by David Ryker
“One of those drones has a blowtorch!” Valeria shouted.
I stood up, and staggered. My head swam and my vision dimmed.
No. Not now.
I took several deep breaths.
“Mitch, what do we do?” Valeria’s question sounded like it was coming from a thousand miles away.
“Hold on,” I choked. “I’ll … ”
“I got it!” she shouted, and clanked away.
I stood where I was, forcing my breathing to slow and my muscles to relax. Thankfully the mech suit kept me upright, or I’m sure I would have ended up sprawled over Qiang. Not a good look in front of your new girlfriend.
My vision cleared and I trusted my legs enough to turn around.
Valeria was at the far wall ripping apart a control panel. Sparks flared and metal groaned in protest.
“Careful you don’t electrocute yourself,” I said.
“The voltage on these panels isn’t strong enough to get through the mech, but if I do a little fancy wiring …”
The blowtorch had already made it several inches down the door, leaving a glowing cut in its wake.
I clomped over to her.
“Anything I can do to help?”
“Guard the door,” she said without looking up from her work. “I got this.”
I moved away and stood between her and the door. If the drones got through before she was finished doing whatever the hell she was doing, I’d buy her a few extra seconds.
The blow torch reached the bottom of the door and turned left, working its way across. The drones were making a bigger hole than they needed to. Their AI had obviously decided that if they attacked us en masse they could take us.
And it was right.
The blow torch made it across and began to work its way up. My heart was thudding dangerously in my chest.
“Hurry up,” I muttered. Valeria didn’t bother to reply. I could hear more ripping of metal behind me. I kept focused on the door, and that blue tongue of flame that was moving its relentless way around it.
“Give me one of your grenades,” Valeria said.
I popped one out of my launcher and handed it over my shoulder without looking back.
“How do you arm it?”
“Button on the side. Two-second fuse. Want me to adjust it up or down?”
“No.”
More fiddling around behind me, then a couple of beeps. I was dying to take a look at what she was doing, but I didn’t dare take my eyes off the door. The blowtorch had almost made it fully around now. We had only seconds before the shit truly hit the fan.
“Step to the side,” she said. I took a step. “More.” I took another step. Man, she really was all business. That was a turn-on. Good thing I was too wired up to really get turned on. Very uncomfortable in a mech suit, I can tell you.
The blowtorch reached its starting point. There was a rattle of explosive rounds against the slab of metal and it fell inwards.
I raised my gun at the horde of drones hovering on the other side, but before I got a chance to fire, Valeria threw the grenade into their midst. It trailed wires that were still connected to the wall. She hit a switch and electricity arched through the wires, creating a blinding display in the corridor outside.
The drones were just dropping out of the air when the grenade blew and sent them flying into the walls. I staggered back but did not fall.
The corridor filled with smoke from the burnt-out drones. There was a loud beep and fire repressing foam shot from the ceiling.
Within seconds the entire corridor was carpeted in white foam. The drones looked like snowballs in some northern winter field.
I looked back at the panels she had ripped open. The wires, now shorted out, still led from the corridor to the wall. I could see she had diverted the power from several systems to make an electrical bomb. The grenade had only been a conductor, something easy to throw past the drones so that they would all get caught in the electrical field. The explosion had only kicked them when they were down.
“Um, nice work.”
“Just a bit of basic science.”
Did I detect a bit of smugness in her tone? Yes. Yes I did.
I laughed. “Okay, hotshot. Let’s go find out what’s happening around here.”
“All right. Just give me a heads-up if you need me to save you again.”
Ignoring that, I knocked on Qiang’s and Chen’s faceplates and motioned that we were going on a scout and would be back as soon as we could. They nodded, looking frustrated but resigned. Both were good soldiers and hated sitting out the action when we were going into danger.
I stood up, happy to not feel any dizziness this time.
“Now let’s go find the Subines,” I said.
We found the next one within minutes. Like the first, he or she or it hung from the ceiling, its tentacles slack, fast asleep. We shouted, stomped our metal feet, poked and prodded, but nothing could wake the thing up.
“This is a hell of a time to take a snooze,” I grumbled as we continued our search.
We found a few more scattered in corridors and rooms, until we entered the heart of the ship, well below the main decks and close to the engine room. My sensors told me it was a few degrees warmer than the rest of the ship. Here there was a large, circular room, bare of everything except a few interactive panels. From the ceiling hung more than fifty Subines. The ceiling was a metal mesh with holes about a centimeter wide, as if to make it easier for the Subines to keep their grip. All were deeply asleep. Their tubular bodies trailing dozens of tentacles made the place look like some weird living cave.
“What the hell?” I whispered.
Valeria pulled out a tablet and began tapping away. I walked slowly through the hanging Subines, entranced by the surreal sight. None of them seemed hurt, and I saw no device that could have put them in this state. It was like they had all taken the opportunity to go into some deep trance state at the same time.
“Here it is! I should have thought of this before,” Valeria said.
“What?”
Valeria pulled out a scanner and a hypo and went over to the nearest Subine. She jabbed it in its side, which got no response from the thing at all, and extracted a sample of blood the color of lapis lazuli. She inserted it into the scanner and a spectrum appeared on the screen, cut with dark lines.
I clomped over.
“What did you find?”
“Hmmm …”
“Hey.” I knocked on her helmet. “Care to share with the rest of the class?”
“Patience,” she mumbled, not looking up.
I had been warned about dating scientists. They always have another love.
At last she shouted, “I got it!”
I was surprised she didn’t shout, “Eureka!”
“What?”
“They’re hibernating.”
“Hibernating?”
“The Subine homeworld has a very slow wobble, making for long winters during which the Subines and most other large animals go into hibernation. Once they became technologically advanced they found ways to delay hibernation, and once they became spacefaring the seasonal changes that triggered hibernation didn’t kick in at all. They found that their bodies had evolved to require hibernation, however. It’s a rest and recuperation period for them. So now the Subines artificially induce hibernation. They go in shifts so no workplace or spaceship ends up shorthanded. This is a Subine hibernation hall. Normally it would be about a third full, but for some reason all of the Subines ended up coming here to hibernate all at the same time.”
“The encyclopedia has all that? You should have read up on this before we came over.”
“There are literally millions of pages of information here. Thousands just on the Subines alone. Our allies have been very generous with information. Too generous. We can’t keep up with it all.”
I thought about the Shadow Fighters and how the Dri’kai insisted only they could collect debris from the battlefield. Yes, our al
lies were being generous with information, but there were limits to that generosity.
“What about the Subines we found outside this room?”
“I’m thinking they tried to resist instinct, maybe by injecting themselves with stims. They tried to stop whatever was happening but they ended up falling asleep just the same.”
“So what caused it?”
“This.” Valeria tapped the screen to indicate a part of the spectrum, creating a hairline fracture on it. She hadn’t gotten used to the strength the mech suit gave her. “When environmental conditions are just right, the Subine body produces an enzyme that kickstarts hibernation. It generally gives them a few days of gradually decreasing energy levels to get to a safe space before sleep overwhelms them. This time it appears to have taken only a matter of minutes.”
“How?”
“I’ve found the enzyme in the blood sample I took, but in massive strength, far more than a Subine could create on its own. I’ve also found evidence that it was manufactured artificially.”
My heart sank. “A bioweapon from the Centaurians.”
Valeria nodded behind her faceplate. “Looks like it, yeah.”
“Why not just send them some killer bacteria?”
“Because that would have been detected, both by them and by the people coming to investigate. It was only when I started looking at their natural bodily processes that I discovered what really happened.”
“Clever,” I murmured. “Wait, how could they know so much about a species they’re only meeting for the first time? And how could they have transmitted this enzyme through space during a battle?”
“Good questions.”
I looked at the crowd of Subines in their deep sleep, knowing that this scene was being repeated in all the other Subine ships in our fleet. I supposed the drones activated as an automatic defense when they detected no Subines awake on the ship. I bet the Centaurians knew about that too.
“I have another good question for you,” I said with a sigh. “How the hell are we going to fight the Centaurians now that we’re missing ten percent of our fleet?”
23
We got more bad news once we returned to the shuttle. A messenger probe had arrived and told us that the Vlerns had come down with a hypersensitive response to particulates in the air. The sand-dwelling slugs found some particulates irritating, although generally they were accustomed to them. Now their immune response had kicked into overdrive and they were basically suffering from severe allergies. They had curled up in their sand beds, unable to function in the open air for more than a few minutes.
Another section of our fleet gone.
Valeria sent off our findings while I ordered Qiang and Chen to use the mechanical override to get out of their mech suits. Valeria had already done an initial scan and found no artificially engineered organisms, enzymes, or any other compounds capable of affecting humans.
“We’re safe for the moment, because these genetically engineered substances show all the hallmarks of careful planning,” she reasoned. “The Centaurians obviously sent probes to scout ahead. Since we’re so new to this part of the galaxy, they don’t know what to do about us. The only bioweapons they have that can hurt us are all ones we can easily detect.”
The response from General R’kk’kar’s flagship came quickly enough, sent by messenger probe to every ship in the fleet. All the science crews had to analyze their ships’ atmospheres for altered compounds, and we were stuck on the shuttle until we got the all-clear.
That took several hours. Valeria got busy with her analysis of the enzyme that made the Subines go into hibernation. The rest of us took a nap. Soldiers know to catch their sleep when they can.
Turned out the fleet got lucky. Only the Subines and the Vlerns had been hit. The problem was, they were still hit and we didn’t know how to cure them. With the Vlerns nearly incapacitated and the Subines literally asleep on the job, it was up to the other races to find cures, and of course that would lead to delays.
There followed much discussion about what to do, with no one asking our opinion as we hung out in the shuttle next to the Subine ship awaiting orders. We ate dinner. Valeria continued her research. We worked on the two broken mech suits.
Hours later, just as we were about to bed down for the night, the fleet commanders came to a decision. It would be foolhardy to charge into battle against the Centaurians with a fifth of our fleet incapacitated and none of us having any idea how the enemy managed to infect two of our races with such insidious bioweapons. We would get out of warp and stay in deep space until we knew how to proceed. The Chordatids objected, of course—their planet was in peril—but they were overruled. We were simply not ready for battle.
We were given the all clear to return to the Nansen and alien pilots were sent over to the Subine and Vlern ships to take them out of warp along with the rest of the fleet. We ended up hiding behind a red giant a few light years from the Chordatid home world. With the time lag from our position to the planet we shouldn’t have needed to hide, but General R’kk’kar decided to be on the safe side. I thought that was wise. We needed to stop underestimating our enemy or assuming they thought and fought like us.
Dr. Stark met me at the shuttle bay after we had one final microbe check.
“Your heart monitor sent me its readings from when you were over on the Subine ship,” he said. “Of course I couldn’t read them at the time.”
“I know. It felt kind of peaceful.”
“Peaceful is the last thing your heart feels. I’m giving you a sedative and you’re going to bed. Don’t get up until 1200 hours tomorrow. At that time, I want you in Medical for a full checkup.”
“Doc, I—”
“No arguments.”
Amazing. I could have slapped this guy around the room without working up a sweat, but when he said something like he meant it, he actually intimidated me.
“It’s the scientists’ show for the moment,” Qiang told me. “I’ll take care of things at Security, and I’ll send the mech suits over to Engineering for full repairs.”
“You aren’t the only person in this fleet, Commander Ayers,” the doctor said, giving me a jab.
True enough, and when I got back to my quarters, I discovered I wasn’t the only person in my room, either.
Foyle was in my armchair, helping himself to some of my whiskey.
“What are you doing here?” I blurted. Obvious question, I know, but what else are you supposed to say in that situation?
“Sit down. We need to talk.” The words came out like an order.
I sat in the chair opposite him, a small metal table between us.
“The Doc give you a jab? The old ticker feeling all right?”
Wow, he was being even more of a condescending fuck than usual today.
“Yes.” Even now I could feel it pulling me off to sleep, but what he said next woke me up.
“I know you used to work for Leo Franzetti.”
The name hit me like a thunderbolt. If it hadn’t been for the sedative I’m sure I would have dropped out of the chair stone dead.
As it was, it took me a moment for my head to clear. Foyle waited.
“I … don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s not going to slide. You used to work as an enforcer for a mob boss named Leo Franzetti, and then you robbed him and used the money to buy your way on to the ship.”
“How do you know all that?” I said, feeling cold. I must have been as white as a sheet. My entire body trembled.
Foyle gave me a smug smile. “That third probe? The one that the commander hasn’t said anything about? It had all the details. They busted Franzetti a few years after we left, and he told them the whole story. He was headed to the electric chair anyway, so he wanted to get his revenge on you.”
I put my head in my hands. Then I looked up, confused.
“They sent a probe all the way after us for that?”
Foyle chuckled and poured himself ano
ther whiskey. “Don’t flatter yourself. That wasn’t the only information it brought. Not by a longshot. But it’s the only thing you need to concern yourself with.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked, my mind racing. All my instincts told me to jump him, to squeeze his throat, to bang his head against the metal floor, but logic held me back. His gray command uniform held me back. My own body’s weakness held me back.
The impossibility of my situation held me back.
“I’m not going to do anything,” he said, taking a sip. “That is, if you cooperate. I want to fly one of those Shadow Fighters. You know I’m the best pilot on the Nansen. And I’ve watched the battle videos. I’m the best pilot in the whole damn fleet. I deserve one of those ships.”
“I can’t do that.”
He jabbed a finger at me, sloshing his whiskey. It was only then that I realized he was drunk.
“You can and you will, or everyone gets to know about your dirty little secret. You’re all buddy buddy with the Dri’kai general, whatever the fuck his name is. Make it happen. I don’t care how.”
Then something dawned on me. My eyes narrowed and I sat up straighter. “Why didn’t you pull this the first time you asked me?”
He shrugged. “I was trying to go easy on you. That heart of yours is the heart of a weak old man. That’s why I waited for the doctor to give you a sedative. You’re no good to me laid up in Medical.”
I shook my head. “No. I get it now. I was wondering why the commander suddenly went cold on me after the probes arrived. She learned about my past and judged me for it, but she kept me in my position because I’m useful. She didn’t tell you, though. You’re too undisciplined to keep it to yourself. But you got curious. You noticed her change in attitude as well, and wondered if it had anything to do with the message from the probe. Everyone in high command is wondering about that probe. So you snuck a look at it. How did you manage it, Foyle? How did you break the security codes? Those messages were for the commander’s eyes only. You wouldn’t have had access to them.”
Foyle shifted in his seat, looking less certain than before. “She gave me commander’s level access.”
“Bullshit,” I snapped, leaning forward. I had him now. “She doesn’t trust you any more than I do. She’s trying to create a team so we can get the colonists through to Terra Nova, and you aren’t exactly a team player. You took a peek at the commander’s restricted files. I can have your stripes for that. Hell, I could have you in the brig on treason charges for that.”