Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  “Yeah,” Meiks said, “and I’ve got a birthday in three weeks, I don’t wanna be late.”

  “I’ve got bad news, friend,” Ptolem chimed in. “By the look of things up there, I’m pretty sure you already missed it.”

  Lyokh looked up just in time to see another flash. And his jaw went slack. For a moment, he didn’t believe what he was seeing. Another ship had been destroyed, but rather than one of Crusade Fleet’s, or even the Faedyans…

  “The broodling’s done!” someone shouted. “Look! They blew it the fuck up!”

  Everyone looked up. They had never seen this sight before, and the temptation to forget what they were doing and cheer was great. Lyokh heard a bit of hooting and clapping, and cut it short quickly. “All right, everybody! Focus! Hoy up! Do not take your eyes off your surroundings! Captains, give updates to your battalion leaders! Knight Companions, report to me once you have those updates! The wall!”

  “THE WALL!” they answered.

  While he was looking up, a hand tapped his shoulder. Lyokh turned, and stood face-to-face with the single, orange-glowing eye of a TRX security bot. He’d seen its like before, but not in a long while. They were tricky things, capable of hacking, tracking, and close-quarters combat, with modular pieces meant for upgrades of specializations. What the hell is this thing doing here? How did it even make it this far?

  By the look of it, it had barely done so. One of its arms was missing, and in its remaining hand was a thing wrapped in silk cloth, maybe a foot in width, octagon-shaped, and thick. The robot presented the item, and said in a monotone voice of clipped cadence, “Here is something you may need.”

  “What is this?” Lyokh shouted over the sound of another skyrake exploding overhead.

  “I do not know. I did not look. But there is a message explaining it. It comes from Kalder. Goodbye.”

  Lyokh took the object, felt its considerable weight, even with the strength-assist from his STACsuit. Watching the TRX turn and walk away, he hollered, “Wait! Where are you going? Aren’t you going to stay and help?”

  “My master requires me elsewhere, and I am already behind schedule.”

  “Behind schedule?”

  “Yes, it took me a day to commandeer a civilian shuttle and navigate it towards the worldship. If my calculations are correct, several more days will have already passed.”

  Days, he thought, glancing upward. So many lost days are passing above our heads.

  “I have to get back to my shuttle, if it is even still there. Goodbye, Sir Captain Lyokh.”

  The bot disappeared through the smoke from a burned-out Mantis, and never looked back.

  Lyokh opened the cloth, and stared at a tablet made out of green alloy, with perfect octagonal dimensions, and with an engraving of such precision that he was instantly sure of two things. That it belonged in a museum, and that it was of alien origin. A dataskiff was taped to it. Lyokh tapped the top of the finger-sized chip, and told his suit’s computer to rifle through its unpacking algorithms to read the dataskiff.

  From of a million pixels swirling like sand, the chiseled-in-stone face of Holace Kalder assembled in front of him. The old man looked in a hurry, out of breath. “Captain Lyokh, hopefully this message and the Tablet both reach you in good time. I will not waste what time you have, as I’m sure you are busy down there. The Tablet in your hand interacts with Brood technology, it can snag their communications from frequencies your SIGINT officers will not be able to detect—”

  Even as Kalder spoke, something incredible was taking place. In the palm of Lyokh’s hand, the Tablet was shifting colors, assembling tiny holographic strands of code that hovered only an inch off its surface, first in alien runes, symbols he’d never seen before, then in patterns he recognized. Number sequences, first in trinary, then in binary, then in both. The surface of the Tablet was wavering. The carving on its surface, an image of some alien holding up an object against a broodling, began to fade, and a many-colored screen began to show. A dazzling array of alphabets began to assemble before him. They disassembled and reassembled as different symbols entirely.

  “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” he murmured to himself.

  On his screen, Kalder was still going on, “—regret that I only have this to offer in aid. I cannot even be sure it will do you any good, but pay attention to it. I’ve been told that its kind will attempt to decipher Brood coding-language. It is a sequencer. A codex. Perhaps it will guide you. Good luck, and may your enemies run far.”

  As Kalder’s image winked out, Lyokh looked down at the object. He couldn’t see how in the world it would be of any use.

  “Doyen!” Ziir called excitedly. “I think I’ve got something!”

  “Let’s hear it, Ziir,” he said, folding the Tablet back into its cloth and tucking it inside one of the empty mag pockets on his belt.

  Ziir started his report—

  —when all at once the ground beneath them heaved. The floor was like a large beast about to give birth. Then, it formed cracks, fragmented. Panels, hitherto unseen, began sliding to one side like manhole covers. And, out from each hole, pouring like rats fleeing a sinking ship, came numbers of Brood drones unlike anything they’d ever seen.

  The ambush was a perfect one, and the world erupted into the sound of guns, swords, and death screams.

  TWENTY-NINE DAYS. That’s what it had taken to throw everything they had at the broodling. That’s how long it had taken to coordinate fully with the Faedyans. Twenty-nine days of Kalder barely sleeping, receiving updates from Desh, approving his decision to alternate “fighting shifts” with Task Force One. It seemed a good enough plan—retreat to the asteroid belts, regroup, rest, spend a few days gathering resources from the asteroids themselves, work the fab room like a bunch of slaves to create weaponry, and have the Orphesians conduct the necessary repairs. Meanwhile, Task Force Three would swoop in to relieve Two, and when Task Force One was ready, they returned, Lord Ishimoto back at the lead, to aid the Faedyans in whatever way they could.

  Kalder had grown a fully, scraggly beard now, one as unkempt as the hair on his head. It was in this fashion that he made his first appearance by vid to the Chief Presider of the United Congress of Pelgotham, and convinced him to send the last of his reserves. Kalder also managed to sway more of Deirdra’s nations over to their side, their militaries tossing what missiles and nukes they had into orbit for Crusade Fleet to pick up, to use in tandem with their own arsenal.

  When the broodling finally exploded, Kalder had been asleep, and it was Julian who woke him to come see. “Sir, you’ll want to see this.”

  He got up and rushed out, barefooted as usual, the cold compristeel floor bracing. “Is it done?”

  “It’s done, sir,” Julian smiled.

  “And?”

  “It’s beautiful. But there are still more broodlings arriving.”

  Kalder nodded. “This fight is not over, not by a light-year.” He looked at Julian, “And Miss Holdengard?”

  Julian’s face turned dour. “I’ve made inquiries. No one has seen her or her shuttle since she made her emergency escape, sir. It was all pretty chaotic back then, no one was really keeping track of her.”

  “I understand, Julian. Keep searching.”

  The revelation that Moira had told all she knew to Captain Lyokh had proved to Kalder that he could still make the mistake of trusting too easily. He had seen her curiosity over who he was, and what all he wanted to achieve with the Crusade, and he had become worried about her. He’d thought that letting her in a little might assuage her, especially if he could direct her with the truth—for he could not lie to her. He’d thought she would be a team player. In the end, she had been like all the other stellarpaths, more than willing to leak what she knew.

  He rushed into CIC, demanding updates. Desh was there, parsing the inflow of data. His beard was now thick and merging seamlessly with his moppy black hair. When Kalder looked at the main viewscreen, he saw what all the fuss was ab
out.

  Cheers went up as the broodling continued to come apart in pieces. The three Faedyan ships were relentless, and did not stop blasting the pieces of the destroyed broodling with their own particle beams until it was naught but tiny chunks. The other broodling banked away, and made a new orbit around the debris and attempted to hide behind the larger chunks of Sikorskiy.

  “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen a Brood ship of any kind perform an evasive action,” Desh said.

  Kalder nodded, not mentioning that it was the third such time for him. He glanced over at the worldship, looming now over Deirdra like a god of death, still firing its full force at the Watchtower. Looking over at the Watchtower itself, he saw it had expanded immensely, still spreading its many wings, reaching now some fifty miles in height, with a diameter half as big.

  “Are the Brood still having trouble weaving in and out of the Safe Zone?” That’s what they had called the energy shield that the Watchtower had draped around their area, extending roughly twenty miles out from itself. All Crusade ships had been utilizing the Safe Zone, huddling close to it and forcing the Brood ships to come in close-quarters for a fight.

  “You know it,” Desh said. “And the Faedyans have started using it, too, though they have to maneuver outside of it sometimes to get a clear shot of the broodlings without the Watchtower getting in the way.” He smiled. “They’re using the Watchtower as cover, in hit-and-run maneuvers, while our ships harass the Brood from behind. It’s working. Slowly, piece by piece, but it’s working.”

  Kalder scratched at his beard, watching it all play out slowly, the lumbering ships jockeying for position.

  “Conn, the Faedyans are sending a message through,” said Comms One. “Diogenes is interpreting it now.”

  “Play it,” Desh said.

  A mix of guttural and singsong noises came through; one of many languages of Faeyda Cradle. An AI’s voice speaking English was overlaid on the message, saying, “We hope that you will remember our involvement here, and recall that we helped you before the Isoshi arrived.”

  “Arrived?” said XO Vosen. “What are they talking about? What Isoshi?”

  “It’s happening,” Kalder said.

  “What is?”

  “Captain, call down to the sensor room, and ask them to conduct a far-ranging scan of the entire system,” Kalder commanded. “Tell them to network to the probes Task Force Two and Three have been dropping around the system the last two weeks, and have them look for any large levels of quantum second-order phase transitions taking place in the system. Tell them to cast about for any emissions of scalar fields.”

  Desh no longer questioned Kalder. None of them did. Even Vosen seemed to have caught on to the fact that Kalder knew things they didn’t, things most humans didn’t know.

  The sensor room responded, “That’s…that’s highly unusual scanning criteria. I mean, we can do it, but it’ll take a few minutes. I’ll have to switch Diogenes over to a specialized brane warp setting, the Midway-detection programming, and a quantum condensation setting to look for byproducts of such processes.”

  “Tell us the instant you know something,” Desh said, then turned to Kalder. “You expecting company?”

  “I hope so,” he said. “How are the other Cohorts doing in the rest of the system?”

  “I just got an update from Ahlander,” Desh said, referring to the Knight Companion that Lyokh had put in charge of the Second Sol Cohort. “Third Battalion is dug in on Thustra, and Fourth Battalion has Torrence, the drone factories are secured, no sign of Brood activity. I left Vaultimyr and Bushido’s Culmination there to provide support and sensor networks.”

  “And the asteroid belts?”

  “Ecclesiastes and the rest of Task Force Three have it covered. Knight Companion Josep says he’s ready to deploy his Third Sol Cohort, but I saw no reason. The other broodlings we detected moving in have kept away, and are orbiting Veronica near its chromosphere.”

  Orbiting the sun, Kalder thought. Interesting. Probably they wish to control the Dyson swarm that the Takans put in place, seeing as how it will surely become an energy supply for our fleet, eventually.

  Kalder nodded. “Just as well, we may need Josep’s Cohort here at Deirdra before this thing is through. How many broodlings are there now?”

  “Six, we’re waiting for the sensor room to confirm a seventh. They’re all keeping away for the moment.”

  “Because they’ve never seen this before. More than twenty ships, all Pacifier-ready, with a Faedyan task force and an active Watchtower. And now one of theirs has just been destroyed. They’re contemplating something they haven’t thought about since the time of the Strangers: The possibility of defeat.” He nodded, “And if I’m right, they’re already detecting something we haven’t even seen yet.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Sensor room, conn!” shouted DeStren.

  “I believe that’ll be them,” Kalder said.

  “Go ahead, sensors,” Desh said, eyeing Kalder suspiciously.

  “Sir, huge readings on those scalar fields, but they’re all over the place! Spacetime distortions, too! It’s all conducive with what we know of Isoshi signatures around bulk space ingress/egress points.”

  Desh looked at Kalder. “The Midway. Only the Brood and the Isoshi know how to travel that way.”

  “It’s not the Brood,” Kalder said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Look at those broodlings huddled near the sun. They’re afraid, Captain. They know what’s coming.” He added, “And the Faedyans’ last transmission all but gave the game away.”

  Seconds later, the confirmation came in from DeStren. “Uh, conn, we’ve got Isoshi incoming. Beckinger-class. Popped out of nowhere. They’re hailing us now, Diogenes is translating…”

  To Kalder, Desh said, “Before all this started, you seemed to suggest that the dead broodling was put here on purpose, a trap laid for humanity a thousand years ago. If that’s the case, then they can see the future. And if they can see the future, then how come they didn’t see this coming? All of us, uniting as one.”

  “I imagine their view of the future is a dim one, Captain. Not a crystal ball, just mathematics. They sussed out we’d be here eventually, coming to reclaim a lost colony, and they bided their time.”

  He looked out at the worldship, moving ominously around Deirdra, casting an immense shadow over whole continents and seas. Its very presence was having an effect on the planet’s weather, its mass, proximity, and gravity were influencing Deirdra’s magnetic field, disturbing its stratosphere, and smashing any of the satellites too slow to get out of its way. The worldship had a thin, thin atmosphere of swirling gases near its “tail” end, one forming from its own exhaust and magnetic fields, and portions of that atmosphere was already peeling off towards Deirdra and polluting it. UCP ships had tried feebly to mount their own offensive against it, two of them passing through the time-warp and dying in slow-motion.

  “Isoshi message coming through now, looks like,” Desh said. “It’s a dialect Diogenes isn’t very familiar with, but it seems as if they’re going through the motions of making their presence officially known…damn.” He looked at the holographic tac display, which showed red dots flashing quickly towards the green pinpoint now representing the Isoshi ship. “Looks like a couple of the broodlings are rushing to intercept.”

  Kalder spoke to Vosen. “Get a steward to bring me a meal and some go-pills, and get the UCP’s Chief Presider on the line. Soon their satellites will pick up the Isoshi newcomers, and I would like to warn them first. And send a message to First Sol Cohort, let them know that the Isoshi have come to help.”

  BY THE TIME Lyokh received the message that the Isoshi were coming, he and his people had already been fighting for the better part of an hour. Hunkered down on Devonshire Street had proven impossible, nearly a quarter of their forces had been slaughtered and Lyokh had spent every ounce of ammunition of his Fell in pushing them back. Drones.
Uncountable drones had come pouring out of the ground. Wicked, winged things with razor-sharp talons and mounted turrets, able to fight on the ground or take flight to battle the wyrms, ’rakes, ’screamers, and Novas.

  He didn’t acknowledge the signal from Lord Ishimoto. He was too busy directing his Cohort down one avenue after another, following a signal that Ziir had sometimes locked onto, and other times lost. Ziir claimed the signal appeared to be moving.

  And besides, by the time they had actually gotten the message, the cylindrical Breckinger-class ship had already materialized overhead, seen clearly through the worldship’s dome, fighting in concert with Task Force One and the Faedyans.

  Lyokh roared as he drew his sword, the runes along the blade glittering as he ignited the plasmetic edge, and directed his people to conduct themselves as they had trained. He’d torn through six of the centipedes, dodging them with fleet feet, and hacking at their legs in the same manner he’d used in the Kennit sepulcher.

  Presently, a horde of the centipedes was coming at them from multiple avenues, obviously hoping to get them in a pincer. Lyokh was not having it. Wiping the blood of a fallen brother from his visor, he directed the warhulks to form their walls, and shouted for Morkovikson to get his people ready to receive more wounded. It was a flash engagement, but an intense one, with centipedes trying to knock over or slip past the warhulks. A few of them were able, but were quickly blasted to pieces by men ready with their launchers.

  One of them seemed impervious to the damage being done to it, and sawed through a line of infantrymen before they made it to Morkovikson’s modified phalanx. Just as they had rehearsed, using four warhulks as a shield wall, Lyokh’s people made narrow lanes between the battle, allowing the contrite brothers to rush in, grab up the wounded, and pull them to safety.

  It was orchestrated beautifully, and Lyokh had only a moment to marvel at the efficiency before another centipede literally sprung out of the ground. He spun, ducking one swing of its bladed appendage before rolling out of the way of the next. He came up on his knees, defending while moving forward with kneeling-step, then rose and plunged his sizzling blade into the thing’s abdomen. He twisted the blade, screaming, pushing forward. The blade ripped from its chest in a rain of crimson and milky-white tissue.