Rift in the Races (73 page)

When the last ship signaled that they were in position, the planet-wide onslaught began. Without pomp or preamble, the order was given, simple and direct. “Kill them,” said the admiral. “Kill them all.”

Roberto, at his station on the
Aspect
, grinned at the command.
Finally
. Finally those bastards, after all they’d done, after killing nearly everyone he knew on his ship, after the total genocide of the Andalian race, finally they would pay. The blue lights of his console reflected off his teeth, his feral grin, as he initiated the first of the launch sequences, already laid in for alternating waves of air detonations and ground blasts. The same as the other ships. Launch. Launch. Launch. Launch. Launch. So many in a row. Twenty hundred-megaton warheads, just like that. The big ones. Any one of which could wrap an ashen blanket around the Earth for years. When the skies finally cleared down there on Goldilocks and the exposed atmosphere with all its new-made gasses caught fire—and they believed it would catch fire, literally, if only for a while, until it all burned off—that would be the definitive end to the Hostiles. Nothing would ever live on this planet again.

All the missiles launched perfectly. He watched them in his monitor, blue thrusters trailing away into the sprawling face of the planet, viewed from above the southern pole where the
Aspect
orbited, charged with decimating a large portion of it and all the life living there.

He saw on another screen that the nukes were on their way from all the other ships as well. Hundreds upon hundreds of them all told. It was exhilarating. The Hostiles were finally getting what they deserved—they weren’t the only species who knew how to wipe a planet clean.

Then the missiles began to disappear. First one. Then another. And then several all at once. The monitor blipped at him each time one vanished, as the computer processed the event and gave an error notice on his screen.

“Uhhh, Captain,” he said staring into his controls. “I think we have a problem.”

“What problem, Commander?”

Roberto put his panel up on the main screen. “Look.” The last of the
Aspect’s
missiles vanished a moment after. “That was all of them, sir. They’re all gone.”

“What do you mean they’re all gone? How?”

“I don’t know. Pulling it up now on visual.” But there was nothing to see. Only the spray of glowing orange Hostile guts everywhere.

“Damn it,” the Captain swore. “Launch another salvo.”

“Yes, sir.” He tapped in the commands and off they went.

“Pull up the video feed on one of them.”

“Yes, sir.”

The heads-up display flickered for a moment but immediately filled itself with the round disc of the Hostile world. The disc grew larger the closer the missile got. It grew and grew, and soon the brown and green patch of the south pole with its watery blue seas expanded to fill the entire screen, blocking out the stars. Still it grew larger, and land features began to shape themselves as the missile got closer to the outer reaches of the atmosphere.

A dot appeared in the distance. Small at first, but growing fast. It expanded like a hole opening in the ground far below, except soon enough they realized that it wasn’t a hole at all. It was a Hostile orb.

The orb shot up with incredible rapidity and swallowed up the nuke nearly as fast as it took for them to realize the dot on the video feed was getting bigger. So quickly did it grow and then, nothing. Blackness. The missile was gone.

“Son of a bitch,” said Roberto. The captain didn’t say it, but the way his knuckles tightened on the arm of his chair suggested he felt it every bit as much. Probably more.

“Fire again,” came the admiral’s orders over the general com. “Continue firing until I tell you to stop. They can’t possibly eat them all.” Clearly he’d seen what was happening as well.

Missiles streaked like brilliant blue rain from the bellies of every ship. The crews on the missile decks worked furiously to keep the tubes loaded and the warheads on their way. But after several long minutes, minutes that seemed like hours, the order finally came to stop.

“Save the rest,” said the admiral, clearly upset. “They’re not getting through.”

Roberto wanted to argue. To tell him to keep going. They only needed a few to make it, to go off. But he knew none would. They weren’t even making it through the atmosphere now. The Hostiles had figured it out somehow. So he didn’t say it.

A wave of frustration and despair washed him, over the whole fleet, and more than one chin fell to a crewmember’s chest, eyes closed, wondering what next. Too many were already on borrowed emotional energy. Failure on this scale was unthinkable. Even Roberto’s generally indomitable nature was not immune, though he did his best to hide it.

He glanced over to see how his counterpart at the controls was holding up. Ensign Nguyen was too busy staring into his monitor. “Where are they taking them?” the younger man asked. “Look.” He pointed into his screen at a long cluster of orbs streaking away from the planet. He put the view up on the lower quarter of the main display.

They were heading for the sun.

“I don’t believe it,” Roberto muttered as he watched. “The bastards are going to drop them into the sun.”

The captain’s face was stony cold, long fissures of tempered fury cutting diagonally down each cheek.

In the end, all the missiles were caught in the same way, captured within the Hostile’s physical form, rendered beyond radio contact and, ultimately, deposited in the sun.

“Wow, they even suicide themselves,” Roberto observed, seeing that, after several orbs had finally reached the sun, they never came back. “They didn’t even eject them. They just plunged right in. That’s pretty hardcore.”

“You would have done the same to save the Earth,” said Captain Asad grimly. “You have to respect them for that.”

“I might respect them, but that doesn’t help much. What are we supposed to do now?”

Some brief conversations took place about sending down robots or even Marines in battle suits to hand-deliver the nukes themselves, a tit-for-tat suicide scenario. Colonel Pewter even agreed. He assured the admiral all his men would happily oblige and that he would lead the team himself—twelve years with nothing to do and a daughter still unaccounted for made him more eager for battle than ever before. But in the end that plan was cast aside. Even if they could fight off the swarm of Hostiles that would surely come to destroy the landing vessels, they didn’t have enough mech units to carry it off efficiently, not on the scale of a planet this size. They had far more missiles than they had shuttles, robots and mechanized battle armor. And even if they’d had more of each, and could get down to the surface successfully, they still had no idea what they would encounter when they got there. For all they knew, whatever served the Hostiles as ground forces could be worse than what they had in space.

In the end, Admiral Jefferies had to order yet another retreat. And it was with broken spirits that the whole fleet turned and once again headed for the sector of space where the magicians could operate. It was back to Mana’s Edge.

The Hostiles did not pursue them beyond the edge of the solar system as they left. It was fairly evident the orbs had finally figured out that they no longer had any advantage in ship-to-orb combat. But everyone in the fleet felt as if they could hear the Hostile victory shouts, or whatever passed for such a thing amongst their kind, echoing in the sighs and profanities of their crewmates. In the span of barely an hour, they’d gone from rapturous anticipation to shame and defeat.

The only one not especially bothered by the outcome was Conduit Huzzledorf, and when Admiral Jefferies called the next strategy conference—the conduit amongst those personally in attendance on the admiral’s ship—the portly Prosperion was perfectly comfortable letting everyone know that the recent outcome was no surprise to him.

“While I appreciate the frustrating nature of this setback,” he said, “you couldn’t really believe that a magical people—or whatever they are—would simply sit back and let you shoot them with those things, did you? I can assure you that were you to make such an attack on Kurr, our magicians would do just the same. Or at least, something similar. Our transmuters would turn them to cotton balls; our conjurers would smite them with fire, ice or wind; and our teleporters would send them off into our sun much like the Hostiles did. I hate to seem unimpressed with your colossal efforts back there, but to be frank, had you asked me, I could have told you that was exactly what was going to happen.” He puckered some and amended, “Or if not exactly how, still how it would turn out.”

“While your people skills are more than wanting, Conduit,” said the admiral, “I admit that it might have been prudent to consult you first regarding our attack. However, given that your people have no power in the Hostile system and little understanding of our technology, it seemed, irrelevant. You said yourself your people can’t cast spells. Your own words, as I recall, were: ‘There’s nothing we can do.’”

“Irrelevant!” He let go a whoosh of air that rippled his cheeks and the fleshy parts of his neck like gelatin. “We shall see about irrelevant moving forward, sir.”

“I meant no disrespect.”

The conduit refused to respond.

“So what are we going to do now, gentlemen,” the admiral asked the room. “I would be dishonest if I did not tell you that, at the moment, I am completely out of ideas.”

“We should just go home,” said Captain Eugene. “They’ve learned not to pursue us, so maybe that’s good enough. We left with something of an unspoken truce back there. They didn’t come after us. They know we’ve got their number, even if they have ours too.”

“We’re not running away,” snapped Captain Asad. “We’ve seen what they can do. We’re not running from this fight.”

“Then what do you suggest, Captain, if you are so hell bent on continuing this, despite our being completely powerless?” Captain Eugene looked as if she was ready to have this argument out all the way this time.

“We wait for
Citadel
,” Captain Asad said. He could not have jolted the room more thoroughly if he’d tossed in a stun grenade. He ignored the collection of open-mouthed stares and shaking heads and pressed on. “We get Pewter’s boyfriend out of amnio; we get
Citadel
out here with its two thousand magicians, and we go back.” He looked as if he’d had to swallow broken glass to make the words come out, but he’d said them.

Not as familiar with Captain Asad as the rest, the statement did not seem like a complete and total reordering of the universe to the conduit, so he was the first to speak. “You forget, Captain, that my people can’t cast anything there. The mana is … the force of it is so powerful it has thickened beyond reach. It is difficult to explain to a blank, as you have never cast a spell before. So, simply put, we cannot use it.”

“Meade did,” said Captain Asad. “Maybe he’s the only one of you who’s any good. I don’t know. But we’re not running from this thing, so have him tell you how to do it.”

“Sir Altin came back nearly dead, and he did it with a fast-cast amulet like the one you now have on your bridge. This has already been explained. He got himself there the same way we did.”

“Then transport our missiles to the surface of the Hostile world.” He stood and placed his hands on the table before him, glaring into the screen. “You’re not even trying, Conduit. If I can think of these things, you can.”

“While I admire your enthusiasm, Captain, your ignorance is volcanic.”

Captain Asad’s eyebrows raised expectantly. He was not interested in the insult, only the answer.

“We can’t teleport anything to someplace we’ve never been or never seen. And, as you may recall, we can’t channel mana in the vicinity of the planet, so none of us could push a seeing spell to it even if we wanted to.”

“What about the big diamonds?” asked Admiral Jefferies, coming to Captain Asad’s aid.

“Even if we could guess the distance and land one on the surface rather than in the center of the planet, which is plausible, that would only serve one missile. You need hundreds as I recall. A ‘really big planet’ and all that rot, is that not what you said? Precisely placed no less. And while we can scry out a seeing stone, we can’t see from them to move around, as that requires channeling mana, which as you know we cannot do. Frankly, it’s only barely plausible, and the number of wizards required would be formidable, given how difficult blind casting is. Blind casting into Hostile opposition will only be worse, if not entirely impossible.” He stopped and, by the way his shoulders dropped an inch or two, everyone could tell he was willing to relent some. “Listen, Captains, Admiral, Colonel, if we could get your weapons there, we would. We will, if it’s possible, I assure you. My people have no more interest in being annihilated by those things than do yours. But we’re going to need a very nuanced strategy.” He turned and faced Captain Asad directly. “If it’s more magic that you seek, I suggest you seek the counsel of the Queen. I know no better tactical mind than hers.”

There were grumbles and nods, but everyone present knew they weren’t going to solve this problem right away. Frustration and impatience had everyone punchy and on edge. They spent a few more minutes kicking around ideas, though Captain Asad remained silent and barely listening. When the meeting concluded and the monitors went dark, he leaned back and stroked the stubble along his jaw. He was not going to lose this war. Even if that meant getting in bed with someone he wasn’t particularly fond of. At least this one was competent, or so it seemed when put in comparison to the rest.