Chapter 14

The Galactic Concord had the most sophisticated communication grid that had ever existed. With more connections than there were neurons in a Terran brain, and significantly more bandwidth than there were in every single pre-Concord planetary networks combined, the Concord required multiple gods to oversee just the FTL signaling stations, let alone the sublight networks that webbed between FTL chokepoints, transforming every single solar system into an invisible web of thrumming commerce and culture.

In approximately twenty four hours after the Battle of Found, it was beginning to collapse.

The network had been built to weather storms. It was not built – could never have been built – to withstand the hammer blow after hammer blow that the Voidbringers were smashing into the galaxy. Three hours after Found was overwhelmed, the first battlefleets dropped out at sixteen different solar systems. The smaller systems were swept over and destroyed in minutes. The larger took hours. The Voidbringers worked, and their immense stellar-engineering projects spun stars apart, then sucked their hydrogen into vast foundries. They used E-space shiftgates to shunt that hydrogen into neighboring universes, where the laws of physics allowed for relatively easy mass-matter manipulation, then shunted the altered materials back to automated factories.

From those factories came more fleets.

More planetkillers.

More stellar engineering systems.

More death.

Roxi dropped from the orbit of a venusian world and onto the surface. Acid rain washed long her hull, while next to her, Sting staggered and stepped away from her, panting softly. The other ship had been repaired in a tearing hurry at an automat factory that had been still operating in Sellarinder, before the Voidbringer ships had arrived and the evacuation fleet had started to rush away as quickly as they could. The sky, before it had been shrouded by the clouds of the planet they were sheltering on, was already blazing with nearby supernova detonations as more iron bombs were chucked into more solar systems. But the font was too wide now for choke points to matter much – even if the Voidbringers could only approach through narrow lanes of E-space, there were enough lanes that they could still bring more and more troops.

As it was, the nova were mostly trying, desperately, to sterilize as many Vodibringers as they could.

“Well, this is a pisser,” Sting said, shaking her head.

“We have some hope,” Roxi said.

“You gotta be shitting me,” Sting said. She had been out cold for the majority of the past few hours – the repairs had just gotten her to barely functional and then they’d needed to run before the sun had detonated from iron bombs. “How the fuck can we have any hope against this?” She threw out her arm.

[Simple, ] Carcass said, projecting his moldy form into the smog-filled air of the nameless venusian. [We have tracked down the origin point of an extra-galactic ship, sent from the Andromeda galaxy, ahead of the Voidbringer wave. We know where it ended up in the galaxy. If there are any clues as to the origin of the Voidbringers, their goals-]

“Beyond xenocide,” Sting said, her voice dark.

[Yes, beyond that, ] Carcass said. [Then this ship would have it.]

“Great,” Sting said. “Where is it?”

Roxi rubbed her hand along the back of her neck. “You’re not going to believe this...” She paused. “Terra.”

“You’re shitting me,” Sting said, then one of her crew – her helms officer, Roxi thought – popped up next to her, shimmering faintly.

[Terra!? As in homeworld!?] he asked, his Terran features twisting into an expression of pure shock. [No one lives on Terra anymore – not since the anthropocene ended!]

[Well, that’s just redundant, ] Carcass said, dryly.

“We need to get to Terra,” Roxi said.

“We need? We?” Sting gestured between them. “No, no, we need to get in contact with whatever is left of the Corps, and we have to...” She paused.

“Two starships aren’t going to do shit against the storm out there,” Roxi said. She paused, trying to ... put the images she had seen over the past twenty four hours out of her head. But she couldn’t help herself. For a moment, all she could see was Arlelan burning from orbit as blue-white flares roared across the surface of the planet as ground forces threw around their WMDs with wild abandon in the megacities that sprawled across the northern continents, desperately trying to slow down the Voidbringer ground forces. All she could think of was the death-screams of a billion people, reaching across the local net as people literally posted their final words to social media accounts as their orbital habitats were dragged from orbit by netwar attacks and smashed into their planetary surfaces. All she could hear was the hammering of the railgun batteries on the surface of Torphin, constructed along the desert flats by massed work teams, all to slow the Voidbringers down for less than fifteen minutes.

She shook herself and forced herself to sound calm. Focused. “But ... if ... this ... long shot works, if we can find out what the Voidbringers are, what they want, then...”

“We can stop them before they eat the other half of the galaxy,” Sting said, quietly.

The only sound between them was the driving sound of acid rain.

“If it helps, uh, I think most of our command structure is dead,” Roxi said, nervously.

[Heh, ] Heinlein added.

“You know what? It really fucking doesn’t,” Sting said, then held out her yellow and black hand. “Lets do it. Lets take this long shot.”

Roxi took her hand.

The two of them took to orbit, leaving behind momentary ripples in the cloud cover of the Venusian. They came out to find that the Voidbringer armada earmarked for this system had arrived – and this system wasn’t even populated. The Voidbringers didn’t care. In the distance, Roxi could see that the ships were already beginning to disassemble local planets to add material to the armada’s construction efforts, the form of the superstructure that would rip the star apart and turn its mass into more building materials already starting to glint at the polar edges of the orb of pale white light that was the star – when looked at through her vision filters.

[Lets get the hell out of here, ] Hugh said. [Plotting a jump to Terra.]

[Make it a fast one, ] Heinlein said.

[That will take more time-]

[Incoming!] K’iren shouted.

The Voidbringer armada might have been primarily in the inner system and the venusian that they were hiding out around was in orbit around an out system gas giant. But that didn’t stop them from having picket forces. And when Voidbringers were on the march, a picket force was on par with most species’ entire fleets. Dozens of frigates, backed up by a trio of battleships, came around the polar orbit of the gas giant, their long kinetics already coming to bear on the two starships. Sting and Roxi burned hard, turning their gentle elliptical into hyperbolics that curved back in on themselves, swinging their orbits retrograde.

That put the Venusian between them and the enemy ships.

It also meant when the spinal kinetics went off, the only indication was the blooming of red, right above the horizon, from ejecta thrown into orbit by the impacts. As the debris shimmered outwards in a slow flowering, strike fighters screamed over the horizon and directly into Sting and Roxi’s x-beams and grazers. By this point, Roxi had used her energy weapons often enough to barely need to aim – the Voidbringers came to pieces as the beam of invisible death cut through armor and sliced through metal.

The only problem, as was always the case, was that there were just more Voidbringers.

“Any second now, Hugh!”

[Almost-]

A wing of fighters that had avoided both ship’s beam weapons dropped their munitions and opened fire with their nose kinetics. Orbits started to get increasingly chaotic and Sting had to split her beamfire from fighters to munition duty. Atomics flared with blue-white flashes as they detonated within a few dozen kilometers of Sting, trying to overload her armor with radiant heat. It didn’t work very well, but it did force her to focus on her flying for a bit, while kinetic impactors around Roxi hazed space with dust and darts.

[Got it!]

With Hugh’s voice, Roxi risked a straight line shot away from the gravity well...

Into the line of the battleships...

Their noses flashed.

She hit E-space and swore she could feel the ghost of the impacts, sweeping through her belly. She shook herself, as E-space swept past her. She closed her eyes, whispering quietly to her crew.

How close are we to Terra?

There was a short pause.

[I ... uh ... didn’t want to bring this up, Roxi, ] K’iren said. [But your homeworld is right next to the Perseus arm.]

Fuck, Roxi thought. She had been hoping that Terra would be off in the boonies, far, far, far away from the onrushing wave of Voidbringers. Instead, as the map unfolded before her eyes thanks to Hugh’s tapping, she could see that they were on the leading edge of the Orion Arm, which was the arm that was directly trailing from Perseus. It was just a short hop along the stellar nurseries between habitable sections of the arms, and then they would be right back where the Terran species had begun. Roxi felt a momentary flare of embarrassment at the fact she hadn’t known, precisely, where Terra was...

But...

As Sting’s helmsman had pointed out, no one had lived on Terra for thousands of years. After the climatologic disasters of the Pre-Diaspora, after the atomic wars, after the United Nations, Terra had been left to the Order of the Green. They had gentled the seas and regrown the polar caps. They had introduced gene-fixed ecosystems back and had begun to bring the Terran globe back towards a garden. It had never been possible to recreate what had been lost, but they had made something new and spectacular.

And now, it was on the front edge of a Voidbringer wave.

Not if we get there first, Roxi thought.

A tiny flash of light.

A moment of silence.

Roxi soaked it in as, beside her, Sting came to a halt, looking down with her. The two women were looking down at ... Earth. The old name was the only name that felt appropriate. The continents were mostly the same, save for the large circular chunk ripped out of the western coast of North America around the ancient city of San Diego. Green spread along all the places that weren’t artful deserts, and the oceans glittered with blue perfection. There was a very thin orbital webwork around it – communication buoys and orbital habitats that held the Order of the Green – and the glittering megacities of Luna, which had become ossified over the millennia – transformed first from a nationalistic colony to a central city of commerce and communication to a massive museum piece.

“So,” Sting said, her lips pursed. “Where do we start first?”

[Getting a communication ping, ] Heinlein said.

“Put it up, Carcass, scan the planet,” Roxi said as a glowing image appeared in the empty void ahead of her, painted into her eye by her head computer. It was a woman who exuded age and grace in equal measures, her face covered with wrinkles like a prune, her hair pale white and heaped into a conical beehive.

“Welcome to our system, honored Starship,” the woman said, her voice a soft creak in Roxi’s ear. “If you have come to evacuate us, then I must once again state that the Order of the Green have chosen to remain with our world. Those who would evacuate-”

“We’re not here for that,” Roxi said, knowing that she was being both rude and a bit cruel. But she didn’t have time. She waved her hand, a bit, as if to dismiss any worries. “We need a meteorological record of Earth, er, Terra, stretching backwards to approximately four point five billion years ago.” She knew that it was a very ... specific request. But she knew that the Order existed for precisely this kind of question.

The old woman frowned, slightly. “May I ask-”

“We believe that an extragalactic ship arrived on Earth, approximately four point five billion years ago,” Roxi said, knowing that in fiction, you always said stuff like ‘there’s no time to explain.’ Well, there wasn’t really time for a ton of explanations. But, like, it wasn’t that fucking complicated. “We hope to find some part of it, and to determine any information we can about it as it came from the same galaxy as the Voidbringers.”

The old woman’s mouth opened, then closed. “Well, I...” She frowned, slightly. “One moment.”

She fizzled out of Roxi’s perceptions and, beside her, Sting chuckled. “That definitely wasn’t what she expected.”

[To be fair, ] Hugh said, his voice wry. [Who the fuck would?]

[Scan complete. There is no immediate sign of any starship, ] Carcass said, before the old woman reappeared before them, joined with a younger androgene, who bowed their head to the two starships.

“Honored starships-” they started, then cut themselves off. “R-Right, no time. The only impact, uh, in the time scale that you, uh, request that, ah, we are aware of is the, ah, Theia impact.” They paused, and then added: “T-The impact event that ... created our holy Terra’s beloved Lunar satellite.”

“Wait, are you saying that this ship might have hit the planet so fucking hard,” Sting started, turning to face Roxi. “That it threw enough chunks into orbit to make a goddamn moon!?”

[If this thing was extragalactic, and sublight, then it’s possible it was still mid-deceleration burn when it smashed into Terra, ] Carcass said, quietly. [It’d have needed to hit the habitable zone before it’d be able to turn on the ramscoop – there’s no interstellar hydrogen to burn between galaxies.]

Roxi nodded. Then...

Then the sound she had never wanted to hear again filled her ear. It was the sound of Voidbringer arrivals. The only thing she could say was on their side was that the Voidbringers had dropped out near the outer edge of the system – in fact, as she examined the scanner results, she realized that they had dropped out further than she’d ever seen them dropping out of E-space. “What the fuck?” she whispered, which caused the old woman to purse her lips and frown at her, as if she needed to worry about bad language when the apocalypse was on her doorstep.

“That is weird!” Sting said, her eyes unfocused as she looked at her own readouts.

[They’re almost a hundred and thirty five AU from-] Carcass started.

“Eldest!”

The voice that cut into the conversation was faintly off mic, muffled and raspy. The old woman, the Eldest woman Roxi supposed, turned to look at someone that Roxi couldn’t see to her left, before she gestured and a man was added to the consensual display. He looked nervous and unhappy to be the center of attention, but soldiered on. Roxi felt a twinge in her gut, knowing that ... these people had all chosen to die. They were all going to die and there was ... nothing...

Unless-

“Eldest, every seismic monitor on Holy Terra just triggered at once,” he said.

“Well, that can’t be a coincidence,” Sting said, her voice soft.

[Sure it can, ] K’iren said, her voice huffy. [You just-]

[I’ve found it, ] Carcass said, sounding actually shocked. [By my spores, I found it.]

The globe that still spun slowly beneath Sting and Roxi’s feet flared with an augmented reality image – narrowing in and focusing in on a single point in the middle of the largest landmass, near a complex kind of contained sea. The Eldest, sharing the imagery, whispered. “It’s under Persia!” she said, her voice soft. “The Zagros range, if I don’t miss my guess.”

“That appears to be where the ripple came from,” the man said. “It was relatively minor, but ... obvious, ah, completely impossible, unrelated to any seismic movements that we should have in that region, Eldest, it’s almost as if...”

“As if a massive starship materialized in rock,” Roxi whispered, reading the scrolling line of text that Carcass was feeding her. “That’s how they did it! That’s how they survived the fucking impact!” She shot forward, and Sting flew after her, the consensual imagery fuzzing apart in a haze of pixels. Sting matched her acceleration as they began to burn through the orbit, and her voice came clear in Roxi’s ear.

“How’d they do it?”

“A stasis field!” Roxi said.

“Those are impossible-”

“For us, maybe!” Roxi cut her off. “But we’ve seen the things that the Voidbringers can do to E-space. Lets say this ship has the same capacities. That means that it’d be able to use E-space engines to phase the majority of the ship out of time. The remaining skein sheds the excess kinetic energy...”

“That’s a fancy fucking way to say crash!” Sting snapped as they emerged from the glow of reentry and soared above what seemed to be an endless desert, which gave way to grassland and prairie, then foothills. Their bodies were chased the whole way by the sonic booms of their passage.

“Yeah, crash, whatever,” Roxi said as they approached the austere, white mountains that had risen over the millennia above the resting place of the starship. “If the ship shuts the stasis field down, it would push the local matter out of the way – create the shockwave we picked up – and be perfectly maintained, as if it was built yesterday. Which you’d want for this kind of thing! They had to know that it might arrive millions, billions, of years too early!”

“Better than too late,” Sting grumbled as they slowed – the mountains glittered with snow. Strange, horned animals that seemed to defy gravity and friction snaked their ways along impossibly narrow pathways that were a natural byproduct of erosion and titanic pressure. A few of them glanced up at the two women, as if they saw starships every day. Carcass sighed.

[Now, how do we get in?] He asked.

“Flicker jump?” Roxi suggested.

[No, we’re in a gravity well, ] Hugh said.

“Hey, tell the Order this was my fault,” Sting said.

“What was wha-” Roxi started, before Sting’s shoulder slid open and two missiles launched from her feminine hull. They arced upwards and Roxi’s eyes had just enough time to snap on vision filters before the pair of shaped atomic warheads detonated with a roar like the end of the world. When the smoke cleared, they were both looking at a mountain face that had been completely scooped clean. Dust and grit billowed through the air – radiologically clean thanks to the design of the atomics – and the rubble that shifted and flowed away from the impact points glowed a brilliant cherry red.

And there, buried within the mountains ... was the ship.

It looked untouched. Undamaged. The hull was vast and pale beige, with a smoothness that made Roxi’s skin prickle. She’d have expected a craft like this to be pitted and marred by billions of years of cosmic rays and erosion, chipped away down to a weathered ruin before it had even crashed onto Terra and was buried beneath sand and rock. Instead, it looked as if it had been built yesterday. And there, sprawled on the hull, was a massive insignia. A name plate. A title.

“Roxi,” Sting whispered.

“Yeah?” Roxi asked.

“Why the fuck is that in interlac?” Sting asked, turning to face Roxi, pointing her finger at the name-plate.

[Technically, it’s not in interlac, it’s just tripping the automatic translation programs, ] Carcass said, cutting in. [It is a primitive Terran language we have logged in our databanks.]

“Okay. That’s worse. You get how that is worse, right?” Sting whispered.

Roxi shook her head. “Lets find out,” she said, flying towards the massive name, looking for an airlock. An entrance. Something.

She found it.

Right underneath the O in The Long Shot.

While the exterior of the ship had been timeless, the interior of The Long Shot felt as ancient as a tomb of some forgotten king. Roxi’s palm glowed as she swept her arm outwards, bouncing various emissions along the walls and ceilings for her crew to puzzle over and to give herself some plain views of the surrounding environments. The walls were obsidian black and etched through with tiny green lines, green on black, reaching backwards into infinity. As they walked together through the corridor, Roxi and Sting both fell into silence and ... despite knowing that they only had limited time, they found it almost impossible to hurry.

Every step felt as if it was dragged through a weight of time – psychological not physical, but unavoidable despite it all.

The corridor opened, at the end of the ship, into a vast chamber. Circular, with a jutting walkway that reached into the direct center of the circle. The walls were covered in smaller, interlocking domes, giving the inner sphere a kind of dimpled, rumpled pattern to it. The whole room was entirely dark, save for the pale light cast by Roxi. However, as the two starships entered, the walls began to glow to life.

“It’s still got functioning systems?” Sting hissed.

“It was in a stasis field,” Roxi said, quietly.

The walls ... spoke.

“Ave.”

The voice had an echoing timber to it – and Roxi frowned as she looked upwards, towards the source of the sound. “Great,” she said. “You don’t speak Interlac.”

“Repeat your query. I did not understand you,” the ship said, in clear Interlac. This time, Roxi noticed the tiny translation symbol popping up as Sting swore.

“The ship speaks fucking Latin!” she said.

“What the hell is Latin?” Roxi asked.

“I don’t know, that’s just what the translation program says,” Sting said, while the ship continued to speak.

“Ah, good. You can speak a language that I have in my data-banks. That will make this significantly easier. My systems have detected a number of the Abomination’s appendages have entered this solar system. While my safeguards have forced them to emerge from the dimension for the travel of faster than the speed of light-” The translation hiccuped as the literal words were replaced by something a bit less unwieldy. “-from E-space further from the center of the system than is normally possible for them, we have only approximately forty three thousand two hundred seconds before they arrive and destroy me and this planetary body, before continuing their programming.”

Roxi rocked backwards. Her knees trembled. She almost collapsed, but Sting put her hands on her shoulders, steadying her. Roxi breathed in a shuddering breath. Closed her eyes. Forced back the emotions that roiled through them – the most potent of all being a sudden, intense upswelling...