Some Worlds Fight Back — Beyond the Frontier

The volcanic planet first appeared as a dark sphere with veins of orange light.

As the Terran flight descended toward the enemy installation, the veins became rivers of lava winding between black ridges. Ash lay in pale bands across the upper atmosphere. At the horizon rose a volcano so broad that its summit seemed to interrupt the curvature of the world. The enemy’s structures stood along the route toward its crater.

“Why would anyone build here?” Lantern Lead asked.

Her wingmate watched an artillery emplacement turn toward them.

“Maybe they were here before it became dangerous.”

The first molten projectile struck his shield before he finished speaking. Burn alarms lit his display. He shook the damaged craft clear while Lantern Lead destroyed the artillery vessel responsible. Another shell arced across the flight path and burst against the rocks below.

Seen from the ground, a giant alien artillery cannon on a volcanic ridge fires into a sky of smoke and flame, with falls of lava below and two Terran interceptors overhead.

Their interceptors had been built for empty space. Here, every burst of light reflected from the ground. Every withdrawal required them to choose between climbing toward enemy guns and descending into a landscape that looked as though it was trying to escape itself.

The Thaevrek craft kept coming, dark hulls moving over their own installations with practiced certainty. They knew the approach corridors. They knew where the thermal currents bent. They knew where a formation would have to break apart to pass a ridge.

For the first time in the campaign, Lantern Lead had the uneasy sensation that the enemy did not need to chase them because it had nowhere to go.

The squadron reached the crater at the end of a long channel of lava. A broad saucer rose above the rim, heat shimmering around its armored edge. Four glowing generators fed a geothermal weapon mounted beneath the hull.

“Primary installation defender,” Control said. “Engage.”

The saucer fired a beam that turned the smoke white. Lantern Lead rolled beneath it, brought her ordinary guns onto the exposed generators, and watched them fail one by one. The saucer’s field flickered. She held her line long enough for her VECTOR charge to recover, then drove a lance into the opening.

A broad alien saucer with four glowing domes rises over a lava-filled landscape and fires red beams as white Terran interceptors attack it.

The great disk staggered. A second strike split its lower hull, and it dropped toward the crater in sections.

“Target destroyed,” Control reported.

On the squadron channel, somebody laughed. Not because the battle had been easy, but because everyone needed one moment in which survival might mean it was over.

The flight turned away from the mountain.

Then the crater began to move.

At Terran Reach, the public broadcast had already prepared the victory graphic. Its headline appeared on the central defense feed while Juno was helping Chief Okafor test the replacement missile racks.

VOLCANIC COMMAND PLATFORM DESTROYED.

A second line began to scroll: ENEMY RESISTANCE COLLAPSING.

Juno looked at the time stamp. It was several minutes behind the raw telemetry she could see on the Battery Three maintenance channel.

“That’s strange,” she said.

Okafor moved beside her. The latest signal showed an eruption at the crater. A larger contact was rising from below the destroyed saucer, its shape obscured by ash and heat.

The victory headline remained on the public feed.

“Maybe the announcement’s early,” Okafor said.

“Maybe they wrote it before the battle.”

Okafor said nothing. She had learned to recognize a sentence Juno did not want answered.

The second saucer rose through the volcano’s smoke like a piece of the mountain that had decided to fly.

It was broader and more heavily armored than the first, with launch structures placed around its rim. Beneath it, the crater glowed brighter. Defense drones poured from openings in the hull and spread into a dense rotating screen. There were too many for the pilots to count individually. Their firing paths crossed one another until the sky seemed filled with moving sparks.

A colossal alien saucer rises through volcanic smoke, a swarm of small drones spreading across the sky around it, while white Terran interceptors fly toward it over the lava.

“New capital contact,” Control said. “Mother Saucer designation confirmed.”

Lantern Lead tried to reach its central body. Drones intercepted every approach. Her emergency pulse rolled through the swarm without destroying a single drone. A burst of molten fire struck her weakened shield, and several honeycomb cells went black.

“Lead, you’re taking damage,” her wingmate said.

“I can see it.”

“No, you can’t see the left quarter. Your camera’s gone.”

She pulled away, letting him draw the drones toward the crater’s far rim. The Mother Saucer continued releasing replacements. It had protected the smaller defender until the first one was destroyed; now it was protecting itself with a fleet of machines built to be lost.

Lantern Lead found a gap near one of the launch structures. Her primary guns hammered it until the outer plate peeled away. A second launch bay exploded. The drone screen began to thin, not because the drones were being killed faster, but because fewer were arriving.

Her VECTOR charge filled.

She aligned with the exposed machinery and fired. Wingtip light converged into the familiar sphere. The cyan lance cut through a line of drones and struck the saucer beyond them. The impact shook its armored ring. Still it held.

She fought for another charge, shattering drones with the primary guns and staying alive by the width of ruined shield cells. Each recovered burst brought the Mother Saucer closer to failing. When the final lance crossed the crater, it broke the central core and sent the great disk turning downward into the smoke.

The eruption that followed hid everything beneath it.

There was a long silence on the squadron channel.

“Mother Saucer destroyed,” Control said at last.

No one laughed this time.

A young pilot in a gray flight suit sits at a glowing tactical table, hand to her mouth, as an officer holds out a display; through the window behind her a volcano erupts beneath dark alien ships.

In the review chamber on Terran Reach, Renn placed two reports beside one another. The first announced that the volcanic installation had been secured. The second detailed the emergence and destruction of an even larger defender, together with a loss of Terran ships the first report had omitted.

“Did the first report go public?” Park asked.

“Yes.”

“Will they correct it?”

“They issued another victory statement.”

He sat across from her. “Two victories for one battle.”

“Two versions of what happened.”

Park looked at the flight casualty list. “The people at home need something to believe in.”

“I know.”

“And you think the reports take that away.”

“I think they ask people to believe something that isn’t true.”

Renn signed the corrected chronology and attached the raw signals. For the first time she copied Serrin directly instead of routing everything through oversight.

Serrin called within the hour.

“The installation was inside the crater?” she asked.

“The larger one was.”

“Was there anything in the readings before it emerged?”

“Thermal activity. Structural movement. We thought it was the volcano.”

“Maybe it was. Maybe they built something that uses the heat.”

“You sound impressed.”

“I am. They make machines for places we would call uninhabitable.” Serrin paused. “I wonder whether they would say the same about us.”

Renn looked at the two victory reports and the names between them.

“They’d have evidence,” she said.