Chapter 4: Message in a Bottle

“The assault carriers are clear of boarders,” the comms officer said, Vos nodding in quiet approval. “They managed to cut their way inside the Dragoon, but were repelled by security teams. Casualties are minimal.”

“They went straight for the ships at the rear of the formation,” Captain Fielding added, steepling his gloved fingers as he leaned back into his chair. “They’re smarter than a lot of the fleets we’ve faced before. They knew that we were protecting them for a reason.”

“Even so, their forces have been crippled,” Vos replied as he swiped at his holographic display. “Reports are coming in that the last of the enemy ships that joined the attack have been destroyed. A few of ours sustained minor damage, and two of our railgun frigates were disabled – the Dartnell and the Kerrey. One of them launched escape pods, and the Taipei is dispatching shuttles to pick them up. We’d better leave a CIWS frigate behind to keep an eye on those ships until we can mount a proper salvage operation.”

“Makes you wonder how these engagements would go if the different hives actually shared information and knew what they were going up against,” Fielding said. “We gain experience from each engagement, tailor our tactics and technology to counter theirs, but they start fresh every time.”

“That’s an eventuality I’d rather not imagine,” he muttered. “I’d better check in with our friends,” he added, swiping at his display. After a momentary delay, an image of the Ensi appeared on his feed, peering back at him with her one eye. “Do you have a status report for me, Ensi?”

“One cruiser sustained minor damage, and one of our frigates was disabled,” she replied.

“Do you require assistance?”

“No,” she replied tersely. “We have the situation under control. What is the next course of action, Admiral? Our ion cannons are ready to fire on the station.”

“It shouldn’t be necessary. The Mars will soon be in a position where she can fire her main gun without the risk of hitting Kerguela.”

“Then, we shall see what these fabled planet-killers of yours can do,” she said. “We will continue to fire on the insect ships in the vicinity in the meantime.”

She closed the feed, Vos putting through a call to the Constancy, the strange visage of its insectoid pilot appearing before him.

“Admiral,” she said with a nod of her horned head, the plates and mandibles that made up her face moving as she spoke.

“Constancy,” he began. “What’s your situation? Did you sustain any damage during the battle?”

“The ferals sent several boarding pods, but they were repelled,” she replied. “No damage to report.”

“Excellent,” Vos replied. “Stay in formation with the assault carriers. We’re about to begin our attack on the Betelgeusian station.”

“By your orders, Admiral,” she replied. He cut the feed, Fielding glancing over at him.

“Ferals?” the captain asked, raising an eyebrow.

“I suppose they consider themselves domesticated,” Vos chuckled. “Alright, let’s level out the jump carriers and follow the Mars in. I want a good view of this.”

The Rorke slowly nosed down again, the camera feeds on the bridge windows disappearing, revealing the sloping prow of the craft. Kerguela loomed ahead of them, the station slightly off to their port side. The fleet had taken up its previous formation again, the battleship and the railgun frigates forming a wedge at the front of the group, the CIWS ships creating a protective cordon. Bright tracer fire lanced out every so often, the enemy torpedo boats still taking pot shots as they clustered around their station in the distance. Their fighter swarm and their boarding craft had been repelled, and it didn’t look like they had any more tricks up their sleeves.

After a few minutes, the Mars slowed, beginning to turn its pointed prow towards the enemy station. The frigates burned away, clearing the area, Vos leaning closer in his chair as he watched intently. A shroud on the vessel’s aft, just above the engines, folded back to expose a mess of bulky machinery. Thick heat pipes that ran the length of the main gun terminated there, feeding into an extensive radiator system. In space, there was no medium through which to quickly dissipate heat, so the battleship’s designers had devised a quicker method. Waste heat was dumped into cylindrical radiators, which could then be physically ejected like spent shells from a breech.

Just in front of the bridge windows, at the mouth of the giant railgun, was the loading cylinder. Like a revolver, it rotated a tungsten penetrator the length of a trailer into place, preparing to accelerate it down magnetic rails that ran almost the entire length of the 350-meter ship. The weapon had originally been designed as a means of sterilizing worlds, where it would leverage the immense kinetic energy that it could output to target vulnerable fault lines. At the right angle, it could tear open the planet’s crust, exposing hundreds of miles of molten mantle to the air. Subsequent bombardments would only increase the effect. The resulting volcanism would render the planet uninhabitable, even to the Bugs, choking the atmosphere and destroying its biosphere. It was a last-resort weapon that had never been used for its intended purpose, but that might be the fate of Kerguela if they couldn’t accomplish their goals on the ground. The Bugs could not be allowed to maintain their foothold in this system.

“Do we know what firing that thing is going to do?” Fielding asked, making no effort to hide his concern. “It’s going to be difficult to get shuttles to and from the ground safely if we fill the moon’s orbit with debris from these stations.”

“Scans show that the station is made up primarily of porous, organic material,” Vos explained. “It’s full of empty cavities, probably not dissimilar from a beehive. It’s also in an unusually low orbit for a tethered station, which means that once the tether is severed, it should de-orbit relatively quickly.”

“Is that going to do much damage to the surface?”

“Not enough to be of concern to us,” Vos replied with a wry smile. The implication was obvious enough. The falling station wouldn’t do any lasting damage to the planet’s ecology, but it wouldn’t be a good time for any Bugs caught in its path.

“The Mars requests permission to fire,” the comms officer said. “They have reached the appropriate inclination.”

“Tell them to fire when ready,” Vos replied.

A moment later, the battleship’s main engines began to glow brightly, jets of azure hydrogen flame spewing from its massive cones. It needed some kind of opposing force to help control the recoil. The entire craft shuddered as the main gun fired. There was no residue, no muzzle flash, no friction in the absence of an atmosphere. The projectile closed the distance between the ship and the station instantly from the perspective of the observers, a bright flash of light darkening the bridge windows. When they cleared again, there was a conical crater in the near face of the station, pulverized debris spreading out from it in an incandescent cloud. It looked like a giant bullet wound, exposing organic material beneath the structure’s outer hull, along with structural supports that looked like they were made from some kind of metal. They were molten now, twisted, like pieces of broken rebar. What hadn’t been vaporized on impact had been decimated by the resulting shockwaves, all of that energy dumped into the structure, shaking it apart like an earthquake. Behind it, more glowing fragments spewed out of the exit wound, glowing like sparks against the black backdrop of space.

The metal rings that formed the base of the tether began to break apart, the force of the blow enough to disrupt its orbit. The organic cable stretched, then tore open, exposing the pink meat beneath its off-green exterior. Unknown fluids spewed from it as it began to slowly sink back towards the planet, the station starting to drift. Many of the frigates that had still been clustered around it had been destroyed by the blast, fragments of the station peppering their hulls like a giant grenade, the burning wreckage tumbling away. A few survivors began to burn clear, but the Mars turned its super-railgun turrets on them, swatting them out of the sky in a way that came off as almost lazy.

From the machinery on the aft of the ship, one of the radiators was ejected, sending a cylindrical capsule sailing away from the battleship. It was glowing red-hot, storing all of the heat that had been generated by the firing of the weapon.

“I’d call that mission accomplished,” Vos said, watching as the spreading debris field slowly cooled.

“How long do you think it will take to de-orbit?” Fielding asked, still wide-eyed.

“The wreckage should enter the atmosphere in a few hours, by our estimation,” Vos replied. “Once we confirm that the rest of the battlegroups were successful in taking down their respective stations, and most of the debris is clear, we can move in and begin our ground operations.”

“What about the battlegroups that don’t have battleships?” Fielding asked. “How will they take down their stations?”

“Massed bombardment. Saturation fire from torpedoes and railguns should get the job done. We’ll reposition the battleships if they have trouble.”

“I’ll let the fighter squadrons know that they can start rearming,” Fielding said, turning to the comms officer. “Have all of the ships in the battlegroup run a self-diagnostic and report their status. I want to know about every flake of chipped paint and every twisted ankle.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Now, we wait,” Vos sighed as he relaxed into his chair.

“Typical,” Xipa muttered, watching the ravaged station start to fall towards Kerguela. “We build a weapon that pushes the limits of our knowledge of particle physics, and the Earth’nay build a giant hammer.”

She turned to her bridge crew, a flush of angry red snapping them out of their stupor.

“Stop gawking and do your jobs,” she hissed, her crew quickly turning their attention back to their displays. “What’s the status of the fleet?”

“Minor damage reported across several ships,” the comms operator replied. “The disabled frigate is being evacuated. It doesn’t look like it will be salvageable.”

“We’ll have to tow it back to Valbara when we have a ship available,” the Ensi sighed. “No matter, the day is won. Our new fleet performed to the standards that I expected.”

“Our ships were almost untouchable,” the weapons operator added with a prideful flush of her panels.

“Do not expect the battle on the ground to go as smoothly,” the Ensi chided. “There are fifteen million insects down there, and they’ve had thirty rotations to harden their defenses. This campaign has barely begun.”

“Ensi, we are picking up a signal,” the comms operator interrupted.

“Well? Transfer it to my display,” Xipa replied with a flutter of irritation. “I’m sure the admiral is keen to extol the virtue of his superweapon.”

“No, Ensi,” the operator replied hesitantly. “The signal is coming from the moon’s surface.”

“What?” she demanded, narrowing her eye. She marched across the bridge, stepping down into the operator’s booth, a flicker of worried purple flashing across her subordinate’s panels. “Show me.”

“There’s a lot of electromagnetic radiation coming from the surface,” she elaborated, bringing up a feed that showed a visualization of the signals. It was color-coded, spiking up and down to form wavering lines. “The interactions of the moon and its parent produce natural radio waves that create a lot of interference, but we’ve been picking up ... something else. Firstly, there’s this,” she began with a gesture to one of the graphs. “I think these are artificial signals. They’re using very low frequencies in the three-kilohertz band, which could be dismissed as lightning or disturbances in the magnetic field, but these consistent patterns in the signal suggest that they’re carrying information. It’s all gibberish, nothing that I can make sense of, but maybe a flock with more expertise could decode it.”

“Are you suggesting that the insects are using radios?” Xipa asked skeptically.

“Not as such,” the operator replied. “That kind of thing wouldn’t be detectable at this distance anyway. What we’re seeing here – if it’s not some kind of natural phenomenon – is a very large, very high-powered antenna.”

“How large?”

“It would have to be ... around forty kilometers long to produce a signal like this.”

“What do you think it’s being used for?” Xipa asked.

“If I had to guess, I’d say that it’s being used to communicate over long distances and through solid barriers, perhaps underground. I don’t see another reason to build an antenna this large. Hives don’t communicate with each other, so whatever they’re doing, it has to be confined to the moon.”

“It makes sense that they would have to develop some kind of global communications network,” Xipa mused. “They can’t rely on pheromones over those kinds of distances. This makes them vulnerable. We can triangulate the positions of these transmitters and take them out, cut off the Queen’s ability to coordinate her troops in different regions.”

“There’s something else,” the operator continued, a purple flicker of hesitation passing through her panels. “As we neared the moon, we began to pick up a strange transmission. Either it doesn’t have the power to leave Kerguela’s immediate vicinity, or it was being blocked by the gas giant’s magnetosphere, but it’s different from the insect radio signals.”

She tapped at one of her touch panels, bringing up a new visualization. This one was very regular, far simpler, almost as though it was intended to be understood.

“Wait a moment,” Xipa said, staring at the feed. “I ... I think I recognize this frequency. Play it through the speakers.”

The operator did as she was asked, a steady beeping sound filling the bridge. The Ensi’s feathers flushed a shocked shade of yellow as she raised her scarred snout to the ceiling, cocking her head, listening intently to the regular pulses.

“Ensi?” the operator asked, lowering her voice to a whisper as though afraid to disturb her. The rest of the bridge crew were watching now, sharing concerned glances.

“I remember this pattern,” Xipa muttered, lost in thought for a moment as she dredged up long-buried memories. “I’ve heard this before – during search and rescue training, back when I served in the city guard. This is an emergency positioning beacon. They were used to call for help after natural disasters. We don’t use them anymore, but they were little polymer devices that put out a repeating radio signal,” she explained as she cupped her hands to demonstrate their size. “Their batteries were only supposed to last for a few days at most. There’s no way that one of them could continue to transmit for thirty rotations ... not unless someone...”

The Ensi clenched her fists, straightening up, her scarred lip rising to expose her sharp teeth.

“Triangulate its position,” she ordered, the operator quickly turning back to her displays. “I want to know exactly where that signal is emanating from, down to the millimeter. Contact me on the priority channel as soon as you have a lock. I need to speak to the admiral,” she added, hopping out of the booth. She marched to the door at the rear of the bridge, a flock of engineers quickly scurrying out of her path as she stalked past them. “Put the call through to my private quarters.”

“The tether cracked like a whip when it snapped,” Fielding explained, keying in coordinates for the telescope. The captain and the admiral were standing on the observation deck of the secondary bridge, situated beneath the belly of the carrier. It had excellent visibility, as the name suggested, the expansive windows allowing them an unimpeded view of the planet beneath their feet. The red forests and shining rivers drifted past far below, shrouded in wisps of white cloud. The hull of the Rorke sloped away in the distance, forming an ocean-grey ceiling, clusters of railguns pointing down at the moon.

The main window became opaque for a moment before displaying the live feed, Vos examining the display. A great chunk of forest had been carved out by the falling tether, forming what looked like a new valley, which was already starting to fill in with water. It was miles long, a scar cut into the planet’s surface.

“No matter,” Vos said, clasping his hands behind his back. “It won’t do any lasting ecological damage. What about the station?’

“Burning debris rained down over a two hundred kilometer radius,” Fielding explained, typing in new coordinates. The view changed to show the crash site, where a vast swathe of forest had been wiped away, plumes of smoke filling the air as some of the plant life burned. There were hunks of charred meat that had somehow survived reentry littered all over the place, as well as hardier, technological components that had dug furrows in the earth. “The fires aren’t expected to spread,” the captain added, anticipating his concern.

“All of the stations have been destroyed,” Vos added. “Losses have been minor, and we now have total control over the gravity well. I want to run some more surveys before we commit our ground forces – try to get some idea of what they’re hiding beneath that jungle canopy. Once we’ve confirmed that they have no ground-based weapons that can reach orbit, we can send a courser back to Valbara and have them open up a supply line. We’ll have all the supplies and reinforcements that we need.”

“It’s strange,” Fielding added, switching the display back to transparent mode. “I always imagined that the Bugs would ravage the worlds they claimed. I thought of them as space locusts, like they’d eat everything on a planet’s surface until it was barren, then move on to the next one. Kerguela looks ... pristine, untouched.”

“The Jarilans say that the Betelgeusians maintain the planet’s biosphere, tailor it to maximize the resources that it can produce for them,” Vos explained. “They settle their planets long-term, just like we do. They farm, they raise livestock, they replant forests. According to the Jarries, at least.”

“Good,” Fielding muttered, a hint of malice in his voice. “That means more infrastructure for us to destroy. There are no non-combatants, which means crops and supply lines are valid targets. Even the Bugs can’t fight on an empty stomach.”

“No, but their Repletes can eat just about anything,” Vos added. “Speaking of infrastructure, did you read the report on the giant radio antennas?”

“I did,” Fielding replied. “Some hive fleets have used radio to communicate between ships, but I’ve never seen them use it on the ground before. It’s odd. In any case, their transmitters are broadcasting their locations to the whole fleet like they’re asking to be leveled. We’ve already got coordinates for most of them – priority targets if I’ve ever seen one.”

“Once we have a better idea of what’s going on down there, we’ll start sending in the assault carriers,” Vos continued. “I want to secure the bases of the tethers first. There seem to be large concentrations of structures built around the anchors, and we need to make sure that the Bugs can’t salvage whatever resources they’re storing there. If it’s stuff that we can destroy from orbit, all the better, but we need boots on the ground to assess the situation.”

They were interrupted by a beeping sound, the admiral’s tablet computer flashing an alert. He pulled it from his pocket, examining the display.

“Apologies, Captain. It seems that the Ensi is requesting a private audience.”

“I’ll leave you two alone for a while,” Fielding said, giving him a sympathetic smile as he made for the door. Once he was outside, Vos opened up a video feed on the nearest console, watching the Ensi’s scarred face flicker into view.

“Ensi. To what do I owe the pleasure? If you’re here to discuss the outcome of the battle, I’m happy to say that your fleet exceeded my expectations.”

“Admiral,” she replied tersely. She seemed worried, almost anxious, in stark contrast with her usual icy demeanor. “Our sensors have detected a distress signal emanating from the moon. It’s coming from one of the old cities, which now lies in ruins.”

“A distress signal?” Vos asked skeptically. “Some old repeater from before the invasion that was left active, you mean?”

“I am familiar with the device that is producing the signal,” she explained. “It’s a small, handheld radio designed to lead rescuers to people who are trapped beneath rubble or lost in the forests. Its battery was only rated for a period of days, not thirty rotations. It is impossible that such a device could simply have been left on unattended.”

“You can’t be suggesting that there might be survivors down there?” Vos scoffed, the Ensi giving him an involuntary flush of angry red in response. “Someone must have hooked it up to a larger battery or some other power source to extend its lifespan during the invasion, perhaps expecting that there would be a counter-attack or a rescue operation. The moon has been occupied by Betelgeusians for decades. They’re efficient, ruthless killers, Ensi. You know that better than anyone.”

“Regardless, I mean to lead a team down to the surface to investigate this signal personally,” she continued. “If there is even a remote chance that someone has held out this long, I cannot ignore it. I have to know what happened.”

Vos considered his next words carefully. The Ensi was a brilliant tactician and a capable commander, but she bore far deeper scars than those on her face. She had seen this planet die, her flock had been slaughtered before her eyes, and she was clearly letting her emotions get the better of her now. He had to be tactful, but firm.

“Ensi, you have a fleet to command,” he replied. “Your troops are relying on you to lead them. You can’t go gallivanting around on the surface chasing ghosts.”

“Our command structure is not as monolithic as your own,” she said, the corner of her lip rising in a twitch. “I trust my subordinates, or I would not have hand-picked them for this mission. They are more than capable of carrying out their duties. Besides, my absence would be a short one. This campaign could last for months.”