Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  Thessa looked at Prophet’s rear cam feed, and saw the battle happening over Deirdra going at an insanely accelerated rate. They were now within a field of slowed time.

  She smiled. “They wish to hoard all the glory of defilement, of glory, and take all the weapons that Deirdra’s government offers freely. We will not sit back and let the thanes of Vastill know that we stood idle, performing scout watches at the system’s outer rim like good little dogs. Let the thanes of Vastill know that the High Priestess is commanded only by Mahl, and let them fear her after her victory here.”

  She peered at them all through the dark eyelets of her mask.

  “We shall have victory. Mahl has shown us.”

  “Mahl has shown us,” they intoned.

  Kalder left me out of the Visquain, out of the decision-making, but he made two mistakes. He did not defile me, and he let me live.

  “Captain Ta, take us to the opening where the Knights of Sol made their ingress. I would sooner be at the forefront of this battle than at the rear.”

  She opened her hands, splaying her fingers wide. Already she sensed the fell power of Mahl gathering in her palms in warm pools of the most exquisite corruption.

  THE FIRST SHOTS were fired not by the maggot-things they had seen on Kennit 184c, nor by the octopus-things or eel-things. Once again the Brood proved their creativity in design, and further blurred the lines of understanding just who the Brood were as a species. For what emerged from the dark doorways and passages all around them, and what shuffled onto the streets, were large segmented centipede-things, easily eight feet tall and with dozens of legs on an elongated body, their flesh black and coated in armor, their heads the shape of an oval and with a single green eye that peered out at the invaders. Their arms were humanoid, only much longer, and six-jointed. Their eyes spat green particle beams that splashed off the plasma shields of each STACsuit, but with constant pressure burned through and melted armor, flesh, and bone.

  The first few centipedes were met by Meiks’s First Battalion, who made short work out of them. One of the larger ones proved more difficult, and tore through his battalion with arms wielding glowing blades that hewed men in half. Rabastiik swept low, grabbed the centipede in his jaws, then flew away, fighting with the thing like a carrion bird fighting a rabid raccoon it had plucked out of the field.

  There were drone starfighters streaking overhead, which Lyokh dimly recognized from an old archive on a Faedyan battle against the Brood. PI referred to these drones as clawcraft, because they looked like a clawed hand reaching out to tear at prey. Skyrakes were already engaging, with Novas offering support from the periphery of the dogfighting.

  Takirovanen moved Second Battalion up behind Meiks’s people, fanning out in a wider formation in a support capacity. Brother Penitent Morkovikson and his people had spilled out of shuttles launched from Tao of Piety, and took a command from Lyokh to spread evenly among the battalions, and get ready to offer medical attention.

  Bringing up the rear was Paupau with Third Battalion, who were encountering heavy resistance at their flanks already. More of the centipedes, their beams lasing the street behind them. Paupau successfully coordinated a counterattack using his battalion’s Mantis and Ravagers to catch the enemy in a crossfire.

  Lyokh moved at the center of this storm, kneeling at times to confer with the map updates that the Novas were sending to his HUD. Reports from the ’rakes and ’screamers showed a city-world as strange and limitless as a dream.

  A tongue of lightning shot out from the ground and licked the dome some twenty miles above, as Lyokh tried to focus on the layout of the worldship’s interior. They had only mapped about five miles of it so far, just a tiny fraction of the whole insular world. There were vast stretches of buildings that connected together for common purpose—energy, manufacturing, waste—and those clusters were either cubed or octagonal, for no discernible reason.

  “Launchers to the fore!” Tsuyoshi cried, kneeling just behind Lyokh. He was making the second-to-second tactical calls, alleviating some of the burden from Lyokh’s shoulders, allowing his commander time to go over the tactical data. “Ravagers front and to the rear! Cover our arse! Ptolem, I need your people at our flanks! Watch those alleys! Two hulks to each!”

  “This is Ptolem, I copy! Heeten’s Heroes moving to flanks!”

  Lyokh watched as Lieutenant Ptolem directed his mechs wordlessly, using a coordinate system that had already been worked out by the Novas’ onboard Diogenes supercomputer. The coords themselves were highly improvised, combining the curvilinear nature of a cylinder and the longitudinal/latitudinal system humans used for planets, then divvying up the sub-city sections into blocks, megablocks, and sector blocks, then further divvying up the matrix of lanes with randomly generated names—Raggos Street, Forest Avenue, Peachtree Lane. It gave them some semblance of reference.

  An explosion rent the air above them, and a clawcraft smashed into a windowless structure behind Lyokh that reached a thousand feet into the air. Thrallyin had taken down an enemy, but was now hit by a barrage of fire from six more clawcraft.

  Lyokh saw all of this, and absorbed all the latest data. Right now, he was just trying to survive the first few minutes, and get his people to develop roots inside this megastructure.

  Looking at the layout of their general vicinity, he decided he liked what Tsuyoshi had already commanded First Sol Cohort to do. But he saw the need for development. All plans needed development, they should never simply be made and never changed.

  Always in flux. In a constant state of becoming.

  “Sol Actual to Sol Two, do you copy?”

  “I copy, Actual,” came Meiks’s reply.

  “Meiks, take First Battalion and advance two hundred meters to Devonshire Street. There’s a clearing there, I marked it on your map. Proceed three-one-four, squad-line formation. Maintain hulks to flanks, Ravagers to fore and aft. Set up a moving perimeter with squad walls and phalanxes. Over!”

  “Copy that, doyen! Proceeding now!”

  Meiks switched to another channel to give the order, meanwhile Lyokh gave orders to Second and Third Battalions to offer support and to not not let any progress that First Battalion made be lost. No sooner had the order left his lips than a centipede came screaming out of a shadowy alley to his left. It was taller than most, screeching loudly, and flailing its six limbs. He rolled out of its way as it tore through his men. Tsuyoshi lit it up with his Fell rifle, and Lyokh came up firing into its single eye. Thirty other Knights joined in, and together brought it down.

  Lyokh jogged over to its corpse, looking through its wounds at white muscle, and even whiter blood that leaked out slowly like a mucous. There were snapping wires and sizzling circuitry, and occasionally the thing spasmed like it might come back to life. Lyokh had dark memories of the Ascendancy resurrection, and backed away.

  “Ziir,” he said on a local channel. “How are we coming with SIGINT?”

  “Tons of interference from the structure, I’m afraid, doyen,” the signals intelligence man said. “I’m rooting through it now. We did just received a message from Ishimoto, though.”

  Lyokh found that surprising. “How is that possible? I thought we were cut off due to the spacetime distortion.”

  “Somehow they managed to deploy stealth satellites, some of which are hovering just outside of the bubble, while others are hovering inside. Ishimoto is sending messages to sats outside, which manage to get through the bubble and relay the message to the sats inside the bubble, then slip back out. A satellite messenger service, sir.”

  Clever, he thought. “Well, what’s the message say?”

  “It says we have incoming from Task Force Mahl, and to expect support. But…”

  Lyokh waited. “But?”

  “I checked the pattern attenuation of the signal,” Ziir said. “As well as the rate of decay. If I’m right, it took six seconds for us to receive it. Radio signals travel at the speed of light, so the time it takes for us to get a
response is nothing huge to us. Our signals go out fast, and the fleet’s response is fast. But anything that happens to us down here happens at a snail’s pace for them, so by the time we formulate a message to send back, it’s likely to be irrelevant to them, completely unusable to them.”

  There was a tremor of fear in Ziir’s voice.

  “I think Kalder was right, communication is going to be…problematic.”

  Lyokh looked up, through the dome, and saw the war still happening at super speed. Another explosion lit the vast city, and he was pretty sure it was the Sikorskiy he saw being destroyed.

  “Then we’d better hustle, unless we want to be trapped down here forever and watch the universe age without us.”

  AS HE WATCHED the Sikorskiy be turned into another heap of slag, Kalder reached up to scratch his chin thoughtfully. There was two-day-old stubble growing there, fast becoming a beard. He had rarely left CIC, taking what meals he could, never taking his eyes off the battle overlong. He and the entire crew had been taking go-pills, committing themselves to the long-term engagement of the enemy. The broodlings had been slowed by Desh’s tactic of using the slag from Reason and Ego as cover, and borrowing a page from their playbook by focusing on a single one of them while all other remaining ships battered the same broodling with Pacifiers.

  Captain Trepp had used Miss Persephone for her best use, going at nearly full speed with her plasma shield up, flying blindly but making herself impervious to energy-based weapons, and ramming the broodling’s hull and scraping off its larger turrets.

  “Sensor room estimates they’re probably just now receiving the message about Task Force Mahl,” Desh said, his face equally shadowed by hair.

  Kalder nodded. “To them, it will have seemed relatively quick,” Kalder said. “But for us, the signal races across the gulf of space between us and the invisible sphere of the time-warp, then slows down a great deal as it makes its way towards them. But radio signals move far faster than people, and their response to any request we send is going to be hours old by the time we get it.”

  He looked at the worldship, and saw the molasses-slow approach of Governor Zane’s three ships. From the perspective of Kalder and everyone else, it had taken Task Force Mahl two days to snuggle up close enough to the worldship to send drop ships through the opening the Knights had made. For Zane and her people, maybe only two minutes had passed.

  Kalder looked out at the battlefield, which had become a sea of bifurcated hulls and superheated slag. Persephone turned slowly, slowly, coming back around for another attack on the broodling. Shatterstar was backing off to let its Pacifiers cool down, meanwhile Lord Ishimoto opened up with hers at Desh’s command, and Tao of Piety led a quick strafing run against the broodling chasing its sister ships, Divine Influence and No Forgiveness.

  The second broodling had already selected another target: Shatterstar. It focused all its power on the corvette, and an instant later, the other broodling followed suit.

  Meanwhile, the worldship continued raining fire on the Watchtower, which only continued to expand, but had now finally started to show signs of damage. Panels were being blown off, whole sections were coming away in the vacuous silence, and a few explosions rippled along its hull.

  Kalder had not prayed in a very long time. Not even the Buddha man had asked him to pray, only meditate. But now, more than ever, looking out at the Watchtower, he silently willed it to do something. He had reason to believe that it would, but…Perhaps it needs time. Perhaps it just requires us to hold the off a little while longer.

  But then another, more disturbing thought occurred to him.

  What if I was wrong? What if they aren’t coming?

  As he watched Shatterstar take a devastating hit, Kalder had just about been ready to believe that was true. Then, a voice came over the speaker at the captain’s seat, and it said, “Conn, sensor room! We’ve got incoming at the edge of the system! Moving fast beyond the Oort cloud, heading in-system!”

  Desh’s finger was on the button at once, his eyes aglow with fear. “Another broodling?”

  “Negative, we’ve got…looks like a W-shaped silhouette in profile.”

  Desh looked over Kalder.

  “Looks like…yes…yes, non-belligerency confirmed. It’s a Nqrarfonq-class. No…three of them! They’re Faedyan! The Faedyans are here!”

  Kalder sat in a seat usually reserved for the XO, and gave a small sigh. “At last,” he said. “At last.”

  “You knew about this?” Then, realization dawned on Desh’s face. He smiled, then scowled. “The message you sent them. The Faedyans we passed on our way to Phanes, the ones from the Moloqullor Federation of Assembled States. You sent them a message. What did you say?”

  “The Faedyans are fractured into many governments, but one thing they all want—that all sensible races want—is the power of the Strangers. For the promise of activating a Watchtower, I reckon they came. I told them it might happen, and that if it did, I would have more information for them concerning the nature of the Strangers. They took the bait.”

  “You were that certain the Watchtower would do what it did? Is that why we went to s’Dar in the first place?”

  Kalder shrugged. “Among other things,” he said, thinking about Lyokh’s claims of a world somewhere in the Crab Nebula. “But for now, it’s enough for you to know it worked, and we now have allies.” He gesticulated at the viewscreen. “And now look, the broodlings have both stopped firing. Saving their firepower for the newcomers. The playing field has changed, Captain.”

  IT TOOK HALF an hour to establish the perimeter he wanted. The centipedes took to the streets in mass numbers, ripping into First Battalion and nearly decimating Enceladus Wing. Second Battalion’s support made short work out of them, though, Takirovanen and his snipers providing killing shots from far away. This opened Lyokh’s mind to a new technique for fighting the centipedes—Give them space, and let Takirovanen’s sharpshooters pick them off, while the rest of us clean up the wounded.

  Paupau’s people engaged with a new kind of drone, a bipedal one, almost looking human, but with four arms and rifles not unlike the Ascendancy’s tinzers. Third Battalion’s warhulks advanced on them, their wrist turrets blatting as they turned the enemy to mincemeat, popping them like pimples, and Ravagers utterly destroyed the buildings that the four-armed monsters were pouring out of.

  So far, thirty-seven men had died, twenty were injured. Morkovikson’s people and a dozen med bots pulled the injured out of harm’s way and got to work on them.

  Once the perimeter was established on Devonshire Street, Lyokh gave himself a moment to glance upward. He could hardly believe what he saw. A trio of what looked like Faedyan ships, their signature W-shaped hulls giving them away. They had encircled a broodling and were spinning around and around it, in fast-forward like everything else, while Lord Ishimoto and others backed off, firing only the occasional Pacifier beam. Once, he saw Task Force Two come in to join the fray, while all of Task Force One retreated, vanishing altogether, only to return seconds later to relieve Task Force Two.

  “They’re fighting in shifts,” Takirovanen said, coming up beside him.

  Lyokh nodded. “Wonder how long it’s been.”

  “Hopefully long enough for my third ex-wife to be dead,” Meiks chuckled over the radio. Then he shouted, “Hey, Tarmond, move your shitty arse with those ammo hoppers! I’ve got hulks over here in need of a refill!”

  They now sat at the center of a street that Lyokh knew would soon be contested. All around them were high-rises, octagonal buildings, most of them without windows, but with plenty of vents for chuffing out black smoke. Lots of manufacturing was going on beneath their feet, and behind the walls around them, Lyokh was sure. The sky was filled not only with enemy clawcraft, but also drone ships, carrying loads of God only knew what. Construction machines and flying maintenance drones were zipping about everywhere, creating congestion within the sky.

  “They fly around like there is
n’t a war going on,” Takirovanen marveled.

  Devonshire Street, as it was labeled on his HUD, was octagonal, as well, and the Ravagers and warhulks had formed wide walls of compristeel at the mouth of each street, with First Battalion backing them up, and Second Battalion nestled at the center with the Brotherhood.

  A skyrake exploded high above, went into a death spiral, passed through the cloud of smog, and vanished somewhere too far away to be heard over the roar of battle. One street over, Lyokh heard multiple detonations. Paupau’s people were engaged again, a small group of the bipedal drones had tried ambushing them, nothing serious yet.

  Then, a voice said over the open channel, “Uh, doyen, this is Sergeant Pearce of Europa Wing. We’ve got someone here for you.”

  That was strange. The sergeant said someone, not something. “What is it, Pearce?”

  “Sir, it’s a security bot, TRX model, says it was sent by Kalder with a message, and something else you might need. I don’t know what it is. Looks like…a slab of steel, a tablet of some kind, I don’t know.”

  “Send the bot to my coords.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Ziir!” Lyokh called as he moved through the ranks of men knelt behind various pieces of cover and aiming their weapons at rooftops and apertures in the buildings. “Tell me something!”

  Their lead SIGINT operative tossed two EyeSpys into the air. Lyokh watched them zip away in opposite directions. It was the seventh pair of drones he’d released, and most of them were being shot down. “Uh, so far I’ve compiled a list of best guesses. It’s long, doyen. Really long.”

  “Narrow it down, Sergeant,” he said, moving in a low crouch behind a group of Heeten’s Heroes, where Meiks was hunkered down and peeking out at the next street. “Time’s flying, and we’ve got a fleet counting on us.”