by Ian Douglas
Just to be on the safe side, he fished several spare battery packs out of Kelly’s smoldering suit and placed them in his own reserve pouches. He was not, he told himself, looting a corpse. Kelly was giving him that extra edge that might keep him alive through the next few minutes.
Groton leaned closer to examine the fire control officer’s screen. “He’s coming closer! Try for a lock!”
“Yessir!” McKelvey replied, obviously nervous at the thought of his commanding officer literally looking over his shoulder.
Too bad, Groton thought. Things are tough all over . . .
The thumps and bangs from behind the sealed partition in front of the flag bridge had stopped some minutes ago. Groton had ordered a couple of ship’s Marines from the MAA department to stand guard on the flight bridge and watch for the appearance of any more of those dimensional spheres. The enemy hadn’t tried that tactic here, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t try soon. Everything hinged on factors that Groton had no way of guessing. How many Saurian commandos were packed onto that little ship? Had they all been sent across to the Hillenkoetter, or were there still a few left who might pop through onto the bridge at any moment?
Groton thought it likely that there was no one left on that saucer except the pilot and crew, however many that might be. But might they decide to transport some commandos back, then send them here?
Was the bridge even important enough to capture? That depended on how the Saurians thought, and Groton was the first to admit that he was anything but expert on Saurian psychology.
“Target is coming alongside!” McKelvey said suddenly. “Locked on with four heavy DEWs!”
“Fire,” Groton said.
The result was anticlimactic. Four particle-beam cannons—the ship’s heaviest direct-energy weapons—loosed silent and invisible hellfire at the target.
And nothing happened.
“Hit ’em!” Hunter yelled, his voice shrill inside his helmet. He hoped he didn’t sound that unsettled to his troops.
Alfa Platoon had encountered several Saurian commandos sheltering behind a line of supply crates at the forward end of the flight deck, and were hammering them with laser fire. The enemy returned fire, but in scattered, disorganized fashion, and the human troops were picking them off every time they showed themselves.
It helped not having to brace yourself and take careful aim. Using the in-helmet display, Hunter could stick his rifle around a corner, watch the crosshairs moving against his visor, line them up, and trigger a burst strong enough to burn the target down.
Sometimes, the target exploded in a noisy, messy display of pyrotechnics.
It was more satisfying than he would have thought.
A couple of Saurians ducked through a door into a passageway leading forward. A third followed, and Hunter nailed him, a clean shot that burned away the creature’s helmet and the head inside.
A fourth and a fifth emerged from the shadows and sheltering supply crates, their arms raised in a very human gesture of surrender. “Pollack!” Hunter called. “Take charge of the prisoners!”
Alfa Platoon had taken heavy casualties so far. How many were left . . . eight? Nine? Fifty percent casualties was no joke in a tight-knit and tightly bonded unit like this one, but it felt like the momentum of the battle was shifting, the tide turning.
They had the bastards on the run.
“Field control center, this is TR-3B Charlie. What the hell’s going on in there? We were told to board at the forward lock!”
“I don’t know where they’re sending you, Lieutenant,” Duvall replied. “Alfa has already trapped on the flight deck.”
“We’re coming in.”
“Careful when you do,” Duvall told him. “You’ve got a hot LZ.”
“Copy.”
The second TR-3B slipped in through the double kinetic screen. Duvall immediately relocked the screen mechanism so that no one else could come through. The transport set down on a bare stretch of deck next to his TR-3R. Moments later, the access ramp lowered, and a platoon of JSST troopers charged down onto the flight deck.
Duvall met them at the foot of the ladder below the control booth. “Welcome back aboard,” he told them.
“Thank you, sir,” Master Sergeant Bruce Layton said. He looked around, puzzled. “I thought you said it was a hot LZ?”
“It was, Master Sergeant. But I think the little gray monsters are on the run now. But I suggest not taking any chances until we have them all accounted for.”
“Good.” He gestured over his shoulder. “I have a shuttle full of them here—thirty-eight. They’re under guard, but I don’t know for how long. Tricky little bastards. . . .”
“I’d say leave them on the transport under heavy guard,” Duvall told him. “They shouldn’t get into too much trouble there. When the Big-H is secured, we can move ’em all to the ship’s brig.”
“So why the hell did the skipper tell me we were boarding the ship up forward?”
“Because,” Hunter said coming up on Layton from behind, “I didn’t want the aliens to read your mind and find out we were coming in here. I figured if they did read you and they were helping their friends in here, they’d tell them we were going in at the forward lock and maybe divert some forces up that way.”
“Didn’t think of that, sir,” Layton said.
“I think it worked, too,” Duvall put in. “A lot of them started hightailing it out of here and moving forward just before you trapped.”
“That’s what I was hoping,” Hunter said. He slapped the rifle he was carrying. “Let’s go see if we can round them up.”
A man’s scream sounded over the tactical channel, followed by a string of foul imprecations. It didn’t sound like he’d been hit—not physically, anyway.
“Taylor!” Hunter said, recognizing the voice. “What’s wrong?”
“It . . . it’s Ann! They killed her!”
Safing his weapon, Hunter walked back to the tableau beside the 3R’s nose strut. Taylor was kneeling beside Ann’s body, as Grabiak held his shoulder.
“Easy, Thomas,” he said. “Hold it together . . .”
But Hunter knew that it had been his orders that had put her there.
Damn, damn, damn.
“Hit ’em again!” Groton snapped.
Hillenkoetter fired her main weapons once more, targeting the alien saucer. The lack of return fire either meant the alien was unarmed, or that they didn’t want to wipe out the human carrier when they still had their own commandos on board.
The lack of any appreciable effect when the Big-H scored direct hits on the little craft suggested that it was well shielded. Human technology included protective shields around starships; they had to be well shielded, given that if they hit a dust mote while traveling at near-c they would end their journey very quickly.
But the protective fields around Saurian craft appeared to incorporate a whole other level of high technology. The xenotechnologists claimed the Saurians were using gravitics to twist both space and time around their craft, which explained why they tended to look a bit fuzzy when they were in flight. Gigaton energies from Hillenkoetter’s DEWs simply vanished into those fields. No effect.
Groton remembered someone telling him that if you saw a crystal-sharp image of a UFO in a photograph, that was almost proof positive that it was a hoax, a model on a string or, more recently, CGI manipulation. Real alien spacecraft always looked fuzzy, their outlines blurred by the space- and time-bending gravitic shields surrounding them.
He heard a clatter at his back and turned. Several humans, anonymous in their combat BioSuits and carrying bulky Starbeam rifles, came through the aft hatch to the bridge. A Marine guard beside the door raised his weapon, then snapped to attention.
“Permission to enter the bridge,” the lead figure said.
“Commander Hunter!” Groton said. “Permission granted. It’s damned good to see you!”
Hunter removed his helmet. He looked . . . haggard. Very tired, a
bit pale and drawn. “Thank you, sir.”
“What’s the situation?”
“I think we’ve got them on the ropes, Captain. Charlie Platoon is down in Engineering and the power plant, and report they’ve cleared the place out. And we’ve been chasing the bad guys forward, all the way from the flight deck. They’ve broken, sir. They can’t wait to surrender.”
“Thank God!” Groton said. He gestured toward the sealed pressure door leading to the flag bridge. “We may have some locked up there. Care to check it out?”
Hunter hefted his weapon. “Yes, sir. Okay, people. Spread out, and be ready . . .”
The pressure doors slid open.
There was nothing inside. No Saurians. No bodies, human or alien. “Looks like they got out of Dodge, Captain.”
“Captain—” McKelvey said. “I think they’re making a break for it!”
Groton and Hunter looked over the fire control officer’s shoulder at his screen. The saucer was dwindling . . .
. . . and then with a suddenness that made all three men jump, it was replaced by a wall of rugged, dust-clotted rock.
“What the hell?” Groton said.
“The Xaxki,” Hunter said. “Looks like they finally decided to put in an appearance.”
“They ate the Saurian ship?”
“Looks like. I guess they’re dealing with the bad guys in their own way.”
The Game ends, a voice said inside Groton’s mind, and from the expressions of the others, they were hearing it, too. Take your people . . . and leave.
“Son of a bitch!” Hunter said softly.
There was nothing more to say.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
H. P. Lovecraft
“The Call of Cthulhu,” 1926
Commander Philip Wheaton leaned over the old, wrinkled figure strapped down on the gurney. “You know him?” Simone Carter asked.
“I know . . . of him,” the intelligence officer replied. “It’s been a long time. My dad used to talk about him.”
“Who is he?”
“The name is Hans Kammler,” Wheaton replied. “He was Nazi SS, one of the worst. He helped design Auschwitz. And he was in on Hitler’s treaty with the Saurians, back in the late ’30s. He escaped the fall of the Third Reich in an alien time ship, jumped twenty years and crash-landed in a little town in Pennsylvania in 1965. The Agency knew he was coming, of course. The Talis were feeding us information ahead of time . . . literally. We had a recovery team pretty close by. They went in, cordoned off the area, and started C and C.”
“C and C?”
“Containment and control. Shut down anyone spreading eyewitness accounts. Stop the story from leaking.”
“I knew you guys did that!”
“That was my dad, not me. I wasn’t even born in 1965. But I did the same thing later on. I’m not proud of it.”
“Okay . . . so it was your dad that rescued this guy?”
“Yeah. He was Kammler’s handler for a bunch of years. Then Kammler disappeared.”
“When was that?”
“I dunno. Early ’80s.”
“You think he’s been their prisoner this whole time?”
“Seems that way. So what’s wrong with the poor bastard?”
“We’re not sure,” Carter replied. “He had a psychotic break of some sort down on the planet, while they were packing him out. They sedated him, but we haven’t been able to bring him back. It’s like he’s lost in his own tight little world. EEG traces show brain wave activity consistent with dreaming . . . dreaming with violent emotions.”
“Nightmares.”
“Probably.”
Kammler twitched in his stupor. . . .
And then gave a small, despairing whimper.
“The Xaxki,” Elanna said carefully, “don’t think of it as war. They think of it as a game.”
“A game,” Hunter said, feeling like the bottom had just dropped out of his world. “A game?”
It was a meeting of all department heads, with the senior members of Hillenkoetter’s officers and scientists gathered around an enormous boardroom table in Conference Compartment A. Elanna was present as a representative of the Talis.
She spread her hands. “I’m sorry, Commander, but that’s the best interpretation we can put on it. Maybe it’s the only interpretation possible.”
“So I guess,” Hunter said, “that the things we were calling ‘pillbugs’ were kind of like . . . I don’t know. Game pieces?”
“That seems to be the simplest, the most direct explanation,” Elanna said, nodding. “And Dreamers apparently inhabit those bodies, running them by remote control.”
“Kozlov and King kept trying to establish contact with the Xaxki,” Groton pointed out. “Shouldn’t that have stopped this ‘game’?”
“Maybe the Xaxki are so far ahead of us they just didn’t notice us,” Dr. Steven Vanover said. “The way we might not notice ants, or cockroaches.”
“If a cockroach is in my kitchen, I notice it,” Hunter said. Others around the table chuckled at that.
“Not when they’re in the walls,” McClure said.
“So what you’re saying,” Groton said, “is that to them we’re vermin?”
“Something like that,” McClure agreed. “That, or they just came to the conclusion after our brief chat that we had nothing to say that would be of interest to them. Or . . .” She shrugged. “Maybe they just didn’t understand us. And with quadrillions of individual Dreamers—a number that we, as humans, really can’t come close to comprehending, but know that it’s massive—they couldn’t sort out who within their population was attacking the Saurian base. In other words, who was playing the game. The pillbugs numbered . . . what? A few thousand, maybe? Controlled by that many Dreamers, but out of a population exponential magnitudes larger? For the Xaxki leadership, that’s like finding one specific pinch of sand out of all the beaches and all the oceans in the world. We don’t even know if they have something that we might recognize as leadership. In any case, we think those Dreamers were playing a kind of game, one with the goal of driving the intruders, the Saurians, out of the system without forcing them to simply annihilate them.”
“Nice of them,” Brody said. “So very civilized . . .”
“So a few Dreamers got together and were having a games night,” Hunter said. “When we came along, we were nuisances . . . vermin. Some of them, the Guardians, were talking with us, but they weren’t taking us seriously, and maybe didn’t talk to the leadership, if there is a leadership. Is that it?”
“We think so,” McClure told him. “But remember: this is all guesswork on our part. We don’t know how these beings think or what they feel, any more than we understand what’s going through a cockroach’s brain.”
“We came in, and we almost didn’t come out,” Hunter muttered.
“What made them call Dreamers out of retirement?” Captain Groton asked. “What was the big decision that needed to be made?”
“Whether or not we must be destroyed.”
There was a long silence around the table. Finally, Simone Carter said quietly, “I gather they’ve decided not to wipe us out?”
“If we agree to leave right away, yes,” Elanna said. “The one thing they’ve been very clear about is that they don’t want us here. Having outsiders, aliens in-system in proximity to so many vulnerable members of their civilization, makes them . . . nervous.”
“It would make m
e nervous,” Groton said. “I don’t blame them. The question is whether or not we can leave the system knowing our mission here is complete.”
“I’d say it is, Captain,” Hunter told him. “Operation Excalibur was tasked with finding out if the Saurians had a homeworld here at Zeta Retic. We found they had a base, but not a homeworld.”
“There’s also Zeta 2 Retic to consider,” McClure pointed out, “but we have the Guardians’ assurances that there are no Saurians there.”
“The Xaxki claim to be building planets at Zeta 2,” Vanover said.
“You think that’s true?” Hunter asked.
Vanover shrugged. “Who knows? They possess technologies we can’t even begin to understand, but—”
“We should jump over there and take a look,” Brody said, “just to see for ourselves.”
“Sounds good,” Groton said. “Assuming the Xaxki permit it. Then we shape a course for Aldebaran.”
Hunter slowly shook his head. “Ah, with respect, sir . . . I think we need to rethink that.” By which, of course, he meant that Groton should rethink things. “We need to get back to Earth, and the quicker the better.”
“Negative,” Groton said. “The mission orders for Operation Excalibur clearly—”
“Sir,” Hunter said firmly, “we have three hundred–plus civilians on board now. I don’t think the Hillenkoetter is equipped to take care of that many evacuees. There’s also the JSST wounded to consider. We’ve got them in sick bay, but they need a full hospital to give them the proper treatment.”
“Commander Hunter is right, Captain,” Carter pointed out. “Three hundred civilians, all of them badly traumatized. Some of them comatose. They need treatment we can’t offer them on this ship.”
“We sent the rest of the task force to Aldebaran,” Groton said. “They expect us to follow. I am not going to abandon them!”
Hunter thought about that. The cruisers Samford, Carlucci, and Blake all were almost seventy light-years away by now, awaiting the arrival of the Big-H.