B009NFP2OW EBOK

by Douglas, Ian

  Obviously, that captured fighter was of tremendous importance to the aliens. . . .

  Slan warship

  Low Orbit, 36 Ophiuchi AIII

  1535 hours, TFT

  Cautiously, Megan Connor raised her head above the lip of the gaping hole in her fighter’s dead hull. The Slan had seemed unaware of her skin suit’s light earlier, so she flashed it briefly into the encircling darkness . . .

  . . . and saw weirdly shifting shadows, low, humped masses moving in the darkness.

  Slan. Dozens of them pouring into the cavernous compartment. They were wearing a kind of mesh armor draped over their squat forms, and were carrying glittering, metallic devices that might have been weapons. Connor ducked back into the shelter of her dead fighter.

  She held the Solbeam hand laser, contemplating once again the need to kill herself before they reached her. And she recognized something . . . odd.

  She’d come damned close to using the thing on herself a couple of times in the past hours, but each time she’d decided to wait, just a little. She’d made it this far, she was still okay . . . and the human brain, she was learning, simply could not cling to a fever’s pitch of despair and terror for very long. Oh, the terror was still there, as was the feeling of hopelessness, but the monofilament’s edge to those searing emotions had worn down a bit, had lessened enough that she was able to hold on a few more minutes . . . and a few more . . . and a few more after that.

  The Slan in the hangar compartment seemed . . . agitated. Just maybe, the Marines were on their way in.

  “This is Lieutenant Connor, VHF-140!” she called, using her squadron’s tactical frequency. Her suit radio would not have penetrated the Slan vessel’s hull, but if help was close, she might be able to make contact. “Lieutenant Connor, VHF-140! Does anybody read me?”

  “This is Captain Charles Whittier, USNA Marines,” a voice came back, static-blasted and vanishingly faint. She heard the voice continue for a moment after that, but the words were too distorted to make them out.

  But it was the Marines, here!

  She chanced another look over the edge of her lifeless Stardragon. The Slan appeared to be gathering in front of one bulkhead, 30 meters away. More were arriving moment by moment, coming in from each of the other bulkheads. She did a quick count; there were at least thirty of them in the huge room already, probably more, though it was tough to tell in the glare of her light and the jerk and shift of the moving shadows.

  “Captain Whittier!” she called. “This is Connor! Do you read me?”

  “I read you,” the voice replied. “Your signal is weak.”

  “Listen, if you’re trying to reach me . . . there’re about thirty Slan in the compartment with me. They’re gathering behind a bulkhead like they’re waiting for you to come through.”

  “Copy that. Are any of them with you?”

  “They . . . I don’t think they can see me.” She went on to tell the Marine what she’d guessed about the Slan having difficulty seeing their surroundings in a low-pressure environment.

  “The pressure’s up to one point five, now,” Whittier said. His voice sounded a little clearer, a little nearer. “How high does it have to be for them to see us?”

  “I don’t know. I imagine it will be pretty soon, though.”

  “Okay. We’ll ride with it. Get down under cover.”

  “But I can—”

  “Don’t argue, Lieutenant! Get down!”

  And the bulkhead beyond the waiting Slan exploded.

  Marine Assault One-one

  Slan warship

  Low Orbit, 36 Ophiuchi AIII

  1537 hours, TFT

  Gunnery Sergeant Clegg ducked as the flare of light washed across the crouched Marines. His helmet sensors screened the worst of the glare, but nano-D breachers were powerful stuff. The nanodisassemblers released a great deal of energy in the form of searing heat and light as they took apart the molecules of the target—in this case a low, curving bulkhead between the Marines and the presumed location of the POW.

  “Fireteam Alpha . . . go!” Captain Whittier shouted, and Clegg and three other Marines swept forward, moving through the still smoking breach in the wall.

  After they’d entered the ship, Clegg and Owens had almost immediately begun gathering up other Marines as they’d moved deeper into the alien vessel, reaching platoon strength in minutes. Whittier was First Company’s CO, and he’d shown up with fragments of three different platoons. Colonel Birney, the regimental CO, was holding the beachhead LZ with about fifty Marines; other Marines were moving through the ship, converging on the emergency beacon from the captured fighter.

  Sergeant Patterson had slapped the nano-D charge against the bulkhead, and the Marines had moved back until the disassemblers did their work. Now they were going through.

  Slan were waiting for them on the other side. Lots of them.

  To his left and right, Marines began to die.

  Slan warship

  Low Orbit, 36 Ophiuchi AIII

  1537 hours, TFT

  As soon as the flash subsided, Connor lifted her head above the rim of the crater gaping in her fighter’s hull. Marines in jet-black armor were coming through . . . directly into a maelstrom of enemy fire.

  She wasn’t certain, but it appeared that the Slan could see after all. They acted like it, targeting individual Marines and catching them in multiple beams—electron beams, she thought, because each shot snapped and glared like blue-white lightning, arcing among the Marines and bleeding off into deck and bulkhead and overhead. Three Marines went down in the first salvo, their armor savaged, peeled open and smoking. The Marines returned fire as they advanced, using lasers and man-portable plasma weapons. The Slan armor absorbed and deflected a lot of that energy, but couldn’t block all of it. Slan troops were dying as well.

  She didn’t think the Marines were going to be able to get through that wall of Slan armor, however.

  She saw only one possible way out.

  Marine Assault One-one

  Slan warship

  Low Orbit, 36 Ophiuchi AIII

  1537 hours, TFT

  Sergeant Patterson slumped as what looked like a bolt of lightning punched through his helmet, blasting half of it into white-hot vapor and a grisly splash of red mist. Clegg pushed forward, pushed past the falling body, firing point-blank into the wall of alien Slan.

  Modern combat rarely was fought at such tight, close quarters, and with so little cover. The scene was more reminiscent of a massed bayonet charge out of World War I, of hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches—brutal, inelegant, vicious, and bloody.

  The Marines wavered. Not enough of them could come through the opening in the bulkhead at once to hold against the surge of aliens on the other side. Clegg took a step back, firing from his hip, not bothering to aim because the Slan were so thickly massed in front of him.

  And then, suddenly, it was the Slan who were wavering.

  Clegg wasn’t sure at first what was happening. Those weaving, cone-shaped appendages, each wrapped in something like chainmail mesh, were twisting around to look behind them, to the rear. Clegg followed their alien gaze . . .

  The woman was running directly at the Slan line, coming at them from behind. She wore a utility skin suit, black and tightly fitting and offering almost no armor protection at all, and a bubble helmet, and some sort of flight unit patch on her right shoulder. She was firing a small hand laser into the Slan, catching them in a withering crossfire with the Marines.

  In point of fact, she wasn’t doing a hell of a lot of damage. The Slan mesh armor was absorbing most of the energy pulses from her weapon, but the aliens appeared to be so startled by her headlong rush that they were scattering.

  “C’mon, Marines!” Clegg yelled. “Take ’em down!”

  “Ooh-rah!” several Marines chorused in the ancient Cor
ps battle cry. Lance Corporal Sullivan fired a man-portable plasma weapon that seared through four Slan in a star-hot blaze of destruction. The alien bodies, he saw, burned in the high oxygen content, filling the chamber with greasy black smoke. Even the obviously dead aliens were twitching in horrible imitation of life as the fires consumed them.

  Clegg saw an opening and forced his way through, scrambling over the tops of several dead or disabled Slan. The local gravity—almost two Gs—dragged at Clegg, but his armor employed powered biofeedback that amplified his movements and kept him upright.

  He broke through just as the woman’s hand laser failed, and she threw it aside.

  Reaching out, he grabbed her arm and spun her about. “This way, ma’am,” he said. Her rank tags said she was an officer, a lieutenant, and not even the confusion and noise of combat could derail basic military courtesy.

  “Thank you, Gunnery Sergeant,” she replied. The smoke was thick enough that she’d started drifting off in the wrong direction, but Clegg let his suit electronics guide the two of them back toward the main body of Marines. A Slan rippled in from the right, blocking the way, but Clegg opened up with his weapon and burned the ungainly, domed shape down.

  “We got her!” he yelled at the others. “Start falling back by fireteam!”

  “But we got ’em on the run, Gunny!” one young private screamed, his voice shaking.

  “Move out, Jordan!” Clegg ordered. “Now!”

  Marines helped other Marines, those who were disabled or hurt, and others dragged along the mangled, burnt-out forms of those killed in the sharp, short firefight.

  The Marines would leave no one behind.

  The Slan continued to retreat, fading into darkness and smoke.

  And the Marines retreated back through the twisting tunnels toward the LZ.

  “How . . . are we getting out?” the lieutenant wanted to know.

  “Landing pod,” Clegg replied. He grinned at her. “It’ll be cozy, ma’am. But we’ll fit!”

  They reached one of the Apache Tear assault pods, visible only as a gaping, molten-looking hole in the bulkhead where the pod had eaten through from outside. “In you go,” he said, guiding her. “It’ll adjust to fit.”

  An assault pod normally just fit a single Marine, but the nanomatrix hull sensed the extra passenger and adapted to fit. The two of them nestled down within the pod’s embrace, and Clegg gave the debarkation order.

  The front of the pod sealed itself shut, and gravity vanished as the black teardrop hurled itself away from the Slan vessel. Imagery flooded Clegg’s in-head—a slowly turning view of the receding side of the Slan vessel—and then they were dropping through open space once again.

  “Thank you,” the lieutenant said. “Th—thank you . . .”

  And then she was sobbing, her helmet awkwardly pressed against his shoulder.

  “No problem, ma’am,” Clegg said gently. “It’s what the Marines do.”

  But forty-three Marines had died to rescue this one fighter pilot.

  He hoped the bill was worth it.

  Chapter Fifteen

  12 November 2424

  TC/USNA CVS America

  Low Orbit, 36 Ophiuchi AIII

  1555 hours, TFT

  The Battle of Arianrhod, so far as Captain Gray could tell, appeared to be burning itself out. Most of the Slan warships near the planet were withdrawing. There were other Slan ships farther out—a number of them in the outer reaches of the star system like Tango One—but they so far were holding position, not moving toward Arianrhod and the battered USNA flotilla.

  A respite, then. Good. Maybe the Slan had been hurt as badly as had the human fleet. Gray ordered America and her escorts to enter close orbit, with a thin and ragged screen of destroyers and frigates thrown farther out, at the million-kilometer line. America had been badly hurt in the battle, and needed repairs, and several other ships—the cruisers North Carolina and California, and the destroyer Cumberland, especially—had been savaged by the deadly Slan fire and were in no shape to undergo heavy acceleration.

  Gray was under no illusions about the outcome of the battle. It wasn’t a victory . . . not yet, not until the Slan had left the system and no longer posed a threat to the human ships. Given the disparity in technologies, though, Gray was more than willing to accept a draw and a moment’s rest.

  His first orders were to commence repairs on the damaged warships—especially on America, which had lost much of her forward shield cap. They would need a local water source to top off the ship’s reservoirs before they could do much maneuvering.

  He took the time to dispatch a high-speed courier back to Sol, reporting on the recent events at 36 Ophiuchi—both the sudden and unexpected cessation of fighting, and the defection of the other Confederation forces. Delattre’s ships were decelerating now, and Gray was sure they would rejoin the fleet within the next few hours. What would happen after that was anyone’s guess. As they dropped into orbit, scanners on board America had detected a courier drone leaving the Confederation fleet, no doubt with a request for new orders from Geneva.

  But Gray decided he could face that particular set of problems later, when it was immediate enough to bite him.

  Of more pressing urgency was the Slan.

  Reports from the intelligence officer on board the USNAS Inchon had confirmed both that the Marine assault team had rescued a captured human pilot, and that they’d successfully infiltrated the enemy’s electronics network with an AI hack virus. It was distinctly possible that the Slan had broken off the fight as soon as they’d realized that their computer net had been compromised. The ship attacked, the largest in the Slan fleet, might be their command and control vessel. If so, the other ships might be unwilling to follow orders from an HQ ship that now was controlled by the humans . . . or even to receive communications from that vessel, which might carry an electronic contagion.

  Gray remembered that the ancient Sh’daar, at the Battle of the Six Suns in the Omega Centauri T-0.876gy dwarf galaxy twenty years ago, had also suddenly and unexpectedly broken off from a major battle, a battle that they’d been well on the way to winning. The Sh’daar and their assets appeared to have a habit of breaking off when there was even a chance of losing. An important bit of xenopsychology, that. Humans were more likely to go in, all weapons blazing, no matter what the odds.

  And sometimes, sometimes, that strategy worked.

  “Captain Gray?” The call was from America’s communications officer, Commander Pamela Wilson. “We have an encoded message, single burst transmission, coming through from Inchon. It’s flagged urgent.”

  “Decrypt and patch it through, please.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  A new window opened in his head, and Gray found himself looking at the lined face of LCDR Raymond Villanova, the Marine ship’s S-2. “Captain Gray, sir, there’s been an important new development. I think the Slan want to talk. . . .”

  Gray listened carefully to the rest of the message, as Villanova told him about Chesty2’s discovery.

  “Chesty sub-two” was the name of one of the artificial personalities residing within Inchon’s AI—specifically the subset of artificially intelligent software running the ship’s intelligence department, and which had been copied and inserted into the Slan vessel during the Marine boarding action. Named for Lieutenant General Lewis “Chesty” Puller, with five Navy crosses the most decorated Marine in history, this Chesty had spent the last thirty minutes infiltrating the alien network, mapping it, and looking for a door.

  And it was just possible that Chesty2 had found it.

  Almost nothing was known about Slan technology, and that included whatever it was they used for computers. Hacking into a human-built computer was tough enough, what with passwords and high-level encryption, plus security software running in the background designed to spot and block unauthorized attempts
to break in. When you didn’t know anything about the target operating system, or what it was running on, or even the language of the beings that had built the thing, the task became all but impossible.

  Human-built AIs attempting to penetrate networks used by any of the Sh’daar client races, however, had an important advantage. Human contact with the Agletsch had early on revealed a number of languages—most of them artificial—that had been designed to help the diverse Sh’daar client species communicate with one another. If nothing else, each had to communicate with their Sh’daar masters, no matter what form of physical communication they happened to use. The Sh’daar themselves, at least originally, were not a single species, as it turned out, but a kind of federation of many races, with many different forms of communication.

  How could you run a galactic empire without a common language? There were, Gray knew, races that communicated by changing patterns of color on their integuments, by naturally generated radio, by moving tendrils or other external organs to convey data in a form of semaphore, even by shifting patterns within internally generated electrical fields.

  Spoken language—generating sounds that carried meaning—was perhaps the most common form of personal communication, but even here there was an astonishing variety. The Turusch spoke with two separate voices, each carrying meaning and which, when heterodyned together, produced a third layer of information. The Agletsch themselves spoke by belching air from their upper stomachs through the mouths located in their abdomens, and supplemented the sounds with curious weavings of their four eyestalks that carried emotion.

  The spidery Agletsch, however, widely traveled traders of interstellar information about tens of thousands of worlds and intelligent galactic species, had devised a number of artificial languages—trade pidgins—that allowed the Sh’daar to communicate with the weird zoo of beings that comprised their empire. These pidgins were actually electronic in nature, allowing sophisticated translators worn by the various species to talk to one another, and to speak with native languages stored in the translation database.