by Richard Fox
****
Valdar stepped into the morgue, a frigid room cold enough to be a meat locker. Space ships weren’t meant to carry significant numbers of their own dead with them. Under combat conditions, Valdar had the authority to either cremate or consign the dead to the void. Out of combat, he was expected to preserve fatalities for investigations and proper burials.
Three dead banshees lay on wheeled tables bolted to the deck. Dr. Accorso, wearing a lab coat stained gray up to the elbows, stood next to the head of a corpse and waved a bloody hand at Valdar.
“Captain, glad you could join me,” Accorso said.
“Smells like roadkill during an Alabama summer, doctor. What am I doing in here?” Valdar asked.
“I found something very interesting in these banshee corpses. Rather, it’s what I didn’t find that’s interesting.” Accorso pointed to a pile of X-rays on a shelf. “See for yourself.”
Valdar held the X-rays up to the ceiling lights. Each was a cross section of the banshees’ craniums, one a ruined mess from whatever killed it.
“What am I looking at?” Valdar asked.
“There’s a void in their heads, captain. Something was in there, connected to their spinal columns and their brain stems,” There was a sickening crack as Accorso pried the banshee’s head open and peered into it with a small flashlight. “And there’s no trace of it. Sound familiar?”
“The Xaros.”
“Precisely. The Marines encountered banshees with Xaros technology incorporated into their bodies, the D-beams. Reason stands that there could be something else in them. I doubt a fleet full of the Dotok’s best and brightest decided that this…” he gave the banshee’s armor a pat, “was a great idea. My hypothesis is that there’s a control chip in their brains and it disintegrates when they die. Hmm, yes, definitely an invasive foreign body in the brain stem. I see the scarring around the nervous tissue.”
“Great, doctor, save it for a research paper. I have a ship to fight.” Valdar went for the door.
“You don’t want a Xaros radio?” The question halted Valdar in his tracks. “These banshees aren’t mindless berserkers. They act with purpose and direction.”
“Where are you going to get a…the prisoner.” Valdar said.
“Yes, the banshee that’s been pounding away on the walls of its cage for the past many hours. My new assistant and I could remove the implant, if we could get it to hold still,” Accorso said.
“How are you going to do that? Promise it a sticker and a lollypop if it gets its shots without crying?” Valdar asked.
“I’m just a doctor, captain, not an animal tamer,” Accorso said.
“What will happen to the banshee when you take the implant out?” Valdar asked.
“We shall see. Science requires experimentation,” Accorso smiled, and Valdar felt a chill in his heart that had nothing to do with the cold air in the morgue.
CHAPTER 10
Hale hung from the end of a line dangling out a Mule’s open cargo bay. The Mule hovered half a mile above the bottom of the Great Expanse and dangerously close to the cliffs that made up the edge of the valley.
“Don’t look down,” Hale repeated to himself several times. He swung his body back and forth, building momentum as the swings brought him closer and closer to the cliff face. He reached for the rock and his fingertips managed to grab a handhold.
The cable attached to his waist and feet pulled him back from the wall with terrifying slowness and surety.
“Got some crosswind coming in, hold on tight,” the pilot said. Hale felt a slight buffet of air, then the wind howled around him. The gale sent him spinning away on his line like a wayward top.
“Reel him in!” Torni shouted.
“I can’t! The line’s twisted,” Standish said.
The wind subsided and Hale found himself swinging toward the rock wall with more speed than he thought he could handle. He spread his arms away from the line and slammed into the cliff, his armor absorbing most of the blow. His hands raked over the rock and found purchase. He ran the edges of his boots against the cliff until they secured a foothold.
Hale hugged the wall with more strength and genuine affection than he thought possible.
“Sir, you good?” Torni asked over the IR.
“Uh-huh,” Hale pressed his visor against the rock, mashing his face against the reinforced plastic.
“Don’t let go.”
“You think?” Hale grabbed an auto-anchor from his chest harness—a small spike of metal attached to a carbon-fiber line that ran to his belt—and pressed the tip against the rock face. The screw came to life and bore into the cliff. He heard a thunk as the spurs deployed on the screw, increasing the amount of weight the screw could hold should he fall. He attached two more screws into the wall, then detached the line to the Mule from his waist.
“Standish, your turn,” Hale said.
Hale clutched the wall, praying that Standish wouldn’t have the same trouble he did.
Less than a minute later, Standish swung up to the wall, level with his lieutenant, grabbed the wall with ease and anchored himself without incident.
“Dang, sir, why you always got to make things look difficult?” Standish asked as he detached the line leading to the Mule.
“Just get the torch,” Hale said. “Mule two-nine, we’re secure. Do a recon around the pass. Make sure no banshees get through.” The ship pulled away slowly, then banked into a low cloud.
“One stone torch coming right up.” Standish pushed back from the rock and grabbed a handle on the tiered device the size of a manhole cover strapped to his back. “Ready on three. One…two…three.” He swung the device to Hale, who grabbed it by a handle on the other side.
They slapped it against the cliff. Spikes attached to the torch snapped into the rock. Red warning lights lit up across the device.
“Look away,” Hale said. He followed his own advice and felt the cliff shudder as the torch began its work. Stone torches were a natural by-product of asteroid mining. Drilling into asteroids was problematic. The ejected material proved hazardous for navigation and some asteroids had a bad habit of fracturing from a drill’s vibrations. Melting a hole into an asteroid with focused lasers and heat shunts to determine its composition (and whether the rock was worth mining) was seen as a huge improvement for the industry. Naturally, the military found an application for the technology.
A column of vaporized stone poured from the hole like steam from a locomotive as the torch moved at a downward angle into the cliff side.
“Think it’ll go deep enough?” Standish asked.
“Doesn’t have to go that far. The nuke will follow the same principle as a firecracker in your hand. Firecracker goes off on your palm, you get a little singed. Wrap your fist around it and you’ll lose fingers when it pops,” Hale said.
The vapor subsided and three long buzzers sounded from the hole. The stone torch had reached an optimum depth.
“We’re in business,” Hale said. He pulled a tube set in a wire frame from off his belt and held it up to the hole. He hit a button on the tube and the frame snapped out to touch the sides of the hole.
“Nuclear device activation code: Kenneth Alpharius Hale X-ray one-two-seven-two-two-niner,” Hale shouted, his voice competing against a howl of wind.
“Authorization accepted,” a pleasant-sounding woman’s voice said. “Specify detonation criteria, command or timer?”
“Timer. Three-zero minutes.”
“Nuclear detonation in thirty minutes, confirmed?”
“Confirmed, launch!”
The nuke slid down the hole with a hiss.
“Sir, this is Torni. We’ve got a situation.”
Standish’s eyes went wide as he looked into the hole where the nuke had already slid into darkness.
“Go, Torni,” Hale said.
“We’ve got civilians out there, looks like a couple dozen coming by foot,” she said.
Hale groaned and thumped his h
ead against the wall. “Are they to the east or the west of the blast site?” Please don’t say east, he thought.
“East. They’re on the wrong side of our demo work,” Torni said.
“The nuke is set. Come retrieve us. We’ll work out what to do about the civilians after that,” Hale said.
The two Marines clung to the cliff, wind blowing pebbles loose.
“You don’t need to work it out, do you, sir?” Standish asked. “We’re going to go get them, bring them back to New Abhaile.”
“And how do you know that, Standish?”
“You and the skipper are almost the same person. You can’t let the innocent suffer, not if you can do something about it.”
“Am I wrong?”
“No. I think about Earth a lot, everyone Ibarra left behind. If you had a chance to go back and save one more person—don’t care who it was—I know you’d have risked it. And I’d be right there behind you. These Dotok, they aren’t so bad. Kind of friendly in a stuck-up sort of way. If we can save more, that’s almost like saving a human, right?”
“I don’t see them as being that different from us. They’re scared, they love each other…they don’t want to die. If we bring them back to Earth, they’ll help us fight the Xaros,” Hale said.
“Not like we don’t have enough room on Earth. Imagine that, a Dotok city. Up in Utah, maybe. You think they’ll make statues of us? ‘Here is the great Paul Standish, hero of Takeni and our savior from genocide.’”
“They don’t seem like statue-building kind of people,” Hale said.
“Yeah, more modern-art types. Wait … your middle name is Alpharius?”
“My father’s idea, don’t ask. I wasn’t consulted. You keep that secret between us, understand?”
“Sure thing, sir. You can always count on me to keep my mouth shut,” Standish said.
Their Mule emerged from the clouds.
****
Crewman Daniels bent at the waist and stretched his hamstrings. He re-tied the shoelaces on his running shoes and ran in place, bringing his knees up to his chest and slapping them against his palms. Ericcson stood next to him in her void combat suit, at odds with his physical training clothes.
“You ready, Daniels?” Ericcson asked.
“Ma’am, why am I doing this again?” Daniels asked. His Welsh accent was thick, but not so bad that Ericcson couldn’t understand him.
“Because you are the fastest runner on this ship and the lowest-ranking sailor. You’d get this assignment for both those reasons. You can pick whichever one makes you feel better,” Ericcson said.
“But Tavish in gunnery control ran in the bloody Olympics!”
“Tavish is dead. He was in gunnery control when the banshees boarded us, remember?”
“I can’t be the lowest-ranked sailor. Didn’t…didn’t…?”
“You got drunk and urinated all over a security robot attempting to issue you a citation for disturbing the peace. You caught a Captain’s Mast for that and he knocked your rank down to Seaman Apprentice. Whale shit is higher up the chain of command than you are, Daniels. Maybe you think about this situation the next time you want to get drunk on shore leave.”
“If I survive this, I’m definitely drinking again,” Daniels said. His eyes kept wandering to the heavy iron door in front of him.
“Explain the plan to me, one more time,” she said.
“You open the door to that banshee thing. I get its attention and have it chase me up the hatch to deck twelve. I hit the lifeline, Bob’s your uncle, all done,” he said.
“You scared?”
“Of course I’m scared. I’d shit me pants but I got nothing left in there,” he said.
“Good, that’ll make you run faster,” she said.
“Put a bottle of beer at the end of this race and I’d light the damn deck on fire gettin’ there so fast,” he mumbled.
Ericcson stepped through a different door and shut it behind her. The sound of it sealing shut sent shivers down Daniels’ spine.
“Ready? Opening the outer door now. Cage opens after that,” Ericcson said over the intercom.
Daniels squatted down and jumped back up, feeling blood rush to his muscles.
The door in front of him rolled to the side. Down a narrow corridor of reinforced armor plates purpose built for this operation was the ammunition cargo container holding the captive banshee. The container’s walls had been dented from the inside, like the banshee had systematically searched for a weak point in the construction.
Daniels whimpered as the latches came free and the container door opened, revealing darkness.
“Come on, you big ugly,” Daniels said.
There was a low rumble from the void. Daniels saw the thing’s claws first as it reached past the edge of the container. Yellow eyes floated through the darkness.
“Hey! You! The one with a face like a kicked-in shitcan!” Daniels grabbed his crotch. “How about you come over here and give me a wristy, you ugly wanker?”
The banshee let loose a blood-curdling scream and charged straight for Daniels.
“Bad idea! Bad idea! Bad idea!” Daniels turned and ran down the passageway, his arms and legs pumping like pistons as he raced to a pair of handcuffs dangling from a chain out of a hatch cut out of the ceiling.
He heard the banshee slam into the corridor behind him and beat at one of the welded-shut doors. His heart pumped battery acid as he got closer and closer to the cuffs. All he’d have to do was attach them to his wrists and he’d be safe—that was the promise.
The banshee roared and tore after Daniels, who suddenly realized what a gazelle felt like when a cheetah was on its tail.
Daniels skidded to a halt and reached for the cuffs, just as his feet slid out from under him. He slammed to the deck and jumped back up and made the mistake of looking back at the banshee. The thing moved with an almost leonine grace, its eyes set on Daniels and murder.
He got one of the cuffs snapped tight against his wrist.
“Go! Now!” He fumbled with the other cuff and the banshee got closer by the second.
The chain went taught and pulled him into the air. The banshee’s claws barely missed his shoes as it overran his position.
Daniels laughed, ignoring the pain in his wrist as he went higher through a ventilation shaft. He looked down…and didn’t see the banshee. His ascent stopped, leaving him dangling from the chain.
“Hey! This wasn’t the plan!” he shouted. One of his shoes came loose and fell down the shaft. It thumped against the deck, and the banshee picked it up. The creature looked up the shaft and snarled.
“Hey! Come on! This isn’t funny!”
The banshee climbed into the shaft and made for Daniels with all the ease of a squirrel moving up an oak tree.
The dark airshaft had a built-in design feature: it narrowed toward the top. The banshee climbed higher and found its freedom to maneuver robbed inch by inch.
“Help!” Daniels screeched.
He could almost smell the thing’s breath when a metal bar shot through the shaft right between the banshee’s legs. Another came through over its shoulder. More bars slid through the shaft, trapping the banshee in place. It struggled, tried to claw at the bars with its talons, but with no room to move, it had no way to leverage any of its strength.
The chain holding Daniels started moving again. It pulled him through an opening at the top of the shaft and a pair of crewman got him clear of his exit. One slammed a metal plate over the top and activated mag-locks, sealing it to the opening.
“Is he OK?” the XO asked over the intercom.
“He’s in one piece, ma’am,” a crewman said.
“I’m just…going to lay here…for a minute,” Daniels said between breaths.
****
Valdar caught his reflection in the tactical plot. His face was haggard, his beard needed a decent trim and the bags under his eyes spoke of days without sleep. He took a sip of black coffee. The caffeine haze of the p
ast many hours would come to a screeching halt once his body demanded rest. Perhaps he could step away for a cat nap.
“Captain, you need to see this,” Ensign Geller said.
Perhaps not.
“According to the Dotok, their Glorious Fleet had five Canticle-class generation ships, right?” Valdar glared at the ensign. “So, I thought, ‘Where are they?’ The entire rest of the fleet was blown up by the Dotok or us. That many ships would—”
Valdar slammed a fist against the plot table. His cup and saucer fell to the deck and shattered.
“I found them!” Geller squeaked. “And I found out why our jump in to the system went sideways.” He held out photographs of a rocky toroid, a gigantic doughnut-shaped asteroid. Long spikes punctured the surface, like someone had dropped a crown of thorns into wet concrete.
“This is a Crucible. A jump gate,” Valdar said.
“One under construction, at least,” Geller said with some pride, “and look around it.” The other pictures showed four Canticle-sized ships around the proto-Crucible. “That’s what messed up our jump. And that’s how I found it! I thought that something out there must have the mass to generate a deep enough gravity well to offset the quantum field variance by at least—”
“Good work, son. How far away is it?”
The ensign picked up a red icon and set it on the tactical plot. Valdar made a few quick calculations in his head then turned to the XO.
“Get all the department heads up here immediately, and get Lafayette on the holo.”
****
The operations table held a small globe, a miniature of the Breitenfeld and five red enemy ship icons on short pegs. The senior members of the ship stood around the table, along with a hologram of Lafayette.
“The new Crucible is here on approach to Takeni,” Valdar said. “If the Xaros hold true to form, they mean for it to take up orbit. It’ll remain a work in progress until then, which means no drone reinforcements coming through. It does present a problem though.” Valdar pointed the stick in his hands at Ensign Geller.