Stardust Page 3

  3

  The orange dots of the incoming missiles tracked across her tactical. Rada opened the life raft's boosters to full thrust and activated her comm to the DS agent she'd spoken to before.

  "I'm about to get blasted! Help me!"

  "We can't," the man replied calmly. "Not without exposing ourselves."

  "Then expose yourselves!"

  Without waiting for a response, she keyed up three nearby fighters to divert from their targets and fire a volley toward the missiles coming for her. She broke hard away from the Lurker rockets, but that wasn't going to buy her more than a few extra seconds.

  She tensed, ready to make her next move, but there was nothing more she could do to save herself. This was it. This was it.

  With this admission, this understanding that her fate was now fully out of her hands, a weight fell from her. Or maybe it was more like a light entered her: like a lid being lifted from a tomb. She couldn't do anything more to help herself.

  But she could still do so much more to hurt the Lurkers.

  As the missiles streaked closer, she frantically drew up a new battle plan. One that would involve every remaining ship in the UDL fleet. She sent the signal, ignoring the missiles closing on her on the close-range tactical display in favor of the one that showed the two hundred surviving UDL ships breaking away from their current engagements and plunging at the Lurker carriers instead.

  "Agent!" her DS contact squawked. "Our assets are meant to be spent destroying their warships. That's the only way to weaken them enough for our other fleets to destroy them!"

  As he spoke, every Lurker ship in orbit had also changed course, streaking toward the three remaining carriers—or whatever they were—like a school of threatened fish.

  "You just said it was too dangerous to save me," Rada said. "Forgive me if I won't take orders from cowards."

  Her tactical was starting to beep. Urgently. The missiles were now so close her display had to zoom in. The intercepting rockets she'd fired from the UDL vessels screamed in from the side. The closest exploded directly between Rada and the enemy missiles, catching two of them in the blast and forcing the others to divert around the fireball.

  With the extra two seconds this bought, four more interceptors carried through and exploded in the enemy's path. Lurker rockets died in sunset flashes. But others punched through the dwindling flames. These too were intercepted, fire rushing toward the escape pod's cameras.

  The life raft tumbled and shook. The cameras snapped off. So did her tactical display. The thrusters sputtered, on the brink of death. They kicked in and realigned the raft just in time for another blast to hit her from behind.

  The pod spun so fast her senses decided to take a breather until things calmed down again. What felt like a few seconds later, the craft was still spinning but it was no longer getting shaken like a paint can. An alarm screeched, incredibly loud, the kind of alarm that was meant for you to know at once that you only had a few seconds to act before you were dead.

  The good news was that the screeching was already getting quieter. The bad news was that was because the atmosphere was being sucked out of the pod, leaving the alarm with nothing to transmit through. Panic spiked through Rada's brain, but she already had her suit on. She yanked the hood over her head and sealed it.

  A second alarm began to go off. It didn't have the power of the other one, but it shared the same frantic tone.

  Oh. Right. She'd spent nearly all of her suit's oxygen maneuvering herself onto the flagship, then burned through all that was left clinging to the flagship's hull and waiting for the software to come in. She currently had just a few minutes left.

  She sighed and closed her eyes.

  ~

  She opened her eyes. Dim room. Walls of charcoal and gray. Drawers in the walls. Well-hidden, but easy to spot when you were used to hunting for them. The room was tight, economical, instantly recognizable as a ship even though she was barely awake, but it was still bigger than the entire life raft had been.

  Her body lurched with adrenaline—had she been captured by the Lurkers?—but no, the ship felt human, smelled human.

  Which was among the strangest things she had ever had to think in her life.

  She wasn't restrained. Good sign. Someone had removed her suit, but she was still dressed in the same clothes she'd been wearing, which was nice even though they were stiff with battle sweat.

  The room was just a bed. She didn't see a device anywhere. She looked up and said, "Hello?"

  No answer. She tried the door's open button. The door didn't budge. As she pressed it again, a voice spoke from hidden speakers in the room.

  "One moment, Ms. Pence."

  She backed away from the door. Just as she was starting to think about wringing the bed sheet into a makeshift rope/weapon, the door slid open.

  A man stepped through wearing the silver-trimmed black uniform of Dark Solutions. His dark hair was close-cropped and his face was so blandly handsome Rada suspected he'd employed the services of a chameleon to make himself as least memorable as possible.

  "Ms. Pence." His voice was much different from how it had sounded over the comm—it had been disguised—but the cadence and vowel sounds were the same. "It's me, Winters."

  "Winters? How did you get out here?"

  "The same way you did. Under normal circumstances, we wouldn't be speaking in person, and I would pretend to be a stranger. But it seems we've moved so far forward that we couldn't see 'normal circumstances' without the aid of an orbital telescope."

  Her eyes skipped between his. "How do I know that you're really Winters? Or that you even work for DS?"

  He raised an eyebrow, then broke into laughter. He'd changed everything else, but it was that sound that confirmed to her that he was the same pilot she'd flown with out beyond the Black Curtain and in the recent fighting.

  "You're starting to understand how we work," he said. "I'm me and I work for Dark Solutions. You are currently onboard one of our ships. If you would like to leave it, I am happy to let you leave, or to transport you anywhere between here and Mars."

  "I'm tempted to take you up on that. You almost got me killed."

  "Our institution warned you that would be the likely outcome of your mission. It's unseemly of you to whine about it now."

  Rada eyed him. Leading up to the schism over Earth, when the UDL had attacked them in an effort to make them surrender, and Toman had stood down, she'd flown with Winters numerous times. Yet she knew almost nothing about him other than that he was a good pilot, he could be trusted to make his own decisions in a fight, and that he was an officer of some type in Dark Solutions, which she'd barely been aware of a few months ago but now seemed to be involved in everything under the sun.

  "Considering how many times I've almost died in the last year," she said, "it wouldn't make sense to get too mad about adding one more to the list. I'll stay."

  "Very well."

  "So what happened out there? The last thing I remember is getting my life raft ripped open like a can of Whisker Fritters."

  "It's no surprise that there is short-term memory loss. Your suit's logs indicate that you turned down your oxygen to a level that would barely keep you alive. We picked you up as soon as it was over."

  Rada squinted. "You waited until after the Lurkers won? How did you know they wouldn't slag you?"

  "Because they were no longer there."

  "That's impossible. We can't have won. We were on the brink of collapse!"

  Winters shook his head quickly. "Your order to send our ships against their carriers was excessively costly to us. However, it also succeeded in destroying a second one of them. As soon as it went down, the Lurker fleet disengaged and broke from Earth orbit."

  She clapped her hands. "To regroup? Where are they headed?"

  He got a funny look on his face. "We don't know."

  "You don't know? Where a fleet went? Did it not occur to anyone to, you know, watch them?"

  "O
nce they attained a certain distance from us, they faded from all of our forms of sensing them. We believe that the same technology that allowed them to deceive us about when they would descend on the System also allows them to conceal themselves when moving at slower speeds."

  "Which they didn't use when entering the System because there was no need. What about their e-sigs?"

  "They are jumbled, they head in many different directions, and they are unusually difficult to follow. We have sent messages across the System to warn the other stations of the potential danger of a strike and to request that they inform us immediately if they see any indications of Lurker presence."

  "We have to track them down. That is the absolute number one priority."

  "Agreed." Winters looked her up and down. "This conversation should be continued on our operations deck. Are you in need of food? Water?"

  "More like a shower. But you're just going to have to pretend you can't smell me until we've processed what's happened and committed to a new course of action."

  Winters nodded and led her down a well-lit corridor with slate-dark walls, a color scheme that was strangely unnerving inside the tight confines of a ship, but which seemed to be DS' standard. They entered an elevator that required Winters' security code before it would take them up. It came to a stop, doors opening to a relatively large (by ship standards) rotunda of a room, half of which gave a perfectly clear view of sunlit Earth.

  Winters caught her staring. "Correct," he said. "That isn't a screen. It is an actual window."

  "You guys do know those are a lot easier to shoot through, right?"

  "Which merely incentivizes us to not get shot. It is also our guiding philosophy to never forget where we are. Ever. The interior of a ship feels safe. It is not. The fragility of a window helps us to remember that."

  Like every other part of the ship, the room was dark but decently lit. A long table faced the window. Winters showed her to a seat, but didn't introduce her to the other two people who were already there, an older woman with a severe frown and a younger man who looked like he could have been Winters' brother. They both wore DS uniforms.

  Rada motioned to Earth, which was too distant to make out any detail. "What's the situation down there?"

  "Grim," Winters said.

  "That's also going to be my mood if you don't get more specific."

  "Nearly every major population center has been bombarded. Some have been utterly destroyed. Manufacturing cores were also targeted, along with most significant military sites. The planet has been utterly crippled on every front. If you are requesting a death toll, immediate casualties number at least two billion. More will follow."

  "Did they make any effort to fight back?"

  "Several nations outside of the UDL launched nuclear weapons against the Lurkers. Nearly every last one was intercepted, but they were able to strike a handful of enemy ships."

  "Did more harm than good," the old woman said, almost snarling.

  Rada cocked her head. "Fallout?"

  "Not of the radioactive kind," Winters said. "But of the political variety. What remains of the UDL has accused the nations that launched missiles of violating the treaty with the Lurkers. Some are further claiming that these 'rogue nations' are behind the assassination of President Cannel and the hijacking of the UDL's fleet. The only reason Earth hasn't devolved into full-blown war is that no one's in condition to fight one."

  "Then I'm guessing no one's in much condition to protect their people from mob violence. Or starvation. What can we do about this?"

  "Nothing. We cannot divert resources to Earth as long as the Lurkers remain in the System."

  "We're just going to let billions more die? Then why are you even telling me about their status?"

  "Because you asked."

  Rada rolled her lower lip between her teeth, gazing out at Earth. She hadn't spent all that much time there, and largely resented it for the way it still tried to wrap its tentacles around everything in the System, even the Outer stations that had been founded with the specific intention of getting away from Earth's reach. Yet the thought of the planet in bleeding ruins hurt more than she would have guessed.

  She laid her hands on the table. "What are we here to do?"

  "The Lurkers," the older woman said. "You've fought them more than anyone. You're developing a feel for them. What are they doing?"

  "I don't mean to rely on something as old and tired as cause and effect, but I'm guessing they skipped out because we started targeting their carriers."

  "You're saying it was a retreat from a field that had become unfavorable. Nothing more than that."

  "I just changed my mind. That's not how they operate. They design every maneuver they make to also be a trap."

  Winters lifted his chin. "To do what? Get us to chase them? They were on the brink of annihilating our fleet. If they'd stayed, Earth would have been theirs."

  "The retreat is real. Whatever they've got in those carriers is so valuable they'd rather abandon Earth—for now—than risk losing the rest. But I promise you, the retreat is also a piece of a backup plan."

  "To do what?"

  "To pull off an alternate way to take control of the System." Rada gazed down on Earth. There was no obvious damage to it, not from this height, yet something about it did look different. "Their initial plan was straightforward: get us to disarm, then arrive at Earth and smash it. After that, they'd go to the moon, then Mars, and so on, until everything was theirs.

  "The straightforward plan didn't work. I'd bet their next move will be more subtle. That means it's going to take time to pull off. And that means that whatever they show us next will probably be misdirection—a way to buy time and distract us while the real plan unfolds in the dark."

  "The act of retreating itself could be misdirection. By disappearing, they force us to spread out our ships to try to find them. If we're spread thin, they'd be able to easily destroy anyone who gets close to them."

  "To minimize our losses, we should limit the search to single fighters equipped with drones. Don't commit any forces until we know exactly where they are."

  The old woman glared at Rada like it was her fault an alien species had decided to destroy them. "When we find them, how are we supposed to fight them? Earth worked because we were already in range when we opened fire. If we run a fleet at them, their lasers will chew us up before we can even hit back. Just like they did when we tried to intercept their advance fleet."

  "Then we're going to have to be clever, aren't we? Cunning. Just like the Lurkers are." Rada stood, unsure where she was going, but feeling like she needed to move around. "Above all else, we need to find their carriers before the enemy can hide them away. I don't know what they've got in them, but I think they're the key. Destroy those ships, and the Lurkers may not have enough left to take the System."

  4

  MacAdams threw himself to the floor. The hallway flashed with light; bullets shredded into the wall, spraying him with drywall and paint flecks. Webber yelled out, stumbling back from the door and dropping onto his rear.

  He looked like he'd been hit. Either way, MacAdams had to work fast. His device was a blank one given to him by DS and was missing his usual library of tricks, but the two guys were wearing infrared goggles to avoid using light and the solution to that was built into every device. MacAdams shot a few rounds through the wall to keep them honest, thumbing through his device with his other hand.

  Done entering his commands, he lobbed the device in a high arc through the door. The strobing of its screen was as bright as a chain of missiles detonating in the black of space. Fairly but not entirely certain their goggles wouldn't be able to adjust as fast as needed, MacAdams flung himself through the door.

  The two of them were covered up behind a desk. A desk with three inches of clearance underneath it. Shielding his eyes with his other hand against the device, which was flashing like a lunatic on the far side of the desk, MacAdams straightened his pistol and fired into t
he knees of both men.

  They screamed, which is what you did when your kneecaps were blown out the back of your legs. One of them fell over and MacAdams rewarded him with two bullets to the skull. To the other guy's credit, he stayed upright, waddling on his bleeding knees around the side of the desk to try to get an angle on MacAdams.

  If he hadn't been three-quarters blind, MacAdams would have launched himself on top of the desk and fired down on the man. Instead, he lay perfectly still.

  The man stuck his arm around the desk, firing blind. A bullet passed over MacAdams' head, another ripping into the shoulder of his suit. He squeezed the trigger and the man's fingers exploded, gun dropping to the floor. MacAdams jumped to his feet and put two more into the man's goggled head.

  At a glance, the office was clear. He headed for the strobing device, ejecting and replacing his magazine. He switched off the light, blinking slowly, as if that would help wipe the stars from his vision.

  Shots flashed from out in the hall, the sound no more than airy pops. MacAdams ran for the doorway.

  "That's what you get, you bug-eyed sons of bitches!" Webber zipped past the entry, firing down the hallway. "Now I want you to think about what you've done!"

  MacAdams rolled around the door frame into the hall. Two people lay on the floor, one motionless, the other holding up his hand to Webber. Webber pulled the trigger again. The man's head snapped back and his body slumped to the coral tile floor.

  The two of them swept through the president's quarters room by room. Once they were sure it was clear, Webber returned to the hall and nudged a body with his toe. "Who are these guys?"

  MacAdams shrugged. "The type who shoots first and finds out who you are after you're dead."

  He got out his device, snapping pictures of the dead men's faces. And then took their devices, too. The gunshots had been quiet enough, but there had been plenty of screaming and yelling, and MacAdams positioned himself outside the elevator doors while Webber went looking for the storage devices they'd been sent here to find. Five minutes later, Webber showed up carrying a bulging black satchel.