Fear the Future (The Fear Saga Book 3) (50 page)

Interval O: Taking the Leap

“Well, Marta, what the hell do you think it means?” said Fral, staring at the cryptic message.

The message in question, that was without sender, subject, or time stamp, said simply: ‘stop or limit the separation.’

“Well, Fral, I’d say it means that we should try and stop or limit the separation,” said Marta.

He stared at her.

“Yes, thanks for that,” he said, exasperated, adding, “but it’s done. You saw the vote. We can’t change that now. And I’d say it is safe to say the recon force is going to be anything but limited.”

“True, but when this was sent, it clearly wasn’t decided yet,” said Marta, and then, pausing for a moment, added, “When, exactly,
did
you get this?”

He checked and then showed her what he found, the data appearing in the air between them. It had come in two hours before, while the Council meeting had already been well underway and well out of their control.

Marta nodded. “Whoever sent this cannot have known that the Council was already in session.”

He nodded as well. “No, clearly. Whoever
they
are, they’re clearly hiding somewhere within the fleet, and it wouldn’t do them much good to hide in the senior ranks, among us. There is just too much chance of discovery. That’s why we don’t even know what the hell is supposed to be happening. That way we can’t spill the beans if we’re caught.”

“So they’re only getting information third- or fourth-hand, and …” Marta looked a little crestfallen, then went quiet.

“And …?” Fral prompted.

“And apparently they’re getting desperate enough to risk sending out notes like this one, no matter how redundant and obvious they may be.” Marta smiled without humor, then said, “It would seem that whatever plan we have inadvertently signed up for, it isn’t going quite as our little mastermind here had hoped it would.”

Fral added somberly, “No.”

Marta, “Well, is there anything we
can
do, you know, to help limit things?”

Fral looked at her like a child being asked whether they have anything to say for themselves, then slowly shook his head.

“No, I guess not,” confirmed Marta, all her wit and banter deserting her in the face of their simple impotence.

- - -

Not all messages that Kattel sent out that day were so redundant, though. The second he sent was more useful and also less vague, going as it was to someone under far less scrutiny.

Other Pulujan moved inside her suit, barking frustration into the dark, unrelenting faceplate in front of her. She had an itch under her left breast that made her want to cut the bloody thing off, and she could no more reach that part of her than she could come to terms with what she had just been asked to do by her enigmatic benefactor.

Shunting her body’s pleading call for scratching to her autonomic systems and returning to the semi-conscious state she now spent ninety percent of her time in, she settled in to read the note for the tenth time, and considered its implications once more.

She had opened herself to full consciousness, as she must regularly now, to attend to various biological issues that her autonomic AI could not handle. Once upon a time, she thought, they would have been handled by her far more willing and capable cryo-unit, but, oh lucky day, that unit had, by merry fortune, switched its goddamned-pricking-bastard self off and birthed her into a dark, damaged, and cold transport ship so she could take up residence in this motherfucking roly-poly chubby-cheeked shit-machine of a repair bot!

And to top it all off, it had all, apparently, been her bloody idea! She screamed inside her head.

“
They have just voted to separate the fleet
…” the message began.

As she read it one more time, O-Pu was already running a diagnostic on her suit one more time in preparation for her response to what she knew she was going to have to do next.

“
When they do, they are going to drop the majority of the remaining Skalm fleet at Earth
…” the message went on.

The diagnostics results were not encouraging. This hollowed out junker was just not built for extended exo-atmospheric work. She read on regardless.

“
This was not part of our plan
…” the message said, pointing out the painfully obvious.

The suit had strength, no doubt about that. It had to in order to be able to work in the high-g environment of full thrust deceleration. But it lacked so many of the standard systems needed for extended internment.

“
Forget the original sabotage targets. You need to move
…”

She waited a moment before reading the last part. If she did this, and she really had no choice that she could see, then the one thing she could be sure of was that it was really, really going to suck.

“
You need to get to [loc. coords.] and join the carrier ship that will go with the departing fleet. You have two days. They are working on pulling the thrust cores from a portion of the Skalms to use for the fleet’s deceleration. You will have to sever yourself from the system first. Then rejoin once you are in position using the same availability code you used to gain access after the attack.
”

She focused. This plan was a dud, she knew that, but then so was the first one, now. Her fifty-fifty survival chance was about to have a chain saw taken to it, and if that was the case, if she was, indeed, going to be royally screwed by her own deviousness, then she might as well do it right. After sending the kill code to her repair bot’s link with the fleet, she called up her autonomic AI.

O-Pu at AAI:
‘i need a priority excise program established for all but the most essential body parts. i want circulatory system cutoff to unnecessary extremities and a long-term maintenance program created for whatever is left.’

She began receiving a list of proposed items under the heading of ‘unnecessary extremities’ and began ticking them off. Minor items like her limbs, reproductive organs, eyes and ears, all were vestigial now, and so she put them on the list for ligation, and eventual avulsion. She looked over the list once more, noted that her backside was on it, and then kissed her ass good-bye.

That was that then, she thought, leaving her autonomic AI to get on with it. No more itches for her to scratch, and no more fingers to scratch them with, either.

“Let’s get going then,” she said with lips she would not have much longer, and she started clambering away from the hull of the transport ship she had supposedly been trying to fix.

The chunky repair bot, fat and ungainly among its peers, but just a dot in the huge Armada’s midst, began clambering along the thick spar linking this one ship to its neighbor, and from there, onward, from ship to spar to pivot, crawling like an insect through the colossal fleet’s superstructure to get to its shining vanguard.

Interval End: Dropping an Ocean

The fleet was dropping at Earth. Having catapulted itself through planets and stars, accelerating all the while, it had stolen momentum from the cosmos, and now that momentum was its power and its curse.

It was coming. Only the great engines of the carrier ships dotted throughout the Armada could stop it, and the loss of some of those great pilots had cost them greatly. Nowhere had the effects of the attack been felt more than in the Yallan sector, now just a scar slowly healing, the sides of the great slice that had been cut out coming together as the battle group reconfigured itself to face its foe.

As the fleet hurtled toward its destination, its many components braced for what was clearly going to be a very real fight. After days of analysis, modeling and remodeling, the many military AMs and PMs had submitted themselves to the Arbite and a picture of the coming war had started to take shape. Humanity had, in some part, shown its hand. It had landed the first real blow in the war, and it had struck home, cutting the Mobiliei far more deeply than they had thought was possible.

But in the transient moment of the attack, the humans had also left many clues, markers that gave the great minds of the various contingents an insight into what their enemy was capable of. It was much more than any among the Mobiliei had expected, but it was not insurmountable. They had not been struck with some great godlike blow, and in the scars of the attack were the signs of a civilization working at the limit of its capabilities, flaws and tremors in the subspace fingerprints that showed humanity was stretching itself to the limit, driven, no doubt, by war’s uniquely primal drive, a civilization-wide survival instinct.

But, the fleet-minds saw, if this was the best mankind could do, then the Mobiliei still held the higher ground. We are not fools, said the great minds. We are not going to brake neatly into your waiting arms. We are not going to trip lightly across whatever wires you are setting for us. We have an asset you cannot match, speed. Where you are anchored, trying to erect a barrier around your fragile world, we are mobile, imbued with kinetic supremacy.

Now you will see the truth of surprise, the stark reality of our superiority.

From under the falling fleet, the plume faltered for the third time in less than a week. This time, like the second, it was deliberate. After they had excised the injured Yallans from their midst, they had worked to prepare for the greater separation.

The white-hot fires slowed and realigned again now, steadying for the coming change in pressures. Freshly cored engines from a subdivision of the fighting fleet were locked in place and firing as subsidiaries of the carrier ships. The departing Skalm force was ready, all that was left now was the displacement.

The engines vacillated, a tremor whose seeming insignificance did not beget the scale of the coming schism. And then the carriers were changing their form once more, awakening their captured singularities and warping them outward, not to encompass the whole Armada, as they had when they had stepped into the beyond after the attack, but to suck the Armada proper out of reality, and leave a swathe of the vanguard behind.

To see it was to see a sun blink out, and the effect of the departure was immediate. In an instant after the ensuing blindness, the Skalm attack force that had been left behind in reality began to free-fall, its sleek blackness dropping away into the greater dark between solar systems, the interstellar void.

The effect was like a formation of parachutists parting, the bulk pulling their cords as the carriers’ fusion brakes dug in once more, while the few, the unleashed, plummeted onward with abandon, toward Earth, toward war, closing the gap now without restraint.

In a few hours, when the Skalms were but a distant horde of bombs dropped into the night, the fleet would reappear, its lights shining forward once more, illuminating their path with nuclear flame. They would not talk to their kin again, not until the fight had engaged. The massive flotilla of Skalms would be silent now, as they closed on their unsuspecting prey.

Chapter 49: Under the Radar

On the outskirts of our solar system there is a ring of broken lumps of rock and ice. They form a roughly spherical border marking the outer reaches of the sun’s influence, a loosely strung fence around our stellar home. Against this backdrop, a meteor ten times the size of Central Park flies past.

Not that its size is particularly unusual.

Size, like speed and distance, can only be judged as usual or unusual when taken in context. So as we consider this particular meteor, even though it is ten times the size of Central Park, or about half the size of Hekaton, it is dwarfed by the multitude of extra-stellar debris relegated by chance to the cold, distant reaches of our sun’s gravitational well, which, in turn, are made minuscule, negligible even, by the unfathomable expanse of the void beyond.

All that said, no human eye could compare them in order to judge the disparity, as none had yet come this way, and may never, given what is going to happen in a month’s time when this object reaches its destination if it is still travelling at the blurringly astonishing rate of four thousand kilometers per second.

Of course, this meteor’s seemingly incredible speed is also not that exceptional for an interstellar body, which, though rare, are not unheard of.

No, the only truly exceptional thing about this meteor is that it comes from the very same place as another that came this way ten years ago. But where that dark object had, spread out behind it by a complex invisible web of magnetic forces, a vast, atom-thin solar parachute that was slowing it, this one is coming on far faster, with no brake or hindrance.

And this one is alive. Not with eight Agents and their four orbital minders, but with nearly a hundred thousand survivors of the missile-mine attack, hurtling out-of-control at their destination.

- - -

Two weeks after passing the proxy border to the solar system, the raft of interconnected ships passes Jupiter. As it does so, it is already starting to glow under the ranging spotlight of active deep space detection systems coming from Earth. It does not wish to be seen, but nor can it do anything to stop it. Its superconductive shielding will make detection difficult, but by scatter scanning alone, its size will make it visible soon.

It will not actually hit Earth, but that is not much of a consolation. Its fate lies either in flying past the planet at this same unbridled speed and being ripped to shreds by Earth’s magnetic and gravitational fields even as it reeks terrible havoc on that planet’s tides and orbital bodies, or being destroyed by the people it had once sought to conquer when they see how close it has been aimed to them, and what its approach and passing will do.

Its inhabitants wait, and they watch. Many submit to the balm of mental hibernation, some commit suicide, some argue futile strategies. And some think of asking for help from either their enemy or their executioners, though not with much hope of an answer.