"Quite possibly. But we're not going to beat them in a fair fight. We're going to have to take a chance somewhere. Any strategy designed to do that will inevitably have a high risk of failure."
"Our advantage isn't just about making them defend territory. In bigger terms, it's about making them react to us. What we want is for their reactions to be failures. That means the simpler we make our strategy, the more likely they'll be able to respond optimally, without making any major mistakes."
"It's only the core of our strategy that will be simple. The surrounding details can be more complex. We can mix in feints. Retreats. Anything to disguise that our goal is to divide them."
"I don't think that will be enough." She felt something swell inside her, a mania she would have rolled her eyes at if it had been coming from Webber. "Trying to divide them can be part of our strategy. But we have to think bigger. I want to throw the kitchen sink at them, then pull up the pipes and throw those too. I don't want the Lurkers to even know we do have a strategy. I want to make them so confused they don't know when the punch is coming."
Winters nodded sagely. "Ah. You want to employ the Nine Hands Are Empty But the Tenth Holds the Knife."
"The what? Winters, did you just have a stroke?"
"It's a philosophy of battle. Mauser came up with it himself."
"It sounds more like Queen Raina did."
He laughed. "There is a record indicating it was developed from one of her actual knife techniques. In the Nine Hands, we employ every single idea of attack we can come up with. In its most perfect form, we will shift back and forth between looking strong and looking weak. This will leave the Lurkers hesitant, uncertain, and prone to tactical mistakes."
"That's more like what I had in mind."
"Some of our attacks should be feints and ruses while others should be intended to be deadly. But if everything goes very well, the Lurkers will be so off balance that some of the things we intended to be ruses will end up being vital weapons instead."
"Where do we begin? Do we just start throwing ideas at the wall?"
"Everything you can think of. As you said, the idea is to throw the pipes along with the sink."
"Got it," Rada said. "One last question. Just how stupid can these ideas be?"
"These are the last battles of the human race. Either our stupid ideas help us save the day, in which case they're not so stupid after all. Or we wind up dead and no one is left to complain that our ideas were so stupid that they got us all killed."
The first few suggestions were among the hardest to generate. After that, they got into the flow of it, rattling off schemes one after another. When ideas ran low, they got up to pour coffee from their respective dispensers, then started back in. Two hours later, when they'd been staring past each other for five minutes without one new suggestion, they bundled up everything they had and transmitted it to Toman and LOTR for refinement and simming.
Rada was about to get up and stretch her legs when she remembered she'd gotten a message from Toman while she and Winters had been talking. The message hadn't been flagged as critical, so she'd ignored it, and was more than a little surprised to discover it was his broadcast address to the entire System.
"People," he said. He was staring straight into the camera, dressed in a blue and white uniform that somehow suggested clouds and sky—or whitecaps on the waves. "People of Earth. People of the moon and Mars and the Asteroid Belt. People of the Outer System: of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and all free-standing stations.
"For the second time in our history, an alien species has come for our home. Just as the Dovon before, the Lurkers intend to remove us from our home root and branch. We've all fought hard. Unbelievably hard. Still, they've taken more than twenty stations from us. And they've done their best to take Earth, too.
"But I don't intend to let them take any more.
"In approximately two days' time, we begin the last stand of our people. We will do so here in the Belt. We won't stop until either they're dead or we are. If we survive the first battle, we expect that another two days after that, we'll be attacked by the Lurkers' second fleet. I guarantee that as things stand today, we will not win that battle."
Toman spread his feet, arms folded. There was no pacing today. "We won't win—unless every nation, habitat, corporation, and individual with a ship brings them here to join us. Come now. As soon as you can prep your ship. And fight alongside us.
"Fight for your families. Fight for your homes. Fight for your freedom. Fight for the green of Earth and the red of Mars and the blue of Neptune, for the warmth of the sun and the chill of the ice, for the history given to us by our ancestors and the future we can still give to our descendants. Fight, at last, for everything that makes us human together and will no longer exist anywhere when the day comes that we're gone. If you won't fight alongside us now, it won't be long until the Lurkers come for you instead—and then you will fight alone.
"I will see you soon, friends. Either here or in hell. Wish us luck."
The message concluded. The screen went black.
~
Some parts of the Big Fat Plan, as someone within LOTR had dubbed it, were able to be implemented immediately. Others could be started on the spot, but needed as much time to develop as Toman could give them.
As his fleet waited, ships struck out from across the Belt. Not as many as Rada had hoped—they'd already drained themselves in the earlier battle—and some were little more than hollow hulls with an engine on the back. But they would take whatever they could get.
Scout drones buzzed around the enemy position, a quadrant of space that someone, again possibly LOTR, had labeled Pipe Alley. Of course the Lurkers weren't just sitting there motionless waiting to be strafed to death by fast-moving ships: they were zipping around at high speed, meaning the region's "borders" were in constant flux. Their territory always included seven bombed-out stations, however, which had presumably all been infected with Lurker factories. The region also included a whole lot of floating rocks, several of them big enough to support mines or habitats.
As Toman's fleet waited for the more time-intensive parts of the BFP to coalesce and for the incoming Belters to join them, a score of scout craft poked around the edges of Pipe Alley, mostly to make sure none of the Lurker ships faded away into the darkness where they could go cause trouble. So far, there hadn't been any exchange of fire.
24 hours after his speech, Toman rallied his people and headed for Pipe Alley. This turned out to be a false start: halfway to the battle, word came in from the inner Belt. The second half of the fleet had been spotted by one of the drones parked in empty space between Earth and the asteroids. It was running behind LOTR's predictions and was still a full two days out. Toman pulled back, giving his people and the Belters another day to work around the clock on the BFP.
The day flew by and Toman led them forward again. Over the last three days, the fleet had swollen to over two hundred vessels and now outnumbered the Lurkers. As one of the architects of the plan, Rada was supposed to fly near the back of the formation, where she would be more protected; she understood why, but that didn't stop her from being angry that she wouldn't be in prime position to kill Lurkers.
But her attitude was positively adjusted by the fact that Toman had brought the Tine with him, and during the lull of the past few days, Rada had finally been able to switch over to it. Being back on its bridge in command of the full power of the Tine's weapons and engines felt like removing a cast from her leg after a long recovery and then dashing through a grassy field.
The Lurkers appeared on tactical, one orange triangle after another popping onto the display until it looked like a span of hostile stars. The enemy had already bent away from the irregular loops they'd been making through Pipe Alley to come at the humans head on.
"I don't need to remind you of everything that rides on this," Toman said across the fleet-wide comm. "We fly now into glory like no human has ever seen. If we win these two f
ights, our names will be remembered forever."
He switched over to a broadcast aimed at the enemy lines. "Attention invaders, the ones we call Lurkers. My name is Toman Benez, and I am the High Admiral of the Great Solar Fleet. Power down your ships, jettison your weapons, and prepare to surrender. If you do not obey, we will destroy you—and then we will dedicate our existence as a species to finding your homeworld and slaughtering every single one of you."
18
The turtle hung above him in the darkness of the sea, silhouetted by the moonlight spilling down from the surface. Its shell was six feet from tip to tail and its flippers looked big enough to bash a man in half, propelling it forward with deceptive speed.
It was a real live turtle, but it seemed entirely untroubled by MacAdams swimming along beneath it, or by Webber keeping pace with the other turtle to MacAdams' right. Possibly it was so complacent because he and Webber had had their breathing suits modified to give them the silhouettes of turtles as well, but it probably had more to do with whatever techno-witchcraft Dark Solutions had used to convince the turtles to swim straight toward Tandana.
Or so they claimed. All of MacAdams' electronics and navigation were shut off—to avoid detection, the same reason they were swimming under turtles in the first place—and for all he knew, the turtles were leading them to a secret turtle breeding ground for some hot and shelly times.
But sometimes, all you could do was trust in the turtles and swim on. So that's what he did. Anyway, he didn't have time to worry. Not when it was so damn dark that even with his face mask's heightened vision, if he lost track of his reptilian guide for more than a few seconds, he'd never find it again.
A long time later, swells began to roll across them. MacAdams surfaced. Waves broke ahead, clapping into the shore. He spotted Webber, then swam over to him and motioned for him to surface. They got their heads above water and stripped off the turtle-shaped silhouettes from their suits. As the turtles turned to swim parallel to shore, he and Webber headed for land.
His feet touched a sandy bottom studded by a few rocks. The water dropped suddenly to his waist. Just ahead, where the water still covered the sand even when a wave was at its lowest ebb, blue-white strands shined faintly in the moonlight, forming a grid like a fishing net. Only the net extended to left and right as far as MacAdams could see.
He threw his arm across Webber's chest and switched off his enhanced vision. The grid disappeared. He turned it back on and the lines reappeared.
"Security grid," he whispered. "We'll have to hop over it."
He waited there for two minutes, letting one swell after another pass him by. At last, feeling the water sucking past his legs hard enough to stagger him toward sea, he bent his knees. The water reversed course, pushing toward shore. He threw himself forward, swimming as hard as he could as the swell rushed forward, carrying him and Webber along with it.
The wave bore them in hard, grinding them into the sand. MacAdams got to his feet. Behind them, the grid looked untouched. As far as he could tell.
"Back again," Webber muttered.
MacAdams nodded. "Earth ain't my world, but those factories still feel like a tumor on it. Let's go blow 'em to hell."
He strode into the line of palms. As soon as they were hidden from shore, he kneeled and opened his pack.
Collapsible KM-9 rifle, scoped and suppressed, utterly beautiful. A standard Felder pistol, nothing fancy, but you could drop it in the surf for three days and it would still fire when you picked it up. As many Smilex portable explosives as he could carry. And two of the wand-like Lurker lasers they'd captured from the hidden station beyond the Black Curtain what felt like a very long time ago. Moonlight played over his left-hand glove, showing it only had four fingers. Fortunately, he still had the one he used to pull the trigger.
He pocketed a laser, slung a pistol over one hip and hung the folded rifle from his shoulder. Webber was practically rubbing his hands together and salivating as he armed himself similarly.
They had landed close to but not at the precise spot they'd come in on their first trip to Tandana and MacAdams hiked in through the forest toward the ridge, keeping one eye out for Lurkers and the other for tigers. The aliens couldn't possibly be monitoring every square inch of island, but it was clear they'd upped their security. He wasn't sure if the bafflers and the blackness of their suits was going to be enough.
They came to the ridge and started uphill. The calls of insects and birds thickened the night and he could hear the wash of the surf below them but it was otherwise quiet and there were still no lights or sign of inhabitation, human or alien.
Webber gazed off into the trees. "Hard to believe this pretty little island is responsible for a quarter of the globe getting nuked."
"It ain't the island's fault. It's the things that infested it."
"Yeah." Webber detoured around a wall of spiky yucca, some of which had sprouted central stalks that climbed twenty feet into the air like something from an alien swamp. "Even if we pull this off, do you think it will matter?"
"What do you mean?"
"If the Lurkers still control space, they'll just bomb the hell out of Earth from orbit. There's nothing left down here to fight back with."
"If we don't get this taken care of, there won't be any Earth left for our fleets to save. We'll just have to trust that they're out there doing their job, too." Seeing movement in the undergrowth, MacAdams reached for his rifle, then saw the glint of small mammalian eyes. "Speaking of jobs. Anything happens to one of us, the other one has to finish the mission. I have the feeling there won't be a second chance to get this done."
The ridge narrowed. A strip of the blue-white grid lay across the dirt and leaves, ten feet wide. Another glimmered beyond it.
"What now?" Webber said. "Backtrack?"
"Don't have enough time for detours. Not if we want to get to the base before DS starts their attack."
"Well let's just walk across it, then. The Lurkers may rush out to shoot us dead, but at least we'll be on time."
"I thought we'd tap into our primal side." MacAdams checked the grapplers on his wrist. "Grab on."
Webber tied himself to MacAdams by the all-purpose cords of their suits. MacAdams squinted up into the branches of a tree on the other side of the first grid. He fired his right-hand hook. It sped into the boughs, found a hold, and reeled in, pulling MacAdams and Webber into the air. They swung forward over the blue grid. MacAdams launched his second grappler into another tree, swooping low over the ground before being reeled upward. He caught the trunk of a third tree and they whisked over the second grid.
"This is great!" Webber said. "Why haven't we been doing this the whole time?"
"Because—"
A great dark branch reached out from nowhere, catching MacAdams square in the gut. His suit had some light armor to it or he might have broken some ribs. As it was, he rebounded, dangling in the air like a cat toy. He groaned and lowered them to the ground.
"That," he finished.
"Okay, let's just stick to our feet."
MacAdams took a moment to catch his breath, then hiked on. The ridge widened. He didn't see any more of the grids. They were making good time and the rise soon flattened into the plateau. Off to his right, the ocean shined under the moonlight, miles distant. The hidden canyon was just a few hundred yards ahead and he advanced slowly, stopping often to take in the night. Something felt off, but he saw nothing.
He came to the plateau's edge. After a bit of searching, he found a hole in the foliage woven over the tarmac below. The installation was completely dark, but with the help of his visor, he made out guards standing motionless among the jets. There were fewer of these than last time, but still plenty to muster a strong defense.
After a good long gander at the layout, he motioned to the leeward side of the canyon where they'd used the cliffside path to escape during their last visit. It was so dark he could barely see his own legs. The trail was hidden, but he'd marked it last
time by the spindly tree overhanging it, trunk and branches leaning forward like an old woman getting a better look at your face.
He stopped, crouching behind a shrub. Crickets hummed. There was barely a breeze and sometimes he could hear the smack of surf on the cliffs at the north end of the canyon. The way looked clear, but something told MacAdams to wait. He listened to this feeling, clearing his mind and letting his eyes do the work. A jillion years of evolution had trained the eyes to register harmony at a glance—and to identify anything that disrupted it.
There was a bulge on the tree trunk. It would have been too dark for his bare eyes to know what was wrong with what he was looking at, but his visor made up the difference. Two long, thick branches seemed to be stuck to the trunk right next to each other, twelve feet long apiece.
MacAdams touched Webber's shoulder, motioned back the way they'd come, and backed out as slowly as melting ice. He didn't stop until they'd retreated a hundred yards.
"Lurker in the tree," he murmured. "Looks like we're grappling down after all."
Webber nodded. They returned to the rim of the canyon, skirting it until they found a hole in the vines and shrubs. It was a little further from the hangars and stairwell than MacAdams would have liked, but he would have liked to not be infiltrating alien territory in the first place.
He checked the cliff face for any sensor grids, stuck his grapplers to the rock wall, and lowered them down. The only way he could have felt more exposed was if his suit had no pants and his balls were swinging free. If it came to it, he'd go with his rifle. The light of the Lurker's laser would make him a target for everyone there.
They descended fifty feet, a hundred. When they were still forty feet from the canyon floor, a sentry walked along the empty space directly below them. The man was well-trained enough to glance up, but whatever he had for eye gear, it wasn't good enough to see through the bafflers and the UltraBlack suits.
Stardust Page 23
