The Dotari Salvation

by Richard Fox

  “Open. It,” Adams said.

  Lo’thar pried open a control panel and reached inside. “The ships inside may not be assembled,” Lo’thar said and the entire team groaned. “And I may not be able to open the bay doors.”

  “Anything’s better than a knife fight in a corridor with the banshees,” Max said.

  Hoffman listened to their conversation but filtered out the nonessentials. He tracked the progress of his rearguard by the sound of battle moving closer and closer. An energy beam struck a wall he’d just passed at the last corner. With a final glance at the door Lo’thar was working on, Hoffman moved back toward the hallway and crouched against a corner for cover. He leaned out to aim his rifle.

  “Duke and Garrison, I have you,” Hoffman said. “Get back here. I’ll cover.”

  The breacher and the sniper each pulled a grenade and lobbed it down the hallway before sprinting back to the rest of the team. The double explosion killed the leading edge of the banshee swarm and collapsed the deck plating.

  Garrison finished the race slightly ahead of Duke, despite being fifteen pounds heavier.

  “Last man,” Duke said as he chugged past Hoffman.

  Hoffman flipped his ammunition selector to shot and fired marble-sized beads into the advancing mass of banshees. They were bigger and more muscular than a normal Dotari, with pieces of armor, weapons, and technology melded to their form. Most of these were covered with onyx plates and cybernetic vision components hooked cruelly over their yellow eyes. Their scarred, chipped beaks peeked out from the armored wedge of their heads, and they screamed with such force that Hoffman could’ve sworn that blood and bits of their throats flew ahead of them.

  “LT, I got you. Fall back,” King said.

  One of the lead banshees stumbled and its brethren stomped it to the deck as they scrambled over it. There were so many they slammed each other against the walls and shoved each other forward. The passage shook with the violence of their advance.

  “Lo’thar! How’s that door coming?” Hoffman yelled into his helmet mic. He fired one more burst, then turned and ran without looking at the advancing threat, placing his trust in his team, counting on their rounds to slow the banshee advance. Pushing his combat armor to its maximum potential, he set a new personal record for the fifty-yard dash.

  “Working on it! Something is weird with the code. Should be universal.” Lo’thar cursed in Dotari. “There! Finally!”

  By the time Hoffman reached the hangar, Duke, Garrison, and Max were holding positions at the threshold of the giant cargo door, firing on the advancing enemy in a steady rhythm to conserve ammunition.

  “Reloading,” Duke said.

  “Covering fire,” Garrison and Max said.

  The banshees were so close and so numerous now, the Strike Marines’ gunfire barely slowed their progress.

  “Reload—” Max yelled, his voice cutting out.

  Garrison let loose several three-round bursts at the small groups of armed banshees, silencing two of the energy weapons. Duke switched from headshots to throat shots for reasons he didn’t stop to explain.

  “Pull back and let’s get these doors shut,” Hoffman said, then conducted a head count once the doors slammed together. Garrison whipped out a cutting torch and began welding the door shut.

  After so many hours in sewage tunnels and hallways, the hangar felt like a coliseum. There was a broad path down the center with some sort of rail assembly that Hoffman assumed was for launching ships into the void. He identified several workstations and arms lockers in the corners and nonessential areas. What caught his eye were rows of the Dotari shuttles in storage cradles.

  “The hangar is clear,” Booker announced as she strode into the light from the shadowy recesses of the large space.

  “You see anything that looks void-worthy?” Hoffman asked.

  “Everything looks packed for storage,” Booker said. “Imagine that. Maybe our resident Dotari pilot has some better news.”

  “Nothing but time,” Hoffman said as he jogged toward the medic and the Dotari pilot while still giving orders to the team. “Garrison, door?”

  A banshee fist hit the opposite side of the door, beating a small lump in the metal next to Garrison’s face.

  “Slagged the locks and the hinges,” Garrison said, “time to staple her shut.” He pulled a cylinder of metal off his belt and unrolled a thirty-centimeter-long sheet shaped like a flat crossbar with flared ends like a big letter I. The crude sheet of metal was thin, a raw material straight out of a ship engineer’s workshop.

  “I never thought I’d use one of the staples, but here we are, lost in deep space in an ancient ship full of psychotic alien cyborgs with nothing but my skill, imagination, and good looks to save us.” He welded the improvised crossbar across the seam of the closed door and gave each bead of the weld a double-hatch cap.

  The door rumbled as banshees beat against it.

  “Does he always talk like this?” Lo’thar asked.

  Adams leaned forward and smiled. “Only when he’s concentrating.”

  Lo’thar shook his head, judging the tactic from a distance. “Why not damage the servo mechanisms in the door? That will almost certainly snap that—”

  “Just break it? OK!” Garrison snapped out his breaching hammer and slammed the spike into the servo housing. There was a screech of metal as he wrenched it out and impaled the other servo box.

  “Really hope there’s a way out of this bay. We keep painting ourselves into a corner, our luck will run out eventually.” Adams drew her Ka-Bar from her forearm armor sheath, paused to sigh dramatically, then slammed the blade overhand through the left servo. After cranking the blade back and forth several times, she moved over and took out the right servo as well.

  “Never a dull moment in the Strike Marines.” Garrison worked the blunt flame across the crossbar. “Which is why we get paid an extra two hundred bucks a month. That money definitely makes experiences like this better than some logistics post on Triton…if I ever see my recruiter on the street…”

  “Keep concentrating, Mr. Garrison,” Lo’thar said.

  Garrison rapped knuckles against the half-welded-on crossbeam.

  “Anything else we should break?” he asked Lo’thar.

  “Don’t…ah…That’s quite enough. Can you make her stop?” Lo’thar shifted from foot to foot and gripped his hands together nervously as Adams kicked in a maintenance hatch at the bottom of the door frame. “This ship is a treasured artifact of my people. It is our history and heritage.”

  Adams examined her work, then sheathed her knife with a wink at Lo’thar. “Every artist has her medium. Marines break stuff.”

  “Yes, I remember now.” Lo’thar breathed the words with little enthusiasm as the emergency lights in the shuttle bay blinked off and the banshee assault on the door petered out.

  Each member of the Strike Marine team switched to infrared optics and helmet lamps.

  “They think they have us locked inside,” Lo’thar said.

  Booker finally walked away from the ships in discouragement and joined the rest of the team near the doors that were barricaded against the banshee swarm.

  “They do.” Hoffman grabbed Lo’thar by the shoulders and spun him toward one of the Dotari shuttles. “Figure out if you can get that ship up and running.”

  The lieutenant stared at the very large and very shut bay doors at the opposite end of the bay. “Nothing quite like having our backs to the wall at the ass-end of nowhere.” He moved toward three of his idle Marines. “Garrison, take Adams and Opal. I want every possible entrance to this place secured against those things.”

  “For the love of God,” Garrison muttered as he walked. Adams and Opal followed him without interrupting his grumbling.

  “What was that, Lance Corporal Garrison?” King grunted as the trio passed.

  “Happy to be here, Gunney,” Garrison said. “Opal, yank the framework of those crates off. I need something to weld.”
>
  Opal pulled apart metal crates and interior door frames. Adams carried them by the armload to Garrison, who welded them across any opening large enough for a banshee to smash through as though he was trying to break a speed record. Sparks flew all around him as he worked.

  Hoffman signaled King over. “Do an ammunition and equipment count. I want to compare it with what my armor computer is telling me. Booker, inspect the team and advise me of any unreported injuries.”

  Without the flying sparks of Garrison’s welding torch, darkness gave the place the feel of an eerie green cathedral. Hoffman’s enhanced optics magnified details on the Dotari ships. They preferred larger wings and more maneuver jets on their shuttles than Terran engineering, which made the alien ships far more graceful in flight, but significantly more difficult to pilot.

  Bas-relief sculptures of the ancient Dotari crewmen and symbols scrolled around the most utilitarian archways. What made them truly strange was the shape of the archways—larger at the top like an inverse tetrahedron but not quite. The shuttle doors were ovals that opened on hinges at the top of the frames.

  The hangar seemed both mystical and dangerous with Dotari words scrolling across arches of doorways. Relative silence only increased Hoffman’s dread.

  Instead of using colored lines like those found on most Terran flight decks, this hangar had paths bordered by descriptions, instructions, and warnings he could not read without Lo’thar’s frequent and excited explanations. Hoffman thought the ceilings were unnecessarily high and grand. Even the distant ceilings were inscribed with careful detail, as though the creators of this Dotari fleet had intended the ship to last forever.

  “Some of what you are seeing is… how do you say it… graffiti of a long voyage. Do you not observe the difference?” Lo’thar said.

  Hoffman shook his head, then stepped across the launch railings, staring at the old ships as he formulated a plan. The shuttles appeared to be asleep, covered with a thin layer of frost.

  “Lieutenant Hoffman.” Lo’thar hustled away from a mothballed shuttle and pointed at large mechanical wheels on the side of the bay doors. “The manual controls are still operational. We can open this to the void.”

  “Small favors,” Hoffman said. “None of us can fly, Lo’thar. These shuttles void-worthy or not?”

  “Still assessing.” The Dotari bent his head and went back to the shuttle.

  “It’s like a tomb in here,” King said.

  Hoffman nodded.

  “The Xaros—or the top banshee, if there is such a thing—are smart enough to cut all power to this area. They’re either readying an all-out assault or are about to blow the doors and suck us into space. Either option is bad. No time to waste,” Hoffman said. “Lo’thar, how we looking?”

  Lo’thar paced near the mothballed shuttles. “So old…and they’re broken up for deep storage.” He stopped near one and opened the cockpit door.

  Booker threw up her hands. “Really? I hadn’t noticed. Well, except for these here without engines…or wings. Aren’t most Dotari shuttles atmosphere-capable like our Mules?” She shook her head, talking to herself in a loud voice. “Don’t mind the medic. What could she know about void-capable transports? She’s just a girl…” She thrust a finger toward a ship parked near the end of the flight deck. “This one doesn’t even have doors!”

  Hoffman and the other Strike Marines watched and waited, splitting their attention between Booker’s increasingly theatrical tirade and Lo’thar’s reverent approach to the ancient shuttles.

  Lo’thar played with the controls. “No power source, no wings. Would take me eight hours to make it flight-ready with a Dotari maintenance team.”

  “No power source?” Booker asked. “None of these even have batteries?”

  “It taxes the system.” Lo’thar shrugged.

  “Fuel?” Hoffman asked.

  “Neither are in this bay,” Lo’thar said. “Which is different from my experience. In the event of an emergency, having such components in different bays means—”

  “I think we can appreciate the situation just fine.” Hoffman beat his fist against the handrail and looked at the door Garrison had welded shut, then to the bay doors.

  Lo’thar ignored them as he looked at a row of cargo containers along the wall. “And we’d have to find the parts. Hmm…I don’t recognize some of these controls.”

  Hoffman flinched. “It gets worse?”

  “The equipment I know has a thousand years of design evolution since all this was manufactured. The capacitor controls are labelled with a colorful euphemism Dotari teenagers use for their genitalia.” Lo’thar frowned as he studied the cockpit. “Something of a language shift. This can’t be right. Did they really call the brake a…”

  Without warning, thunder boomed through the hangar as the entrance shook from an impact.

  “I think the banshees just got reinforcements,” King said.

  Hoffman pointed at the mechanical wheels, called “dogs” on Terran ships, next to the bay doors. “Seal up your suits. We’re going for a walk.”

  “Get on that wheel and heave to,” King said, closing his visor and running systems checks on his armor as he hustled to comply with the order. He gripped the wheels and put his back into it. It moved slowly and with a groan like an ancient tree about to fall.

  Opal leaned over King pushing higher on the wheel. Hoffman and the others found their own places and put their backs into the effort.

  Atmosphere bled out of the hangar as the large doors opened inch by inch. Warnings popped on Hoffman’s visor as he looked at Lo’thar, then pulled him away from the work team to fix his helmet seal. Inside the helmet, the Dotari’s eyes were wide with alarm.

  “What do you mean, ‘going for a walk’?” Lo’thar asked.

  “The banshees ever operate in a vacuum during the fight on Takeni?” Hoffman asked. He could still feel the vibration of the banshees banging on the door but could no longer hear it without air pressure to carry the sound waves.

  “No…we only fought drones ship to ship.” Lo’thar leaned over and looked into the widening gap open to the void. “The noorla don’t have helmets. But we do!”

  “Strike Marines improvise, adapt, and overcome,” Hoffman said. “This armor comes in handy most days. Team, follow me.”

  He stepped through the opening and mag-locked his boots to the exterior of the hull. Time wasn’t his friend, but he took a moment to look around. The exterior of the Kid’ran’s Gift remained dark despite the activity inside. The rest of the Dotari fleet floated in absolute silence.

  Hoffman shuddered, paused, then activated the comlink in his helmet. “Clear. Bring ’em out, Gunney.”

  King brought the team out in good order, setting Opal on overwatch with his oversized gauss rifle.

  Hoffman sent an alert to Max’s helmet. “Get on the comms to the Barca ASAP.”

  “On it,” Max said, dropping to one knee as he swung his backpack off and unpacked his communications gear. “Going to be tough without line of sight.”

  With several quick movements, he unrolled a whip antenna and sealed the base to the hull with a suction clamp. Grav locks and magnets could disrupt certain comm frequencies, so he extended a shorter antenna from his armor, then nodded to Hoffman.

  “Do a radio pulse,” Hoffman said.

  “In the clear? The banshees will know right where we are.”

  King turned in a circle, weapon ready. “You think those uglies chasing us don’t know we’re here?”

  Max extended an antenna from his backpack, then typed quickly on his left forearm screen with his right hand. “Sending.”

  “...this is Barca. We are receiving poorly. Copy?”

  “Strike Marine Crimson Team, we copy. Stand by for message.”

  “...say again?”

  As Max repeated the protocol several times, Hoffman listened in to his conversation with growing dread.

  “We’re being jammed. Barca commo techs should realize that
and switch to freq hoping to compensate…come on, you squid amateurs.” A few heartbeats later, Max flashed a thumbs-up and an open channel flickered on Hoffman’s visor.

  “Barca, we’re on the ventral hull, just above a shuttle bay. How do you copy?”

  King pointed over the edge of the Dotari ship hull. “Here she comes now.”

  “We have you on visual. Relay to the Breitenfeld the Kid’ran’s Gift is compromised. Active enemy presence,” Hoffman said.

  Max shook his head. “Radio’s not getting through. No way those banshees broke our freq crypto this fast. The computing power—”

  “Not for the Xaros.” Hoffman’s mouth went dry. Earth’s entire military had shifted from advanced computers to near analog controls before the Ember War as a safeguard from the drone’s hacking. Shifting back to networked systems had been slow since the conflict ended. Just how susceptible the Barca and the Breitenfeld were to the Xaros was a terrifying question.

  “Max, go IR line of sight,” Hoffman said.

  The commo tech pulled a different antenna up from his back and bent it toward the approaching ship. The tip snapped open into a dish.

  Staring at the ship that seemed a thousand miles away, Hoffman flinched when his helmet alerted him of an IR channel communication from the Barca. A generic avatar for the ship commander popped into his visor.

  “Hoffman? We lost all contact with Captain Bradford and his team several minutes after he made entry. What’s going on in there?”

  Hoffman felt distinct tremors emanating through the hull and looked around for the source. An armored door rolled back to reveal one of the anti-meteor guns unlimbering.

  “The ship is compromised—”

  One of the Kid’ran’s Gift counter-asteroid turrets rose behind Hoffman’s team, a massive cannon that could shoot a shell the size of a Marine. The armored mechanism swiveled to track the corvette.

  “I thought those were as dead as the rest of the ship!” Adams exclaimed.

  “What the hell?” Garrison ducked as he turned to look.

  Hoffman snatched his rifle off his back and set it to a high-power shot. “Lo’thar, where do we hit it?”