Swarm

-14-

As Crow had ordered, I took up a position about fifty thousand miles above the North Pole. We encountered a whole new problem at that point, weightlessness. At first, it was kind of funny. Sandra laughed at me, as I floated away from my chair. I called to the ship and had it tether me with one of those instantly grown arms. The thin cable felt warm around my waist. It was a creepy feeling, as I knew now the thing was made up of about a million tiny, squirming nanites. Just knowing that made me itch when the arms touched me. It was like being touched by arms made up of fleas that had all interlocked their legs together and formed a chain with their bodies.

I didn’t laugh, but it did give me my second smile since I’d lost my kids for good. Sandra and I were equals when weightless in space. The ship had us both on leashes. Then we noticed all the liquids we had around the place in cups and cans were now floating with us. This took a while to clean up and sort out. The nanites weren’t super good with liquids. They could form hard surfaces of their liquid metal, or turn the floor porous and suck it up, but those skinny black arms were simply no good at catching liquids out of the air.

After a few hours of drifting, we got into a routine and things were almost normal. We were going to have a problem with liquids, however, I could see. We only had so many squeeze bottles and we had no way of handling cooking properly. It was a good thing, I realized, we were only expected to hang out on sentry duty for half of every day. I was looking forward to returning back to my familiar gravity-well long before our first shift was over.

“Shouldn’t you call that Pierre guy?” asked Sandra, drifting over the new couch with a roll of paper towels. She’d found one last floating dollop of orange soda and was determined to catch it.

“I should,” I said, “But somehow I’m not looking forward to it. The truth is, besides being distracted, I’m a little embarrassed.”

“Why?”

“Well, he’s some kind of internet scam artist, from what I gather. Who knows what kind of embarrassing crap he’s been spouting off to Senator Bager. It just seems so unprofessional. They must think we are a bunch of nuts, and we’ve acted like kids. Kids who accidentally got hold of nuclear weapons.”

“Your first time talking to a Senator?”

“Definitely. What a way to start my political career.”

“Just get it over with.”

“I will, after we figure out how what we are going to eat for lunch.”

We never did get to eat lunch that day, however. I’d just managed to get a floating frozen rice dinner into the microwave and slapped the door closed before it could drift out again when the Alamo spoke up. I’d been dreading the words it spoke.

“Enemy ships detected. Emergency signal received. Gathering initiated.”

Enemy ships? I thought. Knowing what was coming, I tried to grab the cable arm that tethered me and pull myself down against the floor. I managed to do it, but I’d guessed wrong. The ceiling was the floor this time. Everything began to fall, sag or slide toward it.

“Alamo, secure everything you can!”

Arms snaked out but it was too late in many cases. Bottles broke and spilled their contents in slow, glugging motions. The fridge slid up the wall it had been against and dented its top against the roof of the ship.

“Alamo, new standing order: When about to accelerate due to some alert, secure everything first.”

“Program rejected. Overridden by prior programming. Options not set.”

I gritted my teeth. “Alamo, as soon as you can when we get an alert call, secure all equipment and personnel.”

“Program set.”

“Also, Alamo, turn us right side up.”

“Ambiguous statement. Command rejected.”

“The deck that has been the floor since I was kidnapped by this crazy ship. Make it the floor again, turn the ship so that our acceleration pushes us against it.”

“Command accepted.”

Another series of sliding sounds and a few crashes soon followed. I sucked air through my teeth and put my hands over my head. The microwave missed me, as did the fridge, but my rice bowl caught me in the back of the head. It was still uncooked and frozen, and I felt like I’d been hit by an iceball. Sandra yelled something from the main bridge, but I didn’t hear exactly what it was.

“You okay?” I called out to her.

“Quit screwing around with the ship!” she called back.

She didn’t sound hurt, so I didn’t pursue the matter.

“Alamo, where are the enemy ships? Are they in our sector?”

“No.”

“How many ships are there? Put them on the forward screen.”

“There are three ships. They are being displayed.”

Paranoid, I stepped unsteadily out of the kitchen area into the main bridge. The forward wall showed the dark circle representing Earth in the center now. I looked around for a few long seconds before I spotted the rust-red contacts. One was on the wall to the left, one to the right, and one was crawling along the floor. I’d almost stepped on it.

The ship was accelerating faster now. At first, I’d thought we were at about half-gravity—half a gee of acceleration. But now it felt like a full gee, maybe more.

“They are coming at us from different angles now, Kyle. I don’t like this.”

Neither did I. I stared at the walls and tried to absorb what was happening. Due to the fact we’d put out scouting groups, we had more warning this time. We had more ships, too. But I could see right away things weren’t going well. The ships we’d put out over the equator were making bee-lines for the nearest enemy ship. They were going to reach them and be destroyed before the rest of us could get there in force. Worse, all our ships were heading up in randomly distributed swarms toward whichever of the ships was closest.

“Incoming call from the Snapper.”

“Open connection,” I said.

“Commander Riggs?” shouted Crow. He sounded like he was having a heart attack.

“This is bad, Commodore.”

“I can see that. What do you think we should do?”

I began working on the ceiling, pointing toward spots where I wanted groups of ships. The Alamo had been trained to respond to this sort of thing by now, and obligingly placed groups of golden beetles in each spot I indicated.

“Let’s just group up into three teams of twenty ships, form a ball of them and hit them all at once.”

“No, too risky,” said Crow.

“What do you mean ‘no’? What do you want to do?”

“Form a mass on one ship, beat it, then form a mass on the next and beat it down second.”

“If we do that, the ships will get to Earth.”

“Yes, two will, until we can deal with them. I don’t want to divide my forces when I’m not sure how many ships it will take to kill one of the enemy.”

“Look, Jack,” I said, alarmed. Were we deciding which cities of Earth were about to get nuked? “We can’t decide this on our own.”

“There’s nobody else up here, Kyle.”

I took a deep breath and looked at Sandra. She looked back with wide, frightened eyes. I don’t think, up until that moment, I’d ever really seen fear in her eyes. Suspicion, worry, anger, yes. But not open fear. She knew the stakes.

“Riggs, I’m going to try to recall the sentry ships that are about to suicide on the enemy. Call me back when you have a better idea. Crow out.”

I turned myself back to the big board, seeking that magical, better idea. Our sentries had bought us some time. They were way out there, and this time they’d seen the enemy and we had maybe half an hour before they would reach Earth. The bad part was trying to convince any of the ships that pulling back wasn’t running from the enemy but rather was repositioning so we could win the battle. Thinking about that gave me my first idea.

I contacted Crow.

“What?” he roared at me.

I could see by the action on the board he’d not been able to stop the ships. The single closest ones had slowed their hell-bent drive to meet the enemy, but had not turned away, had not pulled back to regroup. Now the incoming enemy were closing on these ships. I was glad they’d not come for the North Pole this time. If they had, the Alamo doubtlessly would have rushed eagerly toward the nearest enemy alone.

“Jack, tell the sentries to order their ships to attack the enemy on the opposite side of the planet. That way they are still attacking, but they can escape the one that’s—”

“Got it! Crow out.”

I could see why he had disconnected so quickly. The ship out over Africa had almost made it to the big red bastard that swam toward it. I took a step, then two steps, closer to that side of the battle. It was on the right wall, just over my easy chair. Yes, there it was. As I watched, a tiny sliver bubbled out of the attacker and became a red contact.

“Crap, they fired,” said Sandra.

“Dammit!” I said. I walked to the wall and hammered my fist on it. I could feel the tiny hard surface of raised metal under my fist. My hammering, unsurprisingly, had no effect. Within thirty seconds, we lost the first ship of the battle.

I walked to the other side. Crow had gotten through to the other sentries in time. They had turned and were moving away. It did seem as if our ships were slightly faster than the enemy.

I called Crow again. “You saved two of them.”

“Yeah,” he said. “She’ll be right, mate. Don’t worry. What else have you thought of, besides killing my entire force by splitting it into thirds?”

“That would put twenty on each ship,” I said, thinking hard. “We might win all three.”

“Or we might lose all three battles and the war.”

“We have sixty ships. How many are you willing to lose to figure something important out?”

Crow chewed that over for a few seconds. “Depends. Talk to me.”

“We know forty or so can win, we did that before. In fact, with more organized fleet command, we should barely lose anyone with forty. We can afford to put the rest on a second ship.”

“And the third one?”

“We’ll let the enemy coming in down low over the South Pole get close. Let it through. There’s not much in Antarctic for them to destroy. By the time they make it up to Argentina or South Africa or Australia, assuming that’s what they are going to do, our main force will be done fighting and we can turn on the third ship en masse.”

“What do you want to learn by pitting twenty ships against one?”

“If they can win. Think about it, Jack, they lost the last fight, right? So, they tripled their numbers. Next time, if they lose this fight, they will send nine ships.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I can’t. But they are machines. They will tend to loop and follow similar patterns.”

He was quiet for a second. “I’ll send ten. Ten tightly clustered ships. If they kill it, we know something.”

“Why ten?”

“Because that’s about how many we will have left to face each enemy if they send nine next time.”

I rubbed my neck and lounged in my easy chair. The gee-forces were getting to me. I agreed to his plan. We might lose ten ships, but if we couldn’t take out one of theirs with ten of ours, we were probably dead anyway.