The Apocalypse Ocean (15 page)

“Clear,” Piper murmured as Tiago swam free of the acceleration that dimmed his mind.

They burst away from yet another wormhole, streaking free of a swarm of drones intent on killing them. The dark vacuum of space pinwheeled some more around them and Tiago’s vision blurred again as the ship jerked left to hop away.

Three wormholes upstream, Tiago thought. Deep into League territory.

Space was enormous. The ship kept zooming in and out of different scales to try and display the information to him. Thousands of miles here. Millions here.

In the Xenowealth they’d moved most of the wormholes into small places. Geography made sense, and was human-scaled. But out here in the League, it was as it always had been. The wormholes orbited distant planets, or hung in the depths of space. How the hell were they going to find a tiny ship in the middle of all this space? Tiago wondered.

And then the data started appearing over the emptiness the spaceship careened through. Routes to other wormholes. Blinking ship identification tags. This wasn’t like Placa del Fuego, he reminded himself. The outside world was showered with data. And what Tiago saw was what Piper called the “simple” setup.

“Chasers are still closing,” Nashara muttered. “I found the
Saguenay
.”

“
Selby
?” Pepper asked.

A new voice tag flashed. “Matty here.”

“Time to drop back and engage,” Pepper ordered. “Fall through and then head out for open space, draw them out. See if you can cripple them, but if you need to hit hard to stay in one piece, then you go all out.”

Captain Matty Mallette sucked his teeth. “Can’t cripple. It’s all or nothing here, sir. We’ll be back to rearguard in thirty minutes, if all goes well.”

“Be careful,” Pepper said, his voice softening a bit.

The
Selby
slowed and faded into another blip in Tiago’s view of the world. It was still disconcerting to not be able to see any bit of the
Takara Bune
around him.

Piper whispered into Tiago’s ear, “Pepper and Nashara have been running some serious black ops on the League networks. We’ve got the
Saguenay
in our sights now. Pepper said it would be close. Get ready. We’re about to engage.”

About to? To Tiago it had felt like a battle from the moment they’d approached Trumball.

He glanced behind them and winced as everything lit up with intersecting lines and a flurry of glyphs. Then explosions. Missiles intercepted, stabbing lines of pure light cutting through the sky.

That was a battle. But happening so fast he could hardly understand it. He needed a pause button.

Back in the front there was a zoom. And then another, until he was looking at a collection of rocks around a wormhole. Another zoom. There were five blips moving out from the rocky cluster.

Another zoom. The recognizable cylindrical hulls of spaceships popped into focus.

The one in the center of the formation though, looked nothing like the League or Xenowealth ships Tiago had become used to. The front was a long spine, a tower of struts and flanges, with even more machinery and shapes packed into the core of the spindle.

Behind that, the ship itself was covered in a white, bone-like lattice that gripped several spheres. Raw black tendons lashed the spheres to the ship’s metallic spinal cord.

Saguenay
, said a tag. That was the ship they were after. The wormhole destroyer.

“All go,” Piper muttered.

“Weapons hot,” Nashara said.

Tiago felt the implacable grip of acceleration grab him and squeeze. For several minutes there was just calm, punctuated with cryptic updates from the crew. Words that might as well have been another language.

The world outside the spaceship started to jerk again. They were spinning on their axis and yanking themselves to the right – or left. Spinning, ducking, weaving. Tiago’s body felt like a ragdoll.

“Upwards, sixty-five and six,” Pepper shouted, tension in his voice.

The world lit up. Like the end of a fireworks show when everything launched up into the air and exploded at the same time.

“Drones out. Screen’s down. Kinetics partially effective. Closing. Can’t get around these four to the
Saguenay
,” the
Jericho
reported.

Tiago couldn’t track everything. It was a constant barrage of explosions and dazzling light. Lances of energy. Debris whipping past. And every other second his vision blurred, blacked out, and he shook himself back awake to find everything changed.

“Fuck, what’s that?” Goz asked.

“Where did
they
come from?” Nashara asked.

Tiago looked around the confusing mess of a lightshow. “I don’t see, I don’t understand …” he gargled around whatever was in his mouth.

“We did a lot of damage to the four support ships,” Piper explained to him. “But they held strong, no damage to the
Saguenay
. We passed through their formation now and are in decent shape. But more ships just arrived.”

“Is that bad?” Tiago asked.

The searing light was fading. They were moving back out into empty dark again. But seven small icons lit up in the distance ahead. They all glowed red.

Red was usually bad, Tiago realized, answering his own question.

“We don’t know who they are. We’ve moved from five versus us two to seven on two.”

“We’re not going to be able to second pass,” Nashara announced to everyone.

Pepper sighed loudly. “Bug out, loop around, and let’s get back to the other side of Trumball, see if we can hold them off and harass them, get them to talk about this.”

“Talk?” This was Yuki jumping. “They’re not going to want to talk to us. We threw in first.”

“Shit,” Nashara said.

“Yep, I see it,” Pepper said.

“What’s going on now?” Tiago asked.

“We turned away from the seven new ships,” Piper said. “And they’re turning as well. Hailing gets no response. We have to assume the worse. This is another battle.”

“Fuck running,” Nashara said, “Best bet is to run right through them as fast as we can.”

“Shiiiittt,” Goz said slowly. “The hull still patching itself from that last exchange. We making some more mines in the fabricator, but they won’t be ready.”

“Just toss anything with some mass in it out,” Pepper said. “Clutter the space and punch as we come through.”

“Let’s spin up,” Piper said to everyone. “Get ready in three, two, one …”

Tiago passed out yet again as the ship accelerated so fast the blood drained away from his brain.

“… coasting!” Goz shouted.

Tiago flopped and opened his eyes as they whipped right through the formation of seven ships.

For the first time, he felt explosions. Something ripped his world apart. Steam, or air, whistled. Things sparked just outside the world of his chair. Nothing felt right about this, he thought hazily.

“Dead in the water,” Goz reported.

“Damage?” Pepper asked.

A ghostly image of the
Takara Bune
appeared in front of Tiago. The ship was no longer a cylinder. It was mangled and crunched up, pitted with craters, holed in …. Tiago stopped counting after thirty large holes.

“How are we still alive?” he croaked.

“Kept the cockpit’s center of mass just clear of intersecting vectors of any attacks, sacrificed other parts of the ship as we came through the mess,” Piper said sadly. “It was pico-seconds dicey, but we threaded the needle.
Jericho
wasn’t so lucky.”

“
Jericho
?” Tiago asked.

In response Piper showed him a cloud of debris in the distance.

“Oh.”

“We’re coasting away from both groups; they’re not turning to come after us. We’re going to save fuel and continue coasting while we repair and watch.”

“Watch what?” Tiago asked.

“We attacked while approaching at full acceleration, with this new group of ships coming the other way. High-speed flyby. These new ships are catching up to the League ships from behind now, slowly matching up. They’re starting to slug it out, and they’re not disengaging.”

“They’re not from the League?” Tiago was confused. “Why’d they attack us?”

“We don’t know who they are. What we seem to have are three different teams out here, Tiago. And since we barely survived that encounter, our best bet is to watch right now.”

Piper’s voice faded and the tags all popped away. The dark night of space all around Tiago stuttered and then shut down. Tiago found his eyes pressed hard up against foam. He tried to move a hand, or wiggle a toe. But he couldn’t move.

The power had gone out.

He was trapped.

They had transferred from the hover jet to a car in an old building. Then out to the docks near the black disc of the wormhole. Thinkerer’s bullet-shaped spaceship took them through the wormhole, where Kay barely had the time to gasp and take in the fact that there were no oceans on the other side. The League still kept all their wormholes in orbit. The other side of Trumball was open to a large, orbital complex where ships docked while passing in between a pair of wormholes.

All this hung far above a rocky planet.

Thinkerer eased them past the handful of other ships.

“Small attack craft,” he observed as they ghosted by just a few miles away. Then he pointed at the orbital complex. What Kay had thought were windows in their cockpit swirled and the orbital complex jumped in size as the windowscreens zoomed the image in for them. The cockpit they sat in had comfortable, padded couches and lots of clean, white equipment. Luxury and comfort. Immense wealth, Kay decided. “Their defenses are fully activated. Everyone is on high alert, according to reports I’m getting from sources. Though the League is clamping down, as they do.”

“Are they looking for us?” Kay asked, looking back at Avris. There was still anger and frustration radiating from her. And a sort of broken resignation. Kay wondered if she’d be able to fix that.

Avris had jumped with the two of them. At first Kay assumed she would leave them to go back to Xenowealth territory – that she didn’t want to remain jailed by a League that would assume she was the spy.

But Avris had sullenly remained by her side without Kay’s asking her to. They weren’t talking much. But there was some dogged persistence in Avris. She wanted to see this through. Kay hadn’t convinced her that her debt was paid.

And maybe, Kay thought, maybe it was because Kay didn’t actually believe that herself, really.

 Kay could see a disgust and anger at her building in Avris. But her adherence to soldier’s honor, that pride, remained at her core. She was going to see her debt through. At any cost.

It might be annoying having this glowering shadow. And Kay could probably have forced her to go. But a small part of her somewhere deep inside didn’t want to be alone here. Angry company on this quest might be better than the emptiness Kay sometimes glimpsed when alone with her thoughts.

Plus, Avris knew about spaceships and other things Kay didn’t. She was still useful. That wasn’t something to forget.

“I don’t think this is about us,” Thinkerer said. “Xenowealth ships penetrated Trumball’s defenses. As soon as they stop flailing around, they’ll be blocking all transits and locking down.”

Kay looked back at him sharply. “Are they at war?”

Thinkerer was looking up in the air, as if thinking. Accessing information invisible to her, Kay thought.

She was going to need to be able to play in this world as easily as Avris and Thinkerer. It was worse than being illiterate, she thought. And as daunting as learning to read had been, it had proven key to helping her find the tools she needed to build her empire back on Placa del Fuego.

“No one is really sure,” Thinkerer said. “The Xenowealth claims that rogue elements made the incursion. We’re getting scanned and our paperwork double-checked. We may not hold up under the scrutiny. If that continues, it might get interesting.”

“Rogue elements,” Kay said thoughtfully, thinking about Nashara and her willingness to hand over weapons to further her own agendas.

One of the ships paced them for a moment, then peeled away.

“We’re clear,” Thinkerer said.

Kay looked at him. No sign of relief. Nothing. Flat. A golden, ticking robot with human skin.

As they passed through the black disc Kay held her breath against the now-familiar flip-flop in her stomach. She saw Thinkerer touch his forehead with thumb and forefinger.

“What was that,” she asked.

“What?” he asked.

“The way you touched your head. That was purposeful. Symbolic.” There was no emotion. But deliberate actions could still reveal inner truths, Kay knew.

“Do you ever wonder who made these wormholes and left them scattered around the galaxy for us to stumble into and use?” Thinkerer asked.

“Many obsess over it,” Avris said, joining the conversation for the first time. “They’re central to everything. None of the alien races that dominated the Forty-Eight worlds created them, we know that.”

“The Makers were an ancient cooperative of species,” Thinkerer said. “Engineers that banded together for an engineering project so vast, so massive. The first Makers knew it was not just a project that would take longer than their lives, but longer than their entire civilizations. They expended great portions of their entire civilizational output to build and create the wormholes, and launch them throughout the galaxy, knowing it would take millions of years to create the system. Knowing that they probably wouldn’t exist by the time the project came to fruition.

“Instead, other species found it, migrated in, and filled it up. They warred. Took what they could. All without the Makers ever appearing. And now the system is old, and fetid, rife with broken parts and so many subdivisions. You are in a half-forgotten cul-de-sac, so to speak.”

Kay moved away from the windows, or screens, or whatever they were, toward Thinkerer. “You didn’t answer my question, though,” she said, curious. She had a feeling she was onto something.

“There are some of us who believe the Makers will come back from beyond the Precipice.”

“The Precipice?”

“The earliest known part of the wormhole network. There are artifacts there, billions of years old. Some believe the Makers still exist and will return with knowledge about the next step for civilization. We remember and honor them every time we pass through a wormhole.”

Kay folded her arms and looked at Avris. Her stomach flip-flopped. They’d passed through another wormhole while talking. Thinkerer touched his forehead again. “We’re in a spaceship with a religious robot,” Kay said as she sat down. That was interesting, and something she needed to follow up with. But there was something more important that needed drilling down into. “So, then, what does that all have to do with the wormhole-destroying ship you want so badly, and the Doaq?”

“The Doaq is an ancient piece of Maker tech,” Thinkerer said. “In the first days, when intelligences found the system, they were guarded and maintained. The Guardians protected the sanctity of the system and kept neutrality. Anyone could pass through; no one could attack the system.”

“In the beginning,” Kay watched every little movement of his. He was still blank. Still a robot.

“Your Doaq is a Guardian – reprogrammed and repurposed. I was built, created to try and stop it,” Thinkerer said.

“That’s – ”

“Sit down,” Thinkerer ordered with sudden authority. “We might be under attack. The couches will transform into acceleration-capable restraints in emergency. We’re not armed, but we are fast.”

“What is it?” Avris asked.

“Those Xenowealth ships attacked my fleet,” Thinkerer said. “We’re entering a very complex battle, one that should have been well over by now. But isn’t.”

Kay glanced at the windows, and saw nothing but the distant twinkling of stars.

She’d never seen them
twinkle
while in this ship, she realized. Did stars not twinkle in space? Was that something to do with atmosphere?

Her question was answered as one of the twinkles bloomed. A violent scattering of colors and an expanding, ringed fireball that then rapidly faded.