ship doesn’t change course and then giving yourself a little push and trying not to wipe out on its hull. Simple, except that the maths involved is staggeringly complex, and here we were in the middle of the biggest fleet action in human history.
I hoped our pilot, whose name I hadn’t even bothered to learn, was really good, or we were going to be left with our cocks flapping in the wind.
‘This is as close as I can get you,’ our nameless pilot told us over internal comms. I checked our position. Saying it was hot would have been a vast understatement. There was silence on the tac net. Like everyone was waiting for something. The head of Mudge’s armour turned to look at me in my converted bomb cradle.
‘Ready?’ I asked. It seemed that I was back in charge of real-world security. They confirmed their readiness in turn. Right, time.
We came out of the bomb bay using our flight fins to adjust position in tiny increments. Initially we planned to stay close to our long-range strike craft, matching its velocity, trying to get our bearings. Rannu and I were out first, Pagan and Morag following, but the strike craft was coming apart around us. Metal buckled, broke apart and became fragments pierced by black beams and ruptured by exploding warheads, so Merle and Mudge exited what was now a high-velocity debris field. We set course and triggered burns on our fins as parts of the craft bounced off our armour, knocking us in random directions. We took a kicking getting out of the wreckage, our expert navigation systems constantly having to recalculate course. Free of the debris, we used one short burn and then hoped our stealth systems would mask us. Hoped that they would think we were also debris. Working for us was the fact that nobody had ever been stupid enough to try something like this during a fleet action.
It was like being born into light. The red of lasers, the blue and white of particle beam weapons, the white fire of plasma, the burn of missile engines multiplying as they exploded into submunitions. We could see long trails of railgun tracer fire. Point-defence systems killed incoming warheads. Armour-plated hulls melted and ran as plasma fire blossomed across them.
Screening remotes looked like swarms of insects around the bigger ships as they fired at fighters, interceptors, other remotes and incoming missiles. Skin mechs fired their weapons like a crawling artillery barrage at any enemy craft in range.
Some of our fighters shot by beneath us. They were little more than oversized engines propelling armoured, wedge-shaped weapons platforms filled with gel. Without gravity they were pulling manoeuvres at Gs high enough to powder unprotected and unaugmented bone. The fighters were pursued by one of the organic Black Squadron frigates, its black beam weapons stabbing out again and again as its point-defence system destroyed incoming missiles. The frigate’s engine glowed a cold blue like one of Their vessels. With every beam of black light one of the fighters split apart, bleeding frozen gel out into the vacuum. We were too small for the frigate to notice.
Everyone knows that war is horrific, and it is. What nobody will tell you is that sometimes it is beautiful. This was beautiful. This was like watching fireworks as a child. I was exhilarated but I was calm. This was so unreal. It was a beautiful chaos of light and fire and metal. It was balletic, and the only thing I could hear when I shut down the noise from the feeds to block out the screams and the panic was the sound of my own breathing.
I felt a surge of exhilaration as one of their battleships came apart under heavy fire from lots of different sources, including the bright blue lance of the Thunderchilde ’s main particle beam weapon.
All around us impacts blew off fragments of armoured hull. The faster ships flew by, skirmishing with each other – or dogfighting, as pilots insisted on calling it – risking missile fire at the bigger ships, drawing laser and railgun fire from screening drones.
Above us my vision was filled by the enormous organic and seething chitinous form of the mutated Bush. The Hellion’s passive sensor picked up an increase in radiation as the Bush ’s enormous entropy cannon fired and drew a scar down the length of the Thunderchilde. Good, I thought, it needed a bit of dirtying up. It needed to earn its scars.
I saw missiles fired from a battery that looked like a cancerous growth on the skin of the Bush. Where it was damaged, the hull swam like bacteria under a microscope as it grew new armoured flesh. This wasn’t a ship, it was a nightmare, some kind of monster.
I ignored the readout on my IVD that told me how fast we were going. It was relative, I told myself, as the Bush got larger and larger until it was all I could see. We were still tens of miles from it. We still had the screening drones to deal with. Whether they thought we were debris or not, they would still detect and fire on us to protect the mother ship, and they would be linked to Demiurge. H would know we were coming.
We sent the signal to fleet. Our prearranged call for help. The closest carrier to us was a German carrier, the Barbarossa. Every carrier had held a squadron back to help us if need be. Now that we had called for air support, all the reserve squadrons were released to join the fight. We saw some of them drop out of docking airlocks, manoeuvring jets moving them away from the carriers before they kicked in their main engines. Many of them didn’t get far.
I knew the Barbarossa. It had once taken on one of Their dreadnoughts in the Proxima system and won. Too old now for front-line service, it had been sent back to Sol for system defence duties. Sadly, Luftwaffe Fortunate Sons now crewed it. Shame. It would have been nice if it had been the Valkyries they launched to help us. I remembered that the Valkyries would be on the other side somewhere and flying better fighters.
Pagan did what he was good at, forward observing for the squadron of fighters that was being torn apart as it headed towards us. He used passive scans, so as not to give our position away, plotting the positions of the screening remotes we needed taken out. He also sent the pilots the locations of point-defence weapons on the hull of the Bush. All the other weapons were too large to be used against us. He then sent the pilots targeting solutions via our, hopefully, masked comms link.
Waiting for the fighters, falling up towards the Bush, I enlarged the net feed in my IVD. The war between God and Demiurge looked like a viral eclipse. As if God’s red sun was slowly being eaten by infection. More and more black spread over it. God’s screaming was a constant ambient noise on all the feeds now. Uncharitably I wished he’d shut up.
Then the best hope we’d had since the start of the fight. They came like a vagabond army – corporate and criminal hackers, amateur savants and signals veterans, sport and illegal-snuff virtual gladiators – the net’s dirty fighters, tricky bastards, chancers and assorted scumbags. Some were ex-military; many were draft dodgers, and I had a horrible feeling that many were still too young to be drafted. They were cloaked in icons that ran the gamut from just about every popular cultural icon to just about every religious icon imaginable. Some just came as themselves.
They were angry and armed with the best attack and defence programs that Morag, Pagan, Salem and Tailgunner, before he died, had managed to develop from what they’d learned of godsware. We’d given them the best software sword and shields we could in the packets that Pagan had sent after the Earth had been hit. It was manipulative. We’d known that Rolleston was going to bombard the Earth, but there had been little we could do about it and there had been no time for the powers that be to evacuate the targets. The packets had contained a heartfelt plea for aid from Mudge. He’d composed it when we’d been in the assault shuttle heading for Rolleston’s ancestral home.
The sun grew and the darkness receded. Slightly. As just about every single isolated computer system left on Earth, in orbit and in the fleet was opened to God.
I watched the vagabond army hit the demons and the angels as an undisciplined mess, trailing their silver cords behind them. There was less than a second’s delay between them thinking something wherever they were jacked in and their icons acting on it. The tiny delay was a result of operating in virtual territory so far away from their bodies. It was small but sometimes it was enough to give their opponents the edge, particularly the angels.
Demons were thrown into the air as the new army joined the fight and nasty tactics were used. Groups of hackers who knew each other ganged up on targets, took one down and moved to another. The vagabond army may not have had the training, discipline or technology of the attacking hackers, but they had the numbers and they’d seen huge parts of the Earth destroyed in the bombardment. They had anger on their side. Anger is always a good motivator.
Pagan sent us feed from the surface of the black glass plain. An angel towered over the vagabond hackers and the remnants of our fleet’s military hackers and signal personnel. It was sweeping multiple hackers aside with every stroke of its spear of white fire, leaving them corpses with smoking plugs back wherever they were tranced in. I saw Papa Neon charge the angel, throwing every dirty little hex program he had at it. He distracted it, parried a
