Stardust

by Edward W. Robertson

  They set out from Earth with a force, if you could call it that, of six ships. They were good enough to give one to Rada, which she appreciated: being a passenger instead of a pilot made her feel like a child again, and not in the happy carefree way.

  But after so much time on the Tine, piloting the Silence III felt like signing her name with her left hand. Fortunately, she wasn't the slowest ship in the convoy, which let her spend the first day of flight making a number of course corrections and maneuvers, getting a feel for the craft.

  It had been three days since the Lurkers had left Earth. The entire System was on the lookout for them, and though there had been enough rumors that they'd had to outsource investigating most of them to random net communities, not a single "sighting" had been verified.

  That was worrying.

  Rada signaled the others she was about to start more maneuvers, then threw the Silence into a continuous barrel roll, the kind that could theoretically disperse a laser's heat across her hull.

  In the middle of her fifth rotation, Winters' voice came in over the comm. "Incoming signal from the Belt."

  "What've they got to say?"

  "That's the trouble. The habitat of Proud Rock isn't saying anything. It's gone completely dark."

  "Huh. Any signs of previous trouble there?"

  "None at all. It's just an agricultural station, providing…" Winters trailed off. "The habitat of Johani has just gone dark as well. It's in the same cluster as Proud Rock."

  Rada snapped the Silence back into zero motion along its axes. "Are we looking at a Lurker attack?"

  "Johani is just a minor population center. These aren't strategically logical targets."

  "They've also gone silent at a time when we need everyone talking to us. Either they fear they're about to be attacked, or they're under assault right now."

  "Then why in the world wouldn't they broadcast that? Ah—because the Lurkers are locking down their communications."

  "Get word to every habitat in their vicinity. Hell, send it to the entire Belt. And get the neighbors to send some drones over to see what's going on."

  Their convoy had already been headed toward the Belt, but the Belt was a gigantic circle that could take days to cross unless you were already up to System-crossing speed. So it was only through good fortune that they were already headed to the twelfth of the circle that bordered the section containing Proud Rock and Johani. They adjusted course, ETA a little over a day.

  As Winters went to work shooting off messages across the Belt, Rada composed a Needle and fired it to Titan, where Toman had two hundred-plus ships concealed away, waiting for an opportunity to strike. Shortly after she finished, Winters informed her that the stations of Obold and Athena had gone dark, too.

  Rada and the Dark Solutions officers filled the time speculating and strategizing. A half hour later, messages started to return from the Belt. No one had seen anything, but the nearby stations had all dispatched resources to get eyes on the scene.

  Toman's reply came back in less than ten minutes more than the lag time needed to cross the gulf between them. "Rada! You could have told me we'd lost the war and I still would have been happy to hear your voice. What you did at Earth was miraculous. I truly believe it saved us. You gave us a chance to fight back.

  "Here's the problem we're up against now: the surprise attack at Earth worked because the Lurkers were already within our range when the UDL ships opened fire. But if we come at the enemy without a better strategy than the one we used against their advance force, we'll be ripped to pieces by their lasers.

  "I know that's not what you want to hear. It's not what I want to say. But it's true. We're working on it, Rada. The instant we hit on a solution, we'll be on our way. Until then, exposing ourselves would be a grievous strategical error."

  He had more to say, but none of it changed anything and so Rada didn't register it. She knew her anger wasn't rational—she hadn't come up with a way to beat the Lurkers, either—yet she couldn't help her mounting frustration. Toman had had weeks to come up with a solution. Other than the ambush at Earth, which had been Dark Solutions' idea, they still had nothing.

  She chewed this over like a slice of gristly beef she couldn't decide whether to spit out or keep working on until it was ready to be swallowed.

  The comm pinged. Winters appeared, his typically impassive face looking jumpy. "Video incoming from Johani."

  Rada's screen split into two images. The video on the left showed Johani as it had been: an egg-shaped asteroid, its old mining tunnels converted into a charming habitat. It was the kind of everyday station that would never be newsworthy—which was the same reason its residents loved growing up in.

  The video on the right showed Johani as it was now. Cratered and black. Gas and smoke venting from its broken interior. Shards of rock orbiting around it. On infrared, it glowed with the heat of the weapons that had killed it. Bio scans showed no signs of life.

  Rada's mouth was dry. "Any survivors?"

  "Our drones have activated their security beacons. So far, there haven't been any responses."

  "The Lurkers came up on them without warning. Jammed their communications. And then killed everyone in the habitat. We'll see the same thing at the other stations that have gone dark."

  Winters said nothing for several seconds. "I can only hope that you're wrong."

  The report from Proud Rock came next. It was another oblong rock, but unusually, it rotated along its X axis, meaning one of its sides was permanently fixed toward the sun. Colonists had taken advantage of this feature by fitting its sunny side with domes, turning it into a massive greenhouse.

  The Lurkers had now turned it into a scorched shell. The domes had been cracked like eggs, the crops inside reduced to black smudges of carbon.

  Obold and Athena came in minutes later. They had been destroyed as well.

  "That's their new strategy," Rada said. "Earth showed it could defend itself. So they switched to targets that can't."

  Winters' voice had gone quiet. "This will be a slaughter. The Belt doesn't have enough ships left to try to fight back."

  "What if we muster the UDL ships that survived the battle at Earth? Along with the ships from all of the nations that didn't surrender?"

  "Even with the Belt's combined fleet, that won't be nearly enough to win."

  "But it might be enough to scare off the Lurkers."

  "It might." Winters swung his chin to the side. "Or that's exactly what they want us to do. Send everything we have at the Belt and leave Earth wide open for another attack."

  "It's probably both. They'll destroy whichever target we leave open for them."

  "Then it still comes down to the carriers, doesn't it? We take a fleet and we drive it straight at the two remaining carriers with the understanding that we could lose every single ship in the process. But destroying those two targets seems like the only chance we have to change the game and break the Lurkers' strategy."

  "I'll try Toman again. And Kansas, too—I don't know where she is, but someone at the Locker will know where to forward the message. You need to get ahold of Earth. Show them what happened with the carriers. Convince them that this is how we fight back."

  Winters nodded and signed off. Rada recorded her message for Kansas first, because it was much easier: all she had to do was prove they had a realistic strategy, and then remind Kansas that pursuing it would let her slaughter as many aliens as she could get her missiles on.

  Under the pretext of explaining how they'd discovered the importance of the carriers, Rada laid out how they'd executed their sneak attack at Earth. Not only would it sharpen Kansas' appetite for battle, but Rada was almost certain it would make her jealous, hungry for some glory of her own.

  She was in the middle of drafting her proposal to Toman when her comm beeped at her. The purple light indicated it was an outside communication from an unknown source.

  Rada authorized it—and jerked back from the screen, yelling out in su
rprise. A Lurker stood before her, one end of the two thick black tubes that made its body supporting itself against the ground, the other end pointed at the camera.

  "Hello." As always, its voice was as smooth as oil, somewhat but not entirely masculine. "I expect by now that you have seen the news. If you haven't, I have attached it for you. You should pause this message and catch up before continuing."

  Video clips appeared in the lower right corner. Footage of the aftermath of Proud Rock and the other three habitats.

  "Did you know anyone who lived inside these four places?" the Lurker continued. "If so, I am here to tell you that they are all now dead. If you did not know anyone who lived in them, your fortune is short-lived, because we will soon destroy four more, and then four after that, and on and on: and sooner or later, you will know someone who once lived and is now dead. More likely, you will know many of these former people. And the longer we go on, the greater the chance that you will be one of these people.

  "You might be thinking that we are doing this to frighten you, or to demoralize you so that you won't fight back with enough spirit. This isn't really the case. Yet you might find it interesting that the truth of what we are doing will demoralize you far more deeply."

  The tip of one of the Lurker's two face-limbs rippled and shifted, molding into an abstract human face. The face's lipless mouth bent up at the corners. Into a smile.

  "You see," it said, "we know your history as well as you do. We know what happened when the ones you call the Swimmers came here. They killed you so thoroughly and so well that it was hundreds of your years before you could be said to have reclaimed your world's wildernesses. It was eight hundred years until you had recovered to where you were before the attack.

  "The more intelligent of you will already see where this is going."

  The smiling face faded from the limb, only to reappear on the one next to it. "We will win here, within weeks if not days, and everything you once owned will become ours. And even if by some chance or fluke we do not win right now, we will kill so many of you that you become primitives again. When our second force arrives to finish this, what remains of your people will be so few and so weak that you will be able to do nothing more than close your eyes and pray to your gods as we erase your kind from the universe."

  The Lurker made a bowing motion, both head-limbs dipping. "Consider this message a mercy, one that will let you spend what time remains doing whatever it is that you love. Goodbye for now." The face winked. "And to you as a people."

  The message ended. Rada's heart was beating like she'd just been sprinting. She tried to raise Winters, but it was a minute before he responded, as ashen-faced as if he'd just been stabbed.

  "What do you make of this?" Rada said. "Are they bluffing?"

  "Why do you assume it must be a bluff?"

  "Otherwise it would be completely stupid. Why would they just tell us their plan?"

  "You are making the assumption they're doing this for strategic reasons." Winters stared at her. "But what if they're just sadists?"

  Rada closed her mouth, teeth clicking, a frisson running up her spine. "That could be. But we still have to treat the sending of the message as part of their strategy. What's the goal? To demoralize us?"

  "Or provoke us."

  "To immediately fly out and attack them? If I were them, I'd want to be left in peace as long as possible, giving me more time to maximize the damage I can do to the Belt."

  "Unless the attacks on the Belt—which so far have been civilian populations without strategic value—are no more than a ploy to get us to attack them before we're ready."

  "Or to make us pull our defenses away from Earth so they can finish bombarding it into extinction."

  Winters stared blankly, like a resetting device. "They've trapped us. Whatever we do, we lose."

  "When foxes are caught in a trap, they'll chew their own legs off if that's what it takes to get out."

  "I'm not following this metaphor. Is the Belt our leg?"

  "What I mean is that the only way to guarantee we'll stay trapped is if we don't try to get out. That's what I've learned about war. When two sides come in conflict, the outcome is chaos. No matter how bad the odds look for one side, that chaos always gives them the chance to win. That's why we have to act. If we leave the Lurkers to carry out their plan, we know exactly what will happen: they'll destroy the Belt station by station. Even if we find a way to beat them later on, they'll have crippled the System so badly we won't recover before they send a second wave here. But if we fight back now, we have no idea how it will turn out."

  "You want us to call for Earth's fleet."

  "Every last ship. We'll send out a call to the Belt, too. They sent most of their best ships to Toman's fleet before the actions at Earth, but I know they've still got some left here. They've probably spent the last two weeks bolting wings to every engine they can scrape together."

  "Ships aren't enough. We need a strategy."

  "Same as Earth: go straight for the carriers no matter how much it costs us. It might be enough to scare them off. If we actually succeed at taking out those last two ships, it could break their entire invasion."

  "I know that's a possibility," Winters said. "I'm not sure it's enough to convince Earth to leave themselves unguarded for the possibility of temporarily scaring the Lurkers away from the Belt."

  "Then tell them it's about more than scaring off the Lurkers. It's about taking revenge."

  A surprised smile flashed across Winters' face. "I'll send them the message."

  He signed off. Rada recorded a new video to Toman and Needled it off toward Titan. As soon as this was done, she composed one to the Belt, calling on every habitat to pledge every ship it had left to a joint defense.

  They were now well past Mars—in fact, they were past the orbits of a few stations generally considered part of the Belt—and the lag time from the closest habitats was just a few minutes. Ten minutes later, she still hadn't heard back from anyone. Just as she was starting to seriously wonder if everyone had gone dark to avoid drawing attention from the Lurkers, a Needle came in from Sasaki Station.

  "Thanks for the offer," the woman on the screen said. "But we've decided to let you go fuck yourself."

  The message clicked off. Rada blinked at the screen. Once she'd processed what had just happened, she pulled up a list of nearby stations. It turned out that Flybye was just six minutes' lag away: one of its station heads, a Dasher man named Mat-Nalin, had been at the big meeting near Mars when they'd discussed a unified defense of the System. She composed a new message and sent it his way.

  Her comm activated eight minutes later. Mat-Nalin's face appeared on her screen, looking weatherbeaten, which the Dashers somehow always managed to pull off despite the fact there was no weather to be found anywhere in the Belt.

  "I know who you are, Rada Pence." He squinted his left eye as if to ward off unseen smoke. "When the damned Tubes flew their smash-and-dash squad in, you and your master at the Hive couldn't abandon the Belt fast enough. When you rushed off to save old Earth instead, we saw exactly where your loyalties lie. And what happened when you got to your precious cloud farm? Earth turned on you and you ran off like beaten dogs!"

  Mat-Nalin laughed, a noise somehow like two pans clonking together. "Now Earth's dead, ain't she? So no, I think we're better off without your 'help.' Good luck to you, Rada."

  The message ended. Rada's skin was hot and crawling. She turned on her recorder. "Listen close, you dumb rock-worm. Earth took a beating, but it's a long ways from dead. And the only reason it's still alive is because I risked my neck turning the UDL's fleet against the Lurkers. Now we're bringing everything left from Earth and the moon out here to make a stand with you. So you can hide in your rocks and wait your turn to get slagged like Proud Rock. Or you can join us, defend yourself, and kill as many Lurkers as you can."

  Before she could reconsider and redo the video, she Needled it out to Flybye. Three messages from other sta
tions arrived in the meantime. One politely declined to join her. The other two were insults, scornful and crude in only the way that Dashers could pull off.

  Mat-Nalin's reply came back not long after. He regarded the camera with his head tilted back, amusement glinting from the gray of his eyes. "You want to talk? Come by and talk."

  That was the whole thing. Rada requested a course change from Winters and the six DS vessels diverted toward Flybye with the intention of curving around it as they returned to their original path, which would give Rada and Mat-Nalin a few minutes to talk in something close to real time.

  Rada killed the intervening hour sorting through rumors from the net. Nobody had anything confirmed, but there had been a cluster of reports of sightings or comms going out in a patch of space clockwise from where the four stations had been destroyed. This seemed as good a spot to check out as any.

  She prepped a message, sending it once they were a few seconds' lag from Flybye. "Here's what we're looking at doing, Mat-Nalin. Oh, and if you can not share this with the Lurkers, I'd really appreciate it."

  She followed this with a quick rundown of their plan to scrape together everything they could and take a run at the carriers. "I know you guys held some ships in reserve for home defense. I also know you've cobbled more together since then, and probably held back others that we didn't even know about. Well, I'm here to tell you that you better use them now—or else you'll never get the chance to."

  Mat-Nalin's face appeared on the screen a couple seconds later. "So you found your balls at Earth, huh? Well, I saw what happened when you turned on the Lurkers. Good show, but you don't have enough ships left to hold a parade, let alone a war. I'm sure we can get you a few more, but it still won't be nearly enough."

  "It's going to have to be enough, isn't it? That's all we've got. Besides, we don't have to stake everything on our fleet versus theirs in the middle of open space. I know you people have made plenty of plans for how you'd defend yourself if Earth or a corporate fleet ever showed up to take your stations away from you."

  The left corner of Mat-Nalin's mouth curved up while the rest of his face stayed perfectly still. "Only a proper idiot wouldn't plan to protect his home from invasion." His mouth now drooped at both corners. "But I can't say that any of our plans were intended to save us from aliens bearing lasers."