash of experimental and largely unproven designs. Even aboard the Slipwing, he’d never felt especially vulnerable. Sure, prior to her upgrades with Unseen tech, he’d had to keep her limping along as best he could on a shoestring budget. Even so, she’d been fundamentally safe, her systems well-understood and sound.
But people like S. Lavarovna took a seriously calculated risk every time they boarded one of their ancient ships. System failures were common, and any of them could be quickly—or even worse, slowly—lethal. It took a special type of bravery just to break atmo back then.
Of course, what that old tech couldn’t do is send an astronaut from the orbit of Jupiter, in the Sol System, deep into the Big Black. Using available schematics, Custodian had even constructed a virtual version of her ship, the Novgorod, one of the first capable of plus-light travel. He’d then simulated every set of conditions he could envision, but in none of them could he get the ship to suddenly translate literally tens of thousands of light-years.
“Do we know what her first name is?” Dash asked, studying her remains. “I hate just calling her S.”
“The available records don’t record her given name, no,” Custodian replied.
“Really? That’s odd.”
“Actually, it isn’t. There are significant gaps in the historical archives available about your race. The information may certainly exist somewhere in human records, but not in any to which we currently have access.”
“Huh. So what do we know about her, then?”
“She was born in a city named Vladivostok in the Old Earth calendar year of 2287. She became an astronaut when she was twenty-two years of age. By age thirty, she had achieved the rank of Colonel and, under the aegis of the Pan-European Transit authority, flew successful missions to the Solar asteroid belt and the planets Venus and Mars. She was subsequently selected for the Novgorod expedition, as its second-in-command, which was intended to test an early version of a translation drive. The flight, which was launched from Earth, was only supposed to traverse the orbit of Jupiter and then be recovered by prepositioned support vessels. However, the Novgorod never emerged from unSpace and was declared lost.”
Dash walked around the table. The life capsule in which they’d found Lavarovna sat on a second table nearby. Custodian had already confirmed that it was one that had equipped the Novgorod, which meant she’d used it to escape her own ship—a ship incapable of sustaining a translation to Sol’s nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, much less beyond the galactic rim. Deepening the mystery, she’d been found on a trajectory leading from the distant white-dwarf, near the margin of the Large Magellanic Cloud, that had been their destination. Somehow, she’d ended up there on her way back toward the Milky Way.
“Custodian, how many crew were aboard the Novgorod?” Dash asked.
“There were five. Besides Lavarovna herself, there was the expedition leader, a Colonel named Pavel Hu, two engineers, and a mission specialist.”
“Okay. So where the hell are they?”
“It probably won’t surprise you to learn that my answer to that question is, I have no idea.”
Dash crossed his arms and stared at S. Lavarovna’s remains for a moment. “What’s your story?” he finally asked them. “What happened to you? How the hell did you get out into the middle of the Big Black?” He looked at her nametag. “And what was your name? Let’s see, S. So—Sarah? Samantha? Selena? Cynthia?”
“I believe that name traditionally begins with a C, not an S,” Custodian said.
“Hey, you spell it your way, I’ll spell it mine.” Dash puffed out a sigh. “Well, we need to call you something. Colonel Lavarovna’s just a little too formal. And calling you S. Lavarovna makes it sound like I’m taking roll call.” He thought for a moment, then a slow smile spread across his face.
“Got it. It’s perfect.” Dash stepped back from the table. “Custodian, I’d like to introduce you to Star Lavarovna.”
“Star?”
“Yeah. You don’t like it?”
“On the contrary, I think a single, descriptive, four-letter nickname fits extremely well, Dash.”
Dash applied power to the Archetype’s Blur drive as soon as traffic control gave him clearance to maneuver. The incoming Deeper force had dropped out of unSpace perilously close to the Kingsport, something made possible by the absence of anything even resembling a stellar mass. In fact, immediately after selecting this remote place in the Big Black, the AIs had specifically pointed this out as a strategic vulnerability. Attacking forces wouldn’t be forced to reveal themselves nearly as early as they would w
hen confronting a full-blown, stellar gravity well.
They did have an answer, thanks to the Golden, in the form of scrambler mines. This was a device that could yank a ship passing through its area of effect right out of unSpace and deliver a debilitating EMP jolt in the process. Custodian had devoted part of the Forge’s fabricating capacity to a dedicated scrambler mine production line, and they were being steadily sown in an enormous halo around the Kingsport. The coverage was far from complete, but it had been enough to prevent this Deeper force from falling right on top of them, as a few of the preceding raids had. What set this one apart, though, was its size. This was no mere raid. This was a full-on, deliberate attack.
“Sentinel, how many Deeper ships did the scrambler mines knock out of unSpace?”
“Three. Two destroyer-class, and one corvette. It was sufficient, however, to convince the rest of the Deeper force to return to real space.”
“So, satisfy my morbid curiosity. If we hadn’t deployed those mines, how close could they have gotten? I mean, could they really have translated that many ships? In that few raids?
“Potentially, although the risk of emergence collision would be considerably higher, simply because of the number of ships involved.”
Emergence collision. It was a dire tale told among spacers about the perils of translation. Everyone seemed to know someone, who knew someone, who’d seen one happen. A ship drops out of unSpace such that it overlaps with some other mass. The universe, it turned out, didn’t like the idea of matter trying to share space-time with other matter, so the supposed result was a colossal explosion, all that overlapping matter suddenly converted to energy.
It was also bullshit. The fact was that matter simply refused to share space-time. What actually happened was that the ship attempting to emerge from unSpace simply wouldn’t be able to. Instead, it would just stay in unSpace, or possibly run afoul of the voodoo physics of that infinite, dimensionless state of existence, being displaced in space, or even time, or simply lost altogether.
Still, a determined enemy, or a desperate one, might be tempted to try it anyway and just accept the risk of lost ships. But the scrambler mines had done their job, so instead of scant minutes of warning, they had more than half an hour. It was enough for the QRF to immediately get underway, buying time for the rest of the fleet to form up for battle.
Dash studied tactical. The Deepers had thrown a much more potent force at them this time. He counted two big battleships, two only slightly smaller battlecruisers, a dozen heavy cruisers, and seventeen smaller ships. It certainly was enough to worry Dash—or would have been, up until a few days ago. Now, though, they had not only the Forge on-station, but also two of their Anchors, Eastern and Northern. Each of the latter had the firepower of a small fleet unto itself, as Eastern had so dramatically demonstrated during the Second Battle of Backwater. And the Forge could outshoot both of the Anchors combined. It made Dash momentarily marvel about what the Kingsport would bring to battle once it was complete. According to Custodian, it would be able to deliver more firepower than the entire Realm fleet, even if it were twice its current size.
A voice broke into his musings. It was Elois, of all people.
“Dash? You got a second?”
“Kind of on my way to kill some stuff here, but sure. I can spare a moment. What’s up?”
“Well, this might be relevant to you killing stuff. Our AI switched to defense mode as soon as these Deepers appeared. He just made an interesting observation, and by interesting, I mean kinda terrifying. He thinks that this Deeper attack is aimed at us.”
“Us, as in the Absolute Zero and the Iron Gate?”
“Yeah.”
“Sentinel, can you confirm that?”
“The Deeper forces have indeed begun to maneuver in a way that suggests the Absolute Zero is their target. They appear to be detaching both of their battleships, and six escort-class ships, to continue pressing an attack on the Kingsport. The remaining entirety of their force is now changing course to attack the research ships.”
“Well, I doubt they care about the Absolute Zero. It’s those three Bishops they’re after. They want them back.”
“So it would appear,” Sentinel replied.
Dash cursed. He knew what the Deepers were doing. Their battleships were going to avoid getting decisively engaged with the Realm forces and try to continue being a threat for as long as possible. By continuing to threaten the Kingsport, they’d tie up a chunk of the Realm’s combat power. That was what they’d done to split the Realm fleet at the outset of the Second Battle of Backwater.
Which meant they’d again gotten a jump on the Realm defenses by shifting most of their combat power into an attack on the Absolute Zero and, more importantly, the Iron Gate. They’d moved the two ships studying the enigmatic Bishops well away from the Kingsport, unsure of what sort of threat they might pose. They might even have been nothing but an elaborate trojan horse, an irresistible prize brought back into the heart of the Cygnus Realm, but carrying some sort of deadly payload. They hadn’t left the research ships entirely undefended—a small task force, consisting of two light cruisers and four destroyers, was on-station nearby. But they’d mainly been deployed to bolster their defenses against missiles and small craft, like fighters, not battlecruisers. They wouldn’t last long against the far superior Deeper force approaching them, either.
Dash cursed again. Their caution was coming back to haunt them. The Absolute Zero could, if need be, just translate away. But the Iron Gate couldn’t. They’d removed her translation drive to make space for more research equipment. The idea was that if they ever did need to translate her, they could just reinstall it, or even bring her aboard the Forge or one of the Anchors and just carry her as cargo.
No longer tied to the lumbering battleships, the Deeper force now racing toward the research ships had a distinct time advantage, as much as fifteen minutes of pretty much unimpeded engagement time. That would be more than enough to destroy both research ships. They simply weren’t armed or protected for sustained combat, nor were they fast enough to outrun what was coming for them.
Dash’s mind raced through the possibilities. It didn’t take long. “Sentinel, can we just translate there?”
“I wouldn’t recommend it. The spherical error associated with emergence from unSpace normally isn’t an issue over distances of light-years. At such short range, though, we’d be almost as likely to emerge further away from our intended destination. Moreover, the presence of the Kingsport within that zone of error increases the chance of emergence collision.”
They needed to buy fifteen minutes to give the mechs time to intervene. There was only one way Dash could see to do that. Unfortunately, it meant asking a lot of people to put their lives on the line, and he didn’t want to do that.
But he would anyway. He switched the comm to the command ship of the little task force assigned to protect the research ships, the light cruiser Taffy. Her commander, a brusque Commander named Ellsworth, immediately responded.
“Go ahead, sir.” She spoke with taut efficiency. Dash knew she’d come to the Realm with military experience, but that was about it.
“Hey, Commander. First, it’s Dash. Second, I’d prefer to use your first name, too, if I could.”
“It’s Alora. And the fact you want to keep this informal tells me where this is going.”
“Yeah. I need the Deeper force coming at the Absolute Zero delayed for at least fifteen minutes. And you’re—”
“The only force in range to do it. Roger that.”
“Alora—”
“Sir—Dash—we’re on this. It’s what we do. We’ll buy you your fifteen minutes and then some.”
Dash nodded, surprised that he suddenly found it hard to speak. It took him a few seconds to find his voice again.
“Thanks, Alora. We’ll be there as soon as we can.”
“Roger that. Taffy out.”
With the Blur drive maxed out, Dash raced the Archetype
toward Deepers threatening the Absolute Zero, Leira to his left, Jexin to his right. The Herald followed, leading the bulk of the available fleet at its best possible speed. Eastern plodded its ponderous way along behind. That theoretically only left the QRF to deal with the two enemy battleships menacing the Kingsport, which would be another lopsided fight favoring the Deepers, if not for the presence of Northern and the Forge itself. Dash left that battle to the commander of the QRF and Custodian, and focused on the situation ahead.
It was, Dash thought, like watching two ships about to collide. You knew it was inevitable, you knew the outcome was going to be terrible, and yet there was nothing you could do but watch.
The Taffy and her consorts flung themselves into the teeth of the Deeper attack, spewing out missiles, as well as dark-lance and pulse-cannon fire as fast as they could cycle the weapons. The Deepers struck, landing hit after hit on the smaller ships. The damage quickly began to tell, the Realm vessels staggering under the impacts, shedding debris and shimmering clouds of venting atmosphere. But they pressed on, undeterred, concentrating all of their limited firepower on the lead battlecruiser.
Incredibly, the big ship slowed, drive plasma venting through a gash in her rear starboard quarter. Several smaller Deeper ships faltered as Alora quickly shifted her remaining fire from one target to the next. The whole time, the Deepers pounded the Taffy and her accompanying ships with blistering fire, pummeling one after another into submission.
But the Deepers had been forced to deploy into a battleline, costing them time. The question was, was it enough time?
Dash refused to pull his gaze away from the remarkable sacrifice playing out ahead of him. “Sentinel, please tell me this is going to make a difference.”
“The anticipated ten-to-fifteen-minute window, during which the Deepers would be able to attack the Absolute Zero and the Iron Gate unimpeded, has been reduced to less than five minutes—”
