by Damon Alan
“Peter. Peter Corriea.”
Thea laughed and waved her hand dismissively. “That’s the same as you deciding. He’d eat your dirty socks if he thought it would make you happy.”
“Okay, Alarin then,” Sarah countered. “He doesn’t have the technical knowledge to understand the vagaries of a successful starship raid, but he should be able to see the difference between success and failure.”
Thea’s foot bounced again for a few minutes as she considered.
“And he has a stake in this,” Sarah said, enriching the pot. “He knows that there is a threat out there that would destroy his people if given the opportunity. He knows we are his defense. He has money in the game for both arguments. Stay here and build our defense, or go on the offensive in the galaxy.”
“He might decide in a way that is biased,” Thea replied. “Emille is at risk, and he’ll clearly do what he has to do to protect her.”
“So he has a lot of money in the game then. All the more reason to let him make the call.”
“Agreed.” Thea took a sip of her tea. “So what’s your plan for the Entalia?”
“Same refit as the Stennis. We keep training the young adepts to jump with Emille’s coordination. Eventually the Entalia will be the main defender of this system. It’s seen its last days as a far traveling starship.”
“How are the previous owners dealing with that?” Thea asked.
“The Korvandi refugees? They’re so happy to be walking under open sky again that I doubt they ever get back on a shuttle to space. Handal and Sarlani built a small house on that little island between us and the South Sea.”
Thea shook her head. “Everyone just gives you whatever you want.”
“Pffft. You made me admiral,” Sarah replied, smirking.
“Had to make your rank match your ego,” Thea teased. She stood up and grabbed her medical bag. “I’m hungry, let’s get some dinner. You’re buying.”
Sarah grinned as she walked out the door behind Thea. She’d won at least one chance to make the Hive pay for their crimes, and an opportunity to test a new style of warfare.
All she had to do was make sure she scored a spectacular victory.
Chapter 3 - Realization
27 Noder 15331
Shuttle 1A approached the Admiral’s hangar on the Stennis. Strobe lights began flashing on extended booms to guide the small ship in, allowing the pilot to line up the HUD lines on the cockpit window with the strobes. It was barely a minute before they transferred control to the capable hands of the docking crane.
Sarah had finally talked Thea into joining her in space, giving her friend a complete tour of the ship that would save them.
They stood together, looking out the viewport at the warship.
“He’s looking a lot better,” Thea said.
“He’s never looked this good,” Sarah agreed, “although I’d certainly like to have a naval yard for doing refits like this. Despite the circumstances, Captain Vargas and the Fyurigan did a great job.”
“Heinrich doesn’t get any credit?”
“Of course she does. It’s a team effort. Most of the design changes are from her.”
They stood in silence for a minute as the shuttle entered the hangar, sat down on the deck, and magnetically locked in place.
“Do we have to suit up?” Thea asked.
“No. The bay pressurizes. This and the service shuttle bays are the only ones.”
The window in front of them iced over as water vapor from the air rushing into the shuttle bay condensed on the space cold surfaces of the shuttle.
Their pilot looked back through the hatch and gave them a thumbs up. “I’ll go through the shutdown checklist, Admiral, you are clear to depart now.”
“Good job, Ensign, as always.”
The women activated their boots, lowered the shuttle’s back loading ramp, and walked out onto the deck.
A bosun’s whistle piped Sarah aboard. A dozen blue and gray uniformed officers stood at attention, saluting.
“Admiral on board,” Captain Heinrich called out.
Sarah walked up to Heinrich and returned her salute.
“This really isn’t necessary, Inez,” Sarah said.
“I think it is, Admiral, the crew need to know you’ve come on board,” Heinrich replied. “I will cease if you like, but I think it’s a morale booster.”
“If you say so,” Sarah responded. “Have a steward put my stuff in my quarters, I’ll unpack it myself. For now, I’d like you to give Mayor Jannis a tour of this success story you’ve created.”
“I’d be honored, Admiral. Will you be accompanying us?”
“No. I am going to my quarters. Order the bridge to make thrust away from Refuge, and head us toward the test range. The EF-2358 is in position?”
“They headed out two weeks ago. They’ve gone stealth, hiding in the asteroid belt. It will be up to us to find and engage them as per your orders.”
“Excellent. Notify me when the tour is complete.”
Heinrich nodded, then turned to Thea. “Madam Mayor, if you’ll accompany me.”
“I’d love to, Captain. Show me all your shinies.” Thea looked over at Sarah, and mouthed, “You’re up to something.”
“I need a moment alone to sort out some thoughts.” Sarah grinned as she separated from the rest of the greeting party. Behind her she heard the crew start offloading gear from the shuttle.
Included in her gear was a holographic tactical planner Peter had built for her. Having an in with the husband of the Director of Sciences was paying off.
The device would display a variable holographic projection of the known galactic map, interactive with the user. The data contained within the secure safe in Sarah’s quarters would make the planner complete. It would show all the known human supply caches in Hive space, and Sarah would make a determination as to which ones may or may not be known by the enemy.
And then they would raid them as time provided.
Alliance fleets couldn’t get to the stores, their inclusion spheres would give away their arrival, prompting a Hive response and revealing the locations of the cache. Sarah, however, could. An advantage she intended to exploit.
She reached her quarters. The habitation rings were spun up and being able to walk without the click and required pause created by magnetic boots before stepping again was nice. She transferred Lucy, her AI, to her new station.
“Greetings, Admiral,” Lucy82A said.
“Hello, Lucy. Do I have any critical messages?”
“You have forty-seven non-critical messages, only one message marked critical. A reminder. From yourself. Would you like me to give it to you?”
“Yes, remind me.”
“Today is the day that the Hive entity you encountered in Backwater may have reached the galaxy based upon travel rate predictions made after the battle. Projections may be off by as much as twenty-five percent, but if the worst case scenario holds true regarding the efficiency of the Hive FTL drives, it is arriving at the galactic disk about now.”
Sarah stopped stowing her gear and looked at her wall. An as of yet unresolved thought was troubling her unconscious mind. “Lucy, display the galactic disk, with a 3D representation of Alliance and Hive space.”
“Only a portion of Hive space is known, Admiral, but based upon expansion rates from Albeus III and remotely observed star systems, I can extrapolate a reasonable projection for you.”
“Do that.”
The display wall in her quarters changed from gunmetal gray with the Alliance logo to deep black. A moment later the disk of the Milky Way popped on screen, followed by a yellow filled area indicating the boundaries of Alliance space. About forty star systems. Then a red area popped up depicting the Hive controlled areas.
“That’s much larger than Alliance space,” Sarah observed.
“It is merely a projection. But if expansion rates into other human colonized areas are consistent with observed intrusion into Alliance spa
ce, the Hive currently control seventeen hundred star systems.”
“Harmeen’s gods… how do I fight that?” Sarah whispered. The problem tickling her unconscious swelled, and a slight sweat broke out on her forehead as fear nibbled at her stomach.
“I am unable to satisfactorily answer that query,” Lucy replied.
“Assuming the Hive could carry enough fuel to do so, Lucy, how long would it take their new drive system we observed at Backwater to carry an enemy fleet to Andromeda?”
“Approximately two-hundred and fifty years,” Lucy replied.
“Stars,” Sarah said. “That’s not much of a comfort zone.”
She stared at the display for a few minutes, and her unresolved concern began to gel into conscious understanding of the problem. “At the current rate of expansion, modified to reflect more star systems to expand from, how long before the Hive occupy the Milky Way?”
“Five hundred and twenty years.”
“What? That’s insane, we’re talking four hundred billion stars.”
“You specified at the current rate of expansion. The Hive have gone from one system to an estimated seventeen hundred in two centuries. That is three point eight percent growth. At that rate, they will occupy the estimated four hundred billion systems in the galaxy in roughly five centuries,” Lucy reaffirmed.
“Son of…” Sarah’s voice tapered off.
“Andromeda isn’t safe at all,” Sarah said. We have to go farther.”
“I am unable to determine the veracity of that statement. Insufficient data,” Lucy replied.
“Go silent, Lucy.”
Sarah stared at the red zone. It would swell rapidly, like a cancer, and in two more human lifetimes every star in the galaxy would be inside it.
The Hive would not stop there.
Either she stopped the Hive now, or there would be no stopping them. There was no reason to assume the enemy would be satisfied with just the Milky Way. There was every reason to assume they’d occupy every niche of space they could reach. And their new drive system put a lot more of it in reach. Eventually, all of it. Twenty trillion galaxies.
“Lucy, put me through to Heinrich,” Sarah said.
“Captain Heinrich.”
“Inez, cancel the rest of your tour. You can finish it in a few hours. You and the Mayor meet me in briefing room two in ten minutes.”
“Aye, sir. Ten minutes.”
Sarah severed the connection and stared at the display for half a minute. “Lucy, monitor briefing room two. I’ll need you there to show them what you just showed me.”
Sarah pushed the drawer shut on her dresser, breathed deeply, and headed to convince Thea to back a new plan even now forming in her mind.
Chapter 4 - Tumor
31 Noder 15331
Thea looked at her like she was mad. “You’re saying we have five centuries before the Hive fill the galaxy?” She shook her head and pursed her lips. “I’m not good at math, but that can’t be right.”
Sarah started to speak, but Lucy beat her to it. “I assure you, Dr. Jannis, the numbers are correct,” the AI said. “Assuming the present rate of expansion, as well as the rate of attrition of human forces, these numbers are valid. There is no reason to assume the Hive expansion will slow, in fact, as more areas become unreachable to human attacks, it may increase.”
“Why hasn’t anyone done this math before?” Thea asked.
“They probably have, but we didn’t have the clearance to get that briefing,” Sarah said. “Warriors tend to fight with less enthusiasm if they’ve lost faith in the cause.”
Captain Heinrich looked disturbed. “Lucy, do you have more information on this?”
“I have a programming shackle placed on divulging this information to anyone below the rank of admiral, or associated staff officers,” Lucy said, “and, on top of that, not to divulge it to any admiral who does not specifically ask for information on this topic. Admiral Dayson qualifies. But this is math any human could have done on their own. It’s not difficult.”
Sarah smiled wryly. “There you go. Lucy is incapable of lying.”
Thea stared at the wall.
“Mayor Jannis, we can’t just sit here,” Heinrich said, “we have to do something.”
Thea leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. The briefing room was silent for a moment longer as she prepared her words. “What do you propose we do with our two fighting ships and a few dozen grapplers?” Thea asked Heinrich dismissively. “Sure, maybe you can pop in and out of locations like a magician. But the Hive will develop a counter to that.”
Sarah stared at her friend, carefully considering how to convince Thea of the need to try. With the election of Thea as the civilian leader of the colony, whether or not they did anything about this new realization boiled down to her decision. Thea was a woman who’d been a thorn in Sarah’s side in many ways for the greater part of a decade.
Sarah wasn’t about to pull a military coup, however. If Thea said she couldn’t attack, then she’d find another way. “We only need one ship to take this fight to them. We have superiority in every regard except numbers.”
Thea’s hands shot up in the air, reflecting her belief in the futility of the struggle. “Superiority? Here we are, with really one functional ship that can fight since the Entalia is about to be refitted by our engineers, and you want to attack a seventeen hundred star system empire? What in space-time makes you think you can make a dent in that?”
That sort of mentality didn’t sit well with Sarah, and never had. If there was a time to act, it was always now. Tomorrow only allowed problems to get worse.
“We have the adepts,” Sarah answered curtly. She didn’t appreciate her commander-in-chief losing faith, particularly at such a critical moment. This is exactly why the analysis Lucy had just shared had been classified.
“They have thousands of fleets,” Thea countered. “You have delusions of grandeur or something?”
That was approaching a line that Sarah didn’t want to cross. If anyone had delusions of grandeur, it was regarding the capabilities of the Hive, not what Sarah could do. She was fine arguing a point, but Thea’s habit of going personal when she disagreed with the opinions of others tended to result in fireworks between the two.
“Mayor Jannis,” Sarah said coldly. “You act like there is a choice. The Hive will fill the Milky Way in five hundred years. They have an improved drive system that we saw bring them to Backwater in just two years. They can reach Andromeda within centuries at most. Our colony there is not safe.”
“By the time we find a planet and terraform it, the Hive will probably already be there,” Heinrich added.
“But we have one ship,” Thea responded. “Are you insane?”
“The Hive will never know what hit them. It’s the Stennis,” Heinrich said. “I oversaw the rebuilding of that ship. With the abilities the adepts bring to the equation, it is the scariest piece of machinery in the galaxy. And it’s on our side, unlike the machines we’re fighting.”
“I knew you were a good choice for XO,” Sarah said, smiling at Heinrich.
“That’s just pomp and bravado and you know it,” Thea replied angrily. “Don’t blow smoke up my backside. You won’t like what I fire back at you.”
Both Sarah and Captain Heinrich stared at Thea for a bit, grim looks on their faces.
“By the stars,” Thea gasped, realization dawning on her. “You’re going to use Emille to blow up the Hive star systems, aren’t you? It’s the only weapon you have that can—”
She cut her own words off, she was so upset.
The two officers glanced at each other, and Sarah signaled to Heinrich that was exactly the plan. Her XO displayed a moment of contemplation, but allowed herself no other display of emotion.
Thea gasped again. Their faces had revealed how right she was.
“You’re monsters,” she spat out.
Best to confront the morality of the issue head on.
Sarah was
going to do it. Whether she arrived in Hive space in a shuttle or a hardened battlecruiser was really all that was being discussed here. “It’s the only way. I did the calculations with Lucy while I waited for the two of you to get here. Detonating the stars in the Hive systems will irradiate a large part of that region of space, sure. It renders a zone six thousand light years long uninhabitable. People inside that zone will die, or at best be forced to live deep underground. But some must die so that humanity might live. Along with the deaths in the radiation zone, we will erase the Hive’s ability to expand, if not the Hive itself.”
“That’s the coldest damned thing I’ve ever heard you say,” Thea hissed.
“And yet it is true,” Heinrich added. “If we have this power, and we don’t use it, soon there will be no stopping our enemy. You’ve just seen it yourself. The entire universe will fall under Hive control, and, if you believe the science Ambassador Corriea is quoting on the matter, our universe’s very quantum structure will fall unstable without conscious observation to stabilize it.”
Thea held up a hand, palm outward, indicating they should be quiet.
The two officers did what they should. They waited for their boss to speak.
The mayor sat in her chair, for several minutes, her eyes closed. “How many will die?” she finally asked, her voice practically pleading for a low number.
“Lucy?” Sarah asked.
Lucy answered Thea’s question. “An estimated seventeen trillion humans, with a margin of error of plus or minus ten percent, will have to be evacuated or placed in hardened shelters to survive. Failure to do so will, without exception, result in death. There is likely to be some who die due to the gargantuan effort of protecting that number of individuals and some being missed.”
“How can you doom that many people?” Thea pressed.
“I’m not. They won’t be doomed,” Sarah argued. “It will take a few millenia for the radiation front to cover the area, the radiation is limited to light speed. The nearest worlds would be evacuated first, and as the dead zone expands humanity simply evacuates ahead of it. Ten thousand years in the future the sterile area of the galaxy will be primed for terraforming and resettlement.”
