Stardust

by Edward W. Robertson

  He pressed his lips together in the smallest of rueful smiles. "I'm sorry we don't have a better answer, Rada. We're watching closely and working hard to come up with more. Keep fighting and stay safe."

  The message ended and Rada had to hold on to the arms of her chair to prevent herself from putting her fist through her screen. Once she was ready, she reached out to start recording a reply, but it was too late: on her other screen, the Lurker ships were wavering into view, the orange dots of enemy ships popping up across tactical. The two carriers flew with them, protected near the rear of the formation.

  Ships launched from the rock of Balden, spraying in all directions. As the clunky, jury-rigged crafts boosted with everything they had, Lurker fighters broke from their fleet, spreading out like an umbrella.

  They swept past Balden, launching missiles the instant they entered effective range on their prey. Behind them, a cone-shaped cruiser disgorged a heavy spread of rockets that speared straight toward the piebald surface that had given the station its name.

  Rada could only watch, helpless, as the first missiles struck the fleeing refugees, and the people of Balden began to die.

  Before the Lurker rockets hit the habitat itself, Balden rattled off a broadside of missiles. These were followed by six other ships that diverted from the enemy missiles' path before correcting to a crash course with the Lurker fleet. The surviving escape vessels hooked around, blattering kinetic rounds from their homemade cannons at the Lurker fighters.

  A last act of defiance: as beautiful as it was futile. The alien fighters consumed the escape vessels in fireballs. The main fleet dropped a second volley of missiles to intercept the broadside from Balden.

  It looked well in hand for the Lurkers, yet their fleet rippled, one of the carriers breaking to the right while the other turned left. A prism of lasers blazed from the larger ships. In unison, all six of the most recently launched human craft exploded, the fireballs whooshing outward, shockingly large.

  The human ships that had turned to fight died in seconds, taking out a single Lurker fighter with a lucky shot. The escapees exploded moments later. Then the volley of missiles hit Balden, swaddling the rock in a world of fire.

  The flames faded across the screen. Puffs of dust marked where the ships had once been. Smoke and ash twirled around Balden, obscuring the cracked and shattered surface.

  The Lurkers flew on toward Rosemary. The other station had launched its escape ships within moments of Balden, but even at the Lurkers' leisurely attack velocity, it was already clear they wouldn't have the speed to get away before the enemy closed on them.

  Rada worked in silence, gathering the footage of the destruction of Balden. She opened a new message. "Toman. I don't care if you don't have a plan. We do. And it depends on making the Lurkers nervous. Launch your ships now. You can run away at the first sign of danger. Until that time comes, I need the Lurkers to think you're coming for them. If you won't do this, then I will immediately resign from the Hive. Maybe that doesn't mean much to you. But know also that you will have condemned me, my fleet, and the Belt to death."

  She pushed send. Not long after, the Lurkers descended on Rosemary. It took them a little longer to hunt down all of the escapees, but in the end, the habitat did no better than Balden.

  Once they were done, the Lurkers sank back into the darkness, pursued on all sides by the cloud of drones that could no longer see them.

  "Did you see what they did at Balden?" Rada sent to Winters. "They packed non-combat ships with mining explosives and tried to ram the Lurkers."

  "They had to know they didn't have a chance."

  "If I'm ever in their situation, I hope I'll do the same."

  Winters gazed past her. "It made the carriers flinch. Should we encourage more of this?"

  "It's better than closing your eyes and waiting for the missiles to rain down. This is who the Belters are. Even when they know they're doomed, they'll charge the carriers with a rebel yell and a fist in the air."

  ~

  Things were quiet for a few hours. The first evacuees began to leave the Belt, headed inward for Mars or the moon or outward toward the many moons and stations of the Outer System.

  Still, it was barely better than a trickle. Most Belters stayed put in their homes. Rada watched the lack of evacuations with disgust. Earth hadn't been allowed to evacuate and more than two billion had died as a result. Now, when given the choice, the Belt chose to get vaporized.

  The Lurker fleet changed course, then a second time, then a third. Each time, the aliens took out a handful of drones, but they couldn't shake their pursuit.

  Or maybe they weren't trying. Near the end of the first full day of the countdown until the arrival of the Earth fleet, the Lurkers made a fourth change, putting them on course toward Rajak's Folly, an old mining settlement founded by a man named Rajak who'd gone on to lose his entire claim over the course of a single all-night poker session.

  Unlike most Belt settlements, the Folly encompassed multiple rocks: the main station, a second smaller rock where Rajak had founded a new colony after losing his first one, and eleven mined-out asteroids, three of which had been settled for brief periods before the new residents had deemed them too small for permanent habitation. These were now empty, but net registries mentioned they'd occasionally been used as hideaways by smugglers and outlaws.

  As the Lurkers neared, a few ships left the territory, speeding outward from the sun. In response to the suicide attack at Balden, rather than approaching with the entire fleet, the Lurkers dispatched a vanguard of four corvettes and eighteen escort fighters. As soon as they came within range, they launched an overwhelming volley at Folly's main habitat, then a second lesser salvo at the second rock Rajak had made a home in.

  The ships broke away, angling to rejoin the main fleet as it cruised to the side of the loose cluster of asteroids. As they passed through a triangle of mined-out asteroids, flames leaped from the two rocks in front of the Lurkers. A school of missiles rushed toward the alien fighters.

  The Lurkers dumped missiles and pulled up. Behind them, the third asteroid belched out a squadron of ships—if you could call a cargo container strapped to an engine a "ship." The three corvettes pivoted their lasers about while the fighters broke upward, looking to slip out from between the hammer and the anvil.

  Lasers flashed. One of the makeshift ships went up in a fireball so wide it nearly took out the two others closest to it. Its destruction was followed by a second and a third, then three more as the fighters flipped tail-for-nose to bring their own lasers to bear. On the other side, missiles slammed against each other, almost an afterthought.

  Yet others broke through, pursuing the Lurker fighters tightly enough to stop them from taking aim. The bomb-ships plowed forward. A group of alien fighters swung downward, firing kinetics and rockets behind them and spearing four more human ships, but this brought them closer to the pursuing human missiles.

  A Lurker fighter went up in white heat. The corvettes fired a frantic spread of missiles at point blank range. The last of the bomb-ships exploded into spheres of white heat, rushing outward until the blast washed over the closest corvette.

  The other ships turned hard. The fireball peaked, then began to fade, slowly at first and then in a rush. Rather than revealing a cloud of flotsam and smoke, when the flames faded, the corvette was still present and recognizable. Yet its bow had crumbled, shedding metal and plastic to all sides. The ship had been crippled beyond repair, but it was unusually intact, enough that there might have been survivors—but the other Lurkers didn't so much as slow down as they powered away from the now-dead stations.

  The rearmost fighter launched three missiles behind it. These flew almost leisurely, plowing into the hull of the wounded ship and utterly destroying it.

  "Vicious," Winters said. "Destroying their own ship so we can't study it."

  "I don't like that," Rada said. "If they're willing to do that to their own people, they're more likely to wi
n."

  The Lurkers dissolved into the background of space once more, the Belt's drones giving chase all the while. The DS task force flew past Rajak's Folly, scanning it for survivors. They found none.

  The Lurkers spent the next few hours making what felt like a half-hearted effort to shake off the drones. Rada caught a nap, trusting the Silence to autopilot. When she got up, she had a message waiting from Mat-Nalin.

  His eyes were heavy-lidded, the skin beneath them darkened and puffy. "Thought I'd bring you up to speed. Won't take long, because hardly anyone's willing to give us any ships. I'm up to forty pledged to our service. Which means I expect no more than twenty to actually show up to fight for us. There ain't many stations left on my list, Rada. If you want more ships, we're going to have to put the screws to them. I'm thinking we quit helping to evacuate any station that won't pitch in to the war effort. That's the kind of tough action these people understand."

  Rada Needled back: "No. Keep helping everyone. In fact, make it clear to them that we will keep helping them whether or not they will give us a single ship."

  His reply came in a few minutes later: "What's your angle? They ain't helping us."

  "And at this rate they never will. So let's get them out of here and get them safe. Maybe that will convince some of them that we're worth fighting alongside. If not, I don't care. I'm not feeding these people to the Lurkers."

  She leaned forward to send the message, then sat back in her chair and started recording again. "Even if they only give us twenty ships, we're still going after the Lurkers. The problem is that our battle plan consists of 'run straight at them and hope we take down their carriers before they can kill us all.' I'm not sure that's going to cut it. We need to integrate any defense plans you guys have cooked up for the Belt over the years."

  He let her know that he'd see what he could do. Rada settled into her chair and gazed at the screens. One told her they still had three days until Earth's remaining ships arrived. The biggest showed the Belt and its scores of stations, with colored tags indicating which were being evacuated, which had pledged ships, which had been destroyed, and which were currently the closest targets for the Lurkers.

  There was too much territory to defend. Too many people to save. Too many enemies to fight with too little resources. Soon enough, they'd make their run at the carriers, and she would probably die.

  She could feel herself sinking into something dark. But she'd finally been around for long enough to understand that the only escape from the darkness was to get moving—it didn't even matter which direction—and keep moving until you found yourself back in the light.

  She sent Toman a quick message. Not to berate him, but to ask him to ask LOTR for suggestions on improvised weapons, escape craft, and survival. Her next messages went to Mars and its moons and nearby stations to request the aid of any non-combat vessels with enough life support to cart people out of the Belt. Her third set of messages went to the Belt's stations, providing coordination for their evacuation campaigns, along with all the advice she could squeeze out of her previous tangles with the Lurkers.

  By the time she was done, the darkness had gone.

  ~

  Two and a half days until the arrival of Earth's fleet, a Needle arrived from Titan.

  "I've thought about your message." An undercurrent of tension ran through Toman's voice. Possibly it was anger. "I can't commit my ships to battle without being confident that we have a plan that is at least theoretically capable of beating the Lurkers. But that doesn't mean I can't put those ships to work in other ways. Within 24 hours, I will launch my fleet and make for the Belt as if I mean to attack the enemy, with the goal of bluffing them away from the local stations. Let me know if we can make any other maneuvers to scare them into dancing to your tune. Good luck, Rada."

  He'd also attached a host of files from LOTR about the making of space-grade bombs from spare engine fuel, mining chemicals, and all of the other sorts of things rock habitats tended to store in large quantity. Rada transmitted these to every station in the Belt.

  Possibly spooked after losing a corvette and a few fighters to a station with no real defenses, the Lurkers had stayed dark for a full day. Less than an hour after she got word from Toman that his fleet was now inbound, the Lurkers made an abrupt course change, barreling toward Darran Station.

  It was one of the biggest habitats in the Belt. Population of two million. They'd evacuated just thirty percent of their citizens. They hadn't had the ships or time to do more.

  They'd told Mat-Nalin they hadn't had any ships left, but as the Lurkers neared, Darran mustered a defense force of eight combat fighters to meet them. The station fired everything it had, thousands of missiles along with its antique flak cannons. Mining ships and small personal craft threw themselves at the coming enemy.

  With everything they had, they managed to destroy one Lurker fighter and eight drones before the enemy reduced the station to a floating smear of entropy.

  Rada watched the now-familiar scene of the aliens flying past the wreckage and vanishing back into the ether. Then she returned to her work of getting as many people out of the other stations as possible.

  Mat-Nalin messaged her an hour later. His eyes were so red and his face so puffy that it looked like he'd thrown himself into a moonshine binge, which wasn't out of the question for a Dasher, but his words were clear, his wrath shining through them like sunlight through a still northern lake.

  "I don't have words for what they've done. But I do have hands. Rada, when you go for them, bring me back one of the Tubes—and make sure it's alive. I want to crush the life out from whatever it calls a throat."

  He swiveled from the camera to stalk around his quarters, the rough stone walls hung with analog paintings of vintage ships. "I'd been trying what you said, telling my neighbors that we'd help them whether or not they helped us, and it had been working somewhat, you know, a few people who'd said no before pinged me to say 'It's the funniest thing, we double-checked the old hangars and wouldn't you know it, we found a ship after all…'"

  Mat-Nalin came to a stop, clutching his face with a hand bent like an oversized spider. "The death of Darran changed everything. Everyone I've talked to is pledging everything they've got. The total should clear a hundred ships. Now you gotta understand, Commander Pence, these won't be the fancy warbirds you're used to flying. They won't have enough missiles or drones. No Motion Arrestors, either. I expect most wouldn't even pass your safety inspections.

  "But they're our ships. And this is how we choose to spend them."

  He smiled then, mouth closed, staring into the camera as if he was seeing forward in time and staring down an uncertain future. He smoothed his hair and seated himself. "As for the defense, we've got a plan for you. Don't ask what it is, because I won't tell you and then I expect you'll sulk about it. Just make sure that when you make your run at the Tubes, you make sure that the battle takes place at the Utter Stone.

  "I can already picture you working your pretty jaw to complain that you'll never fool them into fighting you exactly where you want to fight. Well, if the Utter Stone's too tough for you, you can have your showdown at Einart Station or the Ruse instead. But it has to be one of those three. Otherwise, you're on your own."

  The screen went blank. Rada held to the arms of her chair, as if the news might cause her to become so light she'd float away.

  She and the Dark Solutions crew spent the next full day strategizing how to goad or lure the Lurkers to the Utter Stone, which was an older tunnel station whose glory days were long behind it but was still respected as the site of a victorious skirmish during the Sword of Ares conflict that had sprung up with the Martian mining companies as local settlers had started rejecting the companies' claims to all of the habitation-sized asteroids. Einart and Ruse didn't have any obvious strategic or historical importance, they were just middling stations about a twelfth of the way around the Belt in opposite directions from the Utter Stone.

  DS'
brainstorming boiled down two basic tactics: lure the Lurkers into the battle sites, either by feigning weakness or pretending there was something of vital importance to defend, or herd them into it, using Toman's fleet as a sheepdog. If the Lurkers tried to give them the runaround and avoid a showdown, that meant more time to evacuate the Belt and continue to piece together new ships.

  As the drones applied subtle pressures to the Lurkers, looking to gradually shift their path toward the Utter Stone, Winters sent a message to the Earth fleet, advising it to adjust course.

  Two hours later, a Needle came in for Rada, encrypted heavily enough that it would have made LOTR jealous. She recognized the man on the screen at once: Admiral Vance, his iron gray hair cut short in classic military style, his gaze as steady as a pair of stars.

  "Commander Pence. My name is Lukas Vance, admiral of the Combined Earth Task Force. We have spent a great deal of time studying the video of your previous actions against the invaders. It is invaluable material. It has fostered the optimism among myself and my officers that when we make our stand, we will do so with the real hope of victory.

  "I imagine you are busy with preparations of your own. However, if you can spare the time to provide me with any additional advice and insight into your experience with the enemy so that we can wield it as a sword against them, I swear that we will not disappoint you. Thank you for all you have done, Commander. We will be seeing you shortly."

  It was a recorded message and no one was there to see her, yet Rada felt herself flushing. She spent a minute wondering what in hell she was going to tell him: Vance had seen action in numerous corporate conflicts before being brought on by his home nation of Castovia, which many considered Earth's best-trained navy outside of the UDL. The idea that the admiral would seek combat advice from somebody who had recently been a drunken mining cart operator on a backwater moon was almost frightening.