Vargus had gone off on a side mission to raid enemy reinforcements arriving via Heaven’s Gate, while Fox evacuated Commander Kelly’s base in Castillo and as many rustics as he could manage. Before the enemy arrived here, they’d have to fight their way into Nebuchadnezzar and finally come through the jump into Persia’s cul-de-sac system. One way in, one way out.
Meanwhile, and in spite of Drake and Bailyna Tyn’s temporary retreat toward more settled systems, the fleet continued to grow in the Persia System, until Tolvern had a powerful, but sluggish armada of ships. Most of the corvettes and light cruisers were across the Inner Frontier with Fox and Vargus, but she boasted dozens of destroyers, star wolves, sloops of war, and smaller support craft like torpedo boats and Singaporean war junks, as well as a number of missile frigates.
All of these ships would play a critical role when the enemy arrived, but the frigates, especially, were a devastating weapon to use against massed Adjudicator ships. Providing they could be adequately protected behind friendly lines.
The science officer emptied his pockets: calipers, glass slides, a broken switch, a tablet with stylus, a broken earpiece from the com, and a pair of stoppered glass vials with tissue samples. He dug deeper and removed additional gizmos and geegaws, including something that set off a a bio-contamination alert.
Svensen scrambled to his feet when Brockett set it on the table in front of him. “By all the icy hells!”
“Don’t worry, it’s gone through the autoclave.”
Tolvern gave him a stern look and pointed to the incinerator. Brockett sheepishly dropped the object into the chute, at which point the incinerator detected the active bio-contamination and flushed the room with a bitter chemical scent. Emergency safeguards.
Tolvern waved her hand in front of her face. “Nice—thanks for that, Brockett.”
“Sorry, sir.” At last he found his hand computer and went to work.
Svensen settled warily into his seat and looked back to Tolvern. “Is Kelly out of danger yet?”
“She’s off Fort Mathilde,” Tolvern said. “Not yet clear of Castillo.”
“Isn’t that where the leviathan is at the moment?”
Tolvern took a seat next to Brockett. “Yes.”
No need to specify the danger Svensen’s lover ran while she remained in Castillo. The monster had already gobbled down more than twenty allied warships and devoured three navy supply depots, and it had suffered no visible injury from countless attacks from Alliance warships. It had never been stopped or even slowed, only turned temporarily aside.
“How are the Fourth Wolves?” she asked.
“I don’t like this new ship, Firestorm.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“The ship is fine,” Svensen said. “It’s the crew I don’t like.”
“Ninety percent Scandian, aren’t they?”
“Aye, but they’ve all been trained by your navy. The ship even came out of your yards on Albion, not one of our own.”
“I thought you said it was fine.”
“It is fine,” he said, “until you put it with Albion-trained men. Why not call it a destroyer or whatnot and be done with it?”
“Because Firestorm is outfitted Scandian style, with Scandian weapons and command structure,” Tolvern said. “And she’s under your command. Don’t the Albion-trained crews fight just as hard as the ones trained on Roskilde or Viborg?”
He rubbed at the stump on the end of his left arm. “Nearly, but not quite. They’ve been softened by your naval training.”
“I wasn’t aware that our training had ‘softening’ as its end goal.”
“You know what I mean. The men might toughen up from how they started, but they don’t come out like Scandian raiders, they come out like Royal Navy types. Soft.”
Tolvern remembered the vomit-inducing physical activity at the academy, after which she’d been expected to attend hours of lectures on everything from the technical specifications of a Hunter-II torpedo to Hroom battle techniques. It had been the most exhausting three years of her life.
“Now you’re just being ridiculous.”
Svensen rubbed his stubble and gave a little shrug. “We’ll see how they do. Firestorm hasn’t been tested yet, so nobody knows. But that’s not why I’m here, so let’s get to the point.” He said this with a pointed glance at Brockett, who remained immersed in his work.
“Very well,” Tolvern said. “Then I have a question for you. How well can your mech raiders work with mechanized Royal Marines?”
“Hmm. The marines are good enough. I suppose.” It sounded grudging. “But why does that matter? Aren’t I going in with my wolves to destroy this implant thing with my pummel guns?”
“That’s a good way to get your wolves eaten for lunch. But even more importantly, the ghouls know we’ve been studying the damaged implant, and have figured out how to shield it from our scans. We can’t simply shoot at it from a distance—it has to be found.”
“So I’m not charging in and destroying it?”
“You’re charging in and destroying it . . . by landing raiders and marines on its surface and doing it by hand.”
“I see,” Svensen said after a long moment. “And you think this is safer than standing at a distance, targeting the implant’s last known position, and hitting it with pummel guns?”
“Not in the slightest. But safety has nothing to do with it.”
Svensen still looked skeptical, and so Tolvern explained some more. Subsequent fights after the Heaven’s Gate battle had shown that the Adjudicators knew the implants were the vulnerable point in their control of the star leviathan, and they weren’t only concerned with the damaged one. The enemy had directed baffling cloaks toward each of the six implants on the monster’s carapace, making the exact locations impossible to detect.
Other devices dropped onto the leviathan’s back simulated implants, until very nearly the whole surface of the miles-long creature appeared to be giving off a signal. Even the superior sensing equipment of the Singaporean war junks hadn’t been able to penetrate the enemy’s subterfuge.
Brockett spoke up. “What’s more, the skin of the leviathan shifts about over time.”
Svensen frowned. “Shifts? How so?”
“It grows, stretches, forms new tentacles and the like.” Brockett nodded. “So the ‘last known position’ is meaningless in this context.”
“All of which adds up to one thing,” Tolvern said. “Pummel gun attacks from a distance are pointless, while landing troops has a good chance.”
“A good chance of getting us all killed, is what you mean,” Svensen said.
“Quite possibly. But if you’re going to get eaten for lunch anyway, you may as well achieve your objective.”
“All right,” he said. “So we have to land, and your idea is an assault with a combined force of raiders and marines. What’s everyone else doing while we’re down there?”
“The rest of the fleet?” Tolvern said. “We’re trying to keep you alive, of course. That means I send my forces after the star fortresses to engage their weapons and defensive systems while I try not to lose too many ships to the leviathan.”
“As we’re running around on the surface of the star leviathan looking for this damaged implant.”
“I wouldn’t call it running. There’s microgravity, but you’ll be using some combination of magnetic coupling and rocket packs to maneuver.” Tolvern nodded. “You’ll land as close to the location as we can guess, then seek out the damaged implant—which we now think was purposefully crippled by one of their slaves—and cut it off with plasma torches.”
Svensen grunted. “You may be engaging the enemy in battle, but they’ll try to stop us all the same. Blast us from the surface like shooting ticks off the back of a dog.”
“If they start shooting at the leviathan, it will turn on them,” Tolvern said.
“Decimator units, then. It won’t take long to figure out what we’re up to, at which point they�
�ll bring down troops to stop us. Assuming they don’t say screw it, and drop nukes anyway.”
“I guarantee there will be no nukes.”
Well, to be honest, Tolvern couldn’t precisely guarantee it, but she didn’t see how enemy ships could attack anyone on the surface of the leviathan without getting eaten themselves. The monster was perfectly capable of devouring two fleets at once, while snacking on the orbital fortress on the side.
“If that’s the case, then bring on the decimators. We can take them.”
Brockett was still messing around with his hand computer and spoke without looking up. “If only it were just decimators.”
“Huh?”
“Turns out the surface of the leviathan is a hostile environment with or without the ghouls,” Tolvern said.
Svensen hooked his thumb at Brockett. “And that’s why he’s here?”
“I’m here because I’m the leading expert on leviathans,” Brockett said. It didn’t sound like a boast, but a simple statement of fact, and the Scandian commander looked thoughtful as the science officer continued. “I was studying them long before the current war, and have landed several probes on leviathans that returned valuable data in the seconds before they were destroyed.”
“Seconds, huh? The leviathan ate them?”
“Not exactly. They were each smaller than one of your mech suits, and it’s doubtful the creature even noticed they’d landed. Here, I have footage of one of them.”
He tapped his hand computer, and the war room viewscreen showed video of a strange, undulating surface set against the backdrop of a brilliant blue-and-green nebula. Knobs and waving, cilium-like hairs dotted the surface of the creature, and lumps the size of house cats rippled just below the rubbery skin.
One of the lumps burst like an exploding pimple, and Tolvern caught a glimpse of looming metallic teeth and claws before the image went black. She’d seen it before, but it still made her flinch.
Svensen had not. He jerked back and nearly flipped over his chair. “By the gods!”
Brockett backed up, frame by frame, until he froze on the creature, which looked like a biomechanical octopus with lamprey-like biting mouths at the end of each of its tentacles.
“I believe this one is a leviathan spawn,” Brockett said. “They live under the skin of the parent organism for some unknown period of time, feeding on whatever scraps land on the surface and perhaps eating each other when they go too long between feedings. Occasionally, one will launch off on its own and grow into something . . . well, a whole lot larger than what you see here.”
Svensen looked at his empty whiskey glass and then back at the cabinet where Tolvern had put the bottle. “So we’re going to be attacked by hundreds of baby leviathans, is that what you’re telling me?”
“Probably not,” Brockett said. “Most likely it will be something else. There are plenty of something elses to talk about. You see the waving hairs? I call those leviathan worms—they’re independent organisms, and they’ll spray you with acid, wrap you in knots, and slowly digest you. The knobby protuberances hold some other creature. I hope to dig one out and take a sample back to the lab for study.”
“What, you’re going in with the marines or something?”
“Of course. It’s essential research.”
This was the first Tolvern had heard of this scheme, and she let her skepticism show on her face. Brockett threw up his hands.
“Surely you didn’t think I’d let this chance slip by, Captain. This is a wonderful opportunity, and I’m going to take advantage of it.”
“You’re no coward,” she said, “I’ll give you that much.”
“Depends,” Brockett said. “I don’t like spiders—they freak me out.”
Svensen snorted. “But flying metal squid-thingies with biting parts are okay?”
“Like I said, it’s a wonderful opportunity. Worth a little discomfort.”
“Out of the question.” Svensen folded his arms. “I don’t have time to babysit you down there.”
“It won’t be babysitting,” Brockett said. “You’ll barely notice I’m there. I’ll be armed and armored. Probably bring a few experimental pulse-type weapons with me. Stuff to disable the native flora and fauna.”
“You mean the plants are going to attack us, too?”
Brockett shrugged. “Technically, they’re not plants. More like a type of bio-mechanical fungus.”
Svensen turned to Tolvern. “And you’re good with this? Your science guy going into battle and everything?”
She definitely was not good with it. The more she thought about it, the deeper her discomfort. “You know, I’m not sure I am. Brockett, you’d better make a case.”
“Here’s one,” he said. “What if this isn’t the only leviathan we face? What if the ghouls have more of them, and we end up repeating this fight under different circumstances?”
“The gods save us if that happens,” Svensen said. He drew in his breath and glanced up at the screen to study the frozen image of the metallic octopus-like creature. “Yeah. Here’s the thing. Some of us are going to die down there. Maybe all of us. Hell, some of us won’t even make it to the surface in the first place. Tolvern, you’re going to lose your science officer if you send him. Have him collect all the data he wants—who is going to analyze it for you when he’s gone, him being the leading expert on leviathans, and all of that?”
“Point taken. But we could sure use more data. Brockett’s right about that part.”
“I’ll grab whatever I can—cut off bits of tentacle, if I can get them.”
“That could work,” Tolvern said. “Run cameras, too. That will be better than any probe.”
Brockett interrupted. “Wait a second—”
Svensen turned on him. “I don’t think you heard me. If you go down to the leviathan, it will be a one-way mission. If you’re as valuable as all of that, how in the icy hells can we justify sending you?”
Studying the star wolf commander’s face, Tolvern knew he wasn’t blustering. He wasn’t maneuvering to keep Brockett out of the action through professional jealousy, and he wasn’t worried about babysitting the science officer down there, either. He did not believe that Brockett would survive the assault.
By this stage, Tolvern had turned realistic and hard. Whatever they could figure out, at whatever cost, might help them win the war. But with a star leviathan on the loose, Science Officer Noah Brockett might be the most valuable person in the fleet. She had very nearly decided to send him in with Svensen’s assault team; now, she made a different decision.
“Svensen, you will assign a man from each crew to collect data—video, audio, observations—and I’ll put a few marines on it, too. And you,” she added, pointing at Brockett, “will stay on Blackbeard and analyze what comes back.”
Chapter Five
Catarina Vargus stepped into the medical facility where they’d put Pierre Fontaine after bringing him over from Scorpion, the warship rescued in the I.F.-IV System. He was no longer wearing the worn, faded Terran uniform, but Royal Navy garb without rank or insignia.
He rose from the chair where the doctor was drawing blood, pulled out the IV, and clamped a wad of cotton over it. The doctor protested, but Catarina waved him off.
“That was a whole lot of trouble, for what?” Fontaine said.
His English was accented with French and peppered with strange vowel changes, but she could understand him easily enough. The dialect reminded her of the Old Church English she’d studied in school.
“The doctors tell me you had an Adjudicator implant in your head at one time. We have to make sure you’re clean before we let you run around unaccompanied.”
“You didn’t see me fighting for my life? Did that look like the actions of an enemy mole?”
“I did see you fighting. And I saw your companion ship die while fighting for its life. But the enemy has tricks. Anyway, we weren’t only worried about treachery. There was a crippling outbreak of blood tongue that de
vastated the Scandian worlds a few years back, and we wanted to give you inoculations for that, as well as test for anything you might have brought back from the other direction. It’s been decades since we had contact with anyone from Old Earth, and the last thing we want to do is introduce a plague.”
He looked somewhat mollified by this. “And who are you? Who do you represent? You’ve been awfully coy since we made contact.”
She looked him over before answering. He was thin, almost gaunt, as had been the others on his undermanned warship. When Void Queen dislodged the new brawler so Scorpion could dock, a glimpse of the pitted, scarred surface showed just how long it had been since Fontaine’s ship had seen a friendly base. A marine who’d inspected the Terran ship told of worn, faded paneling, of sealed bulkheads held together with temporary sealants. Of exposed wiring and sour-smelling air from faulty recyclers.
Fontaine had set into his first meal like a famine survivor, and word had it that his crew had subsisted for weeks on nothing but an algal-protein paste.
Scorpion had shown some impressive fighting skills, that much was for certain. She was bigger and faster than a destroyer and used her railguns like a Scandian star wolf used its pummel guns, and while the railguns couldn’t strike as hard as star wolf weaponry, they had greater range. A fine mid-range weapon, had they been supported by cannon, missiles, and torpedoes.
But a solitary warship dozens of star systems from its home world wouldn’t amount to any help for the Alliance. The only thing Fontaine was likely to offer was information.
Catarina dismissed the doctor, then told Fontaine to return to his examination bed. She remained standing. Still scowling, he sat down, opened a drawer to fish out some surgical tape, and fixed the bloody gauze in place while he waited for her to speak.
“I’ll be frank with you, Fontaine,” she began.
“What do you mean, frank? I don’t know that word.”
“Blunt. Direct. You’ve got one warship. You’re not much use to me.”
“One warship here. What makes you think there isn’t a whole armada backing me?”
The Alliance Trilogy Page 55