by A. D. Bloom
Garlan nodded. "Now."
They walked cautiously at first, but after the shock wave from the detonation in the chamber Ix and the Stripeys had just left, the clicks and clacks he heard all translated to 'faster' and 'go' and 'now'. Half Ix's remaining guard stopped to fight. Weapons fire filled the atmo behind them with flashes and shrieking alien battle cries cut through him.
At every threshold between chambers he whipped his head to look over his shoulder and make sure Carnaby and Graves and Tripper were still there with the Stripeys carrying Ix. Every time he looked back, there were less bugs.
"Exit. Exit." Ix's translator said without expression. "Exit now."
By the time they spilled out the bugs' airlock and into the mainsway of the Doxy, there was only him, his crew, the Ambassador to War, and two Stripeys carrying him. At least some of the rest were still alive because he could still hear weapons fire behind them.
"This way! This way! Run! Faster!" Lucy Elan's voice came from up the mainsway to the bow. He and the rest of them began running that way, but only seconds later, the world shifted sideways.
The detonation that took his feet out from under him slammed Garlan with the bulkhead. He fell to the deck with his crew and the bugs, and when he looked back twenty yards through the smoke, what he saw was a gaping hole into the mainsway from inside the Shediri section and three Ekkai mechanized battlesuits stepping out into the passage.
"Down!" shouted Lucy!
He pressed himself to the deck and fumbled for the translator button to shout out the same thing in clicks and clacks and Shediri hisses, but nobody could hear them over the sound of all the railgun sabot impacting on the Ekkai's battlesuits.
There was no cover in the mainsway. For Lucy's Marines it was a shooting gallery. The Ekkai boarders never got a chance to fire. Garlan kept his head down and prayed the ricochets wouldn't hit them and that his crew in engineering weren't standing at the open hatch.
"Cease fire! Cease Fire!" she barked. The hail of sabot that had been flying overhead and the terrifying, hammering impacts that shook the deck around him ceased. He looked up to see his crew and the bugs including Ix flattened to the deck like him, covered in the Ekkai's oily fluids, but with all their parts still attached to their bodies.
The Marines charged past them then, forming a firing line in front of the breached bulkhead. Lucy Elan waved them in.
"Mr. War Ambassador Ix!" Dana Sellis said as she approached. "Are you injured?"
Ix hissed and swayed and clacked its jaws and batted the arms of the Stripeys who tried to pick it up and carry it. "Garlan Foet," it said clacking and swaying. It minced its way to him on those 58 little VIP bug legs and crossed all six arms across its chest. "Shediri thank you."
The Ambassador to War clamped onto the shoulders of Garlan's suit with its bottom two arms and gave a hop that put its short legs in contact with his. In less than a second, the clamping claws on all 58 of those legs had walked up Garlan's lower body and begun to curve around his back. Wrapped in bug, he staggered and shifted his weight and struggled not to fall over.
"Ix honors you," said Captain Sellis.
The bug contracted itself around him then and he thought his bones would snap under the pressure. "Honor is pain," Garlan said through grit teeth. The translator passed it on, and the Stripeys made that same keening noise they'd made the first time they heard his name.
EPILOGUE
23 hours after the battle
SCS Tin Louie, over Shedir-4
When the descending junk hit the planet's wet atmo, its red-hot belly left a trail behind them. In moments, the hull had cooled enough for Ram to make out the clouds in the pinkish sky over the capitol mega-hive where the Regent's Palace Complex had been. The alien clouds caught the light from the sun overhead and lit up bright behind Captain Chun's face at the porthole. Ram thought his expression seemed to darken.
"I'll be lucky if they don't put me under arrest," Chun said. "You and the other Privateers know the Board of Directors will back you now that you've won. The public relations value alone makes it worth their while, but the UN Navy isn't like that. We follow the Uniform Code of Military Justice. I and quite possibly my officers and crew can expect to be placed under arrest. They'll put us in prison at the least...all of us. The fact that my crew were only following my orders makes no difference whatsoever."
Ram nodded. Chun's sacrifice would always haunt him no matter what happened, but it might not go the way the UN captain thought it would. "Did it ever occur to you that maybe you're the only one following the rules anymore, Chun? Maybe they'll keep you for the recruiting value. You're the heroic battleship captain that saved Shedir-4. I wouldn't be surprised if the orders you disobeyed suddenly ceased to have ever existed. What are they going to do, shoot you?"
The color of the Shediri atmo only made Chun look paler somehow. "I think if a UN Spec Ops team came for me, they'd probably get aboard, kill me, and be gone before anyone knew it happened."
As the junk broke through the cloud ceiling, the full extent of the devastation became visible below. The reddish vegetation that had once covered much of the region surrounding the mega-hive had been burned and blasted away. The radiant patterns that remained behind in the ash and ejecta told a story of fire and shock waves. Greenish waters lapped undisturbed at the bleached shores, but where the twisting towers of the capitol mega-hive and the Regent Kesik's palace had once stood, now only a glossy concavity remained.
"Taipan," Dana said from the other side of the personnel compartment. "Taipan is just...gone...It's gone with everything else."
At the location in the center of the palace complex where Taipan had remained under repair there was nothing but a different color of fused and cracked surface crust.
"Margo said the Shediri saved the art collection. They moved everything but the Olmec Head."
"I don't care about the goddamn art collection," Dana said. "I want my ship. What the hell am I going to do now? I'm not going back to driving your ship, that's for goddamn sure."
The surface of that shallow, 27 kilometer-wide, 2 kilometer-deep bowl had been melted into glass. It was a shattered gem in the ash of the burned lands around it. Flocks of something the size of bats wended a line below over the destruction and as Ram's eye followed them, he spotted the first of the exits from the shelters.
"There," he said as he pointed out the holes and the radiant cracks that made it look like they'd come up through meters of ice. He spotted five such cleared exits in as many breaths, and a few moments further into their descent, he saw them everywhere below. Hunks of glass thick as icepack were strewn around them - fused crust the Shediri blew away to exit. Around the rubble piles, the Shediri flowed in curving streams. He saw thousands. Millions had hidden in the depths of those hives. The beams of the Ekkai battleships' shore bombardment had dug over 2 kilometers deep and fused the surface where the cities had stood, but the bugs of Shedir-4 were very much alive.
The conversation between the ground and Dice and Lippmann up in the cockpit got relayed to him over suit comms. "Hardway junk, Tin Louie, this is Margo Devlin, please come to heading 0145. Sending you landing coordinates..."
"Roger, Mrs. Devlin. Receiving them now..."
The deck shifted under them then as the pilots turned onto the new heading. Dana said, "I wonder if Margo and the boy enjoyed their time hiding underground with the Hive Regent."
Ram didn't consider the stranded redsuits and repair crews that had been working on the ship to be any threat, but once he heard Dana say that he realized how much it should worry him to think of Margo and the boy spending so much time unsupervised with Regent Kesik. They were two of Humanity's most dangerous war criminals or clones of them at least. They were the last people he'd wanted to make into diplomats. As the junk set down and the dug-out rubble mounds rose up around them like anthills, Ram shuddered at the thought of the two of them having the Hive Regent's ear.
Moments after he stepped out the port side l
ocks, he saw the redsuits and repair crews that had been working on Taipan before the surprise attack now walking towards them across the fused crust. They looked ready to go home. But Margo and the boy were another story. Those two now wore only their suit liners and rode on palanquins, actually chairs from Taipan now attached to long, flexible poles affixed with and made of a resin-like, amber-colored solid that glowed between the worker bugs' claws as they bent.
The eight Shediri that carried the two palanquins on chitin shoulders hissed as their legs fast-twitched in unison. War-painted soldier bugs skittered on the fused surface in two lines on either side and swayed their torsos together once the procession came to a stop five meters in front of him.
"Welcome to Shedir-4!" said Margo Devlin. "The Hive Regent regrets to inform you that she cannot meet with you today."
"What?" Ram said, "Why? What changed between now and fifteen minutes ago when we spoke?"
"She didn't say, Father," the boy added. "You can try again tomorrow if you like."
"What the hell is going on, Margo?"
"Oh, this? Young Hank and I are working for the Shediri now, darling. Hank is something that sounds like a Major and I'm....well, I think I've been given a rank similar to a full Colonel in their Intelligence Service. You see, Hank and I have gone into consulting. In exchange for our advice, the Hive Regent has offered us asylum and 'prosperity'. She's most generous even if the meaning of prosperity is somewhat unclear. We're getting on quite well with the bugs. It's nice to be needed and how they do need advisers when it comes to dealing with humans."
"What kind of game is this, Mrs. Devlin," Chun said. "Why could we see the Regent minutes ago, but not now?"
"No games, Captain. On Shedir-4 action is truth. It is exactly as it appears. Before you could see her and now you cannot. Conditions have changed."
"What's changed in the last minutes?" said Ram. "The Staas convoy's arrival? Did the Regent speak with Cyning?"
"Ah," Margo said. "That would be telling secrets."
"What? Whose secrets?"
"The Regent's, of course. You knew that," said the boy.
"As your son said, my dear, unfortunately, the Regent cannot meet with you today. Perhaps tomorrow."
The boy hissed through his teeth then. It didn't sound anything like a Shediri hiss, but when young Hank made that sound, the bugs holding their palanquins twitch-stepped in unison and turned them clockwise to withdraw the way they'd come.
"Hey!" Ram tried to follow as they departed, but the Stripeys darted inwards to close the gap and blocked his path with all their arms spread wide. Unless he planned to start a diplomatic incident, there was nothing Ram could do but watch Margo and the boy go.
SCS Doxy
Garlan Foet descended from the bridge to the hab deck of the Doxy's command section and softened his footsteps when he heard the voices ring out from the mess. Carnaby led the others and sang his song to a sailors' tune that rolled like the deck of a ship and hopped like a peg-leg pirate. At least seven voices chimed in with him.
"Ram Devlin stole our ship so we signed on quick..."
"To get our Doxy back on a promise and a lick."
"We chucked up all our beer on a joyride to Shedir..."
"And that's how we signed on as Ram Devlin's Privateers...We all got shanghaied into Devlin's Privateers."
Garlan laughed at the last part and felt his body lean forward. He wanted to join them, but that first foot to hit the deck wouldn't move and some kind of emptiness formed in his gut as they sang.
"Ambushed at the transit and our tin can took a hit..."
"To late for regrets; good thing our armor is so thick."
"Hey, ho, where will we go? the mighty hull split under fire..."
"Survivin' anyway is how we earn our pay in Devlin's Privateers...You'll earn your combat pay on the very first day with Devlin's Privateers."
Sailors sing. And Garlan wanted to sing with them. He always had. He loved Carnaby's stupid songs more than anyone, but he couldn't join them. His boots stayed glued to the steel and even as they continued to sing the empty passage rang lonely in his ears. They wouldn't want him there if they knew what he'd been willing to do for them. Neither would the bugs. But they'd never know. Neither would his crew.
"Skipper!" Annie's voice out the speakers in the chest panel of his suit made him jump off the deck in the low gees. She said, "Captain Sellis is landing in our bay. She says you want to be there."
Bix looked normal when he came out the hatch of the longboat with Dana Sellis. The kid grinned like nothing had happened. He held the medal up in Garlan's face once he was through the locks. "It's shiny," Garlan said.
"Sure is. Thanks for requesting it." The kid's voice was like a rough grit grinder wheel now. Probably always would be. "Never ever thought I'd get a medal."
"Don't pin it through your suit." He turned to Dana. "Thanks for getting it to him fast and all, but isn't there supposed to be a big ceremony and VIPs like when the kid saw you on vid?"
"Nobody's trying to cheat him out of anything. That little merit badge was one of mine. I gave it to him because it might be a while before we're back on a public stage with any human VIPs."
"You don't say..."
"But Ix wanted you to have something. Well, these were coming to you anyway. We would have given them to you after the freighter in your convoy brought them, but there wasn't time. And after you saved him in the battle, Ix wanted to add some touches to honor you and your crew."
"What are you talking about?"
"The bugs should be laying it all out now along the mainsway. You should probably call your crew there."
Singh and Graves got there first. Garlan and Bix got there ahead of Carnaby and the singing crewmen from the mess, but not far enough ahead to have figured out what they were looking at by the time all of them had crowded into the passage and started hopping up and down around Bix.
"Look at the kid!"
"Let's see that scar!"
"Forget his scar, what the squidy-shite happened to his voice?"
Because of the Shediri war paint all over them, the shapes of Ix's gifts were hard to pick out against the wreckage of the similarly painted incursion from the Shediri section into the Doxy's main passage. It took time for his eye to understood what he was looking at. "Exosuits. The new kind."
"With armor," she said. "Seems like you'll need it."
"Where are the bugs?"
"They don't like to be around when gifts are received."
"Weird."
"What can I say; they're aliens. But obviously you have them to thank for the war paint on your suits. I think it's their way of saying they trust you." That made him wince. "Throw away those POS suits you've got and wear these," she said. "You'll live longer." The Doxy's crew were already stripping down to put on their new assault suits.
"We're Stripeys!" said Bix's torn voice.
"Here's yours," she said. It had been draped over the curves of the Shediri airlock and when he picked it up by the arm, he felt the armor. "The plates deliver decent protection," she said. "Put it on. I want to see what you look like."
Garlan set the new exosuit down. "About our pay," he said.
"You're now seventy-three percent owners."
More than a few ears snatched those words from the air, and heads turned their way. "What?!"
"The Commodore took the liberty of assuming reinvestment would be acceptable payment. Tax options have allowed him to purchase 20% of the Doxy from Staas and gift it to you and your crew as payment in lieu of the smaller sum our contract dictates. He hopes that's an acceptable violation."
Judging by the hooting and hollering up and down his mainsway, the crew of the Doxy thought that was more than acceptable, but Garlan was looking for the catch. There was always a catch. "Don't look at me like that, Captain Foet," said Dana. "I'll begin to think you don't trust me."
He escorted Dana Sellis off his ship while his crew grabbed slim jim belts and took their n
ew suits for a lap around the carrier. Before he closed the airlock on her, she asked why he looked so worried.
"I kept them out of the last war. Now, all I keep asking myself is: what the hell have I gotten them into?"
"Whatever it is, you're in way to deep to get out now. Look at the bright side," she said. "At least you've got a ship. That's more than I can say."
SCS Hardway, bridge
When Ram stepped out of the lift, his eyes went past the command chair and the consoles, out the windows and down to the charred and deformed hull of his ship. He saw flight activity in only two of the six topside primary bays below. "The primary bays are better than they look," Biko said as Ram stepped up to the arm of the command chair. "But the forward bays are much worse. They aren't on fire anymore, but that's the best thing we can say about them. Inside, there's a few bulkheads missing. The module will hold to the spine, but half of it is a big burned out cave."
"And we need replenishment," Dell Pardue said from the AT Controller's console. "Why isn't Staas sending any replacements for our lost pilots, Sky Jacks, and junks? They should have arrived with the convoy, but they didn't."
Ram said, "I don't know any more than you do."
Biko turned his entire mass in the command chair when Ram told him what had happened on the surface. "The Hive Regent snubbed us?"
"That's right," Ram said.
"After we saved that big fat bug," Pardue said. "I can't believe it."
"It may be more complicated than it appears," he said. "My wife, Margo implied Kesik knows something we don't. I'm betting I'll find out what that is when Cyning arrives."
"His longboat is requesting clearance," Pardue said.
After the Marines escorted the company man there, Ram found Cyning in his ready room, sitting on the desk inside the counter-surveillance cage next to a bottle of liquor. "This is a gift for you, Commodore Devlin."