War on a Thousand Fronts Read online

  The pinnace continued boosting—well beyond its safe acceleration threshold—taking more and more weapons fire from the drones as it closed.

  Then the craft was amidst the drones, its beams shredding the robotic attackers at point-blank range before the pinnace was finally overwhelmed and holed, venting atmosphere in a dozen locations as it tumbled away from the battlespace.

  “Shit,” Tangel muttered. “That was brave…but stupid.”

  “Why would you say that?” Jason asked, glancing over his shoulder at her, as their pinnace continued to weave through the attackers. “I’m rather proud of it.”

  “What?” Tangel asked, then realized what Jason had done, and groaned. “You know…next time you send an empty pinnace into the enemy, can you let me know beforehand?”

  “Sorry, forgot you weren’t on our comms when we boarded. That was the one we came down in…I was remote piloting it back up.”

  As Jason explained his clever duplicity, their pinnace shuddered under a heavy barrage of enemy fire, and Tangel redoubled her concentration on dissecting the drone’s control wave.

  The two remaining ISF pinnaces were ninety thousand kilometers from the Helios when the drone pattern shifted. The robotic attackers intensified their fire, and Tangel knew their orders had changed from ‘capture’ to ‘kill’.

  Exactly what I needed.

  With the orders had come a new auth packet, and Tangel lifted it off the carrier wave and pulled it apart. She realized that the token was generic, not hashed per command. Sloppy, but maybe it was done to keep the data packets small, counting on security through obscurity.

  “Rear umbrella’s failed!” the pilot called out, and then Jason swore as one of the pinnace’s two engines died, beamfire from the drones triggering a thermal shutdown.

  The pinnace slewed to port, and Tangel closed her eyes, crafting new orders for the drones while configuring the remaining pinnace’s comm systems to send out the low-frequency wave.

  Here goes nothing, she thought, and sent the command.

  Half the drones immediately broke off from their attack on the pinnaces and turned on the other drones. Utter chaos erupted around the pinnaces, and Tangel managed a laugh, not caring to think how close they’d come to being dead in space with thousands of enemy drones around them.

  “Now that’s more like it,” Jason crowed as the Helios drew closer, its beams sweeping away any drones that had survived the robotic civil war Tangel had ignited.

  “This is insane,” a voice whispered from behind her, and Tangel turned to see Jeffrey approaching. His mouth was agape as he stared at the forward view—a display that showed the Helios fending off dozens of Airthan ships on its own, while miraculously—to him—remaining unscathed.

  “This?” Tangel asked, gesturing to the firefight occurring around the Helios. “This is just another day at the office. Don’t worry, Airtha doesn’t have weapons that can penetrate the Helios’s stasis shields, and we’re almost there—”

  Tangel’s words cut off, as a massive ship appeared on scan, easily a hundred kilometers long. At first glance, it appeared to be little more than a rail accelerator with engines—more like a defensive platform. One that looked incomplete, judging by the construction scaffolding on one side, and the missing hull plating in a number of locations.

  As she watched, thrusters fired along its length, and the weapon shifted its orientation to align with the Helios.

  “What the…” Sera whispered, then the pinnace’s alarms wailed as a massive EM burst flared on scan.

  “Holy shit!” Jason swore as the forward view showed arcs of electricity flowing across the Helios, dancing between its rings, sending explosions flaring across the ship, as the rail accelerators lost containment, and a billion fist-sized pellets tore through the hull, flying in every direction.

  Then the Helios went dark.

  Colonel Pearson called in from the other pinnace.

  We can see that, Tangel thought as she watched escape pods blast out of the Helios.

  Tangel ordered the colonel, while she addressed Jason and the pilot aloud, “Get us in close to that thing, I’m going to take it out.”

  “Close?” Jason twisted in his seat. “How close?”

  Tangel turned and strode down the passageway, calling over her shoulder. “Jumping distance. Don’t worry, I’ll wear a helmet this time.”

  Tangel reached the armory with Sera close on her heels.

  “Tanis! You can’t be serious! We’ll never make it close enough to that weapon!”

  “Pull scan and look,” Tangel said as she grabbed a helmet and pulled it on.

  “So you think.” Sera shot back.

  Tangel placed a hand on Sera’s shoulder.

  “Who?” Sera asked, then her eyes widened. “Dammit, the rest of your Aleutian fleet. That thing is going to tear them apart!”

  Tangel replied to Sera before calling up,

  Jason asked.

  Tangel replied.

 

  The calm certainty in Jason’s voice steeled Tangel, and she leant forward, touching her helmet to Sera’s, letting the vibrations carry her voice through. “When I get back, we have to talk. Things have to change.”

  “What things?” Sera’s eyes were wide. “Are you going to leave us?”

  “No.” Tangel shook her head. “We’re going to go on the offensive.”

  “With who?” Sera whispered.

  “Everyone.”

  Tangel gave Sera a quick embrace, then turned and walked to the airlock, closing the inner door on Sera’s worried expression, and grasping a handle as she cycled the outer door open.

  All around the pinnace, the remaining drones were flying in a tight formation, absorbing beamfire from the Airthan fleet, and taking shots of opportunity to keep the forty enemy cruisers at bay.

  Ahead, three of the enemy cruisers were in a close formation near the EMG, and Jason dove the pinnace between them. She could tell it was him, not the Marine pilot, by the chances he took, passing only a few kilometers from the enemy vessels.

  He’s one to call me reckless….

  Tangel directed a hundred drones to launch their remaining missiles at the closest cruiser as they swept past, taking out its shields with the weapons, and then the drones themselves slammed into the enemy ship’s hull, tearing it open to gout flame into space.

  Three hundred thousand kilometers away, the Aleutian ISF fleet was shifting vector and burning hard to reach the pinnace and the disabled Helios.

  They were too far away to damage the EMG, but she wasn’t so certain that it couldn’t hit them.

  Tangel sent them a warning to stay at least fifty degrees away from the business end of the EMG, praying that the dozen ISF ships could last long enough for her to destroy this new weapon and still have enough firepower to take down the remaining Airthan ships.

  As those events played out, Jason spun the pinnace and fired the engines for a full braking burn, slowing the craft down to a mere hundred-kilometers-per-second. The a-grav dampeners failed to absorb all of the energy, and Tangel was slammed against the bulkhead, nearly missing the optimal time to jump.

  With three hundred milliseconds to spare, she leapt out of the airlock.

  Faster than her eyes could send the information to her brain, Tangel crossed the forty meters between the pinnace and the EMG. Luckily for her, she had other ways of seeing, and was ab
le to stretch her arms out and disintegrate the hull of the enemy weapon before she was smeared across it.

  Shredding the EMG’s hull was a lot harder than when she’d destroyed the Nietzschean soldiers’ weapons on Pyra, or dissolved the hull of the IPE cruiser just an hour earlier. This time, she had to shred molecular bonds at break-neck speed, praying that she didn’t tear through anything too volatile.

  The slurry of matter and energy around her slowed Tangel’s descent, and she came to a stop near the center of the ship’s long shaft, roughly a kilometer forward of the bulge she suspected to be the main firing system.

  Around her, the matter began to solidify, chemical bonds reforming, and Tangel pushed her way through, finally coming to a passageway.

  A wave of exhaustion hit her, and she realized that, while her non-organic body was able to feed off the energy around her, she wasn’t so adept at keeping her flesh energized while performing these insane feats.

  Don’t get lazy now, Tangel, she chided as she pushed away from the corridor’s bulkhead and began a slow, loping jog down the ship’s length. Next time I do something like this, I’m wearing powered armor.

  She drew matter from around her, and converted it into fuel for her organic body, carefully altering molecular compounds into safe carbohydrates. Her body responded, gaining strength, and she picked up her pace, reaching the end of the corridor in just another twenty seconds.

  Ahead of her was a thick door, sealed against intrusion, and half-covered with warnings about the environment beyond.

  Tangel reached out, feeling the magnetic fields on the far side, a realization hitting her like a hammer blow.

  So much mass…Finaeus always said this was impossible…Seems like Airtha knows a few things he doesn’t. Like how to jump a black hole.

  Tangel knew that destroying the EMG was no longer an option. If she did, the black hole on the far side of the door would eventually fall into the planet below—or maybe, given the mass of the black hole, the planet would fall into it. Either way, it would destroy the ark hidden beneath its surface.

  Not to mention kill her, as well.

  She called out to the pinnace, but didn’t get a response.

  The snap of kinetic rounds ricocheting off something nearby drew Tangel’s attention back to the world around her, and she realized that a group of Airthan soldiers were firing from behind her, and the ‘something’ was her armor.

  With a wave of her hand, she dissolved their weapons and seized the joints in their armor.

  Enough distractions.

  Tangel concentrated on the dense alloy before her. The door to the EMG’s firing chamber consisted of layers and layers of carbon-reinforced steel and lead.

  She was about to dissolve it, when she realized it would be wise to protect her organic body from whatever lay within. She drew the lead out of the door and formed it around herself, wrapping her body in a thick cocoon before pulling the door apart the rest of the way and drawing herself through.

  With her organic eyes trapped inside the leaden cocoon, Tangel pulled feeds from the chamber’s systems, while also examining it with her extradimensional vision.

  Sure enough, in the center of the chamber was a one-hundred-meter sphere, magnetic fields surging around it, holding a ball of mass and energy within. As she watched, streams of material were fed into the black hole, the matter flaring brightly as it was torn apart, becoming the ultra-dense non-matter within the singularity itself.

  What amazed Tangel was that, to her other vision, the black hole was not black at all. Waves of extradimensional energy flowed off it in every direction, a shimmering halo of luminescence so bright it was almost blinding.

  The magnetic fields generated by the chamber’s containment systems warped that energy, and as she watched, the fields shifted, focusing the energy into a single point on the forward-facing side of the black hole.

  The energy held at that point for a second, building. Then a tremendous blast of electromagnetic energy tore out of the black hole, surging down a shaft that ran the length of the EMG.

  So that’s how they power this thing, Tangel thought, while trying to determine the best way to stop the weapon without destroying the ship and herself.

  Her initial thought was to disintegrate whatever system was used for firing the weapon, but she knew that tearing apart a black hole was far beyond her abilities. Especially one that had to mass at least a hundred times that of a terrestrial planet.

  She briefly wondered how they held the thing within the weapon, let alone moved it, and why it wasn’t crushing her with its gravitational pull. While she was toying with those questions, she tasked a part of her mind with breaching the ship’s systems.

  If she could take control of the firing systems or the positioning thrusters, she could nullify the weapon’s effects.

  She set about that work, cringing as the weapon fired again, knowing that her people were being targeted, and that she would be too slow in stopping it.

  Milliseconds stretched into seconds, then longer. An excruciatingly long two minutes and eleven seconds later, Tangel broke through the encryption on the weapon’s firing systems and took control of it.

  What she found there was terrible in its cruelty. Six AIs were mentally conjoined at the heart of the control system, their sole task to control the fields around the black hole and trigger its electromagnetic eruptions.

  The instant they detected Tangel’s presence in the system, they did the unthinkable: the AIs shut off the magnetic fields containing the black hole.

  While a part of Tangel’s mind wailed in terror, feeling an increasing gravitational pull of the thing—and wondering why it wasn’t crushing her—another part examined the systems that had been holding the black hole aloft.

  In addition to magnetic fields, anti-gravity stabilizers had been present, firing negative gravitons at the black hole. Without the containment systems, she could now see that the black hole was roughly six centimeters in diameter, an unimaginable amount of mass to haul within a ship, but something that the graviton emitters had negated.

  Seven milliseconds had passed since the AIs shut off the containment systems, and Tangel could now feel her body being crushed against the leaden cocoon she’d made, by a steady 100gs’ pull from the black hole, as the graviton emitters ceased operation.

  She stretched an ethereal hand through the cocoon, and anchored herself to the chamber’s wall, while simultaneously re-activating the a-grav emitters.

  The AIs countered her by shutting off the CriEn modules that had been powering the emitters, leaving Tangel only whatever energy was left in the backup SC batteries.

  Knowing she had less than a second to live, Tangel did the only thing she could think of: she used the a-grav emitters to open a hole into the dark layer.

  A fhummp thundered through the ship as the rift opened, drawing the black hole and the air inside the chamber into the dark layer.

  The rift surged toward the perimeter of the room, stopping only a meter from Tangel’s cocoon, the gantry she was resting on cutting off in a ragged line, as the eternal darkness lapped hungrily at the solid matter.

  A curious realization struck Tangel.

  There are no Exaldi out there. I should be able to see them, but there’s nothing….

  Forcing herself to stay on task, she shut off the a-grav emitters to seal the portal into the dark layer, but when the emitters registered as offline, the opening into nothing still gaped before her.

  “Nooo,” Tangel whispered, remembering what had happened with the planet Aurora in the Bollam’s World System.

  She had believed the black hole’s creation and connection to the dark layer to be just a fluke, but perhaps there was some strange property of black holes and the dark layer that no one had guessed at.

  Either way, the thing wouldn’t close.
<
br />   With a growing sense of abject terror, Tangel watched as a clump of dark matter streaked through the dark layer, bleeding gravitons that she could see with her other senses, and impacted the black hole.

  Frantically, Tangel activated the a-grav emitters once again, attempting to reverse the waveform that had opened the rift in the first place, but nothing happened.

  Then she remembered the emission pattern that Earnest had devised to push the Exaldi back into the dark layer above Carthage.

  She tweaked the frequency and amplitude, and fired the a-grav emitters once more. This time, they shoved the black hole away from the rift’s opening, deeper into the dark layer. Once it had moved a kilometer away, Tangel deactivated the emitters and gave a cry of joy, the utterance consuming the last of her flagging strength.

  The rift closed, and Tangel breathed a long sigh, as consciousness slipped from her mind.

  SERAS

  STELLAR DATE: 09.07.8949 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: Airthan Ring

  REGION: Huygens System, Transcend Interstellar Alliance

  Airtha reviewed the information from the secondary observation team stationed beyond Valkris’s heliopause with mixed feelings.

  That the EMG had worked—and spectacularly so—was something that pleased her greatly. Losing Sera, and then her forces, to the ISF fleet ruined that elation and left her feeling hollow.

  Another daughter lost.

  She had hoped that letting Sera leave on her own would temper her impetuous daughter’s need to ‘get out of this place,’ as she’d frequently taken up saying.

  However, there was a second silver lining. Airtha now had no doubt in her mind that the ISF had developed a near-instantaneous means of communication.

  Quantum entanglement was the most obvious possibility, though how they’d compensated for the heisenberg uncertainty principle intrigued her greatly. So far as she knew, even the core AIs—her hated enemy—had not properly managed to solve that conundrum.

  How to know where the entangled particles are, and how to measure their movement at the same time with any fidelity…?