Nemesis (68 page)

‘People of the home system, I have some incredible news!’ said Yunus. ‘As a few of you know, I have been away on a secret mission to investigate a possible first-contact event. I am glad to say that it has resulted in the most wonderful success.’

A barrage of supporting appendices and data files came with the message. They started unfolding all over River’s displays.

‘We have found
life
in the universe,’ said Yunus, ‘and it is Truist. It comes in the form of a benign symbiont. It is a gift from God and it has been searching the galaxy for mankind. We are now ready to receive that gift and be granted its incredible bounty.’

Yunus spread his hands as if to embrace the world.

‘The symbiont offers increased lifespan to all, not only rich Colonials. It offers new technology for spaceflight and terraforming. And, most importantly, it offers peace, harmony and plenty for all mankind.’ He smiled beatifically. ‘There will be rewarding jobs for everyone, my friends, new homes offworld and new lives. Astonishing though it sounds, our age of need and worry is at an end.’

River stared at the message in outright shock. He knew that Yunus had been part of the mission to Tiwanaku, but what the hell was he playing at now?

‘Sir,’ said Carol. ‘What is this?’

As he got over his astonishment, River noticed the way the ships were tearing sunwards and splitting their formation. They didn’t look all that friendly.

‘Just as was true in the days of the High Church,’ said Yunus, ‘those who join with God first will benefit most. There is absolutely no time to waste. Our arrival is at hand. Prepare to receive your Lord! Let those of the greatest faith be the first among the flock to receive the Lord’s gift!’

River shook off his stunned disbelief and picked a target.

‘We’re converging with that ship,’ he said. ‘Lay in an intercept course.’

He sent them a vector for the closest nestship. His tactical SAP gave a higher than ninety per cent probability that it was headed for Mars.

‘Grease the rails!’ he ordered. ‘Warping in five.’

River hit the drive and warp pressed him into his couch. As he flew, he sent a warning to the alien vessel.

‘Unidentified vessels, this is the IPS
Griffin
. You are to cease your advance until it has been approved by IPSO Fleet Command. I repeat, you will cease your advance otherwise we will be forced to fire.’

At this distance, it would be over ninety minutes before his message reached the mysterious nestships, but it was clear that these visitors didn’t intend to slow. If anything, they were speeding up – burning a prodigious amount of antimatter in an attempt to penetrate deep in-system without losing too much velocity. And all the while, Yunus’s sermon kept coming.

‘No hesitation is necessary!’ he said. ‘No attempt should be made to impede God’s gift. As in the days of the true prophet Sanchez, attempts to obstruct holy destiny will be considered acts of sin.’

Around the time River’s warning was due to hit the closest nestship, about a quarter of the drones flying escort with it shifted course to bear down on him. He watched them come and deployed defensive munitions as late as he dared, giving his enemy as little warning as he could. The drones intercepted at full speed and exploded in bursts of sizzling plasma.

In an instant, the
Griffin
tore through the overlapping sheets of fire. The nestship didn’t appear to care about his approach. It pressed onwards, its warp field surging.

‘Ara, give me a full tactical map,’ said River. ‘Deep diagnostics on all ship profiles.’

He filtered it using the Rumfoord League’s overlay code and was relieved to see League ships converging on the enemy from everywhere the arrival flash had so far reached. Like him, the other captains with foreknowledge of the attack had decided to pull out all the stops immediately and get on with rebuffing the assault. It made sense. Letting a few drones near Earth might have been permissible. Letting a nestship get close was suicide.

‘The invaders have changed course,’ said Ara, throwing him a window. ‘They’re staying above the ecliptic.’ No doubt they planned to angle down on the in-system worlds while avoiding major traffic and defences. ‘Defences posted at Jupiter’s L3 are moving to intervene,’ she added.

The orbit of Jupiter marked the notional boundary between in-system and out-system space. Beyond Jupiter, the gaps between planets were huge. Space was relatively clean and respectable sub-light velocities could still be achieved. Within the arc of Jupiter’s motion, planets and populations tended to be clustered dangerously close together. Ships could do little more than crawl. And a single starship-scale screw-up got people killed in large numbers. There was a reason the Fleet kept most of its action out at Triton.

‘There’s no way we’re letting those fuckers any deeper than five AU,’ River snarled.

He knew the rest of Earth’s guardian fleet would share that sentiment. As they watched, the Jupiter-band’s prodigious defences snapped into action. Ponderous sub-light suntap barges fired giga-scaled g-rays in a scanning pattern, creating moving fans of instant death entire light-minutes wide. The nestships veered to avoid the onslaught, dropping speed as they approached.

‘Looks like the invaders are realigning for a joint push,’ said Ara.

‘Then we’ve got them,’ said River.

Like wolves seizing on wounded buffalo, Fleet ships from all over the system took the opportunity to attack. They surrounded the Nem ships and poured on munitions. Battle was well and truly joined.

The nestships’ drone cloud thinned rapidly but they made up for it with g-ray batteries. By the time the
Griffin
caught up with the action, the fight had become an energy battle glowing like the mother of all Christmases and wreathed in scarves of tortured plasma. Admiralty strategic data bursts started popping up on River’s display as Fleet High Command struggled to instil order into the mob of ships.

‘Release drone salvos two through nine,’ said River. ‘Carol, go to full guidance assist.’

‘Captain, hold!’ said Ara. ‘The nestships are dumping disrupters.’

River zoomed his view to watch. The Nems weren’t just dumping a few. They were dumping
thousands
. Long streams of disrupter buoys were jetting out of the Fecund hulks, weaving between the attacking ships at full tilt.

‘Reversing thrust,’ said River.

It wasn’t easy. Other ships had already arrived behind them. They didn’t have a clear exit vector, and so many warp arrivals had made an ungodly mess of the local curvon flow. All at once, the disrupters activated, locking the battle in place. No one was going anywhere.

‘Fuck!’ said River. ‘Still, this hurts them more than it does us. There’s no way they can reach the major worlds now. Concentrate on the attack. We’ll finish these bastards off.’

As the words left his mouth, a radiation blast-wave hit them from behind. Warning klaxons filled the cabin.

‘What the hell was
that
? Ara, status report.’

‘Sensors down to seventy-one per cent, sir. It’s a new arrival burst, just like the other one. This time near Neptune. I’m seeing a new cloud of foreign warp signatures.’

River held his breath as he reassessed their situation. With a cold, sinking feeling, he realised that maybe the battle wasn’t going quite as well as he’d thought.

20.4: ANN

Ann arrived to chaos. The outer reaches of the home system sparkled with bright flashes of warp and the even brighter flashes of g-ray fire. Confused warnings and alerts crammed the public channels. Dense, overloaded bursts of Fleet tactical data filled the encrypted ones. Despite herself, she groaned with relief. Chaos meant life.

Ann had used both Will’s data and the League’s to compute the Nems’ likely attack time and then overclocked the
Ariel Two
’s engines to try to beat them to the punch. Nevertheless, she’d half-expected to find either a mass graveyard or a pulsing hive of alien activity. As it was, the Nems had arrived mere hours ago. She’d made it in time – just.

[
Nems are attacking at four sites,
] said her shadow.

It brought up a map in her sensorium revealing the probable insertion points and the clusters of Nem activity around each. Three of the sites had targeted the major out-system population centres – Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. At Neptune and Uranus, fighting had been underway for a while. At Saturn, all Ann could see was the flash of ships moving to intercept each other. However, that action had a light-lag of over three hours. For all she knew, the battle for Saturn might be over already.

It was the last site, though, that scared her most. Three nestships and a huge cloud of Fleet ships lay snarled in a vast smear of disrupter chaff just five AU from Sol. When she looked for Fleet signatures elsewhere in the system, she saw hardly any.

She realised immediately what must have happened. The Nems had used the League’s expectations against them. Sam’s people had anticipated a direct attack on Earth from a single carrier, so that’s what the Nems had provided. But they’d raised the game by using old nestship hulks to make sure the Fleet couldn’t possibly avoid the threat. Then, with the Fleet’s efforts effectively mired uselessly close to their parent star, they’d begun their real assault. Why they’d chosen to attack the relatively tiny populations in the out-system, she still didn’t understand. But either way, it was clear that the Nems’ intelligence had caught up with their own.

[
I want full tactical impressions of the out-system battles,
] she said.

Her shadow dropped her into a full-immersion sim, overlaying knowledge into her head as it did so. Ann still wasn’t used to seeing things and visiting places inside her own skull. It made her squirm despite the intensive training Will’s ghost had provided on the flight home. She doubted she’d ever accept it the way a born roboteer would, but feelings were for later. First, she had a war to win.

‘I’ve filtered out the human traffic,’ said Nelson from the other side of the habitat core. ‘There’s a standard Nem arrival message being pumped out system-wide. They’ve adapted again. You’re not going to like it.’

‘Show me,’ said Ann.

She frowned as she took in the sight of Yunus Chesterford spouting his new doctrine.

‘I can think of people who’d buy this,’ she said. ‘The Nems have to die here, today, or we’ll never finish them.’

She fired off the information burst she’d prepared for Ira Baron and weighed her options.

[
Target Neptune,
] Ann told her shadow. [
The Fleet needs Triton intact.
]

The
Ariel Two
pivoted and dived, squashing her against her couch. In the primary habitat core beneath
Ariel Two
’s bulk, her crew groaned under the strain. They’d already suffered over three weeks at two-point-six gees of warp-load to make up the time. Now it was about to get worse.

Ann’s tactical display zoomed in to show her the frantically warping cloud of ships spattered around the ice giant. There were three raspberry ships larger than human battle cruisers, over two dozen mid-sized Nem ships and hundreds of small munitions. Yet the Nem craft made up less than half of the action.

[
What am I looking at here?
] she said. [
If only half of these ships are invaders, what’s everything else?
]

[
Scans suggest mercenary drone fleets,
] said her shadow. [
The Nems are targeting the private worlds in Neptune orbit. The owners are defending with their own weapons.
]

Ann reeled as she took in the implications of that. The sect leaders must have been hoarding drones in anticipation of war and they’d amassed an astonishing number. If the Nems had expected all the Earth’s defences to be drawn by their initial feint, they’d misjudged the sects’ capacity for self-interest. For the first time in her life, she found herself relieved that the sects were a bunch of secretive, warlike scumbags.

Then, as she watched, one of the giant raspberries opened up with a massive parallelised barrage of g-ray fire, vaporising hundreds of sect drones at once. Warlike they might be, but the sects weren’t geared up for all-out slaughter. The Nems had taken advantage of their in-system distraction to give them time to acquire suntap links.

Ann dived on the closest behemoth, scanning her target as she came. As soon as she had range, she fired her primary boser, aiming dead-centre. It was the wrong choice. When her beam hit the raspberry, it simply came apart into its constituent drones. She’d killed less than ten per cent of them while putting a serious drain on her own power reserves. The scattered automata rejoined the fray as independent munitions without a second’s hesitation, leaving a small patch of superheated slag spinning in space.

[
Looks like they’ve lost suntap capability, at least,
] her shadow pointed out. [
That’s a start.
]

[
How long till we get ours?
] After the painfully hurried flight home, the
Ariel Two
already needed recharging.

[
Over two hours. This fight will be done before the channel opens.
]

Ann muttered to herself. She hoped they’d hold out long enough to make a difference.

‘Tactical update,’ said Nelson. ‘It’s bad.’

He sent her a video window showing a knot of activity involving some of the smaller ships. In the middle of the fray hung a few large Nem craft much like the ones she’d seen at Snakepit, only these had grappling arms and docking probes on them. They were latching on to the private habitats and drilling their way in like giant aphids. Only it wasn’t sap they were sucking. It was people.

‘We’ve got this all wrong,’ said Ann with horror. ‘This isn’t an invasion. They’re trying for a population grab!’

Suddenly, the entire pattern of the assault made sense. The Nems had never intended to hit the Earth. They hadn’t even come for revenge – just bodies. And there were plenty of them to be found in the outer system where the Nems could easily strike. The suntap ships provided cover while these aphid-ships did the dirty work. She reassessed the threat. There were thirty aphids at this battle site alone. Not to mention the other two attack points in the out-system.