by Chad Huskins
“You’re reaching there, brother. You know some of those worlds we’ve been watching are at war with each other,” Reyes argued.
“Then we unite them behind a common cause.”
“You mean the Brood?”
“No, I mean the scourge of head lice,” Lyokh said tetchily. “Of course the Brood! And the Machinist Ascendancy, and the Micinki, and all other warmongers. Let them know they’ve got enemies all around them that they don’t even know about yet.”
Reyes made a face. “What would you like us to do, Lyokh? Fly into to previously uncontacted worlds—which they will likely see as some kind of invasion in itself, if most other first-contacts are any indication—and then learn their ways, their language, all inside a few weeks, and understand them enough to make meaningful negotiations? Then what, somehow communicate to them that alien species and a galaxy-swallowing techno-organic race is coming to kill them all?” He snorted out a laugh. “We would probably be embroiled in war with them for a dozen years before they cooled down enough to listen, and we can’t afford more first-contact wars.”
Reyes was referring to a feudal era that, according to legend, took place sometime in the dim past, when humanity had first met with peaceful worlds. Coalitions had been formed, it was said, much like the Coalition of Contact, only a bit more ardent. Whole fleets plunging into star systems to try and “deliver” intelligent civilizations from their ignorance. It didn’t always go as planned. After millions died on all sides, a more cautious, staged approach was adopted, until finally the Republic reverted to how other races had treated humanity before they launched into the stars—they waited patiently for developing worlds to discover the truth of the cosmic community for themselves.
“Besides,” Reyes continued, “most of those civilizations have done nothing more than land on a moon or two, they don’t have any sort of standing space fleet.”
Lyokh ran his hands through his cropped black hair, then punched the side of a compristeel crate filled with ammo hoppers. A few beaten, oil-stained faces glanced in his direction, then went back to their work. He looked at Reyes. “Anything from Third Fleet?”
Reyes shook his head forlornly.
“Fifth?”
“They’re pulling back into the Juarez System,” Reyes said. “They can’t get to us because the entire Orion-Cygnus Arm is littered with random clumps of the Brood.”
“So, what, they’re completely cut off? Are they going to starve out there?”
“One of their stellarpaths thinks he’s found a star system a few light-years away that was once an old human colony, maybe five thousand years ago. A bunch of religious zealots that wanted to be left alone. Fifth’s commander is hoping to push there, maybe find some resources.” He offered a hopeful smile. “Who knows, maybe they’ll find a whole star system of humans that have built up their own technology over the last few millennia, and will have a space fleet that can help.”
“Or they’ll find the Brood there first,” Lyokh said. “Or get boxed in, unable to leave, and after a hundred years of Decay, they’ll become just another lost colony.” He sighed heavily. “We don’t have what it takes to take on another fleet of machine cultists and you know it, Reyes.”
“It’s what High Command wants,” the Wyrm Master said.
Lyokh noticed that he didn’t deny the inevitability of defeat. “Then this will be our last battle.” Once again, Lyokh was already transitioning back into the mode of the already-dead, resigning himself to a fate no one else admitted to, but a look at all the haggard faces around him said that they understood it. “This is it. The last fight.”
“It’s what High Command wants,” Reyes repeated, in a tone that suggested he should not voice his concerns too loudly. “They’ve conferred with the Visquain, and the Two Consuls, and there’s word we’ll get some support from Pennick’s fleet.” He shrugged, adding, “Plus, this will act as a rendezvous point for us and Kalder.”
Lyokh shook his head, not understanding. “Kalder? Who the hell is that?”
“I forgot, you don’t follow politics, do you?”
Lyokh shrugged. “Why should I? They don’t seem to follow us.”
“Kalder is a senator, he lives and works inside Monarch.”
“What’s Monarch?”
“The asteroid where our government was forced to fall back to.”
Lyokh nodded thoughtfully. He often wondered why he and the rest of Second Fleet, and all fleets for that matter, hadn’t just said to hell with the so-called powers that be and gone off on their own, making their own decisions, forgetting the politicians and rebuilding themselves as a military culture, with a military government.
But he knew the reasons. If you broke protocol now, if you just up and decided that the established order no longer mattered, then how much longer before that sentiment became a general philosophy? How long before the disease of rebellion spread amongst the crews of each fleet? How long before the first mutiny? How long before humanity degenerated into a scattered few swarms of failing starships, running low on supplies, forced to land on barely habitable worlds where they let the hulking starships rust away into nothing, while the too-few inhabitants of that world began the inevitable downward spiral of a dead people?
How long before humanity ended up being just a bunch of stranded hillbillies, their brains turned to mush, their history among the stars passing into legend, then into myth, forming new religions of ancestral star-gods or some such?
How long?
We’re all headed for that anyway, I suppose, Lyokh thought morosely. It’s just a matter of time. Who knows, maybe it’s already happened before. Probably has. How else did humanity get spread all over hell, with colonies we don’t even remember establishing in far corners of the galaxy?
Like the nightmares of death and destruction, Lyokh shook the thought away. “Who is this…Kalder, did you say? Why does he want to rendezvous with us? And at Phanes, of all places?”
“I only read the message that Pennick sent to the rear admiral,” Reyes said. “That we are to be among the first to aid Senator Kalder in the Crusade.”
Lyokh arched an eyebrow. “Crusade?”
“Pennick’s words, not mine.” Reyes waved a hand. “But that’s weeks from now. Right now, let’s go and meet your surprise.”
THEY PASSED THE main weapons exhaust chamber, which was loaded with clattering bots moving all around the complex tangle of plasma coils and heat vents. They were working on the particle accelerator of Lord Ishimoto’s primary weapon, whose barrel was currently retracted and hissing with jets of superheated steam.
Fast and sleek, Lord Ishimoto was built on a design meant for interdiction missions, but due to shortages of true firepower in the fleet, she had undergone some remodeling in order to unleash some punishing damage. She had three point-defense turrets mounted to her top and sides, each one capable of firing 40mm rounds of Kubar depleted-uranium rounds, with an adjustable rate of fire ranging from 1,000-7,000 rounds per minute. Two torpedo tubes at the front of the ship could fire Ender torpedoes, each one equipped with high-yield plasma warheads.
But Lord Ishimoto’s ultimate weapon came from its DLS/x1.22 particle accelerator, located near the rear of the ship, and powered by the ship’s own fusion drive. It fed a tightbeamed burst of excited particles into the Zhang Advanced Particle System, or ZAPS, which then funneled the beam through a collimating lens. The result was the Particle Cannon Focused Ray (PaCFR), colloquially known as the Pacifier, located on the ship’s belly. Pacifier fired a narrow particle-beam with an effective range up to fifty thousand miles, with a yield of twenty-three terajoules—about one-quarter the energy expended in an atomic bomb.
Every time he passed the ZAPS room, Lyokh had to marvel at the thing. The culmination of past brilliant minds, the entire setup was a monument to the Age of Lost Technology, when an unknown thousand-year calamity had separated human colonies for such long stretches that, by the time they started reestablishing contact, each col
ony had evolved along different lines, with varying degrees of technology, all with mixed results. Only one colony—the Colony of Iris in Proxima Centauri—had managed to create major particle-beam weapons.
In those days, the Republic was formed in an effort to bring all of humanity back under one umbrella. And just when things had started to look promising for Man, along came the Brood. The Republic had recovered tech from the Colony of Iris after the Brood decimated their fleets, but not enough of their genius elite had survived to explain how it all worked, not to its finest detail. And, as everyone knew, the devil was in the details.
There were a few Orphesians who understood the Pacifier weapon system well enough to conduct maintenance, but someday there would be none. The knowledge was becoming lost again, and mankind could afford little time to train engineers. For Lyokh, looking upon the might of the Pacifier was both awe-inspiring and depressing.
Reyes led him through another hangar, where, at the far end, more warhulks rested. There were so many of them, the large and lumbering Dagonite series, the small and nimble Aravastar series, and the Untamak series with its enormous grapplers. They stood upright on the deck, receiving maintenance from their technicians. The air was redolent with the acrid smoke of spitting welders, and the competing smells of hydraulic fluid and lubricants. The deck was littered by sand that had been tossed on the floor to clean up oil spills.
Lyokh, unfortunately, was the victim of one such spill, and before he or Reyes could stop him, one foot shot out from underneath him and he slammed hard on his ass, his entire body-glove becoming soaked with the slick liquid.
“Shit!” he shouted, smacking his knee in anger.
“Well, well, well,” a familiar voice laughed. “Hello, handsome.”
Lyokh looked up. Climbing down from a warhulk ahead of him, flipping up the visor of her welding helmet, stood a woman whose face he had only ever seen through a thick plasteel window, wreathed with puddles of control-board light. He fought to keep the smile from his face. He didn’t know why, but he felt like keeping his cool, after having just made a fool of himself.
“Heeten?”
“And to think, after all they through at us, all the Brood had to do was toss a little lubricant on the ground and the mighty doyen would have fallen,” she said, giving him a wide grin.
She was short, maybe only five-foot-six, but that was pretty normal for mech pilots. She was slim, too, with green eyes, pale skin, and long blonde hair pulled up into two topknots. She moved without grace, with an insouciant swagger that typified mech pilots, her arms showing some muscle that gave her a masculine flair. But her hips and face were all woman.
She offered him a hand, and he took it. Stood up slowly. As soon as he was on his feet, she gave him a mock salute. “And if the mighty doyen had fallen, what ever would have become of his poor squad?”
He smirked. Tried to think of something to say.
She shook her head and put up a hand to silence him. “Don’t. You don’t have to try and be clever. I’ve heard you don’t have a sense of humor.”
Lyokh blinked. “Who…?” He looked at Reyes, who was smiling. “Yeah, well, maybe I don’t find a whole lot to grin about.”
Heeten’s own smile wavered a bit. She nodded. “Right. Dead friends and all.”
Lyokh thought that was a flippant way of putting it. Maybe she did, too, because she recovered by clearing her throat, and pointing at her warhulk. “What do you think?”
He gave it an appraisal. “It’s a lot cleaner than the last time I saw it.”
Heeten nodded at her mech like a proud mama. The modified Mark IV was repainted with infrared-suppressant gray, and was outfitted with a new holopane-plasteel screen—the last one had been cracked by the things trying to peel her out.
Heeten looked at Lyokh for a moment, like she expected more from him. Lyokh just stood there awkwardly, wondering if this was the surprise that Reyes had for him. If so, he wasn’t sure he liked it. He only knew this woman through combat, had never shared a drink with her, had never shared anything besides his tactics against the Brood.
Then, as if requesting a private audience through telepathy, Heeten looked at Reyes, who nodded curtly. “I’ve got a report to make to High Command in one hour, and I must speak with the Visiquain about our mobilization. It was good seeing you, Lyokh,” he said, giving him a pat on the shoulder as he departed.
Lyokh watched him go, then looked at Heeten. She looked back at him, and let her arms flop out to her side. “So,” she said.
“So.”
They looked at each other, the deck buzzing around them with activity. Lyokh looked at the purple wingspan painted on the warhulk’s left arm. “Purple Wing, huh?”
“Yep, that’s us. Or, I guess, that’s me.”
Lyokh looked at her. “The others…?”
She shook her head.
“Sorry.”
“I’m sorry for you, too. We’re in the same boat. The only ones that made it out of that chamber were you, me, Meiks,and Takirovanen. Meiks is from Green, they found four of his people during the evac, two of them didn’t make it. Takirovanen got luckier, almost a dozen of Red Wing got buried beneath a collapsed wall as soon as they made planetfall, spent the whole four days trying not to run out of water. I understand they ran out of go-pills the second day, had to subsist off of bits of the enemy. Two of them have some sickness the med bots haven’t identified yet.”
Lyokh nodded slowly, thinking on that. By some instinct built into all of us, he realized that walking while talking was probably best. As he walked, Heeten naturally joined him, and they moved quietly for a time around the bay. They passed pieces of warhulks in various stages of assembly or disassembly, torsos hanging from clamps, their pilots climbing up through their dangling guts to get at hard-to-reach servo-brains. Steel arms and legs the size of a man’s body lay on the floor, dissected like a schoolchild’s experiment, the mechanics fumbling around for the right tools.
Here, Lyokh saw the conglomerate of Those Rescued. Men and women from countless worlds that the Coalition of Contact had pushed to retrieve in decades past.
The master mechanics of the Lost Colony of Orpheus were here, with their silvery robes of office and mass-tangle of wires and pneumatic hoses, moving about the hangar with purpose and giving their attention to every detail. The Orphesians lent their considerable know-how; knowledge of machines garnered from nine hundred years being left alone in the Orpheus System, toiling in the vast seas of asteroids there, building titan harvesting machines of their own. Orphesian apprentice-mechanics, in small gold robes and wearing the iron hammer sigil around their necks, dashed here and there to retrieve tools, clean up spills, and give order lists to the forgers in the fabricator room.
There were dozens of bald people with mocha-colored flesh, clad only in loincloths and with ritualistic scarifications all over their bodies. These were the vorta, collected from the Lost Colony of Faber. It was said that they had actually lost all knowledge of space travel, and eventually re-invented the A-drive all by themselves, but vorta civilization had collapsed soon after that, descending into a series of internecine wars. By the time the Republic found them, the vorta lived on two planets and three moons, unable to even reach orbit, all of them living in irradiated wastelands and becoming the thralls of charismatic demagogues. The ones that had been thankful for rescue were aboard Lord Ishimoto, or served in other fleets doing cleaning or other menial labor. The rest were still toiling stubbornly on their wasteland worlds, fine with being forgotten.
Lyokh watched it all with sadness. Remnants, all of them. Even he was a remnant. They were all leftover debris of something that had once been, some vague, not even half-remembered legacy of a people that had clawed out of the womb of Earth six thousand years ago, and, through a series of expansions and deflations, had finally withered.
If it wasn’t the Brood, we would’ve done it to ourselves. He didn’t like the defeatist thinking. It was a character flaw, he knew, in
stark contrast to the never-die spirit he had discovered when entering the Army, and which had burned so brightly in the hive of Kennit 184c.
“Don’t let it taint you,” Heeten said, suddenly invading his thoughts.
He looked at her, confused. “Sorry?”
“The experience on planetside, you’re letting it get to you.”
He snorted. “What are you, a mind reader?”
“You think I haven’t seen that look before?” she returned. “I see it all the time, especially after there’s a run-in with the Brood. It’s the look of someone who doesn’t see the point in it anymore.”
“Do you?” he asked. “See a point?”
She shrugged. “I see nothing else to do but to keep at it.”
“So do I.”
“Really?”
Lyokh nodded. “Maybe it’s the reason for my grim humorlessness that someone told you about,” he said, nodding in the direction that Reyes went.
Heeten’s smile wavered again, and her green eyes gave him a look of reappraisal. “I have to admit, the man we followed in those tunnels…well, I wouldn’t have thought he would be you. This isn’t how I imagined you. I mean no offense. But the guy we followed down there…we couldn’t see his face, just his helmet, and we heard his voice. Your voice. The man standing in front of me doesn’t seem like the same guy I followed. I don’t know why, you just seem…you know? Again, no offense.”
He shrugged. “None taken.” There might have been a little, but it was negligible. What was an insult in the Fall of Man?
“So you don’t see a reason to keep on fighting?” she said.
Lyokh paused to let a barefooted vorta go scuttling by with his mop and bucket. “No reason, just habit. But I guess that’s all I need. And I can fight as long as I see an objective. A near objective,” he clarified. “Destroy this ship, rescue that person, recon this sector of space. It’s better if I look at it all in small increments like that. If I looked at the totality of it, if I focused on all of it, I think I’d see the hopelessness of the endeavor, and then I’d be…” He trailed off.
