Armageddon

by Craig Alanson

  As he windmilled his arms, he slapped a palm on some surface, it may have been the deck. The suit secured the glove to the surface and jerked him to a halt. Indicators were flashing yellow and orange in his visor, showing minor damage to his suit that the reservoirs of nanomachines were repairing as best they could. He was still combat-effective.

  So was Adams and the combot.

  So why the hell wasn’t she shooting back at the enemy?

  “Gunny-”

  “Booby trap,” she hissed to him. “Some kind of IED you triggered,” she explained, and highlighted a view forward in his visor. “The target you shot at was already dead,” she added, and the image she sent rolled back, to show the headless body of a Maxolhx floating in the corridor, right before he tore the corpse apart with a rocket.

  “IED? Then-”

  Before Gonzalez could finish the thought, Adams already had the combot rotating to face to the rear. She was turning also, and her instincts served her almost well enough. Just after the combot detected a target and cut loose with its autocannon, something tore into the killing machine and a piece broke off to slam hard into Gonzalez. Adams had a split-second image of her companion’s suit going offline before the combot was torn apart and she was knocked sideways to crack her helmet into a bulkhead.

  Her suit was flashing orange warnings, with the most ominous message being ‘SENSOR RESET’. Without sensors, she was blind, and it felt like her brain was rebooting from being smashed into a wall. A shaky eyeclick made the faceplate go clear, and she was able to rely on the old Mark One eyeball sensor.

  Beside her, the combot was in pieces, sparks arcing outward. The machine was moving only in a jerky, uncoordinated fashion and was no longer linked to her suit. Effectively, it was dead, no longer an asset to her.

  What else? Something else was torn apart; a Maxolhx who had been cut in half by the combot’s autocannon before the machine ceased functioning.

  And a second Maxolhx, clad in a matte-gray environment suit. It had been holding some type of hand weapon, which was now on the deck, out of reach. Cursing to herself and shaking her head to clear her fuzzy vision, she raised her rifle and-

  It was not responding. Why- The barrel and casing were cracked.

  “You can’t use that weapon, primitive,” the haughty senior-species warrior said with a voice that gurgled from blood seeping into its mouth. With its good arm, it reached behind its back for another weapon.

  “Watch this, motherfucker.” Adams flipped her useless rifle around so she was holding the barrel. Her suit, sensing the adrenaline surging into her blood, automatically went to full power-assist mode, just below the level at which she would risk injuring herself.

  She threw herself forward at the shocked enemy, driving the rifle butt into its helmet with maximum force. Alarms screamed in her ears and flashed red in her vision as the suit protested, but it did exactly what she ordered. The rifle’s stock cracked on the first blow, from being struck by a force beyond its design limits. She gripped the barrel tighter, trusting her suit’s computer to understand she did not want to snap the alien weapon in half. A split-second after her first blow landed, the rifle again slammed full-force into the Maxolhx warrior’s super-tough helmet. And that helmet cracked under the kinetic hammering.

  Shit, Adams thought with a flash of panic. As her arms drove forward again, the enemy dodged to her right at amazing speed, too fast for her reflexes to follow. She would have missed except she had an ace in the hole: Skippy the Magnificent. That smug asshole beer can had stripped out the original software of the Kristang armored suit she wore, and enhanced its processing speed and capacity so it was almost a submind. The suit she was assigned to was hers, not only because it was fitted to her athletic form. Assisted by Skippy, the suit’s onboard computer had learned how Adams moved and fought during extensive training exercises, and it anticipated her intentions. Without her conscious input, the suit changed the trajectory of its arms to follow the enemy’s helmet. Not only follow but lead, so the smashed stock of the rifle arrived where the target helmet was. The suit computer assessed the situation, including factors such as the overall tactical situation of the assault team, the estimated level of force the rifle could take before it became uselessly small pieces, the condition of the enemy combatant, and the fact that Margaret freakin’ Adams was not going to stop until her opponent was dead, no matter the cost to herself.

  The suit computer calculated those factors, engaged in a very brief conversation with one of Skippy’s lesser subminds, and came to a conclusion of ‘I gotta get this shit over with right fucking NOW’. Thus, it took control of the nanomotors and the arms reared back then forward with blinding speed, with the remainder of the rifle aimed at a hairline crack in the enemy’s helmet. The rifle’s barrel punched through the helmet’s faceplate and drove straight through the face, skull and brain of the vastly superior enemy, before it mushroomed against the rear inside of the helmet.

  The suit’s gloves released the shattered pieces that were left of her rifle, and Adams slumped away, drifting backward to thump against the opposite wall in the zero gravity. Her suit’s sensors had now reset, and only a few yellow icons indicated faults with the suit. “Gonzalez?” She asked automatically.

  “Still here,” the petty officer croaked. “My suit is busted. Both legs are inoperable. Right shoulder can’t move. Shit. I can hold a rifle with my left-”

  “You stay here,” she ordered, aware that time was slipping away, and time was on the enemy’s side. She needed to get to their objective, right now.

  Gonzalez might have argued, but he was a professional. “Take my rifle,” he offered.

  “Keep it, and cover my six.” She walked over to the combot, her boots clicking as they kept her clinging to the deck. Bending down over the combot, she inspected the autocannon. The arm it was attached to was shattered, but the autocannon appeared intact. Pressing a status button showed green. “Suit, command the combot to release the autocannon.”

  “That is not advisable. But,” the suit sighed, “since I know you are going to do it anyway, the autocannon system is now under control of this suit. The icons are in the lower lefthand corner of your visor.”

  Part of Margaret’s brain wondered when the hell her suit had acquired a personality so it could sigh, while the rest of her attention was taken up by accessing the jury-rigged control system. “Right, got it.” She pulled the cannon free and hefted it. In zero gravity, it had no weight but it still had mass, and it was awkward to handle. “Suit, you can compensate for the recoil of this elephant gun?”

  “Not completely. Please, please, avoid hazardous situations.”

  “I am a Marine,” she said as she eyeclicked to deactivate the elephant gun’s safeties. “Hazardous situations is what we do. Gonzalez?”

  “Covering your six,” he coughed up blood, “Gunny. No bad guys are getting past me,” he said as he used his one good arm to drag himself behind the skimpy cover of the broken Thuranin combat machine.

  Adams pulled herself forward with one arm, cradling the autocannon with the other. It was awkward and she kept getting off balance, forcing her to kick off the bulkheads with her feet. This is stupid, she told herself after the fourth time she ended up spinning in the middle of a corridor. She could not control the elephant gun with one arm, and every time she kicked the wall, overhead or deck, there was a thump she could feel. She had been flying along the corridor for speed, and to avoid her boots clomping along the deck and alerting the enemy. Because moving with the bulky cannon was so awkward, she was slow and bumping into the bulkheads anyway.

  Tossing the autocannon gently in front of her, she flipped head over heels and extended her legs until her boots contacted the deck and adhered securely. Pulling the spinning cannon to her, she got both hands wrapped around it, and set off up the corridor at a steady run, moving faster as she built up momentum.

  In front of her, the corridor bent to the left, with another corridor coming in fro
m the right, just in view. Should she rely on surprise if an enemy was around the corner?

  No. The vibration of her boots had surely given away her presence, to anyone who was conscious. She slowed, shifting the elephant gun to her left arm, and pulled a pair of grenades off her belt. In the zero gravity, it took little effort to toss them down the two corridors. The one to the right flew straight, the other bounced off a wall to the left and out of view.

  She saw and felt the explosions, feeling it odd that no sound accompanied the violence. “Ok, Maggie,” she whispered to herself. The diagram on her suit showed that one of her two objectives was just around to the right, a data connection that had to be cut. The final objective was to the left, a dismaying distance deeper inside the ship. Smythe had not ordered her to cease fire, so she had to keep going. Her own data connection was spotty, cutting in and out. What she was sure of was the others were still fighting.

  It was not good to be alone. While planning the mission, Smythe had considered fewer, larger teams that could provide better support. In the end, with objectives so widely scattered inside the alien ship and speed crucial, the SAS man had decided to divide up his force into teams of two. That, in Skippy’s opinion, gave the humans their best chance to reach the required number of objectives before the enemy could react and stop them.

  The option also gave the humans the worst odds of survival.

  After shrapnel from the grenades pinged off her suit, she ran forward. Making the sharp turn to the right would be tricky, she opted to aim for a spot on the left side of the righthand corridor, and thumped into it with an armored shoulder. Straightening herself out before she crashed into the opposite wall, she strode forward, picking up speed-

  And stumbled to a halt. Her visor was outlining the data connection objective, overlaying it with a grid like Luke Skywalker saw when targeting the exhaust port of the Death Star. “Got you,” she muttered, dropping to one knee and bringing the autocannon to bear, selecting single-round shots and fragmentation mode. Using the rounds in armor-piercing mode might send the rounds to punch clean holes all the way through the ship without damaging the target.

  The first round knocked her backward and she recovered, seeing she had missed. Bracing the cannon against a frame that stuck out into the corridor, she sent one, two, three rounds to blow ragged holes in the target. After the third round, the outline in her visor switched to blue, indicating that data connection was no longer an objective. “One more. Once more into the breach,” she said, annoyed with herself for talking to no one.

  The last objective, where she could jack Skippy’s presence into an access point, was behind her, down the other corridor. Knowing her suit was trying to inform the team that she had taken out the data connection, she swung the big cannon around, its barrel smacking into the bulkhead, throwing her off balance. Annoyed with herself again, she got the elephant gun balanced properly and-

  The cannon exploded, jerking out of her hands. Something impacted her back and the visor blinked out, her suit power cut off. A single red light blinked in the lower left corner of her vision, informing her that backup power was being restored.

  Too late. Laying prone against the deck, no, it was a bulkhead, she felt vibrations as someone approached.

  A Maxolhx stood staring at her, an oddly bulbous-looking pistol in one hand. The creature tilted its head, looking in obvious surprise at her face inside the clear faceplate. Whatever the Maxolhx expected, humans had not been on the list.

  She was dead, she knew it. Moving to throw a grenade would be too slow, the alien would shoot her first. But her right arm was already behind her back, and a turn of her wrist brought the activation button of a grenade under that thumb. “Adios, asshole,” she groaned as she press-

  “No!” She was startled as Skippy’s voice pounded into her ears. “Margaret don’t! I got-”

  “Been nice knowing you, Skippy,” she felt for the button again, and her thumb-

  Jerked away as the pistol held by the Maxolhx exploded in a shower of sparks and plasma, tearing that being’s arm away and shredding its torso.

  When she was able to speak again, spots were still swimming in her vision, she took a sip of water from the helmet’s reservoir. Her suit was operating on backup power and working to restore as much function as it could. “Skippy,” she asked. “What the hell was that?”

  “I had control of the ship. It happened about, oh, twelve seconds before you blew up that data connection.”

  “So, I didn’t need to do that?” She shuddered in the suit. She had put her life at risk for nothing.

  “You did. In fact, it would be great if you could go jack me into that access point. The ship’s AI is still fighting me, and I want to remove its ability to contact subsidiary systems. Don’t worry. I now have full sensor access of the interior, and there are only two Maxolhx alive right now. Giraud is engaging them now, they are no threat to you.”

  “Gonzalez?”

  “He will be fine,” Skippy assured her.

  “This was a tough fight, Skippy. With the weapons the Maxolhx have, these Kristang suits can only take one hit.”

  “It’s worse than that. The kitties only had access to hand weapons like pistols, and they were in standard shipboard environment suits. This could have been a very bloody fight.”

  “Was it?”

  “Uh, I had better let Smythe tell his team about that. I am about to go through the wormhole, so we will lose contact briefly. Good! Oh, sorry, I was excited because Giraud’s team just took out the last two kitties. Gotta go- Uh, are you Ok, Margaret?”

  “I’m fine, Skippy. Fine. Do what you gotta do.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  After Skippy declared, with a solid shmaybe, that we had control of the battlecruiser, I ordered him to recon the other side of the wormhole, the side where the aft end of the target ship should be. The aft quarter of the ship we had sliced apart contained all the important engineering components we needed to make the ship useful; power-generation, normal-space engines and the jump drive. The bagel slicer had left the two parts of the ship separated by a hundred and seventy-eight lightyears, now that the forward section of the ship was under our control we needed to get the other part. If we could.

  We had wounded people aboard the forward section of the target ship, and I hated the idea of leaving them, but that was the mission.

  Because the wormhole was open at other endpoints right then, we had to wait for it to shut down on its normal schedule, then Skippy instructed it to do its recon thing. “I’m not seeing anything, Joe,” the disappointment was evident in his voice. He wanted to be the hero by locating the other part of the target ship, and he couldn’t. “It may have drifted out of range by now.”

  He did not mention the other possibility; that the engineering section of that ship had exploded. “Ok, when can we go through, to check it?”

  “Give me a minute to get a status. Oh, nuts. There are a pair of Thuranin ships waiting to go through at another location. If the wormhole doesn’t open on schedule, they will alert everyone this wormhole is acting strangely.”

  “How long until it is scheduled to shut down again?”

  “It will remain open at that location for eighteen minutes. Joe, by that time, the backup systems aboard the aft section of the ship will surely have established control. It will be a very tough fight to capture the-”

  “Yeah, I know. Shit. All right, we wait. Nagatha, tell Smythe that he’s on his own over there, we won’t have time to take a dropship aboard before the wormhole opens for us.”

  We waited. My alter-ego No Patience Man was about to explode. If I wanted, I could have looked at data from the assault team’s suits and seen the status of each person. That would tell me who we had lost, who was injured and how serious each case was.

  I did want to do that.

  I did not do that, because as the commander, my job was to focus on the big picture, the overall mission, and not get distracted by details. Deta
ils, like playing favorites by worrying about one person. I could not do that, no matter how much I wanted to.

  Everyone else aboard the ship had something useful to do, while I sat in the command chair, feeling useless. To take my mind off worrying about anything and everything, I wanted to take out my tablet and play a game, even solitaire. But that would be disrespectful to the crew, and Skippy would gleefully rat me out in a heartbeat.

  Finally, Skippy took temporary control of the wormhole again and reconnected it to where the battlecruiser had come through. Again, the sensors of the wormhole did not detect any hazards on the other side, they did not detect anything on the other side. To be safe, we sent a remote-controlled Dragon through ahead of us, in case somebody was out there looking to shoot at whoever sliced a ship apart. The Dragon’s crappy Kristang sensors, even upgraded by Skippy, did not see anything, so I ordered the Dutchman to go through.

  And, damn it, soon after our sensors recovered from the spatial distortion of transitioning through the wormhole, we detected debris. There wasn’t a lot of it, and the tiny pieces we saw were in a sphere that was expanding away from us in all directions.

  It was quiet aboard the ship, then Skippy spoke for all of us. “Well, shit.”

  “It’s gone?”

  “Looks that way, yeah. Sorry.”

  I wasted no time. “Pilot, take us back through the wormhole and rendezvous with the target, I want to take the wounded aboard immediately.”

  She acknowledged my orders and the pilots responded by pulling the ship into a tight turn, but I knew we first had to cancel our forward momentum before we could head back to the wormhole. In the meantime, people could be dying from lack of medical care. Our pursuit of the target’s aft end had been for nothing, and had consumed valuable time.

  “Skippy, what happened?” I asked, being careful not to be angry with him.