Sam closed his eyes for a moment but the images remained.
“I do not have a physician on board. You are the closest I have to a trained pathologist. I need you to watch the recording and tell me if it is possible for any of the landing party to have survived. It will affect decisions I have to make in the next few minutes.”
Sam saw her intellect overcome her rage and she brought her emotions under control, then nodded her understanding. Sam looked away, the only privacy he could give her. After three or four minutes, she spoke, her voice strained but under control.
“No member of the landing party who entered that audience area can have survived their wounds.”
“Thank you, Doctor. You are excused from the bridge.”
Sam pinged Merderet.
“Major, do you have comms to your Mikes?”
Not this second, sir. They’re in the hot part of the reentry, lots of ionization. Give me a minute or two.
“When you’ve got comms, tell them there are no survivors of the landing party, so they can go in guns hot. Recover their remains. Let’s not lose anyone else. If anything down there moves except to run away or surrender, kill it.”
Aye, aye, sir.
“And Major, I would really, really like a prisoner.”
We’ll do our best, sir.
Sam cut the link. He’d tried to mentally prepare himself for every possibility, walk through what he would have to do, have to say, but there was one event he had never prepared for. He went over the words he would have to say next, trying to treat them as words in a script he was reading so his voice wouldn’t shake, as Alexander’s had a few minutes earlier.
“Mister Brook.”
The Ops boss rotated his workstation and looked at Sam through eyes hollow with shock.
“Mister Brook, call your senior chief to the bridge and turn your chair over to her. Then lay aft to the auxiliary bridge and take the command chair there. That’s your new battle station . . . XO.”
Brook subvocalized an order on his commlink, and began releasing his restraints.
Sam turned to Alexander. “TAC, execute your target queue. Sweep every goddamned satellite you can see from the sky.”
For the next hour, Alexander’s TAC department knocked out satellites with murderous efficiency. As they had expected, the largest platforms in higher orbits were directed energy weapons, but the ones closest to them went down immediately. Another fired at them as it rose over the distant horizon, hit the habitat wheel, but did surprisingly little damage and no casualties. The Bay’s lasers knocked it down before it fired again.
Forty-three minutes from when the Mikes entered atmosphere, Chief Wainwright came up on the commlink.
Captain Bitka, I have twenty Mikes, one prisoner, and all recovered remains on board and I am lifting off. Estimate dock in two-five minutes.
Another cheer went up from the bridge crew and Sam relaxed a little. Twenty-five more minutes and they could accelerate out of here. But where to? They had a whole world, a whole star system trying to kill them.
“Captain,” Lieutenant Alexander said, “We’ve got a couple more of those gun-sats ready to come over the horizon in their orbits. I’d like to engage over the horizon with a Mark Five. With all the junk out there, I don’t think they’ll be able to pick our missile out of the clutter before it detonates. In Sunflower mode, it can take down twenty or more satellites in one shot, and scramble their electronics to boot.”
A deep-space intercept missile was not meant for use in orbit. When it detonated, a thermonuclear warhead destroyed the missile but pumped out thirty X-ray laser pulses, each one enough to blow most satellites into scattered debris. The problem was any unshielded electronics in a large part of one hemisphere would be fried by the electromagnetic pulse, along with most remaining satellites on that side of the world. Usually, that was a bad thing, but right now it sounded pretty good to Sam.
“What’s loaded in the coil gun?” he asked.
“A standard Thud,” Alexander answered. “Kinetic energy submunition round, take out twenty hectares.”
“Marines said the Guardians fled into an underground complex. Unload the Thud, load your Mark Five, and take out those gun-sats. Then load a Thud, but not a submunition round. Give me a crust buster.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Suddenly, Sam felt himself thrown hard to one side against his restraints, and then heard the whooping siren of the hull breach alarm. The bridge filled with the babble of voices, particularly from the left side—maneuvering and engineering.
“Pipe down!” Sam shouted, and the bridge fell silent except for the hull breach siren.
“You’re the crew of a US Navy warship and we’re under fire. This is your real job so get used to it. Now work your stations. Ship status, what’s the damage?”
“Losing pressure in the docking bay and compartments twelve and twenty-two in the habitat wheel, sir,” the machinist mate at the Engineering Two station answered. “A-gang on the way to repair damage. No power loss. Sensors and weaponry still up.”
“Ops,” Sam ordered, “evasive action, but keep us in orbit. The Five Boat’s still on its way.
“TAC, what’s shooting at us?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Alexander answered, desperation in his voice.
“Well, figure it out, and quick.” Sam heard two short blasts of the acceleration klaxon, the warning alarm for lateral thrust, and then felt a tug to the side as the Bay used its attitude control thrusters to displace. It wasn’t much, but with so many of the satellites down, and so much new debris in orbit, the Desties’ tracking and fire direction might be pretty degraded. It might be enough.
Sam pinged Major Merderet in the launch bay.
Yes sir, she answered immediately.
“Major, we took a hit aft of where you are. Better pull your reserve platoon from their jump pods and get them up to their squad bays.”
Aye, aye, sir.
“Captain,” Alexander called out, “it’s fire from the surface. We’ve got a firing solution for a Thud, and we’ve still got that submunition round in the coil gun.”
“Hit him, TAC,” Sam ordered, and Sam felt The Bay shudder with the launch.
“On the way,” Alexander said.
“He fired again!” the sensor tech in the TAC Three chair called out. “Missed us, but look at this.”
The main screen showed an exterior view looking forward over the bow toward the planetary horizon. A momentary flash came and went, almost too quickly to register.
“Show that again and freeze it,” Sam ordered. The image reappeared as a thin, bright line running almost straight up past them. As they looked at it, he felt the Bay accelerate slightly.
“What is that?” Lieutenant Bohannon asked. “A laser?”
“We’re in vacuum, COMM,” Sam said. “Nothing for a laser to interact with out here, so no visible track. Maybe a particle accelerator?”
“From out of an atmosphere and into vacuum, sir?” Alexander said. “I’d like to know how that works. A neutral beam won’t hold together in the atmosphere, and a charged one won’t outside of it.”
“Can you track its origin?” Sam asked.
“Yes, sir. It’s close to the original firing point, but it’s moved,” the sensor tech said. “It’s moving counter-rotation, and I think it’s firing from underground.”
“Underground? Let me see that,” Alexander said and touched his own workstation to bring up the duplicate of the sensor tech’s display. Sam did as well. Assuming it was the same weapon, and that it wasn’t actually moving with respect to the planet surface, but was instead moved along by the planet’s rotation, the only solution was a site on the far side of the planet but underground, maybe half a kilometer.
“Bullshit!” Alexander said. “Who can shoot through a whole planet? It’s crazy.”
“Firing again,” the sensor tech reported. “Missed even farther. The firing track lines up exactly with the previous solution.”
“Tac,” Sam said, “get a Mark Five ready and take out those gun-sats. The blast will keep those sensors blind. Then take out the complex the Guardians retreated into with a crust buster. Ops, keep maneuvering, but get us down lower and meet our PSRV. I want to recover the Five Boat and get the hell out of here.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Five hours later, aboard USS Cam Ranh Bay
7 April 2134 (thirteen days after arrival at Destination,
second day in orbit around Destie-Four,
fifty-eight days after Incident Seventeen)
Five hours later, once they were safely away—at least for the moment—Sam stood helmeted in the docking bay. Fourteen bodies in sealed gray composite bags floated in zero gee, tethered to each other, held by a mixed honor guard of Marines and bosun’s mates. He heard Lieutenant Bohannon say, “All hands, bury the dead,” on the all-ship channel, the signal for everyone to stop their work for a moment while they said goodbye to their shipmates.
“Honor guard, hand salute,” Sam ordered and then read the names of all fourteen dead: one Buran, one Varoki, and twelve humans. Among the humans, two Marines, two sailors including Mikko Running-Deer, and eight civilians. One of the civilians was Abisogun Boniface, the Nigerian journalist. The other civilians were killed by the final energy weapon hit on the habitat wheel.
Sam got to the end of the ceremony, to the final line, the one which read, We therefore commit their remains to space, to rejoin the universe from which we all came, and to which we all surely will return, but he could not say it. He could not.
“At this point in the service,” he said, “we bury the remains in space, as has become our tradition, but we’re not going to do that today. I’m not going to dump our friends and shipmates into space someplace where if one of these monsters finds them . . . well, we all know what they’d do. So we’ll freeze and store their remains. If we die, we’ll die together, and if somehow we get back home we’ll carry them with us for burial in their native soils. We’re not leaving anyone here.
“Ship’s company, dismissed.”
One hour later, Sam turned on the holovid recorder and simply sat, unsure where to start.
“Cass . . . ” he said and then stopped and looked away, looked at the exterior starfield view on his cabin wall and ceiling and floor, the view that made his furniture and himself seem to float in space. It made him appear the same as he felt—adrift and alone.
When Sam was seven years old, an elderly lady in the neighborhood died and his parents took him to her funeral. The old lady rested silently in her open casket and Sam had stared at her for a long time, knowing she would not move but waiting for movement, anyway. Even when people sleep they move, their chests rise and fall as they breathe, skin throbs here and there with the energy of blood coursing beneath it. What most distinguished this first dead person from all the live people he had seen was the absolute lack of motion.
In deep space, the stars are like that. People grow up under a canopy of stars and, like the body of a living person, that canopy is always moving slightly. Variations in the atmosphere make the stars twinkle and flicker. But in deep space there’s no atmosphere and so each star is a single, solid, unchanging point of light. On Earth, the stars look magical. In deep space, they look cold and dead.
He switched off the external starfield view. He had spent enough time staring into the abyss. He rested his face in his hands for a while, not saying anything, trying to keep his mind as blank as the gray walls around him.
“Jesus, Cass . . . what they did! I don’t know if they treat everyone this way or if we did something to especially piss them off, and I don’t care. This is so sick, so . . . twisted, it’s hard to get my head around. They didn’t just kill the landing party, Cass, they butchered them right there while we watched. And I mean butchered—professionally, methodically, and some were still alive when they started.”
Sam paused because he could feel his throat tightening, his voice starting to fail him. Running-Deer had been alive for a while, trying so hard not to scream in horror and agony but then giving in to it, because anyone would have. He could still see it, but for a while couldn’t trust his voice to say it.
“They sliced them up, filleted them, and then, so help me God, Cass, they ate them. At least the four big mucky-mucks did, the one who called himself The Eye of P’Daan and his three sidekicks. Guardians! Well, they’re dead Guardians now, all but one we’ve got locked up. Our Marines grabbed that one after having to kill most of their squat little servants. The head guy and two others fled underground, into the main complex. We dropped a crust-buster on it, one of our deep penetrating bombardment munitions, so . . . well, they’re dead, but I’m not sure where we go from here.
“We took down damn near every satellite in orbit around the principal world, over fifteen hundred of them, but they’ve got some damned particle accelerator that I swear to God can shoot through planets. How the hell does it do that? It hit us once, killed seven civilian passengers up in the wheel and one crewperson in our docking bay. If it hit fifty or so meters aft it would have taken out engineering, and that would have been the end of that.
“We lit off three nuke warhead from Mark Five torpedoes to kill satellites, scramble their ground sensors, and cover our acceleration burn. Then I shut down the reactor and got our thermal shroud deployed. We’re coasting in low-heat emission mode. In a few days, if we’re still alive, I’ll use our low-signature MPD thruster to match course with one of those automated bulk freight carriers we spotted outbound for the big gas giant. If we get in close below it, I’m hoping we’ll look like a false echo.
“But I can’t imagine a way out of this, a way home, a way to stay alive much longer—one armed transport with a screwed-up jump drive against a whole civilization that looks to be at least as advanced as we are. I don’t even have a plan yet, not beyond the next couple weeks.”
He felt a tingle at the base of his skull and saw the commlink ID for Dr. Däng.
“Have to close, Cass. My resident xenobiologist wants to scream at me some more. Smartest person I’ve ever known, and an even bigger pain in my ass. I love you.”
He turned off the recorder and felt a second tingle.
“Yes, Dr. Däng. What is it?”
Captain Bitka, I must talk with you. I must talk with the entire advisory group as soon as possible!
She sounded even more upset, more agitated than earlier, maybe because the shock was wearing off. Sam didn’t relish a public screaming match with her, couldn’t see what it would accomplish.
“Dr. Däng, I know we disagree over my actions, but what’s done is—”
No, it’s not about that, she snapped, her urgency turning to impatience. We have all been too shocked to think, and I have been a blind fool! What we witnessed on Destie-Four was scientifically impossible.
“Impossible?” Sam said as he felt the first flush of panic. “You mean . . . our people weren’t actually killed by the Guardians? But we recovered their remains, didn’t we? Or . . . were our people still alive in the complex when I ordered it destroyed?”
No! They were certainly dead, Captain Bitka. Please try to put aside your guilt and self-flagellation for a moment and listen to me.
All six intelligent races of the Cottohazz are from independently evolved trees of life. Their fundamental protein chains are different and incompatible, to the point that they are poisonous to each other, often producing fatal results within minutes.
Sam knew that, knew it because it was the reason humans and Varoki fought over K’tok—other than Earth the only naturally occurring ecosystem discovered which was human-compatible. Then he understood Däng’s agitation.
“How could the Guardians eat human flesh and not die?” he asked. “Unless . . . wait, you mean the Guardians are biologically compatible with humans?”
No. As unlikely as that would be, it is at least within the realm of biological possibility, as the K’tok ecosystem demonstrates. But
you forget, Captain Bitka, they—including our prisoner—also ate the flesh of the Varoki envoy e-Lisyss and the Buran Acolyte Onogoe Barvenu. There is no way that is possible! Nevertheless, we witnessed it, and our prisoner is still very much alive.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Six days later, aboard USS Cam Ranh Bay
13 April 2134 (nineteen days after arrival at Destination,
sixty-four days after Incident Seventeen,
running dark, outbound to gas giant)
Dr. Däng Thi Hue sat back from the genome analysis and imaging display and rubbed the back of her neck. She’d known the truth hours ago, suspected it days ago, but she had to be sure, had to be absolutely certain before reporting her results to the captain. If they ever got home, what a story this would be!
A story . . . She thought again, as she had so many times in the last six days, of Boniface, the Nigerian journalist killed in the landing party. They had become friends in the last month, sharing tea together daily at 1600 hours, a quiet time she had increasingly looked forward to, and which had now become a bleak dark corner of her day.
She wished so much now that they had done the interview he had asked for that first time they met. She knew her own fame had a power which made her uncomfortable, but which was undeniable nevertheless. An interview with her would have given him wider exposure, would have been a nice counterpoint to his war reporting.
Why, she wondered, had he become a war reporter? He was gentle, but with a streak of righteous anger under the surface. She had seen it directed twice at the Varoki trade envoy, heard its echoes when he talked about the Varoki trading houses, but also about his own government’s benign neglect of the rural poor, what he called the forgotten upcountry. Did that anger suggest a fascination with violence? She didn’t think so, and yet he felt a need, or perhaps a responsibility, to bear witness to it. She knew his first name, Abisogun, was Yoruba and meant “born in war.” He had told her that but had not told her which war. There had been so many.
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