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

by A. D. Bloom

  "More contacts on the limb of the star," Biko said with flat calm. The tenor of his voice changed as he recognized the hulls. "Earth ships! Destroyers! Privateer carriers, three battleships, cruisers and escorts! It's the Earth fleet! They must have entered via the transit on the far side of the system!"

  Their superheated hulls streaked plasma as they used Alcyone's gravity to slingshot themselves around the outer atmo of the star at fantastic speed. "They'll be in range to fire in....six minutes."

  "The Imperium ships can see our fleet now," Ram said. "They've got line of sight finally."

  He was right. She knew it because the three Imperium warships flying at them so arrogantly came about together and reversed course. "They're making for the stellar atmo," Biko said.

  "They're running!" said Dana.

  The reversal of fortune didn't leave the men and women and bugs of the task force suspicious of their good luck. It could always change again. It was better to cheer right away, while you still had time and so they filled the comms channels with whooping victory once more.

  "Incoming message!" Biggs shouted over the din. "It's from Anton Cyning. Text only."

  "Read it out," said Ram.

  "It says: 'Congratulations.'"

  "Inform him the Ekkai have surrendered," he said. "Mr. Biko, start the search and rescue operations."

  Dana unstrapped herself, stood, and stepped to the command chair. She couldn't help herself and she didn't want to. She grabbed either side of Ram's head with her hands and kissed him then and there on his bridge, damage to the Commodore's reputation be damned.

  Epilogue

  72 hours after the Battle of Alcyone

  Longboat Three

  They wouldn't give Hellcat 1-1, aka Pill, clearance to simply land his F-223 on SCS Colt when he was coming off the CAP, so the bitter Hellcat had to hitch a ride to Rabal's ship on a longboat like he was some wingless leadsuit chump. Once he boarded, he didn't sit down in the back with the other three passengers. He lingered over the two pilots' shoulders. He stayed there even after they joked about him asking to fly. The view never looked right from the back of the boat, Pill told them. He couldn't see where the hell they were going.

  As they lined up with the hull of the railgun monitor and came in for a landing on the Colt's single pad next to the tower, Pill's eye followed the wandering tracks of the scars in the giant cannon's armor. Discharge lines from the plasma that zapped her crept down her hull where the charge had melted the lines in like a network of jagged veins. Her wounds had been patched with a new chitin plate already. The bugs were so fast with that stuff he began to think the redsuits were right and the Shediri were squeezing it out their butts like spiders make webs.

  After they set down, it was out one hatch and in another, and once he was in the command tower of the monitor, he didn't know where to go until a Chief told him. "Skipper is waiting in his quarters. One deck up. I'll take you." Once he rapped the hatch, the man finally went back to his duties and left him to enter Captain Rabal's quarters alone.

  Rabal sat at a tiny metal shelf of a desk in a bare bulkhead compartment built just like the rest of his ship. "I thought captain's quarters would be bigger," said Pill. The room was hot and smelled uncomfortably personal.

  The captain of the Colt said. "I'm sorry about Strike. I liked her. She was good people."

  "I don't have the money she owed you."

  "That what you came to tell me? Most zoomies would have told me that over comms." Rabal sat back in his chair then and looked into Pill's eyes without blinking for a few seconds. "You sure she didn't leave any cash in her locker for me?"

  "Nobody took the money and shafted you if that's what you're getting at. She didn't have the money. She never did."

  Rabal blinked at him and then squinted. "But...she said..." As Pill shook his head, Rabal seemed like he gave up trying to understand. "Why'd you come here? Just to tell me that? See my face when you did maybe"

  "No. I wanted to give you the only thing she had that actually mattered to her." Pill reached into the thigh pocket of his suit then and fished for the blue ribbon. He pulled the gold-painted, fast-printed medallion out and let it swing back and forth in front of Rabal. Inside the thick, gold ring onto which the ribbon had been tied, a crudely modeled figure of a sprinter dashed in a stylized pose as if she'd just come off the blocks.

  "The fuck is that? A high-school sports medal?"

  "It was her sister's," said Pill.

  "Why don't you send it to her."

  "She's dead. She was in a sub-orbital transport accident when Strike was in training. This plastic, gold-painted trophy for the 440 her sister won meant more to Strike than ten-million Ameros. I saw her use it as collateral once and pay twice what she owed you to get it back. It meant more to her than anything. She'd want you to have it...as an IOU sort of. It's not worth money. It's worth something else."

  Rabal put his hands over his face, covering it for a moment. After he took his paws away and Pill could see Rabal's unshaven mug again, the man nodded and watched Strike's treasure swing on the ribbon. "Okay," Rabal said. "Yeah. Thanks." His fingers wrapped around it and gripped it as if something of Strike would come out if he squeezed hard enough. He hung it around his neck, with one hand, but the other hand still gripped the medallion as Pill turned to leave.

  Rabal's voice almost cracked with tremor. "This better not be some kind of bullshit, 1-1."

  "It isn't. Strike didn't like to lie," Pill said on his way out the hatch. "Don't think of her as a liar because of this. She wasn't like that. I knew her real well and she wasn't like that."

  Two steps out the hatch, Rabal called to him. "Pill!"

  He stopped mid-step. Without looking back, he said, "What."

  "You going down to the planet? Gonna get some shore leave with everyone else?"

  "Yeah...in a few hours."

  "Look for me down there," said Rabal. "I'll be carrying a bottle of the good stuff with your name on it."

  Surface of Alcyone-3

  Ram Devlin dug at the pebbles with the heel of his boot while spray blown on fast winds pricked at his face. Sound in the alien atmo seemed thinner than on Earth, but he could still make out the lubricated grind of the wet stones beneath the sun-paled top layer of the beach. Water rose up to fill the bottom of the trough he'd made with a lake only a centimeter deep. He looked up and squinted at the encephalitic sun of that system, filling the sky.

  "Those stones came off the jut of the cliffs there, where the waves are breaking right now," said Dana.

  "That's what I was wondering," he said. It wasn't.

  She laughed into the bottle at her lips. "I'm a geologist. Sorry." She stood up from the wave smoothed boulder they sat on and held the bottle out to him so that the name scrawled on it in wax china marker faced him. "Who the heck is 'The Pill'?" said Dana. "And why are we drinking his scotch?"

  "Pill, aka, Charlie Kelvin is the new Hellcat squadron leader. That's 1-1, down the jetty there I think." Ram pointed casually with his thumb to a cluster of reclining, blue flight suits and figures in company dungarees and jumpers. "He and Captain Rabal passed by on their way over there. They were already drunk. They said I needed the bottom third of that bottle more than they did."

  "They were right."

  He took the bottle when she passed it to him. "I'm in limbo," he said.

  "When did Cyning say they'd know what they're going to do with you?"

  "He didn't."

  "Fine time for shore leave," she said. "The bugs...what are they doing out there...are they hunting?" Dana pointed down the half-moon beach and out fifty meters to the pack of Shediri bravely wading in the alien shallows with their short spears held over the water, pointed down and tracking the movement of something swimming beneath the surface.

  "I hope like hell they don't end up the prey."

  Up in the sky, out past a trio of Shediri raiders cruising slowly through the atmo between the island and the shores of the equatorial co
ntinent, at least two thatches of Freezt floated together as one mass with their branching appendages intertwined, propelled by their thick lower limbs. In the water, they used them more like paddles. The grove of Freezt that had been on the island when they arrived a few hours ago had been edging closer, chancing descent further and further down the hills from the island's central peak to the pebble beach where strange visitors had arrived.

  A hundred meters away, in the reddish grass that tufted the hillocks, figures in Staas jumpsuits and dungarees edged closer and then darted away as the Freezt pounded at the ground with their lower walking branches raising little dust plumes that blew away in the wind. Their branches and the membranes stretched between them opened and closed themselves like angry umbrellas.

  "Your boy looks like he's having fun helping Duds get his samples," said Dana. Hank was a bright orange dot in the little 'survival suit' Margo had made for him by trimming down some SAR gear. The Freezt sensed him coming and what surprised Ram most wasn't that the boy kept going and charged into the midst of them. What surprised Ram most of all was how he was suddenly, disproportionately concerned for the boy's safety. Hank could dodge a slow-moving Freezt and he knew that, but he couldn't stop himself as he stood and started that way with Dana behind him.

  The dust clouds went up as Hank ran at one and then the other, presumably trying to get a sample of their living cells. Each of them flapped their branches and stomped once he got close. He ran from one to the other, but they always sensed him coming.

  Halfway to the boy, it was pride Ram felt swell in him when he saw Hank had figured out they didn't have eyes and felt him through the ground. Once he stopped moving, the Freezt calmed. The orange dot in the middle of the walking grove froze then, and it waited. In less than a minute, they began their slow shamble again. Before long, a three-meter one passed close enough for the boy to reach out and nip a few cells of the living bark. It must have felt something, because it stomped around raising holy hell and flapping so hard wind whistled through it as the boy ran away laughing.

  He'd already proudly handed the prize over to Dudley from the med bay by the time Devlin got there. "Did you see that?" the boy said. "I don't think they have eyes. And their memory isn't very good."

  "I saw that," Ram said.

  "So did I," Margo added. "And I was appalled. Those things could have crushed you and ruined that little suit I made for you." She winked at Ram so the boy couldn't see.

  Sun-burned Dudley said, "That's going to be very helpful."

  "You been getting all the samples you want Duds?" said Dana.

  "I'm going to have a hell of a doctoral thesis."

  "What about?" Ram said. "This place?"

  "You sent me along with Captain Sellis to see if it was safe for Humans. And to make that wild guess, I had to take a lot of samples. Water samples, atmo samples, soil, lichens, animal cells, anything and everything I could get. I fast-sequenced a lot of the gene-codes of the lifeforms I found here here and to make a long story short, almost all the life here is alien, I think. I mean, I don't think most of this stuff evolved here."

  "How can you tell?"

  "Some have four chemical base pairs their gene code, but some have six, eight, more. Everything here is so different from everything else that I can't be sure what belongs here."

  "Are you saying this place was seeded?"

  "Technically everything on the planet is an invasive species, but it all belongs here now. I mean, all the different lifeforms have found an equilibrium with the things around them. These life forms came here and then evolved to what we see now if you ask me. The evidence of it is in their gene code." He glanced up at the Freezt as the tail end of the grove began to pass on its way down to the water. "Can't wait to test this."

  "What do you think you'll find?" said Ram.

  Dudley grinned. "The thing that seeded this place, maybe. A lot of the organisms I've sequenced have fragments of shared, dormant gene code that seems spliced from the same donor organism. It's in everything here. Just bits of it, not the whole thing. The simulators have no idea what to make out of it. Not yet, anyway."

  "How do you know its not just common to all of them because they're distantly related?"

  "No mutation in the shared sequences. If it was from a distant relative, there would have been mutation over millions of years and selection in action. Nope. They didn't get it from any common ancestor. I think this gene code was stashed here," said Dudley.

  "By what?"

  "That's what my doctoral thesis in exobiology will reveal."

  "Some alien stashed their genes on Alcyone-3?" said Dana? "How long ago?"

  "Don't know. I'm sure they're all long dead now. I'm betting I'll find more fragments of that gene code in these nice and fresh Freezt cells Hank just got for me."

  Ram said, "You think you can really put the pieces back together and isolate the original organism?"

  "It sure would be a nice way to enter the field with a splash," said Dudley.

  Ram's matchbox computer vibrated against his leg as his XO's voice spoke through it. "This is Biko. We've got some basic shelters up for our personnel thanks to the bugs and they've raised us a structure for the signing of the treaty once the clams' ambassador comes tomorrow."

  "How many shelters?" He was glad it was the XO's job to worry about it and not his.

  Biko said, "Enough to sleep 600 at a time I think. They're communal sleepers for about a dozen each, I guess. Just a honeycombed chitin and wind shell with a chimney, anchored with some kinda roots, but they have floors. They smell nice, too. Guerrero will be sending people to join ours for 48 hour leaves."

  "And what about Cookie?"

  "He says he's happy with the meat Cyning gave him - says we'll be happy, too. He's literally playing with fire right now, getting his big barbecue right."

  "Was that Ix landing before in one of those raiders?"

  "With Garlan and Lucy Elan and some Stripeys. And Dana's bug buddy - the one from the planet."

  "Ein Kai Kesik," said Dana.

  "And Terrazzi is coming down with the rest of the gear."

  "Don't we need her on Hardway?"

  "To do what? Engines are at 70%. Reactors are stable. We can maintain orbit. The damage to the rest of the ship is beyond our redsuits. Might as well let them relax...wait...hold on..." when Biko came back on the frequency, it didn't sound like good news from his voice. "Pardue tells me there's another boat coming down ahead of Meester now. It's Anton Cyning's skiff."

  "Maybe he's just here to inspect the structure the Shediri fabricated for the treaty signing," said Dana, but when the incoming ship over their heads caught Alcyone's light and flashed its golden hull at them with a brilliant wink, it gave Ram a sense of foreboding like a bad star in the sky, an omen of ill fortune to come. He was certain that Anton Cyning's only reason for coming now would be to enjoy telling him what the Board of Directors had decided to do with him.

  "I'll go meet Cyning's skiff," said Ram. "Alone."

  He didn't give Dana or Margo or anyone else a chance to say anything more before he skirted the tail end of the shambling Freezt, and made for the encampment, some two-hundred meters over the crest of the grass-tufted hill. The sound of the Stripeys drumming their chests down below rode up on the wind. They'd caught something. He imagined they probably planned to eat it, too. None of his officers or crew would go in the water - none of Chun's crew would either, but the Shediri didn't seem afraid of all the things they couldn't see or even imagine lurking on this world. They were moving right in. Whatever they caught was big enough to see from the top of the hill. It flapped and glistened like some kind of manta ray as they held it up in the light, impaled on their spears.

  The chitin shelters the Shediri had extruded as a gift looked somewhere between giant igloos and onion domes with chimney tops. The bugs had constructed them in loose groupings that followed the line of the plateau, behind the lip of the hill and out of the winds. They were only ten meters ac
ross, but the pavilion the bugs had constructed for the signing of the treaty was of less humble scale.

  The oval platform stage sprawled for over fifty-meters on its shortest line. Above it, the multiple levels of chitin rooftops spiked upwards, curving like beetle-horns at the edges. The ornamental structure rested on eighteen pillars set into a stage that curved in a gentle dome, barely perceptible like the curve of the Parthenon.

  The two, stiff bodyguards Cyning brought with him waved Ram past, and after he hopped up on the alien stage, he met Anton Cyning in the middle of it. The company man spread his arms wide into the space around him. "It's quite grand. The bugs do like a bit of spectacle."

  Ram said, "In a very short time, the Ekkai ambassador and Ix and a UN representative will stand here and make their marks to sign a tri-party alliance against the Imperium. That's more than spectacle."

  The smile didn't fade from Cyning's thin lips. "It's all theater in the end, Mr. Devlin. And you've had quite a time rewriting our collective script. We can't allow any more of that. You're going to prison for a few years, Mr. Devlin."

  "Where?"

  "Here, of course."

  "I don-"

  "You will become both the first prisoner and the first Governor of the this planet's new penal colony. But don't look so sad. Captain Chun of UNS Guerrero is going to a much worse place than you and for longer if what I've heard is true. He's currently confined on his battleship. He won't be joining your shore leave barbecue with his officers and crew."

  "Why now? Have we outlived our usefulness as PR props?"

  "Not at all. But you must be disciplined. The sense of order must not be lost or an organization falls apart. You have been successful in your attempt to direct the course and nature of Humanity's relationship with its neighbors. While I'm sure you compliment yourself on this, leadership must come from the top down. We are all about hierarchy, Mr. Devlin. You've challenged the integrity of that structure. The world must see you punished and quite frankly, I think you need a reminder that all the power you wield is borrowed from us, from the men and women who finance and make the ships you fly. Without us, without the very power you have challenged, your ship and your power would not exist."