The mysterious local ship or space station was wasting time and resources
trying to fire on Sugar’s ship. She had no offensive measures of her own,
save for the hot pocket, which was currently empty because up until this
point, they had no reason to conceal their heat signature. The defensive
measures, however? Well, those were stacked to the ceiling. It was designed
with an EM shield, a TP field, and a GD yield. The first one was the most
common. Every interstellar vessel needed to have it, or compensate for it
with an extremely robust—and costly—physical hull. The teleportation field
was simple enough, but at the very least, it required knowledge of temporal
manipulation in the first place. The geodesic yield was a different story
altogether, and these strangers instantly assumed that Sugar’s ship would
not be equipped with it.
The first two defensive methods were no match for extremely high-energy
particles, which were sometimes known as exotic particles. They were just
too small and too fast. Even an endless supply of power would make the task
an improbable proposition. There was an entire star system called Toliman,
which colonists avoided due to an unusually high concentration of ultra
high-energy cosmic rays. To protect against them, you don’t just have to
know about time travel, you have to have an intimate understanding of
advanced spacetime mechanics.
The GD yield didn’t deflect these particles, it basically just moved out of
their way. It warped spacetime around the ship, so that when particles
attempted to collide with it, they instead passed around the breadth until
reaching the other side. From the particles’ perspective, nothing
happened—they simply maintained their respective constant vectors the whole
time. This was the best way to handle it without going the transdimensional
route because it prevented energy exchange, which would be the inevitable
result of any means of deflection. Again, even if you had the power to
simply swat the particles away, doing so would generate subatomic reactions
that could result in secondary damage, especially at scale from trillions of
these collisions.
The first thought these strangers had was to beam them with exotic
particles. They didn’t ask questions, they didn’t assess the threat, they
just fired. And instead of starting small, they went straight to one that
most vessels would be powerless to survive. Whoever these people were, they
were not nice, and they were not messing around. Someone would have to do
something about that.
Sugar could have just stood there and waited them out, but now she was just
pissed off. If they wanted to play dirty, she could get creative.
“So what are you doing?” Liselot asked her after Sugar quickly explained how
they were able to protect themselves from the onslaught.
“I’m dialing down the GD yield,” Sugar explained.
“Won’t that hurt us?” Liselot pressed.
“It would,” Sugar said, “if I turned it off entirely, but I’m just creating
a few billion collisions, the irony being that if they didn’t ever fire, I
wouldn’t have any ammo against them. Until they showed up, we had no
reason to mask our heat signature, so the heat shunt was off. I’ve now
turned it on, and I’m diverting the energy to it. Once it builds, I’ll purge
it and fire right back, targeting their weapons array as a warning. Every
time they hit us, we’ll hit them back just as hard, like Sebastian Shaw.”
“Is that a band, errr...?” Liselot asked, trailing off.
Sugar stopped. “Where did you hear that?”
“I told you, I’ve never heard of him.”
“No, that phrase, is that a band, errr. That’s a common time traveler
phrase. We say that all the time. I didn’t know it had made its way into the
general population.”
“I don’t know that it has,” Liselot replied with a shrug. “It’s just
something I said. Is it a secret code, or something?”
Sugar sighed and shook her head. “No. Never mind.” She looked back at her
screens. “Hot pocket is full; that was fast.” She leaned over the console.
“Unless you have any objections, I’ll fire it.”
“Do what you gotta do,” Liselot encouraged.
Sugar pushed the button. Their own energy beam was released from its hold
all at once, hitting the supposed enemy so hard and fast that it didn’t have
time to protect itself. That was what happened when engineers designed for
offense; they sacrificed defense in service to it. They had diverted all of
their power to the energy weapons so that their own EM shield was severely
underpowered, and practically useless. In seconds, the weapons were
disabled, leaving the strangers as sitting ducks.
A console began to beep. Liselot looked over to it. “I think they’re
calling.”
“You’re my comms officer now. Go ahead and open a channel,” Sugar requested.
After Liselot did as she was asked, a woman appeared on the main screen.
“This is Supreme Chancellor Gentry Ruvow. We attempted to end your lives
quickly and painlessly, but you have chosen the difficult route. Please
switch off all defensive and offensive systems, and prepare to be boarded.
In exchange, my operatives will no longer make it painless, but we will
still make it quick. If you resist or attack again, the full force of the
Desulforudisian Guard will descend upon you, and nothing will keep them at
bay. Respond now with your surrender.”
Sugar smiled. “Supreme Chancellor, we will not be surrendering—”
Gentry immediately closed the channel. The viewscreen turned black.
“This, kids, is why it’s sometimes necessary to bury the lede.” Sugar
sighed. “Okay. The global address system we installed so we could reach out
to all of Bida. Do you think you could modify it to address the planet down
there, whether they call it Desulforudis, or whatever? I need to work on a
few other things.”
“Yeah, if you could do it, I can do it,” Liselot agreed.
Meanwhile, a number of ships launched from their space stations, or even
from the surface, all heading towards Sugar and Liselot. They would not be
able to take them all on. Orbit was no longer a safe place to be. Sugar
didn’t understand what these people had against Tau Ceti, but she was going
to find out, no matter how much they resisted.
After a few minutes, Liselot said, “I’ve done it.”
“Great. Just in time.” Sugar flung the hardware identifier code over to
Liselot’s workstation. “Route communications to this buoy. It’s equipped
with its own miniature hot pocket, and can scramble regular radio waves on a
quantum level, so they will not be able to trace it.”
“Where are we gonna be?” Liselot asked as she was uploading the new
program, and taking the initiative to launch the buoy.
“On the surface. I have a nice little patch of land picked out for it. Well,
it’s a building. Brace for minor atmospheric disturbance.” They didn’t need
the equilibrium generator again this time, though entering an atmosphere
always did throw off the artificial gravity controls, especially if done so
quickly. This planet came with a protective teleportation barrier, but she
rather easily bypassed it. The natives still didn’t understand who they were
up against, and continued to underestimate the two of them.
In a moment, they were parked on top of the Capitol Building, which was
where Ruvow was talking to them from. “Reopen the channel to that asshole
first, not the whole planet yet.”
Liselot tapped on her screen, then nodded at Sugar.
“Supreme Chancellor? Supreme Chancellor, are you there?” Sugar asked.
“Supreme Chancellor, I don’t know if you noticed, but we’re no longer where
we were before. If you attempt to fire on us again, you will literally only
be hurting yourselves. I suggest you answer so we can work this out. I
realized my mistake when I first responded to you. I tried to be nice. I
should have started with...I’m not fuckin’ around! Answer the goddamn
phone, or I poison the well with your own people!”
Ruvow’s face reappeared on screen. “You insolent little—”
“No, you’re gonna listen to me now,” Sugar interrupted. “You have been
sending us black hole after black hole after black hole, and when we show up
to put a stop to it, you don’t even apologize? You just try to kill us? What
kind of monster doesn’t even take a second to find out if they’re murdering
innocent children on a school trip, or a hospital ship? That’s ignoring all
the people you tried to kill on my home planet in the first place. I want an
explanation, and I don’t want any more threats out of your little mouth.”
Ruvow narrowed her eyes. “We have not been sending you black holes. You have
been sending them to us!” She started out calm before devolving quickly by
the end.
Sugar shut her eyes in frustration. “Did you ever think that maybe that
wasn’t us, and you should ask us about it first? Again, what kind of
monster are you?”
“We don’t ask questions,” Ruvow replied. “If someone invades our space, we
destroy them. That is our way. We have established ourselves in this system,
and that should be enough. Merely being present makes you a threat. I don’t
know if I believe the black hole weapons aren’t from you, but it doesn’t
matter. Now exit your vessel and surrender to the operatives who are now
surrounding you on the roof.”
Sugar pantomimed turning down the volume, prompting Liselot to do it for
real. “I’ve heard of these people...total idiots. I thought we sort of bred
them out of the population because they kept putting their hands on hot
stoves and eating glass, but I guess some managed to survive long enough to
invent the aerosol can.” She glanced over at navigation. “I know where we
are now. We’re in another galaxy. My people call it Miridir, but you may
know it as Andromeda XXI.”
“That is millions of light years away. How is it colonized?” Liselot
questioned.
“It’s a long story,” Sugar began, “but this isn’t Dardius, which is the only
planet I’m personally cognizant of as being populated here. I’m
guessing this is some kind of offshoot faction from there...isolationists in
the dark forest.”
“The dark forest hypothesis was virtually debunked centuries ago. If you
want to keep people out of your home, you tell them that it’s your home, you
don’t make it look available.”
“I know. Like I said, they’re stupid. But they’re also under attack. If
they’re getting their own procession of KBHs, our conjecture of natural
causes no longer sounds viable.” It wasn’t just happening to Tau Ceti, which
meant the black holes were no accident. Only happening at one location? A
tragedy, but at least it followed a plausible natural pattern. Many
locations, each only experiencing one black hole? Okay, that would be even
more believable because of the randomness. But two systems—constant
bombardment? That was a directed attack. Someone wanted to hurt Tau Ceti, as
well as the Desulforudisians, and perhaps understanding their common thread
would tell them who. Who would have motive to destroy them both when the two
worlds were millions of light years apart, and had not even heard of each
other?
“Volume back up, please,” Sugar ordered. She looked back at the Supreme
Chancellor, who was still sitting there, surprisingly patient. “Someone is
attempting to hurt us both. We have a saying where I’m from. The enemy of my
enemy is my friend.”
“We have a similar saying. It goes,
the enemy of my enemy is still my enemy. I can have more than one enemy,
and do. All are enemies.”
“Well, that’s quite a mouthful but... Suit yourself.” Sugar turned her head.
“Lise, open a global channel now. I wanna talk to everyone who lives here.”
