Through the Andromedan Line
Posted
Sharon stepped up to the featureless black cylinder of the old blockade runner ahead of Richard and Amy. She sang a polite introductory stanza, and the ship boomed back a slightly discordant dirge, as was befitting an Ebony Fleet vessel of its vintage. It was rather rude, but Sharon did not take it personally, the ship not being particularly intelligent.
Amy giggled, and skipped up to the ship, singing a cheery travel song, though with some hidden sub-lyrics that were just beyond Sharon, and in an eerie minor key. To Sharon’s irritation, the ship boomed back cheerfully.
The little girl placed her cheek against the hull and continued her song. The ship opened to allow them entry. Sharon blanched slightly as she finally parsed the sub-lyrics that Amy was encoding in the song.
Richard, for his part, carried himself as one on holiday.
“You seem calm,” she observed as he sauntered up.
“Freeze, thaw, fight, freeze, thaw, fight. Any time I am awake and not in the guts of whatever new thing they want us to kill, is vacation enough for me. Now I have a chance to read, work on my hobbies, then a few days of work, and back to vacation on the way home.”
“If we survive,” Sharon observed.
“Yes, there is that.” He smiled mischievously, “Pretty good chance of enjoying half the time, though!”
Sharon slipped into the skin of the unfamiliar vessel, chanting for status of the various systems. Amy, with her evident familiarity with this sort of vessel, joined in with an eerie harmony of secrecy and stealth.
Sharon felt webs of shadow wrap about the hull, and she was uneasy at the feel of the strange Ebony Fleet glamour. It lacked the crispness and definition of that used by the militia of the Hill. The sensation was almost like tendrils, or maybe black fungus. She could almost smell a mustiness from it.
Sharon extended her wings, the wings of the ship; not the quick, flitting things of her Mariposa, but strong and taut. Powerful, if less agile. She sang out a soft warning to nearby ships, then she sprang up towards the black.
She spiraled around the crystal city’s central spire as she ascended. She glanced at where Michael would be observing their departure. With the keen eyes of the ship, she saw him standing. She looked back at the distant blue sphere of the hill, wavered for a moment, then beat her wings into the void.
More earnestly now, Amy’s verse wove into her own as they cautiously left the protective circle around the Hill. The siege line of the Andromeda Ghing stretched invisible in the dark marches, where the light of their host star grew dim and cold. She wanted to reach out and probe where they were, but knew better.
They too sang songs. Alien dirges of stealth, and death, and destruction. During the long stalemate, each side would occasionally break the implicit truce with probing attacks. The Andromedan ships testing the rings of Crystal Cities, bright Mariposas spreading light and destruction along the shadowy Andromedan lines. The militia lines always held, and Andromedan ships always poured back into the gaps of their siege lines.
Their run on the blockade was timed so as to coincide with one such militia sally. Sharon felt the warning when the gamma-ray emitters came to life. Invisible searchlights groping in the darkness from the Crystal Cities, distant snowflakes now, even with the ship’s sharp eyes. The warnings told her where not to be, allowing her to avoid the beams.
The ships of the Andromeda Ghing had no such convenience. Anon a beam would find its mark, raking across a hidden bow, making the concealing gloom flicker. The beam would redouble in strength, and be joined by others. The curious shape of the vessel would be revealed in the radiation bathed light of vaporizing armor. Projections and embellishments of unguessable utility. Chiral hulls, similar, but no two alike. Snowflakes melting in fire.
Then came the Archer missiles. Searing white lights as their payload of anti-matter combined efficiently with their hulls. The ships that were not so close as to be swept away or crippled by the overlapping spheres of radiation had their shrouds spoiled by the merciless glare.
Sharon pressed forward as she sensed a swarm of Mariposas fluttering enthusiastically into the fray after them, falling on the crippled ships while the gamma emitters of the Crystal Cities seared away at the less damaged portion of the opposition.
As she dove through a gap in the disordered line, still wrapped in concealing shadow, Amy’s voice helpfully sang out the disposition of nearby Ghing ships as they brought their concealment back online. No longer cautious, Sharon spread the blockade runner’s wings to their fullest, as too late the disordered opponent sensed their faint presence. They were too few and too slow to make an issue of the escape. Skirting in and out of their futile energy beams, Sharon melted into the blackness, and the blackness melted in around the Hill as the Ghing silently filled in its broken line.
Sharon’s song trailed off with a final verse of direction and vigilance as she stepped down from the central podium. The scene from the outside faded away.
Amy was sitting on the edge of one of the peripheral podia. “You sing nice!” she piped. “We should practice together.”
Sharon looked at the abomination. “Yes, perhaps,” she said, without conviction.
Olivia continued to smile after Sharon left the control room, but there was something hard in her eyes.