SEPTEMBER 13, 2060
0500 ZULU
SOMEWHERE BETWEEN MARS AND JUPITER
Spinning, tumbling, rolling against a lightless backdrop, the
Torie ships approached. Bare sunlight struck the fresh paint on their
hulls and begat a million angry colors, arranged into shapes and slogans
to savage the human eye. In the vast darkness of interplanetary space,
the ships would be invisible until they reached their target.
It had begun a week ago. Seven days, one hundred and sixty-eight
hours, over six hundred thousand individual seconds for vaporous thoughts
to condense into irrevocable resolve. It takes the human brain only a
fraction of a second to react to intense stimuli -- fear, hatred, pain --
and once a motivation, no matter how irrational, has been jolted into
being, the rest follows easily.
Samuel-Rosenthal Swebedlus Gregory had not been the most beloved
President in the history of the new United Nations, but his assassination
had shocked the world. For forty-three years, the UN Security Council had
said that the crime was unsolvable. It was the greatest lie in human
history.
Seven days ago, the Chief Investigator of UNIA Open Section --
code name "Gandalf" -- had allowed
Kyle-Bartelt Blue Jemison to destroy
that lie. The UN would never be able to offer proof that a conspiracy
against the Torus did not exist, but Gandalf believed he could show that
if such proof did exist, it would already have been found. He thought he
could change the course of a river with a handful of pebbles.
The magnitude of his failure would now become clear.
Ghostly images faded in and out of Europa Station's radar
perimeter, sometimes one ship, sometimes many. The attacking Tories
included the engineering team who had designed and built the station's
main sensor array. They knew what wasn't in the operations manuals.
The UNSF monitoring officers at Europa had only spent four weeks
working with the new radar system. They wrestled with software band pass
filters, pushing luminous graph lines back and forth on their monitors,
for twenty minutes before realizing there was a trap door into the
computer.
Ten minutes later, Europa Station's sysadmin, dripping
wet and wearing a garish purple bathrobe, had secured the computer and
reset the sensor hardware. An irregular sphere of yellow blobs -- the
color indicated unidentified objects -- solidified inside the radar
hollow, centered around Europa, shrinking rapidly. Every person in the
control center knew what the computer did not: this mob was hostile.
As a tide of red light flooded the room, the station commander
ordered the communications officer to send out a general distress call. A
synthetic fog of electromagnetic radiation strangled the transmission
before anyone heard it.
The mob had planned well. Nearly half of the attacking ships were
unmanned, and continued accelerating until they obliterated themselves
against the station in filigreed showers of sparks and metal. The
communications tower disappeared first, sheared off by a robot loneboat
moving at nearly ten percent of lightspeed. Next to vanish was the radar
dome, followed by the defense satellites, then the rotation thrusters.
Half of Europa Station had been torn away before the manned Torie ships
decelerated to maneuvering speeds.
The five UNSF corvettes in dock moved to intercept the war-painted
Torie fleet, knowing the battle to be hopeless. Even when joined by
twelve private vessels, the attackers outnumbered the defenders by twenty
to one. With the control center blind, deaf, and mute, a dogfight would
be no contest. But UNSF had to try.
Colors exploded all around Europa Station. Loneboats displaying
false corporate logos and scurrilous slogans danced around the
gray-and-white UNSF vessels, pounding them with matte black projectiles.
Against the darkness of space, the missiles became practically invisible,
making it look like ships were exploding from mere proximity to each
other. Lasers winked blue, green, and white, burning through bodies and
equipment -- sometimes the wrong ones, thanks to the reflective chaff
littering the battlespace and scattering all useful radiation. Tactical
navigation became nearly impossible, and ships began crashing into each
other, adding to the mist of flotsam.
The Torie landing parties didn't need to see. Their courses had
been plotted days ago, and those flight paths were now cleared by hordes
of robot minesweepers. The surviving UNSF personnel on Europa Station saw
the Tories approaching, and began to signal surrender by blinking the
station's running lights: red, dark, long red, dark, long red, long dark,
red, long dark... Most of the Tories could read Morse code, but they all
ignored it. They had decided to kill long before they reached Europa.
The station's defenders, on the other hand, did respond to the
surrender signal. They ran. One UNSF corvette ran fifty kilometers
before a pitch-black kinetic slug pierced her scorched and crumbling hull.
She fell for eight seconds, bleeding air and coolant in pale blue
streamers, before her main engines overheated and turned everything within
four kilometers into white fire. The blast did kill a Torie vessel, one
of only eleven lost in the battle.
When the last of the ships defending Europa had been destroyed,
black-and-orange striped Torie freighters smashed through the station's
main hangar doors and towed out six water tankers. An equal number of
tugboats helped push the tankers into space as Torie astronauts planted
explosives inside the hangar, among the four other cargo freighters and
two dozen loneboats.
The Technicolor sphere of ships expanded again, neither as dense
nor as regular as before. Some deliberately lagged behind to kill escape
pods. The slowest Torie was two hundred kilometers from the station when
the explosives detonated. Three UNSF patroller captains, who had changed
course toward Europa as soon as its telemetry went dead, cursed when the
green blip flickered and faded from their radar displays.
Spiraling, turning, falling away as freely as they had come, the
Torie fleet disappeared into the void, like stars winking out before
daybreak. Nobody would ever be able to track them all down.
Copyright © 1997 Curtis C. Chen. All Rights Reserved.