The fighting had intensified above Juna. Aesop could see the small explosions from missiles and lasers as the Maeyar fleet made contact and exchanged fire with standoff armaments. Without the ship’s sensors operational, his knowledge of the scope of the battle was severely limited. But the communications array had begun to pick up some snippets of the Maeyar fleet chatter, and from what he could tell, another wave of the Pedres Defense Fleet was about to cripple an over-exposed picket. It was a ballsy move on the part of Pedres if they could pull it off.
The only problem was that Gavisar fleet comms had ordered the bulk of the fighting ships to pull back, so what were the Maeyar engaging up there? Had a few warships missed the order? The wing admirals were assaulting a superior force, but every Gavisari ship destroyed carried with it a non-insignificant percentage of their entire population. It was hard to imagine they would leave any out of position.
"Singh, tell me you found Jones’ key. Ben-zona, Singh?"
There was no answer. Probably plugged into the banks of recordings again, lost to the dead Gavisar communication recordings. Growling, Aesop swung around and nearly raised his rifle to the figure of Vega in the hatch, hands squeezing the rim. Mags floated behind him.
"Sarge, you need to see this."
It took him a few moments to realize why Vega sounded odd. The grunt had only ever used his rank a handful of times, when shit was really hitting the fan. "Where’s Singh?"
"Trying to raise someone on the dish. Anyone, but no one in the Maeyar fleet is listening. They’ve shut out external comms."
"What?"
Aesop launched himself through the hatch. Broadcasting communications other than the discrete databursts carried an entirely unacceptable level of detection risk. The isolation couldn’t have gotten to her in only a day, so what was that girl thinking?
"Sarge, come on," Vega protested as Aesop pushed past him. He could see Singh at the breach in the Blessing’s pressure hull where he’d clamped the portable communication array to the deck. Sure enough, his marine had patched into the unit and was issuing plain-voice radio signals on Maeyar bands. Hands grabbed him from behind as he made to push toward her and he found himself spinning through the compartment with Vega slapping the side of his faceplate.
"Vega, let me go!" said Aesop, trying to pry the marine off him.
"Not until you look down below, you dense mother fucker."
Aesop calmed himself and released the grip he hadn’t noticed wrapped around his knife, still sheathed, thank God. Vega was a Privateer marine, and a hell of a fighter. But Aesop had seen the worst of the fighting in Gaza and Tehran and it didn’t take much to slip back into those days. Mags and Singh were both staring at them, having bounced off enough walls for their scuffle to translate through the metal and composite bulkheads.
Maggie motioned for him, and after he and Vega untangled themselves he drifted over to the hole in the hull that faced the space-ward side of Pedres. He watched for a second, then two, and then raised his rifle to use the magnification built into his sights to be sure of what he was seeing.
One after another, Gavisari ships were coming to life. Running lights, engines, and active EM emissions as scanners swept the sky. There were bursts of light, and ship after ship sped up their orbit with the terrifying acceleration only possible with warship-grade inertial dampeners, leaving behind thin tethers of white-hot metal.
"Keep at it, Singh. Get the old lady, or the Maeyar fleet, or whoever you goddamned can."
The Gavisar Home Defense Fleet hadn’t been overextended, they’d been lying in wait disguised as refugee ships barely capable of emitting power. Aesop swore. That was the fleet movement they’d witnessed before they could get comms running, when so many of the ships had pushed into upper orbit on their last legs. They’d swapped the induction tethers to their fighting vessels and trusted the storms to disguise their nature.
And it had worked. It was human deception, and Aesop should have spotted it. Somewhere up there Jones was watching through the viewscreen on the Howard Phillips as humanity’s would-be allies fell into his trap. And Aesop was helpless to stop it.
But there was something he could do . . . .
"Contact bearing zero zero four, up nine on the positive azimuth. Designated Gavisar heavy cruiser. No active emissions."
Victoria looked at the sensor repeater on her captain’s console, lips pursed. So far there had been zero active emissions from deeper in the system. No radio waves, microwaves, collect calls, bird calls, just . . . nothing. For a planet of thirty-six billion and a habitable moon they didn’t seem to be the talking type. If there are any of them left.
Victoria shuddered, and watched as Huian swung them to keep the railguns trained on the contact. As if they would do serious damage to a heavy cruiser. By all accounts the Gavisari knew how to build a beastly cruiser, and they’d used their fleet to repel all would-be conquerors.
"Avery, give me lidar on that cruiser."
"Aye Vick," her sensor officer replied with a tad more hesitation than usual.
"Fire Control, get me a solution on him just in case."
Typically used for mapping planetary surfaces and terrain features through low visibility, the Condor’s lidar could also be used to construct a millimeter-detailed model of any surface, including derelict ships, in just a few seconds. The only problem is that shining a thousand lasers at your target was a good way to get their attention, but Victoria didn’t expect that to be an issue as she watched the computer reconstruct the heavy cruiser on the main viewscreen. Or rather, three quarters of the cruiser. The rest had been shorn off by some cataclysmic ordinance. It almost looked as though some celestial giant had gripped the ship at stem and stern and pulled as hard as it could until the thing parted. Debris floated along the same vector, scattered across dozens of kilometers, and Huian maneuvered the Condor to remove any risk of collision. At these relative speeds, being unlucky enough to hit a sizable chunk of the cruiser would result in the Condor being spread across a similar distance.
The scan continued as the Condor sailed past, filling in the holes of the surface model. It didn’t take long for Avery to paint another contact on her screen, and more after that. Eventually her scope had gotten so full that her sensor operator had given up labeling designations on individual ships and instead had his sensor techs group them in groups of five or ten.
"They’re all trying to crawl to the star for a jump. Every fucking one," said Victoria. Hundreds of warships and thousands of civilian vessels floated in a moving graveyard toward their eventual stellar cremation. If even a third of the wreckage had cleared the star as viable fighters they’d have rolled over Pedres like a three-legged tide.
Huian entered another course correction that carried them close enough to a broken transport to trip the radiological sensors on the starboard side of the Condor. The torn hull still glowed where the rest of the ship cast it in shadow, the same assortment of gamma and beta rays that infiltrated horizon space. Meanwhile Victoria continued to monitor on all open frequencies for even a single sign of life in the ghost fleet and the growing orb of Gavisar beyond.
"How many do you think this fleet carried?" asked Huian. "Millions? Perhaps a billion Gavisari?"
"How many never made it off the surface?" Vick retorted.
The closer the Condor approached Gavisar, the slower the main force of the Homeworld Defense Fleet drifted, many still venting burning plasma from breached reactors. All the while the planet continued to grow in the sensors, revealing the vast swaths of deserts and mountains across the surface.
"Huian, start the deceleration."
"I already have, Skipper."
Victoria frowned, eyeing the astral distances winding down at a slower rate than she’d have expected. "Avery, anything in orbit yet?"
"I’ve got a dozen more infrared radiation signatures, Vick, zero bearing. And we’re about to lose it over the planet. Fire aboard orbital defense platforms. No radio waves, no active emissions. Dead quiet out there."
It was a new sensation for Victoria, a new kind of chill creeping down her spine as she approached a planet in broad daylight. The light didn’t concern her, the surface of the Condor absorbed ninety-six percent of all light all the way up into the ultraviolet spectrum. Even if you shined a flashlight at the hull you’d miss a Privateer. No, she’d flown through hundreds of uninhabited systems and never experienced such an errant and oppressive stillness, as if the entire planet were becalmed. Forty billion souls and not a single one was talking. Not only were the air waves quiet, but whoever had silenced them left no sign. An entire fleet torn apart, and not a single confirmed kill on whoever had done it. Victoria’s hair began to rise as the distance to Gavisar crept down. Whoever had done it could still be out there, and the list of possible culprits was growing worryingly thin.
Sothcide's impressive combat record included fleet action against a race called the Pfelt in contestation of a mineral-rich moon in an independent system, in which he claimed four confirmed kills on enemy fighters and disabling shots on two light frigates. His second combat patrol he’d met the light of his horizon, Jalith, and offered himself for marriage to the young bridge officer less than a year later. By then, Sothcide had proved his merit and been given an assistant squadron leader position on a nimble support carrier, smaller than the Twin Sister by over half. In that position he completed four successful combat sorties against the Grah’lihn, or Graylings as the humans called them. His third tour, his squadron’s carrier was shot out from under him and he was picked up by Victoria and her Vultures.
Now, drifting about the sunward side of Juna, he led a full wing of able pilots at the controls of deadly fighter craft. The snow of the magnetic rails was gone from his screen, and he could see clearly ahead the pinpricks of light as Wing Commander Arda threw punch after punch at the hardened Gavisar line with missiles and tightbeam masers. In his rear viewscreen he could see that the Starscream and her sister ships had come out of hiding, piling on the acceleration with a brilliant flare on his thermal scopes.
"All craft, full burn. Maintain designated targets and soften those anti-missile defenses."
As soon as he gave the order, the thirty-two fighters and twelve bombers of the Starscream flared to life in a new constellation brightening the sky so far from Pedres. The whine in his own ship increased tenfold, manual controls bucking under his grip as Juna grew and his ship began to feel the pull of her gravity. His targeting systems began to pick up the profiles of the hulking Gavisar ships.
"Starscream fighter wing, this is Commander Arda. Enemy response has underperformed expectations and fighter presence is minimal. Perhaps there was something to your human’s report after all. I’m ordering the Trepid and the Vitacuus forward to cover your initial run with our point defense."
Arda was pushing her own cruiser closer to the front. The Vitacuus was one of the heaviest ships in the system, and once committed it could stand toe to toe with anything short of a Gatekeeper ship. Or Big Three, as the humans were wont to call the Malagath, Dirregaunt, and Kossovoldt.
"Understand all, Wing Matron. Our attack run will commence in thirty seconds, followed by an atmospheric braking maneuver around Juna. We’ll cover your withdrawal after the Starscream hits the picket. All fighters, report firing solution status."
Entering orbit at full acceleration the fighters would need the aid of Juna’s thick upper atmosphere to slow down enough to rejoin the fight. The relative speeds would make it almost impossible for Gavisar ships in orbit to react quickly enough to return fire, and the pressure wave from dipping into atmo would make targeting almost impossible. The fighter wings would be under the majority of the invasion fleet ships. The maneuver would take only a few minutes, compared to the hour a full orbit would waste.
"Twenty seconds to firing range. Report solutions." Sothcide said for a second time. The radio clicked in his cockpit as his other interceptors reported, almost reluctant with their status.
"Poor solution, Wing Officer."
"Poor solution, thermal can’t identify armament pods."
"Poor solution, active sensors show target is unstable."
Even his own gunner was struggling in the seat behind him. Sothcide could see the laser arrays adjusting their angle on his side monitor as the targeting solution tried to locate the anti-missile defenses on the ship ahead. But there was no time left, and no changing course.
"All wings, fire when in range, solution agnostic. Trust your eyes."
Visually targeting at this speed would leave only a fraction of a second to identify something to shoot at, and gunners would be firing wastefully on redundant targets. But anything was better than nothing. The ship began to buck as they began the evasion program, the point defense from the Vitacuus slapping down the sparse anti-fighter missiles that his display warned him of almost before his gunner could identify them.
Steady . . . steady . . . here it comes.
His displays dimmed as the power draw on the tiny fusion reactor drained to the capacitors and the lasers burned away at the Gavisar ships ahead of him. They cut through something volatile, and the resulting explosion left Sothcide wide-eyed and shaken. Not because it had been close or unexpected, but because in that brief moment before the interceptor passed the picket he had discovered why the firing solutions had failed. Gavisar civilian ships had no armament pods for the thermal sensors to track, and lashed together to mimic the size and mass of warships presented no solid silhouette for the radar to return. Certainly there were warships among the defenders—someone had to be offering return fire to draw the Maeyar fleet into the jaws of the trap. Arda had pushed in, and Vehl wasn’t far behind.
"Pedres fleet, abort abort! Picket is a scam, repeat, picket is a scam, majority non-combat vessels, abort ab-"
But his arc carried him across the horizon of the planet, cutting off communication. As it did, dozens of contacts began to appear above his altitude on the thermal scopes.
"Evade, evade! Damn it!" he called, and fire began to erupt in his formation. Then the fighters and the Gavisar warships passed within a few hundred miles of each other, too close for coincidence in the vast sea of space. The invasion ships had built up enough momentum across the starward side of Juna to intercept and crush both Arda and Vehl before either could escape.
Reports began to fill his screen of losses within the wing. Nearly two-thirds of the fighters and all but two bombers had been destroyed. Sothcide had been spared by virtue of leading the charge, riding past the anti-fighter defenses too quickly for the warships to gain a solution. The rest of his wing was not as fortunate. In solemn silence they dipped into the atmosphere to chip away their incredible velocity. It would take them four minutes to complete the maneuver. Would there still be a battle to join when it was over?
Ahead of the Condor, Gavisar loomed. There was no other word to describe it. "Two-fifty KK, Vick. Do you want me to take her around the planet?" Huian asked from the pilot’s station. The same distance between the Earth and the moon, but Gavisar filled the entire viewscreen.
Victoria shook her head, her attention pulling away from Jones’ last communication to the Yakima before opening fire. Her suspicions had been confirmed, and they’d left the slimy bastard back in Pedres to play havoc with the Maeyar. Stupid, stupid, stupid. "Not yet Huian, hold thrust and let’s growl the duchess. Avery, get me a tightbeam."
"Conn sensors, aye Vick. Sending the communication package and imagery."
"She won’t see it for another sixteen minutes, unless the Malagath can read radio waves before they arrive. You know what? I wouldn’t even be fucking surprised. But all she’s going to say is to bury our noses in the dirt. Let’s take a closer look at one of those orbital defense stations. Match our orbit, Huian. Low power, if any living xenos are listening out there we don’t need to paint a bullseye on our ass."
As the Condor descended toward the thermal signature of an orbital defense platform, Victoria eyed the readout for their relative velocity.
"Coming in a bit hot, Huian. Not like you to not factor in the increased gravity of a large planet."
Huian glanced back from the pilot’s station, a mixture of confusion and annoyance on her narrow face. "I did, Ma’am. Gavisar is pulling more than its size should suggest, even corrected for a nickel-rich composition," she said. As if to illustrate her point, she gestured to the orbital defense platform growing on the main screen. "The platform’s orbit is decaying too."
She was right, the orbital defense platform was falling, if slowly, into the planet’s surface. In a day or two the thing would either begin to break up in atmo or would crash into a cliffside down below. There was a certain sort of finality to that idea, Victoria decided. The scene would not be so dissimilar from Earth if the xenos managed to spot it. Not if, when. They would have to be better prepared than Gavisar, and as it stood even the battered and bruised remnants of the fleet above Juna could wipe out the entire Union Earth Navy ten times over.
"Conn sensors, heavy radiation off that platform, recommend we don’t get much closer."
No one down below was going to fire back, but she had other reasons to slow down and so she leaned over and gave her pilot the order. Someone nuked the space platform, but the precise radiation profile didn’t match any nuclear device or particle cannon that humans had yet documented. It was closer to a horizon space transference.
"Alright, Huian, keep your distance from the platform."
"It’s not the platform, Vick. It’s the planet, the whole thing is irradiated. Not just the high background radiation we were expecting, it’s almost like it just left a horizon jump."
Victoria brought up the display on the main viewscreen, showing radiation hotspots across the valleys and deserts of Gavisar. For enough radiation to be reaching the Condor’s sensors at this distance, standing on the surface would be like taking a naked spacewalk near Sol, and would turn a human body to jerky in just a few minutes.
Between the density and the radiation, the people of Gavisar must have been damned near impossible to uproot once they settled into the tunnels and caverns of a planet. If they had been aggressively expanding, they’d be a force to reckon with in the local neighborhood. And Earth would have been one of their potential habitats. There were only a few oxygen-tolerant species around, but just as few oxygen-rich planets that the UE had surveyed. Even with advanced human optics and remote study, the only thing that could give accurate compositional detail was an atmospheric probe, and to deploy those you had to be in-system. Ithaca had been the first. And between the growing human population and infrastructure, and the utter inequity of the defenses arrayed around the planet, by some metrics, in more danger than Earth.
The orbital platform spun as it continued its orbit, a lazy derelict hulk of metal and rock. The light of the system’s star revealed the enormous laser arrays capable of cutting down capital ships that strayed within almost a hundred thousand kilometers by their estimation of Gavisari advancement. Impressive, though less than half the range she’d personally witnessed the Dirregaunt capable of reaching. Crystallized coolant from the platform’s reactor left a frozen trail of vapor behind it in a gentle, expanding spiral. The power required to operate such a weapon could have lit half of Europe for a year. Or burned London in an instant. The silent display was almost serene, were it not for the fact that someone had struck down those awesome arrays without leaving a trace.
"Perhaps it was civil war, Skipper," said Huian, mirroring Victoria’s own thoughts on the absence of perpetrators.
Victoria shook her head. "That would account for only seeing Gavisari ships, but not that conga line of hulks all trying to claw their way to the jump. Besides, thinking they get all rowdy, nuke the surface of their planet ‘til it glows, and then decide to go find a new one? I don’t fucking buy it. Spacefaring cultures don’t nuke themselves," she said. She eyed Huian, who might have grown up far enough west in China to have had family in the fallout zone from the nuclear exchange in north India. "With some notable exceptions."
"Xenos don’t nuke themselves and survive," Huian pointed out. "The Gavisari haven’t survived yet, they’re still barely holding on."
"Shit, that’s a fair point. Still, smart money isn’t on civil war. Whatever happened here happened quick, and it happened to Gavisar. This stinks. Let’s finish the recon and let the Duchess know we found fuck-all."
The investigation of the orbital defense platform wasn’t revealing anything beyond the gaping holes torn into the side of the structure. But as it carried them over from day to night, her thoughts were interrupted by her sensor officer.
"Conn sensors, superluminal contact. Photon doppler coming from the star."
Before he could even finish the report, sirens blared on the conn as the hulk of the Duchess’ yacht appeared only a few thousand kilometers away, and her face once again commandeered the majority of Vick’s screens, though her command repeater remained on the exterior visual feed of the planet’s dusk band.
"Shit," said Victoria, as much in surprise at the Malagath countenance forcing its way onto all her monitors as at the light speed maneuver that had announced their presence to anyone with sensors capable of detecting the approach of a superluminal vessel. "Duchess Tora, hello, hi, a pleasure as always."
"Be silent, fool, and attend. I thought these images you sent were in jest, or you had found your way in ignorance to the wrong planet. But this is Gavisar and something is terribly, terribly wrong."
Victoria looked at the images of Gavisar, the deep valleys and high mountains that marked its barren surface. But it wasn’t supposed to be barren, was it? Victoria mentally recited the brief description the young Maeyar wing officer had left her. Large, dense, fresh . . . Shit!
Sothcide mentioned Gavisar to be the home of vast freshwater oceans that were in no way apparent in any of the imagery. The entire rock was bone dry. But how? Entire oceans didn’t just disappear. Where the fuck had they gone? It was like someone had pulled the plug on a planet-sized bath.
The Condor fell into shadow as it crossed the sunset below, and there on the starward side of Gavisar was the cosmic drain valve.