So, it had come down to this. Caught, not even in the act . . .
Suddenly, an idea leapt into Chief Schumann’s head. She turned her gaze from the onrushing mantes to the great egg on the hill, then back to the mantes. A realization hit her like a bolt of lighting. Then she was ripping the last bandolier of squad gun shells from Powell’s back, and before he could protest, she was up and running.
Powell yelped, trying to pull her down, but she was too quick. The crew screamed after her as she tore past them, and then they were up on their own feet chasing after her, howling like Zulus.
“No, no, NO!” Amelia puffed into her headset. “Stay behind and give me cover! The mantis patrol will follow me! It’s the ship they’ll be protecting!!”
Powell and the others slowed and stopped.
It was true.
The mantis aliens—riding their discs—had turned away from the crew and were now zooming straight as an arrow at the shrinking figure of their commanding officer. Powell and the rest of the platoon watched in amazement as every last mantis ignored them and pursued Chief Schumann.
“Awright, you heard the lady!” The big corporal snarled. “Up and ready!”
Each of the crew dropped to one knee and raised his or her weapon up to the shoulder, telescopic sights whining as they focused on the retreating images of the mantes.
Rifles cracked to life, sending bullets into the cluster of aliens that were right on Schumann’s heels. The creatures broke, trying to avoid the incoming fire, but still maintained their pursuit. Powell, using the last free round for his squad gun, adjusted the weapon’s trajectory and drew a bead on the lead mantis.
The group leader died, as did three of its kindred. The dream of mating—so wonderful, so fleeting—was terminated in a hail of anti-personnel shrapnel.
Amelia Schumann’s ears pounded loudly as her heart forced blood to her brain. Her legs pumped like pistons, muscles burning, but running on pure adrenaline, while her lungs hurt with each ragged breath. The grass and weeds flowed under her feet in a blur, yet the distance to the mantis mother craft shrank ever so slowly. She could hear the hideous squeals of the cyborg bugs as they died behind her, and the reports of the crew’s weapons as they fired. She almost fell as one of Powell’s shells decimated the head of the pack. But desperation drove her onward.
Thus far no one had even put so much as a scratch in the alien ship. The Brahe’s rail guns were hurling everything short of nukes, and they ran off the egg’s shields like rainwater. Dissolving into nothingness. The only way anyone was going to get to that thing was to go right up to it and shove a shell up its ass. And Amelia had a whole bandolier of shells.
The drop-pod super-carrier commander watched as one of the bipedal creatures—still some distance away—destroyed the tactical group leader who was leading his patrol to defend the ship. The group leader had been on the heels of the smaller biped that now rushed toward the commander’s home. The commander had not given these humans enough credit. They’d proven to have remarkable tenacity, even when faced with overwhelming numbers and technology.
The commander tried to make contact with one of the other mantis troops in the patrol group, and impose his will upon it. But the patrol was too single-minded in their focus now. The little human who ran was clearly all that mattered to them.
The little alien biped sped towards the commander’s armored battle fortress.
Deciding that caution was best, the commander temporarily took his attention away from the pesty human ship in low orbit, and re-concentrated his weapons systems on the planet’s surface around the ship. There were guns for anti-ground attack too. All he needed to do was drop the shield system long enough to squeaze off a few bursts, and the running human would be finished.
Not like a single little alien could do much to hurt the drop-pod super-carrier anyway. The little runner seemed almost cute, in a pathetic manner. The commander regretted that it would be too easy.
Amelia saw the guns emerge, and she leapt violently to her left as a burst fried the air above her head and smashed into the ground several meters behind. Blinded with fear, she ran onward, tears streaming from her eyes, and her breath coming in gasps. The alien craft was less than twenty meters away now. Just a few more meters was all she would need.
More shots lashed out, hitting the ground just behind the Chief. The alien guns were quick, but they could not compensate for her sudden jerking and weaving movements; so close to the point of origin. Burst after burst missed Amelia, but the shield system stayed down.
If the Brahe were on its game, it would give the mantis ship a triple strike right now, and finish the job. But the human ship hadn’t fired in over a minute, and Amelia began to wonder if perhaps the giant mantis craft’s sisters in space had returned and gotten rid of the Brahe?
No matter, Chief Schumann had but one last chore to complete. Her eyes fell on the huge, thick landing leg nearest her. The bandolier of shells came off her back. Giving off a hoarse cry, Amelia slipped a hand grenade into one of the empty ammo pouches on the bandoleer, flipped off the grenade’s spoon handle, and then hurled the bandolier at the leg. That done, Amelia then threw her whole body to the right, tucked into a ball, and rolled.
She kept rolling until she dropped—rather painfully—into a muddy runnel which had been worn in the low rise. It was perhaps a meter deep. No more.
The bandolier had landed in the metal gearworks that made up the “ankle” at the base of the leg. The grenade’s timer fizzed towards zero.
A blinding flash was followed by a boom that muted out every other sound in Amelia’s universe. Poking her head over the lip of the runnel, she saw the mangled mechanisms at the base of the leg begin to buckle and split. The massive mantis ship tilted crazily as the leg finally gave out.
Surprise.
That was the drop-pod super-carrier commander’s only emotion as he felt his ship shudder underneath him. The pilot and technicians who surrounded the commander’s creche all eyed him; the semi-soft portions of their carapaces flushing with confused tension. How could one little human have done so much damage?
The commander told himself he’d be more careful in the future.
Take off now, the commander ordered the pilot, who signaled his obedience, and started up the super-carrier’s lift engines. Just before the ship could lean dangerously out of whack, the repulsor effect kicked in, and the ship began to fly. Slowly, at first—being so massive. But then gradually with more power. The remaining, good legs left the ground, and the commander began to consider his next options, when true disaster struck.
Two consecutive rounds from the Tycho Brahe broke the skin of the super-carrier—now far above the ground, and drifting north at speed. The commander had forgotten to re-erect the shield system. It was a simple error. A momentary lapse. Losing the landing leg had broken the commander’s concentration. And it was an error the commander would never get to make twice.
The wounded super-carrier augered in some six kilometers from where it had taken off, at a velocity of approximately one hundred and sixty kilometers an hour. There was nothing the mantis commander or crew could do but scream oaths into eternity as their ship fractured, then exploded like a tiny fusion bomb.
Amelia swam in a murky pool of calm. Her body was nowhere to be found, and all she could hear was a slow, steady rumble that seemed to emanate from everywhere. Where had she been? It didn’t matter anymore.
“Hey, are you okay in there?”
Corporal Powell’s voice. It was soft, and filled with respect.
At first, the sound was completely out of place. Why was he here? Amelia’s heart saddened at the thought that she could have caused Powell’s death too. Then she noticed that the rumble was getting louder and that there was a warm, firm hand on one of her arms.
Arms?
Amelia’s eyes opened slowly. Everything was terribly blurred.
There, a certain blur looked familiar.
Working hard to focus,
Amelia recognized the face of Powell. There were other faces, too: Corporal Bybee, Privates Li and Shaw, and the others. They each had various bandages and healing sleeves wrapped around their extremities, but they all seemed healthy and, yes, very much alive.
“I . . . we . . . I . . .” Amelia rasped. Her throat felt funny and her body seemed to be immobilized. Powell placed a hand on her lips and gestured to the rest of the crew.
“We’re all okay, Chief. It’s been five Earth days since the Tycho Brahe’s slicks picked us up. The governor’s party too. We’re the lucky ones. The Brahe was the only capital ship that made it. New America is history. But we’re now high-tailing it for Fleet headquarters. For Earth.”
Amelia allowed herself a small moment of satisfaction. Perhaps she and her picket ship crew would get to accomplish their primary mission after all? The mantis aliens were impressive, perhaps even overwhelmingly so. But they weren’t immortal.
Someone on Earth needs to know that, she thought. And let her eyes close once more. For Chief Schumann, her first battle was over.
For humanity, the war to survive had only just begun.
DECAYING ORBIT
by Robert R. Chase
Humanity is on the brink war with itself. Divided into three factions—the Dominion, the Eternals, and the Trans-Humans—each group vies for supremacy in a crowded galaxy. Dispatched to the Disputed Territories, the crew of a Specter Class IV ship comes across the wreckage of a TransHuman vessel of enormous size—and enormous potential. But unlocking its secrets may prove costlier than imagined.
THE SPECTER CLASS IV is a long-range reconnaissance vessel with a complement of a junior lieutenant who is also commander and the primary pilot, an ensign who is the alternate pilot, and a warrant officer who is chief technician, in charge of the esoterica related to impellers, quantum drives and environmental controls. You should not be able to see its exterior under most conditions, but if you could, you would see a long, tapering tube, pinched at its nose and bulbous at its base. It has the largest quantum sur space engine for its size in the Dominion fleet. Aside from its stealthing, it has little defensive capability and no offensive armament.
It also has the most claustrophobically uncomfortable quarters of any vessel to which I was ever assigned. I was still fuzzy-headed from cold sleep resuscitation when the battle stations alarm sounded. I launched myself down the narrow corridor Lieutenant Jansons had christened the birth canal. It was barely large enough for two crew members in horizontal position to float by each other and I banged my head on the exposed pipes. Those would have been covered over in a commercial vessel but Space Force rules mandate that they be left exposed for quick repairs.
Just ahead of me, Jeanine darted into her station. I reached mine, grabbed both handholds and inserted myself. The couch snugged me down in safety restraints as various screens flicked on. I tried to ignore a growing headache and make sense of the data they were throwing at me. The deck throbbed with barely repressed power; O’Connor, our chief tech, was holding the quantum drive just below critical excitation in case we had to leave quickly.
Interstellar politics were in a state of high confusion. If you asked a man or woman of a previous era “Is the human race at war with itself,” there would have been a confident if regretful answer of “yes.” In my lifetime, the answer had changed to “it depends.” On what? On the definition of human. The TransHuman Confederacy boasted that the term had become obsolete with their embrace of the man-machine union. The Eternals, on the other hand, having granted themselves immortality, proclaimed themselves the endpoint of evolution. Both TransHumans and Eternals looked down on the minimally modified citizens of the Dominion, like me, as at best Neanderthal-like evolutionary dead ends.
Mere disdain would have been no more than an irritation. The problem was that both groups were expansionist. The Eternals recruited from both the Dominion and the far distant Terrestrial CoProsperity Sphere. Since the mortality rate of Eternals was less than one percent, they needed planets for their new members. TransHuman motivations were more opaque. Some said they had a missionary zeal to spread the blessings of the Singularity; to others, it looked like they were determined to eradicate any intelligence unlike their own.
When the Specter had been launched from its base on Victoria, Dominion Intelligence estimated that that there was a seventy percent chance that war between the two would break out in the next three months. As far as we were concerned, the optimal outcome would have been for each to blast the other back to the Stone Age. Since we could not rely on that happening, we had been dispatched to the Disputed Territories between the polities where war was most likely to start.
Jeanine and I each did a quick scan of half the celestial sphere. Emerging from sur space sends a pulse of Cerenkov radiation in all directions. Any potential enemies, Eternal, TransHuman or otherwise, could see it and would certainly come to investigate if they were anywhere in the vicinity.
“All clear,” I said after a minute. Jeanine agreed a few seconds later.
“Keep a lookout,” Jansons ordered.
She had put us into orbit around a super Earth, a world with three times Earth’s mass illuminated by a Cepheid variable star. Hurricanes churned through the all-encompassing cloud cover, fueled in part, according to my heat sensors, by volcano chains stretching halfway around the planet. As far as I could tell, its only satellite was ahead of us, rushing into night side’s shadow.
“That’s artificial,” Jeanine said.
“And . . . huge,” I added.
It was larger than the space docks surrounding Gloriana. Large enough to service an armada, if that was its purpose. If it spotted us . . .
“Stand by, Mr. O’Connor.” Jansons was having the same thoughts I was.
I scanned each data stream for any hint that the station was powering up an attack. Nothing. No neutrino flux to indicate a nuclear power source. Skin temperature identical to a black body at this distance from its star. It rotated slowly. A surface irregularity came into view. It became wider and much, much deeper.
The universe is a violent place. It is not that unusual to find a moon or planetoid that has been almost, but not quite, completely shattered by a collision. Something of that magnitude had blown a crater in this station, destroying an estimated twenty percent of its volume. A station that size was frightening enough by itself. Something that could pulverize it like this . . . was something I did not want to think about.
The station was in a lower, faster orbit. Jansons brought the Specter down and slowly closed the gap until we were only a hundred kilometers apart.
“I would like a full, remote inspection of that vessel,” Jansons said. “I want to know if it is really completely dead. Who built it. How it was destroyed. Perhaps most importantly, I want to know if there is anything worth salvaging.”
Putting the bogey scan on automatic, I called up one hundred twenty mini-rovers and, with three muttered commands, had them packed into two firing canisters and loaded them into the rail gun tubes while Jeanine took care of their last-minute programming.
“Ready, ma’am.”
“Fire, Mr. Wu,” Jansons commanded.
I pressed the appropriate button, which kicked them silently out the tubes. It would take them ten minutes to cross the gap. The next phase of this operation was likely to be intense and prolonged. Time to grab snacks and take a restroom break.
I was born in an arcology that was not a slum because slums were illegal on the planet Spencer. I had access to basic nourishment at the communal kitchens, basic education through the city’s library net, and basic entertainment through joining or running from any of the dozens of youth gangs.
Near the top of the pyramid, while trying to hide from one of those gangs, I discovered an abandoned maintenance section. One of the rooms opened onto an exterior platform and it was there that I took myself, whether to watch one of the innumerable Casablanca remakes or read something as old and obscure as “The Ballad of Reading G
aol.” Old entertainments, useless education. I knew I lacked the self-discipline to learn the skills that would free me from the arcology.
From that platform, when the air was exceptionally clear and the setting sun was behind me, I could see a silver ribbon stretching from the ground beyond the horizon to the sky. As dusk spread across the desert, the ribbon would dance and shimmer high above the ground. Sometimes I even glimpsed some of the Dominion’s military spacecraft which, disdaining the use of the beanstalk, hurled themselves into space on their dark-energy impellers.
One day I realized I could watch them no more. I took a jump tube down to the base of the arcology, stepped out to the desert, and began walking to the spaceport. It took all day. As if guided by fate, the first thing I found that I could recognize was a Space Force recruiting station. I signed up after the most rudimentary physical and mental tests. To my surprise, they indicated that I had “intellectual promise.” I was put into a cram course for combat engineers. I learned a lot, sometimes painfully.
Now that I was near the end of my second hitch, I had decided not to re-up. The Dominion economy has good jobs for people with combat engineer training. I wanted to make something of my life. And I wanted someone to share it with.
Jeanine was cradling a coffee bulb by the time I made it to our galley.
“At least your final mission is proving interesting,” she said. “In enemy territory, examining a mysterious derelict . . .”
I turned away from her to heat my own coffee. I was not trying to feign indifference. The truth was, I didn’t dare look at her.
“What interests me right now is what I will be doing after this mission,” I said. “And with whom.”
The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera Page 13