by B. V. Larson
I looked back, and I saw a brightening glow. A white light had grown in the middle of the hold, and it looked like star-fire up close.
“What the hell…?” I asked.
Natasha was looking at it, too. “McGill,” she said. “I think—I think we’re in warp. The radiation signatures, everything matches. They’ve turned on their drive and opened a hatch.”
I was finally catching on. The Nairbs had more in store for us than a simple suffocation. We’d be frozen, asphyxiated and microwaved before they were through. It was just a matter of picking our favorite form of death.
“Get this hatch open!” I roared at Sargon. “Or we’re all dead!”
He was already working on it. No subtlety was required now—he burned the hinges off, melting away heavy metal like butter with the close-range application of his plasma cannon. Several other weaponeers helped him, and steel was turned into burning vapors and white-hot liquid.
Finally, the hatch clanged down. About then, they turned off the gravity.
Not all ships had artificial gravity, but the big ones normally did. This ship had been maintained at something like one hundred and twenty five percent of Earth normal. Very suddenly, that shut down.
The big hatch floated up, still red hot, and it flipped around until it struck a weaponeer’s helmet. The helmet starred, and broke. The man screamed briefly as all the air was sucked out of his lungs.
Then his blood boiled and his eyes popped. Exposure wasn’t a pretty way to go.
“Get through the hatch!” Harris was shouting.
“Help each other!” I called out as the survivors surged forward. “Grab and drag, people!”
We were weightless, but we had magnetic boots and plenty of training. We hand-over-handed our way through the hatch and into the passageway beyond.
It wasn’t a big improvement. The doors at both ends of the passage had already slammed closed. Either the ship had sensed the breach and loss of air pressure, or the Nairbs were actively trying to box us in.
“There’s no staying here,” I told them. “Keep moving, I’m feeding a simulated ship’s layout to your tappers. Follow it to the bridge if command is wiped out.”
None of the troops responded. All I heard over the comm channel was labored breathing and cursing. I opened up the system to allow anyone to transmit. There weren’t so many of us left that it would be all that confusing.
We advanced on magnetic boots, clanging and cursing as we went. Walking on magnetics always felt like you were slogging through snow with gum on your shoes.
The Nairbs sprang their next surprise on us at the forward hatch. It linked this cargo area to the upper decks, and apparently they’d decided to make a stand here with their defenders.
A dozen or so gargoyles kicked the hatch down as we beamed the hinges into slag. That crushed two men, as the gravity had been switched back on.
A gust of air swept over us, as apparently the next region was pressurized. The gargoyles began to smother and die, but they still had plenty of fight left in them. They tore up another man and bit the head off a third before we’d beamed them to the floor. Mostly, they died of asphyxiation.
“Ha!” I boomed, trying to sound hopeful. “The captain is an idiot. He’s killing his own defenders.”
With gravity helping again, we jogged forward at a steady pace. We scrambled over lumpy bodies and reached the next hatch. This one swung open as we approached, making us paranoid.
“Break it up,” Harris shouted, “don’t all bunch at the door!”
They scattered, with two unlucky souls chosen at random sent in to have a look around.
“It’s empty, sir!” the scouts called back.
“Advance!” I ordered.
“McGill,” Harris beamed me privately. “It might be a trap.”
“Of course it is. But we need to get away from that radiation behind us, and there’s nowhere else to go.”
He sucked in a breath and said nothing. He knew I was right.
When the last man passed through the hatchway, it clanged shut behind us. Gas hissed, filling the space inside with air.
“It’s breathable, sir,” Natasha pronounced a moment later.
“Keep your helmets on,” I told them all. “Unless you run out of oxygen, don’t trust yourself to take a single breath.”
Unexpectedly, a sound rang out, and then we heard a translated voice.
“Rebels,” it said. “Your invasion has failed.”
The voice was garbled and artificial, coming through speakers somewhere in the passageway.
“For the sake of your personal honor, I, Magnate Slur, demand that you self-execute.”
We paused and I looked at the walls around us.
“Slur?” I called out. “Will you spare our world if we do as you ask?”
Harris came up to me and grabbed my shoulder, giving me a wide-eyed “are you crazy?” look, but I shook him off.
“No,” the voice said. “You’ve gone too far. Your sins are too great, too unspeakable. Your very existence must end. You must be expunged from the galaxy like the plague you truly are.”
“At least you’re an honest alien,” I told him. “That’s good to know.”
Then I led my troops forward to the next hatch. They followed me in a panicky rush.
-54-
There was no more pretending, or parlaying. It was them or us—it was that simple.
Magnate Slur, however, didn’t seem to have gotten the memo. As we pressed on through brute effort and force of will, taking passage after passage, he continued to demand our surrender and orderly execution.
“I don’t think this guy gets it,” Harris told me. “We’re not his slaves—not anymore.”
“That’s right,” I said. “We’ve bitten the hand and tasted the master’s blood. Like any pack of wolves—we only want more.”
When we got close to the bridge, a new enemy faced us. They were Nairbs, armed with plasma harnesses.
These weapons were different than our rifles in that they were meant to operate when the trooper had no real arms or legs. Nairbs had flippers. They were semi-aquatic creatures, who in their natural habitat could live on land or in the sea. Using the harnesses allowed them to manipulate a weapon just by looking our way with their squishy heads and willing it to project a beam in our direction.
Three men went down moments after the hatch did, and it would have gone badly for us if the Nairbs had been better trained or equipped. They had plasma guns, and there were at least a hundred of them. Unfortunately, they had no armor, just simple vac suits and those weaponized harnesses.
“Wide beam, Sargon!” I shouted. “Burn them out of those suits!”
He cranked the aperture on his cannon to a broad cone and fired a sweeping beam. Enemy fire flashed past him, and a few bolts struck among our troops despite our best efforts. We’d all hugged up against the walls and the floor.
But Sargon’s beam took out a lot of the enemy. At least twenty Nairbs popped and steamed like water balloons put to the torch. The rest began retreating in a near panic.
“Grenades, Harris!” I shouted. “Don’t let them pull back through the next hatch.”
“Don’t worry, sir,” he said, rushing forward with a trio of his people at his back. They all had plasma grenades in their gauntlets. “We’re not letting them pull this shit again.”
When there wasn’t any other good choice, Harris could be extremely brave and effective. He lobbed his plasma grenade into the massed and wallowing throng of Nairbs. Two of his companions did the same.
But one man tripped and went down—at least, I thought he tripped, but then I saw he’d caught a bolt and been killed outright. The Nairbs were firing with wild desperation. Since we were bottled up one of them had been bound to get lucky.
The plasma grenade in the dead man’s hand, unfortunately, was glowing and active. I gripped the armor of the two men nearest to me and pushed them both to the deck, calling out a warning.
> The grenade went off. Harris and his companions were lifted up and knocked flat. They groaned, coughed, and crawled over the deck in agony.
“Advance!” I ordered. “Mow down the survivors!”
I walked up to Harris and knelt beside him as my men finished off the pack of panicked, humping Nairbs. It was a slaughter.
“Harris?” I asked. “Can you walk?”
He made an incomprehensible growl of pain. “Just do it, you fuck!”
I shot him, then I shot one other survivor who was similarly injured. I recorded their deaths on my tapper and advanced with about twenty men into the bridge itself.
Here, the chamber was as quiet as a tomb. One Mogwa sat on a throne of what looked like smooth stone.
“Magnate Slur,” I addressed him. “You’re hereby captured. If you cooperate—”
“Detestable scum,” he said, interrupting me. “The battle fleet will scrub your race from the heavens. We’ll kill every last human on every world in this province, and we’ll determine which species aided you in this accursed act. You have no honor, no right, no—”
I shot him. I’ve killed a few Mogwa before, and they always die easily. This one was no exception. He flopped, and made farting noises, then finally slid out of his monolithic throne to curl up on the deck like a daddy long legs. A wide smear of indigo colored goo was left on the throne behind him.
“That, troops, is a Galactic,” I announced. “Take a good look. They’re nothing. You can kill them the same as anything else—maybe even easier. Remember that.”
The survivors from my unit stood around in a circle and stared. They’d been bred their entire lives to think of the Mogwa as beings akin to gods. Like the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, these alien creatures were supposed to be above us in every way.
I knew from personal experience that this conditioning could be broken. Staring down at a dead god went pretty far in that direction, so I let them have a good, long look.
The next day or two was rough. We had to take the ship out of warp, turn it around and head it back to Arcturus. All the while, we were out of communication with our legion because we’d knocked out the deep-link. We had no idea whether or not Battle Fleet 921 had shown up and killed everyone.
“If we hadn’t had Natasha,” I told my haggard crew some forty hours later, “we’d have flown all the way back to the Core Systems.”
“Truth!” Carlos said, beaming.
He was happy just to be alive this long. Kivi, Harris, Leeson—they’d all bit the bullet on this trip.
Natasha basked in my praise, and I thought she really did deserve it. She was our last surviving tech, and our best. She’d figured out the interface, the navigational system—the works.
“I’d have blown this ship up like a monkey with a stick of dynamite in each hand,” I told her.
“You can say that again—sir,” Sargon chimed in.
After we were all finished praising her up and down, we got to the grim business of manning an unfamiliar ship full of dead Nairbs.
“If there’s one thing I would change,” Sargon said, “it would be that final, wide-angled blast of energy into the Nairbs. They smell so bad when you cook them.”
“That’s right, and their rations aren’t much better.”
As a semi-aquatic race, the Nairbs ate slop that stank of rotting fish. Unfortunately, old fish seemed to smell the same on their planet as it did on ours.
When we finally arrived at Arcturus, I had Natasha park us far from the central sun, or any of the planets. I wanted to see what was what before we moved in.
“I’m not getting much from these sensors,” she complained.
“Well, our ship is pretty far from here. And there are time-effects too, due to the distance, right?”
She gave me a look I knew all too well. It was the look of someone smart trying not to call me a dummy.
“It doesn’t quite work that way,” she said, letting me down easy. “Light does take about four hours to travel from Rogue World to here, yes. But it’s been doing it all along. So, we’re seeing the planet as it was four hours ago from here, and it’s been visible since the moment we arrived.”
“Okay,” I said, “makes sense—sort of. What do we have?”
“I don’t see Nostrum,” she said. “That’s what worries me.”
“Can they see us yet?”
“No, they can’t see us until the four hours have past.”
After thinking about it, I nodded. “Let’s move in then. The only other thing I can think of doing is turning tail and flying this wreck to Earth—but I don’t think parking a Nairb ship in orbit would make anyone at Central happy with me.”
“I should say not. That would be clear evidence of an entirely new extinction-level offense against the Galactics. You’ve got to know, James, that we should probably just destroy this vessel right now.”
“What?”
I couldn’t believe I was hearing this kind of reasonable thinking from her. I’d expected her to be so fascinated with the alien technology all around us she’d skip right by such logical conclusions.
“Think about it,” she said with sudden intensity. “If the battle fleet shows up in the next hour, they’ll see us hanging around here and begin trying to contact us. Once they figure out that only humans are aboard…”
“Huh…” I said. “That would be bad.”
“That’s right. Every minute we spend in this system, we risk discovery and the extermination of our entire species.”
I frowned. “What are we supposed to do then? Self-execute just like that piss-bag Slur told us to? I’m not interested in that.”
“I know,” she said, “but the risk… it’s tremendous.”
Her words concerned me. They gave me a headache, in fact. I’d already searched the entire ship’s stores and found nothing in the way of alcohol, either. Apparently, the Nairbs had never heard of it.
That thought alone was almost enough to make me feel sorry for the arrogant green bastards.
Almost.
-55-
We spotted a starship about thirteen hours later.
I was dozing at the time, in that hazy state between dreams and wakefulness. I knew people were around me, becoming excited, talking faster with each passing second…
Snorting awake, I found Carlos looming over me.
“Wake up, McGill!” Carlos said. “We found her! We found the Nostrum!”
“Okay,” I said, rubbing my face. “Okay, good—now get out of my face.”
I sat up and shook myself like a dog. “Natasha? Where’s Natasha?”
“She’s on the bridge. She spotted the ship—it has to be ours.”
Fixing Carlos with a sudden stare, all kinds of bad scenarios played out in my mind. “Has to be?” I asked. “As in, it’s not confirmed yet?”
“Has to be,” he repeated stubbornly.
I’ve known Carlos for a long, long time. He was one of the first men I’d ever killed directly, and he’d likewise offed me upon occasion. Sometimes, that sort of history builds a connection between two people. It was kind of like we’d been stuck in a bad marriage for decades.
One thing I knew about him was that he was more than capable of self-delusion. All men were, but he had a special knack for it. When he wanted something badly enough, well, in his mind it became an undeniable truth.
Lurching to my feet and snatching up my gear, I marched toward the bridge. Carlos followed me, muttering about something—but I didn’t care what it was.
For all their arrogance and softness of body, the Nairbs didn’t run a luxury ship. They didn’t know about pillows, or beds, really. Someone had theorized this was due to their being an aquatic race. They had bathtubs in their quarters instead of beds, and I guess they were used to just filling them up and sleeping in there when they felt the urge.
That didn’t work for humans, though. I didn’t even try it. Consequently, I’d been sleeping in a dry bathtub for too long. If you’ve ever tried
that, you know you wake up with a crick in your neck every damned time.
Thumping up to the bridge, I rubbed my neck and cursed the whole way. I didn’t put on my helmet until I sighted Natasha. She didn’t like people being out of safety gear while aboard an enemy ship. We were all in the habit of taking our helmets off when she wasn’t looking, mind you, but we knew well enough to put them back on again when she spotted us.
“Hey,” she said, giving me a hard look, “do you know how long it takes to asphyxiate in a hard vacuum… sir?”
“Uh… as a matter of fact, I’ve done it a few times. You might get a minute in there if you—”
“No,” she said. “You get less than that. Your blood will boil within—”
“Look, Specialist,” I told her, “have you spotted an Earth ship or not?”
“I think so,” she said, sighing and turning back to her instruments.
She’d interfaced her mobile computer—which was about a thousand times more powerful than the tappers everyone had embedded into their forearms—into the Nairb ship’s console. From there, she was able to work an interface of her own design. It was quite a feat of hacking, even if the ship was built along Imperial guidelines.
“You think so?” I demanded. “What’s that mean?”
“I mean there’s something out there, and it isn’t an Imperial ship. I think it’s ours.”
“How can you not know?”
“It’s… here, just take a look.”
She transferred the imagery and data she was looking at to the main console. There, I saw the Arcturus system laid out in all its glory. The world of the rogue scientists was there, fourth from the star, looking as dark and unpleasant as always.
“You see that?” she asked. “Peeking out from behind the planet?”
“No—wait… Yeah, I see something. A little silver line. Is that a ship?”
“It has to be. It’s not a satellite, natural or unnatural. I’ve plotted its orbit—and it’s not orbiting. It’s stationary in a position that can’t be maintained normally without a prohibitive amount of thrust.”
“Have you contacted them yet?”
Natasha looked at me. “I was waiting for you to make that decision.”