Once the explanations were done, the votes were held.
The idea passed by one vote.
***
Wendy Michelson, of DNN, stood on the bridge of the flagship of the SOL system Disney fleet, looked at the camera, and did what she always did to bring out a natural smile: Think of Robin Hood, naked, knotting her silly. The smile was natural, and she as she had not yet let her own predilection towards anthropomorphic vulpine slip towards anyone in her staff, everyone just assumed she was a good actress. She swung her old fashioned looking microphone up to her face and spoke to the camera with her cheerful, authoritative, newsie voice.
“Good evening Earth from the happiest place in the galaxy!” She said. “This is Wendy Michelson reporting live from the bridge of the Milton Friedman. Under the daring command of the ruggedly handsome Heroic Gaston, the MF is the core of Disney’s current attempts to bring the ice moon of Europa under control from the villainous pack of evil Imperials that have taken up roost there.” She stepped over to Heroic Gaston, who was sitting on the command throne of the Milton Friedman with his elbow crooked onto his red pantaloons. He had been born Tyrone Biggs, but Disney had paid for the surgical treatments that had lightened his skin, broadened his jaw, straightened his hair, and changed his eye color as part of their comprehensive package plan to turn the best tactical and strategic specialist they had (after Space Belisarius) into a marketable tie-in for the twenty third Beauty and the Beast remake.
Sometimes, Wendy wondered how Heroic Gaston felt about his surgeries. He gave no sign of disliking it as he leaned towards her mic and said: “It’s a pleasure to have you aboard, Wendy! And a hello to the rest of you back on Earth!” He winked and made a finger gun at the camera drone. Wendy laughed.
“So, Heroic Gaston, can you tell us about the Imperials on this ice moon?” she asked.
“Well, Europea is just a little ball of ice,” Heroic Gaston said cheerfully. “That’s why it has served as a perfect hideaway for this band of imperial oppressors. They’ve managed to steal a heavy anti-ship ion cannon and are currently using gravitic shields to keep our on the ground Commander from taking them directly. Fortunately, we’re not alone out here.” He gestured to the front window of the bridge. The false projection screen showed the CGI images of the other ships in the fleet – in actuality, they were too far away to be seen by the naked eye. “We have the Beast, the Beauty , and the Sustainable Constantly Accelerating Quarterly Growth. They’re each good ships, and with our combined firepower, we’ll root these re...Imperials out lickety split!”
“That’s marvelous!” Wendy said. “Now, ah...” She paused. “What is that?”
“Well, that’s the forward-”
“No, what is that !?” Wendy pointed directly at the screen – and at the half a dozen rippling blue portals tearing open in the fabric of space-time ahead of the ship. The portals swelled wider and the view panned inwards. Once the images resolved into something visible, Wendy began to scream. She screamed and she screamed and she screamed as the horde of monsters poured through tears in space-time and into the SOL system. There weren’t just hundreds of them. There weren’t just thousands. There were hundreds of thousands of them. Most of them looked like chips of bone surrounded by still bleeding gums. Their ragged edges frilled and rippled, like the gills of whales, and sent them surging forward. But surrounding them were manta-ray crab things that soared through space. The crabs were vastly smaller, but there were so many of them, moving forward in sheeting, terraced waves.
Wendy swore she could hear them shriek as they flew through space.
“Shut the fuck up!” Gaston shouted, springing to his feet. He started to bellow orders to the crew – crew that normally wouldn’t be on his ship. Normally, Gaston commanded the entire Milton Friedman by himself, using the beta-level AI core to direct the ships. But DNN had wanted the people back home to be reminded of Star Trek and Star Wars and their other sci-fi properties. So, they had gotten a load of extras, extras that now began to tap hurriedly at buttons and command switches until Gaston screamed at them to stop.
After-all.
They were just actors.
Wendy stopped screaming – and clung to herself as she watched the bioships coming in, and watched the Milton Friedman beginning to open up. The railguns spoke first, tearing through space and impacting into the front waves of the enemy forces. Ships were torn from nose to belly, filling space with gouting blood. Then the beam weapons and the missiles started to fire, streaking into space. The beams were invisible, save for where they intersected with the exhaust trail of missiles. Blue-white flares of fusion and antimatter warhead detonations filled space as the munitions from not only the flagship but the rest of the Disney fleet began to hammer into the onrushing alien armada.
It didn’t look like enough.
It wasn’t.
The first bioships reached the inner edge of the Disney fleet’s firepower. Their fighter-crabs swept down and screamed past the bridge cameras, firing darts of quivering biomass into the armor plating and gravitic shielding of the Milton Friedman . Those quivering thorns exploded a few seconds later, leaving cherry red craters in the armor hull. The groan and whine of straining metal, stressed and pushing against itself and the superstructure, filled Wendy’s ears as she sagged to her knees.
Think of Robin Hood, think of Robin Hood, think of-
A bioship, larger than the others, filled the view screen. Its prow began to gather energy – a light building in what looked almost like an eye. It was a force that defied conventional human physics, a beam weapon from another galaxy, powered by methods that humans would need centuries to tease apart.
“Well,” Gaston snarled. “Talk about a pisser.”
The flare of the Milton Friedman’s antimatter reserves detonating in a single cataclysmic explosion was visible across the solar system. Slines saw it through the smog-clouds that roiled above their habitats. The Kappels – still reeling from the news that their daughter had been killed when StarCon had conquered Trappist-1a, saw it through their tears. And the CEOs of every major corporation on Earth saw it as well. The orders were already screaming across space as fast as tachyons and laser light could carry them. But the Claw had already dug themselves into the space of Jupiter. Construction spores, dropped by the millions, fell upon the moons of Jupiter. Drones whirred and chomped into the ground, tearing up the surface of almost fifty moons, planting biomass. Hatcheries. Feedstock. Huge tendons of hard flesh were extruded from the belly of skyscraper sized gas-bags and threaded through the magnetosphere of the immense gas giant like hoops.
These tendons were ringed with conductive flesh, taking advantage of the radiation and the magnetic energy put out by Jupiter. The radiation alone could have fried an egg in a second flat. By collecting it along the hundred kilometer long tendon-tethers, Evil was able to suck up more energy than he could have possibly need and beamed it into the rapidly transforming moons.
All of this took place with lightning speed, as if the universe had been set to fast forward. What should have taken months or days took hours, helped along by an intellect as vast and as deeply powerful as the void between the stars.
The decision on Earth was delayed. Arguments broke out between the CEOs of StarCon and NovaDyne as to culpability, resource allocation. Debates raged as to who should command, considering the best Commanders were out of the system and even using FTL communications and HPS Drives, it would take ages for any reinforcements to get home. But, at last, grudgingly, the command was given to the protege of the now deceased Texas Dallas: Arkansas Jones. The fleet, composed of the surviving Disney fleet, and the main force of every other corporation in Earth orbit, burned for Jupiter’s moons.
In a single day, humanity’s disparate fleets had become the single largest fleet that homo sapiens had ever put to sail in space or on the surface. There were battleships, combat carriers, close in attack ships, gunboats, torpedo skiffs, laserships, railgun broadsiders, relativistic kill
vehicles manned by suicidaly stupid Zeta level AI cores, and more. They flew towards a glittering maw of biomechanical death – not knowing the name of what they were facing. Telescopic observation saw the changes wrought on the moons, the tendon-tethers, the chunks of still metallic liquid hydrogen dredged from the oceanic depths of Jupiter.
Arkansas Jones’ strategy was to hit the enemy hard and fast, throwing everything right at them.
Funny.
That was Evil’s plan too.
The Claw started with a bombardment, triggered by the fusion detonation of complex, beetle like organisms. The heat and light of those fusion bursts slapped against the gravitically stabilized metallic hydrogen ‘bullets’ that the Claw had dredged from Jupiter, accelerating them to a nightmarish factor of C in a matter of seconds. They filled space, slugs of incredible density, moving at ludicrous speeds. At the ranges they were fired, they primarily served to panic humanity, sending their fleets scattering to avoid the slugs before they tore ships apart.
As the fleet elements spread, the Claw swept forward on wings of silent death. Bioships and crab-fighters filled in the empty gaps that were formed between Disney, StarCon, NovaDyne, PG&E, Microsoft, and more. The ships opened up with railguns and particle beams and X-ray lasers. But for every bioship that was ripped to shreds or immolated by the killing light of hard radiation, there seemed to be dozens more. And yet more flew from the remade moons of Jupiter, belched into space from the vast ship-wombs that Evil had crafted for this specific purpose.
The human fleets consolidated. They drew back, bleeding crew, oxygen and metal plating into the void, and formed into a bristling sphere of omnidirectional death. Antimatter warheads saturated space and human strike craft, flown by gamma-level intelligences, dueled with the Claw’s crab-fighters. Stuttering pulses of laserlight and hissing streams of high velocity acid-pellets zipped through vacuum as human crews manned guns and repaired rents in a war unlike anything they had expected.
It said a great deal about humanity, in that moment.
These people were corporate citizens, collecting an easy paycheck. They had expected their naval careers to be long, boring, and finally end with a semi-comfortable retirement with Class-C pensions and Class-D healthcare for themselves. That would be a great place for their kids to earn their own healthcare (Class-D healthcare didn’t cover children costs) and be a satisfactory end for most of them. In the brutal calculus of war, they were not exactly what one might have wanted to place in such a position.
They were not the Spartans at Thermopylae.
They were not the 2nd Army Rangers at Hill 400.
They were not the Io Uranium Miners’ Union during the Tunnel War.
They were desk jocks.
They were pencil pushers.
Maybe it was the speed of the battle. Maybe it was the fact there was no easy retreat. Maybe it was the slight remove – fighting a battle using computer consoles and command chairs. Or maybe…
Maybe five centuries of corporatism hadn’t squeezed that ineffable spark from them. Maybe they saw those moon-wombs, those howling, screaming space-beasts, and saw what would happen to Earth if they failed. Maybe they had seen enough movies, enough remakes of the old classics. Maybe they were just fucking professional. Maybe, at the end of the day, all it took to get a human to stand and die in place was a dental plan and some basic health insurance.
Or maybe, just maybe...they were fucking stubborn bastards.
Whatever the reason, the human fleet gave no ground. They sat and they fired their guns until the barrels were shining as bright as their ventral radiators. They shot off ammo until their maker cores were tapped out of feedstock and they were reduced to ripping out secondary components for recycling. They launched missiles into space so dense with debris and blood that every laser fired glowed ruby red and searing blue-white. They welded up hatches and they got out small arms – and readied themselves. Because, as the guns went silent and the picket ships folded under a spray of acid and bone, the Claw did not simply crack the capital ships in half.
Instead, the crab-fighters were replaced by bulbous, froglike things that swam through space in eerie, impossible parabolas. Their guts were distended and their cheeks flared out and when the dim light of the sun passed through them just so , the cameras on the beleaguered human ship saw that each one was filled with writhing masses of something . They caught hints of snapping teeth. Of curved claws. Of glistening skin. Of evil eyes.
The Claw intended to board them.
On his bridge, Arkansas Jones coughed as a medtech tried to patch the bleeding wound in his shoulder. Two other meds were dragging a dead woman off the bridge by her ankle – a technical sergeant was spraying down the exploded console with some fire retardant foam. Jones looked at the forward screen, at the camera display of the ship. He saw the boarding creatures swarming in closer. Time seemed to hang as he saw them and realized, with an icy jolt, just what was coming. He had no idea what this alien threat could do – but he had horrible memories of seeing Alien and Aliens . Well.
The remakes at least.
“Ensign Kim!” He shouted. “Full speed ahead! There!” He pointed. “That one.”
There was an immense battleship that had sat in the center of the alien formation the whole battle – watching with its hideous eyes, blinking and fluttering shut in the void. In that instant, Jones felt a deep, writhing hatred for it, one that burned deeper than any hatred he had ever felt for anything before in his life. He wanted, if he was going to go out, now, here, in this moment, he wanted to see that eye bloodied. Ensign Kim – a rather pretty young girl, before a chunk of shrapnel cut her forehead open and a medtech had wrapped half her face in bandages, looked back at him.
“Sir?”
“Ram me down their fucking throats. I am not going to be facefucked by a goddamn xenomorph today!” Jones bellowed.
Kim nodded.
“Once we’re within the blast range...blow the tanks,” he said.
“Setting self destruct codes. Sir.” Kim’s fingers shook as she punched them in. The ship rocked and the enemy formation began to swell. Acid projectiles splashed against the forward armor of the flagship – the Invisible Hand. It was from this ship that all other Invisible Hand class battleships took their name. Jones gritted his teeth and clenched his hands on the command throne’s armrests as the acid projectiles came in fiercer and faster. A report came from one of the other bridge crew.
“Sir! Borders on deck five and seven! They- oh god...”
“Sir!” Kim’s high voice cut through the screaming that was coming over the security desk console.
“What?” Jones snapped.
Then he saw it.
Glowing hypertropic planeshift portals were snapping open in the space above and below and even within the enemy formation. Jones sprang to his feet. “Belay the ram!”
“Hey guys!” A cheerful, female voice spoke over the coms. But it wasn’t one she recognized. “You look like you could use a hand.”
And the most insane, motley, bizarre collection of starships that Arkansans Jones had ever seen in his life poured into the SOL system.
They came out weapons blazing – and screaming across every communication frequency.
“Yeeeeeeeehawwwwww!”
***
Sarah had picked her ship right after the plan had been voted on. The craft, which she had named the Natural Selection, was among the smaller craft built by the Haveners. It had been designed to somewhat ape the functionality of a Commander power armor suit, with a nanotech fabricator in the prow and a shocking amount of weapons and armor to go with its small size. But the true treat had been when she had sat down with the designer and the two Pro-Tas and hammered out a basic piece of tech that the Pro-Tas had developed themselves, centuries before. Adapting it for human technology had been a bit tricky, and considering the time crunch, the fact it worked at all was near miraculous.
It was, in effect, one gigantic paracausal amplification u
nit. Crystalline structures that had been fabricated to exacting specifications by Zeradar and L'Laya threaded through the slender, needle-like ship like a nervous system. And now that she was in battle, Sarah felt the thrumming power of her own power, surging and growing. It was like riding a horse. Or Aiden. But rather than being overwhelming, it was empowering. Thrilling. She skinned her lips back from her teeth as she let her perceptions filter through the skin of the ship. She felt her awareness of the smaller body inside of the vehicle fade.
She was the ship now – it was like driving her hazardous environment suit on steroids. Her vision was clearer and farther than it ever had been before, and swept into ranges and bands she had never thought she would experience before. She could taste gamma ray bursts from the grasers mounted on the heavy combat ships. She could hear the howl of exotic particles as munitions detonated. And she could feel the caress of a thousand radio signals along her skin.
It was almost erotic.
Sarah grinned and launched herself at the thickest of the fighting. Her thrust plume shot below her – and as her mind adapted to being a needle without arms, she focused on the battlefield ahead of her. There were five of the heavy bioships, each one armed with a massive, belly length gravity wave weapon. They essentially collapsed a microsingularity into existence using agrav crystals and vomited them at the enemy. The singularities were unstable – but if they struck an enemy ship before they dissipated into a frustrated howl of hawking radiation, they would be devastating.
“Annie! Tasha! You’re on my six, keep the fighters off my back.”
“Got it!”
“R-Right!”
Tasha was in a similar craft, though one without the paracasual amplification. Sarah felt her nerves twinge – Tasha had been, like the rest of them, modified with some instinctive combat abilities. But that didn’t make Sarah any less terrified for her. Then all feelings were consumed by the eclectic thrill of the moment . A wing of twenty to thirty crab-fighters swept out of space towards them. Sarah’s belly stuttered, X-ray laser turrets mounted in ball-socket joints strobing as they cut through dirty space. Sarah registered the death of six of the enemy fighters before Tasha and Annie both opened up with their weaponry, killing all but two.
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