by C. Gockel
The floor fell beneath him, and for a millisecond, 6T9 was weightless, and then his body jerked as Sundancer and the second LCS struggled to keep the Luddeccean ship aloft. 6T9 held his breath. If they could just survive the wave’s crest … No sooner had he thought that when the wave’s shape changed, twisting up like a waterspout, swirling around the ship like the living thing it was, a predator desperate to hold onto his prey. The holomat began to rattle on the floor as Sundancer began to shake with the strain.
“Incoming,” Volka said with eerie calm. The scene in the holo shifted, and he saw fighters on the horizon.
6T9’s Q-comm sparked. “Tell the Luddecceans to fire on the water. We’ll take the fighters.”
“How do we do that?” Dixon asked.
“Send you through the ship again?” Carl suggested, eyes not opening.
6T9’s vision went white. “Let the Skimmers send the Morse Code!” His vision came back, and he dropped his head hard against the floor. Why hadn’t he thought of that before?
Volka spoke softly, “Jerome is formulating the message for Farsong.”
In the holo, fifteen of the Skimmers rose to face the incoming fighters.
Three Skimmers stayed behind, one of them flashing, “Concentrate fire on the water!”
Phaser fire ripped out of the cannons embedded in the Skimmer’s keels and from the LCSs.
Sundancer jerked up, and 6T9’s head banged against the floor. Carl squeaked. Volka was pitched forward over Carl. Her hands were on the floor, her eyes were open, but not focused on anything.
“Verify the damaged LCS is able to free-gate,” 6T9 said.
“Jerome is doing it,” Volka said. In the distance, phaser fire erupted from the Skimmers engaging the new fighters.
“They are,” she said. “Just no hovers.”
6T9 frowned. “How close to the planet can they engage their drives?”
Volka’s ears flicked. “Jerome is asking. Sixty, Sundancer is struggling, and Dandelion says so is the other LCS. I don’t know if they can tow the ship out of atmosphere.”
6T9 looked at the oncoming fighters; his Q-comm hummed. They were near the equator of the planet. It was large, but its moon, terribly close by most standards and as large as Ganymede, had the planet spinning at a rate that made its days only ten hours long.
Volka’s ears came forward. “Noa says—”
“Use the spin to throw us out of the atmosphere,” 6T9 said. He looked at the holo. “That means flying into their fighters.” He counted twenty-three in the holo—not advancing, just hovering. More came into view, and he swore he saw more still on the horizon, fuzzy in the holo view.
It might be better to let the LCS go.
Volka’s lip curled, and she growled. “I see it.” On either side of Carl Sagan, her hands curled. Farsong began flashing directions to the Luddeccean ships. The Skimmers repositioned themselves so Sundancer and the other LCS were at the center of a broad flat Phalanx, the damaged ship hovering slightly below. All the while they advanced toward the oncoming fighters. On the horizon, the number of Infected ships increased. They were unmoving, waiting for something.
Volka growled again.
6T9 blinked, and everything was on fire.
Sundancer was awash in phaser fire, and the ship loved it. Volka grinned, and knew it was feral and wolfish, and didn’t care. The phaser fire from the Skimmers was doing damage. There were more of the enemy, but the Skimmers were holding their own—more than holding their own. If it wasn’t for the damaged LCS, she’d want to eradicate the other ships. Kill one today, and it was one less to kill tomorrow.
Sixteen of her captains, engaged in the fire fight, agreed. Even Elam, their medical doctor—he was a Marine first.
But Dr. Patrick and Jerome’s thoughts were elsewhere. They had crewmates on their ship’s phaser cannons. Those crewmates had to use the cannon sights—inferior in Volka’s opinion to the vision that came with the mental connection, but Dr. Patrick—not a medical doctor, or, as Volka’s father would say, “Not a doctor who does anything useful”—and Jerome had anti-jamming devices and were trying to break through the jammers. Their thoughts were a strange mishmash of lingo and numbers that Volka would have to pry to understand. She didn’t want to understand. She wanted to kill.
Dr. Patrick’s gunner missed his target. Volka snarled, and for just a second, Volka almost commanded the doctor—compelled him—to leave be with the anti-jamming devices. They didn’t need them anyway. The shamefulness of the thought shocked her eyes open.
She found herself staring at Sixty, her mouth agape.
“Volka,” he said, not knowing the shamefulness of her thoughts, “they’re not advancing. They must be waiting for something … a ship with Dark weapons that will destroy the Skimmers. I’m almost sure of it.”
Volka stared at him, stomach constricting; at the same time, Ramirez’s ship Bubbles sang out, “Another ship!” And she saw it on the horizon, directly in their path. It was larger than the LCSs. Worse, the stink of Dark was stronger in it.
Noa’s thoughts echoed through the waves. “She’s a Hawkins-class Cruiser, she’s at least forty-years old—Fleet sold most of those to System 3 ten years ago. She has no marking but … Lizzar dung.”
Volka gulped. System 3 didn’t just have a turncoat Senator, their Local Guard had gone rogue as well?
Phaser fire ripped from the Hawkins’s cannons, but it would have torpedoes, too. Torpedoes might be conventional or weapons that could infect the Skimmers.
The Skimmers and the Luddecceans were still accelerating, still rising. The Skimmers were faster than the fighters, but the LCSs were not as fast even when they weren’t damaged or playing tugboat. In her mind’s eye, Volka saw their course and felt Noa’s certainty that they had to keep going.
Carl squeaked, and Dandelion spoke into her mind, “We still have torpedoes—us and the damaged ship—we are preparing them, but without radio signals, we won’t be able to control them.”
The thought flowed from Volka to Dr. Patrick and Jerome, and her mind filled with a picture: two blue spheres that rose around their ships, overlapped and encasing the Skimmers and the LCSs, and then got hazy at the edges. There were numbers in the picture—the anti-jammers’ range and the time before it would be available. She gulped in understanding. They’d have to be almost on top of the other ship before they could fire their own torpedoes, and in the meantime, they’d be fired upon by the Hawkins.
At current rate of acceleration, there were four more minutes until the Luddecceans could free-gate … the thought flowed from Lieutenant Young.
Carl squeaked in her lap. “Volka, the fighters near the Hawkins! They’re preparing to run interference for the Dark’s weapons.” Volka “looked” and saw two neat fighters rising from the Hawkins’s bow. Behind them, the waves rippled, and two torpedoes rose in their shadows. The fighters would repel the Skimmer’s phaser fire just long enough to cover for the heavier torpedoes that could destroy the Skimmers.
The Skimmers did have one other weapon to use against the fighters. Volka’s lip curled, and she became the two captains closest to Sundancer, Morgan and Ramirez—or they became her. With a shout, their Skimmers shot toward the fighters running cover. “Fire now!” Volka ordered just before impact.
Skimmers and fighters collided in phaser fire, and Volka pulled her Skimmers up. More phaser fire whipped toward the oncoming torpedoes, and Jerome and Sixty shouted, “Jammers are down!”
Torpedoes shot from the Luddeccean vessels. Two for the torpedoes, two for the Hawkins. The Hawkins was so close; Volka thought she could make out faces in the portholes on its stern. It was too late for the vessel or the torpedoes to dodge, though they tried. The Luddeccean torpedoes—smaller, nimble, and remotely controlled—ripped through the ship’s torpedoes and vulnerable wings.
And then they were past the Hawkins. Behind the Skimmers, it pitched helplessly. Volka almost exhaled in relief, but Sixty shouted, “Get a phaser site west-no
rth-west approximately 300 kilometers—”
She opened her eyes and saw him staring at a blur at the edge of the holo’s range. She blinked and sent the thought to Stratos at his phaser cannon, felt him divert his attention from an oncoming fighter—and heard his next thought. “Shit. We found their shipyard.”
Volka’s ears came forward. This was System Zero … Planet Zero. They’d found it.
He must have said it through the newly established ether because Sixty said, “Ya think?”
And TAB, until that point blessedly silent in Jerome’s skull, blurted in the ether, “That was a rhetorical question!”
Volka wanted to look, but at that moment, Sundancer jerked forward, and the undamaged LCS jerked backward. Young said, “Lost your tow cable.”
The “cable” that had been twisted around Sixty’s wrists abruptly began flowing through Sundancer and out into the void.
Volka’s heart stopped, but in the hololight, the blue outside was turning to black, and Sixty said, “We’re almost high enough that they can use their Net-drives … inertia might be enough to take them there.”
A minute later, and an unfamiliar voice came over the holomat, “Republic ships, we can begin free-gating.” Outriggers rose from the Luddeccean ships at a pace that seemed glacially slow, but they weren’t quite far enough out of atmosphere anyway, or, as Volka understood the physics of it, far enough from the epicenter of the planet’s gravity well. Volka spoke with calm she didn’t feel. “We’ll cover you.”
Infected fighters were rising from the planet, and four ships not as large as the Hawkins, but still too big for the Skimmers’ phaser cannons. The Infected ships would have Dark weapons, too. Noa’s thoughts were a snarl. “Those are System 3 Guard ships.”
Gritting her teeth, willing her stomach not to sink, Volka let all but Nightwing and the LCS ships fall back into a protective wall.
A thought flowed from Noa. “Strange that they wouldn’t have fighters on patrol in close orbit.” And Volka looked up through Sundancer’s hull. Her jaw fell open.
Sixty said, “Well, that’s a circuit killer.”
Phaser fire erupted around them, obscuring the view. The Luddeccean ships vanished. But Volka couldn’t forget what she’d seen. Just a few hundred kilometers from the planet’s atmosphere the sky had been filled with singularity weapons.
20
The Program
Luddeccean System
Volka remembered nothing of what she’d seen above Planet Zero. Or at least that was how it seemed standing in the Uriel’s docking bay next to Sixty, staring at the enormous holo TAB had generated. TAB had constructed the holo from her crews’ cybernetic memories and the sensory readouts on the Luddeccean ships—not just the two on the planet’s surface, but a third one that had come to the first party’s rescue. That ship had free-gated just outside of atmosphere at the point on the planet where they’d encountered the second wave of fighters—it had nearly been lost in a singularity beam. Volka glanced up at the ship in the shadows of the Uriel’s darkened docking bay. Its outriggers had been extended and bent forward, unable to retract, and it was missing portions of its wings and bow. But it had collected very useful information in the seconds before it managed to free-gate back to Luddeccean space.
That useful, terrifying information floated above Volka’s head now. TAB’s holo took up more than a ship’s worth of the floor of the docking bay and much of the air above it. TAB had transported them to a miniature version of Planet Zero. At their feet was the shipyard—hazy and somewhat indistinct, it was an island surrounded by dark water. Much clearer was the atmosphere above it. Yawning hoops of singularity beams filled the space just out of atmosphere, covering Planet Zero like links in medieval armor. One hoop looked distinctly different, more silvery.
Before she could ask, thoughts whizzing around the room like flies caught her attention.
At least part of System 3’s local guard was compromised, likely some of its leaders.
System 6 had been unusually peaceful for the last year, maybe because its troublemakers had been absorbed.
The refugees flowing into System 12 from System 13 suggested unincorporated settlements in System 13 were also falling. How many Infected were there? Certainly over a million had been Infected already?
“Why doesn’t the Republic know System 3 and System 13 are compromised?” Volka whispered.
Sixty leaned closer. “The Dark doesn’t want them to know. It is not terribly contagious. You have to be very close to someone to catch it from the air they breathe. My guess is it Infects slowly, and then, when it reaches a tipping point, Infects very fast.”
Stratos was standing nearby, not thinking about sex for once. Instead, he was thinking about a thought puzzle his dad had shared with him. The number of lily pads double in a pond every day. On the fourteenth day, the pond is halfway full. How long before the pond is completely filled with lily pads? Fifteen days. Slow, and then fast.
Someone cleared their throat. Volka’s ears swiveled to a Luddeccean Officer standing with his fellows and the Galacticans at the edge of the holo.
“Are those rings moving?” the officer asked.
Young replied, “Yes, we believe so.”
Noa added, “We believe they’re spreading out to more effectively protect the planet’s surface.”
An iridescent sphere, very much like a soap bubble, appeared in the silvery ring Volka had noticed moments before. An instant later, the sphere vanished, and where there had been nothing but empty space, a ship appeared in the ring—the heavy, bulky sort that even Volka knew was for transporting goods. Numbers appeared in the holo, indicating the ship’s dimensions, tonnage, and cargo space. Someone whistled. Someone else thought distinctly, “That’s three times the size of the Uriel.”
“They have a time gate,” Young said. “That’s how they managed to transport conventional ships from System 3.”
There were low murmurs.
Walking into the holo’s light, Noa stopped beneath a ring that wasn’t quite complete. Clinging to one sharp end of the incomplete ring was what looked like a square-shaped bead. Pointing at the bead, Noa said, “We weren’t able to get close enough, but we believe this is the production facility for the rings.”
“They’re not just building ships,” a Luddeccean Officer said. “They’re building a fortress.”
Sixty said, “Not just building. They have a fortress.”
One of the Luddeccean Officers looked at Sixty and thought, “One of the machines,” with so much disgust it made Volka’s skin crawl and her lip curl. Her eyes shot toward the man, and he hissed faintly. She saw herself in his mind: a shadow with tall, pointed ears and glowing eyes, a demon.
Sixty, not privy to the officer’s mind, continued, voice wry, “They’re expanding their fortress.”
The archbishop was sitting on his chair, Isssh on his lap, next to Alaric. “I think that assessment is correct,” he said.
“I, too,” said Alaric. He’d been quiet, his mind ticking through the details, his emotions a banked fire of anger, though Volka wasn’t sure at who.
At the archbishop’s and Alaric’s words, assent rolled through the room like a wave.
A Luddeccean Officer shifted on his feet. “If they already have one of the inner systems—” What hope is there of stopping it? he didn’t say aloud.
Noa frowned. “Quarantining a single system is not out of the realm of possibility.”
A Luddeccean priest said, “The Republic doesn’t have the will to do that.”
“Not all the systems are as vulnerable as System 3,” James said. “Gate 3 doesn’t take the Dark seriously. Gate 1, Gate 11, and Gate 5 do.”
A Luddeccean Officer scoffed. “The gates care.”
“They do,” said Volka, thinking of Gate 5. He had created a real-world avatar because some people didn’t have neural interfaces. People like her. He’d only spoken to her for a minute … so it hardly seemed he had done it on her account alone, b
ut he’d also given her fairy lights and thought of a place both she and Sixty could eat and been dismayed when he couldn’t protect them. “They aren’t like us, but they do care.”
“They miss humans when your mental chatter is gone,” Sixty said.
“Forgive us for being skeptical,” said a weere priest who didn’t think they needed to be forgiven at all.
James spread his hands in a conciliatory gesture, though his face remained as inscrutable as ever. “Whatever you think of the gates—”
“—or machines in general,” Sixty added. His fingers flowed to the spot where Eliza’s ashes used to be, and it made Volka’s heart hurt a little.
James continued, “The gates in other systems are working with The One and actively scanning for the presence of the Dark.”
“No matter what the gates think,” Alaric said, “They won’t have the opportunity to control the traffic between systems much longer. The Dark is building more ships, and at the same time, making sure that its efforts to do so are well protected.”
James’s shoulders fell. Sixty sighed so imperceptibly that Volka doubted she would have noticed if her ears hadn’t been large and pointed and swiveled in his direction.
“We must strike, and soon,” Alaric continued. He knew that the Dark couldn’t be held back, even by destroying the shipyard, but he did think it would buy more time.
Noa was still standing in the holo, gazing up at the rings of the singularity weapons from below. “I have some ideas.” She turned to her brother. “A lot depends on how far along Dr. Zeller’s brought your quantum-teleportation fusion program.”
The archbishop’s heart sank, though outwardly, all he did was take off his glasses and polish them on his robe.
