by Nick Webb
Oppenheimer flashed a grim smile. “Just a lot of firepower to open up that hole down to Titan’s core.” He glanced sidelong off the viewscreen, whispering something to another officer. After a few nods, he turned back to the screen. “Ok, channel’s secure—we can speak freely without twenty billion people listening in. Once that hole is open, we’ve got some leftover firepower thanks to former president Avery. An antimatter bomb she produced for the Second Swarm War.”
Good God, does everyone have one of those blasted things?
Proctor played coy. “I thought we got rid of all those? The joint chiefs thought they were too dangerous to keep around.”
“Most of them were disposed of. But when I came on board after you left IDF I … intervened. Saved a few for just such an occasion. In case the Quiassi and Findiri ever decided to pop in. Joint chiefs backed me up. Not sure the president knows … I mean, the former president. And it looks like Mullins was able to lift at least one of them off of me. Two, if the reports from El Amin can be believed. I’ve got one left.”
Proctor looked incensed, and her face said she had a million questions and retorts, but to her credit, she buried them all and focused on the task at hand.
Saving Earth.
“Ok.” She looked offscreen and listened to a report, giving another curt nod. “Mr. Qwerty informs me that he thinks the Dolmasi are on board. If he’s translating them correctly. At least they’re not shooting at us yet. Looks like Titan is almost here. Is the fleet ready?”
“Ready as we’ll ever be. I’ll give the orders to special ops to ready the anti-matter bomb for insertion into the shaft we create in Titan’s crust.” He turned as if to end the conversation, but glanced back at the screen. “Oh, and Shelby, don’t think this means you’re not going to be held accountable for your actions. If we succeed today, I’ll see you court-martialed for the murder of President Quimby. And if we lose today…” he paused, weighing his words.
He threw caution to the wind. “I’ll hunt you down and put a bullet in your head myself for throwing away our planet just to settle one of your petty grudges.”
Oppenheimer signed off before Proctor could protest. She turned to Volz, and actually smiled. “Well? At least he’s not shooting at me either. Yet. Probably because he doesn’t suspect yet that I know he was involved in that gallium cloud. If he did, he’d have killed me by now before I can testify to the inevitable senate panel.”
Volz sat back down in the captain’s chair. “Think this plan can actually work?”
She looked caught between a sigh and a profane outburst. “Probably not. It’s a moon. If it decides to collide with Earth, there’s nothing we can do to stop it. But at least we’re not going down without a fight.”
The tactical officer shouted across the bridge. “Sir! Massive power spike coming from Titan!”
Proctor leaned forward, and her expression became resolute. “I guess it’s now or never.”
Chapter Sixty-Eight
High Orbit over Earth
ISS Defiance
Bridge
“Ma’am, Vishgane Kharsa on the Dolmasi flagship confirms they’re moving in for their run at the surface of Titan,” said Qwerty. “Says he has fifty terawatts of collective power from their ships’ antimatter turrets to fire at the target. Also says he’ll make us pay for the disruption of the Ligature when this is all over and hang our skins as trophies above his command center. He … uh, doesn’t sound too happy … but at least he’s not shootin’ at us.”
Proctor nodded. “Good. Payback can wait for all of us.” She glanced at her tactical readout. “Looks like Oppenheimer is making good on his promise. The Earth Defense Fleet is turning to bear on target and powering up their terawatt lasers.” She turned to Whitehorse. “Power up ours. Let’s get this show on the road.”
Titan grew larger on the screen, until it filled the entire front wall. Far below, on the surface, she could just make out the site where the pieces of the Golgothic ship had crash landed all around the hole it had bored into the surface, which was now covered by rock and dirt. All they had to do was punch through, and maintain the hole open just long enough for Oppenheimer’s special ops team to insert the anti-matter bombs.
Would it be enough? Would just the threat of what they were doing be enough to convince whatever force or intelligence that was steering Titan to back off? And if not, would the destructive power of the bombs be enough to push the moon off course? She checked its trajectory. Still pointed at Earth. Except … it wasn’t pointed exactly at Earth. Just slightly above the north pole. What did that mean?
“Ma’am, Oppenheimer’s ship reports the fleet is in firing range.” On Proctor’s tactical screen, she confirmed. A swarm of green dots had closed to firing range on the rogue moon, accompanied by a wash of yellow dots indicating the presence of the Dolmasi fleet, that had, for now at least, put their war on hold and decided that Titan posed as much a threat to them as it did to humanity. Moons shouldn’t be able to steer, after all, and if it could steer towards Earth, it could steer towards Verdra-dol.
“Fire.”
As one, over fifty human cruisers, frigates, carriers, and corvettes, combined with dozens of Dolmasi light cruisers, opened fire on the site of the hole. Rock vaporized away. She could even see it on the screen without any magnification, like a sprout of fire from the surface of Titan, just visible through the tenuous yellow atmosphere.
“Progress?”
Whitehorse tapped her console. “Down one hundred meters. One hundred fifty. Two hundred.” A pause. “Going faster now. One kilometer. Two kilometers. Three—”
But that was as far as she got before the screen washed out with a blaze of light, the pixels over-saturating. When it auto-corrected the light balance, she gasped.
From the very hole they had created, another beam had erupted. Red. Deadly shimmering red, like the beam that the alien ship had wielded so effectively and terrifyingly against their ship just two weeks prior.
Titan was … firing.
Firing.
Titan was no longer a moon. It was a space station. “It’s a fucking cannon,” she breathed. Her mother’s voice didn’t even chide her for language. “A planet-sized cannon.”
“What the hell is it shooting at?” said Volz over the comm.
Whitehorse frantically worked her console, shaking her head in frustration. “It’s—it’s not hitting any of the ships in the fleet. Neither our fleet or the Dolmasi.”
“Earth?”
Whitehorse tapped a few buttons and the viewscreen flipped to show Earth, with the giant red beam disappearing past it, zooming off into space thousands of kilometers above the north pole. “It’s missing Earth, too.”
The red beam shimmered and pulsed. Almost … regularly. Was that…
Was that another code?
Holy shit.
“Mr. Qwerty, if you please—”
But he’d already sprung into action. “Translating now, Admiral.” He worked, and after a moment, his jaw hung open, slack. “It’s not morse code like before, ma’am. It’s … dear Lord.”
“What?!”
Qwerty’s face had gone white. “It’s encoded audio.”
“Play it!”
The red beam pulsed and shimmered, continuing its destructive path into … nothingness, far above Earth. And over the speakers, a voice.
An alien, almost robotic, mechanical voice.
And yet, a voice she recognized.
It was impossible.
“Shelby, they’re back,” croaked the voice. “Shelby, they’re back.”
Proctor had slowly risen to her feet without even realizing it. Before she could speak, the voice repeated itself a third time.
“Shelby, they’re back,” it scratched. “And … so am I. Like a … like a … brick wall out of nowhere. I … I think I was supposed to tell you that.”
She grasped for her armrest, feeling her legs about to give out. This was impossible. This was a fantasy.
But whatever it was, that was unmistakably Captain Timothy Granger’s voice, however robotic or mechanical it sounded. Granger’s voice from the grave. From the void. Granger coming, returning—just like the fucking Grangerites predicted—to save them all, again.
Her mind flashed to Carla’s hospital bed, where the dead girl lay silent and peaceful and bloody, as a defiant young Shelby yelled her disbelief at her grieving mother. Raging against the unlikelihood of an arbitrary god and the terrible injustice of a mortal life that had ended too soon for an innocent young girl. “I don’t believe, mother!” she’d yelled. “I don’t believe in your fake magic god!”
She collapsed back into her chair, staring at the red beam disappearing into the void beyond Earth. The red beam encoding Granger’s voice. The red beam originating from the core of a moon that, against all hope, against all reason, now held the body or the consciousness or the essence or the mind of … Captain Tim Granger.
The Hero of Earth.
“I believe,” she whispered.
Whitehorse pointed at the screen. “But what the hell is it firing at?”
Chapter Sixty-Nine
High Orbit over Earth
ISS Defiance
Bridge
“Tim,” she said. “Tim, is that you?”
Qwerty, jaw still half open, pointed up at the screen. “That’s … that’s insane.”
“I’m inclined to agree, Mr. Qwerty. But … facts are facts. Evidence is evidence. Who else could it be?” Indeed, the pieces were starting to assemble together in her mind. And as unlikely a picture as they were painting, as she said, facts were facts. The piece of the ISS Victory that was embedded deep within the alien ship, dated to thirteen billion years ago. The original message that read Shelby, they’re coming, hidden in the alien ship’s energy beam using morse code—a method so unlikely and unsophisticated that it was a wonder they even caught it.
And now Granger’s voice, albeit … altered. Different. She supposed thirteen billion years in a black hole wouldn’t do one’s vocal cords any favors.
Qwerty wasn’t having it. “Could be anyone’s voice, ma’am. Could be computer generated.”
“No. It’s him.” She couldn’t say exactly why she knew it was him. She couldn’t exactly blurt out It’s him because he’s repeating cryptic words that my dying sister said to me that I never told anyone about. But they needed to believe her. “I don’t know how, but it’s him. I know it.” She reached down to press a button on her comm that would broadcast to the fleet. “All hands, all ships, cease fire. I repeat, cease fire, immediately.”
The Independence’s and the Defiance’s laser turrets all fell silent, and after some hasty translation, Qwerty managed to pass along the order to the Dolmasi, but the Earth Defense Fleet continued its bombardment on Titan, drilling deeper and deeper into the previous hole, though several ships had now retargeted the exact site where the red beam was firing from.
“Oppenheimer, we need to stop. Now.”
A sigh over the comm. “Really, Shelby? First you side with the Dolmasi, then kill Mullins and Quimby, and now this? Titan is a direct existential threat to Earth, and now you want to stand back and let it continue on its mission of destruction?”
“We don’t know what its mission is! And Christian, I think … I think Tim is on that thing.”
Silence over the comm. She held her breath, knowing how crazy she sounded. “Excuse me? Did I hear that right?”
“Yes, Christian. Tim Granger just spoke to us. Encoding his voice into that red beam. He said they’re back, Christian. The Swarm. They’re back.”
Another pause.
“He actually used those words? He said, the Swarm is back?”
She closed her eyes and held her head in her hands. “Well, no. He didn’t say Swarm. It was implied.”
Oppenheimer grunted a laugh. “So, the ghost of Granger is … implying … that the Swarm have returned?”
She swallowed back a lump in her throat that had suddenly appeared. “Yes.”
Another pause, this time for nearly ten seconds. “And … you have proof? Dammit, Shelby, what the hell has gotten into you? You used to be the fleet admiral of IDF. You’re a scientist, for god’s sake. Where’s your evidence? Where’s the smoking gun? Where’s your fucking proof?”
She held her face in her hands. He was right. She had no evidence. Just inexplicable coincidences. Circumstantial evidence that she had assembled into a picture. She was ashamed to admit what she saw—a picture of a dead Granger coming back to save them all. Again.
“I have none. But … it feels right, Christian.”
He guffawed. “Just listen to yourself, Shelby.”
“Ma’am,” began Whitehorse. “About that beam coming from Titan. It’s aiming at some undefined point above the north pole of Earth.”
“Yes?”
“We thought it was just heading off into deep space. But … it’s not. It’s actually disappearing at a point about fifty thousand kilometers from Earth. And that point where the beam is disappearing … it’s approaching.”
Proctor frowned. “Wait. You’re saying the beam is simply disappearing at a singular point, and that point itself is approaching Earth?”
“Yes ma’am. And that’s not all. You know that gravitational anomaly we detected earlier? The one we assumed was Titan before it appeared? Well from these numbers, Titan doesn’t account for all of it. It’s why I had trouble determining the source, because there was more than one.”
Proctor lifted her head up to talk to the comm. “Did you catch that, Christian?”
“I did. What of it? Still doesn’t prove that Granger Jesus has returned from the dead to save us all. Get your head out of the clouds, Shelby.”
She pounded her armrest. “Dammit, Christian, look around you. A blasted moon just appeared out of nowhere. If Granger returning from a black hole is stranger than that, then I don’t know how to help you.”
Whitehorse’s eyes widened and she pointed at the viewscreen. “Ma’am! Something’s happening!”
Proctor looked at the viewscreen to watch. There, above and beyond the Earth, the starlight was shimmering. Wavering. Almost like how the Defiance’s viewscreen looked when it was stealthed. The starlight … stretched. And when it had stretched to a point where the lines of light were bending and reddening and beginning to blur, something else appeared.
Something massive.
Something bigger than the largest spaceship she’d ever seen.
Chapter Seventy
High Orbit over Earth
ISS Defiance
Bridge
It felt like a dream. A nightmare. And yet even in her nightmares she’d always known that the horrors she saw or re-experienced were shadows and phantoms, and would soon fade away if she could only wake up. Just wake up, dammit.
But she didn’t wake up.
This was not a dream.
Beyond Earth, at a point her console was telling her was over thirty thousand kilometers away, a monstrosity appeared. A behemoth.
A ship.
Easily ten times the size of a Skiohra generation ship. Maybe a hundred. And even though it was far beyond Earth, it looked nearly as large.
Titan’s red energy beam slammed into it, raking across its thousand-kilometer-long surface, spitting great gouts of fire as it tore into the hull, but it continued on its course towards Earth.
“What the hell is it?” she breathed. Though she knew the answer. Granger had already told her.
Through the comm, Commander Mumford on the Independence replied, “Ma’am, I’m reading unmistakable … Swarm signatures off this thing. Power levels are far higher than the original Swarm carriers we faced thirty y
ears ago, but the power phase profiles are identical.”
Impossible. They couldn’t be back. They couldn’t be back, bigger, stronger, and more powerful than ever. Tim had stopped them. She’d stopped them. But the evidence was staring her in the face, bearing down on Earth, ready to unleash who-knew-what kind of fiery hell on the birthplace of humanity.
Lieutenant Whitehorse seemed to be stunned into silence. The whole crew was speechless. Their mouths hung open. No one knew what to say or what to do—they were all frozen, as if they were stuck in a dream. Or trapped a burning building where every exit was locked.
They needed a leader.
Proctor stood. She planted her feet firmly and clasped her hands behind her back. “Mr. Qwerty, patch me through to … everyone. Wide band transmission. And translate for the Dolmasi, if you please.”
He nodded. “Aye, ma’am. You’re on.”
“This is Admiral Shelby Proctor. My fellow servicemen and women, my fellow citizens, our enemy is unveiled at last. We do not fight the GPC. We do not fight Shovik-Orion or any other corporation. We do not fight amongst ourselves. We do not fight the Dolmasi, or the Skiohra, or any other living, breathing beings native to this reality. And we most certainly do not fight against the so-called Golgothics—what we now know to be a completely fabricated, made-up, imaginary enemy.” She paused, letting the words sink in as she watched the terrible, enormous ship approach Earth. “No. We fight the Swarm. And this time, we don’t do it alone. We were never alone,” she murmured, watching the entire moon of Titan accelerate towards the massive ship.
Lieutenant Whitehorse caught her attention. “Admiral, power surge coming from the new ship. Off the charts. Similar to the power output of Titan. I think it’s readying some type of weapon—”
As if in answer, the screen lit up. From one of the four giant, kilometer-sized ports on the gargantuan, twisted new ship, an energy beam erupted. It lanced out across the tens of thousands of kilometers separating them, and slammed into the surface of Titan. A white fireball blasted out from the moon, billowing up into a distorted mushroom cloud with waves of rock and debris flying up out of the moon’s gravity well.
