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Grant and Blue had no trouble piloting the ship through the nebula toward the factory planetoid where the other two ships waited for them. The sensors worked in the usual spectrum Grant was used to, and in several others besides. There were gravity sensors—the sort the Children utilized which they had clearly stolen from the planet receding in the distance—as well as something he eventually worked out was a mass detection system. It tracked objects down to a few kilograms. Locating the planetoid and their friends was easy.
Which made him sweat. If this thing could do it, so could the alien fleet still massing on the rogue planet. At last count there were more than a hundred of the bizarre ships there, every one of them landing on the surface.
While the rest of the crew debarked in their suits and trekked across the vacuum to return to the Seraphim, Grant remained inside the alien craft with Dex and Blue. The younger man was unwilling to voice his plan in front of the others, and that alone was enough fill Grant’s belly with a ball of lead.
The three of them stood in the now-roomy crew area. The body was gone. Batta had taken it with him to go into cold storage in their medical bay. It represented a vital piece of intelligence, especially if these people were actively planning an invasion. Who the strange humans were, where they came from, and how their technology could possibly be so far beyond anything else in this part of space were all questions he wanted answered right the hell now. They had to wait.
“Are we agreed that what we’re seeing here is a hostile force inside our borders?” Dex asked. His words were...not harsh, precisely, but clipped. Hard. There was no emotion in them, but Grant could hear the hard edges that meant the younger man was holding them back with a good deal of effort. It was a captain’s job to know the moods and mannerisms of his crew, and the time since Dex’s abduction gave Grant an excellent education on the subject.
“Hard to read it any other way,” he said, glancing at Blue.
The avatar nodded. “I concur. This ship is one of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, manufactured on that planet. It is a dual-purpose drop and attack vessel. There are no living facilities on it that I can determine. Nor are there settlements on the planet itself. It appears to be a manufacturing center for a military force.”
Grant sighed. “Yeah. Doesn’t change the fact that those are living beings down there.”
“Human beings, at that,” Dex said. “Sitting on top of a technological resource that would essentially hand power in this chunk of the galaxy over to anyone who got hold of it. I don’t think any of us are innocent enough to believe imperialism in humanity wouldn’t pop back up if it were suddenly a lot easier to conquer other worlds.”
Grant nodded. The kid was right—he usually was. They had come far as a species over the centuries largely in part to technology. Medical care was universal thanks to the huge advances in automated treatment, from machine surgery to nanotechnology. Everyone could eat because food could be produced almost perpetually even in the closed systems of ships with the advent of bioreactors. The funny thing about providing the basics of life was that it created a more functional society. People were far less prone to the sort of greed and hoarding common on old Earth. The same went for colonizing new planets and systems—there was plenty of real estate to be had. Planets took a long time to fill up.
Yet thousands of years of history were not on humanity’s side. There were always people who would use power simply because it was there, and keep on for no better reason than to accumulate more of it. Even now there were places in the Alliance itself where subjugation happened with disturbing regularity. It didn’t matter how strongly the majority of the species rejected the idea. Outliers always cropped up. It only took a few.
“Yeah,” Grant said. “Our options are pretty limited, though. Those...people will swat us out of the sky as soon as they bother looking this direction.”
Blue shook his head. “I do not believe they will. From what we have seen of them, they appear far more prone toward reaction rather than action. If they are aware of us, it seems likely they view us as no threat at all so long as we do not attack.”
Grant shrugged, turning his palms upward. “How the hell would we even be able to attack them? I know you’ve got something in mind, kid, but we saw what just one ship could do with that shield. Nothing we can throw at them is gonna matter against something like that.”
Dex sighed. “Well, first off: I don’t think that was all just the one ship. I think it acted more like a primer, something to activate defenses all over the planet. Yeah, that’s kind of splitting hairs, but I think the distinction matters. All of their tech seems sort of organic. I don’t mean just that they grow some parts of it, but the way it’s all integrated. The design ethic feels like every piece and part can flow into the whole or separate from it as needed. One ship can act as a control module to direct every other system on the planet.”
“How does that help us?” Grant asked. The words were sharp but it was a genuine question.
Blue cleared his throat, purely an affectation but effective in drawing attention to him. “It may not in a larger sense, but Dex does make a good point. Regardless of the energy these vessels are able to put out, their systems are still physical. They can only regulate and control so much power. They are not invincible no matter what reality they come from.”
Dex’s face shield was up, showing his expression. Grant saw his mouth drop open in dumbfounded shock, but he raised a hand to forestall the younger man. “Okay, we’re gonna pause so you can explain that, please. Then we’re letting Dex finish what he has to say.”
Blue’s head cocked sideways, not unlike a confused puppy. “I assumed you made the logical leap. These aliens are human beings, but not from our reality. Their mastery of the Cascade, which we suspect to be the liminal space between our universe and another brane—universal space—containing the nearest separate reality was the first clue. The ability to create machinery which exists in real space and the Cascade simultaneously would imply these strangers have learned to move between universes. When I saw the broken ship for the first time, I noted how difficult it was to look at, as if my senses were trying to comprehend dimensions our universe simply did not have the capacity to relay.”
Dex raised a hand, waving it violently. “But this ship isn’t like that.”
“Because it was made here, in this universe,” Grant said. When Dex and Blue both looked at him in surprise, he chuckled. “Hey, I might not be super intelligent like you two, but I’m not an idiot. I was trying to figure out what felt so familiar when I looked at that thing. It was like being in the Cascade. My brain couldn’t interpret all the data.”
“Yes,” Blue said. “The Cascade is a space with at least eleven spatial dimensions. Those vessels originate from the aliens’ home. They exist in three dimensions here, but one has to assume there is a field of some kind maintaining a bubble of their home reality around them. Otherwise it would be like a human being suddenly turning two-dimensional. Instant death.”
“Whoa,” Dex interrupted. “Then why invade? What’s the point? If they can’t survive here, then...”
Grant raised a hand to rub his jaw, but the old stress habit didn’t quite work. His gauntlet clanged against his armored chin. “They seemed to be able to survive just fine on Vault, though. Maybe they have some kind of translation machine? Something to drop them into three dimensions without dying? It’s something to think about, but not right now. Dex, go on.”
It was obvious the kid wanted to chew on the casual revelation that beings from another universe were within a relative stone’s throw, but Grant saw him swallow it and carry on with business. He took a little pride in that—Dex was the closest thing to a son he’d ever had. Seeing him grow up came with a bit of a father’s satisfaction.
“We need to get one of the ships close to light speed with a Slip drive,” Dex said, “and hit that planet with it.”
Blue shook his head. “It will not work. From my observations, the strangers would be able to detect the energy increase and raise the field before impact. I believe it capable of absorbing the energy of all three of our vessels at maximum Slip acceleration.”
As they approached the planetoid, Iona had hailed them with a tight beam and filled them in on the situation. Grant knew the rough lay of the land, so to speak. He understood the basics of what this rock did and how it did it. He probably wouldn’t have had the idea on his own—but hell, that was what teams were for.
“Well, shit,” he said with an air of mild curiosity. “How about something a bit bigger?”