Chapter 11

Admiral Yen Yen Ro walked along the corridor while Roxi floated beside him and explained everything. Well, she didn’t explain the orgy, but she didn’t actually have to – the facts of the case were shocking enough for him to actually pause mid stride. His lower-body limbs clacked against the floor of the tube-tunnel leading from the outer edge of the headquarters’ upper ring section to the spinal column of the station and he swung his gaze to look directly at Roxi.

“Damn.”

“We need to send someone, right?” Roxi asked.

“Yes, we do – but Gyre couldn’t have picked the worst time to be alive.” He lifted his palm to his face, thinking. “Damn, damn, damn – the fleet has almost fully assembled and we’re about to blow a half a dozen super-giants into stellar dust. I can’t spare a single rocket or ship, not with every logistic op we have going right now. Hell, you shouldn’t even be here talking with me: I have four iron bombs that need to be escorted to their systems and deployed, and you’re the only ship I have who can run those missions.”

“A rocket-”

“We can’t risk the entire galaxy on a rocket, and any rocket squadron we send will unacceptably reduce our strength at Found,” he said, shaking his head. “No. I’m sorry, but Gyre will simply have to survive being marooned on a paradise planet for another few days.” He smirked. “I’m sure he can handle it.”

Roxi wanted to argue. But ... he had a good point. According to everything she had gotten from Gyre, he didn’t have a huge chunk of his memory banks, he didn’t have his crew, he didn’t have any idea about the Voidbringers. But something in her gut told her that this was wrong – that there was something important there. She shook her head. “Can you at least prep his crew? He’s asking about them!”

The Admiral, who had started to walk away, paused. He looked over his shoulder, his six eyes blinking in a corkscrew pattern. He nodded. “Yes, they will be forked from storage and brought up to speed. We normally keep dead crews out of the loop until they can be rebodied – keeping people around in digital purgatory while they’re already mourning the loss of a dear friend is ... just cruel. Their replacement bodies are still in the growth tanks, but ... we can get them back up and tell them the good news.”

Roxi nodded.

“And now you need to get to those iron bombs!” The Admiral barked.

“Yes sir!” Roxi saluted.

[[You know, you don’t need to salute, right?]] Heinlein asked, his voice amused. [[We’re not really a military.]]

[[Besides, ]] K’iren said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. [[You’re always armed.]]

Huh? Roxi thought at the same time Hugh said: [[Huh?]]

[[Philistines, do you not know the glorious history of your own military? And I thought humans were all proud warriors, ]] K’iren said, laughing. [[Saluting as a form of respect grew from showing you didn’t have any laser focals attached to your combat visor – you flip up the visor, to show you’re not packing directed energy weapons. Read a history book!]]

Is that true? Roxi thought as she flicker jumped out of the station and into the parking swarm of Concord rockets that thronged around the station.

[[She says it confidently enough to make me want to immediately check, ]] Carcass said.

[[Hey!]]

The docking swarm was a lot dirtier than Roxi had expected. But rockets weren’t starships. They were huge, ungainly things – with massive reaction mass tanks and fusion torch-drives and blisters of turrets and railgun emplacements, and heavy duty armor plating, covered in thick paint. Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, they shed tiny bits of debris every second they were in orbit: Bits of paint chipped free by micrometeorite impacts became their own kind of Kessler Cascade, because they would then ping out then strike other nearby ships and cause more chipping, more spalling, more damage.

All of it was so fucking minor that the people in the rockets barely noticed. It would take more than a fleck of paint going at orbital velocities to really bother a sturdily built war-rocket. And, honestly, it wouldn’t have bothered Roxi...

Save that Roxi was a starship.

Meaning she was both naked and flying through this dross. And while only an infinitesimal fraction of it actually smeared itself against her hull – mostly her face and shoulders as she darted past the kilometer long war-rockets of some gasbag species she had never seen before – it was still enough to make her feel like she needed a shower. Ugh, can’t you refine my kinetic barriers to block this stuff? She thought to her officers.

[[Working on it, ]] K’iren said, sounding amused. [[The issue is, we don’t want to put too much strain on reflecting the small, slow stuff and burn out our emitters before we even get to being shot by petajoule kinetics or something.]]

“Bleck!” Roxi said, aloud, into the vacuum of space. Then a paint chip flew into her eye and she squalled, rubbing at her camera lens. “Ugh! Ack! I hate this!”

She finally emerged from the docking swarm, turning her orbit from a distended oval to a hyperbolic arc – transforming it from an orbit around Found to around Found’s primary, in a way that Hugh’s nav-plotting claimed would intersect her with the freighters carrying the Iron Bombs, which had just arrived in-system at a comfortably safe distance from either the Primary or the docking swarm. Roxi squared her shoulders, then sighed.

Do you think we’ll have any countermeasure against the E-space fuckery? She thought.

[[No, but we don’t need to have countermeasures if we manage to pull this off – it’s all a race to see who’s super weapon manages to alter the course of the war first, ]] Heinlein said. [[It’s just like the Mars Independence movement all over again.]]

[[Or the Corevore War, ]] K’iren put in.

[[Or any number of conflicts in my people’s history, ]] Carcass said.

Roxi frowned.

[[What are you thinking, Roxi?]] Hugh asked.

I’m thinking that when it comes to a superweapon fight, it might be a really really really bad idea to do it against an extragalactic intelligence that might be ... She paused, not wanting to put words to her worry. But they didn’t need to hear her say what she was thinking.

[[Aren’t you glad you signed up for the Corps now?]] K’iren asked.

Honestly? Better out here, doing something, than sitting back on my homeworld watching the news and worrying, Roxi thought, then spread her arms as she came within easy light-speed communication of the Iron Bomb freighters. Each freighter looked like a kind of huge beetle, with a bulbous set of interlocking carapaces that were the reaction mass chambers, and a sextet of immense fusion torches as their butts. They had ramscoop capability for when they were being used for Core diving, but they also contained the minute spinal framework of E-space drives which would allow them to keep up at FTL speeds out here in the Habitable Zone.

“Hello, big boys!” Roxi called out over a laser-light linkup. “How many people do we got in these suckers?”

“Skeleton crews, CNS Approximating Apotheosis,” a gruff voice speaking untranslated interlac said. “This is Freight Captain Willstone San Diego of the Good Hope. Never thought I’d be carrying this abomination aboard.”

“If it makes you feel any better, there’s no habitable planets around our targets!” Roxi said. “And, please, Roxi’s fine.”

“Roxi it is, then,” Captain San Diego said, then sighed. “And you know? That does help. A little.”

Roxi darted down, then skimmed along the bellies of the transports, looking up at them. The Iron Bombs had replaced their entire cargo holds – what were usually pressurized or semi-protected cargo units were gone. In their place was the spindly, spined mass of the bomb. The majority of it was a collection of ablative plates and radiative spires that were designed to redirect and shunt heat away, until the core of the device hit a certain depth within the target star. Then there were the actual energy storage devices: Huge spooled up capacitors that, if hooked to the X-beam or grazer turret of a war-rocket, could probably power it through a whole battle. Maybe two, if they were didn’t have the spin gauge.

As it was, those capacitors were used to shunt energy into the very core of the bomb: A massive E-space drive that was pre-programmed to rip a hole straight to a parallel universe where the majority of matter had condensed into the element of iron – normally a painfully uninteresting and useless part of the possibility space that E-drives allowed access to. But when combined with the photosphere of a star, iron had a very unique and interesting property: It could undergo fusion, like hydrogen, but with an endothermic property.

In other words: It took more energy to fuse than it produced. Dump enough into a star, and that star’s fusion pattern would stutter and fail. The heat that forced a star’s mass outwards against its own gravity would fail, and the star would collapse ... and the E-space portal, shutting off with the eventual destruction of the Iron Bomb, would snap shut and the star would stutter back. Used on an already unstable star, one that would eventually go supernova, an Iron Bomb would turn the sun into a precision timed weapon of mass destruction.

And Roxi was now going to be escorting four of them.

She shivered. Okay ... I think we’re going to split them up – escort each one one at a time. Hugh, can you plot a course for them through E-space, so each one will arrive at a staggered interval at their destinations?

[[Yup! But if they run into any of those interdiction ships... ]

[[Then we’ll be able to swoop in, ]] Heinlein said. [[And it’ll mean they’ll face less realspace dangers than if we kept them in a clump and carried them from system to system.]]

[[All right, charting navs, ]] Hugh said.

Roxi crossed her arms over her chest and looked up at the massive bombs, shaking her head slowly.

A bomb that could kill a sun. Hell, with their targets, they’d be killing most suns in a big area around them. A whole swath of the Perseus Arm would be unapproachable by E-space and unlivable in realspace for decades, if not centuries, after this. But if the plan worked, then the Voidbringers would be forced to attack through a narrow funnel of realspace, or leave the galaxy and come back along a different approach – either by attacking out of plane (which, as was true in solar system scales, was expensive and time consuming) or by traveling retrograde until they could swing in along another galactic arm.

Or, I guess, they could attack along the void spaces ... she thought.

[[No – any invasion fleet like this has to have logistics. I bet they already have dozens of colonies along the rim, where they’re building new rockets, making more fuel, replacing losses. If they attacked along the void spaces, then they’d just be opening themselves up to being slaughtered by hit and run attacks along the edges, ] Heinlein said, confidently.

You say that, but they have brought millions of ships here without us noticing, Roxi thought.

Heinlein was silent for a long while.

[[We have to hope, I guess.

Yeah, we have to hope, she thought, watching as the first of the beetle shaped transports vanished with a flare of ultraviolet light. The others began to pop away, each one bathing her with illumination, and Roxi watched them go, one by one, then turned her head back to the rocket swarm that waited around Found. At this distance, they were nothing more than a dusting of sparks around the green-blue orb there. She lifted her hand, used her thumb to cover Found, so only the swarm sparkles around her fingers.

“See you in a bit,” she whispered. Hugh?

[[We’re prepped.]]

Roxi jumped into E-space, after the freighters.

Gyre stepped out from the ansible and shook his head at his fellow travelers.

“No luck,” he said.

“No luck?” Captain Yetna hissed, her hands on her hips. “You said that these people would be relieved to hear you’re alive! They’d come around and find you and help you off our planet. And, you know, help us.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t expect the Voidbringers to show up with a million ship strong fleet!” Gyre snapped. This caused both Yetna and Chinsara to quiet down, looking subdued.

“A million ships?” Yetna whispered.

“Yeah, that’s what Roxi – the other ship on the other line – said,” Gyre said. He put his palm against his face, rubbing his thumb against where, on a human face, grit would collect against the eye. He didn’t have any grit there, but old habits were ingrained, deeper than even years of being a starship. “All right. Lets focus on what we do know. There’s a backup system here...” He looked over at Tulon, who looked as if she had been keeping herself from leaping at him through sheerest force of will. “I ... didn’t want to risk damaging any of the saved data in this place without backup.”

“Yeah, that is what you said,” Tulon said, her voice guarded. “But ... you can’t just dangle the fact my husband might still be alive before me and then just ... leave me hanging for hours!”

Gyre nodded. “Come on.”

The four set out through the jungles, walking past the ancient relics of the bygone world. Old buildings made of strange material loomed from the grass and the loam, while trees grew around ancient spires of metal that thrust towards the heave. They came to a narrow slit in the hillside, which Gyre pointed into, standing proud and strong in a beam of sunlight that cut through the canopy, illuminating his nude body with glittering highlights. He looked back at Tulon.

“The storage vaults are in here – under a shelf of granite thick enough to reduce any risk from cosmic radiation,” he said, quietly. “The vaults themselves, from what I can tell, are all solid state memory, encoded in quantum locked crystals. They have a direct tap to the men of this world ... not sure why.” He frowned, slightly. “I’m still a bit at a loss as to what this planet’s exact gimmick was.”

“Wait, only the men?” Yetna asked. “What about women?”

“They might be stored in another database,” Gyre said, then stepped forward. His palm glowed as he moved into the darkness, providing a stark white illumination that he swept around. The cave entrance was a mixture of ornately carved and utterly natural – the ceiling had caved in due to the pressure of erosion and moving earth, but the floor and walls were clearly synthetic, and patterned in complex, gridlike weaves that made the three natives eyes’ hurt to trace. Tulon kept her eyes focused on the sleek blades of Gyre’s shoulders, while Chinsara tried to trace the lines of the grids with her sky blue fingers.

They came past a narrow blockage, then stepped down some stairs, entering into a chamber more vast than even Tulon had expected. Gyre’s light barely reached the far end of it – shining past endless rows of black stone that rose, monolith like, from the floor. The stone had a strange, iridescent pattern over it, glittering with the light that Gyre shone along their sides. HE placed his non-glowing hand on a nearby one, nodding.

“Each of these has the storage to hold tens of thousands minds,” he said. “I’m picking up sixteen by fifty rows of them – eight thousand storage units, capable of holding ten, twenty thousand minds each?” He whistled. “That’s enough to store sixteen million minds at a minimum. If your world’s population is as low as it seems, then they might have every dead male since your world was seperated from the Concord.”

Tulon shook her head slowly, trying to ... hold onto that number.

But it skittered away, lost like a fish wriggling out of a net. She was left only with ... Xan.

“Can you ... awaken Xan? Talk to him here?” she asked.

“Let me see,” Gyre said, his brow furrowing, his eyes closing. “I’m not exactly a system tech or an administrator – but I did look over old Thuf’s shoulder when he did some of his work.” He paused for a long moment. The silence of the cave was overpowering – the only noise was their faint breathing, and with every second, each of the three women seemed to work harder and harder to stifle their own signs of life, as if their very presence was faintly insulting for the sleeping dead in this place. After an agonizing eternity of waiting, Gyre lifted his palm.

“I have found him,” he said. “The scan is preposterously accurate.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means, if I ... scan him out, into my own computronium core, then he’ll basically be restarting from the moment he exploded, as if nothing had ever happened,” Gyre said, then licked his lips. “Your men, they can produce light, right?”

“And heat,” Yetna said, sighing. “Some can produce enough heat to make steel.”

“Tang ina!” Gyre swore, slipping out of both the native language and Interlac to really curse the amount that he wanted to. “I was such an idiot on this planet!” He put his hand over his face, pacing back and forth, hurriedly, his feet clacking on the floor. “So wrapped up about my own fucking amnesia, I didn’t even do basic Starship duties.” He shook his head. “Your males are a diffuse cloud of particulate critters. I thought they were like fireflies or something – but they can produce heat enough to melt steel. That’s in excess of, what, three thousand degrees?”

“They do have help from furnaces,” Chinsara said, cheerfully.

“That’s not natural,” Gyre said. “No way does that evolve in a sentient critter.”

“I thought you’d already figured that out,” Yetna said. “When you realized our planet was a ... what did you call it, a theme park?”

Gyre chewed his knuckle. “The outcomes of it are only making sense to me now. We don’t know what’s the range of frequencies they can emit – if your males are able to broadcast on the EM band, then they can...” He trailed off, seeing the confusion on their features. “Just ... trust me, they can be recorded by these vaults.”

“Then get him out!” Tulon said, her voice tight.

“Right!” Gyre said, then placed his palm on the stone. He breathed in, then breathed out. “All right. Downloading.” He nodded, then smiled. “Hello there, Xan.”

Inside of Gyre’s bridge, Xan looked like a human made of glittering spots of light, swirling around in the vauge pattern of a muscular, nude male. He looked around himself, blinking. “Where am I!?” he asked – first question, Gyre supposed, was the most reasonable. “Is Tulon okay?”

Gyre felt a knot in his stomach relaxing – a sensation of guilt, even if he had started to move past it, fading away as he stepped forward in the simulation of reality that was the interior of his mind and took Xan by the arm. He squeezed, shook his hand, and beamed at him. “Tulon is just fine. As for where you are ... that ... is going to be a little tricky to explain...” He said, nodding a bit as he did so.

“Try me,” Xan said, frowning as he slid his hand from Gyre’s grip.

“Okay. You died,” Gyre said. “But your body is connected to a magical stone that records the memories and thoughts of every male on this planet – and so, when you died, your backup here stopped getting new memories. I’ve awakened that backup and transferred it to a magical stone inside my body. Except, uh, I’m using the term ‘magic’ as a short hand. It’s just technology, like the ropes and pulleys of your ship, but infinitely more complex and difficulty to understand and manufacture.” He paused for a beat. “How is that?”

Xan sat down on the nearest chair, his arms resting in the rests that had once been used by old Thuf as he grumbled about sensor readouts. His eyes were wide and his mouth opened. “I...” He closed his lips. “I’m dead?”

“Not anymore,” Gyre said. “And well, in the Concord ... the land I came from ... there’s two ways of seeing this kind of thing.” He walked over, then sat on the next chair over, looking seriously at Xan. “Either you think that there is a soul that has gone on to a new afterlife and left you behind. That makes you a kind of a child – an offspring of the original Xan, who is dead. You have all his memories and thoughts, all his feelings and wants. He may not have gone in the same direction you do – but you carry on the tradition of his life, so to speak.” He smiled, cocking his head to the side. “Or, if you don’t believe in souls and afterlife’s, then you are Xan. It’s just that the pattern of thought and consciousness that is Xan was interrupted for a few weeks before being restarted.”

Xan breathed out a ragged sigh. “Goddess ... that’s a lot, you know?”

“I know,” Gyre said. “But you should get over it quickly – I’m running my bridge at faster than normal timescales, so you have more time than you’d normally have before Tulon starts shaking me.” He smiled. “But not an infinite amount of time.”

Xan gulped, then nodded. “Right.” He rubbed his palms against his face, before drawing them back, looking at his palms. “I’ve never had this much body before.” He wiggled his fingers, slowly. “It feels nice. Natural, even.”