Starship Tomahawk (The Hive Invasion Book 2)

by Jake Elwood

  Kaur shrugged. "It seems so."

  "Monitor the broadcast," Hammett said to Ramirez. "Record it too, but I want you to listen. One EMP hit and the recording's gone." He leaned back in the captain's chair, thinking. Survivors were a complication. He was ashamed by the thought, but the simple fact was, his already difficult mission was made vastly more complicated by humans on Ariadne. If the Hive had wiped them out, Hammett's life would have been easier.

  "Obviously we need to take a closer look," he said. "In the meantime, let's recap what we know about Ariadne and the colony. Ms. Kaur?"

  Kaur nodded and tapped a console. A map of the planet appeared in the air above her console. "Naxos," she said. "The third system ever reached by human explorers, and the second system connected to Earth by Gates. Gate One goes from Earth to Alpha Centauri, and Gate Two takes you back to Earth. Gate Three connects Earth to Naxos." She frowned. "Connected." The Gate was offline now.

  "Naxos had two Gates," she continued. "Gate Four led back to Earth. Gate Five continued on to Deirdre. From there it linked to four more systems, so quite a lot of traffic went through Naxos before the Hive showed up."

  Hammett nodded, fighting impatience. It would do no harm for Kaur to take them through the basics.

  "There has been a human presence on Ariadne for a hundred and nine years," Kaur said. "Terraforming began in earnest about eighty years ago. Ariadne is well within the Goldilocks zone, and it has a gravity of about point nine eight, so it was an excellent candidate for colonization." She moved her fingers in the air and the holo projection zoomed in on the northern hemisphere.

  "The planet has an atmosphere mostly composed of hydrogen and helium. Terraforming efforts have focused on generating oxygen at low elevations, where it can dislodge the lighter local gases." She zoomed in further. "This is the Green Crater. The floor of the crater is almost eight kilometers lower than most of the planet, with quite steep walls." The projection showed a circular gash in the planet's crust, the bottom darkened by a combination of vegetation and shadow.

  "The crater is just over five hundred kilometers wide. The earliest settlers built walls in key places to minimize wind, then set to work making air. They used-"

  "Let's skip the details on air generation," Hammett interrupted. "The bottom of the crater is full of air. Let's move on."

  Kaur frowned, then nodded. She had an engineering background, Hammett remembered from his personnel file. She would be fascinated by the technical details.

  "It's been about fifty years since the crater floor has been able to support plant life beyond genetically modified grasses and shrubs. The air quality has been stable enough to allow people to live there without artificial air supplies for just over thirty years. The original settlement has grown substantially in that time." Kaur's hands moved and the projection of the crater disappeared, replaced by a flat image of a small city. The picture changed every few seconds, showing different views of the settlement. "Spacecom's best estimate is that the Naxos system contained eighteen thousand, five hundred and twelve people at the time of the invasion. Nearly everyone lived in Harlequin. It's the only city in the system."

  Hammett watched pictures appear and vanish in the projected display. The city seemed to have no buildings taller than two stories. The sky was never visible. Instead, he saw the looming wall of the crater in the background, a cliff of ochre stone. Most of the buildings were made of stone blocks the same color as the crater walls. It gave the place a rustic, friendly feel that was missing in most Earthly cities.

  Pumpkin-colored stone dominated the city, but lush green vegetation offered strong competition. Harlequin had the look of a town carved from the jungle. Trees flourished everywhere, mostly palms with a variety of fruit trees mixed in. Every building had a lawn in front, and planters lined sidewalks or marked property lines. Flowers erupted from the planters, while vines climbed walls and spread across tiled roofs.

  Some of the pictures showed the outskirts of the little city stretching away in the background. The floor of the crater looked like jungle at first glance. Hammett saw broadleaf trees twice or even three times the height of the tallest buildings in Harlequin.

  A closer look revealed that much of the crater was under cultivation. Wide swathes of greenery had telltale lines showing that they were crops, not wild growth. The picture changed, and he saw a house and outbuildings nestled in what appeared to be a forest, until he noted the trees stood in perfectly straight lines. It was an orchard.

  Kaur continued her lecture. "One thousand and fourteen people would have been off-planet in nine different settlements and stations orbiting either the planet or the star. In addition, there was a science outpost on Dryad with a staff of several hundred." The picture changed to a series of domes set on a crater-pocked plain. The sun was a fiery giant that dominated the sky.

  "Our intelligence is now 42 days old," Kaur said. "That's how long it's been since Gate Three went offline."

  "What about this radio station?" Hammett asked. "Do we have any record of it?" He had heard of public radio broadcasts. They were a phenomenon of the distant past. Still, colonies often employed primitive technology side by side with cutting-edge modern tech. He'd seen waterwheels and saddle horses on some worlds. Why not a radio station?

  "I can't find anything specific about it," said Kaur.

  "All right. We'll track it down." He looked at Sanjari. "Anything interesting on the long-range scans?"

  "That orbiting object is about to move past the visible disc of the planet," she said. "That will make it a lot easier to pick out details."

  "Show me," he said.

  A projection appeared above her console, showing the mystery object in its white circle almost at the edge of the planet. Resolution was already much better than before, Hammett noted. The ship's AI would have been fine-tuning the focus and finding ways to enhance the image.

  Sanjari zoomed in until the edge of the planet was a vertical black wall and the orbiting object was a palm-sized blob. The blob moved past the wall, and details began to appear. The object became a crisp silhouette.

  "It doesn't match any ships or stations that should be in the system," Sanjari said.

  Hammett didn't need the clarification. He knew what he was seeing. It was an amalgamated vessel, a collection of Hive ships.

  Kaur said, "Well, that's disappointing, but hardly surprising."

  Hammett nodded. "We need to figure out its period of rotation. We'll jump to the far side of Ariadne from the colony. We need to keep the planet between us and that ship."

  "Calculating," said Benson.

  "The Bayonet will stay here and deploy the Gate," Hammett said. "Tomahawk and Achilles will jump in."

  He saw Kaur and Touhami exchange glances, though neither of them spoke. The Bayonet carried a replacement Gate ready to connect to Earth. It would allow instant transport between the two systems. Deploying the Gate would bring them reinforcements, but it would involve risk, as well. Powering up the gate would require a fantastic amount of energy. The gate would glow like a beacon as it formed a connection to the matching Gate in the Sol system, twelve long light-years away. In the vastness of space it might go unnoticed by the Hive. Or it might draw in every Hive ship in the system.

  And the Gate would have to blaze away for more than three hours before it could make a connection.

  "We can jump in twenty-six minutes," Bennett announced.

  Hammett nodded and steepled his fingers, doing his best to appear calm. The next jump would take them very close to the planet. In all likelihood they would be spotted immediately, no matter what precautions they took. Even if they arrived undetected, they couldn't stay hidden for long.

  In a very short time – probably just over twenty-six minutes – they would be fighting for their lives.

  Chapter 6 – Janice

  Early afternoon sunshine slanted through the trees in Veterans Memorial Park. Janice Ling sat on a bench under an oak tree, soaking in the serene beauty of
the scene. Lush grass surrounded her. Like the oak, it could never have survived in the parched Baja Peninsula without human intervention. The whole park, with its flower beds and shade trees and shrubs, existed on artificially enriched soil and had to be extensively irrigated.

  The park, she reflected, was as artificial and fragile as the sense of tranquility she stubbornly clung to. There was nothing tranquil about her life these days. She lived in a maelstrom, and her mini-vacation was about to end. She had to step back into the storm.

  Her gaze strayed from the dappled pattern of leaf shadows on the grass, rising in spite of her. She looked across the Boulevard of Heroes at the long fused-sand wall of a block of row houses on the far side. Her apartment was in that block, and it had been her haven in a bustling city, her oasis of peace in a chaotic world.

  Not any longer. Now the apartment felt like a prison, a dangerous trap. Too many people knew where she lived. It had never bothered her, before.

  But she'd never been infamous before.

  With a reluctant sigh she tilted her head and brought up a menu on her implants. Getting her implanted electronics restored had been painful and tedious, but completely worth it. She already couldn't remember how she'd coped without functioning implants for all those long weeks on the Alexander.

  A flashing light in the corner of her eye told her she had messages waiting – dozens of them. The temptation to ignore it all and go back to enjoying the park was strong. She suppressed it.

  Most of it was from strangers. She was tempted to filter out everything that wasn't from someone she knew, but that would eventually cost her priceless story leads. She sighed again and resigned herself to slogging through the whole stinking mess.

  In most cases the headlines made triage simple. Lying Bitch. Die Traitor. YORE NOT HUMAN. She ached to delete those ones. Instead she dumped them into a separate folder, in case she ever wanted to write an article about the backlash to her exposé.

  For every death threat and message of hate there was a message thanking her, blessing her, or calling her a saint. She glanced at some of the headlines, smiling, then deleted the whole works. The messages came in a torrent. She didn't have time to read them all, never mind reply.

  There was a message from Pan Galactic, trying to schedule an exit interview. She deleted it unread. The cowards had fired her. She wasn't going to trek across town to sit in a meeting room and explain herself.

  There were job offers from a handful of media outlets, most of them fringe organizations who wouldn't actually pay a salary. She saved those, just in case. The future was nothing if not uncertain.

  Near the bottom of the list she found a message from her mother. She opened it without enthusiasm. Mom was pretty conservative. She believed in supporting the status quo and the establishment. The message would undoubtedly be a lecture about endangering her career, with perhaps a few words about how every citizen owed the government support during a time of crisis. She braced herself and started to read.

  Janice, I'm so proud of you. I always knew you had courage and integrity, but in the last few days you managed to exceed even my very high expectations. I know a lot of people are criticizing you. Don't you listen to them! I'll tell you what I tell every single person who has the nerve to bring up the subject with me. You did the right thing!

  When I look at those poor peace protesters I just want to scream in fury. Those awful EDF people scare me. I know they must have scared you, too. But you didn't back down. You exposed them for the bullies and monsters they are, and you make me so proud I feel like my heart is going to burst.

  Tears filled Janice's eyes, distorting the text, and she stopped reading, wiping her eyes. I must look pretty funny, sitting here crying and smiling like a fool. She glanced around. The park was almost empty, and no one was paying her the slightest attention. She finished drying her eyes and kept reading.

  The rest of the message continued in the same vein. She'd lost her job, but any company that wouldn't support her decision was a company not worth working for. More opportunities would come along, from employers who valued integrity and courage. She would catch some flak, but everyone knew that bullies were cowards. She would come through it just fine.

  "Thanks, Mom," she murmured when she came to the end. She closed the message list and leaned back on the bench, smiling and shaking her head. "I should have known you'd be on my side."

  She sat there smiling until the rumble of tires on asphalt caught her attention. She looked up.

  A couple of large vehicles came rolling down the Avenue of Heroes. The electric engines were silent, but the vehicles, some sort of car-truck hybrid, were massive enough that their tires made a distinct racket. Both vehicles were black, with large tires and elevated suspension that gave them a vaguely military look. Tinted windows added to an overall sinister impression. She somehow wasn't surprised when they rolled to a stop in front of her apartment.

  Doors flew open and men and women spilled out. Black and red uniforms made her think of exotic beetles, something dangerous and unpleasant. Sunlight glinted on gun belts and put a silvery sheen on black armbands. They were too far away for Janice to read the white letters stenciled on each armband, but she knew what the letters said.

  The EDF had grown up rapidly in the scant few days since the election. Acton was gaining quite a reputation as a man who could get things done, and done quickly. Within hours of his inauguration he had given official status – and a considerable budget – to the EDF groups that had grown like mold in cities all over the world. They had proper uniforms now. They had handcuffs, and badges, and guns.

  She watched, numb, as a battering ram smashed open the front door to her building. Then she stood, turned, and walked as calmly as she could across the park and away from her home.

  She didn't look back.

  Chapter 7 – Hammett

  The Tomahawk dropped through a wormhole, and suddenly the bulk of Ariadne filled the port window. Before Hammett could speak the planet dropped away in a blur of red and brown and he saw stars above a curving horizon as the corvette leveled out. Then the ship plunged toward the planet, and the stars faded as the Tomahawk entered atmosphere.

  "Achilles is with us," Kaur announced, and Hammett felt a tiny bit of the pressure he was under bleed away. Plenty remained, of course. Jumping this close to a planet was dangerous to the point of being foolhardy. He certainly wouldn't try it without a functioning AI. That would take things beyond mere stupidity and into the realm of the suicidal.

  "No contacts so far," Touhami said. He leaned over his console like a vulture, eyes fixed on the display like his life depended on it.

  The windows now showed blue sky with a green tint. It was pretty, and Hammett wished he could take a moment to enjoy the sight. Instead he watched their descent on his own screen. The ground rose quickly. The ship's belly cameras showed a beige plain with blotches of green where swathes of genetically modified grass clung stubbornly to life. In a couple of centuries the whole planet might have breathable air.

  I wonder if any human beings will be alive to breathe it? He pushed the thought away. Focus on winning the war. You're doing well so far. Okay, you're skulking and hiding and avoiding the enemy. The point is, it's working.

  So far.

  Benson said, "Touchdown in thirty seconds or so. I don't see anything that looks like cover."

  The land below seemed to be a mix of rolling plains and naked rock. "Any place will do," Hammett said. "Just get us on the ground."

  "Right." Benson's left hand tapped at the helm controls while his right hand moved in the air, manipulating more controls through his implants. "Touching down now."

  The Tomahawk landed with a thud that made Hammett's teeth click together. Clouds of dust rose on either side of the bridge. A moment later he saw a silvery gleam as the other corvette landed a couple of dozen meters to starboard.

  "Sorry about that," said Benson.

  Hammett shook his head. "I wanted us down quick, and
that's what you did. No apologies necessary." He turned to Kaur. "What do you see?"

  "Nothing so far," she replied. "If they saw us, they haven't come after us yet."

  They could be gathering their forces. Or waiting for that behemoth in orbit to get around to this side of the planet. Or maybe the big ship will spot us as soon as it finishes its orbit. Or-

  He squashed the line of thought. You'll deal with them when they come. In the meantime, knock it off with the frightened granny routine. This isn't your first dance.

  Kaur said, "What now, Sir?"

  "Now we wait." He glanced at Sanjari. "That alien ship takes ninety minutes to orbit?"

  "Ninety-three minutes and a few seconds," she said.

  "We'll wait ninety minutes," Hammett said. "If they aren't swarming us by then, they don't know we're here."

  "What then?" Kaur said.

  How should I know? I never dreamed we'd make it to the surface undetected. "Then the Achilles will land in the crater and try to make contact with the colonists. The Tomahawk will remain here. Then we'll wait for word from the Achilles, or from the Bayonet, whichever comes first."

  Chapter 8 – Carruthers

  "Excuse me, Captain."

  James Carruthers straightened, barely managing not to touch the captain's bars on the collar of his uniform. He was still not used to the rank. He turned to face Specialist Kuzyk. "What is it, specialist?"

  Kuzyk's hand went to his sleeve, unconsciously touching his rank bar, and Carruthers smiled. Kuzyk had been promoted from the rank of cadet at the same time Carruthers was made captain. He was no more used to his rank than Carruthers was. "There's a lady here to see you."

  No rank. So it has to be a civilian. "Another bloody reporter?"

  "Yes, Sir."

  "Tell her to go away." When Kuzyk didn't move, Carruthers said, "Well? What's the problem?"

  "It's Janice, Sir!" Kuzyk reddened. "That is, it's Ms. Ling. From the Alexander."

  Carruthers scowled. Did she think to presume on their history together? Remind him they'd been shipmates, and pressure him for an interview? It was completely inappropriate, and he felt a rising annoyance.