DOMINATION SPACE COMMAND PLATFORM MOURNBLADE
LOW EARTH ORBIT
FEBRUARY 5, 1998
0900 HOURS
The commander of the battle platform looked up sharply. "That's the code," he said. His second nodded, confirming. They were in the center of the platform, and the Chiliarch allowed himself a moment's pride; this was the newest and best of Space Command's orbital fists.
"Initiate Zebra," he said.
There was heavy tension on the command bridge, but no confusion, no panic. This was what they had trained long years for; if any of the operators at their consoles were thinking of homes and families below, it made no difference to the cool professionalism of their teamwork.
"Preparin' fo' launch," the Weapons Officer said.
The commander touched his screen.
[Detonation sequence activated]
"What the fuck – that's not the launch protocol." There was controlled alarm in his voice. "Weapons, pull that sequence!"
Frantic activity. "Suh, it's not responding. The central comp's not acceptin' input."
[Ten seconds]
"Dump the core, over to dispersed operation." A sound of protest from the Infosystems Officer; that would reduce their combat capacity by nine-tenths. "Do it, do it now."
"Initiatin'... suh, it won't respond. Null board."
"Get in there and slag the core, physically, now."
[Seven seconds]
Fingers were prying at the access panels. Hands tore bunches of wire free, and sparks flickered blue.
[Five seconds]
Sections of screen were going dark. He could see the globes of fire rising and flattening against the upper atmosphere, down below on Earth. Vortexes of black cloud were gathering.
[Three seconds]
Even now there was no panic. Desperate effort... Impossible, he decided. The Chiliarch closed his eyes, called up a certain day. He was small again, and his father was lifting him...
[Two seconds]
...up so high toward the tree...
[One second]
...with Mother smiling, and...
[Detonation]
DONOVAN HOUSE DEEP SHELTER
FEDERAL CAPITAL DISTRICT
NEW YORK CITY
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FEBRUARY 5, 1998
"This had better be worth it, compadre," Carmen Hiero said, fastening her robe. It was the early hours of the morning, and she reached grumpily for the coffee. Then she saw her aide's face, and gulped without tasting. "Something more about those broadcasts?"
"No, still just harmless modulated signals," the aide said. "But there's something else... Madam President, the chairman's gone to the Denver War Room." Thousands of feet under a mountain; she felt something clutch at her windpipe. That was where the real decisions would be made, as was right and proper; the Alliance was sovereign, not the member states. "Please, the briefing's being prepared." It was a short walk to the War Room; even after all these years, she still found the salutes a little incongruous for an elderly Sonoran lady in a housecoat.
"What's the status?" she asked, sinking into the command chair. There was a tired smell of cigarettes and stale coffee, under the artificial freshness.
"They've gone to Force Condition Eight," the general said. "Full mobilization. Evacuations in progress; nearly complete, in fact. Nothing overt, not yet; we're matching, of course. No panic..." Unspoken, the knowledge that the civil defense measures were inadequate passed between them. Yes, yes, General. I did my best. Pray that we will not see how far short of enough that is.
"And they're continuing that crazy broadcasting. The experts say the only thing it's going to affect is the homing sense of pigeons. Evidently that's in the same range, planetary magnetism or some such."
Hiero nodded. "Get me Orbital One." Reason fought with sick dread. It made no sense; the balance had not changed. Von Shrakenberg was still in power over there, and still a rational man, for a Draka. They had been counting on that, on him keeping the Militants out until the Alliance was ready...
"Madam President, we're having a little trouble with the link to Orbital One," the comtech said, puzzled. "The signal's odd."
The communications desk of the orbital battle station came on, but there was no one behind it. Silence, then a flicker. Then the image on the screen jumped, to the command desk. A man turned to look at them, and Carmen Hiero crossed herself reflexively. There were screams, and one of the techs started vomiting on her console. The man on the screen wore the uniform of an Alliance general; there were deep nail gouges down the side of his face.
"Urr," he said, advancing on the screen pickup. They could see the body behind him, broken and floating in the zero-G chamber. Little else, too much blood was coming from the throat. More floated around the general's mouth. "Aaaaa." The mouth swelled enormous, and a slick grating sound came through the speakers; the sound of teeth on a crystal sandwhich. The general was trying to gnaw his way to the command room on Earth.
Below her in the War Room the tech was screaming again, but now he was standing, tearing out handfuls of his hair. The president lifted her hands against the sight, and the fingers turned on her. They smiled, showing their fangs. Burrowed towards her face and began to feed, smiling.
Pain. That was the first thought. Then, absurdly: So this is what madness is.
She stood, floated upward, landed on her feet that rooted themselves deeper than the world. That was terrible, because she must run, she must hide. The Anglo girls at Mount Holyoke had sprinkled brown sugar over her sheets again, and-
-She was walking down the corridor toward the elevators, and the wall kissed her shoulder wetly. A tech was kneeling in a corner, hands locked around her feet, shivering with a tremor that sent waves of blue into the air in time with her whimper.
Hiero reached the elevator and keyed for the surface. It shot upward and inward, compressing her into a fetal curl that spat her out into the corridor. Tissue and fragments flowed together and she crawled along a carpet that moaned in pain and writhed away from her. Something grabbed her and jerked her upright. Insect-stick limbs, oval body, buzzing wings, centered in a face she knew. What is this monster doing with Roderigo's face? she thought, and felt rage seep wetly out of her stomach. Words spattered around her, heavy with evil oils. She lunged forward and it ran, ran before her out onto a balcony beneath a sky that shivered and thundered.
Light blossomed, and there was a moment of total clarity as her melted eyeballs ran down her cheeks. Then-
SEABED, ANGOLAN ABYSSAL PLAIN
MALVINA SSN-44
FEBRUARY 5, 1998
1005 HOURS
"Damned fragmentary, Captain," the Exec said. The lines were scrolling up the screen were the longwave relay from Hawaii. "What the hell does that mean?"
Commodore Wanda Jackson rubbed one hand across the other. She felt a little off, as if things were blurring at the edges. Christ, I can't be coming down with the flu now of all times. "It's completely garbled."
She read through the report once and then again, then turned her head to look at the Exec. Her hand reached out and she felt warm wetness on her hand as the red began singing. The Exec flailed away from her, screeching and making the air taste like yellow and chocolate chip cookies, just like her mother baked when she was a little girl. She lunged after him as screams began reverberating through the hull.
Fifteen minutes later, the metal teardrop, the finest class of submarine the Alliance had ever built, veered downward and plunged into the seabed, its hypervelocity sea skimmers with multiple warheads still in their tubes.
CENTRAL OFFICE, ARCHONAL PALACE
ARCHONA
DOMINATION OF THE DRAKA
FEBRUARY 5, 1998
1700 HOURS
"Excellence, they're getting some of the birds away," the liaison officer said pleadingly. "Please, it's important that you get to the shelter."
Eric von Shrakenberg shook his head. "We didn't expect to disable all the submarine launchers," he said quietly. "But if they get Archona, then it's pointless anyway. I'll live or die with my city... Call it an old man's fancy. Status report."
The Palace infosystem was excellent. Not that he was in the command loop, of course. Today he was a spectator.
Have I ever been anything else? He thought wearily. The lines traced over the globe. Somewhere outside there was a mammoth crack, like thunder. Manmade thunder, a laser burning a trail of ionization through the atmosphere, and a particle beam following it.
"We got the sub!" someone shouted. Lines were spearing out from somewhere off the Cape of Good Hope. "Two skimmers away." Hypervelocity, low level. "Sweet mercy of the White Christ, that's Mournblade's sector."
"The close-in will stop it... One down. Come on, baby, come on... Two!" A collective sigh of relief. "That damn near got Capetown."
"Status," he said, without opening eyelids that felt heavier than worlds.
"Excellence, we've lost... Wotan, we've lost a quarter of the discrete platforms out to L-5. Alliance, ninety percent down an' falling fast. Freya bless, Excellence, if it hadn't been fo' Stone Dogs" - a quaver, hastily suppressed – "there wouldn't be anythin' left, Excellence."
Another stone-shaking roar of manmade thunder through the walls. Eyes darted to the screens, relaxed; the last salvo had been at low-orbit targets, ones that were unlikely to respond. Eric forced his eyes open, onto the screens. Forced his mind to paint the full picture of what the bloodless schematics meant, through the hour that followed. Your doing. Your responsibility.
A man was cursing softly. "Oh, shit, oh, shit, that's Shanghai. Penetrator."
"Northern hemisphere stations report high-incidence cloud cover-"
"I don't believe it," somebody said. Eric looked up; that had been soft awe, not the hard control that had settled on most. "London's gone."
Eric slammed a hand down on the arm of his chair. "Who ordered that? Get me their name!"
"Excellence—" the operator looked back over his shoulder; the New Race control of hormone levels must have slipped, inattention, because there was a sheen of moisture across his forehead. "Excellence, they did it themselves."
Eric sighed and sat back, reluctantly letting go the balm of anger. "It'll happen, if you inflict insanity on those in charge of nuclear weapons," he said quietly.
"Multiple detonation, Japan." A toneless voice, lost in procedure. "High-yield groundbursts. Sublevel." A pause. "Jacketed bombs. Prelim'nry sensor data indicate radioactivity-"
The Archon listened through the figures. "Schematic on distribution, given projected wind patterns," he said. "Give me an intensity cline, geography an' timewise." The deep lines beside his beak nose sank a little deeper as the maps twisted themselves. "Note to Plannin' Board: We'll probably have to evacuate the survivin' shelters from the Korean Peninsula up through the Amur Valley, minimum. Draw up estimates." The Japanese had been true to their tradition, and had taken a good deal more with them to the land of the kami than their home islands. They never liked the Koreans, anyhow, he thought.
Minutes stretched into hours, as the quiet voices and screens reported. The thunder spoke less often now, outside; more of it was being directed offensively, into space, to make up for battle stations left derelict. More and more his eyes went to the screens that showed the cumulative effects, graphs rising steadily towards the red lines that represented estimates of what the mother planet's biosphere could stand. Conservative estimates... we think, he reflected.
At last he spoke. "Strategos, a directive to the Supreme General Staff. No mo' fusion weapons within the atmosphere. Kinetic energy bombardment only, on Priority Three targets and above." Active military installations. "Throw rocks at them."
"Excellence—" A glance of protest from the Staff's representative.
Suddenly Eric felt life return, salt-bitter but strong. "Gods damn yo, that's our planet you fuckin' over, woman!" A dot expanded over the Hawaiian Islands. "There goes twenty-five percent of Earth's launch capacity! Do it. Get them on the blower, do it!" What's a few million lives in this charnel house? he asked himself mockingly. Go on, finish the job.
"If only it were that easy," he muttered to himself. "If only." Aloud: "I'm goin' to catch some sleep." Chemicals would ensure that, and these days they could bring true rest. Whether you deserve it or not. "Wake me immediately if we get any substantial info'mation on the translunar situation."
Even this day had to end, sometime.
ABOARD ASFS SACAJAWEA
CENTRAL BELT, ALLIANCE INTERDICTED ZONE
FEBRUARY 5, 1998
"Hit on starboard hull," a voice called. "Kinetic barriers holding steady."
"Evasive maneuvers." That was Ibrahim Kurasaka, face tightly composed as his hands gripped the arms of his command chair.
Frederick Lefarge swallowed thickly as he watched trajectories change on the plotting console in front of him with a speed that would have been unimaginable a mere decade before. Good god, these mass effect drives have speed! he thought. There were five other marks able to keep pace with the Sacajawea: the Columbus, the Yamato, the Alaungpaya, and those two damnable Snake FTL ships that were leading the raid against Ceres. Most of the sublight ships on both sides, mirror-matter and the antiquated pulsedrives, had already been destroyed or withdrawn from the battle zone; against ships with FTL drives, their performance was as if someone had nailed their feet to the floor.
"Not the only thing running slower than it should," he muttered. The last hit had been a nigh miraculous event even though the barriers had shrugged it off. One thing both sides were rapidly discovering was that sublight weapons – which consisted of most of both the Alliance's and Domination's arsenals – were woefully inadequate for firing at an FTL ship. Only beam weapons seemed to have half a chance, but they were still underpowered for ship combat. What it all amounted down to were these six ships dancing around like crazed hummingbirds firing off weapons that moved at a relatively glacial pace.
The answer was obvious to the scientists: build weapons based on Prothean technology. That required generating mass effect fields, however, which in turn required element zero. Which we have too damn little of, Lefarge thought. The only supply in the entire solar system comes from the Prothean equivalent of a research outpost, and both we and the Snakes are trying to use it to fight a war! Something had to give eventually, and this farce of a ship-to-ship battle was the result.
"Sir, I think I have an idea." Both Lefarge and Kurasaka looked over at the young officer manning another plotting console. He was a lean young man in his early twenties, with a surprisingly low and gravelly voice for such a frame.
The Exec's brows came together, and his scowl was fearsome. "Ensign, you are out of line—"
"Wait." Kurasaka held up a hand. "Go on, what is it, son?"
The young man took a deep breath through his nose, then nodded once before he began speaking. When he was done, Lefarge and Kurasaka exchanged a look.
"Risky," the ship's captain remarked.
"We can't just keep flying around like this indefinitely," Lefarge replied, "and we have to show the Snakes that the Belt is ours. I say we try it."
A moment's hesitation, then Kurasaka nodded and started issuing orders. "Send communication back to the Project. We need them to—"
Caroline McAlistair, chiliarch of the DASCS Phaeton, had a scowl on her face as she watched the viewer. Distant Ceres flashed through the frame every so often, as did the flashes of Yankee ships and the Arjuna as they banked and spun around each other in something akin more to an in-atmosphere dogfight than the ship-to-ship combat she was used to. Which would be more effective if I was the one at the stick with weapons under my thumb, she thought. Relaying orders to the pilot and the Weapons Officer cost too much time in the rapidly changing circumstances of mass effect ship combat.
She had led this task force from the Fleet in orbit around Mars in the hope of destroying the center of the Alliance's power in the Ceres would have also brought immeasurable glory, making her a hero of the Final War that brought the solar system under the dominion of the Race. But these damnyankee FTL ships won't give me a clear shot! she thought, clenching her fingers in impotent rage on the arms of her crashcouch.
"Pickin' up a new energy signature, Chiliarch," the sensor officer said. "Wotan, it's a big one!" His voice was startled, jolted enough out of his usual self-control to make the off-hand remark.
Caroline leaned forward slightly. "What kind?"
"Mirror-matter drive, looks like, but much bigger'n any known Alliance vessel."
"The starship." The chiliarch's lips peeled back in a hunter's grin. "It's they starship." The New America had long been the Alliance's open secret, something they never acknowledged but everyone knew they'd had ever since its auxiliaries had raided the Draka's Prothean convoy back in '89. If I take that thing out... "Where's it at?"
"Deeper into their interdicted zone, located at..." He rattled off the coordinates; Caroline considered: Still has a sublight drive, so they haven't upgraded the thing since they started buildin' it before the bunker on Mars was discovered. We'll run rings round the thing.
"Prepare to break off engagement with they FTL ships and make a run on the starship." She knew the Yankee auxiliaries would likely try to prevent the destruction of their mothership. One good strike and then break off to avoid getting caught up in another dogfight oughta do it. It wasn't as if their weapons would be able to catch up to them from behind in a chase, as this whole mess had proven. "Target weapons on the drive, then break wide." An uncontrolled anti-matter/matter reaction should be enough to destroy the ship and the facility it was launching from. Maybe even a bit mo' of the surroundin' area, she thought with a silent giggle.
The pilot waited for an opportune moment, then pulled an Immelmann turn that sent them hurtling in the opposite direction, straight towards the New America. As always, the speed of the mass effect drive was startling; in an astonishingly small amount of time, tens of thousands of kilometers disappeared and the starship came within sight. It was a huge cylinder with the ball of a crew module at the front end with a rotating wheel to simulate gravity just behind it, while at the rear was the long stalk of a boom that connected the cup-shaped mirror-matter reaction drive to the main body of the ship.
Freya, that's big. The scale seemed more like a project her people would have pursued. 'Course, they built the thing to go interstellar distances at sublight speeds. I s'pose it has to be big to carry enough to make a colony on the other end worthwhile.
"Only one Yankee ship's pursuin', Chiliarch. T'other ones are still after the Arjuna."
"Continue with the attack." If the damnyankees were going let their starship get attacked, she was only too happy to oblige them. The Phaeton arrowed towards the boom and drive end of the ship, then banked upwards as it released a mine shower, letting the speed of their approach send them hurtling towards the ship, then slowed slightly to launch a hail of missiles and railgun fire.
At first Caroline thought the blue flashes as the railgun slugs hit the boom were some sort of optical trick. Then the mines hit and the she could clearly see the outline the the shield around the hull.
She felt the blood begin to drain from her face. "White Christ, it has kinetic barriers," she said a split second before the first particle beam slammed into the Phaeton. The entire ship jerked around her as she began to issue frantic orders. She'd assumed the starship didn't have a mass effect core at all due to its primary propulsion being sublight; she hadn't considered that it would have the advanced – yet still economical of element zero – defense system of kinetic barriers.
"Barriers are down!" the weapons officer shouted as more particle beams rocked the Draka ship. While the beam weapons of the Yankee auxiliaries and her own ships had been underpowered for this sort of combat, those of the New America had the reactors sufficient to maintain its interior systems while propelling its huge weight without the use of a mass effect field to have their weapons to draw on.
Damnyankees snookered me, Caroline thought a moment before her world filled with brightness and flame, then blackness.
Cheers erupted in the bridge of the Sacajawea as they watched the Draka FTL ship disintegrate under the pounding of New America's particle beams, then continue blasting its debris into safer sizes as it hurtled onward towards the starship and struck harmlessly against the kinetic barriers. Smaller, slower moving debris – not moving at velocities high enough to activate the barriers – splashed over the boom and the drive.
Probably element zero from its core in that debris, Lefarge noted to himself. Have to get some teams to try and recover as much as possible.
"The other Snake ship took some heavy damage and jumped to FTL," the Exec announced. "Looks like it's heading back to Mars."
His fellow crewmates were slapping the young man who had spoke up on his shoulders and back as Kurasaka watched on, smiling. The ensign himself had a self-conscious but bright grin on his face.
"That was some quick thinking," Lefarge said when the noise died down to a more manageable level. "What's your name, son?"
"Hackett, sir," the young man replied in his startling voice, straightening to attention under the eyes of the OSS Brigadier. "Ensign Thomas Hackett."
"Well done, Ensign Hackett. That'll teach the Snakes not to-" He trailed off as the communications officer looked over, his face pale.
"Sir, you're going to want to see this. We've gotten transmissions from Earth, fuzzy but clear enough."
Lefarge felt a chill run through his very core as he watched the final video pickups from the Alliance's orbital battle stations before they cut off abruptly. He immediately went to the nearest medicomp and set up an injector. He pressed it against his neck and felt a cool bite. A wall of glass came between him and the world, imposing an absolute calm.
"Now hear this," Kurasaka announced over the general circuit a few minutes later. "All hands. This is the captain speaking. All hands will proceed to the nearest medicomp and take the maximum waking trank dose, immediately. Remain calm. Once you have taken the medication, report to sickbay by watches."
"—caused by those modulated signals the Snakes were transmitting," the ship's doctor was saying. "It's some sort of biopsychological agent that must have been lying dormant until the coded microwaves resonated and activated it."
"Why weren't we effected?" Lefarge could still feel the sick feeling at the edge of his vision, but with the tranks he could feel it as something apart from him. His tone was dull and heavy; even with the flat lack of caring, trained reflex had took over. That would be enough until they all took counteractants. Paranoia and schizophrenia were reasonably well understood, and you could suppress the symptoms quite readily, for a while.
Henry Wasser straightened in his chair. "I think I can answer that. The mass effect field somehow dissipated or blocked the Draka's transmissions."
"And we've been fighting off Snake raids off and on for hours," Kurasaka commented, eyelids heavy as he leaned his head into his hand.
Lefarge nodded slowly. "Alright. Have our people start looking for a cure immediately." Damn Snakes always have had an edge in biologicals. Their secret weapon seemed obvious now, in hindsight. "In the meantime, we've beaten the Snakes here in the Belt." His mouth tightened into thin, hard line. "Now we're going to start looking to take the battle back to them."