The other planet slipped on the screen. It was a desert world devoid of atmosphere, its surface covered in a chaotic mix of volcanoes and huge canyons. Around the mountains, the bright-yellow land bordered pitch-black areas dotted here and there by small, red spots.
The image expanded a bit more, and he noticed a thin ring of asteroids of all sizes circling the planet—the largest ones being dozens of miles across. The worlds may have been amazing, but the asteroids left him out of breath: their silvery-gray color could only mean they were made of metal! All of them! Antyrans had nothing even remotely close to this. Most of their ore came from the Blue Crevice, a rift in the thick crust of Antyra III where the mining town of Ropolis was built. Surely the planets and the asteroid field had to be invaluable for any civilization that possessed them!
The commander gave an order, and the resolution increased again, accompanied by a low hum. The image became distorted at the edges, but it quickly stabilized, the asteroid field slowly unfolding in front of their eyes. And then they saw it: a space battle was in full swing!
The gods burst into cries of horror.
All the barriers of communication broke at once, the bracelet bearer’s maddening thoughts flowing through his kyi like torrents of fire. Gill managed to understand most of them easily, whereas others eluded him altogether.
But… how’s that possible? the horrified god asked himself. We left the enemy around Sigia! What’s their fleet doing here?
Sigia. The name brought with it the kind of warmth meant for the cradle of their civilization. Gill quickly found the information in their shared memory: the aliens were called Sigians!
The asteroid field was under attack. Long flames coiled around an asteroid, followed by fountains of sparks. Shortly after, huge fireballs vaporized parts of its body or broke it in millions of pieces. In the absence of an atmosphere, the nuclear blasts lasted only for a moment, barely visible. Each explosion was accompanied by the angry exclamations of the Sigians around him.
At first, he didn’t know what was attacking the asteroids. It took him a while to spot the gray flashes. The ships moved so fast that they never stayed in one place for more than a heartbeat before disappearing into the night. They seemed to pull the space at their leisure, going instantly anyplace around; all he saw were long strips of color stabilizing into ships, only to vanish the next instant and become visible elsewhere. Their movement wasn’t chaotic, as it may have seemed; it had a precise logic: the ships always stabilized close to the asteroids, attacked them with nuclear charges, and then jumped away before getting fried by the lasers of the mining bases.
Even though the chances of inflicting some punishment on their speedy enemies appeared ridiculously low, the asteroid gunners were fighting back with astounding precision. They always hit the same ships in the same spots as they did before. They chased the bombs, too, and most of them exploded too far away to cause any damage. Unfortunately, they couldn’t stop all of them. After a full hit, the asteroid defenses became silent. Other bombs closely followed, digging into the rock before smashing the asteroid into pebbles or chopping off parts of it.
Just when he thought that no Sigian ships were fighting the swarm, one of the color arrows stabilized—a golden vessel damaged more than it could bear. It had a much broader outline than the attackers, and its fuselage was horribly pierced, smoke and gas leaking out of the holes. The Sigians attempted to steer clear of the battle, even though they had no hope of escape. Dozens of gray ships exited from the swarm, stabilizing around its flanks like a pack of guvals ready to tear their prey into bits. They all started to hit the wounded ship at the same time, firing at the engines with everything they had. One by one, the engines exploded, leaving the hopeless derelict to float adrift.
The grays began to frantically dismantle it. Whenever they punched the armor, a decompression shock burst debris into the void. Several rescue modules detached from its belly. At least some Sigians were trying to keep fighting, steering toward the mining bases. The enemies didn’t bother to chase them, knowing all too well that the defenses of the asteroids would soon be silenced, too.
The wreck wobbled from all its seams when a series of blasts began to propagate inside. With the enemies still firing, a huge explosion obliterated the vessel, throwing millions of fragments everywhere. The grays didn’t appear affected by the rain of metal. The splinters that reached the ships were deflected by some kind of energy shield—a bluish shock wave appeared in front of them, and the shards accelerated along the invisible force field, followed by trails of fire.
The bracelet bearer finally understood what was happening, and the reality turned out to be even darker than his worst nightmares. When the enemies stabilized behind the Sigian ship, he realized he had never seen them before. The ships were of a new class—built for speed and power—with slick fuselages and bigger lasers than the older models. They had segments of different diameters welded together and laser turrets mounted at the joints. The four main rear engines were complemented by several silvery spheres with bluish iridescences at the front—the distortion front engines. Clearly the fleet couldn’t be the one orbiting Sigia, but a brand-new army that seemingly appeared from nowhere!
That the grays had two fleets of such power crushed any hopes the gods had of winning the uneven war. Their enemies had more ships than the Sigians were aware of, much more than they could ever dream of defeating. How did they fool them like that? No manufacture of this scale could be hidden from the spy drones—factories, mines, or cargo convoys. Alas, it was of little interest how they built them. They had the ships, and this spelled the end of the Sigians.
However, instead of breaking their will to fight, the impending doom strengthened them. With extraordinary speed, the Sigians accepted their fate, and just as quickly, they lost the fear of death.
Soon, it became clear that other Sigian ships were inside the twister, fighting against an enemy a hundred times stronger. From time to time, huge fireworks, laser beams, and even nuclear blasts flashed into the chaos. One by one, the golden ships stopped jumping and shared the fate of the first vessel, being torn apart by lasers. But the enemies didn’t destroy them alclass="underline" after disabling two smaller fighters, a swarm of pods boarded them. Neural probes! the sinister thought flashed in his memory. The prisoners would share a fate more dreadful than death.
The battle was drawing to an end, as the asteroids had quit fighting. About half of the silvery ships, shining in the light of the star like the mercury scales of an aquatic monster, stabilized around them and pounded the surviving structures with impunity. The other half departed the planet, drifting toward the hydrocarbon world.
The despair of the Sigians became unbearable.
“Our cities!” they wailed.
Another surreal image came to life. The Sigians had built their cities on platforms suspended twenty miles from the planet’s surface, right above the hydrocarbon lakes. The structures were anchored on three solid pillars curved on the inside, thick pipes coiling all the way down to the black waves. Hundreds of shiny domes crowded the platforms of the sky cities, surrounded by two-mile-high skyscrapers. At least ten such colossal cities—with their buildings colored in bright red, violet, or scarlet—streamed on the ship’s display.
The gray ships slowly approached them through the smog clouds. Suddenly, from all the buildings, hundreds of thousands of vehicles darted at the same time toward the skies, in a desperate attempt to break away. The small ships of the city dwellers came out of the fog, strewing the orbit with bright streaks. The grays immediately opened fire, but the sheer number of the refugees made their losses truly insignificant.