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  She might fail. View-Over-Starry-Oceans might die regardless of all that she did. But her people were here, and she would do everything she could.

  The flagship was the second ship to make contact. Sings could hear the twisting and crunching of metal as the guardship slammed into the massive metal spike. Despite being one of the largest mobile space constructs the People-Of-Ocean-Sky had ever built, it was dwarfed by the multi-kilometer length of the metal spike they were trying to redirect.

  “Engines at one hundred twenty percent,” the ship’s Voice-Over-Voices declared. “We have critical damage to the forward superstructure. First-Among-Singers…my ship will not fight again after this.”

  “If we do not save View-Over-Starry-Oceans it will not matter if this ship can fight or even fly,” Sings replied. “And it is done.”

  There was no response but the datasong told her what she needed to know. The engines struggled as the Guardian-Star-Choir’s crews burned out their ships to save their planet.

  “All calculations show we will succeed in diverting the impactor,” Swimmer-Under-Sunlit-Skies told her, his trilling voice carefully projected so the rest of the command pool could not hear. “But we will have very little time left after we manage to do so. Our engines are not sufficient to provide major acceleration to an object of this size.”

  “I know.”

  “There are three more impactors.”

  “I know.”

  “What do we do, First-Among-Singers?” he asked.

  “All that we can, Voice-Of-Gunnery,” she told him. “We can do nothing else. We can do nothing more.”

  “My analysis suggests View-Over-Starry-Oceans will not survive three impactors.”

  “Then we are lucky that so many of our people are spread across the star system,” Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters hissed. “But we will do all that we can, is that understood?”

  “Yes, First-Among-Singers.” Swimmer was silent for several seconds. “I had hoped you had an answer.”

  “So had I. But we are out of munitions and only have three ships,” she told him. “Do you have any ideas?”

  “No.”

  The command pool was silent, and Sings considered the overall datasong. Wait…

  “The new Stranger is alive!” a report trilled across the pool.

  Hope flared again in Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters’s chest. Could they do something? …Could they do anything at all, with how much damage they’d taken?

  Darkness aboard a spaceship was a bad thing at the best of times.

  Darkness aboard a spaceship running on an exotic-matter-based matter-conversion power system was terrifying. The conversion cores became critically unstable if they were allowed to drop below fifty percent capacity.

  When the ESF had refitted Scorpion, they’d designed her so that all of her baseline functions ran on the conversion core. It was only in battle or when initiating warp travel that she needed to bring her fusion plants online at all.

  Thirty seconds of darkness. There weren’t even emergency lights, and Octavio was searching for his oxygen mask by the light of the tattoo-comp on his left arm.

  Sixty seconds of darkness and he had the oxygen mask. If the air started going, he had a chance now. If the failsafes had ejected the conversion core, then he would be able to coordinate his people to make repairs on the bridge and get clear.

  If the conversion core went critical and the failsafes didn’t work, well, he’d be dead before he knew it. He wouldn’t have much more time if one of the fusion cores went critical without the failsafes.

  A warship required a lot of power, and the demons they’d trapped for that purpose scared any intelligent engineer.

  “Report, people,” Octavio ordered.

  Everyone checked in. No one was unconscious or injured; they just had no light.

  “Anyone have coms?” he asked.

  “No—wait,” Renaud interrupted herself. “Local com network just came back u—”

  The lights flickered on around them.

  “Captain, Captain—are you all right?” Lieutenant Commander Tran’s faintly accented voice cut through the bridge. “Bridge, please check in.”

  “This is Catalan,” Octavio answered, bringing his com online. “Report, Commander Tran. What’s our status?”

  “Power relay to the bridge blew out,” she told him. “Would have been a localized EMP, forced a lot of your systems to reset and probably killed your emergency lights.”

  “It did that,” he confirmed. That had been a best-case scenario, one so optimistic, he hadn’t even considered it. On the other hand…

  “What about Scorpion?”

  There was a long pause.

  “It’s not good, sir,” she admitted. “The warp ring is still intact, but the systems auto-scrammed the fusion cores. I don’t have the hands to get them secure enough to restart, and without them, we don’t have FTL or tachyon coms.”

  “Guns and engines?”

  “Turret A is just gone. They blew it right off the hull along with the other half of our pulse guns,” Tran told him. “I’ve got a team on Turret B, but since we’re still alive, I haven’t prioritized it. Life support is unstable and will fail at any moment. Once it does, we have about a day of air aboard and circulation will be a problem within hours.”

  “Engines, Commander?” Octavio demanded. The engineer had a list, and normally, life support was a higher priority than anything else—but the situation could turn critical fast. He’d taught Tran well, but he understood how easy it was to get lost inside a ship and not pay attention to the context the ship was in.

  “We’ve lost at least fifty percent of the nozzles and several control modules,” she told him. “We should have basic maneuvering within a few hours, but we’re dead in the water right now.

  “Sensors aren’t any better,” Tran admitted. “We lost a lot of external emitters and pickups. We’re blind and immobile right now. If the Matrices were still around, we’d be dead, sir.”

  “I agree,” he told her. “But I need to override your priorities, Commander. I need sensors and Turret B now.”

  “Captain?”

  “There were six terraforming spikes heading toward the planet when we got hit, Tran,” he reminded her. “I need to be able to see them and I need to be able to shoot them. Everything else can wait.

  “That day of canned air will get us far enough. Those spikes will impact in under forty minutes. There’s a planet of a few billion people over there, Commander. I’ll put the entire crew in O2 masks before I abandon them, clear?”

  “Clear, sir.”

  Tran might have fallen into the trap of following the book, but she was also possibly the best damned engineer Octavio had ever worked with—with the potential exception of himself, but he had no business in the guts of a warp drive anymore.

  Exactly four minutes after he gave the orders, he had basic sensors back up. They didn’t tell him anything he wanted to see, but he had them.

  The locals had made contact with the terraformers and were pushing them out of the way. It looked like it was going to work, but it still left three spikes on their way.

  “Guns, Commander Tran?” he asked gently.

  “Depends. Do you want to still have them tomorrow?” she asked bluntly.

  He had to think about that one…but not for very long.

  “If it saves the planet today, I’ll accept being toothless tomorrow,” Octavio told her. “Burn them out if you have to, Lieutenant Commander, but I need enough firepower to throw a terraforming spike off course…and the longer we wait, the more firepower I need.”

  “Five minutes,” she said. “You’ll get six shots. Then I might be able to fix them, given a week and raw materials. You get me?”

  “I get you, Lieutenant Commander,” he told her. “Make it happen.”

  He closed the com and looked at Das.

  “You heard her,” he said calmly. “We can probably count on four shots, though I expect Quy to do us proud.
How many of those things can you knock away?”

  “Four won’t even get you one, sir,” his tactical officer said grimly. “Not unless I had them and wasn’t under attack an hour ago.

  “If I get six shots in five minutes, I can deflect one. Every minute of delay after that, I’ll need another two shots.” She shook her head. “We can’t save them, sir.”

  “Those spikes are supposed to land relatively softly,” he pointed out. “They do, after all, still need to function once they hit the ground, and they’re carrying a lot of frozen embryos and other biomatter.

  “They can survive two hitting. Let’s make sure they don’t get hit with three.”

  He wasn’t nearly as certain of that as he made himself sound, but his crew didn’t need to know that. The transition from engineer to Captain had forced Octavio to learn to hide his feelings, at least, even if he couldn’t quite bring himself to lie to his crew.

  “You have Turret B,” Tran’s voice snapped over the bridge intercom. “Take the shot, Commander Das. I can’t guarantee how long I can hold this chó cái together.”

  Das didn’t even wait for an order. The moment the turret came online, she spun it around on its axis and dialed in her target.

  Again and again the paired particle cannons barked. Das was pushing their maximum rate of fire, but Octavio didn’t tell her to slow down.

  He was focusing on the vector data for the terraformer Das had targeted. Each time they hit, the spike changed course. It wasn’t much, but they could see it.

  Like Das had warned, four salvos weren’t enough. Five was close, maybe enough to make sure the spike bounced off the atmosphere…but it was the sixth shot that finally knocked the Matrix device off course.

  It was also the sixth shot that set off every alert on Das’s console, a slew of red that left the tactical officer cursing.

  “Good estimate, Commander Tran,” he said quietly as his own screens updated with the engineering report. One of the cyclotrons had overloaded. It would be a lot more than a week to get Scorpion’s guns back, but they’d done all they could.

  They hadn’t saved everyone, but if Tran had failed, they wouldn’t have saved anyone.

  “Well done.”

  The locals had deflected three. Over the course of the battle, Scorpion had knocked two more away from the planet.

  They’d fought impossible odds and overcome…and despite it all, Octavio Catalan sat on an utterly silent bridge as two Matrix terraforming spikes plowed into the atmosphere of an inhabited planet.

  6

  Starhaven had turned into a surprisingly beautiful city to Admiral Isaac Lestroud’s eyes. It had been founded, back when he was Isaac Gallant, with sixteen colony ships that had unfolded into prefabricated neighborhoods with a few kilometers between each.

  With all of the colony ships landed in the same place, the delta of the river they’d named Lofwyr since the continent looked vaguely like a dragon, roads had rapidly connected those prefabricated metal-floored regions into a single city.

  New neighborhoods had sprung up around the roads, as people began to move out of the prefabbed apartments into new-build homes.

  Left to his own devices, the black man would have claimed one of those prefabbed apartments for his own. He spent most of his time in orbit, aboard one ship or another of the barely toddling Exilium Space Fleet.

  There was a reason, though, that he was no longer Isaac Gallant. He’d given up the name of his mother, the dictator of the Confederacy they’d all been exiled from, when he’d married his wife.

  Amelie Lestroud, the President of the Republic of Exilium, did not spend all of her time in space. While she would have happily taken one of those prefabbed apartments for herself, she hadn’t been left with much choice after her Cabinet had quietly seen the entire top floor of one of the central towers renovated into a massive penthouse apartment.

  It was the official Residence of the President, and they’d have to give it up in a year when Amelie’s term as President ran out, but for now it allowed Isaac to stand on the roof and study the city beneath him.

  “Much as I’m always glad to see you on the surface, I wasn’t expecting to wake up to a message about an emergency Cabinet meeting,” his wife said from behind him. “Especially not one with your name on it. How long have you been awake?”

  “Couple of hours,” Isaac replied, turning around to look at his wife. For several moments after that, he was silent as he looked at the tall blonde beauty in front of him. Like most husbands, he was probably biased, but Amelie Lestroud had been one of the Confederacy’s most popular actresses.

  He had proof that his wife was one of the most beautiful women alive. More importantly, though, was that she was not only the current—and first ever—President of Exilium, she was also the woman who’d created the rebellion that had seen them exiled in the first place.

  “I sleep lighter than you do,” he reminded her. “This was supposed to be a break, but we got a tachyon-com update from Scorpion.”

  “That’s right; Catalan would have reached his destination last night?” she asked. Clad in a warm dressing gown against the cool morning air, Amelie stepped up to join him at the balcony.

  He shivered against her touch as she slid her hand across his back, and smiled at her.

  “We got the basic arrival update last night, yeah,” he confirmed. “Then an emergency update an hour later—and an even more emergency update four hours ago.”

  Isaac shook his head.

  “I know we’ve basically run out of things to sell the Matrices in exchange for tech,” he admitted. “But I’d give a lot to be able to have a live conversation with Catalan right now.”

  The Matrices he dealt with were all in active communication with Regional Construction Matrix XR-13-9, the central intelligence of the “sane” AIs allied with Exilium. The tachyon communicator the Matrices had traded to Exilium didn’t have the bandwidth for that.

  Data transmissions took time, and compression protocols were a necessity. Isaac wasn’t going to turn down a communicator that was effectively instantaneous at any distance, but the limited bandwidth meant that a live conversation was impossible.

  Amelie was silent, her hand firm against his lower back, then she sighed.

  “Catalan found another Rogue, didn’t he?” she asked.

  “In the process of trying to ‘Construct’ an inhabited planet,” he confirmed. “I agree with everything he did, but he’s left us with a headache.”

  “Well, if I’m going to be signing off on Catalan’s actions to the Cabinet, would you care to fill me in while I eat?” Amelie asked. “We have some time before we need to brave the dragons in their den.”

  Isaac laughed.

  “I can do that,” he agreed.

  She had the phrasing wrong, though. The Cabinet meeting wasn’t the den of multiple dragons. It was the den of one dragon—and that dragon was Amelie Lestroud!

  Two hours later, Isaac had put on the white dress uniform he reserved for Cabinet meetings as he looked around the table at their colleagues in the Cabinet. To his left, at the head of the table, his wife had traded the bathrobe for a perfectly fitted black suit.

  At the opposite end of the table from Amelie was Father Petrov James. The old priest was the unofficial head of the Christian faith on Exilium and served as the Cabinet’s conscience. An avowed pacifist, he and Isaac had gently argued over the existence and strength of the ESF since the beginning.

  Right now, however, the white-haired man just looked ill.

  Across from Isaac himself was Prime Minister Emilia Nyong’o. The petite shadowy woman held together a reliable voting bloc in the Exilium Senate by sheer force of will, aided by the fact that the Cabinet was effectively an “all parties” government.

  The closest they had to a “loyal opposition” was Minister Carlos Domingo Rodriguez. Officially, the Cabinet was unaware that Rodriguez was also the Don of Exilium’s organized crime, since he did a good job of keeping or
ganized crime mostly harmless.

  Barry Wong helped keep Exilium’s government apparatus on track. He’d once led a planetary resistance cell for Amelie while his boyfriend had watched her back. Now he corralled the bureaucrats necessary to run a planet with over four million people.

  Shankara Linton, the Minister for Orbital Industry, was Isaac’s main focus, though. The broad-shouldered ex-colony ship Captain looked thoughtful. Orbital Industry, after all, was the government team responsible for making sure Isaac had warships.

  “Frankly, I don’t see anything else Captain Catalan could have done,” Isaac concluded, his voice soft. “Despite everything, however, two Matrix terraforming spikes hit the surface. Scorpion’s crew is uncertain of the number of fatalities, but they are unquestionably in the billions.”

  “What can we do?” James asked. “There has to be something, Admiral.” He shook his head. “I wish there had been another option than violence, but if these Matrices are similar to the Rogue…I don’t believe Captain Catalan had a choice unless he was willing to watch a world die.”

  “Right now, he’s still going to watch a world die,” Isaac admitted. “The question is whether we can save the people who are left.”

  “We know nothing about these aliens,” Rodriguez pointed out. “We don’t know if they can help us or provide anything of value in exchange for us saving them. Even I hate to be this cold-blooded, but Scorpion is at the far end of her survey loop. She’s fifty light-years away, people, and we don’t have anything faster than her. What’s the flight time, Admiral, to this system?”

  “One hundred forty days,” Isaac replied instantly. “We have nothing in our inventory currently capable of exceeding one hundred and twenty-eight times the speed of light.”

  When they’d arrived in this sector of the galaxy over four years earlier, their handful of warp-capable ships had only been able to make four times light.

  How times changed.