HULL BREACH. VACUUM CONDITIONS ON MULTIPLE DECKS. PROCEED TO YOUR NEAREST SAFE DUTY STATION. REPEAT, HULL BREACH….
“There!” Adanaho said, almost climbing up my back so that she could point over the Professor’s shoulder.
A row of hexagonal hatches had opened along the walls, much further down the corridor. Personnel were piling into them. Each hatch was ringed with yellow and black caution striping, with tiny beacon lights spinning rapidly at the corners.
“Find one of those,” Adanaho said.
Though the ones closest to us appeared positively choked with people, all clamoring for escape.
Grrrrakkkkaaaaanngggggkt!
The guttural grinding sound of metal announced to even my inexperienced naval ears that the Calysta’s remaining moments were few. A wind had picked up in the corridor—air bleeding out into space. Men and women screamed, redoubling their efforts to seek escape.
For a brief instant, the Queen Mother and I locked eyes—hers as alien as the Professor’s had ever been—while we clung to the Professor’s separated forelimbs. I could not detect emotion behind her alien, multi-faceted gaze, but her contorted body posture spoke of both fear and pain, while her mouth gaped in a show of murderous rage. I’d have let go of the Professor in terror at the sight of those tractoring incisors if I didn’t feel sure that the Professor, and the mobility of his functional disc, weren’t the only hope I had.
And besides, there was the captain to think of. She clung to my back like a bear cub.
Suddenly the Professor moved in a new direction. Opposite the way we’d all been looking. We shot down the corridor, headed aft, bumping aside crew and marines alike. A few gunshots rang after us, but in the panic of the moment they went wide, embedding themselves into the bulkheads.
The wind spiraled up to become a gale-force howl.
Now, humans no longer floated or pulled themselves along the corridor. They were vacuumed away, shrieking.
My ears suddenly began to hurt.
I wanted to yell at the Professor—to ask where he thought he was going—but then I saw it: an open emergency hatch, unblocked.
The Professor’s disc moved toward it at best possible speed.
We passed through the doorway and the captain had the good sense to reach out and slap the panel just inside the threshold. The doors to the emergency exit snapped shut with a loud clang. Suddenly we were all flattened against the hatch as the lifeboat spat through the disintegrating interior of the Calysta, following a pre-designated route.
Rapid egress shafts honeycombed the ship—as with all Earth war vessels—such that it took only moments for the lifeboat to be disgorged into the emptiness of space.
We floated free as the force of our acceleration ebbed. I found myself at a small porthole, catching a glimpse of the Calysta as she spun away—in my eye view—from us. There were huge wounds in her belly, punctuated by the gradual fragmenting of her exposed bones as new missiles from the mantis armada continued to home in on and decimate the frigate.
Then the Calysta flashed. Her reactors going up.
I jerked away from the porthole, having been strobed almost to blindness. There was a human coughing sound behind me, and the additional noise of mandibles skittering and scratching out the mantis language.
I rubbed my lidded eyes and then opened them, seeing through purple spots that it was only the captain, myself, the Professor, and the Queen Mother aboard.
We were alone.
Chapter 5
This far north of the equator, the nameless planet was arid and unremarkable—with barely enough oxygen and nitrogen to support a grown man.
A heck of a lot like home, I thought bitterly.
Hours after our ejection from the dying Calysta, our lifeboat had plummeted into the atmosphere. There’d been no sense trying to figure out who was winning or who was losing. The lifeboat had no tactical data nor any theater sensors with which to ascertain the progress if the battle. Every once in awhile lights in the sky would sparkle and flash—ships exploding in the emptiness of space, their fantastic vanishings visible even in the daylight. Human. Mantis. All perishing together in one, pent-up orgasm of long-delayed, hateful fury.
Death.
It was the thought that most concerned me as I trudged back up the broken-scree slope upon which the lifeboat had come to rest. The lifeboat’s yellow and orange striped parachutes drifted and fluttered on a cold breeze, their cords stretched out across the crumbled and rocky bluff. My old survival training told me I’d best collect the chutes and tuck them away. But now it didn’t much matter. Human or mantis, whoever found us, there’d be hell to pay.
I climbed up the side of the lifeboat and dropped in through the top hatch, closing it behind me so as to preserve the batteries that were keeping the interior warm. The captain sat with her arms folded tightly across her stomach, back hunched and head down.
The Queen Mother was still helpless, her disc a dead weight while the Professor attended her with the gentleness and focus of a lover. Had they, I wondered, ever mixed seed? He the drone and she the recipient of his genetic lineage? There was still so much about the mantes culture and society at which I could only guess.
The Professor and the Queen Mother were engaged in gentle conversation, her mandibles clicking and chittering while he held one of her forelimbs in both of his.
“How is she?” I asked.
“Not good,” the Professor said, his disc rotating so that he could face me. “The internal systems of her carriage have all failed. If we do not get her to a mantis physician soon, it’s probable that she will pass from life.”
“She’s not bleeding,” I said. “Internal injuries?”
“I do not think you understand,” the Professor said, his mechanized voice only hinting at the emotion that seemed to hover beneath the surface of his chitinous skin. I’d spent enough time around mantes—and this mantis in particular—to know his body language. The Professor’s agitation was plainly spoken in the way he moved his forelimbs and rapidly swiveled his wedge-like head from side to side.
“No,” I said, “I guess I don’t. Unless she’s been hit some-where I can’t see, I don’t understand what’s the matter with her.”
“Our carriages, or discs as you commonly call them, are integral to us from the moment we achieve consciousness. No mantis lives without one. They protect us and provide us with mobility, allow us to work and manipulate the world around us, they expand our senses as well as our consciousness, and without them we are worse than helpless. The mantis and the carriage are one.”
“Okay,” I said carefully. “But this can’t be the first time an adult has had her disc—her carriage—shot out from under her, right?”
“Of course not,” said the Professor. “But in those instances, death has either come quickly or medical aid has always been ready at hand.”
“So we can’t just pull her out of it?” I asked.
The professor’s antennae shot upward, waved a bit, then curled into an expression of pronounced shock.
“That would surely prove lethal,” he said, acting as if I’d suggested the worst sort of obscenity.
“But you just told me leaving her in the dead disc is bad too,” I said, growing frustrated.
The professor seemed to want to respond, but let his antennae fall to either side of his head, and turned back to speak to the Queen Mother in the indecipherable language of the mantes.
Now it was the Queen Mother whose antennae gave a sign of shock. She stared intently at me—multi-faceted eyes cold and alien without the vocoder of her disc to give words to her thoughts—then she yammered something at the Professor in a rather rushed fashioned, and slumped back into the center of her ruined disc.
“She says that while she was prepared to die in battle for our people, to commit helpless suicide in front of you humans is not to her liking.”
“If the Fleet finds us,” said Adanaho, surprising everyone as she finally looked up at us—her
eyes puffy and red, “then the Queen Mother faces much worse than suicide. I’m with Intelligence and you can be certain that, with hostilities renewed, my comrades will spare no effort picking both of you apart in their quest for tactical and strategic information.”
“You assume humans will outlast the Queen Mother’s armada and reach our lifeboat first,” said the Professor, his wings rustling slightly with grim amusement. “Did not your warship fall before our own, despite your best attempt to replicate our defensive technology?”
“The flashes we’ve been seeing in the sky since planetfall tell me not everything has gone your way,” the captain said, also grimly. “The fighting continues. General Sakumora was rash and quick to shed blood, but he was also well-prepared. Our dreadnoughts were the finest in all of Human space. Built using every lesson taught to us during the first war.”
I waved a finger in front of me, not looking at anyone in particular.
“The new war’s a non-starter if the Queen Mother can convince the mantes to cease offensive operations,” I said.
More fluttering of wings.
“And why would she do that,” asked the Professor, “assuming she could regain contact with our forces?”
“Because the captain saved both your lives when it would have been more expedient to let our marines fill you each full of steel bullets.”
The Professor had no answer to that.
The Queen mother snapped and chattered at him.
He relayed to her what he’d heard.
They engaged in a quick series of mantis exchanges.
“She says,” the Professor proceeded delicately, “that the mercy shown by a single human does not translate to good will on the part of all humans. In fact, while we remain stranded here, events are doubtless in motion that are beyond recall for either side. If what the Queen Mother has told me is correct, her return to the armada was not expected—all they awaited was her signal, at which point the war plans would be put into effect. Doubtless our couriers are speeding back to join the rest of our ships, eager to relay news of the renewed offensive. Human planets will be under siege in a matter of weeks, if not days.”
“I don’t doubt it,” I said. “But assuming we could contact the mantis hierarchy—prove that the Queen Mother was alive—could she impose a cease fire on your side of the battle lines?”
The Professor communicated my question to the Queen Mother, who stared at me a moment, then replied.
“Yes,” said the Professor.
“Then what are we waiting for?” I said. “We’ve got to find a way to get her back in touch with your people.”
“Chief Barlow,” Captain Adanaho said, “I appreciate that you might still feel obligated to accomplish the mission, as originally assigned. But events have clearly wiped all previous considerations off the table. Our first objective is to alert Fleet to our presence. Intelligence will want otherwise, but I can argue from historical precedent that the Professor and the Queen Mother should be processed as prisoners of war. As such, they’d each be entitled to certain rights. Perhaps with her safely in our custody—unharmed and unmolested—we can bargain our way to a new armistice?”
“You sound too much like your old boss,” I said. Then thought better of my tone and added a respectful, “Ma’am.”
Adanaho raised an eyebrow.
“Believe me, Chief,” she said, “I didn’t intend for any of this to happen, either. Nobody wanted a war.”
“But the Fleet bosses were obviously prepared for it,” I snapped.
“And why not?” she said. “your own records from the original armistice state the matter plainly—the Fourth Expansion would have wiped humanity from the face of the galaxy. We were up against the wall, one way or another. It would have been foolish to count on the cease-fire to last indefinitely. Even if you and the Professor had managed to achieve some measure of mutual understanding.”
A chime suddenly sounded through the lifeboat.
Adanaho got up and checked the lifeboat’s computer.
“Our emergency beacon’s been spotted,” she said. “We’re getting telemetry from a Fleet rescue team in orbit. Looks like they’ll be here in a few hours, once they’ve picked up other survivors.”
“Do they know we have the Queen Mother with us?” I said, alarmed.
“If they knew,” the captain said, “we’d be their top-most priority. That we’re not tells me they think we’re just another lifeboat filled with survivors—one of many, from the looks of it.”
I would have been lying if I said I didn’t feel a sudden surge of pride. A human rescue team meant that not only were we holding our own against the mantes, we were doing well enough to be able to afford search missions for the retrieval of survivors from lost ships. Not exactly the actions of an overwhelmed and beaten species.
The Professor shrank in on himself, just as he had while aboard the Calysta.
“Prisoners of war,” he said. And none too happily.
“It could be worse,” I said to my old friend. “I survived the experience for years. You will too, if the captain is right about being able to secure your POW status under Fleet protocol.”
He chitter-scratched with the Queen Mother, whose deflated body language grew even more so.
“Of course,” I said, thinking pessimistically, “if the captain can’t secure your status, then you’re meat—subject to the total spectrum of our interrogation techniques.”
Adanaho didn’t meet my gaze.
I turned to face the Professor.
“Tell the Queen Mother that if she can promise us safety among the mantes, we’ll help her escape.”
Adanaho opened her mouth to object, but I held up a hand, not wanting to get into an argument with my superior—at least not yet.
“Impossible,” said the Professor. “With her carriage non-functional the Queen Mother is trapped here.”
“This is ridiculous,” I said. “There’s no contingency mode?”
The Professor hesitated, then he and the Queen Mother conversed for several minutes, their heads shifting back and forth and their mandibles rattling, clacking, snapping and stuttering. If Adanaho picked up on the fact that the Professor was straining to remain respectively persistent, she didn’t show it. But I could see what he was trying to do. Doubtless, like me, he was required to display deference to a superior, lest he forfeit his position. Or worse. But in the Queen Mother’s current state, she was dependent on him totally. And might be forced to acquiesce to whatever he suggested.
“The carriage’s engineering has changed little in hundreds of your years,” the Professor said. “It is one of the all-time outstanding technical achievements of the great forebearers of mantis civilization—the first ones to meld mantis biology with mantis cyber-technology. There is an emergency release procedure, though it is seldom used. And I have never seen it done.”
“Good,” I said. “The sooner she’s out of that thing, the sooner we can get moving. No doubt your own carriage has been sending out coded mantis distress signals, ever since we landed.”
“You guess correctly,” the Professor said.
“Then it’s a race against time—the further we are from humans, the safer we’ll be. We’ll have to hope that your people have started dispatching rescue missions of their own.”
“But where will we go?” the Professor asked.
“Anywhere but here,” I said, raising my arms out and indicating the walls of the lifeboat with my open palms.
“Very well,” said the Professor. “But you and the female must wait outside. The extraction from the carriage will be even more humiliating for the Queen Mother than remaining bound to it. This is not a thing for human eyes to see. Gather your human survival equipment and supplies and be gone. We will come out in time.”
The captain and I quietly collected what we could, slung the frames of the emergency packs on our backs, and climbed out of the lifeboat and walked up to the top of the bluff, pebbles and sand swamping over the
tops of our boots with each step.
“You realize I could order us all to stay put,” she said, her short-cropped hair ruffling slightly in the cool, dry breeze. The sun—a star smaller and yet brighter than that which Purgatory circled—was still high up in the sky, but sinking almost imperceptibly towards the horizon.
“Ma’am,” I said, “if you meant it when you told me you didn’t want a war, then there’s no way you can turn these two over to Fleet in their present circumstances. We might as well stuff apples in their mouths and shove them into the oven. They’ll be picked apart like frogs in a biology class. First their minds, then their bodies.”
“Are you forgetting that you have a duty, Chief?” she said sternly, turning to face me fully, with hands clutching the straps of her pack, elbows thrust just slightly out.
Our uniforms were barely keeping the cold at bay, and I suspected we’d have to use the emergency jackets in our packs if we didn’t start hiking soon.
“What good’s that duty going to do if we still lose? C’mon, Captain, you know the odds. The mantes own thousands of planets, and even with the years of the armistice taken into consideration, I can’t believe humanity has caught up much. Have those colonies crucified in the first war even fully recovered yet? What about Earth? No, ma’am, if the mantes want us dead, it will happen eventually. The only difference now is we can actually put up a fight, whereas last time they cut us down like lambs.”
My superior officer didn’t appear convinced.
“Look,” I said, figuring it was time to put all my cards on the table, “I’ve never been a great one for protocol and going along with orders at all costs. In some ways, the absence of Fleet rules and regulations from Purgatory life was the best thing that ever happened to me, because it made me realize what kind of man I am. I’m not a very good soldier. I don’t like being told what to do. And if I’d had a choice in the matter I’d have thrown my non-standard commission back in Fleet’s face.
“The Chaplain gave me a job once, and I did all I could to carry it out. For his sake. Now I have a new job, and until that job’s been done—the resumption of peace between the mantes race and our own—I won’t rest.”
Lights in the Deep Page 22