They were building freighters for the Vistans. Considering the strength the Matrices could send against them, Isaac realized that would only be the beginning. The yard in Refuge that was building Interceptor—not so much a yard as a collection of Matrix fabricator modules, but the point still stood—wouldn’t shut down once the specialized ship needed to catch the Creator slowboat was built.
Once it had built Interceptor, Isaac would have the Vistans fully take over the yard and start building strike cruisers. Modified strike cruisers—ships designed to have water on their decks and moisture in their air.
Terran-designed warships intended to have Vistan crews. The Regional Matrix threatening Hearthfire was going to have to be destroyed, but the ESF wouldn’t be able to do it. Projecting power two months away was too difficult, and the threat wasn’t immediate enough.
It would be a Vistan fleet that would destroy that Matrix. It would have to be—but for the Republic of Exilium’s survival, those Vistan ships would have to be Terran at their core.
It was a discussion he’d have to have with Amelie. How much technology would the Cabinet really let him give away to their allies? How much technology could the Republic afford to hold back?
The Matrices could muster effectively infinite numbers with enough time. He couldn’t counter that with only four million humans to draw on for crews.
He probably couldn’t even counter that with “only” a billion Vistans to draw on for crews—and didn’t that raise some strange thoughts?
They’d found one ally they had no choice but to uplift to their tech level or watch them die. If they were going to fight the Matrices—if Isaac was going to organize the grand crusade the Cabinet wouldn’t let the ESF fight—they’d need other allies.
Other species who recognized the doom slowly expanding toward them.
Maybe, just maybe, part of the answer would be on that strange Creator ship. Somehow, Isaac knew that the Creators didn’t have a magic button to shut down the Matrices.
If they did, after all, they wouldn’t be trying to get clear of the space occupied by their creations.
41
A week aboard a space station designed for people who had no real sense of color was not an experience that Octavio Catalan had ever expected to have. The Vistans used three-dimensional iconography and a written script that more closely resembled Braille than an alphabet.
The 3-D icons were the only reason his people had been able to navigate around the various stations they’d been staying on while Scorpion was dismantled. The rotational pseudogravity had also been a problem for crews used to true artificial gravity, but they’d survived.
Now the freighter Perfumed Dancer glowed on one of the portable holoprojectors his people had set up in the docking bay of the habitat. The two-hundred-and-fifty-meter-long bulk hauler had been refitted to carry passengers before she’d left Hearthfire the first time and was currently surrounded by a swarm of shuttles.
Each of those shuttles carried between fifty and a hundred people. There were currently a hundred spacecraft on approach to the freighter, with another two hundred either coming up from or heading back down to the surface.
If he’d expanded the view, over four thousand shuttles would be hauling people up from the surface to the evacuation ships. When the freighters weren’t there, those shuttles would also be carrying people to the orbital habitats, but most of that transport was being done by monstrous landers that were too big to dock with the freighters.
It took two days to fully load the freighters, a task that was almost done for this trip. Two of the shuttles were docked with the orbitals, waiting to carry two hundred of Octavio’s people over to Dancer.
“I would prefer you stay at Hearthfire,” Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters told him, the man-sized hunchbacked amphibian standing behind him. She tended to forget that humans didn’t have three-hundred-and-sixty-degree awareness.
He turned to face her and smiled from habit.
“With Scorpion reduced to spare parts and a semi-mobile turret, a starship commander isn’t needed here,” he reminded Sings. “Commander Renaud is an extremely competent officer; she can provide the same orbital watch I could and lead the crew who are remaining.
“The ship we’re building in Refuge, though, requires the skills of an absolute expert in propulsion and warp-drive technology. I’m the best we have who isn’t fifty light-years away.”
“An odd skillset for a starship commander,” Sings replied. “I understand.” She paused. “We owe you a great deal, Captain Catalan. We will miss you.”
“I’m an odd starship commander,” Octavio said with a chuckle. “I’m glad we were able to help you. At the same time, though, at this point, you’re helping yourself as much as we’re helping! The Matrices have been more use than us all along, and they’re staying here.”
Sings’s unconscious chirps flattened.
“I trust that you trust them,” she told him. “They still remind me of the monsters who destroyed my world.”
“And their guilt for their connection to those monsters will help save your people,” Octavio replied. “Renaud can ride herd on them for you, but we owe the Matrices ourselves. If this strange ship really belongs to their Creators, we owe it to them to make contact.”
“And their Creators may have a weapon we can use to protect my people from the Rogues,” Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters conceded. “We have had this discussion before, my friend, but the time for it is now ending.
“It will be years before I come to Refuge. I may not even live that long—I am far from young—but I will not leave Hearthfire until my people are safe.”
“You and the Empress alike.” Octavio shook his head. “You need to tell Sleeps-In-Sunlight that she’s going to need to move to Refuge eventually. The Empress can’t be the last one out before the lights turn off.”
“She knows,” Sings said. She offered a delicate arm to him for the not-quite-hug, not-quite-arm-grip that was a gesture of close friendship. “We will see you again, Captain Catalan.
“You must be certain of that.”
“I am,” he told her, touched by the gesture and her words. “If Refuge is as close to Exilium as I’m told she is, you’ll be stunned by your new world. For all of their flaws and problems, the Matrices create paradises.
“After all, that is what they were built for.”
Newly promoted Warrant Officer Ghulam Kinnaird had been one of the petty officers running Scorpion’s shuttle deck. Now the dark-skinned man with the shockingly red hair was the Captain of Perfumed Dancer, saluting crisply as Octavio came aboard.
“Welcome aboard, sir,” he greeted the Captain. “Have we had any problems?”
“No,” Octavio confirmed. “And remember, Kinnaird: you’re in command here. I’m just a passenger.”
Kinnaird looked a bit awkward at that. He was a brand-new Warrant Officer, a rank that the ESF had on its books but hadn’t really used before, and Octavio was coming aboard with half a dozen commissioned officers senior to him.
“I mean it, Kinnaird,” Octavio repeated. “We’re just passengers. Dancer is your ship. How are you and your crew holding up?”
The Warrant Officer gestured for Octavio to follow him deeper into the ship.
“It’s weird,” he admitted. “The Matrix remote does a lot of the work of running the ship, and the Vistans are bringing their own law enforcement and leadership. The trips are running pretty smoothly, but we haven’t had a chance to slow down and check the ship over at all.”
“We need to do that in warp,” Octavio told him. “Most of the estimates I’m seeing say this evacuation is going to take years, and we can’t afford to lose this ship—any of the ships, really.”
Each of the ten one-twenty-eight freighters carried twenty thousand passengers on each trip. Losing one of them would leave hundreds of thousands of people behind in short order.
“We’re doing what we can. The Matrix remotes are even handier than I thought, but it
’s still a lot for five of us. We’ll keep on top of it,” the Warrant Officer promised.
“We’ve got you and the other officers in private staterooms in the old crew quarters,” Kinnaird continued as they continued into the ship. “Everyone else is in one of the dormitory sections nearby. It’s not comfortable by any stretch of the imagination, not for seventeen days, but it could be a lot worse.”
He shrugged.
“The Vistans have complained a lot less than I would have expected, too. They’re brave people, sir. I’m glad we can help them.”
“Me, too,” Octavio said as they reached the crew quarters. “I still need to touch base with a few people before we get going. Buzz me if you need anything, but remember: this is your ship.”
“Yes, sir!”
Renaud had been waiting for Octavio’s call, sitting at her desk in her new office in the unimaginatively named LPC Platform One.
It wasn’t much of an office, but it at least had artificial gravity. The entire platform was built of pieces from Scorpion, with some assistance from the locals and the Matrices. Powered by three of the surviving fusion cores from the warp cruiser, it could power the two surviving light particle cannons and maneuver.
It was actually a bit more maneuverable than the guardships, to be fair, but it was using Vistan-built fusion engines instead of Scorpion’s burnt-out main engines and thrusters. Artificial gravity meant that she could do so at full power and evade incoming fire, but that was it. LPC Platform One wasn’t a warship.
She was Aisha Renaud’s command.
“I have about twelve hours until the convoy moves out,” she told him. “I guess that’ll leave me in charge here.”
“You know it,” he replied. “Even if rank and such didn’t say it was your place, you’re the best person for the job until the Admiral gets there.
“And you get to go play with warp drives,” Renaud said. “Leaving me here.”
“The Vistans need someone—and Interceptor needs a warp-drive expert.” They’d had the argument before. It was starting to feel like a familiar rut, and part of him wondered just why Renaud kept bringing it up.
“I know.” She made a throwaway gesture. “I’ll miss you, you know. That’s me talking, not Commander Renaud.”
“We make a good team,” he agreed.
She shook her head at him and sighed.
“That’s true enough,” she allowed, her tone sounding like she was giving up on something. “Anything we need to consider here in Hearthfire we haven’t already gone over?”
“Keep an eye on Africano and her computer worms,” Octavio advised. “Vistan cybersecurity is crap, but we don’t want to accidentally piss our allies off. I think she’s starting to think they’ll never catch on and just opens up anything that looks interesting to her.”
“She’s a little too curious; got it,” she agreed. “Anything else?”
He chuckled sadly and shook his head.
“Keep people moving,” he told her. “We failed these folks pretty badly when those impactors came down. I don’t want to fail them again.”
“The Matrices think the Rogues won’t be back soon,” she said. “That buys us some time.”
“Do you really want to risk a billion lives on that bet?” Octavio asked. “The Admiral is here in two weeks. Then we might be able to breathe. Until then, watch every spark, every unexplained anomaly.
“We know their protocol, but they’ve already demonstrated they can go beyond that if they think it will help. They’re robots; they’re not stupid.”
“I know,” she replied. “Just not much I can do with a glorified flying turret.”
“More than we could with Scorpion with no guns, no power and no engines,” he reminded her. “And that one’s on me. All of this is on me.”
“It’s not, not really,” Renaud told him. “Getting you away from here is a good idea just to help you process that.”
“Plus, well, the engineering challenge of a lifetime,” he said with a grin. “Trust the Admiral, Aisha. He’ll be here soon enough.”
“You be careful,” she replied. “If you get yourself killed, I will never forgive you.”
He wanted to say that there was no real risk of that in an engineering project, but he knew what Interceptor was being built to do. They knew nothing about the Matrices’ Creators. Catching that ship was not going to be safe.
“We’ll know how it went soon enough,” he replied. “We’ll talk again once I’m in Refuge. Good luck, Commander Renaud.”
“Good luck…Octavio.”
42
Vista had been a beautiful planet. Isaac had seen the original survey scans and imagery from when Scorpion arrived. The scout ship had spent some time in the system following her original mission before the Matrices had changed the objectives, and the pictures were beautiful.
The planet Vigil decelerated into orbit of was not beautiful.
Clouds had covered the entire sky, black and ugly things concealing the world beneath them. Numbers flashing across the holodisplay on Vigil’s flag deck told him the truth those ugly clouds hid, too.
Global average temperature in the single digits of Celsius—the low single digits. Ice caps doubled in size and gaining thousands of square kilometers by the day. Winds over a hundred kilometers an hour, and waves over much of the open water that weren’t any slower.
“They’ve pulled everything back into the sheltered seas, right?” Isaac asked quietly.
“This sea here,” Connor agreed, a section of ground under the clouds flashing. “Orange-Sunset-Waters. The second area that was mostly protected from the initial impact has been abandoned. The ice and waves that are making it through the channel into Long-Night-Waters got too dangerous.”
Three hundred and fifty million people lifted off the surface. Eight hundred thousand shipped to Refuge—and the two transport ships that Isaac had brought had arrived in orbit first. They were already being swarmed with shuttles loading civilians aboard.
In twenty-four hours, a million Vistans would either be in Refuge or on their way. That was only a drop in the ocean, however, and almost a billion people would remain.
“They were building ships here, right?” he asked quietly.
“Here,” Connor confirmed, highlighting a facility orbiting in the Vista-Hearthfire L5 Lagrange point. “Four ships under construction right now, and they’re working on four more slips. So long as we keep supplying them exotic matter, it’s a geometric progression in how many ships they have online.”
And still four years to evacuate. A billion people. The task had seemed so simple when he’d discussed it with Octavio Catalan, but the sheer scale of it awed him now.
They’d arguably already saved the species, but Isaac agreed with his subordinate. They hadn’t saved the Vistans until they’d saved all of them that they could.
“We’ll need to set up meetings with the First-Among-Singers and the Great High Mother,” he told Connor. “The evacuations and the habitats appear to be moving along, which means we now need to consider how best to protect them.
“Our best guess is that the next Matrix attack is going to be much larger. Our Task Force is far more powerful than anything they’ve had to defend Vista before, but Catalan held this system by luck and suicidal insanity.”
Isaac grinned.
“I’ve been known to rely on those myself, but I’d very much like to even the odds with a bit more preparation this time!”
The two Vistans who met him on one of their stations twelve hours later were a fascinating study in contrasts for him. The heavyset aliens were strange-looking to human eyes, almost looking like hunchbacked two-mouthed frogs with their legs coming up to their shoulders and dwarfing their delicate arms, but the distinctions between the two were most interesting.
Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters was even more hunched than the general impression of their race, clearly having suffered the same bending-over with age many humans shared. Her skin was a mottled gray, wit
h occasional patches of a very pale green, and she wore a black vacuum suit with the sleeves and helmet retracted.
Despite the difference in species and fashion, the purpose of the garment was very clear.
Her companion and leader, Sleeps-In-Sunlight, was among the straightest-standing Vistans Isaac had seen so far. Tall for her race, the Great High Mother matched Isaac’s average-for-a-human height—and her skin was a rich verdant green, as bright for a Vistan as Isaac’s skin was dark for a human.
She was, he’d been briefed, very young—but those same briefings made it clear that Sleeps-In-Sunlight was now the unquestioned leader of the Vistan survivors.
“Thank you both for making the time to meet with me,” he told them. “I know how busy this entire situation is making you, and I appreciate the effort.”
The speakers mounted on his shoulders were going to take some getting used to, he reflected. The dual voices of the Vistan language were strange enough coming from the aliens. Hearing them come from his uniform was just weird.
“We survived because of your Captain Catalan,” the Great High Mother told him. “You come to us as his First-Among-Singers; we would only dishonor ourselves to ignore you.”
“Plus, your ships may be our only hope against the Strangers,” Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters added. “The vessels you arrived with are intimidating. We had only barely become accustomed to the power of Captain Catalan’s ship.”
“Captain Catalan’s ship served us all well,” Isaac replied, burying his own sadness at Scorpion’s loss. “Task Group Vigil’s warships are newer, larger and more powerful. We will surprise the Matrices when they come.”
He considered softening the truth, but he suspected that Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters knew it already.
“Unfortunately, it seems likely they’ll come with sufficient force to overcome even this fleet. We will need you to contribute to your own defenses now that the evacuation seems to be going well.
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