On Silver Wings

Chapter 1

Terminal velocity sucked.

That was the only thought in Sergeant Sorilla Aida’s mind as she picked herself out of the hole that she’d dug in the soft loamy ground when she hit. Her head was still spinning, and the only thing she could hear was the ringing in her ears from the near miss at 18,000 feet.

“Sergeant Aida reporting in.” She mouthed the words without sound, the implanted chips in her cheek and jaw translating the movement of her muscles and bone into communication that was compressed and pulsed out in a micro-burst transmission. There was no response, either through the audio channel or through the OLED Heads Up Display (HUD) that had been inserted into her corneas.

Her threat board was clear, however, which was a damned good thing. The way she felt, she probably wasn’t a match for a terrorist, let alone a real soldier.

‘Any Recon Team Alpha members, report in,” she again spoke silently, leaning against a towering tree, popping the seals on her helmet and letting it fall to the ground. ‘I say again, any team members report in.’

There was no response over the digital com and no sign of her unit’s transponders on any of her systems either.

“Well, hell,” she muttered aloud, eyes dully looking out into the jungle without seeing.

Her stomach chose that moment to rebel and spattered the ground with what was left of her last meal. Nauseous, headache

can’t focus. Yeah, I’ve got a concussion for sure.

It had all gone to hell after the team had been committed. There had been no way to turn back, no way to regroup. Intel had screwed up, that was the only answer. Aida just wished that she were surprised, but it wasn’t the first time in her career that it had happened. Hell, if she were lucky, it might not be the last.

She coughed, blood flecks spattering her lips as she convulsed with the spasms wracking her body. Though it might take more than a little luck this time, she decided ruefully. She must have dug in pretty hard when she hit, probably had internal injuries.

‘Proc,” she mouthed again silently, ‘med scan.’

An instant later, the computer in her combat suit was humming happily away as she lay back and tried not to move too much. Her eyes glowed faintly as the HUD lit up, the thin film of organic light emitting diodes (OLED) in her cornea displaying the results of the scan.

She wasn’t hurt beyond the suit’s ability to do some good, thankfully. The internal systems produced near-infrared light at varying intensities, which were feeding energy directly to her cellular structure in order to promote healing as a secondary command was issued, and she felt the warmth spread deep into her, biological bacteria cued to mobilize in support of her white blood cells and other bodily defenders. Sorilla just lay back as it went to work, wondering what had happened to her team.

They had jumped together, drifting into planetary orbit from well past the Lagrange Five point, suits on minimum life support as they made the eight-hour approach on momentum alone. Nothing should have been able to detect them in the carbon nano-mesh of their combat suits, and it seemed that it had worked according to plan.

At first.

They’d made entry on schedule, burning up their ablative armor as they fell through the thickening atmosphere of the planet, looking for all the universe like a small handful of debris burning up from the friction. Everything by the numbers, right up until they hit 20,000 meters.

The air itself had exploded around them then, brilliant white flashes of light that tore the sky apart around them.

No smoke, no trail to follow back to their source, the fire just exploded from nowhere in their midst. Suit lights had gone off in her HUD, each one representing someone she’d trained and lived with for over a decade, and Aida’s eyes were coated with moisture as she closed them. She’d been caught in a near miss that had blown her completely off course and knocked her out even through the armor of her suit.

She remembered waking up when her chute deployed on its own, jerked around by the sudden deceleration before it blew out and turned into nothing more than a runaway streamer. She’d opened her eyes just in time to see the green canopy of the jungle rushing up at her, and then she hit the branches, snapping through the foliage on her way to the ground, and everything went dark again as a splitting burst of agonizing light tore through her head.

Sorilla slumped as consciousness left her again, oblivious to the continued operation of her combat suit as it went about its attempt to heal her injuries.

*****

“This way…”

“Are you sure? I can’t figure out where we are…”

“It’s this way.”

Two men cut their way through the undergrowth, the lead man grimly hacking at the thick vines as the one following him grumbled and complained.

“Don’t know why we’re out here anyway. You saw the explosions…everyone did. Nothing made it down. Not the army, not the supplies…We’re on our own.”

The lead man didn’t reply as he continued forging on through the undergrowth, hacking away with one steady swing after another until he pushed out into a clearing. He paused at the edge, causing the man following too close behind to run into him.

“Hey! What the hell?”

“Shut up.”

The voice was calm, no inflection in it, but it stopped the second man cold.

The clearing was mostly empty, but only mostly. Against a thick tree about ten meters away, a figure in mottled black and grey was resting, resting or something else. The face and armor were clearly female, her eyes closed as she lay unmoving against the thick Hayden tree at her back.

“Oh, Jeez…” the second man muttered. “Is she…?”

The first, a man named Jerry Reed frowned. “I don’t know. Let’s find out.”

He stepped fully into the clearing, noting that some distance from the tree there was a helmet, probably with a pressure seal from the looks of it. It, too, was mottled in random shades of gray, looking like it had passed through a fire and been burnt up. There was no glass visor, just a solid, black shield over where the face would go.

Impersonal. Intimidating. Almost evil looking.

He stopped by the helmet, eyes casting to either side and then finally looking up.

Way up.

“We’ll have to get that,” Jerry said after a moment.

“Get what?” the second man, a baker by the name of Thomas Burns, asked as he followed Jerry’s gaze. “Oh holy crap!”

Above them, tangled in the canopy about thirty meters up, was a black case that looked to be about the size of a coffin in length and width, but only about half a meter thick. They could see a hole torn through the normally tightly woven canopy, exposing the blue-green sky above.

“How the hell are we going to get that?”

Jerry ignored the question and moved instead to the unmoving figure. He knelt by her, noting the close-cropped hair and the surprisingly unmarred skin that was exposed from her neck up. He’d have expected someone to look much worse after what she must have been through. He checked her pulse then frowned thoughtfully as he pried open first one chocolate-colored eye, and then the other.

“She’s alive. Looks concussed,” he said. “Help me get the case down, we’re taking her back to camp.”

*****

When the world came back to Sorilla again, she could move, though it wasn’t pleasant. She resisted the urge to activate the military-grade implants in her body and instead forced herself up to a sitting position with nothing but her own muscles and determination. Nausea assaulted her as she did, making her head swim, and she groaned silently.

Concussion.

She must have hit her head on the way down.

Any hit that could do that through her helmet would have squashed her head open like a melon if not for the armor. She forced her eyes open, even as the urge to vomit persisted, and looked around carefully.

It wasn’t much. In the dim light that filtered in, she could tell that it wasn’t much more than a hut, really. The sort of thing that still existed deep in the jungles on Earth, among tribesmen who either resisted the pressures to join the modern world or were protected from them by more “progressive” governments and corporate entities.

She’d spent more than a few years of her life in similar surroundings, usually right before or right after someone tried to kill her.

The more things change, she sighed as she rubbed her eyes, trying to keep that sensation of moving at bay, and queried her on board processor silently. ‘Proc, log. Motion. Since last command.’

The little computer obeyed in its eternally cheerful way, showing her a map of her movements as gathered from the GPS satellite network that still hung in orbit, as well as dead reckoning and inertial systems.

One hundred and fifty kilometers east-northeast of her landing point.

Someone had performed a lot of work to get her here, dragging her through the jungle around them. Unless they had emergency response vehicles, of course. Somehow, though, that didn’t seem the case. She lay back, still talking silently to her constant companion, dumb though the tiny computer was. ‘Proc, med scan.’

The scan ran through again, giving much the same information as before, only this time it noted the concussion with a bland notation warning her not to fall asleep.

Stupid machine.

She killed the readout, the glow fading from her eyes as the twin displays returned to their clear state, and proceeded to do her own little medical scan. She sat up again, head still swimming, but she forced the sensation away as she put light pressure on her ribs, arms, then legs. The sharp pain in her side told her that the medical scan was right on the money there, but it wasn’t as serious as the computer reported.

She could deal.

Sorilla grunted with the exertion but managed to swing her legs off the makeshift bunk she had been left on and planted her feet firmly on the floor.

‘Proc,’ she mouthed silently, her eyes glowing again as the system shifted readiness states, ‘system check.’

The computer instantly displayed the data on her right eye HUD, while the left lit up with a schematic of her body with check status of all major systems, inside and out. Implants, armor, and basic equipment checked out clear, but her eyes were drawn to the power display settings.

Twenty-two percent on her armor.

That was less than four hours at combat states, maybe a day if she didn’t use any of the carbon musculature chains or advanced sensors. She needed to find the rest of her equipment.

‘Proc, locator pulse. Two hundred meter range. Initiate.’

Her silent command was received and accepted by the implanted computer processor that rested just inside her rib cage, floating in the protection of her internal tissues and the surrounding cage of bone made up by her ribs. The low power pulse went out, sending a Radio Frequency Identification Pulse similar to the systems used in inventory management systems, and waited patiently for the reply.

A long list immediately appeared as her eyes glowed again, recording every piece of consumer electronics within two hundred meters, along with several items that appeared to be from widely scattered sources. Everything from children’s toys to farming equipment.

Those were interesting, in an abstract way, but what she was looking for were listed right on the top, in a totally separate category.

Inventory Report Results : Military Equipment

1X–Combat Helm–Assigned–Sergeant Sorilla Aida–MSIN# 2735639264

1X–M140 Assault Rifle –Assigned–Sergeant Sorilla Aida–MSIN# 2735639264

40X–75Rnd Mag, 12.9mm SP-E–Assigned Sergeant Sorilla Aida–MSIN# 2735639264

1X–Field Charging Kit–Assigned–Sergeant Sorilla Aida–MSIN# 2735639264

3000X–12.9mm SP-E Bulk Pack–Assigned - Sergeant Sorilla Aida–MSIN# 2735639264

The list went on, but she ignored it, flickering her eyes to select the military category, then demanded a positional lock from the display menus.

She had it within seconds.

Twenty meters, bearing fifteen degrees from magnetic north.

Life-modeling software reported as many as 500 people, but more likely under 400 in the immediate area. Sorilla didn’t know whether to be concerned or relieved by that, however. It all depended, she supposed, on whether they were friend or foe. She would have to find that out quickly. Before that, however, she had to get her gear.

‘Proc, full combat power.’

The suit didn’t hum, there was no external change in the equipment at all, but Sorilla felt the shift just the same. She looked up, eyes glowing a faint green as the displays implanted in her corneas lit up with an infrared overlay that rendered the interior with a daylight clarity, then added in the system’s analysis of the structure as well.

Neither she, nor her computer, thought much of the construction.

She rose to her feet, the carbon chains in her combat suit expanding to take up her weight, making her feel like she was almost weightless on her feet. A wave of dizziness washed over her, but she again fought it off and then was forced to manage with the pain in her ribcage as well.

‘Proc, enable spinal shunt.’

The subvocalized order seemed innocuous, but its effect was instantly felt as all sense of pain from her limbs and torso stopped like someone had flipped a light switch. She straightened unconsciously; the weight of the pain lifting from her shoulders, then looked up.

The dizziness persisted; it was based above the spinal shunt after all, but she could deal. She’d have to. First step: get armed.

“Twenty meters, north by northeast,” she whispered, dropping into a crouch as she raised her arm to shield her head. “Let’s go…”

She uncoiled like a snapping spring, rising into the air like a rocket from a tube, arms folded over her head, and struck the flimsy roof of the hut she was in with enough force to shatter the local wood into nothing more than splinters. Her feet touched down on the edge of the rooftop with an easy grace just as her now-enhanced hearing began to pick up surprised voices.

“What the hell was…?”

“Look out!”

“It’s an attack!”

She ignored the screaming, her mind plotting her next jump, then was airborne before her thoughts could catch up to her instincts. The twenty meters that separated her from her equipment was bridged in a single leap, her figure soaring through the low hanging jungle branches, snapping them aside with ease.

The target was another hut of similar construction, so she flexed her legs just before she landed, then snapped them out hard. The rooftop splintered under the blow, and Sorilla fell through amid the debris. She landed on the hard-packed, earthen floor, falling into a crouch as someone screamed, automatically pivoting in the direction of the sound.

Only a child. She blinked, somewhat surprised as the young girl screamed again, and voices outside became more alarmed.

Sorilla ignored the girl, turning in the direction her HUD said her equipment was located, and instantly spotted the helm where it was resting on the equipment case she’d jumped with. She dropped to one knee, plucking the helmet up instantly as it opened up on its dual clamshell hinges and fitting it over her face. The helm snapped shut instantly, causing her to wince as she felt it pull at a stray strand of hair, so she twisted her head slightly to yank the offending follicle out by the root as she snapped both hands down to unlock her equipment case.

Her rifle was loaded and locked, so she swept it up into her arms as she rose to her feet and turned toward the door just as it burst open.

*****

The girl’s scream came from the central hut, what passed for a town hall since the invasion had driven them out of their homes. There were four men nearby, and they ran for the hut, throwing the makeshift door open wide as they rushed in. Those that didn’t rush in waited, staring in mild, though not overwhelming, concern.

What had attacked them had never chosen to chase them into the jungle, and while there had been other scares, they always turned out to be local animal life. Dangerous, but nothing that they weren’t equipped to handle.

That changed when the first man came flying back out through the wall, splintering the branch construction of the hut like a toothpick toy. A woman screamed, more men rushed up, this time pausing to retrieve weapons, and the wall shattered open again as a second flew out through another section before the first had even touched the ground.

Yells erupted from inside the hut, and a child’s scream echoed again as the sentries rushed in with the rifles ready, the long guns against their shoulders as they paused at varying distances from the hut and waited.

Movement startled them, and a rifle went off as a figure in black stepped clear of the building, setting off a fusillade as they each opened up, recognizing that the figure was armed.

“Look out!”

“Run!”

*****

Combat Analysis Complete, Sorilla read off her left corneal implant while the right fed her targeting data on the incoming shots even before they ricocheted off her armor. Threat level negligible.

Hunting rifles, Sorrilla thought as she raised the muzzle of her battle rifle into the air, clearing its line of fire so she wouldn’t kill anyone accidentally. Her eyes flickered around to confirm the readings, even as she calmly ignored a fifty-caliber hunting slug that caromed off her helmet. It wouldn’t do to kill the people she was here to check up on; the thought of the paperwork that kind of incident would birth gave Sorilla shivers. She’d be behind a desk for months, even if she was cleared of wrongdoing.

Besides, the black and featureless mask that her helm presented to them wasn’t even remotely the weakest spot on the armor. The high-powered civilian round did little more than scrape off some of the smoke-gray residue of the ablative material she’d burned up on entry.

On the other hand, the impact of the round twisted her head minutely but sharply, crossing her eyes as even that small motion made her feel like her brains were ricocheting around the inside of her skull. Again, Sorilla found herself waging a battle against her own body as she forced down the desire to vomit and pass out. Time enough for that later, she had a job to do.

She confirmed the scan by eye, quickly deciding that the computer was right in its deduction. The processors implanted in both her and her armor had analyzed the speed, composition, and sound of the incoming rounds and declared them to be civilian hunting rifles. Powerful enough to down any animal you might face, but not a match for military-grade armor.

She kept the muzzle of the rifle up, left eye flickering to the power charge status of her armor as she held out her right hand in a gesture to stop. “Cease fire!”

The fusillade of rifle rounds fell off after a moment, the men behind the weapons slowly raising their heads from the rifle butts, a look of wonder on their faces.

While she waited for them to stop shooting her, Sorilla’s right eye carefully noted the accuracy percentages while she made mental notes on what training they would require if she needed to turn them into a semi-decent militia.

Not bad, she decided, noting that three of the five shooters had hit her with every shot. The other two had missed once apiece but were farther back by a factor of three and had missed only their initial shots. Could be worse, could be better. Given that I wasn’t moving, I’d rather they didn’t miss at all

The sound of shots was dying down, the echoes fading as she dropped her rifle, catching the weapon by the fore-stock and setting its butt against the ground. “Who’s in charge here?”

A moment passed, the fear and tension palpable, but finally a man with graying hair stepped out of a nearby hut.

“That would be me,” he said loudly enough for everyone to hear.

Sorilla’s gaze took him in, sizing him up by eye even as her processors took electronic stock of him. He was probably around his fifty-fifth percentile, about 112 Solar years, though her programs read him as sixty-eighth percentile. The computers often misjudged ages on colony worlds, their software unreliable when a sun-weathered face was presented to them. He was fit, both she and her processors agreed on that, and her electronics told her that his heart was beating fast but steady and strong, so he wasn’t prone to panic.

He had no implants, at least none that responded to an RIF request, but that wasn’t as unusual out here on a colony world as it would be back home. Implants were both expensive and required extensive medical expertise to properly insert, and while they were normally good for a lifetime, having that medical expertise available in case of emergency was highly recommended.

Her system flashed names and faces of known colony personnel across her left eye, but he didn’t match up with anyone. Again, not a surprise since, unfortunately, colony records were a little more spotty than she might have hoped for. Hayden’s World was a second gen colony, working on its third generation. The man she was facing had probably been born here, she decided, and no one had bothered to update the files.

“Your name, sir?” she asked, keeping her tone crisp and respectful, like she was talking to a keyboard cowboy colonel who might take offense at any perceived relaxation of discipline.

He stopped about ten meters from her, blocking the line of fire of at least one of his men. She made a note of it to bring up later.

“Samuel,” he told her. “My name is Samuel Becker. Who are you?”

“Sergeant Sorrilla Aida, US Army Special Forces, currently assigned to Fleet SOCOM out of Earth Space,” she replied.

There was a pause as the words sank into the people who had begun to timidly reappear from the huts around them.

“The Fleet is here?”

“Is there a rescue party?”

“Where are the rest?”

The man who called himself Samuel held up his hand, his face grim. “Let her speak.”

Sorilla nodded to him gratefully, then tuned her suit systems so everyone would hear her. “The Fleet is holding outside the heliopause, waiting on intel. There is no rescue party yet. We have been unable to acquire any scans of the planet or detect any transmissions from the surface. Everything we’ve used beyond basic optics has been jammed. I’m here to find out what is happening and prepare a report for Fleet command.”

“We’ve been damned well invaded! That’s what’s happening!”

She ignored the yell, feeling another wave of dizziness sweep over her as she stood there, relying on the powered components of her suit’s artificial muscles to hold her upright. Even so, something must have been visible to the outside observer, because Samuel snapped his fingers.

“Tara! Help her.”

A redheaded woman rushed forward, ignoring the threat of Sorilla’s weapon, and took a hold of her elbow. “You shouldn’t be up. I checked you when you were brought in…You are the same woman right?”

The woman’s smile was mildly sarcastic but appeared mostly harmless. Sorilla smiled back, though her blank helm relayed none of the warm gesture and showed on the same anonymous cold exterior.

“Yeah. And I know. Concussion, some fractured ribs, and lots of heavy bruising. I’ll heal,” she told the redhead.

“I’m sure you will,” Tara replied. “However, you’ll heal better lying down.”

“All the same thing in a suit,” Sorilla responded, but she allowed herself to be led back to the hut she had woken in.

“Alright, everyone…back to what you were doing.” Samuel clapped his hands behind her, “You’ll all be apprised of the situation just as soon as we find out ourselves!”

*****

Concussions were a stone cold bitch.

Sorilla couldn’t move by the second day. Her head was nothing more than a mass of pain that throbbed with each beat of her heart. The homegrown bacteria in her bloodstream that poured bioluminescent energy into her cells were rapidly healing everything else, but the process was only making the head trauma worse for the moment.

Her blood pressure was up; she didn’t need the medical display on her left eye HUD to tell her that, which would have been a good thing except for the bruising on the inside of her skull. That was setting things ablaze inside her head and screwing up her voluntary control over her implants and armor systems.

She’d had to power down the armor anyway, so that wasn’t too bad. At least she wasn’t a danger to anyone else from the muscle twitches setting off a power amped response. There wasn’t much she could do about the implant controls, however.

In the middle of the night, when the twitches first hit, she just tried to close her eyes and ignore them. Mixed signals sent information flashing across the OLED screens embedded in her eyes, filling her world with a hallucinogenic morass, turning her feverish dreams into unending nightmares as the neural misfires rolled uncontrollable images across the inside of her eyelids.

By morning, the local medic woman found her rolling in her bunk, feverish from both her injuries and the heat being poured into her body by the lifesaving systems in her suit and the bacteria in her body.

“God…she’s burning up,” Tara whispered, pushing a lock of dark hair from the soldier’s forehead, her hand coming back slick with sweat.

“Can you do anything?”

“I don’t know,” she replied, not looking up as the voice of Samuel Becker sounded from behind her. “She shouldn’t be this feverish.”

“Is it an infection?”

“No. I think it’s the concussion…but there hasn’t been time for an infection to set in…”

“She’s equipped with portable infrareds and nanite cell regen.”

Tara looked over her shoulder, eyes wide. “In this suit? But the power drain…”

“Is probably quite high,” Samuel replied, cutting her off, “but I imagine that her gear is a few generations ahead of what colonists get.”

“It might be killing her,” the medic frowned. “I…I just can’t tell.”

“She didn’t sleep last night…” Samuel replied. “The sentries said she tossed and turned all night. They’re spooked.”

“By what? She’s just one woman.”

Samuel’s lips twitched. “Well, they said her eyes glowed.”

The medic frowned, then leaned forward and pushed the soldier’s eyelids open. A moment later she hissed, leaning back, and sat stock still for a moment.

“What is it?”

“She has ocular implants…They’re active,” Tara replied, thinking furiously. “Probably have been all night…She’s been seeing god knows what the entire night. No wonder she hasn’t gotten any sleep.”

“Is that causing her fever?”

“It’s not helping.” the medic replied, shaking her head. “I…I don’t know what to do.”

“Can’t she shut them off?” Becker asked, his voice becoming more concerned.

“If she could, she would have. Implants this advanced, they’re controlled by mapping unique neural responses…” Tara said softly, still thinking, “Oh, lord…The concussion. It’s got to have skewed her responses. No…she can’t turn it off.”

“What do we do?”

“Send some men down to the stream for water…We’ll have to cool her down. Her own medical systems are killing her now.”

Chapter 2

Hell is a state of being, not a physical place.

In all of the universe, there are many places that fit the human definition of hell. Worlds filled with molten rivers and sulfur air, ice planets where the oxygen condenses into liquid and freezes like water, and barren moons with no air to regulate the environment and the temperature fluxes from zero to 1,500 degrees kelvin in a matter of moments.

But for all that, hell is not a physical place. Those places will kill you far quicker than a bullet from a gun, and with more mercy. Hell is being caught in a nightmare, out of control, out of your mind.

Sorilla Aida knew hell all too well; she was a frequent visitor.

This time, it was filled with numbers: statistics, heartbeats, footfalls, voices, inventory receipts, and casualties.

The heat was there this time, too, burning from the inside.

Last time it had been cold, she remembered in a moment of lucidity. She hadn’t been able to stop shivering then. Not this time. She was slick with sweat, and the numbers in her own personal hell reported that most of it was being recycled back into the liquid pouch that lined the back of her armor.

The numbers just wouldn’t go away, no matter how much she tried.

‘Proc, sleep mode,’ she mouthed in her feverish dream, again demanding that the system shut down.

It did, flickering away in an instant, only to light back up a few seconds later when her face muscles jumped involuntarily.

She wanted to scream, a desire that built up deep down inside her, but she kept silent. Always stay quiet. Someone had told her that, a long time ago, but the name escaped her for the moment. The name did, but not the lesson. She let the urge to scream bubble and well deep down inside her but only moaned slightly as she twisted her head and felt the pain rush through it.

Hell was so hot this time.

She wished she was back in the cold hell, just for a little while.

Sergeant Sorilla Aida knew hell, though, and knew that wishes were worthless there. Hell fed on wishes, turning their false hope into new torture.

She knew that but couldn’t help making them anyway. That was the hell of it, after all.

*****

Water flowed from the stream to buckets to be poured on the feverish woman’s face and head every few minutes, a steady stream of people bringing the water in from the mountain stream to where the young woman in charge of the group’s “medical facility” poured and dabbed the cool liquid on her patient.

As she did, the redheaded nurse puzzled over the situation. The woman’s implants had obviously gone haywire, their control inputs skewed by the concussion. The ocular implants were constantly firing, and Tara could only imagine the horror that would be.

It had been twenty hours now, at least, since the ocular displays had shorted. Twenty hours in which her patient’s body hadn’t been able to get any real rest in order to help its own healing.

Surprisingly, she was healing well other than the head injury and fever. Her ribs seemed to have firmed up, and the few cuts she’d had were already pink with healing. The infrareds she had were well-tuned, Tara could tell, and were considerably better than anything she’d had even when she had an actual hospital.

Unfortunately, infrareds were not intended for feverish patients.

“More water,” she ordered, “and bring me her equipment case…Maybe I’ll be able to find a way into it this time.”

That was a forlorn hope, unfortunately. She’d already checked the case, but there wasn’t any way she could find to get into it. She had the wrong biometrics, couldn’t get a clear scan of her patient’s iris through the clutter of the implants, and it wouldn’t take a palm scan either for some reason.

She’d try again, though.

And in the meantime, more water was the best she could do.

*****

The fever broke on the third day, after day and night of near constant treatment from the people in the camp. It had happened suddenly, and Tara almost missed it because she was worn out herself. One moment her patient was wet and sweating, the next she was wet and shivering. Not uncommon in some cases, but it was the first time for this patient. After that, she checked the temperature and slumped in relief when it came back several degrees below the last, almost normal.

The flow of water stopped, and within the hour the soldier stirred.

“Are you feeling better?” Tara asked her softly.

The soldier nodded slowly, her voice halting. “Guess I’m back…again.”

Tara frowned. “What?”

She smiled tiredly. “Nothing.”

“Can you shut down your implants now?”

The soldier blinked, her jaw moving, and then the glow in her eyes faded. Tara watched intently, and the soldier looked back at her with an intense gaze that she found discomforting. Long seconds passed, and when the glow didn’t return, the soldier slumped back and closed her eyes.

“Thank god…”

Her whispered words were almost inaudible, but Tara heard them well enough. She let out a breath of relief herself as her soldier patient slipped into a sleep after more than thirty hours and didn’t move again.

“Thank god,” the nurse agreed, closing her own eyes as she rubbed them tiredly.

She got up and grabbed the closest person. “Watch her. Come get me when she wakes up. I need about a week’s sleep, and she probably needs two.”

*****

She didn’t take two weeks, not even two days, not quite anyway. Sorilla awoke after thirty-two hours, her fever well and truly broken and her body healed and regenerated by the mechanical and biological systems she had been assigned. The light was streaming in through the walls and ceiling, as well as under the doorframe and between the windows. The shades had been pulled on the windows, so they were about the only squares of black against the streaming light.

She flipped the toggle for her Heads Up Displays, navigating the neurological interface with practiced ease, and closed her eyes again as a systems status glowed under the thin stretch of skin.

Damn it, she thought grimly.

Suit power was all but shot, barely three percent above the minimum unlock state. She killed the extraneous systems and toggled the suit lock to unseal the armor. The magnetic seals broke silently, but she left them as they were for the moment while she took stock of her surroundings.

There was a man in the room, snoring softly as he leaned against the far wall. His rifle set about three meters from where he’d settled in for the night. She twitched slightly at that, sighing silently. Chances were the weapon didn’t have a round chambered either, and she wouldn’t have been completely shocked to find that the magazine wasn’t in the receiver, though she couldn’t see from where she lay.

It was a hunting weapon, used for food or protection, not war. So the man was a hunter, not a soldier. First rule of weapons for a hunter, she reminded herself, was safety. Don’t keep your weapon loaded, don’t store ammunition in the same place as the weapon, and keep trigger locks on it until it’s ready for use.

Good rules for a hunter who may have children in the home, bad rules for a warzone.

She broke the seal on her armor, the chest flap making a sucking sound as it pulled away from her flesh. The oxygenated gel that both connected her body to the suit’s internal sensors and provided her with another line of defense against injury and infection clung to her skin as the armor pulled away, giving Sorilla that familiar sensation of being skinned as she peeled the segments back.

The noise should have woken the “guard” posted to the hut, but he didn’t do more than snort and shift as she sat up, her nude form glistening in the streaming light as globules of suit gel slid off her skin.

Her head hurt when she moved, but it wasn’t unendurable. She lifted herself out of the armor and planted her feet on the packed dirt floor, where they instantly picked up a coating of earth and pebbles that clung to the remaining gel, piling up clumps of grains between her toes. She ignored it, wiping her skin clear of the majority of the gel with the ridge of her hand before clearing her throat.

The guard started slightly, then just stared as his eyes came into focus and he found himself looking at a nude woman just a few meters away. His stare intensified, eyes widening, slowly climbing her form while taking long “rest” breaks at her hips and breasts, and then finally made it all the way up to her head.

Sorilla cocked her head to the left, her expression far from amused. “Get me my gear case.”

He nodded slowly, not moving.

“Now.”

He moved. Scrambling for the door. Sorilla sighed, shaking her head as he left, and walked over to the rifle he’d left behind. She picked it up and quietly checked the breech. Empty, as she’d guessed. The magazine was locked, however, which was almost better than she’d expected.

Of course, that meant he’d just left a loaded weapon with the person he was apparently guarding.

Oy. She rubbed the bridge of her nose tiredly. Some days it doesn’t pay to get out of bed.

*****

Tara rushed into the humble hut a few minutes after the man had come running out of it, dragging a towel and a small medical bag along with her. She found the soldier in the process of calmly wiping a blue-green gel from her skin, using the ridge of her hand as a scraping tool with methodical motions.

The sergeant was a tall woman, slim but noticeably muscled. Her hair was cut shorter than was fashionable, though not to the shaven extreme that was often implied by entertainment dramas. Her body was probably fitter than would be considered attractive, the tough musculature development of her upper torso tightening and flattening her breasts, for example. While not bulging to the extent of professional bodybuilders, she was hard cut and more solidly blocky than most female fashions idealized.

She also had absolutely no concern for her nudity, Tara noticed idly. As a nurse, nudity didn’t have much effect for her either, so she merely set her medical kit down and handed the towel across.

“Your supplies are being brought,” she said softly, opening the medical bag. “How are you feeling?”

“Better,” Sorilla replied, taking the towel and wiping herself down with hard, scrubbing motions. “Good to be out of the mummy case, and a lot better to be in control of my implants again.”

“Does that happen often?” Tara asked softly. “The loss of control?”

“Never before, to me at least,” Sorilla said, not looking up. The rough towel was taking almost as much skin off her body as it was gel residue, but that was what she wanted. The dead skin cells had built up over the past several days, and she was in dire need of a thorough cleansing.

Any further questions were interrupted by the arrival of two men carrying the coffin-sized case that Sorilla had jumped in with. She ignored their stares as she tossed the towel aside and palmed the biometric identification on the case to open it. It queried her Near Field Communications (NFC) implant, got the answer it wanted, and then slid open on compressed air pistons, hissing even as she reached in and drew out a pair of dark pants.

She slid them on, cinching the waist and buckling them up with two simple motions, and retrieved an assault vest. Once that was in place, she flashed a wry smile at the observers. “Better?”

Only Tara smiled back, nodding. “Much. Less distracting, at least. You might find the color to be a little sweltering here, though. We prefer lighter colors and clothing. It reflects the heat.”

“Heat’s not my main concern,” Sorilla replied, attaching a bracer to her left wrist. “But these are versatile.”

Tara was about to ask but was spared the need when a simple tap on the bracer caused the clothing to shift colors to a light tan and khaki combination that was more suited to the jungle heat.

“I’m impressed,” the nurse admitted, half smiling.

Sorilla smiled briefly, then frowned and looked over at her nurse. “What happened here?”

Tara was silent for another moment, her eyes falling as she considered the question. “It happened a few months ago…no warning at all. Several buildings around the main colony site…well, I don’t know really. Some of us think they exploded, but I was there. There was no smoke, no fire…Just dust and debris flying…”

Same as what hit us, Sorilla thought, her expression pensive.

“They landed just after that…We couldn’t see them, but they ripped through the colony center like…monsters,” Tara went on. “Things would be normal, then suddenly it would get cold and there would be this sudden quiet…and then, blood and dying…people were panicking, talk of ghosts and demons…it was…”

Tara closed her eyes and shook her head slightly, unwilling to say more for a moment.

Active camouflage units, Sorilla filled in mentally, trying to determine the nature of the weapons in use from the nurse’s descriptions. White noise generators, maybe environmental power converters as well. Never seen any that were portable like that before, though.

“We abandoned the colony within hours…ran into the jungle. They chased us, but it’s a big jungle…”

“And your people know it well,” Sorilla said without question.

“Of course,” Tara shrugged. “The main colony site had been there for almost a hundred and ten years. This is our world.”

That basically told the whole story, as far as Sorilla was concerned. Her units were generally deployed solely to Earth, given that most of the war fighting in the known systems happened there. Terrorist groups, religious fundamentalists, and “freedom fighters” in the Middle East, Africa, South America, and Asia kept her and her peers well-trained and occupied.

And the various assignments she’d had into those areas had taught her one thing. You don’t chase the locals into their backyard, not without a secure firebase and lots of backup. Once the colonists made it into the jungle, they were playing on their home field, not the enemies’. Within the city, those advantages were easy enough to negate.

Sensors could pick people out among buildings, preplanning could outline strategies, contingencies, and all sorts of nastiness for the colonists within the static environment of the colony. In the living jungle, however, those advantages were out the window. Local fauna and flora would scramble and degrade even the most advanced sensors to ranges of little use, turning the attackers’ advantage against them and returning the home court to the defenders.

Sorilla automatically consulted the intel that had been preloaded into her implants before the mission, calling up the location of the main colony site. “Your central site is about a hundred kilometers due south of here.”

It hadn’t really been a question, but the nurse answered anyway.

“That’s right.”

“I’m going to need a local guide. Just one,” the soldier said as she laced up a pair of shin-high combat boots and straightened up.

The movement of standing straight made her dizzy, and Sorilla closed her eyes for a moment, wavering in place.

“Oh no, you are not ready for any treks through the jungle!” the nurse objected, her soft voice growing sharp and commanding.

“Doesn’t matter,” she replied, wincing as she pushed the feeling down. “Concussions take time to heal…We’re out of that. I’ll need that guide.”

Tara frowned, grimacing herself, but only sighed aloud. “You’ll need to talk to Samuel.”

“Then let’s do that, shall we?”

*****

She got her guide, despite the protests of Tara, a man named Jerry Reed, whom she was told was one of the better pathfinders. They left within an hour of her walking out of the hut she’d slept in for three days, against the advice of the local medic and her own implants, but she knew that time was more important of a factor than it had begun as.

The Fleet would wait out past the heliopause only so long before coming in, and when they did, she had to have things ready and waiting for them.

That was what brought her to the knoll upon which she currently crouched, the local pathfinder laying stretched out on the ground beside her, looking down at the colony site.

“It’s quiet,” Jerry said, reaching for a pair of imagers.

She restrained his hand, shaking her head. “Don’t.”

“What? Why?”

“Those use active lasers for range finding,” she told him, eyes fixed on the site that lay six klicks down from their location. “Right equipment on the other side and that’s like wearing a nice big sign saying ‘shoot me’.”

Jerry grimaced, laying the imagers aside. “So how are we supposed to see anything from here?”

“Take this,” she said, pulling a small chunk of plastic from a pouch and handing it to him.

He recognized it easily enough as a portable computer system, its flexible screen tucked away inside the protective plastic shell. He pulled it open with a jerk, shaking his head. “What good is this going…? Holy…”

“It’s linked to the reverse imaging system built into my corneal implants,” she told him as he found himself looking at a close up of the colony’s center of government. “I’ve got liquid lenses floating over my eyes…a little computer adjustment to the surface tension and…”

The scene zoomed in even closer, focusing on a window over six kilometers away.

“And in we go,” she said, her voice dropping. “Looks deserted.”

The pathfinder nodded. “That’s what I said. Quiet.”

“Why hit the colony if they weren’t going to move in?” Sorilla asked rhetorically.

Jerry snorted, “Better question. Why hit the colony at all? There’s nothing of extreme value here…some plants that can be processed into some useful pharmaceuticals, but nothing spectacular. Local geology isn’t anything special either, richer than Earth for metals and such, but nothing compared to any asteroid belt in any of a thousand stars within jump range.”

Sorilla had to remind herself that Jerry wasn’t the “classic” definition of a pathfinder. That type of man and woman had really faded from the scene hundreds of years earlier, the last true versions of them dying out as the last continental wilderness was settled and “civilized” on Earth. A few still existed in odd places back home, but they were rare and were the exception rather than the rule now. It was out on the colonies that pathfinders and their traditions still existed and always would, but they had different jobs now.

Hunting wasn’t a priority here. The local fauna weren’t edible anyway, so Jerry’s job was that of a surveyor with a little botanist tossed in for good measure. He had to know the rifle he had slung at his side, to be sure, since the local animals weren’t always the most pleasant types, but odds were he knew his way around a pocket processor a lot more.

“There aren’t more than three worlds with jump range of Earth that can support life,” Sorilla replied. “That’s just basic statistics. Hayden’s World is three jumps out, and in that entire sphere, we’ve only found a total of fifteen planets we can live on…after a fashion.”

“And Hayden is the most Earthlike we’ve ever found,” Jerry replied dryly. “I know the story.”

“Well, you might be looking at a flat out land grab,” she told him. “Still one or two countries back home that might think they can get away with it.”

Jerry shook his head. “You weren’t there when the colony was hit. Those weren’t humans, they were ghosts.”

Sorilla didn’t respond as she continued examining the colony from a distance. There was no such thing as ghosts, she knew. If there were, she would have seen them by now. Some of the things she seen and done would have sent them back to haunt her.

Just the same, as she looked at the apparently abandoned colony site through the intense magnification afforded her by the liquid drops her implants had drawn up in a bubble over each eye, she had to admit something.

The Hayden capital looked a lot like a ghost town.

In the sweltering heat of the jungle sun, Sorilla shivered a bit but put the thought aside and moved on.

“Wait here.”

“What? Where are you going?”

“I’m going in closer,” she told her guide. “If I’m not back by morning, head back to camp. I can find my own way back now.”

Jerry glared at her. “Like hell! This is breeding season, dammit! You step in the wrong pond out here and you’ll be eaten alive before the Kyraoptis realize you aren’t digestible!”

“I was briefed on the local fauna, I’ll avoid the water,” she promised. “Just wait here.”

Then she simply turned and stepped off the mound they were on, gliding easily down into the trees and vanishing into the jungle. Jerry watched with grudging respect, knowing that he could have matched the move but probably with less grace.

“Damn it,” he muttered, shaking his head. “All the way out here, right in sight of home…and now I’m supposed to wait.”

*****

Even the persistent headache she was battling with didn’t keep Sorilla from making the six-kilometer hike to the edge of the colony in a little under thirty minutes. She paused before she would have lost the cover of the jungle and found a place to rest as the sun continued its drop toward the horizon.

She and Jerry had made the hundred-klick hike out in two days, actually just a little more than one, but as they’d neared the colony, they had continually slowed their pace. Now, with the buildings only a stone’s throw away, Sorilla slowed to a halt and hunkered down. The active camouflage built into her vest and pants was now a dark blue-green to match the color of the large, fuzzy leaves of the alien jungle she was waiting in, and the heat began to climb as the material she wore absorbed more and more of the incoming wavelengths.

First rule of warfare after staying alive was keeping your head down. An old way to say keep out of sight, and the best way she knew to do that was to send nothing back to where someone might notice it. No light, no sound, nothing at all if it could be helped. The sun baked her in the shade of the jungle canopy, but Sergeant Sorilla Aida waited it out. She wished she hadn’t had to leave her suit back in camp to trickle charge off its solar cells, however. Its environmental control systems had spoiled her.

She smirked slightly into the wavy shimmer of the heat-baked jungle air and squirmed a little tighter into the tree she’d picked out, making herself that much smaller and, hopefully, harder to tell apart from the alien plants. Too much comfort in her life, she supposed, if she were already whining about a little heat and sweat.

She watched the shadows lengthen until the time for waiting was over and then pushed off the tree and dropped easily to the ground. Before setting out, she swallowed a pair of analgesic tablets, hoping to push the ache in her skull a little further into the background, and then she began to move forward into the colony as the sounds of the jungle night began to come alive around her.

Approaching the colony, Sorilla shifted her grip on her assault weapon, moving slowly along the side of a building and keeping to the shadows as she looked slowly around. Her eyes had the faint, green glow that indicated her OLED Heads Up Displays were operating, their molecular-thin film filtering the light spectrum as it passed, overlaying infrared heat emanations on the regular light of the colony’s streets. Beyond a couple meters, the gleam of the OLED light was invisible, but within that range she looked like a supernatural demon on the prowl.

The result from her point of view was a multicolor spectacular that showed the buildings and world around her according to their heat dissipation levels in the night air. The concrete was a steady, even yellow, while the metal was already dropping from the dull pink to a cooler blue as the material shed its heat quicker.

Nothing alive, however. Just the predictable heat decay of a ghost town in the dark jungle night.

She moved around a corner, rifle to her shoulder, leading the way with its muzzle, and swept the next street and buildings with smooth, economical motions. Still nothing, though. Just a silence that felt even more unnatural after the constant life that existed in the jungles. She moved through the streets quickly, making her way to the first signs of damage from the attack.

It had been a microwave transmission tower, she could tell. The metal structure was twisted and bent, crumpled in on itself like it had been caught up in some giant’s grip and simply crushed. She quickly lost count of all the things that didn’t make sense about the scene. The debris pattern, the damage itself, hell, almost none of it was what she’d come to expect.

This wasn’t a bomb… She blinked away the thermal overlay, moving through the twisted metal of the tower, idly kicking over the microwave dish. Strange.

She moved on, heading to the center of the colony, where the next item on her list had been located.

The orbital tether had occupied the town square, though it was actually more of a town circle, a centerpiece and probably the most vital part of the colony’s community. The tether was their link to space, to home. It had been connected to a prefabricated orbital habitat that had once housed the colonists while they were en-route to Hayden’s World.

While the colonists would have been preparing themselves for planetfall, the command crew would set the “anchor.” The ten centimeter-thick, one meter-wide carbon nano-mesh tether would have been lowered in a rather dangerous procedure, and then anchored deep into the center of the chosen colony site. Once that was done, the command module’s engines were shut down and the rotation of the planet took over the job of keeping it in orbit, like a counterweight swinging on the end of a string.

She located the tether site easily enough, and much of the tether as well. The material had fallen down around the site and was lying like cable strewn around where it had fallen. She frowned, shaking her head. There wasn’t remotely enough tether lying around to account for the entire 160,000 kilometer length.

‘Proc, analyze and locate the end of the tether.’

The image of the tether was suddenly highlighted in blue as the computer in her chest began by tracing the entire length of the tether in its attempt to comply. After a few moments of this playing in the background while she continued to move through the town square, the computer chirped its victory in her ear and highlighted a section of the town.

She made her way in that direction, still keeping to the shadows despite the total lack of life so far.

The end of the tether was somewhat more spectacular than she’d expected, given that even dozens of kilometers of the cable weighed only a few hundred kilos. The end was located in a crater that had once been someone’s house, unless she was seriously mistaken. The crater had been caused by the tether car, a self-powered and autonomous vehicle that ascended and descended the carbon highway to heaven.

The car was also constructed of superstrong and ultralight materials, mostly the same carbon fiber and nano-mesh construction as the cable itself, but even so, it weighed as much as ninety-five kilometers of the cable due to its power systems and climbing motors. Weight which was entirely concentrated into one relatively compact object that must have hit with one hell of a bang.

She winced as she climbed down into the crater, forced to sling her rifle in order to make her way down the debris-strewn hole. It had struck like a bomb, was her first observation, and, ironically, it was the first bit of destruction she’d seen that made sense and followed a pattern she knew. It was textbook, actually. The impact had shattered the prefab finish of the dwelling, sending fiber-board and glass shards flying out in all directions. At the center lay the car, its structure mostly intact, long snaking coils of the tether curled all around.

The car had been quite high up when the tether was cut, she decided. Its fall had turned the vehicle into a low-yield, kinetic weapon. Low-yield, but more than enough to destroy this home and probably scare the bejesus out of anyone within three klicks.

It would have been, as she surmised, one hell of a bang.

“Tether…tether…where is the end of the tether?” She frowned, picking through the mess.

Orbital tethers were among the strongest constructions ever devised by men. They could not only haul materials the 160,000 kilometer trip from surface to orbit, but also hung on to the weight and inertia of the transfer station at their far end as they swung around the world like a lead sinker on a string. Anything that could break one would have left a mark, and she dearly wanted some evidence of what she was dealing with.

Locating the end of the carbon ribbon among the coils and coils of it that lay strewn around its fallen car was easier than one might have presumed. She started at the car and found that the tether had been cut above the car’s position, so she just tracked along that length, which was, thanks to the laws of physics, on top of the pile.

What she found when she picked up the length of ribbon cable, however, was less easy. No burn marks of a laser or energy weapon, nothing that indicated the use of explosives, and no sign of any physical cutting tools. It looked like it had simply snapped like a strand of taffy. Sorilla hadn’t even known carbon could pull like that; in fact she was reasonably sure it couldn’t.

Sorilla slumped down, sitting on the coiled cable as she held the torn end in her hands and just stared at it.

What in the name of all that’s holy happened here?

No answer came on the whispering wind, but she hadn’t hoped to be so lucky. Sorilla shook herself slightly, laying the end of the tether down as she pulled her knife from its sheath. She twisted the pommel, causing the edge of the blade to glow for a brief moment as the power core imbedded in the weapon caused the molecules along the edge to align, then she drove the blade into the tether.

When she had hacked off a foot of the tether from the end, she stuffed it in her pack and started to climb out of the pit. She was halfway up when a low rumble vibrated through the ground, too low for her own ears to hear but enough for her fingers to feel and her computer-aided senses to easily pick up.

Sorilla paused, the ridge of the crater just a few meters away, and looked around slowly as she pressed herself into the crevices of the debris and waited. She had to control her breathing, keeping it slow, even as her body demanded that she openly pant for oxygen. The sensation of the rumble passed, but now she felt like someone was sitting on her chest, squeezing the breath of life from her lungs, and her heart was beating faster as something caused it to strain for each pump.

Sorilla’s eyes flickered quickly as she looked around, the soft green glow of her implants looking out eerily from the dark paint that covered her face.

They were out there, somewhere; they had to be. Whatever this feeling was, it wasn’t natural. It wasn’t panic. someone was doing something nearby. Something to her that had the back of her mind gibbering wildly, screaming at her to fly. Run. Bolt for her life. There was no enemy here to fight, so she must flee.

She held her ground, digging deeper into the crevice and refusing to give up her position. Patience was her mantra, wait the enemy out. Minutes, hours, days, and weeks. Whatever it took, wait the enemy out.

That changed when an earsplitting crack ripped the air near her and something moved in the corner of her eye.

MOVE!

She shoved off her concrete perch, out and into the air on instinct alone, just scant instants ahead of a huge chunk of stone that slammed right into where she had been, pulverizing the locally mixed concrete back into the dust from which it came.

“Ah!” She yelped as she misjudged her landing, twisting her ankle against the uneven ground, then scrambled back into motion as she barely dodged another, smaller stone.

Her rifle swung up as she hit the ground rolling, tracking as a piece of the crater wall shifted then exploded as another chunk of rock flashed out at her. Her finger brushed the trigger of the chunky weapon, its coils of superconducting monofilament pulsing once in response. The hundred-gram chunk of depleted uranium erupting from the muzzle at barely 600 meters per second, hissing softly through the atmosphere as it was propelled on its way.

The round’s scramjet motor didn’t have a chance to ignite, its guidance fins only barely deployed before it slammed into the chunk of rock and exploded in a chemical flash. Sorilla threw up her arm as she was showered with slivers of stone and washed over by the smell of chemicals from the round’s fuel and shaped charge.

She spun, rifle seeking out another target as her eyes flashed slightly brighter as her implants made the final step up into full-blown combat mode.

Ultra-fine filaments deep in her brain matter intercepted sensory inputs she didn’t even realize she was hearing and seeing and threw the numbers down to the processor in her chest for crunching. Others sent electrical signals instead of intercepting them, regulating the adrenal response to a sustainable level as she dropped the rifle butt to her hip and rested it there as she turned slowly around.

That feeling was still there, that pressure on her chest, making her feel panicky and tense. The rumble was there, too, in the background. Her implants could still detect it, and she could hear occasional cracks from around and even below her.

Time to pull out, she thought, twisting quickly as she slung her rifle and sprinted for the crater wall. Caught in enemy territory, alone, my location blown wide open, under fire with no targets in sight. This is what the term “advancing to the rear” was invented for!

She scrambled up the concrete debris, rifle banging against her back as her ankle screamed at her, intent on getting the hell out of the deathtrap prison that the crater had become. Almost to the top, another crack of sound startled her into half turning. The motion saved her life, as she caught a fist-sized piece of stone in her right shoulder instead of the back of her neck. She went down, losing ground as she started to slide back down the crater wall. She screamed out in pain as she snapped her left arm out, snagging the lip of the crater ridge, and hung on.

Another rock slammed into her leg as she forced her right hand to join the left, pulling another scream from her throat.

“God damn it!” She ground up, pulling herself up and over the lip to sprawl out into the streets of the colony proper. “Proc! Enable Spinal Shunt!”

She hadn’t subvocalized the command, but her implanted pico-processor caught it anyway, and in an instant, all the screaming sources of pain from her lower body vanished as she rolled over to her stomach and pushed up off the ground, instantly breaking into a sprint as she headed for the jungle line.

She hadn’t gone more than ten meters when the rumble became audible, and the buildings around her began to visibly shake. Sorilla pushed hard, hoping that she wasn’t running into a trap, and dove for the perceived safety of the dense jungle with every ounce of strength she had.

Chapter 3

Jerry almost shot her when Sorilla stumbled out of the jungle, the muzzle of his rifle seeking her center mass as he’d been taught many years earlier. He recognized her before his finger reached the trigger, however, despite the glistening reflection of starlight on her face that obscured her features.

He lowered the weapon in relief, blowing out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “Damn it, Sergeant, you scared the ever living…”

He stopped as she did, frowning when she didn’t say anything.

“Are you all right?”

She dropped to her knees, her rifle falling from her hands as her arms fell numbly to her sides, and she sat back on her heels.

“Jesus!” he exclaimed, rushing forward as she started to fall. He caught her before she hit the ground and lay her down on the soft jungle floor before drawing his hands back and realizing that they were wet.

He lifted them to his face, frowning, and smelled them.

The odor was distinctive, a copper tang that he could instantly taste at the back of his throat.

Blood.

“Oh, Christ…” he muttered, eyes and mouth open wide as he looked down at the unmoving body for a moment. “Light…I need a light…have to…”

He almost jumped out of his skin when her hand snapped up and snagged his wrist, her eyes turning toward him, glowing that eerie green.

“No light,” she said. “I’ll live.”

He let a few breaths out, trying to keep his hands from shaking. “What the hell happened?”

“Don’t know,” she said, looking up at the sky from where she lay, still unmoving, on the ground. “Never seen anything like it before.”

“Did you see them? The invaders?”

She shook her head. “Didn’t see anyone. No one there to see.”

“What? There had to be…”

“No…I would’ve seen them…heard them…” Sorilla was whispering, eyes flickering wildly as she seemed to be speaking to herself. “This is…new.”

Jerry could have cried. New. She had staggered back, beaten and bloody, and all she could say was that it was “new.” God, this woman was something else. Jerry closed his eyes, trying to get a handle on his breathing and the shakes that were starting to come.

“Are you sure you’re ok?”

She snorted, shaking her head. “I said I’ll live. I’m not ok.”

“Can I do…?” He looked down helplessly.

“No…” She shook her head. “I’m already being healed. Just…settle in. It’s going to be a long night.”

He frowned. Already being…?

“What are you talking about? You don’t have your suit…”

“Don’t need it,” she smiled, her teeth black with blood. “Bacteria in my blood, already juicing up. I’m gonna be sore in the morning, but I don’t think I’ve got any ruptured organs…Nothing you could do if I did. Get some rest. Gonna need it.”

He shook his head, forcing his questions back as he nodded and sat back. Bacteria in her blood? God, he wanted to ask, but even if he didn’t feel like he needed rest, she sure as hell did. He’d ask in the morning, if she were better. Oh, lord, I hope she’s better. It’s a long frickin’ way back to the camp.

*****

She wasn’t fine when the sun rose, but she could charitably be called better. Jerry watched her break camp alongside him, the way her fingers didn’t close completely around things she picked up, and her footing wasn’t quite right.

“Spinal shunts are illegal, you know,” he said, finally putting it together.

“Not for military personnel,” she replied without looking up.

He shook his head. “They were banned for a reason.”

“I’m aware of the risks,” she said, straightening up and shouldering her pack. “But unless you’d rather carry me a hundred klicks back to the camp

”

He had to concede the point, at least for the moment, but wasn’t especially happy about it. “At least tell me that the threshold isn’t a hundred percent.”

She quirked a slight smile. “I’m a big girl, Reed. I can take care of myself…but since you asked, no, it’s an adaptive threshold algorithm. Right now it’s holding just under fifty percent.”

Fifty percent. That wasn’t so bad, he supposed. At a hundred percent, the shunt was effectively the equivalent of being a quadriplegic, at least from the body to the brain. Signals going the other way were passed along fine, for all the good they did. People didn’t navigate well when they were cut off from all sensation below the neck.

A fifty percent threshold rating didn’t cut the signals in half. Instead, the system was designed to intercept only signals which passed a certain frequency threshold. Light tactile sensations were unaffected, but more extreme signals, such as those caused by injuries, were intercepted before they could reach the brain.

Side effects were the lack of pain sensations, some loss in coordination, and complete lack of awareness of any sensation that surpassed the threshold setting. Which meant she could break her leg and not know it until she turned off the shunt, walking on the ruined limb until it was entirely beyond hope of healing and had to be amputated.

Of course, those weren’t the reasons the shunts had been outlawed. Psychological effects of being impervious to pain were profound, to the extent of causing wild personality changes in otherwise normal individuals. The affected people were often called Shunt Psychos or, more clinically perhaps, referred to as suffering from superhuman psychosis and were known for doing insane things across the board. Earth entertainment dramas often made use of them as the villains of action pieces because of the street mythos that had grown up around them.

“Let’s go,” she told him, jerking her head toward the jungle in the general direction of the camp.

He nodded, shouldering his own pack, and they set off quietly.

“What happened last night?” he asked after they were well into the jungle.

She was silent for a moment, her face pensive.

“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “I’ve been thinking about it all night. I think it was some kind of automated defense system…It cut off almost as soon as I penetrated the jungle line…like it lost me. A human would have kept firing on visual for at least another fifty meters.”

“It was weapons fire then?”

She shook her head. “No. It was rocks.”

Jerry blinked. “What?”

She looked over at him as they walked. “That’s not what happened to you?”

“No…we told you, there were these explosions…”

“I didn’t see any evidence of explosives,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t think there were any.”

“I’m telling you what I saw…”

She held up a hand. “Don’t get excited. I believe you. I’m just saying that what you saw wasn’t caused by explosives. There was no evidence of fire or scorching, and most of the damage I saw seemed to be all wrong for explosives. My best guess is that the explosions you heard were secondary, stuff like the crawler hitting the ground and whatnot.”

He let out an annoyed breath. “I don’t suppose you know what it was then?”

“No…” She shook her head, chuckling dryly. “I’ve never had an enemy throw rocks at me before…Well, actually, there was that one time in Pakistan…”

He wasn’t sure if she was joking or not from her tone and just let the comment pass as he sighed. “You mind if I ask a question?”

She shrugged, catching herself against a thick tree as she stumbled when her ankle went out from under her. “Ask away.”

“Last night you said something about bacteria in your blood?”

She half laughed, “Yeah. Bugs.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Bugs?”

“You know…” She waggled her fingers in front of her mouth as she walked. “What’s up, doc?”

Jerry closed his eyes, shaking his head slightly. “You’re kidding.”

“Naw,” she replied easily as they walked on, “but the official name is about eighty letters long and can only be pronounced after twelve years of university study.”

He snorted despite himself, though her joke was at least partially aimed in his general direction, whether she knew it or not.

“Just some gene-altered bugs that radiate infrared light and do some other little tricks when they’re told to,” she told him, “You know the drill after that?”

He nodded without speaking. Near-infrared radiation, along the right frequency pulses, could be absorbed by the cells of the human body and used as energy for mitosis. Application to many types of injuries speeded healing by several times and, in the right situations, could even be used to power the body despite a lack of normal fuel, such as food. Of course, the application of the technology was fundamentally limited; the body needed more than raw energy to properly heal and operate. Jerry wondered what the other “little tricks” she referred to were, though off the top of his head he could imagine a lot of fun things you could potentially pack into something like that.

It was the first time he’d heard of the idea being delivered by a biological source, especially from within the body, but it made sense. He was surprised it hadn’t been done a long time earlier, actually.

Then again, what did he know? Maybe it had been in use for decades. He wasn’t exactly up to date on modern medical treatments.

“Must be nice,” he offered after a moment.

“When it’s not trying to kill me with a hundred and six fever, sure,” she replied dryly.

*****

They stumbled back into camp well into the night, Sorilla having refused the suggestion to break for the night. Jerry was wiped out but more worried for his companion than anything else. When she parted from him to head toward the hut they’d let her use, he made a straight line for Tara Steven’s shelter.

The redheaded nurse was blinking away sleep when he got her up, looking confused as she tried to wake up with little success. “Jerry? You’re back?”

He smiled a little at the dumb question but cut her some slack due to the time. “Yeah. Look, I think that Sergeant Aida needs to be checked out.”

Tara wiped her eyes, planting her feet on the dirt floor. “Alright…she’s in her shelter?”

“Yeah, I saw her to her door a few minutes ago.”

The nurse smiled. “Chauvinist.”

“Cut me some slack, Tara,” Jerry said, rolling his eyes. “I’d be after you to check up on anyone I thought was hurt.”

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t walk them to their door.” She smiled, pulling a light jacket on over her night shirt. “Go get some sleep, Jerry. You look like hell.”

“Wait ‘til you see her,” he sighed, nodding.

Tara chuckled softly. “I’ll tell her you said that. Go.”

He shot her a look of mock horror but let himself be pushed out ahead of the nurse as she grabbed her medical bag and turned off the battery-powered lamp. She was right, he knew; he was running on less than fumes. He didn’t know where Sergeant Aida got the energy to keep moving, especially since she’d been injured, unless it was from that “bugs” bacteria of hers, but whatever well she drew her energy from, his was dry.

“Alright, alright, I’m going…” Jerry told Tara with a weak smile. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

She nodded, patting him on the shoulder as they separated, and she went back toward the sergeant’s hut. He watched the nurse go for a moment, his face darkening a little as he thought about what Sorilla had told him, then shook it off and headed for his own bed, such as it was these days.

*****

Tara knocked softly on the door when she arrived at the sergeant’s hut, seeing from the light pouring out through the cracks in the door and wall that the occupant wasn’t sleeping. There was no response for a moment, then a tired voice spoke out, “Come in.”

She pushed the door open, not really surprised to find that Sorilla had her vest and boots off, her pants the only clothing she still wore. What did surprise her, however, was the extent of injuries she saw on the soldier’s torso.

“My God…” The nurse whispered. “What happened?”

Sorilla looked up, her lips twisted in some emotion Tara couldn’t quite place. “Someone thought that throwing rocks would be a laugh riot.”

Tara winced as she moved closer, eyeing the injuries. There were multiple gashes along the sergeant’s arms, blood stains coating what skin was left unmarred. Bruises covered her breasts and hard abdominal muscles, some of them quite obviously deep in nature. Sorilla remained in place as Tara stepped behind her and waited as the nurse hissed.

“Bad?” she sighed.

“Could be worse,” Tara admitted after a moment. “But not much worse without killing you.”

“Missed the kidneys, then.”

“Just.”

Sorilla nodded. “I was pretty sure they had.”

Tara shook her head then gently took the sergeant’s shoulder and pushed her back. “Let me check you out.”

The soldier didn’t argue with her and just lay back slightly, hissing as the pressure was put on her bruised back. Tara winced in sympathy but just went on with a quick examination that focused mostly on finding anything more serious than the bruises and lacerations that were already healing.

She didn’t find any broken bones, but a quick glance at the sergeant’s feet were enough to tell her that the woman wasn’t walking anywhere for a while. Both feet were swelling up nastily, now that the pressure of the boots had been removed, and the right ankle looked really bad.

“How does this feel?” she asked, gently prodding the ankle.

Sorilla smiled ironically. “It doesn’t, which isn’t a great sign.”

“I wish I had more advanced tools…” Tara said, shaking her head.

Sorilla pointed to the coffin-shaped kit on the floor. “Open that up and pass me the kit with the red cross on it. My armor would do better, but there’s no point wasting its power reserves.”

Tara located the kit easily enough; the dark, brown-green case didn’t exactly identify it well, but the red cross centered on it did. She opened it as she brought it back and raised her eyebrows as she saw the equipment inside.

“That has to be about twenty thousand dollars’ worth of equipment,” she said as Sorilla took out a compact diagnostic scanner.

“Try eighty,” the sergeant smiled, eyes glowing a faint green as she accessed the device’s computer through her implants. “Though you can get better on the open market for fifty. We pay a premium for the ‘ruggedized’ version. It does the job, though.”

The scanner was a small instrument package that resembled larger ones Tara, herself, used in the clinic back before they had been forced out of the colony, but appeared to be more advanced. The colony’s equipment had been top of the line when it was founded, but new upgrades, even to medical equipment, were slow to come.

“Nothing broken,” Sorilla sighed after a moment, passing the instrument over to Tara and turning on the built-in display so the nurse could see for herself.

Tara looked and nodded. “Bad sprain, and you made it worse by walking on it, I’ll bet.”

“You’re not winning any sucker bets tonight,” the weary soldier sighed, smiling slightly. “But it’ll heal.”

Tara nodded. “With proper care…three days.”

“I’ll be ok by tomorrow evening, if you’ll just help me splint it up properly.” Sorilla motioned.

Tara raised an eyebrow but did as she was asked, using the plastic splints from the pack to lock the injured joint in place, wrapping it with straps, and then pinning them off. “There. Now let’s do something about those cuts before you get an infection.”

Sorilla nodded tiredly as the nurse began to treat her, catching something in the woman’s eyes. “What?”

“Could I…Would you mind if I used this?” Tara asked, holding up the medical gear, “There are some people…”

“By all means,” Sorilla said, nodding with a weary smile. “That’s what it’s there for.”

*****

In the morning, Samuel Becker looked up as the shadow fell over his table and smiled as he recognized the newcomer to their little jungle hideaway. “Sergeant Aida, good morning.”

“Morning, sir,” she responded, coming to a stop near his makeshift desk-slash-table.

“Please,” he said, still smiling, “we’re not formal here. Call me Samuel.”

She just nodded, looking down at the things he had spread over the table. “Inventory?”

“That’s correct,” he sighed. “We’re low on supplies. We’ve been living off things taken from the outlying farms…There’s nothing in the jungle that we can properly digest, you see.”

She nodded. That had been in her briefing. “There was a series of supply drops made just before and after my team’s insertion. Some of them might have made it down.”

He looked up, hopeful. “You think they weren’t hit like…?”

He winced, and she nearly did, too, but she just tilted her head as her eyes chilled slightly.

“It’s possible. I made it down, after all.”

“How can we find them?”

“I have a variable strength riff system,” she replied, hesitant.

He caught her hesitation, his own face darkening. “Do you think that’s safe?”

She shook her head. “I’m not sure. I think maybe it is…When I reached the jungle line, whatever it was that attacked me seemed to lose track of me. It might be that they’re confined to the colony sites.”

“I understand. I’d really like the supplies, but I’m not sure that we can afford the risk.”

“Sir, we can minimize it if I go with a team and we hike some distance from the camp before I use the riff pulse. If it’s picked up, it won’t lead back to the camp that way.”

Samuel thought about it for a moment, slowly nodding. “Do it, please, Sergeant, and thank you.”

*****

“You’re one crazy b…lady, you know that, right?”

Sorilla didn’t look up as she finished the final check on her armored suit. “Go with your first instinct, Jerry…It’s more accurate.”

“Christ, you barely limped in here last night under your own power!” the pathfinder growled, digging his right foot into the ground with a sharp kick. “You’re never going to heal if you don’t take a couple days…”

“Don’t have them,” she replied. “Fleet’s not going to wait forever. I’ve got to get to those supply cases, if any made it down, just as badly as you and your people do.”

“What could possibly be so important?”

“Each case was packed with a backup long-range laser transmitter,” she replied. “We left retransmission satellites in orbit around your second moon…”

“We’ve got tight-beam radio transmitters!”

She shook her head. “Won’t work. This planet is a black hole right now, except for light. The Fleet tried all their active and passive scanners before my mission got the green light…There was nothing but visuals coming off the entire planet. No radio, no Casimir radiation from the FTL transmitter, there wasn’t even any radiation from the particulate belts in orbit.”

Jerry, the jungle biologist-turned-pathfinder, blinked, practically crossing his eyes. “Is that even possible?”

“No.” Sorilla shook her head. “Which, combined with the insanity at the colony a couple nights ago, makes me very anxious to contact Fleet.”

“I see,” he sighed. “When are we going?”

“Now,” she replied, pulling a section from the vest front of her armored suit, tucking it into a pouch on her vest.

*****

For Sorilla, the next three hours of hiking out and away from the camp, heading toward her “landing” site, were pure agony. She had, again, left her armor and its environmental control systems behind while it trickle-charged on its organic solar collectors and was sweating bullets as she and the others marched through the jungle heat.

The people Jerry had gathered for the task seemed to be better off, though few of them were in a state of physical fitness that compared to Sorilla’s own. This was their world, however, and they were acclimated to it. The slight difference in oxygen levels, combined with the heat and her injuries, was making every step a torturous ordeal for the woman, for the human, in her. The operator she’d trained all her life to be, however, refused to let that slow her down.

When they stopped, more than fifty klicks from the camp, she pulsed the radio identification frequency (RIF), its range setting kept to a mere hundredkilometer range. According to her maps and the locals’ input, there was nothing but jungle in that entire range, so it was the best she could do to minimize the danger of being detected.

Only one hit came back off the signal, and it was quite a distance off. Sorilla sighed, then looked off in the appropriate direction and nodded. “That way.”

Several hours of marching later, they stepped into a clearing that had a huge hole in the canopy and a matching supply container sitting lopsided against a boulder.

“It looks intact,” Sorilla said, relieved. She’d been worried, actually, though the containers were among the most solid items in the Fleet. They broke cover, approaching the large container slowly as Sorilla looked for damage.

Just as she reached it, a local avian screeched, and her HUD flashed to life with a red warning blinking into on her right eye. Sorilla spun, dropping into a crouch even as a sound of wood splintering erupted into the field.

“Incoming!” she screamed, throwing herself to one side as a pattern of splinters erupted out in her general direction, and a tree began to topple.

One of the men yelled in shock and horror as a lumbering form suddenly rushed out of the jungle foliage, its massive size dwarfing him as it loped in on all fours. It reached out with a forelimb before he could move, plucking him up like a toy, and threw the man across the path of the others as Sorilla hit the ground, shoulder first.

She rolled, swinging her rifle up as she came to a stop in a crouch near a thick tree, her eyes focusing in on the thing for the first time even as her processor finished pattern matching it against local predators.

Warning! No Matches Found!

She noted the red flash as her rifle buttstock pressed tightly to her shoulder, the beast dropping into her sights as she squeezed off her first shot. The round hissed through the air, almost silent as the magnetic propulsion sent it on its way, and slammed into the target with an eruption of black smoke as it exploded on contact.

The creature roared but didn’t go down as it backhanded another of the local men hard enough to send him sprawling through the brush, well out of sight. Rifle fire erupted around her then as she squeezed off the next round, and Sorilla could see the heavy hunting rounds sparking off the thing without affecting it in the slightest.

She flipped the lever that converted her battle rifle to full auto mode, locking the creature into her targeting HUD, and squeezed the trigger down. Twenty rounds erupted from the weapon in under a second, erupting into a cacophony of explosive percussion as each of them tore into the thing without mercy.

It paused in mid-motion and then fell over without moving again.

Slowly, the members of the group appeared from the brush as Sorilla moved toward the thing, her weapon trained constantly on it. Behind her, Jerry was calling out orders to the others, his voice urgent.

“Ben, check on Mike! Sam, you go see if Trent is ok! Keep your eyes open everyone!”

In the back of her mind, Sorilla approved of the orders, but her attention was focused on the thing that had attacked them. She moved closer, pausing just out of reach as Jerry came up behind her.

“Christ…is that thing…?”

“Rock. It’s made out of rock…” Sorilla said in disbelief.

“There’s nothing on this world like that,” Jerry replied with an uncertain-sounding voice. “Nothing around here anyway.”

“There’s nothing anywhere like that,” she responded, handing off her rifle to him. “Hold this. Keep it pointed at that thing.”

“What? Hey, wait a second.” His voice slightly panicked.

“There’s no safety. If it moves, just hold the trigger down,” she told him, drawing her knife from the sheath that crossed the small of her back along her belt. “I want a chunk of this thing to take home.”

He covered the beast as she carved into the stone with the molecular edge of her blade, eyes flickering to the jungle constantly. She got her chunk of stone, a sizeable hunk taken from its forelimb, and retrieved her rifle as two of Jerry’s people appeared.

“Mike? Trent?” he asked.

They shook their heads, causing Jerry to grimace. “Damn.”

Sorilla sympathized with him; she knew what he was feeling, but at that moment, her mind was too caught up with the new information to focus entirely on him. The enemy had something new, something she could not fathom, and that was not acceptable. How could a rock move, let alone fight?

Jerry came up beside her as she was thinking, laying a hand on her shoulder. “We’ll start unloading…”

She nodded. “I’ll keep watch.”

Jerry stared for a moment. “All right.”

“From now on, no unnecessary talking,” she told him. “I’m on point when we leave, watch me for signals…Someone’s out here hunting us.”

*****

Nothing else accosted them on the return trip, and they arrived back in the camp about halfway through the night, the binary moons high in the sky above of them, the reflected light of the lunar twins visible occasionally through the jungle canopy as they walked.

Sorilla and the rest tiredly dropped their burdens into the main shelter and collapsed in exhaustion for the night. It was midday the next day before anyone saw the soldier appear in the camp. She simply appeared outside Samuel’s hut just after lunch break, a tight, tan tank top and matching pants her chosen covering. She carried a big pistol on her hip, a five-cylinder revolver that made most of the automatics available to the colonists look like children’s toys by size alone.

Samuel nodded to her, once his heart had slowed to a normal beat. “Good day, Sergeant.”

“G’day, sir,” she replied, nodding to the papers he was looking at. “Better today?”

“Yes, thank you,” he nodded. “The rations will keep us in food for another month. Did you retrieve what you needed?”

She nodded. “Yeah. Now I just need to figure out what to say.”

“I’m not sure I can help there,” Samuel smiled, his eyes holding a twinge of sadness.

“That just makes us even, sir,” she sighed, pulling up a rough bench cut from the local wood and sitting down. “Nothing makes sense

”

“In what way?” Samuel asked curiously, pushing his papers away as he crossed his arms on the rough table.

“The invaders…enemy…whatever they are,” Sorilla responded, shaking her head. “They’re not right.”

“I could have told you that,” Samuel replied, eyebrow raised.

“Not that…I mean…” Sorilla shook her head, pausing often as she tried to find the right words to describe what she’d seen. “The weapons they use…all wrong. I’ve never seen anything that does what they do…And these stone…things.”

Samuel nodded. “Is that so strange, though? New technology comes around quite often.”

“New, yeah…but usually even new technology is just…faster, stronger…but basically the same,” Sorilla said, wrapping her hands around something in midair. “Bullets make holes, lasers burn holes…missiles blow shit up…”

She paused, shaking her head. “I don’t know what I’m trying to say, sir. I’m just

I’ve never seen a weapon that mangles what it hits, folding it in on itself, compressing it. It’s like some giant hand just reached out and crushed my people…and your colony.”

She stopped again, taking a breath before continuing. “And then there’s this…”

She tossed the chunk of tether to the table, where it actually glided for a moment before touching the wood of the desk. Samuel frowned, examining it, then looked up. “Is this…?”

“From the colony’s orbital tether, yes, sir.”

He looked at the cut end, then at the end that had been snapped, and his eyes widened. “This is impossible.”

She nodded. “I know. Any force that could have snapped a tether like that should have pulled the counterweight right out of orbit first. It’s still there though. I checked.”

“My God,” Samuel replied, frowning at the piece of carbon lying in front of him. “The force…it’s almost incalculable…”

“Almost?” Sorilla asked, the corner of her mouth turning up.

Samuel looked up at her, a hint of amusement in his expression as well. “Well, Sergeant…we are largely a colony of researchers here. I’m sure I can find someone to tell you exactly what level of force this would have taken.”

“Do that,” Sorilla said seriously, “and anyone else who might have an idea, too. I was sent in for intel, and I’ve got some of that…but I’ll be damned if I can figure out what it means.”

“Perhaps we can help then.” Samuel nodded to himself. “I’ll begin speaking with some of our more…academically minded members of society. They’ve been in need of something useful to do for quite some time anyway.”

“Thank you. While you’re at it, let your geeks loose on this, too,” she said, dropping the sawed off chunk of the strange thing that had attacked them onto the makeshift desk as well. “I’m going to prepare my report to the Fleet. I’ll be able to transmit it tonight as the moons pass over. I’d appreciate it if you could get any firsthand reports of what happened when the colony was attacked for me. I’ll provide recording equipment, if you need it.”

“No, that won’t be necessary,” he said, shaking his head. “We have such equipment aplenty.”

She nodded. She hadn’t really expected much different. Everyone, especially scientists of any type, carried portable computers, even if only for day scheduling and holding contact addresses.

“I’ll have those for you by nightfall,” Samuel promised, “and whatever we can figure out on this, too.”

Sorrilla nodded. “Thanks.”

*****

As he’d promised, Samuel delivered the force calculations within a couple hours, but it was what he had to say about the chunk of rock she’d cut off the golem thing that piqued her curiosity.

First, it wasn’t rock. It was silicate based, to be sure, but it had no more in common with rock than a human being had in common with diamond. The entire chunk of material was crisscrossed with nanometer sized pathways that resembled nothing more than neural superhighways. It had a far more fluidic structure than anything any of them had ever seen, with enough completely alien structures to have the local eggheads yanking their hair out and wishing for the labs on the counterweight.

Despite all that, by nightfall she had her report filled out, as much as possible at any rate. She then added all the colonists’ impressions, as well as the theories Samuel’s academics came up with, to the report and keyed in the coordinates on the laser transmitter. It hummed happily in her ear, letting her know that it was working, and she settled back to wait. The distance to the moon was far enough that her stomach clenched while waiting for the return signal bounce to confirm a lock.

She let out a relieved sigh when the system responded with the comforting chirp directly fed into her inner ear through her implant interface. The military station keeping relay was still in place, and she was linked in. She checked the time on her HUD reflexively, noting that she had another half hour before the orbit would bring the satellite out of range.

She only needed a few seconds.

She uploaded her report in a pulse, then waited for the confirmation to report that it had been received. When that came back, there was an info-dump along with it. Sorilla signed off the satellite and quietly packed the system away as her processor checked the dump and confirmed that she had all the decryption sequences required to access it.

Days on Hayden’s World, a dozen lost lives, and it all came down to less than one minute to send back her report.

No, she shook her head. Not that easy. Her report was only the first stage. There was a lot more work to do. She checked the chrono again and did some mental calculations. Fleet would have her report in about fourteen hours, if they were still holding station at their scheduled location. After that, well, it would depend what they made of the situation on planet.

For her, the job was just starting, no matter what else was now set in motion.

She closed up the kit, hefting the transceiver in her left hand as she headed back to her shelter. There she put the electronics away and lay back on her cot, eyes glowing green as she stared at the ceiling without seeing and read the Fleet info-dump.

FLTCOM FLASH TRFFC

TO : All Operators, Operation Jungle Savior

FRM : FLTCOMSOL

SUBJECT : Intel Update

MAIN BODY FOLLOWS :

Long-Range Scouts have detected ship movements in range of Hayden’s World. Unknown ship configuration, unknown propulsion system. Operation Jungle Savior is suspended, all operators are to shift to Stance Beta and commence Operation Jungle Wind. Secondary objectives green-lighted, new intel attached.

SIGNED : Jorgen Sweet, VICE ADM, Commanding USV Taskforce 2

Sorilla sighed, closing her eyes as she continued to read the attached files. Jungle Savior had been a straightforward operation, basically a short-term mission assignment with the goal of preparing for a Fleet landing on Hayden’s World. Jungle Wind was…something else.

Things were likely to get messy now.

She briefly reviewed the data, then deactivated her ocular displays and shifted until she was comfortable. She might as well, after all. She was here on Hayden’s World for the long haul now.

*****

The morning light was filtering through the jungle canopy when Samuel looked up as the shadow fell across his table. He nodded to Sorilla as she pulled up the roughhewn bench and straddled it with a serious look on her face.

“Problems?” he asked, sighing as he pushed his work aside.

“Maybe,” she said, not giving much away. “Tell me something, Samuel.”

“If I can,” he replied, laying down the old-fashioned stylus.

She looked down at the ground for a moment, then back at him. “You’ve got how many people here in camp?”

Samuel frowned, looking at her. “Why do you ask?”

“It’s pretty basic intel. My processor estimates between four and five hundred. Is that right?”

He nodded. “Yes. We have a current population of four hundred and twenty-eight…We had four hundred and thirty before…”

Sorilla nodded, knowing that they had lost two men to retrieve the supplies and locate the bodies of the two members of her team. She pushed that aside for a moment and moved on to more important things for the present.

“What was the population of the colony?”

Another moment of silence hung between them, but Samuel finally spoke up, “Just over five thousand at the main site. The rest of the planetary population is spread out among the continental masses.”

She nodded and spoke succinctly. “Where are the rest of the people from the main camp?”

Samuel sighed. “A lot of them, we just don’t know. We were scattered when the colony was hit. Some of the ranchers and their people refused to leave their homes. Maybe some of the others are with them.”

Sorilla nodded, having expected as much. “The situation’s changed. We’re going to need to contact them.”

Samuel shook his head as he leaned back in his roughhewn chair. “What’s going on, Sergeant?”

“I need to contact everyone I can, locate all the people possible.”

“That doesn’t answer the question,” Samuel said. “I thought you said that you were scouting places for a relief landing.”

“There’s not going to be a landing,” Sorilla replied flatly. “Not any time soon.”

Samuel stared for a moment. “What happened?”

“I’ve been ordered to shift to long-term planning, Mr. Becker. I don’t know all the details, but it’s fair to say that things have escalated somewhere.”

“My God,” he muttered, shaking his head. “How long? I mean…We don’t have the supplies here to last long.”

Sorilla nodded. She’d been briefed on the world before insertion. Hayden’s World was a lush jungle, but almost none of its plant or animal life was edible to humans. Even now, the people here were living on ration packs and hoarded foodstuffs they’d managed to save from the colony site as they were run out. Neither of those would last long, however, and when they ran out, they’d starve to death, even if they tried to eat whatever wasn’t toxic to human body chemistry in the local jungle.

Starving to death, even on a full stomach, wasn’t a pleasant way to go.

“The ranchers were growing edible crops, right?” she asked.

Samuel nodded, but his expression was pained. “Some of them, yes…but for their own table mostly. Our food production is in the aeroponics bays we established in orbit. Production there was far higher than we could possibly have hoped to maintain Hayden-side.”

She nodded in understanding. “Well, that’s going to have to change. Call your best trackers and pathfinders, Mr. Becker. We’ve got a month, maybe, before we’re in trouble here. Other places may be even tighter. That’s not much time to work with, let’s make the most of it.”

He pushed his hair back along his forehead, nodding slowly. “I…I’ll gather them.”

“Thank you,” she said, standing up and walking to the door of the shelter.

Outside, she paused, drawing a bundle of green cloth from her vest and carefully unfolding it before setting the beret over her head.

There was a war to fight now, not just a scout recon. All she had were the colonists as backup, but there was a reason why they sent her and her team. The silver wings she wore on her vest weren’t for show, and these people were certainly the oppressed. They’d just have to learn to help her help them.

De Oppresso Liber.

No one said it would be easy.

Flight of the Angels

Chapter 1

USV Los Angeles

On Station, Outer Hayden System

Vice Admiral Jorgen Sweet looked out on the distant world, its reflected light little more than that of a star, and wrapped his hands around the railing bolted to the observation room walls until his knuckles whitened. At fifty-three years of age, Sweet had never grown used to the waiting that was a primary responsibility of a man in uniform, and when he knew the waiting was coming to an end, the time just seemed to drag even more.

The half hiss, half grind of a deck door sliding open caused the admiral to turn his head as Captain Richardson twisted through the door and pushed off the wall. The captain glided over to him, hooking a grip a few feet away, and swung into an orientation that roughly matched the admiral’s.

Jorgen suppressed a smile. Working in zero gravity had an interesting effect on rank and rank courtesy. Most officers and enlisted on the Los Angeles didn’t take the time to reorient with each other; the free fall environment had become second nature, and they simply went on with their jobs. When reporting to the admiral, however, Jorgen had noticed that he never had to strain his neck or his mind to talk to someone who was floating around upside-down.

“Yes, Captain?” Sweet asked, turning fully away from the observation area and using the hand grips to firmly plant his feet on the floor. “You have a report?”

“Yes, Admiral,” Kay Richardson nodded briefly, her short-cropped hair flowing almost as if she were under water. “We’ve downloaded the contents of the message box in Hayden’s lunar orbit.”

At his age, Jorgen was long past most things that could make his heart rush. A beautiful woman could still make it happen, but surprisingly little else. Those words, however, combined with the look on Kay’s face, set his heart thumping powerfully.

“Was there…?” He had to ask, licking his lips as they suddenly dried out.

“Aye, sir.” She confirmed it, nodding. Her face wasn’t as eager as he would have expected, however, so there was bad news, too. “We lost most of the team.”

He winced, looking away for a moment, then back. “How many survivors?”

“One known. Sergeant Sorilla Aida,” Kay replied, handing him a folder.

He took it, flipping the plastic folder open, his mind wrapped up in the idea that only one of their SF team had survived. There wasn’t a RADAR or detection grid on Earth, not even in the United States or China, that could pick up a SOCOM team on an orbital approach. They were easy enough to pick up on entry itself, but they looked like every other little piece of rock burning up in the atmosphere. No one would waste energy trying to pick off shooting stars; there were hundreds on any given day.

Not to mention hitting something moving that fast was an exercise in frustration, and once they were low enough to be slowing down, they were invisible again. Not even a LIDAR system could pick them up a few seconds after they’d burned off their ablative armor.

He sighed, pushing the frustrated tension down, and focused on the open folder. On the inside cover was an image of the sergeant in question, along with her name, serial number, and basic medical information along the opposite side. He thumbed the page flipper, letting the picture fade away as a detailed service record replaced it, and read briefly.

“Good woman.”

“Aye, sir,” Kay nodded.

“What was in her report?”

Kay shook her head slightly. “Not as much as we could have asked for, but maybe more than we’d hoped for.”

That was more along the lines of what the admiral wanted to hear. “Explain.”

“The tether cable to their orbital counterweight was snapped. Not cut or burned, snapped by pure force. That means we can calculate the precise force applied from the counterweight’s current orbit and the reports from the local survivors,” Kay said. “Though, for the record, they already did it for us. It’s in Aida’s report.”

The admiral let out a strangled chuckle and shook his head. “Did they do anything else for us?”

“A lot, including some brainstorming for possible causes,” Kay replied grimly, handing over another folder. “This is the one that they, and Liz, believe is most likely.”

He took the folder with a sense of trepidation, uncertain if he really wanted to know, but he just flipped it open and read. After several long moments he looked up at his flag captain and raised an eyebrow. “You understand this?”

“Most of it, yes, sir.”

He wasn’t surprised, not really. There were a few ways to get a command in the space Fleet, such as it was. He’d come up one way, serving with the United States Navy in various military posts until he’d requested a transfer to the Colonial and Home System Fleet. His own education was generally in electronics, tactics, and strategies. Kay Richardson had come up a second way, like Commander Elizabeth Shay. She’d entered from the academic route and studied for her command rank as a secondary priority.

Most of the information in the folder in front of him was a fair bit over Jorgen’s head, but he suspected very little of it confused his flag captain. That was a good thing, since he understood enough of it to know that it had very serious implications.

“Who’s seen this data?”

“You, me, Liz, and the commo who decoded it,” she replied instantly.

He nodded. “Has Commander Shay compared it to the drive readings we’ve been pulling off the silhouettes we’ve been stalking?”

“Aye, sir,” Kay replied. “They match…in theory.”

He noted the qualifier but didn’t respond to it. They weren’t at the point just yet when hard decisions had to be made, so she was just making certain that they kept an open mind and not trying to play “cover your ass” with the admiral.

Since arriving in the system, Fleet Taskforce Two had been hit with one unknown after another, so keeping an open mind was starting to feel more like having your mind blown open with copious amounts of high explosive. He sighed, looking back to the receding light of Hayden’s World before glancing back to Captain Richardson.

“Captain, inform me when we’re clear to jump.”

“Aye, sir,” she said.

“Leave the files. I’ll look them over while we’re heading out-system.”

She saluted, then let go of the rail and kicked off the wall, sailing toward the door. He watched her go for a moment, then thumbed open the folder again and began to read the long, detailed explanations he’d only skimmed before.

He was still reading the intricacies of multidimensional theory and their effect on gravitation when the general quarters alarm sounded, causing Sweet to swing around and instinctively kick off the wall as he shot for the door. He caught a handgrip as the door swung open automatically, swung out and up, and pushed off again, heading for the flag deck.

*****

“Report!” Captain Kay Richardson growled as she looped her arms into the five-point restraints, slapping the catch shut over her chest even as she reached down between her legs for the crotch strap and snapped it into place as well.

“Three Bogeys coming at us right out of the star! They must have been hiding around one of the inner giants, ma’am.”

Kay grimaced, shaking her head. The Hayden System wasn’t setup even remotely like Sol. The first three inner planets were gas giants, practically proto-stars in their own right. Part of the reason the colony even existed on Hayden was to observe their consumption by the local primary, or their eventual birth as newborn stellar furnaces.

Scientifically, it was an invaluable process to observe. From a military aspect, the gravity fluctuations and increased radiation from those three planets in addition to the star itself made spotting anything as small as a ship a task worthy of Hercules himself. Coming out of the sun was a time honored tradition for fighter pilots, and it looked like it was working for these ships as well.

“Give me a track!” she growled just as a light lit up on her right-hand command screen. She flipped a switch open and turned to it. “Hello again, Admiral. We’ve picked up three unidentified craft approaching from the cover of the star.”

Admiral Sweet nodded. “Understood, Captain. Increase acceleration. I don’t believe getting caught would be in our best interests just now.”

She nodded, though it was counter to previous orders. They’d been trying to get closer to these puppies for days, playing cat and mouse with them in the shadows of Hayden Primary. Now that they had some real intel onboard, of course it was the time the puppies would decide to play wolf.

She opened a ship-wide com. “All hands, this is the captain. Prepare for acceleration, one-g. I say again, prepare for acceleration, one-g.”

“Helm, engage one-g acceleration in two minutes. Tactical, where’s my track?”

“On screen!”

She looked over to the left-hand screen built into her console and frowned. The three unidentified ships were coming up behind them. They had the speed advantage for the moment, but they were pouring on the acceleration.

“Are these numbers right?”

“Aye, ma’am!” Ensign Soru yelled from the tactical station. “Triple checked. 100-g’s, ma’am.”

Kay swallowed, her lips suddenly dry. A hundred gravities of acceleration would knock most of her crew out; maintaining it over any real period of time would kill them. She licked her lips, suddenly shaking her head. “Great. We’re being chased by a science fiction nightmare.”

Luckily, no one heard her or responded if they did.

“Helm, belay last order. Prepare for emergency acceleration,” she called out, slapping open the ship-wide again. “All hands, all hands, prepare for emergency acceleration. I say again, emergency acceleration. Check that all loose items are battened down. You have three minutes.”

She turned off the ship-wide and flipped open the channel to the admiral.

“I heard,” he cut her off before she could speak. “We’re preparing now, and I’ve already issued similar orders to the group. They’re linking into the battle network now. You have tactical command.”

“Thank you, Admiral,” Kay said, sweating. She had never believed that she would hear those words from anyone, let alone an admiral in a potential combat situation. “I have tactical command.”

He nodded, and she could see him look aside for a brief moment. “What is our maximum acceleration, Captain?”

“In fighting trim, sir?” she asked, then shrugged as she went on. “Ten-g’s…maybe fifteen.”

“I’m plotting overtake, Kay,” he said softly, “and my numbers say they’re going to take us one hour from the jump point.”

She only had to glance at the repeater plot on her left to confirm the numbers. “Aye, sir.”

“Captain Monroe won the Fleet speed trials last year, didn’t he?”

She hesitated, but nodded. “Aye, sir. Monroe and the Majesty’s crew took top honors, Admiral.”

“I’m ordering Monroe and the Majesty to go ahead, Captain,” Sweet said after a moment. “We will turn and meet the unidentified ships.”

She nodded, then hesitated. “Sir, may I suggest shifting your flag to the Majesty?”

He actually chuckled, shaking his head. “I don’t think so, Kay. You’re stuck with me.”

“Aye, sir.” She replied grimly. “Standing by to flip the ship.”

*****

“Do you understand the orders, Captain?”

Alexander Monroe stared at the large screen and the image of the admiral for a few seconds longer than he probably should have, his mind trying to rewrite the orders he had just received into something more palatable. His mind failed miserably.

“Aye, sir,” he said, voice dull and speaking by rote. “Orders received and understood.”

“Good. Sweet out.”

The screen flickered back to the large-scale echo of the Fleet movements on Monroe’s own tactical repeater, and for a long moment silence reigned in the bridge of the HMSV Majesty DJS7. Monroe took that moment to reorder his thoughts, then his voice cut into it, startling the others, who had listened in, from their shock.

“You heard the admiral. Prepare for emergency acceleration,” he snapped, opening a computer screen and tapping in calculations.

The bridge bustled into action around him, voices suddenly seeming to talk at once as the people got things cleared with their departments.

“Now hear this, now hear this,” the first officer’s voice echoed over the speakers a second later. “All hands, prepare for emergency acceleration. This is not a drill. I say again, prepare for emergency acceleration. This is not a drill.”

Monroe let it all happen; his people were professionals, and they were racers on top of it. The Majesty had won the Fleet speed trials three years running, and that was a matter of pride to the people on her. Speed trials in space weren’t about the equipment, after all. They were a measure of the men and women onboard each ship.

Pretty much all the ships ever built by any Earth government were capable of speeds that would crush a human to death in seconds, so the challenge of speed trials wasn’t in how fast the ship could go. It was in how fast the crew could stand to let her go and still be in shape to work when they stopped boosting.

“Helm, give me a least time for the closest jump point,” Monroe ordered, noting the squadron moving on his tactical repeater.

“Aye, Captain. Shooting it over now.”

The numbers appeared on his screens a second later, and Monroe nodded. “Good enough. Are we secure for acceleration?”

“Navigation is green!”

“Labs are green!”

“Tactical is green!”

“Medical is green!”

“Duty boards are green, Captain!”

“Roger that,” Monroe replied by rote. “All boards are green…Fire pulse drive.”

“Firing.”

A low rumble echoed through the Majesty just moments after the order as two pellets of material slammed into each other deep in the iron-nickel drive chamber. They self-annihilated, spewing energy into a spontaneously growing foam mass that was being pumped into the drives, vaporizing the materials, and spewing the result out the back.

The reaction slammed them back into their acceleration couches as they spun on their axis, aligning with the direction of the thrust. A few seconds later, another blast slammed them back into their seats a second time and then another just after.

“One-g accel and climbing, Captain.”

“Adjust VASIMR drive to fourteen-g’s.”

Someone gulped audibly on the bridge, but the ensign at helm just nodded. “Powering VASIMR drive.”

*****

“The Majesty is pulling away, Admiral.”

Sweet nodded as his acceleration couch pivoted on its axis, keeping his back to the acceleration of the USS Los Angeles DDJ 101. He could see the Majesty pulling away at five-g’s and climbing rapidly and wished the crew of the Los Angeles’s sister ship the best of luck before he turned his attention back to the unknown targets that were closing at insane acceleration levels.

On the main bridge of the Los Angeles, Captain Kay Richardson was doing much the same thing, eyes watching the 110-g acceleration of the unknown ships with trepidation. They were so far beyond what the ships in USV Taskforce Two were capable of that just the sight of them was daunting.

“Reorientation complete, Captain.”

“Fire pulse drive. One-g accel,” she ordered. “Bring all forward targeting sweeps to full power and charge weapons’ capacitors.”

“Aye, Captain. Shall I unlock the guns?”

“Negative,” Kay replied. “All ships are to maintain weapons secure.”

“Aye aye, ma’am.”

Kay glanced down, then plotted a diverging course for the taskforce to apply, wanting to keep her command spread out a bit more than it had been. The order went out over the battle network instantly, and the ships began to spread apart as the red light on her energy weapon mounts changed to yellow.

“Unknown vessels have accelerated!”

“How fast?”

“150-gs and climbing!”

Kay swore under her breath. “Plot intercept!”

The numbers were updating even as she gave the order, though, and they didn’t look good. The unknown ships were going to sweep right through their position at almost forty percent the speed of light and continue on to intercept the Majesty well short of the jump point.

“Active locks forming up! We’ve got fuzzy locks on the lead ship…maybe seventy percent.”

Kay ignored the report, knowing that the lock would firm up a lot as the ships hurtled together. She was trying to decide if she should recommend to the admiral to go weapons free, despite the fact that they still had zero identification on the bogeys that were barreling down on them. If those ships belonged to the Chinese, it could be a nasty political mess to open fire on them.

Of course, if those ships belonged to the Chinese, Kay was a painted spider monkey.

“Give me a missile lock, full active sensors. Let them know they’ve been painted!” she commanded.

“Aye, ma’am.”

The powerful targeting suite of the Los Angeles was a combination of multiple transmitters, ranging from old style AEGIS-X RADAR to microwave and more advanced Casimir Doppler Pulse Ranging systems. The CDPR system was relatively low-powered but had the advantage of being FTL-based, capable of producing an instantaneous response.

“Hard locked!”

“All stop!” Kay ordered. “Steady your aim, people. It’s their move next.”

“All stop, aye, ma’am.”

The pulse acceleration from the drive system died out, leaving a quiet through the ships that was almost palpable. Kay could hear breathing from all around her and could imagine it through the ship. The tensions rose as the unknown ships spread out slightly on the plot, two of them suddenly cutting their acceleration while the third pushed on.

They made their move, she thought. They’re testing us. But what’s the correct response? What do they want to see?

The Los Angeles suddenly groaned and pitched to port, slamming Kay and her crew to the side, alarms blaring to life.

“Helm!” Kay snarled. “What the hell…?”

“All thrusters read clear! That wasn’t us!”

Kay suddenly paled, one of the items in the intel they’d retrieved from Sergeant Aida floating to the front of her mind.

Gravity manipulation.

“Priority command to the fleet! Re-designate Bogeys One through Three to Bandits One through Three! Weapons free! I say again, weapons free!” Kay called, hands punching open a line to the admiral. “Admiral, I think they just—”

“I concur,” he cut her off. “Assume they are hostile.”

“Show me the lock on Bandit One,” Kay growled, bringing the Los Angeles’s torpedoes and energy banks fully online as she opened a command channel to the local battle network. “Delaware, Guardian Spirit, and Sierra, fire when ready.”

The order came a moment too late, it seemed a second later, when alarms howled through the squadron as the Delaware’s computers began to wail. The Los Angeles swung about again, like some invisible hand was batting it around like a cat’s toy, but this time the helm was ready for it and they began compensating.

“Put the Delaware on screen! Captain Timmons! Do you read me?” Kay yelled over the din. “Captain?”

The image of the Los Angeles class destroyer appeared a second later, floating quietly in space as if nothing were wrong. For a moment, between the beats of their hearts, the observers wondered if it was a computer error.

Then the Delaware shuddered, and the meter-thick armor plating that cast the big ship from stem to stern seemed to shiver from the distance. It buckled amidships a second later, the heavy armor pleating like the folds of a dress, and Kay watched in horror as the stem and stern of the Los Angeles’s sister ship began a long journey to meet each other. It crushed like a beer can before their eyes, accelerating toward the end. Then there was a flash of light, and the screens went dead to protect them from damage by the sudden flare.

“Radiation alert! Her plant must have blown!”

Kay shook her head, not believing it for a moment. The fission plants on the Los Angeles class destroyers didn’t blow like that, they couldn’t. That had been something else entirely.

“Hard lock! We have a hard lock!”

“Fire!” she snarled, snapping out of her shock. “All weapons, all ships! Fire!”

On the flag bridge, Sweet watched the lines reach out from the remaining ships of the squadron, each one indicating a missile or beam launching from one of the Los Angeles class destroyers toward the onrushing vessel. It was an awesome sight, but he wondered if it would be enough. His fingers danced over his console controls as he opened a tight beam to the departing Majesty.

*****

“Holy shit.”

The curse echoed across the bridge, sounding over the throbbing power of the drives as the crew panted under the force of acceleration and watched the Delaware vanish from their plot. The flare of nuclear fire reached the Majesty entire seconds after the event had happened, and Monroe honestly didn’t know what the hell was going on, but suddenly the fact that he was running for safety felt even worse than it had a moment earlier.

Or it would, if he thought he would reach safety.

He wouldn’t, that was obvious, if the remaining ships of the taskforce weren’t able to stop the onrushing juggernaut that was screaming through the black coming right at them. He’d done the math; even the Majesty’s crew wasn’t that good.

A light lit up on his command screen then, however, and he looked away from the destruction to see what it was.

A direct line from the Los Angeles, he noted with a frown. His brow furrowed as he opened it up, then smoothed as he recognized the contents. The admiral had started to dump everything the taskforce was picking up directly into his computers.

Data that was going to be worth more than all the uranium in ten solar systems, unless Monroe was very much mistaken.

He swallowed, glancing down at his numbers again, then he reached up with great effort, opening a private channel to the helm.

“Hey, Jacky,” he said softly, using his implants to talk straight to her.

“Sir?” she asked, glancing over her shoulder with taxed pain as she panted.

He licked his lips. “Can you rig an automatic jump?”

He could see her pale across the bridge, the implications sinking in almost immediately, but she nodded weakly.

“All the way home?”

She shook her head. “Too far. We’re three jumps from Earth, at least.”

He nodded. He knew that, but he could wish.

“Where’s the closest friendly ship?”

“One jump?” she asked. “Signi Major. Survey ship there, won’t be clear for at least another month.”

He nodded. “Program it. Don’t screw up.”

She gave him a sour look. “Aye, Captain.”

Alexander Monroe took a deep breath, then powered down all nonessential systems and rerouted everything to the VASIMR drive. Those actions were quickly noticed by others around the bridge, of course.

“Captain? My board is showing we’re half blind…”

“What the…? Lab computers just shut off! There were experiments running…”

“Captain! What are you doing? The VASIMR drive is running in the red!”

“We’re not going to let them catch us,” Monroe said then, looking around the bridge with a rock solid glare. “Am I understood?”

He was. He could see it in the fear their eyes showed and the sudden loss of color in their faces. Even Robert Calsey, his engineer and the blackest man Alexander had ever met, looked pasty ill. He gave them a moment to object, though, and not one of them did. He looked over at them all, silent as they strained to look back at him, and then simply nodded.

“Jump plotted, sir,” Jacky panted out, voice straining as she fought for each breath under the heavy acceleration.

He didn’t answer but lifted his hand painfully to rest it on the thrust override. “Godspeed and fair journey.”

Then he pushed the VASIMR controls all the way to maximum power, and the thrum of the ship’s drives exploded into an overpowering rumble that slammed him hard back into the seat. He regretted for an instant not having warned the crew, but they could have done nothing to prepare themselves anyway.

Then everything went black and he passed out.

*****

More torpedoes tore from the forward bays, sending shudders through the decks as the Los Angeles and other ships of the squadron continued to empty their munitions stores at appalling rates while they tore and twisted in space on evasive patterns, hoping to throw off the aim of the approaching ships.

“Holy Christ!”

Kay’s head snapped up, jerking over to the source of the yell. “What now?”

“The Majesty, ma’am. She’s making for the jump point, at forty gravities and climbing!”

Kay’s head dropped to the plot, eyes seeking out the icon that represented the Majesty, then she just shook her head.

I hope you know what you’re doing, Alex.

“So wish them luck and keep firing!” she said aloud, just as the Sierra suddenly shook from a sphere of flame that erupted from her rear port stabilizers. “And get me a track on our torpedoes!”

“First impact in thirty seconds! We’ve lost telemetry on half of them, though…I think they’re engaging with point defense!”

The admiral’s voice echoed over Kay’s implants just a moment later. “Gather every bit of data you can on their systems, Captain. I’m transmitting everything to the Majesty.”

Kay swallowed but nodded, though she couldn’t see her. “Close on the bandit! Engage with lasers!”

“Impact!”

The nuclear-fused torpedo erupted as it slammed into the enemy ship, tearing through the outer armor at a speed difference of almost sixty percent the speed of light. It penetrated through eight decks before the explosives detonated, and even on the Los Angeles, they could see the reaction spread through the enemy ship as it spewed nuclear fire through the hull breach.

“Hit! We have a hit!”

“Bandit One has lost acceleration!”

“How much?” Kay snarled, leaning forward.

Surely it would stop accelerating altogether.

“Down to ninety gravities…holding at ninety!”

Kay stared, unbelieving. Ninety. How could it hold at ninety after a nuclear weapon detonated inside its hull?

“Lasers discharging!”

The lasers lanced out as the ships closed, sending thermal blooms off the hull of the bandit ship but without noticeably affecting it in any other way.

“Point defense is too strong! We’re running out of torpedoes!”

Three ships, all firing four of the things every three point two seconds, and they’d only managed to get one solid hit through the enemy point defense. Kay supposed that could be considered too strong, but what else could they do?

“This is Admiral Sweet to all ships,” the admiral’s voice called out calmly through the insanity. “Continue firing.”

The answer was they couldn’t do anything, of course. Not a single goddamned thing.

“You heard the man!” Kay growled. “Empty the magazines!”

Twelve more torpedoes surged into space from the three ships, angling up and away from their launching points and straight into the bandit ship as it came within only a couple light-seconds. Its closing speed was such that it would blow right past them in less than a minute, but in that time, the three salvoes had maneuvered into its path.

This time they registered shifts in the course of both the torpedoes and the squadron’s ships themselves as the bandit opened fire on the torpedoes, but it had less time than before and more of the missiles survived.

Three of them slammed into the thick forward armor this time, and like the bunker-busting brethren their design was based on, they slammed through the armor like ice picks through cardboard. In the instant it took to tell the onboard warheads to detonate, all three had slammed through five decks of the enemy ship, and when they went up this time, they gutted the ship with nuclear fire.

“Her accel just died!”

The victory cry went up as the still remarkably intact ship lashed past them, now on a ballistic course with no power to her drives. All Kay would think was that the damn ship was still in one piece and it didn’t seem possible.

“Bandits Two and Three are accelerating again!”

“Weapons status!”

“We’re down to two salvoes!”

Two salvoes. Kay shook her head, knowing that it just wasn’t enough.

“Captain,” the admiral’s voice sounded again, “I want you to launch all our ground support supplies.”

Kay blinked, confused, and stared at the screens in front of her. “What?”

“The colonists will need them more than we will,” he said quietly.

She swallowed, nodding. Of course.

“Liz!”

“Ma’am?” Her CO looked over.

“Fire all our ground-pounder gear. Try to land them around the colony site,” she ordered quietly.

Liz looked confused but nodded. “Alright…I mean, aye, ma’am.”

It would probably be a lucky break if they got them on the planet at all, but Kay didn’t care just then. The fast approaching ships were consuming her attention. She knew that they’d let one go on ahead just to test her ship’s capabilities. It was wasteful, perhaps, but then she was launching billions of dollars’ worth of gear into space on the odds that some of it would get where it needed to go.

She’d already lost one ship, and another was probably a Dutchman…She pushed the Majesty out of her mind, focusing again on the enemy. Who were they to waste lives like that? Her lives, their lives?

She seethed, knowing that it was all over except for the shooting.

“Lock them up!”

And soon the shooting would be over as well.

*****

The two alien ships charged in against their human counterparts, apparently taking the barrage of fire without answering in kind. However, the torpedoes launched by the Los Angeles class destroyers would just detonate halfway to their targets, destroying others in fratricide, one after the other until space was wiped clean.

And as they closed, first one then another of the human ships buckled and crushed under an unimaginable force, until they finally erupted in a sphere of perfect, white light.

The Los Angeles, namesake of the entire class and flagship of the squadron, closed on the two, her lasers and mazers blazing with unearthly energy at her enemies, but they just shrugged off the assault and turned their weapons on her.

Nothing crossed the gap between them as the Los Angeles died; she just suddenly ceased to be as a ball of white light erupted where the proud ship had once flown. The remaining alien cruisers continued on, accelerating hard toward the sole remaining ship, only for it to disappear moments before they could get its range, vanishing out of existence in a brilliant blue flash of Casimir radiation.

*****

Fourteen light-years from the Hayden System, the crew of the survey vessel USV Socrates was shaken when her computers began screaming alarms. They roused themselves from the dreary routine of their mission, shaking off the rust that had accumulated on their rarely used skills.

“What the hell is going on?” Captain Alexi Petronov growled, swinging down from the observation bubble to the bridge as the alarms continued to wail.

“Emergency transponder! USF signature, sir!”

“Here?” Alexi snapped, unbelieving.

There was nothing out there for the Fleet to be looking into, let alone get into trouble over. There wasn’t a colony for fourteen light-years, and nothing ever happened at Hayden anyway. Alexi pulled himself hand over hand to the center of the bridge as the sensor data kept flowing in.

“Yes, sir…Reads out as the Majesty. She’s a…”

“Los Angeles class. Yes, I know,” Alexi growled, pulling his straps tight as he settled in. “Locate her, and prepare the ship for acceleration.”

“Yes, sir.”

Finding the Majesty was easy. She was screaming for help on every frequency in use. Catching up to her was a little more difficult, Alexi noted. She must have been running at one unholy speed when she jumped, he decided. She’d bled some of the momentum into jump space, but most of it was still hanging with her, and she was flipping end for end through space at almost forty percent of light speed.

They spent the better part of three days just catching up to the vessel, screwing their survey mission all to hell in the process, but they finally managed it and roped the navy ship to flatten out her spin. Only when that was done could they send in boarders.

The ship was dead, literally, bodies still strapped into their crash couches with limbs floating freely in the zero gravity. Alexi led the team himself, moving through the ghost ship with a sick feeling forming in the pit of his stomach.

On the bridge, things were the same. Dead officers were slumped over their equipment, some of them with obvious injuries like broken limbs and necks, but most simply still.

“Gott,” one of the crewman whispered. “What happened?”

“Acceleration,” Alexi said softly, floating over the captain’s console, gently moving the uniformed figure out of the way. “They redlined their drive.”

“Why the hell would they do that?”

Alexi read the displays on the screen, barely able to understand most of them, but he saw enough to make him pale in his suit. “Kelly…”

“Yeah, Cap?”

“Radio back to the Soc, tell them to start priming the drives for a jump.”

“Captain?”

Alexi pulled a portable memory drive from his suit pocket and slid it into the captain’s console. “We’re going home, Kelly. Mission’s scrubbed.”

There was no answer to that, only a faint sound that seemed like a sigh. One of relief, perhaps, Alexi thought as he downloaded the data from the computer onto his portable drive. If it was what he thought it was, the men and women around him had given their lives to get it this far.

He’d just have to carry it the rest of the way for them.

To Free The Oppressed

Chapter 1

Sorilla raised her hand, sinking down into the field as a stray movement caught her eye. Behind her, the colony’s pathfinders froze as well, ducking down and out of sight. They were approaching the outskirts of the colonized and quasi-terraformed section of Hayden, and the fields of cultivated crops marked the border between the local fauna and the imports like a ruled line.

Her corneal implants refocused on the movement automatically as she flicked her gaze across the fields, following it, then she ducked to the side and vanished into the leafy blue vegetation. Behind her, Jerry slipped slowly up to the position she had vacated and knelt quietly with his rifle in hand. For the past week, they’d been working to locate other remnants of the main colony site, but it was long, slow work.

Hayden had jungle aplenty, and the concentration of living things packed so close played havoc with even the best gear available to Sorilla. It had quickly come down to quartering over a 10,000 square kilometers of jungle, then picking out priority search locations based on the opinions of the pathfinders themselves. No one knew the jungle like they did, barring, of course, the people who were likely guiding the other survivors to hiding places.

It had become a game of who could outguess who, and only the fact that one side didn’t know precisely what it was playing made the game winnable.

Jerry swept the field once again with the scope of his rifle, the only sighting tool he had that didn’t have an active component that might give away his position, then sank back to the ground and shook his head as he glanced back.

Behind him, Bethany Connors shrugged slightly but didn’t speak or otherwise move.

Bethany was an exo-biologist, one of the transients in Hayden culture. Unlike Jerry, she had only arrived on-world a year and half earlier, coming in on a university work visa to study the Chiroptis and other microscopic species that populated Hayden. She knew her stuff, though, and like most frontier academics, she more than knew her way around a rifle, so he was glad to have her.

Not that rifle fire had proven to be much value against the Golems they’d begun to meet in the jungle and along the outskirts of Hayden Capital. At best, the most powerful rifles the colony had only served to distract the lumbering brutes while Sorilla nailed them with her assault rifle.

Not precisely a fulfilling activity, in Jerry’s opinion, but someone had to do it.

*****

To those born of Hayden chemistry, the fields were flowing seas of death. Eating the Earth-born crops would kill any of the local fauna, just as the plants poisoned the ground where they grew, introducing elements to the soil that would strangle the local plants. To the transplanted colonists, however, they were now the only hope for life that remained.

Dean Simmons had grown up tending them, being a third generation Hayden man. Most of his young life, the fields had been a chore, a duty that took from his time in town and with his friends. Food was plentiful, supplied from the orbiting counterweight, and the crops seemed useless. Medical crops that grew far better on Hayden than anywhere else in the known worlds, cash crops that grew so well here that even with the transport costs to Earth they turned a profit.

Now they were the only foods that could be eaten.

As long as the ghosts didn’t get him while he tended them.

Since that long night, the shadows danced around Dean when he moved, following him wherever he went and making him look over his shoulder and even under his bed for the monsters in the dark. There was something wrong in the fields today, wrong beyond his paranoia. The local versions of animals were quiet, but it didn’t feel like the sudden oppressive silence that had landed on their head during the attacks.

Dean stayed low, making his way through the fields, intent on getting back to his bolt hole and clearing the area. He didn’t care about the differences; there was something wrong in the air, and he wanted out of the fields. He’d come back later for the food.

Less than twenty meters from the bolt hole, a chill ran down his spine, and Dean suddenly couldn’t resist the urge to make a break for it. He didn’t know where the feeling came from. It just surged over him, and he broke into a sprint. Just a few instants too late, as it turned out.

Something flashed out of the field, cracking hard across his shin, and he went down in a sprawl as something moved above him. He tried to cry out, but his head and face were pushed down into the ground, filling his mouth with dirt and plant material. He spat the mess out as he went for the pistol on his hip and tried to turn, but a weight dropped on his back and he was pinned.

“Move and I’ll break your legs.”

The voice was a woman’s, whispered softly enough that he almost didn’t understand, but the tone cut through him and left no room for misinterpretation. He froze, his mind racing as he tried to spit the soil out of his mouth.

“What’s your name?”

He spit out the dirt, turning his head to the side. “D-Dean.”

She was looming over him, her weight laying hard into his arms, pinning them up and off the ground. He couldn’t get any leverage to move, and the slightest effort drew sharp stabbing pains in his arms. He felt her hands patting him down, her knee in his back, and his pistol was pulled from its holster on his hip. She found his knife a few seconds later and that, too, was tugged away.

When she was finished, her weight lifted off him, and Dean felt himself tugged over onto his back.

“Well, Dean,” she said, “sorry about treating you so roughly, but I’m not wearing my battle armor, and you looked twitchy enough to shoot first and let someone else ask the questions.”

“W-Who the hell are you?” Dean stammered out, blinking as he looked up at the woman above him.

The sun was above her, the dark blue of the Hayden sky faded out by the brilliance, shadowing her face into obscurity. She placed a hand on his chest as she knelt over him, turning to look over the fields for a moment.

“Sergeant Aida, US Army Special Forces, currently assigned to Solari Unified Fleet SOCOM,” she said.

“You’re with the Fleet?” he gasped, trying to sit up, only to have her shove him back down.

“Stay down,” she hissed. “And yes.”

“Well, where the hell are they?” he demanded from the ground.

“Gone,” she replied. “Halfway back to Earth Space by now, if we’re lucky. Are you alone?”

“Earth? Why Earth? We need them here!”

“Are you alone?” she hissed, glaring down at him, her eyes suddenly glowing green.

He gulped, swallowing hard, and nodded. “Y-yeah…”

“Bullshit.” She lifted her hand over her head, fist clenched. “Where are the others?”

“W-what others?” Dean asked, trying to bluff the woman.

She wasn’t biting, however. “Don’t screw with me, kid. I am not in the mood.”

A rustle in the fields around them drew both their attentions, and Dean gasped softly as he saw the first figure appear through the plants. Dean jolted in the grip of the woman as he saw the darkened faces appear, a thrill of shock singing through him.

“Dean?”

He knew that voice, and he stared at the speaker, looking through the face paint that covered the man’s features.

“Jerry!”

“Jesus, kid, what are you doing out here?” Jerry demanded as he and the other three pathfinders came in closer and crouched around them in a semi-circle. “I figured your dad would have you over in the North Lakes area.”

Dean hesitated, glancing at Sorilla, then looked back over to Jerry. “Dad didn’t make it out of the capital that night.”

Jerry winced, looking away for a moment. “Damn, son, I’m sorry.”

Dead shrugged from his position on the ground. “Yeah, well, me too. I’m staying with Silver and his bunch.”

Jerry nodded. “Old coot got some of you together then, huh?”

Dean smiled.

Jerry patted Sorilla on the shoulder. “You can let him up. I’ll vouch for him. Dean’s a delinquent, but he’s not stupid.”

Sorilla cast a slight smile at him and moved off the kid, passing the gun and knife back, though, to Bethany and Sloan, two of the other pathfinders. Dean followed the weapons with his eyes but didn’t say anything as he got up to his knees and dusted himself off.

“Knew I heard something out here,” he bitched. “Didn’t figure on G.I. Jane though.”

Sorilla just smirked at him, having heard all the jokes before, but the others chuckled quietly.

“Take us back to the old coot, Dean,” Jerry said, glancing around. “We’ve got some business to talk with him.”

Dean looked around at the five faces, all serious as they stared at him from behind the face paint they all wore. He swallowed and nodded, though.

“Yeah, sure, Jerry…I’ll take you.”

Dean led them back out of the fields to a small hillside that looked to Sorilla like it had been built up during the planting of the fields. Probably from the dirt and rocks they’d plowed up to level the grounds. When he moved in behind one large chunk of granite and disappeared, she reevaluated that impression, however. There was more to the hill than it would appear, and as the group followed in single file, she could see the entrance to a tunnel cleverly hidden there.

As she was ducking into the dark hole, a sudden feral hiss startled her slightly, causing her to twist back from the sound. Her implants shifted to light-gathering mode automatically, the HUD flickering to life on her corneas as it isolated the source of the sound and motion.

A shiver passed down her spine as she recognized the form viscerally, even if it didn’t quite match anything she’d ever seen before.

Spider.

Alright, it had twelve legs and was easily the size of a grown man’s head, but it was still a damned spider, and it was holding up four of its legs as it hissed at her in warning. She shifted her heels in the dirt, muzzle of her rifle twitching as she began to lift it up.

Jerry moved before she could, though, sliding his knife from its sheath and digging it under the spider thing from behind, flicking the beast out of the tunnel and away from them both.

“Racknian,” he told her with a twist of his lips. “Nasty little bastard.”

“Poisonous?” she asked as they continued into the tunnel.

“Lethal to locals, doesn’t technically affect humans.”

Sorilla raised an eyebrow in the darkness. “Technically?”

Jerry shrugged. “The venom doesn’t break down in our system. Depending on how much it pumps into you, you could basically smother because it blocks the oxygen in your blood from reaching your brain.”

A pleasant thought, Sorilla thought dryly as they continued on. “Treatment?”

“Transfusion or application of local enzymes,” he shrugged. “Transfusion is easier, though.”

Sorilla noted that, cataloging the Racknian to her internal memory storage, along with Jerry’s description, then moved on. “Who’s this Silver person?”

Jerry chuckled. “He’s first gen, been around here as long as anyone can remember. Something of a local legend.”

“Influential?”

“Yeah,” Jerry nodded in the dark as the continued to move along. “He can bend a few ears…or he could, if we had contact with most of the ears.”

Sorilla nodded in return, and they went the rest of the way in silence. The tunnel broke out into the open after a few twists and turns, back in the jungle beyond the fields. Sorilla nodded to herself, recognizing that the Hayden jungle was the safest place to hide. The thick overlay of flora and fauna would scramble any sensors you might use, forcing an enemy to take a personal hand and come in themselves.

Or send the Golems, of course.

“Dean!” A sharp voice snapped through the air, refocusing Sorilla’s attention. “Who are these…Jerry?”

“Hey, Silver.”

The man Jerry called Silver looked to be maybe in his fiftieth percentile, roughly in his middle years, to Sorilla’s eyes. Her implants gave him slightly higher, but again, that was likely because of the effect of the weathering on his face skewing the results. She had to remind herself that, as a first generation Hayden man, he had to be in the area of a 150 standard years old, probably more. Some people, though, were just like that. Youth was in their genes if they took even a modicum of care with their lives.

He looked past Dean and Jerry, noting the others briefly, then promptly ignored them as he and Jerry shook hands. “Didn’t think you made it out of the city, son.”

“I helped shepherd Samuel and his bunch deeper into the jungle,” Jerry replied, smiling.

“How many?”

“Just short of 500.”

The silver haired man nodded grimly, shaking his head as he clasped Jerry on the back and led him away. “Bad times, boy. Bad times.”

Jerry nodded as he and the group followed the older man and Dean down a jungle path until they reached a small clearing. Sorilla’s eyes flickered around, noting the people and the shelters built mostly of prefabricated materials that had apparently been scavenged from colonial buildings. Her implants quickly tallied up a rough count of about 150 people, a sizeable portion of them being rather young, like Dean was.

“You got most of your kids out, huh, you old coot?” Jerry asked, smiling genuinely.

“I’d have gotten you out, too, if you hadn’t been so busy running for the hills with Sam’s academics,” Silver replied dryly.

“I am one of his academics, Sil,” Jerry reminded the older man.

“I taught you everything you know about Hayden life, kid. You’ll always be one of mine.”

Jerry chuckled. “No law says I can’t be both.”

Sorilla noted the older man’s expression wasn’t exactly in agreement, but he seemed to let it go as his eyes flicked back to take in Sorilla herself in a brief glance. Jerry followed his gaze back at the same time and apparently guessed the question before it was asked.

“Sergeant Aida,” he said. “She came in with a Fleet team…The others didn’t make it all the way down.”

Silver grimaced, shaking his head. “The explosions in the sky a couple weeks back?”

Jerry nodded.

“Sorry to hear that, ma’am,” Silver said simply, then he ignored her again in favor of Jerry. “I take it this isn’t a rescue operation?”

“I’m afraid not, Sil.”

“All right,” he sighed. “You’d better come on into my ‘office’, son…Bring the gal with ya.”

Sorilla raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything as the older man led Jerry and herself into one of the larger shelters, waving the curious onlookers back to their jobs or whatever they had been doing. He closed the door behind them and set about pulling a couple chairs and such into place while Sorilla examined the interior.

It was better built than what the people in the first camp used. The prefabricated materials had been scrounged from other areas, but they had been professionally reassembled here and well-sealed. She could see wire leads heading out from a battery array, presumably to a solar charger, but there was no sign of any power usage inside.

“So how badly are we screwed?” Silver asked as he settled into a chair and waved to a pair of others.

Jerry laughed dryly, “Pretty badly screwed, Sil.”

“I figured as much,” he said, glancing over at Sorilla. “Care to add some clarity to the kid’s opinion?”

“We’re on our own,” she said flatly, deciding to forgo any attempts to soften the blow. The man didn’t look like he either needed them or would appreciate them. “Fleet came out here with a taskforce, but after I landed, they started picking up…unidentified contacts in the system.”

“You mean aliens.”

Sorilla had actually been avoiding that conclusion, keeping her adversaries labeled as enemies in her head. Having the word out in the open was conflicting, actually. Part of her was relieved to have someone else say it, but the rational section of her mind rebelled against the very idea.

Aloud, all she said was, “If you want to call them that.”

He snorted, lips twitching wryly, but didn’t pursue it. “What did the taskforce decide?”

“Return to Earth, deliver intel, and gather reinforcements,” she replied.

He nodded, unsurprised. “How long before they can be back?”

Sorrilla shook her head, shrugging slightly. “Don’t know.”

*****

Unified Solari Fleet HQ

Third Tier, New Mexican Tether Counterweight

The conference room was huge, but it was filled just the same. Members of the Fleet’s representative nations had been summoned, and after the brief delivered by Captain Petronov of the Socrates, a dark silence filled the room.

The American chairman of the Fleet’s Civilian Oversight Committee looked sick to his stomach as images of the interior of the Majesty were shown, and the shock on the faces of the room filled in the rest of the picture. A few moments later, the room erupted into a wave of rumblings and alarmed murmurs as the facts sank in.

Someone in the central row of seats cursed loudly, and a wave of louder yelling started up from there, causing the chairman to bring his hand down hard on the pressure pad that sounded a chime through the room.

“Please! This is getting us nowhere!”

“Mr. Chairman!”

The chairman glanced over and sighed. “The board recognizes the representative of the European Union.”

“What is the status of our current Fleet capacity?”

“You know the numbers Mr. Arsenault. With the loss of Taskforce Two, we’re down by over fifty percent of our combat capacity.”

The gathered representatives grumbled again, the noise once more threatening to flood out the room. The chairman slapped the pad again, sending chimes ringing down the aisles. The room slowly calmed down as the sounds continued, until finally the chairman sighed.

“If we could please continue this without the unnecessary sidetracks?”

“What are our options, Mr. Chairman?”

He glanced over at the curved table that housed the military heads of the Fleet departments. “Admiral?”

Admiral Shepard, on detached assignment from His Majesty’s Royal Navy, rose from behind the desk and cleared his throat. The sound of his voice easily carried through the room, aided by the acoustics as well as the implants resting in his throat, cheeks, and jaw.

“We have a tentative plan to increase the size of our Fleet forces by tenfold within two years,” he said. “However, it will require a substantial increase in both logistics and manpower budget. Additionally, by refitting approximately sixty percent of the Fleet’s transport hulls, we can increase our overall weight of fire by more than a 150 percent of previous Fleet levels within three months.”

The assembled people began whispering again, but a figure rose from the back row and yelled out angrily.

“What about Hayden?”

The men and women representing the nations of Earth turned as one to see the colonial representative of Hayden standing alongside those of the Ares Terraforming Project, Icarus Mining Incorporated, and the Sylvan colonies.

“Mr. Hayden…”

Gil Hayden Jr. held up a hand. “No more pawning me off, damn it! I’ve been trying to get you to tell me what is going on for days! Weeks! Now answer my question! What about Hayden?”

The chairman sighed again, the sound audible through the large room. “Hayden is on its own for the foreseeable future. We do not have the forces to retake the system, let alone engage in a military landing attempt against the defenses the invaders have established there.”

“There are over 80,000 people on Hayden!” Gil snapped. “They are all citizens of a member nation of the USF! We pay taxes to this coalition!”

“And if your governing bodies hadn’t refused to pay for decent military spending, maybe we’d have some ships to spare!” a vice admiral at the military table snarled, coming to his feet. “We’ve limped along for over a century on budgets that barely pay for office supplies, and now you come complaining to us?”

“Admiral Givens!” the chairman snapped, slapping his hand down on the attention chime.

“No! I’ve had it!” the admiral slapped his own palm down, hard enough for the slap of flesh against ceramic to overpower the chimes. “We can’t even afford to recruit and train our own personnel, damn it! We’re forced to rely on whatever we can get from the militaries of Earth, and even then, more than half the volunteers are turned down because we can’t afford to pay them.”

“Jack…” Admiral Shepard laid a hand on the vice admiral’s shoulder.

Jack Givens fell silent but obviously continued to seethe as he sat back down. Shepard looked around the room, then straight up at the representatives of the extra-solar colonies. “We will make regular contact with the satellites we’ve hidden in the Hayden System and continue to attempt delivery of supplies to those on the surface. For the moment, that is all we have the forces to accomplish.”

The representatives of the colonies, as well as those of the Earth-born nations, fell silent at that.

“Two years,” Shepard went on. “They’ll have to hold out for two years.”

Chapter 2

Habitat Deck Twelve

New Mexican Tether Counterweight

“Captain, I’m glad you were willing to see me.”

Captain Alexi Petronov didn’t reply; he just nodded and waved to the couch across from him. They were in his home away from home, the apartment he kept when he wasn’t on extra-solar assignments. He could have stayed in the Hong Kong Counterweight, he supposed, that being closer to his home, but with continued tensions between the Chinese and the Soviet Allied States, he didn’t feel comfortable there.

“What brings you to see me, Admiral?”

Jeremy Shepard sighed, taking the proffered seat. “You’ve been told?”

Petronov smiled darkly, his lips twisting. “Of what you intend toward my Socrates? Of course, I have been told.”

“We want you to stay on in command.”

Alexi sighed, setting down a cup of tea. “Admiral, I am not a military officer. I would not be comfortable in a warship.”

“The Socrates will never be a warship, Captain,” Shepard said. “But with the weapons we’ll load on her…well, I can’t promise anything…But we need you, Alexi. You’re one of our most experienced deep space captains.”

“Admiral, I signed on as a researcher…an explorer,” Alexi replied, shaking his head. “I do not wish to command a military ship.”

The admiral stood up. “Please…Alexi…Consider it. I know that I can’t order you; your contract doesn’t cover military service. But we need your experience, the people on Hayden need you.”

Petronov grimaced, looking away.

“I will…consider it,” he said finally, sounding like each word was drawing out teeth.

“Thank you,” Shepard said, nodding from where he stood.

Alexi rose to his feet but then turned away from the admiral. Shepard waited a moment, then nodded and left the room. Alexi sighed softly, walking toward the imaging wall, looking out through it to the projection of Moscow that was being fed up to the station in near real-time over the grid. He reached out, gliding a hand along the wall as if to touch the city of his birth.

“It’s never easy, is it?” he asked rhetorically before shaking his head and tapping out a pattern on the image of the city.

Moscow was gone in a second, replaced by an interface screen. “Hello, Captain Petronov, how may we serve you today?”

“Book me a flight home,” he said.

“Yes, sir, one ticket from New Mexico International Airport to Moscow. When would you wish to depart?”

He paused, considering it. “Twelve hours.”

“There is a flight in ten, and one in eighteen.”

“I’ll take the one in ten. Hold the next lift planet-side for me. I’ll be right there.”

“Done.”

*****

Shepard sighed as he made his way back into the USF offices. The United Solari Fleet had been established as an attempt to create a nonpartisan organization to enforce laws beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Much like earlier attempts at establishing any form of governing body that enforced rules to entire nations, things hadn’t gone according to plan.

Admiral Givens wasn’t the only person in the USF who felt that they, particularly the military component of the Fleet, had received the short end of the orbital tether. The USF simply didn’t have the budget to construct their own starships, or even recruit and train their own people. The vast majority of their projectable power was almost entirely dependent on the United States.

As much as the Britishborn man hated to admit it, few nations other than the United States had done more than show their flags in space. The United Kingdom had precisely two jump-capable ships, one of which had been the American-designed USV Majesty, which should be returned to Earth Space within the week. Tragically, her crew would be arriving at the same time, but as cargo, not crew.

The Germans had one ship in the Fleet, as did the French and Japanese. Every other ship in the Fleet literally flew American colors. On the other side of the line, the Chinese had a small but growing force of Mao Tse class ships that were comparable to the Los Angeles class, generally stationed in or near Earth orbit despite the Chinese forays into extra-solar colonies.

Historically, the Chinese simply let the USF respond to emergencies on their colonies while they kept their power concentrated over Earth. Not particularly palatable, but there wasn’t a captain aboard a USF ship of any nationality who would ignore a plea for help, so the Chinese government saw it as simply a smart way of doing business.

Now, however, Shepard was willing to bet that things were going to change. He just wished he could be sure how, since there was no predicting the Chinese, in his experience. They were almost as alien to him as the forces that had wiped out Taskforce Two. Cultural differences made predicting their responses extremely difficult, which would prevent the Americans and the USF from dedicating their full attention to the current situation.

The only upside to the Chinese, as far as he was concerned, was the fact that their pressure had caused the United States to design the new Cheyenne class hulls and his own government to design the Long Bow series. The odds were originally against the Long Bow vessels ever being built as a production series, but with the new situation, the rumblings said that His Majesty’s government was willing to pony up the dough.

If only they’d done it five years sooner, things might have turned out differently for Hayden.

*****

The Alamo, American Shipyards

West Jovian Trojan Point

The data from the USV Majesty had been shared throughout the labs of the USF and its member states, but the original chip from Captain Petronov’s hand delivery had arrived on the asteroid facility known simply as the Alamo. Fully three quarters of the multi-rock facility were dedicated to civilian slips, leased by the USF and the United States government at an overall loss to various corporations that specialized in deep space shipping to and from the various colonies, projects, and stations that dotted the reaches of explored space.

Those corporations had already received word that their leases were being pulled for immediate review. They hadn’t yet had the opportunity to formally register their complaints. Not that it would matter in any event.

Of the rest, approximately fifty percent belonged, more or less, to the member nations of the USF. Their leases were not under review, primarily because their governments had negotiated largely unbreakable clauses and the American government had decided that the trouble of evicting them wasn’t worth the scandal.

The remaining one eighth of the facility was owned and utilized by the United States of America, with some staff from the United Kingdom and Canada. Within that section of the facility, and totally oblivious to the chaos going on around them, men and women were already pouring deeply over the data on Petronov’s chip while the rest of the facility geared up for the largest space construction bonanza since the early days of jump point travel.

Looking over the facility through the observation deck, Admiral Patrick Gates could see the drive flares of literally every tug in his command harvesting asteroids from the Trojans the Alamo rested amongst. Each ship would locate and lasso a nickel-iron asteroid of appropriate size, then fling it sunward to where the solar furnaces would be prepared to smelt it into workable metal. Using centripetal force, the smelted metal would be spun into new ship hulls and slung back after a quick orbit of the inner system.

“We need a defensive system.”

Gates was in no mood to be pleasant; the commander of the Alamo facility wasn’t in a terribly good mood.

“Sir, with all due respect, I don’t think that there is a defense.”

That would be the cause of his bad mood. His people, the best people he could lay his hands on, persisted in telling him that they were all screwed.

“Admiral, I’m not sure you understand what’s going on here…”

Doctor Silvia Smith, current head of the Alamo’s high energy physics department, shook her head. The data spoke for itself, in her opinion, and it had a lot of bad things to say. “We’re looking at the formation of micro-singularities within the hulls of our ships…These are unprecedented applications of universal dimensions theory. Admiral, they’re somehow projecting a high energy dimensional collapse directly into our ships. We have no defense against that.”

Gates rubbed the bridge of his nose. He hated it when they talked to him like he was both an imbecile and someone who could fully follow the way their minds worked. He was no slouch himself in the education department; he certainly wouldn’t have been assigned to the Alamo if he had been. However, he was primarily a manager and not one of the researchers. He knew enough about all of their work to keep up with their reports but not nearly enough about any one subject to match minds with any of them.

“Doctor Smith, if they’re projecting it into our ships, then there must be a way to intercept, block, or scramble their projections. I may not understand physics as well as you, but I know that there is no such thing as a magic bullet,” he said firmly. “If it can be shot, lazored, fired, or burned, there is a countermeasure. Find it.”

Smith groaned, almost silently but not quite. She leaned back, shaking her head as the footage of the Delaware played on an endless loop. Ironically, with all the advanced sensors in that battle, the most telling piece of information they had came from the visual scanners of the USV Los Angeles. The Delaware shuddered at first, then her cylindrical hull and huge hexagonal armor plates visibly buckled. The effect was slow at first, but it accelerated until the ship literally folded in on itself like an empty beer can being crushed. The final moments of the Delaware’s existence ended in a brilliant flash of nuclear fire that was entirely impossible as far as all the design specs on the ship could tell. There was simply nothing inside her that could go super critical like that, even taking into account her fission reactor and the tiny supply of anti-deuterium she would have had stocked at any given moment.

The consensus of the eggheads was gravity induced fission, that somehow the enemy had created an area of dimensional collapse within the Delaware. When the eleven known dimensions of the universe were forced to collapse into each other, the force of gravity was multiplied until the matter within the area formed a point singularity. Not actually an uncommon event, in fact. In the upper atmosphere of Earth, it was estimated that several thousand point singularities popped in and out of existence in any given hour. However, they expended energy at such atrociously high rates that they blew themselves out before they could absorb any mass to stabilize.

Whatever had hit the ships of Taskforce Two hadn’t had any problem stabilizing the singularities long enough for them to affect the structure of the ship. In fact, what they had done, in the estimation of Doctor Smith and her colleagues, was actually turn the full force of each ship’s own gravity against them.

In effect, each ship had actually crushed itself as the normally muted power of its own gravity was turned up to full force by the enemy’s weapon. So powerful, in fact, that the force of the rushing atoms slamming together was enough to split them and turn the ship itself into a nuclear device.

Impressive, certainly, but to Admiral Gates, that only meant that finding a way to defend against the weapon was that much more of a priority.

“Can we at least detect them using this information?” he asked, looking around the table, “Like the way we calculate jump points?”

“Possibly…” Doctor Simon Harris said slowly. “Jump points are similarly based in gravity propagation…However they form much more evenly and move in predictable fashions. When the gravity ripples from variable geometric stellar objects collide with known objects, the counter ripples that form merge into the jump points at predictable distances. They shift through space, vanish into nothing as the waves cancel each other out, occasionally double and treble their power as two waves reinforce one another…However, those are all calculated based on indirect observation…this is a different matter…”

“Perhaps if we had more time…” Doctor Smith ventured, leaning forward. “We might be able to calculate the location of the weapon from its effect when it is fired.”

“That’s a little late, Doctor…” Gates growled.

“It’s a start,” Harris snapped. “Take what you can get, Admiral. I know it goes against the grain, but this will take time.”

“Time is in precious short commodity now, Doctor. The Cheyenne class hulls will be beginning their orbital return track to our slips in less than three weeks. We’re going to need the very best of everything to pack into them, and it’s your jobs to make sure we have it.”

The men and women around the table glared at him with various levels of openness, but Gates just smiled grimly.

“And it’s my job to make you do your jobs. Am I quite clear?”

*****

Hayden’s World

Golems

It was the only word to describe the things she was now seeing as Sorilla crouched in the crook of a tree at the edge of the protective jungle. Another two weeks had passed, bringing more people into the fold as the pathfinders located more refugees surviving to various degrees out in the jungle.

Silver and his “kids” had swelled their numbers of trained jungle people, and since they’d established contact with them, Sorilla had been spending half her time teaching them about jungle combat while they taught her about Hayden’s jungles. The other half was spent out on the fringes of the jungle like she was now, watching for what she’d finally found.

The main city on Hayden was located in the center of a hundredkilometer-diameter plateau that rose over the jungle that surrounded it. The colony had anchored the orbital tether and begun their buildup in the relatively sparse foliage that grew on the barren and rocky surface. She had been able to make her way in toward the center shortly after landing, but since her reception then, she and the pathfinders had begun circling around the rim of the crater, looking for more signs of the ghosts’ existence.

The four meter-tall lumbering Golems fit the bill, in her estimation.

“Motherless void,” Dean Simmons whispered, shaking his head. “What are those things?”

She glanced sharply back at him, but the young man wasn’t looking even remotely in her direction. In fairness, she didn’t really blame him. The Golems were something to see. There were five of them just a few hundred meters away, apparently clearing back the jungle below them. It was the first time she’d had a chance to calmly observe the enemy, or an aspect of the enemy, at least, in action.

“Golems,” she replied quietly, using the term for the things they’d all settled on. It fit the bill, of course, looking like nothing more than an animate pile of rocks.

There was more down there than the Golems, though. Sorilla blinked, activating the liquid lenses that floated over her eyes, and had her implants dial up the surface tension until the magnification placed her right on top of the moving things below. In addition to the four meter monsters the colonials had begun calling Golems, she could see smaller, maybe one and a half meter, versions moving around the feet of their bigger brothers. Mentally, she dubbed them Goblins and started a new file in her processor.

Both types were working, not fighting or patrolling. The larger Golems would clear the jungle back while the smaller Goblins policed the debris that resulted from the overall operation.

“What are they doing?”

Sorilla glanced back again, just catching sight of Dean in her peripheral vision where the liquid lenses didn’t magnify her vision. The young man had a lot to learn about patience. They’d only been here for a little over a day, and with all the activity going on, Sorilla figured they were good to stick around for at least several. She looked back to the activity, watching as she considered the young man’s question. It wasn’t a dumb question by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, she was wondering the same thing herself. If he’d waited until they were out of the area, she wouldn’t have thought twice about starting a serious discussion about it.

Finally, she sighed softly. “They’re clearing the ground, probably in preparation for installing another defense point.”

“Oh,” Dean said, blinking. “How can you tell?”

“Dean,” she said tiredly. “Are you usually this noisy when hunting?”

Dean blinked. “Well yeah…if we can scare away the animals, all the better.”

“Kid, these targets don’t run away if they hear you, ok? They come in with guns blazing, trying to kill us.”

He shrank back, blinking. “Oh. Yeah.”

Sorilla turned her focus back to the activity, sighing silently. There wasn’t a hunter on Earth who would think the way the kid did, but this wasn’t Earth. Here on Hayden, you only killed animals if they were a threat to human operations, so if they ran off due to noise, you’d accomplished your goal without firing a shot. Hunting for food was a generational tradition, passed down from father to son in most cultures, and it encompassed many of the skills a guerilla warrior needed. Here, though, there was a generational break. You didn’t hunt for food on a world where you couldn’t eat the local game. Dean and the others were skilled jungle men, but hunters and guerilla fighters they were not. She found herself wishing for some real jungle warfighters, just a small handful to help her establish a cadre of Hayden-born warriors.

A few hours later, though, she had to admit that the kid learned. He was still fidgeting, nervous or impatient, but he’d shut his mouth and not opened it again so far. That was a plus. Now, if she could just figure something for him and the others to do. The Golems were entirely invulnerable to small-arms fire and only barely vulnerable to her own assault weapon. Given that she held the only military-issued weapon in their possession, they’d have to be creative.

“You think you can find your way back to camp, kid?”

She glanced back to see him looking at her, his expression insulted.

“Of course.”

“I want you to head back and bring Jerry and a half dozen of the best jungle men in camp. Tell them to bring up saws, axes, and rope. You get that? Saws, axes, and rope,” she said sternly.

He nodded, but she shook her head. “Repeat it back.”

“Saws, axes, and rope. Half a dozen good jungle men,” he said calmly.

“Good, now, before you go, hand me your rifle.” She reached out a hand.

He looked puzzled, but handed his .300 Magnum weapon to her. She took it, cleared the chamber automatically, and checked the fittings. “What’s the zero?”

“300 meters.”

She nodded, accepting that since she didn’t have time to zero it in herself, nor the opportunity for that matter. She popped the cap off the scopes and chambered a round as she leaned down against the rim of the crater wall. The Golems and their diminutive Goblin compatriots had closed a little in the hours she had watched them, and her implants’ rangefinding software put them at just over 500 meters. She sighted them in, blinking away the liquid lenses over her own eyes, and laid her eyes against the scope.

Panning the narrow field of view over the moving targets below, she took her time, picking through the alien constructs that had invaded this human world. Finally, she had her choice, the crosshairs centering over it as she made an adjustment for the wind.

“Get ready to boogey, kid,” she said softly, taking in a calming breath.

She held it, the rifle pausing between her heartbeats, then let it out until her abdomen was relaxed. Seconds ticked by like minutes, and then, between the beats of her heart, she squeezed the trigger.

The rifle roared, sending its 220 grain round out at just over 3,000 meters per second. It thumped back into her shoulder harder than her own, more powerful assault weapon, but she just accepted it as she kept her eyes on the target. This was one time when she had to hold her position just a little longer than she’d prefer.

The heavy hunting round slammed into the Goblin a few moments later, sending a shower of shards into the air as it kicked the smaller thing off its feet. Immediately, the others twisted around, looking right up at her position. Sorilla’s eyes widened in revelation as her stomach jumped into her throat.

“Oh hell,” she whispered. “Move!”

“What?” Dean asked, surprised and confused.

“Move it, kid! We’ve got to boogey out of here!”

She tossed his rifle into his arms, then kicked off the lip of the crater and bolted for the jungle with one hand gripping the back of his neck. He scrambled along with her, glancing back. “Our food! We left the food and the field gear…!”

“Leave it!” She yanked hard on him, pushing him ahead of her. “Run!”

He got his feet under him, pounding through the thickening jungle as Sorilla watched the timer she’d automatically set. Thirty seconds had passed and still no response. It didn’t make sense to her. She’d seen the reaction, they had pinpointed her position almost instantly. An American armored unit could pinpoint a sniper that fast, and when they did, the sniper almost invariably died a few seconds later.

Perhaps they didn’t have the artillery capacity to…

A flash lit the area in front of them like the bulb of a thousand cameras had gone off, and Sorilla’s mind boggled in disbelief.

No one would do that. Would they?

While her mind was boggling, however, her body was reacting. She lunged forward, tackling Dean off his feet, and they both went down, tumbling along the ground as she pushed them behind one of the large boulders that dotted this section of the Hayden jungle and covered Dean with her own body as she clapped her hands over her ears.

The shockwave tore the leaves from the jungle trees above and around them, just ripping them off in an instant. The wind beat at them as they cowered behind the boulder, feeling like a hot hurricane whipping around them. Debris tore through the jungle, ripping trees apart and flattening lesser vegetation to the ground. Then, for a moment, everything was still and silent.

“What…?” Dean started to look up, but Sorilla shoved his head back down.

“Stay down! Not done!”

It wasn’t either. As the moment of silence passed, the wind picked up again, this time from the other side as it howled past them, pelting them with smaller debris and even burning chunks of wood and random debris. Sorilla hissed in pain as something nailed her shoulder, but she kept her head down and covered, even as she made certain Dean did the same.

Ears ringing, they looked up a moment later to the skeletal remnants of the jungle around them, smoking limbs hanging off some of the surviving trees. Dean looked around, confused and stunned.

“What was that?” he yelled.

Sorilla looked over her shoulder, then grabbed his arm. “Tactical nuke.”

“What?”

She looked sharply at him, then winced as she spotted blood running from his ears. She held his head so he was looking at her and waved away from the rim of the crater. “We have to run!”

He blinked at her, shaking his head.

“Run!” she yelled again. “We run!”

He finally nodded as she pulled him along, and they finally broke into a run toward the safety of the green jungle ahead of them. As they ran, Sorilla was sorting the intelligence she’d managed to gather.

First, the smaller Goblins were susceptible to small-arms fire. That was good. However, the enemy had a very hostile response to sniper threats.

Not so good.

She tried to shake her head clear. She’d have to take Dean back now, she couldn’t send him off through the jungle in his current state. He’d obviously blown his eardrums in the concussion of the blast, and his state of mind was in question for the moment, as well. She’d have to gather the men and gear she needed and hope to be able to find the Golems and Goblins again.

Just before they penetrated the living jungle, she paused to glance back at the rim of the crater where she had hidden. The rock was smoking. A hole carved out of the rim told her that they’d targeted just below the rim. That had probably saved them, she thought, sheltering them from behind the rock of the rim itself as well as the boulder and several dozen meters of jungle. It hadn’t been a huge blast either, but the flash was unmistakable.

So was the sound of rocks and boulders as they continued to crash down into the jungle around them, only falling from the sky now, several minutes after the initial blast.

Who are these people?

She couldn’t help but ask herself that over and over again. No nation on Earth would ever consider popping off a nuke, even a small one, to take out a damned sniper. The term overkill came to mind, despite the common military axiom that there was no such thing. Of course, as it hadn’t actually killed her, perhaps it was underkill after all.

Very damned expensive underkill, in terms of munitions and damage to the local area, however.

She pushed the thought from her mind and kept focused on Dean as she pushed him through the jungle ahead of her. Her shoulder was hurting, but it wasn’t too bad. If Dean could make it back to camp under his own power, at least she’d be spared the strain of carrying him. In the meantime, she could feel Bugs kicking in, and with a little luck, the spreading warmth would keep her joint from tightening up on her.

At least, she supposed, she’d have some interesting data to send back to the reconnaissance satellite on its next pass.

Chapter 3

A few shocked cries brought Tara from her shelter, blinking into the sunlight that streamed through the jungle above as she looked around. Her eyes widened as she saw Sorilla push young Dean Simmons ahead of her, sending him staggering, almost drunkenly. A sharp comment rose to her lips until she saw the look in Sorilla’s eyes and the slow, deliberate measure of her step.

“Oh, lord,” Tara muttered, ducking back inside to fetch the medical kit that she had “inherited” from the soldier. A moment later, she rushed out, grabbing two of the stunned onlookers as she ran. “Jason, Tom, grab them!”

The two men shook their heads clear and followed her, grabbing Dean before he could fall to his knees. Tara stopped at his side, checking his pupils first, then noticed the dry blood that ran down the side of his head and neck from his ears. “Oh, heavens. What happened?”

“I think it was a nuke.”

Tara and the men turned sharply to where Sorilla had stopped. The soldier was standing, apparently easy, her legs spread just enough to balance her weight without much work on her part. A good thing, Tara supposed, because she looked like she was about to fall over.

“Check his ears,” Sorilla said dully. “I’m going to lie down.”

She shuffled past Tara as the young medic did a quick evaluation of the young man, then nodded to the other two. “Take him into the shelter.”

They nodded, picking the exhausted young man up and physically carrying him into the makeshift nurses’ station that Tara worked out of. She followed, noticing Sorilla vanish into her own shelter out of the corner of her eye, but only spared a brief thought for the soldier as she followed them in.

Hours later, after determining that Dean’s eardrums were indeed blown but his life was apparently unthreatened, a very tired young nurse found her way over to the soldier’s shelter and let herself in. The solar lighting was glowing softly, returning some of the energy it had absorbed through the day, and she could see Sorilla lying face down on the bed. Apparently, she hadn’t moved from where she had fallen, but her back was rising and falling slowly in time with her breathing.

Tara shook her head, then closed the bug mesh properly to keep out the nocturnal insects of the Hayden jungle. They weren’t likely to bother a human, but the higher oxygen levels in Hayden’s atmosphere led to some rather disturbingly larger insects than any person really wanted to deal with, and those that did bother humans really bothered them.

Only when the netting was back in place did she turn to look at the soldier, noting that the woman had flopped down half on the cot and half off, face down in her pillow, just barely turned enough to be able to breathe. The nurse shook her head as she moved forward, then hissed as she spotted the shaft of wood jutting out from the bare shoulder.

It rose up nearly five centimeters from the skin, the flesh around it already black and blue with ugly red veins winding through it. There was a lightening of the color around the core of the injury, surrounding the wooden splinter itself, and she grimaced as she recognized the onset of an infection.

“Pull it out.”

Tara shook herself, surprised that Sorilla was still awake. “What?”

“Pull it out,” she said again, “I can’t reach it.”

Oh. Tara shook her head, moving forward. “This isn’t going to be fun…Wait a moment while I examine the wound.”

“It’s infected,” the soldier said flatly. “I can read the heightened activity of white blood cells on my HUD. Just get the foreign material out of my shoulder…please.”

Tara nodded, reaching down to wrap her fingers around the slim shaft of Hayden hardwood, grasping it firmly as she pressed down on the shoulder with her other hand. “This is going to…”

Sorilla screamed as the shaft jerked out, her body convulsing briefly as Tara leaned in and put her weight into holding the soldier down.

“… hurt,” the nurse finished, almost bemused as she held up the slim, ten centimeter long shaft of wood.

“No shit,” Sorilla hissed from the bed, her body relaxing suddenly as the sharp pain vanished and the dull throbbing seemed a million miles away by comparison. She let out a breath she’d been holding, and then rolled up onto her good shoulder and looked back at the nurse. “Some bedside manner you got, Doc.”

“I’m not a doctor,” Tara corrected automatically as she tossed the shaft of wood into a trash bin, then fiddled around with the small case of medical materials she’d drawn from Sorilla’s supply. Antiseptic went on next, then a quick wave with the Wand, and finally, she sprayed on a synthetic skin to close the wound.

“Close enough for me,” Sorilla said, rolling over to her side. She favored the injured shoulder but seemed more comfortable with the shard of wood gone. “How’s the kid?”

Tara winced, shaking her head grimly. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to do anything about his hearing.”

Sorilla smiled grimly. “It’ll probably heal.”

“It will?” Tara asked hopefully.

The soldier nodded. “Yeah. Few weeks, maybe months…Probably months, actually…It was a nuke after all…a small one, but it was pretty bad. Just make sure it doesn’t get infected, he should be ok.”

Sorilla considered for a moment, then shrugged with a hiss as a lance of pain from her shoulder reminded her of her injury. “If it’s worse than that, we’ll get him help when the Fleet comes back.”

It was something in the eyes of the woman when she mentioned the Fleet that caught Sorilla’s eyes, a look she’d seen before, a long time ago. Hope, mixed with dread, and the dread was winning.

“Hey,” she said, catching the redhead’s attention. “They are coming.”

Tara shivered but nodded. The nod wasn’t agreement, Sorilla could see that, it was just an acceptance of the words. An acknowledgment that she’d heard them and little else. It was different for Sorilla. She grew up army, her dad and her mother were both serving military, and she knew the credo, felt it in her blood and bone.

No one left behind.

It was possible that they would come late. It was even possible that they would all die before they could set foot on Hayden, but it was patently impossible that they would not make the attempt. Fleet was coming back, and they would be bringing the hells of war with them.

There was no way to communicate that to the young woman in front of her, however. It wasn’t that Tara was incapable of understanding the oath, nor that she lacked something that was present in Sorilla’s brothers-and sisters-in-arms. Such confidence, however, was not easily given to a group you didn’t know. Sorilla sighed and opened her mouth to speak, only to be shocked by a sudden explosion rocking the small community.

The soldier jerked from the cot, the pain forgotten even as it lanced through her shoulder.

“What is it?” the medic asked.

“Sonic boom,” Sorilla said, grabbing up her vest as she tore through the bug mesh and stepped out into the jungle night. Her eyes glowed green as she accessed her local equipment and began downloading a series of messages from the queue even as they appeared.

The sonic boom was shortly followed by an explosion Sorilla now recognized as an atomic blast, then more sounds of supersonic cracks, quickly followed by more sounds of war.

“What’s going on?”

“Is it them? Are they coming for us?”

“Fleet! It’s the Fleet!”

Sorilla shook her head, looking up as she read the information passing across her HUD. “No. It’s not the Fleet.”

And it wasn’t the Fleet, not at all. It was a gift from the Fleet, however, the last gift of a dying squadron if she was reading the message downloads right. It was a gift they sorely needed, in fact, and she hoped that some small fraction of it might reach the ground, even through the hellfire it now endured. It had traveled millions of miles, and taken over a month to arrive, but it was here.

“It’s not the Fleet,” Sorilla said again, her voice carrying as she tightened her combat vest over her bare chest, “but it’s the next best thing. Call up the pathfinders, Samuel. We’re going out tonight.”

*****

Moscow

Alexi Petronov flinched as his implant hummed lightly behind his ear but covered it as he rose to his feet. “Pardon me, Father, Mother, I have a call.”

The old woman nodded, watching as he stepped away from the dinner table. She exchanged glances with her husband, worry evident in both their eyes. They weren’t privy to exactly what their son was dealing with lately, but he had been preoccupied since he returned home.

In the next room, Alexi answered the call, his eyes glowing slightly as the implanted film filled his vision with the image of Admiral Shepard.

“Good afternoon, Alexi,” Shepard said formally, his English accent a stark contrast to the Russian Alexi had been hearing for weeks.

“Admiral,” Petronov replied, tipping his head slightly. The implants used their connections to his body to encode the motion, and Alexi knew that his avatar would make the same move in real time as the computer-generated version of himself spoke to the admiral. “I… assume that the Soc is ready?”

His English felt halting, but it smoothed out almost instantly as the nickname for his ship came to Alexi’s tongue. He’d told the admiral that he was an explorer, a researcher, and had no interest in commanding a military ship, but he did love the Socrates. He missed her decks, the zero gravity that existed through most of her, even the queasy feeling he got in the centrifugal sections of the old girl.

He found himself wanting her back, new weapons and all.

“Very nearly, Captain. We need your answer.”

Alexi half turned, looking away, though the image of the admiral followed his eyes wherever they went. He wasn’t precisely opposed to the military, certainly not now. Alexi was a realist, despite his own personal preferences, but he’d never desired to serve in a military structure.

He looked back into the kitchen of the old townhouse where his parents had gone on with the dinner. A fair portion of his family had gathered, as they did whenever they were in town. In the end, Alexi knew that if they didn’t stop them at Hayden, whoever they were, they may come for Earth.

“Captain?”

“I’ll be on the next sub-orbital to New Mexico, Admiral.”

The admiral stifled a sigh, but it was transmitted loud and clear over the digital line. “Thank you, Captain.”

“If you’ll excuse me, sir, I have a family dinner to finish,” Alexi said, his voice tight.

“Of course, Captain. Take your time,” Shepard said quickly. “In fact, I’ll have a military transport waiting at the base outside of Moscow. When you’re done, they’ll be ready.”

“Thank you, Admiral.”

“Good bye, Captain,” the admiral said, then closed the connection.

The image dissolved, leaving Alexi standing alone in the old living room. He took a moment to compose himself, then turned and stepped back into the kitchen while forcing a smile as he switched back to Russian. “So, didn’t get cold while I was talking, did it?”

His mother smiled, pushing another serving plate in his direction. “There is more, Alexi. Eat, you lose weight when you’re away.”

“Health regs, Mom.” He smiled, accepting the plate and forking the food over to his plate. “Have to stay fit on a ship.”

His mother grumbled a bit, and Alexi shared a smile with his father and sisters, though he knew that they didn’t understand the severity of health regulations onboard ship. Since most areas on a ship were zero gravity, it was easily possible to suffer from muscle, tissue, and bone degeneration on long missions. The near-infrared systems in the medical and exercise facilities helped compensate, but in the end, it just took a lot of hard work and sweat to keep a man in best form.

“Was that the call you were expecting, Alexi?” his father asked.

He nodded reluctantly. “Yes, Papa…”

“A new mission?”

Alexi didn’t smile as he nodded, something he didn’t realize he was doing but was noted by his parents. Their Alexi always smiled when given a new mission; he loved his job and his ship.

“Do you leave soon?”

He nodded again, still serious, “Yes, Mom. Tonight.”

“What star will you see this time, Alexi?” his sister, Olga, asked. She was the youngest and had often professed her desire to follow in her older brother’s footsteps.

Normally, he would gladly have told her everything he knew about his location and the mission. Today, however, Alexi just shook his head. “I’m afraid I cannot say.”

“They haven’t told you?”

He opened his mouth, then shook his head again. “I’m sorry, I cannot speak of it this time, Olga.”

“But…”

“Olga.”

They all snapped around, the sharp command in their father’s voice startling. The former colonel in the Soviet Alliance glared at his daughter. “Your brother said he cannot talk about it.”

She blinked, then just nodded. “Yes, Papa.”

Alexi looked over at his father, uncertain for a moment, but as their eyes met, a brief spark of communication flashed between them. Not as precise as an implant, perhaps, but perfectly clear to Alexi just the same. He nodded in gratitude and then turned back to his meal as his mother turned to Olga.

“So, Olga, how was your day?”

*****

The Alamo

West Jovian Trojan Point

Admiral Gates stared out through the heavily reinforced aluminum crystal that made up the observation dome as the first of the new Cheyenne class hulls was pushed into a slip by a tug. The heavy nickel-iron construct was a flattened cylinder over 400 meters long, literally forged from an iron-rich asteroid they’d farmed from the East Jovian Trojan point almost eight months earlier. Solar blast furnaces had been used to melt off the slag material as each hull was sent on a 210-day fast track orbit that eventually led them back to the Alamo in their finished form.

The hulls were one-piece monsters of metal armor over a dozen meters thick in places, enough to withstand the stresses of high-thrust maneuvers, the dangers of high-speed impacts with micro meteorites, and most any conventional weapon known. There were four of the Cheyenne class hulls out there, and almost forty on the inward track to the solar furnaces waiting inside the orbit of Mercury. Builders were scrambling madly trying to figure out how to fit that many hulls into the furnaces, but those hulls weren’t his problem, yet.

He had crews standing ready, ceramic battle plates stacked in his warehouses, and all the electronics, heavy equipment, and other necessities needed to turn those hulks into the most powerful warships ever built by man. The meter-thick ceramic armor would add another level of physical defense to the ships, the shaped charges formed inside them ready to defeat any conventional munitions with an instant level of reactive protection that went beyond sheer physical toughness.

The previous standard hull was the Los Angeles class, which had been sold to allied governments and corporations alike for the better part of half a century. Larger and more powerful than the Los Angeles class, the Cheyenne hulls would likely remain a military asset well into the foreseeable future, even had the specter of war not locked up all their assets for military production.

Against any conventional weapons system, Gates figured that a Cheyenne could take anything an enemy might shell out and just grin wide as it kept on coming. The numbers even indicated that the armor would shrug off a nuclear strike with little damage to the internal systems or crew, through her armor would be totaled, of course.

Now, thought Gates, if only they were going out after an enemy that used conventional weapons.

*****

USV Socrates

On Station, Earth Orbit

Alexi Petronov firmly gripped a handhold as he swung across the last airlock connection and into his ship. His boots landed against the deck, and he held himself in place for a moment as he looked around. The Soc looked the same. There were no glaring signs of the military changes they’d wrought on his poor ship. In fact, most of the crew seemed to be intact and moving about their business pretty much as usual.

From where he was, there was a ton of cargo visible in the bay, far more than they would normally have crammed in for the majority of missions he’d been sent on, but they’d weighed off with full bays more than once, too. Space on a starship wasn’t exactly at a premium. The space-only vessels were built big, and generally the outer colonies were small and mostly self-sufficient, so they didn’t import bulk items as a rule.

Colonies like Hayden, for example, generally imported information chips, because the bandwidth on the Casimir transmitters was limited. Scientific, commercial, and industrial instruments, and luxury items were also on the list. They grew their own food, produced their own raw materials, and were often net exporters of many bulk items. There were generally reasons why a colony site was selected, of course.

Ships like the Socrates occasionally brought in emergency supplies, much like this mission, or helped a new colony establish, but both of those instances were rare. In fact, in the entire line history of the USV Socrates, she had been loaded this heavy only once before. Alexi had looked it up. That was in response to a massive critical failure of both meat and vegetable crops at the Ares Terraforming Project over thirty years previously. A local contamination had infiltrated the main Ares bio-tower facility and managed to ride the tether up to the orbital counterweight before it was noticed. The complex chemical toxin had destroyed growth mediums for both the protein domes and aeroponic facilities before anyone realized they had a problem.

This mission was probably a bit more nerve racking, Alexi had to say, though. He steeled himself with a deep breath and kicked off the ground, gliding deeper into the research vessel turned uncertain warship.

“Captain!”

Alexi twisted in midflight, snagging an overhead handgrip and arresting his motion smoothly as he spotted Quartermaster Koonzin swinging in his direction. The squat-looking woman was proportioned like a wall but had shipped with him on every mission he’d taken in the last five years, and Alexi was both disappointed and relieved to see her.

“Shiri,” he nodded as she swung to a stop. “I’d hoped you and the rest would turn this one down.”

She snorted, shaking her head. “Not likely, Captain. We’ve been let in on the secret, once we’d signed a whole crapload of papers saying we wouldn’t even think about what they were about to tell us. We’re all back, ‘cept for Mackay and a few of the short timers.”

Alexi winced. “Jane’s not on board?”

Jane Mackay had served as his first officer for the past three years, and the woman was a treasure. Alexi again felt the mixture of relief and disappointment, this time the other way around, and he chided himself for the stupidity of the emotions.

“They gave her the Hood.”

Alexi froze, his stomach lurching as he recognized the name.

“That…” he licked his lips. “That’s one of the Longbow class.”

“Yes, sir,” Shiri Koonzin replied, her dark face as serious as her Captain’s. “The British admiralty called her up the day after you left for Moscow, sir.”

It made sense, he supposed. Jane was a British reservist and had to have some of the longest deep space times of any British military personnel. She was also damned good at what she did, so he’d always known that he wouldn’t have her forever. Even in the Solari Organization, where the budgets were so slim they occasionally vanished into the air recyclers, a woman like Jane Mackay wasn’t going to stay second fiddle on a survey ship for long. Advancement in the Fleet had been slow over the past few years, but it was apparent that the times were changing.

He forced himself to nod, accepting the information that a woman he considered a close personal friend was now in command of a ship that would most likely be right on the front lines.

“Right,” he said firmly. “I’ll have to send her a congratulations. Thank you, Koonzin.”

Shiri nodded, her eyes understanding as he pushed off the deck and glided toward a nearby lift. “Captain?”

He turned back in midflight, eyes questioning.

“Relieved to have you back on board, sir.”

Alexi Petronov nodded gratefully, hand reaching out automatically to hook a handgrip as he reached the far wall. He swung into the lift smoothly, slapping the manual close even as he accessed his implants and connected to the ship’s computer system. A few moments later, he was accelerating along the inner shaft, climbing the ship’s spine to the forward command deck as he began referencing the changes they’d made to his ship.

The USV Socrates, Plato class survey vessel, was about as far from a warship as anything jump-worthy could be. Oh, it was about as well armored as a Los Angeles class cruiser, and unlike seafaring merchant ships, the Plato class ships were laid out inside with much the same paranoia as military ships. Explosive decompression didn’t much care if it was caused by a missile or a rock, after all. The hull was actually identical to an older military design, the first jump-capable Armstrong class, in fact.

The Soc’s maneuvering capabilities weren’t up to military specs, however. Her VASIMR drive held only a quarter the thrust of a military vessel because the bone-crushing, death-dealing thrust that a Los Angeles class vessel was capable of wasn’t something that the civilian designers of the Soc had even considered a crew might want to have on tap. Likewise, while her armor and layout were similar to military specs, her damage control capabilities were not. Fast and efficient though it was, Alexi knew damned well that, even at their peak, his crew didn’t have the tools to match even an older military ship on that level.

Weapons wise, well, until a few weeks earlier, there were none. None to speak of, anyway.

They had laser and maser nodes, used mostly for burning out chunks of rock and comet fragments for analysis. They had two torpedo launchers made to military specifications, but those were used to launch probes mounted on torpedo thrust modules. Even with military-grade torpedoes, the Soc wasn’t a threat to anything but another unarmed survey ship.

Things had changed in some small ways since then, however. The Yard had tacked on some box launchers, loaded with fifty birds apiece nose-to-tail in a head-to-tail launch configuration. That basically gave the Socrates a throw weight equivalent to a pair of fully armed Los Angeles destroyers. Not bad, he supposed, though from the data he’d seen, it wouldn’t be enough, and there was no simple way to reload the launchers short of a Yard slip.

The Soc’s mission profile wasn’t fighting, however. For that, at least, Alexi was glad. He swung off the lift as it came to a halt on the command deck and drifted over to the central chair as the skeleton crew nodded their greetings. Most of them were faces he knew, but there was a man at a new station that had apparently grown out of the side of the bridge.

Weapons control, he filled in mentally as he pulled himself into the command station and fastened his belts.

“Captain.”

Another new face, Alexi noted as he looked up.

The blond man drifted in slowly, reorienting himself to match Alexi’s up/down position as he approached. He wore a USF uniform with an American patch on his shoulder and a set of bars on his chest that identified him as military. Not reservist either, current serving military, Alexi noticed as he tried to pin down the rank.

“I’m Commander Ashley,” the man said, extending his hand as he finished his docking maneuver and came to a stop by the command station.

Alexi took his hand and shook it firmly. “Petronov.”

Ashley nodded, smiling. “Yes, I know.”

Of course he knew, Alexi thought. He was obviously the replacement for Mackay, and a military liaison as well.

“I’ve been assigned as your new executive officer,” Ashley went on, confirming Alexi’s thoughts. “I’ve been trying to fill in for Captain Mackay since her promotion.”

Alexi nodded, “Yes…I can see that. How are things?”

“Coming together, sir,” Ashley said instantly. “The new systems are being wired through the mains now, and we should be mission-ready within the week.”

Alexi nodded. “That’s…excellent, Commander. Thank you.”

Ashley nodded then waited for a long moment before squirming a little as he floated in place before finally nodding again. “Yes, well, I’d best get back to work.”

Alexi nodded. “Of course, Commander. Ah…before you go…”

Ashley looked back from where he was twisting away. “Yes, Captain?”

“I’ll be having dinner this evening, about seven…Senior officers would be welcome.”

The commander blinked, and then smiled. “Yes, sir. I’d be delighted.”

“I’ll see you then, Commander,” Alexi said before turning his eyes back to the large interface screens in front of him.

Commander Ashley nodded and kicked off, floating away quickly.

*****

Maritime Warfare School, HMS Collingwood

United Kingdom

Newly minted Captain Jane Mackay found herself wondering if she shouldn’t have stayed on the Socrates when offered the early promotion. The idea of commanding the HMS Hood was an incredible honor, to be sure, but since she’d received her command, she’d spent every waking moment seated behind an antiquated plastic desk, staring at slideshows of theoretical space combat strategies that had been developed at various allied think tanks since the loss of Hayden’s World become known.

Material specs, technical details, performance charts

The data on the new Longbow class of ships alone were going to make her brain bleed out through her ears at the rate they were being crammed in. The space war tactics classes were a relief compared to this, but they were entirely theoretical at this point and, as the developers had pointed out, were based on an incomplete understanding of the enemy technology and tactics.

The one thing they were certain of, however, was that the enemy’s apparent control over gravity made them incredibly lethal within their active engagement ranges. Best guess there came from the data the Majesty had brought back, which seemed to indicate that their engagement envelope was within 300,000 kilometers.

It sounded like a lot; in fact, it was a lot. Just a hair over two astronomical units, but space was a big place. Even with a massive envelope like that, there were obvious tactical issues with deploying weapons like the enemy’s gravity implosion device.

Which is exactly where the assumptions start to come into play.

First, the think tanks assumed that the weapon was a light-speed effect. Unlike human missiles, the enemy’s weapon system was presumed to operate at the speed of light. On the surface this was a huge advantage, but it was also an energy-based system and therefore unguided. That limited its range drastically, particularly if the target was maneuvering. You had to aim where they would be, not where they were.

Missiles were slower, but they could track and be guided.

The eggheads were supposedly working up some countermeasures for the weapon itself, but the current plots were all about evading the gravity weapon as long as possible while engaging with missiles.

Of course, that was easier said than done when you took the enemy acceleration into consideration. Anything that could move as fast as those things belonged in a science fiction movie, not the real universe.

Which brought her to the core tenant of the new space war tactics “bible.”

The center cannot hold.

It was a line out of a poem by William Butler Yeats, a rather dreary piece of prose in her opinion, but that had little relevance to the point the strategists were making.

A key tactic of warfare, historically, had always been surrounding your opponent with overwhelming force. In space war tactics, this became far more powerful a tactic as you could practice an “englobement” maneuver, which could force the defending ship or taskforce to attempt to fight back while their computers were trying to analyze exponentially greater target area than your own.

In simulations, even the best battle computers in the Solari fleet were simply unable to keep up with the needs of that sort of situation. It was, therefore, the first rule of space war. The center cannot hold, so do not let the enemy englobe you.

Against a foe like those faced in the Hayden System, that was easier said than done, of course. They were capable of maneuvering at acceleration rates that made even bleeding edge Earth technology look like sailing ships becalmed in the doldrums. The only hope they had of countering that was with precision maneuvering and exceptional inter-ship communications.

Mackey again found herself flipping back to the think tank’s answer to that problem, the first shipboard Casimir FTL coms. The specs looked good, but she wanted to get her hands on the hardware and put it through some real space trials.

Chapter 4

Jerry Reed watched Sarge as she pushed through the jungle, the light from the moons occasionally filtering in to cast a sheen off her skin as they moved. She looked bad, and he was starting to worry about it. He knew that she had been on her feet for at least a day and a half, more likely a full forty-eight hours or more. In addition to that, she’d been attacked and apparently blown up in the process. Sorilla Aida was a tough woman, that was damned certain in his mind, but Jerry really wondered what the limits were on that toughness.

She was moving well, though, he had to admit that. Since the explosions had died out, she had been leading them at a fast pace through the Hayden jungles, and she was easily pacing the better rested men and women he’d rounded up to join them. There were times when Jerry admitted, privately, that this woman scared him.

Only privately, of course, and even then not when anyone was around.

He smiled at the thought just as Sorilla’s fist came up, and the group froze in place. She was perched at the edge of a jungle clearing, and as she turned back, he caught a hint of faint green glow in her eyes to tell him that she was accessing implanted displays. Whether it was for information, or full night-vision, he couldn’t tell, of course.

“Reed.”

Her voice stirred him from his thoughts, and he slid forward until he was up beside her.

“One of the drop boxes is just over the ridge. No sign of the Golems,” she told him. “Set up a perimeter while the rest of us get in and break open the tin can.”

Jerry nodded, then slid back to Jason Clarke and Scott Siemens and relayed the same orders to them. The group split into two, and Sorilla led the larger forward. Jerry and his team broke up further and began to circle slowly around.

As he melted into the jungle shadows, Jerry reluctantly put his worry for Sorilla aside. For the moment, there was nothing to be done about it anyway. Later, perhaps.

He had to believe that there would be a later.

*****

Sorilla kicked a broken branch out of her way as she stepped up to the drop box and checked it out. The box was about twenty meters on a side and five meters high, the drogue chute hanging half over it and half caught up in the trees above.

“Cut that down,” she ordered, nodding to the chute. “There’s about a million things we can use the silks for.”

Two men nodded and clambered up the side of the box as she got closer and found the access panel on the side of the box. Ripping it off was the work of a few seconds, and she spent only a half dozen more examining the flashing lights inside. “Fire in the hole!”

Men ducked back, automatically shrinking from her when she said those words, and a smile touched her lips as she triggered the explosive bolts that held the side of the container on. The nuke story must have already made the rounds a few times, she decided. The bolts weren’t dangerously powerful, however, and in a few seconds they’d popped clear off and the side fell clear into the jungle.

“Hold back,” Sorilla ordered, planting a foot on the fallen siding as she stepped inside. A red glow from the black box lit up suddenly, and her eyes glowed green in response as she was challenged with an IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) signal. She responded with the appropriate codes from her processor, and the red light dimmed slightly as the Cougar Automated Battle Tank rolled forward, its twenty millimeter turret swinging to cover the jungle.

“Holy shit!”

Sorilla ignored the shocked curse, instead waving the Cougar on past. “Perimeter defense, maximum stealth.”

The tank didn’t respond verbally, but the heavy machine rolled out past her and bulled into the jungle as her HUD lit up with the system’s affirmative response. Multiple queries began lighting up on her implants, and Sorilla found herself directing several automated combat systems into the jungle, basically telling them to make their own way as best they could. She had to get them cleared out of the area as fast as she could, in case the Golems showed up before they could get clear.

“Son of a…” Bethany muttered as she stepped up close to Sorilla. “It’s a freaking army.”

“Not hardly,” Sorilla replied, even as she continued to give orders to the machines. “A short platoon at best, and none of them are exactly nimble in this environment. You know any routes we can get through the jungle from here in a vehicle?”

Bethany blinked, twisting around to orient herself. She’d only spent a year and a half on Hayden, and most of her time was spent with her nose in a field microscope, studying the Chiroptis and their ilk. “Damn. No, this isn’t one of the places I spent a lot of time in.”

“Go out and find Jerry,” Sorilla ordered. “Take his place and send him in here.”

“Right,” she nodded, turning and heading out.

An army MULE (Multifunction Utility, Logistics, and Equipment vehicle) rolled up and out of the drop box, loaded down with a full load of munitions, food, and water, causing Sorilla to breathe a sigh of relief. The squat vehicle was a good deal wider than it was tall, and she knew that it was loaded with the standard 1,000 kilos of equipment intended for delivery to a frontline squad in the middle of a firefight.

Sorilla directed it to the side and had it park just behind her as another rolled out on its silent, electric motors. There were five MULEs in total, three Cougars, a half dozen of the armed scout DOGs, two Oshkosh freight transports, and a single tracked ambulance. They’d just finished unloading themselves when Jerry arrived from the jungle.

“Well, I didn’t believe Beth when she told me, but hot damn…”

“Don’t get too excited,” Sorilla cut him off. “We’ve got to get them out of here before we get nuked.”

Jerry winced and scratched his head. “Yeah, well, there is that. Need some sparse jungle then…?”

“Right. These boys are good to go, and they’re all terrain ready, but an three meter-wide Hayden tree is gonna slow ‘em down some,” Sorilla replied simply. “Besides, I don’t want to leave a trail a blind man could follow.”

“Leave a…?” Jerry blinked. “What do you mean ‘slow them down?’ These are Hayden hardwoods! You have any idea how long it takes to cut one down?”

“About two seconds with what these puppies are packing,” Sorilla replied. “But that’s not my first choice. We need to get the MULEs out of here, at least…And I’d really love to get the ambulance, and we can’t leave behind the pair of Oshkosh freightliners either. The DOGs aren’t a problem, those really are all terrain. The Cougars would be nice, but from what I’ve seen, they probably won’t make much difference.”

Out of that entire speech, about the only thing Jerry recognized was the word “Cougars.” The automated battle tanks were well-known military chassis, even out on the colonies. They were featured in a ton of action shows and the like, and he had to admit to mixed feelings about having a bunch of automated killing machines rumbling around his jungle.

“Cougars?” he asked, looking around. “Where?”

Sorilla glanced up then pointed out into the jungle at three specific points. “There, there, and there…They’re filling out the perimeter defense.”

He looked, hard, but couldn’t find what she was pointing to. He decided to take her word for it, however. “And you want to leave them?”

“I don’t want to leave any of it,” she growled, stepping over a small quadruped bot that was brandishing an assault rifle as it ran past. Jerry flinched and jumped out of its line of fire as the small DOG hit the jungle ground and accelerated out into the tree line. “But I’m not going to blaze a military specification road right back to camp either.”

Jerry followed her into the darkness, looking around as he did, but it was almost pitch inside and all he could see was the faint glow of her eyes. Then there was a snap, and red lighting lit up the entire cavernous box from one end to the other, and he turned to see Sorilla with her hand on a large switch. “Alright…it’s over here.”

“What is?”

“This is a standard drop box. It’s meant to supply an infantry platoon with support and resupply,” Sorilla told him as she stepped up to a large locker on the far wall. “Which means that…”

She palmed a catch and the locker snapped open, the top falling back and swinging down with a bang that startled Jerry into jumping back again. When he looked up, though, he whistled. The locker held a line of infantry rifles identical to Sorilla’s own, which he knew were incredibly more powerful than the hunting rifles he and the others held.

“Get a couple boys in here,” she said quietly. “Get these distributed around. Tell them to just sling the new rifles, use their own. I’m going to have to pull the discrimination chips before you can use them.”

He didn’t understand completely, but he nodded and whistled in a couple of the others and told them what she’d told him while Sorilla pulled open another locker and drew a rather large and heavy-looking rifle from it.

“What the hell is that?”

“M900 sniper system,” Sorilla replied. “Not my tool of preference, but this is going to come in real handy. There’s another in there, grab it, Reed. And hey! Shorty!”

“Shorty,” a squat but powerfully built man named Greg Corbin, turned to glare at her until he saw what she was picking up with one hand. The weapon made the assault rifles the others were picking up look like half-grown runts, and Corbin immediately cut his path to the rifle’s short and headed for where Sorilla was standing.

“Squad level support weapon,” Sorilla told him. “We’ve got eight more in here, so get them broken out and passed around to the guys who can lug ‘em best. Jerry, grab a couple of the 900s and follow me.”

Sorilla picked up the other two sniper systems and strode out the door, making Jerry scramble a bit to catch up. He found her outside, stuffing the long rifles into the straps on one of the Army MULEs, so he did the same.

“Any thoughts on the best way out of here?”

He nodded. “Yeah, there’s an old access road just over the hill. If we can get there, we can follow it up the line a hundred and fifty kilometers, then double back through some softer jungle. Can these things ford a river?”

The soldier smiled. “Like ducks.”

“Alright, I think we can hide our trail then,” he said simply.

“Good,” Sorilla said, yanking a strap tight. “Let’s strip this box to the bare walls while we’ve got the time, then we’ll be ready to move out. Twenty more minutes, max. Pass the word.”

He nodded. “Got it.”

It took them twelve, and when they pulled out of the artificial clearing, there was nothing but the box behind. Sorilla would have taken that, too, but dismantling a drop box took two hours with an experienced crew and she didn’t feel they had the time. The jungle wasn’t too thick in the immediate area, luckily, or they’d have had to clear a road. As it was, the automated combat vehicles picked their way between the larger trees and only occasionally had to break out a terrain-clearing device to make things easier.

As they were programmed, the vehicles worked together; the heavy tanks and freightliner trucks used their weight and larger tires to pull the lighter MULEs through any tough spots while the smaller DOGS covered the perimeter with their own assault weapons. Sorilla and the rest mostly just hung on and hitched a ride, only occasionally hopping off to clear a light obstacle from the road of a MULE or the ambulance as they moved.

Her eyes were on the Oshkosh Terrain Max 12 freightliners, however. She knew what was in them and was extremely happy to see those two behemoths. Of course, they had to get them back to camp in one piece, which she knew was going to be tricky.

They hit the road a few minutes later, and Sorilla glanced over her shoulder. Time to see if the enemy won’t mind helping sow a little confusion.

She accessed the computer system in the drop box, then ordered it to send a planetary scale signal, announcing its location to anyone listening. Sorilla made a private bet with herself, silently counting off the seconds as they rode away, and reached forty-eight seconds before a ball of nuclear fire erupted behind them.

As the men and women of the Hayden pathfinders yelped and ducked their heads, Sorilla just smiled grimly to herself. Her suit coms were spread frequency, encrypted, burst transmission systems. So far she’d been able to use them in limited levels without having whatever the enemy used for artillery nuking her off the face of the planet. However, it was obvious that the enemy did have the capability for radio direction finding, and they didn’t mind dropping some arty on anything transmitting that wasn’t them.

That’s one trail they’re gonna have to work to pick up, she thought. That’s what you get for being predictable, assholes.

The pathfinders stared in confusion at the soldier in their midst, who whistled cheerfully as they bounced and jostled down the old access road. They couldn’t understand what she was smiling about, given the fires burning in their wake, but whatever it was, it had to be pretty disturbing to put a look like that in her eyes.

Sorilla ignored the looks and just kept on whistling as she began to consider exactly what else she could do to use the enemy’s tactics against them.

*****

Unified Solari HQ

Third Tier, New Mexican Tether Counterweight

“Captain Petronov, welcome.”

Alexi nodded to the adjutant who welcomed him into the room, glancing over the man’s shoulder to see that there were another couple dozen men and women he recognized. All of them deep space captains, none of them military. He walked in and took a seat next to Captain Mira Vasquez, nodding to her.

“Alexi,” she said, “I see they sucked you into this mess, too.”

He nodded, eyeing the screen they were all arrayed around. It was blank for now, so he tried to relax despite the fact that he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to like it. Hell, he knew he wasn’t going to like it. There was nothing about the entire situation he liked.

“You staying with the Soc?” she asked.

“Da,” he told her, turning his attention to Mira. “You?”

“They’ve refitted my Nico,” she admitted tiredly. “What do you know of the situation?”

“They tell you about Hayden?”

“Yes,” she said, shaking her head. “Unbelievable. Is it really aliens?”

Alexi considered for a moment then shrugged. “I saw the raw data. Nothing human moves that fast.”

“Mierdre,” she muttered. “Your Soc, my Nico, they are not military any more than we are. Why are we here?”

Alexi sighed. “Because we are all they have right now.”

Mira was about to reply when the lighting shifted and the screen came to life, showing a set of star charts recognizable to everyone in the room. Alexi was mildly surprised to note that it wasn’t the Hayden System, but the Ares mining platforms up on the screen.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” Admiral Shepard said as he walked to the front of the room. “I’m sure you all have things you want to be setting right with your ships, so I’m just going to cut to the chase here.”

The view shifted, showing a computer-enhanced image of a ship none of them knew. It rotated in three dimensional space, with areas highlighted by the computer. Alexi leaned forward, eyeing the highlights and zooming in on his personal terminal.

“This, as you can see, is not a ship designed by the UNS, or any member nation,” Shepard told them. “Nor is it designed by the Russian Federation or the Chinese. It’s non-human in origin, with a maximum acceleration in excess of one 150-g’s.”

Those numbers weren’t news to Alexi, but it shook several of the other captains sitting with him. They’d only been given sketchy information to date, apparently, and they were shocked by the raw data.

“Mierdre!” Mira cursed again. “How?”

“Our best estimate is that they use advanced gravity manipulation for propulsion and as a weapons system,” Shepard said grimly. “As you all know, our own jump drives are based on some first generation technology that manipulates space-time. Experts have analyzed the raw data, and they think that the alien technology is at least several generations ahead of our own. We can now confirm that they are capable of exiting jump space without being at any of the mapped solar jump points.”

That threw the wolves among the lambs, and the room erupted into excited talking as the captains began to talk about how the apparently impossible could be done. Alexi didn’t say anything; he’d had longer to wrap his mind around this whole situation, and it was no scientific wonder to him. He realized that, soon, he was likely to be facing these people in battle. The last thing he wanted his enemies to have was such a powerfully superior strategic capability in addition to their tactical speed.

The statement also brought another question to his mind, and for that he leaned forward and spoke a single word.

“How?”

Mira quieted, frowning as she looked at him. “Alexi, if we knew that, we’d do it ourselves.”

“Not how do they do it, Mira.” Alexi shook his head. “How do we know they can do that? I saw the raw data from Hayden, they didn’t jump anywhere.”

The others were quieting down as Alexi nodded to the map of the Ares system. “They’re not just in Hayden anymore, are they?”

Silence filled the room as everyone turned to look at Shepard, who nodded grimly in his direction.

“That’s correct. At 0915 hours, four days ago, a courier scout posted near the Ares Jump Point Alpha spotted four of these bandit configuration starships enter the system. They arrived over ten AU closer to the Ares primary than the heliopause.

“They engaged system defenses, destroyed the mining facilities, and crushed the Ares orbital tether counterweight before moving on through the system and jumping out from eight AU within the heliopause,” Shepard said. “No attempt was made to land on the planet. They apparently aren’t interested in Ares itself.”

Alexi let out a long breath. None of the jump points were within a system’s heliopause. The solar gravity was far too strong there for a point to form, so there was no way ships should have been able to exit a jump that deep in the system. Alexi was no physicist, but he knew his jump point physics well enough.

The points formed along numerous points where solar gravity crossed with extra-solar gravity sources in interstellar space. Most points were variable, waxing and waning with the motion of planets with the system, or often blinking in and out of existence due to the gravity influence of a distant pulsar.

Since gravity propagated similarly to wave motions, the points where different gravity waves crossed one another would either reinforce one another, or negate one another. It was at the points where they negated one another that a ship could open a jump gate. When the ship was gravitically removed from the galaxy, it was possible to punch through space-time and cause the ship to move entirely separate from the galaxy and universe itself.

In this way it was possible to build up extreme relative velocities compared to the local space-time.

To punch through without being in one of those null gravity zones, however, indicated a fairly powerful and extremely precise control over gravity itself.

“But why attack the Ares facilities?” Mira asked, confused.

“We believe they’re cutting supply lines,” Shepard told her and the room. “Likely as part of a search grid operation in this area of the galaxy.”

“But searching for what?” another captain asked, confused.

Alexi snorted, “What do you think, Daniel? Us.”

“That’s what we believe, yes,” Shepard confirmed. “Ares was four jump points from Earth, farther out than Hayden, actually. We have a lot of strategic depth we can sacrifice, but that’s our only advantage at the moment. We need more data on their weapons and technology, and that’s where you are going to come in.”

“Oh, I hate this already,” Mira muttered.

Alexi chuckled, “That’s because you are intelligent woman, no?”

She shot him a smile. “You’re pretty quick yourself, Alexi.”

Shepard rolled his eyes slightly and cut them off. “This is what we’re going to do, pay attention people. Lives ride on this.”

“Yeah. Our lives,” Mira muttered.

“All the more reason for you to pay attention,” Shepard told her, an edge of sarcasm in his voice.

“Sir, yes, sir,” she muttered in response, rolling her eyes.

“All right, as I was saying.” Shepard looked over the group. “The mission is codenamed Operation Locksley. Our goal is to land relief supplies on Hayden, along with a light division of automated armor, recon, and support personnel.”

“Are we going to withdraw the civilians, Admiral?” Captain William Gates asked from across the room.

“We don’t have the lift,” Shepard shook his head. “Their tether was destroyed in the initial contact, so there’s no way to get that many people into orbit.”

The assembled captains nodded, understanding the problem. Even heavy lifters were only rated to a few dozen people, at most, and few enough of those existed. Most of the ones they could think of required massive facilities on-planet to refuel and refurb the lifter, facilities that didn’t exist on Hayden.

“Alright,” Alexi Petronov spoke into the silence. “So we’re landing supplies. I think I can speak for most of us here when I say that is the sort of mission our training has at least some applicability toward. What about alien interference?”

“We’re counting on it.”

“It’s official.” Mira jerked her thumb at the admiral as she looked at Petronov. “Those pretty uniforms have got to be cutting off circulation to their brains.”

Alexi sighed. “Would you care to explain, Admiral?”

“We need information. While your ships are delivering the supplies, Taskforce Three will be providing cover and trying to draw out the alien ships. We’ll be refitting all your ships, as well as those of Taskforce Three, with the most advanced detection systems available.” Shepard shrugged. “Including a few systems we’re still tinkering together as we speak here.”

“That’s comforting,” Gates muttered, rolling his eyes. “Any more good news?”

“We’re launching the mission in six weeks.”

*****

Survivors’ Camp

Hayden

Getting the gear back to camp was a dreary, mudslinging job, but they managed it in a little under eighteen hours. It had only taken them four hours to make the walk from the camp to the material in the first place, but given that they’d had to constantly double back on their trail, looking for better places to travel and, of course, cover their tracks, Sorilla was more than willing to take eighteen hours and be happy with it.

The preserved food was a huge hit with the colonists, but for Sorilla it was a distraction. A few days’ worth of nutrients at best, given the number of people they had to feed. No, she was far happier with the two big Terrain Max trucks they’d recovered from the boxes. Once back in camp, she’d wasted no time getting them secured and covered.

“What are these?” Samuel had asked as she finished securing the camo tarps, hammering pegs home into the trees to hold them in place.

“These things are gonna keep us alive,” Sorilla grunted as she swung the hammer one more time before tossing it to the ground.

Samuel didn’t answer, but his eyes twitched. “Oh?”

“Yeah,” she said, nodding to the back of the truck. “Come on.”

She led him around to the back of the truck and up into the covered box, nodding to a large machine that took up most of the space. “Say hello to the chef, Samuel.”

“Excuse me?”

She cracked a wry grin. “I’ve got the vats cooking up some meat for us. We’ve got chicken in this one, beef in the other. We can swap one out every three days for pork, as long as we remember to maintain the cultures.”

“These are growth vats?”

“Right in one. Portable, hardened, and high production value,” she said. “Not really chicken, beef, or pork, but tastes close enough, and it’s been gene-fortified to keep soldiers on their feet. We can trade some of it with the outlying farm boys for greens, but I’m claiming the lion’s share here and now for the militia.”

Samuel blinked. “We don’t have a militia.”

“You do now. I want every man and woman who can swing a rifle and march with a ruck on their feet at dawn tomorrow,” she said seriously. “They’re gonna work like they’ve never worked before, but that’s a fair sight better than bleeding out when we mount a raid.”

The older man swallowed, going pale. “Raid?”

Sorilla just smirked, her expression feral.

Ghosts of the Jungle

Chapter 1

In times gone by, the training of a soldier was an endeavor of a lifetime. To teach a man to wield sword and stave was such work that only the richest could afford to have it done, and the job never ended until the man retired or died on the battlefield.

Luckily for Sorilla and the survivors of Hayden, those times had come and gone with the invention of the firearm. A moderately fit human could become a competent fighter in as little as a couple weeks, assuming you didn’t need him to do anything fancier than hit what he was aiming at.

When it came about in history, the modern firearm utterly destroyed the old way of doing things. Monarchies, once the only groups that could maintain a standing army, were suddenly displaced by groups of peasants who could learn to be effective militias in a matter of weeks. Without the modern firearm, empires could be ruled by a single family, sometimes a single person. With it, the United States of America declared and held its independence from the preeminent empire of its day.

Today, Sorilla was about to put that theory to the test.

The colonists were, by and large, quite fit, and even more importantly, they were motivated. After Sorilla had pulled the discriminator chips from the rifles, in effect unlocking the weapons to use by people without the coded implants given to military personnel, she’d only needed a week to get the first group of militia trainees familiarized with the weapons and their incidental gear.

She left the job of day-to-day management of the village in Samuel’s hands, as he’d shown an aptitude for the task but wouldn’t be going into the field with them, and handpicked a dozen of the best for “on the job” training. Between him and Silver, who Jerry had basically force-marched into camp a few days earlier, Sorilla figured they had the administration aspect of the militia covered.

Old Man Silver, as most of the colonists referred to him, was a taskmaster the likes of which Sorilla remembered from her own early days in the military, and she was glad to have him and his group joined up with them. It had taken Jerry and herself the better part of two days to get him to agree to work with them, but from what she’d seen since, she suspected the man to be former military himself.

With those aspects of management handled, she turned her focus to where the metal was going to be meeting the road.

Until Fleet gets back, my job is fairly straightforward, Sorilla reflected.

She was to organize resistance to the invaders while gathering what intelligence she could on their activities. The first wasn’t so hard. However, the second was giving her problems.

The key one being that she didn’t know anything about the invaders in order to determine a place to begin. They hadn’t been able to locate any kind of base camp, not even the pathfinders who’d gone on long treks around the area, sometimes taking weeks before they came back.

Without that basic starting point, Sorilla had decided that she would begin harassing enemy activities as her opening move. With their willingness to use strategic weapons as a tactical alternative, however, she was going to have to get

creative.

She belted her gun belt across her waist, setting the heavy piece low on her thigh before strapping it down.

The enemy was an enigma, but there were certain patterns she could see. It was an invasion force, most likely a colonist advance force, she decided. The extent of the work the alien forces were involved in, whether they be the actual aliens or some sort of military drones, made it clear that they were moving in.

That meant that they had to have established a beachhead somewhere, a place where they were coordinating planetary operations from.

Sorilla strapped her vest on, keying its camo mode into standard jungle patterns before swinging her rifle up into her arms by its strap and slinging with a casual motion before she stepped out of her room and headed to meet her field team.

They were waiting for her in what passed for a town square, a dozen of the fittest men she’d begun training. They had slung rifles, battle weapons from the drop box but, more importantly, were the other tools she made certain they’d brought.

“Everyone set?” she asked, nodding to the group.

Jerry answered for them. “We’re set, Sarge.”

She suppressed the urge to smile, noting the use of her rank had become more common since training had begun showing results. She wasn’t the soldier lady anymore, or even Sorilla Aida for the most part. Sarge was her name to most of the men, and she could live with that.

“All right, we’re going to ruck out about a hundred fifty odd kilometers, back to where Dean and I saw them working,” she told them. “Keep quiet, no talking, and for god’s sake, don’t take any potshots at them if you can avoid it

”

The men grunted, some laughing bitterly, some shaking their heads.

They weren’t likely to forget that the enemy responded to sniper threats with nuclear assault.

“That said, if you do have to take a shot, move your ass. Don’t hang around for the fireworks,” she ordered. “And do the rest of us a favor and don’t keep it to yourselves, right?”

They chuckled, nodding in agreement.

Right.

Sorilla shouldered her pack. “Let’s move.”

*****

“They’ve made progress since we checked last,” Sorilla said as she knelt on the hilltop knoll, watching the Golems and Goblins as they worked at clearing back the jungle below. “A lot of progress.”

Jerry was lying back on the rear side of the hill, examining what she was seeing through the portable computer she’d passed him. “What the hell are they doing?”

“I’m not sure,” Sorilla admitted. “I thought that it was some kind of defensive emplacements before, but this doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen.”

The Golems had apparently blazed a trail almost a two klick wide and longer than she could determine, and behind them the Goblins had come along and paved it. Or at least, she thought it was paved. Whatever it was, the surface was gleaming white and seemed as solid as any concrete she’d ever seen.

“Is that a landing strip?” Jerry asked.

“Can’t be. They’ve got some kind of gravity tech, remember? What would they need with a landing strip?” she countered, frowning. “I’ve never seen concrete that white. It’s almost a reflector

”

“Solar power?”

“Wrong angles,” Bethany Caern said, entering into the conversation. “They’d have to have a collector in orbit to catch the energy, and if you’re going to do that, it’s easier and more efficient to leave the reflectors up there, too.”

Sorilla and Jerry turned to look at her in surprise.

“What? I worked energy collectors as my minor before taking up exobiology.” She shrugged.

“Right. Well, then what is it?”

Sorilla shook her head. “Don’t know. Doesn’t really matter, I guess. Let’s go blow it to hell.”

The two former field researchers glanced at each other with wide eyes as the soldier gathered her kit and broke position. She was halfway down the hill before they started moving to catch up.

*****

They got ahead of the work, staying in the jungle as they circled around. Sorilla had the men get ready for some heavy work of their own as she took time to survey the area carefully.

“Ok, they’ll be coming through here.”

“You’re sure?” Jerry asked.

She nodded. “Yeah. The road or whatever it is that they’re building curves very precisely. It’ll bring them right through here. So here is where we’ll start.”

“Start what?”

She just smiled evilly then circled her arm in the air. “Let’s get to work, boys and girls. We’ve got a reception party to prepare.”

They had maybe two days’ lead on the advancing Golems and Goblins, Sorilla figured, which meant that they would have to work hard, but they should be able to put down a nice welcome party for the group with some sweat and luck.

Given the zeroing capability of the enemy, she didn’t want to use any direct fire or even ballistic weapons unless it became unavoidable. Both could be tracked back to their source, and when the enemy was willing to split your atoms for putting a bullet in the air, it just wasn’t cost effective to give him any more advantages.

In theory, the military rifles they’d picked up should be proof against that sort of source backtracking, but she didn’t want to chance it, for obvious reasons. Until she had a better idea of the enemy’s tech, she couldn’t assume that they used thermal, sonic, or RADAR systems to triangulate weapons fire like the US military did.

Against those systems, her rifle was effectively proofed to be invisible. It used an electromagnetic launcher to accelerate the round out of the barrel, leaving no heat trace, then engaged fin guidance and scramjet motors to accelerate the round to hypersonic velocities once it was clear of her position. Against human tech, she could pick off a target from as much as thirty kilometers away, if she had a spotter with eyes on, and then walk away entirely undetected.

The problem was she still didn’t know how they’d detected her team on entry and really didn’t know a damn thing about the enemy’s capabilities at all.

That was one of the biggest reasons she was taking the war back a few centuries. Fighting atom bombs with shovels and saws made a lot more sense than doing the same thing with guns and grenades. Odds were you were boned either way, in her experience, but if you were very good, and very, very lucky, you could inflict a lot more damage with a shovel than you could with a bullet.

“Reed, take two men and start cutting down trees. I want them at least four meters in diameter,” Sorilla said, surveying the area. “Everyone else, let’s get digging.

*****

Days in the jungle, in any jungle, can seem like an eternity. When you’re working in that same oppressive heat, seconds feel even longer. The funny thing about that, in Sorilla’s opinion at least, was then, despite all of that, a deadline still rushed up on you with terrifying speed.

They weren’t able to finish even half of what she wanted to get done, partly because the crew was far from experienced in asymmetric warfare tactics but mostly because Sorilla herself had underestimated the challenges of working with Hayden hardwood trees. The higher oxygen and slightly higher gravity of the alien world had left its trees with correspondingly denser material.

She shrugged it off and made notes for the next time. For now, she had other concerns to address.

“All right, everyone, clear out. Put as much distance between you and this place as you can,” she ordered, nodding to Jerry. “Don’t go straight back to camp, Reed. Make sure you cover your trails.”

“Right.” He nodded. “What about you?”

“I’ll meet up with you back at camp,” she said. “Give me a few days.”

“You’re planning on hanging around, aren’t you?”

“We need intel,” she said. “This is how we get it.”

Jerry frowned, shaking his head. “I don’t like it. I’ll stay with you.”

“No offense, Reed, but this is what I do,” Sorilla told him. “What you do is get your guys out of here so none of you are in my way if this all goes south, right?”

He started to object, but she just stared him down until he finally nodded.

“Right.”

Sorilla helped them get their kit packed away and then hustled them clear of the area ahead of the enemy movements coming their way. Once she was sure they were well clear, she doubled back and headed to the spot she’d scouted out when they arrived.

Camouflage was more than just color or patterns. In fact, it had more to do with contrast and breaking up a silhouette. Stalking a target meant making yourself look like part of the scenery, becoming an element of the natural world you were moving through and basically looking like anything other than a human being.

On Earth that was how it worked, at least. Against other humans, and against human sensing technologies.

All she could do was fall back on her training, adjust where she had better onsite intelligence, and hope for the best. So she started to gather up local plants, shoving them into pockets built into her vest and pants to break up her profile, and slathered mud from the jungle floor across her arms, face, and neck wherever flesh was exposed.

It was time to see just how good the enemy was at watching their backsides.

She dug into a small depression about two thirds of the way up the hill she’d chosen to watch from, resisting the urge to hide around the back side and peak over the top. It was a common misconception, and often lethal error, among rookies to consider the high ground as the most advantageous position on a potential battlefield. Particularly when stalking, you wanted to avoid places that might place your silhouette against the even backdrop of the sky. It was a dead giveaway and the most common mistake made by amateur, wannabe snipers.

Instead, she curled up in a position about a quarter of the way down the hill, near a thick tree that had staked its claim to the leeward side of a granite boulder. She dug in a little, staying away from the straight lines of the boulder and the tree itself, instead making herself into another small bush among many in the area, and then she waited.

Six hours passed, then twelve. Night fell and dawn rose before she heard the rhythmic thumping that she knew could only be caused by non-natural sources. The heat of the day was on her before the first movement betrayed the approach of the lead elements of the enemy formation.

The smaller Goblins were first, moving ahead of the slower-moving Golems. Sorilla watched, her implants recording data, as the Goblins policed the area. They cleared out smaller shrubs and debris, basically preparing the area for the arrival of their bigger brethren. Sorilla was glad that they’d taken the Goblins into account when they’d gone to work on the area over the past day and a half, otherwise the lead element could have kicked off the party entirely too soon.

The first of the Golems turned up about an hour after the lead Goblin, trudging along at a lumbering pace that reminded Sorilla of an elephant as it moved. Deceptively slow, but with obvious power behind it. The Golem stopped at a tree marked by the Goblins and began to burn it out of the ground with a laser or arc system. The smoke from the burning tree was just reaching her nose as another handful arrived and moved to their own trees.

A near inaudible creak was the first sign that one of the Golems had tripped one of the rigs they’d put in place, and Sorilla had to force herself not to look around to see which one. The question was answered a moment later when an eighty-ton Hayden hardwood trunk swung down on carbon fiber cable, impacting a Golem at just over ninety kilometers an hour, and pinned the big boy to a still standing tree.

Even Sorilla winced as the Golem was shattered by the force of impact.

Everything froze for a long moment. The Goblins and Golems alike slowly turned to look at their felled sibling, and then the long, boring wait Sorilla had settled in for erupted into a made minute of action as the jungle beneath her practically exploded.

Deadfalls made from huge Hayden trees collapsed, pinning or outright smashing the units trying to get clear of the area even as others collapsed into pit traps loaded with directional explosive charges that sent plumes of plasma straight into the sky, along with pieces of the unfortunate unit that had fallen in.

Tripwires made of incredibly strong carbon fiber cabling snapped into place, tensioned by the falling tree trunks, and turned the jungle floor into a crisscrossed nightmare to navigate. Several times, a Golem moving to escape the area tumbled over one of those, only to set off another rigged area and be crushed, blown up, or simply trapped by one of the snares Sorilla had had the Hayden group put into place.

Her satisfaction with the results was put in hold, however, when a sudden tension in her chest nearly caused Sorilla to break cover and run. She hadn’t felt that sort of fear in so long it was almost an alien force in itself. Iron nerves and unrelenting tactical training kept her in place as she began to scan the area for the cause.

It’s like that night at the colony site, she thought tensely, eyes darting around as she fought down the panic she was feeling.

When a slow chill entered the area, bringing involuntary shudders from her, Sorilla knew that the game had changed. She couldn’t locate the source, however, until a low hiss from above redirected her attention to the jungle canopy.

Air support.

It was bigger than a Golem, barely making any sound as it dropped through the canopy and nimbly moved through the large bulk of the trees. It dropped over a still-active Golem, and six spindly legs closed shut over the large unit before a slightly louder hiss sounded and the two lifted off.

Sorilla watched as the enemy units were withdrawn one by one by the flyers, pulled out of the danger area by the numbers. She was impressed, actually. The action had been smooth and planned out in detail. After the initial panicked reaction, if it was actually panic, the response showed excellent training, or at least contingency planning.

After they had all been pulled out, Sorilla slowly pulled back, as well. She wanted to be well clear of the area in case they decided to nuke it in order to clear the traps from the terrain. That would be something of an overreaction, in her opinion, but they’d already proven capable of that. She moved around the hill, not over the top of it, and sheltered among some boulders on the far side while hunkering down again to wait.

They were building whatever it was they were building for a reason; they had to clear the area one way or the other. Now that they’d pulled out the Golems and Goblins, what was the next step?

The answer to that question took more than another day and a half to materialize. She was slowly stretching out a leg cramp when the first of the new units emerged. Four-legged, about twice the size of a Golem but with considerably less bulk, and fast as all hell, they broke through the jungle at maybe fifty kilometers an hour just a few dozen meters from her position. Sorilla froze in place, the cramp doubling up as she grimaced, but kept her eyes steadily on the new units.

They skidded to a stop at the outskirts of the trapped area, pausing to scan or otherwise examine the area, then quickly broke ranks and began to methodically tear apart the jungle with invisible blasts of something she couldn’t identify. They tore up the jungle, sometimes picking up and flinging debris with the force of bullets.

She felt the tightening of her chest again as they closed on her position, the sense of barely suppressed terror telling her to flee and the creeping chill that was so at odds with the hot jungle climate. She flashed back to what Tara had told her when she first woke up at camp, so many weeks ago.

Environmental energy converters are causing the cold, she thought with certainty. I’ve seen them before. Never anything this efficient, though, or this portable. But what is this terror? I’ve never felt anything like it, not while I was awake.

She, for the first time in her life, let terror rule her. Let it freeze her in place. For once, perhaps the only time she’d ever heard of, being frozen with fear was the right thing to do. Her heart pounded, the blood rushed through her, but she only moved her eyes as the alien units went about their business.

They tore up the jungle, destroying the few traps left untripped, and leveled the jungle around in an impressive display of power. It was over in just a few minutes, ending with several acres of the jungle razed to the ground before the four-legged units were finished and began to withdraw just as Sorilla saw new Golem and Goblin units approaching.

“Huh,” she said softly as she, too, began to pull back, inching slowly away from her position. She’d learned what she needed to learn.

That didn’t mean she was quite finished, however. Sorilla paused near the crest of the hill she was sheltering behind and slung her rifle. She’d left her assault rifle back in camp for this mission, instead opting to pack one of the M900s. She accessed its systems through her implants and killed the safety, bringing the ballistics computer online as she edged the long gun out ahead of her.

The barrel just pushed past the brush she was covering under, only enough to bring the optics into the clear. Sniping wasn’t her specialty, but she was sharpshooter qualified and knew her way around a long rifle. It wasn’t just about being a good shot; you had to be able to do calculations in your head that would make some math savants cry for mercy. Shooting was the easy part.

Luckily, this was a chip shot, barely 200 meters, practically point blank for the sniper system she had to her shoulder. Sorilla stretched out a little, now forcing her breathing to calm down as she tried to bring her heart rate under control. There were fifteen units below her, and she methodically tagged each one on her HUD, haloing each in the ballistics computer with priority. The system used optical parallax to determine exact range and calculated all the basics automatically. Gravity was adjusted for Hayden normal, air density measured. The computer even took the time to input the data on the curvature of Hayden, though at these ranges it wouldn’t make any difference at all.

That left wind speed and other more esoteric calculations to be made by Sorilla. Again, however, at the ranges she was dealing with, those wouldn’t be enough of an issue to really mess her up. She activated flight guidance on the rounds, though she didn’t think it would have time to make a difference, then confirmed the lock on all the targets below.

Fifteen targets, ten rounds in the mag, and no time to reload. Sorilla let out her breath, squeezed the trigger, and unlocked the final safe on the rifle, letting the computer fire as she bore. She swept the barrel along the crest of the hill, acquiring one target after another and letting the computer pulse the rounds as it came to bear. The electromagnetic launcher spat a round at just under supersonic velocity, unloading the entire mag in one sweep of her field of view.

She didn’t bother to watch the results. Instead, Sorilla popped to her feet and bolted around the hill without even looking over her shoulder. She heard explosions in the distance and knew that her rounds had struck, but that was the past and she had the immediate future to worry about. Jungle vines whipped past her face, branches of the ground-hugging brush grabbing at her legs as she pumped them as hard as she could.

The stealth portion of the exercise was officially over.

She didn’t stop for well over a kilometer, closing on two, but finally slowed to a fast walk when no nuclear reaction was forthcoming. She paused, listening for signs of pursuit, but again there was nothing to indicate that any of the units were on to her.

Were they unable to get a zero on my position? she wondered, starting to walk again. She circled north, away from camp. It looked like everyone got away clean, even her, so now wasn’t the time to screw things up. Was it the rifle? Maybe they can’t track military grade tech after all.

She couldn’t count on that, not yet, she knew. If it were true, however, the game on Hayden might just be moving out of the minors. She slung her rifle, checked her bearings again, and started to jog north.

*****

Sorilla jogged back into camp a little over three days later, having circled around and come in from the back side compared to the current location of the enemy in relation to the camp. She greeted the few children out gathering what plant life was partially digestible to humans, with proper supplements, but didn’t slow her pace until she reached the makeshift array of huts and tents that made up the camp proper.

“Ho, Sarge.”

“Hey, Mark.” She nodded to a sentry as she went past.

She’d passed several already and, not attempting to sneak her way in, had been spotted and let past without comment each time. Poor security on Earth, probably, but their enemy here on Hayden was something else entirely.

That was something that had been bothering her, actually. The Golems and Goblins were originally the only face of the enemy they had. Contrary to appearances, neither were made of rock, of course. When they’d hacked them open, it had become clear that both were nano-assembled drones constructed largely of silicon allotropes, much the way the Solari technology base built largely out of carbon allotropes.

They were probably significantly stronger in the face of compressive forces than most of Earth’s technology, which tended to focus on tensile strength. Certainly they were more mobile than any comparatively massive construction or military units she had seen, able to maneuver remarkably well for bipedal drones in uneven terrain.

What was bothering her, however, was something else entirely.

Sorilla pushed open the flap of the command tent she’d set up over a week ago and collapsed into a folding chair that was leaning up against the camouflaged Oshkosh transport truck the tent was draped off of. It had been a long run in the jungle, and it was good to be under shade in a moderately secure area again.

So she relaxed, but her mind stayed on the single fact that was bothering her most of all.

“Sarge?”

“Ho, Reed,” she said, eyes closed. “In here.”

Jerry stepped in, pushing the tent flap back and nodding in her direction. “Good to see you back. How’d it go?”

“Mission was a qualified success.”

“Qualified?” he asked, one eyebrow raised questioningly.

“We got most of the Golems and Goblins in the traps,” she told him. “Forced them to reveal air support and a new class of drones.”

“That’s good, right?”

“Yes and no. Good that we got to see them, but I wish they didn’t have them,” Sorilla told him tiredly.

“Ok

”

“The Goblins and Golems, Jerry, they’re not enemy military,” Sorilla sighed. “We just blew the ever living crap out of some enemy bulldozers and forklifts. They sent in the military units to clean up

”

She trailed off, considering, then shook her head. “We don’t want to get in a firefight with them.”

He sighed, shaking his head, and pulled up another folding chair. “Well

crap.”

“Well crap indeed,” she said, taking a deep breath. “It’s going to be a long war, Jer.”

Jerry sighed, slumping a little in his chair. Honestly, he hadn’t expected anything else, but it was still discouraging to hear it put into words. “Great.”

“You want the good news?”

“I could do with some good news, yeah.”

Sorilla opened her eyes. “Before it’s done, they’re going to pay Hayden’s worth a hundred times over. You have my word on that.”

Chapter 2

HMS Hood, Lagrange Four

Earth Orbit

“Coded impulse from the Cheyenne, Captain.”

“Time stamp?” Captain Jane Mackey demanded softly.

“Three seconds ago.”

A low whistle sounded across the ship’s bridge, and even Jane herself had to admit it was impressive. A three-second signal delay from Mars to Earth orbit was a huge technological jump, considering the limited power and mobile nature of the transmitters. First generation Casimir transmitters were the size of apartment complexes and drew enough power to run a city.

“Confirm receipt, send to Captain Blake,” Jane said, turning on her personal panel. “Decode and direct the message to me.”

“Roger.”

The new technology was being integrated as quickly as possible into the next generation of ships coming out of the Alamo facility, all the while the First Deep Space Tactical Fleet was being organized under the command of Admiral Brookes.

Events were flying along at breakneck speeds, even for someone like Jane Mackay who was used to hurtling between the stars. Admiral Nadine Brookes was one of the most experienced deep space commanders in the world, and the most experienced deep space military commander. Jane had modeled much of her career on the American woman, actually, having admired her climb through the UNS ranks from early childhood. It was both a dream and a nightmare to serve under her, given the circumstances.

Her panel flashed, and she focused her attention on the decoded message, which basically amounted to a location and time. They still couldn’t transmit much information over Casimir systems, so brevity was a virtue.

“Helm,” she spoke up, “plot a course to the coordinates I’m sending you, eight hour transit time.”

“Aye, ma’am.”

Just enough information to coordinate over stellar distances, she hoped. They were going to need every advantage they could scrape up.

*****

Hayden

Sorilla hit the ground running, her men around her as they raced away from the location of their latest strike. Behind them, the chaos of their latest attack was ranging with fire and explosions.

She paused, rifle braced in the crook of her arm as he made sure everyone was still with her.

“Move! Move!” she ordered, slapping Dean on the shoulder as the young man ran past her. In the distance she could see the flitting blips of the enemy air support approaching. “Into the jungle!”

The approaching aircraft didn’t make a sound, so she kept her eye on them as she covered her team’s rush to vanish into the jungle’s depths.

A flash in the distance caused her to close her eyes and looked away. “Nuke flash! Hit the dirt!”

Sorilla tagged a running man who didn’t dive fast enough and threw him to the ground. “Cover your eyes!”

The nuke illuminated the area like a camera flash, Sorilla’s ocular implants adjusting to block out the light as much as possible before she turned her back and took a knee. The thunder of the explosion in the distance shook the ground just before the wind ripped through the jungle around them and the light began to fade.

Sorilla opened her eyes as she rose back to her feet and glanced back behind her, eyeing the rising mushroom cloud in the distance.

“Reed!”

“Over here.”

Sorilla walked in the direction of the voice and found Jerry helping Dean to his feet.

“Alright, we should be clear. Get everyone together and make a headcount,” she ordered. “Did everyone get clear?”

“I’m on it.”

Sorilla nodded and then turned away as she jumped up on a crook in a nearby tree, kneeling there as she scanned the skies around the cloud that was forming behind them. The enemy flyers were actually charging through the cloud, apparently having ridden the shockwave out while still in there air.

She shook her head. Damn, that’s impressive.

If they had the capacity to fly through that kind of shock front, not to mention the heat and shrapnel they’d encounter, then the flyers would be tough to take down. There were a few advanced mechs back on Earth that could possibly match it, though she didn’t know of any tested to that extreme.

Sorilla kept an eye on the flyers as she took notes and checked off the mission objectives.

“Sor.”

“What is it?” she asked, turning to see Jerry approaching.

“We’re missing two. Mathew and Roderick aren’t around,” he said, his face grim.

Her lips tightened, but Sorilla just nodded. “Send the men back by the planned route. You and I will wait until things calm down here and scout around, see if we can’t riff their implants.”

“Right, thanks,” he said before turning to relay the orders.

Two losses.

Sorilla considered that in her checklist and sighed. Overall, it was still a good mission, but they didn’t have enough men to lose recklessly. She hoped they’d find the two missing men but somehow doubted it. If they’d been caught up in the retreat and were within range of that nuke, well, their odds weren’t great.

She continued to watch and take notes on enemy movements as the men regrouped around her and took off. Jerry settled in at the base of her tree, and soon she heard his breathing even out, bringing a smile to her lips.

Like many of the best soldiers she’d worked with, Jerry had quickly picked up the ability to sleep when possible, because once they were on the move it was anyone’s guess as to when he’d get the next chance.

They’d wait for nightfall, at least, she decided, then judge the level of enemy movement. If things were calm enough, they’d try and get into range of the colonists’ implants so she could pulse them.

It was going to be another long day.

*****

Four days later, Sorilla and Jerry trudged back into camp, filth covering them from head to toe, looking like the entire world had come crashing down on them at some point in the intervening days. Carried between them, however, was one of their missing men.

Roderick Kane was still breathing, but not a whole lot more than that. Sorilla and Jerry dropped him unceremoniously on a bunk in Tara’s tender care before they stumbled back out and made it most of the way back to their own cots before they collapsed themselves.

Sorilla woke up on her own floor a few hours later, about a meter from her bed, and wasn’t sure if she had fallen asleep before getting there or simply didn’t want to mess up her bed kit with the filth encrusted on her gear and body. She sighed and stripped down before staggering into her gravity shower and washing down.

Running guerrilla operations was long, hard work at the best of times. Having to run training for a bunch of field academics didn’t make it much easier. That said, thankfully more than a few of them were also practical engineers and knew their way around hand tools and explosives. If they’d been desk jockeys, Sorilla probably would have cried.

She didn’t bother drying off as she stepped out of the shower, instead just flopping down on the cot she called her own and lying there. The jungle heat would replace the shower water with sweat in no time, anyway, so she just pulled her pillow close and curled up on top of the light blankets and dropped back off in a few seconds.

She woke up again just after dusk, mostly recovered from the exhaustion of the mission. Her scratches and scrapes were scabbed over and itching, which was luckily the worst she’d endured this time around. She shrugged into a pair of pants and her vest before heading out and taking a walk over to the command tent across from her hut.

“Sergeant Aida.” Samuel nodded as she walked in. “Good to see you up. Sleep well?”

Sorilla nodded, grabbing a steaming kettle from the cook stove in the corner. “Yeah. What’s Rod’s prognosis?”

“Tara thinks he’ll make it,” Samuel said. “Did you locate Mathew?”

She nodded, frowning deeply. “He didn’t make it. Too close to the nuke flash. We found him with third degree burns over most of his body and a branch from a blasted tree sticking out of his back.”

Samuel winced.

She sighed, finishing brewing her coffee from one of the Emergency Field Meals (EFM) as she sat down across from Sam. “He and Rod were rearguard on this run. They must have lagged farther behind than they had to. Be sure you make the point to the others that you can’t stay in range of enemy dead, Sam.”

“I will,” he said seriously. “You?”

“I’ll tell them, too, but they listen to you,” she said.

Samuel Becker nodded in acceptance of that. “Right. The mission, though? Did it go well?”

“Other than that, yeah. We blasted another section of that white road, whatever it is,” she responded, leaning forward to run her finger along the map. “Right around here. They’ll have to backtrack and clear out a lot of this section to repair it.”

“That’s good, I assume.”

Sorilla shrugged. “Right now, Sam, all we can do is make them pay for every day they sit here on Hayden. We don’t have the forces to push them off.”

He nodded, understanding what she was saying. When you couldn’t go for a direct victory, you had to try something else. The goal of a guerilla wasn’t to somehow eject the invading army, but rather to make it too damned expensive for them to stay.

Cost them enough money, material, and lives and you could make any enemy decide that it simply wasn’t worth the effort to hang around.

“How long?”

“Mmmm?” Sorilla murmured as she took a deep breath from the coffee steam coming off her black carbon fiber cup. “How long what?”

“Before it becomes too costly for them to stay?”

“No idea,” she shrugged. “It’s impossible to tell. A lot of it depends on what they have to spend, really, but it also comes down to how much support they have back home

wherever home is.”

“Lovely,” he sighed.

She shook her head. “Just too many factors, Sam. How many resources they have is a big one, for sure, but what kind of government they have is just as big. A dictatorship can spend a far larger chunk of their resources on something like this than, say, a representative democracy. A republic, like the US back home, is somewhere in the middle. It also depends on what kind of people they are, and how much the public is told about what’s going on out here.”

She shrugged again. “Honestly, the only thing I can tell you for sure, Sam, is that we’ve not yet scratched the surface of what it’s going to take to send them packing. I don’t think we’ve even really annoyed them yet.”

She smirked wryly at him, waving her hand idly.

“That’s not what I wanted to hear,” he admitted tiredly.

“Putting out a strong invading force is a long game, Sam,” she told him. “You can ask the Afghans back home about that. They had to eject two world superpowers from their country in less than half a century, despite being completely outmatched both times. It took years, blood, sweat, and toil. In the end, I think more money was poured into Afghanistan than any other country on the planet in the twentieth or twenty-first century, all to leave it the same windblown hellhole it was when they started.”

She sighed. “Hayden will be here when we’re done, more or less unchanged, Sam

but if we do our job right, we’ll force them to invest the equivalent of several dozen trillion US dollars back home. Most of it into things we’ll blow right the hell up as soon as we can. At some point, the idea is to make their politicians, or whatever they have in that role, declare victory and go home.”

He shot her an odd look.

“What? Politicians never admit defeat unless you ride a tank down to their capital building,” she snorted. “Let them call it what they want, Sam, as long as they call it a day and get the fuck out of here.”

He could agree to that, Sam supposed. He lifted his mug in a salute.

“Amen.”

*****

Just Inside Mars Orbit

Sol System

Admiral Nadine Brooke floated across her flag deck, looping her arm into one of the restraint straps built into her command bolster. She swung herself around by that strap and slid her other arm into its match on the other side, then proceeded to strap in carefully.

“Captain Roberts reports all ships in formation, Admiral.”

“Very good, Denise. Thank you,” Nadine said, nodding to her attaché. “Anything else?”

“Admiral Shepard took Taskforce Three out to Jump Point Gamma at 0300, ma’am,” Denise Milan said quietly. “They executed a combat formation jump at 0330.”

“Hayden then,” Nadine said thoughtfully before nodding. “Well, good luck to them.”

She considered that mission for a moment, almost wishing she were going along. Her taskforce, however, wasn’t remotely ready. The Cheyenne and Longbow class ships were the most advanced built in the Sol System, generations ahead of anything else, in fact. They would replace the eighty-year-old Los Angeles class ships once they were fully rolled out, but it would be another couple months before even the last of her taskforce were completed.

They’d be in Hayden in a little over half that time, if her calculations were correct.

“Well, nothing to be done for them now,” she said. “Patch me into the fleet-wide, please.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Nadine fit the pair of over-ear headphones on and settled back, listening to the chatter for a few minutes as the ships drifted in formation.

“HMS Hood, adjust course four by eight, mark to the negative twelve. You’re drifting into the Cheyenne’s sky.”

That was Captain Roberts; she recognized his voice as he spoke.

“Roger, Cheyenne,” the voice of the HMS Hood’s navigator came back. “We’re working on an instrumentation glitch. Our navigational systems are currently down.”

“Understood, Hood. Cheyenne out,” Roberts answered before switching over to the ship-wide. “Goss, keep an eye on them will you? I swear, half the crap they stuffed into these things should have been junked out by quality control.”

“Unfortunately, Captain,” Nadine said, switching them both over to a private channel, “we are quality control.”

“Admiral

” Roberts came back, shocked. “I’m sorry, ma’am…”

“Don’t be sorry, just keep doing your job,” she told him. “I want my taskforce combat ready by the time we get our last ships from the Alamo.”

“Yes, ma’am. We’ll be ready.”

“Very good, Captain. As you were.”

“Aye, ma’am.”

She signed off the channel, leaving the captain to his duties before she turned back to her own. The flag deck of the USS Cheyenne was small, tight, and crowded despite the fact that there were only two people in the entire place. She sighed, calling up the latest status reports on her fleet.

Eight more Cheyenne class ships had arrived overnight, bringing her total up to sixteen, along with two Longbow to supplement the three she already had. Along with the logistics ships she’d be picking up off Mars when they finished shaking down, her Taskforce Four would have forty ships of war, with over half that number again in support vessels.

The fact that every single one of her combat ships was fresh off the Alamo was going to make her job a living nightmare, unfortunately.

“Send me the latest status reports on division one, please, Denise.”

“Already on your panel, ma’am.”

“Thank you, Denise.” She smirked, calling up the data. Honestly, she should have known better than to ask. It seemed that Denise was always two steps ahead of her anyway. She would have to remember to just check first, next time, and see if what she wanted was waiting.

There was a lot of work to do, and while the time seemed interminable at the moment, Nadine was quite certain it would run out like water through her fingers soon enough.

*****

Hayden

Keeping her last conversation with Samuel in mind, Sorilla led several more sorties over the next month. Destroying everything they found, forcing the enemy to chase them for days through the jungle, and killing anything that moved that wasn’t of Hayden or Earth.

Between the crude traps they’d set, the high explosives she’d use, or even the enemies own gravetic-induced fission attacks, they had managed to effectively bring all enemy construction on Hayden to a standstill.

Sorilla was worried, however.

They were holding the line in the here and now, and Sorilla was relatively certain that, with the help of her team, there was little chance that the enemy could find, or take, their positions in the jungle. There were signs now, however, that they were establishing a second base on another continent.

That was outside her reach at the moment, and if they finished the base there, then her ability to make them pay for every second they breathed Hayden air would be severely limited. If they abandoned the central colony site, the biggest part of her little guerrilla war was over.

The writing was on the wall, however, she could tell.

Barring a miracle, she and her little band of geeks-turned-warriors was about to be dealt out of this war.

USV Socrates

Hayden Jump Point Gamma

“Clearing jump point. Advance squadrons are moving ahead.”

Alexi grunted, not looking up from his personal display. He knew what the plan was and didn’t care for the details as long as they were proceeding according to it. He was focusing on the initial system scans, sharp eyes looking for the leviathans that hunted here.

In the six months since he’d been recalled to command the Soc, Alexi had run his crew through every hellish training scenario in the military books, plus several he devised on his own. Better to sweat blood than leak it, but he was one of the few people in the Fleet that truly understood the situation they were flying into.

Finishing his calculations, Alexi looked up, his eyes finding Richard Ashley where the commander was staring into a triad of displays with the intensity of a man possessed.

“Any red flags, Commander?”

“Negative. All quiet on the western front,” Ashley replied softly, using the code phrase the USN had determined to use for the Hayden System.

Alexi nodded. “All right. By the numbers. I want the cargo crews to start prepping the load in case we have to drop it and run like hell.”

“Aye, sir.”

“The admiral’s launching the drones, Captain.” Andrezj Simone said from the LIDAR station.

“Show me.”

*****

“Decoys accelerating to ten gravities, Admiral.”

“Understood,” Admiral Shepard answered, schooling his voice to a calm level despite the heart pounding in his chest. “Signals?”

“Nothing yet.”

He nodded to his flag captain in thanks and turned back to the system charts.

“System is quiet, sir,” his aide said from the other side of the repeater display.

“I’m sure Jorgen’s people told him the same thing when they arrived,” Shepard responded, his voice cool.

The aide nodded jerkily, swallowing. “Yes, sir. Sorry.”

“Decoys are squawking, air!”

“Very good, Captain. Take the fleet in, approach alpha.”

“Aye, sir, approach alpha!”

The ships began to rumble as they slowly climbed to one gravity of acceleration and began making a best speed approach for the planet Hayden.

“Hit the satellite over Hayden with a tight beam as soon as we’re in range.”

“Aye, ma’am!”

*****

Guerrilla Camp

Hayden

An urgent tone woke Sorilla from a deep slumber. She rolled over and kicked the light blanket from her body before reaching across the bed and snagging her vest from the bedside stand and pulling it over her form.

‘Proc,’ She subvocalized as she reached for her pants. ‘Alerts.’

One Alert.

‘Display,’ she told the system, reading the data as it scrolled across her eyeballs. A few minutes later, she strode out of her tent, buckling her belt as she went and grabbing her pistol belt on the way out.

Outside, the sun was still a few hours from rising, but she paid the dark little mind as she made her way to the Oshkosh truck she’d strung a tent off to create a command center.

“Hey, Sarge, what’s got you up?”

“Hey, Shorty.” She nodded to the guard. “Get Reed, Sam, and wake up anyone with good knowledge of the planet.”

“Sarge?”

“Do it,” she ordered curtly. “Daylight’s wasting, and the Fleet’s coming.”

He gaped for a moment, then stiffened and ran for Jerry’s tent. She watched him go for a moment, then climbed into the tent beside the large truck and pulled the flap closed behind her.

*****

By the time Samuel stumbled into the makeshift command center, he found Jerry and Sorilla already pouring over maps.

“Scouts reported more of them working at these coordinates, but the construction hasn’t begun yet. They’re still clearing trees.”

Sorilla nodded. “Right. The Fleet will be making a least time approach, probably sweeping by within forty-eight hours. We’ve got to be ready.”

“The Fleet’s really back?” Samuel stammered out, blinking away sleep as best he could.

Sorilla nodded. “Yeah. Sooner than I expected, to be honest.”

“It’s been months!”

She shrugged. “I half expected a year or more. We’re not ready for an interstellar war, Samuel.”

He stared for a long moment, but really, what could he say to that?

“Right,” he finally nodded with a sigh. “What can I do?”

“Help us get organized. Come morning, we need to know what everyone is going to be doing,” she told him. “It’s going to be a fun week.”

Samuel shuddered at the feral grin she flashed him but nodded dutifully as he, too, waded into the maps and reports and got to work. He began by looking over the information requests and noted that the Fleet wanted to know a lot about how many people were left and where they were.

“Are they planning to lift us off Hayden?” he asked, frowning.

Honestly, he wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Hayden was his home; he couldn’t imagine the empty pit it would leave in his soul if he were to be run out. However, there were a great many people here who were helpless against this sort of aggression, who should be anywhere but on Hayden.

Sorilla, however, shook her head.

“No way they have that kind of lift, even if they could get through the defensive perimeter,” she said. “Without the tether, I don’t even want to think of the fuel cost to lift that many people from the surface.”

“Ah.” He nodded, realizing that she was right.

The orbital tether was the colony’s lifeline, their connection to the universe. Without it, they were effectively cut off from any large-scale exodus. Earth might still have the kind of lifting capacity to pull off an evacuation of several thousand people, but none of the colonies did.

He sighed, both relieved and sorely disappointed, then went back to work.

The first light of the sun was slowly showing through the Hayden canopy when the laser com set again demanded Sorilla’s attention. She keyed it over to the public screen this time, letting Jerry and Samuel get the information at the same time she did.

It was mostly mission directives and what little intelligence they’d been able to put together back home, which wasn’t really a lot, but it also included a lot of best guess information about the enemy super-weapon.

The gravity valve.

The name seemed nondescript for something that crushed starships as easily as beer cans, but fitting just the same. The numbers theory the scientists on Earth had come up with was fairly simple, for an M-Brane researcher. For Sorilla, it mostly left her in puzzled confusion, but luckily, someone had taken the time to break it down into chunks she could digest.

“So that’s how they’re doing it,” Samuel whispered, eyes narrowing.

“You following that mess?” Jerry grimaced.

He nodded. “Yes. It makes sense, though I can only imagine the mechanism at work.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” the biochemist-slash-frontiersman muttered.

“I’m more interested in these estimates,” Sorilla said, highlighting the specs a military planner had devised based on the numbers theory. “That’s not a small installation.”

“If they’ve guessed right.”

“Let’s say they have,” Sorilla muttered, glaring at the screen. “Why haven’t we spotted this?”

“Our patrols only cover a small chunk of this area, let alone the continent or planet,” Jerry reminded her.

She nodded, not happy to concede the point but unable to deny it.

Samuel frowned, thinking a moment before speaking up. “This data fits one of the theories some of my researchers brought to my attention a week ago or so.”

“How so?”

“The ‘road’ the aliens have been building,” he said, nodding out in the general direction of the construction.

“Right

”

“You reported a while ago that it’s laid out in concentric circles around the old colony site,” Samuel went on. “That’s been a puzzle for us.”

“Yeah, I know,” Jerry acknowledged. “But we don’t know what the damn thing really is, so we can’t work out why they’re building it like that.”

“Right, but the prevailing idea at the moment is that it’s some sort of collector or concentrator of some kind,” Samuel continued. “We just haven’t been able to figure out for what because, honestly, it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen.”

“Just like their gravity tech is like nothing we’ve ever seen.” Sorilla nodded. “All right, I see where you’re going with this, but I’m not sure it really helps us.”

“Why not?” Jerry asked, having figured out what Samuel was saying. “We find it and we blow it to hell, right? We’ve got weapons, explosives, and people willing to go in.”

“First, they’ve got all those, too, and they’re better established,” Sorilla countered, ticking off her finger. “Second, while I see the logic, I’m not convinced it’s the truth. They engaged my team without that collector or whatever it is, and they have ships that were plenty capable of taking out Taskforce Two.”

Jerry and Samuel frowned.

“According to the message, they are going to try and draw ships away from the planet,” Samuel pointed out. “In that case

”

She nodded. “Agreed. In that case, if we can take out the local defense point, then maybe they can land.”

She leaned over the large map they’d been able to compile of the area, finger tracing around the large concentric circles of the collector the enemy had been building. “All right. Forget the collector. Our target has to be in here.”

They looked at where she had stabbed her finger down and winced as she held it right at the center of the colony site.

“They forced you out of the colony for more than just the fun of it,” Sorilla said. “They wanted that site for a reason, and they wanted to deny it to you.”

“It is the highest cleared area on the continent,” Jerry supplied.

“The planet, actually,” Samuel countered. “We chose it because it was an ideal location to anchor our counterweight while still providing easy defense against local wildlife and access to raw resources.”

“Then we have to assume that they chose it for similar reasons,” Sorilla replied, thinking about it. “Would the area have any unique gravity traits?”

Samuel shook his head. “No I don’t believe so.”

“So they could have built their valve anywhere?” Sorilla was disappointed.

“That depends,” Sam countered. “Remember, we don’t know nearly enough about this device. However, building near the equatorial regions like this has several advantages and effects due to the rotational momentum of the planet, and though the difference is minute, the colony site is located on the lowest natural gravity point on Hayden

excepting a few rather inhospitable mountain peaks.”

“So less interference in their gear, maybe?” Jerry offered.

“Maybe,” Sorilla said, considering it. After a moment she shrugged it off. “It doesn’t matter. If the valve is at the colony site, that’s all that matters right now. Why it’s there is something your geeks can worry about later, Sam.”

“Indeed.” The older man smiled at her.

The soldier smirked. “Get a squad together. Sam, you get our people in place according to the plan. Jerry, take a couple teams and raise all hell along the active construction points they’re working on now. I want to take another look at the colony site.”

The two men nodded as Sorilla got up and walked over to the coffin-shaped box leaning up against the side of the truck. She palmed the biometrics, and the locks popped, the cover hissing open on pneumatics to reveal the armor within.

“Game on.”

*****

Flag Deck, USS Montana

Hayden, Outer System

“Laser return from the Special Operations’ satellite in Hayden orbit, Admiral.”

“Send it to my panel.”

“Aye, sir.”

Shepard pulled himself down into his bolster, strapping in carefully before he pulled the panel in closer on its swing arm. The Special Operations Unit sent into Hayden had gone in with full kit, and part of that was leaving a small bird in planetary orbit to facilitate communications. Since all conventional, and some unconventional, communications frequencies were somehow being jammed by whoever landed on the planet, light-based signals were the only options that remained viable.

He scrolled through some of the report headings, checking summaries mostly, then looked back at the last status report filed from planet side.

Well, Sergeant, what have you for me today? he asked himself as he went over the report.

Shepard’s eyes widened slightly as he read, and he let out a silent whistle through pursed lips.

Very nice. Coordinates, capabilities of ground-based troops and close air support, interesting estimates on construction capabilities and technological capacity. A local militia trained and already resisting, excellent, excellent

“Get this compiled and sorted out for command briefing at 0900 hours,” he said, half turning to his aide, “and please have Rackham on the Valley Forge contact me as soon as he’s available.”

“Yes, sir, Admiral. May I say as to what you want him for?”

“I think we have a change of plans concerning his deployment.”

“Understood, Admiral.”

As his aide turned back to his station, Admiral Shepard flipped a switch and opened a channel to his flag captain.

“Yes, Admiral?” Captain Jackson said from his station.

“Any sign of our uninvited guests yet, Captain?”

“No, sir. All still quiet.”

“Understood. We have updated intel from the planet. I’m having it analyzed now. We’ll look it over before the morning meeting.”

“Yes, sir. So there were survivors?” Jackson asked.

“At least one: Sergeant Sorilla Aida, US SOF, seconded to Solari Special Operations,” Shepard said. “She’s trained a local militia, and they’ve apparently been giving the aliens all kinds of hell.”

“Well now, that’s nice to hear.”

“We’ll be reorienting our landing plans to accommodate her intel,” Shepard said.

“Understood. Does she have any reports on planetary defenses?”

“Nothing I’ve seen so far,” the admiral admitted. “I’ll send a query to her with the next update, see if there’s anything she left out.”

“Unlikely,” Jackson offered.

“Agreed, but we’ll be thorough.”

“As you say, sir.”

*****

Alexi Patronov tried to hide his sweating palms as he stared at the repeater signals that showed him the Hayden System. The Socrates was patched into the most advanced mobile sensing array ever devised by man, and it was showing no threats across the entire system. Oddly, it didn’t make him feel any better.

I am such a fool, he thought to himself. What am I doing out here?

He didn’t want anything to do with the military. He’d joined the Solari Fleet to explore, not to fight. The entire situation was alien to him, and to his ship.

Most of his ship.

That thought shifted his attention to where Commander Ashley was poring over the data coming in via the sensor net. The military man seemed like a good enough guy, but Alexi didn’t much like the guy being on his ship any more than he liked the damned missile tubes strapped to her hull.

“Anything new, Commander?”

Ashley shook his head. “Nothing out of the ordinary, Captain. Unfortunately, the intensity of the system primary makes it very hard to see something as small as a ship hiding down there.”

Alexi nodded. He’d had enough trouble along those lines himself on past missions. Ok, he hadn’t been looking for aliens that wanted to kill him, but he had been trying to find interesting bits of flotsam for the Soc’s labs to analyze. Sometimes even if you knew it was there, it was damned hard to find some things.

“So far, everything is running to plan,” Ashley went on. “The decoys are running hot, straight, and normal while the Fleet drops toward Hayden. Barring enemy action, we’ll intercept Hayden orbit in

nine hours.”

“Thank you, Commander.”

Alexi checked the plot himself, not that he doubted the commander but just out of habit.

Nine hours.

Alexi found himself calling up a visual of the system primary to his repeater screen. Are you still out here? Where are you?

Come out, come out, wherever you are

*****

Survivor’s Camp

Hayden

“What’s the plan, Reed?”

Jerry looked over at Bethany, who seemed to be speaking for the assembled group. “My group is taking on a fairly standard raid, Beth. We’re going to hit a little faster than normal and generally try to raise as much hell as we can, but that’s not too out of the ordinary.”

His smirk brought a few laughs from the group.

“True enough,” one man chuckled.

It was a testament to the possessive and naturally defensive nature of humanity, Jerry supposed, that the general reaction to blowing stuff up and probably killing things, if not people, was more one of cynical humor than horror. Just a few months ago, there wasn’t one in ten people on Hayden who’d react like that, and pretty much none of those who would have were part of Samuel’s academic group.

“Sam is taking a larger group out

” Jerry started, but the murmur of surprise quickly cut him off.

“Sam?”

“Reed, he’s never taken any groups out on raids

”

“That’s nuts.”

“It’s not a raid.” He held up his hand. “His people are—”

“Holy shit.”

A shocked hush fell, causing Jerry to half turn and fall silent himself as Sorilla stepped into the tent.

It wasn’t the woman they’d come to know over the past months, not the woman with the somewhat acerbic, if witty, sense of humor. It wasn’t even the professional soldier who’d trained and led them on raid after raid.

No, it was the armored knight who had first arrived on their doorstep mere days after the worst few nights of the lives.

In full armor, her helm cradled against her hip, Sergeant Sorilla Aida looked over the assembled group with a critical eye.

“Fleet’s back,” she said simply. “Sam and his group are in charge of prepping a landing area while Reed draws the enemy’s attention.”

“What are you going to be doing?”

She smirked. “I’m going to try to locate and eliminate as many critical assets as I can, starting with whatever they’re protecting at the colony site.”

“You need backup,” Jerry objected.

“Jer.” She shook her head. “Without armor, you’d just slow me down, and speed will likely mean life on this run. Just do your jobs, I’ll do mine, and we’ll see each other when the dust settles.”

“You’d better be there.”

She smiled in his direction but didn’t answer as she stepped up to the front of the assembled people. “All right, listen up!”

They shut up, all attention focusing on the armored woman addressing them.

“Fleet is inbound, ETA is nine hours,” she told them. “That assumes they don’t run into any interference on their way down. If they do, I’m sure they’ve got a plan to deal with it, so we’re not going to worry about that. What we need to do is keep the enemy we can reach as busy as possible while preparing to receive the Fleet.”

“Are we going to be evacuated?”

“Probably not,” she told them flat out.

When some cries of objection called out, Sorilla held up her hands for quiet and eventually got it.

“Fleet doesn’t have that kind of lift, and most of you should know that,” she told them sternly. “If possible, I’ll try to arrange emergency evac for anyone seriously injured, or those unable to fight. Children, mothers, some of the elderly, at most. Beyond that, until we re-establish the tether, there just is no way we can even lift more than a few dozen people at a time. Probably a lot less than that, all right?”

She could see a few holdouts still grumbling, but the majority was too aware of how vital the orbital tether was to space access.

“All right,” she said with finality. “We know our jobs, we’ve got people depending on us to do them, both here on Hayden and out there in the Fleet. We are not going to let them down. Got me?”

There was a long silence, then Jerry nodded.

“Damn right.”

That was the moment the others were waiting for. Slowly, one after another nodded or spoke up in agreement until they were shouting their readiness to execute the planned action. Sorilla nodded, walking through the group as they patted her on her armor or wished her luck, until she arrived beside Jerry and Sam.

“I’m heading out now,” she told them. “I’ll scout out what I can find but won’t hit any targets until 0715. That’s one hour before Fleet makes planetfall, copy?”

“Right,” Sam nodded.

“Should we do the same?” Jerry asked.

“No, I want you to get your men out there, double time. The closest construction area is reported to be what? Six hours from here?” she asked.

“About that.”

“Hit it hard, hit it fast,” Sorilla told him. “Get in, get out, don’t get dead. That will pull some forces away from their central location, maybe clear a little resistance from my path, if I’m lucky.”

“Got it. Can do, Sarge.” Jerry flipped her a sloppy wave that was probably his attempt at a salute, all the while grinning boyishly at her.

Sorilla rolled her eyes but smirked back. “All right. Good luck, then.”

The two men nodded. “Good luck to you, as well.”

“To us all,” Samuel added to Jerry’s rejoinder. “I suspect we are going to need it.”

“No doubt, Sam,” Sorilla said as she flipped the clamshell helm over her head and let it snap into place. Her voice came over the speaker a moment later. “Hayden hurrah!”

Jerry smirked back, recognizing the call of the militia, and pumped his fist into the air. “Hayden hurrah!”

Behind Sorilla, over thirty men and women heard Jerry’s call and responded in kind.

“Hayden hurrah!”

It was amidst the resonance of all those voices that Sergeant Sorilla Aida stepped out into the jungle air and broke into an easy loping jog that led her out of the small makeshift village and into the dark heart of the jungle night.

Chapter 3

CZM 98 Break Alpha-powered armor, often referred to as Grunt Suits, were the mainstay of most all first world nations back on Earth. That is, those nations who allied with the United States against the Soviet Union during the Cold War of the twentieth century. The term had been twisted around a little over the decades, but some things remained loosely affiliated along those lines even after more than a century and a half.

Unlike the second world nations, those allied with the Soviet Union, a lot of the old alliances remained strong in the first world nations well into the twenty-second century. Military technology was one of the key elements, particularly cutting edge tech like Sorilla’s Ops Suit, that tended to follow along those old alliances.

The Ops Suit let its wearer stretch her capabilities well beyond the human range, giving her incredible speed, strength, and tactical capacity. In ideal circumstances, the record holder for the hundred kilometer sprint ran a sustained hundred and fifty kilometers an hour along the open track, and ended the run barely winded.

Sorilla was not currently running in ideal circumstances.

She had less than three hours to run a couple hundred kilometers through uneven terrain and sometimes dense jungle, the lives of her militia and those troops on the Fleet landers depending on her. a hundred and forty kilometers an hour was outside her range, but with her suit’s advanced mapping systems turned on full, she was loping through the Hayden jungle at just a hair over seventy, with occasional boosts to around a hundred.

The forward-looking sensors mapped the jungle ahead with binocular rangefinders along every frequency from x-ray to RADAR. In the few seconds it had before she overrun its range, the suit’s combat computer tandem cored with the minicomp implanted in her chest to plot the fastest path through the jungle and made micro-adjustments to her motions to keep her from planting face first into a tree while she ran.

Sorilla blew through the jungle faster than the fastest Hayden land animal, a tornado instead of the soft breeze she normally emulated, focused entirely on getting to her goal as quickly as possible. thirty kilometers from camp, she exploded out of the jungle, planting a foot on a large granite boulder, and propelled herself off a cliff face.

While not as capable as the heavier capacity versions of the CZM series power armor, the Break Alpha model was still able to absorb impacts up to forty percent of terminal velocity into the elasto-polymer musculature built into the legs and arms of the armor. Sorilla flipped over in midair as she fell, aligning to take the impact from the thirty meter descent, and hit the ground in a crouch that just barely tapped the suit’s power reserves.

As her legs folded up under her, the kinetic energy of the fall was directed straight into the musculature of the armor then released back as she kicked off again and continued her breakneck run through the Hayden wilderness.

The passive nature of the polymer muscles meant that she could maintain an incredible rate of travel with little to no power draw on the armor, barring the use of its advanced sensing grid.

forty klicks down, a hundred and sixty to go.

*****

In the opposite direction of Sorilla’s run, Samuel Becker was riding a MULE at the front of a bizarre column of people and equipment. His mission, like Sorilla’s, was to prepare for Fleet’s landing, but unlike her, he wasn’t going to try and see to it that they could land in one piece. Instead, Sam and his group were going to make sure that the Fleet had somewhere to land when they arrived.

They took the old logging road toward a river delta about 820 kilometers from the colony site. It had been considered as an alternate site for many of the reasons cultures often built in such places on Earth, including easy access to the water, rich soils, and a more moderate climate.

In the end, though, the inland site won out because it was built on a plateau almost 2,000 meters above sea level almost directly on the planet’s equator. For a variety of reasons, that made it a far more attractive location to anchor the planetary tether.

Sam’s main concern at the moment, however, was that making a 800 plus kilometer trip in nine hours was daunting on its own. Through the Hayden jungle, without the existence of the old road, it would be impossible.

The MULEs shook and rattled as they roared along the old dirt road, damn near shaking the teeth out of his old skull every few feet along. Despite being strapped into the squat military vehicle, Sam held on tight to the dash in front of him with one hand as he kept his other tightly pressed to the hat on his head.

“You know, we’ll never get there in time, right?”

Samuel shot a glare over at Silver. “We’ll have an hour to work before the Fleet arrives in orbit.”

“A whole hour, really?” Silver mocked him, rolling his eyes as he, too, held on to the side of the rocking MULE. “Why didn’t you say so? It’s obviously in the bag then.”

“Oh grow up, Silver. For a man who arrived on the Appleseed itself, you act like a petulant child,” Sam growled.

There was no love lost between the two. Silver and he had a long history of butting heads over priorities of the colony, and it seemed that proud tradition was to continue as an ongoing affair.

Silver snorted, eyes on the road, even though the MULE handled its own navigation. “Coming from you, that’s a laugh! I can’t count how many times I’ve had to break up slap fights between your academic wimps out in the bush where they should know better

”

“Would you two shut up?” Bethany snapped in their ears as she leaned forward from her precarious perch atop the gear packed in the MULE behind them. “God, it’s like being locked in a room with Dean and his friends, only without the intelligent conversation!”

The two older men glanced at each other, then glared back at the younger woman, who was holding on for dear life as she scowled right back at them while the makeshift military convoy roared down the old dirt road that snaked through the Hayden jungle.

*****

Sorilla eased to a slower lope as she came closer to the edge of the jungle that surrounded the colony site. A quick glance at the chrono app in her corneal implant told her she’d made excellent time, leaving her over an hour before Jerry was scheduled to kick things off on his end of the operation.

Perfect. Now, let’s see if I can get in unnoticed this time.

That was probably going to be a bit more of a trick than it sounded at first blush, she had to admit. The last time she’d come through this area, she had been spotted, somehow, and Sorilla still hadn’t worked out the detection method.

It was possible that she’d just been seen. Eyeball mark one, or whatever the alien version of such was, was still one of the most effective methods of spotting an infiltrator around. While meta-material science had made invisibility possible, the art was damned near impossible to nail down perfectly. Mix in a moving target, and even an invisible woman could be spotted by the naked eye of an observant spotter. There was just something about the motion blur that triggered every danger sense the human mind had.

Of course, all that was academic, since she didn’t have a system capable of tactical invisibility in her armor. The meta-materials in question wouldn’t survive the severe environmental stress she put her armor under, which was why it didn’t even have basic chromo-key capability like her flak vest.

What it could do, however, was absorb most frequencies of the EM spectrum as well as do active contrast matching along many of those same frequencies. Contrast matching would let her armor appear to be roughly the same brightness as the background, especially in frequencies like infrared.

It wasn’t invisibility, but it was the next best thing, and so, with those stealth systems running, Sorilla slowed to a halt at the edge of the jungle and took a few minutes to observe the colony site with the far more powerful computer and spotting gear integrated into her armor.

It only took a few minutes to actually spot several things she’d missed her last run through, including a very powerful infrasonic hum that was permeating the area.

Oh, so that’s how they did it.

Sorilla almost kicked herself; it was actually an old trick, one the military back home had stopped using in the twenty-first century because countermeasures were reasonably simple. Infrasound, sonic vibrations below twenty hertz, could make a human panic, become paranoid, even see ghosts under the right conditions for a variety of reasons.

First, at around eleven hertz, it triggered the fight or flight mechanism the same as a tiger’s roar upon pouncing, or the grinding of the Earth in a quake. Some frequencies could even impart physical symptoms, including headaches, nausea, and other less savory aches and pains.

It wasn’t normally as reliable as the colonists had reported and her own experiences suggested, however, so Sorilla directed her armor to analyze the signal. It quickly located several carrier waves and patterns in the signal that weren’t in her database. Possibly nothing. Her portable system packed a ton of information, but it wasn’t comprehensive.

She filed the information aside for the moment, set her armor to isolate and redact the frequencies from her hearing, and then moved on to the next subject of interest.

Her armor’s internal gyroscopic system had instantly noted a shift in planetary gravity as she approached the colony site but actually buried the information deep down in the alerts as unimportant. Sorilla quickly struck that line of code from her active pattern recognition system and recoded it as highest priority intelligence.

Gravity sensors were generally used to determine spatial orientation of an object so that the armor would know if it were right side up or not and how orientation would affect its user. Pretty standard stuff, actually, in use for several centuries, at least, in one form or another. But Sorilla quickly found that her software couldn’t quite keep up with what the hardware was telling it.

There was a discrepancy between what the hardware was reporting and what almost every other system in her armor was insisting was true, causing a series of alignment error alerts to show on her HUD.

Damn it, she hissed, trying to recode the gravity sensor on the fly.

Software coding wasn’t her specialty, obviously, but every armor-rated grunt had to be able to talk the talk. Everything she used ran on a finely meshed combination of hardware and software, right down to her rifle. Oh, certainly it would all work with the software disabled, even her armor

after a fashion, but none of it would work well by modern military standards.

After a few minutes, however, she gave up and disabled the gravity sensor’s feed to her armor’s controller. It would make her a little less nimble in the field, but with the conflicting messages bouncing between it and her dead reckoning systems, Sorilla felt more comfortable running without it.

She kept the feed running to her HUD, however, opening a small app for it in the lower left corner. She had a feeling she might just be able to use it to locate the enemy installation, if she could work out how to read the damn thing.

That all settled, Sorilla dropped to a crawl and began the long task of approaching the colony site. Just under an hour before Jerry kicked off the festivities on his end, she had to recon as quickly as possible beforehand.

Preferably without getting herself caught in the process, of course.

Hooyah.

*****

USV Socrates

On Hayden Approach

“Commander.”

Ashley glanced up to see the captain drifting over his station. “Sir.”

“Anything?”

“No, sir. All quiet,” the commander said, nodding to the repeater panel. “No sign of anything out there.”

“Creepy,” Alexi muttered under his breath.

The waiting was killing him. They’d passed the debris from Taskforce Two an hour earlier, and Alexi had literally felt the tension scale up exponentially since then. Ships had died in this expanse, not by the dangers inherent in space but by violence.

The godforsaken blackness wasn’t supposed to be this quiet after something like that.

Alexi pushed back from the defense station, drifting away from the commander and across to navigation.

“Captain.” Sharon Miles nodded to him as he stopped his motion just behind her. “We’re four hours out, sir. Formation holding.”

He just nodded. Of course it was; nothing had happened yet.

“Thanks, Sharon.”

He pushed back, knowing that he was starting to make things worse as he made his own tension visible to the crew but unable to help it. Thankfully, there was really only so much he could do to make an ass of himself in the cramped space of the control deck, and most of those present knew him too well to hold it against him later.

Alexi sighed, forcing himself back into his own bolster and strapping down. Normally, time in space was something he looked forward to, something that relaxed him. This, however, was driving him around the bulkhead.

It wasn’t like he wanted to see combat or anything insane like that. That would be

well, insane. Alexi just wanted to be back on a survey mission where the odds of an alien armada popping out of nowhere were at roughly the same levels as the odds of God popping by for tea.

“We’ve got a Fleet-wide alert across the gravity trap array!” Specialist Hawking Tatum spoke up from across the bridge. “Gravity anomaly has shown up near the north flank of the decoy formation!”

“Commander, confirm the report,” Alexi ordered.

“Confirmed,” Ashley said from his weapons and tactical control station. “Admiral Shepard is coming online now.”

The bridge crew of the Socrates turned to the main repeated screen as the admiral appeared in a centered window and began to speak.

*****

Flag Deck, USS Montana

Admiral Shepard focused his eyes on the spot he knew the conferencing camera was rather than the screen where his captains’ faces were split up into several tiled windows. He hated it when people were talking to him on screen and couldn’t be bothered to look at the camera. It made him feel like they were talking to someone else just behind him.

“Logistics squadron, fall back by the numbers as soon as you’re finished topping off our tanks. Maintain observation and record all events. Your orders are to retreat back to Sol space if, at any time, it looks like we’re going to lose tactical control of the situation,” he told the commander of the logistical support squadron, eyes firmly on the camera. “Intelligence and recon, you have your orders. Go silent, take command of the decoy URSVs, and maintain laser coms with each other at all times.”

Technically, he supposed that there was no need to give these orders. They all knew their jobs. But there was still a long waiting period before the gravity anomalies would be positively identified, and Shepard wanted to keep people from imagining too much in the meantime if he could.

“Alexi,” he said, eyes flicking from the camera to Petronov’s location on the monitor before flicking back. “I want you to remember, your job is to get in and deliver supplies and relief troops to the people on Hayden. Do not engage the enemy if you can avoid it. Make your deliveries, pick up the priority persons of interest as designated, and get the hell out. Clear?”

“Da,” the Russian national said with a wry smile. “Have no worries on that, Admiral. If I can avoid firing the vacuum-blasted birds you strapped to my hull, it’ll be a good day for me and my Socrates.”

“A good day for all of us, Alexi,” Shepard told the man. “A good day for all of us.”

He nodded to them, told them good luck, and closed the channels for the support squadrons. On his screen then were the captains of his tactical divisions, including the captain of the Montana.

“Ladies, gentlemen.” He nodded to the camera before checking the numbers coming through his repeater. “Long-range detection matches the initial readings reported by the Los Angeles and Taskforce Two. They’re here, and they’ve noticed us.”

“Aye, sir. Are we following the primary protocols?”

Shepard nodded. “We are. You are cleared to fire as soon as you have positive tracks on the incoming bandits. As per the briefing, maintain a thirty light-second gap between each other at all times. Do not group together and make it easy on them. Clear?”

“Aye aye, Admiral,” the group said in unison.

He waited a moment to be sure they all understood then nodded. “Good. Their weapons and speed are beyond impressive, ladies and gentlemen. Do not give up any further advantage to them, they sure as hell don’t need it. Spread out, wait for them to focus on a ship, then converge and hit them from all sides at extreme long range. We can’t win if we go toe-to-toe, but the Los Angeles and its taskforce showed that they can be made to bleed. Clear?”

“Clear, sir!”

“Good, you have your orders. Break formation and accelerate as per Maneuvering Plan Alpha. Maintain all possible stealth. We don’t know if they’ve seen us yet, or just the decoys. Please remember, our first priority is getting useable intelligence. At all costs, the reconnaissance ships must return with all pertinent data. Once that is complete, if it all goes to hell

do everything you can to get yourselves and the relief ships out in one piece.”

Shepard eyed the screen intently for a long moment, then nodded in satisfaction.

“Godspeed . Shepard out.”

The tiled windows blinked out one by one until only the captain of the Montana was left looking back at him.

“Your orders, Admiral?”

“You have tactical command, Captain. You know our opening move.”

“Aye, Admiral. I have tactical command,” Neal Jackson said in response, keying open several toggles to the ship’s com center. A moment later, his voice echoed through the ship, “All hands, all hands, prepare for full military power. I say again, prepare for full military power. Lock it down, boys and girls, things are about to get a little rocky.”

The general quarters alarm began to blare across the ship and the fleet as Admiral Shepard shifted his focus to the long-range scans coming from deeper in-system. He’d made his opening gambit, now he could only hope that the enemy would play into the trap. If they bypassed his decoys, things would get stickier, to be sure, but if they did something really crazy, like ignored his forward squadrons of Los Angeles class ships, then the entire game could be lost.

Normally, he wouldn’t be concerned about that. Few were the people who could or would ignore a squadron of eight Los Angeles class star vessels after all. What worried him was the fact that if anyone was going to be able to do it, it would be an alien mind backed by the kind of advanced technology that brought Taskforce Two down out of the black sky.

*****

Alexi watched as the battle squadron began to slowly pull away from the main corps, thick refueling hoses popping free as the tankers pulled in their lines. The logistics vessels reversed thrust, dropping back as the destroyers pushed ahead and began to spread their formation.

That left Alexi, his Socrates, and the relief column on their own, with Hayden looming off their bows.

He toggled the com open. “All hands, we are now on final approach to Hayden’s World. Our escorts are pulling away to provide us with the cover we need to deliver relief supplies to the colonists. There are people down there who have been living in an alien jungle for months. That’s months in an environment that produces no edible plants, no wildlife to hunt for food. How they’ve made it this long, I can’t say, but we can put an end to that for them.”

He paused, considering his screens for a long moment. “Leave the fighting to the Fleet. That’s what they do. We’re on a relief mission to a colony in distress, we’ve done it before, and like as not, we’ll do it again. Let’s do our work, gentlemen, ladies, do our work so we can go home and get ready to do it again another day. Captain out.”

He turned to Ashley. “Sound general quarters, Commander.”

The commander looked in his direction for a moment, face blank, then nodded and turned back to his station to key the alarm.

“Aye, Captain. Sounding general quarters.”

The USV Socrates echoed with the blaring alarm while Alexi examined the orbital tracks of the system, focusing mostly on Hayden and the relief column.

“Ahead one third, Mr. Keith,” he said to the helmsman. “We’ll take the lead. Commander Ashley, have the others follow us in.”

“Yes, sir,” Brian Keith said as he adjusted the power settings on the ship’s VASIMIR drive.

“Aye aye, Captain,” Ashley said as he relayed the orders to the column.

The Socrates rumbled under power, beginning to edge forward as the rest of the relief column drew in behind her.

“Arm weapons, Captain?” Ashley asked tensely.

Alexi looked at his XO with mild annoyance bordering on distaste. He considered it, however, and sighed in assent. “Arm weapons, then. Keep the safeties on them, for the love of clean air.”

“Yes, sir, safeties engaged.”

And thank mercy for small favors, then, Alexi thought sourly as he, the Socrates, and the relief column drove on toward Hayden.

*****

Colony Site, Hayden’s World

Sorilla pressed her back against what used to be a dry cleaners, judging from the sign that was half blown clear of the building. She’d managed to penetrate the town easily, once again, but this time, with her armor’s help, she’d located a series of infrasound generators that had been emplaced in an overlapping perimeter.

Circling them as quickly as she dared, she determined that the center of the perimeter wasn’t the center of the colony site, but rather off to the southeast. Firmly a believer in the theory that people put their most valuable points at the deepest section of their defense perimeter, Sorilla redirected her motion away from the center of the colony and toward the center of the defenses.

It was time to see just what these people, if that was indeed what they were, were hiding here on Hayden.

Considering her approach, Sorilla reviewed the colony’s official planning reports as she moved. The colony was technically required to submit any deviations from the original plans, but Sorilla knew better than to expect them to have kept up with the slate work on that. Few enough places on Earth did, why would they bother way the hell out here?

That said, she quickly located access to the utility tunnels dug under the colony and headed for the closest access point. She kicked in the door to the access building and switched her implants over to full and active night-observation mode as she stepped out of the limited starlight of the surface.

She led with her assault rifle, sweeping the stairwell as she moved down into the tunnels below the colony.

Nothing.

She hoped that meant she was in luck and the tunnels hadn’t been invaded. It seemed unlikely they hadn’t been found, but with luck, maybe the opposing force had discounted them. She paused in the tunnels proper, checking for the same infrasonic resonance that had been employed above ground.

The tunnels checked clear.

Sorilla couldn’t help but grimace. She would have almost welcomed it more if the place had been crawling with automated security the way the colony site aboveground was. The fact that the tunnels were apparently clear creeped her out more than the infrasonic-induced ghost terrors above.

She pushed the feeling back, though, and got her bearings quickly. The tunnels were laid out in a circular grid that mimicked the layout of the colony above, allowing for delivery of power, water, and utilities while permitting the clean removal of wastes. After checking the maps again, she headed east, knowing that the tunnel would circle around to the south and into the section she wanted to scout.

Half a kilometer around the perimeter, she slowed to a halt, taking a knee while she kept her rifle trained ahead of her. With her left hand, she reached down, brushing the floor with her fingertips. Chemical analysis showed on her HUD a few heartbeats later.

Rock dust, skin cells, some pollen trace.

All of it several months old.

Sorilla rose back to her feet, eyes scanning the tunnels as she considered things for a long moment. No heat trace, no tracks, nothing down here but me. Could they possibly have ignored the tunnels under the colony? They have to know that they’re here.

She shook off the feeling. The tunnels checked as clear, no sign of any inhabitation since before the invasion. Aboveground she’d be spotted, just like the last time. The infrasound devices were probably receivers as well, tracking footfalls, even heartbeats, possibly. That had to be how they tracked her the first time, so the tunnels were the only reasonable options she could see.

Too bad they felt like a trap.

Screw it. She pushed off the feeling. It wasn’t useful, and she didn’t have time for it even if it were. She began moving again, slower now as she was approaching her goal. If her calculations were right, she’d be coming right in under the target area any time at all.

Another hundred meters down the tunnels, she rounded a corner and came to a halt, eyes widening under her helm as she examined what remained of the corridor.

Well, this might be why they ignored the tunnels, Sorilla scowled as she examined the collapsed area ahead of her.

The debris blocking her way was fresh, mostly local concrete from what she could tell, but it was clearly stacked too neatly to be an accidental collapse. Sorilla sighed, calling up the schematics again. She could backtrack, circle around, and try another route, but she didn’t think it would be any better. If they collapsed one section of the tunnels, they certainly collapsed the rest.

She crossed the secondary route from her list of options, highlighting the schematics for a moment until she spotted a surface access close to the cave-in, back twenty meters from her current position and north thirty. She may not be able to come in from under them, but the tunnels had gotten her close enough.

She jogged back, making it to the stairwell in just a minute, then slowed to a crawl as she swept the route ahead with every step. Her rifle butt was fitted close to her shoulder as she moved up the stairs to the access door.

Sorilla dropped to a crouch by the door and killed her active night-observation mode before testing the door and slowly pulling it open.

Still quiet, she thought as she peered out through the passive light amplification mode, examining the colony as best she could from her new position. The infrasound was back, however, so quiet was perhaps a misnomer in some ways. Sorilla made sure that her armor was still isolating the signal then edged out of the access building and back into Hayden air.

Her corneal implants flashed slightly, drawing her attention to the chrono app in the corner.

Jerry should be kicking things off anytime now.

*****

Better than a hundred and fifty kilometers away, Jerry settled into a crouch as he watched the workers clearing out the jungle ahead of him. The invaders worked twenty-four hours a day, like clockwork. If they weren’t being interfered with by strikes and ambushes, you could set your time app by their progress through the jungle.

“They’re slipping into the zone now.”

Jerry looked aside at Dean, who had crawled over to his position. The younger man still wore bandages over his ears from the near miss with the nuclear explosion months earlier, but he refused to be kept back from the fight.

“Good. Spread the word to pull back. I’ll light the fuses and be right behind you.”

Dean nodded and drew back, heading toward the main group to spread the word. Jerry watched him go for a moment, then turned his attention back to the main event, as it were.

He checked the time app on his pocket slate and nodded to himself.

Right on time. Good luck, Sergeant, he thought as he put the slate away and manually connected the fiber cables lying by his feet to the power source.

“All right, we’re live,” he whispered, hefting his assault rifle as he followed Dean’s path back through the jungle.

Behind him, a series of explosions rocked the world, illuminating the jungle in a series of flashes and an orange-red glare.

Step one complete, now on the step two.

Jerry broke out of the jungle into a clearing that hadn’t existed twelve hours earlier to find a couple dozen men and women waiting for him, perched on and around three Cougar battle tanks, while eight armed scout DOGs sat in their midst.

“All right, you know what to do,” he told the people. “Break into groups, find whatever is left, and harass them as much as you can.” He grinned at them. “Just remember, friends don’t get friends nuked. Kay?”

They laughed as they hefted their weapons and hopped down off the tanks, breaking into three-man squads as they headed into the jungle. Jerry watched them go for a moment, leaving him in the jungle with Dean, Bethany, and almost a dozen killer robots.

“Cheery,” he muttered as he walked forward, tossing his rifle to Dean. “Hang on to this for a sec.”

Dean caught it easily. “You got it.”

Jerry stepped up onto one of the Cougars, pulling himself up by the twenty millimeter railgun. He swiped his fingers across the biometric security panel and quickly found himself gazing into a dark, red eye glowing at him.

“Identify.”

“Reed, Jerry,” he said, creeped out by the alien-sounding voice of the war machine. “Authorization, Aida Niner Bravo Sierra Hayden Twelve.”

“Confirmed. Orders?”

“Asymmetric warfare, plot Bravo,” Jerry told the machine, giving it its marching orders. “Maintain maximum engagement range, stay mobile. Assume overwhelming opposition.”

“Confirmed. Orders?”

“Engage,” Jerry ordered, closing the panel and jumping off as the Cougar’s turbine wound up and its motors engaged.

“Confirmed.” It rumbled as it, and the other automated platforms, moved out of the clearing and into the Hayden jungle.

Jerry took his weapon back from Dean, checking the magazine on reflex before nodding to the jungle. “Now it’s just us.”

“What’s the game, boss?” Dean asked as he and Bethany followed Jerry toward the jungle.

“We’ll play cleanup,” Jerry decided. “Ghost the other teams, give them cover if we can, pull them out if things go bad. Clear?”

“Clear.”

“Sounds good.”

“All right, let’s go.”

*****

Military theories of asymmetric warfare had existed almost as far back in human history as warfare itself. The Spartans at Thermopylae, the Samurai on the Bridge, even tales of brigand heroes like Robin Hood all fell into the category.

Historically, the best examples always revolved around forces that were faced with overwhelming power in their enemies, the necessity of the situation breeding the brilliance of their maneuvers.

Victory wasn’t the goal for such warriors, whether they realized it or not. It was about making victory impossible, or at least impossibly expensive, for their enemies. Keep forcing the enemy to pour more and more resources into the front of a conflict until they couldn’t afford to pour any more down a seemingly bottomless pit.

Eventually, if the deaths didn’t cause them to pull back, the sheer lack of resources would.

Every aspect of Sorilla’s plan for the Hayden resistance was designed based around those theories. In fact, her entire career had revolved around asymmetric concepts. She had trained, like all Green Beret special operations, to go into a troubled area and build a resistance core from local people and resources.

So when planning the Hayden resistance tactics, Sorilla put everything she knew from any useable source she could into the effort.

Hit and run tactics from the Revolutionary War, jungle warfare techniques from Vietnam, IED tactics from Afghanistan, and of course, whatever she could from every terrorist organization ever recorded.

It was these tactics that lead to the opening gambit Jerry initiated against the invaders and, in fact, Sorilla herself planned to use in its wake on her end of the operation.

In the aftermath of the initial attack, the small squads of the Hayden militia descended on the disorganized, surviving targets and opened up with mid-range automatic fire. Hails of direct fire rounds slammed down on already stunned and disorientated targets, shattering armor and destroying cohesion in an instant.

The militia didn’t let up. They knew that any momentary respite would let their targets potentially call in a fatal artillery strike from their local firebase. They’d also learned through hard experience, however, that the enemy network was neither omnipotent nor omniscient. Overloading their ability to backtrack attacks was effective at preventing them from delivering that killer long-range strike.

It was as Sorilla had once told them: the Golems and Goblins weren’t enemy military. They were the equivalent of bulldozers and forklifts; putting down a guerrilla force just wasn’t their specialty.

So when the secondary hail of fire rained down on them, the hapless Golems and Goblins were torn apart by the follow up to the initial sabotage, and in that moment, phase two was successfully completed.

Signals were sent, some were not, and in both cases, responses were drawn up by an enemy that had so far proved itself fatally predictable in its responses. Far from the ambush site, across kilometers of jungle, military drones leapt into the air and hummed to the attack.

For one Sergeant Sorilla Aida, that was the signal to begin phase three.

A familiar hum penetrated her armor, causing Sorilla to drop to a crouch as a flicker of motion exploded along the side of her HUD. One of the enemy flyers tore into the sky, bringing a smile to her lips as she consulted her chrono app.

Right on time, she thought, tipping her head to Jerry’s timing as she turned in the direction of the motion’s source.

The flyer had appeared right in the center of the area she’d narrowed the probable enemy location at, so Sorilla rose from her position after the flyers had flitted away and ran toward the concrete wall between her and her target. She jumped up, scissoring over the four meter wall, and landed in an easy crouch on the other side.

Got you. She grinned under her helm as she saw heavy slab doors closing on a deep hole in the ground that she knew wasn’t on any of the colony specs. Sorilla bolted for the doors, dropping through them before they could close, and free fell for a dozen meters before landing in a three-point crouch on the floor of an immense hangar.

This may have been a touch impetuous, she thought dryly as several bipedal alien creatures turned to stare at her in obvious shock.

They stared at her for an interminable moment before the first of them acted, lifting what every instinct in Sorilla’s body identified as weapon. She extended her right arm, leveling her assault weapon singlehanded, and haloed the alien in her HUD. When the halo flickered from white to red, she squeezed off a round even as she turned away.

The electromagnetic launcher ejected the heavy round at a subsonic speed, crossing the range between Sorilla and the target in less time than it took to blink, and slammed into the big alien across the hanger. The heavy round tumbled moments after penetration, tearing its way through the flesh, and came to a stop within the powerful body.

The target hadn’t hit the ground before Sorilla redirected her attention to other, dissimilar aliens that were manning the equipment at the far end of the hangar. They stared back at her with large, dark eyes and grey skin that reminded her of stories from Earth describing alien visitors. The incongruity of the alien’s looks only stumped her for a moment before she haloed them as well and squeezed off a burst as her rifle came around to bear.

Heavy, depleted uranium rounds slammed into the targets across the hangar, slamming the aliens against the far wall with brutal force. Sorilla rose to her feet as she took a moment to look around, examining her surroundings with care now that she had a few moments to consider.

It was almost a stereotypical hangar, obviously for VTOL attack craft. There were even flyers in racks against the far wall, waiting to be activated. Similarly, Golems and Goblins stood immobile near them, with what were probably rows of ordnance racked up nearby.

A ready response team, then, she thought as she walked over to the fallen grey aliens, ignoring for a moment the security guard. She was more interested in the technicians than the shooter, and most especially the technicians’ toys.

She stepped over the bodies, not looking at them for the moment as she examined the consoles they were standing by. The devices were partially familiar, flat and holographic displays close enough to standard issue gear for her to recognize a fair percent of it. Sorilla focused in on what appeared to be a telemetry panel, linked to one of the flyers that had just launched.

That’s a ballistic graph

Are these numbers? She frowned, her onboard computer analyzing the symbols that were passing through the displays and running them through every code-breaking algorithm she had available. She doubted it would give her much, but it was just possible that she might be able to decipher their number system, if nothing else.

With those orders given to her computer, Sorilla turned her own attention to the system itself as she tried to decipher the control systems. It only took a few seconds, however, for her to determine that she couldn’t locate any!

Impossible. They have to be here somewhere

She growled, tapping the screens lightly and sweeping the holographs the way she would human systems. No buttons, levers, or keys to tap, and nothing she did to the displays got any reaction at all. Sorilla growled again, then grabbed up one of the dead bodies at her feet and swept the displays with the alien’s fingers.

Still nothing. If it’s biometric security, it seems to be able to tell if the authorized user is alive or not. Great.

She dropped the corpse and examined the rest of the area quickly, finally coming over to the armed guard that had been her first kill upon arriving.

It was large, lightly furred to her eye, and massively muscled compared to the grey aliens. Sorilla hefted its weapon idly, noting that the design was recognizable enough.

Business end, buttstock, everything looks pretty familiar. Let’s see

trigger stud looks to be thumb actuated, she noted, recording her observations as she flipped the weapon over and dumped it all into her memory systems. Her hands, in armor, fit almost into the grooves of the weapon. She’d have to stretch her thumb to trigger the weapon, but it was workable.

Sorilla kicked the alien over, noting that it was wearing something akin to armor, but it hadn’t done squat against a bullet. She nudged it with her foot, noting the flex of the material, and decided that if it were a ballistic vest, it was only rated to the equivalent of civilian rounds. Not too shocking. In order to stop military spec calibers, you pretty much needed hard plate since, even if a soft material could stop the round, all it would do was transfer the energy into the body underneath. Dead by internal bleeding instead of external was still dead.

She glanced at the solid, glass-like cut of the alien’s weapon bore, however, and remembered that the military drones used some sort of energy weapon in the jungle. She decided that there was a fair chance that the material was anti-laser or something more than ballistic. There were energy and particle weapons issued by the army, but they were mostly anti-armor weapons and a hell of a lot bulkier than what she was holding.

Means they’ve got some pretty sweet power sources, Sorilla decided, considering the weapon for a moment before dropping it back onto the body.

She didn’t have time for it now. If the opportunity presented itself, she’d grab it or another one on the way out, but she had another job to do first.

Sorilla smirked as she jogged toward a door that seemed to lead deeper into the complex.

It was most certainly time to harass enemy supply lines and destroy a few valuable resources.

*****

USS Montana

Inner Hayden System

“Confirmed enemy sighting, Captain.”

“I see them,” Neal Jackson said as he watched his repeater plot. “Designate as follows

Bandits One through Three.”

“Aye, sir, targets designated. Send to the fleet?”

“Send it,” Jackson replied, pivoting his seat to the left as he flipped open three local channels. “Give me a system eval.”

“Engines are primed, Captain,” the chief said immediately. “Tanks are topped off, and the colliders are operating at peak efficiency.”

“Weapons are hot and ready to fly, Cap,” the weapons chief noncom answered in turn. “No red lights, Cap.”

“Damage control is the same, Captain. Keep us from being crushed like a tin can and my teams will keep us flying.”

Jackson scowled lightly at the man’s tone but didn’t comment. He understood the concern but wished that he’d keep it to himself. That kind of talk had a place, but it wasn’t right after they were committed to contact.

“Excellent,” he said finally, pivoting back to where he opened the channel to the admiral. “Admiral

”

“Yes, Captain?” Admiral Shepard came back almost instantly.

“We’ve confirmed three bandits trying to sneak up on us, pulling the same out-of-the-sun maneuver they used on Admiral Sweet and Taskforce Two.”

“Fool me once

” Shepard said calmly, nodding. “Do they know we’ve spotted them?”

“No way to know, sir,” Jackson answered. “They look to be coming in straight, fat, and happy, though.”

“Let’s hope it’s our time to fool them,” Shepard said, leaning forward. “I’m going to issue orders to initiate the next phase.”

“Understood, sir.”

“Go get ‘em, Captain.”

“Aye aye, Admiral,” Jackson said, nodding once before closing the channel and turning his chair back to look over the bridge. “Sound battle stations.”

“Aye, sir, battle stations,” the XO responded as the alarms went off.

Jackson did a quick check of the fleet’s positions, satisfying himself that they were all where they should be even as he noted the admiral’s orders going out.

The best intel they had on the enemy bandits limited their main weapon, both in range and targeting capability. Admittedly, most of those limits were based on advanced guesswork and applied scientific theories way over Jackson’s head, but they were the best numbers anyone had to offer so he’d take them.

They were pretty sure that the enemy’s weapon wasn’t FTL, thank whatever gods ruled creation. The range seemed to be within a couple dozen light-seconds, since that was when they’d opened up the last time. Probably, they could take potshots from farther out, Jackson guessed, but even with FTL targeting, there was a physical limit on how effective you could react at that kind of range.

Telemetry from the taskforce gave them some pretty hard numbers on the effective attack window of the enemy device. From first indications of a gravity event to the total catastrophic failure of the target ship was always at least thirteen point four seconds. To hold your aim on a target for more than thirteen seconds at better than twenty light-seconds, well, that took a fair combination of technical excellence and dumb, sheer luck.

All of that was why the fleet was spreading out, keeping thirty light-seconds distance in their formation. Frankly, missile guidance sucked out past twenty light-seconds, but it was technically feasible to maintain guidance as far out as there was fuel left in the tanks.

“Lock up Bandit One,” Jackson ordered, sounding a lot calmer than he felt.

It was a strange feeling, he thought, knowing that he was about to open fire on an entirely alien species. He wouldn’t be the first to do so. That “honor” fell to Admiral Sweet and Taskforce Two. He told himself, not for the first time, that he wasn’t starting this war. The first shots were fired on civilians almost a year earlier, but honestly, it didn’t really help sooth his mind.

This is going to be bloody

he thought grimly, watching the numbers slowly spiral down. Maybe the bloodiest ever. These

whatever they are have weapons that could theoretically crack planets. God help us, but I’m about to spit in their eye.

“Bandit One is entering maximum engagement envelope.”

Neal Jackson nodded, only thinking about it for a moment.

“Fire as she bears,” he said with a wry smile. “All tubes.”

“All tubes, aye.”

The internal magazines of the Montana whirred to life as the ship’s armory began feeding the four main tubes with missiles, rapid firing her birds into the black.

The remaining seven ships in the offensive fleet followed suit, each putting twenty birds into space in a matter of seconds before falling silent as their crews settled in for the long wait to see the results of the handiwork.

“Ahead one-g.”

“Ahead one, aye.”

The Montana, followed shortly by the rest, surged ahead to meet the bandits head on as they formed a line through space four light-minutes across.

*****

USV Socrates

“That’s it, they’ve kicked off the fireworks,” Commander Ashley announced calmly from his position across the bridge of the science and research ship.

Alexi nodded, lips drawn over his teeth in a grimace. “Understood. Let us hope that they can keep them occupied long enough for us to do our work, yes?”

“Aye, sir.”

“Increase acceleration,” Alexi ordered, cocking his head slightly as he ran the numbers in his head. “Make it

four gravities, Mr. Keith.”

“Four gravities, aye, sir.”

The Socrates rumbled for a moment as its VASIMR drive lit off, slamming them back hard as the big ship made for Hayden at almost forty meters per second per second.

Commander Ashley grimaced as he reached forward and opened a keyed com to the captain on a private channel.

“Sir?”

“Yes, Commander?”

“At this acceleration, we’re going to have an issue stopping in time, won’t we?”

“Nyet, Commander. Trust me.”

Ashley didn’t say anything else, but Alexi could see the military man shooting him worried glances that told the tale. He grinned widely, probably a little lacking in sanity, he supposed, but this was the one part of the mission he enjoyed. Behind him flew some of the best people he’d ever worked with, people he trusted to follow him without killing either themselves or him in the process.

They didn’t often get a reason to let it all out the way he intended; the brass tended to frown on putting that kind of stress on the space frames. He didn’t suppose they’d be in much of a position to bitch about it this time, though.

“Let us hope that they keep those alien warships away from us, da?” Alexi muttered, his accent deepening darkly as he focused on the plot. “Or this will be a very short rescue.”

*****

USS Montana, Flag Deck

Admiral Shepard watched over the telemetry plots, eyes constantly flickering to the countdown. Five minutes after launch and there was still no sign of response from the enemy ships.

They can’t be that arrogant, can they? The Los Angeles made them bleed, took one of them, according to the telemetry we recovered. They can’t be planning on just sitting there and taking our best shot in the teeth, can they?

“Bandits One through Three are on the move!” The ensign stationed at the sensor suite jarred him from his reverie. “Accelerating

100 gravities

200! 300! Holding at 300! They’re avoiding the missiles!”

Shepard grimaced, accepting the news. He’d begun to hope for a minute that they were as stupid as they seemed, but if they had been, he would have had to start wondering how the hell they’d become a spacefaring people.

“Maintain course and speed,” Jackson ordered calmly. “Load tubes one through four and ready the magazines for rapid fire launching.”

“Aye aye, Captain.”

“All ships, initiate phase three of the operations,” Admiral Shepard’s order issued over the FLTCOM channel.

Captain Jackson of the Montana answered instantly, confirming phase three initiation. Shepard knew he’d have to wait minutes and more for the responses from the other ships.

He settled for watching the plot adjust as the best detection systems of Taskforce Three worked like mad to track and predict the moves of three alien ships. Three on eight, it shouldn’t even be a match, he thought. Too bad reality is such a bitch.

The three bandits had split up, circling wide around the missiles well out of their maneuvering range. The missiles had a maximum acceleration of just over 250 gravities, but that would burn them out in no time at all. Given the endurance they needed, Shepard knew that the Fleet’s birds wouldn’t be able to pull more than 100-g’s.

The bandits were tracking wide. They’d obviously got a good read on the missiles’ capabilities in their engagement with the Los Angeles Taskforce. They were skirting the edge of the missiles’ maneuvering range, playing it close to the edge all along the way. Shepard had to admit that he was impressed with their intelligence gathering and general technical capabilities, at least if he stepped back and looked at it from an outsider’s perspective. From the perspective of a man about to be on the receiving end of said technical capability, however, he wished they were just a little less competent.

“That’s it,” Jackson announced over the ship’s command channel. “They’ve burned out their motors.”

Shepard glanced at the plot, nodding as he noted that the missiles were on a pure ballistic trajectory. The bandits were arcing back in, coming at the line of war in roughly evenly separated intervals. He allowed himself a smile. It was almost better than he’d hoped when they’d worked up the plan.

They’re using a geometrically perfect assault pattern, he noted. They think they’re going to run us over.

Shepard exerted the discipline he’d forged to make it to the position he currently enjoyed and kept himself from micromanaging his captains. The plan was in action now, he just had to trust them to do their jobs.

Hardest part of his job was just sitting back and letting them do theirs.

“We’re coming into range of their weapons,” the tactical report came up. “Thirty light-seconds and closing, Captain.”

“Hold fire,” Jackson said coolly. “Let them commit.”

“Three minutes to their minimum engagement range

God, they’re moving like bats out of hell.”

“They’ll be unable to turn back shortly,” Jackson said. “Just keep it cool a little longer.”

“G-force spike on the gravity array!”

“Helm! Give me twenty-g’s, full ahead!”

“Twenty gravities, full ahead, aye!”

Jackson thumbed open the ship-wide even as the VASIMR drive began to rumble. “All hands, brace for full military power acceleration!”

Men and women across the ship grabbed onto their seat straps, closed their eyes in some cases, and started to pray even as they were slammed back into their acceleration bolsters. The ship surged forward as every warning alarm in the universe seemed to go off in their faces.

On the bridge, Jackson was grimacing as he panted and clenched up, trying to keep the blood from running to his feet. At twenty-g’s, he couldn’t hold out for long. It had been a long time since he’d run the races, but it would only be a few seconds. If he and his ship were still alive by then, well, then the enemy weapon missed.

Seconds ticked by like hours before the ship jerked once, hard, slamming Jackson and everyone else back and to the left like a giant hand grabbed them, batted them around a bit, and then let go.

“Kill the drive!” he gasped out in between breaths.

At the helm, the ensign reached out painfully and oh-so-slowly for the kill button before he managed to slap his hand down.

Instantly, the giant fist pressed into his chest vanished, and he began to float free within his restraints again.

“Report!” he barked out.

“Best I can tell, the gravity event happened portside, aft,” Ensign Meers said from where he was surrounded by screens. “No damage showing. I think we got through clean.”

“Standby starboard thrusters,” Jackson ordered.

“Starboard thrusters standing by!” the helm called back.

“Fire starboard bow thrusters, full burn.”

“Aye, sir, full burn!”

They were slammed into the side of their bolsters as the thrusters burned, twisting the ship to port.

“Standby VASIMR drive!”

“Standing by!”

“We’re in the minefield now, boys and girls!” Jackson grinned wide. “Let’s step lightly!”

“Gravity event, portside, amidships!”

“All ahead, twenty-g’s!”

“All ahead, aye!”

Jackson opened the ship-wide again. “Brace for acceleration!”

A few seconds later, he was again slammed into the bolster, and he started panting through clenched teeth as he fought the tunneling of his vision. That went on for a few seconds, his grunting breaths the only thing he could hear as Jackson tried desperately to stay conscious, in control, and keep an eye on the telemetry plots in front of him.

Just as he thought they were through it, however, the Montana twisted hard to starboard, and they were all slammed just as hard to the side. The twisting acceleration pressed on them for a few interminable seconds, and then all the lights and displays flickered before going dead for a moment.

“Power’s out?”

“That’s impossible!”

“Where are the backups?”

There were calls like that all through the bridge, and Jackson could hear them through the bulkhead leading to the next compartment as well. He figured that most of the ship was in a similar state, just waiting for someone to ask the question no one wanted to ask before full blown panic erupted.

Were they hit?

He keyed the ship-wide, panting through his clenched teeth against the acceleration, desperate to keep people from working themselves into a state of panic that led them to forget acceleration discipline. The last thing he needed was half the ship blacked out in the middle of a battle.

“Stay

calm!” he grunted between breaths. “We’re not

done

yet!”

He was about to continue when the universe suddenly seemed to invert, and he had to fight to keep his coffee from coming back up. He couldn’t breathe, his ribs felt like they were caving in, and his brains felt like they were trying to run out his ears. Then the world went black.

When the light came back, no more than a few seconds could have passed, but he felt like he’d been out for days.

He gasped out twice, trying like hell to get all the air he could. “K

k

kill the accel!”

A moment passed, but the giant fist was still pushing down hard on his chest. “Kill it!”

When there was no response, Jackson reached out and forced his hand to flip open the emergency breaker in front of him before slamming his fist down hard. The rumble of the VASIMR drive died in an instant, leaving Neal shaking his head painfully.

The lights flickered and came back while he was recovering.

“Helm

helm! Damn it, Wayne, wake the fuck up!”

“S

sir!” Lt. Wayne Powers’s head lolled about as he came out of the blackout.

“Prime the damn drive! I had to kill it!” Jackson growled. “Meers, you aware?”

“Visions still spotted, but I’m good to go, sir.”

“Glad to hear it, boy. Now what the hell happened?”

Meers rapped the side of his display units, shaking his head. “I’m half blind here, sir, but it looks like they swept the track of their attack along our previous course. Then they led us toward the end. That’s why we’re still here.”

“Of course they did,” Jackson said. “You don’t aim where they are, you aim where they’re going to be. I just didn’t expect him to sweep it that far. Damage reports?”

“Tons of warnings across every system we’ve got. Nothing reading as dead.”

Jackson sighed in relief as the VASIMR rumbled to life and power came back to most of the screens. “Find our bandits, boys! Get me my tracks back!”

“Coming online! Shit! They’re twenty light-seconds out, closing fast!”

“We’re in a flat spin, Cap!”

“I can see that! Standby starboard thrusters!” he ordered, calling up the plot.

“Thrusters standing by!”

“Fire full thrust on the starboard bow thrusters!” Jackson commanded. “Spin us faster!”

“Aye, sir, firing full thrust!”

They were pushed into their seats, pressed hard to the side as the thrusters flared, spinning the bow of the Montana momentarily away from the enemy track.

“Tactical!”

“Sir!”

“Prime the box launchers.” Jackson’s eyes gleamed as he gave the order. “Prepare to flush the external magazines.”

“Aye aye, sir!”

The Montana spun around, its nose sweeping through a full arc before coming back to bear on the bandit’s position. The two ships, hurtling toward one another at significant portions of the speed of light, closed fast. Jackson knew that he’d only get one chance before they blew past one another, and at that point, the game would change from chicken to a marathon race.

He wasn’t so sure that he and the Montana had the legs to survive a marathon. He had to end this while it was a sprint.

Neal Jackson leaned forward. “Are the external magazines primed?”

“Aye, sir.”

“Then, Chief, fire as she bears.”

“Aye aye, Captain. Firing as she bears

”

The nose of the Montana swept around, bringing all the external magazines they’d strapped to her hull to bear on the target. Big, clunky boxes that weighed better than half again the total weight of the Montana were shunted over to computer control. As they came to bear on the enemy ship, optimal flight paths were calculated, and when they matched with reality, a signal was sent to the magazines.

150 of the heaviest missiles ever built in Earth Space, more than twice the normal load of a Los Angeles class destroyer, exploded from the magazines and tore into open space, accelerating at 300 gravities into the face of Bandit One.

At less than twenty light-seconds, the enemy ship had time to see them coming, but despite its superior maneuvering speed, it was still ruled by inertia enough that there was no chance in hell of getting out of the way.

They tried, though, Jackson noted with a savage sense of glee. The enemy ship peeled to port, pouring on literally lethal levels of g-forces as it showed its broadsides to the Montana and her missiles.

Unfortunately for the bandit, the missiles the Montana had just loosed through the black were capable of the same crushing accelerations as it was, and at such close ranges, there was just no way to build the kind of Delta V needed to break loose.

“They’re engaging with point defense!”

Missiles began to blink out of existence, exploding in space and destroying some of their fellows in the chaos of the engagement, but Jackson saw immediately that the enemy’s defensive measures simply weren’t going to be enough. A few long minutes of watching blood-red icons vanish from the plot were rewarded in the end when over thirty surviving missiles slammed into the starboard side of the enemy ship, punching ragged holes through the hull that were visible in the reflected light of nearby explosions.

The big ship shuddered briefly on the twenty-second-old visual plot Jackson was watching, great gouts of flame erupting back out through the holes the heavy penetrator missiles had blown through its hull, and then its engine acceleration died as it began to drift through space.

“We got it!”

Cheers erupted through the ship, stemming from the bridge and branching down the corridors of the Los Angeles class destroyer as word was passed from man to man through the ship. Jackson let it happen, his men needed the moment, but he shifted his own attention to the other bandits.

The Nevada and the Anchorage were missing from his plot, their trajectory telemetry ending at dead ends in space where they’d died. He put the feelings those abruptly-ending lines dredged up away, locking them deep inside, because if he didn’t, he’d probably ruin all the good morale their little victory had just won his crew.

That left five other destroyers in the taskforce, four of which were deeply engaged with the enemy while the fifth was accelerating in from the Montana’s starboard flank.

Jackson checked the plot quickly, doing the math in his head. “Signal the Indiana. We’re coming about to their portside and following them in against Bandit Two.”

“Aye, sir! Message sent.” A few moments passed. “Reply from Indiana, sir. Orders acknowledged. They’re accelerating to the attack.”

“Take us in on their portside, aft! One standard gravity acceleration,” Neal ordered, shifting in his restraints as he checked the numbers. “Inform damage control that they have fifteen minutes to fix whatever’s broken. Don’t waste it.”

“Aye, sir!”

Through the ship, men and women seconded to damage control slapped off their harnesses and quickly started moving around the ship. They didn’t have time to waste, as their captain ordered, so they slid down ladders into sections strained by the near miss with the enemy weapon and began a tediously thorough eyeball inspection of every component on the ship.

With lives resting on the systems of the USS Montana, they couldn’t afford to miss anything.

Chapter 4

Hayden’s World

The Cougar Automated Battle Chassis was one of the older and more robust weapon systems still in use by armies on Earth. Developed by Swedish engineers through a contract with first world military planners, the system had survived several major wars, fourteen significant upgrades, and most telling of all, the best efforts of many a foot soldier’s attempt at “maintenance.”

Equipped with a class three artificial intelligence, the Cougar was capable of discerning allies from enemies as well as civilians from combatants with an acceptably low margin of error. In combat, the chassis projected both power and fear in near equal measure across every battlefield it had ever fought on.

On Earth it did, at least.

On Hayden, against an enemy that had no experience with its legendary reputation, it would have to settle for power alone.

The lead element of the automated strike force didn’t consider any of those factors. It only concerned itself with tactical realities. Once the order to engage in an asymmetric battle was given, the lead Cougar immediately linked up with all the other units in its squad and began sharing data.

The smaller DOGs were sent out ahead, positioning themselves in secure places where they could gain a good overview of the area while the other two Cougars rumbled into position across the area the Hayden-born guerrillas had hit earlier.

Tactical data from earlier fights gave the Cougar a good idea of what the enemy response was, so it backed into a thick piece of brush and settled in to wait. As expected, the waiting didn’t last long.

The Cougars noted the approaching thrum sound in the air long before the distinctive alien flyer arrived, triangulating position and arrival time based on the speed of sound through Hayden air at their altitude. Knowing precisely the course and approach speed of the alien flyer was child’s play from that information, and each of the automated tanks adjusted its positions minutely to maximize its opening attack.

As the flyers entered into the target zone, each of the three Cougars opened fire as one, their elevated twenty-millimeter magnetic accelerators rocking the jungle with the supersonic pressure wave. The three streams of automatic cannon fire intersected just as the enemy flyers slowed their approach and tore the birds apart.

Even before the shards and scraps hit the jungle, the Cougars were on the move. They reversed out of their hides and tore away through the jungle on preplanned escape routes. The operative phrase for their current plan of action was “stick and move.” The Cougars had been programmed with specific tactics for almost every situation, though unfortunately, being on the wrong side of asymmetric combat tactics were the lightest part of their coding.

Despite centuries of practice, many guerrilla tactics were still largely a matter of guesswork and instinct. Not exactly the strength of artificial intelligence systems, unfortunately. The Cougars did their work by the numbers, however, blazing a path through the Hayden jungle just a few breaths ahead of the inevitable rain of nuclear fire in their wake.

As the shockwave roared toward them, the Cougars rolled to a stop and dropped their suspensions low, mashing their armored v-shaped hulls into the jungle floor. The raging shockwave passed over them, battering the autonomous, fighting vehicles with rocks, trees, and other random articles whipped up by the hurricane force winds generated by the blast to little avail.

As it passed, the Cougars rose back up on their hefty suspensions and rolled on, heading for their next engagement point.

Kilometers away, Jerry and his team got back to their feet where they’d thrown themselves as the explosion crossed over them. As deep in the jungle as they were, it was mostly baffled out so they didn’t feel much, but the roar and flash that lit up the canopy was unmistakable.

“Holy crap.” Dean shivered. “I hate that noise.”

Jerry didn’t blame the poor kid. Having been that close to a nuke would fry his nerves, too, but he didn’t have time to stand around commiserating about it.

“Buck up, boys, we’ve got work to do.” He nodded over a ridge. “The next target is another three klicks that way, step it up.”

They grunted as they shouldered their gear, but no one complained.

They’d spent too many weeks huddling in the jungle, afraid of shadows and mist. Today was when they got some payback. What was a little sweat compared to that?

*****

Sorilla shouldered through a heavy stone door, using the power of her armor to shatter the stone in place. She had to give it to the invaders: they built some impressive constructs, and they built to bloody well last.

She also cursed them, because even through her armor, she could feel massive bruises forming on her shoulder and arm from slamming through the damn things. She’d never seen anything like the construction they were using; even major military bases on Earth were lighter built in many ways.

The construction was clearly monolithic, something Earth hadn’t seen in close to 4,000 years, possibly more. Even the instrumentation built into stone carved clear out of the plateau the colony had been built on, possibly the very reason they chose to land right on top of the colony instead of the reasons the colonists had chosen the place.

Luckily for her, the place was sparsely staffed, as best she could tell. Mostly empty space greeted her as she blasted her way through the facility. She shuddered to think why they needed all this room with as few people as she could determine they seemed to have, but for the moment she was wrecking her merry way through the whole place and having a lot of fun in the process.

Anything she spotted that looked important got a small slab of Q-Tex and a micro-detonator slapped on it. The quantum explosive would ensure that whatever it was on would be a lot less interesting after she left.

She had just planted her eighth charge when a high-pitched whine almost vibrated the teeth out of her jaw, setting Sorilla so badly on edge that the experienced Special Forces operator almost put rounds through everything in sight just in hopes of killing whatever it was that was making the sound. It reached crescendo after just a few seconds, then abruptly died in such a way that she found herself looking around and wondering if it had really happened after all.

It was several seconds after that when Sorilla felt a distant rumble run through the floor and her onboard computer instantly put a flag on the feeling that matched it to a nuclear strike that she got really interested in the source of the high-pitched whine.

‘Proc,’ she subvocalized. ‘Isolate and locate source of highlighted sound.’

The computer worked feverishly for a few moments before sending back a negative result, bringing a growl to her throat. Sorilla knew that she needed, needed, to locate the source of that whine. It practically had to be connected to the enemy super weapon, the gravity valve, if it weren’t the valve itself.

She put her boot through another closed door, shattering the stone construction with a blow that would have killed a man in armor, and moved through with her rifle leading the way. She was halfway through the door when another sound caught her attention, and she paused for a brief instant.

The sound was both unfamiliar yet unmistakable. Sorilla recognized it at once despite never having heard it before.

An alarm had been sounded.

Either they’d finally found the bodies she’d been leaving behind, or something else bad was happening to the aliens. It didn’t matter which, she supposed. Sorilla set her jaw and moved on, rifle to her shoulder as she did.

Somewhere in this place was the only thing that kept Hayden under the control of the bastards. She had to find it.

Find it and blow it all the way back to whatever space blasted star they came from.

*****

The aliens, drones, whatever the hell they were, were reliable if nothing else. Jerry’s gaze darkened as he watched the Golems and Goblins work their way toward where the Hayden militia lay in wait.

He could literally set his watch by the bastards, they were so regular in their actions. The Sarge said they had to be drones of some kind, and Jerry knew from the ones that they’d blown to pieces that there weren’t any soft, squishy parts hidden inside them, so she was probably right. That made it all the worse, though, knowing that he and his had been chased out of their homes and into the jungles

left to starve or be eaten by some local beasty too stupid to know that humans weren’t digestible. All that and they were denied even the chance to get real payback.

All they could do was break the aliens’ toys.

They’d done that so much that Jerry hadn’t even needed to send the signal when the Golems finally lumbered into the kill zone following after the nimbler Goblins. The echoing crack of sonic booms announced the presence of the pathfinders as they opened fire from their positions at near point blank range.

Striking so hard and fast that the last of the enemy fell before the sound of the supersonic rounds reached them, the militia appeared from the jungle like wraiths and spent a scant few seconds ensuring that they’d eliminated their target according to plan before ghosting away once again.

Jerry himself paused, the last man visible on the killing field they’d created. He shook his head tiredly and tossed a bundle into the center of the field before vanishing into the underbrush himself.

As Sorilla had discovered, the enemy’s ability to backtrack the location of shooters had inherent limitations. Predictable ones that they could use against the invaders, much as they’d been forced to use any advantage they’d been able to glean.

In this case it was the fact that the MilSpec weapons were simply harder to triangulate. Not impossible, they’d learned that the hard way, but harder. The depleted uranium rounds were hard hitting but, more importantly, fast moving.

Really fast.

The rounds were hypersonic-capable, which meant that even whatever system the aliens were using could only identify the source of the shot from some pretty long ranges. As close as they’d gotten against this group of aliens, there was next to no chance of them being able to even recognize they were there, let alone have time to triangulate their positions.

It would have been a moot point, of course, had any of the Goblins had a chance to see them. They’d have simply called in a strike on top of their own position and been done with it, which was why Jerry and his group offered no quarter in the ambush. They had yet to see one of the invaders appear to give a damn about anything other than the job they were doing, and that kind of bull-headedness was lethally dangerous.

No surprise there, Jerry supposed, not if they really were drones or something. Why would a robot care if it were destroyed, after all?

The opinion among the academics back at camp was split on that subject. The pieces they’d brought back made it damn clear that whatever these things were, they weren’t life as any human knew it. They weren’t even life as any alien world known to Earth knew it. Every world they’d found to date with life was, in many ways, a mirror Earth.

Sometimes it was a funhouse mirror, to be sure, but a mirror nonetheless.

Convergence theory had predicted it at the turn of the twenty-first century, but the proof came when they discovered life on world after world and found that it really wasn’t that different from home.

Carbon-based life, following the same rules in largely the same environments inevitably turned out largely the same creations. Oh, sometimes the wolves had six legs instead of four, or the ostriches had beaks and muscles that could cut through a recon rover, but over six billion years Earth had tried out, if not all permutations then all the good and effective ones.

The only times explorers had found really weird life was on truly strange worlds. Places with environments totally bizarre to Earth produced equally bizarre creatures, but even then they’d found nothing remotely like these Goblins and Golems.

He supposed that was probably a fair bit of what was behind the Sarge’s belief that they were drones.

Jerry didn’t argue with her, but he was one of the few that didn’t, it seemed sometimes.

Examining the remains of the Goblins and Golems under intense magnification showed some really incredible nanoscale musculature and circulatory systems, nervous systems at least as complex as humans had, and other decidedly biological-looking systems.

It didn’t rule them out as drones, Jerry knew, but the debate was there.

He didn’t really give a damn, however. They died, or broke, just fine when he and his group engaged them, and since the attack on the colony, that was enough for him. When the war was over, one way or another, whoever was left standing could worry about who or what had actually fought the war.

With that thought in mind, Jerry pulled a remote from his pocket and triggered the high-powered signal jammer he’d left back at the ambush site.

He barely flinched when the nuclear flash lit the jungles around him and actually smiled as he kept walking through the group of people who’d thrown themselves to the ground in shock.

Sarge was right, predictable bastards. That’s going to cost you even more than it already has.

*****

Rolling echoes in the distance told Samuel that the attacks had begun. He could feel shivers running down his spine at the thought of the nuclear fire burning around his home.

“Bad days, old man,” Silver said from beside him.

Sam shot the other man a glare. “You’ve got three decades on me if you’ve got a day.”

“Only as old as you feel, Sammy,” Silver grinned at him unrepentantly. “And you look like you feel goddamned well ancient.”

Sam sighed, shaking his head. He wished he could argue, but honestly, he felt like he’d aged decades in the past months.

They’d arrived at the secondary colony site mere minutes ahead of the first rolling thunder of nuclear fire in the distance, unable to take even the barest of time to worry about what was happening in their absence. They’d started to tear into the old site, a place that had been reclaimed by Hayden in the decades since landing.

It was new jungle, though, not so hard to cut through. They located the old survey points quickly enough and set to peeling back the jungle as best they could. The work moved on through the night, against the backdrop of a dark Hayden night, punctuated only by the rumblings of the jungle beasts and the rolling thunder of the distant battle.

“Sam! Silver!”

The call from ahead brought the two to attention from the brush they were pulling aside, and they left it where it fell as they turned to see one of the children from Silver’s camp running in their direction.

“What is it, Josh?” Silver asked, clapping the dirt from his hands.

“You need to see this.”

Silver and Sam exchanged glances but nodded and gestured the boy ahead of them. He ran on while they walked, albeit quickly, after him. When they arrived to where a group of people were standing, Sam frowned.

“We don’t have time enough as it stands, and you’re all just standing here?”

“Sam, look at this,” Tara told him softly.

He stepped through the crowd and blinked as the light fell on a section of cleared jungle. “What in the name

?”

He trailed off as realization struck him and again shared a loaded glance with Silver.

“Well, I’ll be

” Silver muttered.

“I didn’t know they built another tether anchor point.”

“Nor I,” Silver admitted with a shrug. “That would have been the advance team’s doing.”

“Why would they put it down? A backup?” Sam asked, confused.

“Hardly. The only reason would be if this were the primary site, but something changed their minds.”

Sam walked around the immense, bonded crete block, eyeing it carefully. “There’s no mention of that in the histories, I’m sure of it.”

Silver shrugged. “No talk of it on the ship, either.”

“What would change their minds then?”

“Soil tests may have been misleading. Could be something wrong in the geology, I suppose.” Silver shrugged. “Maybe the tests came back on our site and showed it better than they expected. Lots of reasons, Sam.”

“Can we use this?”

Silver snorted. “Not without a tether, and I don’t have 30,000 kilometers of carbon nano ribbon back at my camp, do you?”

Sam grimaced, realizing the absurdity of the suggestion, and sighed. “You’re right, of course. I had a flash of insane hope for a moment.”

Silver shrugged. “It’s here. We can test it and see if it’s properly anchored. If so, then it does provide an alternate point to tether the counterweight. The real problem isn’t getting the tether, though, Sam, it’s defending it if we do.”

Silver had a point, Sam knew. The tether was incredibly valuable, but its nature made it a terrifyingly easy target, as they’d all learned on the long night of wraiths and spirits.

“Back to work!” Silver stepped up, waving people away. “Nothing to be done with this just now. Maybe we can use it later, but for now we have a job to do.”

The group broke up, leaving Sam staring at the anchor point in thought before he, too, turned back to the task at hand.

*****

Her armor chimed, warning Sorilla of another instance of the high-pitched whine. She’d set her systems to edit it out but also to automatically track and triangulate its source compared to the earlier sounding.

The second rumble of nuclear fire had quickly been followed by a third, but it wasn’t until the fourth that she got a heading with any reasonable confidence. The fact that there had been four uses of the valve told her that Jerry and his pathfinders were pushing the enemy hard on the outside, harder than they’d been pushed to date.

Getting a bearing on the location of the sound was the good news; the bad was that she didn’t have a map of the damned place, and there were walls of solid stone between her and it. The worse news, well, that was coming through the next set of doors already.

She hit the ground as a particle blast cut the air over her head, vaporizing a chunk out of the far wall the size of her armored head.

What had begun with a practically vacant base had become a nearly literal beehive in short order after the alarm sounded, with more and more of the larger, furred aliens pouring through every damned door she approached. Their weapons were impressive, at least at close range, the power of their beams fluorescing the air they passed through.

Like something out of a damned movie, she thought, rolling clear of another beam as she brought her rifle to bear.

It barked in her hand, the power set to maximum so that the supersonic crack of the rounds were still echoing off the walls as the two charging aliens went down with holes blown through them.

Security guards. Not even soldiers, she thought grimly as she got back to her feet.

Their tactics were too crude to be divined by a soldier’s hand, but their organization was obviously too disciplined to be anything resembling a rough militia. She stepped over the bodies on her way through the door, looking for a way down to the next level where her armor indicated the source of the sound was located.

She snarled under her helm as the blasted door sealed shut before she could reach it, her shoulder screaming as she again planted it into solid stone, and again the stone gave way before her.

She stepped through the shattered stonework door, leading with her weapon as she scanned the room. This one was what she’d been looking for, a ramp leading deeper down into the bowels of the plateau, into the heart of the base she had to penetrate.

Below her, the sounds of men running were easily picked up by her armor, bringing a dry smirk to her lips.

Sonic analysis couldn’t give her an exact number, just estimating the enemy total at better than ten men coming her way in a hurry. Against those weapons, she couldn’t stand, not in the tight spaces the base provided.

Sorilla knew she could only fall back, which wasn’t an option if she wanted to achieve her mission, or do something more than a little insane.

She charged.

Armor levels amped up to full enhancement, her speed hit ninety kilometers an hour in the space of seconds. She rounded the corner, not on the ramp itself, but with feet planted on the walls as she launched herself down the next partition with knees bent and leading just as the rushing guards turned the next corner below.

Sorilla hit them in full flight, ramming her knees into the flat nose of the first and driving him back into the rest. Her rifle barked, at such insane proximity she didn’t even bother to aim. She simply ordered the computer to discharge a round every time the muzzle crossed a target’s path.

Her weight drove them all back into a heap of tangled limbs and the occasionally frying body as one of the particle weapons went off unexpectedly. It became clear quickly, however, that in that press of flesh, mobility was a major issue as the dead began to impede her movements even more than the living.

She broke her rifle free of the mess for a moment and came to a fast decision, electing to continue with the bold actions that were so far keeping her alive.

Bold, insane. Same thing really.

She tossed her weapon into the air, imparting a spin to the rifle as she twisted about and planted her elbow into the throat of the closest guard that was still kicking. It continued to fire on full automatic as she moved, her left hard drawing her knife as she lashed out with a full power kick that lifted another of the aliens off the ground and threw him down the ramp like a ragdoll.

The furred aliens were twice her size and mass, even accounting for the armor, but with all the limiters removed, Sorilla moved like a demon in the blood-spattered mass. Her knife, its monomolecular edge powered, relieved her enemies of their limbs as she slashed. Her armored fists broke bones and ruptured internal organs with every blow, and above them her rifle continued its job and slew every enemy that crossed its barrel as it flipped and spun through the air.

When the weapon clattered to the ground, its magazine spent, the only thing standing on the blood-slick ramp was its owner.

Sorilla kicked a body away from her so she could get her legs free of the press, then walked over to the rifle and calmly picked it up. The spent magazine hit the ground, or rather a cooling corpse at her feet, with a wet-sounding splatter as she clicked another in its place.

Weapon primed and knife returned to its sheath, Sorilla walked over the bodies laid out around her and walked to the bottom of the ramp before heading in the direction her armor estimated as the location of the high-pitched whining.

She was reevaluating the entire situation almost constantly. Every minute she was inside the enemy facility, it became clearer and clearer that her original assumptions weren’t remotely on target. Whatever the hell this was, it wasn’t a military invasion any more than she was currently within a military base.

Oh, they had what any sane person would regard as military weapons, but their tactics were pure civilian contractor. Security was first rate, if you were looking to keep out anything up to hostile protestors and the like. Big, strong, decently armed, but dumb as a brick. Just what you wanted if you were looking to intimidate locals, but about as effective as tissue paper against a military response.

Which, of course, led her to her next big question.

Who in the name of all that was good and sane in the universe would give nuclear capability to a bunch of corporate rent-a-cops?

Ok, she had to stop thinking like that.

The ships that initiated the first strike had military capacity, and at least someone onboard knew enough to take out the tether in their initial hit. That on its own was suggestive but not solid enough to say one way or another. Their follow up invasion had been fast, brutal, and effective by all accounts, however.

That spoke to her of split personalities in the enemy command. On one side an effective military organization with effective tactics, clear goals, and highly capable execution. On the other, well, this base. Ambulatory meat slabs as guards, no clear goals for winning the little war she’d launched, and yet armed with nuclear response capability.

Sorilla moved through the base, following her computer’s guidance toward the source of the whine she’d heard earlier. That was her best lead for the moment, her best chance to put a little paid to the invaders directly instead of through indirect actions as she had been doing.

Besides, with the relief column coming in, she had to make sure that the valve didn’t have orbital targeting capability.

That would be one hell of a rude welcome for the column.

*****

USV Socrates

Approaching Hayden Orbit

“Sir

Captain?”

Alexi glanced over to see Commander Ashley drifting up close to his bolster, whispering so as not to be overheard.

“What is it, Commander?” he asked, glancing back between the commander and the acceleration bolster the man had vacated.

It wasn’t strictly a violation of safety protocols, but unstrapping in the middle of a maneuver was a mite reckless. Even when they weren’t scheduled to fire the engines again for some time.

“Aren’t we approaching Hayden a little

fast, sir?”

Alexi glanced curiously at the man for a moment. “What’s your specialty, Commander?”

“Weapons and tactical systems, sir.”

“And how many hours do you have logged?” Alexi was curious now. What he was doing wasn’t common practice, but most experienced spacers had at least some inkling of it.

“Over 500, sir.”

500? Alexi blinked in shock. The only way you got numbers that low was if you never left Sol System. “I thought you were a spacer, Commander.”

Ashley grimaced slightly but merely shrugged. “I’m a weapons and tactical systems specialist, Captain. My training in Fleet was only started when you brought back the intel from the Majesty.”

Alexi nodded, hiding a grimace of his own. Well, he supposed, it was of less concern than he might normally exhibit. At least the man wasn’t in charge of the helm or something vital.

He sighed, “We’ll use atmospheric braking to slow us, Commander. I don’t want to give anyone a clean shot at us if I can avoid it, and since there isn’t anything to hide behind up here, I’ll have to settle for making myself a moving target. A fast moving target.”

Ashley nodded though still looked a little nervous as he pushed off and drifted back toward his station.

Alexi didn’t blame him for that, in all truth. The man clearly had just enough knowledge to know that they were going far too fast for any sane attempt at orbital insertion but not enough to really know what ships like the Socrates were made of.

He’d learn.

In about another thirty minutes, he’d learn.

Alexi grinned to himself. Atmospheric braking was about the most fun part of being on this whole damned mission. It wasn’t often he was given clearance to run his ship through that kind of stress.

Of course, technically, he hadn’t been given clearance for it this time. But with full strategic and tactical command of the relief column came some benefits, and he knew all the captains under him were more than capable of the move.

Luckily, they were also just as crazy as he was.

“Twenty minutes to retro burn, Captain.”

“Understood. Sound the first warning.”

“Aye, Captain, twenty-minute warning sounding now.”

A soft chime echoed through the ship, across all decks to give any crewmembers up and about time to wrap up their business before Alexi ordered the ship brought about for retro firing.

The trick was going to be letting Hayden’s gravity do most of the deceleration, otherwise they’d be forced to dump too much Delta V to make the target arrival point. Doing that would crush everyone onboard, which was precisely what he was hoping to prevent with the maneuver in the first place.

On arrival, well, that was when the game was going to enter sudden death.

He just hoped that wasn’t a literal event.

The whole run was measurably insane by most standards, Alexi was sure of that. Even with Taskforce Three keeping the enemy ships at bay, there was every likelihood of planetary defenses waiting for them. Flying into the teeth of such things was something only the very insane would even attempt, but then, of course, you didn’t go out into space by being sane in the first place.

Alexi’s mission, and that of his column, was to deliver relief supplies to the planet and extract a few key personnel as they did. That meant entering Hayden orbit. There was no other way to land a ship on-planet and retrieve it in any reasonable time without holding some sort of orbit of the world.

The military briefing made it clear that stealth wasn’t an option. The Special Operations team that went in first had been blown out of the skies, and their stealth systems were so far beyond anything the Socrates could manage that it wasn’t even an amusing comparison.

So if sneaking in wasn’t an option, Alexi had opted for kicking in the front door and stomping all over the poor sod’s living room carpet.

He consulted the telemetry plot he’d been keeping on Shepard and the taskforce, noting that they’d lost another ship since he’d last looked.

That makes three, he thought grimly.

Three for one so far, though he could see Shepard’s Montana and the Indiana closing in on another of the bandits. At three for one, the cost of fighting this war could

no, almost certainly would, prove prohibitively high. Alexi didn’t know how many ships the enemy had on tap, but if they were a starfaring civilization that was prepared to engage in warfare with others, then they certainly had far more hulls than Sol did.

There was no chance in hell that Earth, even on a wartime footing, could hope to slug it out at the wrong end of three-to-one odds.

“Five minutes, Captain.”

Alexi looked up, startled by the voice for a moment, then nodded. “Sound general quarters then. Get everyone strapped in.”

“Aye, sir, general quarters.”

As the alarm sounded, Alexi checked the plot himself. With the Socrates leading, the relief column was bearing down on the planet like the proverbial bats out of hell. He’d had every captain send their navigation plots over so he could look them over. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust their work, but none of them were exactly team players.

You didn’t get command of a survey ship because you were an expert on Fleet maneuvers.

After confirming that none of their intended trajectories were likely to cross paths with another ship or, less likely, dip too deep into Hayden’s atmosphere and burn up, Alexi pushed the plots aside and opened a ship-wide com.

“All hands, this is the captain,” he said, sounding a lot calmer over the intercom than he felt actually. “We’re approaching Hayden and are about to begin retro firing. Please ensure that everything is locked down. I know I don’t need to tell you your jobs, but this is going to be a rough one. Triple check.”

He closed the com and nodded. “All right. Final checks, people. Let’s not take any chances, shall we?”

The crew agreed, apparently, as they all bent to the task of ensuring that the Socrates was ready for what was coming.

Five minutes passed quickly, and Alexi was soon giving the final warning and waiting for confirmation that everyone was strapped in. He was pleased when everything went smoothly, leaving him no reason to be forced to call an abort. Missing their entry window at current speeds would require the better part of a full day to recover, and that wasn’t an option.

“All boards green, Captain.”

“Very good. Bring us about. 180.”

“Aye, sir, coming about. 180.”

The thrusters flared, first on the Socrates, and the one by one on the other ships of the relief column. Slowly, the heavy ships spun in space, positioning their main engines toward the looming face of Hayden.

“Coming up on the changeover, sir.”

“Fire main engines on my command

Ten standard gravities.”

“Ten standard, aye.”

“Fire in T-minus

five, four, three, two

one

mark!” Alexi called out, his voice echoing across the relief column.

“Main engines firing!”

The low hum of the VASIMR drive erupted into a powerful roar that slammed them all back into their bolsters, the bridge becoming filled with the low grunts of men working hard to keep their blood from being forced away from their brains. The pressure suits helped, using constant active pressure to massage the blood through their bodies. With the suits, they could survive and operate at extreme gravities well beyond anything normal humans could remain coherent at.

Of course, not even the best pressure suit could let a person withstand the insane gravities the alien ships routinely endured.

With that cheerful thought, Alexi turned his full focus onto commanding his ship through what he was certain was going to be one of the more harrowing moments of his career. They had to survive pulling a solid ten-g’s for the entire approach, an uncomfortable yet doable requirement. It was at the end of their approach, however, that things got rough.

*****

USS Montana

Inner Hayden System

“Relief convoy has begun final approach, sir.”

Admiral Shepard spared a glance at the plot before nodding. “Well, wish them luck. We’ve got enough problems on our own plate at the moment.”

“Aye, sir.”

Shepard glared at the tactical plot, eyes drawn inexorably to the red icon that showed where the New York had died. Three gone. Three ships down, so damned fast. Only one enemy in return.

If he wasn’t so damned hard up for time, he’d cry.

“Sir, Indiana reports solid lock on Bandit Two.”

“Tell them to fire at their discretion.”

“Aye, sir.”

The Indiana was leading the Montana in against the bandit, still accelerating as it bore down on the enemy ship. Bandit Two was the ship that took out the New York just a dozen minutes earlier and was now pulling hard g’s as it tried to come around in their direction.

Shepard could only assume that it was bringing its weapon to bear on the Montana and the Indiana.

I guess that makes this a race then.

“Indiana reports weapons away!”

“Missiles live on the plot, sir!”

“I see them,” Shepard confirmed, eyes watching the icons of the Indiana’s one-shot load of missiles track across his screen.

The enemy ship, which had been turning into the Montana and Indiana’s plot, peeled away. Shepard’s lips pulled back into a nasty smile; that was the second time the enemy had shown their broadsides to a missile barrage. Against an attack like that, you one couldn’t avoid it, Shepard personally would turn his bow into the attack and bull through.

You would take hits, to be sure, but under power, you could cut through the wave of missiles and present them with a minimum profile to attack in terminal mode. For a missile commander, the dream was to catch your opponent running broadside onto your attack.

So, either they’re not too bright

which seems unlikely, Shepard admitted, or they’ve no experience with missiles at all. Fair enough, we’ve no experience with their gravity valve technology. At least we’re on even footing somewhere.

He studied the plot for a moment, eyes widening as he realized that the remaining bandits’ courses had shifted to bring them closer to one another. Along with them, the five remaining ships of his taskforce were closing together as well. He pursed his lips, considering the plot for a few instants before making his decision.

“This is Admiral Shepard to all ships,” he said, noting the time code on his plot. “Commence full court rush at precisely 0315 hours, ship’s time. I say again, full court rush at 0315. That is all.”

When he closed the channel, Shepard activated a timer. Judging by the distances involved, it would take three minutes and twenty seconds for the order to reach the farthest ship, which would give them almost a minute to implement his orders.

Plenty of time.

Now they just had to survive the next four minutes and twenty seconds.

As he was considering that and mentally making alternate plans, Shepard heard Captain Jackson’s voice come over the ship-wide.

“All hands, all hands, stand by for full military acceleration. I say again, all hands stand by for full military acceleration. Batten down and strap in, we’re going for another ride.”

*****

Below the flag deck, Neal Jackson was sitting in the midst of a hurricane of activity. With the admiral ordering a full court press, time was suddenly tight again. The more urgent of system strains had been checked and either fixed or cleared as no an urgent concern, but he still had men performing emergency maintenance of a few systems that had been deemed as probably ok but borderline.

They were being pulled back and should be into their bolsters before the action was underway. Jackson knew that they’d better be, otherwise they were very likely to become casualties of the situation.

A full court press was a combined fleet action, and the Montana couldn’t be late. It depended on the coordination of every ship available and was literally a case of better never than late. If he had men unstrapped when the clock ran down, the Montana was going in anyway.

“Systems check,” he ordered, flipping his repeater display over to the overview screen.

“Weapons green. Our remaining missiles are ready to fly, sir.”

“Engine is green, sir. VASIMR drive is primed, no signs of undue stress on the system.”

Honestly, Jackson would have been personally shocked if there had. The VASIMR system was the single most robust part of the entire Los Angeles class design. It had to be to survive the matter/antimatter annihilation that propelled the ship. A few near misses from an enhanced gravity field shouldn’t be able to have any great effect.

“Navigation is green, all screens are go, sir.”

“Coms online, we’re connected over the fleet-wide battle network, sir. Latency is under three minutes now.”

He nodded. Latency would continue to drop as the ships closed on the enemy and each other. He wasn’t sure why the enemy wasn’t trying to jam the spectrum, however. He would, if he had any idea what signal systems the enemy were using.

Of course, that could be the exact problem they’re facing, he supposed. We certainly haven’t picked up any signs of radio telemetry from them. FTL coms. I know that R&D is working on some sort of mobile Casimir system for the Cheyenne class

He shrugged the thought away. In the end it didn’t really matter, for the moment. While FTL communications could be an immense tactical advantage, its uses at the current engagement ranges would be of limited impact.

Still, he knew that they had to be talking back and forth somehow. The question was, how?

Jackson had to admit, though, it was a bit of a mind job to think that, just over one and a half light-minutes away, there may just be an alien captain thinking the exact same thing about him.

“Life support is green, Captain. All repairs are concluded, and the men report that they’re strapped.”

“All right, excellent work,” Jackson said. “Sound battle stations.”

“Battle stations, aye!”

The alarms sounded throughout the ship, warning every one of the impending action, as if they hadn’t already been aware. Space combat involved such insane distances that it was possible, even likely, to be forced to take a nap between engagements of the same battle. This was something that led to a certain degree of lethargy, Jackson had found, which was something to be stamped out as quickly as possible when found.

With the alarms doing the stamping, Jackson took a moment to examine the plot and the countdown.

He could see what the admiral was thinking. With both enemies and allies closing on each other at such a rate, the odds favored an action like a full court press. There was an element of risk to the strategy, but Jackson figured that most of those were already at play in the current action.

The admiral wasn’t quite ordering a Hail Mary play, but it was close. It was probably the right move, too, all things considered.

Of course, Jackson knew, it was possible to make all the right moves and still lose the game.

Here’s hoping the admiral has a little dumb-fool luck backing up his core competences, Jackson through with wry humor as the countdown ticked down to the last few seconds.

“Prepare to engage the VASIMR drive on my mark,” he ordered.

“Aye, Captain, VASIMR standing by.”

Jackson’s eyes flicked down to the clock as the last instant passed, then they came up again as he stared ahead at the main repeater display. “Mark!”

“VASIMR firing!”

Simultaneously, across more than three light-minutes, five VASIMR drives lit off as one. The effect on the crewmembers of those ships was to be slammed back into their bolsters as their vessels dove in against the pair of enemy ships they faced.

The Montana and the Indiana dove after the Indiana’s own missiles barrage, using it as a distraction and as cover for their own charge. The others led with missile attacks of their own, the remaining ships with full external magazines flushing them at their targets as they accelerated into the teeth of their enemies’ weapons.

Hundreds of Earth-built missiles filled the black between the ships, illuminated by their drive flares and by the explosions of the dying as the alien ships engaged the missiles attack with point defense and their main gravity valve weapons.

Even as missiles were being swatted from the sky, however, the five remaining Los Angeles class destroyers closed with the enemy, their internal magazines primed as they prepared to unload the last of their weapons in their admiral’s final play.

Through the debris and radiation of the destroyed missiles, they dove, all eyes that could watching as the surviving missiles entered terminal guidance and raked the enemy ships with direct and glancing strikes that would have annihilated any lesser-built craft. The large alien cruisers, however injured, were still able to accelerate as they came through the missile storm and turned their weapons back onto the advancing Solari cruisers.

“All tubes to rapid fire on my mark!” Jackson ordered.

“Tubes stand ready, Captain!”

“Captain! Gravity event! It’s centered on the Indiana!”

Jackson threw open the ship-to-ship. “Max! Get your butt out of there!”

The Indiana shuddered, thrusters burning as its VASIMR drive erupted into full force. The big ship turned slowly, edging away as it began to build serious speed. Jackson could see that the ship was fighting some external force, however, as its motion didn’t look quite right.

“Gravity event is moving amidships! She’s reaching crush tolerance!”

“Come on, Max,” Jackson urged as he tried to lean forward, only to be held securely by his webbed straps. “Get out of there

Move it

”

“Her external armor is failing!”

“Goddamn it,” Captain Neal Jackson swore. “Let’s see how strong these things really are. Helm, bring as about to 1:39, Mark two to the positive twelve!”

“Aye, sir, coming about to

” The ensign trailed off. “Captain?”

“Do it!”

“Aye, sir.”

Jackson knew that the Montana had already built more Delta V than the Indiana, as they were moving to catch up already. As she twisted around onto the new course, he did the math in his head and winced as he opened the ship-wide com.

“All hands, brace for impact!”

The Montana struck nose first, angled into the portside aft section of the Indiana, at several hundred miles an hour in the difference. The ungodly scream of metal on metal echoed down the entire length of the ship as the Montana physically shoved the Indiana out of the way, spinning the other ship violently as it performed a zero gravity rendition of what on Earth would be called the Pit Maneuver.

Thrown against their straps, the crews of both ships were deafened by the blaring klaxons warning of dire happenings, both ships still maintaining full acceleration as they moved. The Indiana spun out, spiraling around the Montana as it continued on course through the crash zone.

“Gravity event to port!”

“Indiana reports gravity event to port!”

Jackson winced, though that was pretty much what he’d hoped. With the Indiana twisting around and now pointing the other way, that put the enemy attack directly between them.

“All power to port thrusters!”

Both ships fired their thrusters as one, even as the sudden lurch of the ships threated to throw them back into each other, pushing against the invisible force threatening to swat them from the sky.

“Increase VASIMR power to fifteen gravities!”

“Aye, sir! Increasing to fifteen gravities!”

The Montana surged again, charging ahead of the twisting Indiana and putting itself between the foundering ship and the enemy.

“Open fire, all tubes!”

“Captain! Starboard tubes are not in service! We damaged them in the impact!”

“Rapid fire on port tubes!” Jackson ordered. “Shift the magazines’ missile supple to the port side!”

“Aye, sir!”

The Montana opened up in rapid fire on its portside tubes as the other three ships pressed the attack as well, firing their own internal magazines as fast as their tubes would cycle them. Now within less than forty light-seconds of the enemy, the danger increased exponentially for both sides.

Missiles streamed into space from the four charging ships, every passing shot having less and less time to reach its target, making it almost impossible for point defense to effectively target. However, on the other side of the coin, the enemy’s gravity valve weapon could lock with greater and greater confidence and the alien ships were able to maintain locks with much more effectiveness.

“The San Jose is experiencing a gravity event!”

Jackson’s eyes fell on the plot, but this time there was nothing he could do. There was no ship in range to give them an ill-considered push, nor did it appear that they could maneuver themselves out of the predicament.

“Her integrity’s failing! Nuke flash!” The announcement chilled the bridge, to be followed up by a quieter, “She’s gone, sir.”

“Keep firing,” Jackson ordered tersely as he grunted against the heavy forces of acceleration. “No matter what

just keep firing.”

*****

USV Socrates

Entering Hayden Orbit

Hooking the planet’s gravity in the opposite of the classic Slingshot Maneuver, using the mass to bleed speed off as fast as possible, was a tricky move. Alexi brought his ships in like shooting stars, sweeping into Hayden’s gravity well counter to the planet’s orbit and hooking around the world in a tight spiral that brought them in tighter to the surface at insane speeds.

They were still riding “backwards,” drives burning as high as the crews could physically tolerate. The g-forces were on the edge of what Alexi was willing to subject his crews to, knowing that pushing it any further would create unacceptable risk of blackout for mission-vital crewmembers.

“Coming up on turnover, Captain!”

“Bring us about, signal the Fleet,” Alexi ordered. “Put our noses to the forge.”

“Aye, sir. Coming about.”

First the Socrates, then one by one the remaining ships in the column fired their bow and aft thrusters to bring themselves around to face the planet looming in their screens. Alexi opened the fleet-wide com as he checked the trajectories and made some last-minute mental calculations before speaking.

“All hands, stand by for aerobraking maneuvers,” he said. “We’re going to be digging deeper than normal, so it’ll be rough. Captains, keep close watch on your telemetry, let’s not suck each other’s dirty air. Good luck, all.”

Mira Vasquez’s voice came back over the clear channel, “Teach your grandma to suck eggs, Alexi!”

The others laughed as Alexi Petronov shook his head with a half-smile, glad that Mira hadn’t chosen to be somewhat cruder in her rejoinder. Unlike his military counterparts, Alexi somewhat enjoyed Mira’s earthier sense of humor, but since things were being recorded for posterity, it was probably best she kept it lower key than usual.

The Socrates buffeted slightly, bringing his full focus back to the present. “Are we in the atmosphere already?”

“No, sir! Gravity detection indicates an event, just aft of our position.”

“Bozshe!” he cursed, slapping open the fleet-wide. “Hold on tight, planetary defenses have engaged!”

The newly installed battle stations’ alarm blared to life, driving shivers up and down Alexi’s back. He hated that sound.

“Put our noses another ten degrees down, relative to the planet!” he called out over the damned alarms. “And fire VASIMR drives, one-g!”

“Firing drives, one gravity, aye!”

The Socrates dipped her nose down as the big drive flared to life, pushing her into the edge of the atmosphere ahead of schedule. The forward ceramic tiles caught the edge of the rushing air first, erupting into flame as the ship dug in at a steep angle, actually under power while, in the midst of a maneuver, most ships would be using braking thrust during.

“We’re digging in too steep, Captain!”

Alexi grinned, slightly manically, knowing that right on his heels, the Nicola Tesla was following along with every other ship in the column.

It was good, sometimes, to have friends as insane as you were.

“Stand by to fire thrusters!”

“Thrusters standing by!”

“Kill power to the VASIMR!”

“VASIMR offline!”

“Fire bow thrusters, bring her nose up seven degrees relative!”

“Aye, sir, seven degrees up to the planet!”

The relatively weak bow thrusters flared brightly but were almost lost in the friction flames erupting around the surface of the ship as it plunged deeper into the planetary atmosphere. They slowly lifted the bow up, nudging it away from its death dive just before it suddenly bucked hard and impacted thicker atmosphere.

The captain and crew were slammed hard into their bolsters, spines compressing from the impact, just before the ship skipped along the atmosphere and arced in a low curve along the planetary envelope. Behind the Socrates, streaming long tails of fire, the remaining ships in the column followed like some insane game of interplanetary hopscotch.

Alexi Petronov was all grins as the Socrates whipped around the curvature of Hayden, skimming the atmosphere again in another blaze of fire and light, the dangerous maneuver bringing out the child in him who’d grown up wanting to work in space more than anything in the world.

The tens-of-thousands-ton large spacecraft all whipped around the curve of the planet, skipping along the atmosphere and bleeding speed as quickly as their human passengers could physically endure, all the while streaming fire behind them.

At the apex of one of the skips, during a rare moment of relative free fall, Alexi called out new orders.

“Bow thrusters to half, bring our nose down six degrees!”

“Six degrees down to the planet, half thrust, aye, sir!”

The Socrates dipped its nose into the coming dive, and this time, instead of bouncing off the atmosphere, the big ship drilled right through in an explosion of flames and sound.

Alexi and his crew were thrown forward hard into their restraints as the thickening atmosphere began to work on the Socrates. Behind them, the rest of the column had followed the Socrates’s lead and were boring through Hayden’s upper atmosphere and leaving trails of flame hundreds of kilometers long in their wake.

“Heat shields!” Alexi called out, having waited until the last possible second to give the order.

“Heat shields lowering, aye!”

One by one, critical telemetry plots went dead as the more vulnerable sensors were covered by thick metal and ceramic shields, until the Socrates and her allies were plummeting half blind on their headlong rush around the planet.

“We’re on dead reckoning systems now, Cap! Shields in place, all systems standing by!”

This part of the maneuver was one that Alexi wasn’t terribly fond of. Between the heat shields and the interference from the atmospheric plasma around them, the entire column was pretty much blind, deaf, and dumb. Given that they were hurtling well beyond hypersonic speeds, with the distance between each ship being measured in thousands of meters at best, it was by far the most dangerous maneuver he’d ever attempted.

In the end, however, all he could do was trust the captains he was flying with, trust his ship and crew, and try like hell to figure out what he was going to do when they slowed enough for that space-be-damned planetary defense system to start effectively tracking them again.

It had always been a gamble, hoping that the enemy was using ships to cover the planet and that the combat component of the Fleet could lure them away while the relief column did their work. As it turned out, that clearly wasn’t the case, so he now had to try and determine his best strategy for dealing with it here and now.

Unfortunately, that was going to mean even more reckless piloting.

Alexi laughed, drawing odd looks from the men around him. Soon they’d whisper from one side of the ship to the other that the captain laughed in the face of death. Maybe it was true, but really he was just laughing at the fact that the only thing he could think at the moment was that it was a really good thing that he loved his job.

Chapter 5

Enemy Facility

Hayden

When her computer informed her of another high-pitch event, Sorilla winced. Each and every event she’d experienced had been followed by the low rumble of a nuclear explosion in the not so distant distance. Each whine indicated an attack on people she’d worked with for months, trained, fought beside

This time, however, when no returning rumble sounded, Sorilla was given pause.

She knew that there were no operations so far from the colony center that her armor’s systems would be unable to detect the blast of one of the enemy’s attacks.

So what are they firing at? she thought for a moment but then immediately berated herself. She knew what they had to be firing at.

Damnation, Sorilla thought grimly, glancing at her chrono app. They made good time. Of all the times for Fleet to hold to a damned schedule.

The insides of the enemy base were like something out an ancient monument, like wandering through the pyramids in Egypt or Sorilla’s own middle-American nations. Without her armor’s dead reckoning navigation systems, Sorilla suspected she might have gotten lost already. With those systems, however, she had made her way quickly through the corridors, and unless something was well and truly mucking up her systems, she was closing on the source.

Which, to absolutely no shock on her part whatsoever, left Sorilla staring at a blank wall with no door in sight.

Well, just fan-fucking-tastic, she cursed silently while staring at the wall that every system she had said was blocking her destination. Sorilla sighed, shaking her head. “Well, like my EOD instructor always said

when in doubt, Q-Tex.”

She pulled a charge of the quantum explosive from her supply and eyed the wall for a moment, then ran her hand over it. Ultrasound readings were pretty solid, so she doubled the charge and applied a nanotic shaping to it. A nanometer-thin barrier of copper mesh flexed under power from her suit, molding the material into a breaching charge before Sorilla applied it to the wall.

After she physically attached the detonator, Sorilla stepped back a couple paces and pushed herself against the wall. In her armor she wasn’t too worried about debris, especially coming back from a shaped charge, but accidents happened and a solid chunk of rock could put her on her back. While seemingly minor, even a few seconds could be costly depending on just what was on the other side of the wall.

In place, she quickly ordered the plasticized explosive to detonate and was rewarded by a pressure wave and flood of dust filling the corridor as the explosives went off and sent a star pattern blast of copper plasma through the stone wall. As the dust was settling, she stepped over to the wall, not in the least bothered by the tiny fist-sized hole that was the entirety of the results.

A glance through the hole left her puzzled, but not enough to stop. Sorilla drove her elbow through the stone wall, revealing that, while it seemed solid on her side, the explosives had blown out the other side quite well indeed.

She found herself staring down several dozen feet from a position roughly about midway up the side of an immense spherical room. A glance down told her that dropping into the room would be easy enough but pointless. She’d slide down the wall to the bottom, where there was nothing but stone curving up in all directions.

The real game was playing out in the very center of the room, across from her position. There was a catwalk established, leading back to another section of the wall and centered on a mechanism that made no sense to her whatsoever. Of course, since the harmonics her armor was picking up matched the general frequency of the spikes that preceded a nuke rumble, Sorilla figured she didn’t need to understand it to know what it was.

She took a moment to evaluate the distance to the catwalk, noting that the room was empty in the process. The rangefinder in her armor made it fourteen meters to the catwalk, easily workable, she decided as she kicked more of the stone away from the perimeter of the hole she’d blown. When she was finished with that, Sorilla loped easily back down the corridor to the end.

Sorilla started from a crouch, leveraging the full power of her armor as she boosted into a sprint that crossed the distance to the hole in under two seconds. She vaulted from the edge, in as high an arc as she could without taking her own head off on the edges she’d been forced to leave, and smashed through the metal rails of the catwalk like they were made of foil.

The walk itself held, though, as she skidded to a stop by digging her armor shod fingers into the metal it was made of before she slid clean off the other side. Sorilla took a moment to get her breath again, then rose to her feet as she examined the device within the catwalk.

It was composed of two black hemispheres horizontally cut by a complex-looking mechanism that spun freely within. Sorilla recorded the sight before tossing the last of her Q-Tex into the horizontal cut and loping around the catwalk toward the door in the far wall of the sphere. She was sure that the boys and girls in fleet R&D would want to check out her recordings when it was all said and done.

That, and they’d be a tad miffed at her for blowing the whole damn place before they could check it out.

Screw them, she thought, smirking as she ran. There were real people on the wrong end of this thing, if it was what she was betting it was. The lab geeks could wait for another chance; something told her that this wasn’t going to be the last time she got to play this game. That is, unless it really was the last time.

As she approached the stone door ahead of her, Sorilla was determined to make sure that she got to play a few more hands before cashing out. She was too addicted to the game to give it all up now.

She hit the door without slowing, grunting as her bruised shoulder flattened against the inside of her armor again, the gel layer be damned. The stone shattered again as she catapulted into the room, hitting the floor in a roll and coming up with her rifle already seeking targets. She skidded into the center of the room on one knee, her other leg stretching out to balance her as she identified and haloed targets in the large room.

It was a control center, obviously, with large screens and a holographic display of Hayden itself floating right above where she slid to a stop. Sorilla noted the telemetry tracks above the image of the world in the corner of her eye but had other things to worry about just then. More of the furry types rushed her, lifting their particle weapons, and ran right into the first shots from Sorilla’s rifle.

They went down hard, her assault rifle putting out heavy rounds designed to perforate light armor. What they did to unarmored security guards simply didn’t bear thinking on. Unlike older armor-piercing rounds, the new military standard didn’t over-penetrate, as it was designed to tumble and explode within its target.

The first two meat slabs went down, spraying blood or whatever bodily fluid did the job for them from grapefruit-sized holes in their chests. Sorilla and her armor’s computer quickly evaluated the odds, leading her to extend her rifle to the left one-handed while drawing her pistol to cover the right. The rifle fired on automatic as her armor computer recognized targets and nudged her arm to fine-tune the shot while she covered the other side with her pistol, putting high-caliber rounds into three more as her armor and rifle perforated another four while her attention was focused in the opposite direction.

She slowly rose to her feet, keeping an eye on the room through the compressed panoramic view provided by her ocular implants and armor HUD. There were no more meat slabs lumbering in her direction, but she counted at least eight of the shorter and frailer looking grey-skinned types.

Sorilla snorted lightly, noting the rough resemblance of the aliens to Earth folklore, and wondered briefly if there was a connection. She put it aside for the moment; it hardly mattered for her purposes. She’d leave it to the historians to figure out.

Come to think of it, Sorilla noted that she was really leaving a lot to other people lately.

Ah well, the wages of war and all that, she thought, grinning under her helm.

The grey-skinned types didn’t seem to be interested in attacking, but Sorilla didn’t lower her weapon as they stared at her with, frankly, rather creepy, large, dark eyes. As she was debating what to do, her armor chimed in with a warning that there was another harmonic spike occurring. Sorilla glanced at the holo of Hayden and noted flashing lights circling a point well above the world’s surface.

That didn’t look good to her, so Sorilla moved right to the GOTH plan.

Normally, detonating high explosives in an unknown weapon of mass destruction was pretty far from her idea of a good time, but with several ships in immediate danger and absolutely no time to try and figure out any of the equipment surrounding her, Sorilla decided that the situation definitely warranted “Gone to Hell” level action.

The explosions from the next room were relatively sedate. Sorilla would have barely heard them if her armor hadn’t noted the sound and brought it to her attention as a potential threat. The reactions of the grey-skinned folk, however, were anything but sedate.

Instead of standing there, staring at her in either shock or indifference

she honestly couldn’t tell which from their expressions, or lack thereof, said aliens were pointing at readings and all but waving their arms in the air in panic. Naturally, this brought mixed reactions to Sorilla.

It meant, of course, that she had probably achieved the effect she was aiming for

but, on the other hand, it also meant that she was probably sitting on something she’d really rather not be sitting on. When the smaller grey-skinned aliens broke for a door on the upper terrace of the room, Sorilla had her answer as to what she should be doing next.

When it doubt, follow the guys who were most likely to know what the hell is going on. If they were running, make it a foot race.

She vaulted from a standing position to the second floor terrace, crashing through a glass or similar barrier with ease, and landed in their midst. The aliens were wearing what looked to be thick, possibly rubberized uniforms that reminded her slightly of hazmat suits without the helmets. Their reaction to her arrival was to freeze in shock and stare.

Well, that won’t do.

Sorilla drew her pistol again and put a heavy round into the ceiling, startling them out of the shock, then waved them toward the door.

Thankfully, they got the idea in a hurry and bolted on ahead, while Sorilla took up the rear. She’d gladly leave them to whatever fate had reserved for the facility, but there was that little problem of not knowing where the hell she was going and all.

Well that and Sorilla had never much liked killing in cold blood. She’d taken out her share of unarmed people in the past, a few even in this very base just a few score minutes earlier, but those were mostly collateral kills. This group was obviously technical support for the most part, maybe an officer in the bunch, though she couldn’t see any insignia tabs on them to prove it. Not on her list of opportunistic kills, at any rate.

A new alarm was sounding through the facility, along with some pretty funky lighting going off in every corridor. Her armor and ocular HUDs were informing her of deep slashes into the ultraviolet and infrared spectrum, with very little showing up in the human visual range. Sorilla shelved that little tidbit as she chased the aliens upward through another set of ramps than the ones she’d come down.

Her armor registered a rumble deep down in the facility, but it didn’t match any explosion harmonic, so it only listed it as a secondary level warning. She flagged it anyway and asked her computer what it most closely matched.

Three story building collapse.

Well, that’s just lovely, she thought dryly, her attention diverted as she rounded a corridor in time to see the last of the aliens ahead of her dive into a room of some sort and seal the door.

“Oh fuck!” she snarled aloud, striding forward with the intent of pulling the door clear from the wall.

She was within ten feet when an explosion went off in her face, lifting Sorilla, armor and all, clear off the ground and slamming her back into the far wall. It wasn’t enough to injure her, but she saw stars for a moment, and when they’d cleared, Sorilla found herself looking at a gaping hole where the door had been.

She staggered to her feet, cursing some more under her breath, and made her way over to the hole. It was the entrance of a tunnel that went up at a forty five degree angle from where she was standing, and her armor quickly reported starlight at the far end.

Escape pod. Nice, she thought idly before bracing herself and starting to sprint up the long tunnel. Probably still should have shot the bastards before they blew that sucker in my face, though. Next time.

*****

Hayden Jungle

Jerry cursed as he threw himself to the ground, just evading a barrage of beam blasts from one of the enemy combatant units. They’d had their way most of the night, but he must have screwed up his movements because they’d managed to drop one of their close combat squads almost right on his position.

As far as ambushes went, it wasn’t particularly good but only because he and his team could hear the flyer coming. They managed to go to ground before the units were fully deployed, but shortly after, they found that they weren’t capable of moving from cover without being bracketed by lethal fire.

He’d already lost three of his pathfinders, good people who deserved better, to the crossfire and had been pushed hard enough to risk calling for support from the automated units. He knew that the shift-frequency military coms they’d gotten from the container were supposed to be untrackable, but the idea of calling down nuclear fire on his position just sent shivers down his spine.

Six klicks away, the Cougar element of the autonomous units paused as it received and acknowledged the priority tasking. The three Cougars in the element immediately dropped stabilizing braces into the soft jungle ground, the hydraulic arms planting themselves and lifting the front tires off the ground as the twenty millimeter accelerator on each climbed to near vertical positioning.

The trio consulted with one another for a moment before deciding on a fire plan, which, once confirmed, was entered into the final targeting solutions.

The first three rounds fired within a millisecond of each other, fired almost vertically into Hayden’s atmosphere. Three cannons dropped several degrees and roared again then another few degrees down and another sonic boom erupted as the shells were launched skyward. Each of the three Cougars repeated the same process ten times, launching a total of thirty twenty-millimeter rounds in less than three seconds.

That complete, the Cougars again consulted with one another and determined that the fire response mission was complete and, that decided, they elected to move on with their original mission.

Back at the focus of their attentions, for as little time as it was, Jerry and his pathfinders were still hugging whatever cover they could find as the particle blasts from the approaching combat units torched the jungle around them. Above the hissing sound of the enemy fire, however, a rushing roar began to fill the air, causing most of them to look up in wonder and not a little fear.

“What the hell is tha—?” Dean managed to ask just before the world exploded.

The TOT, or Time on Target, assault was pioneered in the Second World War by artillery units who would carefully calculate the flight times of their shells and coordinate firing schedules to drop as many shells on the enemy in as short a time as possible. The idea being to drop the entire world on an enemy platoon or division before they had a chance to react to the first shell, thus catching them out in the open and inflicting massive casualties and damages.

Since that time, with computer-aided systems, and then the advent of modulated electromagnetic accelerators, the concept had been perfected to the nth degree.

While not packing as much firepower as a full artillery brigade, the Cougars were programed to maximize what they had, so when they received a request for fire support from Jerry, the autonomous units responded with their best effort: a simultaneous barrage of thirty twenty-millimeter high-explosive rounds in a tight pattern around the closest confirmed enemy location.

The result? Over three acres of Hayden jungle were completely flattened, trees and brush toppled, and fully two thirds of the enemy forces were wiped out in less than the space of second.

The blast still ringing in his ears, Jerry lifted his head to stare in wondering shock at the devastation.

Beside him, Dean was saying something, but he couldn’t hear a thing over the ringing in his ears, so Jerry just let him go for a moment before some level of sense filtered back into his mind. It was then that Jerry realized that Sorilla would kick his ass if he let this moment completely slip by in the heat of battle.

“Come on!” he yelled, hefting his rifle high as he called out to his fellow pathfinders. “While they’re disoriented! Take them down!”

He leveled his weapon, firing as he emerged from cover, and kept waving to the others to get them moving as well. Slowly, one by one, the high-powered crack of sonic booms filled the jungle as he and the others unloaded their weapons in an attempt to turn the ambush on the ambushers.

They had a few seconds all to themselves in which the enemy was too stunned or disoriented to respond, and then it became an exchange again. The particle beams of the enemy combat units crossed paths with the heavy, depleted uranium slugs coming from the pathfinder’s military-issued rifles, turning their little corner of Hayden’s jungle into a slaughter house.

DPU slugs blew chunks off the alien units as particle beams fried the Hayden colonists, but neither side were remotely willing to give an inch of Hayden’s jungle floor in this moment. Jerry kept pushing his people on, trying to maintain the pressure while not losing too many more of his own people.

Or anymore of his own people.

An anger welled up in him then, thinking of those they’d lost, the homes that had been destroyed, and Jerry found that he had had enough. He rose up, firing his rifle dry, and swapped the magazines smoothly as he stepped forward out of the jungle.

“No more! Do you hear me! No more!” He roared over the sonic boom of his weapon firing and the sizzles and snaps of the enemies return fire.

Behind him, the other pathfinders found themselves echoing his statement, ghosting from their cover as their leader’s righteous fury infected them. They appeared from the jungle that was their home, weapons calling down the thunder as they moved as one against their enemy.

The exchange of fire was blindingly fast, enemy crawlers and shamblers falling to heavily concentrated fire even as pathfinders were cut down in turn.

And then, at its peak, the enemies return fire simply

stopped.

To be entirely honest, Jerry and his pathfinders didn’t notice at first and went on firing. Then it slowly sank in to their skulls that something was up and, one by one, they stopped firing in turn. A silence fell on the jungle, no man, nor alien, nor Hayden-born making a sound as the pathfinders looked around themselves in confusion.

One of the enemy crawlers teetered for a moment then simply toppled over and lay with its legs in the air, still unmoving.

“What the hell?” Jerry whispered as he moved forward, ironically more cautiously now than when they had been shooting.

“Jer, what’s going on?” Dean asked hesitantly, coming up behind him.

“I don’t know, I—”

Jerry was cut off by a low rumble from the northwest, causing them all to turn. It took him, them, a moment to recognize that it came from the direction of the colony site, and just as that was filtering into their minds, a great plume of dust, dirt, and smoke blew straight up thousands of meters into the sky.

“Vacuum sucking hell, what was that?”

“Something happened at the colony site!”

“Sarge

” Jerry hissed, breaking into a run through the jungle.

The others followed suit quickly, threading through the jungle as quickly as they could until they burst clear out onto a rocky outcropping that loomed over the jungle and offered a clear view of the colony plateau. It was, ironically, Jerry realized, the same rocky outcrop that he and Sorilla had stopped on months earlier during her first visit to the colony.

A colony that now apparently no longer existed.

A great gaping hole was blown clear out of the plateau, splitting the immense slab of stone in half. From what he could see, it must have blown three quarters of the colony back to Sol and merely flattened what was left.

“Holy stars, did Sarge do that?” Bethany asked softly from behind him.

“I don’t know,” Jerry answered honestly, looking about him as the remains of the pathfinders were splayed out on the rocks, staring at the plume of dirt that rose above what had once been their home.

They looked tired. Hell, they looked exhausted. Most likely because they were. Jerry realized that he was at that point, and his legs wobbled enough for him to collapse on the rock beside him.

“What do you suppose happened to those things back there?” Dean asked, taking a seat nearby.

“Sarge must have been right,” Jerry shrugged tiredly. “They must have been drones. Not even autonomous, like the Cougars. She took out the central command, I’m guessing.”

Dean shook his head. “That’s one damned scary lady.”

Jerry chuckled, he couldn’t help it, he just didn’t have the strength anymore to keep a straight face. “Just be glad she’s on our side, Dean.”

Dean’s laughter proved contagious, and soon most of those assembled were laughing along with him. If any of them noted the hint of hysterical relief in its tone, none mentioned it aloud.

*****

USV Socrates

58 Grand, Over Hayden

“Outer hull is cooling to within tolerances, Captain.”

Alexi nodded. “Very well. Lower the heat shields.”

“Aye, sir. Heat shields retracting.”

One by one, the blank telemetry screens lit up, resetting as they were forced to recalibrate for the new information being fed from the previously shielded arrays. Alexi’s eyes were glued to his repeater screens, and he breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that all the ships of the column were still with him.

“Captain, transmission incoming on the military spread frequency channels,” Commander Ashley spoke up from his side of the bridge.

“Put it through.”

“Aye, sir.”

There was a brief instance of noise as the channel opened, then a woman’s voice was cleanly broadcast over the comm.

“—a Aida, calling Sol Fleet. Please acknowledge, over.”

There was a pause, then Ashley spoke up. “It’s on repeat. Message starting over.”

“This is Sergeant Sorilla Aida, calling Sol Fleet. Please acknowledge, over.”

Alexi keyed open the channel. “This is Captain Alexi Petronov, USV Socrates. Go ahead, Sergeant.”

“USV? No offense, Captain, but I was hoping to speak with a military officer.”

“The military portion of our taskforce is currently dealing with our visitors, unwelcome though they are,” Alexi said. “I am in command of the relief column.”

“I see,” Sorilla replied, “very well. I’m pleased to report that, barring a backup installation, you shouldn’t have to worry about the Hayden gravity valve. It’s been blown halfway back to Sol.”

Alexi smiled, relieved. “I’m very pleased to hear that, though I suspect that some of our scientists will be disappointed.”

“Yeah, well, they can kiss my

” She paused. “They’ll have to do with the armor recordings I made of the facility. At any rate, you should be clear to dismount supplies on this end at least. The colonists are preparing to receive you at the following coordinates

”

“We have their position, Sergeant,” Alexi told her. “It was on the satellite we pulled data from before entry.”

“All right. Good.”

Alexi frowned, hearing the fatigue in the woman’s voice. “I believe orders are being delivered for you, Sergeant. They’ll arrive with the relief supplies.”

“Right.” She sighed audibly. “I’ll meet them as I can. Aida out.”

The channel went silent, and Alexi pondered it for a moment before shrugging and returning his focus to the task at hand.

“Very well, the good sergeant has cleared the road. Let’s see our deliveries through then, shall we?” he said mildly, getting everyone’s attention. They stiffened immediately and began chattering over their coms. Alexi smiled at the sight. He knew that he didn’t have to give any orders there, his people knew their jobs.

That said, there were a few little things he could deal with.

“Miss Evans?”

Sheila Evans, the life sciences officer looked up, surprised. “Sir?”

“I believe that Hayden is noted for its spectacularly clean air, no?” he asked mildly.

“Uh, yes, sir.”

“Excellent, then let us vent this smoke, shall we?” He smiled at her.

“Yes, sir,” She nodded, tapping orders into her own board.

Air exchange wasn’t strictly necessary, but when it was possible, it was done with alacrity. Long-term exposure to recycled air was unpleasant, particularly when you did EVA work and breathed the pure stuff and had to come back aboard.

There were half a hundred other, similar, small items that had to be cleared through him before they could be done, so Alexi turned to that while he waited for his people to finish with the larger and more important tasks.

“Sir?”

“Yes?”

“Relief supplies are ready to launch.”

“Excellent, inform them that they may launch when ready. Please coordinate with the other ships, however.”

“Aye, sir.”

*****

Former Colony Plateau

Hayden

Sorrilla sighed as she popped her helm and let the clamshell hit the ground by her side, eyes focused up on the blazing streaks of fire cutting through the skies above. The relief column was shockingly low and still moving fast. She was surprised that they’d risked flying in that low. Actually, they weren’t even in low orbit now. By her eye, they’d come under 50,000 meters and were plowing through the air fast enough to ignite the higher hydrogen mixture at that altitude.

Not hot enough to threaten their sensitive gear, obviously, but they made an awe inspiring site as they blew overhead like shooting stars flying in formation. Whoever was in charge was something of a lunatic, though she supposed having the valve take a potshot or two at them had made him willing to take a few risks.

As she watched, she could see objects launching off from them, dropping speed fast and maneuvering for the edge of the continent. The relief supplies, reinforcements, hopefully, and whatever else Earth had seen fit to send along.

She sat there on the edge of the plateau, the dark jungle laid out below her, the stars above, and for a long moment Sorilla just let herself quietly enjoy the moment.

Then it was done.

She grabbed her helm and rose to her feet, snapping it back into place as the ships vanished over the horizon. The enemy base was destroyed, but until she heard otherwise, their ships were still out there, and those that escaped the base couldn’t have gone far in escape pods.

Or at least, she presumed they couldn’t.

So they had to be out there somewhere, and beyond Hayden lay their home worlds. So no matter what happened before dawn arrived, they had a great deal of work left to them.

No time like the present to get started, she thought wryly as she leapt off the plateau, landing a few dozen meters below on an outcropping before jumping off that as well.

She hopped point to point until she landed at the bottom of the plateau and then settled into an easy loping run in the direction of the coast.

Orders were orders.

*****

Coastal Survey Site

Sam, Silver, and their people had to scramble for cover as the drop boxes came down. They were guided systems, but no one wanted to chance that they’d miss and land on someone’s head.

General morale was higher than it had been since the start of the whole damned affair, however, so everyone was happy enough to be dodging thousand-ton boxes falling from the sky. There was probably something to be said for both fear and elation being relative experiences to the human condition.

From as far back as they could manage, the group of colonists watched as container followed container out of the sky, coming down on huge cargo parachutes since there was no point wasting fuel on a reaction system for such things. They slammed into the beach, the jungle, even the water where they bobbed in the waves until driven ashore.

A short while after the last one landed, a hissing roar caught the attention of the colonists as a large lifting-body shuttle came into view, lights bathing the area in blinding rays before it came to a slow hover and settled down.

Even before it landed, several containers blew their doors on their own, and the colonists were shocked to see armored soldiers hopping out and milling about.

Sam let out a long breath. “Looks like they sent the whole damned army.”

“A light division, Sam,” Silver corrected him, eyes roving over the troops as they jumped into action to clear away more of the brush than they’d been able to manage in the time they had. The soldiers blew some of the other containers open, and more Cougars rolled out onto Hayden soil along with enough gear and equipment for everyone twice over as far as they could tell.

The shuttle settled in for a landing next to the tether anchor they’d uncovered, settling in on huge landing struts that sank into the soft soil.

“Best get out people helping with the work, Sam,” Silver said, nodding to where the soldiers were working to get one of the big trucks ashore. “Get them clearing the shrubs back, leave the heavy work to the armored grunts and machines, ‘k?”

“Right.” Sam nodded, forgetting that he and Silver didn’t really get along. He waved a few people over and directed them to the task.

While he was talking, the shuttle lowered its boarding ramp, allowing men and women to begin streaming from it as well. Silver moved in that direction, catching the eye of a uniformed man who seemed to be in charge.

“We’ll be with you in a moment, sir,” the man said, glancing his way. “Please be patient.”

“What’s your name, son?” Silver asked.

“Lt. Commander Rivers. Now, I’m a little busy here. Give me a moment, sir.”

Silver just stared at him until the lieutenant commander finally turned back to him. “Now, you are?”

“Lt. Colonel Alexander Silver,” Silver replied. “US Army, retired.”

Silver ignored the surprised look Sam sent his way, focusing on the commander.

“What are you orders here, Commander?” he asked.

“Resupply and reinforce, sir,” Rivers told him. “Until we can get another tether manufactured and moved out here with a reasonable chance of holding the position, we can’t hope to pull people out.”

“We’re aware of that, son,” Silver told him. “Just wanted to be clear, you’re here to help us get back control of our home, right?”

“That’s an affirmative, sir.”

“Well, that’s just fine then. Tell us what you need,” he told the man, “and it’s yours.”

“Can you tell me where Sergeant Aida is?”

“She took the pathfinders out when we heard you boys were in-system.” Silver shook his head. “Haven’t heard from them since.”

“She talked to the commodore in charge of the column before we launched,” Rivers said. “Told him she’d meet us here.”

“If she said it, it’ll happen, son.” Silver shrugged. “Could be a little while, though. We’re at least a hundred kilometers from any AO she was working.”

“Damn it.” Rivers shook his head. “We’re on a schedule here. We don’t know if Admiral Shepard took out the last two bandits. We lost coms coming in and only got them back a few minutes ago.”

Silver just nodded. “Nothing to be done, son. If you need the sarge, you’ll just have to wait for her.”

“Alright, what about Bethany Connors, PhD?”

“Out with the pathfinders.”

“Excuse me?” Rivers blinked.

“I don’t stutter, son.”

“You sent the daughter of Senator Raymond Connors out with a guerrilla force?”

“Son, she volunteered. We’ve been up against the wall here, in case you missed it. Able body is a body in the field,” Silver told him sharply.

“Bloody hell, I’m glad this is my new duty assignment and I don’t have to explain that one to the brass back home.”

Silver chuckled. “Connor must be a ballbuster if you’d take a warzone over that.”

“The senator isn’t the problem,” Rivers shook his head. “His wife, however, is an admiral.”

“Ouch.” Silver winced.

“You have no idea, sir. She’s still alive, I hope?”

“Hale and hearty last I heard, but she and the others were out on a bait and decoy run to give the sarge a fighting chance while she went after that valve thing you lot were so worried about.”

Rivers let out a strong of curses, though Silver smiled as he recognized a tone of admiration coloring many of them.

“Takes after her mother, I’m assuming,” Sil said idly.

“Not for about forty years, from what I hear,” Rivers sighed. “But yeah. All right, I need the rest of the people on this list here, ASAP.”

Silver accepted the list, looking them over quickly. “We got about half them here, the rest I couldn’t say. May not have gotten out of the colony the night of the attack, might be on another continent. Haven’t had any contact with any of the research facilities since that night.”

“I’ll take what I can get,” Rivers sighed.

“We generally do.” Silver grinned. “I’ll get your names rounded up. Sarge will be in when she’s in, same goes for Beth.”

“Understood, sir. Thanks for the help.”

“No problem, son. Been on your side of things, didn’t like it much.” Sil smirked, waving as he turned off and started to head away. “Anything I can do to help out some other poor sucker in that situation is time well spent.”

As he walked off, Commander Rivers heard Samuel whispering to Silver.

“Lt. Colonel?”

*****

Sorilla and the pathfinders shambled into the military camp around twelve hours later, having met up about thirty kilometers from the coast. Most of them looked worse for wear, some carrying the wounded, though the nature of the weapons involved meant that injuries were uncommon. You walked out intact, or you simply didn’t walk out.

By the time they made it to the coast, there were tents and shelters erected all along the river delta, the infantry brigade settling in for the short term while the brass decided where they were going to dig in for the duration.

She and the pathfinders were waved through quickly, Sorilla directed specifically to the command tent. Most of the pathfinders with her followed along out of curiosity.

Sorilla nodded to a private in stock augmentation armor, a setup a fair sight heavier than her own. “Sergeant Aida reporting as ordered.”

“Ma’am,” the kid nodded. “I’ll fetch the commander.”

“Go on.”

The kid practically scrambled away, obviously barely out of armor training by the way he moved. She shook her head. What the hell were they thinking? It’s not like we’re short of experienced manpower. At least, we weren’t when I left.

She didn’t have time to follow that line of thought, though, before a man in a Fleet lieutenant commander’s uniform showed up. She stiffened to attention, throwing him a salute.

“Sir. Sergeant Aida, reporting as ordered.”

“As you were,” he said, extending his hand.

She glanced at it and accepted the chip he offered her.

“Orders from SOCOM, Sergeant,” he told her. “You’re being recalled for debriefing.”

She frowned, dumping the orders through a contact port, and confirmed them quickly. “Understood, sir. I’m ready to go.”

“Nothing to fetch?”

“Nothing of consequence,” she said, turning to Jerry. “Tell Tara my kit is hers. She probably won’t need it with this lot here, but every little bit.”

“You’re leaving?” he asked, shocked.

“Orders, Jer,” she said flatly. “Brass wants me to debrief. They order, I jump. That’s the way it plays, my friend.”

“Sergeant,” Rivers broke in. “Did anyone else from your squad make it down?”

Her face darkened for a moment, then she shook her head. “Negative.”

“Understood. I’m sorry, Sergeant.”

She shook her head. “How long before dust off?”

“As soon as I can lay hands on Bethany Connors, you’re all packed off and shipped out.”

Bethany squeaked. “Me?”

“Why her?” Sorilla glanced at Bethany.

“She’s on my list. That puts her on the shuttle when it lifts off,” Rivers said simply, not wanting to get into it with any of them. “Five minutes. Say your goodbyes, I’m letting the pilots know to wind up the turbines.”

“Five minutes. Got it.”

Lt. Commander Rivers nodded and then left, leaving Sorilla with the pathfinders she’d trained.

“So, that’s it then?”

“That’s it,” she confirmed, face flat and unexpressive. “For now.”

“For now?” Jerry asked.

“They ordered me out because they want my experience with these aliens.” She shrugged. “That’ll mean lots of debriefs, but sooner or later they’ll be done with me and it’ll back to the field.”

“Back to Hayden?” Dean asked from where he was standing.

“No way to know,” she said. “Somewhere they figure I can do some good. This war, I expect it’s going to be a bad one.”

“Not going to be the same around here without you, Sarge,” Jerry told her wryly, forcing a smile.

“Yeah, well, I’m not looking forward to deskwork for the next few months myself,” she responded dryly. “I was born in a jungle, Reed. This is what I live for.”

“You need a better life,” he told her in no uncertain terms. “When you finish up with this silly war business, drop by and I’ll show you how to really live a jungle life.”

She favored him with a mock smoky look. “You couldn’t handle me, Jer.”

“Probably not,” he grinned as the others laughed, “but I’d be willing to try.”

She just smirked at him and clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t die, Jer, and I may take you up on that in twenty years.”

She turned to look at the others. “Same orders. Don’t die. Give ‘em hell. And stay on the path. Hayden hua.”

“Hayden hua!” They yelled back at her.

“Don’t take too much shit from the regulars either,” she said with another grin. “They don’t know squat about jungle fighting.”

Amidst the chuckles, she put a hand on Bethany’s back. “Time to go. We have a shuttle to catch.”

“But

” Beth looked over her shoulder.

“I know, but we’ve been called off.” Sorilla shook her head. “We don’t question why, Beth.”

“Like hell, I’m a civilian!”

“In a warzone, Beth,” Sorilla smiled wanly. “Not to mention that you’re a civilian who volunteered for the Hayden militia

”

“Oh, that’s bullshit!” she protested as she was led away.

“Tell it to the brass, girl.” Sorilla continued to lead her away. “I’m just a grunt.”

“Oh, keep feeding me that bullshit, maybe it’ll start to taste better.”

Sorilla just laughed as she walked the woman to the shuttle, ignoring any and all protests.

Jerry and Dean watched them go, both sporting somber expressions.

“Got used to having her around,” Dean said, “even if she was a hardass.”

“Rather liked her ass, myself.”

Dean snorted. “You’re only saying that cause she’s about to be safely off this rock and about as far away as possible.”

Jerry gave him a serious look. “Damn right. That lady scares me.”

He then laughed, along with the rest of the bedraggled-looking pathfinders as they watched two of their own board the waiting shuttle.

*****

The shuttle was one of the USV’s VIP jobbies, Sorilla noted as she climbed aboard and into the large, open section that made up the passenger compartment. There were others she recognized from the jungle camp, and she nodded to them while strapping Bethany in to a free bolster.

“Sergeant?”

Sorilla turned, careful not to hit anyone while she moved about in her armor. “Yes?”

“Good to have you aboard. The Thomas Edison is on course to pick us up. We have to move,” the pilot said, nodding to the front of the shuttle.

“Right, I’ll strap in as soon as I ditch the armor,” she said.

“What are you wearing under that?”

“What I was born in,” she grinned.

“Don’t take it off, we’re likely to be slapped all around this thing,” he told her. “Those straps will slice you up against bare skin.”

“I’m not going to fit in one of these acceleration bolsters.” She shook her head.

“We’ve got cargo straps against the back wall,” he offered, getting a scowl from her that only resulted in a grin from the pilot. “Or you can strap in up front. The cockpit has bolsters designed for vacuum suits.”

“Let’s do that,” she said dryly.

The pilot chuckled but led her up to the front of the craft and saw her strapped into the bolster directly behind his before he dropped in beside his co-pilot.

“Jace, meet Sergeant Aida. Sergeant, this is Jace. If he hits on you, don’t kill him. I need him breathing.”

“I’ll just break his legs. He doesn’t need his legs to fly a shuttle, right?”

“Yeah, I’m just going to keep my mouth shut and eyes forward,” Jace put in dryly. “Everyone aboard?”

“Yeah, we’re good.”

“Excellent, the Ted just re-entered atmo,” Jace said. “They’ll orbit once and pick us up on their lowest pass in about ten minutes.”

“Alright, let’s not miss our bus,” the pilot said, flipping switches to bring his bird to life. As he did that, he glanced over his shoulder. “Oh, I’m Roger Sterling, by the way, Sergeant. Good to meet you.”

She nodded to the displays in front of him. “Watch the road, Sterling. We can do the introductions thing when we’re off world.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He grinned but turned back to the controls as the big craft began to whine with tightly controlled power.

The shuttle vibrated for a moment before the engine smoothed out and began to pick up speed, the pilot pushing forward on the engine throttle.

“Turbines to speed, all systems check green,” he said.

“Roger that,” Jace said with a smirk. “Ground is clear, we’re good to go.”

“Redirecting exhaust thrust to vertical ports,” Sterling replied, flipping an entire bank of switches with a sweep of his hand.

The shuttle shook for a moment then slowly began to rise up on a plume of superheated plasma exhaust that charred the ground beneath it. Sterling brought it up about fifty meters, then slowly stood the shuttle on its tail as he cut power from the vertical ports and put full throttle to the main engines.

They rolled slightly to the left as the power fluctuated, then slowly began to climb as the system stabilized.

“Airspeed approaching 200 knots,” Jace said a moment later, surprising Sorilla. She’d barely felt the acceleration.

“Roger. Leveling out, increasing to max cruise.”

Sterling leveled them out around 20,000 meters, bringing the shuttle up to just under the speed of sound.

“Scramjet systems read clear.”

“Go for scramjet,” Sterling said, swiping more switches.

“Scramjet is go,” Jace said just before they were all slammed back into their seats as the immensely powerful systems kicked in and boosted the rocket past the speed of sound, heading for its maximum hypersonic speed.

“There’s the Ted,” Jace said, nodding to his screen.

“I see her, portside,” Sterling replied, causing Sorilla to glance out the thick port glass where an approaching fireball could be seen. “Bringing us to matching course.”

The USV Thomas Edison was technically still on a ballistic orbit of Hayden, just one that had taken it insanely low in the planet’s atmosphere. As it hurtled along at increasingly dangerously low speeds, the shuttle struggled to speed up fast enough to catch the larger spacecraft or, rather, to make a speed that wouldn’t result in everyone onboard being torn to pieces when they were picked up by the faster-moving Edison.

They turned the shuttle onto a matching course, pushing its scramjet engine as fast as they could, and waited for the larger ship to overtake them. As it closed on them, the shuttle jerked in place.

“What was that?” Roger frowned. “Turbulence?”

“Area checks clear. Shouldn’t be any

” Jace said, frowning himself. “Must be the heat from the Ted.”

“They’re still behind us and moving hypersonic. No way their heat has messed up local air yet.”

Sorilla’s attention was diverted from their discussion when her armor sent a warning straight to her ocular implants, using the priority codes she’d put in herself just a day earlier.

Warning. Gravity event detected.

She leaned forward, actually snapping the straps holding her in place, and put a hand on Sterling’s shoulder.

“Enemy fire incoming! Evade!”

“What?” he and Jace half turned to look at her, but she just reached over and put a hand on his, shoving the stick hard to the right.

The shuttle’s engines whined as it was thrown off course, both pilots refocusing in a hurry to keep from spinning out at hypersonic.

“Lady, you crazy bitch! You’ll kill us all!”

“Get fast! Get moving! And get us the hell out of here!” she snarled in reply. “There’s a bad guy with a big, bad gun out there somewhere, and he’s aiming it in our general direction!”

They were about to reply when there was a flash of light in the sky that nearly blinded them all, and every system on the bird seemed to start screaming as one.

“Radiation alerts! EMP wave detected!” Jace called out. “Crap! It’s a nuke!”

“I can’t find the Ted on screens!”

“It’s gone.” Sorilla said, eyes staring out at the fireball in the sky to their left. “That wasn’t a nuke, it was the Thomas Edison.”

“Holy shit,” Sterling cursed, pushing the stick forward. “I’m getting low and fast. Hang on to your hats.”

The shuttle screamed in protest as he dove her hard, heading for the jungle below.

Sorilla, bracing herself with the full strength of her armor, found herself staring out the large screens, fascinated. “What the hell is that?”

Jace looked over at her, then at what she was looking at. His jaw dropped. “I have no idea

”

It was a fireball, so low that Sorilla could hardly believe it hadn’t hit the ground already, racing along the curve of the planet with such speed that it was leaving a wake of destruction behind it the likes none of them had ever seen.

“Is it

them?” Sorilla asked, completely at a loss.

“N-no,” Sterling replied, checking his instruments. “It’s us.”

“What?” both asked him together.

“If I’m reading this right, that’s the Socrates!” he said, barely believing his own words.

“They’re flying under 1,000 meters!” Jace objected. “That’s insane!”

“Who’s in command of that thing?” Sorilla found herself asking in total shock.

Modern spacecraft, shuttles, and the like notwithstanding, were not flight capable. They didn’t “fly” in atmosphere; they fell with style. If things were all plotted correctly and they used a little engine power, they could even manage to miss the ground they had aimed at, but for all that they did not fly.

Taking one into the atmosphere was an exciting maneuver, but as crazy as it all seemed, it was reasonably routine. Especially on pre-colonial worlds where no tether had been established yet, you needed to duck into the atmosphere to pick up shuttles. It was a lot cheaper to burn some antimatter than it would be try and give a shuttle all the fuel, support, and other things needed to give it trans-orbital capacity.

Even so, you never took a ship down into the thicker atmosphere near ground level. It was exponentially more likely to do something untoward, like, you know, crash. To go that low while moving as fast as this ship was moving wasn’t insane, it was suicidal.

“Vacuum sucking

” Jace whispered. “They’re off my speed charts. I can’t calculate for them without recalibrating my displays.”

The Socrates, if that was what they were watching, was pulling away from the jungle canopy now, and they could quickly see why it was going so fast.

“They’re firing their engines, full burn!”

“Snap out of it, Jace. Plot me a course that stays way the hell clear of that!” Sterling ordered. “We’d fry like bacon strips if we got within a kilometer of them at the rate they’re going!”

The Socrates stood itself on end, engines sending a plume of particles that marked their passage like a ribbon in the sky, and powered its way back into orbit.

“What the hell is he doing?”

“That’s an attack vector, gentlemen,” Sorilla said. “I suggest you brace for more EMP hits.”

*****

USV Socrates

15 Grand over Hayden

“Sookin syn!” Alexi swore in his native language, infuriated by the situation. “Where did they come from, damn it all!?”

“Admiral Shepard must have missed one, Captain,” Commander Ashley said grimly.

“Exterior heat!” Alexi commanded, not acknowledging the statement.

“Too hot, Captain. We’re still blind here!”

“Bozhe!” he cursed again. “Position?”

“20,000 meters and climbing hard, sir.”

If they see us, we’re dead. And how could they possibly miss us? Alexi thought grimly. His only hope was that his ship was moving fast enough, close enough to the planet, to come up on their target before they could retask their weapon from the Edison.

“90,000 meters! Heat is falling off!”

“Retract heat shields!”

“We’re still too hot, Captain!”

“They’ll survive long enough! Do it!”

There was a pause, then. “Aye, sir. Retracting heat shields.”

“Commander, now is the time for you to do your thing, yes?”

“Aye, Captain,” Ashley said, keying his board to life. “Permission to remove weapon safeties?”

“Granted!”

“Safeties off. Weapon systems are live. Awaiting targeting data

” Ashley said, eyes on the screens that had come to life showing the blue skies of Hayden giving way to the black of space.

“There she is, Captain! I’ve got her on my screen, coming in from the second moon!”

“Send data to Commander Ashley!”

“Aye, Cap!”

“Locking

Locking

” Ashley said. “Goddamn we’re close, and that is a big ship.”

“We are closer than anyone else who has lived, Commander. Kill that sookin syn before it kills us,” Alexi ordered tightly.

“Locked! Hard lock! Sir, permission to—”

“Just shoot them!” Alexi snapped, irritated by the seemingly interminable steps involved in having such a simple thing done.

“Aye aye.” Ashley sounded a little put out at having his procedures interrupted. “Firing all tubes on external magazines. Firing all tubes!”

The Socrates shuddered as the full 150-missile load exploded from her box launchers, jumping out ahead of the ship and accelerating hard into orbit. At better than a hundred gravities of acceleration, they crossed the space between the two ships in seconds instead of minutes. The alien craft had no chance to turn, or even open fire with its point defense as the entire salvo slammed home.

“Shields!” Alexi called as he saw the missiles hit, knowing that, one way or another, it was all over.

The screens went dead again as the heat shields slammed back into place, leaving them blind as the Socrates continued to climb into Hayden orbit. A few moments later, the big ship bucked hard, as if slapped, but when they didn’t die from it, the crew started to breathe again.

“External temperatures dropping. They’re reaching safe margins, sir.”

“Retract shields.”

Everyone waited with bated breath as the screens flickered back to life, eyes searching for evidence of the alien cruiser. Any evidence.

“There

We got it

” someone said, pointing. “We got it!”

Cheers went up and then down the length of the ship as people realized they weren’t about to die, but Alexi didn’t join them. His heart was slowing again as he examined the screens. Where the ship had been, there was now nothing but expanding plasma and flying debris. They’d hit it with many times the power needed to kill it, he was sure of that. Streaks of fire marked the debris passing into Hayden’s atmosphere, burning up as it passed the Socrates on its way down.

Alexi leaned back, swallowing hard.

It took him several long moments, but he managed to find his voice finally. “Do we have Taskforce Three on any of our long-range screens?”

There was a long pause before anyone responded.

“No, sir.”

Alexi sighed, eyes closing for a moment. Shepard had been a friend for a long time, and this was no way to die.

“Order the Nicola Tesla to pick up the shuttle,” he said finally, eyes coming open again.

He stared out at the curve of the planet and into the depths of space beyond for a long time.

“Tell them to be quick about it, if you please? I desire very much to be gone from here.”

The USV Socrates cut back its engines, flying into a ballistic orbit of Hayden as shooting stars colored the planet scene behind.

*****

“It’s almost beautiful, until you know what it is,” Sorilla said as she leaned back in her bolster, eyes on the shooting stars crisscrossing the sky above them.

“The Nicky is inbound. ETA five minutes,” Jace said, his heart rate now back to normal.

“Alright, leveling out. Send me the plot,” Sterling replied.

“On your board.”

The shuttle twisted around, its scramjet thrust bringing it to hypersonic speed as it made for the pickup point. Sorilla found herself looking out at the curvature of the planet and the two moons beyond. The shooting stars made by the destruction of the alien ship completed the picture, a surreal moment in time. She didn’t stop staring until the USV Nicola Tesla rumbled over them, snagging the shuttle in flight with a carbon tether hoot, and pulled them up and into its belly.

Hayden was gone for her then, a slice of the past. There would be more jungles in the future, Sorilla knew, more fighting, more dying. If she could help a few more people the way she felt she’d helped the colonists on Hayden, then she would be fine with that.

It was the only way she could live, the only way she wanted to live.

De Opresso Liber.

Hayden hua.