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  2

  The First-Among-Singers of the Guardian-Star-Choir froze as the datasong updated. It was a prey reaction, one her race had never quite lost. Even in the shallows of the ocean, after all, technology might not always be enough to save you from the monsters of the dark water.

  “The new Stranger is using different technology,” her Voice-Of-Gunnery told her, breaking the spell. “But not completely different. They are using the same plasma burst technology as the first Strangers. Slight differences, but not significant.”

  The datasong changed. There was no emotion in the flow of information, and yet Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters could have sworn there was a new eagerness. That might just have been her, since the strange ship had given her something she hadn’t had in many turnings: hope.

  “The Stranger ships coming after us have turned.”

  They’d destroyed two of her guardships with missiles, and Sings was convinced they were toying with her people. Nothing she had seen suggested that they couldn’t have simply obliterated her ships where they stood in a single blow.

  Now they turned back toward the new ship. It was bigger than the small ships engaging her crews—but those were smaller than the ship it had already destroyed. It was engaging a second midsized ship as she watched, and the datasong told her that the new ship’s plasma weapons were blazing into the strange spikes heading toward her world.

  “They are no longer focusing on us,” Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters noted, letting her thoughts join the datasong as she trilled. “Let them be distracted. Orders to the guardships: all vessels are to stand by to open fire.”

  “Our hit chance is no higher than it was before,” her Voice-Of-Gunnery warned her. “They are not that distracted.”

  “Indeed. But now there is no risk of them destroying the lasers before they ignite. We will have the advantage of surprise.”

  Unspoken was that they would have had the advantage of surprise before. She’d been waiting to make that single attack she expected to work count, prepared to sacrifice half or more of her ships just to make certain that their first volley of lasers did the most damage.

  Now…now they weren’t going to die instantly after the first strike and the single-shot munitions spilled out of her guardships. Each of the immense vessels deployed twenty weapons, and Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters trilled a wordless command, indicating her target in the datasong.

  One hundred and twenty fifty-megaton fusion warheads ignited in the night, each funneling over sixty percent of their destructive power into three carefully designed lasing units.

  At over a dozen radiation-seconds against a target moving at ten percent of the speed of radiation, the Guardian-Star-Choir’s chance of hitting was pathetic…but they flung three hundred and sixty insanely powerful lasers across space.

  It would take over twenty seconds for Sings to know if she’d had any effect at all, but it didn’t matter. More of the Strangers had already been destroyed than she’d dared to hope. Her people might not turn the tide of this fight—but she would be lost in dark waters before she’d let the battle for her world pass without them at least engaging the enemy!

  “Deploy the next wave,” she ordered. “Maintain firing sequence until we’re out of targets or munitions.”

  Or ships. Despite the intervention of the new Stranger, the First-Among-Singers knew that was still the most likely end.

  A dozen flashing red lights appeared on Octavio’s screens as Scorpion lurched under fire from the Matrix combat unit’s gamma ray lasers. The main display in front of him was showing the warp cruiser’s position in the middle of the enemy terraformer spikes, but the screens on his own command chair were showing the status of the ship.

  “That would have killed us a year ago,” Renaud said aloud. “Graser hit to the core hull. We’ve got heat dissipation issues throughout and we’ve lost a pulse-gun battery. Main guns are still online.”

  “Then kill that bastard for me,” Octavio ordered. He could read the screens as well as Renaud could. They’d been lucky. There hadn’t been time or resources to fully re-armor Scorpion when she’d been refitted before this mission, but specific critical sections of her hull were reinforced with the Matrices’ energy-absorbing ceramics.

  The gamma ray laser had hit one of those, which had saved his ship. That wasn’t going to save her from the next hit, though, and the recon and security node carried three grasers. Scorpion rolled sideways as he watched, letting a salvo of gamma ray beams flash past her—and hit the terraformer spike she’d been shooting at.

  “Well, thank you friend,” Renaud said with fake cheerfulness. “That spike is finally off course enough to miss the planet.”

  It was taking a lot more firepower to push the terraforming spikes to where they wouldn’t hit the planet than Octavio liked. If their guns weren’t enough…the deadly math came back into play.

  “Wait…what the hell?” Das demanded.

  “Das?” Octavio asked.

  “One of the recon units headed back our way just…disappeared. Refining imagery,” she snapped.

  A replay of the critical seconds appeared on a subsection of the screen, as hundreds of X-ray lasers flashed into existence around the squadron of recon units. The hit percentage was barely over one percent—but that still saw the one recon unit hit by five immensely powerful laser beams.

  And disintegrate.

  “Focus on the ship shooting at us, Das,” Octavio ordered. His crew was good…but this was the first battle for all too many of them.

  And the first time their Captain had been in command. “Get me a damn shot. XO—what am I looking at?!”

  The Captain was controlling his fear and keeping his people in line, but the engineer in him needed to know more.

  “Bomb-pumped X-ray lasers, probably with disposable focusing optics,” she reported. “The local ships that we’ve all been ignoring dumped a bunch of them into space, pointed them at the recon nodes and then detonated them all at once.”

  “Let’s not underestimate those guys,” the Captain said drily. Depending on the scale of the warhead, that could be terrifying. The weapon was crude, but its effectiveness was clear. “I’m not sure we could build a bomb-pumped laser that could hit at that distance.”

  “Well, given that they hit with five out of three hundred and sixty beams, I’m not sure they can either,” Renaud pointed out.

  “Got him,” Das snapped, and Octavio’s attention came back to the immediate fight as three of four ion packets hammered into the tactical officer’s target.

  It was the second time Das had landed hits with the particle guns, and the recon and security node was feeling it. That hit had knocked two of her grasers off-line, but the Matrix ship didn’t retreat.

  So far as Octavio could tell, neither their robotic enemies nor their robotic allies really considered the option for their lesser units. Even the recon units were sentient, if dumb, but all of them could be replaced so long as there was a construction Matrix to build more.

  Self-aware and intelligent or not, they were disturbingly willing to die for their mission.

  “We’re not doing anything to the terraformers with the pulse guns,” Octavio realized aloud, the numbers for their key mission still running over his screen. “Das, bring them to bear. Burn him out.”

  There wasn’t a chance. As soon as he’d issued his orders, Scorpion’s helm officer flipped them around another burst of graser and plasma fire and lined the turrets up perfectly.

  Four ion packets slammed directly into one of the gouges Das’s previous shots had opened and Scorpion was suddenly alone with the terraforming spikes.

  “We still have seven recon units heading our way from where they were chasing the locals,” Renaud reported calmly. “The locals took a second shot and it looks like they hurt a recon node, but they’re all still there.”

  “I’m not really worried about them,” Octavio admitted. His focus now was on the asteroids, and he’d seen what he was afraid of.
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br />   There were two combat platforms guarding the Sub-Regional Construction Matrix out there…and they’d both just lit off their drives and were heading toward Scorpion at ten percent of lightspeed.

  “GUARDIAN PROTOCOL ACTIVATED. MULTIPLE TARGETS ENGAGED. ALL TARGETS DESTROYED.”

  The sudden interruption of the mechanical voice threw everyone on Scorpion’s bridge mentally off-balance. It was easy to forget that the warship carried an AI, if one vastly less capable than their Matrix opponents.

  That AI mostly enhanced human actions, providing data needed for decision-making and taking care of vast amounts of clerical minutiae behind the scenes. It was allowed to do one thing without authorization and one thing only.

  That was the Guardian Protocol. Designed by the absolute paranoids who’d put together the warships of the old Terran Confederacy, it recognized that no human could react in the time between detecting a high-c-fractional attack and the impact.

  So, the AI took full control—and with the upgraded rapid-fire pulse guns Scorpion now carried, even the Matrices’ point nine five c missiles should be easily handled.

  “System reports forty missiles inbound from the recon nodes,” Das reported, her voice soft with awe. “All destroyed. Gods, sir—six of their missiles overwhelmed Dante’s defenses in Exilium.”

  A battlecruiser like Dante was much bigger than Scorpion, but these same missiles had wrecked the bigger ship in humanity’s first engagement with a Matrix recon node. The Matrices had brought the same ships to the game.

  The Exilium Space Fleet hadn’t. Octavio had gone through the schematics and upgrades with an engineer’s eye. He knew how much more powerful his ship was—and he still hadn’t expected the odds to have been evened up this much.

  A second Guardian Protocol announcement didn’t shock him as badly as the first, and he turned a questioning eye on Das.

  “They didn’t get their timing right, sir,” Das reported. “Combat platforms fired late. They threw another sixty missiles at us.”

  All destroyed. If it wasn’t for the blinking damage icons on his displays, Octavio would be feeling a moment of invulnerability.

  There was also the fact that the Guardian Protocol was taking full control of his pulse guns as well as his defensive lasers. As long as the Matrices kept firing missiles at him, he couldn’t do anything about the terraforming spikes.

  “Ignore the combat platforms for now,” he ordered. “Take us towards the recon squadron. We’ll pin them against the locals and remove them from the equation.”

  So long as the recon nodes were shooting at him, they weren’t shooting at the locals—and while a fourth blast of lasers marked the death of a second recon node as he gave the order, the locals couldn’t stop the missiles.

  “What about the combat platforms, sir?” Renaud asked. “So long as they’re in-system, we’re going to have a hell of a time stopping the terraformers.”

  Seven of the massive spikes would be able to completely rebuild the planet’s atmosphere and biosphere, creating the perfectly standard “Constructed Worlds” the Matrices left behind them—worlds like Exilium itself.

  Their landing, however, would destroy the existing atmosphere and biosphere on the planet in this system. Octavio had calculated the numbers and they were burned into his brain. He couldn’t let that happen.

  But each of those combat platforms had thirty missile launchers and six gamma ray lasers. Scorpion could apparently handle the missiles, and her particle cannons came close to matching the grasers for range…but those grasers had at least four or five times the impact energy, and the combat platforms were far more heavily armored than the recon and security nodes.

  Octavio wasn’t prepared to watch a world die. Despite having charged into battle to save the planet, though, he still didn’t know how he was going to stop the terraformers. Not with two Matrix combat platforms heading his way.

  Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters listened to the datasong of her ships firing again, a fifth salvo of their mighty lasers, and admitted that she was surprised. Five times, they’d flung fire into the dark waters of the void and converted it into coherent radiation.

  Despite the astronomical range, they’d hit each time. The first time, with enough firepower to destroy one of the terrifyingly powerful Stranger ships in a single salvo!

  They hadn’t been so lucky since, but her fleet had now killed three of their eight opponents. If she’d been able to bring the Star-Choir into the intended effective range of the beams, she’d have torn them apart.

  Without the new Stranger, however, she’d have been forced to fire far beyond that range to get any shots off at all. They were firing from far beyond any reasonable range now, and the enemy was maneuvering more effectively than they had in the beginning, but she was filling the void with so much energy, they couldn’t entirely dodge.

  “Target three has stopped moving,” her Voice-Of-Gunnery reported. “Targets four and six have taken hits but appear fully functional. Strangers have not responded to our fire yet.”

  That was terrifying on its own. What monster of the deep was the small white ship that had appeared out of nowhere? How powerful was it that the Strangers were calmly accepting the loss of multiple ships to engage it?

  The destruction of the two larger vessels escorting the incoming metal spikes suggested that the new Stranger was powerful indeed—but the strange void ship wasn’t firing on the enemy. She was now charging toward them, her engines understandable in principle at least to Sings.

  “Target half the next salvo on target three,” she ordered. “Split the rest between four and six. Be careful to keep the new Stranger out of the void beyond your targets.”

  They were going to miss with over three hundred X-ray beams. She didn’t want to hit their new…friend?

  The survival of the People-Of-Ocean-Sky might depend on this strange ship. Certainly, Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters did not expect her people to fare well against the two vast warships descending from the outer system now.

  “What if the new Stranger is also a threat?” her flagship’s Voice-Over-Voices asked. “What if we are simply watching two dark-water predators fighting over the soft prey?”

  “The new Stranger was trying to deflect the spikes,” Sings noted. “Even if they are an enemy, they do not seek to destroy us utterly.” She flashed her fangs. “I will take the slaver over the monster of the deep, if that is my choice.

  “But I will hope for a friend-of-different-waters. Because they are the only reason we have hope.”

  3

  The Matrices were far faster than Scorpion and closed most of the distance between the cruiser and her enemies.

  Unfortunately for their targeting, Octavio’s ship was dramatically more maneuverable than their reactionless engines. They could go from zero to ten percent of lightspeed in seconds—a violation of the laws of physics as Octavio knew them that was just plain rude— but their vector was relatively fixed after that.

  Scorpion’s engines could fling her all over the sky. It would take her time to get up to anything close to the Matrices’ velocity, but she was a lot harder to hit.

  To Octavio’s surprise, Scorpion hadn’t taken a single hit while closing the range. The enemy’s barely-sub-c missiles had hit the shield of his automated Guardian Protocols and been obliterated.

  “Make sure we have the effectiveness numbers on the new Guardian Protocols loaded up to send home once we have the power,” he ordered. Tachyon coms were an energy hog, almost as bad as the warp drive itself. “And everything we’ve got on their missiles. I think we’ve seen more of the things fired today than the ESF has to date.”

  “I thought we had their full specifications?” Renaud asked. Their allied Matrices had provided Exilium with a lot of data on their weapons. Usually redacted to make it harder for the humans to duplicate the systems, but with enough detail on performance to fight against them.

  “Live-performance records are always more accurate than theoretical capabi
lities,” he pointed out. He was a working engineer, after all. He was familiar with the difference between theory and practice.

  “Do the same on the performance of the particle cannons,” he continued, studying the oncoming flotilla of recon ships. They’d increased their range from the locals, which meant there were still five of the Rogues left. All of them were at least lightly damaged, but one recon unit had savaged the entire original Exilium Space Fleet.

  “And make sure there’s an Omega Protocol set up for the AI to transmit everything we’ve seen home via tachyon com,” he added. “Admiral Lestroud needs to know what’s going on out here.”

  “Graser range in thirty seconds, sir,” Das reported. “Particle-cannon range thirty-eight after that.”

  “I’ll set up the Omega signal,” Renaud promised. “Damage Control teams are on standby.” Her eyes were also riveted on the main screen. “What do we do now, sir?”

  There were no fancy maneuvers left to this part of the fight. They’d keep dodging, but at under a million kilometers, this was now a slugging match. So long as his ship survived the hits she took, however, Octavio knew his engineers. He’d trained half of the officers himself.

  They could fix anything the Matrices did to his ship, so long as he still had a ship.

  “Lieutenant Daniel.” The helm officer barely even spared a glance to acknowledge Octavio’s address. Yonina Daniel was dancing her starship all across the sky, shifting the cruiser’s angle and acceleration by small amounts every second. It wasn’t enough to slow them down, but it was enough to increase their chance of living through this.

  “Once we’re in range, we don’t need to worry about continuing to close,” Octavio told her. “Put us everywhere their beams aren’t—but make sure Das gets her line of fire. All models say a solid hit from all four guns will end one of the ‘little guys.’ Let’s test it.”

  He’d barely finished speaking before his screen filled with lines of light, the AI calmly drawing in the otherwise-invisible beams of the Matrix grasers. Each of the recon units only carried one beam…but it wouldn’t take more than one lucky hit to finish Scorpion off.