by B. V. Larson
“You ask questions for which we do not have an answer. But the beings we speak of are as far beyond our understanding as we are beyond yours. They are so advanced as to be gods. Do you know the mind of your gods? No, you do not, and neither do we. But we know enough to fear them wherever they are and whatever they’re doing.”
I turned my eyes back toward the screens to see how the battle was shaping up. It was looking pretty good. We still had seventy missiles of theirs inbound, but the missiles were traveling pretty slowly now in relation to my retreating fleet. I figured we could shoot them all down before they hit us.
My own forces were closing with the enemy. I had about a hundred fighters out there and at least a thousand marines. We would board their ships or stand-off and bomb them with tactical nukes. Those of the enemy cruisers that survived Marvin’s continuous fire, that is. They were dodging around, but it hadn’t spoiled my robot’s aim much. In fact, he was hitting them faster now. Maybe he’d gotten the hang of his system, or maybe it was warmed up. Every thirty seconds, another of their ships crumpled into a wad of metal and released a puff of gas and energy. Already, more than half of them were out of the fight. There were only about a hundred and seventy ships left.
“Looks like our boys are going to miss this fight!” I said proudly. “I thought Marvin needed a helping hand, but now I’m beginning to think there will be nothing left by the time our fighters reach the enemy.”
“Your statements are nonsensical,” Mercy complained in my ear. I grimaced. I’d forgotten about him for a moment.
“Sorry,” I said. “I was speaking in code. What do you want again?”
“Most of my people, who are listening to this conversation now, do so solely for the purpose of gloating. They understand you have doomed yourself, and they are joyful. That is not my way. No matter how unworthy your form of existence, I feel compelled to offer you solace.”
I snorted. “Solace? What kind of peace can you offer me?”
“It is known to us that, in his final moments, you shared matter with Tolerance. That was a thoughtful gesture for a barbarian. Our scholars are somewhat at a loss to explain it. Perhaps our civilized natures have infected the purity of your naturally feral state, instilling you with refinement. In any case, I wish to personally offer the same courtesy to you.”
I frowned. “Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re offering me the opportunity to come into your atmosphere, meet up with you, and, uh—trade matter?”
“Exactly. It is a burdensome thing, and I will forever be stigmatized among my own people for having allowed it. But I am the one called Mercy, and I would stay true to my principles even under these circumstances.”
The Blues were a strange people even by the galactic standards for strangeness set by all the aliens I’d encountered so far. These beings existed largely in a gaseous state, and when they met up with one another, they often traded some of their personal matter. To a solid creature such as myself, this seemed odd at the very least, like keeping a lock of hair from everyone I’d ever met. But they didn’t only keep this exchange, the puff of gas exchanged became part of them. They believed they were immortal as long as some piece of their molecular matter was still functioning in another of their species.
Knowing this, I understood that the Blue was offering me something significant in his culture. But I wasn’t keen on the idea. I’d traded spit with Blues twice before, and I hadn’t enjoyed the experience in the least.
“Why are you offering us this now?” I asked him. “Why do you think it’s a merciful act to share matter with me?”
“Is that not obvious? I’m fairly certain it must be abundantly clear by now. I truly don’t understand how you can have advanced so far—”
“Right, okay,” I said. “I’m a big dummy. Now, just tell me why you want to do this?”
“Because you are doomed, Colonel Kyle Riggs. Your existence cannot continue. You have violated the will of the Ancients, such as none has dared to do for a billion years. You and all your people will be destroyed when they come back.”
For the first time, the Blue had my full attention. I turned away from the screens, the cheering crowds, and cupped my hands over the mouthpiece. “You say they’re coming back? These Ancients? When?”
“That is known only by them.”
“Well, how long has it been since you’ve seen them? How long in standard Earth years?”
There was a moment of quiet, then the answer came at last. “The stillness of space was last visited upon all our species over a hundred thousand years ago.”
“A hundred thousand…?” I asked? Then I smiled. “Ha! I’ve got news for you, Mercy. That’s a long, long time for a human. I’ll be dead and gone long before they come back. But what was that you said about the stillness of space? I didn’t get that.”
“The reference was to the cold they bring with them: the chill of the stars, the cooling of the planets. All life suffers when the Ancients glide through our systems.”
I was frowning again thinking about that.
“Okay, Mercy,” I said. “I’ve got to go. I have a battle to win. But I want to thank you for this call, the warning and your very personal offer of solace. I know that means a lot to your species.”
“You appreciate my offer?”
“I do indeed,” I lied. “I might even take you up on it someday.”
“I am surprised. I was told you would not understand my generosity and would reject it. You are a strange being, Colonel Kyle Riggs.”
“I’ve been told that before,” I assured him and closed the channel.
Around me, my staffers were cheering. The enemy was down to thirty ships, and our fighters and marines had finally reached them. We were tearing them apart.
But I stared at the screens, troubled.
“What is it, Colonel?” Jasmine asked me. “What did the Blues have to say?”
“They wanted to give me the last rites,” I said.
“What?”
I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter. But Jasmine, do you happen to remember when Earth’s last glacial period began? You know, when the ice covered most of our world?”
“You mean when it ended?” she asked, frowning.
“No. I want to know when it started.”
She brought up a screen and did a search online. I could have done that, but I let her.
“Just over a hundred thousand years ago,” she said. “Why do you ask, Colonel?”
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “No reason. Carry on.”
A few minutes later, the last of the enemy ships blew up. While everyone else on the ship cheered and whooped, I remained quiet and brooding.
What if I had pissed off these Ancients—some sort of sinister super-aliens we’d never encountered? What if I’d unwittingly stirred up a new shitstorm, the like of which hadn’t been seen in a hundred millennia?
Well, I told myself, it wouldn’t be the first time.
-14-
We all thought the battle was over when the last Macro cruiser turned into a fountain of plasma and shrapnel. But it wasn’t.
Those seventy-odd missiles kept coming at us. I’d pretty much discounted them until they started slowing down and taking complex countermeasures.
“Sir,” Newcome said, calling me from the bridge.
“What is it, Admiral?”
“I think you better come up here.”
I’d been taking a sip of coffee down in the cantina, wishing it was beer. I stood up with a grunt. Kwon stood up with me.
“What is it?” he asked. “Something’s gone wrong? That’s it, I can tell!”
He sounded eager to fight. He’d missed out during the last battle. The last Macro cruiser had died before it had reached cannon-range. He’d asked to go out with the marines, but I hadn’t let him. I didn’t want to risk losing a key man on a fight that was pretty much a foregone conclusion.
I had to admit that sometimes Kwon’s lust for battle was dis
turbing. A normal man wouldn’t be all turned—on about a chance to face death, but Kwon never got tired of it.
“Maybe,” I said, giving him a tight smile. “Trouble on the bridge. But it might just be Newcome acting nervous again. He needs babysitting more than most officers.”
“Babysitting, ha ha!” Kwon shouted, enjoying the joke more loudly than I would have liked.
“You want to tag along?” I asked him.
“Would love to, sir!”
He followed me all the way up the main passage, and we pressed our way through the nanite door. Right away, I could tell the mood was all wrong. The staffers were bustling, but quietly. The jubilant mood left by our recent victory had vanished.
“Brief me, Newcome,” I said. “And this had better not be some kind of a screw-up on your part.”
“Hardly, Colonel,” he said huffily. “The enemy has employed sophisticated countermeasures. Their missiles are still coming, and we aren’t going to be able to stop them.”
Narrowing my eyes, I surveyed the boards and the holotank. The enemy missiles were already in range, and I could see we were taking potshots at them with lasers.
“Why are we missing?” I said, watching a steady series of stabbing beams reach out from our fleet in flickering lines which intersected the enemy missiles neatly. Each time they did so, there seemed to be no appreciable effect.
“Technically, we’re not missing, sir. The enemy has deployed a particularly effective aerosol. It is prismatic, highly reflective and stubbornly difficult to burn through. Unlike chaff, there doesn’t seem to be any end to it, and we can’t burn through it. Even direct hits are having no effect on the enemy missiles.”
I nodded. “I can see that our fighters aren’t going to return in time to help.”
“It will all be over hours before we retrieve them. We’re reducing the fleet’s speed in order to do so, but it won’t help.”
“What about Marvin?” I asked. “Can’t he zero in on these missiles and crush them for us as he did the fleet?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“What about using our own missiles against these incoming birds? Have we got anything left?”
He shook his head. “We threw it all into destroying their ships. We’re on our own. We’ll have to ride out this attack without the fighters or missiles.”
I frowned, looking it over. Jasmine arrived, and she rushed to the table. Her eyes swept over the scene, and she nodded in understanding.
“I have received a message from Marvin, Colonel,” she said.
I looked at her expectantly.
She shook her head. “He won’t be able to help. The moment the last Macro cruiser was destroyed, he launched from the Sun Factory and headed back toward our fleet. Really, we can’t be angry with him about that. He completed his mission perfectly.
“It wasn’t quite over with yet,” I grumbled. But, after thinking about it, I shrugged.
“Looks like they’re going to tag us, people,” I said loudly. “Really, we had to expect this. We could hardly hope to get through a fight like this one without a scratch. Seventy missiles will hurt, and they will probably take out a few ships. But if we all—”
“Sir?” Newcome interrupted me.
I looked at him, frowning.
“There’s more to it than that. The enemy missiles are slowing as they come in close. They are, in fact, matching our velocity and deceleration arc.”
It took me a second to get what he was saying. “You’re telling me they aren’t missiles at all. That these are assault ships?”
He nodded. I looked at Jasmine.
“That would fit the profile of behavior, sir,” she said.
For the first time, I felt a twinge of worry.
“How far are we from the ring to the Eden System?”
“About an hour away, Colonel.”
“What if we sped up again? What if we zoomed right through the ring and made it home as fast as possible?”
They were both working on the numbers. Glimmering lines curved on the screens, projecting new paths.
“We could do it in half that time.”
“Thirty minutes…and the enemy missiles—um, assault ships, will speed up again to catch us, I’m sure. But that might screw up their little protective clouds. Let’s do it. Fleet, I want every ship in the task force to accelerate, all ahead full. If we make it to the ring while they’re landing on our hulls, the guns of Welter Station can pick them off.”
I didn’t have to ask twice. I could tell by the speed of the response Jasmine had already tapped in the order. She was always on top of these things. I was glad I’d brought her along.
The ship’s decking lurched under my feet. A painful, growing weight caused by the acceleration pressed upon me, too much for the grav plates to compensate for.
The next twenty minutes were rough. The missiles gave chase, and we fired everything we had left at them. Unfortunately, I’d unloaded all my missiles, fighters and marines to meet the ships themselves.
It soon became clear we weren’t going to make it to the ring before they caught up to us. We weren’t going to be able to stop them.
“Sixty-eight left?” I demanded incredulously. “Are you telling me we only got a handful of them with all that fire? That means their anti-laser systems are far better than ours. This is actually depressing news. We surprised them with the gravity weapon, and it was a damned good thing we did. These ships would have mopped up the floor with us. They would have deployed these defensive measures to protect their cruisers when we got into range with our main guns, I’m sure. I’m shocked at their technological advancement.”
“Sir,” Newcome said. “Maybe that’s why they have so few ships. It’s been a long time since we met up with the Macros. Maybe they spent their time upgrading weaponry rather than building more vessels.”
I nodded. “I have to concede that possibility. It fits the facts, but we may never know the truth. It does, however, emphasize our need for technological advancement. We can’t have a bunch of machines out-teching us. It’s downright embarrassing. I want samples after this is over—presuming we survive. Transmit every measurement we’ve taken to Welter Station, and have them relay that to Earth.”
“We can’t do that right now, Colonel,” Jasmine said.”
“Why not?”
“They’re jamming the rings again.”
I growled. “The Macros and the Blues are in coordination yet again. What a pair of devils. I tell you, I’ve still got half a mind to erase the Blues while we can.”
At this, several pairs of eyes looked up at me. Only Kwon didn’t appear to take note. He was tapping at one small corner of the boards, where he was checking his troop rosters. I approved as he was arranging defensive operations on the ships. That was his job, and he always stuck to his job rather than getting upset about whatever I said.
The rest of them looked worried. I heaved a sigh.
“No, I’m not going to order you to commit genocide no matter how much the Blues deserve it. I’m just annoyed with them. We have to make it painful to them when they pull stunts like this. Possibly, that entire line they gave me about sharing matter and me being doomed was bullshit meant to cover for the fact they really just wanted to give the Macros their marching orders.”
“What did they say about being doomed?” Jasmine asked in concern.
“Never mind about that. They never talk to me without throwing in a few oddball threats. Let’s get back to the battle at hand. Kwon, where are you setting up your marines?”
“Center of each ship, main passage between the bridge and engineering.”
I nodded. “Tell every crew to keep the engines burning. I don’t want them crawling in that way. Once they get off their damned missiles we’ll take some shots at them. Each ship can try to burn individual machines off his neighbor’s hull.”
“Good idea!” Kwon shouted. “It will be like picking fleas off your neighbor’s back—but try to leave a few
for my men. We need practice.”
I knew Kwon really meant he wanted to have some fun fighting with the machines personally, but I didn’t argue with him. Our gunners and brainboxes would not need my encouragement to fire when the enemy was swarming on hulls. They probably wouldn’t have listened if I’d told them to go easy on the machines, in any case.
When the machines finally did hit us, it wasn’t loud or flashy. They came in, unloaded marines that looked like headless grasshoppers, and all we heard was the clank and rasp of their feet on the hulls.
It was impossible not to look up at the ceiling when you heard that sound.
“It’s been a long time,” I said.
“It sure has,” Kwon said, cradling his projector and checking his charge for the tenth time. “Too long.”
Up until that point, nothing had really gone wrong. I’d known for twenty minutes that they would catch us, and I knew those missiles were full of enemy marines. If they couldn’t find a way in for the next ten minutes, we’d slip through the ring and find ourselves in home space. Welter Station had lasers that dwarfed anything that my ships had. Even if they had their own personal aerosol shields up by then, I was confident our big guns would burn through it without a problem.
I was beginning to think we were going to ride this one out. At that moment, something new went wrong.
“Sir, we have a hull breach,” Jasmine said.
“What? Already?”
She’d hardly had to tell me. The screens were flashing red. Our exterior view of space and the Thor System flashed away and was replaced by a diagram of our ship. Up forward, about ten meters from the nose itself, the breach appeared as a dark hole surrounded by red warping radiating lines.
“They’ve got something new. They’re cutting through our hull as if it’s paper.”
I watched for a second, fascinated. Then I turned to Kwon. “They’re getting inside. Let’s go.”
“Colonel!” Jasmine said in alarm.
I paused.
“You don’t have to go personally. We still have a complement of defensive troops and crewmen. Let them do their jobs.”
