The Dark Between The Stars

NINETY-SIX
GENERAL NALANI KEAH

This was going to hell, and she didn’t even have a handbasket to carry it in.

General Keah gripped her command chair as the bridge of the Kutuzov rocked from side to side—partly due to weapons blasts from the attacking robot ships, partly because her ship’s stabilizers and artificial gravity had gone haywire. She could see the writing on the wall.

The CDF ships descended toward Plumas, and Keah wondered why the Shana Rei had such a grudge against that unremarkable frozen moon. “We have to take those Tamblyn evacuees aboard. I’m not sounding a retreat just yet, but when we do get the hell out of here, I want to take those people with me.”

The mammoth cylinders went into orbit, aligning their flat hexagonal ends toward the icy crust. Their very presence seemed to distort the reality of the moon. Ripples and tremors tore through the pockmarked surface, and quakes shattered the ice. Geysers of released water erupted from the oceans below.

The surface wellheads, pumping stations, and landing fields were flattened. Urgent distress signals came from Roamers beneath the ice sheet who had not yet managed to evacuate; they cut off abruptly as the ceiling collapsed. The rest of the clan Tamblyn ships lurched away from the ice moon, racing pell-mell toward the dubious protection of the CDF battle group.

Fifteen lumbering water tankers tried to match the speed of the swifter evacuation ships. Why would Ron Tamblyn bother rescuing a water cargo that could easily be replaced? When Keah scolded him over the comm, the Plumas administrator responded, “By the Guiding Star, General, I don’t care about the water—I want the tankers! You know how expensive those are?”

“That’s not your biggest worry right now, Mr. Tamblyn. Get your people aboard my Juggernaut. We’ve got all our landing bays open. Come in hot—don’t waste any time!”

The Shana Rei were devoting their energies against Plumas itself, ignoring the flurry of space battle. The thick ice sheets continued to crack and crumble under the entropy bombardment.

The Ildiran ships continued the battle, but in disarray, and many of their weapons seemed to be offline. Three more warliners careened into one another, and black robot ships swooped in and hammered the damaged Solar Navy vessels, destroying all of them.

The Three H’s had gone quiet, letting Keah issue orders for the entire battle group. She appreciated not having to chase after unruly and inept admirals, but she needed them to pull their weight. “Admiral Handies, go lend assistance to Adar Zan’nh. The warliners are suffering heavy losses.”

“Our ships are suffering heavy losses, General.”

“We’re all in this together—that’s the point of being allies! We don’t have super-lasers like what the Ildirans just tested, but you can use regular old jazers to wreck some bugbots. There’s plenty of ‘em.”

Admiral Handies dutifully sent his Mantas into the fray.

Keah transmitted to the other two Grid Admirals, “Buy us some time so the Roamer evacuees can get aboard.”

The first clan Tamblyn ships rolled in, skidding to a halt in the Kutuzov’s landing bays. Though the Roamers were not military trained, even the worst of them was a crack pilot.

She sent a signal to the Ildiran flagship. “We’ll have everybody on board within an hour, Z. Can you give us that much time?”

“We shall do our best, General. And then I suggest we retreat.”

Keah let out a grim laugh. “In the CDF we prefer to call it ‘regrouping and reassessing’—but I agree.”

“I have one more item to test,” the Adar said. “Observe. You may find this interesting—we have only one prototype. For now. If it proves effective, we will build many more.”

“What is it?”

“A weapon called a sun bomb. We recently found the plans in old records.”

Keah thought that sounded promising. “What are you waiting for?”

The Adar’s flagship launched a pulsing sphere, a metallic ball that hurtled out from a specialized weapons port. Keah leaned forward, holding her breath, staring at the screen. Her bridge crew fell silent. She counted to five.

The Ildiran sun bomb became a miniaturized supernova, an explosion of pure photonic energy so intense that it temporarily burned out her main viewing screens. When the images finally returned, blurred and filled with static, Keah saw the Shana Rei hex ships reeling, parts of them melted away, craters hollowed out in their long obsidian sides.

She hammered the comm button. “Damn, that was terrific, Z! When can we get a thousand more of those?”

“Not until we manufacture them. But we will share the designs with you—now that we know they are effective.”

“Good. I’ll thank you later.” Now she had to take advantage of the surprise and get her ships ready to race away.

A haggard-looking man in a smudged and patched jumpsuit staggered onto the Kutuzov’s bridge. His headband was askew, his hair sweaty. “My first Roamers are aboard, more to come—thanks for giving us a lift.” Ron Tamblyn shook his head. “Now can you tell me what is going on out there?”

When the Roamer administrator stood by her command chair, Keah could smell his sweat. “Black robot attack, creatures of darkness… the usual. We don’t know how to fight them, but we’re learning as fast as we can.”

The detonation of the sun bomb served to rile up the robots, and they intensified their attack, causing significant damage, because their weapons were immune from the Shana Rei entropy backwash.

Tamblyn looked mournfully at the cracking moon on the screen, the crushed ice sheets that bled sprays of spilled water. Plumas didn’t even look spherical anymore. He let out a low moan in his chest. “I guess now I’m director of Humpty Dumpty Station.”

“If you want to get out of here, sir, our engines are iffy,” said the Kutuzov’s navigator.

“Admiral Haroun reports the same, General,” said the comm chief. “He’s lost eight Mantas already.”

She worried that even when they retreated, the robot ships could pursue them and continue to harass, damage, and destroy her ships. It wouldn’t do much good to escape the Plumas system if the bugbots wiped out the rest of her battle group before they got back to Earth.

She realized with a chill just how bad the situation was. Somebody had to survive and make a report about the effectiveness of the laser missiles, the sun bomb.

“We’d better squeeze as much out of our stardrives as possible,” Keah said. “Get ready to run.”

The fifteen Roamer water tankers continued to crawl upward, well behind the rest of the evacuating ships. She studied the water tankers, then snapped her head around. “Mr. Tamblyn, do those pilots have evacuation pods? Can they dump the tankers and get to safety?”

Ron Tamblyn grimaced. “After all that work of getting them away?”

“I already know what we have to do—I’m just trying to see if I can save a few more of your people.”

Tamblyn recognized the terrible shape they were in. “Yes, they can evacuate. And most of our people are aboard by now—do what you have to.”

She sent a tight signal over to the Ildiran flagship. “Z, we need to get the hell out of Dodge, and I’ve got a way.”

Adar Zan’nh responded, “Where is Dodge? We are at Plumas.”

The Shana Rei hexagon ships were reassembling themselves, rematerializing structural matter, but they seemed smaller and stubbier now, as if they had been dealt a terrible wound. She didn’t know if the creatures of darkness would get vengeful, but she didn’t want to stick around to find out.

“I’m going to make a smoke screen. Set your course and head out when you see your chance. We evacuated about as many of these people as we’re going to.”

A few more Roamer ships were still crowding into the Kutuzov’s bays. She could give the Plumas workers a few more minutes as she set up.

Adar Zan’nh’s normally implacable face showed deep concern. “Very well, General, I will trust your instincts. The Solar Navy is ready to depart.”

She turned to Ron Tamblyn and gave him instructions. He broadcast on a frequency that the CDF didn’t use, instructing his tanker pilots to eject and to make their way immediately to the nearest battleship. The barrage of complaints that came back was loud enough to make Tamblyn flinch.

Keah said, “Tell them they’ve got five minutes. No excuses, no apologies.” She turned to her navigator. “Mr. Tait, set a course for us to get out of here.”

“Yes, General. Informing our other vessels as well—all the ones we’ve got left.”

The tanker pilots ejected their tiny evacuation pods, and some of the last-wave Roamer ships scooped them up and pulled them into the nearest Manta cruiser landing bay.

Keah let out a sigh. “Mr. Patton, train our jazers on one of those tankers. Inform your counterparts to do the same and wait for my signal.”

“A smoke screen,” said Patton. “Yes, General.”

When the tanker evac pods had tumbled aboard the waiting CDF ships, Keah gave her order. As the black robot ships continued to attack, jazers exploded the tankers and vaporized their contents. The detonation was powerful enough to spread water vapor in a huge, dense cloud.

It was exactly what they needed.

The vapor cloud engulfed the robot vessels, blinding them, along with the CDF ships. In a last glimpse, Keah saw the Solar Navy warliners wheel about and accelerate away.

Ron Tamblyn stared at the tanker explosions and at the crushed ice moon, seeing in the water droplets a few billion tears for his facilities and his lost friends.

“Helm, full acceleration! Let’s get out of here.”

She would have preferred to score a clear victory rather than just getting away alive, but their survival was vital. She had to report this to the Confederation. The data they had gathered would form the basis for developing new defenses for the CDF and the Solar Navy.

And she wanted a lot of those sun bombs.

She muttered, “Well, Z, looks like we found that unexpected enemy after all.”