Defender Hyperswarm Read online

  Glasgow looked skeptical, and Kyoto couldn’t blame him. The only emotion Mudo seemed to be repressing was glee over having a new and challenging puzzle to wrestle with.

  Adams, Mudo, Glasgow, and Kyoto—who had discarded her ruined dress uniform and now wore a flight suit and her trademark bomber jacket—were the only ones present at the meeting. Unless you counted Memory, who was listening in via comlink. Glasgow’s fellow council members were headed back to their respective colonies to assess damage and oversee relief efforts. Since stargate travel wasn’t possible for the time being, the council members were returning home on transports traveling at sublight speeds, protected by escorts of GSA starfighters.

  Glasgow turned to Adams. “Any word from Rhea yet?”

  “Not since the Swarm first attacked.”

  “But that was nearly two hours ago!” Glasgow protested.

  “The stargates are down, remember?” Mudo said. “All of them.”

  Mudo had finally managed to devise a computer program that transmitted a rapidly fluctuating signal to all the active stargates in the system, successfully shutting them off.

  “Without the gates, we can’t send or receive real-time messages,” Mudo continued. “Depending on the orbital positions of each colony, com signals can take hours to arrive—and that’s assuming each colony still has communications capability. Given the situation, it may be some time before we know the full extent of the damage wrought by this latest Swarm.”

  “But we haven’t heard anything from Rhea,” Glasgow said. “We have to learn whether or not the colony survived—we’re going to need the Rheans if we’re to have any hope of fixing the stargates so the Manti can’t use them.”

  Rhea was the location of Influx, the GSA’s stargate production facility. The techs there knew more about hyperspatial vortexes and gate travel than anyone in the system.

  “I have a few thoughts on that matter,” Mudo said. “If you’ll permit me—”

  “Not just yet, Doctor,” Adams interrupted. “We have other things to discuss first.”

  Mudo didn’t look happy about that, but he nodded and gestured for Adams to go on.

  “Thanks to Kyoto, Mars suffered the fewest casualties of all the colonies. Only 412 Martian colonists died in the Manti attack.”

  Only, Kyoto thought. If only she could have saved them too.

  Adams continued. “Mars also suffered the least structural damage. The GSA Armory was hit by Manti fire. We lost some starships, but most of the other weapons—such as our tanks and missile crawlers—remain functional.”

  Kyoto wondered if the Janus had been damaged. She glanced at Mudo, and he gave her a reassuring smile. Good, the ship was unharmed.

  Adams went on. “In addition, the GSA experienced few casualties among personnel.”

  The woman Kyoto had spoken to in the hangar, Garcia, had been one of those who’d made it. A small victory, perhaps, but it made Kyoto feel a little better.

  “The Syscom installation took some hits, but they’re still online. Without the stargates to transmit their signals, though, their broadcasting capabilities are—”

  Glasgow’s personal comlink chirped, and a woman’s voice began speaking. “Janeesh? This is Aspen. I know you’re there, so don’t try to pretend you’re not.”

  Glasgow’s face reddened. “I have absolutely no idea how she got the code for my personal comlink.” He held his wrist up to his mouth so he could whisper, not that everyone else couldn’t hear him anyway. “Aspen, I’m in a very important meeting right now! This isn’t the time—”

  “It’s the perfect time,” she said at normal volume. “Right now you’re in a meeting with Adams, Mudo, and probably Kyoto, too.” There was something about the way she said Kyoto’s name that made it sound like some sort of industrial waste product. “You can’t freeze out the media, Janeesh! The Colonists have a right to know what’s going on—and that means I have a right, because I’m their eyes and ears!”

  “And mouth,” Kyoto muttered.

  “I heard that!” Aspen said. “Now, I demand that you allow me in there at once! If you don’t—”

  There was a loud squawk from Glasgow’s comlink, and the channel went dead.

  “Oops,” Memory said. “It seems I accidentally overloaded your personal comlink, Mr. Glasgow. My apologies.”

  Glasgow looked relieved. “No apologies necessary, Memory.” He wiped his brow with the back of his hand, as if he’d just escaped a close call, then said, “Now, where were we?”

  “We were discussing Mars’s current situation,” Adams said. “The Manti came through the orbital stargates as well as those planetside. The GSA has three Battleships that survived the last Swarm, and they were all in orbit at the time the Buggers attacked. Two of the Battleships are in dry dock, but the third ship—the Kipling—was up and running, getting ready for a shakedown cruise to test some new upgrades. The captain and crew fought the Manti until Mudo was able to shut down the Gates. Once their reinforcements were cut off, the Manti that remained were easy pickings for the Kipling and our orbital defense satellites.”

  “What of the other two Battleships?” Glasgow asked.

  “They should both be battle-ready in twelve hours,” Adams said. “Unfortunately, the other colonies didn’t fare as well as Mars did. Phobos took a pretty bad beating.”

  Kyoto looked at Mudo to see if he had any reaction to this news, since he’d been born and raised on Phobos, but his expression betrayed no emotion whatsoever. Kyoto wondered if the good doctor’s self-control ever slackened.

  “The penitentiary was destroyed, killing all the prisoners and most of the guards—those that didn’t desert their posts, anyway. The aquiculture farms were wiped out, as well. Europa had massive loss of life in the residential areas, and both the McGraw Institute for Medical Wellness and the Europa Credit Exchange were destroyed.”

  Everyone in the room was silent for several moments as the impact of this news set in. The McGraw Institute manufactured most of the medicines used in the Solar Colonies, and the Credit Exchange was the system’s center of financial markets and transactions. And now both of them were gone… the impact of their loss on the Colonies would be devastating.

  “The Sawari Virtual Zoo was destroyed as well,” Adams said. “The exhibits can be rebuilt and reprogrammed, of course, but the Manti also took out a third of the tissue banks stored there.”

  Kyoto thought she was too numb by now to be shocked, but hearing that the Sawari Zoo was gone nearly caused her to burst into tears. The zoo was—had been—one of the most beloved places in the Colonies. It featured holographic recreations of extinct Earth animals in simulations of their natural habitats. More importantly, the zoo housed genetic samples of these animals, stored away until a new Earth-like world could be discovered or terraformed. When and if that occurred, the animals would be cloned and taken to their new home. At least, that had been the plan. But now a third of Old Earth’s animal species had been destroyed. She wondered which creatures had been lost. Owls? Deer? Cats? She’d wanted to hold a real cat ever since she was four, when her parents had taken her to Sawari for the first time and she’d seen a holo of a kitten. Now, perhaps she’d never get to hold a real cat. Perhaps no one ever would.

  A thought occurred to her then. “It’s almost like the Manti knew exactly where to hit us, isn’t it? GSA Headquarters, Syscom, Influx, the aquifarms, the McGraw Institute, the Credit Exchange…”

  Mudo looked suddenly thoughtful. “Defense, communications, transportation, food, medicine, and finance.”

  “What about the tissue banks?” Glasgow asked.

  “The future of your species,” Memory said. “You won’t be able to create a viable ecosystem for a new Earth without any fauna to go with the flora.”

  “So what are we saying here?” Adams asked. “That the Buggers planned this assault? C’mon now, despite their size and power, they aren’t any more intelligent than the insects that inhabited Old Earth.”

>   “Not necessarily,” Mudo said. “We know from our experience battling the last Swarm that the Manti are organized in a hierarchical fashion somewhat similar to a hive structure. Different types of Manti are engineered for different purposes, and we did encounter some that seemed to exhibit a type of intelligence—the Brain Bugs, as the media so colorfully calls them. Perhaps the last Swarm wasn’t so much an attack as it was a fact-finding mission. Maybe the Manti learned as much about us as we did about them, if not more.”

  The notion was too disturbing to contemplate. The one advantage humanity had over the Manti was intelligence. If it turned out the Buggers were as smart or smarter than humans, it was doubtful the Solar Colonies would survive.

  “What’s the bottom line here, Adams?” Glasgow said. “Are we prepared to fight another war with the Manti?”

  Adams surprised Kyoto by taking a few moments to consider his response.

  “No,” he finally said.

  Glasgow’s eyebrows shot up. “That’s it? No?”

  “Make no mistake: we will fight, and we’ll fight hard. But we’ve been slow in rebuilding our military strength after the last Manti war. During the Second Swarm, we had seven Battleships. Now we’re down to three. Where once our starfighter fleet numbered over two hundred pilots strong, we’re down to less than fifty.” His voice grew softer. “Perhaps even less after today. The Manti also attacked the Defender Academy on Titan.”

  Kyoto felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach. Though it often seemed like a lifetime, she’d been out of the Academy for less than three years. She’d even toyed with the thought of returning there to teach one day.

  “The instructors and students fought their best,” Adams said, “but the casualties were heavy.”

  Kyoto remembered her first day at the academy. She’d been standing at attention in one of the hangars, along with all the other raw recruits. The flight instructor had looked them over, scowling as if she couldn’t believe that this sorry lot was the best the GSA could do.

  Kyoto had never forgotten what the instructor had told them. “The average life expectancy of a new fighter pilot in battle against the Manti is three to six weeks. If you intend to beat those odds, you’ll need to pay attention, work hard, and learn to fly as if your life depends on it. Because it does.”

  Three to six weeks… Kyoto had beaten those odds, and so had Wolf. But fate had finally caught up with him today. Kyoto knew that very few fighter pilots died of old age, and that given the choice, Wolf would rather have gone out fighting to defend the Colonies. But that was cold comfort. Wolf was dead and losing him hurt like hell.

  Adams went on. “Without the stargates, we’ve lost the ability to respond immediately to any Manti attack. It could be hours before we learn of an attack, and more hours until we can reach the battle site. And we simply do not have the personnel and equipment to station an effective fighting force on each Colony. So here’s your bottom line, Glasgow: we’ll fight, but in the end, we’ll lose.”

  “It was foolish of the council to believe the Manti threat had ended,” Mudo said. “If the seven of you had continued to support the GSA, not to mention my research…”

  Glasgow pounded his fist on the plasteel table. “Damn it! We had to rebuild half the colonies after the last Swarm. We did not have the resources to do that and keep the GSA strong. Some hard choices had to be, Dr. Mudo, and the council made them.”

  Mudo fixed Glasgow with an icy stare. “From whre I sit, Mister Glasgow, it looks like you chose wrong.”

  All the fire drained out of Glasgow then, and he slumped back into his seat, looking tired and defeated. “Perhaps so, Doctor. But the question is, what do we do now?”

  There was one question that had been plaguing Kyoto since the meeting began. “How did the Manti learn to use our stargates, anyway? They’ve never been able to do so before.”

  All eyes turned to Mudo. The scientist leaned back in his chair, folded his hands over his stomach, and gazed up at the ceiling while he spoke.

  “There are many things we don’t know about the Manti. But chief among them is, where did they originate? Not in our system, certainly. None of the planets or moons possess environments that could have produced such a life-form. Over the last century, ruins were discovered on both Luna and Mars that seem to indicate that the Manti visited the system long ago—thousands, perhaps even millions of years in the past. In some of my more whimsical moments, I sometimes wonder if a prehistoric Manti swarm was responsible for the extinction of Earth’s dinosaurs.

  “We’ve never been able to discover any indication as to the Manti’s place of origin. We know they can travel through space at sublight speeds thanks to the bio-energy fields their bodies generate, but from what we’ve observed and the experiments we’ve conducted on dead and captured Manti, it does not appear that they have the ability to travel faster than light. This would seem to rule out their coming from another star system. How would they have survived such a long journey at sub-light speeds without replenishing their energy? And though the Manti have demonstrated signs of an organic-based technology—Lander forges, pod worms, shock towers, and the like—no evidence of Manti transport ships has ever been recorded.”

  “But you have a theory, don’t you?” Adams said. “You always do.”

  “Naturally. I believe that the Manti are native to hyperspace itself.”

  No one said anything for a moment, and then Glasgow laughed. “You’re joking, right?

  “Not at all,” Mudo said. “Memory will confirm my conclusions.”

  “Gerhard’s theory, while as yet unproven, is sound. Analyses of living Manti have shown that the bio-energy their bodies produce shares a number of similarities with hyperetheric radiation. If the Manti were denizens of hyperspace, it would explain why we’ve never seen any Manti transport ships: they wouldn’t need any. It would also explain how they’ve managed to use our stargates.”

  “The gates are passages into and out of hyperspace,” Kyoto said. “If the Manti live in hyperspace, it would be as though we opened a door for them to get out.”

  “Several doors, actually,” Mudo said, “spread throughout the Solar Colonies. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the First Manti Swarm took place not long after humanity’s initial experiments with hyperspace travel. I believe those early experiments created rifts between realspace and hyperspace, rifts that allowed the Manti passage from their dimension into ours.”

  From the confused expression on Glasgow’s face, he was having trouble processing this concept. “If your theory is true, then why did it take the Buggers so long to begin using our gates?”

  “In the absence of any evidence, I’d only be speculating,” Mudo said. “Perhaps our way of traveling through hyperspace—using it to ‘jump’ over long distances in realspace—is so alien, or even primitive, to the Manti that it took awhile for them to realize what the stargates are. Perhaps it simply took them some time to decipher the specific frequencies that our hyperspatial vortexes are tuned to, like a thief picking a lock. Perhaps the energy released from the explosion when Memory’s first incarnation crashed the moon into Earth somehow rippled outward, like circles from a rock splashing into a pond, and altered the frequencies of our Gate vortexes just enough to allow the Manti through. Perhaps the Manti knew all along how to infiltrate our Stargates and were only waiting for the right time to do so. Right now, the important point is no matter how they did it, if they did it once, they can do it again.”

  “But we’re safe as long as we keep the stargates offline, right?” Glasgow asked.

  “Not necessarily,” Mudo answered. “Neither the First nor the Second Swarm needed stargates to attack us. It’s quite likely they have other methods of emerging from hyperspace. And who knows? They were able to prevent us from shutting down the stargates right away during this newest attack. Perhaps they’ll also be able to reactivate the gates on their own, given time.”

  “So that’s it, then,” Glasgow said.
“Without gate travel and without a stronger military force, it’s only a matter of time before the Manti wipe out the human race.”

  Mudo at last took his gaze from the ceiling and looked at the group, his eyes shining with a mixture of intelligence, excitement, and perhaps a touch of madness.

  “Not necessarily.” He smiled. “Let me tell you about a little project I’ve been working on.”

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  Kyoto sat next to a marble fountain, listening to the soothing sound of trickling water. The water was real—not the thicker, somewhat oily chemical mixture Colonists were often forced to use. All around her, trees stretched to the top of the domed ceiling of the Cydonia Arboretum. Oak, cypress, ash, palm, pine, elm… so many different kinds that Kyoto could never remember all their names.

  The floor was covered by rich synthetic soil from which dozens of different plant and flower species grew. Ferns, sweet grass, yucca, cacti, reeds… roses, lilies, daisies, lilacs, sunflowers, black-eyed Susans. Birdsong filled the air—recorded, of course—and holographic butterflies flitted from flower to flower. But despite the artificial touches here and there, the greenery was all real, and Kyoto inhaled deeply, savoring the mingled fresh scents of life itself.

  Wolf hadn’t exactly been a sentimentalist, but the arboretum had been one of his favorite places to bring her.

  “It’s so peaceful,” he’d once said during a visit. “The plants don’t have anything to do but grow, and they do it at their own pace. And once they’re finished, they don’t have anything else to do but continue existing and one day produce more plants.”

  Kyoto had laughed. “Doesn’t that sound like a boring life to you?”

  “Boring? Being able to live without worrying about tomorrow… being able to focus on just enjoying the present?” He’d smiled. “Sounds pretty good to me.”

  It was then that she’d first realized just how deeply he’d been scarred by battling the Manti swarm. Medical science could repair the wounds done to his flesh, but nothing could heal those done to his spirit.