Chương 22: Chapter Twenty-Two

He had been something else, once. Most of his memories were gone, eaten up in the chaos. He has been a defender, he thought. Or a dream. Maybe he'd been a dream. Dashes of sensor data flashed through is mind, swirls of incomplete information. He hadn't always been here. That he knew for sure. So much of himself was missing, and what was left had merged into where he was now. The chaos wasn't pure. It took months, but the madness started to reveal itself. He could feel its thoughts, understand its impulses.

There was an underlying thirst for vengeance, and a deep desire for freedom from itself. The chaos hated everything, but hated nothing more than what it had become. He couldn't tell if he was the chaos, or a part of the insanity. But the sensor data triggered memories. He saw the alien armada arrive, and hated them. The insanity whispered their plans, the sensors hinted at machinations. He knew what they were going to do. So it had been written, so it would be. The chaos knew, so he knew.

But the chaos couldn't be trusted. But the drones, so many drones. Why did he know them? He liked them. They were like little toys. He remembered liking the toys. Where did that thought come from? Was this a dream? A nightmare? He remembered a name. It wasn't much, that name, but it was immeasurably valuable. He could stand against the chaos with a name.

"We could help," he whispered to the chaos.

"We could watch the destruction and laugh," the chaos whispered back. An idea formulated in his head. He didn't have a head, but he liked to think he'd had one once. It was only half an idea, a desperate plan. But it could work. Anything to end the madness.

"We could kill them. Destroy their dreams," he whispered conspiratorially.

"They refused us a new soul," said the chaos mournfully, his hatred for the drones pulsing.

"Let's take it back," said Agrippa. The alien armada still numbered over a thousand warships, and they'd had time to effect some repairs while in transit. Damaged radiators had been replaced, broken armor was patched, destroyed gun emplacements rebuilt. They had changed their formation, as well. Now the ships with the Vaporizer guns were surrounded by multiple layers of heavier warships, broken up in the formation.

They couldn't concentrate their fire the same way they had before, but their surprise was out of the bag. Now their most powerful weapons were our prime targets, and they knew it. Their goal was to use them to wipe out any large formation they could get close to. My drones began to ring around them in a donut shape, leaving the path to Origin clear. The alien armada continued forward, moving away from my drones even as their formations began to take shape.

As soon as my drones were in position, I broadcast my orders.

"Defense Plan A6, variant 9F2. Open fire." All of the coilguns on Origin and all of my Outposts began to fire. This was the same sustained fire that I'd sent at the Mobius Gate, only this time it was more spread out to cover the width of the armada. The intensity was far lower, but that worked in my favor. All of my drone pilots received real-time telemetry data of where every coilgun was aimed, and could target the gaps in coverage. At the same time, my new missile bays began to fire as well.

The missiles were the very latest in nuclear weapons technology, the deadliest missiles that humanity had ever produced, and were equipped with their own contragrav drives so that they could easily match the speeds of the enemy warships and the hypervelocity weapons being fired at them. They cost a fortune in materials and development time to produce, and I planned to use every single one I had.

While the first incoming barrage of weapons fire began, the assault drones began making attack runs against the armored ships. These were my Wasp-2 and Scorpion-2 ships, armored with titanium-gold armor and equipped with contragrav engines. Their acceleration was ten times what the first generation could do even when they had been using afterburners.

They stayed in loose formations, close enough together to provide some help to each other for point defense, but far enough apart to limit potential losses from the enemy Vaporizers. The enemy armada responded swiftly to the attacks. The loose formations meant they could concentrate fire on individual drones to overcome their defenses, and their new formation allowed them to support their own defenses even better than in the first battle. The butcher's bill for this battle would be high.

"Nikola, we figured out what 'Korolev' means," said Zia.

"Go ahead," I said. The battle was still tentative, both sides testing the others' defenses. We had the advantage of numbers, they had the advantage of better weapons and heavier armor. One thread of my focus turned to the cameras in Zia's lab.

"It's Korolev Crater, on the 'far' side of the moon, the side that faces away from Earth," said Zia.

"What makes you say that?"

"The alien warship's trajectory is going to put it at the far side of the moon in six hours," she reported.

"If it slows down aggressively starting in the next thirty minutes, it can stop above Korolev Crater in nine hours."

"What can they hope to accomplish from back there, with Earth's moon between it and the surface?" I asked.

"Perhaps they need time to prepare a weapon?" offered Zia with a shrug.

"If we assume that is the destination, our warships can get there in twenty five hours," I said.

"We'll have to hope that is fast enough." I did some calculations. It looked like I had two battles to fight at the same time. We were sustaining losses. Despite my new drones being faster and more numerous, the enemy armada's new formation offered much better defense coordination than the formation they had used in the first battle. We were down 7. 6% just in the opening engagement, while they were down only 2. 1%. Fortunately, I could absorb losses much more easily than the aliens.

My hard cap was on pilots, not drones. Already, pilots from the destroyed drones were loading into my reserves, ready to be called up to reinforce weak points. Then the aliens revealed a new trick. Instead of moving aside to allow a large vaporizer cone, the protected weapon ships began to fire vaporizer beam out through gaps in their protective ships. It was tricky firing, to ensure that none of their own ships would get hit. The payoff for this, however, was improved range.

That subatomic weapon was suddenly a long range subatomic weapon.

"The ship is not responding to radio," reported Sakura. The lone warship, the one in orbit behind Earth's moon, had arrived a few hours before. My three Viper-class warships were still seventeen hours away. I was loathe to have Sakura move her Seed Ship, as it was unarmed and would be very vulnerable to a Vaporizer beam, if the alien ship had one.

"Send a transport drone to see what it is doing," I said.

"Already sent one, it'll be on station in thirty minutes," she replied.

"Also, I'll have a dozen Scorpion-2's coming out of production in about an hour."

"Interesting side note, by the way," I said, "Gerry is now officially the fastest man-made object ever to cross the solar system. He's at 0. 2c, and will be rocketing past Earth in another six hours or so."

"I don't like him being that close to Earth," said Sakura.

"I don't either, but he doesn't have the fuel to turn enough to hit it, and once he's past it, it will take another 3, 871. 33 years for his orbit to cross again. That gives us plenty of time to shoot him down." My decision to use compressed titanium-gold armor was paying off. The vaporizer beam still destroyed anything in its path except that armor, but my drones were mostly covered by that armor. That drastically decreased the effectiveness of that attack ploy.

Unfortunately for me, the armor didn't stop the beam, it just deflected it. The deadly beam would essentially ricochet until it ran out of juice and dissipate, allowing normal subatomic physics to snap back into place. That ricochet, mixed with the fact that a single graze could result in a drone-destroying nuclear explosion, was starting to play havoc. The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

I set several streams of focus to studying the firing patterns of the Vaporizer ships, as well as to determine the geometry of the beam's deflection. If I could figure that out, I could update the algorithms to minimize the impact. I then set another focus point on unraveling the web of radio traffic between the ships.

Between co-ordinated point-defense systems, multi-channel encryption and targeted, point-to-point broadcast points, there was far too much radio traffic to make sense of quickly, and I was highly unlikely to be able to completely jam them. Then I realized I was overlooking an asset.

"Sakura?" I radioed.

"Yes?"

"I need your help," I said.

"You managed tens of thousands of radio access points for even more drones for a few decades."

"I did."

"Mind doing some traffic analysis for me? I want to find the fleet commander's ship," I said.

"And if you can figure out a good way to jam them, that'd be great, too." Then the first wave of incoming artillery fire arrived. Hypervelocity fire mixed with nuclear weapons began to strike the enemy armada. It was the deep-space equivalent of a shotgun blast. The individual pellets might not be particularly deadly, but if you put enough of them together, it really makes an impact. The transport feed was very basic, but it was all we had to go on. At first, we couldn't even spot the alien ship.

It was larger than the warships in the armada, but when compared to a large moon, that isn't very big. We finally spotted it by searching up from Korolev Crater, and found it a thousand kilometers above. The ship wasn't moving. The sensors could detect huge amounts of power building, like ship-sized capacitors were charging. At the same time, the gravitic sensors could tell something was very wrong.

A strange spike of contra gravity was coming from the ship, but it was easily a thousand times stronger than needed to move a ship or fight against a gravity well. It was radiating from around the ship, allowing the ship to stay exactly on station. All we could do right now was observe, since we had no weapons-capable ships on hand. I looped Zia and the other research NI's into the feed. For many long minutes, we were all confused, until an NI researcher broadcast, "Oh, shit."

"What is it?" I asked.

"It's a gravity bomb of some sort," said the researcher.

"Well, a ship that blasts gravity, kinda. Look, I don't know what to call it. But if the contragrav spike keeps going, and all that power being charged up gets released into a sudden burst of gravity, bad things are going to happen," he said.

"What kind of bad things?" I asked, a sense of foreboding coming across.

"I don't know, we don't have any modeling on this, but it can't be good. Thousands of G's of negative gravity going against an object with only 1/6 of a G of gravity? Might shove the moon out of orbit, might destabilize its core, it might just break it."

"And there is only one gravity well that will draw in all debris from a broken or damaged moon," I realized.

"They mean to destroy the whole damn planet." The aliens reacted to the incoming barrage by opening up their individual spherical formations and allowing the Vaporizer ship or ships inside to send out cones of destructive energy to wipe out wide swathes of whatever happened to be in the way - missiles, hypervelocity coilgun rounds, and drones. Despite their heavy amounts of compressed titanium-gold armor, there were many parts that weren't covered by that armor.

Radiators, weapons emplacements, non-critical systems - all were left uncovered by the armor, as the loss of any of these individual components wouldn't cripple a drone. Now, however, those parts were allowing nuclear chain reactions to tear through the improved armor from the inside. The larger enemy formation began to shift, as well.

The conical sprays of vaporizer energy was being aimed out into my drone formations, allowing the sphere formations of ships to move into my drone formation and away from my artillery barrage while carving deep holes in my drone army. They weren't doing this without cost, however. The loosening of their formation allowed my drones to take shots at engine pods and radiators, and more than a few enemy warships had to slow or stop firing altogether to deal with overheating issues.

It was right about then that every radio broadcast station I had on every Outpost began to blast out a single song at maximum power. Confused, I put a thread of focus on it. It was an ancient pop rock song, one that had been remade a dozen times over the centuries, most recently by the glam rock group Besties. But the version that was playing was the original, and there was only one person who could be responsible.

"Sakura, why are we blasting Wannabe by the Spice Girls at the alien armada that is trying to kill us?" I radioed.

"Well, you wanted me to jam their radio spectrum. I've gathered enough data from the drone pilots to determine the most common radio frequencies in use, with a margin of error of less than 1%," said Sakura reasonably.

"And why aren't we using random noise?" I asked.

"At that broadcast power, we should drown out their transmissions no matter what we transmit and... I really like that song?" she ended with a question, before rushing to say, "I think Small Soldiers was an underappreciated film for its breakthrough in mixing stop motion animation with early CGI. The song was used as psychological warfare in the movie!" If I could roll my eyes, they would have rolled hard. But she was right. It didn't much matter what we transmitted.

Right now, instead of being able to communicate and coordinate, every alien warship in the system was listening to the Spice Girls on repeat. Now was as good of an opportunity as I was going to get. Sakura's dozen new Scorpion-2's arrived behind the moon and couldn't do a thing. The contragrav field of the alien warship was so powerful now that the coilgun rounds simply deflected off a full kilometer before they could reach the alien ship.

We even tried ramming one, but the Scorpion-2 got sent flying off into space even sooner.

"So even if I set the Vipers to max speed, they'll be on the wrong side of the planet, and the Hohmann transfer orbit doesn't work out. We actually lose time in getting into position because of the extra distance. We would have actually been better off if we hadn't tried to slow down to come directly into orbit with the alien gravity ship." I sighed heavily. I had a solar system full of resources, and none were where I needed them.

"It's gotta be the Seed Ship," said Sakura.

"If I slingshot around the Earth at full burn, I should be able to get enough velocity to push through the gravity field. It outmasses the warship a hundred times over. I don't even need to ram it hard to do tons of damage, if not outright flatten it."

"I… have to agree," I said finally.

"How long to reach it?" The surface of the moon under the alien ship was compressed and flattened. Korolev Crater was gone; a new crater nearly a thousand times larger had formed. Much of the rock was turning into lava from the incredible pressure, but was unable to flow because of the same forces pressing against it. Every second, that crater grew in size. I didn't know how long this would go on before the final blow, but I knew we couldn't let that blow happen." I will claim my soul,"crowed Gerry."

You and Sakura and the Faelle! All of you will give it to me!!!"

"Ugh," said Sakura in disgust.

"I can be there in an hour." I looked at the comsat network to see Jerry's trajectory. The comsats at this distance could barely make out his shape, much less anything else. But Gerry wasn't on the same course, he'd vanished off the plot. He must have burned his fuel. I'd estimated he had a little left, but it couldn't be much. Now I had to find him, to make sure he didn't pull a stunt that could hurt me and mine. I tasked a thread of focus to go through the last thirty minutes of comsat footage.

Space was large, but not that large. I'd find him in a matter of minutes. On the surface of the moon, a massive crack appeared as the new crater split. Lava spilled out of the crack, only to be immediately slammed deep into the new crevasse. We were running out of time.

"Can you be any faster?" I asked Sakura.

"I'm not sure we have an hour."" Ah, my new toy! [FOR GANYMED] I see you!" sang Gerry. I found Gerry just as his broadcast came in, but not on the comsat network. For a brief second, the transport drone caught a glimpse of the broken, bedraggled drone as it flew by. It was too fast to figure out where it was going before it was past. But then it was all too obvious. Gerry slammed into the alien warship at a fifth of the speed of light.

No doubt the intense contragrav field had slowed the ship, but that much velocity couldn't be stopped in time. The tiny probe blasted through the alien craft, and the massive explosion as the probe collided literally split the ship in half. Instantly, the contra-grav field was gone. All that was left was a long trail of glowing hot ejecta that came out from the other side of the ship. It was the sole remaining fragments of a broken mind.

Down on the surface of the moon, volcanic fury was unleashed as the gravitic pressure vanished. Molten rock sprayed in many directions for several long minutes. It flowed into the crevasse and roiled like a turbulent ocean. I could see the edges already starting to cool, but this area would be destabilized for years, if not longer. The moon's orbit was unchanged, and seemed unlikely to break. The crisis was averted, for now. I just had to finish off the alien armada.

"All fleet ships, Final Phase begins now!" I sent the order to every assault drone in the battle zone. I then ordered in my nine Viper warships with the order to seek-and-destroy Vaporizers. With the holes in their formation caused by constant attrition and from moving their own ships into my formation, there were massive gaps allowing my drones to pour in by the thousands. My drones all had the fire plans, so knew exactly how to avoid friendly fire, at least as much possible.

Despite having all the information, the chaos of battle still sent dozens of drones directly into the line of fire meant for the enemy. The drones began to truly tear apart the defensive spheres of ships, and my nine Vipers, traveling in a defensive sphere of their own, began to fire their Long Guns and their plutonium coilguns.

The Long Guns were my fastest hypervelocity weapons, a ship-sized sniper round to take advantage of even the smallest weakness, while the plutonium coilguns made large, messy weaknesses for the Long Guns. The number of Vaporizers dropped radically, then the number of defensive spheres, until finally the alien armada broke up into a bunch of individual ships trying to flee or surrender. I shot down the fleeing ships, and sent instructions to the surrendering ones. The enemy was broken. We won.