Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  They were passing through another giant colosseum, running through a bowl that looked like it might have been a dish of some kind, a transmitter covered in viscous liquid, when they were once again ambushed by octopus-things. Lyokh remembered how to take these down, and though the Brood tried to divide them, and though they killed a few of his brothers, he had never felt a resolve so deep in his life.

  They task me! he thought, or might’ve roared aloud. They task me! His blade scythed the air, splitting the enemy in half, and in his soul he rejoiced at the bloodletting. He even allowed the deaths of his brothers to excite him—if he took the time to feel their tragedy, he would’ve been lost.

  The deathlust had returned fully, mixing, in a strange way, with the peace and tranquility he had discovered after his experience inside the s’Dar Watchtower. All was lost, but all was not lost.

  Lyokh combined Tsuyoshi’s battle analysis with the tracing HUD ghosts, and with the Forty-Seven Steps, and in so doing became virtually uncatchable by any of the Brood’s tactics. He surrendered himself to no-mind once again, hewing through packs of enemies. He was joined, quite suddenly, by the High Priestess, who pressed her back against his more than once, covering him, her hands waving without blade or rifle, but no less bringing down whole throngs of the enemy.

  “The wall!” he heard himself scream from a million miles away.

  “THE WALL!” the Knights answered.

  “Such defilement!” the High Priestess sang. “It brings us closer to divinity! Mahl has shown us!”

  “MAHL HAS SHOWN US!” the VPMC answered.

  The gravity switched off again, but it did no good, Lyokh’s people fought just as well—better, even. And the Brood seemed to notice this themselves, for the gravity soon returned.

  “They were not prepared for us!” Paupau screamed, leading the seventy or so men left in Third Battalion through the other side of the colosseum. “Paupau!”

  At the end of the brushfire, hunks of flesh were sizzling on Lyokh’s plasmetic edge. Huffing, still half blinded by the deathlust, Lyokh cast around for wounded. He helped two of them reach the Brotherhood, who had a quick med circle set up, then followed after his Knights. After thirty seconds, Morkovikson broke up their med circle and followed after Lyokh, his people applying what ministrations they could to soldiers on the go. Six mortally wounded Knights were left behind with guns to kill what they could.

  Another ten minutes of minor brushfires, and finally they approached the Giant Egg, as either the computer or Lerwin had labeled it. The SIGINT officer was already at the lead, being covered by Paupau’s group, and kneeling at the base of the immense thing.

  Lyokh came up panting beside her, realizing that much of him being out of breath had to do with the suit leak. Another alarm went off to remind him of the atmo leakage. Switching it off, he said, “Meiks, if I drop dead, you’re in charge!”

  “Copy that, doyen. But don’t do that.”

  “I’ll try. Lerwin, tell me good things.”

  “Well,” she said, “I’ve sometimes heard no news is good news. I’ve got no news, doyen. It’s…well, I don’t know what it is. It’s emitting a huge energy signature, STACsuit insulation is the only thing keeping us from getting bombarded by enough radiation to kill us. Our cancer would have cancer.”

  “Is there…some way to interact with it?”

  “Maybe we can demolish it,” said Meiks, running up to join them.

  “I could destroy it with a wave of my hand,” remarked the High Priestess, walking up to them, half sagging, as though her sorcerous effort had drained her. But her eyes still had fire in them.

  “We don’t even know what this thing is,” Lyokh said. He gesticulated around at the whole facility. “We don’t know what any of it is. Destroying it might cause a chain reaction, and destroy the entire fleet—”

  “Doyen,” came Takirovanen’s voice. “If I can offer this advice, whatever happens if we destroy it will be no more or less ruinous than what the Brood have planned for Taka-Renault anyway.”

  He’s got a point.

  “High Priestess, it’s your show.”

  Zane walked up to the Giant Egg, raised a trembling hand, and gazed intently at it. Then, after a few seconds of nonactivity, she gasped. “It…resists me.” Then she said something in a low whisper that, to Lyokh, sounded like, “Just like Kalder did.”

  “All right, demolitions! I need you front and center!” Lyokh called out. “Start rigging this thing to blow! Paupau, ’Vanen, give me a barrier around this area while we work…” Lyokh trailed off. Suddenly, something occurred to him, quite out of nowhere. He reached into one of his empty mag pouches, and pulled out the object that the senator sent with his Trix robot. Lyokh unwrapped it, and saw that it was going crazy, flashing with multi-colored hexagonal screens, turning, interlocking, like gear cogs.

  “What the hell is that?” asked Lerwin.

  On a hunch, Lyokh walked towards the Giant Egg, and as he did, the screens became more animated, flashing more symbols, sometimes in binary. He backed away, and the images became more staid, just the blank hexagonal screens. He stepped forward again, and saw the Tablet’s many displays begin to dance. Lyokh remembered Kalder’s message. “It’s code,” he said. “It’s how they talk to each other. On a frequency we can’t see. What if we…?”

  “What if we what?” asked Meiks. “Call it a day and headed back to Widden to sunbathe on the beaches? Best plan you’ve had all day. Last one in the ocean’s a rotten egg!”

  Lyokh knelt, and sat the Tablet at the foot of the Giant Egg. The Tablet went crazy, lines of code jumping like frogs on a hot surface.

  “Lerwin, can you set up a feed to record this?”

  She shrugged. “I could use my helmet cam. Why?”

  “I want you to sit here and record it while the demo team sets up,” he said. “And I want you to broadcast back to Lord Ishimoto what you’re seeing.”

  Lerwin pointed up. “Sir, we’re under a dome in here, and all this radiation is interfering something fierce.”

  “Takirovanen left Io Wing back near the entance of this facility. You’ll tightbeam what you’re seeing to those Mantises up there,” he said, pointing to the drones perched atop a high tower, “and they’ll transmit it to Io Wing, and they’ll tightbeam it through the dome outside, for the fleet to intercept.” He added, “Hopefully.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Meiks said. “What are you saying? You’re going to try and decipher this code? That could take weeks. Years, maybe! We don’t have that kind of time, Lyokh.” He only called Lyokh by his name when he was dead serious about something.

  “Not down here, we don’t.”

  Realization dawned on Meiks’s face, and Lyokh saw it through his visor.

  “We only have to hold them off a day down here, to give them a couple years up there. In a way, they’ve got a head start. I saw Isoshi ships out there, and the Isoshi have been on board a Brood worldship before. If the coalition is going well enough, maybe they’ll share what they know. And maybe…I don’t know, maybe Kalder and them can work something out, some way to exploit this code.” He turned to Lerwin. “Send it.”

  After a few seconds of blinking and waving her hands at menus only she could see, she nodded. “Sent.” Then, two seconds later, “We’ve already got a reply.”

  “What is it?” Lyokh asked.

  “It’s directly from Senator Kalder. It just says, ‘You clever bastard.’ ”

  “THE CLEVER BASTARD,” Kalder muttered to himself.

  Desh stood beside him in Lord Ishimoto’s War Room, both of them staring at a vid feed that made little sense to the human eye, some of it was binary code, as one might see in the programming of an old manmade computer, while other bits were clearly of alien design.

  The lights above Kalder switched off when the Faulkner field turned on, and they shifted into FTL. They were currently on the run, chased by a wounded broodling that had picked them off from the rest of the fleet, cornered th
em. A Faedyan ship was coming to help, but Ishimoto’s A-drive was failing and they couldn’t be sure they would be able to keep ahead of it long enough for help to arrive.

  Kalder had a creeping suspicion he would die soon, that Ishimoto would finally give out. The old girl had certainly given her all. It was strange, preparing himself for death. Kalder had done it exactly twice before, once with the Buddha man, and…one other time. He was used to it. It was a habit of his life, a natural circular course he’d been on for a long, long time.

  He looked up at the 3D display, showing the shipyards that had been assembled these last four months by Pennick’s business associates. Ten so far, nine of them producing fast-attack drones with interdictor capabilities, and one of them producing skyrakes and starscreamers. Sixteen broodlings were now scattered throughout Taka-Renault, fighting different groups of humans, Isoshi, Faedyans, and some Takans. Detonations were happening in space that, had they taken place on a habitable world, would render it uninhabitable. And they were happening all over the system, leaving chunks of starships floating like litter, or else turning them to vapor.

  “What does Lyokh expect us to do with this?” asked Desh.

  “It’s a screenshot, Captain,” said Kalder, brushing aside a tuft of white threads from his eyes. His own hair had grown as moppy as Desh’s, and perhaps even more unkempt. “A menu screen, perhaps. Or even raw code.” An idea was coalescing inside his head, something he had not considered until that very moment. He turned to Donovan, who was at the far side of the room, staring desultorily at the massive field of war on the holo display. “Get me Primacy Intelligence on a secure line. Make it quick!”

  The usurped captain had learned not to ask questions. Sullen-faced, he moved to obey.

  A hologram of General Hyatt’s face hovered nearby, shifting and jumping as the ship’s power kept almost failing. “What is it you want from PI?” Hyatt had been in holoconference with Kalder when the message from Lyokh interrupted them.

  Kalder didn’t answer him immediately. Instead, he turned to Desh, and said, “Speak with the two Isoshi tactical advisers, tell them we may have a vid connection that shows raw source code, or maybe important intel from the Brood. Tell them that whatever they know from their time aboard a worldship, they need to share it now. If they hesitate to help, or seem to be keeping anything close to the chest, let them know we have something of great interest that might help them—”

  He was cut off by a loud bang and a spark from overhead. On his imtech eyescreen, he saw the damage report. Inside the wall had been a malfunction of a main transmitter, its coil getting overloaded and backfed into a dump capacitor, frying several circuits. Lord Ishimoto was coming apart.

  Desh nodded. “All right, but what is it? They’ll want to know.”

  “Someone who’s been to the brink and back. Someone that was almost completely assimilated by Brood technology, but was rescued just when there was an iota of her left.”

  Desh’s lips parted slightly.

  It was Hyatt who said, “You don’t mean…the Queen of Mothers?”

  Kalder looked at the hovering face. “Her, yes.”

  “But…how? I thought there wasn’t anything left. I thought the Brood had scooped everything out of her—”

  Just then, XO Vosen’s voice came over the room’s speaker. “War Room, conn! We’ve just been forced out of FTL! A-drive was seconds from overload! Two broodlings dead ahead, they must’ve estimated the malfunction. It’s an ambush.”

  Kalder rested his hands on the side of the table, and sighed heavily. He looked up at Desh. “We gave it our all. We did our best. Perhaps we’ve laid the groundwork, Captain, for future generations to figure out how to stop the Brood.”

  Desh’s jaw tightened, his mind already wrestling with the notion of preparing for death.

  “The other one is still coming…hold on.” Vosen trailed off for a moment. “Senator, Captain, we’ve got company! Short-form transponder IDs show good, and non-belligerency is confirmed! It’s…it’s Canis Majoris-class, sirs! Six of them!”

  Kalder exchanged a look with Desh, whose face lit up with mad humor. “The Grennal,” he whispered. “The Grennal made it. But they’ve been hemmed in their own system, blocked on all exiting routes by the Brood. How the hell did they get out?”

  “Perhaps,” Kalder said, looking at the new dots lighting up on the hologram, “all of the Brood in their sector came here to help the worldship.”

  It was a boon, an extremely lucky break, and no doubt about it. The Grennal were a relatively new spacefaring race, having suffered no wars with galactic neighbors, which allowed them to amass quite an arsenal never used.

  “If any of you are praying men,” Kalder said, “now is the time to thank your gods.”

  : Primacy Intelligence Black Site

  A heart that no longer beat. Was it her heart? No, it was the heart they gave her, the lab coats. To see if she would respond to it. To watch in case her eyes fluttered with familiarity.

  But it was just a heart, it had no meaning. A heart that no longer beat, so cold and alone the universe wept tears for it. There was an ailment of her spirit, one felt in every pore of her body, and that no palliative care could assuage. Self-pity sometimes found her, but mostly it was adrift, along with her dignity, both crashing against shores of cold indifference.

  Echoes…those stirred insider her still. Echoes of who she once was. And the pain, both fresh and old, like the death of a loved one ages ago.

  Lost within herself, she reached out for someone. Anyone. No one. Echoing screams bled from the walls of her mind, collecting in pools of eternal regret, pools of such corrosive intensity they devoured identity.

  More of her came unspooled every day. She now walked in a desert, trapped in the blast crater left by her decision to listen to the Harbingers, leave her home, her people, and surrender herself to an alien host. She should have listened to people like Marquand, and Xavier, and her father’s ally, Kalder. She should have forbidden xeno concepts on her world, banished their writings, their philosophy, and isolated herself and her people forever.

  They called her the Queen of Mothers once. Now, she was a horrible disfigurement of partial Brood assimilation. An embarrassment to her race. A traitor, even.

  The people walking around her in lab coats and carrying various scientific instruments had been communicating with her for a while now, albeit haltingly, and with mixed results. Now, however, they showed her something different. They showed her a vid, one that she saw not with her eyes—those were both gone—but with sensory-compiling nodes that had been implanted beneath her necrotic flesh. Nodes put there by the Brood.

  As she hung there by hooks, her arms and legs mostly gone, her belly pried open and exposing a gelatinous core filled with nanite-infused fluids, and with electric-blue arcs crawling up her exposed and dangling spine, the woman once known as Little Bit by her dear father now looked at the images, realizing at once what they were. Images of slithering lights, jumbled texts, alphabets both human and alien. She saw it all and understood it, for she was a bridge between two worlds now. A twisted bridge, but a bridge nonetheless.

  She spoke, though she had no mouth to do it with. The fleshy wires and hoses spilling out of her trembled, and the vibrations made the air unpleasant to the human scientists all around her. Those vibrations changed the pressure of the air in the room, and the lab coats backed away from her. She generated an inhuman voice, one that resembled nothing like the former Queen of Mothers, the woman who had been given the moniker because of her ability to stave off war and save millions of mothers from burying sons and daughters.

  The inhuman voice said, “I know what you want, and I wish to help. Use me as you wish.”

  “We’ve informed the Isoshi of your existence,” said one of the scientists, a compassionate woman who had been the first to communicate with what was left of the Queen of Mothers. “They say they have ideas for how to best use you. This footage coming in from Sir Captai
n Lyokh, it has code. Code that comes from a major energy source on one of their worldships. Code that they think you can help decipher. By letting them plumb your mind, they may be able to…I don’t know, hack the Brood system in some way. But they also warn…it may be painful.”

  “Whatever it takes,” the inhuman voice said. “This flesh once belonged to the Queen of Mothers, and if it can be used again to prevent the grief of mothers everywhere, then bring it pain. Bring it all the pain in the universe.”

  : Kalder’s Limits

  The new tactic had been Desh’s idea, but it had been informed by Kalder’s notes on the Brood. For the last six months, he had been keeping a detailed journal on the Brood’s movements, and had meditated long and hard on them, utilizing the ORB method. He knew their objectives—to annihilate all life that wasn’t them—and he felt sure he knew most of their resources, so now he felt ready to predict their behaviors.

  “They concentrate all power on a single opponent to completion,” he’d laid out to Desh, Donovan, and Hyatt. “And though they come ready to set traps, they are not used to falling into traps themselves. That is, they’ve never had to deal with them. Any trap ever set for them has been utterly useless, and therefore totally ignored as they destroyed the trappers. And they so love to kick us while we’re down, to attack when we’re helping a fallen comrade—like a sniper who leaves one man alive and wounded, so that his cries attract the attention of his fellow soldiers, who he then picks off one by one.”

  The plan’s time had finally come, and Kalder watched its execution play out with appalling exactitude. Desh stood proudly and eagerly at the tac display, all the rest of CIC’s crew as quiet as a spirit’s whisper. Kalder watched from behind Desh, waiting to see if this would be the moment the tide turned, or if this would be the first domino to fall against their favor.

  The gas giant loomed ahead. From this angle, most of it appeared to be consumed by shadow. Vesterpul looked like the knuckle of some red-and-yellow god emerging from the darkness. The five remaining ships of Task Force Two were hiding behind various moons, waiting for their moment to strike. Three Isoshi ships crowded over the largest moon, Depahk, making themselves the obvious draw. The bait. A crippled Faedyan ship hovered close to them, its many dead crewmen orbiting it like the rest of the hull debris. When the eight broodlings suddenly appeared, Desh spoke to Vosen. “Now,” he said.