Date Point: 14y4d AV
Interstellar space near the Gao system
Captain Joyce Luong, USAF 946th Spaceflight Wing
Life and death could hang on even nonviolent actions. There were hundreds of thousands of personnel across all the branches of the armed services who in fact would never fire a shot in anger, but whose daily responsibilities could have fatal consequences…or avert fatal consequences, as the case may be. The sailors who lashed a helicopter down so it wouldn’t shift in rough seas and crush somebody, the navigators shaving precious hours off a charted course to deliver humanitarian aid, or the intel analysts who had to decide if those known terrorist leaders were gathering for a strategy planning session, or a wedding.
…More often than not, of course, the wedding was cover for a strategy planning session, which was why Joyce Luong was very happy indeed to leave that job to other people.
Attention to detail. It was why uniforms existed, in the end. The military didn’t want to hand life-or-death responsibility to somebody who couldn’t even dress themselves correctly, and the habits engrained in training still applied thousands of lightyears from Earth in the cockpit of an FTL strike fighter on deep-ranging patrol of near-Gao interstellar space.
Dull as it might be—and long may it remain dull—if anything big was on approach to Gao, the difference between victory and catastrophe might be measured in seconds.
Her WSO, Curtis, was constantly fine-tuning the FTL wake sensor. They had a lot of sky to cover, so the pattern was simple: Broad sweep, narrow focus on anything that looked even the least bit out of place, verify, repeat.
“…Clear,” she announced. “Next.”
Luong nodded inside her helmet and called up the target she’d already programmed. “Warp drive active…two…one…warp.”
This far out, there was nothing to show that they were travelling at superluminal speeds at all. They were half a lightyear from Gao, and at the slow and energy-efficient pace they were doing even that comparatively close star’s track across the sky was imperceptible.
But track it did, until they’d traced a full ten degrees of orbit.
“…Back at sublight.”
“…Got an echo already,” Curtis said.
Luong’s pulse kicked up a fraction. “Field’s flat. It isn’t our wake echo,” she said.
“It’s way too big to be ours…” Curtis sounded tense. Luong watched her narrow the scan.
What she saw sent her hands flying to the FTL controls. There was a tsunami of dark energy headed their way, the combined bow-shock of uncountable thousands of warp signatures. They weren’t perfectly in its path…but Gao was.
“Shit…” Curtis swore.
“I see it.” Luong was surprised to find that she was perfectly calm, now that the worst was happening. Her fingers danced across the console with mechanical precision, selecting a beacon code almost on instinct. “Jumping back.”
There was that…odd feeling that came with a Jump. It wasn’t unpleasant, it was just impossible to describe, being neither negative nor positive G. As though her guts had very briefly been pulled in a direction she couldn’t point to.
They were instantly the focus of several sensors. Destroyers, Bulldogs, the USS San Diego. Nothing jumped unannounced into Gao.
IFF was working fine, though. Several of the sensors promptly lost interest.
“FIREBUG-TWO-ONE, PYRAMID. Rebound check.”
’Rebound check’ was the new brevity code requesting to know the reason for an unscheduled incoming urgent jump. Luong’s reply was just as efficient.
“PYRAMID, FIREBUG-TWO-ONE. Rebound bellringer. Multiple superlight bogeys inbound, vector RIDLEY-ONE.”
There was a pause. Not, by any standard, a long pause. But it was long enough for swearing. The brief lapse in communications traffic ended with the clipped, cultured voice of Admiral Knight.
“Fleet, TEMPLAR. Maneuver to intercept vector RIDLEY-ONE. FOOTBALLS ready, weapons free. Load spike rounds and hold for blockade…The Swarm of Swarms is here. Good hunting, everyone.”
Date Point: 14y4d AV
Dark Eye facility, Shasu, moon of Gao
Technical Sergeant Adam Arés
“…Powell told me about you.”
<:-(>
“Can’t you speak?”
<NotEasy; AlienForeignWrong>
“You? Or speaking?”
There was a moment’s hesitation before the next message appeared on the screen Adam was addressing.
<Yes>
Adam almost snorted a laugh. “…Right. Well…thank you. A lot of lives got saved.”
<:-)/<3>
That sobered him.
“There’s…really some Ava in there?”
<Yes>
“How…how much?”
There was a much, much longer pause before finally, to Adam’s enormous surprise, a complete and coherent paragraph wrote itself on the screen.
<It’s complicated. I’m not alive: this entity killed me. What you’re reading now is the entity inputting the thought it wants to communicate into my memories, which interpret that thought. Yes, it’s ghoulish and probably disturbing. I’m sorry. Just remember that you’re not actually speaking to Ava—the real Ava is back on Cimbrean. I’m just a ghost, or echo.>
“It…you…have her memories?”
<Mine and several others. But the rest are Igraens. It…for lack of a better word, it likes me more.>
The screen changed and an image formed. Adam looked away—The Entity had picked a moment when Ava had been examining herself in the mirror to form its image of her, and was apparently either ignorant or uncaring of the fact that she’d been fresh out of the shower at the time and wasn’t even wearing a towel. God only knew what other cues it was probably missing.
“It, uh… doesn’t have a lot of respect for your privacy.”
The image vanished.
<It’s sorry. Some of my memories confuse it. It used that memory because it was a happy one, and it likes happiness. Unfortunately, most of my happy memories are like that. You, me and Sara on the beach, for example.>
“You seem pretty calm about this…” Adam ventured.
<I told you, I’m not Ava. I’m just her memories, translating its meaning for your benefit. You’re speaking to the Entity through me, and it has very little control over what I say.>
“You keep saying ‘me’ and ‘I’ though, and calling it ‘it’.”
<Yes. Adam, there’s enough of me here to behave like myself, but I’m not really real. If I was I would be screaming in horror right now but I’m just memories and however much of my…her…personality it decided not to delete.>
“That’s…fuck, that’s horrible.”
<You just made it feel very sad. It wants you to know that it doesn’t want to be horrible, it just wants to survive. If it’s any consolation, I would have gone insane pretty quickly if it hadn’t assimilated me. It hopes that it spared me some suffering.>
Adam cringed internally and tried not to let it show. As strained as his relationship with Ava might be at times, he still cared deeply for her. This whole situation was sickening, but to think about a version of her being euthanized in cyberspace, alone and afraid and impossible to rescue, that was…
He didn’t want to deal with it. He was going to have a long talk with the counselor after this was done.
“…If all it wants is to survive, why help us?” he asked, veering away from the subject of Ava’s digital double’s horrific fate. “It must be taking some big risks by fighting Big Hotel.”
<Purpose is a vital component of survival – you have to have a reason to live, otherwise you’re just…existing. It thinks you probably know that. I KNOW you do.>
It was completely right, there.
“It learned that one from you?”
<Yes>
“…Well…Thank you. Again. You saved a lot of lives today.”
<Never enough.>
That actually put a smile on Adam’s face. “No,” he agreed. “Never. But better than nothing.”
<Give Ava a hug for me. You don’t have to tell her who it’s from.>
“…I’ll do that.”
<Thank you. …I miss hugs.>
The screen faded and Adam got the distinct sense that the conversation was over, on a note that left him completely off-balance.
It had certainly knocked all the manic, bouncing energy out of him. Right now, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do.
Firth and John were waiting outside for him, all concern and serious expressions.
“So…how’d it go? Is it really her?”
Adam signed. “No. It’s…Fuck, man.”
The other two nodded, understanding him perfectly, and scooped him into exactly the brotherly hug that he needed at that moment.
It took a lot of the tension out. “…Shit.”
“It coulda fuckin’ left us something to shoot,” Firth groused, letting him go. “I was all ready to fuck shit up an’ then I get fuckin’ blue-balled.”
Adam couldn’t help but chuckle darkly, despite everything. “You really are a fuckin’ savage, aren’t you?”
“Why deny it?” Firth’s voice was warm, but he sobered and gestured toward the transit shaft, where the others were gearing up to recover Rebar. “…Come on, bruh. We got a brother to carry…home…Somethin’ wrong LT?”
Costello had paused in his preparations, and his hand had drifted up the side of his helmet as he listened to whatever was coming in through the command channel. He turned and bolted back toward them. Behind his visor, his eyes were wide.
“…The Swarm’s here,” he said.
Date Point: 14y4d AV
Fleet Intelligence Center, HMS Myrmidon, Gao System
Admiral Sir Patrick Knight
“Counting a million warp signatures! …One point two million! …One point three!”
Knight lofted his voice over the urgent reports. Never mind that the sky was full of more contacts than they could possibly shoot down, panic was absolutely not an option.
“Seed their approach and launch the shield!”
“Aye Aye!”
The swarm reacted as it always did, less like a fleet than like some immense abyssal octopus under the command of a single will. As the fleet brought guns to bear and filled space at their extreme long range with gravity spike rounds, it split and flowed, tried to flow around the outside of the denial zone. It was slowed, but not stopped.
The shield went up. A system defence field out-system, between the orbits of Gao-star’s fifth and sixth planets.
Seconds later it was torn down again. A Hunter scout decloaked and fired off a nuclear-pumped X-ray weapon that vaporized both the emitter and the Firebird that had deployed it, costing precious seconds and two valiant air crew. Retaliatory fire from the Firebird’s wingman obliterated the Hunter, but the damage was done—the Swarm pushed over the threshold.
They had planned for this. There was more than one shield, more than one deployment point, but the confirmation that there were still Hunter scouts loitering inside their perimeter was grim…and as fast as the fleet poured on the gravity spikes, the Swarm had the sheer mass to just bully past and around it. It didn’t matter how good the FIC and the distributed calculations of all their Watsons were, the Swarm was just too big.
The Firebirds carrying the second shield closer in-system spent precious seconds relocating to throw off any lurking scouts that might have been lurking nearby. Sure enough, two new, previously hidden warp signatures moved to follow them and a faster-than-light game of cat-and-mouse bounced around Gao-4 intraorbital space as the Firebirds fought for a safe spot to drop the shield and defend it.
Other Firebirds scrambled to intercept and help, but…Too long. It was taking too damn long.
Knight straightened up and made the decision he’d been dreading.
“QUARTERBACK, TEMPLAR.” He read off his authorization. QUARTERBACK was Brigadier Stewart, currently aboard the USS San Diego and responsible for authorizing every WMD they’d fired so far in the last four days. In his hands sat the keys that unlocked all of the most devastating power that the human race had to its name.
“TEMPLAR, QUARTERBACK. Authorization received and acknowledged. Which asset do you require?”
Knight watched another tendril of the Swarm slip around the spike cordon and shave another half an AU off their safety margin.
“QUARTERBACK, TEMPLAR,” he said, with his pulse ringing in his ears. “Fire WERBS.”
Date Point: 14y4d AV
The Swarm-of-Swarms, Gao System
The Alpha-of-Alphas
The hunt was ecstasy, a pleasure unlike any other the Alpha of Alphas could imagine. The prey was dangerous and it fought, squirmed, held the Swarm at bay, but the Swarm was bigger, crueller, stronger.
Every second of futile resistance just made the coming orgy all the sweeter. The Alpha-of-Alpha’s maw—one of the few physical vestiges it had retained, for to remove that would have been the closest thing Hunters had to heresy—drooled prodigiously.
It would eat.
It would feast.
It would—
There was a millisecond anomaly on the sensors. Wormholes, thousands of them, opening all around it….And the Alpha-of-Alphas was reintroduced to the bite of something it had managed to forget.
<PAIN!>
Date Point 14y4d AV
Allied Deep Space Strategic Weapons Reserve, Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, USA, Earth
Weaponized Einstein-Rosen Bridge System
Technically, the allied military had already weaponized wormholes just by using them to connect their ships and strike craft to the enormous central reserve at Minot AFB. Thanks to ‘The Magazine’ as it had been nicknamed, every spaceborne asset humanity had could summon in the correct tool for the job at immediate notice, and the reserve ran deep.
WERBS went a step further, in that it actually used wormholes as weapons. It too was based at Minot, in a bunker excavated and constructed for the express purpose of housing it, and there were two important reasons why Allied commanders had been wary to the point of paranoia of ever using it: Its vast destructive potential, and its alarming simplicity. It was the second piece of FTL technology that mankind had ever invented, and it relied on nothing more than a simple mathematical trick.
Warp fields and wormholes interacted in peculiar ways. The two were distinct and thoroughly dissimilar kinds of distortion, forming as a consequence of entirely different higher-dimensional topographies. Where those topographies overlapped, the interference was mostly too weird and arcane to make use of.
But there was one mathematical solution to a wormhole’s tuning algorithm that interacted very neatly indeed with certain shapes of warp field. If the fields were adjusted just so at exactly the correct moment…then the intricate dark energy landscape they created stretched, snapped and cracked like a whip, and the object fired down the warp field and through the wormhole was annihilated. Utterly and instantly smeared out of material existence.
Its energy however arrived at the intended destination just fine, and even something as small as a ten-gram bullet, thus annihilated, produced an energy discharge encroaching on a quarter of a megaton.
All of which was why WERBS was so desperately secretive. It was absurdly simple, in that it consisted of only three main components: a warp field generator, a jump array, and a reliable supply of bullets.
Specifically, a General Electric M134 minigun.
In space around Gao, the pilots and crews of the fleet were saved from blindness by their canopies and screens, which protectively blanked out the light. Across the system, sensors shut down to avoid being damaged. In the Three Valleys region and across Gao’s night side, Humans and Gaoians alike flinched and shielded their eyes as a brief and unnatural day wrote itself across the heavens.
The Swarm-of-Swarms recoiled like a burned animal as its forward tendrils were eviscerated and boiling gravity waves tore through its core, ripping apart what they didn’t vaporize. A million Hunters died in a matter of seconds while seething radiation and exotic particles blinded and overwhelmed the Swarm’s sensors. Its shared communications network became a logjam of panic and the sensation of fellow Hunters being slaughtered by the thousand every moment.
In its sanctum, the Alpha-of-Alphas convulsed and howled in mind-fraying agony as its ships, its limbs were shredded. It panicked, flailed…and fled.
In a blind panic, the swarm dispersed. Hundreds of ships were obliterated before they could turn, hundreds more were smashed while their warp drives spun up. The deadliest military force in the galaxy scattered to the winds rather than stare down a weapon that had, in absolute terms, not destroyed that many of them.
But the pure shock and awe was devastating. Within moments, there was no Hunter presence remaining on the battlefield, only wreckage.
Thousands of lightyears away, in a bunker in North Dakota, a minigun spun down with its barrels glowing cherry red amidst a smoky haze and the hiss of boiling coolant.
WERBS had spoken.