The Wau considered jumping from the Eos to reach the bombs, but what for? He would never have the speed, and the Halcyon was too far away. All right…
He contacts Dorian.
- "King Dorian, I inform you that the Alké has just sent eight projectiles in your direction, do you see them?"
- "The Wau Order serves the dissidents, if I remember correctly," replied the King with bitterness.
- "We can discuss politics later, look at your radars."
- "I remember a Wau who came before Huan and bowed to him…"
He finally looked at the radar.
- "I see them."
- "They are nuclear fusion bombs. It costs you nothing to destroy them."
- "It may be a trap."
- "King Dorian, I beg you. I am not lying to you. The Wau Order does not take sides. It tries to save lives. And I am sorry for Huan. He deserved to die, but I do not kill in cold blood. Or even no-no man deserves to die, even an abominable tyrant. And I did not kill him because in that sort of system, killing a tyrant is the same as making room for his likeness. I had no replacement ready. But it was in my plans."
- "Your words touch me. I may be naïve, but I want to believe you. Thank you, Wau."
The bombs were already halfway to their target. The Wau did not quite know whether he should continue supporting Andreï, who now seemed unrecognizable in his actions.
To make good measure and reduce the risks, fifty Ozys from the front line launched their missiles at the bombs. Almost all the projectiles hit their targets; the three or four that remained spiraled off toward Caliban's star.
The bombs burst in an apocalypse of silence: eight luminous explosions, each ten times more powerful than the nearby star, in under two seconds. A hyper-powerful electromagnetic flux shoots in all directions at the speed of light-it crashes against the magnetosphere of planet Caliban-1, cloaking it in a titanic aurora.
The Armor holds, but the Wau sees all the Endymions go dark. In the distance, the Nations no longer respond either.
The Wau descends near the command bay of the Alké, from the outside. The officers are there, and operational. The explosion has not blinded them. Because their eyes were closed. Because they knew the bombs would be triggered beforehand.
Andreï approached the bay, facing the Wau from the other side. The Wau signed in Stellar Tongue, since communications no longer worked.
- ME NOT LOVE PROJECT YOU
- ME AND FRIEND SEVERAL IN SHIP, WIN LITTLE TIME, Andreï replied.
- PROJECT YOU PRESENT, QUESTION
- ENDURANCE, STRUGGLE (he paused, then continued): YOU GO PLANET. GATES EMPYREAN
- ME WITH YOU AND FRIEND SEVERAL. GATES EMPYREAN, FUTURE
- ME LOVE YOU, GREAT THING
The Wau did not sign back. He was disappointed not to have been told about the plan, and to have been used. For a moment he thought he could answer with a word of love, for he might die…but never mind. He stepped away from the window and rose far above, onto the Eos which spun gently.
The Endymions of the fleet had positioned themselves all around, but several thousand kilometers out, encircling the fortress of wreckage surrounding the Alké. As though for a celebration, the Wau saw them re-ignite one by one, and beneath him, the Eos transmitted the vibrations of the Alké's machines.
Apparently, the Ozys were no longer responding for now. As much as the Endymions were over-protected cruisers capable of operating around neutron stars or Kugelblitzes, the Ozymandias ships were merchant vessels. For all he knew, they could be out for several days. Well played, Andreï, well played. Hoping they would manage to recycle their oxygen nonetheless.
And now? The black silhouette, almost invisible, of the Harpocrates, an infiltration cruiser, stood in the front line above. The Wau could have joined it, exhausted himself trying to shut it down, and then what? Eight others would pass, not to mention those already aboard, and from all sides…
He will defend the Alké. And the Alké will fall. Andreï, if the Wau followed his most intimate conviction, would surrender to save his crew. Just before that, the Wau would dive toward Caliban-1 with the Halcyon. Why endure, Andreï? You are not a proud man!
One hundred kilometers more, one minute of grappling hook, and the fortress of wrecks will be within missile range.
All sensors of all ships go wild.
Space, in a remote corner of the system, becomes luminous.
A hallucinated parade suddenly bursts from Drift, ship after ship, each more phantasmagorical than the last.
Colossal stellar amoebas containing in themselves clouds of nebulae and moons. Stone ships, modified asteroids plated with metal like cyborgs, but also ships carved into perfect solids: cubes, tetrahedrons, icosahedrons, star-shaped volumes, gigantic sea urchins in rainbow colors. Ships of the HS, old tinkered invictus, affixed to the flanks of stellar whales as large as continents. Giant spikes, like huge nails, to which cling, directly in open space, Xenos armed with spears who by the thousands prepare to leap. Ships belonging to the secret race of whisperers, who live inside gas giants, themselves hidden within great billows that burst from Drift like the smoke of a colossal invisible hookah.
Bursting from a wormhole-using a technology considered impossible by the HS-appear the legendary Zero, Xenos absolutely black, possessing ships that absorb light and are impossible to observe. The Zeros are said to be unsurpassable in combat, and a single one can decide the fate of entire planets, though they are also said to be wise and conscious of their own power.
Now comes a cohort of creatures existing in dimensions above or below the three dimensions: vast polygons of light that seem to slice and reform according to invisible waves, armies of flat, iridescent ovals aligned like dominoes. In the realm of the invisible, wave-creatures, vibrating in the texture of spacetime, moving at light-speed, rebounding from one hydrogen molecule to the next in the vacuum to carve a path toward the system's planet; but also monstrous agglomerates of molecule-creatures hiding their intelligence in distant places linked through biological Entangled Gates-and finally, creatures of light whose ships are nothing more than mirrors arranged to contain their troops inside.
At the end of the procession, devastating for every side, entire miniature suns-likely burning gas giants emerging from Drift, sheltering within them civilizations of hyper-fluid beings traveling from star to star with these natural vessels: their arrival alters the gravitational field of the entire system in a tsunami moving at the speed of light-like an elephant shaking the ground, all ships tremble in the vacuum; every sailor feels in their own body the colossal scale of the tidal forces.
And leading this insane cohort stands an Adventura marked with a sun, broadcasting over radio:
- "Uh, Salman reporting… I see lots of Endymions here, are you still there Captain Andreï?"
The Wau hears their communication and rejoices. Good Lord, Salman, in just a few weeks, has achieved this Xeno union that seemed impossible to all. He too wants to know, when Andreï, after giving his coordinates, asks:
- "All these Xenos… they're your allies, Salman? Really?"
- "They're here for Caliban, my Captain. And yes, they're our allies."
- "Admiral. But how did you gather them?"
- "Uh… the Abandoned helped me a lot…"
- "Yes sir!" gargles the octopus in the background…
- "And the Xenos, when they're decided on something, they're efficient. They contact each other, they organize. They have the equivalent of a super HS if I understand… Actually… it's not the moment but… we should really study all these civilizations. Excuse me now, we'll tell them the targets."
- "Salman-not a massacre, alright?"
- "That's not the Xeno philosophy, my Admiral."
Astonished, the deck officers of the Alké and the Amaterasu bend over the radars and the observation bays. The cruisers of the HS scatter to disperse the Xeno fleet, in perceptible panic.
- "Go fire missiles at a sun!" shouted a captain toward Gulmira.
In many ways, this fight was as uneven as that of the HS against-alternately-the fleet of the resistance, and the sailors felt heartbreak seeing humans, even enemies, hunted by unknowns.
The Xenos, however, showed that despite their numbers, their apparent power, and their obvious strangeness, they did not truly master the art of space battle. These were carried out in a strikingly primitive fashion: ships chasing one another without basic notions of positioning, not to destroy at a distance but to be boarded by warriors, often armed with blades.
- "Gulmira," declared Andreï over the radio, as a terrible black Zero ship approached the Gilgamesh, "one word from you, a word of surrender, and the Xenos will stop."
In response, she sent him a furious look within a motionless face.
- "They have a joker," declared Andreï privately to the Wau.
- "The Aleph. I do not understand his absence from the battlefield. A mere thought and he crushes anyone: you, me, all fleets, Xeno or not."
- "I know Garen, and if he is not here, he will never come. He does not tolerate failure, even the slightest in a victory. He is afraid of the Empyrean Gates, that's all."
- "I do not share that view, Andreï," declared the Wau pragmatically. "He may have been waiting for the Xeno fleet to come out of hiding."
- "In that case, Wau, please do me a favor and dive to Caliban."
The Wau seems to hesitate like a panther, gauging the planet. In an even higher orbit, the Halcyon scans the surface-how simple everything is today, now that the anti-entropy shield is gone! Through the cloud layer, the Halcyon finds again, beyond mountains, not far from the coast of the largest ocean, the famous Xeno "outpost." An outpost a hundred kilometers across.
It is not far below. If the Wau jumps now, he can keep the Halcyon in the sky. If he waits… it will take hours for the configuration to become adequate. He has not a word for Andreï, and, taking his momentum on a huge drifting slab of hull that he hurls toward an Endymion at destructive speed, he plunges toward Caliban.
Andreï sees him and sighs. He will succeed where others have failed, inevitably. But Gulmira sees him too.
Here comes the Phrike bursting from Drift from the edges of the galaxy, propelling with the cruiser's spindle many projectiles in the Wau's direction, at a prodigious speed. On the bridge of the Alké, they attempt to capture the images: they are eight Anti-Waus, in their golden armors, used as ammunition.
A veil of concern passes over Andreï, but he remains confident. If they send ten against one, it means the Wau has resources. On the radars, the Aleph Fleet continues to move erratically, military AIs having no training against the semi-improvisation of the Xeno Fleet, which in any case was difficult to evaluate: which ship was dangerous? Which one was resilient?
Without surrendering, some cruisers had taken the decision to go into Drift toward Earth. As for those who remained, if it was impossible for Andreï to decipher their communications, their intensity spoke volumes about their distress.
And yet they hold. They cling on.
If Andreï had only received the somewhat stupefying education of the military academy, he would simply have felt admiration; but he clearly read in their evasive maneuvers and analyses the clear will to buy time. If he had received only the somewhat stupefying education of the military academy, he would have pressured Salman to make the Xeno exterminate the fleet as soon as possible. But he was not here to kill. The Wau having fallen on Caliban-and if a few ships had survived planetary approach-the victory for him also meant gaining time.
Truthfully, he could surrender to save everyone's lives at Gulmira's next attempt at contact.
His ruminations were swiftly answered by something as sudden as it was staggering and terrifying.
The expected deus ex arrived from an unknown angle of Drift.
The radar dedicated to stellar ships had no means to detect it. But there was no need-you could see it with the naked eye.
Larger than Caliban, it was a pyramid both full and empty. Its structure unfolded like lace, again and again, and it was impossible to know whether the thing was more a cloud or a ship. But it was pyramidal, so strange it could have been Xeno, and its point was turned toward Caliban.
It was the Hyperion, the fractal-dimension ship. As light as an Endymion, but with a hull radiating protrusions sharper than molecular daggers or, if they existed, atomic daggers: the ship used its fractal dimension to cut through matter with no resistance whatsoever. Besides, by its mass alone, it sliced, in the vacuum of space, the few drifting hydrogen atoms, which burned like atomic bombs, without taking any apparent damage.
It would not even need to slice Caliban in half, even though it could: when its nose plunges into the planet's atmosphere, it will trigger so many nuclear fission explosions that all life will be eradicated.
Andreï tries not to panic, but there is an animal fear before the strangeness, the colossal scale, the inevitability of this machine of death, and he must ask Petra twice, stunned, to initiate a communication with Gulmira.
The Admiral of the Fleet refuses. Of course. No more negotiation possible. The Hyperion advances slowly-perhaps they use reactors rather than a grappling system. A part of his brain overlays equations, and of course concludes, he knows not how, that grappling propulsion is impossible.
He calls for Salman. The young man's face, already rather pale and tired, seems devastated.
- "Salman, we must save Caliban."
- "I saw…," he stammers, "but…"
- "Ask them to launch an attack. Look at the protrusion at two-thirds-looks like a command center."
- "I will do my best, Admiral."
The Xenos remain scattered, but a giant stone icosahedron, following the Adventura's orders, manages to align around itself a constellation of debris and hurls itself at full speed, with unsuspected acceleration, at the Hyperion. Immense blinding explosion, waves of electromagnetic interference that scramble the instruments-and then nothing.
No more Xeno ship, no more asteroids. The Hyperion is intact.
Other Xeno ships, including a mini-sun, throw themselves upon it in the hope of achieving a better result by sheer mass, but the outcome remains precisely the same.
Meanwhile, King Dorian's fleet has reassembled. It charges, the Royal Ozy at the front, toward the Alké. A brave man, that Dorian.
Milovan explains that the Hyperion has indeed lost matter equivalent to about half the volume of the ships that charged it.
- "And it is larger than a planet…" murmurs Andreï.
Standing since the beginning of the battle, he sits-rather collapses-onto the command chair.
In a few minutes, the Ozys, even if annoyed by Xenos, will reach the fortress of the Alké. Yes, he could ask the Xenos to throw themselves at the Hyperion, but what for? There are not enough of them and he does not want to be responsible for a massacre. Salman would refuse anyway. The Stellar Fleet no longer wants to negotiate. As powerful as the Wau may be, he is made of atoms and will not survive the Hyperion. In this battle, between the Wau and the Xenos, Andreï had benefited from more surprise advantages than he could have dreamed. But from the beginning, Gulmira had the ultimate weapon, and the worst part is that Andreï had been warned. This is the true reason why the Aleph had not moved. He was not afraid of the Empyreal Gates. He simply wanted to crush the Resistance Fleet without even showing himself.
Garen Antor will live, and we will all die. All that remains is to hope that in the future, Andreïs, Pallases, Tohils and Waus brighter than them will take up their mission by learning from his failure. But what lessons, in the end? The only lesson is that the strongest wins. The military manuals, stupid as they seemed, were right. The Aleph's lesson. The strongest wins.
In a pale voice, relayed by Petra, he simply says:
- "To the entire crew and the Fleet. The battle is lost. Our adversary no longer accepts our surrender. You are free to take the escape pods of your choice. Avoid Caliban. When the enemy comes to their senses, they will recover you. I nonetheless invite every sailor to follow their captain's orders, and captains to act as best they can. Thank you for your trust, and my apologies for having failed."
He closed his eyes so as not to see which officers left, or worse, which stayed for a certain death.
He threw his head back, sighed. All his life, his brain-wired by Lodovico's experiments on parallel worlds-had told him a story of death at the hands of the Aleph, but even that would not happen. All those terrors, every day, to end up on a ship's bridge under the deadly fire of missiles.
Nothing but suffering, and right here, a few seconds of happiness.
No After for me. Life would finally stop, for me, the coward who failed to join the others and merely endured life as one endures a battle.
For he who fears death every day, what relief when it finally comes. May this feeling last and last, until the end.