Give us ten minutes, sir, and then send them over. We can use the extra bodies. Got a shitload of EPWs to watch.
“Will do, Major. And Merderet . . . well done,” he said, his voice suddenly thick. “Well done.” It seemed such an inadequate response, he had to resist the temptation to say it yet again, as if repetition might somehow inflate it to the proportions required by the moment.
Twenty minutes later Sam met with his advisory group and department heads, with Lieutenant Bill Parker from engineering standing in for the absent Koichi Ma. The other novel addition was the Guardian Te’Anna, along with her two silent Marine escorts, complete with gauss pistols and neuro-wands. Sam was happy to see the wands collapsed and in their small holsters on their web belts. It would be stupid not to carry them, but he didn’t want to rub Te’Anna’s nose in them.
Why did he care? Well, she could be an invaluable asset in understanding and hopefully thwarting P’Daan’s plans, but that wasn’t all. He was starting to . . . maybe not like her but sympathize with her. She wasn’t just a template for what all Guardians must be. She was a unique, sentient being trying to find something to make her life worth living. She could almost be one of them, aside from being immortal, oversexed, and a bird.
“It’s been a hectic day,” he began, “but I’m glad to say our Marines have the highstation and Lieutenant Ma has transferred there to begin interviewing the Guardian K’Irka and her senior technical staff to get a handle on fixing our jump drive. In the meantime, we are breaking Destie-Seven-Echo orbit and bending course for a Molniya-style highly elliptical orbit around Destie-Seven itself. That will take us deep into the gas giant’s atmosphere on our closest approach and we will scoop hydrogen to refill our HRM—that’s hydrogen reaction mass—tanks. We’ll make three orbital passes which will get us up to about seventy percent of our full tankage. Then we’ll head back to the highstation and hope Lieutenant Ma has some progress on the drive front.”
“How long will that take, Captain?” Doctor Däng asked.
“Each orbital pass will take about sixteen hours, so with transit time back and forth to the Highstation, about sixty hours total.”
Sam saw the flicker of a frown on the biologist’s brow.
“What’s wrong, Doctor?”
“Oh, I am only concerned about my friend Koichi. It seems like a long time for them to remain on the station without possibility of assistance from us.”
“A very long time to be with K’Irka,” Te’Anna said, her first words since joining them. Everyone in the room turned and stared at her. She looked around at them and then ran her fingers through the fine feathers on her neck and head, fluffing them out, an unmistakable preening gesture. She did love attention, Sam thought.
“I wouldn’t leave if we didn’t need that reaction mass,” Sam said, “but he’s hardly alone over there. Major Merderet’s there with a heavily reinforced company of Mike Marines, over a hundred grunts, armed to the teeth. Most of them are veterans of the assault landing on K’tok. You won’t find a better trained or more experienced force of close combat troops in the Cottohazz, and I bet you won’t find their match anywhere around here, either.”
Doctor Däng turned to Te’Anna. “What did you mean, about the Guardian K’Irka? Is she dangerous?”
“Oh, yes,” Te’Anna answered, and she nodded for emphasis.
Nodding, Sam noticed: a Human gesture of agreement the Guardian had picked up over the course of her weeks with them. Although she spoke Guardian, and the others in the group understood her by means of commlink auto-trans, none of them wore vox-boxes, nor needed to, for her to understand them. Te’Anna had developed a near-perfect understanding of English, the language spoken by everyone present. Her spoken English was almost as good as the auto-trans. Sam wondered at her ability to learn a new language so quickly, especially as she had never in her entire memory encountered any language but her own. If, as Choice claimed, she was a biological machine, she was a pretty impressive one.
“How is she dangerous?” Däng asked.
“K’Irka is the most accomplished gene sculptor I have ever encountered,” Te’Anna said, “certainly the best in this realm.”
“She’s under guard,” Sam said. “She’s not doing any gene sculpting now.”
“No,” Te’Anna agreed, “not now.”
The words sent a surge of unease through him that made him shiver.
“How could she know what to sculpt, or how?” he asked. “She’s never even seen a Human, or heard of one before we got here.”
“You are probably correct, Captain Bitka,” she answered, and she leaned back in her chair, a model of idle grace. “It is unlikely any of the genetic material left from the circulatory fluids of your party—which soaked the audience ground—was recovered at P’Daan’s orders, analyzed, and then the data sent by tight beam to K’Irka. After all, your enemies have only had a hundred days to do so, and they are probably too stupid to have even thought of it.”
Damn! She had an uncomfortable way of making a point. Sam squinted up the duty Comm chair, Signaler First Lopez.
Yes, sir, he answered from the bridge.
“Lopez, get me a tight beam commlink to Major Merderet.”
Around him everyone else in the conference room fell silent. After less than a minute Merderet’s voice sounded in his head.
Yes, captain?
“Major, our guest Te’Anna suspects her friend K’Irka has prepared some sort of trap for your people.”
I think so too, sir. Taking the station was too easy.
“Yeah, now that you mention it. She thinks the threat is biological in nature. Don’t let up on your biosecurity.”
Sir, we found four compartments we sealed off and we pumped them down to hard vacuum, then filled them with virgin air brought over in tanks from the Bay by our supply echelon. Nobody desuits except in that safe zone, and not until after a thorough suit scrub, including live steam and a UV burn that would give a virus melanoma.
Sam couldn’t think of anything else to do. He looked at Te’Anna but her eyes told him nothing. “Okay, Major, sounds good. I’ll check back after each scoop.”
Te’Anna did one of her head duck and neck stretch motions, then looked at the ceiling of the conference room and rolled her head from side to side. “My friend, K’Irka,” she said, mimicking Sam’s words, and then repeated it, as if listening to it for some hidden meaning. She looked around the conference room, her eyes coming to rest briefly on each person there, and she leaned forward as she spoke.
“You, the one named Parker. I know your name but nothing else about you. Alexander? I have heard of you but we have never spoken. Strangely marked Human female named Choice, we have spoken once but shared nothing interesting. You, Buran-thing: I will never know you. But the rest of you . . . understand me when I say each of the rest of you is a better friend to me, in the sense you mean the word, than is K’Irka. Why would I think such a thing? I still look for answers, as do you. K’Irka found her answers long ago. She found them at the cellular level and her mind dwells there, not here.”
“And what about P’Daan?” Sam asked. “Does he search for answers?”
She leaned back, again relaxed and made a graceful gesture with her hand, as if to reveal something, or perhaps dismiss it. “P’Daan has no need to; he simply makes them up.”
Two hours later Ka’Deem Brook found Captain Bitka in the officer’s gymnasium in the habitat wheel, working on the resistance machines with a studious intensity which made Ka’Deem wonder what demon the captain was trying to cast out.
“You sent for me, sir?”
The captain stood up from the lower back machine.
“XO, I’m getting a sense of what P’Daan has in mind and it’s making me nervous.”
Ka’Deem couldn’t imagine understanding what went on in the mind of a Guardian. The captain obviously believed he could, but Ka’Deem thought there was as much vanity as insight in that belief. Ka’Deem waited as the capta
in wiped his face with a towel.
“Those two long ships around Destie-Four have broken orbit and are accelerating down, out of the plain of the ecliptic. They have been for over a day.”
“You think they’re getting ready for another in-system jump, sir? But P’Daan is with that division of their fleet. I thought you were certain a Guardian wouldn’t take that sort of personal risk.”
The captain paused and looked at him carefully, as if for a moment sensing Ka’Deem’s true hidden feelings. The captain’s face remained a blank mask, however, as blank as Ka’Deem kept his own.
“I still am,” the captain answered. “He keeps peppering me with these angry rants by holocomm, but I think he’s just going through the motions to keep me distracted or something. Comm records them and I look at them when I get time. You watch them?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Notice anything different about the last one?”
Ka’Deem thought back. He’d only half-watched it, not paying that much attention. As the captain said, the messages had become boring and repetitive. “Not really, sir.”
“I saw a crewman on that last vid, just for a second. It was a Destie—a New Person. P’Daan is transmitting from a Destie ship or orbital station. He’s not on one of those Troatta battleships anymore, which means he’s going to send them against us, jump in above the plain of the ecliptic and have their residual velocity carry them down toward us. Only question is when. Are they going to wait for the two ships trailing us to catch up or go sooner with just two?”
“If I were them, I’d wait, sir. They know we can beat two ships. It’s safer to wait until they have all four.”
The captain shook his head. “I sure hope you’re right, XO. If they think that way, odds are we’ll be gone by the time they get here. But if they come early with two ships, we’re in trouble. They know our main trick, which is to throw off their sensors with a thermonuclear warhead. If they’re smart—and these Troatta are supposed to be good at this stuff, even if P’Daan is an amateur—they’ll realize our tactic worked in part because they were down to one ship but also because they were in tight formation. If they come in spread wide, we have to use twice as many warheads to block their sensors, position them just right, and that assumes they don’t have a sensor drone they can send out as a flanker.
“We’ll also have to send two different attack swarms. We’re fabricating more decoy clusters but we don’t have an endless supply of missiles. We’ve used four of our twelve Mark Fours and six of our thirty-six Mark Fives. I’ve been stingy with them so far, but next time we’re going to have to fire them as fast as we can clear the coil gun. If we have to fight again, it’s not going to be so bloodless.”
The captain wiped his face again and Ka’Deem realized the perspiration might not all be from the exercise, and that thought made Ka’Deem’s heart rate climb.
“I want the ship at Readiness Condition Two for the entire duration of the scoop. Everyone on their toes. And I want you to have Mister Alexander work out the solution for a Mark Five shot that will take it straight up above the plain of the ecliptic. Fire that one off by the end of the watch. We’ll follow it with one more every watch for the run in to the first scoop and then the next two watches afterwards. If they come from up there, we might get lucky.”
“The odds of them emerging anywhere near one of the missiles . . . is that worth shooting four of our remaining Mark Fives, sir?”
“Well, long shots are about all we’ve got at this point, and those missiles aren’t drawing interest sitting in our hold. Make it so, XO.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” he answered, his heart still pounding in his ears. Bitka knew the long ships were coming for them, knew where they would come from, and Ka’Deem knew, just looking at him, that the captain had no idea how to beat them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Two days later, aboard USS Cam Ranh Bay,
in scooping orbit around Destie-Seven
13 July 2134 (one hundred forty-seven days
after Incident Seventeen)
Eleven thousand tons of HRM—hydrogen reaction mass—scooped in two passes. Not bad, Sam thought. He thumbed his signature to the watch log as the tactical sensor array extended again and the bridge display began showing detail of their surroundings.
“Coming out of ionization,” Lieutenant Barr-Sanchez reported from Ops One. “Comms and sensors coming back online.”
“Contacts!” Alexander called out from TAC One. “Two bogies, great big ones, seven degrees relative, angle on the bow eighty-nine, range three million and change.”
Sam brought up the tactical display on his workstation. They’d expected this sooner or later but his hand still trembled from the sudden jolt of adrenaline. “What’s the closing velocity?”
“Sixty-nine kilometers a second, sir,” Alexander answered. “That’s pretty good for those big tubs.”
“Yeah. Well they spent four days accelerating. What’s that work out to?”
“A fiftieth of a gee continuous burn for ninety-six hours would get almost seventy klicks, sir,” Barr-Sanchez answered. “That’s probably as high a burn as they can manage for that long and still have reaction mass in the tank to turn around.”
“Why that high a closing rate, sir?” Alexander said. “That helps us. And they’ll be here in twelve hours, way before their other two ships get here.”
“Excellent question, TAC. How far out is the first Mark Five we fired?”
Chief Bermudez in the TAC Two chair touched her display. “Cold Alpha is six hundred ninety-one thousand kilometers out, sir.”
Sam did the quick math in his head. “About ten hours to missile detonation, unless they start decelerating. Chief, please tell me it’s going to pass within range.”
“Sorry, sir. Cold Alpha will pass about three hundred thousand kilometers away at closest approach. Cold Bravo is also a miss, but Cold Charlie will pass within four thousand kilometers, unless they change course.”
“Sir,” Bohannon in COMM One said, “I’ve got an emergency tight beam from Major Merderet at the highstation.”
Emergency? Now what?
“Patch her through.”
Captain Bitka, he heard Merderet’s voice in his head, but it sounded hoarse and strained. I don’t know how, but she got to us, and it’s coming on fast. Elevated temperature and heart rate, vomiting and diarrhea, dizziness, blurred vision, skin lesions. We been pulling blood samples for the last hour and running them through the breakdown scanner. I’ve got a burst data dump ready for Doc Däng.
Sam looked at the main display, saw the closing track of the two long ships. Had they timed their jump emergence to coincide with symptom onset? Well, why not?
“Send the databurst now, Major, and keep taking samples.”
Sending now. I pulled all our security people back and we’re locked down in here.
She paused and Sam could hear her vomiting. Her voice was weaker when she resumed talking.
We’ll keep at it as long as we can, but at this rate we aren’t going to be upright very long. Can’t keep enough fluids in to keep our body chems right. Lieutenant Ma wants to add something, sir.
After a pause, Ma’s voice joined the feed.
Captain, as near as I can tell nobody on this station knows how to fix our jump drive. All they manufacture here are in-system cargo haulers and the occasional patrol/rescue craft. No starship technology or the apparent ability to make it.
Sam felt suddenly lightheaded as Ma paused to vomit. They were right back where they’d started. Worse. He had over a hundred Marines on an orbital shipyard with some sort of galloping rot, and two battleships, wise to his tricks, screaming down on them.
Here’s a good one for you, Ma continued. The New People who used to work on jump drives were the ones who tried to kill their Guardian overlords. They’re still alive, down on the surface of Haydoos, what we call Destie-Seven-Echo. I guess they’re there in case the Guardians ever need to pick their brains or so
mething. I’ve got all the information the station has on their habitat and I’ve got a databurst ready to send.
Whatever bug we have is bad and progressing rapidly, and none of our filtering and sterilization techniques can contain it. Sir, you need to get those Desties on Haydoos to fix the drive and then get the hell out of here. Don’t get everyone else killed trying to save us. Major Merderet and I are on the same page about this.
Sam paused before replying, wanting to be sure his voice betrayed none of the emotion he felt. “Send the databursts, Mister Ma. Yours and the major’s recommendation is noted. I cannot in all honesty promise I will get you out of this alive, but I’ll do my best, and alive or dead I will get you home. I will be damned if I will leave you or anyone else behind.”
He cut the channel, pinged Doctor Däng, and told her what he knew, asked her to go to the medbay and look over the incoming data burst. He could hear the agitation in her voice. She and Ma had been close since before Sam had come aboard. She’d already lost Boniface, her other close friend. Sam wasn’t sure how well she would hold up if they lost Ma as well.
He looked back at the tactical display, forced himself to focus on the oncoming ships. He turned to Alexander.
“TAC, what would we do if we didn’t have a package of silent death on the way to greet them?”
“Maybe get some started, sir.”
“Yeah, I’m thinking the same thing, and I wonder if that captain is as well. Ten thousand tons of HRM is all we’ll need for this. Helm, cancel the third scoop. Bend orbit for Highstation.”
Barr-Sanchez triggered the lateral acceleration klaxon and then began turning the ship for deceleration.
“TAC, get a decoy cluster loaded in the coil gun and then prep a Mark Four. We’ll launch straight from the dispenser in the wheel. Decoys from the coil gun followed by one hot missile, easy to see. How many sensor drones we have left?”
“Six, sir.”
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