The Stars Like Gods Page 31

  They were so many, so commanding, so unfathomable, they must know.

  A cargo freighter approached her location. Possibly the same one as the last twenty-eight times, possibly half the same and half new Rasu, right? Either way, the wave of claustrophobia it evoked when its hangar bay opened and swallowed the Tabiji whole felt the same.

  “Asterion Dominion vessel. Provide your cargo manifest.”

  Gemina gazed blankly out at the cavernous hanger bay. “8,000 biosynthetic life forms in stasis and in a suitable condition for incorporation.”

  “Open yourselves and deliver your cargo.”

  “Acknowledged.” With pleasure. Let her just get straight on that. She entered a command on the pane beside her. The Tabiji’s bay doors opened, and rows upon stacked rows of stasis chambers cascaded out of the hold to be claimed by Rasu machinery—by Rasu.

  She almost felt…empathy for Nika as she watched the chambers be gathered up and trundled away. She would not trade places with the woman right now for all the worlds and an endless supply of sake-soaked dumplings.

  “Your next contribution will consist of no less than 9,600 biosynthetic life forms. Our needs have grown.”

  Didn’t they always? The Rasu seemed to her a ravenous beast striving to feed a hunger which could never be sated. But for better or worse, almost certainly worse, there would be no next contribution. “Acknowledged. Request permission to depart.”

  “Granted.”

  She held her breath while the freighter expelled the Tabiji from its belly and headed off toward the heart of the stronghold, carrying an army of Nikas to their suicidal fate.

  Gods, had it worked? Had she succeeded in fooling them? She oh-so-cautiously turned the ship around and began accelerating away. Just like normal, nothing amiss here. Her pulse pounded against her temples as she waited for a shot that…never came.

  When the comforting darkness of the interstellar void at last welcomed her, she sent a ping.

  Commander Palmer, the packages have been delivered. It’s your show now. I am getting the hells out of here.

  49

  * * *

  RASU STRONGHOLD

  “Holy shit, these monsters are big.”

  Dashiel glanced tensely at Palmer. “Didn’t you accompany the reconnaissance mission?”

  “Yes. They’re bigger the second time around.” Palmer gave a wide berth to a Rasu vessel departing one of the platforms. “I’ll be honest. I don’t see how our little bombs are going to do more than dent these platforms.”

  “The math says they’ll do more. So does the science and multiple ceraffin’s analysis. This is chemistry and physics in action.”

  “I’d prefer it was guns in action.”

  “I’m sure you would, but I’d ask you to restrain yourself. We cannot win a shooting war against this enemy.”

  “Couldn’t win a shooting war against the last one, either. All right, let’s get this done.”

  Commander Palmer (OpFlare): “Heavy vessels, you are clear to deliver your payloads according to your assignments. Careful and quiet, and the enemy won’t know we’re here.”

  On a wide pane in the center of the bridge, several thousand dots began crawling toward the orbital platform ring. Out the viewport, nothing changed in the busy but deliberate activity of the Rasu ships.

  Around Dashiel, military officers and a smattering of dynes monitored ship readings and relayed and confirmed orders with notable, professional efficiency. He was ashamed to admit that until a few weeks ago, he’d never given more than a passing thought to the Dominion military. It existed on the periphery of Asterion society as a small force large enough to dispatch the occasional violent primitives exploratory teams stumbled upon and to intercede when mercenary activity spiked along trade routes.

  He currently wished it was a lot bigger and better funded, but mostly he was grateful it existed at all.

  Palmer talked a couple of pilots through some harrowing approaches to their assigned platforms, and Dashiel listened in with interest. He was here on the Dauntless in case something went wrong with the bombs, but unless or until this happened, he arguably had nothing to contribute.

  When he’d told Palmer he was coming along, the man had resisted, asserting that if something went wrong with the bombs during deployment, the whole plan was already fucked. Dashiel had responded that Palmer had obviously never had an assembly line go down at three in the morning the day of a massive product shipment deadline. It had earned him a confused glare, but also a seat on the command ship.

  He studied the scrolling chatter of the mission channel, but it was so laden in military jargon he couldn’t get a good sense of the state of affairs. “How’s the deployment going?”

  Palmer frowned as he entered a command at his control panel. “Twenty-two percent of the bombs have been placed. No signs of detection so far.”

  “Then why are you frowning?”

  “Because that’s what I do during missions.”

  Well. Dashiel rubbed at his jaw, annoyed at his own frustration with this waiting and watching. They’d spend an hour delicately placing the bombs, then everything would more or less happen all at once—and by then they’d be fleeing the system, lest they get caught in the resulting inferno.

  They’d placed more conventional if still powerful explosives at each of the d-gates during the journey here, because should Rasu ships be following in hot pursuit, they wouldn’t have the luxury of placing them on the way back. Either way, they’d use remote triggers to blow the d-gates one by one after traversing them, and hopefully before any pursuers did the same. It might only buy them a few days, but they’d deny the Rasu a breadcrumb trail leading directly to Synra’s doorstep.

  The Taiyok commander insisted his ships would take the long way home, so they didn’t have to worry about getting those ships through the d-gates. Dashiel, however, was not inclined to wait three weeks to get home and see Nika again. And if it all went to hells, both he and Palmer needed to be back in the Dominion, on the ground, doing whatever they could think of to stop the inevitable.

  ADAF Second Lieutenant Kiernan Phillips did not want to be here. ‘Here’ being 0.8 kilometers from an alien structure so vast and menacing it blocked out the inferno of a star burning just on the other side of it.

  The dull, purplish metal of the Rasu platform absorbed so much light that, as Kiernan stared at it, it seemed to dissolve into a black hole waiting to absorb his miniscule ship and him with it. It was alive, right? The structure had its own thoughts, its own intentionality—no reason to believe its intention wasn’t to consume him for a snack.

  He shook his head roughly, trying to break the spell. He had a job to do. Place a single one of the new KA bombs at the location marked in bright red on his HUD, then place a single additional one at the second location marked in equally bright red. Then turn tail and flee this freakish spectacle.

  He breathed through his nose and extended the ship’s grapnel. The KA bomb hovered in its grasp in front of the bow, a speck of dust against the looming shadow of the platform. He didn’t comprehend how the bomb was supposed to vanquish the enemy, but he didn’t need to comprehend it—he only needed to place it.

  “So get the fuck on with it, numb nuts.”

  He fired his thrusters in short bursts until the bomb slid inside the bright red circle on his HUD, then released the clamps and retracted the grapnel.

  “See, that wasn’t so hard. One more to go.”

  While the grapnel returned to the undercarriage and retrieved the second bomb, he whistled a tune he’d heard at a party last weekend. Until today, the life of a pilot in the Asterion Dominion Armed Forces had not been a particularly notable or exciting one. Half the people he met thought he was blowing smoke when he told them what he did for a living. ‘What military?’ they’d retort, staring at him suspiciously.

  What military, indeed. Endless training and endless drills for a war that would never come—until one day, approximately yesterday,
it did.

  Still, it wasn’t going to be much of a war if all they had to do was stealthily drop off a bunch of bombs and leave. No shooting at the enemy, no flexing of his ship’s acrobatic muscles, no trench runs.

  As his gaze drew inexorably back to the towering hull of the Rasu platform, he decided he was okay with this.

  He eased the grapnel and its new cargo out and eased the ship over to the next target location. Almost…almost…there. He released the clamps and let his body sag within its harness.

  Done. Time to go home. He reversed thrusters and rejoiced every new meter added between him and the platform—

  —an alarm flashed in the left section of his HUD. Nothing catastrophic like a hull rupture or oxygen loss, thankfully. He zoomed the alarm.

  Package 1 is no longer in position.

  The hells?

  “We’ve got a problem.”

  Dashiel hurried to Palmer’s side, dreading the nature of the problem but relieved for the interruption of his own morbid ruminations. “Tell me.”

  “Multiple deployment units are reporting the bombs aren’t syncing their orbits with the platforms. They’re drifting off their targets at a rate of 1.4 meters per second.”

  Dashiel moved to the pane at the center of the bridge. “Do we have any visuals?”

  The feed from an Asterion vessel materialized in a corner of the pane. The pilot had tagged one of the KA bombs, microscopic against the hull of the twenty-kilometer-long battery platform, with a bright green dot to identify it. Both the platform and the bomb traveled in a clockwise orbit around the star—but as they did, the bomb inexorably drifted at a downward angle. Another few minutes and the platform was going to leave the bomb behind.

  Lacking any form of artificial propulsion, the bombs were placed in such a way as to fall into a natural stellar orbit. They’d assumed the platforms did the same, but it now appeared the structures were modifying their orbital paths in some way. Why and how didn’t matter.

  By the time the pilots finished placing all the bombs, upwards of thirty percent of them would have fallen out of position. But they couldn’t begin detonating now. The plan depended on the creation of a cascading power surge across the entire network.

  They needed a way to keep the bombs in position for just a few minutes longer. Dashiel pressed his palms against his temples, racing through knowledge banks and analysis algorithms in search of a way—then spun to Palmer. “I need to look at one of the bombs.”

  “We’ve got ten spares in the cargo hold. Don’t blow us up.”

  50

  * * *

  RASU STRONGHOLD

  The KA bomb resembled a large storage trunk—longer than it was wide, with curved edges leading to a cylinder slot on each end. Inside were two compartments, one packed with raw kyoseil, the other with alisinium6. When triggered, valves in each compartment would open, shooting both materials into a central chamber that would then be electrified and ejected from the casing, ensuring fireworks in short order.

  The bomb’s casing was constructed of a tungsten-cobalt superalloy. Tough, resilient and capable of retaining structural integrity against the blistering heat that came with proximity to the star. Borderline ferromagnetic.

  He stood and stared at the device for another beat…but there was only one way to be sure. He cleared his throat and motioned to the officer standing guard. “Can you help me for a minute? We need to remove the bomb from its berth.”

  “For what reason? We can’t have an explosive device just rolling around in here. Do we need to load it into a launch tube?”

  “No. I need to test something. Urgently. All our lives may depend on it, so please.”

  The man’s lips puckered. “Commander Palmer said—”

  Dashiel hit his comm. “Palmer, I need authorization to undock one of the bombs from its berth. Now.”

  “Gods help us all. Authorized.”

  He crouched on the left side of the berth. “Let’s unlock both sides at once and carefully roll it out.”

  “Yes, sir.” The officer moved to the other side, and together they eased it onto the floor. It rocked once before settling on one semi-flat side about two meters from the inner starboard hull.

  He unholstered his Glaser, then adjusted the setting to low-power, narrow-beam. “You’ll want to stand clear, Officer.”

  “Sir!”

  “Another step back. Thank you.” He aimed the Glaser and fired on the bomb’s casing.

  A weak surge of electricity tickled his skin, but no explosion followed. Instead, the device rolled end-over-end until it hit the hull.

  Dashiel hurried over and fell to his knees beside it. He curled his hands around one end and tugged, but the device remained locked in place, one side flush against the hull.

  Okay.

  He stood and nodded to the officer. “Thank you for your help.”

  “But what about the bomb? Don’t we need to return it to its berth?”

  “Keep an eye on it, but it should stay where it is.” He pivoted and hurried back to the bridge.

  “You shot a KA bomb? The bomb that’s designed to detonate when electrified?”

  Dashiel hurried past Palmer to the central pane—but no red warnings flashed, which suggested the entire plan hadn’t collapsed while he’d been below. “Only the internal compartment gets electrified, and it’s insulated from the exterior casing. It was a low-risk test.”

  “Well, so long as it was low risk. Why did you do it?”

  “I had to confirm the casing was ferromagnetic, meaning it can turn into a permanent magnet when an electrical current is introduced. Jerry’s default physical state is a metal similar to vanadium and niobium, both of which are paramagnetic.” Palmer blinked at him. “When exposed to an external magnetic field, a paramagnetic material will be weakly attracted to the source.”

  “You…” understanding dawned in the man’s eyes “…oh. You want us to turn the KA bombs into magnets so they’ll stick to the hulls of the platforms.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “A little piece of Jerry in a lab is a long way from star-rated superstructures. What if the form the Rasu take to create the hulls isn’t…paramagnetic?”

  “Then we’re fucked. But we know the Rasu are constrained by the laws of physics and chemistry, same as we are. The materials we would use to construct hulls capable of withstanding the prolonged heat of a star? They’re nearly all at least paramagnetic.”

  Palmer gazed out the viewport. “How strong of a pulse will it take to magnetize them without blowing them up?”

  Dashiel had done the math on his way to the bridge. Out in the field, the bombs were a lot farther than two meters from their targets, so the field needed to be stronger. But Palmer was right. Too strong of a jolt stood to burn through the protective interior layers and set the bombs off prematurely. He blew out a breath through a clenched jaw. “Two hundred megajoules in a single millisecond burst.”

  Palmer reached out and began entering a series of commands.

  Commander Palmer (OpFlare): “Deployment units, listen up. You have new instructions….”

  Dashiel tuned out the details as his attention focused in on the visual at the center of the pane. The bomb they’d observed before had drifted almost to the far edge of its assigned platform. Another thirty seconds and the platform would move beyond its reach.

  From beneath the visual, a flash streaked toward the bomb, then vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The next instant the bomb leapt toward the platform like a tether had been yanked, landed on the hull, and rolled back and forth a few times before settling to a stop.

  Dashiel soaked in the rush of adrenaline that flooded his veins, relishing the high it brought. He was smiling by the time he turned to Palmer—who scowled darkly at the zoomed-in visual.

  “What?”

  “If the platforms are Rasu, aren’t they going to notice when a foreign object attaches itself to them?”

  “I had actually thought of tha
t. I never said it was a perfect fix, merely our only fix. Hopefully the devices are too small for them to notice immediately. But tell everyone to hurry.”

  “I assure you, Advisor Ridani, they are proceeding with all due speed.”

  “Of course.” He dragged a hand along his jaw. “We should wake Nika up.”

  “No. Not until all the bombs are placed.”

  “But we don’t know how long it will take her to reach the power control center.”

  “And when she does reach it, she won’t be able to loiter there while we finish our job. If every last bomb isn’t in position and ready to detonate right then, goodbye plan. We have to wait.”

  A readout in the bottom left corner of the pane ticked up.

  KA bomb placement: 72%

  The number had crawled to a virtual standstill for the last ten minutes while pilots returned to already-deployed bombs and electrified them, but in the last minute it had finally started increasing again. Almost there—

  —a tiny burst lit a corner of the viewport.

  Palmer instantly began scrolling through incoming data. “Report, Quadrant 3 vessels.”

  Lieutenant Volshoi (OpFlare): “ADV 8-5C got sideswiped by a Rasu vessel leaving the nearest platform. The collision disrupted the cloaking shield, and the Rasu vessel fired.”

  Commander Palmer (OpFlare): “ADV 8-5C, what’s your status?”

  Silence answered.

  Palmer’s posture grew more rigid. “They know we’re here now. I’ve no idea how fast word will spread among the aliens, but we are out of time.”

  Commander Palmer (OpFlare): “Heavy vessels, you have sixty seconds to deposit your remaining payloads and bug out. Light vessels, depart for Rendezvous Point Bravo near Gate 6.”

  “All stations, we are at Alert Level 1.” Palmer spun to Dashiel. “Now. Wake her up now.”