The skull ship is targeting you!
I didn’t think about how bad that could be for me, though that concept arrived fully formed a moment later. My initial reaction was that I needed to get as far away from the others as possible, and I did it the fastest way I could, the superhero jet straight through enemy lines. I hit hard without the cushion of a hideous drone head to soften the blow and dug a trench ten meters long with my shoulder as the bulldozer blade, and even through the armor, a flash of pain told me I’d tweaked something—AC joint, rotator cuff, something that hurt badly enough to warrant a stop in the auto-doc. If I’d had the time, I would have laughed hysterically at the thought of there being a me or an auto-doc still in existence at the end of this battle, but neither the ride nor the pain was finished with me. I popped back to my feet as the mindless gyros in my armor decided I’d fallen by accident and forced me to stand for what came next.
The deluge of annihilation bathed an area two hundred meters long and twice as wide in white fury. Fire rose from the ground to meet the fire in the air, the wave of heat and concussion enough to blow my Vigilante backward another twenty meters and deposit me onto my back, a turtle on a fencepost, helpless. My aching shoulder seemed like a pleasant memory compared to the dull throb that ran from head to toe, like God had decided to play handball with my body. Forcing my eyes open, I tried to focus on what the HUD was telling me, though even it flickered a few times, insulted by the abuse.
Of the Unity drones, nothing remained but a film of black dust atop the meter deepness of ash the barrage had left behind. But the skull ship floated a few hundred meters directly overhead, and I had no doubt the Unity was about to correct the mistake it had just made.
Thankfully, we weren’t alone. Four delta shapes rocketed across the sky wreathed in white shock collars, their wrath unleashed in lightning that split the darkness and overwhelmed the shields of the skull ship. The vessel rocked and pitched, an ancient sailing ship swamped by rough seas, and tumbled out of the sky. That it didn’t land directly atop me was a minor miracle, though the blast from its impact twenty or thirty klicks away was enough to ring the ground like a gong.
And into the silence after that vibration ceased came a voice. Not in the air, not on the radio, but inside my head.
You thought you could hide from me, Cameron Alvarez, the Unity mocked, but I have all the time in the world. Destroy one after another of my creations, I can make more at my leisure, and I’ll either find you or draw you to me as I did this time. Do you think I don’t know you inside and out? That I wasn’t sure you’d come personally to the rescue if I began slaughtering your kind?
“Cam,” Deke interrupted the demonic sending with an actual, physical voice, though the words he spoke were no more comforting. “There are three more of the skull ships breaking orbit, heading for us. I don’t think we’ll be able to stop them.”
“I understand,” I replied, rolling to my feet. No use maintaining radio silence anymore. The bad guys knew we were here and knew who I was.
I spent a moment’s attention checking the sensor read Deke still relayed of the Ellen’s fight beyond the planet’s moon. The picture up there was no less unpleasant than the one down here. The Predecessor ship had taken damage, that much was clear from the fiery red glow at the edges of her drive field, and if she’d destroyed a full dozen of the Unity skull ships, the rest would overwhelm her in minutes and there was nothing I could do about it.
Maybe once I’m dead the Unity will forget about the others. Maybe I can at least buy them that.
“Cam, are you okay?” Vicky asked from somewhere on the other side of the swathe of destruction left by the Unity barrage. “Where are you?”
She wouldn’t be able to pick me up on thermal or IFF, not with the intense heat still radiating off the ground, and I sighed in relief, knowing she still lived.
“I’m here, Vicky,” I said, wishing I could hold her hand one last time. “I’ll always be here.”
Drifting with what might have been a slight concussion, I toyed with the idea of crawling out of my armor and seeking her out but abandoned it immediately. The three skull ships would be on us in less than a minute, and the Intercepts wouldn’t hold them back for more than seconds. No bothering with ground troops this time either. The Unity wasn’t interested in giving me a sporting chance.
“What the fuck is that?” Deke blurted, and since I shared his ship’s sensors, I knew exactly what the fuck that was.
Transitions. Dozens of Transitions. Hundreds of them, closer together than was humanly possible, and the second the wormholes closed, raw, unbridled energy threw the ships across the distance to the orbit of Hausos’ moon in a minute. Lances of photonic destruction converged on Unity skull ships, dumping more power into the craft than their shields could absorb. The alien ships disintegrated, collapsing in on themselves, and those who were fast enough to fire back finally faced the one thing they weren’t prepared for, an enemy just as unconcerned with casualties as they were.
Tens, dozens, nearly a hundred of the cutters disappeared in supernovas of matter-antimatter annihilation, but the others kept coming as if the losses meant nothing, and the three ships heading into the atmosphere paused, as if the Unity itself hesitated, unsure how to respond.
And like all who hesitated, the Unity was lost. The uncrewed cutters didn’t even bother trying to shoot the three vessels out of the sky, instead just slicing through their shields and their hulls with a hypersonic, nearly relativistic impact. Massive explosions turned the depths of the night into brightest daylight, and what was left of the three enemy ships rained down in showers of meteors across the scar of where Gamma Junction had been.
“Can someone,” Vicky asked, her voice thick with disbelief, “please tell me what the hell just happened?”
“Victoria Sandoval,” I said, wishing I could get out of the suit and collapse from utter relief, “allow me to introduce you to Illyana.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Illyana said brightly over the general comms network. “Any friend of Jim’s is a friend of mine.”
What the fuck did you do? I asked Jim, shaking my head even though he couldn’t see it and didn’t need to. She’d already made up her mind not to help! And the version of you we left with her was useless!
Jim shrugged. He was inside me, invisible, but I felt it.
Oh, that. I determined that the issue was likely that I’d underestimated the complexity of her logic systems and merely needed to encode a new cracking software patch and inject it into the clone. When you touched his avatar back there while we were interfacing with Illyana, I had the chance to do it.
Hold on, I said, a feeling of utter horror drowning out the relief. Did you make me touch the avatar? Did you plant that idea in my head?
Of course not! Jim sounded scandalized at the very thought. You’re a sentient being. To force you to act against your will and without your consent would be totally unethical.
Isn’t that exactly what you did to Illyana? I pointed out. She’s a sentient being and you just took control of her, didn’t you?
Oh. Well, that’s different.
[ 28 ]
“This is so fucking strange,” Captain Nance whispered as if to himself, shaking his head as he stared at the dozens of Project Rho cutters clustered in one of Hausos’ Lagrangian points.
The ships floated in utter contentment, their purpose fulfilled, nothing else to occupy their time. There they’d stay until recalled, and I didn’t intend to let them be recalled, since I was the one pulling their strings. Well, Jim was.
“They’ll be heading to Sylvanus,” I told him. “We know that the Unity has other forces out there, searching for human colonies… and for me. The Ellen is going to be searching for them, and when we find them we need these ships set up at an InStell ComSat, ready to respond to a distress call.”
“I still don’t get it,” Deke said. He’d found himself an unoccupied duty station and sprawled across the chair, clearly enjoying the artificial gravity in the ship, though the physical relaxation didn’t translate to the troubled expression on his face. “How?” I didn’t answer, but he wouldn’t give it up. “How did you convince that Corporate AI to cooperate with us? ‘Cause I sure as hell wouldn’t have guessed this outcome after your last meeting with her.”
“We’re dealing with a person.” I shrugged. “People change their minds.”
Vicky very carefully avoided his eyes and mine, and I knew why because we’d talked about it privately while the Marines had escorted the citizens of Gamma Junction to the outlying settlements. There wasn’t enough housing on the farms to handle them all, but we’d flown buildfoam dispensers over from the refugee city across the continent and our engineering crews were cranking out emergency shelters as fast as they could.
“Deke can read your body language, voice stress, heart rate, respiration, skin temp… everything. Try to avoid saying anything to him about this,” I’d warned her, hanging out of the open chest plastron, armor shut down, mics shut off.
“What about you?” she’d wondered, looking skeptical. “You’re going to have to talk to him about it.”
“I have inside help.” I’d tapped the side of my head. “I can control my autonomic responses consciously.”
I hoped I was right about that, because Deke stared at me as if he could see right through into my brain.
