The Liberty Fleet Trilogy (War of Alien Aggression, box set two)

by A. D. Bloom

SCS Doxy

  Singh turned from the NAV and said, "What the hell is Chun talking about?"

  Garlan Foet knew exactly what the UN captain meant about honor and vanity.

  "We're staying right?" It was Graves who said it first, but he was an old spacer. He'd already lived three times as long as some of them. What about Bix?

  If Doxy was going to remain here, he needed his crew to ask for it. "This is the Skipper," he said, thumbing the ship's squack from the arm of the command chair. "I want to hear a vote from all of you right the hell now."

  "Vote? What vote?" Tripper said over comms.

  "That ain't how this works," Carnaby said from engineering.

  "That's how it works today. I need to hear you say this is what you want - all of you."

  Singh said it like he couldn't imagine anything else. "We stay. Of course we stay."

  "We stay." The words echoed over comms.

  "I can't believe there's even a question," said Annie. "Stay."

  Carnaby said, "They stole or ship to get us here, yeah...but none of us are giving this up, Skipper. Even if they'd let us have Doxy back and let us go, we'd stay. All of this...the Privateers and the alien bugs...the new worlds... We can't go back now, Skipper. Not now."

  "Not even if this gets all of us killed, Carnaby?"

  "Hauling with you and the Doxy has been great. But we're part of something now, something that doesn't exist for us on the other side of that transit. Even if they gave us back the ship, we'd stay here with Devlin and the bugs."

  "Right," Garlan said. "It's settled."

  "No," Carnaby said. "It ain't. You never said your vote, Skipper. What is it?"

  "I vote we stay. Of course." Garlan actually smiled then and Annie and Singh and Graves on the bridge had no idea the relief flooding through him. The feeling was cool in his veins and intoxicating. It made the flash of panic heat that went through him all the more jarring as he realized that a man like Cyning wouldn't accept uncertainty in a plan if he didn't have to.

  A man like Cyning would have taken precautions and had a contingency plan in place should Garlan refuse to betray the Shediri. Because Garlan was thinking about it in the moment it happened, he instantly realized why his organs dropped in his chest and the flesh sagged over his bones. He understood exactly what was going on when it suddenly felt as if there were twin elephants standing on his shoulders, pushing him downward, crushing his vertebrae together and pulling the fluids in his head towards the deck with what felt like almost three full earth gravities. The company man had a backup plan. And it had just been activated.

  At 3 sustained gees instead of the planned 1.5, the crew of the Doxy and Garlan might not be around to talk about what happened. "Artificial gravity!" The words barely came out his mouth as he fought to stay vertical and slide his hand back to the squack button. "Kill the gravity!" The only reason he was able to speak at all was that he was still mostly vertical and didn't have the full weight of his chest compressing his diaphragm. He got his finger over the comms button and said it again and again. "Kill the gravity! Kill the pinch!" But he didn't know if anyone back in engineering where the field coils' power feeds were could even move.

  Graves had collapsed over the console and couldn't lift his arms. Singh was prostate on the deck, unable to move. Annie had stayed propped up, but her head hung backwards. He heard her wheezing.

  "Carnaby!" he said, his finger still on the button, his voice echoing across the ship. As Garlan began to lose the fight with gravity, he was unable to maintain his position. The weight of his own body pulled his torso to the left and after it dragged him down over the arm of the chair, he could barely breathe. When his vision began to fuzz over because the blood couldn't get to his head, he knew there wasn't much time left. That metal taste came back into his mouth and the sound of his own breathing took on a distant quality like he was hearing someone else, far off and away.

  'Not yet' was the last, melancholy thought he had before the artificial gravity ceased completely, and Garlan felt his insides shift as his body lifted off his command chair. "Thank you, Mr. Carnaby!" he managed to get out with his first breaths.

  "I didn't do it!" Carnaby shouted. "Get back here! It's Bix! We got to..doctor..we.. Get back here, Skipper!"

  "Bring him up the mainsway towards the bays!" The nearest doctor was on Hardway. Carnaby didn't reply and Garlan was already out of the chair and running back that way with the rest of his bridge crew at his heels.

  When he swung through the hatch and entered the mainsway, he saw Carnaby at the far end, coming out of he engineering section with the kid over his shoulder. Without the rail-car it was going to take forever to get down the mainsway, but since the gravity was out, Carnaby used a slim jim. By the time Garlan reached the Shediri airlocks, Carnaby had flown the bulk of the distance down the passage, but was going too fast to stop when the Shediri hatches cracked open and bugs spilled into the mainsway. Stripey soldier bugs and workers flooded out like they planned to board the Doxy, and Garlan even saw weapons in their hands - those spear-things they carried.

  He glimpsed Carnaby and ragdoll Bix through the mass of bugs. Carnaby tried to fly over them, but with Bix's weight off center, he spun wrong, impacted on the side of the passageway and fell into the Shediri. Insect arms held them to the deck.

  Garlan shouted, "No!" and fumbled for the translator button on his suitcomp's chest panel. Singh crashed into him from behind. They both spun out of control until four Shediri caught them. The alien's 'hands' felt like bony snakes wrapped round his limbs.

  "Let them go!" He twisted and tried to get out of their grasp. The computer-generated hiss and click came out of his chestplate speakers, and he was surprised when the bugs released him. "He's injured!" Garlan shouted at them. His suit shrieked and clacked. "Carnaby!"

  "Get them off me!"

  When Garlan made it through the Stripeys to his crewmen on the far side of the group, the bugs released Bix and Carnaby. Only Carnaby moved. Bix's eyes stared out to nowhere and his head lolled when Garlan touched the burns across the chest of his exosuit.

  "He's not breathing, Skipper. He's got no pulse!"

  "We've got to get him to Hardway and a doctor." But when he and Carnaby tried to push off the deck with the kid, the bugs' arms shot out and pinned the boy to the deck again. "Stop it!" He tried to lift their alien hands off and couldn't move them. The bugs behind them clutched him and Carnaby to their twitching frames. They stank like almonds and socks. After his suit translated the word 'stop' five times, a response finally came.

  "No," the voice said from behind. The computer generated voice came out the speaker on the panel hung around the neck of the Shediri Ambassador to War. Ix said it again and then waved its arms, shrieking and fast clicking its jaws at the bugs standing over them.

  Four of them were Stripey soldier-bugs and one was a worker. It wore no armor so when two of the soldier bugs lifted it over unconscious Bix and held it there while the third plunged a short spear into its midsection, the blade opened it up quick and clean. Garlan was already in a state of mental shock, but the way the bug didn't struggle at all - that's what confused him the most. The Stripey pulled the blade towards itself while pushing off the body of the worker as it split the other bug up the center of the thorax. Nothing came out of the cleft Shediri, not until they placed the body close over young Bix's head and pushed on its sides.

  The fluids that oozed out weren't all the same color. They got birthed from the abdomen of the worker in a great, pale greenish glob with swirls of what looked like broken egg yolks. Once the mass of fluids was clear of the body, the Stripeys pushed the dying worker away. Then, one of them opened its clacking jaws wide and sucked the fluids from the air. The other bit Bix.

  Alien hands held them all pinned to the deck while the Stripey bent Bix's head back to expose his throat. Jagged, clacking chitin jaws clamped across his neck. Purple-red arterial blood shot from both sides of his wound briefly and then, no more leaked into the
air. The sound of thick fluids being sucked with an imperfect seal scarred his ears with horror.

  Annie screamed. They all did. None of them could fight free. "Stop! Jesus, no... stop..." She was crying now. "Stop!"

  "What the hell are they doing to him!"

  Garlan looked to Ix, and they swaying bug looked back at him with a dozen cold, compound eyes. "Wha-...why?"

  The stripey that had been sucking the fluids from Bix's veins suddenly bent its thorax back over itself and ejected all of Bix's blood in a fountain of purple globules along with some of its own fluids. In nearly the same moment, the soldier bug that had filled its jaws and stomach or lung or air bladder or whatever it had with the insides of the gutted worker bug now gripped Bix's head and shoulders in its four upper claw-hands. It brought those clacking nightmare jaws to the kid's throat, clamping slowly, taking care to slide the jagged chitin blades into the wounds the other had made.

  Bix's eyes stared at nowhere, focused to infinity, looking through jets of pale green fluid that shot from the spaces where the seal wasn't tight. The terror didn't much recede from Garlan as he realized the bug was pumping the kid's drained arteries full of the bug juice it had sucked from the air - the blood and liquid guts of the worker bug. It stopped when no more of that greenish goo would go in.

  Garlan didn't understand what Ix said then. It hissed and whined and clacked, and the translator said, "Share life."

  "Let me go!"

  Ix clacked and snapped, and the Shediri released them. The bugs leg them all go then, including Bix who now floated in a cluster of Shediri fluids so thick they had to bat the greenish globules away to see his face. The bugs began their thorax thumping then, drumming with all those arms. Garlan wanted to kill them...kill them all. He wished he'd done it when he'd had the chance.

  Carnaby shot from the deck at one of the Stripeys then, swinging like a mad ape. "Why?! You stupid bug fuck, he saved you!" It didn't expect Carnaby to jump up and elbow it across its big head. It shrieked while it and another one caught Carnaby again and held him by all four limbs. They clacked at Ix, and Ix said it again through the translator, "Share life."

  Bix's limbs jerked. It wasn't just a postmortem reflex. The kid convulsed once, then twice, then spun and twisted as Garlan and Annie tried to hold on to him. "He's back!" Bix flailed as if he had electrodes stuck in his muscles. He moved in fast jerks like one of the bugs. Then, his eyes opened wider and began to jitter in their sockets. A second later, the Shediri fluids spurted from the open arteries in his neck like they were being pumped by a beating heart. Garlan clamped his hands around the wound out of reflex. "Hold it in! Hold it in while we get him to Hardway!"

  SCS Hardway, Medbay

  Garlan waited while Doc Ibora and his team worked.

  The white, molded panels in Hardway's trauma bay had been spattered and smeared with all the alien blood Ibora and his team tried to clean out of the kid's veins. Doc Ibora had been in there working on him for two hours. There was no way they could have gotten it all out, but the doctor stepped away from Bix, stripped his gloves, and withdrew a cigarette and a lighter from a pocket. Ibora lit up next to one of the vents installed to suck fluids out of the air when gravity fails, opened both doors of the airlock and shouted to him outside. "There's no question they saved his life. Even if you'd got him here in time to restart his heart, he would have had terrible brain damage from oxygen deprivation."

  "But what the hell did they do to him?"

  Ibora exhaled a long stream at the vent. "What the bugs have got inside them isn't just blood like we know it. It's mixed up with a set of bacteria and microbes they live with in symbiosis. Those organisms are like the ones that can live off metals. They can extract or transfer electrons directly and fuel cellular processes directly."

  "So..."

  "That accomplishes the same goal as delivering oxygen with a platelet like we do, but you don't need to refresh the supply so often. I'd say a Shediri could hold its breath for days. So can a human if you pump them full of Shediri blood, but it might kill them for a dozen other reasons."

  "They cut open one of their own to save Bix. Gutted it."

  "I was going to ask where you got all that blood."

  "How bad did it mess him up?"

  "Weird proteins in there got stuck to everything, but we cleaned them out. Mostly. I don't know what to do about the bacteria. Those little alien fuckers are still in there, but they're not multiplying anymore and his immune system is ignoring them. I think they're finding equilibrium with his system."

  Garlan twitched a little. "Is that good?"

  "I have no bloody idea," Ibora said. Garlan thought he looked all too comfortable with that uncertainty.

  "When can we have him back?"

  "He's got a full tank of clean, human blood. The throat wounds were easy to repair. I could give him a stimulant right now and get him moving if his life depended on it, but it wouldn't be the best thing for him. How did he get hit with so much charge in the first place? It melted his suit and liner to his chest. He's covered in Lichtenberg scars."

  "The pinch malfunctioned and threw way too many artificial gees. Flattened us. That kid has been at .3 gees for five years, but he fought ten times that to crawl across the engineering deck and pull the juice on the system before it killed us and all the Shediri. Conduit was still live. He didn't care."

  The doc shook his head. "How the hell did that malfunction happen?"

  "Remote scripting error," he said. "I don't know." Only the second part was a lie. He knew who made it happen and how.

  The voice out of Hardway's squack mangled Garlan's name. "Captain Garlan Fo-et to the ready room. Captain Fo-et to the ready room."

  Garlan checked again to make sure Bix's chest was actually moving up and down and that he was breathing on his own.

  "Didn't they just call your name to the command deck? Go, Captain Foet. Leave the powder monkey with me and go. Leave me in solitude to enjoy my few moments of quiet before we steam into battle. Things are about to get a lot bloodier."

  8

  SCS Hardway, Observation Deck

  Ram moved the briefing to the observation deck when he realized he couldn't fit three Shediri in the counter-surveillance cage with all those captains. Ambassador to War, Ix and his two bodyguards arrived first with Asa Biko, Dell Pardue, and Dana Sellis. She said, "The UN captains are almost here and the captains of the monitor squadron are close behind. Foet is on the way from Medbay."

  It took Ix time on all those those short legs, but the Shediri crossed the compartment and situated himself in front of the windows that looked out over the primary launch bays. The Ambassador to War rested on the piece of alien furniture they'd printed for him in the fabrication bay. The hollow, offset and smooth-edged pyramid jutted upwards like a giant doorstop, and Ix's 58 legs dangled over the sides. They fanned together as if swimming while he watched the UN captains arrive with Chun in the lead and the destroyer captains behind him.

  "Captain Chun Ye Men," Ram announced.

  Ix clacked and sputter-hissed. "Shediri offer admiralty."

  "Don't offer it to me," Chun said. "I can't follow orders." Chun smiled after that to evidence it was a joke, but his face fell back to stone a second later. "Thank you for hosting the briefing here, Ram. It'll be faster this way."

  The remaining five captains of the converted monitor squadron arrived looking grim. After having watched one of their sister ships cut in half and another run through, the vulnerability of their ships to fire must have been at the front of their minds. "There's scotch," he said to Rabal and the others, but they shook their heads. "Your ship..."

  "Colt can still fight," Rabal said. "They missed her vital parts. She'll be a touch slower than her sisters, but her railgun is operational."

  "Sorry I'm late," Captain Foet said as he came in the hatch. He froze when he saw the Shediri. Ram saw his hand go to the chestplate of his exosuit to activate the translator. "Bix is alive. Thank you." The translator c
hatter clacked as Ix nodded with a learned gesture and swayed at the same time with its guards.

  "Share life," it said.

  "Now that we're all here," Captain Chun said, "let's begin." The UN captain set his matchbox computer on the table between them all and stepped back as he gestured to control its display. The image of Shedir-4 appeared with the enemy battlegroup no longer in orbit above it. "We're only two hours out from the Shediri homeworld now. The Ekkai heavies have ceased bombardment and moved outside the orbit of the planet's two moons to meet us out in the open where we won't have any advantages. The Imperium ship is at the center of their formation. The Ekkai we can see suggest they've deployed according to conventional task force doctrine with the Imperium ship surrounded by their largest ships and another ring of smaller, faster ships and beam-ship gunboats that are particularly effective against small, fast-attack craft like our fighters, junks and the Shediri raiders. It will be small craft that penetrate the Imperium vessel's shield this time so where these Ekkai gunboats are and where we can lure them is especially important. The Privateers stand to take a lot of punishment even if this goes off the way we hope so I'd rather you hear about that part of the plan from Commodore Devlin. Win or lose, this was his idea."

  Ram said, "Thanks to our partnership with the Shediri and the fact that Hardway has remained here since we first arrived, we currently have six torpedo junks with newly installed, alien-modified field coil pinches that have been reconfigured as shield penetrators. Those six junks will be able to fly through the Imperium vessel's energy shield if they can make it there. They can evade the slower-tracking beams of the Ekkai heavies if they have to and dodge the plasma weapon of the Imperium vessel to some degree, but the small, fast-tracking guns all over the fat Ekkai gunboats will tear our strike force apart. Simply put, our plan is to make it appear as if the air group is with the carriers, lure the gunboats and hunter-killers to one side of the battle, and launch our real attack with the air group and the battleship from the other side."