by Ian Douglas
What was their range? How far apart could two Saurians be and still be able to think at one another? How far away did a Saurian have to be from a human to read his mind? Hunter had no idea.
He was afraid they were about to find out.
“How far behind us is TR-3B Charlie?” he asked the pilot.
“About three hundred miles, sir.”
All of the Saurians and Grays brought along from Velat were on board the other shuttle, Charlie. Hunter had not wanted to mix them with the rescued humans, many of which were in near-psychotic states after their ordeal. There were too many of the former prisoners to put all of them on one TR-3B, so Hunter and Layton had worked out a half-assed solution. Two hundred and three refugees were on board Alfa, along with Hunter’s Alfa Platoon. One hundred refugees were on TR-3B Charlie, plus Bravo and Charlie Platoons and all thirty-eight aliens. Before lifting off, Hunter had ordered Master Sergeant Bruce Layton to keep the aliens under heavy guard, and to keep them sequestered from the refugees in the shuttle’s upper passenger deck. He wanted to get them back to the ship alive.
Things would have been so much simpler if he could have just killed them all. But there were rules about stuff like that.
“Give me a channel to TR-3B Charlie,” he said.
“Here you are, sir.”
Hunter took the mic again. “TR-3B Charlie, this is Hunter. Let me talk to Master Sergeant Layton.”
“Layton here, sir. What’s up?”
“You heard the alert from the Big-H?”
“Yessir. What are we going to do about it?”
“I’m concerned about our special passengers. About them listening in.”
“I was wondering about that, too, sir.”
“Okay. Listen close. I’m not too concerned about the Grays, but those Saurians are a real menace. Put some armed men behind them, and give them orders: if they feel anything crawling into their minds, they’re to kill the prisoners. Got that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’re going to dock with the Hillenkoetter at its forward lock. Pass the word to your pilot.”
“Sir? Why not go into the flight deck?”
“Because we may have hostiles there. Right?”
“Copy that, sir.”
“Hunter out.”
He hated lying to his own people, but there was no other way. With any luck, the Saurians would read Layton’s mind without him even knowing, and pass the word to their buddies on board the Big-H. If they were sincere about their desire to surrender, well, no harm done.
And now he just hoped the bastards weren’t reading his mind from three hundred miles away.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Meeting an advanced civilization could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus. That didn’t turn out so well.
Stephen Hawking, Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places, 2016
Hans Kammler, heavily sedated, was adrift in a world of dream . . .
He’d been distantly aware of the stab of a needle in his wrist, of people placing him on a stretcher and carrying him out of that basement, but the noise and jolting had all swiftly faded, and he was now . . . someplace else.
He floated within a universe of extraordinary color, of sensation, of movement, of joy . . . a joy so alien in texture he could only register its touch as terror. Some part of his tortured mind knew that all of this was a hallucination. Odd how he could feel such a flood of free and happy—even orgasmic—emotions, and have those unfamiliar emotions fire such terror in his thoughts.
There were alien beings here as well, myriads of them, beings of every conceivable shape and size and form, and quite a few that were inconceivable, as well. Kammler floated among them, feeling himself, his mind being sucked down into a vortex of madness. There were six-meter worms, sinuous and writhing, with twelve black eyes encircling what might be a mouth. There were things like gray pillbugs with segmented backs and complicated underparts. There were faces, horrible faces drawn from sheerest nightmare, gaping lamprey mouths filled with rasping teeth and surrounded by Medusa-like tendrils. There were blobs of jelly unfolding in the light, alive with inner, rippling patterns of light visible through transparent flesh. There were things like geometric shapes constantly turning themselves inside out as they somehow shifted through multiple dimensions. There were—
Why are you here?
The words thundered within his brain.
What are you? Why are you here?
Kammler wanted to reply, wanted to beg for help, but he couldn’t stop screaming.
Duvall leaned around the landing strut and snapped off two shots from his laser pistol in rapid succession. A pull on the trigger a third time set off a single warning chirp over his helmet radio; the weapon’s battery had been completely drained.
He thumbed the battery release and fished in his hip pouch for another. Damn! Only one left. He snapped it into the pistol grip and looked for another target. Why the hell did they make these things only good for four shots? Or why didn’t his flight BioSuit come with a full backpack PLSS with a longer lasting battery? He had to make every shot count, but the targets were small, fast, and maneuverable. He didn’t think he’d hit anything yet.
Across the flight deck, a small, black figure made a sudden dash up the ship’s ladder toward the elevated control booth for the magnetokinetic induction screens that kept the ship’s air from spilling out through the open flight deck. The bastards seemed determined to get up there.
Grabiak and Seton were behind Duvall, facing the other way. Several more of the Saurian commandos had appeared on the other side of the ship, threatening to catch the three humans from behind.
It was up to him. . . .
Duvall gripped the laser pistol in two hands, sighting carefully. He’d just realized that he’d been leading his targets slightly. If his pistol had fired lead slugs at eleven hundred feet per second, they would take a fraction of a second to travel all the way to the target—not very long, certainly, but just enough to miss against a target that was moving quickly and erratically. A trained shooter, Duvall had been automatically allowing for the targets’ speed and distance.
But a laser pulse across a hundred feet was, for all practical purposes, instantaneous.
He aimed dead center as the armored figure reached the door to the control booth and squeezed the trigger.
Hit! The Saurian’s armor flared in a burst of white light, and it staggered, hitting the ladder railing, then pitching over and falling eight or ten feet to the deck.
“Good shot, Lieutenant!” Seton called over her shoulder.
Duvall measured the long distance between his position and that ladder.
If he could make it across that open deck. . . .
Hunter leaned forward in the TR-3B’s cockpit, peering through the windscreen at the long, cigar-shaped bulk of the Hillenkoetter which had just come into view. The carrier was moving erratically, using its gravitics to shift and dodge and change course every few seconds. The Inman was farther off, staying clear of the Hillenkoetter’s drunken walk. Closer to the carrier, a point of light dodged in an apparent effort to match course with the behemoth. “Look at that thing move!” Hunter said. “What the hell is it?”
“Saurian ship,” the pilot replied. “Sports Model. Fifty-two, fifty-three feet across, sixteen feet high.”
“Is it armed?”
“Don’t know, sir. It’ll at least have energy weapons for vaporizing meteors and space junk that get too close. Whether it can hurt the Big-H, or us . . . can’t tell you.”
The TR-3B was unarmed, and there was nothing they could do about the alien ship, save keep a close eye on it. If it decided to attack them, it was game over.
But it appeared to be totally fixated on the Hillenkoetter.
“What about the other ships? Can they help out?”
“Don’t think so, sir.” The pilot shook his head. “That hostile is sticking so close . . . I don’t think Inman or the others can get a clear shot wi
thout hitting the Big-H.”
“Okay,” Hunter said. “Get us in close.”
“You want to go in by the bow?”
“No. The flight deck.”
“But you just told Charlie—”
“So that the Saurians would pick that thought from Layton’s mind, and tell their friends on board the Big-H.”
“Ahh . . .” Hunter could see the light dawning in the ship’s pilot. “We’re not going to be able to board with them jittering around like that.”
“I know,” Hunter replied. “Open a channel to the Big-H.”
“Here you go, sir.”
“Hillenkoetter, Hillenkoetter, this is Hunter. We’re going to try to board. Please stop maneuvering so we can do so.”
“Alfa . . . we copy and will comply. But for God’s sake make it quick! If we don’t maneuver, we might get more bad guys jumping in from the fourth dimension!”
“Roger.”
The TR-3B began accelerating. Ahead, the Hillenkoetter stopped her random movements across the sky.
And the Saurian ship, detecting an opportunity, moved in for the kill.
It was a long, long way across that open deck to the ship’s ladder leading up to the kinetic field control room. But the black figures had vanished—called away, perhaps, on some other mission. There was not going to be a better chance.
“I’m gonna try to get to the control booth!” Duvall said.
“Go for it, sir!” Grabiak replied. “We’ll cover you!”
Crouching low, expecting an energy bolt out of the shadows at any moment, Duvall ran for the access ladder. Several small, armored bodies lay scattered about on the deck, but there were also human forms as well, broken and motionless.
To his left, a point of white light winked on . . . and then swelled into one of those blurred spheres.
“Keep going, sir!” Seton yelled. “Go! Go! Go!”
Grabiak and Seton opened fire on this new threat, loosing bolt after bolt into the unfolding alien vortex.
Duvall kept going.
Just before he reached the foot of the ladder, a Saurian stepped out of the shadows to his right, leveling some kind of weapon at him. He snapped off an instinctive shot without slowing his pace, and was rewarded by a shrill, gurgling cry as the being fell backward. A second being appeared from the same shadows, and Duvall shot that one, too.
Then he collided with the metal ladder . . . hard, grabbed the rung, and spun around. A hundred feet behind him, Saurian commandos were spilling from the light-distorting impossibility of the sphere, firing their weapons at Grabiak and Seton as they emerged behind the two JSST soldiers.
One of the humans was hit—Duvall couldn’t tell which one. The BioSuited figure twisted away and dropped in the half-g gravity, smoke and hot ceramic armor everywhere. The surviving human kept firing at the attackers, taking shelter behind the TR-3R’s landing strut.
Duvall snapped off another shot from his laser, but there was nothing more he could do to help from here. He pounded up the ladder and palmed the door.
Two human bodies lay sprawled on the deck, the control booth watch officer, presumably, and another. A Saurian stood above the control panel, its helmeted head turning as Duvall burst in. He raised his laser pistol . . .
. . . and heard the despairing whine over his helmet speakers warning of a dead battery.
Damn! Four shots per battery was next to freaking useless! He shifted his grip and hurled the weapon straight at the alien as hard as he could, then leaped, arms spread. The pistol bounced off the Saurian’s helmet in pieces—cheap junk—but Duvall collided with the being with a crash, driving it backward into the control panel. Duvall outmassed the creature three to one, but he felt its twisting, wiry strength as it tried to wriggle away from him. Grabbing the strangely elongated helmet in both hands, he slammed its head hard against the deck . . . and again . . . and again . . .
When it stopped moving, Duvall stood up, slowly and panting. He was now in command of the control booth, for whatever that was worth. Now, how was he supposed to hang on to it?
The alien’s weapon lay on the deck nearby. It looked weird, black and silver and all smooth curves, no angles at all, and he couldn’t even guess what it used as a trigger.
Hell, he was having trouble deciding which was the business end.
“That’s it!” Hunter said, watching as Hillenkoetter dropped onto a steady course and speed. “Punch it!”
The long, slender cigar shape of the Hillenkoetter swelled rapidly in size. Hunter could see the central flight deck port brightly lit from within, a long, flat slit in the vessel’s hull a hundred yards wide. Instinctively, Hunter braced himself for an impact, but the TR-3B’s pilot was a true artist in balancing the ship’s gravitic field. He slowed at the last moment. “Shit!”
“What is it?” Hunter asked. The shuttle had come to a near-halt outside the landing bay.
“The force field . . . it’s locked!” the pilot said. “It won’t open if we try to go through!”
“I thought it was automatic—the field cutting out then coming back up!”
“Depends on how the thing’s set, sir.” The pilot pointed at a screen. “That queries the control booth and reports whether it’s locked or not, see?”
And the screen said “fields locked.”
For a moment, Hunter wrestled with the incongruous vision of David Bowman outside the recovery lock of the Discovery in Kubrick’s 2001. Even he knew that image. Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
Duvall dropped the alien weapon. A slightly more pressing issue was visible on a large wall-mounted monitor. An external camera had focused on an oncoming TR-3B as it accelerated toward the landing bay. A warning light flashed, and he read the legend “containment field locked” on the instrument panel. That shuttle was coming in for a landing, but the force field would not be coming down for it. He scanned the booth’s controls desperately, looking for . . . anything. A button, a knob, a touch screen. . . .
Hunter’s heart was hammering in his chest. They could not hang around out here for long. That alien saucer was on the far side of the Hillenkoetter, but it would swing around to this side at any moment, and when it did . . .
“Can you connect me with the control booth?”
“I think so. Try that. . . .”
“Kinetic field control booth, this is TR-3B Alfa! What the hell is going on? Open the damned doors!”
“I’m working on it, Commander,” a familiar voice came back.
“Duvall? Is that you?”
“Double-D at your service, Commander. I’m just trying to figure out what to push.”
“Look for ‘manual override,’” the pilot said. He glanced up at Hunter. “I’ve stood watch in that little box,” he explained.
“Got it!” Duvall said. “You should be clear now.”
“Thank you, Double-D,” Hunter replied.
“Watch your ass coming into the flight deck, Commander,” Duvall said. “Hostiles are on board. There’s a firefight in the landing bays!”
“Affirmative.”
The TR-3B surged forward, accelerating hard, slipping through the containment shields easily, then flaring suddenly to a hovering halt, then setting down gently in the deck. Damn, that pilot was good! Hunter felt his weight fluctuate, then drop to about half normal as the pilot switched off the shuttle’s gravitics. Hunter hurried back to the main passenger compartment. “Listen up, people!” he shouted into the crowded room. “Civilians . . . stay put! All of you! Just One, check your weapons and gear, and form up at the ramp. And watch yourselves—it’s a hot LZ!”
He heard the multiple snicks of weapons being checked and safeties going off.
An absurd thought clammered at the back of his mind for attention, and he grinned. “Just like Blackbeard’s pirates,” he called. “Are you with me?”
The chorused response came back, a thunderous “Arrr!”
“Hoo-yah!” He led the platoon to the ramp access. At least the atmospheres
matched, inside and out, and they wouldn’t have to cycle through the airlock a few at a time. With a shrill whine, the ramp dropped, the ventral doors swung wide, and two platoons of the 1-JSST banged and clattered down the ramp.
A bolt took down Lieutenant Carl Bader halfway down the ramp, searing in from a stack of crates and gas bottles off to the left. Hunter and several others returned fire, but most importantly they kept moving, rushing to get clear of the shuttle. If combat taught you anything, it was that when you got hit with an ambush in the open, you didn’t just stand around with your thumb up your ass, or even stand and return fire. You moved, fast as you could, clearing the ship to let the others get out behind you, and rushing the enemy position before the bad guys took you all down.
So Hunter sprinted across the Hillenkoetter’s flight deck toward the far bulkhead, seeking cover. There were a number of ships here—fighters, TR-3Bs and Rs, auxiliary craft of various kinds—but the only shelter was the forest of landing struts and the spacecraft themselves. He did not want to get pinned out here, exposed.
“Alfa Platoon, to the left!” he called. “Bravo, to the right!”
Energy bolts snapped out of the shadows. The bulkheads were broken into numerous recesses, with doors and ship’s ladders leading to viewing alcoves overhead and plenty of dark corners for shooters to hide. Hunter slammed into a bulkhead, looking to his right, trying to penetrate the darkness as something moved . . .
Mike Kelly screamed and flailed, his BioSuit engulfed in flame, just yards away. Hunter, holding his weapon in a tight, two-handed grip, returned fire, but couldn’t tell if he’d hit anything.
His weapon chimed empty.
Rather than snap in a fresh battery, he dropped to his belly and crawled out to the smoking remains of the ranger, picking up the RAND/Starbeam 3000 Kelly had dropped on the deck. The laser rifle—and why the hell did they call the thing a rifle when it shot pulses of laser light?—was far better in combat than those crappy little pistols. If he kept the weapon dialed down to tenth-second pulses, he should get twenty shots or more.