Tolvern raised an eyebrow. “Are the trees going to eat us, too?”
“I don’t think so?” Brockett’s statement came out like a question. “At least not directly. But bones make good fertilizer in a mineral-poor environment like this one. If you catch my, er, drift.”
They were hiking a sand dune at the moment, and the pun brought groans from Carvalho and McGowan, and a laugh-snort from Capp.
A reptilian head peeked over the top of the crest of the dune above them, long and scaly and big enough to fit a man’s head inside its mouth. A tongue flicked out and tasted the air. Before Tolvern could react, an enormous lizard shot down the slope with long, loping strides, almost gliding across the surface of the sand on its padded feet. The marines lifted their rifles, and Capp fumbled with her sidearm, but the lizard wasn’t pursuing them, and they held fire as it raced at an angle up another dune and disappeared over the top.
“He was just a little bitty one,” Capp said. She holstered her gun. “Couldn’t have been more than a thousand-pounder.”
Carvalho kept his sidearm in hand. “Looked plenty big to me.”
She elbowed him. “You ain’t scared, are ya? You see that look he gave us? Like he was as surprised to see us as we was him.” Capp chuckled. “Glad we didn’t shoot the little bugger.”
“A juvenile,” Brockett said. The science officer sounded even more pleased than Capp. He tapped his hand computer. “You can tell by the green blotches on the ventral abdomen. They turn black as it matures.”
“I wasn’t exactly studying his spots,” Tolvern said. “More like wondering if it would swallow me whole or tear me apart in pieces.”
Her heart was still thumping from the encounter, and McGowan, Smythe, and the marines were all studying the landscape with sharper gazes.
They didn’t spot any more lizards, and a couple of minutes later crested another sandy ridge, where they found the site of the trap waiting on the other side. It was a crater about three hundred yards across, rimmed by dunes on one edge and rocky bluffs on the other, roughly a hundred feet high and lined with scrubby vegetation. Sand filled the bottom of the crater.
“It doesn’t look like much,” Tolvern said.
Brockett shrugged. “The instruments say it’s here.”
Smythe had his own computer out and thumbed at the screen. “The excavation goes down several hundred feet. It must have filled in with sand over the years. The Persians say there should be some equipment around, probably under the sand, too.”
“How long has it been abandoned?” she asked.
“Three or four years,” Smythe said. “Whenever the government collapsed during the war. But the climate is dry enough—some of the gear could probably be salvaged.”
“We’ll bring in Diaz,” Tolvern said, “and let him figure out how to dig out all the sand, but I figure he’ll reuse what he can. It’s hard getting new equipment this far out from Albion.”
“If you ask me, the trick will be keeping it from filling in again the first time the wind blows,” Capp said. Tolvern’s first mate rubbed a hand across her skull and flicked away sand from where the stubble, sweat, and sunblock collected grit.
“The Persians must have figured something out,” Tolvern said. “They were evidently mining this spot for a while if it’s as deep as they say.”
Capp perked up. “Hey, can me and Carvalho climb down and take a look while the rest of you are gabbing?”
“Hold position,” Tolvern said. “We’ll only be here a few minutes.” She turned to McGowan, whose scowl was deepening. “Something wrong, Captain?”
“So let me get this straight,” McGowan said. “We’re putting the trap here because it was some sort of uranium mine?”
He spoke with his snootiest aristocratic tone, and Tolvern braced herself for an argument. Vargus was patrolling with Void Queen at the head of one squadron, Fox had Citadel, leading another, and Admiral Drake had raced back to Albion to take possession of the latest battle cruiser, HMS Inferno. That left Tolvern relying on McGowan, the most stubborn, vainglorious officer in the fleet, to organize the defense of Persia in advance of the Adjudicators and their captive star leviathan.
He was a jerk, but he was also an excellent warship captain. That was the problem.
“It’s the perfect enticement,” Brockett said. “A leviathan doesn’t just need heavy metals and ores, but feeds on fissionables, too.”
McGowan gave Brockett a look. “I’m not an idiot. But it’s not like the beast carries a long-range Geiger counter on its snout.”
Brockett looked sullen. “I never said that.”
“Very nearly you did, yes. You said it would attract the creature. How will it know how to find the ores, if we can barely detect them ourselves?”
“Come on, McGowan,” Tolvern said. “Lay off my science guys, will you? If it weren’t for Brockett and Smythe, we’d have no clue how to defeat this thing.”
“I’m not sure we do have a clue.”
“And yet, you gave no alternate suggestions when asked.”
McGowan crossed his arms and looked sullen. “I might have done so, if I’d known you were looking for trivial, foolish attempts. I thought you were looking only for serious suggestions.”
“The scheme is serious,” she said. “Obviously, we have to lure it down here in the first place, and that’s no trivial undertaking. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”
“Very well. Explain how.”
Tolvern gestured at the far side of the crater. “We’ll set up missile batteries there, where they can be sheltered by the rock wall—that will save us the trouble of installing bombproofs. Drop a couple of colony reactors in the center, and explosives that we can set off once the monster starts to approach. What else can we feed it? Leaking shells, damaged mines, maybe even a few derelict ships—there are a bunch of them still floating around here.”
“And then what?” McGowan asked.
“If we leave enough goodies down here—not just reactors and wrecked ships, but scrap hauled in from the abandoned cities—the thing should dig in long enough to detect the uranium ore.”
Capp cleared her throat. “Them Persians gonna be okay with us dropping a star leviathan onto their planet, Cap’n?”
“No,” Tolvern said, “I can’t imagine that they will be. But this is desert wasteland, and if we stuff the trap good and full of bait, then let it feed on the ores, the creature should go under for a good long time.”
That was how Tolvern had come up with the plan in the first place. Fox and Vargus were leading squadrons through the frontier systems to skirmish with and annoy the leviathan and the star fortresses guiding it, practically throwing ships away in an attempt to delay the inevitable while Tolvern gathered forces in Persia. Hold out long enough for Drake to bring back reinforcements.
Here, Tolvern, Drake, and the survivors of the Fox-Vargus task force would make a final stand before the enemy attacked more heavily populated planets closer to Albion and the Hroom Empire. But how to possibly win the fight?
Nine weeks had passed since the battle in Lenin, since the star leviathan gobbled up HMS Dreadnought and numerous other ships. Normally, after consuming so much, a leviathan would bury itself into an asteroid or a small moon to digest its meal, a process that could take years or even decades before it spawned and emerged from its lair, hungry and ready for more mayhem. But the Adjudicators were forcing it to vomit up its meals somehow, and then driving it onward into Alliance systems.
What they needed to do, Tolvern had decided as reports came in via subspace from across the inner frontier, was stop that process. Break the leviathan’s bonds with the Adjudicators, lure it to the surface, stuff it full, and hope it went dormant.
“Let future generations figure out what to do with the leviathan when it rises from the desert,” she said. “For now, putting it out of commission for a stretch is the best we can manage. We’ll clean the old mines of their sand, throw in as many goodies as possible, and
lure the monster down. By the time it’s done, drifting sand dunes should have it covered up. It will be ready for a nice long nap.”
“The flaw in your plan is quite apparent,” McGowan said. “You can shoot as many planetside missiles as you want, but the ghouls aren’t idiots—they will be shocking the bloody thing’s nerve clusters to keep it in line.” He looked down his nose at Smythe and Brockett. “Yes, I read the report. I understand how the beast’s brain works.”
Brockett wiped at the dust on his glasses. “It’s not really a brain, per se—”
McGowan shut him down with a dismissive wave of the hand. “It’s a brain, to all intents and purposes. Don’t be pedantic.”
“You’re one to talk, mate,” Capp said in a grumble.
He turned and fixed her with a cold stare. She met McGowan’s stare with one of her own, and Tolvern was prepared to defend her first mate if he grew huffy. He didn’t. Well, no huffier, at least.
“Brockett has a point,” Tolvern said. “They are six independent centers of control, managed by six different implants. One of the implants is damaged—two of Fox’s war junks got a closer look and think it was done intentionally. Partially cut through with a plasma torch, is our best guess.”
“Whoever did it was a hero,” Capp said. “Wish we could give that bloke a medal.”
“I’ve heard that theory,” McGowan said. “Highly speculative.”
“The point is,” Tolvern continued, “the monster is fighting back. Every time control of that nerve cluster falters, it tries to do its own thing.”
McGowan still looked skeptical. “So they say. Then what do we do about it?”
“First we lure it to Persia. That’s the easy part—the Adjudicators are most likely headed this direction anyway. Then we destroy the implant and set the monster loose.”
#
A lizard attacked them on the way back to the shuttle, followed by a giant beetle that heaved from the ground, shaking sand from its polished black shell. Marines chased off the lizard with gunfire that it nimbly evaded as it tore over the crest of a dune and disappeared. The beetle went down under a hail of fire, bleeding green ichor, pincers still snapping as it plowed into the sand, dying, only a few feet away from its target.
Which was Henny Capp. She seemed unconcerned, and kicked the carapace as she passed. “Ay, ya dumb thing, did you think that was gonna work? I been out here fighting ghouls and leviathans and the lot. It ain’t gonna be a giant bug that does me in, yeah?”
Tolvern took the lieutenant’s arm and pulled her away. “I wouldn’t be so sure. The universe has a nasty sense of humor.”
“Yeah, Cap’n?”
“One of my instructors at the academy lost his ship to a Hroom ambush and fought three more battles planetside, all without a scratch. He ended up in a wheelchair after an away pod malfunctioned. Who would have guessed that?”
“I’d have guessed it,” Capp said with a grim nod. “I hate them away pods. Always feel like I’m gonna miss the exchange.” She glared at Smythe, who made a scoffing sound. “It happens. And you heard what the Cap’n just said—the universe can be a jerk sometimes, yeah?”
McGowan stomped ahead until he was walking in front of the lead marine. His sidearm remained in its holster. “You have the most annoying crew, Tolvern. You know that, don’t you?”
Capp leaned in and spoke to Tolvern in a stage whisper. “If the universe really has a sense of humor, a lizard is going to grab him by the throat while he’s strutting around up there. Then we’ll be done with him for good.”
McGowan glanced over his shoulder. “The wind is carrying your voice, you know. I heard every word of that.”
“He doesn’t know Capp very well,” Carvalho said to Smythe and Brockett. “If he did, he’d know she meant him to hear.”
Tolvern was more careful than her first mate as McGowan forged farther ahead, and made sure he couldn’t hear her. “And he doesn’t know me very well, either, or he’d know that I invited the lot of you along precisely to annoy him.”
This brought grins from the others, even the marines. McGowan disappeared over the top of the ridge, and as the others crested, he was already heading up another dune on the other side. He stopped at the top and spoke across the com while facing away from them.
“This is McGowan. We’re arriving now. Hold your fire.”
He held position while they caught up. At the top of the ridge, Tolvern spotted the shuttle below, with sand already piled a couple of feet up the struts. A pair of the strange, unfurling trees flanked it at about fifty yards in either direction. The marines sat in front of the door, alert, guns at the ready.
“We see you, sir,” one of the marines replied, raising his rifle in a gesture of acknowledgment.
Tolvern hadn’t noticed the landscape beyond the shuttle before. Humps of wind-scoured rock dotted the plain at intervals, their size and shape too regular to be a natural feature of the desert.
Smythe came up beside her. “Ancient temples. Built by the natives—whoever lived on the planet before the Persians arrived.”
“They remind me of Egyptian pyramids,” she said, thinking of her Old Earth history, “only more eroded.”
“They were already twenty thousand years old when Khufu built the Great Pyramid of Giza.”
“Who were the natives? Does anyone know?”
The tech officer shook his head. “Some long-gone civilization of intelligent reptiles—that’s all the Persians know. They never made it out of the stone age before they vanished.”
“Maybe the lizards are their descendants,” Brockett said.
Capp had come alongside, and gave the science officer a look. “Them things didn’t build any pyramids. They’re dumb animals, is all.”
“Evolution is natural selection,” Brockett said. “Which doesn’t necessarily imply a straight line from the mastery of fire to the invention of the warp point engine.”
“There’s one thing that concerns me about all of this,” McGowan said. He gestured dismissively at the landscape. “And I’m not talking about lizards and pyramids.”
“Go on,” Tolvern said.
“So we lure the monster to Persia and destroy the implant. And then it comes down here and eats all the junk you’ve dropped in place.”
“Right.”
“What about the six star fortresses and all the dragoons that arrive alongside it? Aren’t they going to try to take control again? How do we stop them from doing so?”
“By destroying them in open combat.”
“Ah.”
Tolvern nodded. “And we have to set our trap in two weeks, which is how long Vargus and Fox figure they can play cat and mouse with the leviathan before it muscles its way here.”
That statement sat in the open for a long moment without reply. A long, steady wind picked up, like the final sigh of the storm. It whistled over the rounded hull of the shuttle and drove a mist of sand across the surface.
“In that case,” McGowan said with an air of finality, “we’d better get Diaz down here and put him to work before that bloody crater fills up with more sand.”
Chapter Four
Ulfgar Svensen settled into a chair in the war room with an exaggerated sigh. He crossed and uncrossed his legs, put his good hand on the table and drummed his meaty fingers, then shifted around again, as if the chair and table were too small to contain his body.
Tolvern remained standing behind her chair with her hands on the seat back and kept her expression neutral as she waited for his display of dominance to play out. In her experience, these Scandians were full of bluster, but easier to deal with when you recognized how much of their behavior was ritual posturing, honed from years of dealing with their fellow blustering raider commanders. Get past the nonsense and they could be reasonable enough.
“Let me know when you’re comfortable,” she said.
Svensen grunted. “Chair is a little small is all.”
She kept her tone innocent. “Really? I
had the Hroom general in here just before she set off for the empire to take command of her new fleet of sloops.”
“Yeah?”
“Bailyna Tyn is over seven feet tall, but she seemed comfortable enough with the chairs.”
“Aye, but the Hroom are skinny little things.”
“True, I didn’t account for all of your muscles.”
“Are you mocking me?” Svensen seemed half-annoyed, half-amused, and rubbed the stump end of his left wrist. “I think you are.”
“Of course not. Would you like a drink while we’re waiting?”
That settled him. She removed a bottle of whiskey from the cabinet—nothing special, some off-brand from Saxony—and poured him a snifter. He’d finished it by the time Noah Brockett arrived from the lab.
Brockett was flushed, with beads of sweat at his brow. He still wore a lab coat, which was splattered with brown and reddish stains, some of which were still damp.
“Sorry, I was dissecting barnacles and lost track of the time. If Capp hadn’t called, I . . .” He must have caught Tolvern’s scowl. “It’s not trivial, sir—the barnacles are important, even if it doesn’t seem that way.”
“Fine, Brockett,” she said. “Have a seat and do what you need to with the equipment.”
The viewscreen above the war room had been set up to display Persia. A regular stream of shuttles dropped onto the rust-colored desert below, where Diaz and several thousand workers labored around the clock to set the trap. Six destroyers stood in a line from the fleet to the planet’s upper atmosphere.
The destroyers were ostensibly to guard the smaller, unarmed ships, but at the moment, Tolvern felt safe enough. Fox and Vargus had been sending a steady stream of subspace messages from systems like Fortaleza and Castillo as they fought delaying actions against the leviathan and the Adjudicator fleet leading it.
The Alliance Trilogy Page 54