Mulmulpa looked up toward the shield dome hidden in the night sky. “I cannot see the spirits in the sky. It is not meant to be this way.”
“There’s no radiation from the weapon,” Beckman said. “No after effects. It’s clean.”
“That’s comforting,” Laura snapped. “A nuke has already gone off. What about its radiation?”
“There’s nothing I can do about that. All I know is that the President had to authorize that nuke. That means bad shit is happening, and he’s telling us to use that weapon as surely as if he handed me the order himself. Your government must have agreed, because there’s nothing they can do to fix this. Not now.”
“Destroying this place isn’t the same as protecting it.”
“It’ll recover,” Beckman said. “It may take a hundred years or a thousand, but it will recover. But if we don’t knock that ship out now, we may not be here in a year.”
Laura wanted to scream, but it would change nothing. Everything her life had stood for to that moment was being torn apart.
Bandaka approached her. “We belong to the land. If the land survives, we do too.”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Beckman said, turning toward Mulmulpa who nodded slowly.
Laura sighed. “How close are you going to take that thing, before you set it off?”
“We’re going to shove it up their ass,” Tucker declared malevolently.
“Yeah!” Nuke exclaimed, “Biggest freaking enema in history!”
Beckman nodded. “We have to get close enough for the ship to be inside the blast sphere.”
“What about my husband? He’s on that ship.”
“This was never a rescue mission,” Beckman replied with a hint of sympathy.
She glanced at Markus, who remained quietly uncommitted. “That’s it then.”
On the far side of the camp, a weak moan sounded. Virus rolled sideways, slowly bringing a hand up to his pounding head. He opened his eyes, blinking weakly. Xeno rushed to him, placing a hand on his shoulder reassuringly. He groaned, then mumbled several incomprehensible words in a voice straining to reach a high pitch beyond his physical capabilities. Everyone stared at him in astonishment.
His words were of a language unknown to Man.
* * * *
“Sonar contact, bearing one seven five degrees, speed–” the sonar operator cut off as his mind struggled to grasp what his instruments were telling him.
Captain Bourke turned toward the operator curiously. “Speed?”
The sonar operator gave the captain of the USS Michigan a confused look. “Over two thousand knots, sir, submerged!”
“That’s impossible!” Commander Thompson snapped as he started toward the sonar operator’s console.
“Heading?” The captain demanded.
“Straight for us!”
“Battle stations,” the captain ordered. “Launch countermeasures.”
The XO leaned passed the sonar operator, peering to see a fluorescent line streak across the screen toward the Michigan. “There must be something wrong with your instruments.”
The sonar operator ran his eye over his controls doubtfully. “I don’t think so, sir.”
Captain Bourke took up position on the other side of the sonar operator, reaching for the operator’s head set. He pressed one of the speakers to his ear, listening. Instead of the familiar sound of high speed propellers cavitating through the water, he heard barely a whisper. It was the sound of water particles being pushed aside by an acceleration field that ensured the speeding object never actually touched the water, even though it was cruising hundreds of meters below the surface.
“It’s not a torpedo,” the captain muttered as he watched the line streak toward them. “Hard a port, seventy degrees!”
Before the massive submarine began to turn the silver ellipsoid struck the Michigan amidships, plunging into its nuclear reactor and detonating. For a moment, the dark depths of the ocean burned with the radiance of a star, then the sea water collapsed into the empty airless void that had formed where SSGN 727 had been. There was no wreckage, no surge of bubbles or debris, no hope of survivors.
The USS Michigan had been annihilated at a molecular level.
* * * *
Markus borrowed Tucker’s entrenching tool as the team made last minute preparations before moving out. Leaving camp with an entrenching tool indicated he was going to attend to his morning needs in the absence of a proper latrine, and ensured he wouldn’t be followed. He caught Laura’s eye, and nodded for her to follow, then once out of sight of the troops, he drew his transceiver and typed quickly:
Request:
1. Rationale for use of nuclear weapons.
2. Confirmation of mission priorities.
Urgent. Beckman planning to deliver payload.
He knew Nuke had been receiving nothing on the radio, and the dome’s ability to filter out a nuclear blast’s EMP made him doubt anyone would receive his signal, but he had to try. The DSD team were barely a hundred kilometers away and their equipment was extremely sensitive, so he hoped they would pick up some trace of his signal.
“Are you going to let them do it?” Laura demanded.
Markus glanced to his left, this time not surprised that he hadn’t heard her approach. She stood with hands on hips and an angry look on her freckled face.
“I haven’t decided.”
She nodded to the transceiver in his hand. “Getting anything?”
“Not yet. I may have to make a judgment call.” He gave her a questioning look. “Can I count on you?”
Laura looked surprised. “Me? What do you want me to do?”
“I’ll let you know.” He waited. “Well?”
She realized he might be her husband’s only hope. “You can, if you stop them destroying that ship with my husband inside.”
“Good.” Markus drove the entrenching tool into the ground, levering up a spade full of dirt. He glanced at Laura. “That’s all.”
She felt mildly irritated that she was being dismissed, as if she was in Markus’ employ. Without a word, she turned and headed back to camp. When Markus finished digging a shallow hole, he checked the transceiver.
Its gray LCD screen remained blank.
CHAPTER 14
The heavy lift suit flashed a priority alert into one of Nemza’ri’s cerebral implants.
She ignored it, focusing instead on gently lowering the damaged transport cell she held onto the med lab floor. It was the third functioning cell she’d found with her suit’s biosensor. Each rescue gave her hope, even though the cell’s occupants all suffered from terrible burns, and would require months of nano regeneration to recover. The miracle was that the cells themselves had survived, shielding the occupants from the worst of the heat, even after their outer shells had melted.
She released the octagonal transport cell and stepped back. It was scarred black and splattered with droplets of molten metal, now cooled, but its inner walls had not collapsed. By a stroke of luck, the cell’s artificial awareness had survived and managed to keep the biostasis field operating under the cell’s own emergency power. The cell’s power module was damaged and wouldn’t last much longer, something the cell’s awareness was constantly screaming at her as it struggled to keep its precious occupant alive.
She flashed a signal through the suit’s communicator, summoning six spherical, multi-armed med drones. The med drones erected a mobile stasis field around the transport cell, then transferred the charred occupant to a regrowth chamber. Once inside, millions of nano machines swarmed around the blackened body, passing between dead skin cells to work directly on ruined organs at a cellular level. The nano machines functioned less efficiently inside a stasis field, but could perform even the most delicate of operations when supervised by the vastly more capable med drones. The automated medical team replaced hundreds of damaged nano implants and amputated all of the patients limbs in preparation for regrowth. Once he was stabilized, they would determine if they
could save his body, or would have to construct a cloneform for a brain-consciousness transplant. It was a dangerous procedure, and would only be carried out if there was no way to rebuild the patient’s original bioform.
The med drones identified the patient by his DNA, informing Nemza’ri of his identity. He was a mid level ground unit commander, not scheduled for revival until planetfall plus two. Technically, he outranked her, but not being crew meant in matters of the ship he was no more than cargo, and being male, he would always defer to her irrespective of grade. While she was glad she’d found another survivor, her inability to find a ship’s officer worried her. Being the only surviving crew member meant she was in command of the ship, even if the Command Nexus refused to recognize her rank. Saving passengers was her duty, but she desperately hoped to find one of her more senior sisters to take command.
When the med drones had stabilized the patient, they shut down the portable biostasis field and allowed the regrowth chamber’s own life support system to take control of the patient’s metabolic processes. The med drones informed her that he would survive, but would be unconscious for many weeks. Knowing there was nothing more she could do, she at last turned her attention to that annoying alert that kept sounding deep inside her brain. She’d assumed it was a malfunction, but her training and discipline wouldn’t allow her to cancel it until she’d followed the required termination protocols. To her amazement, she discovered it was not a system failure, but a genuine combat alert being transmitted throughout the ship.
She listened with growing concern as she discovered the deployment shield had been struck by a low yield fusion weapon! She wondered who could possibly be firing at them. And who would dare to use such outlawed weapons? They were universally hated by all sentient species, and the consequences of building, let alone using such weapons, were too severe to contemplate.
With the ship under attack, and fighting for its survival, her perspective changed.
She was no longer struggling to save survivors. She no longer doubted the chain of command, or feared her part in it. The Command Nexus was trying to defeat an enemy she knew nothing about, an enemy that had tried to destroy the ship while it was helpless. As was the way of her kind, she was now driven to commit herself totally and selflessly to the defense of the ship.
Nemza’ri used the suit communicator to ask the med drones one question. They informed her that two of the male survivors were viable, but they needed growth hormones. The ship carried a number of myrnods, an aggressive, predatory creature native to her homeworld that secreted the needed hormone, but to look for those creatures meant temporarily abandoning the search for survivors. The myrnods had been stored in several locations to ensure they would not all be lost if the ship was damaged, so there was a chance some could have survived.
She requested a tactical update through the channel that had supplied the combat alert. The response was immediate: the Command Nexus had been suppressing orbital and atmospheric defenses since landing and had mounted punitive operations to secure the area. No contact had been established with Fleet for many days, threat levels were high and reinforcement unlikely. Enemy action was also interdicting supply, further retarding recovery operations.
That settled it. She had to find the myrnods. If there were any more survivors, they would have to wait. She was crew, she was nominally in command and she knew her duty.
Most importantly of all, she was female.
CHAPTER 15
Vamp led Dr McInness and Timer toward the circle of light marking the end of the tunnel from the destroyed mantle mine, periodically glancing at the crystal ball’s display surface. The recovered scanner indicated no contacts, yet she couldn’t believe there were no guards. She pocketed the scanner as she crept towards the mouth of the tunnel and raised her gun. A smooth rock floor several football fields in length stretched out before her, beneath a cavernous chamber that rose through several kilometers of rock to a barely visible gray ceiling.
She glanced back into the deep shadows behind her. “Wait there, Doc,” she said, motioning for Timer to follow.
Timer hesitated until a sharp look from her forced him forward. He drew his special, but remained several paces behind as she stepped out onto the fused rock floor. Her footsteps clicked hollowly on the glassy surface while the vast emptiness towering above made her feel insignificant. To her right was the dark opening of the second tunnel leading back to the mantle mine, while a featureless rock wall stretched away to the left.
“This must be where they unload the transports, but then what?” She sensed the chamber was too large to simply be a terminus for the mine, yet there was nothing to indicate its greater purpose.
“They must be going to build something in here,” Timer said from the tunnel entrance.
Vamp finished surveying the floor of the chamber, finding no sign of an exit on the smooth rock walls. “Looks like the end of the road,” she said, wondering if they were trapped.
She looked up, following the chamber’s walls past yellow-orange light panels ten meters above the floor, to the dark gray rectangular ceiling far above. The ceiling’s only feature was several white points of light, too distant to determine what they were. She aimed her M16 at the lights, using its ACOG telescopic sight to resolve the dots into small circular openings.
“Oh shit!” she murmured.
“What is it?” Timer whispered anxiously.
“We’re under it!”
“Under what?” Dr McInness demanded.
“The ship! I can see open hatches.”
“Really?” Dr McInness asked excitedly as he rushed past Timer, unable to contain his curiosity any longer. He looked up, trying to gauge the distance to the gray metallic underside of ship’s hull. “My God, it’s huge!”
“Not what you expected?” Vamp asked, unclipping her telescopic sight and passing it to him.
Dr McInness scowled as he peered through the low power lens. “I think we got our calculations wrong!”
“Oh really?” Vamp asked.
“It’s much bigger than we thought.”
Timer looked up apprehensively. “I knew it. We’re trapped!”
Dr McInness handed the telescopic sight back to Vamp, then wandered across the floor, staring up at the gray hull, frustrated he couldn’t get closer. “There must be a way–”
A white beam flashed down from above and enveloped the scientist. Without any sensation of movement, he found himself shooting up through a shaft of light. Vamp and Timer fell away rapidly, shrinking to tiny dots in seconds, while the glistening rock walls flashed past in a blur. He entered one of the circular openings, slowing as he passed through the hull’s three thick layers. He popped up inside a cavernous space shrouded in shadows, then he was swept sideways and deposited on a polished metal deck. The transport beam winked out, leaving him blinking in near darkness. Slowly, as his eyes adjusted, he began to appreciate the vast nature of the deck. A few dim yellow-orange lights flickered against a wall, struggling to survive on a faltering power supply, while the other walls were lost in darkness hundreds of meters away.
He turned slowly around, feeling small and alone in a giant’s lair. The deathly quiet was periodically broken by a distant clang of metal on metal, resonating to him through the great ship’s superstructure.
Repairs? he wondered as he turned toward one of the four circular openings in the deck. Suspended high above each hatchway was a gray machine fitted with a translucent conical projector. He approached the hatchway cautiously and peered down into the rock shaft he’d just ascended. Its bottom appeared to be a tiny square of light far below, bordered by rock walls obscured by darkness. He felt his head spin with vertigo and stepped back, then one of the conical projectors glowed to life, pushing back the night. A transport beam flashed down into the chamber, then Vamp appeared above the hatchway and was carried sideways to the deck. The beam blinked out, leaving her standing in the spot Dr McInness had vacated, blinking to focus. She leveled her M
16, turning quickly full circle to check for possible attack.
“We’re alone,” Dr McInness assured her, then a distant metallic clang sounded. “Except for that.”
She studied her surroundings, looking up curiously at the conical device hanging above the hatch.
“It’s a cargo handling system. That’s how they get the metal ingots up here.”
She glanced thoughtfully at the open hatchway. It was far larger than was necessary to bring small metal cubes into the ship. “And move stuff down there.”
“What stuff?”
“Stuff they didn’t want us to know about, until they jump out of the ground. You’ve seen how fast they build tunnels. We could never get down that deep if we had to stop them.”
“Stop them from doing what? I don’t see much happening around here now that Beckman blew up their mine!”
Vamp looked around for the shipment of ingots they’d seen depart the mine terminus. “So where’s the metal?”
“I guess they used it already.”
Timer appeared above the cargo hatch, and was placed on the deck beside Vamp. “Cool ride! Now let’s get the hell out of here.”
The faint sound of another distant metallic impact rang through the ship, then faded before they could guess how far away its source was.
Timer glanced into the cargo hatch he’d just passed through, spat into the void, and watched as his spittle sailed through the air into the shadows below. “Watch that first step!”
Vamp noticed the thick triple hull, several hundred meters thick. “That’s a big hull.”
“It’s a big ship,” Dr McInness said.
“It looks like armor.”
“So what if it is? The ship has to deal with radiation, meteorites, who knows what else.”
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