IGMS Issue 22 (12 page)

Tens of thousands of Swarmers perished.

But their fleet -- their ever-dispersing and multiplying fleet -- was hundreds of thousands in number, and growing larger with the passage of time.

The similarity to The Battle of Sol was undeniable. The Swarmers used no special maneuvers, no grand strategy. They came in such great numbers that even a hundred of us -- our guns blazing together at once -- could have only dispatched a fraction of them at any one time.

The mood on the Link grew grim.

We'd all seen this before. Seen it, and knew the end results.

But one thing seemed peculiar. Where was the sun-killer?

I Linked this question to the others, who sent the equivalent of shrugs.

That had been something we'd seen at Sol, and not realized what was happening until it had been too late. Not a large device, the sun-killer was a bit like a bastardized superluminal reactor, only with extra shielding and inverted coils. How it penetrated so deeply into a star's mantle or generated the chain reaction necessary to cause a yellow dwarf to blow apart remained a mystery, but we'd seen the device plunge into the heart of Sol, and none of us could ever forget the results. So where was the sun-killer this time?

We saw only Swarmer fighters and carriers, nothing more.

Carlos, Wanda, the others, they were frantic on the Link, relaying tactical suggestions and working far too hard to conceal the terror underlying each communication.

It occurred to me that this might not be the first time the Swarmers had done this. Having constructed their trap, what was the use in destroying it if they still had more bugs to zap? I imagined previous collections of us -- the many of us who had escaped Sol after our world was obliterated by our exploding sun -- finding this planet in their wanderings; a planet populated with humans. When enough of us arrived, the Swarmers attacked, destroyed, recovered the wreckage, then returned to their lairs in the Oort, like trap door spiders, ready for the next set of prey.

It was a clever ploy. Far more clever than any of us had suspected possible on the part of these aliens.

I sent my hypothesis via Link, only to find the connection . . . muddied. Not blocked per se, just clouded. I could no longer coherently talk to any of the others. Nobody could hear me, which meant none of us could hear each other.

The massive gaps we'd first created in the Swarmer battle line, gradually filled. Without the Link to keep us organized, our firing discipline began to falter; we could not mass our attacks into truly effective strikes. On its own, a single antiproton weapon could only clear a corridor a handful of kilometers in diameter. And our envelope of free maneuvering space was being squeezed inward, from hundreds of thousands of kilometers in diameter, to a hundred thousand kilometers, then ninety thousand, then eighty thousand . . .

Carlos was the first one to go. Precision particle beam strike from somewhere in the crowding Swarmer fleet. One instant Carlos's ship was there; the next, a ball of light and gas.

We were now firing randomly in all directions, taking divots out of the Swarmer cloud without having any real impact.

Bana went up. Then Charlie. And then Ormond.

It was like skeet shooting. The Swarmers were having sport at our expense.

And all I could think about was the clouding of the Link.

I chanced a switch to ordinary radio. It too was jammed. In desperation, I tried a message laser. The beam lanced out towards where I knew Wanda should be.

"Wanda," I broadcast to my flank-mate. "Resume parallel course with me. We're going to get the hell out of here."

"How?" she replied, her thoughts muted by the ordinariness of the laser signal.

"Just keep the laser communication open and follow me. Maximum pulse."

We broke and ran, delta-vee ferocious, pulsing at the limit of our structural integrity. I felt my ship complaining around me, the internal sensors going from blue to green to yellow to orange. I indicated to Wanda a somewhat diffuse sector in the enemy fleet and lasered for her to get her antiproton gun ready.

It took agonizing moments for both of our weapons to reach capacity, then we fired in unison, clearing a path through the Swarmer cloud approximately twenty kilometers wide. We pulsed like crazy, seeing the escape window begin to close almost as quickly as it had opened. I lasered to Wanda to drop behind me as I waited for my gun charge, then fired it again, re-opening the path.

A particle beam lashed me but it was a glancing blow. Systems across my ship went red.

"Rordy," Wanda said through the laser, "we're not going to make it."

"We have to make it," I lasered back. "We're all that's left. Someone has to get out of here. Get to the transluminal boundary. Go find and tell the others who are left."

"We can't abandon Eden," she said.

"Eden will be fine," I told her.

Then I sent across my trap door spider hypothesis, and she understood.

"As long as they think some of us are still out there," I lasered, "they won't destroy Eden. Not yet. Not when they know there are people around who will come."

Another particle beam bit me. Then another. These were smaller, from the littlest ships in the Swarmer line. I opened up with my antiproton weapon and re-cleared the corridor a final time. Most of me was red -- which meant dead -- and I wondered how much bigger I might make the hole if I simply dropped the antimatter containment separators entirely when I hit the demarcation point of the Swarmer line -- giving Wanda a great big hole.

"No!" Wanda lasered, it was almost a scream.

"It's the only way," I said to her.

"Rordy --"

I triggered the antimatter containment separators, and a huge, very-bright flash burned across my few remaining optical sensors. Not from the inside, but the outside.
What?

All my systems shut off.

I opened my eyes.

The sky was deepening to evening, and a small wave of water tumbled across my bare legs as I lay on the sand.

"Hello," said a woman's voice.

I turned my head, only to see Wanda's Edenite body.

Memory loop. Must be. I closed my eyes and tried to shut it off, when the woman's voice said, "Rordy, it's me."

I opened my eyes again, and sat up.

"What . . . happened?"

"I activated my transluminal reactor," she said.

"Ships that go transluminal that close to a star,
don't come back
," I said.

"We almost didn't," she said. "You were torn to shreds, and I wasn't going to last much longer either. I figured if we had to go out, why not go out with a bang."

"Die on our feet?" I said.

"Something like that," Wanda said. She smiled.

"So how did we end up back here?"

"I still had the coordinates for Eden orbit in my transluminal calculator. When I jumped, it fried the system, but the transluminal rebound took what was left of both of us and deposited us at one of Eden's lagrange points. Your ship was pretty messed up. I had to grapple yours to mine, then I soft-landed us both in a crater on one of Eden's asteroid moons."

"The Swarmers will detect the Link and come looking for us," I said.

"No they won't. I ordered a one-way core dump into our Edenite bodies. We're stuck here now, but we're both in one piece. Hope you don't mind."

I shrugged. "Beats the alternative."

Many minutes passed, and I watched the sky as the gentle waves lapped against my new body. A faint arm of the Milky Way slowly rose over the horizon and eventually the night sky filled with stars.

"What do we do now that we're stuck here?" I asked.

"Rordy, I think you were right. About the Swarmers not destroying Eden as long as they believe there are some of us left in the galaxy to snare. That means there's still a chance we can set humanity free. Still a chance to start over, get these people someplace that's safe."

"It'll take an awfully long time," I said. "The Edenites can't even build or launch a bottle rocket, much less an orbital booster. We'll have to find a way to communicate without the Link and industrialize without tipping our hand."

Wanda said, "You were pretty fired up before about wanting to get the Edenites out of the stone age. This is your big chance."

I said nothing.

Wanda remained quiet for a time, both of us watching as the side-on disc of the galaxy drifted slowly overhead.

"You were going to say something," I said quietly.

"What?" she said.

"I was about to blast a path for you through the Swarmer fleet, and you said my name. But I cut you off before you could finish."

"It was nothing important," she said.

I didn't believe her, but I didn't want to push it. So I beckoned for her to sit.

She sat next to me with her chin on her knees. We'd barely known each other before Earth was destroyed, and had only the briefest of time to get acquainted before we'd been downloaded into our separate ships and sent into battle. Maybe this was an opportunity for us, too.

"Well," I said, "if we had to be exiled somewhere, this place isn't too bad."

"True," Wanda said.

"Teaching these people the basics of math, chemistry, physics, engineering --"

"It'll be fun having something to work on," Wanda said quickly. "Together."

"Yes, it will," I said. And meant it.

I turned to stare at her dark shape, the faint light of our galaxy shining on the water. There wasn't a whole lot to say, so I searched until I found her hand. I squeezed it. She squeezed back: a sensation that suddenly filled me with more true
feeling
than I'd had in a long, long time.

Together, we began to make our plan.

Henry Spalding walked along the bumpy sidewalk of Beech Avenue thinking that it was amazing just how fast ten years could go by. Jake, his son, had been a baby when Henry's ex-wife, Stephanie, had moved them to the rusty little town of Buena Vista, Virginia, and Henry had followed, abandoning his manager's job at Blake Construction and taking what he'd expected to be a temporary shift as an assembly operator at the local Dana plant. Now, a decade later, Henry was still working the same shift, and Jake was nearly eleven years old. The wildly impetuous kid that had once trotted along hand in hand with his father had grown into an increasingly sulky young man. Henry tried not to think about it. He had learned as a child how not to think about things: it was how he got through life.

The evening sun painted long tree shapes across the road as he turned onto Twenty-Third Street. The houses here were small and weathered, with dormers crowding their sagging roofs and tree roots pushing humps up beneath the sidewalk, reminding Henry of his childhood home of Clyde, Ohio. Of course, Clyde had been neater, with its immaculate old Town Hall and busy Main Street. By comparison, Buena Vista's half-empty downtown was a grungy ghost town. There wasn't even a decent bar, like the old Eagles Lodge back home on Main Street, or its lesser counterpart, the Clyde Piper. Henry didn't mind that. Lately, he preferred to do his drinking alone. He approached the house, his work shoes clumping on the wooden front steps.