by Joshua Guess
There was no grand farewell. None of them held any love for this place. A hellhole is largely defined by the experiences one has in it, and in other circumstances the valley might have held pleasant ones. Half a month of pain, fear, and death was enough to sour the optimism of a saint, however, and Dex for one would be glad to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.
Together they left the camp and headed north, following the trail left by the other evacuees. The forest was thick but not so dense that it slowed their travel much. Erin had moved the surviving members of the clean camp days before, when it became clear the overseers would need desperate measures to clean the prisoners off the planet.
Now the infected moved alone, and they did it at what was for them a comfortable jog. In earlier ages, world-class athletes would have stared at their speed with slack-jawed amazement.
Dex, Erin, and Fatima kept pace with each other, only speeding up when the first sonic boom heralded the arrival of the other shoe dropping from orbit.
31
Iona flew the ship as it had never been flown before. As no ship had ever been.
Though Child Blue changed the calculus of the battle in their favor, the enemy fleet still refused to stand down. Without the advanced drive system, their movements through space were relatively slow and clumsy, yet the probes Blue sent out as kinetic strike weapons could only maneuver so quickly and still maintain the momentum necessary to do serious damage. The enemy fired PDC rounds in seemingly endless bursts, far more than any ships of their size should have been capable of. Far more accurately, as well.
Not only were they more heavily armed than any three ships of their size should have been, but their aim was nearly perfect. Torpedoes and missiles were shredded the instant they reached the firing envelopes of the enemy fleet. She suspected this was more technology gifted by the Children, but ultimately the source was unimportant. Only the reality mattered.
And so Iona did the only thing she could and took the ship to warp. Her inspiration came from the series of tiny hops they’d taken inside the Children communication hub all those months ago. Destroying a space station 750 kilometers long using only the gravitational shear of a warp bubble was, in her mind, a monument to Krieger’s incredible talent as a pilot. She didn’t have his experience, which allowed him to make creative leaps on the fly. A brain capable of calculating warp jumps with pinpoint accuracy in a minuscule fraction of a second was a nice consolation prize.
She prepared and sent automated orders to the captain and the other gunners in perfect time with every microjump. Torpedoes fired a split second before the bubble dropped, too close and too fast for even an AI to acquire targets and pick them off.
The Seraphim blinked in and out of reality in a furious dance, unleashing an unending hell of weapons fire with every brief stop. She stayed no longer than a few seconds in any one place. The exterior of the ship was the sacrifice needed to make the play work. The enemy PDC networks filled the sky around each ship with a hail of shots too dense and thick for something the size of Seraphim avoid. The thick armored hull took an incredible beating, if not as terrible as the one it suffered while attacking the hub. Stealth coating was vaporized in huge patches as the tungsten rounds ablated into thermal blooms upon impact. Tattered pieces flapped in space, perturbed with every blast of thruster fire and making the ship look like a burned man with his skin peeling off in sheets.
Cameras blinked out at random as stray rounds found them. The remaining eyes showed a hull once more dimpled and pockmarked, and she thought it unlikely Commander Sharp could be convinced to cover the repairs a second time. This was not, after all, an existential battle. Few people got into more than one of those in a lifetime.
On the fifth jump, a rocket scored a lucky hit. In what Iona had to assume was a desperate gamble, the ship fired off a volley of shots in expectation of the Seraphim making a jump toward them. It used Iona’s trick against her. The rocket slammed into the ventral seam between the drive cone and the main hull, obliterating a huge section of the cone in a flare of white light.
Iona swore, but the exchange was more than fair. The pair of torpedoes the captain had loosed made it through the rain of PDC rounds and found their target. The warheads triggered a thirtieth of a second before impact, as they should, and the speck of exotic matter within was energized. The gravitational shift in a ten meter area around the warheads was small. Almost nonexistent. But it was there.
The small shear force weakened the hull, causing microfractures that spread like a web. The normal structural strains of the ship were too much for it. Its own rigidity worked against the doomed vessel as the strong areas pulled on the weak from every direction. All of this happened in the next few thirtieths of a second, followed by the impact of the torpedoes themselves. Like a sheet of polymer stretched thin before having a dart thrown at it, the side of the enemy vessel exploded, a geyser of atmosphere, debris, interior mechanical components, and human beings erupting through the point of impact.
They stayed long enough for Iona to see and process this, but to the human eye the entire exchange could have literally been missed by a long blink of the eye. Then they were gone again, off to repeat a strike on targets not disabled or destroyed on the first try.
She received a notification that Commander Cho was stable and secured in the med chamber, the automated doctor system inside the small tube busily working on her leg. A video feed accompanied the text pop up, and the human part of Iona—the aspect of her raised and taught by good people—paused in shock and grief.
*
The ship took two more strikes from heavy weapons before the fight was done. Neither did any additional damage to the drive cone—not that it could have suffered much more and stayed attached—but one was a torpedo hit. On the plus side, it landed dorsally, nearly dead center on the ship’s strong armored back. The negative was that it left a section of weakened hull and destroyed every piece of equipment attached to it in an area ten meters wide.
Iona had planned the entire attack around the idea that PDC rounds couldn’t do substantial damage to the ship, and that nothing heavier could be launched in time to do much more. Yet the enemy had formulated a response within seconds, using the best tactic available given the circumstances.
And why shouldn’t they? Presumably the men and women working those vessels were seasoned hands with years of experience in combat and responding creatively. Iona felt a pang of deep shame pulse inside her. The arrogance in assuming she could manage it all in ways that no one else could. That she could engineer a plan so clever that no response should even be possible.
The commander was hurt. Iona was the one running the mission, and the responsibility for those wounds rested solely on her shoulders.
“How bad is it?” the captain said, removing the tac array from his sweating face. When Iona stared at him blankly, he repeated the question. “The hull, Iona. How bad is it?”
She blinked, not realizing tears had begun to form in her eyes. “Not great. The torpedo worked, though the Seraphim is much more dense and heavily armored than the standard ship. I wouldn’t want to take any hits there until we can put her in dock, heat up that section of hull, and temper it to match the rest of the ship again. The wave would have attenuated through the steel quickly, so I doubt many internal systems were harmed. Certainly nothing critical.”
“Then why do you look like you’ve seen a ghost?” the captain asked, his brown eyes full of concern.
“The commander,” Iona said, her voice tight. “She’s hurt.”
He nodded. “I saw the notification, but all I got was that she was injured, alive, and being treated. How bad is it?”
“Bad,” Iona said. “We should go see her.”
His eyebrows arched up. “Is she dying?”
“No,” Iona said. Before she could continue, he held up a hand.
“She knows the risks of what she does,” he said in an even voice full of quiet authority. “We have disabled enemies who wi
ll be working their asses off to either get away from us or start fighting again. We blew through most of our ammunition. The ship is damaged, we don’t have a functional drive cone, and there’s a shitload of work to do. Crash can wait. She has to wait.”
“She’s going to lose that leg,” Iona said flatly. “This is my fault. I had command.”
“It’s your responsibility,” he said. “That much is true. Leading means taking ownership of what happens under your watch. And would you look at that: we won. It had a cost. Winning always does. It’s one I’ve seen Crash happy to pay more times than I can count. If she does lose a leg, well, that will be hard for her. For us, too, because she’s someone we love. But I guarantee you if an angel came down and told her the price for winning this battle was losing a limb, she’d have signed on the dotted line with a grin on her face.”
He leaned over the command console and flicked its display onto the primary monitor. A sea of red and green lights filled the detailed schematic of the ship covering its surface. “Responsibility, Iona. Not fault. You made the calls you made, and they worked. You minimized risk as much as anyone could have in a battle like this. Crash chose to go out in that Ravager with untested engines. From where I stand, it was necessary, incredibly brave, and kind of stupid. Almost suicidally dumb. You don’t get to take the credit for when she succeeds at doing her job, so you don’t get to take any blame for choices she made like the grown woman she is.”
Iona stared at him silently. “And if she were conscious, she’d want us ignoring her while she loses a leg?”
The captain actually laughed at the words. Deep and from the belly. “Are you kidding? She’d call us morons for wasting time standing over someone who had no way of knowing anyone is watching. She would—and I’ll remind you, has, many times—put the ship first.”
Iona nodded. “You’re right. Her attitude is so...informal toward command, sometimes I forget how dedicated to us she is.”
The captain snorted. “Well, yeah. But mostly I think she’d want us to fix the ship and lock down these assholes because she’s one of the people who’d die if we didn’t. Never underestimate the power of rational self-interest.”
Iona only smiled grimly in return before calling the rest of the crew and telling them to get to work.
32
There was no final battle on the ground. No dramatic scene where the defenders held a hill bravely while a sea of mercenaries lapped against them like the tide. When Dex left those last few dead behind in the valley and retreated before the might of the orbital strike he fully expected to come, that was the real end. Not heroic or moving. Just people on different sides killing each other in the dirt as they have been doing for thousands of years without end.
The strikes took the upper valley easily. The light from each impact turned night into day, painfully bright even from tens of kilometers distant. The group kept moving, endlessly putting distance between themselves and the place slowly being reduced to a quagmire of atomized trees, disintegrated animals, and stone turned molten by the unstoppable dance of physics.
There was no one left to fight. Days had passed with no evidence of further strikes, and no booming reports across the sky heralding the arrival of new drop ships. It struck Dex that the agent of Threnody who had inherited this mess from the proctor Dex killed might have decided to cut their losses. It would be cheaper in resources and lives to move on an restart the project elsewhere.
The thought of others being taken, for all of this to start over again, bothered him more than being stuck here for the rest of his life. The margin was thin, mind you, but very real.
What never occurred to Dex was that the enemy would do nothing and yet remain in the system. The prisoners were trapped here, after all. No way off the planet, no means of communication. After bombarding the surface, gating out to regroup seemed smarter than hanging around a planet that all logic said should be abandoned.
In truth, Dex didn’t consider for a second that the enemy was still there. No obvious signs like low orbiting objects that shouldn’t be there gave them away. He thought they’d run, right up until the first bright flares of light began erupting in the sky.
In the camp hidden near the low mountains that rose up a hundred kilometers past the valley, in a thick cluster of stone and trees that allowed a gorgeous view of the heavens while protecting them from detection on the ground, every survivor of the experiment gasped as one. Nuclear fire blossomed silently in the black above, large and bright enough to instantly gather the attention of all present.
“Oh, god,” Erin said. “They’re going to do it, aren’t they? Drop nukes on us.”
Dex began to nod, but froze when his thoughts caught up with his initial emotional reaction. “If that’s true, why are they happening up there?”
Erin pondered that. “Maybe they’re calibrating shots to hit us with radiation? Kill us that way?”
“No,” Dex said. “That’s not...well...shit. Yeah, they could be thinking of setting something with hard gamma off above us. Sterilize this whole section of coast line.”
Fatima, who had been standing off to one side, drew near. “Do they have weapons capable of that?”
Dex shrugged. “I could do it with the equipment on my ship, and it’s not even military.” He regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth. There was no need to scare anyone more than they already were. Either death would come for them or it wouldn’t. There was no stopping it. Hiding in caves might do the job, but there were none here.
But when he glanced at the grim faces surrounding him, Dex modified that opinion. They might be scared, but even the people from the clean camp looked ready to face whatever came next head on. There was no abject terror on those faces.
When he looked back to the sky, a new star joined the field. This one was moving, obviously a ship, and growing larger by the second as it skated closer to the atmosphere in its orbit. So close, in fact, that Dex could estimate its size. Then closer still, while that calculation worked in the back of his mind. An uneasy feeling came over him just before his mind worked out the answer. When he opened his mouth to shout for the others to scatter, that one of the Children was here and apparently bent on destruction, a hot sensation washed over him and the world went black.
*
Someone slapped him really hard.
“Children!” Dex screamed as he sat bolt upright. “Run!”
Erin crouched in front of him, nearly getting a head-butt from his lurch into a sitting position. “Calm down, man. It’s not attacking. But we’re a little worried.”
“What happened?” Dex said, running a hand over his face. “Was I hit? Am I hurt?” He didn’t feel wounded, though his nerves were jittery in a way that told him something had happened. Some kind of long distance disruption weapon? But why had he been the only one affected?
“You were out for like thirty seconds,” Erin said. “You don’t look hurt. But right when you passed out, that thing up there just...stopped. It’s just hovering up there, and it fired off four probes or something. They look like they’re coming this way.”
“Perfect,” Dex muttered. “Care to help me up? I’m a little wobbly.”
He stood straight right as the thrumming whoosh of displaced air buzzed overhead. A black object hovered there, dark against the night sky and only seen in outline. It was small, hard to see at a hundred meters.
“How fucked do you think we are?” Erin asked conversationally. “If we’re about to die, I’m going to find the nearest willing partner and go out having some fun.”
Despite his fear, Dex laughed. “Not it. I’m taken.”
A warm feeling spread over his body—decidedly warm, but not the flare of overwhelming heat from before—and immediately after, the probe dropped from the sky. He took an involuntary step back as it again stopped without slowing, this time less than two meters away from him.
“Identity confirmed,” the probe said, though no speaker was evident. “Hello, Dex. We’ve
been looking for you for quite a while now.”
“Uh, hi?” Dex replied, unsure how you talked to an enemy of humanity that had apparently been hunting you. “I didn’t realize the Children had an interest in me.”
There was a click, which he felt might be the machine equivalent of a surprised pause. “You misunderstand, but it is only natural. You would not recognize my voice. I am Child Blue. Your crew—your ship—is here with me. In one of my bays. We have come to rescue you, but I see you are not alone.”
At the word ‘rescue’ an excited babble of conversation absolutely erupted from the survivors. Dex didn’t bother trying to suppress it enough that he could hear himself speak. He just spoke louder, this time with a grin nearly splitting his face in half. “Well, it took you guys long enough. What was that flash, though? I got really hot and passed out. Did the other side paint us with a weapon of some kind, maybe something your people gave them?”
“Ah, no,” Blue said, and Dex was astounded to discover that the sentient ship, itself larger than a space station, could sound embarrassed. “I am afraid that was me. The self-assembling beacon Iona transferred to you used your nervous system as an antenna. The filaments capture microwaves to power the beacon. I...fed you a little too much energy when I swept the surface in my attempt to trigger the beacon.”
“Putting aside why Iona has nanotech capable of making something like that, and we definitely will circle back around to it, how did you find us? And when can we get the hell off this planet?”
The probe dipped slightly, reminiscent of a bow or a curtsy. “Of course. I am fabricating a drop ship with my internal printers. It will be ready in approximately six hours. You should make sure the rest of your group brings whatever food and supplies they require, as I am not outfitted for human comforts. I can make plenty of space inside myself for you, but I lack materials for anything other than repairs and construction.”
