Prologue

Unnamed Star System

Base of the Orion-Cygnus Arm

It had been a long time since Masters of Ships Parath had observed a fleet quite as disparate as the one his personal transfer craft was currently skimming through. Parithalian cruisers and battleships were the norm for his experiences, and he had of late become used to seeing Ros’El Gravity Destroyers. But by his count, at least three other peoples were present, and that made this one of the more diverse Allied movements he’d been a part of.

It is not usual for so many different species to come together in this way. He frowned curiously, trying to determine why. To the best of his knowledge, there was no reason for it. Certainly the species they’d encountered out on wheel fringe of Alliance space wasn’t enough to warrant it.

He continued to ponder on that as his transfer craft docked with the Everlasting Glory, one of the Parithalian flagships.

None of this makes any sense. Why send the Glory out here? This is a small fringe empire at most.

“Master Parath.” A young Parithalian approached him as he disembarked, stepping down onto the deck while tenders took care of the transfer craft. “I’ve been sent to escort you to the meeting.”

“Thank you,” he said simply, gesturing to the back of the ship bay. “When you are ready.”

“Of course. With me then, Master.”

They took a short walk to a transfer station, then rode the car up to the upper command deck. Built into ships like the Glory, the upper decks were for Masters of Fleet Operations and were only used on Flagships. Parath followed his guide into a secure room, standing to order when he recognized the people within.

“Master of Ships Parath, Masters,” the Officer said quietly, announcing his arrival.

For a few long moments, his presence was ignored, until finally an elder Parithalian looked over at him and nodded.

“Welcome, Master of Ships. We have some work to finish, please be seated,” Master of Fleets Demescene said.

“Thank you, Master of Fleets,” Parath said, advancing deliberately to take the proffered seat.

He remained there, silently, for a significant time until the murmurs of the Upper Deck Officers finally quieted down and the Master of Fleets again turned his attention to Parath.

“Well, Ships Master,” he said, using the informal, “you managed to land yourself in a particularly pungent pile of excrement, I see.”

Parath stiffened, not sure how to take that. It was in some ways a literal truth, but to his mind it was more accurate to say that they’d all be pulled into the pile by the Ross. He finally settled for a stiff acknowledgment that gave away little else.

The Master of Fleets smiled slightly in return.

“You disagree?” he asked, his tone deceptively mild.

Parath considered his response for a moment. “That would depend on what we’re intending to do about it, I would think.”

“Oh?” Demescene asked, seemingly amused. “I would say that our intentions are clear.”

“I saw one of the most extensive fleets I’ve ever personally been a part of as I transferred over,” Parath acknowledged slowly. “However, I must admit that I cannot fathom the reason behind it. This is, at best, a minor fringe empire. They’ve shown no technical, or numerical, edge to elicit this sort of response.”

“No, they haven’t,” the Master of Fleets sighed. “And if it were purely another pocket empire on the fringes, we’d not be overly concerned. I looked into the records, and the Ross agree that the primary contested system was populated originally by people from this empire.”

Parath winced, rubbing his eye bones lightly. This entire mess was just one headache after another.

“If that is the case,” he asked finally, “why are we involved at all? Other than trying to keep the Ross from imploding planets wholesale, that is.”

“That alone would be worthy enough for our attention, Master of Ships,” Demescene admitted. “But no. We analyzed instrument logs from your ships and found something that concerned us.”

Parath frowned. “I don’t recall anything of particular interest.”

“You would not have noted it,” Demescene sighed. “This comes under your Oath to the Fleet, and to the Alliance, Parath. It is not to be repeated.”

“I understand.”

“Since the Alliance last went to war with the Ross’El, there have been a few things that were never brought to the light of the stars,” Master of Fleets Demescene said seriously. “One of those things is that we’ve added an instrument package to every ship built in Alliance space since the end of the last war. Every ship, Master Parath, save those of the Ross. We would have put it on theirs as well, were they built anywhere but deep inside Ross’El-controlled space. This package is very secret, and its purpose even more so. Whenever an Alliance ship lands in any major, and many minor, ports throughout Alliance space, the data from this package is retrieved and sent to the central worlds.”

Parath’s mind boggled. There were tens of thousands of Alliance ships, hundreds of thousands even. The data take from military vessels alone would be staggering, to say nothing of civilian ships.

“That’s…that is incredibly difficult to believe,” he finally choked out.

“Believing it is not a requirement,” Demescene growled. “The instrument package from your ships recorded something we’ve not seen since the last war with the Ross’El, something that makes us believe that the Alliance may be on the cusp of another war with the Ross.”

A dark chill shuddered through his body as he considered that. The Ross weren’t what anyone would call a “warrior” race. However, when pressed, they had no conscience and no limits. That, combined with a knowledge of space-time that was literally unrivalled by any known species, made for a very dangerous group to list as your enemies.

“Why do you think that?” he asked finally.

“These readings.” Demescene passed over a modular display.

The information on it made little sense to Parath, however, but he did note the timing involved. “These signals were detected during our last scouting encounter.”

“That is correct,” Demescene acknowledged. “That was our first hint of what the Ross might have been flying so close to the light for.”

The Masters of Fleet sighed. “During the last war, the Ross had several installations deep within their territory. They were centers of research, we believe, core to their space-time manipulation technology. We detected them originally because they seem impossible to hide due to the enormous warping of space from the technology within. It can be detected many light years away, almost in life time.”

Parath hissed through his beak. For a warping field to be detected that far away in life time… well, there were singularities that weren’t that blatant. Large ones.

“What did the facilities do?”

“We never found out,” Demescene admitted. “The Alliance had intelligence that they were vital to Ross’El war efforts, so Command sent in the Sentinels.”

Parath dipped his head, understanding. When you absolutely wanted something destroyed in the least time, you asked for Lucians. They had unparalleled records in the field and were the devil itself to kill. And you didn’t stop a Lucian Sentinel, you could only kill one.

“Not one of them returned,” Demescene went on, drawing another shocked hiss from Parath. “However, the systems in which we’d detected the warping… no longer exist.”

Parath dropped the display to the table, eyes bulging as his inner lids snapped open to expose the inner eye completely to the air. “Excuse me?”

He must have heard that one wrong. Star systems didn’t vanish. You didn’t destroy them. That was insane. Even the Ross’El had never imploded stars during the war.

“We don’t know what happened,” Demescene admitted. “They were all extremely populated Ross’El star systems… And now they’re all extremely hazardous point singularities. The Ross began negotiations for peace shortly after that, and applied for alliance membership fifty stellar intervals later. The Alliance has always considered it better to have them close and know what they were doing than to leave them to their own devices.”

That much Parath was well aware of. The Ross had never been the most trusted players in Alliance politics, but it had always been clear that they were too powerful to be sidelined in any significant way, despite the intense communication problems engendered by the enigmatic species.

Like many in the Alliance military, Parath had done at least a few studies of the Ross’El; it was practically required that at some point an officer candidate write up some treatise on the Ross and their unique gifts to the Alliance.

He was in general agreement with the popular view among his peers that the Ross simply didn’t observe or experience the universe the same way most sentient species did. It was clear that they had some form of sensory connection to space-time that went far beyond normal senses. Many believed that they could see, or in some other way sense, gravity itself.

They certainly can’t seem to see much else, Parath thought sourly. Ross’El blindness when it came to any sort of interaction with people was nearly legendary.

“Do you believe that these people are somehow on the same level as the Ross?” he asked finally, rather skeptical of the thought.

“No,” Master of Fleets Demescene gestured negatively. “What we believe is that the Ross had backup facilities and one of them was hidden in this backwater part of the Galaxy. Likely they either lost contact with it after the war, or intentionally severed contact to prevent us from locating it. It’s been over a hundred stellar intervals. This empire expanded to absorb former Ross territory and now control the facility, likely without even being aware of it.”

Parath snorted. “So they have something buried somewhere near their worlds that could quite easily collapse an entire star system into a singularity, and they have no idea? Knowing the Ross, it’s most likely in an attractive system as well. They have a peculiar affinity for certain forms of life types.”

“Most likely,” Demescene nodded. “However, our concern is securing the device or, failing that, seeing it destroyed. The Ross can’t be permitted to believe they have a war edge on the Alliance again. It would be far too destructive.”

Parath acceded, “That will be difficult. Particularly if we must fight these people while hiding our intent from the Ross.”

“Yes, I’ve seen the new data,” Demescene said. “They’ve massively increased the acceleration potential of their ships. They approach Ross’El speeds, now, surpassing some of our own ships.”

“Not combat-rated vessels, but yes.” Parath nodded. “What concerns me is that they went from a maximum of twenty-eight times Parithan gravity acceleration to over five hundred times in, as near as we can tell, a single generation advancement. That indicates that they’ve managed to begin manipulating space-time on par with Alliance ships, though likely not to the levels of the Ross.”

“Diviner forbid,” Demescene swore lightly. “We have enough difficulty with one species like the Ross.”

“Be that as it might be,” Parath said, “we should not take them lightly. They control the jump nexus that holds the gate to nearly the entire arm. We may be able to find a path around, but it would likely take entire stellar intervals…”

“No, we’re taking their nexus,” the Master of Fleets declared. “The world the Ross’El want is the stepping stone. We must control it if we’re to find the device before the Ross.”

“They’ve already fought fiercely to retake it once,” Parath warned, “and even fiercer to hold it. I believe that they’re well aware that it stands on a jump nexus, otherwise I think they would have fallen back already.”

“That isn’t our concern. We need that system, so we’ve mobilized a fleet to take it,” Demescene said seriously. “A fleet that would have given pause to even the Ross themselves at the height of the war.”

Parath nodded grimly. He’d seen the fleet, at least part of it, when transferring over. There was no doubt, the Alliance was quite serious about taking that system, no matter how troublesome the current occupants were.

This will be a short conflict, he supposed. However, I believe it will not be so clean as the Master of Fleets believes.

*****

West Point Academy,

New York, NY, Earth

“Lieutenant!”

The woman was a slightly stocky five foot ten, and from behind she looked like most any one of the other uniformed people around her. When she turned in the direction of the familiar voice, however, it became clear that she stood out in at least one way.

In a sea of people at the epitome of physical fitness and youth, the lieutenant was clearly head and shoulders above her associates in both categories. Unlike the gym fit eighteen-and nineteen-year-olds around her, the lieutenant looked to be somewhere in her late twenties or early thirties, with sundried skin and eyes that looked a decade older at least.

She was also the only one of her fellow students who wasn’t carrying books or slab computers, something that only a particularly observant viewer might pick out. If they were close enough to look deep into her eyes, they’d realize why she didn’t carry those things, but then, if they were that close they either already knew… or they were in mortal peril for their lives.

“Lt. Aida!”

“Yes?” Newly minted Second Lieutenant Sorilla Aida looked to the speaker, smiling when she recognized him. “Ton! I haven’t seen you since…”

“The op on Hayden,” the big man grinned. “I was shipped out while you were shipped on. How have you been?”

She sourly glanced down at the gold bar on her shoulder, then rolled her eyes. “I’ve been regretting taking the Army up on their offer for promotion.”

Ton chuckled deeply. “Imagine that. It’s hard to see a butterbar in the sergeant I relied on, though.”

“Tell that to my professors,” she snorted. “I haven’t felt this stupid since boot.”

“You can’t tell me that classes are seriously giving you a problem?” Ton shot her a skeptical look.

“Did I say that? I said I felt stupid, not that I was stupid.” Sorilla grinned wide.

“Good. Good,” Ton said, glancing behind her. “Don’t look now, but I think you’ve picked up a tail.”

Sorilla didn’t have to look over her shoulder to know who he was talking about,.“They’re classmates.”

“Really?” The big man grinned, his white teeth gleaming bright enough to blind a person. “Well, introduce me then.”

Sorilla groaned. “Ton…”

“That’s Captain Washington to you, Lieutenant.” The big Marine kept on grinning. “Or would you prefer I made it an order?”

She gave him a look that clearly defied him to even consider it, but also realized that she didn’t really have any good options either way. The hell of it was that she knew he’d never once have even dreamed of doing the same to her when she was a master sergeant. There was something just wrong about being promoted and actually getting less respect than she had before.

Sullenly, Sorilla turned to make the introductions, mumbling under her breath just loud enough for Ton to hear her, “See if I drag your wounded arse out of any more jungles in the future.”

Ton just laughed it off, chatting amiably with the kiddies while she stood in the background. He at least had the decency not to bring up any stories about her, though she’d have been genuinely surprised if he had. Most of the stories they shared were either of the boring variety or the private sort between squadmates. Some things stayed with the squad.

Finally he was done schmoozing the kids and Ton looked them over seriously. “I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to steal the El-Tee away from you for a bit. She’ll catch up later.”

Well, what could any of them say to that? They saluted and left.

I need to get Captain’s bars, or better yet, a nice Leaf on my collar. Doesn’t matter if it’s silver or gold.

Ton turned back to her after the kids were all gone. “You busy for lunch?”

“I guess I am now, sir,” she told him with a soft snort and a crooked grin.

“Good,” he said with his blinding smile. “I need to ask you some things.”

“Oh? Do tell.”

“On the way. I know a nice little bistro not too far from here, by shuttle bus,” Ton said, extending his arm. “If it pleases m’lady?”

She rolled her eyes, knowing that it was all a game, but what the hell, it was a fun game once in a while. Especially when she wasn’t in a warzone. She took his arm and they walked off toward the closest public transit portal.

“So, what brings you to my neck of the woods?” she asked while they walked.

“Don’t know if you heard, but I was assigned to Task Force Seven,” he told her. “We’re shipping out shortly to fill out their TO&E for ops.”

“You headhunting, Cap?” she asked, a little hopefully.

“Sorry, Sar… Ell Tee.” He shook his head. “That just sounds wrong. “

“Call me Soeur,” she said, shrugging. “Most did when I was growing up.”

“Oh?” He blinked. The word sounded French to him, but that wasn’t one of the languages he knew, unfortunately. His career had leaned more toward middle-eastern languages, followed by far eastern. “Is that a word or just short for Sorilla?”

“Both. It’s French for sister. Sorilla is a variation on the Italian for the same,” she said.

“Ah, and Aida?” he asked, while they were on the subject.

“Japanese.”

“Seriously?” he blinked. “How the…?”

“Dad’s dad was Japanese American, third generation. Bit of a mix there, but the name followed down. Dad grew up with his mom, she was Italian,” she said. “Mom was Mexican.”

“Interesting mix,” he said, shrugging. “At any rate, no, I’m not headhunting. My team’s full up.”

“Pity,” she said sourly as they got to the transit portal.

The local transit portal was linked into the statewide transit system, which in turn cross-linked into the interstate, so as they took a seat in one of the available cars, they could have gone literally across the country if they had the time or inclination. They had neither, of course, so Ton just waved to the computer as he sat down.

“Stony Point.”

“Please remain seated while in transit,” the car said, pulling out of the lot and into the transit lane. “For your security, all passengers are required to…”

“Save it,” Ton said, tapping a cancel button. “We’ve all heard it before.”

The computer shut up as the car accelerated south along the Hudson, heading for the small town of Stony Point. Sorilla preferred cars she could drive herself, but the public system had its advantages. It was a hell of a lot easier to hold a conversation while taking the transit cars, for one, and they legally went a lot faster. The only way to get from one point to another both faster, and legally, was to use a private aircraft, and she got enough falling out of the skies on the job.

“So, what is it you’re after with me then?” she asked, settling into the seat.

“You are pretty much out premier expert on the aliens, didn’t you realize?” he asked, half chuckling.

“Me? Ton, I’m a glorified school marm.”

The big black man laughed outright. “If my school back in the day had teachers like you, I’d probably be a doctor now. You have more firsthand knowledge of the aliens than anyone else. There are a few scholars and researchers out there who probably know more theoretical bullshit than you, but when it comes to experience, you’re it.”

Sorilla grunted, though she supposed she shouldn’t be surprised. There was a reason she was at West Point rather than on a fast track OCS program, and that was because while she was taking classes in leadership and so on with other butter bars, she was giving classes to full bird Colonels on enemy tactics and psychology. Granted, when it came to their tech, her knowledge basically extended to “will it kill you or not?” and ended right there, but she’d had a lot of time to ponder just why they acted the way they did and how they were liable to act in the future.

She wasn’t a psych expert, but she knew how to hum a few bars.

“Huh,” she said finally, “never thought about it.”

“You’ve been too busy with everything they’ve thrown onto you, I’d bet.” Ton shrugged. “You’ve almost not stopped since that first op on Hayden, aside from some mandated medical leave, which barely counts as time off.”

That much was true, she supposed.

“Your missions records are required viewing,” he said. “I’ve ridden with you through every second of combat and intelligence gathering you were involved in since your first drop on Hayden, but it’s not quite the same thing as experience.”

That was true enough, she knew. There was a world of difference between riding a log record and actually being there, despite the wide array of sensie data you got in the record. You could only see what decisions the original person made, how they reacted and acted. You couldn’t make those same decisions yourself, and often you couldn’t even see what it was that led them along the path they chose.

It was an invaluable tool, especially for after action reviews, but it had its limits.

“All right, well, ask away and I’ll do my best,” she said simply.

“Never doubted it, Sister, not for a second.”

*****

USV Barry Sadler

Unknown System, Three jumps from Hayden

The Sadler was a small picket ship assigned on a deep space patrol that they’d been working on for too many weeks by the time they’d jumped into yet another unnamed system.

It actually had a name, it was just one of those generic names from a few hundred years ago that no one but an astronomer or a navigator cared to remember. As far as Lieutenant Alder, who was sitting watch, could remember, it was named after some Middle Eastern king or prophet or something. Most of the stars in the entire region were listed with Muslim and Arabic names, actually, save those few that had been renamed.

For the most part, the only place a star’s name showed up was on the mission reports, and the computer filled that in automatically, so for him and the others on the Sadler, it was just another reef in the darkness.

Alder finished his top-of-the-hour checklist and unbelted, drifting just above his acceleration bolster. The Sadler was on a ballistic course, sweeping around the primary star in a high speed three-week orbit that would bring them close enough to query the eight known jump points that surrounded this particular reef.

He was idly reading an old science fiction novel on his slate, mostly just because he liked reading about all the ways people could get the future wrong and the few ways they could hit the nail on the head. He only managed a few pages this time, however, before a signal tripped the Sadler’s warning network and made him put the book down in a hurry.

He secured it properly, an instinctive reaction for any experienced spacer. Most everyone had a story about the one time they didn’t secure something, the best result being that it was shattered into pieces when the ship accelerated. Alder’s story didn’t have a best result ending, and his nose now had a permanent angle to it that he hadn’t been born with.

The chair straps came next, but he just looped them over his shoulder to hold him down while he worked. There was very little that could sneak up on the Sadler and get so close that they’d have to accelerate before he got his straps done up, and if there was anything that close, they were dead already.

He slapped the shipwide open and opened a checklist with his other hand.

“Wakey wakey, boys and girls, we’ve got a hit on the long-range scanners from a buoy sitting near this star’s Epsilon Jump Point. Secure everything, including yourselves. We may have to light the fires.”

Alder closed the com and went straight to work.

The satcom hit was just a notification of a gravitational event near a jump point, which could mean any of a number of things. The Epsilon Point was three light minutes from their current location and, either fortunately or not depending on what exactly was happening, almost dead ahead.

He killed all power and active scanners—they were only good for short-range work anyway—and put the Sadler into deep listening mode.

Somewhere out there, something was about to make a lot of noise, and the Sadler’s job was to hear every last bit of it.

Even in space.

“What’s going on?” Chief Bitte demanded as he swung himself onto the command deck of the Sadler.

“Hold on, data is still coming in. We’re looking at an unknown gravity event at Epsilon JP,” Alder said, not looking up. “First visual data is compiling now.”

“Roger,” the chief said, settling into the chair beside Alder.

The Sadler was a scout/courier class ship, built probably the better part of a century earlier as part of the initial push out into space. It was intended to locate planets that could be colonized and to act as an emergency courier and transport for vital materials. She was a fast ship from the days when fast was a relative term.

The command deck housed two people, and that was it, pilot and co-pilot, while the rest of the eight man crew tried to keep her in one piece from below. Like all ships built on Earth in the last hundred years, she was about as solid as you got. Ten thousand tons of meteoric iron spun-welded into an ugly cigar and wrapped around a five-thousand-ton VASIMR drive.

Alder swore as he got a look at the first compiled image and slapped his hand down over the alarm switch.

“All hands, general quarters. I say again, all hands to general quarters. This is not a fucking drill.”

Beside him, Chief Bitte swore softly, eyes on the screens.

“Holy shit.”

Less than three light minutes ahead of them, closing far too quickly for Alder’s liking, was what looked like an Armada moving slowly out of the Epsilon Jump Point.

Chapter I

The Alamo Shipyards

West Jovian Trojan Point

Admiral Nadine Brooke stepped awkwardly through the curving corridor, intently aware that the environment she was traversing wasn’t built for the standard gravity it had been converted to. She ducked under a water reclamation hose and made her way into the control center for the station.

“Admiral on deck!”

“As you were,” she said, eyes gravitating to where the commodore in charge of the facility was standing. “Permission to enter, Commodore.”

“Granted, Admiral. Come on up here and have a look at your new ship.”

She stepped up beside him, looking out over the vac-dock section of the facility. Her ship wasn’t the only one being built in the immense space beyond the air seal; there were five others just like it on this side of the facility alone.

“Modified Terra Class. We’ve made some changes based on what we learned building TF-7’s ships,” the commodore said quietly. “Officially, they’re still listed as Terra Class, but around here we’re referring to them as Valkyries, ma’am.”

Nadine smiled thinly.

The term “Valkyrie” had originally been slapped on her group, particularly from the ground-based military that was still predominantly male, as a snide slur because a such a large portion of her command staff were women. The early days and weeks of the war were horrifically hard on the personnel of the Solarian organization, starting with the near total annihilation of Task Force Two. So total was the devastation, in fact, that there was only one single survivor.

Then Sergeant Sorilla Aida was the sole survivor of her squad and, in fact, the entire Task Force. In that single strike, over ninety percent of the organization’s military officers were killed. Officers that also happened to be mostly men, since the military track was slanted strongly to that side. Nadine herself came up through the science track, a much more gender-balanced group, as did most of her officers.

So they’d staffed TF-V with the most experienced people they had available, and she supposed that no one should have been surprised when the people on the ground started making snide comments about them. She’d been the most experienced spacer available when she took over TF-V, but for combat operations, she could admit, to herself at least, that she had been the proverbial babe in the woods. Most of her command stand had been. Their most experienced military officers were all non-coms, and thank God for them because without them she would not have been surprised if someone had forgotten to pop the safeties off the weapons in their first action.

After the last battle of Hayden, however, no one was saying “Valkyrie” with snide tones and chuckles under their breath. She and her officers took the title and made it theirs, and that was the way it should be and the way it was going to be from that point on. They’d taken ownership of the title, paid for it in blood, and anyone who disrespected the people who’d died under that flag would face her.

Simple as that.

She refocused her attention on the new ships, letting that train of thought fade for the moment. She had others things to concern herself with, and going any deeper down that road would require some free time, privacy, and a bottle of contraband whiskey to toast the fallen.

The new so called “Valkyries” were functionally identical to the Terra Class, of course: Long, squashed cylindrical bodies built around a solid nickel-iron core that housed the powerful VASIMR Drive that powered all human ships. Unlike the old Los Angeles Class ships, the Terra and Valkyrie Class ships housed three large observation decks that jutted out from the aft sections and leaned forward. She knew from the specs that each could be used as an auxiliary bridge when not engaged in combat, or as lounges, observation points, and various other uses.

The biggest change, however, was the ugly bulge at the front of the ship, making each of the new ships look like a snake that had somehow managed to get an apple stuck halfway down its throat. That, along with the hammerhead structure jutting out from the prow, gave the ships a decidedly different silhouette that wasn’t remotely as sleek as the older style.

She supposed that it was an example of military engineering, valuing form over function, because those structures, though ugly as sin, had a function that she and any spacer worth their O2 would value almost as much as their lives.

“What’s her top speed?” she asked softly.

“In our space-time?” The commodore shrugged. “Projections make them a bit faster than the Terra Class, ma’am. Almost 800 standard gravities, but you could push it higher if you get everyone strapped in and everything bolted down. Just remember, once you redline the drive, you lose gravity compensation for acceleration and the crew and ship will get pummeled about just like on the Los Angeles and Cheyenne Class ships.”

“Understood.” She nodded. “It’s amazing that you managed to cram all that into the forward section. How on Earth did you manage to reverse engineer the enemy gravity tech, even to this degree, so quickly?”

“Classified, ma’am,” he said instantly, looking somewhat apologetic. “Even to you.”

Nadine twisted her lips a bit, but nodded. “Understandable, I suppose. How soon until TF-V is refitted and ready to deploy?”

“A few more weeks,” he told her, happy to shift topics. “We have another half dozen hulls on the sundive now. They’ll be slagged by the forge facility as they sling past Mercury and form molded on the way back here. Once they’re in our control, we’ll fit them with all new ceramic panels, control electronics, a new power reactor that is far better than anything you had before, and all the other requirements for a military ship. My crews are the best, ma’am, but even they can only put together ships just so quickly.”

She nodded silently; there was nothing to be said there. It took time to completely rebuild every ship in the fleet, but it was necessary. The Los Angeles and Cheyenne class had served well, but they were hopelessly outclassed by the alien ships. Successes with them so far had come from the fact that most of the battles to date had occurred when one or the other of the groups had been pinned down to planetary defense.

In that situation, you had limitations on speeds that handicapped the aliens, but you couldn’t rely on it. If she were forced to remain in defensive positions entirely, the alien forces would have the initiative, and that would not end well for Earth. They needed ships that could intercept and engage the enemy in deep space, away from planetary targets, without giving up a huge tactical edge to the enemy.

Nadine just hoped that the new class of ships was the answer to that problem. Otherwise she had bad misgivings about the future.

*****

Restaurant, Overlooking the Hudson River

Stony Point, NY

It was a small-ish eatery, not one that Sorilla had visited before, but it was clear that Ton had been in the area a time or two. He ordered for them both, after securing permission from her with a glance. She was both amused and appreciative. She’d spent many previous outings with men that went disastrously wrong in either direction. He at least had enough sense to check that his chauvinism was appreciated or, at least, tolerated before he started taking liberties.

While they waited for their food, the two operators exchanged the normal everyday pleasantries one would expect from a couple out on the town, be they professional colleagues or something more. It was the sort of meaningless drivel that Sorilla had picked up quickly when scouting out targets for guerilla ops in various nations that she had both been, and absolutely never been, assigned to.

It was all a cover for a series of sub-voc transmissions pulsing between their respective implants, exchanging far more information than anyone could by voice alone.

A peculiar multi-tasking talent, Sorilla supposed, but one quickly picked up by soldiers equipped with their level of cybernetics. Her own implant suite was far beyond his—most of Ton’s gear was not much more advanced than she’d had on her initial op on Hayden—but that was fine. Most of the com stuff hadn’t changed all that much since she’d gotten her suite.

They shared tactical maps of some of the areas Sorilla had encountered the aliens at. Ton had them already, but it was more to establish a common ground for their conversation. While talking about the weather and the view, Sorilla subvocalized a few comments to Ton, supplementing them with fragments of her mission logs, while he sent back the occasional question in like manner.

It was a fast shot-by-shot method of communication that moved information back and forth with shocking swiftness. They were both trained speed readers, though in this case it was more a matter of briefly imprinting the meaning as files flashed passed the visual cortex without actually appearing visually. It didn’t convey emotions particularly well, however, and when she got to a certain part, Ton shifted out of the process and began chuckling deeply, unable to help it.

She scowled at him, recognizing the moment he was laughing at, and spoke aloud. “It wasn’t that funny.”

“That’s just not fucking fair!” he quoted, his voice a rough falsetto.

Sorilla groaned. “I said that aloud?”

“Sub voc,” he grinned, correcting her. “Your implants picked it up.”

“Great,” she muttered, shaking her head ruefully.

In truth, there was very little that the implants they’d put in her didn’t pick up. They were calibrated to record everything she saw and heard; they picked up far more than she could possibly smell or taste with the hyperspectral capability of her corneal implants. She supposed her sense of touch was still largely inviolate, but that was about the only exception and even much of that could be interpolated by her implants.

Being enhanced as she was meant giving up a lot of privacy, but being in the military did that too. A lot of things that civilians took for granted were almost unthinkable for her or her comrades and, she supposed, vice versa.

“Anyway,” she sighed, pushing on, “those guys aren’t the same as the Ghoulies, that’s for sure. Charlie there knew how to fight and could take a shot from a battle rifle and keep on coming.”

“I noted that from the records,” Ton said, “not to mention my own brief encounter with them.”

Sorilla nodded. Ton had almost gotten himself killed pulling Crow out of a bad spot in the Hayden jungles. The Charlie types were seriously bad news, no matter how you figured it.

“What do you think about them besides that, though?” Ton asked.

“Operators,” she said simply. “They’ve got to be special forces, or the alien equivalent. You don’t send in small groups of regular military like that, not unless you’re used to fighting from a position of massive superiority.”

“Not even then, not without a hell of a lot more support than those poor bastards were afforded,” Ton shrugged.

“Exactly,” Sorilla said as their food arrived.

They settled in and Sorilla was pleased to find that the food was really quite good. She wasn’t one to complain about what was for dinner, she’d eaten too many barely digestible things in her life for that, but she could still appreciate something like a free range steak with locally grown mushrooms and onions.

Ton scowled playfully at her as she closed her eyes and savored the bite, so she smiled smugly at him in response.

“Trying to drain my poor limited accounts,” he mourned the cost of the meal, shaking his head.

Free range steak was uncommon, not rare, but certainly pricey in the world. Especially in the U.S., where large factory farms had finally been broken up and all but outlawed decades earlier. The costs of fixing the problems with the runaway greenhouse effect had been such that the government had finally stopped subsidizing companies that made it worse.

Most people ate burger steaks now, as a rule. You could buy them in most any flavor you wanted, and they cost a fraction the price of the real thing, using vat-grown meat that was then ground up so the texture wasn’t off putting. That said, it was the USA, so the real deal was still available, but cattle farming had moved back to the old school methods of the open range. You got less product, but it was generally higher quality and the market price was high enough to make it worth the while of the ranchers.

“Oh, shut it and eat your steak,” she told him as he forlornly looked her over, no doubt calculating the price of the meal in his head. “You’ll be dining on the Army’s dime soon enough anyway.”

Ton shrugged. “Well, there is that.”

A lot of things had changed over the last century. Hell, things had been on a fast track to change for more than a century before that. Industrialization had opened the door to the stars, but at a price. There had been a point when people wondered if the price would be fatal, but thankfully they’d edged through it and backed away from the edge before they had managed to irrevocably toss themselves over.

Either that or we learned to fly on the way down, Sorilla thought with a grim amusement.

There was a lot of truth in that sentiment, the idea that the human race had actually stepped over the brink and plummeted into the abyss, only to flap its arms real hard until it managed to fly back to the top. Global warming had become irreversible by the mid-twenty-first century. Nothing done on Earth would put the genie back in the bottle once the global temperatures rose high enough to start freeing deposits of methane from polar grounds.

Every man, woman, and child on the planet could literally have vanished at that point and it wouldn’t have mattered. The Earth was on a rollercoaster ride to the hot place, with the most pessimistic views stating that eventually it would be no more than a second Venus in the solar system.

That was when governments finally admitted that there as a problem and it had to be resolved. It cost a particularly large fortune, but the price paid had paved the way for the future in ways no one expected. In order to reverse the warming trend, it was necessary to undertake an active attempt to cool the planet. They had been so far beyond merely passive attempts to stop causing harm that it wasn’t funny by that point.

It was a second great space race, one that dwarfed the Apollo project. Eleven nations all cooperating on the first stage of Earth’s weather control network. Stage one was a series of satellites in geo-sync orbit with massive reflectors, intended to direct some of the sunlight away from key areas. They started at the poles, keeping solar energy from melting the ice that remained and encouraging the formation of more. That alone dropped the average temperature by over a full degree in just five years.

Cleaning up the mess on Earth itself took a lot longer, but in the end, they’d managed to pull it off. Most nations had built up deep undercurrents of trust and community in the process, and it wasn’t long before the Solarian Organization formed. Every space-capable nation on Earth, except for the Chinese, were members, as were a great many of those who weren’t space-capable.

The Solarian Organization went far beyond “United Nations in Space.” It was in many ways a nation unto itself. It oversaw colonies once they reached a point of self-sustainability and requested membership, provided for the common defense, and many other functions besides.

Of course, that was what brought them to the point they found themselves at now.

Moving out into the Universe—well, the local parts of the Galaxy, in truth—they eventually ran flat into another group that was expanding in the opposite direction. A lot of people wondered if war was in the nature of humanity, but Sorilla didn’t. She knew that war was in the nature of life.

All living things waged war all the time, with every breath and every motion.

Plants gobbled up resources, strangling out their competition, while insects arrayed themselves in battles with a truly mind boggling variety of weapons. Animals hunted each other, many killed even for sport or pure pleasure, while some species even raped others not of their own kind. The natural world was bloody in tooth and claw, and humans were the top of the heap.

Until now, perhaps.

Out there, they’d perhaps finally met their match.

The unstoppable force of humanity not coming up against an immovable object, but rather another unstoppable force. One of them would have to give. It was her job, hers and Ton’s, and many others, to make sure that it wasn’t humanity that gave.

“So watch out for the stocky grey guys,” she said seriously. “They’re not to be underestimated. They don’t use WMDs as far as we know, but they are skilled and they are precise.”

Ton nodded. “Don’t worry, Sister, I know this. They nailed us fair and square on Hayden the first time. Won’t give them a chance to do that again.”

“Good,” she said. “The Ghoulies, they’re nasty but only because of the sheer firepower they have. Keep that always in the back of your mind and you’ll be okay. They’re predictable: When they encounter a problem, they use their tech like a hammer.”

“Right.” Ton nodded. “And every problem looks like a nail.”

“Bingo.”

“What about the Deltas?” Ton asked.

“Don’t know much about them, never seen them myself.” Sorilla shrugged.

“Yeah, but you’ve read every contact report, haven’t you?” He smiled as he asked.

Sorilla shrugged but conceded the point.

“Honestly, you’re better off asking Fleet there. They’re the ones who’ve contacted those, but they feel like regular army to me. Maybe Navy, something like that,” she said. “They’re competent, obviously trained well, skilled flyers, and disciplined. Those are the sort that win wars, Ton. The Delta’s are the most dangerous of the bunch.”

“Really?” he asked, surprised.

“Hell yes. Operators are scalpels. We are precision instruments that are best used to eliminate very finite targets. The Deltas?” Sorilla shook her head. “My read is that they’re regular army. Those are the guys who take land and control it.”

“Fair enough,” Ton said, nodding. “I can see that.”

“What we don’t know, and what we really need to find out,” Sorilla said, “is just how long the enemy supply chain is. If they’re working a conventional force into this equation, then we’re going to have to figure out what kind of logistics challenges they’re facing, because those are the points we need to hit.”

Ton smiled. “And they have you taking classes with cadets.”

“They also have me teaching classes to Colonels, Ton,” Sorilla grinned back. “This is one of the things I know. Granted, I usually work on a smaller scale than this.”

“Sister, we all usually work on a smaller scale than this,” Ton told her flatly.

She snorted, amused by his tone more than his words. He was right, of course. The sheer logistics of maintaining any sort of war at distances measured in hundreds of light years was staggering. She’d actually gone looking for any treatise written on the subject, in the theoretical realms of course, and found a few. Most were of the general opinion that it wasn’t really possible.

So far as Sorilla was concerned, they’d been proven wrong, but some of their points were very well made.

Supply lines were all but impossible to secure, even if you controlled every jump point right up to the last one, because no matter what, you were still going to have to transport all your material, soldiers, and whatever else, across an intervening space that light itself took significant time to cross. Ambushes were incredibly easy to set up, especially as you got closer and closer to the enemy homeworld. Your supply difficulties would increase geometrically, while the enemy’s would decrease by the same degree.

At some point, no matter how much more technology you had over your enemy, you would lose. Even sticks and stones could eventually wear down a force armed with automatic weapons and ships. Transporting even light armor across the stars was a mind boggling task, and when you got it to where you were going, there was no guarantee that it would operate effectively in the environment you had to fight in. The Cougars and other armored units on Hayden were a perfect example of that; the otherwise quite competent light-armored units were bogged down to inutility by the terrain rather than their opposing numbers.

Taking a world was easy. Destroying it? Childs play. Holding it, however, was a promethean task if there was an indigenous people in place willing to die for their freedoms.

There were ample points in Earth’s own history to show it. Afghanistan, Vietnam, Iraq, France, and many others just in modern history. In fact, she was only really aware of one true example where the territory taken by the superior force was permanently held, and that was the United States of America.

That one was a cheat, however, because that battle was won before it truly began. Before the first settlers arrived on American shores, a massive plague, or series of plagues, had essentially annihilated the indigenous peoples. They were all but extinct, and even then they put up a fight that lasted well into the twentieth century before it was finally ended. Had the Native American peoples maintained the numbers they existed in just a couple decades before the European settlers arrived, they would most certainly have sent the invaders packing in short order.

That was what worried her most, Sorilla realized.

There was historical evidence there that if you wanted to hold land for your own nation, you almost had to commit genocide to do it. Anything less, and sooner or later you’d lose your grip.

It was one lesson she fervently hoped that the enemy hadn’t learned from their own history.

“Well,” Ton shrugged, “I hope those colonels are listening when you talk, Ell Tee.”

Sorilla smiled wanly. Sometimes she wondered.

“A few of them do,” she sighed. “There’s one prick who I swear is watching porn on his implants.”

Ton laughed. “There’s always one in the room doing that.”

“I’m just glad that none of them have processors like mine,” Sorilla admitted. “Otherwise they’d be watching me teach naked. Not that I have a lot of hang-ups, you know, but there’s a big difference between on-mission and some jackass recording me for future private viewings.”

“Your gear is that good?” Ton asked, skeptical.

She just nodded. “Yeah. The proc is amazing, never had anything like it before, not in my head or on my desk.”

“Damn,” Ton rumbled.

“It’s a quantum processor, able to work on multiple problems at once,” she told him. “Not sure when they’ll clear them for general use, but one look at someone with my implants and the software they jacked into my skull breaks down everything you’re wearing, carrying, or hiding and gives me a heads up. It’s distracting as hell here on Earth too. Since I have access to military and civilian databases, the damn thing keeps trying to do facial recognition searches. I keep it running in the background most of the time, but the AI still flags anyone important and alerts me.”

Ton snorted into his drink. “That doesn’t sound so useful, you realize?”

“Yeah, well, I’m pretty sure that I got a lot of alpha software,” Sorilla bitched mildly. “I have access to recode, thankfully, and a full SDK for it all, but it takes months of work just to wade through the crap code they put together in the first place.”

“You’re checked out to mess with your own implants?” Ton asked, both surprised and impressed. Few people were code-qualified for basic stuff, let alone tinkering with their own shit while was in their bodies. “Damn, girl, you’ve got some real skills.”

Sorilla waved it off casually. “Think about it for a second, Ton. Would you honestly let them sink alpha-tested hardware and software into your head and not get admin access to it?”

Ton cringed, but nodded. “Fair ‘nuff.”

“There’s a reason why I was selected for the new implants too,” she said, “beyond the fact that I was laid up in the hospital at the time and was due for an upgrade anyway. I trained with the first gen stuff years ago and helped devise the requirements for SF people in the field. I know the infrastructure like the back of my hand, and I’ve waded through that particular jungle more than once already.”

“Any tricks in there that would be useful to me?”

Sorilla shrugged. “Not as much as you might think, unfortunately. Most of the software is still heavily orientated around human enemies, so the estimates and projections you’d get would be way off. Some of the alpha software is incredible, but it really only works through advanced statistical models and a really deep database. We don’t have enough on the aliens to do that for them yet.”

“Too bad,” Ton said as he sliced off a bit of steak and chewed thoughtfully. “What can you get out of it when you look at me?”

Sorilla smirked, her eyes glowing faintly as she brought her HUD fully online. It only took her a second before she started to speak.

“You went out last night, night on the town with the boys,” she said, tilting her head slightly as her expression grew quizzical. “To a club, I think. Yeah, must have been, but it was a private club. Strippers were involved. You spent…”

“Whoa!” Ton threw up his hand, palm out to stop her. “Enough. How in the hell?”

Sorilla grinned, her implants automatically scanning his hand, prints, and bone configurations while she shrugged and answered. “You drank three shots, probably rum from the composition of the chemicals in your sweat. It was watered down booze, though, something I’ve never known a Marine to do at home. You and your friends were smoking cigars last night, which means it had to be a private club. No public place in the country will let you light up a stogy, not even a Havana.”

He glared sourly at her. “And the strippers?”

“You’ve got significant cocaine traces on your fingers,” she answered, “but no signs of use in your eyes, exhaled breath, and such. Best guess is you were handling a lot of low denomination dollar bills.”

“Jesus,” he swore, pushing back from the table. “You got all that at a glance?”

“The raw scans, yeah. It all has to put it together though, so it really comes down to the user,” she answered. “Novice users would be hit with a massive information overload. It’s one of the big reasons why this kit isn’t standard issue. There’s not many people with the education and data processing mentality needed to make use of it.”

“I’ll bet,” he said sourly, shaking his head. “Didn’t know I was sitting across the table from a damned Sherlock Holmes.”

“Holmes did it without a database helping out,” Sorilla smiled.

“So it told you about the strippers?” Ton asked skeptically. “Or just listed the coke trace?”

“Listed the cocaine trace,” Sorilla admitted.

“Yeah, like I said, Holmes,” he grinned. “You’re one scary lady.”

“You best keep that in mind before you try embarrassing me in front of the kiddies again, Ton,” she told him with a mildly sour expression.

“Tell you what, shoot me your code revisions for the basic implant set and we’ll call it a deal,” he offered with a grin.

“Done,” she accepted instantly.

They both grinned, knowing that she’d have given him the coding freely anyway, but it gave them a nice excuse for establishing some boundaries.

*****

USV Barry Sadler

Alder and Bitte stared at the screens in the darkened cockpit of the Courier Class starship; they’d killed every power source they could. There was very little data on the enemy’s electromagnetic scanning capability, but now wasn’t the time to take any chances.

The Sadler was running dark.

“Look that that. We’ve never seen one like that before. What do you suppose it is? A kilometer long?” Bitte asked, voice hushed.

“One five,” Alder answered, eyes flicking to the range finder. “And it’s not a Ghoulie ship, looks like a capital ship belonging to the Deltas.”

“I thought the ones we already saw were their capital ships.”

“Apparently not.”

Ship after ship slowly moved past the Sadler, heading on course to the beta jump point, which would take them one jump closer to Hayden.

“No way we can slip past them. You know that, right, sir?” Bitte asked.

“I know. They’ve got everything on us. The Sadler couldn’t outrun them with a ten-hour lead from here,” Alder admitted through clenched teeth. “And if they see us, they’ll pop us like a zit.”

Bitte grimaced, but nodded in agreement. “So, what do we do?”

“If a battle group like this surprised TF-7, they’ll be savaged. We’ve got to do something.”

“We will. Just make sure to catalog every ship we scan and put in a file ready to dump to the beta point marker,” Alder said. “If they see us, we’ll have to transmit in a hurry.”

“Aye sir.”

Chapter II

West Point, NY

Sorilla settled down in a comfortable chair, all the lights but the one beside her turned off.

Dinner with Ton had been a lot of fun, and had things been a little different, it might have gone on beyond the meal. Unfortunately, she didn’t have the energy for even a one night stand at the moment, and the ring on Ton’s finger told her that he wouldn’t be up for it even if she did. Not if he was half the man she read him for at least.

Of all the things in her life, oddly, her sex life was probably the one thing that Sorilla had never really had a lot of success with. Oh, she’d had her flings and trysts in her younger years. When she was a tomboy teenager, she could get away with the tough girl image and still have something of a decent social life, but when she joined the Army and won the her beret, that changed.

Mostly it was her who changed, she knew. She had to work five times as hard as the men beside her to stand equal to them, and that didn’t leave a lot of energy or time for a relationship or a husband. Sorilla wasn’t complaining about the work, however. She accepted that as not only necessary but right and just.

She didn’t work that much harder because people looked down on her as a woman, or because there was some invisible chain holding her back because of her gender. It wasn’t that at all, which wasn’t to say that didn’t happen from time to time.

No, she worked five times as hard in order to qualify to the same standard as the men she worked with because they deserved it. The men she worked with deserved to know that the person coming to pull their ass out of a firefight didn’t qualify on some easier standard because of some twisted idea of fairness. She met and exceeded the men’s qualifying times because Sorillla Aida was no one’s weak link.

To do that, and then maintain that, however, had its price.

If she wanted kids, she’d have to give up her field duties, probably permanently. It was unlikely that she could conceive safely without dropping her training to almost civilian levels, and after more than a year of that, it wasn’t likely that she’d regain her fitness level. Not at her age. Men had it easy when it came to families, physically at least.

Of course, to have kids she’d need to find someone worth spending that kind of time with, and Sorilla wasn’t about to hold her breath. Even the best men were intimidated by someone who could break them in half, and that was before you factored in her training.

In the end, it was all a moot point.

She worked all day, every day. If she wasn’t in the gym, she was in the classroom…in her seat or at the screen. She spent her weekends in the field or the shoothouse, and her nights with her nose in a reader. She didn’t have time for a cat, let alone a man in her life.

She was 43 years old, not a young woman anymore, but not remotely old either. The average age people lived to on Earth now was better than a 180, and you could stay active almost that entire stretch. Someday she knew that she was going to have to choose a new career path, but for the moment, Sorilla had few regrets concerning her choices in life.

It was just that those few all seemed to converge on her on nights like this.

Sorilla pushed the thoughts back and picked up the manual she had to read for the next day.

Like everything else in her life, regrets were just one more tango to put down with extreme prejudice.

*****

SOLCOM Offices, Washington D.C.

“So?”

“I’d take her on this assignment, but I already told you that,” Captain Washington answered with a shrug. “The lady knows her job. Hell, she knows my job and probably the jobs of everyone else even remotely associated to her position, at least well enough to teach. She takes her job description seriously.”

Brigadier General Gregor Svboda snorted. “That’s part of the issue, Captain. No one is questioning her skill or experience. It’s her skillset that concerns me. She’s a schoolteacher who packs heat, but by and large we don’t need those in this war and you know it.”

Washington remained silent. He’d already said his peace and been ignored in his opinion.

“No one is going to deny that she was exactly what we needed on Hayden at the start of the war, but there aren’t many worlds where what she did would even have been possible, so her role as a Special Forces trainer is hardly a pressing one.” Svboda shrugged.

“As I said, I’d take her with me on TF-7 any time.”

The general glared over his paperwork at the captain, but Ton didn’t budge or flinch. Finally Svboda snorted and shook his head.

“You can’t have her, she’s spoken for.”

Ton blinked.

That was new, no one had mentioned that to him.

“Sir?”

“Admiral Brooke wants her for TF-V,” the general said. “They’ve been given a new directive, and it’s going to involve their operator contingent. I’m not cleared to tell you anything else.”

“Understood, sir.”

Svboda looked over his reports for a bit longer then waved to the Marine captain across the desk from him. “You may go, Captain. Thank you for your report.”

“Sir.”

*****

USV Legendary, Alamo Shipyards

The Legendary was the first of Task Force V’s ships, and Nadine found herself feeling like a bit of a ghost as she walked the corridors of the big ship. She wasn’t the only person on board, but as the main reactor had only just been activated, she was one of the first to set literal foot on the big ship.

Compared to previous ship classes, including the Cheyenne, the Terra Class ships were configured in an inverse design. On a Cheyenne Class ship, “up” was to the bow and “dow”’ was to the stern. This was because, when you accelerated, your inertia would press you back into the direction you were coming from, which was obviously the direction the engines were point at.

On the new Terra Class ships, like The Legendary, “up” was now toward the stern. “Down” was toward the new gravity singularity that rested in the bulbous orb that defaced the smooth prow of the ship. While she wasn’t cleared to know about how SOLCOM R&D came up with the new technology, beyond that it had been reverse engineered from captured alien tech, Nadine had done her reading and had a good idea how the system worked overall.

The singularity was computer controlled to vary from one gravity to over 800, precisely linked to The Legendary’s throttle controls. As the ship increased speed, the singularity would warp space-time at the same linear rate, pulling people “down” at the same rate the ship pushed them “up,” plus one gravity.

Balanced on a knife edge, with enough force to turn us to paste on the ceiling…or the floor, all depending on which system has a glitch first.

She couldn’t say that she liked how very thin the razor’s edge seemed to be, but honestly, it wasn’t all that different from the older classes of ships. In space, your life depended on everything working perfectly. Too little oxygen, you died; too much and you probably died. Hell, the old ships had more than enough thrust capability to turn their human cargo to crunchy bags of jelly, so the fact that the new ones could turn them to a smear on the deck or the ceiling really wasn’t that big a change.

Oddly, it was the layout of the ship that bothered her most.

It felt almost like an office building instead of a warship. There were personnel elevators that travelled up along the internal spine of the ship, the central thrust chamber. They never bothered with anything like that on the Cheyenne Class because you mostly just drifted where you wanted to go or you damned well stayed put. The Terra was a lot larger, however, and unlike a seafaring ship, all of its size was in “height.” There were skyscrapers on Earth with a lot fewer floors than The Legendary.

The lowest levels, closest to the thrust chamber’s exit ports, were reserved for ship’s stores and engineering sections. Above that were command levels, along with access to The Legendary’s three observation decks, and then came habitat, quarters, medical, and other various departments. Primary engineering was next, positioned close to the VASIMR hardline controls, and above that, after the thrust chamber ended, was the ship’s flight decks.

At the very top of the ship was gravity control, a third engineering section, and most of the forward scanner systems, as well as a good chunk of the weapon control lines.

The entire ship was built inside three-meter-thick, sun-forged meteor-iron hull, with a one-meter ceramic composite active armor system layered with synthetic armor sandwiching-shaped high-explosive charges designed to defeat any conceivable assault.

Any, save one.

Brooke was well aware that The Legendary, as awesome a ship as she was, would stand no more chance than a snowflake in the hot place if she were pitted against a Ghoulie Gravity Valve.

All that armor would only serve to make a brighter explosion to mark her passing.

R&D said that they had something in the works to help with that, but until it was tested in battle, Nadine was not about to put her trust in it. Until that time, her taskforce was going to be a moving target for that enemy weapon.

She was just thankful that they were now going to be a much faster moving target than ever before.

Now she just had to get a move on before she was late to her next meeting.

*****

“Admiral.” Major Sam Shepherd saluted automatically as Brooke entered the room.

“Room” was perhaps a misnomer, she supposed, as it was easily as large as the shuttle hangars on the old Cheyenne class, though those were considerably larger on the Terra Class ships. This was an assembly point for ground forces and special operations soldiers, and had to be large enough for their vehicles and equipment.

“Major,” she nodded, “as you were.”

Shepherd nodded, relaxing marginally as the admiral stepped past him to examine the equipment.

“Impressive,” she allowed after a moment.

“Yes, ma’am,” he answered. “I realize it’s not much compared to a ship, but for the needs of the upcoming mission…”

“Yes, a ship would certainly be overkill,” she admitted with a twisted smile. “We’ve already hammered those ships to pieces and learned what we could. Time for a new approach.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Sam answered. “Uh, ma’am, when are we getting our operator contingent? TF-V will be operational in a few weeks, and it’ll take a while to get them familiar with these new systems. My Marines could handle the job if needs be, you understand, but I was told you wanted to use operators?”

“Yes. I have someone in mind for the squad,” Brooke answered. “We’ll be pulling her from her current station in a few days.”

“Her?” Sam blurted before his brain caught up with him, “No offense, ma’am.”

Shepherd didn’t have anything against women in the military. However, they were still quite rare in front line units, let alone operator units, and he was surprised.

“None taken, Major. I expect that Lieutenant Aida will be up to the job.” Brooke smiled thinly. “She’s been up to everything else that has been thrown her way.”

“Aida, ma’am?” Sam frowned. “The only Aida I know of is the master sergeant in the SF.”

“That’s her. She’s in OCS at West Point now. We’ve only left her there this long so she could give lectures on enemy tactics to as many ground force commanders as we could cycle through,” Brooke said. “As soon as Valkyrie goes active, she’s slated to command our operator contingent.”

“Didn’t know she was that good, only heard stories about her, ma’am.”

“Don’t believe a word of them, Major. I’ve heard them all myself, and not one of them comes close to the truth of what Aida has pulled off for us so far.”

“I see, ma’am.”

He didn’t, not really, but that was fine. He didn’t need to.

Brooke supposed that it was about time to call the former sergeant back to the fold, however. Valkyrie had a new mission brief, and soon they’d even have the ships with which to accomplish it.

*****

USV Barry Sadler

Unknown System

“That’s it, that’s the last of them,” Alder said after a long and tense wait in the darkened cockpit of the small ship. “Dump the data to the beta probe and tell it to jump for Hayden at best speed.”

“Aye, sir,” Chief Bitte said, shaking his head.

The pulsed signal went out in a series of redundant laser bursts, and they would keep transmitting the same signal over and over just in case some random event kept the first signal from being received. It would be several hours before the probe waiting at the beta point would get the message, but that would be several hours ahead of the alien fleet’s arrival, so there should be some time to space.

Not a lot, but some.

In the meantime, Alder opened the file and looked over the count they’d made.

There were at least a half dozen Ghoulie ships, their bulbous design unmistakable. None of these quite matched the more common designs they had on record, but that wasn’t his department. Someone in NAVINT would have that to worry about, he supposed.

There were a few unidentified ships that bothered him more. They had designs he’d never seen in any of the war records. That might mean more species to add to the roster of potential enemies they were facing, and that felt more than a little disconcerting.

In all the science fiction he’d read, it was always the humans with multi-species allies facing off against some group of monolithic aliens bent on destruction. They seemed to be facing a genuine federation here, however, and Alder had to wonder just what had been done that attracted their attentions.

Surely this can’t all be over Hayden, can it?

*****

“Master of ships?”

Parath glanced over to where one of the younger officers under his command was standing. “Yes?”

“We detected a brief photon pulse on the edge of our scanners, Master,” she said. “It was difficult, but we managed to track its origin to a metallic anomaly back along the course we followed to arrive here.”

“Send me the scans.”

“Yes, Master.”

The scanner information was sparse, unfortunately, but at the ranges they were dealing with, Parath was hardly surprised by that. Whatever it was it certainly didn’t match any of the known configurations of the enemy vessels. The limited materials scan, however, was a solid match.

A new ship design, perhaps? Or just one we haven’t seen before. It is rather small for an interstellar-capable starship, however. Likely a fast scout, if it is anything.

His eyes tracked the trajectories and he smiled slightly.

No matter.

“We would not catch them if we turned about. Send a pulse to the main fleet,” he ordered. “Then continue on course.”

“Yes, Master.”

I suppose that it is easy to assume that they’ve warned the enemy of our approach, Parath sighed.

That was going to make things bloodier.

*****

West Point, NY

“Lieutenant?”

Sorilla glanced to one side, nodding to the cadet that had appeared at the door of her classroom. She was in the middle of a xeno-psychology lecture, most of the room filled with colonels and the odd general and admiral auditing.

“What is it?”

“Message from OPCOM, ma’am.”

Sorilla blinked but waved the cadet in. A hand-delivered message only meant one thing, and everyone in the room knew it. She accepted the card but didn’t bother to open it. Instead she just swiped it along her arm, the near field implant there automatically scanning and sending the message to her optics.

ATTN: Lieutenant Sorilla Aida, OPCOM

Frm Admiral Brooke, Task Force Five, Commanding

Subject Deployment/New Assignment

Lieutenant, congratulations on your promotions. I was pleased to see you put the opportunity presented to such effective use. OPCOM has granted TF-V leave to begin assembling. Crews will be recalled from leave and other assignments shortly. You have been reassigned to TF-V pending your acceptance. This is strictly a volunteer position, Lieutenant, and I’ve been instructed to inform you that, should you prefer it, a full time teaching position is available with SOLCOM. If you prefer to remain field active, however, I have a place for you with my operator contingent.

Flt Admiral Nadine Brooke

Sorilla blinked away the message, barely considering the offer for a second before she turned to look over her class.

“Well, gentlemen…ladies,” she said, nodding to the group, “it would seem that this will be my last presentation for a while. Let’s make the best use of our time, then, shall we?”

She smiled as the colonels, generals, and admirals all shook themselves at once and immediately turned their slates back on.

“Now, this is of particular interest to those of you who may be commanding ground forces,” she said. “We’ve seen quite clearly that Charlie has the more military discipline and skill…”

An image of the squat and muscular aliens appeared on the screen behind her, dead in this case, with a halo of greyish blood spattering the ground around it.

“However, the edge in raw power undoubtedly goes to the Alphas,” she finished, an image of the spindly aliens that resembled nothing more than the legendary Roswell greys now appearing beside the other. “Individually, these two types are not insurmountable, though I will caution everyone against underestimating Charlie. He’s a tricky bastard, and I have a gut feeling that he enjoys fighting at a disadvantage.”

Several of the Army colonels and generals grimaced, but nodded. The Navy admirals and Air Force officers just nodded thoughtfully.

“But don’t ever count out Alpha either,” Sorilla said, face set. “So far he’s been surprisingly docile, given the sheer technical advantage that species has over us, but if our guesses that we are dealing with a frontier corporation rather than military forces turns out to be true…Alpha may yet be the biggest and baddest bully on this block.”

*****

USV Barry Sadler

Alder sighed as he looked over the last solid scans they had of the enemy fleet, eyes flicking back to the recordings of the passage that were playing on a loop on the next screen. The group of ships was at least three times the size of a standard taskforce, at least 45 ships of war by his count. Possibly more, if the ships he counted as likely support vessels were actually more ships of war.

Doesn’t seem likely, though. No group that size moves without support ships of some kind.

He hoped, at least.

Human fleets had managed to pair back the support requirements some, as there was no need for refueling ships anymore for one. Even his small scout was able to generate its own antimatter over a prolonged run, several times the length of any mission they’d send The Sadler on at least. Human fleets still needed supply ships for munitions, personnel, advanced medical care, and various other sundries.

While he expected that a culture advanced enough to manipulate space-time to the degree that the Alpha aliens did might have pared away the need for support even more, Alder hoped that was the case. If he was wrong, then Task Force Seven would be outnumbered more than three to one, and he wasn’t really sure that they could manage things as it stood.

“How many G probes are left in the beta point sentry?” he asked, glancing over to where Bitte was working.

“Two, after that last signal you sent gets there in…” Bitte glanced at the chrono, “eighteen minutes.”

“Right.” Alder nodded. “Okay, let’s prep another update.”

“Those birds cost a fortune, Lieutenant.”

“No one is going to notice once that fleet shows up.”

Bitte shrugged. “Fair point.”

“Let’s send the whole package again, along with whatever we’ve got since the last burst,” Alder decided. “The redundancy won’t hurt.”

“As you say, sir.”

Bitte was putting together the new package when an alarm went off, making Alder twist about.

“What the hell? Proximity alarm?”

“No, sir, that’s the gravity trap, sir.”

“Shit.” Alder went pale, bringing up the exterior feeds from all scanners.

The Sadler was sailing right past the jump point as their alarms went off, and he knew that there were only two things likely to do that.

Neither of them were good for him or his ship.

“Oh my lord,” Alder whispered in shock, eyes widening as The Sadler was caught in the gravetic backwash of ships arriving.

They didn’t feel it on board—in free fall, the sudden shift in gravity just hauled the entire ship and its contents, people included, around at the same rate—but the instruments registered a massive spike in their acceleration and a displacement of thousands of kilometers before local space-time finally stabilized. That was a secondary concern to Alder, however, as he was staring at a fleet of ships four times larger than the one that had just passed them.

“It was just a forward division…” he whispered.

“What?” Bitte asked, looking up.

“The first force, that was just a forward division!” Alder snarled. “Compile what we have and send it! Send it!”

“We’re still getting data!”

“Send it! Send it now!”

Bitte swore, hitting the command as more alarms went off around them. “What the hell?”

Alder didn’t answer. He just closed his eyes to block out the image of the big Alpha ships bearing down on them. He couldn’t block out the sound of the gravity alarms going off, or the sudden groaning sound that seemed to come from everywhere, however.

The USV Barry Sadler vanished in a flash of nuclear fire just moments after it was crushed under its own mass, the gravity-induced fusion reaction briefly lighting up the hulls of the enemy fleet before they moved on toward their ultimate goal.

Chapter III

USV Terra, Task Force Seven

Hayden System

Admiral Jacob Fairbairn stepped onto the bridge of the Terra, quietly observing from the back of the command center as his aide walked over to the captain and quietly announced his presence.

Captain Pierce Richmond was one of the younger Captains in the Solari Organization. He’d been promoted up from the British Blue Navy straight to the command slot of TF7. That would never have happened just two years earlier; there were far too many people clogging up the promotion tracks then. Today, with more ships being built every passing week and so few officers to command them, it was rapidly becoming standard operating procedure.

Pierce glanced back and nodded, pausing to give a couple orders to his people before he made his way back to where Jacob was standing. He waved off the salute, or tried to, but Pierce completed it anyway much to his amusement.

“What’s the latest?” Jacob asked, casually returning the gesture.

“Sir,” Pierce nodded, dropping to a half-relaxed stance. “A G probe dropped through the jump point at 0900 hours, dumping several terabytes of data into our systems. It was a message from one of our fast scouts, four jumps out. The Sadler, sir.”

Jacob nodded. “Enemy ships?”

“Battle squadron, sir. Looks like 40, maybe 50 combat ships plus support.”

“Damn it. They’re coming loaded for bear this time, then,” Jacob sighed.

“Yes, sir.”

The question, he supposed, was should he order TF7 out to meet them or wait and ambush them here in Hayden. It wasn’t as simple a question as one might think, or hope, given that they were outnumbered approximately three to one. Even in a perfectly executed ambush, those weren’t good odds. In space you had limited ways to array your ships and almost no chance for cover, which made an ambush little more than a matter of who yelled surprise first.

That said, meeting a prepared fleet out in open space wasn’t any better.

The Terra Class ships were fast, at least as fast as the enemy ships had shown themselves to be, so they could now keep up with them, and that would even the battleground considerably. In the past, smart maneuvering and better tactics and strategy had conspired to given human fleets victories over considerably stronger opponents while fighting at severe disadvantages, but Jacob knew quite well that few of the enemy ships were actually likely to have been military ships, strictly speaking.

Outmaneuvering and outfighting what the intel division now considered to be civilian contractors was a far sight different from taking on a proper battle group.

“Move the fleet into position around the gamma point,” he ordered finally. “We’ll take them as they jump through.”

“Aye, sir.”

An ambush might not hold the tactical advantage it did planetside, but they couldn’t afford to give up any edge they could get just now.

*****

Solari Operator Command

Los Alamos, New Mexico

The first time she’d been cycled through the Los Alamos special services base, she’d spent most of her time nude with sensors taped all over her body. This time they let her keep her clothes, and Sorilla honestly couldn’t help but feel a little insulted.

As usual, she had to go through the medical checks in order to be deployed, which meant a whole panoply of tests that were normally about as invasive as a visit to her gynecologist. This time, however, she was broadcasting on all her implants and they hardly had to even look in her direction.

Sweat was pouring from her face as she kept up the run she’d been marking for the last twenty minutes, monitoring her heartbeat and willing it to slow as she controlled her breathing with rigid discipline learned a long time past. Slow beats, but strong beats, were what she was aiming for, and it took work but Sorilla got what she wanted.

With the circular feedback from her implants, she had managed to learn how to exercise a lot of control over her body in ways that just weren’t possible under normal circumstances. The ability to actually see a real-time display of her blood pressure, heart beat, oxygenation levels, and more was just an unparalleled tool for her to wield.

“Time.”

Sorilla slowed to a walk, grabbing a towel from the rail beside her, and wiped the sweat from her face. The doctors finally deigned to look in her direction as one walked over.

“Absolutely unreal, Lieutenant.”

“I passed then?”

The doctor snorted. “Lieutenant, I’ve seen Olympic athletes in worse physical shape than you. Certainly you have an unparalleled control over your autonomic functions. How were you lowering your heart rate on command?”

Sorilla shrugged, tossing the towel aside. “I put the biometric data up on my HUD and just watch what works. It’s pretty simple biofeedback control after that, sir.”

“Simple, right,” the doctor scoffed politely. “Our data right now shows that you could probably outlast a champion marathon runner by twenty percent, just from the control you simply exercise over your heart rate and breathing. Combined with your general conditioning, Lieutenant, you more than pass the requirements for deployment.”

“Implants check out?”

The doctor nodded, but his face darkened slightly. “They all check out fine, but we’re concerned with how you’ve integrated them.”

“Oh?” Sorilla asked, keeping her tone neutral. She knew that her mind and body had done some strange things with the new implants. They’d never been designed to work quite the way they worked for her.

“As you know, your implants are an experimental generation that was designed to use your nervous system to send messages across your body network,” the doctor started. “The system appeared to work fine and didn’t interfere with your body because we adjusted it to run on different frequencies from what your body normally used.”

“I know, I read the brief.”

“Of course. Well, it appears that your brain has begun to intercept and interpret those signals anyway. That’s why you’ve begun showing more sensitivity to gravity changes, for example.”

“I know, doc, I reported most of this, remember?” Sorilla reminded him with an easy grin.

She was no expert in medical processes, but she knew her own body and implants.

“Yes, well, we’ve confirmed a lot of what you supposed and found some other interesting things,” he said. “Now that your mind is interpreting signals from the implants, it’s begun to move past just the gravity sensors. We’re showing that your reflexes are heightened, hand-eye coordination is at least fifteen percent over your previous top scores, and you’re actually starting to show almost precognitive abilities in some narrow traits.”

Sorilla snorted. “You’re saying I can see the future?”

“No, not even remotely,” the doctor laughed, “but your brain is actually reading messages sent to your HUD before your eyes get a chance to see them. In our tests, you’ve begun to actually act on information as much as a full second before you should even be registering it. I’m concerned that these changes may become a detriment, however, if your brain becomes unable to filter the information being sent by your implants.”

“Not seeing much of a downside so far, other than having to fight to keep my lunch down when we go into jump space.”

“Unfortunately, we’ve run into serious issues with others who received the same implant suite,” he told her. “Most of our early candidates began to suffer with uncontrollable motion sickness, headaches, and other minor symptoms that forced us to cycle them off deployment and remove the implants.”

“Most?” she asked dryly.

“You’re the only candidate left using the neural transmission technology. We have to change it all back to Near Field Radio-based transmissions,” he admitted.

Sorilla grimaced. That certainly didn’t sound great for her, but the fact was that despite some increased sensitivity to gravity fields and, yes, jump sickness, she was largely doing fine. “So what are you saying, just to be clear?”

“We’ve recommended that you have your implants removed and replaced with NFC alternatives.”

“How long will that put me out for?”

The doctor shrugged. “Not long. The implants can be adjusted using minimally invasive techniques. Say, two weeks.”

“Doc, I’m slated to begin mission training tomorrow for a mission that starts in a couple weeks.”

“You would be replaced on the lists with the next candidate.”

Sorilla shook her head. “I’ll keep my implants, doc.”

“Lieutenant, I don’t believe you understand…”

She cut him off. “I get it. Motion sickness, headaches, and so on. Except that I don’t get headaches, and I’ve been able to control the increased jump sickness. Unless you’ve got something solid to make me reconsider, I’ll keep my implants.”

He started to speak again, but this time a voice from the door cut him off.

“The lady made her choice, doctor.”

Sorilla jumped, shifting to stand at attention instantly as she recognized the voice and face.

“At ease,” General Graves said as he stepped into the room. “And you can go now, doctor.”

“General, I am going to lodge a protest. This implant suite has been considered obsolete and a danger to its users for almost a year now.”

“It’s the most advanced and secure system anyone has ever developed, doctor,” Graves said flatly. “As long as the lady says so, she keeps them, until and unless they start to negatively impact her performance.”

“Yes, General.” The doctor grimaced, leaving the room with obvious reluctance.

When he was gone, Graves turned back to Sorilla. “Don’t mind him. He was hoping to keep you around for a few months. They’ve been trying to figure out why you didn’t reject the implants the way others have.”

“Cutting them out of me seems a funny way to study their impact on my brain, if you ask me.”

Graves smiled slightly. “It’s been made clear that you’re a field op, Sarg—sorry, Lieutenant. The only way he could manage the pull to keep you off Task Force Five and out from under Brooke’s command was to pull a medical override.”

“Great. So he wants a lab rat.”

“Precisely.”

Sorilla grimaced. “He can go… enjoy himself, General. I’m fit and ready for duty.”

“So you are, Lieutenant,” Graves agreed, ignoring her obvious near slip and close catch of her language with some amusement. He was a Special Forces brigadier, he’d heard worse than she could throw out, but he didn’t say as much because, as an officer, now he knew that she would be expected to police her own language, around the brass at least.

It was funny, really, there were so many things a sergeant could get away with that a lieutenant had absolutely no hope of even attempting.

“Well, since you’ve passed your medical, I have a new set of clothes for you try on.”

“Sir?”

“Come on, Lieutenant, you’ll like this. I promise.”

*****

Chinese Warship Feng Lau

En Route for Hayden

Major Washington shifted uncomfortably in his seat, resisting the urge to get up and float around. The Chinese ship wasn’t built to accommodate men with his body type, and that was being generous about it.

Oh, he knew that the idea that the Chinese were all small men was more than a bit of a myth. He’d met more than his share of towering brutes from that country; it did have almost ten billion people after all. Life extension technology hadn’t been a boon there, not as far as quality of life went.

The Chinese didn’t build with comfort in mind in the first place, not for the rank and file at least, and so being larger than their average recruit left him cramped and fidgeting as they made their way from the Centuri jump point toward the Hayden one.

Unfortunately, there just weren’t any ships available in the Solari Organization at the moment. Everything was either deployed or being slagged down for recycling into one of the new class of ships, and every single one of those was spoken for at the moment.

That left the Chinese and the Russians with some spare tonnage, but unfortunately, the Russians didn’t have anything they were willing to dispatch out to Hayden.

Ton rather thought that they were bringing all their ships in for the same reason as the Solari Organization had. There were rumors of the Russians signing on fully with SOCOM, rather than the commercial and scientific partnership that had been running so far. If that was the case, Ton expected that total tonnage was about to go up by a third at least and maybe they’d be able to move some stuff around again.

Until then, however, he was stuck in a Chinese tin can with a bunch of other men who needed their space at the best of times.

“God damn it, are we there yet?”

“Jenks, if you ask that question one more time…” Ton growled.

“You’ll what? Turn the ship around?” Sergeant Micheal Jenks asked, chuckling.

“No, I’ll lighten it by about 230 pounds,” Ton growled. “Might get us there quicker. Not that you’d care in that case.”

Jenks shut up, and beside him he could hear Crow snicker slightly.

“Don’t know what you’re laughing at, Crow,” he told the younger man. “I recall a certain butter bar who couldn’t talk for stammering back in the day.”

“Between you taking an alien pulse blast for me and the Sarge kicking my ass afterwards,” Crow snorted, “I grew up. Good to be working with you again, by the way. We didn’t have much time to get reacquainted before they shoved us on this tin can.”

“That we did not. I heard your team had a helluva ride last time out?”

Crow shook his head. “We were on the Hood when she got cut in half, so you could say that. Most of us lived; that’s better than the Skipper got.”

Ton nodded. He’d read the reports of course. That was an ugly situation, but the fact that as many people lived through that battle as did was a testament to Captain MacKay and her crew’s skills. He just hoped no one had to pull anything like that while he was riding their ship. It didn’t sound like a fun time.

*****

USV Terra

Outer Hayden System

“The taskforce has been positioned, sir.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Fairbairn said, not looking up from his desk work. “Do we have an ETA on the enemy fleet’s arrival yet?”

“40 hours, Admiral.”

Fairbairn nodded. “All right, I suppose that there isn’t much more to do but wait.”

“Yes, sir,” Pierce replied. “I’ve stood the ships down from high alert, let the men get some food and rest before action.”

“Very good, Captain, just be sure that we’re back to general quarters in 35.”

“Aye, si—”

Pierce was cut off by an alert, and he turned on his heel.

“Captain?”

“Gravity alert, sir. Something is coming through the jump point.”

Fairbairn jumped to his feet, forgetting his desk work in a hurry. “Are they here early?”

“No way, no possible way they could have cut that much time off transit, sir. This is probably another message from The Sadler,” Pierce said calmly, already walking toward the bridge. He discreetly keyed open his com without pausing and hissed into the device, “This is the captain. I want us back to general quarters.”

“Aye, Captain. Sounding general quarters.”

A second alarm blocked out the first as Pierce hit the main transit corridor, forcing himself to walk and not run around the curving path that led to the bridge. He stepped onto the bridge twenty seconds later and straightened his uniform before speaking.

“Talk to me.”

It was an order, not a request, and everyone knew it.

“We have telemetry from a gravity probe, sir.”

Pierce let out a sigh of relief. “No other signals?”

“No, sir.”

“Excellent. Stand down from general quarters.”

“Yes, sir, standing down general quarters.”

“Get the data from that probe and direct everything marked Priority Three and higher to my workstation.”

“Aye, Captain.”

*****

The replay of The Sadler’s last moments went by again as the admiral stared at the screen, fingers numb as he reflexively rapped them on the desk.

“Do we have a count?” he asked sickly.

“At least another 80 warships, sir,” Pierce said. “We had a chance against 45, given the ambush. Against this? Not even if God was rolling the dice.”

Fairbairn nodded reflexively, though he’d barely heard the response. He already knew that TF7 didn’t stand a chance against a force like that. He was just shocked that the enemy even had that many ships to send out this far. The logistics of sending even a force the size of TF7 a few jumps from Earth was formidable; they probably wouldn’t be able to do it at all without the local resupply from Hayden’s orbital habitats and growth.

This was a force many times their size, and it was certainly farther from their home than the Earth was from Hayden. Human ships had explored outward dozens of jumps and found no sign of civilization. That meant that these people, if that was what he should call them, had sent a massive fleet farther out than humans could even consider.

I suppose we’d best test their resolve, then… Fairbairn thought grimly, and their range.

“Captain, I think we’d best break out the pulse generators.”

Pierce nodded slowly, hiding his wince. “Yes, sir.”

“Order the Canada to mobilize and bring us to jump readiness,” the admiral said, checking the time. “We’ll go through the jump point in ten minutes.”

“Aye aye, Admiral.” Pierce grimaced, but didn’t hesitate.

“I’ll dispatch new orders to the remaining ships.”

“With respect, Admiral,” Pierce shook his head, “I strongly suggest that you shift your flag to the America.”

“I’m not running from my duties, Captain,” Fairbairn growled.

“I’m suggesting you stay and do your duty, Admiral,” Pierce countered, face a stony mask. “You’ll have nothing to do with the Terra and the Canada on the other side, but there will be plenty for you to do here, sir.”

Fairbairn glowered at him but couldn’t marshal much of a response beyond throwing an infantile tantrum and saying, “But I wanna stay here.” He took a deep breath and nodded. “Very well, Captain, you have command of the detachment. Do try to bring your ships and crew home.”

“My very second highest priority, Admiral.”

Admiral Fairbairn nodded as he got up to gather his things and staff. He didn’t need to ask what the first priority was. That was self-evident.

*****

SOPCOM, Los Alamos

“New standard issue, just for your team,” Graves said, gesturing to a table in front of her.

“My team?” Sorilla cocked her head, shooting him a glance as she walked over to the table and looked over the array of kits laid out on it.

“Haven’t been briefed yet?”

“No, sir.” She shook her head.

“You will be, probably on the Alamo.”

“Yes, sir,” Sorilla nodded, picking up the Metalstorm pistol that she recognized.

The compact weapon fired half-inch rounds from two over-and under-barrels at rates of up to a million rounds per minute. Granted, it could only hold fifty rounds in the weapon at any given time, so there was no possible way to hit that theoretical limit. In practice, it meant that she could hammer a target with up to fifty rounds so quickly that every shot would be on target before the recoil of the first one hit her arm.

It was a precision weapon that doubled as a small artillery piece, and since it was a Metalstorm configuration design, there were no moving parts in the entire thing. Even the trigger was a simple pressure flex material that didn’t move, not that she needed to use it. Her implants could tell the weapon to fire directly if needed.

Beside the pistol, however, was something she didn’t recognize. Sorilla picked up the device, turning it over in her hand. It looked rather like an electric screwdriver, except that in the place of the driver bit there was a smooth piece of glass.

“Chemically boosted gigawatt laser,” Graves filled in. “Has a ten-minute burn.”

Sorilla whistled appreciatively. Lasers weren’t commonly used in her line of work, not as weapons at least. Plenty of ships used them, generally for point defense purposes, but few power sources were potent enough, and stable enough, to put out the required current to weaponize a handheld laser system.

“Ten-minute burn? Damn, sir, that’s impressive. Why haven’t we seen these before?” she asked, honestly curious since even a two-minute burn would be useful with a weapon of that power.

“Price, mostly,” Graves answered. “That’s worth almost as much as your suit.”

“Ouch.” She laid the device back down in its case.

Her suit was worth close to twenty million, one reason why OPCOM was the only division that used them.

“It’ll give you another way to deal some havoc, not that you need any more ways from what I understand.” Graves smiled thinly. “But more importantly, it also has some versatility. You can fight with it, cut with it, weld with it…think of it as a multi-tool, Lieutenant.”

Sorilla nodded slowly.

“A very expensive multi-tool,” Graves said with a sinister smile. “Don’t break it.”

“Yes, sir,” she said in a slightly strangled voice.

She knew he was kidding, mostly. You didn’t send kit out into the field without the full knowledge that it may well have to be used up to accomplish the mission, that was the way of the military. In fact, in most cases, the brass tended to prefer if material was used up. It looked better on their books if the pricey toys they paid for actually got used, otherwise why were they purchased in the first place?

That said, she didn’t much like the idea of the desk work she’d have to fill out if she dropped the damned thing and stomped on it.

“Most of the rest are updates on items you’ll be familiar with,” Graves said. “However, over this way you’ll see that we’ve saved the best for last.”

He led her over to a familiar, yet distinctly different, shape. She smiled slowly and walked around the item, taking it in from all sides.

“I like.”

“I suspected that you would.”

Graves watched impassively as Sorilla walked around the new issue operator class armor, designed to replace her previous kit with something that had a little more kick to it. The new suit had an angled face plate, replacing the flat black slate of the original OPCOM suit, giving the impression of a knight in matte black armor. Sorilla reached up and broke the magnetic seal, opening the armor up, then glanced back.

“May I, sir?”

“This is your suit, Lieutenant. Feel free to get acquainted.”

Sorilla nodded, reaching in and running her hand along the inside of the armor. “I don’t see gel dispensers.”

“The gel is in a porous membrane, still there and you get the benefits, but no more mess when you get out.” Graves shrugged. “Unless you get yourself shot up.”

Sorilla smirked crookedly. “Pity. It was always fun to watch men squirm when I wiped it off.”

Graves, probably wisely, refrained from commenting. There were some subjects that were, if not taboo, then at least risky for a man to enter into, even if he was a general. Along those same lines, he had to steel himself to keep from turning aside as she methodically stripped down. He refused to look away from her when he wouldn’t even consider looking away from one of the men under his command, but the lieutenant did make it…difficult.

She was perhaps not a beautiful woman, but she was certainly striking and very attractive in her own way. Her skin was pulled tight over ropes of thickly twisted muscles that moved and rippled with every motion she made. She wasn’t muscular on the order of a body builder, but there was probably an unhealthy lack of fat on her body.

Sorilla paid him little mind as she climbed into the armor.

It wasn’t difficult to suit up, but it did present its own challenges. From the knees down was closed, and she had to squeeze her feet down into the pointed toes of the armor, squirming slightly as the cool gel-filled material compressed around her to fit as snugly as possible.

The arms were the same, leaving her hanging in the suit like she’d been crucified. Sorilla lay her head back into the helmet, making contact with the NFC receiver at the base of the neck. She nudged the suit awake and waited for the boot sequence to complete before the suit was ready to activate. After that, it just took a thought to close it around her.

The upper legs and arms went first, sealing easily. The chest was a one-piece slab that closed from right to left, and then the helmet slid shut over her face. For a moment she hung there in darkness, her implants syncing with the armor, and then the HUDS came online.

“New interface,” she said, noting instantly by the hollow echo that the com wasn’t on yet. She nudged the armor mentally and instantly the noise cancellation activated along with her mic, so she repeated herself, “New interface, same command line though.”

“There are a few new commands in the command line, I believe you’ll find,” Graves said. “But yes, the software has been updated.”

She nudged the help menu while the General was speaking, spotting the new commands in the list that followed.

Nothing spectacular here…no, wait, what’s this?

“Active camouflage, sir?”

“This suit is invisible to most wavelengths used for detection on Earth,” he said. “Microwaves, radio waves, infrared, a few others. We haven’t quite got the visible spectrum worked out yet, but the armor can fake a pretty decent invisibility cloak,” Graves told her. “Nothing you want to depend on up close in a well-lit room, but in a shadowy jungle? It’s a solid King, if not an Ace.”

“Groovy,” she said softly, cycling the system on and looking at her arm and hand as she held it up in front of her face.

The image of the general wavered as she waved the limb in front of her, a noted distortion warping the air in front of her. He was right, not something to be relied on in a well-lit room, but she didn’t do much fighting in well-let rooms.

“Unfortunately, we’re not sure how much good this is going to do for you.”

“Oh?” Sorilla lowered her hand and cycled the armor back to normal mode. “Why?”

Graves had a dark look on his face as he let out a gravelly sigh. “We suspect that the aliens, the Alphas at least, use your body’s gravity to track you.”

Sorilla couldn’t help it, she laughed out loud. “You have got to be kidding me.”

“Someone might be, but it’s not me, Lieutenant,” Graves replied seriously. “The Alpha technology is insanely refined compared to our own. We’re still picking it apart, but just the stuff we’ve been able to work out has boosted our technical capability by decades.”

Sorilla shook her head, noting in the back of her mind that the armor felt more natural than her old model. “Seems to me that it’s not a reliable method, Sir. Hard to tell the difference between human and animal, for one.”

“There is that, which is probably the only reason they didn’t nuke your ass on Hayden.”

Sorilla nodded. That was entirely possible. She shuddered at the level of information overload a system tracking individual space-time deformations would provide on a planet that held sophisticated life forms.

“I don’t suppose going on a diet would help?” she asked, voice a mix between sour amusement and mild disbelief.

“It might, for some people.” Graves shrugged. “You’ve studied the gravity technology, I believe?”

“Yes, sir, as much as I could without a doctoral course at least,” Sorilla answered. The basic theories were complicated enough, she’d found quickly. If you wanted to know anything in depth, it required advanced study in quantum mechanics just to scratch the surface. Since the first recovery of alien technology from the Alphas, gravity theories were effectively a discipline all their own.

“Well, the iceberg effect comes into play,” Graves said. “We suspect that they can track the full gravity of a body.”

“Right.” Sorilla knew that one.

Most of the gravity that made up “normal” space-time—that is to say, the universe humans experienced—was actually only the very tip of a rather large iceberg. The rest was hidden away beneath the surface, unnoticeable to human sense but still very much in existence. That was the secret of the Alpha’s Gravity Valve: It didn’t magnify or create gravity, it just opened up access to what was already there.

So in answer to her own question, it was entirely possible that losing one pound of body weight may actually be the same as losing ten pounds to the Alphas’ detectors. It seemed unlikely that it would make much difference, not on that scale, but suddenly it didn’t seem like a great idea to have the massive space craft that humans had built. Not if the enemy was tracking by the full potential gravity of an object.

Brigadier Graves smiled. He couldn’t see her face, but the armor relayed body language well enough to someone who was used to dealing with people wearing it. He could see the thoughts taking over the lieutenant’s mind and could almost pick them out individually. It helped, of course, that she was hardly the first person he’d seen tread this line of reasoning.

“You’re wondering about capital ships and how much they mass,” he said, shocking her from her reverie.

“Uh, yes, sir,” Sorilla mumbled dumbly. How the hell?

“We’ve instituted some plans to test and potentially counter that,” he told her. “You’ll be briefed at the Alamo.”

“Yes, sir.” Sorilla was thinking furiously. “Fighters, sir?”

“Not as such. Possibly, later, but for now we have other ideas,” Graves told her. “Take some time to test your new kit. The shoothouse here is open to you, but your tether car leaves in two days. Make use of them.”

“Yes, sir!”

Chapter IV

Deep Space,

Master of Ships Parath eyed the displays carefully, making his own judgments as to the state of the local space-time before he ordered his ships into the gateway.

Gravetic gateways were tricky things by times, formed as they were by the interaction of gravity deformation from stellar class and higher masses. Generally stable, they could be misjudged if you didn’t account for pulsar interactions at distances that were occasionally rated in hundreds of light spans. No one understood how or why a pulsar could throw a gateway off, except perhaps the Ross, but only a fool transited without checking.

All things seemed clear this time, however, and he’d personally checked the logs and charts before beginning the voyage. There should be no odd interactions to affect the transit of his fleet, and that was as it should be.

They were still a fair distance from the last jump point to the nexus of this part of the galactic arm, even at their current rate, so most of his work now was just idle busywork more than anything of real value. Oh, it served a purpose, of course—fr one, it made certain that no one messed up their calculations, which was always important, and it made it look like he was working, which also mattered to the crew’s morale, he had long since learned—but there was nothing new in it.

Not normally.

This time, however, just as he was wrapping his calculations with some degree of satisfaction, Parath found himself staring at the computer models in what was quite simply undisguised shock as they began to shift and warp on him with no warning.

For a moment he just stared, but he was a trained stellar interpreter and a master of ships; he recognized the signs long before even the computers did.

Parath slapped his hand down on the alert com, voice crackling out. “Alert! Incoming transiting objects from the gate!”

Alarms sounded across the ships and, he knew, would be spreading across the fleet as fast as photons could carry his order. He rose to his feet and strode around the displays, eyes to the communal screens.

“Bring in the focus, show me the gateway.”

“Yes, Master.”

The gate they were looking at was the last one before contested space and the planet the alien forces were so determined to hold. It was the ideal place for an ambush, he supposed, but if that were the intent, then the enemy had mistimed it. They were still well out of combat range, and if needed, Parath was confident that he could out-maneuver the aliens until the bulk of the fleet arrived.

“Ships transiting the gateway!”

Parath glowered at the screen for a long moment, recognizing the configuration of ships. They were the same as the ones that chased him out of the system during his last foray into the alien territory. Unlike the flattened sleek designs of the Parithalian ships, the aliens preferred a cylindrical design that seemed centered around an outdated yet quite effective reaction-based thrust system.

Most Alliance ships now used variations on the Ross gravity drives, to one degree or another. Only the Ross truly understood the design, if even they did, but it was efficient and limited only by the effectiveness of your ship’s cooling systems. At high thrust, the opposed gravity fields generated an inordinate level of heat and radiation that would eventually overwhelm any shielding and cooling.

“All stations to readiness state.”

Parath gave the order calmly, knowing that he had time to consider what to do. Two ships had transited so far, and the gravity point was showing little sign of others incoming.

Must be a scouting group.

That seemed odd. He would have expected that they already knew what was coming. The previous scout had sent those messages on to someone after all, so why would they feel the need to send anyone through to check?

He had been expecting an ambush on the other side of the gate. That was the tactically ideal choice for the aliens. He still was expecting said ambush, actually, since two ships here would not slow him significantly.

“Bring forward our strike wing,” he ordered. “Cover the Ross battleships. We will approach with caution.”

What are they doing?

*****

USV Terra

“Battle stations!”

“Battle stations, aye, sir!”

Post jump, the last thing anyone on board wanted to do was move around. Jump sickness wasn’t usually crippling—most spacers got used to the disconnected feeling that jump space gave them—but moving around quickly was a sure way to feel like crap just out of a jump point. The crew of the Terra and the Canada were among the best that the Solarian Organization could find, however, and they’d been through jump drills many times before.

They got the job done.

“Enemy starships, still four light hours out.”

Pierce nodded. “Good. Standby for GPD deployment.”

“Aye, sir, all stations standing by.”

“Signal the Canada, begin deployment.”

“The Canada signals ready, sir.”

Pierce glanced over the digital reports himself, then waved a hand to his senior officer. “Deploy.”

“Deploying.”

The two Terra Class ships began spitting probes into their wake as they accelerated out of the jump point in tight formation. Pierce didn’t bother watching the deployment reports, he trusted his people to handle their end. His next worry was the approaching ships that were most assuredly capable of slapping his two-ship cohort down like insects.

“Standby to come around to two-three-niner, mark five galactic south,” he ordered, spotting what he was looking for.

“All stations standing by, sir.”

Pierce glanced around, making sure that everything was in order, then nodded. “Engage new course, full speed ahead.”

“Aye, sir, full speed ahead.”

The Terra and the Canada’s drives flared, massive gamma ray bursts erupting from the shielded engines just ahead of the particle emissions of the powerful VASIMR drives. For all the innovations brought on by captured and reverse engineered alien technology, the human ships still relied on the Variable-Specific Impulse Magneto Rocket drive (VASIMR), a technology so old it was born less than a decade after men first walked on the moon.

The VASIMR design had several key advantages over the alien gravity drives, including the fact that humans knew it inside and out and could literally keep it running with a few rolls of duct tape and a computer probe. For one, the system actually had a marginally higher initial acceleration than current human gravity systems could match. It took time to warp space, and a matter/antimatter explosion was reasonably abrupt if you were in a hurry.

More importantly, though, was that the heat buildup of a VASIMR drive was mostly controllable. Over the past century, humans had perfected the system to a high degree. In fact, heat was mostly directed away from the drive and ship as part of the impulse that pushed the ship ahead, the rest used to generate power for the onboard systems. Gravity drives, even those used by the Alpha species, directed insane levels of heat inwards and required massive shielding technology that human scientists had yet to crack. In fact, as best as any researchers had been able to determine, the only limit on a gravity drive was how much heat you could manage before the system cooked your crew.

It was entirely possible that the alien gravity drive was even able to go to FTL without a jump point, assuming it didn’t turn every living thing on board to ashes in the process.

*****

Parath watched the numbers change, no expression on his face.

“Enemy vessels have shifted heading. New course indicates an intercept plot with the eleventh planet of this system.”

I can see that, the master of ships thought. The question is why? There is nothing there, we scanned every world in this system as a matter of due course. There is nothing here of any import. Why go there?

Actually, if he wanted to follow that line of thought, why bring only two ships through? They couldn’t engage his fleet with so few, and if he was right about the earlier signals, then they had to be aware that his fleet was approaching. In fact, they should have been able to calculate the arrival time of his fleet to a reasonably precise degree.

Which means that they knowingly sent two ships through the gateway, despite the approach of my taskforce.

“All ships, reverse acceleration. Bring us to station-keeping mode,” he ordered abruptly, rising from his station.

“Master?”

“Follow my commands.”

“Yes, Master.”

The ships of the fleet responded to his commands swiftly enough, he supposed, but had they been closer, he would not be so generous. Parath made a mental note to drill his ship’s commanders on procedures again in the near future.

“I want full scans of the gateway,” he said. “Every spectrum, including from the Ross gravispecular systems. Make that very clear to them, I want the raw scans from their systems.”

His aide swallowed but nodded seriously. “On your order, Master of Ships.”

The Ross would balk, Parath knew, they always did, but the agreement they had with the Alliance made it clear. In Fleet maneuvers they had to answer to the Master of Ships in command of the formation. Parath wasn’t sure what the enemy was up to, but he was quite certain that they were doing something he wasn’t going to like.

Hopefully they merely mined the gateway. The Ross can clear any type of mine in instants, but I doubt that I am that lucky.

*****

USV Terra

“Enemy ships have reversed thrust. They’ll come to a zero/zero stop relative to the local system in fifteen minutes.”

“Damn,” Pierce said with a rueful grin.

He hadn’t expected much else, in all honesty, but he’d have liked to seen the enemy ships fly right into the GPD field they’d laid in. He wasn’t sure what, if anything, would have happened to them, actually, but it would have made for some interesting data to take back to Earth.

Once we manage to get home.

“Transmit the signal, initiate the GPDs.”

“Aye, Captain. Signal transmitted.

*****

The Gravity Pulse Devices, or GPDs, were single-use, nuclear-pumped gravity weapons. In close enough proximity to a ship or, in extreme cases, a planet, they would act as a poor man’s version of the alien Gravity Valve technology. By creating a pulse warp in the local gravity field, the tidal effects of their detonation could, and would, tear apart almost anything in their range.

Their range was, however, too short to be of significant use in ship-to-ship combat.

The field pulse devices did have another use, largely theoretical in nature, but the mathematical solutions were proven so the devices had been built and issued to Task Force Seven as part of their last ditch defense plan.

When the signal from the Terra triggered their detonation sequence, each of the eighteen weapons floating near the Hayden jump point detonated in a brilliant flash of light and radiation that appeared only for a few seconds and then vanished as abruptly as it had come.

The nuclear explosions of each weapon were captured and sent into a single-use version of the Gravity Control Valve reverse-engineered from the alien technology. All of that power was sucked up and turned on local space-time with a vengeance, growing in local influence until it was enough to actually suck in the light of the explosions itself.

The multiple-phase-arrayed devices went off in staggered order, turning the local space-time field into a chaotic mush of violent and counter-opposed fields.

Sailing through the tidal effects of such a place probably wouldn’t be enough to seriously damage a ship, though the stress would be far greater than normal wear and tear, so it was of limited use as a method of slowing enemy vessels.

One thing it did do, however, was utterly destroy any chance of forming a stable jump point.

In an single blinding instant of power, the two ships of Task Force Seven had just shut the door to the Hayden system and locked themselves out in the cold with their enemy.

*****

“What in the infinite abyss is that?”

Master of Ships Parath said nothing to reprimand his subordinate. He was thinking much the same thing in even less polite terms himself.

Whatever they did, it wasn’t a mine field. Even our limited gravity-based systems are showing that little slice of hell as something not to be trifled with.

“Scans and raw data from the Ross ships, Master!”

“To me.”

Parath glowered at the numbers, mentally trying to do calculations that no one but the Ross could manage without immensely powerful computational aides. He uncrossed his eyes after a few minutes, forcing himself to skim the data while waiting on the data being processed by his own ship’s computers.

I don’t know what they did, but I’m not taking my ships into it anytime in the near future. The entire region is a snarled mess. It appears that they literally gathered up space-time and tied it in tangled knots.

If he was reading it correctly, the aliens had actually sealed a jump point. That was something he’d never even considered before, which, now that he was looking at it, seemed absurd. It was suddenly the most obvious idea in the world, yet he was aware of no one…not even the Ross, who had ever even attempted it.

“Master!”

“What?” Parath half snarled as he turned, glaring at the officer who had interrupted his train of thought.

“The Ross ships have broken formation!”

“What?” This time his voice was filled with incredulity, though a moment later he wondered if he should have really been that surprised. Parath rose from his position and made his way to the main station, looking over the course plots with a practiced eye.

The two Ross ships that were part of his fleet had indeed broken formation and were now accelerating away on a fast intercept course with the two enemy ships. Parath swore when he noted their speed, recognizing that his main group would never be able to keep up with them.

“To the eternal singular abyss with them!” he swore, shaking his head as the light feathers along his blue-skinned neck twitched with his anger.

He finally sighed, forcing himself to calm down.

“Detach our interceptors and escorts to provide them with cover, have the rest of the fleet adjust course to intercept the alien ships at best available speed.”

“Yes, Master of Ships.”

The Ross are forcing my hand, but their move is the only one available to me at this point anyway.

That wouldn’t stop him from putting in a complaint against the Ross fleet and black marks against the commanders of the two ships, of course. Unfortunately, he doubted it would do much. It took a medical examination to tell one Ross apart from another, and the Alliance had long suspected that when a Ross commander accumulated enough black marks to be a liability the Ross governing body merely changed his name rather than actually do anything about him.

Sometimes I honestly wonder if we shouldn’t have just flattened over the Ross worlds and been done with it.

Genocide wasn’t something that Parath was normally wont to consider, but the Ross pushed him sorely.

*****

USV Terra

“Movement on the enemy ships, sir. We’ve got two Alpha destroyers…check that, unknown Alpha Class ships heading our way.”

“Unknown?” Pierce asked, walking over to check the scans himself.

“Unknown. They’re definitely Alpha make, the design influence is clear, but they don’t quite match anything in our database,” Lt. Sandra McPherson told him. “A little more mass, and they’re moving faster than anything we’ve rated to date.”

“Lovely,” Pierce muttered. “All right. Sound the call. I want all weapon systems live and ready in five minutes or less. Wake everyone up, we have company calling.”

“Aye, Captain.”

The general quarters alarm sounded again, pulling everyone back to their stations from the brief break he’d authorized. As long as the enemy were focused on the jump point, there hadn’t been much need to worry about them. Any move they could make in the direction of the Terra and Canada would be telegraphed far in advance.

That said, while light did indeed move faster than any of the enemy ships, he was a little concerned by the fact that the two currently moving toward them were faster than they’d seen before. That made it very hard to predict the actual moment of interceptions and, far more importantly, the actual current position of the ships in question.

The eleventh planet was approaching quickly, but he wasn’t sure that they’d be able to complete the maneuver before they were overtaken.

Damn. It’s always something.

At the distances and speeds involved, the difference between ship speed and the speed of light became a huge factor. If his estimation of the ship’s rate of travel was off by even a fraction of a percent, it would likely mean missing any shot he made by thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of kilometers. That made engaging in combat problematic, since he needed direct hits to score any damage.

In space, without an atmosphere to absorb energy and convert it to kinetic power, even a nuclear weapon didn’t get points for “close.” The simplest of starships were shielded against radiation, they had to be, and the blast of a nuke was a warm day’s sun compared to some of the things that existed this far out. He needed accurate information on the rate of approach to make a battle plan, otherwise he’d have to wait until they were practically into knife range before he could engage.

Against Ghoulie weapons, that was just asking for a swift death in the heart of gravity-induced fission.

*****

Parath scowled at his screens, watching the Ross ships pull effortlessly away from the rest of his ships despite his orders to bring them back to the formation.

What is wrong with them? Even the Ross are not normally this intransigent. This is enough to count as defying authority in the order of battle, should the Alliance choose to press it.

It wasn’t likely that they would, given that the Ross ships were running toward the line of battle rather than away, but it was still a diplomatic risk that was unusual for the Ross to take. They were defiant, to be sure, often pretending to be oblivious while outright ignoring all sorts of minor orders. This, however, was far beyond that. The Ross normally were careful to stay within the larger laws that governed the Alliance, and disobedience in a time of war certainly didn’t fit that psychological profile.

And then there was the speed of their ships.

They’ve clearly been hiding technical capacity from the Alliance. No ship in the Alliance could catch them, and they are battleships. What could their faster ships do?

The fact that the Ross were hiding technology from the Alliance, and were willing to expose that here and now, made the information he’d learned before the mission all the more vital. There had to be something more in this branch of the galactic arm, something the Ross wanted…or, more likely, wanted back.

“Push it.”

“Master?” the closest officer asked, looking over at him in confusion.

“Push our speed. Faster. We must go faster,” he ordered.

“Yes…Master. How much?”

“To the limits,” Master of Ships Parath ordered. “Push everything to the limits.”

“Yes, Master.”

*****

“We’re showing smaller ships catching up and moving into support positions around the Ghoulie ship, sir.”

“How much smaller?” Pierce asked, glancing over.

“On the order of a kiloton or less, each ship.”

That was small, for starships at least. He leaned over the lieutenant at the scanner station, peering at the data closely.

“Am I looking at fighters?”

“High-speed interceptors from the looks of things, Captain,” Lieutenant McPherson confirmed. “Almost a kilo-grav acceleration showing so far, and I think they’re going to crack the kilo barrier.”

“Damn, that’s fast.”

“Yes, sir.”

Earth ships were close to cracking the kilo barrier, another couple hundred gravs would do it, but it was still considered one of the new standard measuring sticks in space travel. The big problem for humans was that the tidal effects of the gravity control mechanism used to regulate acceleration forces began to become exponentially harder to control as you approached a thousand gravities.

Tidal forces were particularly difficult to deal with, particularly over the length of a Terra Class starship. When the force on one part of the ship was significantly different from the force on another point, it introduced massive stress over the length of the ship. Enough tidal stress would tear the ship apart, literally extruding it through the focal point of the gravity source in a process charmingly referred to by its scientific term…spagettification.

At 800 gravities, they were pushing the limits of the control mechanism used to prevent tidal forces from exceeding the structural limits of the Terra Class ships. At that speed, in fact, the Terra was only rated to ten thousand hours of service, so Captains were instructed to use it only in combat situations where speed was a necessity.

Pierce wondered if the alien ships had to deal with the same problems.

Probably not, not if the speculations about their system were true. Not from gravetic stress, at least. He supposed it was possible that the ships’ hulls might degrade from heat damage over time.

I’m sure they’ve got something that screws them over, that’s pretty much non-negotiable for military service in my book. If nature doesn’t provide it, the brass steps in to take up the slack.

Pierce smiled, more than a little darkly.

That joke had been much funnier back before he became one of the brass.

Chapter V

Chinese Vessel Feng Lau

Hayden System

The Feng Lau reversed thrust, decelerating into Hayden orbit at a single Gee, ostensibly to give her passengers time to pack their crap and get themselves in order. Which meant, for Ton and his team, they had about an entire week of sitting around while everyone else ran around like chickens with their heads cut off.

I swear, most of these guys couldn’t possibly have made it all the way through boot.

His operator team was only one part of the transfer of troops to Hayden. Most of them were regular Army, and they didn’t look to be particularly ready for what they were doing. Most likely they were actually fresh from boot, but completely untrained for space travel. If they were to be stationed on Hayden, he supposed it would make sense. No point in wasting spacer training on groundhogs.

“Major Washington?”

Ton glanced up to see a Chinese officer standing across from him, a flexi in his hand.

“Yes?”

“Communique from your Task Force Seven.”

“Thank you.” Ton accepted the flexi.

The Chinese officer left, not bothering to say anything else, and Ton let him go. Relations had never been particularly warm between the Solari Organization and the Chinese, though the two had never come into conflict. Solari had backed the U.S. interests in the South China Sea area, however, during a conflict over where the Chinese could put their orbital tether.

It had mostly been part of the still ongoing feud over Taiwan, but it had spilled over into Hong Kong and then across the rest of the area when Japan announced their intention to build a tether in the region. Before long, it had nearly spilled over into an armed regional conflict, and only the intervention of the UN and Canadian peacekeepers kept the smaller brushfires from igniting something larger.

Things had thankfully cooled down before the current conflict erupted, so the Solari Organization and its backers didn’t have to be watching their backs all the time, but a lot of tensions were still burning brightly between the two groups and the people who served in them.

While the two had never officially come to blows, Ton was well aware that more than a few of the accidents that befell Solari colonies were the work of infiltration experts trained, or bought, by the Chinese. Likewise, while he wasn’t entirely certain, he expected that there was a damned good chance that the reason former Sergeant Aida even made Solari rolls was to play a part in certain off-world uprisings that neither the Solari Organization nor the American government had any part in.

He put that aside for the moment, however, and glanced over the flimsy.

Flimsies were biodegradable sheets of organic light-emitting diodes packed into a transparent sandwich of paper pulp with an eight-hour battery. Disposable, cheap, and the sort of thing you printed off and gave to someone without worrying about whether you’d be getting it back. They didn’t have much in the way of computer power, enough to display text, pictures, audio, and video as needed. Probably a few million times more than it took to get men on the moon, but nothing compared to the cheapest piece of civilian kit these days.

In this case, it was a simple message, along with a status update and an encrypted package that he scanned automatically into his implants.

The Terra and the Canada have moved off-station, no explanation why. Interesting. Report to the admiral on the America. All right, that’s clear enough.

“What’s up, Major?”

Ton shrugged. “Change in our berth assignments, we’re bunking on the America.”

“Why not the Terra?”

“Captain Richmond took her and the Canada out of the system, no reason stated here,” he told his unit’s second commander, Lieutenant Nathan Clarke. “No difference for us.”

Clarke nodded. “As you say, Major.”

Ton nodded, idly fingering the new gold leaf on his uniform. His promotion had been quick, given just before shipping out, and he was still getting used to the title and the insignia in the mirror.

Well, it looks like I’ll have time. Communiqué checks out. Other than the fact that the Terra and the Canada are missing, it looks like things are dull here.

*****

Alamo Shipyards

Trojan Point, Sol System

Sorilla pushed back the slightly nauseous sensation as she stepped off the shuttle that had delivered her to the shipyards and her new assignment. There was something just vaguely off about the local gravity, but she couldn’t quite place what it was, unfortunately. It wasn’t as bad as coming out of jump space, thanks be to whoever might be listening, but it was bad enough for her to notice.

She schooled her face to an impassive expression as she walked, stepping down the ramp of the big shuttle and onto the surface of the large meteor that had been dug out to create the Alamo facility.

A figure was waiting for her at the edge of the ramp, and Sorilla brought her heels carefully together as she dropped her personal duffel and saluted.

“Commander,” she said, holding the position until the other woman returned the salute.

“As you were, Lieutenant. I’m Commander Latiffe. I’ll be your immediate supervisor while you’re at the Alamo.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Sorilla answered automatically.

“You’ve been here before, but this will be your first time in officer country I believe?”

Sorilla nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Grab your kit, follow me.”

Sorilla swung up her duffel, easily slung it over one shoulder, and followed as the other woman walked off. Her eyes flitted around, easily picking out signs that she knew indicated that the Alamo had originally been built as a microgravity environment.

“New gravity system, I presume?” she said as they walked.

“Yeah, test system used to develop the design for the new ships.”

Sorilla’s stomach rebelled just a little as she cringed. “Damn. I hope they refined the system on the new ships.”

“Why?” Latiffe asked, glancing back at her.

“Something’s off with the system,” Sorilla said. “I feel like my head is lighter than my feet.”

“You can feel that?” the commander blurted, clearly shocked.

“I’ve got micro-accelerometer implants all through my body, Commander. Took me a few seconds to figure out why I was feeling a little nauseous when I stepped off the shuttle, but yeah,” Sorilla confirmed.

Commander Latiffe shook her head. “We’ve had dozens of OPCOM operators through here recently, all with those implants, Lieutenant. None of them noticed a thing.”

“They’re all using the RFID-based implants, ma’am. My suite uses nerve coms,” Sorilla explained.

“What’s the difference?”

“Nerve coms are more secure, but it turns out that using the nervous system to piggyback communications has side effects,” Sorilla said. “Basically I’m more in touch with my implants than other ops are. They could have detected the difference if they’d queried the computer specifically, but there isn’t much call to do that.”

“I see,” Latiffe said in the tone of someone who really didn’t.

“Don’t worry about it, Commander. I’m just awesome that way,” Sorilla said with a smile that was very uncharacteristic of a butter bar lieutenant talking to a full commander.

It was pretty much par for the course for an experienced master sergeant talking to damned near anyone, however.

Commander Latiffe didn’t say anything in response, so the two continued deeper into the Alamo in silence.

*****

“Admiral?”

Brooke glanced up. “Yes, Terrance?”

Terrance Briggs was her Navy-assigned steward, or whatever they were calling his specialty these days. Terms and names changed, but the position was a constant in the service of the Solarian Organization. Something of a babysitter combined with a social secretary, she had once joked, though with more than a touch of truth to it all.

“Lieutenant Aida has arrived on station, ma’am.”

“Ah, thank you, Terrance,” she said with a nod and a casual gesture. He tipped his head slightly and backed out of the room, closing the door.

With Aida on station, her part of the upcoming operation was ready to begin, though the first few stages were going to be little more than training, of course. They certainly had a lot of that to do, there was no doubt there. Task Force Five had drawn the short straw, for better or worse. Seven had been assigned with the defense of Hayden and holding the jump point there at all costs, but Five…well, she wasn’t sure that what they wanted from her was even entirely possible.

I suppose that’s what we get for doing the impossible once before, she thought, a little tired. She’d been working on the administration side of the upcoming mission now for over a week, and it would be good to focus a little more on something practical even if she wasn’t personally involved.

Brooke straightened up and got her feet, stretching somewhat to limber up muscles that were too used to being cramped into the uncomfortable office chair.

I’m going to really miss microgravity onboard ship.

Progress had its price, she supposed. Brooke glanced at the clock on her desk screen and decided to get something to eat before meeting with Lt. Aida. This was one brief she wanted to get in person.

Besides, the lieutenant might just deck someone else if I sent anyone lower ranked to tell her what we want her team to do.

Brooke was chuckling softly to herself when she stepped out of her office and nodded to where Terrance was sitting at his own desk. “Going to get some food, Terrance.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the steward said as he got to his feet.

“I’ll be fine alone.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Terrance paused, then remained behind as she left, looking much put out, to her amusement.

Brooke wasn’t present to see him wait for precisely a 30 count and then follow after her anyway.

*****

USV America

Hayden System

Major Washington looked over the interior of the America’s shuttle bay, a cavernous facility within the ship that made him boggle slightly at how very large the ship itself had to be. There were four other shuttles in the lineup, as well as room to move them all around if needs be. Large airlock lifts were in place to move the craft down to the launch bays below, and there were easily enough machinery, vehicles, and people milling about to make him feel right at home, as on any military base he might choose to recall.

“Major.”

Ton turned and nodded to the lieutenant who had walked up to meet them. “Lieutenant.”

“Sergeant Krantz will escort your team to their berths,” the young officer said, nodding to the sergeant standing behind him. “May I suggest giving him your bags? The admiral wants a word.”

Ton nodded and handed off his duffle to the man. “Let’s not keep the man waiting.”

“This way, sir.”

They all headed across the bay together, walking a fair distance before arriving at a series of elevator doors. The lieutenant nodded to the sergeant. “Take the major’s team to the berths. I’ll show him the way when the admiral is done with him.”

“Sir.”

Ton followed the lieutenant into a separate lift and found himself looking at a set of numbers that really would have fit in at any of a thousand office buildings he’d ever been in. The digital display didn’t indicate just how high the numbers went, but as they flashed by from single digits to double and kept running, he whistled slightly.

“First time in a Terra Class, sir?”

“Yes it is, Lieutenant. I cut my teeth on the Los Angeles Class, but spent most of my space career on the Cheyennes,” Ton replied.

That was as good as admitting that he was basically a greenhorn when it came to space-based operations, Ton knew, but it was the cold hard truth. He’d barely been certified when the war came to Hayden, and hadn’t even been fully jump qualified when he led the second operator jump into Hayden’s World.

“The America is a big ship. You’ll get used to it quickly, though,” the lieutenant said before adding, “I’ve never been on anything else myself.”

Ton closed his eyes, thinking about his former sergeant and what she’d have to say about this.

Lord, here I am thinking that I’m the wet-behind-the-ears bastard in this tin can and he says something like that? Aida would be laughing silently behind me right now, probably sending sarcastic comments over my implants too.

The elevator lift chimed softly and the doors opened on a nondescript corridor with few people in site.

“This way to the admiral’s space, sir.”

Ton followed dutifully, feeling a little off balance as he realized that the corridor was curving downwards, although the ship’s gravity didn’t fell as if it were. The disconnect in his head gave him a mild feeling of vertigo that he ruthlessly suppressed as they walked.

“We’re on one of the observation spars,” he said, voice thick with the realization.

“Yes, sir. Noticed the curve, did you? The admiral uses this one for his personal staff and such unless we’re at general quarters, in which case they move in to the main ship.”

“I see.”

He did, actually. The observation spars were curving outriggers that jutted out from the rear of the Terra Class ships, angling toward the front. They looked like the classic guidance fins on old rockets from science fiction movies in the mid-twentieth century, but were actually large structures capable of housing labs, offices, recreation areas, and, of course, observation decks.

They came to a large and heavily reinforced door, with biometric scanners active. Ton felt his implants respond automatically to the computer’s handshake request, and the door began to open without comment from either him or the lieutenant.

If the curving corridor wasn’t enough to throw him off, the room beyond would be. He stepped out onto what seemed to be a catwalk, though as he looked a bit closer, it was clear that it was more of a suggestion than a required walkway. The floor around was transparent, probably transluminum or something stronger, he supposed.

Below his feet were two more decks built just the same, with people and equipment, but it was what was beyond that that gave him chills.

Open space, right under his feet as far as he could tell, and so very far below he could make out the running rights of the America herself.

Amazing.

“Admiral, this is Major Washington. He’ll be your primary field op.”

“Ah, excellent, thank you, Meadows. Stay close, if you don’t mind, we won’t be long.”

“Planned to, sir,” Lieutenant Meadows answered before turning to Ton. “I’ll be right over in the lounge there when you need me.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Washington managed to get out without sounding too stunned, he hoped.

The admiral turned to him after Meadows had left and gestured deeper into the room. “Walk with me a moment, Major.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m sure that you’re wondering about the absence of the Terra and the Canada,” Fairbairn said as they walked.

“It’d crossed my mind, sir.”

“Yes, well, I’ll supply you with a full report to your local inbox, but the short of it is that they went through the jump point to the next system to shut the front door,” the admiral said. “Something we’d hoped to avoid, but circumstances made necessary. Those same circumstances will, unfortunately, almost certainly put your team into the thick of things faster than we had hoped.”

“We’re good to go, sir.”

“I have no doubt. For the immediate future, Hayden is…or should be, reasonably secure. Unfortunately, the way we acted to ensure that security has our defensive plans somewhat more… complicated.” The admiral sighed. “Before, we knew where they were going to come from. There was only one direct route, and all other routes were…impractical, at best. The actions of Captain Richmond, the Terra, and the Canada will have forced the enemy to consider those as possible alternatives.”

“Then why did they shut the door as you said, sir?” Ton asked, curious.

“Because even with the advantage of knowing where they’d come from, there are limits to what we could stop, limits that the enemy wildly surpassed,” Admiral Fairbarin said, lips curling up. “Better to draw them into a war of attrition than to lose everything in one glorious battle, I’m afraid.”

“Understood, sir.”

“What that means is that as soon as I can scrounge up a few more ships to cover Hayden, we’ll be taking most of TF-7 out through one of the other jump points and begin running strike against known enemy installations between here and where we suspect they’ll be coming from,” Fairbairn replied. “If all goes well for the Terra and the Canada, they’ll be working their way back towards us doing much the same thing. The idea will be to bleed off their resources as they’re forced to respond to requests for help, as well as to deny them resupply from any of those locations.”

Ton nodded, he understood the strategy well enough.

“Do we have intel on the assets we’ll be striking at?”

“Some,” the admiral said, before admitting, “Not enough. Most are probably listening posts, but we know there are a couple resupply depots that Task Force Five never got a chance to service, and we have extremely high EF and GF readings from a system we’ve barely mapped, so that could be something important.”

“All right, I’ll have my team ready to go when you need us.”

“I have no doubts, Major. I’m not sure when we’ll be moving out, but be certain that your team is prepared for the possibility of extended missions without the support of the fleet. We may have to drop you on a target world while we service another target elsewhere,” Fairbairn told him. “It’s not the way I prefer to conduct a campaign, but the ship numbers we’ve received from forward scouts make it clear that we won’t be able to afford to do things entirely by the book on this one.”

Ton nodded, but had to imagine that the numbers the admiral was talking about had to be pretty bad. From his earlier briefings, he’d known in vague terms that this sort of strategic move was considered an option, but it was very far down the list. He hoped that the admiral’s full brief included that bit of intelligence, because he wanted to have an idea of what exactly he and his team were dealing themselves in against.

Not that it makes a huge difference. We’re none of us planning on folding the hand.

*****

Alamo Shipyard

Sol

“That’s a big ass suit.”

Sorilla’s reaction was perhaps understandable as she found herself looking up at a hulking man-shaped suit of armor that dwarfed her by more than she cared to think about.

“How tall is this damn thing anyway?” she asked, looking over at the civilian contractor who was tasked with showing her how the monstrous beast functioned.

“35 feet, from head to heel, Lieutenant.”

Sorilla swore, fluently, in several languages.

“What in hell’s name possessed you to build something like this? Tanks not good enough?”

“Funny you should ask that, Lieutenant.”

Sorilla spun on her heel, eyes widening as she recognized the woman walking toward her. She brought her heels together with an audible click and threw as perfect a salute as she’d ever managed.

“As you were,” Admiral Brooke said, a vaguely amused smile flickering around her lips. She walked past Sorilla and looked up at the beast before her. “You asked a question, I believe, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Brooke smiled coolly, but didn’t look back at the lieutenant. “The answer to your question, is Golems.”

Sorilla blinked, frowning. “Golems? Ma’am, the Golems we’ve encountered are glorified bulldozers. They’re dangerous enough to civilians, but a military unit can handle them without problem.”

“The ones we’ve encountered on the battlefield, yes.”

Sorilla felt the hairs on her neck stand up. “Ma’am, I have a feeling that you have a certain advantage over me on this.”

“The perk of being an admiral, Lieutenant. We get to see all the intel before anyone else,” Brooke said in a tone of forced casualness. “In this case, one of the Ghoulie ships Task Force Five splashed over Hayden in the last go ‘round had a few surprises on board.”

Sorilla grimaced. “I’m not sure I want to know.”

“In your position, I believe I would desperately want to know.”

“No, in my position I likely desperately need to know. There is a difference, ma’am.”

Brooke smiled and nodded. “Agreed. Now that that is out of the way, why don’t we break down exactly what it is that you need to know, Lieutenant?” she went on, losing the smile. “I promise you, you do not want to know any of it, but you most certainly do need it.”

“I was afraid it was going to be one of those briefings, ma’am,” Sorilla said warily. “Lay it on me, ma’am.”

“During exploration of the wreck of the one we took that was somewhat intact,” Brooke said, being more than a little charitable about the state of the wreck—nothing was remotely intact after being hammered with kinetic kill weapons and nuclear penetrators—“we found a few things of interest. Including half a dozen militarized Golems.”

“Militarized how?” Sorilla asked, now genuinely and deeply interested.

“About ten feet bigger than the ones you saw on planet, armed with what we have tentatively identified as projective Gravity Valve weapons, and beyond anything we’ve been able to reverse engineer,” she said flatly. “Their technology doesn’t look like anything we’ve ever seen, Lieutenant. Some of it, like the Gravity Valve, fit into our own theories and we were able to adapt it. However, we think that the Valve is the least of their technology.”

“The least…” Sorilla blurted before she got control over her mouth, somewhat shocked by her lack of propriety when speaking to an admiral, but the very idea that something like the Gravity Valve could possibly be the least of the enemy technology was…

Honestly, she didn’t know the word for it. Disconcerting? Yes. Shocking? Damn right. Fucking terrifying? Getting closer.

“We’ve detected micro warps in the space-time around all of their technology, Lieutenant,” Brooke went on, ignoring her outburst. “The Valve is impressive, but it’s crude. It’s power, pure and unrefined. We’ve been able to duplicate it, with effort, but we can’t even figure out if the Golems are even technology. We can’t find circuits, we can’t find muscles, there isn’t any sign of anything in them that really makes them stand out from a chunk of silicon with a few other elements mixed in. What we do know, from your reports, is that they can move. They can think. And even the civilian models can fight.”

Sorilla shook her head, considering all that. “Even so, Admiral, why would you need something like this beastie?”

She glanced up at the massive suit. No, it wasn’t a suit. You couldn’t wear something that size, you had to pilot it. It was a robot, or a walking tank. What is the word from those cartoons my grandfather used to watch with me? A Mecha.

“Tanks, drones, jets, even handheld artillery could take one out. There’s no reason to build something like this,” she said. “Not to engage these things on any planet I can imag…”

Sorilla trailed off and she looked down at her feet for a long moment. “We’re not going to engage them on a planet, are we?”

“No, you are not,” Brooke confirmed.

Sorilla thought about it. It didn’t make sense to go after them in space. There was nothing to take or defend in space. Realistically that only left one thing, but it was insane.

“You want a ship. You want one of their ships,” she said with wonder. “And you want it intact.”

“Yes, that is exactly what we want, Lieutenant,” Brooke said, “and it’s going to be your job to get us one.”

Sorilla blew the air out of her lungs, whispering three words so low that she hoped and prayed the admiral couldn’t hear her.

“Well, fuck me.”

Chapter VI

USS Terra

Unnamed Inner System of the Orion-Cygnus Arm, Milky Way Galaxy

“Watch it! They’re coming around!” Lt. Commander Brian Douglas growled as he held on to his seat, debating whether or not to strap down.

He brushed off the thought again, since, unlike the now-obsolete Cheyenne platforms, the USV Terra had internal gravity and decent cushioning against rapid acceleration.

That wasn’t to say it was perfect, but generally speaking, if things got out of computer control, they were all dead anyway.

“I see them.”

The helmsman was hunched over his computer, fingers pounding at the mechanical keys that let him input new course programs with rapid-fire precision. Again, unlike the Cheyenne platforms, the new Terra Class ships had such significantly faster acceleration that tactical maneuvers could and, indeed, had to be changed constantly in the midst of battle.

Combined with the longer reach of their new weapons systems and the dampening effect the gravitational systems had on relative inertia, the Terra outclassed the Cheyenne by degrees that made the older class look like little more than a Roman Trireme compared to a twentieth-century battleship.

For all that, however, their enemy was apparently unimpressed.

The Terra and the Canada were one jump into enemy territory, though now it might be considered significantly more since they’d slammed the door shut on the jump point back to Hayden and it was going to damn well stay that way for a while. That was just great for Hayden, but it didn’t do much for the two ships on the wrong side of the jump point now, not when they were faced with a fleet of ships that looked to consist of at least five different alien groups. That was just a guess based on ship design and scans of their power curve, weapons use, and other factors including NAVINT (Naval Intelligence) analysis of their tactics.

They recognized two of the ship types easily. They were clearly variants of the Ghoulie Gravity Valve monsters that first showed up during the initial invasion of Hayden’s World, and the Delta species that had mounted the last assault on the system. Between those two types, at least three other distinctive design philosophies appeared evident, which was striking when compared to Earth designs over the last few centuries.

Form, for humans, followed function. A good design was immediately recognized and copied ad nauseum until every fleet on Earth used something more or less identical. That had been the way things worked since the early days of sail, and still worked through to this day. Even the Chinese, who were as insular a people as any on Earth, used designs that were very similar to the Cheyenne Class.

They didn’t have anything like the Terra, of course, but that was likely just a matter of time and a good spy or two.

“Lead elements are coming into optimal range, Captain,” Douglas announced after a moment’s observation.

“I see them, Commander,” Captain Richmond answered. “Lock them up.”

“Target bandit elements one through five!” Douglas called out sharply.

“Bandits one through five, aye, sir! Targeted!”

“Fire the Hammers,” Pierce ordered a moment later.

“Aye, Captain! Firing!”

A rapid-fire burst of twenty “Hammer” Class projectiles blasted away into space.

Those on the ship didn’t even register the departure of the magnetically accelerated weapons, the minute force of their departure barely enough to be detected by their onboard accelerometers. However, the Hammers hid a secret, one that the enemy hadn’t yet seen in a fight. Douglas leaned forward, involuntarily angling for a better look at the plot.

Each of the Hammers was a hundred-kilo spike of steel accelerated to around 0.4c by the massive magnetic rails on the Terra. That alone would be enough to wreak some serious havoc on anything they slammed into, but inside their steel cores they each hid a variation of the enemy’s own weapon, the Gravity Valve.

It wasn’t enough to crush ships under its own weight, but it didn’t have to. Each Valve pulsed as the weapons went into terminal mode, opening the force of gravity by a factor of one hundred. It was enough to deform the steel into an oblong ball of metal, but certainly not enough to initiate gravity-induced fission. What it did do, however, was suddenly increase the kinetic power of the strike a hundred fold.

At better than a third the speed of light, a thousand-kilo effective projectile was enough to vaporize even the most resilient armor, sublimating parts of the enemy ships directly into plasma. Before the Valve core was destroyed by the impact, it went on to actually tear large chunks of the enemy ship, shard from shard, under their own enhanced weight.

Because the effect of the Valve extended beyond the edge of the Hammers themselves, it was almost like firing a miniature black hole through the enemy ships. The enhanced gravity spread as it passed, affecting the material of the enemy ships, and forced them to flex and compress in ways they had never been designed to.

“Targets destroyed.”

The small interceptor and escort ships that had come up with the Ghoulie ships were small potatoes, but eliminating as many of them as possible before the main conflict just made a whole universe of sense.

Captain Richmond nodded, satisfied with the results. “That’s what I would call a successful weapon’s test, people. Good job. Now, lock in the Ghoulie ships and standby to go to rapid-fire on all rails.”

“Aye, sir! Targets locked in, but the ships are holding back outside of optimal range.”

Richmond was unsurprised; the Ghoulies had weapons that redefined the term “standoff range.” The other ships were obviously providing a shielding element while they prepared to engage with Gravity Valves at maximum distances.

That was a luxury that the human ships didn’t have, and if he couldn’t enjoy the little things in life, Captain Richmond had absolutely no intention of allowing his enemies to either.

“Plot our course, Mr. Stewart,” he ordered the helmsmen. “Dead ahead, into the belly of the beast. Point defense weapons are to be at the ready. We’re not going to have time for those smaller ships on the way through. Some will get too close.”

The man at the helm swallowed hard, eyes on the lights that indicated all the enemy ships between them and the targets.

“Course prepared, sir.”

“Ahead then, all flank,” Pierce ordered grimly. “They’re between us and the planet, and you know what that means.”

“All flank, aye, sir.”

It meant that they had to go through the enemy to achieve mission success, and if that was what they had to do, then by God that was just what Pierce intended to do.

The big ships rumbled as there was a brief feeling of quaking while the drives and the gravity well to the bow of the ships fought briefly, then balanced out. The USV Terra and USV Canada began their charge into the black, all hands ready and all weapons primed.

*****

Parath wanted to hit something, his frustrations growing by the second as he watched his interceptors being destroyed piecemeal by the aliens without the Ross ships bothering to so much as provide the slightest cover. The Ross were an inscrutable race at the best of times, but few would ever call them stupid. Right now, however, he had no other word that could be used to describe their actions.

They were charging blindly like maddened Lucian regulars, which was entirely unlike them.

This strange empire, there is something here that…I think, none of us know, save perhaps the Ross. Have they had dealings with them before? Do they know something we do not? How did this minor empire jump from what records clearly show to be a mid-range fledgling space-faring society to a group that can now shut down a gravetic gateway?

There was more going on than anyone knew, certainly more than he knew, but he’d be damned to the eternal singular abyss if he could work out what it was.

Whatever the Ross are after, it’s more than enough for them to risk their treaty and place with the Alliance in its pursuit. Yet… Even that didn’t make sense to him. If that is the case… why did they summon us in to help them in the first place?

The whole situation was spiraling out of control, and Parath had a sneaking suspicion that if he didn’t get a handle on it quickly, then he could very easily be looking at the beginning of a genocidal campaign. The Ross were not known for restraint, and out this far from the Alliance? They were clearly not interested in showing any now, nor did they have the political reasons to do so.

The problem was that not one ounce of it made any sense whatsoever, and he didn’t have any time to try and force it to make sense either.

“Time to intercept?”

“The aliens have accelerated toward the Ross ships,” his aide said, tone filled with disbelief.

Parath didn’t blame him. No one accelerated toward a Ross battleship. A smart commander stood off a long distance, never stopped moving, and hammered them with extreme range weapons until there were no two molecules that remained sticking to one another.

“We’re closing, but the alien ships will engage the Ross momentarily.”

“If they make it past the Ross, will we beat them to the planet?”

The young officer gave him a look that clearly said that the youth thought he was insane for asking what would happen if they made it past the Ross, but Parath didn’t give a damn what he thought. He just stared at the youth until he blushed blue, ducked his head back down, and answered, “No, Master. They will make the planet before we can intercept.”

“Blast.”

“What do you think is at the planet?”

Parath glanced over at his second and waggled his hand. “Nothing. I expect that they will use the planet as a gravity assist.”

“To escape?”

“Yes. Likely to this system’s fourth jump point. That will take them back around one of the long routes that eventually makes its way back to their space,” Parath said. “It is what I would do, were I stranded in this situation.”

“High praise, Master.”

“No, merely giving them that which they’ve shown to be their due. They are ship handlers of some skill.”

For a Parithalian, there was little more that needed to be said.

Parath had trained most of his life to be a master of ships, the avian before the master of everything onboard ship. Parithalian chits grew up knowing the basics of flight to a degree that most species considered to be bordering on the supernatural. Nothing in three dimensions was hidden from their eyes, and it was instinct as well as skill that caused Parithalians to be the unbreakable spine of the Alliance Fleet.

Even the Ross had fallen against them eventually, bloody though that war had been.

So when Parath, a blooded master of ships, said that his opponents were handlers of some skill, he meant precisely what he said. Not a fluff more, not a fluff less.

*****

USV Terra

Pierce gripped the arm of his seat like it was a lifeline and he was a drowning man, the sheer size of the alien ships beginning to filter into his head.

My God, they’re bigger than anything I’ve ever seen. These aren’t the same class of Ghoulie ship, that’s for damned sure.

“We’re in their range now, we have to be.”

“Belay that whining,” Pierce growled, shutting up the fearful words. The last thing he needed was to let that sort of talk get started on the bridge during a battle. “Standby all weapons.”

“A…all weapons standing by, aye, Captain.”

“Fire.”

The Hammers launched on rapid fire, all tubes lighting up the screens as they emptied the magazines. Beside them, the Canada opened up as well, her Hammers tracking on the second Ghoulie ship as both ships bore down on the pair in a completely mad game of chicken.

“Gravity event detected!”

“Launch countermeasures!” Pierce snarled, though, honestly, he shouldn’t have had to give that order. If his people weren’t smart enough to do just that in the face of a Ghoulie weapon assault, then he needed a new crew.

“Countermeasures away!”

The Terra flushed the defensive tubes just ahead of the Canada, both ships putting dozens of canisters into space in rapid fire. The devices, each just a little larger than a fifty-gallon oil drum, exploded in a brilliant flash of energy-like flares around the ships as everyone tensed.

“All hands, standby for turbulence.”

The calm voice belied the tension in every section of the starship as people grabbed onto whatever they could and began to pray.

It started softly, a vibration that was almost imperceptible, but climbed rapidly. The two ships rumbled and rocked like cruisers at sea in a perfect storm. The decks bucked underfoot and systems wailed as the computers struggled mightily to keep the gravity core in tune with the motion of the ship.

Those canisters had broken up the local space-time, much as the larger ones at the jump point shut the door on FTL travel, and in the next few seconds, as the Ghoulie weapon was focused on them, the Valve found that someone had crimped the hose it was trying to turn on.

On the bridge of the Terra, Pierce was holding his breath as he watched the screens. After a few long, interminably long, seconds, he let out the air and shook his head in some wonder.

“Well, I’ll be damned, the countermeasures actually worked.”

His XO shot him an ugly look, to which Pierce just shrugged and grinned.

“You know as well as I do it was a hail Mary, Paul.”

Paul Sanders rolled his eyes. “Yeah, but I wasn’t planning on ever admitting it. Not while I was sober, sir.”

Pierce laughed, loudly, and turned his focus back to the bridge.

“ETA to Hammer time ,” he called, feeling far too good for a man who had yet to lead his ships into the fight he knew was coming.

“Two minutes to impact, Captain.”

“Expedite reloading the magazines. I want to hit them again.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

*****

“What was that?” Parath demanded, glaring at the screens.

The battle was being relayed back to them via the FTL communications systems on the remaining interceptors he had dispatched to cover the Ross’El. The blinding flares, or whatever they were, had briefly flooded out the screens, but the effect hadn’t remained long enough to be of much tactical use.

Perhaps if they were in close enough, under a single light interval, but not at these ranges.

“Master…scanners on the interceptors show that the Ross have engaged with their primary weapons.”

Parath blinked. Twice.

“The alien ships didn’t maneuver, did they?”

He hadn’t seen them do it, but then, he hadn’t seen them explode, either, and at the range they were fighting, it damned well should have been one or the other. Often both.

“No, Master.”

“Failure of the Ross weapon?” Parath asked, skeptical. There was a first time for everything, he supposed.

“Both ships’ weapons, Master?”

No, that didn’t happen.

That really didn’t leave many options, the only one was that…

Parath thought back to the moment the two ships had entered the system and what they had done to the system’s gravity gate that led back to their world.

“Singular abyss,” he swore. “They’re matching the Ross, gravity weapon for gravity weapon.”

*****

USV Terra

“We can’t take much more of this, Captain!”

Pierce was loathe to agree with that assessment, but there was little doubt that the Terra and the Canada were being shaken apart by the combination of the enemy weapon and their own countermeasures.

The gravity jammers twisted up space-time enough that focusing the enemy weapon became a tricky thing, almost impossible when you accounted for the movement of the ships and how hard it would be to keep the weapon focused over both time and distance. The problem was that they also played all kinds of havoc with local space-time, which meant that the Terra and Canada were being twisted every which way but loose while they were under attack by the enemy weapon.

It was better than being squashed into an infinitely small space and then being split into one’s component sub-atomic particles, but it was still going to tear the ships apart if something didn’t change.

“Impact in three seconds…two…one…”

They couldn’t see the flash of the weapon’s impact, it was still a few seconds away, but Pierce devotedly hoped that it was a particularly bright and violent flash indeed.

The Hammers were relativistic weapons, faster enough that there were few things that could stop them and fewer things that could dodge them, but until he saw the flash on his scopes, he wasn’t going to celebrate. That said, one thing that happened right around the same time as the predicted impact was the sudden cessation of the enemy gravity assault.

That was good enough, so that when the flash confirmation came though, it was something of a letdown.

“Good hit!”

“Signal the Canada,” Pierce ordered. “Tell them all weapons free and follow us through.”

“Aye aye, sir! Signal sent to the Canada. They confirm, will follow us through.”

With the enemy’s main weapon being, for the moment, neutralized, they just had to punch through the enemy formation. Beyond lay the planet they would need to make their escape.

*****

The two human ships tightened their formation, skimming within kilometers of each other as they dove in on the enemy ships. The two hulking Ghoulie ships seemed to pay them little mind, not changing their course in the slightest, though both were now spewing atmosphere and fires from where they had been struck by the Hammers.

The smaller interceptors, however, reacted instantly as they accelerated in to a strike formation that would be familiar to many pilots from Terran wars long past.

It was going to be a fast interception pass; both sides would only get one chance to make their arguments, so to speak. In space, however, one chance was generally all you needed.

On the Terra and the Canada, the point defense weapons whirred into position. Now that the two groups were far too close to hope to engage with each other’s standoff weapons, it would be down to what they packed for knife-range encounters.

*****

“Here they come!”

The enemy interceptors were a fraction the size of the Terra, but clearly capable of matching her speed and still having a little left in the tank. They were actually decelerating relative to the Terra and the Canada as they made their pass, however, burning hard along a matching course with the human ships in order to extend the engagement time.

Pierce had to give them credit for guts, because he was sure this was going to be at least as ugly as passing engagement for them as it was for the Terra.

“Target and open fire with lasers and mid-range cannons,” he ordered. “Standby interception rockets for point defense.”

“Aye, sir, engaging with lasers and cannons.”

The Terra and the Canada, both ships still pouring on the acceleration as they aimed to blow through the blockade of ships, opened fire on the smaller interceptors. Lasers and deck-mounted Metalstorm cannons swung to life, the lack of sound from both more than a little creepy to those watching on the bridge, and spat their respective payloads out into the void.

High-energy photons, slugs of depleted uranium, and magnetically contained plasma arcs crossed one another in the vacuum at high speed then proceeded on to tear into their particular targets.

Human conventional weapons were crude in many ways, but then, if someone is swinging a club at your head, it could easily be just as effective as the most sophisticated weapon in the world.

Gigawatt lasers vaporized chunks of armor, turning the material to plasma in a sublimation process that took fractions of a fraction of a second. The resulting plume of superheated material erupted from its source and exploded into space in a violent display of pyrotechnics.

Depleted uranium rounds moving at significant portions of the speed of light, relative to their targets, were not significant threats to a starship. Not individually. Ten thousand of them slamming into armor, chipping away at it until it was gone and they were tearing through the softer frame underneath? That was a completely different story.

Metalstorm weapons shredded their targets, pulverizing armor that could block a single high-velocity strike with ease, actually targeted at the areas the lasers had already struck and tore through the enemy ships to ricochet around the interior like thousands of insane pool balls in a three-dimensional table.

On the other side of the equation, however, the human ships weren’t getting away completely clean either.

The first plasma arcs rained down on the Terra as the big ship cleaved the lead path, slamming into ceramic armor actually designed to stop very similar weapon concepts. The active armor sandwich that the Terra was plated in had thick heat-resistant ceramics sandwiching-shaped high-explosive cores. When the outer shell of armor was cracked by a plasma arc, the explosive would detonate and throw out a plasma jet of its own to disrupt and diffuse the incoming weapon.

Tested and proven, the active armor had been developed for tanks shortly after the Second World War and had been refined ever since. Unfortunately, as sophisticated and powerful as it was, the enemy weapons were far beyond what the designers had intended, and some of the blasts inevitably burst through.

*****

“Losing pressure on our starboard side, sections nine, forty, forty three, fifty…. Reports still coming in, Captain!”

“Get damage control on it, but don’t stop firing!” Pierce ordered. “Priority to any section with munitions magazines!”

“Aye, sir!”

On the bridge, as deep as the command center was buried in the hull of the ship, they barely felt anything of the explosive impacts. Some stray vibrations made it through, occasionally the distant thunder of a panel blowing, but by and large Pierce was disturbed more by the lack of sounds of violence than he ever had been in command of a blue water warship.

“Bogey eight and nine are down!”

“Five is losing acceleration! They’ve ceased firing!”

“Hammer magazines reloaded!”

Pierce leaned forward. “Lock up the Ghoulie ships and fire as she bears!”

“Aye aye, Captain. Firing as she bears!”

The bridge was a scene of order on the razor’s edge of chaos, held in check from an inevitable decent into total entropy only by the skill and training of the people manning the stations, and for Pierce it was home sweet home.

The ship did shudder from the magnetic launches of the Hammers, which felt wrong to him when he could barely feel strikes that were killing members of his crew, but the distinct low thrum of the launchers felt good. It felt like a victory condition.

*****

Parath hissed softly as he watched signal feeds blink out as one interceptor after another was destroyed or damaged beyond function. Somehow the two alien ships had negated the standoff weapons in use by the Ross, and the interceptors that were fast enough for him to send ahead were armed only with light weapons. Against the hulking battle vessels the aliens were fielding, it was like watching chits assault a full grown adult with pebbles.

Unfortunately, it was clear that the enemy ships had no intentions of slowing, and at their current rate, they would explode past the Ross blockade in mere moments, and from there nothing was left to stop them from their goal.

If he were right, they would immediately sling in close to the planet and from there boost around and use the gravity to increase their angular velocity and course to send them out toward another gravity gateway. At that point it would become a chase, which was something he was not looking forward to. The direct path was now apparently closed, though for how long the alien method would be maintained, he wasn’t sure, which meant that his group would be forced to use the next most direct path to reach the alien empire.

Which sounds far better than it actually is, given that the second most direct path is nothing of the sort!

Tracking a hostile force across multiple star systems was a nightmare, particularly when they apparently had the capacity to match the Ross gravity weapon for gravity weapon and could somehow shut down gravity gates. It would be a violent and arduous voyage, and one in which the enemy held far too many advantages despite being outnumbered by a normally decisive amount.

Unfortunately, for all that, he wasn’t going to have a choice.

His orders from the master of fleets was clear: The enemy worlds had to be secured. Particularly the nexus world, though he wasn’t certain if that world was of as much strategic value as they had once believed. It would depend on if the disruption was permanent and, if not, then just how long it would last. He couldn’t imagine that any race could come up with something of this nature that could permanently override the natural universe in such a way, but Parath supposed it was remotely possible.

Even in the event that it wasn’t, however, until they had a better idea of just what they were dealing with, that gateway would have to remain off limits for fear of what may have been done at the far side.

He could feel the ache forming in his mind at even the thought of the work it would take to unravel that.

Damn the Ross to the singular abyss. This is rapidly becoming more than it could ever possibly be worth, and I foresee it only becoming more costly in the future.

Unfortunately, as he’d considered before, he had little choice.

His path was set now, and it led back to the alien empire via whatever route the mission deemed necessary.

*****

USV Terra

“We’re through!”

The Terra and the Canada blew through the two Ghoulie ships that had tried to block their advance, though thankfully not as literally as the USS Cheyenne back on in Hayden space. The Terra was tough, but Pierce could do without that particular “honor” on his record.

“Get eyeballs on the accelerometers!” he snarled. “They’ll be able to target us again once we’re outside knife range!”

That was the real risk now, though both ships under his command were spewing air and debris from the damage they’d taken. Not even the Ghoulies were crazy enough to call down a Valve strike on their own position, or as close to it as the Terra and the Canada currently were.

As that range opened up again, however, they would no longer have any such restriction on their actions.

Unfortunately, the human ships did have a major restriction on theirs. The kinetic accelerators used to launch the Hammers, the human versions of a standoff weapon, were fixed emplacements that aimed dead ahead. They’d not be able to get any return shots off, and that was all there was to that.

“Space-time normal! No sign of attack.”

That won’t last, Pierce thought grimly, stretching slightly in his seat.

The planet ahead was looming in the screens, and with it he knew was their shot at escape. A gravity assist sling around the planet, come out with higher angular velocity and a new course that put them on target for an emergency jump to a system about eighteen light years closer in toward human space, and they’d be clear.

They just had to survive the next few minutes of the enemy’s Gravity Valve.

“Captain, I’m getting strange readings across the accelerometers,” a crewman announced, sounding uncertain as he spoke up.

“Then launch countermeasures,” Pierce said.

“No, sir, you don’t understand. It’s not a Valve strike.” The crewman shook his head, “Captain, I’m reading this as being located on the planet.”

Pierce blinked. “What?”

He got up, moving quickly over to look at the readings himself. He could have had them sent to his station, but he was a blue water captain and this felt more natural to him. What he found when he got there was perplexing, however.

The crewman was right. The waves of warping in space-time were coming from ahead of them and not the ship behind or on their own location, the way a strike would appear. Instead it looked like the gravity of the planet itself was…

“They wouldn’t…” Pierce whispered in shock.

“Sir?”

“Come about!” he screamed. “Come about! Reverse heading!”

“Sir? That will let them catch us…”

“Damn them! And damn you,” Pierce snarled at his XO as he rushed across the bridge and grabbed the shoulder of the helmsman. “Bring us about, full reverse heading, all flank thrust! Put our backs to the planet! Do it now!”

“Aye, sir!”

“Tell the Canada to do the same!” Pierce snarled. “They targeted the planet! It’s going to…”

There was a white flash across every instrument they had, and then it all went black.

“Oh hell,” Pierce said into the darkness of the bridge now that every display screen was off and only the overhead lights provided illumination. “All hands…brace for impact.”

He slumped into his seat as the alarms sounded, mind mentally counting down the time between the flash and what he knew was coming.

*****

The USV Terra swung away from the Canada, obeying its captain’s order as the planet ahead of them both simply ceased to exist for a moment and then was replaced by a blast of white the likes of which no human had ever witnessed before.

It burned out every sensor on every ship looking in that direction, and then there was the eerie darkness of artificial night.

Seconds passed, the Canada now turning to match her cohort, and the Terra completed its maneuver. Drives pointed to the rear as she suddenly poured on full flank power, literally tossing everything they had into reversing course.

On a world with atmosphere, there would have been an eerie silence then, a period in which everything seemed to stand still, but in space nothing changed until, suddenly, everything changed.

A plasma wave rushed over them first, catching the Canada across its side as the big ship foundered briefly, its engines unable to cope with the massive shift in power and pressure around it. The Terra’s drives flared brighter, stray anti-protons not yet annihilated in the drive getting caught in the backwash that slammed into the ship from the rear.

The VASIMR drive, however, acted much like the Van Allen Belt around the Earth. It pushed back against the blast pressure of the explosion and shunted much of it aside. The Canada, however, was not nearly so fortunate.

Searing radiation tore through the hull with ease, penetrating deeper than anything should have been able to, and irradiated the inside of the ship. In seconds she was hotter than the interior of a fission plant, and the only consolation for the crew was that it wouldn’t be long.

It was shorter than they realized.

Following on the plasma wave, rocky shards of the planet that hadn’t been completely destroyed roared through. In those terms, even a ship the size of the Canada was a tiny, tiny, target, but in the end it only took one.

A piece of the planet roughly the size of Mount Everest slammed into the Canada in a direct broadside and wiped the ship from the face of the Universe in a single instant of carnage and destruction. Just a few dozen kilometers away, the Terra was being battered by chunks of the planet as well, but the big engines of the big ship were burning many of them up before they could strike.

The whole event took only minutes, but felt like an eternity as the blast wave moved on past and annihilated the interceptor ships following the Ghoulie vessels. The big gravity-powered ships themselves didn’t get off entirely unscathed, large gaping holes were dug out of their hulls by chunks of the planet, radiation penetrated through their damaged hulls and killed crew by the score, but they had been prepared for what they unleashed and both ships stood and weathered the storm.

After it passed, space managed to seem just a little more silent than it ever had before, impossible though that may have been.

Chapter VII

Alamo Shipyards,

Sol Trojan point

There was something decidedly unnatural, Sorilla felt, about being trapped in a 35-foot-tall bipedal behemoth while every voluntary muscle in her body was paralyzed by an induced form of REM atonia. She could fight through it, of course, there was no way she’d let anyone lock her into a beast like this if she couldn’t pop the hatch and be mobile on her own two feet in about ten seconds, but that would defeat the point of the exercise.

With several of her key neurotransmitters being blocked by the induction of what was, in effect, sleep paralysis, she found that her motion sickness had gone away, so that was an upside. The reason, unfortunately, was that she was now somewhat cut off from the implants in her extremities. What she was wired into, however, was the semi-autonomous robot she was piloting.

The Behemoth had a quantum core processor that put the one in her primary implant to shame, capable of solving thousands of mathematical problems at once while her own could maybe handle a few dozen. It needed every atom of that processing power, however, because the machine it was running was a brute in every sense of the word.

“Alright, Lieutenant, walk toward me.”

Sorilla looked around, finding the source of the voice using the optics of the mecha. The speaker was Raymond Hearse, a rather abrasive civilian contractor who had designed and built the machine she was piloting. He was an ass, but he knew his stuff, and while she had the chance, she intended to bleed him dry of whatever information she could.

Her first steps in the beast were hesitant, like a toddler stumbling away from its mother. Thankfully, unlike the toddler, however, she had a whole array of autonomous software backing her up and keeping her from falling on her ass in front of God and everyone.

Sorilla found that walking was surprisingly easy, as long as she stayed calm and didn’t fight past the paralysis. One foot in front of the other, balance dictated by signals from her own inner ear as well as the accelerometer in the bot itself. Piece of cake, as long as she had a few minutes in advance to work out how she intended to eat the cake.

Need to be faster. Instinctive. Damn it all, why did they tap me for this? A tanker would have been better than me. I’m a fucking operator for Christ’s sake.

For all her mental bitching, Sorilla made her way across the room with what might be charitably called a casual amble.

“Stop bitching to yourself about the assignment and focus on the job,” Hearse snapped at her, shaking Sorilla out of her reverie.

“How the fuck do you know what I’m thinking?” the eight-ton war machine snarled in a vaguely female voice that almost sounded entirely unlike Sorilla’s own.

Hearse rolled his eyes and looked her right in the primary optics. “Because you walked across the room like a pissed off woman who wants her boyfriend to know he did something wrong but won’t tell him what it was.”

The macha unconsciously cracked its knuckles, obviously sizing him up for a coffin, but Hearse only nodded and smiled.

“Better. You’re interfacing almost on an instinctive level now.”

Sorilla rolled her eyes as she rested in the chest of the big machine, about the only muscles she had full voluntary control over. Her mind and body were such a mishmash of conflicting emotions that she couldn’t get a handle on all of them, much to her irritation.

Worst of all, not that she’d tell this asshole, but she literally as horny as she’d ever been.

This contraption blows.

At least she didn’t have to endure that sensation and wonder if she was actually attracted to the prick. The sensation of sexual arousal was a side effect of the paralysis, which of course meant that she didn’t have to tell him shit because he designed the system and knew damned well what it did.

She was really starting to despise this assignment.

“Catch!”

Sorilla looked up in time to see a barrel flying in her direction, one of the big ones used to pack food for, like, fifty people. She twisted around and dove for cover automatically, hitting the deck in a rolling slide that brought her up on the other side of the room, her rifle appearing in her hand almost by magic.

It was only then that she looked around and saw about fifty-odd people cowering behind whatever cover they could, staring at her incredulously, and she remembered that she wasn’t just wearing her power armor at the moment.

“Not quite what I was aiming for,” Hearse admitted as he walked across the room in her direction, “but impressive maneuvering all the same. I think I have your baseline scans now. Park your machine so I can see if you scuffed the paint.”

Sorilla scowled at him as she slung her rifle over her shoulder, then flipped him the bird as she got to her feet again.

“Ah, better and better. Excellent manual dexterity,” he said cheerfully, turning his back on her and walking away.

Sorilla haloed him briefly with her targeting software, but eventually just walked over to the gantry park and settled the machine back into place. Once it was locked down, she popped the hatch and gritted her teeth as she pushed through the paralysis and pulled herself out the back hatch of the big machine.

“For the record,” she said, “this thing blows.”

No one paid her much mind.

*****

Nadine looked at the orders she’d just received and read them again.

It was the eighth time she’d done that, and they still hadn’t changed.

Damn reality.

A courier had come back from Hayden with news, and not one bit of it was good. Not really, at least. She supposed that the probable success of the new gravetic pulse devices might be considered good news, but since no one knew how long they would last once deployed, she’d leave that for history to decide.

The Terra and the Canada were missing in action, and it looked like Fairbairn wanted to go haring off after them, despite not having enough ships to cover Hayden. Of course, that meant that SOLCOM was going to drop the problem in her lap and expect that she take care of it.

Never mind that they’d only delivered her last ship, the Banshee, two days earlier. She didn’t even have full crews for TF-V yet and they wanted her deployed!

She could feel a migraine coming on, and all she’d done was open the damn orders.

Task Force Five was to report on station at Hayden before embarking on their assigned mission to attempt capture of an Alpha alien starship. During the course of that mission, they were to watch for any activity that might indicate alien movement toward Hayden and, if possible, curtail it where found.

Easier said than done.

All things considered, they were orders she actually agreed with and wanted to pursue, but the timing…the timing was no good. She was supposed to have two more weeks before they even began assembling the crews, damn it.

Her ships weren’t ready, her crews weren’t ready, and even her operator team wasn’t ready.

Command has to be out of their ever-loving minds on this one. Aida is good, but she needs more training time than this. Hell, her team hasn’t even been checked and certified yet. This is going to be such a goddamned nightmare.

The enemy was so inconsiderate.

“Terrance.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the steward asked from the doorway where he’d appeared almost instantly.

Honestly, sometimes she thought he slept there, other times she suspected that he teleported when called. Either way, he was too damned good to let out from her command anytime in the next hundred years or so.

“Call up my staff,” she said. “We need to have a planning session.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

His vocabulary left a little to be desired though. Always made her feel so damned old.

*****

Sorilla felt stiff as she made her way back to the testing facility, somewhat puzzled by the crowd she was working her way through to get there.

“Damn, what is going on with all these people?” she mumbled under her breath when she finally made it to the facility and stepped into the cavernous room.

It was a dry dock used for maintaining civilian ships, huge but not remotely large enough for the current generation ships of the line. That was why it had been relegated to a testing facility for her squad, as soon as she got them at any rate.

Sorilla was somewhat put out to discover that the crowd had apparently beat her to the facility and, more than that, were literally crawling over everything in it. Including her ‘bot.

“Hey, what hell?” she complained, glaring at the men who were loading the bot onto a shipping platform and strapping it down.

They couldn’t hear her, of course, so they just ignored her as she waved angrily at them and went about their business.

“Orders came through, Lieutenant.”

Sorilla twisted around, eyes on the speaker. She stiffened and saluted quickly when she saw his oak leaf.

“At ease,” he said, eyes on the big machine behind her. “I’m Commander Sear. I’ll be showing you to your berth on the Legendary.”

“I was told we weren’t shipping out for over a month,” Sorilla said as she stood there.

“We weren’t, now we are. Situation has changed, Lieutenant, time to adapt.”

“What happened?” Sorilla asked, concerned for the people she still knew on Hayden.

“Attempted assault on Hayden. It’s been stopped for now, but the threat remains,” Sear told her. “We’ll have to do the rest of your training on the move.”

She was about to complain that that was impossible, then she recalled that the Legendary had gravity and some areas almost as large as the space she was in. Okay, not really, but almost half the size. Maybe.

Should be enough, but they haven’t even given me my team yet!

“My team, sir?”

“They’re being mobilized on Earth now, should be here within 48 hours.”

Crap. They’re really moving us on this one.

“Understood.”

“Come with me, Lieutenant,” he said, gesturing back the way she’d come. “Time to board the Legendary.”

“Yes, sir,” Sorilla answered, moving to fall into step with him.

Sear paused, then glanced back. “Officially the admiral will convey this to you, but as of this morning, the papers came through. Here.”

Sorilla reached out and took what he was offering her, then blinked at it in surprise. It was a set of steel bars to replace the gold ones on her lapel.

“Can’t have a junior lieutenant commanding a mission of this import, Senior Lieutenant Aida,” he said. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Now, shall we?”

Sorilla nodded and the two left the former dry dock.

*****

Task Force Five consisted of fifteen second-generation Terra Class ships, unofficially called the Legendary Class everywhere but on their official papers. The USV Legendary was the first of the modified class, a ship that utilized third-generation gravity manipulation units and incremental improvements on everything they’d been able to learn from the reverse engineered technology they’d taken from the alien wrecks.

It was clear to the brass, however, that they were reaching the end of what they could learn from what they had, which was why they’d authorized the primary assignment of TF-V and assigned two special support ships to the order of battle.

It was tricky, building support ships for Terra Class ships. They had to be able to move damned near as fast as the ships they supported, but there wasn’t much time and they were critically short of available hulls. So SOLCOM leaned back on an old standby: They retrofitted a pair of older hulls that belonged to the Russian Federation. Not enough to give them the full 800-plus gravities of acceleration that a Terra or Legendary Class ship might reach, of course, but more than enough to give them the speed and power they’d need to do their jobs.

The ships were former colony ships, huge empty flying storehouses that hadn’t been established as the Counterweight to a tether anywhere. They weren’t as tough as a military ship, or as fast, but they were the fastest civilian ships in human-controlled space by a huge margin.

Now Nadine Brooke found herself idly admiring the way they’d redone the interior of the old Explorer ship she was walking through, noting that it couldn’t have been an easy job.

“Ah, Admiral Brooke, yes?”

She glanced up, smiling as she recognized the man walking toward her. “Captain Petronov. It’s a pleasure to meet you in person, finally.”

“Yes, in that we are in agreement. So, what do you think of my Socrates?”

“A fine ship, Captain. I’m impressed with some of the refits you managed.”

“Well, as you know, SOLCOM could not afford us much aid beyond technical help with the new gravity manipulation device,” Alexi Petronov said with a slight shrug. “We have to work out where things would have to be for ourselves. I think it works.”

“It certainly seems to,” she agreed. “I admire the design work you’ve done in here. It’s much more organic than the Terra Class.”

“Well, we are not ship of war. We will never be ship of war,” Alexi said with a slightly rueful smile, “even if we sometimes carry weapons and fight in battles, yes?” He laughed. “We took care for safety and security, of course, but is much more open design. We can load very large things in here.”

“So I see.”

He wasn’t kidding, she could tell that just from looking around. They were standing on a platform built within the hull of the Socrates, and out beyond the platform was a cavernous space that looked large enough to park the Legendary in.

It wasn’t that large, of course; it just looked it from where she was standing.

“We have retractable gantry cranes in place, so we can put in new decks as needed. Lots of room for supplies, people, whatever we need,” Alexi told her, sounding deservedly proud of his ship.

She didn’t blame him at all. The view of the interior of the newly refitted Socrates easily matched and potentially rivaled the view from the observation decks of the Legendary. The Russians had done incredible work.

“I’m pleased to have you along on this one, Captain Petronov.”

“Ah.” He smiled a little sadly. “Is bad business, but I am honored to sail with you, Admiral.”

*****

SOLCOM HQ

Earth Orbit

“Admiral Brooke has acknowledged her orders.”

“Of that there was never a doubt. I merely said that we shouldn’t send her without a full intelligence brief.”

“The device is top secret for a reason, Maxwell.”

“Yes, and I agree with all of those reasons, but the news coming out of Hayden is disturbing. If those numbers are right, we stand to lose everything. TF-7, TF-5, Hayden…eventually, we lose Earth.”

“I do not see how briefing the admiral will substantively improve her odds…”

“We don’t just brief her, we give her access to the device. To what we’ve learned. Everything may depend on this woman’s decisions, people. We can’t hold back.”

“Perhaps. A vote, gentlemen? Ladies?”

*****

USV Legendary

The shuttle deck of the Legendary was a shockingly large place, but as Sorilla stepped off the shuttle and onto the deck of the warship, she shook her head.

“This isn’t going to work.”

“What’s that, Lieutenant?”

“Sorry, Commander, I was just thinking that this isn’t going to work for training the new machines,” she said wearily. “Are there any larger decks available?”

“I’m afraid not, but I believe we have a pair of storage rooms that may work.”

“I hope so,” Sorilla said, “otherwise we’re going to have a lot of holes punched in the walls.”

Commander Sear grimaced at that bit of imagery and made a note to ensure that everything breakable, hell just plain everything, was moved out of their training areas.

“Have you been on a Terra Class ship before?” he asked as the woman at his side casually slung her rather large duffle over her shoulder with ease that unnerved him.

He had offered to help her with it while loading and had barely been able to heft the large canvas bag, so seeing her sling it around like that made him feel rather like the comic relief in a particularly bad movie. It was a role he wasn’t used to seeing himself in, in all honesty, because like all members of the SOLCOM space service, not only did he keep himself fit, he was required to do so under his contract with SOLCOM.

He knew that he wasn’t out of shape, but the woman beside him was clearly leagues beyond him, and Sear found that an uncomfortable realization for his part.

“No,” she said, oblivious to his mental issues. “After the last mission on the Cheyenne, I spent my time Earth-side, taking classes and teaching at the academy.”

“Which academy would that be?”

“West Point.”

He stared for a moment, then nodded slowly. “The lifts are this way. We’ll get you berthed, I believe, then find you some workspace.”

“Copacetic, Commander,” Sorilla said. “Let’s be moving then.”

*****

Admiral Brooke was in transit back to the Legendary when the orders came in. This time they were delivered by hand via a courier ship she didn’t recognize the class off. Again, however, she found herself reading them over multiple times.

“They want me to report where?”

“The zeta point, ma’am.”

Brooke had to think hard to remember what the hell the zeta point was, but it came to her after a few seconds. The zeta point wasn’t actually a place, rather it was places within the system. Within all systems actually. Potential jump points that weren’t useable for one reason or another.

Some weren’t stable, some weren’t aligned with anywhere you’d want to go, and some were just dangerous.

She scowled, looking over the orders, and identified which Zeta point she was supposed to report to.

“That’s out past the orbit of Pluto!” she blurted. “It’ll take days to get there without the Legendary!”

“You’ve been assigned a high-speed courier ship, the Hermes, ma’am. Its gravetics are fourth generation.”

Nadine stared a little dumbly at the young officer standing in front of her.

“The Legendary only has third-generation gravetics.”

“Yes, ma’am, I am aware.”

Brooke licked her lips, considering that, and looked out at the sleek and small courier sitting docked with her shuttle.

“All right. I’ll be aboard in five minutes.”

“Very good, ma’am. I will be awaiting your company.”

The officer stepped off and floated back down the connector to the courier ship. He had to reach out and grab the sides to slow his descent into the field of the small ship, which caught her eye. Brooke was suddenly very interested in what her new orders might lead to.

Someone has cleared me for intelligence that I couldn’t access yesterday. Interesting.

“I will prepare our bags, Admiral.”

“No, Terrance.” She shook her head. “Not us. Just me. Orders. Return to the Legendary and inform the captain that I’ll meet with the squadron when you’re all outbound.”

“Aye. ma’am, as you say.” Terrance was far from pleased with that set of orders, but there wasn’t a whole lot he could do about it. “Watch yourself, ma’am.”

“He’s SOLCOM, Terrance, I doubt he’s planning on spacing me.”

“He stinks of intelligence, ma’am. He’s probably not smart enough to work an airlock,” Terrance said. “But intel weenies can’t be trusted. Those bastards don’t know what it is to work for a living.”

“I’ll bear it in mind, thank you, Terrance,” she said, amused. “Just pack me a fast bag, would you?”

“Will have to be, ma’am,” he said as he was moving. “Not a lot on here to send off with you. I have a change of uniform and some basic toiletries.”

“It’ll do. I can rough it a little while.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Terrance nodded, throwing what he had into a small pack and handing it to her.

“I’ll see you in a couple days,” she said as she made her way to the lock and pushed down the connecting tube.

The gravity of the courier ship caught her quickly, and she reached out a controlling hand to slow her descent as she’s seen the other officer do. Once she was gone, the lock was disengaged and Stewart watched as the courier ship pulled quickly away and vanished into the black of space.

“Prick could have at least picked her up on the Legendary so I could prepare a proper bag,” he grumbled, shaking his head.

Honestly, some people had no sense of decency at all. Just no sense of decency.

*****

The officers quarters onboard ship beat the hell out of what she’d been afforded as a grunt, even a master sergeant, Sorilla was pleased to find. Oh, maybe the grunts had better on the Legendary than the old Cheyenne, but she doubted they were much better.

It wasn’t much, even so, not as rooms went. A small slice cut out of the deck, room for a bunk, a desk, and not a lot else. As a lieutenant, even a first lieutenant, she wasn’t going to qualify for anything better, but it was hers.

She tossed her bag down—she’d unpack later—and dropped onto the bed.

It was a double, instead of the single she’d been expecting. That meant that she could stretch out, and that was a luxury onboard ship. Usually you just strapped in somewhere in a room with a few others and slept when you had a chance. Microgravity wasn’t exactly conducive to having beds, after all, or privacy for that matter.

This isn’t half bad. I could get to like this.

Chapter VIII

Master of Ships Parath truly and honestly hated the Ross.

“Damage reports coming in, Master,” his second offered, looking somewhat shell-shocked.

Parath didn’t blame him, it had been a long time since anyone in the Alliance witnessed what they’d just laid eyes on. The Ross hadn’t turned their weapon on a planet since the war, and there weren’t many people in the Alliance who were still living from those days. Well, few Parithalians at least; some species were longer lived.

The reports were interminably long, lists upon lists of things that had been damaged by the secondary effects of the blast, for the most part. The level of radiation involved in the annihilation of a planet was obscene, for one problem. It blew out shielding two full orbits away and would probably still kill as many as ten percent of his crews, depending on how badly they were exposed. Minor effects could easily be countered, moderate ones would require extended treatment, but without direct access to Alliance facilities, there were some who could not be saved.

The majority of the rest of the damage came from random debris strikes. Space was immense, and the odds of being hit were low, even when you had an entire planet’s worth of fragmentation flying around, but some hits were all but inevitable, even as far away as his main force had been. These were almost all minor damages, however, and easily repaired in the field.

Unlike his interceptors, who had been much closer.

None of them survived the event, not a single ship. The Ross may as well have executed them personally, because there was no way that a lightly armored and shielded interceptor could possibly have endured anything of that nature.

Hence Parath’s current desire to order his ship to annihilate the two Ross ships before they recovered from the event themselves. He could blame it on the aliens, after all, his crews would keep the secret, at least long enough for him to secure backing in the higher political arena.

Tempting. So very tempting.

Unfortunately, he may well need their weapons in the upcoming campaign, and Parath could not afford to forget that.

This was a minor incident, as obscene as it is to say. The campaign will certainly continue.

“Master, the Ross ships are moving again. Heading toward the surviving alien ship.”

Parath hissed. He’d been hoping for a bit more time before they got moving again. “Put us between them! I want prisoners, and I want them under my command!”

*****

USV Terra

Pierce Richmond felt the world swim back into existence around him, a hand on his shoulder shaking him roughly.

“Captain! Captain! You have to wake up!”

Pierce rolled painfully over and found himself looking up into the eyes of an ensign he couldn’t quite place.

That’s odd. I know the names of all my officers, don’t I?

He didn’t feel so good.

“I think he has a concussion.”

“He was thrown across the entire bridge into a bulkhead. I’m surprised he didn’t break his neck.”

“Captain, are you awake?”

“Stop flashing that damn light in my eyes.” Pierce weakly pushed the hand holding said annoyance away as he sat up.

The bridge spun around him, but only briefly before he got it under control. He groaned and got to his knees, then leveraged himself to his feet.

“Oh my lord, that sucks,” he mumbled out. “What’s going on?”

“The Ghoulies blew up the planet, sir, and…”

“I remember that part, I mean current status,” he growled, hand on the wall as he stood straight.

“Yes, sir. We’re not dead in the water, but we may as well be. Surrounded, all sides. The other species have put a blockade between us and the Ghoulies, but it looks like they intend to board us, Captain.”

“Weapons?” Pierce asked, limping back toward his station.

“Enough active to guarantee they blow us to hell, not much more than that.”

“Lovely.”

Pierce slumped into his seat, glancing over the status reports and tactical situation. As he’d been told, it wasn’t good.

The enemy fleet had them surrounded, which basically shot the idea of running out the window. They still had PD weapons available, but against alien ships of war, those weren’t going to do much more than annoy someone. There was a single ship in line with their Hammer launchers, but as satisfying as popping one ship would be, it wouldn’t exactly get them a lot.

“Captain!”

Pierce winced, pain spiking through his head. “What is it?”

“The aliens, sir, they just fired on the Ghoulie ship!”

*****

Parath glowered his screen. That should show them where I think they can put their demands.

The Ross had the nerve to order him to stand aside and let them take prisoners, as if he didn’t know what happened to Ross prisoners. The damned in the eternal singular abyss were likely better treated, given that the Ross didn’t seem to understand that other races actually needed more than occasional fluid to survive.

He’d had his ships fire a series of warning shots across the bows of the two big warships and would now be sweating their response if he were so damned angry. Given his secondary orders from the Master of Fleets, however, he couldn’t let the Ross have these prisoners even if he wanted to.

There was something going on in this back star arm of the galaxy, something far more than a minor border skirmish, and his duty was to uncover just what the hell it was, in addition to quieting down this little war.

Handing valuable prisoners over to the Ross would accomplish neither of those things.

“Send to the Ross,” he spoke up, “you are part of an Alliance commanded fleet and are under my command. You will cease your actions and return to your proper place in the formation or I will bring this rebellion up with the highest levels of the Alliance Navy. Continue with your hostile actions and I will have black marks entered into your dossiers…post mortem.”

He had to wait a moment for the message to be transcribed and sent, then even longer for the response.

“Ross vessels are pulling back, Master. They’re moving into their assigned positions.”

Parath let out a long breath. While he’d been ready to push the situation as far as he had to, he was more than relieved not to be required to do so. The carnage a pair of Ross warships could wreak on his ships simply didn’t bear thinking on.

And speaking of carnage…

Parath turned back to the now-more-immediate threat on his screens.

“All ships are to prepare for boarding actions. Ships with Lucian compliments to the front.”

*****

USV Terra

“Sir, the enemy ships are shifting formation. Ghoulies are…moving away.”

Pierce closed his eyes, trying to block out the headache. “That’s good news, I suppose. Repairs?”

“Progressing, sir.”

He didn’t know why he asked, to be honest, it was just reflex. The Terra wasn’t significantly damaged, considering what they’d endured at least. They could maneuver, they could shoot. The problem with that was the fact that if they did either of those things, they would—not could, would—be destroyed. They were outnumbered eighteen to one and were too deep into knife range to even think of using their standoff weapons more than once.

Oh, they’d blow the ever-living hell out of one ship, no doubt about that. They might even get a second one, but there would not be a third for the USV Terra. Not in this fight.

“I think they’re preparing to board, Captain. I see small ships launching from the carriers.”

“Great.”

Fight and die, or surrender?

The moment was coming up on them, and he knew that the decision was about to force itself on him in turn.

“Howard,” Pierce said softly, eyes shifting to the man at the tactical station. “Line up your shot.”

“Yes, sir.”

Who was he kidding, there was no decision to be made. Every one of them had seen how the enemy treated prisoners.

“Fly the black flag,” Pierce ordered as a resigned sense of peace fell over him. “And fire as she bears!”

*****

The first hint anyone on Parath’s ship had that something was happening was when the Everlasting Glory was blown to shards in a single instant of destruction. Even Parath himself, who had been watching and half expecting some sort of action on the part of the aliens, had taken a few interminable seconds before he could react.

By that time, the alien ship was pivoting toward the Victorious Emblem, its intentions now as clear as crystal.

“Target their weapons ports! I need prisoners!” Parath snapped out. “We need them alive! Alive!”

His squadron was already moving, plasma arc slamming into the alien ship and lighting up the construction with flames and blasts that couldn’t last long in the vacuum of space. His orders only redirected their focus as the ship brought its nose around and the Emblem vanished into a cloud of expanding gas and debris.

We should have guessed that they would not be easy. They’ve done nothing easy in the past after all!

Parath was swearing under his breath, but it was nothing truly unexpected. The only way he could have hoped for an easy surrender would have been if they were almost dead already, and that clearly wasn’t the case. As he watched, plasma arcs slammed into the ports that marked the enemy launchers, something he hoped would be enough to stop them from firing.

Of course, the way fortune had been showering on him lately, he supposed that might just be asking too much indeed.

He was struggling to coordinate with the remaining ships, direct their attacks to likely spots, but when the alien ship fired its engines and began to move forward, it became more pressing.

“Signal the Lucian assault ships,” he ordered. “I want that ship under my control! Now!”

*****

USV Terra

“Incoming shuttles!”

“Point defense, take them out!”

The Terra’s point defense systems whirred into action, swatting the first of the assault ships out of her sky with ease, but were instantly beset by plasma arcs slamming into the laser and Metalstorm emplacements mere seconds later.

“We’re losing point defense stations across the board!”

The enemy’s assault was closely coordinated, and the assault shuttles never even paused in their flight as they charged right into the teeth of the Terra’s defense amidst the chaos of their own side’s close support strikes. Pierce would have been impressed if they weren’t trying to board his ship.

“All hands, this is the captain. Stand by to repel boarders. I say again, stand by to repel boarders!”

The alarms were wailing across the ship as his orders went out, enough that had he not had his mind on more pressing matters, Pierce was sure he’d have a migraine by this point. He mentally considered his options, then waved his XO over.

“Sir?”

“We need to start purging the database.”

“What?”

“If they take the Terra, we can’t give them anything they can use against us,” Pierce growled. “I want our star maps wiped. I want all information about Earth wiped. I want you to rig the cores to blow if you can and get the controls back to me.”

The commander paled but nodded hesitantly at each command until Pierce grabbed him by the uniform and pulled him closer.

“Commander, if they take this ship, they get nothing but a hunk of metal and a whole galaxy of pain. Do you get me?”

“Yes…I mean, aye, Captain. I get you.”

“Good. Go.”

Pierce looked around, considering for a moment, then grabbed the next closest officer by the shoulder.

“Sir?”

“While we still have guns to fire, I want you to load up a couple jump drones with a mayday signal and send them out in the confusion,” he ordered her.

“Yes, sir!”

He watched her run off, eager to follow orders and do something useful, and envied her just a bit. The drones would likely only serve to warn anyone not to come after them, but that was good enough reason to send them.

Pierce just hoped that they got through to do that much.

*****

“Go! Go! Go!”

Marines grabbed weapons from the ready rack, most of them still strapping heavy armor on as they ran by. The halls of the Terra were barely-controlled chaos wrapped in steel, alarms sounding nonstop as men called out orders over the noise and directed troops to where they’d be most needed.

They knew that a boarding attempt was coming, that much was clear, but none of the Marines on board had the slightest idea what a space boarding would look like. No one had ever tried it before, not on a human ship, so they grabbed the guns and gear and followed orders and hoped that it would be enough.

The problem was that no one really had any idea where they’d be coming from.

Were they going to try and force their way in through the shuttle bays? That made a strange kind of sense, except that they’d need someone to cycle them through the airlock and that wasn’t happening anytime soon. A lot figured that the aliens would have to cut in, come through the hull, which was a job that even made the Marines cringe and sympathize with the aliens just slightly. Cutting through reactive armor was an ugly job at the best of times, doing it while surrounded by the vacuum of space was beyond nasty.

Worse for them, however, was that if the aliens did cut through, they could come in from anywhere. Which was why squad leaders were on the comlinks cursing up a storm and trying like hell to figure out where they should be stationing their men.

The only answer any of them had was not in the external corridors.

Which was great and all, but it meant effectively giving up the outer shell of the Terra to the enemy, and if any of the Marines had ever heard a losing strategy, that was it.

An explosion shuddered through the hall as one Marine looked around, trying to locate the source.

“What the hell was that?”

“Poor bastards must have cut into the reactive armor,” his buddy said, shaking head. “Bet that came as a nasty shock.”

“Couldn’t happen to nicer folks. You think it’ll stop them?”

“Fuck no.”

As if on cue, they spotted a shower of sparks and molten metal erupt into the corridor from the outer hull, and the squad sergeant took over.

“Squad Three, set up on the other side! I want cover and converging lines of fire on that spot in thirty seconds! Move your asses!”

The men lugged their gear and guns, taking cover behind bulkheads and in doors as they zeroed their weapons in on the source of the sparks and settled in to wait for the enemy to finish cutting their way in.

“Check you environmental suits! They may not have a perfect seal on that thing!”

One of the Marines leaned in over the top of a crouching comrade, looking at the showering sparks through the aiming reticule of his weapon, and frowned slightly.

“Hey, Mike?”

“What?” his buddy asked from where he was crouching.

“This feel really familiar to you?”

The Marine crouched on the deck scowled in turn. “Now that you mention it…”

“If you two idiots don’t shut up,” the sergeant growled, “I’ll personally send you down there to plug the hole those bastards are cutting.”

Normally that would have been enough to shut them up, but the sergeant already had his respirator on and was breathing heavily, which left both of them feeling even more confused.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Mike said from his crouch just as the hull gave in a burst of liquid metal that flowed out from the three-meter-thick hull like a river.

There was a brief moment of silence, and then figures jumped through the hull and splashed through the molten metal. The Marines didn’t bother to boggle at the scene, they just opened fire, and the corridors of the USV Terra turned into a charnel house.

*****

Kris laughed wildly as he jumped through the still-glowing hole they’d cut through the enemy ship and planted his feet in the liquid metal still flowing across the alien deck. Boarding operations were among the most challenging missions assigned to Sentinel divisions, and this one was looking to be nothing approaching an exception to that rule.

Projectiles buzzed, screaming off the metal hull and detonating against his armor as he took a moment to examine the situation.

The aliens had them in effective crossfire, but their weapons were too light for the job. A common error onboard ships, actually, one that Lucians didn’t make.

He shifted to one side and fired a singularity pulse downrange, blowing two of the enemy soldiers across the hall.

“Sentinels, forward,” Kris ordered, stepping through the now-hardening metal and firing as he moved.

“Heavy resistance, Prime.”

“Yes, but they’ve brought the wrong tools. Secure the opening before they bring up better weapons.”

“Yes, Prime!”

They quickly established control over the area they’d breached, forcing the defenders to pull back. Kris examined the interior of an alien ship for the first time, noting the way the walls curved out of sight in either direction. There was little to use for cover, but it looked like they would have to clean out the ship room by room, and it wasn’t going to be an easy job.

Perfect. I have been looking forward to a rematch with these people since the last fight.

Unfortunate, he supposed, that the soldier he’d encountered then wasn’t likely to be present. Still, perhaps there would be some Sentinels on board somewhere. Just to keep it interesting.

*****

“We’re getting hammered here, sir!”

Major Brent Caldwell grunted in response; he could see that for himself. He slapped the back of a corporal to get the man’s attention.

“We need the heavy weapons packs brought up from the central armory. Get on the horn and tell them to expedite it unless they want a personal visit from me.”

“Yes, Major!”

Heavy weapons were secured in a central armory. No one had really considered a full armor firefight in the corridors of a starship, he supposed. Caldwell figured that if he lived through what was coming, he’d put in a complaint to the brass about that when and if he made it home.

In the meantime, he had work to do.

“Someone get this door sealed! We have to slow them down!” he roared, firing his assault rifle through the still-open hatch.

A nearby explosion made him flinch back, swearing as chunks of metal whirred through the air in lethal arcs. A Marine went down, blood spraying from his throat as a bad hit took him out. Caldwell fired from the hip, singlehanded, as he reached down and pulled the man back by his armor as the door slowly sealed in front of him.

“Medic!”

A corpsman rushed over, hand on the Marine’s throat as he pressed hard to stem the bleeding. “Give me some help here! We need to get his suit off!”

Caldwell let them to it, stomping his way back to the next communications post. “And tell them to get me some real battle armor up here, god damn it! These guys are not playing around, they’re using that damned alien shit on us!”

“Yes, sir!”

*****

Kris grunted in annoyance as he came upon yet another sealed door.

The interior of the alien ship was a maze of corridors, and if that wasn’t bad enough, it seemed like it could be sealed off in extremely small sections. The doors they were dealing with were strong enough that blasting them wasn’t practical, so they had to stop every time and bring up a cutter to melt the material to slag.

It was taking an annoyingly long period to make any headway through the ship, which, he was sure, was part and parcel of the defense plans. The resistance they were encountering was fierce but mostly ineffective; it was the interior design that was making the whole progression of the assault such a challenge.

“Bring up the cutter!”

“Yes, Prime!”

*****

The battle for the Terra was progressing all across the big ship, furiously fought for every inch, but the invaders were slowly gaining ground everywhere they had found purchase.

Pierce glowered at the schematics that showed red corridors slowly extending into the blue areas as the enemy took his ship section by section.

“Marines have requested heavy weapons in sections 80, 93, and 98!”

“Expedite the request. Give them whatever they need. I want those things off my ship!”

“Yes, sir!”

That was wishful thinking, Pierce supposed, but one had to keep up the image right to the bitter end.

And it is going to be a bitter end, I can taste it coming already.

His executive officer reappeared on the bridge, looking like he’d been running a fair bit. Sweat and some dirt ruined his perfect officer look, but Pierce was hardly going to hold that against him.

“Is it done?”

“Yes, sir. I’ve rigged the cores, and we have scrubbers removing data from our computers as we speak.”

Pierce nodded. “Good.”

“How is the fighting going?”

“They’re going to control the top decks soon, and then it’ll all be over except for the shooting,” Pierce said.

There was no response needed to that. They both knew that the bridge and all command functions were in the top decks. The lower decks were mostly stowage, vehicles, crew quarters, and other such things. Lots of open space, relatively speaking, and very little to hold back a force intent on taking ground.

“Give me the controls to the charges you’ve rigged.”

“Here you are, Captain,”

Pierce accepted the detonators. For form’s sake, if nothing else, he would hold off until it was necessary, but it would take a miracle now.

*****

Caldwell swore over the sound of his rifle but never stopped firing.

“Hold them back! Hold the bastards back!”

His squad was down by three and low on ammo, no word on when they would get any more, but they were done giving ground. All that was behind them now was the bridge, command and control sections, and medical. Lose those and the ship was gone.

His assault rifle roared. He’d given up on single shots and was now muscling the big gun around on full automatic. It blew through ammo like no one’s business, but the aliens’ armor was enough that single rounds weren’t doing the job.

That was cold comfort when his weapon slammed back on an empty chamber, and he didn’t have to reach down to know that he was out. Major Caldwell tossed the lightweight ceramic gun to the deck, disgusted that it wasn’t even heavy enough to use as a club, and pulled the knife from his thigh sheath.

Its carbon edge glowed as his hand wrapped around the hilt, giving him some real comfort as he prepared for one last charge.

The explosive discharge of a weapon behind him was accompanied by a whine of rounds flying by his head, causing Caldwell to twist as a squad of Marines in full armor exploded out from a lift and charged past him.

“Hey there, Major, miss us?”

“Where the hell have you slackers been?” Caldwell snarled through his relief.

“We had to look spiffy for our guests, Major. Wouldn’t be right to show them the ship looking like a cut rate operation. We’re Marines, Major. Show some pride.”

“Semper fi, Corporal. Now go get ‘em.”

“Right you are, sir. Oh, by the way.” The armored Marine glanced back. “We left you some party favors in the lift.”

“Oorah.” Caldwell sheathed the knife and patted his squad on the shoulder, pulling them back to the left to rearm.

This fight wasn’t over yet.

Chapter IX

SOLCOM Research Facility

Code Name : Aion

“Welcome aboard, Admiral.”

Admiral Brooke looked around the facility she hadn’t even been aware existed; not even a rumor of it had reached her in the months she’d been working around top secret facilities in Sol System.

The Aion facility was large enough on a human scale, she supposed, but where it had been positioned there was no active jump point remotely nearby so she could easily see how it would remain hidden from normal traffic. Hiding it from the informed officers of the Solarian Navy, however, was another matter.

Given all the high value intelligence that passed through her desk, she was shocked that anyone could have hidden the facility so perfectly.

“Thank you,” she answered finally, turning to focus on the man who had greeted her. “Admiral.”

Admiral Mathew Ruger nodded. “Welcome aboard Aion, Admiral.”

“Please, call me Nadine. Otherwise we’ll be up to our ears in admiral this, admiral that, in short order.”

“Agreed.” He smiled. “Call me Mathew.”

“Well, Mathew, I was sent her for a briefing,” Brooke said, eyes still moving around as she looked for any sign of what she was to be briefed on. “I suppose we should be about it.”

“Yes, I understand that you’re on a schedule. Come with me, I’ll show you the only thing of interest in the entire facility.”

“One thing? Surely not?” Brooke chuckled. “It was a large place from what I could tell.”

“Larger than you realize, Nadine,” Mathew assured her. “Far larger, but only a very small portion of that is intended for habitation by people. Come on, I’ll show you.”

Brooke tipped her head and followed as he lead her deeper into the station, through several security checkpoints, and finally to a simple-looking computer lab. She looked around it, eyebrow cocked, but saw nothing of any interest.

“This is Aion, Nadine,” Mathew said, taking a seat and gesturing to a large screen on the far wall.

“I’m not certain I understand…”

“Good, if you did you’d be practically the only one,” Mathew chuckled. “Even the people who built this station barely understand it. Aion began as a research facility intended to reverse engineer the alien gravity technology. We believed that they were using singularities to warp space and time, and that was the concept behind their technology.”

“I remember, I was part of the initial discussions along those lines, before I was assigned to Task Force Five.”

“Yes, you were, weren’t you? Good, that will help you understand,” Mathew said. “What we found, our first great breakthrough, was that they were doing nothing of the sort.”

“Pardon? I thought…”

He held up a hand, silencing her. “I know. We’ve released some misinformation on the subject because we didn’t want anyone tinkering with this technology without proper clearances. They don’t create singularities to warp space-time, Admiral. They warp it directly. The aliens’ technology treats space-time the way we would treat…dress fabric, or steel, or whatever else we build with. They actually interact with space-time directly, something that no one ever really thought possible.”

“That’s impressive, I’m sure, but I don’t believe I understand what this has to do with my current mission.”

“I’ll get to that, but honestly, I believe that you’ll beat me there once we get going,” Mathew said with a smile. “It’s important to understand that space and time aren’t exactly what we thought, and neither is gravity. In fact, they’re all the same thing.”

“Yes, I’m familiar with that concept.”

“Right, well gravity is just the effect of space-time being twisted by mass. Mass can affect the structure of our universe, actually changing the laws of physics. As you gain more and more mass, those laws change in one way, but just as importantly, as you shed mass and move more and more toward true emptiness, the laws change another way. We rarely see this because we live constantly in a field of gravity. Even in space we’re entangled in the effect. The Earth, the Sun, the Galaxy, the Universe. It’s all part of a single immense system of space and time; there are only very small points in the universe where the twisting of all that mass actually balances out.”

“Jump points, yes, I know.”

“Right, in those points at specific times.” Mathew gestured with his hands. “You can do things that appear to violate the laws of physics, like jump past the speed of light.”

“This is nothing new.”

“No, but here is what is new,” Mathew said, tapping a command to bring up a schematic.

It showed a massive toroidal design with what looked to her like the Aion facility sitting in one tiny edge of it all. Brooke looked at the design, her mind trying to wrap itself around the design, but she was quickly stumped. It seemed to look like the atom smashers used by starships to generate the antimatter used for fuel, but it was too large.

“A particle collider?”

“No,” Mathew shook his head, “not at all. It’s a region of space-time we twisted using the alien technology. Over a full astronomical unit in diameter, we’ve custom designed our own…universe, you might call it. Inside, the laws of physics are quite different.”

“For what?” Brooke leaned forward, eyes trying to take it all in.

“To study space-time, Nadine,” he said softly. “But it’s not what we built it for that you need to be concerned with. It’s what came out of it when we turned it on.”

Brooke turned to look at him, frowning. “What do you mean by that?”

“When we activated Aion, not that we called it that back then,” he smiled, laughing at a joke only he seemed to understand, “we were using it to master the technology you’d brought back from the battles over Hayden. However, as soon as we turned it on, almost to the nanosecond, we began receiving a signal from within the very section of space we’d just created.

“The signal had a SOLCOM encryption tag, and it was dated six months from the day we received it,” he said with a smug smile. “Six months into the future, Admiral. We sent ourselves a note, and six months’ worth of scientific research, to prove its validity. Since then, Admiral, Aion has been the most secret facility in the history of the planet.”

Nadine stared at the screen in silence. Honestly, no words came to mind.

*****

USV Legendary

Sorilla growled in annoyance.

All right, she didn’t growl exactly. Her vocal chords were temporarily paralyzed, so growling wasn’t in the book. What she did was subvocalize the growl, which was a really weird sensation, then the computer took that, compressed and morphed it, and played it back over the speakers of the bot in a synthesized voice that almost sounded entirely unlike her.

Three men who were nearby started and nearly pissed their pants, deciding at that point that they had elsewhere to be. Given that they were the only three that had been brave, or stupid, enough to hang around the storage room once she started stomping around in a thirty-five-foot robot, Sorilla took that as a sign that maybe she needed to cool down a bit.

The bot slumped as she broke the paralysis and popped the rear hatch so she could pull herself out. The system was designed so she could—actually had to—wear her full armor inside the bot, so this really did nothing at all to make her feel like she was free of her frustrations except to let her physically move again.

“What is it this time?”

“Hearse, if you come at me with that smug attitude right now I’ll break your jaw,” Sorilla warned, popping her helmet seals and pulling it off so she could breathe air that hadn’t recently been cycled through her own lungs a thousand times. Sure, fresh was a matter of perspective when you were onboard a starship, but anything was fresher than suit air.

“There’s no reason to be hostile.” The civilian contractor held up his hands in surrender. He knew well enough that she could break him in half given the opportunity, and she’d already made it clear that she didn’t lack the motivation. “I was just pointing out that we are behind schedule.”

“We’re never going to catch up to the schedule, Hearse, even you should know that. My squad isn’t even here yet and we’re prepping to move out in a few hours,” Sorilla gritted out as she stretched her limbs, feeling the satisfaction of a pop in her shoulder as she rotated it. “We’re going to be playing catch-up on the schedule right up until we launch the op.”

“That’s hardly a reason to slack off.”

“Hearse,” she growled, turning to look him in the eyes, “shut the fuck up. I’m not slacking, I’m just taking a break because trying to maneuver that behemoth around this tiny ass room without breaking something, or someone, is nerve wracking and I need to stretch out.”

The way she looked at him when she said someone must have convinced Hearse to back off in a hurry because he threw up his hands and literally backed away. Sorilla snorted, amused that he didn’t want to show his back to her.

If I wanted to kick your ass, you prick, I wouldn’t have to hit you from behind.

While Hearse was a jackass by times, she knew he was right about the timing. The schedule was getting more cramped by the hour, and the amount of work wasn’t dropping off at all. The mechanical monster they’d brought her was easy enough to operate—the issue wasn’t in basic operation, it was in making every action instinctive. She’d seen flashes of what it could do, and Sorilla was as eager as anyone else to bring those flashes to operational reality. It was just turning into a long road to get there, and she doubted they had the time.

Sorilla knew the numbers all too well. Statistically, it took ten thousand hours of practice to become truly proficient at anything. Want to rock the guitar like a master? Ten thousand hours. Drive a car like a race car driver? Ten thousand hours. Anything you wanted to become really good at, not merely passable, you had to be prepared to invest the time, and the magic number was ten thousand.

She doubted that they had that long before this operation was a go, and even if they did, there was no way she or anyone could spend all that time living in a monster robot that barely had room to swing its arms without caving in a bulkhead.

Alright, that was a bit of an exaggeration. The room they were using was a storage section normally used for munitions, and it was pretty big. For humans. After all the munitions were moved out, they had room to walk the beast from one side to the other, almost sort of semi-sprint for a few steps, and practice some katas from her hand-to-hand training just to get the feeling of the machine down.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to be enough. She needed more. More of everything, and they weren’t going to get it the way they were going.

Sorilla had requests in for more training space, but the ship was cramped as it was. The only free space was the flight decks, and those were packed with shuttles that couldn’t exactly be crated up and moved off like the munitions could. They had an assembly point on the ship that technically had the room she needed, but again, there were combat vehicles, engineers, mechanics, and god alone knew what else filling it. She just couldn’t risk killing some poor sap because she wasn’t handling her machine properly yet.

Something has to give. Either it’s going to be this machine or me, and I’m damn well not going to let it be me. We’ve got to figure a better way to do this. Sorilla walked over to the slumped robot and glared at its impassive face. Maybe I could train out on the hull?

There was one request for the books; she’d love to see the captain’s face if and when he read it.

Requested : Permission to EVA for combat training on the hull. I promise to try and avoid damaging the armor plates with my eighty-ton war machine, sir.

Yeah. Probably best if she kept looking for alternatives.

*****

Raymond Hearse walked with a purpose as he negotiated his way through the upper decks of the USV Legendary. He was deep into officers country and generally walking like he belonged there, much to the minor irritation of many he passed. He didn’t care about that, or about them; he was on the ship for one thing and that was to see that his personal project for DARPA and SOLCOM was a success.

The abrupt change in the schedule was entirely unacceptable.

He sighed audibly when he was held up by security for the flag deck and found himself literally tapping his foot impatiently as he waited to be cleared.

“Honestly, you people know who I am by now, don’t you? I really didn’t think that even the military could suck the brains out of anyone this effectively.”

The Marines on duty didn’t even bother to look up at him, much to his continued annoyance.

“Mr. Hearse, there are procedures to follow. You know this as well as anyone,” one of them said when he signed loudly for the fifth time.

“Mindlessly following procedures is hardly a good use of time,” he countered, rolling his eyes.

“Security breaches are a worse use of time, sir. All right, you check. The admiral isn’t available, however,” the Marine told him.

“What?” Hearse blurted. “Why didn’t you say so before you started the security check?”

“Procedure.”

Hearse glared at the man, knowing damned well that he was smirking at him but there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it just then. “Fine. When will she be available?”

“Two days.”

“What? No! I need to speak with her sooner than that!”

“Admiral Brooke is not on the Legendary, sir. We have no means of contacting her for two days.”

There were times when he suspected that the military grunts of the ship were messing with him, and days that he knew it. Today was one of the latter, but there was little he could do about it.

“Fine,” he ground out. “I need to see the captain then.”

“Captain Roberts is on the bridge.”

Hearse gritted his teeth, then turned on his heel and walked out. The bridge was one area he had no access whatsoever. He had no chance to get there, but it didn’t mean that he was stumped. Going right to the top had its advantages, but Hearse was well aware that there were ways that were almost as fast, maybe even faster. He made his way down to the administration levels and found the captain’s secretary.

“Ah, Mr. Hearse.” The young officer recognized him as he entered. “What can I do for you today?”

“I’m having a devilish time with the project, Adam,” he said. “As you know, it’s a terribly high priority, but I’m afraid that I’m caught in a pinch here and the admiral is off the ship.”

“I’d heard about that,” the ensign said, nodding. “Lots of rumors floating around, no one really knows where she went, though.”

“Yes, well,” Hearse sighed, more theatrically than before. It didn’t pay to annoy people who could get things accomplished, after all, unlike the Marines, who only existed to put stumbling blocks in his way. “I find that we simply must have more space. We can’t run tests in that area, it isn’t safe and it isn’t practical.”

“Hmm,” Adam hummed to himself, checking the logs. “Let’s see here. We have you assigned to a munitions storehouse. I’m sorry, that’s literally the largest area on the ship short of the shuttle bays. Has to be, to run the machine loaders through it.”

“Well, could we clear a shuttle bay?”

Hearse was disappointed at the instant shake of the ensign’s head.

“No, that isn’t possible, sir. The Legendary just doesn’t have the space available to empty a shuttle bay for you.”

“There must be some alternative. We’ll never complete the testing and familiarization program for the lieutenant, let alone her team, at this rate.”

The ensign sighed. “I’ll make some inquiries for you, Mr. Hearse, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up. This is a warship, not a development testing area.”

Hearse sighed, but knew from the man’s posture and expressions that he wasn’t getting any further just then. “Thank you, please let me know if anything comes up.”

“I’ll contact you in a couple hours, but remember what I said…”

“I know, I won’t get my hopes up.”

Hearse left, leaving the young officers in the shared office to look at each other.

“Are you actually going to call anyone?” one asked, half smiling.

“For that prick? No.” Adam shook his head. “I would if I thought it would do any good, but the computer doesn’t lie. We don’t have anywhere to put them with more room. We had to have four teams work double shifts just to clear that area. There are Hammers piled up in the corridors from A Level to C.”

“I know, I bunk on C.”

Adam winced, but shrugged. “Well then, you know we’ve got nowhere to send them.”

“That isn’t quite true.”

The two turned, surprised by the intrusion of the third voice. One of the admiral’s secretaries was standing in the doorway, a flimsy in her arms as she glanced up at them from whatever she was reading.

“It isn’t?” Adam blinked. “Begging your pardon, but the computer…”

“Only shows what is available on the Legendary.”

“Well, yeah, that’s the point.”

“No, the point is that we have another class of ship in this Task Group. Call up the interior specs on the USV Socrates, latest refits.”

Adma frowned but turned to his console and did just that. When the specs came up, he choked.

“Holy God! What are they doing with that much interior space?”

“The ship was designed to carry hundreds of kilometers of cable for a tether, as well as everything a colony would need to survive and get set up. Now it’s been assigned to us as a glorified tow truck and repair yard. They only need a fraction of its internal space for crew.”

“My lord, if I hadn’t seen it…” Adam shook his head. “All right, thanks, I guess. I’ll run this past the captain and see if it’s an option.”

“You mean I might get the hallway to my room back?”

*****

Sorilla looked up at the brutish-looking figure slumped in front of her. She had replaced her helm, the new HUD felt odd to her eyes, but she was getting used to it. She had to learn to live in her armor, and as much as she was frustrated with it, she had to learn to live in the bot as well.

Why’d that idiot design the thing to be run by implants? That damn paralysis drip gives me the creeps and makes my skin crawl.

She did admire the technical achievement of the big machine, both in brute design and in the more refined software and hardware needed to control it. She was intimately familiar with both and knew how hard it must have been to surmount some of the challenges they had to have dealt with.

Humanoid bots had been tried before, were even somewhat successful in some cases. She knew some artillery units that used bipedal mobile guns for rough terrain, but they were slow and operated entirely on computer control. Sure, they could move over softer terrain than even tracked vehicles, tackling terrain that most heavy vehicles would have a nervous breakdown just looking at, but they couldn’t react to anything unexpected, couldn’t adapt.

The new control system leveraged the power of the implants sitting in her skull to a level nothing else ever had, but it meant learning an entirely new control system and she was getting too old to learn new tricks.

It didn’t really help that it didn’t feel like a job she was qualified, or had trained, for. She was Special Forces: She worked with her hands, not a huge ass tank on two legs.

She knew why she’d been tapped, of course. That was plain, even if it hadn’t been outlined in the brief. She was the most experienced op they had when it came to dealing with the aliens; she’d seen more, fought more, and, frankly, killed more than anyone else on the ground. Her instincts had proven reliable so far when dealing with them, so it made sense to give her a mission this high priority.

She also had a suite of implants that made her more capable than most when dealing with the gravity-bending technology of the enemy. Sorilla didn’t pretend to know why her head was wired differently, or how she had integrated the information feeds the way she had, but it was an advantage she didn’t mind having and one that had clearly helped her career.

So Sorilla Aida found herself glaring up at the slumbering giant, determined not to let the bastard beat her.

You hear me, you overgrown garden gnome? You’re not kicking my ass, not now and not ever.

*****

Aion SOLCOM Facilty

Nadine Brooke found herself blown away every time she learned something new about the Aion facility. What they were doing there she would have sworn was entirely impossible.

No, not impossible, Brooke corrected herself, but as good as in many ways.

She knew that time travel had always been considered theoretically possible. If you could move in space, than you could certainly move in time as well. The problems with it were manifold, however, given the way human beings experienced time.

“What about paradox?” she asked finally.

Mathew smiled. “That’s a good question, one I’m glad you asked. The answer is…well, it’s complicated.”

“That’s not much of an answer.”

“Honestly, we don’t have much of one,” Mathew admitted, grinning widely. “It’s one of the big things we study, but so far we don’t think it’s possible to initiate a paradox. Or, at least, we are unable to experience one as human beings.”

That made some sense to her, since it was possible that a paradox would resolve itself outside human senses.

“You’ve tried to create a paradox then?” she asked. Given the way he’d spoken she figured it was a good bet.

“Not in so many words, but we’ve been using the device to compress our research and we’ve had mixed results,” he admitted. “In some cases, when we tried to use data from the device in our research here, the results were badly scrambled. However, if we offloaded the data to a lab that was isolated from our feedback under contract for the next six months, the results were confirmable and repeatable.”

Brooke leaned back, breathing out as she considered that. “So you were somehow contaminating your own experiment?”

“That’s our best guess, yes,” Mathew said before admitting, “Though we can’t figure out how, beyond the obvious theories.”

“Obviously. You can’t work on the data you send back, because if you do, you risk contaminating the data you will send back.” She frowned. “But can’t you just resend the exact file you received?”

“First thing we tried, still scrambled our results.” Mathew shrugged.

“I’m getting a headache,” Brooke admitted painfully.

“That’s how we spend most of our days here, yes.”

“I’ll bet. Dare I ask why I was cleared to be briefed in on this project?”

Mathew nodded, leaning forward. “A few reasons, actually. We’ve recorded the signature of this station’s space-time warp, and we want you to look for any sign of a matching signature out there.”

“You’re concerned that the aliens may have a similar device,” Nadine nodded.

“Exactly, and you’ll be running deeper than anyone else ever has according to your mission brief.”

“Potentially.”

“Well, that’s one reason.”

“Is there another?”

“Isn’t there always?” Mathew asked with a smile. “We have some new developments that may be of use to you. We’re limited now to refining what we already know—there don’t seem to be any huge breakthroughs looming—but refinements can swing the scales.”

“Yes, they can. I presume you mean on control of the gravity systems?”

He nodded. “For the most part. They’re minor improvements to software. I’m sure you were told that the courier that brought you here had fourth-generation gravetics?”

“Yes, I was rather shocked. There has been no hint of rumors about a new drive.”

“That’s because there isn’t one,” Mathew said, shaking his head. “The speed difference is entirely in the software. The hardware is about as perfect a device as we can build based on the alien technology. Unfortunately, the one thing we’ve never been able to reverse engineer was their software. We can’t even tell how their computers work, let alone what runs on them, so the one area we have a lot of room to improve is the software.”

“That’s interesting. I would have expected room for improvement in the hardware as well.”

“We basically copied the enemy design. Honestly, we don’t fully understand it yet,” Mathew admitted.

That brought a grimace to Brooke’s face. “That isn’t something that brings confidence to mind.”

“Those are the cards we’re dealt, Nadine,” he told her with a troubled look. “Either play them or fold.”

“I’m all in,” she said simply after considering it for a moment.

“Rather suspected that you were.”

*****

USV Legendary

Sorilla had to pull herself out of the hulking bot before she could finish settling to go another round with the infernal contraption.

“What’s going on?” she demanded, glaring down at the men and equipment who were now surrounding her.

“Orders, ma’am,” one of them, the chief of the deck, told her. “Packing this thing up.”

“Packing it up? I need to train!” she growled. “This op is going to be insane enough as it stands.”

“Sorry, ma’am. As I understand it, you’re being shipped out.”

“Again?”

Sorilla dropped down from the thirty-foot back of the machine, landing easily with just a little flex in her legs. She walked over to the chief. “Where the hell am I being shipped off to this time?”

“We’re moving our part of this to the Socrates.”

Sorilla turned to look at Raymond Hearse, who had just stepped in, confused, though it didn’t show to anyone watching because of her personal armor. “The Socrates? That’s an old Explorer Class ship, isn’t it?”

“It is a refitted Explorer Class ship,” Hearse answered, “one with all the room we need. We’ll train there, then you will return to use the Legendary as your base of operations. Now, be a good girl and let the help here pack things up.”

Sorilla scowled at Hearse, but it was nothing compared to the looks the “help” shot in his direction.

She bit down on her annoyance, however, and waved a hand.

“Fine. I’ll pack my kit and see you in the shuttle bay.”

Some fights weren’t worth starting.

Chapter X

USV Terra

The battle was over by the time Master of Ships Parath carefully eyed the two lines of Lucians arrayed before him as he stepped down lightly onto the uneven deck of the captured starship.

So this is what the enemy ships look like inside.

Pedestrian, surprisingly, for machines capable of such destruction. They were aligned differently than he’d expected after examining them from the outside. From what he could see of their design, externally, he had expected them to have aligned around the inner core rather than the bow of the ship.

Gravity was really just a matter of perspective in space, so there was little advantage to the decision they’d made, but he had seen odder choices in the past and likely would find stranger ones in the future. At least they’d picked a consistent alignment, he supposed; it made them easier to understand than the Ross, if nothing else.

The re-solidified molten metal from their hull did little to add to the impressiveness of the interior, and neither did the blast marks and bodily fluids spattered over the decks.

“Hard fought?” he observed more than asked as his group walked.

“Yes, Master. We lost several dozen Lucians in the assault, most in the dirty fighting along the ship’s internal structures.”

Parath winced, that was a significant loss.

“Prisoners?”

“Isolated toward the lower decks of the ship, where there were larger areas to keep them in. We don’t have the guards or facilities to house them apart from one another.”

“Yes, that’s fine. What of those in authority?”

“Still working out which ones those were, exactly, but we have several candidate groups that we’ve kept apart from the rest.”

Parath nodded. “Excellent.”

“We’ve secured the ship and disarmed the crew, Master, but it’s still an unwarranted risk for you to be here…”

“Shortly the Master of Fleets will be in this system with the main bulk of our forces,” Parath said grimly. “When he arrives, I will have to explain how it is that we have been stopped dead in our courses by two enemy ships who did not even have to fire a shot at us to do so.”

Parath sneered, not at his officers, but at the situation itself.

“I would prefer to have answers available for him at that time,” Parath said. “Wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, Master.”

“Good. I want interrogation teams brought on board. Focus on the ones we believe to be non-officers first. I want language information, vocabulary, structure, idioms. When we begin on the Master of Ships for this vessel, I want nothing to be missed. Am I clear?”

“Yes, Master. Teams are already onboard. I will issue your commands to them directly.”

“Good, now, where is the Lucian in charge?”

“This way, Master. Sentinel Prime Kris is the Lucian in charge. He awaits you in the next section.”

Parath gestured ahead of them. “Then let us be on our way.”

*****

“Tell me the charges worked.”

“They did, sir. I was in the computer room when they busted in. You blew the cores while they were securing us.”

Pierce nodded, thankful. He didn’t know if the aliens would be able to read the technology; lord knows, from what he knew, it was almost impossible to read the aliens’ own tech. With luck, they’d have such completely different technology that it would take years, if not decades, to decode the interface medium, but he couldn’t count on that.

“Did anyone see where they locked up the crew?” he asked softly, eyes on the squat grey aliens holding weapons on them.

“Cargo deck, sir. They had to drag me past there.”

“Well, they’ve got some idea of who are the officers on board, I suppose.”

“We probably should have worn the fancy uniforms, sir.”

Pierce chuckled softly, glancing over the mussed up and somewhat bloodied uniform of the engineer who’d spoke. “You probably have a point, Lieutenant.”

“You suppose they’re recording us, sir?” Commander Riggs asked, eyes flicking over to the guards.

“I would.”

That was enough said as far as Pierce was concerned, and the look in his eye made the point. No one was going to be talking about anything classified.

“If they didn’t,” a bloodied and battered Marine officer offered up, “they probably would object to us speaking. Only reason I let prisoners talk amongst themselves before an interrogation is if I’m hoping they’ll say something I can use.”

“You think they can understand us, sir?” a younger officer asked quietly.

“No telling.” Pierce shook his head. “They’ve had prisoners before, but the ones we recovered said they never asked questions, never even really interacted with them at all. Just gave them water and that was it.”

“Water but no food. Sadistic bastards, want to watch us waste away,” the Marine said. “It takes weeks to go like that.”

“Belay that talk,” Pierce growled.

Just because it was true was no cause to bring it up and put it dead center in everyone’s minds. A lot could happen in a few weeks, so he didn’t want his people becoming demoralized before they could even look for a way out.

They may now be Persons Under Control, but that just narrowed the scope of their duty.

The Terra was crippled, by his own hand, but she wasn’t dead in space. The trick wouldn’t be getting the ship moving again, it would be finding the right time to throw that switch and getting the guards out of the way when the time came.

Pierce looked over at the guards, recognizing them from the descriptions he’d read from Sergeant Aida’s detailed reports.

They were clearly the ones she referred to as the Alien Operators. Squat and grey-skinned, like the Ghoulies, but the resemblance ended right there. These creatures, people, whatever they were, had hard, chorded muscles, practically like twisted ropes just under the skin, and they moved with a precision that he recognized.

Whether or not they were of operator quality, that he didn’t know, but they were soldiers. Disciplined and determined, of that he had no doubt whatsoever. That would make his job distinctly more difficult, but that was the way of things.

“One duty,” he said aloud, looking around.

The Marine officer, a major, nodded instantly, and it only took seconds for the rest to agree. They all understood.

One duty left.

Escape.

*****

“These are the officers?”

“Yes, Master.”

Parath looked over the somewhat bedraggled assembly in the relative small room on the other side of his view. “Which is the Master of Ships?”

“We do not know yet, they haven’t made any obvious addresses to a superior.”

“Keep watching. They will.”

“Yes, Master.”

They watched the figures beyond, listened to them as they spoke softly to one another. Parath couldn’t identify the Master of this Ship, but if he wasn’t in this group, he would be in another. They would find him, but for now it was a low priority. There was no point, after all, until they could understand and make themselves understood.

“What do you think they are saying, Master?”

“Plotting escape, I would presume. I would be,” Parath answered simply. There really wasn’t anything else he could say on that, it was as obvious as the beak bone under the skin of his face what they were doing. If they weren’t plotting escape now, they would be soon. That was what people did when they were held prisoner.

“What happened to the one in the lighter uniform?” Parath asked, mostly curious.

“Hmmmm.” His assistant checked the files. “Resisted the Lucians. Surprisingly effectively, given the relative disparity in their strength and weight.”

“How effectively?”

“Broke a Lucian’s parnelia, fractured the bones of another’s leg. It took two of them to secure him while a third put on the restraints.”

“Effective indeed. Check and see if any others in that uniform did similarly.”

“Of course, Master, but why?”

“I want to know if this one is an exception, or if the ones in the lighter uniforms are their security officers.”

“Ah, of course, Master.”

Parath turned away from the view and glanced at the Lucian in charge. “Continue recording. I want to examine the other prisoner locations and reports of the action you took. Translators will be working all shifts until we have some knowledge of their language, please try not to interfere with their work.”

The Lucian Prime nodded his head once and saluted. “It will be as you order, Master of Ships.”

Parath returned the nod and saluted curtly as he walked out.

*****

USV America

Two Jumps out of Hayden

After spending three days scrounging every available hull available to defend Hayden, Fairbairn had finally managed to raise the defenses of the system to a level where he could afford to send a few ships out on a raiding mission deep into contested space.

Losing the Terra and the Canada, hopefully not permanently, had put a distinct pinch into any plans he could make. He couldn’t leave the front door unguarded, not without knowing just how long the gravity pulse devices utilized by the two missing ships would last. There had been no chance to test them before deployment, and even under best circumstances the only answer the researches had given when asked how long they would work was a shrug and a mumbled “dunno.”

For all that, however, he couldn’t afford to leave the back door uncontested either. Shutting the front door had been a desperate play because, while it stopped the enemy in their tracks, it also split the likely and possible paths they may take to get around the block. Splitting the enemy forces was great, but it also meant splitting his own.

Task Force Seven was a powerful fighting force, but it wasn’t up to taking on anything the likes of which the long-range scouts had reported.

Not in a straight up fight, at least, which was what brought him to his current strategy.

Bringing the bulk of TF-7 through the jump point and into contested space would give him a chance to engage the enemy away from Hayden. Fight and retreat, hitting them from extreme range and trying to take them down by a war of attrition was the only feasible strategy he had left.

All he had to do was find them, and then be perfect.

One tactical error and he could lose it all.

He could not, would not, make that error. He couldn’t afford it, so he just wouldn’t do it.

“Admiral on deck.”

Fairbairn signaled the men and women on the bridge of the America to return as they were. This wasn’t the time for disrupting their routine.

“Captain,” he said as he walked over to the command station.

“Sir.” Captain Pete Green nodded respectfully before returning his attention to the screen.

“I understand we have a blip in the system?”

“Yes, sir. Fourth planet, some odd readings in space-time.”

“Is it them?” Fairbairn asked, tensing.

“No.” Green shook his head.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, sir. This is probably another forward scout, maybe a survey group. Looks the same as what hit Hayden the first time around. Three ships, Ghoulie design. No significant support.”

“Okay, hit them,” Fairbairn ordered. “Clean them out of my sky, Captain.”

“Aye, sir,” Green said, looking around. “Give me a go/no-go check on all major systems and tell the boys below decks to make sure the magazines are primed. We’re going in.”

*****

Three ships broke from the main group, altering their trajectories to proceed deeper and faster through the system while the main group skirted a safer route.

The America, the Great Britain, and the Germany accelerated past free fall as they bolted deeper into the system’s gravity well, heading for the fourth planet. The advanced space-time telemetry sensors the Terra Class ships had been constructed with leveled one particular playing field by rendering the enemy’s tactic of flying out of the sun to blind conventional sensors obsolete.

They had three solid blips on their gravity detection system, points in space-time that were warped when they shouldn’t be, and those marked the enemy ships as bright as the sun itself.

Their own approach couldn’t be masked long either, however, since the new sensors the Terra Class ships sported had been stolen from the very same class of Ghoulie ships that they were now stalking. Three Ghoulie ships lit off their drives before the humans got within five AUs of their position.

*****

“They see us coming.”

“Good,” Green said coldly. “That will make this all the more painful for them.”

The telemetry showed the two groups on an intercept course, locking horns at knife range in less than ten minutes, but Green had no intention of running a fair fight. He tapped in a new course and speed, one that would increase their approach from a 100-gravity acceleration to just under 800 as they closed to engage the enemy. It would push up the interception point by over seven minutes.

“Sending course corrections. Engage on my mark,” he ordered.

“Aye, sir. Corrections received.”

“Mark.”

“Course engaged!”

The three ships leapt forward, bolts of lightning through the black, and Green was determined to deliver the death blows from the hands of an angry thunder god himself.

“Make the Hammers ready to fire.”

“Hammers ready, sir!”

“All ships,” Green called over the squad-wide com, “fire.”

*****

The diving ships opened fire from just over a half an AU out, using gravity assist and EM kinetic launchers to put their weapons into space at a rate just over 0.6c relative to the enemy. The Hammers were flung true, going terminal only seconds after launch as they entered into a ballistic trajectory and crossed the 75 million kilometers that would take fifteen minutes.

The ships were still accelerating, however, and while the Hammers were certainly going faster, the closing speed of the two groups was going to be blindingly fast as it was.

*****

“Two minutes to impact.”

Green nodded, eyes on the plot. Wondering if the enemy ships would see the kinetic strike coming. They should, he decided, it didn’t seem likely that a simple hit like that would escape notice, but it would be telling if it did.

I wonder just how many of the speculations were accurate and how much was just blowing smoke?

“One minute.”

Green leaned forward, intent on finding out.

“Ten. Nine…”

The countdown proceeded as everyone watched, then passed, and they still watched.

Damn time delay.

Finally a splash of light erupted on their screen.

“Direct hit!”

Green slumped back in the seat, just a little grimer than he had been a moment ago.

Too easy. Looks like the speculations were right, these aren’t military-trained crews. No way one of my ships would get so damned blindered at inbound ships that they would miss a kinetic strike that obvious.

The trio of human ships fired again on close approach, destroying two of the three ships and crippling the other as they arced out of the system.

“Third target still moving, sir.”

“What acceleration?”

“ Eighty-three gravities.”

“Leave them,” Green grunted. “They’ll slow down anyone who stops to help them.”

“Aye, sir.”

*****

Major Washington stepped over a knee knocker and into the compartment, holding onto the doorframe to keep his extra-sized body from bouncing off the walls. The new acceleration on the Terra Class ships was plenty impressive, but he’d learned the hard way that there was a brief delay between when the America stepped on the gas and when the counter-gravity stepped in to keep him from being turned to jelly on the far wall.

Sometimes the delay went the other direction, which completely messed him up, and he was half convinced that the designers did it just to fuck with people’s heads.

That wasn’t his problem just then, however.

“Jack,” he said, nodding to the officer in charge of the shipboard Marines, Major Jack Kinney. “I hear you put the word out for me?”

“I did, Ton.” Jack gestured to a chair across from his desk. “Take a load off, you have got to get tired lugging around a body that big.”

Ton just grinned, white teeth shining against black skin. “I’m used to it.”

He took the seat, though, making the steel-frame chair groan as he settled his weight to it.

“I’ll bet. Looks like we’re going to have work for your team, Ton.”

“We’re ready.”

“No doubt. There is a reported outpost in the next system. Scouts located it weeks ago, but we never had the forces to dispatch it properly,” Jack said. “Boss wants your team to correct the oversight.”

“Don’t want to take it out with kinetic strikes?” Ton asked, mostly just curious. Time was of the essence, from what he could tell.

“We could do that, but you know how effective the Valve can be defending terrestrial targets,” Jack said.

Ton nodded. Valves installed on planets seemed to have greater range and power than the shipboard ones they’d encountered to date. No one was clear why, but it seemed likely a power issue, for which Ton figured everyone should just be damned grateful.

“More to the point, we don’t want it wiped out.”

“You don’t?” Ton asked, frowning.

“No. Take out the Valve, blow the holy hell out of most of the rest, but try and leave them with a transmitter working.”

Ton nodded, understanding. “You want to bleed off the enemy ships, get them dispatched out to help.”

“Exactly,” Jack confirmed. “The America will peel off from the rest, we’ll take a separate jump to the new target and insert you, then jump to this system here.”

Ton glanced at the star map, but he was only slightly literate when it came to stellar cartography. “Leaving us on-world?”

“For a short time. We want to hammer another suspect site while we have the chance. The main group will stay on course to the most likely place to pick up sign of the enemy, but we’re peeling ships off for small missions like this to try and sow some chaos and confusion in the enemy ranks.”

“Roger that.” Ton nodded. “Two of my favorite things.”

“The America will sweep back on a three-jump tour, pick you up, and then we’ll hightail it for a rendezvous with the task group here, where we expect the enemy ships to be,” Jack told him. “Clear?”

“Clear, and wilco. My team is ready.”

“Glad to hear it. Go brief them, I’ll send you a heads up before we jump.”

Ton nodded and got up.

“Ton.”

“Yeah, Jack?” the big man asked, turning back from the door.

“Good luck.”

Ton grinned. “Thanks.”

*****

USV Terra

Parath walked the corridors of the ship his people had captured, eyes noting the lines carefully as he compared it to his own.

The ship, the alien ship that it was, had many familiar notes.

It was familiar in many places, the aliens were surprisingly close to Parithalian standards, though they were somewhat shorter and stockier. Not so much as the Lucians, but noticeably so, and of course instead of the bluish color to the skin they were reddish or darker. One could see the glow of their life fluid under their skin, which was interesting, he found. Parithalians kept their fluids deeper for safety and camouflage from predators of the far past.

The engines, however—they stood out.

Parithalian ships had engines that were less than a quarter the size of the ones he was seeing. It had taken significant time for them to recognize that they were in fact engines. The engines in this ship stretched almost the entire length of the vessel, and it was not a small vessel.

He was reasonably knowledgeable in the mechanics of most common propulsion systems in use in the Alliance, but the one the aliens used was both antiquated and quite sophisticated. No Alliance species used anything similar, or had for hundreds of intervals at least. It bore some similarities to a few obsolete systems he knew, but the level of sophistication involved here was far beyond anything he’d ever studied.

“Master.”

Parath paused, glancing back. “Yes?”

“We have basic translations of their text now, the computers just finished pattern recognition on the alien computer systems.”

“Good. Anything of interest yet?”

“No, Master. Their remaining systems have large sections that are completely random.”

Parath snorted, unsurprised. “Remaining systems?”

“We’ve identified some of the destroyed equipment as computer cores. They are unrecoverable.”

“Very well done indeed,” Parath laughed as he complimented his counterpart.

“Master?”

“These are not fools, and they are not to be underestimated,” Parath said easily. “Have you enough to begin translating the lettering we see around the ship?”

“Yes, Master. We’ve identified the name of the ship as the…” The young officer looked down at the reader. “The United Solari Vessel Terra.”

Parath frowned. “I know what united means, and I know what vessel means, but what does Solari and Terra mean?”

“Terra seems to be a variant of the word for dirt, possibly in a separate language. We haven’t identified the word Solari yet.”

“They named the ship dirt?”

Parath had seen ships named sillier names in the past, but never a warship. He shook his head. “If you’re sure you have the translation correct?”

“We believe so.”

“Very well, send me a copy of the translation codes. I would like to read some of these postings, they appear to be important.”

“Yes, Master.”

Chapter XI

USV Socrates

Outer Sol System

Alexi Petronov stood at the outer command deck, staring out over the looming maw of the Socrates’s hold.

One upon a time the ship had been massively compartmented; large spaces were actually something of a hated and dangerous thing to have on a starship. He was an old enough hand to cringe at the knowledge that the entire hold could, in fact, be pressurized. The idea of how much atmosphere they would lose if the ship were to be breached in that gaping area made him sick to his stomach.

Air wasn’t as valuable as it once was, however. They had the capacity now to save most of the atmosphere even in the event of a large breach. All they had to do was turn up the gravity, actually, a three-or four-gravity pull would make things hard on the crew, but it would keep the atmosphere close enough to be mostly recovered as well.

What was lost could be easily be replenished from the ice that was plentiful in practically every system that humans were interested in.

It still went against his nature, however, to have that much space open on his ship.

Deep down, a hundred meters below him, was another thing that he wasn’t particularly pleased about. Alexi was a pacifist at heart, though he didn’t take the philosophy as far as some extremists, so the idea of a weapons system being tested on his ship made him cringe in more ways than the obvious.

It was a very interesting system, though, that he would admit.

Bipedal robots had been done, they were commonplace in Japan now, serving in many buildings as guides, helpers, and various other things. Most other places hadn’t adopted them to that degree, though he understood that some places in America had taken to them quite hotly. In Russia, if you saw one, it was usually with a tourist, in his experience.

Those were human-sized, however, not this monstrosity.

What made it stand out—actually made his skin crawl as he watched it through the magnified screen projected on the thick transluminum bulkhead in front of him—was how smoothly it moved. It was like a living thing, only clearly not.

I believe they call it the…what is it? Uncanny Valley Effect, yes, Alexi thought as he watched the lieutenant put herself and her new squad through their paces. The squad, they were clumsy, blocky, as he expected of a robot. They did not bother him.

It was her.

She moved with a fluid grace that could only be a living thing, but did it in a machine that clearly was anything but. It reached deep into him, he found, and plucked at some ancient fear of revenants and mystical golems that could not be controlled.

It was creepy, there was no other word for it, and he’d given up looking and chosen to be content with that word alone.

Creepy.

It suited.

*****

Sorilla had parked her bot, mech, whatever it was they wanted to call it. Perched on its shoulder, she watched the members of her “team” work on getting their acts together in their own machines. The thirty-five-foot beasts made for a fascinating recreating of the Three Stooges when put under the control of several of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine’s best, much to her visible disgust and private amusement. No international force this time, which was curious given the nature of the people usually sent to SOLCOM, but it turned out that no one had any men to spare at the moment so they at least gave her people who had experience working together.

She had three of each, much to her everlasting joy, she supposed, or rather, she hoped. Navy SEALs, Detachment One, Parajumpers, and Army Rangers. Their jackets were all good, but they were operators in name only as far as she was concerned. This was their first op in deep space, though they’d all done the training, thankfully. She didn’t want to go through a mission like this with total greenhorns, but she did wish that the brass had seen fit to give her a few deep space hands to walk on other side of the children until they learned how to be good war elephants.

Unfortunately, experienced spacers were few and far between at the moment; most of them died early on in the war and, honestly, there had never been all that many to begin with. So that left her babysitting the children until they learned to walk without bumping into each other and winding up sprawled across the ground.

Sorilla sighed. It’s a good thing that I am a teacher, or I’d have shot them already.

Her eyes flicked down and to the right as her HUD blinked and caught her eye, leading her to give an exasperated sound as she dropped off the shoulder of the bot and walked across the floor.

“God damn it, Bean! You’re running that damn thing with manual controls again! If you don’t use your damned implants the way you’re supposed to, I’ll come up there personally and take them back so the Army can give them to someone who deserves them!” she snarled, jabbing a finger in the direction of a machine that was walking even more stiffly than the rest.

The machines could be run on manual, using controls similar to those in a fighter jet, but it was slow and didn’t react according to the design. Good for moving from place to place, maybe doing some basic scut work, but of no value whatsoever to a soldier in a fight.

Francis Bean was an Parajumper, and she was getting tired of making air force jokes about him. Some people just made it too easy.

“Come on, El-Tee,” he whined, making her despise the man even more, “I can move it better like this anyway, and being frozen like that makes my skin crawl.”

“Fine. You want it the hard way, let’s do it the hard way. I’m coming up there, and if you don’t stop me, I’m going relieve you of an implant. Dealer’s choice. Stop me if you can.”

With that as the warning, Sorilla nudged her armor’s helm on and sprinted right at the man. He actually yelped, despite the fact that he was facing a woman in power armor while he was piloting an eighty-ton war machine. Sorilla was sorely tempted to make good on her threat by yanking out his central proc, but the Air Force would probably frown on her lobotomizing one of their PJs.

The bot stepped back from her, still moving clumsily, and she vaulted from a running start to plant her foot on the robotic “thigh” about ten feet up. From there she caught a flailing arm and levered herself up the next ten feet and twisted around to grab a purchase on its back.

In under two seconds, Sorilla was crouched on the back of the wildly flailing bot, keying in the emergency shut down and access code. The big robot ground to a halt as the hatch popped open, and she then just reached in and physically hauled the bigger man out by the back of his own armor.

“If you make me do this again,” she growled, blank helm facing equally blank helm, “then I swear to god that the next time I will shuck you out of that armor and perform an elective surgery on you that you will not enjoy. Are we clear?”

“Y…ye…yes, ma’am.”

She dropped him back into the cockpit of the machine. “Jack in and get stiff, dick head. No one leaves here today until you do your job.”

With that she slammed the hatch shut on him and leapt clear, landing easily thirty feet away and walking back toward her own machine.

*****

USV Legendary

Admiral Brooke stepped off the ramp of the transfer shuttle, eyes glancing around the bay. Her mind was still catching up with everything she’d recently learned, and she had to wonder if the Universe would ever feel the same again.

“Ma’am, latest status report is on your workspace.”

“Thank you, Sean,” she told the lieutenant who had come to meet her. “Is everything proceeding with no issues?”

“We shifted training for the strike team to the Socrates, ma’am. Other than that we’re on schedule and on plan.”

She raised an eyebrow. “The Socrates? Why?”

“More room, ma’am. Things are cramped most places on the Legendary, and there was no way we could clear the hangars.”

“Ah.” Brooke supposed that made sense.

Pity, she’d wanted to see the training in progress.

Ah well, the Socrates is within range of a real time link, and only a few minutes away by shuttle if we get the time in the next system.

“Very good.” She nodded after a moment. “And we are on course to jump?”

“Already have people at jump stations, ma’am, we were just waiting on you.”

“Well then let’s not keep things up any longer,” she said, nodding to the lift. “Shall we?”

“Yes, ma’am. After you.”

The two officers made their way to the lift and were quickly gone from the nearly deserted hangar deck.

*****

The jump alarm had sounded a few minutes earlier, so Sorilla had marched her unit back into the hangar deck they were using for maintenance and diagnostics and gotten everyone parked and the machines tied down. Despite her annoyance with Bean, she was far from unsatisfied with the first training session. Most of the men were experienced power suit operators, and that required a lot of knowledge and experience using implants.

If they were also a lot younger than her, well, they were used to learning new shit every day of the week and twice on Saturday, so she’d take that as a plus.

It would be nice if the irritating little puppies would stop leering at me when they think I’m not looking, though. Honestly, they should know better. Implants record everything, whether you notice it or not. It’s just bad form to give your superior that much blackmail material on you.

After checking all the machines, Sorilla paused to give hers a last glance over and then patted the armor-shod leg somewhat fondly before heading out.

For all her earlier intransigence, she had to admit that she was growing to like the big clunker. There was something primal about when everything connected just right and she was the machine. So far she’d only managed it for a few tantalizing seconds at a shot, if that, but the view of what could be was enough to get her to come back for more.

“You done in here, Lieutenant?”

Sorilla glanced back to see one of the Socrates’s workmen at the door to the hangar and nodded. “Coming right out, Doug.”

“All right, we’re going to seal up the room for jump.”

Sorilla thunked the big machine once, bare fisted, then walked out while the worker held the door for her. She didn’t want to be standing around in the open during a jump. She made it to the lifts and caught the last one out of the cargo deck, heading north to the command and habitation areas, but her mind was still on the mission before her.

She’d received the brief on the alien ships, as best they were able to reconstruct them after TF-5 was finished blowing them to hell and gone, and was almost finished finalizing the sims she was going to use to train her team on the entry plan.

Normally she’d prefer as much as six months just to train on mission-specific items, to say nothing on new equipment familiarization, but this time she estimated that she’d be lucky to get one. It depended on how long it took them to find an enemy ship that matched their shopping list, and assumed that they didn’t get embroiled in a full fleet action first.

I think I’m going to be sick, and we haven’t even jumped yet, she thought darkly. I should have stayed a sergeant.

*****

On the bridge of the Socrates, Alexi looked over the status reports with no small satisfaction. His ship was fresh out of a major refit and everything appeared to be in operating order and running as smoothly as he could hope.

“Is everyone in their assigned locations?” he asked, glancing up.

“Yes, sir, Captain. All decks check clear and ready for jump.”

“Signal the fleet, we are ready to jump.”

“Signal sent…uh…Legendary has issued a standby command, sir. The Spirit is tracking down an intermittent fault in their gravity system.”

Alexi nodded wearily. He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. The Socrates may have been fresh from a refit, but it was a proven hull and solid as the day it was built. The other ships, aside from the one other Explorer Class with them, were all fresh paint and shiny circuits. He would have been shocked had there not been issue.

“ETA?” he asked.

“At least two hours.”

Alexi sighed, but smiled and nodded. “Understood. I’ll be back in an hour. Need some coffee, yes?”

“Yes, sir, we’ve got things here.”

“Never a doubt entered my thoughts,” he said, walking off the bridge.

*****

Sorilla settled into the lounge area of the ship, a large space by military standards and far more comfortable than she was used to. It had a nice view as well, though not out into space. Of course, views of deep space were generally about as dull as you got. No, this area looked out over the massive expanse of the deep and empty cargo deck of the ship.

All the gantries were retracted off to the side, lending it an open industrial look that was punctuated by the massive vertical gardens that hung along the entire inside of the ship. Unlike military ships, which depended on industrial scrubbers to regenerate oxygen content and remove carbon from the air, the Socrates had gone the opposite route. Aeroponic gardens with fast-growing crops to provide food and air, efficient and effective, but largely not something a military vessel could or would spare the space for.

I bet the crews of Valkyrie are happy to have the Socrates and the Newton along for this run, though. These gardens could feed a small city I’d bet.

Most of the food would be recycled, of course, but there would be plenty to spare for the plates of sailors and soldiers who were used to eating everything but fresh on an extended run.

She took a sip of a drink, just pure water for the moment, and looked out at the vegetation. The jump had been postponed. She didn’t know why, but it wasn’t her affair either. For now, she’d just relax and try to enjoy the ride.

There was a minor commotion at the far end of the room, a few people waving or saluting…though if the latter, they were the sloppiest salutes she’d seen in a long time. Either was possible on a civilian ship, she supposed, but it was enough to catch her attention.

The captain of the Socrates had stepped in; she recognized him from the time she’d seen the man when she hitched a ride back to Earth from Hayden the first time around. He was an impressive sort, she’d decided that back then, and nothing had happened recently to change her mind. She’d gotten a peak at his jacket while she was convalescing from that mission, and the mission review by his military second-in-command summed him up by simply calling him a Sierra Hotel Captain.

That was because the words “Shit Hot” didn’t belong in official reports.

Alexi Petronov was a tall man, even for the times, almost six and half feet. He was also gym-fit to the point of perfection, something not uncommon with spacers, in her experience. Men and women from the pre-Terra days didn’t have gravity and had to work out near constantly if they wanted to stay flight certified. If you didn’t, you’d lose bone mass quick and be taken off active duty permanently, even with the miracles of modern medicine.

That problem was probably in the past, so Sorilla idly wondered if the ultra-fit standard would eventually drop or not.

She hoped not, a hint of a smile on her lips as she watched the captain taking a few moments with each of his crew on his way to the cafeteria counter.

She’d never been a particularly active party girl, nor had she ever gone through the boy crazy stage as a teen, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t appreciate a hard body when she saw one, and Alexi Petronov was all kinds of hard.

*****

Alexi looked around the lounge. It was fuller than normal because they were basically in a holding pattern around the jump point and no one had anywhere better to be for the time being. He took his time as he made his way to the counter to get a cup of coffee, speaking with several people he’d not seen a lot of since before the started refit.

His crew were all long-term veterans of the Solari Space Agency, and later the Solari Organization as a whole, most of them conscientious objectors like himself who didn’t like to fight. That didn’t mean any of them were cowards. When it came time to liberate Hayden, they all stood with him as the military armed his ship. They served through a battle that had to be fought, but that was where they drew the line.

He and his crew were not military, and had no intention of ever becoming military.

Sometimes, however, they were willing to help the military when things got rough.

Speaking of military. He noticed that the lieutenant was watching him from the far corner. Her eyes were dark but they held a glint of more than just intelligence. He knew intelligence when he saw it, he was around it enough to have gotten used to recognizing it in the way a person held themself. This one had something more.

He retrieved his coffee and cradled it thoughtfully for a moment before he set off and crossed the room to where the lone military officer sat.

“Lieutenant.” He nodded to her when he came to a stop by her booth.

“Captain.” She half smiled back, her fingers coming up in a salute that wasn’t quite casual but neither was it quite military perfect.

“May I?” he asked, gesturing to the seat.

“It’s your ship, Captain, enjoy.”

Alexi sat down, looking her over as she unabashedly returned the favor. He broke eye contact first, glancing around the lounge.

“You came here alone.”

“So I did. My squad is getting to know each other. I figured I’d let them without the boss looking over their shoulder.”

“Ah, yes, that makes sense.” He nodded, taking a sip of his coffee, “Tell me, what do you think of my Socrates?”

“She’s changed a lot since the last time I was aboard her,” Sorilla answered simply.

“Da, for the better, I hope…” Alexi trailed off. “I do not recall you. You’ve been on the Socrates before?”

“One way trip. Hayden to Earth.” Sorilla smiled. “I was drugged most of the run, didn’t get out of the cabin much.”

Alexi stared for a moment, thinking furiously. Normally he knew every face that stepped on his ship, past and present, but he found himself annoyingly blank here. “From the liberation of Hayden, I presume?”

Sorilla nodded simply, taking a drink while she smiled rather amusedly at his consternation.

“I must apologize,” he said finally. “I do not recall you.”

“I was a sergeant back then,” she said as she set down her water and extended a hand. “Sorilla Aida, sir, at your service.”

“Aida,” he whispered, nodding now as he took her hand and shook it firmly. Her hand was cool, but strong, he found. “Yes, now I recall. You were the survivor of the team they dropped in at the start.”

Sorilla’s smile went away, but she nodded.

“Sorry, I was not thinking,” he said.

Sorilla held up a hand. “Don’t apologize. I remember them because they mattered to me. Every time someone brings them up, I’m grateful for the reminder.”

“Da, still, I should have been more circumspect. I know better,” Alexi said, “or I should at least. I am captain, my job is to know better.”

Sorilla laughed softly. “Yes well, we’re none of us perfect.”

“Da. Is true.”

The two didn’t speak again after that, both just looking out the transluminum barrier at the great vertical gardens beyond, and sat in companionable silence until the captain’s wrist com chimed and he had to leave.

*****

Problems resolved, the ships of Task Force Five made one last holding-pattern-based turn around the jump point, maneuvered tightly into their final formation, and then accelerated into the point and jumped to FTL and out of the Sol System.

*****

Aion Facility

Admiral Mathew watched as the ships on his plot reached the jump point and vanished in a burst of signal-scrambling energy. It took a few seconds for the telemetry feed to settle, and he turned away from the plot and back to his desk, where a face was waiting on the screen.

“They’ve jumped,” he said.

“Good,” the answer came back tiredly over the short-range FTL com.

“I still think we should have told her everything.”

“There is too much at risk, Admiral. You know that as well as I, that was one thing we could not tell Admiral Brooke.”

Mathew sighed, but nodded. “Yes, sir, Mr. President.”

“We have another month, two at the outside. Prepare your plans to shut down Aion.”

“Yes, sir.”

The tired-looking man on the screen stared off into the distance for a long moment, then spoke again. “We do things in the name of the greater good that can be called nothing short of evil. I wonder if it is really so bad to choose the right thing once in a while?”

“Sir?”

“Nothing, Admiral. You have your orders.”

“Yes, sir.”

The screen went black.

Chapter XII

OPCOM Squad, On Planetary Approach, unnamed world

“Spread formation, radio silence from this point on.”

Washington’s team responded without further communication as they entered the atmosphere of the planet below, feeling the first slight buffets of real turbulence through their armor with over 150 kilometers left to fall.

The fourth planet of the system had no name besides the letter “d” tacked onto the number and letter identification of the star it orbited, but it was a surprisingly hospitable system by human standards. Long-range analysis registered a higher oxygen content than Hayden, which was higher again than Earth, and a gravity rating of about 1.4, Earth standard, but that was well within the range that SOLCOM would consider as a prime location for a colony.

The fact that it was three jumps deep into what was now disputed territory was a black mark against it, of course, but more importantly was the fact that the Ghoulies had put a Valve installation just like the one on Hayden smack dab in the middle of the major northern continental mass.

Time to remove one of those black marks, Washington thought to himself as he kicked up and nosed into a deeper dive, aiming to keep his speed as long as he could. I really hope the eggheads are right about how these bastards track us.

They were riding the coattails of a meteor shower, literally falling through the burning tail streaks as they began to hit the thicker atmosphere on the way down. Pebbles and debris were bouncing off his armor as Ton angled in to follow one of the smaller ones down. He had to be careful; some of those chunks of rock could go up like a pocket nuke when they hit lower atmo, and it would be better for him not to be too close when that happened.

His HUD was silent, running on passives as he cut into the deeper atmosphere and snapped his arms and legs out. He slowed fast, leaving the meteor trail as the big rock continued down. At eighty miles up, he disengaged his reentry armor, blowing the excess material off and deploying airfoils.

Ton banked left, putting himself on a perpendicular course from the meteor shower, now sacrificing speed for lateral travel.

He’d been moving for less than five minutes when a white flash from behind him lit up the sky. He didn’t have to count off many seconds for the shockwave to slam into him either.

Cut that too damned close.

Meteors that made it to deeper atmo, like the ones they’d followed in, were rare on Earth but less so here. This system still had big chunks of rock floating around and huge debris fields in the outer system because there hadn’t been any big gas giants here to fly around sweeping up the mess from the early chaos of solar development.

The fact that there was a world with life on it was almost shocking, but for the odd orbit the world followed. It turned around its parent sun on an eccentric path, well off the system elliptic, and was only exposed to the hazards of the majority of the system twice per orbit.

It was still a shooting gallery, but usually only small stuff from what the Fleet projections could tell.

With the meteor show now beyond him, Ton gave up altitude for speed as he dove for the deck with legs and arms tucked in tight. He broke the sound barrier thirty seconds in, but his measly sonic boom wouldn’t be noticed after that thunderclap, and below him he could now make out some of the landscape he was diving into.

Another flash behind him lit the sky. Ton didn’t look back. He just had to hope there wouldn’t be any that came closer.

Get low, get fast. The enemy Valves can only track so quickly in this close, even if they do see me.

Tracking a fast-moving target became exponentially harder as the range decreased, since you had less time to react and target. But by the same token, he was moving a lot slower in atmosphere than a ship in space would be, so he wanted to get below their detection threshold as quickly as possible.

Without active scans from his armor and HUD, he could only hope that his team was doing the same. They knew their job, though; he’d trained them as best he could. Time to let them get a move on without training wheels.

He could make out the trees on a nearby mountain as the spire of rock came rushing up at, and then past, him. Ton snapped out his arms and legs to inflate the airfoils, turning speed into lateral movement again as he rocketed down a mountain valley at just over the local speed of sound.

Proc! he subvocalized. Go active!

His HUD lit up as the LIDAR mount on his armor painted the valley he was racing through, plotting his course for him. Banking hard to the left, he cut a sharp turn and kicked up a puff of snow as he cleared a tight outcropping.

He was almost on autopilot now, his course being dynamically mapped by the computer. It knew where he had to go, so he was counting on it getting him close enough to meet up with the squad, otherwise it would be one hell of a long walk home when it was all over.

There was a brief buffet as he dropped below the speed of sound, his remaining sonic boom starting an avalanche in his wake as he left the snow behind and began to follow a mountain stream down to the river delta they’d chosen as their meeting place.

So far, so good. Should be below their detection threshold now.

The big Marine took a couple slow breaths, intentionally willing his heart to slow a bit. He hadn’t been looking forward to being squished into a singularity, extruded through the tidal vortex, and then blasted across the face of the planet as his component atoms were converted into energy.

That just sounded like all kinds of unpleasant.

*****

USV America

While the Major and his team were infiltrating the planetary target, the America had another mission in mind. It was a dead end system, so called because the local jump points connected only to one star, so ships could only enter and leave the system through that single point in space-time.

In theory, at least. Admiral Fairbairn was well aware that the alien technology allowed them to negotiate jump points that humans still considered incredibly risky or even impossible. There was no way to know for sure if the aliens might be able to come in from another direction, but for the moment that was really quite irrelevant.

A previous scout had reported the existence of a small local base in the system, but SOLCOM hadn’t had the ships to spare for an assault, particularly not for a system that humans had little interest in. Fairbairn rather felt that things had changed now, though he wasn’t looking to capture the system. No, not at all. He had something rather different in mind.

“We’ve located a gravity anomaly on the second planet. It is consistent with the reports from the scouts and our profile on enemy forward bases.”

Fairbairn nodded. “Tell the captain that Olympus is a go.”

“Aye, Admiral. Olympus is a go.”

*****

“Captain, message from flag. Olympus is a go.”

Pete Green nodded absently, having expected that since they’d arrived in system. He finished making a few last second calculations then sent the numbers to his weapons officer.

“Chuck, could you run those and make sure they’re good?” he asked. “If they check out, shoot them over to the Germany.”

“Aye aye, Skipper.”

He’d been trying to put together a firing pattern that would both saturate the enemy defenses and also use up a minimum of their onboard munitions. They weren’t going to waste Hammers on a planetary target, though it seemed counterintuitive that targets in an atmosphere didn’t need the same level of punch as a starship.

Within an atmosphere, close counted when you were talking ship-to-ship and ship-to-surface weapons. In space, however, without something to transmit the shockwave, not so much.

“Looks good, Skipper,” Charles Grimm said a moment later. “Sending to the Germany.”

That only took a few seconds before a confirmation tone sounded, letting them know that their cohort was prepared.

“Initiate Firing Pattern Olympus.”

“Firing pattern initiated.”

Iron spikes launched from the main tubes didn’t have the same punch as the more advanced Hammers, but at significant fractions of light speed they would do a hell of a job on anything they hit. The America and the Germany put twenty apiece into space, staggering their rate of fire so that no single shot from the enemy Valve would stand a chance of taking out more than a couple of them.

They had limited data on how well the enemy technology handled rapid-fire engagements, but so far as they’d been able to determine there were distinct limits to how quickly a Valve could target and warp space-time in a given timeframe.

Time to put that to the test.

Green eyed the plot for a moment before he stood up. “Call the relief watch and get everyone some grub or coffee.”

“Aye, sir, relief watch.”

He watched the men and women swap places smoothly before he excused himself from the bridge and headed across the hall for a cup himself. They’d launched their staggered burst from hours out; it would be almost three hours before the burst struck and almost another hour on top of that before the light got back to them to tell the story of the hit.

The so called “Rods from God” strike, or bolts from Olympus in this case, was a standoff tactic that wouldn’t work particularly well against a prepared military installation. He knew that human stations would track and terminate each spike before they got within three light seconds of a valuable asset.

The aliens, however, didn’t appear to be military, if the theory was correct, and so far he had to admit that it seemed to be holding up. They were, most likely, an advance recon or even civilian installation. Probably government-backed, to be sure, and certainly combatants by humans standards…

Using WMDs puts them right the hell in the category of priority targets, that’s for damned sure.

However, they seemed to primarily be equipped for defense against natural events, not coordinated military strikes.

That was a psychological and tactical blind spot that Green fully intended to leverage to his maximum advantage for as long as he possibly could, because he knew without the shadow of a doubt that the Ghoulies had to have real military out there somewhere, and when they finally showed up, the game was going to change.

Again.

*****

USV Terra

Master of ships Parath stood over the clear floor of the observation and command deck, the length of the alien ship falling away beneath him into the distant darkness of space. He rather appreciated this particular aspect of the alien design, though he was also noting it as a likely target of opportunity in further engagements.

I expect that they likely seal this off during battle, however; it may be a waste of munitions.

Clearly it wasn’t the battle command station of the ship—they’d located that quite quickly once resistance had been put down.

It was, however, a majestic location from which to command the normal operations of a star vessel.

“Master?”

“Hmm?” Parath half turned, only slightly focusing on the voice.

“We’ve completed the first round of translations. The computers now have the aliens’ language encoded.”

“Ah, excellent.” Parath nodded. “And the command structure?”

“Their Master of Ships is known as a Captain.” The man said the unfamiliar word. “On this ship, that would be Captain Pierce Richmond. We do not yet know which of the prisoners this Pierce Richmond is. His data files were among those destroyed by enemy sabotage when we took over.”

“Of course they were.”

“Oh, and you wished to know about the lighter colored uniforms, Master?”

“Yes?”

“Those are what the aliens term ‘Marines’.”

“Marines? An aquatic species?” Parath asked, confused.

“No, it appears to be a traditional title. From an ocean-based military force,” the aide said simply. “They are, as you guessed, ship’s security and the primary assault force during ground missions.”

“Ah.” Parath considered that. “Very well, triple the guards on all of these…marines.”

“We’ve already doubled them, Master, I’ll add the extra shifts immediately.”

Parath smiled slightly, looking out at the stars. “Excellent work. Now, bring me a full translator package and one of the officers.”

“Yes, Master.”

Parath supposed that it was time to get some useful intelligence on these people, though it would be a long and dirty job. Without far better information on their physiological makeup, not to mention their mental capacity and design, it would be a drudging task indeed. Luckily, they had time. The main fleet was still several fractionals out, and while the assignment was time sensitive, it was mostly only so in that they complete their task before the Ross finish their own.

That was good, because proper interrogations could not be rushed.

*****

Commander Diane Riggs cursed as she was dragged through the corridors, heading for the admiral’s flag deck as best she could tell. She struggled a little, mostly because that’s what she figured her captors would be expecting, but what she was really focused on was the enemy presence on the Terra.

There were quite a few of them visible, guards mostly. The tall blue ones seemed to be in command, while the more squat and powerful grey ones were clearly their version of Marines. The blue ones didn’t carry any visible weapons, something she considered abominably stupid given that they were on an enemy ship, even if it was a captured one, but every grey one she’d seen was armed.

Except the two dragging me through the ship. Smart.

They’d handed their weapons off to the others of her escort party before they grabbed her from the room with the captain and the others. They were disciplined, strong, and clearly trained well. That made them dangerous, but her interest at the moment wasn’t in them. She was trying to memorize everything she could about the taller, blue-skinned beings.

They had what she’d have to call an ethereal quality about them, a hint of otherworldly qualities that the grey aliens just couldn’t match. Where the greys—the Charlies, she supposed— moved with precision, the blues almost seemed to float between steps. Either they had some very interesting physiology, or they had an impressive strength to weight ratio and a feather-light stance.

The two greys half dragging her slung her into the admiral’s flag observation deck, letting her sprawl to the deck in front of a blue. She sized him up from the corner of her eye for a moment before moving. He was as tall as any of them, but while the others were probably officers, there was no doubt in her mind that this one was in command.

Captain, then. Admiral, maybe, or just one arrogant prick of a commander, she thought humorously as she climbed to her feet, her hands shackled in front of her, and turned to face him.

“You have built a very impressive star ship here,” he told her in nearly flawless English, the only fault she could detect being that it was too precisely delivered.

Still, it was enough for her to gape at him in shock.

He ignored her obvious surprise, gesturing below their feet where the transluminum deck opened up on deep space and the running lights of the Terra herself. The length of the ship ran below them, falling away for hundreds of meters, and you could just make out the gravetics bulge in the distance. It was, she knew, an inspiring view, but it didn’t hold her focus in the slightest this time.

“Few of our ships are built with such places,” he told her simply. “It is perhaps a sad thing. I find myself truly in love with this concept. It is a grand place from which to command.”

“You speak English,” she stammered out, still boggled by the fact.

“Yes. It is a recently acquired talent,” he told her, turning his focus back to her. “Now, we have much to discuss.”

“I’m not telling you a damned thing.”

He laughed, or she thought that was what it was. It was almost a chirping sound, but it had a cadence that felt like laughter, and he didn’t seem pissed.

“I have little need of your secrets, those we will learn in time. The longer our conflict goes on, the more secrets will spill, from both sides. That is the way of war,” he told her when he’d stopped. “No, this is to be a…friendly chat, yes? I am Master of Ships Parath.”

She considered for a few seconds. “Commander Diane Riggs.”

“See? A most friendly chat,” Parath told her with what she thought was a smile. It was hard to tell; his mouth was small, hidden under a beaked nose that seemed to be bone or something hard. “Let us discuss something safe, yes, Commander? I understand that your world is quite beautiful, some of your crew spoke of oceans. My world has very little water above the surface, but our mountains have few peers in the Allied Worlds.”

Diane blinked, considering his words. She knew what he was doing, recognized the technique. It was one of the more effective interrogation methods one could employ, more so because even if you knew it was being used there was little you could do to counter it.

Under torture you could lie, make up whatever you wanted. Torturers weren’t going to stop even if you told them what they wanted to know, they enjoyed their job too much. That was what made enhanced interrogation useless except as entertainment for the less savory members of a given organization. If you wanted real information, you took your time, you got friendly with the target, you chatted.

Stockholm Syndrome would come into play in your favor, as well as other psychological factors. A human, at least, could only maintain a false persona for so long. Eventually the brain just got tired of it and the defenses would come down, mistakes would be made. Things of importance would slip.

There was a truism in military an intelligence circles. It went: Everyone breaks sooner or later. Most people thought that meant under torture, but no. You could hold out under torture indefinitely—it had been done before and would be again. You couldn’t hold out under a good and patient interrogator, however. It actually was a psychological fact. Resisting torture was easy; keeping your mental defenses up constantly was patently impossible.

How long does SOLCOM need? she thought quickly, trying to work out just what she could say and do to push the timeframe back as far as she could.

Diane licked her lips slowly, thinking about each word before she spoke. She would not be able to keep that up for long, but she’d do so as long as she could.

Parath, for his part, had silently waited while she struggled with her thoughts. He probably knew everything she was thinking, she realized suddenly. If he were a good interrogator, he’d recognize her delaying for what it was.

Of course, it worked both ways. The interrogator was under almost the same stress as the subject. He, too, had to be on his guard, watching and considering everything he was saying, and he, too, could only hold that up just so long. That mattered less, since there was a hard limit on what she could do with the intelligence he let slip. Also, she wouldn’t have access to recordings as he would, but it was still something she could use to her advantage. She already knew one thing: If he was using this tactic on her, then the aliens’ minds worked very similar to humans. Very similar indeed.

“Yes,” she said slowly. “We have large oceans.”

“Marvelous,” he said, settling back in the admiral’s chair. It was a little small for his height, and large for his body type, but he made it look comfortable as well. “I’ve often thought about commanding a ship at sea. It seems like a very different task than one in space.”

“Probably,” she answered, this time electing not to offer up anything as she tried to work out what he was angling for, all the while knowing that she was playing into the technique just by trying to figure it out.

“Yes, an ocean command would be fascinating. We developed air ships before anyone even thought of something that floated on water,” Parath went on, as if he were simply chatting without a care in the world. “My ancestors harvested hydrogen from several species of floating flora and fauna on my world, using it to fly before we developed fire.”

He chuckled, “Between us, I’m quite certain that the development of fire was met with dismay in many corners.”

She smiled weakly, committing it to memory. Whether it were true or not didn’t matter, it was information and she needed, all that she could get.

“You must have a very different history than ours,” she offered up. “I admit, I would enjoy comparing them sometime, when things are more…calm between our people.”

“Indeed, that would be of great interest,” Parath agreed. “In time. For now, safe topics, yes?”

Diane sighed, repressing the urge to smile at him.

It was going to be a long, long discussion. She determined herself to try and keep her guard up as long as she could. She didn’t know what they might be looking for, but the longer she could keep from letting anything slip, the better it would be for SOLCOM.

In the back of her mind, she supposed it was probably futile. He had a whole ship of people to talk to, and if he and his people were as patient and as good as she was reading into the situation, they’d get what they were after. Few members of SOLCOM were as trained in counter-intelligence as she was. It wasn’t an in-demand field of study in the current climate.

I think that is about to change.

*****

Unnamed World

Ton dropped down from the rock cropping he’d just climbed over, landing easily on the edge of the river delta, and walked toward the five figures standing there.

“Is this everyone?” he asked, tone moderately concerned.

“So far, boss,” Crow said from where he was sitting by the river bank.

“Damn. You guys count the secondary flashes?”

“I got three,” Crow put in.

Korman looked over. “Five.”

“Four.” Merkur shrugged.

“I only noticed two,” Ton sighed. “I was hoping that meant good things.”

Scott Merkur chuckled dryly. “You know what hope did, boss.”

“Yeah, tell me about it,” Ton shook his head. “We’ve got a couple hours to dawn. We’ll give the others that long before we head out. Grab some shut eye, I’ll stand watch.”

Ton jumped back up the twenty-foot height to the outcropping he’d just hopped off and adjusted his adaptive armor to a smoked grey that matched the color of the rock he was perched on.

Two hours, then I add a few more MIAs to the men I’ve commanded.

He pushed that thought firmly from the front of his mind, focusing on the watch while his remaining men took the time to rest. The powered armor could keep you supported and on your feet for days, but it was still hard to sleep standing up.

A couple hours on your back could change the way you saw the world after you’d been on your feet for days. He knew that from experience, both good and bad.

While keeping watch he called up the mission plans for review, one eye literally on the map while the other watched the forest around them. They’d now made the primary rendezvous point, the next step was the final approach and then the actual assault. Shorthanded as they were, it would be tricky, but they were still mission-viable.

The Valve itself was a primary target, but not the real target. Ton hadn’t had a mission spec quite like this in a long time. Usually he was fighting on the side that had the power advantage and it was his enemy that was hitting all around him, trying to bleed off his forces, making him tired and worn down. Now here he was doing it to someone else.

Funny how the universe worked.

Must be true, after all. No matter how big you are, there’s someone out there ready, willing, and able to cut you down to size and teach you the meaning of humility.

Chapter XIII

USV Legendary

Outer Hayden System

Nadine Brooke stood in the center of the observation and command deck, deep space surrounding her on all sides and below her feet. Task Force Five, Valkyrie, was arrayed around her and she found the feeling of being in space beside them to be more than a little empowering.

“Give me an update on the jump point status,” she demanded.

“We can’t get anything from this side of the point, ma’am, everything reads as normal.”

Brooke grimaced. She wished that there had been more intelligence available on the gravity pulse devices. She’d read the briefing on them and knew that they were supposed to be able to temporarily distort space-time, rendering the proper operation of a jump gate practically impossible. What she didn’t know, however, was manifold.

What happens if we jump into a region of warped space?

That was the question, something she wanted an answer to. She could initiate a jump from this side, but what would happen to the ships when they arrived at the other end? A rough landing, she’d expect at least. But there was rough, and then there was rough.

Brooke sighed, shaking her head. “We’ll have to do it the long way, then.”

That was going to take time, however—days at least, and maybe weeks. They’d be tracing the route that TF-7 had already taken, doing work someone else had already done, which was no way to get ahead of the game.

“Put up the local chart,” Brooke said suddenly.

“Yes, ma’am.”

The chart lit up the 3D display, a block of clear material that could be made to fluoresce under intersecting laser lights. It served as a star map she around which could walk and get a better concept of the relationships between stars.

She stared at the chart for a long moment, then flicked out a finger and highlighted a star.

“Query the computer and every trained navigator onboard. I want to know if we can make that system from here.”

“Admiral, ma’am, that’s almost half a light year out of range.”

“Tell everyone to recalculate range based on the fourth-generation software.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Brooke stared at the highlighted point for a long moment then turned back to the distant running lights of her new Valkyrie squadron.

If we can cut through to that system using our improved control over the gravity systems, we might just be able to cut TF-7 off at the pass and provide them with some much needed backup.

She didn’t know what Fairbairn was thinking, haring off that like.

No, actually she knew just what the man was thinking.

Foolish, damned, stupid, gutsy son of a bitch.

He’d try to bleed the enemy of every ship that he could, make them split their forces again and again, all in the hopes that when they finally came up against Valkyrie there would be at least a chance of victory.

It wouldn’t work.

He didn’t have enough ships, not from the scout reports.

He had to have known that, and yet he went anyway. As did they all.

Now she had to try and find a way to save all their arses, not because she felt for one instant that she had a chance in hell of doing that, but because she had try.

Out beyond her observation deck, the lights of trillions of distant stars all peered back on her, unblinking. She found herself detesting war more so with every mission she undertook, and those stars were beginning to feel like judges watching her and weighing her. Brooke had always been a science track officer; she wasn’t out here for the adventure, she was here for the unanswered questions.

Now, though, while she hated war, she found herself reveling in being a warrior. The test, the challenge, finding ways to make her enemy boggle and her allies roar. It was addictive, she realized, despite the horrors of it all. The loss of so many good people.

Brooke thought briefly of Jane Mackay, one of the most brilliant minds she’d ever known, and again the horror overwhelmed the rush she felt. Were it not for the horror, Brooke knew that she would grow to love her new job in a way that no one should every feel about actions as despicable as those she had ordered, and would order again.

There had been a time when Brooke felt herself righteous in her stance against war and violence, and now she felt sick inside as she contemplated the horror she would wreak on those who had attacked her people. It was a strange dichotomy, a hypocrisy that she found comforting, something that she was slowly integrating into her soul in a way that left her feeling both powerful and unclean. She longed for the feeling of purity she had once known, but knew that would never come again.

Brooke looked out on the stars and smiled softly. Let the stars judge the righteous, I will settle for burying the guilty.

*****

USV Socrates

Sorilla looked over her team as they put their bots through the paces.

They were starting to look like soldiers, men she could serve with without worrying about who was going to watch her back in a fight. She still wished for some experienced spacers, but as far as soldiers went, they would do.

She dropped into the back of her own bot, nudging the hatch closed above her. It was dark as space inside, her only stars the random flashes of neural activity sending lights across her visual cortex until she fired up her HUDs and lit off the bot.

Sorilla stilled, slipping into the induced sleep paralysis her implants pushed across her body. It was a disturbing sensation, the loss of muscle control, the sudden inability to move or speak. She sank into it with the focus of someone settling into a bath that had the water temperature just a little too hot. Slowly, deliberately, and with equal distaste.

Her implants swapped over to the second level then, however, and she felt the biofeedback of the bot itself replace her limbs and senses. It had taken weeks of practice to get this deep, and she now found herself reveling in the hot soak of the bot’s sensor feeds as they were run back through her own nervous system.

I wonder, is this what I’m supposed to feel? The manual didn’t say anything about it, but it was probably written by armchair grunts with more time in classrooms than the field.

It wasn’t like being herself, of course. The visual acuity was better than human, as was the hearing. She could feel heat and cold in a general sense, but nothing really localized. Tactile senses were effectively blank, except for her fingers. They’d put special resistance units there so she could get a feel for the pressure she was exerting on whatever she grabbed.

The whole rig was a mixed bag like that—some things more than she was used to, some completely absent. For all that, it was a rush to be jacked into the few sensors that were amped up past human limits. She brought up the visual controls, sweeping the bay and locking onto her team.

They were handling their drill admirably, some better than others.

Francis “Frank and Beans” Bean was doing better, which was good, because Sorilla didn’t have a lot of confidence in her ability to perform surgery and have the patient survive. The PJ had gotten used to the soft paralysis drip and was moving his bot around competently, if not with much flair.

The Air Force pajama boys were the smoothest in their bots. Not surprising, she supposed. They were also qualified pilots and they’d spent a chunk of their careers qualifying on exotic equipment. Unlike her, they lived in their armor while on duty and were used to patching into UAVs, aircraft, and other equipment through their implants.

The SEALs were used to operating as a strike team, so they, too, were more used to armor operations than she’d ever been. Rangers relied on the gear a little less, but not much. Ironically, Sorilla noted with a certain degree of chagrin and annoyance, she was the least experienced person in the room when it came to operating machinery via implants.

Green Berets didn’t rely on that BS; they had to serve behind the lines for long period where their only assets were their brains and the local populace. That made her a very dangerous person, all round, but right now she was starting to feel a little self-conscious about how fast her team was picking up on the interface. They seemed to be on a faster track than she was, which meant that she’d have to work twice as hard to stay ahead of them if she wanted to keep her position of strength

Well, what else is new?

She let herself relax, the tensions and uncertainty floating away as she sank deeper down. Her implants shifted subtly but noticeably as theta and alpha waves spiked across her mind. Meditating with her eyes open had taken a lot of practice, but when she hit the sweet spot, it felt like time had slowed.

The bot moved out smoothly as she stepped as lightly as was possible in an eighty-ton war machine, the floor of the starship vibrating with each step. She stopped in front of the rest and subvocalized her next words. The computers captured the words, converted them to digital format, and then broadcast them in a voice that was almost entirely, but not quite, unlike her own.

“Form up.”

The squad turned, her spoken word reverberating off the walls even as her budge to their IFF and HUDs made certain that they couldn’t mistake her. They fell in, a veritable mountain of an army standing two deep by six wide. Sorilla looked them all over, using the bot’s cameras to check each in turn without moving, then gestured casually with her right arm.

“PT drills,” she said simply. “From now on we do PT every morning, first without armor, then with, and finally in the mechs. I want every one of you to run these things like you were born in them. Clear?”

“Ma’am! Clear! Ma’am!”

Impressive. They managed to get the computers to evoke emotional tones.

“Afternoons will be for combat practice. Targeting, mech to mech, and obstacle courses. Captain Petronav would not be pleased to have to polish out dents in his newly refitted ship, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t fuck up while you’re running around in eighty-ton machines. Am I clear?”

“Ma’am! Clear! Ma’am!”

“Do this right and I’ll even overlook you dumb fucks answering me like I’m some dipshit drill instructor,” she told them, her own mechanical tones managing to convey the threat she wanted them to hear before she continued in a whisper that rasped out of the speakers. “Am. I. Clear?”

They were silent for a moment, and she could see them sneaking looks at each other through the cameras on the heads of the mechs.

Finally, one of the PJs, piloting the Zero Five Unit, took a half step forward. “Yes, ma’am.”

Sorilla looked them over silently for a long moment before nodding the cameras of her bot. “Better. Break for now, get something to eat. We’ll be living off suit sauce soon enough, eat fresh while you can,” Sorilla ordered. “Dismissed!”

*****

Alexi watched the hulking machines as they marched back to their gantry docks, impressed despite himself by the maneuvers the military machines had been capable of.

He’d seen bipedal mechs in use before, usually used in certain narrow construction scenarios. His own Socrates had once carried a pair of the big machines, intended to be used in the deployment of the orbital tether the ship could carry. They had some other uses, being particularly useful in a microgravity environment since you could magnetize the large feet, something that was far more difficult with tires or tracks, but in general there were better designs.

These new military models, however, were something quite different.

He’d idly watched them work through their training, clearly moving the machines through maneuvers that required not only precise motor control but also a certain degree of on-the-spot spontaneity. Advance control systems could do the first, he was well aware, but they tended to be less-than-exemplary at the second.

“Impressive machines, aren’t they, sir?”

“Indeed they are, Commander,” Alexi said without turning around to look at his first officer.

Commander Ryan “Mack” Mackenzie was a recent addition to the Socrates, but a welcome one. Mack was an experienced spacer, something that had been in short supply since the beginning of the war, and not a military liaison. The shortage of hulls in the Solari Organization was working in his favor, for as long as it lasted. Alexi planned to enjoy the luxury while he could.

“I wonder how long until they start putting that control technology into our machines,” Mack mused idly.

Alexi snorted. “Sometime after I retire and not one instant sooner. I’ll not have them cut me open and start playing with my neurons, Commander. Bad enough the metal and plastic I already have in my body, I have no need of anything more.”

Mack chuckled softly, catching Alexi’s attention more thoroughly as he turned to look at the younger officer.

“Amusing?”

“Somewhat,” Mack cheerfully confessed. “I’m sure that Captain Hayden himself said something similar about the implants that took over toward the end of his time, and I’m just wondering what I’ll be complaining about when my time comes.”

Alexi snorted. “Watch yourself, you young pup, I’ve got more than enough years left on me than you could have a wait ahead of you.”

“No doubt, sir. No doubt at all,” Mack answered honestly.

The truth was that while Alexi Petronov was pushing sixty, he’d probably stay right where he was for another twenty years or more. Life extension treatments were in their infancy, but every year or two it seemed like someone figured out a way to improve them just ever so slightly. In many ways, it was like a replay of the Moore’s Law period of electronic development that defined the century between the early twentieth to early twenty-first century.

A true golden age, possibly, which was one reason why finding funding for extra-solar colonies was relatively easy. Earth’s population had now topped fifteen billion people and, in those areas that hadn’t planned for the increase, things were more than a little uncomfortable. Thankfully, no one needed massive petroleum-based transport networks anymore, but just the press of humanity itself left the world feeling like a dystopian culture in places.

All they needed to do was end this blasted war and get back to the real business of expanding out into the galaxy to change all that.

Of course, out beyond human-controlled stars, it was now clear that it wasn’t exactly a wide open and empty galaxy they were spreading into. That was going to affect some calculations.

“Mack,” Alexi said, “you have the bridge.”

“Aye, sir,” Mack smirked. “I have the bridge. Captain?”

Alexi paused, glancing back from where he was walking toward the exit. “Yes?”

“Good luck.”

Captain Petronov didn’t dignify the comment with any further response, silently turning and walking off the bridge.

*****

USV Legendary

“Marginal, Admiral.”

Brooke nodded. “Yes, Captain, I agree. However, if we can make this star system here…” She looked over the star map being projected between them, pointing to a star some distance from their current position. “Then we would be able to jump here in two hops,” she said, pointing, “and that should let us cut off TF-7 cleanly, hopefully before they run themselves into the grinder.”

“You’re assuming they haven’t already.”

“No.” Brooke shook her head. “They haven’t had time. Transit times, including periods spent sublight while moving from jump point to jump point…unless the enemy has been hiding something huge from us to now, they won’t have had time for that. We can catch them.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She could hear the distinct tone of unhappiness in her captain’s voice and really couldn’t blame him all that much. It was not a great solution, there was no elegance or glory to it, it was just what needed to be done.

Roberts didn’t say anything more, however. He knew his duty and wasn’t one to shirk from it.

“Deploy a messenger drone to inform command or our intentions, then secure the squadron for an extended jump,” she ordered.

“Aye aye, ma’am.”

*****

Plotting a course through what humans referred to as “jump space” was more complicated than even most navigators knew. For one thing, there was literally no such thing as “jump space.” It was a term for something that humans barely had concepts for. The manipulations of space and time that allowed for FTL travel were based in the creation of a total vacuum, something that was anathema to natural science.

Not merely an absence of particulate, as most conceive of a vacuum, the warping of space and time had to actually create a total null point, a place where space and time no longer existed.

In theory this could be accomplished anywhere, from the uncharted depths of interstellar space to the crushing core of a galactic singularity. In practice…well, things were a little more difficult than that.

You had to fight space and time if you wanted to eliminate them, and the stronger either was in a given region, the harder it would be to create a jump point. The solution was to seek out points where gravity waves crossed one another, cancelling each other out, and use that natural weakening in space-time as a jumping-off point.

There, you punched through into nothingness, and a ship could leap into the abyss and cross vast distances in a very short time. Time, as always, was a relative thing, however. For those on board the ship in question, it passed in a blink of an eye no matter what distance was crossed. For those on the outside, the period was often measured in days or weeks.

No human ship had ever made a jump that would take longer than about a week or so, galactic time.

Until the Legendary issued orders to Task Force Valkyrie and they began to calculate for a journey that would just top ten days of near literal non-existence.

After all, breaking all the rules was just what legends did.

*****

USV Socrates

“Captain.”

Alexi looked up at the voice, smiling. “Lieutenant.”

“May I?” Sorilla asked, gesturing to the seat across from him.

“Please.”

She took a seat, setting down the tray laden with food she’d been balancing in one hand, and popped the cap off a bottle of enhanced water. Taking a deep draught, Sorilla grimaced at the taste but went on to finish the rest before setting the empty bottle aside and reaching for a small carton of milk.

“You do know we only stock those for emergency use, correct?” Alexi asked, mildly amused and disturbed by the scene.

Enhanced water was nutrient rich, fortified with vitamins, proteins, carbs, and fiber. It was an all-in-one survival food for when you might be caught in a suit and not be able to eat solids. Sure, it was stocked in just about every ship commissary because it was a high energy meal for people on the move, but he didn’t know anyone who actually liked the stuff.

“Acquired taste, I suppose,” Sorilla admitted with a chuckle.

“You need an upgrade on your taste buds,” Alexi said with a roll of his eyes.

“Tastes fine going down, it’s the aftertaste I have to wash out,” Sorilla told him, taking a sip of her milk.

Now that the pre-meal was done with, she quickly turned to the mound of fruits and vegetables, devouring them with a certain brutal efficiency that Alexi had to admit he found fascinating. He supposed it came from her choice of professions—he knew that his own eating habits often disturbed his family on Earth—but when you weren’t sure when you’d have time to eat next, you downed what you could as fast as you could.

“Heavy day?” he asked mildly, trying not to stare.

“Not too bad,” she told him. “Oddly exhausting, given that I technically slept through most of it.”

Alexi frowned, curious. “Oh?”

Sorilla shrugged, considering her words for a moment. “Do you have clearance for the new interface?”

“Partially,” Alexi admitted. “I know it has to do with neural feedback through your implants.”

Sorilla nodded, guessing that he’d been issued to the quasi-public version of the briefing pack.

“Right, well, we have to induce a form of sleep paralysis, otherwise we’d be kicking and punching the hell out of the cockpit while piloting the damn things,” she said. “So we literally just sort of hang there all day, but after a couple hours it takes more and more focus to keep from ‘waking up,’ so to speak. It’s exhausting to maintain.”

Alexi nodded, not sure that he understood, but that wasn’t a big surprise. There were many things in life that you just didn’t get until you did it yourself. Not moving didn’t sound exhausting, but he’d spent many long days and weeks sitting at his command station and doing nothing but math in his head and each of those nights were spent in some of the deepest sleeps he’d ever experienced.

“I have been watching your maneuvers,” he told her.

“You and the rest of the crew,” Sorilla answered with a wry grin. “We’re the greatest show off Earth at the moment, if you judge by our audience.”

Alexi laughed. “Possibly correct. You, especially, move well.”

“Oh, been watching me especially, have you?” Sorilla grinned a little wider.

Alexi, had he been a few years younger, might have fallen for the jibe and even blushed, but he was well past that now, so he merely shrugged and admitted it.

“Yes, actually. You are graceful in your machine,” he told her. “It is odd to see a machine meant for war almost dance across the deck.”

Now it was Sorilla’s turn to consider that. Were she just a bit younger, he may have gotten the reaction he had aimed for. She’d been complimented on many things in her life, but her grace wasn’t one of them, as a general rule.

“It’s an eighty-ton war machine, Captain,” she told him with a gentle snort of amusement. “Grace isn’t what it was built for.”

“Call me Alexi,” he said, “and remember, I am Russian. We still have choreographed dance displays using T-90 tanks maintained from the Great War.”

Sorilla chuckled. She’d actually seen one such display while on leave and travelling. It had been impressive, to say the least, especially when they actually jumped said tanks over ramps in synch with music and each other. Russians were all crazy, but most of it was a good kind of crazy.

She was about to say something more, but a chime sounded from the captain’s com and it was followed quickly by a silent buzz from her own. They both faded away slightly, their expressions growing vacant as they focused on their implants.

Sorilla came back first, taking a deep breath and hissing slightly in annoyance.

“Sorry, Alexi. I’ve been recalled, my team will be shipping back to the Legendary immediately.”

“Da.” Alexi Petronov nodded, standing up. “The Socrates has been ordered away from the fleet. We will be jumping in the path of TF-7 in six hours. You follow a different route.”

Sorilla nodded, extending her hand. “It’s been good to talk, Alexi. I’ll catch you on the other side of the void.”

He took her hand, but didn’t shake it as she expected. Instead he bowed low over it and kissed the back lightly.

“Da. We will meet again, Lieutenant. On the other side of eternity, or before.”

“Alexi.” She stopped him as he started to leave.

“Da?”

“Call me Seour,” she said, winking. “Until later.”

The two split up, one heading north and the other south, ship terms, each to their own destiny.

Chapter XIV

Unnamed planet

Three jumps past Hayden

The door didn’t come off the hinges as he kicked it; instead, the heavy stone shattered under the power of Ton’s power-assisted mule-kick, clearing the way for Merkur to step into the room and open up with his weapon on full auto.

The roar of the gun was enough to shatter glass, but the aliens didn’t much take to glass or wood in their construction. They seemed to prefer megalithic materials, stones and crystals that could take any beating you’d care to name. That was good because it meant that Merkur’s blast of full-auto fire didn’t blow through the walls and destroy anything unintentionally.

The intentional destruction was good enough.

The aliens in the room, the ones that survived the barrage, which was most of them, were too busy kissing the ground to cause much trouble as Ton led his somewhat diminished team into the command center.

People had a misconception about automatic weapons, that they could be used as a sword and just swish swish around until you cut your enemy in half. Truth was, full auto wasn’t very good for killing people. That wasn’t what it was designed for. It was designed to scare the hell out of people, make them keep their head down while you and your squad took ground. For that, it was reasonably effective.

They cleared the room quickly, kicking the enemy weapons aside and leaving the living, wounded, and dead where they were. They’d learned from experience that however the Ghoulies communicated, it wasn’t speech, so they didn’t waste time chatting. That wasn’t the point of the mission.

“Main controls are that way,” Merkur growled.

Ton nodded, turning to Crow. “I’ve got them. You take Scott down and blow the core. I’ll power down the system.”

“Right.” The duo ducked out at a fast jog.

“Everyone else, keep these bastards covered but try not to hurt them too bad,” Ton ordered as he walked out. “We need someone here to call for help when we’re gone.”

*****

The control room was standard, as was most of the Ghoulie equipment. They’d learned a lot about the aliens just from the shattered hulks of the destroyed ships, but it was the rare occasion of capturing a facility intact that yielded the true gold mines.

Ton made his way over to the main control panel, ignoring most everything in the room. Ghoulie tech was mostly indecipherable on this level, they’d discovered, likely using some form of neural link to control much of it. No one was sure. They’d not been able to find any implants in the bodies captured, but that was the best guess anyone had.

There were manual controls, however, particularly shut down and initiation controls, as a rule.

Ton located those easily and walked himself through the shutdown sequence according to the intel in his files, then waited for a confirmation from the second team that he’d succeeded.

“Core deactivated, planting charges now,” Merkur came back over the com a moment later.

“Roger. Meet back at the prisoners when done.”

“Wilco.”

Ton stepped back, surveying the room one last time, then unloaded his mag into everything in a single long burst. Smoke was rising from the holes as he walked back to where they’d secured the prisoners.

A dull crump in the distance told him that the core of the alien Valve had been blown, so he tripped his beacon and set it to green as he rejoined the others.

“All clear, boss?”

“Looks that way,” Ton nodded. “We’ll know in a few minutes if the America is back in town. If she’s on schedule, we’ll meet up with a shuttle in a few hours and blow this pop stand.”

“Too bad it ain’t literally this time,” Korman grumbled, menacingly looming over the prisoners.

“Leave em be, Smith,” Ton ordered. “We want them alive and screaming for help from anyone who’ll listen.”

“I know, boss. Just not happy about it.”

“You don’t have to be happy, you have to follow orders.”

“Roger that.”

*****

USV America

Pete Green looked over the signals intercept and nodded, satisfied. “Admiral?”

“Yes, Captain?” Fairbairn asked.

“We have a green signal from the planet.”

Fairbairn smiled, letting out a breath he’d been holding since they arrived back in system. “Good. Launch a shuttle for dust off. Let’s not hang around any longer than we must.”

“Aye, sir.”

Green sent out the orders quickly—the shuttle had been on standby for over six hours already—so in only minutes the telemetry feed showed it heading out ahead of the ship as they ducked back in toward the planet.

*****

Like the Cheyenne Class ships, the Terra Class weren’t designed to land on the surface of a planet. Similarly, the shuttles still weren’t really capable of reaching orbit from space either, so they had to send the shuttle on ahead and then pick it up in high atmosphere after it had retrieved their men on the surface.

It was an expensive proposition, and a tricky bit of flying, but far more practical than trying to load a shuttle up with all the fuel it would need to reach orbit from the surface.

The Nevada—all of the America’s shuttles were named after States of the Union—accelerated out from the ship and began its drop toward the orbit of the target world. They’d had time to scout the system fairly well, so the pilots knew that unless the OPCOM team had missed something, they were in the clear, but it was still a tense drop for all that.

The enemy weapons were just too terrible to be completely calm around, even when you were pretty sure they’d been taken out.

“Picking up gravity flux,” the co-pilot said, sounding a little nervous.

“Keep your pants dry,” the pilot said. “Nothing out of the ordinary for a two-moon system. We’re entering into local Cis-Lunar space. There’s going to be a few bumps in the road.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Stand by to retro.”

The shuttle twisted about in space, turning on its gyros, and put its main engine’s face onto the approaching planet as they fired. The retro burn slowed the craft down as they approached, and they continued until they were almost to the upper atmosphere of the planet.

The pilot them flipped back around and put the heat-shielded nose into the first hints of a thickening atmosphere as she flipped a few switches.

“Entering atmo,” she said. “Watch for turbulence as we get deeper.”

“Aye, ma’am. LIDAR and Doppler activated.”

A fiery trail began to plume behind them as the shuttle bit deep into the atmosphere of the alien world, carving its path toward the surface.

*****

On the surface, Ton stepped out of the alien facility and looked up. He couldn’t see the shuttle yet, but it was squawking loud and clear on the IFF frequency, so he knew that their time on world was coming to an end.

“Get everyone outside,” Ton ordered, shouldering his rifle. “I want eyes on those bastards until we’re out of here.”

“Yes, sir.”

They shuffled the prisoners outside while Ton watched the skies. It didn’t take long before he made out the smoke trail of the inbound shuttle, so Ton lit off his armor signal to confirm the green LZ. The smoke trail turned toward him shortly after, and he was able to make out the shuttle in just moments.

“Ride’s here, boys,” Ton said. “Merkur, head out and pop green smoke to mark the LZ.”

“You got it, boss.”

With the landing zone marked and the temporary prisoners under control, Ton and the rest of the team just had to wait, and not long for all that. The low rumble of the shuttle preceded its arrival—it had used aerobraking systems to drop it below supersonic—and the big lifting body airframe eased slowly into the sky over the enemy facility on vertical thrust as it settled itself down into the marked LZ.

Ton waved to the pilots as he got his team in order, then nodded to Merkur.

“Cut one loose.”

“If you say so.” Merkur didn’t sound happy about it, but he pulled his blade and made short work of the flexicuffs on the closest of the little grey aliens. As the Ghoulie stared at him, he didn’t know if it was impassive disdain or shock or something in between, Merkur tapped the side of its head with the flat of his blade. “Don’t even think of moving until we’re out of here, pal. I can cut someone else loose just as easy, and we don’t need all of you intact.”

The alien showed no hint that he’d even spoken, let alone been understood, but neither did it move, so Merkur fell back with the others as they backed to the shuttle while keeping the aliens covered the whole way.

“You rig the door?” Ton asked when it was only him and Merkur still on the dirt.

“Yes, sir. It’ll take a while to open, guaranteed.”

“Good, get on there, son,” Ton ordered, shoving Merkur up and into the shuttle.

The Marine took one last look at the still-smoking alien facility—it felt really weird leaving one even mostly intact—then pulled himself up into the door gunner spot as the shuttle fired its thrusters again. It lifted slowly away as he kept his rifle aimed at the unmoving aliens, resting it on the pivot mount there until they were well and clear of the area.

Only then did Ton pull himself fully into the shuttle and slide the door shut.

The lifting body craft flared its main thrusters and began the process of climbing to hypersonic speed so they could meet with the America in upper atmo.

*****

“Report from the ground squad, sir.”

“Give me the highlights, Lieutenant,” Pete Green said as he checked the telemetry and trajectory feeds for the America.

“Mission success, multiple casualties, however,” Lieutenant Piebald told him. “Bodies currently unrecovered.”

Green winced. “Note that, schedule a pickup mission as soon as we have time.”

“Yes, sir.”

At the moment they didn’t have time to hunt around for KIA or even MIA soldiers. If any of the team were still alive, they’d have to fend for themselves until the ships made it back this way. If the America didn’t make it back…well, then they’d have been dead and lost a long way from home either way, he supposed.

For now, however, the alien fleet had to be their primary concern.

Not to mention the Terra and the Canada.

They had two entire ships out there, not far from their current location if things hadn’t gone completely pear-shaped, and that meant that the America and TF-7 had a whole helluva lot on their plate at the moment.

“Copy that to the admiral,” Green said after a moment, “and set it to relay to any other Solari ships we come in contact with.”

“Aye, sir.”

At least he’d do his best to ensure that someone made it back to pick up the bodies, eventually. They were owed that much.

“High atmo coming up, sir.”

Green nodded, putting the fallen from his mind and turning to the task at hand. “Take us in, son. Keep speed steady, ready aerobraking systems.”

“Aerobraking, aye!”

The America shuddered as the thicker atmosphere began to pluck at her as she ducked into the planet’s grip, still moving far too fast to be useful. The ship had large aerobraking flaps that were shoved out, though, using the atmosphere to slow her speed as she continued deeper into a realm she was barely designed for and most certainly not suited for.

“Velocity decreasing, Captain.”

“Get us down to low hypersonic and send telemetry to the shuttle as soon as we clear the com blackout.”

“Aye, sir!”

Communications started to come back as the America slowed enough that the superheated plasma shockwave bled away, and Green noted with satisfaction that the Nevada was moving into position ahead of them.

Shuttles couldn’t carry enough fuel to make orbit, so they used ramjets to get up to hypersonic speed while the America came down to fetch them up. It was a delicate maneuver, a matter of feet the only difference between success and a terminal fall, but it was one they’d trained in heavily. The shuttle slipped into their path just ahead of the America as the mothership opened the shuttle bay doors and lowered the skyhook.

While the pilot of the shuttle struggled to hold steady, the America thundered over them just a few dozen feet away and caught the shuttle’s dorsal rack with the skyhook and plucked her right out of the sky. Even as the shuttle was being drawn up and into the big ship, the captain ordered the VASIMR engines to full thrust, and the USV America stood on her tail and made for the black of space from whence she came.

Green looked across the bridge and nodded, well satisfied. “Textbook, ladies and gentlemen. Absolutely textbook. My compliments.”

*****

Ton popped the seal on his helmet as he stepped out of the sterilization room, ignoring the men moving past him with portable sterilizing kits on their way to the shuttle. They had to get rid of bacteria and other organisms the team may have picked up while on the untested world, just as a basic safety procedure, but it was a pain in the ass to deal with.

“Major.”

Ton glanced over, nodding to the lieutenant who had spoken. “Yes?”

“Admiral wants to see you.”

“I’ll be up as soon as I’ve got the suit stink off me,” Ton told him. “Been locked in this thing for over a week.”

“Yes, sir, I’ll tell him.”

Ton pinned the young man with a cocked eyebrow until he squirmed. “You will?”

“That you’ll be up, sir. No need to mention suit stink.”

“Wise choice, son.” Ton grinned. “Go on then.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ton turned back to Crow and gestured to dismiss him. “Get the men fed, rested, and make sure you get some rack time yourself. I’ll be checking on the lot of you when the admiral’s done with me.”

“You got it, major.”

*****

Fairbairn was filling out reports when Ton stepped to the door and waited.

The admiral’s office was in the secured inner hull of the America, rather than the observation deck used as an alternate when not at general quarters. There was no incredible view, but it was considerably safer against conventional weapon strikes. Not such a huge deal when facing the Ghoulies, but some of the aliens used weapons that humans could classify as “conventional,” if one were to stretch the term.

“Come in, Major,” Fairbairn said after a moment, looking up from his work.

“Sir.” Ton stepped in, coming to attention in front of the desk.

“At ease, Marine.” Fairbairn gestured to a chair. “You may as well take a seat. This may take a while, and you make me tired just looking at you.”

Ton didn’t comment, he just accepted the seat and said a simple, “Thank you, sir.”

“I won’t bother asking about the mission, I’ll get that in your report,” Fairbairn said. “This is about your next mission.”

That got Ton’s interest, as if he weren’t already paying attention. “We have another target, Admiral?”

“Potentially.” Fairbairn nodded.

“I wasn’t aware of any other enemy outposts in this region. What’s the target?”

“The USV Terra.”

Ton’s eyes bulged. “Admiral?”

“When we hit the fleet target while you were on planet, a jump drone came through. It was taking the long way home, but we picked it up and queried the damn thing,” Fairbairn said. “According to the reports, the Terra may have been taken by the enemy, intact.”

Ton slumped slightly in his seat as he considered that.

“Damn, sir.”

He wished he could have been more eloquent, but there it was.

“Indeed.” The Admiral didn’t seem to mind, thankfully. “I need you to prep your team for an entry assault on the USV Terra. If we get indicators that the crew is still alive, your job will be to make entry, free as many of the crew as you can, and retake the ship while Task Force Seven provides fleet cover.”

“And if we don’t get those indicators, sir?”

Fairbairn looked at him coldly, “Then we destroy the Terra along with as many of the enemy ships as we can.”

Chapter XV

USV Terra

Parath found himself enjoying the conversations with the aliens. They were an interesting and intelligent group. It was clear that the officers were all reasonably schooled in counter-interrogation techniques, which meant that it would take much longer to get useable intelligence from them, but that was fine.

That just meant that they had useable intelligence worth taking them time for. After all, you don’t waste that sort of training on someone who doesn’t have anything to hide.

He had saved the “captain” for last, gaining as much familiarity with the language and colloquialisms as he could before bringing up his counterpart. As expected, the man was reticent, but actually more sociable than his subordinates. This Captain Richmond was fully aware of what he was doing, and actually was using counter-intelligence techniques to get information from Parath.

That was fine. It was all the better, really, because in order to trick information out of Parath, the captain had to bait the conversation with interesting bits of intelligence to draw him in. It was a give and take that, in itself, was incredibly informative even before one considered the actual information gained.

They are not another race like the Ross, of that at least I can be sure. They’re young, barely in the darkness between worlds a few dozen intervals unless I miss my guess. Perhaps a little longer, but not by much. Pity for them to have encountered the Ross first of all Alliance races.

“Master Parath.”

“Yes, what it?” Parath was shaken from his thoughts by an approaching subordinate.

“Signals from the Glory, Master. The main fleet has arrived in system and is approaching our location. Master of Fleets wishes to speak with you.”

Parath nodded, rising to his feet. “I will return to the Glory to prepare. See to local security.”

“Yes, Master.”

*****

Pierce looked around his cell, eyeing the door darkly, but there was nothing much he could do. Once they began interrogations, and that was precisely what it was, the aliens had separated the officers they spoke to. Once taken out, he’d not seen them again, but it was fair to assume that they were in cells of their own, much like his.

Speaking of cells, his was a former bunk room for junior officers. The aliens had torn out the electronics, welded their own locks over the doors, and generally made things uncomfortable inside. Not that he blamed them, he’d have done better himself, but there it was.

What they hadn’t done, however, was anything to impede his implants.

That bugged the hell out of him, since he was still somewhat in contact with the ship. Not as useful as one might think, not since he’d had the memory cores torched, but the operating system was still partially intact and there was nothing wrong with the hardware.

So Pierce took a seat and linked into the local node, checking the options available. He could have wished for more, but he’d make do with what he had.

The main core was gone, so only local nodes and processors were still intact. The trick was recoding the software so they would talk more with each other rather than trying to run back to the main or alternate cores.

Distributed computing. Old school tech, Pierce noted idly as he worked.

Unfortunately, not his specialty, but he could probably hum a few bars. You didn’t climb the ranks in SOLCOM without knowing your way around the innards of a computer system, after all. The closest local node was a life-support-monitoring station, checking the air for carbon dioxide levels as well as other trouble issues. It didn’t have much extraneous processing power, but he’d make do. In a pinch he supposed he could wipe the node and recode it completely, but he’d rather not mess with the system that was keeping him breathing.

Unfortunately, software coding via implants was long and tiresome work. His own suite really just let him select and input a single function at a time, and he wasn’t in practice of doing things that way, so it was slow going at best.

However, it wasn’t like he had anything better to do.

*****

The approach of the main fleet was an impressive, even awesome, sight to behold. Parath somewhat wished that he had remained on the…human ship and watched from their observation deck.

It probably wouldn’t have been terribly impressive, there, however. Biological eyes never developed with the intent or ability to see at stellar ranges. There was no biological advantage to that, so in space even the most adapted species had to settle for using instruments to increase their natural abilities.

“Master of Fleets is hailing, Master Parath.”

“Acknowledge, and inform him that I stand ready to transit to his ship,” Parath said calmly.

“Yes, Master.”

It only took a moment before the response came back, and the young Parithalian shifted nervously as she read it. “Uh, Master Parath…”

“Just say it.”

“Master of Fleets informs you that a virtual transmitted meeting will be sufficient, time is not to be wasted.”

“Understood,” Parath sighed. “Make the connection.”

“Yes, Master.”

It was a subtle insult, saying that Parath wasn’t worth wasting time on, given that the delay involved for a face-to-face meeting would be negligible in stellar terms, but there it was. Parath was well aware that his orders had been to remain ahead of the fleet, weakening the enemy forces and gathering information for the main fleet, but situations changed. He would make the same decision again.

His private screen flickered for a moment, then coalesced into the image of the bridge of the Exploding Star, with the Master of Fleets seated in his place.

“Parath.”

“Master.”

“You are not where you were scheduled to be. Explain.”

“Master, if you check your charts, I believe you will find that this system is one planet short of what it should be…”

The Master of Fleets grimaced. “The aliens or the Ross?”

“The Ross, thankfully.”

It was a terrible thing to be grateful for in the light of such destruction, but it was far better that it be the Ross who initiated it than the aliens. At least the Ross were, nominally, on the side of the Alliance.

“I decided that if these aliens were enough to drive the Ross to such extremes in the light of our alliance and the terms of such, it may be more important than ever to gather intelligence on them,” Parath offered.

“You captured the ship and crew intact?”

“Mostly. They scrubbed their computers, and the fight to take the ship was costly, but yes, it is largely intact.”

“I see, and what have you learned so far?”

“Nothing of immediate value, a great deal about their language however, and details about the world they come from originally. So far they’ve kept from revealing anything overtly valuable.”

The Master of Fleets considered that, lightly rubbing his fingertips along his palms as he thought.

“Very well. Remain on task,” he decided finally. “I will take some of your ships into my fleet and move along ahead. You will remain in real time contact with us for as long as possible, I believe we may do so right to the enemy nexus world?”

“Yes, Master. It is within range of our real time transmissions.”

“Excellent. We will send back information on our actions. You send any useable information you gain here.”

“Yes, Master.”

The Master of Fleets considered for a long moment. “Do you believe you will need, or can keep control of, the Ross ships that travel with you?”

“Need? Most likely not, and I would honestly prefer that they were removed from the vicinity of the prisoners,” Parath admitted. “They were…oddly emotional about the aliens, Master.”

“Yes.” The Master of Fleet’s eyes flickered to the side. “Destroying a planet to stop two escaping ships…there’s something wrong there, to be sure. Very well, I will take them with me.”

“As you decide, Master.”

*****

On the Terra, Pierce finished recoding the local processor node and rebooted it.

All officers and enlisted in range of this pulse, log in and report. Command staff, make reports to the appropriate forums.

He worked his jaw, irritated by the focus needed to subvocalize. It was a skillset he’d never had a lot of use for in the past.

Once he’d finished recording the message, he posted it to a public forum he’d created to handle the responses and sent it on an open pulse. There wouldn’t be much range, not in the iron-and steel-heavy structure of the Terra, but he figured that it should cover much of the section he was in and maybe one above and one below his level as well.

Beyond that…well, if he got any responses, the others would have to slap his new software onto the local nodes near them to act as range repeaters. It would take time, but if there were enough of his people in range, they should be able to extend their communication range to cover a significant portion of the ship.

He smiled slowly as, one by one, names and messages began to appear on the impromptu network forum he’d coded.

Vacation’s over. Time to get back on the job.

*****

The systems on the Terra were designed to be primarily centralized, just for ease of coordination if for no other reason. Signals were intended to run to the main systems, overseen by the command computer, then relayed back out to where needed. It was a heavily controlled system that sacrificed some speed for the precision needed to run a battleship.

That didn’t mean that the designers had completely slaved the ship to the main core, of course. For redundancy if nothing else, each node was linked with alternate paths it could take, and those were designed based on what was, by this point, a very old and proven concept.

The Internet.

Designed in part by DARPA in the United States, the digital entity that became known as the Internet was originally intended as a communications tool that was hardy enough to provide military grade signals even in the event of a nuclear war. Should one part of the system be destroyed by, for example, the city it was located in being flattened by a nuclear weapon, the network was inherently designed to route around the lost servers and get the message where it needed to be.

Now, on the Terra, Captain Richmond and those of his crew he could contact were bent to reconfiguring the internal electronics into their own version of a military-grade Internet.

They bounced signals down one side of the ship, around the inner halls, and then back up the other as they slowly began to pull more and more people into the group. It was long work, recoding sometimes taking hours when a system needed some special twist to make it work right, but they had the time, they had the skills, and they certainly had the desire.

All it would take would be for the right opening to appear, and then they would have the Terra too.

Chapter XVI

USV Legendary

Lieutenant Sorilla Aida fell to her knees, her lunch and whatever other fluids she’d been fighting to keep down splattering across the deck as the ship came out of jump space. She slumped to one side, just being able to keep from lying in her own vomit, and rolled as far away from the smell as she could, curling into a ball as she took steady, even breaths.

That sucked. That sucked so much worse than a normal translation from jump. Oh fuck.

She’d never felt so damned miserable in her life, not that she could remember, at least. The moment of disorientation had been so extreme, she felt like she was going to die right then and there. Now she was just trying to snort back the chunks of vomit that had been packed up into her nasal passages when she threw up without replaying the scene.

She was still lying there, miserable and sick, when a rap on the metal of her door forced her to move. She got to her feet, physically making her body do things it really didn’t want to do, and spit into the sink before walking to the door and unlatching it.

“Lieutenant, message from comma…” The ensign stopped, staring at the mess on the floor, then up at Aida, and fell silent and wide-eyed.

“Implants make jump sickness worse,” Sorilla said, forcing her voice to sound casual. “Don’t worry about it. What’s the message?”

“You and your team are on alert, ma’am.”

“Understood,” Sorilla said, nodding. “Message delivered. You can go.”

“Uh…yes, ma’am.”

The young officer, still wide-eyed and uncertain, stepped back and let the door swing shut, where it clanged and locked again. Sorilla sighed, looking at herself in the mirror. She was pale and clammy, but the motion sickness was passing, thankfully.

You look like shit, girl, she told her reflection silently. Should have picked a job that gave sick days.

Sorilla tossed towels down on the mess, along with a douse of cleaner, and wiped it up as quickly as she could. Unlike most people, the smell wasn’t enough to induce another bout of vomiting with her, she’d smelled much worse in her time, but for all that it was a far from pleasant job.

She tossed the towels in a laundry bag and sealed it up, then slung the whole thing out the door and hit the room with an air freshener before she left. She’d drop the bag off on the way to the flight deck and didn’t particularly care what happened to the towels. They could burn them so far as she cared, just as long as they weren’t in her room.

*****

The flight deck was buzzing when Sorilla stepped off the lift and into the cavernous interior of the deck and headed for the section where her team had been told to stow their kit. There was a ton of movement around that area, so it was clear that she wasn’t the only person called in. Men and women were crawling over the machines, and she could smell paint in the air as she approached.

“What’s with the paint?” she demanded as she stopped in front of Sergeant Zimm, one of her operators with a Ranger background.

“Brass finally decided to name the squad,” Mike Zimm said coolly, nodding to her. “I guess the maintenance boys wanted to tag the machines.”

Sorilla raised an eyebrow, mildly disconcerted by the idea of someone tagging her machine. Something on her face must have given her thoughts away, because Francis Bean partially stepped in front of her with a hand raised.

“Leave ‘em be, Lieutenant. Those are their machines as much as ours,” the Air Force parajumper told her. “It’s a matter of pride for them.”

Sorilla checked her motion, glancing at him, perplexed.

He just smiled. “You’ve never been a pilot, El-Tee, trust me. Us and them, we’re a team. A good crew keeps us alive in the field. They’ve earned the right to take a little pride in our bots and our accomplishments.”

She briefly considered pushing past him anyway, but the memory of dealing with annoying lieutenants who knew everything and didn’t listen stopped her and she considered what the Air Force puke was telling her. She usually handled her own kit, even her suit. She had to be able to do basic maintenance, repairs, coding, basically everything needed to keep it running because she was often hundreds of miles from a repair depot and if she didn’t do it, it wouldn’t get done.

Bean was a pilot and a parajumper, however, and he came from a different culture, so she decided to take the advice she’d given to every lieutenant she’d considered worth a nickel.

Listen to your sergeants.

She put a stopper in her kneejerk reaction to kick people the hell of her equipment, admitting to herself that she really didn’t know how to maintain the bots to the same degree as her armor, and nodded to Bean.

“All right,” she said. “So what name did we get saddled with, since no one’s seen fit to run it past me?”

Bean snorted. “I suspect it was the civvie, Hearse, who came up with it.”

“Oh crap.”

“It’s not bad, ma’am,” Mike laughed. “You now command the Titans, El-Tee. The Zero One Unit is yours.”

Titans.

Sorilla considered it, rolled around for a bit, then nodded. “It’ll do.”

*****

Captain Roberts eyed the telemetry readings carefully, doing mental calculations to ensure that what he was coming up with was roughly in the same ballpark as what he was reading.

Close enough.

“Admiral.”

“Yes, Captain.” Brooke turned in the direction of the open com between the bridge and the admiralty deck.

“Ma’am, I think we have light enemy force in system.”

“Oh? That could be very good for us,” Brooke said. “Confirmation?”

“Working on it, but there is certainly an anomalous gravity signature in system, ma’am. Fits what we’d expect to see from a pair of Ghoulies,” Roberts confirmed.

“Excellent. Locate them, adjust our course, let’s get our mission accomplished early.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Roberts issued the orders and linked in the rest of Valkyrie to the plan. The task force of fifteen of the latest Terra Class ships shifted course as they began to move in on the location of the anomalous gravity sources.

“Contact Lieutenant Aida, have her team on standby.”

“Yes, sir.”

*****

The system was a normally quiet one, a white dwarf star putting out far too much radiation to be of interest to either humans or, apparently, their alien counterparts. The inner worlds here were gas giants, the closest baking so long in the heat of the star that it was within a hair’s breadth of igniting and possibly becoming a proto-star itself.

The outer system was barren, aside from a few rocks and the occasional plutoid floating on a different plane from the gas giants, making it clear that early in its development as a system the gas giants had formed in the outer system but were unstable. Something had shaken them loose from their orbit—possibly they simply didn’t have the velocity to maintain a stable position or possibly something had actually destabilized their orbit. It hardly mattered.

The results were clear: The gas giants had spiraled inward like colossal bulldozers and demolished everything in their path.

Behind them they left an open field of battle for Task Force Five as they burned their VASIMR drives on full combat power and dove inward toward the anomalies they had detected.

Their own presence had not gone unnoticed. In fact the alien ships had detected them almost the moment they entered the system, and the species humans knew as “Ghoulies” were, for once, spoiling for a fight.

Both battle groups accelerated on intersect courses as they primed their weapons and prepared their strategies.

The war had come to a barren patch of sky that neither side had a name for, yet both were now prepared to bleed on.

*****

Sorilla swung herself up into the cockpit of her Titan, dropping her armored body into the body-conforming seat as the deck alarm sang out the call to general quarters.

“All right, Titans,” she said with a trace of a smile on her lips. “You know the drill. We’re on standby for scramble from here on out. Lock in, but don’t lock up. Stay mobile and use the OS to handle movements until we get into combat range. I don’t want anyone fatigued before the fighting starts.”

Her team acknowledged the order, settling into their own Titans easily as the crews cleared the deck of debris and maintenance gear. If they were going into a fight, they’d know it shortly. Sorilla left her cockpit open, not so much because she needed the air—she was in her armor, after all—but more because she didn’t want to feel cramped just then. The after effects of the jump were still plaguing her, and a slight touch of claustrophobia was the last thing she needed to be dealing with.

Puking in her room had shaken her up, more than she wanted to believe, even as she forced herself to be introspectively honest if nothing else. She’d never been susceptible to motion sickness before and she wasn’t happy about being so now, not in the least. That said, it had been a particularly bad translation from jump space. If that was the only time she lost control like that, well, she could deal with it.

“Titans, report to your launch positions.”

The order made things official. Sorilla reached out and touched the switch that closed the cockpit hatch and sealed her inside the eighty-ton war machine. Hydraulics lifted her seat from the angled position to vertical, sealing the armored back behind her, and the screens all lit up.

“By the numbers, Titans,” she said. “First squad with me. Second, to your positions.”

The lumbering beasts moved out, the decks vibrating with the pounding of metal on metal as the Titans walked over to the electromagnetic launchers designed to move cargo to orbital installations. They’d been retrofitted with large sabots for each Titan, and Sorilla’s was waiting for her as she guided her machine into place using the manual controls.

Men swarmed over her Titan, locking her in place and checking her gear one last time.

“All clear, Lieutenant!” The crew chief flashed her a thumbs up. “Happy hunting!”

Sorilla sank into the neural interface long enough to give him a thumbs up about as thick as a telephone pole, then settled into her launch position as she waited for the green light or the call to cancel the mission.

It was out of her hands now.

That was a sensation she didn’t like in the slightest.

Ugh. How to fighter jocks do this? Give me a nice thick jungle to stick and fade from any day.

*****

On the bridge, Roberts looked out over the three-dimensional displays that showed the system before him. His own ships and the enemy were represented by icons; the zoom was immeasurably too far out for them to be shown in anything resembling visible scale. The alien ships were visible now, showing up on light-speed scanners as well as the gravity detection traps, and while they wouldn’t be certain for over an hour, it seemed that they were just as interested in meeting Valkyrie as Valkyrie was in meeting them.

More aggressive than usual. I wonder if we’re dealing with the same class of enemy, or have they finally brought up their military arm?

He had mixed feelings about that idea, to be frank. On the one hand, he didn’t much like the idea of blowing even armed civilians to the depths. Fighting wasn’t supposed to involve civilians, that was why they were called civilians. On the other hand, however and of course, he was justly frightened by just how much more advanced the aliens’ true military technology was.

Earlier interactions with them were clearly limited, both sides holding back for reasons neither may have truly been able to understand. Now TF-V had new ships, new tricks, and a whole new place…but the enemy had time to adapt and come up with their own tricks and plans, and those ships out there certainly didn’t match the configuration of the vessels that had annihilated The Los Angeles task group over Hayden.

“Steady on course,” he ordered. “Make certain that the gravity pulse devices are prepared to fire, and have all stations do full diagnostics. We have a short while before this fight gets down and dirty, let’s be ready for it.”

“Aye, sir.”

*****

Even to their allies, the Ross’El were an inscrutable species.

They didn’t communicate directly with anyone, choosing…or perhaps requiring, a complicated exchange of mathematical models of space-time in the place of what most might consider a language. It made any sort of empathy with them, or from them, all but impossible, even to those that dealt with them regularly.

Those who did do so were quick to point out that dealing with them regularly actually ensured a distinct lack of empathy, but few believed them.

For the Ross, it was perhaps a lonely existence in some ways, but a heady one indeed in others.

As many suspected, once upon a very long time in the past, they had been a very normal iteration of sentience. Bipedal, interacting with other species like themselves, and intelligent.

So incredibly intelligent.

Evolution was a powerful thing, however, and intelligence was both a matter of context and perspective.

After thousands of years, the Ross’El had become something far different than they begun as, something that their own ancestors would not recognize any more than their supposed allies did. Having delved more deeply into the universe than any species they, or anyone known, had ever encountered, the Ross were well aware that they had little in common with those who remained fully embedded in the four dimensions through which most species experienced space and time.

They no longer cared, however.

Their motivations were their own, and the Ross brooked no interference with their societal quest. Those who interfered, such as the species they now faced, had to accept that annihilation was their final reward.

Insects did not get a vote on whether they were stepped on.

The two bulbous Ross’El warships and their support fleet accelerated toward the signature of technology they knew had been stolen from them.

There would be no thought to mercy, nor a request for same. Total war had been declared.

*****

Admiral Brooke eyed the incoming data as the resolution was constantly improved with the influx of photons across their sensors. The two biggest ships were of a type they didn’t have on their files, which probably made them heavy hitters.

Their signature was clearly Ghoulie, however, so they were targets and there was no doubt about that. The support ships in the enemy formation were more recognizable, including a few of the lighter enemy warships. She picked one out, a lead ship that was clearly screening for the main element of the force, and haloed it in her interface.

“Tag. You win,” she whispered before looking up. “Send these coordinates to the Titans, this is their target.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Be sure that the captains knows not to open fire on this ship,” she added. “It would royally suck to fail in our mission because of a blue-on-blue strike.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She returned her eyes to the map, mostly empty space in a radiation-blasted system that was of no value to either of them. It was perhaps ironic to fight here, but to her mind, it was a better place to decide a battle than over an inhabited world.

No temptations here, boys. Just you, and us.

“Range closing, ma’am. We’ll be in extreme weapons range shortly.”

“Understood. Inform the Titans, they may launch at their discretion,” Brooke ordered, “Valkyrie will provide cover.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

*****

“Titans, be advised. You have clearance to launch. Say again, Titans, you are cleared for launch. Lieutenant, the guns are yours.”

First time I’ve ever fired a gun while sitting in the barrel, Sorilla griped to herself as she nudged open the com. “Roger that, Legendary. All Titans, I need a go/no-go for launch.”

The others in her team chimed in one by one, calling out that systems were green and they were all go for launch. Sorilla nodded, listening with part of her mind while she focused on the target ship that had been sent to her systems. It was of the type they had the most familiarity with, as they’d captured one more intact than anything else they’d had a look at to date. With luck they’d be able to find their way around when and if they made it on board.

“Clamps disengaged. Ready to launch.”

Sorilla twitched slightly in the cockpit of the bot. The vibrations of the hydraulic clamps unlatching had left her feeling just a little anxious, not that she was going to let anyone know.

“Roger that, Legendary. Titans are go for launch,” she replied to the controller, reaching over to flip a switch above the HUD of the big mech suit.

Technically she didn’t have to do that, the entire thing could be run from her implants, but like the others on her team, she’d learned early on that the longer you stayed deep the more mentally exhausted you became. There was a limit to how long a human could stay in synch with a machine, and none of them needed to be blowing off time now that they might need later.

“Titans,” she called over the squad channel, “confirm all systems green and check your system diagnostics.”

The twelve members of her assault squad came back by the numbers, confirming that they were standing by and ready to launch.

“Titans,” the launch controller’s voice came over their squad channel, “give over gravetics control to Legendary.”

That was the part Sorilla hated, but she flipped the switch and handed control of her Titan’s gravity system to the launch controller of the Legendary. She felt the system hum into action, and she was slammed into her seat hard for a moment as the rear generator powered up faster than the forward system. It was only a second or two under twenty Gees, but it was enough for her to grimace and bite back a curse before it evened out.

“Son of a bitch, I hate that shit.”

“Shut it, Frank.” Sorilla cut off the bellyaching before it could start. “No transcoms from here out. Lasers or inductive coms only. Confirm.”

The other Titans confirmed, some more reluctantly than others, but there were no complaints. They were about to launch into the middle of a warzone on what was possibly the most dangerous mission of the entire conflict; they didn’t need to be making any mistakes.

“Legendary, you have the Titans.”

“Roger, Titans. Standby, we’re going to clear the road.”

There was a distant shuddering in the ship that she recognized as the weapons firing, and Sorilla steeled herself.

“Titans…go!” Sorrilla ordered, pulling the trigger on the launcher as she did.

There was a topsy-turvy feeling of riding a roller coaster as she was slammed back into her seat, then forward, and up then down. The HUD blurred in front of her as she was rapidly accelerated out at one hundred Gees then spit into the black of space.

Never wanted to feel what a bullet felt like before. Lucky me, I got my non-wish.

Her Titan exploded out into space, leading the pack by fractions of a second. Beyond the lights of the Legendary she could see the running lights of the other ships of Valkyrie, and beyond those lay the enemy. As soon as she was clear and no longer accelerating, Sorilla felt microgravity return as her core was shut down to prevent the enemy from tracking her.

Now we see if the eggheads were right, or if we’re paste in a tin can.

Chapter XVII

USV America

The America and her cohort had completed the trip they’d set out to make, slipping as quietly as they could into the system that the Terra and The Canadian had jumped into weeks earlier. Taking the long road around had been…well, long but necessary. None of them knew just how long the disruption of space-time would last, or what the long-term consequences would be to employing the disruptors used to shut the direct door to Hayden.

The sensors of the small flotilla of Task Force Seven were immediately assaulted by light-speed data that sent alarms blaring across every deck of every ship while men and women struggled to get everything back in order after the jump.

“What the hell is going on!?” Captain Pete Green snarled, his head splitting from the jump, so the sound was distinctly unwelcome.

“Multiple contacts in system, Captain! Thirty…forty…more individual signals, sir! It’s the enemy fleet!”

“Shit,” Green hissed as quietly as he could manage.

He called up the data himself and found his worst fears confirmed. Ship counts were still climbing, and it was clear that it had to be nearly the combined fleet strength reported by the Sadler. Something caught his eye quickly, though, and he made a fast calculation before smiling a particularly sick looking smile.

“They’re already gone,” he said aloud.

“Sir?”

“The fleet, it’s already jumped on from here,” he said. “Look to the acceleration vectors, they were moving into jump positions almost twelve hours ago.”

That brought a mixed reaction from the crew, much as it had himself. That the fleet was gone was a relief, but it also meant that that massive mass of ships was heading for Hayden and human-controlled space.

They still left a few behind, however. He shifted his gaze to the stationary ships on the telemetry plot.

A handful of enemy ships and…one USV Terra.

Looks intact too. Mostly.

“Jeremy.” He nodded to an ensign nearby.

“Yes, sir?”

“Please inform Major Washington that I want a moment of his time, if you please.”

“Aye, sir.” The ensign nodded, leaving the bridge at a fast walk.

“If you please” was command code phrasing for “right the fuck now,” and the ensign clearly knew it. Green smiled slightly, eyes returning to the still-improving telemetry plot.

This is not going to be easy. They have enough ships to make it a stand-up fight, but they’ve also got the Terra in their range. We need get closer, see if the crew is still alive. Damn it, this just got way too complicated.

*****

Washington stepped onto the bridge of the America, waiting just at the edge of the captain’s line of site to be called in. Green noticed him quickly and waved him in. “Please, Major, come over here.”

“Captain,” he said, nodding as he stepped over to the three-dimensional display the captain was pouring over.

At the center of it were several ships he recognized as alien in nature, the warships they’d brought against Hayden in the past, but also one that he noted was most certainly not alien at all.

“The Terra, sir? Is she intact?”

“Mostly, Major,” Green told him. “I’ve conferred with the admiral on this and we’re going to risk ourselves a bit and try to get in close enough to determine if the crew are still alive.”

“And if they aren’t?”

“Then we take out the Terra as a first strike target,” Green said coldly. “If we don’t succeed with the rest of the alien ships, I don’t want them to be able to learn anything more from the Terra.”

Washington nodded. “What if the crew are alive?”

“That’s when things get rougher,” Green sighed. “We’ll try to plot a rescue, which is where your team comes in. We’d need you to infiltrate the Terra, establish a beachhead for our Marine forces, and try to free as many of the crew as you can.”

“Understood,” Washington said, and he did.

It was just short of a suicide mission, but it would have to be done all the same. A lot depended on just how in control of the Terra the aliens were. Marginally in control meant that an infiltration was possible, since many of the computer codes may still function. However, if they were fully in control, then his team would be served up like a roast on the holidays.

“Prep your team, get your gear in order, and stand by for deployment instructions,” Green told the major. “I’ll let you know more when we know.”

“Sir.” Ton saluted.

Green returned it and nodded. “Dismissed.”

The Detachment One Marine left the bridge, and the immediate job of figuring out what to do, to the captain and the officers of the America. Unfortunately, no one had ever had to do anything like this before, and they were scrambling to make it up as they went along.

“Plot course to intercept the Terra,” Green ordered. “Engage when ready.”

“Aye, sir.”

There was no time quite like the present to learn.

*****

A siren brought Parath’s attention back from his studying of the interrogation reports.

Since the fleet had left, he’d been forced more into his administrative duties and hadn’t the time to see to the interrogations himself, but he still kept his mind in by observing the recordings and making suggestions for topics to pursue based on what had slipped through already.

Interrogations were an exercise in patience and patience. You got nothing reliable quickly, and anything you got quickly had to be considered a waste of your time at the least, a trap if your enemy were intelligent. He’d seen enough to know that he was dealing with some very intelligent people here, so Parath was willing to keep coming at it again and again until he’d worn them down.

Now, however, he suddenly had much more pressing concerns weighing in on him.

“How many?” he demanded as he noted the warning lights on the system tactical display.

“Uncertain, Master. We’re still waiting for light speed sensors, and gravetics are unreliable with unknown starship configurations.”

Parath sighed, but he knew that. “And they already have a count on us and know that our backup has left the system, yes?”

There was a brief moment while his people checked the numbers, but he didn’t need to wait. He’d been doing light-speed calculations in his head all of his career and he knew in his bones that he was right.

“Yes, Master.”

Since the alien ships had arrived through a gravity gate, it would be several hours before light from their ships (along with other light speed particles) began to arrive on the Alliance scanners. However, since the Alliance ships had been sitting in space at a relative stop the entire time, light had been constantly streaming out for the entire time and exposing them to discovery the instant the alien ships had entered the system.

Depending on their acceleration, they may be as little as three intervals out before we even get our first glimpse. Lovely.

“Reform the task group into defensive positions around the captured ship,” he ordered. Parath was loathe to give up their prize so quickly; the information they could pull from it far eclipsed almost anything they currently risked.

“Yes, Master.”

The Parithalian ships he had on command were mostly escorts, not counting his own Glory, but they would do against the most common formations of alien ships he’d seen in the records so far, even the damnably fast new versions.

There are no moons here to hide behind, no tricks of maneuvering to save you. For all your power, you do not have the strength to engage even a minor Alliance task group in open battle, Parath thought at his foes. You’ve proven capable and, as loathe as I am to admit it, even managed to out-ship-handle myself, but power for power, you are no match for the Alliance.

*****

In the shuttle bay of the America, Ton found himself facing his slightly depleted squad and laying all the cards on the table.

“Should we determine that the Terra is recoverable, and its crew alive,” he said, “we will be tasked with establishing the beachhead to open up the doors for the Marine Bad Asses riding our coattails.”

The men chuckled, and even Ton smiled slightly.

The Marine Battle Dress Advanced Armored System (BDAAS), more colloquially known as “Bad Ass,” was a heavier though less expensive version of their own OPCOM armor. More designed to take a beating and dish one out in turn than stick and move the way OPCOM units were, the BDAAS setup was certainly functional but had a reputation for being turned to bloody scrap in a fight.

In fairness, this was more because the Marines tended to lead the charge than through any fault of the armor itself.

“The catch is that if we have to do this, we’ll have to do it full stealth.”

Ton watched as the team winced and was pressed not to wince right along with them.

“That means no coms, no transponders, and no EVA maneuvering thrusters,” he clarified. “We’ll have to go in on a pure ballistic trajectory, black as night, and twice as silent. You all know what that means.”

He could tell that they did, but as this was the military, he repeated it for them anyway.

“It means that we’ll be angling to hit a target we can’t even see from our launch point, stick the landing with nothing but our suits to keep us from going splat, and do it all without any intel about ship movements or changes in enemy positioning,” he told them. “And if you miss the target, you can’t light off your emergency transponder until after the attack begins. That’s why the captain, admiral, and myself are making this a volunteer mission.”

Crow, sitting up front, snorted. “Bullshit, Major. You can’t pull this off if we back out and you know it. I’m in.”

The others nodded slowly, agreeing. They were a short squad already, and there just weren’t enough OPCOM operators around at the best of times. They were the ones who were going to have to do the job, it was really just as simple as that.

“All right then. Check your armor, clean your weapons, and get your kit together,” Ton said, grinning. “We have a game of darts to play. The Terra is the bulls-eye, we get to be the darts. Oo-Rah!”

The others echoed the call in various forms, as befitting their respective trades.

Ton broke them up and sent them on their way before heading for the bridge. He still needed to talk to the captain about the one thing missing from his little dartboard analogy.

Namely, who got to throw the darts, and just how good at playing the game were they?

*****

“Admiral, we’re approaching extreme range. They’ll have us on light-speed scanners in…thirteen minutes.”

Fairbairn nodded. “Thank you, Kyle.”

Task Force Seven was spread out in a wide delta formation, closing at high acceleration with the enemy ships in the hopes of getting the first strikes in before the enemy really had the chance to parse the data from the light-speed scanners. Thanks to entering the system from jump space, TF-7 had an invaluable advantage in the opening salvo in that everything the enemy would have on them would be confused early signals and massively blue-shifted data that they would have to filter through to make any sense of.

Fairbairn knew that they’d probably be able to slam the first salvo into the enemy ships while they were still compiling the fresh data, but after that it would be anyone’s game.

Where fools fear to tread, the Angels rush in, the admiral thought with an ironic tilt to his smile.

“Issue orders to the squadron,” Fairbairn said. “Check fire until they see us coming, then hit them with everything we’ve got.”

“Aye, sir. Time on target launch…twelve minutes, thirteen seconds.”

*****

Green checked the orders and nodded, seeing what the admiral was aiming for.

“Weps, prepare time on target for eleven minutes…forty-two seconds,” he said, patting the shoulder of his weapons control officer.

“Aye, sir. Coded and locked. Squadron acknowledges.”

“Very good,” Green said, turning back to where Major Washington was standing. “Major, your men will launch after we fire. We’ll have to fire you backwards at almost fifty Gees, or you’re going to splatter across that ship like nuts in a vice.”

Ton winced. “Understood, sir.”

“The squadron will blow past the fleet in a glancing engagement and hopefully keep their attention well away from you in the process,” Green told him. “Our zero/zero turnaround should give you time to intercept the Terra. We’ll come back in slow and slugging, with the Marines launching to back you up. Get the shuttle deck under our control. That is an order.”

“Oo-Rah, sir,” the Detachment One Marine said with a slight grin. Ton wiped the smile from his face then, “Do we know if there’s anyone alive, sir?”

“We know they survived the capture of the Terra, Major,” Green said. “We’re waiting on a El-INT response, should have it any minute now. Hopefully the enemy hasn’t gotten full control of the shipwide systems.”

“Understood.”

“You best get down to your team. You launch in less than fifteen minutes, assuming we get a response,” Green said. “Major?”

“Sir?”

“Happy hunting.”

“Thank you, sir. Semper Fi,” Ton answered, saluting before he left the bridge and headed south to the OPCOM deployment launchers.

*****

On the USV Terra, Captain Richmond was letting out a slow breath.

The moment he’d been hoping for was coming.

The Terra’s computers had received an external intel request from the America. He’d had to scramble to get the intelligence they needed, and there were holes all through what he’d been able to provide, but he’d sent off what he could.

Now it was time for them to prepare so they could do their part.

Unfortunately, among the few electronic systems that the aliens had successfully co-opted were the automatic door controls. Not that they’d been particularly elegant on that side of things, their brute force solution had been to disconnect all the doors used to seal in prisoners from the main system. That meant that they couldn’t just open their cells, but there were a few things that Richmond could do when the assault began.

He opened his eyes, red light glowing in his corneas as he worked the system from his implants.

Time for you lot to learn just how hospitable the Terra can be to uninvited guests.

*****

“They’re alive!”

The shout startled the bridge of the America, but the excited nature of it kept anyone from doing something stupid. Green turned to look over at his communications specialist, one eyebrow raised. The young man blushed slightly as he flinched.

“Sorry, Captain. The crew of the Terra is alive and currently Under Control.”

Green nodded. “PUCs,” or Persons Under Control, was the current term for people captured by enemy forces. Not a great position to be in, traditionally, and especially not in this current war.

“More data coming in, Captain. Estimates of enemy numbers, weapons… We’re looking at Charlie and Deltas, sir, no Alphas or Betas on site.”

Of course, it is the height of foolishness to hold people under control within their own ship if they’re equipped with SOLCOM implants, Green noted wryly. “That fits with what we can see on our scanners. No Alpha ships currently in the system. How much control do the prisoners have over ship systems?”

“Not sure yet, Captain. They scrubbed the main core, they’re using a patchwork ARPANet design run through the maintenance processors.”

Green made a slightly surprised noise. “That must have been a neat bit of coding. I’m impressed, don’t know that I’d have thought of it.”

The com-tech considered for a moment. “I think I can see how they did it. If they haven’t wiped the processors, and I doubt they have, then they can probably do some nasty tricks to their ‘guests,’ sir.”

“Good. Suggest it to them,” Green said. “Don’t tell them anything about the mission yet, however.”

“Sir?”

“We don’t know if anyone is listening in, or if someone broke,” He said, “OpSec, son. We’ll give them that intel at the last minute.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“In the meantime, good work. Keep it up.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

*****

Washington nodded as he listened to the orders. “Yes, sir. We’re good to go. Thank you, sir.”

His crew were waiting when he turned back to them and nodded. “We launch in five minutes. Buckle up.”

They simply slammed their helmets shut and jumped into the capsules used to launch OPCOM operators for insertion missions. They weren’t generally intended for this sort of work, but the technicians promised it would work.

Ton hoped they were right.

“Major, you understand how this is going to work?”

“I’ve got it, Corporal,” he told the tech who was standing by his capsule. “Relax.”

“Your pardons, sir, but this system wasn’t designed for this. I’ll relax when you’re back on board in one piece.” The corporal laughed mirthlessly. “We use the stuff here to land sensitive electronics on planets, not people on starships.”

“It’ll work, won’t it?” Ton demanded quietly as he strapped in.

“The math says yes.”

“What do you say?”

“I say good luck, Major. You will need it,” the man said with a humorless grin. “But if it doesn’t work, it won’t be because me or mine fucked up. You have my word on that.”

Ton nodded. “Good enough.”

The capsule closed as the corporal spoke up one last time: “Happy hunting, sir!”

Then it went black and Ton was shaken around as his capsule was locked into place.

*****

“All stations standing ready to fire, Captain.”

Green just nodded. He didn’t have to say anything now. The whole initial salvo was on computer control, no decisions needed unless something went drastically wrong. The mission clock counted down as the tension on board ratcheted up, until it finally hit zero hour.

“Weapons firing!”

Every ship in the slightly depleted Task Force Seven opened up, putting Hammers into space in rapid fire. When the first fire magazines went dry, the distant sound of shuddering and whines stopped and Green nodded to the helm.

“Come about, forty degrees relative up bubble.”

“Aye, sir. Forty degrees, relative up. Coming about.”

The Terra twisted in space, on gyros and thrusters, bringing its launchers around to the appropriate firing position.

“Computer has the helm!”

No man liked giving up control of his ship to the computer, even for the shortest of times, but there were calculations that humans just couldn’t make on the fly like this. The ship adjusted, aiming its launchers just right as it charged them for a fifty-gravity launch, and all that happened to show that anything had just occurred was a set of lights changing from red to green.

“All operators away! Coming back about!”

“Get our magazines reloaded, stand by to continue firing,” Green ordered.

“Aye, sir.”

*****

In the black of the capsule, the only warning Ton and his team had was a red light turning yellow and then a flash of green before the entire world went red and then white, and then black. At fifty gravities, none of them avoided passing out, and for a brief moment they floated in a white haze, moving through a tunnel toward voices of people they knew.

It ended abruptly, however, blackness overtaking the white tunnel, and then the unblinking starlight of space as they woke up and looked around.

Mostly they couldn’t see anything but the stars—even the Cherenkov blue glow of the VASIMR drives was too dim to be visible—but Ton spotted a shadow of another operator maybe a kilometer away from him. Hard to tell, he could only see the man when he eclipsed a star, but Ton was pretty sure that it was one of his team. Maybe it was debris, but he’d assume that it wasn’t.

They had hours to travel now, and a rough landing on the far side.

The things I do for my corps and my comrades. Oo-Rah.

Chapter XVIII

Deep Space

Unnamed System

This is where things get tricky, Sorilla thought grimly as she watched the numbers fall.

They were moving fast, on a terminal ballistics course, which meant that if the enemy moved they wouldn’t be able to adjust and that was just no good. That was the reason why the Titans all had gravity cores—small ones certainly, but they were relatively light machines compared to most things in space. Using captured technology, reverse engineered software, and a lot of luck, humanity had, in fact, unlocked some of the enemy drive technology.

Enough that they could use gravity drives to a small degree, but not enough for them to be remotely effective on a million-ton starship. An eighty-ton Titan, however, was a different story. With their gravity cores, the Titans could maneuver at speeds that made the old Cheyenne Class ships look like slugs but were really a tenth the speed of a proper VASIMR drive starship.

Roughly eighty gravities of acceleration was respectable, but it wouldn’t let them catch up to an enemy ship that was actively trying to evade them. Of course, if the enemy saw them coming, they were more likely to just pop the Titans with a singularity and be done with it.

That was where the next phase of the assault plan came into play.

“Titans, stand by for deployment of GPDs.”

They didn’t respond—the squadron was following radio silence after all—but every member of the Titans shuddered at least slightly.

Gravity Pulse Devices were the weaponized version of a gravity core, basically a shell with enough computing power to manage a core and programming to scare the shit out of any sane man.

Or woman.

Sorilla had gotten a glimpse of the code herself and compared it very carefully to the source code that was currently running her Titan. She had been gratified to find that there was none of the suicidal tendencies in her bot, not even buried in deep. She wasn’t sure what she’d have done if she found any sign that her machinery might decide to implode with her in it, but whatever it was, she was quite sure that there was a coder somewhere on Earth, or within the Solar Gravity Well, who would not have enjoyed her response.

“Deploying.”

Somewhere behind her, Sorilla knew that the Legendary and the rest of Valkyrie were firing the GPD weapons in a rapid-fire pattern that should both keep them clear of her squadron while providing the last, and possibly most critical, element of the operation. Her HUD immediately showed the telemetry feeds from the shells as they blasted past her team and into the contested space between the two warring battle groups.

It was just a matter of counting off the seconds before sparkles of light erupted ahead and every space-time sensor she had on board went completely insane.

Looks like the devices have done their job. Our turn.

Sorilla manually targeted her squadron with com lasers, ensuring secure communications. “Re-initiate gravity cores.”

She flipped open the secure safety, returning control of her core to herself, and felt the system hum back to life as green lights lit up across her tactical board, showing that her team was following suit.

“We should be covered by the disruptions the GPDs have caused across space-time,” she said, hands falling to grip the control sticks. “But let’s not put it to the test. No one redline your drives, minimal thrust only.”

The Titans confirmed her orders, and the team continued to plummet through space as they fell toward their target.

*****

Admiral Brooke looked out over the battle space from the observation and command deck of the USV Legendary. Behind her, her staff was packing up the few things they’d need to take down to the primary combat control center. The observation deck was a lovely place, with gorgeous views of the ship and the space around it, but it was somewhat too vulnerable to risk in a heavy fight.

“We’re ready, ma’am.”

“I’m coming.” Brooke said, half turning.

She paused, looking back on the space ahead of them. She couldn’t see it, but she knew that space had been distorted and warped beyond all recognition directly ahead of them. The GPDs were nasty little beasties: They reached out, grabbed the very fabric of the universe, and started tying it in knots.

And we still have to fly through that. Lord, I hope nobody forgot to carry the one.

The warps themselves were harmless, more or less. What the Legendary had to worry about was entering into multiple warps where the tidal forces were pulling different parts of the ship in opposing directions. Enough force could dislocate something vital inside the ship or even start to tear the ship itself apart.

All the calculations said that the warps were low enough in intensity that the heavily reinforced Legendary and the rest of Valkyrie would be fine, but there was theory and there was practice.

Time to put the theory to practice.

Nadine Brooke turned around and followed her staff off the observation and command center, heading deeper into the protected hull of the USV Legendary.

*****

“The GPD should disrupt enemy fire, but it’s also going to play all holy hell with our targeting,” Roberts said as he walked across the bridge and took a closer look at the gravity scanners.

“Aye, sir, that’s a fact,” Commander Mathews said from where she was trying to map the damage they’d done to local space-time when their GPD deployment.

“Can we fire through that?”

“Not if you want to hit anything, Captain,” she told him, shaking her head. “As it stands, we’d as likely splash our Operators as the enemy.”

“Let’s not do that.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Captain Roberts shook his head, straightening up. “All right then, we go through the chop! All flank!”

“All flank, aye, sir!”

The Legendary surged ahead, followed shortly by her compatriots as Task Force Valkyrie powered through the mess they’d turned space into, the odd twists in space-time making the ship feel like it was rocking under their feet.

“Check fire until we’re through!” Roberts ordered, taking his seat and grabbing a belt to strap in. “Let them waste their ammo.”

*****

Running through the deformed section of space-time was easier for the Titans than it would be for the Legendary, Sorilla knew. The smaller war machines were less susceptible to tidal effects due to their size, most of time even fitting entirely into a deformed patch so that it just felt like regular microgravity.

For most of her crew, that was.

For her it was a ride through pure hell.

Sorilla came within a hair’s breadth of puking in her helmet, something that likely wouldn’t be fatal because OPCOM armor was designed to deal with such things, but it would be highly unpleasant. In desperation, Sorilla threw up an augmented map of the distortions they were hitting across her implants. She felt the difference almost immediately as her eyes and implants began to agree on what was happening to her, and she managed to fight back the urge to color the inside of her helmet with the contents of her stomach.

They burst out of the distortion field in just a few interminable minutes, however, and Sorilla put her focus back on the task as the hull of the target began to grow rapidly in their HUDs. She hit her team with com lasers but, irrationally, spoke in a soft whisper when the link opened.

“Softly. Don’t hit the gravetics unless you have to.”

Part of her almost didn’t believe it as the hull of the alien ship loomed over her, casting a shadow across her mech as it eclipsed the local star. Sorilla had, in all honesty, half expected to be spotted long before she got this close.

Behind her, the rest of the Titans were tightening formation as they made the last-minute course adjustments using thrusters only. This close to a Ghoulie ship, she didn’t want to chance being picked up by their gravetics, even with all the massive levels of distortion being flung around space and time in the local region. There was a point where you were just asking for trouble.

The access point was where her schematics indicated, a large circular port along the hull, one of hundreds that dotted the ship’s flanks. She guided her bot in, landing with a clang that set her teeth on edge inside the war machine even as she steadied herself and took a moment to look around.

She was standing on the hull of the Ghoulie ship, and it had gravity as the brief indicated. That let her take a moment to get her bearings and look out and around at the battle waging beyond her.

The lights were not bright, but she could see the distant sparkles of exchanged fire as Valkyrie pressed their opponents in order to disguise the fact that the entire attack was really just a distraction. Thankfully, Task Force Seven had unwittingly done their part by bleeding off the enemy forces, making them put out brushfires and answer emergency calls all across the galaxy, it seemed.

That gave her team the chance they needed.

Sorilla turned back to the job at hand, pointing to the closest Titan and then down to the hull. The pilot of the Zero Five unit, Staff Sergeant Ryan Cress, lifted his fist and moved into position as she knelt down and got a grip on the edge of the access point.

The enemy hulls used a lightweight, but incredibly strong, silicate-based ceramic. Pound for pound the material was far stronger than steel, but like most similar materials, it didn’t have the flex that steel and iron had. Once you reached the breaking point, the material wouldn’t deform, it would simply shatter. She and the sergeant maxed out their Titans’ servo hydraulics as they put the material under some extreme stress.

It wouldn’t be enough, of course—nothing built by the Ghoulies was likely to crumble under even the strength of a pair of milspec hydraulic presses—but the others of the team were moving into place automatically. They put a series of shaped explosive charges according to the schematic they’d been given, then got out of the way.

The dull thuds of the explosives going off could be felt through the hull of the ship and into the legs of the Titans as they continued to stress the material. As the explosive holes were bored deep by the shaped charges, the breaking point of the armor was reached and it shattered along the constructed fracture, blowing out as both the power of the Titans and the force of the air inside tore the circular section of armor right off the ship.

“Move it! They’ll be coming now!” Sorilla hit her squad with the com laser, waving them in as she stumbled back, steadying herself.

The Titans flared their drives, diving into the ship until they entangled themselves with the gravity well, and then dropped as they twisted around to land hard on the deck inside. Sorilla waved Cress in ahead of her, taking one last moment to examine the war that was playing out on her electronic HUD.

She glanced back in the direction they’d come from and switched to her UWB transmitter.

“The Titans have landed.”

Then she jumped in after her team.

*****

“I’m seeing it, but I do not believe it.”

Roberts shot the speaker a light scowl but didn’t say anything because he was having trouble believing what he was seeing himself. The Titans had landed on the target, completing the first stage of their mission, and honestly, he’d had his doubts about it since he’d been briefed. It was practically a hail Mary to his mind; the idea of dropping an assault team on an enemy ship and having them break in was just insane.

That said, if they could pull it off, it would be the coup of the war, so he was willing to try if they were.

Watching through several dozen seconds of delay at maximum magnification, he and the rest of the bridge watched the Titans bust open the access port they’d identified and drop through.

Phase one complete. Good hunting, Lieutenant.

“All right, they’re doing their jobs, it’s time for us to do ours!” he called. “Start calculating firing solutions. We’ll be coming out of this chop in just a few seconds. Let’s come out fighting!”

“Aye aye, sir!”

*****

“Move your asses!” Sorilla called as she led the charge down the evacuating corridor. The ship was oddly silent, other than the whistling wind of atmo tearing past them and hemorrhaging out into space through the hole they’d torn open.

She ignored the bodies, some still kicking, of the Alpha aliens getting sucked past her. They weren’t her concern and, moreover, they were enemy combatants. Still, deep down Sorilla felt a twisted part of her gut rebelling against the death. Not because they were going to die, no, but because of how.

That’s just no way to go.

The team was in full sprint, bolting as fast as the eighty-ton war machines could run. Sorilla saw the big bulkhead door lowering down ahead of her and leaned into the run, pumping the hydraulic and pneumatics of her machine just a little harder. She threw herself into a slide and caught the big door as it dropped, her machine’s mechanics whining and groaning under the sudden weight.

“Get through!” she growled, getting the knees of the mech under her as she shoved the bulkhead door up a foot.

The team bolted through, rifles leading the way as she held the door. When they were all through, Sorilla shifted her mech inside and dropped the door. It slammed shut with a resounding thud that could be felt even in their insulated bots.

The rush of wind had stopped and they could tell that they were now in a pressurized section. There was no sign of any movement, so they took a moment to get their shit together. Sorilla got fully back to the feet of her mech, unslinging her rifle as she brought up the schematic of the ship she’d been issued. The map was reasonably detailed, but as it was compiled from hulls that had been blown to hell by nuclear bunker busters, there were some missing chunks that she and her team would have to fill in on their own.

“Intel puts the command deck just ahead, but we’re three decks above main engineering and we need to secure both,” she said. “Lieutenant.”

“Ma’am?” Second Lt. Marshal Stern spoke up.

“Take your squad, secure engineering,” Sorilla ordered the SEAL officer. “Alpha is with me, we’ll take the command deck. Try not to blow the core, Lieutenant. I’d like to live through this.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the Navy sailor replied. “Bravo, fall out.”

Bravo team split off, stalking down the hall while Sorilla took quick stock of her team’s location. “All right. Let’s go.”

“Why the hell are their corridors this big? The damn Ghoulies are smaller than we are,” Bean growled as they started toward the predicted area of the command deck.

“You know as well as I do, Beans,” Sorilla told him. “So keep your gear wired and your eyes peeled. There are Golems walking these halls.”

That quieted “Frank and Beans” down, and no one else felt a need to make any more comments as they unslung their primary weapons and started stomping down the hall. The floor, the walls, everything was a heavy ceramic that they didn’t recognize, but it absorbed sound and vibrations well enough that while they certainly weren’t silent. The eighty-ton machines weren’t rocking the house down the way they had back on the Legendary and the Socrates.

Sorilla fought down the uneasy feeling that had plagued her practically since she had been given this mission, forcing her mind to stay on task. She hated the feeling of being out of her depth, but that was the nagging doubt that wouldn’t leave the back of her mind. She was Special Forces, a proud member of the Green Berets, but her specialty wasn’t assault. She was a trainer, cultural expert, language expert, and a great many other things, but leading an assault on a ship was a Marine’s job.

Ton would love this.

The times were changing, however, that much was clear. The Solari Organization didn’t have room, not yet at least, for specialties quite like hers. They needed people who could adapt to the new state of affairs, and she wasn’t going to be left behind.

The squad hit a branching corridor just a few dozen meters down, and they paused as they checked their map.

“This ain’t on the map,” Frank said, unnecessarily. “Which direction, El-Tee?”

Sorilla looked down both branches of the Y-shaped corridor, mapping them with LIDAR and overlaying the new data across her intel-issued maps.

“Left hand side,” she decided, “curves back in the direction we want to go about fifty meters up. Move.”

They moved out again, Bean taking point while Corporal Shu took up the drag position. Sorilla stayed in the middle of the pack, eyes on the map and her HUD. With the intelligence being imperfect, the job had just become quite a bit more difficult, but she supposed that was what they were paid for.

Only a few meters along their new path, they found just how right they were.

“Golems!” Sorilla called, her rifle sweeping up and firing as the lumbering form entered view.

The heavy cannon boomed as she took a knee, clearing room for Bean to step up behind her and open fire over her head. Sorilla’s hairs stood on end as she felt the attack before she saw it, throwing herself and her machine forward onto its belly as she continued to fire. Above her a ripple warped the air, light, and all as a gravity pulse flashed past.

The enemy blast missed Bean, slamming into the machine beside him and throwing the eighty ton Titan back to the ground. He and Sorilla redoubled their fire, shots raining down from both sides as the engagement turned into a mad minute.

“Cover me!” She sent, dropping her rifled cannon over her shoulder before slapping both steel shod hands of her Titan down hard onto the floor.

The machine leapt to her command, surging up from the prone position and getting its feet braced under it. Sorilla didn’t even realize she was tapping the internal gravity core as she lunged, sending the Titan surging forward at eighty gravities of acceleration. The Titan’s metal shod feet dragged, lighting sparks in her trail as she slammed into the enemy group.

She threw her feet forward, sliding into their legs, and kicked hard enough to shatter the Golem’s legs. As it topped, she drew her Titan’s molecular blade and stabbed up into the falling body, finishing the Golem as she twisted it around and rolled on top.

Shots were raining down around her position, mostly friendly fire, but Sorilla didn’t have time to be overly concerned. She got her machine back to its feet, well inside her enemies comfortable fighting range with their pulse weapons. She twisted, slamming her shoulder into the shoulder of the closest Golem and used the impact of the two massive forces to dislodge its weapon.

As the gravity weapons clattered to the ground she casually shoulder the next one into a wall and pinned it there as a rain of depleted uranium slugs tore through the rest, her team running up to catch her. Sorilla swiftly stabbed the blade on her Titan’s hand three times into the one she had pinned, and then stepped aside to let it crumble to the floor.

“Jesus, El Tee,” Bean growled, skidding to a stop, “Save some for us next time!”

“Squad check,” She said, not bothering to respond.

Her HUD answered for her, the telemetry on Scott’s Titan and armor gone completely red. Taking the enemy ship had just incurred its first casualty.

She knew that it was unlikely to be the last.

*****

USV Legendary

“We’re detecting gravity events all around us, sir.”

Roberts grimaced. “Well at least we know that the GPDs are effective at disrupting their Valve.”

“We’re approaching the end of the GPD warp field, Captain. They’ll have a clear shot at us in twenty seconds.”

“And we’ll have a clear shot at them,” Roberts said. “Lock firing solutions.”

“Firing solutions locked.”

“Send to all ships,” he ordered. “Fire as we exit the field, load the rest of our GPDs, and stand by to launch chaff.”

“Aye, sir. Signal sent…all ships confirm.”

“Then open fire.”

“Aye aye, Captain, firing as she bears!”

*****

Sorilla’s Titan paused, fist coming up to signal the stop.

It was an automatic gesture, one used to stealth when you didn’t want to talk and one that was more than a little silly when you were piloting an eighty-ton war machine. Still, it was automatic and it got the point across. The team stopped behind her as she gripped the big rifle, actually feeling the trigger under her finger as she leveled it on the turn ahead of her.

“What is it, El-Tee?”

“Hold on,” Sorilla answered. “Not sure. I felt something.”

The two Titans behind her fanned out, clearing their fields of fire as she edged forward. Behind them, the others turned to cover the rear. She reached out with the off hand of the Titan, gently touching the wall.

The construction design seemed intended specifically to dampen vibrations and limit sound, but she could feel a tingle run up her arm through the circuits of the Titan. Sorilla checked the audio feeds, then secured her grip on the rifle and began moving forward again.

“Stay sharp,” she ordered. “I don’t know what it is, but something is making the ship shudder.”

“Hammers from Valkyrie, El-Tee?”

“Maybe,” Sorilla answered. “Didn’t think they’d fire that close. Doesn’t matter, we need to get to the bridge. Move.”

The team moved.

Thirty-five-foot-tall, eighty-ton war machines didn’t move quietly, but they did move with authority. Sorilla led her team in around the curve in the corridor and got them back on track according to the intel map they were working from. The command deck, best as anyone had been able to determine, was just another two hundred meters ahead of them, and the corridor was heading straight for it.

Sorilla threw her machine into the wall an instant before the gravity alarm sounded, barely avoiding a pulse blast that continued up and exploded against the ceiling.

She tracked the blast faster than her computer did, and realizing that it came from near her feet, she reacted without thinking. She reacted much as she would when dealing with a nasty dog that had gotten in under her guard and too close to use a gun on: She reared back and then stomped the threat into the ground. That move complete, Sorilla twisted and stepped back, clearing the range as she brought her rifle to bear on the smeared deck.

Only then did she notice that she had something she didn’t really want to think about stuck to the boot of her Titan. She took a few seconds, scraped it off with her rifle butt, then looked back at her others and did her damnedest to ignore the roiling in her gut.

“Squishy,” she said laconically, gesturing ahead. “Move out.”

The squad followed her without a word, each purposely ignoring the crushed body of the Ghoulie she had flicked aside.

“Don’t mess with the El-Tee,” was a fair approximation of what each were thinking as they trooped down the corridor and got back on mission.

*****

“Gravity event!”

“Deploy countermeasures! Hard to port!”

“Aye, Captain! Coming to port!”

“Countermeasures deployed!”

Roberts looked over the tactical display, leaning into the table it was mounted on. The enemy ships were pressing forward, but their Valves had been temporarily neutralized and so far the aliens hadn’t shown much beyond that super weapon in their arsenal.

That didn’t mean they had no arrows left in the quiver, however, so the squadron was taking a high-aggression stance and firing almost without pause.

The first of their Hammers had already slammed into the enemy line, but the Ghoulie ships were almost impossibly tough. The high relativistic projectiles slammed into the enemy ships, holing right through them with gravity lens effects to magnify the strikes, but the enemy just kept right on coming.

“Radiation climbing! Gamma radiation, neutron particles! We’re redlining our armor!”

“Is it directional?” Roberts demanded.

“No, sir, ambient field! I don’t know where it’s coming from…” the scanner technician said. “Holy hell! The Olympus, sir!”

“Shift screen!” Roberts ordered. The screen flickered and showed the USV Olympus.

For a moment everything looked normal, and he was about to ask what she’d yelled about, then he saw it. The ceramic plates on the Olympus’s nose were glowing red, and the depression at the front of her prow was lit up with a light that was unnatural.

“Get the Olympus on coms! Tell them to maneuver!” he ordered.

“No response! Nothing on the network either, sir! We’re completely cut off from them.”

The ship on the screen began to explode. At first it seemed to be from an external attack, but Roberts recognized quickly that it was her reactive armor plates detonating. Behind those blasts, the metal hull of the Olympus was bubbling, turning molten again, and that was when he realized that everyone on board was long since gone.

“My god, what the hell?” he whispered in shock.

“Some kind of particle beam, Captain, it has to be!” Lt. Commander Bridger snapped. “We’re just picking up the backwash of it, and it’s almost overwhelming our armor!”

So this is what they’ve been holding back? Their real weapon, not just the construction tool they use the Valve as.

Unfortunately, recognition did not impart any inspiration on how to handle the weapon, and with the admiral’s orders unchanged, there was only one response he could make.

“All ahead flank! Begin evasive maneuvering patterns! Continue firing for effect!”

*****

On the alien ship, Sorilla paused again, lifting the big hand of the Titan again.

“Anyone feel that?” she asked aloud, eyes flicking side to side as she tried to spot whatever it was that was bothering her.

“Yeah, I think so, El-Tee. Felt almost seismic.”

Sorilla nodded, policing her rifle as she looked around. “Anyone have directional readings on that?”

“Negative, El-Tee. Omnidirectional, low frequency.”

“Damn it,” Sorilla hissed. “Same here.” She considered for a moment, then shook herself, lowering her weapon to the ready. “All right, keep moving.”

She took point again, moving forward.

The plans assembled by intelligence indicated that they were almost to the command deck, she just couldn’t shake the feeling that she as being watched.

Of course we’re being watched. If we were on the Legendary, they’d have full body scans of all of us by now. There’s no way they don’t know we’re coming. So, where are they going to hit us?

She hesitated again, checking the map again. The problem was she knew that her map was faulty, and there were just too many ambush points. She honestly wasn’t sure why they hadn’t come at her team harder already. They came heavy, fielding the Titans specifically because they expected heavy resistance.

The halls were so quiet, it was downright eerie. The single Ghoulie she’d stomped was hardly what she’d call an effective defense force.

The squad continued forward, pausing at branching corridors and clearing them deliberately before moving on.

One more branch and we’re there. Where the hell are they?

They slowed to a crawl, putting their focus on every scanner they had as they moved. Sorilla led the team, reaching the next corridor branch, leading with her gun. She paused, signaled back to the others to provide cover, then stepped out and pivoted to sweep the corridor.

That was when the ceiling opened up and a thirty-foot Golem dropped through right on top of her head.

Chapter XIX

On approach to USV Terra

The hull of the Terra came out of nowhere. One moment nothing but open space, and the next, Ton caught a glimpse of the white ceramic tiles that lined the ship’s hull. Then there was an instant of crushing pain, blackness, and a mad moment of pure chaos before he could even begin thinking again.

When it all passed, Ton moved gingerly as his HUD rebooted and he felt his armor come back online. The massive acceleration had blown out all of his calibrations, and he watched it reboot and slowly bring his armor, optics, and computing capabilities back online.

As soon as he had movement and visual capability again, Ton found himself struggling out of a mass of synthetic sheets like a parachute. The fabric had made up the air bag used to keep him from splattering on the Terra’s hull, and he was glad it worked, but it was a pain to untangle himself from.

Unbelievable. It actually worked.

He hadn’t bounced, thankfully. Not only would that probably have killed him, but it would have put him farther away from the Terra if he hadn’t. Instead he found himself within a few feet of the hull, drifting in south along the ship as the gravity of the core tugged him down. Kicking away the last of the fabric, Ton retrieved a grappler from his kit and aimed it at the ship, firing it as soon as the system gave him the green light.

The material on the grappler was designed to work in a vacuum, and it slapped onto the ceramic and vacuum welded itself to the material in an instant. Ton just had to reel the big ship in or, more accurately, reel himself into the big ship.

I went fishing one time and a caught a fish this big, Ton snickered at the thought.

Once on the hull, he adjusted the line from the gun and let it pay out as he began to rappel down the length of the ship toward the shuttle bay near the prow.

This is officially the strangest thing I’ve ever done, Ton thought as he pushed off from the hull and let the gravity draw of the ship’s core pull him down. Whoever heard of rappelling in space?

He was about halfway to the shuttle bay when the first IFF icons began to appear green on his HUD, showing that he wasn’t the only member of the team on time and on mission.

*****

USV America

“Send the signal to the Terra.”

“Aye, Captain, signal sent.”

Captain Green nodded, refocusing his attention on the tactical situation at hand. The enemy mostly consisted of Delta ships, and he knew that they were fighters but they didn’t have gravity Valves, which would mean a fast and furious but largely conventional engagement. The armor on his ship would take a beating, but it was designed to defeat weapons that were largely like those the Delta used, in effect if not in form.

“How long to zero/zero turnover?”

“Three more minutes, Captain. We’re burning delta-V at over eight hundred Gees, but it takes time to burn off that kind of speed.”

Green nodded. He knew that.

“Lock weapons onto the enemy ships and stand by to fire when we have tactical firing solutions.”

“Aye, sir, weapons locked.”

In their glancing pass, they’d raked the big Delta ships with Hammers, but had in turn been torn up by plasma blasts. Almost every ship of his force had missing armor panels, blown out in an effort to defeat the plasma blasts. They’d done their job, but now those ships had holes in their armor, chinks through which they could be hurt.

But so do our enemies. Let’s see who finds the chinks in their opponents’ armor first.

*****

USV Terra

Captain Richmond opened his eyes, a signal lighting them up with a green glow. “It’s time.”

He sent a return signal and then began to coordinate with the other programmers among his little network of hacker prisoners. They had control over a tiny fraction of the ship’s systems, but what they did have was enough to put a serious crimp in the enemy’s day, especially if they weren’t acting alone.

They had to be subtle, which was going to be a challenge in some cases. It was hard to be subtle when you didn’t have all the fine control you might wish for, and it was almost impossible when some of your best coders were Marines, but they’d manage.

Locked in cells, the crew of the Terra set the digital dogs on their captors as they prepared to seize their moment when it came.

*****

Ton came to a stop by the closed shuttle bay doors, hanging on the long line he’d hooked to his waist, and logged into the local systems through his implants. It didn’t take him long to notice the damage the captain and crew had done to their central systems, but he’d expected that and brought along a supply of scripts for the job.

A motion caught his attention from the corner of his eyes, and he glanced over to see a suited figure running in his direction along the hull of the Terra, moving along the arc of a pendulum described by the length of his own line. His IFF was quickly read and identified as Crow, so Ton turned back to his job as the former SEAL grabbed a maintenance handgrip near him and retied himself there.

“What’s the sitrep, boss?” Crow asked, reaching over to touch his shoulder so he could use an inductive com.

“We’re on schedule, as long as everyone turns up.”

“I’ve got IFF hits on everyone except Korman,” Crow answered. “He’s still off the grid.”

“Damn,” Ton muttered. “I hope we can find him when this is over.”

“Let’s hope we’re still here to look when this is over,” Crow suggested. “Team is closing on us. We good to go?”

Ton glanced around to see others dropping in from above or running around the ship the way Crow had and nodded. “Yes. I’ve cracked the door codes. Just waiting for confirmation from the inside. Get the others ready.”

“Right.” Crow dropped away from him, swinging over to the closest of the team to share the news.

Ton stayed focused. He knew that it was going to be a rough one when those doors opened. They couldn’t bring heavy weapons, so they were going to have to try and get to one of the assault shuttles and hope that the onboard armory was intact, otherwise it was going to be one quick boarding party.

His HUD pinged as he got a response from the system, and Ton smiled under his helm. He looked around, noting that his team was close and paying attention, so he hit them with a short-range pulse.

“Stay clear of the doors and hold on,” he ordered. “Time to crack this sucker open.”

*****

Sentinel Prime Kris walked the halls of the alien ship as he had been doing for some time. It was a chance to get a real insight into how the enemy really thought. You could learn a great deal just by how someone designed a military ship.

The Ross were very flat, in his mind. It was amusing to him that a species that many supposed experienced the universe in so vastly different a way would build their ships according to a bland design that felt more like something one might see from a particularly boring private business.

Perhaps they experience the design differently, only the Ross know.

The Pari liked open spaces. Their ships had large open areas that were a distinct weakness in the event of battle, but other than that, they designed tight and well. Their ships were known for being among the fastest and most maneuverable in the Alliance, if not the most heavily armed.

His own species, Lucians, held that particular distinction. However, Lucians didn’t build large ships as a rule. While there was a small fleet, normally assigned to defending Luc, by and large Lucians went out into the galaxy on the ships of other species. Space flight was not a comfortable thing for Lucians, and few sought it out except from necessity or duty.

This species, these…humans…they were different again.

He’d been on many ships from many Alliance species but had never encountered a ship quite like this “Dirt.” It was armored, thick and layered, even inside. Constructed largely of cheap iron and steel, likely acquired from mineral resources floating in space near the construction slip, if he were to guess. It was an inexpensive way to build a ship, using materials considered obsolete by most Alliance species, but it had the virtue of pure mass behind it.

There was something to be argued for having armor thicker than most ground-based bunkers he’d ever encountered, even if it wasn’t the most advanced material around. Cheap, thick, and almost impossible to destroy with any single weapon, barring the Ross super weapons, he supposed. The only problem he could imagine was that pushing that much sheer mass around would require immense power, but apparently they’d solved that.

Honestly, Kris had wanted to flee the ship when he got an answer to that question.

Most species built reaction-based thrust devices at some point in their history. However, it was largely uncommon in Alliance space because the reaction mass required was usually too extreme to be practical. There was also the fact that you were sitting on a bomb that you were praying would only explode in the direction you wanted it to. Kris knew explosives, and while he knew them well enough not to fear them, he also knew them well enough to respect the forces involved.

The use of negative matter to actually propel a starship? That was almost as insane as the Ross and their world-destroying weapons.

Thankfully the Pari engineers had worked out quickly that the ship didn’t store negative matter, it generated particles on command.

Kris shook his head as he stepped onto a personnel lift and hit the command for the lower deck where he was to inspect next.

The species was paranoid and fearless, exactly the sort of combination one preferred not to have on your enemies’ side. They’d proven that already, fighting far superior technology to a bitter standstill, and Kris had to respect them for it.

He actually expected that in a few dozen full intervals they would likely be considered for Alliance membership. The war couldn’t last forever, after all, and he’d seen it happen many times before. The alliance absorbed what it couldn’t force to submit, political will being stronger than military might. If they were not annexed this time, they would be approached diplomatically and a long process of trust-building would happen.

Repairing the damage done by the war would require work, but it was straightforward as well. Time would handle most of it, few species had generational memories. Depending on how long-lived these people were, two generations should do it before an official approach with an Alliance membership offer was made. In the meantime, occasional offers of help to ships and people caught in bad spots would be made, and an effort to open trade.

It was all rather dirty to his mind, he preferred a straight fight, but it would work well enough.

After that…well, then they would slowly be bent to the Alliance until the species really didn’t know any other way.

He had seen it before, and would again.

The lift slid to a stop and the doors began to open, pulling him from his thoughts as Kris took a step toward the opening. The large open deck beyond was lined with ships, and he could see his Sentinels milling near some of them. Kris would have to beat some discipline back into them, he decided as he spotted that.

His arm and leg were through the partially opened door when the heavy slabs of steel abruptly reversed direction with startling speed. Kris threw himself back with as much force as he could and slammed into the back wall as the big doors slammed shut with a clank that shook the air.

What in the name of the abyss?

He accessed his commlink. “This is Prime. What happened to the doors around the lower ship deck?”

He waited but aside from some confused mumbling got nothing out of the people on the other side of the link.

“Damn fools,” he muttered, punching the commands into the alien system again, trying to get the doors open himself.

Nothing happened, of course, but then, he hadn’t really been expecting anything.

Now why would the doors seal automatically like that?

Kris stiffened, an ugly thought occurring to him, and he keyed into the commlink instantly. “This is Prime. Are the other doors around the ship bay sealed as well…? Well, find out!”

Seconds ticked by interminably before the answer came back and his cool blood chilled even further.

“All sentinels, this is Prime Kris! Prepare for assault! If you’re in the ship bay, get into cover! Get into cover!”

A burst of noise blanked out his com, but not before Kris heard a whistling sound rush over it.

*****

The rush of air and debris roared past them as the shuttle bay explosively depressurized. Ton spotted a few kicking bodies blown past into the black and winced under his armor.

Better a bullet than that.

He didn’t have time to think about it, however, because as soon as the rush died out, he nodded to the team and they kicked off the ship and let out their lines. Because of the peculiarities of the gravity system used in the Terra, they were pulled down but also in to the bay because the core was located just below that point and so they experienced the gradient much stronger than on upper decks.

He and his team cut the lines as he hit the deck and rolled to a stop, rifles out and covering the now-vacuum-filled shuttle bay.

“Clear!” Crow called from beside him.

“Clear.”

Ton nodded. “All clear. The shuttle bay is ours. Send the signal to the fleet.”

“You got it, boss,” Crow said, taking a step back.

“Seal the doors?” Cress asked.

“Negative. While we hold them open, the automatic locks will keep the enemy out, and the Marines need a place to land anyway. Hold the breach open,” Ton answered.

“Yes, sir.”

“Cress, take a man and start clearing those shuttles,” Ton ordered. “Be double careful of any that are sealed up. SOP says that they should be open while on ship, but we know that there were enemy troops in here.”

“Roger that.” Cress nodded, tagging Janks on the shoulder. “Come on, man. You’re with me.”

“Got your six.”

They broke off, heading for the line of shuttles with their weapons to their shoulders. Ton let them go. He had more things on his mind.

“America responds,” Crow told him. “Marines will launch in five.”

“Outstanding. All right, the rest of you,” Ton nodded to the group, “secure this area. Clear those shuttles. Crow, I want you to get hands on with the local systems. Get them under our control, local, not just via implant link.”

“On it.”

*****

USV America

The flight deck was roaring with activity, Marines weren’t known for subtlety at the best of times, and in fully armored BDAAS suits, they caused as much chaos as most enemy forces. Wrangling them onto the shuttles and getting them locked in was the job of the chief of the deck and her hands, and she did love her job.

“Stop pussyfooting with him, son,” she growled when one of her men was arguing with a Marine over something she didn’t give a shit about. “Put the little shit in his place and move on.”

All she had to do was glare at them for a minute before the Marine gave up and let himself get locked into place in the shuttle. Chief Siema just snorted and moved on. They were minutes away from a combat launch, and a lot of lives depended on their doing things right the first time.

The America’s five shuttles were loaded, packed stem to stern with Marine Bad Asses and enough firepower to fight a moderately sized war. The lights in the bay were all still green, though, so they had a few minutes at least…

A siren called and the light went yellow, causing the chief to swear.

“Move your arses! Launch in five! Move! Move! Move!”

They had to be loaded and the deck cleared in four minutes, otherwise they’d lose the launch window, and that wasn’t going to happen on her watch.

*****

“Keep firing! Hammer them!” Pete Green ordered as a rain of plasma bolts descended on his ship and the others in the squadron.

They were coming back in now, swinging wide as they vectored their thrust to put the task group into an orbit around the enemy ships. The America was shuddering now, bleeding atmosphere into space as plasma bolts found spots where their ceramic armor had already been blown away. The destruction was lighting up their damage control boards, but Green had no choice but to trust his people to handle that while he focused on keeping the battle itself on the course they all needed.

“Marines are go!”

Green nodded. “Launch shuttles!”

On the screens, they could see the shuttles explode out through the big bay doors, thrusters flaring as they pulled clear of the America. Beyond them, shuttles launched from the other ships of TF-7 as well. Green winced as a couple were blown apart by plasma bolts intended for the America, but they were small and fast targets so most of the shuttles got clear in time.

That wasn’t to say that the humans were on a one-sided beating. Not even remotely.

Hammers had struck deep in the enemy formation, tearing through armor and hulls with equal ease. He knew that his enemies were hurting, some far more than his own ships, because the human-designed ships were bigger and thicker and more able to absorb damage.

It was going to be a tight battle, but no matter who won, Green intended to be sure that this particular group wouldn’t be in any shape to move against Hayden or beyond.

*****

Parath hissed as one of his ships took multiple strikes along the dorsal vents, crippling them. They were fighting at a parity, and while his ships had better weapons in terms of firing rates, the enemy projectiles were not to be underestimated as they struck with far more force than their kinetic energy calculations would indicate.

“Watch your dorsal flank,” he snarled, stepping forward and looking over the battle schematics. “Move the Unrelenting into position to cover them or we’ll lose the Gigantic!”

The Raptor Unrelenting moved into position, covering the weak position over the Gigantic Eternal, but in order to do so, it took a pair of heavy strikes that got through their defensive screens and was already bleeding atmosphere into space at a dangerous rate.

Parath swore. “Break from the alien ship! We need to move, they have us pinned against it!”

“But, Master…we’ll lose the ship, its intelligence value…”

“They won’t destroy their own ship! It will be here when we finish,” Parath growled. “Break formation! Move to attack speeds and engage the enemy on our terms.”

“Yes, Master.”

“Master! There’s something you need to see!”

Parath groaned. Anything he needed to see right at that moment was nothing he wanted to see. He headed over to the speaker, a Pari on the long-range scanners. “What is it?”

“Multiple smaller craft have left the main contingent of the enemy, Master.”

Parath hissed. He didn’t even need to look at the telemetry feed to know what that meant, though he confirmed it quickly anyway.

“This is Master Parath,” he called on the open com to the captured ships. “Stand yourselves ready to repel assaulters. The enemy have launched assault craft.”

*****

Sentinel Prime Kris pounded on the sealed doors, snarling as the announcement came over his commlink and announced the impending assault.

He had no doubt where it was coming from, but there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it closed up in a small metal box with only his sidearm. “Get this lift moving! Or the doors opened…!”

The controller on the other side of the link mumbled some helpless reply, but it was as useless as he was, and Kris didn’t bother to listen. He drew his sidearm, considering the weapon for a long moment as he looked at the doors.

I cannot use it yet, but perhaps…when the ship bay is sealed and re-pressurized…

It would be a risk, that he knew well, but it may well be a worthy one.

He had Sentinels on the other side, assuming any survived the decompression. Lucians were tough, but that would kill them just as dead as it would most species, though they might last a shade longer. All species need to breathe, be it one gas or another. There were ships inside, though, and those could be sealed.

If the warning got out in time. I just don’t know…

Kris detested, more than anything, being helpless. And what was he here and now? As helpless as a Ross’El babe in the wilds without his toys.

He roared at the ceiling as he waited for a sign, for some hint that he could finally do something.

*****

“Down! Down! Down!” Ton yelled as a burst of fire erupted from one of the shuttles, tearing into the deck as his team dove clear.

“It’s a Charlie!” Cress yelled, rolling along the deck and bringing his weapon to bear.

The EM rifles opened fire, tearing into the shuttle the fire had come from, eerily silent into the vacuum of the deck. Sparks and shards of shuttle aluminum filled the air as the team converged on it with weapons blazing.

Ton got a glimpse of the figure standing in the walkway of the shuttle with nothing but his uniform and what appeared to be a breather mask from the shuttle’s stores.

Unreal. Tough bastard.

“He’s got the ramp covered, we can’t get a clean shot without him blowing our frickin’ heads off!” Cress swore from where he’d scrambled to cover behind a cargo truck.

“Keep his attention,” Ton ordered, circling around to the far side of the craft.

The shuttles were intended to be boarded from the rear ramp, yes, but that wasn’t the only way in or out. They were also assault craft, and they had to put a lot of soldiers into the field in very little time, plus there were two emergency hatches in the front cockpit for the pilots.

Ton headed for one of those.

It was up high, of course, but he had no trouble jumping up to the latch using his powered armor. The whole thing was evacuated, so there was no wail of an emergency alarm to contend with when he popped the hatch and pulled himself into the shuttle. He tumbled into the cockpit, kicking himself loose of the large acceleration bolster, and scrambled to his feet as he got his rifle up and to his shoulder.

“I’m in the cockpit, keep them focused on you while I move up behind them,” he sent, using a pulse transmission.

He couldn’t hear it, but Ton was well aware when the level of fire exploded in intensity ahead of him as it lit up on his HUD like a five-alarm fire. He edged the door from the cockpit to the crew and passenger section open and slipped out. Stairs led down to the ramp deck, but Ton paused to scan the passenger seats, clearing them before he began down.

In a crouch, he descended the stairs until he got a bead on the Charlie that was still firing out into the shuttle bay. Ton remembered Sorilla’s reports on the muscular grey aliens, and he pushed his rifle’s power all the way up to the highest setting as he steadied the front sight and squeezed the trigger.

The alien’s head exploded from the force of the explosive round, and he fell forward to the ramp and slid down out of the shuttle as Ton finished making his way down the stairs and began to clear the area.

“One Charlie down. Negative contact on others. Anyone have anything different?”

“Negative,” Cress said. “We’ve got nothing out here.”

“All right,” Ton said as he moved forward. “Clear. Check the other shuttles.”

“Roger that.”

“Boss,” Crow spoke up.

“What is it, Lieutenant?”

“The Marines are landing.”

Ton stepped down the landing plank and peeked out to see the first of the assault shuttles sweep into the deck, flying on retro-thrusters and baking the floor. It opened hatches on either side of the big bird as it hovered, and Marine Bad Ass units jumped clear to the deck before the shuttle turned slowly around and flew back out.

Behind it, shuttle two was already making its entry.

“Semper Fi,” Major Washington said with a grin. “Let’s take back our ship.”

Chapter XX

Unnamed solar system

Sorilla rolled as she felt her Titan being slammed to the ground, sweeping the feet of the Golem as she did, and the pair wound up in a tangled mess on the floor of the ship as the deafening roar of portable artillery rent the air itself asunder.

Her squad had stepped back as the forms jumped down from above them, bringing their weapons up high to avoid hitting her, and then opened fire with the big fifty-millimeter rifled cannons they carried. Two of the Golems were blown back and hit the ground in a dead sprawl, not moving again, while Sorilla wrestled in close with the one that had landed on her.

“Behind us!”

“Cover the flanks!”

Artillery fire erupted again as they opened fire on the group coming up behind them, and return blasts from gravity pulse weapons turned the halls into a very inhospitable place for anyone not doffed in layers of thick and sturdy armor.

A pulse blast took a Titan in the chest, blowing the eighty-ton machine back in a spiral tumble as it hit the ground with enough force to dent both floor and armor. The pilot, Sr. Master Chief Carson, struggled back to his knees, and the big robot shook its head as he tried to clear his own foggy brains.

“Chief! You okay?”

“Got my bell rung, I’ll live. Keep us covered!”

Sorilla heard all that as she struggled with the surprisingly agile Golem pinning her down. She twisted, getting one of the legs of her Titan against the wall, and then kicked. Her machine slid out from underneath the Golem, sending sparks flying as she truly and utterly destroyed the pain, but also pitching her opponent to the ground as she rolled and started to get to her feet. It grabbed her by the leg and yanked, sending Sorilla face first to the ground with a bang that resounded both through the air and through her bones.

She twisted over onto her back, cocking her Titan’s “head” down so she could get a good look at the Golem holding her. She snarled, kicking it with enough force to bring down a building, but it doggedly held on.

“Fine,” Sorilla snarled. “Let’s play this your way.”

She pushed off the ground, twisting around and rolling on top of the Golem, getting it locked between her legs as she drew a five-foot-long carbon blade from her Titan’s thigh sheath and slammed it down through the Golem’s throat.

It jerked under her, but she held on, then it finally slumped back and stopped moving. Sorilla snarled, twisting the blade and decapitating the big beast. She slipped the blade back into its sheath as she glanced around, evaluating the situation. Retrieving her rifle, Sorilla opened a channel to the others.

“Fall back to me! The objective is this way. Keep firing!”

Her squad fell back by the numbers, two firing as the others picked Carson’s Titan up and put him on his feet before the three fell back to her position. Then they took up firing positions and covered the next two as they leapfrogged into position.

“If I’m reading this right, they hesitated just a minute too long to drop the boom on us!” Sorilla yelled over the booming of her own gun, audible even through the thick armor of her machine. “Carson, is your Titan okay?”

“Functional, El-Tee. I’ve got warning lights all across the board though.”

“Fine. You’re with me. Everyone else, cover us!”

“You got it, boss.”

They continued to fall back until they reached the spot Sorilla had been calculating on and came to a stop.

“This is the place. Carson, you and me are going for a walk. Everyone else, hold this position!” Sorilla ordered.

“Roger that.”

Sorilla dropped her bot to a kneeling position and hit the hatch release, air hissing around her as the pressure equalized. She pulled herself up out of the bot, pulling rifle and pistols from their slots, and dropped to the ground just as Chief Carson landed a few dozen feet away.

They looked to the slightly smaller-than-human door about thirty meters away and nodded silently as they broke from cover, racing through the feet of giants toward the door that would hopefully take them to the Land of Lilliputians.

*****

USV Legendary

A cheer went up as one of the alien ships finally gave up the ghost, unable to survive the constant hammering from the Valkyrie ships. Roberts shut it down fast, however, as they had to keep moving to try and avoid the alien particle-beam weapon.

It wasn’t an easy thing to do; the beam was a light-speed weapon but highly lethal. You couldn’t detect it coming until it struck, by all available data, and that was too damned late. Just the coronal radiation was enough to raise levels inside their armor to dangerous heights. The Legendary’s medics had been handing out iodine pills like they were candy, and the maintenance crew had a high priority request to clean the outside of the hull in the hopes of washing some of the residual radiation away.

Like I’m going to let anyone go outside while we’re in a frigging battle, Roberts scowled darkly. Of course, he was well aware that another near hit like the blast that took out the Olympus and he may not have a choice.

There were still two of the warships active, including the one they weren’t allowed to shoot at, plus several of the smaller escorts. Luckily only the larger warships seemed to be equipped with the weapon they had tentatively classified as a manufactured gamma ray burster, otherwise Valkyrie were all too likely to be summoned by that last Valhalla Call right here and now.

As it stood, light-speed weapons of this nature had one devastating flaw when fighting at significant stellar distances. More than a light second or so and you had to not only be precise with your attack, you also had to be precognitive. Ships moving at the speeds the Valkyrie were capable of could be thousands of kilometers away in the span of a second, often more than that. Granted, their maneuvering variance was much smaller, but even hundreds of kilometers made for a difficult target to hit with a weapon that simply had to be focused to remain lethal.

That was why every ship humans used to date always had guided weapons on board—originally the missiles of the old Los Angeles and Cheyenne Class ships, and now the Hammers themselves. Granted, they didn’t offer a massive level of course correction, but even a couple degrees or so could be the difference between success and ultimate failure.

It almost made him wonder by the enemy didn’t use such weapons, but the truth was he just had to look at the Legendary’s magazine stores to know the answer to that.

If we don’t end this soon, ammo could become a serious issue.

Unlimited ammo concealed many a flaw in a weapon system, in his opinion.

“Reverse our course, circle back the other way with a fifteen degree up tilt,” he said walking over to the helm. “Keep them guessing.”

“Aye, Captain, vectoring back around, fifteen degrees up.”

Of course “up” meant little in space, so SOLCOM had established “up” to be anything that brought a ship unto a path that moved along the Z axis of the Galactic plane. The command brought the big vectored thrusters of the VASIMR drive into play, powerful magnetic fields twisting and manipulating the ship’s main engine power as it, in turn, twisted and turned in space to come about.

Valkyrie followed their lead, but each ship put a variation in their course, throwing some more spanners into the enemy’s targeting works. So far they’d managed to keep the enemy from turning the Gravity Valves into weapons, and mostly managed to avoid the enemy beam weapon, but Roberts knew that was just a matter of time. They needed to end this fight, and fast.

Lieutenant, get it done or get the hell off that ship. We can’t keep playing cat and mouse with these things. We’re not the damn cats in this equation!

*****

The door was solid for the thickness of the material they’d used, but few things stood up to a breaching charge. The shaped explosives blew a man-sized hole in the door, leaving Sorilla plenty impressed that it was still hanging on its brackets as she stepped through with her rifle leading the way.

“This is the strangest ship design I’ve ever seen,” she said as she covered the smaller corridor while Carson followed suit.

“Been in a lot of alien ships, have we?”

Sorilla snorted. “You damn well know what I mean. Who builds a damn ship designed for thirty-foot-tall rock men and four-foot-tall Ghoulies?”

Carson shrugged, the SEAL following her as they made their way up the corridor toward what should be the command deck. “Maybe the Golems are more than we thought?”

“Have an idea on that?” Sorilla asked, eyes forward as she put her rifle to her shoulder and nudged the power all the way up. The little Ghoulies themselves were soft targets, but it was entirely possible that the smaller Goblin-type machines could be crawling through these corridors.

“Well, it just seems to me that we’ve been thinking that they’re machines, right?” Carson asked as he followed, turning often to get a good scan of the path from which they come.

“Yes, so?”

“So maybe they’re not. What if they’re another species? Species Gamma, if you will?”

Sorilla considered it, shaking her head. “People have torn those things apart. We don’t even know how they move, there’s no sign of anything anyone could point to as living.”

“More things on heaven and Earth, ma’am. I’m just saying, everything about this ship looks like a partnership,” Carson said as the reached the end of the corridor and both stopped in shock.

Beyond them was an immense space, far larger than they’d seen the estimates for. Their suits’ telemetry was going insane as they tried to take it in, and Sorilla felt her stomach curling up and trying die in her belly.

“Oh my lord,” Carson mumbled.

The entire space crawled with Ghoulies, Golems, and Goblins, but that wasn’t the shock. It was the fact that it had to be larger than the size of the ship itself! They felt like they were standing on the edge of eternity, staring into the abyss.

And the abyss was, indeed, staring back.

*****

Space and time are two dimensions of the same single universal truth.

Or, perhaps, it is more accurate to say that they are as many as six dimensions of the same truth, depending on how you calculate such things.

One can move up and down, left and right, forward and backward through space. So it is of little surprise, to those who take a moment to ponder such things, that all of those dimensions exist in time as well. Forward and backward, left and right, these are easy enough concepts for a human to understand. Time travel and alternate realities are simple enough to ponder, if rather difficult to achieve or even prove.

Up and down, however, those are confusing dimensions when applied to time.

For those such as the Ross’El, however, and their allies…their true allies, those dimensions were as simple as primary colors and shapes to a child. If anything, it had become clear to many of the Ross that they were in fact losing touch with the dimensional understanding of the more limited species. What motivated those often proved bewildering and totally incomprehensible to the Ross’El and their partners.

That this was so was considered a minor loss at best for those who plumbed secrets of the Universe beyond the ken of more limited species.

At times this was a minor conceit, an appellation of little note, but there were times when the Ross…if pressed, would admit that it was a major blind spot in their social vision.

The trouble with blind spots was the fact that, by definition, you never saw them coming.

*****

“Madre de Dios,” Sorilla swore under her breath as she stood on the edge of an infinite impossibility and tried to figure out what she was seeing and how in the name of all that existed she was supposed to deal with it.

“Tesseract,” Carson muttered in turn. “I never thought I’d see the day…”

Tesseract. She knew the word. Anyone who calculated high level math was at least slightly familiar with the concept. A space larger on the inside than on the out.

What she didn’t know was how the hell she was going to find and disable the main command systems in this impossibly large space, not in the time she had available. She shook her head, so stunned that, had the enemy tried to kill them then, she doubted that she would be able to do much about it.

“It’s too big. We’ll never find it in time,” she mumbled, shock lacing her every breath and word.

Carson was silent for a time, eyeing the mass of people or things he was seeing. “Are you calling an abort, Lieutenant?”

That shocked her from her reverie. Sorilla blinked and considered. It was her first mission in command; to abort was unthinkable! And yet…this was certainly a reason to do the unthinkable, if any such reason were to be found. They were facing an overwhelming force. She could see thousands of enemies just from where she was standing…

Sorilla stopped, her mind blanking for a second.

Why aren’t they attacking? They don’t even seem to see us? What is going on here?

“No,” she said slowly. “No abort.”

“What’s the plan, ma’am?”

“Hold your position,” she ordered. “Give me a moment.”

“Ma’am?”

“Just hold.”

Carson didn’t say anything more as Sorilla broke from position and began to move deeper into the tesseract. He blinked when she vanished from sight and started forward, but her voice came clearly over his suit.

“I said hold.” Her hand came down on his shoulder.

Carson damn near jumped out of his skin, suit and all, as he spun about only to find that she was nowhere in sight. “L…lieutenant?”

“I see it, Carson,” she said, her voice sounding…light and amused. “No. Not see. I feel it. Can’t you feel it?”

“Feel what, ma’am?”

“The Universe, Carson. The Universe itself.”

For the Navy man that he was, Carson knew when he was well out of his depth, and now was the time. “Lieutenant, you’re sounding a little crazy, ma’am.”

Her laugh filled his com. “Oh, Carson, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Watch this.”

“Ma’am? Ma’am!” Carson started to panic. Nothing good was going to come from his boss laughing and saying the equivalent of, “Hey, y’all, watch this.”

Too bad for the SEAL, he didn’t get a say.

*****

Sorilla was walking through a labyrinth she couldn’t see. She could feel it, however. The changes in the fabric of space-time resulted in subtle, and occasionally not-so-subtle, changes in the gradient of local gravity, and her implants were designed specifically to pick those up.

Her computer might have been able to map them, eventually, but she didn’t have time for that, so Sorilla blanked her optical sensors and walked. Her HUD showed motion, threats, all manner of augmented information, but not the light that would lie to her. She stepped around a curve in the continuum and out a hole carved in space and then around the circumference of a globe not much more in diameter than she was tall.

It was utterly illogical, but through it all she made her way to the center where the gradients peeked and the tidal force of gravity was strongest, and then she stopped and once more used her optics to look around.

Sneaky. The command center was here all the time. Was that really a tesseract? Or just a mask? Is there more here than I thought, or less than anyone realizes?

It didn’t matter. She made sure everything was logged as she drew out the shaped charges from her satchel and placed them on the console as she checked around. Thousands of Ghoulies, Goblins, and Golems wandered around her, and none of them looked her direction at all. She didn’t know what to make of it, couldn’t decide if it was reality or illusion she was seeing.

Sorilla stepped back from the console that intel said was the primary control, reaching minimum safe distance in just a few steps. Shaped charges were efficient—they didn’t waste energy away from the target—and so when they blew, she barely registered the shockwave.

The tesseract around her, however, registered it plenty. It folded and twisted, warping reality in ways she imagined being on LSD might do, and then it seemed to implode on itself as it exploded around her all at the same time. Sorilla staggered as the gradients in her area suddenly equalized and she found herself standing in a large, though not shockingly so, room with Chief Carson standing just back by the door.

Sorilla’s eyes widened as her computer core fed her more information, clarifying what she had been feeling with hard math.

“Lieutenant! Are you all right?” Carson took a couple hesitant steps in her direction. “What happened? What happened to the tesseract?”

Sorilla smiled, not one of humor, but one of understanding.

“It was never here, Chief,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t think that was a tesseract.”

“Then what the hell was it?”

“A wormhole. I think we were seeing their homeworld, Chief,” she said seriously. “Their version of SOLCOM.”

“But…” Carson felt his mouth go dry. “That’s…”

“That’s for later,” Sorilla said. “We have to get back to business.”

“Right. Right.” Carson nodded. “We have to get to the others and make sure that team two has taken out engineering.”

“I don’t think we need to worry much about them,” Sorilla said as they began to run back down the hall. “I think that there are much fewer troops stationed on this ship than we ever thought possible!”

“You think they’re drone ships then?”

“No, no.” Sorrilla shook her head. “I think they’re doorways.”

*****

“Captain! The target ship has lost all acceleration!”

Roberts rose bolt upright from his chair, By Gods, she did it!

He hadn’t been in love with the plan, had actively thought it lunacy from the start. A small squad of boarders, no matter how heavily armed, wasn’t taking over a ship. Oh, he knew that they didn’t plan to take over anything—the idea was to disable and tow it home, in essence. Even so, it seemed ludicrous, but here they were. The only thing that had ever killed the acceleration of these monsters in the past was massive degrees of overkill, and they hadn’t struck it with a shot!

“Re-adjust maneuvering plans around the remaining ship! Close range and take that bastard out of my sky!”

“Aye, sir! Adjusting course calculations!”

The two ships had been playing one off the other, forcing him to keep his ships back as they covered each other’s blind spots too well, but now he could close the range. With only one warship and a few of the smaller Ghoulie ships defending, it would shortly be over.

“Target the remaining warship and saturate her defenses. I want them gone.”

*****

Task Force Valkyrie had been working together for a long time, for the most part. There were new people assigned since the new ships had come from the slips, but the commanders, captains, and senior officers had all been drawn from the ranks of Valkyrie veterans at Admiral Brooke’s request. Her reasoning was simple: People who trusted each other, and their commanders, worked better in the heat of the moment.

So now, with clear orders and an opening to pursue, every ship in the taskforce lunged into the mix with clear intent and obvious zeal. Their rail gun tubes glowed red with residual heat from Hammer launches, and they kept firing as they charged. The alien point defense system was effective, but all systems had a saturation point, and with only one ship left that seemingly packed the beam weapon that had destroyed the Olympus, the end of the fight was a forgone conclusion.

Valve countermeasures swamped the area around the ships as the taskforce closed, and with those came an end to the point defense. The remaining Ghoulie ships withered under a tidal barrage that tore their ships asunder, leaving one lone Ghoulie ship floating dead in space with Valkyrie arrayed around it.

The urge to celebrate only lasted a few moments, however, because the instant their computers had more cycles for crunching numbers not related to battle, alarms wailed across every ship in the force.

*****

“Now what?” Roberts hissed, striding across the bridge.

They’d just eliminated their targets, captured an alien space ship, and the alarms choose then to wail? It just wasn’t right, by God. There should be some sort of break between crises!

“Incoming contacts, Captain! Moving at medium relativistic speeds and climbing! We’re running calculations now, sir, but they can’t be more than a couple hours out, if that,” the scanner tech said tersely. “My god, there’s a lot of them.”

“How many?”

“Thirty we’ve identified so far, count is climbing.”

Roberts closed his eyes. To have come so close and now… He opened his eyes. “Can we outrun them to the jump point?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Get me the admiral.”

*****

Nadine Brooke could feel the bottom dropping right out of her stomach as she looked at the numbers. They’d know that there was such a fleet out and about, of course, and she’d been ready and committed to engaging them to the last to defend Earth space, but they had been so close to accomplishing one of the primary tasks and now…

Now she didn’t know.

She had to make a decision, and it had to be made now, because if they were to try and get back to the jump point…either to defend it or to attempt to disrupt it, they had to move now.

“Contact Aida’s team. Tell them to get the hell out of there,” she decided. “We’re abandoning the mission.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

*****

On the alien ship, Francis Bean couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“Say again, Legendary? We just stopped this sucker dead, that’s what we were sent to do, and now you want us to leave it here?”

Lieutenant Aida had just reappeared with Carson in tow, and she was climbing into her machine as Bean objected. The Zero One Unit shuddered back into action, rising to its feet as Sorilla brought it back online.

“What’s going on?” she demanded, noting that the tactical network was lit up, most of it with colorful language.

“Legendary just ordered us to ditch and run!”

“What?” Sorilla blurted. “Why? No, never mind. Legendary, this is Aida.”

“Lieutenant, get your team out of there. We have a fleet inbound, and we can’t spare any more time. If you’re not moving in thirty seconds, we’ll have to leave you!”

“Shit!” Sorilla blurted, kicking her team into action. “Roger, Legendary, we’re on the move. What is going on? I need to recover my second group before we can abandon this heap!”

“Forty-plus enemy battleships inbound, Lieutenant. The admiral says we’re moving, so we’re moving.”

“Everyone, move it!” Sorilla ordered, mind racing as she kicked her team into gear. “Anyone see any more of the Golems?”

“There were two firing on us a few minutes ago, El-Tee, but they just shut down for no reason.”

Controlled from home, then. Drones, not people. Probably. She wasn’t sure, something was gnawing at her, like she had part of the answer but was missing a key piece of the puzzle. Sorilla shook it off, she’d work it out later.

“Roger that. Belt it, boys, we need to pick up team two and haul ass!”

“You mean we did this shit for nothing, El-Tee?”

Sorilla grinned, a death’s head grin. “Oh hell no. We learned a lot, soldier. They may get to keep the ship, but I think they’d almost have rather lost it in the fight. Does anyone have contact with team two?”

“Negative, ma’am. Lost contact when they went in deep.”

“Damn it,” Sorilla swore. “Okay, the ship is quiet. You guys get the hell out of here. I’ll find them and be right on your tail.”

“Like hell, Sister,” Frank told her in no uncertain terms. “We all get off this heap or none of us do.”

Sorilla grimaced, but honestly, they didn’t have time to fight.

So the team thudded down the hall, not even attempting to negotiate stealthily through the ship, and at the branch where they had to pick between heading for the outside or finding their missing teammates, they didn’t hesitate. They ran deeper into the ship, intent on finding the others.

“Lieutenant Aida, Legendary. Your signal is breaking up. We can’t wait any longer, the enemy ships are too close! You have to get out of that ship!”

Sorilla glanced to either side at the Titans running alongside her, then over her shoulder. The others just nodded back, the big helmet-shaped heads of the war machines bobbing with certainty. Sorilla sighed, but nodded back.

“Legendary, Aida. Get out of here,” she said. “We’ll hold the ship as long as we can. Send the Socrates back for us if you can.”

“Lieutenant…”

“We’re not getting off here in time. Get your butts moving before that fleet gets onto you!” Sorilla swore. “They’re not going to blow us out of the sky! We’re in one of their ships! Just don’t forget us!”

There was a long silence before the controller’s voice came back.

“Understood, Lieutenant Aida. Wilco and out.”

“Legendary! Am transmitting vital intel. Confirm receipt!” Sorilla sent urgent, sending everything she’d recorded while in the enemy command center, along with as much of her speculations as she could. “Say again Legendary, confirm receipt!”

There was a long pause before the Legendary came back, “Receipt confirmed. Admiral says good work and god’s speed, Lieutenant. Legendary out.”

The channel went dead then, and Sorilla looked around at the men of her team.

“Well, we’re now the proud owners of an alien battleship. Cheers.”

The laughter from the group was a relief, though she could hear the undercurrent of strain as well. Sorilla didn’t know if she’d made the right choice, but it was the right choice for her. Whether it was the right one for her men…well, that was something she didn’t think she’d ever be able to say. She knew one thing, however: As a sergeant she’d not have run out on half her team, be damned to the consequences.

She sure as hell wasn’t going to start as a lieutenant.

*****

At 800 gravities, you lost sight of things in your rearview in a hurry, but Admiral Brooke found herself staring at an empty bit of space that had once held an alien spacecraft and rethinking every decision she’d made to this point.

Valkyrie was running hard now, but their enemy had the lead time and they were going to get caught. It was just a question of picking the ground upon which they’d made a stand. Likely, their last stand.

The enemy fleet—and it was a fleet, of that there was no doubt—consisted of more than three times the number of this at her command. In open space, going toe to toe, Valkyrie didn’t stand a chance even with a full load out, which they simply no longer had. The fight with the few enemy ships they had just conquered had bled their munitions down to a little over half, and that didn’t bode well for their chances against an enemy fleet, even if it did consist of ships of a different class.

No, our only chance is to make the jump point before them and try to bolt back to Hayden or, more likely, make our stand at the jump point itself.

That last option tore at her, because she didn’t have a good solution there.

They could expend the rest of the gravity pulse devices, disrupt the jump point, and try to block or delay the enemy further, but they weren’t at a choke point. The most it would do was extend the enemy supply lines by another jump or two, and at this point that hardly mattered.

They’re going to get past us, Brooke thought with a cold pit forming in her stomach.

Honestly, that made her feel a little less horrible about leaving Aida and her team on that ship. The odds were they’d live longer than those on Valkyrie. Maybe the Socrates would even pick them up. Anything was possible.

Valkyrie, however, was outnumbered at the least, and possibly outclassed…though, she’d defy anyone to say that to her face and make it stick. At three to one, though, she didn’t see an out for her people.

She looked over the numbers, recognizing that the overtake was going to be…close.

We’re going to be on the jump point when they intercept… Can I use that?

They’d been exposed to incoming fire for a time before that, but she focused more on the jump point as well as the new math she’d learned from Aion. If it checked out, not that she’d have a chance to test it, then maybe…

Oh my.

Brooke stared at the numbers for a long moment, then reached to her console to open a squadron-wide conference with her captain.

I hope they can forgive me for this. All of them.

Chapter XXI

Parath swore as reports began to filter in from the captured alien ship.

The fighting had turned furious after the aliens landed their assault craft, unsurprisingly perhaps, but for now it was contained to the lower decks of the ship. The Lucians would hold it as long as possible, of that he had no doubt, but he was facing significant problems of his own above and beyond that.

The alien squadron had been unrelenting, likely because they were well aware that if he could shake any of his forces loose he could end the assault on the captured ship in a few moments for all intents and purposes.

He’d lost four of his best ships, and three others were likely headed for the breakers even if they survived this engagement. In return, of course, he’d inflicted five totally destroyed alien ships and likely crippled another. The aliens were fast, but lacked maneuverability compared to the Parithalian ships, and once they’d moved away from the alien ship, they were no longer pinned against it in some futile defense that had come into play on their side.

It was going to be a disastrous engagement, however, no matter how he looked at it.

Even so, Parath steeled himself to bleed the enemy here while he could. Every ship he eliminated here was one less that could be marshaled in defense of the alien world he and his had been tasked with taking. The Master of Fleets had the main group less than three jumps from the nexus world, and once he took that world, they’d have full access to the rest of the galactic arm beyond it.

Even if Parath and his were to fall here, the Alliance would emerge in a solid position to end this foolish conflict and, hopefully, learn precisely what the Ross’El were up to at the same time.

“Instruct the Victory to watch their dorsal flank,” he called. “They have one of the alien ships maneuvering to get in the blind section of their weapons!”

“Yes, Master!”

These people learn fast. Too damned fast.

He was perspiring, though the deck was cooled to just below what most would consider comfortable. The conflict was taking every bit of his focus, and far too much of his time.

Master of Fleets, end this as you can. These people will cost us much more if we do not finish this while we have the advantage.

*****

With the Main Fleet

The Master of Fleets stood on the deck of his flagship, the Everlasting Glory, and glowered out at the ships fleeing from them. They’d happened on the enemy fleet just as it finished eliminating the small contingent of Ross’El ships that had proceeded ahead of him against orders from Master of Ships Parath. The loss of the Ross vessels was no loss, but it was still an act that had to be answered for.

“Approaching weapon ranges, Master of Fleets.”

“You may instruct the ships to fire as they can,” he said, a regal tilt to his sharply defined features.

“Yes, Master.”

The first of his ships opened fire moments later, plasma bolts crossing space at just under the speed of light. The enemy ships didn’t bother dodging. In fact, they were flying so close in formation that they were all but impossible to miss. The Master of Fleets shook his head at the amateurish flying. Parath has become overly cautious if he believes these people to be a true threat, let alone real ship handlers.

He choked a moment later, however, when the blasts seemed to strike dead on and yet none of his ship’s instruments registered any damage.

“How?”

“It is their drive system, Master,” came the answer. “It functions much like the magnetic belt that protects many planets from solar radiation. The plasma is redirected and blown away by the thrust of their drives.”

Clever. More than expected, perhaps Parath had a point. Very well, it will take slightly longer, but so be it.

“Surround them,” he ordered.

“Yes, Master.”

The Alliance Fleet spread wider, the ships at the outer edges increasing their acceleration beyond safe limits as they moved to surround their enemy from all sides.

*****

USV Legendary

“The fleet has redeployed…. They’re moving to englobe us, Admiral.”

Brooke nodded absently. She supposed it was inevitable. The first rule of space combat, as learned since encountering the aliens, was “the center cannot hold.” At the center of an englobed position, a ship, or task group, had to deal with exponentially more space than their enemy did. It taxed computers to the point where they slowed down, unable to process the sheer level of data they had to work with, and began to make mistakes.

SOLCOM SOP was to avoid englobement at all costs, as it inevitably mean defeat even by an inferior force. She was about to rewrite that SOP.

“Let them,” she said. “Instruct the captains, reduce acceleration, ten percent. Initiate Last Stand.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The engines of the remaining ships of Task Force Valkyrie gradually reduced output as they approached the jump point. She hoped that their opponents would mistake the move for them preparing to jump, but that wasn’t the intent at all.

It took a few long minutes, but slowly the enemy ships pulled abreast of her own.

Soon…

They couldn’t simply turn and shoot at her; they’d lose their acceleration advantage if they did that. No, they had to get ahead, match speed, and then turn to take their shots. At the speeds they were moving, they’d have to do it from close as well, otherwise any fraction of a percentage change in acceleration in any direction would foul their shot.

And I want you close. Closer. Come into my web…

“They’re firing!”

“Point defense!” she ordered, completely unnecessarily. Her people knew their jobs.

The first rail guns, Metalstorm turrets, and other light armaments opened up as the plasma bolts flashed in. The lighter weapons were totally unsuited to ship-to-ship combat, but their rapid fire capacity made them superb at point defense. They intercepted the incoming fire by throwing a curtain of steel and iron into space and let the enemy fire waste itself on that instead of their ships.

“The flank is pulling ahead, they’re completing the englobement maneuver.”

“Weapons free. Hit them with the Hammers.”

“Aye, ma’am! All ships, weapons free! I say again, all ships, weapons free!”

The legendary began to shudder slightly underfoot as she and the other ships of Valkyrie began to pour the last of their Hammers into space.

“Circle the wagons!”

“Aye aye, ma’am!”

The ships of Valkyrie ceased acceleration altogether, turning to bring their primary weapons to bear to cover the full perimeter. It actually weakened their defenses, but it would look like desperation to their enemies, if Brooke were right.

Of course, that was because it was desperation.

Just not the sort they were no doubt expecting.

*****

“Alien ships have initiated defensive positions.”

The Master of Fleets smiled very slightly. “I see it. They should have kept running. They may have escaped with some of their vessels. Close ranks, continue firing.”

“Yes, Master!”

The more than fifty heavy class ships of his fleet completed their englobement maneuver, closing in on the now beleaguered ships of the alien squadron with a vengeance. Their fire rate tripled as they closed, and the answer rage of defensive fire from the alien ships lit up local space like the light from a million small suns.

It was an impressive and ferocious display, but a futile one.

*****

“Computers overloading, ma’am! We’re losing defensive coverage!”

“All ships go to manual control!”

“Aye, ma’am! Manual control! I say again, manual control on all defensive systems!”

The point defense perimeter slipped as the weapons moved to manual control, but fewer shots made it through all the same as men and women took individual control of their guns and continued the defense of the ships.

The center cannot hold.

Bullshit. We’ll hold.

Brooke glanced at the map of local space, eyes to the jump point they were gliding into. Valkyrie were almost entirely within now. They could try a jump out, but there was no guessing where they’d arrive. They hadn’t been able to come in at a speed or vector that would allow a safe jump.

If they did, they would only be killed at the far end when the alien ships caught up to them anyway, so it hardly mattered.

“We’ve lost the Odysseus!”

Brooke winced as she looked to the telemetry system in time to see the USV Odysseus break up under heavy, concentrated fire. The Odyssey wasn’t the only one, she was just the first of many. The Befrost was in nearly as bad a shape, as were several others.

On the tactical map, the enemy closed as her ships glided entirely into the jump point.

“Stand by all remaining GPDs! Half power to jump drives!”

“Aye, ma’am! All ships report ready on GPDs, drives powering.”

Brooke closed her eyes, then keyed in a personal comm. “Chief. Launch the drone.”

On the other side, the Navy master chief in engineering responded, “Aye, ma’am. Drone away.”

That’s it then.

Brooke opened her eyes and saw that the enemy had closed to within the jump point.

“Launch all GPDs and blow our jump drives!”

*****

In deep space, there is both eternal light and darkness that exist as one. The stars never go out, yet their light cannot hope to illuminate either. Yet here, in this one place, the light was winning over the darkness. Explosions silently tore space asunder, lights flared between two great fleets of ships as the battle raged.

Then the smaller fleet launched one last attack.

Barely a hundred small devices launched into space, exploding well away from their enemies’ ships. The white light was the birth of a hundred mini suns, but harmless at those ranges and in that environment. Harmless at first, but those weapons were designed not to destroy ships, but space itself. They twisted and folded and warped space and time around the two fleets.

This, alone, would have done little, but then the smaller group of ships blew out their own drives and utterly rewrote the laws of physics in that local area for a split second.

When that fraction of an instant had passed, and the blinding light had begun to die out again, where over seventy-five warships had fought, there were now none.

In the emptiness of deep space, the darkness once more gained ascendency.

*****

With The Secondary Task Group

“Master of Ships!”

Parath twisted from where he was directing a counterattack on the enemy squadron. “What is it?”

“We’ve lost contact with the main fleet!”

Parath paled, turning a pasty blue, and rushed over. “Show me!”

He paled further, if it were possible, as he saw the data for himself. The entire fleet was gone.

Impossible.

Impossible or not, however, every instrument he had linked to the main fleet now registered no signal from them. Even in jump space, there would be a signal.

The only answer was that the fleet, the Master of Fleets, was…gone.

Parath was too stunned to even think for a long moment, until a cry from behind him shook him free of it.

“We lost the Victory!”

He forced his attention back, eyes to the battle. Shakily he stepped back to the control and linked to his ships. “All ships. Pull back. Disengage from combat.”

“Master?”

His aide looked shocked, and he didn’t blame her.

“We can’t win now. Even if we eliminate them here, there’s no victory for us. This fight is a waste,” he said. “The Alliance was wasted too much here. It will be a dozen intervals before we can mount another such expedition, and for what? To lose them as well? Not until we know what happened. No, all ships are to break contact.”

“Yes, Master.”

Parath considered for a moment. “Do we have records of the enemy transmission frequencies?”

“Yes…”

“Open a channel on them.”

*****

“Captain…I think you need to hear this.”

Pete Green turned, frowning at his com officer. “What is it?”

“Transmission in the clear, sir. Not one of ours.”

The only thing out here is… We’ve never detected any com link from them. What the…?

“Save it and we’ll analyze it later,” he ordered. They certainly didn’t have time to puzzle over alien chatter just then.

“Captain, it’s in English.”

That stopped him short. “Put it on audio!”

There was a moment before it came through, then the speakers crackled and a strange voice came through.

“Alien vessels, I am Master of Ships Parath of the Alliance of Known Worlds. I am ordering my ships to disengage from this battle. If you pursue, we will defend ourselves. I request a cease of firing.”

“The message repeats, Captain.”

Green hit a button. “Admiral…”

“I’ve heard it, Captain. Pull back to the Terra.”

“Sir…”

“Let’s give them a chance. They’re talking, Captain.”

Green nodded, mouth dry. This was the first time they had a hint that the aliens even could talk. “Withdraw. Cease firing and pull back!”

“Aye aye, Sir!”

*****

“Get down!”

Washington had to tackle the young marine he’d busted out of the makeshift brig, bringing them both tumbling to the deck as a blast scorched the bulkhead above them. He pushed himself back up, patting the marine on the back, “Kid, watch yourself or you’re gonna end yourself.”

The clearly frightened marine nodded shakily as Ton snuck a glance around the corner.

“They’ve got a choke point up ahead, Lieutenant. We’re going to have to bring up some heavier artillery.” He called over his comms.

“Roger that, sir.” Crow answered. “I’ve got some kit on the way.”

“Good man.”

So far the retaking of the USV Terra was going more or less according to plan, which was to say that the plan got tossed out the window pretty much on first contact with the enemy. The Charlies had tried to contain them on the flight deck, but the Terra was a human ship and they just didn’t know all the ins and outs. Breaking out had been a challenge, but not remotely an insurmountable one.

It had been far tougher to break out the prisoners, as they’d been spread around, and honestly Ton didn’t think they’d even gotten half of them yet. They’d gotten lucky, though, and found where most of the Terra’s marines were held.

Alright, lucky may not have been the right word since there were three times more guards on the Marines than anyone else apparently, but they still found them. Breaking them out had bolstered the morale and numbers of the boarding group, and now there was a real fight going on.

“Sir…”

“What is it, son?” Ton asked, turning back to the Marine.

“I think you need to see this, Sir.”

Ton frowned under his helm, but snuck another look around the corner the Marine was looking down. He stiffened when he realized that there was no one there, no shots being fired, nothing but an eerie calm.

“Lieutenant, we may have a problem here.”

“Is your problem that the enemy just decided to cut and run?” Crow asked dryly.

“Shit.” Ton swore.

That couldn’t be good. Nothing that looked this good could possibly be good.

He was about to order his own men to regroup so they could try and figure out what the hell was going on when a priority order broke through his filters.

“All hands, cease combat operations. Enemy forces are withdrawing, do not… I say again, not engage further unless fired upon by order of the Admiral… Message repeats…”

Ton lowered his rifle, looked around as if lost, and spoke out in the clear.

“Could someone please tell me what the fuck just happened?”

Epilogue

On the alien ship, Sorilla used her Titan to force open the hatch they’d entered through, marching out to the blown-open section of the hull. Maneuvering the big machine out and onto the hull was a bit of a fun challenge. She stomped across the hull of the alien craft, surveying it like a conquering hero.

The sun was rising over the bow of the ship, a white ball far in the distance, and she paused there to watch it.

The aliens on board had continued to resist shortly after the squadron had left, but without the Golems, they were no match for the Titans, not even with their portable Valve weapons. That there were damn few of them on board helped a lot, she had to admit. Whatever the case, they had the ship under control now, for better or worse.

She evacuated the cockpit of her Titan and popped the hatch, pulling herself out and climbing up on the shoulder of the big war machine. She keyed into the Titan’s comm system, sending out a relay transponder signal, and then just stretched a bit. She’d been locked in the eighty ton machine for too long and it felt simply amazing to move around freely again, even if she was still breathing suit air.

The sunrise over the bow of the alien starship was a gorgeous sight, though not remotely worth the price of admission. Her comm box squawked a reply, the signal she’d come out to hear, and Sorilla relaxed a bit as she settled into the crook of her Titan’s neck and just watched the stars while she waited.

Sorilla was still sitting there when the shadow of the USV Socrates eclipsed the sun and settled over the big alien ship. She looked up from the shoulder of her Titan and waved more than a little cheekily at the immense research ship. It moved slowly into position over the alien cruiser, big outer doors sliding open as crews and cables began to snake out. They all had their jobs to do, and Sorilla was just glad that her immediate one was over.

Mission accomplished.

I just hope that the Legendary and others made it too.

*****

AION Facility, SOLCOM

“The alien alliance have actually sent a peace envoy?”

“Yes, sir.” The messenger nodded. “Near as we can tell, from their hinting, they want to know what happened to their war fleet.”

“Do we know?”

“No, Sir. There is no sign of either fleet, we have ships scouring the jump linked systems, but whatever happened it’s like they were wiped clean from the universe. Valkyre did get off a messenger drone, sir, but they must have been in a rush because it was damaged in transit.”

“Was anything recoverable?”

“Just one line, sir.”

The admiral frowned. “What was it?”

“Valkyrie reports: By the Gods…the center held.”

About the Author

Evan Currie is the self-published author of four books, Thermals, On Silver Wings, Valkyrie Rising, and Odyssey One. A long time fan of science fiction, his love of epic storylines led him to put several million words onto the net in the pursuit of fanfiction stories, and eventually led to the novel you just finished.

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Table of Contents

Foreword

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter

About the Author