by Ian Douglas
“I need my clothes,” he managed to say, though the effort seared his burning throat.
“Sorry, fella,” the voice said. “We don’t have ’em and you don’t have the time if we did. I need you to sit up as soon as you think you can manage it. Here, let me have the towel. . . .”
The room, he saw, was filled with naked people being ushered along by a handful of space-suited figures. The room was freezing cold, a sharp and abrupt shift from the temperature-neutral environment of the tank.
“Please,” he said. “What is happening?”
“No time! Think you can stand? Good. Go with that group over there. Quick, quick!”
Kammler stumbled forward on cold bare feet.
The terror grew worse. He’d seen scenes like this, exactly like this, decades before—before his escape through time. At Auschwitz . . . crowds of terrified, naked people in a shambling press, herded through cold, dark passageways toward a room behind a massive steel door, toward a room with a sign above the door reading Duschen.
Showers.
“Raus, Juden! Bewegt euch! Schnell! Schnell!” The memories, the screaming memories came flooding in, filling his brain.
Kammler shrieked as his knees buckled under him, and he collapsed.
Two hours had passed since the two TR-3Bs had departed from Hillenkoetter’s flight deck. Carruthers looked at his senior aide, who was seated at a nearby console monitoring the ship’s communications channels. “Colbert!”
“Sir?”
“Status update.”
“TR-3B Alfa and Charlie are now on the ground, Admiral. They report that 1-JSST is loading the refugees as we speak. Estimated liftoff . . . they say another ten minutes. TR-3R Delta has recovered on the flight deck. Medical personnel are seeing to the refugees and the wounded, sir.”
“Any problem from the aliens?”
“Not that anyone’s mentioned, sir.”
Carruthers allowed himself to relax ever so slightly. Perhaps they were going to get away with this after all. Like Hunter, he had deep reservations about trusting the aliens, especially the Saurians. Vashnu had told them repeatedly not to trust the ugly little creatures, but he didn’t need the reminder.
What he still needed to give some careful thought to was what disciplinary actions he was going to take. Duvall and Hunter both had been operating out of the very best of motives, but that did not excuse rank insubordination and direct violations of orders. Damn it, the chain of command needed to be respected.
In a far corner of the flag bridge, Vashnu was in quiet conference with King and Kozlov, and Carruthers watched them narrowly. He didn’t trust them either. Not the beings that called themselves humans from the future, and not the so-called ambassadors. Carruthers had heard endless stories back on Earth and at Darkside about aliens infiltrating the highest levels of every government on Earth, of alien influence behind the scenes as they brazenly manipulated everything from stock prices to oil futures to international politics to government social policy. World leaders were puppets controlled by aliens . . . or by beings who might as well be aliens despite their claims to the contrary. According to some, Earth was already owned by alien powers, and they’d quietly invaded the planet and taken it over without firing a single shot or landing a single spaceship on the White House lawn.
He’d dismissed those stories, or most of them, as sheer moonshine . . . but lately he’d begun to wonder. That aliens were present on Earth was undeniable. So was the fact of wholesale cover-ups and disinformation from the government. The question soon became . . . why? Why the secrecy? Why the transparent lies?
Why a policy of deception that had dominated human politics for the past seventy-some years?
As one of the cognoscenti, Carruthers knew the official line. If humanity knew the truth, people wouldn’t be able to handle it. There would be panic . . . riots . . . revolution . . . the collapse of every human institution from the stock market to the Vatican.
But sometimes the official line just wasn’t enough. What were the visitors really after?
“Admiral!” Colbert called. “Sensor department reports an unknown spacecraft has just come up alongside!”
“What?”
“It’s pacing us, sir! Matching course and speed!”
“Show me.”
On a big monitor above Colbert’s console, a view of space came into focus: myriad stars across a jet-black sky. The twin suns of this system were not visible.
In the center, a silver disk gently moved from left to right.
“What is it? Xaxki?”
“Don’t know, Admiral. It looks like a Gray Sports Model.”
“Sports Model” was the slang term for one of several extraterrestrial spacecraft recovered by human operations over the years, and one supposedly had been given to humans as part of an exchange program of some sort.
Carruthers doubted that the saucer alongside was one of the human ships, though.
“Captain Groton has ordered our weapons systems to track the unknown, sir.”
“Good. I—What the hell?”
On the flag bridge, just in front of Carruthers’s command chair, a point of light had winked on, then expanded into a fuzzy silver sphere some five feet across. And within the depths of that sphere . . .
“Sound the alarm!” Carruthers yelled, but it was already too late as small figures poured out of the sphere and onto the flag bridge deck. At first he thought they were children, children in black armored suits and carrying—
Energy bolts snapped, the air stung with ozone, and Admiral Carruthers pitched back against his command chair . . . and died.
Captain Groton whirled at the admiral’s shout, turning in time to see the first armored figure emerge from the blurred sphere and shoot Carruthers in the chest. A second figure emerged close behind the first, turning its weapon on Colbert and several other aides on the flag bridge.
The flag bridge was aft of the main bridge and elevated like a stage perhaps six feet high. Vashnu and the two ambassadors turned and dived for the edge; Kozlov was cut down from behind, but King and Vashnu leaped off the stage as Groton yelled, “Vac doors!”
Massive panels slid from deck and overhead at the edge of the stage to meet as a single airtight door, sealing the two bridge compartments off from one another. The system was designed to allow crucial compartments on board the Hillenkoetter to be sealed in the event of a hull breach, but it worked now to isolate the invaders boarding the ship. Groton could hear yells and screams from the far side of the partition. He’d just sealed eight or ten men off from any possible escape, but there were no weapons on the bridge, no way to fight off the intruders.
“Where the hell did they come from?” he demanded.
“Quickly!” Vashnu said, rising from the deck. He appeared to have injured his arm in the fall. “Maneuver the ship!”
“Why?”
“So that they . . . look there!”
A bright white point of light appeared above the main bridge deck, swiftly expanding into a sphere of blurred space. “Helm!” Groton yelled. “Acceleration now!”
The Hillenkoetter lurched forward and the sphere vanished.
“That is a Saurian ship alongside,” Vashnu told him. “By matching course and speed they can use their dimensional transport system to open a pathway between their ship and this one.”
“So if we’re each on different vectors, they can’t link up?”
“It is extremely difficult to do so,” Vashnu told him. “Not impossible, but . . .”
“You’re hurt.”
“A broken arm.” The Talis gave a dismissive shrug. “I’ve switched off the pain.”
“We’ll get someone to look at it. Helm!”
“Sir!”
“Stay focused on that alien ship and don’t let them match course and speed with us!”
“Yes, sir. They’re a lot more maneuverable than we are, though.”
“Random movements, then. Change course and velocity randomly.�
��
“Yes, sir.”
“Fire control!”
“Fire control, aye!”
“Target that ship out there and burn it out of my sky!”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Captain!”
“What is it, Commander Haines?”
“We’re getting in reports from all over the ship, sir. We’ve been boarded.”
“What, more of those pint-sized freaks?”
“Saurians, sir. In battle armor and with advanced weaponry.”
“How bad is it?”
“I don’t know, sir. But bad. They’re in Engineering . . .”
Shit! That meant the Big-H might not be able to keep maneuvering for much longer. Or firing her weapons. And when that happened . . .
“McKelvey!”
“Yessir!” the fire control officer snapped back.
“Talk to me.”
“Target is too damned maneuverable, sir. It’s jumping all over the damned sky!”
“Keep after it.” So long as the alien saucer was maneuvering like that, it couldn’t board the Big-H. And maybe the humans would get lucky.
Groton touched an intercom switch. “S-2.”
“Here, Captain,” Philip Wheaton’s voice replied.
“What the fuck is going on aboard my ship, Commander?”
“S-2” referred to the intelligence section of a given military unit. Besides providing information on the enemy—where they were and what they were doing—the S-2 section on board ship managed security clearances, intelligence oversight, and physical security for the vessel.
And Hillenkoetter’s physical security had just been compromised big-time.
“We’re getting reports of unknown alien incursions on board, Captain,” Wheaton replied. “Seven so far. Two in Engineering, one at the power plant, two in PryFly, two on the main flight deck . . .”
“They’re on the flag bridge, too.”
“Eight, then.”
“Can you stop them?”
“Working on it, sir. Spain and Milhouse are on the flight deck. Hot firefight, sir.”
Lieutenant Commander Milhouse was the security officer; Chief Ed Spain was the master-at-arms.
But . . . shit again. Aliens on the flight deck suggested the nightmare possibility that they planned to switch off the kinetic fields maintaining the atmospheric pressure on the ship. If they accomplished that, the entire ship would depressurize in minutes, save for isolated pockets that managed to get the vac walls closed in time.
Briefly, Groton considered ordering all vac doors closed and sealed throughout the ship just in case, but that would seriously hamper efforts to get from one compartment to another, and thoroughly screw their chances of organizing against the invaders.
“We’ve got the weapons locker secured, sir,” Wheaton continued. “We’re trying to link up with the JSST guys who just came back aboard.”
“Okay,” he said, keeping the stress out of his voice. “Keep me informed.”
“Yes, sir.”
A hot firefight on the flight deck. That was not good.
“Stay down!”
Duvall took his own shrill-shouted advice and crouched behind the landing gear of the TR-3R, parked on the flight line in Bay Twelve. Alien energy bolts slammed into the spacecraft’s hull a few feet above his head, splattering him with droplets of molten titanium. Carefully, he peered past the strut, took two-handed aim, and squeezed off a laser pulse. He saw movement across the broad open deck space—a small figure in black moving in the shadows—but he couldn’t tell if he’d hit anything or not.
He’d been in the middle of an argument with Ann Seton. She and the other three JSST people were insisting that they go back with him to rejoin their unit, now that the first batch of refugees had been turned over to Hillenkoetter’s medical section. He’d been explaining for the third time that as far as he knew, the rest of 1-JSST was already on the way back to the carrier and there was no point . . . when a blurred sphere of emptiness had opened in empty air a dozen yards away and space-suited kids had started pouring out. Marine sergeant Randolph Brown, standing just a few feet away, had gone down as a high-energy bolt flashed against the shoulder and upper torso of his suit.
The personnel gathered around the lowered ramp of the TR-3R had dropped immediately, unshipping their weapons and trying to return fire. Seton and Gunny Grabiak both had their Starbeam 3000 laser rifles in action, and Duvall saw at least one of the aliens pitch backward as a section of its body armor exploded.
“Duvall!” a voice crackled in his helmet. “Lieutenant Duvall, this is Spain!”
The ship’s MAA. Duvall had yelled for help as soon as the shooting started. “Go ahead, Chief!”
“Sir . . . we’re in Bay Five. What’s your position?”
“Bay Twelve!”
“Can you see the Kinetic Field Control Center from your position?”
“I don’t know, Chief. Where is it?”
“Forward end of the flight deck. You see a bulkhead with a big number 8 on it?”
“I see it, Chief.”
“And windows up high, just above the eight?”
“Yes, Chief. There’s a ship’s ladder. . . .”
“That’s it! Can you reach it?”
“Negative, Chief!” He ducked back behind the shelter of the landing strut as three more alien lightning bolts snapped past his head or flared blue-white against the transport’s hull. “We’ve got six . . . maybe seven hostiles right below it—some in the recess beyond the ladder, some behind some equipment crates stacked up in front of it.”
“Can you take them out, Lieutenant?”
Another bolt struck the TR-3R, splattering him with hot metal droplets. He was very glad he was wearing the protective BioSuit, though with much more of this kind of treatment it would have some serious holes in it pretty soon. “I’m working on it!”
“Okay, sir. Try to keep the little bastards busy, will you? I’m going to try to reach the hostiles from behind.”
“Right, Chief.”
“And if you see them going up the ladder, for God’s sake take them down! If they reach the kinetic shield control room, they could drop the field and open the ship to space!”
“Copy that!” He took aim again and fired . . . a clean miss.
Damn it.
Hunter was in the cockpit of the TR-3B, a narrow space with just enough room for two seats side by side. He didn’t have room enough to turn around . . . but from here he did have one hell of a view.
The big transport was rising in her gravitics smoothly into the upper atmosphere, on the point of transiting into space. The planet was below the atmosphere showing two distinct layers. Above was a thin band of blue consisting mostly of nitrogen, but beneath that was an orange cloud deck—a witch’s brew of methane, ammonia, and organics. The cloud layer was patchy and tended to open up quite a bit in sunlight; Hunter didn’t understand the chemistry involved, and was glad he didn’t have to.
Ahead, the two suns of Zeta Reticuli gleamed in darkness, a bright white disk a little smaller than the sun as seen from Earth shining brightly a little ways off from its companion, a brilliant star perhaps as bright as the planet Venus.
“How long to the Big-H?” he asked.
Lieutenant Manuel Ortega was the craft’s pilot. “Normally, sir, we’d take our time and pull a couple of orbits to catch up. Maybe three hours.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, indicating aft. “With the current passenger manifest, though . . .”
“Pedal to the metal, Lieutenant,” Hunter told him. “The sooner we’re back aboard the Big-H, the better.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” He made some light-fingered adjustments on the touch screen in front of him. “How’s twenty minutes sound?”
“Better. I’d settle for ten.”
“Right now, Commander, the Big-H is on the other side of the frickin’ planet! We have to catch her. We can push c in this thing, but that’s going in a straight line. Turning corner
s around a planet, that’s something else.”
“Right.”
“Uh-oh . . .”
“What is it?”
“Trouble on board the Hillenkoetter. I can’t quite . . .”
“Put it on speaker.”
Ortega touched a screen.
“. . . boarded us and we are under attack! Repeat, hostiles have boarded us and we are under attack! TR-3B Alfa and Charlie, do you copy?”
“Let me have that,” Hunter said, pointing at a microphone. Ortega handed it to him and opened a channel. “Hillenkoetter, Hillenkoetter, this is Hunter on TR-3B Alfa. We copy! Where do you want us?”
“TR-3B Alfa, we suggest you stay clear.” The voice sounded like Groton’s.
“Captain Groton? Is that you?”
“It’s me, Commander. Saurian boarders came in. Not sure how they did it. Vashnu is talking about some sort of dimensional transporter. Admiral Carruthers is dead, and the flag bridge is under their control. We have reports that Saurians are in Engineering, on the flight deck, and in other key areas, as well. I repeat . . . stay clear!”
Hunter thought furiously. He had two TR-3Bs loaded with over forty combat personnel, plus three hundred–some rescued civilians. He didn’t know how many Saurians were on the Big-H, or how many shipboard personnel were fighting back, but he also knew that if the aliens took over the Hillenkoetter the humans were royally screwed. The TR-3Bs couldn’t make it back to Earth—they didn’t have the time-bending gravitic stardrive. They would be stuck at Zeta Reticuli and Hunter didn’t think the Xaxki would be interested in helping them.
If the two transports could get back onto Hillenkoetter’s flight deck, they might have a chance. The refugees could stay safely aboard the TR-3Bs, while the JSST attacked the Saurians from an unexpected direction.
But there was a problem with that. Also with the group were thirty Grays and eight Saurians—though whether they qualified now as prisoners or as refugees was anyone’s guess. They were telepathic, though, meaning they could easily be in touch with their kin on board the Big-H.