Those two arrowed straight for Sarah, as if Evil knew where she was.
Sarah thrust out with an arm that wasn’t an arm, and she felt fingers that were not fingers closing around one of the crab fighters. She saw the impossible damage: Dimpling fingerprints mashing into the armored carapace, blood bursting and freezing into space. Then she flung them at the other fighter, causing both to smear into one another.
Sarah whooped, then glared ahead of herself. She narrowed her not arms into a needle-like cone, almost a kilometer long and half a kilometer wide. It shrouded her ship, turning her into one massive, invisible lance. Putting another few Gs of acceleration on, she dove, head first into a bioship. The moment of gore was so fast and so flashing that she barely registered before she burst into open space on the other end. Spurting blood jetted into space on either side of the bioship, which moaned like some great, underwater thing .
Tasha swept past the hole and fired a brace of antimatter bomblettes into the gaping opening.
The bioship cracked in half with a flare of blue-white light.
“Great shot kid, one in a million!” Sarah whooped. Then, more commanding; “Sexy! Space! Report!”
“Bombs away!” Sexy Napoleon said.
“We’ve done it, sir.” Space Belisarius sounded grimly determined.
Sarah looked.
The portals that she had opened contained a great deal of ships. Many of them had already acquitted themselves far, far, far better than the corporate built ships – the innovations and wild risks of Haven paying off dividends when combined with the sheer shock of ambushing an enemy fleet that was already in the midst of a battle. The Ben Sisko’s Motherfucking Pimp Hand was the standout, with nearly half a dozen capital ship kills and five hundred confirmed fighter kills. But, in the end, the Haven fleet wasn’t actually the point of this little excursion.
The Haven fleet…was the cape .
The sword, the real killing blow, the flourish used by the bullfighter, were both being commanded by Sexy Napoleon and Space Belisarius. They had emerged into the SOL system well above the plane of the ecliptic, riding a pair of the crudest ships that the Haveners had built. They were called, in order, the Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan and the Suck This Palpatine.
Each was built on the same line: An immense tube of cheap propellant (in this case, hydrogen and a half dozen fusion torch drives) attached to a sphere filled with two dozen tungsten rods, each one weighing five hundred tons. But the real killer was that Space Belisarius and Sexy Napoleon had both practiced a single piece of paracausal manipulation, demonstrated by Hailee.
They dampened inertia down to nothing as the fusion torches kicked on. In a space of the entire short battle, they had burned through half the fuel reserves. The fact that both Sexy and Space were themselves nearly dead from the strain of sustaining their powers for that long was by the by. They kicked away from their spent starships and drifted through space, their bodies sustained by their genetic alterations. They had the best view in the universe for what was to come.
The Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan and the Suck This Palpatine came within roughly half a light second of Jupiter. Then they fired off their secondary charges. A series of carefully designed, carefully planned micro-munitions bucked the tungsten rods out of their container in a shower of shrapnel. Each rod, glowing with the heat of the charges, drifted. Some flipped end over end. Some spun wildly on their axis. None of them were quite on target, but that didn’t really matter.
They were all going a truly ludicrous speed – on a course that directly intersected with each of the transformed moons of Jupiter.
For a very brief moment, Jupiter had several small stars in orbit around it.
The light faded – and the entire mass of the Claws fleet seemed to stagger in space, writhing and convulsing in on itself, ships drawing close, claws clattering. On the blood soaked decks of half a dozen human ships, men and women who had been fighting a terrifying, losing battle from bulkhead to bulkhead saw as the hideous monsters that they were used to seeing on the silver screen hesitated en mass. On one ship, a woman who had nearly lost her left arm earlier in the fight, sprang into the corridor, and shouted: “They’re afraid! They’re afraid !”
The counter-attack, across the human fleet, started to mulch the invaders into a fine paste. Shotguns, assault rifles, close ranged laser gauntlets, razorwire grenades, even bayonets and fire axes, were used upon the mewling, squirming, confused creatures.
It was, in short, a good thing that Sarah – who saw such creatures as her delightful pets – didn’t have to watch.
Sarah, in fact, was too busy grinning as she watched the Havener fleet blow bioships into chunks.
YOU THINK YOU HAVE WON, DON’T YOU?
Evil’s voice waspish.
“You need to get better at hiding your concern, eyebo,” Sarah said, adopting Spez’s name for it specifically because she knew it annoyed the extragalactic creature.
DO YOU KNOW HOW LITTLE TIME IT WILL TAKE FOR ME TO BRING MY SHELL-WORLDS TO LIFE? I HAVE SIX HUNDRED SOLAR SYSTEMS, ENTOMBED AND ENTRAPPED. WE WILL FALL UPON YOU LIKE LOCUSTS, WE-
“Hey, Evil,” Sarah said. “You talk too fucking much.”
Which was when the Mulan Transgender Power Hour Apocalypse Boat unloaded six spinal, two terrawatt gamma ray lasers directly into the belly of Evil’s main battleship. The voice cut off in a howl of static and a wash of pure, bilious hatred. When Sarah was done blinking the reflected pseudo-light from her eyes, the rest of the Claw’s fleet was disintegrating – individual elements fleeing off in every direction, returning to animal instinct. Every direction she looked, they were being cut to pieces by railguns, by lasers, by missiles. She breathed out a slow sigh of relief.
Then her eyes fell upon the debris that still choked space around the human fleet. Of the hundred and thirty six ships that had set out from Earth, forty two were still intact, and of them, half were burning. Corpses floated between the twinkling starlight of the debris.
Corpses created by her.
Sarah felt her awareness of her body snap back to herself. She sat in the dark cockpit of her ship.
And she started to cry.
Chapter Eight: Sarah Destroys the Earth
A hypertropic plane shift drive could bring any ship at any point in real space to any location, gravitational stresses permitting. There were certain power and cost ratios that determined the practical limitations, but those could be ignored under times of duress. The signal that had been transmitted, via quantum entangled Q-bit reserves, had been exactly the kind of duress that the commanders of the far flung fleets of corporate humanity had been trained to respond to.
The shareholders are in danger.
And so, across the human sphere, a dozen brushfire wars were canceled nearly instantaneously. Ships screamed through atmospheres to scoop up Commanders, while robotic armies were left in standby mode – many of them literally posed like still life diorama recreations of battles on a full, lifelike scale. Weapons aimed, but not firing. Limbs drawn back for blows that would never land. Some of the Commanders left behind more ‘altruistic’ projects – which meant a few colonies who had been in the midst of a rescue from a cosmic disaster were left, screaming their heads off as their corporate support was withdrawn at the last second.
One colony, about to be destroyed by an asteroidal impact, managed to avert disaster by overriding the corporate locks on their starship engines, allowing them to vacate the premises. They saved their lives – but their contracts stipulated that any damage done to the mining colony would be taken from their pay, retroactively. The asteroid that flattened their base, collapsed their mines, and immolated the hemisphere they had been settled on put each of the fifteen thousand workers into a debt that would take them several trillion years to pay off, assuming their standard pay of ten UN backed credits an hour.
Another colony, soon to be sterilized by the sweeping wave of captured pulsar, solved their problem by hacking their maker
and mass producing military grade EM shields to ward off the streams of high energy particles that would have killed each of them. They were facing an equally grim legal punishment in their future – hacking a maker was a crime worth of banishment and nerve stapling.
A third colony, who had been under martial law due to the fact that the world they had settled on produced a natural aphrodisiac (an aphrodisiac they had been trying to package for shipment back to the SOL system for consumption), simply celebrated being left on their own by throwing an orgy. They would have been fined for illegal use of company property.
Fortunately for each of these colonial settlements…by the time anyone heard of their crimes, the legal system that made them illegal in the first place would be on fire and the people who perpetuated it would be having a far, far, far worse day than any of them might have imagined upon waking up this morning.
***
“Repeat!” The voice that filled the bridge of the Mulan Transgender Power Hour Apocalypse Boat was growing increasingly strident. It had started off as controlled and steady and almost monotone, then worked its way up and up the ascending scale of consternation. It was currently at, if Sarah measured it properly, at a seven out of eleven on the scale. “Your fleet is engaging in an illegal maneuver under the Geneva Convention on Interstellar Warfare. You are to cease your approach towards cislunar space immediately, or we shall open fire.”
Sarah tried to feel as confident as she looked. But her stomach was roiling and turning over, end over end, inside of her. The corporate fleet that she had allowed to get mauled to bits was currently in a parking orbit around Jupiter, taking advantage of the sudden dispersal of readily accessible raw materials that had been kicked off by the destruction of three of Jupiter’s moons. The kinetic impactors that her fleet had used had thrown enough debris outwards into the high orbits of the Jovian system that each of the corporate ships simply needed to scoop up enough gravel for their onboard nanolathes to begin to produce repair components.
They would be, in a word, fine. Doubly so with the Ahahahahhahahaha Get Bent Sucker and the Communism Kills (This Name is Ironic) in a polar orbit over them. According to the space war nerds from Haven, a polar orbit would allow the two Haven ships to keep an eye on every part of the corporate fleets and blow anyone up who tried anything funny – like, say, making a break for Earth. Which was exactly what Sarah wanted. She drummed her fingers on the metal armrest of her chair and took in the view the bridge was throwing up.
The entire Haven fleet – sans the ships they had lost – was decelerating towards Earth. They had enough agrav impellers and inertial controllers to make this deceleration a whole hell of a lot less showy. But they weren’t using them. Instead, they were using conventional fusion thrust, which kicked out massive plumes of glowing, super-heated exhaust. Those thrust plumes would sketch themselves across the night sky of Earth – like the fingers of an immense, neon demon. They would be an announcement that the jamming systems couldn’t block out.
Sarah licked her lips. “All right,” she said, ducking her chin forward as she focused and threw her words out throughout the fleet. “Anyone have some final change of plans they want to suggest.”
“Yup,” a voice she half-recognized came on. It was one of the Syndicalists, she was pretty sure. “The jamming means we can’t get any signals through to the people down there – but we could use some of the auxiliary ships to cut messages into the sky using thrust plumes! I’ve got the flight plans laid in, we can use drone ships so no one has to actually fly them.”
“What will the message be?” Rose asked.
“Uh...we come in peace, death to capitalism?”
“No, that’s terrible!” Annie said. “Death to capitalism should come first.”
The debate started to pick up heat. Sarah grinned – and was glad of the distraction.
In the end, the message that the Haven fleet voted on – with a bare majority – was: We come in peace. Our only enemies are the CEOs. Sarah wasn’t sure how comforting it would be to the population of Earth. But she figured it was better than nothing. And, well. Life was about to get extremely scary for them. She waited for the last few seconds of the braking maneuvers that would bring them into a geostationary orbit above the Cayman Crescent. Four centuries before, the Crescent had been where the founders of the modern world had traded their money, far from the greedy, grasping claws of the vicious nation-states of the time. Or, at least, that was the history that Sarah had been taught. For all she knew, it was just a lie – like so much of the rest of the history she knew. They had started as islands, but as the nation-states fell and the corporate power structures that had dominated human space for nearly four hundred years took over, the islands had been built up, expanded, interconnected and transformed into a vast, floating arcology that was used to differentiate the haves from the have nots.
A corporation wasn’t really ranked as one of the top dogs, the real winners, until its CEO was able to afford the stratospheric prices for one of the penthouses on the Crescent. This meant that the former chain of islands, nestled in the gulf between the American Archipelagos and the South Georgian coastline, was also one of the most heavily defended places in the entirety of human space. The defense grid was maintained by several hideously expensive satellites, an immense number of surface-to-space missile platforms, particle beams, kinetic weapons, and chaff drone launchers, and an entire army of corporate security goons.
“Why are you doing this?”
Sarah nearly sprang out of her own chair, her nervous tension high enough that she could have cut it with a knife. She snapped her head around and saw Zeradar standing beside her – the uncanny Pro-Tas ability to blend into the background until they wanted to speak or be noticed once again biting her in the butt. Sarah sagged back into the seat. “We have too, Zeradar,” she said, her voice soft.
“To make war on your own species, while the Claw rampages across the galaxy still? It strikes me as rank foolishness,” Zeradar said, his translation orb whirring softly as it rotated around and around his head.
“We’re not making war on humanity,” Aiden’s voice broke into the room. Sarah sprang to her feet as her lover walked onto the bridge, stretching himself as he did so. “Just CEOs.”
Sarah snuggled up against Aiden. One last hug before the next bit. She whispered in his ear. “Off the books? I’m terrified of fucking this up.”
Aiden squeezed her butt. “Hey, you haven’t screwed up so far.”
“Well, that’s not true-” Sarah started.
The instant she started that sentence, the defense grid around Earth opened up on the Haven fleet and the Haven fleet opened up on the defense grid. The Haveners had been prepared for what the corporate grid would throw at them – and the first few parries and counter-attacks that filled space went exactly as planned. Thermonuclear and antimatter weapons were swatted out of the sky by directed blasts of energy, and ablative armor took the brunt of particle beams and lasers. Precision railgun shots from the orbiting ships fell upon the emitters and the beam turrets, while beams swept satellites out of existence.
And then the spores began to fall.
Sarah closed her eyes and let her awareness sweep outwards. She was no longer focused on her own body. Instead, she felt the creatures that they had bred on Haven, waking fully to their new task. Each landing spore had been culled from the race-memory of the Claw, pulled out and used to her own ends. They were large, ablative chunks of bio-organic armor, wrapped around a cluster of organic units. Said units were, in the first wave, primarily a mixture of her favorites, the bladelings, and the shield emitting crabs that Sarah had named, despite all protests to the contrary, krabfriends.
The krabfriends wreathed each spore in a glowing shell of gravitic energy, turning aside the anti-aircraft fire that tried to smash the landing spore out of the air as they streaked down towards the glittering, hyper-wealthy arcology. Tracers filled the air, brilliant orange lines of weapons fire cutting across
the night, bending away like rivers of light being displaced by boulders. Some of the gravitic shields collapsed under the onslaught and the spores broke apart in the air, spilling their creatures into the plastic choked surf and boiling waters of Earth.
Most of them struck.
When a landing spore struck, it absorbed the impact into its own body, causing it to bust like a fruit. This had the side effect of sweeping the bladelings out into the air, so that the sleek, armor plated murder-dogs were sent tumbling. Sarah felt their tiny, murderous brains squealing with delight as they skittered across the smooth, silvery surface of the shuttlebays, rooftops, and garden atriums that they landed in. Some smashed through glass. Others upended elegant tables that had been, until very recently, occupied by the wealthy vacationers that made up the majority of the Crescent’s population.
Almost a hundred thousand bladelings landed at about the same instant, the tiny sparks of their awareness filling Sarah’s mind with a full, three dimensional view of the arcology. She saw people running desperately for cover – and she saw the armored goons of Crescent Security sprinting towards the landing sites. They were dressed in gold filigree, with tall shako hats like they had stepped off the battlefields of...World War...One? Sarah was a bit fuzzy on ancient uniforms. But whatever they wore, they were armed with sleek and futuristic looking energy weapons.
Sarah focused and activated the modification she had given to the bladelings.
“C-Sec officers!” she spoke through the bladelings, her voice booming from sleek voice-organs mounted on their backs. “I am Sarah Kappel. I’m not here to fight you. We are not here to fight you. We are your brothers, your sisters – we’ve all been screwed for so long, and we say no more. Step aside, and we’ll-”
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