Authors: Steven Lyle Jordan
“‘It’ may be vital to the very survivability of Verdant, and quite possibly, to the Human race,” Dr. Silver replied matter-of-factly. “Assuming, of course, we manage to activate it… which is why I need those calculations.”
“Dr. Silver, will you please explain—”
“Calvin!” Dr. Silver snapped, and as Calvin did not remember her using his first name—
ever
—he was brought up short. Satisfied that she had his attention, she continued. “If the reports Lin is hearing are true (and Calvin noticed, for the first time, that Chiu had a com earpiece in his ear), then Tranquil’s CnC is already destroyed, Fertile is still silent, Qing is co-opted, and Verdant is now coming under attack from the ground. That means that, for all intents and purposes, it is
too late
for you or me or any of us to build your defensive system to help protect our satellite.” She paused to allow the logic of her statement to sink in. “Therefore: I’d appreciate it if you would humor me, and please help me with another urgent task. Before it really is too late.”
Calvin froze, at a loss to figure out what to do. He knew that Silver was essentially correct: It was too late to build their defensive system now. But here was Silver and a team of people, doing he-didn’t-know-what, acting like whatever this monstrosity was, would somehow guarantee the safety of Verdant. Silver had never struck him as unbalanced or impractical—and she seemed to be completely rational now—yet something made him want to find someone to arrest her… or at least have her committed.
With no internal guidance to go on, he finally looked at Valeria for help. Valeria had also been watching Dr. Silver carefully, and she finally turned to Calvin. When their eyes met, Calvin had no trouble reading the intent behind Valeria’s expression: She wasn’t sure what was going on, either; but she believed in Dr. Silver and trusted her, and was inclined to accept that whatever she was doing, however crazy it seemed, it was actually the right thing to do.
Taking a deep breath, Calvin reached out and took the datapad from Valeria’s hand, and approached Silver and Chiu. “Valeria said she found a working range going for the R-Phi variable, but got stuck on the range to fit to the H-sub-Y variable. What are we trying to accomplish with these equations?”
~
Wasps three and four slid right and heeled left, unleashing another salvo from their guns, and cutting altogether five fighters in half at once. Then they sheared apart and circled back, altering their configurations regarding each other as they prepared for another attack run.
So far, all the Wasps were having similar luck against the clumsy Raptors, rendering them next to useless against them. But they were outnumbered easily twenty to one, and if they weren’t careful, just a few lucky shots could end the skirmish and leave Verdant wide open.
“Delta-six,” Goldie said, that brief command being all Hunter needed to slip into a new attack configuration and wait for her next order. “Three!” Hunter threw his ship sideways as Goldie came behind him, and used his ship as a feint to fire on the third Raptor in the formation ahead of them. The Raptor ripped into pieces, and the other two arced clear before they were caught in the crossfire.
Hunter started to speak, but realized in a split-second that one of the Raptors had happened into a maneuver that would bring it to bear on his Wasp.
“Whoa!”
he cried as he kicked the retros, putting the Wasp into a tight spin just as the Raptor fired. The Wasp seemed to pirouette on an off-center point, which was intersected by the tracers from the Raptor, but the Raptor was rotating in the wrong direction. The Wasp, in the meantime, finished its pirouette and faced directly down at the Raptor, which was helpless to maneuver into a new firing position, or get out of the way. Hunter fired, and the Raptor ripped apart below him.
“You watch it, three!” Goldie snapped, glad he had managed to pull out of that near-fatal position.
There, but for the grace of God, goes Hunter.
“Break left, let’s give that carrier some sweat!”
“You don’t seriously expect to disable that thing?”
Hunter responded.
“I just want ‘em to know who’s boss around here,” Goldie said.
“That I can do,”
Hunter replied enthusiastically.
“But they’d better get the message fast… we can only keep this up for so long, and they know it!”
“Then let’s make sure they know what it’s gonna cost ‘em,” Goldie said grimly. “Delta-two, break wide, on me …
break!
”
~
“They obviously don’t want to fire on us,” Reya was commenting, “considering what they really want is to occupy us.” She watched the skirmishes on the main column. “But they have a full complement of missiles on that carrier. Somebody gets trigger-happy, or just a little too pissed off, and that’s all she wrote.”
“Thank you, Little Miss Sunshine,” Julian muttered, earning him a lopsided grin from his Executive Officer. “But I’m more concerned with their deciding to try to board us forcefully through the central core.”
Reya nodded. “Freudian allusions aside, if they penetrate us there, there won’t be much we can do to stop their getting all the way in…” she looked again at the column. “Aw, Hell!”
Everyone looked at the icons she was pointing to. “Another carrier coming up, complete with fighter escort!”
Julian suddenly found himself glancing over at Kris Fawkes, still standing quietly out of the way. He fervently wished there was some message he could give her to deliver to President Lambert that would stop this madness… a threat, a bluff, a promise, anything… but he couldn’t see any possibilities. Kris, who had been looking elsewhere, turned his way at that moment, almost as if she had sensed his eyes upon her. Their gazes locked. Julian could see that she was wishing the same thing he was.
~
“It’s working. There, right there, look!”
Dr. Silver crowded next to Valeria and Calvin, and bent with them over the workstation they had been working feverishly over. The three of them, with occasional input from a scientist or engineer that Dr. Silver would call over from another task, had been throwing ideas and numbers about, wrestling with the figures, trying to coax them into giving the answers Dr. Silver said she needed. Calvin was still not sure what the figures were for, or what the monstrosity behind him was designed to do, but once he had decided to trust her judgment, he had thrown himself completely into finding a solution, if only to see what she intended to do with it.
Only Chiu had stayed out of their way, not being a scientist or mathematician, and who therefore had nothing to contribute. But even he started to come around the other workstation where had had been standing, when he heard Calvin’s exclamation.
Valeria examined the figures on the screen. “Are you sure? That y variable still has a plus-or-minus of point-zero-zero-four…”
“No, that’s fine,” Calvin said. “Look here. Adjusting the sub-g variable absorbs that y variance at the next level… see? That’s why the range didn’t work before…”
“Show me the projection,” Silver urged by his side. Calvin worked over the controls, and as they watched, a three-dimensional plot began to form, its cymbal-shape revolving on the screen.
Valeria watched, and after a moment, her eyes popped. “Oh, shit,” she muttered. Then, in a louder voice: “That’s it! That’s it!”
Dr. Silver turned and regarded Calvin with shining eyes. “You did it.” She said it reverently, as if he had just summoned God himself… a tone that was not lost on Calvin. The moment was short-lived; she immediately spun about and said, “Lin! Transfer the equation to the gigacapacitor control!” Chiu immediately jumped back to the workstation he had been standing near, and worked over it furiously, while Silver lifted her head up and bellowed throughout the room: “Standby, everyone! We’re going live, right now!” Then she strode away from the workstation, as the workers all around the chamber scrambled for their stations.
“Going live?” Calvin repeated, caught flat-footed by Silver’s sudden motion. A moment later, he stumbled after her, followed by Valeria. “Doing what?”
“In a minute,” Silver said over her shoulder, then glanced up at a workstation high up in the scaffolding. “Ozzie, tell me when you have a ready! Lin, what’s going on outside?”
Chiu came up beside her. “It sounds like… a second carrier is approaching. Our fighters can’t repel all their fighters. It’s almost over.”
“Not yet, it isn’t,” Silver stated, and raised her voice again. “Gentlemen?”
“I have a ready!” Ozzie suddenly yelled down.
Another technician called out a moment later, “And I have a full count!”
Silver turned towards the back of the room, where the monoliths resided. “That’s it! Charge ‘em up! Cates, you have the coordinates input?”
“Yes, ma’am!”
“Coordinates for what?” Calvin demanded.
“For us,” Silver replied.
“To do
what
?”
Dr. Silver turned to him and smiled a frightening smile. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
~
“That’s fifty more incoming!” Goldie snapped, her adrenaline raising her voice. We’re being smothered!”
“Watch it, Wasp nine—”
a voice rang out, but quickly went quiet, and on Goldie’s screen, she saw the telltale signal of a fighter being destroyed… the fourth in as many minutes. The second carrier already loomed large in her view, and the fighters it bore were entering the field of battle in numbers they couldn’t hope to match.
“All Wasps, pull in! Close quarters on Verdant!” Goldie ordered, narrowly avoiding a line of tracers and pivoting around to narrow her defensive angle. Hunter’s Wasp followed her, her normally-talkative wingman now limiting his comments to clipped responses and commands. “Watch the northern hub!”
“How close?”
another pilot asked.
“Put it on the deck! The closer the better!”
~
“I have full charge!”
“Thank you!” Silver called out, spun about, and cried, “Emitter control?”
“We’re hot! Focus is optimum!”
“Anytime anyone in this room wants to tell me what’s going on,” Calvin said coldly, “feel free…”
“Almost there, Doctor,” Silver assured him, a strange look on her face. Whatever she expected to happen, she expected it to be phenomenal. “Gentlemen, initiation begins on my mark…
Mark
!”
Calvin was instantly aware of a high-pitched tone, coming from seemingly everywhere around him. Before he could ask about it, it rose in frequency, until it was beyond his hearing, but not quite beyond his ability to sense its presence. And then that sense, too, went away.
A technician called out above them: “Firing in three.”
Calvin repeated, “Firing?”
~
In CnC, Julian was brought up short when he became aware of a high-pitched tone, coming from seemingly everywhere around him. Before he could ask about it, it rose in frequency, until it was beyond his hearing, but not quite beyond his ability to sense its presence. And then that sense, too, went away.
He spun about, and realized by the expressions he saw that everyone else in CnC had heard the same thing. “What the Hell was that?”
~
“Two.”
~
Goldie dipped to port to avoid a communications blister on the northern hub, a moment before she heard a high-pitched tone. Thinking her earphones had malfunctioned, she yanked them off, only to realize that the sound was coming from seemingly everywhere around her. Before she could react, it rose in frequency, until it was beyond her hearing, but not quite beyond her ability to sense its presence. And then that sense, too, went away.
She was surprised by Hunter’s voice.
“What the Hell was that?”
~
“One.”
~
High in orbit above Earth, the carrier
Puerto Rico
roared along its course to the Verdant satellite. The fighters and the carrier
Dominica
had already done their job of minimizing the damage done by the satellite’s few fighters, and they expected to have minimal trouble approaching Verdant’s central core and entering the zero-gravity docking bays directly.
The commander of the
Puerto Rico
was suspended on the bridge, his hands gripping the support struts to keep him from floating away, as his staff worked around him. On the tactical column in the forward end of the bridge, they watched their approach to Verdant with calm satisfaction.
Suddenly, the column blinked. When the column recovered, just a second later, the image of Verdant had disappeared, leaving nothing but Raptors in view.
“Display malfunction!” the commanded barked. “Get it back up!”
There was frenzied activity at a workstation to the side of the bridge. Then the soldier at that workstation reported: “Sir, I have no malfunction here.”
“Look at the display, Donat,” the commander growled, waving a hand at the column. “Get my display back!”
“Sir, all inputs check out! The column is functioning one hundred percent!”
“Then you want to tell me,” the commanded demanded, “where the Hell is the Verdant?”
~
“Where did all the fighters go?”
“I was wondering the same thing,” Goldie said slowly. As soon as she had realized she could find no more fighters on her screen, she had throttled the Wasp back and put some distance between her and Verdant. She checked her equipment again, and her mouth hung open. “I have only three fighters, besides our own. I have no carriers. And I don’t hear any chatter from below…” She looked down at Earth, and after a moment, looked back at Verdant. Goldie, like any other orbital pilot, had a good sense of direction, and a good grasp of her surroundings, and she immediately knew something had happened. Something impossible.
She voiced what she could not believe. “The Earth…
moved
.”
“Yeah,”
Hunter replied.
“And why does it look so weird?”
The room was bathed in a dark red glow, as it had been since Yellowstone, but after so many days of it Sergei didn’t even notice anymore. He sat in the living room, where the sheer white drapes allowed in the full redness of the ashy sky, and felt listless. He had been listening to the news reports all evening, and he now felt simply drained. Even now, the reports continued to drone on, but he had long since tuned them out.