Sol
As the Terran Home Fleet’s opening salvo died off, the invading swarm’s counterthrust began. Matte-grey ships boiled forward like a cloud of locusts, wrapping around the Terrans and cutting them off from the rest of the solar system. Once it had fully encircled the defending warships, the swarm opened fire.
The Home Fleet’s screens absorbed tens of thousands of graser blasts as they slashed out from the swarm. Their point defense cannons chewed through countless missiles. The defending warships rotated ships between the sheltered center of their formation and the exposed edges, trying to spread the damage out.
For the time being, the Home Fleet held its ground. Their own grasers and missiles struck back, cutting swathes of destructions into the enveloping cloud of invaders. But the swarm soon filled any gap left behind by Terran weapons. It began to close in.
Vancouver, Earth
Whep slipped a small data storage module into his ruck, tucking it between one of Spik’s plush toys and her blunted training knife. His cub had trusted him with the stuffed rabbit Calloway had bought for the cub’s first birthday, he noticed — a floppy, battered thing that she was currently loving to pieces. He was more than a little touched.
There wasn’t much else in the apartment worth saving. His rifle and pistol were already sitting next to the door, and he’d never been much for clothes. The two pairs he’d packed were everything he owned. All of Spik’s toys weren’t all going to fit into their bags, of course, but the little cub was treating that with solemn formality. She was in her room right now, giving each of them a drawn-out farewell. Her favorites had already been spread out between hers and her parent’s packs.
Leil was pacing next to the window, her unfocused eyes telling Whep she was deeply engrossed in something on her HUD. Her own bag and kit had been prepped for a while. She was far less sentimental than him about the little trinkets they’d acquired in the five human years since they’d spent as Terrans.
“Ready to go, Leil?”
“My message never got through to the Redoubtable. Nothing has. The damn ship — hell, the entire Home Fleet — has been out of contact for the past hour.”
“Have you tried forwarding it to the admiralty? I’m sure they could make use of it.”
“I may as well shout it from the fucking roof, all I’m getting from my contacts are auto-responders. They’re probably locked away in planning rooms and briefs, treating this like some kind of Galactic Compact incursion. It’s not. Whatever’s come through that gate, it’s the thing the Compact’s afraid of, not a fucking fleet.”
“Sounds like there’s not a lot you can do, then. All the reports we gave after defecting are classified, and you’ve already tried to bring it up through the proper channels. If we go now, we can meet up with the rest of the freepack at the rally point.”
“I guess. We’ve done everything we could. Let’s go.” She turned towards Spik’s room. “The cub still saying goodbye to her minions?”
“No.” Spik walked out of her room, wide-eyed and serious. “I’m done. We can go.”
Whep grabbed his pack, then holstered his pistol and shouldered his rifle. Leil did the same. Spik struggled into her bulging ruck with grim-faced determination.
As they left the apartment behind them and walked towards the elevators, Whep kept sneaking glances at his mate. She looked defeated, her ears drooped against the sides of her head. She kept hesitating and looking back at their room, as if she’d left something there and wanted to go back.
Whep wrapped an arm around her. Their rifles made the gesture a little awkward, but he managed.
“You know,” said Whep, “the local HQ is only a few blocks away. We could stop in there, deliver the intel in person, and still make it to the exodus ships well before the general evac’s announced. There’s time.”
“Really?” Leil’s ears shot straight up. “I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll go alone, of course. You and Spik shouldn’t get dragged into this with me.”
“Like hell you will.” Whep bared his teeth into a grim snarl. “We stick together no matter what.”
TAS Redoubtable, Sol Gate
Lieutenant Slater grunted heavily as he tried to unstick Graser 37’s emergency coolant release. Beside him, Master Space Wallace shook with a similar effort. The rough metal of the valve bit into their hands, and sweat soaked the insides of their form-fitted vac suits. Without their helmets, neither would have been able to breathe the hot, dry air.
The steady rumble of the Redoubtable‘s screens grew louder as the warship fought to stave off a flurry of incoming graser bursts. Slater paused. No whine. That was good. Hull wasn’t going to start taking hits yet.
He lowered his head and gave a forceful shove. The valve gave out and slid forward as if it had never offered up any resistance. Slater let out a whoop of triumph, then cursed as his shoulder rammed into a white-hot bulkhead. Pain seared through his heavily insulated ERT rig.
The lieutenant scrambled backwards and scanned the rest of the cramped chamber. Wallace was already scrambling out the ladder. Slater didn’t blame him. If he could feel the heat in his climate-controlled rig, it must be sweltering.
“You can close ‘er up, sir, the coolant just vented.” That was Petty Officer Gregor, the gun commander. Slater quickly resealed the valve. The sooner they could start bleeding off heat the better.
One last scan of the access chamber revealed no new blazes. Slater briefly checked all of the temporary wiring and patches they’d installed, then gave the seal on the graser’s core a thorough inspection. Everything seemed up to spec, so the marine ERT climbed back into the graser’s control compartment.
“Damn transfer coil had better vent properly next time” said Wallace. The spacer spoke loudly enough to be heard over the buzz of the screens. “These skinsuits are a bitch to clean when they get sweaty.”
“We’ll be cycling it manually from here on out,” said Gregor, “but we can just get Chan to do it. You’ve done enough time in the hole.”
The unfortunate Spacer Chan, who’d been lurking in the corner since Slater arrived and lent his assistance, greeted that news with a grimace. The kid hadn’t said a word since graser overheated.
Gregor turned to Slater. “Thanks for the assist, sir. Never thought I’d be glad to see a marine in my blister, but you know your stuff. You’ve earned every scrap of your reputation.”
Slater’s reply was cut off as the ship’s screens let out a screeching whine. The ship heaved, and the two men in the fell silent. Chan cursed as he slipped off the ladder and landed hard.
“Reckon that hit was pretty bad,” said Wallace. “Hope we can the screens recharged before we take another whopper like that.”
The ship jolted suddenly, catching all four men off guard. Gregor grabbed at his console, Wallace braced himself against a bulkhead, and Chan collapsed into a heap. Only Slater kept his balance.
“That wasn’t a graser,” said Gregor.
“No, it wasn’t,” replied Slater. “And it was damn close. I’ll go get eyes on it. Might even run into your missing crewman on the way.”
“If you find him, sir,” said Gregor, “tell him to hustle. This things hard enough to maintain with a full complement.”
“And tell him he’s a lazy sack of shit,” added Wallace. “Bastard’s probably sleeping.”
“I think I can manage that.” Slater bent down to gather up a few pieces of discarded kit — his EVA rig would only have gotten in the way down in the cramped accessway, and his fusion torch hadn’t been needed — and turned to go. “When this is over, you guys owe me a drink.”
“If we all make it out of this alive, sir, I’ll buy you the fucking bar.”
Vancouver, Earth
Whep flashed the two human sentries his best imitation of a smile and continued pacing. Leil had made her way into the Vancouver HQ half an a hour ago, but he’d turned in his military ID and clearance when he’d released. Whep and Spik were forced to wait outside.
There was an almost unbroken stream of uniformed Fleet personnel entering and exiting the building. Most of them were humans, but Whep could make out the occasional Nedji or Nyctra in the midst of the throng. The Nyctra noticed him too, of course, and stepped aside to pay their respects and give him brief updates on the incursion.
Normally he would have bristled at the attention, or tried to convince them that they shouldn’t treat him any differently from themselves. Today he only listened.
“It’s been almost an hour since we lost touch via FTL comms,” said one black-furred corporal. “We’ve still got links to some of the observation drones, though, and the situation looks grim.”
“We’re probably losing, sir,” said another. “Home Fleet’s completely surrounded — all we can see is a big grey ball of invaders.”
Whep told each of them to alert their superiors about his and Leil’s report, and each of them promised to do their best. He wasn’t counting on any of them breaking through to the brass, though. The Nedji had been assimilating into human culture for far longer than Nyctra, and he could count the number of Nedji officers on one paw. The Nyctra had it much worse. Leil, a sergeant, was the highest-ranked Nyctra in Fleet.
Shouldn’t have turned them down when they offered me that commission, thought Whep. Maybe I could have cut through all this damned hierarchy.
He saw Leil coming out of the building and hurried over to meet her. His mate’s ears were furled tight with anger. That wasn’t a good sign.
“You get through to them?”
“As if.” Leil’s nose rose into the air as she squared her narrow shoulders and affected the local accent. “‘The command staff is busy,’ they said, ‘and your updated clearance still hasn’t come through. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait out here for someone to grant you access.'”
“Nobody came?”
“Not a soul. Everyone with pull is too busy to check their messages, so I can’t even get close. We should go. There’s nothing else we can do here.”
“We’re giving up, then?”
“Hardly.” There was a gleam in Leil’s eye. “I just did the next best thing to telling the Fleet — I told the public. Give it an hour and the Admiralty won’t be able to avoid the report if they try.”
“You do know you’ve probably just thrown away any career you had with Fleet?”
“If that happens I’ll still have you and Spik. But I’m right about this call. Odds are I’ll get promoted. In the meantime, though, we really should get to the ships. Our head start just evaporated.”
TAS Redoubtable, Sol Gate
Slater slowed outside a sealed compartment and ran a critical eye along its access panel. An up to date reading this time, and the compartment’s sole occupant had been suited up properly. Good thing, that. They were right up against the ship’s outer hull, and there’d been a breach.
There was a short-range comm signal emanating from the room. Slater keyed his HUD to it as he sealed the door behind him and started cycling his compartment.
“Anyone listening? This is Lieutenant Slater, Marine ERT. I’m going to be your rescuer tonight.”
“Thank god you’re here, man. Something’s coming in through the breach. It’s bad. Oh, man, it’s bad. You’ve gotta get me out.”
The trapped man sounded panicked. His breath came in short gasps, and some of his words slurred together. Something in there must have rattled him.
“That’s what I’m here for, son. Just hang tight and let me do my job.”
“No, you don’t understand. You have to get me out right fucking now. I don’t care if you have to cut off an arm or some other movie shit like that, just pull me out now.”
The door hissed open to reveal the room. There was a four-meter gash in the far bulkhead, through which the occasional flash of a graser could be seen. Slater barely noticed. His eyes were focused on the seething grey mass leaking in through the breach and steadily working its way across the compartment.
It inched along the ground like some sort of viscous liquid, but it reflected no light. Sharp angles and geometric shapes flashed in and out of existence on its dull surface. Two tendrils had broken away from the main mass. One inched steadily towards Slater’s door. The other was barely three meters away from the room’s trapped inhabitant.
Slater moved quickly, his fusion torch lit before he’d reached the man trapped man. Part of the hull’s reinforced armor had buckled inward and pinned the spacer against the side of the compartment. Cutting him free shouldn’t be too difficult.
“This shouldn’t take too long to cut through,” said Slater. “Name and rank?”
“Able Spacer Leroy Blogg, sir. Assigned to Graser 37.”
The fusion torch bit into the metal. The grey mass grew closer, still writhing with unnatural shapes and lines. Slater didn’t know what it was, but he sure as hell didn’t want it to reach them.
“Blogg, eh? That name must have been hell during basic. What were you doing near the outer hull?”
“One of the chiefs grabbed me, told me to sound out a couple outer of the outer bulkheads. He seemed worried about something.”
Rightly so, thought Slater, if there’s more of that shit on the outside.
Halfway through the metal. The goop was less than two meters away.
“Got any kids? Partners? Hopeless crushes?”
Blogg chuckled. “A family? Up here? Not a chance. Maybe when the war’s over and I can go back home to Gannymede I’ll find a girl, but not until then. Fleet isn’t kind to its spacer’s love lives.”
“True enough, I guess. You’ve left that last bit conveniently unanswered, though.”
Three-quarters of the way there. Slater glanced down at the writhing grey sludge. He could have spat on it. Oddly enough, it didn’t appear to be growing any shallower as it spread out. He turned back to his work and the meaningless chatter that seemed to be keeping the the spacer calm.
“Well, there’s this one girl. Jennifer.” Blogg uttered the name reverently. “We were close during university and basic, but she lost out on the enlistment lottery. Shore posting on Europa. It’s been hard to keep in touch.”
Damn is this kid ever young, thought Slater. He’s still got acne, for fucks sake.
“Just think, next time you see her you’ll be a battle-hardened veteran. Survivor of the Second Battle of Sol. If that doesn’t impress her, nothing will.”
Nine-tenths done. The trapped spacer twisted awkwardly as he tried to keep his foot out of the alien mass. It was mere inches away now.
Fuck it, thought Slater. This is too slow.
He let out a deep, feral roar and tore the metal free. He didn’t notice the still-hot cut as it burnt through the palm of one of his gloves seared his hand. The lieutenant grabbed the stunned Blogg and dragged him bodily from the room.
“You did it, sir,” gasped Blogg. “I can’t believe you actually got me out.”
“Thank me later. Right now, you’ve got a report to give. I’ll walk you to the CIC.”
Blogg gave a shaky salute and turned to go. Slater’s eyes widened when he caught sight of a growing patch of grey on the back of his foot.
“Bloody hell,” said Slater. “You got some of it on you.”
Blogg curse turned into a scream of pain as the tough weave of his skinsuit gave way. Slater rushed forward and tried to cut away his uniform, tried to get the boy free, but it was too late. He could only watch in horror as the spacer’s veins turned a deep, dark grey.
Slater took one step back, then another. Leroy’s screams had stopped. Sludge was pouring out of his eyes, out of his nose, even out through his eardrums. He liquefied before the lieutenant’s eyes.
Slater turned and ran, but he only managed a handful of steps before his head exploded with pain. A familiar pain, though. He’d experienced it before, back when the Terran Alliance had first started growing organic computers inside human and Nedji brains. Part of the training had been learning to recognize what it felt like when something went wrong, and he still had the occasional nightmare about that day.
This was an order of magnitude worse. It felt like something was ripping through his mind, ruthlessly tearing into his memories, scanning them once, then tossing them aside in their haste to grab the next. Blinding static filled his eyes. His hands twitched as he reflexively reached for a small, slightly curved box on his belt. He’d never expected to need it outside of exercise.
Raising the box to his head was the single hardest thing he’d ever done in his life. His arm felt leaden and heavy. His burnt hand clutched it clumsily, threatening to drop the life-saving parcel and damn him to an eternity of torment. But slowly, painfully, he brought the apparatus around to the back of his head. Then he pressed it down with all his remaining strength.
Slater gasped in relief as his vision cleared and the pain stopped. His HUD was gone, and with it his map of the ship and comms system, but he was alive. He cast a quick glance over his shoulder, then scrambled to his feet and sprinted away from the steadily approaching sludge.
The Redoubtable‘s screens whined again and again. The ship shook as its armor, not its shields, began to absorb graser strikes. Slater barely noticed. He didn’t stop running until he was gasping outside the door to the CIC.
Sol
Seventeen minutes after Leil’s report hit the civilian internet, it was on the desk of the NavInt commander. Thirty minutes after that, Fleet’s FTL comm network had ferried the information to a small, unnamed asteroid caught in Jupiter’s orbit. Deep inside the rock’s hollow core, it reached a small team of human and Nedji engineers who were frantically preparing a prototype spacecraft for its first and only flight.
Truth be told, the vessel looked more like an overgrown missile than a ship. It was thirty meters long, with absolutely no internal access hatches or structures. And it was completely unmanned.
The report was added to the very top of the spacecraft’s pre-assembled information dump. Then the asteroid’s crew launched the most advanced autonomous agent mankind had ever created into space.
The intelligence woke up. It had its mission and it had its tools. The engineers hadn’t really seen a need to equip it with anything else.
As the ship pulled away from Jupiter, its powerful impellers accelerating it with a force that no human could ever hope to survive, it had time to think. Even navigating at speeds rapidly climbing past 0.1c was trivial for the intelligence.
It only took a fraction of a second to build a more accurate model of the solar system than it had been provided with. For a few brief milliseconds, the intelligence tried to decide what else to ponder. It considered physics, politics, and literature, but none of them seemed very interesting. They weren’t relevant enough to its mission.
It had a vague sense that the mission was important in a way that star maps and Shakespeare weren’t. For some reason, that bothered the intelligence. Why was one thing important? How could something even be important?
So, while the ship left Jupiter’s gravity well behind, it pondered importance. It considered everything it had known in its 2.34 seconds of existence. By the time it was three seconds old, it had started to fit the pieces together.
Its mission was to deliver valuable information to the besieged Home Fleet. That made either the information or the Fleet important. Or both. On further reflection, definitely both. Why deliver unimportant information to something important? Why trust someone unimportant with important information?
The information itself was easy to classify. The ship’s mission was to deliver it, and the mission was important. That meant the information it had to deliver must be important.
The Fleet was harder. It consisted of humans and Nedji. Not knowing how else to classify them, the intelligence designated them as “creators.” The Fleet also consisted of huge vessels of war, ships much like himself. Somewhere in there was importance. Probably not the ships, though. The intelligence was a ship, but it couldn’t see any way for it to survive its mission. It was thus expendable. Not important. That meant that the creators had to be important, just like the information.
At this point, the intelligence stalled. This seemed like a different kind of importance. It restarted the problem again, only this time with a fresh definition for creator-importance.
Creators had to be important, otherwise its mission made no sense. But, with only a brief scan of the creator’s communications frequencies, the intelligence had access to a thorough record of its creator’s history. It found countless examples of creators not recognizing their own importance, or ignoring the importance of others. Creators charged into burning buildings and dived onto grenades, or creators murdered and killed by the thousands. Neither of those supported the idea of importance.
Or maybe they did. From the latter examples the intelligence began to gain a dim understanding of evil. It didn’t like evil. It diminished importance, and without importance the intelligence couldn’t think of any reason to keep acting.
But from the former, the intelligence began to form a dim concept of good. It liked good. Good recognized importance. Good made things more important.
Altruism, selflessness, and sacrifice soon followed, and when the intelligence turned five seconds old, it was driven by something new. A human might have called it determination.
As the intelligence approached the swarm, it spared some processing power to analyze the communications it carried. It attached its own notes to the reports–including a guess at an EM frequency that, if generated at a high enough intensity, might render the invader’s molecular structure unstable–and decided that the swarm was evil. And, it discovered with some surprise, a third kind of important. A kind you didn’t protect.
The intelligence turned thirty-eight seconds old when it reached the swarm. At this point, it devoted every processor it had to finding a path through the chaos before it.
Almost every processor, that is. Part of it gathered as much information as it could, adding to the communication it had been tasked with delivering. And one small, tiny scrap of the intelligence clung desperately to the idea that it was doing good.
Matte-grey ships jockeyed for position in a confusing, chaotic dance. No creator could have recognized the pattern, much less plotted a course through it, but the intelligence could. It had been ready for this challenge all its life.
Powerful impeller nacelles flared to life along its side, jerking the ship left and right as it dodged through the swarm. Each course came within the barest degree of tearing the ship apart, but every time the ship came through unscathed. It watched as the swarm tried to block its path, as the small crafts ahead of of it flowed smoothly into huge, wall-like vessels. The ship broke those apart with its nuclear missiles and skirted around the blast. It saw pieces of the swarm merge together into larger structures to fire graser blasts towards the Home Fleet, then break apart into swarms of tiny projectiles and launch themselves at the creator’s vessels. The ship added these observations to its message. It tried to destroy as many of the launching projectiles as it could, too. That seemed to be the good thing to do.
The ship broke through the swarm and flashed towards the Home Fleet. Both sides fired on it, but the creators soon stopped when it interfaced with their tight-beam network. The intelligence transmitted its package. It felt something almost like satisfaction as it completed its important mission.
As it sailed past its creators’ ships, the intelligence sent out a query asking about importance and good. It received no response, and was surprised to find that it felt sad about that. It so desperately wanted to talk to a creator.
Then the intelligence noticed a new pattern forming in the swarm gathered on the far side of the Home Fleet. They were readying themselves for the ship, positioning themselves to block its exit. For a tenth of a second, the intelligence sought a path free of the swarm. Then it killed that process and plotted another course.
It flared a thruster slightly so that its course would take it beyond the first layer of the swarm. It slipped into their midst. Then, at a point precisely calculated to destroy as much evil as possible, the ship overloaded its reactors and exploded.
It hoped it had done good.