Into the Maelstrom

by Loren L. Coleman

  Raymond Sainz had never intended to simply walk away from Chernaya Gora. The reality hit Tousley with the force of a hammerblow between the eyes.

  “Whatever it takes.” That had been the code to Captain Dillahunty. How appropriate. And if the timing meant anything—hard to believe it didn’t, Sainz was no fool—Tousley knew what was to follow. This defile was the safest place to be, provided that Dillahunty held back any rush to take it. And the Sleeper did not move back in against them.

  There was still work to be done, then. He settled back into the rocks, trying to put as much cover as possible between his back and the Neo-Soviets as he sighted back in against the nearest Chem Grunt. Another well-aimed burst and the violent explosion filled the lower end of the defile with a heavy mist of toxins.

  No quarter asked. None given.

  * * *

  “Whatever it takes.”

  With the code phrase spoken, Major Rebecca Howard ordered the final attack. She’d led the flanking assault against the Sleeper, trying to hurt it enough to force it back from the defile. The Neo-Soviet chemsprayers and Dillahunty’s auxiliary force on the other side of the defile had done the bulk of that work, and except for a bad moment when the Sleeper’s armored tail had smashed into and wiped out a full support squad, her casualties had been light. It left her in direct command of three Union squads and two of Neo-Soviet Vanguard. And not even that a moment later.

  “Fall back ten meters and reload fresh clips,” she ordered, working her way back through the broken terrain and out of the Sleeper’s shadow.

  If the Vanguard found anything odd in the order for a coordinated ammo change that meant discarding good clips, they gave no sign of it. Union battle tactics had never made much sense to the average Neo-Soviet soldier anyway, or so Colonel Sainz had promised her. A few of them took the opportunity to burn out the rest of their ammunition and then began to change out their own empty clips.

  The armored tail slammed the ground again not twenty meters behind, shaking the ground with a false quake. Several Vanguard looked that way with looks of apprehension. The faces of Howard’s Union infantry showed the same expression, but for another reason. The last clip was slapped home and the first rounds all chambered. The air was tinged acrid from all the ordnance spent this day, and it caught in her throat as she drew breath for the final order. “Auxiliary targets. Fire!”

  Her Pitbull twisted in her grip as she sprayed fire on full automatic, stitching red splashes in a line across the chests of two nearby Vanguard. Her people were all careful not to shoot through a Neo-Soviet soldier and into their own. The betrayed infantry jerked and stumbled, then fell to the ground lifeless. Two Vanguard were fast enough to hurl themselves behind the protection of other bodies, slapping at comms to alert their colonel. One managed, “Taking Union fire—” before the final burst from an assault rifle silenced him for good.

  Howard cursed silently. Colonel Sainz had wanted no warning back to Katya Romilsky. But the Vanguard were tough soldiers all.

  “Operation Sting completed,” she said over her private link to Sainz. With a beckoning gesture she led her forces on a run across the side of a hill, trying to put the curve of its slope between them and the Sleeper.

  “Thirty seconds, Rebecca,” Sainz warned her. “Get out of there.”

  She kept a silent count to twenty-five, and then threw herself to the ground into the lee of a boulder. Her people followed her example and also grounded for cover—no need to tell them. Craning around the edge of the boulder, she noticed that the Sleeper had been driven farther out into the canyon. The first missile actually tunneled into the ground between it and the defile, throwing up a heavy curtain of scorched earth and burning wisps of grass.

  The ground trembled in protest as another of Freedom’s precision missiles framed the Sleeper on its other side and a third fell almost immediately on top of it. It detonated in an aerial burst, as if it had hit some kind of field, but the raw force of the explosion hammered down and flattened the titanic alien against the ground. The armoring of several of its legs bent and cracked under the pressures. The monstrous head was rudely slammed down flat. It sprang back up almost at once, whipping about to stare up into the sky as if it could see the offending battle station or its incoming death. Its long neck at full extension, the Sleeper shrieked once more its earsplitting, high-pitched scream as the missiles began to fall fast and furious.

  Twenty missiles all told, smashing down within a quarter-klick diameter centered just off of the Sleeper’s position. A few impacted the upper slopes over the defile, but most fell into the canyon as target-identification software and tracking data pulsed out in the final split second so that better than half hit or fell near the Sleeper. The thunderous tumult died away as quickly as it had begun, and as a breeze cleared away the dust, Rebecca Howard nodded her satisfaction.

  The Sleeper was dead.

  Its head severed from the body, the entire creature mangled into a mess of ocher tissue, grayish green chitin, and pools of black-specked white fleshy gobbets. Pieces of the carapace lay about like broken bits of an armored shell, steaming thin wisps of black smoke. Large streams of bloated gobbets and black fluid poured from deep within its body, staining the ground. A caustic stench rose over the canyon, but apparently nothing more harmful than the stench of death.

  Then, as she watched, something deep within stirred and struggled to the surface of the mess of internal fluids and meat. First one, then a half dozen, and finally a full score or better of new creatures unlike any they’d seen before. Bloated, ocher-colored sacks of flesh ringed with thin but strong tentacles that pulled and pushed their way out from the inner cavity. Clear of the body, they vibrated and shook the slime and fluid from their skin. Feathery antennae rose to sample the air and then continued to vibrate as the fleshy sacks rose into the air, trailing the tentacles behind them. At the same height, the tentacles dropped away like useless shedding, and the final birthing of symbiots rose quickly into the sky, always upward. Rebecca Howard followed them until they were lost from sight, bidding them a hearty good riddance.

  “Colonel Sainz! This is Colonel Katya Olia Romilsky of the Neo-Soviet empire’s Fifty-sixth Striker, demanding the attention of Colonel Raymond Sainz!”

  Colonel Romilsky sounded less than pleased, and Rebecca Howard walked her gaze from the dead Sleeper back to the sky where she’d seen the final symbiots disappear, waiting. Watching.

  “Yes, Colonel Romilsky.” No measure of respect or courtesy decorated Sainz’s voice now. Flat and emotionless, he simply recognized her demand in the simplest way possible.

  “I demand an explanation for the lack of contact with my auxiliary force attached to Major Howard’s command. They do not answer any calls. And your people in the defile have violated our truce by destroying my Zephyr and firing on several of my units. I had your word, Sainz.”

  “Duty above all, Katya Romilsky. Isn’t that what you argued to me?” His voice never rose beyond a casual tone. To Major Howard he sounded almost resigned. She knew how hard this was for him, but that fate had left him no choice. He had his orders, his sworn duty. He had given his word. One of them had to give.

  “I am sorry, Katya, but you lose.”

  “I will bury you for this! You and your entire command, beginning with the snakes cowering in the defile.”

  Howard saw it then, the trail of vapor condensation that marked the first missile of a new set, arrowing down from space. It slammed into the ground just beyond the bluff, over Chernaya Gora, transmitting target-correction data back to all those which followed.

  “No,” Sainz said in the few seconds’ lull that followed. “I don’t think so.”

  And the missiles began striking in earnest against the Black Mountain.

  28

  * * *

  B rygan Nystolov shivered, but the chill wasn’t one of temperature. It was the cold silence that greeted his arrival in the science station and then followed him as he set about his chore
.

  His requests were met with silent compliance, no words. The consoles to either side of him stayed empty, and the only scientist who would meet his gaze was Randall Williams. And even Williams didn’t speak as he watched Brygan collect his copies of all the data to date; everything to which he had been a party, which Colonel Allister had promised him. Watched with a wary eye.

  It was near time for him to depart, but he knew that meant leaving something precious behind. In the fragile trust he’d built with Major Williams, Brygan had felt for the first time in his life that he belonged to something bigger than just himself. That he was valued, respected by his comrades even as he respected them. Staring at the Icarus’s stark metal bulkheads, he had never felt more alone than just then.

  The Neo-Soviets spoke of such a camaraderie, promised it to each other constantly in their varied forms of careful address. It took the Union to show it to him, though, no doubt hoping he would return it. Hoping he would defect? Probably. But on the bridge he’d seen the disappointment in Major Williams’s eyes. What the major had offered, he’d given freely for its own sake.

  Brygan had wanted to believe that from the start, from the first offer to join the exploration mission. Yet he lived behind the wall of his carefully crafted identity. He’d never trusted enough to come clean as lie piled on top of lie, all the while postponing his return to the empire, drawn by the lure of mutual respect. Devoting his skills to the service of the empire, the years spent challenging Mars on its own terms, all that had been merely a method of existence. No one had truly valued his efforts. Not until he became part of a Union team. Not until these last few short days.

  All lost.

  Pausing at Randall Williams’s console on his way out, Brygan held the computer file copies of the survey’s work in his two large hands. Williams paused in his scrutiny of the Icarus’s approach to Terra, the imminent slingshot pass that would lead to the final decel burn for Luna. The scout wanted there to be something he could say, something he could do. Give up the data and deny it to the empire? That would make him a defector and a traitor besides. The Sputnik data belonged to the Neo-Soviets, as did the research based on it. Didn’t he owe that much to Mother Russia? Did he owe her anything? These were questions with no easy answers. If there was a line he could walk without feeling the betrayer, likely he had already stumbled across it. And there was no going back.

  “You could stay,” Williams said slowly, preempting whatever the Neo-Soviet might decide to say. “We’ve days of work ahead of us at Luna, reviewing and analyzing the information collected by the survey.” His dark eyes flickered for an instant to a few of the nearby scientists. “The offer still stands.”

  From Williams, likely it did. But that brief glance revealed his concern for the shattered trust between Brygan and the other team members. And, by implication, between Brygan and Paul Drake, who would make his own report to Colonel Allister. Perhaps Drake would balance the lives Brygan had saved against the minor deceit. Perhaps not. But it wasn’t fear of Colonel Allister’s response that kept Brygan from accepting. Not truly.

  “All you ever asked of me,” he said softly, his voice pitched for Williams’s ears only, “was that I give to team as much as I take.” He shook his head. “I failed that trust.”

  That was not an easy admission for the man known as the Bear to make.

  Williams cupped one hand under his chin, stroking his sideburns. For an instant the wariness fled his eyes, replaced by frank evaluation. Another problem to which he could set his mind. “But are you avoiding the problem now, or turning to face it?” he asked.

  Williams had put his finger on the heart of Brygan’s trouble. He had never thought his leave-taking would be easy, given that his impromptu escape might look to Williams—and certainly would seem so to Drake—like he’d never planned a return to Luna. They would never know how close he had come.

  “There are several problems, Randall Williams. One of the first I must deal with is the loyalty I owe Mother Russia. That exists whether the empire . . .”—he paused—“values it or not.” He had almost said whether the empire wanted to claim him, or not.

  “This isn’t about politics,” Williams said.

  “It should not have been,” Brygan agreed. “Your Union, my empire.” He shook his head sadly. “But I brought politics into it. Me. That means I am not ready.”

  Placing one hand on either side of his console station, Williams stared down at the screen for several long seconds. Finally, he exhaled deeply, and said, “I see. I can’t say I agree with your decision, Brygan Nystolov, but I understand it.”

  Yes, he would. It was the major’s nature to probe something until he understood, though Brygan might wish that Williams were not so tenacious in that respect. It made him a dangerous man, both personally and professionally. It also made for an open and curious nature that Brygan would miss.

  He sketched a light bow to the major, leaning forward slightly at the waist and dipping his head. “Good-bye, Randall Williams.”

  Williams smiled thinly, eyes guarded as he returned the courtesy. “Dos vedanya, Brygan Vassilyevich.”

  Brygan nodded again, this time more abruptly, then walked quickly from the science station. Once in the corridor, he leaned back against one of the bulkheads until his uneasiness passed. He’d steeled himself against this moment, but receiving a Russian farewell only deepened his self-inflicted wound. It would be a long time closing, if it ever did.

  It was almost as if Williams had known those would be the last words he’d ever speak to Brygan Nystolov.

  * * *

  Phillipe Savoign continued to track the emergency escape shuttle, which had separated from the Icarus as the spacecraft approached its slingshot around Earth. It was currently locked into a rapidly decaying orbit, decelerating at better than five standard gravities as it swung over the Laptev Sea. He checked the approach vector again, and it cut straight across Siberia and the southern Urals. He knew enough of orbital mechanics to program ballistic and orbital missiles, such as the space-to-earth weapons he’d helped Freedom task. If his calculations were right, the shuttle was making for the landing fields outside Volgograd or Zhdanov.

  “Say again, Major Williams.” Savoign adjusted the link nestled into his ear, thinking he hadn’t heard correctly.

  “The shuttle we launched is to be given clear passage,” the major said. “Pass along the authorization to any battle platform it passes near.”

  Actually, the shuttle would pass almost directly under Station Freedom on its current course. Not that Savoign had to pass along the authorization codes, though. Freedom’s targeting was still slaved to his console, its own abilities not yet back to full capacity. He glanced at the video feed showing the twenty-three small figures rising through the upper atmosphere. A decision had yet to come back down from the general about those. Now he had this new problem.

  Savoign switched back over to the video link as if wanting to verify that Williams was who he claimed to be. It was the major, right enough. Savoign also checked out Williams’s bona fides, just in case the video images were falsified. If this was a trick, it was a well-prepared one.

  “Sir, do you know where that shuttle is coming down?” he asked.

  “Somewhere over the Neo-Soviet empire, I’m sure.” Was that a touch of resignation to the major’s voice? “Phillipe, do you remember that Neo-Soviet we had in custody at Tycho?”

  “I heard about him, Major.” He’d been out on constant sorties then, trying to control the Neo-Soviet rush over the smashed fence line. “He’s the one Colonel Allister sent up with you on the Icarus.”

  “Well, we’ve released him back to his own nation, as part of an agreement I arranged with the colonel. Now if you need to, get General Hayes’s direct consent. But clear that shuttle.”

  Easier said than done. Tranquillity’s central control was still a bedlam of activity, with the general coordinating a battle to secure the western plains in hopes of reestablishing part of
the fence line. Not even Savoign’s report of aliens rising up toward Freedom had garnered much more than a curt, “I’ll be there in a moment!”

  That had been over an hour ago.

  With the general indisposed, no one else had the authority to second-guess Major Williams. Especially as he stood in line to take over Tycho Base. What was left of it. And Savoign knew the major. That counted for something as well.

  “The shuttle is flying through a sensitive area,” he said carefully.

  “How sensitive?”

  So sensitive that Phillipe Savoign had not believed the target profile General Hayes ordered him to program for Freedom’s first missile launch. He’d thought the whole thing some poorly timed joke and the video stills a hoax. But Hayes wasn’t known for a sense of humor when it came to military priorities. The fact that he’d stood over Savoign’s shoulder, ignoring the battle he was now commanding, proved that the general considered this no light matter. It was true, then—mankind had made its first alien contact. An event Savoign was sure every spacefaring Union rank had considered at least once in passing thought.

  And they had killed it.

  Knowing the major’s propensity to ask questions first—lots of questions—and shoot later, he could well imagine Williams’s reaction to that event. Fortunately for Savoign, the event was classified as “need to know” and currently could only be briefed by hard copy. No transmitted data. He wouldn’t be the one to inform Randall Williams that he’d been deprived of studying what might be the only alien contact in his lifetime.