by Douglas, Ian
Whatever it might be, the Slan ship didn’t appear to have noticed him as he drifted toward it, angling to pass over the quarter of the vessel that had already been ripped open by multiple AMSO rounds. He was still getting power readings from the ship; weapons and drive were on-line. “Demons, Demon Nine!” he called, identifying himself. “Got a big target, here, not in the warbook. Designating it as Tango-two-four. Taking a shot . . .”
His Starhawk’s primary beam weapon was a “pee-beep,” a StellarDyne Blue Lightning PBP-2 particle beam projector firing high-energy protons accelerated by a fierce projected magnetic field. He waited until he had a clear shot into the damaged enemy warship’s interior, then triggered multiple rapid-fire bursts. White light flared within the ship’s interior as the proton bolts hit home.
And then he was past, accelerating and jinking as the enemy’s defenses opened up, seeking him. . . .
His AI pointed out the anomaly.
“Hey . . . Skipper?” he called.
“What is it, Nungie?”
“I’ve got a radio signal coming from the Slan I just toasted. Tight beam, highly directional.”
“Are they surrendering?”
“No, sir. It’s a distress call, Code Red-Alpha. Shit, sir, it’s one of ours!”
“I’ve got the signal,” Mackey replied. “IDs as VFA-140.”
“What the fuck, sir? They’re not on the fleet roster!” He was wondering if the Slan were sending a spoof, a fake message.
“No, but they’re listed as planetary defense out of Caer Arianrhod. Sounds like the Slans might have a POW.”
“Black Demons, CIC,” another voice said over the tactical channel. “We’ve been monitoring your chatter. Break off your attack on Tango-two-four, and stand by to offer close assault support.”
“Copy that, CIC,” Mackey said. “What’s going down?”
“We think there’s one or more human prisoners on that Slan ship,” CIC replied. “So we’re sending in the Marines.”
Chapter Fourteen
12 November 2424
Slan warship
Low Orbit, 36 Ophiuchi AIII
1427 hours, TFT
Megan Connor crouched inside the ruin of her captured fighter, still in darkness, still weighed down by twice Earth-normal gravity, wondering how long it would be before they came for her.
There were two distinct values for “they”—humans and Slan. She was praying for humans . . . but knew how slim that chance actually was.
Her fighter’s main systems were down, singularity generator dead, weapons off-line, life support gone, AI fried. All that was working was the crash kit, a pod containing emergency supplies against the possibility of a crash on a hostile world. There was a battery, a nanomedic kit better than what was built into her suit; recharge nano for her suit’s air, food, and water cyclers; and an emergency radio transmitter smart enough to locate nearby friendlies and ping them with a tight-beam data burst.
There had to be human ships out there. If the Slan vessel had been hit, the attackers must be human, right? But she had to assume that the Slan would pick up any radio message beamed from the bowels of their ship . . . and nearby human ships might be too distant, now, or moving too swiftly to receive her SOS. Or the Slan warship’s structure or defensive fields might block any radio signal, or . . . or . . . or . . .
All she could do was stay here, crouching in the darkness, waiting for someone—human or Slan—to show up.
If it was Slan, she didn’t have many options. When she’d reached her fighter, she had at least been able to get at the emergency survival pod behind the seat. Now she had a weapon—a Solbeam Mk. VII hand laser. She’d not been able to get at it when they’d come for her before to drag her out of the wreckage. She held it now, though, feeling its heft in the darkness. It was something, at least, and comforting in her gloved hand . . . but the weapon had an output of only half a megajoule, with ten expendable battery caps for ten shots. That was plenty for dealing with most predators on a planetary surface, but if the target had any armor at all the thing was little better than a toy.
A comforting toy, to be sure, but a toy nonetheless . . .
Her suit’s environmental readout was worrying. The surrounding air pressure, she noticed, had ceased its fall toward hard vacuum, and now was slowly rising once more. That meant either that the Slan were overpressurizing a still-leaking interior, or that their repair systems had sealed the leaks. Either way, the pressure now was at eight tenths of an atmosphere, and rising. At some point, the Slan would again be able to “see” their surroundings, would no longer be effectively blind.
A big part of the question lay in how sensitive Slan hearing was. That one she’d encountered in the passageway a few moments ago had been blind in half an atmosphere. Their sonar sense had evolved in an environment with about five Earth standard atmospheres; sound traveled faster, farther, and more clearly at higher pressures. What was their threshold? Humans could certainly still hear sounds at half an atmosphere or less, and it wasn’t until you got pretty close to hard vacuum that all sound vanished. Perhaps Slan evolution had settled for a “good enough” lower threshold of two or three atmospheres. She wished she knew. It would be nice to know how long she had before they came looking for her.
Megan Connor only recently had become a USNA citizen. She’d been born and raised on Atlantica, one of the larger seasteads, a free-floating city slowly circling the North Atlantic outside of the territorial waters of any land-based nation. Her mother had been a North American while her father had been from Ireland, and she’d received from them both a strong appreciation for freedom coupled with an almost libertarian mistrust of big government. When the Confederation had stepped in and taken over all of the Atlantic seasteads, claiming sovereignty over the Earth’s dying oceans, Connor’s family had fled west, moving first to New New York, then to the nation’s capital at Columbus. They’d applied for citizenship and been refused; relations between North America and the rest of the Confederation—especially Pan-Europe—had been deteriorating for some time, and there was talk of deporting Ewan Connor back to Great Britain.
Megan had stopped the deportation order by volunteering to join the USNA military. By doing so, she’d been granted citizenship—and with that she could formally request citizenship for her parents and younger brother as well. She’d gone through the training downloads at Oceana, and a year ago she’d been posted to VFA-140; she’d not expected her first deployment to be to the ass end of creation, though. The Confederation’s Dylan Research Station at Arianrhod was small, cramped, and had nothing like the amenities of larger and more civilized colonies. The handful of military personnel at the base had been fully integrated into Caer Arianrhod’s general population. Most of the personnel stationed there had been Pan-Europeans, too, and that had put her at the center of a lot of unwanted attention . . . especially after she’d gotten into a knock-down, drag-out with Corrado Passeretti and nearly gotten herself arrested. She’d forgotten about the Confederation’s damned White Covenant laws—no public discussions of religion, and no attempts at proselytizing. She’d made the mistake of asking the planetary environmentalist how he reconciled his Catholic dogma with his Randomist beliefs concerning the evolution of life, she’d been ordered to keep her libertarian filth to herself, and things had gone downhill from there.
The civilians at the base had called her “Rebel” after that, and the nickname had stuck. Her seven months at Arianrhod had rapidly devolved into nightmare. The other members of her squadron had been okay, since they all were USNA Navy; hell, most of them hated the Confederation almost as much as she did, but with Dylan Base integrated into the larger facility it had been all but impossible to avoid the locals.
She wondered if the base was still there, if any of the people who’d been stationed there with her for the past half year were still alive.
Bad, bad though
ts to be having while waiting in the darkness for the monsters to come . . .
She spent some time considering opening her helmet . . . but the atmosphere, she guessed, would take some time to kill her. The carbon dioxide might put her to sleep, but the effects might be countered by the high levels of oxygen.
She didn’t know the chemistry well enough to predict what would happen, and she feared lying in the darkness, strangling on poison that might take long minutes to kill her. The laser . . . yeah, she could use it, a single, quick bolt through her brain . . .
She wasn’t quite that desperate however, she found, not when there was even the slimmest of chances that Confederation forces were engaging the Slan ship. The emergency pod was transmitting. They might be coming.
No, she could hold on a little longer. . . .
Marine Assault One-one
Slan warship
Low Orbit, 36 Ophiuchi AIII
1510 hours, TFT
Marine Gunnery Sergeant Andrew Clegg watched the objective expand in his in-head, a ship larger than a USNA cruiser, its side torn and gashed by high-velocity AMSO rounds. He was encapsulated within an Apache Tear, a sleek, black teardrop of nanomatrix fired moments ago from the belly of the Marine transport Inchon, one of some 650 identical teardrops in the first wave—the bulk of 1st Battalion, 3rd Regiment, 1st Marine Division. MAPP-2 personal assault pods were designed to get a large number of Marines across distances of up to a few hundred kilometers in a hurry, to get them there and put them down, with their equipment, as quickly as possible, and with a minimum of casualties. The light-drinking qualities of the pod’s nanomatrix made them all but invisible, even at close range, and the dedicated AIs residing within the shape-shifting hulls could fly the pods through a sharp and random series of maneuvers to throw off enemy point defense weapons.
Even so, this assault had been expensive already. The Slan had seen them coming and opened up with antiproton beams, slashing wildly at the sky. The battalion was down to fewer than four hundred by the time they gravdecelled in for the docking.
Exactly how the Slan had “seen” them was still unknown. Data provided by the Agletsch suggested that the species used sonar to perceive their surroundings. Judging from the electromagnetic fields surrounding their ships, they used magnetism, radar, and lidar to see in a vacuum, with the return signals converted to audio displays by their sensor suites, but how these were perceived by the beings was a mystery. Getting inside an alien mind, knowing how they thought or how they saw the universe around them was still all but impossible.
No matter. If the Marines could see them, the Marines could kill them. Clegg’s black teardrop slipped past a tangle of torn and half-melted structural supports well inside the target vessel’s hull and slammed into a bulkhead. The leading surface of nanomatrix switched its programming, becoming a nanodisassembler surface that melted through the unyielding polycarbolaminate bulkhead in seconds, then opening into the ship once it hit gas instead of solid.
His pod gave him the specifics of the atmosphere inside the alien ship: nitrogen 41%, oxygen 28%, ammonia 6.3%, carbon dioxide 5.6% . . . a hot, wet, rather nastily poisonous soup with an overall pressure just a bit higher than that at sea level on Earth. Didn’t matter; he was wearing assault armor, a bulky suit as ink-black as the Apache Tear’s hull. He dropped through the opening into the alien ship, twisting as he felt the tug of internal gravity and landing heavily on his feet.
The ship’s interior was lightless, hot, and wet, the supersaturated air steaming in the cone of light from his helmet. His suit told him the gravity here was about twice Earth’s—1.94 Gs. Non-spin generated, too, which meant the Slan had a pretty advanced technology, compared to Earth’s. Human ships still needed to rotate hab modules around a central axis in order to mimic gravity enough to keep the crews healthy.
Turning, he glimpsed movement in the darkness, shadows jittering on wet, black walls. His armor’s light showed something big and flat and rubbery-looking, a squashed bell-shape with a couple of weaving tentacles up top bearing massive, fleshy spindles. He triggered his Mk. 17 laser, sending an invisible ten-megajoule bolt into the target. The thing came apart in a messily wet explosion of liquid and partially burned flesh.
More movement ahead . . . but this resolved itself into another armored Marine. The tactical net in Clegg’s head identified the Marine as PFC Carol Owens. “With me, Owens,” he snapped.
“Right, Gunny,” she replied. “Which way?”
He gestured past her, farther up the lightless passageway. “Signal’s coming from that way.”
On his in-head, Clegg saw the green blips representing others of the assault group winking on as they entered the alien ship. Tactical data feeds from all of the Marines began building up a picture, a map, of their surroundings.
The passageways were wide and low, only about a meter and a half from deck to overhead, and Clegg and Owens both had to stoop forward to navigate the lightless path. Their suit lights gleamed off black, dripping-wet walls that looked unpleasantly organic. Clegg tried hard not to think about intestines. . . .
The mission of the USNA Marines—originally the United States Marine Corps—had changed a great deal over the past six and a half centuries. They’d started as shipboard soldiers and sharpshooters, firing down onto the decks of enemy ships from the rigging, then added amphibious landings to their repertoire, storming ashore on enemy-held coastlines to secure beachheads for the troops to follow. For a long time, they’d served as a kind of elite but generalist special forces, and more than one U.S. president or Congress had tried to eliminate them as redundant.
As Humankind began its diaspora to the stars, it had taken its wars with it . . . and the Marines had followed. They still served in the ancient roles of shipboard police, of landing forces, of elite special operations personnel, but in addition they’d gone back to their earliest roots, serving as close-assault troops tasked with boarding enemy ships, usually for purposes of intelligence gathering, but also for the purpose of rescuing POWs. The Marines off the Inchon had been tasked with both objectives. Emergency radio transmissions from inside the disabled Slan ship proved that there were human captives on board . . . or at least a captured Stardragon fighter. But the fact that the ship was a larger, different design than other Slan vessels encountered so far suggested that it was some sort of command vessel. That was logical, too, if they’d taken a human captive aboard. Presumably, the Slan were as curious about humans as the humans were about them. It was tough fighting a foe whose very natures—both biological and psychological—were largely unknown.
“S-2, Assault,” a voice said over the tactical net. “Good job! We’re into the system.”
S-2 was Lieutenant Commander Villanova, the intelligence officer on board the Inchon. A number of the Marines were cross-trained in xenointelligence work, with special AIs riding in nanoinfiltration pods that melted into bulkheads, tracked electronic circuits, and followed them into the local equivalent of a computer network. Those AIs would go to work attempting to crack both the alien language and their computer operating systems. The data would at the very least reveal how the Slan ships worked, possibly reveal their weaknesses.
And at best, it might permit the USNA fleet to communicate directly with the beings.
In any case, half of Clegg’s mission was now complete, since the AI insertions were autonomous and would complete their tasks automatically. The other half was to rescue any human POWs on board.
Clegg didn’t think about the second, unspoken part of those orders. If he couldn’t rescue the human captives, he was to make sure the Slan couldn’t take them back to their homeworld, or learn anything more from them.
He tried to think of killing any Slan prisoners as doing them a very large favor. . . .
Slan protector Vigilant
Low Orbit, 36 Ophiuchi AIII
1524 hours, TFT
The enem
y, the sixty-times-sixty times 3600-times damned Nah-voh-grah-nu-greh Trafhyedrefschladreh, had breached the ship at dozens of points, were inside the Vigilant, apparently converging toward the central docking bay. Clear Chiming Bell listened to the three-dimensional spacial representation of the enemy forces, occasionally giving orders to its scattered shipboard forces, trying to throw up a screen around the advancing monsters.
It didn’t help that its soldiers were still very nearly deaf. The ship’s internal pressure was coming back up, but slowly, slowly, like partial sunrise back home. Vigilant’s crew had put on emergency respirators, but were still groping about in soundless low pressure.
The ship’s internal sensors, however, were feeding data from passageways and compartments throughout the ship to the main computers, and those in turn created a sonic picture of the ship within Clear Chiming’s mind. The Slan had evolved from communal subsurface animals living in tunnel mazes on the night side of a tidally locked world, emerging from the greater to the lesser night to hunt food animals and drag them back to the burrows. Their physiology and, more, their psychology revolved around the concept of myriad underground passageways. Even if sonar wasn’t working, individual Slan were comfortable in close, enclosed spaces. The ship’s command staff could relay instructions by radio, guiding the soldiers into position.
Like numerous other communal species across the galaxy, the Slan were organized in a kind of caste system—brute workers and soldiers, administrators and breeders, scouts, designers, and engineers. Clear Chiming Bell was cht’!k’k’t’!cht’k’k, administrative caste of the third level, trained from hatching to oversee the activities of an entire sub-hive. It was used to seeing the larger sound-picture, and to giving orders to workers and soldiers as though those other hive-members were natural extensions of its own body.
The central docking bay. Why would they be interested in that?
Of course. The alien fighter. And when Clear Chiming Bell focused his instrumentation on that compartment, he picked up the repetitive pulse of radio chirps—an emergency beacon.