The second system, Leviathan, despite its impressive name, had been a Sirius B-type white dwarf with only a dozen or so Ouster asteroids huddled close to its pale fire. Here there were none of the obvious military targets that de Soya had attacked so willingly in the Belphegor System: the asteroids were undefended, probably birthing rocks and hollowed-out pressurized environments for Ousters who had not chosen to adapt to vacuum and hard radiation. Task Force GIDEON swept them with deathbeams and passed on.
The third system, Beelzebub, was an Alpha Centauri C-like red dwarf, devoid of worlds or colonies, with only a single Ouster military base swinging in the darkness some thirty AU’s out and fifty-seven Swarm ships caught in the act of refueling or refitting. Thirty-nine of these warships, ranging in size and armament from tiny ramscouts to an Orion-class attack carrier, were fit to fight and flung themselves at Task Force GIDEON. The battle lasted two minutes and eighteen seconds. All fifty-seven Ouster ships and the base complex were turned to gas molecules or lifeless sarcophagi. No archangels were damaged in the exchange. The task force moved on.
The fourth system, Satan, held no ships, only breeding colonies scattered as far out as the Oört cloud. GIDEON spent eleven days in this system, putting Lucifer’s angels to the torch.
The fifth system, Asmodeus, centered by a pleasant little K-type orange dwarf not unlike Epsilon Eridani, sent waves of in-system torchships to the defense of its populated asteroid belt. The waves were burned and blasted away with an economy born of practice. The Gabriel reported eighty-two inhabited rocks in the belt, harboring a population estimated at a million and a half adapted and unadapted Ousters.
Eighty-one of the asteroids were destroyed or deathbeamed from a great distance. Then Admiral Aldikacti ordered prisoners taken. Task Force GIDEON decelerated in a long, four-day ellipse that brought them back to the belt and its sole remaining inhabited rock—a potato-shaped asteroid less than four klicks long and a klick across at its widest, cratered point. Doppler radar showed that it was orbiting and tumbling in random patterns understood only by the gods of chaos, but that it was turning on its axis in a carefully orchestrated one-tenth-g rotisserie mode. Deep radar showed that it was hollow. Probes told that it was inhabited by as many as ten thousand Ousters.
Analysis suggested that it was a birthing rock.
Six unarmed rock hoppers flung themselves at the task force. Uriel turned them into plasma at a distance of eighty-six thousand klicks. A thousand Ouster angels, some of them armed with low-yield energy weapons or recoilless rifles, opened forcefield wings and flew toward the distant Pax ships in long, tacking ellipses along the crest of the solar wind. Their velocity was so slow that it would have taken days to cover the distance. The Gabriel was given the task of burning them away with a thousand winks of coherent light. Tightbeams flicked on between the archangels.
Raphael and Gabriel acknowledged orders and closed to within a thousand klicks of the silent asteroid. Sally ports opened and twelve tiny figures—six from each ship—caught the light from the orange-dwarf star as Swiss Guard commandos, Marines, and troopers jetted toward the rock.
There was no resistance. The troopers found two shielded air-lock portals. With precise timing, they blasted the outer doors open and entered in teams of three.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been two standard months since my last confession.”
“Go ahead.”
“Father, today’s action… it bothers me, Father.”
“Yes?”
“It feels… wrong.”
Father Captain de Soya was silent. He had watched Sergeant Gregorius’s attack on the virtual tactical channels. He had debriefed the men after the mission. Now he knew he was going to hear it again in the darkness of the confessional. “Go ahead, Sergeant,” he said softly.
“Aye, sir,” said the sergeant on the other side of the partition. “I mean, aye, Father.”
Father Captain de Soya heard the big man take a breath.
“We came onto the rock with no opposition,” began Sergeant Gregorius. “Me an’ the five young ones, I mean. We were in tightbeam contact with Sergeant Kluge’s squad from the Gabriel. And of course, with Commanders Barnes-Avne and Uchikawa.”
De Soya remained silent in his part of the confessional booth. The booth was sectional, meant to be stored away when the Raphael was under boost or combat stations, which was most of the time, but now it smelled of wood and sweat and velvet and sin, as all real confessionals did. The father-captain had found this half hour during the last stage of their climb toward translation point for the sixth Ouster system, Mammon, and offered the crew time for confession, but only Sergeant Gregorius had come forward.
“So when we landed, sir… Father, I had the laddies in my squad take the south polar air lock, just like in the sims. We blew the doors as easily as you please, Father, and then activated our own fields for the tunnel fighting.” De Soya nodded. Swiss Guard fighting suits had always been the best in the human universe—capable of surviving, moving, and fighting in air, water, hard vacuum, hard radiation, slug assault, energy lance assault, and high explosive environment up to the kiloton-yield range, but the new commando suits carried their own class-four containment fields and were able to piggyback on the ships’ more formidable fields.
“The Ousters hit us in there, Father, fighting in the dark maze of the access tunnels. Some o’ them were space-adapted creatures, sir… angels without their wings extended. But most of them were just low-g adepts in skinsuits… hardly any armor to speak of a’tall, Father. They tried using lance and rifle and ray on us, but they were using basic night goggles to amplify the dim glow from the rocks, sir, and we saw ’em first with our filters. Saw ’em first and shot ’em first.” Sergeant Gregorius took another breath. “It only took us a few minutes to fight our way to the inner locks, Father. All the Ousters who tried to stop us in the tunnels ended up floatin’ there…” Father Captain de Soya waited. “Inside, Father… well…”
Gregorius cleared his throat. “Both squads blew the inner doors at the same instant, sir… north and south poles at once. The repeater globes we left behind in the tunnels relayed the tightbeam transmissions just fine, so we were never out of touch with Kluge’s squad… nor with the ships, as ye know, Father. There were fail-safes on the inner doors, just as we figured, but those we blew as well, and the emergency membranes a second later. The inside of the rock was all hollow, Father… well, we knew that, of course… but I’d never been inside a birthin’ asteroid before, Father. Many a military rock, aye, but never a pregnancy one…”
De Soya waited.
“It was about one klick across with lots o’ their spidery low-g bamboo towers takin’ up much of the center space, Father. The inner shell wasn’t spherical or smooth, but more or less followed the shape of the outside of the rock, you know.”
“Potato,” said Father Captain de Soya.
“Yessir. And all pitted and cratered on the inside, too, Father. Lots of caves and grottoes everywhere… like dens for the pregnant Ousters, I suppose.”
De Soya nodded in the darkness and glanced at his chronometer, wondering if the usually concise sergeant was going to get to the perceived sins in this account before they had to stow the confessional for C-plus translation.
“It mst’ve been pure chaos for the Ousters, Father… what with the cyclone howlin’ as the place depressurized, all the atmosphere flowin’ out o’ the two blasted air locks like water out of a bathtub drain, the air all full of dirt and debris and Ousters blowin’ away like so many leaves in the storm. We had our external suit phones on, Father, and the noise was unbelievable ’til the air got too thin to carry it—wind roarin’, Ousters screamin’, their lances and our lances cracklin’ like so many lightning rods, plasma grenades goin’ off and the sound bouncin’ back at us in that big rock cavern, the echoes goin’ on for minutes—it was loud, Father.”