The rockets had already been in flight for half an hour and they didn't have to wait long until Tandana was in sight. Black dots swarmed from the island like flies. The jets straightened out and locked on. Red beams lanced from them to the missiles, setting them off in quick succession. Debris splashed down into the sea. Not a single missile made it within ten miles of the island.
"Well," Loris said softly, her hands motionless on the table. "So much for that."
"That's not fair!" Webber got to his feet, giving the bird to the screens. "They can't just shoot down all of them!"
"This was my fear."
"Then what's next? Can we try another round?"
"Now that they are alerted, I'm not sure we could slip through their defenses even with every nuke remaining on Earth. Not that such a thing is possible. After the strike launched on Ralania, no one else will take such a risk."
"Then hit them with something they can't shoot down. Like a rock."
Loris swiveled her head toward him. "You mean to drop a rock on them from space. Like they did to Earth on their first run through the System."
"Worked pretty well for them, didn't it?"
"We face a problem. Every single military vessel from Earth and the moon has now been destroyed."
"So call up Mars. Anyway, who says it needs to be military? Just find a hauler and cram its hold with the biggest boulder it can fit."
Loris planted her elbow on the table and her chin in her palm. "It's not quite so simple. The vessel will need to get up to speed. This will draw attention."
"So set up some distractions. Or make it look like it's coming here to do something innocent, like evacuate whoever the leader of the UDL is now."
"One does not typically perform an evacuation of world leaders at the speeds necessary to destroy an island with a spaceborne rock, but I'm sure we can come up with something. However, this will have to be done quickly. Before the Lurkers return to orbit and put a lock down on all approaches to the planet."
"How close are they now?"
"We can't say for sure, as they've disappeared from all scans again. But they were inbound to Earth at high speed when they set upon Admiral Vance's fleet. We can't count on more than three days."
"Ain't a lot of time," MacAdams said.
"That's for me to worry about now." Loris smiled wryly. "If you'd like to keep your mind off it in the meantime, how do you feel about another job?"
~
It would have been too much to hope that the job not be dangerous. These days, that was right off the table. But at least it was straightforward: travel to Taijin, the country that had just nuked Loris' buddies in Ralania, and assassinate its leader, one Galan Lin.
Loris claimed this had nothing to do with revenge, and MacAdams almost believed her; Dark Solutions had clearly been up to all kinds of subterfuge over the years, and couldn't have stayed hidden for long if it was the type to get into petty beefs. Rather, it was for two good reasons. First, Lin was spooked and unstable, a threat to a region that was already on the brink of collapse.
And second, Loris was almost certain that the real Lin had been replaced by a Lurker duplicate to stir up trouble. If they took him down and showed the proof to the world, the leaders of other nations would have no choice but to submit themselves for inspection to prove they were still human.
DS didn't have an exact lock on Lin's position, but they pegged it at an eighty percent chance he was hunkering down in the Longwall Mountains near the border with what was left of Ralania. The plan was to drop MacAdams and Webber in with a local guide, locate Lin, and either kill him or call in backup as necessary.
The submarine made its way to the coast, where they'd wait underwater until the plane and gear arrived. MacAdams spent his time reading up on the climate and conditions of the Longwalls. It was winter and the mountains in the area broke 16,000 feet in places. Traversing them would be even rougher than the crossing to Sky's Reach. He was just getting up to go request that atmospheric suits be added to their gear when the cabin door slid open and a sailor in DS black informed them Loris would like to see them at the bridge.
She was seated at her usual table, her feet not quite touching the ground. She didn't look happy. "We have run into a problem."
Webber slung himself into a chair across from her. "We're tangling with the Lurkers and we've run into a problem? We're in unprecedented territory here!"
"Get your jokes in while you can, Mr. Webber, because at this rate there will soon be no one left alive to hear them. We have been searching for ships suitable for making the attack on Tandana. We located a pair of mining vessels in Carriana, but they were destroyed by missiles upon trying to reach orbit. Those ships represented the only two available vessels on Earth or the moon."
"No way. There have to be others."
"None capable of fulfilling our objectives."
"All it has to do is carry a big rock around. There must be thousands of ships that could do that!"
"Yes, there were, before the alien invasion that slagged the entire navy and bombed every shipyard and spaceport they could. Now there is literally nothing left."
MacAdams rubbed his mouth. "What about Mars? Has it even been hit yet?"
"Not meaningfully. But it's too far away. The Lurker fleet will arrive at least a day before anything from Mars could reach us."
She had a map of the Inner System up on the screen, the sun at the center, the Belt dispersed around the edges.
MacAdams didn't even need to look at it. "Ravin Station."
"What about it? Ravin is little more than a rest stop for those too stupid to understand that stopping at it will add days to their journey."
"Just a third of the way to Mars, but it's one of the quietest places in the System. Which is why Locker pirates who made a fortune robbing the Lanes have always liked retiring there."
Loris put on a Sphinx-like smile. "But Ravin is a completely artificial station, Mr. MacAdams. There are no rocks there."
"If we have a big enough ship, we don't need a rock at all."
This time she laughed. "That is precisely what I told them. Three ships will be leaving Ravin within minutes. Other than a few defensive measures, they are unarmed, and are supposedly on their way to deliver food and medicine to Earth."
"Do you expect that to stop the Lurkers from attacking them?" Webber said. "You could say the ship's full of three-legged puppies on their way to be adopted by one-eyed kitties and the Lurkers would still nuke them."
"I expect it won't matter, because the Ravin ships will beat them here. But we operate on the guiding principle that every detail, however small, can be shaped into something that will help you succeed."
She tapped on her device. A shorter green line appeared, tracing a route from Ravin to Earth, along with a longer orange line from the Belt. "The Ravin ships will arrive in just over two days. We expect the Lurkers to appear no more than 24 hours after that. In the wake of the destruction of their manufacturing facilities at Tandana, we expect them to commence another round of bombardment. Nonetheless, due to the fact that you two and Rohan are the only people who've stepped foot on Tandana, we'd like you to remain aboard the submarine until the facility has been destroyed. We'll then immediately fly you in to Taijin."
MacAdams crooked his eye. "That won't give us a hell of a lot of time to take out Lin before the Lurkers' bombs start to fall."
"So what? Once their bombs are falling, the heights of the Longwall Mountains will be one of the safest places you can be."
That left MacAdams with two days to browse through old satellite footage, communications triangulation, and recent rumors to try to pin down Lin's exact location. Inland, the Sveylani alliance—which was still apparently being backed by the Lurkers—razed the New Mongolian city of Jardo, captured the state capital of Dozel, and prepped to make a push for the national capital of Korak.
"If Korak falls," Loris predicted, "New Mongolia will launch every missile in their arsenal."
&
nbsp; "Humans are the worst," Webber said. "What are they thinking, fighting each other like this right now?"
"Likely that they don't want to be slaughtered by invading nations. Don't forget that they have been provoked into this through deceit."
"But it's so short-sighted. They should declare a ceasefire, spend the next few days throwing a big drunken party, then wait to see what the Lurkers do. If there's still a world left to fight over after the aliens come back, then they can go right back to killing each other."
MacAdams watched the clashes of jets and troops a while longer, then decided watching wasn't accomplishing anything and went back to his bunk to study more maps of the Longwalls. At some point, he fell asleep. At some point after that, a rattled-looking sailor was shaking him awake.
Without looking at his device, MacAdams knew it was at least six hours until the Ravin ships were scheduled to arrive and plow themselves into Tandana. He and Webber ran to the bridge barefooted. Loris stood in front of the screens, arms hanging by her sides, hands balled into fists and cocked outward, suddenly girlish despite her years.
On the screens, three clunky-looking haulers raced toward Earth, orange cones of flame trailing from their engines. Behind them, what had to be half the Lurker fleet closed steadily.
Webber gawked. "Where'd they come from?"
"They just dropped out of the shadows," Loris murmured. "We were basing their arrival time on the expectation that they would slow down to enter Earth orbit. But they haven't braked at all."
"Why would they do that? Could they have known what we were up to?"
"We have to assume so, yes."
There wasn't much else to say. When the Lurkers nudged into combat range, six missiles streaked forth, two per target. The Ravin ships tossed out flares and spinners. It was enough to confuse the missiles into blowing themselves up, but it was also a sign of near defenselessness.
The next time, the Lurkers fired sixty missiles. Twenty apiece. The Raviners dumped everything they had. It scared away the first few rockets. MacAdams didn't get his hopes up. The missiles closed in. As if they'd coordinated it, all three Ravine vessels expanded into simultaneous balls of fire.
There was a moment of silence on the bridge.
Loris lowered herself to the ground, fingers trailing on the table. "Well. I suppose that's that."
"It's like they knew," MacAdams said. "Could someone have tipped them off?"
"Yes, of course someone could have tipped them off. Humans are disloyal under the best of circumstances, let alone when Earth's largest alliance has already defected, the survivors are warring with each other like ancient tribes, and everyone knows that they will soon be dead unless a miracle intervenes. All the Lurkers would have to do to turn someone traitor is offer them the chance to survive. Then again, the Lurkers could simply be tapping our communications. Who knows? What does it matter?"
"Guess it doesn't. There aren't any other ships remotely close enough to get to Earth before the Lurkers arrive. From here on, they'll shoot down anything that tries to get close."
"While their assets on the ground spread their factories, their machines of war, and their control over the few who are able to fight back." Loris' expression went so brittle it would shatter with a tap, her eyes a shimmering gray, the only part of her that didn't look suddenly old. "A thousand years. A thousand years of thought and planning and preparation. Ten centuries of labor from some of the best minds of our species. And in the end, it did nothing. Should I be consoled that my failure will be erased along with our species?"
MacAdams didn't know what the hell she was on about, but he discovered he didn't care to find out. "So that's it?"
"We've exhausted everything we can do. The only strategy left is a delaying action. We must try to hold out until our fleet arrives to bomb Tandana from orbit."
"That ain't ever going to happen with the Lurker fleet blockading Earth."
"No, likely not. And every day we wait for salvation brings the Lurkers among us one day closer to victory. If other factories are founded without our knowledge, it won't even matter if a lucky strike eliminates Tandana."
"If delaying's all we can do, you might as well drop us in Taijin now. Purging the Lurkers who've infiltrated the governments will slow them down as much as anything."
Loris nodded and picked up her device.
"I've got a better idea," Webber said. "Instead of dropping us into Taijin, why not drop us on Tandana?"
Loris' eyes shifted between them. "As in the two of you?"
"We've already been there twice before. We can do it a third time."
"The first time, you crept up on them completely unsuspected. The second time, they delivered you there themselves. And both times you had bafflers to aid your escape. This time, they will be wary of intrusion. They'll spot you the second you step foot on the island."
"We still have to try. We can't just sit here waiting for someone else to save us!"
"It will never work," she said, holding her somberness for another second before a grin spilled across her face. "Not unless we send you in alongside every power left at our disposal."
17
She Needled Toman footage of her strikes on Obold and the Lurker's response, along with everything she'd pieced together and recorded earlier. Then she opened a comm line to Winters, who looked ready to combust with impatience.
"Thank you for the generous amount of time you gave me to think," he said. "I've deduced that the Lurkers destroyed the drones following them so that we wouldn't know the exact position of their fleet."
"Right."
"Very good, I'm proud of myself on that one. Now do you mind explaining every other part of what's happening?"
Rada took a deep breath. "When we sprung the ambush on them in Earth orbit, they left before killing us all because we were starting to destroy their carriers. There was something very, very important on those ships: the machinery they needed to build new weapons factories."
"But the last time we fought them, they let us get to the carriers. They were using them as bait. You said so yourself." Winters' eyebrows jumped. "Because at that point, the carriers were no longer carrying anything."
"They had already dropped their machinery off at the new factory sites. At least one was set down on Earth, but most were established here in the Belt."
"Inside the asteroid habitats the Lurkers had destroyed earlier."
"If we looked at one of the habitats, our scanners would show us that there weren't any survivors. There wouldn't be anything for the Dashers to salvage after a slagging like that, either. The only thing left would be melted metal and a few rare minerals. That might be worth extracting at some point in the future, but not in the middle of a war."
"Leaving no reason at all for anyone to approach the stations—and giving the Lurkers almost total certainty that their manufacturing would proceed unobserved and uninterrupted."
"Anywhere else would have been suspicious. Even if they'd slipped into their stealth and gone to try to set up their factories on some rock in the middle of nowhere, all it would take would be a single ship or camera in the wrong place to spot the aliens skulking around, and provoke us into investigating what they were doing there."
Winters thought for a moment. "So how did you know? Simple deduction based on what they're doing down on Earth?"
"That was part of it. So was the fact their interception fleet practically jumped toward the Belt when I got too close to Obold Station. The last clue was what I saw once I got there. There were intact bodies floating around. Some of them were huddled together. They hadn't been blown up by missiles, they'd been thrown out of their own station."
"But why were they alive at all?"
"The Lurkers didn't want to completely slag the stations. If they collapsed all the tunnels, they'd have to excavate new ones. That might have kicked up enough ruckus for someone to notice. Instead, they hit the habitats just hard enough to knock out the infrastructure and kill the citizens—
or at least most of them."
"And they flushed the others out into space." Winters took on a distant look. Without wanting to, Rada saw once more the clump of the dead iced together by their own skin. Winters looked back into the camera. "So what are they building in these factories? Weapons, like they're making down on Earth? Their lasers seem to be wearing out. Could they be replacing those?"
"Almost definitely. But we have to assume they're building new ships, too. We have to destroy them before they get off the ground."
"You've told Toman as much?"
Rada laughed. "I told him everything. I advised him to split up his fleet to go after multiple stations at once. Depending on how many of them are infected, we may not be able to take out all of them before the Lurker fleet shows up to try to stop us. But we can get a lot of them."
"We can make Toman's job easier by scouting as many habitats as possible before he gets here. We can enlist the Belters to help us, too."
"Think they'll go for that?"
Winters nodded. "They're staying here to defend their home. Once they learn the Lurkers have infested their back yard, the Belters will come for them with knives out."
"Then we better talk to them before they rush in half-cocked. I suspect the Lurker-held stations have defenses. Now that we know they're here, they have no reason to hide anymore."
~
Ships, drones, and messages flowed across the Belt as thickly as they had during the initial evacuation. Most of the vessels were headed toward the numerous stations the Lurkers had destroyed—nearly all of which were asteroid habitats, Rada now noted, despite there being many free-standing stations in the region—but other Belters zipped toward the inhabited rocks along the inner rim where the Lurkers were most likely to pass by on their way to defend their infiltrated habitats.
Stardust Page 21
