A Sword Into Darkness

18: “WELCOMING COMMITTEE”

December 10, 2055; Patron Collection Fleet, outside the orbit of Jupiter, 6.5 degrees below the ecliptic and approaching Earth

For nine uninterrupted years, CDR Nathan Kelly floated transfixed—caught mid-leap, his face frozen in a mask of hatred and rage, stuck like a fly in amber. He and the others were locked in place by dim golden light, the barest hint of illumination, awash in the glow of quantum fluctuations slowed and softened to visibility by the step-function transition of stasis, separating normal spacetime from the region where they lay, where time’s arrow was stunted and light itself barely crawled along.

The Sword’s crew was trapped, impotent prisoners of a single moment, unable to affect the course of their captors in any way. Had thought and reflection been possible, Nathan would have seethed and put his mind and their collective will to thoughts of escape. But there was no thought. His mind was still fixed upon nothing but murder—hot, mindless revenge against the one nameless Patron they had seen, the Patron who had frozen them in time and then moved on without sparing them another thought.

They—and all humans, all other species—were but petty annoyances, minor obstacles to deal with en route to their latest acquisition.

Moving out from the captured captain and crew of the late USS Sword of Liberty, the living statue of Christopher Wright—avatar of the Patrons—stood motionless as well. In its case, however, it was as empty of volition and will as a mere statue. Even if it were not in stasis, it would not move. The alien that had given it life had gone on to other, more important things.

Outside the mess, the patched forward hull of the destroyer continued on, changeless within the hangar of the Control Ship. Temporary repairs that had been designed to last for days had been held in place for years now by the stasis field surrounding them—and that field itself was sustained by the curving spars of the stasis generator, the first hint of alien technology to be found as one moved outward from the long-trapped crew.

The spars bracketed and embraced the Sword of Liberty, blocking it away from the universe at large. Within their encircling arms, spacetime bent and dipped sharply, separating the dim region where duration was eternal from the brightly lit hangar in which time flowed straight and true. Elsewhere in the Patron vessel, other stasis fields also existed, allowing the aliens themselves to endure the long, unavoidable voyage between stars. For all intents and purposes, the Control Ship was eternal, implacable, a sleeping dragon content to allow its technology to carry it safely to its destination and its treasure.

Outside the restored, pristine hull of the Control Ship were the other ships of the Collection, most of them cruising about in stasis as well in order to preserve the shiny bits of now-dead alien cultures the Patrons had stolen for their own benefit.

These frozen, eternal ships spun slowly about the equator of the drive-star, whose roiling surface and brilliant, powerful exhaust were anything but frozen. However, even though it moved, and burned, and blasted forth with fusion fire and photonic thrust, it too was as static and eternal as the Sun, varying continuously over time, but truly changing only on the scale of eons.

Altogether, the Patron/Deltan fleet was unstoppable, a thing relentless and forever-lasting. For nine years since the last time it had been toyed with, it continued on toward Earth, unperturbed, unopposed, and beyond the reach and capability of the human race, who cowered upon their single planet before the approaching alien force.

That time was over.

Stealth in space was impossible.

That simple tactical conclusion was the logical consequence of the laws of thermodynamics. For a weapon to operate, power must flow through it. For power to flow it must have a source. Since no source can be 100% efficient—another law of thermo-damn-namics, as many frustrated engineers referred to it—then every source must give up detectable heat to its environment, thus increasing universal entropy and shuttling everything one step closer to eventual heat death.

The Sword of Liberty had therefore been built with large, vulnerable radiators, simply because there was no other choice. They had been hidden and protected as well as the engineers could, but they still proved to be a tactical vulnerability. The Patrons themselves made no effort to hide their waste heat, having proclaimed their presence a good ten light-years from Earth. It was foolish to believe any weapon of any reasonable power could be hidden away in space from any and all observers.

But from one observer? From one specific direction of travel, along a trajectory capable of being predetermined years in advance? From an enemy as assured, secure, and complacent as the Patrons? In that one limited case, unlikely to occur except in the case of an enemy as tactically dominant as the Patrons themselves—in that case perhaps a few surprises could be set up.

LFM-10277 was cold. It did not feel that in any real sense—its own AI was too low-powered and dimwitted to interpret physical parameters as feelings. But it was actually cold, radiating only a few degrees above the cosmic background radiation, indistinguishable from a myriad of small rocks strewn through the vacuum of space, and which were somewhat denser in this area, not far below and out from the leading Trojan point of Jupiter. At this temperature, the amount of available power was on the order of milliwatts, hardly detectable and nothing of consequence to the approaching force.

As a rock, it held no particular danger. The Patrons had overcome the problem of the rare mid-space collision millennia ago. What the humans accomplished with layered whipple shields of varying density and a thick nosecone of lead and ice was resolved much more elegantly by the aliens. Invisible fields pushed out ahead of the drive-star, either pushing molecules and larger objects out of the path of the convoy entirely, or pulling them in to be swallowed in the fires of the drive itself. A torus of perfect vacuum surrounded the four Patron ships themselves.

But as something disguised as a cold rock, LFM-10277 was a good deal more threatening. First it was larger and far more massive than it appeared. While the leading face of it was rocky with a roughly spherical half-meter diameter, it actually extended back several meters. Its greater density meant that its path was less perturbed by the protective fields of the drive-star. And as the limited albedo of its stealthy, disguised surface reflected back a greater and greater amount of the drive-star’s thermal radiance, it could begin to add its own heat to the mix, getting hotter and more energetic as the Patron fleet closed—all without alarming any of the alien AIs keeping watch for their masters in stasis.

When the secondary systems came to full power they began warming targeting circuits and cold-chemical vernier thrusters, then prepping the weapon’s densely charged sacrificial capacitor banks for cascade breakdown. At that point, the Patron fleet was almost even with the solitary weapon. In milliseconds, the Lasing Fusion Mine’s heat and power spiked to incredible levels, broadcasting its position and intent for anyone or anything to see, but by that point it was too late.

LFM-10277 burned with a light brighter than the sun as a slushy ball of metallic hydrogen was compressed to fusion densities by Kris’s non-nuclear photonic initiator. The energy from the blast—much larger than any of the Sword of Liberty’s own warheads—was then confined, channeled, and ordered for a brief instant by coils of electromagnets and ablative mirrors. Before the whole assembly dissolved away in a fusion release on the order of tens of megatons, 24% of its energy shot forth at the speed of light in a single beam of coherent x-rays.

The laser struck a glancing blow on the Control Ship, but that glancing blow vaporized entire decks along a narrow cone through the alien vessel, then exploded outward in a fiery wave of transfer energy. As a single shot, it dealt an impressive degree of devastation, but it was by no means enough to put the Patron ship out of commission, not for a race which could reconstruct anything at the nanometer scale with relative ease.

However, LFM-10277 was numbered 10277 for a reason.

Even as the Control Ship rocked and reeled from the mine’s laser, three more beams struck from three different directions. Two imparted glancing blows like that of 10277, but the third cored the alien vessel straight into its center of mass. The beam burned down through a quarter of the ship’s depth, and every joule of x-ray energy was converted to an explosive thermal/kinetic punch. The Control Ship dipped in its orbit and the drive-star itself flared in response.

All over the Patron vessel, systems began to fail.

whiteness pervades

hints of images flash and jump

nathan screams

raging but powerless

what is happening

The moment of stasis ended abruptly, as short and as interminable as any of them had been. Nathan’s suicidal charge toward the door of the mess—toward the Patron who no longer stood there—continued unabated. He crashed into the door frame with nothing to expend his murderous rage upon.

He punched the bulkhead in frustration, and then was slammed against that same bulkhead as the rest of the crew behind him—who had all made the same charge at their one identified enemy—crashed into his back. Nathan pushed back and up, crying out, “Off! Get off! It’s not here any more!”

They all surged off of him as fast as they could. Nathan looked around when they were clear and surveyed the situation in the mess. The Patron was nowhere to be seen, but its avatar still stood rooted to the deck behind them.

Nathan drifted over, approaching the statue warily, looking for any sudden movement from the marbled form. Nothing. He reached out a hand to touch its shoulder, but just before he made contact … .

The mess room suddenly shook and shuddered. The avatar, which had been firmly planted upon the deck, came free and drifted up to bounce off the overhead and float uncontrolled through the room.

Nathan jerked his hand back and then looked around him again, his eyes seeking out Kris and Edwards. “What was that?”

They both, along with the others, looked around carefully. Kris reached upward, pulling herself into contact with the overhead and laid her ear against the metal surface. She looked back at them. “I hear a rumbling or a roaring transmitted through the hull.”

Master Chief smiled. “I think our hosts might be having a bad day today.”

There was another sharp blow, and a couple of the crew cried out. Nathan reached down to the deck and felt the unsteady vibration Kris had described. He nodded. “I think you’re right. Either something’s gone wrong on board … .”

Kris grinned back. “Or something’s been made to go wrong. I wonder how long we’ve been out?”

“Long enough for Earth to build at least one effective defense,” Nathan answered. “Thank God. I was afraid Sykes and his cronies would keep a damper on the programs Lydia had going. I wonder how close to home we are now?”

Edwards grunted. “More importantly, how much time do we have before these art snobs get their acts together and decide to put us back in a still life?”

The ship shook again, this time severely enough for it to affect their own jury-rigged wiring. Compartment lights flickered and they could hear the groaning of the hull as the stresses the Control Ship endured were imparted on what remained of their destroyer.

Nathan grimaced. “Yeah. It would be just our luck to hitch a ride all the way back to local space and then get killed by friendly fire.” He quickly locked eyes with his remaining crew, glancing swiftly from one to the next. “All right, everyone, we’re going to get out of here and, if possible, join up with the home-team. And if we can do a little mayhem on the way out to help our brothers-in-arms, well, all the better.”

Edwards quirked a brow. “Do you happen to have a plan for this effortless egress, Skipper?”

Nathan shook his head. “I don’t, COB, but she does,” he said, gesturing to Kris.

The ship shook again as it took another hit. Edwards glanced back and forth between Nathan and their Chief Engineer. “Oh. Really? I must have missed that particular meeting. Care to share, boss?”

Nathan moved closer to him and grasped him on the shoulder. “Afraid not. I don’t want to inadvertently give away our plans to unfriendly ears,” he said, waving a hand at the slowly drifting avatar. “Just do what she says.”

Everyone turned expectant eyes upon Kris, who, despite everything that had happened to them, managed to blush slightly. “It’s not a very safe plan.”

Mike Simmons, their TAO and Ops Officer who had led them in decimating half the Patron fleet, grunted a laugh. “And waiting here doing nothing is so much safer.”

Kris shrugged. “Okay. Andrew,” she said, addressing the helmsman, Andrew Weston, “The remaining engineers and I are going to be jury-rigging some power. I need you to go to the bridge and set up a program for remote triggering … .”

She went on, handing out assignments, providing little detail, but all of them had worked together for years, and for over a year and a half on the voyage itself. They listened to what she said as well as to what she did not say, filling in the blanks for themselves. A few pairs of eyes grew fearful, but most of the crew began to smile wickedly. They might all die in the attempt, but if it worked, it would be spectacular.

In pairs and groups of three, they all departed—some headed to the banks of batteries and capacitors where their only remaining power was still stored, while others headed to watchstations to set up automated programs to aid their escape, and still others hit the SSTOS Hangar and the weapons locker / armory.

Soon, Nathan was all alone in the mess, just himself and the quiescent avatar. The only sound breaking the tableau was the occasional repeated lightning crash of a strike upon the Control Ship surrounding the destroyer.

He approached tentatively, the fear, nerves, and anticipation built up during the talk of escape falling away to be replaced by renewed feelings of hate and devastation. The captain pushed off the overhead such that he could match the statue’s drift, and he looked upon the frozen white face of his XO.

Nathan gazed into the flat, marbled eyes of the avatar, searching for any hint of awareness, any sign of life or humanity, but there was nothing there. This was simply an inert tool of alien design—a golem cleverly sculpted to mimic a friendly, trusted face.

Despite the resemblance, there was nothing about the avatar’s form in homage to Christopher Wright. This marvel was, if anything, a repudiation of everything that Wright had been, an insult to his life and memory.

Nathan snarled, reached out to grasp the statue by the shoulders, and pushed it back violently. Since they both floated out of contact with the deck, his shove pushed him back in a spin exactly opposite to the one he had given the avatar, but where the statue spun stiffly—striking the bulkhead behind it with a loud crack—Nathan reacted smoothly—tucking in to spin faster, then kicking off the deck and the opposite bulkhead to drive his outstretched hands at the statue like a battering ram.

He slammed into the avatar and pinned it in the corner between the bulkhead and the deck with his momentum. There was a loud crack and the statue broke in half at the waist, casting stone dust out to hang motionless in the air.

Nathan grunted, grabbed the torso by the wrist, braced himself, and swung the upper half of the heavy avatar down onto the table. Another crack and the arm shattered. He shifted holds, swung again, and the torso was rendered armless, with long chips and cracks appearing on the statue’s head.

Nathan breathed heavily, only briefly worrying about the nano-created stone dust he inhaled. He rested a foot upon the statue’s head and glared down at the broken form. Wright’s face was placid. Nathan shook his own head and whispered, “I’m sorry,” as yet another attack thrummed through the hull.

Holding himself in place with the edge of the table, he kicked out with his free leg and snapped the head from the statue in another explosion of dust. It bounced up and rebounded from bulkhead to bulkhead until it eventually drifted slowly over the deck, bumping along as it spun around, uncontrolled.

Nathan surveyed the devastation one last time with a heavy feeling of regret and self-recrimination, and then pushed off toward the hatchway to join Kris.

There were nearly 18,000 lasing fusion mines distributed along the expected path of the Deltan/Patron convoy, but even with the alien’s course well-predicted, it was unrealistic to expect more than a small percentage of them would actually be in a position to engage the enemy. Space was simply too large, and prudence dictated that the field be spread wide in case the aliens altered their path as they closed with the solar system.

Of the 9500 mines along the primary route, a still smaller percentage were actually within range to make an effective attack. Others were simply too far out or were arrayed elsewhere along the circumference of the drive-star, too far from one of the relatively small alien vessels to make an attack. And not all of those within striking distance were effective. Due to the limitations imposed by their “stealthy” low-power state, many simply reacted too slowly or inaccurately, wasting their one and only shot upon either empty vacuum or the burning hell of the drive.

Therefore, approximately 2000 mines of the remaining field with a decent probability of hit upon one of the actual Patron vessels were distributed uniformly along the fleet’s projected course. This spread the mines out to increase the overall engagement time and to avoid calling attention to the massive field of weapons lying in wait. If the Patrons did nothing, each of these 2000 mines would have the opportunity to slice, burn, and pierce their way through the alien ships—and there was no way for the Patrons to survive, not when each and every shot was individually more powerful than 10 of the Sword of Liberty’s warheads.

Of course, that assumed the aliens would do nothing to defend themselves. This was not the first time the Patrons had faced armed resistance, however. Perhaps it was the first effective opposition in centuries, but these conquerors were not without tricks of their own.

Beneath the embattled Control Ship, the drive-star suddenly fluoresced, radiance boiling out from the knot of energies gathered below the main alien vessel. The orange and purple ropes of light binding the drive-star’s plasma tightened and shifted. In reaction, the photonic thrust blasting out from the pole flashed brighter and widened out, turning from a tight column of light to a broader and broader cone.

Propulsive photons lit up local space, trading thrust for searing reflections. Dust motes, particles, and each and every rock and mine within striking distance shone like a local cluster of microscopic stars. The smaller inanimate flecks were burned away or flung far from the fleet. The larger, more massive mines had their low reflectivity coatings burned off, each one becoming brighter and more noticeable.

As the carefully placed weapons melted and cracked from differential heating under the wide, indiscriminate onslaught, the weapons that had a chance of destroying the Patron ships triggered early, far out of range and position. Fusion explosions and invisible beams of x-rays dappled the vacuum around the fleet, spearing infinity with furious energies, but failing to connect with their true targets.

For the few remaining weapons still close enough to score a hit, the new brilliance of their positions gave their one real defense away. Lasers and nano-particle beams shot out from the Cathedral, the Polyp, and the Junkyard, defending themselves and the Control Ship from further attack. Lasing fusion mines, struggling to wake up and perform their duty, were annihilated before they could fire.

From 18,000, to 9500, to 2000 mines, Earth’s second attempt at battle came to a mere 217 total strikes. The rest either never came into play, failed to fire, missed, or were destroyed before they could make their attempts. The damage dealt by this relatively low number of hits looked devastating, but for a culture capable of rapid nano-scale repairs, it was not catastrophic. By the time the Patron fleet met humanity’s next line in the sand, they would be nearly unmarked, with little sign of the attack but for some missing mass and a higher ratio of replicas to originals in their collections. All mankind would have to show for the hours of battle as the fleet fought its way through the mine-field would be a little information and good deal less assurance that their other preparations might be any more effective.

Within the Control Ship, now safe from the assault of its latest quarry, the Patrons began to re-assert some sense of order. Systems came back online as damage was repaired. Atmosphere ceased to billow out from chasms cut and burned into the hull. Lights came back on and machinery hummed back to life.

And the stasis fields surrounding the Sword of Liberty snapped back into operation, suspending time, interrupting Nathan and the crew, and exposing their every careful preparation for the aliens’ inspection.

The destroyer’s mission hull was again awash in dim golden light, trapped in stasis, but something still moved, an alien form around which the golden radiance of time-almost-stopped shied away, replaced by a blue-white nimbus. The segmented, tentacled Patron moved slowly, remaining carefully within the tight boundary of the anti-stasis bubble conforming to it. If it moved too swiftly, the space-time counter-reaction would not have time to negotiate its motion within the wider stasis region. It would become frozen, or worse, beset by destructive atomic tidal stresses shredding it at the molecular level.

The Patron—the same one who had first made contact with the crew, not that there was individually much difference between the thousands of its species within the fleet—drifted through the human ship, noting with close analogs to interest and consternation that its prize humans were not where it had left them. It seemed that the troubling creatures had been in the midst of mischief-making.

The humans were everywhere, all dressed out in vacuum suits and frozen in place throughout the ship behind makeshift barriers and defenses. Weapons had been broken out from the armory and distributed amongst the crew, as if such simple chemical slug-throwers could ever be effective against an enemy that could cross stars, stop time, and even bend space.

The defenses seemed to center upon the ship’s single shuttle, though how they expected to escape from within their own hull, and then from within the Control Ship itself was unknown. To even make an attempt, they would have to employ some significant ship-to-ship weaponry, but every missile had been expended, and the Patrons had ripped out the railgun and the laser emplacements themselves. Also, the reactor was gone, so they could not even have turned that into a weapon, were such a thing possible.

The alien recalled the fictions Earth had heedlessly and endlessly broadcast out into space, with their repeated themes of succeeding and surviving despite seemingly insurmountable odds against them. Had it been human, it would have grinned and shook its head. This was their last stand.

This … pitiful display actually seemed to indicate that the crew thought they had a chance of winning, of escaping. It surveyed the ship, but found nothing to indicate that this plan was anything but the most forlorn of hopes. It actually made the Patron think less of them, and of humanity as a whole. To think that they would endanger their precarious position on so feeble an attempt, it almost seemed to express a suicidal intent.

The Patron thought briefly of honoring their apparent wish. With them frozen like this, it would be no problem at all to end each of their lives, in any of a variety of ways. But that would almost seem to be a gift.

Better to take their hope from them entirely, to crush even their weak ability to oppose their captors, and then show them the price of their pride, the price of destroying so many irreplaceable treasures for their own selfish survival. The Patron went to work.

It and its remotes moved through the mission hull, disarming each of the defenders and destroying the weapons. The crew and the broken remains of the guns were then deposited back in the mess room amidst the shattered pieces of the avatar. After a time, the task was complete, with Nathan, Kris, Edwards, and the rest arranged in a circle facing one another.

When next the Patrons awoke them, they would return to normal time facing each other, powerless, and spared only by the cruel mercy of the aliens. And the next thing to which they would be forced to bear witness would be the murdered Earth, reaped of all its treasures, fated to be forgotten by the universe, except as an exhibit for their captors. Then, at last, these final few humans would know the futility of opposition.

The Patron departed, satisfied and at ease.