Here Be Dragons (3 page)

Erasmus stopped, and brought forth the hands had clasped behind his back.

“Today, we take the sky back. These world are our worlds, and they shall not be taken. Commander Azzam and the brave men and women who died with him aboard the
Solstice
that day had fallen, but they were not forgotten. And it is in their name that we send you outside the walls to meet the adversary. We do not send you to begin a war, because it was waged against us, without declaration and without warning. And we do not send you to end a war, because a struggle for the ages cannot be won in mere days. We send you, finally, to fight this war.”

The wind picked up and drove the snow into his face, but his words never faltered.

“The archangel Gabriel was a divine messenger, bearing with him the will of God. You too carry a message. It is much more humble, but no less noble. You are the messenger of humanity, and it is our will, and our wrath, that you carry with you. For decades we have hidden in the light from those who strike at us from the darkness. Those days end now. No more will we bow to those who would keep us from our rightful place in the sun, and no longer shall we be our own worst enemy. Today, all of humanity speaks with one voice, and raises one fist. But today is only the beginning. In the hours and days ahead, you will fight a battle in the
Solstice’s
name. And in the years to come, we will fight a war in yours.”

Erasmus paused. He stared at the camera, head back and mouth parted slightly, as if he were trying to decide what to say. He squinted through the flurries.

“Men and women of the vessel
Gabriel
, we do not ask you to give us victory. We ask you to bring us hope, and the promise of a future free from fear. Good luck, and good hunting.”

Erasmus was silent. There was no cheering, and no applause. There was just an old man, standing alone in the cold. And then he was gone.

The distance from the Belt to Jupiter was nearly as great as that between the Belt and the sun. It had been almost four months since
Gabriel
had left behind Pallas, the last human outpost, buried deep within its asteroid. She was
now traveling at a speed that had never been matched in human history—and she still wasn’t quite there. To most, the gulf was almost incomprehensibly vast. The Pacific Ocean covers an entire hemisphere, but on a map all the eye sees are the tiny continents that float on either side of it.

Humanity had many names for the sheer space that lay beyond the Belt—the red zone, deep heaven, the black. But to the men and women of the Agency it would always be the outside. Elena called up a map of the region on the holo. The image of
Gabriel
fell away and receded into a dot, and then disappeared entirely as Jupiter rose into view. The scale of the image was so huge that Elena could see every one of its six dozen moons, and even the trojan asteroids, which preceded and followed Jupiter in its orbit like an honor guard at a distance of almost one billion kilometers.

She adjusted the holo and displayed the local gravitational fields. A few tens of thousand kilometers ahead of
Gabriel
, the lines of force surrounding the planet met and coiled around an invisible knot in space. This was the lagrange point, where the gravities of Jupiter and the Sun meshed and canceled each other out. Anything that entered a buffer like this one could hover almost indefinitely, pinned between the two giants. It was the perfect place for the first line of defense, and the unofficial border marking outsider territory. It was also where the
Solstice
and her seven person crew, Earth’s first manned mission to Jupiter, had been lost forty years before.

Humanity hadn’t been back since. Elena was trying very hard to forget that
Gabriel
had never been intended to do this alone. But she wasn’t alone—not quite.

“Contact.” Vijay’s voice was steady, as if this weren’t only his second time in combat. “
Cherub
reports contact.”

“Alert stations, warning yellow,” Elena said. “Vijay, arm missiles. Weapons hold.”

Gabriel
carried eight of these, twenty tonnes of heavy metal and high explosive. Up until recently, they had been the most powerful weapons in the Space Agency’s arsenal—every one of Earth’s nuclear warheads had been hunted down and destroyed pursuant to the Treaty of Jerusalem, which every officer was sworn to uphold.

“Hassoun, tell the engine room we’re going cold. Keep the avram online, but switch over to batteries, vital systems only.”

At the very aft of the ship, the chief engineer shut off the fuel cells, and
Gabriel
began to rapidly cool. Battery power was more than enough to keep the basic life support and sensor systems running, and even the avram at the center of the ship. But everything else went into hibernation, even the guns arrayed on every side of the hull against missile attacks.

“Auxiliaries only. Rockets and thrusters cold,” Demyan said.

The ship’s speed hadn’t changed at all. In fact,
Gabriel
hadn’t fired either rockets or thrusters in months. With no gravity or friction to hold her back she continued to hurtle forth towards the border under her own momentum. By dashing at the enemy headfirst
Gabriel
had kept the thin edges of the sails facing outwards, rather than their broad faces, and running cold could buy her a few more precious hours. But if the outsiders detected her now, she’d be defenseless, unable to fight back or even to run.
Gabriel
had long since passed the point of no return.

“Firing solution?”

“Not yet,” Vijay said. “All we have is bearing.”

“How did
Cherub
find him?”

“Short burn. Probably a course adjustment.”

Vijay brought it up on the holo.
Gabriel
still shone with a faint gleam of waste heat, but the blaze of a rocket flare could be seen for millions of kilometers. Even magnified and projected in sharp three dimensions, the exhaust flame was little more than a red smear of infrared light. Elena supposed that a nearsighted man saw a candle in a darkened room in much the same way.

“Estimated distance, thirty thousand kilometers.” Demyan read off the six-digit string that represented its location relative to
Gabriel.

“Are we coming out of the sun?”

Demyan shook his head.

“We’re a degree or two out of line,” he said. “The corona might hide us for a while. But only for a while.”

“Burn duration was six point six seconds,” Hassoun said. “Exhaust temperature, three thousand Kelvin plus.” The rocket plume had been hot to enough to boil steel.

“Doppler study,” Demyan said. “Estimated velocity, ten kilometers per second.”

“Firing solution ready, weapons hold,” Vijay said. He would fire only upon order or attack.
Gabriel
would get only one chance.

“At that speed and that temp, it masses about ten thousand kilograms,” Elena said. Demyan and Hassoun briefly looked up at that—at the number itself, or the fact that she found it mentally.

“Bantamweight,” Vijay said.

“Decoy,” Elena said. She shook her head. “That burn was way too hot and too long.”

“I agree. A ship that small should need only a nudge.”

“That’s our index point,” she said, jabbing a finger at the holo as it zoomed out. The distance between
Gabriel
and the enemy was so great that the two ships were mere pinpricks in the air. “We start at the center, and work our way out.”

She clicked her keysticks quickly, and numbers shimmered at the center of the bridge. 3:12:00. It began to count down.

“Three hours to the border,” Elena said. “Start the music.”

Ten thousand kilometers to either side of
Gabriel
,
angels began to sing.

The Global Union had never dared to challenge the outsiders directly, or to take their warships off the home front. And even if they had wanted to, the decimated Earth nations of the
Solstice
era had been in no shape to raise an armada and send it to battle. Most Agency warships were drone carriers, built to ferry robotic soldiers to and from the battlefield. Elena had begun her own career in drone fabrication, before becoming an operator.

The
Archangels
had been built to finally take the war to the enemy, but
Gabriel
had brought her squires with her. Humans still built aerodynamic craft out of habit, and
Cherub
and
Seraph
were as sleek and avian as their mother ship, though only one ten thousandth her size. The first of their kind, they were the most expensive, most advanced unmanned combat vehicles that the Global Union had ever built. And today they were the most dangerous, though they carried no conventional weapons at all.

“Key of E today, I think,” Vijay said.

The radar emitters in their noses energized and sounded off, and
Cherub
and
Seraph
began to volley invisible pulses into space. The signals were low power and narrow beamed, and they hopped frequencies with each new salvo. The two drones had been spaced out far enough that they could angle their signals around the lagrange point, and bounce them off Jupiter and back through it and into
Gabriel.
At this distance, it would take over five minutes for the signals to make the round trip. And on the ricochet, the weakened pulses would sound like radio thunder from the electromagnetic storms in the atmosphere.

Thirty minutes passed. The two drones fired thousands of pulses per second, but fewer than one in a million would hit. Or not hit, rather. If one of the signals failed to return, it was because it had struck an outsider and rebounded.

“Multiple contacts,” Vijay said.

He spoke softly, as if the outsiders could hear him through hull and space. The holo zoomed out to show a map of the lagrange point, and speckled the image with red dots which hung like motes of dust caught in the beam of a setting sun. Each dot was a radar contact. Vijay began to calculate potential trajectories, and thousands of even tinier specks appeared and swirled around the original contacts. Each of these specks represented a new potential position—the redder the blip, the higher the probability that it represented the enemy. Soon the holo was fogged with crimson clouds. But at the center of the mist was a black hollow, the eye of a bloody storm. The lagrange point itself was empty.

An hour passed as
Cherub
and
Seraph
tracked their prey like bloodhounds on the trail, or bats in a cave. All they needed was a second hit, a second point of the triangle, to home in on the target.

Gabriel’s
approach was meticulously planned. The initial rocket burns had been timed so that she had been aimed not where the Jupiter was at the time, but where it would be six months hence. She had fired her engines only when the gas giant had been eclipsed by a planet, moon, or asteroid, and relied on her avram the rest of the way. As she closed she presented only the blades of her sails, not the flats. With the fuel cells in cooldown, the temperature of the hull had plunged below freezing and was still dropping. And now she was flying out of the sun.

But it wouldn’t matter, unless the drones could find the enemy. No human craft, manned or unmanned, large or small, warm or cool, had ever crossed the border unseen. And
Gabriel
, all hundred thousand tonnes of her, would not be the first. She would have to fight her way through—but she couldn’t fight what she couldn’t see.

“Sixty minutes,” Demyan said.

Reports from every station poured onto her screen and demanded her attention, but Elena kept an eye on the holo at all times.
Cherub
and
Seraph
searched one hiding place after another, a few thousand at a time, and the holographic clouds ebbed. Half an hour again later they had burned away completely and left only thirteen red embers behind, each tagged with a red numeral. These were the outsider sentinels, and her targets.

“Firing solutions ready, Captain.”

“Resolve all contacts, get me visuals,” Elena said.

Gabriel
was outnumbered thirteen to three, and her two companions couldn’t fight. Even if she
fired every missile and the ballista simultaneously and scored a kill with every shot, which was impossible, there would be four opponents left to counterattack. Information was strictly need to know in combat, and only Elena, Vijay, Demyan, and Hassoun would see death coming. For the rest of the crew, it would simply end. They would never know what mistake their captain had made.

Vijay shouted.

“Shots fired!”

“Hit!” Hassoun said. “
Seraph
is taking fire.”

“Weapons hold! Helm, keep her steady.”

“
Seraph
is down, Cap’n,” Hassoun said.

The drone had run headlong into the fire. The closing speed was murderous, and a few bits of steel, no larger than billiard balls, had demolished ten tonnes of aluminum in an instant. Elena bowed her head briefly, and fought the absurd urge to cross herself.

“Thirty minutes,” Demyan said.

“Do we have visual?”

“Not yet, Captain,” Vijay said. “Which contacts should I prioritize?”

“Same as before, start in the middle. But skip the original.”

Elena pointed again, though she knew the gesture had no use. The holographic projectors displayed the same image to everyone, at the same angle, no matter where they sat. Vijay began to identify the targets individually.

“Cap’n, should we power up the guns?” Hassoun asked.

“We can’t risk the heat.”

“If they picked up
Seraph
—”

“Qué le vamos a hacer? If the outsiders had
Seraph
on infrared, they had
Gabriel
an hour ago, and we’re already dead.”

“Then how was she detected?”

“Did any of the signals hit a drone out of the air?”

“No, Captain,” Vijay said. “The only hits were on rebounds.”

“Did
Seraph
register any radio noise before she died?”