Chapter 10

“You absolute bastard!” Lou snarled, stepping forward – but a pair of Federal marines in power armor were there to grab him and slam him back down into a chair. Their metal gauntlets were shockingly gentle, considering their enhanced strength, but Lou still felt terribly impotent in their grip. His hands tightened into fists and he glared at Admiral Bosch, who shook his head slowly, looking sad.

“That is the problem with you Neopolitans. You’re so sentimental. Embracing tradition for aesthetic reasons, without understanding their true value. You think you can defang our past – remove everything that made it sharp and hard and power. But humanity is not a coddled pet that you could render impotent. We are built on generations of struggle, conflict, the Manichean battle between good and between evil...” He spread his hands wide. “Between good, honest, Aryan people, and the corruptive forces of Marxism, anarchism, decadence...”

“Sir.”

“You think that a petty monarchy can stand against such forces? You, yourself, are already corrupted by it! You have fallen in love with a mass murdering bug! A roach!” Bosch’s hands came together before his chest as he walked towards Lou, glaring down at him wildly. “An inhuman creature! And you didn’t merely consort to a fiction, to control it, to lull it into a false sense of security. You love it.”

“ ... sir!”

“And that,” Bosch hissed, leaning in close enough that his breath warmed Lou’s face. “That is why you failed, my Prince. And that is why the Neopolitan Star Empire will bend the knee to the Federated States as the United Human Polities are reshaped into-”

“SIR!”

Bosch turned – and didn’t see Lou’s smirk.

On the force projection maps that were being used to plot out the arrayed forces of the Federated States navy, the singular blip that was the lighthugger bearing the diplomatic envoys from Alpha Centauri had continued to draw closer – but there was a tiny glyph on it designating that it had ceased firing its stabdrive. “The lighthugger is on an intercept vector with our L2 fleet. They’re not responding to laser pings or radio coms.” The woman who was speaking sounded steely and confident – the picture of a fascist officer. “Lieutenant Admiral Langston is asking for permission to open fire.”

“The king and queen of Venus are on that ship,” Bosch said, frowning. “They need to surrender ... have you sent the image of their son? And said that his life is forfeit unless they surrender?”

“Yes, sir. The lighthugger is still on an attack vector.”

“It can’t be on an attack vector. It’s unarmed!” Bosch said, his lip curling. “Prep marine pods.”

“Yes sir.”

Lou chuckled.

Bosch turned, his eyes narrowing. “Soon, I will have your parents in custody as well, princeling.”

Lou leaned his head back slightly. “Admiral...” he paused, then glanced out the window, at the buzzing pyramid that was the quantum interference device that the Admiral hoped would kill his wife. Beatrice’s hive mind depended on quantum communications to function – signaling from mind to mind in her trillions of bioforms faster than the speed of light. But there was something more powerful even than the ability of quantum wave-forms to interact at superluminal speeds – something that Lou relied upon, right now, when hope should have been lost.

His wife.

Not her powers, not her billions of bodies, not her alien nature.

Her.

“What? Spit it out,” Bosch snarled. “Did you build some weapons on that tub? Some defenses?”

“No, actually,” Lou said, chuckling. “It’s just before we left, before I decided to spend the trip out of cryogenic storage, my wife said that to be alone for a year would be several million eternities. Each entity, a second.” His eyes flickered as he looked up at Bosch. “You left my wife alone on a starship, with the entire history of the human race at her fingertips, a fabricator, and three trillion minds spread across three solar systems ... and you gave her nearly thirty million seconds. Thirty million eternities. With. One. Goal.”

Bosch’s face was reddening.

“Me,” Lou said, casually. “And, if the pain in my chest is any indication, you only yanked the communication grub I had in me out when I was thawing. So she knows exactly where I am.”

Lou did not grin.

He showed his teeth.

“To borrow a phrase my friend Godfucker might use ... you done fucked up.”

Bosch turned back and screamed at the top of his lungs – his face red, his voice cracking: “FIRE ON THAT LIGHTHUGGER!”

It was already too late.

A lighthugger approaches a solar system rear first. Normally, it spends only the last few hours of its flight into the system decelerating, using its stabdrive to put out crushing levels of force to snap its speed down from near light to something approximating normal, Newtonian velocities. This is done at the edge of the system, to minimize the chances of slamming into any small chunk of matter that might slip past the magnetic deflection screens.

For the lighthugger bearing Beatrice Benoit and the rest of the diplomatic envoy team and the cargo recovered from Charon, the modifications made to their flight had required some changes. The ship hadn’t used the full power of the stabdrive, it had accelerated at one gravity for half the trip, then decelerated for the other half. This meant that, as it approached Mars, it did so with its drive still burning.

Until the light went out.

Every astrogation program in the Federal fleets instantly changed their projected ETAs for the lighthugger. In one of the counter intuitive parts of interstellar warfare, by turning off their engine, the lighthugger was now going to arrive sooner. It was going at such a clip, in fact, that the crews onboard the various ships in the L2 fleet all began to hastily make ready for a fast pass battle. It would require less actual human involvement than a more standard slugging match. Instead of battery and counter battery fire, interception missiles and chaff clouds, the entire battle would take place over several seconds as the two ‘fleets’ passed through one another.

It was likened by some to a bullet firing past another bullet, and both bullets then trying to shoot one another with more bullets.

“Our forward laser arrays are locked in and coilguns are primed, sir!” the gunnery control officer aboard the flagship of the L2 fleet, the Bismark IV, said, looking towards Lieutenant Admiral Langston, who sat in the acceleration couch of the bridge, glowering.

“Damn bastards couldn’t even give us the satisfaction of a proper fight.” He shook his head. “Give things over to the SIs.”

“Sir, the Bismark III and IX are reporting that there are strange energy signatures coming from the lightthugger,” the coms officer says.

For not the first time in his storied carrier, Lt. Admiral Langston wished that the naval registry of acceptable ship names drawn from the glorious history of their people was a tiny bit longer. Would it really hurt to include, say, Yamato? The Musashi? They weren’t really properly white names, but ... still, it had to be better than having, in the list of Thor class battleships, nine different Bismarks. Honestly. Langston looked ahead, to the forward screens of his bridge – which showed the telescopically magnified view of the lighthugger. He didn’t need a comptech to tell him something strange was happening – tiny flashes were sparkling along the edges of the lighthugger, in spreading, triangular patterns.

“They’re firing the deicing charges!”

“Fools,” Langston chuckled. “That ice armor was their best chance at-”

A star-bright drive flare exploded from the expanding mass of ice chunks and mist that had once been the lighthugger. A single scout ship – a two seater rocket with more telescopes than sense – situated at the edge of the fleet’s orbital path managed to snap a single, blurry shot of what was the life support containment and stabdrive of the former lighthugger, accelerating towards a stable orbit around Earth. It carried every sleeper berth and what was left of the cargo hold, and nothing else. The remaining superstructure of the lighthugger was spreading among that mist of ice and dust – and the confusion that the cloud of particulates wrought on the fleet’s sensor suite could not be overestimated.

In battles that take seconds, moments of confusion and indecision could cost the war.

“Sir, should we loose the fire control SIs?”

“No,” Langston growled. “If we fire into that mess, we’ll hit mostly vacuum! The cowards are running and think that we can’t track them back to wherever that drive structure went. Trace it, n-”

The cloud of debris rippled.

And from it came horrors.

They were each different. Each unique, in its own cleverly sadistic way. Covered with glowing chunks of carapace that acted as radiators for biologies designed to operate at chemical temperatures beyond anything seen in normal life, their bodies studded with crystalline growths that mimicked agrav generators and unified field focusing lenses, the bioforms that spilled into space each looked like a neon glow nightmare. The commonality was grasping tentacles, dripping maws, and eyes. A whole hell of a lot of eyes.

They flung themselves forward, agrav fields dropping their mass to a feather as their thruster organs spilled superheated, high pressurized fluids into space, and corkscrewed into the L2 fleet, broadcasting terribly human warcries over the radio frequencies.

“Come on boys! Lets FUCK EM UP!”

The first of the bioforms smashed into the Bismark II, a Thor class battleship and cut their way through the hull with acid tipped claws. They writhed into corridors and began to flow past crew and marines like liquid death – leaving behind screaming, stunned survivors in their wake. Those with guns usually found their arms missing, while those without were left stuck to the walls by glistening, fast hardening resin. The marines usually fared the worst of it – they were set upon by snarling, hissing monsters that usually sprang on them two, three, four at once. Claws snipped and snapped, and sometimes, they managed to get the armor off without killing the marine underneath. But gentleness wasn’t really their end goal – and more than a few Federal marines were left as quivering, dripping piles of acid seared flesh.

Langston, on his bridge, kept gaping as screams came from every ship in the fleet. Some were already flickering, their IFF signals going dark.

‘What is going on!?” He shouted. “Why ... how!? Their hive mind is dead!”

“I don’t know, sir!” a com tech screamed. “I didn’t build the fucking thing!”

The door to the bridge exploded inwards and two scorpion like bioforms – low and snarling. Langston yanked out his pistol, swinging it around and aiming it straight at the first of the scorpions, who leaped at him, snipping his hand off with a single claw – while a voice emerged from it. “Ah ah, nope!” Langston gaped at the stump of his hand and began to scream as the other scorpion clattered over to a computer, reared up, and revealed that its belly could open to reveal nimble, human like hands, which tapped away at the computers.

Missiles began to streak off the side of the Bismark – and every other Thor class. They began to sweep towards the L1 and L3 fleets. Laserfire started to swat them from the sky.

But in the end.

There were an awful lot of missiles.

Lou leaned back in the seat, grinning as he watched Admiral Bosch, his eyes widening, his jaw hanging open in mute shock as he watched light after light go out on his big board. “How? How? The hive mind is dead, how is she DOING this!?” He grabbed one of the few people in the room who wasn’t wearing a military uniform – some kind of scientist, if Lou didn’t miss his guest. “Why isn’t the Project working?”

“I-I don’t know, sir!” the scientist stammered. “M-Maybe the, the, the propagation effects aren’t working at the same scale we thought, maybe they’re out of the range, and only once they come closer...”

“That won’t matter if they take out our fleets!” Bosch shouted. “Mobilize our SDS systems, prepare to ward off orbital attack!” The men and women that he shouted at began to work – but Lou could already see the orbital strategy of the attackers ... of his wife ... beginning to form. The L2 fleet had been the primary defensive fleet, with the L1 and L3 fleets being significantly smaller. Both of them were currently busy dealing with the missiles from the boarded and hijacked ships – and the bugs were continuing on their blitz towards Mars. They looked like they were taking advantage of the relatively thin atmosphere and their agrav capacity – Lou had guessed that they had that, if only because of their visible acceleration curve on the charts – to just throw themselves at the planet and decelerate at the last second.

They were carrying large objects with them, though...

“Sir, there is a wave heading straight for this facility,” an officer said.

Bosch nodded, then glared at Lou. “Men, bring him to his feet,” he snapped – and the marines dragged Lou to his feet. Lou, still naked, smiled at Bosch.

“Feeling nervous, Bosch?”

“When those bugs get close to Etemenanki, they’ll regret this,” Bosch muttered. “Their regret not bowing before me...” He snapped his fingers. “Come on! We’re relocating to the secondary command bunker.” He began to stride off, the men at their stations looking at him, their eyes widening. The screens were beginning to fill with red as the Bugs came down – more of them seeming to emerge from the ships than what went inside of them. It was as if every single ship in the L2 fleet had become a flower and was spreading their seeds.

And the seeds were falling – falling towards the red planet.

Lou was grimly amused that, in the shoving and the hustling, no one had ever thought to give him pants. He was marched, naked, from the command rooms to the adjoining tube bridge that connected the command station to the pyramidal shape of Etemenanki. Bosch strode ahead, trying to look regal and impressive and not like a scared child. Behind him, Lou smirked as the marines walked him forward. At the edge of the horizon, where a distant city’s lights gleamed in the pale, rarefied atmosphere of Mars, Lou could see the streaks of reentry vehicles. No. Not vehicles.

Bugs.

“They’re going to be landing near biomass first,” he said, casually. “My wife isn’t going to kill human beings – but there’s still plenty of lichen.”

“Shut up,” Bosch snapped.

“Lichen and farm animals and compost and nutrient algae and-”

“Shut up!” Bosch turned to face him.

“Sir, you want me to...” One of the marines hefted up his arm and revved the rotary barrels on his recessed machine gun.

“Ah. Yes. A very wise move,” Lou said, casually. “Take the husband of a seven hundred and fifty million year old hive mind and kill him while she’s landing Mycetic spores on your homeworld and your orbital fleets are in shambles.” His voice was underlit by the sharp, harsh flares of upper atmosphere nuclear detonations – the pinprick flashes were eerily silent, like thunder beyond the range of sound. By now, the stars streaking through the atmosphere were multiplying into a blanketing shower. They weren’t all invading bugs, of course. A lot of it would be deorbiting space debris from wrecked starships.

“He’s right,” Bosch said, frowning. “But that doesn’t mean we cannot induce silence. Break his hand.”

Lou clenched his jaw. Hard. He refused, utterly, to give these men the satisfaction. It remained quite possibly the most difficult task he had ever set himself as the marine took his hand and, with utter ease, crushed it. Bones cracked and skin split as shocking, fierce, white hot pain shot up Lou’s arm. His teeth creaked and his breath hitched and caught. His face went pale and he managed, somehow, to keep himself standing ... until the marine let him go. Then he fell to one leg, his bloodied hand clutched to his chest, his breathing growing increasingly ragged.

“Did you learn your lesson, then?” Bosch asked, his voice shining with sweat, his eyes gleaming as he glared down at Lou.

Lou managed to smirk. His head lifted up and he showed teeth. “Yeah. Loud. Clear.”

Something in Bosch’s face showed he heard the undercurrent of Lou’s words. He turned and he stalked off, his hands clenching and unclenching and clenching again. They came to the doors and entered into the interior of the Etemenanki pyramid – which opened up to reveal that for all the Gothic, impressive stature of it, the inside was unfinished, unpainted. Bare space that left room for the machinery within and nothing else beyond. It was like being in the skeleton of a building. The machinery itself did look ferociously complex – endless arrays of tubes, and pipes and interlocking devices that plugged into one another, forming larger and larger complexes that themselves created a vast spiderweb that itself was one immense system. Standing on the gangway that looped around the interior, Lou almost forgot his pain as he looked slowly around it, his eyes wide, gaping.

“Amazing amount of labor...” Lou said, then hissed as he was pushed forward – after Bosch, along the gangway. “For something that doesn’t fucking work.”

Bosch’s hands tightened.

They came to the middle of the structure and there, Bosch took control. The command bunker that was built near the machinery was the same kind of overly designed ornate bullshit that Federals loved: Heavy walls, lots of extraneous machine gun nests. It was all designed to make anyone who came this far to pay a horrible last price. But it was also situated in the center of a machine so far from the centers of power that if it was being taken, then the rest of the world had fallen. It was a testament to what mattered to the fascist mind.

Make them bleed.

Fuck the cost.

Lou was slammed down into a chair by one of the marines as Bosch began to activate screens.

The all showed the same images.

Spores hitting the ground, unfolding to release bioforms. They weren’t all combat bioforms – in fact, a good chunk of them looked as if they weren’t designed for combat at all. There were huge creatures that immediately punched holes through walls in recycling plants and food centers and began to attach egg-sacks to algea tanks. There were several of similar makes who looked as if they were focusing on prison centers. And there were helpful, scarab shaped bugs that were heaped with...

“Are those rifles?” one of the marines whispered.

Through several microphones at once, through several speakers, each one piped in from a different part of the Martian dome cities that had been Federated territory for centuries, overlapping voices came. They were shouted from bioforms that were distinctly different from the others. They were not chitinous and covered with spines and spikes and claws. They were curvy. Buxom. Cute.

They were copies of his wife’s bodies. Her wasp form, her moth form, her spider form. They didn’t speak in unison, but they all spoke – shouted – into megaphones.

“People of the Federated States! For too long-”

“-crushed under their heel!”

“Friends, brutalized! Family, taken to work camps! Children, sterilized!”

“-servile slaves! And if you speak out, you’re nerve stapled!”

“Atrocities uncounted!”

“Illegal memetic reprogramming camps!”

“Smash the state! Smash the state!”

“What is she doing?” Bosch hissed.

“It looks like she’s been talking to Godfucker,” Lou said, managing to sound remarkably calm, considering the mangled wreck of his hand. The broken bones had gone from aching to throbbing, and the cuts were dripping blood in a slow, sluggish rate. He wasn’t sure how long he had before he bled out from the wounds – considering their size, he thought he had time. “Would you look at that. Proles with guns.”

Bosch shook his head. “This isn’t possible. They’re all within range of the transmitter, this isn’t POSSIBLE!”

Lou watched him, intently. And through the camera feeds, he could see the people in the streets. Men and women with guns, their gray uniforms marked with hastily daubed AnCom symbols, supported by heavy duty Terror Talons, marching towards bunkers and civil defense check points that the Federated States had built, fortified, staffed and trained in the use of for decades. Whatever insurrection they had planned for, they had not planned for it to be started simultaneously across the city as stunned, shell shocked civilians emerged to find a helping hand, smiling face, free food, and guns.

They definitely hadn’t imagined that it might have included walking, twelve meter tall biomechanical tanks armed with heat seeking acid spraying organic missiles.

“I wonder how well the Chancellor is going to take this,” Lou hissed through gritted teeth. “You sold him on the idea, didn’t you?” He glanced left, then he glanced right, at the two marines. “I mean, if the Chancellor even survives for the next few hours. It looks like a hell of a lot of proles are out there in the streets with guns. People, you know, have a pretty long memory.” He frowned. “My ancestors learned that, in France.”

Bosch’s head hung forward. He turned, slowly – and then frowned. “You two. Man the guns.” The faint sound of screaming and gunfire was coming from one of the speakers – and through the camera into the headquarters that Lou had been dragged from, he could see the sight of combat specialized bioforms cutting their way through the defenders. They seemed to be as perturbed by Project Etemenanki as he was.

Not at fucking all.

“Yes, man the guns,” Lou said, his voice flat. “Man the guns and die in them.” He looked to the left, then to the right. “You’ve lost. But you know what? If you take that armor off, if you pull your marine identification chips out of your wrists...” He smirked, slightly. “I’m pretty sure people won’t find you for a while. I’m betting that the government’s deleting confidential files as fast as possible before the parliament building gets raided and central command gets looted.” His voice was growing more and more confident as he kept the pain out of his mind through sheer willpower. “After all. You’re just a Lance Corporal and a Private First Class?”

“Don’t listen to him, men!” Bosch said, his sweat so intense that his hair had flipped down. His hand went to his belt and he jerked his pistol free. “He claims that we are doomed. And yet, he has no will. No true grit. We’ll hold a gun to his head and his precious bugs are going to grovel to make sure we don’t hurt him.”

He aimed the gun at Lou’s face.

Lou lifted a single eyebrow, then slowly, his jaw tightening, placed his injured hand down upon the armrest.

He pushed.

White hot pain shot up his arm and filled his eyes and his knees nearly buckled. The only thing that kept him from face planting was the weight he put on his arm – and that made the pain worse until he lifted his palm and the absence of pain was so intense that he almost felt good. Lou lifted his chin and sent his most icy, withering glare at Admiral Bosch. His skin was beaded with sweat, and his breath was ragged, but Lou managed to speak without stammering.

“If you shoot me with that pistol, my body will live for a few seconds. In those moments, I will clear the distance between me and you and I swear, Admiral Akin Bosch ... by the Daughter and the Holy Ghost. By the Flaming Chalice and the Ten Thousand Faces of God. By the living memories of Achilles and Ashoka...” His tongue darted along his lips, and he growled. “I swear ... for I am Prince Louis Benoit XII of the Neopolitan Star Kingdom and by that name and for the honor of humanity ... I ... will kill you.”

His eyes flashed.

“Drop the gun. Now.”

Silence rang in the room. Bosch dropped the pistol onto the ground with a clatter.

Lou dropped to his knees, panting. “Wow, that worked,” he breathed. “Hah. Holy shit.”

“What!?” Bosch gaped – but Lou had already reached out and snatched up the pistol. He aimed it at Bosch, grinning fiercely.

“An honorable gentleman never treats a prisoner with dishonor,” Lou said, his voice ragged. “Be damn glad I am both...” He started to lift himself up, panting, his vision going gray around the vision. In the distance, he could hear screaming sounds – metal, being torn. “Or else I’d have blown your fucking balls off.”