Stardust

by Edward W. Robertson

  MacAdams aimed the laser. He fumbled for the twist-operated part of the grip that would fire it, but in his shaking grasp, the weapon was a lump of dumb matter. A red beam blared toward him.

  It touched the Lurker instead. Its other end was angled upward to a wall overlooking the corridor, where Webber stood tall, features drenched with crimson light.

  The Lurker fell from the wall and thudded to the floor. The air filled with steam and the stink of charred crickets. The alien writhed forward, shooting at MacAdams, the beam burning the toe off his boot. MacAdams steadied his weapon. This time, his fingers found the grip. He twisted. A cherry-colored lance struck the Lurker just below where its front tube-limbs came together. Webber's second shot speared through its back. The alien collapsed, smoke squiggling from its wounds.

  Webber dropped from the wall and ran toward him. "Are you hit?"

  "I told you to set off the bomb!"

  "Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you said 'come save my ass from the alien.' But that's all water under the bridge now, so I'll repeat: are you hit?"

  "Yes. Now go and put a countdown on that bomb before I hang you with the alien's guts."

  Webber took in the scene, emotions skirting across his face as fast as coastal clouds. "Stay here, okay? And don't get shot again."

  He turned and ran back toward the wall, scaling it in seconds, and jumped down into the other room.

  It was too dark and his suit was too much of a mess for MacAdams to tell how bad his wound was. Wasn't much he could do about it at that moment anyway. His suit had already loaded him up with pain meds and amphetamines and MacAdams allowed it to give him a little more. The pain shrank from his mind like he'd put it in a box. The world got a little clearer, but there was still a lot of smear around the edges.

  He grabbed hold of a non-pointy part of the folded saws he'd covered behind and heaved himself up. Didn't quite make it, had to lean over the saws to keep from falling, which sent a few distant flares of pain shooting up his chest. He rested for a second. Maybe a little longer than a second. Next thing he knew, Webber was hopping back down from the wall and sliding next to him.

  "Bomb's set to go in five minutes. If we don't get out of here by then—or if the Lurkers touch it before then—then we're going down with the ship."

  "Best get moving." MacAdams made to push himself up, but his chest lit up with fire. His legs went limp, dumping him on the ground.

  "I'd carry you out of here like Sam the Wise," Webber said. "But I'm just a normal-sized person and you look like you've spent your life training to wrestle angry bears. Fortunately for you, I've got another idea."

  As he'd been speaking, Webber had stripped the grapplers from MacAdams' forearms and was now snapping them around his own. While he did so, MacAdams tied their belts together.

  Webber fired a grappler at the ceiling. "Up we go!"

  The floor lurched away beneath them. As they sped upward, Webber launched his other grappler thirty feet further aft. It stuck to the ceiling and Webber released the other, swinging them forward over the maze of orange boxes.

  "Screw feet," Webber said. "I'm never walking anywhere a—"

  A laser flashed by them, striking the ceiling to their right. MacAdams couldn't see the shooter, but he fired back in the general direction. A second bolt melted into the ceiling in front of them. Webber swore, launching the next grappler and swinging toward the aft wall, which was already just another swoop or two away.

  A dark figure moved in front of the doorway. MacAdams sent a pulse of red at it, missing. The Lurker took aim. Webber swore harder and let out slack, dropping them so close to the walls that MacAdams had to lift his knees to his chest to stop his feet from banging into the edges of the boxes. The drop in height was just enough that the Lurker's next shot passed over their heads—and into the grappler line.

  The cord snapped, throwing them at the floor. MacAdams wasn't in condition to try a shoulder roll and couldn't do anything more than tuck and cover his head. He hit hard. Even through the painkillers, it was like getting struck in the chest by a spear.

  They had crashed down on the other side of a wall from the Lurker who'd taken the shot at them. As MacAdams fought to clear his head, Webber wrenched off the grappler that hadn't been shot, picked up a stray piece of jet fuselage shaped like a small sail, and cuffed the grappler to it. He went to the corner and fired the grappler toward the doorway to the stairwell.

  MacAdams made himself stand. The grappler struck the wall with a thump, whipping the hunk of fuselage after it. The room lit red—the Lurker had fired at the moving object. Webber rolled out from around the corner, yelling a battle cry as he activated his laser.

  MacAdams staggered around the corner. The Lurker was collapsing, weapon falling from its limb. Webber grabbed it and shot the alien with its own gun. But their lasers were more than weapons: they were devices, too. Webber waved it in front of the door, opening it.

  He motioned to MacAdams. "Is your suit still watertight?"

  MacAdams checked his device. "No. But I'll have twenty-thirty seconds before it fills up."

  Webber shut the door and headed up. "We'll lash ourselves down. As soon as the stairwell's flooded, we'll swim out to the surface."

  MacAdams nodded, hauling himself up the too-high Lurker stairs. By the sixth step, he felt so worn out that he would have laughed at his own chances if he wasn't too tired to laugh, too. Yet he kept going, one step after the other, until somehow he was all the way up and they were standing in front of the door that led out to the lasered-off hatch.

  They pulled the hoods of their suits over their heads and used their belt cords to tie themselves to sway-handles set into the walls. MacAdams leaned against the bulkhead for support. Something was rumbling beneath them, lighter and fainter than the vibration of the ship's engines. He leaned back for a look down the stairwell. At the bottom, the door was sliding open.

  "Stop!" he yelled. "They're opening the door!"

  Across from him, Webber raised the stolen laser-tool to the entry pad.

  "Stop!"

  Webber acted like he couldn't hear him. Too late, MacAdams realized he couldn't: with their hoods secured around their heads, they were relying on comms for communication.

  And the comms were still blocked.

  The door activated, opening to the right. Dark sea water sliced into the room, the flow expanding into a thunderous rectangle, battering Webber and MacAdams with relentless force. It wouldn't stop coming until the entire ship was flooded.

  21

  The message stopped, leaving Kansas' face frozen on the screen like a teenage khan.

  "Kansas is that close to us?" Rada shot to her feet. "What kind of numbers is she bringing?"

  Toman grinned. "The entire Locker and every pirate from the Outer System. Over a hundred and fifty ships."

  "With the most recent ships trickling in, we're up to 77. That means the Lurkers will only outnumber us by two dozen!" Rada narrowed her eyes. "If Kansas is flying in with her whole fleet, why didn't we spot her days ago?"

  "She was using an old pirate's trick. Flying single-file with Saturn directly behind them. They even matched their light signature to the planet. Unless you pointed a telescope right at them, you wouldn't know they were there until they crossed into the long-range scans."

  "Will she be here before the Lurkers?"

  "Barely." Toman's face flickered. "We'll have to bring her up to speed on the fly. If her crews don't already hate me for refusing to stand up against Cannel and Earth, they'll loathe me once I'm done drilling them for battle."

  "I'm sure they'll change their tune once you save their children from being hunted for sport. What do you think? The Lurkers still outclass us. They still outnumber us. Can we win now?"

  "I always thought we could win. But now I don't think it's stupid to think so."

  The surge in numbers meant nearly all of their previous strategy had to be thrown out the airlock. They spent the next several hours hashing out ne
w plans.

  Each fleet—Toman, Kansas, Lurker—was identified with a solid line tracking its current course, along with a transparent funnel indicating every point of space it could reach if it changed its course. As the hours went on, the shape of their potential flight paths shrank from funnels to cones.

  The three solid lines were set to converge at a spot dubbed Ragnarok, which Rada had thought was some obscure joke about all the asteroids in the region until Toman had explained its much older meaning. He had been in steady Needle contact with Kansas, and if the Lurkers hadn't known she was coming before, they certainly knew it now.

  Yet the line of the aliens' course didn't waver. They still intended to attack. They believed they would win. More than that, the battle represented the opportunity to smash Toman and Kansas' fleets at the same time. After that, the humans would have nothing left. The war for the Solar System would be over.

  As the strategy session wore on, Toman ducked out more and more, stating he was in ongoing communications with Kansas. As things were winding down, he returned to the comm.

  "We've gotten as far as we're going to get," he said. "I strongly suggest you all grab some sleep. Like they say, a tired pilot is a dead pilot."

  They still had nine hours left until the convergence at Ragnarok. Rada doubted she'd be able to do more than doze in and out of a nap, but she crashed out immediately. If not for the blaring of her device two hours later, she might have slept right up until the battle itself.

  She pawed at her device, answering. Winters blinked onto the screen.

  "Rada," he said. "You need to see this."

  The urgency in his voice sent her heart beating. She pulled on her shirt and ran to the bridge. There was no need to ask what Winters wanted her to see. On tactical, 32 of their ships had flipped around and were curving back toward the Lurkers. With a lurch of her stomach, Rada saw that Toman was among them.

  She opened her comm to him. "Toman! What the hell do you think you're doing?"

  Though they were close enough to speak in real time, she had to ping him again before he answered.

  "Recon," he said. "LOTR detected an anomaly in the Lurkers' scans."

  "What kind of anomaly requires sending three dozen piloted ships instead of a few drones?"

  "I need to get some live eyeballs closer to their fleet. I've already made the course corrections for us and for Kansas to ensure that I'll still be able to catch back up once I'm done here."

  "Done doing what?"

  "My job," he said. "Keep watch on the fleet and await my call."

  He ended the communication. Rada switched back over to Winters. "Do you have any idea what this is about?"

  "They broke formation a few minutes ago with orders for the rest of us to hold tight," Winters said. "I contacted you as soon as I noticed you weren't acknowledging."

  That was as much as Winters or anyone else seemed to know. Rada went back to examine the tactical logs of the period she'd slept through, but there had been no deviations from the flight paths or unusual movements from the enemy. Even so, with Toman having delegated the remainder of the fleet to her in his absence, she doubled the drone scouts watching their flanks and rear.

  Toman's task force completed their U-turn. They carried directly toward the Lurkers for just five more minutes before pulling a hard turn back toward the main fleet.

  "Rada." Over the comm, Toman's voice sounded flat. "It's just as I feared. The Lurkers are much closer to us than our sensors are telling us."

  A squib of data passed over the line. It opened automatically on two separate screens. One showed the same image that tactical did. On the second, the orange triangles of the Lurker fleet jumped forward in space. Their revised course-line now had them intercepting Rada's temporary command a full hour before she and her 45 ships were set to rendezvous with Kansas.

  "They're employing the same field distortions they used when they were first approaching the System," Toman said. "The ones that made it look like they'd arrive much later, tricking us into thinking we'd have more time to prepare. LOTR picked up hints of it, but I had to get closer to confirm."

  "That's why they dropped their stealth, isn't it? They wanted us to think we knew exactly where they were. While giving us no reason to send any drones close enough to find out the truth."

  "I expect so. Do you see the revised contact estimate?"

  "Yes. They're going to be on us an hour before we reach Kansas. So how can we slow them down?"

  "We can't. Not in any way significant enough to make up that much time."

  "Then they'll overwhelm us. After they're done with us, they'll catch up to Kansas and they'll destroy her, too. She doesn't have any laser-boats to defend herself with."

  "Correct. That's why I'm going to buy you some time."

  "But you just said…" Rada stepped forward, pointing at his image on the screen. "You son of a bitch. You can't!"

  "The only way to slow them down enough to save some of us is for the rest of us to engage them. Otherwise, we all die."

  "So throw a hundred drones at them! Or come back to the fleet and let your pilots do this for you! That's what they're here for, isn't it? To fight on the front lines while you command them from the center?"

  "It's like you said: if the Lurkers catch us by ourselves, first they'll kill us, and then they'll kill Kansas. After that, there will be no one left to fight back. This means that the job of slowing them down is the most important job in the universe. I won't trust it to anyone but me."

  "You should have let me command them!"

  He shook his head. "It was my mistakes that put us here. I should have held firm at Earth against the UDL to kept the fleet united. If I'd done that, we could have made our stand a long time ago."

  "You can't blame yourself for that, you idiot. That was the UDL's decision—and the UDL's fault."

  "This is where my path has led me. You're not resisting my decision because you think I'm wrong. You resist because you're afraid of having to bear the weight of what comes next."

  "That's the most ridiculous—"

  "These are my last orders. You will obey them. And you will lead us to victory."

  They stared at each other, allowed to see each other by the tether of electrons connecting them across thousands of miles of empty and lethal space.

  "Goodbye, Toman."

  "Goodbye, Rada. It's been my greatest honor."

  He made a fleet-wide announcement explaining their dilemma and that he wasn't sure that he would make it back. Before Rada knew it, Toman's ships turned their tails to drop rocks and stray junk to impede the Lurkers' path, then did the same with carefully-spaced jags of kinetic rounds. The Lurkers corrected course, losing a little bit of ground each time.

  Laser-equipped fighters flew among the Lurkers, but the enemy kept these back, saving them for the battle that was still to come. Toman angled his forces across the downward face of the enemy formation. Wary of tricks like at the last battle, the full alien fleet bent course to slow their approach. Now that the Lurkers had shifted to a different vector, every second Toman fought them bought Rada more time.

  The first missiles traded back and forth. After a minute of probing, Toman turned his ships and flew straight at the enemy lines. This felt like a sparrow charging at a falcon. Yet it was the falcon who flinched: twenty Lurker ships split off, chased by missiles, cleaving from the formation as cleanly as a block of wood split by a wedge. This didn't look terribly significant, but the action forced them to slow down. And a fleet traveled at the speed of its slowest ship.

  Toman danced across the edges of the formation, keeping his people out of the missile range of all but the foremost ships. The Lurkers were already accelerating at maximum speed and that meant the only way for them to reinforce their front line was for it to decelerate and let those behind it catch up.

  For a long time this was how they fought, flies nipping at the flank of a bull, launching only enough missiles to protect themselves and occasional
ly push the Lurkers back, punctuating their strategy with kinetics rounds to further foul the field.

  There was nothing flashy about it and there didn't need to be. When the Lurkers grew tired of it, their front line slowed fractionally, finally allowing the heavy fighters to drift toward the line of contact. Red bolts seared forth, straighter than anything Rada had ever known.

  Instead of Toman's ships exploding, four of the Lurker heavy fighters died. He'd brought four of the laser-boats with him, keeping their ability secret until the moment it mattered most.

  The Lurkers backed off at once, deeply alarmed. They reacted with a probe of drones like a cloud of mosquitos, then a smattering of ships. When these probes weren't chewed up by laser fire, the Lurkers mustered themselves and fell on Toman hard, with ships enough to cross an ocean by stepping from one to another and missiles enough to block out the sun.

  Toman's pilots should have died within two minutes. Instead, they flew in intricate braids to confuse the missiles that pursued them. They planted rockets of their own in the precise places where they would light up the closing missiles in a wall of fire. And when they died—for the most inspired flying in the history of your people still couldn't save you when thirty-two ships stood against a hundred and twenty—they used their deaths to save the lives of the others in their squad.

  They flew like music, each swoop and maneuver carving down on the hour the Lurkers had expected to have alone with Toman and Rada's fleet. They swatted down missiles like it was a psychic power. Rada could tell just by watching that they had slipped into that rare space where they were one with the moment, beyond any need for thought, as if the battle was a dream inside their minds and they were both riding it and reshaping it at the same time.

  Even so, they dwindled. Those 32 ships became two dozen, then twenty, then twelve. It was then, with a certain air of annoyed impatience, that the Lurkers braked yet again, allowing the heavy fighters to return to the fore.