Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  The full theater of war had been brought to bear.

  Off in the distance, Lyokh could see a blue-green needle of energy that came from high orbit, and nuked a hive-city miles away. It was Lord Ishimoto’s Pacifier, a particle-beam weapon with a yield of twenty-three terajoules. The heavens parted for the mushroom cloud, and the ground shook.

  Lyokh found a moment, just a breath in the midst of battle, where he could resheathe his blade. He took a moment to reload both his pulser-pistol and his Fell. With trained precision, it was done in five seconds, as Gold Wing soldiers plunged ahead and died all around him, their bodies twisting from explosions, dancing macabre dances when riddled with unknown projectiles. The golden wingspan, the sign of their unit emblazoned on their shoulders, was impossible to see beneath the layers of blood and mucus.

  He advanced through the gaping wound in the wall, Fell rifle up and at the ready. Others were shouting in radio chatter. He heard almost none of it, for Lord Ishimoto was still punishing the land. They passed through the interstitial tissue of the enemy’s walls, the warhulks moving forward, slashing through with blue-green beams from their shoulder-mounted particle cannons. Lyokh and his fellows were now truly a host of germs infecting a wound. The wall even reacted by convulsing, the open wound dilating. Hundreds of gallons of black sludge washed over their feet and knees. Inside that sludge, things moved and swirled, like tiny, sightless eels, slapping at their armor. An immune system of some kind, like red blood cells looking for the invading agents.

  “The wall!” Lyokh shouted madly, even though they had already accomplished that mission. There was nothing else to say. “The wall” became their battle cry. They pushed. Just like Lucerne had told them to do before he was annihilated. They pushed. “The wall!”

  Asteroid Monarch

  Kalder does not bend. Those words hung in the air, unspoken. They needn’t be said, not among the august senators gathered in the stony cavern. They sat, as they often did, hunched and uncomfortable, their collective attention focused on trying to ignore the awkwardness that wouldn’t abate. More than a hundred men and women in layered robes sat in tiered stadium seats that had been carved out of the carbon-rich rock walls of the asteroid, and glared across at one another with a cocktail of interest, worry, and suspicion. The Senate Hall was ill lit. Torches and electric lights running on backup generators cast flickering shadows and a sickly, pallid glow on the faces of the assembly, and the whole room smelled of sweat, decay, and stagnant water.

  No one spoke.

  There was this expectant silence, a sort of contest of wills going on that never seemed to get old to the senators. It was their entertainment of late, their sport. They waited to see who would flinch first. A sport, yes. Always welcome these days, a bit of diversion from the usual tactics. What else did they have?

  Still, there were those that found these long stretches of inactivity tedious, senators that ill liked the implied theatricality of it all, men and women who saw each passing second of stubborn silence as another death knell to the Republic of Aligned Worlds, another sign of the glacial bureaucracy that was killing it.

  And why not feel this way? Forced to retreat and hide as they were, it was only fitting that termites be made to feel like termites, so small and insignificant that they could barely carve out a place on an asteroid for their skeletal government body to conduct business.

  The senators exchanged glances, some leaned forward, arms resting on their elbows, eyes turned upwards at the leaking ceiling as if they were pondering the last words of Socrates. Surely, most of them were thinking, This could last all day. And it very well could. After all, Kalder did not bend.

  When the silence finally broke, the shame fell on a man named Goro Notombis, a senator from the Jovian Planets Circle. He stood waveringly to his feet, unused to the light gravity of an asteroid, even one so large as Monarch with its considerable spin. “C-Consuls?” Notombis stammered. He was a young man, who inherited the magistracy and senatorship from his father when he died. It was almost a tradition in the political circles of the Jovian moons. “Consuls!” he said again, this time with a fraction more confidence and leaving off the question mark. “I wish to be heard.”

  Horace Belmont, First Consul of the State, nodded his assent to Ishmael Yon, Second Consul of the State. They were both seated at the center of the room, near the spot where the water was leaking and puddling, their faces limned by the torchlight and the holopanes on either side of them.

  Consul Yon held up the Iron Rod and tapped it twice on the floor. “The Senate will hear Senator Goro Notombis.”

  All eyes on him, Notombis gathered his rustling robes to him, holding the hems with one hand, putting on a show of utmost dignity. The robes themselves told his story. Fresh and clean and bright red when he first fled to Monarch seeking refuge, his robes were now darkened, constantly damp, stained near the ankles by the loose clay polymers that escaped the neglected pipes in the mining corridors. His gloves, once so ivory-white, were now browned and stiff-looking.

  Kalder does not bend. When he raised one of those gloved hands and began to speak, those words were surely at the back of Notombis’s mind. Kalder does not bend. His eyes cast about the room. Doubtless, he was waiting to see if Kalder would interrupt him.

  “We…” He stopped. His voice seemed to catch. He cleared his throat and tried again. “W-we stand at the precipice…of annihilation. I don’t think there’s any word better suited to describe what we now face, and I don’t see any reason to avoid the word itself. This age has been called the Fall of Man, and I think it fitting.”

  He paused, perhaps for poignancy, possibly for courage—probably for courage—and licked his lips.

  “They came leaping out at us from the darkness,” he continued. “Corpus alienums. Xenos. Aliens. Otherworlders. Whatever you prefer to call them. We were just explorers in those days—children, even, in our most nascent stages of discovery. They did not seem a threat at first, more of a…curiosity. To be sure, they showed us that we were not alone, as some had feared, but beyond that—beyond the scientific and philosophical inquiries their existence begged—they were no terror, no threat, yet still they were monumental.

  “Three hundred billion. That’s how many stars are in our wondrous galaxy. About one in a hundred have basic life—microbes, algae, the like. About one in six thousand have some form of intelligent life—that’s about thirty million worlds, give or take. And an estimated two thousand have advanced, spacefaring civilizations, all of them remarkable in their own right, some of them waiting to be contacted, probably a few still waiting to be discovered. Most, of course, will be annihilated, either through war or through some natural catastrophe.

  “The Brood is only the latest. Boundless, shapeless, they slowly began to cover every corner of every major trade route. First a hindrance, then a plague, and then an outright enemy, they’ve separated us from…well, everything. But it’s not just them. At every corner, at every turn we find ourselves cut off. How many colonies lost, just in the last hundred years, forever cut off because the Brood ships linger in our path? How many over the last five hundred, or thousand years?

  “Now, we find ourselves pushed to the brink. Scattered as we are, our defenses down…well, just look at us. Just look! Look at what’s left of humanity’s governing bodies, huddled together like the old fearful men we are, gazing into a fire that dies in our hearth, on an asteroid overflowing with refugees. Humanity may not disappear in a day, but it’s clear that if we do not act soon, we may disappear with a slow, soft whimper.”

  The more he spoke, the less Notombis stammered, and the more confidence he seemed to gather to him. “Star systems are cut off from each other…some have been so for centuries now. Do their children even recall that they were once of Earth? Has the Sol System, Jupiter, Saturn, Europa, and Earth Cradle herself, become just a story to them? How much longer before it becomes myth? How long before we say enough is enough, and go and retrieve them?”

&nb
sp; There were a few nods of approval around the room.

  “We stretched ourselves too thin, we conquered too far, and now our resources are scattered, separated by light-years of distance.” The lump in his throat now metastasized, and he swallowed hard. And though he knew it made him appear weak, he wiped sweat from his brow. “I move that we recall all our military and exploratory ships, withdraw them from the horrors they face in the Kennit System, and bring them back to the Sol System to regain our full strength. Then, after a measure of years, after we’ve regained stability, we launch probes into our lost systems and begin systematic rescue missions—and rescue missions only! No more wars! We retrieve our lost colonies and reforge humanity where it began! In Sol! No more wars!”

  A chorus went up, men and women shouting their agreement, a handful their discontent.

  “Bring our people home!” Notombis said, now heartened by this support. “Bring them home to Earth Cradle! To Europa! To Mars! Bring—them—home!” He shook a dirty fist in the air as the Two Consuls smacked their Iron Rods against the stone floor. Notombis was smiling, almost grinning. Not bad. Not bad, at all. Especially for a man who had dared to break the silence.

  Then, the cheers died down, a low murmur passed through the room like disease spreading, and finally a quiet, dark cloud fell over the Senate.

  Notombis looked at all of them, wondering what could’ve put them in such a mood.

  The senators were looking behind him. Notombis turned and looked up, near the top of the theater where the steps were ill carved and water trickled down almost constantly. There, in the “spider’s corner” they called it, so dark and away from the rest of the lights, Kalder had stood up.

  : Kennit 184c

  Lyohk heard the clattering of armor behind him. He looked over his shoulder, saw the helmeted face of Durzor, his rifle in low-ready position. So, Durzor had survived. Behind him were a dozen others, coming down the dark passageway and pushing up too closely to one another.

  “Keep your spacing, Gold Wing,” Lyokh said over an open channel. “Don’t bunch up. Breshdt, take point.”

  The group made space for Corporal Breshdt, who received encouraging pats on the shoulder and knocks on the helmet as he progressed up to the front. He sidled up to the doorway, looking across at Lyokh, waiting for the signal.

  The fighting had been hard. Every man was coated in layers of pus, mucus, and the blood of their brothers. Despite their helmets’ sound and flash suppresors, their ears rang with juddering autofire, and their eyes were half blinded by multiple explosions and a sea of muzzle flashes.

  They had come in through a large edifice, over the bodies of two of their own, who had died when they were ambushed by a group of six shapeshifting drones. The corridors were black, with only occasional bursts of blue lightning within the thin translucent skein of the walls to light their way. Visors had switched to night-vision, and they advanced through the corridor, which appeared to be a huge and dilating intestinal tract. Ulcerous growths along the lining in the walls pulsed as the soldiers came near, and something swam within each one, but never hatched. They had followed the three-dimensional map on their HUDs, a map put together by Primacy Intel after weeks of launching probes from high orbit.

  Lyokh and his people now stood at a chitonous doorway, which Draznik, in his Untamak warhulk suit, had blown halfway open, then ripped the rest of it clear. A tremor had rippled through the walls, a defensive spasm from the supermassive life-form itself.

  They waited for a moment, listening. On top of protecting his ears from the shock of explosions, Lyokh’s STACsuit’s helmet extended his hearing range to forty kilohertz. He could hear scuttling noises and differentiate between them, as well as the pulse of fluids in the walls. So far, there was no sound of the enemy approaching.

  Peeking through the door, Lyokh tossed in two EyeSpys, which hovered in the air on repulsors and advanced ahead, sweeping the rooms with ladar that fed details back to their HUD maps. There was no clear distinction of where the organic ended and the technological began. Organic slush blended seamlessly with chiton floors and walls, and all surfaces, whether solid, semi-solid or liquid, were filled with trembling, fleshy wires.

  With the Brood, it was never clear what was sentient and what was just an organic lump of tissue grown out of necessity. It was not even clearly understood who the Brood were, whether they were the maggots, the shapeshifting drones, or even the city itself. Was the massive organism-city producing the drones, or was it the other way around? Were they all the same, symbionts that had grown to understand and help one another, growing commensurate with each other’s understanding of technology, blending their cultures?

  This was the reason diplomacy had always failed with the Brood—indeed, it had never even gotten off the ground. The only thing the Brood understood was submission to their ways, or rounds in their face. Nothing in between worked. However, they experienced no war amongst each other, and had never been known to fire even a single shot at a member of their own race. Whatever the Brood were, they were almost a perfect civilization, they had just one major issue with other living beings: they didn’t want to share the universe’s natural resources with them.

  There came more clattering noise.

  Lyokh cast around, saw that a second unit had moved up behind his people, their booted feet clicking lightly on the chitonous floors. The commander was a man Lyokh knew: Davisjo, a ten-year veteran. He had his assault rifle out, kept in high-ready position. Behind the commander was his sergeant, Ruvio, his rifle slung low, depleted. In his hands he gripped his field sword, the runes of its blessings glowing blue along its compristeel blade.

  “Sergeant Lyokh,” panted Davisjo, his voice ragged through the speaker of Lyokh’s helmet. His shoulder pauldron had a hole in it, which was slowly resealing itself with neodymium filler, and the inner med-layer was gauzing over his wound. “Fancy seeing you at the tip of the spear. What happened with Lucerne, and Egleston? No luck today?”

  “No luck,” Lyokh confirmed. It was slang within IX Legion. Luck or no luck, that’s what it came down to. The difference between which way the enemy chose to shoot at any particular moment, which determined who got which bullet, was all luck. Training could prepare you for many scenarios, but no amount of training could sway which way a bullet went.

  “So that makes you commander, eh?” said Davisjo.

  “I am,” Lyokh said. “Unless you wish to have the honor?”

  “May I?”

  “By all means,” he said, relieved. Lyokh had been trained to do what he must, like taking command when other leaders died, but he was not comfortable with holding a leadership role overlong. It wasn’t his style. He liked the simplicity of taking orders, and following them.

  Davisjo nodded curtly, and received a few claps to his back as he moved to the front of the squad. Breshdt, who had been made point by Lyokh a second ago, now stood down. Davisjo peeked around the corner, and checked the 3D map on his HUD, as well as the updates that Lyokh’s EyeSpys were sending back. He nodded. “All right, button-hook entry. There’s a corridor to the right, we’re gonna take it. Bounding overwatch. Hulks, watch our asses.”

  Davisjo held up three fingers, and when he counted down to zero, he swept in through the door, hooking to the left, rifle up and pointing. Lyokh was next, going immediately to the right, searching for work. Behind them, the others followed the button-hook pattern, turning the corner around the doorway fast, punching out with their weapons and seeking.

  “Clear,” came the calls.

  “Clear!”

  “Clear!”

  “I’ve got deep,” Lyokh said, advancing to the hallway. Davisjo and Durzor took up flanking positions on either side of the opening, while Lyokh baby-stepped around the corner, sighting down the rifle. He looked down a long, black corridor, whose ceiling seeped black sludge. A metallic roly-poly machine, egg-shaped, dropped from the ceiling. It sprouted metallic legs, and its three eyes, located in its abdomen, stared at Lyokh
before scuttling away quickly. “Contact!” he shouted, and destroyed the whatever-it-was with a short burstfire.

  “Clear!” he called, keeping his Fell rifle trained on the hallway as the others advanced.

  He followed, bringing up the rear with the warhulks. The mechs’ servos whined as they trudged forward. The teams took positions on opposite sides of the hallway, advancing in the bounding overwatch that Davisjo had ordered.

  At the next junction, Breshdt took point again, performed a sneak-and-peek, then waved the others on. Behind them, a Dagonite warhulk pilot shouted, “Contact!” By the time Lyokh turned around to bring his weapon to bear, the warhulks had already turned the three shapeshifters to mulch. “Clear!”

  For the next ten minutes, they traversed the corridors of the hive in near silence. The only sounds they heard, and felt, were the distant thumps of the orbital bombardment outside. At times, the corridors quavered, and pieces of chitonous struts broke apart and fell, bouncing off their helmets. But the tunnels never collapsed.

  They followed the map to where Primacy Intel had stated they believed the Queen of Mothers to be located, a chamber high up the tower. Lyokh was almost afraid to see what was left of her. It couldn’t be much. He had seen the vids that PI put together of those few husks found wandering 184c’s wastelands, doing the work of their new Brood masters.

  No capital-class starship could land safely on 184c—indeed, it was extremely difficult to even make it into orbit around the planet without a fight, for all the satellites the Brood had flung into space—so all the images ever taken of the husks were taken from high orbit. What little anyone could see were broken, twisted bodies, deprived of souls and usually with a coiled umbilical cord extending from their exposed brains. PI referred to them as “leashes” and suggested that it was a means for the Brood to maintain control over human husks, which had become drones. It was the final stage of indoctrination. A long walk across the wastelands, a march of indignity…