A Sword Into Darkness

19: “FROM DARKNESS—LIGHT”

December 28, 2055; USS Trenton (CA-1), Flagship, CRUDESGRU One, within the Asteroid Belt on approach to Earth

Lydia Russ squinted at the wide screen in front of her in the Trenton’s wardroom, silently cursing the slow assault of age that wore down her senses, despite the sci-fi future she found herself in. It was unfair that after all the pain she and the others had been through, all that she had compromised and wheedled to achieve, and all the impossible obstacles that had nevertheless been overcome—that her savoring of this moment would be diminished by something as pedestrian as an old lady’s eyes.

On the wardroom screen, false color overlays pinpointed every significant rock and asteroid in their quadrant of the Belt. Years of movies and popular portrayals had convinced her inner expectations that the Asteroid Belt would be a jumble of tumbling mountains, filling the night black sky all around. The reality proved much more mundane. In terms of the wide vacuum of space, it was a busy mess, but only relative to the emptiness between planets.

Hundreds of kilometers and seconds of arc lay between even the closest of the independent, serenely rotating mountains of iron-nickel ore and silicates, shot through with veins of richer, heavier metals. Only upon a compressed, simulated view such as this one—from the main tactical screen aboard the bridge of the US task force flagship, where a major portion of the Belt could be displayed at once—did the belt seem as dense as common belief held it to be. Were the screen a window, however, she would be hard pressed to point out even a couple of dim rocks within view to lessen her isolation.

Some of those asteroids were practically crowded now, however. Along the projected path of the Deltan approach and behind the bulk of four semi-close behemoths—each unnamed mass many times the size of Mt. Everest—were the total assembled forces of the planet Earth. As an ambush site, it was as ideal as they could make it. Of course, it had to be.

This was the last stand, the line which could not be crossed, the best that mankind could collectively muster. Yet the numerous ships were dwarfed by the asteroids they hid behind, asteroids which themselves were dwarfed by the enormity of the solar system and space itself. As sparse as the asteroid belt was in reality, the defenses of the human race seemed even sparser in the presence of this unstoppable enemy. And beyond this were only the pitiful fixed emplacements back on Earth.

Lydia forced her doubts away, convincing herself she felt nothing but fierce pride and determination. It was an act of will which was only sustainable because of where she found herself—here, where determination would be needed to see them through, rather than “safe” at home.

Her presence and the confidence it implied was not an asset embraced with equal enthusiasm by everyone. A searing, disapproving gaze bore down upon her from behind. She hardly needed to note his reflection in the screen to realize who it was. It was a look he had favored her with routinely, ever since she had announced her intention to remain aboard.

Lydia’s eyebrow arched slightly and she spoke in a patient, amused tone, not bothering to turn around to confirm her guess at his identity. “Can I help you, Admiral?”

Rear Admiral Calvin Henson—former colonel in the US Air Force, original commanding officer of the Sword of Liberty, and current commanding officer of the US Aerospace Navy’s Cruiser Destroyer Group One—smiled tightly. He pulled himself next to Lydia, the “mother” of the entire USAN, and tried to address her face to face at the very least. He would do anything if she would just listen to reason. “Ma’am, our last rescue cutter—Nightingale—is ready to cut free and head for cover. I’m holding her for you. Please, Ms. Russ, you need to get aboard.”

She turned and looked at him, firm in her resolve, but compassionate for his position. “I’m sorry, Calvin, but you know I won’t do that.”

He pulled himself in closer, not in any attempt to intimidate, but as an opportunity to speak low and frankly in the presence of the few other personnel present in the wardroom, to save either of them embarrassment over what needed to be said. “Ma’am, this international fleet wouldn’t be here without all that you’ve done. God knows every single squadron owes you for its existence, but that gratitude was only enough to get you this far.

“You simply have no place in my operational chain of command. You’re not a tactician, strategist, or systems tech. Frankly, all you are is a VIP and a liability. There is a very good chance that you’re going to be injured or killed when that fleet crests those asteroids, and all you are going to do then is draw resources and attention away from an injured or dying crewman. Not only that, but your loss would be devastating to the defense back home, and that’s something none of us can afford.”

She frowned, and her eyes narrowed slightly. “I don’t know if I agree with the value you place on me, especially as far as that planet of sitting ducks back on Earth are concerned, but I’ll concede that I have no place in your battle organization. What do you intend to do about it? Throw me off?”

His mouth tightened. “What I want you to do is see things from my perspective. Get on that cutter of your own free will.”

The Admiral turned to glare at the handful of officers still populating the wardroom. Each of them realized his intent and quickly and quietly departed. Once they were alone, he turned back to Lydia, no longer glaring, but still intent on her concession or explanation. Neither of them said anything.

Eventually, Henson’s face softened and he slumped in as much as anyone can in freefall. “I’m not going to throw you off, ma’am, but you at least owe me a reason why you have to be here. And not simply as a sign of your confidence in us, like you told Trenton’s CO, because everyone knows that’s just some PR bullshit.”

Lydia smiled at him. “Such a cynic, Calvin. I’m shocked, just terribly, terribly shocked.” She turned back to the display screen with its false color representation of their ship, the USS Trenton (CA 1) and the five escorting Sword class destroyers that made up CRUDESGRU 1, tucked in behind a mountain of iron and silicates.

CRUDESGRU 2, similar in composition but headed up by USS Lake Erie (CA 2), lay about 2000 km further on behind another rock, while two other asteroids were held by allied UK/CAN/AUS and EU squadrons, adapted Sword class destroyers all. Support ships, minelayers, and rescue cutters from a variety of countries—countries allied not only by the desire to aid in the defense of Earth, but also by the obligation to produce such vessels as the price of receiving the required technology and designs—fled from the planned ambush site to hide behind still other asteroids, deeper in the Belt. Each fleeing vessel was careful to remain within the shadows of the large asteroids shielding the four strike-groups, lest they give away the slim hope of a surprise attack against the Deltans.

Most, but not all of the tonnage out there was American—they had, of course, started first and were the original developers of the tech—but all the designs were Windward’s, either directly or as a close adaptation. In a very real sense, Henson was right. This fleet would not have been here defending the Earth without all that she had done.

But the honor of parentage was not hers to claim. She was at best its stepmother, moving in to carry on when those who had toiled and worked and paid with their very lives could no longer complete the fight. The father of this fleet, Gordon Lee, had never seen a single one of his children fly. Its other progenitors had been lost to the unknown, and in so doing had gained them the information they all needed if they were to have even the smallest chance of survival.

Every other person who had led this battle for all their futures had made the ultimate sacrifice. Was she truly a part of its wondrous, miraculous ascendance if she felt unwilling to pay the same price?

Her eyes misted as she stared through the screen, hardly seeing the icons of the ships any more. How much of what she felt could even be put into words? How much would someone like the Admiral ever believe? “I have always been here, Calvin. But I have not always been part of the solution. I’ve been referred to as the mother of this fleet. You just said much the same, yet,—in the beginning—I tried to abort the whole affair. What if I had not? What if I had done as Lee begged me to do and thrown the full measure of the government behind his project? What if I had contained that bastard Sykes earlier? Would we be where we are today? Could we have gone further? Could we be better prepared?

“The Deltans have stolen the lives of all the people who ever meant anything to me, and I owe them a reckoning for that. But I also owe the people—my friends—who have come before me, who faced this foe with a level of faith I was late in achieving. It’s a special sort of hell to be the one left behind. I’m certain you’ve been in that same position, given your career. You understand. I have to see this through. I have to face down the Deltans here. I have to stand shoulder to shoulder with my family and see this through to the end—here on the front line, facing the same threat they faced, not hidden away on Earth or cowering behind some asteroid. Admiral, I have to be here, because here is where I’ve always been, here beside the crew of the Sword of Liberty.”

Henson locked eyes with her, trying to ascertain her true feelings, her actual intent. To his shock, he saw a sincerity so true, a resolve so intense, that he had to look away from the fierceness of it.

Lydia followed his gaze down and touched his temple gently, drawing him back to her. This time she appeared softer, more vulnerable. “Please, Admiral, don’t force me onto the sidelines. Let me finish this.”

He glanced over at the screen, then back to her. He shook his head and raised his comm suite. Pressing a single button, he said, “Bridge, this is the Admiral. Cast off Nightingale and send them to the reserve point. There are no further passengers.” With that, he nodded to Lydia and turned to pull himself away.

She reached out an arm and stopped him with a gentle grasp. He looked back and saw her smile slightly, tears of gratitude welling un-fallen in the corners of her eyes. “Thank you, Calvin. You’ll never know how much this means to me.”

He grunted. “Ms. Russ, I’m not quite as sentimental as all that. I said you served no purpose on this ship, and it turned out I was wrong. It’s as simple as that.”

Lydia grinned more fully. “Oh, really? And what purpose is that?”

“Ma’am, you seem to have a faith and a will stronger than any single warhead, and everyone on this ship has seen that and been inspired by it. You are not a shooter—that’s true—and your value may only be symbolic, but the strength of that symbol may prove critical in the end. If this battle is as close a thing as I fear it may be, your spirit could be all that sustains us. I had forgotten, and for that I am sorry. Your place is here.”

With that, the commander of CRUDESGRU 1 turned and left, leaving Lydia alone in the Trenton’s wardroom, alone with her thoughts, her fears, her hopes, and with the converging icons on the tactical screen.

The battle was about to begin.

A tragically beautiful dawn came to the asteroid belt.

These inelegant remnants of the ordered solar system had never known any illumination beyond the meager sunlight of Sol, far, far beyond the orbit of Mars. And all that cold light had ever revealed were stark shadows dappled across slate gray ore and faded brown rock. The Belt may have held incalculable wealth as a resource, but it had never been exactly attractive.

That assessment changed with the arrival of the Patrons, though. The drive star still sprayed its photonic thrust wide, and the convoy continued to decelerate, still normalizing and circularizing its orbit over these long months and years of thrust. Even though they were well and truly captured by the gravity of the distant sun, they were not yet at their intended destination, wherever that might prove to be.

For both defense and maneuver, the drive star blazed on, burning and illuminating sections of rock that had never before seen light of any kind. Crystals and pure un-oxidized metals fumed and shone brilliantly from deep crevices. Striations of heterogeneous minerals stood out for the first time like the lines and whorls of some demented abstract canvas.

Dawn came to the asteroid belt, but vastly brighter, more revealing, and in direct opposition to the only light that had ever really touched them since the moment of creation. Here was beauty, but a terrible beauty wrought only by destruction.

The Patrons paid this truly unique spectacle no heed, however. They simply cruised on, either unaware or uncaring. Their four ships—the Polyp, the Cathedral, the reconstituted Junkyard, and the slightly smaller, yet more forbidding Control Ship—all orbited serenely around the drive star, protected by its thrust and unmolested by any mines or attackers for the last few weeks. The ships had all returned to their quasi-Lagrange positions, seemingly unworried about a different, more defensive configuration.

The convoy came upon a loose, arbitrary grouping of four asteroids separated by thousands of kilometers, seemingly no different from any other set of rocks in the Belt. It passed blithely through the center of the group, content to allow the proven effectiveness of the drive star’s radiance to defend it from any potential attack.

But a static, single layered defense was a weak one, no matter how effective it might originally have been.

The searing cone of light swept over the asteroids’ rocky surfaces, leaving behind fields of pitted, half-melted stone which ended abruptly at the mutual horizons on all four masses. The defensive radiance then passed on, leaving the shadow zones behind each untouched. From those shadows, the coordinated first strike flashed out.

Twenty-two warships each unleashed initial salvoes of thirty missiles—nearly a third of the load-out for the destroyers, but just a ninth the complement of the two larger cruisers. The 660 missiles which streaked out from the four asteroids toward their convoy targets were not the still, stealthy threats of the mines. This wave of devastation was like the Sword of Liberty’s attack: swift, directed, and erratic, but dozens of times larger and more deadly.

Missile trajectories blossomed into hundreds of disparate tracks, only converging upon one of the four possible targets at the last moment. One fifth of the wave exploded into fusion brilliance along a direct line between the targets and the shielding asteroids in an effort to obscure direct targeting of the warships now emerging from their hiding places. For a moment, the drive-star’s luminance was overcome by a halo of nuclear glory, and only then did the offensive wave truly take effect.

Fully half of the remaining missiles made their objective the Control Ship, with the remaining split between the other three lesser targets. 264 missiles corkscrewed in toward the lead vessel, becoming over 1500 individual warheads, each one a step in a fiery spiral ending in immolation. The space above each target began to froth with the white globes of nuclear flame and the lobed spears of coherent x-rays as the warheads worked their way down toward the endgame.

The first few hundred beams flayed into the Control Ship and the museum vessels without opposition and very nearly ended things there. The critical weakness of the Patrons was also one of their greatest tools: stasis. The game-changing nature of the alien technology meant that the Patrons and their equipment could survive any shock, thermal load, or duration that the stasis machinery itself could survive. Short of a direct hit or the indiscriminate battering ram of transfer energy, the invading force would survive even this onslaught—provided they could stop the attack before those direct and indirect assaults pulverized or vaporized even the hardened areas of the fleet.

And that was the Achilles Heel of the device that enabled the Patrons to survive the vast distances between stars. Stasis made them slow. It introduced an unavoidable pause in whatever reaction they might take, and as mankind had exploited it twice before, they did so again.

The Control Ship erupted in apocalyptic fissures of light as beam after beam flayed it or stabbed deep, rending deck after deck, layer after layer of alien technology. Entire sections of the vessel were cut free to spin wildly away from the pseudogravity around the drive star. Patrons died by the dozens as the warheads worked their way ever closer.

Rear Admiral Calvin Henson smiled slightly, deeply satisfied but cautiously optimistic. He keyed his mike to the flag battle net, his link to his group’s commanding officers, as well as CRUDESGRU Two and the two allied destroyer squadrons. “All stations, CRUDESGRU One will remain on a southern approach, centered on the Control Ship. Group Two, detach and proceed at best speed to the opposite side of the drive star, make your approach out of the magnetic knot to the north. Your objective remains the Control Ship. Recommend detaching Sword of Industry as command and control relay to coordinate additional salvoes after you pass the limn of the star. DESRON Alpha, break east and engage the Polyp and the Junkyard. DESRON Bravo, make for the Cathedral and continue.”

Commodore Dan Torrance, his old XO from their mutually stolen bid for command of the Sword of Liberty, responded first. “Roger, Admiral. We’re headed for the backside and we’ll meet you again up front, hopefully with nothing but a debris field between us.”

“DESRON Alpha, aye.” A clipped British voice—Commodore Lawrence aboard HMS Conqueror.

“DESRON Bravo, will comply.” And this, a slight German accent—Flotillenadmiral Krueger of NAE Bismarck.

From within the confines of his acceleration coffin, Henson nodded as best he could. Almost all the first wave’s missiles were committed, with outstandingly destructive results and virtually no reaction from the enemy vessels. Yes, optimistic, but cautiously so. “Tactical teams, release second wave per the op plan and prepare for direct fire when within range, at ships’ discretion.”

All his subordinates’ voices together. “Aye aye, sir!”

Uncomfortably cocooned within her own “coffin” inside her stateroom aboard the Trenton, Lydia Russ fretted with the wealth of information she’d been offered by Calvin Henson. Despite her lack of a place within his tactical organization, he had seen fit to provide her with a direct view of the action, just as his tactical watchstanders saw it. The veering icons, lines, and splashes of color proved to be a three-dimensional mess, however. She silently complimented whatever training program enabled the tacticians and technicians of the aerospace navy to make any sense of the gobbledygook she had become privy to.

After a short while, though, she began to get the gist despite herself. All the available information appeared overwhelmingly lopsided toward man’s victory. And as she felt her body vibrate with the multiple ejections of the second wave of missiles, it only seemed as if it would shift even more in humanity’s favor.

She could not help thinking, however, that were she in gravity, she’d be listening for the other shoe to drop.

preparations undone

shift and jostle, whirl about

back where we started

are secrets revealed

Stasis vanished abruptly once more, and every remaining crewmember of the Sword of Liberty comically whirled their arms about as they adjusted to their new locations. Where before they had been armed and arrayed in defensive positions throughout the remains of the ship, now they were all back in the wardroom, in a circle, surrounding the broken pieces of their small arm weapons.

Nathan looked at his crew, silently checking their names off an internal truncated list, ensuring they were all there. His eyes lingered on Kris, across from him in the circle, until she locked gazes with him and he could see and feel that she was all right. He looked at the pile of guns and then turned to Dave Edwards. “They took the low-hanging fruit. Did they wreck all our preps though?”

Edwards shrugged, then pushed off from the bodies next to him and flew over to the ops console there in the wardroom. “Dunno, Boss. Let me check.”

Before he could query the system though, the entire hull jerked and flexed violently, scattering people and gun parts through the air. The debris filled the weightless room, sowing even more confusion and pain as the pieces collided and rebounded painfully off both person and bulkhead without discrimination.

Kris grinned even as she rubbed a fresh bruise upon her forehead. “Well, at least we woke up during another round of action rather than coming in after humanity was toast.”

LT Simmons steadied himself and responded, “Yeah, but that action seemed a little close and a little too strong. I’m glad our people are still giving the Patrons some effective resistance, but I’m less keen to wind up toast myself.”

Nathan grinned. “Mike, we’ve been on borrowed time for who knows how long. All I want is a chance to get out of here. Whether we make or not is in the hands of whatever higher power’s been watching over us up until now.”

Kris drifted near and she and Nathan snagged one another out of the air and held on tight and close. “Never knew you were quite so religious, Captain-my-love.”

“Hey, there are no atheists in foxholes. Or in this case, probably none captured by implacable aliens and thrown into stasis at will.”

Kris frowned. “Stick with the foxhole analogy. It’s pithier.”

Edwards turned away from the console and gestured to gain all their attention. “Well, whether angels or the incompetence of our captors is responsible, our preps are still good. They satisfied themselves with wrecking our obvious weapons. Auxiliary capacitors are still charged, maneuvering jets are still good, and the shuttle shows five by five. Plus, get this: I’m picking up encrypted comm chatter. I can’t decipher it without a key, but it means it’s not just missiles or mines out there. There are people.”

Nathan nodded. “That tears it. We make our attempt now. Everybody, we’re abandoning our defensive stations and leaving. These aliens thought they’d taken away all our weapons, removed every means we had of opposing them. But they didn’t count on our ingenuity, our resolve,” he looked over at Kris lovingly and continued, “or our sheer stupidity. Let’s do something stupid and suicidal and show our Patrons what it means to underestimate Earth.”

As the last half of the first wave’s warheads committed themselves, and as the second wave of missiles launched from the rapidly maneuvering Earth fleet, the invading Patrons finally reacted. And this reaction was the last thing anyone had expected.

For the first time in over 80 years, the drive star’s radiance shut off. The blue-white beam—which had propelled the Patrons all the way from Delta Pavonis to Sol system, and which had in turn ushered on the technological leaps enabling mankind to meet them on something approaching an equal footing—vanished.

Aboard the Trenton, Rear Admiral Henson would have bolted upright if his restraints had allowed it. His feelings wavered between hope and dread, and he held his breath to see if this meant the end of the battle, or just that it was only now about to truly be joined.

His answer came—again—in an unexpected fashion. Below the battered Control Ship, the tortured lines of color constraining the drive star flexed and writhed. Their confining limbs now curled and looped, gathering the brilliant fusion plasma of the drive star into waves and arcs, not to direct an enhanced photon beam for thrust, but to propel the plasma itself outward.

Sheets of plasma jetted off the drive star to arc over the Control Ship and the museum vessels, coordinated prominences and mass ejections who’s electrically charged sprays of matter attenuated warhead beams, burned missile bodies, and engulfed both laser and railgun fire. Where the vessels of the Patron fleet had been exposed to space and both direct and indirect assault, they were now shielded by atomic flame.

The flares of the drive star swatted the remainder of the first missile wave out of the sky, then broke free to send an intense wave of energy out to scorch both the second wave and the attacking ships. The plasma blasts cooled and dissipated rapidly as they left the confining energies directed by the battered Control Ship, such that they disabled only a tithe of the second wave and had even less effect on the larger, more distant warships. However, the sheets of star matter proved completely effective in shielding the Patron vessels. Worse still, as the level of assault slackened, clouds of nano-assemblers poured out to begin in-battle repairs.

With a command, Henson adjusted his plan, and all the ships of his fleet broke free of their original objectives to instead converge on the Control Ship. Where a distributed attack no longer worked, concentration and mass of fire might still carry the day.

The second wave, now given up for lost due to the mutating nature of the battle, was joined by a third missile assault, a continuous stream of missiles aimed past the Control Ship at the surface of the drive star itself, directed at the continually shifting upwellings which gave birth to the plasma sheets. Nuclear blasts pummeled the immense surface of the star, an attempt to use brute force to disrupt the fiery shields. At first, it seemed like trying to extinguish a blow torch as one would a candle, but after many, many poorly placed explosions, the series of relatively small puffs achieved in aggregate what no one individual blast could.

The shield thinned and faltered, opening clear patches over and around the Control Ship. Into these patches, lasers and railgun fire poured forth from the human warships. Each hit was small and dealt nowhere near the damage even one of the dwindling number of missiles could accomplish, but at the very least it disrupted the nanotech repair effort. At best they achieved a stalemate, but it was a tenuous draw, limited by the relative size of each force’s magazines: missiles and railgun rounds versus the unimaginable mass of a dwarf star. And once their missiles were used up and their magazines had gone dry, the Patrons would pour forth an onslaught of laser and nanobeam fire that would decimate the Earth forces, not to mention the damage the drive star’s propulsion beam could presumably deliver.

Despite the best that humanity could bring to bear, they were still going to lose.

“SITREP, people.” Henson’s voice on the net was grim.

Dan Torrance came back angry. “We’re in position but nothing’s making it past that goddamn plasma shield. Who the fuck uses a solar flare to guard their ships? How is it not burning them up?”

Lawrence, the British DESRON commander, spoke up. “Our lads have analyzed a cross section of the shield. It’s actually quite distant from the ships themselves. Our entire force could easily fit inside that volume.”

Henson jumped on that quickly. “This goes back in our favor if we remove the interference of that shield. If we can’t disrupt it, can we at the very least get inside it?”

Torrance blew a low whistle. “It’s a wall of fusion plasma, Calvin. The only reason it didn’t burn right through our ships when they started throwing solar flares at us was that it dissipates and cools rapidly once it’s away from whatever’s keeping the plasma confined. If we go down there, though, what’s happening to our missiles and railgun rounds will happen to us. Up till now we’ve had virtually no casualties.”

“You think that’s going to stand, Dan? The Deltans haven’t really fired at us yet. The offense has been entirely on our side. As soon as we shoot our last missile, they’re going to drop those shields and skewer us with every last damn megajoule of laser energy they can bring to bear. And we don’t have enough time to retreat, resupply, and re-attack. They’ll be in orbit of the damn planet before we can attack again. No. We have to finish this assault here and now, even if it means ramming the goddamn thing and blowing all our drives. Now then, any bright ideas on how to get past the plasma shield when it’s at its strongest?”

Krueger, the German DESRON commander, then mentioned reluctantly, “We have an idea, but none of you are going to like it.”

The ships of the combined fleet ceased firing missiles and shifted positions, drawing closer and closer to one another until Group One and the UK squadron formed one wedge-like phalanx approaching from the south and Group Two and the EU squadron formed another wedge from the north. The Sword class destroyers arrayed themselves in front of and around the two cruisers, with the bulk of each formation opposite the direction of the plasma flow surrounding the Control Ship. The prominences of their drives blazed so closely to one another, that there was a very real danger of fratricide—destroying their fellow ship’s hulls before the Patrons even fired a shot.

The two formations each went to maximum group acceleration, nearly crushing their crews within, but gaining the vital speed they needed to make it through the wall of plasma and to their quarry. Missiles, lasers, and railguns all ceased firing, as combined fleet tactics turned toward formation and maneuver. Closer and closer, the brilliant ramparts of dense, ionized matter loomed, while within each ship, every servicemember grew silent with the knowledge that finality was upon them.

Just before breaching the curving wall of plasma, missile hatches rippled open, disgorging dozens of missiles, but these did not dive for the plasma sources upon the drive star or scream toward any of the Patron vessels. Instead they flew out a short distance and formed a second wedge leading the first defensive layer of destroyers before the plasma sheath blocking them from the Control Ship. As each missile touched the fringes of the prominence, all six warheads aboard them detonated in maximal fusion glory. Nuclear shockwaves and pulses of radiation battered the destroyers which fired them, but—more importantly—also blew back the plasma of the Patron shield for the briefest of moments.

The destroyers passed through the thinned region of shield plasma, and absorbed or blocked what remained, casting a shadow of safety upon the cruiser at the heart of each of the two wedges. Trenton and Lake Erie followed close behind and breached the Control Ship’s shield in turn, but it was not without cost. A momentary weakening of stellar plasma did not mean that the plasma was not still capable of causing damage, nor that it remained in that weakened state.

The first destroyer to breach of either group, Sword of Freedom of Group One, proved slightly too far ahead of the missiles’ explosive shock front. Stellar plasma cut deep within her, vaporizing the destroyer from the bow back as momentum fed her into the fire. She simply ceased to be, the flames of her demise still nothing next to the luminous energy of the plasma itself.

Flanking her and slightly astern, Intractable and Sword of Vengeance hit the pause imposed by the missile shockwave. That pause was still energetic enough to raze both vessels. Armored hull plates blackened and popped, springing free to allow the energized gasses of the plasma shield to stab deep into each ship. Crew died and weapons burned, but the hulks of both ships made it through. The next rank, with four destroyers and Trenton herself, pushed through with survivable damage, but every last radiator on each ships’ amidships spine was blown—still the greatest weakness of the human warships. However, the cruiser design mitigated this obvious flaw, and from her spine Trenton extended a full set of auxiliary radiators from within armored sleeves along her central spine. Heat management would cripple the remaining destroyers, but Trenton would soldier on.

Group 2 breached the plasma shield with a similar butcher bill, and Admiral Henson had to take a moment to allow the shock to dissipate as he saw all the damage that had been wrought on the fleet. Out of two cruisers and eighteen destroyers, only the two cruisers had made it past the shield relatively mission capable. Of the 17 surviving destroyers, five were all but blackened frames to which a few dismal lifepods clung, ten more were in various states of distress, and two—Sword of Independence and the NAE Paul Teste—appeared virtually undamaged aside from their damaged radiators, but their lack of cooling capability still rendered them almost immobile and with a very brief attack window before their systems overheated.

It horrified the admiral.

He could not dwell upon it yet, however, because the now exposed Control Ship—which already looked less distressed under the silver clouds of repairing nanotech—opened fire with multiple lasers and assemblor beams. The battle had only just begun, and though they had wounded the enemy severely and survived his surprising defense, their victory was by no means a foregone conclusion.

Calvin Henson glared at his tactical screen and snarled, “All vessels, FIRE!”

“Move faster, damn it!” Nathan yelled. The crew streamed up the corridor before him, just short of panic.

Their initial attempt to escape the wardroom had been stymied for a time when the violent shaking of the Sword of Liberty and the Control Ship that surrounded it had jammed the doors between them and their destination and made opening them next to impossible. Then the shuddering largely stopped, and they all worked with nervous intensity, worried they had missed their opportunity to join with their compatriots from Earth, worried that now when they had committed themselves and there was no way to hide what they were up to, the stasis would return and all would be lost.

Nathan and Dave Edwards, channeling the spirit of Christopher Wright proceeded to yell and berate the fragile crew until they began working again, struggling to open each and every pressure door, step by step closer to their objective. Now, as they finally set to work opening the last door, the wide loading doors leading into the hangar, the concussions and shaking of the Control Ship being subject to pitched battle began anew.

Kris looked to Nathan. “Second wind? Think our side took a little breather and now they’re back to fight?”

Nathan shrugged. “I have no idea, babe. But if the Navy brought enough firepower to re-engage after being repelled once, then they may well have enough to finally crack this ship down to whatever protected core we’re in. And that’s good and bad for us.”

“Yeah. Good that maybe we’ll have a clearer path out of the belly of this monster.”

Edwards chimed in after her. “Yeah, and bad because they ain’t gonna be likely to hold fire if and when we bust out. Hate to go all this way to end up a victim of friendly fire.”

Nathan looked around them. “I don’t know. I’m not feeling the big hits like the missiles would make. These are taps like kinetic rounds. Maybe the battle isn’t going as well as we could hope after all.”

Edwards grinned. “Then maybe our boys need a little help. Your girly’s got a prescription for some heavy duty mayhem against these bastards. I say we let it loose and deal with whatever comes.” The Master Chief turned to the techs working on cranking the powerless door open. “Or I would if you idiots could just open a goddamn door!”

With that, the door sprang open and people began to rush through toward the SSTOS. Edwards pushed off the overhead and pulled himself through the doorway. “It’s about friggin’ time! Well, don’t wait on me, boys and girls, get aboard! Because I promise I will kick your ever-lovin’ asses—legs or no legs—if you let me board that shuttle before you do.”

The crew flew aboard the shuttle, unencumbered by any luggage or supplies. Kristene and Andrew Weston shoved their way to the front of the boarding throng so they could finish the preps for launching and initiating her plan. Edwards went aboard as the last crewman to enter, leaving only Nathan aboard the Sword of Liberty, the captain about to abandon his post.

Nathan stood half in, half out of the shuttle, braced in the frame and looking back at what he had worked so long to build, at what had sustained them and protected them for so long. The Sword of Liberty was not just a ship. It was a part of him, a part of them all, and the final part that he could touch of Gordon Lee, his last link to the great man and his friend. After this, live or die, the past would be gone, laid to rest. Did they have a future? And if so, what did it hold?

“Stop the sentimentality and get your overpaid ass on the bus, sir.” Edwards clasped his hand, drawing Nathan in. Nathan nodded and swam into the shuttle, turned and shut the hatch. He checked the seals, glanced around to assure to himself that everyone else had strapped in, Edwards included, and pulled himself to the cockpit.

Weston had brought the reactor online and the engines were warmed already. Kris had negotiated a link to Liberty’s bridge and monitored the conditions aboard her. Nathan drifted behind her. He felt the vibration of the shuttle through his palms as he held himself in place, followed by a sharp shudder, transmitted through the SSTOS, through the ship, and presumably through the alien vessel. “I’m feeling missile strikes, Kris. It’s time.”

Her fingers hovered over her screen’s connection with the Liberty. “Nathan, you know this whole scheme is nuts. I got the damn idea from a freakin’ Niven story I read as a kid. We’re probably either going to be blown up, or else it won’t do enough and we’ll still be stuck in the middle of this Patron prison. This is a huge gamble.”

“Kris, I’m CO, so it’s my gamble and I choose to gamble on you. Do it.”

Without another word or hesitation, Kris stabbed down on the button, initiating the Sword of Liberty’s final program. All the power cells, batteries, and capacitor banks for the power conditioning system, the empty missile modules, and missing railgun and laser emplacements suddenly reversed their flow of energy and fed electrons back into the destroyer’s grid. This energy circulated about, bypassing shutdown system after shutdown system, seeking a lower potential and somewhere to expend itself. Finally it found an objective and flooded in, energizing the twelve enhanced photon drives of the auxiliary propulsion and maneuvering system.

Despite merely being the actuators for the forward half of the hull, they were still powerful photonic rockets on their own. All twelve fired at beyond full power—their safeties removed—and their radiance punched outward into the atmosphere surrounding the bay enveloping the wrecked forward half of their ship. Just like with their initial launch and that of the Promise, each thruster fired like a continuous stream of nuclear firecrackers. Twelve blowtorches lit with a fire that only existed at the heart of quasars poured energy into nearly every outward direction, and just like the nuclear missiles attacking from outside, their transfer energy propagated outward from the point of application.

Here within the protected inner shell of the Control Ship, where no attack had ever reached, the Patrons had left their hostages one of their most powerfully destructive tools to act as a weapon.

Calvin Henson winced as another laser bit deep into Trenton and more lifesigns flashed red. “Captain Everest, your men have GOT to get those missile cells back online. This little trickle of an attack we’re putting out isn’t doing enough. I need more than one missile at a time and two railguns!”

“Admiral, my men are doing what they can, but the shield plasma fused together too many of the VLS hatches, and hardly any of the missiles in those cells are communicating with the weapon control system. Even if I send someone EVA, the birds won’t work!”

“Captain, if we don’t have any missiles then our only option is to become a missile. I will order this group to ramming spee—”

“Admiral!” a new voice cried out on the battle net. Henson thought he recognized it as his Flag Captain’s Weapons Officer. “The Control Ship is starting to swell! We’re seeing a massive thermal bloom at her core and she’s ceased firing.”

Henson flipped his screen back to the data in question. Sure enough, the smooth, hard core at the center of the crustacean-like ship of overlapping plates, which they had thus far been unable to scratch, swelled and cracked. Molten metal and flame gushed outward from spot after spot.

He did not know what was happening to it, but he dare not let the opportunity get by. “All remaining units: Fire for effect! Everything you have left, overheating or not.”

The shuttle bay of the Sword of Liberty disintegrated around them. Their SSTOS flipped end over end, banging into flaming, flying debris, a leaf in a hurricane of furnace light. Nothing, not even the auxiliary drives themselves, could hold together in this maelstrom. Abruptly the brilliance of the photonic drives cut out and all that could be seen was the burning, collapsing bay where their ship had been held captive.

Weston deftly stabilized the battered SSTOS and spun the shuttle slowly about. All three sets of eyes in the cockpit darted about, each of them trying to find a way out. Nathan soon jabbed a hand forward, pointing past Weston’s shoulder toward a fissure through which debris streamed, beyond which was the deepest, blackest night. “Andrew, can you get us through that crack?”

“Skipper, I damn well will get us through. Can’s got nothing to do with it.” Weston punched up maximum thrust, rocketing the SSTOS forward and turning the shuttle to align their frame with the fissure. The spaceplane crashed through, ripping free their wings and tail, and causing a terrible cacophony of alarms and screaming passengers.

Nathan and Kris screamed too, but for entirely different reasons. “Hell, yes!! Andrew! We’re free! We made it!”

“Admiral! The Control Ship is breaking up and the plasma shield is dissipating. We have chunks of debris ejecting from the core, but we have no way of knowing what’s just damage and what might be a Deltan escape pod.”

Henson thought about the status of the fleet, about all the people they had all lost. “We’re in no shape right now to worry about prisoners or to allow their leadership caste to get free to threaten us again. Take all escaping debris under fire.”

Lydia felt at peace for the very first time since Gordon’s death. She took in the rapidly disintegrating wreck of the Deltan’s most heinous vessel and allowed herself to feel satisfaction, allowed herself to embrace the hatred, to acknowledge it so she could then discard it and move on. The Deltans had deserved everything they had gotten, but they were over now. She could move on from being the mother of the fleet to being what she had last been happy being: a scientist and an observer of all things.

Lydia looked over the tactical display, at the debris now being targeted since that put the most accurate, highest resolution sensors on them. It was a pity all the pieces she looked at would be destroyed. Who knew what sort of technical marvels could be extracted—

What is that, she wondered. No, it can’t be, it doesn’t look right … maybe some technological convergence … no, it is their shuttle! It has their crest, but it looks so damaged …

Lydia rapidly scrolled through menus, until she came to the comms screen and checked incoming transmissions from the area where that one piece of debris flew. Her eyes grew wide.

“Calvin! You have to cease fire!” Lydia cried frantically over the net.

Henson wasted an annoyed expression within his acceleration coffin. “Lydia, why are you on this circuit? Shut down and stop interfering.”

“No, no, you don’t understand. It can’t possibly be a real miracle, but it might as well be. Calvin, they’re alive!”

“Who’s alive, Lydia? What do you mean?” A tactical close-up of one piece of debris appeared in three dimensions before him. This piece appeared to be marked with a navy crest and seemed to be maneuvering slightly, but it also had a comm log attached to it. Henson expanded it, and his eyes grew as big as saucers. He threw the “hold-fire interrupt” for the entire group.

Lydia kept talking, excited. “It’s really them. I don’t know how, but it’s them. The Sword of Liberty’s crew survived!”