Para Bellum

by Christopher Nuttall

  And the zampolit will jump on me if I appear too subservient to my commanding officer, he thought, morbidly. Mother Russia might have accepted his position, and I may have been ordered to follow his commands, but I cannot be too submissive or my career will be destroyed.

  It wasn’t a pleasant thought. He’d read his orders very carefully. If Dezhnev was located, he would have to leave the flotilla and carry out his sealed orders. The politicians might assume that he could do it without causing a breach between Yuriy Ivanov and the remainder of the ships, but Pavel knew better. They were unlikely to succeed in the first half of their mission without surrendering all chance to complete the second half of their mission. Pavel eyed the zampolit’s back with some irritation. The bastard would probably make it impossible to complete the first half of the mission, let alone the second. And there was nothing Pavel could do about it.

  Perhaps I should arrange an accident, Pavel thought. He’s certainly stupid enough to override the safeties on the airlock and walk into space without a suit ...

  His attention was diverted from a contemplation of his government’s many shortcomings when a handful of red icons blinked into existence on the display. An alarm howled a moment later, warning the crew that the system was inhabited - infected, he supposed - by the alien menace. He snapped out a command as he took his chair, ordering his officers to shut off the alarm. They weren’t going to be jumped immediately, not unless the alien sensors and stealth systems were far better than he’d assumed. It was unlikely they’d been noticed. Yuriy Ivanov was a very small target in a very big system.

  “Captain,” his sensor officer said as the sound of the alarm died away. “We have two large stations and five small ships orbiting the planet.”

  Pavel frowned. “What kind of ships?”

  The sensor officer hesitated. “Judging by their power output, I’d say they were cruisers,” he said, finally. “But it’s impossible to be sure.”

  “Yes,” Pavel said, before the zampolit could start being unreasonable about the whole affair and say something the sensor officer would regret. “I understand.”

  He studied the display for a long moment, cursing the alien virus under his breath. He’d read the reports written by the British scientists - and his engineering staff - and noted all the questions they had been unable to answer. If the alien fusion cores were truly as advanced as they claimed, it was quite possible that those cruisers were actually destroyers ... but there was no way to be sure. They might also be faster than Invincible, faster even than Yuriy Ivanov herself. And yet ... the only encouraging sign was that the aliens didn’t seem to have miniaturised their drive nodes. A cruiser-sized ship designed to overhaul Yuriy Ivanov would be nothing but engine. She might catch up with Yuriy Ivanov; she wouldn’t be able to kill her.

  “Direct the probe closer to the ships,” he ordered, finally. If they could get a clear look at their hulls, the analysts would finally have detailed sensor records to examine. “And then relay everything we’ve found to Invincible.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  Pavel forced himself to relax as the probes drifted closer to their targets. His family had a long tradition of military service - his father had been in the navy, his grandfather a soldier on the borders of civilisation - but none of them had told him that being in the military was long hours of boredom mixed with moments of sheer terror. He wouldn’t have understood, Pavel thought; he’d been so thrilled with the idea of wearing a smart uniform that he hadn’t really understood what it meant. Service in Russia’s military was never easy. It had only been a few decades ago that the knout had been formally banned.

  The display updated, time and time again. A small cloudscoop orbited the gas giant, while a handful of asteroid miners moved around a cluster of asteroids. Alien-3 wasn’t the richest system Pavel had seen, but he couldn’t help thinking that there should be more activity surrounding the planets. The virus didn’t seem to worry about developing its worlds as extensively as humanity, although it was possible that it thought it had eternity. Mother Russia’s brief flirtation with communism, over two hundred years old, had floundered on human nature. The virus, practically a single entity in billions of bodies, didn’t need to worry about keeping its people happy, let alone building a capitalistic economy. There was no need to hurry. It certainly didn’t have to handle colonists who demanded the trappings of a modern economy even as they fought to tame a whole new world.

  And then we lost our first colony world, Pavel reminded himself. New Russia was independent these days, maintaining nothing more than cultural ties to the motherland. Who knows what will happen if we lose the rest of the settlements?

  The sensor console chimed. He leaned forward. “Report?”

  “Captain,” the sensor officer said. “There’s a whole primitive settlement on that world!”

  ***

  “It’s thoroughly weird,” Lieutenant Allen Travers said, as he activated the conference room’s projector. The analyst sounded bemused. “As far as we can tell from our probes, there’s only one source of high technology - and transmissions - on the planet’s surface. The remainder is a primitive society with nothing more advanced than horses and carts. There’s nothing comparable to gunpowder, as far as we can tell.”

  Stephen leaned forward, studying the display. The Russians had taken an immense risk when they’d steered a probe into orbit, yet he had to admit it had paid off. The aliens on the surface were very alien - they looked like absurd crosses between humans and spiders - but they didn’t appear to be infected. They seemed to be living normal lives. Or were they? It was impossible to tell. Stephen had no doubt the virus would have infected them, if it could. All the normal calculations about the efficiency of slave labour went out the airlock when the virus was involved.

  “Maybe they’re holding the world hostage,” Commander Newcomb said. “Those stations could easily be bombardment platforms.”

  “They wouldn’t need to bother,” Major Parkinson pointed out. “They could simply infect the entire population.”

  “Assuming they can,” Stephen mused. He looked at Doctor Nancy Drawn, the ship’s chief xenospecialist. “Doctor, can you tell if they’re infected? Or if they’re somehow immune to being infected?”

  “Not from this distance,” Nancy said. She had a clipped voice that reminded Stephen of one of his instructors from the Luna Academy. “Captain, we would need bio-samples to examine before we could tell you for sure. The virus does not appear to be making use of the aliens - the new aliens - for anything, as far as we can see, but we might be wrong. We need to get down there.”

  “That will be tricky,” Newcomb observed. “The enemy cruisers alone pose a significant threat.”

  Stephen was inclined to agree. Invincible could take one or two of the alien ships, unless they carried a completely new weapons system, but five of them would pose a serious problem. And they were - he assumed - fast enough to overhaul Invincible in a stern chase and bring her under fire. And that didn’t include the orbiting space stations. They looked like transit hubs, rather than orbital bombardment platforms, but Stephen didn’t like their power readings. It looked as if they were designed to defend themselves.

  “We could get a marine team down to the surface,” Major Parkinson said. “The trick would be getting them up again.”

  Stephen looked at him. “You think you could get a stealth shuttle through the atmosphere without being detected?”

  “We’ve done it before, on Earth,” Major Parkinson reminded him. “And it was done under combat conditions too, on Clarke.”

  “Clarke was hardly covered by an extensive sensor net,” Newcomb pointed out, in his role as devil’s advocate. “The Indians barely had time to set up their mass drivers. And the planet’s weather masked the shuttle as soon as it slipped into the atmosphere.”

  “We flew a shuttle through the UKADR,” Parkinson said. “That was hardly an undefended region. And we got away with it.”

  “Y
ou also lost a shuttle the second time you tried it,” Newcomb said, dryly. “Yes, I know; the shuttle wasn’t actually lost and the pilots weren’t actually killed. You were still tracked and, if they’d wanted to kill you, they would have killed you.”

  Stephen held up a hand. “Major, we don’t know half as much as we should about the enemy sensor nets,” he said. “If we’re wrong, if you’re picked up by a ground-based detection station, whoever you send on the mission will be dead.”

  Parkinson nodded. “We understand the risks, Captain,” he said, “but my pilots are confident they can slip through the enemy sensor network. They do not appear to have set up a global network. As long as we are careful not to pass too close to the orbiting stations, or the installation on the ground, we should be able to move unnoticed.”

  “You’d still have the problem of getting off the ground and back home,” Newcomb said, slowly. “Are you sure you can make it into orbit without being killed?”

  “In theory, we should be able to escape,” Parkinson said. “It’s basically a question of making a very slow ascent, keeping our power stepped down as much as possible. In practice ... it depends on how alert the aliens are. We got away with it on Earth a few times, Captain, but it proved impossible to minimise the risks. There was no way to predict when we’d be detected or what would happen if someone decided to take a closer look at a transient contact.”

  “And you want to do it,” Newcomb said. He shook his head. “It sounds insane.”

  “It’s doable,” Parkinson insisted. “Ideally, we’d be landing near an alien town, but well clear of any technological installations. We’d then observe the aliens from a distance before deciding what to do. If we decide they’re infected ... we might take one of them as a biological sample or merely continue to watch them. It would tell us a great deal about their social structure - and what the virus does to it.”

  “At the risk of losing whoever we send down,” Stephen mused. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d sent people under his command into danger, but he couldn’t think of any time when the danger had been so ... intimate. If the recon team was captured, the best they could hope for was a chance to commit suicide before they were infected and overwhelmed. “Major, Doctor, I want you to ask for volunteers. You are not to go yourselves.”

  Nancy swallowed. “Captain ... I wouldn’t ask my people to do anything I wouldn’t do myself.”

  Neither would I, Stephen thought. But he couldn’t go down to the surface. The idea of the starship’s commander going on away team missions belonged to bad television programs like Stellar Star, not the real world. We may never be able to recover whoever goes down.

  “You know too much,” he said, bluntly. The virus would learn things Stephen didn’t want it to know if it managed to access Nancy’s memories. “Your staffers are a far lesser risk.”

  He ignored her stricken look. “Major, have your pilots refine the plan,” he ordered. “I’ll review it when they’re finished and make my final decision then.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Parkinson said.

  “Until then, we will watch the aliens from a safe distance,” Stephen added. It was unlikely they’d learn much more from long-range observations, but it might yield something useful. “Dismissed.”

  The compartment emptied rapidly, leaving Stephen alone with his thoughts. He’d sent people into danger before - he reminded himself of that again and again - but this was different. He’d never sent someone into a position where he’d expected him to die, let alone an entire recon team. There was a very good chance that the recon team would be trapped, unable to retreat, if they weren’t blown out of the air when they tried to leave. Stephen was all too aware of the hard choices admirals and generals had made, during the First Interstellar War, but now ... he wondered, grimly, if he had it in him to make the choice. There were good reasons not to risk the recon team, volunteers or not. He didn’t have to send them down the planet.

  Yes, we do, he told himself. We need to know what’s really happening on Alien-3.

  He gritted his teeth, feeling - once again - the loneliness of command. The prospect of losing twelve or so of his crew was bad, but the risk had to be balanced against the need to gather more data. There was no way they could land an recon team on Alien-1. If they learnt something new about the virus, something they could turn against it ... what if the natives were immune? What if their immunity could be duplicated? What if ...

  Don’t be so hasty, he thought, sharply. There was a very real danger of seeing only what he wanted to see. The virus might have infected the alien population years ago. It wasn’t as if a society that didn’t even have gunpowder could put up any real resistance. The virus might just have hit the planet with a biological bomb and then moved on to bigger targets. We need to be very careful.

  He didn’t want to do it. But he knew, all too well, what the answer had to be.

  The intercom bleeped. “Captain,” Parkinson said. “The pilots have refined their flight plans as much as possible. They feel the flight is doable. And my entire complement of marines volunteered for the mission.”

  “Very well,” Stephen said, quietly. There was no longer any time for delay. “The mission is authorised. We will launch the shuttle in two hours.”

  And may God have mercy on us, he thought, as he closed the connection. If they get one sniff of our presence, the shuttle and her crew are doomed.

  Chapter Twenty

  “I must have been mad,” Lieutenant Travers bemoaned. “Why did I ever agree to this?”

  Alice bit down the urge to make a snide remark about knowing the job was dangerous when he took it. Lieutenant Allen Travers was a naval officer, true, but he was an analyst who specialised in xenobiology rather than someone who expected to be charging into the teeth of enemy fire. Alice was mildly surprised that he’d volunteered to join the mission. He’d had the standard firearms and self-defence training the navy gave to all its personnel, but beyond that he had nothing. The rifle slung over his shoulder looked terrifyingly out of place.

  “You’ll be fine,” she said, trying to channel her school’s matron. The senior matron had been a horror, hated and feared in equal measure, but the junior matron had been a solidly reassuring presence to children who had never been away from home before. “We’ll be down before you know it.”

  The interior of the stealth shuttle was a little unnerving, she had to admit, even to someone who had been using assault shuttles for most of her adult life. It was cramped, with every last square inch of free space crammed with seats and supplies for twelve marines and five researchers; the bulkheads, formed of a composite that was supposed to make it harder for active sensors to see the shuttle, looked weak, as if they were made of plastic. Alice knew the shuttle wasn’t quite as fragile as it looked, although she also knew that it wouldn’t matter if the aliens detected them. A single HVM or plasma pulse would blow them to atoms before they even knew they were under attack.

  But then, an assault shuttle wouldn’t be much better, she thought. One of the reasons everyone had dismissed the idea of serious interstellar warfare before First Contact was that transporting an invading army across light-years and landing it on even a lightly defended world was a logistical nightmare, although - the cynic in her noted - it hadn’t stopped the world’s militaries from building formidable spacefaring navies. Getting down to the surface through a blaze of enemy fire would rely more on luck than judgement.

  She winked at Travers, then pressed her armoured gauntlet against the shuttle’s receptor, hooking her suit into the craft’s passive sensors. Alien-3 was slowly coming into view, a handful of icons representing the alien stations and starships holding position over the green-blue world. The shuttle’s pilot was bringing them in carefully, gliding through a sparse network of sensor pulses that felt a little perfunctory. Alice, who had trained to penetrate places that were far more heavily defended, couldn’t help thinking that the virus didn’t really care about Alien-3. It wouldn’t h
ave taken much effort to construct a sensor network that would have made it far harder for the marines to land without being detected.

  We haven’t got down yet, she reminded herself. The stealth shuttle was slow, compared to even a civilian model. It would be hours before they reached the planet’s atmosphere, where the real excitement would begin. Don’t count your victories before you actually win them.

  Travers coughed. “How long until we get out of here?”

  Alice made a show of checking the timer, although - after more assault landings than she cared to remember - she was all too aware of the passage of time. “Seven hours until we hit atmosphere,” she said, calmly. “Consider yourself lucky. You could be on one of the early stealth shuttles.”

  The younger man - it was odd to realise that Travers was actually a year or two younger than her - gave her a sharp look. “What was wrong with them?”