38
Keening echoed through the empty space of the command pool, the unconscious noise of grieving Vistans tearing at Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters’s heart and mind alike. Another guardship gone, destroyed by a missile that Scorpion’s best efforts hadn’t stopped. The flagship was alive only thanks to the knowing and intentional sacrifice of over a dozen bombers by their own crew.
Sings had been unable to change that. She’d watched her bombers moving in front of the remaining guardships, shielding the mobile asteroids with the only defense they could offer: their own fragile hulls.
She was alive thanks to their sacrifice. Thousands of her guardians were not.
Worse, for the long-term survival chances of her species at least, Scorpion was crippled. The datasong was clear on that, the starship’s wounds readily perceptible to the First-Among-Singers’s ears.
Her engines were gone. Her weapons were gone. Seven times the Matrices had landed hits with their grasers before the last one had fled, and while only the first had been critical, the rest had taken their own toll.
“First-Among-Singers,” Swimmer-Under-Sunlit-Skies addressed her. “What do we do?”
“We can’t reach Scorpion,” she pointed out. “The Matrices are already on their way. We will aid her once she is returned to us.”
The attacking force had withdrawn once again. The game of shields and arrows the robotic warships played was over for today. Their attempt to play outside the rules of the maneuvers, so similar to that old Vistan child’s game, had failed thanks to Scorpion and Captain Catalan.
“We can’t fight these monsters,” Swimmer murmured, projecting the trill of his voice so only she heard him. “Without Scorpion, can we protect the habitats?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted, her voice projected just as carefully. “We may need to consider moving the habitats away from Vista. The Matrices focus seems to be on our world—separating the evacuees from the planet should help protect them.”
“But so many of our people remain on the surface,” he objected.
“And we will do all we can to protect them, as well,” she agreed. She did not finish the thought, but she knew Swimmer understood it: if the hundreds of millions still on the surface had to be sacrificed to protect the hundreds of millions already moved into space and awaiting evacuation, it would be done.
“Twenty-nine days, Voice-Of-Choirs,” she told him. “Then the humans’ true warships are meant to arrive. If the Matrices can protect us from their rogue kin until then, we are safe.”
He accepted that. Sings…didn’t. She knew that the warships the humans had sent dwarfed Scorpion and that Scorpion was far more powerful than her own guardships, but she had seen the might of the Matrices.
Her faith in her human allies was complete. She believed, in her bones, that the human warships would do all they could to protect Vista. That, if necessary, Octavio Catalan and his people would die to protect her people.
She just also realized that the enemy they faced was beyond them all.
The computers sang a song of icons and data. Two guardships and a hundred and sixty-four bombers in orbit. One hundred and thirty habitats holding two hundred and forty million souls---the last fifteen habitats still being filled by the endless stream of shuttles that didn’t stop, even for a Matrix attack.
Those shuttles could never stop. There was no time.
Outside the orbit of Vista, there were other points the computers told Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters about. The shipyard, almost finished and ready to begin the construction of the first four warp-capable ships to ever be built by Vistan hands—massive ships, to carry a hundred thousand evacuees at two hundred and fifty-six times the speed of radiation.
Vistan work shuttles swarmed that shipyard, their tools a frail substitute for the Matrix fabricators that were doing most of the work. Those Matrices were elsewhere at that moment, making sure their Rogue cousins were truly gone…and guarding the last icon, the one that truly occupied Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters’s attention.
Scorpion. Two recon nodes had attached long cables to the crippled human ship and were towing her, keeping their strange engines down to a pace that Sings’s ships could have duplicated.
The combat platforms and recon and security nodes kept watch. They’d return to the shipyards and the habitat-production facilities soon enough, but for now, they watched Scorpion.
And yet…the big warships kept their distance from the crippled starship. They were watchful, protective…but they were watchful and protective from a hundred thousand kilometers away.
Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters remembered the cataclysmic fate of a crippled Rogue combat platform a few hours before and wondered if her friends carried the same power source. She wondered if she was going to watch Captain Octavio Catalan die in the same kind of explosion.
She didn’t think so, but it was a terrifying thought. Her allies seemed so fragile sometimes and so powerful at others. Without Catalan, her world would have died.
She willed the ship to make the trip to Vistan orbit safely. There was nothing else she could do, but she couldn’t take her attention away, either.
39
“Step-down complete,” Tran announced in Octavio’s ear. She sounded exhausted—even more exhausted than Octavio felt.
For thirty-six hours, the engineer had struggled with the terrifying beast at Scorpion’s heart. It was dangerous to take a matter-conversion plant below fifty percent output. They were rarely shut down after coming online—but Scorpion no longer had the power distribution system to draw fifty percent of her main power plant’s energy.
“We’re cold?” he asked, needing her to confirm. Needing to be sure.
“We’re cold. We can start looking at everything else now,” she told him.
He barked a short laugh. They’d evacuated the ship once the Matrices had towed them into orbit. Only the engineering teams had remained behind—the engineers and the Captain who’d once been one of them.
Renaud hadn’t even argued. She’d taken command of the evacuated crew aboard the orbital habitat without even blinking. If Scorpion was going to die to an engineering casualty, Octavio Catalan was going to be aboard her when it happened.
“What ‘everything else’?” he asked. “Both turrets are wrecked to various degrees. Without replacement cyclotrons, Turret A is just done—and without a fully functioning power-distribution system, the rest of our weapons are useless.
“The maneuvering thrusters are semi-independent, so we can use them to maintain our orbit, but I’ve been looking at ‘everything else’ while you were dealing with the power plant,” he told Tran. “We’ll need to do a full survey to be sure, but my assessment isn’t good, Commander. We need a shipyard. A real, fully equipped shipyard.”
“And the only one of those we know of is fifty light-years away,” Tran said with a sigh. “My teams and I will double-check everything, but I don’t doubt you, sir. She’s a write-off?”
“We can probably get her home eventually,” Octavio replied. “But she’s not fighting again, not without another six-month stint in that yard.”
He sighed, too.
“While you’re doing that survey, check over the remaining guns,” he ordered. “I don’t like the thought of hacking our girl up for parts, but if we can pull out enough pieces to set up a few weapons platforms, that’s one more mark in the column that says Vista might survive until Admiral Lestroud gets here.”
“I’ll make sure of it,” Tran promised. “If nothing else, the day I can’t turn four half-wrecked LPCs into two functional particle cannons is the day I take up knitting instead of engineering.”
Octavio snorted at Tran’s pale imitation of humor.
The question wasn’t whether his people were good enough to do that. The question was whether Scorpion’s guns were merely half-wrecked, or if the power-distribution net failure had done more serious damage.
Only time and hard work would tell.
And only
time would tell if the Rogues would let them do the work.
Three days of surveying later confirmed Octavio’s worst fears. Not only was Scorpion’s power-distribution network wrecked, the long, drawn-out process of stepping down the matter converter had sent enough energy surging through it to wreck most of what had still been attached.
Scorpion still had intact pieces, but they weren’t hooked up to power. Anything that had been hooked up to power had been repeatedly overloaded. The maneuvering thrusters that had been her last remaining mobility had fried their control mechanisms. Enough power had been accidentally pulsed through the warp drive to misalign the careful balance of the exotic matter.
His ship might not look it, but she was dead.
“What do we do?” Renaud asked after Tran had finished briefing them.
“We should be able to assemble a platform for the two particle cannons Tran thinks she can build,” Octavio told her and the other senior officers. They were gathered in a conference room aboard one of the orbital habitats now, a hastily rigged-up holodisplay allowing the humans to see their ship.
“We’ll have to gut Scorpion to do it,” he said sadly. “Pulling the exotic matter from her warp drive will help the locals get their warp ships online—the Matrices have been building an EM stockpile with material brought from home, but anything we can add to that is worth it.
“Especially,” he forced a dry grin, “if it isn’t doing anything where it is.”
None of his crew shared his false humor.
“The crew is safe here for now,” Das told them. “We can breathe the same air as the Vistans, and we’ll bring over our food supplies from Scorpion. We’ll be…okay.”
“I’ve already sent a message home via the Matrices,” Africano added. “They know our situation and that everything has to be relayed via them.”
“Which limits our coms with home,” Octavio said. “I trust our Matrices… I’m not sure I trust that the Rogues can’t get into their communications. Which leaves us with some interesting problems.”
“Sir?”
“Vigil is twenty-four days away. The next convoy to Refuge will leave in eleven days.” Those dates were burned into everyone’s brains, but Octavio reminded them regardless.
“With Scorpion wrecked, there is no point in keeping any more of our people here than necessary—and most of our crew will have value for the Interceptor project.”
“We can’t abandon the Vistans,” Renaud objected. “You’ve said that yourself.”
“We won’t be abandoning them,” he agreed. “You, Commander Renaud, are going to remain here and speak for the Republic. By the time the convoy is ready to leave, we’ll have a far better idea of how many weapons platforms we’ll be able to set up from Scorpion’s remains and how many people we’ll need to man them.
“Everyone else is going to relocate to Refuge with the intention of becoming the crew of Interceptor. We’ll take all of the Marines with us—and we’ll probably need to borrow some Spears from the Vistans, too.”
He shook his head.
“I’d like to think that everything is going to go perfectly smoothly and the Matrices’ Creators will greet us with open arms…but then I remember that these are the people that decided to build a self-replicating fleet of armed terraforming robots.
“I don’t trust that they’re working with anything that I’d call logic.”
40
There were three round seals on the wall in Isaac Lestroud’s office. Once was a copy of the commissioning seal for the new Vigil with its Eye of Horus and Republic of Exilium rockets. The other two had survived the destruction of the old Vigil, his exile to the far end of the galaxy and everything else his career after the rank of Captain had thrown at him.
One was the commissioning seal for the battlecruiser Victoria, the ship he’d commanded before his promotion to Rear Admiral. His time aboard the battlecruiser had been short, barely eighteen months before he’d been promoted and given command of Vigil’s battle group.
Filling the role had been the final checkmark for that promotion, though he liked to think he’d done well by Victoria’s crew.
The last seal, though, a the copy of the commissioning seal of the ship he’d spent most of his time as Captain aboard and fought his only battle as a Confederacy officer aboard: Scorpion. He’d commanded the warp cruiser for three years and had built his reputation as something other than his mother’s son aboard her.
Isaac took the seal down from the wall and put it on his desk, looking at the golden scorpion icon with WC-17 emblazoned across the top. She’d served him well, under his direct command and in his service.
And from the message from Amelie he had paused on his screen, she’d given her last. With a sigh, he un-paused the communique.
“All of our updates at this point are being relayed through the Matrices, and Octavio clearly doesn’t trust their encryption protocols,” his wife’s recorded face told him. “I don’t blame him. We know the protocols we’re using on the tachyon coms are very different from theirs. It sounds very possible to me that the Rogues are listening in on our friends’ coms.”
Isaac understood encryption and transmission protocols significantly better than his wife—though he’d freely concede his knowledge of just about anything non-military paled in comparison to hers—and he knew she was probably overestimating the odds.
It was possible that the Rogues could access XR-13-9’s communications. It wasn’t likely…but it was more likely than the Rogues managing to penetrate the humans’ encryption, which wasn’t even running on the same basic system architecture.
“What we have confirmed is that most of Scorpion’s crew is fine and Octavio is preparing them to relocate to support the Interceptor project,” she continued. “Once he’s in Refuge, he and I will be able to have a live conversation: Interceptor is being fitted with a full-bandwidth tachyon communicator, and we now have access to one as well.
“It seems the Matrices have decided that we’ll keep our part of the bargain and are handing over some of the technology they’ve been more protective of already. Schematics for a full-bandwidth com will be in the general packet. I don’t know if your people can fabricate it en route, but I’m hoping to be able to actually talk to you by the time you’re in Hearthfire.”
The hologram shook her head.
“There’s a lot of crap going through our updates, but here’s some of the ugly: even the Cabinet is concerned about what happens if the Rogues show up before you get there. You have new orders, Isaac: if Vista has fallen by the time you reach it, you are forbidden to attempt retaliatory action.
“You are to assess the situation and see what is salvageable of the remaining surface and orbital populations, and decide whether to continue the evacuation project,” she continued. “But you are not to hunt down this Regional Matrix. It’s a problem for another time.”
Amelie shook her head.
“They’re right, my love. I signed off on these orders, too. I know you,” she said firmly. “But our first priority has to be protecting the surviving Vistans…even if the Matrices cut that number down.
“Hopefully, that won’t happen. LOK thinks that the losses inflicted should buy us a few months, maybe as much as six months to a year, as the Regional Matrix dramatically augments their forces.
“The downside of that time frame is that they estimate the next force will be at least double the force that engaged Catalan. A minimum of sixteen combat platforms and probably around fifty escorts.
“The Rogue will have to fabricate that fleet…but it’s a regional node. It can do that. I won’t tell you that you can’t fight that kind of fleet. You can run the odds better than I can.”
He could. Vigil was designed to chew up and spit out combat platforms. She was smaller than the robotic ships, but her designers had known their enemy and had been able to draw on both Matrix technology and a large amount of black Confederacy research.
Isaac would put his new fl
agship up against four combat platforms. With the three strike cruisers, he was fully confident in his ability to take out the force that had just attacked Hearthfire.
Even with Giannovi and Task Group Galahad, though, he couldn’t reliably take on sixty Matrix warships headed by sixteen combat platforms.
What both he and Amelie weren’t saying, though, was that he’d try regardless.
“What’s our ETA?” Isaac asked when he returned to the flag deck. The usual clock was ticking down, telling him that it would be a bit over ten minutes before the task force resumed its FTL travel.
“Nineteen days.”
Commander Aloysius Connor had clearly been waiting for the question. Isaac’s operations officer was standing next to the console that handled task force–level navigation.
“Almost exactly,” Connor continued. “Nineteen days, one hour, thirty-six minutes.” He shrugged. “We could cut two hours off of that by making the entire transit in one shot.”
“Even with the lower impact of the new drive, that’s not a choice I’ll make for two hours,” Isaac pointed out. “If you could find me a day somewhere, I’d consider it.”
“Talk to Reinhardt about that,” Connor told him. “I just make sure your orders get fulfilled to the best of our ability. I don’t create new abilities. You have a massive one-eyed wizard for that.”
“And even he has his limits.” Isaac sighed and stepped over to the main display. Six ships, two of them completely unarmed, seemed a tiny thing to throw into the night. The next Rogue Matrix wave would outnumber them ten to one—more, considering that the freighters would go directly to evacuating Vistan civilians.
Of course, he’d have Giannovi and her ships by the time the Matrices were likely to come back. Another missile cruiser and four destroyers weren’t going to shake the pillars of heaven, but anyone who underestimated the nine-ship battle group he’d have by then would regret it.
Refuge Page 24
