Date Point: First Contact Day, 10y AV
Capitol Station, Capitol System, Dominion Space.
Officer Regaari Clan Whitecrest Attaché to the Mother-Supreme.
“You’re both courting a controversy, you know. A scandal, even, given how close you both are to me.”
Regaari’s head-duck of agreement had an unconsciously immature, cubbish quirk to it that came naturally when Giymuy engaged her Mother’s instincts. The Mother-Supreme was now silver from eartip to foot and thoroughly venerable. Over the years of working together, her relationship with Regaari had thawed from purely professional, to something of a friendship, but she was still the Mother, and when she gave advice, deference was instinctive.
“I know…” he agreed, reluctantly. ”‘Human ideas, eroding Gaoian culture.’ I’ve been staying well abreast of the backlash. We both have, which is why we’ve only…talked about it.”
“Even talking about it is ‘heresy,’ in some camps.”
“That’s a human word.”
“Indeed it is.”
Regaari caught the sad irony in Giymuy’s agreement. “We’re a free society.” he pointed out. “Free to speak our minds, free to act and do as we please so long as we cause no harm. Aren’t we?”
“So it has been since before the females were united.” Giymuy agreed. “But, I note, we have never actually been cunning enough to codify those freedoms in law. And in the meantime some peoples’ ideas of what constitutes ‘harm’ have broadened, spreading out to cover a wider area but, I think, becoming shallower in the process.”
“The humans need those things coded in law.” Regaari pointed out. “In fact they were, from what I gather, something of a revolutionary concept when first introduced. We meanwhile have always taken them as self-evident. You don’t need a law granting people the freedom to.. to breathe, or to eat.”
Giymuy chuffed. ”‘We hold these truths to be self-evident…’” she quoted.
Regaari, being the one who had first introduced that document to her, recognised the quotation instantly. “Missing, of course, the irony that if they really WERE self-evident then they would never have had to write them down.”
Giymuy duck-nodded herself. “Meanwhile, we DID find them self-evident.” she observed.
“And yet you’re warning me that Ayma and I are courting controversy by preferring each others’ company.”
“Dare I whisper the word ‘monogamy’?”
“It’s not…she’s had other cubs since mine. It’s just that we still enjoy each others’ company and…we still feel much the same as we did when we sired that cub.” Regaari stood and paced the room. “And this, somehow, is a brewing scandal. A male and a female liking each other and wishing to spend time together, rather than simply remembering one another as a fond, temporary dalliance? Perhaps those truths aren’t so self-evident after all, perhaps Gaoians have all just…thought too much alike up until now.”
Giymuy chittered loudly and at length at that one. “Oh!” she gasped, trying to recover. “If only we did! There would be no need for a Mother-Supreme and I could retire and live out my time surrounded by cubs and happy young Mothers.”
She regained her composure, and noticed the slightly offended set of Regaari’s ears. “Ah, I am sorry. You may be right. We are discussing the… adulteration of our culture by alien ideas, after all.”
“That was probably inevitable the moment we made First Contact.” Regaari grumbled.
“We know that.” Giymuy gestured to the station they were aboard. “Many Gaoians may not. And this is the root of our problem—–we are being changed by these ideas whether we like it or not. These ideas of ‘heresy’ and ‘taboo’ are just as much a pollution of what it means to be Gaoian as…pizza, pancakes, meditation and monogamy. Then there’s poor Myun. I never imagined that I’d see the day when a young, healthy, intelligent and very pretty female was shunned because no male will court her for fear of the political consequences.”
Regaari snarled a little angry laugh. “Oh yes. they’ll hire her to provide hand-to-hand combat instruction, but mating with the ‘freak’?” He growled a little. “If she wasn’t young enough to be one of my cubs, I might approach her with a contract myself just to spite them.”
“Why not?” Giymuy asked. “You’re already flirting with scandal with Ayma, and you’d be actively seeking it by courting Myun. Why should age make a difference at that point? Maybe your example is all that’s needed to rehabilitate an outcast.”
Regaari fell silent. He was still considering the suggestion when the communicator in his pocket buzzed. He tapped it with a claw. “They’re ready for you in the council chamber.” he said.
“It’s about time…where’s my stick?”
Regaari handed it to her. Giymuy had many walking sticks these days, and each one was a calculated statement. For today, she had selected the natural, knurled one made of Cimbrean Pinkwood, a now-extinct species that had once occupied one small portion of a continent that was now long swallowed up by deathworlder terraforming. The humans had logged the lot rather than let it be ruined by the advancing tide of disease, and had sold the wood to collectors to drum up funds. Giymuy had snapped up three tree’s worth. Craftsmen from every clan on Gao and beyond had vied for the privilege of creating the sticks, desk and curiosities she had commissioned, predicting that the prestige of creating for her would improve their own mating chances.
Giymuy in turn had encouraged them by selecting lesser-known, obscure males for the privilege. The famous ones, she had reasoned, didn’t need the help. Now, the stick tapped sharply on the decorative stone tiles of the Capitol Station concourse as they left the Gaoian ambassadorial quarters. Dominion security guards—two Vzk’tk, two Kwmbwrw—fell in line behind the entourage of four Gaoian guards from Clan Flashfang, all painfully eager young males and all—Regaari had seen to this personally—trained to handle threats up to and including a human.
It was quite the little procession. Giymuy had chosen simple charcoal robes that offset her fur, and wore three loops of fine gold chain clasped to each ear. The effect was venerable and dignified, still understated, but enough to make her stand out next to Regaari’s severe black uniform, or her guards’ combat harnesses.
This was a big occasion: A galactic broadcast that had taken some negotiation to secure. Even Regaari didn’t know what the Mother-Supreme had planned for the address she was about to give to the Dominion Grand Council, but he was looking forward to it.
Every species had automatic membership and presence on the Grand Council, even if they were not Dominion members. Even if that species was an enthusiastic member of the Celzi Alliance, there were dissenters, ones who had chosen to side with the Dominion, representing their species. An unpopular minority at home, perhaps, but still there. The only vacant seats belonged to the declining species, who no longer cared to show up…And to the humans.
There was a space for them, but it remained unoccupied. Regaari wasn’t even sure if the deathworlders knew that space existed.
Giymuy created a stir when she walked right past the podium that had been set up for her, and instead strode into the area designated for humans. The susurrus this move generated soon became a white noise that only subsided when the chairman—a rotund VGork nearly as large as a young Guvnurag—slammed his gavel into the desk in front of him with enough force to dent the wood.
“Mother-Supreme Giymuy.” he began, addressing her. “That place is for the delegates from Earth.”
“The delegates from Earth, Chairman” Giymuy replied, speaking with surprising force and clarity for her age “Do not know that this seat exists. This council has never seen fit to inform them of it nor invite them to attend. I am taking the liberty of speaking on their behalf.”
The chairman slammed down his gavel again as the gathered species took to muttering to one another again. “Can I not persuade you to take the podium?” He asked.
“You can not, Chairman.”
The Chairman considered her for a while, then backed down. “Then please. Continue.”
Giymuy accepted the concession with a slight bow to the chair, then turned to address the Council as a whole.
“Gaoians and Humans share a fondness for Base Ten mathematics.” she began. “Which is why I note that, by the calendar of the planet Earth, It has now been exactly ten years since the Hunters raided their city of Vancouver. Less than three of their years later, the human race achieved faster-than-light manned flight for the first time. Those ten years have been…tumultuous and interesting, and often controversial.”
She tapped her stick down, twice. “The Dominion’s response to this singular deathworld species has been one of fear and mistrust. This stick I am holding is a symbol of why that fear is justified, being made from the wood of a tree now extinct due to them. I am not here to argue against the policy of the last ten years—the past cannot be undone—but to share a vision of policy for the next ten.”
This time, the delegates were polite enough to remain silent and listen.
“The humans are here to stay.” she announced. “Even if we never see one again, even if they were to retreat behind their quarantine field and remain there, they have already changed the outlook of many species, on a great many things. Even now, the questions are being asked ‘why haven’t we united to fight the Hunters?’, ‘Why has the Dominion-Alliance war gone on for so long without ceasefire or negotiation?’, ‘Why do we transport goods in vulnerable freighters and lose their crews to Hunters and piracy when displacement jump drives render the very concept of a freighter obsolete?‘”
“I have seen personally just how powerful and dangerous humans are. I have seen for myself, some of the plagues that our one human visitor—my clan-Sister—could have unleashed on Gao, which would surely have killed our entire species if we had lacked the technology to protect ourselves. Humans are undeniably dangerous. But so too are the tools that were used to build this station. So too are fire, or the knives used to prepare food.”
She tapped her stick again. “Unlike those things, humans are thinking, living beings. Fellow intelligent life, which is a rare and precious thing in this galaxy. My clan-sister would have wept and been thrown into the kind of despair none of us here can imagine, if she had been forced to watch the Gaoian people die through no real fault of her own. They know, or are learning, that they are dangerous. Where it is already too late for them to prevent the damage, they are trying to repair it as best they can. Where it is not, they are taking precautions to prevent harm.”
“On their behalf, given their absence from this assembly, I humbly beseech the council to–”
She was cut off. Blue lighting—the universal colour of emergency and alarm—slammed on and a deep howl filled the council chamber. She was still standing bemused by it, ears twitching back and forth, when Regaari took her by the arm and escorted her with inexorable firmness, towards the exit.
“Regaari? What is happening?” She asked.
The male’s ears were pricked up and his teeth bared—sure signs of stress, alertness and concentration. He was listening to words that Giymuy could not hear, and reading words she could not see.
“The station’s under attack.” He reported, tersely.
“Who by?”
“That’s still being…” His ears rose, then flattened against his skull.
“Regaari?”
”…The Swarm of Swarms.” he quickened the pace. “The Hunters are back.”
HMS Sharman, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches
Major Owen Powell
“FALL IN! Fall in and listen the fook up!”
The Operators had been in the middle of tidying up the barracks and doing basic chores like the washing up and laundry. They immediately dropped what they were doing and fell in around him, giving Powell their full and undivided attention. He didn’t skip a beat.
“Ten minutes ago our listening post in the Capitol system sent back its message buoy, reporting a massive spike in activity on Hunter communications channels and several sensor contacts. The Swarm’s attacking Capitol Station. Gear up and get on the shuttle, We dust off in three! Go, GO!”
Gearing up was a simple as grabbing the emergency bags that they all kept in the locker room for this exact reason and sprinting for the waiting shuttlecraft which had set down on the base’s helipad. It was a simple, stock Dominion model, little more than a dull grey cuboid with a window in the front and a door in the back. No human company had yet developed a version that the armed services liked well enough to buy, much to the grumbling of the people who had to use them, who were universally of the opinion that literally anything human-made would have been an improvement.
They were aboard and belted in in less than two minutes. Powell stood towards the front, gripping an overhead strap to stabilise himself as the little craft lurched skyward.
“Right, This operation is called ‘NOVA HOUND’.” he began, raising his voice over the engines. “Lucky for us, we’ve got an OPLAN for this exact scenario. The attack began ten or fifteen minutes ago. Our estimated response time is forty or fifty minutes. By the time we’re on scene, the defending fleet will have been brushed aside and the station itself will have been overrun by Hunters for a good half hour. Safe to assume that civilian casualties are total, and in this station’s case that’s a good twelve thousand people.”
“VIPs—council members, ambassadors, visiting dignitaries—have all got security details with them, which we believe makes enough difference. We have schematics for Capitol Station, we think we know where they’re likely to be holed up. Our mission is rescue and extraction of as many dignitaries and civilians as we can. Secondary objectives include causing as much damage as possible to the Swarm, intelligence gathering, and propaganda.”
“We’ll be deploying on Caledonia, which has been refit as a staging and hospital ship. The V-class destroyers are the frontline, they’ll hold the swarm by the nose. They’ve got the staying power and EWAR. Myrmidon will be serving in its new role as on-field energy support, keeping the V-class’ charged. Meanwhile, USAF TS/2 squadrons will deliver the killing blows and provide close screen. Both of them are there as a big distraction to let the men on this shuttle accomplish the real mission.”
“Our overwatch is provided by JETS, led by Lieutenant Ross aboard HMS Caledonia. Jones, Murray, Price, you’re covert infiltration and assault. Your job is to drive the outboard and dive onto the station, effect quiet ingress as close to the target section as possible. Blaczynski, Firth, you’re on the boat too, as am I. We help secure our foothold then dig in and command.”
“Once we’re in, the Protectors—-that’s Arés and Burgess—-and Defenders-—Stevenson, Sikes, Akiyama and Vandenberg—-Jump in from the shipboard array. That’s the assault team’s cue to go monkey-shit on the Hunters, leave none of them alive. Delta sets up the evacuation Array then maintains our perimeter and runs combat camera. Protectors, you’ll be handling the refugees. Hunters usually kill outright, so there probably won’t be a lot of medicine to do, so you’re also humping ammo and gear for the assault team. The evac Array will be sending the civilians to the deck of HMS Caledonia. We’ll be using our default callsigns. I’m STAINLESS. Any questions?”
“Sir.” Stevenson raised his hand. “Do we bring a backup Array?”
Powell nodded. “Yes. Any further questions? No? Are we clear?”
“YES SIR!”
“Right. Give me your war names!”
“LONGLEGS!”
“STERLING!”
“HIGHLAND!”
“RIGHTEOUS!”
“STARFALL!”
“TITAN!”
“THOR!”
“REBAR!”
“SNAPFIRE!”
“BASEBALL!”
“WARHORSE!”
“And don’t you fookin’ forget it, lads. Let’s do this right.”
Capitol Station, orbiting Planet Garden, Capitol System, Dominion Space
Regaari
“Every shot we fire misses—they’re just NOT THERE any more. I don’t know where they learned a trick like this, but we’re losing ships fast out here, and inflicting no damage that I can see.”
“No hope of holding the field?” Regaari was part of a wedge of Gaoians pushing against a tide of stampeding lifeforms. Already one of his men was badly hurt, having been kicked hard by a panicking Vzk’tk. His role wasn’t to push and shove and shout and try to make room—he was too busy co-ordinating with the largest and most senior craft in the Gaoian contingent of the security fleet, the CGC Winter Fire.
“None. Your ETA to the shuttle?” Its captain was a Whitecrest, one of Regaari’s Brothers, both by clan and, he suspected, a half-sibling genetically.
“Everything’s panicking in here.” Regaari grunted, then raised his voice to be heard as a flock of wailing Kwmbwrw became the latest obstacle for them to push against. “Most of them are running away from the escape ships for some stupid reason. How long can you give me?”
“If we let all the others die first? A paw of [minutes], six at the outside.”
Regaari assessed matters. They had made it only a few hundred meters at best from the council chamber since the attack began. “Not good enough.” he declared.
“I know. I’m sorry, Brother, but at this point we have to treat everything aboard the station as lost. We may as well salvage some assets from this, and carry word to Gao of what–”
The link went dead with a sharp squeal in Regaari’s ear.
“Winter Fire, you broke up there.” He told them.
Silence.
“Winter Fire, come in?”
“Officer Regaari, CGS Winter Fire is destroyed.” one of the other ships sent. “We’re warping out. Nothing we can do—may as well save what we can. Sorry.”
“Regaari!”
He turned. The Mother-Supreme was leaning heavily against a wall, panting and grimacing with a hand pressed to her chest. “Mother-Supreme?”
She slumped, sliding to the ground. Concerned males gathered round and Regaari rushed to her side. “Giymuy!”
“Oh, don’t…” she coughed. “At least my age is getting me first, before the Hunters do.”
The men exchanged glances, aware that they weren’t to be so lucky.
“We can still–”
“Don’t be so stupid!” she snapped, then her breath rattled horribly. She was clearly in hideous pain.
She continued In a gentler tone. “Regaari. You can escape. I will only slow you down, and so will these soldiers. Get…” she heaved and coughed, but fought through it. “Get to the diplomatic shuttle, and activate the emergency displacement recall…Tell them…” her strength was failing by the second, and when she repeated “tell them…” she was almost inaudible.
Regaari leaned in close. He only barely heard her last words.
He closed her eyes. “I’ll tell them.” he promised.
“Officer?” One of the soldiers asked him, clearly expecting an order.
“What?” Regaari asked, surveying the ceiling.
“What do we do?”
“First, you stand back.” Regaari ordered. When they did so, he aimed his pulse rifle and blasted the vent cover out of the ceiling with three precise shots.
“Second,” he said, slinging the rifle over his shoulder “you give me a boost up into that vent.”
They did so. Gaoian gravity was just a little higher than Galactic Standard, and between two of them, he was launched to the height of a ceiling that could accommodate even the tallest Rrrrtktktkp’ch or bulkiest Guvnurag. He caught the edge, swung there for a second, and then hauled himself up and into the air duct.
“And…third?” One of the soldiers asked.
Regaari unslung his gun and got his bearings.
“You kill as many of them as you can, and you don’t let them take you or your Brothers alive.” he told them. “Goodbye.”
HMS Violent, Cimbrean orbit, the Far Reaches
Commodore William Caruthers
“Signal from HMS Caledonia, Commodore. They say the SOR is aboard, suited up and ready.”
Caruthers acknowledged the communication with a clear nod and eye contact. “By my estimation, that makes us ready to go.” he observed.
Violent’s Captain—Commander Anthony Miller—nodded. “I agree sir.”
“Signal the fleet to prepare to jump on my mark…”
He was pleased that it took only some five seconds before “All ships ready to jump, Admiral.” was called.
“Mark.”
Caruthers always felt cheated by the occasion of a jump. He would have liked a lurch, or a little jolt, or some tingling sensation, or even just a nondescript sense of something having happened. As it was, the only indication that anything at all had changed was the way his operations display began to populate itself.
The untrained eye would have seen only a mess. Caruthers, however, had a very trained eye.
The seven ships of his task group had translated through their wormholes and landed some ten thousand kilometers from Capitol Station. Far enough away that their miniscule signatures would be easily missed, close enough that the EM-spectrum latency shouldn’t throw off their targeting or electronic warfare.
As they arrived, HMS’ Violent, Vigilant, Victory, Vendetta, Vanguard and Viceroy each quietly released their passenger contingent of six BAE Terrier unmanned space vehicles—car-sized lozenges of thrusters, sensors and electronic attack modules designed to multiply their mothership’s electronic superiority and obfuscate the fleet’s exact size, composition and position.
The result was an immediate widening of their sensor net, and the Hunters weren’t bothering with subtlety. Even on passive sensors only, with the full group of seven warships and thirty drones deployed, he had an excellent idea of exactly what they were dealing with.
Capitol Station was a white, glass and chrome broccoli floret twenty kilometers long, ending in a tangled root of rust-brown mooring gantries and docking bays. describing a rough sphere around it with a radius of some five hundred kilometers was the Swarm, consisting of literally thousands of ships, including fifty or sixty which were a match, in terms of tonnage at least, for Myrmidon and Caledonia, both of which were by far the most massive ships in the human fleet.
They did not, fortunately, appear to be reacting to the arrival of the Deathworlders.
“Dragon’s teeth out.” he ordered.
The dragon’s teeth had been modified since the last battle at Cimbrean. Their canisters were now filled with high-pressure air rather than using explosives to disperse the minisatellite jump beacons, allowing them to be deployed without creating an obvious sensor contact. Violent’s hull rang as twenty such canisters were launched away from the ship on random timers, creating a friendly sphere of possible evasive jumps.
At a range of ten thousand clicks, and with the twin advantages of surprise and EWAR on their side, the fleet was now well prepared to weather a sustained firefight.
“Signal the fleet.” he announced.
“Ready sir.”
“Horatio.”
In the finest of military traditions, ‘Horatio’ was a prearranged code phrase, meaning that the fleet should load a specific type of ammunition, calculate a specific firing solution, and await the second phrase which would be the cue to fire. Caruthers gave them the thirty seconds they needed.
“Nelson.” he ordered.
The answer from all six ships at once was an opening flurry of firepower, a two-to-three-to-one mix of gravity spikes, conventional anti-ship ammunition and specialist ammo that would hopefully go unnoticed alongside the rest of the firepower. Simultaneously, the EWAR opened up, strobing the Swarm with dazzling masers and flooding every band they were broadcasting on with powerful white noise.
Those gravity spikes were necessary. Without them the Hunter ships would just warp to point-blank range in the moment they were aligned along the correct vector, eliminating the human range advantage in an infinitesimal shaving of a second. The only counter to that was gravity spikes, delivered by timed-explosion rounds that filled the intervening space with heavily distorted spacetime against which warp drives could secure no footing, ensuring that the Hunters would remain firmly confined to subluminal maneuvers.
The three parts of conventional ammunition did their job equally well, however. Four of the larger Swarm craft were crippled in the opening volley, spilling the contents of their pressurized bowels as the human guns thumped and hurled their payloads down a narrow warp channel which dissipated mere centimeters from the target’s hulls, allowing no possibility of evasive action.
The Swarm responded with animal speed, showing off just how efficient the Hunter cybernetic communications really were. All of those ships were behaving almost like a single amoeboid organism, spreading out and sending loose tendrils of high-speed ships creeping out and around, questing for a vector from which to try and warp the intervening distance and engulf or snare the outnumbered human task group. Several motes of light actually lifted off the surface of Capitol Station, abandoning their tick-like burrowing in pursuit of the prized Deathworlder quarry.
Caruthers allowed himself a satisfied nod. “Signal Colonel Stewart.” he said “Tell him they’ve taken the bait.”
Rylee Jackson
“Epic to Group: The Brits have engaged. All units fold your WiTCheS and accelerate to combat speed.”
Rylee practically swore with relief. The tension had been killing her, and she obeyed the order enthusiastically, punching Firebird up to speed and aligning for the station as hard as her sled could accelerate.
Lurking near the star to recoup their lost energy from the extreme long-range jump from Sol had swiftly gotten dull. She was a combat pilot, and Firebird and her sisters were combat spaceframes. They belonged in the melee.
The wing reported ready. Stewart’s voice had an eager edge to match Rylee’s own feelings “Epic to Group: Off we go.”
They jumped. Warping to the target station when the British ships had polluted its skies with gravity spikes was asking for damage, which is why the opening salvo had included beacon rounds that streaked through the Hunter formation and slowed to sublight velocities on the far side, inviting the TS/2s to enfilade the Swarm.
The sky went from empty, to being awash with red contacts, painted by the Royal Navy FOF and confirmed by the absence of friendly RFID. Fed by the combat controllers aboard Caledonia, her HUD indicated her assigned box and describing a cuboid some thousand kilometers long. At the kinds of speeds reached in starship combat, she would sweep through a volume that large in seconds.
Semenza was reciting his EWAR and weapons reports from only inches behind her head.
Things had changed in the last couple of years. The missile payload was gone, replaced with electronic attack pods that further multiplied their force’s ability to blind and confuse the Hunters. only the GAU-8/S remained for their onboard weaponry.
A targeting laser speared one of the big ships as she raked its flank with 30mm rounds, shredding its shields. Behind her, Semenza grunted in satisfaction. “Firebird one, fox four.”
Rather than launching the missile, he summoned one. There was a stockpile of thousands back on Earth, and one of them jumped into the fight at Semenza’s call, existing on the battlefield for barely half a second before it slammed into the Swarmship and mauled it.
“Data point. The fuckers are armored now.” Semenza noted. He was right. In their last fight, that exact same class of missile had dismembered a ship of that size. Now it had merely gouged a ragged chunk from its flank.
“Hit it again.”
“Wilco. Firebird one, fox four.”
The wounded Swarmship blinked out of existence, and Semenza’s missile spiralled drunkenly off into the black, too confused and low on power to select a new target.
“Data point. They can evade-jump now.” Semenza added.
An incoming contact became a cloud of gas and light debris as Riley vectored sideways and put a cloud of 30mm rounds in its flight path. Its own railgun rounds went wide, barely a hundred meters to starboard.
“Stay frosty.” she muttered.
Regaari
The vent did two things for Regaari.
It saved his life, allowing him to walk, then crawl through the narrower ducting, unimpeded and unobserved towards the hangar where the Gaoian diplomatic yacht was landed.
And it let him hear the screams. It caught and amplified them, so that he heard every one in hollow, magnified, metallic detail.
So many of them. Intermingled with the sounds of pulse gun fire, the flash and strobe of Nervejam grenades, and a new sound, a heavy explosive sound that reminded him of the action movies he’d watched with Xiù, years ago.
But mostly screams. Screams of terror. Screams of pain. Dying squeals and pleading. Defiant yells as some of the soldiers and security troopers went down fighting.
Sometimes, when he couldn’t hear the screams, he could hear the eating.
Those were the worst. He hardly dared move at all in those quiet sections, for fear that the slightest sound would give him away. He had to inch past, treated to a full view of what, exactly, the Hunters did with their prey.
But his luck held. Either he was silent enough to not give himself away, or else they were so enraptured by their feast as to not notice.
He crawled onwards.
Owen Powell
When it came down to it, the difference between riding an outboard launch wearing a wetsuit, and riding an extravehicular launch wearing an EV-MASS, was basically that the latter was quieter. No waves, no bird call, none of the little noises that had hitherto masked every covert infiltration of Powell’s career. Just silence, save for his breathing.
The craft itself was little more than a conical bank of capacitors mounted on a kinetic thrust plate, with latching points for the infiltration team and any heavy gear they were bringing to be attached and folded inside its little warp field. It almost looked like a black rubber launch. Across the huge distances involved it relied on computer navigation rather than a pilot, so there was little to do but program it, hang on, and hit the button on the control screen at the little vehicle’s nose.
He had never felt so exposed in all his life.
There was no jolt or anything—the inertial compensation provided by the warp field was too well-tuned for that—but it was still jarring for HMS Caledonia to vanish from behind them and for Capitol station—which had until now just been a nigh-invisible glimmer of light, suddenly be there, right in front of them. Twenty kilometers long and only two kilometers away.
Technically, they were smack in the middle of the Swarm of Swarms, but at the scales involved human senses were hopelessly inadequate for noticing that fact. Only the occasional streak of light across the stars—weapons fire, or a ship moving at sanity-fraying velocities—hinted that there was even a battle raging silently all around them.
If their stealthy approach was not stealthy enough, if the EWAR that was theoretically blinding every sensor delicate enough to spot them, wasn’t, then the only mercy would be that their annihilation would be so instant and total that none of them would notice it happening.
The last approach used cold-gas thrusters rather than the kinetics. The Launch was designed to have practically zero sensor signature, after all. It had been a precision approach—they were barely ten meters from the station hull, stationary relative to a large window, though the mirroring on the glass made it impossible to see within, only that the section was not lit.
They detached from the Launch and Powell turned a single gentle somersault to kiss against the hull, absorbing the last of his momentum with his knees just as they had practiced in zero-G training so many times before.
Breaching the glass was simple. STERLING and HIGHLAND hacked a simple square out of the glass with two simple swipes of their fusion knives. Air pressure did the rest, flinging the plate of glass out into space, along with a blizzard of small objects caught in the rush of escaping air.
Legsy heaved himself through. There was a moment of silence.
“Clear.”
Powell hit the beacon on his belt as the Combat Controllers propelled themselves through the breach, and an inky cuboid, nearly invisible in space, simply appeared without ceremony next to him. Divorced of its power source, the stasis field collapsed and WARHORSE, BASEBALL, TITAN, THOR, REBAR and SNAPFIRE were hanging next to him.
He let them through the hole first and, once through himself, settled onto the deck in galactic standard gravity. The Deltas deployed a forcefield seal over the breach and, at their nod, Legsy and STERLING burst through the door into the corridor beyond, pushing past the hurricane rush of air that flooded into their entry room. Their SMGs spat out their rounds with a noise that went right through Powell’s chest..
He was pleased to hear it. The silence of vacuum had been getting to him, and any sound was welcome, even if it wasn’t a pleasant sound—shrieking alarms, wailing aliens and the distant hammering of Hunter pulse fire, plus an unpleasant hissing. Apparently their forcefield wasn’t as airtight as hoped.
“Right. Let’s get into an airtight compartment.” he ordered.
They vacated the room and sealed the door behind them. Arés raised his SAW and fired a sharp six-round burst at something, and Powell suppressed some pride when he turned and saw that the kid had just bagged his first Hunter kill. He was in commander mode right now, he couldn’t afford to be sentimental.
Legsy, HIGHLAND and STERLING took point, storming down the corridor and ripping into a knot of Hunters that were tormenting a shuddering Guvnurag. All five of the monsters were dead before they even knew they were under assault.
The huge alien was in a bad way, bleeding horribly from where the Hunters had bitten the flesh right off her living body. Burgess went to work, and Powell took a moment to evaluate their position. It was some kind of a common area, full of benches and tables and the kind of alien-sized furniture that made good high cover for humans. Better still, there was plenty of room for the Defenders to deploy their jump array.
“This is our spot.” he announced.