Not that it matters, she told herself. It had already overrun the native population and taken control of their world.
“There will be no infection from me,” she said, firmly. “And if I feel ill, I’ll let you know.”
The hatch hissed open. Major Parkinson was standing on the other side, waiting. Alice straightened up as she stepped through, snapping a salute. The older man looked her up and down for a long moment - she thought, just for a second, that he was going to aim another punch at her - and then nodded, curtly. Alice looked back, waiting for him to speak. Behind her, the hatch hissed closed again. It was a relief to know that the headshrinker was on the far side.
Although he’s probably still watching me, Alice thought, with a flicker of irritation. She was used to a complete lack of privacy, but it still grated. I wonder what he makes of our little stand-off.
Major Parkinson smiled. “Welcome back, Alice,” he said. “Stand at ease.”
“Thank you, sir,” Alice said. “It’s good to be back.”
“Said the Lunatics, when they discovered that Earth was no longer their home,” Major Parkinson growled. He turned and led the way down the corridor. “You may have the same problem, of course.”
Alice nodded, although she knew he couldn’t see her. It was unlikely she’d ever be allowed to return to Earth, unless the doctors and boffins found a way to flush the dead or inert viral matter out of her body. It made her wonder precisely where she’d be allowed to go, if she reached the end of her enlistment. An asteroid settlement might be able to cope with her - an artificial environment would have no trouble ensuring that any infection was safely contained - but she doubted that many of them would be willing to take the risk. Perhaps she’d spend the rest of her days in a secure medical facility, having doctors poking and prodding at her until she finally cracked. Or maybe she’d see if her father - and his new wife - could find her an isolated mining settlement. The miners would be so glad to have her that they’d overlook any ... irregularities ... in her records.
Major Parkinson said nothing more until they entered Marine Country and walked into his office. Alice took a long breath, feeling as if she’d come home. The smell of sweaty men was weaker than she’d expected - she could hear the air filters as they worked to cleanse the atmosphere of anything that might be an alien cell - but it was still where she belonged. She took the rickety chair he offered, then accepted a cup of coffee. She knew she wasn’t in trouble, or at least she knew she wasn’t about to get chewed out by her commander for something that might or might not have been her fault, but she was still relieved to be offered the drink. Major Parkinson wouldn’t have offered her anything if he was about to tear her a new asshole.
“I spoke to your subordinates on the mission,” Major Parkinson said. “They all agreed that you handled yourself well, in the finest traditions of the service. There are no concerns about you returning to duty from them.”
“Thank you, sir,” Alice said. It was rare for junior officers, even marines, to be asked for their opinions of their seniors, but her situation was effectively unprecedented. If her subordinates had any doubts, they couldn’t be allowed to fester. “Did they have anything interesting to say?”
“You will, of course, have to go back on the training roster from today,” Major Parkinson said. “You’ve done well, Alice, but you’ve lost a great deal of muscle tone. Still within acceptable limits, of course ...”
Alice winced, inwardly. She’d worked hard to regain her muscle tone, but ... it had simply never crossed her mind that spending several months in bed would weaken her to the point where she had to struggle to go to the toilet on her own. It was galling to know that she’d been so weak that she couldn’t walk from one end of the asteroid to the other, let alone complete a ten-mile forced march across Dartmoor or the Brecon Beacons. She had been so weak that a mere civilian could probably have overpowered her. There was no way, four months ago, that she’d have completed the entry requirements for commando training. She knew, without false modesty, that she’d come a long way. But she still had a long way to go.
And I will, she told herself, firmly. I’ll qualify if it’s the last thing I do.
“You’ll have the next week to qualify,” Major Parkinson said, as if he’d peered into her mind and read her thoughts. He might have done the next best thing. An experienced officer was almost always skilled at reading the men under his command. “You’ll go into your bunk, with your rank in technical abeyance. Fortunately, you’re still receiving the pay for your permanent rank. That could have been a bit of a headache.”
“Yes, sir,” Alice said. She hadn’t been demoted, technically, but it could hardly be denied that she hadn’t been carrying out her duties. It was hard to believe that the beancounters would garnish her pay, on the grounds she wasn’t on active service, yet she’d met enough sour-faced accountants to believe it. Idiots. It wasn’t as if the government’s budget would be ruined by paying her salary. “But I’m not allowed to use my permanent rank.”
“Not yet,” Major Parkinson said. His lips twisted. “You’ll still have to take orders from the sergeant.”
Alice had to smile, even though the sergeant had forgotten more about the military than she’d ever known. “That’s not going to be easy to explain.”
“I’ll write some bullshit into the logs,” Major Parkinson said. “Captain Shields has signed off on it, in any case, so you’re probably in the clear. It will be me who will have to provide a written explanation for any irregularities in the roster. Unless the shit really has hit the fan, back home. They won’t care about you if missiles are crashing down in London and Plymouth has been burnt to the ground.”
“No, sir,” Alice said. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that they were still deep within viral space. Invincible was making her slow way towards the tramline, inching along rather than powering up the drives and running for her life. She took a sip of her coffee, reminding herself that sneaking out might be better than leaving a trail of electronic noise a blind man could follow. “We have to get home first, of course.”
“And the paperwork can wait until we do,” Major Parkinson said. He grinned, suddenly, as his datapad bleeped. “You’ll be pleased to hear that your old comrades are waiting for you in the romper room. I think they want to welcome you back home.”
Alice smiled and finished her coffee. “I look forward to it,” she said. It wasn’t entirely true - she’d been dunked in the duck pond when she’d been promoted to officer rank - but she would welcome almost any kind of hazing, if it meant she got a clean bill of health. “And sir ... thank you for having faith in me.”
“If I hadn’t had faith in you, I would have had you rotated out before we left Earth for the first time,” Major Parkinson said. His tone gave nothing away. “I had my doubts about you, just as I had them about everyone who was assigned to my command, but you proved yourself fairly quickly. Everything that’s happened since ... it wasn’t your fault. You didn’t make bad decisions that led to disaster. I won’t hold your problems against you.”
But you wouldn’t let me come back if you thought I couldn’t hack it, Alice thought. And how could I blame you?
She stood, pushing her doubts aside. “Thank you, sir,” she said. “I’ll see you on the training deck.”
Major Parkinson gave her a toothy smile. “Have fun tonight,” he said. “And prepare to have your ass kicked tomorrow.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
“Local space appears clear,” the sensor officer said. “A little too clear.”
Captain Pavel Kaminov held up a hand before the zampolit could start snapping at the unfortunate officer. The bastard had been stamping around like a bear with a toothache for the last two days, snapping and snarling at anyone unfortunate enough to earn his ire. Pavel had no idea what had gotten into the man, but he had too many other problems right now to care. Alien-1 was heavily defended. The last thing he wanted was to draw the virus’s fleet onto his ship.
<
br /> “Explain,” he ordered. “What do you mean?”
“Long-range sensors show no trace of the alien fleet we saw when we passed through the system two months ago,” the sensor officer said. “The orbital industries are still there, sir, but the fleet itself has gone.”
The zampolit looked up. “Destroyed?”
“Perhaps,” Pavel said, although he doubted it. The Yankee officer in command at Falkirk, two transits down the tramline chain, had orders not to attack the virus unless he believed that a full-scale invasion of human space was imminent. It was a great deal more likely that the virus had launched a full-scale attack instead. “Or they might have set out to wage war on us instead.”
He turned to his helmsman. “Take us back through the tramline, then update Invincible,” he said. There was nothing they could do about the missing alien ships. He had no way to know when the ships had departed, let alone if they’d reached Falkirk. “And then set course for the next tramline.”
“Aye, sir.”
***
“That’s confirmed, sir,” Lieutenant Alison Adams said, thirty minutes after Invincible jumped into the alien system. “The alien fleet we saw has vanished.”
“Either that, or they’re lying doggo,” Newcomb said. He stroked his chin, thoughtfully. “Or they were rerouted to Alien-4 after we went through Alien-3.”
Stephen considered it for a long moment. The timing did work out, he supposed, but he doubted it. Alien-4 wasn’t the sort of place that would be left undefended, even when there was no reason to believe that a war was about to break out at any second. It was far more likely that the Russians were right, that Admiral Weisskopf was already under attack ... or, worse, that the combined fleet had already been destroyed. But there was nothing he could do about that now. They’d just have to wait and see what they found when they reached Falkirk.
“We’ll continue on our current course,” he said. “And we’ll keep our eyes open for trouble.”
He settled back into his command chair as Invincible inched her way across the hostile system. They’d added days to their transit time by coming through the tramline so far from the primary star, something that might come back to bite them now they knew the alien fleet had departed, but there had been no choice. His ship was in no state for an encounter with a flight of alien starfighters, let alone the fleet they’d seen the first time they’d entered the system. Better to take a few extra days to cross the system than be blown out of space.
The hours ticked by remorselessly. More and more data flowed into the passive sensors, each update convincing him that the war had well and truly begun. Alien-1’s industrial base, already formidable, seemed to have doubled or tripled in the last two months ... he would have liked to believe that the energy signatures were nothing more than decoys, but he didn’t dare take it for granted. They had to assume the worst. And that meant assuming that there might be shipyards and industrial nodes that had yet to be located. They couldn’t be taken out before they were located ...
We’ll have to get more survey ships up here, Stephen thought. And then run a sweep through the entirety of alien-held space.
An alarm sounded. “Captain,” Alison said. “Passive sensors are picking up a ... ah, something fuzzy dead ahead of us. It could be a masking field.”
Stephen tensed as a blur appeared on the display. “Dead ahead of us?”
“Yes, sir,” Alison said. “And it is coming right towards us.”
Stephen felt his blood run cold. It could be a sensor ghost, an artefact of Invincible’s cloaking device, but he didn’t dare believe it. The live feed from the other ships indicated that they were seeing it too and that meant that it was more than just a random energy pulse that would be gone within seconds. And yet, if it was an alien ship - or a fleet of ships - how could it have located them? Stephen found it hard to believe that the virus could have pulled off a successful ambush ...
Unless they were tracking us as we fled Alien-4, he thought, grimly. There was so much sensor distortion during the final moments that they might just have managed to stick a cloaked ship on our tail. And then they planned an ambush in Alien-1.
“Helm, alter course,” he ordered, although he was fairly sure it was pointless. The masking field - if it was a masking field - was far too close for any hope of evasion. “Tactical, bring the ship to battlestations. Prepare to launch fighters.”
“Aye, Captain,” Arthur said. “I ...”
The display suddenly sparkled with red icons. “Captain,” Alison said. “They just dropped the masking field! I’m reading over two hundred small craft!”
They buggered up the timing, Stephen thought, as alarms howled throughout his ship. If they hadn't launched the invasion, or whatever they did with the missing ships, they would have been able to meet us with battleships and fleet carriers, not gunboats and shuttles.
His eyes narrowed. The alien tactics didn’t make sense. And that meant ... that meant that he was missing something. The virus could surely have put together a stronger blocking force if it wished. No, it had made a deliberate decision to use small craft. His sensors were picking up a handful of ships lurking behind the small craft - escort carriers, according to the warbook - but they could have deployed something bigger. Hell, it wouldn’t have been difficult to get battleships and fleet carriers from Alien-4 to Alien-1 before Invincible crossed the tramline. They were up to something.
“Launch starfighters,” he ordered. The alien craft were picking up speed, heading right towards Invincible. A handful were already launching missiles - standard missiles - at his ships. “Point defence, stand by to engage.”
“Aye, Captain.”
***
Richard braced himself as the starfighter was catapulted into space, cursing the timing under his breath. He’d had every starfighter pilot under his command in the simulators when the shit hit the fan, trying desperately to smooth the rough edges off before they actually had to follow their new wingmates into battle. He wasn’t sure if the older pilots or the new ones, the ones he’d conscripted from the carrier’s lower decks, were more of a problem. The latter had less to unlearn, but the former had spent too long in their old squadrons. It was hard to get them to work together as a team.
The alien craft closed rapidly, firing as they came. Richard scowled as his sensors updated, reporting that the alien gunboats carried multiple plasma cannons that were apparently capable of engaging multiple targets at once. They wouldn’t have any blind spots, he thought; their main drives had been carefully configured to ensure that their enemies couldn't fly up their rear and blast them out of space before they could alter course. It was rare to see gunboats, certainly outside training exercises, but he had to admit they could be effective in combat. The virus certainly believed they could be useful.
“Engage at will,” he ordered. The gunboats were one thing, the shuttles were quite another. Were they crammed with nukes? Or ... he swallowed, hard, as he realised the truth. The virus didn’t intend to destroy the carrier, it intended to board her. “I say again, engage at will.”
A gunboat flashed past his starfighter, its weapons firing with a savage intensity that surprised him. Richard blew it away, snapping orders for the first squadron to concentrate on the gunboats while the second took out the shuttles. But there were so many of them ... worse, the shuttles were armed too. He saw one of his pilots die because he’d made the mistake of assuming the shuttles were unarmed, giving the enemy crew a clear shot at his hull. There was no time to mourn. Richard killed a shuttle that strayed into his firing arc, then altered course as the remainder of the enemy craft blazed past him and roared towards their target. An alert sounded - enemy starfighters were inbound - but he ignored it. Right now, his priority was the shuttles. The starfighters would have to wait.
“Concentrate on the shuttles,” he ordered. They might not be that dangerous to the starfighters, not compared to the gunboats, but they were still a major threat. “Don’t let them get too c
lose.”
He gritted his teeth. Invincible was pumping out a hell of a lot of fire - and the shuttles were bigger targets than starfighters - but it was clear that some of them were going to make it to her hull. He just hoped they weren’t packed to the gunnels with nukes - or antimatter. The boffins had been promising antimatter for decades. It would be just their luck if it had been the virus, rather than humanity or its allies, that had made the fatal breakthrough. A plasma bolt shot past him, coming from the carrier. He cursed, again. Invincible’s point defence didn’t have time to make entirely sure of its target before it took the shot. The risk of being killed by his own side was unacceptably high.
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