B. Larson - Conquest

The new enemy ships finally came into sight. There was a large wing of them moving after the Macro Cruisers. They looked vaguely like the old NASA shuttlecrafts to me, but a bit larger. They had stubby wings and a pointed snout. They were clearly designed for atmospheric travel as well as voyaging in space.

I squinted at the vessels. The lines were unmistakable.

“That’s a Worm ship!” I shouted. I whooped for joy, and the crew looked at me as if I were mad. “Show me more, what are they doing?”

Data poured in and the reports were good. All good. The Worms had nearly two hundred vessels. They were all small, but they were pursuing the fleeing Macro cruisers and firing on them. I shook my head in amazement. They’d been busy. I had to admit, of all the people’s I’d met in space so far, these creatures impressed me the most. They’d never even considered surrender or peace agreements. They simply fought the Macros and they’d died in their millions, but the moment they’d been given a breather they were back at it, putting up an offensive fleet rather than focusing purely on defense and rebuilding their lost cities. If anything, they were even tougher than we were.

Fortunately, I had had the foresight to transfer translation neural patterns from Marvin for all known species into every brainbox in the fleet. Our ships could talk to these aliens. But I knew from experience such translations were not that simple. The symbolic pictographs of the Worms and the idiomatic poetry of the Centaurs were challenging mediums, even after you had established a means of communication.

The Worms were particularly challenging to communicate with. They used images to communicate remotely and sculptures to communicate in person. They were tactile, rather than audio or optical in their conversations. When using radio communications, they’d fortunately developed a simplified set of pictographic symbols to express ideas. They weren’t words, exactly, but rather images that conveyed concepts. When combined together, they communicated meaning. It was rather like having a pen pal who only understood Egyptian hieroglyphs.

“Barbarossa,” I said, addressing the ship directly. “I need to open up a channel to the Worm ships.”

“Clarification required: Worm ship. Please define.”

“Scan the nearby vessels. Many of the smaller ships are not Star Force ships, nor do they meet the definition known as Macro cruisers. These ships are known to us as Worm ships.”

“Definition complete. Associations established.”

“Good,” I said pausing for a moment to think. “We need to transmit something to them. Access your data on translations of English into Worm pictographs.”

“A one-to-one translation of human speech into Worm pictographs is not possible. It is suggested-”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, interrupting in annoyance. “Believe me, I know all about it. I need the pictograph for hunting together-some kind of fat, sliced-grub thing. Send that along with the images for machine and destruction.”

Captain Miklos looked at me with a bloodless face. We were in the domain of new aliens, and I sensed this crew felt out of their depth. Well, that was just too bad. You had to pick things up quickly in space-either that, or you died.

“Symbol group selected,” Barbarossa said. “Transmitting.”

“Let me know when you get a response from them.”

There were perhaps thirty long seconds to wait. During that time, much of my fleet had flown through the ring after me. They came in two or three abreast and advanced quickly after us. We were not yet in firing range. I squirmed in my chair, and my armor squinked as I did so, the cringe-worthy sound of metal rasping against metal.

“Incoming repeating message from Worm ships: grub, machine, destruction.”

“Good,” I said in relief. “Accelerate to full speed, helmsman. Relay to the fleet, we are going to chase down those Macros and engage them. No one is to fire upon a Worm ship without authorization. Maybe with luck, we can catch some or all of the Macros before they reach the far side of this system.”

I wanted to get into the fight, but it was going to take some time. We’d slowed down before plunging through the ring, and that delay had cost us a lot of momentum. Even with our faster ships, we’d have to accelerate hard for days to catch up and join the running battle.

Captain Miklos leaned toward me and eyed my screen. “What the heck do those symbols mean, Colonel?”

“The grub means hunting, a team interaction. The machine symbol clearly refers to the Macros. Destruction indicates we are going to destroy the machines. The Worms communicate differently than we do. Did you attend the officer’s briefing on alien cultures?”

“Yes, of course, sir,” Miklos said, leaning back into his own chair. “But it isn’t every day you meet a new alien species.”

“Well, get used to it,” I told him.

We pursued, watching the two groups of aliens fight it out ahead of us. We were all heading toward the next ring, which linked the Alpha Centauri system to Aldebaran system, the home system of the Worms. Frequently, the Worms made passes at the Macros, harassing and skirmishing with the larger ships. I grinned broadly. Having allies made the universe a brighter place.

It took time for our sensors to figure out everything we were looking at in a new system after crossing through a ring. The distances were immense, and some of the ships presented little or no radar signature. They were only visible when they fired weapons and could thus be counted optically by our sensors and the brainboxes connected to them. After an hour, we had hard numbers. The Worms had started with two hundred and seven ships when we’d entered the system. The Macros had started out with forty-one cruisers. At this point, the Macros were down to thirty-four ships, while the Worms had a hundred and seventy-nine ships left.

Calculating the loss ratios, I realized the Worms were only barely on the winning side thus far. The Macro cannons were taking their toll each time the Worms drove in close to hit them in a sweeping pass. On two occasions as we watched, the Macros fired two barrages of eight missiles. In each case, a few Worm ships were caught and destroyed by the missiles. The Macros were clearly holding back their firepower, and the enemy cruisers only fired their last weapons when they were too badly damaged to keep up with the rest of the pack.

The tactics of the Worms were effective and impressive. They would make a strafing pass, firing at a particular cruiser at the rear of the formation. Targeting the engines, they sought to damage and slow the vessel. When a doomed cruiser lagged behind the protective cover of its fellow it fired its last salvo at its tormentors. Immediately afterward, the cruiser would be set upon by the Worm ships. Like a cloud of swarming piranha, the Worm ships tore the straggler apart.

The Worm weapons were unlike anything I’d ever seen. They appeared to be particle-beam systems. Gushes of hard radiation flared lavender as we watched from afar. The guns seemed effective, but the beams moved at less than the speed of light and didn’t have anywhere near the range that our lasers had. Still, after witnessing their power, I was impressed. If a Worm ship got in close to one of our laser vessels, I had no doubt their ship would win the duel. That was the trick, though-they had to get in close. We calculated their effective range at about twenty percent of the distance our own weapons could reach.

“Just like back home on their homeworld,” I remarked to Captain Miklos. “The Worms like short-ranged, hard-hitting weapons. If we showed them a sawed-off shotgun, I bet they’d heartily approve of the design.”

Captain Miklos nodded, staring intently at the screens. “The Worms are taking serious losses. Are they always this-vicious?”