He told the pinnace pilots over his link, “Give me one minute, then fire off that set of breaching missiles, and like I said, give them shots of hot thrusters now and again to keep this area from healing. If you have to, pull out. No reason to lose the pinnace. If we don’t win, we’re all dead anyway.”
***
Skull groaned as he came to. The back of his head throbbed as if someone had whacked it with a baseball bat. His entire body ached and his skin felt as if it had been stretched and split. Must have been acceleration, he thought. How many gravities? Ten, twenty, more? Enough to kill an unaugmented man, for sure. Hooray for nano.
He had no idea how long he had been out for, and he wondered why no white cells had come to eat him. Perhaps they had tasted him and found they did not like him. Or perhaps they misrecognized him as friendly, since he was wearing a Meme-derived biosuit.
He tried to move, but could not. Must be my spine, or worse. Best to just lie here until I heal. He drifted off into a fog of pain.
Skull opened his eyes to see human figures in armored suits standing over him. They did it, he thought. They boarded the ship like pirates. Like Marines. Well done, boys and girls. He was filled with an elation that grew and grew, until lightning throbbed through his bones and sang along his nerves.
Suddenly he perceived himself lying on the floor, as if from above. His body, encased in the bio-suit, surrounded by armored figures, jerked and thrashed in seizure, and in the moment before the tunnel of light swallowed him, he knew the nano had gotten him in the end.
Fair exchange, was his last living thought.
***
Launching himself across the now basketball-court-sized room, Stallers thrustered himself through the slowly closing hole First Squad had taken. He set one blood agent and one blister agent chem grenade against the edge of the hole, where the clotting tackiness held them in place. Then he pulled the pins and fired off his suit jets.
He heard the pops behind him but didn’t bother to check on the effects. Victory lay ahead, not behind, and though he was smart enough not to think the Guards company commander should take point, he was Marine enough to know he had to be where the fight was.
Besides, there was always the Final Option.
He patted his belly self-consciously. Under the grenade box rested a transverse-mounted detachable cylinder the size of a small scuba tank. It was a 0.1 kiloton atomic device, probably not big enough to vaporize the frigate, but certainly enough to gut it.
And kill every Marine aboard. The equivalent of one hundred metric tons of TNT, it was their insurance. Each company commander and the Colonel carried one, to be used at his own discretion. It was insurance that no matter what, their gamble would pay off, if only even money. For the safety of Earth, it would be a small price.
His external pickups brought him the sounds of firing up ahead and he switched to First Squad’s freq. They sounded cool and disciplined, and he was pleased to see them moving with precise motions in the microgravity, bracing themselves before each shot, firing with deliberation at nightmare creatures that crawled and flapped to attack.
The fight was slow and surreal but not particularly difficult, and Stallers wondered about the enemy response. Sure, he figured the frigate and its alien crew had their hands full, what with the pounding they took and the hundreds of Marines dealing a thousand internal pinpricks, but he thought the internal defense seemed mindless. These things were strong but soft; purpose-built security creatures should have hard armor made of ferrocrystal, and claws that could snip off limbs. They should have projectile weapons powered by chemical reactions or compressed gas or something along those lines, yet they had seen nothing more than a horde of dangerous gummi-spiders that died in droves.
Moving to another chamber, Stallers heard the point man cry out, “I got something new!”
“Show me,” Stallers said, pushing to the fore. In the next room he saw the shape, huge, eight feet tall and proportionally heavy, but lying inert on the floor. It had a darkened faceplate and for a moment he could swear there were human eyes behind it. Then it jerked and thrashed, as if in seizure.
The Marines backed up and raised their weapons but Stallers barked, “Don’t fire! Keep the assault going. I’ll handle this.”
His men moved on and he watched the thing – the man in the suit, he thought, until it stopped, stilled, and died. That it was dead was made clear when the suit split in several places to reveal a shaven-headed man in commando spidersilks. Rolling the inert body over with effortless strength, Stallers observed that the man’s back had been pulped beyond even nanites’ ability to repair. “Poor bugger,” he said out loud to himself. I know who this was – that commando that ran off with the alien. Was he a prisoner, a traitor, or a hero? Shaking his head, he hurried to rejoin his men.
First Squad Leader waved him forward in the next room where the men guarded a large hole in the wall. The Major bounded to the opening and grabbed the edge before committing himself. He looked up at a startlingly normal scene, at least by comparison with the organic world of the rest of the ship. This room had a flat floor, glowing lights and panels, concave hemispherical displays and what must be consoles with knobby control sticks and large round buttons.
Three large pools perhaps five meters in diameter occupied half of the floor space, each one within long reach of a bank of consoles. Each was mostly filled by puddles of yellow-green goo. Immediately beyond the pools, an explosion had blown apart an enormous section of the control consoles.
Puddles? Gravity? They have artificial gravity!
Stallers stepped inside and immediately felt a pull toward the floor of perhaps one third of a G. I sure hope they can’t increase it to ten or a hundred Gs. That would be some defense mechanism, to simply smear us with our own weight. But that didn’t happen, and he charged forward with his Guard Marines at his heels, to surround the figure and the things in the pools.
“Hold your fire!” Stallers called. “This looks like the control center. We don’t want to damage anything unless we must. Cover those aliens with the flamethrower. Roast them if they try anything.” His men ran to do his bidding.
-59-
“Orion, we have met the enemy and they are ours.” The transmission from Colonel MacAdam set up a round of wild spontaneous cheering throughout the ship. Work did not stop, but it became less grim and desperate, more deliberate and thoughtful, as the entire crew came to know that yes, they had survived and succeeded, and all that was left to do was to limp home.
On the bridge Absen slumped. “Congratulations, Colonel. You may have just saved us all. Give my regards to your Marines. Let us know what you need.”
“We’re fine here for a few hours, Captain, but we’ll be happy to see Orion parking nearby. And sir…we have three alien prisoners, and a dead man.”
“A dead man?” Absen shook his head in confusion. “You mean a casualty?”
“No, sir, it’s not one of us. We found him dying here on the ship.”
“Who is it?”
“Major Stallers thinks it’s that commando that ran off with the alien woman. It looks like he blew up their control center before he died.”
Absen thought about that for a moment. Finally he responded, “Good thing he did, then. Keep a close eye on the aliens, Colonel. Intel will want to debrief them.” If they can communicate.
“Yes, sir, we can handle it.”
“Excellent. Orion out.” He touched an icon on his armrest control screen. “Infirmary, Captain Absen here. Once you get a chance, send someone to the CCC, low priority.” Clicking off, he carefully pushed himself out of his seat, swaying in the low shifting gravity. “Bring the spin up to fifteen percent, Mister Okuda, and match velocities with our prize. Carefully.”
“Aye aye, Skipper,” Okuda said jauntily.
“Thanks, little buddy,” responded Absen. He saw puzzlement cross Okuda’s brow while others on the bridge chuckled. Guess they didn’t get Gilligan’s Island in the Congo.
Our prize, he repeated to himself. An old term for a ship captured in battle. But with their own drive so badly damaged, how in the hell were they going to get it back to Earth? They might have to wait for the Artemis, might have to drift around here for two or three more months. He didn’t even know what direction they were headed, but it was one in a thousand that it was toward Earth.
Getting out of his seat as the gravity rose, he made his way carefully down to Johnstone and popped open the man’s helmet. His pulse was strong under Absen’s forefinger, and peeling back an eyelid revealed normal pupils and the herky-jerky motion of REM. That was as far as his medical training took him and he was happy to see an Asian man with a caduceus on his collar climb the ladder into the bridge. The captain pointed silently at Johnstone and the doc shuffled over, holding onto handrails.
He opened his medkit and pulled out a diagnoster, using it to scan the unconscious Comms tech. Two minutes later he said in precise Queens English, “He’s fine, sir, as far as I can tell. Just in some kind of intense fugue state, if I was to guess. He’s got several cybernetic implants and some of them run into his brain. If you want to bring him out of it I can give him a stimulant and unhook him from the jack there, but I am really just shooting in the dark. He’s an Eden carrier so it might just be best to wait.”
“Thank you, Doctor, we’ll wait. I’m sure you have other more pressing patients.”
“Quite so, I do sir. Good day,” he responded, then hustled off.
“You heard the doc, leave him be. Ensign, I guess you’re in charge of Comms. What’s your name?”
“Mirza, sir. Iranian Navy.”
“You’re Earth Space Navy now, Mirza.”
“I didn’t know there was such a thing, sir.”
“There isn’t, but I swear there will be soon. I’m proud of you, Mirza, you and everyone on this bridge and on this ship.”
The dark-haired young man blushed red and turned back to his board, and there were smiles all around. “Might want to tell the rest of the crew, sir,” Master Chief Timmons said from behind Absen.
He’d forgotten the man was even there, silent backup for his captain. And I have to deal with deLille. Later. Let her stew. “Good idea, COB.” He punched for shipwide, composed another inspiring speech, and recited it with sincerity.
When that was done Mirza spoke up. “Sir, there is a transmission coming in.”
“From Earth?”
“No, sir. I mean, yes sir, there’s a lot of gabble from Earth but you said to ignore it all until you were ready, and all our telemetry has been continuously sent back, so they already know the outline of what happened.”
“Get to the point, Ensign.”
“Yes, sir, I mean, there’s a transmission from nearby us. From there.” He pointed at a screen, the one that showed the largest scale and thus the greatest area of space. On it an icon flashed yellow.
“Conn, Sensors, bogey, one hundred sixty thousand kilometers!” the Sensors officer said excitedly.
“Yes, Scoggins, I think Mister Mirza scooped you. Are you slacking off?”
“Sorry, sir. Won’t happen again.”
“I hope not. Now, what’s the transmission?”
“It says…sir, it says, ‘Orion ahoy, permission to come aboard – Raphaela.’”
Absen sat bolt upright. “The alien! The one that flew off almost a year ago with the rogue commando...the dead one we found.”
“Unless it’s a trick, sir,” Ford said darkly from Weapons.
Absen frowned. “You keep thinking that way, Ford, and I might not fire you when this is all over. Mirza, how do we know it’s not a trick?”
“It’s coming through on video, sir. And Sensors could take a look at the source.”
“Already on it. Here,” Scoggins said as she threw up an image showing a rounded, winged shuttle. The scale bar on the display made it out to be about fifty meters long.
“Okay, looks like the craft that landed on Earth. Link the video.”
A moment later the main screen jerked and fuzzed, then showed a view of a blindingly beautiful young woman, the goddess they all remembered from the media frenzy of her landing in South Africa almost a year ago. Beside her in a kind of cradle-seat sat a tiny boy-child with clear blue eyes and a gurgling smile.
With a frown Raphaela said, “Good to see you all,” in rich contralto tones. She reached a hand over to caress the boy. “Ezekiel Denham says hello too. Permission to come aboard?”
Flabbergasted, the bridge fell silent, then turned as one to their captain for a response. Absen shut his open mouth and spoke when he was certain he wasn’t going to say something stupid. “We’re a little busy right now, miss. We could use a few hours to make repairs. Is it urgent?”
“Why don’t we rendezvous near the Meme scout ship. I have a feeling I can be of great use to you. But first…” her face turned worried. “Did you find Warrant Officer Denham on the Meme ship?”
Absen nodded sadly. “We did, but unfortunately he didn’t make it.”
The goddess’ eyes teared. “Thank you, Captain. Please leave his body where you found it for me. I need to see him exactly as he fell.”
“All right,” he said. “We’ll be waiting. Orion out.” The video cut off.
“I still don’t trust her,” muttered Ford.
“And neither do I, really,” said Absen. “Mister Tobias, I want two Stewards with her at all times.”
“What about the baby, sir?” Tobias asked with a slight twitch of his eyebrow.
“If you think he’s dangerous, give him a minder too, maybe Repeth.” Absen said with a straight face. “What do you think he is, some kind of mini-me?”
The bridge laughed, and someone called out, “Or a mini-Meme!” But Tobias only smiled faintly. “Who knows, with these aliens, sir.”
“Hm. Fine, keep an eye on the baby too.”
Tobias nodded gravely. Absen wondered how much of that was serious and how much was the man’s dry humor. Either way, he was right. With aliens who could absorb a human being and become something else, you could just never tell.
“Helm, how long until we catch up to the…to our prize?”
Okuda answered, “Five hours, twenty minutes at current speed. I’d prefer not to use the drive if we don’t have to. I’m starting to get some warning signs on my diagnostics.”
“Very well. Comms, sound secure from battle stations and general quarters, go to normal watch rotations. Pass the word for Commander Huen, bring the auxiliary bridge crew here and conduct turnover and relief.”
Absen caught an odd look passing over Okuda’s face before the man turned away and closed his eyes, to commune with the computers. He wondered what that was about. Perhaps he wanted to stay on duty for a while longer, but everyone needed sleep. Even me, Absen thought. He’d long ago learned to resist the urge to stay awake too long. It just promoted mistakes.
He was very thankful when Huen arrived leading a troop of fresh – well, fresher – bridge officers. Okuda’s relief came in last, a puffy-faced mustached German named Ingold, and the two Helmsmen exchanged looks, as if possessed of secret knowledge. Absen put it down to their odd little fraternity of astronaut-helmsmen; he couldn’t chase down every twitch and nuance or he could lose his mind.
After a thorough turnover – and instructions to leave Johnstone alone in his trance – Absen stumbled, head suddenly swimming with fatigue and stress reaction, to his bunk.
***
He took his next shift after just enough restorative sleep. Absen knew everyone was tired. He had taken four hours to make sure he wouldn’t make any stupid mistakes, then he ordered Commander Huen to bed for eight. The man probably had been stimming, but he was an Eden and could take the chemical abuse.
Speaking of Edens, he said to himself, I feel a lot better than I have any right to. And I feel like myself. Perhaps my fears were unfounded. “Report, starting with Engineering,” he ordered crisply as he sat down. It looked like he had a whole
new crop of officers on the bridge, except for Johnstone, who now sat alert and seemingly unaffected. I’ll get to him in a moment.
“Power at thirty-six percent. All breaches sealed, air supplies at nineteen percent.”
“What does that mean, nineteen percent? How long?”
“Given the current remaining crew, about five weeks, sir.”
Absen breathed a sigh of relief. He really had no idea how they would get more oxygen, and it was tragic that they had five weeks only because they had lost so many people to breathe it, but that was a problem for tomorrow. “Casualties?”
Master Chief Timmons answered from his niche, putting down his coffee cup to look at his tablet. How the man had managed to find hot lifer-juice in the chaos was beyond him, until he saw the small portable brewer bolted to the deck by his feet. “Crew, six hundred sixty-four fit for duty. One hundred twenty-two in the Infirmary. One sucked out into space in her suit, the pinnace is going to pick her up on the next run to the prize. Marines, two hundred five fit for duty, forty-five in the infirmary. In total, nine hundred thirty-seven living souls.”
“Out of an original complement of three thousand five hundred. Christ, that’s three out of every four dead.” Absen pressed his palms into his forehead for a moment.
“Hell of a price, sir,” responded Timmons, “but we won.”
“Yes we did. Helm,” Absen asked the unfamiliar man in the cockpit, “how long until we park? Dock. Whatever we call it.”
“We’ll match velocity in about twenty-five minutes, Captain. Do you want me to bring us close enough to dock?”
“Can we even dock with another ship?”
“With an Earth ship, yes. With the prize, unknown. Either way, we would have to take all spin off the ship.”
“Another design issue for the future. All right, hold off, just get as close as you think best. Sensors?”
“On the screens, sir. No bogeys.”
“No bogeys? What about those drones?”
The Orion Plague Page 26