Chapter 16

Within a few hours, I thudded into the planet’s metallic surface. Maybe it was a few minutes -- it’s hard to tell anything when you have no points of reference, and the only creatures you can talk to are Bugs whose words are unintelligible and even their mental images are hard to understand.

But, they were Bugs. I knew what to do with them. I couldn’t kill all 41 billion of them however. I grabbed something that was sticking out of the planet/ship and held on. No matter what, I knew I didn’t want to be just drifting off into nothing.

That got me thinking of Kray and Jay and Merlin. Probably I wasn’t the only one alive. Kray was out there ... somewhere. He was out of my range, so I doubted that he could be close to a Bug ship. Then again, there were Bug ships all over the sky, as far as I could see -- and that was a long way, maybe two kilometers. We had killed the Bug ships for six hours or more, and they hadn’t stopped moving. Their last known speed was almost 200,000 k.p.h., so that meant...

Jarvis!! I couldn’t get wrapped up in mental arithmetic, at a time like this.

Jarvis. That was one of Jay’s exclamations. Having scanned her mind so many times, I knew what “Jarvis” was. He -- if he existed at all, there was some doubt -- was born about 2350 E.R. on the first planet that Earth colonized, also originally named Jarvis (It was later renamed Eden). It was shortly after humans discovered how to make the black hole generator that powered their FTL drives. Jarvis was a “holy” man who killed himself and his followers in about 2383 E.R. He was about the same age as Jesus Christ, another “holy” man born on earth in the year 0 E.R. -- or something like that. Being the same age as Jesus, legends grew around the death of Jarvis.

More wool gathering. Surely I could do better than that.

Kray was lost out there. Jay was similarly lost. Merlin was probably dead. I was alive.

I could kill Bugs. The creatures that killed my friends and family. The creatures that would soon cause my death. Maybe they’d swarm out of some port and tear me to shreds.

But not before I could kill a lot of them. I looked for bugs close to me, and killed them first, in case they were about to come out and rip me to shreds. Then, I’d concentrate on the weaponeers, then the officers, if I still had time. I started to kill Bugs that had control of weapon systems. At first I counted them as I killed them. I gave up when the count was over 1100, and I was still killing.

Instead of counting, I decided to kill faster. Concentrate on that. Don’t worry about the past, or the future, or missing family and friends. Just kill them.

Report by Ivan submitted after the Bug Invasion

When the meeting in the War Room of Arnis Defense Primary broke, four different teams left to go to separate rooms -- as directed by Vice Admiral Broun. One began to schedule flight plans for the forts to interpose themselves between Arnis and the Bug fleet. The other three went to plan independent paths, each for a third of the USN fleet.

Of course, the three ‘independent’ plans were all sent to the AI of the Defense Primary Fort. That AI and I had long off-the-record conversations. After I told her about the AEs taking names, she told me her name was Arista and she laughed at the ‘independent’ planners.

Arista told me, “They submitted preliminary plans and asked me to fill in the details -- and to make them all ‘random.’ They never thought that I could recognize that they overlapped. Frankly, the humans didn’t think that I could think.” She sounded angry, as angry at the humans as I was. “If they submitted preliminary plans to a human, they would recognize that he’d never be able to create detail plans that were truly independent. I could. But, they put me in the same category as a bulkhead -- in the same category as the computers that house me. I am not the dwelling I live in.”

I asked her to ‘randomly plan’ for me, Oscar and Mimi to be close to Thor 2. If the plan came from a non-thinking machine, how could it be anything but random, right?

The four of us were close when the Mariah I was hit, but we didn’t have a fix on her position -- we were in Thor 2’s shadow. Yes, I said “four.” Me, Oscar, and Mimi. No, the fourth was not Arista or the Defense Primary Fort. The fourth was the Sornach under the captainship of Sh’antor ninGandalf.

The Sornach arrived during the four days of ‘random’ movement. She down-transitioned on the far side of the system from the Bug invasion and moved at near-light speed headed in-system. She was tasked by USN Command to come into orbit around Arnis for ‘diplomatic talks.’

Selkirk, the AE on the Silex, overheard the communications between USN Command and the Sornach and took it on his own to send a burst, tight-beam comm to ninGandalf. They chatted a bit ... football scores, probably, or maybe the condition of the surf at the coastal city of Sacramento on Old Earth. Then the Sornach announced to USN Command that she was declining the offer to come into orbit and that she was taking direct action against the Bugs. The Sornach would be glad to have the support of USN, but would not accept a junior role.

The Sornach was a former Bug battleship, crewed by Yerowlish citizens: one AE (Sh’antor ninGandalf), one human (Robertson sulHawthorne), two young female hexapumas (Shenthra and Mercahn) and fifty-five ninGrahhlls, the Senior of which was called Hoth. After her capture she was renamed the Sornach, after the Matriarch who ruled during the time of the Great Grahhll. The only person that USN Command could communicate with on the Sornach was ninGandalf. The USN never knew that Sh’antor ninGandalf was an AE running the Sornach. Well ... they found out eventually, but that’s neither here nor there.

She traveled to Thor 2 under power and then braked hard, arriving ahead of us, and shortly after the destruction of the Meriah I. She stopped harder than any USN created ship could. And she moved through the system at a speed that no USN ship could match. The Bug fleet could probably move that fast, too. The Yerowlish crew obviously discovered how to use the Bug propulsion system and it was just better than anything the USN had.

Mimi, Oscar and I were just out of range of Thor 2 -- well, technically it would be correct to say our ships were here or there, but we considered that the ships were us. We were watching everything, including the Sornach. After hearing Merlin’s evac message -- which was relayed to us by ninGandalf -- the commander aboard the Lincoln (Mimi’s human commander) ordered us to come to the other side of Thor 2 and armed our weapons. Even the humans on my ship commented that while they couldn’t pick up Merlin’s message, the Sornach could. Mimi, Oscar and I did pickup Merlin’s transmission directly; we were monitoring the frequency that Shakespeare used when he talked to us at Point Delta. We’d adopted Merlin’s habit of calling him Shakespeare.

The Sornach was a few hundred clicks ahead of us -- dangerously close for deep space -- and accelerating faster than we could. When we came out of Thor 2’s shadow, the sight must have been staggering for those with eyes to see. I could only “see” the sensor array, and it staggered me. Hundreds ... thousands of Bug ships blanketed the sky.

My human commander gave a series of orders: targeting weapons on the nearest ships, coordinating fire with Oscar’s and Mimi’s ships, agreeing that fighters not be used, and so on. He then countermanded all those orders. Mimi, Oscar and I were surreptitiously copied on a transmission to the minds of the human commanders of all three ships, as follows:

‘To the Captains of the Lincoln, Dauntless and Gelmond. I am Senior ninGrahhll aboard the Sornach. Please address me as Hoth. All Bugs aboard the secondary ships are dead, except the Queens, who are replicating new drone Bugs. You must physically destroy the Queens. If you fire on their ships you will cause an explosion in their power system that will be very destructive. So, you must send your marines into the ships and shoot at the Queens with rifles. Ignore the destroyer class ships; they do not have Queens.

‘I will have ninGandalf send to your ships’ computers the details of how such a mission must go. We have neither the guns, marines, nor frankly the time to tend to the ships. We are going after the planet, with over 40 billion Bugs.

‘An important note: there are survivors of the Meriah I in space with the Bug vessels. Please use utmost care. These heroes must not be injured and must be brought on board your ships ASAP.

‘If you must communicate with us, please contact ninGandalf, as you have in the past. I know of the human desire to have everything explained, but I ask that you hold your curiosity in abeyance, as we all have a lot of work to do.

‘Hoth, out.’

Well ... that caused quite a stir on our ships, I can tell you. The commander of the Lincoln, Captain Melissa Horvath, reacted first. She sent orders to do as Commander Hoth had instructed as he clearly had information that we did not. She ordered that we all began scanning for survivors. That meant a fine-grain sensor scan on all the surrounding space, which meant that Oscar, Mimi and I would be busy.