De Oppresso Liber

Book VI in the Silver Wings series.

Evan Currie

ALSO BY EVAN CURRIE

Odyssey One Series

Into the Black

The Heart of Matter

Homeworld

Out of the Black

Odysseus One (July 2016)

Odyssey One: Star Rogue Series

King of Thieves

Heirs of Empire

Heirs of Empire

An Empire Asunder (Late 2016)

Warrior’s Wings Series

On Silver Wings

Valkyrie Rising

Valkyrie Burning

The Valhalla Call

By Other Means

De Oppresso Liber

Other Works

SEAL Team 13

Steam Legion

Thermals

Copyright Info

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Text copyright © 2016 Evan Currie

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Foreword

De Oppresso Liber was a tough nut to crack, this story just did not want to play nice. I hope the final results are to everyone’s liking, we’re back in the field where Sorilla belongs, and the action is a little more fast paced. Ideally I’d like to turn out one more Cold War story before moving on to the next arc, but I’m not sure if I’ll do that yet or not. You guys can let me know on facebook which you’d prefer, another Cold War story or starting the Revolution arc…

In the meantime, well I’ll be working on something new. You can keep up to date on the latest releases at my website, facebook account, or other social media accounts (check the contact me link after the story) or sign up to my newsletter at

http://forms.aweber.com/form/86/386797486.htm

Cheers everyone, and enjoy the book

Table of Contents

Title

Foreword

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Epilogue

About the Author

Chapter 1

USV Poland

“Admiral on deck!”

“As you were,” Ruger said as he walked across the main bridge of the Poland, eyes falling to the incredible vista that opened up beneath his feet.

Like all Terra-class ships, the Poland’s main bridge was located in the ventral spire set near to the aft of the kilometer-long vessel. Due to the gravity generated by the singularity core forward section of the big ship, down was more or less parallel to the beam of the ship, rather than perpendicular. So the main bridge was a bubble with a hemispherical view of the surrounding space, with the beam of the big ship and the Poland’s bow resting at the bottom of a kilometer-long drop below his feet.

It was a mind-bending view, like hanging off the edge of a skyscraper perched on the edge of an eternal abyss.

Ruger found himself rather partial to it, actually, and genuinely enjoyed the flag bridge available to him on most Terra-class ships. Not everyone would agree with him, however. He’d known more than one person, not normally spacers, of course, to actually get physically ill standing in one of the open deck bridge areas.

He generally made a point of meeting with people like that in one of the internal command decks, buried deep inside the armor plating of the big ships. Thankfully, he wouldn’t have to be doing that today.

“Captain.” He nodded politely as he stepped up beside the Captain of the Poland, Yuri Levensk, where the man was quietly observing the operation of his ship.

“Admiral.” Yuri nodded in return, keeping his attention on the operations board since the Admiral seemed less interested in formality at the moment than results. Their current maneuver was simple enough in terms of mechanics, but doing it without getting noticed was going to require a certain degree of skill and attention to detail.

The Poland was currently alone, without her escorts or tenders, about three hundred astronomical units out in the outer system of a Class O blue giant. That alone would probably be of interest to some people. In fact, Ruger was certain that there were labs on board at that very moment buzzing with the sheer joy of getting close analysis of a Class O giant, but the relative rarity and lack of scientific data wasn’t the reason for their being in the region.

This particular sun was home to a sentient alien race of a technical level roughly on par with Earth’s about seven decades earlier. A little more advanced in places, but near as anyone could tell, they weren’t close to developing Gravity manipulation technology, so while they’d launched some space exploration, none of it was close to being interstellar.

That alone would have been of great interest and inestimable scientific value, but again, that wasn’t why they were here.

“There.”

Ruger looked to where Yuri was pointing and nodded. “Good eye.”

On the screen they were getting a spectral hit off a familiar silhouette as it crossed the edge of the blue giant, briefly eclipsing a portion of the corona. The hyperspectral hit was clear and one that any SOLCOM sailor worth his O2 would know at a glance.

Alpha ceramic armor, just the right size and silhouette for a Ross’El Portal ship.

Even with all the technological advancements since the first time that profile had been spotted by humans, and the many battles that ended in human victory, there wasn’t a man with his sanity intact who wanted to be within five AU of one of those ships. The Ross’El Gravity Valves weren’t perfect, but they were closer than any weapon system had a right to be in a fair and perfect universe.

All the power of the Poland would be nothing if that ship locked them up in a collapsing section of space-time. They’d go up in nuclear fire just like the Los Angeles and so many others before.

“Police all spectrums,” Yuri ordered. “We are going dark. From this point on, no more transmissions of any kind. Researchers may continue passive scanning. That is all.”

“Aye, Captain.” The duty officer recorded the order and then started relaying it.

Only then did Yuri turn to the Admiral. “Confirmation, sir.”

“So I see. Good job,” Admiral Ruger said. “Intelligence put them out here, looking for an alternate route around Hayden, if we’re right.”

The Hayden System had been the first meeting between humans and the Ross’El, and things hadn’t gone especially well for either side. Ruger still winced to think about how many good men and women they’d lost in that conflict, but for all that, the Ross’El had come off second best. They’d lost at least three Portal ships in the initial conflict, and another half dozen easily over the rest of the war.

According to Alliance records, that was more than they’d lost since their war with the Gav well over a century earlier.

No one knew why the Ross were so interested in SOLCOM’s little section of the galactic arm, but Ruger’s job was to make certain that whatever it was, the Ross were left disappointed.

“Do we have Alliance intelligence on the locals?” Yuri asked.

“Yes, they did a workup on the system some time ago, apparently before the Ross were cleared to ‘develop’ it,” Ruger said. “It wasn’t classified.”

Yuri snorted. “The Alliance confuses me, I do not mind admitting.”

“You aren’t the only one,” Ruger admitted. “The Alliance also said that the locals had launched several probes into the system. Find me one.”

“Admiral?” Yuri blinked, confused.

“Just do it, Captain. Let me know when you do.”

“Aye aye, Admiral.”

*                                        *                                        *

Child of God

Eighth moon, fifth planet

The God-World hung eternally over the horizon, as it had before he was born and as it would long after his passing, but for the first time in his life, Korra looked at it with real wonder and very real terror. It was no longer a source of comfort, not since the Invaders came from beyond the God-World, hammering all resistance to shards in a single night of violence and terror.

There’d been no warning, that terrible night. He had been at home, with his mates and children. They lived in the capital of the Godward side close to his work. That night he remembered thinking that it was unseasonably cold, the temperature dropping unnaturally quickly as he closed up for the night. He’d thought to put on the broadcasts and see if there was any information about inclement weather on the way.

The broadcast he’d tuned in just had time to mention the temperature drop before the frequency went dead. Not merely scrambled, but actually dead. He’d never seen anything like it, and that was notable since he was the man the government put in charge of coordinating and compiling the efforts of thousands who were collating the signals that came from beyond the God-World.

The SI, or Search for Intelligence, project was intended to find intelligent patterns in the myriad signals from beyond the God-World, but that night they were the ones who had been found.

The Invaders landed entirely unopposed; no one saw them coming. The military wasn’t even mobilized until the capital had fallen, and by then the orders going out were so confused as to prevent any coherent response. The Invaders held the leashes of too many people entrusted with the power to give those orders, though how they’d managed it as quickly as they did he doubted he’d ever know.

Within two days the order for total surrender had gone out, and been mostly obeyed.

Life seemed to go back to normal then, for the most part. It was strange how quickly you could get used to the idea that your life was now being puppetted by invaders from the great black, rather than by someone closer. People got up, went to work, got paid, went home, and generally went about their affairs as though nothing had changed.

His job, of course, didn’t seem to matter much anymore.

Korra would have laughed, if it weren’t so damned heartbreaking. He still came in every day, he still spent all day scanning for signals, and he still dutifully filed reports as the protocol dictated. No one cared. The intelligence he was searching for was already here, and it wasn’t friendly.

The rumors started after twenty or thirty days, of people just going missing. It didn’t take long to connect the missing people with regions the Invaders were interested in. Fear was building steadily. The terror of the dark that infected everyone who’d grown up on the Godward side of Child was now nothing compared to the fear of vanishing at the behest of the Invaders.

And still they got up, went to work, and tried to pretend it was all normal.

It didn’t take long for people to start resisting, of course, with varying degrees of success. Military units vanished, only to turn up later fighting tooth and nail against whoever they could find that seemed to represent the Invaders. Few people ever saw the Invaders, Korra knew. They didn’t show themselves often, normally preferring to hide behind their various mechanized constructs and the obviously-too-stupid-to-be-in-charge furry predators.

The resistance was unguided, however, confused. No one had any good information on what the Invaders wanted, and while those on Child were no strangers to war…this was something new. Something few understood.

Korra was so caught up in his thoughts, doing his job by rote with little care for the details, that he almost missed the signal pattern that one of their outer system probes had started to report.

Korra stared at it for a moment, tapping the console with a clawed finger as if that might correct the aberrant signal. His eyes widened as he suddenly recognized the pattern and realized that, whatever it was, it was certainly no malfunction.

Uncertain what to do, he hit the record function and reached for a modulation phone.

“Syntha?” he asked into the device. “There’s something here you should see. No, don’t tell anyone else. Not yet.”

He didn’t know for sure what this was, but it might just be important. If it was, he’d be damned to the dark before he gave it to the Invaders.

*                                        *                                        *

A small group of people were huddled around the signal-monitoring device, those who didn’t follow the pattern directly watching the transcription that Korra and Syntha were feverishly turning out.

It had only taken Syntha a few moments before she came to the same conclusions as her colleague, and immediately sent for others. Someone was sending data back via the extreme range probe launched decades earlier, and it was data about the Invaders!

Tactical information, strategic intelligence, even basic biology… and it was coming in over the most basic of Childean codes, something taught to children. It made no sense, but if it were accurate…

They had to tell someone.

The question remained, however…who was sending this data, and why?

Of course, they didn’t have many options available to them, so it didn’t take too long before someone suggested transmitting back.

*                                        *                                        *

USV Poland

Admiral Ruger looked over the reports he had on his desktop. Though most of them were routine matters that he normally left his assistant to deal with, he was actually getting bored and desperate for anything productive to do. They’d been on station and running dark for almost two months, watching the coming and going of Alliance ships…mostly Ghoulie, but a Parithalian cruiser had made an appearance at one point, quietly transmitting over the alien probe they’d tracked down using archival data lifted from the Alliance public records during their last negotiations.

The Alliance was the very definition of galactic bureaucracy, in his experience. They filed everything, and very rarely did they bother to examine just what it was they’d recorded.

In this case, one portion of the Alliance had been observing this world for the last couple decades or so, near as Ruger could tell. They’d dutifully logged everything and it had been side-loaded to a scientific database for cultural research. Unclassified data, only interesting within the Alliance to those who were studying pre-spaceflight cultures.

To SOLCOM, however, the data was beyond invaluable. It was one of the first bits that the data miners pulled out after Captain Aida had gotten them access to the Alliance public networks, and still potentially one of the most valuable.

For one, it detailed an advanced culture nearing spaceflight practically in Earth’s backyard. They were only a few hundred lightyears out, less than three weeks’ travel and only nine jump points, to be precise. Any information from that close was of infinite interest to SOLCOM and nearly every cultural specialist on Earth.

What made the data truly valuable, beyond price, in fact, was that the Ross’El had targeted this world. Once SOLCOM learned that, the data went from cultural gold to strategic antimatter.

Languages, cultures, technology…it was all there, filed with the dutiful attention to detail of true researchers and bureaucrats. The thing that truly got to Ruger, however, was the fact that no one in the Alliance seemed to be aware that the information was sitting there on their open servers.

Okay, that wasn’t exactly true. They knew it was there, they accessed it and wrote papers about it…but no one had connected it with the world that the Ross’El had just annexed.

Ruger couldn’t help but wonder just how the Alliance managed to continue to exist with that level of insane disconnect existing right under their noses.

“Admiral?”

Ruger looked up and waved in his assistant. “Yes?”

“You asked to be notified if we received a response over the probe, sir?”

He bolted upright in his chair, then lurched to his feet. “I’m on my way. Call ahead, let the interface team know.”

“Yes, sir.”

*                                        *                                        *

The data coming back over the probe’s command channel was painfully slow, both because it was based on a very old type of tight beam transmission several light-hours away and because they were forced to use a code that was reminiscent of old Morse code from Earth’s early radio technology. The culture they were communicating with was capable of much more, of course, but the technical data they’d been able to grab from Alliance public files on the world was fairly limited.

Even the Alliance considered military encryption codes to be a secret, no matter whose codes they happened to be.

So under Ruger’s supervision, the long process of sending, receiving, and transcribing code went on for excruciating weeks as the Poland remained far out in the deep reaches of the outer system, quiet and dark aside from the single low-powered transmitter used to talk to the alien probe.

At the end of which, the time for merely waiting and watching finally came to an end.

“I think we have an agreement in principle, Admiral,” the lead diplomat on the project told him in his office finally. “The Childean resistance, what part of it we’re in contact with, are willing to accept what help we can offer.”

Ruger nodded, having watched the process with interest. The Childeans, the people from the world they called “Child of God,” were desperate, of that there was no doubt. They were looking for an edge, any edge they could lay their hands on, in the fight they were facing. The worst of it was, he didn’t blame them in the slightest.

The Ross were a nasty bunch, and the last thing any species should face was an enemy that was quite capable of collapsing entire planets under their own gravity. Thankfully, the Ross were clearly interested in something in the local system, otherwise they’d have leveled the entire civilization. He wasn’t sure what that could be, but it would seem that the locals and SOLCOM had something in common.

Both of them had a vested interest in ejecting the Ross from this system, all the better if they could figure out what it was that drew the Ross here in the first place.

“Captain,” Ruger said quietly.

“Yes, Admiral?”

“Give the major my regards, and tell her she has a green light.”

“Yes, sir.”

*                                        *                                        *

Major Sorilla Aida examined her orders again, her eyes glowing blue-green as the corneal implants lit up with the information. She smiled slightly at the rank listed, though “Major” was only a curtesy bump while she was on board the Poland. A ship only had one captain, which meant that she spent most of her duty time a rank higher than her official one.

It was amusing for a former U.S. Army soldier; those sorts of things didn’t happen under SOCOM, as a rule.

She put that aside for the moment, however, and looked over her team as she contemplated the upcoming mission. They were preparing all according to procedures, checking and cleaning their kits, packing everything away, joking a little as they did to keep things light. Once, a long time ago, she remembered doing the same thing with comrades as their team leader looked on. That particular mission was as ill-fated as one could possibly be. Of the entire team, only she lived to touch the surface of Hayden.

They’d gotten a lot better at what they did since then, and more knowledgeable of their enemy. This time they wouldn’t be aiming to drop in on top of any large population centers or any known locations that the Ghoulies were showing interest in. That didn’t mean that the mission entry would hold no risk, but they weren’t paid to minimize risks, they were paid to complete the mission.

She cleared her throat, making her presence known as she stepped into the ready room and nodded to her senior NCO.

“Ready to drop, Top?” she asked casually, only glancing in the first sergeant’s direction as she examined the team’s kit and weapons with experienced eyes.

They weren’t going to be permitted to use their weapons much, if at all. The ideal would be to end this mission with the enemy being entirely convinced that the locals pushed them back on their own. They were ghosts in the machine. Their job would be to prepare the locals and advise them on the best ways to win their little war. If they were captured, spotted, or identified in any way, then at least part of the mission would be failed.

That didn’t mean they were going in naked, however. She just hoped that they’d be able to scrounge some local weapons or, failing that, a few Ghoulie guns on useable settings.

“Ready to drop, boss,” the Top, a six-foot-four Samoan, rumbled in response.

“Good. We launch at o-nine-hundred, so hit the gym, double your workout,” she ordered. “My advice is work yourself into a coma overnight, if you can. It’ll be a long fall to the target. You’ll have plenty of time to recover, and it’s not like you’ll be able to move much on the way in anyway.”

The sergeant major, Tane Nano, nodded as he looked around. “You heard the major! Pack your shit and report to the gym in twenty!”

*                                        *                                        *

Sorilla took her own advice.

Long drops were one of the hardest things she’d ever had to do, and she’d done them several times. It was the claustrophobia. It set in even when you weren’t normally bothered by such things. A few inches of armor and some radiation insulation was all that separated you from the eternal abyss, and there was nothing you could do but think about that for days sometimes.

No room to exercise, days in zero gravity felt like weeks strapped to your bed. The hardest part of it was being able to fight the instant the capsule came off. Sorilla was well aware just how critical that could be—the mission that kick-started the Hayden War began with the death of her entire team. She’d only survived by sheer luck, and that brush with eternity was enough to change everything for her.

Almost everything.

She was still a soldier, the only job she’d ever wanted, the best job she could ever hope for.

So she worked out, now, while she could, and tried not to think too hard on what was coming. She had a vague idea of what she was going to do when her team kissed dirt, but only that. They didn’t have enough information on the Childean people, or their culture, and that was vital to her work. Some people naturally leaned to the sort of fighting they were going to have to do; others really preferred a straight up slugging match.

She hoped they weren’t inclined to the second, because no one was winning a slugfest with the Ross. Any species that could blow a planet at whim were not to be faced head on unless you were out of options.

Sorilla was jogging when the rest of the team arrived, each picking a machine and getting to work. She didn’t do much more than nod to them in turn, but her implant suite tracked each of them across the unit’s battle network, even as she knew they were tracking her and each other.

Top Nano was her first sergeant, a job Sorilla wished deeply was still her own. At first, being a mustang in the SOLCOM ranks had been a bit of a rush. During the war, her job hadn’t really changed much, even as she got the personal satisfaction of wearing her new emblems. They were reacting more than acting back then, and much of the time her missions had been more about survival than anything overly strategic, at least as far as she was concerned.

Once the war ended, however, that had rapidly changed. Her last assignment had been paper pushing out of Bragg—thanks be to the Universe that didn’t last long. As a sergeant, she’d had her fair share of the bane of all government employment, of course, but it had certainly been far less obtuse than some of the crap she now dealt with.

So, yeah, Top was a job and title she had always wanted and had held for far too short a period.

Corporal Lance Dearborn, team sniper, was with the rest of the team among the first pure SOLCOM-trained operators. She and the Top were the only members of the team now who were once part of the U.S. Military. It was the end of an era, she could see the march of history as well as anyone. There wasn’t a world government in place, yet, but it was coming.

There was no other rational response to what had happened on Hayden.

We all hang together, or sure as hell we’ll hang separately.

Dearborn would have been at ease in her old unit, however, and that was the highest compliment Sorilla knew how to pay. The lithe blond man acted like he’d been born with a rifle in one hand and a Ghillie in the other. With his implants stealthed, he could ghost pretty much anyone. Sorilla had seen him sneak up on people in empty corridors on the Poland.

Corporal Miram Soleill was the team trainer specialist, another job that Sorilla looked on with an almost whimsical regret and fond remembrance of. Miram had an excellent academic background, but not much field experience. Wars on Earth were of low priority these days, and SOLCOM didn’t have jurisdiction under international agreement anyway.

Pity, that. Sorilla would have liked to have blooded some of SOLCOM’s best before setting them out against the Alliance. Ah well. We’ll make do.

They had a couple buck privates on the team, so green they were probably capable of photosynthesis, but competent enough from what she could tell. Darren Riggs and Samantha Bier were all of eighteen apiece, but they’d completed SOLCOM advanced training at the top of their classes, which was what got them their current assignment. Nothing like success to earn the right to die a horrible death a few hundred lightyears from home.

That just left Louie.

Lieutenant Brad Kepler.

Sorilla wasn’t sure what to think of him, honestly. He, unlike the others, had a little field experience. It just wasn’t the sort she’d come to expect. During the war he’d been a combat medic on Ares, a Mars-type world the Ross had moved on early, killing nearly everyone there.

He’d been a British Army regular until late in the war, when he transferred permanently to SOLCOM and applied for a slot with the Specialists. His record was clean, but there was a hard edge in his manner that didn’t jibe well with the butter bars on his shoulder. Sorilla found herself disliking the man, but didn’t have any real reason for it.

She suspected that he’d lost someone close on Ares. Someone closer than his files indicated, would be her wager. His psych file didn’t show xenophobic tendencies, or she’d have booted him off the team in an instant, but it was clear that he wanted payback in a big way.

In theory she didn’t have a problem with that, but in Sorilla’s experience, the worst baggage a soldier could carry was a desire for vengeance. As long as he kept it aimed at their enemies, in his case the Ross, well, she figured it wasn’t like he was the only one in the service who wanted their pound of flesh.

*                                        *                                        *

She and the others wore themselves down, but Sorilla didn’t let the team bunk out. It would be easier on them if they slept as much as they physically could once they were in deep space, and no one had really mastered stasis sleep yet, so this was as close as she could get.

Everyone was checked out on drop protocol, of course, but Sorilla was the only one of them who’d done it before for real. The others had a dozen or so practice drops on their slips, as well as a few hundred hours in simulators, but there was a psychological difference when you were surrounded by vacuum, little more than an inch of plastic and carbon composite protecting you from a one of the harshest environments possible.

So, by morning Sorilla hid a smile as her team actually started looking forward to being locked in their drop cans. It was the last time any of them would ever feel like that, she suspected as she grabbed a rail bar and levered herself up into her own. She swung her feet in first, sliding all the way in, and then immediately connected her suit’s environmental systems to the pod as the drop techs swarmed over her and the others.

“All systems check, ma’am. Green to go?” one asked.

Sorilla nodded and gave him a thumbs up. “Green to go.”

The man nodded and smiled. “Give ‘em hell, ma’am.”

The large plug swung shut, then rotated until a heavy thunk vibrated through the pod and her suit, sealing her in.

Hell is my specialty.

Chapter 2

Child of God

The God-World hung in the skies where they had gathered, its slowly turning face obliterating the light from the stars beyond as it always had and always would. For those who lived on Child, if you wanted to study the stars, you had to leave the comfort of the God-World and move to the other side of Child, where day and night cycled as the world cycled around its immense parent and was exposed to the deep black and the light of the distant sun.

“Are you certain this is where they said to be?”

Korra nodded in response to the question from Syntha. “The coordinates were specific.”

She shivered, looking around. “It feels exposed. The masters…”

“Call them what the humans do,” Korra said. “They are the Ross. Nothing more.”

She shivered again, but nodded. Nevertheless, she chose to avoid the subject when she spoke next, rather than risk invoking the ire of those who’d so easily taken control.

“Why would they not land on the dark side?” she asked. “Surely a vessel will be spotted here.”

“I’m not sure,” Korra admitted. “It is hard to guess, but it depends on their technology. Perhaps they have better stealth systems than we can imagine…”

Syntha nodded, humming lightly in agreement, but she didn’t know whether that made her feel better or not.

“Look,” she said a moment later, “God’s Tears.”

Korra lifted his gaze, easily spotting the small cluster of fire traces that were cutting a path across the sky, and he grunted slightly in acknowledgement. He was about to refocus his attention elsewhere when he noted that their flame trace was shorter than normal.

The observer in him was awakened and he turned his focus fully onto the burning objects that appeared to be falling from the God-World like fiery teardrops. He knew that they were debris from beyond the Childean system, of course, and that part of his mind started doing rough calculations as he realized that they were going to drop worryingly close to his present positions.

No reason to panic, Korra told himself. They’ll burn up high in the atmosphere. We’ll be fine here.

He cast a subtle glance in Syntha’s direction, but didn’t voice his worries. There was little chance that the debris would strike the exact position they were at, even if they did make it to the surface, so there was little point in running. The odds were precisely the same in any direction they could run, given the limits of endurance.

The tears continued to grow, and Korra found himself getting more and more nervous as he waited for the inevitable explosion of light and sound as the debris was finally cracked by the heat of atmospheric friction. Every second he didn’t see that flash light up the sky was another notch in his concern until finally a distant crack of thunder caused him to frown as the objects finally began breaking up.

It’s too slow, they should have shattered…

Flaming sparks were breaking away from the Tears, slowing quicker than the rest and so creating a trail of flames to the heavens.

*                                        *                                        *

Drop Pods

After three days in a seven-by-three-foot-diameter pod, any movement was a relief, but it was still nerve-wracking to experience re-entry friction…twice, no less.

They’d had to use the upper atmosphere of the gas giant to airbrake, otherwise they’d have hit Child hard enough to leave craters and not much else. So after that brief rumble, they’d still had just enough speed to exit back out of the influence of the giant and were on a straight-line drop for Child.

The friction and rumbles were lighter this time, with thinner upper atmosphere and a far lower entry speed. Sorilla was almost relaxed as the pods dropped deeper into the atmo, airbrakes popping out to stabilize their drop and zero them in on the agreed-upon landing zone.

She hoped that the locals were punctual. The last thing she needed was to be caught out in the open with a green squad, but either way they were going in.

“Check telemetry,” she ordered. “Make your last-second adjustments now, or walk the difference once we kiss dirt.”

Her team acknowledged, and they were all pretty much on course, so she didn’t push any harder. The surface of Child was coming up fast, and she could make out the crystal blue sea beneath them now.

The lieutenant’s pod deployed first, exterior walls snapping out and turning the whole rig into one large airbrake. Sorilla caught a brief glimpse of Kepler standing on the pod’s brace before the whole rig vanished in a blur as she and the others continued down unabated. The others deployed, following the lieutenant as she continued to plummet down, first in, last out.

Sorilla deployed at less than one kilometer above the seas, sudden bone-crushing acceleration compressing her spine as she rode the rigging right on the edge of control. Her pod’s airbrakes were fanned out above her, now trailing the pod by fifteen meters and spinning like propeller blades as Sorilla checked her kit one last time and kicked her pack loose to hang by its tether.

At five hundred meters, Sorilla spotted a pair of the locals using her implants, standing near the shoreline, and she assumed…hoped, really, that those were her contacts.

One hundred meters to impact, she crossed her arms across her chest and kicked the release catch. She fell free the last seventy meters or so, hitting the water feet first with enough force to kill an unarmored human a hundred times over.

She barely went three meters below the surface, curving through the water to redirect and absorb her impact as she got her bearings. Her pack was twenty meters away, floating a meter beneath the surface as the drop pod consigned itself to the deep. She swam over to the pack and clipped it to the belt loop on the small of her back as she waited for the rest of the team to touch down.

Dearborn was the next in the water, just a few seconds behind her. The privates came in half a minute after him; Corporal Soleill was on their heels. Top Nano took his dunking second to last, but she had to wait almost another minute for the lieutenant to land.

Going to have to talk to him about that, Sorilla noted in her implant memory. If this had been a hotter insertion, that extra time hanging under his pod’s airbrakes could have seen him turned into expanding plasma and the entire team’s location being compromised.

Sorilla got the team together after a few moments of wrangling, then got them all pointing in the right direction before leading them toward the shoreline and the two people she’d spotted from the air.

*                                        *                                        *

Korra had difficulty tearing his eyes away from the bulge of the ocean, though there was nothing there now to see.

“Was that…?” Syntha asked hesitantly, uncertain. “Do you suppose…?”

“Yes, I think it was,” he answered, knowing without needing the words spoken that she was asking if they’d just witnessed the “landing” of the visitors they were awaiting. “I hadn’t expected them to arrive quite like that.”

“But they’re dead, surely,” his companion gasped. “A fall like that, it would crush…”

“No, I think not,” he said with finality. “I think they would not come so far to merely crash into Child and die. Watch the seas, Syntha.”

He then took his own advice and waited.

They two of them were silent for a long time, eyes on the gently lapping waves of the bulging sea of Child. He lost track of just how long it was before he spotted the first hint of moment.

A black figure rose out of the water, pointing something…likely a weapon…unerringly at him, water beading off its form as it strode confidently in his direction. Two others appeared just moments later, flanking the first at a wide angle. Korra had never served in the military, but he recognized that they were spreading their fire so as to avoid inflicting harm on their own if it became necessary to kill him and Syntha.

They were shorter than a Childean, he noted as he got his first real impression of size. Almost a fifth shorter, he supposed. Bipedal, and curiously symmetrical as divided vertically. He wondered if that impression would hold up once he saw under their armor?

The lead figure paused at the shoreline, head tilting to one side and then the other, before finally lowering its weapon and taking the last step out of the water.

“Korra?”

The voice was odd, slightly mechanical, he thought, and higher pitched than anything Korra was used to. Nonetheless, accent aside, it was clear and understandable.

Korra gestured in the affirmative. “I am.”

“Sorilla, Major,” the figure said in broken Childean, sliding the now-hanging weapon around behind its back. “Team here.”

“Yes, so I see. I…” Korra considered his words. “I expected more.”

“No more,” the figure said. “Advisors we are. Intelligence, guidance.”

“I see.” Korra slumped slightly, but supposed that he couldn’t be surprised. “You speak our language. How?”

“Watched you were,” the figure said. “Alliance not secure data well.”

What is this Alliance?

He had more questions, so many more that he could barely hold them in mind, in fact, but for now they would have to wait.

“Very well,” he said. “Bring your team. I know where others are. You can find shelter with them. Tell them your intelligence.”

“We follow,” the figure said, lifting one appendage and gesturing curtly.

More of them appeared from under the sea, weapons evident but not aimed at him or Syntha as the first ones had been. He counted six, one for each of the God’s Tears that had fallen, and Korra wondered what they could possibly do with so few.

Of course, what did he know? He was merely a researcher.

*                                        *                                        *

Sorilla chatted with the aliens as they walked, keeping up a steady patter of words as best she could while observing them firsthand. They were odd looking, to the human eye at least. Bipedal, as with humans, but if there was anything symmetrical about the Childeans, she didn’t see it. They did seem to match, if the two she were looking at were representative at least, but they clearly had different features on their left and right sides. Sorilla briefly wondered what that meant for their internal organs, but exobiology would have to wait.

For the moment, Sorilla was far more interested in their language. She was a polyglot, both from before her training and as a result of it, with fifteen human languages plus various dialects under her belt. The Childean language was her second non-terrestrial language, as she’d worked hard in the last couple years to become fluent in Alliance standard.

The chatting with the two aliens served both to increase her understanding of the language, not to mention improve her accent, but also to better prime the computers for the rest of the team. Special Forces operators tended to be multilingual by default. She couldn’t remember serving with any offhand who hadn’t been at least bilingual, but her current team was SOLCOM Specialists, not U.S. Army Special Forces.

The Unitrans software in their implants would let them muddle through, if she could get the system running properly.

Hence, the chatting.

“The invaders,” she asked, “when arrive?”

Inwardly she cringed, knowing instinctively just how broken her understanding of the language was and finding professional offense at it, but there was nothing to do but push forward.

“Over two…” the larger of the two then said a word that the translator mangled horribly, “ago.”

Sorilla grimaced, halting him with a gesture as she repeated the word as best she could and followed it with the question, “Mean what?”

“Cycles of the God-World about the sun.”

Okay, years then…or close enough, Sorrilla supposed. Since Child was in orbit of a gas giant, she supposed that years would track the path of the parent world, and a month would be how long it took the giant to complete a single rotation?

Ugh, Sorilla grunted softly, this is going to play all holy hell with some of our terms.

Outwardly she nodded, gesturing again. “Continue.”

She listened, occasionally asking questions, as the tale unfolded. It mostly fit with what she knew of the Ross’Els’ operating procedures, aside from a few very important points that left her pondering the reasoning.

The initial strike was par for the course.

An invisible strike, temperature drops, inexplicable destruction…all in keeping with the Ross and their normal procedures. The two salient points that struck her as both different and important were the deployment of air units and the takeover of the local government. Neither of those had happened on Hayden.

The lack of air units wasn’t difficult to explain; the war on Hayden had been in the dirt and under cover of canopies of jungle trees well over a hundred meters high. Further, it had been effectively impossible to scan through more than a couple dozen meters at best. Air units would have been of minimal utility in that environment, but Child was a wholly different story.

That held true for the local government as well.

Hayden had been largely a single settlement, with maybe a dozen or so minor satellite settlements around the planet. Perfect target for a decapitation strike.

The Childeans, however, had a planetary government…more or less.

There was some confusion about the “dark siders,” those who lived on the side of Child that was exposed to the night sky and had a more normal day/night cycle compared to the everlasting daylight that existed on the light side, but despite that, they had a planetary-level society. You couldn’t just take that out in one strike, not without turning the planet itself into expanding plasma…which it appeared the Ross didn’t want to do.

We need to figure out what it is that the Ross really want, Sorilla thought as they walked and talked. It’s bad enough fighting an enemy who can obliterate planets at will, it would be really nice to have some idea what might set them off.

“We’re approaching the camp. Those rebelling against the Invaders have been gathering.”

Sorilla looked at him sharply. “Not all, I hope?”

He laughed, she thought, “No. Just some leaders. Is risk, but worth it, we hope.”

Sorilla nodded, satisfied.

“Good.”

It was better when you weren’t starting with a complete lack of common sense in the pack.

*                                        *                                        *

“We’ll meet here,” Korra announced almost an hour later, as they arrived at the top of a seaside cliff with a large open area that Sorilla assumed was intended to accommodate whoever was coming.

She looked around, considering the place, and figured it would do. She could have hoped for more cover, but they were far enough out from the closest population center that they could spot any patrol far enough off that it probably wouldn’t make much difference.

“Works,” she said simply, reaching up to equalize the pressure in her helmet before popping the seals.

The armor hissed as air escaped, and Sorilla drew off the helmet and let it drop to the ground. It could take being run over by the wheels of a Cougar tank, so a little bump wasn’t going to do it any harm. She drew in a deep breath of the local atmosphere, catching the salt smell in the air and nodding with some pleasure.

“Good to breathe fresh air again,” she said in the local language, eyes on her team as they followed suit.

Most of them were fine, but she noticed the lieutenant and Corporal Soleill panting and gasping hard. Sorilla rolled her eyes. “Breathers!”

The two nodded and quickly clipped breathers from their suit supply under their nose, taking breaths quickly as they started to settle.

“Didn’t you two read the file?” Sorilla asked, now in English. “Local atmo is thin. You should have set your suit pressure to drop steadily on the way in.”

“Sorry, boss, my fault. I should have checked on them,” Tane Nano offered up.

“No, it’s theirs, and they’re going to pay for it over the next few days,” she growled, “because we will not be slowing down.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Korra was looking on with what she assumed was either interest or concern, possibly both, judging from his body language. Sorilla simply gestured lightly as she turned to him and switched back to Childean.

“Not adjust breath to match local. Breath thin here for human,” Sorilla managed to push out.

Korra nodded, his attention now entirely on the leader of the group. They had…softer faces than he’d expected, given the hard and anonymous features of their armor.

“How long before they adjust?” he asked curiously.

“Days,” Sorilla said in English as she scowled and tried to figure out the local equivalent.

There wasn’t one, not precisely. The closest, however, was the length of time it took Child to orbit around the God-World, which was around forty hours, Sol Standard. Sorilla shrugged mentally and tagged that as the local equivalent in her translator, before repeating herself in Childean.

“Days. Three, maybe four,” Sorilla answered, not adding that they’d adapt fast or she’d know the reason why.

“Understand. Altitude sickness is unpleasant.”

“Not following instructions is more unpleasant,” Sorilla grumbled in English before nodding and switching back to Childean. “Too true, friend Korra.”

“I will gather the others. Wait here,” Korra said after a moment.

Sorilla nodded. “We wait.”

*                                        *                                        *

Captain Sorilla Aida loved her job.

Usually.

With one foot resting on a boulder and her crossed arms against her knee supporting her weight, Sorilla looked out over the cliff at the ocean as it steadily crashed into the shore a hundred meters below. The spot Korra and Syntha had led them to was perhaps not the ideal place for a military base, but she’d learned a long time ago that when you were facing inordinately more powerful enemies than your own force, you didn’t always get the luxury of picking ideal locations.

 She had to admit, though, that the sky was perhaps one of the most spectacular ones she’d seen in her career, and it had some fairly stiff competition. She’d grown up camping, looking out at spectacular night vistas on Earth, and since she’d joined the Solarian Organization, the things she got to see had only gotten better and better.

Of course, no matter how far she roamed, or how many incredible things she saw…somehow the people were always the same. Aliens, humans, there didn’t seem to be as much difference between them as one might hope…or fear. The good were still great, but the bad were so much more common.

“Captain?”

Sorilla didn’t look back, her implant HUD had warned her long since of the approach. “What is it, Top?”

“The locals are gathered.”

She nodded, straightening from her position and from her thoughts. “Thanks, Top. I’ll be right there.”

The Special Forces sergeant nodded and retreated back the way he’d come, leaving her alone for a while longer.

Sorilla composed her thoughts and then reached down and fitted the small breather into place under her nose. The local atmosphere had enough oxygen to survive, but it was a little thin. She’d worked the high mountains of several nations on Earth, and one or two alien worlds, and here, barely a hundred meters over sea level, she could feel the same shortness of breath.

Hopefully we won’t have to do too much until we acclimatize, she thought.

Three kilometers to the south, however, the grey dome of a Ghoulie ship suggested that she might as well wish for a Gravity Valve of her very own. The enemy would as likely hand it over as they would give her any, literal, breathing room.

Taking a deep breath through the breather, Sorilla palmed and then swallowed a pair of oxygenation pills and made her way back from the cliff and toward the locals’ camp.

There was work to do.

*                                        *                                        *

They were fighting when she walked into camp.

That was nothing new; every job she’d ever done started with people fighting. Arguing over what to do, how to do it, who to blame the situation on. She rarely saw people at their best—it wasn’t in her job description. In the aftermath of a major crisis, contrary to what civilians believed, people didn’t go to pieces. Humans, at least, tended to pull together. You saw the best in them then, the selfless heroics bred by the instinctive urge to preserve the species, or perhaps just some innate goodness in the hearts of men.

That was when the crisis was real and present, though.

When it became an abstract, something even just a few hours or a few miles away, people turned ugly. They wanted to assign blame, tried to advance their own agenda—all sorts of politicking was born then. There was nothing worse for the human condition, in Sorilla’s opinion, than an emergency that wasn’t actually killing people.

The people here on Child of God were so far living down to her experience.

“Just listen to them. They’re here to help!”

“More outsiders? What help did the last group offer us?”

“Mokan, please!”

“No! I will not hear of it. No one just helps. They want something…”

“Precisely,” Sorilla said as she stepped calmly into the center of the camp.

Everyone turned to look at her, her team as well as the locals.

The Childians, for lack of a better name, were taller than humans by a foot to a foot and half on average. The lighter gravity and thinner air of the moon made them lithe of body, yet well-adapted to process what little oxygen they had available. They had red skin, but in the local atmosphere and in the light of the local sun, humans did also. They had bony plates underneath their dermis, however, making them look fairly tough.

I suppose we’ll soon see if that turns out to be a fair assessment or not.

“What?”

The aggressive speaker, Mokan, was looking confused by her statement. Sorilla smiled, her mouth barely visible under the breather clipped to her nose.

“I said, ‘Precisely,’” she repeated. “Of course we want something.”

Mokan appeared flabbergasted at her admission, if she were reading his alien features correctly. The Childeans had no eyes to speak of in the human sense of the word, so she could easily be wrong about that, she supposed. It made it difficult to get a conversational connection with them, but she would adapt. Eyes, human eyes, were the product of early evolution, before life had moved out of the oceans. The Childean oceans were young, according to her brief, young enough that life had been well started on Child of God before they’d come out into the open. How that worked, she didn’t know, but she would trust the researchers until she had reason, and evidence, not to.

“They came into one of our worlds too,” she said. “Landed without warning in the dark of night, destroyed, killed, and generally made a nuisance of themselves. We know your pain, and your desire for payback.”

“So that’s what you want? Revenge?” he scoffed.

“No.” Sorilla shook her head. “That is a bonus, if I’m being honest, but that’s not it.”

“So what then? What do you gain by helping us?”

“The Alliance is a sprawling network of stars…planets and species. You understand what I’m talking about, yes?”

Mokan snorted. “We’re not savages. We’ve studied the stars beyond God-World, we’ve told stories and guessed at what might be out there.”

“Good, then maybe you’ll understand when I tell you that what we gain from helping you is forcing the Alliance to devote more resources here instead of on our border,” Sorilla said. “Bleed them of capital, resources, people if we must, anything to keep them from sending more ships into our space.”

“So, we’re your hunting pets then,” he answered, making a dry sound that could almost have been a laugh, though she doubted that humor was his intent. “Harrying the prey, tiring them, weakening them…bad things happen to hunting pets, human.”

“Worse than happen to the victims of invasion?”

She didn’t know if her sardonic tone carried to alien ears, but the words stopped him dead. Without eyes it was hard to see what he was thinking, but she thought that she had his attention.

Fleet had scouted Child of God well ahead of deploying her team, giving them basic knowledge of the world and system, as well as decent patterns for their translators. She’d tried to get more information on the local culture, but while they were technically advanced, the invasion of the Ghoulies had effectively shut down all transmissions that they could have intercepted.

Someone willing to nuke any active transmitter has a way of shutting up the media, Sorilla supposed wryly. It rather figures that it would take a WMD to get a newsie to shut his fool mouth.

The Ghoulies, they were transmitting plenty on the other hand. Unfortunately, to date, humans hadn’t managed to decode much of the modulated gravity waves that made up Ghoulie transmissions. That was another reason her team was on hand. They’d dropped off sentry drones through the system to relay gravity waves back to the fleet.

Intel wasn’t her job, but the SF teams did that when they could, the same as they did everything.

“We’re here to make sure you don’t die before you can bleed the bastards a little,” she said, focusing on Mokan, who appeared to be the leader of the local camp of resistance fighters.

She didn’t have as much to go on as she normally did when cold reading the people around her, not here were the alien faces were almost impossible to read and body language was far from reliable. She was relying more on very basic psychology, primitive battle psyche 101, to guide her in her initial dealings. Anything more complex would be useless, but she’d seen enough of their interactions to make some judgment calls.

Mokan was angry, afraid, frustrated. He’d lost people, probably loved ones. She could see that, hear it in his words. Maybe she was reading her own reactions into it, but she didn’t think so. He was clearly the leader of this group, and they were a formation she did recognize. Resistance cells were her bread and butter, and she knew how to read and deal with them.

“So, do you want to hurt the ghoulish bastards a little? Or do you want to keep hiding out in the wilderness and let them screw you and your people out of what’s yours?”

She saw the Childean’s posture shift, the shoulder joints rotating slightly as he lifted his head up. Even without eyes, she knew that Childean optic reception was quite acute and centered on their bony skull. Sorilla recognized the shift in his stance as her words struck home. A widening of the limbs, steadying his balance as if in preparation to charge, raising the primary senses so he could see more of the area around him. It was all classic instinctive body language of someone preparing to make a decision to face a challenge.

 “I wish to hurt them,” he growled, low and ominously.

“Then we’ll show you how.”

*                                        *                                        *

Sorilla was concerned about the situation she was facing. There were just too many ways things could go bad on them. With mostly new recruits on her team, mistakes were going to happen. They’d happen with a team of veteran professionals too, of course, but they’d be better prepared to deal with them in that case.

With Earth pushing to expand its military presence, particularly around the colonies situated near the border with the Alliance, the demand for trained and experienced operators with deep space hours on their logbooks were such that she was lucky to have what she got.

That didn’t mean she’d gotten the dregs or anything like that. Her team was about as good as any could be, given their relative inexperience, but she could have wished for at least a decently experienced noncom to keep everyone in line. Unfortunately, the powers that be had apparently decided that she qualified as both noncom and commissioned officer, so they could get away with letting her train her entire team up.

At least it’s work I’m trained for.

That hadn’t always been the case since the war started.

As a Special Forces trainer specialist, Sorilla had spent her early career teaching insurgents and counter-insurgents in various trouble spots across the Earth. Toppling regimes, hunting terrorist guerillas, and generally invoking as much havoc as possible with some of the most modest of starting points were all her bread and butter.

Since the Ghoulies attacked Hayden, though, she’d been tossed out of her comfort zone on a nearly consistent basis.

It was occasionally surprising to her just how conventional combat with the Ghoulies had been. Largely the battles had been little more than glorified slugging matches that usually favored the enemy but were still close enough for her and other SOLCOM forces to get in the occasional knockout blow and keep the whole thing from becoming an out and out rout.

For the most part, she hadn’t gotten to really exercise her training the way she’d have liked, though she supposed the Hayden Pathfinders might not agree.

Here on Child of God, it seemed that was about to change.

The Ghoulies here hadn’t followed the same protocol as they had on Hayden, likely because Child of God was a far more populated planet and just flat out nuking everybody would devastate the local ecology beyond any short- or midterm recovery, even considering the relatively clean nature of the Ghoulies’ weapons.

Gravity-induced fission wasn’t pleasant, to be certain, but while it did produce significant energy in the form of radiation, it was extremely short-lived in nature. With half-lives generally registering well under a minute, most of the isotopes resulting from a Ghoulie Gravity Valve were lethal, but just didn’t last. The destruction they tore through the environment, however, did.

So, instead of opting for the route they chose on Hayden, the Ghoulie force here had simply staged a takeover of the local government.

It made sense. They were using the local infrastructure, which was already essentially designed to control the populace, for the exact same purpose as it had been intended…a clear case of violating the spirit of a thing by following the letter of it. With the Ghoulie Gravity Valves and their essentially omnidirectional capability, however, mounting any sort of conventional assault was problematic.

This wasn’t Hayden, a nearly unpopulated jungle that was effectively impossible to scan through. There were billions of Childean civilians across the face of the world, held hostage by the Ghoulies’ Gravity Valves. Any open military assault would invite repercussion and retaliation.

The problem Sorilla and her team were currently dealing with, other than the irascible natives, was that it wasn’t a perfect example of a guerilla scenario either. The Ghoulies had little care whether they committed genocide or not, in her experience, and in any asymmetrical conflict, if the more powerful side was willing to just flat out murder every living thing in the contested area…they had an undeniable advantage.

She had time to think about that, however. There were other priorities at the moment.

Sorilla checked in with her team. They were organizing some basic training for the locals. Most of them were civilians, but they had a few of the shattered Childean military in the mix just to keep things interesting. Normally that would be her job, getting everything pointing in the right direction and at least competent enough not to shoot their own foot off one time in two.

Now, however, Sorilla found herself tasked with the unenviable job of managing the mix and planning some of the less savory aspects of her duty.

“Top,” she said as she approached the team.

“Yes, Cap?” the six-foot-four master sergeant asked instantly, turning away from the Childean he was working with and straightening to attention.

She waved him down. “At ease. I need two locals as guides and enough local arms for a team of four.”

“Recon, Cap?”

Sorilla nodded. “I’d like to be under way in twenty.”

“I’ll have your guides and gear in ten.”

“Good man.”

Chapter 3

The Childean rebels’ base camp was located fifty or so miles along the southern shoreline from one center of population that was now under the control of the Ghoulies and their puppets. Since Child of God was orbit-locked, the section they were currently on eternally faced the gas supergiant, while the other side of the moon world faced out into space.

Normally an orbit-locked world wouldn’t be a likely candidate for supporting life, let alone an advanced civilization, but the God-World that Child orbited was a gas supergiant that radiated both enough heat and light to maintain a pretty comfortable temperature on the section of Child that permanently faced it, while the local star provided a steady cycle of night and day to the other side of the world, along with the expected seasonal changes Sorilla would see in most inhabited worlds she was familiar with.

Needless to say, eclipses were the norm for Child of God, and the culture had a bit of a dichotomy when it came to those who lived on either face. Sorilla hadn’t had much contact with the culture of the other face of Child, but Solarian intercepts had pulled in enough local media to make it clear that the Childeans were far from a united culture.

That’s something that’s going to have to change if they want to get through this, Sorilla supposed.

While she was waiting for her guides and gear, Sorilla found herself staring out to sea. Out, and up.

The tidal influence of the super-Jupiter world had drawn a permanent tidal bulge to that side of the world, leaving her looking at a sea of liquid water rising up and away from her position like a rippling, seething mountain. At its peak, the ocean levels on the Child’s God-side were three thousand meters above sea level on the “dark” side. She was certain that somewhere back on Earth there were dozens of people very excited about this world, but all she could think as she looked into the deeply reflecting water looming up above her was…

Creepy. That is so damn creepy.

If she had seen anything like this on any other world she’d experienced, she’d turn and run as fast as she could in the opposite direction while calling for an airlift ASAP.

“Ma’am.”

Sorilla shook herself, half turning to nod as the first sergeant came to a stop a few feet behind her and straightened. Sorilla sighed, again waving him down.

“Top,” she greeted him in return.

Normally they’d be a lot more relaxed in the field, but the Childeans weren’t exactly normal fodder for the sorts of mission the Special Forces-trained operatives would run on Earth. In many ways they were far better than she was used to dealing with.

A lot of missions on Earth weren’t in dealing with precisely the best of their representative cultures. A lot of the time, the enemy of your enemy was merely a monster you could point in a useful direction and, with luck, expect to see both him and your enemy kill one another. More often, after a successful mission, your next assignment would be to train someone to kill the monster you’d just created.

That was on the politicians, however. They didn’t know how to use the shiny tools they kept and generally wanted results instantly or not at all.

A good revolt took time.

You didn’t just go in and take out the corruption like a knight with some blazing sword; you had to pick your allies carefully. Usually the people you really wanted on your side weren’t the ones you needed, however, and it was rare that your orders would allow you to take time building up the ones you wanted. So, most often in the past, Sorilla had simply been forced to take the strongest she could find, never mind if they were savages as long as they were willing to kill the people they were told to kill.

It was short-sighted, it was stupid, but no one asked her opinion and, honestly, she hadn’t really understood the insanity of it all at first herself.

Thankfully, here on Child, she was dealing with a very different situation.

The lines were clear-cut: The Ross were invaders, the locals were being oppressed.

De Oppresso Liber.

This was precisely what she’d signed up for.

“Your gear and guides are ready, ma’am,” Top told her.

Sorilla nodded, pushing her conflicting thoughts aside. “Good. I’m going to take Dearborn. I want to lay eyes on the enemy dome, as close as I can.”

“Orders in your absence?”

“Continue as you’ve been,” she said. “Give Soleill her head. I want to see how she handles things. Don’t let her mess up too badly, if you get my drift, Top.”

Top Nano nodded. “I get you, ma’am.”

She nodded to what he was carrying. “Is that a local weapon?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Top said, handing it over. “Small carbine, by local standards, from what I can tell.”

Sorilla took it and twisted the weapon over, checking it carefully. It seemed relatively easy to figure out, but then most weapons were. You had to design them to be effective in nearly untrained hands, if at all possible, because true proficiency took far too long to train. It was generally more effective to put amateurs on the field and let them get their training the hard way.

She found the catch to lever the magazine clear of the weapon, but couldn’t check the breech because there wasn’t one.

Sorilla glanced up. “Guides?”

Nano waved a couple times and two of the locals approached. They were tall, even for the Childeans, easily topping eight feet each. Sorilla looked them over and nodded absently, switching to Childean. “You know the area?”

“Born to it,” one said. “I am Kirn.”

“Good to meet you,” she said, levering the magazine back into the weapon she held, carefully keeping the business end pointed down as she glanced over at the other, recognizing Mokan from earlier as he seemed to glower at her. “Mokan.”

He just grunted, eying the weapon she was cradling. “Why use our weapons? Do you not have ones of your own?”

“Two reasons,” Sorilla said idly, finding a sling from her pack and securing it to the carbine. “First, it is easier to find local supplies. Second, it would be better that the enemy never know that we were here.”

She saw his, well, gaze wasn’t entirely accurate she supposed, but his attention focused on the Metalstorm pistols she wore.

“Those are not weapons?” he asked.

“They are, but they’re loaded with simple elemental lead and tungsten,” she replied. “No smart rounds this mission. If I’m forced to use them, the damage will look like the improvised devices we’ll show you how to build later. No trace.”

“You hide from them.”

It was a statement, not a question, and so Sorilla merely nodded absently.

“We do.”

“Why?”

Sorilla paused for a moment before answering. “Many reasons. It would be bad for both our people if it were known we helped you. The Alliance is more powerful than we are, but slow to move. Anger them too much, however…”

She let that drag on and Kirn made a gesture halfway between a shrug and a nod that struck her as one of thoughtful consideration.

“I understand, I think. What do you want to see?”

Sorilla looked up along the sea-line, to where the lights of the city were visible even in the slightly dim “daylight” offered by the face of the super-Jupiter world hanging above them. “The enemy.”

“Easily done. Come with us.”

*                                        *                                        *

Hours of hiking, even for someone who’d been working hard to pre-acclimate to the environment, left Sorilla and Dearborn badly winded. Their suit air helped, but neither wanted to rely too stringently on it since it was limited and difficult to replace. They had brought compressors and other gear to help top off suit supplies, of course, but she was loathe to rely on equipment that could break down, or supplies that could run out.

They reached a point near the city, having avoided homesteads and outlying communities as they approached, and were now perched over what looked like a fused stone roadway running enough traffic to choke most of the transport hubs on the east coast of North America.

“Highway system?” Sorilla asked, eyeing the vehicles. They looked dirty and loud, but the smell didn’t remind her of the old muscle cars her dad liked to drive on his own time. “Smart cars?”

The pair of Childean guides glanced at her curiously, she thought, and Mokan grunted a negative.

“We’ve some, but such things are still experimental,” he said.

“Combustion engines,” she said, using the hyperspectral sensor suite in her implants to examine the vehicles. She blinked in surprise as her system listed the burn-off. “Ammonia? That’s interesting. All your vehicles run on that fuel?” she asked.

“Most, not all,” Kirn corrected. “Why?”

Sorilla shrugged, mumbling mostly to herself, “No reason. Hydro-nitrogen economy then?”

“You don’t have roadways where you come from? Or vehicles?” Mokan asked in what she presumed was sarcasm. Sorilla noted the tone and stashed it away for later use or reference.

“Not packed like that,” she admitted. “Public transport roads are computer-controlled. We run a thousand times this volume without any snarls like that mess. The old highway system was sold off to private clubs decades ago.”

“Private clubs?” Kirn was confused. “If you have better transport, why would they buy such things?”

Sorilla shrugged. “Some people like to drive fast. Pay a monthly fee and you can barrel across the country at two hundred miles per hour with only your reflexes between you and a nasty case of road rash. Public transport is faster, but it doesn’t have the same feel. Your people rely on these roadways for supplies, I assume?”

“Yes, for the most part. Why?”

“Nothing,” Sorilla said before correcting herself, “nothing yet. It will depend on what the Ross are up to here.”

Mokan grunted again, then gestured, “We can use the beast crossing path. It’s this way. We will be close to the city soon.”

Sorilla nodded, glancing at Dearborn. “All right.

*                                        *                                        *

As they approached the city, both Sorilla and Dearborn once more donned their helms and shifted their armor to active camouflage mode. It wasn’t as good as a vehicle-mounted unit could manage, but the armor would shift colors to blend in better.

The two alien guides looked at them, confused.

“What did you do?” Kirn asked, puzzled. “Something changed…”

“You see us easily?” Sorilla asked.

“Yes…” The big alien blinked. “But you’ve lost…color?”

He seemed confused, which was interesting but not so much as the fact that their limited stealth capability was of little use against the aliens. Luckily, what they knew of the Ross and their allies was enough to tell them that they, and their more passive systems, would be affected within expected parameters.

“We turned on stealth systems,” she said. “Color change, heat and other active frequency suppression, and so forth. The Ross systems will have difficulty seeing us now.”

“Why? You’re right there.” Kirn still sounded baffled.

“To you, yes,” she said, “but Ross see things differently than you do. So do we. Just trust us.”

“Very well,” the alien guide said finally, “best we avoid others, though. You look…stranger now than before.”

Sorilla suppressed a snort, but exchanged amused glances in her heads-up display with Dearborn, who was actually chuckling. Thankfully, he’d had the presence of mind to turn off his exterior speakers before starting.

Sorilla was intimately familiar with the limits of their suits’ camouflage systems, particularly as it concerned the enemy. Within the city limits, those limits meant that they would mostly be shadows of grey as they followed their guides deeper into the metropolis, until they came to a stop at a long, open road that led to a familiar dome. The active scanning systems used by Ross Goblin and Golem units would see through their systems easily enough, not to mention the systems built into the Ross ship, but those all needed to be focused to be effective. Beyond that, the two soldiers were…not invisible, but certainly difficult to spot.

“That was the location of the capital,” Kirn told them, nodding to the dome. “The building was destroyed in the early moments of the invasion. Before the grey dawn rose, that was seated in its place.”

“They did the same on Hayden,” Sorilla murmured. “Took out the center of government and parked one of their damn Portal ships right in the hole.”

“Portal ship?”

“I will explain later,” Sorilla said. “I don’t know the words now.”

The two Childeans looked at one another inscrutably, but said nothing further as Sorilla carefully took stock of the city she could see.

Coming in, they hadn’t seen much in the way of Ross patrols, but now, within site of the dome ship, she could see Goblin and Golem units dotting the back alleys and doorways in all directions. Those were the enemy’s front line, both offensively and for work projects from what SOLCOM could tell. Goblins were shorter than the average human, and slightly odd in their body configuration, while Golems were so named because of their towering size and powerful presence.

They weren’t even hiding, though they almost certainly could have. Instead of the stone grey color they’d worn on Hayden, these seemed to be draped in some sort of uniform. Garish, like the obscene purple camouflage some minor military forces on Earth occasionally still sported, but in blues and yellows.

“Subtle they ain’t, boss,” Dearborn spoke softly, echoing Sorilla’s thoughts on the matter.

“They’re peacekeepers,” Sorilla said. “Worry about the ones we can’t see.”

“Roger that.”

Sorilla subtly nudged Kirn, getting the alien’s attention. “What have they been demanding?”

“What?”

“They must want something, or they wouldn’t be so peaceful about things,” Sorilla said. “What are they demanding?”

“Not much,” he admitted. “Some fuel, foods, metals.”

Sorilla scowled, thinking furiously.

None of that made much sense. Metals and foods were easier to find or synthesize elsewhere; there was no reason to mount an invasion for them. Ammonia might be a different story—certainly it was valuable enough, from what she could remember—but it still seemed like overkill to mount an entire invasion over what should be simple enough to synthesize out of common universal elements.

Of course, no one…not even the Alliance, really understood the Ross.

“Can we get on the rooftops here?” she asked, looking over to Kirn, who nodded after a moment.

“Some, at least, but the Invaders have many up there,” the Childean answered.

Sorilla nodded. “I know they do. That’s why we need eyes up there too.”

Kirn gestured, “This way.”

They doubled back several blocks, with Sorilla and Dearborn watching for any sign they were being followed. Near as they could tell, however, the Ross had little to no interest in the streets or those milling about. It was distinctly different than their approach on Hayden, but as she had to remind herself, Hayden was a very different world. With a far lower population and population density, tactical strikes to eliminate potential competitors would have very little effect on the ecology of the world itself.

Here on Child, wiping out the locals would probably plunge the entire moon-world into a nuclear deep freeze for the next three or four centuries.

And, of course, the Ross may be after something entirely different here than on Hayden. If they landed here looking for metals and ammonia, I’m an Alliance bootlicker.

“This way,” Kirn told them, nodding to the bottom floor of a building just ahead and to their right.

As they entered, Sorilla felt a wave of almost dizziness as she tried to assimilate the proportions, failing miserably in the process. Not only did the interior make her feel like she’d shrunk a foot or two, but the design of the room almost had her questioning her senses.

The twisted perception reminded her of a time spent with a South American tribe, training them to protect themselves against corporate mercenaries looking to secure more of the rainforest for cattle production. The tribe had very strict traditions when it came to warriors, and one of those was a coming of age ceremony that involved some rather potent hallucinogens. That night had taken all her control to keep from wandering off into the jungle, marveling at all the talking trees.

This wasn’t quite so pronounced, of course, but the room evoked the same feeling of distortion of perception as the onset of those drugs had.

Sorilla pushed those observations aside as they were led deeper into the building and finally to an elevator. It was too large by half again, and the controls were a set of dials sitting just over six feet up the wall, but it was an elevator without question. The two Childeans casually set the dials and they started moving up and slightly at an angle, Sorilla noted through her implants.

“It’s adjusted for the super-Jupiter’s tidal gravity,” she said when she caught Dearborn’s odd expression and realized that he’d noted the same oddity. “I imagine everything here is.”

The sniper nodded slowly. “I imagine so.”

The lift shuddered to a stop almost three hundred meters above the surface, not a bad height for observation, but Sorilla was well aware that there were considerably taller buildings in the area. Even with the tidal effect of the super-Jupiter world, the relatively low gravity of Child was an architect’s dream.

The Childean pair led them out onto the rooftop, with both Sorilla and Dearborn now operating in full stealth mode. Even their personal communications were now limited to nearfield coms, which didn’t have nearly enough bandwidth for a face-to-face talk. The skyline around them was impressive, and as she’d figured, they were surrounded by other buildings towering above them, but not so many as to blind them, thankfully.

Sorilla took a knee by the edge of the roof and nodded to Dearborn, who was already eying the lines of sight with a professional eye.

“Goblins on the rooftops, ma’am. No Golems in sight.”

“Probably too big for the lifts,” Sorilla said lightly, though she was honestly far from certain about that. In fact, they probably would fit, though she wouldn’t take bets on whether the lifts could take the weight of the silicon-based robotic avatars they knew as Golems.

Dearborn just shrugged. He was more intent on locating all the sniper points he could in the time they had available.

Sorilla left him to that; he was the expert and she was here for something else entirely. She walked to the north side of the building and knelt down by that edge as she looked out at the Ross’El Portal ship in the distance. From where it was parked, all she could see was the dome that made up the heaviest of the vessel’s armor, but Sorilla knew well what lay under the surface.

In addition to a Gravity Valve powerful enough to collapse planets under their own mass, the ship represented a logistical supply and reinforcement point that defied the rules of the universe as she had been brought up to understand them. In hindsight, some physicists on Earth said that it made at least some sort of sense. The jump points that starships relied on to travel from star to star were generated by areas of pure zero gravity.

True zero-gee didn’t exist in nature. 99.999% of the universe, probably more, existed in a state of gravetic free fall. In a very real way, the universe itself was gravity. Gravity bound everything together, it penetrated the universe, and without gravity the laws of physics themselves were largely open to interpretation. However, at jump points, there were very small points of true zero-gee, places within the universe that were apart from it, where the laws of physics ceased to apply…or at least were stretched thin.

The Ross’El were noted masters of gravity manipulation, so it seemed understandable in hindsight that they would have been able to twist and subvert that fundamental force of the universe even in this way. For Sorilla, however, one of very few humans to have seen the Portals within a Ross ship and lived to tell the tale, it was still unbelievable.

“That was once the capital building of our entire world,” Mokan growled. “Now it is destroyed, replaced with that monstrosity.”

“More monstrous than you know,” Sorilla answered. “I’ve seen the inside of a Ross Portal ship. It’s a direct link back to their homeworld, or staging area. If they choose, they can move troops out of there within a few hours and sweep this entire city.”

Mokan hissed, an odd noise, and his limbs clenched and unclenched reflexively.

“Why do they not do so then?”

Sorilla snorted. “If we knew that, we’d be the only species outside of the Ross themselves able to follow their thoughts. Even the Gav, the species who created the Alliance, don’t seem to be able to talk with the Ross beyond mathematical theorems. The sense I got from Alliance space was that there wouldn’t be too many tears shed if the Ross just vanished one day.”

“Tears?” The alien scowled, the human word having slipped into her statement. “What are tears?”

“Sorry, human thing. Signs of sadness,” she answered.

“Ah. Yes. Tears.” He said the word again, this time in Childean. “There would be none of those here, I promise you that. We can get closer if you need to see more…”

“No.” Sorilla shook her head. “I see everything just fine.”

Her ocular implants included liquid lenses that rested on her cornea, indistinguishable from her normal physiology when not in use. On command, however, the surface tension of the liquid would change and her vision would tighten and tunnel in on a target as though she were looking through a powerful scope. She didn’t entirely lose peripheral vision using the system, but it still wasn’t something to keep active full time for fear of losing situational awareness.

“I count thirty Golems visible in some sort of livery around the perimeter of the dome,” she said aloud. “Probably another thirty on the other side. That’s more than they deployed in total across Hayden, until we started hitting them back at least.”

“I’ve got three, maybe four dozen Goblins on rooftop positions, boss,” Dearborn said cheerfully. “They’re not all gussied up. Instead, they’re wearing some sort of frequency-shifting armor. Never seen anything like it.”

Sorilla stepped close enough to get a nearfield link to his armor and tapped into his IFF stream, pulling up the targets he’d spotted and tagged. It only took a second for her to see what he meant as she turned her own eyes and passive implants onto the targets.

“Weird,” she said after a moment. “Some sort of jammer, you think?”

“Can’t imagine what they’re jamming, boss, but maybe.”

Sorilla gave him that point. The odd frequency oscillations she was looking at didn’t exactly make the targets stick out like sore thumbs, but it sure as hell didn’t do much for their stealth to any automated system she could imagine. The naked eye wouldn’t notice the changes, mind you, but now that she had them recorded into her armor, they may as well be sending up signal flares.

Well, I’m not going to complain, but I’ve got a feeling that we’d better get one of those generators or whatever is causing that. Might give us clue to their intentions here.

They took another few minutes to scout the other two sides of the building, just to be complete, then signaled that they were done and began exfiltration with their two Childean guides.

Sorilla already had enough data for a week’s worth of reports back to the fleet, but they were nowhere near figuring out what the hell this little private war was all about.

Chapter 4

USV Poland, Outer System

“Admiral on deck!”

“As you were,” Ruger said as he walked across the floor of the signals room, heading for the LaCOM station. The tech there was already turning and rising from her chair when he waved her down, and she reluctantly returned to her bolstered seat and twisted back around as he came to a stop behind her.

“I understand we have a report from the planet?”

“Aye, sir,” Ensign Bearwell said. “Came through an hour ago. Arrival confirmation, made contact with locals, plus an intel download.”

“Let me see the intel,” Ruger ordered.

“Sending it to the command screen.”

Ruger turned to look at the large central screen that dominated the far wall of the room, walking slowly toward it as mapping data, troop locations, and other intel began filtering across it.

“The major is a quick hand,” Captain Yuri Levensk said, quietly stepping up beside him.

“She is that,” Ruger replied, eyes still studying the screen. “Some of the work she’s done for us already borders on the miraculous. The woman is both good at what she does, and lucky as all hell.”

“Best combination to be.”

“Damn right…God, will you look at this,” Ruger said, nodding to the screen. “That’s an actual invasion force. They’ve deployed air assets.”

“So?” Yuri asked, shrugging. “That’s just good tactics.”

“It is, yes, but honestly, we didn’t even know the Ross knew what tactics were. They’ve always adopted a power approach to their methodology,” Ruger said. “Hell, when they thought one of our taskforces might escape them, they opted to turn an entire planet into a nuclear fission weapon with their Gravity Valves. What the hell are they after here that’s changed their game plan?”

“I suppose that’s going to be our job to figure out,” Yuri said, somewhat wearily but with resignation.

“Oh, you’re damn right. I want everything we have on both the moon and the super-Jupiter, as well as the rest of the moons there,” Ruger ordered. “And let’s put out some remote satellites with hyperspectral capability to augment our scanners.”

“I’ll issue the orders immediately, sir.”

Ruger nodded absently as the captain saluted and left, shifting his attention to the troop locations Major Sorilla Aida was reporting from the surface. So far she just had some basics, but it was telling to Ruger. He’d seen enough deployments to recognize what he was looking at.

They’ve put enough force into the area to secure the city without the threat of nuking it, and according to the reports from the locals, they’re slowly expanding. They want something down there, and they want it intact.

It was, perhaps, the first chink in the Ross’ armor that he’d seen.

If they wanted something, needed something, then that was leverage. Experts in SOLCOM had long figured that the Ross were driven by some sort of resource, but no one had been able to work out what it was. The normal sorts of things that drove human wars didn’t make sense once you had even basic intra-system stardrives.

Even without jump drives, ships that could do one-gee sustained were more than fast enough to mine enough materials from your average star system to totally flood any ten world economies with more resources than they could handle.

By all logic, there shouldn’t be anything on this world…or Hayden for that matter, that a star-faring race would give a damn about.

Maybe, just maybe, a race might need the territory itself. Overpopulation could be a driving factor, he supposed, but there was no sign that the Ross intended to move in. The general consensus was that they took Hayden because of the strategic location of the system, sitting as it was on a jump point nexus.

Child, however, was far from any strategic locations. It wasn’t a dead end jump point, but it certainly wasn’t holding any vital route either. There were several easy access jumps to bypass the system, and no significant worlds within several jumps according to either SOLCOM files or the public information available in the Alliance.

That left the first strike stratagem as the only other likely driving force behind Ross aggression, the idea that no intelligent star-faring species could take the chance of allowing another sentient race to develop within their sphere. Genocidal attacks were stupidly easy to accomplish once you had any sort of functioning space drive system. All you needed was basic mastery of the simplest trajectory calculations, far easier than was needed to…for example, calculate a moon shot…and dropping an extinction-level rock on any world you chose was almost literally child’s play.

The problem with that idea was that it didn’t fit with Ross actions.

They didn’t annihilate the planets they found sentient life on as their first recourse, even the war records found in the Alliance public files were clear on that. The Ross seemed to prefer occupation, but once they took over a world, they essentially ignored the previous inhabitants unless they crossed some arbitrary and invisible divide that no one seemed able to quantify.

Ruger was already getting a headache and he hadn’t even begun to try and follow the alien logic that might lead to the current situation on Child of God.

A soft warning alarm took him from his mental daze, however, and he turned to the alert station as three crewmen suddenly got very busy.

“Gravity contact, outer system a quarter-way around the elliptic.”

“That’s the Gamma Jump Point. Alliance space on the other side of that, three jumps away.”

“Roger that. Analyzing the signal… Definite jump. We’re three hours from lightspeed confirmation, but best guess is we’re looking at reinforcements, or that Pari cruiser is back for another peek.”

Ruger walked up behind the three men. “Keep an eye on it. I want to know as soon as we have confirmation.”

“Aye, sir.” The senior crewman nodded. “We’ll let you know.”

The Admiral nodded, but had little more to say. They would know more in three hours, when the first photons from the new ship crossed the void to the Poland’s scanners. Until then, it was enough to know that something had arrived in system.

Speaking of which, Ruger thought as he returned to the LaCOM station. “Put an alert update into our latest analysis package and pulse it to the team on Child. If they’re about to have another Portal ship drop in on their heads, I suppose it might do them some good to be expecting it.”

Honestly, he wasn’t certain that was true, not given the limited resources that Major Aida’s team had dropped in with, but better to have the intel than not. He hoped, anyway.

“Aye aye, Admiral. We’ll pulse within the next five minutes. The signal should beat the alien vessel by at least a few hours,” Ensign Bearwell confirmed.

“Good. As you were then, Ensign,” Ruger said as he turned away. “Let me know if the major sends anything new.”

“Aye, sir.”

*                                        *                                        *

Child of God

Sorilla was observing one of Miram’s training sessions with the locals when a small furor went up on the other side of the camp. Everyone paused, looking over, but Sorilla gestured to Miram and the younger woman got control of her training group again and pressed them harder as punishment for being distracted.

They’d never make operators out of the locals, but there was some decent material in the lot. The survivors might make decent Pathfinders.

Sorilla let her focus lock onto the outburst as she walked in that direction, unsurprised to find Mokan was at the center of it.

The large Childean was among the leaders of the particular band that Sorilla had linked up with, for good or ill, and for all his short temper and clear rage at the Ross, he could be a surprisingly intelligent person in his better moments.

This didn’t appear to be one of those.

“You’re disturbing training,” she snapped as she approached. “What’s going on?”

The group barely glanced at her before continuing their rapid fire back and forth in Childean, too fast and using too many slang- or dialect-specific words for her to easily follow. Sorilla debated knocking a couple heads together, but aside from the fact that she would have significant difficulty reaching that high, she also didn’t think it was likely to be the best way to get through to them.

Patience was a key trait in any trainer, but so was the knowledge of when to shelve patience and show your temper.

A piercing squeal from her armor loudspeakers had most of them covering their “ears,” for a certain value of the word, and looking around wildly for the source of the sound.

“I asked,” she went on, her voice just amped enough to be unnatural, “what is going on?”

The grumbling Childeans glowered at her, but none of them had quite gotten it into their head to try and “teach the alien a lesson” yet.

Yet.

Sorilla had little doubt that day was coming, which was one reason she had most of her team playing nice guy routines while she rode them hard. Sooner or later someone was going to snap and try to put her down and, honestly, the sooner the better.

She was honestly a little disappointed that none of them had tried it so far, but figured that at least some slack had to be cut for the whole alien intimidation thing that she and the others had going for them.

It’s sort of weird being the “bug-eyed monster” in this scenario, Sorilla chuckled inwardly while keeping her features implacable.

“We just had a runner come in from the city,” Mokan finally spoke up, clearly reluctantly.

“Bad news?” Sorilla asked.

“More disappearances,” he answered. “More and faster.”

Sorilla breathed in through her nose, taking a deep hit from the oxygen feed on the breather clipped there as she considered that.

Disappearances during an invasion were par for the course, so on the one hand there wasn’t anything really unusual about that. On the other hand, she had to keep reminding herself that the Ross were total unknowns. That meant that anything had to be considered potentially valuable information, even the things she was expecting to hear.

“People are going to vanish,” she said finally. “Some will be running, some will have crossed the agents of the Ross, and some will probably be killed by your own people taking advantage of the situation. That’s reality in an invasion, don’t fight each other over it.”

“It’s not that simple,” Mokan growled. “Too many are involved.”

“How many?” Sorilla asked, mentally nudging her computer core as she started taking notes.

“We’ve lost most of our contacts in the city now, several hundred people,” he told her. “They had no connections to one another.”

Sorilla felt a chill run through her. “Did they know about our location?”

“No,” Mokan said definitively. “They knew nothing more than a few names.”

“Good.” Sorilla relaxed marginally. “Still, maybe they’ve begun sweeping up dissidents? Going after your network?”

“It is possible,” Mokan admitted, sounding like he was having his teeth pulled, “but we’ve had reports of many others vanishing as well.”

“Do we have numbers on those?” she asked, curious.

“Nothing solid,” he told her after a time, still reluctant to even speak with her, it seemed, “but thousands have gone missing over the last few days, at the very least.”

Sorilla considered that for a long, quiet moment before speaking slowly. “That would seem unusual, and counter to their strategy so far. That many missing is going to cause panic, something the Ross forces appear to have been avoiding until now. What’s changed?”

“We do not know.”

“This is a problem,” she admitted.

A local panic in a city that size would throw her plan all to the winds, because there was no question that the Ross would be forced to instigate harsher security measures in the face of city-wide riots, and that was assuming that they didn’t just nuke the whole place and wipe their hands of it.

What the hell are they playing at? Why take over the local government if you’re just going to rip it to shreds a few days later anyway?

“Damn Ghoulies,” she grumbled with feeling. “May as well try and win the lotto as guess what they’re thinking, and even if they’re thinking.”

Meanwhile, the group of Childeans had started once more to argue back and forth, but quieter and more controlled this time, thankfully. Sorilla left them to it for a moment, before making her decision.

“We need eyes on the city. Mokan, take Dearborn out next twilight,” she ordered. “He’ll tell you what he needs. Meanwhile, see if your people can find out anything in the city. Even if no one knows anything, someone must have seen something. Find out where the people are vanishing to. They’re not just teleporting them out of their homes. Find a witness who saw them get taken.”

Mokan nodded slowly, torn between his annoyance at listening to the small person and his eagerness to find out the very same things she was telling him to learn.

“Very well,” he finally said, “it will be done.”

“I’ll brief Dearborn,” she said. “He’ll be ready to leave within the hour.”

*                                        *                                        *

Sorilla had just finished giving her team sniper his briefing, sending him out along with his spotter to join the local guide, when her link to the laser com lit up. She made her way over to the portable transciever and tapped the receive key, aligning the parabolic dish on its top to pull in the tightbeam com laser from the disposable satellites they’d seeded in orbit during the team’s orbital insertion.

The intel brief was, unfortunately brief, but one piece jumped out at her. The Admiral’s priority warning of an unknown ship entering the system could be a mission killer, she realized, but until they knew more details, she wouldn’t be able to make that call.

No matter what, of course, it was a potential problem—how much just depended on what was coming down on them. A Parithalian cruiser was likely just an Alliance observer, probably wouldn’t stick around long if previous actions were something to judge by. The last one they’d observed had left less than a day later, likely just making sure that whatever the Ross were up to, they weren’t violating whatever agreement they had with the Alliance Frontier Corporation.

If it were another Ross ship, however, she honestly didn’t know what that would mean.

While several of the enemy ships had been destroyed in the Hayden System, only one had been dispatched to the planet itself. The others had really only been in the system because the SOLCOM ships kept slugging it out with them in an attempt to establish space superiority over Hayden and control the jump points generated around the system.

Without that fighting, there was little doubt that a single Ross ship was more than enough to control and interdict a single planet with no problems. The Gravity Valve was more than capable of intercepting any attack within several lightseconds at least, and in theory was effective up to a few lightminutes out. Of course, at that range, targeting was a serious problem since even Ross systems appeared to be limited to lightspeed imaging.

FTL communication was difficult enough, but there wasn’t even any theory that would currently allow for remote targeting at faster-than-light ranges, barring a few passive systems that might be able to track the singularity within advanced warships by their gravity disturbance. In a star system, however, that was a very tricky thing to track, since most singularities in use onboard ships were relatively small, generating gravity over a tiny area of space.

That still gave the Ross a standoff range of several lightseconds, inside of which any ship running an assault was basically on a suicide run.

So Sorilla wasn’t certain why they would feel the need to send a second ship, which meant that it was probably another visit by the Alliance.

I wish I knew what the politics of the situation was, Sorilla considered as she continued to review the data.

If the Ross were on thin ice with the Alliance, it might behoove her to rig up a visible sign of rebellion while the visiting ship was in orbit. A little pie in the face of the invaders might get enough Alliance attention focused on Child to keep the Ross from blatantly using their Gravity Valves against the locals.

Of course, the problem with that was, if she were wrong in her guess, that same action might just cause the Ross to decide to “clean up” their mess and move on.

That wouldn’t be a good situation for either the locals or her and her team.

Clean-up usually wasn’t a great situation for the “dirt” being cleaned, after all.

*                                        *                                        *

Lance Dearborn cradled the alien long gun in the crook of his arm as he knelt just below the peak of the hill they were crouched on, carefully keeping their profiles from appearing against the blank sky. He mentally went over firing parameters for the weapon he held again, having fired it a few times to familiarize himself with the tech but honestly wishing for his preferred artillery piece in its place.

The alien weapon was impressive enough in its own right, mind, and had some key advantages over the comparable SOLCOM sniper rifle. For one, because it used a chemical lazing system to discharge a quite potent energy pulse, it was effective undisturbed by gravity over the ranges they would generally be engaging anyone at. The laser pulses were destructive enough as well, though not to the same level as a scramjet-propelled guided round fired from a SOLCOM Samurai 75 sniper rifle.

What he lost in guidance and power, though, the sniper specialist was gratified to accept back in accuracy and time on target. There would be no several-second wait for a shot from the alien weapon to hit the target once he triggered it. The laze pulse would burn a three-quarter-inch hole in milspec armor just as quickly as light could travel, which might just keep the enemy from triangulating their position with anti-sniper protocols.

He’d change hides after every shot anyway, of course.

No one ever accused Ma Dearborn of raising fools…except Ma Dearborn herself, of course, many, many times in his memory.

“We are too far to see anything,” Mokan growled. “We need better devices.”

“Here.” Lance pulled a wrapped flimsy screen from his pack and handed it off, turning it on as he did.

The alien looked at it, confused for a moment, then spotted the display. It bothered him, like there was something missing in the image, but he could see well enough through it to tell that it was looking over the city from their position.

“Where are the optics?” Mokan asked, flipping it over a couple times.

“Right here.” Lance tapped his temple as he peered intently over the city. “Best optic package available in SOLCOM, everything from straight magnification to hyperspectral analysis.”

Mokan grunted, not understanding half of what he was being told, but figuring that it wasn’t worth the bother of asking for clarification. He found that the aliens spoke funny, at the best of times, but other than their leader and the other smaller one who was handling training, their accents seemed to get worse and their word choice even more atrocious as time went on.

It was clear to Mokan that the smaller ones of the species were the more intelligent. He supposed the larger ones were good for something, though he hadn’t seen what just yet. Sighing inaudibly, he settled down into the small divot they’d carved out of the hillside and stared at the flimsy device in his grips, glowering all the while.

Lance focused his attention first on the Ross’El dome, slowly moving his gaze out from there as his internal implants gathered data from the passive imagery and offloaded it to a backup processor he’d humped along with them. The sort of heavy-duty analysis they needed done would have all but crippled his onboard core; hyperspectral imagery took a lot to properly process, plus he was running pattern recognition across the board on frame he was gathering. The computer would pick out any hidden enemy units faster than he could across that much data, even if a human tended to be faster on individual frames.

“I’m seeing a force buildup,” he said after a moment, highlighting several units for his companion. “They’ve more than doubled their visible guards over our last visit, and the city is crawling with the ones in that odd spread spectrum gear.”

Mokan looked over the data being lit up on the screen he was holding. “We must strike them soon. We cannot hope to win if they increase their numbers much more.”

“Don’t kid yourself, you can’t hope to win against the Ross anyway,” Lance said in clipped tones, reaching for the weapon he’d brought. “Their standoff capability with the Gravity Valve in that ship is too powerful. In a straight-up fight, they’ll scatter your atoms to the winds before you even see them coming.”

Mokan didn’t understand everything the alien had told him, but he got the gist of it with no problems and took umbrage at the implications.

“Do not underestimate us, we will fight to the death,” he growled.

“That’s exactly what I said,” Lance said as he casually leaned his cheek into the alien weapon and looked down the optics. “You won’t beat the Ross that way.”

“You did,” Mokan countered.

“Not hardly. They kicked our ass in open fighting,” Lance admitted cheerfully as he tried to adjust to the odd optics he was looking through.

There was something about the alien optical systems that made his eyes bleed, figuratively speaking, so Lance redirected the targeting feed through his implants and let his own optics clean up the imagery. He cleared the weapon, ensuring that there wasn’t anything in the lazing chamber, and familiarized himself with the weapon as he spoke.

“First time we met them, they wiped out every last member of the taskforce that encountered them, except one person,” he said. “She only lived by luck, or maybe fate. Whatever it was, she got on the ground and hooked up with some locals who’d been run out of their homes by the Ross. Didn’t take long before she started training them up. The Hayden Pathfinders are going to be legends in military circles for a long time to come.”

“Pathfinders,” Mokan grunted. “Your leader used that word.”

“She should have.” Lance smiled as he dry-fired the weapon, mentally erasing a distant Golem from existence. “Major Aida was the only survivor of our first meeting with the Ross. She’s been on the sharp end of this war ever since.”

Mokan fell silent for a moment. “She does not seem so formidable as that.”

Intelligent, yes, he was willing to admit that, but while there was clearly a hidden strength in the smaller aliens that he’d met, he didn’t see anything overly special about that one out of the group.

“Don’t fool yourself, Mokan,” Lance said as he dry-fired again, this time with his sights locked onto a distant Goblin that seemed like it was giving orders. “The Major is as tough as they come, and she’s got both a body and a rescue count to show it. Most of us are new at this, we took a lot of losses during the war, but when SOLCOM sent you Major Aida, you got the best we have to offer.”

*                                        *                                        *

USV Poland

“Visual confirmation on the bogey, Admiral.”

Ruger looked up and gestured to his aide. “Well, let me have it.”

“Parithalian cruiser, sir.”

Ruger hummed a little, thinking about that.

On the one hand, it did make marginally more sense than having another Ross ship show up in a secured system, but only marginally, based on what they knew of Alliance operations. The Parithalians never showed up at Hayden until the situation was well and truly in the pot, much the same as the other Alliance races. The sweep of the interstellar Alliance was such that, by and large, the member races left each other largely to their own affairs until something forced their hand.

Is it possible the Alliance is trying to keep the Ross on a tighter leash?

Ruger wasn’t sure if that made sense or not. Certainly, on the surface it seemed like a likely scenario. The Ross bumbling into SOLCOM space had cost the Alliance a lot in terms of manpower, ships, and public relations. Like Earth, the Alliance largely had a “free” media who had caught wind of the war, and despite the normal bit of propaganda tweaking, the reports he’d seen didn’t shine too well on the Alliance.

The Ross weren’t the sort to be leashed easily, however, and he hadn’t found any sign of it ever having been done before in Alliance files. That didn’t mean it hadn’t, of course; it was possible that such actions were highly classified and that would naturally have put them well out of his reach since almost all of his data access in the Alliance came from unclassified public access points.

So, are the Pari here to keep an eye on the Ross, or to back them up?

Probably both, he supposed, unofficially at least. The Ross were just too loose a cannon to leave entirely on their own, but they were at least nominally Alliance members and so couldn’t be abandoned entirely either.

“This is going to make things complicated,” he said aloud.

“Pardon, sir?”

Ruger looked over at his aide. “The Ross themselves are formidable, but basically a power-based enemy that we can take in a fight if we’re sneaky about it. I wouldn’t want to deal with another straight up war with the entire species, mind, but one of their ships isn’t going to be that hard to take down. The Parithalians, however, are a problem. If we have to get involved directly while they’re here, we can’t let them escape alive. They’ll report our presence back to the Alliance, and that cannot happen. I doubt anyone would believe the Ross, but the Parithalians are a different story.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ruger sighed, making a decision. “Make sure the captain knows that we’re to stay completely dark while the Parithalian ship is in-system. No more signals to our people on the ground for the time being.”

“Yes, sir. But, Admiral…?”

“Yes?”

“What about the ground team? They will be expecting additional intel feeds…”

“Aida knows her business,” Ruger said, “and she knows the score, better than most of us do. She’ll keep things together.”

“Aye, sir.”

Chapter 5

Alliance Cruiser Pharhawven

Master of Ships Sephis looked over the massive roiling sphere that was currently growing off the flank of his ship, his thoughts turning to what it would be like to fly such unending skies as those must be.

His race were descended of avian stock, a rare path of evolution in the Alliance, and even the most grounded of Parithalians couldn’t help but look at the skies from time to time and remember as if from a dream. Tall of stature, with thin and hollow bones, the Parithalian people were bred to fly, from their inner cores to their blue-tinged skin. A world the like of the one he was eyeing would be the greatest of adventures to fly, and he supposed that he might make time at some point in the future to return with a high atmospheric skimmer and spend a few weeks riding the unending storm winds.

For now, however, he had other duties to attend.

The world the Ross’El had drawn from the frontier corporation database was a tiny moon orbiting the massive gas world. He didn’t know what the enigmatic aliens wanted there and, in all honesty, didn’t care. What he, and the Alliance, did care about was ensuring that the Ross didn’t get them in another shooting war until they had time to bring up sufficient replacement vessels to refortify this sector.

He hadn’t been involved in the recent spat with the humans, but his briefings had included full recordings of pretty much all the battles, save one.

No one had any recordings of what happened in the last battle of the war, but whatever it was, it had scared the Alliance sector leadership to their core. An entire battle group, complete with Ross’El warship escorts, had vanished without so much as trace gases to prove their passing.

No one knew how the humans had done it, but until some answers were had, the Alliance didn’t want the Ross’El digging them all a new hole in space-time.

“Entering intercept orbit, Master of Ships.”

“Thank you, Kilen,” Sephis said, nodding to his second, who was observing the orbital mechanics of their entry as the ship was brought into place by a new pilot.

They had slung in fast, using the mass of the big planet to slow the ship rather than waste fuel or time. Skimming the upper atmosphere had been an adventure of sorts, but now they were slow enough that the moon world was catching up to their orbit, approaching the Pharhawven from aft.

“Intercept in three marks.”

“Place us in orbit, Second,” Sephis ordered, more for the record than anything else.

“As you order, Master.”

As the moon world swept up past them, the Pharhawven fired her engines just enough to drop the ship into the moon world’s gravity and was swept along like a floating toy caught in a draft.

“Insertion successful, Master,” Kilen reported a few moments later, nodding his approval to the pilot.

It had been a largely textbook maneuver, but well-handled, so Sephis added his own congratulations as he rose to observe the moon world on his screens.

“Yes, thank you. Excellent work,” he said, eyes on the clouded ball that looked rather dirty and uninteresting from space. Of course, most worlds looked that way to him if he were honest. Sephis liked to think that he’d inherited more of his ancestors’ avian stock than the average Parithalian. He wanted great skies, not green and brown dirt farms.

That was why he joined the Parithalian Fleet.

There was no greater sky than the great darkness, and no greater flight than to hurl through jump space at hundreds of times the speed of light. Only the Fleet would have permitted him such freedoms, and he had never regretted his choice.

The Ross’El may well make me start, however. He glowered at the screen. Particularly if they continue as they have been lately. What is their sudden fascination with frontier expansion about, anyway? They’ve not shown any interest in such since they joined the Alliance.

That was, frankly, the main reason the Alliance wanted observer ships assigned to the Ross’El expansion efforts. Getting the Alliance into a shooting war was bad enough, but there were more than a couple factions who considered that a good thing so long as it wasn’t with anyone who might constitute a real threat to the Alliance as a whole.

There were fortunes to be made off the sale of military arms, and the people who were in that sort of business rarely gave a damn about the lives of those who were destined to wield said arms. As long as the money flowed, well, there were always new fools to fill the frontline slots in their minds.

Sephis knew from personal experience that many of his fellows both hated and deeply needed those warmongers because, unfortunately, war was a reality of the universe, and while you may not like the man whose fortune depends on death, your life could very well rest on the quality of his product. It was an uncomfortable position for a Master of Ships, one who was used to commanding his own path in the void, but no one flew alone.

Sometimes you didn’t get the luxury of liking those who flew with you.

Sephis sighed, but waved to his chief translation specialist. “Send the greeting.”

“Yes, Master.”

Kimmsa, the young Parithalian, turned to her task, carefully inputting the greeting code and watching as the systems translated them to mathematical codes as complicated as any Sephis had ever seen. The Ross seemed only capable of communicating in mathematical descriptions of the Deep Reality. Frankly, Sephis would rather just step out an airlock for one last eternal flight than try to translate any of that insanity without the help of a specialist.

“Greeting sent,” Kimmsa said calmly as she settled back from the system.

He nodded and settled in to wait for the response.

*                                        *                                        *

Child of God

“It’s a Pari ship, no question.”

“You sure, Major?”

Sorilla nodded, eyes still on the skies as she watched the silhouette of the alien ship pass across the face of the Childeans’ God-World.

“Absolutely, Lieutenant,” she told Kepler. “The Pari ships have a distinctive profile. They’re more artistic than the rest of the Alliance races; they like their ships to have wings.”

Bard Kepler nodded slowly. “What do you think that means for us?”

“Hard to say,” Sorilla admitted. “It depends on a lot of information we’re not privy to, but my best guess is that they’re here to keep an eye on the Ross, maybe try and head off any problems like we gave them on Hayden.”

Kepler considered that. “We can use that.”

Sorilla nodded absently. “Maybe. I just wish we had more intel on how the Alliance leadership was divided on this. Without knowing that, anything we do could blow up in our face in a big way.”

“How?”

Sorilla looked over at him, taking her eyes off the distant shadow of the vessel that was only visible through augments. Kepler hadn’t come up through the Special Forces, so she wasn’t surprised that he hadn’t really thought it through all the way.

“If they’re here to keep the Ross in line, then showing that the Ross don’t have things under control might make the Alliance turn pressure on them, maybe force them to withdraw,” Sorilla said. “But without knowing the current state of affairs in Alliance politics, they might decide to do something like clean up the evidence of their failures.”

Kepler grimaced. “That would be the locals, I suppose?”

“And us, yes,” Sorilla nodded. “And given the Ross’ capabilities, cleaning up the evidence might result in one less moon in this star system.” She shrugged. “For them, it’s just a small one. Not like anyone would miss it, after all.”

Kepler groaned, rubbing his forehead. “So what do we do?”

Sorilla side-loaded the observational data she’d gathered on the orbiting ship over to the field comm—she’d laser link it back to the squadron once they had clear skies again—and shrugged.

“We do our jobs, and we take it slow,” she said. “Big, spectacular actions look great, but it’s slow and steady pressure that wins a war. Don’t ever buy into the hype, Lieutenant. The more bragging you see on the media, the faster the war is turning against the braggarts. If we do our job right, no one will ever know we were even here, and that’s the way I’d like this one to go.”

“Never thought of it that way,” Kepler admitted.

Having read his file front to back, Sorilla was aware that Kepler had seen some action before the war with the Ross, but it had been mostly in the open conflicts that Britain had been involved in over the last decade or so before the Ross happened on Hayden. He did some time in Pakistan, South America, and a short tour in a South Asian nation that didn’t exist anymore. His orders had always come in clearly, with distinct objectives that could be won.

This…this was something very different and he was only now really getting that settled in his head.

Sorilla nodded quietly. “For now we don’t make any changes to our operating plan. Help Miram with the training. I want some of the locals ready to shake up the Ross within the week.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Sorilla watched him go for a moment before turning back to focus her gaze on the skies above them. It took a few moments to track down the dark sliver of the Parithalian cruiser as it crossed the face of the super-Jupiter world, but she found it again presently.

So, I wonder, is there anyone I know up there?

It seemed unlikely, but Sorilla did have a passing familiarity with several of the Alliance’s key figures in this sector. Mostly from their files, but she was among the very few humans who’d gotten to meet the enemy and recognize them as people too.

That was a blessing and a curse in her line of work.

*                                        *                                        *

Alliance Cruiser Pharhawven

“The Ross’El station has acknowledged our greeting and returned the standard reply,” Kimmsa reported finally, after a significantly long wait.

Sephis sighed, but nodded his acknowledgement.

The Ross’El were honest pains to deal with at the best of times, but under the current tensions, they’d become even more so.

“Did they send the report?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

“Request it, officially,” Sephis sighed.

Kimmsa nodded. “As you command, Master.”

Sephis rose from his console and walked around the displays to look at the large screen that showed the world, eyes staring as he tried to make out any sort of useful information from the face of it.

“Any sign of trouble on the surface?” he asked finally.

“No, Master.” The scanner tech shrugged his shoulder blades in the negative. “No significant changes from our last scans. Initial damage from the Ross’El landing has been cleaned up a little, no signs of any serious fighting anywhere around the controlled metropolis.”

Sephis snorted.

Of course there isn’t. Only a suicidal fool would engage the Ross’El within a clear line of sight of their Gravity weapons.

While it was known that the Ross’El weapons could fire through a planet, if needed, it was a little lesser known that the Ross’El still needed very clear targeting coordinates to do so. One didn’t estimate when one was using a weapon of that scale of power, and even the Ross’El weren’t insane enough to deploy their weapon wildly upon a planet they themselves currently occupied.

Thankfully, if they started deploying Gravity weapons on this world, it would be clearly visible even from orbit.

Huge gaping wounds sliced out of a planet’s surface were easy enough for system pattern recognition to pull out of the imagery data.

“Very well, scan and register as we go,” he ordered. “One pass will suffice.”

“Yes, Master. One scan.”

One scan wouldn’t be enough to get a really detailed look at the surface, but it would do a good enough job in the absence of any reason to look closer. For the moment, at least, this world was the Ross’Els’ play. He wasn’t going to be the Master of Ships who got the Alliance involved with a Ross’El world for no good cause.

“Signal from the surface, Master,” Kimmsa said a moment later.

“Yes?”

“Decoding it now, but it’s the report you requested.”

Sephis nodded. “Good. Second?”

“Yes, Master?”

“Complete the scanner pass, then break orbit and make for the tertiary jump point. We’re due back in Alliance space shortly.”

“As you command, Master.”

Sephis nodded curtly, then excused himself from the command deck of the cruiser. It had been a long day, and any time spent within range of a Ross’El Gravity weapon was stretched out beyond all recognition. He felt like they’d been in orbit of the moon-world for days already.

*                                        *                                        *

USV Poland

The Parithalian ship had passed behind the super-Jupiter and out of the reach of the Poland’s direct sensors, which Ruger knew meant that they’d have to wait until it was safe to recover data from the disposable satellites they’d seeded into the planet and moon’s orbit when they’d launched the infiltration team. For the immediate future, however, Ruger was less concerned about what the Alliance ship handlers were doing and more with why they were doing it.

We need better intelligence inside Alliance politics, he thought, certainly not for the first time.

The problem of how to infiltrate an alien culture, let alone its political body, was giving the intel specialists back home no end of migraines. They’d had some luck wedging open the crack Sorilla Aida had provided them, buying intelligence and access from some of the less savory Alliance members, but they were certain that they had more people selling them misinformation than the real deal.

That was par for the course, Ruger was well aware. They had people doing the same thing to Alliance members on Hayden, where SOLCOM had allowed an ambassadorial mission to be established within its territory.

The intelligence game was almost gentlemanly compared to the realities of what happened when it failed, or sometimes when it succeeded, but so far neither side was really playing the game all out. In order to more effectively spy on one another, it was clear that the Alliance and SOLCOM were going to have to get a lot friendlier in the near future.

The irony wasn’t lost on Ruger.

“Let me know the moment we have sensors on the Parithalian ship again,” he ordered his aide, mind twisting in the proverbial wind as he tried to determine how to best make use of this new turn of events.

Flying blind through a canyon would have less potential consequences than what we’re playing at here.

*                                        *                                        *

Miram Soleill dropped to a crouch where one of the Childeans was gasping on the ground, shaking her head gently even though she really wanted to be gasping right beside him. Without the oxygen boost from her suit air, there was no way she’d have been able to keep up with the locals, and that could have been problematic given that she was supposed to be training them.

“Tired so soon?” she asked sardonically, not aiming for the abuse a drill sergeant would pour out.

They didn’t have time to properly break down the Childeans and rebuild them into a cohesive fighting force, so they were aiming for a skilled, irregular force that could start tearing all living hell out of the Ross operations here on Child. That meant that the abrasive drill instructor persona was right out, so she was going more for a disappointed big sister approach.

“We only just got started…”

“I…can continue,” the Childean gasped out as he lifted himself up to his feet again.

“Good man,” Miram said warmly, not clapping the Childean on his shoulder because that didn’t seem to have the same connotations as it did for humans, but she did pull him fully upright.

She didn’t even need to lean into her suit muscles to easily heft the surprisingly light body of the Childeans, she’d learned early on. While physically larger than humans, and surprisingly sturdy as a people, the Childeans were made of lighter stuff than her and her fellows. The lighter gravity of Child combined with the heavier musculature of the human form didn’t hurt in that regard either, of course.

“Take a breather,” she ordered. “Then start again.”

“Yes,” he confirmed, clearly psyching himself to follow her orders as he took deep breaths.

Miram was about to say something else but paused when she spotted the major approaching, and she turned to greet the older woman. She didn’t go to attention. Like the major, Miram was a cultural specialist and asymmetrical warfare expert, and she’d learned very early in her career indeed that those two particular specialties didn’t have much use for the formalities in the field…not unless they served a real purpose.

“Ma’am, what can I do for you?”

Sorilla looked over the small bridge that were training in coordinating small-arms fire and maneuvering in tangent with one another for a moment before speaking.

Finally she looked back to Miram. “Where are you on IEDs?”

“We’ve looked over the easiest available materials and begun building example detonators from locally sourced materials,” Miram answered. That wasn’t really her specialty, but she was following what the others were doing. “We’ll start hands-on training shortly.”

“Good. Talk to the others, see what you need to do to speed that up,” Sorilla ordered.

“Ma’am?” Miram frowned. They were still scheduled to train for quite some time yet.

Sorilla’s eyes lifted skyward. “I want to put a couple teams in the field, monitored, as soon as our visitors are gone. We need to see how the Ross are going to react to some pressure.”

Miram was puzzled, but she nodded slowly. “Very well, ma’am. I’ll see to it.”

“Good,” Sorilla said firmly, then glanced at her with a hint of concern. “How are you adjusting?”

“Better now,” Miram admitted after a moment. “The air is thin, but I’ve done mountain training. I can hack it, ma’am.”

“Never any doubts,” Sorilla said, “but you don’t go in the field until you’re fully acclimated. Clear?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Chapter 6

Ross’El Golem avatars were in excess of ten meters tall, constructed of a silicon matrix that most closely resembled a nanotech-assembled variant of volcanic rock, yet moved with the precision and speed of any modern military unit Sorilla could imagine, and a good deal better than most. In close proximity, the only unit SOLCOM fielded that could go one on one with a Golem were the SOLCOM Titans, and those were definitely not on the TO&E for this particular mission.

Still, there were ways to deal with even the biggest and baddest of foes if you took the time to prepare the battlefield beforehand.

Sorilla nodded, letting Mokan deliver the final order to the Childeans controlling the explosive charges. The ground and air shook with violence as a shockwave threw smoke, shrapnel, fire, and pure force through the narrow alley they’d trapped the Golem and its Goblin escorts in.

She let the locals cheer a little as the Golem vanished into the smoke, but caught Mokan’s attention and gently gestured with her hand, telling him to hold still. She was mildly surprised when he did, but judging from his body language, the big Childean was just happy to have gotten a little revenge on the aliens.

How little he knows, she thought as the smoke began to clear and the cheering hushed when the Golem stomped out of the cloud, looking for targets.

“Hit him with the second charge on my mark…” she ordered softly.

“But the first did nothing!”

Sorilla ignored Mokan’s fear and objection, just holding up three fingers. The Childean had worked with them long enough in training now to recognize the significance of the number three to humans. He gestured rapidly to the others and they rigged the second charge on his order as Sorilla folded one finger down.

The Golem stepped forward, still seeking targets as it moved through the alley.

Sorilla folded the second finger, and the Childeans tensed.

The Golem paused, turning toward their position as it picked up something, but Sorilla smiled under the respirator attached just under her nose and dropped the last finger, clenching her fist.

“Mark.”

Mokan snapped the order, on the edge of panic. “Do it!”

This explosion was quieter, more of a dull thud. There was no smoke to speak of, and effectively no shrapnel either. In fact, many of them thought for a moment that the weapon had been a dud and they were about to die.

Then the Golem teetered on one foot and crumpled to the ground with a noisy, ground-shaking crash.

Sorilla dropped down from the hide she and Mokan had used. It was probably closer to the target than was strictly intelligent, but risks sometimes had to be taken and she needed the locals to get real eyes-on instruction in the reality of what her team was teaching.

“That,” she said calmly as she walked over to the destroyed units of the occupation force, nudging the remains of the Golem with her foot to expose the clean black circle burned right through it, “is the difference between anti-personnel weapons and anti-armor weapons. Secure any of their weapons that survived. We want to be gone before backup gets here.”

Or before they decide to nuke the block on general principle, Sorilla thought grimly.

She didn’t think that they’d be doing that, however, since so far the Ross had shown a light touch in this particular operation. Until she figured out why that was the case, she wasn’t planning on pushing them too hard in any area filled with civilians, but it was time to start applying pressure. If they were lucky, they’d start to see where the seams were in the Ross’ patience before it blew up in their faces.

Literally.

The Childeans moved quickly, scrambling over the rubble and remains of the enemy units as they grabbed anything that looked mostly intact, knowing that they’d have to sort it out later. Sorilla herself found a Ghoulie gun that had been thrown against the wall of the alley but other than a few scratches looked in decent shape. She pulled a field strap from her gear and looped it around the weapon before slinging it casually over her shoulder.

“Time to go,” she told Mokan.

The big Childean nodded, making an odd noise that was almost like a subsonic whistle to get the attention of the others. They hastened their motions, grabbing whatever they could in the last seconds, then the whole group vanished into the buildings around them.

Sorilla nodded approvingly and saluted with two fingers to the south before she and Mokan followed suit.

Three kilometers away, on a carefully chosen hill, Lance flipped a similar salute back as he began breaking up his kit and packing it away.

*                                        *                                        *

Sorilla and Mokan quietly sat in an empty room of a slightly ramshackle building, a little over a kilometer from the strike point, watching through the window as the Ross response flooded the area.

“We should have planted more,” the Childean said eagerly. “We could kill dozens.”

Sorilla didn’t respond. Though she was listening, she was far more intent on the action she was watching.

The Golem units came in first.

These weren’t the same ones they saw initially on Hayden either, not the glorified bulldozers designed to clear jungle. These monsters were half again as tall as those and carried cannons that she did not want to ever get on the wrong end of.

Then it was the Goblins, more numerous as they swarmed the area.

Again, not the same construction units from Hayden, but three-meter-tall combat units that appeared armed to the teeth. Sorilla made several notes, saving them to her implant memory so she could prepare a new brief for the Admiral and SOLCOM.

“Killing,” she finally said, “is not the point.”

Mokan was momentarily confused. He’d apparently almost thought she had ignored him entirely, but finally rallied a response.

“Then what is?”

“Freedom. Yours,” she said, not taking her eyes off the tactics being displayed as the Goblins secured the entrances to the buildings around the area and the Golems raised their cannons.

Mokan was about to respond, but flinched back as a whining crackle filled the air. He turned his focus to the source of the sound just as the Golems opened fire, electric blue bolts slamming into the two buildings they’d used as their trap. In seconds, the internal supports failed and the structures began a slow motion collapse that filled the area with smoke and dust.

The Childean looked on, shocked and at least slightly horrified if Sorilla were to judge his body language, as the Golem and Goblin units continued to clear every nearby building with clear precision and significant firepower.

“And that would be why we didn’t strike at them near any populated areas,” Sorilla sighed softly. “Even when they’re not using their Gravity Valve to full effect, they’re still devastating. Still…”

“Still? Still what?” Mokan growled. “They’re destroying an entire sub-sector! What still?”

“I’m wondering why they didn’t just blow it all up before they sent in the reinforcements.” Sorilla shrugged. “They have the capability, and I know they have the will to do it. So what stopped them? Why are they playing nice?”

“This was ‘nice’?”

“For the Ghoulies? Oh yes, this was very nice.”

Mokan moved shakily, and Sorilla filed away what little expression she could read from his face as probably “sickened.”

“It will get worse before it gets better,” she promised. “Decide now if that’s something you can deal with. If not, I’ll call for dust-off and you can bend over like a nice little boy for the invaders.”

The old fire flared in the alien’s features as he spun on her, limb coming up as if to strike.

Sorilla didn’t move. She just stared him down until the limb slowly descended, then finally she nodded away from the scene they’d been observing.

“We’ve seen enough. Time to go.”

The two quietly exfiltrated the building they’d been using as an observation post, vanishing into the city moments later. Behind them, another building toppled under fire from the Ross’El cannon fire.

*                                        *                                        *

Back at the guerilla camp, Sorilla tossed down the Ghoulie gun she’d taken and slumped into a too-large seat that was a little too firm for human comfort. At the moment it hardly mattered, though. She’d been out for three days to prep that ambush, and while she made certain that the others got as much rest as possible in the process, she’d been active for most of the time and awake for all of it.

“You all right, boss?”

“I’m good, Nano,” Sorilla said, looking up to the big Samoan as he casually walked in and took a seat opposite her. “How were things here?”

“Good,” he said. “Training is progressing. We’ll have the next group ready in a few days.”

“Excellent,” Sorilla said tiredly. “You do good work, Top.”

Nano eyed her for a long moment before he spoke, obviously choosing his words deliberately.

“We’d do better work out there,” he said finally.

Sorilla laughed softly. “Feeling left out, Top?”

Nano shrugged his large shoulders. “Just want a little action, boss.”

“That’s not our mission, Top.”

“You still went out.”

Sorilla sighed, honestly too tired for this at the moment but knowing that it wouldn’t be put off and probably too tired to sleep anyway.

“Someone had to, just to keep them in line,” Sorilla said. “We have a few months’ work left before they can be left to their own devices. I’d rather not have one of them screw up and lead the Ross back here before we’re done.”

“That’s the truth,” Nano said, but countering with a shake of his head, “but begging the major’s pardon, that someone doesn’t have to be you alone.”

“This time it did.”

The statement was delivered with such certainty that Tane Nano just nodded. He knew his job, and while sometimes doing it right meant being willing to argue with the boss, there was a clear line he had no intention of blurring. He fell back on the sergeant’s best kept secret, telling your boss she’s being a complete idiot by agreeing with her.

“Right you are, ma’am.”

Sorilla didn’t even open her eyes.

“I was a sergeant once too, Top. I know what that means.”

Damn it, Nano grimaced.

*                                        *                                        *

USV Poland

“Gravity signature from one of the close-in jump points, Captain.”

“Secure all comms,” Yuri Levensk ordered automatically. “Redeploy our satellite array to observe the arrival.”

“Aye, sir, all comms securing now. Micro-birds retasking as ordered.”

The captain of the Poland happily watched as his command crew went about their business like a well-oiled machine. The Poland was a new ship on SOLCOM’s roster, with a young crew to man her, but they’d handled their current mission flawlessly.

Of course it wasn’t the most taxing of missions, mostly long weeks of boredom punctuated by days of high-tension boredom. Still, they’d come together pretty well from the start and he was reasonably confident that no one was going to lose it at any inopportune moments and screw them all. Sometimes, on a deep black mission, that was literally the best you could hope for.

“How long to lightspeed imagery acquisition?” he asked the observation officer who was standing station at the long-range scopes.

“A little over four hours this time, sir,” Fleet Specialist So-Ching answered without looking up from her instrumentation. “We’re just fine-tuning the resolution and focus now.”

Yuri nodded, though she could hardly see it. “Excellent.”

Since they knew where the jump point in question was, it would be child’s play to pick up the imagery of the exact moment of the alien starship’s arrival. That would let them determine a lot of information, actually, beyond the obvious. The vector and speed of arrival would be an indication of how important this particular visitor considered this mission. If they came in fast and hot from a known Alliance star system, something might be up.

Traversing jump space wasn’t entirely without risk, though the issue wasn’t with jump space itself. A perfect lack of gravity was also indicative of a perfect vacuum, in which case there really wasn’t anything there to threaten the ship in transit. Entry and exit from jump space, however, could be another story.

Alliance ships used very high-tensile strength ceramic composites, not merely as armor as SOLCOM’s own ships did, but as a significant part of the ship’s structure. It was far stronger per pound compared to the massive cast nickel-iron hull of the Poland, but it was also far lighter. By and large, this made Alliance ships a great deal more maneuverable when compared to human ships, but their absolute toughness was substantially lower.

Against the Gravity Valve weapons of the Ross’El, this meant little. The extra mass of a ship like the Poland was just more fodder for the gravity-induced fission explosion that would send their component atoms scattered to the cosmic winds. However, against the more traditional threats of plasma weapons, particle cannons, and debris damage, the Poland could smile and shrug off damage that would turn an Alliance ship to a collection of debris flying in loose formation.

Very loose formation.

So an Alliance ship exiting the jump point at high relativistic speeds was someone in a hurry.

He had to wait over four hours to find out, however, and by the time it came in, Yuri was already three hours past the official end of his shift. None of his first shift crew had left either. No one wanted to find out if anything interesting had happened while they were grabbing the same old food or, even worse, sleeping.

“Imagery is compiling now, Captain.”

“Put it on the main display,” he ordered, noticing the Admiral standing off to one side out of the corner of his eye. Ruger had stopped just before the strip of tape on the floor that officially divided the command deck from the corridor beyond, which meant he hadn’t been announced, so Yuri ignored him for the moment.

“Aye, sir. Main display.”

The imagery was rough, still being compiled and built up, but a glance was enough to tell them that it wasn’t a Pari ship this time around. Yuri winced. Someone swore but he didn’t know who, and Ruger stepped immediately over the tape.

“Admiral on deck!”

“What’s their exit speed?”

“Point three c, Admiral,” So-Ching answered instantly, barely glancing in his direction.

Sometimes it’s good to be a specialist rather than enlisted, I suppose, Yuri thought wryly, making a mental note to have a talk with her if she got too casual with flag rank officers.

“Do we have an origin vector yet?” Ruger asked intently, eyes on the ship as the computer continued to fill in the profile of what was clearly a Ross’El Portal ship.

“Vector data is rough, but it’s not from any known Alliance system,” So-Ching admitted after a moment, sounding like someone was pulling her teeth to get that from her. The Chinese national was a little too prideful for Yuri’s taste, but he had to admit that it was…mostly…warranted. She didn’t like not being able to offer a certainty in her response, however, and it showed.

“Extrapolate,” Ruger ordered with a hint of a grin that made it clear he wasn’t in the slightest concerned with her uncertainty. In fact, he seemed rather pleased with it. “If that ship came in from one of their home systems, I want to know its route. Find out where it came from so we can track this snake back to its hole.”

So-Ching stiffened, then nodded intently as she got back to work with faster and more energetic motions. “I’ll have an origin star in ten minutes, Admiral.”

“Good,” Ruger said, now turning to Yuri. “Do we know where this ship is now?”

Yuri eyeballed the vector and waggled his hand slightly. “Judging from their speed and vector, they’ll be arriving in orbit over Child of God in a little under two hours.”

“How long to message Major Aida?”

“Ninety minutes, give or take,” Yuri answered off the cuff. The orbital path of the Poland roughly matched the Childeans’ super-Jupiter God-World, but natural variance meant that hour to hour the distance could vary significantly.

“Tight beam a warning to her,” Ruger ordered. “This sort of company could put a heavy crimp in any plans she has going down.”

“Yes, sir.” Yuri nodded, turning to his communications officer. “You heard the Admiral. Package up our latest intel along with whatever else we’ve got tagged for the major, and get it in the ether ASAP.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’d best add that the Poland may leave station for a time,” Ruger added.

Yuri turned to the Admiral. “Sir?”

“I told you, I want to know where that little ghoul came from.” Ruger nodded to the ship on the screen. “If it’s not coming in from Alliance trade routes, then I’m very interested in where it is coming from.”

Yuri nodded slowly. “Yes, sir…Admiral, you’re aware that we risk detection each time we jump? Even going slow and low will only mask so much.”

“I know. It’s worth the risk,” Ruger said calmly.

Yuri nodded, recognizing that the conversation would go no further. He just hoped that the people they had on Child agreed with the Admiral about the risk, but then, it was the Admiral’s decision to make.

*                                        *                                        *

“Shut it down!”

The entire group froze as the order carried loud and clear over the thin air, and they turned to see Major Aida coming in their direction with a purposeful stride.

“Ma’am?” Top Nano asked, just to be certain he’d heard correctly.

“Bogey inbound, Top. It’s a Ghoulie,” she said firmly.

“Right,” Nano nodded. “Okay, we’re shutting down all operations. Everyone, you know the drill!”

The Childeans were a little more confused over it, but obeyed quickly as everyone started packing their kits and got ready to move everything. They were out in the open, almost within sight of the city, prepping for a new operation, and Sorilla knew well that this would put some heavy delays into their plans, but she wasn’t going to chance any new operations until she had a good idea what the newcomer was going to do.

“How long do we have?” Lieutenant Kepler asked, coming up beside her.

“Less than an hour,” Sorilla answered, packing her own gear and getting ready to hump it back to the wilderness. “The Poland picked them up just over an hour and a half ago, coming in fat and slow, so we’re probably okay, but I don’t want to be caught out in the open without an umbrella if the rain starts.”

Kepler snorted. “If it starts raining singularities, there’s not an umbrella in the universe that’ll save us, but I get your point, ma’am.”

Sorilla nodded curtly, and he headed to take care of his own kit. He wasn’t wrong, of course, but she knew the Ross from personal experience. They were liberal with their Gravity weapons—frankly, they had few reasons not to be, as near as she could tell. Gravity-induced fission was destructive and certainly incredibly messy in terms of short term radiation, but few of the isotopes generated by most Valve uses had half-lives longer than a few hours.

That meant that in a few days, at most, the vast majority of the initial radiation exposure was played out and the strike region was safe to send people into. Combined with their reliance on Golem and Goblin avatars, they had little reason to hold back tactical deployment of what most races would consider a strategic weapon.

That didn’t mean, however, that they were wild in their use of said weapon.

The Ross were clearly working to a playbook that no one else had managed to get a peek at. SOLCOM had every expert on Earth and her colonies pouring over every recorded action the Ross had taken, looking for a pattern, but so far nothing had been found. It wasn’t just SOLCOM either, near as Sorilla could tell from her time in Alliance space.

The war between the Sturm-Gav and the Ross had been an incredibly devastating conflict, beyond anything any human had ever seen or practically imagined. The Ross’El annihilated entire planets, while the Gav took their licks up to a point before they started striking back with weapons that baked entire solar systems to the consistency of charcoal by turning their own stars against them.

It was only mutual self-preservation that eventually prompted the end of hostilities, as both species quickly realized that if they continued, the odds were very good that one, or both, would become extinct as a direct result…and no one in Alliance space really had any good bets on which one it would be.

To this day, so far as Sorilla had been able to determine at least, not even the Gav had truly meaningful communication with the Ross. They were clearly able to exchange some information through some form of mathematical equations, according to Alliance records, but as best anyone could tell in either the Alliance or SOLCOM, the communicated information was severely limited and often plagued with misunderstandings.

The Ross were literally too dangerous to have around, but even more dangerous not to keep a close eye on, and too powerful to simply remove…and there didn’t appear to be a soul in the galaxy who understood their motivations.

Sorilla grabbed her kit and slung it over her shoulder as she headed for the rest of the team.

“Top, grab this for me, will you?” she asked, tossing one of her packs to the big Samoan.

He caught it easily enough, offering her a quizzical look. “What’s up, boss?”

“I’m going to detach most of you to see that the locals are undercover when the Ross get here,” she said. “Kepler’s in charge while I’m gone. Lance, you’re with me. I need a second pair of eyes on this.”

“Right,” the team sniper said, reaching for the alien long gun he’d taken to carrying.

“You going Rambo on us again, Boss?” Nano asked sourly.

Sorilla laughed openly at that, shaking her head. “Just going to get eyes on the arrival if they put down locally. Any intel on the Ross is golden, Top.”

Tane Nano sighed, but nodded. He knew that, even agreed with it, but he also knew the major’s record better than probably anyone else on the team. She had always been a team player right up until the incident on Hayden, but since then she had a bad habit of lone wolfing her actions.

Oh, sure, most of the time she didn’t have a choice in the matter when it happened, but it was becoming a pattern in her actions all the same. A pattern that he really didn’t much like, to be frank, but even the company “Top” didn’t get to tell a major that she was starting to act like some old school film hero and escape the consequences of pissing her off.

Especially not since it was probably nothing she wasn’t fully aware of herself.

Kepler kept him from having to say anything more by interjecting into the conversation, “We’ve got it covered, Major.”

Sorilla nodded. “I know you do. I’ll see you in a few days.”

*                                        *                                        *

The Ross’El vessel slipped smoothly into orbit of the world known to the locals as Child of God, a world that only the Ross knew their own appellation for. The vessel paused for a moment in a geo-stationary arc a hundred thousand kilometers above the surface.

Ross’El vessels were smooth domes, not spherical but composed of spherical sub-sections that housed the multiple singularities that powered the ship, its weapons, and far more than most anyone other than the Ross themselves knew.

This particular ship was three times larger than the one already occupying a place in the center of the world’s capital city, a class of ship that matched the standard Ross vessels in every way save size. In fact, while many had seen this particular class in combat, few aside from the Gav themselves were even aware that it existed because of the lack of scale generally available when it was spotted and the hectic nature of combat against a species capable of making your own atomic structure your very worst enemy.

A series of gravity pulses were shortly echoed from the ground, and the big ship began to move again.

*                                        *                                        *

Sorilla stopped in mid-stride, halfway up the side of a hill that separated them from the city that was their destination, her head tilting back suddenly as she stared up into the sky.

“Boss? You okay?”

Sorilla didn’t respond as she then snapped her gaze down, staring hard at the side of the hill for a long moment, as if she could see right through it.

“Boss?” Lance pressed, snapping his fingers. “Boss!”

“I’m fine, Dearborn,” she murmured. “Just hold for a second.”

“Right,” Lance muttered, but he held up a fist and the Childeans behind him relaxed marginally. “What are we holding for?”

Sorilla didn’t answer. Instead she cast about quickly and then moved off to the side, broke out a small laser transceiver, and began setting it up. It only took a moment to get it aligned, the computer quickly finding the closest satellite in the disposable constellation they’d put into orbit along with the insertion of the team.

A few moments later, she swore.

“What’s wrong?”

“They’re not coming down local,” Sorilla grumbled. “Should have known that would be too much to ask for.”

Lance knelt down beside her, glancing at the data and spotting the trajectory information. “You have an LZ yet?”

“If they hold, yeah,” she said. “Give or take a thousand klicks. It’ll tighten up quickly, though. Bring up our guides.”

Lance waved, signaling the Childeans forward.

“What is it?” Orin, one of their first class of local Pathfinders, asked as he approached.

“What’s out here?” Sorilla asked, turning the display around, showing the circle of the estimated landing zone overlaid on satellite imagery of the moon-world.

He stared for a moment, then shrugged a negative. “Nothing. No water, few plants, no communities.”

“Desert,” Sorilla murmured, confused. “Why land in the desert?”

“Why do these things do anything they do?” Lance asked, rolling his eyes. “They’re enigmas, boss. No one can figure them out.”

“But desert? It’s not in their pattern,” Sorilla insisted. “They’ve taken out the locals everywhere else, but here they secure the capital city and use the government infrastructure intact to control the locals. Every other world, they land in rich land, jungles, with plenty of freely available water, with only one ship…here they land a second ship in the middle of a desert?”

“It wasn’t always, as you say…desert?”

Sorilla snapped up, eyes on the second Childean. It was one of the Childean females, or what they thought of as females at least. Strictly speaking, Sorilla wasn’t certain that they were either male or female exactly, but it was easier to think of them that way for humans.

“What do you mean, Dineth?” Sorilla asked.

“It is partly legend, partly history rebuilt,” Dineth answered, “but that region was once jungle, as you call it. Great deep forests, climbing so far into the skies that the clouds themselves could barely see the tops. We have stories about what happened there, children’s tales, but the jungle was real.”

“What do the tales say?”

“There was a great war of the Gods,” Dineth replied. “The Juketh, the Gods of Justice, descended from the God-World to strike down the Riketh, Gods of Darkness and Destruction. There was a battle, and for twenty days and nights, as measured by the far side of Child, the sky was lit with blinding light that hid even the face of God itself. It is written down in the holy books, but few believe the stories these days.”

Sorilla glanced at Lance. “A light bright enough to fade out that?”

She jerked her eyes in the direction of the looming super-Jupiter that dominated the sky above them, then shook her head, unbelieving.

“It would have to be their Gravity weapons, boss,” Lance offered up as an option.

“A controlled burn, via gravity-induced fission? I don’t know, a day here is three times longer than on Earth,” Sorilla said. “That’s at least two months of daily expenditure that would stagger SOLCOM’s energy budget for a year.”

“I can’t think of anything else that would do it,” Lance said, “not without burning away the face of Child at least. Our antimatter thrusters might, but you’d never be able to live on this moon again afterward.”

That, Sorilla knew, was more than likely an understatement.

The level of power expenditure was, frankly, obscene…even for a battle. Of course, it was an old legend, so it could well be an exaggeration, she supposed.

Still…

“Are you sure this wasn’t always desert?” she asked, looking over at Dineth.

The Childean nodded. “There have been many studies. The entire area has been dug up uncountable times. This area once had thick forests and even seas.”

That brought her up short.

“Seas?” Sorilla asked, wondering how that made any sense. “Are you sure?”

The Childean grunted an affirmative, causing Sorilla to exchange glances with Lance. She wondered how that was supposed to work, given that most of the water on the moon world was drawn to the planet-facing side because of the tidal influence of the super-Jupiter. Sure, there were lakes, some large ones, on the other side due to precipitation and such, but seas?

Sorilla put that aside for the moment, figuring it was probably just large lakes or something.

Even so, if they had real evidence of the cataclysm the Childean was talking about, then that brought her back to the sheer level of power it would take to cause the events they described. If they were right, then that meant…

“They’ve been here before,” Sorilla said, a moment of realization finally sinking in. “They’re not just expanding their empire, they’re reclaiming old worlds.”

Lance frowned. “Even if so, boss, I’m not sure what that gives us.”

“It gives us a lot, Lance. If they’re coming after worlds they used to occupy, or even just visited, that’s one more bit of intelligence about the Ross than we had a few minutes ago,” Sorilla said firmly. “Now the question is…”

“Why?” he finished for her. “What’s so special about the old worlds they abandoned, or were forced out of, that they’d come back for them…how many years later?”

The two glanced at the female Childean, who had been following the conversation carefully. She shrugged uncertainly after a moment’s thought.

“The jungle was burned away over three thousand full turns of the God-World past.”

Sorilla closed her eyes, doing the math. “Seven thousand years, Earth standard…roughly.”

“Long damn time to be pining for old stomping grounds, boss.”

“Too long,” Sorilla said. “No, the Ross don’t strike me as sentimental. They’re after something. Maybe there’s something here, some resource they need. They had to have come here for a reason. Maybe the conflict with the Gav has forced them to reopen old worlds.”

“Or maybe they left something behind when they were forced out.”

Sorilla frowned, but nodded slowly. “Either way, we need to figure out what.”

Lance looked over the data on the screen again, shaking his head. “Child may be smaller than Earth, but that’s still days away without transport.”

“Weeks,” Sorilla corrected. “Lower gravity and thinner air will slow us down, otherwise we risk serious injury or illness.”

“We can acquire transport,” Orin offered, gesturing apologetically. “The Invaders are keeping all flyers out of the air, but ground vehicles are not hard to come by.”

Lance and Sorilla exchanged glances, considering it.

“I make it a couple thousand klicks, give or take,” Lance said. “With decent transport we could be there and back in a week. Longer if you want to really spot anything on site, though.”

“We’ll need the others,” Sorilla decided before once again looking at the hill they were on as though she could see through it. “First, though, I want eyes on the dome in the city one more time before we pull out.”

Chapter 7

USV Poland

Ruger glowered at the data profiles he was looking at, as though he could change them by will alone.

That didn’t work, of course, and the data stubbornly refused to give itself over to his obviously superior mind. Thus he was stuck staring at an impossibility.

Specialist So-Ching hadn’t found the origin star in ten minutes. In fact, she hadn’t found it in ten days.

There was no origin star for the plotted course of the most recent visitor to Child of God, which, as far as anyone knew, was a physical impossibility. The ship’s vectors, however, were quite clearly not from any mapped star in the galaxy or from any galaxy even remotely in the Milky Way’s “local” neighborhood.

The most obvious conclusion to draw was that the Ross’El had mastered gravity control to the point that they could either create jump points without a stellar object to bounce waves off of, or they could somehow change source while in jump space.

Either were huge problems, both tactically and strategically, but they didn’t fit with what little intelligence SOLCOM had gathered on the Ross’El and the Alliance either. One thing that Alliance public data was clear on was that jump points, and thus a ship’s access to jump space, required a stellar object to form. The level of gravity needed to negate the very fabric of space-time, even locally, was immense.

It may be a military secret, of course, Ruger supposed. Either an Alliance secret, or perhaps one held by the Ross alone.

The problem was that neither of those theories quite made any sense to him.

If they had those capabilities, either of them, then why fight so hard for Hayden? They could easily have bypassed Hayden, found Earth itself even. Instead they maneuvered like Hayden’s choke point was of strategic value. A bluff?

None of it made any sense.

He glowered at the screen again, staring at the vector line that lanced out from their current stellar location and cut a swath across empty space until it eventually left the galaxy.

He felt that he was tantalizingly close to an answer, but couldn’t quite bring up that last piece of information needed to coalesce what he had into a real solution.

Ruger called up the Poland’s own scopes, focusing his attention along the vector as it was again projected out against the real-time imagery.

“Computer, show me infrared scans,” he ordered thoughtfully.

The image shifted, but along the vector in question there was still nothing. He hadn’t expected there to be, honestly, since So-Ching would have checked for infrared signs as a matter of course just in case there were a Dyson Construct hiding their target star.

Dyson Constructs would hide visible light, but the inevitable heat absorption would cause one to shortly radiate in the infrared. None had ever been detected in the many decades humanity had searched the skies, however, so it would have been surprising on several levels if one had shown up this time around.

So, there doesn’t seem to be a star hiding out there, and they don’t act like they have some sort of super jump drives. Ruger rubbed his temples in annoyance. So what the hell is going on here?

“Raina,” he called out.

“Yes, sir?” his assistant asked from the next room, stepping into sight a moment later.

“Call down the cartography, inform them I’m coming down. I want them to pull all charts we have of the projected course the Ross’El vessel should have been on. I don’t care if they have to pull up wood burnings from a thousand years ago, I want to see it.”

“Yes, sir.”

*                                        *                                        *

Childean Badlands

The God-World hung lower in the sky as they roared across the desert waste, bouncing and half flying in the lower gravity as the maniac behind the controls of the alien vehicle hunched low and had what Sorilla could now tell was a disturbing grin plastered across his face.

The local transport was a six-wheeled buggy with one of the softest suspensions of any vehicle Sorilla had experienced, mostly just intended to keep the rig planted on the ground and not attempting to enter orbit on its own power, as best she could tell. Their driver seemed to know his stuff, otherwise she was certain that they’d have been scattered all over the desert by this point, but it was far from the smoothest ride she’d ever endured.

What the locals called a desert would probably translate more into badlands on Earth, she thought. Not much sand, lots of rock, and evidence abounding of the presence of water in the ancient past. She wasn’t much of a geologist, but Sorilla found the erosion evidence rather curious since, as far as she knew, the local area was far too elevated to have been covered in water at any point.

The tidal gravity of the super-Jupiter, combined with the locked rotation of Child, kept the water only in extreme low-lying regions, except where the small world faced the Childeans’ God-World. There, a veritable mountain of water loomed up, as though reaching to touch the face of the great planet that hung above it.

This area, however, was neither a low-lying region nor was it anywhere near the face of the world that looked up at the gas giant. She could still see the God-World as they drove, but from this region, it hung low in the sky, almost swallowed by the horizon. They were almost along the twilight border between the eternal daylight afforded by light reflecting off the gas giant and the more traditional cycle of day and night that existed on the “dark side” of the world.

There wouldn’t be any night here, according to their guides, but the light did drop off to a dim twilight for a few hours each cycle.

We’ll need to make the most of that, Sorilla was certain. While the Childeans didn’t have eyes the way humans did, the Ross’El did, in fact, have eyeballs with a very similar design. So, while she knew that their technology was impressive, moving during the twilight hours would still provide a natural advantage over a species that had evolved to be diurnal and use light as their primary sense, as long as they could spoof whatever advanced scanners the Ross were likely to utilize.

Luckily, their best scanners were gravity-based, and while those were lethal against most military targets, they weren’t going to be able to pick out a few soldiers from the other gravity sources in the area. That just left conventional scanners to fool, and she knew how to deal with those.

The transport skidded to stop along the top of a rift, a hundred-meter drop to the floor of the badland beyond, the driver turning to look at them before they stopped rocking.

“The area you wanted to see is out there.” He pointed past the drop-off, out into the deep desert.

Sorilla nodded, dropping from the vehicle and walking over to the edge. Behind her, Lance joined her as they looked over the vista.

“I’m getting rad hits on my counter, Captain,” Lance told her.

Sorilla nodded. “I’ve got them. Low count, but we’d better watch it. Looks like thorium deposits on hyperspectral. Mined out, I’m guessing.”

“You are correct,” Mokan said as he stepped up behind them. “The mines were cleared a long time ago.”

“Maybe the Ross don’t know that?” Lance suggested.

Sorilla shook her head. “They can scan from orbit, detect gravity flux all across the surface of a world. They’ll know this place has been mined out. Besides, thorium isn’t the only thing out here.”

Lance scowled. “I’m not picking up anything else of interest, Captain. You sure?”

“Right there.” Sorilla pointed off in the distance. “There’s something right there.”

He blinked, changing the tension on the liquid lenses coating his eyes, focusing out in the direction she was pointing. “I don’t see anything but rock and dust. Lots of that, though.”

“Underneath,” Sorilla answered. “Deep down. It almost feels like…one of their ships?”

Lance shifted his focus to her, blinking away the lens from his eye, and took a deep breath from the breather he was using before he spoke.

“How do you do that?”

Sorilla glanced at him, but then looked back across the desert. The Ross ship had landed some distance away from the second source she was feeling, just far enough that she could feel the gravity shift put out by the Ross’ powerful drives as a separate pull.

“You have third-gen implants, right?” she asked finally

He nodded. “Sure. We all do.”

“I have a prototype suite,” she corrected him. “Same sensor gear as you, same implants mostly, but the comm lines run through my nervous system instead of using near frequency transmission. It was designed to prevent any chance of jamming or intercept.”

Lance frowned, but nodded. “Makes sense. Why didn’t they keep it in the production models?”

Sorilla tapped the side of her skull. “The designers seriously underestimated the brain. Subconsciously, I cracked military encryption in three days, within another week I was picking patterns out faster than my computer core. These days I can feel shifts in gravity the way you feel the wind on your skin. I’m also incredibly susceptible to motion sickness as a result, though I’ve been getting better at that. For a while I couldn’t even be within a thousand meters of one of the new starship classes without losing my lunch.”

Lance winced. “Ouch.”

“Yeah, it made for some miserable missions,” she confirmed, “but that’s how I do what I do. There’s a gravity anomaly out there, other than the Ross ship. Mokan, I’m going to need a map and a compass.”

The big alien grumbled, but fetched the two items for her. Sorilla quickly laid out a vector across the map, then did a rough distance estimation before circling a spot about a hundred kilometers away.

“Around that area,” she said, handing the map back to the Childean. “What’s out there?”

Mokan scowled at the map, then handed it back to the driver and guide, who also glowered for a moment before stiffening and uttering a couple words Sorilla hadn’t heard yet. She expected they were curses and logged them for later identification and personal use.

“Bad place,” the driver admitted finally. “Cursed.”

“Cursed?” Lance chuckled. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“Stuff it, Lance,” Sorilla ordered, looking back to the driver. “Tell me.”

He did an odd semi-circular shrug that she’d seen other Childeans do when uncertain what to say. “Don’t know much more. Is only place in the region not mined out, too many lives lost, machines destroyed… People say it’s cursed, but the scientists always believed that there was some sort of interference that made things unreliable there.”

Sorilla snorted. “I imagine so. If I can feel it from here, that singularity is putting out at least a half gravity, Earth standard, on a short-wave configuration. You try to dig mineshafts into that mess without knowing what you’re doing and you’ll get the bracing all wrong. Weight distribution will pull sideways, so unless you reinforce the walls more than the ceiling…well, it won’t be pretty.”

“A Ghoulie base, you think, Cap?” Lance asked quietly.

“I don’t know,” Sorilla admitted. “It feels like it’s underground. How long has that area been a bad place?”

“Always.”

Sorilla and Lance exchanged glances.

“Well, if it’s a base, then they invaded this world a long damn time ago,” she decided. “Maybe it’s a derelict? Old ‘sunken’ ship they’ve come to dig up?”

“Invading the planet and taking over the local government seems like a bit much to go to just to get the salvage rights, Cap,” Lance chuckled.

“True,” Sorilla admitted. “Well, we’re not going to find out here. We need to get closer. Pack ‘em up, boys. We’ve got a long ways to go and a short time to get there.”

*                                        *                                        *

Childean Resistance Camp

Miram Soleill looked up from where she was watching over the explosives training they were giving some of the local resistance. Teaching people to make effective explosive devices was part of the job she found nerve-wracking and more than a little distasteful, due to the rather unstable nature of the weapons in question. It wasn’t explosives, exactly, that bothered her, but rather the combination of improvised explosives and amateur hands handling the wiring and placement.

When you were dealing with a force as powerful as the Ross dropping in on your local neighborhood, though, you cut the bullshit and took some risks.

“Easy,” she said softly in reasonably accented Childean. The entire team was well on their way to basic fluency by this point, even without the Unitrans software handling things. “Don’t let the wires touch the…”

She flinched as the primer exploded, making everyone else jump and the Childean working on the device hit the table in frustration.

“Don’t rush,” she extolled, reaching above her head to put a hand on his shoulder. “Steady progress is the goal. Now, take a moment to calm yourself and try again.”

He nodded gruffly at her, in an eerily human way coming from an inhuman source, and stepped back from the table. She looked over the rest of them. “The same holds true for each of you. Speed is important, but finishing alive is more so. If you never finish, then you weren’t fast enough, were you? Wars are won by inches, not by miles.”

It was a testament to how many hours they’d put in together that no one asked her what inches or miles were—they’d all heard the phrase before, and would again. She wondered if any of them had even bothered to learn what an inch or a mile was, beyond a unit of measurement and their relative size. She supposed not, and it didn’t matter if they understood the intent.

Miram’s thoughts turned to the captain and other missing members of the team. She couldn’t help but wish that she was with them in some ways, but this was what she had trained for. She never would have believed it possible, growing up, but the job description actually included “meet interesting alien species and teach them to fight.”

All right, the actual wording was more along the lines of “instruct them on conducting asymmetrical operations,” but what was in a few words, really.

Miram was pulled from her reverie as a commotion broke out a short distance across the camp. She focused in on the ruckus, heard the word “aircraft,” and figured the rest from context.

“All right, pack up! Air sweep coming this way. I want this ground scoured and clean in five!” she snarled, the calm and patient explosives instructor gone and the snapping bitch of a drill instructor in her place.

The tone was enough to set her class moving, some breaking down the table as the rest picked up whatever debris was lying around. They’d drilled this often and everyone knew their job, but that didn’t stop Miram from eyeballing the whole operation with a critical gaze.

It was imperative that this mission end clean. No one could connect any actions on Child with SOLCOM, and ensuring that was as much a part of her job as teaching the locals.

“Clean it up! We’re moving!” she ordered, hefting the solid table just as the last of the kit was snatched from the surface.

They had a plan for overflights, of course, and everyone was more or less moving in accordance with it. Small communities of Childeans lived all along the coast, so there was no need to completely sanitize the area, thankfully. However, every trace of weaponry and, of course, human presence had to be scoured from the surface.

She almost ran into Kepler as the lieutenant physically manhandled some of their transmission kit into the tunnel they were using for cover, tossing the table in a nearby hut before diving in after the lieutenant.

“Secure any active transmissions,” Kepler ordered, pulling her past him so he could peer out the opening of the tunnel. “Looks like a routine overflight. Let’s not give them any reason to change that.”

No one said anything. There weren’t any active systems online anyway, but Miram supposed he had to issue to command just in case. She unclipped the breather tube from under her nose and took a deep breath of the local air with no supplemental oxygen. It was still thin, but she was mostly acclimatized. It didn’t make her dizzy any longer, and she could actually work now without feeling like she was dying, though she was just as glad not to be with the captain on a field mission; she doubted her system could keep up.

“You see them?” she asked softly, looking to where Kepler was angling his head to stare, stony faced, at the sliver of sky visible through the opening of the tunnel.

“No.” He shook his head. “I can hear them though. I remember that sound.”

Miram didn’t have much response for that, so she kept quiet. Kepler had been one of the few survivors from the Ares mining world. They’d been hit harder than anyone else in the initial rounds of the war, even Hayden hadn’t taken it quite so badly…mostly because the Haydenites had been able to retreat into the jungle and scrape out a living there until help arrived.

Ares was a Mars-type world, one without a breathable atmosphere or any hope of local food sources. She’d heard stories, rumors and whispers, of what happened there…the choices they’d had to make, and it was honestly a subject that Miram didn’t want to know much more about.

Right about then she abruptly realized she could hear it too, though perhaps “hear” was the wrong term. It was a deep hum that vibrated right down into her bones, and dust started drifting down from the tunnel walls around them.

“It’s right on top of us,” Kepler said, somehow relaxed suddenly.

Miram eyed him with some concern, noting that almost all the earlier tension she’d read in him was now gone. His face almost looked…happy.

“Sir…” Miram hesitated. “Are you…?”

“Shh,” the lieutenant said softly, a smile playing at his lips. “They’re scanning.” His head snapped back around. “Helms! Now!”

Miram’s hand snaked down to where her helm was hanging on her belt. Behind her she could feel the rest of the team following suit as she snapped her helm open and fit it over her face. The clamshell back locked shut around her head with an audible clap of sound and a hiss of the pressure seal activating.

Her HUD lit up even as her corneal implants started reporting data from her team’s implants in a double-layered interface that started feeding her every bit of data her computers thought she needed to know. She glanced up, eyes on the icon representing the Ghoulie aircraft that was hovering about a hundred thirty meters overhead. Her implanted accelerometers could detect the gravity drive, and with the interlinked network she had with the others, triangulation was child’s play.

Before she could think much on that, however, a shudder shook the ground around them. In a few moments it faded, then another struck, and another…and another.

“They’ve deployed Golems,” Kepler said, sighing softly. “They don’t want to nuke us. I wonder if that’s good, or bad?”

*                                        *                                        *

USV Poland

“Action from Child, Captain.”

Captain Yuri Levensk turned and looked over at the long-range station. “What kind of action?”

“We’re reading gravity flux, Captain, powerful enough to trip our early warning alarms.”

Yuri stiffened. “Valve shots?”

“Negative. Wrong frequency and pulse duration.” Ensign Bearwell shook her head. “This is a lot more power than a Valve shot, sir, and it’s building.”

Yuri paled. He really didn’t want to know what the hell took more power than a pulse from a Gravity Valve that could induce nuclear fission in almost any material. Of course, he already knew one thing that could do it, and that didn’t bode well for anyone still standing on Child of God at the moment.

“Contact the Admiral,” he ordered, turning back to the communications section for a moment. “Inform him that we may be looking at a total mission loss. We’re still gathering intelligence.”

“Aye, Captain!”

“Tactical, I want course vectors plotted for every conceivable option we might employ, from rescue to retreat. Whatever we decide on, I want the Poland already leaning in the right direction when the order is given.”

“Aye aye, Captain.”

*                                        *                                        *

Admiral Ruger glowered at the star charts, as if daring them to keep telling him the same thing.

It was a challenge they met with ease, unfortunately.

There was something out there, of that he was certain. With over a century of detailed observatory data mapping the skies, they had depressingly little of this particular region of space. As several of his best astronomers had pointed out, it was a big damn sky and the budgets to cover it had never been particularly impressive until after the Ross invasion and the discovery of the Alliance.

That was a bit of penny pinching bullshit that the human race was now paying for in spades, Ruger decided, but he had little option but to work within the limits of his available intelligence.

There were some older charts that showed a star close to the projected course the Ross ship had entered the system on, but they were ancient. Mapped with optical scopes in the seventeenth century, no one could confirm that they were accurate. Charts made a few decades later showed nothing, and nothing had appeared on any chart since.

That left him with a bit of a conundrum.

Plotting a course along that vector was insanely dangerous. If he were wrong, and there were no stellar mass out there for them to re-enter universal space at, the Poland could essentially be flung clear out of the galaxy or be forced to pressure a re-entry using the singularity core of the ship and be trapped in interstellar space.

At high relativistic speeds, it would take years of ship time to reach the closest star from any given point along that course. Decades or even centuries of Earth time would pass before they could rejoin SOLCOM, assuming that either they or, pessimistically, SOLCOM survived that long.

No, as much as he desperately wanted to backtrack the Ross vessel’s course, that just wasn’t an option he could authorize.

I’ll have to bump it back to SOLCOM, he decided finally. Maybe they can figure out an automated probe.

In theory, that wasn’t out of the question, he supposed. Certainly there was no inherent reason why you needed to have a human at the controls of a starship, but the limits of Earth’s FTL capability made for rather limited value of that sort of probe system. Detailed intelligence would almost certainly have to be transmitted via sub-light methods, which would like as not mean that by the time any useable data were returned from the probe, any window for its use would long since have closed.

That would be a decision for someone else, however.

“Admiral, sir.”

Ruger looked up as his assistant rushed in, looking rather stressed. He was rising to his feet even before he spoke.

“What happened?”

“Not certain, sir,” the aide asserted. “However, we’re reading a building gravity anomaly from Child. Whatever is going on, it doesn’t appear to be a weaponized burst from a Valve, but it is very powerful.”

“Call ahead to the bridge,” Ruger ordered. “Tell the captain I’m on my way.”

“Yes, sir!”

Chapter 8

Childean Badlands

Sorilla crawled forward to the lip of the hill, nudging a couple rocks ahead of her to break up the silhouette she’d present to any observers in the distance before settling in to observe the distant Ross operational area.

“Well, I don’t think they could have picked a more defensible area if they’d planned it,” Lance said sourly from eight feet to her left. “There’s no cover for a hundred klicks, no life to speak of to mask our signals, and even if they don’t see us coming, we don’t have remotely enough kit to do any damage to one of their Portal ships, Cap.”

Sorilla only nodded slightly as she blinked the liquid lenses over her eyes to maximum magnification, carefully moderating the motion of her eyes so as not to completely miss anything as she studied the place where the ship had landed.

As seemed to be standard procedure for the Ross, the Portal ship had collapsed a section of local space-time, resulting in a small sinkhole forming just the right size to settle the big ship in by about three quarters. All that was resting above the surface were the sections she presumed housed their primary scanning arrays and, probably, main egress points.

“You tell me you can’t ghost them, Corporal?” Sorilla asked, keeping her tone light.

Lance snorted. “Of course I can ghost them, Cap. The problem is, that’s all I can do. I’d be about as useful as a real ghost in that thing, and you know it.”

“We need to know what they’re up to,” Sorilla said, “but you’re right. There’s not a lot we can do about whatever it is, as things stand.”

“So, what do we do then?”

“First, we update the Poland on the new intel,” Sorilla said, pushing back from the edge and crawling until she was sure that she couldn’t be seen above the line of the ridge, then she stood up and walked back down to where the Childeans were waiting with the transport.

“What are the Invaders doing?” Mokan grumbled as she approached.

“Setting up base camp,” Sorilla answered as she pulled a laser-comm from the transport and casually flipped it open on the hood of the vehicle. “Standard procedure for them, so far. They’re not making any moves to the anomaly.”

“Anom…what?”

“Sorry,” Sorilla said, mentally chastising herself for slipping into a bastardized cross between Childean and English. “They’re not moving toward the odd gravity I feel.”

“Oh. What does that mean?”

“No clue. Going to update above.” She jerked a finger to the skies. “Then start planning on a way to figure that out.”

Mokan grumbled again, but seemed satisfied by her explanation enough that Sorilla got back on with the job of loading all her scanner data into a file, along with personal observations.

Sorilla shifted as she worked, feeling like her skin was crawling. She didn’t know what it was—possibly just nerves, or maybe the anomalous gravity field was doing something she wasn’t familiar with. Whatever it was, for the moment she just forced herself to ignore it so she could get back to work.

The laser comm would link to the disposable mini-sats they’d seeded into orbit, but from there it would be hours before the Poland got her uplink and just as long before they could reply…assuming they made a decision instantly, which wasn’t going to happen.

Just like old times, Sorilla sighed. Hurry up and wait.

*                                        *                                        *

Childean Resistance Camp

“Keep your heads down!” Kepler’s order echoed over the squad’s close field network, a heavily encrypted extreme-close-range system that he was praying the Golems wouldn’t pick up. “If they spot us, the mission is done for!”

There had been almost no warning before the assault, not enough to organize and barely enough for Kepler to get his own people moving. If they hadn’t been living in their armor, there wouldn’t have been enough time for even that. As it was, the team managed to go to ground in various parts of the compound, out of sight and reasonably hiding as the Ghoulie strike team swept in.

Some of the Childeans in the camp had tried to resist the Golems and their Goblin support initially, but that had been hammered down in a hurry. Even without using the tactical Gravity Valves, the Golems were equipped with nasty space-time blasters that could tear a chunk out of pretty much anything by compressing the space around it, then letting it snap back hard enough to annihilate chemical bonds.

It was a poor man’s version of the Ghoulies’ main weapon, but unless you had some hard core carbon composite armor—which Kepler and his team did have, but the locals most certainly did not—it was just as deadly to the person struck. Carbon armor was strong enough to resist the snapping force and contain the squishy stuff it was protecting. But even through armor there was a good chance of splintering bones with a direct hit, and that just meant you’d die slowly instead of in a spectacular explosion.

Either way, he had no intentions of letting his team into the enemy’s sights.

“Nano, grab some of the locals weapons,” he ordered. “Miram, I want you to find us a path into the scrub. Everyone else, just keep your damn fool heads down!”

Kepler didn’t quite follow his own advice, telling himself he needed to see what was going on as the reason, but his grip clenched and unclenched on his issued assault rifle as he watched the Golems stride into the small camp-slash-town the resistance had been using.

They were pretty clearly on some sort of scout mission; they weren’t on any sort of definitive search and destroy. The Golems took care of any threats as the smaller Goblins went building to building, clearing each in turn as they looked for threats. Kepler had to give it to the little bastards—they were professional and thorough. He’d done similar missions himself, back before the war and before his posting to Ares, and though they handled things a little differently than he had in the day, it appeared to him that it was mostly due to differences in their ROE.

Good Rules of Engagement can make an idiot a genius, and bad ones can turn a genius into a drooling, dribbling moron. Kepler knew that to be true, and from what he was seeing, the alien ROE was an effective, if brutal, one.

It was a fair sight less brutal than their ROE on Ares, of course, but apparently there was something on Child that they wanted intact.

No sense nuking every occupied section of the planet if there’s a nice clean ecosystem you want to keep in one piece, I suppose, Kepler thought bitterly as he forcibly pushed his rifle around to his back and let it rest on the straps. He wasn’t going to get into some useless shootout with Golems and Goblins if he could help it—they were just avatars of the Ghoulies anyway. May as well go blow up some radio-controlled toys.

“I’ve got a few Childean rifles,” Nano said as he crawled back over, “and it looks like a handful of our trainees made it out of the AO before the Golems dropped in on them.”

“Good. Let’s hook up with them,” Kepler said, palming a NFC transponder from his kit and dropping it to the ground at his feet. He kicked dirt over the small device even as he uploaded a status report to it and took one of the Childean weapons from Nano. “When the captain gets back, this will let her know what went down, in case we can’t come back here.”

“Yes, sir. What are we doing?”

Kepler considered that for a moment before making his decision. “We stay on mission, Top. Let’s show the locals just how you raise some hell.”

“Yes, sir.”

*                                        *                                        *

Kepler looked over what they’d managed to pull out of the camp before it was taken over by the Ross forces and supposed that it could be worse.

They had a couple dozen of their trainees. Most of the rest were still alive, probably, but they were under control now. Persons Under Control, or PUC, the modern jargon for what used to be POW or, more commonly, “that poor bastard.”

Pucked.

He hoped they had the sense not to cause too much trouble. Things didn’t generally go well for uncooperative prisoners, even in “good” prison camps. Generally, the best you could hope for was to largely be left alone with enough food to get by and no regular torture, but that was unlikely at best. War had a way of bringing out the worst in those who didn’t have the guts to set foot on the front lines, and those guys had to prove how tough they were somehow.

“All right,” he said, “we’re fading to our second fallback point.”

He pointed to a projected map that was in the middle of the bunch of them, reflected off the dirt, and jabbed his knife into the spot they’d picked out for secondary fallback. It wasn’t their primary, but with so many trainees under control now, Kepler wasn’t taking any chances.

“This place, this isn’t where we were told to go,” one of the Childeans objected.

“Exactly,” Kepler snorted. “The primary was in case of a staged assault, something that resulted in us scattering. We didn’t just lose people back there; the enemy gained prisoners. The Ross don’t usually bother chatting, but we’re not taking any chances. We’ll send an observer to watch the primary, but there’s no chance in hell that I’m taking the bulk of your resistance, or any of my team, anywhere near that spot. We go to the secondary.”

“What do we do now?” another demanded. “We’ve lost so much…”

“And we’ll lose more,” Miram said softly, gathering everyone’s attention. “That’s war. When it’s over, we can cry about our losses, but right now…suck it up and move on.”

It was, perhaps, not the most tactful way she could have put that statement, but Kepler just nodded in agreement.

“I know it feels like you just had your heart torn out,” he said, “and some of you are wondering who we are to speak to you like this. And you’re right. We haven’t lost people here. Yet. This isn’t our world. But we’ve lost, we’ve all lost. In the past, today, and in the future we’ll lose even more. Our job, here and now, is to make sure the enemy’s losses make ours look tiny by comparison. So pack up. We’re falling back to the secondary location.”

*                                        *                                        *

Childean Badlands

Sneaking across an open section of rock with no cover to speak of for miles around you was an exercise in patience more than anything else. No matter how good your stealth kit was, camouflage would only buy you so much speed. The best way to be invisible was to become a rock, just another chunk of sediment lying out there in the elements.

No one noticed rocks.

The only problem with that tactic was a fairly obvious one, really. Rocks didn’t move. Normally. There were exceptions, but they weren’t of much use to Sorilla at the moment as she painstakingly inched her way across the terrain she knew to be covered by the enemy scanners.

Somewhere out there she knew Lance was doing the same thing, but she’d lost sight of him a long time earlier. They were moving at a rate of literally a few inches an hour, and if they were lucky they might be able to keep up an average rate somewhere close to that. Any faster and they’d be spotted, no question. She knew the enemy scanners well, and this scenario was the worst case for her side of things.

On Hayden they had the jungle to cover in. The best of scanners couldn’t penetrate more than a few meters into that roiling mass of living material, and an operator could move with near impunity as they willed.

Child was certainly a new experience, and one she could have done without.

One of many in my life, Sorilla thought dryly, inching forward another few millimeters as she looked for any sign of movement, wondering if she’d even know that the enemy had spotted her if it happened. More than likely, out this far, the only warning she’d get would be a sudden sinking feeling as her implants tried to warn her of the enemy Gravity Valve compressing space-time around her.

That thought drove off the impatience she was feeling nicely, allowing her to again focus on the job at hand.

They weren’t trying to get close to the enemy ship. No, Sorilla knew about as much as she could learn about a Ross Portal ship as it was. There wasn’t a ton she could do there, not without calling on resources that she really didn’t want to authorize…even assuming the Admiral wouldn’t veto the request.

What they were working their way toward was the anomalous gravity source that existed out in the middle of the badlands. It was the only thing that was out of place, the only reason she could see for the aliens to have come out here, and that made that anomaly very interesting to Sorilla Aida.

Pausing again to scope out the area, she noted that she’d moved about three meters in the last few hours. It was going to take her days to get where she was going, but there was no way around that. With no sign of motion anywhere else, she checked the time against her HUD and then shifted forward again.

Another inch.

*                                        *                                        *

The only exterior part of his body that was moving was his eyes, and that was the way Lance Dearborn liked things. They’d been in too much of a hurry since they landed on this rock, trying to get things set up, get the locals moving, figure out what the enemy plan of operations was…too complicated, too rushed.

Here, out in the middle of the badlands, with no cover for the better part of kilometer, this was where he lived.

The target zone was hours away, probably a day or so at least, almost a full kilometer from his current position. Lance kept his eye on the prize, but couldn’t help but spare some of his attention to his boss.

She’s not bad for a teacher, he noted as he watched her inch a little forward. She wasn’t perfect, and he thought she was moving a little too quickly. By his figuring of things, Aida would reach the target first, but that only counted if she weren’t spotted in the attempt. He figured the odds were low—he knew where to look and the enemy didn’t after all—but like most of the great unwashed, the boss was in a hurry.

Hurry.

The word just tasted bad in his mouth.

*                                        *                                        *

Sorilla stopped at the edge of a crater lip, feeling the source of the gravity anomaly ahead and below her. Whatever it was, it was a lot closer now, not more than a few hundred meters away from her position. The Ross ship was still a few dozen kilometers off, and not moving. She didn’t know if they were looking for the anomaly, or something else, but it was strange enough that she simply had to investigate it now that she’d found it.

Twilight was coming, and it would be darker here than where they’d landed originally. The super-Jupiter was lower on the horizon, its tug a gentle influence on her senses. It was a little destabilizing, unfortunately, since it was pulling more to the side than straight up, as it had been, but she could deal with that.

The more pressing issue was the closer proximity of the anomaly.

The closer she got to it, the more it messed with her inner balance. She was experienced enough to adapt to the differences—lord knew that she’d had enough practice. Just travelling on the new class of starships was a constant balancing act for her, given the changes her implants had made in her. There were more variables at play on Child, however. The super-Jupiter, Child itself, the anomaly, and two Ross vessels were all tugging at her senses.

The other moons in the planetary system occasionally could be felt as well, of course, but for the most part those were the variables she had to be concerned with. Five gravity sources were a distraction, but at least most of them were constant. The only real pain was the second Ross vessel, as that was currently mobile.

If they took it into mind to buzz around too close to her, Sorilla knew that it would be a major distraction. Annoying under most circumstances, but potentially fatal in a fight. She was getting better at dealing with gravity distractions, but she’d rather not push her limits if she could avoid it.

Proc, Sorilla subvocalized, sending orders to her implants with quick, nearly inaudible commands. Compress and pulse to Dearborn. Am at crater lip. Descending. Take overwatch. If not back in twelve hours, withdraw and regroup with the team. Aida out.

She waited for the processor to compress and pulse the message and orders out, then shrugged off the camouflage cloak she’d used to blend with the dirt and rocks, dropping over the lip of the crater, and slid downwards. By her estimation, she had some time before the Ross showed up. They were still a good distance off and as a rule were cautious when it came to risking even their Golem or Goblin avatars, let alone their own skins.

If they were confident in what they were going to find here, Sorilla suspected that they’d have already arrived.

She was going to beat them to the punch, even if she didn’t know what the hell she was punching this time around.

*                                        *                                        *

Damn it, boss! Lance had developed a tic under his left eye, the only muscle of his body that was moving externally.

One incredibly frustrating part about being a sniper in a hide was wanting, no needing to curse at, let’s say, your boss for doing something incredibly stupid, and have to do it all mentally. It honestly took all the fun out of swearing when you couldn’t vocalize it.

Before the mission, there had been talk that the captain had been pulling a few too many John Wayne moves, but he’d mostly discounted it. The nature of the job was such that sometimes you were out of contact with higher-ups and had to make the plan up as you went.

Now, though, he wasn’t so sure.

She seemed a little too eager to slide down that pit for his comfort.

Don’t get killed, boss, Lance thought as he watched over the area, one eye flicking to the last known location of the second Ross vessel. I do not want to explain to the Top how I lost the boss on a fieldtrip.

*                                        *                                        *

Sorilla hit the bottom of the crater in a sliding crouch, left leg leading as she slid to a stop. She straightened to her feet, standing tall for the first time in many long hours, and took a moment to survey the area.

There wasn’t much to survey, honestly. It was a crater, and an old one. Local weather wasn’t as extreme as on Earth, but after a few thousand years, that didn’t matter much when it came to erosion. Any weather would eventually wear down anything, including solid stone, so there wasn’t much of the original impact signature left, not to her eye at least.

She supposed that someone who specialized in ancient craters would probably be able to tell a lot more than her, but her knowledge base was a little more inclined toward much newer impact craters, unfortunately. Sorilla started walking toward the center of the nearly one-kilometer-wide crater, bringing her armor’s radar systems online. The pulse radar her suit used was primarily intended to identify incoming sniper rounds along with the point of origin, but it also had some limited penetrating ability.

Normally it was more suited to conducting recon inside of target buildings, mostly judging if there were any enemy forces inside that needed to be taken out, but in a pinch she could use it as ground-penetrating radar.

“Well…” She noted an immediate return. “That didn’t take long.”

There was a rather large mass not far under her, clearly not part of the local material. She couldn’t get information off the radar hit to tell what it was made of exactly, but since she could feel the gravity pull closer than ever, she figured she’d hit pay dirt.

In the middle of the crater she found a thin spot in the dirt and kicked it out of the way. It wasn’t enough, so she dropped down to her knees and started to dig. Armored hands didn’t replace a shovel, but they were actually a pretty decent substitute for an e-tool. She cleared a section five feet deep, but only a couple feet wide, in a few minutes before she finally hit something.

“Huh.” Sorilla flipped her implants over to hyperspectral analysis mode. “This doesn’t look like Ross hull plating.”

The elemental breakdown seemed all wrong, at least according to modern Ross metallurgy. Sorilla supposed that it could be simply that they’d updated their technology over the years, in fact that seemed almost certain, but she’d have felt better if any of it looked familiar.

However, Ross or not, it clearly wasn’t natural, and that made it a priority target.

*                                        *                                        *

A flicker of motion in the sky caught Lance’s attention and he, again, fought the urge to start cursing.

He hated doing it, but Lance opened up his processor with subvocal access.

Proc, compress and pulse transmit. Boss, we’ve got movement on the second Ross ship. They’re inbound on your position.

That was possibly a bit of an exaggeration, since it was pretty hard for him to calculate a course for the ship without pinging them with active gear—something he was not going to be doing—but where else could they be going in this area?

He waited a few seconds, and was almost ready to risk sending another pulse when she finally responded.

Roger, hold position.

He listened to the transmission twice, willing it to have more information, but it became clear in short order that the boss had no intention of sending anything else. Hell, it was probably smart even—longer pulses could be detected or triangulated—but she could have sent a little more than, “Roger, hold position.”

He sighed, then sent a quiet confirmation of receipt back.

There wasn’t anything else he could do, other than check his rifle one more time and wait.

He was good at both, but waiting was his specialty.

*                                        *                                        *

Sorilla found herself standing in the center of a five-foot-round circle of cleared metal, at the bottom of a now seven-foot-deep hole she’d cleared, the banks of dirt from the hole itself making up the extra. She could feel the shift in gravity now that Lance had brought the movement to her attention. They were heading in her direction, but they weren’t in a hurry about things.

She pulled a breaching charge from her thigh pack and unrolled the hi-ex cord, laying it in a circle around her feet.

The cord on its own would barely heat up the metal she was dealing with, of course, so she followed that with an orichalcum covering and packed down the whole line with local dirt. Despite the rather ostentatious name, orichalcum was merely an ancient alloy that had recently been resurrected in Earth military circles as a replacement for straight copper in shaped charges. The metal was mostly copper with a mix of zinc, gold, and a few other trace metals.

Sorilla didn’t know if it was the same metal Plato actually referred to in his writings about Atlantis—probably not, she supposed—but when they pulled up some unusual ally ingots that dated to that era, the general consensus was to call the new alloy orichalcum after his writings. While researching its various uses, one that stood out was how it magnified the Monroe effect that made shaped charges possible.

She jumped out of the hole and retreated to a safe distance. She supposed she should call fire in the hole, but frankly she wasn’t much worried about bystanders, even if there were any. She sent the signal and a dull crump shook the ground under her feet. Dirt blew up out of the hole, showering down around her as she walked back to the hole and looked down.

Nice.

The enhanced plasma from the shaped charge had cut a near perfect hole, and the plate had dropped through it. Sorilla scanned the hole briefly, then jumped down and dropped through it into the darkness within.

Chapter 9

Coastline

Lieutenant Kepler ducked as pulse fire from the Goblins peppered down around his position. They hadn’t seen him—he was sure of that, as he had stealth active—but they were probably triangulating sources of fire. That meant only one thing.

“Time to move,” he ordered, nodding to Nano. “Signal the withdrawal.”

“Yes, sir,” the big man said firmly, sending quiet signals.

They fired a few more rounds, suppressive fire more than anything else, as they broke position. They were all using local weapons, and the lazing pulses were destructive enough to take out Goblins and even chip off some gravel from a Golem in a pinch.

They weren’t going to do much against a Valve attack, if one was inbound, however.

The Ross had moved quickly to capitalize on their earlier attack. They seemed intent on shattering the local resistance in one fell blow. Kepler wasn’t as expert in that sort of thing as the captain was, but even he knew that this was the wrong way to go about it. They were striking too much in the open, hitting too many who wanted nothing but to be left out of the fighting.

In open combat, if you killed enough of the enemy, they would eventually stop fighting. That was the nature of war.

In this sort of fighting, however, there was a corollary.

Kill all of the enemy you like, but if you touch their families, or the families of the unaffiliated, at the same time…you would never see the end of the recruits that would rise up to fill their ranks.

That was how you won every single battle, and then would inevitably lose the war.

He wondered if the Ross knew they were sowing the seeds of their own defeat.

Probably not. No invading force ever seemed to realize it until it was long over, not on Earth at least. From what he’d seen, there was nothing to indicate that aliens were any smarter.

He took stock of the situation, noting that the Childeans were falling back as well as could be expected. The squad was hanging as close as they could, providing cover for the retreat but staying out of sight and ready to ghost if it looked like they might be exposed.

He hated the idea of running from those things.

Long game, play the long game. Line them up and kill the all, he told himself as he fired another burst and fell back to the next cover point. There’s no sense in killing just a few. I want them all.

A warning on his gravity sensors sent Kepler to the ground, calling out an order, “Take cover! Gravity Valve!”

Humans and Childeans alike threw themselves to the ground, covering hurriedly as a deathly silence fell around them. A howl took the place of the silence, growing from a whisper as the air rushed in toward the forming singularity. Then quiet again as anyone still in the open scrambled to cover or just bundled themselves up and covered their more vulnerable parts as best they could.

The flash hit first, blinding and hot. The air temperature rose dozens of degrees in a flash, even at the range they had managed to retreat to. Kepler hoped the Childeans could handle the change; their armor wasn’t sealed as well as the SOLCOM powered kit he and the squad wore. Whether they could or not, however, the worst was yet to come.

The shockwave thundered over them, a hundred hurricanes at once, pieces of buildings caught up in the wind like straw in a gale.

Everything went black.

*                                        *                                        *

Everything was black.

As soon as she stepped away from the limited light coming through the hole above her, the interior of whatever it was she was in was black. Not just dark, but effectively total blackout conditions. Sorilla grimaced and cycled through her implant’s vision modes, more annoyed for the moment than anything else.

Light amplification gave her a little more range away from the hole, but not much before there just wasn’t enough light to amplify.

Thermal mode was worthless. Other than her, everything else inside had long since reached a temperature equilibrium.

She lit off the lights of her suit, a last choice alternative, in her opinion, since she much preferred using passive systems, but with no other option it was back to the old fashioned approach. With high intensity beams pouring light out ahead of her from her shoulder mounts and helmet, Sorilla examined the room she was in.

There was nothing spectacular, in her opinion, just what looked like almost any other ship’s interior, from human to Ross. There were only so many ways to build an internal habitat, in her experience, and while most species did like to put a touch of their own spin on things, the basics were the basics. A metal box with big thick doors.

Sorilla moved to the door, looking for a mechanism she could operate but not finding anything.

Annoying, but not a surprise.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have enough breaching charges to blow her way through every door and bulkhead she wanted to pass, but there were other ways. Another thing every ship had in common was that there had to be manual overrides for everything, no matter how automated the ship was in reality. If it was to carry people, they had to be able to get into damaged areas in order to effect repairs.

She found a well-disguised panel beside the door and pulled out her laser tool, finding the fasteners that held it in place and burning them out with the beam. The panel clanged to the ground as she examined the interior mechanism for a moment before grabbing a lever and yanking it down.

The door shifted just slightly, only enough to open a crack, but that was all she needed. Sorilla got her armor-shod fingers into the crack and pulled with all the force her body and enhanced armor could manage. The door slid slowly open and allowed her access to the corridor beyond.

Does not look like Ross manufacture, she noted, scanning the area before venturing forth.

The corridor was too small for the Ross Golem avatars and too large for the Ross themselves, which left her confused. She could feel the gravity source nearby, so this ship or base or whatever it was clearly had an active singularity reactor intact. No other Alliance species she knew used them, just the Ross and, recently, humans. Humans only used them because they were captured tech that was admittedly superior to anything they’d had before, but crude in comparison to the Ross applications they’d copied from.

Alliance species preferred to use what had been listed in SOLCOM intelligence circles as Exotic Matter Reactors. Basically that meant no one was really sure, but everyone had their own ideas. They’d not recovered any Pari or other species’ vessels intact enough to study, so for now guesses were all they had.

They knew, however, that they didn’t use Gravity Cores. Those were something humans had gotten very good at detecting since the invasion.

And Sorilla was quite certain that there was an active Gravity Core very close to her position.

All right, not Ross tech. Not human tech. Who the hell else is brilliant enough or, in our case, stupid enough to use a black hole to power their ships?

That was actually a misleading thought, though Sorilla tried not to worry about it. Humans weren’t stupid enough to power their ships with a black hole…

Sorilla knew, sadly, that humans would have to get a lot smarter before they were stupid enough to power their ships with black holes.

Until someone figured out how to gather energy more efficiently, the Gravity cores in use on SOLCOM ships would continue to be limited to generating artificial gravity and inertial compensation.

That still left her wondering just whose ship it was she was traipsing through as she made her way through the corridors, electing to try to get closer to the core she could feel on the assumption that she’d likely find main engineering in that direction, if nothing else.

The ship was clearly locked down, and she had to cut through more access panels and pry open more doors as she made her way toward the center of the ship. No significant security locks, though. It didn’t seem like anyone had taken precautions to lock the ship down against intruders, which was a relief, if not mildly disconcerting.

She was well aware that any such security was always a balance of priorities onboard a ship, however. On the one hand, sure you wanted to slow and contain intruders as much as possible, but much more often it was far more important that your own crew not be impeded by overt security. Human ships solved the balance with layers of security that could be adjusted to the situation, but ultimately even that amounted to little more than a patch. Good security was an implacable wall, and good ship design was as open and accessible as possible. The two ideas were simply the antithesis of one another.

In her experience, shipboard security was only as good as your Marines and the tech guys in the security offices. This ship currently had neither, which meant that while she was being slowed down by the lockdown, she wasn’t being stopped.

Of course, if the Ross showed up before she found out anything, slowed was as good as stopped.

With that thought in mind, Sorilla doubled her pace.

*                                        *                                        *

Main engineering was huge.

This place has that much in common with the Ross, at least.

The room itself was large, not immensely so, but it was what was beyond the clear screens that lined one wall that really opened it up. The core pulsed to her senses, almost what she could describe as alive even, but clearly dormant. That was a good thing, she supposed. An unmonitored active core sitting on a planet’s surface was very close to the worst nightmare of pretty much anyone who had the slightest education in the damn things.

Dormant cores weren’t quite as bad. They were generally just below the level of stability, so they lost mass rather than gathered it. That was so that, just in case shielding failed, they wouldn’t swallow whatever they were in the vicinity of. On a planet, particularly an inhabited one, that was somewhat of a good thing.

Sorilla found the closest console and checked it over.

No power. Of course, there’s no power anywhere. There should be backup power available somewhere. Dormant or not, that core is generating power.

She started scanning the script markings on the consoles and walls, comparing them to Alliance script through her implants. Some of the iconography matched, or seemed to, but then again, she could squint and see the letters of the alphabet in some of it too.

Sorilla started running pattern-matching software in the background as she took scans of every piece of writing she could find, then made comparisons of all the consoles and controls she could spot as well. She didn’t have the same extensive files that were on the Poland, but she had language files and technical files from every enemy ship that SOLCOM had been able to study.

She was still running the scan when suddenly the lights came back on.

“What the…?” Sorilla held up a hand to shelter her eyes before her implants adjusted to the change, casting around as the equipment came to life.

An image appeared above a central console, attracting her attention. It was a global survey image. She frowned as she tried to place it but couldn’t quite manage it. After a moment Sorilla’s eyes widened.

“The water levels are wrong,” she murmured, walking closer. “Coastlines are wrong, but major landmarks are visible… It’s Child.”

She trailed off as the map changed, water levels receding from the far side of the moon and gathering under the locked planet-facing side. After a few seconds it matched the survey maps she’d memorized before the mission, right down to the towering water bulge rising up to the face of the super-Jupiter God-World.

She was still trying to figure that out when a red light lit up near where she knew the Childean population center was. The image focused in and another set of consoles lit up. Sorilla twisted in place, eyes locking on what she instantly recognized as a targeting system coming to life and locking onto the city.

“No, no, no, no!” Sorilla swore, rushing over. “Whatever you’re doing, cut it out now! I have people in that region!”

She scanned the controls, still running pattern recognition with no hits, before finally deciding to take her chances and try entering a command on instinct and guesswork. She glanced over the iconography, then at the map and the targeting system.

Red. They’re using red to signify a target location. Red means danger to them too, she thought, reaching out and tapping the only red icon on the console.

“Shit!” she hissed. What looked like an override password demand appeared.

Sorilla hit the side of the console, frustrated as the target continued to lock in. A voice spoke up, in a language she didn’t recognize, the air filling with the reverberating tones just as the lights dimmed slightly and the targeting reticule blinked green, then red again, and vanished.

Sorilla felt her blood run cold as she tried again to figure out how to read any of what she was seeing.

*                                        *                                        *

Coastline

Kepler groaned as he shoved the remains of a tree trunk off, got to his knees, and looked around. They hadn’t been at ground zero, of course, not even SOLCOM armor would stand up to that. A nuclear fireball might not compromise his armor, but the radiation associated with it would turn it into an oven, and that was assuming he and his armor didn’t get turned into part of the bomb by gravity-induced fission.

That didn’t mean they were far enough out, however.

The blast wave had blown down trees, Childean dwellings, and pretty much everything else in its way after they’d taken what cover they could. The entire area looked like something he’d only seen in pictures, but the local rad count was already dying back down.

One thing you can say for the Ross weapon, he thought grimly, they don’t like to poison the area they’re hitting.

He pinged his squad’s transponders, getting green-coded returns quickly, and breathed a sigh of relief. His people were alive and intact, at least.

“Everyone,” he said over the squad channel, “locate as many of the Childeans as you can, dig them out quickly if possible. Do not be seen.”

He flicked the acknowledgments aside even as they came in, focusing on following his own orders.

He found Korra under a massive tree, pinned down and having seen better days by far. Kepler braced under the trunk, getting leverage, then boosted it off the Childean with his whole body lifting. Even with his armor, the weight was not trivial and he had several warning alerts sounding before he managed to roll it clear.

“Can you move?” he asked, using his translation system. He didn’t have time to try and think in Childean at the moment.

“I believe so,” the Childean grunted as he rolled over painfully and climbed to his feet.

“Get your weapon, then either fight or get clear,” Kepler ordered. “With the Ghoulies intervening with Valve fire, we have to keep on the move.”

Korra nodded weakly. “Very well.”

Kepler was about to say something else when his armor started screaming at him again.

“Shit!” he swore. “Gravity anomaly, centered on us!” He reached out, grabbing Korra, and tried to clear the area as he locked into the squad channel. “Escape and evade!”

The external temperature of the surrounding area suddenly began to drop, a growing breeze whipping up dust and debris as Kepler tried to run against it but found himself being pulled back by an inexorable force.

Oh shit, he thought as he struggled against the pull, what a lousy way to die…

His feet were sliding against the ground as he leaned forward, digging his toes in as he left furrows in the too-soft dirt. Of course, the dirt was sliding along with him, so it was possible that solid rock would have presented just as much traction. Straining as best he could, Kepler felt Korra slip ahead of him and fall into him with enough force to knock him back just enough that the gravity force yanked him off his feet and back through the air.

Trees whipped past him, debris and bodies. The IFF signals from his squad were all glaring red on his HUD, but he couldn’t scrounge up the focus to tell where they were as he was tanked backward through the air.

Then, like a switch was flipped, the force stopped.

Kepler hit the ground, with a hundred-thirty-kilo Childean landing right on top of him. He dimly supposed that should have hurt, even with the armor, but frankly, he was too confused by why he was still…well, in one piece rather than having his atoms scattered across the surface of the moon world.

“Uh…”

He looked around, shifting Korra off him, before continuing.

“Did anyone get any readings off that that made sense?”

*                                        *                                        *

Sorilla glared at the system, but realized that she was dealing with a read-only display. She couldn’t access anything that even looked remotely like control systems.

I need the command center, not engineering.

With the lights on now, she returned to casting about the engineering section, looking for any symbols that seemed familiar. It only took a few seconds for her suit’s pattern recognition systems to find one.

That is very nearly the symbol we have on file for the Sturm-Gav, Sorilla realized as it was brought to her attention. This is a Gav ship? I didn’t know they made it this far into Orion’s Arm!

While the Gav were largely credited with creating the Alliance, neither Sorilla nor any of the SOLCOM envoys after her visit to their space had ever found any evidence, or even rumor, that the Gav had left their sector of space, which was quite deep in the main galactic body. A Gav ship this close to Earth was…well, honestly she didn’t know what it was, but it was something big.

With that bit of information, Sorilla directed her suit and implant processors to focus on what little they had on the Gav, whose language was on file with the Alliance but wasn’t Alliance Standard. That meant that she didn’t have complete files, unfortunately, but there was enough there to throw out some of the misleading pattern recognition files that had been screwing up the translations.

Sorilla noted a placard imprinted on the wall by the door she’d used to come in. This has to be location information. The schema was hardly clear to her, but its intent was crystal. With that now in mind, and the lights on, Sorilla left engineering and started jogging down the corridors, scanning the similar placards on the wall beside every door she passed.

It took over a dozen before her processors worked out the basics of the coordinate schema, and twenty more scans before she could make any predictions based on it.

Not much different than a SOLCOM ship, she decided once the basic translation was offered up by her systems.

The ship was divided by deck, obviously, but instead of using port and starboard designations, it seemed to use quarter-spheres. That made sense, given that the ship was built around a Gravity generator rather than laid out like a SOLCOM warship.

That didn’t help her find the bridge, however, since she had no idea where the logical place for a command center would be on a spherical spaceship.

Other than the center, which is currently occupied, of course.

And, of course, the damn ship felt bigger than it could possibly be in any sane universe. Sorilla wasn’t sure if that was just her perception and concern over time, or if there was actually some weird effect going on similar to the interior of Ross Portal ships. She didn’t really care, either, so there was that.

“Command center, command center,” Sorilla grumbled as she jogged through the halls. “Where the hell would I be if I were a command center?”

At least the doors were operational now that the power had been activated, and she wasn’t wasting power cells in her laser cutting through access panels.

Sorilla was trying very hard not to think about just how, or why, the power had come back online.

She skidded to a halt next to one door that was a little different than the others, her processors’ pattern recognition flagging it and throwing a red halo around it through her corneal implants.

“Hello,” Sorilla whispered as she noted the iconography above it that matched some of the Alliance script for “important,” or close enough for translators at least.

Unsurprisingly, this particular door didn’t open automatically like the rest had since the power returned. Sorilla took that as a good sign, working on the assumption that you wouldn’t want access to a command area just freely open to every passerby that happened through the hall.

Her laser in hand, Sorilla located the access panel and burned out the welds that held it in place. Thankfully, the Gav, assuming this was one of their ships, seemed a practical sort. Lacking any sort of security lockdown, which Sorilla assumed wasn’t in effect, they hadn’t gone out of their way to make it difficult to override door locks. That was just common sense to her, of course, since in a power emergency the crew would still need to be able to navigate the ship.

So, assuming there were no automatic lockdowns initiated, Sorilla had high hopes that she might actually be able to get to the command center.

Eventually.

The doors had to be pried apart and forced, but they gave with only a little force, letting her push through and into the section beyond. It wasn’t the command center, unfortunately, but it was starting to look like officers’ country, if she wasn’t terribly mistaken.

The colors were a little different here, lighter and more open, and there was more room.

Room was, generally, at a premium on any starship, unless you were on a Ross Portal ship, and even then the open spaces that you found were generally scaled to the Golem avatars and, in those terms, weren’t nearly so roomy as they seemed to a normal-sized human.

Sorilla quickly scanned all the visible iconography, zeroing in on another hall leading out in a different direction. The script didn’t give her much, just a list of coordinates that could be found in that direction, but the color coding was different than any she’d seen yet, and the coordinate range was quite small. She took a chance and headed that way.

Chapter 10

 USV Poland

Silence descended on the command deck of the Poland as those present stared at the readings they had just scanned, trying to make some sense of them.

“What just happened?”

Ruger’s question was the proverbial elephant in the room, the question everyone wanted to ask but only the Admiral was willing to put voice to. Honestly, even the computers didn’t seem to really know what they’d just recorded.

“Unknown, Admiral,” the gravitics technician on duty said, shaking his head in confusion. “We’re registering multiple gravity anomalies originating from the Childean moon world. We’ve accounted for two, the Ross’El vessels, and at least one instance of a Gravity Valve in action. However, that still leaves a minimum of two unknown and unaccounted for anomalies in our scans.”

“Blast the anomalies,” Ruger growled. “I want to know happened right there, time code four-four-six, mark two-two.”

Ruger gestured and the scan recording back up to the designated time code, showing the beginning of a very familiar Gravity spike on the scanners…one that was followed very closely by a reverse spike.

“Did…did something counter a Ross’El Gravity Valve?” Ruger demanded incredulously.

“Not enough data, Admiral,” the technician said. “However, at first glance, I wouldn’t rule that out.”

Ruger ran his hand through his hair, considering what little information they had that they could understand. Unfortunately, that wasn’t much and it wasn’t the interesting stuff. He kept coming back to the Gravity spikes, one recognizable as a Valve activation, and the other…the other seemed a precise counter wave. If something on that planet could meet a Valve wave with precise destructive interference…

“Captain, rig the ship for silent running,” he ordered, “and prepare to move the Poland closer to the Childean super-Jupiter.”

“Aye, Admiral,” Yuri acknowledged, turning to his command crew. “Police all spectrums. No emission from this point forward. We don’t even talk to our probes. Bring the ship drives around, minimum thrust only, until they’re pointed fully away from the planet. Admiral?”

“Yes, Captain?”

“If we get close with the singularity at one-gee, they will detect us.”

“I said silent running, Captain.”

“Aye aye, sir.” The captain nodded, turning back and addressing engineering. “Standby to kill the singularity. Comms, give me shipwide.”

“Shipwide to your stations, Captain,” the communications officer said.

“All hands, this is the captain. Standby for microgravity maneuvering. Secure all items within your departments. You have ten minutes.”

*                                        *                                        *

Child of God

Well, Sorilla thought as she stepped into the large open area, complete with floating projections lit up and displaying data from all sides. I’m guessing I found the command deck.

SOLCOM had depressingly little data about the Sturm-Gav. In fact, Sorilla was quite certain that at the moment she was probably the leading human expert on the entire species simply by virtue of standing where she was standing. The Gav, like most of the species they’d encountered so far, were apparently bipedal. That was more than any other human knew about them, and their relative size was close enough to human for the layout and shape of the area to be familiar.

That was interesting information, but not groundbreaking, of course.

For some reason, most of the species they’d encountered were more or less bipedal humanoids, something that was driving evolutionary theorists around the proverbial bend. Size wasn’t much of a surprise, though, since the human scale of things seemed to be fairly close to optimal for most lifeform durability. Much larger and bones tended to break too easily under the strain of supporting the mass; much smaller and larger carnivores became more than a minor challenge to scale in the earlier days of evolutionary development.

The bipedal rules seemed similar, as quadrupeds and other forms had inherent disadvantages when compared to those species that evolved a pair of free manipulating appendages. Tool users quickly overtook other sorts of evolutionary paths, and once they got a foothold in an ecosystem, the game’s ending was effectively written.

For Sorilla it didn’t matter much, however—at least not the theories. She was more concerned with the practicalities. Since the Gav, and most races they’d encountered, were quite similar to human in form, that made their equipment…their tools…accessible to her.

In theory.

Sorilla walked between the active consoles, eyes and processors scanning left to right as she looked for anything she could use to determine what the ship or installation she was on was doing.

There. The current map of Child.

Sorilla stepped into the console and took a seat in front of the display, automatically reaching for the display to try and manipulate the image directly. Unsurprisingly, that resulted in no effect other than her hand passing through the projection.

Great. Gene-locked maybe, might require specific implants… Sorilla scowled from under her helm, considering her options.

The Ross locked their tools as well, though not entirely. Some aspects of Ross weapons were designed to be manually manipulated, while others required some sort of connection to the device. No one had worked out what sort since there were no implants ever pulled out of Ross’El autopsies, but Sorilla assumed that they likely used some form of biological implant instead of electronic ones. Properly engineered, those would be all but impossible to differentiate from a normal organ, particularly if every Ross soldier were implanted similarly.

That was her theory, at least. Sorilla had read many others since the invasion, ranging from speculation of telekinetic controls to simple central radio frequency settings.

Those theories were all for the Ross, however, and no one had ever bothered to try and speculate on how the Gav operated their equipment.

Sorilla checked the local air for any impurities that would cause problems, but it came up clean, so she broke the seal on her helm and pulled the protective device off. The combat capacity of the helm wouldn’t improve her analytical abilities, and right now she needed to think more than she needed to fight.

“Access…requested,” she said in Alliance standard, eyes flitting around as she looked for a response.

The display shifted, and she heard a voice respond.

“Identification.”

Well, it uses audible commands. Same as Alliance computers, Sorilla noted with a mixture of relief and trepidation.

The Gav had founded the Alliance, or were among the first and strongest founders at least. It made sense that the systems on one of their ships would mirror Alliance equipment. The odds of them having shared military ciphers with other species seemed slim, however, and SOLCOM hadn’t even broken many of the Alliance ciphers so far.

Nevertheless, Sorilla checked the controls and fittings for the station she was sitting at and found what she was looking for. The optical interface was visible, and appeared to be Alliance Standard on the surface. Sorilla drew her handheld laser and implant linked to it, turning the beam strength down and entering modulation keys. As soon as the beam linked to the computer terminal, codes began flying across her eyes as her corneal implants glowed red.

Breaking into alien technology wasn’t her specialty, but when she’d been tapped for the envoy’s security as an intelligence specialist on her mission to Alliance space, they’d added a lot of extras to her implant suite. Cryptographic software was just one of the more useful additions, in her opinion.

The code isn’t up to Alliance Standard. It must be much older than what SOLCOM has been dealing with, Sorilla noted almost instantly as the code complexity became apparent.

Modern SOLCOM codes were terabit level encryption, considered effectively unbreakable in most cases, Sorilla herself being one of the few instances where SOLCOM code had been cracked. Since she’d been the one to crack it, or rather her brain had been, SOLCOM had considered it more of a curiosity than a security breach. The code she was looking at through her implant connection to the laser-optical link to the Gav computer wasn’t anywhere near that level of complexity, let alone the monstrous level of present day Alliance codes.

How long has this ship been here? Sorilla wondered as the cryptographic tumblers clicked into place, one by one.

The security was too easy to break, even for old and outdated crypto. Sorilla didn’t understand it. It was almost as it if were designed to be broken. There were codes from the twentieth century that would have taken longer to crack, she thought as the last virtual code was broken.

Still, she didn’t have many options.

Here goes nothing, Sorilla thought as she put her own codes into the system.

“Identification,” she said aloud, “Aida, Sorilla. Captain.”

She almost held her breath waiting for the response.

“Captain welcomed.”

Sorilla resisted the urge to say “too easy.” she didn’t feel like mocking Murphy at the moment. Enough would go wrong of its own accord without bringing that troublesome Irishman into the mix.

Instead she just used the modified Alliance computer protocols to send orders to the system from her implants to the laser relay. The display shifted, the map sinking back as new information appeared in front of it. Sorilla glared at the alien script, trying her best to simply read what was written. Unlike machine code, language was heavily interpretive, and her processors sucked at interpretation.

Wave compensation? Sorilla’s lips moved as she silently read the Alliance script as best she could. No, not Alliance script, but rather the language Alliance script was based on.

Gav script.

Sorilla wished she had a specialist with her. Despite the extensive training she’d received in the last year, this wasn’t her specialty by any remote definition of the word. Alien cryptography, WMDs, capital ship design…she was a Special Forces trainer; that was all she’d ever wanted to be.

How did I get here?

She pushed those questions from her mind, focusing on the task at hand. No matter how bizarre the situation, how out of her depth she was, Sorilla always fell back on the lessons she first learned at Fort Bragg. There were no insurmountable problems, no problems too big to deal with.

Big problems were always composed of many small problems.

Identify the small problems and start picking them off one by one; eventually the big problem would crumble under its own weight and collapse. Then you just walked through the mess and took on the next big problem.

Right now she had one mother of a big problem on her hands, one so big and so far over her head she couldn’t possible solve it.

Okay. Fine.

Let’s solve the little ones.

Language wasn’t a little one by most people’s standard, but Sorilla was a polyglot from the time she could talk. It was one of the talents that made her so good at her chosen vocation, being able to learn new languages in days, compared to months and years for most. The Gav language was complex, but it was the root language for Alliance Standard, which she was already fluent in. That was a good place to start.

Of course, she didn’t have time to do that the old fashioned way, so she settled for using her processors’ pattern recognition system and translation tool, allowing them to take the heavy lifting part while only calling her attention when they needed direction. That would leave her enough focus to solve maybe one or two other small problems in the meantime.

Small problems such as what was happening to her squad.

She didn’t know anything beyond the fact that the computers on this ship had targeted that area, and now she had to worry about her team in addition to the Ross forces that were certainly converging on her location.

Sorilla tried to put that out of her mind for the moment. There was nothing she could do about those problems except finish her work as quickly as possible. With that in mind, she turned her focus back to the projection in front of her.

The map of Child was not particularly high resolution, even when she directed it to focus in on the area where the fighting was going on, which probably meant that it wasn’t a real-time system. More likely a recording from the last time the Gav ship had access to reconnaissance data, but it had to have at least some real-time components in order to be scanning anything.

Likely gravity scans, Sorilla supposed.

That would explain how it had the Ross vessels plotted, near as she could tell. However, no gravity system she knew of had a resolution fine enough to pick up much smaller-than-lunar-scale objects, or those that were putting out gravity waves on that scale at least.

Now, what the hell are you up to? She focused on the actions of the system, looking for the definition of “wave compensation.” It didn’t sound like it was engaging the area in combat, despite what the scans she’d seen in engineering had done.

So, if it wasn’t targeting data for artillery as she’d originally assumed, what the hell was she looking at?

“Definition required,” Sorilla said, still speaking Alliance standard and hoping that the computer wouldn’t balk. “What is ‘wave compensation’?”

There was a silent moment as she cringed, hoping she hadn’t revealed herself as an intruder. Any high end Computational Intelligence System would probably flag her for asking a question she should probably know the answer to, but she didn’t have time to do things the long way around.

“Automated defense system,” the computer responded, “intended to negate artificial gravity singular points.”

Sorilla froze.

Did that just say what I think it said?

“Locate and identify source of artificial gravity singular points,” she stammered out, trying not to let her heart thump right out of her ribcage as she listened intently for the response.

“Two Ross’Ellian Portal cruisers. See map for coordinates.”

Sorilla glanced at the map, noting that one of the two was certainly the known Portal ship in the Childean city. The other, presumably, was the second arrival.

The Gav had a way to negate Gravity Valves? Sorilla didn’t understand it. The Alliance seemed to believe that the two species had fought to a standstill, only stopping when it became clear that the conflict was likely to result in few, if any, survivors from either combatant.

If the Gav had a method to negate a Gravity Valve assault, that should have been a devastating advantage.

What the hell were they doing this far out in the Orion Arm? The Alliance doesn’t have any records of fighting between the Gav and the Ross within nine hundred lightyears of here.

“System status report,” she managed to get out.

A series of bars and numbers overlaid the map in front of her, and Sorilla scowled as she tried to make sense of them.

Power levels are regenerating, if I’m reading this right, but the rest of the numbers don’t look good.

It was impossible to be sure, but Sorilla suspected that the ship didn’t have the capacity to maintain any sort of long-term defense against the Ross. Rather, she didn’t think it would hold up to much more at all. The automated systems were slowly coming online, but the Ross were unlikely to give it the time she figured it needed to do so.

We need this ship.

Sorilla rose to her feet and bolted from the command deck, fitting her helm as she ran.

“Proc,” she said aloud as the seals snapped tight and the helm pressurized from suit air. “Record and compress for transmission…”

*                                        *                                        *

USV Poland

“We’re approaching the super-Jupiter, Captain,” the on-duty navigator announced softly.

Everyone was speaking quietly, for as little sense as it made, and had been since they began their approach deep into the Ross-controlled star system.

“Thank you, Jorgen,” Yuri said, his own voice just a few decibels higher.

As much as he was loathe to admit it, Yuri knew himself well enough to know that he wasn’t immune to the clearly foolish belief that something out there would hear them if they spoke too loudly. Yuri looked over his shoulder and up to where the admiralty deck was, spotting Ruger as the man stood watch silently over them all.

The Childean God-World, the super-Jupiter they were approaching, was a massive example of a planet. The gas giant was just short of a stellar mass in of itself, and it radiated thermal energy enough to warm its moons even more than the distant star that stood as the system’s primary.

That same thermal energy would help hide their approach. Or that was the plan, at least.

The Poland was dropping into a close orbit and would sling around the gas giant and approach the moon world out of the reflected light of the super-Jupiter. It wasn’t quite the same as attacking out of the sun, but with a little luck, Yuri hoped it would do just as well.

Of course, they still needed to know whether they were attacking or not.

He risked another glance over his shoulder to where Admiral Ruger was standing watch. The order hadn’t come down yet, and honestly, Yuri wasn’t sure what they were doing.

Does he intend to engage the Ross? Our orders were to remain undetected.

*                                        *                                        *

Ruger clasped his hands behind his back as the gas giant loomed ahead of them. They were close enough now that they could make out the twisting storms roiling the upper atmosphere with the naked eye. Another hour and they’d have to begin high speed braking maneuvers, or they’d be forced with a choice between air braking in the upper atmosphere of the gas giant or slinging clear out of orbit.

Neither were ideal options, though Ruger wasn’t certain that high speed braking wouldn’t be worse.

He needed more information, and he was gambling everything that they’d get it as they closed in on the Childean moon world and have access to higher resolution scans of just what was happening. If his interpretation of the scans was right, this system was far more important than SOLCOM had realized.

A countermeasure to the Ross’El Gravity Valve. Please let it be true.

*                                        *                                        *

Lance Dearborn twitched imperceptibly in his hide as he watched the approaching Ross vessel deploy air assets and landing craft. He checked his HUD, suppressing a curse as he confirmed that the captain was still off the grid.

Come on, Cap, he thought urgently. Time is running out. Get your butt out of there.

The Ross ship had slowed its approach and was hanging back now, though he didn’t understand why. Leading, as it was, with air support and landers would buy them some time, but only a few minutes. On reflex, Lance checked the action of his borrowed Childean weapon and ensured that it was primed and ready for a fight. Mentally he reminded himself not to adjust for windage, gravity, or any of several other factors that he would if he were using his own weapon.

The Childean weapon wouldn’t be fettered by the tether of gravity or the limits of wind resistance, as it fired a laser pulse through a chemical medium that was expended with each shot. It was laser-accurate, which was a good thing, but it would require some adjustment to his methodology.

Lance took a moment to target the vanguard of the incoming units, trying to decide where he could best place his shot. A well-positioned sniper could hold off an army, but only if he picked his targets carefully. The Ross used disposable shock troops in their front lines, and their control was never close enough to be vulnerable. That made his position untenable in the long run, as there would be no intimidation to losing avatar units like the Golems or Goblins.

The best I can do is buy a few minutes, maybe half an hour, Lance figured. What I don’t know is it I should.

He didn’t have much choice, he figured, not with the captain still down in that pit.

Lance picked one of the lead elements, a lander. He didn’t have any data on the air support elements, but SOLCOM had gotten some data on the landing craft.

I wonder… Lance thought as he sighted in the weapon and laid his thumb on the firing stud. Captain, I hope you found something worth this.

He took a deep breath, then slowly let it slide from his lungs as his heart slowed. As the breath left him, Lance paused and waited between the distant thuds of his heart. In between two beats, his thumb twitched and the Childean weapon barked as the chemical cartridge lazed instantly, sending a pulse of pure power out into the sky.

The energy pulse took the lander in one of the forward control thrusters, not normally a vital target but while in the last few seconds of landing there was a definite period of exception. The lander twisted in the air as it dropped suddenly, spinning into the ground with a spectacular smash.

I hope to hell they can’t triangulate my position from that, Lance prayed silently, knowing that he had no cover to shift position quickly.

With slow, smooth motions, Lance shifted his weapon over his shoulder to his back and crawled backwards. It would take time to do it right, but he still had no intention of holding one position against an advanced taskforce with only a single long gun.

Come on, Captain…get moving…

*                                        *                                        *

Sorilla skidded to a stop, the hole she’d blown in the ship directly above, her implants picking up signals from outside for the first time since she’d ventured inside the Gav vessel.

Ross signals approaching, looks like Lance opened the party up already. This is bad.

She glanced up, then dropped into a crouch before jumping straight through the hole and to the surface above. Once in the open air, Sorilla started getting more information feeds coming through her scanners. The Ross’El advance guard was dropping to the ground well away from the Gav ship, rallying around the crash site. If she had heavy weapons, Sorilla figured she could end their lead force in a heartbeat while they were still recovering from Lance’s initial shot.

If wishes were dishes, Sorilla thought grimly, we’d all learn to cook.

She glanced to where she knew Lance was, his position showing on her HUD even though even her implants couldn’t actually pick out any sign of him. He was moving, and that was good, but he was just repositioning.

No, Sorilla shook her head, sending the order to withdraw instead.

A sniper wasn’t going to do much once they finished deploying avatars into the field. Sorilla didn’t know what she could do, but she wasn’t going to waste Lance’s life, or her own, in an attempt to stop the Ross that was doomed to fail. She glanced back over her shoulder at the hole leading down to the Gav vessel.

I might be able to overload the core, she considered. That would certainly end the immediate threat, though she wasn’t certain that the Childean moon world would survive the gravitic aftershocks of that kind of reaction.

That…didn’t seem like a good risk to her.

However, if the Ross acquired Gav technology…particularly what she believed that ship to represent, it might be the end for SOLCOM, maybe the Alliance too, she supposed. The Ross’El encroachment into human-controlled space was making sense to her now, on some levels. They had to be looking for this ship, or perhaps others like it, she didn’t know for sure.

They’re looking to break the stalemate and shatter the Alliance.

If she were right, then SOLCOM hadn’t ever been a real target; they were just caught in the middle of an ages-old war that hadn’t ended after all.

An alert on her HUD caused Sorilla to look upward.

“Code Zulu,” she said. “Say again, Code Zulu.”

Chapter 11

USV Poland

“We have Code Zulu, Captain! Code Zulu confirmed from the surface of Child!”

Yuri froze for an instant at the unexpected announcement, looking over his shoulder to where the Admiral was watching over them. A Code Zulu was something he’d never expected to hear—it was a last ditch request from the planet for all available support.

They’d put the code into the mission brief as a matter of procedure, but the orders were clear: There was no support for the ground team, not if it exposed SOLCOM’s presence to the Alliance.

He looked over the incoming data they were still decoding from the pulse they’d received from the surface, noting targeting data among other information. It would take time to decode it all, and Yuri didn’t know what he was supposed to do with any of it. He couldn’t expose their presence to the Ross. He didn’t have that authority.

“Captain.”

Yuri turned to look at the Admiral. “Sir?”

“You have a Code Zulu, I believe. Do your duty,” Ruger told him.

“Sir! But our orders…” Yuri hesitated, then stopped and nodded firmly. “Aye aye, Admiral.” He turned around, eyes blazing. “Send targeting data to kinetic launchers, arm all weapons, standby gravity control on my orders!”

*                                        *                                        *

Above the command center, Ruger stood on the admiralty deck and considered his next actions.

He knew Captain Aida, both personally and professionally by this point, and knew that she would not have called for a Code Zulu without extreme cause. He prayed that what he believed to be the cause was, in fact, the cause.

If it weren’t, this was likely to be the shortest offensive in military history.

“Deploy Titans,” he said quietly.

“Sir?” His aide blinked, looking over in surprise.

“In for a penny,” he said firmly before repeating himself, “Deploy the Titans.”

*                                        *                                        *

The Poland tipped its nose up from the face of the God-World, pointing to the light reflected from Child as her kinetic launchers charged and began firing. Electromagnetic launchers put one-ton chunks of metal into space, delivering them on a ballistic trajectory for the targets provided.

At the same time, a series of non-weapon launches were made at slower velocity.

Within and without, the Poland was a beehive of activity as the SOLCOM vessel stood up from stealth observation and made ready to go to war.

*                                        *                                        *

Sorilla hopped back behind the lip of the crater as she received a pulse in reply to her Code Zulu.

“Alpha Team, Poland. Launch over. Laze targets.”

Yes! Sorilla pulled her laser out and set it on the lip of the crater, eyes on the skies, searching.

There was no use lazing the target until the missiles were in the atmosphere. Kinetic strikes had no onboard fuel for maneuvering, so they couldn’t make any course alterations until they hit thicker atmo. She’d just have to wait it out.

In the meantime… Sorilla glanced back to where Lance was still crawling in the dirt and sent another pulse. Incoming strike, danger close. Take cover.

Sorilla estimated the range to the enemy ground formation at about five klicks, which was dangerously close for a kinetic bombardment. She lay down along the crater lip and drew a lens fitting from a thigh pouch, idly twisting it onto her portable laser as she considered the distance and kept an eye on the sky.

The Ross were already organizing on the ground. Some of the Golem avatars survived the impact of the lander and were getting formed up as the other landers disgorged their payloads nearby. That didn’t make much difference, as long as the strike hit on target, but that was the gamble she’d made when she called in the Code Zulu. The gamble the Admiral accepted when he authorized it.

The Ross would normally eliminate any atmospheric anomalies that were aimed in the vicinity of their operations. That was what cost her team their lives during the original Hayden insertion, so long ago now. They’d gone in stupid, aiming to land near the colony site where the Ross had set up camp. The Ross hadn’t identified them as a military insertion; they’d just taken out a few bits of debris that looked like it was coming too close to their ship.

A flicker in the sky above caught her eye, and Sorilla remembered catches of phrases from the Childeans as she saw the fire track of the missiles entering the atmosphere.

God’s Tears.

She flicked the laser on, directing her processor to take control of the new optical assembly she’d attached, along with the integrated beam splitter, and painted all the targets within line of sight.

Targets painted.

Now she ducked down below the lip of the crater, debating the merits of hopping back down inside the Gav ship. While it would certainly provide her with superior cover, the hull of the old vessel would also cut her off from real-time data feed, and she didn’t have any fiber she could lay to offset that.

I guess that’ll teach me to pack light.

She felt the gravity sink before her implants reported it, a wisp on the air like a chill breeze freezing the sweat along her spine. Sorilla glanced up to where the missiles were beginning to track their final guidance operations, and with her corneal implant she spotted the slight warping of the singularity bubble as it formed.

The pull almost reached critical mass, chilling her to the core for other reasons, when a responding pulse traveled through Sorilla’s position so quickly she almost missed it. It flashed upward, impacting with the first pull she felt and…for an instant, Sorilla could feel the reversed polarity of the pulse, then it encountered the Ross Valve point and the two just…cancelled each other out.

In the next second, Sorilla could feel the sink of a new singularity forming, but it was already too late.

The kinetic kill impacts struck with the force of angry gods, first slamming through the Ross’El vessel that had been standing off from the ground force, then into the ground forces themselves. She could feel the impacts through the ground before the shockwave roared overhead, hurricane winds picking up everything in their path and just flinging it along like toys.

It buffeted around the crater she was sheltered in, dust and debris roiling in and around her, but the worst was expended above. Silence descended a few moments later, a dark silence as the air was filled with dust and rock that still held, suspended and hanging over the area like a shroud. It would be days, at least, before the air was clean again, Sorilla was certain, but that didn’t matter to her at the moment.

The initial shockwave was past, so she retrieved her laser from where it had been blown back and climbed out of the crater to survey what the Poland had wrought.

*                                        *                                        *

Holy…

Lance fought the urge to cough, though his suit systems were unimpeded and his helmet was sealed. All the dust and debris in the air made him feel like he was suffocating.

His hide had been obliterated by the blast front, leaving him mostly exposed other than the hastily chosen depression and boulder he had ducked behind when he received the captain’s message. He’d heard about the effects of a kinetic strike, but had never seen them, let alone had a front row seat. His communication suite was dead, there was enough static electricity in the air to jam a starship’s systems, and lightning was crackling around him like a living thing.

They’d been danger-close to the strike point, but close to the outer edge. Seven thousand meters was generally considered the minimum safe distance from a kinetic strike, if he remembered his classes correctly. It wasn’t something he’d ever been tempted to see in person, frankly.

The combat network was down, and he was out of contact with the captain and everyone else. Without either that or mapping available to him, Lance knew he’d have to work with dead reckoning systems.

I’m sure as hell not going to find my way out of here without some kind of help, the sniper grumbled as he began falling back from the strike point and tried to aim his way toward the rendezvous point they’d arranged with the Childeans.

Normally the idea of him getting lost would have Lance laughing out loud at whatever fool suggested it, but the blast wave had obliterated a lot of the local terrain, thrown up enough dust to reduce visibility to near zero, and had totally fouled the local magnetic field. Even his simplest system, the magnetic compass built into his implants, was completely unreliable.

Dead reckoning systems were old school technology, early Cold War back in the twentieth, in fact. Those systems relied on compass headings combined with known factors, such as how far a specific submarine would travel for every turn of the screw. Modern updates didn’t require the compass headings, thankfully. Instead they kept a log of every step he took, including every degree arc he turned, to provide soldiers with a completely internal mapping system.

Without it, Lance doubted he’d have any chance of navigating the apocalyptic wasteland he now found himself it. He just hoped the captain was far enough from the strike to be all right. He’d have preferred to go after her before pulling out, but orders were orders, and realistically, even with his armor, there was no chance of him finding her in this mess.

You better be all right, cap.

*                                        *                                        *

Remind me not to ever get in a pissing match with a Terra-class starship, Sorilla thought grimly as she made her way toward the center of Armageddon.

Crossing five klicks of pure hell was a job and a half, she learned quickly as she ran with what should have been an easy, ground-eating lope. The electrical power in the atmosphere was currently enough to send visible and audible crackling and discharges all around her. She wasn’t overly concerned; the nanoweave of her armor was insulated against electrical shock. If she were caught in the air, with nowhere for the power to go, it might be enough to blow her suit’s safeguards, but with her feet in the dirt, or even reasonably close to it, where the power could be grounded out, she was as safe as she could be.

Ground zero was a crater in the most literal sense of the word. As she got within a kilometer of the targets, the ground dropped away under her feet, sinking rapidly down. She stopped. There was no point in going any farther. There was effectively no chance of any target survival in what she was seeing.

Proc, record and compress for pulse transmission when communications are restored, Sorilla subvocalized as she looked through the settling dust and smoke. Poland, Striker. End of mission. One Portal ship, four assault landers, multiple air support vectors destroyed. No casualty estimate.

A small boulder fifteen feet from her exploded as lightning struck it, superheating what little water was in the stone. Sorilla flinched as shrapnel plucked at her armor, and decided that was enough for the moment. She got her bearings via dead reckoning systems and started away from the epicenter of the kinetic strike, heading for where the Childean resistance was supposed to be waiting.

Sorilla supposed they would need a new name for the badlands now.

Liberation Crater has a nice ring to it.

*                                        *                                        *

The dust lay thick on the big soft-wheeled transport as she approached it. The Childeans had clearly bunkered inside. She didn’t blame them; air quality in the region had recently taken a turn for the worse.

Lance was sitting on the front hood of the all-terrain vehicle, his rifle leaning against the tires.

“You’re a little relaxed,” she said dryly as her armor-shod boots crunched in the rock dust and sand under foot.

“You Code Zulu’d every Ross target for a hundred miles, at least.” He shrugged. “I’ve got the passives listening for any hint of movement, but you’re the only thing I’ve picked up since I got back.” He hopped off the vehicle, nodding back toward the wasteland. “What the hell was that, Cap?”

“I found something that takes precedence over remaining unnoticed,” she said.

“Forget unnoticed,” Lance scoffed, “how did you, or the Poland, get a kinetic strike through Ross defenses? They should have crushed anything inbound on their position.”

Sorilla popped her helm, fitting the nose filter before taking a breath. “What do you think I could have found that would be worth a Code Zulu?”

Lance’s eyes widened under his helm. “You were checking out that anomaly, another Ross ship? Some kind of air defense system?”

“It wasn’t Ross.” She shook her head. “Come on, pile in. We’ve got to get heading back. Something tells me that this fight is just getting started.”

The Childean driver greeted them with trepidation that Sorilla supposed she could forgive him for, and it probably wasn’t just for the sheer level of dirt and dust the two of them were tracking into his transport.

“What in the God-World happened?” the Childean driver and guide demanded, agitated all to hell.

Sorilla looked Dineth steadily in the face and optic receptors—she couldn’t bring herself to consider the dull ovoids “eyes.” “One of the Ross’Els’ Portal ships was destroyed by our own vessel.”

Dineth shrank a little, his body language registering as fearful, even if she couldn’t read his face. “You told us that you dared not intervene visibly.”

“The situation has changed,” she said as she grabbed a handle to steady herself. “It is time to return now. Hurry.”

The Childean seemed to want to ask more questions, but after a glance back at his compatriot, he apparently decided against it. The ammonia-powered engine belched once as he put the drive train into gear and they lurched off.

After they were moving, Mokan leaned forward and got her attention.

“The invaders were destroyed?”

“That group,” Sorilla nodded, not looking back at him. “Nothing much lives when that kind of force hits them.”

“Then we can win back our world,” the aggressive Childean growled.

Sorilla snorted, an expression of amusement that the Childeans didn’t share but had come to recognize.

“Why is that amusing to you?”

“Mokan, do you really want that…” She jerked her hand over her shoulder, thumb extending back to the still-roiling cloud of dust behind them. “…to happen to your capital city?”

The Childean turned without thinking and stared for a long moment, finally slumping back with no response.

“I didn’t think so,” Sorilla said. “The Ross use layered tactics to defend their ship. We only caught that one out in the open because it was investigating the anomaly in the badlands.”

Silence, other than the rough jostling of the vehicle on the trail, followed her statement, and Sorilla was almost satisfied to leave it there. Finally, however, she relented slightly.

“We have a chance,” she said, “but the fighting is going to get a lot dirtier from here on in. There’s no time to do this right. We’re going to have to do it quick…but yes, Mokna…we may just be able to win back your world.”

“Any price is worth paying.”

“Don’t.” Sorilla twisted in her place for the first time, glaring openly at the aggressive Childean. “Don’t go there. There are always prices too costly to pay. Always.”

Sorilla settled back. She hadn’t meant to snap at Mokan there and knew that it was the wrong tact to take with the big Childean. He wasn’t a being who cared for subtleties, or who understood nuance. He was black and white. The sort who would choose between freedom and death as though those were two actual choices.

She knew better. Freedom wasn’t a choice; it was a state of mind. You never had to die for freedom. You were either free or not. No one in the universe could take that from you. Some people didn’t get that, however, and they never really saw the world the way it truly was. Shades of grey, a palette of colors, and no white or black to be found as far as the eye could see.

That didn’t mean Mokan was wrong, however. Just simple.

Simple could be good by times. Simple could be great. Many of the greatest men to ever live were simple men, who saw black and white amid the horror and beauty of the universe. At the right time, a simple man could become the pivot that turned the whole of history to a better direction… Most of the time, however, oversimplifying the universe just got you into trouble. Sorilla wasn’t sure which type of era was unfolding before her here on Child, but she could hazard a guess.

One thing, however, was certain.

Child of God was far more valuable than anyone at SOLCOM had realized.

*                                        *                                        *

Kepler let his helm drop to the dirt as he stumbled to a stop, falling to one knee and mopping his face with his free hand.

They’d broken clear of the Ross’El net, but it had cost them.

The SOLCOM team was still intact, with heavier armor than the locals had been able to scrape together, and their integrated network. At the very least, his team knew when to duck and when to run. That couldn’t be said for the locals, unfortunately.

The gathered guerilla fighters they’d been training had been decimated, almost in the very literal sense of the word. Casualties were right about ten percent, with a little over half of those injured. That was a high kill ratio, but given the overpressure wave of the first Gravity Valve assault, he was surprised it wasn’t higher.

They’re resistant to pressure changes, I’ll give the Childeans that much.

Shrapnel had accounted for most of the injuries. A terrifyingly random assortment of whatever had been lying around the epicenter of the attack had been picked up and tossed by hurricane force winds with no mercy. Kepler didn’t know for sure why any of them were still breathing.

Why didn’t they push their advantage? They had us.

For whatever reason, the Ross had chosen not to follow up their first Valve attack, and that had given the resistance the chance they needed. Miram had rallied her trainees, punching a hole through a weak spot in the enemy line. They hadn’t packed enough Golems to net the force entirely in, and she’d spotted a section manned primarily by Goblin avatars.

The locals had responded well, dropping mass fire with their pulse weapons, and shredded the enemy line badly enough that the rest of the SOLCOM team had been able to push the families out through the hole. Since then they’d been on the run.

The Golem units were slow, but with Ross air superiority allowing them to airlift forces anywhere they chose with effective impunity, it was impossible to lose them. Kepler didn’t know why the Ross didn’t just tag the group for a Valve attack, though. It wasn’t like the Ross were known for mercy or restraint.

Of course, no one could figure out why the Ross did anything they did.

The paranoid part of him, a very large part of his psyche Kepler would be the first to admit, could only assume that the SOLCOM team had been detected and the Ross wanted one of them intact to parade in front of the Alliance. He didn’t know if it would be enough to open a declaration of war, but it wouldn’t help the diplomatic situation, of that he was quite certain.

“All clear, ten klick cordon, Lieutenant.”

Kepler nodded as Miram and Top Nano approached from his left. He gestured to the ground beside him. “Pull up some dirt. Might be the only rest we get for a while.”

The two SOLCOM operators collapsed to the ground not far from where he was kneeling, popping their own helms and sucking some of the local air. Thin though it may be, alien though it certainly was, any fresh air beat what a suit was putting out after it had been scrubbed and recirculated a few hundred times. He knew that their mouths, like his own, tasted of the carbon filtration system and whatever impurities had built up over the past few days.

Riggs and Bier were heading in as well, clear as day on his implants, even if they were still out of sight in the trees to the south.

“You think we lost them this time, Top?” Kepler asked tiredly, drawing a pull of water from his suit’s reclamation system.

Nano shrugged wearily. “No telling, LT. They’ve got friendly skies, and they’re using them this time. They can drop teams anywhere they choose.”

Kepler nodded. He knew that—he’d just hoped that the Top had a better answer.

He was about to say something else when a warning sounded from the eastern picket they’d left in place, manned by Childean trainees. The three SOLCOM soldiers grabbed their helms and surged to their feet, fatigue taking a backseat to adrenaline and electromotive muscular amplification.

Kepler gestured Nano into the lead, flanking the bigger man to the left while Miram took the right as they moved to a better position. The locals were getting better at setting up an ambush, he noted with some satisfaction.

No better teacher than the enemy, Kepler decided, though he wasn’t sure he’d say that in front of either Miram or the Cap.

“Vehicle moving in,” Nano announced, “Childean ground crawler. Coming fast.”

Kepler nodded. He could see it too.

“Stay frosty,” he ordered. “Watch for flankers. It could be a distraction.”

He doubted it. So far the Ross hadn’t shown any inclination to that sort of cleverness. They were pretty straightforward, for all their airs of mystery. When it came to fighting, the Ross were definitely of the “hit it with overwhelming firepower” school of thought. Using a local transport as a distraction would be a distinct shift in their playbook, but he couldn’t discount it all the same.

The big-wheeled vehicle slowed before it got into the ambush zone, causing him to tense up.

Did they spot us? How?

That question was answered a moment later when he saw a friendly marker show up on his battlefield map.

“Stand down,” Kepler ordered. “It’s the captain.”

The transport started in again as he gave the all clear, and rolled to a stop a few dozen meters away. The doors popped open and a mix of Childean and SOLCOM figures disembarked.

The captain looked around at the bedraggled and bone-weary Childean and SOLCOM survivors of the resistance camp and shook her head as she pulled her helm off.

“Goddamn it, Top, Kepler,” she grumbled. “I only left for a few days!”

Chapter 12

The war council Sorilla called included the Childean elders and a handful of the best trainees from their ranks as well as her SOLCOM team. The situation had changed, and that meant they needed to do a rethink and get it done in a hurry.

“Are you sure, Cap?” Kepler asked after hearing her report. “SOLCOM’s been looking for a countermeasure to the Gravity Valve since the Ross hit Hayden and Ares.”

“Near as I can be, and it fits with what you reported too,” Sorilla answered. “The ship looks to be Alliance tech, at least in part. I’m guessing it’s Gav.”

Kepler nodded absently. He’d done some of the reading on the Gav, but SOLCOM didn’t know much and they weren’t considered a high priority species since they were centered much closer to the galactic core.

“What are they doing out here?” he asked, puzzled. “We’ve got to be, what? A thousand lightyears from Gav territory, according to Alliance records.”

“About that,” Sorilla confirmed. “The way I see it, there’s two possibilities that seem more likely than the rest. Maybe the Alliance records are wrong, either intentionally or otherwise, or perhaps the Gav set up outposts this far out in order to conduct research away from the Ross and their Gravity traps.”

That made some sense, Kepler figured. The Ross gravity sensors were known to be second to none, at least according to Alliance records. SOLCOM had certainly determined that they could track Terra-class ships easily enough if the singularity projectors weren’t kept extremely low. Anyone conducting gravity experiments would stand out to Ross scanners like a beacon in the night.

Mokan, who had been listening intently and whispering with some of the others, cut in at that point.

“What use is this talk?” he demanded. “Your ship destroyed one of the Invaders’! Do so again and this is over!”

Sorilla and Nano exchanged dark looks before she shook her head. “That’s not a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“Mokan, the Poland turned a two-kilometer-diameter section of your badlands into a dust hole that nothing will live in for the next few years,” she said. “The Ross ship we struck at was airborne, nowhere near population centers. How many people live in your capital city?”

Mokan slumped back, considering before he mumbled a response. “Twenty million.”

“Twenty million, most of them packed into a ten-kilometer-diameter area, with the Ross ship right in the center,” Sorilla said. “Casualty rates would be…what do you think, Top?”

Nano considered. “A straight kinetic hit? Nothing left alive for three klicks, maybe sixty percent over the next kilometer, with casualty rates dropping off exponentially for every kilometer beyond that. Best guess? Twelve million dead in the strike, another five or six dead of lung and blood diseases over the next ten years. The dust from those pulverized buildings alone would probably poison people for a hundred kilometers in either direction along the coast and inland. I don’t even know what’s in the Ross ship that might be toxic.”

Sorilla rather thought he was overplaying the numbers slightly, but it suited her to allow it. She also figured that he knew both of those things, since that was what the Top was there for.

She just looked back to the angry Childeans, shaking her head.

“The Ross are not stupid, for all that they sometimes act in ways we don’t understand. They chose their position carefully, knowing what it would cost to hammer them even if we could get through their defense systems,” she said firmly. “An orbital strike is our last resort.”

“What are our options then?” Mokan demanded, a weary tone in his voice as he slumped visibly.

“Right now, we only really have one play,” Sorilla said, a smile playing at the corners of her lips.

Everyone, even her own, leaned in closer as she said that.

“What is it?” Mokan asked.

“Frontal assault.”

The explosion from those listening was about what she expected.

“Look,” she growled, including her own people in the piercing stare she sent around the assembled group, “we don’t have a lot of options. I’m not convinced an orbital strike would work, even if we were willing to sacrifice millions of civilians. They dug their ship in deep, and the only thing that stops a kinetic strike better than water is loose dirt like that. So our options are slim to none right now, but that ship out in the badlands is SOLCOM’s ticket to evening the playing field with the Alliance…”

She turned to focus her attention on the Childeans next. “And it’s your ticket to kicking the invaders off your world for good.” Sorilla took a breath and sat back, frowning. “But we can’t secure it while the Ross hold any position on the surface of Child. So we have no choice. We need to take the capital…and the Ross Portal ship.”

“Not meaning any offense, Captain,” Kepler ventured as he glanced around, “but we can’t assault a fortified position with one SOLCOM team and some half-trained local militia.”

Sorilla made a mental note to get her lieutenant better trained in diplomacy as she heard the growls from the Childeans. He should have known better than to leave his translation system online before saying the second part if he was going to phrase it like that.

Not that he was wrong, of course. Even fully trained, the Childean militia was a guerrilla force. You didn’t assault a position fortified by regular army with a guerilla force, not unless the local army was about ready to fall apart anyway for some reason. He just should have known better than to say it in such a way as to allow the locals to understand him.

That was how militia trainers got themselves shot in the back by their trainees.

The Childeans, however, for all their clear dislike of Kepler’s words, basically agreed with his assessment.

“Those things you call Golems are too powerful,” Mokan admitted, sounding like he was having his teeth pulled.

Hmmm, Sorilla wondered, do Childeans have teeth? Haven’t seen any, not that I watch them eat. Oh well, I’m sure someone will be curious enough to ask later.

“They’re no joke, that’s certainly true,” she said aloud. “And with the support of a Valve emplacement, we’d have no chance against them…but they don’t have that support, for now.”

Sorilla stood up, looking over the gathered people of both species.

“We have a limited opportunity here, and there’s no guarantee it will last. As long as the Gravity Valve is being interdicted, we have a chance.”

She had their attention, at least. Now Sorilla knew that she just had turn that into something she could work with. Honestly, it would probably have been easier if this opportunity had come up after a few more months of occupation, or a couple years. The Childeans who stood in revolt against the occupation of the Ross were the proud, the first line, those who wouldn’t bow to any foreign force.

That was good, but that also meant that they all still had something to lose. Their lives meant something to them, which would make them cautious, careful. In a few months or so, most the Childeans she was looking at now would be dead. The ranks would be thinned of the proud, but flush with the desperate. Desperate people made better guerrilla warriors; they had nothing left to lose, no concern for their own lives.

They just wanted revenge.

You could convince desperate people to do anything, just by promising them that it would mean something.

That wasn’t what she was working with, however, so Sorilla knew she’d have to stoke the fires.

“If we allow this moment to pass,” she said in a voice toned just low enough to make them quiet and lean closer in order to hear her correctly, “then this resistance will ultimately fail. Against an enemy willing, and capable, of engaging in genocide, you cannot stand. Not when they have the power of high ground.”

She watched the body language around her, judging her next words by the impact of the last.

Strictly speaking, what she’d said was true, though there was a difference between being willing to engage in genocide and actually doing so. Historically, of course, the Ross had shown that in their war with the Gav, but in their current form they’d had similar chances on Hayden and not taken them. It was possible they were looking for this ship, or one like it, and hadn’t wanted to risk destroying it, of course.

The Childeans were angry at her words—not at the Ross, but at her for voicing them. She’d expected as much, but didn’t have time to cajole the pride of this group. She needed their anger, and if it were directed at her for the moment…well, so be it.

“Allow this chance to pass without taking your shot at it, and in six months those of you left alive will curse your stupidity today,” she snarled, drawing shocked looks from her team.

The gloves were off. She wasn’t a trainer anymore, and these weren’t her students.

God help me, I’m about to become a cult leader, grooming radical believers for the slaughter.

“They took your world,” she said grimly. “They killed your families, drove you out of your homes. Now you have a chance to take it all back, and as I stand here, I see the fear in your eyes. What more do you have to lose? Your lives? Is breathing so dear to you all that you’d sacrifice your pride, your freedom…your remaining families?”

The angriest ones, the ones like Mokan, they flinched with every statement. She couldn’t have hurt them more with a physical blow, and she knew it, but she wasn’t done.

“What is it worth to you, to control your own fate again? To breathe free air?” Sorilla challenged, eyes on Mokan specifically. His anger made him the most vulnerable, and it easily infected the others around him. “Or have the Ross already beaten you?”

Sorilla could see him shaking, just under the surface, and her own guts twisted as she considered what she was doing. She hated doing this. She much preferred a long-term solution to the easy path of firing the fears and hatred of the people she was training. A foundation built on fear would not stand, but she was well aware that SOLCOM needed access to that ship.

If the Ross closed the door on the opportunity, that chance would likely be lost entirely.

“NO!” Mokan bellowed, as she’d been expecting. “They’re the Invaders; this world is ours! We’ll fight!”

Soft murmurs spread out from the Childeans like ripples across a pond, his actions infecting those others who shared his anger, his fear. Sorilla masked her grimace and distaste. Fear was one of the easiest emotions to manipulate, easier still when there was an actual threat, of course, but one really didn’t need that. It was a primal reaction, a deep seated and primitive part of the mind that Childeans and humans shared all too clearly.

Fear turned to hate, hatred of the primal “other,” with ease…and hatred, well, that was a weapon that could be honed and directed.

For a short while.

Sorilla started making plans then, plans to withdraw from Child as soon as was practicable. The last thing she wanted was to be caught on this world if the hatred she was fanning turned into an uncontrollable blaze.

She consoled herself with the knowledge that, without this, the odds were very bad indeed of these people ever seeing the tail end of the Ross in their lifetimes.

“Then let’s take this war to them,” Sorilla declared. “Make the Ross fear you. Show them what taking this world will cost them!”

“Yes!” Mokan roared. “They will fear us now!”

The shift in the emotions of the room was palpable. A new energy filled everyone there. Were she a little less experienced in such things, Sorilla could almost have mistaken it for hope.

Sorilla tried very hard to ignore the real undercurrents of emotion as the Childeans roared in support of Mokan’s statement.

She turned to her team and nodded curtly. “Prep the team. Miram, make sure the Childeans are ready to fight. We’ll start the assault at daylight tomorrow.”

“Ma’am.” Kepler leaned in, eyes narrowing, “We don’t have anywhere near the firepower we need to mount an assault on the Ross in the city.”

“As much as I hate to agree with a lieutenant, Captain,” Nano said, drawing an exasperated glance from Kepler, “he’s right. The Golem avatars in the city are combat-rated. They’re not the same as the ones you faced on Hayden.”

She nodded. “I know. Don’t worry, Top, we’re covered.”

He eyed her for a moment, wondering if he should ask, but finally just shrugged it off. Not his place. If the Cap said it was covered, it was covered.

“All right, we’ll be ready,” Nano said.

She nodded, gesturing to dismiss him as she turned back to the crowd, which was still building its fervor with Mokan at the center.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

Miram’s voice was soft, and Sorilla recognized that she at least had the sense to deactivate her translator before speaking, but the question burned between them nonetheless.

“I am, quite possibly,” Sorilla said in an equally quiet voice, her own translator off as well, “igniting a jihad.”

Miram was quiet for a short time before she spoke again. “Maybe it’ll burn out fast.”

“When do they ever?”

There was no response to that, so Sorilla was thankful when her subordinate chose not to continue the conversation.

*                                        *                                        *

USV Poland

Yuri stood over the busy workings of his command deck, eyes flitting to the displays around and below him, even as he queried and checked different systems with his implant suite. The Poland was still in orbit of the gas giant, holding low but not quite low enough for the upper atmosphere to start heating her hull. They were using both the gravity of the large world and its magnetic field to hide the ship as they conducted considerably more detailed scans of the moon world than had previously been possible.

Or wise, Yuri supposed. Taking the ship in had been risky, and now there was basically no chance that their presence wasn’t know, or at least strongly suspected, he supposed. It depended on just how successful their kinetic strike had been, and how much of a surprise it came as. If the Ross vessel had managed to signal out the nature of the kinetic warheads, then the other ship certainly knew that a human ship was in the area.

If that nature had remained hidden, then he supposed that they were only aware that someone was in the area. Someone hostile, of course, but no more than that.

That is still more than our mission profile demands, he thought, risking a glance over his shoulder and up to the admiralty deck.

*                                        *                                        *

Ruger looked over the actions below the deck, observing all the readings available through his implants. It was slightly slower than having the direct feed available, mainly because he had to prioritize his feeds, but he’d gotten quite decent at manipulating his implant suite over the years.

They were still running largely in stealth, which limited the feeds available anyway. The situation on Child was growing more interesting, and risky, with each passing moment, but he couldn’t turn away. Not his eyes, and not the Poland. Whatever was going on down there on Child, the chance of even finding a hint of how to neutralize the Ross Gravity Valve was worth more than his life, more than the Poland, more than anything he could imagine short of Earth itself.

And hell, I’d even trade one hell of a lot of damage to Earth for a countermeasure, a real way to secure our systems.

The Ross Gravity Valves were strategic and tactical nightmares the likes of which no one on Earth had been forced to contemplate since the early years after World War Two. That mad scramble for some sort of defense against the atomic bomb had led Earth to a state of mutually assured destruction as global superpowers stockpiled enough weapons to destroy the human race a hundred times over.

Atomic weapons, even at their peak with the Russian Tsar Bomba, were nothing but firecrackers compared to the potential of a single Gravity Valve…and the Ross loaded one on every ship they fielded.

Worse, they were only barely put off by the idea of mutually assured destruction.

A countermeasure, however, that would change the game, at least so far as the Ross themselves were concerned. The Alliance still had them outmassed in tonnage, number of ships, and more importantly, systems to supply logistical support.

Still, the Alliance could be negotiated with. They understood the rules of statesmanship, knew how to play the game. Maybe it would still come to war with them, maybe it wouldn’t, but at least they understood.

The Ross were simply too dangerous and too alien to have running around without a leash.

He turned his eye up from the command deck and the world below them, looking to the sliver of the moon world as it hung in the black above.

Was the answer he, and SOLCOM, seeking really on a small moon in the proverbial boondocks of the Orion Arm? And, more importantly perhaps…

If the answer is here, he thought wonderingly, in all the Gods’ names…why here?

*                                        *                                        *

Child

The militia they’d started to train had taken a beating during the Ross offensive. Sorilla could see them proverbially licking their wounds in every direction she looked. It wasn’t them that would cost the aliens the most, however. It was the families, the bystanders who’d been caught up in the military action, who would be the strongest weapon she had now.

You could kill a military man or woman and most people would simply shrug, because that was within the rules they accepted. Fighters knew the risks going in, or that was the assumption at least. Soldier deaths were tragic but expected, no matter what side you were on. Oh, people liked to make noise as if they didn’t think that way, but precious few actually ponied up to the bar and put their money where their mouths were.

You kill a soldier’s family or a civilian bystander, however, and that rule went out the window.

They’d lost better than ten percent of their barely formed militia in the strikes, but afterwards recruitment had gone up tenfold easily. Childeans who hadn’t wanted to get involved before, who’d just wanted to duck their heads and go along to get along, they were showing up in droves. Many of them had no place to go, of course—their homes had been destroyed in the Ross sweep, their families killed or driven out, but not all of them. Most, even, had come from beyond the sweep, flooding into the area from safer places.

Anger and outrage was a great motivator.

Unfortunately, it can turn on you so easily, Sorilla thought broodingly.

She was no stranger to either facet of that equation, not given her chosen line of work. Anger, rage, they were the cornerstones on which she’d built armies in the past. She was too aware, however, that you didn’t get a long-term solution with that foundation.

Indeed, if you were very lucky, the army you built would self-destruct quietly after they’d accomplished their goal.

If you weren’t lucky, then they’d self-destruct spectacularly.

The rare times they survived, well…those didn’t bear thinking on. Sorilla had hope that this time wouldn’t be so bad, though, because if they succeeded, the Ross would be gone and the Childeans wouldn’t have that constant reminder in their face that they had enemies just over the horizon, enemies to kill.

It was a hope, at least.

That was for the future, however, and the future would have to care for itself. She was too concerned with the present, and the situation in which they’d placed themselves.

Having greater numbers at their disposal was a boon. However, they were almost entirely untrained. Some had served in the local police forces, and a few with the local military equivalent, but the Childean people had largely been under a single government for quite some time, which meant that their military was more ceremonial than practical.

Normally she’d factor that into the training schedule, push off any big operations for a while, and count it as a win all the same. However, with the current window of opportunity being so uncertain, that just wasn’t an option, which meant that Sorilla was going to have to do something she rather detested.

Again.

She was going to have to send effectively untrained people into the grinder and let them learn war the hard way, by experiencing it.

I don’t know if I can do this much longer, Sorilla thought as she looked out to the rising sea that filled the sky, reaching up to the super-Jupiter that hung there in perpetuity. She’d thought about retiring before, of course, but normally it was the paperwork that drove her to entertain the notion, not fieldwork.

When she was younger, it had been a game, one she was extremely good at even, but mostly just a game. The military side of things, at least. De Opresso Liber was more than just a motto, however. It was a way of living. It fueled your soul, but it could eat at you too.

Lately, for Sorilla, that fuel was becoming caustic.

She laughed without humor, shaking her head. The old lady of the team is finally feeling her age, I suppose.

Those thoughts could wait for another day, however. On this day, she had a mission.

De Oppresso Liber.

To Free the Oppressed.

Even if it kills them.

Sorilla linked to the laser link through her implants, accessing the microsats they’d put in orbit, as well as the package the Poland had sent along. Then she straightened up and looked out and up over the seas, to the face of the God-World above.

“Poland, Aida,” she said, signaling her implants to compress and prepare a pulse transmission. “Operation Prometheus is a go. Execute in twelve hours, request all available support. Titan package activation on my authority. Aida One-Zero-Niner-Break-Delta-One-Quebec. Deploy to my location.”

She ended the message, letting the system handle the rest as she looked over the calm seas for another stretch. There was a storm brewing in the upper atmosphere, off in the distance. Just visible at the crest of the standing tidal wave that eternally reached for the God-World.

She knew that it would soon start descending, following the curve of the ocean down toward the shoreline, bringing winds and rain along with it.

There was work to do before it arrived.

*                                        *                                        *

The city was quiet; even those few occupants who still felt free enough to move around were settling in to weather the coming storm. Unfortunately for them, the tempest coming down from the horizon was going to be more than any of them expected.

“Your prediction is true,” Korra grumbled from where the big Childean was standing just a ways behind her. “The storm will land soon.”

“That’s why I moved up our schedule,” Sorilla said. “We’ll use it as cover.”

“Not going to be much for cover,” Kepler said, shaking his head. “I don’t have as much experience as you do with Ross tech, but there’s no way any space-faring culture is going to be blocked by some rain.”

“I’m not worried about spoofing the Ross systems,” Sorilla admitted. “They’re definitely all-weather capable, but the civilians will stay inside.”

Kepler nodded slowly. “That’s a double-edged sword if this gets really hot. I’d rather get them out of the city.”

“No way.” Sorilla shook her head. “Local capital has over three million people, and the Ross have them locked down. They’re allowing some movement, but the second a large-scale evacuation started, they’d lock the city down. They’re not going to give up their shields.”

Kepler grimaced. “I really hate this.”

“Yeah, well, join the club, Lieutenant,” Sorilla said. “Mokan knows how to access the local emergency broadcast system. That will override all the local frequencies and order people into their basements. That’s what we can do, that’s what we’re going to do. The rest…”

She shrugged and looked up at the super-Jupiter hanging in the sky above them.

“The rest is up to the God-World. We have our jobs; we can’t do its job too.”

Kepler laughed dryly. “Getting religious, Cap?”

“They say there’re no atheists in foxholes,” Sorilla replied after a moment’s thought. “I never understood that, to be honest.”

“Human weakness, I suppose, boss.” Kepler shrugged. “We all want meaning when things are at their worst.”

Sorilla shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. I know human nature, Lieutenant. What I mean is, why do people think that’s a good sign for religion? That some people only turn to it when there’s nothing else left? Desperation does not make for good decisions.” She shrugged again. “For myself, I’ll trust what I believe when my mind is calm, rational, and at peace.”

“Yeah? What do you believe?” Kepler asked, curious.

Sorilla took a breath. “I believe in freeing the oppressed, Lieutenant. Let’s go spread that belief.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Chapter 13 

USV Poland

“Put the clock on the main screen,” Yuri ordered as he walked the deck, looking over the crew as they worked.

The countdown immediately took up the largest portion of the main display, counting down now from less than eight hours. When it hit zero, Yuri and the Poland were going to violate the very spirit of their orders in ways that he’d have sworn that he never would.

The Admiral was right, though, the value of what they’d stumbled onto here vastly outweighed the risks…no matter how great those risks were.

“Marines report ready for deployment, Captain,” his XO reported, walking over.

Yuri glanced up him before nodding curtly. “Good. They have their orders?”

“Yes, sir. They’re deploying directly to the badlands. They’ll land there in force and secure the primary site. From there they’ll deploy air support to the city.”

The XO hesitated, looking uncertain. It was brief, but Yuri knew the man too well to miss it.

“Question, Mark?” he asked.

“Shouldn’t we deploy directly to the city? Take out the Portal ship, Captain, and take the artifact ship at our leisure?”

It wasn’t a bad suggestion, in fact Yuri had made it himself. He gave his man the same words the Admiral had offered him.

“The city isn’t our primary concern,” he said, a little sick to his stomach as the words passed his lips. “Worst case…we’ll shell the Ross ship from here.”

Mark Kandle paled, freezing for a moment, but finally nodded jerkily in understanding.

The death toll from an orbital bombardment of the Childean capital city would be the stuff of nightmares. Honestly, for all the fighting the human race had done, Kandle rather thought that he’d have to go back to World War Two to find comparable actions taken. Not even some of the worst dictators in history had managed to inflict the sort of death the Poland would cause in that case—not in a single strike, at least.

“The Marines aren’t going like that, sir,” he offered finally.

Yuri snorted. “The Marines can damn well stand in line.”

*                                        *                                        *

“God’s tears,” Sorilla said, looking up.

Top Nano glanced over in her direction. “Ma’am?”

She gestured up to where the flickering traces of several shooting stars were crossing the face of the super-Jupiter above them.

“God’s Tears,” she said again. “That’s what they call shooting stars here.”

Nano nodded, eyes narrowing as he spotted the fire trails. “So they do, ma’am. Are those…?”

“For us? Yes, Top, those are most certainly for us.”

The trails shortened, indicating that the plummeting objects were aimed more or less at the pair of observers. Sorilla wasn’t getting any telemetry from them yet, but she knew that was just a matter of time. Once the capsules made it fully into the atmosphere far enough to bleed off speed and lower friction heat, the heat shields would blow off and then the fun would start.

A flash of light in the sky signaled the next phase had started.

“We have separation,” she murmured, her implants coming online. “Guidance is active, all systems green.”

“What are we getting?” Nano asked, curiously.

“Standard automated platoon,” Sorilla said. “Four Cougars, twenty DOGS, and a half dozen fully loaded MULES…”

The roar of the descending capsules was approaching now, the drop vehicles having fallen below supersonic. The two soldiers watched the trajectory shift on their implants, the flames of friction now having died out. Retro rockets roared as large parachutes deployed while Sorilla waited on edge, reaching out with her accelerometer sensors for any hint of a Valve strike.

When none came and the deployment vehicles dropped low enough to be visible without implant aid, she breathed a sigh of relief.

“Get the others together,” she ordered. “Time to go shopping.”

Nano chuckled, but nodded and headed off to get the rest of the team and a few of their half-trained Childean resistance fighters.

*                                        *                                        *

As they approached the landing point, it became distinctly clear to Nano that he wasn’t looking at a simple deployment container. It was too tall by far, even having dug in deep on landing, and was still draped by the softly billowing chutes.

“What the hell?” the Samoan grumbled as he approached, noticing another similar crate dug in a distance off.

“Don’t recognize them, Top?” Sorilla asked, casually approaching from his rear. “I suppose that’s not a surprise. I don’t think anyone’s deployed these from orbit before.”

Nano’s eyes widened. “Holy hell. They authorized Titans?”

Sorilla snorted. “I damn well authorized them. Link up, strap in. You’re qualified, so one of them is yours. Kepler, you’ve got the second. Miram, I need you on the ground with the Childeans. That means, Riggs, you get number three, and the last Titan is mine.”

She gestured Miram and Bier forward to the supply container, but held Lance back for a moment.

“Lance, get your kit and supply from the container. You’re handling overwatch,” she ordered.

“Got it.” The sniper nodded.

“You’ll ride with me and deploy off the Titan. Good to go?”

“Good to go.”

She didn’t respond. She didn’t need to. Instead, Sorilla marched over to the Titan she’d tagged as her own and got a grip on the chute, pulling the synthetic silks clear of the crouching giant.

The Titan was about ten meters tall, designed and built to go toe to toe with the Golem avatars. They’d only seen combat once before, on another mission Sorilla had led. It had been successful, but the price paid for that victory…well, it still haunted her.

Valkyrie, Sorilla thought as she climbed up the side of the Titan, over the thigh mechanism and up along the back to the shoulder pauldron. She popped an access panel and directly connected to the Titan system. For security reasons, the Titan wouldn’t accept certain commands over anything other than a hard line connection. As she popped the hatch, allowing entrance to the war machine, she considered the lives lost so far in this war.

The greatest people she’d ever known, who’d answered the Valhalla Call, their sacrifices getting her as far as she now stood.

Sorilla dropped into the Titan and linked to the system as the hatch hissed shut and the dark interior began to light up. Sacrifices got her to where she was, put her in position to do her job once more. Every step Sorilla took now, she knew she owed to someone who would never take another. More than anything else, that was a weight she felt on her shoulders.

A duty light as a feather, yet heavier than any boulder.

“Titan One, online,” Sorilla said calmly, pushing those thoughts aside as she took control of the big war machine and stood it up.

Straps holding it in place snapped with gunshot cracks as she straightened the war machine up, casually pulling parachute chords from her—its—chest and shoulders, tossing the broken remnants aside before she reached down and pulled the big autocannon from where it rested on the deployment sled, hefting it up and taking a moment to survey the situation.

Controlling a Titan was similar in concept to subvocalizing orders to her processor—the massive machine was linked into her nervous system through Sorilla’s implants, and thus it responded to commands in almost the same way as her own limbs did. She had been forced to get used to not finalizing those commands, but once she had that in line, walking a Titan was like going for a stroll.

Ten meters tall, armored enough to withstand almost any conventional strike by a combination of active and passive armor plating, the Titan was SOLCOM’s response to the potential threat of the Ross Golem avatars and the worry that if the Ross’El made it to Earth, the fighting might grow far more intensely personal than it had so far been.

Sorilla didn’t know if that would be the case, frankly—so far the Ross had seemed disinclined to duking it out street to street—but events here on Child seemed to have proven her wrong, at least in part. This was the first world they’d taken with a truly significant population.

Hayden and Ares had been colony worlds, quite different from each other in most respects, but with similar populations. In each of those cases, forcing the population out of their homes was relatively simple, and securing the planet against the now displaced people equally easy. Here on Child, where the population was anything but small, the Ross strategy was markedly different.

That meant that the Titan platform was about to get its true acid test, and she was just fine with that.

Sorilla marched the war machine over to the supply crate, which was already opened up and had Cougar light tanks rolling out just ahead of the support MULES while the light scout DOGS ran on ahead. She knelt the Titan down as Lance stepped out of the crate, heavy rifle over his back and equally large munitions boxes in each hand.

She extended a hand, letting him step lightly on and drop to a crouch before she lifted the sniper up to the shoulder of the Titan. He secured the boxes of munitions, casually drew a cable from his armor, and slapped the carabineer on its tip to the bolt hole on the Titan before flashing a thumbs up to her.

“Everyone ready?” she asked over the battle network as she stood the Titan back up.

The team signaled back; all of them were in position and ready to move out. Only Miram took a few moments, but Sorilla had expected that. The SOF trainer had the unenviable job of herding cats this time around, with only a fraction of the cats in question having any training at all. Still, everyone was pointing in the right direction in short order, which was something of an accomplishment.

Once that was settled, the rather large force started moving. With the Childean force taking the obvious route directly toward the city, Sorilla and the Titan forces broke off and headed to the shore, leaving only the automated units with the Childeans and Miram.

“See you all at the target,” Sorilla said.

“Roger that, Cap,” Miram replied. “Save me some.”

“Plenty to go around, Corporal. Plenty to go around,” Sorilla said as she waded the Titan into the deep water, hiding them from all but the most intense of scans as she turned north and began to lumber up along the coast. “You good out there, Lance?”

“No problem, boss,” Lance said from his perch on the Titan’s shoulder.

The rushing of seawater around him was an unusual sensation but nothing his cable couldn’t handle, so the sniper just relaxed and went with the flow.

“Good. Titans, on me,” Sorrilla ordered as the remaining three Titans plunged into the ocean behind her, and they began to move steadily north with a purpose.

*                                        *                                        *

Corporal Miram Soleill couldn’t quite keep the stress butterflies from turning her guts into their playground as she marched with the Childean forces. Well, she rode actually, having bummed a lift with one of the lead transports so she could keep close to the local leadership.

Still, she and Sam Bier were the only two humans in the immediate group, and that put her effectively in command. Technically, command had devolved to Mokan, but for the moment, the normally abrasive Childean was listening to advice and “suggestions” from the Terran contingent.

Miram had her doubts that would last, however, once the fighting started.

The Childeans were too angry, too fired up, for that. The only thing that made the situation tolerable was the fact that they’d planned explicitly on his fury. The Childean forces were primarily a distraction; no one on the team expected them to actually accomplish anything of strategic value beyond that.

The captain’s plan was reasonably simple, as it had to be when part of it pivoted on the actions of an untrained force.

The Childean force would make the first strike, drawing out the combat Golem and Goblin units and focusing the attentions of the Ross along the southern limits of the capital city. While their attention was diverted, Aida would strike from the eastern shore, taking the Titans on a straight line to the Ross Portal ship with the hope of cutting off their reinforcements. The fighting in the city would be dirty, there was no question there. Miram just hoped that the captain wasn’t biting off more than she could chew.

Time will tell, the young Special Forces trainer thought glumly as the specter of war loomed ahead of her.

*                                        *                                        *

USV Poland

“Operation has commenced, Captain,” Commander Mark Kandle said quietly as he approached where Yuri was standing.

Yuri Levensk nodded. “Thank you, Mark. Do we stand ready?”

“Marines are ready to drop, all shipboard batteries are green,” Kandle responded. “We’re as ready as we’re going to be.”

Yuri could hear the tension in his XO’s voice, but could hardly blame the man. No one knew at what range the presumed Gav ship could, or would, interdict the actions of the Gravity Valve. If it were limited to the atmosphere of Child, then the Poland was about to very much put herself at risk of destruction. They’d do everything they could to minimize that risk, of course, since losing the Poland would likely end the mission, even if the teams on the ground succeeded in their objectives.

Having no way to leave the surface would just mean waiting until the next Ross vessel showed up to finish the game.

Yuri glanced at the countdown, the numbers now falling from just under three hours.

“I want the Marines in Child’s atmosphere sixty seconds after the fighting starts,” Yuri ordered. “That’ll give them the best use of the distraction we can manage while still putting them on the ground early enough to be of use.”

“Yes, sir. They’re ready in drop crates,” Kandle said, laughing slightly. “I don’t envy them. It’ll be a rough ride.”

“They’re tough,” Yuri said with a crooked smile.

*                                        *                                        *

Admiral Ruger was doing his very best not to reveal just how badly his nerves were jumping.

It had been a long time since he’d been in command of combat operations—too damn long—and the best he figured he could do right now was not get in the way of the people about to do the fighting. Like most of SOLCOM’s experienced space commanders, Ruger had been on the research track before the war.

Give him a few dozen civilian scientists to corral like cats, and he’d hand you right back a few dozen trained cats doing exactly what they were supposed to do. Ruger had done it before and, with luck, would do it again.

Run a battle, however?

Not his job.

Until it was.

He didn’t want to show just how many doubts he had about his decisions, but they were preying on him constantly. He was committed now, of course, and he knew well enough that indecision would only favor the enemy, but he just kept hoping that he wasn’t about to lead the near-thousand-strong human presence in this system to their deaths.

Not to mention the millions in that city down there, whether they’re human or not.

The rewards, though…the rewards were so impossibly high that he simply couldn’t let the chance slip past.

In all the research he’d overseen, all the wonders they’d managed… By God, they’d created time travel, but no one had figured out how to interdict the Ross’El weapon. He had to get that tech. The future of SOLCOM and the human race itself might well depend on it.

*                                        *                                        *

Child of God

The numbers kept on falling as Sorilla checked the countdown, her Titan now resting just beyond the city’s harbor.

Miram and the Childeans will be noticed soon, the Ross will move to intercept. Sorilla closed her eyes, turning her implants off as well as she rested.

When the Golems moved to enforce the southern section of the city, it would lighten the defenses in other sectors. The eastern section was already lightly covered as it was, since any assault by sea would normally be easily noticed and even more easily blockaded against.

That was their way in, their chance.

Sorilla knew her way around the Portal ship—she’d been in two of them before and managed to take one of those intact…mostly. Unfortunately, the majority of Ross technology seemed to be dependent on a link back to their command and control center, wherever that was.

When they abandoned the Portal ship she’d taken under the auspices of her assignment with Valkyrie Squadron, they’d also deactivated key components to their Gravity systems. SOLCOM would dearly love a good look at a fully active and operational Portal ship, but that seemed unlikely in the foreseeable future. This time around, she’d count it as a singular victory if they managed to force the Ross to retreat and deactivate the ship.

Perhaps the technology on the Portal ship would be crippled, but the prize this time was the Gav interdictor.

And the people, Sorilla reminded herself. The people here deserve their freedom. I can’t forget that.

She didn’t want to become some mercenary-minded bitch, always looking for the angle, for the paycheck. She took the motto of her chosen specialty seriously, and was never more proud than when she’d finally put on that green beret.

The anger in the air, the frustration she’d fanned into hate…that she’d intentionally and knowingly fanned, no less, those ate at her. Mokan was an angry man…Childean…whatever. He’d lost people when the Ross landed, though he never spoke of them. She knew the signs. He was ideal recruitment material for what they were doing right now. A man, Childean, with nothing to lose. No life left to live.

He would throw himself at the enemy with guns blazing, knives gleaning, and teeth gnashing if that were what it took.

She needed him to do just that, him and many others, but Sorilla had seen it all before and she could admit to herself that she was afraid of what she’d started. Not for the immediate future, no. They would fight, and they would die, for the freedom of their people.

Unfortunately, not all of the angry ones would die in this fight.

Well, at least it’ll be contained here, whatever happens, she thought grimly as the timer buzzed softly and she opened her eyes.

It was time.

“Let’s move,” she said over the local network.

Chapter 14

Miram ducked behind cover as she ordered one of the Cougars to lay some fire in on a closing Golem. The Cougar light battle tank pivoted on its six independent wheels and brought the hundred-twenty-millimeter cannon to bear a moment later, and a supersonic crack rippled across the battlefield.

Childean pulse weapons were filling the air with high-pitched popping sounds, like some manic computer going insane, but they were at least blowing enough chunks off the enemy Golems to gravel the area in debris, but the armored Golems were just wading through the fire with seemingly little care as they returned it with a vengeance.

“They saw us coming, Miram!” Private Samantha Bier yelled over their link, irritating Miram.

“You don’t have to yell, damn it,” Miram grumbled. “We’re wearing blast isolation armor. You don’t get better soundproofing than this.”

“Sorry,” Bier said, sounding a little sheepish. “It’s just…”

She shrugged helplessly and gestured at all the fighting around them. Miram supposed she could understand, it was instinctive. The sounds weren’t the trigger, but rather the rush of the fighting and the flood of adrenaline and other hormonal changes as the body entered fight or flight mode.

Fight, Miram thought as she tagged another Golem with her laser and sent priority orders to the Cougars. Definitely fight.

A trio of supersonic cracks again rippled through the air, lifting dust and sending visible shockwaves through the atmosphere as the one-hundred-twenty-millimeter tungsten rounds slammed into their target and sent the Golem tumbling backwards. It slammed into a building, sort of slumping in place as though a man on a throne, then began to struggle out.

Miram winced as the building sagged, teetering dangerously forward, but didn’t fall when the Golem emerged.

I hope everyone got the message to get underground, otherwise the price of this battle is going to be a lot higher than the normal butcher’s bill.

The Golem that had taken the three rounds from the Cougar brought its own weapon into play and returned fire now, rippling pulses twisting space, air, and light as they lanced back across the field and tore into the Childean ranks with a vengeance. Limbs were torn from bodies, bodies flung in unreal motions that seemed to defy physics, but the moment the blast had passed, more screaming Childeans filled the hole and sent a thousand pulses of lazed plasma back down on the badly damaged Golem.

Tough or not, even the Ross combat Golems had their limits, and this one had reached those limits. It slumped forward and collapsed face first into the cement as a scream of furious frenzy and victory rose up.

The screams sent a chill down Miram’s back, but she pressed forward with the forces as the buildings grew taller around them. They were nearly into the city proper, she noted, and that meant that the captain would be starting her attack shortly.

Good luck, boss. We’ve got the door open, and we’ll hold it as long as we can, Miram thought as she directed the Cougers and DOGS forward. Give ‘em hell.

*                                        *                                        *

Sorilla’s Titan exited the water in a surge that left Lance hanging on by the cable as he stayed locked into the external shoulder mount. The rush of water transitioning to air and the sudden feeling of lightness in his guts left him grinning under his helm. The Titan’s thrusters then roared and they vaulted a docked transport ship in the harbor, coming down on a wide roadway, skating on the skirted thrust from the Titan’s feet.

Three other ten-meter-tall war machines landed around them, splitting down different roads without waiting for orders. They knew their jobs, and by this time were eager to get to it.

Lance held on as Sorilla skated her war machine forward, hitting eighty kilometers an hour in speed that was shockingly quick considering the weight that was being pushed around.

“There’s my stop,” Lance nodded ahead, though he doubted the boss could actually see him at the moment.

“Got it,” Sorilla responded, kicking a parked ground car out of the way as she casually leaned back to slow her speed and came to a stop near the tallest building around with decent lines of sight.

It was a good deal taller than her Titan, of course, so Sorilla just reached up with one steel-and-titanium-reinforced fist and punched in the wall and windows. She then held still while Lance retrieved his gear and clambered up the arm into the building.

“Clear,” he said. “Go!”

“I’m out,” Sorilla responded, withdrawing the arm from the building and firing her thrusters again.

The Titan spun around in place, realigning as she looked for the location of the Ross Portal ship. She brought her autocannon up now, then accelerated away.

Lance watched her go for a moment, then turned inward as he picked up the two crates of munitions and began to jog toward the stairwell.

*                                        *                                        *

Sorilla made it a half klick deeper into the city before she spotted the first enemy Golem. The Ross avatar was crossing her path, heading south, presumably to back up the forces near the Childean assault. She fired from the hip, trusting her computer to handle the targeting well enough for this job, and put a ten-round burst through the combat Golem from a hundred meters.

Sorilla didn’t slow as it began to fall, instead crouching low to strike the Golem below its center of gravity and shoulder it up off its feet into a spin that sent it smashing into the ground behind her. Cement and steel and stone split on the impact as she straightened the Titan and twisted enough to level her weapon again and deliver a coup of five rounds to ensure the job was done.

Satisfied, Sorilla turned back on task, but paused for a moment when she spotted a Childean figure staring at her from a fourth floor window across the way from her.

Get underground, you damn fool, Sorilla grimaced. This is no spectator sport.

In either case, it wasn’t her concern at the time. She turned away from the figure in the window and worked her Titan from a walk to a jog before firing thrusters again to use the skirted thrust vectoring to speed her way toward the center of the city.

Three klicks to go.

The Titan platform used dozens of bleeding-edge technologies, including some of the very earliest human applications of gravity manipulation, in order to make the ten-meter-tall war machines into viable and monstrous masters of the battlefield. As nimble as a soldier on foot, as fast as many racing vehicles, and tougher than any ten main battle tanks ever built, they were largely intended to fight the Ross’El street to street if the aliens ever managed to make it to Earth.

Inside the Childean capital, the Titan she was piloting made Sorilla feel like a giant at play. It was something out of old science fiction—all she needed was a massive fire-breathing lizard to show up to make it perfect.

She didn’t have much time to reflect on that before she got a warning signal over the tactical network. Riggs’s Titan had noted two more Golems converging on her area and automatically sent out a warning across the system.

“I’ve got them,” she said, cutting off any attempt to come to her aid. “Stay on mission.”

She then flagged off their comm channel to keep from being distracted and haloed both enemy Golems for her targeting system. They weren’t in sight yet, but that was just semantics in this sort of fight. Nothing in the city around them counted as cover, even the largest buildings barely qualified as concealment to the weapons both sides were bringing to the game.

Even so, she was surprised when the first Golem put its shoulder to the building it was behind, breaking a chunk of it off to smash to the streets below as it brought its weapon to bear through the hole and opened fire.

Sorilla dropped, bending the Titan at the knees to keep the boot thrusters planted, and fired the main thrusters on the back to keep from hitting the ground as she skidded under the burst of fire and returned in kind from her own autocannon.

Tungsten and uranium slugs tore through the Childean building like it was made of rice paper, slamming into the Golem mercilessly until she got a low munitions warning from her weapon. It took precious time to switch to the second ammo reserve, but before that process even started, the second Golem burst from a side street and charged in her direction.

Reloading Autocannon : Time Remaining…30 Seconds.

Sorilla flared the thrusters on the Titan’s back, pushing the big machine back to its feet, then leapt over the burst of fire coming her way.

A thruster-assisted jump put tens of tons of Titan over twenty meters in the air, on an intercept arc with the charging enemy armor unit. The Golem barely had time to recognize the threat before Sorilla planted the armor-plated knee of her machine right in its face and drove both of them powerfully to the ground with enough force to shatter glass in the nearby storefronts and other windows.

She followed through with three vicious punches, armor-shod fists the size of small commuter vehicles thoroughly demolishing the head of the Golem. Only then did she pause and climb back to her feet.

Reloading complete.

Sorilla wrapped her Titan’s fist around the autocannon again and rose fully upright, looking around to take stock of the situation.

“Nice moves, boss,” Lance’s voice broke in, “but you’re attracting attention. Three more converging on you from the north.”

“What about the others?” she asked as she flared the thrusters and got on the move again.

“They’re encountering resistance as well, but you seem to have won the lotto.”

“Lovely. Bring ‘em on.”

*                                        *                                        *

Lance snorted softly at the captain’s words, but didn’t bother to comment. She could handle herself, and she outranked him anyway, so it wasn’t his place. He dropped from his crouch on the corner of the rooftop and laid out flat as he drew his rifle over, putting the butt to his shoulder and sweeping the city again.

“Riggs, you’re about to run into a trap,” he signaled. “Three Golems and a squad of Goblins are setting up an ambush a klick ahead of your position. Suggest you evade south.”

“Roger that,” Riggs answered, his Titan grabbing the corner of the closest building and using the leverage to sweep through a ninety-degree turn as he changed course.

Lance tagged each of the three Golems in the distance, noting that only one of them was what they’d classified as a combat model. The other two were closer to the construction models used on Hayden, if his computer was right. He set his priorities and calculated the distance next, using passive range-finding.

Twenty-three hundred meters. No need for guidance, I can do this cold, he decided as he seated the heavy magazine into his rifle and slid the bolt closed to load the first heavy round.

The combat model was his first target—it was the biggest threat, but Lance was pretty sure that it had enough armor to take multiple rounds from his rifle without blinking. He elected to pick his target with a little more precision as he finished factoring in the effects of the moon’s lighter relative gravity and that of the super-Jupiter above them.

Thankfully, the Ross Portal ship was almost directly behind the target, so the gravity effect the ship put out should have minimal impact on the shot.

He didn’t even have to factor in the rotation of the moon, since it was tidally locked. Of course, the lower size of the moon meant that the curve of the surface did play into the shot significantly. It was an interesting set of factors, he noted with some distant interest, though he was more focused on the present. It would make for a good paper to write later.

The main focus of his thoughts was the dot in his HUD implant, seemingly floating off in the distance. As his equations filled in, the dot settled more securely on the target in the distance, shrinking as better precision was acquired.

Lance prodded the cartridge in his rifle through his implants, making the payload live as he settled the rifle steadily on the target and took a breath. He held it for a moment, slowly letting it out, and just as his lungs emptied, he ordered the weapon to fire via his implants. Without even the brush of a finger on the trigger to shift its aim, the rifle bucked lightly as it discharged the round downrange.

Lance ignored it, instead opting to re-sight and secure the target lock for the next round, discharging two more downrange before the first had traveled half the distance to the enemy Golem.

The rounds arced out from the rifle, running passive guidance as their fins locked into place within the first hundred meters. They went wide to the south of the target initially, arced back in on a tight spiral that looped them around the building the Golem was sheltering behind, then slammed into the target with three hits to the head and neck in a little under a second.

Lance shifted his focus and began calculating a new flight path for the next series of shots, mentally trying to decide just how long he had before he’d have to abandon his hide. Arcing the rounds on-target would buy him some time. It was effectively impossible to track passively guided rounds back to their origin within city-wide ballistic monitoring systems, but effectively impossible wasn’t impossible.

He’d cut it as close as he dared, however, if only to use up as much ammo as he could before he was forced to jump from the top of a Childean skyscraper. Those extra pounds in the difference could mean the difference between landing his jump or breaking bones.

Good thing I’ve been on a diet, he thought with grim humor as he chose his next target, a standard Golem that was trying to sneak up on Nano while the Top was distracted with a combat model.

*                                        *                                        *

A red dot on his HUD went black as Tane Nano exchanged a burst fire with his opponent, both of them tearing the ever-living hell out of the city around them.

“Thanks for that, Lance,” Nano said as he knelt his Titan behind a shattered building amid a shower of rock dust and gravel blasting around him.

The enemy weapons were destructive as all hell, but they had limited penetration capability, from what he could tell. It made the buildings effective cover for one or two shots before they were turned to dust and rubble.

Nano hoped the locals had taken the advice they’d broadcast over the local emergency system, otherwise this fight was going to be a lot bloodier in the final tally than anyone wanted to see.

“No problem, Top. Check your system. I’ve got coordinate lock on that Golem you’re tangling with.”

Nano grunted, noting the lock coordinates being fed into his system.

“Got it,” he said, selecting close-range mortars and firing a trio of fifty-millimeter warheads up over the buildings on a short arc.

He was moving before they landed, jumping his Titan up over the rubble on the assumption that the Golem would react to the first attack.

He was right. The enemy armored unit shifted back, clearing enough room to aim its weapon up and fire at the incoming rockets. The first two exploded under the fire, even as Nano opened fire himself. The near-point-blank burst riddled the Golem, staggering it back just as the remaining mortar round landed with a blast that shook the air around them.

Nano landed the Titan in the middle of the alien street, walking it calmly forward to confirm the kill.

The Golem was shattered in at least fifteen pieces he could count, probably millions he couldn’t. He considered that confirmed, noting that his Titan was reloading from the second magazine, which meant he was down twenty-five percent on ammo already and the battle had just begun.

I hope this isn’t as much of a Hail Mary as it seems, the master sergeant thought grimly to himself, though he knew that it wasn’t the first such operation that had been conducted since the Ross’El had started playing their games in the human sphere. Won’t be the last, either, like as not. You bastards messed with the wrong species.

*                                        *                                        *

The four Titans of SOLCOM slashed deep into the Childean city, heading for the ship buried at the geographic center, but ran into trouble and resistance quickly. By the time they penetrated around a kilometer into the city, a third of the way to their target, the Golems had cottoned on to the assault and were moving quickly to reinforce that path.

What became clear almost instantly, however, was that the Ross’El forces were far too dependent on their admittedly impressive indirect fire capability. With the Gravity Valve no longer being an option—though Sorilla wasn’t certain yet if it were due to interdiction or simple desire not to nuke the city they were sheltering in—their defenses were entirely unsuited to the job.

The SOLCOM Titans weren’t regime protection forces, unlike their Golem and Goblin counterparts, and the difference between an elite team geared, trained, and motivated to the highest possible levels and that of the Ross avatars was never clearer than right then.

The Titans left a strewn mess of Golems and Goblins behind them as they tore through the city en route to their goal, their weapons perhaps cruder than those of their enemies but more suited to the task all the same.

Even so, as the threat the Titans posed became more pronounced, the Ross command threw more and more Golems at them, and their progress slowed from a rush to a crawl.

Sorilla recognized quickly that was going to be a major problem, not the least of which because they were already deep into the yellow on ammo and still had a little over half the distance to the enemy ship to cover before they could even begin the real fighting.

*                                        *                                        *

Behind them, Lance fired off the last of the rounds from his first crate and decided enough was enough. Sitting in one place for so long after firing was sending chills down his spine. It was time to move.

He grabbed the other crate, slung his rifle, and retreated back from his hide toward his chosen withdrawal path. The distance to the next roof was a little better than twenty meters horizontal, thirty vertical. He sprinted to the edge of the roof and made a leap of faith.

*                                        *                                        *

USV Poland

“Marines are entering the upper atmosphere now, Captain.”

“Understood,” Yuri acknowledged, glancing up over his shoulder to where Admiral Ruger was watching. “Inform the Admiral that we’re about to enter the terminal phase of the plan.”

“Aye, sir,” Kandle told him before leaving.

Once the Marines hit the lower atmosphere and stopped burning brightly enough to attract every targeting system for two solar systems, they’d start putting drones into the air. Before they even landed, there should be enough air support to provide friendly skies to ground combatants, but since they were playing for keeps, Yuri figured it wouldn’t do them much good to hold back.

“Engine room, Captain,” he said, toggling into the communications system. “Are you ready?”

“Aye, Captain, as ready as we’ll ever be.”

Yuri glanced at the screens, quietly waiting for a moment, then nodded firmly to himself.

“All hands, this is the captain speaking…stand by for high stress maneuvers. Helm, engine room…go.”

The Poland shuddered as the forward singularity suddenly surged in response to commands from the engineering section and navigation, and the VASIMR drive went from a cold start to all military power in a split second.

The Poland hit just shy of a thousand gravities’ acceleration instantaneously, lancing out of the upper atmosphere of the super-Jupiter, an arrow fired from the bow of the Gods. At almost ten kilometers per second per second, or adding close to thirty thousand kilometers per hour every second they traveled, they made turnover in a hair under five seconds and plowed into the upper atmosphere of Child in just under eight.

Yuri almost wished he could see it from the surface, honestly. He suspected that the Poland’s arrival would be…was…spectacular.

*                                        *                                        *

The flash of light was their first warning that something was up, though Miram didn’t know what exactly.

She did know that flash for what it was, however, and was instantly ordering everyone around her to duck and cover as she did so herself.

Most didn’t listen. It went against the civilian mindset, and though they were certainly fighting, the Childeans with her were not soldiers. They paused, they turned toward the flash, and they looked up.

Stupid.

In the early days of the Cold War, during the mid-twentieth century, there was a great panic about nuclear war. Enough that children in schools were often taught just what to do in the case of a nuclear attack. The instructions they were given were simple: In the event of such an attack, immediately cover under your desk, table, or any possible cover you could find…even a tablecloth if that was all you had available.

Decades later, such Public Service Announcements were subject to ridicule and notoriety as the sheer stupidity of bureaucratic busywork. What good, after all, would such defenses do against a nuclear fireball?

Well, nothing obviously. If you were that close to ground zero, you were dead. Sheltering under your desk, or whatever, wasn’t intended to protect a child, or anyone, from a nuclear blast. It was supposed to protect them from themselves.

The human reaction to a flash of light in the distance is to turn toward it, get up, run to the window…basically to investigate and determine what had happened.

The real killer in that situation wasn’t the explosion, but rather the difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound. The bright flash attracted your attention, you turned to see what caused it, and then the blast wave strolled right along to slap you in the face for your idiocy. God alone could help you if there happened to be a glass window between that shockwave and you when it showed up.

The shockwave of the Poland’s entry into the upper atmosphere blew out windows for a thousand miles as the miniature star rocketed across the skies above them, even throwing many viewers off their feet.

For the SOLCOM operators on the ground, however, it wasn’t a terrifying sound.

The Poland had arrived, and it was clear that her captain wasn’t interested in pussyfooting around the star system and longer.

The gloves were, most officially, off.

Chapter 15

USV Poland

“Heat shields down! We’re getting targeting data from the surface, Captain.”

“Point defenses up,” Yuri ordered. “Weps, lock in all isolated targets, designate those as Reds.”

“Aye, Captain,” his weapon’s officer responded. “Red One through Ninety-Seven now entered into the system.”

“Weps, I hate the color red,” Yuri said blandly. “Remove that from my screen.”

“Aye aye, skipper. Point defense systems engaging.”

The Poland’s point defense capabilities were largely similar in concept to her primary kinetic weapons, just designed on an entirely different scope. Rather than one-ton chunks of meteoric iron and steel, the PD systems fired fifty-kilo “crowbars.” Against other ships it wasn’t a particularly effective weapon; however, it was more than sufficient to disrupt plasma bursts, soft-skinned missiles, and most conventional weaponry.

Fired from orbit, these “Rods from God” were also among the finest anti-armor weapons every conceived.

The skies above the Childean capital city rained fire as the Poland opened up its PD systems, launching ninety-seven fifty-kilo projectiles at hypersonic speed. They smashed down into any identified Ross avatar units that had been designated as isolated or, more importantly, far enough from known friendlies to be destroyed with minimal consequence.

Minimal, however, did not mean no consequence.

The shockwaves of the attacks blew out any remaining glass that had survived the Poland’s entry into the atmosphere, while shrapnel made up primarily of the Poland’s targets tore into the nearby buildings. For anyone witnessing the event, the attack bordered on the supernatural.

When a Terra-class starship enacts a Time on Target attack, the only thing any rational mind can liken it to is an Act of God.

*                                        *                                        *

Child

Roiling clouds of dust swept through the artificial valleys of the city streets, swallowing the actors in the macabre little play Sorilla found herself a player in. Her instrumentation was lit up, the direct feed from the Poland now fully live, with real-time battleground intelligence feeding through the systems.

“Heads up,” she called over the team network. “The Poland just kicked open the door, let’s not waste the opportunity! Last one to the target gets to hold the position while the rest of us have our fun inside. Move it!”

She made to take her own advice, shifting her Titan out from behind cover, only to duck back quickly as a flurry of pulse blasts erupted out of the smoke and dust and tore into the buildings and street around her.

Whoops, closer than I thought, she grumbled as she worked the controls and brought the Titan to a crouch behind cover as she considered her options. I am not going to be the last one to the target…

If her brief scan was correct, then she had two Golems pinning her down with crossfire. Thankfully, they seemed at least slightly affected by the dust and debris in the air, but that wouldn’t last much longer. Her ammo load out was down in the red now, under a third of her starting load, and she’d have to come up with something there in short order; but that wasn’t her immediate concern.

Sorilla scanned the area quickly and quietly, noting that the building she was behind was in pretty bad shape already and wasn’t registering any internal motion, heat, or any other signs of life.

Good. I can work with this.

Sorilla risked another glance out, ducking back instantly as more shots ripped out at her, and got the measure of her enemy’s location. They were leapfrogging forward, surprisingly decent tactics given her previous experience with the Ross, but that also meant that they were putting themselves on a predictable course.

Normally, she had to admit, that wouldn’t make a lot of difference. That was why you leapfrogged your squad, after all—to maintain covering fire and force your enemy to keep their heads down while you took the ground right out from under their feet.

Too bad for you we’re not playing normal rules, Sorilla through as she slammed the shoulder of the Titan into the building, leveraging all the power of the machine’s hydraulics and the thrusters at the same time as she pushed in and up. The building wasn’t huge by the local standards, but it still towered many stories over her Titan and at first didn’t seem to budge.

A few seconds passed, however, and there was a loud crack and a shudder that ran through the towering building. Slowly it gave, toppling as if in slow motion but gaining speed quickly as she continued to push with all the strength her impressive machine could muster. Finally it gave fully, falling on its own, and Sorilla took advantage of that to jump up over the falling building and then chase it down, hiding her Titan in the devastation she’d just caused.

The Titan landed on the building as it began to topple, and Sorilla ran her machine along the falling and crumbling building as it crushed three Golems, emptying her autocannon into the remaining two as she surfed the rubble to a stop.

Sorilla checked the ammo counter again, but it stubbornly refused to change, so she sighed and pulled the feed from her Titan and let the cannon drop to her feet as she stepped off the rubble.

“Well, I’m out of bullets,” she said over the comm.

“Boss,” Tane Nano’s voice seemed oddly hesitant over the network, “did my system just bug, or did you drop a building on a squad of Golems?”

“Probably your system, Top, don’t worry about it. Heading for the objective,” Sorilla responded.

“Boss, you’re out of ammo.”

“Then you’d better get there quick to give me some cover. Aida out.”

*                                        *                                        *

Nano swore under his breath as he broke his Titan from cover, twisting through and around the sudden hail of pulses coming his direction as he returned fire in kind. He hated it when officers got the idea they were some kind of badass; it never turned out well for anyone.

He didn’t know what it would do to the rule when the boss actually was a legitimate badass, but Nano didn’t think it would be anything good.

“I suppose that means we’d best get there in a hurry, Top,” Kepler’s voice broke his reverie as Nano stepped his Titan over the remains of his fallen foes.

“Right you are, Lieutenant,” he responded. “Any word on a supply drop from the Poland?”

“Nothing yet,” Kepler answered, “but we only got full feeds a couple minutes ago. They’re dropping Marines into the badlands now, so I wouldn’t expect anything until the jarheads get their area secured.”

“Figures,” Nano grumbled.

“We’ll make do,” Kepler said. “Better move now. The captain is getting ahead of us.”

*                                        *                                        *

The fighting along the southern edge of the city had intensified; the lines between the Childean resistance and the Ross forces had stabilized. Likely, Miram knew, that would not have been the case if not for the strike made through the city by the captain and the others on the team. The apparent parity of force had raised morale among the Childeans, however, and Miram had done her very best to encourage that belief.

There was little sense in telling them that the captain alone had destroyed more Golems than the entire resistance combined.

That wasn’t to say that they weren’t putting up a good fight, considering the general lack of training the majority of them had. They’d pinned down no less than eight of the Golems and destroyed more Goblins than she’d counted, Miram was sure.

Most importantly, they were making one hell of a noise that the Ross were clearly unable to ignore.

It was turning costly, however, of that there was no doubt.

The resistance lines were ragged, chopped to pieces by heavier and more precise fire from the Golem and Goblin avatars of the Ross’El forces. She didn’t have a count, and wouldn’t know the butcher’s bill for quite some time, but Miram had no doubt that it would be terribly high even if one didn’t count the losses from within the city itself. Including civilian losses, there was no way this battle could be anything but a pyrrhic victory at best.

That wasn’t slowing the Childeans any longer, however. The screams of exultation when a Golem finally went down, the general mood of righteous fury, those things buoyed up the morale and turned the line of battle into something out of a film. In the moment, even Miram herself couldn’t pretend not to be affected by the rush of battle, the screams of victory, even the howling anger when an ally went down under massed fire.

All of it just fed into the same reservoir of emotion now, where it was processed and converted, stored, and then tapped for use by the whole.

The Childeans were fighting back. They’d been cowed, but no longer, and that energy wasn’t to be kept bottled up. It was exploding out, and Miram wondered if the Ross realized just how precarious their position had become.

Subjugating a native force was quite possible, but it required the cooperation of the natives in a very real way. When that cooperation was withdrawn, an oppressor force very rapidly had to make a decision. Genocide or withdrawal?

If they didn’t choose, and quickly, then the fighting would draw on and on, with the native forces growing stronger as they fed off the emotions of battle. Every defeat they suffered, every man they lost, those just became fuel for the fight. They were the reasons more would sign up, seeing the symbols of freedom in what were by all objective review nothing but pain and loss.

Those same things would tear the oppressor force apart, because fighting and dying for some land you couldn’t care less about held no victorious emotional charge. It was just loss, and could easily become loss with no sense of purpose, and when that happened…it was all over.

In the case of the Ross, however, Miram was distinctly concerned that they would opt for the genocide option.

In that case, the power shift would be as abrupt as it was quick, because when the side with the power advantage decided that killing everything, down to the last, was acceptable as a strategy, then you did not want to be fighting on the guerilla side of the equation.

I hope the Cap is right about the Ross Gravity Valve being interdicted, or this is going to be the shortest “victorious” campaign in history.

*                                        *                                        *

Mokan roared, entirely unable to describe the turmoil of emotional waves he’d been riding since the fighting had begun. But he was quite certain of one thing.

He liked it.

Kicking the enemy’s bones in, showing them that Childeans were not here merely to bow and scrape before them. That was a cause he could not help but embrace. He fired his plasma caster dry, tossing it aside, as it took less time to pick up another off the dead than to reload, and continued to press the fight forward.

“With me!” he roared. “Fight, Childeans! Fight for your homes, fight for the God-World! They can but kill you if you fight, and in death you’ll achieve victory the living slaves will never know!”

Those in hearing distance of him screamed their accord as Childeans rose up in a wave, even reaching far beyond the range of his voice. They charged into the fire from the Invaders’ weapons, Childeans falling in droves or being blown back like paper in the wind, but in ones and twos the enemy fell as well, and that was enough.

He’d been injured somewhere along the way, Mokan honestly couldn’t remember when. His life’s fluid seeped from scores of slashes across his body, likely the result of the shrapnel being flung about, as even glancing blows from the enemy weapons were unlikely to be mistaken for anything else, nor were they likely to be forgotten.

Amid the dead, both Childean and alien alike, Mokan realized something:

He’d never felt more…alive than he did right then, standing amid the death and destruction. Behind him, the hopes, dreams, and roaring support of his people…ahead of him, only evil to be faced, and conquered.

It was the stuff of legend.

*                                        *                                        *

Miram struggled to keep up with the tide of battle. The Childean forces were unpredictable in their actions, despite her every attempt to keep them to a strategy. For the moment, that seemed to be working for them, but she was well aware that without discipline in the ranks—and lord knew there was none here—then any random setback could potentially break the line, and that would be a disaster.

So she and Bier tried to be everywhere at once, lending support as possible, offering advice and suggestions where it seemed they might be listened to. Once in a while she even put boot to ass, occasionally in the most literal sense possible, to get the force moving where it needed to be. It was grim work, more time spent climbing over the bodies of the dead than anything else, but it was all she could think to do for the moment.

I need to get Titan-certified, she thought tiredly. That has got to be better than this shit.

*                                        *                                        *

Childean Badlands

“FOB is down, Major.”

Major Joseph Camp nodded. “Get it deployed, on the double, Sergeant. We’re going to want that up and running, no matter how the fight in the capital turns out. How long until we have drones in the air?”

“We’re breaking out the crates now, sir,” his adjutant replied. “We can have the first five in the air in ten minutes.”

“Make it five minutes. I want eyes on the capital in thirty, and fire support available to the team there in no less than forty,” Camp ordered, knowing that forty minutes was likely to be long past the time of utility in this case, but he and his men were bound by the laws of physics as they were currently understood.

His Marines had come down in a hard drop, complete with a Forward Operating Base (FOB) kitted out to secure and control a thousand-mile radius of its location. Putting that kind of power down took time—there was just no way around that. Even prioritizing the deployment of drones could only do so much since drones had to be unpacked, flight checked, and then deployed to the Area of Operation (AO) and, in the case of armed drones, some had to be loaded with munitions, which took additional time.

Doing all that while potentially being under the gun of an enemy Gravity Valve was not something geared to making Camp feel all warm and fuzzy about the current op, but he’d do his duty, as would his men, or he’d learn why.

The FOB had landed just northeast of the crater he’d been briefed on, and he hoped it was as important as the Admiral believed it to be. The data from the ground looked good, and from what Camp could tell, this Aida character was hell on wheels for a Beanie, but he’d believe it all when he saw it.

Of course, the fact that we’re still here and not the component parts of our own genuine nuclear blast is a vote in her favor, he supposed.

There had been a few dark moments during entry where he hadn’t really expected to kiss dirt, but he had and that meant they had a lot of work ahead of them.

“Major!”

“What is it, Lieutenant?” Camp didn’t even turn around.

“The research team is requesting permission to approach the crater, sir.”

“What?” Now he turned around. “Denied! We’re still securing the AO, Lieutenant!”

“Yes, sir, it’s just…they’re really insistent.”

“Then sit on them, Lieutenant,” Camp snapped. “Literally, for all I care. Just keep them in camp and out of my hair.”

“Yes, sir.”

Scientists. The Admiral should have kept them on the Poland until we’d secured the area, but I suppose he didn’t want to put up with them either.

He understood why the Admiral had shipped all the research staff down, of course. In the worst case scenario, if the Poland were to be destroyed, it was better to have them with the relic, where they might have a chance of fighting back if they could figure out the derelict ship.

That didn’t mean the major liked it, however.

*                                        *                                        *

USV Poland

“We have real-time imagery of the fighting now, sir.”

“Put it on the displays, Commander,” Yuri ordered.

The orbital imagery snapped onto the primary display, zooming in to show the Childean capital. Someone swore softly, Yuri didn’t know who and didn’t care. The city was a warzone, no question about that, with the heaviest damage being clearly to the southern sectors, but no small amount being along a line that started from the coast and proceeded inwards about two point five kilometers toward the Ross ship.

It wasn’t the most devastation he’d ever heard of in a modern metropolis, or near enough, but it was certainly the most Yuri had ever seen personally. Fighting on Earth had long since devolved to peacekeeping actions, counter-terrorism, and the like. Full open battlefield conflicts were a thing of the distant past, at least until the Ross had discovered Hayden.

Since then, things had quieted down even more on Earth, and while there had certainly been impressive fighting, it had mostly been contained to space and relatively unpopulated areas of known worlds. The fighting in the city below the Poland was almost a throwback to far less civilized times.

He didn’t want to guess at the total number of civilians already casualties of the conflict, to say nothing of the likely end results.

Needs must, when the devil drives.

“We’re going to be over the horizon in a few more seconds, Captain,” Kandle told him. “We’ll be out of contact for fifteen minutes at our current orbital velocity.”

“Understood. Continue breaking protocol. I want to be stopped in geosynchronous orbit over the badlands as quickly as possible.”

“Understood, sir.”

Yuri turned his focus back to the rapidly dwindling real-time imagery of the city. The Poland had entered Child’s atmosphere fast and hard as part of their plan to deploy Marines and initial support with as much “shock and awe” as possible, but there were costs to a maneuver like that. In this case, they hadn’t bled off all their velocity on approach and were now using air braking to bleed off the rest.

It would have been more efficient to reverse thrust, turn the ship around, and blast all power in the opposite direction, but the VASIMR drive would turn wide swaths of Child to radioactive wasteland if they did that. About the only things likely to survive such a maneuver were the Ross’El themselves, since their vessel was most certainly shielded against far more than that.

Killing all their allies and leaving their enemies intact seemed…counterproductive.

Thus, air braking.

Once the moon world had slung them around enough to redirect their angular velocity, as it had already begun to do, the Poland could climb back out of the atmosphere and safely reverse power with her drives pointed away from Child.

*                                        *                                        *

Child

The flames of the Poland’s traversal through the atmosphere faded over the ridge of the mountain of water that rose up over the city, held in place by the massive gravity of the super-Jupiter eternally floating above. From the ground it was a terrifying sight, its absence a welcome respite for anyone who didn’t understand. For the team on the ground, however, as the light of the fires vanished over the wall of water, so too did their first support since they’d landed on Child.

The network feed from the Poland went dead as Sorilla charged up the last straight avenue, heading for the landing location of the Ross vessel. She swore under her breath, though she’d been expecting it, as her HUD lost track of a pair of combat Golems that had been converging on her position.

She had probability tracks for their approach, but those were already diverging and becoming less and less accurate with every passing moment. Normally she wouldn’t mind so much, but without her autocannon, the loss of real-time data was a far larger problem than otherwise.

She slowed her approach, entering into the probably contact zone.

“Overwatch, Aida,” she got on her network. “Do you have eyes on any bandits ahead of my position?”

It took a few moments before Lance came back, “Aida, overwatch. Negative contact. Large blind spots ahead of you, could hide a tank battalion.”

“Roger. Thanks anyway.” Aida pushed her Titan closer to the buildings around her, now moving to keep cover between herself and the approach vector she was following. She reached down with the metal-shod fist of her Titan and drew the heavy one-meter blade from where it was sheathed along the back of the big machine. The blade was barely worthy of the name, in all truth, sharpened to an axe edge rather than a proper fighting hone, but it was reinforced carbon steel with the mass of a small girder.

Brutish, to be sure, but it should do the job…assuming she could get close enough.

It felt awkward to handle the blade through the controls of the Titan, requiring more focus from her on the control interface system. Titans weren’t run by joysticks or control panels; they had to be piloted through the implant suite most SOLCOM officers utilized. Few used them even remotely like a Titan pilot, however. The suite had never been designed with that level of fine-tuned control in mind, nor had it been intended to allow for bidirectional tactile communication.

Those functions had to be hacked into the system after the fact, and they remained quite crude in the current iteration. So as she tightened the Titan’s fist around the blade, it felt to her like she had a hold of a lumpy mass of clay. Alternatively flexible in places, yet solid in others, and varying with time.

It was distracting, but she forced those thoughts aside and flipped the blade over a couple times to get a feel for the manipulation system, then settled on a familiar grip as she began to move forward again, with caution.

*                                        *                                        *

Lance Dearborn swore under his breath as he observed the captain’s actions.

She’s going to take a knife to a bloody gun fight, of all the idiotic things…

He abandoned his position, leaving half a crate of ammo behind as he slung his rifle. Speed and mobility were his primary concern now as he leapt from rooftop to rooftop, circling the captain’s position as quickly as he was able.

Stupid, stupid, stupid…

The words were his mantra as he ran, consulting the available data from the team’s networked systems. No one had the Golems he was worried about in sight, and the computer projections of the paths were becoming less and less likely to be accurate with every passing moment.

The only certainty was that the captain was closing on their known AO, and the pair was most certainly still active within it.

“All Titans, overwatch,” he called as he pumped his legs and arms, “converge on the captain if able. Say again, converge on the captain if able.”

“Overwatch, Titan Two,” Kepler responded. “Moving to support. Three minutes out.”

“Overwatch, Titan Three,” the Top’s voice cut in. “Am pinned down. ETA five minutes to clear, three to intercept.”

“Overwatch, Titan Four,” Riggs responded. “Moving to support. Four minutes out.”

Three minutes, Lance grumbled as he ran and jumped. Three minutes was three lifetimes too long in a battle, especially when the captain wasn’t playing for time but rather seemed intent on engaging. Oh, she slowed down, certainly, but that was purely tactical if he were reading the data correctly. The captain has gotten too used to lone wolfing it.

It was something that happened, though less often these days. Despite being drilled in near constant team exercises, even the best of soldiers could forget themselves. Captain Aida had better reason than most, in his opinion. She’d been forced into that role multiple times in the past and had proven damn good at it.

It was a form of Victory Disease, a reinforcing habit that, more often than not, turned out to be fatal. Unfortunately, it was also generally incurable, from what he knew of history. History was full of lone wolf soldiers who were legends, but the number who died before achieving such a status most certainly ranked in the tens of thousands to one. Hell, even most of the legends eventually met their end alone and at the hands of the enemy.

Lance would prefer it if his captain didn’t enter military legend in that matter, nor quite so soon.

*                                        *                                        *

Sorilla hadn’t slowed down purely out of caution, actually. Rather, she had done so to limit the noise she was making. Not normally something one worried about in a thirty-plus-ton war machine, she’d be the first to admit, but the less noise she made, the more likely she could hear the noise the enemy made.

So she approached the corner of the building she was sheltering under, using the Titan’s anti-sniper systems in all sorts of ways they’d never been intended for.

Designed to detect and triangulate the source of incoming sniper attacks, the system used sonic detection, radar, and even visual scanners to accomplish that task. For the moment she was by far more interested in the sonic capabilities.

There was no such thing as “stealth” when moving any large-scale war machine around a battlefield, at least not in any serious meaning of the word. Take all the mass of a main battle tank and focus it onto a pair of “feet,” albeit very large feet, and that became even truer. For the Titans and the Golems, stealth was most certainly a relative term. Her systems picked up the crackle of pavement and cement from the nearest Golem’s footsteps, even as she was reasonably certain they were listening to her own.

That was a problem in a city, however, because most methods of detection like that, including sound, tended to bounce off buildings and generally get mucked up. She knew the Golem was close, and getting closer, and could make a prediction based on previous vectors from before the Poland went over the horizon, but that was about it. The Golem, in the worst case scenario, might be tracking her mass.

Sorilla’s mind, long tempered by military service, couldn’t help but fill in all the fat ass jokes she’d ever heard right about then, but she firmly set them aside. They were only fun when you had a mate in on the joke anyway.

Tracking by mass would likely mean that the Ross knew where she was at that precise moment, possibly to within fractions of a millimeter. Realistically, however, given the fact that they’d started remodeling the city since this fight began, there was likely a significant fudge factor in any such scans.

She hoped so, at least.

It’s close…almost there…

She hesitated, then flipped the blade around again into a reverse grip as she waited at the corner of the building. A crackle of crumbling cement and the hint of a shadow in the normally shadowless world made her decision for her, and Sorilla struck.

The Titan’s arm snapped out, driving the blade into the silicon-based armor of the Golem just as it started around the corner. The heavy weapon actually flexed slightly on impact, shocking Sorilla for a moment, as she almost expected it to snap, but before she fully processed that impression, it drove through the armor and was buried almost hilt deep.

She was surprised when the Golem continued to move, her Titan’s arm being forced back as it closed on her, but that movement wasn’t going to do the Ross avatar any good. She used it as leverage, forcing the hilt of the big blade up and splitting the Golem from sternum to throat.

The Titan’s blade scarped as it withdrew from the armor, the Golem finally falling. Sorilla shifted enough to catch the enemy unit with her other arm and dragged it around the corner, where she lay it out on the ground at her Titan’s feet.

“Let’s see what you’re carrying.” Sorilla knelt her machine down and examined the Golem’s weapon.

The normal Golems they’d encountered on Hayden weren’t combat chassis, near as anyone could tell. Oh, they were quite capable of fighting and against infantry they were even formidable in their own right, but primarily they’d been assigned to clearing terrain on Hayden.

The one she’d just killed, however, was clearly a combat chassis. Larger, more heavily armored, and equipped with rather significant weaponry, the combat chassis were a much higher threat. For the moment it was the weaponry she was interested in, so Sorilla divested the enemy Golem of its primary weapon, turning the heavy piece of gear over in her Titan’s hands as she rose back to her feet.

Judging from what we’ve seen, it looks like a heavy version of the Alliance compression cannons, she thought as she closed her metal-shod fists around the control surfaces. It wasn’t built for a Titan, that was sure, but it seemed to have manipulation surfaces all the same.

That surprised her.

We would secure a weapon like this to internal controls, she thought as she finished her examination and lifted the weapon skyward before fiddling with the controls. Of course, that had the limitation of making it harder to interchange weapons on the battlefield, so maybe the Ross had the right idea on this one. She didn’t really care, to be honest, not at the moment at least.

It pulsed once, sending a blast into the sky. Well that would be the trigger. Huh, same as the Ross small arms, then. Probably locked into the last setting used, but still useable just the same.

She couldn’t decide if that was really good design, or really, really bad design.

For the moment, however, she didn’t care. It was a functioning weapon, that was all that mattered.

“Heads up, Cap! You’ve got company!” Nano called out a warning.

*                                        *                                        *

Sniping was a game of geometry and physics, a three-dimensional version of billiards or pool, only arguably simpler in theory. You only had one projectile to worry about, with a much more reliable initiation factor. Of course, for real sniper shots, the complexity went up exponentially. Rather than just gravity, air resistance, and initial factors, you quickly had to calculate for the curvature of the world and rotational forces, among others.

To pull off a really long shot, you had to do math in your head the likes of which would pop the brains of probably ninety-nine percent of the population.

And, after all that, just like a good billiards player, you could get really complicated.

Lance tracked his target from the moment he identified it, throwing himself to the rooftop in a prone shooting position as he unslung his rifle and thrust it out over the edge of the roof. The combat chassis Golem was closing on the captain’s position from her six, and even as he called a warning, Lance could tell that she wouldn’t be able to get turned around fast enough to get off the first shot.

He fired on reflex, his thumb flicking the fire selector to full automatic, putting a six-round burst into the air before he had completely figured his shot.

Like billiards, if you knew the trick to it, you could curve a bullet.

In fact, all bullets curved naturally, as they were acted on by gravity and air, but to intentionally curve a bullet, one had to have a way for the bullet to be acted upon in predictable, useful, ways. The rounds from his rifle extended control fins as they left the barrel, arcing out and away from Lance, dropping faster than they should have normally until they were down within a few dozen meters of the streets before they straightened out.

He was interfacing with the bullets in flight, having only a few seconds to finish sending them the math needed to ensure they’d strike right on target.

In mid-flight their trajectory changed, branching down a side street along a Y-branch and exploding out into the avenue as Lance’s implants delivered terminal equations in the very last second as they tore past Aida’s Titan, bracketing the big machine on all sides, then converging just beyond as they slammed into the approaching Golem and exploded.

*                                        *                                        *

Sorilla barely registered the passage of the sniper rounds as they screamed past. Her implants had already registered them as friendly fire. She was focused on the ghost blip that had appeared on her HUD, right on her six. The bullets exploded as she was half turned, bringing the alien weapon level, her scanners reaching out to solidify the signal.

The combat Golem stumbled back under the fire, its own weapon pulsing in response. The first shots went low, tearing up the ground and showering Sorilla with shards of cement and road material. She ignored it. One of the main benefits of being an armor operator was that you didn’t have to sweat the small stuff.

Without computer-aided guidance, Sorilla leveled the alien weapon and fired from the hip, walking her shots in. The first three tore the hell out of the road, much the same as the Golem’s had, but the fourth connected low in the right leg. The Golem’s balance was destroyed a second time, its leg being blown back and out from under it, so Sorilla pressed her advantage and kept firing.

She stalked the Titan forward, firing the whole way, driving pulse after pulse into the enemy Golem and driving it back until it slammed into a building behind it. With the pulse cannon to her Titan’s shoulder, Sorilla didn’t let up until the Golem had been powdered into dust.

That complete, she paused, lifting the weapon as she scanned deeper to ensure the target was down. Satisfied, Sorilla finally turned away.

“Thanks for the cover, Lance,” she said. “Titan One, back on mission.”

“Roger, Titan One,” Lance said a moment later. “Mission objective is approximately six hundred meters west of your current position…oh, and you’re welcome.”

Chapter 16

USV Poland

The Poland was twisting around the orbit of the moon world, using its main thrusters to bleed as much remaining speed as they could as they came around on another full orbit. With the capital coming back into range, Yuri had ordered the ship flipped back around so that the primary scanners could be brought to bear, even though it would limit their deceleration somewhat, as they didn’t want to scatter even a fraction of the Poland’s radioactive wake into the atmosphere.

“Real-time imagery is back online, Captain.”

“Thank you, Mark,” Yuri said, leaning in to check the feeds on the display for himself.

The fighting had shifted north along the line where the resistance was still entangled with the Ross defenses. They’d apparently able to gain ground after the Poland had thinned the defenders deeper inside the city, but Yuri wasn’t particularly concerned with them. He’d seen enough from the earlier take, both from observation and querying the ground team’s implants, to know that the resistance was merely the distraction.

The hinge play rested on the rest of the team and the Titans the Admiral had authorized for deployment.

Now that imagery was back online, those were the signals he was primarily interested in.

Captain Aida was almost to the target, he noted instantly as he let out a breath he hadn’t been aware he was holding. The rest of the team was still intact and mobile, and not far behind. That was their best chance to end this fight, now, and in their favor. He just wished he could get them some backup, like fifty more Titans at least, but as they’d experienced in the past, the Ross did not seem particularly adept at combat.

Given how much the race seemed to fight, that was an oddity, he supposed, but it also made sense in an annoying sort of way. They had power, lots of power in spades, and it was the old Hammer Syndrome. If the tool you knew best was a hammer, more and more of your problems began to look like nails.

The Ross Gravity Valve was a terrifying weapon, frankly it was possibly the closest to an ultimate weapon he’d ever heard of. So it didn’t surprise him that when using that weapon became inconvenient or impossible, the Ross tended to go to pieces. The fact that they rarely risked themselves in the front of fighting, opting instead to act through their avatars or subject species, certainly didn’t help.

“Take out any isolated Golems we can find on this pass through,” he ordered, “and tell the Marines to hurry up and get some drones in the air.”

“Yes, sir,” Kandle nodded, sending commands.

While the Poland was still braking, there was little they could do, but he’d make certain that they did what they could.

Behind him, Yuri could feel the Admiral watching. He almost felt sorry for the man, in an abstract sort of way. Ruger had committed them all to this fight, but that just meant that his job was done for the immediate future. All he could do was stand there and watch, and wait.

As frustrating as Yuri found his own limitations at the moment, that was a hell he didn’t want to even imagine.

*                                        *                                        *

Ruger was doing his best to not glower at everyone as he reviewed the latest data flowing through the Poland’s computers. He knew from his own experience that having the boss glaring over your shoulder was not the way to encourage people to do their jobs. In his experience as a boss, however, not glaring at people when he was feeling helpless was probably the hardest part of the job.

“We’re drawing the rest of the take from Captain Aida’s implants now, sir,” his aide said quietly. “She’s managed to accumulate quite a lot of data.”

“No doubt,” Ruger said. “I’ve worked with the lady before. She is the epitome of thorough.”

There was no challenging that statement, Ruger noted as he looked over the files they were pulling up. Aida’s team had been operating more or less as expected, of course, but the woman herself was a walking treasure trove of data taken from the alien ship. They’d pulled her visual feed first and had been looking over that since the Poland arrived in orbit, but some of the in depth scans she made took up quite a bit more bandwidth.

The hyperspectral scans off her corneal implants alone were likely worth the investment Earth had made in the system. The metallurgy of the ship she’d investigated was…quite possibly earthshaking in nature. They were getting enough data to possibly recreate some of the alloys, and the sims they’d run already made it a dead certainty that they would try.

Her notes, of course, were invaluable—or would likely be once the Marines let the research team start investigating the ship—but the real take was the pre-work she’d already done on the language issue. No one was certain if the ship was actually of Gav origin, but if it was, then they were looking at possibly the Rosetta Stone Earth needed to understand one of the key founding races of the Alliance.

Even without the Gravity interdiction the ship appeared capable of initiating, that would be worth exposing their presence here and making this system a place where Earth should draw the line in the sand.

Now we just have to survive defending that line in order to make use of this treasure trove.

*                                        *                                        *

Child

Sorilla surveyed the mounded dirt and stone that she knew masked the top of the Ross ship, eyes focusing particularly on the access passage their forces had been using to enter and exit the vessel.

“Blow it, boss?” Nano asked as he stood his Titan to attention just behind and to her right.

“Looks like. Call up a breaching charge.”

“Riggs! Breacher!”

The private trundled his Titan forward, retrieving a breacher from behind his back. The charge was just a larger version of the type Sorilla had used on the Gav ship some days earlier, basically just a large ring of explosives with a thin metal barrier molded to an edged ridge. The ring went up against the sealed doors, then Riggs slapped some field expedient molding around it using dirt and sludge before stepping his Titan back.

“Fire in the hole,” he said over the tactical network as he triggered the charge.

The sound of a shaped charge going off was more of a dull crump than a bang, smoke and debris rolling back around them as Sorilla led the Titans forward. She was mildly surprised to see the door still standing, at least until she reached forward and…pushed. The heavy metal groaned as it gave way, then slammed into the deck of the ship inside.

“Team, Titan One,” Sorilla said. “Titan Squad is entering the building. Expect loss of comms, will contact when we’re out.”

“Roger, Titan One,” Miram’s voice came back. “Good luck.”

“Roger that,” Sorilla said with some feeling, then started forward as she led her team into the Ross Portal ship.

*                                        *                                        *

Miram sighed as the signal quality linking her to the Titans network almost immediately degraded.

“Well, we’re going to lose them entirely in less than a minute at this rate,” she told her partner, Samantha Bier.

“What’s our play?”

She hesitated a bit at that. As a corporal, Miram wasn’t exactly used to being in charge, though she certainly gave orders a bit more than your average corporal, being an SOF trainer. For the moment, however, she just had to focus on the job at hand.

“Do our job, try and keep this mess going in the right direction,” she said. “The line is holding fairly well so far, but you know as well as I do that an untrained militia is a brittle hammer to swing at the best of times.”

“Right,” Bier agreed before she glanced around. “They seem to be holding well all the same. We’ve gained ground over the last quarter hour.”

“The Ross had to pull forces back to deal with the Titans after the Poland hammered their forces across the city,” Miram said. “We’re gaining that ground mostly, but the lines have solidified again. They’ve regrouped their command, and honestly, they’re better at this then I expected.”

Bier nodded. Checking the data feed they had from the last pass of the Poland, she could see that Miram was indeed right on all those counts. The Ross lines, while still recovering from the sudden loss of their support units, were fighting back using effective tactics, and while they weren’t pushing the resistance forces back, neither were the Childeans gaining any more ground at the moment either.

That seemed at odds with their relative lack of proficiency when it came to effective open field, and even urban combat tactics, against real soldiers. Bier had done enough tours to know that just because the resistance weren’t “real soldiers” didn’t mean they were pushovers. In fact, fighting against a determined amateur force was in many ways a great deal harder than dealing with a professional military force.

Professionals knew when to call it quits, for one thing. You could never quite predict when amateurs were going to give up the game. Sometimes they’d fight to the death for no particular gain, and sometimes they’d break when the value of their objective actually might justify real sacrifice.

“They’re used to police actions,” Bier said finally.

“That’s my bet.” Miram nodded, eyes scanning the line of the battle where it had stabilized. “They’re actively attempting to reduce civilian losses, which means they have long terms plans…and not just for the moon world, or that ship the captain found.”

“Intelligence says they use puppet races when dealing with the Alliance, like those big musclebound cat things on Hayden,” Bier allowed, glancing at the Childeans as they led another charge. “They’re rough, but good material if you want shock troops.”

Miram considered that. It wasn’t too far out, she decided. The Childeans were tough enough, and seemed gung ho enough, but there was no way the Ross could expect any sort of quick turnover in that respect. They weren’t just going to roll over for invaders, the resistance proved that…

Except there wasn’t much of one before we showed up, was there? They were willing to fight, but… Miram couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

“You might have a point, but if so, I think maybe we screwed that plan up,” Miram chuckled softly. “Unless I’m very badly mistaken, the resistance we’ve kickstarted is going to poison that well beyond reclamation anytime soon.”

“I’m all broken up over that, Corporal,” Bier said in a slightly mocking tone.

“Yeah, me too. All right, the line needs bolstering to the east,” Miram ordered. “You go see what you can do while I ride herd on the crew here.”

“You got it…boss.” Bier laughed lightly, sprinting off before Miram could glower at her.

Not that it did her much good, as she was still connected to the tactical network between them.

“Don’t call me boss,” Miram said, speaking from a small window in Bier’s implants.

*                                        *                                        *

Mokan roared, a deep, reverberating sound that played out below the unaided hearing range of humans but could be felt more than heard. The fight was slowing, he could feel that more than see it, and it just made him madder. For a time there they’d been pushing the Invaders, those bastard aliens, back, and it had felt good. Now that the push had slowed—ground really—to a stop, he threw himself forward as best he could with his burster firing enough to have overheated the system twice.

The powerful pulses of force that returned on him were enough to force him and the others to crawl on their fronts in the dirt and dust as they desperately tried not to die then and there…but that just wasn’t good enough.

Not for Mokan.

Not now, and not ever again.

He surged up, his weapon whining as it lazed off material with each firing cycle.

“Rise up!” he screamed over the noise, not really knowing if anyone could hear him or not. “Childeans! Rise! Fight! These are not your masters, they are invaders in our world! We will not bow to oppressors!”

Those nearest him heard, at least, and their roars and motion to join his charge set off others up and down the line of battle. In a matter of moments, the Childean line had risen up and surged forward, right into the teeth of the enemy formation. Mokan led the wave, his weapon already overheating again, but he continued to fire even as it began to burn his flesh, his anger superseding any pain he felt.

Pulse fire rippled around him, and peripherally he could see his fellows fall.

One, five, a dozen.

There was no end to the death, but the charge didn’t falter. They would not allow these foreign things to rule over them—better death than that. Dimly, Mokan noticed the surge of emotion he was riding and realized in the moment just how powerful he, and they, really were.

The aliens would fall.

*                                        *                                        *

“Oh shit,” Miram swore as she tried to keep up with the charge while not getting herself killed in the process. “I knew this was a bad idea, boss!”

However, the captain wasn’t around to hear her, and she had a mission to finish.

“Cover them as best you can!” she transmitted to Bier, picking targets through the mass of Childeans who’d charged, and opened fire, forgetting about conserving ammo or strategic targets for the moment.

If the charging wave of Childeans died in the next few seconds, it was all over anyway.

“Poland, Ground Five. Fire mission priority!” she called. “We need close fire support ASAP. Targets are danger close!”

She put her armor comm on auto transmit and hoped the Poland would sweep back around their position before it was too late.

“Watch your ass, Bier. I’ve called down the fire on our positions.”

*                                        *                                        *

The interior of the Ross ship was chillingly familiar to Sorilla as she led the team of Titans through the empty gaping corridors that had been designed for the similarly sized Golems. The last time she’d seen the inside of one of these things had been just before the disappearance of TFV and the loss of, well, everyone she’d worked with aside from a few fellow Titan operators.

Taking an intact Ross ship was probably the apex of her career, but the memory of it was ashes to her.

“Watch for ambush,” she ordered, forcing the memories away in favor of the priorities of the present. “They’re sucking us in.”

“That’s just fine with me,” Kepler said, deploying an explosive near a conduit junction they’d located on scanners. “All the better for us to get in deep and tear the guts out of them.”

“Nice enthusiasm, Lieutenant,” Nano said, “but just keep in mind, the longer they let us rumble around unopposed, the bigger the trap they’re building.”

“And with that,” Sorilla broke in before the lieutenant could reply, “let’s deny them the satisfaction. We know the layout of this sucker, we know its weak points. I want this ship disabled in five minutes, boys. Don’t disappoint me.”

Chuckling, the team moved forward. SOLCOM had all but dismantled the last Ross vessel Sorilla had boarded, providing them with as complete a set of specifications as they could realistically hope for. The problem really was that they needed to disable to ship, but did not want to, accidentally or otherwise, destabilize the Ross Gravity tech.

That would be…ugly.

“Riggs, rearguard,” Sorilla ordered. “Cover Top and Kepler while they set explosives. I have point.”

Riggs nodded and trundled his Titan back as the other two started pulling more explosives from their supplies, the team penetrating deeper into the ship as they followed the plan.

Sorilla kept her captured pulse weapon leveled ahead, not worried too much about aiming it anymore. Inside the contained area of the ship, the wide effect of the pulses would be as effective as any scattergun might. She was a little more worried about ammunition levels. SOLCOM had been tearing apart Ross weapons since practically day one, but no one had gotten too far with the tech.

Her Titan noted the sounds ahead of them first, but Sorilla realized what they were before the computer managed to send along the information.

“Heads up, we’ve got company.”

“Technically, boss,” Kepler chuckled, “we are the company.”

“Yeah well, let’s make sure we’re never invited back,” Sorilla replied.

“Who invited us this time?” Riggs asked, clearly laughing.

“Goddamn it, you guys, stop stepping on my lines,” Sorilla sighed, just keeping back a laugh of her own. “Just shut up and shoot.”

They opened fire just as the squad of Golems and Goblins rushed around the corner, right into the teeth of the Titans’ firepower. Sorilla would have almost felt sorry for them, really, but at least they didn’t have to put up with her team.

Sometimes death is better.

*                                        *                                        *

USV Poland

“Captain, we have a request for close fire support from the surface. They report danger close to targets,” Kandle said as he approached Yuri. “We won’t be able to make it clean.”

Yuri looked over the information, not having much time to make a call. The Poland was already on their third orbit, and while each was becoming longer now, that really only meant that they were spending that much more time out of contact when the Poland went over the horizon.

“Trust the woman on the ground,” he decided. “Let them know hell is about to come raining down on their heads.”

“Aye, sir.”

*                                        *                                        *

“Ground Five, Poland.” Miram’s comm snapped to life, startling her as she was in the process of laying down fire, trying to keep Mokan and his maniacs alive. “Danger close fire support approved. Seek cover.”

She instantly swapped her armor over to its external speaker, cranking the volume up as loud as she could.

“Resistance! Take cover!” she screamed, scrambling for the ruins of the closest building. “Fire out! Fire out!”

Miram just prayed that they remembered the lessons they’d been taught, and the key words that were never to be ignored on the battlefield.

Across the way, nearly half a klick away, she could see Bier’s icon lunge for cover, dragging a few of the closest Childeans with her. All around, of the survivors from Mokan’s suicidal rush, many seemed to have heard her and were scrambling for cover.

Not all of them were either that lucky or that smart. She didn’t know which, and it didn’t matter.

Miram could already see the Tears of God crossing the super-Jupiter that hung high in the sky, the friction flames of the Rods from God flickering briefly before there was a sudden bright flash and utter silence. The silence only lasted as long as it took for the sound to reach her, however, and as close as the strike was, that was almost instantly.

A hurricane tore apart the ruins around her, howling and plucking even at Miram’s armor as she curled up and just tried to think small.

She felt the thunder through the ground, multiple strikes coming in Time on Target almost in unison, and didn’t move until things quieted down. Above her hide, the dust was still rolling, thick and roiling from the buffeting winds caused by the displacement of the attack. Her suit scanners switched to active systems, hitting the scene around her with penetrating scans in order to allow her to see more than a few centimeters in front of her face.

“Holy shit…” she mumbled, taking in the destruction.

Danger close strikes were not called down lightly, nor were they granted lightly, for good reason. Even the smaller point defense kinetics the Poland mounted were quite capable of near strategic levels of devastation. You just did not want to be anywhere near a danger close strike. Even wearing armor wasn’t a guarantee of safety.

She kicked a slab of concrete away from her and stepped out onto the street, scanning constantly as she looked for survivors from either side of the fight. There was movement and signs that matched Childean life scans around her, and she felt a little relief as the survivor count began to climb. There were still a lot of people missing, so Miram brought her rifle up to her shoulder and pushed forward into the worst of the destruction to seek out what she could find.

The dust was settling slowly out of the air, still thick, but visibility was opening up as she moved forward. Movement ahead caught her attention, and Miram leveled her weapon on shifting rubble until a dust- and dirt-covered Childean climbed sorely to its feet.

The Childean looked around, confusedly at first, then slowly seemed to shake off the feeling as it looked around.

“Mokan? Is that you?” Miram asked, uncertain because of all the dust and, frankly, the difficulty she had telling the Childeans apart. A few months in their company made it easier to a degree, but her mind was simply better attuned to the faces she grew up with. “Are you all right?”

The Childean was looking ahead of him as the dust of the attack continued to settle. The city had seen better days, that was certain, but the Poland’s strikes were precision and tactical, so most of it was still standing. There was no sign of any Golems in motion, however, and around them, more Childeans were appearing out of the dust and the smoke.

Mokan, she was pretty certain it was him now, mumbled something she didn’t catch as the Childean looked around.

“What was that?” Miram asked, stepping closer. “Are you hurt?”

He almost had to be, she figured. Anyone out in the open should be dead, or thanking the heavens for a miracle. Childeans did seem to have better resistance to pressure differentials than humans, but even so, Miram didn’t think they were that tough.

“Victory,” Mokan said, with a finality to his tone as he surveyed the devastation, seeing only Childeans moving now, if one discounted the humans.

“Excuse me?” Miram blinked. Surely he didn’t think they’d won? The Portal ship was still intact, and as long as that had a foothold on Childean soil…

“VICTORY!” Mokan screamed, his call echoing then through the ranks of the resistance forces who’d survived the insane charge followed by a danger close strike.

Miram fell back a step as the roar redoubled, almost seeming louder than the kinetic strike as more and more Childean voices joined in. She was somewhat surprised that many had survived, if she were brutally honest. She’d only called down the kinetics because, frankly, she figured everyone in the charge was dead anyway.

That was forgotten, however, as the near bestial roars of celebration drowned out everything else.

This was not good. Miram didn’t know what was going to happen next, but she was pretty damn well certain that things weren’t going to end well if the Ross marched a new army of Golems out of that damn ship right in the middle of a Childean victory celebration.

Unfortunately, she also knew from experience that she had approximately zero chance of making any headway with this bunch at the moment.

Oh hell, Cap, what do I do now!?

Chapter 17

“Damage reports,” Sorilla snapped as she climbed her Titan back to its feet and disgustedly tossed away the ruined pulse cannon she’d be using.

“Green, Cap,” Riggs said immediately.

He’d been to the rearguard, so that didn’t surprise her. Nano’s machine was reporting differently, however, so Sorilla prodded him.

“Top?”

“Yellow, boss. No reds, but everything is yellow,” Nano admitted. “I think that strike blew my diagnostic processor or maybe just tossed everything out of alignment. I can still move and fight.”

“All right, let me know the second you have any motor impairment, Top. There’s no room for error in here,” she told him. “You’re not the only one you’d be putting at risk if you go all macho on me.”

“Got it, boss.”

That left Kepler, whose Titan had taken a couple solid strikes similar to her own, forcing the active countermeasures to be expended on his legs. She looked his Titan over, shaking her head and unknowingly causing her Titan to do the same.

“Looks worse than it is, Cap,” Kepler assured her. “I’ve got a couple reds, but they’re secondary systems. All primaries are yellow at worst, and most aren’t that bad.”

“Maybe not, but those chicken legs of yours look like someone flash-fried them in batter,” Sorilla told him. “Can you get up?”

The Titan clambered back to its feet under Kepler’s direction, showing that it was still in decent shape for mobility at least.

“Well, that’s something, but another hit like that and you’re riding out of here, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, ma’am, won’t get hit, ma’am.”

“Promise me the moon next time, Kepler,” she told him as she turned her Titan and marched it up the hall to the fallen Golems they’d destroyed. “You have as much chance of willing that to happen as evading a pulse blast with your name on it. For the moment, however, let’s move. We have a job to finish.”

“We’re ready to go, Cap,” Kepler assured her.

Her own machine was still mostly in working order, she noted as she had the computer run diagnostics across all systems. The Titans had been designed to take the sort of molecular compression Alliance pulse weapons could put it through, at least enough to keep the enemy weapons from snapping chemical bonds, but the stress still told after a couple hits.

Her armor was the most worrisome, she decided after a moment. Internal systems were still mostly in the green, with a few yellow warning signs that might be diagnostic errors. The exterior armor was battered, however, with key active countermeasures tripped in her shoulder and chest. Sorilla knew that she couldn’t afford another strike to the chest, not with the active systems used up.

Still, better than she perhaps had a right to expect.

Sorilla dropped her own Titan to one knee by the nearest Golem, where she examined the combat unit’s weapon.

“All right, I think this will do for me,” she said as she got back up, cradling the weapon lightly in her Titan’s arms. “How are the rest of you on ammo?”

“Deep yellow, Cap,” Nano answered, “all of us. We’ll be red after another fight.”

“Hand off ammo, Top,” Sorilla ordered. “Give Kepler and Riggs your rounds and grab a Ghoulie gun.”

“Why him, Captain?” Kepler asked. “I can—”

“The Top is an expert marksman, with and without computer-aided systems,” she shut him down, hefting the cannon in her machine’s grip. “These things don’t interface with our implants.”

Nano was already dumping his ammo reserves, splitting the belts up and handing them off to Kepler and Riggs. “It’s not much.”

“It’ll put them both back to high yellow,” Sorilla said. “It’ll have to do for now.”

With the belts of ammo handed off, Nano disconnected his autocannon and tossed it aside as he walked over to the closest pulse cannon and picked it up.

“Awkward,” he commented as he got his Titan’s grip around it, “but I can work with this.”

“Figured you could, Top,” Sorilla said simply, turning her main scanners back to where the other two were loading up. “You two ready?”

“Hoo rah, Cap,” Riggs answered instantly.

“Ready to roll, Cap,” Kepler said.

“Let’s rumble.”

The team nodded and brought their weapons to ready position as they moved out, heading for their next target.

“Something creeps me the hell out about the inside of this thing,” Riggs admitted a short while later. “Something is wrong in here, isn’t it?”

“It’s bigger on the inside,” Sorilla answered blandly. “Confused us the last time too. We’re heading for the Portal core, so get ready. They will defend that.”

“Roger that.”

*                                        *                                        *

Sorilla hesitated as they stood their Titans at the edge of the center deck in the Portal room, shaking her head.

“I don’t like this,” she said finally. “Where the hell is everyone?”

“All clear, Cap. We scanned the whole place. It’s clean.” Nano said, approaching from her left. “Looks like they bugged out.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Sorilla said, confused. “The Ross will withdraw, yes, but I would have sworn that ship was enough to make them stick this out until we forced them out.”

“Maybe the Poland scared them,” Riggs offered, his Titan standing almost stiffly at attention.

“Yeah, maybe.” Sorilla knelt her machine down and popped the seal on the cockpit.

“Captain, what are you doing?” Nano demanded as she climbed out the back and dropped to the deck.

Sorilla looked around the vast spherical chamber, adjusting her pistols as she snapped the gun belts on. “I want to have a look around, Top. Secure this area. I want to check the Ross habitats and command centers.”

“Take support, Cap,” Nano said. “I know you’ve got this Rambo thing goi—”

Sorilla shot him a dark look, stilling him even though he was inside a thirty-plus-ton war machine.

“Don’t even.” Sorilla held up a finger. “Just…don’t.” She sighed. “Riggs, you up for a walk?”

“Yes, ma’am, eager to be out of this tin can.”

“You’re with me,” she said, still glaring at Nano for a moment before turning away as Riggs instantly popped his Titan and started to climb out.

“Kepler, you and Nano keep our Titans secured,” she ordered. “Riggs, on me.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Riggs said as he pulled an assault rifle from the Titan and fell in step behind her.

*                                        *                                        *

USV Poland

“Four more orbits before we can take a geostationary orbit, Captain.”

Yuri nodded. “Thank you, Kandle. Any word from the ground teams?”

“Marines have finished establishing a perimeter, primary base functions are up and running…”

“Good. What about the SOCOM squad?”

“Nothing from Team Actual,” Kandle said, shaking his head. “They went into the ship forty minutes ago. We lost contact about eight minutes after that.”

Yuri nodded, understanding. Thankfully, the signal had faded out, according to recordings from the rest of the team, rather than being cut off abruptly, as if by battle.

“Get drones in the air,” he ordered. “Are we running slow enough to launch our own yet?”

“Almost, sir. Another pass.”

“Damn it,” Yuri swore.

Drones were soft targets. They could withstand atmospheric entry, but that was about it. Until the Poland dropped below a certain velocity, launching her drones would be the same as tossing feathers into a blast furnace. If the heat didn’t fry them, the shockwave would.

“I want a CAP over that city,” he ordered firmly, “yesterday. Tell the Marines to expedite combat drones. I don’t care what they have to do.”

“Yes, si—” Kandle started to confirm, but was interrupted when alarms began to blare from all corners.

“Now what!?” Yuri snapped as he spun around.

“Gravity signature. We’re sourcing it now, Captain, but it’s big!” the scanner duty officer responded quickly.

“Jump point?” Yuri asked automatically, fearing that the Ross had support in the system.

“Negative, Captain. It’s local…I’m guessing from the moon world, sir, but it’s hard to…” The officer paused, looking befuddled. “That’s…not right. Captain,” he said slowly after a moment’s deliberation. “I think the moon is starting to rotate.”

*                                        *                                        *

Child

In one of the control rooms, Sorilla went to one knee, fighting a wave of nausea and dizziness that had her stomach threatening to empty itself in a vigorous fashion. Given that she was wearing a full face helm, that would be a very bad thing indeed.

“Captain, are you all right?” Riggs ran over.

“Gravity shift,” she moaned. “Never felt anything like it. It’s so powerful…”

“Gravity shift?” Riggs frowned, checking his implants. “I’m not registering anything on the accelerometers.”

“It’s there.” She sucked in some air before clawing at her helm, pulling it off her head, and taking a deep pull of free air from around her, letting the helm clatter to the floor. “Your implants are calibrated to look for Valve bursts. This is…different. Your processor is ignoring the signals as natural. It isn’t.”

Riggs just shook his head. “How do you know that?”

“I helped code the processors,” Sorilla said, pulling something from her belt and putting it in her mouth, sucking on it avidly as she got back to her feet. “Personal implants and processors don’t have the cycles to monitor everything, so we coded them to recognize specific signals.”

“Great, that makes sense. So why are you reading this?” Riggs asked. “Don’t your implants have the same coding?”

“They do, but my brain doesn’t,” she said, straightening and stretching slightly.

Riggs blinked under his helm. “That doesn’t tell me much.”

Sorilla took a few more deep breaths, then hooked her foot into her helm and kicked it up into the air, catching it easily. She hooked it under her arm, then pulled another thing from her belt and tossed it in her mouth.

“What are those, can you tell me that at least, Cap?”

“Chocolate-covered ginger,” Sorilla answered, “good for motion sickness. Come on, we need to find the source of that signal.”

*                                        *                                        *

Corporal Miram Soleill looked around, uneasy as she tried to identify the source of her nerves. There was something wrong, but she couldn’t figure out what. The whole world felt too quiet all of a sudden, though her suit was insisting that noise levels were normal.

“Do you feel that, Bier?” she asked over the network.

“Feel what?”

Miram shook her head. “Never mind. When is the Poland due back overhead?”

“Three minutes.”

Miram nodded. “All right. Keep everyone in line as best you can. I don’t think this is over.”

“Keep this bunch in line?” Bier asked, looking around.

Miram had to admit she had a point. The Childeans were too busy partying to be kept in line, but at least they were distracted. She just left Bier to it, turning her focus to her implants and suit processor as she tried to locate the source of her unease. Everything looked normal, but she couldn’t seem to stop glaring at the environmental stats.

“Proc,” she ordered, “compare environmental stats to baseline.”

The computer threw up comparative charts to her ocular implants, her corneal implants glowing under her armor as she tried to figure out what was wrong. Everything seemed to match; only the barometric pressure seemed off, growing sharply even as she watched.

High pressure zone moving in? The storm should have dropped the pressure, Miram noted, confused. What the hell is going on?

“Corporal!” Bier called abruptly. “We’ve got a problem!”

“What is it?” Miram snapped back to reality, looking over to her partner and then in the direction Bier was pointing.

She froze, eyes on the harbor just a few hundred meters from her position, not really sure what she was seeing. The water level was up, waves licking along the top of the piers and ships being pushed hard against their moorings.

Tide is coming in, strong one… Miram thought before her brain caught up with itself.

She was on Child.

There were no tides on Child.

*                                        *                                        *

USV Poland

“That’s not possible,” Yuri growled as he leaned over the scanner station, eyes boring into the display that refused to stop lying to him.

“I’ve checked it eight times, Captain. Child is beginning to rotate.”

“He’s right, sir,” Kandle said, checking his tablet. “I’ve had the numbers checked in the labs. It has to be the Ross.”

Yuri shook his head. “Not even they…no, it’s impossible, I can’t accept it.”

“Captain.” A voice turned them all around as Admiral Ruger appeared behind them. “It’s my experience that we don’t question reality. The how’s of the situation can wait until we’ve resolved the what. If the scanners say the moon is starting to turn, then we deal with that before we worry about who, or how.”

“Deal with it? Sir, with all due respect,” Yuri objected, “this moon is tidally locked. It can’t just start to rotate…and if it does, what are we supposed to do about it?”

“Perhaps we should start by determining the current threat to our ground teams?” Ruger asked mildly.

Yuri considered that, thinking about the numbers. “We’ll have to confirm, but minimal threat for the moment. The moon is starting to turn, yes, but it’s still measured in millimeters of motion.”

“Less,” Kandle cut in. “However, it does seem to be increasing.”

“The source must be the Ross ship,” Ruger said. “We need to disable it.”

“The ship?” Yuri paled. “We can land a kinetic strike, but our team…the city?”

“How soon until we’re over the Childean capital again?” Ruger asked.

“Thirty seconds,” Kandle answered, “less actually.”

“Then dispatch orders,” Ruger said. “Get our team out of there.”

*                                        *                                        *

Child

Sorilla leaned over a control console, glaring at it as she rested her helm on the next one over. The Ross didn’t use Alliance systems, unfortunately, and SOLCOM had rather limited luck in decoding how any of their technology actually worked. The best guess anyone had was that they used implants to communicate with it, much the way SOLCOM personnel did with their own tech.

The only problem with that theory was the fact that no one had ever found any implants in the bodies of enemy KIAs.

“I feel like I’m half blind here,” she grumbled, running one hand through her sweat-soaked hair as Riggs paced behind her with his rifle almost, but not quite, to his shoulder.

“That’s nice, boss but, uh,” he stammered a little, “could we hurry this up a bit?”

“Working on it, Riggs,” she growled over her shoulder. “You bugging me is not going to speed things up.”

He, wisely in her opinion, decided that shutting up was the best thing to do at that point.

Sorilla turned back to the display and control console, trying to work out what it was telling her. She was getting nowhere with it, however, and the gravity surge was still making her stomach churn.

What the hell are they doing? I’ve never felt a gravity pull like this before. It’s far too strong for a Valve pulse. What the hell is going on?

She set her hands down on the console, mostly to steady herself, but yanked them back in surprise when she felt something. It took Sorilla a few moments to realize that it wasn’t her so much as her implants that registered a very local change. She hesitantly extended her hands again, cringing slightly, as she almost felt like it was going to burn her or something.

“There’s some kind of very local gravity manipulation right here on the console,” she said finally, eyes wide. “Why didn’t we see this before?”

“See what?”

“The Ross, they…” Sorilla started laughing, shaking her head. “Of course, it’s so damn obvious.”

Private Riggs snorted. “Not to me it isn’t.”

She was barely listening to him as she rambled on, talking far more to herself than him.

“The Ross see gravity fluctuations, or feel them somehow,” she said. “Their system uses micro-fluctuations as a feedback mechanism…it’s a haptic setup. No wonder no one could decode this. You’d need SOLCOM tactical implant suite just to detect it, and researchers don’t get those. Nothing else would be localized enough…maybe the large research scanners would notice something, but they’d never be able to localize it. This is amazing…”

She found quickly that she could manipulate some of the controls by touching the slight bends in space-time she’d detected, but at the same time, she was still working half blind. It was like manipulating an old keyboard without any letters on the keys…or knowing exactly where the keys were. Possible, sure, but it took some trial and error.

“Okay, I’ve got something,” she said finally as the display in front of her lit up, showing a relief map of Child. “They’re running some sort of autonomous program through their Gravity manipulation core. I can’t tell what it does, but it’s clearly big. The area of effect is all across Child, at least.”

Riggs got nervous. “You don’t think they’re planning on popping this whole burg, do you?”

Sorilla hoped not. She’d seen records of what a Valve attack could do to a planet when the Ross were less-than-interested in maintaining the local property values.

“I don’t think so,” she said aloud. “If they could manage a Valve pulse, I think they’d have used it on us already. The Gav ship is still interdicting.”

“Yeah? Then why isn’t it stopping whatever this is?”

“I don’t know,” Sorilla admitted. “Maybe it’s not calibrated to detect this as an attack? There’s just no telling, really…maybe it isn’t an attack?”

The private snorted, looking around. “You really think they abandoned ship through those Portals of theirs for fun, ma’am?”

Sorilla hesitated, then shook her head. “No. No, I do not.”

That, of course, left her with the problem of determining exactly what they had done.

*                                        *                                        *

Miram was running flat out in powered armor, straight line speeds topping fifty miles an hour easily enough, but turning was a pain in the ass. She had left her Childean contacts to their party, along with Lance and Bier to watch over them, and was now playing messenger duty for the Poland as she headed for the Ross ship at the center of the city.

So far the shift in the planet wasn’t significant, though given the scale of things, even an “insignificant” change was terrifyingly large in absolute numbers. Just a few millimeters of movement could cause incredible flooding in areas that were already prone to it, never mind all the other variables she was undoubtedly forgetting. The giant mountain of water that was held in place by the tidal force of the super-Jupiter represented a singularly terrifying potential for devastation.

As soon as she entered the ship, her network linked into the Titans’ combat system, though the signal quality was pretty bad.

Miram started sending the Poland’s orders on repeat anyway, continuing to run.

*                                        *                                        *

Kepler was bored, frankly.

Since the captain had made her way into the control centers with Riggs, he and Top had been standing guard duty in an empty Portal room where absolutely nothing was happening. Hell, even the eponymous Portal that was supposed to be the centerpiece of the room was shut down; the Ross had clearly not wanted to be followed after their retreat.

His comm crackling to life with a priority order from the Poland nearly startled him right out of his Titan.

“Strike Team, immediate withdrawal from the Childean capital is ordered. Situation update is being transmitted.”

Kepler swore. “What the hell…?”

He opened the file, trying to make sense of it, but really, it was over his head. All he needed was the summary, though, and that was enough to curl his hair and age him ten years.

“Holy…” He breathed out. “Top…?”

“I’m getting the captain on the line,” Nano said.

“That’s…a good idea.”

*                                        *                                        *

Sorilla blinked at the immediate order to withdraw, but only to flick it off her HUD. She was far more interested in the Poland’s telemetry data.

“So that’s what they’re up to…” she breathed, impressed despite herself. “Devious bastards.”

“Cap? You understanding any of this?”

“Oh yeah,” Sorilla said, refocusing on the console and display. “They’ve lost, and they know it, but they still want Child for themselves so they can’t blow it, even if the Gav ship weren’t interdicting.”

“So they start it rotating?” Riggs blinked. “What sense does that make?”

“All the sense in the universe, Riggs,” she said. “The tidal mountain won’t move as the world does, so if they can get Child up to speed…it’ll sweep the surface clean. I can’t believe they have this capability. The fine tune control is…” She shook her head. “Unbelievable.”

Riggs was shifting nervously. “Captain…we need to move. Orders…”

“Go,” Sorilla said, waving over her shoulder. “I don’t need you here now, and I have plenty of time to withdraw later. Even the Ross can’t possibly accelerate the rotation of Child that quickly. They’d tear it apart under the stress if they tried.”

Riggs stared at her. “How do you know that’s not the plan?”

“I’m guessing.” Sorilla answered without looking back. “Now let me work.”

*                                        *                                        *

USV Poland

“We’ve reestablished contact with the strike team,” Kandle said, catching Yuri’s attention. “Captain Aida has issued orders to her team, telling them to withdraw.”

“Telling them?” Yuri glanced over sharply.

“She intends to stay,” Admiral Ruger said from where he was standing on the command deck. “I’m not surprised.”

“With all due respect to the captain,” Yuri grumbled, “she has her orders. Send them again, specifically to her, Commander.”

“Belay that.” Ruger shook his head. “Aida is the woman on site. I’ll trust her judgment.”

More to the point, Ruger was riding her implant telemetry even at that very moment and he was having a very hard time believing what he was seeing.

How is she manipulating…ah…oh my, how did we miss that? he wondered, making mental notes in his implants to schedule his researchers for implant surgery. It explained so much about Ross technology, albeit in some ways only confirming a few of the more outlandish theories made about the enigmatic species.

If they can see or touch space-time, that might explain why we have so much trouble communicating with them. No frame of reference in common, Ruger supposed.

He turned around sharply and left the bridge, heading for the admiralty deck and his personal secure network.

*                                        *                                        *

Child

“Come on, where are you?” Sorilla grumbled under her breath as she kept working, trying to find her way through the alien operating system.

It wasn’t so bad, really. The layout was almost intuitive, once she figured out the space-time interface the Ross used, or started to figure it out at least. Sorilla suspected that she was still missing a chunk of it, either because her accelerometer implants were too limited or perhaps because the Ross really had a more sophisticated natural sense for such things.

She was still lightyears beyond where she’d been just a few minutes earlier, however, and that was what counted in her mind.

She almost ignored it when her HUD tried to get her attention, figuring it was a reiteration of the order to withdraw. She had no intention of pulling back yet, not with the threat being what it was, at least. An imminent Gravity Valve strike was a good reason to withdraw, but hell, in her armor she could swim out if she had to. Sure, the city would be wiped clean, but she’d be fine.

That said, Sorilla had enough care for her military roots and career to still care about the chain of command, and so she flagged the alert and opened it in a side screen on her Heads-Up Display.

“Captain Aida.” Admiral Ruger’s voice nearly brought her to attention on reflex alone. “Stand by for a data dump.”

What the…? Sorilla wondered just as the data stream began pouring in, then her eyes became wider…and wider.

She was looking at highly classified files, summations, commentary from people with credentials so high it made her nose bleed, and in-depth analysis of the Ross vessel she’d once helped capture.

“We’re calculating the shift in rotation, Captain,” Ruger said. “At the current rate of acceleration, it will become irreversible in twenty-three minutes, barring intervention from the very system that’s causing it.”

“If I can stop it before that?”

“The shifting mass of the water will likely absorb the kinetic energy,” Ruger replied. “There will be several natural disasters over the next few years, but nothing on the scale of a Childean Armageddon.”

“Understood, Admiral. I’m on it.”

Ruger nodded in her HUD. “Be advised, I am keeping your team on sight.”

That made her look up sharply. “Admiral, there is no reason for them be here now.”

“Disagree, Captain. We need the telemetry link they provide,” he said. “I’m piggybacking your implants. What you’re doing right now is almost as valuable to SOLCOM as the ship you discovered in the desert. So get to work. The Poland is settling into geosynch orbit now, Captain.”

“Never stopped working, Admiral,” Sorilla said, only half listening as he talked. “I think I’ve located the controls for the Gravity system, but there’s something here I don’t understand…”

“If it’s only one thing, Captain, I’m very impressed,” Ruger chuckled. “However, I think you’re wrong. I believe that you’ve located the Gravity drive controls.”

Sorilla swore. “That’s what didn’t make sense. The equations are wrong. They’re optimized for a warp field.”

“That is my read, Captain. Try the console four meters to your left,” Ruger told her.

Sorilla stood up, looking over in the direction he’d indicated. Unfortunately, all the consoles pretty much looked like one another, so she couldn’t vet his suggestion at a glance. She sighed as she left what she now assumed to be the helm controls and headed there anyway.

The tiny warps in space-time were floating over that console as well, and in a moment Sorilla had the display functioning.

“This does look better,” she muttered as she worked. “The equations are far simpler, however. Are you getting a copy of this, Admiral?”

“Indeed, Captain,” Ruger replied. “Simpler equations, certainly, but look to the power variables.”

Sorilla did and whistled as she took a moment to analyze what they meant, realizing that the ship was pouring an, almost literally, ungodly level of power into them.

Is it enough to turn a fair size moon, though?

That was a difficult question to answer. Among other problems, Sorilla had no freaking clue what kind of power was needed to turn a small moon.

It had never really come up before.

What she could tell, in very short time, was that the system here wasn’t accepting any changes. She could look, but touching was right out, apparently.

“It’s been locked,” Sorilla said after just a few seconds, not wanting to waste time if she had any other choice.

The Admiral’s response only took a few more seconds itself.

“Concur.”

His voice was sour, clearly unhappy with the conclusion, but it was enough. Sorilla stood up from the console and grabbed her helm as she headed for another room.

“Cap! Where are you going?” Riggs chased after her.

“To do something stupid,” she answered, snapping the helm shut over her face and head, bringing her armor systems back fully online.

*                                        *                                        *

The Ross didn’t use singularity cores the way a SOLCOM ship did, that was one thing that her previous capture of a Portal ship had shown quite clearly. They were more than capable of generating singularities, of course; that was how humans had learned to do the limited twisting of space-time that they had managed, after all.

The Ross themselves, however, were far more elegant and sophisticated. Rather than brute-forcing space-time with something like a singularity, they could manipulate it directly. It was the difference between an old steam locomotive and a mag-lev. Both got the job done, but one was just better at it than the other.

Unfortunately for Sorilla, that also made localizing the source of the power currently being exuded by the Ross ship far more difficult. She could, at any time while on the Poland, instantly locate the singularity, even while it was powered down. It was a finite point in space-time, a singular point even, and that made it easy for her implants to determine vectors and draw, pinpointing it from wherever she was within range.

The Ross ship didn’t do that, however. By manipulating space-time directly, the source of the gravity change she was feeling came from outside. It came from Child itself, rather than a discrete source within the ship. So, instead of tracking a source like that, she would have to look for the far more subtle feelers the Ross systems were using to tweak space-time if she wanted to find the source.

Those threads were almost damned invisible, particularly against the rather overpopulated neighborhood of gravity sources she was currently stalking through.

Effectively an impossible task, unfortunately, so Sorilla discounted that and instead started looking for the power core of the ship itself.

Screw subtle, let’s bust this place up.

Chapter 18

USV Poland

“Oh hell,” Ruger swore softly, shaking his head.

Stratten, one of his aides, looked over, concern on her face. “Problem, sir?”

“Nothing unexpected,” he grumbled a little. “Captain Aida just went from investigation mode to terminal search-and-destroy in the blink of an eye.”

The young ensign stifled a laugh, drawing an irritated glance from Ruger before she stilled her expression to one of professional competence.

“That would hardly be unexpected, sir,” she said with an admirably steady tone.

“Yeah, yeah,” Ruger sighed. “Don’t rub it in. We were learning so much too, damn it.”

“I’ve read her file almost as often as you have, sir,” Ensign Stratton said with a delicate shrug. “She’s not precisely a researcher, Admiral.”

“No kidding,” he admitted, “but she has moments of sheer brilliance. I wouldn’t care to make the mistake of assuming that lady is all brawn and no brains.”

Stratton permitted herself a very slight smile at that. “I have a feeling that many people in the past have made that mistake.”

“Their last, most of them, I’d wager,” Ruger snorted.

“No bet. I told you, I’ve read her file too,” Stratton said, her eyes straying to the recordings Ruger had playing. “Is she…operating Ross equipment?”

“Moments of brilliance,” Ruger repeated himself, nodding as he did. “She may have just broken the real secret to their tech for us. I’ve already had my system schedule all the top researchers in SOLCOM for surgery. The order goes out the second we hit a SOLCOM network.”

“Surgery?” Stratton’s eyes narrowed, then widened. “Her implants. They use gravity alterations in their equipment?”

“Very quick, and very good, Ensign. Yes, they do,” Ruger said, taking a cup of coffee from the desk for a sip. “Thankfully, any SOLCOM implant suite should do, though I expect hers provided her with a little bit of an advantage in terms of speed…”

There was no way he would authorize surgery to implant the prototype suite into his researchers; their brains were far too valuable to have computers rewiring them on the fly. Ruger was actually shocked that they’d left the early generation gear inside Aida, actually, given how it was interacting with the wetware of one of their best soldiers. Personally, he would have ordered it out, or at least disabled until something could be figured out.

He did have to admit, though, that Aida’s unique interactions with her implant suite had opened a lot of doors into cybernetic research. Her brain had cracked military encryption that linked supercomputers would take fifty years to break, and it had done it in just days, weeks at the outside. The potential in that, if anyone could work out how to harness it, was amazing.

Right now, however, the woman was hunting down a power reactor that made a nuke look like a campfire…and, unless he greatly missed his guess, her plan was to blow it up.

Ruger would have cried if the situation wasn’t so damned important.

“Ensign, call Doctor Crowder up here, please,” he said. “If the fool is going to tinker with a singularity reactor, I suppose we’d best supply her with some expert support.”

“Aye, Admiral. Right away.”

*                                        *                                        *

Child

The rapping of Sorilla’s boots on the metallic floor came to a stop as she did, skidding briefly as she slowly looked around.

“Cap! Hold up, I’m supposed to be your—” Riggs skidded to a stop behind her, narrowly missing running into her in his surprise at her abrupt presence. “Cap…”

Sorilla held up her right hand, curled into a fist, and Riggs shut up instantly as his battle rifle rose to his shoulder. He didn’t know what she’d spotted—there was nothing on his scanners—but she was the Cap.

Her wrist flicked and he moved left as she went right, her paired Metalstorm pistols practically leaping from her belt a second later. Sorilla put her left hand pistol on computer control, focusing her attention on the right as she started forward.

Normally she wouldn’t do that, but at the moment, the only ally she had to concern herself with was at her back. She didn’t give two voided chips for anyone in front of her.

Sorilla stepped cautiously as she moved forward, eyes on the long corridor she was walking and the multiple side routes and barriers that could probably hide an army if someone wanted. Thankfully, the ceiling was too low for a Golem, but almost anything else was open game.

She wasn’t sure what had stopped her, but there was a definite feeling of something wrong ahead of her, and like most of her comrades who lived through their first tour in a real combat zone, Sorilla was not inclined to ignore the feeling.

A flicker of motion was all she got before her left hand bucked as the pistol fired automatically, holing a Goblin avatar through the neck and dropping it in a slump. That was the signal for the rest to move, she supposed, because Sorilla found herself diving left as she swept her guns across the plane of combat with fire spewing from the pair.

“Jesus!” Riggs dove the other way, his battle rifle blaring in short bursts as he hit the ground. “Ambush! We need backup here!”

“On our way,” Kepler’s voice echoed over the tactical network. “Just hold on!”

Sorilla ignored the byplay, sliding along the smooth floor to the wall as she pivoted to plant her feet on the surface of it. The Golems were getting her range then, their blasts tracking for her, so she kicked off and skidded across the corridor, heading for a door hidden in a slight alcove.

Her pistols roared, each shot coming after the other so fast as to be mistaken for automatic fire. Between her and her implants, each round was aimed before the guns had permission to discharge, and Sorilla wasn’t interested in suppression fire.

As her slide neared the alcove, Sorilla kipped over backwards and rolled to her feet, coming up with her back to the door as she cracked both guns open and flicked them up and to either side. The empty barrel assemblies ejected clear to clatter to the deck at her feet as she passed the right hand weapon off to her left, both guns held in a tight grip, and reached for a reload.

“Reloading!” she called automatically as she pressed tighter into the alcove to shelter from enemy fire.

“I thought this place was EMPTY!” Riggs snarled almost as loudly as his rifle did from a few meters behind her.

“They must have left a connection open,” Sorilla said, “or these Goblins are running on automatic.”

The Goblins and Golems were largely theorized to be the Ross equivalent of robots, either with internal software hidden in the silicon matrices that composed their being, or being run like puppets by operators on the other side of the Portal the Ross vessels housed. A smaller percentage of experts in SOLCOM believed them to be alien life of some other type, but they were certainly in the minority.

For Sorilla at the moment, it hardly mattered. They were just obstacles to eliminate before billions were doomed by the Ross plan on Child.

She finished dropping two fresh barrel assemblies into her weapons and flicked them shut with an easy motion.

“Backup is almost here, Cap!” Riggs told her.

“Tell them to hurry up, or they’ll miss the fun,” she replied, deadpan, as she hefted her pistols again and pushed off the wall.

*                                        *                                        *

“Hurry up!” Kepler yelled, surging down the corridor in the direction of the fight, running flat out as fast as his armor could take him.

He just reached the passage, through which they could hear rapid-fire gunshots and pulse discharges, when he was suddenly yanked back, hard, just before a pulse blast tore through the open passage and gouged the wall where he’d have been a moment later.

“Proceed with caution, Lieutenant,” Top Nano said, letting go of the cable clip on the back of his armor. “Arriving dead will be a good sight worse than arriving late.”

“Th…thank you, Top,” Kepler mumbled, swallowing hard. “I’ll remember that. How did you…?”

“I linked into the Cap and Riggs’s telemetry. They’re holding their own for now,” Nano said, “so on my word, ghost the door…now!”

Kepler dove across the doorway, taking refuge on the other side as Nano took the position he’d been in. The master sergeant paused, considering the telemetry carefully before suggesting targets to Kepler. The lieutenant, wisely in Nano’s opinion, didn’t object.

“Ready to move on your mark, Lieutenant,” he said, nodding once.

Kepler nodded back. “In three…two…one…mark!”

They split the entry, Nano going first and to the left while Kepler followed to the right, their battle rifles roaring in the enclosed space. Sorilla went low the second they made their move, hitting the ground on her back as she kept firing her pistols, bullets whining over her head, and Riggs just hugged the wall and tried to think like paint.

With the addition of two more guns to the fight, the battle was short lived, only lasting seconds longer before the only moving things in the corridor were human.

“You all right, Cap?” Nano asked, cautiously moving forward.

“All good, Top,” Sorilla said as she climbed to her feet. “Thanks for the assist.”

“No problem. The lieutenant insisted,” Nano replied easily. “What’s the mission?”

“Locate and disable the ship’s power core,” Sorilla said. “I can’t track the Gravity manipulations, they’re too subtle.”

“Subtle?” Kepler choked. “They’re rotating an entire moon!”

“And not a small one either, Cap,” Nano agreed. “You and me may need to discuss the exact definition of subtle sometime.”

Sorilla laughed, continuing down the corridor. “I didn’t say they weren’t using a stupid level of power to do it, I just said that their manipulations were too subtle to track to their source. The power, however, that I can track.”

“And by track you mean follow the blueprints you have from the people who studied the last one you brought in?” Nano asked dryly.

Sorilla paused, glancing over her shoulder at the first sergeant. “A good and wise first sergeant knows the difference between tweaking a lieutenant and doing the same to a captain, Top.”

“A good and wise first sergeant wouldn’t have volunteered for this op, Captain.”

Sorilla stared at him blankly for an incredulous moment in time.

“You volunteered?” she blurted. “Good god, Top, and to think I’ve actually been trusting you until now.”

“Frankly, Cap? All they had to do was tell me who was honcho on this run.” Nano grinned. “You’re a damn magnet for the Ghoulies, and I wanted to see them in action.”

“Great.” Sorilla turned back to continue down the hall to the engine room of the Ross vessel. “My first sergeant is crazy, my lieutenant apparently doesn’t know how to duck…”

“Hey…ma’am…” Kepler started to object but trailed off lamely as he realized she’d already noticed that little slip.

“Aren’t you the one who swan-dived off an orbital elevator without a parapack?” Nano asked blandly.

“I didn’t volunteer for that,” she growled. “I was blown out, kicking and screaming, the way any sane soldier should have been. How you made sergeant, let alone first sergeant, I’ll never figure out. Volunteered…”

Nano laughed slowly as Sorilla wrenched open a sealed door and stomped into the engine room, still grumbling to herself. Kepler glanced at him as he passed, and though the lieutenant’s face was covered entirely, his body language couldn’t have been mistaken for anything other than, “Are you out of your mind?” Nano ignored him. Kepler was okay for a Louie, but he certainly wasn’t going to explain himself to him.

The engine room was, like the rest of the Ross ship, immense. Larger, in fact, that it had any right to be.

“I need their interior decorator for my loft apartment back home,” Nano commented as he looked around. “Might be able to actually fit all my stuff in it that way.”

“The Ross control space-time in ways we haven’t figured out yet,” Sorilla said simply. “Maybe in ways we’ll never entirely figure out. Time is relative, remember that in basic space travel 101?”

“Yes, ma’am, vaguely,” Nano admitted, albeit a little grudgingly. He’d hated that class. It wrapped his brain in knots without half trying.

“Well time and space are the same thing,” she went on, “so if time is relative, so is space. Tinkering volume is apparently not much harder than tinkering mass, and we all know just how well the Ross can to that.”

The men behind her shivered in their armor. No SOLCOM operative was likely to forget, even for a second, just what the Ross could do with mass and gravity. Gravity-induced fission was responsible for more lost years of sleep among them than anything else in recent, or historical, memory. The idea of a weapon you couldn’t defend against, couldn’t see, hear, or sense coming, and that would turn you into your rapidly scattering component atoms was…well, terrifying.

The engine room was empty as they entered, eerily silent in ways no human ship ever was.

“I can’t believe they just abandoned ship,” Kepler muttered as he swept the corners with his rifle, looking for anything moving.

“The Ross don’t think like we do,” Sorilla admitted as she focused on another console, heading to it. “I don’t think they consider it abandoning anything, more like stepping out of the room while the trap closes on us.”

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t put it quite that way, boss,” Nano grumbled, feeling his paranoia kick in.

She just chuckled, “Honestly? They might not have ever been here. The creatures we think of as the Ross might just be another subservient race, like those cat guys they used as fodder on Hayden. Even the Alliance isn’t sure what to make of the Ross, or their version of logic.”

She activated the local console, but quickly realized that, too, was locked.

“We’re going to have to blow their reactor,” Sorilla said, wincing.

Only Kepler really understood what she was saying. “We’re in a city, Captain!”

“I know.” Sorilla grimaced under her helm. “I need contact re-established with the Poland. Spread back along our path, try and get a signal relayed down here.”

“Yes, ma’am!” Nano said, grabbing Riggs and pushing him out of the room.

“You too, Kepler,” Sorilla ordered.

“Ma’am, if the reactor goes…” he said warningly.

“Just go.”

He eyed her for a moment, then finally nodded reluctantly. “Yes, ma’am.”

In a moment, Sorilla was alone in the engine room of the alien vessel. She looked around for a brief moment, then crossed over to the access port that would lead into the reactor room.

There was dirty work ahead.

*                                        *                                        *

USV Poland

“Admiral, we just reestablished contact with the ground team.”

Ruger instantly linked into the network with his implant suite, taking a moment to parse what had happened in the brief battle since they’d lost contact, then opened a line directly to Captain Aida.

“You’ve tried some boneheaded maneuvers in the past, Aida,” he grumbled, “but this one might just take the cake.”

There was a brief delay before she responded; Ruger wasn’t certain if it was because she was distracted or perhaps they were experiencing more significant network delays than the last time.

“If you have a better suggestion, Admiral, believe me, I’m willing to listen,” she told him, rather more curtly than Ruger was used to hearing from a mere Army captain.

He shrugged it off. Honestly, he’d heard worse since making Admiral, just not usually from officers. A chief petty officer in the teams had once spoken to him considerably more bluntly while on mission and, on reflection, he supposed that in many ways Aida was closer to that in persona than her actual rank.

“No better options, I’m afraid,” he admitted. “However, I have an expert on hand that might be of use making the most of your boneheaded plan.”

“All ears, Admiral.”

Ruger turned to the woman standing beside him. “Doctor Crowder, she’s all yours. Good luck.”

Lower ranking military officers rarely gave him dirty looks, but civilian PhDs did so with such regularity that he barely even noted the one directed his way by the good doctor at his side.

Crowder sighed, but didn’t bother saying anything to him, instead opting to focus on the task at hand.

“Captain Aida?”

“Yes, doctor,” Sorilla responded. “Might I know what your specialty is?”

“String theory, quantum manipulations of space-time using vibrational changes in the underlying structure of the universe,” Maria Crowder answered calmly.

There was a long silence at the other end.

“Let’s just assume I understood that, doctor, and move on to what you think I can do to improve our chances down here.”

Maria smiled thinly. “Very well, Captain. I understand that you’re intending to blow the reactor of the Ross vessel?”

“That’s the idea.”

“I will congratulate you for thinking big, Captain, if not particularly intelligently,” Crowder told her. “Are we quite certain this is the only option?”

“We could let the largest tidal wave in recorded history scour the surface of Child clean,” Sorilla responded dryly.

Crowder sighed. “Understood. Very well, Captain, if you’re intent on doing this, might I suggest we at least try to contain the blast?”

*                                        *                                        *

Whatever Lieutenant Kepler and First Sergeant Nano were thinking was going to happen, the captain screaming “Run for it” over the com wasn’t it.

The fact that the Admiral repeated the order a second later when they hadn’t started to move yet…well, that got them in motion double quick. They caught up to Riggs, who was sliding into his Titan and powering up systems, even as they leapt for their own, following him out as he poured the power into his thrusters and slid from the Portal room into the main drag of the starship.

Nano just hoped to hell the captain was on her way too.

They nearly ran over Miram on their way out, Nano just ducking down to scoop her up after Kepler had nearly plowed right through her.

“Oof! Not so rough, you big bruiser!” Miram yelled after she managed to get her breath back.

“No time for niceties, Corporal,” Nano countered. “We’re trying to get to minimum safe distance!”

Miram shuddered at the phrase, knowing that as fast as the Titans were, they weren’t guaranteed of that. Not with the large array of unknowns involved in a Ross’El reactor. Not to mention, she wasn’t in a Titan, so the distance they had to get to and the distance she needed were likely to be two very different things.

The four of them exploded out of the alien ship, not slowing in the slightest as they began having to deal with the rubble and detritus of the battle, heading east as fast as their machines could handle.

“Dearborn! Brier!” Kepler was yelling over the comms. “If you’re not heading for the water now, I’ll kick whatever is left of your ass when this is over!”

The two were already on the move, however, along with some of the celebrating Childeans. Miram was surprised that Bier had managed to get any of them moving, honestly, and more than a little impressed. Getting victory-drunk pseudo-soldiers to do anything other than congratulate each other and break shit around them was one hell of a job.

*                                        *                                        *

“That’s it, Captain.” Crowder’s voice was choppy over the network, the signal degraded by the rather extreme radiation and gravity interference. “I think we’ve done all we can.”

Sorilla hoped it was enough, but really didn’t have time to worry about it. She didn’t bother replying to Crowder, not sure that a signal from her lower powered suit transmitter would even make it out, and instead opted to leave. Her armor was cranked past normal combat mode, just bleeding power at atrocious rates as she bolted through the corridors of the Ross vessel, even as the power continued to build behind her.

Alarms were sounding all around her, most of them not audible, but rather gravetic in nature. She could feel the screams of those alarms in her teeth, it seemed, like nails on a chalkboard, but she didn’t have time to cringe or even pay the sensation the slightest mind as she had to kick off a wall to redirect her pace.

Ahead of her she could see the icon for her Titan light up, the signal from the big machine finally close enough for her implants to recognize.

Almost there.

*                                        *                                        *

Ahead of the team, the looming mountain of water that was the tidal peak of the Childean ocean seemed somehow larger and closer than before. Maybe it was, but Miram rather supposed that it was just her imagination.

She reconsidered that when she realized that the water level had now risen over the docks and was flooding many of the lower districts.

It has to be the storm surge…mostly, right?

They almost made the water when a crackle of power tore through the air and all their systems suddenly went dead. Miram felt herself tumble to the ground as Nano’s Titan lost power, her HUD went black, and all comms went out. She scrambled to her feet as her carbon black helm faded to clear, letting her see out slightly. It was an emergency feature in the armor, where if the system lost power at least the soldier could still see.

A silence dropped on them, and her heart dropped with it. She knew the signs too well, instantly curling into a ball as the shockwave rippled out and blew past her. In that moment, Miram expected it all to be over. When nothing more than that single blast shook her, however, she uncurled and looked around.

Back the way they’d come, where the alien ship was…had been?

She didn’t know which, but whatever it was, at ground zero there was now a plume of…energy reaching to the sky. Lightning crackled around it, storm clouds blowing back from it to show stars and the curve of the super-Jupiter above.

Miram didn’t know what had happened, but as she got to her feet and her armor systems began to reboot, she decided that apparently it wasn’t going to kill them all.

Probably. Right?

Epilogue

Admiral Ruger looked over the devastation centered on the landing zone of the alien spacecraft, most notably the twisted and tangled wreck of a Titan that hadn’t quite gotten clear. Just the corona of the power discharge had been enough to slag sections of the armor in ways nothing should have been able to do, but for the moment it wasn’t his problem to deal with.

Captain Aida had survived.

She was injured, likely would require surgery, but she’d somehow managed to cheat death one more time in the process of saving others. Mostly aliens this time, he supposed, but Ruger didn’t think the captain made much of a distinction there. She was a credit to her old unit’s motto, through and through.

“De Oppresso Liber, indeed,” he said, shaking his head.

“Excuse me, Admiral?”

“Nothing, Major,” Ruger said to the Marine commander who was leading the force helping police the rubble and trying to put the city back to a decent state of affairs.

The destruction of the Ross ship had worked, it seemed, though Ruger expected it would be years before the effects of the alien interference were finally put entirely to rest. For now, coastal flooding was being reported all along the coastline, though the Childeans hadn’t connected it with the Ross yet.

He didn’t know if that would hold, or maybe SOLCOM would choose to inform them at some point.

Not his department.

He was only on-world now because he couldn’t stand to be cut off from possibly the most valuable research project of the last…well, year or so at least.

He couldn’t help it. Ruger laughed, drawing odd looks from those around him.

Major Aida had practically made his career, twice. First the Ross vessel, and now this new discovery. Maybe a Gav ship, maybe not. He didn’t care, really, he just wanted to get his hands on that interdiction technology.

The Poland was heading back to SOLCOM space, as fast as her drives would carry her. They needed more ships out here, yesterday, and there was no fleet comm setup in this system, so a return trip was the only option. That left them vulnerable on Child for a while, but there were several Terra-class ships stationed at Hayden’s World, so it should only be a few days.

“I believe I’ve seen enough, Major,” he said, turning away from the wreckage of the Ross vessel and the twisted remains of the Titan. “Have the Titan secured for examination. Maybe we’ll be able to improve their armor if we figure out just what happened to it, but for now I have a project to oversee.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ruger walked back to where the transport was waiting, his eyes drawn to the rally that had gathered. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of Childeans gathered to listen to the speaker.

Mokan, I believe is his name? Ruger wondered idly, watching as the Childean belted out a speech that probably sounded quite impressive in the native tongue, though was a little stilted through the translator. The gathered seemed to like what they were hearing, however, as they were cheering loudly on queue.

The Childean was an angry one, Ruger noted, though he didn’t blame him. The speech called out the quislings who’d served the Ross, as well as the aliens themselves to great effect. The Admiral made a note of the Childean. Unless he was mistaken, that was the one they’d be dealing with most in the future.

Leader of his people, that one.

With that thought, Ruger climbed into the transport and waved to the Marine pilot.

It was time he got back to work.

*                                        *                                        *

USV Poland

Sorilla lay back in her hospital bed, staring at the ceiling.

The painkillers had finally faded enough that she was thinking clearly, though the throbbing pain that seemed to come from every part of her body was making that almost as hard as the painkillers themselves, she supposed. She didn’t care; the drip pump by her right hand was left unused. Pain was an old friend, and for the moment, at least, Sorilla would rather keep his company.

It was a rare mission that ended as clean as this one had, she decided, though she had her misgivings.

They all lived, the objectives had been achieved, and they even scored a bonus win…so she supposed that counted for a lot.

All the same, she didn’t feel the victory this time for some reason.

I’ve been doing this too long, Sorilla thought. I should have stayed a first sergeant. I don’t think I’m cut out to be an officer.

Things were too complex now, and all she could think about was the future and whether she’d made the best decisions for that. Maybe it was being injured, not that she remembered much about that. She’d made it back to her Titan, that much she remembered, but the rest? Smoke and darkness.

Using the Ross’s own gravity manipulations to contain the explosion was brilliant, she had to give that to Crowder. The doctor knew her stuff.

In all, it had been…if not a textbook mission, then still a wildly successful one.

So why am I feeling so damn jaded about the whole thing? She sighed. It’s probably the drugs.

Drugs or not, for the first time in her entire career, Sorilla Aida seriously wondered if it were time to retire. The day she couldn’t feel great about freeing billions who had been oppressed by a hostile force, that was the day it was time to pack it in. Of course, she realized as she analyzed her feelings that she did feel good about that. Great even. Something else was bothering her, but she couldn’t pin it down.

Sorilla didn’t know what and, honestly…didn’t care at that moment.

Mission accomplished.

That was enough.

The USV Poland entered jump space then, heading for SOLCOM territory, leaving behind the star system with the super-Jupiter called God and the moon, God’s Child.

De Oppresso Liber.

END

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Evan Currie is the bestselling author of the Odyssey One series, the Warrior’s Wings series, and more. Although his postsecondary education was in computer science, and he has worked in the local lobster industry on the Magdalen Islands steadily over the last decade, writing has always been his true passion. Currie himself says it best: “It’s what I do for fun and to relax. There’s not much I can imagine better than being a storyteller.”

Contact the Author

http://www.evancurrie.ca

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@tenhawk on twitter

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Or just email me @ tenhawk@gmail.com

Cheers everyone, I hope you enjoyed the novel.