Alliance Marines: The Road To War

by John Mierau

  In-Fold

  Aboard Cloke Tender 5

  “Ryson? Is that the comms satellite shaped like a big dick?” the muscular blonde private, Erin Padalecki, asked.

  A rail-thin corporal smacked his palm against the back of her head. “Jesus, Private!”

  “Sorry, sir,” Padalecki muttered, rubbing the same spot on the back of her head.

  “You should be,” Corporal Tyler grunted and pointed. “Ryson is the pale blue one with the wheel on the end.”

  “The wheel used to be on the Fleet Flagship, back when it arrived from Earth and was still called Lucky Strike. I hear she’s a resort ship now,” the corporal continued over Padalecki’s shoulder, wiggling his eyebrows at Lieutenant Bowen. “The wheel don't spin anymore, but your head will if you get to visit. Earthers only.”

  “Jesus, Tyler!” Bowen hurled the words in precise imitation of Tyler’s words.

  The corporal looked away, red-faced. “Sorry, sir.”

  “You should be, you know better,” Bowen continued, suffocating a smirk before anyone but Willard caught it. “Or you should know…that they wouldn’t send a Reacher crew to save a resort ship if it had the last working girls in the Fleet on it.” He waved at the hatch at the back of the cockpit. “Suit up for vacuum. Tyler: full gear for you! We dock in…”

  “Two minutes to get there, five ‘till hard seal,” Willard said, his eyes staring at something only he could see, as he flew the tender through the interface.

  “I want you breathing out of cans in four,” Bowen finished.

  “Yes, sir!” Padalecki and Tyler both acknowledged, sketching off salutes and scooting out of the cockpit.

  “Why’d you tell Tyler to gear up all the way?” Willard asked, his voice as far away as his eyes. “You know something I don’t?”

  “Me? Not a thing,” Bowen said, staring out the front window at the boxy blue shape rapidly increasing in size as the tender approached. “Except for that big hole just below the wheel.”

  Willard’s eyebrows knit together as he ‘looked’ with ships’ sensors. “Oh, yeah.”

  “I thought you didn’t miss things when you were plugged in.”

  “I don’t ‘miss things.’ I was just busy looking elsewhere.” Willard’s eyebrows pushed together again. “Most of her ox is gone and she’s running on emergency power, but what’s bugging me most is that she’s not broadcasting an emergency code.”

  “No code?” Bowen looked out at Ryson. She was visibly listing, falling out of position from the rest of the Fleet. “I don’t need piloting skills and a fancy neural interface to know she’s big enough to do some real damage if she hits something. Why send just us? Why not a whole crew with backup supplies?”

  “I don’t think we’re the A-team on this one.” Willard’s voice turned grim. “Look in the hole.”

  A small cargo carrier—or what was left of one—had collided with the Ryson, burying itself completely inside Ryson and doing massive damage in the process.

  Bowen whistled. “Almost ripped her in two.”

  “There’s no record of any crash. Or any visit by a cargo carrier, even.”

  “How could Ops miss this?”

  “They didn’t miss anything.” Willard sent his consciousness rifling through the Fleet’s traffic systems. No collision report. Only incidental damages recorded for Ryson. He puffed out his cheeks and blew out a frustrated breath. “Shit is happening here, Bone.”

  Bowen slapped both hands on the instrument panels below the window and leaned closer to the window. He chewed his lip a moment, then stared back at the pilot’s chair.

  “Black shit?” he asked.

  “Black shit,” Willard agreed.

  Silence filled the cockpit as the pale blue hull of Ryson filled its windows.

  #

  Tee-Five’s sensors detected only one location bleeding more than residual heat, light, and sound on Ryson. Heavily shielded, so Willard couldn't be sure what he was picking up. Nonetheless, he docked the Tender one level below, at the closest docking station to the area ticking the ‘maybe-someone’s-left-alive’ boxes.

  They were near the top of Ryson’s vertical module, two levels above the crash site. The kilometre-wide wheel was two levels up. The wheel wasn’t moving, but it didn’t have a reason to in the new age of grav-gennies. Willard wondered what it was used for, if not to provide good old-fashioned centrifugal gravity.

  The tender’s backside airlock opened silently onto Ryson's interior. The inside was black, except for lines of red, green, white, and yellow glow-light stretching out in faint lines on the floor. Willard, Bowen, Tyler, and Padalecki paced inside, flipping suit lights on in the dark. A four-legged robot followed, the square cargo bed on its back full of emergency vacuum suits, oxygen, and other creature comforts.

  “No power, no comms, no heat…” Bowen muttered, jumping lightly on the spot. “How’s there still an up and a down?

  Willard turned to look at the airlock assembly behind them. Two ship-sized airlocks, set fifteen metres apart on the outer wall. He tapped the console for the airlock leading back the tender. Nothing happened. He squirted a message through his ship’s radio and the airlock cycled closed under power provided by the tender.

  “The grav-gennies still work?” Willard wasn’t complaining—he hated zero-g—but it was definitely odd. “Main reactor's cold. Emergency shutdown means it won’t be spinning up any time soon. Takes a lot of power to fake gravity.”

  “This place gives me the creeps,” Bowen added privately, then roared on the open line. “Corporal Tyler! Haul ass outside and bubble us up.”

  “Yes, sir!” Tyler bounded to an emergency airlock. The ground shook with his steps. The rest of the group were wearing armoured space suits, but Tyler was wrapped up in a ten foot tall mechanized suit. The arm-mounted weapons had been swapped out for four bulky canisters on each limb. Blue incandescent light shone from ports on each of the canisters—primitive versions of the wielder kit Willard had admired on the repair techs he’d flown to Harrison.

  When there was a Harrison.

  “Don’t blow your whole load, Corporal!” Bowen’s taunt jerked Willard out of his black mood before it could congeal. “Always leave a little in the clip.”

  Willard’s nose wrinkled. He closed his eyes and summoned a private channel to Bowen’s suit. “Jesus, Bowen. Phallic much?”

  A click in Willard’s helmet, then Bowen’s reply: “You went through the same boot camp bullshit I did to qualify for Alliance Service, you hear the newbies talk.” Bowen’s head dipped in Tyler’s direction. “Tyler’s a soldier through and through. Only enjoys his orders when they’re dipped in cheese.”

  Bowen clicked back to the team channel. “Padalecki!”

  Private Padalecki turned and stiffened to attention. “Yes, sir?”

  “Lieutenant Tsu and I will recon the shielded area bleeding onto the tender’s sensors. You accompany Corporal Tyler. Keep a visual on each other. Soon as the hull’s sealed, be good enough to join us”

  “Yes, sir!” Padalecki acknowledged, and jogged across to the second airlock. Tyler was already inside, making ‘hurry-up’ gestures with his suit’s massive hands.

  The lighting inside Bowen’s helmet made his smile look a little crazy. “See?” he continued to Willard on their private channel.

  Willard didn’t respond. He knew Bowen was hamming it up for him, probably to keep his mind off the Harrison. Willard also had to admit he was just as conflicted by the Marine lifestyle. Working alongside Earthers was a hard sell for anyone who’d fought for Reach during the civil war. A war that just stopped overnight, on the day the last convoy winked into existence.

  Yeah, no. ‘Conflicted’ wasn’t a strong enough word.

  He rolled his eyes. Snap out of it, Will!

  Along with the words, he heard Elena’s voice, bringing him down or up a notch as she deemed necessary.

  That put half a grin back on his face. Deciding laughter might be the best medi
cine, he flipped Bowen’s own words against him. “Ours is not to reason wh—”

  Bowen lashed out and punched Willard hard in the shoulder. “Don’t start!” he laughed.

  Willard rubbed his shoulder and glared through his face mask at Bowen. “Keep that shit up and you walk home.”

  Bowen laughed again.

  Willard conjured up the map of Ryson and cursed silently. Paired with the processors in a ship or an advanced mech, his neural implant could extend his consciousness into a ‘sandbox’—a shared space that was half computer generated and half lucid dreaming. In a sandbox, Willard could gin up hyper-realistic projections virtually indistinguishable from hallucinations and process dozens, even hundreds of data streams faster than he could think about blinking.

  The best he could do with the idiot processors in his space suit was spray a wireframe diagram of Ryson onto the standard retinal-projected heads-up display. He blinked and finger-tapped contacts in his gloves to examine the layout of the craft.

  Compartments wrapped out around a central spindle which contained power and life support systems, plumbing, a mass of secondary systems, and three separate elevator assemblies. A pressurized corridor connected an inner ring with an outer ring of compartments.

  Willard’s map included data Tee-Five’s sensors had collected on approach Unlike the map from Ops, it showed the crash site two floors down. Ryson’s hull had been torn wide open by the cargo hauler’s impact, and her insides jutted out like some kind of creepy spaceship anatomy lesson.

  Mildly curious what would happen, he squirted the updated information on Ryson’s status out to the tender, which transmitted it to whichever of many tiny drone satellites floated closest, dotting the vacuum between the ships of the Fleet.

  Red boxes flashed over the updated map. Tee-Five’s systems had been locked down, its logs encrypted in place. It would take more pull than his lieutenant’s bars to lift that lock and upload his data.

  The only copy available was stuffed in Willard’s head, and he was pretty sure any network he tried to offload it to would get only a corrupt copy.

  Somebody really didn’t want to advertise what was happening on Ryson.

  “I hate black ops shit,” Willard moaned again, severing his connection with the tender and catching up with Bowen. The walked down the corridor to the right, following the green glow strip on the floor to a pressure door into an inner compartment.

  Bowen was on his knees, one gloved hand popping open the repair hatch at floor level.

  Willard refreshed the Fleet triage map again. Most ships had flashed back to greens, a few showed yellows, and what hot spots hadn’t been put out were well attended by rescue teams. At least nobody was left waiting to be rescued because Ops had ordered his tender to Ryson to provide…whatever the hell they were supposed to provide.

  Bowen did his thing in the repair hatch and the elevator doors opened as silently as the airlocks had. He stood up, clapping pretend dirt off his gloves, and joined Willard, peering into the empty shaft. They flashed helmet, chest, and wrist lights up and down.

  The walls of the shaft were buckled and twisted a floor and a half down. Lights from Tyler and Padalecki’s suits cast flickering shadows past the wreckage of the cargo hauler.

  Zero signals or vibrations from inside. Willard hadn’t bothered to check the names assigned to the eight flatlined life-sign monitors of the crew of the crushed allow coffin.

  “This…” Willard sighed.

  “Sucks,” Bowen agreed, already climbing the rungs to his side of the door.

  The climb was easy. Willard got the door open, they helped each other out and started down the hall towards the last place on Ryson there could possibly be crew to ‘make secure for transfer.’ The orange glow strips on the floor led right to it.

  “You think there are boy Takers and girl Takers?” Bowen asked, staring at the door.

  Willard turned his body sideways to get a look at the other man’s face. “Do I think—? Do you just lie awake at night thinking up crazy shit, Bone?”

  An embarrassed laugh on the channel. “Well, yeah, I do but…don’t you ever wonder what they’re like? What we’ve got in common, what we don’t? ‘Know your enemy right?’”

  Willard shrugged his shoulder and arms wide. “Guess we’re gonna find out in seven months.”

  “Or maybe we already know,” Bowen countered. “Maybe the last convoy out of Earth figured more shit out than they let on.”

  Both men stopped talking. Not because Willard was surprised or offended by the conspiracy theory. He’d heard it often enough before. He wasn’t convinced the idea was crazy, either.

  With the door before them, neither man spoke, neither made a move toward the door, out of fear of what they’d find inside.

  Finally, Bowen knocked.

  He waited a few seconds and knocked again.

  Willard turned his back. He didn’t know what the hell difference a few more bodies would make, not on top of what he’d already faced, but he had to turn away all the same. He called up an outside camera mounted on the tender to check on Tyler’s progress, rather than watch Bowen knock, and get no answer back.

  Tyler was floating in the vacuum of the Fold, thirty or forty metres out and facing the Ryson. As Willard watched, the back of Tyler’s suit glowed. Thrusters on his back pushed the marine towards the hole in Ryson’s side. His suit had covered half the distance back to the hull when electricity crackled along both arms.

  A corona of blue obscured the suit’s arms. It curled and turned, then changed density and form, becoming more like a physical thing, like drifting sand or water lapping at a rock. Electricity arced off Ryson’s hull from of each growing, twirling pillar of blue.

  Each crystalline matrix writhed and turned and surged forward in thin, whipping trails. On contact with the hull, the streams rippled against the hull, then seemingly froze into place. Tyler’s rate of approach slowed, offset by the release of energy and matter.

  The fringes of the matrix turned solid anchored to the matter of the hull. The electric blue faded to a dull matte, out of which drifts of metal and blue crystals curled and elongated, adhering to the ship’s skin at the subatomic level.

  The ends of the stream solidified and rippled back over themselves. The ripples curled and became solid again, one on top of another. Tyler skillfully angled the growing pillars over the breach, entwining them into a bridge.

  The bridge became the first of several strips. In minutes, the corporal began weaving perpendicular strips overtop the first rows. The crystalline-alloy matrix accreted more quickly over the crosshatching. Willard knew from past experience that in just a few more minutes a metres-thick dome would seal the breach closed, making Ryson’s hull airtight again.

  Another airtight mausoleum.

  Seven months, Willard thought. Seven months to go, cooped up in less than half a million square kilometres of Fold, alongside Earthers he’d tried so hard to wipe off the face of Reach.

  Almost ten minutes passed while Tyler worked his crysteel magic.

  Bowen knocked the whole time.

  Willard closed his eyes, and dredged up all the tattered faith he could. It wasn’t quite enough. He felt the doubt eating a hole inside of him.

  No one would answer.

  Nineteen thousand human beings had boarded the sixteen ships of the Fleet in the days and weeks before the Fold took them.

  Would anyone be left to fight the Takers when they arrived?

  Then, the airlock opened.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  A woman answered the door, mouthing ‘come on!’ through her face mask. Carina Mentel was printed on both shoulders of a thin, well-designed spacesuit of recent production. Below the name was printed her specialty, same as everyone in the Fleet. Instead of a color code and group section, however, was simply the word Doctor. She grabbed Bowen’s arm and dragged him inside the airlock. Willard squeezed in beside them, tugging the door closed behind him and cycling the wheel
quickly.

  The comms channel to Ops and the video feed of Tyler and Padalecki floating outside Ryson both winked out when the airlock closed. A yellow curser danced at the end of a block of text notifying him of multiple network connection failures.

  Fleet-wide streams sometimes cut out aboard ships, but there was always an internal network to pick up the slack. Not this time. The airlock was struggling to pressurize the inner chamber on battery power. Willard felt instantly exposed and unprepared. He didn’t like being in the field without a safety net.

  Once the atmosphere was topped up, the inner door opened. Mentel strode inside and quickly removed her helmet. Willard and Bowen cracked their visors and followed Mentel to a row of lockers beside the airlock. The air was stale with a metallic tang, but perfectly breathable.

  Doctor Mentel turned her back on them and stripped off her space suit with small, economical gestures. She was on the older side—late fifties maybe—but she was ‘Earther old,’ possessing a healthy, clear complexion, straight posture, good muscle mass—and attractive too, Willard had to admit. Emerging from the top of the line, custom space suit were dark-coloured athletic tights and a slim hoodie sweater with a high collar. Willard had a feeling her clothes were picked more for utilitarian reasons than fashion, even though they suited her.

  “Doctor Mentel, I’m Lieutenant Bowen, can you tell—?”

  “Just a minute!” she scolded Bowen, carefully folding her suit and placing it in a locker.

  Willard coughed. “Ma’am, we need a SITREP here.”

  She finally turned and stared at him, gently touching the top and sides of her head.

  At first, Willard thought she was just obsessive about helmet-head but she was touching her scalp lightly, not smoothing her short gray hair.

  “Yes, fine. They’re all dead, and we need to go before we’re dead, too. After you help me move the Q’s.” She pointed at the back wall, poking her finger at racks and racks of shoeboxes: quantum supercomputers. “How big is your ship?”