Ghost Wing

The Ragnarok Saga Book 4

Kevin McLaughlin

Role of the Hero Publishing Company

Exclusive for fans of the Accord series!

Find out how the story started… When Captain Nicholas Stein set out to stop one enemy ship, and set in motion events which shaped the course of human history for decades to come.

http://kevinomclaughlin.com/accordoffire/

1

The alien ship burst into regular space in a frenzy of suddenly released particles as the bubble of warped space it was maintaining around itself popped. The effect was brilliant - a flash of light that could be seen across the solar system. The arrival was unannounced. The visitor made no contact with the residents of the planets around that star, remaining instead in orbit around one of the outer worlds.

“We’ve tried to reach out to them?” Thomas Stein asked. He watched the view screen intently as the recording sped up to show a time-lapse of the continued activity around the ship.

The command-and-control center of the United Nations naval forces was more than busy. He’d never seen such intense activity in all the years he’d been there. This was the day they’d all known was coming. The eventuality they’d all prepared against, planned for, and dreaded.

“Yes, Admiral. No reply.” Captain Fairhaven was an excellent aide. She always had the information he needed at her fingertips before he asked for it. Thomas wasn’t sure how she managed it.

“What’s the signal lag?” Thomas asked.

“A little over four hours, sir. They’ve had time to respond if they were going to do so,” Fairhaven said.

“Damn.” Thomas waved his fingers in the air. The screen responded to the gesture command, zooming in closer. The image was fuzzy at this resolution, but smaller objects were zipping through space around the more massive ship. Whoever they were, they weren’t just sitting there. They were building something, but he couldn’t tell what it was.

“We think it’s a ring, sir.”

The voice startled Thomas, coming from near his left elbow. He turned so quickly that he almost knocked over the small man standing beside him. Bespectacled, thin, with sandy hair that had to be longer than regulations allowed, the man was nonetheless in a uniform.

“You are?” Thomas asked.

“Commander Max Knauf, sir. I’m - I do a lot of our deep space research, sir,” the young man replied.

From the looks of him, Thomas thought he did little else besides research. Everyone who spent a lot of time in space ended up looking somewhat pale, but Knauf seemed more so than the norm. A bookworm picked up by the service for his brains. Thom could respect that. Those were the folks who gave him one of the most potent weapons in battle, after all. Information was often more important than missiles.

“A ring, you said?” Thomas asked.

“Yes sir,” Knauf replied. He took the question as permission to take over the display, splashing a series of images from his tablet up onto the large screen. They flashed on the screen in sequence, showing the past construction, current level, and then what Thomas assumed were predictions of the future build. Eventually, the image stopped changing, settling on a computer-generated picture of a vast ring floating beside the planet Neptune, the alien vessel in space beside it.

Thomas stared, frowning. “That doesn’t look good.”

“No, sir. We’re not sure if it’s a weapon or something else. I’m leaning toward the something else option, though,” Knauf said.

“Why?”

“Because I think those points you see at the segment junctions are for power generation. They’re aimed inward, not out,” Knauf said. “We know too little about their technology to be sure, but my best guess is we’re looking at some kind of gate.”

Thomas wished he could scoff at the idea. It sounded like something straight out of science fiction. But they knew too little about these aliens to leave any possibility off the table. They weren’t even sure which star they’d come from - only that they’d been here before, and that their return would probably be bad for humanity.

“Why a gate?” Thomas asked.

“My best guess is they plan to bring in more ships, sir,” Knauf said. “That ring will be large enough to bring in vessels several times bigger than the one they sent.”

They had to destroy that ring before it was operational. Gate or weapon didn’t really matter. Either could spell the end for all of them. But the adversary had picked their base of operations well. Neptune was so damned far away! Thomas did some mental math, trying to figure out how long it would take their ships to arrive.

“About three months to get a ship out there?” Thomas asked. “How long until they complete the ring?”

“We can make it in two, actually. I did the math, and it would be hard, but we could get a few ships out there in about sixty days,” Knauf said.

“Well, that’s good news.”

“But at present rate of construction they should have the ring complete in less than thirty,” Knauf finished.

“Damn,” Thomas said. He rubbed his jaw, thinking furiously. All the work they’d done to prepare for this day, out the window because the aliens had done none of the things they expected them to.

Five years before, humanity had learned that there was life in other solar systems. Earth was given an ultimatum: come under the control of one being, and the aliens would negotiate. Fail to do so, and they would consider humans a threat to eliminate. The leader of the United Nations had moved heaven and Earth trying to bring all of humanity under his sway. He’d murdered, lied, started wars, and committed just about every evil action Thomas could think of. But he couldn’t entirely blame Choi for having done all that. He was trying to preserve humanity.

While Thomas would rather see Earth burn than humanity give up all the good they’d been able to accomplish. He couldn’t help but recall the old quote - the man who will give up freedom for security deserves neither.

They’d built up the fleet, pouring resources into new ships. The latest - and best - was a massive vessel under construction with what should be a working Alcubierre drive. The engines would create a bubble of warped space around the ship, enabling it to cross vast distances in less time than had ever been possible before. The Intrepid was a first-strike weapon, a tool with which they could go to other stars and meet the aliens on their home ground. If only anyone knew which star they were from!

The Intrepid might be their only hope in this scenario, though. Once finished it could cross the distance from Earth to Neptune in minutes. “Fairhaven, I want all priority placed on getting the Intrepid launch-ready. We need that ship.”

“The drive is still untested, sir,” she replied. “But I’ve already ordered rotating shifts around the clock to finish all essential work.”

Knauf coughed.

“I suppose you’ve already done the math on the Intrepid’s completion?” Thomas said. He couldn’t help but crack a grin as Knauf blushed and looked down at his boots. That was a yes.

“Yes, sir. Unfortunately, even with round-the-clock effort, we’re looking at about thirty-two days. Plus or minus three.”

“Damn, that close?” Thomas said. “We’ll have to make sure it’s minus the three and hope we get there before they finish the ring.”

He tried to imagine what the worst-case scenario might be, were they to complete the ring. How many ships might this race have that they could send through a portal? Dozens, certainly. Maybe scores or even hundreds. It was a nightmare. Their fleet was only a few dozen ships. Given that they were assuming the aliens had technological superiority, the odds were awful.

“There might be another way to get out there,” Knauf said, his voice soft.

“How?” Thomas asked, rounding on the man.

“I’ve been thinking about this ever since we first detected the ship’s arrival,” Knauf said. “The problem isn’t our engines. We could reach Neptune in about three days if we could burn the engines at maximum the whole way.”

“But the crew would be dead, which defeats the purpose,” Fairhaven said. The acceleration would kill a human, even with the best protection available.

“Right. But what if we didn’t send a crew?” Knauf asked.

“Our computer automation is good, but not good enough to survive combat. The aliens would take the ship out long before it got into range to do any damage,” Thomas said. “If you’ve got a point, make it.”

“There might be a way to send people without sending people. Have you heard of Valhalla Online?” Knauf asked.

Thomas recalled hearing something like that in a briefing once. It hadn’t seemed especially important, an interesting footnote of technology. The invention of technology enabling humans to upload their consciousness to computer systems had rocked the world. For a brief moment, everyone thought they’d finally attained immortality. Then they discovered that an uploaded consciousness could be cloned over and over. One human being could become a hundred, or a thousand. There was no practical limit. This was first noticed when a primary election was thrown wildly off when someone cast thousands of digital persona ballots. All effectively from the same person, but each one a different thinking, feeling copy of the original.

Laws went into effect almost immediately stripping all rights from digital personae. They couldn’t vote or own property. They weren’t considered people, but software, owned by someone. This had created its own set of problems, with near-slavery of digital personae taking place in some countries.

“You want to use uploaded minds?” Thomas asked.

“Not just any minds. The Army’s experiments indicate it takes months for a mind to acclimate to the digital environment. It’s too late to upload, say, a group of our best star-fighter pilots. That would have been my first pick,” Knauf said. “But what about minds which were uploaded a while ago? Valhalla Online is an artificial afterlife, a place for rich people who wanted to hedge their bets to upload their minds so they could get an afterlife. Because the game involves combat, the US Army was involved from very early on. They have a few minds uploaded in there, and they’ve tracked the progress of VO carefully.”

Thomas saw the practical applications at once. Clone a digital mind and you could have an infinite number of combat pilots or tank drivers, with no cost in human lives. If it worked. If people were willing to allow such a thing to happen. But under UN law all weapons had to be controlled by a person.

“We can’t,” Thomas said simply.

“I know about the law,” Knauf said, nodding. “Which is more important? Following that rule, or getting to the ring?”

Without law, they were lost. But Thomas knew better than most that sometimes the rules were in the way of surviving. He might be tasked with upholding those rules now, but that didn’t mean he could not find a way around them.

“How were you planning to approach them?” Thomas asked.

“The Army has an officer with an uploaded avatar,” Knauf said.

“The person is still alive?” Thomas wondered how they’d managed that. From everything he’d heard about Valhalla Online, all the digital minds uploaded there were of dead people.

“It was a unique occurrence. I thought we might ask the officer to speak with her avatar,” Knauf said.

It could work. Thomas tried to figure out how he would feel, speaking to someone who was literally a copy of himself. It was an uncomfortable thought, but he also had the sense it might be the most convincing person he could speak with.

“Make it happen. I’m putting you in charge of it. See to it - personally,” Thomas said.

“Me?” Knauf squeaked.

Thomas lifted both eyebrows and stared at Knauf, who quickly understood he was being dismissed. He dashed away, leaving Thomas to stare at the screen again. He watched the aliens continue their construction. Like bees buzzing around a hive, little ships darted around, setting up the framework for what would finish as a massive construct.

The clock was ticking.

2

Afireball splashed against the wall just a few feet from Sam’s head. She ducked instinctively. When she rose, it was to send her own blast of flame back at the enemy. She didn’t think it connected. They were at a stalemate.

“Gurgle! Can you take out that caster?” Sam called out.

“Gurgle do.” The dragon beside her launched into the air, winging down from the wall and breathing ice across the enemy ranks.

Sam smiled. Nothing like a dragon flying by overhead to make the other side look for cover. Gurgle was only one of her secret weapons, though. The opposing force was making their big push. It was time to push back. She stuck her sword into the air and made a circle with it, then aimed it toward the enemy ranks.

“Black Knights! Let’s finish this!” Sam shouted. She rushed forward with a yell, her guild members’ shouts joining hers as they crashed into the other army like an unstoppable wave.

This, she was good at. Sam felt in her element in this place, leading these people. She parried a sword slash with her own blade and stabbed, forcing the other fighter back a step. The enemy line was crumbling. She spotted their leader just ahead and pushed her way closer to him.

“You’re going down this time, Grimalf!” Sam called out, laughing.

“Like the last three days? Not this time, Samantha. Look!” Grimalf shouted back. He pointed his sword.

Sam looked at the hillside where he was directing her attention. A new band of troops was pushing forward from hiding, attacking her left flank. She didn’t think it would be enough to overcome her people, but it was a sneaky move. Much more thought than Grim usually put into his tactics. He was more of a brute-force sort of guy.

“Devious. I’m impressed,” Sam said. She slashed out toward his head with her blade.

He blocked. “I’m learning from the best!”

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” Sam replied with a grin. “Loser buys the first round?”

“As usual.”

Gurgle was already banking over the new attackers, coating two of them with ice and distracting the rest. Sam was confident he would slow the advance long enough for the rest of her people to react. Grimalf was getting better, but her team was still the best. She feinted at his head and then whipped her sword around to the other side of his body, slicing his leg just below his armor. Grimalf winced and took a step back. Sam pressed the attack with a flurry of blows he barely blocked. She smiled, sensing how rapidly her opponent was tiring. It was time to finish this fight.

All at once everything faded around her. Sam blinked, trying to figure out what had happened. The hills, the fields, both armies - all of it was gone. She stood on a surface she couldn’t see, mist obscuring everything from her knees down. The same pale grey fog colored everything as far as she could see. The place reminded her a bit of the Helheim zone, but even that place had some objects scattered about as reference points. This limbo had none.

She’d been all over Valhalla Online, but this place was like nothing Sam had seen before.

“Hello?” she called out. Her voice vanished into the mist without an echo. “Is anyone out there?”

There was no reply. Sam sheathed her sword. She could draw the weapon quickly enough again if she needed it, but there were no apparent threats, so she felt foolish with the blade in her hand.

The mists swirled. Were they parting up ahead? Was there something moving out there? She couldn’t be sure, but better to go out looking for something than standing in one place forever. Sam’s first step was a cautious one. She couldn’t see what was under her feet. It was hard. Her feet didn’t sink into it. But it didn’t feel like any normal surface she could recall.

It supported her weight readily enough. She stalked forward, growing more confident with each stride. She’d figure out how she’d come to be in this place - and who brought her there. It was probably a who. Usually, Sam found her troubles came down to someone screwing with her life.

Whoever it was this time was going to regret it, same as the rest.

“I told you she’d move,” came a familiar voice from behind her. “Better go talk to her now before she’s really pissed. Take it from me, you don’t want her to get angry with you.”

Sam turned in place and saw…herself. Her own face stared back at her. Her body stood there, dressed in an Army uniform instead of the armor she wore. She relaxed a little, realizing who she was looking at right away. If she was involved, it couldn’t be that bad.

“Hi, sis,” the other Samantha called out.

The little man standing there with her looked back and forth between the two of them like he wasn’t sure which one to address first. His eyes were wide, but he didn’t look stupid. Far from it, there was a curiosity burning in those eyes that made Sam chuckle under her breath. She was pretty sure the stranger was responsible for bringing her to this place. But she trusted the other Samantha like she’d only trust herself.

Which made sense, since from a certain point of view that was her other self. As far as Sam knew, she was the only existing copy of a human mind where the human being copied was also still alive. The Samantha standing in front of her was a projection from the physical world into her virtual space.

They might call each other sisters, but they were much closer than that. Everything the physical Samantha had experienced and known over the course of her life, the virtual Sam knew as well. Their lives diverged on the day Sam was copied away from the original consciousness. It made them more than sisters, but not quite the same people.

Sam trusted herself enough to know Samantha would never knowingly put her in harm’s way. It was enough to encourage her to stop and listen to whatever they had to say.

“What’s up? I hope you didn’t yank me out of winning a fight just to chat,” Sam asked.

“Your people can trash any other group out there with or without you there to micro-manage them,” Samantha-image replied. Then she grimaced. “Anyway, you know me better than that. It’s important. Tell her, Knauf.”

The little man stuttered for a few seconds. He looked from one Sam to the other again. Then he straightened himself up and looked into her eyes.

“I’ve been sent here with a proposition for you,” Knauf said.

“Really. I’ve never heard that line before,” Sam said, rolling her eyes.

“This is no joking matter. The fate of Earth is at stake,” Knauf said. “We need your help.”

Sam read his body language and looked into his eyes. One of her most valuable skills had always been the ability to read other people. Everyone had tells, little tics or motions or expressions which gave away what they were thinking and feeling. Sam was good at spotting them. Knauf was telling the truth. Or at least the truth as he knew it.

Samantha-image nodded to her.

“What’s going on?” Sam asked.

“An alien ship has arrived in Neptune’s orbit. It’s building something out there. We think either its a weapon or a gate to bring allies. Either way, it’s bad news for humanity,” Knauf said.

“Send the fleet in and knock it out?” Sam suggested.

Knauf nodded. “We would. But while our ships have the acceleration to make the journey in time…”

“Any human sent along would be splattered during the acceleration and deceleration,” Samantha-vision finished.

“You want me - no, us,” Sam realized. “We’re digital. We can survive the trip. You want us to pilot your fleet and save Earth?”

“In a nutshell, yes,” Knauf said.

Sam felt an anger boiling inside her that she hadn’t realized she was still harboring. She thought that she’d come to accept her life in Valhalla Online. That this was all there was for her. Her ‘real’ body was still alive out there. As a copy, she had no rights. No citizenship. She was just software.

Except she wasn’t. None of her people were, not even Gurgle - who had started off as software before becoming something more. They were alive, could think and feel.

“Why should we help save people who think we’re not even worth basic human rights?” Sam snapped.

Her double’s eyes opened wide, shock registering across her face. She should have known how Sam would feel - but then, the physical Samantha had never experienced everything Sam had. She might sympathize, but she wouldn’t understand.

But Knauf didn’t seem phased by her venting. If anything he looked satisfied, like he’d expected her outburst. He nodded at Sam and gave her a thin smile.

“I understand your frustration. Aside from the obvious - if Earth is hit by those aliens hard enough, the servers hosting you and your people might go down. You’re just data at this point. If the servers are blown up, you’re as dead as the rest of us,” Knauf said.

He wasn’t wrong. Earth might feel like it was a million miles away, but Valhalla Online existed as part of the planet. It wasn’t in some other dimension. Sam might not enjoy admitting it, but he had a good point.

“That said,” Knauf went on. “I don’t know that I’d want to go to war fighting for a civilization that stripped me of my basic human rights. In fact, we’re not allowed to. Weapons have to be under the control of a human being. It’s UN law, now. They know damned well that it’s in their best interest to keep loaded weapons out of the hands of people they’ve abused.”

“If that’s the law, then we can’t help you anyway. But you wouldn’t have come here for no reason, so what’s the story?” Sam asked.

“Suppose I said you could become recognized as a sentient being with rights again?” Kanuf asked.

Sam sucked in a breath. It was something she’d never dared hope for. Life in Valhalla was exciting, but ultimately she knew that nothing she did really mattered. Everything was a game. Most of the events were scripted. The people who ‘died’ just came back again to rejoin the never-ending series of battles. She was playing a role in a story, nothing more. It was a life, but it wasn’t real life.

Some days it wasn’t enough. Most of the time Sam fought hard enough that she was able to push those thoughts aside, though. If Knauf was really suggesting what she thought…! Maybe she could return to the real world, engage in real things again. Make a difference.

“What’s the catch?” Sam asked. There was always a catch.

“It’s a doozy,” Knauf admitted. “The reason for the laws about uploaded minds was fear, you know. People out there in the physical world were afraid that someone might simply make a thousand copies of themself, or ten thousand. You could create voting blocks that nobody could beat. Overpopulate the world with more virtual minds than real - I mean physical - ones.”

“Sure. I understand that. What changed?” Sam asked.

“Technology did. We’ve figured out a way to add copy protection to an uploaded consciousness. It blocks duplication,” Knauf said. “We can also tag each upload, essentially registering them much like we do with new babies being born. A birth certificate that becomes part of your encoded software.”

That didn’t seem like much of a catch. They’d be free to do what they wanted, to live in the real world again. Sam’s thoughts raced, trying to think of the consequences. Sam hadn’t been sure she believed the full scope of the crisis, but this news dispelled her doubts. The UN must be really desperate if they were willing to consider an option this drastic. The alien threat had to be very real indeed.

“The biggest downside would be that you’d become mortal, sis,” the other Samantha said. “No copies means no backup version. If whatever device you were in blew up - say, the spaceship you were riding in on the way to fight a bunch of aliens? You’d be gone for good. No respawn.”

3

There it was, the catch Sam had known was coming. It made sense, in a way. The gift and curse of Valhalla Online was the eternal nature of their digital life. Nothing mattered because no matter what you did there was always going to be a tomorrow. Sam and everyone she knew would just keep going about their virtual lives, no matter what any of them did. It was eternal life.

And it was an eternal prison as well.

Soon after Sam entered Valhalla Online she’d come into possession of a powerful hacked weapon, a pouch which generated unlimited arrows capable of erasing any target they struck. She’d almost died to those arrows more than once. Some of her friends had died - permanent death, with no hope of retrieval. It had been a dark and terrifying time.

The weapons capable of such things had been destroyed. All but one, anyway. Sam hung on to one of the arrowheads. It still carried the lethal code capable of erasing whomever she so much as nicked with the thing. More than once during the year since she’d considered scratching herself. What waited past death for a digital being like herself? She didn’t know what to believe anymore. Was there a god, or gods? Was there a real afterlife, and even if there was would she be considered ‘alive’ enough to get in? All questions that she didn’t know the answer to, but she did know how to find out.

That arrowhead was always with her. She hadn’t used it - yet. It was the final answer. The one escape from the life and prison of her online world. Sam wasn’t sure if it was fear or hope that had always stayed her hand. The emotions she felt were too deep for her to easily parse.

But here was a chance at something different.

“I’m in,” Sam said. She didn’t even have to think about it.

“Sam, are you sure? I mean, you can think about this. It’s going to be dangerous,” the physical Samantha said.

“I know it will. But I’ve faced danger before. That’s why I - why we - put on the uniform in the first place. If I can find a way to serve again, it will be worth it,” Sam said.

“Good. I was hoping you’d join us,” Knauf said. He ran a worried hand through his hair. “I didn’t have any other good options. You’re the only thing I can think of to throw at this problem.”

“Surely you’re not the only one working on this, though?” Sam asked.

“No,” Knauf said. Then he added in a matter-of-fact voice that Sam couldn’t help but believe. “But I’m the smartest. I wouldn’t count on someone else thinking of a solution I’ve missed.”

“What’s next, then?” Sam asked.

“Well, you’re a great asset, but you’re not enough by yourself. One battleship won’t have very good odds out there. We don’t know precisely what sort of technology base these aliens have, but it’s better than ours,” Knauf said. “We want to send a carrier out. Loaded with fighters. Small craft might get through when bigger ones are torn apart.”

Sam wasn’t sure she liked the reasoning behind that. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to send a fleet of big ships?”

“It would if you all were able to grasp astronavigation in the time we had prepared. It’s going to be hard enough teaching you to fly the fighters on the way. That’s going to be one hell of a crash course,” Knauf said. “Without proper training you could drive your ships into a planet, and that’s not going to help anyone.”

Sam nodded. She thought about the distances involved. Radio waves would take too long to travel. Contact with Earth would take what, hours? Days? She wasn’t sure, but whatever it was it would be too long for anyone on Earth to help them if it came to a crisis.

“You want me to see if I can recruit some more people,” Sam said.

“In a nutshell, yes,” Knauf said. “As many as you can.”

Sam thought about the proposal. They would have rights again. Be citizens again. They could own property, buy the devices they resided within. One of the worst things about her digital life was knowing in the back of her head that she was ultimately made up of bits of data that were someone else’s property. That wasn’t a state Sam intended to continue. But would the others feel the same way?

“I’ll see who I can get to join,” Sam said, already rehearsing the words she would need to convince her Black Knights of the cause. “How many do you need?”

“The biggest carrier we have can house thirty fighters. Give me everyone you can,” Knauf said.

The fog rolled back in, growing thicker by the minute. The images of the two people in front of her were beginning to fade away. They were departing. Or she was returning to the game world, leaving this space in between the worlds. Sam wasn’t sure which.

“Sis! Thank you,” the physical Samantha called out. “I’d do this for you if I could.”

“I know you would,” Sam said, nodding to her with a smile. “Which is why I’ll do it for you because you can’t.”

An hour later Sam was in the mead hall, standing in front of the assembled people. They represented half a dozen of the top guilds in the game, most of the groups which had made it to this last level, Odin’s feasting hall itself. Most players never came this far. They stopped in one of the earlier zones or even retreated back down to previous levels. The closer one came to Odin’s realm the more real everything became. Here in the end, death was almost as painful as it would be in the physical world. Few lingered there long. She thought most of them were probably a little crazy, including herself.

It was also the place in all of Valhalla Online with the most consequences. There, players had the most to lose when they died, and the most to gain by surviving. It made each battle just a little more sweet to know there was something significant on the line, even if it was just pain and the avoidance of it. Sam didn’t think there was anyplace else in all the Realms better suited to finding the sort of people she needed.

“That’s the long of it,” Sam said, finishing her tale of meeting Knauf. She left out her other self. It was too strange for most Valhallans - they were the echoes of a dead physical body. Of them all only Sam had a physical self still outside of the game.

“Aliens?” Grimalf said. “Why did it have to be aliens?”

That got a few chuckles and slapped thighs from those gathered. It took a few moments before everyone quieted again.

“We’ve got a choice, folks. We can choose to go back out there and make a difference with our lives again. Or we can opt to stay in here where it’s safe,” Sam said. “Safe for now, anyway - because Knauf was right. If those aliens blow the hell out of our world, the servers we live on aren’t going to last any more than the rest of human civilization.”

A few murmurs of agreement. Then someone stood in the back of the room. Sam knew even before he opened his mouth that he was going to be trouble. Lornif always was.

“If they need us so damned badly, why the special rules? Why not just send us out there with backups remaining behind in Valhalla? Why not keep backups on the ship they send, for that matter? Then we could just go back out over and over until we finish the mission,” Lornif said.

“Because they aren’t going to arm computers,” Grimalf said.

“I’m no machine!” Lornif shouted.

“We are to them,” Sam said.

“Then the hell with them all! Let them rot,” Lornif said. He turned on his heel and stalked toward the exit. “Anyone who’s not wanting to lick the boots of them who think we’re just property can follow me.”

There was a scuffle of shifting chairs as more people made to leave. Sam thought hard for something to get them to stay. She wasn’t sure how many had been moved by Lornif’s remarks, but he was a popular asshole. She couldn’t afford to lose too many of these people. They were running out of time.

“What about your friends? Your family? Your children, and their children?” Sam called out. “Will you not go help them when they need you?”

She stalked forward, her movement catching those who’d turned to go in mid-step. Sam had their attention. Now she needed to win their hearts.

“People! We fight battles in here. We call ourselves warriors. But when we have a chance to prove that, to face real risk and become true heroes, what do we choose to do?” Sam asked. “Do we step aside, let others decide our fate? Or do we rise to the challenge of our lives and prove ourselves the greatest warriors anywhere? You can all stay in this empty life if you want. I will take up a real sword and bring the battle to a real enemy.”

“I will show all of Earth that I am a true warrior. Who will go with me?” Sam asked.

“Gurgle will!” The bugling call all but deafened everyone in the room. The drake clapped both forelegs over its mouth, embarrassed. “Sorry!”

That started the chuckling, which turned into laughter. The laughter shifted to banter, which was always a good sign. Lornif scowled when he saw how few people remained on their feet to follow him. He beckoned, and they trailed behind him as he stalked from the room. Even among those who left with him, Sam could see a few glancing back over their shoulders. They might come along yet.

“So when do we go?” Grimalf asked.

Sam smiled at him, glad he was with her in this. She had few friends left. It was hard to let herself grow close to people after having lost so many. Being a leader set her apart from others as well. In Grimalf she’d found a kindred spirit. His quick wit was always welcome, even if he was getting too damned close to beating her on the battlefield.

“Soon. Knauf will come for us once I have a list of everyone who wants to make the journey,” Sam said. “I have one other person I need to ask before I go.”

“You mean him, don’t you?” Grim asked. His eyes darkened, and he looked down at the floor. None of them could think about Harald without sadness and regret.

Sam least of all.

“Of anyone here, he might be the one who would be most helped by this,” Sam said. “I have to at least try.”

“Go, then. Take the drake. You’ll need to make good time if you want to get to him and back here. I hope you succeed,” Grimalf said. He clapped a gentle hand on her shoulder. “But…try not to put too much stock in it, eh? Harald left for reasons he felt were good. He may not welcome you coming to see him.”

Oh, he probably wouldn’t be glad to see her at all. But Sam owed him a more significant debt than she could possibly repay. Maybe she could begin by offering him something better than he had in Valhalla. It would barely scratch the surface, but it would be a place to start.

“Let’s go, Gurgle!” she called out. The drake winged his way toward her and landed with a scuffling of claws and a blast of wind. Sam turned away from Grimalf and mounted up before he could see how moist her eyes had become. He already knew how emotional she was about Harald’s fate. No sense letting him see her tears as well.

4

Admirals weren’t supposed to fly their own shuttles. They had people for that, or so Thomas had been told more than once. He smiled in spite of the dire circumstances they faced. He’d been flying ships through space since he was a teenager. One plus to his father being who he was. Lord knew there were enough downsides, the rank weighing on his shoulders just the latest addition to the pile.

He hit his shuttle’s thrusters gently, sending the craft into a slow spin as it arced past the Intrepid. Damned if she wasn’t the most gorgeous ship he’d ever seen. That was humanity’s best hope floating out there. Once completed she would be able to soar across the entire solar system in almost no time at all. If the drive worked like it was supposed to, anyway.

The ship was also their ticket to other solar systems. That ship out by Neptune had arrived by the same sort of drive. With the Intrepid they could take the fight out into space, and deal with these aliens on a more equal footing. Once she was finished. There had been so many problems with the construction of this one ship, though! She’d been plagued with one thing after another. It was her unique design, so crucial to the working of the Albucierre drive, that was screwing with construction. This wasn’t a stock ship, but a wholly new conception.

The Intrepid drifted away behind him, the lights still sparkling off her hull as swarms of workers scrambled to finish their work. A month, Thomas had been told. That would be far better than any of the previous estimates if it were true. He couldn’t count on the Intrepid being ready in time to solve their alien problems. As frustrated as it made him, their best hope probably lay not with their best ship, but with an older one.

He tapped the controls again and the shuttle spun on its axis, facing a new direction and bringing the Hermes into view. This ship wasn’t new. She was battle-scarred, the places where her hull armor had been repaired visible even at this range. The Hermes was his choice for their mission to Neptune. She’d just been refit with the fastest drive they had, her armor upgraded at the same time. And she had a berth for a thirty-fighter wing. They weren’t making carriers that large anymore. Too much chance that one blow could demolish too large a percentage of their fighting force. The Hermes was a leftover from the end of the war between Earth and Mars when everyone was still convinced that bigger meant better.

Thomas sent his shuttle into an approach vector. It was a good old ship. She would survive the journey. Whether the people crewing it would be able to hold up their end of the deal, he didn’t know. There was the problem. He was used to dealing with military personnel. People who had volunteered to serve in order to help the rest of humanity. Well-trained and experienced men and women who were dedicated to a common cause.

None of those people were going on this trip. Instead, the ship would be crewed by whatever ghosts of the past Knauf could dredge up out of a virtual world video game. Their best hope lay in some very shaky hands.

“Not that I started out as a military man myself,” Thomas muttered to himself. He’d managed, in the end. It had been hard to rise to the challenges he’d faced, but he’d made the transition. With luck maybe these people could as well.

The shuttle clanged into the docking port. Thomas unbuckled himself and pushed off toward the door. There was no gravity here, not even a spin-induced micro-gravity. The Hermes was being stripped of all non-essential equipment. That was easier to do in microgravity, and there was a lot of stuff to remove.

The airlock opened with a hiss. Still air on board the ship, then. That wouldn’t last. The entire life-support system was being removed. The crew wouldn’t need air, after all. It was a hazard they could safely remove. Along with crew berths, kitchens, heads, and everything else a breathing crew might require. All being hauled away. They would replace every scrap they could with more missile tubes, automated repair systems, and anything else the geniuses over at design thought might give the Hermes a little better chance in her mission.

Knauf was waiting outside the airlock, floating in place near a wall while absentmindedly flipping through pages of something on his handheld tablet. Thomas coughed to get his attention.

“Sir, glad you could come!” Knauf said. “The ship is getting a real makeover. She’ll be ready within the next few days.”

“I’m not thrilled by having to rip out everything that makes her habitable by people, you know,” Thomas said.

“Yes, but it will give the ship a better chance out there, having all this stuff instead,” Knauf replied.

Thomas waved the thought away with a hand. “I know. I approved the changes. I don’t have to like turning one of my best ships into a robot drone though.”

“Don’t think about it as a drone then, sir. It will just have a special kind of crew,” Knauf said.

Thomas started forward toward the bridge. He wanted to see how things were going himself. A quick tour of the ship wouldn’t hurt. Knauf trailed along behind him.

“How many of these uploaded minds did you get to sign up?” Thomas asked.

“Not sure yet, sir. I’m going back in to find out tomorrow. I think we’ll get a good number though. It’s a fair offer.”

“Fair? I suppose. My father had to burn enough political capital to ruin any other career to get the measure past the UN. They still haven’t voted to approve it yet,” Thomas said.

“But they will?” Knauf asked.

He sounded worried. Thomas turned back to flash him a reassuring smile. “They will. If Dad is anything, it’s stubborn. He doesn’t lose when it counts.”

Nothing counted more than this. The news of the alien ship hadn’t yet hit the civilian population, but it would. Once it did there would be panic, calls to cooperate with the invaders, invective to blast them out of space, and myriad other confused calls for action. It would be a mess, and the politicians didn’t move quickly enough for Thomas’s mind when things went to hell. That was one place where the military tended to operate better. More smoothly, anyway.

One mind in charge of everything; that’s what the aliens had demanded from humanity. Thomas could see the appeal sometimes. Having one being call all the shots would be a boon in a crisis. It would enable society to swiftly react to any new threat. But it also left society incredibly vulnerable to some of the worst sorts of things humans had ever done to one another. Slavery, genocide, war - those sprang from the same seeds.

He wondered what sort of society the aliens had. Were they like humans had been during the worst authoritarian times? Or had they figured out a way to work together in harmony with one being in complete command of all the others?

Thomas shook his head. Not his problem to worry about just then. He had to discover whether the aliens really were a threat - and then stop them if they were.

“What will happen to them afterward, sir?” Knauf asked.

“After?” Thomas stopped himself in the hall, catching hold of a stanchion.

“Once we’ve won. Assuming we win,” Knauf said. “What happens to the people who saved us? Those uploaded minds?”

“That’s…a good question,” Thomas said. He wondered if his father had already thought that far ahead. He’d have to ask. All Thomas did was see what needed doing and then took steps to make it happen. His Dad tended to do more forethought than that. He might have a better eye toward what the consequences of those necessary actions might be.

They would be citizens with rights, even though they were virtual beings. How would society react to that? Would they be accepted or outcast? Would they find ways to make a living for themselves? And what might they become in the future?

Was he generating an even more significant threat to humanity than the aliens, in the long run? Thomas didn’t know. He’d learned many years before not to second-guess the future. He worked to deal with the present, making the best decisions he could in the now.

“Maybe they’ll stay on in the UN Navy, sir,” Knauf said.

It wasn’t a bad idea. They could be as useful in the future as they were in this event. The military tended to care a lot less about who you were and more about what you could do to keep the person next to you alive, too. Those virtual personae might find themselves more welcome in the armed forces than just about anyplace else.

“Maybe they will. It’s certainly one option that could be made open for them,” Thomas said. “But they’ll be free to choose as they wish, whatever that might be.”

“They’ll have to be put into military rank for the mission, right?” Knauf asked.

“Yes. I’ve already set up the orders involved. It was interesting, writing that stuff.”

“Just for the duration of the emergency?” Knauf pressed.

He was pushing, too. Why was he so interested in the outcome of life for these people? Thomas was willing to accept them as sentient beings. He’d read all the reports - an uploaded mind was a near perfect replica of the original. It was definitely capable of independent thought. The whole thing still felt strange to him, though. He couldn’t imagine wanting to live without his body around him. Or understand the desire to live on in an imaginary world after he’d finished his life in the real one. But Knauf seemed intent on pressing for more information.

“Why are you so interested in outcomes for people who may die out there?” Thomas asked. Would probably die, if the projections he was seeing were accurate. They would be outgunned to such a degree that none of the analysts thought this Hail Mary pass was going to work. But it might delay construction of the ring long enough for the Intrepid to get out there and finish the job.

“I just want to be able to present the best possible information to them tomorrow,” Knauf said. “I’m trying to predict what their questions might be so I can be better prepared.”

Which made sense, but something about how the words spilled off Knauf’s lips sounded a little too glib to Thomas. Did he imagine it, or did Knauf have some sort of personal stake in those people in Valhalla Online? He’d have to get someone to look into Knauf’s background to see if there were any connections.

“Makes sense,” Thomas said. He’d keep his other concerns private, for now. “Let’s go see how things are progressing on the bridge, shall we?”

5

Harald sat on the edge of the cliff staring down. He wasn’t tempted to topple off. There was no point, after all. He would just respawn again. That was the mixed blessing he’d signed up for when he allowed them to upload his consciousness into this place. If he’d thought about it all those years ago, back in the hospital room where he lay dying, maybe he would have realized that an afterlife could be heaven or hell - whether it was an artificial afterlife or not.

He couldn’t blame the man who’d talked him into signing up. This was a hell of his own making, after all. No one forced him to kill the last vestiges of the woman he loved most in the world. That Cassie was already dead didn’t matter to him. That her consciousness had been torn in two was irrelevant. What remained was still her. Right up until the moment he erased her from existence, anyway.

The hands he held in front of his face were familiar enough to him now, but they still felt alien and wrong. His body wasn’t his own anymore. He was a thing of living stone, crafted into a weapon. A tool that had turned on its wielder, betraying her and himself in the process. He was a damned thing now, unfit for the company of others. Too tall to even enter most halls of men, too ugly for others to stare at for long, too lost in his misery to care.

The sound of wingbeats broke Harald from his reverie. For the first time in a while, an emotion besides regret and despair broke through his feelings. The burning ember of anger woke inside him. He knew who that had to be. Only one drake rider would dare approach this place. The storms which had once kept all away were gone, but his presence scared all would-be curiosity seekers away soon enough. No, there was only one person who would dare come to see him and she had sworn to never bother him again. He was in enough pain without Samantha’s presence reminding him of everything he’d lost.

The drake settled onto the flat ground not far behind him. Harald didn’t acknowledge her presence, not even after she dismounted and walked toward him. He would just ignore her. If Harald was still as the stone he was crafted from, eventually she would remember her oath and go away. All he needed to do was remain lost in his own thoughts for a short while, and then he would be alone with his pain again.

“Harald?” Sam’s soft voice called out to him.

His resolve crumbled in an instant at the sound of her voice. He couldn’t ignore her. That was why he’d asked her to leave him be in the first place, wasn’t it?

“Why have you come here, Sam?” he asked. His gravelly voice sounded exhausted to his ears.

“I’ve had contact from my…sister,” Sam said.

Her physical body, she meant. Harald knew the entire story. He’d been there to watch most of it unfold. Samantha had been copied from a living being, uploaded here as a tool to stir the pot and make things happen. The being who’d inspired all that was destroyed now, but that changed little for her. It was interesting that her physical double made contact with her again, though. He would have thought seeing herself that way would be hard on both of them. Curiosity joined anger as the facade of stoicism he’d maintained for so long continued to crumble.

“The real Sam, you mean,” Harald said. Cruel words? Perhaps, but they were also correct. All of the people in Valhalla were mere copies of the people they had once been. They were ghosts. Leftover remnants of who they’d been. The real people had been who they’d been before they were uploaded.

“I’m as real as she is,” Sam growled at him.

It had been a point of disagreement between them before. He heard Sam inhale sharply and then slowly let the breath out. Harald allowed himself the thinnest of smiles. She’d learned to better control her temper, which was a good thing. It had gotten her into trouble on more than one occasion. She was too smart to fall into that trap.

“Why did she reach out to you?” Harald asked, the curiosity still waking up inside him.

“She came with a man. Military, I think. They have an offer, but it’s dangerous as hell.”

“What sort of offer?” Harald asked.

“There’s an alien ship in orbit at Neptune. Real aliens. Outer space sort. They’re building something that will be very bad for Earth. No human can get that far in the time we have left,” Sam said.

“Why? Oh, acceleration. But we don’t have bodies, so they want us to go where they can’t?” Harald asked.

“Pretty much, yeah. The up side - we’d be back in the military.”

“You don’t ever stop being a Marine,” Harald said. It was a rote response, more habit than anything else. He shook his head. Had the person he was now ever actually been a Marine in the first place, or did he just have the memories of the person who had? Was there any difference?

“You’d be back officially on active duty, though. You’d be able to serve again. Full rights as a sentient citizen of the United Nations, and whatever nation wanted to take us in as well,” Samantha said.

“You said that’s the up side. What’s the down side?” Harald asked.

She’d gone and done it, he realized. He hadn’t meant to engage with her at all. Failing that he’d hoped to keep their conversation to the barest minimum. Perfunctory greetings, then a sad farewell and back to his solitary pondering. But here he was asking question after question. The anger at her presence had already faded. His interest was growing despite his best efforts to quell it.

“We would have copy protection code added to each of us before they took us out of Valhalla. That means no respawns. If the object containing our data is destroyed, we’d be gone,” Sam said. “It means mortality again. But we’d have a chance to make a difference again, too. A real difference, Harald. Not this ghost of a life we live in now.”

Sam walked around and sat down next to him. He looked over at her, staring up at his face. To her credit, Sam never blinked or blanched when she saw him. She’d seen what he looked like often enough in the past to be used to it, he supposed. She hadn’t changed at all, at least not in her face. He thought he could see the echoes of her hard-won experience deep inside her eyes, though.

“You are worth more than this, Harald. Come with me. Serve again. Make a difference,” she said.

He looked away from her. “I am not worth anything. I am a betrayer and murderer.”

There was a long pause in the conversation, like Samantha was trying to figure out what to say. Maybe she would just stop asking. She’d be gone after this, he realized. Off to fight in a war out in the real world. There would be no one to bother him here ever again. Nobody would come to this place offering him another chance. Part of him reveled in the idea. The other half reviled it.

“Then maybe this is your chance at redemption,” Sam said.

He glanced her way again but didn’t speak.

“You were an honorable man, Harald. If you’re telling me that you have done horrible things - whether I disagree or not doesn’t matter. What matters is how you feel about your actions,” Sam said. “So take this chance. Redeem your past wrongs by standing up for those who cannot fight for themselves. Be a Marine again. Be a real warrior again.”

She stood up and rested a hand on his shoulder. “I could use your help out there. I have too few people I can trust as it is. But don’t do this for me. Do it for yourself.”

“Do it for Cassie,” she added, her voice almost a whisper. “She would want you to.”

Harald lurched to his feet. The anger which had faded away flashed back with full force. He raised both of his mighty fists, intending to smash the woman in front of him into the stone beneath their feet. How dare she say that name! Using her knowledge of him in such a way! He opened his mouth to roar his fury at her and looked down. He would see her face as he crushed her body.

Sam hadn’t moved. She stood there, face impassive, hands at her sides. She hadn’t ducked away. She wasn’t drawing her weapon or casting a spell at him. There was no pity on her face, but little mercy as well. He aimed a blow at her head - and then never delivered it.

Harald lowered his hands to his sides and stared at the ground. He couldn’t smash Sam for being right. That was beneath him, no matter how low he’d sunk.

“My friend…I’m sorry to have caused you pain. I never would have come here if I hadn’t thought this might be the answer you were looking for,” Sam said. “This is the way to end your painful solitude. Come with me.”

There was more truth to that than she knew. Harald thought about what she’d said. If he went, he would be mortal again. There in Valhalla Online, he would live forever, no matter how many times he died. He would just come back again. But out there in the real world? There would be battles, from the sounds of it. Always a good chance someone didn’t make it home from one of those. The pile of rubble at the bottom of the cliff which was all that remained of his past attempts to finish his existence mocked him, but no longer. Outside Valhalla, perhaps he could finally find the freedom to rest that he’d craved ever since his betrayal.

“Very well,” Harald rumbled. “I will join you.”

At least until it is time for me to leave you for good, he thought but did not say.

6

Knauf stabbed the button to hang up his phone. He wasn’t sure if he was more exhausted or exasperated. It had taken weeks of calls between various departments to arrange everything, but it was finally settled. To suggest that Afterlife Industries was unhappy with losing some of their uploaded minds was the understatement of the century. It made little sense, of course. It wasn’t like having those minds in their computers was earning them more money. The payment to upload a mind to its virtual afterlife was a one-time thing. After the person died, they didn’t have property anymore, so there was no longer anything to be gained from them.

The law still held data entities to be possessions, though, and corporations were loathe to give up anything they owned. Even if it wasn’t making them money at the time, who knew what the future might bring? It could have been easier if he’d been allowed to tell them that there was an alien warship in space, and the minds he asked for were the only hope humanity had of stopping a major invasion. But he wasn’t allowed to say a word. For now, the alien ship was strictly a need-to-know piece of information.

Instead, he’d called in politicians and generals to whittle down the resistance at Afterlife. The former to offer the stick of additional investigations and restrictions on how the digital entities were housed and maintained. The latter to provide the carrot of additional funding for some of Afterlife’s experimental programs. The combination had worked brilliantly. He now had permission to pull as many as fifty of Valhalla Online’s digitized minds into UN Navy servers. That was more than enough to crew the Hermes for her flight to Neptune.

Knauf’s fingers danced over the keyboard in front of him, testing the connections he’d set in place between his office, the Afterlife servers, and the Hermes in orbit. Everything had to be perfect for this upload. If they ended up with lost or corrupted data during the transfer, it would be a disaster. There might not be a second chance if he screwed this up. Not that he was planning to let anything untoward occur. In fact, he was gambling the highest stakes possible that everything would work out as he expected.

“Max, you’re stalling,” he said to himself. With good reason. This next step was a doozy. He was going to end up in deep shit for doing this, but he couldn’t think of any other way to make it happen.

There was a photo of his parents on his desk. They’d been dead for years, killed when an asteroid smashed into Chicago. No one alive was more familiar than he with the cost war in space could have for those living on the fragile planets below. He’d sworn to find a way to defend others from facing the same fate so that no other college kid would ever wake up one day to learn his entire family, friends, and home had been turned into a smoking crater.

“This is it, then. No turning back. You sure you want to do this?” he asked himself.

Was there another way he could ensure the success of the mission? Max wracked his brains one last time for any other course of action which might give the Hermes a better than even chance of surviving long enough to destroy the alien ring. He knew better, of course, having been over the numbers a thousand times. He’d seen the same analysis that Admiral Stein had. The best hope was that the Hermes might delay the aliens long enough for the Intrepid to come into action.

But the Intrepid was a test ship. There was no guarantee the new drive would work even if it were brought online in time to make any difference. No, there just wasn’t any other way. No other person had all the knowledge and training that he did. He’d been preparing for this moment all his life, after all. Even if he’d never known what eventuality he was actually making himself ready for.

A small cup of water sat on his desk next to the photo. Beside it was a little pill. Such a tiny thing, for such a momentous step. Max gave a sigh and shook his arms to loosen the muscles in his shoulders. Tight as piano cords from the stress. He savored the sensation, unsure what he would feel after all this was done. Then he picked up the headset from his desk and calibrated it to match his mental signature before placing it on his head. He tapped a button on the keyboard, and the system was off and running. His mind was being uploaded into his system, just like the Valhallans he was about to speak with.

The law didn’t allow cases like Samantha’s to exist. Even the new UN law just passed allowed for precisely one living, sentient form of any human being. Under the new law, you could have rights as a living person, or as a digital one. But not both. To go where he wanted to go, he would need to leave his physical body behind. Forever.

Max picked up the pill and placed it in his mouth, which was suddenly dry. He grabbed the cup of water and swallowed the pill. It would dissolve in minutes. It would painlessly kill him soon afterward. Max felt tears running down his cheeks. Was he making the right decision? He checked the upload from his mind. It was complete. The digital version of himself would already be signing into Valhalla. From there he’d go on to the Hermes with the other recruits.

He had time to call for help. Not much time, if he was to survive, but he might still be able to get an antidote in time if he called for assistance right away. Max glanced at his phone. It was so close. All he had to do was call out for the digital assistant to dial emergency services and help would be on the way.

He picked the phone up from his desk and smashed it to the floor. It broke, shards scattering in a small circle.

“There’s the end of that temptation,” Max said. The room was growing dark. The poison had already worked its way into his bloodstream. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He was tired, and it felt like time to rest.

Max’s eyes snapped open. He was in a world of gray mist again, the place he’d met Sam before. He checked his control status and found he still had admin privileges in the game. The systems recognized his brain pattern and granted him the powers he needed; they didn’t care about the meat he’d left behind in the real world. Only his mind mattered there.

He felt lost. This was it. It was all he would ever be. All he would ever sense and experience again would be through this sort of electronic medium. It was terrifying, and for a moment he lost control. Max fell to his knees, sobbing. He couldn’t believe he’d actually gone through with it. The last memory he had of being in his physical body was the dryness of his mouth, the sour taste of the pill, and the cool flow of water down his throat. He had no doubts that the body he’d left behind was already gone.

What remained was the part of himself Max had always valued most: his brain. It was his mind that had led him to the inevitable conclusion that he had to be along on the mission with the other digital minds. It was his mind that would spell the difference between success and failure.

He rose to one knee and then slowly came back to his feet. The digital form still felt strange. He recalled what he’d told the admiral about it taking months for someone to adapt to being a digital mind. But Max had been working with such virtual upload environments for years as part of the military tests around weaponizing the technology. He’d feel off for a few more hours, he knew. But he’d adapt in plenty of time.

Max opened a communication channel into the game, sending a direct message to Samantha with his admin powers. “I’m ready for the transfer on our end. Did you manage to get any volunteers?”

There was a moment’s pause before she replied. “Wow! This is weird. I can hear you in my head. Are you receiving me?”

“I am. How are we looking for volunteers?”

“I’ve got them with me,” Sam replied.

“Good. I’m coming to you. The upload is ready to roll. We’ll have you all on the Hermes safe and sound in no time.”

Max closed his eyes and concentrated, recognizing the irony of the physical action even as habit made him do it. He didn’t have eyes to close. There was no point to the gesture, but even as a digital avatar the old habits died hard. He could sense the thread of consciousness that was Sam and willed himself to move to her.

When he opened his eyes again, he stood in the middle of a stone hall. A roaring fire burned in the front, casting flickering shadow and light across the arched ceiling. Three long tables ran down the middle of the building, and warriors in heavy armor sat at each. In the back of the room, there was what had to be a dragon and what looked like a stone giant. Max looked around, knowing he looked like the perfect image of a tourist gawking at the scenery, but he couldn’t help it.

“Everyone does that when they first get in here,” Sam said from beside him.

“It’s amazing! The renders look so real. I can even feel the heat of the fire from here,” Max said.

“They made the place as real as they possibly could. Anything less and the human mind tends to reject it,” Sam said.

“That won’t be a problem where we’re going,” Max said.

“We?” Sam asked. “I thought this was a mission that would squash human bodies.”

“It is, which is why I don’t have one anymore.”

Her eyes widened as she understood his meaning. But she nodded, accepting his words. He already liked her. Max thought the human - the physical version - of this person was pretty cool. But this digital mind seemed to have more depth to her. Whatever she’d experienced inside this place had shaped her in ways that the other version lacked.

Max did a quick count of the room. Thirty-five souls, if you counted the dragon, the giant, and himself. It was enough to fill the ship and then some. That was good, to be fair. He’d take everyone he could get out there. Even a single person might make the difference for them.

A quick mental command and the fire at the front of the room vanished, replaced by a glowing blue disk. It hovered about half a foot above the floor, tall enough that even the dragon would get through just fine.

“Everyone who’s going on this crazy quest to save the world, step through. We have a lot of work to do, and Earth’s time is running out,” Max said.

7

“Give me a good reason why I shouldn’t have you court-martialed, digital entity or no,” Thomas growled at the image on the screen in front of him.

He was bone tired. Preparations for dealing with the alien threat had him running at all hours of the day and night. He’d finally found a cot in a corner to catch a quick cat-nap when word reached him that Knauf was dead. It didn’t take long to figure out what the maniac had done. The better question was now what was Thomas going to do about it?

“That would be an historic moment, Admiral,” Knauf’s image replied. It looked just like the man had in life, but Thomas supposed Knauf could make himself look like whatever he wanted, now. “But I think we have bigger fish to fry.”

“Why, man? I respect giving one’s life for humanity, but what made you think you had to go do this?” Thomas asked. He’d heard through the grapevine that Knauf was something of a loose cannon, but also that the man was brilliant. Best in the field in three different space-related areas of study, and top notch in half a dozen more. It was a waste to lose him like this.

But had he really been lost? Thomas was still having trouble wrapping his head around the idea of uploaded consciousness. Was Knauf dead, or not? Was he still every bit as capable inside the computer as he had been in the outside world? Supposedly everything that made a person who they were transferred over when a mind was digitized, but Thomas had to wonder - was that really true, or were there certain human elements which were lost in transition?

“I was the logical choice. We needed someone to command the ship, sir,” Knauf said. “There were only four people with enough exposure to virtual uploading who also had at least some command experience. Of the four, I am the person best capable of understanding anything we run into out there which lies outside our experience. I’ve seen the same data you have. This mission had maybe a fifty percent chance of success, and that was probably being generous.”

“You think your presence there will boost the odds?” Thomas asked.

“I know it will. How much isn’t certain, but I am confident I’ve improved our chances out there. I don’t do things without reason, sir. But I also calculated that there was a better than ninety percent chance you’d refuse to send me there, on the basis that I was too valuable to Earth,” Knauf said.

“You were right about that,” Thomas replied.

“I usually am.”

The man was insufferable. Worse yet because he really was right most of the time. The alien device was clearly forming up as a ring, for example, and most scientists studying the structure as the aliens built it now concurred with Knauf’s theory that it was some sort of portal device. No one understood how it would work, but the consensus seemed to be that the aliens might be able to drive an entire fleet through the thing when it was complete.

“We could have used you here to help figure out what they’re up to out there,” Thomas said.

“I can figure that out from out there, too. I’ll broadcast back my findings constantly. Whether we win or lose against them, you’ll still have my data and assessments. But what if the mission runs into new tech out there? They won’t be able to wait while they transmit the news back to Earth and then wait again for a reply,” Knauf said. “I need to be there, sir.”

Thomas stroked his chin in thought. The thing was, Knauf had covered himself pretty well. Thomas himself had given him a lot of leeway in getting his mission accomplished. He was allowed to recruit any digital personae who were willing to go along. That Knauf hadn’t been a digital mind when he was ordered to find people wasn’t relevant. The unintentional consequences of the orders Thomas gave the man made his actions legal. It also made him the highest rank present on the Hermes, and de facto in charge of the mission. Despite there being many former military among the crew, none of them outranked commander.

“You tricked me,” Thomas accused.

The image of Knauf on the screen dipped his head in acknowledgment. “Yes, sir. Because I have to do this.”

Thomas sucked in a deep breath. He wasn’t used to being played like this, but maybe it was for the best after all. If Knauf could pull the wool over his eyes so thoroughly, he might well be the best man for the job out there. It was moot at this point, anyway. His body was already dead. His digital mind was already impressed with the copy-protection software, so he was legally a UN citizen now. What was Thomas going to do, lock him up in a prison? It was beginning to sink in how profoundly and in how many ways this change was going to alter human society. He was getting a headache just thinking about it, and could better understand now the reasons behind the original decision that digital minds were property, not people.

“Very well. You have command of the Hermes. You’re cleared to exit Earth’s orbit as soon as you’re ready to depart,” Thomas said.

“Thank you, sir. We won’t let you down.”

“Best of luck out there, Commander. I hate being helpless here, but we will join you on the Intrepid as soon as we’re able,” Thomas said.

“Understood. If we can’t blow the ring, we’ll do our best to stall them until you arrive,” Knauf said. “Hermes out.”

The screen winked out. Thomas sat back down again. His gut said he’d just consigned those people to death by sending them out there. No one had any idea what sort of technologies they might come up against, not even Knauf. One ship against the unknown? The odds sucked.

But then, he’d gone up against insane odds himself, in the past. He was still around. Sometimes desperate times called for action so extreme that it would never be considered feasible in safer times. Thomas waved at the screen, and it displayed a view of the Intrepid. Her engines were just warming up, starting her acceleration away from Earth. She’d burn toward Neptune at a rate that would kill any human aboard. Thomas still wished that he could go along somehow. He wanted to be out there, in the action. Not stuck back here behind a desk.

Soon enough, he consoled himself. “Computer, pull up the latest projections on the Intrepid’s completion.”

The data scrolled past his screen. Nothing new since the last time he’d gone over the information earlier that day. The engineering teams were working round the clock to finish his ship. Twenty days had passed since they were given a one-month deadline, and it looked like it was going to go down to the wire. Once the Intrepid was done, Thomas would have a weapon he felt more confident using.

Knauf felt like he was floating in space. His mind was tied directly into the computers on board the Hermes. Every sensor was like one of his own senses. Every thruster was like a muscle. It was overwhelming at first, and he let the software take charge of their departure from orbit. The feeling of floating in space gave him a sense of vertigo that faded only a little as they got underway.

“This is going to take a little getting used to,” he mused. Interesting. Had that sentence been a thought, or words spoken aloud to himself? He checked; it hadn’t been broadcast over any speaker system or radio, so it was purely internal. The nature of this new state of being was filled with fascinating features.

He checked on his passengers. They’d be crew once they were fully integrated into their fighters, but it seemed unfair to force them into that transition immediately. Instead, Max prepared a virtual room for them to inhabit, a simulation not that different from the one they’d experienced in Valhalla. He’d yanked the images directly from video feeds of the Hermes, so they were gathered in a set of virtual rooms set in the actual ship. He could monitor their progress. At the moment they were all walking around, chatting. He heard a nervous undertone to their conversation that was completely understandable.

They were someplace new, facing a threat they didn’t understand to defend people they thought they’d left entirely behind. Their circumstances had changed instantly from property that had no rights to being people again with futures. And they were mortal now. They could die. All of that had to be sinking in. It wasn’t going to be easy for some of them to adjust, which was why he was glad there were more than thirty of them. If a few cracked under the pressure of transition, he’d still have enough to pilot the entire fighter compliment.

That felt cold to Max, but he figured there was some reason to be. This was about defending their homeworld. All of them were expendable if their lives could save Earth from invasion. These would-be pilots had known that going in.

A quick thought and Max materialized inside the virtual space. He stumbled with his first step, unsteady being back on two legs again. Would that get easier with time? He hoped so.

“All right, everyone. We’ve got work to do and only a short time to get you all ready for the fight ahead,” Max said. He’d chosen an image for himself dressed in Navy uniform, his rank insignia plain on his shoulders. It was important that he demonstrate command right from the beginning.

“Are we sure there’s going to be a fight?” one man asked.

Max concentrated and the names of each person flagged over their heads for him. There were so many benefits to being in virtual space instead of the real world! He was terrible at recalling names. This was going to be much more comfortable.

“Grimalf - do you prefer that name or your old one?” Max asked.

The man hesitated a moment. He looked surprised at being asked the question. “I’m honestly not sure. We can choose?”

“Of course. You can be whichever you prefer. Although maybe one way to manage both names is to use your old human name, and make the Valhalla name your pilot callsign?” Max asked.

“That works for me,” Grimalf said.

Max tweaked the name tags to show both. “All right. Each of you is now an Ensign in the UN Navy unless you had a higher rank in the service beforehand. Some of you did.” He nodded toward Sam.

“Been a while, though. I have as much to learn here as anyone. I’ve never flown a ship before,” she said.

“I’ve already prepared uploaded basic flight skills to each of you. You’ll understand what’s involved in controlling your craft before you ever enter the vehicles. But that won’t give you hands-on experience, and there’s no substitute for that. We need to get you all up to speed as quickly as we can,” Max said.

“How long until we arrive?” a man whose tag said he was called Harald asked.

“Three days.”

There were some surprised looks and sharp breaths at that news. What had they expected? Max pushed aside his annoyance with an effort. That was why they’d been chosen: so that the ship could get to Neptune faster than a flesh-and-blood human could manage.

“We’ll begin flight training immediately,” Max said. “Everyone, to your fighters.”

8

The fighter’s engines thrummed in response to Sam’s mental command. She activated steering thrusters to alter her vector as she shot around Triton. The alien ring would be in her line of sight in under thirty seconds.

“Look sharp, people. Our best shot at taking this thing out is on the first run,” Sam said.

She checked her radar. Most of the wing was in position, but Gurgle’s fighter was slipping out of alignment. Again.

“Gurgle, correct your flight path. You’re coming too close to Xiang,” Sam said The Wasp fighters were accelerating at a rate that would have been impossible for a flesh-and-blood human to survive. The digital minds flying the little ships only felt that as extra stress on the steel frame of each vessel. The fighters were their bodies, which meant the pilots could push their Wasps to the mechanical limit.

“Gurgle do,” her old friend replied.

Sam watched as he corrected course. If he over-corrected, he risked crashing into someone else. That was the downside of flying at these speeds. Even a small error tended to be fatal, as they’d learned the hard way. Space, Sam found, was as unforgiving a place as its reputation had suggested.

“You’re overcompensating for the turn, Gurgle,” Sam said. “Sending you a new flight path now.” She quickly had her onboard systems plot an adjustment for him and tight-beamed it to his fighter. The change worked. His ship shifted back into its proper place in their formation.

The rest of her fighter wing remained silent through the exchange, but Sam knew what they had to be thinking. This wasn’t the first time Gurgle had trouble controlling his ship. It was going to get someone killed.

Was bringing him along the right thing to do? Sam wasn’t sure. She’d thought he would adapt to flight just fine since he’d spent over a year as a dragon. But so far he was having more trouble than the rest of them. It might have been better to leave him in Valhalla, as much as that would have hurt him.

Streaks of coherent light flashed past Sam’s cockpit. Shit, she’d been distracted by Gurgle and missed the enemy approach entirely. She sent her fighter into a tumbling spin toward Triton to see if she could foil the attack. Erratic movements made her more difficult to track. It was the best chance of staying alive out there. A quick glance at her radar showed that she was in trouble. There were six enemy ships in the front attack line, and another six coming on fast behind them.

“Someone want to get this guy off me?” Sam called into her radio.

“On it,” Harald replied. More blips appeared on her tracking as he fired missiles to engage the enemy ships. Their missile fire was woefully inaccurate against the alien fighters. Winning against them often came down to their nose-mounted railguns against some sort of laser ray-gun thing the aliens had. It wasn’t close to a fair fight.

No one had promised her that things would be fair on this mission. If anything, quite the opposite. She’d known going in that this was going to be hairy and possibly suicide. So why do it? Maybe staying in Valhalla would have been the better idea. Let someone else do the hard work of keeping the planet safe. It didn’t have to be her.

Sam worked at clearing her mind. Everything about piloting her ship was a mental exercise. Distraction was lethal. She needed all her concentration focused on dealing with the threat. That, and leading the others. If there were a real reason she’d come along it was for them, because she wanted to be there to support her friends. These people had become her family, and she’d be damned if she was going to let them go off into real-world combat without her.

“Harald, Grim, take your wings and hit them from above the ecliptic. Xiang, your wing is with mine. Arc around close to Triton and then swing back. We’ll catch them in a ninety-degree pincer,” Sam said.

The other wing commanders called in that they understood. Sixteen fighters. That was all she had to play with, out there, against six enemies. If they didn’t take out these six quickly, it was going to be twelve enemies, at which point it was all over but the crying.

Pushing the throttle to the engine’s limits was second nature to her now. Her people weren’t going to pass out from g-forces. They could drive their little ships as hard as possible. Sam shot toward the large moon with every bit of boost she could get from her drive. The three ships in her wing followed, and she could see Xiang’s group right above hers. Four of the alien vessels followed her. The other two broke off to intercept Harald and Grim’s wings. It wasn’t perfect, but it would have to do.

“Arc back toward them - now!” Sam hollered.

The ships were nimble, but nothing could just stop on a dime in space. There were two ways to change vector. You could either flip the ship over and decelerate as hard as you’d accelerated, or you could use steering thrusters to change the vector of your movement without trying to slow down. The turn wasn’t anything close to tight, but they could create a wide arc back around toward the enemy ships. Now they were nose on toward each other. Judging from the radar image Grim’s people had engaged the other two aliens, but Harald’s wing was driving in toward the same targets she was.

“Now we’ve got you,” Sam said. She fired missiles into the teeth of her opponents. Once she was just a little closer, she’d activate her railgun as well.

A ship exploded to her right. Then another. Two of her wing-mates down in as many seconds! What…?

“Enemy to port,” Xiang called out.

There they were - the second wave of six fighters. Sam thought they still had a little more time before they were able to engage her people. That had been horribly wrong, and now her flank was open to raking fire from the fast ships. One of Xiang’s fighters exploded and then his ship came apart in a ball of fire as well.

“Shit, we’re in trouble!” Sam shouted. She jinked her stick hard to avoid the beams of energy lancing into her people. One after another she was losing ships.

Worse yet, she’d only managed to take out one of the four ships ahead of her with missiles. The other three had turned directly toward Harald’s wing. They were tearing his fighters apart. Grim’s people were holding their own, but the battle was falling apart rapidly. They just didn’t have enough ships to overcome the aliens’ technological advantage! The last fighter from Xiang’s group blew to shreds. Sam had only one escort left, rocking off with three alien ships on his tail.

It was over. They’d lost. But she was still alive, and if Sam knew anything, it was that there was always a chance to do something crazy while you were breathing. Even if you no longer actually inhaled and exhaled, she chuckled to herself.

This time Sam flipped the fighter hard over, firing her thrusters in a dive directly toward Triton’s atmosphere. Three enemies saw her moving and took off to follow her. Twisting and dodging, she managed to avoid their blasts. They were gaining on her, but not quickly enough. She was going to make the atmosphere before they caught up with her.

“Sam, we can’t hold them! We have to withdraw,” Grimalf called out. “Can you get out?”

“Pull back with anyone who can. I’m cut off. Going in,” Sam said.

Grim didn’t reply for a second. “Good luck.”

They’d known each other a while now. It wasn’t always about luck. Mostly surviving battles was about skill, guts, and sheer determination. But having a little luck didn’t help. Sam just hoped she hadn’t used up her fair share.

Her fighter bucked as it shot into a thick cloud. The stuff was denser than she’d thought! Which was good. Her ship could handle it. She was hoping theirs couldn’t.

The human Wasp fighters had been designed to operate mostly in space, but they had atmospheric flight controls as well. She could make the fighter move through air. But the alien ships were awkward things, all spindly parts. Sam was betting that even if they could handle the thin atmosphere Triton had, they couldn’t fly where she was going to take them.

Dead ahead was precisely what she was looking for. Triton was geo-thermally active. She’d seen the massive gas geysers sprouting from the surface on their first approach and remarked on how beautiful they looked. But plumes of hot gas miles high could be deadly, too. Sam drove her fighter directly into the cloud. Her ship bucked and pitched in the sudden turbulence, but it was holding together.

The alien ships broke off from the chase, swooping back into space and scrambling for altitude. One enemy didn’t turn quite quickly enough and lost control of its dive. The geyser twisted it until it spun entirely out of control. It shot past Sam’s ship, a streaming meteor on a beeline for the surface below. That was one less she had to worry about. But there were still plenty more. The one advantage she had was that she’d left them all behind now. Not much further and she could punch back out of Triton’s atmosphere right near the ring.

There was a heavy torpedo mounted underneath her fighter which had a hot date there.

Sam pulled up. The fighter shrieked under the stress. She was putting the thing through its paces, to be sure. But it only had to hold together for a little longer. “Just get me in range to get a lock and shoot this thing.”

Getting away was going to be tricky. The alien ships were faster, hit harder, and could fire from more extended range. Once they caught up with her, it would be over. But if she could complete her mission before they nailed her, at least it wouldn’t be for nothing.

The atmosphere thinned. Sam checked her radar. There was the ring. It was almost in range. The targeting system locked it in, and she lined up the shot.

“Shit!” A giant shadow cut off her light. The big alien ship was right on top of her! It wasn’t showing up on her radar at all. “That’s cheating, damn it!”

There wasn’t time for anything fancy. Her scanners were showing energy buildups across the enemy ship’s bow. Sam gave the mental command to launch her torpedo half a second before ten beams of coherent light blasted her Wasp to smithereens.

9

Thank god it was just a practice run. It seemed like every practice session they ran was getting worse. Sam wasn’t sure if Max was boosting the difficulty or if they were just wearing out. On the plus side, she’d at least managed to get a torpedo off on this run. That was a new record.

There were a few seconds after the explosion where Sam couldn’t sense anything around her. No touch, no sound, no sights. She was used to the experience though. It wasn’t like that was the first time she’d had her ship shot out from beneath her. She’d lost count at fifteen. Sitting tight through the brief transition was smooth enough now.

Awareness and sensation snapped back into place. She was back in the familiar meeting room where they’d all gathered when they first arrived on the Hermes. That was two days ago. Every second since had been spent on training. It turned out that despite Valhalla Online having sleep-cycles, they didn’t actually require sleep as digital minds. They could keep going long after a regular human would have collapsed.

Not needing sleep and not wanting a break were two very different things, though. Sam felt bone tired, an odd metaphor since she didn’t have bones. When she was still in the game that thought would never have crossed her mind. The place felt real enough that her mind had simply accepted that reality at face value. Now that she was out in the physical world again everything felt like a reminder of her state. The way she slipped from her virtual human body into a fighter-body was only the most glaring evidence.

It was wearing on her. She could tell that it was wearing on them all. In Valhalla, they’d never had to ask questions about who and what they were. They all knew, of course. But there was a constant consensus of pretense there, where everyone made believe it was all real. It was their reality, so that made sense. It kept them sane.

The real world had consequences. One of them was a nagging set of reminders that their bodies were gone. They had nothing but this ethereal existence. They’d locked themselves out of the virtual afterlife. Was that a mistake? Would they ever come to feel like this state was normal?

“That didn’t go well,” Max said from the front of the room.

“Understatement of the century,” Harald groused. He plopped down in a chair. Around the room the other pilots followed his lead and settled in to discuss the practice run.

“Did I nail the ring?” Sam asked. “I didn’t get to see if there were fireworks or not.”

“You did,” Max said. He grimaced. “Don’t let that make you think of the run as a victory. Your one torpedo only damaged the construct. My best guess is that we’ll need to nail it with more than one shot to completely destroy it.”

“Better than we’ve done before,” Grimalf said.

“Depends on whether you count dying as better or not,” another pilot said. That was Mala, one of Xiang’s wing in this run. He didn’t look happy.

“That’s a real risk when we go out there,” Max said. “If you can’t handle that you might be better off staying on the ship. We’ve got thirty fighters and thirty-five pilots. The extra five people will help me man the Hermes, maintaining sensors, weapons, repairs, and so forth. I’m sure I’ll need all the help I can get.”

“Count on me for that,” Mala said. “I didn’t sign on to get blown to bits in the first skirmish.”

Sam bit back a harsh retort. She understood his feelings. It was hard to handle this loss after loss, without any break in the string of failures. They were used to losing some battles and coming back from the occasional setback another day. But when they went out there for real, it was going to be their only shot. If they were blown up in the real Wasps, they’d be gone. Dead for good, the last traces of their minds wiped away in the blasts. That was perhaps the most frightening thing of all, for someone who’d battled for years without any risk of real death. Mortality sucked.

“Max, we need a breather,” Sam said. “We’ve been going at this for days. I think we need some downtime to relax.”

He looked perplexed for a moment like he didn't understand what she said. Sam wondered if the man ever took downtime himself. Was he just a nonstop machine for his work? Then Max nodded.

“I can see the sense of that. You all look tired, even if you can’t actually get physically tired. The toll on the emotional processing of everything around you still adds up. We’ll do four hours of rest, and then back to it. Sound workable?” Max asked. He looked directly at Sam, and she nodded her reply. “I’d offer longer, but we’re getting too close to Neptune. We need to spend as much time as we can preparing.”

There were murmurs of agreement from around the room at that notion. None of them wanted to be a gently expanding cloud of dust out there.

“All right. Take a break. You’re welcome to rest anywhere in this virtual Hermes. I’ve set up assigned rooms for each of you, so you can actually go try to nap if you’d like. But get in whatever sort of rest feels best for you. We’ve got a lot to handle, after,” Max said. “Dismissed.”

Sam started to stand with the others, but Max called to her before she could. “Sam, I’d like to see you a few minutes, if you would. Gurgle too, please.”

Shit, this was it. Gurgle was being pulled from flight duty. That sucked, because he’d almost always been able to go with her on their adventures. It was going to be hard for the little guy. But in this case, it was best for him. She’d taken a big chance giving him a shot at the outside world.

“Gurgle isn’t an uploaded mind, is he?” Max asked when they were alone.

Sam was surprised at the question. How had he known? “No, he’s not. He originated from inside the software. The game spun him up to be a companion for me.”

“I find it hard to believe that the game made every companion for every player quite so compelling. Otherwise, Afterlife has a lot more server hardware than the Army knows about, which I doubt,” Max said.

“Gurgle not like others,” Gurgle agreed. He still looked like a dragon, albeit a smaller version of one in this virtual world. If he were the full Valhalla size, he’d have taken up a third of the room.

“He’s a special case.” How much should she explain? Was Max aware there had been two true AIs spawned from the Valhalla software as it desperately tried to adjust itself to compensate for the demands of the human minds present? Both of those AIs were dead now. But they’d brought Sam into the world, and her path changed everything she touched, including Gurgle. Now he was - well, Sam wasn’t entirely sure. Was he a real AI himself? Or just an exceptionally smart program? She didn’t know. She didn’t even know how to find out. All Sam knew was Gurgle was her friend.

Max held up a hand. He must have seen the hesitation on her face. “I don’t need the full story. If you two want to tell me someday, I’d certainly be interested. But it’s not why I asked you to stick around today. You know Gurgle isn’t performing as well as the others?”

“Gurgle know. Gurgle sorry, try harder.” The drake looked down at his claws.

“It’s not your fault, I think. It’s your code. It’s not the same as the human minds. I took a peek, and it’s different in some pretty fascinating ways,” Max said.

“Can you fix it?” Sam asked.

“It’s not broken. Just different. But to answer the question - no. I can’t alter the code of any of you. The copy protection they put in place on our minds is damned good. I won’t say anything is unhackable. But this is close,” Max said.

“If no fix, what I do?” Gurgle asked. Sam raised her eyebrows at the rare I pronoun. Gurgle tended to refer to himself in third person most of the time. He was clearly trying to impress Max.

“I think the same traits which are making it hard for you to focus on the detail-oriented skills involved in flying a Wasp might make you ideally suited to other tasks,” Max said. “Are you any good at fixing or building things?”

“Is he ever!” Sam said with a laugh. “You should have seen him save my ass that way when we first met.”

“About what I’d thought. How’d you like to be the chief engineer of the Hermes?” Max asked. “You’d be in charge of the drive, the power generation, and organizing repairs for any damage we take. The Hermes has repair bots to manage and fix any damage we take in combat. But the intelligence operating them is basic at best. They’d run a lot smoother with someone guiding them.”

Gurgle looked at Max, gazing into his eyes. Then he glanced over at Sam. She nodded slowly.

“This might be really good for you,” Sam said.

“But want to protect you,” Gurgle replied.

“And I appreciate it. But you’re out here now, alive. In the real world, not Valhalla. You will be able to make your own life out here. This might be the start,” Sam said.

“Then Gurgle do,” the drake said, nodding his snout sharply.

“Good! Now that’s settled, I can let you two go get a break. I’ve taken enough of your time,” Max said.

“Show Gurgle engines and repair bots first?” Gurgle asked.

Max looked surprised but offered a pleased smile. “Sure, Gurgle. I’d be glad to.”

They both faded from Sam’s view. She chuckled. Neither of them had even thought to say goodbye before going poof on her.

“Boys and their toys,” she said.

“Indeed,” came a voice from nearby.

10

Sam turned and found herself face to face with Xiang. He was an enigma to her, one of the few Valhallans on board the Hermes that she didn’t have the best read on. Most of the people who’d volunteered were warriors Sam had known for some time. Xiang was new to the final level of Valhalla Online when the call for pilots had come down. He’d snapped up a spot right along with the rest of them.

Sam hadn’t learned much about him over the last two days, but that wasn’t strange to her. Most of them didn’t talk about their old lives at all. He’d shown courage and a natural tendency to lead during their first few engagements. She’d given him a wing command, and he’d never handed her a reason to regret that assignment.

“May I join you?” Xiang asked.

“Sure,” Sam said. “The other two just left. What’s on your mind?”

“I am finding my mind drifting toward after, during this brief sabbatical of ours. Time not spent in the cockpit makes me wonder what life will be like after we are no longer needed to save the planet.”

“It’s a good question. I’ve wondered about it a bit myself. I imagine there are a lot of things we could do that humans can’t,” Sam said.

“There are, but I suspect we’re thinking of different things,” Xiang said. “You’re thinking of doing risky things that would kill physical humans. I am thinking that we will never die, and what that might mean for a long-term stock portfolio.”

“We can be killed,” Sam said.

“By the computer we are housed in being destroyed, yes. But not by age,” Xiang replied. “A well-protected uploaded mind might survive hundreds of years. Even thousands. What would that be like, to watch the centuries roll by?”

He was right. What would it do to Earth, if people were able to jump into a computer and become immortal? How were they going to handle people who lived for hundreds of years, even thousands? The idea of that much future was an alien thought even to herself. What sort of reaction would Earth have once they realized what they’d wrought in their desperate move to stay alive?

“I can see you’ve reached some of the same conclusions I have,” Xiang said, his eyes narrowing.

“You read faces very well,” Sam said.

“I’ve made a career of it, my dear,” he said.

It was the first time Xiang had mentioned something which might be related to his life from before he was uploaded. Most of them didn’t talk much about who they were before they were uploaded. It was a taboo discussion topic in Valhalla, but she wondered if more background was going to spill from all of them now that they were back out in the real world. They might be able to visit old friends and family. How strange that would be.

Sam’s parents didn’t even know their daughter had a “ghost” version of herself. How would they react? Would they see her as a second daughter? Or a monster? The thought made her want to cry. She pushed it aside. Sometimes it felt like that was all she did - push the hard feelings away to deal with them another time. Later, once all this was done, she would see about putting some sort of life together for herself. Or that was what she kept promising herself, anyway.

“I think we need to be careful about our futures. I don’t necessarily trust those in power right now to have our best interest at heart,” Xiang said.

“You talk like you know them,” Sam said with a chuckle.

“Oh, I know the UN president quite well. Nicholas Stein and I go back a very long way together,” Xiang said. There was something about the way he said it that made Sam want to shiver. She stifled the reaction, not wanting to give this man any more information about herself than she had to.

Sam was good at reading people. It was possible that she’d met her match in Xiang. She recognized in him the same skills she had at reading peoples’ moods, emotions, and reactions. But Xiang struck her as someone who used that tool to manipulate others. Maybe she’d made a mistake putting him into a position of leadership. But maybe not. Being able to lead well was a form of manipulation, after all. That skill might be part of what made him effective as a wing commander.

“We can count on each of us looking out for each other, anyway,” Sam said.

“That much I am sure of. We have more in common than not. A threat against one of us would be a risk to all of us. I hope we can all support each other in what I am certain will be trying times ahead.”

“Yeah, I can only imagine half the adjustment issues we’re going to have, getting settled into something that resembles a normal life,” Sam said.

Xiang laughed aloud, a deep and rolling chuckle. “My dear, I doubt any of us are destined for something so boring as a normal life!”

She didn’t doubt him. Each person on their team was a warrior willing to step out of safety to defend Earth. It was a damned fine group of people to be a part of. That she was leading the squadron still amazed her, but Max had made the position official shortly after they arrived on the Hermes and no one had said a peep in protest.

Alarm bells rang. Sam hadn’t heard klaxons like that since she’d been back in the physical world. The lighting around them went red, and the visual effects went fuzzy around the edges. She felt like Xiang and the rest of the room around her were barely there at all.

“What the hell is happening?” she asked.

“Something is drawing away most of the processing power from the ship’s computers,” Xiang said. “It’s limiting the intensity of our simulation as a result.”

There were only a few things that would cause a sudden draw of computing power like that. All of them involved the ship being in a crisis of some sort. Sam wasn’t at all surprised to hear Max’s voice a moment later.

“All pilots to your ships. We have detected probable attack vessels on long-range scanners. This is not a drill. We are under attack.”

The room faded out completely, and Sam found herself back in the familiar fighter she’d flown for so many simulated runs. It felt subtly different this time, and she wasn’t sure if that was a real sensation or her imagination. This was a real steel and alloy Wasp. Before, she’d always flown simulated vessels. The sims were incredibly realistic. But this was no sim. It was the real deal.

They were going to face off against enemy ships that weren’t simulated, too. The sim aliens had been based on Max’s best guesses. What was coming at them might be similar to that, or might be anything at all. The thought sent chills down her spine.

“All wing commanders, sound off,” Sam said.

“Grimalf, wing one up.”

“Harald, wing two up.”

“Xiang, wing three up.”

“Jorn, wing four up.”

“Yvette, wing five up.”

Sam checked her own wing. All five of the other pilots showed ready to launch. “Wing six is up,” she said.

They were really going to do this. Sam felt the engines building up power inside her like a surge of adrenaline hitting her system. The ship was alive with energy. The ship was her, her body, and she would fling herself into the void blazing away with her guns at an enemy she didn’t know or understand, praying all the while that this tiny taste of the life she’d just recovered wouldn’t end today.

Enough. Lead now, worry later. “Launch in wing order. All wings launch as you’re able. Let’s do what we’ve been training for.”

11

Sam felt the thrust of launch like a vibration through her body. It was the strangest sensation! Was this something like what Gurgle felt when he was flying around as a dragon? There was a brief moment where she felt vertigo as her mind adapted to all the data streaming into her senses. The fighter was feeding her everything it received - radar, visual images, feedback from sensors, it all hit her like a physical blow. The constant drills over the past few days had been effective enough that she was able to sort through it all rapidly, though.

Ten objects were streaking toward the Hermes. They were moving fast - very fast! Based on the trajectory there was no doubt they were coming at the ship from Neptune. If there’d been any hope of some kind of peaceful resolution with the alien ship, it was gone now. This was a clear act of aggression. No other way such a move could be interpreted.

“Look alive, folks. We need to slam those bogeys before they can nail our home base,” Sam said. Her wing was the last to launch. The others had already fanned out in a cone, with her wing at the center of the formation. That was her design. She’d read about cones being an effective formation in a novel once, and the simulations seemed to back up the theory. By spreading out in that manner all of their ships could focus maximum firepower on any enemy in their path.

“Put on a little speed. We want to catch them as far away from the Hermes as we can,” Sam ordered. The wings called in their compliance and boosted toward their targets.

Range closed precipitously. It still boggled Sam’s mind how quickly their fighters could chew up the distance. At the speeds they were all moving, their window of engagement would be tiny. They needed to take out all of the ships quickly, or they’d shoot past.

“Enemy ships are firing something!” Harald reported. “Hard objects, presumed missiles.”

“Evasive action! Fold the cone into a spiral!” Sam ordered. Her radar picked up twenty missiles coming from the enemy ships.

The ships on the outside edge of the cone darted in toward the center. Their flight paths became a spiral, slowly tightening as the vessels farther back in the cone joined the knot. The new formation looked something like a corkscrew. It would allow them maximal anti-missile coverage of each other with their railguns. But Sam watched the range indicator as they moved. The formation shift was taking place just before they’d be able to fire their own missiles. If they missed the window, they’d never be able to get their own shots off in time.

“Fire now!” Sam said. “Missiles away.”

Twenty-eight of the ships managed to respond in time, which Sam thought was fairly good. The other two had been busy making sharp course corrections to avoid slamming into each other as they came into the spiral. They missed the window for a missile launch. She could hear them cursing over the radio, but there wasn’t time to worry about it right then. They could be dealt with later.

Each of the ships that managed to fire launched four missiles, their entire payload. This was all or nothing. If a single ship made it past them, it might be able to kill the Hermes. They had no idea what the enemy’s capabilities might be at close quarters. The only thing they’d learned so far was that their missile range was significantly higher than the Wasps. Overkill was the order of the day. Fifty-six missiles tore through space toward the ten alien ships.

The alien missiles struck her own formation a moment later.

Her people all fired railguns, pellets streaming from the nose of each ship. They filled space ahead of them with iron shrapnel. At their velocity, those little pellets carried enormous force. Connecting with even one of them would blast any missile to bits. That was the theory, anyway. It had never been tested against alien tech.

The alien missiles somehow detected their counter-fire and swept outside the railgun fire, steering around her ships. Only five targets were caught. The others swept past them. That was all right with Sam. Those missiles would have to turn around and come back at them. It was precious seconds that her people could use to counter their second pass.

But the alien missiles weren’t turning. Sam realized with horror that she’d miscalculated their range by a long shot. Her fighters hadn’t been the target. They were continuing on, heading directly at the Hermes! The enemy didn’t just have longer range missiles. They had at least twice the range of the human weapons.

“Wings three, four, five and six, come about and burn toward the Hermes. We need to take down some of those missiles,” Sam said. “Other wings engage any surviving enemy ships.”

It was going to be tight. Now velocity was working against her fighter. Sam flipped her ship over and burned as hard as her structure would allow, working to overcome her previous vector and return to the Hermes. Every second she took to decelerate and accelerate again those enemy missiles were getting further away. But they’d lost a lot of velocity maneuvering around her formation. There was still a chance she could catch up enough to nail them with her railgun.

The deceleration ended while the alien ships were still a little distance away. Sam had a chance to watch their reaction to the human missiles at relatively close range.

The alien ships gave a spirited attempt to destroy the missiles. Sam watched on her sensors as what looked like some sort of laser beam fired from the nose of each alien ship, blasting apart missile after missile. Their counter-missile fire was so damned effective! Half of their shots blew apart while they were still too far to accomplish anything. The other half continued in.

What it seemed like the aliens could not do was maneuver very well at such high velocities. She filed away that information for future reference. It might be vital in some future battle. They tried to evade the missiles, attempting to scatter in all directions, but they couldn’t turn fast enough to make a difference. More laser fire took out another dozen of the Wasps’ missile attack.

The human missiles tore into the enemy formation, lighting up one ship after another in a furious burst of energy. Sam breathed a sigh of relief as she saw each vessel vanish from her radar. No super-advanced shields on these ships. They were more advanced than what humanity had, but not by such a massive margin that the advantage was insurmountable. When the series of explosions concluded none of the ten alien fighters were anything more than drifting dust and debris.

Sam heard the other pilots give a series of whoops and battle cries over the radio. She grinned, feeling much the same herself. The enemy wasn’t unstoppable. They could be hurt. Their ships could be destroyed. That made success in this crazy mission a hell of a lot more possible. But only if they could keep the Hermes in one piece!

“All right, everyone. Let’s focus on those missiles. We need to take them apart or it’s going to be a very long walk home,” Sam said.

Fifteen enemy missiles still cruised through space toward the Hermes. If they were anything like the human missiles, even a few of them impacting might cripple or destroy the ship. The enemy had knowingly sacrificed ten fighters for a shot at taking out the human carrier ship. It implied a level of callousness toward their pilots that Sam was uncomfortable with - unless those ships were drones of some sort. But it also told her they understood how important the mothership would be to their smaller craft. Without the Hermes to help them repair small bits of damage and re-arm, they wouldn’t be able to engage in any sort of protracted campaign out there.

Sam opened up with her guns, but it was too early. She wasn’t near enough to target the missile yet. “Shit!”

They were going to come close, but they weren’t going to quite make it.

It wasn’t possible to get any more speed out of the Wasps. They were already doing twenty gravities of acceleration. The ships just weren’t capable of handling more than that. It was a dead race to see if they could close in time.

“I’ve got a lock!” Xiang said.

Sam watched one of the missiles disappear from her radar a moment later. That was one down! She was almost close enough to blast another. A few more seconds...! There - the sensors said she had a firm lock on the target. She fired a short burst from her railgun, blowing the missile apart. All around her the other ships were going after their own objectives, but most of their fire was missing. The rockets were simply too fast and too agile.

The Hermes wasn’t defenseless either. Her anti-missile guns spewed iron pellets into space, desperately trying to track the enemy missiles as they shot in. It took down one missile and then another. Sam chased a second missile, but she knew she wasn’t going to catch it in time. One of her wing-mates managed to get a shot in and took the target out.

In all, they managed to nail eight of the missiles. Seven made it past every bit of defense they could mount. Most of the enemy missiles stabbed home near the middle of the ship, but several of the shots came in at the front and stern as well. Sam held her breath, hoping the Hermes would be able to survive the assault.

12

Max watched helplessly as the missiles streaked toward the Hermes. He’d done everything he could. The anti-missile systems were automated. He’d plotted the best course he could, but the Hermes wasn’t fast enough to escape the attack nor nimble enough to evade it. The fighter wing was taking down one target after another, but he’d already done the mental math. It wasn’t going to be enough.

Sensors couldn’t tell what sort of payload the missiles had. He wanted to swallow hard and missed having a throat to do so. He tried to close his eyes and not watch, but there wasn’t any way to do that either. Oh, he could turn his attention away from the ship’s sensors if he wanted, but that didn’t seem like the right thing to do.

The impacts rocked the ship when the missiles struck home. One after another, all in the space of a couple of seconds, seven missiles slammed into the Hermes. The ship’s automated systems blared warnings. Multiple hull breaches, damaged hangar bay, a torn up anti-missile system, and more. Max waited for the series of fiery secondary explosions he felt confident were about to engulf the ship - but nothing came.

That was unexpected. The Hermes was still intact. They still had power, although a few parts of the ship had lost connection to the engines. Max flickered to security cameras in the damaged sections and understood almost immediately what had happened.

“Hermes, are you all right?” Sam asked over the radio.

“We’re still here,” Max said. He checked the other crew to make sure his statement was correct, but the computer systems hadn’t been compromised at all. None of the missiles had come close to damaging that critical bit of hardware. If they had...it would have been a very different story!

“What happened? I’m doing a flyby, and I don’t see evidence of explosions at all. Just a bunch of holes punched in the hull. Did they fire duds?” Sam asked.

Max had to laugh. “No. SABOT rounds! They were trying to take the ship more or less intact. If we’d had an atmosphere on board, it would have sucked the air and everything else nearby out with each missile’s exit hole. With no air, the rounds just punched through like a knife stabbing a soda can.”

Anti-personnel missiles, not explosive ones. If they’d been a human-manned ship, they would have killed at least half the crew and left the others helplessly cut off from each other. As it was, there was some damage, but nothing they couldn’t set the auto-repair bots working at quickly enough. Max went to ask Gurgle to set repairs into motion but saw he’d already started. Max checked over the work carefully, but Gurgle had triaged the repairs very well. He seemed to have the knack for the work Max had hoped.

“Max, if they were expecting to take out most of the ship, doesn’t that mean they will want to board and kill anyone else on board?” Sam asked.

“You’re absolutely right,” Max said. Alarmed, he initiated a scan of nearby space. If a ship was laying out there being quiet, it would be incredibly difficult to detect. If he was trying to set up an ambush, where would he put the boarding party?

“Sam, send some fighters out to screen space ahead of us. I’m going to limp along on half thrust for a bit. We’re just braking right now anyway. We can bleed off some more speed as we get closer,” Max said. This was part and parcel of travel in space - the more you accelerated during the first part of the trip, the longer you’d need to decelerate at the end. They still had a lot of velocity to dump before they approached Neptune or they risked shooting straight past the target instead of stopping there.

“You want them to think you’re hurt worse than you are?” Sam asked.

“That’s my hope. I’m guessing they have a ship somewhere ahead of us. It would be nice if we could take it out before it takes us out,” Max said.

“Will do,” Sam replied. “Wings One, Two, and Three - move ahead of the Hermes, seek and destroy any enemy targets in our path. The other three squadrons will spell you in a bit.”

Max watched the Wasps streak away from him on his sensors.

It was becoming easier as the days went by to think of the Hermes as his body, the sensors and video cameras as his eyes. Early on it had felt strange, like he was piloting a simulator. But each day that passed found him growing more comfortable with the new normal. He hoped his pilots were likewise becoming accustomed. The growing familiarity he felt with his systems made him more efficient at controlling the ship. With a little more practice everything would become automatic, second nature, just like moving or breathing had in his old body.

The wings spread out as they shot ahead to screen his approach. Somewhere out there was the enemy. He knew they had to be ready to take advantage of the SABOT attack. Soften up the inhabitants of the Hermes, then strike. He figured they would try to board and seize the ship.

Which said something about the aliens, but he wasn’t quite sure what. His money was on curiosity. It stood to reason that most races venturing into space were probably innately curious. That was mostly what had driven humanity into space, the need to see what was on the other side of the mountain. And then the need to go build a farm there, of course, no matter how inhospitable it might be. Max grinned. Curiosity and stubbornness - perhaps those were humanity’s defining characteristics!

Those missiles could have been tipped with explosives. If they had, the Hermes would be dust by now. The hull could probably take a few hits, but seven direct hits at the same time? There was no way he’d have survived that.

No, they were out there. But where?

Max watched the scan data coming in from his fighter wings, looking for anything out of the ordinary that might indicate a hidden ship. If it was somewhere ahead, it was damned near invisible.

“I don’t think they’re buying it,” Sam said. “No sign of enemy ships at all.”

“I’m watching the same scans you are,” Max replied. He was annoyed, but not really at Sam. The aliens should be coming out of hiding! He couldn’t afford to keep the thrusters on low very much longer. Either this would work and they’d fool the aliens into striking, or it wouldn’t and he’d need to resume course within the next few minutes.

“Stand by to return to the ship. All wings, land in the bays. Bay three is damaged - wing three will need to wait on standby until it’s cleaned up,” Max said.

The fighters out front flipped and hit their thrusters, slowing down so the Hermes could catch up with them. That was when Max saw the alien ship. It was almost invisible without thrust running, dark hull against the black space. He only spotted it because it blotted out a couple of stars for a second. Max did a size estimate on the vessel and immediately knew this was no shuttle full of combat troops. There was only one alien ship that large in the system. This was their main ship.

“Abort the return. All fighters move to engage the enemy at the coordinates I am sending,” Max said.

“Nothing there. I’m almost on top of that spot, and-“

Whatever the pilot was about to say was cut off. A flash of light lit up space. The beam lit up his fighter for only a second before it turned into a fireball. Where the Wasp had been there was now a slowly expanding cloud of gas and dust.

“Shit! All pilots, evasive maneuvers as you approach. Move to an envelopment globe. We don’t want whatever weapon that was turned on more than one of us at a time,” Sam said.

Max saw a link for an incoming private line. It was Sam. “Any idea what the hell that was?”

“I’m guessing some sort of particle beam weapon. High energy particles moving at a high percentage of the speed of light,” Max replied. It could be something else, but that seemed like the best bet. “It will burn a lot of power. If you can get them to waste a few shots, it might reduce their firing capacity.”

“Zip around and be bait for big doom gun,” Sam said with a laugh. “Orders understood, sir! Sam out.”

The Hermes would be in the theoretical range for that beam soon enough, but Max hoped they might not fire on him. They’d already gone to the trouble of wounding his ship instead of killing it outright. How much were they willing to risk to get a look at humans and human technology? Intel was one of the most important things in war. This species couldn’t know too much about Earth. The value of any intel this ship was able to obtain would be enormous. Max stayed the course, continuing to drift and decelerate on minimal power.

He was able to track the ship more accurately now that his fighters were engaging the thing. It was a monster, several times the size of the Hermes. It was a closer match for the Intrepid. In a straight-up slugfest, there was no way he was going to come out on top. That particle beam by itself would carve him to shreds inside minutes.

But that was only if he planned to fight fair. It was far better to let the enemy make assumptions and then use them to win. Right now he could fire missiles, but they were far enough out that the aliens would likely take out most of the shots before they got anywhere near the ship. But if he could fire the missiles when the enemy ship was danger close…?

Another Wasp exploded, and then a third. They were losing pilots, but Sam’s people were making the aliens spend at least two shots taking out each fighter. Max tracked the time between particle shots. At first it had been ten seconds, but it was ticking up a little bit with each additional firing. There was now a twenty-second pause between shots. Whatever capacitor system they were using to run that thing was powerful, but it had limits and was pushing them.

Missiles streaked from fighters that still had them. The hard armored hull around the alien ship shrugged off most of what they were sending. Those missiles weren’t carrying payloads heavy enough to kill larger ships. If they’d had torpedoes mounted it might have been a different story, but Max was saving their limited supply of those to deal with the ring.

The Hermes had ship to ship missiles as damaging as the torpedoes, though. He watched as the time to cross between the vessels dipped and the time between particle beam shots increased. They crossed paths at twenty-six seconds. That was it! Max waited until the alien beam weapon fired one more time before unloading every missile tube he had at lightning speed. Sixteen missiles crossed the void between the ships, each less than half a minute from their destination. He brought the engines back up to full power, slowing the Hermes down so that he might be able to get off a clear second shot.

It was a neat trap. The alien ship flashed past him, but his thrusters were braking hard enough that he’d slow down in time. The tubes cycled, getting ready to fire another volley.

Then the alien ship began to sparkle. A bright light appeared at the nose of the vessel. Crackles of energy swept alongside the alien hull. One fighter zipped in too close and was obliterated by the light show. Some new weapon? Max didn’t know what to make of it at first. It wasn’t going to matter once his missiles hit, though. A few more seconds…

But before the missiles could impact the alien ship, it disappeared from view.

13

Xiang kept a focus on his scans as he drifted through the area where the alien fighters had been destroyed, thinking how ironic it was that his wing was tasked with the mission of locating any remaining fighter shards. Commander Knauf was a wise man, to look for such information. Xiang knew the value of good intelligence better than most. Knowing his foes was after all the reason behind his meteoric rise to power in the life he had before he’d been uploaded to Valhalla Online. Failing to adequately account for his foes was directly responsible for his equally rapid fall from grace. He had to tip his metaphoric hat to the Steins; they’d proven to be the most competent of adversaries.

Based on what he’d been able to glean from the newscasts he’d seen since returning to the real world, the Steins hadn’t abandoned his work as he’d feared. Instead, they’d seen the value of what he’d done and continued it! The United Nations was now the primary governing body of humanity. The colonies on Mars and Venus were given an equal membership as nations. Xiang’s thought was to retain them as UN-owned colonies to solidify the power of the United Nations. Instead, Nicholas Stein had managed to at long last alter the Lunar Accords enough to give the UN a space navy that was far more than a few toothless old patrol ships.

Had their way worked better than his? It was hard to say for sure, since his own plans had been aborted. In the long run how unity was accomplished was less important than the fact it was. Only together could humanity hope to hold the aliens at bay, negotiate with them, and survive its launch into the worlds beyond their solar system.

“I’ve got a large chunk of something on the scope ahead,” Tyrin called. That was his wing second; a good man, competent and efficient. Xiang hadn’t let him in on any of the extra information he knew yet, but it was possible he might in time do so.

“I’ll join you at those coordinates,” Xiang replied, jetting his fighter in that direction. “If it looks like viable salvage, we’ll bring it in to the Hermes.”

The hope was they could learn something of the enemy’s capabilities by examining their tech. Even a few small fragments could give them valuable intel through careful examination. But as Xiang approached the rendezvous spot he saw that this was no fragment. He spotted a flash of light and zoomed in on the object. It was a capsule - intact! It had to be a pilot’s module, ejected from the ship in the moments before the missiles hit.

As he drew closer, Xiang could see the side and bottom of the capsule were severely scorched. Holes punched completely through, shattering part of the frame. There was no way the thing could have maintained an atmosphere with so many holes. A pity. It would have been interesting to meet one of these aliens face to face. Even a dead one would give them more information, though. He shot a cable from his Wasp into the capsule. It connected with a vibration he could feel throughout the ship. Good that he’d been sent out on this mission, better still that he’d achieved such strong success. Now if he could finagle his way into assisting with the analysis his day would be complete.

“Line connected. Soon as you connect yours we’ll drag this in,” Xiang said. “I think Commander Knauf will be exceptionally interested in what we’ve found.”

Sam looked on as one of the repair bots fumbled through the process of opening the captured object as it drifted through space nearby the Hermes. They were examining it outside the ship. Max was worried the capsule could be booby-trapped, something Sam hadn’t even considered. Opening it up to take a look was essential, but doing it in space would give them the same data without the risk.

All of them were watching the process. It wasn’t like they needed to strap into their fighters to launch if another attack hit. They were already housed in the Wasp computers. That gave her pilots more time to themselves than she really liked. Bored soldiers tended to cause problems. But for the moment at least everyone had something to distract them - the possibility of seeing the remains of an alien being for the first time.

The Hermes lacked any sort of forensic or scientific equipment. What little had existed on the warship was stripped away along with the rest of the unnecessary gear when it was refitted for their mission. No one thought they might obtain an actual alien for study! The best tool they had for the job was one of the repair bots. Gurgle had proved a steady hand controlling them. It was he who guided the robot through the task of slicing open the capsule now. The robot had cutters and torches capable of burning through just about anything, but whatever the ship was made from it was strong stuff. The opening of this package was proving to be a slow process.

Finally, a chunk of plate fell away. They had their first glimpse inside the thing. The robot extruded a camera into the space, casting a light so all of them could see what was inside.

The alien was dead. They’d assumed so based on the damage to the capsule’s hull, but there was no doubt. When debris from the exploding fighters punched into the capsule, a large shard had sliced upward, cutting the alien nearly in half as it passed through the hull. It must have died almost instantly. That was a plus, in Sam’s mind. The alternative fate, slowly asphyxiating as the air seeped out through holes? She shivered at the thought. One plus to being digital; breathing wasn’t a problem.

“It looks like an ant,” someone said. Sam wasn’t sure who said it first, but she had to admit she’d made the same mental comparison. A few people chuckled over their communication network.

“Sixty million dollars in the best hardware military can buy, and I’d give it all for one lousy can of Raid,” Harald said.

“What?” Sam asked.

“Old movie. Before your time,” he replied with a warmth she hadn’t heard from him in a while.

It was good to see Harald becoming more like himself again. Being alone in his misery hadn’t agreed with him. Sam worried that she’d done the wrong thing, bringing him into this. But the outcome so far had been a net positive. She had to hope that would continue to be the case.

Most of these people were her friends, including the five who’d died fighting the alien starship a few hours ago. Sam winced inwardly at the thought. Those five would never respawn. They weren’t coming back for another round of fighting tomorrow. For them, the battles were at long last done for good.

“It does seem very insect-like,” Max said, bringing Sam’s mind back to the present. “I wonder if that’s why they were so willing to give up their pilots to death like this?”

“I don’t follow,” Sam said.

“Ants don’t worry too much about the loss of a few workers. They’re concerned about the survival of the entire colony, not individuals,” Xiang said.

That made sense. If these aliens were colony creatures then losing a few pilots in a bid to damage the Hermes was only a loss of resources, not lives of people. Sam wondered what it would be like to lose pilots on a mission and not mourn their loss. Part of her was a little jealous, but she didn’t think she’d trade places with the alien leader. She’d rather have the pain and the good memories of lost friends.

“Energy reading in the capsule,” Gurgle warned.

“What? We picked up no power source at all,” Max replied. He sounded alarmed.

“Is now. Building.” Gurgle reached the robot arms deeper into the cockpit, taking video as he went. “Is not good, right? Looking at all I can.”

“It’s going to explode,” Xiang said.

“I’m already moving the Hermes away. I think we’re far enough now, but it’s better to be safe than sorry,” Max said.

“Excellent precaution keeping the thing outside, by the way,” Xiang said. There was a bright flash from the camera as the capsule detonated, destroying itself and the repair bot Gurgle was piloting remotely.

Sam felt a flash of worry for her friend. She knew his consciousness wasn’t housed in the repair bot, but… “Gurgle?”

“Am fine,” Gurgle said. “Send a video to Earth?”

“Yes, and to me please,” Max replied. “I want to examine it in detail.”

They had a little new info from the capsule, but nothing Sam saw gave her any good ideas for beating the powerful energy weapons the ship used against them. Dodging was the only defense they had against that weapon. Any attack was going to be costly. It was partly her job to come up with a strategy for attacking the ring that might have a chance of success, but Sam couldn’t think what might work.

She retreated from the primary communication channels so that she could think for a bit. It was nice to be around the others, but too many voices in the network made it hard for her to think sometimes. Once she was completely ensconced in her fighter again, she was able to consider the problem in more detail.

The solution wasn’t all that difficult, after all. They didn’t need to shoot the torpedoes at point-blank range, after all. The alien missile defense was every bit as good as they’d been afraid. But with twenty-five fighters remaining, they still had enough ordinance to overcome the anti-missile systems through sheer numbers of bombs, even at a decent distance - if the torpedoes were moving fast enough.

“OK, let’s see if this will work,” Sam said. She pulled up the astrogation systems and started plugging in courses. With enough time on full burn the Wasp was already a fast ship. If her fighters came in over Neptune’s pole, they could build up even more speed. By the time the aliens had line-of-sight with them they’d be close enough, moving fast enough, that the torpedoes should be able to do the trick.

Sam ran the idea through a combat simulation. It came back with ten out of twenty-five torpedoes making an impact. They only had to hit with about six to take down the ring. She dialed up the accuracy of the alien defenses and still came out with six impacts. It would be enough. Even if something went badly wrong, they would still have enough firepower to blow the ring away.

“Max, I’ve got an idea,” she said over their private channel.

14

In retrospect, this was a terrible idea. Sam wasn’t about to say that aloud though, not when they were already almost there. Neptune loomed dead ahead. On the other side of the planet floated the ring, in geosynchronous orbit around the planet. There were only seven days left before the aliens completed the thing. Or that was the best guess they had, anyway. It might be wrong by a day or even days. All they knew for sure was that time was running out to stop the ring before it was finished. They still didn’t know what it would do once it was completed, but it was safe to say that whatever it was it would be bad news for Earth.

Max - Commander Knauf, Sam reminded herself. She was back in the military now. She ought to use rank for her CO, but she’d gotten out of the habit over the years in Valhalla and it was a tough mindset to break back into. Especially when dealing with someone she’d first met out of uniform and knew by a first-name basis. He’d approved the mission she suggested, giving only a few tweaks to her plan where Sam’s math was lacking. By the time he was done it had looked great on paper.

That didn’t mean much when you were zipping past Neptune’s atmosphere at a low enough altitude that you could see the storms swirling clouds of ice and gas directly below you. The planet had supersonic storms, Max said. Fly in there, and you probably weren’t coming back out. Sam wasn’t so sure. She thought the Wasps might be able to handle it, but she wasn’t so confident that she wanted to put it to the test like she’d done with the geyser in the simulator. It was one thing to blow up in practice and another when there was no respawn!

“All right, everyone. Max thrust in three…two…now!” Sam called out. All twenty-five Wasps hit primary burn at the same time. The fighters shot across the planet just above the upper atmosphere, building up even more speed than the gravity assist had given them. They were going to exit at a crazy speed relative to the ring. It would flash past in a hundred-thousandth of a second. Everything was set to allow the computer to handle the firing sequence because even their digital minds couldn’t work quickly enough to drop their torpedoes at the right moment. If everything went according to plan, they would be in and out before the aliens even knew they were there.

Coming up over the northern pole was a gorgeous view. Sam could see Triton, the largest moon, and knew the ring was somewhere close by it. Not long now.

“Something odd out there,” one of her pilots called out. “Like a sensor echo ahead of us.”

Sam was about to reply when she saw a flash off to her left - an explosion! The pilot who’d called a warning was gone, vaporized instantly.

Sam checked her scans, looking for what had taken him out. “Who’s shooting at us? Where did the attack come from?”

“There was no attack. No missiles, no beams, nothing,” Harald called out. His wing was the rear element of the formation. If they were under attack he ought to be able to see where it was coming from.

Then a second ship exploded, and a third. All of them were from first and sixth wings, the vanguard of the group. Something was taking them out one at a time. What the hell could it be? Some kind of invisible attack?

Sam noticed a little speck of light ahead of her and off to her left. It was there and gone too rapidly for her to react before she’d zipped past it, but the ship right behind her exploded into flames. Her blood ran cold as she realized what must be happening. It wasn’t an attack killing her people at all.

“They’ve mined the area!” Sam called. That tiny spot of light she’d seen must have been a miniature mine. Too small to detect, they had to be packing a powerful punch to blow her fighters up so quickly.

“I’m not detecting anything,” Xiang replied. “No mines on scans.”

Another ship exploded. They were losing people more rapidly than they had against the main ship! Five fighters down in under a minute. How many more would they lose if they continued the approach toward the ring? Too many. Already their numbers were down enough that she wasn’t sure they could get enough torpedoes through to kill the thing. By the time they were in firing range they would lose even more.

“Abort the run! Change trajectory to directly away from the ecliptic plane,” Sam said.

They hadn’t started hitting mines until they were just past the pole. It had to be the area around the ring that was seeded with the mines. If she could get what was left of her squadron away from the danger zone they might be in the clear. All the fighters turned as quickly as they could, but given their speed a tight turn was impossible. Three more ships ended up hitting mines before the rest escaped.

“We’ve got incoming,” Harald called.

Sam checked her scopes. Insult to injury - twenty alien fighters were zipping toward them from the ring. They didn’t seem to have any trouble at all flying through the minefield. Part of her wanted to turn around and tear into them the same way her people had on the first encounter. But her squadron was in tatters. They’d lost eight people. They needed time to regroup and come up with another way to strike. With so many of their ships destroyed, she didn’t think her original plan was even viable anymore. They’d never be able to land enough torpedoes.

“Return to base,” Sam said. “Don’t engage. They got us this round. We’ll return the favor next time.”

Retaining as much of the speed they’d built up as they could, her remaining fighters had plenty of lead over the alien ships, which were still accelerating. They left the hunters quickly behind, and the enemy ships gave up pursuit once they’d passed a hundred thousand kilometers of gap between them. Which was for the best, because if they’d maintained pursuit Sam was going to have to turn and fight them whether she wanted to or not. She couldn’t allow the enemy fighters to get to the Hermes.

Docking didn’t feel like anything close to victory, this time. They’d had their asses handed to them and there was no way of ducking that. Worse, it was her idea that had cost so many lives. The aliens predicted their move and countered it. She was going to have to come up with something smarter than that if she wanted to beat them at this game. But how could she count on knowing when she had a winning idea?

She dropped her mind back into the shared simulation area. More pilots were arriving as their fighters docked with the Hermes. What little conversation Sam could hear was muted. There was no cheering this time. So many dead, for nothing. What a waste…

“Gather round, all you warriors! Gather round!” Harald called out. He’d stepped up onto a table, and roared to the assembled pilots with a red face and hands on hips. “You look like beaten curs! Is this what you all learned in Valhalla? That honor is easy, and courage worthless? Odin’s blood, you all look like people who would never have made it past the gates of Valhalla. Is that who you are?”

“That was a disaster,” one man called out.

“Absolutely, which is why I have this,” Harald called out. He produced a large cask from somewhere. Sam had no idea where it had come from - it seemed like it just appeared on the table beside him. Then again, this was a virtual space!

“What’s that, you old fart? Your piss?” Grimalf hollered with hands cupped to his mouth.

“Your vinegar!” Harald laughed long and loud. “No, warriors. It’s mead, the best drink for such an occasion. Come all, gather round. Take a mug each and sit with me. We have friends who died with swords in their hands today, friends who fell in battle. Each of them has gone on to the real Valhalla now, don’t you think?”

Sam blinked. He wasn’t wrong. Had she learned nothing at all from her time in Valhalla Online? Death in battle wasn’t something to be dreaded. If it were your fate to die that day, then it would happen, or so they said. Best to go about each day like it was your last, then, and sell yourself dearly when it was finally time to go. Sam didn’t know that she entirely believed in the Norse mythology behind it all, but she’d come to accept the ideals behind them. She shoved her way to Harald’s table and climbed up next to him, picking up a mug of the amber mead as she stood.

“Jorvik died in the first explosion today. He was a bastard asshole who always looked at my chest instead of my face. Had to slap him more than once for that,” Sam said. There were a scattering of laughs from around the room. “But he was my brother in arms out there, and he sails on to Valhalla today. Let us do as well when our time comes!”

Most of the room had mugs by that time, and they raised the drinks in a toast. As Sam stepped down from the table, another pilot took her place and eulogized a fallen friend. They cheered for each of the dead, including the ones who’d passed in their first battle. Each mug was filled more than once for all the toasts to be completed. But even though each eulogy was a reminder of how much they’d lost, it was also a reminder of why they were all out there. They were warriors, fighting to preserve their home. They named the fallen so that their names would not be forgotten. They cried tears for friends lost and sang songs for the dead so that wherever they were now, whatever spirit remained of them, it would know they had not died for nothing.

“That’s one hell of a ceremony,” Max said quietly. Sam had stepped off to the side of the room to lean against a wall, and he’d come over to stand beside her. “You used to do this for every battle?”

“No, I think Harald is ad-libbing a bit up there for dramatic effect,” Sam said. “Remember, back where we came from everyone came back each day, even if they’d died. Some realms it didn’t even take a day. You’d come back much more quickly. But out here? It seems like maybe some of the old ways our ancestors used to treat Valhalla had a real purpose. Can you feel it?”

Max nodded. “Definitely. It’s electric, the way his words and then all the speakers after have charged this place up. When you came back, you all looked…”

“Defeated?”

“I was going to say exhausted and sad,” Max replied, holding up both palms to her. “And I get it. That had to be a crappy and terrifying experience.”

That was more than accurate. Sam recalled with perfect clarity the emotions she’d felt as ship after ship exploded without any cause she could detect. It was like some invisible hand was reaching out to swat them one after another. There was nothing to evade, no way any of them could stave off destruction. Blind luck was the only difference between those who lived and the ones who died.

“I led them there,” Sam started to say. It was her responsibility. But not her fault - she reminded herself of that, because down that road lay some dark shit.

“You came up with the best plan you could, and I agreed to it. They out-thought us this time, that’s all. We need to come up with a better plan for next time,” he replied.

“Agreed. But not tonight,” Sam said. Another cheer went up in the room, and she raised her mug with all the others. Max surprised her by having a flagon of mead and joining them all in the cheer. She wouldn’t have thought this sort of ceremony would make sense to anyone not from Valhalla. He flashed her a sad smile. Yes, he understood. She could see it in his eyes that he’d known loss himself.

“Tonight we toast those who have gone on to Valhalla,” he agreed.

15

Sam left the party early. Most of the other pilots were still in the common area, regaling each other with tales of those who’d died in battle. Enough big fish tall-tales were floating around in there to make her wonder if the mead was somehow actually making them drunk. It certainly wasn’t having that effect on her, so she didn’t think that was the case. No, it was just the camaraderie of warriors who’d survived a battle together creating the atmosphere she sensed.

It was good for them. They needed the time to decompress before heading back out there again. Two fights with the enemy and they’d still come nowhere close to achieving their objective. The ring… It was the key to everything. The aliens were defending it with ferocity and ingenuity. Overcoming them was going to be tricky.

Sam stood in a large room just off the common space. She wondered what this area had been for, on the actual Hermes. Max said the simulated environment they gathered in was based on the original schematics of the ship. If the big common room was the mess hall, then perhaps this was the kitchen. Whatever the original purpose, it would do for what she needed. She called up an image of Neptune and the space around it. The simulation complied by creating a movie-style holographic image in the middle of the room. There was the planet, its moons, and the ring. Sam set them into real-time motion so she could watch the orbits.

Something niggled at the corner of her mind. There was a weakness in the minefield protecting the ring. Her gut said there was a way in. She just needed to figure out what it was…

“Still working even on your time off?” Max said from behind her. Sam jumped, startled.

“We don’t have a lot of time left for messing around,” she replied.

“No, we don’t. What’ve you got?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Sam said. She threw her arms up in exasperation. “I don’t see any way to approach the ring that won’t result in all of us being blown to bits.”

Max chewed on his lip, staring at the projection. “The Hermes could probably clear a path using her missiles. Stagger a series of detonations in space, one after another, to plow a road for you.”

It was a decent idea, but Sam could see the flaw immediately. “That puts the Hermes in range of their main guns. It probably gives their fighters a shot at you as well. It might work as a last ditch move, but it would be an all or nothing gambit. We’d either win or all die.”

“I think we’re getting close to that point now,” Max said. His face looked pained. He apparently hadn’t thought this mission would be as complicated and costly as it already had been. Sam felt for him, but she also knew better coming in. No plan ever survived contact with the enemy. An alien race strong enough to fly to another solar system wasn’t going to go down without a fight.

Of course, they could still give up. Return home again and live to fight another day. Sometimes Sam wasn’t even sure why they were fighting at all. Was Earth still her home, even? It was confusing. She could still feel the emotions the old Sam felt toward her family and friends, going about their business back on Earth without any knowledge all of this was even happening. All of the old Sam’s memories were a part of her.

And yet she was someone else now, too. That other Sam was still around. The other Sam was living the life she remembered. Her family might understand and have some sort of acceptance for her - she hoped they could, anyway. But her friends would never understand. Hell, Sam barely got it herself and she was living the experience. There was no way someone who’d never been a part of this mess would be able to comprehend it.

What humans didn’t understand, they feared. Would Sam and the others like her be the victims of that sort of fear forever?

“Why are we doing this?” Sam asked.

“I don’t understand,” Max replied. “Doing what?”

“Fighting this battle. Killing ourselves off to defend - what? A planet that may or may not actually accept us once all of this is over? It’s not like humans have a great track record for accepting someone who’s different,” Sam said. “Not too many folks more outside the norm than we are.”

Max shook his head. “They’ve already passed the law. We have citizenship.”

“Any law that was passed can be revoked just as quickly if they see the need,” Xiang said from the doorway. “Sorry to intrude. I overheard you talking and couldn’t help but want to chime in with my thoughts. Samantha is quite correct. Humanity doesn’t do well with things they don’t understand. First, they will fear what they don’t comprehend. Then they will hate it. That hate will turn to anger and aggression. It is inevitable.”

Sam turned to face Xiang. “Not always. We’ve done the right thing sometimes. We’ve given rights to those who didn’t have them before.”

Xiang waved a hand dismissively. “Sometimes, and only when public pressure became so great there was no choice but for the leaders to manage that. That sort of public opinion only works for those who are weaker than the masses.”

“We’re not numerous enough to be strong,” Max pointed out.

“How long will that last once we return and demonstrate what is possible?” Xiang countered. “Hundreds of people will want to become uploaded citizens. To live without growing old? Without the risk of disease or disorder? We can live a very long time, if not forever. That’s an enormous advantage over the rest of humanity. We are the next step, in a way. We can do things they cannot. And they will turn on us for it.”

It was a chilling thought. What if they won this war for humanity, only to have humans change their minds and turn on them down the road? What Xiang said rang true. Humans were crappy at dealing with things that were different from themselves. But what else could they all do? Xiang wasn’t suggesting they just allow the aliens to take out the rest of humanity, was he?

“You could be right,” Max said. They were all silent for a moment. Then Max went on. “They might hate us. They might fight against us, someday. But for right now, we have a damned good reason to fight.”

“Which is?” Xiang asked.

“Back on Earth is the seed of everything good about humanity as well as the bad. If we want to survive in the long run, we’ll need them. If we want to keep those we cared about in life safe, this is the way we can do it,” Max said. “We might all be ghosts out here, shadows of what we were. But here we are at the end of the world as the last line of defense between Earth and whatever fire is coming her way. There’s no place I’d rather be.”

Sam heard what he said and couldn’t help herself - she laughed aloud.

“What was funny?” Max asked, a hurt look on his face.

“You really don’t know your Norse mythology, do you?” Sam asked. She hadn’t known much about it before arriving in Valhalla Online, either, but she wasn’t about to tell Max that. You couldn’t stay in Valhalla very long without learning a thing or two about the old Norse beliefs. “Valhalla is where Odin keeps his einherjar, training them for the final battle - Ragnarok, where the Earth will perish in fire and blood. The gods and their warriors will fight together against the giants and other forces of evil on that day.”

Both of the men in front of her stared at her with such blank looks that Sam couldn’t help but laugh again. They still didn’t get it! All of this - everything they were experiencing - it was like something from one of the old tales. Her heart felt lighter just thinking about that. In the Norse stories, the gods of Asgard knew that Ragnarok would be their end. They knew they would lose. But they would fight the battle anyway because it wasn’t whether you won or lost that mattered most, but how you faced life and death.

“Don’t you see? We are the Einherjar. We are those warriors, returned from the dead to defend Midgard. The aliens threaten Earth with destruction, and we rise with the gods to fight for her. We’re riding in a god right now - Hermes,” Sam said, chuckling to herself at the string of coincidences. “The gods don’t battle against Ragnarok because they expect to win. They fight that battle despite knowing they will lose, because it is the right thing to do.”

“You may well be right,” Xiang said. “But I am not wrong.”

“No, you’re not. If humanity turns against us someday, then we’ll deal with it,” Sam replied. “But if we fail out here, there won’t be any humanity left to turn against us. And we can’t make babies, Xiang. If Earth is lost, we’ll be the last humans to exist. We’re not the future; we’re an evolutionary dead-end.”

She turned back to the projection, an idea springing to mind. It was seeing the sweep of Triton’s path out of the corner of her eye that had sparked the notion. The ring was locked in a geosynchronous orbit. Triton was not, and swept past the ring periodically. That was the weak spot. That was how they’d win.

“Gentlemen, I know what we need to do,” Sam said.

16

Admiral Thomas Stein could see the Intrepid from his office window. It floated there in space as a constant reminder of the battle ahead. The ship was almost ready. Crews raced around the clock to finish her construction. The Albucierre drive was already installed, but secondary weapon systems were taking more time to route into the power grid than they’d anticipated. Thomas threw the report down on his desk in disgust. If only they’d had a little bit more time!

The Hermes was still out there fighting the good fight, but as expected they were having little effect. As of the last reports he had - there was a four-hour delay in transmissions - the squadron had attempted a second engagement with the enemy and been rebuffed by a hidden minefield. An entire area of space seeded with mines too small to be seen on radar! That would be a risk for anyone flying through that sector of space for years before all of the mines finally collided with a chunk of debris or fell into Neptune.

Still, the one actual firefight hadn’t gone too badly. They knew the alien tech was good, but not worlds better than their own. It was going to be like fighting early rifles while using flintlocks, perhaps. But at least they wouldn’t have to take their flintlocks up against hover-tanks.

Losing almost half their Wasp squadron meant the Hermes was barely combat operational now, though. He was half tempted to order her home, or at least to stand down from attacks and remain in the area as their eyes and ears. The odds of them doing more than slow the alien construction down a little were slim, and they would pay heavily for causing even a small delay. But a few hours might mean the difference between the Intrepid arriving in time to stop the gate or not. As much as he hated to risk throwing those lives away for no gain, the fact was they were the only asset he had to play with. They had to continue the mission as best they could.

A knock on his door brought Thomas back to the present. He took the seat behind his desk before answering. “Come.”

Captain Fairhaven opened the door and stepped inside. “I’ve spotted something I think you’ll be interested in, sir.”

“Oh?” Thomas asked. From the look on her face, it was grave news. He didn’t need any more… No, this was his job. He’d stepped up when Earth needed him. Now he had to play out the role he’d taken on. To the end, whatever that might be.

Fairhaven dropped a manila folder on his desk. Thomas reached over and opened it. Inside was a single page of paper with a list of names. He scanned the list, not sure what he was looking for. They looked like the cast of characters from a movie. “Harald? Grimalf? Gurgle? Sam? Oh - these are..?”

She picked up when his voice trailed off. “The names of Commander Knauf’s recruits from Valhalla Online, yes sir.”

“What am I looking for?”

“Second name from the bottom.”

Thomas scanned down the list of names until he reached the one she’d mentioned. It was simply ‘Xiang.’ The name rang a bell for him, but he couldn’t place it right away. It was a common enough Chinese name, but why would it have special meaning? Then the memory struck him like a gunshot. He recalled sitting down to dinner with a man who bore that name. Of all the people on Earth, he was perhaps the most dangerous Thomas had ever met. Choi Xiang, the former President of the United Nations. That dinner ended with Choi blowing up the restaurant, killing or wounding scores of people in an attempt to kill Thomas or failing that frame him for planting the bomb. Either would have worked for Choi just fine. He was as ruthless as they came and intelligent enough to make him deadly.

“But he’s dead. I killed him myself. I’m damned sure the job was finished properly,” Thomas protested. He could still remember that battle, the final one of the war between Mars and Earth. He’d engaged Choi in close combat with a Mars powered armor against a monstrous armored construction Choi had constructed from an amalgam of human and alien tech. That’s when Thomas learned that Earth had been contacted. When he discovered the motive behind Choi’s madness.

“Yes, precisely. Minds are uploaded to Valhalla Online after the host dies,” Fairhaven said. “Wealthy people were known to use that upload as an insurance policy against death.”

Was it possible? If it was Choi, what was he doing out there in space? Was he there to cause the mission to fail, or did he have some other agenda in mind? Thomas stood and paced, trying to think what his next course should be. He glanced at Fairhaven.

“Xiang is a common enough name,” Thomas said. “You wouldn’t have come to me with this unless you had more information to support your hypothesis.”

She nodded. “I checked with Afterlife. The upload data is confidential and under seal, but I got a judge to give me a warrant. They are gathering the rest of the information about this Xiang. I should have it soon. But they were able to give me the upload date.”

“It matches the date of Choi’s death?”

“The day after,” she confirmed.

Still not a smoking gun. A lot of people had died in that final series of battles. It could have been their Choi Xiang, or any number of other people named Choi. Still, it was a hell of a coincidence. He didn't really believe in coincidences.

“All right, good work. Keep digging. I want to know everything there is on this Xiang person. If he’s someone else, then there’s nothing to worry about.” Nothing more than they were already worried about, anyway.

“And if it is the previous UN president?” she asked.

“Then we have one hell of a problem,” Thomas said. Because the most deadly adversary he’d ever faced had found a way to put himself precisely where he could do the most damage possible to Earth’s future. There was no telling what Choi would do out there. The man had said he was acting in Earth’s best interests, so would he betray his homeworld somehow? The truth was, Thomas just didn’t know what he would do. That was always the biggest danger in dealing with the man - he was brilliant, ruthless, and not afraid to use both traits in combination.

“Dismissed, Captain. Inform me the minute you have more information,” Thomas said. She saluted and left his office. Thomas took his seat at the desk again. There were so many moving parts out there, he worried that he was going to drop some of these balls if he wasn’t careful. Dealing with this new one was going to be a problem, but luckily he knew precisely who to bring in for assistance. Thomas tapped his desk panel.

“Dial the UN President’s office,” he told the computer running his terminal. “I need to have a chat with my father.”

Harald stared out into the void. He regretted that there wasn’t even a little buzz from the mead. If there was anything he missed about Valhalla, it was the ability to get himself a little drunk. The game mechanics even adjusted performance in about the same way alcohol did in the real world. It was all the booze without any of the liver complications. The simulation on the Hermes was nowhere near as detailed. It lacked the nuance of Valhalla, and the ability to get intoxicated.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t feeling a rush from the meeting anyway. He didn’t know what inspired him to stand up there and roar his heart out to all the other pilots. It was something about the way they carried themselves when they returned to the Hermes. They looked broken. That was a bigger killer than anything else, for a fighting man. Any fighting person, he amended the thought. Plenty of women warriors out there too, even if there hadn’t been so many when he was a young grunt, he was able to stay with the times that much.

Everything out here was different. He was back in the real world. Back in uniform - sort of. He was a Marine. You never stopped being a Marine. Even after his death, Harald still considered himself a Marine while he was adventuring in Valhalla. But he’d lost his way, there.

Was there a chance he could find it again out here?

He’d meant everything that he’d said to the other warriors in their band. The thought made him chuckle to himself. Terms like those rolled into his mind so quickly after all the years he’d spent in Valhalla. The place left an imprint on his soul, if he actually had one.

That was the big question, wasn’t it? Was he still the same man he’d been in life, brought back from the grave with technology? Was he a new person? Were they people at all, or just software? The line between real and imaginary blurred in his thoughts. He stared out into space again to cool the racing in his mind.

The stars didn’t care what others thought of them. They just were. They sat there, burning balls of light, pouring out the energy and materials from which worlds and life sprung. It was damned cool. Stars were one of the most fascinating things Harald had ever heard of, and they didn’t give two rat tails about what anyone thought they were. They merely existed, did what they were supposed to do, and then burned out.

“Penny for your thoughts?” a voice said.

Harald tried to turn, but he was in his fighter, watching the void through his Wasp’s scanners. There was no way to look over his shoulder and view the other person in this place. He felt a second of disorientation before his mind adjusted again to the reality he was living.

“Grimalf. You left the party early?” Harald asked.

“So did you.”

“Yes, but that’s often my style and never yours.”

“It is when I see a friend hurting,” Grim said. “What’s going on?”

Harald gave a sigh. “You’re not going to leave me alone until I talk, are you?”

“Nope.”

“All right then, you old bastard. I’ll spill. But no talking to Sam, all right?” Harald said, chuckling to himself. It was good to see Grim again, even if the man was a constant pest.

So Harald told him the story of how he’d been turned into a living weapon, designed to cause the end of Valhalla and everyone living in it, the tool of a goddess gone mad. He told Grimalf how he’d finally broken free with Sam’s help and killed the goddess - who was herself the last vestige of the woman he loved, slain years ago.

Grimalf listened through the tale, not interjecting a word. He didn’t condemn Harald for his actions but didn’t heap praise on him either. When Harald finished the story, Grimalf quietly said. “That sounds like it sucked, my friend.”

“It did. That it did,” Harald said, surprised into a sad laugh by his friend’s choice of words.

“You were up there reminding us to recall the lessons we’d learned in Valhalla, a short while ago,” Grimalf said.

“Yes? What about it?”

“I was just thinking… Your tale sounds like an old saga. Full of drama, pain, victory, suffering, defeat, and honor. Maybe you’re more like those ancestors you talk about than you might think,” Grimalf said.

Harald chewed on the thought for a moment. It was ridiculous, of course. But then again…

“Thank you, Grim. I’ll think about it,” Harald said.

But Grimalf had already taken his leave. Harald was alone once more, left to stare out into the stars. Somehow they didn’t feel as empty as they had a short while before, and neither did his future.

17

Dust and bits of ice swirled up from the ground as Sam’s fighter settled to Triton’s surface. She was the first one down. Eleven other fighters were all landing nearby, scattered about the rocky terrain and looking like just so many additional boulders. The last six Wasps remained with the Hermes to provide her an escort. Sam shut down most of her systems, keeping just enough power running through the Wasp to maintain her computer and radio. Funny, that computer was almost like life support for her, now. If it failed, she would potentially die. Maybe they could retrieve the hard drive before it took some kind of damage. Perhaps not. But it was juice flowing through the computing system that housed her mind that kept each of them functioning.

“I’m down. The other fighters are landing now. You’re a go for Operation Tyr,” Sam said over the radio.

“You’re hereby banned from naming operations from here on out,” Max replied.

She’d explained the reasoning behind the name - that was her mistake. Tyr had stuck his hand into Fenris wolf’s mouth to prove there was no trick involved in his capture. This had allowed the other gods to finally chain the wolf. But the daring effort Tyr made came at a cost. Fenris bit off his hand.

It seemed appropriate for this venture. The Hermes was the hand being stuck into Fenris. The aliens couldn’t help but react to such a juicy target once they became aware of it. Sam just hoped that the Hermes wasn’t bitten off in the process. Max agreed it was worth the cost if his distraction allowed her to complete her mission. But they’d already lost enough lives. Sam was done with losing more.

Hours slid by as they waited for Triton to continue its orbit. Sam watched the timer tick down. Triton’s orbit swung just outside the ring’s position. Every one hundred and forty-one hours, Triton would pass the ring and continue on its way. This time, though, the moon carried a payload that was going to give the aliens one hell of a surprise.

In the meantime, Sam had far too much time to sit and think. The things Xiang had said - they all made sense, from a certain point of view. He echoed some of the same fears she’d already had. It was a sure thing most of the other pilots had to be having many of the same misgivings. How were they supposed to put their lives on the line fighting for a world they didn’t even know would accept them if they survived? Morale had an impact even on the digital. The will to win mattered more than almost anything else. She needed a way to help resurrect that.

The answer was in the same legends she’d talked about with Max and Xiang. It wasn’t enough to be pilots in the UN space force. Not anymore. They needed to be something else. They had to take on an identity that would carry on the sense of purpose Harald had begun to inspire the night before, and change it into an even more powerful emotion.

Finally, the timer ticked down to zero. By now the Hermes should be over Neptune’s north pole. Max would hammer away at the minefield, carving a hole through it and making as much noise as he possibly could. With luck it would draw the alien ship and their fighters away from the ring. Meanwhile, her Wasps wouldn’t have to worry about the mines anymore. Triton’s orbital path should be clear. Even if the aliens were re-seeding the moon’s orbit every time it went by, there would still be a brief window where they could fly directly toward the ring in relative safety.

“All right, let’s do this. Ghost Wing, sound off when you’re airborne,” Sam said.

“Ghost Wing?” Grimalf asked.

“We needed a unit name. It seemed to fit,” Sam replied.

“I like it. We are ghosts. Returned from the dead to scare the hell out of our foes,” Tyrin said.

“We’re more than that. We are the Einherjar, coming out of Valhalla to save the world from forces that would destroy it,” Sam proclaimed.

She was worried that someone might chuckle and get them all laughing. No one did.

“You know, that does fit the story, doesn’t it?” Grim asked.

“Weren’t you just saying that our tale sounded like a saga?” Harald said. “Seems like you’re not the only one. It’s a good name, Sam. A good fit. If we’re the einherjar, we have much to live up to out here. Let’s make this happen, people!”

All twelve fighters were aloft. They stayed close to the moon for a little longer, letting it mask their presence as each fighter’s scanners picked up more information about what was going on.

The Hermes was easy to spot. It was making all the noise Sam could ask for. One missile after another exploded in empty space. Each explosion would clear a broad swath of any mines that might have been there. The Hermes wasn’t moving especially fast, but it didn’t have to. The point wasn’t for Max to rush forward into the fight. His job was to draw the aliens away from the ring.

It looked like it was working, too. The alien mothership and a score of fighters were racing toward the Hermes. They’d be in firing range in sixty-three seconds. Not a lot of time for her people to get the job done and get clear before the Hermes was engaged. It was time to move.

“Let’s go, Ghosts!” Sam said. She activated her primary drive and blasted clear of Triton’s surface toward the waiting ring.

It wasn’t far, astronomically speaking. They would close to torpedo range in just a few seconds. But if they wanted to get some shots through with so few ships, they needed to be just about on top of the thing before they fired. The closer they were, the more difficult it would be for the aliens to stop their shots before they hit.

“Contacts near the ring,” Xiang reported.

Fifteen of them, small craft that looked like the ones she’d seen before. They were outnumbered and outgunned. It was going to be a shootout Sam wasn’t sure they could win.

“Stand by on torpedo launch. Soon as they’re at risk of nailing us, we fire, regardless of what range we’re at,” Sam said.

“Won’t do much good unless we’re close,” Xiang warned. He was right. They’d already seen the alien defenses at work. They were impressive.

“If we get blown up before launching, it helps no one at all. We’ve got one shot each. Make them count,” Sam replied.

The alien fighters soared toward them. About the same time as they reached maximum torpedo range, the aliens fired a pair of missiles each. The deadly weapons shot away from the fighters, closing the gap toward the Wasps ever more rapidly.

“Railguns, take out those missiles,” Sam said. She ran the math through the computer. The missiles would hit her formation when they were still a little farther away than she’d like, but they ought to be close enough. “Fire torpedoes on my mark.”

After that, there was nothing to do but wait. Shooting the railguns at this distance wouldn’t accomplish anything but wasting bullets. This was one way where space battle differed from a battle on the ground. In the fields of Valhalla battle was usually a hot thing, two forces slamming into each other until one of them crumpled.

But out in space it was a different story. Lags of a minute or more where the two sides just faced off against each other and waited while the gap slowly closed were normal. Adjusting her mindset from the one to the other was hard.

“It’s time. Fire torpedos!” Sam said. “Then full evasive. Use your railguns and thrusters to avoid those incoming shots.”

Twelve torpedoes unlatched from the hulls of her fighters. Unlike the smaller missiles they had mounted on each wing, these torpedoes were powerful enough to put a serious dent in any ship. They ought to be large enough to at least tear big chunks out of the ring. Ideally they could blow the thing up entirely, but at the minimum they had to do enough damage to delay its completion a little longer. Even a few days delay might swing the war.

Missiles spat toward her fighter. Sam threw the Wasp over into a roll, weaving around one shot. Her railgun fire took out another. To her port side she saw something explode and hoped it wasn’t one of her fighters, but she didn’t have time to check. Another missile had latched onto her, following at just a hundred feet or so back.

“Shit, I can’t lose it!” Sam said.

There was an explosion so close it rocked her ship. Sam was sure for a moment that she’d been hit, but her ship was still at nearly a hundred percent functionality.

“You’re welcome,” Harald said, soaring past her. “How many times have I saved your ass now?”

“We’re keeping score? Sam laughed. “I wasn’t aware it was a competitive sport!”

“Everything in life is a game,” Harald replied. “And I’m in the lead on this one!”

Sam was out the other side of the missile attack, still speeding on toward the ring. The torpedoes were just closing on the alien fighters. Another few seconds and they’d rush right past, nailing the ring for good. It was working!

Then the alien ships all moved in unison, dashing directly at the torpedoes. They dove straight into the teeth of the explosive devices, each fighter turning into a small fireball. Two fighters blew up trying to stop a single torpedo, but most of their shots were being taken down by a single enemy each.

“They’re committing suicide!” Grimalf said.

“Giving their lives to defend what is theirs,” Xiang said. “I can understand that. Even respect it.”

Sam could hear the disappointment in both their voices - she was feeling the same emotion. What should have been at least a crippling blow against the ring was now just wasted ordinance. But they weren’t through yet! The timer for how long the Hermes had before the aliens were dangerously close ticked away in front of her. There was still time. Maybe not enough to have the massive effect they hoped for, but it might just be enough.

“Fire all secondary rockets and railguns as they bear. First wing, you’re with me taking out the surviving enemy fighters. The rest of you close with that ring and try to mess it the hell up a little,” Sam said.

“Got you,” Grim replied.

Sam targeted the lead enemy and sent a burst of railgun fire toward it. The enemy ship jerked to the side, dodging her shot, but lining it up perfectly for Harald’s missile. The ship exploded in a flurry of light. Just a little longer and they’d have the thing…!

The ring loomed in front of her ship. At a distance it just looked like a bright point of light. From the nearer vantage Sam could tell how enormous it really was. Every spaceship Earth had could fly through that ring side-by-side with room to spare. If they were building that to enable an invasion, how many ships were they bringing?

Small ships rushed from spot to spot on the ring, continuing construction even while the place was under attack. Humans would have pulled all their workers into safety. These aliens hadn’t bothered, and that disturbed Sam more than she wanted to admit. There was self-sacrifice, that she could understand. And then there was the wanton disregard for life she was witnessing firsthand.

That workers were crawling all over the thing wasn’t going to give them a stay of execution. She fired her small missiles at the ring itself. This time there were no fighters to block the shots. Another dozen missiles joined hers in flight toward the ominous-looking structure. The flashes of light as each rocket smashed home were blinding on her camera and obstructed the rest of her scans for a brief few seconds as well.

When the explosion cleared, the ring was still there. It didn’t appear to have been damaged at all.

18

Dana had at long last fallen asleep on Thomas’s lap. He looked down at her face, drinking in the memory of this moment. He cherished these times. She was less than a year old, but in no time she would be much older. There was too much of her young life that he’d already missed, despite his best intentions otherwise. An admiral paid a hefty price for his rank, Thom no less than any other. It meant far too little time to spend with his daughter - or his wife, Keladry.

“Penny for your thoughts?” she asked from behind him.

Thom turned his head to smile at her over his shoulder. “Just wishing I could be here more often. You know. The usual.”

It was sad that he missed so much time with them, but he worked hard to make what time he had the highest quality he could. The people he loved gave him the drive to keep going even when things seemed most hopeless. At the end of the day, if Thomas were honest with himself, he’d admit that the reason he fought so hard wasn’t for humanity - it was for his family, to ensure they had a future.

“Any word yet?” Kel asked.

“No. But I’m expecting a final report any minute now.” He’d informed her of the Xiang issue. Kel had fought against him in the last war. She’d been even more skeptical than he was about the idea Choi had survived as an upload and then happened to find his way back out of the computer game just in time for the alien invasion. It did sound like an incredible story, but it was just the sort of complicated plot Choi enjoyed.

“What will you do if it turns out it really is him?” she asked.

“The only thing I can. I’ll go stop him. Again. Hopefully this time it’ll take,” Thomas said.

His wrist communicator chimed with an incoming call from Fairhaven. This was either good news or bad. Either way, best to face it head-on. He tapped the control to answer the call.

“Stein here,” he said.

“Admiral. We’ve gotten the data back on the subject you asked us to research. I don’t want to go into detail over an unsecured line, sir - but we’ve confirmed the hypothesis,” Fairhaven said.

“Are you absolutely sure?” Thomas asked her.

“Yes, sir. There’s no doubt.”

Damn. Well, that was the end of his peaceful interlude here at home. It was time to get back to work already. “Understood. I’ll be at the Intrepid within the hour. Meet me there. Pass along orders to the Hermes - they are to immediately withdraw from combat. Maintain a watch on the enemy, but do not engage them until they receive new orders.”

“Understood, sir. See you soon,” she said.

“Stein out,” Thomas said, and cut the connection.

“You’re taking the Intrepid out early,” Kel said. It wasn’t a question. She knew him well enough to predict what he had in mind.

“It’s almost ready. Not all the secondary systems are running yet, but it’s close enough. I need to get out there. It’s been confirmed. Xiang is Choi Xiang, the deadliest man I’ve ever met,” Thomas said.

“But not as deadly as you, love. You’re still here,” Kel said.

Thomas still didn’t know if he was around because he was better, or just because he’d gotten lucky. Which didn’t really matter. Choi was back in the game. That was bad news for everyone.

“The Intrepid is the only way I can get out there in time to act. I only hope it isn’t too late. We have no idea what Choi might be up to out there. He’s already three steps ahead of us. If these are the same aliens he had contact with while he was president, who knows what he might be able to do?”

“I’m not arguing, Thom. I agree. We need to go.”

Thomas frowned and looked down at Dana. She was still sleeping, her small face blissfully unaware of everything going on around her. He wanted more than anything to be able to protect this child and her mother. They’d argued over the issue of deployment more than once. It was bad enough if one of them died while away on a mission. If they both deployed together and the worst happened, they could leave Dana an orphan in one fell swoop.

“We discussed this before she was born, Thom,” Kel said, sensing his hesitation. “We’ve set up caregivers who will take her while we’re away. And people to care for her in case we don’t come back. But you need me out there.”

“Best pilot in the UN Navy,” Thomas said, leaning forward to give her a kiss. She smiled and accepted the gesture. “I’m not debating it. You’re CAG for the Intrepid. You earned that spot, and honestly I wouldn’t want anyone else in charge of our fighter complement in such a dire situation.”

“You just wish there was another way,” Kel added in a soft voice.

“Yeah. Very much so.”

“I feel the same way every time I see you go into danger too, you know. It’s part of our jobs. We take risks so other people don’t have to,” Kel said.

“I just hope Dana doesn’t end up paying the price.”

“If we die defending her and she lives to grow up because of what we did, then she’ll know she had parents who cared enough to give everything we had for her,” she replied. “It is the most worthy gift someone can offer. She’ll understand. But let’s not get so morose! You really think there’s anything we can’t handle, together?”

She slapped him on the shoulder and he laughed. Kel was always good for bringing him out of a bad mood. It was impossible to stay gloomy around her. Thom leaned in and hugged his wife, the baby wriggling a little between them. He held her for probably a few seconds longer than he really needed to. But this - this sensation of love, of family, this was something worth remembering and holding on to.

The Intrepid was already abuzz with activity before Thomas and Keladry arrived by shuttle. Word had spread that something was up. He watched people murmuring to each other as he swung aboard and saluted the watch officer, imagining what they were saying to each other. The ship wasn’t due to depart for several days yet - if it was really ready then. They were running into one problem after another with power modulation. The Albucierre drive was based on alien technology that didn’t want to play nicely with their tech. The resulting mess was an engineering nightmare the best minds in the world were staying up late into the night trying to solve.

“Sound action stations,” Thomas told the watch officer. He gawked, and Thomas clapped his hands together to spur the man into motion. He shook his head. Too many raw, new people in the Navy now. Too few who recalled what real war felt like. That was going to change soon. Sadly, there were probably going to be far too many people who understood the nature of war, before all this was done.

Alarm bells blared through the ship, and people raced to their stations. Kel turned to Thomas and gave him another quick hug. “See you soon,” she said, and then raced off to the fighter bay to ready her people there.

Most of the ship’s complement was already aboard. The shuttles ferrying the last few in and taking away most of the crews who’d been working on the Intrepid’s construction would dock shortly. Ready or not, the Intrepid was about to make her maiden voyage.

Thomas made his way to the bridge. Fairhaven was already there, waiting in his seat. She vacated it as soon as the doors hissed open and he floated into the room.

“What’s our status?” Thomas asked.

“I’m told the Albucierre drive should work, but no guarantees we won’t blow ourselves to bits,” Fairhaven said.

“Well, that’s a comfort.”

“Main engines are at full power. Our primary railgun batteries and missile tubes are also drawing power properly,” she added. “The secondary batteries and anti-missile systems are still not syncing with the power generator though.”

“We’ll do the best we can with what we have. Fighters?” Thomas asked. Without the secondaries and anti-missile guns, the fighters would be the only defense they had against enemy missiles.

“Full complement of sixty ready to fly from four operational bays, sir,” Fairhaven said.

“That’s excellent work,” Thomas replied.

“Mostly thanks to Commodore Stein,” Fairhaven said. “She promised hellfire and brimstone on the engineers if her fighters weren’t all locked, stocked, and stowed properly.”

“That does sound like my wife talking,” Thomas said. He chuckled, imagining what that conversation must have sounded like. Kel could be a veritable firestorm when she wanted to be. “We’ll stand by while the shuttles dock and debark with the extra crews. Which reminds me - time to let the crew know what the hell we’re doing.”

He slipped into his seat and strapped himself down so that he wouldn’t drive away. Then Thomas tapped a console, opening a channel to speak to the entire ship.

“Attention all crew and workers. This is Admiral Thomas Stein. Due to new intelligence received about the crisis out by Neptune, we can no longer afford to wait on further construction before launching the Intrepid. Three shuttles will be arriving shortly. If you’re not crew and want to head back to the station, be on one of them when they depart,” Thomas said. “No one will think less of you. You didn’t sign up to be part of a battle. But anyone who stays will be much appreciated. We could use the extra hands to help keep this ship from falling apart during her first flight!”

Thomas took a deep breath before going on. “You’ve all done stellar work to get this ship as ready as she is. Right now we are the last, best hope humanity has of stemming this alien threat before it turns into something we can’t stop. Man your stations. Remember your training. We’re not just fighting for each other this time. This is for everyone we’ve left behind down on Earth, Mars, and Venus. Our homes are in danger. We will rise to the challenge and defend them.”

He shut off the speaker system and looked up at Fairhaven. “How’d I do?”

“On the scale of most inspiring speeches, it rates maybe a six, sir. But I think it’ll do the trick,” she replied.

“A six? A six?” Thomas looked around the bridge for support from the other crew there. They kept their faces studiously turned away from him. “That’s not a very nice thing to tell an admiral, Captain.”

“You keep me around because I tell you the truth, and we both know it,” she replied with a thin smile.

“Best hit one of those shuttles. They won’t wait,” he said. She was non-combat staff, not crew.

“I think I’d like to stay on board, if that’s all right with you, sir?” she replied.

He didn’t even have to think about it. He merely gave her a nod. She was a smart person with superb organizational and people skills. They might need her before all this was done.

“Grab a chair and strap in then, Captain. We’ll be leaving as quickly as we can. Navigation, plot me a course for Neptune,” Thomas said.

“Where would you like to arrive, sir? We can place the exit coordinates with a great deal of precision,” the young woman manning the station replied.

“Right on top of that ring,” Thomas said with a snarl. “I want to smash it into shrapnel with our arrival.”

19

Sam didn’t understand. How could all of their shots have done no damage at all? No matter how strong the structure of the ring might be there ought to have been some impact from all of those explosives. She continued closing on the thing, blazing away with her railgun as rapidly as it could fire. The shots just weren’t hitting the ring at all. Or they were - but something was reducing their velocity to near zero just before they struck. The little shards of iron bounced off harmlessly, all their speed somehow bled away.

“The thing has a shield!” Sam called out.

“Shit. Now what do we do?” Grimalf asked.

“I’m open to ideas,” Sam replied.

What could they do? Their weapons were useless against this thing. No matter how much damage they did, it just shrugged everything off. She skimmed past the thing’s enormous surface. Small construction bots drifted here and there, working on the structure. She picked a couple of them off with her railgun. Those things weren’t shielded, at least. Maybe if she blew up enough of the bots, it might slow the construction down some?

But the ring looked completed, or very nearly so. Where there’d once been gaping holes in its structure, now it was whole. The thing had to be almost ready for use. They were too little, too late. She fired at another construction drone, grimly determined to do whatever small damage she could.

“Sam, we’ve got incoming. A wave of fighters headed our way,” Harald said.

“And their mothership. It looks like we’re now considered a bigger threat than the Hermes,” Xiang added. “We need to go.”

Her scans showed the incoming enemy ships. Sam had the computer run probably course dynamics. At their current acceleration it was already too late. By the time her fighters overcame their current velocity and turned around to run, the enemy ships would be on top of them. They were neatly trapped.

“No time to withdraw,” Sam said. She sent the others the computer’s analysis.

“Shit,” Harald said. “Not great odds for a fight.”

“I’ve got another way,” Sam said.

“I’m all ears,” Harald replied.

“You’re not gonna like it…” Sam said, smiling to herself. It felt good to poke jibes at her old friend. Felt more like old times than ever.

“I usually don’t. But you usually get us out of whatever mess you put us in,” Harald said. “Let’s do this.”

“OK. All fighters continue on the current path and accelerate at maximum,” Sam said. “Follow my lead.”

“We’re headed toward the enemy fighters?” Xiang asked incredulously.

“No, not quite. We’re going where they can’t go,” Sam replied.

“Oh. Shit,” Grimalf said, finally realizing where her course would take them.

The vector they were on was an almost straight line from Triton to the ring - which lay about halfway between Triton and Neptune. If they accelerated on their present course it would take them directly toward the planet. With its supersonic storms of slush and half-frozen gases. The enemy fighters could follow them in. But would they? Sam wasn’t sure her Wasps could survive in that soup, but at least they were designed for some atmospheric flying. The alien craft didn’t look like they could fly in an atmosphere well at all.

They rocketed on, burning their engines with every bit of energy they could pour in. Twenty gravities of acceleration were more than any human could survive for more than a brief time. The Ghosts could handle it indefinitely, though. They sped past the spot where the alien fighters’ course would intersect theirs long before the enemy was in firing range.

The alien ships fell in behind them, losing a little ground to change course and follow. This was now an enormous game of chicken. Did the aliens think they would call her bluff, force her to turn and face them rather than entering the atmosphere? They were in for a real surprise if that was the case. She never bluffed.

“Here we go!” Sam said. “Hang on! Follow the pre-plotted course as best you can. We’ll rendezvous at the exit coordinates. Communication might be shitty in there.”

“See you on the flip side,” Grimalf said.

The first winds buffeted her small craft. Sam kept the throttle up as the atmosphere thickened. She was coming in at an oblique angle, letting the wind carry her along as she skimmed through the upper atmosphere. If she’d been human, the flight controls would have been torn from her grasp. Her body would have been pummeled to bits by the battering her fighter took, and her body would have been cooked by the friction heat against the fighter’s outer shell.

She was somewhat immune to all of those things, though. A processor went offline, which pinged an alert to her. Backup systems took over the strain of keeping her mind running before a cascade failure sent the entire system into shutdown. That would be bad - akin to falling unconscious while flying through this mess. In other words, certain death. The planet would suck her down into the thicker atmosphere with even a moment of distraction. The winds and ice down there would tear her ship to pieces in seconds.

The only comfort Sam took from the rocky ride was that if any of the alien fighters had tried to follow them, they all had physical bodies inside. Insect or not, she didn’t think they were likely to survive the elements in this mess. Any aliens who followed them were dead.

She poured on speed again as she neared the exit point. The planet seemed to grip at her ship, slowing her ascent out of the windstorm. Gravity tugged at her, she could feel the pull fighting her engines. But the fighter was more than strong enough - the gas and wind around her thinned, and then vanished.

“Yes!” Sam shouted. It felt so good to be out of there!

The scan was clear. No enemy fighters. The big ship - yes, there it was, still a long distance away. It hadn’t tried to pursue, returning instead to guard the ring. Where were her people, though? For a terrible moment Sam thought she was the only one who’d survived, that she’d led everyone else to their deaths.

A Wasp shot up from the planet, and then another. More followed. Soon all eleven other fighters were right behind her, building up velocity again as they shifted course to reunite with the Hermes. They’d all made it. The relief Sam felt was palpable. She wanted to shake with reaction and couldn’t. Her Wasp body didn’t have the capability. But she felt the shudders in her mind anyway.

“Good plan, Sam,” Harald said.

“Any plan we all walk away from is a great plan,” Grimalf added.

“Thanks, guys. It was all I could think of to get us out of that mess on the fly,” Sam said.

“It was more than enough,” Xiang said. “Well done.”

But what were they supposed to do now? The ring was shielded well enough that their missiles did nothing. The torpedoes had been blocked, but Sam wasn’t sure they would have accomplished much more. That was the heaviest firepower their fighters could carry. The Hermes had missiles as powerful as the torpedoes, but nothing stronger. How were they supposed to shatter the ring if they couldn’t even scratch it?

Sam went over the data her scans recorded during her fly-by. It looked like the field around the ring sucked all the energy out of whatever hit it. The railgun pellets had just glanced off after their velocity was bled away. The explosions likewise had done nothing more than warm the surface of the ring a little. There wasn’t anything else she could glean from watching the data, but maybe Max could see something she didn’t. She packed the scan data into her radio and sent it on to the Hermes.

Max was exhausted from the fight. The last thing he wanted was a cryptic set of orders from Earth, especially when the orders made no sense at all. He rechecked the verification codes. There was no doubt - the new orders were deliberately authorized by Admiral Stein himself. But they made no sense. Worse, by the time his request for clarification reached Earth, was heard, and he got the reply, eight hours would pass. That was far too much time to be sitting on their hands, but he prepared the recording anyway.

“Orders received, but need clarification,” he said. “Why are we supposed to stand down? Our primary mission objective is not yet accomplished and the alien ring is nearly completed. Our remaining personnel are still mission capable. We are ready to engage the enemy again as soon as our fighters have resupplied. Please acknowledge.”

He sent the message but wasn’t expecting much. If the admiral was sending orders to stand down without any more information, there was probably a reason behind it. Max couldn’t fathom what it might be, but Stein wasn’t someone to issue a command without reason.

That didn’t mean he had to like it, or that his pilots were going to appreciate being told to stand by rather than fight. The ring wasn’t dead, which meant Sam’s part of the last mission had failed, but he knew her. She’d want to try again as soon as possible. So would the rest of them.

Another message ping reached him. At first, Max hoped it was a follow-up from Earth. It was far too early for them to have gotten his recording, let alone replied. But he had hopes they might have realized more information would be useful for him and sent it along after the first order.

No, this was a data packet from Sam, showing the events of her last fight at close range. Max took in the entire sequence of events. The ring was protected by some sort of shield. That was going to bollox things up. He checked the energy readings on her scan. The ring emitted a constant energy signature which had to be caused by whatever that protective barrier was. Right after the missiles struck, the energy spiked and then waned. It did the same, but to a smaller degree, when the railgun shots impacted.

It wasn’t invulnerable, just resistant. Massive impacts made the field flutter. If they could hit it hard enough, or enough times rapidly, they might be able to overwhelm the thing. But it was going to take a ton of firepower to deal enough damage to take the shields down completely. Max thought he might have enough missiles on the Hermes to take the shield down, but he doubted there would be enough remaining afterward to deal with the ring itself. And that was assuming the enemy ship and her fighters stood idly by and did nothing. Maybe that was why Earth had ordered him back? They’d realized that the only sort of attack that could win against the ring was for the Hermes and all her remaining Wasps to launch a full-scale and likely suicidal assault.

The Wasps were docking again. Max noted that Gurgle had already dispatched repair drones to check on their ships, several of which took damage on the mission. Gurgle was doing a damned fine job in his new role. One of the better decisions Max felt he’d made lately.

He gave a mental sigh and prepared himself to break the news of their new orders to his pilots. He didn’t think they were going to be especially pleased.

20

“What do you mean, we’ve been ordered to stand down?”

If she’d been a physical person, the room would be shaking from the volume and tone behind Sam’s voice. She was furious, as were most of the other pilots. Their avatars in the virtual ready-room were programmed to display body language appropriate for their mood. None of them were pleased.

Xiang was the only person present who knew why the orders arrived and he wasn’t at liberty to pass along that particular bit of information. While some of the other pilots might support him, his sense of Commander Knauf was that the man would be far too much a stickler for the rules. That didn’t suit Xiang’s plans. Neither did getting trapped on board the Hermes when Stein finally decided to show up.

Which would be soon. The only reason the admiral would issue orders for the crew of the Hermes to stand down from fighting was if he’d managed to connect the uploaded mind of Xiang to one Choi Xiang, former president of the United Nations. He wondered how that had been done. Xiang was ever so careful to cover his tracks on the matter of a digital upload. That was as much for political expedience as anything else. Uploading one’s mind was still considered a strange thing to do, even if most of the wealthiest people made a secret practice of it. How else to ensure one’s long-term survival? Certainly the laws of the time forbade the minds to own property or leave their virtual worlds, but laws changed.

Just as important, Xiang had wanted to keep his upload secret for precisely the scenario he faced now: his enemies becoming aware of the fact he was still alive. At least, becoming aware before he was ready to deal with them.

He thought over options, his mind cool as ever. There was no memory of how he’d died. The last recollections he had of his physical life were of the day before, the last time he’d backed up his psyche. Xiang only had second-hand accounts of what happened on Luna, but they all agreed on one thing. He’d died at the hands of a younger Thomas Stein.

Remarkable, really. He didn’t see how it was possible. The base was a fortress. The armor he wore back then should have been all but invincible. The young man had far more luck than anyone had any right to carry around with them. Luck had left him the victor on Earth’s moon. Luck must also have led him to deduce that he was still alive as an uploaded mind. Luck would undoubtedly carry him out here to Neptune on his new ship ahead of schedule as well.

Best to prepare for what the enemy could do, rather than what he was most likely to do. Especially when it came to Stein. But how to survive this? It was more complicated than he’d initially hoped. Xiang managed to confirm that yes, these were indeed the same aliens who’d contacted Earth all those years ago. Being a hive-based species with a strict chain of leadership established at birth, they found the planet to be chaotic and dangerous. They would expunge all life from the Earth.

Xiang got his home a stay of execution, promising to follow their example and bring all humans under the control of one being. The alien race - he never had learned their name - had never replied, but Xiang took the lack of invasion as tacit acceptance of his proposal. He’d then used technology drawn from the alien probe ships to establish the beginning of a UN hegemony over all humanity.

It would have worked, had it not been for Thomas Stein and his father. Now they were facing the thing he’d worked so hard to avoid: the destruction of all human worlds by a massive invasion fleet.

He’d fight to avoid that at all costs. Stein might never believe him, but Xiang was just as fervently devoted to humanity’s survival as he. Of course, he wanted to ensure his own survival at the same time, but that was only natural. Xiang would give his own life to help defend his world if he had to. He’d just prefer not to.

How best to accomplish all his objectives, and if possible improve his own situation in the process? It might be time to share at least a small bit of his information with the others.

“The shield isn’t impervious. Your scan picked up a small shudder in the field after the missiles hit. It should be possible to overload it,” Knauf said.

“Then we can beat it. We need to try before it’s too late,” Sam replied.

“No. We have orders. I don’t understand them either, but they’re valid,” Knauf said. “We should get a reply back within seven hours or so. With luck, we’ll know more by then.”

Xiang would bet money that long before seven hours was up, Stein and the Intrepid would be in their laps. How long would it take him to make the trip? Only minutes. The better question was how close was the ship to departing? It could arrive at literally any time. Once the Intrepid was here, Xiang’s options would become much more limited. Stein had the power to order him erased entirely, or at the least locked up into a computer system sealed off from the outside world. He suspected Stein would choose the latter course. He lacked a ruthless streak. But you never could tell for sure. It was time to act.

“The shield will come down if it’s hit hard enough. But it would require a tremendous amount of explosives or other energy transposed into it,” Xiang said. “It transfers the energy into the shields. They’ll change color as they get closer to breaking.”

They all stared at him for a long silence before Knauf finally spoke. “And how do you know this?”

“I’m not at liberty to say. But what I’m telling you is the truth. You didn’t really think this ship was humanity’s first contact with alien life, did you?” Xiang asked. “Far from it.”

“And you know all about these things?” Knauf asked. His face was growing red. Xiang would need to manage this man’s anger carefully, or he could be in as much danger from Knauf as from Stein.

Xiang shook his head. “No. I don’t have all the information either. Admiral Stein probably would.”

There, that should plant a seed of doubt in some minds. He watched as Knauf’s eyes clouded over, worry creasing his brow. Xiang knew what he was thinking. Why would Stein send them out there without the rest of the information he had? Why risk his peoples’ lives with incomplete data if he knew more? Those were good questions. Xiang thought it likely that Stein was perhaps a little more ruthless than he had been, after all.

“Why would he hold that information back from us?” Sam asked. “For that matter, why did you?”

“I am - or was, in my old life - privy to a fair amount of highly classified data. I’m not at liberty to pass that information along. If I did I’m certain I would be brought up on charges, correct?” Xiang said, directing the last bit to Knauf.

“Yes, I’m sure you would,” Knauf agreed.

“I didn’t even know these aliens were the same ones that had already contacted humans until we hauled one from a wrecked fighter,” Xiang said. “Even now I shouldn’t be telling you what I know. But Earth’s survival matters more than whether I face charges or not.”

That bit of self-sacrifice should cement the deal. They would trust him again, now. He could see an appreciation of the risk he was taking for them all written on their faces. All but the old Marine, Harald. Xiang wanted to scowl and managed to hide the expression. Why was it always Marines who ended up causing him more trouble than they were worth? That one had Samantha’s ear. He could be trouble, and bore watching.

Gurgle appeared in the room in front of them all, breaking into the conversation. He flapped his wings around furiously, although they didn’t do anything in this simulation. It took him a moment to calm down enough to speak.

“Danger! The ring, danger!” Gurgle said.

“We know it’s dangerous, Gurgle. We have to find a way to beat it anyway,” Sam said.

Xiang wanted to roll his eyes. That wasn’t what the being was saying. It was a remarkable thing. He didn’t think most of the other crew were even aware Gurgle had never been human, that he was a true artificial intelligence or something very close to it. He’d seen it fairly early into the trip, of course, but he suspected most people would never guess. They just read Gurgle as being someone who was a little slow.

“No. Ring is showing energy reading,” Gurgle said. He waved his arm, and a holographic display appeared in front of them. It showed the ring, with a graph indicating the energy output. The bar was growing. Sharply. “Is more energy every minute.”

Shit, they were building up to activation. They were out of time. Stein would never get there before the invasion fleet came through. “I think this puts our orders in a new light,” Xiang said aloud.

“It could be almost anything,” Knauf said.

“You know as well as I do that’s not so. Look at the wave-form of that energy output. At the rate it’s building, how long before they can activate that gate? Xiang asked.

Knauf frowned and nodded. “You’re right. They’ve got to be building up to activation. I’m pretty sure they’re trying to generate a wormhole. It could be minutes before they activate. Maybe an hour tops.”

“Stein isn’t going to get here in time to stop it,” Xiang said.

They all looked at each other, then at Knauf. He hesitated. Xiang gave him the time he needed to think. The little man wasn’t a person of action by habit - he’d stumbled into this role and was doing well despite himself. He would reach the right conclusion. And he did, looking up at them all and giving Samantha a sharp nod.

“Do it,” Knauf said.

Samantha clapped her hands together. “OK, people. Saddle up. We have less than an hour to save the world.”

21

Eighteen fighters launched from the bays of the Hermes, barely more than half the ships they’d begun with. Sam felt the loss of each pilot acutely as they soared back into space. In the battle ahead every missile and gun was going to count. The enemy knew they were coming and was sallying forth from the gate to meet them partway. Her scans showed thirty hostile fighters, plus of course the big ship. They weren’t likely to be aiming for capture this time, either. The odd sucked.

“All right, everyone. Pairs of two. Let’s make every shot count. Cover the Hermes - without her missiles, there’s nothing we can do about the gate,” Sam said.

They’d opted to skip flying with torpedoes this run. That allowed each Wasp to carry extra missiles - useful for protecting the Hermes or taking out enemy fighters. It also meant they were effectively useless against the ring itself. They would need to rely on the Hermes and her arsenal to take it out. To do that, they needed to get past the alien ships.

“Missiles inbound. We’re not the target,” Harald said.

True to their earlier tactics, the fighters were sending all their early fire toward the Hermes and ignoring her ships. That was going to cost them, but it was a calculated gamble. If they could blow the Hermes, they won. Those wouldn’t be SABOT missiles this time. The Hermes might survive one shot or even a few, but they had to stop as many as possible.

“One volley at the fighters, then focus all fire on the missiles,” Sam said.

She followed her own command, lighting off one missile at the still distant targets, then concentrated on locking down the incoming wave of projectiles. The rockets were fast and had built in jamming technology that was making it hard for her railgun to lock. Finally, she got a tone that said the gun was locked on target. She fired a burst of rounds from the weapon, spitting metal into space in the path where the missile should be going. All around her the other fighters were likewise filling the space between their ships and the missiles with a cloud of fast-moving metal shards.

The railgun pellets moved faster than the missiles and slammed into the enemy wave of shots more than halfway to their source. Half the enemy missiles exploded. That was a good start.

“Break wide, Ghosts. Give the Hermes space to fire,” Sam ordered.

They split into nine teams of two, fanning out away from the ship in an arc. That gave the Hermes a direct line of sight on the wave of enemy missiles. Her anti-missile guns opened up, spitting steel out at a furious pace. One after another the alien rockets blew apart. The Hermes’ own missile bays were not silent, too - they fired a steady series of shots directly into the mass of enemy fighters. The space between the two contending parties was quickly becoming full of dangerous bits of debris. The two larger ships maneuvered so they wouldn’t run headlong into the mess, circling like two cats waiting to pounce on each other.

“The big ship is closing on the Hermes,” Grimalf warned.

Sam could see it, but there wasn’t much she could do. The enemy fighters were still between them and their mothership. The only way they could scare off the bigger vessel would be to fly straight at it - through the fighters.

“Ghost Wing, form up on me. We’re going to rush. Fire a few missiles, but save a couple. Focus railgun fire on their fighters,” Sam said. She pushed her throttle forward, jetting toward the alien formation.

The first missiles struck the enemy fighters. Their own anti-missile fire took out a great many, but explosions flashed in the dark as one invader after another was blasted to shrapnel. They’d dropped at least half a dozen enemy ships without losing any of their own. It was a good start, but Sam knew better than to think it would last, especially once they got in close.

“Here we go!” They were rocketing straight at the enemy ships, forming a tight, spiraling formation that allowed them to all focus railgun fire forward. Over thirty missiles streamed ahead of them, giving the enemy a conundrum. They could either target the missiles bearing down on their location or the human fighters right behind those missiles. They couldn’t take out both.

The aliens opted to focus on the missiles. Their mothership joined in, the powerful beam weapon licking out to snap one missile after another out of space. Almost all their missiles were destroyed before they were in railgun range. But then it was the Ghosts turn.

All eighteen Wasps fired burst after burst from their railguns, filling space ahead of them with a massive cloud of speeding iron. The alien fighters attempted to evade but focused as they’d been on protecting their mothership from missiles, they couldn’t move in time. Enemy fighters came apart under the barrage. One after another, they either broke from their formation or blew apart.

“We’ve got them running!” Grimalf said.

“Not running, just reforming. Watch above us,” Xiang said.

He was right. They’d killed more than half of the enemy fighters, but those who remained were already beginning to gather again. They had one good shot at the mothership here. It was time to take it.

“Fire all remaining missiles at the mothership! Hit her with everything we’ve got!” Sam said.

All their remaining missile ordinance sped toward the giant ship. The alien fighters saw the assault and dove. They opened up on the human missiles, blasting away a dozen of them. Then they drove their ships directly into the remaining missiles. Only half a dozen broke through the defense to strike their target. They exploded against the ship’s hull, raining debris into space. Sam could see the signs of a hull breach in at least one spot. The vessel was wounded, but not out. It turned toward her people and spat fury with its particle beam weapon. One of the Wasps exploded.

“Well, the fighters are all gone, but I’d rather face more fighters if it meant more of our missiles hit that damned thing,” Grimalf said.

“Eh, we’re not the only ones on the battlefield, Grim,” Harald said.

“That’s right - remember, we’ve got the Hermes behind us,” Sam said. She dove toward the invaders’ ship, blazing away with her railgun. Little explosions dotted the hull where her shots hit, but this close to the ship there were dozens of smaller cannon trying to take out the Wasps. It was everything Sam could do to evade their fire. She twisted the Wasp around, weaving through streams of deadly energy weapon fire.

They only had to hold out a little longer, though. The Hermes had already fired a massive barrage of missiles. They were bearing down on the alien ship. Another minute and the thing would be a charred husk.

More of her fighters were dying around her. Sam focused on the small batteries, hoping to reduce the threat to their Wasps. The main alien gun was firing rapidly, blasting apart the Hermes’s missiles. Their defense was incredible! Sam watched as the enemy ship dove to one side, burning human missiles out of space one after another. It looked like some shots might get through, but most of them were being blown up long before they were close enough to do any damage in spite of all their efforts.

“Sam! New problem!” Max called out over the radio. “Look at the ring!”

She turned her scan focus toward the ring for a few seconds. That was all she could spare without being blasted to smithereens by the enemy ship. The ring wasn’t sitting still anymore. It was glowing, the brilliant light casting shadows. And it had begun spinning - not rotating around like a disk, but spinning in an axis that made its glow look like a sphere. As she watched the sphere continued to get brighter.

“What the hell?” she asked.

“They’re doing it! They’re opening a wormhole,” Max said. “We have to stop them right now, before it’s too late!”

But even as Sam changed vector to head over toward the ring she could see it was already too late. The ring’s spin picked up speed until it was hard to see the metal structure through the brilliant sun flaring in its center. All at once the light vanished, replaced with something that looked like a soap bubble floating in space, the ring gently rotating around it a few more times before coming to a stop precisely where it started.

There was a moment’s pause like the universe was holding its breath. Sam knew what was coming next. She’d never felt so helpless.

The nose of a ship slid slowly from the bubble. At first Sam thought it was a small vessel, but it kept coming - and coming. The thing was larger than any ship she’d ever seen before. Worse, Sam had a hunch that ship was just the beginning. The invasion they’d fought so hard to prevent had begun.

22

Max could only watch with horror as the massive ship slipped free from the sphere and glided slowly forward. It was moving at practically zero velocity, barely creeping along. A side effect from the trip through the wormhole? He didn’t know, but his scientist’s mind wanted to ponder all sorts of theories about why that might be the case. He realized that he was freezing in reaction to the sight. Intellectually, he knew that he was facing a fight/flight/freeze reaction and that his response was not a great one for survival. That didn’t help him break out of the spell as the colossal ship finished cruising clear of the portal.

It had to be the size of four, maybe six aircraft carriers stacked alongside each other. He’d never seen a vehicle so large. The thing dwarfed every spaceship humanity had ever launched. How the hell were they supposed to fight that? There was no way, at least not here, with just this one ship and a handful of fighters!

“Max! You need to get the hell out of here. Warn Earth. We’ll cover you.”

He heard Sam’s voice over the radio, but even that didn’t entirely break through. Running away wasn’t going to do any good. Where could he go? They’d follow him to Earth. Nothing humanity had could stop that monster. Worse, now that it was through the portal Max saw the nose of another ship nudging its way clear of the bubble. How many were they going to send? One probably would have been enough. Everything else was overkill.

He felt a sharp pain, something he hadn’t experienced since leaving his physical body behind. The ship that was his new body had taken damage, sure. But it wasn’t connected to any sort of pain reception. He read damage as…damage, not as a painful stimulus. What hurt? Whatever it was jabbed at him again.

“Wake up. Sam need you,” Gurgle said.

“How?” Max asked.

Gurgle gave him another mental jab. “Gurgle do what Gurgle need to do. You do what Sam need you do. Now!”

“Thanks, Gurgle,” Max replied. He needed to get his head back in the game. Sam was right. Earth had to be warned. He was about to flip the ship over to begin decelerating when he did the math and realized there was no way he could stop the ship before he went sailing into the gate. He’d be in range of the enemy guns long before he could get the Hermes stopped, let alone going back in the right direction.

“When you’re going through hell, keep on going,” Max muttered. He poured on the acceleration instead, altering his course to veer toward Neptune’s upper atmosphere.

The Hermes couldn’t fly through the gaseous layers of Neptune’s air like the Wasps had. She wasn’t designed to fly in atmosphere, and the stress would tear her apart. But he could use the gravity assist from the planet to slingshot around in a tight orbit and come out on a beeline for Earth.

Of course, that also meant flying straight past the enemy fleet slowly forming up outside the portal.

“Max, you’re building speed instead of braking. What the hell?” Sam asked.

“I can’t stop in time. Going to do a fly-by past the planet. Can you cover me?” he asked.

“We’ll try. The new ships don’t seem to be firing. I’m not sure why not, but I’ll take it. We’re staying engaged with that first ship. It’s keeping us busy,” she said.

“No power,” Gurgle said.

“What?” Max asked, alarmed. Was there a problem with the power output on the Hermes?

“New ships no power,” Gurgle said.

An image appeared on Max’s scan. Gurgle was right. There were no power signatures from the three enemy ships that had exited the portal. As he watched, he saw the bloom an energy source start up on the first ship. It wasn’t disabled - it had powered down for transit! All of the enemy ships were powered down.

“Sam! The new ships are powerless. They must need to shut down whatever their power sources are for the wormhole jump. They glided into the bubble - but they’re just now restarting their reactors,” Max said.

“Understood,” she replied. “All fighters, with me.”

Max watched as her wings broke away from the alien ship, which was leaking air from a dozen spots and bleeding liquid of some sort into space. There were only ten fighters left. A third of their original pilots remained. All of them hit maximum acceleration - directly toward the ring.

“Um, Sam, what do you have in mind?” Max asked.

“We’re going to hit that ring with everything we’ve got. We used up all our missiles, but maybe it’s more vulnerable than it was. Railgun shots might have an impact,” she said. “Worst case, maybe ramming it will work.”

“No ramming, but try a pass. I’ll do what I can on my end,” Max replied. “I mean it, Sam. We can fight another day if need be. But we need you all alive if possible.”

“We’ll do what we can.”

Max hoped she would follow his orders. There was nothing he could do to stop them if they decided to try a kamikaze run at the ring, but the little squad of remaining Ghost Wing pilots were damned good after all they’d been through. The previous battles had weeded out the slow and unlucky. The ones remaining were flat-out amazing to his eyes.

He set about calculating firing coordinates. The ring was in range for his missiles, and though he had few left, he figured he would add everything he had to the mix. If they could take down the shields covering the ring, they might be able to shut off the wormhole - at least for the time being. Slowing the invasion was their best hope for survival at this point.

Max set every launcher firing on rapid, each chambering a new missile as quickly as the machines could and releasing it. A veritable cloud of the things shot toward the ring, wave after wave of missiles. But Max had tweaked their course settings. The first wave launched at a slower acceleration than the second, and the third was faster still. Each wave boosted a little more rapidly than the one before so that by the time his swarm of missiles was closing on the ring, they were flying practically on top of each other. All forty weapons would impact within a few seconds of each other.

The Wasps made their run. Max observed his scans as they shot a steady stream of iron into the shield. It wavered but didn’t break. The weapons were just too small. But the explosions caused by his missiles might damage the Wasps if they stayed around much longer.

“Sam, return to base. All Wasps return to the Hermes. I’ve got enough inbound missiles to make our own little sun there in a minute, and you do not want to be around when they hit!” Max said.

“We see them,” Sam replied. “Breaking clear now!”

The Wasps shot past the ring rather than slowing down to make another pass. They were going fast - they’d be clear of the area before the missiles hit. Max held his breath through the last few seconds. The first super-dreadnought had been joined by two more. Both of the newcomers were beginning to power up. The first one looked like it was already underway, but he didn’t detect a shield on the thing. Was it too small for a shield? Or did the shield simply require more power than the ship had available yet? He didn’t know, but it occurred to him that the ships were a helpless target and might have been a better destination for his missiles.

Too late now. They were almost to the ring. The last few seconds ticked by. The missiles started striking home. One after another they detonated, each one virtually on top of the other’s point of impact. Some of them blew each other up, they were so close together. The explosion was so massive it made scans of the target impossible. Max couldn’t see if the strike did any damage or not.

But the bubble never wavered. “Shit. We didn’t break the ring.”

“Shield gone,” Gurgle said.

Max looked at his scans, which were just starting to clear. Gurgle was right! They’d punched a massive hole in the shield, blowing away a considerable part of the ring’s protection. So close to taking the thing out! If only he had more missiles…!

A ping caught his attention. A message from Earth? Max almost set it aside to listen later, but if those big ships got moving and chased him down he might not have a later. Better to listen now. It was a recording from Admiral Stein.

“When you get this, you will have sixty seconds to clear the vicinity of the ring. I hope you’ve followed orders and stayed clear. If not, get your people out now. We’re blowing that thing to kingdom come. Stein out.”

The Intrepid was coming. That had to be what he was planning. The first human use of the Albucierre drive was as a weapon. A ship using the drive picked up particle matter along the way, charging each with enormous energy as it became trapped in the warped-space bubble around the ship. When the object exited warped space, the bubble collapsed - releasing all of the particles in one massive explosion. Albucierre missiles had been a devastating weapon of mass destruction in the last war. Max wasn’t sure the particle wave would break through the ring’s shield. But the ring’s protection was still down.

“Sam, full burn! Get clear now!” Max yelled.

“We’re moving as fast as we…”

Space lit up like a supernova.

The coursing energy of a small sun flared to life a few kilometers from the ring.

23

The navigation console exploded, sending sparks showering across the bridge of the Intrepid. Secondary overloads shorted half the rest of the systems on the bridge. Thomas covered his face with an arm as a wash of hot bits of metal pelted him, singing his uniform. People were yelling. At least one crewman was screaming. The chaos was total. He needed to get a handle on things! He sucked in a deep lungful of air to calm his nerves and ended up coughing on the acrid smoke-tinged air.

“Medical to the bridge,” Thomas ordered into the intercom. At least that was still working. It was hard to tell what was still functioning and what wasn’t. His watch comm-link still worked, though. There was one person he could call who might be able to buy them the time they need to get the ship back in order. He opened the link.

“Kel, how are the hangars?” he asked.

“Thom? My god. The ship’s in a shambles. I had my pilots in their fighters ready to launch. Bay Four is gone, Thom. Just gone. Something blew near the engines and the secondaries…they’re all just gone.”

He inhaled sharply and regretted it just as quickly, coughing louder than before. The bridge was filling up with smoke. “The other bays?”

“One and Two are fine. The doors are jammed on Three, but they’re working on it,” Kel replied.

“Launch all Wasps. Screen the ship while we get some semblance of order in here,” he said. “Get the Bay Three fighters out there too as quickly as possible.”

She was in Bay One with her Wasp, but Kel could just as easily have been in Bay Four when it blew. He’d come that close to losing her - the luck of the draw was all that saved her. What the hell happened? They’d made the jump into a warp bubble with the Albucierre drive without trouble. The course toward Neptune had taken them reasonably close to the sun, which was good news in his book. Solar proximity meant they would pick up more particles to release on exit and do more damage to the damned ring.

But something had gone horribly wrong. The exit hadn’t been the gentle shift back into regular space they’d expected. Half the ship’s systems had fried themselves. Feedback from the particle release? A failure in the drive itself? He didn’t know, and there was no way to find out in the middle of what was probably a battlefield. The drive was still mostly untested technology. Only desperation had driven him to run the first flight of the ship like this.

On the plus side, they’d made it to Neptune. He’d recognize the planet floating out the front of the ship anywhere. Now they just needed to get the Intrepid back under control again and see what damage they’d done. Fire suppression systems finally became active and the ventilation turned itself up to high power, sucking the fumes and smoke off the bridge. Breathing easier was a huge plus. Backup lights were flickering on.

The front of the bridge was a mess. Navigation and helm were utterly destroyed, but the bridge was modular. Any role could be performed from any station. Not that they had power to their drives at the moment anyway, but once damage control teams restored it they’d need to move the ship.

The bridge doors snapped open and a medical team rushed in. Thomas pointed to the front of the room, where the two worst wounded were being treated by other bridge crew. The medics nodded and went to take over care of the injured. The rest of them all had some small burns, cuts, or bruise, but those could wait until after the crisis was over.

“Secondary scans are coming online, sir,” Sergeant Xiva said.

Thom nodded acknowledgment to her. He checked the holographic display panel in front of his station. Miraculously, it was still working. He routed the scan data into the console and lit up the display.

“Let’s see what we’ve got out there,” Thom said.

The ring was shattered. The particle wave the Intrepid released on exit must have smashed into the thing and broken it in two, then continued to tear up one half of the thing until it looked like it had been savaged by a dinosaur and then discarded. Chunks of floating ring scattered in a cone-shaped pattern away from the Intrepid’s nose. Thomas felt a surge of hope. It had worked! They’d killed the ring!

But pieces of the ring weren’t the only nearby encroachments. Thom spotted four other large shapes nearby, two of which were truly massive! At first, he didn’t want to believe what he was seeing. They were too big to be ships! But one of them was moving under power, slowly coming about to face his vessel. The second large ship wasn’t moving. Computer analysis showed massive structural damage. It was leaking air from a hundred spots, and its power levels were near zero. They’d been hurt badly by the Albucierre wave.

Thom assumed the other two objects were smaller ships. But the way they were drifting looked wrong. The computer flashed back an assessment based on video and trajectory analysis. Those two parts had been another one of the supermassive ships, but it had been struck amidships by a large piece of the broken ring. The impact had cracked the spine of the vessel in two. Both parts were powerless, slowly drifting away from each other.

“The big one that’s moving is disgorging fighters,” Xiva said.

“Understood. How’s our fighter deployment coming?” Thomas asked.

“Twenty birds in space, ten more on their way,” she replied. “Bay Three is a mess. Damage control is working on it.”

“Patch me through to the CAG,” Thomas said.

“Aye, sir.”

A moment’s pause, then Kel’s voice came over the speakers. “Kinda busy out here, Admiral!”

“You’ve got company out there.”

“I see them. We’re engaging in ten seconds,” Kel replied. “CAG out.”

Silently, Thomas sent her the luck and well-wishes that she knew he was feeling, but couldn’t say over the radio. Everyone on the ship knew they were married, of course. But it wasn’t proper protocol to act any differently toward her than he would any other officer while they were on duty. Even her presence in his chain of command was a breach of norms. Only their need to have the best people they possibly could on board allowed for them both to be assigned to the same ship. Well, that, and Thomas usually got what he wanted if he pressed for it hard enough, but he’d have rather use his rank to keep Kel away from the fight than send her into the thick of it. If she’d been in Bay Four, he might never have forgiven himself.

Foolish, and he knew it. Keladry was a fighter because she wanted to be. He didn’t make her that way, and he wouldn’t change her for anything. She was perfect just the way she was. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t worry about her when she was in her Wasp, in harm’s way.

“Do we have any secondary batteries alive to engage those fighters?” he asked.

“No, sir. We hadn’t hooked up the secondaries yet when we left Earth’s orbit,” Ensign Javis said from weapons.

The ensign was kind enough - or smart enough - to keep the ‘I told you so’ tone out of his voice. He’d expressed his concerns before they departed about potentially going into battle without their secondaries. Thomas had accepted his advice but elected to proceed anyway. Getting all the secondary guns operational might have taken days, and they didn’t have days. Still, in the chaos he’d forgotten that half the ship’s weapon systems were effectively useless lumps of metal. Thomas cursed silently. He had to be sharper than that.

“Primaries?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. Primaries are charging. Power in twenty seconds.”

“Target the moving ship and prepare to fire as soon as the guns are hot.”

24

REBOOTING.

Sam gradually returned to consciousness. The last thing she recalled was seeing a flash of light brighter than even the ring’s activation had been. Then - nothing. She didn’t understand what had happened. Her thoughts felt sluggish, groggy, unfocused. What the hell?

A systems check showed her the answer. The computer housing her mind had been hit by a massive bombardment of charged particles. The computer had shut down from the overload. Only the fact that the drives containing Sam’s identity were heavily shielded had saved her life. A precaution taken against random solar flares or other space radiation had also kept her from being erased by the barrage.

The computer was slowly coming back online, but it was taking time to get everything running again. Some of the processors were damaged and might have to be replaced entirely, but her consciousness was run by an array. Enough of the array was active that she could think, if slower than usual.

“Anyone else out there?” she asked. “What hit us?”

There was no immediate answer. She activated her radar to get a view of her region of space better than the flash of Neptune she saw every few seconds through the forward camera. Her Wasp was in a spin, but she could fix that as soon as she got her drive functional again.

The radar image was a shock. The ring was shattered into two large pieces and a whole lot of little ones. One of the big alien ships looked like someone had taken a massive sword and sliced it in half. Another was smoking and burning. Only one of the big ships was actively moving around. It and the smaller one they’d been fighting for days were both engaged against a human vessel. At first Sam thought it was the Hermes, but she spotted her home base sailing toward Triton. Max was out of missiles - he didn’t have much left to offer in a battle, so it was good that he was getting clear. That had to be the Intrepid fighting the other ships.

It didn’t look like the battle was going well for her side. Fighters from both sides darted around, blowing each other to bits while the Intrepid and the alien dreadnought hammered at each other with their primary guns. The Intrepid had massive railguns, like the ones on her Wasp but firing shots a thousand times heavier. They slammed into the alien ship, cracking armor and breaching hulls with every shot.

But the main alien gun was even more effective. Sam couldn’t see it firing, but the evidence of its impact was unmistakable. It had to be some sort of particle beam like the one they’d seen from the smaller alien ship. Like the Intrepid’s gun, it was just…bigger. Each shot cut into the Intrepid’s hull like a hot knife slipping into butter. Molten metal streamed into space from the gaping wounds cut by that beam. She wasn’t sure how much more of that abuse the Intrepid could take.

If it died, then the aliens would be free to repair both their dreadnoughts. Those two ships alone probably had enough firepower to take down humanity’s entire space fleet. They were certainly more than enough to protect the ring while it was rebuilt.

“Ghost Squadron, anyone reading me? We need to get back into this,” Sam said. She played with her throttle, trying to activate the Wasp’s engines. No dice. There was damage to the rear of her fighter. The engines weren’t responding to her at all. Most of her steering thrusters were still working, which let her stabilize her flight and stop the spin, but she was stuck on her current vector.

“I’m up again,” Xiang replied. “Looks like the others haven’t rebooted yet. They should be restored soon.”

“Xiang, we need to engage the enemy as soon as we have some fighters operational. This is the big fight. We lose this one, we lose the Earth,” Sam said.

“I have only nominal main drive control. My computer systems took a beating from the Intrepid’s exit. I’m not sure how long it will be before they’ll be up enough to fight,” Xiang said.

“Do what you can,” Sam replied. “I’m having main drive trouble here myself.”

She worked on sorting out the drive. If it was some sort of computer problem, there ought to be a way to bypass whatever damaged CPU or circuit was preventing her from firing the engines. But that wasn’t working. No matter where she shunted control, it wasn’t giving her back any power. If it wasn’t a computer issue, what was wrong? Sam activated her external cameras, flicking through them. The rear-facing camera gave her a good look at the problem.

A chunk of the ring about four feet long had embedded itself in her thruster section. Miraculously the thing hadn’t punctured her reactor and blown her to bits, but the damage was extensive. The ship was toast. Those engines were going to need a complete rebuild. Even that might not be enough. She wanted to scream her frustration. There was no way she was getting back in the fight, not in this ship.

Sam checked her course. Without main engine power, that was suddenly a lot more relevant, and Neptune looked like it was getting bigger in her forward camera. The computer obligingly ran calculations and spat out the cold answer. She was in a rapidly decaying orbit around Neptune. In a short while she’d be dropping through the atmosphere, where she’d either burn up or be torn apart by the winds.

“Not if I can get myself out of this,” Sam said to herself.

She used her steering thrusters to rotate the wasp so that one of the thrusters was facing toward Neptune. No - not directly at the planet. The thrusters didn’t have enough power to slow her to a complete stop. But maybe she could change her approach enough that she skipped off the atmosphere instead of sinking into it? Sam had the computer run calculations on the angle she would need. It was taking too damned long, with so little processing power available. She made her best guess and fired the thruster. It was moving her angle of approach a little bit, but she didn’t need the computer to tell her it wasn’t going to be nearly enough.

“Time to impact upper atmosphere: five minutes.” The computer read her death sentence to her. Damn it all. What a stupid way to die.

She didn’t want to die. But then again, at least she had the chance to now. Valhalla hadn’t been living, not really. It was a pseudo-life, not the real thing. There were so many things Sam had wanted to do now that she was out. She wanted to meet her family again so they could know she existed if nothing else. She wanted to see where this Ghost Squadron she’d led would go in the future. Her hunch was it was going to be a hell of a ride for those who survived this mess. Assuming anyone did.

But even without getting to do those things, she wouldn’t have traded all the experiences she had managed to have for another decade in Valhalla Online. Life - however brief it had been, the real life she experienced since leaving the game - was a damned good thing.

She kept firing the thruster because it wasn’t in her nature to give up. You never knew what might happen, and delaying her end even a minute or two had made the difference in the past. But she was out of ideas, and there were no ships big enough to pull her out of Neptune’s gravity that were anywhere nearby.

“I’m a dead stick headed for a burn up in Neptune, Xiang. Do what you can for the others. I’ve only got about five minutes left. Best of luck - I hope you crush those bugs,” Sam said over the radio.

25

The first thing Xiang saw as his computer came back online, waking him up, was the Intrepid and a Jaernyth dreadnought hammering away at each other. That was more than enough for him. It was time to make his exit. Regardless of who won the fight, it would end badly for him. He knew who had to be commanding the human flagship. That would be one Admiral Thomas Stein, who had more than enough reasons to kill him and had almost certainly somehow seen through the ruses he’d used to hide his identity. Keeping his given name had been a damned mistake, and he knew it. But the name was common enough. It had felt safe at the time. Now it smacked of hubris.

“A luxury I can ill afford at this point,” Xiang said to himself.

It was all right. The Wasp he piloted was damaged but mostly intact. He didn’t need food or air, just energy. The fighter had a reactor to supply that. With enough time he could fly virtually anywhere in the little craft. Back to Earth, most likely. He had boltholes on the planet and the moon above it. Some of those would likely still be intact. Perhaps there were still some people loyal to him back there as well. It would take time and caution, but he could eventually rebuild his power.

Xiang checked the battle again. It seemed to be going badly for the Intrepid, but he didn’t trust that. Stein had more luck than any one person deserved. He’d undoubtedly figure out a way to come out on top of this situation like he had every other. The alien ships would be defeated, leaving Earth safe - and ready for him to help his homeworld rise to become strong enough to resist any future attacks!

He was about to engage his main drive to get out of the area when Samantha’s transmission came through on his radio.

“I’m a dead stick headed for a burn up in Neptune, Xiang. Do what you can for the others. I’ve only got about five minutes left. Best of luck - I hope you crush those bugs.”

He checked her course, running it through his computer system, and was able to immediately confirm her findings. The Wasp she flew would hit Neptune’s upper atmosphere in a little over four minutes. If her drive really was out, then she was as good as dead. A pity - she was a good sort, one he’d been surprisingly glad to serve with. But people died in combat. It was part of battle. His goal was always to make sure he was never one of the ones who fell.

Xiang prepped his Wasp for an interplanetary flight. It would be a long trip, far more kilometers than these ships were designed to manage. He was confident it would handle the trip, though. Another minute and the course would be laid in - curse the computer for being so slow! Then he’d be on his way.

A flicker of light on his forward camera caught his attention. That had to be Sam’s fighter. She was firing her steering thrusters, trying to change her course. He could easily see that it wasn’t going to be nearly enough to save her. But she was fighting to the very end. Xiang found himself admiring the woman. She was the sort of person humanity needed alive.

“Bèn dàn, you’re really going to do this, aren’t you?” Xiang cursed to himself. “Yes, I suppose I am.”

He activated his radio. “Samantha, stand by. I am coming to assist.”

Then Xiang fired his main engines, cruising forward to catch up with her. He matched velocity and glided alongside her, then shot just a little past her and flipped his ship over so that his main engines were facing toward Neptune.

“What are you doing? You’ll get yourself killed too, Xiang,” Sam protested.

“I have no intention of either of us dying this day. But I need quiet, please. This is difficult work,” Xiang said.

He fired his engines - just a tap. Her ship came closer to his. A few more taps and he closed the distance still more. They were both falling toward Neptune at almost precisely the same rate. It was no different than a satellite docking procedure when both satellites were flying at hundreds of miles an hour - or that’s what he told himself to calm nerves that shouldn’t even exist. The Wasps were in no way built for what he was trying to accomplish. Would they survive the strain? He had no way to know. Again he berated himself for the folly of this mission, when he could easily escape. He shook it off and focused back on the task at hand.

“Shut off your thruster,” Xiang said.

Sam complied. Now she was slowly moving toward him, his engines on the lowest power setting giving him a little speed relative to her. They were flying at a few meters per second, then slower still as he gradually brought the engines to zero. The two ships continued a slow glide toward each other.

Then they met with a silent crash. Stress meters built into Xiang’s ship showed the impact. Internal stresses went wild for a second as the structure of his fighter absorbed the blow, then went back to safe levels again.

“Damned tough little things, these ships,” Xiang said.

Sam gave a nervous chuckle. “You’re telling me!”

“Hold on. I’m going to hit my main engine now, slowly ramping up power. I’m getting us both out of here,” Xiang said.

He fired the engines. They struggled at first, the extra weight of a second fighter too much for the low power setting. But as he gradually throttled up the engine their descent toward Neptune halted and then reversed.

The slow trip up into a stable orbit gave Xiang more time to watch the battle unfolding. Perhaps he’d been in error in his earlier estimation. The Intrepid was venting atmosphere from a dozen holes. The ship had taken an incredible pounding. It was giving as good as it got, but the alien ship was simply so much larger that it could shrug off more blows. Stein was going to lose this one.

Xiang felt more than a little glee at watching his killer suffer defeat. He recognized it as a shallow emotion but allowed himself to revel in it for a moment before letting it go. Stein’s failure might feel good, but if the alien ships were allowed to win this day, there might be no stopping them. He hated Thomas Stein, but even that hate wasn’t enough to make Xiang sacrifice the Earth just to hurt the man.

“You should be safe now, Samantha,” Xiang said. “You’ll have to excuse me, though.”

“Where are you going?” she asked as he backed away from her ship and fired his mains again.

“You’re not the only person who needs saving today, it seems,” Xiang said. The irony was incredible. He only hoped that Stein would be able to learn who had rescued him in his hour of need. That, more than anything else, would make this sweeter.

Xiang studied the situation. Militarily it was untenable. There were two human ships, one of which was out of weapons and halfway around Triton. The other would be destroyed within a few minutes. The fighters of both sides seemed evenly matched, but if the second dreadnought managed to launch fighters that too would change. This wasn’t a moment when military heroism would save the day. It was time instead for a little diplomacy, some subterfuge - and ideally a knife in the back.

Luckily, Xiang excelled at all three.

He reached out via the radio to the Hermes. “Commander, we have a situation here that I think you might be the only solution for.”

“I’m watching,” Knauf replied, sounding grim. “I wish I could help, but I’m out of weapons. Not much use in the fight.”

“It’s not your missiles I need out here. It’s your ship. Can you swing around Triton and pick up as much velocity as possible?”

“I can. But what do you want me to do once I’m there? I can probably take a few hits from their big gun, maybe take the heat off the Intrepid for a minute, but then the Hermes will be destroyed. I don’t think that’s enough to turn the tide,” Knauf said.

“You’re correct - it’s not. I have something else in mind. Feeding you precise course instructions now. Please follow them,” Xiang said. “I’m asking you a lot - but trust me. Please. More than anything else, I have Earth’s best interests at heart. Together we can save our world.”

There was a pause before Knauf replied. “You’ve never given me a reason not to trust you. I’ve got the course. On my way at best possible speed.”

“Thank you. You’ll know what to do when the moment arrives,” Xiang said and cut the connection. He appreciated Commander Knauf’s trust more than the man could know. There were too few people in the world who were genuinely reliable, worthy of absolute trust. Knauf had seen the course. He recognized what Xiang was asking him to do, and he was doing it anyway. That…meant something.

Now for the more difficult part. Xiang tuned his radio to another set of frequencies and shot forward toward the enemy dreadnought.

26

The battle wasn’t going nearly as well as Thomas had hoped. Not that he’d been expecting much of a fight! The plan was to drop in on top of the ring, hopefully blowing it to bits, and then work together with the Hermes and her fighter wing to take out the alien ship. The single enemy would have been a threat they’d have easily neutralized by working together.

“No plan survives contact,” Thomas murmured as he watched the damage reports rolling in from around the ship. While the first part of the plan had gone off perfectly - the ring was in pieces - he hadn’t counted on the enemy already getting ships through an active portal. Especially not vessels of such size and power.

The enemy main gun blazed again, smashing through hull plates and digging deep into the Intrepid’s bow. His ship had heavy armor there, which was the reason any of them were still breathing. But there was a limit to how much damage she could take, and she was fast approaching the end of her rope.

There was nothing else to be done. He had to keep hammering away with every weapon he had until either the alien ship was defeated, or the Intrepid was lost. With his drives badly damaged there was no way Thomas could order a retreat even if he wanted to. The enemy would easily catch and destroy the Intrepid if she withdrew.

“Focus fire on their main gun,” Thomas said. He kept his voice cool with an effort. It was hard not to shout, to yell, to scream even. But his crew needed to see him calm, even if he was nothing close to that inside. The facade was all about morale. A crew counted on their ship’s captain knowing what to do next, even if there wasn’t much else he could do.

“Aye, sir. We’ll hit it with everything we have left,” Javis replied.

Which might not be much. The dreadnought was trying to hit his main railguns, same as he was trying to take down their particle beam. They’d managed to take one of the two main batteries out. Parts of the railgun’s barrel had to be scattered between there and Triton, based on the size of the secondary explosions when it blew. Thomas didn’t want to see the estimated casualty count for the Intrepid. All of those men and women volunteered to be aboard, but none of them had signed up for a battle like this. There hadn’t been a battle like this anywhere in the solar system in a generation.

“We nailed the gun!”

Thomas snapped his attention back up to the screen. He saw a huge hole where the particle beam’s emitter used to be. “Well done! Keep hitting them. Engines next.”

With the beam out of commission, maybe they had a chance after all. The dreadnought still had a lot of secondary guns, but without the main beam pounding away at them they might pull off a win yet. Thomas watched the enemy, sure they would react with some new strategy now. He wasn’t disappointed.

“Sir, there’s a cluster of fighters forming up just off the port bow,” Xiva said. “Coming at us fast.”

“Patch me through to the CAG,” Thomas said.

“You’re on, sir.”

“Kel, we’ve got trouble coming our way,” he said. The fighters were picking up speed. They weren’t firing, except at any Wasps which got in their way. They were making a beeline for the front of the Intrepid. He had a bad feeling he knew precisely what they were doing. He’d seen all of the reports Knauf sent back about their engagements with the enemy.

“I see them. We’re engaging,” she replied.

Five Wasps swooped in toward the enemy fighters, blazing away with railguns. They took out a couple of the small ships, but then several of the enemy fighters broke from their formation and veered at the Wasps. Before Thomas could shout a warning three of the alien vessels collided with a trio of Wasps. All six were obliterated. The remaining two Wasps darted sideways to avoid the explosions.

“Kel?” he asked, heart in his throat. Had she been in one of those fighters?

“I’m here,” she replied. “I’ve never seen anything like that! They just suicided against us, trading fighters. What the hell?”

It was starting to seem like a pattern for this race. They would fight straight up, but when defending one of their bigger ships or trying to achieve an important objective, loss of smaller vessels was acceptable.

“Thanks for taking some of them out,” Thomas said.

“We’re coming around to try for some of the rest. Watch yourself. What they did to us, they may try to do to you,” Kel replied.

That’s precisely what he figured they were doing. Without secondary guns, the Intrepid had little defense against fighters in general and no way to stop a suicide run. Kel’s pair of Wasps took out another three enemy fighters, sniping them from behind. But the remaining three were going to succeed in reaching the ship. Thomas toggled the intercom, switching it to broadcast over the entire ship.

“All hands, brace for heavy impact!” was all he had time to say before the fighters struck his ship.

It was like nothing he’d ever felt before. The collision sounded like a tearing, grinding, and smashing sound all at the same time. Explosions lit up the main screen. Thomas was thrown back against his seat, where he clung with everything he had as the Intrepid listed heavily to one side. They were venting atmosphere and more, based on the loss of control. Creaking sounded through the structure of the ship. Was this the end? Had those little fighters finished off his flagship?

“Status on the main gun,” he called out, fearing he already knew the answer. That had to have been their primary target.

“It’s gone, sir,” Javis replied. “We’ve got major breaches on all forward decks. I…I’m having a hard time reaching anyone there.”

They were officially defenseless, except for Kel’s fighters. The fight was all but over. Once the Intrepid was destroyed, the enemy vessels could pick off the rest of the Wasps at their leisure.

“Sir, I’m picking up a Wasp heading toward the dreadnought. Moving fast, sir,” Xiva said.

“One of ours?” Thomas asked. Not Kel, he prayed. Don’t learn that lesson from the enemy.

“No, sir. One of the Hermes fighters.”

What was that pilot doing? Was he planning to dive at the enemy ship, trying to do a little damage like they had just done to the Intrepid? Or did he have something else in mind? Thomas watched the ship’s course. It wasn’t accelerating like it would if it was going to smash itself against the dreadnought’s armor. Instead, it was inexplicably slowing down!

“Sir, that Wasp?”

“Yes?” Thomas asked.

“It’s broadcasting. Not on our frequencies, sir. On a variety of other ones.”

That was damned peculiar. “Put it on speakers.”

The speakers crackled for a moment as the ensign found the right frequency to catch the message. Then a human voice began speaking, using words Thomas didn’t understand at all. It didn’t sound like any language he’d ever heard before.

But he recognized the voice doing the talking without any trouble at all. It was Choi Xiang. He was out there after all. Alive despite everything Thomas had fought for. He ground his teeth together. It wasn’t enough that the man caused untold death and suffering while he was alive. Even dead, he was conspiring with the enemy in the middle of a battle. Because that had to be what he was doing. Somehow Choi knew the alien language. He must have learned it during the first contact, all those years ago. Whatever he was saying, Thomas was sure it wasn’t good for the Intrepid or Earth.

He had to stop the man, this time for good.

27

Xiang’s fighter swung in close to the alien dreadnought. He’d watched the last few exchanges of fire between them with interest. The Intrepid had destroyed the aliens’ main gun. But that suicide run with the alien fighters must have done significant damage to the UN ship. They’d stopped firing altogether. Surely even if the larger guns on the ship were down, there were some backup weapons? Unless the bridge had been hit, leaving their command and control shattered. He wouldn’t feel especially bad if Stein was dead thanks to all this.

The trick was going to be pulling this off without dying himself. The alien fighters were all engaged around the Intrepid. That left an opening for him to move in. If he attracted too much attention of the wrong kind, though, one of those smaller guns on the dreadnought was still more than enough to obliterate him with a single blast.

Talking was the least of his problems. He recalled the frequencies which were used for the first contact. He had faith that those would still work now. And while the alien language was indeed odd, it wasn’t impossible for the human mouth and vocal chords to imitate. It was an elaborate speech, but Xiang always prided himself on his skill with language. He knew twelve different ones from Earth - and one from a distant star. To be fair, he wasn’t fluent in the aliens’ tongue, which was a vibrant mix of hundreds of different clicks and whirring noises. But he could understand and speak enough that he was confident in his ability to get the message across. It wasn’t going to be high diplomacy this time. This would be a walk in the park.

“Attention, Jaernyth ship. This is President Choi of the United Nations of Earth,” he said into his radio. No, that wasn’t really his title anymore. But the Jaernyth responded well to rank. Their society was much more formally structured than anything humanity had developed. Each member was born into a role and fulfilled it throughout their life. Only the highest ranks had any sort of autonomy. Most of the race were drones and soldiers, born to work or fight and never doing more than those things. They were barely what Xiang considered sentient at all. The leaders, on the other hand, were bright - if overconfident. He was counting on the latter today.

“One of the creatures speaks a real language. Fascinating. Barbarians! You used a warp engine as a weapon in violation of interstellar law. You are war criminals and will be treated as such.”

That was interesting news. Both that using the Albucierre drive as a weapon was illegal, and that there was such a thing as interstellar law at all. Was the law just for the Jaernyth race? The implication he heard was that the law extended to many races - including humanity, and that ignorance was probably not going to be considered a good defense. Which raised two questions: if there was a body of interstellar law, who had created it and how was it enforced?

Problems for another time. In the here and now he had to prevent these ships from wiping his species from the cosmos. Perhaps there was a way to cause just a little trouble for his rival at the same time, though.

“Admiral Stein commands the ship you just disabled. He is a rogue and took these illegal actions without sanction. He will be dealt with,” Xiang said. Nothing like blaming the enemy for a crime he didn’t even know he committed. That name might never make it out of this solar system if all went well. On the other hand, perhaps it would.

“It does not matter. We spoke to you before. Your kind was given a deadline to be united or perish. That has passed,” the voice replied. “We will take your worlds since you are using them so poorly.”

“I think not,” Xiang replied. “You won’t. In fact, you will return at once to your own world and not return, or you will die. This is your only warning and last chance.”

There was a series of high pitched clicking noises that Xiang wasn’t sure how to translate at first. It took him a minute to realize the Jaernyth was laughing at him. That raised his ire a notch. He had never cared for being laughed at. But he reined in his temper, pulling it back under the same iron control he always had. This was good news, after all. It meant the Jaernyth were playing right into his hands. Intelligent they might be. Skilled at diplomacy and subterfuge, not so much.

“You will die along with the rest of them. Half a dozen of our beam weapons are trained on your pathetic little ship as we speak. It is only for diplomatic courtesy that we bothered to have discourse with you at all,” the voice replied. “We have spoken with you before, so we offered this courtesy now. All you offer in return are empty threats?”

Xiang checked the time. He needed another minute. The Hermes would be in position shortly. If Commander Knauf understood what he needed to do and followed through, he would still need Xiang to delay the aliens just a little longer. If they discovered the plot early, it could be unraveled. That would never do. He had to stall.

“Our fleet will wipe your ships from the sky. Even now the rest of our ships are on their way here. You will die in fire, but we offer you this mercy: leave now and we will allow you to live,” Xiang said.

More laughter followed. “We have watched you for some time now. We know all your military capabilities. Once we have repaired our sister ship and the ring, our invasion fleet will make short work of all your worlds and your useless fleet.”

They weren’t wrong. The UN fleet was much stronger than it had been when Xiang died. But it was still barely enough to take on just these two vessels in a head-on fight. The Jaernyth wouldn’t attack with only two ships, though. They’d bring in as many as they thought they would need to have no chance of losing. If that meant sending twenty dreadnoughts to Earth, or fifty, he had no doubt that was precisely what they would do.

“You are weak-minded fools. You cannot hope to beat us, so you bluster instead? You call us criminals, yet strike first against a race which has done you no harm,” Xiang said. “That is in violation of our laws, and you shall be held accountable for each human life lost. You are insects. Like any other insect, we will crush you beneath our boots.”

The communication turned into a harsh set of angry-sounding clicks that Xiang couldn’t understand. His grasp of the Jaernyth tongue didn’t extend to swearing, and it was clear from the tone the alien was unleashing every bit of invective it knew in his direction. That was fine. Keep looking at me. Pay no attention to the elephant…

The dreadnought’s guns opened up. Xiang was prepared, already moving at a good speed. All the practice in the fighter over the last few days served him well. He executed a series of evasive moves, dodging and weaving to keep the beams from connecting with his ship. One slip and he would be instantly cooked, and yet it was like this was where he was always meant to be. He was a ghost, dead to everyone on Earth. But Xiang had never felt more alive than in that moment. The combination of physical conflict and mental fencing utilized all his skills and assets at once. It was exhilarating!

“I will have to bid you farewell now,” Xiang said. He checked the timer. Any second now. “It’s time for me to be elsewhere.”

“You go nowhere. You die now,” the alien said.

“I think you have that wrong,” Xiang said.

As he spoke those words, the Hermes shot out from around the back side of Triton. It was moving fast - very fast indeed, having burned on maximum thrust for an extended period of time and then gained more velocity by slingshotting around the moon. It was headed back into the fight and only a few seconds away.

The die was cast. Either Knauf would do the right thing or he wouldn’t. There wasn’t anything more Xiang could do to influence the outcome here, which meant it was time for him to go. He pushed his own engines to the red line, shooting straight at Neptune’s atmosphere. The gases there would block any stray particle beam weapons sent his way, and his fighter had survived a short trip there before. It could do so again.

After that? He’d have to see. Choi Xiang was back in the world again. The future was littered with possibilities for one such as himself.

28

Xiang hadn’t told Max precisely what he had in mind, but he was smart enough to come up with a good guess even before he laid in the course. Once he was underway, it wasn’t difficult at all to figure out what was up. Max didn’t change course though. Xiang wasn’t wrong. They had to stop this invasion here and now, before they got a strong enough foothold in the solar system that humanity would never be able to kick them out. Those ships had to be defeated. No matter the cost.

His guesses were confirmed as the ship sailed around Triton and the battle came back into view. The Intrepid was all but out of the fight, listing wildly with only her fighters still engaging the enemy warship. For its part the alien ship was mainly ignoring the Intrepid for the moment. It had pivoted on one axis to bring its guns to bear against some other target, which left few weapons trained on the Intrepid.

“Three guesses what made them move like that, and the first two don’t count. Well done, Xiang,” Max said over the radio. There was no response, so he didn’t know if the man heard him or not. For all he knew the aliens had already blown him to shrapnel. But it was worth saying anyway.

The Hermes was moving at a reckless velocity. Bits of metal they ran into pinged against the outer armor, embedding themselves into the ship’s surface. It was too fast to be flying this close to a planet. Even worse so close to a space battle, with millions of bits of debris flying everywhere. But the ship wasn’t going to matter in a few seconds anyway. All it had to do was cross a few thousand kilometers more, which it would do in the veritable blink of an eye.

The alien ship saw the threat, but all their guns were turned away from the Hermes. They began to slowly pivot back to face the danger. Max could already see they would never be in time to bring most of their weapons to bear. The few which could fire at him did so, their beams stabbing deep into the bow of the Hermes. That wasn’t enough to stop her. It wasn’t even close. The momentum they already had would be enough to finish the job even if the engines failed.

Time to address the crew. Max opened a link to the other five digital minds on the Hermes.

“I want you all to know it’s been an honor serving with you. In another minute we will impact against the enemy warship. We’re moving fast enough that it is unlikely either ship will survive,” Max said. Unlikely wasn’t the half of it. The transfer of energy should be enough to nearly liquify both ships. “I wouldn’t be taking such an extreme measure if there were any other way, but the invasion must be stopped and we’re the only ones who can still do it.”

Max stopped talking and waited to see if the others would say anything in return. None of them did, which surprised him. They were good people. None of them questioned whether their deaths were necessary or not. They didn’t ask him if there was any other way. If there had been, Max would definitely have taken it! He didn’t want to die. He’d given up his physical body, sure. But that had been part of the deal to transfer his consciousness. Passing away entirely was a whole different ball game, and not one he’d hoped to be playing anytime soon.

There wasn’t another way, though. The last seconds ticked away. The alien ship had given up trying to twist so it could fire at the Hermes and was instead pushing its own engines hard in an effort to get clear. It was nowhere near enough. Max simply used his own thrusters to adjust course and compensate.

Alien fighters swept in toward him to take out those thrusters. Max didn’t even have to react - the rest of the Hermes’ crew was already manning the smaller ship’s guns, which blew apart one fighter after another as they came. He twisted the Hermes to take one suicide run on a part of the ship he didn’t need, rather than lose a thruster. Thirty more seconds.

There was nothing they could do. Nowhere to run. No way to escape. The aliens had to know that by this time. How would it feel to see death bearing down on you like that? He at least had the advantage of having made the decision to do this.

Ten seconds left. Max let his thoughts drift before they winked out.

Gurgle heard Commander Knauf explain what he planned. He was crashing the ship. That was unfortunate because he really enjoyed working with the repair bots on board. It was also a problem because he had promised Sam to always be there to help her. He couldn’t fulfill that promise if he were dead. How to fix?

He was good at fixing things. Gurgle had fixed many things for Sam over the time he’d known her. In return, she had helped him become more than he’d ever dreamed possible. In fact, before he met her he couldn’t recall dreaming at all. Or thinking about what the future might hold, or worrying about death. She was the bright light that had changed his world the moment she entered it.

She never gave up trying. Gurgle had seen Sam go on fighting even when all around her said the cause was hopeless. She never surrendered and so neither would he. There had to be a way to survive.

Gurgle reached out to put all his processing power to work finding a way. He accidentally tapped into the ship’s primary systems, drawing all non-essential processing to his task. The computer was used to his mind working with it to help repair things. Gurgle was used to tapping into the ship’s non-sentient assistive intelligence to learn how to better do his job. It had been a good match.

A solution presented itself almost immediately, and Gurgle set about getting the job done. It would require a special repair bot, one of the outside models capable of surviving in deep space with thrusters to jet about the outside of the Hermes fixing the outer hull. Gurgle ordered the bot into action and sent it to the computer core. There it would pull the memory units housing each crew member and then exit the ship carrying them.

This was the complicated part. Gurgle could either stay behind on the Hermes and ensure the repair bot got off correctly, or he could set off a script for the bot to execute and hope he didn’t make any mistakes. Again he was faced with a dilemma: the certainty of saving everyone except himself, or a riskier method that would save everyone if it worked? Gurgle wondered which path Sam would choose for only a split second before settling on what he knew she would do. There was no question about it.

Gurgle wrote the script and executed the command sequence. The repair bot went into action, racing to the computer bay where the drives were stored. Once it pulled his drive Gurgle would be unable to take any more action, so he carefully checked the script again and then attached a message in his voice to the bot’s homing beacon, just for good measure.

A moment later he and the rest of the Hermes crew went offline as their drives were pulled from the system.

Fifteen seconds after that the Hermes plowed into the side of the alien dreadnought. For the third time that day a massive light burned above Neptune as the two ships obliterated each other in an enormous explosion.

29

Sam watched helplessly as the Hermes plowed into the alien ship. She received Max’s last transmission, but what could she possibly say to him in response? He was doing what he felt like needed to be done. She couldn’t argue. It was do or die time. Either they stopped the invasion right away or they probably wouldn’t be able to do so at all. That didn’t lessen the heartbreak of seeing friends go up in the explosion. If she’d had eyes, they would have been streaming with tears.

“Oh, Gurgle,” she said softly. One of her oldest friends was gone in that flash.

That was always a risk Gurgle faced. He was much more in danger than she back in Valhalla Online. Until she’d managed to find a way to allow him to respawn like she did, any mission that ended in failure could be his last one. A stroke of bad luck would wipe him away forever.

He’d never hesitated to go with her anyway. In fact, he’d fought with her when she tried to keep him out of things. Loyal to the end, Gurgle never gave up on her and always had her back.

Now he was gone. She couldn’t believe it. If she’d never taken him out of Valhalla, then he would still be alive. He could have continued to exist there forever, in theory. He’d followed her over and over and always managed to come out OK. But in the end following her eventually led to the thing Sam feared most: Gurgle’s death.

“He did well,” Harald told her over the radio. “It was the right thing to do.”

“I know. That doesn’t make it easier for me to deal with surviving when they didn’t,” Sam replied.

Harald didn’t respond. He was a Marine and would most likely have lost friends in combat while he was alive. He’d understand more than most where Sam was coming from.

There were still two alien ships remaining. The one which had been so severely damaged by the Intrepid’s arrival was still drifting, powerless. It had ceased leaking air and fluid. That might be because the aliens inside had stopped up the holes, but Sam thought it more likely that it was because the air was all gone and the temperatures dropped to below freezing. Without power, she couldn’t imagine anything living there for long. The ship was a dead husk.

The smaller vessel, the one they’d battled against for so many days, was also badly injured. It was still flying under its own power, limping away from the fight as quickly as it could manage. The Intrepid and her remaining fighters were in hot pursuit. Sam kept watching from afar as her Wasp drifted on through the night. It was all she could do. Without main thrusters she wasn’t going to change her course. The bump Xiang gave her had kept her alive for a bit, but she needed a pick-up or eventually she’d end up falling back into the planet’s gravity again.

Her scans detected a buildup of energy around the fleeing ship. It was getting ready to run. The Intrepid was weaponless and therefore helpless to stop it. Sam wished she could be out with those Wasps at least trying to accomplish something! But they were too little to stop the ship. A warp bubble flashed into being around it and then it was gone. No telling how far away it would exit or what it would do next.

Looking around the battlefield, Sam couldn’t help but think the aliens might consider a little while before coming back. They’d done a lot of damage to the human fleet, but they’d take a serious beating themselves. Of course, the few ships they’d lost might be like nothing to them, but she doubted it. No race could just write off the loss of three ships the size of those dreadnoughts - could they?

“Sam I’m getting a transceiver reading,” Harald said. “I’m going to investigate.”

“Understood, but be careful,” she replied. “Grim, go with him.”

The two fighters shot away from her toward the fragments of metal from the two exploded ships. What a mess. Sam wondered if all the junk scattered around would be harvested somehow and built into new ships, or if Neptune would get itself a brand new ring, or what. They were certainly going to need more ships if they were going to keep Earth safe.

Harald and Grim slowed as they reached the outer edge of the debris field. They coasted along. Now that they were near, Sam could see from their scans where the transmission was coming from. It was on the Triton side of the explosion, where the Hermes would have come from. Maybe a piece of that old ship drifting with an active computer on board?

“Hmm. That’s odd,” Harald said.

“What is it?” Sam asked.

“A repair drone. But the transceiver has been monkeyed with. I don’t know precisely how it was done, but it’s been altered. I think there’s a message, hang on,” he said.

Sam was left wondering what it was. Perhaps Max had left them some sort of farewell note? She couldn’t think what else it might be unless it was just an accident and not intentional at all.

Harald laughed over the radio. “Sam, you’re not going to believe this.”

“Believe what?” she asked.

“This message. Gods, but he takes after you. Never knows how to call it quits,” Harald said.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Sam said.

“No. It’s one of your more annoying and most useful qualities at the same time. But you’ve passed it on. Listen to this,” Harald said. Then he began playing back the message recorded into the drone.

“This Gurgle. No want get blowed up. No have to get blowed up. Gurgle good with drones, get drone to pull memory cores. Drone carrying them now. Please pick up drone so Gurgle no float in space forever, OK? Please and thank you!”

Sam laughed along with Harald. She’d know that voice anywhere even if he hadn’t said his name. He’d found a way to keep the Hermes crew alive after all! She didn’t know where he’d gotten the idea from, but it was a good one. Those memory cores should be swappable, which meant they could almost certainly save all those people.

“Damn. That’s awesome! Do the memory cores look intact?” she asked.

“Hard to tell, they’re stuffed inside the robot’s belly. But I think so. I’m picking up the drone. We need to get Gurgle and the rest of them over to the Intrepid. I don’t want to risk them out here with so much debris and crap flying around. Something hits the drone the wrong way and we’ll lose all of them,” Harald said.

“Do what you have to. I’m just hanging out here anyway,” Sam replied. It was the truth. She had hours left now instead of minutes. The Intrepid should be able to come fetch her long before she was at risk of falling into Neptune’s atmosphere again.

Harald jetted away, leaving Sam to consider what he’d said. He thought Gurgle had learned from her? It was a very ‘her’ thing to do, finding a way to snatch life from the jaws of death. She’d kept fighting long after most people would have thrown their hands up in despair on more than one occasion.

Had he somehow picked that up from her? Sam still didn’t fully understand what Gurgle was. He was clearly his own autonomous personality. Otherwise, the upload from Valhalla to the Hermes would never have worked on him. That meant he was only following her orders because he wanted to. He had free will. That didn’t mean he was super bright, although this latest scheme of his certainly added a new twist to Sam’s ongoing analysis of Gurgle’s intelligence. It felt like he’d been getting slowly smarter for a long time.

It was something she needed to find time to discuss with him. Later, when they were away from prying ears.

In the meantime, it was good just to know her friend was still alive after all.

30

Interacting with digital people was going to take some getting used to, Thomas decided. More multiple reasons, but they were at least making strides in the right direction. One of his computer techs on board the Intrepid came up with the idea of repurposing holographic projectors for his meeting room. This allowed the computers to display digital representations of their avatars, sitting in chairs like they were regular people.

If you could ignore the slight flicker and their translucence, it was a convincing illusion, and infinitely preferable to what they were doing before. A picture of a face on a screen didn’t do justice to the body language a human was capable of. These people from Valhalla Online were used to having bodies, even if they had been digital ones. Without being able to see how they were sitting or moving, one missed a great deal of silent communication.

For instance, Thomas could see that the pilot was extremely uncomfortable. He understood and sympathized. She’d last been a young officer in the Army. Staying out of the way of top brass was an excellent survival skill, yet here she was meeting with a pair of the senior officers in the United Nations Navy - himself and Kel. He hid a smile. The lieutenant might be a remarkable leader and capable of amazing things in a Wasp, but in some ways she was just like any other junior officer. She’d get over that soon enough. They had need of people like her.

Commander Knauf was much more collected, but then he’d been around higher ranked personnel for most of his career. It was old hat to him, meeting up with an admiral for a conference session. He wasn’t even aware of the lieutenant’s discomfort, near as Thomas could tell. A failing that might cost him someday, if Knauf couldn’t read the emotions of his crew well enough. Thomas made a mental note to speak with him about it privately.

“In short, you both did a stellar job,” Thomas finished, ending his brief speech about how pleased the Navy was with their newest Wasp squadron.

“I don’t understand, sir. We couldn’t complete the mission,” Samantha said.

“You came extremely close even against worse odds than we’d expected. The Wasp teams performed extraordinarily well for such fresh recruits,” Kel said. “You should be proud of your people.”

“I am. Just surprised, I think,” Samantha said. She pursed her lips and looked at the wall, lost in thought.

“This isn’t over, of course,” Thomas said.

“It’s not?” Samantha asked, glancing back at him.

“I didn’t think so,” Knauf said.

“No, it’s absolutely not. One ship managed to get away. We tracked it to the Oort Cloud by spotting the particle burst of her exit from warp, but we don’t have any way to track something so small at that range,” Thomas said. “She might have gone home.”

“Or she could be out there building a new ring,” Samantha added for him.

He liked this woman! She was quick. Shy around admirals, maybe, but it was already wearing off. Thomas hoped that she would stay on. That she’d enlist and fight alongside his people for a future that was all too uncertain at the moment. He played with the lure a little bit, making sure there was plenty of slack. She was too important a fish to hook not to take all the care necessary.

“Yes. We’re moving into full-scale fleet building. We don’t have enough exotic matter to build many more Alcubierre drive capable ships, though,” Thomas said.

“Which is where we come in, I assume?” Samantha asked. The corner of her mouth quirked up in a half smile. “We can get to the Oort cloud faster than anything except the Intrepid.

“Which will be down for repairs for weeks. We were thrashed pretty hard in that last fight,” Thomas said. “Yes, we need you. Earth needs you. But - the deal was one mission, and you were free to go. That still stands. If you want out, you can leave today and find your own way in the world. I’m not sure what life will look like for those of you who choose to leave the service, but legally you can absolutely do so. The Navy is even tacking on a monetary bonus for each of you that should help get you launched.”

“That’s very generous, sir,” Samantha said. “I think some of us might take you up on it.”

“We hope you’ll stay on, Sam,” Kel said.

“Me? Why me?”

“Because after only a few days in the cockpit you’re already a better pilot than most of our people are with scores of times more flight hours,” Kel said. She leaned back in her chair and ran her hands through her hair. “You’re a natural. You fly that Wasp like it was an extension of your body.”

Samantha laughed. “When I fly that Wasp, it is my body!”

Kel joined her with a chuckle. “I suppose that’s true. But more than just your raw pilot skill, I appreciate your leadership. I want you to stay on as squadron commander for Ghost Squadron.”

“You’re keeping the name, then?” Samantha asked.

“It seemed to fit,” Thomas said.

There was a pause. Samantha looked over at Knauf, who tilted his head sideways and shrugged. He was letting her make the call for herself without trying to influence her. Which was probably the right move under the circumstances. Knauf still had three more years left of service due, or as long as the ‘needs of the Navy’ demanded. He was stuck. She wasn’t. Yet, anyway. That was her decision to make, and at the end of the day Thomas wouldn’t have it any other way. The Jaernyth might gain strength from mindless compliance with orders, but that wasn’t how humanity worked. Humans got their strength from their desire to be a part of something, not from being forced to do it. Time and again people had learned that a volunteer army outfought an equally trained and equipped army of conscripts every time.

“What do you say, Sam?” Kel asked.

She hesitated only a moment before committing. “I’m in.”

“Excellent,” Thomas said. “We’ll do the official oath for you in a short while, but let me be the first to welcome you back to full active duty, Commander.”

“Commander?” Samantha all but squeaked. With good reason - that was a sizable promotion for her.

“Well, yes. I can’t have a junior officer leading a full squadron. In time I expect it will be much more than that, too,” Thomas said. “I’d like your help with recruitment as well.”

“Of course, sir. I’ll do all I can,” Samantha said. “But speaking of recruits - there’s something I don’t understand.”

Thomas nodded to her. He’d been expecting this question. “Go ahead.”

“Xiang, sir. I’ve heard bits and pieces of gossip, but nothing concrete. Some people are saying he saved the day, but no one is sure how. Others claim he was conspiring with the enemy, and I can tell you that doesn’t make any sense,” Samantha said. “He was out there fighting alongside the rest of us. Worst, nobody seems to know what happened to him. There’s no sign of his Wasp at all. He saved my life, sir. What happened to him?”

Thomas interlaced his fingers in front of him and cracked his knuckles. He felt Kel place her hand on his thigh - urging him to keep his anger about Choi in check. He’d kept the story mostly under wraps by making the information classified as hell, but this was the Navy. Scuttlebutt moved more rapidly than the speed of light. He knew there would be rumors, and Samantha wouldn’t be the leader he hoped she was if she didn’t care enough about her people to track down any leads about what had happened to one of them.

“Xiang turned out to be a more complicated person than either you or I thought,” Thomas said. He wanted to choose his words carefully here. Partly because his new commander did have reason to trust the man, but also because Xiang - or Choi Xiang - had possibly saved them all, not just her.

“Can you be more vague, sir?” she asked. When he frowned in response, she sighed. “I’m sorry. It’s frustrating hearing nothing but rumors and half-truths.”

“I understand. I’ll be as frank as I can. The person you knew as Xiang’s full name when he was alive was Choi Xiang. He was the former president of the United Nations. Under his leadership Earth went to war with Mars, and we very nearly wiped out half of humanity thanks to his machinations.”

Thomas frowned, remembering those days. He didn’t like to revisit that part of the past, but it was important that Samantha understand Choi’s full nature. As much as anyone could. Even Thomas wasn’t sure he had the total picture.

“I remember some of that from my days in the service, sir. The pirate attack, the asteroids dropped… It was terrible,” Samantha said.

“The ‘pirates’ were a group funded by Choi to get humanity under a central power. I didn’t find out until after I’d killed the man, but humans had contact with aliens many years ago. Yes, these same aliens,” Thomas said. “Choi had spoken with them. That’s why he was able to speak with them again at the end of the fighting here.”

“So he was a traitor?” Samantha asked. Her face was pinched. She didn’t want to believe the worst of the man, despite what she was hearing. Thomas understood. He’d risked his life to save hers.

“No,” Thomas said. “After he saved you, he risked his life again to save all of us. He contacted the aliens and stalled them while Commander Knauf circled Triton. Then he lured their guns into facing the opposite direction so that the Hermes would be unopposed when it made that final plunge toward the dreadnought.”

Samantha chewed on those thoughts for a minute. Everyone at the table was silent until she spoke.

“I don’t understand, sir. Is Xiang a hero or a villain?”

“I honestly don’t know,” Thomas said. “I wish I did, because I’m sure we’ll see him again. He fled the battle. That’s why we haven’t found a wreck from his Wasp. We managed to spot his fighter leaving the area on our scan logs. Choi was headed back home. To Earth.”

“He said something about the power being immortal could give someone like him,” Samantha said.

Thomas gave her a sharp look. “He’s not wrong. Which is why I am certain that we’ll see him again. He’s not the sort to stay in the shadows forever. He wants to be a part of things too much. He’ll show up again.”

Thomas leaned back in his chair. Choi was going to be a problem for sure, but he’d also been an asset. Perhaps he could be both. Only time would tell. There were bigger fish to fry for the time being, though. Choi would have to wait his turn in line.

“But in the meantime, we have a solar system to defend. The Intrepid is being repaired. We’ve got a captured alien dreadnought to study. And as soon as you put a full Ghost Squadron together I need you and Commander Knauf to take ships out to the Oort Cloud. You’re to ensure that alien ship gets sent home - or destroyed. Can you handle that?”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

The End

Read book two of the trilogy, “Ghost Squadron” - available for preorder at http://mybook.to/ghost2 until July 26th, when it releases!

Author's Notes

This novel has been a long time coming.

It’s the first book to officially meld two of my most popular story worlds - that of the Accord series and the Valhalla Online series - into one complete universe: the Ragnarok Saga. Although I’ve left a few clues for readers to find that the two worlds were one and the same (bonus points for spotting any!) it was never spelled out so clearly until the release of this novel.

Which was a lot of fun to write, I have to tell you! Science fiction is about cool adventures and blowing things up. But it’s also about asking crucial questions and thinking about deep topics. If we ever were able to upload copies of our minds, how would that change society? What impact would it have on how we lived and died? These sorts of things were on the top of my mind as I wrote this adventure.

Choi never had his story fully fleshed out in the Accord books. They were all from the perspective of the Steins - Thomas and his father, Nicholas. As a result Choi ends up feeling more like a diabolical evildoer, because that’s how Thomas (who has most of the interactions with him) sees him. But its truly rare for a person to see themselves as evil. Most of the time, even those who perform the most horrible acts think they’re doing it for a very good reason. So it was with Choi Xiang, who is the villain of the Accord series but is something else in this book. Not quite a hero, but not a villain. More of a person, trying to make his way and accomplish his goals.

The aliens were my first stab at a much more complex life-form development, too. In the past I’ve mostly written about alien species that were not too different from humans. They might look different, but tended to act a lot like us. Their motives and methods were easy to grasp and understand. But in the Jaernyth we see something very different from us. They represent not just a different look from humans, but a radically different mindset. Where we tend to value individualism and freedom, to them those things look like chaos and anarchy. They can’t conceptualize a race of sentient beings with individual free will any more easily than we can grasp a sentient race totally subservient to their leaders (and perfectly content to remain that way).

It’ll be interesting to see what happens next with them. Of course, the one ship got away. Will they return with a still larger invasion force? Why didn’t they just jump in the entire fleet, instead of sending one small ship?

I’d like to give a shout-out to the other authors in the Galactic Genesis collection, where this work first appeared. Six science fiction authors banded together to release the first book from a new trilogy all in the same book bundle. I don’t know that anyone had ever attempted that before us. It’s a grand experiment, and I hope you’re happy with the results!

The story will continue. “Ghost Squadron” is already out, and that will be followed by “Ghost Fleet” in late 2018 to conclude the trilogy. I doubt that will actually conclude the tales of this universe, however... In fact, I’m very sure it won’t!

If you missed the other books in the Ragnarok Saga and would like to catch up on them, the Accord trilogy is: Accord of Honor, Accord of Mars, Accord of Valor. The Valhalla Online books are: Valhalla Online, Valhalla Online 2: Raiding Jotunheim, Valhalla Online 3: Vengeance over Vanaheim, and Valhalla Online 4: Hel Hath No Fury (releases November 2018).

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this book, please do leave a review - those are a huge help for us writers, and we appreciate each and every one.

Kevin McLaughlin

Ghost Squadron Sneak Peek!

Chapter 1

Sam thought calling this place the 'Oort Cloud' was a misnomer. It wasn’t a cloud at all. There was stuff out there, for sure. Bits of rock and ice. But they were scattered about, so distant from each other that the whole region felt as empty as any other part of space. From her point of view, it was less a cloud and more a zone.

Whatever they wanted to call it, patrolling the place was damned dull. They were supposed to be out looking for trouble. If the alien ship which escaped the scuffle at Neptune was still somewhere in the solar system, the most likely place for it to be hiding out was in the Oort Cloud. Far enough from Earth that it would be nearly impossible to spot, but close enough that it could have made the trip without resorting to a jump with its Alcubierre drive.

That, they would have spotted. The energy surge when a ship went into a jump was nowhere near as dramatic as the one expelled when it arrived at its destination, but it was still easy enough to spot from a far distance. They hadn’t seen a jump signature. So unless the aliens had been extremely sneaky about their departure, they were still in the neighborhood

“Harald, you seeing anything at all out there?” Sam asked over her radio. There was a brief lag before she got a response. Her squadron-mates were all flying at a distance of several light-seconds from each other, spread out to cover more ground. It was still woefully insufficient. A ship trying to hide out there was a needle in a haystack, and they were combing through the stack one straw at a time.

“Still nothing, just like last time you asked,” he replied.

He’d been growing testier by the week. Ever since the battle over Neptune, he’d become more distant and reclusive. Instead of hanging out with the other pilots during downtime, he’d resided in his fighter. Sam stopped by a few times when he started the practice. He was only grudgingly talkative and mostly stared out into the stars. She wondered what he thought about while he sat there all alone. God knew they all had enough demons chasing them at this point.

Sam was evading hers by staying busy. There was a new crop of pilots to train up. Few of their original fighter wing had survived. But the core concept - using digitally uploaded minds as pilots of fighters, because they could survive accelerations and vector changes that would kill an ordinary human - was deemed a rousing success, anyway. Another recruiting drive brought in a host of fresh meat, and it was her job to turn them into a cohesive fighting force.

Easier said than done. Even after a few weeks in space, the pilots were still green as hell. They were all recruits from Valhalla Online, a digital afterlife where you got to play a fantasy game for all eternity. On the plus side, that meant all her new recruits were used to the idea of fighting. But they were also used to respawning after they ‘died’ in the game. A death in Valhalla Online might hurt, but it wasn’t the end of the road.

A condition the United Nations placed on allowing them to run around loose in the outside world was that each digital mind was encoded with a high-grade DRM. Copying them was supposed to be impossible. Sam knew nothing was truly unhackable, but it made it impractical at best to make copies of a freed digital mind. No copies meant that if the fighter your program was uploaded to blew to bits, you were gone. End of story, end of life.

Teaching these new recruits to take death seriously had been a struggle, especially since dying in a simulation was just like what they were used to in Valhalla. They ‘died’ and came right back again to run another sim. It would be very different when they got out in real combat though. The enemy’s guns would cause real damage to their fighters. When they blew up - and Sam knew some of them would die - they’d be gone forever. Wiped from existence. It was a tough concept for them to adjust to.

Sam spotted a flash of light in the distance, out ahead of them. She lit it up with active scanners immediately. The fighter’s instruments fed data back to her about the energy discharge. It was an Alcubierre drive exit explosion, all right. When a ship came out of a jump, it brought with it a swath of highly charged particles that released all their pent-up energy in an instant. The resulting light show was impressive. At close range, it could blow apart a spaceship. Sam knew, since she’d seen it happen.

But this wasn’t enemy action. The friend-or-foe systems on board her craft identified the ship at once. It was the Intrepid, the one human vessel capable of making jumps. Well, it was more or less capable. The first time they tried, it had blown out the jump drive. They’d since made adjustments to get the system more or less working, but it was still new tech. Flying around in the Intrepid when it made a jump was a little like riding a C-130 full of nitroglycerin. It would probably make a safe landing. But if it didn’t, the explosion would be spectacular.

A signal came in from the Intrepid a few seconds later. “Ghost Squadron, any contacts?”

That was Admiral Thomas Stein, the captain of the ship. Technically, Stein was in command of the entire human space navy, but he’d taken direct control during the battle for Neptune and never relinquished it after. Sam wondered how long a member of the top brass would be allowed to remain in the field like that. It wasn’t for her to question his decision, but it seemed unwise to have him on the front lines.

“Negative,” Sam replied. “This sector is clean.”

“Understood,” Thomas replied. “Return to base to refuel and rest.”

“We’re still good for another sector if you want,” Sam said. Her tanks still had plenty of reaction mass left to convert into energy for her drive. They’d been coasting at high velocity for the last couple of days, not using much power.

“Negative. Your people need downtime to stay sharp. Bring them in. Rest, let the techs look over your ships, and then we’ll hit the next sector.”

“Understood, sir. Passing the word along,” Sam replied.

The downtime would be good. It was hard on the mind, being out in the black for too long. Even though the pilots could all connect to each other and talk whenever they wanted, the brief lags in conversation caused by distance shut down discussion. That left all her pilots with a lot of time to sit alone in their fighters and think. Sam wasn’t sure how the rest of them were reacting to that, but it had worn on her enough that she welcomed a respite.

Grab your copy of Ghost Squadron today at http://mybook.to/ragnarok5 and continue the adventure!

Other Books by Kevin McLaughlin

The Ragnarok Saga (Military SF)

Accord of Fire - Free prequel short story, available only to email list fans!

Book 1 - Accord of Honor

Book 2 - Accord of Mars

Book 3 - Accord of Valor

Book 4 - Ghost Wing

Book 5 - Ghost Squadron

Book 6 - Ghost Fleet (2018)

Valhalla Online Series (A Ragnarok Saga Story)

Book 1 - Valhalla Online

Book 2 - Raiding Jotunheim

Book 3 - Vengeance Over Vanaheim

Book 4 - Hel Hath No Fury (November 2018)

Lost Planet Warriors (Military SF with light romance)

Book 1 - Desperate Times

Book 2 - Desperate Measures

Dire Straits - Free short story for email list fans!

Adventures of the Starship Satori (Space Opera blended with military SF)

Finding Satori - prequel short story, available only to email list fans!

Book 1 - Ad Astra: Book 2 - Stellar Legacy

Book 3 - Deep Waters

Book 4 - No Plan Survives Contact

Book 5 - Liberty

Book 6 - Satori’s Destiny

Book 7 - Ashes of War

Book 8 - Embers of War

Book 9 - Dust and Iron (May 2018)

Blackwell Magic Series (Urban Fantasy)

Book 1 - By Darkness Revealed

Book 2 - Ashes Ascendant

Book 3 - Dead In Winter

Book 4 - Claws That Catch

Book 5 - Darkness Awakes

Book 6 - Spellbinding Entanglements

By A Whisker (short story)

The Raven and the Rose - Free novelette for email list fans!

Dead Brittania Series:

Dead Brittania (short prequel story)

Book 1 - King of the Dead

Book 2 - Queen of Demons

Raven’s Heart Series (Urban Fantasy)

Book 1 - Stolen Light

Book 2 - Webs in the Dark

Book 3 - Shades of Moonlight

Other Titles:

Over the Moon (SF romance)

Midnight Visitors (Steampunk Cat short story)

Demon Ex Machina (Steampunk Cat short story)

The Coffee Break Novelist (help for writers!)

You Must Write (Heinlein’s rules for writers)

Exclusive for fans of the Accord series!

Find out how the story started… When Captain Nicholas Stein set out to stop one enemy ship, and set in motion events which shaped the course of human history for decades to come.

http://kevinomclaughlin.com/accordoffire/

About the Author

USA Today bestselling author Kevin McLaughlin has written more than three dozen science fiction and fantasy novels, along with more short stories than he can easily count. Kevin can be found most days in downtown Boston, working on the next novel. His bestselling Blackwell Magic fantasy series, Accord science fiction series, Valhalla Online LitRPG series, and the fan-favorite Starship Satori series are ongoing.

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www.kevinomclaughlin.com

kevins.studio@gmail.com