The Blockade

by Jean Johnson

For a long moment, Li’eth had no idea what those Terran symbols meant. He could read them as letters and numbers, but since they had three clusters of numbers to work with, he recognized at first only one set of them as the readings for latitude, longitude, and depth based on the local positioning satellites. Those numbers hardly changed at all.

  Then he figured it out: The foremost ship had been painted as in targeted, and that was what the second set of numbers meant. They formed an odd spatial partitioning out of three sets of numbers. The first two apparently described two circles, one that sat horizontally, and one vertically. Two zeroes meant dead ahead, which made sense to Li’eth, but the X and Y axis numbers did not dip into the negatives in any direction; they just started with 359 and counted backwards to the left and down, while the numbers counted from 1 forward to the right and up.

  The final number was fairly obvious; it was literally just the distance in Terran measurement units to whatever target or object had been identified and outlined by the scout’s sensor array. So when those digits dipped into single numbers to the left of the decimal point, he knew just how close Corporal Hasmaunsang swam to the nearest Salik soldier, since a Terran meter wasn’t that far off from a V’Dan mita . . . yet another word apparently carried into their distant past by the time-traveling Immortal.

  Compared to the sleek, streamlined Dalphskin suits that dwarfed them by an arm length and more, the Salik seemed stumpy and awkward, like lumps of flesh on sticks, with their bulbous torsos and long, trailing legs. Fruit ices? Fruit pops? He couldn’t remember what Jackie called them, and—

  The Salik slashed at the corporal with a blade wrapped in its tentacle-hand, making half the room gasp and jump. Hasmaunsang gasped, too, jerking away, then jolting—no, jetting—forward, leaving the Salik abruptly rearward, behind a curling cloud of dark, and a rapidly jiggling camera view, along with a shout of, “—I’m hit! I’m hit!”

  “The enemy has engaged! I repeat, the enemy has engaged!”

  “Hasma, report! What is your condition?”

  “1st B Alpha, two are in pursuit, on your five and six!—No, make that three! Three are in pursuit on your six!”

  “I’m alright! Damn blade got halfway through the suit. I can’t turn fast, Sergeant, and it’s going to take five minutes to seal the breach. I’m gone for any tight maneuvers. Request permission to fall back to—”

  “—Permission granted! Fall back, 1st B Alpha!”

  Tai-Khan, pacing, snapped an order into her headset. “1st B Selkies, attack!”

  The two Salik who had lingered, watching, didn’t have time to dodge; a quartet of Selkies sliced right past them—literally sliced, with weapons that scored along their foes’ flanks and limbs. Li’eth didn’t even know when he’d gained his feet; he just knew he stood stooped over, clutching the tabletop and staring into the screen in front of him, showing another soldier’s view of the injured corporal fleeing as fast as he could undulate.

  Come now, get away . . . come on, get away! he urged silently, teeth clenched.

  (Li’eth? You’re projecting,) Jackie warned him

  (Sorry.) Focusing on his shielding wasn’t easy; the three aliens were faster than the man in the damaged suit. He knew the Salik were the fastest species in the water, particularly over short distances; their long legs and long flipper-feet worked the water in lunging shoves that allowed them to use the “pause” between beats to turn on a dime. They could spread and flatten their tentacle-limbs, fanning out and—

  Blurs flashed across his view, followed by murky red clouds. Something tumbled free and drifted downward, flailing and curling up into four swirls on one end, the other ragged and leaking blood.

  “Yes!”

  His wasn’t the only shout of triumph in the control room, but it was the first and loudest. He crowed again when two more blurs cut through the other Salik, one of the Selkies actually having to twist in a tight circle in order to dislodge the impaled body of their target from one of their spikes. Undignified though it might be, Li’eth hopped a little in place in his excitement. The Terrans were decimating the quintet, and he couldn’t be happier.

  The other five aliens on the other side of the Salik fleet darted at the Selkies, scattering the nearest ones. Two more were hit by bladed weapons. Two others had their camera feeds spit static. Complaints of “I can’t move!” and “The suit won’t respond!” proved to the prince they’d been hit by the electrosonic pulses of stunnerfire. Water greatly reduced the range on the damned things, but the Salik were experts at timing their movement in underwater combat, and deadly in close-range attacks.

  Only the fast-slashing attacks from several more Squad members saved the two who’d been stunned and the two who could barely swim away. Trios of swimmers flanked the injured and the stunned, somehow hooking on and undulating for them, giving them a boost in speed, though not their top speed. Others circled, making threat-darts at the lone Salik who escaped.

  “Incoming! We have incoming! Dozens of bogeys entering the water!”

  “C Company, D Company, you are authorized for full deployment!” Tai-Khan ordered. She paced like a hungry hunting g’at, long legs and wiry body, her intense brown stare flicking from screen to screen, taking in every image in fractions of seconds. “E Company, move up into support positions. All E Squads, form an escort for any injured. D Squads, stay on the perimeters of your formations for skirmish strikes! A, B, and C, engage all enemy targets as you see fit.”

  If the bloodied, muddied, ink-scattered waters had been mildly chaotic before, within minutes, the battlefield was a mess. Oddly enough, it was the Terrans in the command center who scrambled the fastest, as five or six who had been idly standing by raced to get into their seats. Li’eth, pushed back out of the way by politeness and the necessity to evacuate that particular station, found himself pacing near their commanding officer.

  He couldn’t make sense of the chaos; aside from her initial orders, Tai-Khan didn’t give any further ones. In fact, most of the orders being given came from the soldiers in the chair, most of whom wore the double stripes or stripe-and-rocker of corporals and privates first class on their gray uniform sleeves. Fifth Tier equivalents. They directed the battle tactics, not the officers, fingertips scraping over their display screens, which had been shifted into angled positions better suited for viewing and swiping.

  It took him several minutes to grasp why . . . and when the realization dawned, Li’eth sucked in a breath at the sheer brilliance of it. The actual soldiers carrying out the combat had to focus on their combat skills, on swimming and circling and staying alive. Their attention lay on their immediate environs. They could occasionally suggest things, and from the sounds of it they indeed were making suggestions, but they merely implemented the tactics being deployed. Their dryland counterparts, with no need to worry over their direct personal safety, were free to view the bigger picture, analyze it, and carve up fractions of the battle zone for their particular teams to fight their way through.

  They decided that the best fighting had to be conducted through hit-and-run tactics, since lingering in the vicinity of the Salik warriors proved to be very dangerous. Once up to speed, a Terran Selkie could outswim a Salik but could not escape if they stayed within range of their deadly lunge-strokes. Most of the fighting had to be done at close quarters to be effective, but that was an advantage as well as a disadvantage.

  Projectile weapons and lasers were difficult to fire underwater, stunners required melee range, and the Salik on the ships that had finally slowed to start circling directly over the underwater battle zone proved thankfully reluctant to torpedo an enemy embroiled with their own troops. Twice, the Salik released depth charges on the outer fringes, only to discover that the thick Dalphskin suits cushioned most of the shock waves, leaving the Terrans in far better shape immediately after each concussion wave than their foes.

  Just as their stunner weapons did.
The prince couldn’t help chortling behind a hastily raised palm when one of the enemy accidentally disabled five of his companions, shoved out of aiming alignment by a Selkie bowling into him from behind. Not that the fight was all victories and smiles; dozens of the Terrans picked up yellow-dashed lines on their tactical markers, indicating injuries. Four turned brown and were “rescued” by brutal dashes from their companions, their bodies towed off out of retrieval range by the enemy.

  Five . . . six . . . ten. Eleven dead on their side. More, as gray outlines turned yellow and turned red, or flashed straight to red while the Salik fought in vicious earnest. Abruptly, new blips appeared on the edges of the largest-spanning maps, swarming inward and upward. Choya underwater forces riding into battle on their underwater equivalent of something the Terrans called a jet skee, individual transports. More forces manning small, sleek submersibles armed with harpoon guns.

  At a word from the four-crested female, Tai-Khan gave the order for the Selkies to scatter and retreat. Even as they did so, two of the Salik vessels started to sink. Somewhere in the midst of the chaos, the Selkies had deployed enough of their mantis-shrimp-limb things to turn the hulls sinking into view into virtual collanders.

  A strange satisfaction crept warmly through him when he heard the startled exclamations from his fellow V’Dan. The local members of the Imperial Navy knew just how tough those hulls were; somehow, the Terran bioweapons had shredded the reinforced-alloy plating on those two ships. Other hulls also had holes, but not as many as those two. He waited impatiently while the Terrans cleared the field for the much fresher Choya troops to claim, then snagged the major’s attention while she had a little break from her intense watchfulness.

  “Major Tai-Khan,” Li’eth had to ask, “why did your troops shred those two hulls so much, but not the others quite so much? Is there a tactical reason I’m missing?”

  The short-haired woman shrugged and shook her head. “I’m not completely sure . . .”

  She looked at Agneau, who replied absently in V’Dan, her attention more on the Choya troop movements to try to cut off escape attempts from the aliens fleeing the sinking ships. “I think I heard one of the techs saying they were picking up a lot of frequency chatter from those two ships. It was a tactical call by the team.”

  “Mind sharing that with the rest of us who aren’t fluent in V’Dan, yet?” her CO asked dryly.

  Agneau blushed and repeated herself in Terranglo. “Sorry, sir . . . I said, I think I heard one of the techs saying they were picking up a lot of frequency chatter from those two ships. I’m not sure which one ordered those two ships to be the hardest hit.”

  “That was me!” One of the men at a row of tables two up from the back raised his hand high over his felt-capped head. “I made that call, Major. A lot of comm chatter usually means a tactical command center, so I tagged it as a priority.”

  “That, it often does. Thank you, Slawson, good call,” Tai-Khan called back. She eyed the rest, their attention still firmly on their workstation screens. “Bring ’em home, people. Time to put our sealskins back in our chests and let ’em repair and rest before the next storm surge hits.”

  Her words were greeted with a surge of strange, barking noises from her soldiers, somewhere between ooh ooh ooh and oiy oiy oiy!

  That confused Li’eth. Frowning, he reached out to Jackie, asking, (. . . Sealskin? I thought you said these were Dalphskins, based on dolphins. Why would they make such a weird noise over a seal? Isn’t that a sort of glue or solder?)

  Jackie, listening to his sending and its underthought of confusion, choked on the drink someone had brought her. Mirth spiraled out of her mind, wrapping down around his even as she coughed several times. (Seal, Li’eth, not seal! Pick up my booting subthoughts, you silly . . . Seal, as in the sea mammal . . . ? Don’t you remember what I told you a week or so ago, all those Celtic myths about shapeshifters who could turn into seals and back? How they’d take off their seal hides and put them into storage chests for safekeeping while they walked around on two legs like a Human?)

  Li’eth blushed in embarrassment. (Right. I forgot that. Your people have a lot of legends. Separate from your histories, I mean,) he added in clarification. (Ours tend to get wrapped up in our histories until it’s hard to separate fact from myth. And the name for the creature is the same word-sound for a completely different thing. At times, Terranglo is very confusing . . .)

  “Casualty report,” Major Tai-Khan ordered, distracting him from the mental conversation. “Have we got a tally yet?”

  “Eighteen dead, five critically wounded, thirty-three wounded . . . and 67 percent of all ’suits damaged, sir,” one of the junior officers reported.

  “All bodies have been recovered, sir,” another stated. “And all pieces have been recovered or targeted with pocket torpedoes to keep the tech out of enemy hands.”

  Tai-Khan nodded slowly, grimly, hands on her hips. “Good work, people. Considering we have never fought this foe before, a 25 percent casualty rating is a good day’s fight . . . and it looked like you reduced that initial spike once you adapted your tactics. You all get a performance bonus on top of your combat bonuses. I will also personally ensure that those promised colonial rights go to the heirs of our eighteen lost souls. Try to make sure we don’t lose more than those eighteen souls after today, soldiers.”

  “Aye, sir!” most of the techs chorused with prompt respect.

  “ETA to med-evac, seven minutes or less,” someone else called out, and their postcombat operations resumed.

  “Try to make it shorter!” Tai-Khan ordered, resuming her pacing while she waited for the three companies to escort all the wounded to the incoming ships. Now that the fighting was over, her movements were slower, a bit more relaxed. More like a hunting g’at tempted to go and lie down after successfully chasing down a meal, but still a little agitated.

  Eyeing the two Choya observers and their fully upright crests, Li’eth moved over closer to them. They didn’t speak Terranglo, but they did speak the Imperial tongue. “Are you pleased with the Terrans’ efforts?”

  “Yes,” the female agreed in V’Dan. “I do not know the casualllty rate, and the battle wasss chaotic, but mmmore of them died in their attack than our ssside.”

  “If we don’t count the damaged suits, just those actually injured or worse, the casualty rate was only about 25 percent,” Li’eth translated. “Only about a quarter of them were injured or slain. That number will rise, as the Salik get over their surprise. The injured suits were 67 percent, about two-thirds, and they will eventually figure out they have to strike deeper to do actual harm.”

  “But it willl nnot rise by much,” the male officer asserted, flexing his single crest in what looked like a very good mood. “These Terrannsss will learnn as well. They fight wellll, for air kin.”

  “Good day fight,” Tai-Khan agreed, following along somewhat with her bare-bones understanding of V’Dan.

  “Yes,” the female officer agreed. “A good day’sss fight.”

  (. . . Time to get back to that paperwork you were given,) Jackie nudged him mentally. She no longer needed to cough though he did hear her clearing her throat of leftover phlegm. (I still have some translating to do, but I should be free in a few more minutes, not much more than a quarter hour.)

  (I’m on it,) he promised, and moved back to the station he had used. Picking up his half-drunk bottle of berry drink for a sip, he searched for his abandoned datapad. After a few moments, he realized it was tucked under the elbow of the oblivious tech who had taken his place.

  Liberating it, he moved off to find an unoccupied chair at the back of the room and turned the device back on. Paperwork could wait, but it bred while it waited, piling up into tedious mountains. It was always best to get the pile scraped down to bedrock wherever possible.

  CHAPTER 9

  OCTOBER 21, 2287 C.E.

  JUNA
12, 9507 V.D.S.

  GONN STAA, AU’AURRRAN, COLONY VI

  SLLC-9898 SYSTEM, SOLARICAN EMPIRE

  The Church of the Spiraling Eye overlooked downtown Gonn Staa. It was not the capital of V’Au’aurrran, but it was their largest city. Set in a long, somewhat broad canyon that suffered from occasional strong storm winds, all of the buildings had reinforced, sloped walls on their north and south sides, stout shields that allowed that wind to pass over and around them whenever it blew that way. The Church, an edifice occupying three of the floors at about the midpoint of the megabuilding they were in, looked out to the east, across the valley.

  The great windows of the foyer-like narthex picked up the glow from the city lights as well as the occasional flake of snow that spiraled down out of the overcast sky. Most melted by a dozen mitas from the ground. Those snow-bearing clouds marched toward the windows at a steady pace, scraping along from east to west; the winds guiding them pulled on the tops of the steam clouds rising from the natural geyser vents found near the bottom of the valley.

  It should have been a beautiful view. It was a beautiful view, for despite the sheer functionality of the building shapes for the local climate, the Solaricans believed everything deserved to be beautiful, not just functional. Load-bearing yet elegant arches outlined architectural elements, carvings and reliefwork covered most surfaces, and even many of the windows across the city had been pieced together artistically out of stained and colored glazings.

  Beautiful though it was, Li’eth could not bring himself to relax. In the main sanctuary of the Church, Grand High Ambassador MacKenzie, Lieutenant Johnston, and a host of V’Dan and Solarican priests were entangled in a great Gestalt. The Seers of the Solarican race had already developed a crude form of language-learning, imperfect and feeble compared to the Terran version but still quite assistive in learning languages a bit faster. The object of today’s lengthy session was for them to observe telepathically while Jackie and Darian worked on language transfers with Solarican Seers, spending the day teaching these people how to begin to make language transfers.