"What was the purpose of the BFP?"
"To push the Lurkers off balance by using a series of unorthodox strikes, especially ones that could be made to look like feints if it seemed like they weren't going to work, but could be made into real attacks if they looked like they'd succeed, with the ultimate goal being to either goad the Lurkers into overextending themselves to attack our perceived weakness, or just the opposite, and—"
"Wrong," Toman said. "The purpose of the BFP was to beat the Lurkers."
"Oh. How stupid of me."
"We thought the tactics you just described would be the best way to achieve that victory. But almost as soon as we started fighting, I could feel that something was different." He called up video of Operation Quicksilver, as the mirror-painted ships first approached the Lurker heavy fighters. "You see what they're doing here?"
Mat-Nalin scratched his head. "Sayin' their prayers?"
"They're hesitating. They're waiting to fire until it won't cost them as much energy, and then when they do fire on the silverbugs and it looks like we're shrugging them off, they're hesitating even more. The flip side of that is that for the first time, we didn't have to hold back out of fear of getting clobbered by their lasers.
"So I pushed them with Quicksilver. And when it very soon became clear that they weren't ready for that, I pushed them with Dump Truck and Dummy. Did you see what happened next?"
Grinning, he pulled up more video of Quicksilver gouging into the middle of the Lurker formation while Dump Truck severed its right limb and Dummy overextended its left. Rada had been too wrapped up in the fighting to have had any real idea of the bigger picture and watched closely.
"Looks a little wobbly," she said. "But not like it's about to get overwhelmed."
Toman replayed the footage. "That's why I decided to apply even more pressure. The most we could put on them. Remember, their jamming affects their own comms, too. I was counting on the charge of Rohirrim to cause chaos to spread through their fleet. Before they fully understood what was happening, they'd be crippled by a cascading failure.
"We can slice this up as fine as you like," Mat-Nalin said. "At the end of the day, only one thing matters: it worked." His face darkened. "Even so, there's one part of this I'm none too pleased about."
Toman lifted an eyebrow. "What's that?"
"We won so fast we never even got to use Operation Reverse Firehose!"
Toman snorted. "That means we'll still have it in our back pocket for the next round. Along with Operation Blue Boomerang and Operation Extremely Unfair Cheating."
"Speaking of the next round," Winters said, "how do you intend to fight it?"
"That depends. Mat-Nalin, does the Belt have anything left it can give us?"
Mat-Nalin croaked out a laugh. "We're completely tapped out, Admiral. What you've got is what you'll get."
"That's what I was afraid of. It's the same with Earth and the moon. Mars is sending everything they have left, but that's a whopping ten ships, with most of those pieced together in the last few weeks. That will push us close to eighty total."
Winters frowned. "While the second Lurker fleet is at two hundred."
"Plus all of the ones that just ran away from us. Call it an even 250."
"That feels bad. Correction: it feels very bad."
"It's beyond bad. Understand that the force we just fought had depleted their laser cannons in the battle with Admiral Vance. The ones coming for us now will have more juice in the tanks. Meanwhile, we spent precious resources of our own today: our dirty tricks with Quicksilver. Going forward, the Lurkers won't waste their shots on decoys or ruses. Even if they think we have the ability to deflect their lasers, they'll just destroy those ships with missiles while saving their lasers for our other fighters."
Rada shrugged. "So let's learn a lesson from the thing we just did and put together an Even Bigger, Fatter Plan."
"We can try that, sure."
"But you don't think it'll work."
"The Lurkers won't be stupid enough to shut down their own comms again. And they won't be attempting to defend any ground. After the beating they just took, they'll fight smart and conservative. A war of attrition. When you're outnumbered and outgunned like we are, that's a war you'll always lose."
"I won't argue with that," Winters said. "But how do you intend to win?"
"Who says I do?"
"You will have to excuse me. All this time that we have been fighting for the survival of the species, I was working under the assumption that we were fighting for our species."
Toman eyed him, betraying no emotion. "Did I say we wouldn't fight?"
"No, Admiral. But—"
"Do you disagree with my assessment of the situation, Winters?"
"No, sir."
"If I don't give you a realistic assessment of the challenges we face, how can you possibly give me a course of action capable of meeting those challenges?"
"Excuse me, sir. I'm just frustrated that even after a victory this big, it still feels like there's no hope."
"We're in a place beyond hope. All that matters now is that we keep fighting until the enemy's arrows strike us dead or we're too tired to keep lifting our swords." Toman turned to his main screen. "Let's take a clear-eyed look at what we face. Here are the numbers arrayed against us." He tapped his device; the screen lit up one group of fifty enemy ships and another of two hundred.
"Here is when they will arrive." A line traced out from both groups of ships, dovetailing shortly before they were scheduled to catch up with the human survivors, which was estimated to take place in just under two days. "And here's the space we have to work with." The various asteroids and stations of the Belt increased in size to be more visible against the dark background.
"We have two days to come up with an idea to make this work. After that, the only thing we'll be able to do is see how many of them we can kill before they bring the last of us down."
Rada returned to the Tine and dispensed herself some tea and sat in the bridge in the dark as the cup steamed beside her. Against all odds, they had won the first battle. But Rada had never felt such a short-lived victory.
~
She and Winters tried another brainstorming session only to find out they'd exhausted themselves coming up with the Big Fat Plan. Toman asked about more asteroid shotguns and Mat-Nalin explained that each one had required sacrificing not only multiple MAs, but also several modified artificial gravity generators, the latter of which they'd run out of. Even if they did have the components, setting them up on an asteroid would take more time than they had.
But Mat-Nalin had another possibility. His people had been fooling around with the weapons they'd confiscated from the first stations. They hadn't been able to figure out how to wire the alien technology into their own ships, but they had discovered the firing mechanism.
"Won't be the same as what the Lurkers got," he said. "We'll have to aim and fire them manually. And if something's going wrong with them, we won't know about it until we're vaporized by exploding plasma."
"Roger," Toman said. "How many of these laser-boats can you give me?"
"Fifteen. Maybe twenty. Mind you, these won't be additional ships. We'll have to convert some of the ones we already got."
"We should have taken more from the other stations. But it's too late now. We don't have time to land on a station, pick up their guns, and bring them up to speed before the Lurkers are on us. Even if we tried, the Lurkers would just blow their stations up before we could capture them."
"Don't curse yourself out too bad." Mat-Nalin grinned, not entirely happy. "They won't make as much difference as you'd think. We've run a few tests and we haven't been able to get off more than a shot or three before the whole apparatus blows up on us."
"So we're looking at thirty or forty shots total. While sacrificing some of our own ships in the process."
"Yep. But it's enough to cause some chaos, Admiral."
Toman ripped them past three infest
ed stations, bombing them all into dust. The two small task forces he'd dispatched to take care of the asteroids the main fleet couldn't reach in time neared their targets.
The coming Lurker fleet was spotted by multiple drone scouts as it made its way across the inner Belt. Each time, the aliens had hunted down and destroyed the scouts, but each time, it cost them a small fraction of their speed. Growing tired of the loss, they switched off their stealth altogether, visible to scopes and long-range scans as they crept closer and closer to Toman's ragged band of ships.
A few Belter and Dasher ships caught up to Toman from ahead, accelerating as hard as they could to match speed. Mid-flight, they transferred the looted lasers over to Mat-Nalin's team, who started welding them to the hulls of the ricketiest, least valuable Dasher ships, the ones that would cost them the least to lose when they inevitably blew. Rather than fear or resentment toward their fate, the pilots and gunners of the doomed craft laughed, joked, and drank, composing crude verses and songs about all the things the demons of the underworld would do to the Lurkers after the Dashers killed them.
Among Toman's core officers and advisors, the mood was rather less lively. A day after his initial speech to them, they hashed out a battle plan that would involve using the laser-boats in an immediate and all-out attack on the Lurkers' heavy fighters and any other obvious high-priority targets.
With any luck, this would shock and disrupt the Lurkers enough to open cracks in their lines. If this happened, Toman's assault squads were to jump into the cracks immediately, inflicting as much damage as possible before the enemy could put their superior numbers to use. If they got really lucky, it might be enough to provoke a cascading failure like they'd set off in the last battle.
Which might—again, if they got really, really lucky—allow them to carve off, say, a quarter of the enemy fleet, though this would almost certainly involve significant losses of their own. They'd then come up with a few maneuvers and schemes to put to use in the event this was made to pass.
They had had a long, angry argument about what strategy to employ after the opening gambit: a hyper-aggressive one that would almost certainly fail extremely badly but at least had a hypothetical chance of overwhelming the enemy, or a defensive stance that would maximize the damage they could inflict on the Lurkers while drawing things out as long as possible, which could (also hypothetically) lead to the aliens making some vital mistake the humans could exploit on the way to victory.
The argument was so divisive that there weren't even any clear sides to it; Rada herself switched positions twice. It was only settled when Toman declared that both strategies were valid, and that rather than committing to either one of them ahead of time, it would be better if he could choose which to deploy after he'd seen how the opening gambit turned out.
Toman dismissed the others to start simming with their pilots, but asked Rada to stick around. Once everyone else had logged out of the channel, he lifted his eyebrows.
"Well? Any last thoughts on the not-so-big plan?"
"You mean other than the ones I spent the last thirty minutes screaming about? It's the best we can do with what we've got left. But we're going to need a miracle."
"False. I estimate we'll need between four to six miracles. Disparity in armaments aside, there's just too many of them. Nobody in modern naval history has beaten a force this much larger than themselves."
"If it's actually, genuinely hopeless, have you ever thought about just running away?"
"Even if we could shake them and light out for Neptune, they'll go plant more factories—and now that we don't have the resources to keep eyes across the System, they'll plant those factories in places we'll never look. Once they're ready, the next time they come for us, they won't come for us with three times the ships. They'll come for us with ten times the ships.
"That's the cruelest part of their invasion. We were supposed to be able to win by wearing them down and outlasting them on our home turf. But the opposite was true: the longer they're here, the stronger they get and the weaker we get. Our current odds are the best we'll ever have."
"Even though they're impossible."
"Yes. Although they can't be completely impossible."
"Because there's always a chance, no matter how small?"
"Yes, I suppose that's true."
She lifted her chin. "But not what you were going to say."
"It was nothing."
"You think there's still a way for us to win, and not die, and not lose the entire human race. I wouldn't call that 'nothing.'"
"It's not what you think it is." Toman grimaced, showing his teeth, then glanced up at her. "You can't tell anyone about this."
"Don't worry, your secret will die with me."
"This is going to sound strange. But I'm going to tell you it exactly as it happened—or at least as I remember it. For my twelfth birthday, my parents gave me a copy of a game called The Blade of the Giant. Which wasn't the best name, because it wasn't about slaying dragons, but slaying aliens—or, if you wanted to play as the aliens, killing humans.
"It was a great game. I played it so much I barely slept for three nights after my birthday. After falling asleep during the middle of a match and losing so badly it cost me half my empire, I finally decided it was time for a proper break. I shut down the game and my screens and just sat there in the darkness of my room for a minute.
"I think I fell asleep then. Or maybe I was just dazed by being back in the real world after being immersed in the game for so long. It was a long time ago and I can't say for sure. All I can remember is the voice that stirred me: 'You must seek them.'
"We didn't know exactly what they sounded like back then—I certainly didn't—yet somehow, with just those four works, I knew exactly what I was hearing. 'You must seek them,' it said again. 'You must seek them and you must find them, boy. There is not much time to do this. There is not much time and thus you must find them before that time runs out.'
"The hair was standing up all over my body. It felt like whoever was talking to me was right there in the room with me. But I looked around and no one was there. Feeling crazy, I said, 'Who? Who must I seek?'
"There was a long pause. Long enough that I was starting to think that I actually was crazy. Then the voice said, 'You must seek the ones that killed you…and the ones that will kill you.'
"'I don't understand,' I said. 'Someone's going to kill me?' Another pause, then: 'Do as I have said, you must do as I have said or else yes you will be killed, and so will everyone you will ever know, and thus you must find them.' 'I still don't understand,' I said, and it said to me, 'But you must. They are there and you will find them.' I still didn't understand. I said, 'Who are you?'
"There was yet another pause, the longest one yet. All this time, my screens had been completely black. Then a light came on, as soft as starlight. It was so faint that I could barely see by it—but there was no mistaking what it was showing me. A lipless mouth. A claw. And a long, snake-like tentacle sliding across the screen.
"'You must find them,' it said. 'Before the last of your time is gone. Do this, and you will be saved.' The screen went black. The voice went silent. I asked it many more questions, but it never said another word. I never saw it or heard from it again."
On the screen, Toman's eyes were wide, skipping around like he was watching it happen at that very moment. "It was a Swimmer, Rada. A Swimmer. And it was telling me that I had to find them. Before it was too late.
"I went to my device. I had it set to record everything that happened on it—I liked to rewatch my matches to see how I could play better—but there was no recording of the conversation I'd just had. My comm log didn't show any inbound messages. It was like it had never happened at all."
Rada licked her lips. "Could it have been a prank? One of your gaming friends?"
"Yes, it could have."
"You were exhausted, weren't you? Could you have fallen asleep and dreamed the whole thing?"
"I don
't think so. I felt awake. But it's not impossible. Like I said, I'd hardly slept in days."
"So you don't know."
"Over the years, I've thought through every possibility you can think of a thousand times. I have no proof that what I saw and heard was real. But it doesn't matter. What matters is that after that night, I became obsessed with Swimmers—with aliens in general—and dedicated my life to finding them."
"How long ago was this? Twenty years?"
"22."
"Enough time for the Lurkers to launch an invasion fleet and cross a few light years of open space."
"That has recently occurred to me."
"The Lurkers have been here for longer than that, too. They've spent decades enforcing the Black Curtain so that we couldn't get out of the System and spread to other stars."
"Right. I now believe the Swimmer who spoke to me—if it was a Swimmer, and not a prank, or a wild fever dream, or a deep cover government agent trying to pass me classified information—was trying to get me to find the Swimmers and the Lurkers."
Rada frowned. It was a moment before she could put her finger on what was wrong. "Back up a step. This is a wild story, but why does it make you think we have a chance of beating the Lurkers?"
"Because the Swimmer told me that if I found them—both those who tried to kill us before and those who would try to kill us in the future—that we would win. And I did what he said. I found both the Swimmers and the Lurkers."
She waited for more, then nodded. "Then I hope the Swimmer who made you that promise is ready to fulfill it."
He smiled strangely. "When I was young, I thought it was warning me about another apocalypse. As the years went on and nothing happened, I started to think it was supposed to be a metaphor of some kind. For the longest time, my dream was to find the Swimmers, to speak to them, to find a way to slip past the Black Curtain, and then to spread ourselves among the stars, ushering in a new era where humans and aliens lived as neighbors. After the way the Panhandler ended, I thought we might even be allies. That seems very naive now."
Stardust Page 26
