Borderlander

by Joshua Guess

  Iona broke out in a sudden, surprisingly sunny grin. “That’s the other thing I wanted to talk to you about.”

  *

  Dex wore his usual jumpsuit and it felt wrong. Everything about the ship felt off in ways he struggled to put a finger on.

  He understood it on a purely logical level Everything had changed. He was no longer in the same constant, immediate danger as he was on the nameless planet. He had left that place behind him, not even bothering to look in the archives to find its system designation. Yet the planet seemed unwilling to do the same for him. It would have been better for the instincts brought back to the fore while living on its surface to be at the front of his mind at all times. That constant stress he could deal with. But no; entire hours would go by where Dex felt at home. It was only when some noise or unexpected light caught him off guard that the survival mechanisms so desperately needed over the last few months kicked in and sent his system into emergency mode.

  Even this he would have been able to cope with, but combined with the pervasive sense that the ship was too small, the air too clean, the surfaces too smooth—no. It was too much. Every nerve in his body screamed to get away from the place.

  And so he did. The run on Threnody couldn’t start for days yet. Seraphim was still undergoing repairs thanks to the massive fabrication systems inside Blue’s cargo bay. The rescued prisoners had been given food and other comforts as Blue floated several hundred kilometers from the NIA anchorage where the fleet was to meet. A transport ship had been arranged, but as with many plans nothing was moving in reality with anything like the speed promised in theory.

  “What are you doing back here?” Fatima asked as Dex approached the survivors. One hundred and twenty two. That was how many made it off the planet. More than half of the dead were infected. Or altered, as Dex had been told they were more inclined to prefer. Certainly not blessed, as he was indoctrinated to believe.

  “Ship feels...weird,” Dex said. “I needed more space than she could give me.”

  Fatima glanced at Erin, who sat across from her leaning against a heavy storage crate. “You talking about the ship, or...”

  Dex rolled his eyes. “Of course I’m talking about the ship. Iona moved heaven and earth to track me down. She’s not the problem. None of them are. I’m having a hard time adjusting, that’s all.”

  Erin stuffed the last bite of a protein bar into her mouth, then dusted her hands on her shirt. “You won’t adjust, you keep coming out here every time things get uncomfortable. It’s not supposed to be easy.”

  He nodded. It only made sense. “It’s also really hard to be away from everybody. Like I’m abandoning you.” The admission was one they had heard before, but part of the problem with being as intelligent as Dex was that when he finally came upon a problem he couldn’t solve, he tended to bash his head against that wall without direction.

  Fatima snorted a laugh. “Buddy, you have your life back. Enjoy it. We’ll be home in a few days, maybe a week if the navy really wants to get deep with their questions. You stood beside us and fought. Helped me get through the worst of the change. But you’re not my husband or my dad. I don’t need you here to hold my hand. Besides, we all shared our contact information. It’s not like we can’t keep in touch. The ship will be here in less than a day, and you have some planning to do. So how about we all say our goodbyes—again—and you go back to your ship and work through this stuff. Okay?”

  Dex nodded, but found himself unable to speak.

  Fatima studied his face, smiling sadly. “Sometimes it’s easy to forget how young you are. What you’ve been through doesn’t really change the fact that you haven’t had a lot of life to give you the experience you need to cope, does it? It’s going to be hard, Dex. But you have good people who want to help you. The rest of us out here? We’ve got each other. We’ll be fine. You will, too.”

  It sounded wrong to him. Life didn’t come with a preset condition you could simply return to. There were no easy defaults to trigger. Every moment, every day, every hurt and every victory all conspire to shape us in a dynamic process that never ends.

  Dex knew it. Understood it on a visceral level. He still felt that uncertainty, the sensation of constantly being in free fall and reaching out endlessly for something to steady him.

  “Go find your girl and talk to her,” Erin said. “You might find out she’s going through something similar now that you’re back.”

  Just the thought of sitting across from Iona and talking about it—just being able to talk about it—sparked a glimmer of stability in his head. It was, he decided, somewhere to start. A good place.

  “Thank you,” he said. “That sounds like a good idea.”

  Fatima grinned. “Of course it is. You’re smart guy, Dex, but sometimes you’re too dumb to see what’s right in front of your face. Try to fix that, okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he replied with a smile. “I’ll do my best.”

  Erin stood and pulled him into a bear hug. “Also, don’t die. I’d be really pissed if you died.”

  Dex hugged her back. “I’ll do my best, but no promises. My crew isn’t well known for sanity in the face of overwhelming odds.”

  Fatima smirked. “Good to know we have something in common, then.”

  35

  “All ships report ready,” Batta said over the comm.

  Grant clicked back twice and took a deep breath. “Okay. So we’re really going to do this?”

  “Unless we want to fight a war on two fronts with the Children and Threnody, yes,” Crash said. Her new leg, manufactured from a design based on Iona’s artificial cells and made at a vastly increased speed thanks to Blue, sat straight out in front of her and bare. The skin tone wasn’t quite the same just yet, but Grant had been in the room when the new appendage formed from countless little grains and Crash got the run down on how it would work. With enough effort, her skin could be made to grow over it, but Grant suspected she wouldn’t bother.

  “Don’t see why you need to be up here,” he said. “That thing isn’t fully rooted to your bones yet. Iona said it would take a few days.”

  Crash put a hand to her chest in mock outrage. “That ‘thing’ is my leg, you heartless monster. And besides, I’m not any safer there than I am here, and my chair has more room to stretch while the bits and pieces network with my nervous system.”

  Grant smiled. “And if you’re gonna die, might as well do it with friends, right?”

  Crash winked at him and brought up her command console.

  He opened a channel to the gathered fleet. “This is Stone. The board is green. We’re ready to gate. We go to full network readiness in one minute. Once the link is established, we jump. Godspeed, everyone, and good hunting.”

  There was no need for acknowledgment, of course. The other twenty-nine ships in their little battle fleet sent their status updates to Batta. Grant wished he could stay below and watch the man work. Back in their navy days, that sort of thing was common. You got away with a lot when you had ten other people capable of doing your job.

  He didn’t envy Batta’s work from here on, however. During the battle, he would only be responsible for the Seraphim, but afterward he would coordinate all repairs for any ship that wanted or needed it.

  “Spencer,” Grant said, watching the countdown tick away on the monitor.

  “You know we’re solid here, boss,” she answered. “All drones are running smooth.”

  The timer reached zero and the entire fleet went into the Cascade together. Not through a system gate, but in the belly of the beast.

  “We have a full map of the target,” Iona said, settling herself into a newly installed jump seat solely for her use. The straps extended around her and cradled her body firmly in place, saving even the negligible processing power she needed to maintain her balance. “The network is up. I’m taking control.” She gave a smile to the bridge crew. “Good luck.”

  Grant was turned in his seat eyeing Krieger and Spenc
er when Iona slumped forward, fully integrating herself with the ship. Spencer’s mouth tightened a hair at her words, which Grant found curious. Normally the woman was as perfectly controlled as a Zen monk on anxiety medication. He filed away the nearly imperceptible frown for future inquiry.

  Krieger, however, smiled widely. While he wouldn’t be piloting the ship, he had expressed eagerness for the novel challenge ahead. “Krieger, you good to go? We only have about three minutes until we drop into real space.”

  “Oh, yes,” Krieger said. “I’m very happy with this. I have never piloted a vehicle like this drone before.”

  “Much less ten of them,” Grant said. “Think you can handle it?”

  Krieger shot him a frank look. “Captain. Please.”

  Grant raised his hands. “Okay, okay, I just had to ask. Crash, you ready?”

  “Yep. I’ll keep an eye on things. You guys have fun.”

  Fun. That was the last thing on Grant’s mind.

  *

  The space around Threnody was a seething mass of steel. Their own fleets stood ready to move, of course, as the delivery of their bioweapon was key to the taking of colonies. Despite the drastic fatality rate its population went through in any given generation, the total number of souls on the planet’s surface exceeded any other human settlement outside of Earth. This was a deliberate choice; building up to war and expansion meant having the bodies needed to hold any ground you took.

  Ring upon ring of defense platforms circled the planet itself like layers of glittering diamond necklaces. More than two centuries of buildup and mining the solar system for resources created a barrier of surpassing deadliness. Any ship trying to pass through would be reduced to metallic confetti in short order without appreciably reducing the defense network’s ability to shrug off attack.

  The ships themselves, both native and hired hands, were a force to be reckoned with even against the established military powers in the region. As predicted, the Alliance navy was at that moment fighting sudden actions against surprise incursions by the Children. The number and frequency of these attacks were to increase over the course of several days, allowing Threnody to strike hard at crucial targets.

  The members of the Ghost Fleet about to arrive had no way to know for certain that the mercenaries awaiting orders in the system actually knew the scope of the job they had been hired for. But every person undertaking the assault presumed guilt. Just as Dex had on his prison planet with the mercenaries he fought. The benefit of the doubt was not an affordable luxury for the human race. Not now.

  Yasin transmitted this data as he had for the better part of a week. He was still tracking and sending in real time when the fleet arrived.

  *

  The thing about defense platforms—about all warfare, really—is that weapons are for the most part designed on a certain scale. There are workarounds and exceptions, but none were in evidence when Blue exited the Cascade deep inside the interior of the Threnody system at five percent the speed of light.

  Latched onto its outer hull, well within the expanded field of its reactionless drive, were thirty Ghost Fleet ships. They broke off in perfect sync, still carried along inside the field as they deployed the weapons known as spikes. Simple kinetic strike projectiles, normally sped up well outside the field of battle and dropped on an unsuspecting capital ship or planetary target.

  Not so this time. Coordinating with the sim staying aboard to act as its link to the network, Blue increased its field output to maximum. The speed of the fleet was far greater than any weapon could attain, and by the time the enemy ships with engines gifted by the Children could react, the fleet was well past catching.

  When they reached ten percent light speed, the fleet went to warp as one.

  Blue, however, immediately went ballistic and reoriented itself. Its job as a carrier was done, but as it made a wide arc, nudged around by a new field once its new heading was in place, its primary task began.

  Streaks of light announced the impending arrival of the altered mercenary ships. Blips on its sensor grid told Blue how powerfully each bent and twisted space to reach this huge new enemy. Blue almost felt pity for the lot of them; fearlessly engaging a superior foe was to be commended.

  Bravery would do them no good in the end.

  *

  Iona was in command of the Seraphim, but she also wasn’t. Yasin fed the sims of the assault group data from his hiding place, performing calculations and running simulations as a central processor would in a lesser machine. She made decisions on the fly—not that any were needed yet—but Yasin directed the fleet.

  Inside their warp bubble, the assault group was immune to anything the universe could throw at them short of flying through a star. The gravitational shear of the bubble would rend all matter into dust and shed it off in a bow wake designed to prevent the deadly accumulation of charged particles that used to make warp travel too dangerous for regular use. Of course, they would have to drop out of warp to deliver their payloads. That was the tricky part.

  Iona communicated with the other sims, less a flow of discrete information than a ceaseless river of awareness. She knew their location in space to the millimeter, the general state of their systems, and what their sensors read. The stream of shorthand delivered a thousand details all at once, but Iona’s mind translated it into broad understanding rather than stark data.

  The order to drop their bubbles came with a timer measured in thousandths of a second. Easy enough.

  Space opened up before her, revealing a planet approaching at an incredible speed. As soon as the gravitational shear vanished, every ship activated what Blue called a ‘catastrophic inertial cancellation device’ but the captain smirkingly referred to as ‘the best emergency brake in the universe.’ Blue had manufactured and installed them in every ship to bleed off the ludicrous velocity it took to reach this point safely.

  Also, if the spikes hit the planet at this speed, there wouldn’t be much planet left to speak of.

  At the periphery of her awareness, a voice went silent. The braking device in one of the assault ships must have failed upon activation. Just a guess, but given the sudden bloom of light and debris in the distance, a good one.

  She would mourn later. There was no time now, not even as her mind perceived it.

  The fleet slowed to sane velocity as the one-use brakes applied highly manipulated gravity to create friction between the ships and the fabric of space in an inversion of what the reactionless drives normally did.

  Iona and the other nine—rather, eight now—planetary assault ships moved right along on their planned courses, their spikes loosed like arrows from a quiver only found at the hip of a god. The metal fingers cut through Threnody’s atmosphere so quickly that no evacuation was possible. It was unlikely anyone on the ground even understood what was happening before impact.

  There simply wasn’t time for them, either.

  In the blink of an eye, nine crucial pieces of the planet ceased to exist. The kinetic energy of the strikes dwarfed any nuclear weapon ever detonated by man. Three of the four major ship yards evaporated in an instant. The agricultural complex on the northern continent, the source of nearly half of all the vat-grown food consumed by the population, disappeared in a white sphere of light nearly forty kilometers across. Infrastructure vital to the people there, gone. Just gone. The capital remained, however. That was never a target.

  Threnody wanted to pit Planetary Alliance citizens against each other with their bioweapon. Why shouldn’t the people responsible be forced to live and deal with the consequences of that plan? It would serve them right for their own citizens to turn on them. Iona found the irony satisfying if unlikely. Dex was adamant that the people here were zealots. True believers.

  Iona wondered how bad the infighting would be once the people on the surface realized what happened to their defense grid.

  Well, what was about to happen to it. She didn’t want to get ahead of herself.

  36

/>   Part of what made Grant such an exceptional gunner was an element of human nature so basic that it could be traced back to when his ancestors first dropped from the trees. That ability was focus. Focus to the exclusion of all else.

  A part of his mind compartmentalized from the majority of his conscious thoughts understood and kept track of the plan for coming into this system. Warping close enough to drop kinetic weapons was dangerous beyond belief, and not just because dropping out of a bubble would immediately open them up to fire from the defense network. It was a gamble of the highest order and everyone in the fleet knew it.

  While his brain tracked the chain of events almost automatically, Grant put the majority of his effort into keeping his ship from being torn to shreds. Thankfully the other twenty ships bought the fleet some time; their spikes weren’t the normal variety. In the fight with the Children and their slave fleets, the need for a new weapon had become obvious. How do you fight a swarm of small ships that have utter fearlessness in the face of death and work together with flawless coordination? It was nearly perfect as a means of combating the powerful but rigid structure of the Alliance navy, designed as it was to fight navies like itself.

  Through the tac array, Grant saw those twenty ships disappear as their spikes split apart into dozens of smaller weapons, each with its own drive unit. Small, certainly, but they didn’t need to add any velocity to the fragments. The trip in provided all the energy they needed, thanks to Blue. No, the engines were little more than thrusters, aligning each fragment with a defense platform, every bit of it tracked and managed by the collective minds of the fleet sims who all had total control of their vessels.

  The platforms, perhaps reading the streaks of unstoppable metal moving toward them, began pouring out their contents in emergency mode. The nearest of them were destroyed too quickly for this, creating an expanding bubble of safe space for the ships with Threnody at its center. Those weapons systems more distant had time to fire off some or all of their munitions and it was this glittering cloud upon which Grant dedicated his considerable mental power.