Dryland's End

by Felice Picano

  “It’s rather obvious, isn’t it, Commander? I’m here to cripple the MC Fleet. And I want to destroy all the Fasts connected to the Groombridge station. Including, naturally, your own craft.”

  “Are you ready to surrender?” Orval asked.

  “If I were a Hume, Commander Orval, I’d be laughing. Your so-called Fleet is outnumbered, surrounded, and, as you may have recently noticed, unable to maneuver very well. If any of us should be ready to surrender, it ought to be you!”

  “We shall never surrender. Prepare to engage!” was her challenged response as her holo snapped off.

  “Engage!” Cray said simply, and leaned back to watch the battle.

  Cray had kept on the tapped-in transmission from the interior of one MC Fast. While checking in with each triad leader and ensuring that all was going according to plan and watching the chart of MC Fasts as one by one they were outfought, crippled, and abandoned or forced to implode, from time to time, Cray also glanced at those three Hume women on the Fast deck as they struggled simultaneously to keep their wits and sanity and to fight an obviously superior enemy. One poor thing almost bit her intake tube in half. Another, on weapons duty, finally tore off her helmet and let go, screaming at the top of her voice as she fired. To no avail. The Fast deck was soon covered with debris from blasted-in viewports; two of the women were dead, and it was obvious even via the poor-quality transmission that the craft had been so severely hit it was about to implode.

  Cray was almost glad when the view of the lone, maddened, and still battling woman was suddenly – perhaps mercifully – cut off.

  The image of her was still with Cray, as one after another of the triad leaders began to comm. in its own damages, the very minor losses – and the overall victory. It had taken twenty-nine minutes for Groombridge XXXIV and the Matriarchy to be rendered defenseless.

  “Where did you learn how to play ecto-chess like that?” North-Taylor Diad scoffed.

  “Electra Lambda II. Why?” Lill replied coolly enough, considering the move she had just attempted to foist on him. “From a Delphinid Master.”

  “Master of what? Lies and deception?”

  “Are you questioning the move I just made?” she asked, with astonishing sangfroid.

  “Questioning?” Diad couldn’t believe her gall. “You’d be booted out of every starport lounge in a dozen wedge-sectors for even considering that move!” Then, to fuel the fire, he added, “You probably have been already.”

  “You didn’t say we were going to be playing a Hesperian-neonate’s version of the game!” Lill’s coolness vanished. “Is it going to be a kiddie game, Northie? Or are you going to show a little of those gonads you’ve been talking up so much.”

  “Hesperian neonates can outplay MC Cybers!” he retorted, “and they did, even before you had to turn off your Cybers because they were getting smarter than you.”

  That really got Lill’s goat, “Oh, yeah!” She stood up, half tilting the ecto-chess.

  “Yeah!” He faced her, and shoved the game aside so they were nose to nose. “What are you going to do about it, big tits?”

  A low whistle announced a message coming in on their closed-circuit comm. Diad listened to it another second, then said in that same strangled tone, “This isn’t over!”

  “Fine by me!” Lill sassed back.

  Diad took the comm., still angry at himself for having allowed himself into a game with Lill in the first place. Everyone knew she cheated, had for decades. Still, they’d been waiting around for hours Sol Rad. Bored, and in need of something. Even a fight would break the tedium.

  “Mart Kell here. We’ve got company. Just as predicted.”

  “They’ve arrived here at Groombridge?” Diad asked and gestured to Lill to pick up a comm. earpiece.

  “They’re coming in right now. More or less at the edge of the solar system. Your holos should have them. Check – What in the name of...?”

  Lill snapped on the holo, just in time to see one of the Cyber Fasts imploding starbright in the far distance. A closer focus on the craft showed a weird effect surrounding it, some sort of blue halo in the vague shape of an infinity sign.

  “Hold on!” Mart said. Then: “What I’m hearing from the tap we’ve got on one of their leaders is very bizarre. Seems like one Fast jumped into a time/space already occupied by some object and – Can you see it?”

  Lill and Diad moved closer to the holo to see two other Fasts drawn in and finally also explode.

  “Every pilot’s nightmare!” Diad couldn’t help saying. Lill shook her head in sad agreement.

  A few minutes later, Mart Kell had the full explanation, although his own staff expanded on the explanations coming in from his tap within the Cyber leadership. It seemed that the triad itself making the jump had something to do with the phenomenon. It had been a long-postulated effect of what would happen if two objects came to occupy the same time/space, but one they’d never experienced – and one reason why Hesperian military craft Fast jumped one at a time.

  “Eve-damned tincans!” Lill said. “They waste each other as though they’re scrap metal!”

  Mart had more to say. “Evidently this triad business is an integral part of this dodecahedron formation they’ve arranged. We don’t quite understand how it works. But the minute we heard of it, we took precautions.”

  “You mean moving the bulk of the Hesperian Fleet away?” Diad said.

  “They’re poised at Euterpe and at Bronte Two. Three minutes away by Fast jump,” Mart confirmed. “Now all we have to do is wait for the Cybers to make a move. If what they told each other is true, that means the Cybers can’t jump within the formation either, so they’ll be moving at sublight speed, enough time for us to see what they’re doing.”

  Soon enough they all got a chance to see exactly how the formation worked. The paths of the Cyber Fasts reshaped the dodecahedral shape and retained it, in effect pulling the twelve-sided shape smaller as they approached.

  “Have you ever seen anything like that?” Diad asked Lill.

  “No one ever taught strategy by irregular polygons when I was at Groomby,” she replied, and he laughed.

  “No, really, Northie. There were all sorts of harebrained strategies for Fast jumping in a group. Most of them dealt with timing. There was one went: Fasts arrive apart by seconds, each one in time squared the last period between them. Of course, anything over six craft, and you’d be waiting around a week Sol Rad. for the rest of your team to catch up with you.”

  Now they both laughed, and Diad said, “You’re a cheat, but I love you.” Into the comm. he asked, “Are we really just going to wait for them?”

  “That’s the plan,” Mart confirmed.

  Lill said, “He wants them near the station’s gun range, and I agree.”

  “Won’t they think it a little odd when no one challenges them?” Diad asked.

  “Let’s wait and see. So far, they’re more concerned with keeping their formation.”

  “What about that idea we discussed of a decoy of Fasts going out to meet them?” Diad suggested. “We take out two or three Fasts. Put the women on holo. Have Lill here butch it up on holo, dare them, and all.”

  “Too dangerous.”

  “We’ll have to do something if they don’t come within gun range,” Lill began.

  “We may not need the guns, if we can time it right,” was Mart Kell’s enigmatic response.

  Lill gestured for Diad to close his mouthpiece. “What’s Kell afraid of? Losing his cherry?”

  “Black Kars Tedesco got all sorts of trouble from the Quinx when one life was lost at the Centaur homeworlds blockade. Mart wants this to be clean.”

  “It’s a battle for the entire Eve-damned galaxy!” Lill exploded. “And we’re soldiers! We’re supposed to die in battle!”

  “You’re a soldier, Lill. Most of the Hesperians would like nothing better than to get rid of the Cybers and go home to enjoy the lifestyle their billions have bought them.”

&nb
sp; He listened to her swearing for a while about decadent males and what was the galaxy coming to, until she stopped suddenly, and pointing to the holo, said, “Looks like someone had the same idea as we did, Northie. Look, Fasts!”

  Diad was on the comm. “Lord Kell, do you – ?”

  “I see them!” was the curt reply. Then, mysteriously, “I can’t believe She’s doing this!”

  It soon became clear that the twenty-five or so military Fasts were Academy issue, Wicca’s own secretly assembled little Fleet, probably lurking at Proteus, a satellite of the Groombridge system’s seventh planet. It also became clear that despite their tubed helmets the all-female crews operating them were both outnumbered and ill-equipped to match the Cyber fleet. The first time they tried to maneuver-jump into battle positions and found they couldn’t, Lill fell into a lounge, moaning, “They’re committing suicide!”

  Diad listened to Commander Orval’s holo-ultimatum and to Cray 12,000’s wry response, and comm.ed in to Mart Kell, “Maybe now, while he’s engaged with them, you could pull in the rest of the fleet and get them from behind.”

  “No!” Lill all but screamed. “The Cybers have to think they’re all we have.”

  “All we have?” Diad asked.

  “To protect Groombridge!” she insisted, as together she and Diad watched the battle on the holo until he couldn’t take any more and turned away.

  “Damn that Wicca!” Mart Kell now said somberly. “I hope She appreciates their sacrifice!”

  Suddenly Diad understood what Kell and Lill were talking about. Inadvertently, Wicca was aiding them. Cray would think he’d wiped out all of the station’s protection, then float right into range and –

  “How bad is it?” he asked Lill.

  “Bad!”

  “Survivors?”

  “Sure, a shuttle here, a T-pod there. Why? You want to go get them?” A plan was brewing in Diad’s mind, one that would not only ensure a Hesperian victory, but also make those poor hormone-crazed women’s sacrifice really worthwhile.

  “That’s it, precisely. We’ll go get them, you and I, once the battle is over. You comm. Cray and tell him that he’s won and all you want to do is pick up survivors. We’ll be one Fast. No real threat.”

  “And ...?”

  “I’ll comm. Mart Kell and tell him you’re distraught and want to do it.”

  “And?” she persisted.

  “And we’ll find the Cyber Fast at the tightest angle of their formation, and we’ll Fast jump to arrive right inside it. Override our Fast’s mind so we can make the jump. Enormous implosion. Pull in maybe twenty, thirty of their Fasts into one big bang. While that’s happening, Mart brings in the fleet from Euterpe and Bronte.”

  Lill looked at him, obviously working it out for herself.

  “You saw what happened when the implosion occurred when the angles of their formation were far wider and much more distant,” Diad insisted. “It will work.”

  “How do you get Kell to go along with it?”

  “We don’t exactly tell him all of what we’re going to do,” Diad said.

  “If Gemma Rinne heard you talking like this ...” Lill began.

  That angered him. “Forget about Gemma Rinne! Gemma and I have made our ... good-byes.” He added, “We can get the Fast’s mind here to work out the best solution as to where among the Cybers’ formation we’ll arrive.”

  “You tired of life after five hundred years, Northie? Seen and done it all?” “Three-eighty! And I’m no more tired of life than you are. It’s just that –” “Just that you’d like to help me gain some eternal military glory. And it’s fine if you get some, too?”

  Diad had thought that. But no, that wasn’t the real reason. It was to save lives – Hesperian and MC lives.

  “Think of it like this, Lill. You’re Cray. You just knocked out all the big bad MC Fasts. Suddenly you’re losing one-third of your fleet in an accident. It’s got to be disturbing. Even to a Cyber. The next minute, all these Fasts appear, and they’re full of males who won’t be affected by your virus, and who can match your strength. End of battle.”

  She shook her head. But she said, “Put it to your Fast’s mind and let’s see if it’s possible.”

  It turned out to be more than possible. It turned out that Cray 12,000’s irregular dodecahedron possessed one plane smaller than all the others by half because of the entry accident, and thus any four of its angles were vulnerable to their scheme. When Diad and Lill fed in the holo of the previous implosion, the Fast’s mind calculated the energies involved and came up with a winner: given that the Cyber craft were arranged in triads, he and Lill could expect to take a minimum of thirty-nine Cyber Fasts with them into the implosion, with a probability as high as seventy-two.

  “You know that we’re going to die,” Lill said.

  “We won’t even notice it,” he replied.

  So she comm.ed Mart Kell, and he was upset enough by the results of Wicca’s error to be swayed by Lill’s overacting of grief and Academy loyalty to her sisters who required rescue ... and all the rest she heaped on him.

  A few minutes later, she opened a ship-to-ship holo to Cray and laid out her case for Humeitarian aid to the abandoned and wounded women. Diad could see that it helped considerably that Lill could do little to hide the fact that she hated every circuit and chip with which Cray 12,000 was constructed. It also helped when she told Cray that her crew would consist only of herself and one “elderly male, not even a soldier,” to help bring the women in through the Fast’s belly.

  Despite Cyber assent, they moved cautiously away from the station, and remained in full comm. with Mart Kell as long as it was feasible.

  Diad was attempting to explain without really explaining why their little first-aid mission would be enough of a distraction to Cray 12,000 to merit pulling in the rest of the Hesperian Fleet.

  “Get downstairs,” Lill ordered Diad. “We’ve got our first T-pods coming up with the wounded.”

  Now he had a terrible thought. “But they’ll die, too!”

  Lill shrugged. “It was your idea! Go! Better bring some of this.” “What’s that?”

  “Nano-sedatives. When they open up the T-pods, knock them out.”

  He slid into the Fast’s belly and arranged the chutes for reception. Three T-pods were pulled in and the women within were a mess. He opened the pods, injected the occupants, and pushed the pods aside. All the while, he was talking to Mart Kell, who in turn was reporting that the Cyber formation was still closing in on Groombridge, coming closer, closer.

  A shuttle full of wounded women arrived. Suddenly Diad had his hands full keeping them from getting out and mobbing him, while he tried injecting them. They were barely settled when another T-pod arrived, and another.

  Mart Kell shouted something into the earpiece.

  “What?” Diad asked.

  “They’ve stopped. They’re not coming any closer,” Kell repeated. “The range for the station guns is poor. It’s time to pull in our Fleet.”

  “Now?” Diad asked, trying to get the time certain.

  But Kell didn’t answer or their reception was gone. So Diad pushed the last T-pod to arrive aside, and intraship he comm.ed Lill.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “Sure did. Time for us to go!” Lill sounded calm enough. “I’ve got an idea, though. Are all those women sedated?”

  “All” – he counted – “twenty-five or so of them.”

  “I’m going to chute them all out,” Lill said. “No sense in them also dying.”

  “Good idea. I’ll line them up.”

  He was working on that while she had the Fast’s mind rearrange their Fast jump entry inside the appropriate Cyber craft, correcting for its latest motion.

  “I’m ready here,” she said. “Tell me the override code so I can convince this Fast to jump even though it doesn’t want to. Are you sending the pods out?”

  He shut the first pod and pushed it down the chute. “I am now.”
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  “You sure they’re all sedated?” Lill asked. “Check the shuttle. You might have missed one.”

  “They look fine,” he said.

  “I don’t want the wounded awakening in the middle of a laser battle,” she nagged.

  “I’ll have to get into the shuttle to check every pulse.”

  “We’ve got time,” she insisted.

  “When did you become such a nurse type?”

  “Let’s do this one Eve-kissing thing right, Northie!”

  He had gotten all of the individual and double T-pods out of the chute. Now he arranged the six-Hume shuttle for its exit, climbed in, and began to check out what looked like five very sedated and variously wounded women.

  “I’d like to know what Cray is thinking about all this,” he asked almost rhetorically. “Lill?”

  “Say hello to Gemma!” Lill replied and in the half second that Diad thought, What in the galaxy is that supposed to mean? he heard the shuttle door slam shut, and saw Lill’s face for an instant as she heaved the shuttle down the chute and out of the Fast.

  “You can’t do this to me!” he shouted, banging against the transparent walls as the shuttle tumbled free-fall out of the underside of the Fast, fell wildly, then righted itself in space.

  Diad rushed to the shuttle controls and tried to comm. the Fast.

  He was still desperately trying to contact Lill when the Fast vanished from sight in the characteristic twinkling light of a Fast jump that Gemma Rinne had compared to fireflies at night.

  Diad was swearing at Lill when he saw the light growing in the distance like a star going supernova. It was minutes before Lill’s suicide attack and the ensuing massive implosion’s first shock wave knocked him into the mass of inert women.

  “Leader Cray? May I ask a question?” It was the Antarean unit, two triads distant.

  “Go ahead.”

  “This MC request just received? Doesn’t it strike you as, well, odd?”

  “Odd?” Cray asked. “Particularize ‘odd.’”