Ark Royal

by Christopher Nuttall

  ***

  “Four of the shuttles made it, sir,” Farley reported.

  Ted grimaced. Two shuttles were gone, then; one lost to point defence, one lost to unknown causes. They’d have to replay the sensor records piece by piece to find out what had actually happened, he knew, which would take hours. He wouldn't know until after the battle.

  “Good,” he said. He looked over at the helmsman. “Pull us back.”

  “Aye, sir,” Lightbridge said. Ark Royal felt uncomfortably sluggish as she moved, slowly, away from the alien craft. On the display, the starfighters pulled back too. There was nothing further they could do to help the Marines. “Two minutes to minimum safe range.”

  If they’re right about the weapon’s range, Ted thought.

  He looked down at the final damage reports, then resigned himself to waiting – again. They thought they’d taken out the alien cannon, but if they were wrong ... the bastards wouldn’t get another shot at his ship. But they were almost defenceless now ... quite apart from the damage to the sensor network, their missiles were completely expended.

  Pushing his thoughts aside, he forced himself to watch ...

  ... And wait.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Charles hadn't been sure what to expect when they plunged into the alien ship. There had been no way to train for the mission, nor had they had any data to use in training simulations, not when the ships they’d examined after the first battle had been shattered by Ark Royal. All they could do was improvise – and pray that the aliens didn't manage to blow the ship before they were wiped out or captured.

  Tiny nanoprobes raced ahead of the Marines, rapidly sending back data to the shared combat datanet. Charles expected to see hunter-killer probes deployed in response – it was the standard human procedure – but none of the nanoprobes vanished from the display. Instead, they rapidly started to map out the interior of the ship, updating the HUD with notes on alien positions and internal environment. The atmosphere was breathable, they noted, but hot and moist enough to make most humans sweaty and uncomfortable. Charles noted it in passing – the Marines wore battlesuits, allowing them to ignore the local environment – as they slipped through a gash in the hull. A scene from hell greeted them.

  Atmosphere – the water droplets already freezing to ice – streamed past the Marines as they entered the alien ship. The fusion flame had melted metal into molten streams of liquid, which were cooling rapidly now the flame was gone. Even so, the interior of the alien ship looked like a melted honeycomb, with decks destroyed or warped into something unusable by human or alien. The gravity field caught them as they pressed onwards, the stream of atmosphere coming to an end. Their safety precautions must have finally taken effect, Charles noted inwardly. The aliens designers, like humanity’s designers, clearly believed in devising hulls so compromised sections could be sealed off at a moment’s notice.

  They saw their first alien body as they made their way down towards the closest airlock the nanoprobes could identify. Charles was no stranger to horror – nothing the aliens had done matched the horrors humans had inflicted on other humans – but he couldn't help feeling uncomfortable at the sight of an alien torso permanently separated from the lower half of its body. A human would probably have been killed instantly through shock, Charles knew, but would an alien be just as fragile? There was no way to know.

  Two Marines attached an atmospheric bubble to the airlock, then went to work with cutting torches. If anything, the alien hull was less resistant than Ark Royal’s armour – although, to be fair, it was an internal airlock. Charles watched the airlock come loose, then motioned for the first Marines to step into the interior of the ship. A swarm of nanoprobes shot past them, racing deeper and deeper into the alien ship. His HUD constantly updated as they mapped out the alien interior.

  Inside, the atmosphere was misty. Visibility was poor, something that puzzled him. Surely the aliens would have wanted to see clearly onboard a starship? But he recalled the sheer size of their eyes – and the speculation that they normally lived in water – and guessed that the aliens probably had far better eyesight than humans. Besides, their helmet sensors could peer through the muck, although the IR sensors kept sounding false alarms. The environment was hot enough to confuse them.

  He took a glance at the updating map, then issued orders. One team would advance towards where they thought the alien bridge was, another would head down to engineering. The remaining Marines would expand through the ship, capturing or killing any aliens they encountered. Charles had given serious thought to declining to take prisoners at all, but he’d eventually dismissed that thought. No matter the dangers, he wasn't about to start committing atrocities against an alien race. Particularly, as he’d pointed out to his subordinates, one that might still win the war.

  The interior of the alien ship looked faintly distorted, oddly disconcerting to the eye. Some of the passageways seemed normal, as if they could easily have been found on a human ship, others were oddly proportioned. It took him a long moment to realise that the aliens didn't seem to have designed their interior to resemble something on the ground, with a definite floor and ceiling. Indeed, were it not for the gravity field holding them down, he would have thought the aliens didn't bother to maintain an artificial gravity field at all. He puzzled over it for a long moment, then realised that the aliens were born in water. They would have an instinctive understanding of zero-gravity environments that only asteroid-born humans would be able to match.

  “Curious wall decorations,” Sergeant Patterson noted. He sounded faintly jumpy, clearly worried about what might spring up ahead of them. “Do you think they can see at all?”

  Charles followed his gaze. The aliens had decorated their passageways with artworks, but there was no recognisable pattern at all. It looked as though a child had taken a paint box and splashed its contents randomly over the bulkheads. Charles suspected his five-year-old nephew could have done a better job, then he touched the bulkhead and realised that the texture changed from colour to colour. Could the aliens be colour-blind? It might explain their choice of artwork ... and, for that matter, the apparent shifts in their own skin colours.

  Or maybe they just have a different set of aesthetics, he told himself. If humans can’t agree on what makes a good painting and what doesn't, why should they?

  The explosion caught them by surprise, despite the drones. An entire bulkhead blasted out at them, forcing the Marines to duck and dive for cover, despite their armour. Behind it, a squad of aliens lunged forward, firing plasma bolts towards the human intruders. The Marines returned fire, blasting the aliens to the ground. Their tactics made no sense, Charles noted absently, part of his mind analysing the brief engagement. Or perhaps they did make sense, he realised, as the second group of aliens appeared. This group seemed far more professional, sniping at the humans from cover rather than merely charging at the intruders and being gunned down.

  There was no time to pick out an alternate path through the rabbit warren. Instead, Charles barked orders, commanding his men to launch grenades into the alien position. The deck shook violently as the grenades detonated, followed rapidly by a sudden reduction in enemy fire. A small group of Marines ran forward, crouching low, and finished off the remaining aliens before they could escape or recover from the blasts. But a second set of aliens had taken up position behind the first ...

  Charles sighed, resigning himself to heavy fighting. The HUD kept updating rapidly, showing more and more concentrations of alien crewmen. It was impossible to tell which of them were trained soldiers – alien Marines, he guessed – and which ones were merely crewmen who barely knew which end of a weapon to point at the enemy. The Royal Navy was often careless about ensuring that its starship crewmen kept up with their personal weapons; he couldn't help feeling a flicker of amusement at the thought of the aliens hadn't the same problem. Making a mental note to suggest to the Captain that weapons practice should be made mandatory – the aliens
might be the next ones to board a crippled starship – he barked orders, leading his Marines further and further into the alien ship.

  His HUD bleeped as it signalled an alert. Charles puzzled over the sudden detection of poison gas, then realised that one of their shots – or an alien plasma burst – had burned into a coolant conduit. The Marines ignored it, even though the aliens retreated hastily. Most of them had no armour. Charles briefly rethought his decision not to blow the ship’s integrity and release its atmosphere, allowing the aliens to suffocate, then reminded himself that all the arguments against it were still valid. But the aliens weren't even trying to surrender ...

  Get real, he told himself, as he snapped off a burst at an alien soldier. The alien tactics seemed haphazard, even random ... but with their weapons, they made a great deal of sense. They didn't have to worry about reloading their weapons, so why not spray at random like a primitive machine gun? The worst that could happen was that they forced the advancing enemy to keep their heads down. We don’t even know how to ask them to surrender.

  The thought nagged at him as he saw his target fall to the deck and lie still. If they’d been facing humans, they would have been shouting demands for surrender in every language they thought their opponents faced. Not that it would have been enough, for some humans; insurgents and terrorists knew what to expect if they fell into military hands. They rarely surrendered – and, unless there were hostages or human shields, they were rarely given a chance to fight back. But the aliens ... how could they tell them to put their hands up when they couldn’t speak to them?

  We have to fix this problem, he thought. Another series of explosions shook the deck as the Marines blasted their way through an alien strongpoint. It looked as though the aliens were organising their defence on the fly, which was fortunate. Given time, they could have stalled the Marines long enough to blow the ship. Somehow, we have to get them to surrender.

  “I’ve found a tube, sir,” one of the Marines called. “That’s how they’re evading us.”

  “Snaky little bastards,” another Marine observed. “We couldn't fit in that tube.”

  “Not unless we start recruiting children,” Charles agreed, as he saw the alien tube. It looked like a Jefferies Tube from a human starship, but it was alarmingly thin, too thin for the Marines to use even without armour. The tubes on Ark Royal were wide enough for human adults to use; the alien tubes were simply too thin. But, given their biology, it probably wouldn't be a problem for the aliens. “Send drones up it, then seal the hatch and hope they can't break out again.”

  He scowled. It was easy enough to imagine the aliens using the tubes to sneak past human strongpoints and take them in the rear. Hell, humans planned to do the same thing if their ships were boarded. But these tubes couldn't be sealed so easily, nor could the aliens be flushed out. They’d have to start cutting through the bulkheads just to get at the aliens hiding within the tubes, doing untold damage to the alien command and control system. Normally, that wouldn't have been a problem. But now, when they needed the alien ship largely intact ...

  “Keep moving,” he ordered. Somehow, they had to take the fight out of the aliens, but how? “Don't give them a moment to relax.”

  Charles let the NCOs lead the advance while he fell back, thinking hard. What did they actually know about the aliens? They seemed to breathe the same atmosphere as humans, but they liked it hot and moist ... indeed, when the alien captives had been shown how to alter the temperature in their cell, they’d cranked it up as far as it would go. Could they cool down the ship, making the aliens sluggish? But how could they do that without cracking open the hull and releasing the atmosphere? What about gas ...?

  But they had no idea what gases designed to stun or kill humans would do to the aliens.

  His HUD bleeped again as the final outline of the alien ship lay in front of him. The analysts were adding their notes to the combat datanet, pointing out how similar – in many ways – the alien ship was to human starships. Charles dismissed their work angrily, cursing the distraction under his breath, then issued orders to his Marines. The alien engineering compartment lay dead ahead of them.

  “They’re fighting like mad bastards to hold the bridge, sir,” Captain Jackson called. “We may need to use grenades.”

  Charles winced. A human bridge had all of its vital components armoured under the deck, allowing attackers to lay waste to the command consoles without doing any real damage. But what if that wasn't true for the alien ship? They could smash up the bridge, only to discover that they’d accidentally crippled the whole ship. And yet ... the longer they waited, the greater the chance the aliens would succeed in blowing up the ship. Right now, Charles knew that he would be preparing the self-destruct. Their position was hopeless. All that remained was to take as many of the humans with them as they could.

  “Do it,” he ordered. He hesitated, then added an additional order. “Use gas first, see what it does. Then use HE if there’s no other alternative.”

  “Understood, sir,” Jackson said.

  Charles tore his attention back to the main engineering compartment, just as the main door crashed inward, revealing a compartment that was strikingly different from its human counterpart. The modular design he had expected was non-existent; instead, all of the alien subsystems appeared to be linked together into a single unprotected mass. It made no sense to him; half of the systems appeared to be exposed to any stray shot or power surge. Or were the aliens in the middle of trying to blow up the ship when the Marines burst in?

  “The gas seemed to make them convulse,” Jackson reported, as the Marines slowly advanced into the engineering compartment. The aliens seemed to have vanished completely, abandoning the section. “They weren't in any fit state for a fight. We’ve taken them prisoner.”

  The bridge crew, Charles told himself. “Keep a sharp eye on them,” he ordered, remembering how bendy and flexible alien bodies could be. Standard zip-ties might not be enough to keep them helpless, not if they could flex their way out of the tie. “Actually, secure them thoroughly. We don't know how easily they can escape.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jackson said.

  The Marines prowled through the deserted compartment, looking for the aliens. There was so much interference in the section that the nanoprobes, otherwise very useful at tracking alien movements, were largely useless. Charles heard bursts of interference over the datanet, wondering absently just what the aliens used to operate their starships. Nothing human produced such effects, of that he was sure. Or would human fusion cores produce interference, if they were unshielded? The prospect of fighting in a radiation-filled zone was chilling. But the battlesuits weren't reading any dangerous radiation in the vicinity.

  “It's like they abandoned the entire section,” Corporal Pollock said.

  Charles rather doubted it. There were four compartments on a human starship that had to be held at any cost; the bridge, main engineering, the armoury and life support. Losing control of one of them could mean losing control of the ship. The contingency plans the Marines had practiced for Ark Royal included stationing a whole platoon of armoured Marines in all four locations, ready to repel attack or buy time for the ship to be destroyed. But the aliens seemed to have retreated instead ...

  The mists grew heavier as they advanced, making it harder and harder to see. Charles sensed the tension among his Marines, understanding and cursing it at the same time. What they couldn't see could hurt them – and the tension would make them fire off a shot at nothing, sooner or later. And then he saw very definite movement, something twitching ...

  “Keep back,” he ordered. Something was barely visible in the gloom. “Sergeant ...”

  The Sergeant advanced forward, weapon at the ready. Charles silently cursed the rules that forced him to stay back, then almost jumped as the Sergeant swore out loud. “Sir,” he said, “they’re dying.”

  Charles threw caution to the winds and ran forward. There was a heap of alien bodies, twitchi
ng unpleasantly, lying at the far end of the compartment. Several of them were already dead – even when sleeping, according to the doctors, they moved constantly – and others were definitely dying. Their skins, normally bright vivid colours, were shading down towards the murky grey he remembered from the first body. But what did it mean?

  “They thought they were going to be captured,” the Sergeant speculated. “Instead, they chose to die”

  Charles nodded, then listened as reports started to come in from the rest of the ship. Some aliens had been captured, but others had killed themselves, either through poison or simply shooting themselves in the head. Were they that fearful, Charles asked himself, of being taken prisoner? For all he knew, the aliens had a long tradition of murdering prisoners ... although the treatment of their human captives seemed to suggest otherwise. But they’d also drugged the humans mercilessly ...

  He shook his head. That too was something that might be answered when human analysts went prowling through the alien ship, trying to recover computer files. There was a great deal of information in any standard teaching program on humanity, from biology to psychology. The aliens had probably cracked the systems they’d taken from Vera Cruz by now, if they hadn't recovered any from the Heinlein. But then, the aliens wouldn't really have had to work hard. Civilian teaching machines weren't designed to make it hard to learn.