by Chad Huskins
“I’ve got tone,” Bishop calls. “Firing.”
Over the next twenty seconds, Bishop unleashes hell…and misses almost every single time. He manages a few glancing blows.
“What the hell’s goin’ on? Are you applying the principle of four programming?”
“Of course. The computer’s aim is close, but the aim is still off—”
“Maybe you didn’t adjust the turret right—”
“The turret is fine.”
“Then what’s the problem?” Rook demands.
“I don’t know, they’re maneuvering in new ways.”
Is that possible? Rook wonders. Certainly the principle of four worked without flaw in the asteroid field, but for it not to be working now…They’ve changed it up. Somehow, some way, they’ve changed it up.
Still, they haven’t changed it up so much that the principle of four doesn’t apply at all. Bishop manages to slice through his target’s rear thrusters enough times that the problems within its engines begin to compound. A second later, the particle beam rips through the skirmisher, superheating it and exploding it. The slagged pieces of the skirmisher glow as the atmosphere vaporizes them.
For Rook, this victory is still disconcerting. “What the hell is going on? I mean, you tagged it, but not as easily as in the asteroid field. And…it ran. It’s like its only thought was to get away.” He looks out the viewport, sees the faint glimmering dot of one of the last two skirmishers shooting hard for Turk 1. “This is…this is something new. They’ve changed it up.”
“They’ve evolved.” Bishop looks at him. “You changed them.”
Rook glances back at him, then sets in a new course. The Sidewinder shutters as its drives fight to break its own speed so that it can change directions more nimbly. As they make for Turk 1, they pass the debris left by the first skirmisher they took out. Though Rook doesn’t see it, we ghosts can look behind the ship at the incandescent holes the debris bores through the sky. It’s beautiful.
Rook checks his scanners, sees the trajectories each of the two remaining skirmishers is taking. One is banking left, around Turk 1’s “eastern” hemisphere, and the other is banking right. “Are targets still painted?”
“Affirmative, friend. But not for long. Once they get around to the other side of the station, our jammer beam can’t touch them.”
“We can only chase one,” he says. That’s why they’re splitting up, but why are they running? Cerebs don’t run, they engage with confidence, so what gives? It hardly matters at the moment, because once they get beyond this cluttered patch of space above Kali, free of the planet and the massive obstacles in their path, the skirmishers will not only be free to communicate with their brethren elsewhere in the galaxy, but they will hit sub-light speeds and be gone. Targeting them will be impossible at that speed.
“Suggestions?” says Bishop.
Rook looks between the two skirmishers, reads their speed and the Sidewinder’s own, then does a quick turn of eeny, meeny, miny, moe, and selects the one on the left. He alters their course, and sets their forward thrusters to full, which shocks the inertial dampers. “Hang on! Stop whatever else you’re doing and target the one on the right exclusively! Fire on it before it gets around Turk One’s horizon! I’m going to keep the one on the left in our jamming cone!”
“That’s going to be cutting it close,” Bishop says, tapping the keys necessary to swivel the turret on the outer hull. “I have to rotate the turret, and recalibrate its focusing lens. Once that’s done, I might have only a second or two to aim.”
“Well get on it!”
“I’ll need you to decrease speed,” Bishop says, hands moving with that insectile rapidity. “At this rate, by the time I’m ready, Turk One’s curvature will hide my target—”
“If I slow down, I lose the other skirmisher!”
“If you don’t, there’s an excellent chance I miss my target.”
It was a delicate balance, Rook going just fast enough to keep the skirmisher on the left in his sights, but trying to go slow enough so that their jammers didn’t lose sight of the other skirmisher disappearing over the opposite horizon before Bishop was ready. He looks down at his sensors, sees the jammer giving him a warning. Targets are almost out of range.
“C’mon, Bishop.” The alien says nothing in response. “Bishop?” One of his holo-displays shows a live zoomed-in image of the skirmisher disappearing on their right. Seven seconds. Rook is on his last nerve. Six. Five. “Bishop!”
“Targeting,” he says calmly. A second later, there’s a loud whine. “Tone!” he calls, firing at the same time. A second later, the blue-green beam lances across the cold darkness, by far the brightest light in the sky above Kali, and hits its target, superheating it and exploding it. “Target neutralized. We’re good.”
Rook looks back at the other skirmisher, which itself is only a few seconds away from vanishing over the other side of Turk 1, and he activates forward thrusters, accelerating so fast he once again puts the inertial dampers to the test. An alarm sounds, a light flashes red above his head, but he ignores it. As they close the distance, the skirmisher begins firing back at them. The particle beams are glancing blows, and the Sidewinder’s EA systems gather some of the precious power and store them in cells.
Another alarm! A hit to the hull was too direct, enough energy couldn’t be shed off the endoergic armor in time. Cells are overheating—
Another alarm! The skirmisher is sending out bursts of radio and energy saturation.
“Targeting systems are being jammed,” Bishop reports.
“How bad?”
“Bad enough that the Sidewinder’s AI can’t track the skirmisher’s current movements but every three seconds. The principle of four is going to be difficult to apply since the computer can’t get frequent updates of its position. I can try free-aiming.”
“Do it.”
Immediately, Bishop engages the turret’s controls himself. Rook watches and marvels, as do we, as two half-machine, half-organic creatures play a game. The skirmisher is getting jammed, and so is the Sidewinder. Neither the Cereb nor the Ianeth can rely on their ship’s targeting controls, they must rely on quick thinking, and God only knows how much processing power to counter each other’s counter moves. Like the exponential problem in chess, Rook thinks, watching the skirmisher dart this way and that as Bishop tries to get a fix on it.
The alien pauses a few times to go silent, not firing at all, just staring straight ahead, then goes back to racing his fingers assiduously over the controls before firing again. He delivers a glancing blow, but one that does enough damage to superheat one of the skirmisher’s forward thrusters, shutting it down. Next, Bishop manages to disarm a side thruster, limiting its roll capability. Finally, the ship lacks enough maneuverability that Bishop is able to deliver the final blow, blasting it to pieces.
Once more, Rook releases a breath he wasn’t aware he was holding, reclines in his seat. He sets them on a course to clear the slagged remains of the skirmisher, then swivels his chair around to look at his partner. “What…the hell…was that? We almost couldn’t lock on in time?”
“I know.”
“They’re not behaving like they did at the asteroid field.”
“I know.”
“They’ve…they’ve…”
Bishop finishes for him. “They’ve learned, Rook.”
Rook shakes his head. “Jesus, we can’t fight them if the principle of four is suddenly so uncertain! I mean, that was close. If either one o’ them had cleared Turk 1 they’d’ve hit sub-light and got out of range, communicated our location back to their fleet.”
“Affirmative, friend.”
“We’d be forced to run, leave everything we worked for.”
“Affirmative, friend. But that didn’t happen.”
Rook runs both hands over his face, then massages his temples. “No, but we’ve only managed to buy ourselves some time. Cerebs are exact, if nothing else, and they’ll start
to wonder why the squadron isn’t checking in.”
“Indeed. They of course will know that accidents do sometimes happen, engine failures and QEC disruptions in deep-space travel do occur, as do accidents inside the slipstream, but I agree that they won’t wait overlong to investigate the squadron’s fate.”
“Whatever we decide to do now, we have to decide it fast. They’re coming. So, what do we do? Do we keep running and hope to find something or someone to help us? Or do we stay here and make a stand?”
The alien takes a moment to think. “If we’re going to make a stand, and if we’re going to realize your plan, then we’ll need to get the derelict ship off the ground. To do that, we’ll need something from the fortress world.”
“Is what’s there really worth the danger?”
“I think we can be in and out quickly. And if we detect the Cereb fleet coming towards us, at least we’ll have already fled Kali.”
A moment of weighing their options. Rook thinks about what they just went through. “We got some energy in our cells outta that exchange, but what about the principle of four? It doesn’t work.”
“It doesn’t not work, either. They’ve altered their patterns somehow. I’m not sure how, it will take a review of the data. Your targeting program was close enough, and it’s obvious you were right that its pattern is deeply embedded in their psychology, but it may require some tweaking.”
“What kind of tweaking?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to think on it.”
“In the meantime we’ve got a fleet probably headed right for us.” He shakes his head. “Too risky.”
Bishop leans forward. “I believe it can still be done.”
“You believe?”
“I do. But we will need the equipment from my fortress world.”
Rook gives it only a second’s thought, then sighs and claps his hands to his thighs. We’re going to die anyway. And like he says, if we detect the fleet coming, at least we’ll already be on the move. And something else inside him needs to be sated. An ember of rebellion still lives, and it won’t back down. Like a dog with a bone, Rook can’t let go. “Alright. Hell with it. Let’s do it. Where is this place, exactly?”
“Punching in the coordinates now,” the alien says, going back to his controls. “It will take us half an hour to get there, so while we’re traveling, I feel I should tell you what exactly the fortress world is. There’s really just one thing you need to know about it.” As Bishop explains it, Rook’s eyes widen, and so does spacetime, as the Sidewinder’s forward laser activates and begins burrowing them a hole through the slipstream. A bubble of normal space is formed around the Sidewinder, protecting it from the considerable hardships of the slipstream. Seconds later, it is gone.
8
The world waiting on us is dark, though not so dark as Kali. It has a blue-white parent start that is dying. The inevitable has happened, it has run out of hydrogen and therefore cannot sustain itself. Taking billions of years to die, it is a pale shell of its former self, casting its soft glow on its lone satellite. The planet hovers 88 million miles away from it, and has no satellites of its own. It once did, but it never will again, and for good reason.
The Sidewinder enters the solar system but remains 1,750,000 miles away from the planet, a safe distance, according to Bishop. And it appears he’s right. There is an incredible amount of far-flung debris—rocks heavy in iron and nickel, as well as scattered fields of alloys and ice. All of these ejecta seem severe, considering the emptiness of the rest of the system.
So much water was flung from the planet’s surface and upper atmosphere that it has now formed into long trails of ice, set softly aglow against the black background, appearing like the massive, hacked-off tail of some long gone comet. The Sidewinder moves slowly through this thousand-mile-long “lake” of ice, its deflectors silently cutting a V just ahead of it.
A fugitive asteroid races towards the ship at a speed great enough that it might make it through the deflection shields, but the Sidewinder’s collision-avoidance systems coast them softly out of the way as the truck-sized rock zips overhead silently.
“We’re passing through the sea of debris,” Bishop explains, sitting beside Rook at the main controls. “An accident of our machine’s malfunction, but we hoped that it would form a great enough wall to hold the Cerebs off. It delayed them a short while, but eventually they had pulverized most of the debris to dust and made it through, bombarding the planet from space.”
Rook nods silently, and then plots a course. Bishop shakes his head, indicating that that course won’t do, and cues up another course. Rook gives the Sidewinder the okay, and after ensuring there were no great asteroids careening towards them, they perform two micro-jumps towards the planet. They stop just 244,000 miles away, at Bishop’s suggestion.
The alien says, “I’ll pilot from here. You need to get below and get ready.”
Reluctant to hand the controls over completely to someone other than himself, Rook reminds himself that it’s either this or shoot the Ianeth out of the airlock now. If I can’t trust him with this, what can I trust him with? “All right,” he says, standing and moving towards the door. Just as he’s stepping out of the cockpit, the ship shudders horribly, almost like she’s about to come apart at the seams! Rook feels his flesh pressing against his face until the inertial dampers make the necessary compensation. “What the hell was that?”
“We just passed through the barrier. We’re inside the reverse-field now.”
“Jesus, how many g’s is it pumping out?”
Bishop checks the screens, pulls up a second holo-display. “Just point-three g’s, but that wasn’t what that shuddering was about. The Sidewinder wouldn’t have been ready to come out of a void where gravity behaves normally and then into a field where it goes the other way. I had to pare down arti-grav and then slowly raise it back up to help out the inertial dampers.” The ship’s internal gravity is now back to standard 1.0 g.
Rook nods. “Guess it’s gonna get more powerful the closer we get?”
“It is. Now go below. I’ll tell you when we’re close.”
Rook takes one last look out the viewport, sees the blue-gray surface of the fortress world coming up at them, the sun bathing it in a cold, dying light. He turns and exits the cockpit, hustles down to the cargo hold and snatches up the SAFER III on the way down. Thankfully the jet pack wasn’t damaged beyond repair in the derelict ship, and it’s going to come in handy. Down in the cargo hold, he straps on the Stacksuit and Tango armor, and then pulls his environment suit on top of them, then checks his HUD and activates the two-way channel. “Check, check,” he says.
“Copy check,” Bishop calls back.
The ship shudders slightly, the bulk heads whining. “How’s it going up there?”
“So far, so good.”
“No slipstream readings? No sign of company?”
“I don’t think anyone’s following us.”
Rook pulls on the jet pack, snapping the straps in place. “Alpha check?” he says, requesting information on bearing and range to DZ. It’s strange how easily he finds himself slipping back into using tactical brevity code; almost as though he and Bishop are old Academy buddies.
“Drop zone ten thousand miles away. ETA ten minutes.” The Sidewinder shudders again. “We’re passing through a heavy graviton tide. The ride may get, eh, bumpy?” Suddenly, the ship jolts and bangs like a car going too fast over a speed bump.
“Copy that. You sure you don’t wanna be the one dropped in? I can fly the ship, and you know the installation better than me.”
“Negative. The graviton tide takes special skills and an understanding of it to navigate. Trust me, you’ll want me in the pilot’s seat if the tide shifts heavily.”
Rook finishes strapping the SAFER to him and then gets the rappelling gear ready. It’s the same gear he found on the Marines in the derelict, complete with Dyneema rope and harnesses. He tries not to think about what he’s a
bout to step into. The way Bishop described it, the fortress world doesn’t just have a repellant force-field encircling the planet, it has a reverse-field. There was an important distinction there.
The problem was that it took incredibly strong magnetic pushes to overcome gravity. So the Ianeth species had come up with a solution. Don’t fight gravity, reverse it. A typical force-field would simply push objects away, but a reversal put gravity on your side. And that doesn’t make for a repellant world, Rook thinks, stepping over to the cargo hold’s viewport. It makes an upside-down world.
Bishop’s description had been imaginative, though difficult to comprehend. Imagine yourself standing on a planet. It will feel like this, but when you look up, instead of the sky you see the ground. When you look down, there is open sky beneath you. The Ianeth machine had done something to the planet, or perhaps to the space around the planet, Rook had trouble understanding exactly what Bishop had meant, which caused the planets gravity to behave strangely. Instead of pulling things toward the planet, things were pulled away from it.
Starting about twenty feet off the planet’s surface, the reverse-gravity field begins. Or so says Bishop. A generator the size of the Hoover Dam, he says, is what once controlled it. Hundreds of miles of particle-colliding tunnels ran underground, and together created the power necessary to warp gravitons, an elementary particle that human beings had only just hypothesized and debated about before they were exterminated.
Bishop calls it a reverse-field, but it’s really a backwards-field. A true reversal of gravity would tear everything apart at its core, no elements could stick together, planets would come undone, suns would come unraveled, and the Sidewinder would be destroyed the instant it entered the field. The gravitons here, however, have just been told to think backwards.
On the ride over, Bishop explained all of this to Rook, and he just had to ask, “Why would your people want to do this?”
“Harnessing gravitons and ‘tricking’ them into operating the other way in a relatively small field around the planet wreaked havoc on ships’ sensors,” Bishop told him. “When dialed up to maximum, it was better than a magnetic force-field, and could stretch farther. We were down to almost no other weapons. I told you before, everything out here is a last-ditch effort at survival. But the gravitonic manipulators also proved to be too powerful an engine to control. When the Cerebs found us, they managed a planetary bombardment, and key generators that made the gravitons behave enough so that they didn’t get completely out of control were destroyed. The reverse-field got out of hand, slowly expanding over the planet.” He shrugged. “An ecological disaster.”
