The Final Key: Part Two of Triad (34 page)

Ready?
Kurj asked.

Yes, sir,
Soz answered.

Data flooded her mind from the ISC defense forces. Soz lost her awareness of the Chair and became a part of those distant ships. Among that deluge of information, she found data from a probe that had detected the invasion force.

Yes,
Kurj thought. His next command didn't just go to her; he sent it out over all the meshes to the ISC defense forces ready to engage the invaders. Kurj said, simply,
NOW.

Four hundred thousand ISC ships dropped out of inversion at exactiy the same moment—in the midst of half a million ESComm ships.

Waves of multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles, or MIRVs, preceded the ISC forces at relativistic speeds. The defenders hurtled among the invaders, firing Annihilators, antimatter beams that created brutal radiation and particle cascades. They used the relativistic exhaust from their ships as weapons. The tau missiles they released were miniature starships that relentlessly plotted and replotted courses as they hunted their targets. The war was engaged.

Within four seconds, the ISC defenders had destroyed a fourth of the invasion force, cutting the ESComm numbers to 375 thousand ships while the ISC numbers only decreased to 350 thousand. But the element of surprise bought ISC little more than those four seconds. It took the invaders that long to recoup and marshal their resources.

A maelstrom of energies roiled through space as the combatants wielded forces that could have slagged entire moons. ESComm had more firepower and ships; ISC had more speed. Without the Kyle web, the defenders would have had no real chance; even as it was, a gambler would have been hard pressed to lay odds.

Soz monitored the combat from her Chair, holding the lines of communications among the ISC ships. The battle raced through space at close to the speed of light, no two craft at precisely the same velocity in either direction or speed. They fired beam weapons as if they were jousting. Time dilated, passing at different rates for different ships, depending on their relative speeds. Lengths appeared to contract as ships shot by each other; in three dimensions, they passed like giant coins flipping over. No unaugmented human brain could handle such combat; only the EI brains of the ships could respond fast enough to compensate for the relativistic effects.

Ships that survived the first wave of the ambush came around to try again. Many were drones controlled by Els. They blanketed space with clouds of smart-dust. It corroded the enemy ships, but recognized friendly vessels by coded signals and left them alone. EI analysts in both fleets strove to break the codes for their opponent's dust and missiles, and turn them against the very military that had created them.

Vessels continually jumped in and out of quasis, or quantum stasis. A quasis field fixed the quantum wavefunction of the ship and everything in it, including any crew. The ship didn't freeze; its particles continued to vibrate, rotate, and otherwise behave as they had when the quasis began. But nothing could alter their quantum state. While quasis operated, a vessel became a rigid body that could neither deform nor explode. It also protected humans from the killing accelerations of combat. But ships could only endure so many hits before the quasis failed. Annihilators ate away at the field faster than missiles, compensating for the drawback of beam weapons, which unlike smart missiles, couldn't chase their targets.

Embedded in his Triad Chair, Kurj created and shaped the

links for those hundreds of thousands of ISC ships. Soz supported his work. The battle flashed by at phenomenal speeds and left an expanding cone of radiation and debris in its wake throughout a huge volume of space. Ions spiraled along the magnetic fields that shielded vessels against Annihilator fire. Ships exploded in geysers of debris, and space became a chaos of oscillating fields.

An ESComm Wasp drove its antimatter stinger into an ISC Thunderbolt—and detonated. Plasma tore the Thunderbolt apart from within, annihilating everything it touched, and gamma radiation ripped through the decks. Soz was connected to the ship through her mental links—and she felt the deaths of the crew. With a choked cry, she clutched the arms of the chair. Tendons stood out on her hands.

One minute after the batde had begun, ISC had lost over half its ships, down to 175 thousand. The ESComm numbers had dropped to 190 thousand. By that time, Soz was so sensitized to the mesh, she couldn't shield her mind. It hit her harder than other psions. They lost a Jagernaut when his fighter exploded—and Soz screamed as if she had died herself.

With sweat soaking her jumpsuit and her hands contorted into claws, Soz forced herself to keep going. She thought of Althor, who had been deep in a four-way link with the other members of his squadron during batde. Their deaths must have ripped apart his mind. Somehow he had kept going, and in doing so he had saved billions of lives. She prayed he hadn't suffered in those last moments before he died.

A memory jumped into her mind: the first time she had sat in this Chair, it had told her that her mother forgot her birthday. And Althor.

Why Althor?

Devon Majda's voice came over her ear comm. "Cadet Valdoria, I need you to work with this flotilla."

Disoriented, Soz focused on the meshes for Roca's Pride and its attendant ships. As soon as she stopped concentrating on the distant ISC defense fleet, her connections with them weakened. The mesh that coordinated their ships fluctuated, links vanishing and reforming by the millions every second.

She couldn't monitor all of that and keep track of the mesh here. It was too much.

Captain Majda,
Soz thought.
If I switch to this flotilla, I'll start losing my links to the ISC defense fleet.

"We're about to go into combat," Devon said.

Bloody hell!
Display flotilla and defense force stats,
Soz thought

Two grids formed in her mindscape, one for the flotilla here and one for the much larger and more distant defense force wielded by ISC against the invasion. The grid for the flotilla was partially overlaid on the one for the defense force, but they had different textures, metallic for the flotilla and stone for the defenders. Each bar symbolized a ship's system. Many glowed yellow, warning of incipient collapses; others had already gone red for failed systems.

Show hostiles attacking Boca's Pride,
Soz thought.

A display appeared in a corner of her mindscape; ESComm ships were racing out of inversion, headed for the flotilla in a solid angle that was fast expanding in space. Only a sliver of the invasion fleet had made it this far, about two thousand ships, but it was twice as many as Devon commanded. The invaders had no Kyle links; with the more limited information gleaned from their probes, they hadn't pinpointed the flotilla. They were coming out a full light-minute distant and in ragged formation, spread out over time and space.

As the two forces hurtled toward each other, Soz scanned the grid with a familiarity gained from her practices at DMA. She quickly located the most urgent problem; the environmental systems on this battle cruiser were having problems again, as when the Kyle nodes had collapsed. Environmental had little to do with communications, but the damn enviro systems were piggybacked on the comm systems because it saved energy. It was a perennial weak point in ISC engineering. When the cruiser began taking hits, environmental would be the first to slip.

The grid in her mindscape for the distant battle flickered and dimmed. Her links with the defenders were starting to fail.

Kurj's thought cut through Kyle space.
Cadet Valdoria, keep those links firm.

Yes, sir.
Soz refocused on the defense grid and fixed errors in the flow of communications. At the same time, she sent a message to Devon.
Captain, I can't maintain the web for tms flotilla and my links to the defense fleet at the same time. I have to let one go.

"We're compensating as best we can," Devon said. "But if you release our links, environmental units will fail. This cruiser will get damn cold and we may start losing breathable atmosphere."

"Understood." Soz directed a thought to Kurj.
Sir, we're under attack. If I don't work here, it could damage our flotilla.

Fatal damage?
he asked.

Not immediately.

If you withdraw my backup, I could lose Firestorm cruisers.

What to do? Soz thought of the exercise at DMA last year where she had needed to decide: fix local environmental systems or the SCAD defenses for more distant ships. She had chosen environmental and lost more people than Kurj, who had fixed the SCAD systems. But she had lost fewer than the other cadets who had chosen the SCAD. Had she lost more than Kurj because she lacked his experience or because his was the better choice? Which one?

More bars on both the flotilla and defense grids were turning red. She couldn't wait; she had to decide now.

Soz sent an accelerated thought to Kurj.
Sir, request permission to focus on flotilla.

Explain,
he thought curdy.

The environmental failures would affect the crew's ability to perform. We are the last substantial force before the invaders reach Metropoli. If we dont rebuff them, they will attack our most heavily populated civilian center.

He paused the barest fraction of a second.
Permission granted.

Soz snapped her attention back to the flotilla. Data poured

erratically through her mindscape, and her node absorbed the reports. As she worked on strengthening links among the various systems, the data flow became less ragged. Within seconds, red bars were changing color: blue for systems under repair, gold for partial repairs, and green for fully operational systems.

Devon's voice came into her ear. "Good work, Valdoria."

Soz didn't answer. No words could compensate for the hideous decision she had just made. On the grid for the distant ISC defenders, more bars were turning red or vanishing altogether. For every bar she repaired in the flotilla grid, one went dark for the defense. She died inside, knowing what those bars meant Lives were being lost because she had chosen to protect environmental units. She hadn't understood what Kurj had tried to tell her last year, after that DMA exercise. People hadn't died then.

Here it became real.

Only a few seconds had passed during her exchange with Kurj. Statistics streamed into her mindscape. The ESComm force had 2,036 warships; Devon had only 998.

Forty-six seconds after the invaders appeared, one of the leading ships engaged a Jag in the ISC flotilla. Within moments, the outer layers of the two fleets were in combat. With her mind boosted into accelerated mode, Soz coordinated thousands of messages every tenth of a second. She couldn't follow each one individually; she monitored the overall grid in her mind. When she fixed errors, the Chair translated her work into commands for the associated ships. Her DMA training barely scratched the surface of what she needed. She felt like someone who had only learned to multiply being asked to solve quantum field equations.

The battie moved through space in a cone of ships and debris expanding toward Metropoli. Drones jousted with beams; tau missiles and MIRVs hunted targets; and Annihila-tors ripped apart matter with antimatter plasmas. The battle skimmed along the edges of the star system, which consisted of a single hot yellow star with three gas giants, each shepherding an asteroid belt, and two small planets closer in— including Metropoli.

The grid in Soz's mindscape flexed and warped as the fighting raged. When an ESComm missile detonated against an ISC Cobra, it registered as a flare of red light along one bar. The Cobra's quasis had weakened to almost nothing. Soz sent a repair tug to the damaged ship and linked the Cobra's EI to those of several other ships that could offer aid as it repaired itself. The red light on the bar turned yellow; the Cobra would survive.

All over the grid, other red flares were erupting. Sometimes she could get them back to yellow or even green; other times the bar vanished altogether. When that bar represented a crewed ship, Soz groaned as their deaths pounded her mind, and she reeled as ship after ship detonated.

After two minutes of fighting, only 436 ships remained in Devon's flotilla. They had lost more than half their vessels. The invaders had fared even worse, with about seven hundred ships left, a third of their initial force. Gritting her teeth, Soz kept her focus on the links among the ISC forces, repairing breaks, straightening distortions, doing everything within her power—and the Chair's—to save lives.

Soz had no links to the ESComm ships, so she couldn't input much about their forces into her mindscape. She had a grid representing them, but it was blurred and sketchy, no more than a vague sense of their meshes.

She turned her focus to the Chair.
Can you break into the ESComm mesh systems?

A sense of pause answered her, but nothing else. Either she hadn't asked the right question or she hadn't asked in the right way.

She tried a different tack.
Scramble enemy grid.

Nothing.

Soz felt the sweat on her forehead despite the visor and the medical lines monitoring her. She imagined the ESComm grid bending and melting, but nothing changed. She had no idea if the Chair could even reach the meshes of the invading force. The two forces continued to decrease, the flotilla down to 374 and the invaders at about 650. The attrition of ESComm ships was faster than for ISC—but it wasn't enough. At this rate, the invaders would destroy the Metropoli

defenses before all of their ships were gone. It would leave Metropoli vulnerable. The planet and its star system had called up their defenses to join the combat, and the sides were closely matched, but from Soz's reading of the grids and the projections she calculated, ESComm would prevail.

Metropoli would fall.

Help us,
she thought to the Chair.