Thirty-three
Myla sat cross-legged on the ground, staring into the
ruby light of the mottled sun reflected in the undisturbed surface of the
mud dragon's make-shift sink hole. The way the blood red sun wobbled up
and down a few degrees above the horizon fascinated her. When she had
ordered Dikki to send down the dome, he had appropriately chosen a
location between extremes of weather and temperature. If her little world
did not rotate, the day side baked in unending heat, and the frigid night
side hadn't seen a dawn in eons. Fierce circulating winds probably
scoured much of the surface of the dying world, but she suspected that
this site was placed on one of the poles of the world, in the eye of
hurricane forces where it was forever calm and peaceful.
Ripples erupted from the pool. Waves reflected
outward, rebounded from the shore, and began criss-crossing themselves in
complex patterns. The mud dragon emerged briefly, engaged in a feeding
frenzy of the white seaweed that seemed to sustain the monster. The
amphibian appeared to confuse it for its less passive staple diet on
Covonia, the jelly fish with its venomous spines used to ward off
attackers. Mud dragons typically hunted in small groups to disarm the
jellyfish, then squabbled furiously over the spoils of combat.
Jeremy emerged from the hut and paced restlessly,
still limping on his injured leg. Myla watched him with simmering anger,
wondering how much of the situation he would accept given enough time to
think about it. Maybe none of it, if his imagination was that terribly
limited, or his courage. He denied the obvious fact that Hague had sent
him to kill her, and the fact that Jeep was somehow responsible for the
accident that disarmed the explosive device, because it was by far one too
many coincidences. If he was having a problem coping with the complexity
of their reality, she would let him deal with it himself in any way he
preferred. She pretended that it made no difference to her.
"You said you were interfaced with Dikki," he called
out. "What's happening now?"
"The Hive is moving in from all over and my own
factories are mopping up just about everything in this whole system to
build enough war craft to stop them when they get here. If they need
this planet, we'll have to move."
"Myla, I can't stand the isolation. I need to see
what's happening for myself."
"You can have any equipment you want, Jeremy."
"In my own body like this, I'm limited to read-out
screens, but I'll settle for those. I just need to see for myself."
"Why do you think I'm so special that I can have an
interface and you can't? I want to know what you're thinking, Jeremy
Kael."
"What I think isn't important. Use the medical
equipment you used to heal my leg. Use the diagnostic programs on
yourself."
"And just exactly what is it that you think I'll
find?"
"It doesn't matter what I think."
"I know what you're thinking. You think I'm an
avatar, but that's not possible, because it would mean that my real body
is in the Ark, and Khalin would have severed the interface by now. I
couldn’t even have an interface so far from the Ark, which is why you
don’t have one."
"The medical equipment will show if you have a human
or a Mysaelian physiology," Jeremy said in a quieter tone of voice.
Myla tried to hold at bay the part of herself that
was not at all confused. "But I just explained to you why I can't have an
avatar, Jeremy."
"I didn’t say you were using an avatar, Myla. I’m
perfectly aware that everything you are is standing right there in front
of me this very moment."
A moment passed before Myla dared speak again. "I
know about Jzon Dalikor. You think I'm like that. You don't think I'm
even human."
Jeremy turned away and went back into the hut,
clearly frightened by the prospect that she might become angry. And she
was. She got up and paced in a wide circle until her agitation settled.
"Dikki, bring Jeremy an interface console, the kind a Nat would use,"
she said, using her inner channels of communication.
Dikki complied. The factories were working so fast
that the order was fulfilled and on its way within seconds, and only
minutes passed before a fireball shot out of the black sky and landed just
outside the dome alongside the airlock. A thin echo of a sonic boom
rippled the dome. Jeremy came rushing from the hut holding his ears.
Mechanical spiders appeared from the landing craft.
They scurried across the landscape, sparkling and gleaming in the sunlight
and throwing long shadows across the dark rock. Jeremy retreated to the
far side of the dome as they cycled through the airlock. Myla gave them
plenty of room as well. Between them, the two machines carried a single
shipping box. They paused in the center of the dome and queried Dikki in
machine language for further instructions. "Have them set it up inside
the central hut," Myla said when Dikki relayed the request to her.
Jeremy waited until the machines had left, then
slipped into the hut to inspect his gift. Myla followed and watched him
sit in front of a panorama of small view screens. He turned them on, one
after another, and made his selection of data from an on-screen menu.
Some screens showed real-time views of the surrounding universe, and
others graphical and mathematical representations. All told, the amount
of information they provided didn't amount to a tiny fraction of what
Dikki was giving her every fraction of a second.
The disparity sent a stab of alarm through her
lingering bitterness. Jeremy Kael was not a stupid boy. Among the
Naturalist children of Bolphan, he had been near the top of his class.
Jeremy had excelled at everything he ever attempted.
And what of herself? Khalin had discouraged her from
attending school. He had been the one seducing her into spending time in
the forest outside the city and convincing her that she was a child of
nature at heart. She had taken pride in her heritage. She had not
noticed how carefully Khalin kept her away from the scrutiny of the colony
as best he could.
"Myla, something's wrong with the Hive formations,"
Jeremy called out.
"Dikki?"
Dikki filtered available information rather than
attempt an evaluation on his own. To Myla's eye, the formations did look
different. She didn't have the experience to say how different, or what
the difference signified. "Have you ever seen ships move in that
fashion?" she asked of the MI.
Dikki combed through historical records of Hive
databanks and came up with a long distance scan of an Alliance fleet
arranged in the same slender, triangular way. "Who commanded that fleet?"
she asked with mounting curiosity.
"Executor General Gorlon Hague," Dikki said.
"Alliance Jilsa Sector, Attack Armada prior to the engagement at Mesa
Prime, fourth decade of the Hive conflict."
"That was almost five hundred years ago," she said to
Dikki. To Jeremy, she said, "It's General Hague."
Jeremy gave her a look of ill-concealed disbelief.
"It's not possible."
Myla hated asking such obvious questions. "If it's
so impossible, how did Hague talk the Hive into sending you to me? Why
would he do that? It was a trap, Jeremy. Hague is trying to kill me."
Jeremy realized the truth and turned pale. "You
can't beat him, Myla. You're going to be outnumbered a hundred to one as
it is."
Myla glanced to where Jeep crouched, staring, almost
blending in against the broken black rock. "I won't let General Hague
hurt you or Jeep, Jeremy. I won't let Gorlon Hague hurt even the stupid
mud dragon."
Jeremy looked doubtful, but said nothing. Myla
turned her back on him. "Dikki, I want to speak with Overlord Khalin
Nome. Can you get through to Bolphan?"
"I cannot penetrate Hive interference," Dikki
announced a few moments later.
"Try every few hours, especially after the fight.
Jeremy might be right about our defense, though. I have to find a way to
make better use of our equipment. Gorlon Hague will not waste his
resources like the Hive does."
Jeremy thought the situation hopeless. He glanced at
her longingly from time to time, but looked quickly away when their eyes
met. Time passed and he ate from the supplies in the hut, supplies she
had never touched. He used the latrine, and eventually pulled the hood
over his head to take his sealed waste into the wilderness of blood red
light and black rock and hide it. She had never used the sanitation
facilities at all. Had she ever in her life, she wondered? Why hadn’t
she ever noticed?
Freshly gathered Hive forces grew near. There were
hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions, of components of the armada,
most of them warcraft of one kind or another and relatively few support
vehicles. Some of the warcraft were long-range weapons and field
generators to protect against her own long-range beam devices.
"If I fight on his terms," she said aloud to both
Dikki and Jeremy, "we will fight a war of attrition and lose. I have to
find a better way."
She paced the dome, filtering through her options one
by one. If she ran away again, the Hive would force her out into the void
where her engines would become unstable. Engaging the Hive armada offered
only two options, a choice between a defensive or an offensive stance.
She could see without the need for training or experience that Hague was
expecting her to fight a defensive battle. It didn't seem as if she would
have any choice at all. Which made an unexpected offense the only choice
worth pursuing.
"We cannot fight better than Gorlon Hague," Myla told
Dikki. "Strategy alone cannot defeat him. Our equipment is the same as
his. We need different equipment."
Dikki started to talk about quality control.
"That's not what I mean. Something entirely new.”
Dikki lectured her on combat simulation. The
warcraft used by the Hive and the Alliance were a blend of defensive and
offensive capabilities perfected over many centuries. One did not have a
significant technological advantage over another, and their configurations
were almost identical.
"Back to strategy then," Myla said, and Dikki showed
her more combat simulation. What more could she expect given the
equipment she had to work with?
The mud dragon splashed nearby, snarling and diving
in pursuit of another strand of seaweed. The little animal's viciousness
had intensified, and Myla thought that he seemed slightly less coordinated
than earlier in their stay in the dome. It probably meant that the
seaweed lacked essential nutrients, or perhaps contained toxins. In time,
the mud dragon would probably weaken and die. Its life was still in her
hands, and Myla silently vowed to return it to Covonia and the very sink
hole of its birth before harm befell the silly beast.
"I'd like to turn General Hague into a piece of
seaweed and turn a dozen mud dragons on him," she murmured in anger.
She meant the comment as foolish sarcasm. It
startled her to realize that she had touched upon a pertinent idea. "Dikki, map the mud
dragon's behavioral patterns all the way down to those little algorithms that make it so
mindlessly vicious. Can you do that without causing injury?"
The mud dragon splashed spasmodically, then recovered
and shook its head. "Mapping complete," Dikki said.
Myla smiled. "Computer simulation. Pit a standard
Hive warcraft against one of ours, only replace the usual tactical
strategies with the mud dragon's feeding frenzy."
The initial movements of her simulated warcraft were
clumsy. The systems were entirely dissimilar. Myla helped Dikki tweak
the programming until it attacked with more grace and precision. On a one to
one basis, her new warcraft had no advantage over the Hive standard,
although it dangerously confused the standard for several essential
seconds of combat.
"Two against one," she suggested, curious as to how
her modified warcraft would cooperate with one another in the attack as
the mud dragons did. The
two spun about the Hive warcraft. Their snapping jaws became lancing
particle beams. She took quick notice of how the unpredictable behavior of her
modified mud dragon warcraft forced the Hive unit to constantly recalculate its strategy.
During those brief delay, her own warcraft cut it to pieces.
Her mud dragon
warcraft now had a significant advantage. The disadvantage was that she'd
need twice as many combat vehicles to engage the Hive, and she didn’t have
the raw resources to double the mass of her fleet.
But she wouldn't need all of
them. "Remove all defensive
systems and transform all warcraft to the new one."
Removing their defensive systems reduced the
mass of the fleet by almost fifty percent and added hundreds of thousands
of the new basic unit. Dikki ran a new simulation using a hundred
warcraft on either side. Her modified warcraft banded into groups,
selected their victims, and attacked with startling ferocity. Light and
agile, they engaged the enemy at such close range that they could not be
targeted at all. They leaped like serpents from one victim to another,
leaving complete destruction in their wake.
"Dikki, do we have time to recycle our old warcraft
and manufacture these?"
It took Dikki time to calculate the figure. She had
enough time.
"Do it," she said aloud.
Jeremy looked around, startled. "Do what?"
"You just keep watching your stupid screens and
you'll find out, Jeremy Kael."
Jeremy went back inside the hut to watch the battle.
Myla stood outside, staring up at the sky, the focus of her own
concentration upon a far vaster, inner world.
General Hague dropped to sublight speeds at a
conservative distance, giving his own forces the fractions of a second
needed to scan for mine fields. No mine fields stood in his way.
Gorlon destroyed the factories in the asteroid belt and then began the
tedious task of targeting Myla's small and widely scattered armada closing
on him from a vast spherical formation. Warcraft like mud dragons
spiraled in unpredictably, making long distance targeting unreliable, and
by the time the two fleets engaged, a battle more swift and vicious than
anything Gorlon had ever seen ensued. Only by viewing quantum
entangled readouts from Myla's fleet were either able to see the
fireworks. Traveling
at the speed of light, it would take several standard months for the
lethal glare of the battle to illuminate the sky of the second planet of the red dwarf
and perhaps irradiate all remaining life clinging to the carbonaceous
rock.
Hague's Hive forces evaporated, ten thousand years of
technology worried and torn apart by the living heritage of a primitive
mud dragon.
Jeremy leaped to his feet and staggered back from his
screens in abject shock. He turned on wobbling knees, and with eyes
unfocused and his face pale expressionless, he left the hut. On the way
toward the airlock, giving Jeep a wide berth, he had the presence of mind
to pull the hood and face shield over his head and pressurize his body
glove before entering the airlock.
Myla watched him race across the terrain outside and
dwindle in the distance. The foolish boy was trying to run away.
"Watch him," she said to Dikki. "I don't want him to
hurt himself."
