“Room!”
Lieutenant Dross snapped to attention as the captain left the CIC. For the next four hours he had the watch, with strict orders not to disturb Captain Merkel for anything less than the apocalypse. Not that that was likely, of course. He was on the TAV Redoubtable, flagship of the Terran Home Fleet. If the Galactic Compact wanted to attack Sol, they’d have to fight their way through the heavily-fortified Midway system first. All he had to defend against was boredom.
Dross settled into his seat near the back of the CIC. The Redoubtable‘s heart was somewhat underwhelming — there was a reason all of the press shots of the Redoubtablehad opted for the flag bridge. Nothing but consoles lined the walls, some staffed by tired-looking sailors, and a curved floor-to-ceiling display on the far wall showed an empty and unmoving starscape. Everything fit together with cold, sterile precision, with not a hint of decoration or flare. This far into the Human-Compact war, every expense was spared. Even the captured GCS Ram had received only minor refits before joining the Home Fleet.
A movement along the right-hand bank of monitors caught Dross’s eye. He strode over to Ensign Peters, who’d sat up in her chair to pore over her console. She’d received an alert of some sort.
“Anything on the screens, Peters?”
“Maybe, sir. Something just cleared the gate, designate ESO 394-Romeo.”
“You sure it’s not just an unscheduled comm buoy from Second Fleet? They’ve been sending them more frequently lately.”
“Doubtful, sir. This didn’t come in on the Midway vector.”
Dross frowned. Warp gates needed two things: a clear path between stars, and a gate on either end. The lieutenant he wasn’t aware of any such routes into or out of Sol besides Midway. It was why they’d spent so many lives trying to hold the damn system. If this object revealed a new, previously unknown connection — perhaps one into a region of space unreachable by the Compact — it could be the discovery of his career.
“Pass the data down to NavInt and keep me informed of any updates. We’re doing this by the book.”
Tweetie picked his way through the crowd outside the Mt Mons Spaceport, doing his best to stay in Jenkins’ wake. The massive human soldier was able to clear a path through the press with an ease that the diminutive Nedji envied. People got out of Jenkins way — Tweetie was lucky if they noticed him in time to avoid kicking him. His bright gold plumage and four dark purple eyes didn’t quite make up for his meager three-and-a-half feet of height.
Ah well. At least he didn’t have to worry about anyone sitting on him in the subway.
The press thinned and Tweetie drew up alongside Jenkins. The human looked haggard — his face was set in a grimace, and large bags had formed under his eyes. The Nedji was fairly certain his friend had spent every night since his discharge drinking. He couldn’t blame him, either. The court martial had been more drawn-out and public than anyone had expected.
Jenkins glanced down at Tweetie, a hollow grin on his face.
“Having fun with the crowd?”
“As always. One of these days your species will learn to look before they step.”
“Doubtful. If a couple millions years of evolution couldn’t drill it into us, I’m not sure how a half-decade alliance will manage.”
“I could start kicking back.”
Jenkins laughed. “You’re pretty much the poster boy for your entire race. Anyone who sends you flying is already going to feel pretty miserable, even without a kick.”
Tweetie warded off a particularly scrawny passerby with a wing. The man stumbled and nearly fell, but he didn’t look down. Bastard probably thought he’d caught his foot on something.
“Reckon Calloway’s yacht’s going to be as nice as he promised?” asked Jenkins.
“Probably better,” replied Tweetie. “Rumor has it that he managed to snag a decommissioned fast attack ship, one of the old Grasshoppers. Those things are sexy.”
“Didn’t we insert into Mylar with a Grasshopper escort?”
“Sure did. I’ll remember watching the strafing run on that fucking Alpier’s palace until the day I die.”
“I, meanwhile, will cherish my memories of long weeks in far orbit, trying to figure out why the hell you guys went out of contact while simultaneously praying that the Compact doesn’t spot us. Longest deployment of my life.”
“At least you’ll get to see a Grasshopper up close tonight. Calloway seems pretty excited about his new ship.”
Jenkins chuckled. “He should be, it’s got the highest cost-to-tonnage ratio in the entire goddamn fleet. There’s a reason these beauties aren’t rolling off the line anymore.”
“You have any idea how he managed to afford this? I mean, the pay isn’t bad, but it took me two years to scrape together enough for a craterside apartment. I couldn’t even buy a share in a civvie four-seater, much less an entire fucking warfare.”
“His poetry, surprisingly enough. Never realized his work was so damn popular.”
Tweetie tried to picture Calloway — an aging chief warrant officer, veteran of dozens of operations during the human Unification Wars and the more recent Human-Compact war — scribbling verse at a desk. The image didn’t fit. Just one more thing the Nedji was sure he’d never be able to understand about humans.
Jenkins let out a groan as they rounded the corner to the spaceport’s security checkpoint. It was Tweetie’s turn to glance up.
“How bad? I can’t see much above belt-level.”
“We’re going to be here awhile.”
“Sir, ESO 394-Romeo has just begun a course correction. It’s decelerating.” Ensign Peter’s voice shook.
“Wait, what? I thought we were dealing with a rock.”
“So did I, sir.” Peters paused. “If we’re going by the book, this is when we send out a gunboat for a closer look”
“Understood, ensign. I’ll draft the orders immediately.”
Whep’s ears were drawn tight with concentration as he stared at the meat sizzling on the grill. The first droplets of blood had just started to rise from the steaks. He’d flip them in another thirty-seven seconds, add seasoning, then wait for their smell to indicate that they were finished. The Nyctra had gotten a lot better at cooking in the four years since they’d settled on Earth.
Whep also watched his cub, Spik. She hadn’t quite developed a sense of self-preservation, and he half expected that today would be the day she decided to try climbing onto the grill. She’d certainly climbed everything else: nearby trees, the three-tiered fountain outside their building, and — much to his and Leil’s embarassment — a solemn statue of a young human soldier standing at attention in the local square.
Leil was lounging nearby, her ears twitching with amusement. For some reason she loved to watch him cook, describing it as more fun than actually eating the food. Whep did his best to oblige her whenever he could.
He flipped the meat, brushed a light layer of spices onto them, then closed his eyes. Leil could manage Spik alone for a few minutes. The savory smell of cooking meat stood out clear against the seaside air, and he could taste the subtle changes in scent as his meal crept closer and closer to completion.
He caught the scents of a small pack of humans walking along the path above. Happy, contented smells, without any of the sharp spikes he’d come to recognize as surprise or anxiety. Vancouver had longs since gotten used to having a few hundred seven-foot tall bipedal wolves as residents. They’d even become something of a local mascot: Mt Mons had its Nedji, Dallas had its Askran, and Vancouver had its Nyctra.
There it was — perfectly cooked steak. He deftly slid the cuts of meat onto plates, subbed a command to disable the grill, and walked over to Leil’s bench to sit down. Spik, looking utterly exhausted, had collapsed beside her mother. Whep gave her twenty minutes before she was peeling around the beach again. He handed them each their plate.
Leil bit off a chunk, taking her time to chew carefully before swallowing. Then she turned to Whep.
“It’s a little overdone…”
“You always say that.”
“And you always know I’m lying. It’s perfect, as always. Nothing like your first attempt.”
Whep shuddered. “How was I to know that there was an actual flame under there? You can’t blame me for letting it spread to the meat.”
“But I can, even if that was a while ago. And I’d still eat burnt steak every night if it meant we could sit down more than once every couple of weeks.”
“It’ll start happening more now that I’m out of the Fleet and you’re stationed locally.”
“Maybe. Or you’ll take on a dozen projects with the pack and leave me lonely ever night.”
“You’re more likely to do that to me by volunteering for extra duty,” said Whep, his ears flaring into a grin. “We’re built to be busy. What’s the longest stretch of leave we’ve managed to take? Four days? Five?”
“Three, actually.” Leil took another bite of meat, then continued on without swallowing. “And the last day of that doesn’t really count, because you rewrote one of the Nyctra subversion SOPs.” She swallowed and glanced down at her plate. “We really need to start buying bigger cuts.”
Whep eyed his own plate. He’d barely made it through a third of his steak. “They’d have to grow bigger cows. Want some of mine?”
“Dont mind if I do.” Leil tore off half of his remaining meal, then paused. Her eyes flicked around frantically. “Where’s Spik?”
Whep glanced down at the spot next to his mate, where an empty plate rested on the weathered wood. Spik was nowhere to be seen.
“Damnit,” he sighed. “We almost made it through a whole day without losing her.”
Dross watched the gunboat’s small blip inch towards ESO 394-Romeo’s position. It looked so small on his HUD, almost swallowed by the vast empty space surrounding the gate, but he was still on edge. The Skipray‘s pilot would be closing to within a hundred klicks of the foreign object, which was now motionless relative to the gate.
The lieutenant had chosen to tap into the tac feed and comm channel discretely, without bringing it up on his console or chair’s speakers. He didn’t want to appear nervous in front of the crew, however nauseous he felt.
“This is Chief Petty Officer Dualla. We just got a good look at the ESO and are transmitting preliminary report now. It looks harmless.”
Dross skimmed through the sensor detail, absorbing the details. It was mostly technical details — estimated mass, element composition, and so on — but he was relieved to see no suggestion of structure or order. There was no way any sentient race would built a ship to that spec.
His relief didn’t last long. Dross jumped as the general quarters alarm sounded. The unidentified object vanished from the tac plot.
“God fucking damnit,” swore Peters. “394-Romeo just retreated it through the gate. The Skipray opened fire, but it dodged the graser and outran the missiles.”
Dross lost track of anything else Peters said when Dualla’s report came over the comm channel.
“Belay my last, it got skittish after we painted it with a targeting laser. Hit us with a weak EM pulse, then turned tail and ran. We failed to neutralize it before it escaped through the gate. Request further orders.”
The communications officer glanced up at Dross, the question already forming on her lips, but he cut her off with a sharp slash of his hand.
“I’m listening, ensign. Tell the Skipray to come home, then wake Captain Merkel. This just got messy.”
Tweetie brushed a reverent wingtip across the sleek hull of the Dewdrop, Calloway’s newly acquired “yacht,” doing his best to keep his crest from flaring up with excitement.
He’d spent most of his life on the various ships in the Nedji Remnant Flock, bouncing from post to post as one of the few shipboard marines. Every vessel had been ancient, held together by hundreds of years worth of jury-rigged systems and scavenged parts. The air recycler on his birthship, the Highbranch, had clunked rhythmically every four-and-a-half minutes. The computer system on the Pouncer, one of their few warships, would hard reset if the grasers were fired while an airlock was open. Tweetie had never dreamed he’d get to see something as beautiful as the Dewdrop up close.
Grasshopper-class fast attack ships had been built to do everything. They were aerodynamic and sleek. Sharp, radar-deflecting angles provided stealth in and out of atmosphere. The stern of the ship featured a pre-contact human ion drive, letting the vessel move quietly at low acceleration, and an impeller nacelle on the ship’s prow gave it the speed of a modern warship when secrecy wasn’t required.
By rights, they should have been ugly as sin. Human designers should never have been able to blend so many conflicting design decisions into a sixty-metre frame. Somehow they’d managed, though, and produced a class of matte-black beauties.
Tweetie could see where the Dewdrop‘s graser blisters and missile bays had been removed — not even Calloway had enough connections to get his hands on a fully operational warship — but the military-grade comms array hadn’t been touched. Neither, he realized with surprise, had the cloaking module. It was experimental, and he’d learned the hard way that the light-bending apparatus didn’t do much against Compact sensors when you got within a few dozen klicks, but it was a hell of a lot better than optical camouflage.
Calloway had tinkered with the ship, too. A small shuttle bay filled the space left after the removal of the missile bay. A modest turret gave the ship a light weapons system. And, if Tweetie wasn’t mistaken, the impellars had been replaced with a model normally seen on civilian racers. That meant the reactor had seen substantial upgrades, too, along with most of the internal systems.
Damn crest, thought Tweetie as he surreptitiously ran an arm along his head. I’m not a fucking hatchling.
Jenkins wasn’t watching — he was busy staring at the ship. Calloway was though, with a shit-eating grin plastered against his face.
“Like it?” asked Calloway.
Tweetie could almost hear the implied ‘sir’ at the end of the question. Calloway couldn’t help but give the impression that he was in uniform and awaiting inspection.
“It’s beautiful,” said Tweetie. “How the everloving fuck did you keep the stealth module?”
Calloway’s grin turned sheepish. “I’m not exactly sure that Fleet knows it’s still on there. The crew behind the decom knew who was getting the ship, and they… took some liberties. I didn’t realize how much they overlooked until it arrived from the Hephaestus.”
“Sometimes I envy your contacts. You seem to know just about everyone of importance in the entire fleet.”
“Just the warrants and chiefs, Captain. The ones that matter, anyways.” Calloway turned away from the Nedji. “Hey, Jenkins, stop drooling on my ship and get your unemployed ass on board. Let’s get this maiden voyage going.”
Tweetie clamped an arm over his crest as he strode up into the Dewdrop. He was looking forward to this. His usual drop pod just didn’t have the same allure of a warship, decommissioned or not.
Dross fidgeted in his seat, doing his best not to make eye contact with the men seated on either side of him. Aside from the petty officer giving the briefing, he was probably the most junior person in the room. He still wasn’t sure how Merkel had managed to send him in her place.
At least it was interesting. In less than an hour, NavInt had manged to turn the mess of readings generated by the Skipray into a detailed threat assessment. Well, a fairly detailed one. There wasn’t much information to go off of.
“394-Romeo appears to be primarily carbon-silicate in composition,” continued the briefer, “with heavier elements present in trace amounts. On a macro scale, it was little more than a twenty-meter amorphous blob. No weapons, no visible means of acceleration. We can only speculate as to how it was built on a micro scale. It emits a fairly constant stream of low-intensity microwave radiation”
A new slide flashed up at the front of the screen, this one featuring a map of the gate’s exclusion zone. The object’s exit vector was plotted in bright red.
“394-Romeo appears to have originated near the galactic core, on the fringes of Compact-controlled space. We’ve identified two candidate systems that could have anchored unstable routes, but they’re beyond the remnants of a nova. We have yet to find a stable route to a star.”
“Upon exiting the gate, 394-Romeo began to undergo a slight deceleration. A gunboat, the Skipray, was dispatched with orders to approach the ESO and provide more detailed scans.”
The gunboat’s course appeared on the map, this time in dark green.
“The initial set of passive scans gave us most of our information. Active scans, however, elicited a response from 394-Romeo.”
An bright-red exit vector appeared, tracing a path from the object back through the gate. Dross frowned slightly when he noticed its curve. Nothing could be that maneuverable. His mouth was already open, the question about to spring from his lips, when he remembered where he was and slammed his jaw closed.
The other men and women in the room were bolder. The briefer set his face into a determined mask as he quieted some of the most senior officers in the Terran Fleet.
“Please hold your questions until the end, gentleman. There’s a good chance I’ll answer them in the next couple minutes. In short, though: yes, it outran one of our Mark-IX missiles, albeit barely. Yes, the Skipraygot a piece of it with its grasers. And yes, it made it through the gate despite that, and perfectly matched its exit vector despite evasive maneuvers. No, we’re not sure how.”
Dross sank back into his seat as the presentation continued. He could feel the wolfish curiosity emanating from the officers — he didn’t envy the NavInt petty officer one bit.
Whep and Leil were walking back to their spot on the beach, their cub clutched between them, when Whep’s mate came to an abrupt stop. Spik let out a yelp as she was suddenly stretched between the two Nyctra.
“Hey Whep,” said Leil, “you remember some of those drills we ran back on the Galactic Pride, the ones that took place behind closed doors?”
Whep twitched his ears in acknowledgment. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget, we went over them enough times with NavInt after we defected. What brought them to mind?”
“One of my friends on the Redoubtable wanted my take on a recent ESO. Nobody’s quite sure what to make of it.”
“What made him think you’d be able to help him ID an extrasolar rock?”
“Take a look.”
Leil bounced the file over to Whep’s HUD. As he scrolled through, his ears drifted lower and lower against his head. Spik let out a small whimper and he loosed his paw before he crushed hers. Leil watched him with concern.
“See it?” asked Leil.
“Yeah. This would’ve triggered the full scrub. Our Claw had a level all to itself, if I remember right, and a small ships worth of explosives and EMPs.”
“Everything dead, every piece of data wiped, and charges at structural points. We never did figure out why they were that paranoid.”
“This might not be what we drilled for.”
“With that EM spectrum? There’s no chance and you know it. I’m updating the Redoubtable.” Leil glanced back towards their home, a cozy apartment halfway up the Harrington Tower. “I vote we head back. Pack up anything we can’t bear to leave. Then we start making sure everyone in the pack’s up to date on the full-planet evac.”
“Those plans haven’t been updated since the human’s contact. They’re half a decade out of date.”
“Then we’re going to have to make damn sure we get to the ships first.”
It started as a trickle, an almost shy beginning. Small ships jumped into Sol in twos and threes along the newly discovered vector, slowing to a stop a few thousand kilometers away from the gate.
A close observer would have noticed that they bore a striking resemblance to the Skipray, but there were no close observers. The nearest Terran platform was more than twenty thousand kilometers away. A clever observer would have noticed the microwave radiation leaking from the new arrivals, but there were no clever observers watching. They were busy arriving at a grim conclusion.
Soon the dozens of intruders became hundreds. Hundreds became thousands. And, as Lieutenant Dross stared at his monitor in disbelief, thousands became millions. They poured through the gate like a flash flood.
The Home Fleet shifted, trying to surround and contain the growing incursion, but it was hopeless. The sheer number of contacts beggared belief. The Redoubtable logged seven million unique objects before the swarm became too dense for Terran sensors to pierce.
The Redoubtable‘s CIC was quiet. Captain Merkel stood next to her station, face set in a grim mask. Ensign Peters fidgeted in her chair as she stared hopelessly at her console. Dross, back in his role as the ship’s fire control officer, frantically designated targets while trying to squeeze in as many last-minute diagnostics as he could.
The Redoubtable had two hundred and twelve graser blisters, each crewed by four men. Dross needed more than eleven minutes to bring them all online. The general quarters alarm was still echoing throughout the ship. Men were still scrambling into their skinsuits, still dashing through the corridors towards their station. They hadn’t expected this. They weren’t ready. They needed more time.
Dross already knew he wasn’t going to get it. He flinched at Merkel’s sharp intake of breath.
“Lieutenant Dross, weapons free. Let’s brush this annoyance aside and get on with our days.”
“Aye, sir.” He was surprised at how calm his voice was. His hands were shaking. “Opening fire.”
Two hundred Terran capital ships loosed their weapons, tearing into the ever-growing swarms. Graser beams raked through the tiny ships of the swarm. In the midst of the formation, the captured Ram struck out with its full might, loosing a thousand lances of destruction. Fragile hulls exploded apart into fragments. The three Terran defensive stations orbiting the gate, each the size a small moon, opened their bays and spilled out half a million nuclear missiles. Every detonation tore gaping holes in the swarm.
The Terran Home Fleet unleashed more destruction in the span of three minutes than the Sol system had seen since the birth of mankind. Wherever their weapons reached, the incoming ships fell. The Terran ships shook with the effort of maintaining the barrage.
It wasn’t enough. The swarm absorbed the destruction, closing ranks as its outer layers boiled away under the Terran’s fury. The torrent continued unabated. The mass of invaders grew. They absorbed everything that Sol had to give until, finally, the missiles bays ran dry. The storm of grasers dwindled, then ceased. For a moment, both sides breathed.
Then the swarm struck back.