Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  Once all its wings were extended, the greatwyrm slowly used them as overlapping armor, its own compristeel plates and energy-absorbent scales a ward against a variety of attacks.

  Satisfied with Nyphere’s cover deployment, Captain Oblavsky said, “Let hatch the eggs.”

  Vaultimyr’s belly opened up, and out came twelve hatchlings flanking a blood-red vipera. They deployed as smooth as blood droplets in water, and took to the void like they were born into it. They moved as a school of fish, and a squadron of starscreamers formed a razor-sharp speartip that moved towards the rear of Vaultimyr, preparing to encounter the Ascendancy ships.

  While they had done this, their enemies had kicked more power to their main engines and plunged directly into the Oort cloud. The Ascendancy ships closed the distance so quickly that it became apparent they were either reckless or had incredibly strong hulls, for the asteroids and debris that would be smacking up against them would be damaging to any normal vessel.

  Within minutes of expanding Nyphere’s wings and deploying the wyrm flocks, they came within fifty thousand miles of the Ascendancy sub-capital ships. Too distant to see with the naked eye, but close enough for scopes to pick up on them and resolve an image. It had been decades since anyone had laid eyes on the Ascendancy, and it was evident they had been hard at work. Their ships were about ten percent larger than Republican Katana-class, their hulls clean and shimmering silver, with hard angles that showed they were not meant for atmospheric maneuvering. Numerous gun mounts were all over the hull, looking quite random and asymmetric.

  So far, no sign of the immense castleships. Those would stay a million miles away or more, well beyond Pacifier’s reach.

  “Sir, I’ve got heat blooms,” called his ship’s TAO. The tactical action officer waved the data over to the captain’s station, and said, “Torpedoes in the water.”

  “Launch countermeasures.”

  “Launching countermeasures, aye, sir.”

  A single barrel of chaff and smart dust was fired from Vaultimyr’s belly, and went streaking out into the vacuum. Minutes later it detonated, the tiny metal fragments created a cloud of sensor-corrupting noise. Most of the torpedoes became confused, locked on to nothing at all, and went flying harmlessly out into the void, never to be seen again. A few slipped through, and ’screamers advanced to deal with them.

  “They’ve launched their starfighters,” the TAO said. A second later, he gasped. “Jesus…it…it looks like hundreds.”

  Oblavsky looked at the data. That couldn’t be right. Unless…

  Unless these Ascendancy ships are not so much destroyers themselves, but supermassive squadron carriers. It was an unusul tactic in space combat, going after a group of Republican starships not with starships of equal size, but of numerous tiny fighters. Death by a thousand cuts, Oblavsky thought.

  Something else was bothering him. Something about the enemy squadron formations. And their speed. It appeared to be increasing, which was unsual because they had to be picking up the Republican ’screamers coming right at them, they had to understand that going that speed would leave them without much maneuverability.

  “Sensor room, conn,” Oblavsky said.

  “Conn, sensor room.”

  “Give me active sensors on those incoming fighters. Check for life signs, heat signatures conducive with life-support systems, and molecule-chain EM polarization effects.”

  Seconds later, the sensor room came back with, “Sir, I’m not detecting anything. Either the pilots inside are in vacuum suits, or…”

  Oblavsky nodded. “Or they’re drones like ours.” He looked at his XO. “How many doms you want to bet each one is carrying a giant plasma warhead.”

  The XO’s face went slack. He looked at the squadron formations, saw what the captain saw. “They’re not assuming battle posture. They’re plunging straight ahead, picking up speed, not decreasing for maneuverability’s sake.” He looked at the captain. “They don’t care how many get shot down, they just need one to slip through.”

  Oblavsky nodded. “Send a tightbeam to all commands. Let them know about this tactic. We cannot let even one of them through.” He said it to everyone in CIC, to everyone down in the sensor pit, to the universe. “Not. One.”

  LORD ISHIMOTO RECEIVED the tightbeam from the Vaultimyr, but its captain and crew could hardly put the information to any use. They were currently engaged in battle with two squadrons, a stealth ship so far not identified, and four troop carriers that had shot up from the surface. The turrets had been dialed all the way up to five thousand rounds per second, and torpedoes had been launched with mixed results. The Ascendancy’s carriers had countermeasures of their own, both chaff and signal-distortion probes that tricked Lord Ishimoto’s targeting computers.

  They were currently fighting all these fights while also fighting their way through a hard Oberth maneuver. They were at the vertex of their plunge, at the closest point in their parabola approach to Widden, and had picked up tremendous speed thanks to the gravity assist. At the height of their slingshot, Captain Donovan shouted for a full burn of RCS thrusters. Lord Ishimoto’s inertial dampeners were fighting with her, and occasionally the crew were jerked around, slammed against their seats, and, in one instance, thrown up off the floor like children on a trampoline.

  One of the carriers harassing them exploded in a fireball and began its planetward plunge. Two enemy starfighters were nicked and began their dance with gravity, leaving thin tails of black smoke in their wake.

  Klaxons went off, sounding an impending impact.

  “Sir, torpedoes closing—” the TAO began.

  “Go with point-defense turrets,” he said, even as he heard the thumping of the guns.

  The TAO looked dismayed by what he saw on his screen. “Uh, skipper, we may have a problem. Enemy torpedoes are easily evading our guns. We’re getting transponder codes from them…and they’re ours. They’ve hacked our system remotely, and they know our IFF singals. They’re firing torpedoes with spoofed friendly transponder codes.”

  “Time to impact?” said Donovan.

  “Eighteen seconds!”

  Too close for countermeasures to do any good. “Brace for impact, XO!”

  Vosen shouted across a shipwide channel: “All stations, brace for impact!”

  The explosion felt like it hit somewhere just beneath them. All of Lord Ishimoto shook and whined, taking offense.

  “Damage report, if you please, Mr. Vosen,” Donovan shouted when it was over.

  While the XO got busy on that, Donovan checked the field display to see how the other starships were advancing. Not fast enough. Xiyi Lang had only just approached a vector and speed conducive to an insertion orbit. Not only that, but according to Widden’s satellite network, which Lord Ishimoto’s Comms One team had patched them into, Xiyi Lang was being approaching right now by Ascendancy starfighters racing up from the surface. Donovan wanted to help them, but right now they were on the other side of the planet, only able to see the enormous blood-red moon of Rah’zen rising halfway over the lip of the world.

  And we’ve got our own problems. Hopefully Shatterstar can provide enough cover until we come back around.

  Transmissions were coming up from the planet, from Gold Wing and Widden’s command structure. Both were desperate for back up, both were screaming that they were fighting to secure enough space for reinforcements, and that they would soon die without it.

  “THIS IS GOLD Wing Actual!” Lyokh shouted. “Come in Killhead One!”

  “Go with your message, Actual,” said a calm voice.

  “We are about to engage in heavy resistance. Request aerial support for suppression fire.”

  “We’ll see what we can do, Actual,” the voice said, in a tone that might have been talking about getting him ketchup for his steak.

  The mechanicae approached as tactical groups. Lyokh saw them from the aerial view the EyeSpy provided, until something or someone took the drone out. The EyeSpy’s footage had show
n hundreds of ants spreading through the alleys, streets, and even over a few rooftops as they made their approach to where Lyokh and his unit was currently dug in.

  The first time he saw one of them with his own eyes, it was just a quick glimpse, a body flitting from one piece of rubble to another, searching for cover. It was larger than a normal man, and monstrous in shape and design. The Machinists’ mechanicae had seen modifications since those vids of Prefect Ruhne’s had been taken. They were slimmer in the legs, but bulkier in the torso and upper bodies, with huge black masses of machinery attached to their backs like sick growths, made out of wires and fleshy tubes. Some of those wires fed into their arms, as well as the tinzer rifles the subhuman soldiers carried.

  Lyokh used his NUI to eye-flick through the vid his helmet had recorded of the split-second sighting, going over it again and again. The mechanicae’s eyes were an unblinking and glowing blue, while some kind of glowing wires ran from its sockets and its gaping mouth.

  A signal lit up in the upper right-hand corner of Lyokh’s HUD. Takirovanen and his team were in position.

  A missile launched from two or three blocks away, headed towards the sky, narrowly missing a skyrake but clipping Thrallyin as he swam through the air and attacked something on the ground Lyokh could not see. Republican Mantises crawled along the exterior of a building far behind him, and they blatted at the sky, missing more than they hit.

  Here it was, the tense moment before contact, when the enemy was all around you, and they knew that you knew it. Soldiers stared dead-faced down the length of their rifles, waiting. With a war raging in the neighboring streets all around them, they waited. War was funny like this. You never saw moments like this in any other conflict in life, when so much death and destruction were abound and with people at the epicenter kneeling calmly, some even whistling. Soldiers exchanged glances. Someone said something funny, and a group of guys had a chuckle. Someone else removed their helmet to have a quick vomit, getting it out of their system.

  The world continued to explode all around them as Reta watched and sunk lower behind the buildings. Gold Wing sat and waited. Enemies were still pouring into alleys all around them. Another blockbuster bomb exploded many miles away, too far to be seen.

  Lyokh glanced at a warning that came from Meiks. His group had spotted the movement of a large vehicle.

  Someone behind him coughed.

  Someone else was saying a prayer to some god or other.

  He heard someone whisper over the open channel, “Fuck this, fuck this, fuck this…just let me get home…let me get home…”

  Lyokh heard the first pop of gunfire coming from Devastator Wing.

  “Contact!” shouted Captain Tsuyoshi.

  Lyokh looked to his left, and saw soldiers with their backs pressed against buildings, sneaking and peeking around corners and letting off short controlled bursts. He saw two different groups clear one narrow alley by moving into it, three at a time, using the exact tactics he had shown them—one man crawling on his belly, one man kneel-stepping behind him, and one man at the back moving in a low crouch. All their rifles were aimed forward and firing in unison.

  Less than a second after Tsuyoshi had shouted contact, across the street Fire Wing had an open exchange with an incoming force. Lyokh watched as they sent a fusillade down into the alleys, and he saw a number of the mechanicae climbing along walls, apparently defying gravity and firing down on Ahlander’s forces. Then, one of the wall-walkers’s heads exploded. A second later, another one’s head did likewise. Lyokh couldn’t be sure, but he believed it was Takirovanen’s group, firing from high up.

  “Killhead One, this is Gold Wing Actual!” he shouted. “We are presently engaged! Repeat, presently engaged!”

  Devastator’s launchers fired grenades that exploded in midair and ignited the sky. A Ravager tank rolled forward into position, aiming its cannons and railgun down into key alleys. Warhulks took up a supporting posture around them, their particle-beam cannons igniting the windows of the buildings around them, for numerous mechanicae were beginning to pour out of them.

  The other Ravager unleashed hell on a building behind them, using its railgun to punch man-sized holes straight through the stone. However, many of the buildings were made out of compristeel, and it did not always yield to the railgun-flung tungsten rounds.

  “Twelve o’clock!” Meiks’s voice shouted in his ear.

  Lyokh raised his rifle over his cover and fired towards the end of the street, where a tank-sized behemoth came crawling on huge legs, with a snout that glowed green and looked deadly. “Weapons platform! Launchers forward!” he cried even as he fired, and tagged two of the mechanicae that were trying to lay down suppression fire for the weapons platform.

  Rockets soared from behind Lyokh, smashing into streets and sending up chunks of cobbled ground. Two warhulks trudged forward, firing from their wrist-mounted, triple-barreled gatling guns, tagging the mechanicae while their PBCs slashed at the grasshopper-like weapons platform. It appeared to have thin shields, and managed to deflect the power of their beams. Lyokh saw the name written on the leg of one of the warhulks: Susi. It was Heeten up there leading them, her guns sawing mechanicae in half, even as she stomped them underfoot. Bullets panged off the side of the mechs, even a few rocket-propelled grenades only managed to stagger them.

  The street was now alive with deafening explosions and gunfire, men screaming. A female soldier behind Lyokh was on the ground, a bullet through her neck, the hole fountaining blood. A med bot hovered over her with coagulant and sealant.

  A shadow fell over them, then was gone. Thrallyin. He was racing around their vicinity, screaming his war-song and doing battle with a number of enemy drones that were converging on their street.

  Lyokh saw all the tactical data on his HUD, and saw that it was encouraging, but he knew the bulk of the enemy force was still gathering around them. These were the forward guard, intended to soften them up for the kill. The real battle had not even begun yet.

  Suddenly, a message came directly from the War Council—the five members of the Visquain functioning in their duty as overseers of Second Fleet’s battle plans. It was direct from Quoden, who put it succinctly:Xiyi Lang destroyed. All souls lost. Deployment of all five drop ships was a success. Back up is on the way.

  The Xiyi Lang…lost? She was a Saber-class, very maneuverable and packing a lot of firepower. If not for Lord Ishimoto’s Pacifier, the Lang would have been the most lethal ship in the fleet. She would—

  Lyokh looked up when a flash of fire lit the sky. Twilight was just now upon the world, and there were a dozen or so stars out. Among those stars, a burning heap of wreckage, breaking apart in atmospheric entry, splintering off in all directions. The Lang, falling towards the planet, already doomed, looking like she may crash into Vastill some fifty miles off.

  However, there were also five tiny trails coming in for approach.

  Drop ships.

  They all spat out one or two wyrms apiece. A second later, three of the Novas exploded, one of them was tagged and veered off to the east, disappearing over the buildings. The last one overshot them by a mile.

  Lyokh’s heart sank.

  They were alone. No one was coming to help them for quite some time.

  Lyokh witnessed all this within seconds, all while sending bursts of rifle fire towards his enemies at the end of the street.

  He spied a few solemn faces around him.

  Lyokh screamed, “The wall!”

  Heeten’s voice came over the open channel, “Eulekk!”

  “The wall!” Meiks cried.

  Others soon took up the call. It was the familiar call of the doomed and the damned, the forgotten and the lost, the desperate and the dying. A senseless platitude that sought to make sense of a senseless world.

  TASK FORCE TWO was headed up by SDFA Ecclesiastes, a Greatwyrm-class dragonship, and presently it sat within the asteroid belt of the Phanes System, between the two largest gas giants, Porlusk
and Dutimeyer. They were parked in orbit around Asteroid Cryzek, a C-type asteroid with multiple mining operations and refueling stations. Cryzek was not only a major supplier of polymers and ice for the outer worlds, but it also served as a halfway point for all drone ice haulers going in- and out-system. Too, it had installations for major drone manufacture. If it fell, not only would fifty million people die, but it would collapse the Phanes economy.

  Half the reason they were in Phanes in the first place was to reopen an artery of trade that had been closed off from the Republic for centuries. Some trade had leaked out of here over the last few decades, but it had been a trickle, and usually only on a fleeting whim.

  Captain Utica of the Ecclesiastes knew this. He knew that all he and the three Scimitar-class super man-of-wars had to do was hold. They had deployed eight wyrms so far—two from each ship—and those were currently in orbit around Cryzek. Nuerthanc, the greatwyrm that regularly mounted itself to Ecclesiastes, had grown too large to be maneuverable, but its tough hide made for great extra shielding.

  There were distress calls coming up from Cryzek’s station command already, offering their surrender. Apparently, no one had told them the difference between Republic and Ascendancy ships, and they believed they had been successfully invaded. They were also panicking about what the wyrms would do to their space traffic.

  Starscreamers fanned out around the asteroid, forming quiet patrols. They had gone dark, switching off all engines and life-support systems, piloting within their e-suits, communicating through occasional light-blinking Morse. This was so that if any Ascendancy ships should show up, the ’screamers would be nearly impossible to detect.

  Two Nova troop carriers had just landed on Cryzek’s surface and deployed three hundred troops taking up defensive positions around key strategic locations.

  “Conn, sensors!” a deep male voice shouted.

  Captain Utica tapped a button on his armrest. “Go ahead, sensor room.”

  “Sir, we’ve got a profile of ships showing up on neutron-imaging. Three of them. They fit the descriptions the Vaultimyr tightbeamed to us. Large vessels. Roughly the size of a Katana-class.”