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

by A. D. Bloom

  Vanta black coatings with albedo so low they appeared to be nothing but a patch of darkness had been around for ages, but this one had a lensing property that was inherent to the light channeling structure of the skin so that what Ram saw was a discrete patch of curling, brackish mist that filled the tiny compartment he now recognized as an armored cache for warspite torpedoes.

  "Detach that," said Chun, pointing to a charging conduit that terminated in mid-air where it met the semi-visible boat. As he grabbed and twisted to the left, the UN captain told him. "She'll be stealthier than this if we can get all her systems powered up right."

  "What do you mean if?" he said while Chun reached to the edge of the mist and opened the hatch. The interior was dimly lit with red light and as Ram stepped inside, the close bulkheads seemed to swallow up his voice and turn it to a whisper. "I thought this was your boat!"

  The two of them hunched inside the low cabin. "Do you know how to run everything on that carrier of yours? The stealth functions are managed from the electronic warfare console there. The Spec Ops teams have specialists for this who train on this gear." He nodded to the console.

  "I don't know how to work that thing," said Ram.

  "That's why you're flying. I'll work the EWC and manage our stealth."

  Ram crouch-walked to the pilot's seat and strapped himself in. "You don't have a suit."

  "Won't need one. Hold on..." The power came on to the piloting console and projected an exterior view along with NAV interface Ram recognized. It was a simple as a longboat, four, small, maneuvering nacelles and main engines in back. "There's no rear engines," Chun said. "It's just a vestigial element in the software of the NAV."

  "Right. Powering up the nacelles. It's going to get hot in this little compartment."

  "Opening the doors," Chun said, hammering a wide button set high on Ram's console. "Her name is Minerva."

  Ram took Minerva's sticks in hand as the bulkhead in front of the craft split in two and withdrew into the deck and upper bulkhead giving him an open path into Guerrero's main bay. The longboat he'd come in was on the other side of the bay parked with six others. The helmets on the gaggle of white exosuits near it all turned to stare at the dim compartment and the stealth craft inside it.

  "Can they see us?"

  "I haven't engaged the real stealth yet. They can see what you saw - a shadow." Chun's sailors began running towards them. "Hurry! What are you waiting for!"

  Ram pointed the maneuvering nacelles at a shallow up angle and gave the the most gentle thrust he could manage. The view of the bay shot forward at him at alarming speed along with the terrified faces of the UN sailors in their helmets. "Turn! Turn!" Chun shouted, and Ram flipped the port and starboard thrusters in opposition so that the craft spun in front of them like a burning specter and blasted them with a 5000 degree plasma bath that sent them flying into the rear bulkheads of the bay. "Don't cook my sailors! Dammit!"

  The bulkheads blurred around them as Ram hit the thrust and cooked the whole bay on the way out.

  "You're a terrible pilot!" shouted Chun.

  "I know! I know! Is the stealth up yet?"

  "No!" Chun said, "I'm trying!"

  "How long?"

  After they cleared the bay and shot out between the ships of the task force, Ram killed the maneuvering nacelles and switched to the gas thrusters. Without real stealth, he knew it wouldn't be long before someone spotted them with something. The alarms had probably gone up in Guerrero. He turned and looked to port at the bay they'd left and saw a pair of longboats leaving already. They turned the wrong direction.

  "Chun! They're going to find us out here if you don't get that stealth working!"

  "I know! I know!"

  "Will an active radar sweep catch us?"

  "Right now, yes."

  Ram heeled the craft over and flew her down at the scared flanks of UNS Guerrero's hull, only pulling the nose of the boat up when they were flying scant meters over her welds. "Deceleration burst in 3...2...1..." With only that craft's tiny pinch coils for inertial negation, the sudden stop over the hull of the battleship threw them both against their straps.

  "What are you doing?"

  "You worry about the stealth. Let me worry about the flying." He pulsed the port side gas jets with all the restraint he'd meant to exercise in the battleship's bay. It had taken a few seconds to get used to the controls, but now, Ram was able to pull off the maneuver he wanted. He slid Minerva sideways, low along the hull and tucked the boat in the shadow cast by the lip of the ship's front section, a dark, inky crescent extending for two-hundred meters. "Even if you can't get the stealth up, they probably won't see us against the hull, not in the shadows like this."

  "Good..." Chun said. "This is good," as a flight of four Sky Jacks broke the line of the curving ship's port side and ripped past them, low overhead.

  The console projected their transponders. "That's the Hellcats out looking for us," he said. "If they didn't see us on that pass, I think we might be safe for a while. Just hope they don't send out the prospecting junks."

  "I think I've got the system start-up sequence right now," Chun said. "We can engage this craft's true stealth capabilities now."

  "How good is it once it's all working?"

  "Not as good as SCS Aragami was. Better than a Shediri raider if you point an active LiDAR or radar beam at it. We don't have the reactor power for grav-lensing or n-space shunting. We're using an interference projection on active sources that sweep us and failing that, we're returning false response on range and bearing. Our best hope to not be seen is to not be looked at."

  Another flight of F-223 blasted past the battleship. "They're all looking for us right now," Ram said.

  "My console is warning me of a dozen active search beams illuminating the space around us."

  "We'll stay right here for a while, I think," said Ram.

  "How long?"

  "Until they think we must be gone and the fighters and junks and radar beams are searching somewhere else. Then, when it's safe, we''ll slip away quietly."

  Surface of Alcyone-3, aka Otherworld

  Ram had to use the pinch coil to lower them straight down into the atmo slowly and under the noses of his own combat air patrols. The boat had been meant for vacuum insertions to asteroids and orbital stations and since the sneak craft's main engines didn't work in the atmo, Ram avoided the junks and slipped Minerva by the Sky Jacks and the ground-based search radar on a straight line to set her down only a kilometer from the island encampment on Alcyone-3 and the newly built stage where Cyning had told him he was going to prison.

  "The shelters are on the far side," Ram whispered through his suit speakers. With his helmet on, he could see just fine in the moonless night. Clouds had set in and even the starlight was denied to them. Without infrared, he didn't know how Chun saw a thing.

  "Dammit!"

  Ram knew by the sound that Chun had tripped and rolled over one of the tufts of long grass that bloomed from the sandy hills of the island. "Careful," he said as he turned to help the UN captain up.

  "It's easy for you to be careful; you can see."

  "Who goes there! Swallowtail!"

  "That's a challenge. Answer him," said Chun.

  "I know what it is." Ram was fumbling to get his helmet off. The blackness engulfed him. "Sucker bet! Sucker bet!"

  "Commodore?" The voice came from the blackness to his left, from behind where he remembered a smaller hillock had been. Lucy's Marine stepped out where Ram could just discern his form against the night, less than ten meters away.

  "It's me," Ram said. "And Captain Chun. Don't shoot us. Who is that? Is that Charney? Are you patrolling alone?" Ram showed his empty hands and waited until the Marine's MA-48 dropped to his side before lowering them.

  "Sagel is over there. Everyone is looking for you two."

  "Would you mind not finding us?"

  "Finding who?"

  Ram smiled into the darkness as the creeping shadow of
Specialist Charney slinked off into the alien night quiet as a Gurkha. All Ram heard as he went to patrol the other side of the perimeter was the wind in his ears.

  "Oh, I see how it is," Chun said. "My men you shoot without hesitation, but yours, it's 'would you mind?'. Bloody pirate."

  "The shelters are this way. I need to find Dana."

  He had to peek in five of them before he got lucky and found her in what had become some kind of a senior officer's shelter with Dana, Biko, Garlan Foet and Lucy Elan who had curled up with Foet and given up trying to hide anything between them. Margo and the boy were still awake. She held a crystal scotch glass and swirled it in front of the embers the boy pushed around the fire as thin smoke rose up under the central onion dome's chimney.

  "Hullo, Daddy," Hank said. "Hello, Captain Chun. Did Earth decide they don't want you either?"

  "Now this is a lovely surprise," she said. "My husband and Captain Chun Ye Men, recently broken out of the brig and on the run. My, you two are enough to make a lady swoon. Chun, you look like you need a drink."

  "I do."

  "Ram?" Dana sat up and unzipped the thermal blankets. "What's going on?"

  It was easier to just show her the goo. He reached into the thigh pocket of his exosuit and pulled out the jar. "Nuts?" she said. "You brought me nuts?"

  "It's not nuts," he insisted, holding the jar up so the embers' light might show her what was inside.

  "You brought me a puddle of goo? What is that?"

  "I need you to find Dudley and get him to test this for me."

  "Where did you get this? Everyone is looking for you."

  "It's not like they say."

  "So you didn't break a prisoner of of Guerrero's brig, steal a ship, and drug eight sailors?"

  "Nine sailors. He shot nine of my sailors," said Chun. "He just kept shooting them like a bloody mad pirate."

  "Get Dudley," Ram said.

  Dana brought him and his gear. Dudley was bleary eyed and bloodshot, but the very fact that Devlin wouldn't tell him what the goo was or where it came from seemed to intrigue him enough to reanimate him fully. After he scraped up some of the mystery goo from the jar and fast sequenced it, his eyes nearly burst out of his head. "Where did you get this?"

  "Is it significant?"

  "Where?!"

  "I woke up and that goo was on the floor of my cabin."

  Dana snickered. "Sorry. I must still be drunk."

  "When I fast-sequenced this," said Dudley, "I forgot to turn off all the daemons running on my matchbox and one of them did what I've been doing with everything I bloody sample here - compare it to the other samples from the planet and look for those instances of repeating gene-code I told you about...the ones that are in disparate species on this planets, but don't have any of the mutation you'd expect to see if the species really shared common ancestry?" Ram nodded. "This is it. This goo here. It's got all the fragments I've found here contained in it. It's much, much larger than all the sequences I've found put together. This might be the whole gene-code that was stitched into the different species on this planet. The Freezt have a lot of this in them. And you say you just woke up and found this goo?"

  Biko snickered now, with Garlan and Lucy. "Yes. I woke up and the goo was right there. On the floor." Margo almost spat out her scotch. "It was there in a puddle on the floor of my cabin. I stepped in it."

  Dana hadn't burst out laughing yet, but when Dudley looked at her and said, "What's so funny?" she lost control.

  "I don't get it," Hank said, stomping his foot. "I want to get the joke."

  "You will in a few years, dear," said Margo.

  Ram said, "Chun, do you think we can make it back up to orbit and come down somewhere else without getting seen?"

  "Where?"

  "A continent close to the southern polar region."

  "That's gong to be risky. What looked to the patrols like random anomalies when we passed before might now appear as an identifiable pattern."

  "You mean they won't fall for it again?"

  "Yes. And I know we can't go that far on gas thrusters in the atmo. Not without days to do it."

  "What you need is a Shediri raider," said Margo. After that she raised the glass to her lips and made a show of savoring the flavor instead of saying anything more.

  "Captain Foet," Ram said.

  "I can get you one," said Foet. "And it can fly pretty well in the atmo."

  "And Ix, the Shediri Ambassador to War?"

  "He won't tell anyone if I ask him not to. Won't ask any questions either. But he's going to want to come."

  "Why do we have to go anywhere?" said Dudley. "I mean...it's all right here. In this jar. The key to understanding everything is this goo in this jar."

  "No," Ram said. "It's not. There's more. I know that for sure now. Captain Foet, get me that Shediri raider."

  Foet nodded. "I'm on it."

  Dana said, "You've got to tell us the whole story Ram. What the hell is going on here?"

  "Are you sure you want him to tell you what he's basing all this on?" said Chun. "He told me, and now I truly wish he hadn't."

  190 meters over the waters of Alcyone-3's south western ocean

  A Shediri raider was built for bugs, not Humans. There was plenty of room inside the main compartment of the 27-meter craft and chairs for eighteen, but a Shediri chair juts from the deck like a smoothed and fattened shark's tooth. These were soft like gravity couches with the topmost jut a little over a half-meter off the deck. The bugs rested their lower bodies on them and set their four (or more) lower legs on either side. For Ram and the indiscreetly large entourage he'd been forced to bring, there weren't many options when it came to seating.

  Margot and Hank had the most experience making do in the bugs' world. The two of them sat astride the Shediri chairs with knees touching the floor or squatting and holding on to the end of it during the bits of wind turbulence the raider hit flying low. The rest of them found it easier to adapt to than they'd thought.

  On his 58 tiny legs, it Ix took a good fifteen seconds to make it from his perch behind the pilot to the rear compartment of the raider and the semi-circle of shark's tooth seats. When the Shediri Ambassador to War arrived, it swayed in front of Devlin and didn't say anything at first as if it didn't know how to proceed. Its vertical jaws clacked and it hissed and whined as the suitcomp translator module it wore around its neck struggled to find appropriate matches in Human English for the words the bug spoke. "Difficult translate."

  "Thank you for your help." Ix had responded immediately, coming with his bodyguards and a raider. He'd arrived so quickly Ram had almost been suspicious. "You came quickly."

  "When Garlan Foet call...already on board...already in atmo."

  "Why?"

  "Difficult translate," it said. "You know. Southern continent, central plain..." He'd told them that much. "Underground," the bug said then. He hadn't told it that. "Underground. 3.7 million Shediri years, 5.2 million Earth years. Ago." It was then, Ram realized Ix had received the same communication he had.

  "You saw it."

  "Ix hear. Ix imagine. [Interrogative] [negative] Devlin same."

  The translator had difficulty keeping up with Ram's words, but the hiss and click kept coming from it as he spoke. "Over five-million years ago, 30km-long arks taking outcasts from one home to another suffered a chance malfunction and fell into our space. Their dimension, the place they called home was so different from ours that even the laws of physics were subtly different. The moment they passed fully into our dimension unshielded, their bodies began to immediately fail as did their technology. Imagine if cell division suddenly took twice as much energy. Your body couldn't do it. You'd die slowly but surely like them. The crews of those arks understood what had happened to them, but they were powerless to change it. The ships were caught in the gravity well of Alcyone-3 by chance and pulled steadily to their doom. But death to them is something we don't understand. They now exist beyond our concept of linear time."


  "Are you saying they're still alive?"

  "I'm saying they never died and they never crashed. But they did crash and die. Both."

  "But last effort," said Ix through the translator.

  Ram said, "Yes, the last effort. They tried to avoid the planet by using what power they had left to wink out of this dimension even though they knew they could only maintain it for a short period. They hoped it would be enough to pass through the planet, protected from its mass and gravity and emerge on the other side with enough speed to escape. They didn't make it. We actually saw it. We saw them crash."

  "But that happened 5 million years ago," said Dana.

  "And we saw it again when they went back there after they saved the Ekkai," like a temporal echo.

  "Excuse me?"

  "They crashed. And died. Sort of. That happened 5 million years ago. But the crash here in our dimension left them in a kind of limbo. They can appear like they did to save the Ekkai, so they're clearly not dead."

  Dana said, "Why did they appear to us?"

  "Maybe just to see if we'd shoot at them. They've appeared to the Shediri as well. Saving the Ekkai homeworld was the first time anyone has ever seen them intercede. They saved the Ekkai homeworld. We all saw it. And then, we saw them die again, or an echo of it anyway as they winked themselves back there and went back to their proper position into the stream of linear time again."

  "So they're not dead," said Dana.

  "Not like we think of it," agreed Ram. "They're something else."

  "And you think they're on or in the southern continent?" said Margo. "We saw the line of arks going in for impact on the Northern hemisphere."

  "They were going to crash on the other side of the world, directly on the other side of the planet from where we're going. The arks passed nearly all the way through the planet and almost made it. During the communication, they showed me the leading ark was only kilometers from freedom when they all reentered this dimension fully and were trapped in the mantle. The bow of the 30-kilometer lead ship breaks the surface somewhere on the southern continent. We're going there and we're going to find it."