by B. V. Larson
I could hear the plaintive note in his voice, and it resonated. I wanted to see Mom and Dad again and friends I’d left behind, not to mention simply to walk a planet in peace. I longed to have Adrienne by my side—maybe on some beach somewhere…
But another part of me was afraid, I realized—not of anything physical, but of losing my command. What if Star Force decided I didn’t deserve to skipper a ship any longer? I knew I’d find it damn hard to work under someone else after being the top dog for so long, but I also knew that too often organizations followed the “rules” instead of common sense. Despite the evidence, they might think that I was too green to be the boss again.
Then again…maybe the flood of new intelligence would convince Dad to come out of retirement, and with his influence…
Feeling a bit ashamed, I pushed my own concerns away and forced my mind back to the here and now. Hansen stared patiently at me, waiting for an answer.
“You’re right, XO. I was getting caught up in finally having a lot of questions answered. Tell you what, talk to the officers and senior noncoms, and make a list of their most vital concerns relating to our current situation. Summarize it, and bring it to me. I’ll use it next time I talk to Farswimmer and Diogenos. That will help me stay on track, okay?”
Hansen nodded. “I’ll get right on that.”
I followed the XO out, leaving the bridge. We went in opposite directions in the central passage.
“Valiant, where’s Marvin?” I asked the ship aloud.
“Aboard Greyhound.”
“Put me through.” I continued down the passageway, walking toward the armory.
“Marvin here,” came a voice from the walls nearby.
“Captain Marvin, dock Greyhound with Valiant, will you?”
“I do not think that is a good idea, Captain Riggs,” he replied.
“Why not?”
“We could be attacked at any moment, and doing so would limit both ships’ freedom of action.”
“Good point. Bring her alongside then, and I’ll jet over.”
“Complying.”
He didn’t sound happy, but I didn’t care. I slipped into my battlesuit, but I didn’t bother taking a beam rifle.
“Greetings, Cody Riggs,” said the suit.
“Hello, suit. What’s cooking?”
“Question not understood.”
“Never mind. Systems check.”
“All systems nominal. Fusion cell warming up. Batteries at one hundred percent.”
“Good. Close and activate.”
The suit wrapped itself around me and the niche clamps released. The servos begin responding to the sensors touching my body, and within moments I felt as if the armor were a part of me again.
“Just like riding a bicycle,” I said aloud.
“Comment not understood.”
“I mean, this feels familiar.”
“Comment ignored.”
The tiny brainbox I was interacting with didn’t make it easy, but I kept making small talk with the suit. It was part of my ongoing tests. I had a theory that the brainboxes of our equipment became slowly smarter, and they also were more and more responsive to their individual users over time. After all, Marvin had said the brainbox which became Greyhound’s controlling AI, my old suit core, “liked me better” than him. It was only a small piece of evidence, but I figured that I might be onto something.
Normally, brainboxes were reset to standard parameters when they received updates and upgrades, but these days we were beyond contact with the Fleet. We’d been operating without those routine patches. I figured anything that made our AIs smarter and gave us an advantage was worth looking into.
To conserve air, I used the standard airlock rather than the assault version. It was just big enough for one battlesuit to stand inside comfortably. When the external hatch opened, I gazed out into the starlit void with the sense of wonder that always hit me. Looking at the universe with your own eyes, with nothing but a piece of smart glass between yourself and the vacuum, was completely different from even the most detailed holotank representation. It always took my breath away.
A ship slid noiselessly into view. From my vantage point, it seemed like a wall covered with a thousand bizarre fittings and bits of machinery, sensors, heat exchangers, emitters, repellers, thruster nozzles and a lot more I couldn’t identify.
Greyhound had arrived. She braked with a jet of gas and floated directly across from me.
I could see the ship’s open airlock, so I stepped out into space. Long practice allowed me to ignore my inner ear, which was convinced I would fall into an abyss. As soon as I was free of the gravplates, I floated straight outward, adjusting my trajectory slightly until I was able to grasp the handle next to the entrance.
Once I’d stepped inside, the airlock cycled and opened inward revealing a narrow passageway barely wide enough for an unsuited human—or Marvin’s cylindrical central body—to pass. I’d mandated that Greyhound remain minimally usable by humans. However, no way the suit would make it through, so I cracked it and stepped out after making sure the atmosphere was breathable.
“Marvin?”
“I’m in the forward compartment.”
When I reached what used to be the control cockpit, I found Marvin had opened up the space around it to make a workroom. The cockpit itself was intact, though surrounded by equipment.
Half-identifiable gear lay here and there. I thought I recognized scanners, analyzers and microscopes as well as a 3D fabricator and a cryo-chamber. His tiny factory held a place of prominence high up on one wall. Marvin had cameras pointed at and tentacles manipulating something that looked like a steampunk ant farm, though I could see no creatures inside. One of his “eyes” pointed my way as I entered.
“What ya working on, Marvin?” I asked brightly, hoping to jolly him into letting something slip. He was usually cagey about his many experiments.
“I am examining the cellular structure of the body I recovered from the Demon corvette,” he replied.
“Found anything out?”
“Of course.”
“What’s the best way to kill them, then?”
Another camera joined the first, giving him a binocular view of me. “Lasers and nuclear weapons seem effective.”
“That’s not very helpful. Tell me something of significance that I don’t know.”
“These creatures don’t need an atmosphere to survive.”
I raised an eyebrow. “That’s interesting. So, no life support?”
“They use hydrocarbons and water to sustain life, but they ingest those rather than breathe. Their adaptations have advantages and drawbacks.”
“Such as?” Letting him lecture me was a way of making Marvin happy and storing up goodwill for later.
“They can operate in a vacuum, protected by their exoskeleton and supplied by internal stores. They can even consume more materials to resupply themselves, with no requirement for air of any kind. Thus, they need no suit, no oxygen tanks, and unless the temperatures are extreme, no heating and cooling or extra protection from radiation. They are also nearly impervious to chemical or biological weapons.”
“So they’re damn tough critters.”
“Yes. Not as tough as machines, but for biotics, they’re impressively designed.”
“I wonder what designed them…”
A third camera shifted to me, but then I lost it again. I must not be all that interesting. “I have theories,” he said.
Then I remembered that Marvin still had a live tap on Valiant’s coms. He didn’t know that I knew about his spying. That was the way I wanted it for now.
“Tell me about that slime inside their ship. What have you learned about that?”
Four cameras aimed my way briefly, then it went back to two again after a brief moment’s study.
“It serves multiple purposes. There are cilia inside the hull of their ships. These move the material around. Waste and sustenance are moved to the aliens.”<
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I almost shuddered. A digestive system inside each ship? It was disgusting—but then, so was the interior of any human’s gut.
“You said multiple purposes. What are the others?”
“Waste removal.”
“And?”
He hesitated.
“There appears to be an anti-bacterial effect.”
“Ah, interesting. So the slime is like our own internal organs—except the bugs have it on the outside. Disgusting, but intriguing.”
“Why should these biological functions repel you?” Marvin asked, awarding me with a record-breaking bouquet of five cameras.
“That’s part of human instinct. We’re repelled by things that are strange and possibly dangerous.”
“Interesting.”
“Okay…” I said. “You’re sure now that they’re insectoid, right?”
“Technically no, but functionally, yes.”
I rolled my eyes. “What I’m getting at is maybe they have different kinds of bugs? Workers, warriors, queens, technicians—like the Worms? This specimen would be a warrior, not a worker.”
“That seems reasonable,” Marvin said cautiously.
“So we need some bug spray…metaphorically speaking. Something better than brute force.”
“Biochemistry is not my strongest field of expertise. I suggest we include Professor Hoon in this enterprise. Hoon also has an exoskeletal body similar to the Demons, and we may be able to gain particular insights with his help.”
I cocked my head at Marvin, who cocked his cameras right back. “Are you saying Hoon knows more about biology than you do?”
“By no means.”
“Good, because I seem to remember you doing pretty well with the Microbes. Isn’t that biochemistry?”
“Let me clarify my proposal,” Marvin said, uncoiling himself and sliding closer to me. Cameras dipped low and swooped high, getting different angles on my face, so he could read my responses. “The best case scenario doesn’t have to involve Doctor Hoon directly. Perhaps he has an abundance of offspring to contend with. If he would be willing to spare a dozen or so, I could easily fabricate a lab to address this issue.”
Staring at him, I got a sick feeling.
“What are you…?” I asked, then I got it. “Marvin, I’m not allowing you to turn Dr. Hoon or his children into specimens for your death-sprays. You can just forget about that right now. It’s bad enough that I accused him of trying to kill me, but to then suggest that we test the bug spray on his children? He would probably try to kill me for real this time.”
“An inconvenient possibility.”
“Marvin, just see what you can come up with using the Demon that we have and I’ll check with Kalu and Bensen.”
I made my way back to Valiant, but I had the feeling I was missing something. I finally made it back to the bridge and found myself in front of the holotank. I just stared into the display. My gut was twisted in knots. What was I missing? The Demon fleet was three days out from Trinity-9, and I was pretty confident we had good tracking on all of them, because the Whales were hammering the incoming enemy fleet and its area of space with a blizzard of electromagnetic waves.
This allowed us to pick up the reflections on our passive sensors without adding to the active pings, in the same way that the human eye sees in the glare of floodlights. The Demons’ stealth technology we’d found on the captured corvette could be overcome by the application of enough illumination, and everything in the holotank and on the screen was labeled with a high confidence factor.
So what was bugging me? I began to pace around the holotank.
I slammed my fist onto a console. “Yes! Valiant, calculate a prediction for the Demon fleet’s turnover and deceleration, assuming they intend to slow enough to take up orbit around Trinity-9 without overshooting.”
“What’s the maximum G-force parameter?”
I racked my brain for a moment then decided I didn’t need to come up with the number myself. “Reference Marvin’s exploitation report on the corvette and the Demon corpse to estimate.”
Valiant thought for a moment. “Combined ship and biotic G force parameters estimated at twenty-two.”
“Ouch. Twenty-two Gs is heavy duty, even with gravplates to counter the forces inside the ship. Let’s assume that’s the most they can do. When will they need to begin deceleration?”
“Negative two days, twenty-one hours.”
“Negative? You mean it’s too late?”
“Yes. As you specified ‘without overshooting,’ sufficient deceleration is now impossible using the parameters given.”
I leaned my forehead against the smart glass of the holotank and tapped my knuckles gently on it, thinking, looking at our allies’ deployments.
The Whales had set up a gauntlet for the Demons to run. A cone of battle with its narrow end pointing directly at the enemy. The tip consisted of automated fortress-asteroids bristling with beam weapons, some railguns and missiles. As the attacking fleet destroyed these sacrificial installations and advanced, they would encounter continuously thickening defenses until they ran into the main Whale force of about two hundred heavy warships.
The simulations showed that the Demons would beat the Whales, but only barely. The hundred fifty or so Elladan ships that formed the reserve would tip the scales in our allies favor, and I hoped my little squadron could do its part as well without getting ourselves killed.
But now, the Demons had passed the point at which they could slow down enough to actually conquer the planet and its system of moons, unless they were to overshoot and come back. Would that be an effective tactic? I put myself in their place.
Overshooting would make the gauntlet far less bloody on both sides. At high speeds, hit probabilities would be low. Then, they could reverse course and come back.
But I didn’t need a machine to calculate that in the time it took the Demons to come back to the fight, the Whales and Elladans could easily shift forces to meet them. Unless I assumed our enemies were idiots, there had to be something I was missing.
Though I hated to ask for help in matters of tactics, I decided to call Hansen and Bradley to the bridge. Once they’d arrived, I explained the situation to them.
“The force with speed has the advantage in combat,” Hansen said in a tone that implied I should know this already. “Their missiles and projectiles will come in faster and hit harder, and once they get close, they’ll be tough to target—at least from the side.”
I nodded. “Sure, but in this case, it also limits their ability to maneuver. They’re in a pipeline and even if they blast sideways starting now, they can’t avoid our allies’ defenses. The Whales might be pacifists at heart, but they’re doing a decent job at setting up a kill zone.”
“Maybe the enemy has some kind of secret weapon,” Bradley said.
“Like what?” I made a come-on motion with my hand. “Go ahead, speculate. What if you were them?”
Bradley chewed his lip. “Well, the hardest thing to stop is hardened mass going fast. If I were designing this attack, I’d have as many cheap bullets as I could in front of me, like a shotgun, to overwhelm the defenses and clear everything out.”
“But there are no cheap bullets, unless the enemy ships launch them…and according to the Whales’ intelligence reports, they have missiles and beams, side mounted, totally unsuited to these tactics.”
“Not totally,” Hansen said. “Their side-mounted beams are good for zooming past, shooting as they go.”
“But at these speeds, nobody’s going to hit much,” I replied. “That’s why we’re trying to figure out what they’re up to.
I could see my CAG was still chewing on something. “Bradley, talk to me.”
“Well, what if the Whales are wrong?” Bradley asked. “That is, what if the Demons changed-up their usual weapons mix or even the way they plan to use them?”
“Okay, so what would you do if you were the attackers? Remember, they refight this battle every W
hale year or so, it seems, whenever the planets line up favorably.”
Bradley tapped at the holotank controls for a minute. “I’m setting up a crude simulation, but I think it will be explanation enough.” After a few moments more, he pressed the key to run it.
The display zoomed in to show the Demon fleet approaching Trinity-9 and its defenses. The simulation and ran at fast-forward speed to compress hours and minutes into seconds.
As the enemy neared the cone, ten big ships split apart into a hundred or so chunks each. The pieces, still coasting at two thousand miles per second, slammed unerringly into defense fortresses and ships, wiping them out.
“Of course, in the real world, not all of them will strike, but you get the idea,” Bradley said.
“Trading ten ships—big, cheap suicide ships actually—for about half the Whales’ combat power. A good deal.”
“This is a wild-ass guess, though,” Hansen objected.
Bradley wasn’t the argumentative type, so he only frowned.
“In the details, maybe,” I said, “but I think he’s correct in principle. They’ve built up all this wonderful kinetic energy. They’d be stupid not to use it for more than mere travel.”
“So that explains why they’re not slowing down, but they’re still going to be fighting an uphill battle when they stop and come back to Trinity-9.”
I walked around the holotank, looking at it from all angles. Suddenly, I saw what I would do if I were them.
“It’s because they’re not planning to go back home.”
Running my fingers over the controls, I set up a different sim. “What if they do this?”
This time, instead of coming back, the Demon fleet kept on going after their slashing attack on the Whales, curving gently but inexorably toward Trinity’s central stellar pair.
And toward Ellada.
“Shit,” Hansen rumbled. “With half their fleet helping the Whales, the Elladans are gonna get smeared.”
“What are we going to do?” Bradley said.
