Earth Song: Etude to War (28 page)

She never got a chance to finish her question. The Squeen responded in a unique way in her experience: they both produced small ballistic weapons and opened fire on her.

Even after years of honing her combat reflexes, she was caught completely by surprise at the action. The light scout armor she was wearing shed two of the rounds, one off the chest and the other her thigh. Aaron grabbed her by the backpack and jerked her backwards, causing a round that would have blown her face off to just wang off the helmet instead.

Cherise and Kal’at both came up firing. Minu would have screamed not to kill them if she hadn’t been smashing flat on her back and being dragged under cover by her husband at the time. She needn’t have worried, though; the Squeen were well defended.

The hypervelocity darts from Kal’at’s rifle drew a spectacular line of red sparks across the alien’s shields, and the shock rifle Cherise fired splashed energy off powerful forcefields as well. Add to that the nimble grace of the two Squeen as they dove behind the crates and none of the rounds would have scored even without their defenses.

Minu rolled away from Aaron and came up with her new shock rifle at the ready. Any sort of aggression from the Squeen was a new phenomenon she hadn’t been expecting. The pair continued to throw down cover fire as they worked on something out of site.

“We just want to talk!” Minu pitched her voice in their direction, and received a salvo of bullets in reply. One of the rounds tore a piece out of the closest robot, dualloy fragments peppering her shoulder armor and making her duck back.

“I don’t think they want to talk,” Aaron told her.

“Killing them won’t help the situation.”

“Dying won’t either,” Cherise snapped as a bullet found her shin armor and nearly sent her spinning to the ground. “Damn it,” she cursed and let a couple rounds snap across the bay.”

Minu dug into her pack and came out with a small case. Inside two gossamer dragonfly-bots sat, their wings folded back and green sensor eyes glimmering in the light.

“Activate,” she instructed and they both came alive. “Mission, disarm. Two biologicals, ten meters east. Engage.”

Their eyes flashed and the bots leapt into the air with a whine of wings and ultra-miniature impellers. In a second they crossed the room and penetrated the two Squeen’s shields. And a second later they were racing back towards Minu. “What the—”

The miniature energy beam that struck her between the breasts was more than powerful enough to be lethal, if not for the improved energy dissipation net of the scout armor. But it was still like being slugged in the chest by a baseball bat and she nearly toppled over backwards.

“Disarm,” she croaked from the floor, only to be shot in the left side. That one hurt, even through the armor, and she knew the energy defensive system was almost shot. The armor was hot enough that she felt flesh burning.

From nearby cover Cherise pulled out her PUFF, the little anti-bot scrambler that Pip invented years ago, and brought it to life. She flipped the control deftly to ‘All Bot’ scramble, and nothing happened. They continued to spray at Minu with energy beams. Cherise stared at the glowing power light in utter amazement.

Minu spun away from the marauding bots, a pair of beams burning the floor where’s she’d been as she came up on one knee and tried to get a bead on one with the long shock rifle. Two huge reports shook the room, one after another in quick succession. Aaron was there, an Enforcer pistol in each hand. Pieces of dragonfly-bot skittered in every direction.

“Those were expensive, you know?”

“Yeah, well you’re priceless.”

Minu checked that they were still behind cover before crawling over to look out. The Squeen and the crate were gone. “Well damn,” she spat and leaned against a smoldering robot.

“The PUFF didn’t work,” Cherise said as she came out from cover. “Not at all, didn’t even slow them down!”

“Pip won’t be happy to hear that.” Minu bent and began retrieving parts of the smashed bots. “Get as much as you can, we need a post mortem.”

“What about the Squeen?” Aaron asked, gesturing to the door with one of his two huge handguns.

“I think they’ve made it painfully clear they want to be left alone,” Cherise spoke up.

“We need to get more info out of them,” Minu insisted.

“I'm kinda with Cherise,” Aaron suggested. “Is the cost worth the gains?”

“They know the codes to get in here, and I know what I had to do to get that information. They led us to Enigma and seem to be hated by just about every one of the higher order species. To top it off their home world was destroyed like the Rasa home world and they're still around. That makes it worth it in my book.”

“Mother?”

“Yes, Lilith.”

“Your suspicion was correct, a ship is climbing to orbit. Records match that of a stealth frigate from the same era as this Kaatan, belonging to a species known as the Passcal. Pip says they are known to you as Squeen. Do you want me to disable it?”

Minu toyed with the idea for a second, but then worried about the capital she’d lose by shooting up a ship of a supposed ally. Of course, allies didn’t go around opening fire on you for no reason, either.

“No, don’t engage. Track it as long as possible, we’re heading back right away.”

Chapter 26

April 14th, 534 AE

Abandoned City, Planet Atlantis, Galactic Frontier

The shuttle docked with the Kaatan at speed. Aaron pushed the little craft to the theoretical limit as he climbed out of the ocean and rocketed toward space. As they closed the shuttle was going nearly twenty percent of light speed, and had only two percent power remaining.

The two craft matched each other and Lilith deftly caught them with forcefields and slid the shuttle into its docking bay like a girl guiding her lover into her depths. They passed the light speed barrier even before the shuttle touched down in the bay.

“It is not a fast craft,” Lilith said through the jewel as the team began disembarking from the shuttle, “but the nature of its stealth design makes it hard to track.”

“Do they know we’re following?” Minu asked.

“That is unknown, but they have not changed course as of yet so it is possible we were not detected when you lifted off.”

The team moved down the hallways and up one of the ship’s unusual jump tubes to arrive at their CIC. Pip was floating there with several of the Rasa soldiers watching the room's walls now turned into a giant display. Various views of the Squeen frigate were displayed with lines pointing to some of its features.

“Tactical comparison?” Minu asked.

“Laughable,” Lilith replied, scorn evident in her voice. If there was anything the young woman routinely showed pride in, it was her ship. “Even back when the ship was first activated and nearly out of power, we outmatched these stealth frigates ten to one. They are not ships-of-the-line.”

The Kaatan had been made to be the preeminent combat ship of their era. As Lilith described there was nothing that they couldn’t either match one on one, or easily disengage from to attack later in force. When Minu had wondered why the design hadn’t resulted in The People winning the war they’d been involved in, she’d only gotten silence. Whether Lilith didn’t know or wouldn’t say was anyone’s guess.

“Can we hail them?” Everyone looked at Cherise who looked chagrined. “You know, like Star Trek?”

“Regular radio does not work at super luminal speeds,” Lilith reminded her, “and attempting to use instant communication could result in getting… someone else.”

Cherise blushed (Minu was probably the only one who noticed her dark-skinned friend do that) and looked intently at a display on her simulated console. “Just thinking,” she mumbled.

The pursuit went on for several hours. They watched on the walls of the CIC showing the tactical evaluation of the stealth frigate as well as graphical representations of the two crafts relative positions. They slowly gained as the minutes ticked by until suddenly the other craft veered and accelerated.

“We have been detected,” Lilith informed them.

“Stay with them,” Minu urged.

The door to the CIC opened and Pip floated in, a tablet in one hand and one of the defunct dragonfly-bots in the other. “You're not going to believe this,” he said then looked around. “You still chasing the squirrels?”

“Squeen,” Minu reminded him.

“Yeah, whatever. Anyway, the bucktoothed little bastards know their shit when it comes to bots.”

“Why?”

“They not only instantly overrode the command protocols on this bot, they overwrote the damn thing with an entire new set of code.”

“Wait,” Minu said and turned to look at him. “I thought there was a couple gigabytes of data in one of those things’ brains.”

“Six gigabytes in this model, to be precise.”

“And without a direct link you can't upload or download anything.”

“Give the girl a cookie.”

“I'd rather have some mead and a sandwich.”

Pip spoke up. “These little nut chompers are a lot more than just humble castaways from the Concordia.” He gestured at the tactical evaluation. “They have ships, after all.”

“Many of the higher order and senior species have ships,” Lilith reminded him.

They'd spent a fair number of hours going over species in the database, figuring out those that might have naval power of the spaceborne type. Of course they hadn't checked the Squeen, who were officially an extinct species.

“Can you catch it?” Minu asked. “We need to talk.”

“Top speed of that class is only three thousand over C.”

“Lose the subtlety, then. Let them know we aren't going to let them get away.”

There was no response, but immediately the two ships began to close at an alarming rate. After only a minute the other ship realized it was not going to outrun the Kaatan, so it switched tactics. The Squeen ship began a series of dizzying maneuvers, all at nearly three thousand times the speed of light.

“It is slightly more maneuverable than I am,” Lilith admitted with a sort of grudging respect. “One well-placed missile...”

“No weapons fire,” Minu ordered, hoping her daughter would listen.

The Kaatan's offensive arrays came one line and targeted the wildly dodging ship. Minu held her breath and waited for the deadly little missile to dart out and deliver a devastating wave of EMP. The missiles were capable of the same maximum speed as the Kaatan, and thus much faster than the fleeing frigate. The target locked into the system, but no missile left its tube.

“The Squeen have proved that they are capable of violence against us,” Lilith spoke over the PA. “I will defend myself.”

“Understood, Lilith. Just harry them. Don't give them a millimeter. They'll have no choice but to stop.”

A minute later the Squeen ship straightened its course and stopped trying to shake the Kaatan. Lilith adopted a pacing course, keeping a safe distance of several hundred thousand kilometers. Minu was about to have Lilith begin to pull even when all hell broke loose.

The space between the two ships lit up with a thousand brilliant charges, nearly blinding everyone in the CIC before the displays dimmed in response. When their vision cleared, there was no sign of the Squeen ship.

“That was a creative tactic,” Lilith admitted. “I have temporarily lost them.”

“What did they do to us?” Minu asked as she tried reading the displays.

“It was a release of negatively charged particles that reacted to ambient positively charged particles in the vicinity. The high energy discharge flash-blinded my sensors.”

“So it wasn’t an offensive attack.”

“No, and that is why I wasn’t expecting it.”

The occupants of the CIC all looked around at each other. Either the Squeen knew they were outmatched and didn’t want to risk being annihilated, or they’d purposely chosen a non-lethal response.

“Target reacquired.” The display spun to show the frigate, now racing at top speed towards a billowing nebula.

“Can they make it into that nebula before we reach them?” Minu asked.

“No. The nebula is twenty minutes away at their top speed, we will intercept them in ten.”

“Cut them off.”

“Course is already laid in.”

The Kaatan swung around as quickly as it could and raced in pursuit. With a top speed nearly five times that of the Squeen ship, it was a certainty that they would quickly overtake them.

Minu’s hope of a quiet little talk were quickly evaporating as their quarry proved to be both elusive and creative. They were again coming into close range and she began considering coming abreast of the little ship and letting Lilith disable it. They could always offer to repair the craft afterwards, but what additional damage might be done to the crew, or any relationship she hoped to foster with the Squeen?

I just want to talk, damn it.

“Additional ships are entering the threat bubble,” Lilith announced. All heads spun around as the big display fragmented, one new screen for each craft. First one, then three, then six new targets were present, and these weren’t the same as the stealth frigate; they were much, much smaller.

“Fighters,” Lilith informed them. “Light intercept fighters, likely drones, of a kind recorded as in use by the Passcal. These are capable warcraft. In squadron numbers…they are a match for me.”

Minu found it surprisingly chilling to hear her daughter say those words. It wasn’t humility she heard, just an acknowledgement of an unfortunate truth. The stealth frigate darted past the advancing fighters and towards the nebula.

“Let it go,” Minu said.

“I said they are a match, not superior.” The tone of Lilith’s voice was unreadable, but not her intentions. Each of the individual displays showing the six fighters began displaying tactical data and weapons lock. Those craft in turn began targeting the Kaatan.

“I know that, but it isn’t worth the risk to your ship to make a point. Besides, even if we win it makes it that much more likely that likely that the Squeen leaders won’t want to talk to us. Let it go, there’ll be another time.”

The ships continued to close for a few more seconds and Minu worried that Lilith was going to make a fight of it after all.

“As your commander, and superior Chosen, I’m ordering you to let it go and disengage.” Minu hadn’t wanted to say it that way, and she hoped she didn’t have to take it to a parent’s words next. Her grasp on the mantel of parenthood was as tenuous as she believed Pip’s grasp on sanity might be.

The target locks dropped and the Kaatan swung away from the nebula. The fighters pursued for a few moments, but held their fire. Minu offered prayers to whoever or whatever might be listening that the controllers of those craft would show restraint. She knew if even a laser bounced off the Kaatan’s shields, nothing on heaven or Bellatrix would restrain her daughter’s fury. Like her mother, she was a redhead.

“We have disengaged. Fighters are breaking off and retreating into the nebula.”

“Thank you,” Minu replied into the quiet CIC.

She lifted her tablet and glanced at the display. She already gone over the newly opened files while riding up in the shuttle prior to the pursuit of the stealth frigate.

“Next destination is designated in the Chosen database as Dervish, sector C.”

“That’s hot territory,” Aaron whistled through his teeth. “Had a few run-ins there in the old days.”

“Lucky for us we won’t be going anywhere that people can find us,” Minu replied as she made a note in her tablet and put it away. “How long to get there, Lilith?”

“The destination is eight hundred, ninety-three light-years. Travel time is twenty-two days.”

“Let’s cut that down with the tactical drive.” There was no immediate reply. “Lilith?”

“I heard you. It took a minute to make the calculation. Using the drive to advantage can cut the time down to one week.”

“That’s a lot better. Let me know when we’re ready to make the first tactical jump.”

In her miniature CIC, Lilith stared at the blank walls and shivered a little. Behind her floated a three dimensional view of the section of the galaxy where they currently resided. Bright yellow lines tracked their course, now dotted with bright green circles where they would utilize the tactical drive. Despite her best efforts, the thought of using the drive was almost inconceivable. And she had absolutely no idea why.