Stardust

by Edward W. Robertson

  Toman's words rang across the vacuum. Brutal. Barbaric. Yet they gave such a thrill to Rada's blood that she silently begged the Lurkers to defy him.

  A Lurker appeared on the main comm screen. It had its two rear limbs bent beneath it, its two forelimbs swaying toward the camera like massive antennae.

  "Hello, High Admiral Toman Benez of the Great Solar Fleet." The alien spoke in a deep female voice as silky as warm cream, somehow better than human. "You've added some words to your title, haven't you? Do you think those new words will protect you from us?"

  "I have given you my ultimatum," Toman said. "Surrender now or we will massacre your fleet, find your world, and annihilate it."

  "So you're finally remembering your animal side. I expect that this feels good. But it will do nothing to save you."

  "These are your last moments in our System. My people will remember this day until the age when we ascend to a higher state of being. Do you have anything to say to excuse what you have done here? To make us look back on you with pity instead of the indifferent contempt we feel when we exterminate a nest of wasps?"

  Without so much as twitching, the Lurker produced a laughing noise. "Are you capable of understanding? If you are capable, do you deserve to understand? I doubt that you do."

  "Okay then, your story dies with you. All ships, prepare arms and—"

  "Then again, if you can understand, there will be more pleasure in knowing that you will be quivering inside your ships as we pluck your lives away one by one." The alien's left front tube swayed toward the camera. Its rounded end rapidly eroded, revealing a beautiful female face like an ancient statue carved from black and mobile granite. "We have told you many lies, because to lie is part of the game. But now I will tell you the truth.

  "We came to your lands because you are prey and you deserve to be hunted for it. Running down your ships and destroying them is gratifying, but the true gratification will begin soon, once we have annihilated all traces of your navy. Once that is done, we will enter your habitats and descend to your worlds, and we will hunt you down in your own cities, and we will preserve the heads of those who fight bravely and eat the bodies of the rest.

  "You will be pleased to know that we don't intend to extinct you. For that would end the hunt too soon. We will leave some of you alive to reproduce, and conserve some of your more enjoyable stations and wildernesses as well—and then we will seed these regions with your children, and we will hunt them too, one generation after the next. In this way, our descendants will know the precise same thrill that we do now, and your descendants will know the precise same fear that you do now. And these states of being will last forever."

  The Lurker stopped and bobbed its head as if bowing. Rada swayed forward in her chair as if she'd been released from a deep hypnosis.

  "Thank you for telling me that," Toman said. "It makes it even easier for me to kill you."

  He boosted forward, Rada and every ship in the fleet following his lead. The comms slammed shut as the Lurkers jammed all signals, including their own. No matter. Rada had anticipated they might bring back that trick. The Lurkers would be needing their comms back soon enough.

  Toman flashed lights at his fleet. Acting as one, they broke right, angling toward the Lurker-occupied remnants of Old Smoke Station, an asteroid shaped uncannily like a hand giving a thumbs up. The Lurkers bent to cut them off. Toman spent some time fussing around, tacking one way after another, as if looking to slide behind the Lurker forces. The Lurkers responded with probes of six to ten ships at a time—obvious attempts to draw out a portion of the human fleet and swamp them. Toman didn't fall for it.

  For what was supposed to be the battle of the end of the world, its opening minutes were exceedingly dull: endless maneuvering and jockeying for position around Old Smoke, with neither side wanting to be the first to expose themselves through an offensive gambit. After a while, that dullness began to be paradoxically interesting. The Lurkers were being more conservative than usual. Because they had finally had to take a defensive position? Or was there something else at play—?

  Tactical screamed. An asteroid was flying in behind Toman's people at ten times their speed. The fleet separated into three groups, falling away from the asteroid's madcap course.

  Ahead, the Lurkers were splitting apart as well. Expecting such a move, they were already clear of the asteroid's potential shotgun blast.

  This time, the Belters didn't blow the rock. Instead, they let it sail onward. Until it was stopped abruptly by the side of Old Smoke Station, which vaporized in a massive release of energy.

  Toman's ship flashed obscene Morse code at the Lurkers. To Rada, he signaled, "Think we rattled them?"

  "We can't sit around waiting to find out," she flashed back. "That will only give them time to recover."

  "Right." He broadened his light signals. "Operation Quicksilver, proceed immediately."

  Fifteen clunky, top-heavy Belter ships that looked like they'd been bolted together over the last 72 hours (and probably had) detached from the formation at full thrust toward the Lurkers. They were painted a flat black, but as soon as they were past their fellow ships, their bodies rippled.

  Silver shimmered down from their noses, coating their bodies from their tips to their tails. Not just a shiny chrome silver, but a mirror-bright silver. The kind whose reflection you could use to style your hair—or repel a laser.

  The Lurkers were still scattered, only just beginning to congeal back into a single mass. The gleaming ships plunged toward the most isolated grouping. A wing of vicious-looking corporate warbirds followed in their wake, far enough back to stay safe from lasers, but close enough to back up the mirror ships.

  A slew of laser-equipped heavy fighters detached from the Lurkers and accelerated at max speed to cut off the mirror ships' approach. Toman signaled the rest of the fleet, which inched closer to the enemy.

  The mirror ships crossed into what had previously been the Lurkers' effective laser range. The heavy fighters held their fire.

  "What are they doing?" Toman signaled. "Are they afraid they'll waste their energy?"

  Rada shook her head, then remembered the comms were down. "No idea."

  The mirror ships drew closer to effective missile range. Behind them, the corporate warbirds had already crossed into the Lurkers' laser range as well. Red beams pulsed from the noses of the Lurkers, tying them fleetingly to the mushroom-fat noses of the silver ships.

  Steam and smoke roiled away from the points of impact—yet at the same time, a red light angled away from the nose of each mirror ship, as if the lasers had been almost completely deflected.

  "As if" being the key to the whole affair. The mirror ships did not in fact carry the reflective armor that Dark Solutions had been working on in secret for years. Instead, their noses were just reinforced with giant slabs of insulatory matter, and had also been fitted with a number of lights matched to the exact hue of the Lurkers' lasers, allowing them to create the illusion of deflection.

  Maybe the Lurkers would buy it and maybe they wouldn't. Ultimately, it didn't matter. The point was simply to make them doubt.

  The mirror-ships continued onward, their backups accelerating to shorten the gap between them.

  "Rada," Toman signaled. "Operation Dump Truck."

  "What," she sent back, "right now?"

  "Right now! I want it thirty seconds ago!"

  She executed the pre-recorded signal to her squad. Fifteen ramshackle Dasher ships veered left from the formation and powered toward Villarny Station, the next-closest of the asteroids occupied by the Lurkers. The group had only been underway for a few seconds when the Lurkers detached a mixed squadron of interceptors, fighters, and two corvettes on an apprehension vector.

  "They bit," Rada flashed to the rest of her squad. "Let's move."

  She pulled forward, joined by Winters, four other DS ships, and another six pilots from the Hive. They'd practiced making their initial movements look shaky, almost panicked,
before cohering into a more disciplined formation.

  Back at the center of the action, the alien heavy fighters let loose another round of lasers. One of the silver ships went up in flames, but the others absorbed the strikes and imitated another "deflection," harmless rays of red light shooting off into the darkness.

  "That volley was weaker than the first," Toman signaled, Rada's computer speaking his words aloud. "That's why they've been waiting to fire until we'd gotten closer; long-range shots suck up far more juice. They flew here knowing they didn't have enough weaponry for a protracted campaign. That's why they were so aggressive with the lasers in the first battles, to make us believe we had no chance to fight back. And it worked like a charm, didn't it? That's how they tricked the UDL into early surrender."

  This was all very interesting, but Rada's attention was almost completely consumed by the maneuvers of the Dashers, who were curving hard left to elude the Lurkers. The Lurkers changed course to match, falling in behind the mismatched Dasher fighters. Rada signaled her team to fall onto the Lurkers' tails, but they wouldn't enter combat range until the enemy had already engaged the Dashers.

  Tactical showed movement on the right flank of the wider battle. Not from the Lurkers, but from the twenty-odd ships involved in Operation Dummy, who were charging the edge of the alien lines.

  In the center of the field, the first missiles began to fly from Operation Quicksilver. Ahead of her, the Lurkers closed range on the Dashers of Operation Dump Truck.

  Rada wanted to ask what Toman was doing—actually, she wanted to scream it; the strategy had been to rattle the Lurkers by running these events one after another, not all at once—but before she could begin her aggrieved flash at him, the rear cargo bays of the fleeing Dashers were flung open. Raw chunks of rock sailed behind them into the paths of the Lurkers.

  "Disperse," Rada signaled to the eleven pilots on her wing. They made small adjustments to their course to avoid the streams of rock they'd soon be flying past.

  The Lurkers had been spreading out, too, but mollified by the lack of concern from Rada's squad behind them, or fearful of losing ground on the Dashers while letting Rada and company catch up to them, they straightened out. The debris came at them in loose columns of rubble, passing between them harmlessly.

  Until the rocks began to explode.

  The interceptors in the lead disintegrated, showering debris to all sides. The other ships broke course in the blink of an eye, yet it wasn't enough to save the fighters closest to the columns of explosive-packed rocks. Others swooped clear, scattering to all sides.

  A corvette lurched away from the blasts only for its tail to disappear inside a disk of blue fire. Flames zipped up the seams of the ship and converged at its nose. The hull wrenched apart.

  "Close!" Rada signaled.

  She fired off three of her drones. Her wingmates deployed two dozen more. The little fleet ran hard to the right of the Lurkers, rattling off rockets and hemming the aliens in. Ahead, the Dashers flipped about, braking while spewing missiles at the enemy's front.

  The now-outnumbered Lurkers dumped drones in an obvious panic. Missiles sprouted on tactical like a time-lapsed video of a toadstool dispersing its spores. The aliens were already boxed in on three sides. If they'd made a run at either Rada or the Dashers, maybe they'd be able to punch their way through, but they were spooked and tried to squirt through the gap before they could be closed in. Abandoned, their drones fell like the oranges in the parks of the Locker.

  "Don't let them get out," Rada sent. "Not without paying for every mile they flee!"

  Winters and the DS pilots closed as fast as shadows. Missiles jumped between the two sides. Rada came up on a smaller fighter, sending a drone after it and chasing it with a volley of rockets. The Hive ships joined the fray within seconds, scaring the fighter back toward her. She pasted it with a flurry of rockets to the nose.

  Winters flashed the kill sign at her. Rada grinned and swung back toward the scrum. Three ships blew above her, a Hive fighter and two Lurkers. The Dashers were most of the way through their turn and their drones were already pelting the closest vessels. Near the center of everything, the remaining corvette deluged the approaching drones with all of its missile batteries.

  Rada came up on the tail of a fighter heading to assist the corvette, dogging it with missiles. The vacuum glowed with little novas. As she neared the corvette's flank, she heaved the Tine about as hard as it would go, whipping missiles at the larger ship's stern. It fired counters and for a moment the space between her and the corvette was filled with so many fireballs she couldn't see her target at all. Then a massive singular fireball went up behind the others, and the corvette was gone.

  Winters sent the kill sign again, blinking it on and off. Rada's short-range tactical had already thinned of both green friendlies and orange foes. With the loss of the corvette, the remaining Lurkers pumped out a screen of rockets, disengaged, and pulled back in tight formation.

  "Attention all pilots," Toman flashed across the fleet-wide channel. "Operation Rohirrim!"

  Rada glanced at the main tactical display in disbelief. "Operation Rohirrim" wasn't even a proper operation: it was just an all-out charge on the enemy. Every ship in the human fleet surged toward the Lurkers, whose formation had been bent and stretched at two points.

  A brutal dogfight had torn the guts out of the aliens' center. Only four of the mirror ships were still alive and kicking, but she wasn't sure she saw any Lurker heavy fighters left at all. On the right, Operation Dummy—which had involved flying out with a wing of cobbled-together-looking Belter ships and launching dud missiles, as if the beleaguered Belt had stretched its supplies to the breaking point—had successfully lured in a swatch of enemy fighters seeking easy kills.

  Instead, the Belters were now turning on them with fully functional missiles—and the backing of Toman's charging fleet.

  Without warning, the comms popped open. Winters said, "Wasn't the Big Fat Plan to wear the enemy down piece by piece until they can't tell what's real and what isn't? Has Benez gone crazy?"

  "We can question the sanity of our leader when we're not in the middle of a dogfight."

  The Lurkers they'd been battling were now flying away from the main brawl and toward the habitat of Cambria, missiles streaming from their sterns. Running toward the station rather than the rest of the fleet was a strange move. Possibly a trap. Rada's first instinct was to back off, rejoin the others, and let the Lurkers take themselves out of the battle.

  But her people weren't backing off anymore. It was no longer time for caution. Now it was time to kill.

  "Knock them off course if you can," Rada said. "Don't hold back. For once, we've got them outnumbered."

  Her tattered wing streamed after the Lurkers, harassing them with missile fire coordinated to force the enemy off of a straight course and give themselves the opportunity to gain ground.

  Winters opened a comm to the Tine. "Forgive me for sounding thick, but is this actually real?"

  "What's the alternative? That Toman put us into a new sim that's so engrossing we forgot we were simming it?"

  "That does seem more plausible than the idea that we just fought the Lurkers, head to head, and got the best of them."

  "Only after we tricked, bombed, and discombobulated them," Rada said. "But yeah. On this one, we came out ahead."

  The Lurkers could accelerate slightly faster than they could, but the wing's constant missile fire slowed the enemy just enough for the humans to stay inside fighting range. An interceptor miscalculated, swerving too close to a series of blasts and finding itself consumed in the flames. A fighter ran out of missiles, flipping its nose toward them and letting loose with its kinetics before a single rocket pasted it across the stars. Under the persistent bombardment, the enemy's numbers dwindled to nine, then eight, then six.

  Without warning, the survivors angled away from Cambria and back toward the main conflagration, spraying clouds of kinetics behind them to tr
ip up Rada's pilots.

  Screams erupted from the comms. At first she thought the Lurkers must have broken through Toman's lines, maybe even killed him. But the tactical display, which was now shockingly bereft of either orange or green triangles, showed that wasn't the case at all.

  "They're retreating," Toman said. "We've broken them. We've broken the Lurkers!"

  ~

  They gave chase the best they could, but the aliens outpaced them until they were able to disengage altogether. Toman followed them until they were far enough out to engage their stealth and drop into the ether.

  The first thing Toman did was allow for a lot of cheering and high-spirited victory speeches.

  The second thing he did was hold a quick strategy session to decide what to do with the rest of the Lurker-infested stations; they had of course discussed it before, but that had been prior to the battle, when no one had really expected to win, let alone so handily. The options were to leave some alive as bait for the Lurkers to defend, to try to capture some and make use of the weapons inside, or to destroy them all.

  They decided that they could leave nothing to chance. Toman gave the order to destroy every last one of the remaining stations. With drones and one-man Belter craft strung across the area to watch for a return of the Lurkers, Toman split his people into three divisions and dispatched them toward their targets.

  The third thing Toman did was to summon Rada, Winters, and Mat-Nalin to the bridge of his flagship.

  "Well," Toman said, leaning back and cracking his knuckles. "I never thought I'd say this about an engagement where we lost more than half our ships, but that went pretty well, didn't it?"

  "The charge was a huge gamble," Rada said. "Every time I glanced at tactical, it looked like another twenty ships had disappeared. How sure were you that it was going to work?"

  "The sims weren't too sure about it at all. Fortunately, I overruled them."

  "You overruled the entire Big Fat Plan, too."

  "And it worked, didn't it?"

  "Yes. Bravo. Now let's pretend I just want to know why you overruled our entire plan that we'd spent the potentially final days of our lives organizing."