There weren’t many Rekiki left in the Ducal Guard, but the lizard-like centaurs who’d followed Tellaki into Bond’s service—and sadly survived him—were all heroes so far as Earth was concerned.
“I’ve kept up with our active technological development, but I’ll freely admit I’m lost as to the high end of Imperial research and science,” he noted. “Would someone care to fill me in on just what we’re looking at?”
“A number of things,” Rolfson replied. “Dr. Wolastoq continues to go through the ship, carefully, but we have no idea what else we’re likely to find.
“What we have found so far is that the hull is semi-motile and semi-organic, sustained and manipulated by artificial microorganisms and similarly sized robotic controllers. We haven’t done too many tests so far, but we know it’s self-repairing and extremely tough.”
The big red-haired Swedish Captain shrugged.
“I wouldn’t want to replace compressed-matter armor with it, but I’d love to have my support matrices made of the stuff. It’s not a world-changing discovery, but reverse-engineering it would still be huge.
“The big discovery, though, is the power core.” Rolfson tapped a command, focusing the image Kurzman and everyone else were watching on the suspended sphere.
“Further scans suggest the core contains a decaying singularity with a mass approximately eleven percent of Earth’s—nine percent of Hope’s. The gravitational effects are almost entirely contained, and the decay of the singularity is used to produce power for the ship.
“It is basically in standby and decaying at a natural rate, hence it still being functional after fifty thousand years.”
“That’s insane,” Pat objected. “Fifty thousand years and it still has power?”
“Best guess that, when crashed, the core had mass roughly equivalent to Earth’s and was somewhere between one fifth and one fourth of full capacity,” Metharom told them crisply. “Not sure what power needed for. Small ship, but core…” The research engineer shook her head. “Core would power Emperor on own. No need for secondaries.”
“Those two discoveries we think we can reverse-engineer,” Rolfson noted. “Not necessarily fully, but enough to get significant value out of.
“The last one, we have no idea what the hell it is, how it worked, or how we’d get value out of it, but…” The image moved to showed the strange V-shaped mechanism from the ancient ship’s engineering section.
“We believe this was their FTL drive,” the Militia Captain concluded. “She was not a hypership, but she was definitely an interstellar craft, I’d guess a scout ship or courier of some kind, as we have yet to find any weaponry aboard her, and she was too small for significant cargo.
“The only known method of faster-than-light travel in our galaxy is via hyperspace,” Rolfson said. “This represents something we did not think existed and have almost no chance of understanding—and also something that every power in the galaxy will literally kill to possess.”
“And it’s sitting on our first colony,” Pat said with a sigh. Humanity had been lucky so far, but this was starting to look like bad karma.
“I’ve already forwarded your report to Sol,” he told the junior officer. “Hermes Nine should be entering hyperspace in the next five minutes. The Duchess will know what we’ve found and so will the Imperium.
“For now, however, what the hell do we do, people?”
“We cannot allow this discovery to fall into the hands of the Kanzi,” Teykay told them grimly. “Or the Laians. Or…anyone else. Can the ship be moved?”
“No,” Rolfson said instantly. “We don’t know nearly enough about her to do so. Her self-repair appears limited to the hull itself; most of her interior systems are still trashed from the impact.
“Wolastoq continues to survey the vessel, and with your permission, Admiral, I’d like to take a team back down to the surface to assist.”
“Agreed,” Pat told him. The Admiral paused thoughtfully, then sighed.
“Emperor has a significant arsenal of ‘just in case’ equipment,” he reminded the others. “Including six surface-to-space heavy missile launchers. We will deploy those, as well as our heavy ground vehicles and Guards, to the surface.
“I hope to stop any further incursions in space, but I think we have no choice but to make certain that this discovery is protected at every level by every means we have available!”
#
Harold’s shuttle touched down at the landing pad at the Corellian base camp amidst a swarm of activity. CDC was breaking the camp down as rapidly as it had gone up. Much of the equipment and personnel were returning to New Hope City.
The rest was moving twenty-three kilometers away, into a new camp around the crashed alien ship. A new nanocrete pad was already taking shape, but it wasn’t complete enough yet to take the military shuttle he’d returned on.
The new pad was supposed to be bigger, too. Designed to handle several of the Militia’s big heavy-lift shuttles at once so they could bring in the defensive launchers and heavy weapons for the Ducal Guard.
For about twenty-four more hours, however, everyone was landing here, at the original base camp. A company of Hope’s Ducal Guard guarded each site, and a dozen or so more came down with Harold and the specialist engineers he’d brought with him.
Kurzman’s words left Rolfson with an itch between his shoulder-blades, though. There’d been no further sign of trouble, but he wore a heavy plasma pistol on his uniform belt anyway. They could not risk anything happening to that ship, not now.
He was surprised, however, to find Ramona Wolastoq waiting for him when he left his shuttle. The xenoarchaeologist was standing aside from the crowd, studying the specialists with an appraising eye, but cracked a slight smile when she saw him.
“Bringing me anyone useful?” she asked bluntly when he approached her.
“Three chief engineers, a hyperdrive specialist, two cyber-technicians I wouldn’t trust within ten feet of my entering a password, and half a dozen other senior techs and scientists,” he confirmed cheerfully. “The best people in the Admiral’s task force for this mystery. Even Kulap Metharom is flying down from New Hope City.”
“That’s good,” Wolastoq replied, giving him a quick and thoroughly unexpected hug. “I can handle the ‘what happened here’ side of this, the archaeological side, but I’m not qualified to poke at strange alien tech.”
He returned the surprise embrace and grinned at her.
“And we don’t have a clue how to deal with things that are fifty thousand years old. We need everybody’s skills today, so we’ll make it work.”
“And security?” she asked softly.
“Once the new pad is in place, we’re landing surface-to-space missiles and pulling together about two battalions from the Guard contingents aboard the Militia ships,” Harold told her. “We’ve got power armor, some heavy weapons… We’re going to make damned sure nothing happens, Ramona.”
“Good. This whole thing just makes me…feel like a target.”
“I know what you mean.”
#
“Captain Sommers, we’re inbound from the main base camp,” Harold overheard the surveyor’s pilot saying into his radio. “Please confirm IFF ID; I’d rather not be shot down today.”
The pilot waited a few moments.
“Captain Sommers? Hope Charlie Company, anybody there?”
“What’s going on?” Harold asked, stepping into the cockpit.
“I can’t raise the camp at the ship,” the pilot replied. “I’m not even getting a system response.”
“May I?” Harold gestured to the equipment. He poked at it for a moment, not seeing anything the pilot hadn’t, then shrugged and activated his earbuds.
“Liberty, can you ping Captain Sommers from orbit?” he requested. “We’re not getting a response on the ground, they may be having system issues.”
“Roger,” Popovitch replied lazily. There were a few seconds of silence, then the lazin
ess was gone as the communications officer spoke again. “I have no response, sir,” he said formally. “Nothing—not the company communications setup, not individual suits of power armor, nothing.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Harold replied, “unless…”
“Even if they’d been blown to hell, this ping would get me locator beacons from the armor, sir,” Popovitch told him. “It’s clean, because I can pick it up, but they’re being jammed.”
Harold’s blood turned to ice.
“General message to the task force, Popovitch: drop all Guard contingents on the dig site. Drop them now, assault mode.
“The camp is under attack.”
“Yes, sir.”
Harold barely heard his coms officer’s acknowledgment; he was turning back to the pilot of the surveyor plane he was in.
“This thing isn’t armed,” he snapped. “Turn us back; get us out of here.”
If it was just him and his Guard escorts, he’d go in. But his shuttle was full of critical specialists…and he was not going to risk Ramona Wolastoq.
Douglas obeyed instantly—but not instantly enough. As the aircraft slowed to begin its tight turn, the white flash of plasma fire passed through where they would have been.
“Shit!”
The surveyor jinked upward, evading a second burst of deadly-hot plasma.
“I can’t evade long enough to get us home,” he told Harold. “I gotta put us down!”
The man didn’t wait for permission or approval, turning off the engines and the antigravity generators in one swift gesture. The survey helicopter did not have nearly enough wing area to support its weight without power and promptly plummeted out of the sky—just underneath a third set of plasma bolts.
Harold’s stomach tried to escape out his throat as the aircraft fell. They’d only been half a kilometer in the air—there wasn’t that much space to fall!
The pilot had it in hand. Ten meters above the permafrost, he slammed the surveyor back to full power. Antigravity slowed their fall while the engines converted most of the downward momentum into forward velocity.
It wasn’t enough to keep them in the air—but it was enough to allow the pilot to coast them to a surprisingly soft landing.
“These things are designed for rough terrain,” the man told Harold. “But they aren’t designed to be shot at—and I doubt whoever shot at us thinks they actually shot us down.”
“No,” Liberty’s Captain agreed, checking his plasma pistol. “I very much doubt that.”
#
“Move out, move out!”
The Ducal Guards in the back of the surveyor were already in motion by the time Harold made it back out of the cockpit, but they’d only been able to fit four of them in with the specialists they’d thought were more important.
“What’s going on?” Wolastoq asked.
“Someone is jamming the camp at the ship and just tried to shoot us down with a plasma cannon,” he told her grimly. “I don’t know who, but I’ve got one solid guess.”
“Who?”
“The Kanzi,” he concluded. “They must have snuck at least one force away as a follow-up team, and they’ve been waiting for us to dig up the ship so they could try and steal it.
“There’s an entire fleet in orbit,” she said. “What are they planning on doing with it?!”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Fifty-fifty between they think they know enough to fly it and they have a second wave coming in.”
“It doesn’t have enough power to fly,” Wolastoq objected.
“I know that and you know that,” Harold agreed. “But these guys haven’t been inside it and checked the singularity core.”
“So, what do we do?”
“We take cover, because the buggers with the plasma cannon are going to come check on us,” he said grimly. “Otherwise? We keep our heads down. Reinforcements are on their way.”
#
Harold left it to the Guards to corral the half-dozen engineers and specialists he’d brought with him while he took charge of Wolastoq. He didn’t have power armor, but the xenoarchaeologist was being significantly more sensible than the Militia officers.
“Are we abandoning the plane?” she asked, her tone almost conversational.
“For now,” he said. “They know where it went down; they’re going to be heading right here.”
He checked his earbud and shook his head.
“On the other hand, we are definitely inside whatever jamming field they’re running. Nobody else is going to be quite sure where we went down. Come on.”
Harold drew the heavy plasma pistol he was carrying and checked the charge. The weapon could, theoretically, take down someone in power armor. If fired at maximum power and relatively short range—but the power pack could only handle three maximum-power shots.
He dialed it to max power anyway. He knew how good a shot he was—with three shots, he was pretty sure of getting one hit, and one dead Kanzi trooper was better than half a dozen lightly scorched ones.
The Corporal leading the guard detachment waved him into a nearby ravine, one of the cracks in the permafrost that ran through the Plateau, nearly invisible from the air.
“We’ve lost coms,” the Guard said without preamble. “Even short-range is gone—but we do have our scanners and we have incoming.”
“How many?”
“Six, maybe seven,” the trooper told him. “Five suits of armor and we’ve got definite movement and thermal separate from the armor.” He pointed an armored finger at the plasma pistol in Harold’s hand. “Can you use that?”
“I won’t hit with every shot, but I’ll hit with some,” the Captain promised.
“Good. Take this and get back in the ravine with the rest of the squishies,” the Corporal ordered, passing him two spare power packs from his suit storage panels. “We’ll hold them, but if any get past us, you’ll be all they’ve got.”
Technically, the NCO had no business giving Harold orders—but the Swede wasn’t stupid.
“Come on, Ramona,” he told the archaeologist. “Let’s go dig in.”
He smacked the Guard on the armored shoulder.
“Backup is coming from on high; I called it in before we went dark,” he promised. “These guys are fucked.”
“I know,” the Corporal agreed, waiting a few seconds in silence as the civilian moved farther back down the ravine. “The question is if we’ll still be here when they get here. Go watch them, Captain. We’ll buy you every second we can.”
#
The wings were the first clue that the attackers weren’t Kanzi. Even as plasma fire started to echo down from the mouth of the ravine as power-armored soldiers inevitably found each other, four winged creatures, entirely alien to Harold’s experience, flew over the ravine.
They were strange golden insectoids, appearing to only be about four feet tall but with six limbs, the middle ones being the rapidly buzzing wings keeping them gliding through the air.
His attention, however, was riveted on their dark gray uniforms and the deadly-looking plasma carbines the flying aliens had in their hands. Whoever these new strangers were, they weren’t friendly.
They were also unarmored, so Harold spent a precious fraction of a second dialing down the power on his pistol before opening fire. Thankfully, they didn’t see him until he started shooting—and the accuracy of his first shots surprised even him.
Three glowing bolts of plasma hammered into the closest flying alien, sending it collapsing from the sky in deathly silence. Its companions, however, returned fire immediately. Harold had better cover, but they landed almost immediately, throwing his second salvo off.
Plasma blew chunks off of his cover, but he ignored it as best as he could as he aimed carefully and shot down a second insectoid attacker.
Then the pistol was suddenly slipping from nerveless fingers as a larger chunk of debris hammered into his shoulder. His uniform had some anti-ballistic properties, but not enough to st
op a six-inch-long dagger of stone from punching through fabric, skin, and bone alike.
It hit with enough force to fling him to the ground, gasping in pain as his arm simply refused to respond to his orders to grab the pistol again. He twisted, trying to reach the gun with his left hand, only for pain to force him to crumple back into the ground as Wolastoq reached him.
“Son of a bitch,” the Amerindian woman swore. “Who are these people?”
Even if Harold had been able to speak past the pain, he didn’t have an answer for her. Before either of them could say more, a mechanical voice echoed over the ravine.
“You surrender now. We claim battle right.”
He could hear them approaching, feet scuffing on the permafrost, but he could barely move. Wolastoq clearly heard them as well and snarled.
“Not happening,” she whispered to him, grabbing up the pistol and checking its settings.
“You surrender,” the translated voice repeated.
Ramona Wolastoq shook her head and suddenly kissed Harold fiercely.
“You, Captain Rolfson, are not permitted to die. I’ll be right back.”
She strode away, the plasma pistol in her hand, and stepped around the ravine corner. The sharp hiss-crack of plasma weapons firing echoed in the tiny crack in the frozen soil. Two shots. Half a dozen. Ten. Fifteen?
Then silence and only pain kept Harold from shouting after Ramona before she came back around the corner. There was a burn across her cheek from a near-miss, and another across the shoulder of her suit jacket, but she was alive.
He had never seen anyone more beautiful.
#
Chapter 20
“Someone get me some kind of update,” Pat Kurzman snapped. “What the hell is going on down there?”
“It looks like we lost communication with the dig site just over thirty minutes ago, but there were no scheduled coms, so we didn’t notice,” Heng Chan reported grimly. “We got an emergency pulse from Captain Rolfson calling for a full-court drop on the dig site six minutes ago, which our Guard commanders executed immediately.
Terra and Imperium (Duchy of Terra Book 3) Page 17