Tarazedi Rain

ShatteredStar

"Northwest unit, online."

"North-central unit ready."

"Northeast, in position."

I nodded grimly as I listened to the communications from my fellow units. "Point unit, online," I reported, allowing the throat mike to transmit my voice to the Apocalypse's main computer, where it would be read off by a precisely modulated voder to the other units in the task force.

"Let's get this on the road," my second-in-command, Prince Vega, said. In command of the north-central unit, his Apocalypse was visible as a golden spark on the ridge of that crater up ahead, the one where the Cybrids waited. Perhaps waiting was not the best word: they had no idea we were coming.

The Ghosts, those mysterious Mercurian folks, had demonstrated to us a way to camouflage our vehicles that strangely enough, our techs had never even considered. They took plain old anorthosite (in other words, Mercurian rock), ground it to a powder, and used a sand blaster to shoot the powder into the normal sensor-masking paint and alloys HERCs carried. After that, they added alternating layers of rock and paint, so that the spectra of the final product were the same as the surrounding rock.

After that, they rewired the vehicle's power systems so that excess power fed back through the shield grid back into the power supply. Dangerous, certainly, but less so than allowing the Cybrids to detect their heat signatures from kilometers away.

The Ghosts were smart, which is why they survived, I suppose. Mercury was wiped clean in 2829, and no humans were supposed to have survived. The Mercury Watch Force, assembled out of a smattering of survivors from Mercury's deep south-polar regions, had fled to orbit and set up a base in an asteroid in near-solar orbit. They were not able to maintain a very good watch on the planet because of the differential orbital velocities, but it seemed clear that no humans remained. Their scouts reported the movements of the Cybrids to other interested parties in the solar system including the Tarazedi Alliance. We'd lost a pretty good chunk of resources and manpower when the Cybrids took out our vehicle research center in Caloris, and we needed to get it back.

We got the chance a few months later. The MWF wanted to take out a Cybrid tactical center in the Antipodal region, and we loaned them some pilots. Shortly thereafter, they detected a human transmission from that region, somewhere near the Vostock scarp. Thinking that anyone able to survive the Cybrid infestation for eight months would be a valuable asset to the Alliance, Icebox, one of the Alliance's Rankless Agents, went with the Antipode strike force while the rest of the Alliance forces struck at Caloris.

The Antipode force was wiped out quickly. The intelligence from the scouts was accurate, but three days old. The local glitch pop shuffled itself during that time and the force ended up dropping just about on top of a massive Cybrid HERC formation. Icebox was presumed lost.

The Caloris force fared a bit better. Though heavily outnumbered, they managed to fortify themselves against the cliffs at the base of the southern Caloris Mountains, and hold off the main wall of assault while elite units ran zip-and-snatch ops to the wreck of the VRS. They recovered what they needed and returned to the main fortification... at kind of a bad time.

A phalanx of Executioners had trapped the main Tarazedi unit against the cliffs, and they were sufficiently out of range that the Alliance vehicles could not maneuver out of their clutches. Our forces had no artillery: the Cybrids did. They took out the command wing first, but then that rarely phased the decentralized Alliance command structure. The returning units got trapped in the middle of a bunch of medium HERCs, Adjudicators mostly.

Luck and planning paid off. The cargo drones were snatched by force-nets deployed from orbit-tangent cargo lifters. They snatched the supplies and database computers out of the Cybrids' teeth at six thousand kilometers per hour, lifting the whole mess into space in a vortex of tuned magnetic fields. "Grab them all, let the supercargo sort them out," is the motto for the OT cargo ships.

The rest of the Tarazedi forces died, of course. But that's why we fight: vengeance.

Anyway, it turns out Icebox didn't get killed anyway. He met up with (ironically) the survivor he was sent to find. I didn't get many of the details, but it seems she and another lady resident of Mercury managed to appropriate some vehicles and dig out a hideaway in Ibsen Crater somewhere, and the lot of them fought the Cybrids tooth and nail in a guerilla-war style. Later, they found the Cybrids had been capturing the few human survivors and using them as slave labor, and they freed those as well, and constructed an underground city.

Icebox left Mercury for a time in 2833, and returned to the Jovian system for several months. I was not sure I believed his story, or at least I didn't until I considered the officer's integrity. He'd not lie. He'd have no reason to, nor would he even if he had. Later that year, this Maria person came to Europa and he left with her. Considering the tactical situation in the Alliance at that time, Icebox would never have left without a damned good reason. The command staff (with which I had only an advisory role at the time) decided to let him go.

Some time later, after my personal mess on Earth had been taken care of, I returned to the Alliance. The battle in the Jovian system was won, for the moment at least, and it was time to see to our affairs on the other worlds. Venus was first: sporadic transmissions bounced off the Aegis Sunshield suggested there were Tarazedi survivors there. We diverted most of our Earth forces to Venus and wiped the glitches off the Ishtar Plateau. I led the final assault on the big glitch force near Maxwell Mountain, and though we took heavy damage, we cleaned up. The Cybrids fell to entrenched positions in the southern hemisphere and the Aphrodite continent. The battle continues there, though our scientists are working on a way to intensify the sulfuric acid's action on Cybrid hull plates. Squirt some accelerant into the atmosphere down there, let the Oberwind spread it around, bye-bye glitches...

Next was Mercury, and this time we had help. The Imps have contributed a sizable force, and they're holding defensive positions around our Caloris staging area. We've cleaned out the Caloris Basin, and we're working on Odin Planitia right now. It's slow going, and there are more glitches than humans, but we're turning the tide.

Of course, it would have to be me in the driver's seat. It had to be me, to lead a force that now fought under alien skies, with no hope of ever seeing home again.

Oh well. I'd lost one home already. Two's no big deal.

"ShatteredStar," I said in Tarazedi, giving my call sign and my authorization codes from my vehicle's IFF system. "All units, shed blood. Repeat, shed blood."

And with that, I pressed my legs down on the control pads for the Apocalypse's engine and servo array, and was pressed back in my seat as the vehicle began to accelerate toward the rim of the crater.

We were arranged in four units, three behind and one (my command unit) in front. The command unit would soon be overtaken by the two side units, and these three would strike at once. The one behind would hold back by half a kilometer, let the command unit take a beating, and then switch positions with it. By this time, usually the two flank units would have passed the enemy formation and we'd have them surrounded.

The screen in front of me held a panoramic view of the area around my HERC, and I gave the mental command to bring up the magnification on my retina's CCD chips. The screen filled my vision, and a moment later, crosshairs appeared directly in my line of vision. As my eyes tracked the horizon, the crosshairs tracked with them, the control systems reading my eye movements and the focus of my magnification systems. During combat, I would focus on my target by eyes only, and allow the computer to work out the necessary firing solutions.

Stupid Terrans. Why did they still use that obsolete control yoke system?

The computer-reproduced voice of my second sounded in my ear, the stereo managed so that the voice appeared to come from my forward left, which was indeed where he was. "First contact," he said, just as the flash of weapons fire drew my eyes toward the crater rim.

"Siya. All units, fire at will." The Apocalypse charged forward toward a horizon that grew closer with each step, and then vanished.

The sixty-ton vehicle hurtled through the air as it passed the rim of the crater, and flew in a long arc downward to the bowl-shaped slope of the crater's interior.

Cybrids were everywhere. The battle was joined.

The Apocalypse slammed into the ground, stumbled, charged forward. "Avenge Tarazed!" I cried over the communications system, knowing that the computer would not filter the emotion or volume out of that particular phrase. And then I turned my attention to the metal monsters surrounding me and my people, and let the fire fly.

* * *

"Unit Trin to west flank point six separate point two focus coords marked," I snapped, touching my screen and ordering Unit Three to attack the west flank of the Cybrid formation. The glitches were doing well, I thought grimly. They had freed most of their lights from our trap and would very soon break out of the battle entirely, thus allowing them to come in and harass my pilots at will. Diverting the mediums unit to that sector, trapping the growing formation of lights, was the only way to prevent a nasty, lengthy firefight.

Impacts sounded on my hull again. My shields and capacitors were both trying to recharge, meaning that I had perhaps a minute without shields. My feet pushed randomly on the control pedals as I swerved and backpedaled, to keep myself out of fire long enough to get my energy fields back online. In the meantime, I could still shoot, and did.

I noted that a nearby Executioner had taken some leg damage. I zoomed in again with my CCDs and looked directly at the spot of greatest damage, and flexed my fingers with a convulsive squeeze.

The sensor glove read the movements, noted that all of the fingers had bent, and accordingly fired all the Apocalypse's weaponry at the spot I indicated. The Executioner toppled nicely, but two others looked up from messing up two of my tankers, and threw particle beams at me.

Cybrid particle beams, unlike those the Alliance had stolen from them and reorganized, were a brute-force weapon designed to do heavy shield-and-armor damage. Ours were tuned to cut through shields somewhat, assuming we could match modulations. These weren't, but then I didn't have shields, and armor is a poor substitute.

One of the beasts missed, its beams skating over my head by about three meters. The other struck me dead-on in the left upper pulse cannon. This might not have seemed like much, but the Cybrids had an interlinked targetting system, therefore the first Exec that shot would have precise ranging data from its miss and it's buddy's strike. I prepared for death even as I through a potshot at the Exec that was powering up to kill me.

One of the tankers was nearby to the Exec. It was a Paladin tank loaded down with Shrike missiles. As I watched, the little vehicle rammed into the hulking HERC, emptying a volley of Shrikes into our foe. "Damn you," I whispered, as the Executioner retargeted and blasted through the Paladin as though it were a paper cup.

"We fight to avenge Oasis," I snarled over the comm system, as the pilot's call sign flashed up on the monitor.

A nearby Gorgon pilot spoke. "I will take three for Oasis's life," she said in a clipped, south-continent Tarazedi accent. I watched her brown-and-red vehicle lumber past me, and she opened up with quantum guns. I fired another shot to clear the shields for her, and the Executioner toppled as the green energy waves from my comrade's vehicle blew its belly out.

Another voice sounded nearby: Vega. "I will avenge Hawthorne," he said in an infuriated voice. Hawthorne was a friend of his, a Mercurian resident from Fantasma, whom Vega had trained in light-vehicle tactics. Vega's Apocalypse wheeled with his customary speed and precision, and its varied complement of weapons cut loose on a Goad.

A nearby explosion startled me, and I glanced aside to see a flaming mound of Gorgon collapsing to the ground. A q-gun fell loose from the wreckage, struck the ground, and detonated. The radiation from the explosion temporarily blinded my sensors.

My shields were back now.

"I will take Beya's debt of one to Oasis," a nearby Minotaur pilot said. "With an extra two for good measure."

I gazed over the heap of Gorgon at the Cybrids beyond, silver-and-brown shapes dealing death to my comrades. Another native Tarazedi had fallen, and we were few, too few, already.

"Hear this!" I cried, as I quickly scanned a tactical map. "I will take four for Beya. And together we will take them all for all we've lost!"

This battle would be won or lost very quickly now, with my next words.

"Abandon current orders. Form by tetrax, targets at will. Avenge Tarazed!"

With this, I tapped three of my comrades on the screen, a nearby Minotaur and two captured Cybrid Adjudicators. "You three, form on me, diamond slot."

"Acknowledged," came the responses.

"We will take four Adjudicators," I informed them, and turned off to the northwest, toward the heart of the formation. "I choose shots, you follow up. Shields ready?"

"Full up," the Mino replied. One of the Adjus echoed.

"Eighty, fifty, sir," the other Adju said. "Make that one hundred, ten."

Shield caps. "That'll do."

Our switch in tactics confused the glitches for a moment, and we were in the clear for at least another three seconds while the warforms communed with Big Glitch as to what was going on. "All pilots, pick new targets every five seconds. Keep them messed up."

"In range," my rear Adju said.

I looked into the center of the formation and picked out a small cluster of Adjus. I flexed my fingers one at a time, and in response, my weapons fired in rapid sequence. The shots splashed off one of the towering Cybrid warforms, and my comrades instantly targetted and fired. The Adju fell with my second shot, exactly one point five seconds later. The explosion rattled nearby warforms, and I immediately targeted one of those.

"The battle is won!" Vega snarled. I studied the tactical map and found he was right. The lights were gone. The mediums were almost gone. The heavies were reeling under the assault, which now consisted of a deadly two-seventy arc that surrounded them. The toasters were toast.

"I have not yet paid my debt," I said as my tetrax charged down the crater's bowl again, to the center of the remaining Cybrids. "Leave me a few!"

* * *

The Alliance headquarters in Odin was a hastily constructed dome about two hundred meters high. The arrays of vehicles, damaged, whole, and captured, sat around the base of the structure in a fan about five hundred meters in radius. There was plenty of space between them to maneuver, should the Cybrids get the foolish idea of attacking the facility. But no. Cybrids were anything but stupid.

My command office was, as Tarazedi custom required, the cockpit of my vehicle. However, as good an arrangement as that was for combat command, it was ill-suited to beaurocracy, and thus I got stuck with a screen-covered room at the top of the dome, for a base command center.

I hate heights, and this place made a point of emphasizing just how high up it was. There were large windows between the screens, each with a better view of the distant ground than the last, and it was unnerving to be constantly reminded of one's position at the tippy-top of a thin, flimsy tower a hundred meters above a thin, flimsy dome.

"Report," I said as I entered the cylindrical chamber. Vega was in command for the trin shift, and he vacated the chair now as I came on duty.

"The destruction of the Amru al-Oays encampment had the expected effect on Cybrid movements. They are redeploying their forces along a north-south frontier on the opposite side of the Schapiarelli ridge, using the lay of the land to provide them with maximum cover. A second force is migrating northward behind that shield, with the apparent intention of reinforcing bases around the Van Eyck and/or Shakespeare Basins."

"And to the south?"

"Data are spotty due to our incomplete satellite coverage, but it appears that the Cybrids are abandoning their hold on Tir Planitia entirely. They are moving those forces northeast, farther into Budh, and appear intent on fortifying the northeastern front at the expense of the southeastern."

"Logical, since there's nothing there but cratered highlands. They know they have the advantage when they're fighting on the intercrater plains."

"Indeed..."

"What can you tell me about the rest of the planet? The Antipode, and the EE region."

The EE was short for "Everything Else," as per the Mercurian joke that Mercury consisted of the Caloris impact basin, the Antipodes, and Everything Else. That region was characterized by intercrater plains and scattered craters. From orbit, it looked rather like a bowl of flat mud that had been shot by spitballs. That would be an apt description for most of Mercury, but it was especially valid for the EE.

"The Antipode... is swamped. The Imperial bases there collapsed after we beat them down, and the Cybrids took advantage of the situation to overrun everything north of Petrarch. Stupid Imps shoulda known better..."

The Imperials had taken exception to Maria Wolfe's rather arrogant claim to Mercury, and had declared war on Fantasma to teach them who was boss. They thought the Emperor was even though he was some six thousand light years away. The Ghosts proved them wrong.

"The EE is mostly empty right now. Past Budh, the only Cybrid concentration between here and the Antipode is Beethoven."

"As usual." I grimaced. Beethoven Basin was located at about twenty degrees south, some three thousand kilometers southeast of the Alliance's staging ground. We'd not been able to get past the glitches in the western basins to go deal with them, and whenever we did manage the trick, we'd be forced to take the northern hemisphere route anyway, to deal with the greatest Cybrid concentration in the regions north of the Antipode.

"I do have an idea for some glitch-beating," Vega said, and I raised an eyebrow. Animae save us from Vega's "ideas." And not even the animae could save those on the other end.

"Do you," I said neutrally. I closed my eyes, brought up an image of my anima, and gestured helplessly to her in my mind. She grinned mischievously, and I grimaced as I realized she'd be offering no help here.

"I require access to our space force."

"You know those only have a support role." That burned. Our space force on Mercury was tiny. Orbital bombardment would be my first idea to clean out the Cybrids, but with only a few dozen dropships, we didn't have the firepower up there.

"We don't need them to actually fire anything," Vega said.

I raised an eyebrow.

"We only need them to tow something."

"Specifically...?"

"Did you know that this system has almost no dust or debris?" he said conversationally. "There's very little absorption from small particles. The system has no zodiacal light."

"I am interested more in practical astronomy these days," I said pointedly.

"The practical is this. There isn't much dust. So it must have been swept up during the system's formation. Into asteroids."

"Asteroids."

"Do you know how much of an atmosphere Mercury has?"

"What atmosphere?" I said dryly.

"Exactly. So little resistance, so little waste of energy. Especially kinetic."

I let him continue.

"Mercury has an orbital velocity of approximately sixty kilometers per second. And there is a nice convenient planet in the next orbit out. For slingshot purposes."

I accessed my internal computer system with a command thought to the small mechanism against the inside of my skull, doing vector calculations. "Locate a sizable body in an orbit just beyond that of the second planet. Shift it into an orbit intersecting the planet. Use the planet's gravity combined with a high-energy burn at perigee to deflect the orbit into a retrograde of high eccentricity. Accelerate sunward along this orbit, adjusting to ensure impact with Mercury. You will get a crater several kilometers in diameter at the impact point..."

"Let's take that one step further. Destroy the asteroid en route."

I nodded slowly, a faint smile playing at my lips. "Vega, you frighten me."

"Imagine a cloud several thousand kilometers in diameter, holing everything within a three-thousand-kilometer radius with pea-sized, irresistible railguns."

"All we need to do," I said quietly, "Is to remove all the Alliance's-- and the Imperials'-- air cover from all over Mercury to pull it off."

* * *

"You want to what?"

I glared at the comm screen with an impatient look. This look gained added weight from the fact that I was impatient.

"You aren't using the air power. So let us do something with it."

"What gives you that idea?"

"The fact we've been monitoring your staging area with our satellites and we've not seen any air traffic anywhere in the Basin."

I grimaced. I'd given Vega my blessing with the plan, but he did not quite have the clout to get the Imperials to cooperate. I did. Supposedly.

And if I didn't get what the Alliance needed by asking, I'd have no choice but to force the issue.

"We have our air force on standby for fire support should the southern flank close on us. We will not allow you to take them for such a frivolous exercise. CalOps--"

"Before you close that channel," I said in a soft voice. The other man looked exasperated. I felt my upper lift start to curl with disdain, but suppressed the reflex. Terran officers. They were contemptible, the lot of them. They had the self-control of a rabid wombat and little more intelligence. They went through a couple years, maybe, of combat training, tech training, and tactical training. I knew the officer on the other end of this line was equivilant in rank to myself. Therefore, he had probably taken four years in the Knights' Academy, a year of ATC upon reaching the rank of Knight Captain, and maybe a year of diplomatic training (though he never showed it) and logistics on gaining high command.

Mental discipline? The guy would not be able to find his Calm with a portable scanner and a full set of navigation charts. Certainly he'd never taken Thought to Action, second year. He would flunk out of the entry-level course.

I'd not met a Terran officer yet who would survive my instructors in the Disciplines that were the core of Tarazedi combat training.

"Yeah, what is it?" The disdainful anger in his voice disgusted me. One did not speak to enemies in such a manner, much less allies. Terrans... their culture had flopped after the Fire, and their untrained, reactionary minds underlined that fact every time one of them opened their mouths.

I took a deep breath and allowed myself to enter the Calm, careful not to let it distract me. "You will not supply the craft we request?"

"No, I just told you that--"

"Very well. I will now order the removal of all Tarazedi forces and hardware from the Caloris Basin, to regroup with our main force here in Odin."

The man's face went ashen. "But you can't do that!"

"ShatteredStar to Comm One," I said evenly, not taking my eyes off the panic-stricken face on the monitor. "Activate Op Centralize."

"Comm One," echoed the voice through the main link on the holostereo grids. "Request confirmation of that order."

"Alright, wait!"

"Stand by, Comm One."

The Grand Master of His Majesty's Mercury Sword was understandably irate, and showed it. This was fine against Cybrids who didn't understand human emotions too well, but how had this guy ever got to rank fighting humans that would take one look at his blood-infused face and rip him to shreds while he tried to control his anger well enough to even remember how to control his vehicle? "Alright, damnit. We'll delegate thirty of our Conveyors--"

"Fifty," I said flatly.

"Now wait just a minute--"

"Comm One? Call for Op Centralize, authorization--"

There was an almost strangled sound from the monitor. "Alright, damnit. We'll send the wing to Amru al-Oays." The man stabbed screen with a finger and his image winked out.

"Cancel that, Comm One," I said with the trace of a smile. "The Terrans have come to see things my way."

"Better watch it," Vega said. "They'll be coming after us next."

I smiled thinly. "Recall what happened the last time Knights tried to turn coats on us."

That was on Io, when a Knights' force decided our equipment was worth having and that they were more powerful than we. Perhaps they were. Unfortunately for them, we learned the terrain and knew how to use it. Sword Rose Noir of the Fifth Pennant found themselves sinking slowly through a vast pit of molten sulfur, after we lured them out onto it and blasted it out from under them. While Mercury didn't have anything so spectacular as Io's convenient volcanoes, it had sunlight, and we had polarize-focus fields.

One of the great things about the Knights was that they used standardized chemicals in their paint. One of these chemicals was a heat-dissipative compound used to reradiate the heat of weapons fire. Unfortunately, when struck by sufficiently concentrated ultraviolet light over a wide area, it denatured into a rather caustic goo that would have no problem melting through the thin shield elements set through the outer shells of the vehicles. In short, if the Imps ever turned on us, we'd just focus the forcefields up in orbit to concentrate the light down on the vehicles in the Basin, one by one, until they all turned into scorched, shieldless hulks with burned-out power grids.

Contingency plans against one's allies were saddening to have to consider, but the Knights had proven their trustworthiness to the Alliance in the past, and we would not make that mistake again.

I sighed. "Vega, you realize we are going to have to shift our own air forces to this task as well, thus leaving our supply lines thinner and subject to attack."

Vega looked at me from over the rim of his console. "Suggest transferring all our materials over here anyway, to centralize our operations and remove our need for a supply line in the first place."

"We cannot dissolve the alliance like that. The Knights only help us to help themselves and would abandon us to our fate in an instant, but we will stand by our agreement until it burns us."

"Which it will," Vega said darkly.

I was silent after that, sinking farther into the Calm. The thought of our allies suddenly abandoning us was alarming, considering we were never going to get reinforcements from Alliance headquarters in the Jovian system. We were six thousand light years away, and had lost all contact with our fellows forever. The Imps were all the allies we had (except for the Ghosts, who were too few in number and busy on their own side of the planet). As much as I disliked admitting it, I realized it was Truth that we needed them and they needed us.

Truth. My Truths were more rigid now than they used to be. The war had taught me how necessary a hard-and-fast set of rules was for survival. Before I had come to the Sol system, I would indeed test my Truths like the Vidalex suggested. I knew that the book (which formed the center of most Tarazedi philosophy) was not a Truth itself but merely a guide (something the writers had reiterated in the text a number of times), but I believed its words. But over the course of the war, I had read the Book of Actions repeatedly, and had spent many nights contemplating it. One had a set of personal morals, whether they liked it or not, whether they strived to keep a perfectly open mind or not. One had to be able to choose a course on an instant's notice, to know themselves and the decisions they would make without having to deliberate. A pause could mean the difference between life and death, and nothing drove the lessons of the Book of Actions home better than a war for survival.

Tarazedi with practice in the Disciplines usually used two guide forces. These were considered to be different aspects of one's own subconscious mind, with processing abilities that went deeper than the mere conscious. It was recognized that these entities (seeming to have independent identity) were little more than mental subroutines, but it became traditional to hold them in the same respect and affection of a wise friend. Traditionally, there were two of these entities, an anima (or animus, for women; customarily the entity was of the opposite sex) and the animal guide that enjoyed a long tradition dating back two thousand years to the Native American tribes. The anima was more useful during dreams, when the conscious mind put up less barriers against forces that it considered foreign to itself. The animal guide was more conscious, and often popped in without invitation.

Mine did so now, and in my mind's eye I saw the bird's white wings flapping as it came to a graceful halt on a phantom branch in front of me. You again, I thought fondly. One usually had something of an amused disdain for the animal guide, and I was no different. What bull did you come to squawk at me this time?

The bird glared at me with big, unblinking yellow eyes. You tell me.

I opened my eyes to see Vega watching me, and I nodded slowly to him and closed my eyes. I heard him activating the command interface on his console, ready to process anything that might happen when I was distracted.

Well, since I was thinking about Truths when you interrupted me, I guess you think I have some kind of moral dilemma on my hands.

Don't you usually?

No, I said calmly. I know where my Truths stand.

The bird snorted and clicked her hook-shaped beak disdainfully. Then why am I here?

Good point. One's animal guide did not spontaneously drop in for no reason. I'm sure I'll figure it out, I said.

Another sniff, and she flexed her X-shaped feet and extended her wings. I don't see why I bother. I'm hungry. Seen any mice around here? The bird caught a wind and flapped its strong, heavy wings to carry itself away.

I'm sure you'll find something. Farewell, friend. I opened my eyes. "Vega...?"

"Yes sir?"

"Contact the Ghosts. Tell them what to expect from our little shower. And have the bay prepare my Banshee for launch."

* * *

I joined the Tarazedi Navy, not the Marines. I did not join to be scrabbling around on the surfaces of planets, 'roids, moons, comets, stations, and all the other various bodies on which I found myself.

I joined to be in space. And for the moment, despite the hearty protests of everyone from Vega to the techs that maintained my Banshee when I was otherwise occupied, I was back in space.

Mercury was a black shadow against the sun from this angle. Half the sun was peeking out around the left side of the planet, a searing silver disc edged with the pearly gray of the corona. I knew that I would not be well-advised to fly on the opposite side of the planet for any extended period; while the Shanti was well-proofed against the light of the sun, after awhile the heaps of helium ions blasting out of the corona at unmentionable speeds would penetrate the outer hull and start tinkering with the electrical systems. The "Ghost Star" was even hotter than Sol, a blinding disc that by no means fit what I thought of as a "sun". To me, a sun is a big, fat red ball that one can stare directly at and keep one's eyes. Sol, and this thing... I shuddered and turned my eyes back to my console.

The Banshee was configured the same way as other Tarazedi-crewed spacecraft. I had a VR glove on my left hand that controlled the ship's attitude, acceleration, and final velocity with a series of specific motions, while my other hand was free for whatever I wanted it for. I could walk around the small flight deck and still be in complete control of the vessel, and if I wanted the other glove I could control weaponry by voice and hand movement.

When the Fire burned Earth, the Terrans did something very stupid: they let their technology collapse. Not so we Tarazedi. We were the product of a sleeper ship that left Earth during the Age of Hope. Our gola was to create a viable colony world in the Alshain system, in isolation from the metanats and their constant strife. The ship's computer malfunctioned (or more likely, was sabotaged), and it did not decelerate at Alshain after all. The ship continued on course for about two hundred years at near-cee until it came close enough to the Tarazed system's distant companion star for the computer to mistake that for Alshain (there was a superficial spectral similarity) to wake up the sleepers. They spent a few weeks looking for a planet in the Tarazed-B system, before giving up and settling on a half-desert, half-water planet orbiting the red giant Tarazed-A.

Abandoning technology was a laughable idea to the colonists, who immediately set up a series of small cities on the north-continental coast. From the founding of the Tarazedi colony in 2602 (ironically) to the final destruction at the hands of the first-generation Metagens in 2827, the population grew from five hundred plus clones to some fifteen hundred million.

We received the Message in 2820. It was a faint distress call from Earth that had been sent at the height of the second Earthsiege, saying that the Sol system was being overrun by the Cybrids. It took the High Tetrax a month to vote to send an investigative team to Earth using some of the new FTL craft that had been designed by the Navy. I got a promotion and the job, thanks to my petition to the Tetrax. "Your idea, your responsibility," I was told in typical Navy fashion. "You screw up, you'll be the one splattered across the Sol system."

Tarazed IV was destroyed while we made the transit. It seemed the Metagens (the originals, the ones that actually had made it out of Prometheus's sight and escaped to the stars) had blundered into some kind of dimensional portal right into the Tarazed system. Spooked by the impossible human presence, they opened up with antimatter-based weaponry...

The Metagens, cut off from the rest of the Cybrids like the Tarazedi were from Terra, had also not lost any great amount of technological know-how... sadly for us.

With these thoughts, I had to seek the Calm again. When I reached the state, I looked out the window again.

The Ghost Star's next planet, the water world Seadance, was a fat aqua speck opposite the sun. It was brighter than any of the distant stars, despite our proximity to the glorious nebula and its clusters. That was our destination. We would have to pick out a nice, fat asteroid on a particular orbit... and we were pretty sure we had found it. En route we would stop by Seadance to pick up a bit of mapping data as well as velocity.

"Whisker Nine to ShatteredStar," came the urgent voice of one of our formation's sensor craft.

"Comm sys. Accept. A/V," I said, and the main screen blinked to an image of a fine-looking young Tarazedi woman wearing a calm expression that belied the urgency in her eyes and voice. "Speak," I said, clenching the fingers of my gloved hand to decelerate slightly and approach the other vehicle.

"Forgive my lapse in Calm, sir. I detect a Cybrid space force lifting from the Mercurian northern hemisphere. They seem intent on intercepting us."

"Noted, Whisker Nine. Are all our vessels up to my specs for acceleration?"

This was not information Whisker Nine, a sensory operator, would have. She regarded me with a lift of one pert eyebrow, her fingers dancing over her console with incredible speed. "Our forces are, but the Imperials are not. Their engines are notably less efficient and their weaponry is heavier."

I nodded in approval. This one had passed the test without so much as a pause. "Very well. Order all the Imperial vessels to transfer all their weight in weaponry to one of their cargo escorts and return it to Mercury. We need speed right now, not weaponry."

Whisker Nine did not even blink at the outrageous order. "Siya, sir. May I point out that the Cybrids can outaccelerate even our fastest vehicles effortlessly due to their immunity to acceleration syndrome?"

I made a note to promote this officer when and if we ever got back to Mercury. "Valid observation. Fortunately, we have a head start and should reach Seadance before they can intercept. At that point, we will scatter and rendezvous at the target."

"Mi comprendiz, sir. Is there anything further?"

"Naya. Carry on, Lieutenant. ShatteredStar clear." The channel closed automatically.

Fine officer material indeed. She accepted her responsibilities yet still sought the whys behind them.

It was too bad she so resembled Tara, I thought sadly as I flicked the glove again to accelerate past at full speed along the axis of the spindle-shaped formation, hoping against hope my quick acceleration-velocity calculations-- and my estimate of the Cybrids' capabilities-- was as accurate as our small fleet needed them to be...

* * *

I looked up from the main console at the rapidly expanding silver sphere that was Seadance, and checked for one final time the fleet's orbital elements. The Cybrids had been dogging us all along the trip. They had one day got the bright idea that, even though they had no hope of destroying us, firing long-range missiles into our midst would necessitate us maneuvering to avoid them, thus damaging our straight-line course and slowing us to the point they could catch us. This would have been true but for Whisker Six and Whisker Eight, whom had turned around when the strategy became apparent, and drove headlong into the Cybrid forces.

It was too bad the agkraz never got the idea that Tarazedi sold themselves dearly. We were picking pieces of Cybrid out of our tailpipes on the better half of the deceleration leg of the voyage. The two kamikazes had blasted their fusion bottles wide open while simultaneously detonating every explosive device aboard... and all of them were fusion- or antimatter-based. The expanding cloud of energy and debris blasted the glitches off the black, and we were in the clear now.

Seadance expanded to a wall of white to one side of our flight path as we approached the featureless haze of the cloud tops at fifty thousand kilometers per hour. At the closest point in the maneuver, all our vessels blasted the engines on full, and we hurtled back into space at ridiculous speed for inner-system maneuvering.

It was only the next day we discovered the asteroid.

It was a good-sized chunk of rock, some three kilometers in diameter in an orbit with an eccentricity of nearly zero. In fact, the object was in a Trojan orbit with Seadance, at that point sixty degrees behind in the orbit where an object would remain stable barring a huge outside application of force.

We were here to give it such force.

Our vehicles fanned out and landed all along the back quadrant of the rock, killing the rotation. This was necessary; a spinning rock blasted apart would cast all its mass outward far too quickly to deliver any concentrated punch. Maintaining null-rotation would require careful balance of thrust and more careful maintenance of trajectory; gravitational action by Seadance would tug on the asteroid's more massive side and set it rotating on perigee. That side wasn't much, just a bulge of rock that contained no massive crater, where the opposite side of the planet had a hole in it three hundred meters wide and nearly as deep. The pattern of cracks suggested that the impact that formed that crater came close to blasting the entire 'roid to bits, and even now left a deep network of weak joints.

These would be useful.

The Shanti was the only vessel not attached to the rock; its computer was near overload as it calculated the necessary thruster firing sequences for all the other ships and transmitted them. Shanti, in the position of coordinator, would need to monitor the other ships precisely at all times, and could spare no processing power to monitor its own trajectory as well. My ship was on its own, since it would be maneuvering with only the most basic of course control, and could not be allowed to approach the rock's gravity well until it had passed Seadance and was on terminal approach to Mercury.

Allowing each vessel to use its own computers would result in chaos as the ships ended up trying to fight each others' courses and made corrections without confirming them with the others. You'd get ten ships firing a correction thrust when only one was needed, and where would that end the rock up?

Shanti was elected because it was the only ship with full command transponder sequences, and it had the processors to go with it. The only other ship with the communications output to handle the telemetry for the fleet of ships was a Conveyor often used as a mobile command post... for HERCs. Spaceship maneuvers were a tiny bit more complicated.

"Let's get this underway," I said, and fired the main thrusters to set Shanti on course. I'd remain with the fleet, but about a quarter of a light-second away. Close enough for easy calculation of transmission lag, but far enough that Shanti the Distracted would not end up[ bumping into the 'roid while she was busy telling the 'roid where to go.

The ship's computer whined briefly then silenced, as the initial spike of processor load eased and the computer fell into the algorithm set that it would use to manage the fleet. Receding from the asteroid, on the viewscreen it was a half-circle of brown lit around the edges by pinpricks of fire: the thrusters of the ships.

The asteroid would be flown to Seadance and hurled around the planet, and as it cleared the limb and brought Mercury into sight, the ships would shift from thrusters to main engines... accelerating the rock with a vengeance straight into the maw of the sun's-- and incidentally Mercury's-- gravity well for all they were worth.

I just had to see that explosion...

* * *

Several minutes before our encounter with Seadance Shanti jerked and fired her engines. Cursing I examined the console, and then as the data sank in I cursed again, softly, and touched Calm.

I was under attack. Right now, when the Shanti needed to organize the terminal encounter burn!

I snapped an order to the vessel, telling it to disregard autoprotect systems and proceed with the mission. I would have to handle this problem without the ship's computer.

I cut the locks to the computer core and accessed manual missile control. It seemed that the enemy was a group of three Cybrid dropships... which were armed with pretty good radio-tracking missiles.

Shanti was broadcasting coordination orders on just about every frequency in the radio spectrum.

The chirp of launch warning sounded, and I used the telescopics to pick the missiles up visually, targeting with my CCDs on maximum magnification. Even in that mode, where my vision was little more than a set of massive pixels, the missiles were no more than a cluster of dots.

I guessed their homing frequencies and let loose a hastily-programmed set of ECM decoys and a small army of countermissiles. The decoys seduced three of the missiles off their attack and the countermissiles smashed five more. That left three, and even one of the birds they were packing would rip poor Shanti into scrap metal.

Fortunately, Shanti was not quite toothless herself, despite her name. I jerked the control glove downward just as the first two missiles engaged their terminal attack run, and they detonated a light-second away as they blew by at point three cee. The emp didn't even twitch a needle on the Shanti's shielded circuits.

One more missile activated its terminal, coming straight down my throat. I had one shot at this, and I had to do it without computer control, without even the advantage of my CCD targeting.

My hand shifted and I patched my glove into the control system for a countermissile, and let it loose.

Piloting the blindingly-fast missile made piloting even Shanti's responsive nimbleness feel like driving a maglev train with malfunctioning magnets. The missile flew wide with the slightest movement of my hand, and it was difficult, terribly difficult, to get it on course to target.

Calm.

The countermissile came up underneath the target, and I stared at the missile that had a seventy percent chance of killing me in three seconds.

"Calm," I whispered, and twitched my hand.

I closed my eyes as white light flashed, and a moment later opened them again to see blank space.

I smiled faintly. My Calm would never break now, after that.

I dumped ten missiles into space, clasped my hands together under my chin, and leaned back in my chair lazily as the ten missiles sought the Cybrid ships.

Cybrid spacecraft have terrible ECM.

The flash of distant nuclear explosions did not break my Calm either, and my smile was the barest twitch of my lips... but heartfelt.

* * *

"Terminal approach," Shanti told me, and I looked back at the aft screen to see fifty fusion-ion torches lighting up space with the blaze of violet-white light. Seadance whizzed by beneath us as we sought the black space above it, arcing around the water world. Mercury was a tiny black point in front of the sun, visible only when my lens contracted, causing the liquid crystal inside to polarize and cut the light level down to a bare one percent of reality. The CCD chip showed Mercury's speck in the sun's whiteness, and the computer processor in my cortex obligingly drew trajectory tracings toward it upon request.

I was kind of surprised that my implants were doing so well after four years with constant use and no servicing; I'd not had the leisure of maintenance since the beginning of the Starsiege. Most of the devices, like the computer nodes, chemical batteries in the muscles, repair nanites resident in the marrow of the bones, and other more permanent enhancements, were designed for life, but most of the military-grade enhancements like the eye and ear implants, combat suit links in the palms, and the joint enhancements in the knees, elbows, hands, and feet were all supposed to be checked and tuned at least yearly, and replaced every five or ten years. Strangely, I had had not a trace of breakdown or (animae forbid) rejection.

I forced aside this irrelevant datum and double-checked the course as the rock passed Seadance.

It was working. We actually were going to get those glitches.

I smiled, then blinked as I wrenched the Shanti into a z-plus veer to avoid an incoming.

"Sorry to startle you, Shanti," came a moment later over the comm system, and I relaxed. Human, though who other than our unit was in space was beyond me. "Xenogears here. Taking a survey of Seadance. What're you doing with the rock?"

"Using it as a blunt object."

The woman was not amused, her voice suggested. "Perhaps you might like to point it elsewhere."

"Considering how much trouble it was to get it aimed, I think not. You are one of the Ghosts, are you not?"

"Correct."

"Do me the favor of informing everyone in Fantasma of the merits of staying indoors," I said.

"You intend to strike Mercury with an asteroid?" The voice was dubious.

"Specifically, the Cybrids on Mercury. I have no quarrel with the landscape," I retorted.

"I see. Perhaps you might like to inform us of your plans before bombarding our planet with rocks?"

"It is not your planet," I said quietly. "Ghost Wolfe's Declaration notwithstanding. We are residents as well as you, and we will defend ourselves as we need to."

"You would violate our sovereignty?" The voice was cold, cold.

"We defend ourselves as we need to," I repeated. "Your misinterpretation of our actions is a Blindness on your side of things and not our responsibility."

"Perhaps you should tell Maria this."

I smiled as Xenogears backed down. She probably wasn't even aware that she just had. "If she wishes to discuss it," I said mildly. "But my answer to her would be no different."

There was a sigh, and then a male voice. "Razorback here. Will you require escort?"

"I would be honored," I said. "Eyes ahead. If the Cybrids get wind of what we are attempting they will attack en masse."

The male voice was as cold as that of his female companion. "Let them."

* * *

According to Tarazedi philosophy, there are four kinds of war. There is war of the white, which is the war of words, paperwork, beaurocracy, and diplomacy. There is the war of the gold, which is the war waged in the credit accounts and the resources. The war of the black is the war of shadows, where covert operations, espionage, sabotage, and acts in the dark weaken or destroy an enemy before an open shot is fired.

And there is the war of the red: open, furious death, destruction, blood, and fire.

This is the war the asteroid's scattered fragments took to the Cybrids' doorstep in February of 2835, when chunks of rock ranging in size from a millimeter to fifty centimeters blasted into Mercury's western face at point six times the speed of light.

At such an impact speed, an object is converted almost entirely to energy. Physics tells us that there are some nine hundred quadrillion Joules of energy in each kilogram of matter, and some five hundred billion kilograms of matter splattered itself across Mercury.

Explosions as powerful as nuclear detonations rocked the planet, yielding some megatons over every square kilometer of the affected area. Rock ran molten and Mercury briefly knew volcanism greater even than that of its formation, in a wide arc extending from the south pole, through the Shakespeare region, up and eastward through the area north of the Antipode, and back around to the north pole. The band of white fire had turned the visible face of Mercury nearly as bright as the sun behind it.

The Tarazedi forces, hidden deep in a rift at the base of a scarp on the western edge of the affected zone, survived with only minor damage. Of the Cybrids, only the Antipode and the northern hemisphere units survived.

It became not war but cleanup. The war of the red on Mercury was almost over.

I left the cleanup operations in the care of Xenomorph, recently grown tired of his position as Dean of the Academy, and took Vega back to Fantasma. I was curious myself to meet the people who said they owned the planet.

Driving a tank through the zone of destruction I shook my head. Toppled Cybrid vehicles littered some areas, and fresh lava gleamed dull gray over buried craters, rifts, and warforms. I saw an Executioner tumbled on its back buried in black lava, its feet pointed straight up into the air even as the body was trapped in the lava. Elsewhere, I ran across a Cybrid city in ruins. The asteroid fragments had blasted straight through it and detonated in the rocks beneath it, turning the city inside out in an explosion of metal fragments. Pieces of silver metal littered the ground for ten kilometers around.

Tarazed was a desert world, with rains only along the coast. There are occasional storms, but usually the weather is quiet, dry, and hot. There is a Tarazedi saying that goes "Fear Tarazedi rain, for since no one ever sees it, no one can know what it is capable of."

Looking around at the aftermath of this Tarazedi rain, I smiled.

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