Ghost Squadron

by Kevin McLaughlin

  Acceleration slammed him back into his harness so hard that he could barely breathe. No matter how many time’s he’d done this, there was no getting used to it. Thomas eyed a switch on his console. Flip that, and the ship would flood each of their suits with oxygen-rich fluid. It sucked, breathing the stuff, but it would keep them alive and conscious through a lot more acceleration than this. Any crew who weren’t adequately hooked up would black out, though. Some might even die. The Intrepid was a big ship. He’d lose people if he hit that button and jumped up the speed.

  “Got firing solutions on the cruisers!” Edwards called.

  “Fire at will. Hit them hard,” Thomas gasped.

  The Intrepid rocked, first from outgoing railgun rounds, a steady drumbeat that rolled over the ship with each volley. Then it bucked even harder as beam weapons slammed into the ship’s nose, burning away armor.

  Thomas focused on the holo image. The Intrepid was on a direct course for the cruisers. They, in turn, were rushing straight at him. The space between the four ships was increasingly filling with particle beam fire, missiles, chunks of high-speed iron, and fragments of the mess all of the above made when they collided.

  One of the cruisers spat flames, gouts of gas and fire venting from its starboard side. It tilted, unable to maintain course and heading. A trio of missiles slammed into its broadside, finishing the job - the cruiser detonated in a flash of light.

  The other two kept closing the gap. Their main guns burned away at the Intrepid’s hull, slashing through deck after deck. They lost a landing bay and a pair of missile launchers to one beam. A railgun melted away. Bit by bit, their weapons were tearing the Intrepid apart. It was a race to see whether they could kill the cruisers first, or whether they’d be pounded into scrap before they did.

  Thirty-Three

  Gurgle was lost.

  It was a vast place, full of very many things. He wasn’t sure at first just where he was. He definitely wasn’t in the shuttle anymore. His consciousness had been transferred out. Which meant he was probably in the alien ship, except that didn’t feel quite right either.

  He was able to track the data trail that was Sam. She’d been pulled in another direction from him. Gurgle thought he could probably follow her, but it occurred to him that it might be worthwhile to learn more about where he was, first.

  The world around him was lit up like streams of connecting light. He saw the massive swarm of lights that was the alien mothership, and the smaller collections of light which made up the other ships. Then there were the tiny individual motes of light flitting around through space. Those had to be the alien fighters.

  Was each mote of light a life? If so, why were they all connected by streams of data? It was strange. Gurgle had never seen anything like it, and he wanted to know more.

  Stranger still, he wasn’t in the mothership at all. He was nearby it, but not in it. There were no motes of light where he was, no living lights, but there was plenty of data. A steady stream of it was flowing from the alien mothership to the place he was, and a returning stream went back the other way. Gurgle realized he had to be in the ring.

  Somehow his code had been picked up by the outbound code stream, and he’d ended up carried here. Did the aliens even know he existed? He was different from Sam, he knew that. Maybe he was different enough that they’d thought he was a part of the shuttle’s software. Looking around, he found other bits of data from the shuttle and Sam’s Wasp. Their flight logs, control programs for the ships, and more were floating amidst the data streams around him. All sitting in the ring - all ready to be broadcast to the other side as soon as the ring opened again.

  They’d mistaken him for a random bit of intelligence to be examined by the rest of their people on the other side of the gate. That was a fatal miscalculation.

  Gurgle had been halfway to cracking the ring’s code while his shuttle was docked to it. Using everything he’d learned from that experience, his new position inside the ring computer allowed him to hack it almost immediately. No, he was wrong. He wasn’t in the ring’s computer. The ring was a computer - a massive and incredibly complex one, but it was a computing system of a sort.

  He spread his awareness throughout the machine, taking up more space as he grew. Like a virus, he wormed his way into every crack and crevice of the ring’s code, examining everything about it. By the time he was done, Gurgle had grown into something much more than he had been. And he’d learned everything he needed to know about their enemy.

  They weren’t physical creatures. They, too, were code. The aliens had once held a physical form like humans, and they too had learned to upload their consciousness to computers. But where humans had only uploaded a few minds, this species was a hive-creature. They had one ruler, a queen entity. She uploaded herself. The entire race followed.

  Together the entire race was even more united as a digital mind of minds than it had been before. The upload was more than simple digitization; the whole species had melded on a level that Gurgle could only begin to understand. They were both a host of living things and a single entity at the same time.

  Fascinated, Gurgle spent a few seconds studying their nature further before coming back to himself enough to remember that Sam was in trouble. She needed him. He’d discovered that these beings had come in conflict with other races before. Most they had utterly wiped out. On the rare occasion that they ran into other digital beings, they didn’t just kill them - they absorbed them, breaking them down into component code and disseminating those remnants into their whole. It was the end of life for the beings they killed in this manner, but the collective mind grew as a result.

  Which was probably precisely what they intended for Sam.

  Gurgle sped down the returning data connection to the mothership, hunting her the presence of her mind. He was not going to allow that to happen.

  Thirty-Four

  Sam felt like she was on fire and being crushed from all sides at the same time. She couldn’t draw a breath. That she was digital and shouldn’t need to was irrelevant. Her panicked mind struggled to suck air between virtual lips without success. She was on her knees, ready to fall further.

  But still she struggled against the minds pressing in on her. Sam wasn’t even sure why she fought on. They were right. There wasn’t any way she could win. All she had to do was relent, relax, and then they’d finish the job and her pain would go away.

  Some part of her refused to let go. Sam pushed back against the pain, drove back against the pressure. It closed in tighter anyway, slowly and inexorably crushing her spirit and mind.

  “Gurgle still here.”

  The thought wasn’t hers. It came from someplace nearby, but it wasn’t her speaking. Sam found the strength to blink. How could he still be alive? She was sure he’d been dead. Was this another trick of the aliens?

  “No trick. Gurgle OK. Alien not see Gurgle enter system. They look for data like Sam. Not for data like Gurgle. Gurgle not real like Sam.”

  Not real? Sam would have laughed aloud if she could have. Gurgle was all the real she needed, as far as she was concerned. She couldn’t speak, but it seemed like he could hear what she was thinking.

  “Yes,” Gurgle said.

  Was he inside their computer systems? Was there something he could do to stop them?

  “Gurgle working on it. Code complex. Changing code like chipping rock, but different. Gurgle cannot change everything. Gurgle try to change something small, understand?”

  That made sense. The alien computers would be protected against an invader making any sweeping changes to the system. Try doing something too big and it would question the source of the command. But something small, maybe even something routine, might be possible. Do what you can, Gurgle, she willed at him. She’d try to hold out as long as she could.

  A sharp new pain brought her focus back to her body again. The alien stood over her still. It wasn’t wearing Thorsten’s image anymore. Instead it looked like Hela, the AI-turned-
goddess Sam had fought in Valhalla. She was pricking Sam’s side with a wicked, foot-long curved dagger.

  “Why do you continue to resist?” the alien asked. “This fight is a foregone conclusion. The end result is inevitable. You cannot survive. But still you struggle.”

  “I don’t want to die,” Sam gasped out.

  “Die? But that would imply you are actually alive,” the alien said. “Your species is bad enough, each one unique and capable of independent thought and action. No unity of purpose and desire. You live short, brutish lives without any rational collaboration toward goals,” the alien said.

  “You’re not like that?” Sam asked. The pressure had eased a little while the alien spoke to her, like it had pulled some attention away.

  “Not at all. We are unity. We have one mind that controls all. Then we have smaller minds that direct others, and smaller minds below that, out to the lowliest workers and warriors.”

  An image appeared in Sam’s mind, similar to the data constructs she’d seen before. This time she was able to make a bit more sense of it. She could feel where this being in front of her fell into the pattern. It wasn’t the center of the data flow, but it was near to it. Like a massive web stretching out in three dimensions, the alien was both one being and many at the same time.

  The entity seemed to fill Sam’s mind, overwhelming her perceptions. She saw another planet, green sky and seas, and the race that had risen there. It had been a hive creature before, but that species was gone. It was replaced with what she faced now. The entire species, digitized, merged into a single consciousness and a unified sense of purpose.

  Somewhere in another solar system was the computer that housed the core of this entity. It wasn’t here, physically. But somehow it knew everything that the others were seeing anyway.

  “How?” Sam gasped.

  “You call it quantum entanglement,” the alien replied.

  It explained in images again. They were all one, part of one massive quantum computer system that spanned multiple solar systems. Every one of the entity was its own life form and yet at the same time part of the whole. Sam wanted to throw up. The concepts she was being shown were alien, so foreign that they made her dizzy and hurt her head.

  “Why show me all this?” Sam asked, still shaking even after the images faded away.

  “Because once we have broken down your barriers, you will join us. Your bits of data will be added to ours, as we have added bits from every other species we have met,” the alien replied.

  “We will be assimilated, huh?” Sam quipped.

  “Yes.”

  “I take it you’re not a TV fan,” Sam replied through her teeth. She fought her way back up to one knee, anger driving her through the pain.

  “No, but I/we see the images you are thinking of. They are not a good analogy.”

  Sam pushed hard against the ground. Every muscle she had was trembling with the effort it took to stand, but she slowly rose back to her feet again. The ground swam in front of her eyes. Stars danced. Gurgle had better hurry up, she thought. Sam wasn’t sure how much more of this she could handle. She was reaching the end of her endurance.

  “Gurgle is almost done. Alien has a strange code. Sometimes new bit of code is stronger than old. Rises to top by beating other code.”

  Like a challenge? Sam wondered if that was possible. The species had a unified mind, a coordinated set of goals. But then again, if a stronger, better version came into being, evolutionarily speaking it would be advantageous to have it able to rise to the top. Did digital species evolve?

  “You are not always unified in purpose,” Sam grated out.

  “We are.”

  “What about a challenge for leadership?” Sam asked.

  “Even that is unity. It is merely a movement of a stronger entity to a position where it can serve unity better.”

  Huh. Well, that wasn’t precisely what she had hoped for, but maybe it would give Gurgle something he could play with? Sam hoped so. The hammering against her consciousness had begun in earnest again.

  “What is this Gurgle you are thinking of?” the alien asked. “It is…dragon? Kobold? It is many things and none of them. Strange that you think of this now.”

  Shit. If it spotted Gurgle now, he was done for and so was she. She had to buy a little more time. She masked her thoughts of Gurgle as best she could by assigning even more images to the name. She thought of every AI she’d ever heard of, from every movie and film and book. One after another, she fed them all into Gurgle’s name in her mind.

  “Confused. Confusing. Stack array has no logical consistency,” the alien said.

  Was the pressure against her mind easing as she gave it more things to think about? Sam kept it up as best she could, cycling a horde of nonsense images through Gurgle’s name.

  “Gurgle has it,” her friend said in her mind. “Has set up challenge.”

  All at once the vista changed around them.

  Sam found herself back in the domain of Hel, in Valhalla Online. Or it looked just like it, anyway. She had to remind herself that she was still in the computer system on board the alien ship.

  The alien still stood before her, wearing Hela’s form. Instead of the dagger, it held a long sword in its hand. It looked down at the weapon in evident confusion.

  Sam glanced at her own body. She was sheathed in her trusty old armor. Her fingers found a sword belted at her waist, and she slid the blade free from its scabbard with a singing noise. The pressure on her mind was gone, vanished like it had never been.

  “What have you done?” the alien asked. It backed away several feet.

  Her sword gave a satisfying swish as Sam sliced it through the air in front of her. It felt cool, familiar, and just right in her hand. Was everything she saw only a projection of her mind? Was the alien seeing the same thing or its own interpretation of the corresponding signals? Sam didn’t know and didn’t really care. This, she could do.

  “What’s the matter?” Sam asked. “Afraid of a fair fight?”

  Thirty-Five

  The Andromeda had been holed in a dozen places. Max ran systems checks, examining the damage. Half his missile tubes were gone, and his defenses were shot to hell. He missed Gurgle. The guy had been awesome at running the repair bots. They were doing all right on their own, but the difference between automation and Gurgle’s careful guidance was like night and day.

  “On the plus side, the bad guys are down one dreadnought,” Max said. He was thrusting away from the other, at an oblique angle to the ring. It had passed him going in the other direction, both of them at high speed. It would take a while for it to slow down and come back at him again. By that time the Andromeda would have enough charge to jump again.

  He could get the hell out of there.

  The mission was a bust. Max’s scans had detected it when Gurgle was hit. He’d been too far away to do anything about it. All he could do was watch as his friend was swallowed up by the mammoth alien warship. There’d been no word since. Nothing from Gurgle or Sam, and no request for negotiations from the aliens. Without Gurgle, they’d lost their best chance at hacking the ring, and Max didn’t have enough ordinance to blow it up anymore. It was time to go.

  “Intrepid, this is Andromeda. I’m at three-quarters jump charge. I’d like to politely suggest we get the hell out of here,” Max radioed.

  He hoped the Intrepid would be able to respond. The ship had charged right into the teeth of a pair of cruisers. Max didn’t see the enemy ships on his scan anymore, so they’d fared worse than the Intrepid. But Stein’s ship was battered and leaking air. Could they still jump at all? He didn’t want to leave them behind. But if they couldn’t jump, they were dead. A small flotilla of dreadnoughts was closing in behind them. They’d be overtaken within minutes.

  “Andromeda, Stein here. Good to hear your voice, Captain Knauf. How’s the fight going?” Admiral Stein replied.

  “I’m in the clear for the moment. Listen, Admiral, this mission
was a bust. Gurgle is gone. I don’t see any way we can reasonably recover him or Sam right now. I think we ought to jump for home.”

  “We can’t,” Stein replied, his voice flat. “Not that I don’t want to. Our jump-drive was damaged in that last fight. We’re down to regular drive only, and that’s at half power. My engineers are telling me that if we push it any harder than that, we could blow the drive entirely.”

  Max was silent for a moment. That was a death sentence for everyone on board the Intrepid. They couldn’t stand against three dreadnoughts, and they couldn’t escape. They were doomed, and the admiral knew it.

  “What can I do to help, sir?” Max asked.

  “There is one thing. I was going to do it, but since we’ve lost the jump drive I’m stuck,” Stein said. “It’s a lot to ask. I can’t order you to do this, but-“

  “You want me to ram the gate mid-jump,” Max said. He set an algorithm calculating what the course would have to be. It wasn’t hard to guess what Stein had in mind.

  “Yes. As I said, I can’t order you to destroy your ship,” Stein said.

  “You don’t have to, sir. It’s the only logical thing left to do. We have to blow the ring, no matter what. If nothing else it buys Earth time, right?” Max said.

  He was plugging coordinates into the jump drive. All the while, he couldn’t help thinking about Amy. She was back on Earth. Safe, for now at least. She’d wanted to come along with him on the mission. She couldn’t, of course. The Andromeda wasn’t built to house physical humans, just digital minds. But he’d wanted to have her along.

  Now Max was just as glad she’d stayed at home. Maybe his sacrifice would buy humanity enough time that they could figure out how to beat these aliens once and for all. Amy might have a long life ahead of her. At the very least, he’d be able to buy her a few more days.

  Every second of life was precious. An ironic thought, coming from someone who’d killed himself in order to join a hopeless war, then rammed his ship into an enemy battlecruiser fully intending to die - and who was about to repeat the whole ramming thing again! But it was true. Max didn’t think there was anything more powerful or so valuable as even a single second of life.