Episode 14: The Bait / The Hunt

Pilgrim Three is drifting toward the enemy's hunting ground with four thousand people aboard. Tonight the weather report gets to walk both paths at once. It will cost Juno. Chapters 28 and 29 of The Battle of Mars.

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Pathfinders of the Dark Book one The Battle of Mars Episode fourteen Chapter twenty-eight The Bait The test came to them, the way these things do, in the form of a threat they could not refuse. A swarm had detached from the main Verithra advance and gone hunting along the trailing edge of the flotilla, the way a predator works the back of a herd, and it had fixed on a single ship, a battered colony hauler running at the very rear because its drive was failing and it could not keep pace. The ship was called Pilgrim Three, and it carried four thousand refugees. And Jax knew the name long before Dovich finished saying it, because for two years a child aboard that ship had been sending crayon drawings of the vigilant guardian to her mother's navigation console, Maya, eight years old, the artist of the gray warship with too many guns, of the ship that keeps Mama safe, renewed with every mail run. The letters pressed so hard the crayons snapped. He didn't tell anyone why his face changed. He didn't need a reason beyond the four thousand. But it lived in him through everything that followed, the small private certainty that somewhere on that failing ship was a girl, whose mother he had watched die because the path that saved the ship and the path that reached the navigation console had not been the same path. He had not been able to walk both then. He thought this time that he might. Dovich laid it out in the strategy room. We cannot outrun it to protect that ship, and we cannot leave four thousand people to it. So we stop running and we fight it. Here, on ground we choose, and we make it the test. We bait the swarm onto a position it cannot resist. We bring the disruptor ships and the three of you, and we break it in the open where the whole fleet is watching. She looked around the room. If it works, we stop being prey. If it does not, we lose three of the last five pathfinders and a screen of ships, and we are exactly where we were, only worse. She did not soften it. Jax respected her for that. I am told the price is steep and the odds are real. I'm also told that the alternative is to keep running until there is no more dark to run through. I have made my decision. Make it work. They staged it carefully. A handful of warships would play wounded, falling back toward Pilgrim three, as if to make a last stand, bait the swarm believed because it was the obvious thing, the thing the consensus would predict. Strung through that screen, hidden in its formation, were the disruptor ships and the three pathfinders. When the swarm committed, spread wide as it had learned to spread, the disruptors would cut every cluster at once, and the three of them would break every cluster at once, and a thing that had never been done would either be done or would kill them. The night before, Jax found Alara in the disruptor bay, running her instruments one more time, and he stood with her awhile in the hum of the machines she had built out of a dead man's research and her own grief. Rees' daughter is on that ship, he said finally. He had not told anyone. He told her. Maya. The lieutenant who died on the Guardian, the one I could not reach. Her little girl spent two years taping drawings of our ship to her mother's console. The ship that keeps Mama safe, in Crayon, with more guns every month the war got worse. I stood at that console the night before Mars and promised her mother I would be wrong about nothing. He looked at the disruptors, at the thing they had made together. I saw Reyes go, and I could not reach her, because reaching her and saving the ship were two different paths. I have spent my whole life being able to see the second path, and not walk it. Tonight, I would like, for once, to walk both. Ilara was quiet a moment. Then she put her hand on the instrument between them. The way you touch a thing you have poured yourself into. Then, we built this so you could, she said. That is the whole point of it, Jax. You alone can only walk one path. You and me, you and this. We widen the road. That is what the pairing is. It is the difference between a man who can only choose and a man who can choose and still get to keep the thing he could not save. She did not look away from him. Walk both. I will hold the road open. Go and walk both. Chapter twenty nine The Hunt The Swarm took the bait an hour after the system's distant sun cleared the bulk of the nearest habitat ring, and from the first instant Jax felt how much it had learned. It came in spread, as they had known it would. Not one body but seven smaller fields held apart, flowing toward the wounded screen and the failing hauler beyond with the seamless certainty of a thing that had already seen how this ended. It was reading the obvious. It was reading the screen as crippled and the kill as sure, and it was right, by every law the consensus knew, because no sane defender does the thing the defenders were about to do. Seven clusters, Wrenz said over the Pathfinder channel, calm as still water. I have the three, two port. Juno, the two center, Jack's, the two starboard, and the coordinating element riding behind the starboard pair. That one is yours because you go deepest, break the coordinator and the two clusters with it, lose their seam. A pause. On the Admiral's mark. Disruptors first, then us, all together, the half second after the field drops. Hold nothing back and do not reach past your own clusters. We each take what we can reach and no more. Understood? Understood, Jack said. He found the starboard pair in the branching, found the coordinating element behind them, a denser knot in the weave, the place the two clusters were thinking from. He felt Juno's nervous brightness and Wren's deep stillness alongside him on the channel. Three minds about to do a thing no three minds had done. And under it all he felt the failing hauler at the back of the formation, with four thousand people in it, and a child, whose mother he had watched die. All ships, Dovich's voice, flat and final. Mark. The disruptor ships fired, all of them, at every cluster at once, and across the whole spread of the swarm the weave came apart. And the three of them went down together. Jax took his pair and his coordinator, and he went to the bottom the way Sable had taught him. The white blade already in his skull, and in the gap the disruptors had opened, he found the thread the starboard clusters had thrown away, the absurd one, the screen that was supposed to be crippled, suddenly turning and biting, and he chose it and made it true. He felt Wren do the same to port, deep and sure. He felt Juno take the center, fierce and fast, and he felt the field snap back, all seven clusters reasserting at once, reaching for their predictions, the predictions in which the screen was wounded and the kill was sure, and finding instead seven futures that were all at the same instant, false. The whole swarm broke. Not one cluster, all of it. Seven fields guessing wrong in the same half second, the seamless thing folding in on itself across a hundred kilometers of dark, units swinging toward kills that were not there, fire crossing fire, the beautiful single motion tangling and recoiling, and Jax felt, through the lens, the precise instant the thousand minded thing understood that it was wrong everywhere at once and did not know how, because it had never in its existence been wrong everywhere at once. Then it ran. The whole swarm, in open route, fleeing the wounded screen that had stood up and bared its teeth. And across the meridian and every ship in the fleet, the crews who had run from these things for three years watched a Verythra swarm break and flee on purpose, by design, the first deliberate victory of the war. The screen wheeled and put itself between the routing swarm and pilgrim three, and the failing hauler with its four thousand limped on toward the heart of the flotilla, untouched. And somewhere in it, a girl named Maya, whom Jax knew only from crayon drawings taped to a navigation console, went on living, and it was not the same as saving her mother. But it was the path he had not been able to walk on the Guardian, and tonight, paired, he had walked it. The ship that keeps Mama safe had not kept her mama safe. He had kept her daughter safe instead, and he thought Reyes would have called that being wrong about nothing in the only way that finally counted. It cost Juno. Jax felt it happen on the channel even as the swarm broke. The center clusters had a second coordinator the plan had not accounted for, a denser knot than the spread had shown, and Juno, young, eager, not yet acquainted with the bill, reached for it. Reached past the center clusters, past what he could safely hold, down after the thing that would make the break complete, because he could see it, and he could not let it go. The part where you put your whole self in front of the thing going wrong. Jax felt him go deep, and deeper, the way Beck had gone deep in a chair on a nameless moon, down past the place a human mind can still find its way back. He shouted Juno's name on the channel. Wren shouted it. It did not matter. Juno took the second coordinator and broke it and made the route total and did not come back up. And on the disruptor ship where his body sat in its cradle, the medics were already moving and already too late. The swarm fled. The fleet cheered most of it, the crews who could not feel what had just happened on the Pathfinder channel. And in the wardroom set a little apart, Wren sat with her ruined eyes closed and her tremoring hands flat on the table. And Jax sat across from her, blood drying on his lip. And neither of them said anything for a long time. Because there were three of them that morning, and now there were two. And the doctrine had worked exactly as designed, and the design spent the rarest thing humanity had. Episode 15 arrives next week, the final episode of Book One.