PROLOGUE
THE VALIS 11 SYSTEM, ZEBRA SECTOR
09/18/2354
“How many stars are there in our Galaxy?” Commodore Garyan Zachs asked out of the blue.
The six recruits went dumbstruck. When just moments ago their new commander had been telling them about the Recon Corps’ operations, and the upcoming missions, they’d been grinning like crazy. Now, you could virtually hear their jaws slamming shut.
“Four hundred and seventy-six billion,” answered Danthony Reyes after a moment’s hesitation. Sitting at the far-right end of the second row, this slim, short blond with an oblong face was the youngest conscript.
Zachs closed his slanting eyes with irritation. That was ABC of astronomy; everyone should know it, even a dimwit—not to mention a cadet of the Orbital Fleet Academy whose job was to reel off this sort of information in the dead of night after having been violently shaken awake. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a single cadet in the small briefing room. Commodore Zachs faced mere run-of-the-mill civilians, lured from the space boonies by the promise of adventure. Only six of them, although he repeatedly requested for nine new operators.
Back in the day … he thought.
Back in the day, only the chosen ones found their way to the Inner Rim lying beyond the Inner Territories. Only best of the best could operate unmanned probes, which were sent outside of the Known Universe.
Today, when deep recon no longer meant contact with the unknown, the discovery and cataloging of new planetary systems fell on the shoulders of dweebs such as these boys—and a girl, Commodore Zachs corrected himself internally, glancing toward a skinny (much too skinny for his liking) female born and raised in one of the outlying orbital stations—whom he now was conveying to Valis 11, the outermost outpost of the Federation. And no wonder; during three hundred and thirty-two years of exploration conducted in the Orion Arm, no trace of advanced alien civilization was ever found. Thus, so far, nothing suggested that somewhere out there, among the hundreds of billions of stars, Humankind would eventually find intelligent extraterrestrial life.
Commodore Zachs smiled thinly. It wasn’t quite true that the Universe was devoid of Aliens. He knew one—albeit unrepresentative—exception. The Xan 4 System with its two fighting races. The excitement he felt while watching the first messages from Beta was still vivid in his memory. Back then, he believed that he witnessed the birth of a new epoch; that he made history—not of the Corps, but of Humankind. Today, he felt only the bitterness of defeat, which wasn’t even sweetened by a well-deserved promotion to commodore.
After long and close observation, the Aliens turned out to be very primitive creatures, in his opinion unworthy of being called civilized. As for the Admiralty … Well, the Admiralty acted as usual in such cases. They put a lid of secrecy on everything so that nobody except the handful of scientists and soldiers who had been assigned to the Two Suns project could find out about the breakthrough, which wasn’t such a huge success as initially thought, although in the grand scheme of things the Corps benefited from it.
Manyfold budget increase, almost one hundred new probes and four extra deep recon bases in the Inner Rim simply had to accelerate the pace of exploration. And, in fact, within just six years, the Federation borders were shifted by a record-breaking eight hundred parsecs, albeit—despite the hard work of hundreds of crews and the exploration of more than twelve thousand further planetary systems—Xan 4 remained a glorious exception and, worse still, nothing indicated that this was going to change any time soon.
“Four hundred and seventy-six billion,” repeated Zachs, turning his attention toward the recruits again. “In the second half of the twentieth century, it was thought that the Milky Way comprised about a hundred billion stars, but then, as the technology developed, this number began to grow rapidly. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it was commonly assumed that there could be twice as many stars; fifty years later this number was doubled again. Today, we know with absolute certainty that at least four hundred and seventy-six billion stars circle the massive black holes forming the heart of our Galaxy.”
He paused for a moment to activate the holo. “For simplicity, let’s assume that there’s half a trillion.”
The lights in the briefing room dimmed, and a hypnotic lambent-light whirl appeared over the commodore’s head.
“Milky Way … If we spent only a second to investigate each system, we’d need almost sixteen thousand years to fully explore all its arms. If we had as much as an hour to do it, we’d reach the last star in fifty-seven million years. The blink of an eye, isn’t it?” he said jokingly, but the keyed-up recruits didn’t notice that their commander tried to break the tension.
Only now did he realize that it must be the first such a far expedition into space for most of these young people.
“Unfortunately, the truth is much more complicated than even the most accurate estimates. Although the Corps now has more than three hundred modern, long-range probes, each mission lasts not seconds, not hours, but days, sometimes weeks. At this rate—unless we change drastically the methods which for now include combing systems one after another, sector by sector—we won’t have colonized the place where the Orion Arm joins the Perseus Arm by the end of the millennium. Who will tell me why these star clusters are so important?”
Everyone raised their hands; after all, it was another no-brainer. This time Commodore Zachs chose the only girl of the bunch.
“Danaomi?”
“For whatever reason, wormholes connect stars within a particular arm of the Galaxy.”
“That’s right. The only known way to the neighboring Perseus Arm runs through this junction.”
“And what about subspace travel?” the girl asked hesitantly.
Zachs sighed. Another thing he wouldn’t have had to mention if he had been dealing with professionals.
“Subspace drive has three basic limitations. Firstly, technology: the most powerful reactors allow you to make jumps within the maximum range of one and a half parsecs. Secondly, time: spaceships of this type are much slower; wormholes make it possible to cover the distance of one light-year in less than fifteen minutes whereas with subspace travel we’re talking two standard days. Thirdly, precision: for reasons unknown, we aren’t able to predict the exact exit point. In addition, the farther we jump, the bigger surprise we’re in for. Therefore, we use subspace drive only in local traffic, between systems very close together. You wouldn’t want to find yourself a dozen billion clicks away from your destination, especially with a core overload. Or go straight into the scattered disk, not to mention the central star. And such incidents are reported several times a year.”
He nodded sadly, recalling the fate of FSS Magellan, one of the first victims of the new technology. After the maximum range jump, it left subspace almost on the border of the local star’s photosphere. The great research vessel evaporated in a split second, and High Command learned about its annihilation from the later analyses of the gravitational field.
“Let’s face it. Until we reach the cluster of stars in the junction area, we can’t even dream of traveling to other arms of the Galaxy—”
“Then why not take a chance and send a probe out there?” Zahartur Gavrylenko cut in. He was the only uniform among the six recruits: a police sergeant from a shabby mining colony, which name was practically unpronounceable. “This way we could get some answers without waiting for—”
Commodore Zachs raised his finger, thus cooling the recruit’s enthusiasm.
“Do you think, kiddo, that nobody else came up with this idea?”
Disoriented Gavrylenko went silent; the others exchanged uncertain glances, and then looked to Zachs. Seconds passed until the uneasy silence was broken by Danaomi Ritter.
“The Corps has already sent probes to the junction?” In her voice, Commodore Zachs detected astonishment and even a pinch of disbelief.
“Yes. We sent a probe to one of the junction’s globular clusters,” he confirmed.
The New Russian, having reacted the way he did, stood out from the rest.
Chances are, he won’t turn out to be a dumb tool in his superiors’ hands, Zachs thought. Maybe he’ll even show some initiative, just like the officers who I used to work with once.
“Forty-eight years ago—after a few decades of continuous failures on that front—the Corps Command finally convinced the Admiralty to take action. Hence, a super-long-range mission,” he added, settling more comfortably into the cocoon of his chair.
“The probe was sent to a globular cluster located in the heart of the junction. The logic of our line of reasoning led to a conclusion that it’s the only way from the Perseus Arm to the Galactic Center. If there is intelligent life in the Milky Way, then we’ll find its traces right over there. High Command designated a special team with sixteen best operators, including me.”
Zachs paused abruptly, as if he’d come to realize that the introductory lecture had gone awry; however, his hesitation didn’t last long.
What the hell, he thought. Maybe I’ll inspire them. Maybe they won’t skimp on performance.
“Back then, we mapped the unexplored regions of deep space in a bit different manner than we do now. There were no van Vogt meters, which enable us to measure space warps. For that reason, our probe—on reaching yet another system—sent drones to all newly discovered gravitational wells to see where they were leading. When the drones returned, we put the data on the holomap and moved on to the next destination.
“It took three years and eight months to find the way to the junction. We made three hundred and ninety-four jumps, of which two hundred and sixty-eight were ineffectual. Sometimes, we had to go back eight or even ten wormholes to get on the right track again. But in the end, we came out on top.” Commodore Zachs paused, then lowered his head.
“And what did you discover?” someone in the first row asked after a moment of awkward silence.
Zachs sighed heavily.
“Nothing. Nothing at all. Neither along the way nor in the junction, even though we were combing the globular cluster for almost six months, exploring every wormhole that we found there. All we came across were dead planets circling the most ordinary stars. We saw nothing new; nothing we hadn’t seen before in the thousands of systems of the Orion Arm. Something snapped inside us.
“We must have realized, just then and there, that we wouldn’t find intelligent extraterrestrial life. When the mission came to an end, we left the probe in the junction, along with a plaque informing of our existence, and returned to routine flights closer to the Known Universe. Another thirty-eight years—”
“Forty-four,” Gavrylenko interrupted him. “If the mission began forty-eight years ago.”
Zachs snapped out of his reverie.
It was a close call, he thought. Luckily, I didn’t blurt out the secret of Beta to these whippersnappers.
“Yes, of course. I got distracted. Well, let’s get back to the subject … Tomorrow, I’ll start instructing you in the procedures. Then, after you’ve passed all your tests, you’ll be assigned—”
He paused again when a ruby icon appeared on the display of his console. It blinked steadily, informing him of an incoming call. Someone from Gamma, the terraformed planet circled by the Corps’ station, was trying to reach him by means of audio-visual quantum transmission. It must have been urgent; otherwise, the mining colony’s authorities would have never allowed such an overload, especially since their reactors weren’t very efficient.
“Excuse me a moment,” he muttered, activating the force field around his workstation and simultaneously turning on the holoprojector. A ghostly face of an olive-skinned, elderly bearded man with a hooked nose and deep-set eyes appeared on the opalescent wall. “Hello, Administrator Rami—”
“We have a problem with the monitoring station at the jump zone!” bellowed the administrator before his interlocutor finished the greeting formula. And instantly added, “Two hours ago we were notified of an increase in the activity of one of the gravitational wells—well number five, specifically—suggesting the arrival of a hyperspace vessel. A few moments later, the incoming data confirmed the jump had been made, and—”
His voice trailed away. Apparently, he needed to collect his thoughts. “And this is where things get weird. Five seconds later, we were alerted of another jump—in the opposite direction this time—and finally, the station went silent for good.”
“It doesn’t even ping?” Zachs began before he realized what he’d really heard.
Well number five led to a system still outside the Federation borders, so only the Corps’ probes could use it. However, none of them was able to perform the maneuver just described by the administrator. The equipment needed at least six minutes before it could jump again.
“Can you check what’s going on, Commodore?” Ramirez exploited Zachs’s hesitation. Each second increased communication cost. “Your ship is now halfway between Gamma and the jump zone. It’ll take you forty-eight hours to get there, five times less than any of our vessels.”
Commodore Zachs swore under his breath.
The monitoring station failure caused a serious problem for the colonists, not to mention the Corps’ base. All wormhole exits were located in a very narrow zone, only one-fourth of an astronomical unit from the central star’s photosphere, precisely in the plane of the Milky Way’s ecliptic. In short, if the average person could discern this anomaly, they would see a swarm of gigantic snakes, squirming behind the star, traveling across the boundless void of space. Appearances to the contrary, the Milky Way was not monolithic. Single stars, clusters, nebulae, all the elements of the whirl, which was a hundred and seventeen thousand light-years wide, swept through the void with various speeds, sometimes varying by thousands of clicks per second, so it was no wonder that the gravitational wells, which were connecting them, remained in motion too. It wasn’t unheard of for them to tear and disappear—when excessively stretched—although this was extremely rare. Only two such cases had occurred over the past two centuries. Once, a red giant intercepted a sweeping by anomaly, divided it, and created a “transfer point” as it was described in the unofficial reports of the scientific department. Researchers kept observing the system in question to see if further star motion would lead to the merging of the bisected hyperspace tunnel.
No monitoring station meant no departures from the system. The traffic on Valis 11 wasn’t the heaviest—only two of the six discovered anomalies led to the Federation territories—but the jump zone handled several, and sometimes as many as a dozen, freighters per day. Plus courier ships, teledrones, and personal vessels owned by people working in the Gamma and Kappa mines. Also, there were the Corps’ probes, which used the other four wells. Forty-eight hours of intra-systemic flight—FSS Walternest Rutheford needed as much to reach the jump zone—would save the miners three, or maybe even four, days of demurrage. The repair vessels were really slow, especially in comparison with a mighty warship.
Another reason why Commodore Zachs was willing to help the colonists was the fact that it must have been one of the returning probes that damaged the monitoring station. For nothing that didn’t belong to the Recon Corps emerged from the wells leading outside of the Federation borders.
“We’ll take care of it,” promised Zachs. He’d just noticed the administrator’s twitching eyelid. Ramirez had also started to sweat profoundly. “If the station failure is our fault, we’ll make all repairs at the Corps’ expense. If the corporation’s equipment has failed for some other reason, we’ll settle up as usual.”
Ramirez nodded quickly and terminated the connection without saying goodbye. Every second of this communication deprived his colony of valuable megawatts of energy. Zachs checked the time. They talked for almost a minute.
Miners won’t be happy to see another blackout, he thought.
“Good news, everyone …” he said, deactivating the force field. “Our flight will take a little longer than I initially thought. We’re going back to the jump zone to provide technical assistance to the colony. Before we reach the base, we’ll have the opportunity to practice the standard emergency and rescue procedures, which are a must when it comes to the final exam. You pass it, and you receive your basic access codes.”
“That’s odd …” Zachs muttered, staring at the streams of data flowing across his holoscreen. “Check it again,” he told the noncoms sitting at the circular workstations to his right. They were responsible for the communications and the sensors.
“Yes sir!” the answer came almost immediately. This was not the time or place for discussion, although both the commodore and his subordinates were well aware of the fact that re-scanning would bring nothing new.
FSS Walternest Rutheford reached the jump zone earlier than scheduled, after less than forty-two hours of flight. Getting so close to the star required force fields set at maximum power. The Minotaur-class cruiser had no problem with that. Just as any other large warship, its shield generators had immense reserves even when the main reactor had been working at full capacity for hours; and that was exactly the case, because Zachs wanted to get down there as soon as possible and look into things.
Unfortunately, the Corps didn’t have any recordings from the moment of the crash—for it must have been a crash, going by the slowly dispersing debris cloud—because at the time of the incident Gamma, the orbital station, and the seven transports which were now headed for the jump zone, were on the other side of the central star, much farther out than the cruiser. Thus, the sensor readings and previously intercepted quantum transmissions were the only evidence, which in Zachs’s opinion didn’t explain anything.
He repeatedly read a concise message, containing information about the activity of well number five. Then, there was an even shorter confirmation of the completed jump; and five seconds later, the sensors received another signal, indicating that the same object entered hyperspace. And that was it.
It just didn’t add up.
Firstly, nobody expected the return of any of the eighteen probes exploring the neighboring sectors of space on that particular day. Secondly, all the equipment located outside of the Federation borders sent a feedback signal when the check was carried out. Thirdly, only one black box, namely that of the destroyed monitoring station, was found at the jump zone, and the data that were downloaded from it didn’t help to explain the mysterious collision.
StarMin, which was exploiting the natural resources of Valis 11, was a typical profit-oriented corporation which was determined to economize at all hazards. Especially here, in the Inner Rim, where nobody had any regard for rules and people. In a civilized system, such an old monitoring station would have been scrapped long ago, but here it was expected to work for many years yet—if not for this unfortunate incident.
Of the three recorders prescribed by the rulebook, only one worked and it wasn’t that great. Someone had disconnected its video module, probably to minimize the antique’s CPU’s load. Zachs wasn’t particularly surprised when the information extracted from the black box by his technicians suggested that the meddling had taken place a few years ago. For corporations, quantum transmission was the most important; colonists could remotely control the extra-systemic traffic only in this way. The inability to determine the course of events in case of a potential accident was the least of anyone’s problems. Whoever heard of the station’s disintegration as the result of a collision with an object leaving hyperspace?
Commodore Zachs didn’t recall such an incident, and he’d been on active duty in the Outer Territories for several decades. But—as his deputy once had said—there’s a first time for everything. And as bad luck would have it, this unusual incident happened right here, right now.
However, Zachs established one thing beyond all doubt. The accident hadn’t come about due to a defective probe. Thus, the Corps wouldn’t have to indemnify the miners, but, on the contrary, they would receive a tidy sum from the administration of the colony for conducting a rescue operation and lending the equipment to replace the destroyed monitoring station until StarMin brought some junk to the Inner Rim.
Despite all, Zachs felt disquieted. He’d done the scanning and conducted a meticulous investigation, but he still didn’t know what destroyed the station. Available data and subsequent analyses of the dispersing debris showed that several dozen hours earlier, an object emerging from hyperspace had collided head-on with the monitoring station. And that was the strangest thing about this.
Everyone living on a planet would say there was nothing untoward about it: after all, the huge monitoring station—a cylinder with a diameter of two hundred and forty feet—floated in front of the gravitational well’s exit. It was as if someone put a graviplane right in front of a multilane tunnel of a transcontinental flyway. Something left hyperspace at just the wrong angle, didn’t slow down in time, didn’t make a turn when needed … Bullshit. In space, distances were so big that using planetary measures made no sense. The monitoring station floated in front of the gravitational well’s exit, true, but half a light-second away from it. One hundred and fifty thousand clicks away from the place where the spaceships left hyperspace. In addition, its thrusters always set it in such a position that it ruled out a collision course with any of the arriving vessels. And even if they’d failed this time, the odds that a one-thousand-foot-wide object spewed from a tunnel with a diameter of one to three thousand miles would bash into the monitoring station were worse than winning Galotto three times in a row. This shouldn’t have happened, unless …
Unless whatever came to Valis 11 was supposed to destroy the monitoring station!
The nature of the space warps indicated that a very small object had been involved, something with only one-eighth of the average probe’s mass.
What could it be? What object, so little, could come from outer space? Commodore Zachs wondered as his displays came to life again.
Just as he predicted, the data filling his holoscreens remained the same. Whatever the trespasser was, it vanished without a trace. Each located piece of the debris came from the monitoring station. Rutheford’s mass sensors couldn’t be wrong.
Slowly, Zachs stroked his smoothly shaved jaw. Had he just witnessed some large-scale illegal operation? He’d heard about private probes being sent to—yet unknown—parts of the Orion Arm. That way, the richest companies had tried to outrun competition in the resources race. Up until the civil war, they’d been able to legally acquire exploitation rights in systems explored by them; but then that policy underwent drastic changes and sixteen years ago, unexpectedly, the last gateway allowing for the big business to exploit the resources which were still waiting to be discovered had been closed. Zachs didn’t know what had brought about this move, but he sensed that corporations hadn’t given up so easily and were still doing their thing, albeit on the quiet.
Never before had he encountered illegal exploration, but in this instance he didn’t rule out the possibility that the monitoring station had been destroyed by people who’d wished to conceal their return to the Federation territory. Actually, with every passing moment he grew more confident that this was the case.
If my instincts are right, he thought, well number five will be activated again, and soon, and some corporation’s research ship will try to enter Valis 11 to immediately make another jump to another system, most likely uninhabited, but lying on this side of the border. Two, three such jumps, and the blockade-breaker vessel will dissolve into thin air—or rather vacuum—and the scientists and data onboard will go to the corporate headquarters, of course after changing spaceships a few times.
Zachs was sure of one thing: no space warps suggested that any of the five wells was activated after the incident; none of the van Vogt meters in the Gamma observatories, the Corps’ base, and his cruiser had noticed even the slightest twitch in the gravitational field.
However, the commodore’s theory had one serious flaw … The last alert transmitted by the station, the one about the return jump, which the trespasser made less than five seconds after the arrival.
Zachs was certain that even the Fleet didn’t have the technology which would enable so quick consecutive jumps, even though the military had best of the best working for them—and if anyone beat them to it, it was the mining industry research centers’ personnel. Which brought us back to the corporations.
Six minutes. That’s how long it took to return to hyperspace. Zachs couldn’t—and wouldn’t—believe that the eggheads being on the payroll of some corporation or other had made such a breakthrough. Reducing that time by half seemed real; in the briefing room, the commodore had heard people divagating on the subject of whether it was worth investing in technologies which would allow similar performance. But accelerating this process seventy times over?
No, that’s pure science fiction, he decided.
“Commodore Zachs!” A voice snapped him out of his reverie. It was Warrant Officer Honved, who oversaw the scanners on this watch. “The equipment registered increased activity of well number five.”
So, I had it right! Zachs was pleased with himself.
The bastards who’d destroyed the station were coming back just now, sure of their ground. If they’d made a thorough reconnaissance—and Zachs couldn’t imagine anyone who risked billions of credits flying blind in this situation—they must have known the freighter flight schedule and been aware of the fact that the colonists would need three standard days to do overhauls and regain full control of the gravitational wells. They couldn’t have foreseen, however, that one of the Corps’ cruisers would happen to be in close proximity to the jump zone.
“Red alert,” Zachs said calmly.
He knew it wouldn’t take much convincing to get his co-commander to agree that they should assure the malefactors a most hearty welcome. The crew could use some distraction, and, who knew, High Command might appreciate such a stance and maybe even reward them with something more than just a pat on the back.
“The space warp is getting bigger,” the warrant officer reported. “The readings suggest that it’s not just one object, but a few, and quite large at that.”
It was a disturbing piece of news.
“How large?” asked Zachs.
“At least Sword-class.” Honved was visibly upset.
Sword was the base model of the Fleet’s corvette. From bow to stern, it was five hundred and seventy feet long, not counting the propeller nozzles behind its stern ruff. It still wasn’t much compared to the full-size cruiser, but …
“If the readings keep increasing at this rate, we can expect craft the size of a third-generation destroyer.” He turned toward the military commander after he’d analyzed the latest data provided by the warrant officer.
“Or a big freighter,” Captain Attanasio piped in before falling heavily onto his chair.
Judging by the smell, he was in the mess hall when the alarm had gone off. Now, he didn’t ask any questions; he’d assessed the situation before he reached the bridge. However, he didn’t seem worried. He placed unwavering faith in the deterrent power of an almost twelve-hundred-foot-long warship, and he pinned even more of his hopes on the most advanced weapons systems. Rutheford’s firepower was comparable to that of some previous-generation battleships. Only a madman would want to engage in combat with such a might.
“Thirty seconds to the emerging of the first object from hyperspace!” Honved reported in accordance with regulations, although this information was on all displays.
“Okay, let’s rock it!” Zachs said, nodding toward the battle stations.
Attanasio looked at him in astonishment.
“You want to kick their ass right after they enter the system?”
“No,” replied Zachs. “But I don’t think a little show of force will hurt. These bastards destroyed the monitoring station to conceal their return to the Federation territory. If they don’t comply with our commands—”
“Yes, I know, three warning shots to the stomach, and then we start negotiations,” Attanasio muttered, rubbing his fingers over the virtual keyboard. He typed a few commands and suddenly froze. “And if they are—” He paused significantly, casting a nervous glance at the navigational commander.
Commodore Zachs winced. He’d pushed aside the thought of Aliens early on. The very idea was preposterous. Now, however—seconds before encountering the enemy—he felt a twinge of uncertainty. He realized that blockade breakers hadn’t had to return to the Federation territory by way of Valis 11.
They could have easily slipped through one of the neighboring dead and unguarded systems, where they would have disappeared without a trace. So why had they decided on a place with—besides a large mining colony—the significant Corps’ base?
“Ten seconds,” reported Honved, breaking the commodore’s train of thought. Attanasio managed to enter the last activation code before the final countdown began. “Three, two, one!”
Contrary to popular belief, there’s nothing spectacular about emerging from hyperspace. One moment you look at the bottomless, black void and the next you see a peacefully flying object against the background of distant stars. Where there was nothing a millionth—even a billionth—of a second ago, the space suddenly “swelled up” (that’s what it looked like, although the human eye was unable to see it) and when the bubble burst, a vessel leaving hyperspace appeared in its place, with no accompanying flashes of light, explosions, or discharges. Only supersensitive sensors were able to capture this phenomenon, but the subsequent holoimages didn’t enrapture the observer. The first showed vacuum, the second a bulge, and the third a newcomer to three-dimensional space in its full glory. In addition, sensors registered gravitational vibrations, which propagated wave—likely around the jump point. Their intensity depended on an object’s mass, but even the strongest could only be measured by van Vogt meters.
And this was exactly what happened now. However, Zachs, Attanasio, and the rest of the bridge crew held their breath as the tactical screen showed a bizarre object unlike any spacecraft built in the Federation shipyards.
Thanks to the drones spaced around the jump zone, Commodore Zachs could see several projections of the weird vessel. At first glance, it resembled an asteroid with a hyperdrive attached. Its hull was bulb-like, its plating—smooth, but ununiformly ridged—in the front part was covered by two rows of almost identical, oblate, concentric domes, and many smaller bubbles. Openwork structure topped off with a cube and several nozzles protruded from the narrower end. Objects number two and three, which appeared at one-second intervals, looked practically the same. Rutheford’s computers detected only minor differences in the plating and the distribution of the domes.
“Aliens?” Zachs and his crew whispered in unison.
The commodore shifted his gaze to Attanasio. The military commander sat stiffly upright, his mouth wide open, his finger within a hair’s breadth of touching the pale red button of the virtual keyboard.
“Wai—” Zachs began, but didn’t finish.
The alien flotilla leader opened fire.
From that distance, even a blind man would have hit a stationary target the size of a Federation cruiser. However, the warship, with its larboard to the gravitational wells’ exits, was protected by force fields and only this saved it from immediate destruction.
But it was just the beginning of the scuffle. The second alien craft was already taking a firing position, and the third was performing a turning maneuver.
Attanasio snapped out of his lethargy just before the computers darkened all the screens so that the people on the bridge would not be blinded by the glow of laser-blasted shields. His finger jabbed at the red button. FSS Walternest Rutheford wasn’t going to give up without a fight.
A swarm of rockets flitted toward the enemy, one volley after another fired automatically from all the rotary launchers, but the laser guns’ batteries were still silent. An almost forty-two-hour flight at full capacity depleted most of the energy reserves, so rebuilding its stocks to regain combat readiness required time. Unfortunately, the Rutheford’s crew did not have it. They couldn’t redirect energy from the shields either. The starboard deflectors had to work at full power to hold back the lethal radiation of the nearby star.
The Aliens destroyed most of the maneuvering missiles before they managed to reach their craft’s deflectors, but concentrating the fire on more than four hundred additional targets gave the cruiser crew a brief respite. Too short, however, for the co-commanders to develop a new strategy.
A few seconds later, flashes of explosions mantled the rounded bow of the attacking craft, which—unfortunately—did not bring the expected results. The deflective field of the alien craft had absorbed the energy of thirty-seven five-pound kinetic rods sped up to 0.01 of the speed of light, no problem whatsoever. The weapon designed to disarm the largest warships proved completely ineffective against the shields of a new, alien enemy.
The deflectors of the bizarre craft glowed only after Rutheford’s turbolaser bow batteries finally opened fire. However, even consecutive series of invisible to the human eye millisecond rays, which could have run right through fifty-foot-thick blocks of plasteel, failed in the face of alien technology, albeit after the last volley the force field flickered for a while, and that could mean that it was starting to give out.
Unfortunately, Rutheford’s crew did not live to see it. The second aggressor opened fire shortly before the midship turbolaser batteries joined battle. The cruiser shivered as if it had hit some invisible obstacle. Alarms sounded, but they were quickly silenced by the technicians’ hands.
“Shield Bb7 down!” reported a panicky petty officer, supervising the defense systems.
Section B7. A larboard stern. The central part of it. The bastards didn’t shoot in a haphazard way! They knew exactly where to concentrate their fire. And they succeeded. Rutheford’s lights and computer displays flickered, and then dimmed for a moment as the systems switched to emergency mode.
Zachs didn’t listen to the alerts, which were coming in from all directions. He already knew that he’d lost the battle—despite the fact that the stern battery was still in use, and rockets kept flying. The enemy took out their drive, cut off the midship and the bow from the main reactor. They lost ability to maneuver and could only dream of escape. The shields crumbled second by second and it was clear that they wouldn’t withstand such fire much longer, especially in the situation when the third alien craft was looking to enter into combat any moment now.
Another impact; longer and heavier this time. If it hadn’t been for the cocoon harnesses, the technicians would have fallen off their chairs.
“Ba7, Bb6, and Bb2 are gone. Bb4 at fifteen percent.”
The opponent couldn’t care less about Rutheford’s continued kinetic bombardment. The Aliens knew that even a hundred simultaneous hits wouldn’t deactivate their shields. So they focused on the turbolaser battery shields and the bared stern, which held twin reactors.
“Get the base on the fucking line! Right fucking now!” Commodore Zachs growled at Honved, all jittery.
FSS Walternest Rutheford, the pride of the Recon Corps, turned into a cloud of white-hot plasma before the warrant officer managed to carry out his command.