I tried to peer around the corner of the windscreen to spot the Lythion, and saw once more the bigger alien ship.
It was aglow with unearthly light, which ran over and along it, to gather at the front of it.
The light formed into a ball which launched itself at ferocious speed right at the Lythion.
“Watch out, Lyssa!” I cried, my hand splaying on the screen, as if I could reach out and stop the thing.
The Lythion jigged. I can’t describe it better than that. Lyssa was the ship, after all. She could duck and sidestep the way humans could.
The ball of greenish red fire passed over the top of the Lythion.
The mother ship fired a ball at us, too. I saw it coming, like a nemesis bearing down upon us.
“Shit! Dalton!”
He did almost the same thing as Lyssa. He jigged, using the shuttle’s atmospheric maneuvering jets to drop us vertically “down”.
The fireball passed over our heads. I watched with sick fascination as it struck the Ige Ibas…and passed straight through it. A ring of fire on the fuselage the size of the ball framed a view of the planet beyond, the rocky surface now bathed in dawn light.
“Lyssa, fire back!” I screamed. “Rail guns! Everything!”
The two guns on the top of the Lythion opened up, raining fire upon the alien ship.
One gun tracked sideways and I saw small balls of flame flare up, then extinguish as vacuum put out the flames. Lyssa was swatting at the little flyers, too.
That gave me a better idea of the true size of the mother ship. It was enormous.
“Coming in hot and hard,” Lyssa warned. “Dalton, stay very still.”
Dalton slapped the dashboard, shutting everything down, then fired the maneuvering jets for a second, to bring us to a complete standstill.
Through the screen, over our heads, the Ige Ibas burned from the inside out.
The mother ship was turning to face us once more, but as it lined us up in its sights, the Lythion rose up between us, its flank facing us. Lyssa had the freight ramp down, and the inside of the freight bay yawned.
“She isn’t…” I breathed.
“I think, yeah, she is,” Dalton said. “This is going to be tight,” he added.
“The shuttle won’t fit!”
“It will and she knows that, or she wouldn’t try it,” Dalton said calmly.
Both rail guns had swung around and were firing almost continuously at the mother ship on the other side of the Lythion. I watched the brilliant twin streams of deathly energy trace their way across the blackness and wanted to cheer.
Then the Lythion loomed up over us and I lost sight of the rail guns and saw that the landing bay was swallowing us up like that long-ago ancient whale had once swallowed ships whole.
I bent to peer through the very far corner of the shuttle screen, for we were being sucked into the landing bay sideways. I spotted the ramp closing and, beyond that, the motion of stars through the sky as Lyssa got the Lythion moving even before the ramp properly shut.
Dalton put the shuttle down on the floor of the bay with a slight thud and shut the engines down.
The silence was thick, broken only by everyone breathing very hard.
“Now, will you for fuck’s sake stay still so I can get this?” Fiori demanded, tugging at my arm.
I lifted up my arm and looked at it. Blood was everywhere, and more of it oozed through the two centimeter trough that had been gouged out of my upper arm. “Damn, I’m really bleeding,” I muttered. “I thought it was the vacuum making me faint.”
—12—
The Lythion had a medical bay that Fiori announced as adequate, while Lyssa hovered to one side, wearing the white tunic that announced she was in medical mode.
Fiori sat Ophir on the first table and put a blanket around his shoulders, while Dalton put me on the second table and lifted a finger up toward my nose. “And stay there until she seals you up,” he warned me.
“Take the suit off her,” Fiori said, her tone distant, as she peered at the concierge panel which was already spitting out data on Ophir’s and my vitals, for the tables scanned continuously. As she studied the panel, she peeled off her environment suit, her hands moving with experienced ease.
I struggled to unseal my suit, but my arm was pretty much useless. Dalton glanced at Lyssa. “Help me.”
Together, they peeled the cumbersome suit off me, then Dalton shrugged out of his own.
Lyssa placed a sterile pad against my arm to mop up the blood, and held it there.
“We’re away, yes?” I asked her.
Lyssa grimaced. “At crawling pace, yes. I didn’t dare wait to build up speed for the jump. I jumped as soon as we had enough momentum, so we might be in the hole a bit longer than usual.”
“I’ll take that over having one of those fire balls rip through the center of us,” I told her, and shivered.
“Core temperature is down,” Fiori said over her shoulder. “Shock and blood loss. We can fix that in a minute but bring the bed’s temperature up a few degrees in the meantime.”
“Just get on with it, doc,” I said as evenly as I could. “I need to figure out what happens next and get moving.”
“What happens next is you sleep,” Fiori said, coming over to the table.
“Not on your nelly.”
“Yes.”
I glared at her. “We’ve got fucking aliens on our tail!”
“They can’t track us through the hole,” Lyssa pointed out with infuriating logic.
“We have to tell someone about this!”
“We will,” Dalton assured me. He put his hand on my good arm. I shrugged it off, but it was too late. The ruse had worked. I’d turned my head away from Fiori. The injection into the side of my neck stung, then warmth spread from my neck, moving down and up.
“Damn it…” I muttered as I slumped. Sleep raced at me, and my last thought was that the table was nice and warm.
*
Okay, so Fiori had been right and I completely wrong. I woke sometime later, stiff and aching, although my arm felt just fine and I could even move it. I was in my bed. I mean, the bed I had once slept in every night, here on the Lythion, in my room with the orchard and the gazebo, and the sound of birds chittering.
It was a soothing sound…until I remembered what had happened. “Lyssa!” I sat up. Then wished I hadn’t sat up so fast.
“Colonel?” Her voice was polite.
“Where is everyone?”
“Diner, boss.”
That was a touch of the old days. I nearly smiled. “I hope you printed new clothes for me. I got the last ones dirty.”
“In the printer, boss. I’ll have a steak waiting for you.” The speaker clicked softly, her way of letting us know she had cut the connection.
I was suddenly starving. I moved over to the printer, the stiffness easing just from a few simple movements, and scooped up the clothes folded and sitting in the printer maw.
I dressed quickly, for I still felt cold. That would linger until I’d recovered from the blood loss, I guessed. Food would help with that.
I found Dalton and Fiori and Lyssa in the diner as advised, but they weren’t eating. They sat around the end of the corner table, heads together.
As I passed one of the little table-and-benches sets, I paused, for the table had been lowered down to the height of the benches on either side, and a soft pad laid over all three. The boy, Ophir, was asleep with his thumb in his mouth, a warm blanket over him. He had been washed and dressed and tended. His hair was dark blond and curled in soft waves. His eyelashes were sooty fringes against his pale skin.
A tail thumped by my foot. I bent slowly and carefully, and spotted Darb beneath the bench, his golden eyes gleaming in the dim light.
“Good boy,” I told him, straightened and headed for the table and eased onto the bench next to Lyssa.
A small 3D screen emitter sat between them, and the rocky ball we had left behind floated in the middle o
f it.
The waitress put a dinner plate in front of me and handed me a steak knife and fork. The steak on the plate was huge. The pile of mushrooms beside it gleamed with butter and smelled of garlic. My mouth watered.
“Go head,” I told the three at the table. “I’ll catch up.”
My arm twinged as I wielded the knife, but not enough to stop me using it. The first mouthful of steak was ambrosial, and I didn’t give a damn that it was printed.
I ate steadily and tried to pick up the threads of the conversation between the three huddled around the 3D holo. They were laying out a timeline of what had happened on the ship.
It was a shock to me that we had spent barely thirty minutes in the Ige Ibas. My surprise told me how out of practice I was with field operations. My subconscious had extended my subjective experience of our time on the ship. Once, when I had been in active operations all the time, my sense of passing time had been cooler and more accurate.
Lyssa pushed her fingers beneath the barren planet and moved it to one side. That pulled the Ige Ibas into view. She used both hands, spreading them apart, to scale up the display. The Ige Ibas grew to about ten centimeters, which was barely a quarter of the screen dimensions.
She moved the Ige Ibas to one side as she had the planet, and the alien mothership slid into view. Unlike the Ige Ibas, the mother ship filled the tank.
I lowered my knife and fork, staring at the thing.
My first view of the ship had been front-on, and even now, the memory seemed foggy. I couldn’t sharpen the details in my mind.
I was sitting to one side of the screen tank and therefore looking at the flank of the ship and now the details were perfectly clear, and I could see why I’d thought my eyes had been failing me.
At the front of the ship, hanging in space like a curved curtain, was a pale, see-through…fabric? Metal netting? It looked misty and insubstantial. My first glimpse of the mother ship had been through this…whatever it was.
A second curtain hung behind the mothership. The curtains bracketed the ship, fore and aft. There didn’t seem to be anything holding them to the ship, either.
“What are they?” I asked, pointing at them. “Solar sails?”
“If they were, there would only be one of them at the front of the ship,” Dalton pointed out. “Having one at the back is useless.”
True.
“We think…I think it is some sort of FTL drive,” Lyssa said, crossing her arms and scowling at the tank.
I might have choked over that, but we’d seen our first aliens, today. An unknown type of FTL drive was nothing, after that. “Why do you think it’s an FTL drive?”
“Because those sheets are at the front and the back,” Lyssa replied. “They could be compressing space at the front, and then decompressing it at the back.”
“To what end?”
“To shift space around the ship. The ship could then go faster than light and not turn into light molecules itself.” She glanced at me. “The theory has been around since Terran times. No one ever figured out a practical application and we already had the array and wormholes, anyway.”
I thought about that, while taking another bite of steak and mushrooms. “Okay, let’s assume it’s their FTL drive. Only, when the ship was firing at us, the curtain thing wasn’t there.”
Lyssa moved her finger in the air in a clockwise circle, and the alien ship in the tank drifted forward. She had slowed down actual footage of the ship so we could analyze it. As I watched, the curtains in front and behind the ship crumpled and folded in on themselves, then disappeared. At the same time, an tiny oval hatch on the side of the ship opened and dozens of the one man fighters disgorged, looking like midges. That oriented me yet again to how big the mothership actually was.
“The drive gets packed away for in-system flight,” Lyssa said. “And because their fire ball weapon would rip right through the forward curtain if it was left out.” She moved her finger in a slow circle once more.
Now the curtains were gone, I could see nearly normal-looking engine exhaust cowlings, and beside them, maneuvering jets. I knew they were maneuvering jets, for they were firing, shifting the mothership’s angle. These jets, unlike our human ones, seemed to move on gimbals or some type of universal joint that let them turn in any direction. They were far more elegant than the jets we used.
The ship itself, besides being enormous, was also strange in design. There did not seem to be any portholes or windows, nothing that gave them an outside view. Perhaps they used screens exclusively. Also, the shape was just weird. The front of the ship—judged by the direction the ship moved in—was a blank ochre-colored curve. Featureless, except for a twin row of…vents? Exhaust ports? Decorations? The holes—or whatever they were—ran down either side of that curved fascia, which made me think of a very large, hooked nose hanging in space with no other features around it.
The rest of the ship was also a conglomeration of vaguely organic curves with fine lines. I glanced at the tiny port where the fighters had emerged, and guessed the fine lines running elsewhere would also be access points, joints, or the outlines of other openings.
“Nothing like a rail gun, or external weapon,” Dalton said, staring at the thing.
“The whole ship is the weapon,” I reminded him. “Did you see it fire?”
He shook his head. “We were coming up to that.”
Lyssa turned her finger in the same slow circle and the ship continued to come about. Now I could see the Ige Ibas and the shuttle, which the mothership had been hiding, before.
“This is when we came back from the Ige Ibas,” I said, recognizing the point.
The mothership was still turning and starting to glow, the hooked nose coming about. “It’s about to fire on you,” I told Lyssa.
She nodded.
The glow over the ship pulsated and ran like liquid down to the bottom edge of the nose, gathering into a fiery green-blue ball. The ball shot away from the ship, moving fast even on this considerably slowed playback.
The images in the tank jerked upwards, as Lyssa dropped the Lythion down beneath the trajectory of the fireball.
“Damn…it spat a wad at us,” Dalton breathed.
Fiori laughed and slapped her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide.
The mothership was still turning, swinging back around to face the shuttle. It grew larger in the tank as the Lythion screamed closer.
Lyssa brought her hands together, scaling the view down once more, until the mothership wasn’t dominating the tank.
I stood up to look over it, at the tiny Ige Ibas and the even smaller shuttle. Off to the side from them was a blue glow—what was left of the fighter I had hit with the torrent shriver.
The mothership was enveloped in the greenish glow again. It coughed its fireball at the shuttle. Dalton dropped the shuttle down, too, and the fireball slammed into the side of the Ige Ibas and emerged on the other side and kept going until it disappeared off the edge of the screen.
I sat down again. My throat was dry.
Lyssa halted the playback.
“No, keep it going,” Dalton said softly.
“You know what happens after that.” Lyssa sounded uncomfortable.
“I know you put yourself between us and the mothership,” Dalton told her.
Lyssa dropped her gaze to the tank. “It was the only way to scoop you up. I would have come from the other side, but the Ige Ibas was in the way.”
“Lots of shipminds would have chosen to save their own asses first,” I said. “Thank you for what you did, Lyssa.”
“Stars, yes, thank you!” Fiori echoed.
Lyssa didn’t look up. She nodded stiffly.
I waved to the waitress. I badly wanted a scotch, to soothe my throat and my nerves. “We could sit here for a month, analyzing the footage, but I think we should save it until there are other minds in the room beside the three of us.” I looked around the table. “The human diaspora is in its tenth millennia. Never once
in ten thousand years have we caught even a hint of alien civilizations. Not their ruins, not space junk, nothing. Now, they’re among us…and they’re not here on a diplomatic junket, either. Everyone has to know about this. Everyone must be warned.”
Dalton shook his head. “You don’t know their intentions are not peaceful. We could be misinterpreting them.”
“I do know,” I said, as calmly as I could, but damn, I needed that scotch! “They stripped the Ige Ibas of every human but the tiny one who hid himself away. And they tried to take Fiori.”
Fiori shuddered.
“There were more fighters behind the one that grabbed her,” I added. “Lining up for the rest of us. When that failed, they opened fire.”
Dalton didn’t argue that.
“I did a quick search on Eliot Byrne before I came to the diner,” I added. “It’s little surprise to me he’s got two successful colonies. He’s a former Ranger.”
Dalton raised his brow. “Son of a bitch. He never said anything about it to me.”
“Because he had a reputation as a wildcatter to keep up,” Fiori said thoughtfully.
I nodded. “His Ranger training helped him keep a tight ship. And it told him exactly what to do when the aliens showed up the first time.”
“He destroyed his data,” Lyssa breathed.
“He destroyed all knowledge of humans beyond the Ige Ibas,” I said. “He didn’t want to give the aliens a map telling them how to find more of us.”
—13—
As soon as we emerged over Polyxene, a slow, trundling thirteen hours later, Lyssa turned on the spot, fired up the reaction engines and leapt into another, faster jump, this time to Uqup Pedrottle. There, we found an organization that could take care of the boy, Ophir, and handed him over.
Then we were free to jump to Triga at best possible speed.
Twenty years ago, Triga had been the near-center of the Empire, in physical terms. It was still the near center of the known worlds, because new colonies had sprung up along all edges of the old Empire’s borders.
Maybe that was why Jai Van Veen had chosen to live here. Or maybe it was the cosmopolitan bustle of a commercial hub at full volume that appealed to him. He’d spent more than a lifetime on Imperial Shield outposts and far-flung, isolated settlements, which was where the Empire had liked to keep their most sensitive projects.
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