by James Palmer
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Leda spun around, startled. Walking slowly toward her, weapon raised, was Colonel Straker, a grim smile playing on his lips.
“We found that out in Sector 3346. A couple of comet miners discovered it in the Oort cloud there. Special Projects paid a pretty penny for it, of course. You’d be surprised what a little silence can cost you.”
Leda looked at him. “Those things destroying our colonies. You’ve known about them all this time?”
“It wasn’t dead, either,” said Straker, ignoring her question. “Not entirely. It taught us so much about our place in the universe. It showed us that we weren’t the first, and we won’t be the last.”
He stepped closer, his gun aimed at her head. “I’m sorry, Leda. I really didn’t want you to find out this way. I was going to bring you in when the time was right, but you stumbled into it before I could prepare you. It’s not very nice to spy on your boss when he’s in an important meeting.”
Leda’s blood went cold.
“Oh yes. I knew you were there. But I couldn’t very well let the group know, now could I? So I decided to give you enough rope to hang yourself. I followed you here, to Silo Six. I’m sorry for the subterfuge, but I had to see if we were on the same side. Are we on the same side, Leda?”
“I should ask you the same question,” she said evenly. “What the hell is going on here, Colonel? If you knew about them, why didn’t you warn the rest of the Fleet?”
“Come on, Leda. You’re a smart girl. Think. This is first contact with a new alien species.”
“But they’re machines.”
Straker shrugged. “So are we. At a basic level, we are nothing more than chemical machines made of carbon and water. We just wanted to meet our new neighbors.”
“But they’re killing us. They’re just blind machines carrying out some ancient programming.”
“Yes. To consume and reproduce. As are we.”
“You sound as if you admire them.”
“I suppose I do,” said Straker. “Well, I admire what they can do. Just think of what such a technology could do for us. We could finally end the war.”
“We did end the war,” said Leda. “We’re at peace, remember?”
“But for how long? I’m not talking about enduring an uneasy truce implemented by some one-sided treaty. I’m talking about actually ending the war the right way. With our victory.”
“You want to reverse engineer the Swarm’s tech and use it against the dragons,” Leda said.
“Oh, our plan is far more grandiose than that,” said Straker proudly. “We want to reprogram the Swarm and turn it against the Dragons. These marvelous machines would leave us alone entirely. Imagine, mechanical hunters sent out to hunt and destroy the lizards, like one of our nano viruses seeks and destroys cancer cells in a human body. It’ll be glorious.”
“You’re insane,” says Leda. “You’ll violate the peace treaty, and spark another long and expensive war.”
“And you’re short-sighted and naive,” said Straker. “Our little friends out there will make war obsolete. We’ll be the dominant species in the galaxy. Hell, the entire universe. And we’ll be more than ready for what’s coming.”
“You won’t get away with this. There are people above your head. They’ll stop you.”
Straker laughed. “My dear Leda. Everyone who could stop me is already on board. The Admiralty, most of it, anyway, want this to happen. We’re soldiers, Lieutenant. And now we have to sit on our hands because of some inane treaty? Look what those lizards did to our homes, our families. They are a disease. And the mechanical Swarm heading this way is the cure.”
“Those machines think the same thing about us,” said Leda as she carefully reached behind her back for her sidearm. Being armed at all times was no longer the protocol now that the war was over, but old habits die hard.
Reading her body language, Straker raised his weapon higher. “Not so fast. This doesn’t have to end this way, Lieutenant.”
“You wouldn’t kill me,” she said. “That will raise too many red flags. Even for you.”
Straker grinned. “Would it? Imagine my surprise when I found out that my personal assistant, one of the finest officers I’ve ever known, was stealing top secret materials right out from under me. I pleaded with her to stop, but she pulled her gun on me. It was self-defense.”
Leda lowered her hands. “You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?”
“Indeed. The wheels have been in motion for years, Lieutenant. We’ve known about the Chaos Wave for a very long time. When it gets here, we’ll be ready for it.”
Chapter 20
The Star Swarm
“It’s quite simple, really,” Drizda explained as she tapped her slate, her long talons clicking against its surface. “The Progenitor Epics speak of a song that will calm the Swarm.”
“Calm them?” said Kuttner, raising an eyebrow.
“That’s their word for it. Calmness is the feeling the word conveys, anyway. Perhaps it means they will go to sleep or shut down.”
Kuttner waved his hand dismissively. “Whatever. I don’t care what it means, as long as it stops those things from eating our ship right out from under us. Communications is yours.”
Drizda turned to Lt. Brackett. “We need to recreate these precise tones,” she said, showing Brackett the slate.
Brackett nodded. “I think I can do that,” she said. “It should be no different than transmitting tones to the Q-gates.”
“Main body of the Swarm approaching,” said Hudson. “They’re headed right for us.”
“Drizda?” said Hamilton. “Are you ready yet?”
“Not quite, Commander.” It will take several minutes to find and generate the tones.”
“We don’t have several minutes,” said Kuttner. “Cade. Warm up the main gun. Let’s see how they like snacking on depleted uranium.”
“Yes, sir.”
Cade’s hands flew deftly over the weapon controls, and Hamilton thought he could hear the soft thrum of the electromagnets charging up through more than a kilometer of titanium and nanocarbon plate. The Onslaught’s central rail gun was what the ship had been built around, one of the most powerful weapons space-faring man had ever devised.
“Fire at will, Gunner Cade,” Kuttner ordered.
“Firing,” said Cade.
A metal cylinder the size of a barrel and filled with depleted uranium was hurled along the rail gun’s length by two powerful electromagnets, accelerating it to thousands of kilometers per second. It exited the main gun with deadly velocity, streaking toward the mass of Swarm machines at a high rate of speed. It struck dead center of the mass, the individual von Neumann probes rippling outward from the impact like a school of fish changing course. There a tiny blossom of orange fire appeared and then vanished. The hole created by the explosion was quickly filled again by the remaining Swarm machines, and they kept coming.
“Apparently, they like the taste of uranium very much,” said Hamilton. “Drizda, status report.”
“Almost there, Commander.”
“So are they,” said Kuttner.
“We’ve got the tones, sir,” said Brackett. “Sending now.”
They could hear and feel the Swarm ships pelting into them like rain on a tin roof.
“They’re chewing into us,” said Brackett. “Most decks reporting multiple hull breaches.”
Kuttner muttered something under his breath, flicked a comm circuit on his chair. “Dutton,” this is Captain Kuttner. Prepare to repel boarders.” He looked to Drizda. “Why isn’t your damned lullaby working?”
“Unknown,” said Drizda, rechecking her slate. “It should be making them calm.”
“Maybe calm means chew faster,” said Hudson, but no one appreciated the joke.
“Maybe they can’t hear us,” said Hamilton. “Try everything. Tightbeam, even radio.”
“Radio!” said Brackett. “Why didn’t I think of that
?” She tapped her controls. “What frequency, though?”
“I have no idea, said Drizda. “Can you try them all?”
Brackett blew an errant curl out of her eyes. “Yes. I think I can. Hold on.”
“Make haste, please Lieutenant,” said Kuttner. To Hamilton he said, “Now if we can just keep this old rust bucket together long enough for this to work.”
Hamilton nodded. “Hudson, how’s the hatchery holding up?”
“Thirty percent of its mass has been consumed,” said the navigator. “The Razor has managed to dock with it. We can only assume they are offloading the eggs.”
“Gunner Cade, keep firing on the Swarm machines near the hatchery,” said Hamilton. “Try to keep any more from latching on without damaging the facility.”
“Aye, sir. Like shooting ducks in a barrel at this distance. But there sure are a lot of ducks. Sir.”
“Understood. Just do your best.”
Hamilton had no doubts as to Cade’s abilities. He was the finest gunner and weapons engineer he had ever had the privilege to work with. But if Drizda didn’t get her little trick to work, all of their skills would come to naught.
* * *
Dutton adjusted the rebreather mask on his face. “Move!” he ordered, and Ellison, Rodriguez, and the others fell in behind him, their weapons held at the ready. They moved quickly but quietly up a narrow passageway. Dutton heard a metallic thud up ahead and raised a fist. Everyone stopped. Beyond the hatch in front of them something moved, and it was their job to make it stop moving. Quietly, he moved to the hatch and shoved it open.
The way was filled with smoke. The acrid tang of burnt wiring assaulted their nostrils even through their masks. The heads up display on Dutton’s tactical helmet cut through the smoke to outline something moving directly toward them.
It was on them in an instant.
Dutton couldn’t believe how fast it could move. It reached down from the damaged deck above, skewering Rodriguez straight through the chest with a long pincer. He screamed, as he was pulled up through the hole the thing had made above them.
Dutton and the others fired up into the hole, oblivious to whether or not they struck their comrade. Dutton knew from that gruesome wound he was dead already.
The alien probe did not engage them again, but retreated somewhere up the corridor above.
“We’ve got to get up there!” said Ellison.
“Belay that, Corporal,” said Dutton. “We’ve got a lot more of these things, and we need to make sure we’ve swept every section.”
“But, Sarge—”
“That’s an order, Ellison. Rodriguez is gone. Now let’s get those mechanical bastards before they get anyone else.”
Ellison stared at Dutton hard, but she fell back in line behind him. Dutton moved ahead, thinking that if he had been just a few seconds slower it would have been him instead of Rodriguez. It should have been him. He pushed such thoughts out of his head and kept moving.
There was a squad of Marines just like them sweeping most levels of the ship, along with the Onslaught’s Navy personnel. He hoped they were having better luck than his squad was.
“Squads, report in,” he said over the common circuit.
“Reid here. We’re moving toward the central rail gun. All clear so far.”
“Donovan,” said a panic-filled voice. “We’re being bombarded up here, sir. They’re everyw—”
Dutton broke into a run, and his squad followed. Donovan and his men should be somewhere up ahead. They ran through an open hatch and rounded a tight corner just in time to see one of the Swarm machines spear Donovan with one of its metal appendages. The Marine hung there limp, his features becoming sunken in, as if the machine were sucking the life out of him, which Dutton supposed it was.
The remaining Marines fired on the machine, the bullets either bouncing harmlessly off its thick metal skin or disappearing entirely, as the machine absorbed them.
In a few moments Donovan was gone, as his body, armor and all, was taken apart atom by atom. It was the most horrifying thing Dutton had ever seen, and he’d lived through a Draconi attack on a remote colony world in which a raiding party had hauled off women and children to be eaten. He screamed and fired at the machine, but it calmly returned its attentions to digesting the ship’s bulkhead, as if oblivious to their presence.
“Cease fire!” Dutton ordered. He glanced at Donovan’s remaining squad. There were only three of them left, and one of them was bleeding from the right shoulder.
“I’ve got an idea, sir,” said Ellison, reaching for a pouch on her equipment belt. She produced a small shaped charge.
“That thing’ll eat that explosive and keep on going,” said Dutton.
“Not if we attach it to the bulkhead.”
Dutton thought quickly. It wasn’t an outer bulkhead wall. They wouldn’t cause another hull breach, or do much more damage than the machines weren’t causing already. “Do it.”
Ellison carefully placed the charge near a section the Swarm probe was busy disassembling. She primed it and stepped back.
“Move,” said Dutton. “Back this way. Let’s go.”
They had just moved back around the bend through which they had come when there was a loud explosion. Dutton’s ears rang from the concussion. Martin, Donovan’s second, was mouthing something to him. It took a few seconds for Dutton to realize that he was actually speaking.
“All clear, sir,” Dutton heard him say once the ringing in his ears died down. “We got it.”
“Good,” said Dutton, relieved. They couldn’t blow up all of them, but it was something, and proof that those things weren’t invulnerable.
“We’ve got a lot more decks to clear,” said Dutton. “Let’s keep moving.”
They had taken three steps when another Swarm machine drilled through the level above to come down directly in front of them. A metallic tentacle shot out, wrapping itself around Lt. Sullivan’s right leg.
The young Marine cried out in pain. Dutton barely knew him, but he was a tough little grunt. Whatever this thing was doing to him must be excruciating. Dutton fired on the tentacle, severing it, the tip wrapped around the soldier’s leg unfurling and falling to the deck inactive.
“Everybody back!” Dutton shouted, irritated to be losing ground. Ellison and Rodriguez supported the still screaming Sullivan, lowering him to the floor while Dutton inspected his injury. The fabric of his jumpsuit was missing where the thing’s tentacle had absorbed it, and the skin beneath was red and raw, blood welling up. Another few seconds and it would have gotten to the bone.
“Medic!” Dutton shouted.
Sullivan’s armor was even now pumping him with pain-numbing drugs, but the wound needed immediate attention. Someone appeared from the back wearing a diagnostic gauntlet. She had been part of Donovan’s squad. While she tended to the injured man, Dutton peered ahead where the Swarm machine had broken through. It was already gone, drilling down into another level where it could no doubt cause even more damage. If something didn’t happen soon, these things were going to take the entire ship apart out from under them, and there wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it.
Chapter 21
Escape
“You’re insane,” said Leda, her eyes never leaving the barrel of Straker’s weapon. “I’ve heard the old stories too, and if even half of them are true there is nothing that can stop this Chaos Wave, whatever it is. The Progenitors couldn’t even stop it, and they were far more advanced than we are. What makes you think we can?”
Straker uttered cold, hollow laughter. “My dear Lieutenant, what makes you think I intend to stop it? I want to join its holy cause.”
Leda opened her mouth in an O of surprise. She wanted to scream at him, but no words came out.
“Don’t worry,” said the Colonel. “All will be revealed soon. You see, Leda, you were right about me. I have no intention of killing you.” He lowered his weapon. “I still need someone in my inner circle with your
special expertise. Otherwise I would have banished you along with that meddler Hamilton.”
“So he was framed all along,” she said. “And the raids. The murdered scientists. That was all you.”
Straker bowed slightly. “Guilty as charged.”
“Then why send Hamilton and I out to investigate?”
Straker shrugged. “I knew that due to the nature of your assignment you would get wind of what I was up to sooner or later,” he said. “And Hamilton was so smarmy and cock-sure, I thought sending him in harm’s way would knock him down a peg or two. If both of you got killed by my Marines in the process, well, it would look like two soldiers getting it in the line of duty. But when you both came back I decided I could use someone with your talents and resourcefulness—and that I’d better put Hamilton as far from me as I possibly could.” He looked down at the floor. “It was working out great until Hamilton and that old fool Kuttner disobeyed orders and stumbled onto the Swarm entering League space.”
That’s it, Leda thought. Keep him talking. Leda moved her right hand behind her along the dais that held the damaged alien probe in its magnetic grip. Straker was distracted as he recounted his tale, his gun now pointed at the floor. It was now or never.
Leda took a step forward and kicked out with her left leg, knocking Straker’s weapon from his grip. It fell to the floor behind him and went skittering under a worktable. Straker mumbled an epithet and swung his fist at her, but she was already gone, standing beside the dais that held the alien probe suspended in its magnetic field.