Beams of ionizing atmo surrounded the defensive fire that lanced down from orbit and rose from between the bacteria fields and the volcanic ridges where the top levels of the Squidies’ underground nests broke the surface like hematite beads embedded in the sulfur crusted hills.

  At an altitude of ten-thousand meters over the particolor moon, the bombs sounded off to determine how many of them had survived the last phase of their journey. The absence of bomb number one and the loss of five others to enemy defensive fire was noted less than .003 seconds before the final sequence initiated, and adjustments were made in the order of detonation.

  Five-thousand meters over the surface of the 1700-kilometer-wide moon, the first gravity bomb's two-stage, trigger device fired inside the thick, belt-iron-steel, 15m-tall casing. The first fission reaction initiated the secondary, thermonuclear, hydrogen-helium fusion reaction. That firecracker was puny compared to size of the target against which it detonated, but the point of the weapon wasn't blast damage. The whole point of the thermonuclear reaction was to generate the tremendous bath of x-rays and high-energy emissions needed to power the terminal gravity pinch set at the far end of the bomb casing. Once energized and before the nuclear furnace could turn the field coils to million-degree plasma, the device produced a pulse of artificial gravity powerful enough to momentarily reduce the effective mass of the surface crust below it.

  Immediately under and around the first detonation, for a radius of over two-hundred kilometers, the crust of that moldy, alien pea cracked. The combination of induced tidal stresses and internal pressures resulted in catastrophic quakes and increased volcanic eruptions. The aliens' homeworld moon, however, was nearly 5500 kilometers around and the overall effect of one, single gravity bomb was negligible. Even if all eighty-seven of the bombs had detonated simultaneously, it still wouldn't have given the geology of the alien moon more than a slight shudder.

  The designers of this weapon knew that fact only too well, and knowing the nature of their target, they designed their bombs to allow the volatile geology of the aliens' homeworld moon to do the work for them.

  The eighty-seven gravity bombs detonated in series. While the artificial gravity pulse from the first bomb still echoed in the homeworld moon, the next bomb detonated, precisely timed to build upon the gravity field distortion generated by the first device and produce a synergistic effect. The third detonation built further on this combined wave pulse as did the fourth detonation and so on and so on, making the series of well-timed gravity pulses exponentially more powerful than a simultaneous detonation.

  The entire firing sequence of all eighty-two devices lasted less than ten seconds. At the very height of the effect, the weaponized artificial gravity pulled matter towards it with the power a miniature black hole, exerting an attraction equal to what would have been produced by a dwarf star briefly hovering only five-thousand meters over the homeworld moon.

  The gravity tore at the surface below it, lifting it, reducing the weight of the crust and its ability to keep the moon's tidally heated insides contained. Although the force of the effect decreased by the square of the distance, the effect of the weapon extended through the molten mantle and into the burning core. At the very same time the mass of the crust on one side of the aliens' homeworld moon was lifted, the weapon actually increased the upwards pressure from below.

  After the flashes in the atmo, in the seconds immediately after all devices had detonated, hairline cracks appeared over the face of the entire moon. The jagged eggshell canals multiplied and branched like jagged rivers as they widened. Gasses vented and jetted from the fissures just before the eruptions began.

  Pulverizing quakes blurred the distended, bulging surface in the pregnant moment before the insides of the homeworld moon burst out through the shattered crust in an explosion so large and so violent that much of the debris was propelled beyond escape velocity and hurled down towards the bloody gas giant.

  Dust and sulfur clouds and steam cloaked the surface, but in infrared, it was easy to see the heat from the magma. The mega-volcano that erupted under the detonations stretched across nearly 20% of the moon's face. Its magma blew into the skies and spread across the surface, rolling over the landscape like a tidal wave while the fracturing and the quakes continued everywhere. The fissures multiplied across both sides of the broken moon, and magma flowed up and out of every one. Molten rock covered the surface, and where the flooding edges of the lava fields met they left no doubt the seventy-billion Squidies living in their nests underground were gone...dead and gone, burned and buried forever.

  *****

  The alien dreadnought steamed so close that Dana could see the human skull painted on its side using only her naked eyes. So many warheads detonated over that hulking ship that it burned red as it came steaming through the last of the Privateers, cutting up one ship after the next.

  Once it broke Pont Neuf’s back and severed her spine, it came for Hardway.

  "Ms. Sellis, bring us around to face it," Cozen said. He thumbed comms to the only remaining railgun battery. Across the valley of zero-gee flames between the midships battery and the command tower, the gun crew waited on his word. They only had one more salvo to fire...the one before impact.

  Dana Sellis knew what Harry Cozen would ask for next. The NAV script was already loaded for a collision course at maximum acceleration.

  Araby and fired on the alien dreadnought’s flanks with impotent fury as it bore down on Hardway. The biggest of the alien battleship's guns stabbed from its towers and cut through the bowplate and burning forward batteries like it was splitting a sausage. Superheated plasma shot out holes in the hull as far back as the secondary bays, and molten gore sprayed out into space with it.

  "It’s going to split us down the spine!" Dana mashed at the blurring console in front of her and tried to throw the ship out of its line, but none of the maneuvering thrusters would respond.

  "Lt. Commander Sellis," Cozen had to shout over the sound of the vibrations coming up through their feet and shaking them inside their suits. "Prepare to ram the enemy on my comman-" His voice went silent as suddenly the enemy guns. The shaking stopped. The rivers of hyper-accelerated nuclei streaming from the dreadnought had dried up. They all went dark in an instant and ceased to fire.

  The few remaining ships of the Squidy fleet all ceased fire without explanation.

  The alien battleship came to a stop less than a thousand meters off Hardway’s ruined bow and hung over them like a mountain suspended on a thread. Araby and two other ships continued to fire salvos for a few seconds, but then, their guns went quiet, too.

  "Mr. Cozen?" Ghostly lines still glowed across Dana’s vision where the weapons fire had seared her retinas. Comms was full of confusion then. She heard them saying ‘homeworld moon’ in the background only here and there at first, but in seconds, the aliens' moon was the subject of every transmission.

  Far off, against the bloody gas giant, the homeworld moon glowed blazing hot on infrared. The moldy pea had burst its molten insides out. The magma now erupted from a volcano so large that the wound in the crust itself was over 500-kilometers-wide. What spilled out couldn't be contained, and molten rock spread like a tidal wave. It shot out of fractures all over that little moon and flowed across its surface, burning away the blue-green lowlands and acid yellow hills alike. It showed no signs of stopping.

  Seventy billion Squidies were burning on the aliens' homeworld moon.

  "Thank you, Mr. Devlin," Cozen said. "Better late than never."

  Only a handful of those cheering over the comms channels knew of the Boomslang’s mission and exactly how the destruction of the enemy's home had been accomplished, but they knew 70 billion Squidies were dead or dying. They could see that much. The cheering continued, even with the aliens' dreadnought still looming over them.

  "Why isn't it firing at us? Why isn't it finishing us off and taking vengeance?"

  Cozen said, "It's under orders not to, Ms. Sellis. Back us off from it slowly, if you please."

  "I don't understand," Biko said as he peered at the alien battleship out the hole in the front of the bridge. It held its fire when it could easily finish them off. "We just killed 95% of their population and made their homeworld moon uninhabitable. Why the hell would they spare us?"

  "As I said, they're under orders."

  She said, "Orders from whom?"

  Harry Cozen clapped his hands together silently in the vacuum and rubbed his palms together. "I'm glad to hear you're interested, Ms. Sellis because with any luck, in very short order, we'll get to meet them."

  *****

  Ram was glad the homeworld moon no longer filled the cockpit canopy and he no longer had to look at what they’d done. "Keep the hull energized. Keep us stealthed. Make for Hardway."

  "Got it," Medoc was all smiles. As far as he was concerned, this was how it was supposed to go. Mission accomplished. The war was as good as over. The Squidies of the homeworld moon were burning away in lava floods and the remains of the alien fleet appeared to be surrendering or at least holding their fire.

  "I’m sorry, Mr. Devlin." It was Tig Meester, the cherry.

  Ram turned to look at him in the hatchway. The redsuit’s eyes looked like he’d been punched in each of them. They glanced down to the x-ray laser still in Ram’s hand, and he holstered his sidearm. "Parker," Tig said. "She helped me isolate a single bomb from the main firing circuit, but…but then, she hit the other circuit and dropped all the bombs.… All but one. I couldn’t stop her, Mr. Devlin. She... she didn't say why. She just did it."

  "Where is Parker?"

  The cherry just shook his head. "She jumped, Mr. Devlin. She jumped out of the bay. Over the target."

  Ram nodded at Tig like he understood even if he didn't. "The Chief?"

  "The Chief’s body is secure."

  "What about my crew?" Medoc said.

  "They’re busted up some. Fractures. They’ll live. But they're tranq'd. I can't revive them."

  Ram said, "You use the darts?" The cherry nodded. "The crewmen will come round in about twelve hours. Sit down. Over there." He pointed Tig to a seat behind the copilot. He didn’t know what else to tell him.

  "Is it over?" the cherry asked. "Is it all over?"

  "Hell, yeah, it’s over!" Medoc said. "We won! They’re dead!"

  "We won!" Max shouted it, but the cherry didn’t even smile. He just got up and turned to go. "I’m riding with the Chief," he said.

  "Tig, stay here."

  "What the?" Medoc’s surprise almost made his voice crack. "New contact?!"

  "Dead ahead, range 10,000 Ks!"

  "Right in our path? What did it just manifest itself out of nowhere? Where did it come from?"

  "I don’t know. That was empty space a second ago. It just appeared! I’m trying to turn!"

  The NAV comp threw a projection of it up between the pilots. It was impossibly broad, at least 100 kilometers in diameter and dark-hulled. The surface looked more like a smooth asteroid or a rounded, pygmy moon than any space-going vessel Ram had ever imagined.

  "Break to starboard, fifteen degrees," Medoc said. For the briefest moment, it seemed to be in two places at once...where it had been and a new position smack dab in front of them. Then, there was only one object in one place, but it filled the canopy. "It cut us off. It can see through our stealth..."

  Ram said, "Dead stop. We’re not going around this thing."

  "119 kilometers in diameter," the pilot read from his console. "More or less spherical. Irregular surface. Can't read the temperature. It's like it fluctuates too wildly."

  "What the hell kind of ship is that?"

  "I don’t see any engines or any bays," Ram said. "No gun ports." The surface seemed free of anything but a layer of what appeared to be accreted dust and small rocks that had glomed onto it.

  It turned blue for a fraction of a second and once again appeared to be in two places at once. One location was some 10,000Ks out, where it had been and the other was barely 10Ks off the bow of the ship.

  Before Medoc finished the first syllable of, "It’s coming right at us!" the ship was upon them and parked at dead stop so close that Ram’s knot puckered looking at the spot where they would have impacted just a ten-thousandth of a second later had it kept coming.

  "It crossed over ten-thousand kilometers in .02 seconds," Max said. "That’s faster than light, in case anyone is wondering."

  "Power down the hull," Ram said. "We're not getting away."

  Line of sight between Hardway and Boomslang had been interrupted by the moon-sized craft in front of them. The signal carrying Harry Cozen’s voice had to pass through comms relays and came to Ram's helmet pockmarked with static. "Hardway to Boomslang,"

  "Mr. Cozen…"

  "Well done, Mr. Devlin. Pass my congratulations to the Boomslang’s crew and hold your position. Don’t even twitch, Mr. Devlin. Hold your position in front of the object and do nothing. Do you understand me? Do nothing at all until I arrive."

  More than victory even, there was excitement in Harry Cozen's voice, like this suddenly manifested ship was somehow the spoils of this war. There was an aggressiveness in his voice as well, one that said Cozen didn’t want Ram or anyone else looting these spoils before him.

  Ram peered out the canopy at the moon-sized vessel. Whatever that is, Ram thought, this is what Cozen’s been working for all along.

  "AMTS 3rd Class Tig Meester," Ram said. "Get down to the ordnance bay. I’ve got a job I need done and only a redsuit can do it."

  Chapter Twenty

  Over the next hour, the surface of the Squidies' moon glowed behind Boomslang while she held station ten kilometers off the surface of the mysterious vessel in their path. The seemingly endless expanse of that uncanny thing in front of them remained near vertical in the canopy as if they were plummeting down to the surface of an unlikely little world and about to smash right into it.

  "That ship has broken at least two laws of known physics since it arrived," Ram said. "And if your console is correct, it has no measurable mass."

  "I don't like it," Max said. "We offed an entire species just before that thing showed up. That can't be a coincidence. It's here to punish us. I just know it."

  "If that thing wanted us dead, then we'd already be dead," said Medoc. "Mr. Cozen will know what to do when he gets here."

  Harry Cozen arrived in a Hardway longboat flown by Asa Biko. Ram saw him in the cockpit with Dana as he pulled the longboat alongside Boomslang close enough for Ram to read the worry in his eyes.

  "The longboat is transmitting something," Medoc said. He jabbed at the console and they heard it, like a thousand rising and falling whistling and buzzing sounds like flies in their ears. "That’s Squidy. He’s transmitting in Squidy."

  "No," Ram said. "It’s different. Listen." It was different. What happened next wasn’t proof of that, but Medoc took it that way.

  "Guess you’re right." A three-hundred-meter, circular section of the dusty surface in front of them shifted and appeared to blur briefly from the dust thrown off it. "They're opening up."

  The entire panel withdrew. That outer hull was thin enough that as soon as the massive hatch had withdrawn only a few meters, it began to slide to the side. At first, all they could see of the inside was an inky crescent. It waxed like a fast-growing, moon-shaped void as the massive hatch withdrew until finally, a three-hundred-meter, circular void hovered in front of them like a pupil. "According to the arrays, there's literally nothing in there. Boomslang can't sense anything at all beyond that threshold."

  "Cozen’s going in," Ram said. The longboat was making for the inky blackness. "Follow him." He half expected to have to draw his sidearm again, but Medoc and Max didn’t hesitate. They took the Boomslang in close on Cozen’s heels.

  "He’ll cross the threshold in…5...4...3..." The longboat dove into the impenetrable blackness like a crane diving into a lake. The darkness swallowed the longboat without so much as a ripple, and once Boomslang’s cockpit dipped into that void, the darkness became a tangible thing that ate all light around him inside the ship's cockpit and he couldn’t see anything at all. He couldn't tell if his own eyes were open or closed and his heart forgot to beat until, half-a-second later, Boomslang’s pointed nose emerged into bright and blinding light, as if they were flying at a small sun.

  The 119-kilometer sphere was mostly hollow, lined with the velvet blackness they'd seen as they entered. At its center was what appeared to be a ball of gas in a sustained fusion reaction like a star, but only a few kilometers across, not nearly large enough to initiate fusion under the pressure of its own, natural gravity.

  Multiple, free-orbiting and concentric rings had been constructed around the pygmy star five-kilometers-thick. They rotated around it in their own planes, but as the two, comparatively tiny, ships entered, the great rings began to shift and rotate around the center to form a single ecliptic plane.

  The nine outermost rings lifted themselves higher than the others as Cozen flew over the first of them. "Where is he going?"

  "There." Medoc pointed to the third ring, now rising higher than the other nine to float alone.

  "What is that?" Asa Biko looked to be circling a spot near a structure on the center-facing side of the third ring. It was shaped like a step pyramid some 450 meters at its base and it appeared to be growing out of the dull, gold surface of the ring itself.

  The longboat began to set down. "Land next to them," Ram said. "And you two, put your helmets on. We’re going outside. You'll stay with the ship, but after we're gone, I want you to move your unconscious crewmen to the longboat. Just in case."

  Medoc nodded at that. "Very good, Mr. Devlin."

  He landed between the longboat and the step pyramid so Harry Cozen had to walk past them. Once the airlock lowered itself from the bottom of the hull and rotated open, Cozen was only a few meters away with Asa Biko and Dana Sellis walking after him in the blinding light.