5
Tribunal
“Where’s my man! Where’s Harrison?” Dane demanded. He had been ushered into a secure metal room. The door thrummed closed behind him.
Much later, Lance Corporal Williams had been stripped out of his suit and had spent an unknown length of time in a featureless gray cell. He had no food or water and nothing for company but the image of that chittering, vindictive Exin lodged into his mind. Dane had no idea how long he’d been in the cell, as time moved strangely when there was nothing but one’s own thoughts for company.
Out of nowhere, he found himself being escorted by grim-faced guards from his cell. They walked through featureless gray metal corridors that he didn’t recognize with a lot of white-and-purple strips on the walls. Command, Dane recognized the base-wide coding, and something else . . .
“Lance Corporal!” It was the snap of command from one of the two other people in the room alongside Dane, Staff Sergeant Lashmeier.
The small bulldog of a man was dressed in his regular khaki combat fatigues. He stood to one side of a desk and glowered at Dane. Standing up from the desk next to him was Otepi.
“Williams, just because you’re in trouble doesn’t mean you get to throw away the rulebook!” Lashmeier growled. “Permission to speak denied!”
Dane felt the immediate rush of angry air to his chest, but he held his nerve and didn’t say anything. Yet.
“Lance Corporal,” Otepi said in a much slower, more exasperated tone. “You and ‘your man’ were found in a highly restricted area of this facility, an area that neither of you had clearance for, and there were obvious signs that you broke in,” She waved a hand over the desk, and a holo of the busted-open door that led down to the Exin appeared. “And what is more, once there, you and one of your squad proceeded to threaten a highly respected and highly valued member of the military intelligence scientific corps.”
“Are you talking about the human or the Exin?” Dane muttered under his breath.
“DID YOU NOT HEAR ME, LANCE CORPORAL!?” The Staff Sergeant broke into “full Lashmeier” without even taking a run-up or a breath. It was fairly impressive, Dane had to admit. Like watching a sports car do zero to sixty in about a heartbeat.
Dane considered his options. It looked pretty much like they were going to throw the book at him for something that wasn’t his fault. He could start wheedling and explaining that it was all on Harrison, and that the younger marine was clearly addled, scared, and wounded—but Dane merely shook his head at himself. He wasn’t about to do that. Harrison had a right to feel scared and angered, after all. Harrison, along with every other marine of the Mechanized Infantry Division, were putting their lives on the line for the defense of Earth, and no one thought to tell them that there was an Exin right there?
And anyway . . . Dane took a deep breath and rolled his shoulders back. “I’m the commanding officer for that training operation, and for Private First Class Harrison,” he said loudly and formally, ignoring the sparks of ire that seemed to catch fire in Lashmeier’s eyes. “And so I have a right to ask where he is, and what you have done with him. I also take full responsibility for his actions, and, quite frankly, sirs—I would do them all again if I found an Exin hanging around in the middle of my base.”
“Dear god,” Otepi muttered, shaking her head as she closed the holo with a grabbing motion. Dane expected more of a response from Lashmeier, and so was surprised to see that the staff sergeant had taken a step back and was regarding him like an eagle might regard a mouse. Appraising.
“Lance Corporal Williams,” the captain began. “Lucky for both of us—it is not your base. And neither is it mine. It is the first admiral’s, if anyone’s. We cannot have you and your men taking it upon yourselves to burst into any old room you want, or to become vigilantes over something that is way beyond your pay grade.”
What is beyond my pay grade—that there is collaboration going on with the Exin, right here!? Dane could have snapped, but he didn’t.
Instead, he said, “I believe, sir, that we were searching for a way out of the chasm, and that door afforded the most direct opportunity available to us.” He completely covered the fact that the door had already been burst open when he got there—by Harrison and not himself at all.
“What is more, sir,” Dane went on. “As I saw no restricted signs or off-limits or warning insignia, and my suit was offline from central marine servers, I had to act as best I thought in the situation to get my man to safety. He had already been pretty badly roughed up from the training operation.”
There was silence from the two officers, and Dane saw Lashmeier half turn to Otepi, as if the eagle had just seen another rival for dinner. Something wordless passed between them, and Otepi appeared to lose some of her edge suddenly.
“There is still the pointing the gun at the military scientist,” Otepi said wearily.
“See my earlier response to that, sir.” Dane didn’t blink. How was I supposed to know whether the highly valued scientist was or wasn’t a traitor!? Dane thought that they should count their blessings that he hadn’t shot the man already . . .
“The Exin is not a threat, Lance Corporal. And it was not your job to make it so,” Otepi blinked.
“Excuse me, sir,” Dane interrupted. “But I was trained to believe that all Exin are a threat.” It was hardly his fault that he assumed what he had been told, every day, from the moment that he had woken up in the hospital after an Exin raid on his home . . .
“Captain,” It was Lashmeier’s turn to intercede. “The Lance Corporal was there at the capture.”
What capture? Dane thought, and then realized what the staff sergeant was talking about. The egg. Or seed. He had personally saved First Admiral Yankis from being captured and dragged off by two of the Exin warrior caste to one of their “seed crafts.” Yankis had been overjoyed, not just at his freedom, but also at the apparent capture of one of the alien vehicles.
“Agreed.” Otepi nodded, before eyeing the marine before her with a hard glance. “I wanted more time to present this information to the marines, but I guess that time is the one thing we don’t have any more.” She paused, frowned. “We have no idea when the Exin will next attack. So, I guess I’d better get you up to speed . . .”
“That Exin you saw came from the seed craft that was left behind after the last incursion,” Otepi said, and her hand moved over the desk once again. This time, it wasn’t a hologram that sprang to life over it, but the entire back wall shimmered and faded, replaced with what had really been hidden by the holo of plain metal.
A large viewing screen, looking out over a gigantic subterranean hanger. The space was much bigger than any warehouse or vault that Dane had seen so far at the facility. And it was busy. Dane could see cranes and loaders and trucks whizzing back and forth with flashing lights moving between large shapes half-covered in tarpaulin.
And there, in the center of the hangar, were two craft, side by side. The larger by far was a giant wedge of metal, with two sidereal, tubelike nacelles, although its main body was vaguely wedge-shaped. It had a blackened nose cone, and the ends of the nacelles appeared to be ports of some kind. The craft stood on a number of hydraulic legs, and it was so large that Dane reckoned it could probably hold thirty to fifty people.
And next to it was the Exin seed craft, almost half its size and hovering in the air malevolently. The Exin attack vehicle was larger and more bulbous at one end and sharper at the other, ending in a “beak” of bonelike points. Dane thought of them as antenna. A scattering of organic humped nodules like the giant barnacles on bowhead whales rippled over its front quarter. Seeing it again made Dane feel a little queasy. It floated on a slight haze that Dane didn’t understand—he wondered if anyone on Earth did.
And between the seed craft and the clearly human-built one, there was a river of cables and wires and boxlike instruments. Dane suddenly thought about the two sorts of bodies he had seen in the facility laboratory, the drone Exin and th
e human. Both had also been covered with wires and sensors.
“We have been studying the captured vessel for its weaknesses.” Otepi turned to regard the vessel. “And for its strengths.” One of her gloved hands moved to the human-built one. “Lance Corporal Williams, please meet the ship that will take you to the artifact. This is the Gladius.”
“Cool name,” Dane mumbled.
“The Gladius has been built by the very best minds that the world has to offer, and with our understanding of the alien technology available to us. We believe that we have a nearly functional FTL drive.”
“A what?” Dane tried to remember his nerd youth watching sci-fi shows. “You mean faster than light, right? A ship that can break the light barrier.”
“Well, approximately.” Otepi shrugged. “I cannot quote you the science, but it works on a jury-rigged version of the Exin craft’s propulsion system. It creates disturbances in the local gravitational wave to pull it along faster than was thought currently possible to science. Human science, that is. It means that it will be able to make the journey to Jupiter and the alien artifact in acceptable times, rather than say, months or years.”
“Makes things easier,” Dane had to concede. But how safe could it be to use Exin technology?
“That Exin whom you saw was a scientist on board the craft who surrendered when we got the seed back here. He says he . . .”
“Says?” Dane burst out. “You understand their language?”
“They understand ours.” Otepi glowered. Clearly not a topic she wanted to dwell on for some reason. “But our scientists—like the one you almost shot—are making headway in that regard. The captured Exin tells us that he is a scientist, and represents a faction within the aliens who do not wish to wage an interstellar war but believe in cooperation.”
“And you believe that bullcrap?” Dane said before he could stop himself, earning a warning growl from Lashmeier for his insolence.
“No. Of course not.” Otepi shook her red hair determinedly. “But the first admiral does, and so far, he has helped us build the Gladius, and also, what you saw there was the research into ways to cure the Exinase virus currently eating our planet.”
A cure. Dane felt his mouth go dry. Could it be true? Could there really be a cure for his condition coming? He suddenly felt very conflicted over his desire to shoot the alien, compared to his desire to live longer than three months and to not be permanently medicated by the box strapped to his thigh.
“Exactly, Lance Corporal Williams, you see how serious the situation is.” Otepi sighed. “Even those drones that your squad faced yesterday were directly modeled on test results we got from our Exin collaborator.”
“And they almost killed me . . .” Dane murmured, but no one appeared to notice this latest interruption. Otepi continued.
“And that is why, Williams, that we couldn’t have you or anyone else bursting in and shooting our alien. Ironically, he is the one alien that we don’t want you to shoot on sight.” Otepi nodded.
“Understood, sir,” Dane saluted. He couldn’t say that he liked what he was being told, but he also didn’t know what else to think about it. An entire scientific community of aliens that didn’t want to kill him? That, amazingly, might want peace?
“You will return to the barracks, and you will wait until I have managed to brief the others. Understood?” Otepi said.
“Sir, yes sir.” Dane said. “And—and Private First Class Harrison, Captain?”
Otepi looked at him owlishly. “There have to be consequences, Lance Corporal. Harrison will not be invited to become an Orbital Marine. We believe that his emotional state is too volatile for this important mission to the artifact.”
Dane felt his jaw tighten with anger, but knew that they were right. Harrison had looked as though he was losing it, after all.
“We are told by our collaborator, Lance Corporal, that the object orbiting Jupiter is a working jump-gate,” Otepi said seriously.
“What!?” Dane couldn’t help but burst out.
“A jump-gate. A ship capable of creating a wormhole through time and space, back to the sector where the Exin come from. It is their invasion route . . .” The woman’s eyes flickered. “And their route home.”
Dane knew instinctively what Otepi was going to say next, and he found himself nodding.
“And First Admiral Yankis has tasked us with destroying it.” Her words held no question or expectation. It was stated as a fact that they would get the job done. No matter what it took.
Yes, Dane found himself agreeing. Yes, we will.
Lance Corporal Dane Williams was dismissed to follow the blue strip light back to the areas of the Nevada Facility he was allowed in. But as he marched back, he couldn’t keep the words of Captain Otepi out of his mind.
What was coming next. The artifact.
6
Launch
Despite every marine in the base knowing precisely what it was that they were here to do, all of them—even Dane and Lashmeier and Otepi—were surprised at how quickly they were called on to do it.
It started the very next midday after Dane got back to the rest of the Orbital Mechanized Infantry areas of the Nevada Facility. Williams was greeted back into the fold of his military brothers with a mixture of wariness and sympathy. None of the other soldiers knew why he and Harrison had been taken out of active training, although there was an air of punishment about it.
Dane had batted off the questions and concerns fielded at him—usually by Bruce Cheng. Instead, he had thrown himself into the morning’s PT and the isolation tank. Then, when the shift bell rang, he broke for lunch. He had grabbed a tray of reconstituted, high-protein gunk and was slogging through it when Private First Class Copelli suddenly shot to his feet, swearing.
“Dear holy fracking-frack crawdads!” Copelli was shouting, pointing at the small screen that hung on one wall in the marine canteen. The cafeteria was the only place where screens were allowed, and the content on it was military issue only, so it usually featured pep talks and promotional materials peppered with the regular military-wide bulletins. It was the last of these that was currently on, and which had raised Copelli from his lunch.
Dane, like all the others, glanced up at the disturbance. He saw the marine standing, pointing with his plastic fork held waveringly out at the terrible scenes on display.
Dane saw flashes of light, the white flares of explosions.
“Where have they hit? Where!?” he heard himself shouting, automatically knowing that it had to be about the Exin. There had been another attack.
There was the gleam of fire and explosions, but the landscape was all wrong. The mountains that rose in the distance were gray and white, and the sky was an eternal black. The flames were short-lived . . .
“That’s Luna Station!” Hopskirk was the first to call it, and immediately it made sense to Dane’s eyes, At the same time, the military news anchor’s voice confirmed it.
“Breaking reports of Exin attack on the scientific community of Luna 1. We are receiving these reports in near real time, with a three-minute delay. Here is the video footage captured by our orbital satellites at approximately 12:18 hours . . .”
It was now 12:33, Dane saw, and the footage showed the expanse of the Moon large across the camera as a great curve of white and gray, with several gleaming geodesic structures across its surface, connected by a spiderweb of impossibly thin and fragile covered walkways.
It was impossible to see the stars above the brilliant horizon of Earth’s pale sister. But there were still pinpricks of light moving through the night. They grew impossibly fast, turning into moving stars and then taking on shape and form. A phalanx of five of the Exin seed crafts, lowering silently as they raced towards the surface of the Moon.
Another shot from a different angle—which must have been from one of the colony’s own satellites or cameras—picked up the sudden shape of the crafts. They resembled hard pellets with an iridescent gleam as they arced o
ver the mountains, billowing moondust around them as they shot straight towards the camera. The footage caught the sudden glow of the Exin seed craft’s weapon ports activating around their beaked nose cones, and then the image cut once again to outside the Moon.
Strafing volleys of purple pulse weapons hammered into the habitats, bursting into brilliant glitters of sparks and flashes of light as they broke against the reinforced steels and concretes of the octagon shapes . . .
And then the sudden plume of flames as one of the attacks found a way in. The dome was cracking and venting gasses and fire and ruin as its sensitive internal pressures, vital for the human animal, were exchanged for the uncompromising void of space.
The Exin completed their first strafing round, and two out of the eight separate habitat domes were left broken or damaged. That was when the defense began.
Why so late!? Dane cursed. Wasn’t that precisely why First Admiral Yankis had been installed on the Solaris International Station? The Solaris was the largest space station that humanity had ever constructed, and it stayed in a geo-synchronous orbit between Earth and her satellite. But hadn’t Yankis been trying to upgrade the Earth defenses!?
The first strafing shots of returning pulse fire from the lunar colony started, but it was clear to Dane and to every other marine watching that it wouldn’t be enough. There were only three round bunkers that surrounded the Luna 1 colony, and the footage on the screen ahead showed their domes opening to extend pulse-cannon batteries. Each one recoiled as they fired their answering orange-white pulse blasts back. Humanity had only recently developed the ability to build pulse weapons, but it looked to Dane as though they hadn’t even finished installing the defense batteries by the time they needed to be used.
Dane watched in horror as the defensive batteries missed the Exin craft as they rose far over the plains, starting to turn back for another sweep. The batteries were quickly tracking upwards, following their arc . . . But the Exin are just too damn fast!
Metal Warrior: Steel Trap (Mech Fighter Book 3) Page 5