A Sword Into Darkness (46 page)

The statue was stock still, not reacting at all.  Nathan continued.  “You might take every work of art from our planet, every last trinket and use it however you use it in whatever economy or society there is out there in the greater galaxy—though how that interaction works on interstellar timescales, I have no idea—but you’ll use it to gain power.  That power, that wealth only retains its value if there are no other human artifacts.  If anyone else drops by and picks some up—or if we start bartering for ourselves—your collection is devalued.  The only way your collection keeps its worth is if there’s no more human stuff being produced for other entities, other patrons to acquire.

“Maybe you’d act in good faith right up to the end, playing nice so we won’t damage the goods fighting against you, but in the end you’ll torch the planet.  You’ll make us ‘past tense’ because that’s the only way that particular universal truth works out.  Well, forget it.  We’re not going to help you sneak up on mankind unaware.  And without us making the introductions, you can plan on every nasty trick our human culture can devise being thrown at you.  You’re not indestructible.  We’ve proven that, and now we’re going to make you pay for even
thinking
about raping our planet.”

The avatar stood frozen, stone-faced.  In the hatchway, the Patron itself entered the mess, maneuvering nimbly in microgravity with its mass of tentacles.  Nathan and the others all stiffened as it came closer and raised the same device with which it had destroyed Wright.

Nathan forced himself to remain still, to not retreat as the creature pointed the weapon at him.

The avatar shook its head, its expression sincerely saddened, even if its voice was as articulate and monotone as ever.

“We thought it probable that you would defy us, but we had to make the attempt.  There is always some damage incurred when a species resists.  Plus, it is always difficult to catalog and describe the various works when the artisans and historians are dead, but we will deal with it.  We always have.

“What will happen is this:  when we arrive in your solar system, we will sweep aside whatever primitive resistance you have cobbled together, and then we will take station at one of your planet’s LaGrange points.  The drive will be turned upon your planet and the resulting disruption of your ionosphere and the cascades of radiation will, within a few days, sterilize the Earth.  Humanity will be dead, and your works will remain, hardly the worse for wear.  Do not doubt us.  It is not the first time we have done it.”

Nathan glared at the weapon in the Patron’s tentacle, his jaw set in anger.  “And what about us?  Are you going to break us all down with that thing like you did our XO?”

The statue smiled.  “No.  You may yet have an opportunity to survive, to serve.  A human perspective will be necessary to properly catalog and classify the collection.  So you will go into stasis as others have.  And when you emerge from the white field, your planet will be dead, your artifacts will be in a dazzling new collection, and the wider galaxy will be presented the whole exhibition to the accompaniment of the last humans’ anguished cries—your own anguished, bitter cries.”

Nathan snarled, and his wordless, angry command spoke to most of the crew.  En mass, they all surged forward, hands stretched out like claws toward the alien—

a sea of white

filled the mess

nathan cried out

in frustration

at the vanished patron

18:  “WELCOMING COMMITTEE”

December 10, 2055; Patron Collection Fleet, outside the orbit of Jupiter, 6.5 degrees below the ecliptic and approaching Earth

For
nine uninterrupted years, CDR Nathan Kelly floated transfixed—caught mid-leap, his face frozen in a mask of hatred and rage, stuck like a fly in amber.  He and the others were locked in place by dim golden light, the barest hint of illumination, awash in the glow of quantum fluctuations slowed and softened to visibility by the step-function transition of stasis, separating normal spacetime from the region where they lay, where time’s arrow was stunted and light itself barely crawled along.

The
Sword
’s crew was trapped, impotent prisoners of a single moment, unable to affect the course of their captors in any way.  Had thought and reflection been possible, Nathan would have seethed and put his mind and their collective will to thoughts of escape.  But there was no thought.  His mind was still fixed upon nothing but murder—hot, mindless revenge against the one nameless Patron they had seen, the Patron who had frozen them in time and then moved on without sparing them another thought.

They—and all humans, all other species—were but petty annoyances, minor obstacles to deal with en route to their latest acquisition.

Moving out from the captured captain and crew of the late
USS Sword of Liberty
, the living statue of Christopher Wright—avatar of the Patrons—stood motionless as well.  In its case, however, it was as empty of volition and will as a mere statue.  Even if it were not in stasis, it would not move.  The alien that had given it life had gone on to other, more important things.

Outside the mess, the patched forward hull of the destroyer continued on, changeless within the hangar of the Control Ship.  Temporary repairs that had been designed to last for days had been held in place for years now by the stasis field surrounding them—and that field itself was sustained by the curving spars of the stasis generator, the first hint of alien technology to be found as one moved outward from the long-trapped crew.

The spars bracketed and embraced the
Sword of Liberty
, blocking it away from the universe at large.  Within their encircling arms, spacetime bent and dipped sharply, separating the dim region where duration was eternal from the brightly lit hangar in which time flowed straight and true.  Elsewhere in the Patron vessel, other stasis fields also existed, allowing the aliens themselves to endure the long, unavoidable voyage between stars.  For all intents and purposes, the Control Ship was eternal, implacable, a sleeping dragon content to allow its technology to carry it safely to its destination and its treasure.

Outside the restored, pristine hull of the Control Ship were the other ships of the Collection, most of them cruising about in stasis as well in order to preserve the shiny bits of now-dead alien cultures the Patrons had stolen for their own benefit.

These frozen, eternal ships spun slowly about the equator of the drive-star, whose roiling surface and brilliant, powerful exhaust were anything but frozen.  However, even though it moved, and burned, and blasted forth with fusion fire and photonic thrust, it too was as static and eternal as the Sun, varying continuously over time, but truly changing only on the scale of eons.

Altogether, the Patron/Deltan fleet was unstoppable, a thing relentless and forever-lasting.  For nine years since the last time it had been toyed with, it continued on toward Earth, unperturbed, unopposed, and beyond the reach and capability of the human race, who cowered upon their single planet before the approaching alien force.

That time was over.

Stealth in space was impossible.

That simple tactical conclusion was the logical consequence of the laws of thermodynamics.  For a weapon to operate, power must flow through it.  For power to flow it must have a source.  Since no source can be 100% efficient—another law of thermo-damn-namics, as many frustrated engineers referred to it—then every source must give up detectable heat to its environment, thus increasing universal entropy and shuttling everything one step closer to eventual heat death.

The
Sword of Liberty
had therefore been built with large, vulnerable radiators, simply because there was no other choice.  They had been hidden and protected as well as the engineers could, but they still proved to be a tactical vulnerability.  The Patrons themselves made no effort to hide their waste heat, having proclaimed their presence a good ten light-years from Earth.  It was foolish to believe any weapon of any reasonable power could be hidden away in space from any and all observers.

But from one observer?  From one specific direction of travel, along a trajectory capable of being predetermined years in advance?  From an enemy as assured, secure, and complacent as the Patrons?  In that one limited case, unlikely to occur except in the case of an enemy as tactically dominant as the Patrons themselves—in that case perhaps a few surprises could be set up.

LFM-10277 was cold.  It did not feel that in any real sense—its own AI was too low-powered and dimwitted to interpret physical parameters as feelings.  But it was actually cold, radiating only a few degrees above the cosmic background radiation, indistinguishable from a myriad of small rocks strewn through the vacuum of space, and which were somewhat denser in this area, not far below and out from the leading Trojan point of Jupiter.  At this temperature, the amount of available power was on the order of milliwatts, hardly detectable and nothing of consequence to the approaching force.

As a rock, it held no particular danger.  The Patrons had overcome the problem of the rare mid-space collision millennia ago.  What the humans accomplished with layered whipple shields of varying density and a thick nosecone of lead and ice was resolved much more elegantly by the aliens.  Invisible fields pushed out ahead of the drive-star, either pushing molecules and larger objects out of the path of the convoy entirely, or pulling them in to be swallowed in the fires of the drive itself.  A torus of perfect vacuum surrounded the four Patron ships themselves.

But as something disguised as a cold rock, LFM-10277 was a good deal more threatening.  First it was larger and far more massive than it appeared.  While the leading face of it was rocky with a roughly spherical half-meter diameter, it actually extended back several meters.  Its greater density meant that its path was less perturbed by the protective fields of the drive-star.  And as the limited albedo of its stealthy, disguised surface reflected back a greater and greater amount of the drive-star’s thermal radiance, it could begin to add its own heat to the mix, getting hotter and more energetic as the Patron fleet closed—all without alarming any of the alien AIs keeping watch for their masters in stasis.

When the secondary systems came to full power they began warming targeting circuits and cold-chemical vernier thrusters, then prepping the weapon’s densely charged sacrificial capacitor banks for cascade breakdown.  At that point, the Patron fleet was almost even with the solitary weapon.  In milliseconds, the Lasing Fusion Mine’s heat and power spiked to incredible levels, broadcasting its position and intent for anyone or anything to see, but by that point it was too late.

LFM-10277 burned with a light brighter than the sun as a slushy ball of metallic hydrogen was compressed to fusion densities by Kris’s non-nuclear photonic initiator.  The energy from the blast—much larger than any of the
Sword of Liberty
’s own warheads—was then confined, channeled, and ordered for a brief instant by coils of electromagnets and ablative mirrors.  Before the whole assembly dissolved away in a fusion release on the order of tens of megatons, 24% of its energy shot forth at the speed of light in a single beam of coherent x-rays.

The laser struck a glancing blow on the Control Ship, but that glancing blow vaporized entire decks along a narrow cone through the alien vessel, then exploded outward in a fiery wave of transfer energy.  As a single shot, it dealt an impressive degree of devastation, but it was by no means enough to put the Patron ship out of commission, not for a race which could reconstruct anything at the nanometer scale with relative ease.

However, LFM-10277 was numbered 10277 for a reason.

Even as the Control Ship rocked and reeled from the mine’s laser, three more beams struck from three different directions.  Two imparted glancing blows like that of 10277, but the third cored the alien vessel straight into its center of mass.  The beam burned down through a quarter of the ship’s depth, and every joule of x-ray energy was converted to an explosive thermal/kinetic punch.  The Control Ship dipped in its orbit and the drive-star itself flared in response.

All over the Patron vessel, systems began to fail.