Ghost Squadron

by Kevin McLaughlin

  The aliens were willing to toss that away. Individual pilots and crew seemed to mean nothing to them. They cast them aside in pursuit of their overall goals, and maybe that was a more efficient way to be. Perhaps this was evolution’s way of deciding between the two competing ideals. Which would survive when put to the test? Unity and complete dedication to a single species goal? Or individualism and freedom, where collective action was only done when a person willingly committed to it?

  “I’m in, Admiral. It’s been an honor serving with you,” Max said.

  “Likewise. We’re about to turn around and unleash a little hell on those ships trailing us. We’ll give them all something to remember us by,” Stein replied.

  “Godspeed, Admiral,” Max said. Then he cut the connection.

  He powered up the jump drive. It was almost to full charge. There were no enemy ships near enough to him that he had to worry about them. It was just him and the gate.

  No one knew what happened when a ship in jump impacted an object too large to be drawn into the warp. Would warp field just grab chunks of the ring as he passed through? Max thought the most likely answer was that at the point of impact his warp field would attempt to draw the ring in, fail, and then collapse. At that point his ship would enter back into real-space catastrophically. Every bit of kinetic energy from his warped motion would be unleashed in a single burst explosion.

  It ought to be enough to take down the ring, and maybe the big alien ship floating next to it as well. That gave him pause for a moment. Gurgle and Sam were on board that ship, if they were still alive. He’d be blowing them up as well.

  “Sorry, Gurgle. It has to be done,” Max said.

  “No blow up self.”

  For a moment Max thought he was hearing things. It couldn’t possibly be Gurgle! He was a prisoner. Or dead. A trick of the enemy? If they’d cracked Gurgle’s code they might know everything he had. They could imitate his voice and his mannerisms. Why now? If they’d figured out his intentions, it would be the best time to play that hand.

  “I don’t think so,” Max said. “You’re not Gurgle. Nice try, though. Gurgle would tell me to go ahead.”

  “Gurgle no lie. Sam fight alien leader. Gurgle in ring. Max blow ring, mess up everything!”

  An image flashed into his mind: Sam, in armor, a sword in her hand. She was battling someone. A woman in black armor, wielding a wickedly curved sword in one hand and a long knife in the other. Nothing he saw made any sense. Why would the aliens send him this? It sounded like the most feeble excuse. Sam and Gurgle, free and fighting back? Improbable at best.

  Which made him want to believe.

  “Gurgle?” Max asked.

  “Yes.”

  Suddenly he was sure, or sure enough to gamble on it. His friends really were out there. Hope flickered in his heart again. If Gurgle was alive and reaching out to him, then he must have a plan. Something which ideally didn’t involve Max blowing himself to kingdom come.

  “Damn good to hear from you, buddy,” Max said.

  “Gurgle glad too. Have to go. Aliens fighting Gurgle,” the strange intelligence growled that last. “Sending course. Luck!”

  Then he signed off. Max could feel the familiar presence vanish from his computer systems. He hadn’t realized how powerful that presence had been until it was gone. What the hell had happened to Gurgle? He’d never felt so big before. There was this impression of vastness…

  Max cleared his thoughts and examined the new course data Gurgle had left behind. He plotted it into his jump drive and laughed aloud at the new directions. Oh, this was going to be messy.

  “I thought for a second there I wasn’t going to get to blow myself up,” Max said. “Looking at this, I might just get a chance after all.”

  Then he opened up his radio and broadcast to all the remaining Wasp fighters. “Folks, I need your help…”

  Thirty-Six

  The sword slashed by over Sam’s head, narrowly missing as she dove beneath the swing. She thrust her own blade out lightning-fast at the alien attacking her. The edge of her sword scraped along the armor guarding its ribs. Not hard enough to do damage, it nonetheless got the alien to take a step back in caution.

  That it was playing things safe meant Sam could hurt it. She just hadn’t managed to do so yet. So far the match had been too even to call. Neither had scored more than a scrape against the other. But Sam was tiring, and the alien didn’t seem to be.

  It stood seven feet tall, clad in black steel armor. Mostly, it looked like a human woman with jet-black hair. The eyes gave it away, though. Instead of human eyes, the alien had glowing yellow orbs. The helm atop its head resembled a crown, and it made itself look like a girl. Sam was tired of calling the thing ‘it.’ If it wanted to look like some kind of dark fantasy queen, she’d go with it. She had to wonder what it said about her own subconscious if these were the sorts of images the alien was dredging up…

  “Bored yet, Queenie?” Sam asked. She lashed out with her blade, and the alien took another step back. “We can call this quits anytime you want to turn around and go home.”

  “You are weak and tiring,” the alien replied. “Soon you will falter. Then you will fall. And then you will die.”

  It advanced with each sentence, bashing down with pummeling force. Sam parried desperately, trying to keep her body out of the way of that deadly blade. She wasn’t sure what would happen to her if the alien got in a good hit, but she didn’t want to find out.

  The second blade seemed to come out of nowhere. Sam gasped, pain filling her right side. The alien spun away. She had two weapons - a sword, and a dagger. The latter was dripping Sam’s blood. She looked down at her side. There was a two-inch stab wound. She cupped her hand over the spot, sucking in a hard breath at the pain. Blood trickled out between her fingers.

  “You see? I will whittle you down a bit at a time until you are gone,” the alien queen said. She came in again, whirling in circles with both blades flashing.

  Sam backed away and to her left, protecting her injured side. Another slash left a trickle of blood running down her left arm. It wasn’t as deep as the first wound, but it was another distraction she couldn’t afford.

  “A shame. You thought you were like us,” the alien said. She slashed downward. Sam’s parry was made with a shaking arm. “You are just software. Just a program. Digital media, a saved copy of a human being. Like a photograph, if a bit more interactive.”

  Was she right? Worry and fear welled up in Sam’s mind. That was the question she’d been asking herself ever since discovering that she was only a copy of the original Samantha. Fear rose up like an old demon, claws extended to claim her mind. Sam struggled with the terror she felt. Dying was bad enough. Not being real at all? That was the worst fate she could imagine.

  “Look. Your own people reject you. You will never belong with them. You are not alive. You are an aberration. A bit of flawed code that we will correct,” the alien said.

  Sam felt the alien put pressure against her mind again. This time, the images it sent were clear, though. The alien was showing her a televised broadcast - was this from Earth? The screen had a time-stamp. It had happened just twelve hours earlier. The US Senate voting to block citizenship for all digital minds. Cheering in the stands and outside from sign-holding citizens. Another image came into focus, this one of a different council of leaders. Sam recognized Nicholas Stein arguing from the center seat and knew this had to be the UN Security Council. They, too, were voting. Since all the digital minds had gone rogue with Admiral Thomas Stein, they would all be destroyed as soon as possible, their promise of citizenship revoked.

  Sam cried out as the images faded away. She fell to her knees, her sword point sinking into the dirt beside her. “It isn’t real. You’re lying.”

  It couldn’t be true. They’d promised. She and her people had given up so much, risked everything, in return for that promise. There was no way the UN would turn on them like that. But it had felt real.
Looked real.

  “Why would I lie, when the truth is far more deadly?” the alien said. It loomed over Sam, sword held high. “Look inside my mind, if you will. See that I speak the truth. Then you will understand that it is time to surrender. Time to end your artificial existence.”

  Sam felt like a door was opening up before her. She reached forward with her thoughts, not her hands, and looked into the alien’s mind.

  It was telling the truth, or at least it seemed that way. Dozens of media broadcasts all saying the same thing. Demonstrators and protests in the streets demanding the end of the ‘digital mind threat.’ Then the images flickered. Sam saw a large fleet of dreadnoughts in orbit over Earth and knew she was now seeing what this alien projected would happen next. The massive ships each carried a large rock. They flung the things down with enough force that the impacts boiled the oceans, ignited the atmosphere, and scorched the land. The alien queen showed her every single death, one after another. Each person who was drowned by a tidal wave, each baby burned by flame, one by one thousands of them flickered by in her mind. By the time the aliens were done with their bombardment, nothing was left alive on Earth. Not even a single bacterium remained.

  Sam wanted to sob but couldn’t even manage that much. The alien’s mind still had hers in its grasp. It zoomed in on one of the dreadnoughts, and she saw something familiar. It was a fragment of code, a scrap of something she thought she ought to know. Horror dawned as she spotted a second, third, and fourth shard. Those bits and piece it was showing off were her - what was left of Sam, or what would be left of her after they were through. She’d be broken up and absorbed into them. Not even a drone; she would no longer exist at all, but she would continue to exist forever, too.

  The alien released Sam from its mental grip. She tumbled to the ground, curling around herself at all the horror she’d seen, unable to stop her tears.

  Thirty-Seven

  The calculations for this move had to be precise. If Max was off by even a thousandth of a second, it was probably the end of the road for the Andromeda. On the plus side, he’d probably take at least one enemy ship with him. But on the other hand, Max wasn’t the one doing the calculations. The math was beyond him.

  No, he was counting on a course and jump settings that were laid in by what he hoped was his somewhat unpredictable and often weird friend. If it really was Gurgle who’d spoken to him, then he knew those numbers would be good. Gurgle wouldn’t lie to him or lead him wrong. Max trusted him. But he had no way of being sure it really was Gurgle.

  He was taking a leap of faith.

  “God help us all if I’m wrong,” Max said.

  In the end, it came down to math. If he ignored Gurgle’s message and took down the ring, Max figured he’d probably succeed. Then the Intrepid would be destroyed, and the aliens would build themselves a new ring. Another fleet would come through long before humanity had made another jump ship to get out and stop them. He might buy Earth a month or two, but the result would be the same: extinction.

  If it really was Gurgle, and this gambit worked? Well, that might just change the course of everything.

  “Stand by for my arrival,” Max called over the radio. Then to himself, he added, “Assuming I make it!”

  He initiated the jump.

  It was a micro-jump, barely even a hop. There was no way he could ever have made the destination so precise, but the Andromeda exited precisely where Gurgle’s data said he would. It really was Gurgle! Max felt a surge of relief.

  Then guns erupted from the enemy mothership just below his vessel. No time for woolgathering! He lit up the engines, the ship surging forward. All around him a cone of Wasp fighters slipped in closer.

  “Dock fast. We’re out of here in ten,” Max said.

  Docking was too kind a word for the maneuvers the Ghosts and remaining Pheonix pilots were using. It was more like they were doing controlled crashes into the sides and top of his ship. Each impact scraped up the hull and left gouges in the armor. He could only imagine what it was doing to their fighters, but none of them backed down. Hell, he wouldn’t have either. A single Wasp left behind would mean almost immediate death for that pilot.

  At the ten second mark, he lit up the jump drive again. It activated - barely. There was just enough energy for the second transition. The jump felt strange, like he was being tugged apart. Then he was back in jump-space. This jump, like the first, was a very short one. It would only be a few seconds long.

  A hundredth of a second before he transitioned back into real-space, the preprogrammed command triggered every operational missile tube to launch at the same time. The missiles streaked away from the ship, arcing downward as they moved. But they were instantly caught in the warp wake, crushed into particulate matter, their kinetic and potential energy bounded together as they streamed at nearly the speed of light to the apex of the warp field, just ahead of the Andromeda.

  Max had half an instant to wonder if this was even going to work. No one had ever tried to trigger missile launches in jump-space before. Would they fire normally? Would they explode and disrupt the warp field? He had barely the space of time to consider those thoughts, even with his mind operating at computer speed.

  Then the Andromeda burst back into real-space.

  Every missile had been broken down into particles, then accelerated to a high fraction of the speed of light. On arrival, every particle was released at once from the nose of the Andromeda. For a single second a nova flared in space as a small fraction of the energy transformed into light.

  Most of the particles continued on their forward vectors, inertia allowing them to retain their velocity. They slammed into the dreadnought directly ahead of where the Andromeda had appeared.

  The alien race knew about jump technology, of course. Their larger ships had powerful energy fields designed to block the impact of high-speed particles such as the ones ejected from a jumping ship’s arrival. The design was solid, created to prevent an attacker from blowing up a vessel just by arriving next to it.

  But even the powerful shields on the dreadnought hadn’t been built to sustain this much mass, accelerated to such speed.

  The shields flared brilliantly, changing through a rainbow of colors in the instant the particles slammed them. They buckled in the same moment, absorbing only a portion of the incoming energy. The remaining energy was transferred to the hull of the ship.

  The dreadnought came apart like tissue paper, shredding into fragments under the deluge of particles. Gurgle’s course landed the Andromeda right behind the alien ship. The engines vanished first, vaporized by the strike. But the particles didn’t stop there, slicing through deck after deck as they tore their way forward through the vessel until their energy was spent.

  In less than a second, the dreadnought vanished into a kilometer-long fireball.

  The Andromeda veered off, avoiding the explosion. Wasps slipped free from the ship, forming a halo around it. Max retook manual control of his vessel, changing course to swing around toward the Intrepid. Now there was just one massive vessel on the opposing side - and it was facing both human ships and two dozen fighters. Max felt more than satisfied. Now the shoe was on the other foot!

  “I told you to hit the ring!” Stein said, calling over the radio.

  “Admiral, I’ve received a transmission from Gurgle. He and Sam are fighting the aliens from inside,” Max said. “We can still win this. Let’s take down that other ship together.”

  “Understood. That’s irregular, but I shouldn’t be surprised given who we’re talking about. Who has command of the fighters now?” Stein asked.

  “Your wife is in charge, sir. I brought them along because I figured we could use all the help we could get,” Max replied.

  “Works for me. I’ll have Edwards coordinate our strike with you,” Stein said. Max could hear the relief in the man’s voice and was glad to be able to share more good news.

  An incoming stream of data began flowing from the Intrepid al
most immediately. With all their ships working together, he felt confident they could take down the opposing vessel. There were still other enemy forces scattered about, and of course that one massive ship and the ring.

  But if Sam and Gurgle failed to come through, there was always the final option. Max watched his jump drive’s power level slowly climb. If it came down to it, he’d jump again and blow the ring. Even if it cost his friends’ lives as well as his own.

  “Come on, guys. We’re doing our job out here. Make it work in there. Somehow,” Max whispered. He couldn’t imagine what they were facing in there. It was impossible to imagine just the two of them taking on that huge alien ship. Max said a quiet prayer for a miracle.

  Thirty-Eight

  Sam was dying.

  She was aware of it, in a manner that felt like she was being fractured, fragmented into shards of herself. Memories flashed before her. Some of them were the old Samantha’s. Others truly belonged to her in this life. Sam was surprised to feel like the latter were more valuable to her. Those were things she had done, after all. Samantha’s life had shaped her until the moment she was copied away. But the decisions she’d made since then were all hers.

  It was almost over. She was half aware of the alien queen hovering above her. Except that wasn’t right, either. It was around her, a digital mind encompassing hers and absorbing everything she was. Her life, her thoughts, her memories, her very self was being sucked up, swept in. And the memories kept flickering past her conscious mind.

  We want you to know that we love you.

  The memory of those words went past like a thunderbolt in her mind. That was one of her memories, wasn’t it? It wasn’t Samantha. The memory was important somehow. Sam forced herself to concentrate on the thought, to ferret it out of the flood of jumbled threads in her mind.