As a good detective, Ray did not accept a negative response. Something about the destroyer was familiar and he checked back on the stored memories from his conversation with Lucky several weeks ago after she interviewed the city Administrator.
The strange Wrogul shuttled up to a destroyer that System Control subsequently “lost.”
This was not a coincidence. This was an attack…and an opportunity.
* * * * *
Chapter Eight
I know what you are thinking. A Peacemaker should be in the command center during a battle. You are correct. There was no way I was going to stay in my compartment.
* * *
Ray had been assigned to the fluid-filled spaces of the ship used by the Arritim crew. Like Wrogul, they did not need constant immersion, but they liked to stay wet. In gravity they filled the corridors with water, a bit salty for his taste, but tolerable for a few hours. Now that they were in microgravity, however, the water was drained and replaced with a high humidity air mixture with just a film of water coating the surfaces. It also had rungs like the Human spaces, and his eight arms made for a very fast transit to the bridge.
Surprisingly, the bridge was actually two decks divided by a klearplas floor/ceiling. The lower deck was for the Arritim, designed for a water environment, and consisted of all of the stations for controlling the ship. The upper, Human, deck was the CIC—the Combat Information Center for fighting the ship. An airlock at the rear of the compartments provided passage between the two, and Ray quickly joined the Human officers—and Lucky—in the drier of the two spaces.
“Prepare for boarders,” the Human captain said. His name tape read, “Perna, Michael,” and he ignored Ray’s arrival. Of course, he was busy with both his own console and pinlinks to critical ship systems.
“We’re not fighting the ships?” Ray asked Lucky.
“No, they outgun us,” supplied another Human. “We’ve already taken a hit to the Number Two fusion torch, and it caused a reactor surge. They have a particle beam cannon and can run us down. We’re better off defending against boarding parties until we can bring our own specialties on-line.”
“Colonel DiNote, this is Investigator Harryhausen. He’ll probably tell you to call him Ray. Ray, this is Colonel DiNote, commander of the Custode Sviss.” Lucky performed the introductions.
“I have information,” Ray began, but Lucky held up a paw.
“This is the ship that brought the rogue Wrogul to the system,” she said.
“Why, yes…how did you know?”
“Simple, it’s a MinSha destroyer and the frigates are registered to a Zuul. The Tossers forbid the use of any merc forces other than Lumar and Blevin by any but official agencies. They don’t trust mercs that are cleverer than they are.” Lucky was looking rather smug. “Thus, your rogue Wrogul came here on a MinSha vessel that System Control subsequently lost, and here we are being attacked by MinSha.” She turned to Ray and grinned, baring sparkling white rows of very sharp teeth.
Ray’s preferred retort—that she was smarter than she looked—seemed like a bad choice for the moment. Gamma Besquith were smaller than either their alpha or beta counterparts, the only way for a gamma to compete was to be clever. It was why Lucky had become a Peacemaker. She was very clever!
“So, you are going to let them board,” Ray continued.
“We’re going to let them try,” replied the commander.
Ray thought for a moment. “Wait, what specialties?”
The CIC was surrounded with Duo-V and Tri-V screens showing the view outside the ship. A large Tri-V tank in the middle of the compartment showed a schematic of the immediately surrounding space. The Jefferson was in the center, and one large and two smaller red icons showed the locations of the enemy ships. The destroyer was off their port side, with the frigates fore and aft, effectively boxing them in. Small orange dots separated from the larger ship and approached Jefferson.
Ray could hear Captain Perna giving commands, and the Tri-V showed a yellow fog begin to form around the ship. “What is that?”
“Something we learned from our Arritim brothers. Ice crystals, frozen water. We carry enough to be able to spare some for an ablative shield. It will make things uncomfortable for anyone approaching in a suit instead of a ship. Of course, we lace it with quartz crystal and tungsten spurs to make things tough on the ships as well,” answered DiNote. “It’s a delaying tactic at best, though.”
The “fog” indicating the microscopic hazards expanded out from the ship and started to thin. Several of the orange icons blinked as they encountered the thickest regions of the countermeasures. At least two blinked out, and several more turned back. At least five managed to clear the field and enter the less dense region closest to the ship.
“Engage point defense,” said Perna.
“Rolling the ship,” came a translated voice from one of the Arritim on the lower bridge.
Two more icons blinked out, but three managed to attach to the Jefferson. “Boarders at Deck Three, Frame Nine, Compartment Seven, and Deck Sixty, Frame Four, Compartment Eight. There is penetration by a breaching pod at Deck Twenty-eight, Frame Five, all port compartments; the pod was penetrated to midline.” The Damage Control tech activated their internal defenses and re-routed critical systems around the cut and damaged bulkheads.
“Marines to forward point-defense control, Deck Three starboard and main engineering, Deck Sixty port. Colonel Triplett, if you would, please deploy your men around that breaching pod. Form a perimeter and keep them contained,” Colonel DiNote said into his comm. Turning to the Peacemakers he said, “It’s a good thing we had the Copperheads aboard. We actually outnumber three boarding ships, although I hate those damned burrowing pods. Three ships worth of MinSha we can handle, as long as they don’t have Goka.”
Lucky and DiNote visibly shivered. No one liked fighting Goka. The damned cockroaches were virtually indestructible in boarding actions. Which was why they were used for that purpose so often.
“Goka! We have Goka!” came the voice over the comm a few moments later.
Ray was tempted to resort to language he seldom used as Lucky, DiNote, and Perna simultaneously uttered a single word: “Fuck.”
The good news was the Goka were in the breaching pod and not part of the two boarding parties. The Copperheads were in CASPers configured for ground defense, which meant they still had MACs and explosives. They would need them for the Goka. And the Goka were only seven decks away from the bridge.
Ray looked over at Lucky; she still had the pink and purple bows, but was also wearing a combat harness with a heavy cannon as big as the Human crew-served version and a bandolier of reload cartridges slung over her freshly groomed and styled fur. Besquith were the beasts of myth and legend as far as Humans were concerned, and their rows of sharp teeth and bad dispositions did not help. They were also—literally—inhumanly strong.
Except for gammas.
Lucky was a gamma, a head shorter and less bulky than the typical Besquith merc, but she was clever and she knew some tricks that might come in handy. Ray looked at her and said quietly, “You look pretty, Peacemaker Lujkhas.”
Lucky spun to glare at him and growled, but then she stopped, nodded, and took off down the companionway toward Deck Twenty-Eight. Colonel DiNote stared in confusion.
Lucky and I fight all the time. All. The. Time. But there are times when we do not fight. We settle down and work together and get the job done. Well, the fecal matter had truly met the rotary impeller, and we both knew it.
Some unknown agency just targeted Peacemakers, and that is just not done in this galaxy. There may be very few Union-wide laws, but you do not go around attacking Peacemakers. Oh, it happens, but it gets punished.
So, I told her she looked pretty—and she did. I know she wants to go for alpha, and her appearance is starting to become important to her. I meant it, and she knew I did. She also knew what I meant.
It is spinning excrement time. Time to get
to work.
* * * * *
Chapter Nine
There is not much for an octopoid Peacemaker to do during a battle, but the fact that there was an enemy breaching pod embedded in the hull meant there was a possibility for hacking into the enemy communications net. The time and credits spent with Jess at B’nb’n were worth it, considering the new suite of cracking tools Ray had downloaded to his pinplants. Unfortunately, his first several attempts at a remote link were unsuccessful. He needed to get closer and an opportunity presented itself.
“Goka in the Star tubes,” announced one of the CIC crew.
“Flush them,” replied Captain Perna.
Jess had eventually relented and let Ray examine Molina’s security and escape plans. He had quickly understood the implications of the hydraulic connections to To’Os’ sewers. The captain’s latest order would do essentially the same thing, fill the Arritim—nicknamed “stars” after their five-limbed radial symmetry—transit tubes with water again, then send a pressure pulse toward Deck Twenty-Eight to literally flush the cockroaches back out of the tubes.
That same pressure wave could deliver Ray to Deck Twenty-Eight as well. He just needed to get into the tubes. His new software held the solution, as it had gained access to the unsecured portions of the ships’ computers immediately after boarding. The secured portions took only a little longer, but it meant he had a complete ships’ schematic in his ’plants. The nearest access heading in the proper direction was not back through the airlock to the lower bridge, but rather through a service access hatch barely a meter from where he was standing.
Ray announced to the CIC, “Excuse, but I need to be going…” The only response was a vague wave from the colonel, so Ray dragged himself over to the hatch and entered the tube. He could hear the gurgling sound of inrushing water, and quickly secured the hatch from his side. There was no point in subjecting the bridge to a sudden jet of water. Humans were as bad as cats in that respect.
He considered bracing himself with a couple of arms wrapped around various rungs but decided that was a good way to injure himself. Instead, he wrapped into a tight ball and waited for the flood. He didn’t have long to wait. First there were a few centimeters of water, then the tube started to fill with a swift current. After another minute of steadily rising flow, a wall of water literally flushed him down the passage.
He had only covered two decks before he first saw sign of the Goka. His connection to the ship’s computer indicated the tube he was in had been cut open on Deck Twenty-Seven, and the first Goka had made it nearly five decks. Ray reached out and grabbed the nearly impervious carapace of the insectoid merc. He could not penetrate the shell, but he could dislodge it from the wall and carry it back toward Deck Twenty-Seven with the flow.
Ray grabbed two more Goka crossing the next two decks, although one resisted and was likely still attached further up the tube. That one would be for security. By now, the Wrogul and Goka formed a mass that just about filled the tube and swept the remainder of the invaders in front of them. Water was starting to back up, and the pressure was rising. By the time they hit Deck Twenty-Seven, the mass quite forcibly squirted from the cut in the tube, hurling a dozen cockroaches and one bruised cephalopod against the opposite bulkhead.
Ray was stunned, as were the Goka, but they recovered much quicker. Fortunately, so did the surprised mercs in CASPers who had been trying to enlarge the cut and get inside the tube. During the headlong rush, Ray had instructed the crewman at the damage control station to close the Deck Twenty-Six iris valve as soon as he exited the tube. The confirmation that he had arrived was sent automatically and did not depend on the sluggish response of the stunned sender. With only one Goka left in that tube, the odds were much more in the favor of the Humans.
Now to deal with this lot.
Most of the CASPers had given up on the ineffective handheld lasers and closed to melee distance, relying on integral blades and K-bombs to break the laser-resistant shells. Ray’s hacking of ship and merc communications revealed a team on Twenty-Eight was setting up a crew-served particle beam cannon energized from the ship’s power systems. While these more…energetic approaches tended to be effective against the heavily armored Goka, they also tended to make additional holes in the ships they were trying to protect.
Ray noticed one of the CASPers was having somewhat better success. His right arm-mounted laser was more powerful, and he was able to cut into the Goka carapace in one swing with his left arm-mounted blade. The suit was slightly smaller than the others, with a heavier laser that seemed to shift frequencies while firing. The sword blade also had an unusual appearance—Ray could not actually see the edge of the blade. Wrogul vision was monochromatic; they only had receptors for light and dark, somewhat like black-and-white sensitive rods of the Human eye. However, their irregularly shaped pupils scattered different colors of light in a manner known as chromatic aberration. Ray had inherited memories from his progenitor, Todd, who had discussed the mysteries of Wrogul color vision with his Human rescuers seventy years ago. Different colors refracted to separate regions of the Wrogul retina, and their brains reassembled the image into color spectra that far surpassed the capabilities of Human eye. For his vision to blur the edge of the blade meant it was refracting in an odd way…
A vibrating edge! No wonder it was more effective at cutting into the Goka armor. The smaller size of the CASPer and upgraded…no, tinkered!…weapons meant this had to be Verne! It also gave Ray an idea.
“Verne! Cover me!” The mecha swiveled only slightly. To his credit, the operator continued exactly as before, slashing and stabbing Goka, while also moving into a position to give Ray a clear route of advance under his powerful laser.
Ray moved to the nearest Goka and put his delicate sensory tentacles along the carapace. He concentrated and the tentacles started to vibrate, then blur. It was difficult, like trying to swim in mud, but he was able to slide one tentacle through the shell to where he could feel the pulsing primary cognitive ganglion. Without thinking, he wrapped the end of the tentacle around it and pulled.
The tentacle came back through the shell holding a piece of Goka brain and the insectoid soldier abruptly stopped moving, released its attachment to the bulkhead, and drifted in the reduced gravity. The rest of the battle was a blur of Verne’s laser and blade over his head clearing the way while Ray repeated the technique.
Finally, they ran out of Goka, and the comms indicated the other boarding teams had been stopped as well. A damage control crew was already fixing the damage around Deck Twenty-Eight where the pod had breached bulkheads and broken cabling runs.
Verne was there with his cockpit open, staring at him strangely. There were calls for the Wrogul merc to report to Engineering to help with some crisis, but he seemed to be ignoring them for the moment.
Verne flashed sulameia—concern. Ray looked down at his tentacles, dripping with blue-green Goka cerebral fluids.
What had he done?”
* * * * *
Chapter Ten
What had I done? The fiilaash was for healing. That was drummed into us from the day we budded. Damn the bipedals for infecting us with their ethics, but they were not wrong!
I broke the fundamental code of my family.
My cracking routines had penetrated the comms on the breaching pod while I fought the Goka. Like cockroaches everywhere, they were nearly indestructible, but not smart. Their pod had an unsecured link back to the MinSha destroyer, and I cracked their system and drained it dry. I left what Jess called an Easter Egg for them. All three ships were busy trying to restart their fusion torches while Jefferson made best speed to the stargate. Apparently, Verne had worked a miracle there, too. The mercs call him their good luck charm.
The data from the MinSha was good—very good. The rogue Wrogul was gone—he left the system two months ago, but had the mercs remain on station to stop anyone who followed him. I now had a name—or rather two. When he hired them, he was using the name P
asteur, but before he left he had decided he wanted to be called Mengele.
An appropriate name, since I now knew what he was after—any of the Wrogul from Azure who truly understood Human nervous systems. That meant Nemo, Molina, Todd, and maybe Verne. He was after something about Human brains and was abusing pinplant technology to study the Human merc Ginzberg.
The data was more than just good, it told me that I had a legitimate case against this…Mengele. I also knew one more thing. Mengele was from the world on which all Wrogul had originated. No one in the Union knew where that was, and all of Todd’s memories were wiped before he arrived at Azure. There was now reason to think it was deliberate.
There was only one problem. Like Human surgeons, we knew the first code of using our unique gift was to Do No Harm.
I violated that code in mindless violence.
Lucky and I were pursuing a monster—a Wrogul who apparently used the same techniques to torture and interrogate.
But what kind of monster was I?
* * *
Once through the stargate, the ship secured from Condition One and concentrated on repairs. They had expended a lot of water, so the companionways were left unfilled and personal compartments were limited to partial fill. Ray decided to do his part by not filling his quarters, but neither did he utilize the high-humidity heliox mix used by the Stars. It was dry in his quarters and getting drier.
Ray did not care.
“Uncle, you need to eat,” Verne said. “You need to drink, and you need to hydrate yourself.” The merc-engineer had visited him many times during the one-hundred seventy hours of hyperspace transit. This last time he resorted to wearing one of his customized wet suits and brought along a spray tank of water to wet down his fellow Wrogul.
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