Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  The fleet navigated through the destroyed hulks of their Legion, those that had been hit by plasma beams shot from the surface, or else crushed when the broodling ships caught up to them. A few e-suited corpses floated out in the cold void, never to be recovered, unless by Brood harvesters. Scorched debris panged off the hulls of those in the flotilla. A dead frigate tumbled end over end, breaking apart in atmospheric entry, the debris flashing first an incandescent white, then orange, then vanishing.

  Soon, Lord Ishimoto turned to follow the fleet. It pushed around Kennit 184c in a parabola, fighting against the planet’s gravity bow-wave before whipping around and shooting for deeper space. Besides the roar of trembling engines far belowdeck, no one aboard detected a thing, for Lord Ishimoto’s graviton controllers and inertial dampeners kept them within a field of perfect artificial gravity.

  Lord Ishimoto’s forward laser shot out into the vacuum, parting spacetime by one part per ten million, opening an invisible bubble that Lord Ishimoto inserted itself into. The ship’s A-drive kicked in. They were safely insulated inside a Faulkner field, its shimmering pearlescent light cascading over the dark hull at regular intervals.

  They translated into the FTL bubble, punching forward into the blackness. The effects of faster-than-light travel caused all the stars to appear to gather in front of the ship. All other starlight was leached from the void, leaving total darkness all around them as they plunged ahead, seeking respite anywhere they could find it.

  LYOKH AND REYES made their way down through the levels of the ship, trying to keep out of the way of the crewmen and maintenance bots. The corridors were filled with bleary-eyed Navy boys and girls rushing to their stations. There was a lot to be done while the ship was going FTL, lots of catching up to do and clean-up work, now that the focus wasn’t on the battle. Bots trundled or staggered through the corridors, their unoiled joints grinding, their servos sputtering from neglect.

  The corridors smelled of machine oil and sterilizing agents. Also of bodies. You could never quite get rid of the smell of bodies, it seemed, not when it came to placing them in a giant tin can. Submarine commanders of old had learned this, as well as the earliest astronauts. No amount of tech ever got rid of that smell. The funk of exhaled air, of sweat, of hair, and of armpits, it never quite got removed by the air-recyclers, never quite left the pores of a ship. It stayed. Lingered. Became part of the ship’s DNA.

  “Doyen,” said one officer as she hustled past, her uniform disheveled and heavily stained. Such disarray would not have been tolerated years ago, but now was the Fall of Man, a time of social entropy and fatalism. Mankind had once looked at the stars and seen them as their birthright, but had manifestly underestimated the threats lingering out here. Clean uniforms were now the least of their concern.

  “Doyen,” said another officer, who was moving quickly with half a maintenance bot attached to his back. He moved sluggishly, Lyokh thought, his body leaden with exhaustion.

  After a few more people saluted him as “doyen”, Lyokh began feeling confused, and Reyes laughed at his bewilderment. “Word’s gotten around, old boy. Sorry, doyen. People are sharing the HUD vid, they know what you went up against and what you did.”

  “You would think they would be a little more…melancholy. Considering so many of their own died down there, and the Queen of Mothers betrayed them and was just slain.”

  Reyes shrugged. “They’re just glad to be getting out of here. Because of you and your team, we no longer have to throw ourselves at an unwinnable battle just to satisfy some old men sitting safely inside an asteroid a thousand light-years away.” He smiled. “Besides, it’s good to have a hero around, gives everyone something to aspire to. So I suggest you milk it.”

  “You know me,” Lyokh said.

  “Yes, I do. You’ll crawl inside your bunk and read your damn books, and won’t come out until everyone stops singing your praises. You’ll retreat into the background and hope nobody remembers you, that no medals come your way and that your name is forgotten.” Reyes gripped his shoulder with his large gauntlet. “I implore you, don’t do that. For all our sakes, don’t.”

  Lyokh sighed, and gave a half nod.

  Reyes led him through another hatchway, passing a trio of engineers working the main circuitry room.

  Another Naval man walking the corridors called him doyen. He didn’t like where this was going, and he desperately hoped that Reyes wasn’t leading him to some kind of celebratory gathering, where everyone would cheer for him and sing the IX Legion’s “Song of Returned Heroes.”

  “Where are we going?” he asked, nervously.

  “Like I said, it’s a surprise. I think you’ll like it, though. Down ladder!” he shouted as they came to the porthole leading down to Deck 2. Reyes gripped the handrails and slid to the bottom. Lyokh did the same. They moved through the main engineering compartment, where the temperature rose by almost thirty degrees.

  They stepped through a sweltering maze of mini-reactors and the computers that controlled them. Puddles of coolant had spilled onto the deck, and plumes of evac’d steam swirled in Lyokh’s face. The acrid smell of burning wires and ozone filled his nostrils, a smell so familiar it was now imprinted on his brain as the smell of home. That smell had him recalling Lucerne, Egleston, Halbreck, Norton, a dozen other faces that had traveled these corridors with him. Faces he would never see again.

  Lyokh tried to suppress the memories. As easily try to suppress the sorrow felt by lost comrades, or the sounds they had made as they died…

  “Doyen,” came a few more curt nods.

  They walked through the cargo bay, where drones moved about prioritizing supplies, foodstores, and any raw materials that Lord Ishimoto’s crew had mined along the way from asteroids. They passed through the fab room, where those raw materials were fed to the fabricators, turning them into usable items. As starships went through the cosmos, they collected asteroids for their nickel, iron, water, carbon, platinum, and clay polymers, using the ingredients to make everything from rivets for bulkheads, to clothing, to collimating lenses for the Pacifier’s main particle beam.

  “I hear you haven’t been to med bay since you woke up,” Reyes hollered over the whining machinery.

  “I haven’t had time,” Lyokh replied, watching with curiosity as two yeoman stood quickly to one side, saluting him as though he were an officer. One of them muttered “doyen” predictably.

  “You haven’t had time?” Reyes chuckled mirthlessly. “You’ve got nothing but time, Lyokh. Your part in the war has been over for more than three days.”

  “I wasn’t injured in the fighting,” he said. “God only knows how, but I managed to make it out without any injuries.”

  “Any physical injuries,” Reyes clarified. “Let’s be honest, we both know that’s not all that needs checking out. Your fluids need to be checked, you pushed yourself to the point of dehydration and mental breakdown. Did you know you weren’t even speaking intelligibly to the medics on the ’rake ride up?”

  Lyokh looked at him sharply. “No, I didn’t.”

  “You kept crying out for someone named Eulekk,” Reyes said. “And you were shouting out tactical orders, like you were still down there.”

  Lyokh felt a little embarrassed by that. “I don’t remember.”

  “Down ladder!” Reyes called out, sliding down to Deck 3. “Take care of yourself, Lyokh. We need people like you, especially now that the herd is thinning.”

  “Doyen,” said a midshipman, who nearly bumped into them at the hallway juncture.

  The smell of lubricants and cleaning solvents came rushing through the next hatchway, letting them know they had reached the repair compartments. Here, the deck was littered with weapons racks, armiger stations, and warhulks hanging overhead like slabs of beef on meat hooks. Orphesian armigers were at their workstations soldering pieces of armor back together. They glanced up at Lyokh as he passed, but did not call him doyen, or salute him at all. The Orphesians were not mili
tary themselves, just refugees from lost human colonies who used their mechanic skills to pay their way on Republic ships. No one ever spoke to them, but they were highly valued in the fleets.

  At the far end of the room, a wyrm was being de-armed. It was a support wyrm, its scales gen-engineered with chromatophores, which shifted pigmentation and allowed it to blend in with its environment, chameleon-like. Its scales currently matched the dull-gray hue of the cargo bay’s walls. It had only one dorsal gun, and was laden with intel-gathering arrays, medical equipment for field medics, and giant ammo hoppers for the warhulks. Support wyrms were generally serpens—200-foot-long males that could coil in tightly, deflating their many lungs and taking up little space—and were bred for long stretches in high altitudes, able to stay in the air for a hundred days, sometimes more.

  The wyrm was not in a cage, though it sure looked like it was, because of all the cables and steel bars that wound spaghetti-like around its body, either performing diagnostics checks or unbolting its support equipment from its wings, spine, and head. Two Tamers were signaling with bright-orange flares, using gestures the wyrm had learned meant they wanted it to lower its head. The wyrm was only a hundred years old or so, not even a buck yet. It lowered its huge head for inspection.

  “Malloy,” said Reyes, clapping one of the Tamers on the back as he passed. “What’s the status?”

  “Both exhaust vanes shot, sir,” Malloy said, who was interacting with a holopane floating in front of him. He pointed at the wyrm’s dorsal. “Both are going to need replacing if we want Tsarcco here to maneuver fast outside of atmosphere, I think.”

  Tsarcco was the name of the wyrm. All of the wyrms had names, usually derived from their own strange, ululating dracun. Some people called it a language, others said it was not evolved enough. They said it was more like whale songs, with syllables they had learned by listening to the many humanoid species that had tamed them.

  “Get the order in to the forgers in the fab room,” Reyes told Malloy. “Make sure they know it’s priority. We may need the flock to launch with us at Phanes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Lyokh looked at the Wyrm Master as they stepped beneath one of the deceptively flimsy flaps of the wyrm’s extended portside wing. “We’re heading to the Phanes System?”

  “We are,” Reyes said. “With a quick stop at the Wahlstrom Asteroid Field first to grab some raw materials. Then it’s on to Phanes. To Widden specifically, the fourth planet. Ever heard of it?”

  “Barely. Why are we headed there?”

  “The wardeness of the planet is also the queen of its largest city, Vastill. She’s also royalty, a princess, and the High Priestess of Mahl—some religion or other. She’s informed the Senate of trouble there. It’s the first communiqué between their government and the Republic in almost a hundred years, they’ve been isolationists, trading only in ice and water harvested from their poles.”

  Lyokh gave him a wary look.

  “Look, it wasn’t what I wanted, but High Command made it seem inevitable.” Reyes hove a sigh of resignation, his eyes leaden with solemn duty. “There’s been an attack. Nothing major yet, a group of Ascendancy scoutships passed through the asteroid belt in Phanes, did a scan of the mining facilities there, took out a couple of drone mining drills, but you know as well as anyone what that means.”

  Lyokh winced. His temper flared momentarily, and he came to a halt. “Wait…another campaign? Are you kidding me? We just—” Overhead, a load of plasma torpedoes moved on a motorized rack along a steel gantry. Lyokh waited for it to pass so that he didn’t have to shout over the rack’s enormous rumbling. “We just got finished with a major campaign, we lost thousands of good people! We need to get refitted. Phanes is only sixty light-years away, there’s nowhere between here and there to get the ordnance or materiel we need.”

  “Lyokh, listen—”

  “No, you listen! We need to do some resource-gathering, shore up our reserves. Tell that to High Command. Not to mention our people deserve a little downtime—”

  “There can’t be any downtime right now.”

  Lyokh leaned in at him. “Reyes, we cannot go into another war. We just can’t.”

  “We’ve been at war for the last two hundred years, Lyokh. A dozen different ones. With this government or that. Are you just now waking up to this fact?”

  “But the men…they have to rest sometime.” He nodded towards the bedraggled throngs of crewmen. “Look at them. Circles under their eyes, bodies dragging.” Just as he said it, a yeoman stumbled and spilled a crate full of coiled superconducting wire. It hit an officer’s foot. There was an argument that broke out, shoving. Others stepped in to break it up. “They’re at their wit’s end.”

  “You would leave Phanes to be swallowed by the Machinist Ascendancy? You would leave the High Priestess and everyone there to die, when their planet provides water to other Republic worlds? Water that can be used as fuel, or sustenance? You would disrupt what few bits of resources we have?”

  “I would order an immediate evacuation of the entire system, is what I would do.”

  “Then you’ll be happy to know it’s already been ordered.”

  Lyokh nodded gravely. “Then that’s all we can do. Tell that to the Visquain, they’ll listen to you.”

  Reyes shook his head. “I’m not telling them anything. You know as well as I do that there’s no way to evacuate five billion people in time before the Ascendancy shows up en masse.”

  Lyokh ground his teeth, bit out an old Timonese curse, and walked away a few steps before turning back to face the Wyrm Master. “What about the Faedyans? They’re closer, they’ve not been hit by the Brood or the Ascendancy, so they’ve got to be shored up for this. And they owe us after all those resupply runs we did for their colonies in the Sagittarius Arm.”

  Reyes shook his head morosely. “They’re not going to help us, Lyokh.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they’re evacuating, too.”

  Lyokh blinked. “What? Why—?”

  “They think they’ll be next. They’re probably right. Their own Cinor System isn’t too far away from Phanes. They’ve got their priorities straight, I guess, letting Phanes be a distraction for the Ascendancy while they prepare the entire Cinor civilization to make for the stars.”

  “Those…ungrateful sons of bitches—”

  “We know the Faedyans have been planning this for some time, Lyokh, building backup worlds out in the Scutum-Centaurus Arm, where no Brood worlds have ever been detected. They’ve been building them for hundreds of years, before we ever made contact with them. PI says atmo generators have been going for centuries on three dozen worlds, and that they’ve been detonating hydrogen bombs in the atmosphere for decades in order to melt ice caps. They’re a long-lived people, they’ve survived a million years of strife by knowing what to do. They know how to read the tea leaves, they know when it’s a lost cause.”

  “And the Isoshi?” Lyokh said. “What are they saying?”

  “Well, their world is divided among fifty different nation-states, half of them vying for power over the other half. Asking them for help is like asking to speak to the Brood leader, in that no one seems to know who that is.”

  “What about the Grennal?” asked Lyokh desperately.

  Reyes made a face.

  Of all corpus alienum, the Grennal were the newest spacefaring race known to the galaxy, only discovered by Republican scoutships a hundred years ago. They had developed their own FTL drives two hundred before that, and had terraformed exactly one planet outside of their solar system. However, their powers of industry were incredible. Humanoid in appearance, with multilayered robes that looked shamanistic in nature, they stood eight feet tall on average, with three variations of their species: V’laren, blue-skinned and six-armed; H’tosh, green-skinned and four-armed; and B’zod, gray-skinned and two-armed.

  The Grennal had a culture steeped in religion, and all their wars seemed to have had a
religious context and catalyst. They had established colonies in their solar system and fought major wars between those colonies. They had mined all twelve planets in their system, and all one hundred thirty-seven moons, depleting them of resources to build massive fleets that rivaled even humanity at its peak. They had proven themselves non-xenophobic when the humans and the Faedyans had formed the Coalition of Contact to make first contact, in order to warn them about the Brood threat. So far, though, the Grennal had been left alone, largely, they believed, because of prayers and offerings made to Zesh, the Fragmented God.

  Like Man, the Grennal believed that the stars were their birthright, yet in no way believed that it meant they had to destroy every civilization in their path to achieve their goal. Indeed, they were fascinated by the alien cultures they found post-contact, and had begun a market of trade between themselves and Man that had been mutually beneficial to both crumbling economies.

  But no more. Too many trade routes had been disturbed by the Brood, too many worlds cut off or brought low by the onslaught of broodlings. And whereas Man had started to fall because of spreading itself too thinly, the Grennal, having depleted their solar system, were beginning to collapse again because they could rarely leave it. Overpopulation and lack of resources would be their downfall.

  “The Grennal can’t make it out this far and you know it,” Reyes said.

  “Reyes, if we don’t have at least the Grennal on our side, then what good are we going to be at Phanes with our wounded fleet?” Lyokh said. “We’ve been on the move too long. Soon, all that we have, all that we are, will be…” He didn’t want to finish the sentence. He didn’t need to.

  “What do you expect the Visquain to do, Lyokh?”

  “We should restart the Coalition of Contact again,” he said instantly. “There are dozens of worlds that the Senate knows about, systems with developed worlds, charted by the stellarpaths. We could send envoys to make first-contact with them, get their help.”