Their Last Full Measure

by Christopher Nuttall

  Defiant lurched as she fired her first barrage at the enemy ship. Hoshiko watched as the cruiser started to power up her drives and weapons, too late. Her point defence lashed out, but she didn’t have time to target the weapons properly. She didn’t even have time to fire back or jump out before it was too late. Hoshiko watched, coldly, as the alien ship exploded into a ball of expanding plasma. There were no survivors.

  “Target destroyed,” Yolanda said. “They didn’t even get a message out.”

  “There’s no one to hear it,” Hoshiko said, although she knew that might not be true. A star system was a vast place to hide a small fleet of starships, if the Tokomak had realised where they were going and why. She shuddered to think of how much could have happened while she’d been in transit. Admiral Teller’s fleet could have been wiped out and she wouldn’t know about it, not for weeks. “Order the squadron to assume position on the gravity point and send the freighter for the remainder of the fleet. I want the marines to move as soon as possible.”

  She turned her attention to the system display as the squadron shook itself down. The recon reports were clear. The fortress on the other side was practically a sitting duck, if she was prepared to abandon subtlety and make her presence achingly clear. The files weren’t too clear on the settled world beyond, but she doubted it didn’t have the usual web of passive sensor platforms watching for possible intruders. If they picked up the destruction of the fortress, they’d have a chance to send the alert further up the chain before it was too late.

  And we don’t care about the planet, as long as it doesn’t get in our way, she thought. The small colony was worthless, from her point of view. It couldn’t provide any real support for the fleet, if the locals were inclined to help, nor could it pose a threat to their rear. They can wait until the war is over.

  Yolanda looked up. “Admiral, the remainder of the fleet is inbound.”

  “Inform General Romford that he can begin the operation immediately, once he arrives,” Hoshiko ordered. In hindsight, perhaps she should have kept the general closer. The longer they delayed, the greater the chance of the ship they’d destroyed missing a scheduled check-in. “And ready the fleet for an emergency transit.”

  “Aye, Admiral,” Yolanda said. “How quickly do you want to move?”

  “If we get the alert, I want the fleet to start streaming through the gravity point as soon as possible,” Hoshiko said. It irked her that she’d been asked, although she knew it was better to make sure that everyone was clear on what they had to do. If things went wrong, they couldn’t afford to waste time issuing orders. “We’ll stick with the plan. No need to change things. Not yet.”

  “Aye, Admiral,” Yolanda said.

  I should have kept the LinkShip, Hoshiko thought, grimly. Or asked for a second one from Sol.

  She shook her head. She’d made her call. It had seemed like a good idea at the time ... it still did, when she put her doubts aside. But it meant she wouldn’t be able to call on the ship ... she sighed, inwardly. She’d just have to live with the consequences. And so would everyone else.

  We can do it, she told herself. And who knows? If they realise we’re here too early, they might just give Admiral Teller a clear path to Tokomak Prime.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I’m getting too old for this shit, General Edward Romford thought, as the captured warship made her way towards the gravity point. I should have left the mission to one of the young bucks.

  He shifted uncomfortably inside his armoured combat suit. He’d never grown quite used to the armour, even though it had saved his life a dozen times. He would have sold his soul for the suit in Afghanistan or Iraq, where near-perfect protection combined with environmental control would be worth its weight in whatever precious substance one cared to name. Not, he supposed, that he would have wanted to go back to the hellholes. He’d spent too much of his life trying to help the locals, and watching helplessly as his buddies died while politicians fiddled, to want to do it again. The Solar Union was his home now. If people wanted to wallow in the dirt, without embracing the chance for a better life, they could do it somewhere else.

  The timer ticked down, each second feeling like an hour. Romford wondered if the ship itself was aware, if she was determined to avoid being turned against her old masters, or if he was just imagining it. The concept sounded like the plot of a bad movie ... his lips curved into a smile at the thought. He’d always had a fanciful streak, although he’d never had the time to make something of it. And, after he’d been rejuvenated, he’d chosen to stay in the military rather than build a new life for himself. Someone had to fight to defend the society he’d helped to build.

  Maybe I’ll write the story later, he thought. Or get one of my grandchildren to turn it into a movie.

  He braced himself as the timer reached zero. The universe seemed to sneeze, the display going white instead of blanking out. It looked more alarming to him, but he supposed the Tokomak felt differently. The entire ship felt eerie to him, as if the designers hadn’t been human. They hadn’t been human. The proportions were all wrong, the displays were too bright and uncomfortable and the cabins ... he shook his head. If they’d had to stay on the ship for longer than a few days, he would have had to order the cabins refurbished. He’d been in worse places, but the alien ship was just ... alien.

  The display dimmed, revealing a conventional planetary defence fortress. The files insisted there were no defences on the gravity point and only two fortresses protecting the planet itself, something that had struck him as odd given that there was little on the planet worth stealing. On the other hand, they were on the edge of the inner worlds. Perhaps they thought pirates and raiders would hit the system first, devastating the entire planet for shits and giggles. Worse things had happened, over the centuries. The Tokomak themselves had done most of them. Or maybe they were just buying make-work projects for their industrial base. They had to justify its existence somehow ...

  “Engage the AI overlay,” he ordered. They were already within missile range of the fortress, but destroying it was very much a last resort. “And get us permission to teleport.”

  His chest clenched as he watched the overlay go to work, projecting the image of a very senior Tokomak demanding immediate permission to teleport. He’d known a few rich kids and dumbass politicians in his day, but they were humbleness incarnate compared to the Tokomak. The demands were so rude that, if anyone had dared address them to his face, he would have put a fist in theirs. And yet, the xenospecialists swore blind it was how the Tokomak addressed their subordinates. Edward couldn’t understand why they hadn’t faced an endless series of terrorism, revolts and revolutions. He would have been plotting an uprising from the very day his world was forcibly incorporated into an alien empire.

  Lieutenant Munoz’s voice echoed through the command net. “They’re powering down the teleport baffles now, sir.”

  “Stand by.” Edward felt his chest clench again, for a very different reason. Teleporting had never sat well with him, for all sorts of reasons. It was disturbingly easy to block a teleport signal with very basic equipment, if one knew how to do it. The Tokomak didn’t use mass teleports to spread their power because they couldn’t. They had to force their targets to turn off the jamming first. “Teleport as soon as the baffles are down.”

  He braced himself. “And then activate the jamming field,” he added. “I don’t want a single signal getting out.”

  The world came apart in a shower of golden light, then came back together as an alien command centre. Edward sighted his rifle on a stunned alien, the unreadable face somehow suggesting horror and terror, and pressed down on the trigger, spraying the compartment with stun bolts. They’d been configured for Tokomak ... he breathed a sigh of relief as he realised there were no other races within the command centre. The analysts had insisted there would be no others, but he hadn’t been so sure. And if they’d been wrong ...

  He smiled, grimly, as he surveyed
the scene. A dozen aliens lay on the deck, stunned. They hadn’t had a chance to sound the alert before it was too late. They’d awake in an hour or so with massive headaches, by which time they’d be in the brig and waiting to be repatriated after the war. He watched two of his men press their suits against the computer nodes, using their processors to hack the alien systems. Thankfully, they’d had a lot of practice with hacking enemy computers. Their computer security wasn’t bad, but it tended to assume that any attackers would be outside the station. They found it a great deal harder to deal with someone who was already inside. But that, he supposed, was true of everyone. The absence of proper AIs didn’t help.

  “The weapons and communications systems have been knocked down for good,” Lieutenant Hendry reported. “But I can’t bring the intruder control system online.”

  “Probably for the best,” Edward grunted. “Can you bring up the internal sensors?”

  “Aye sir.” There was a pause as Hendry worked his magic. “There are two hundred souls on the station, not counting us. I don’t know how much they know.”

  “They know we’re here,” Edward said, with utter certainty. They’d planned the assault well, targeting the vital sections, but he’d assumed that word would get out. “We’ll have to deal with them.”

  He snapped orders, then forced open the hatch and led the first platoon into the darkened passageway outside. The Tokomak didn’t see any better in the dark than humans ... he smiled grimly as his suit peered through the shadows, watching and waiting for potential threats while the enemy were blind. There were plenty of ways to continue the fight, if one happened to lose control of the station’s command systems, but ...would the Tokomak have time to think of them? A human installation would ensure that everyone was armed at all times, just in case someone managed to trick their way onboard or simply force their way onto the station the old-fashioned way. But the Tokomak ... he cast his mind back to the aliens he’d stunned. None of them had carried any obvious weapons. It didn’t mean they didn’t exist - he knew, better than most, how much firepower could be implanted into a seemingly-harmless human being - but it was odd. Perhaps the Tokomak didn’t trust their own people with weapons. If they constantly talked down to their subordinates, he could see why. Sooner or later, one of them would snap and gun his former superiors down.

  A Tokomak fumbled through the darkness, heedless of the human threat. Edward stunned him, the stun bolt blindingly bright in the shadows. Two more Tokomak ran down the corridor, only to be stunned before they could escape. Edward checked their bodies briefly, finding no trace of any weapons. It looked as if they were completely unarmed. He wondered if they’d have the sense to surrender, if he offered ...

  His intercom bleeped. “General, we have activity on the shuttlebay,” Lieutenant Hendry snapped. “I think they’re powering up a shuttle!”

  Edward swore. That was smart. The shuttles were unarmed, he thought, but they had communications systems and teleport baffles. The shuttlebay probably also had everything from portable flashlights to tools and weapons that weren’t connected to the main datanet and couldn’t be shut down remotely. If there were any contingency plans for dealing with unexpected and unwelcome guests, they probably centred on the shuttlebay. He kicked himself for not targeting the shuttlebay during the first invasion, even though he’d only had a limited number of marines. What price the shuttlebay if they failed to take control of the command core?

  “Teleport us there,” he snapped. “Now.”

  “No can do, sir,” Hendry said. “They’ve got the baffles up and running.”

  Edward fell into a sprint, the rest of the platoon following him. The fortress was vast ... tiny, compared to a planetary ring or one of the planned megastructures, but still immense by human standards. Normally, he could get from one end of the structure to another within seconds by using an intership car or a teleporter, yet ... that wasn’t an option. All of a sudden, they were running out of time.

  “Get the other teams to meet us at the shuttlebay as well,” he ordered. “And ask the enemy to surrender. Promise them good treatment, in line with the laws of war.”

  “Aye, sir,” Hendry said.

  He sounded doubtful. Edward didn’t blame him. The Tokomak really didn’t have a reputation for treating prisoners well. It made sense - they’d been the masters of the universe until recently, with no one being willing and able to call them out for being bastards to helpless captives - but now ... if they thought they’d meet the same fate as people they’d taken prisoner, they wouldn’t surrender. Edward himself would sooner go down, biting and kicking and scratching, than surrender in the certain knowledge it would mean torture, brainburning and eventual death. It would take time to establish a reputation for treating prisoners well ...

  ... And some moron will claim we should abuse their prisoners because they abuse our prisoners, he thought. He could see the logic, but it revolted him. And once we get a reputation for treating prisoners like crap, we’ll never get rid of it.

  A Tokomak stepped out of the darkness. Edward crashed into the poor bastard’s arm, sending him howling to the deck. The arm was broken, at the very least. There was no time to stop and do anything to help, not now. The platoon kept moving, running down corridors and jumping down dark intership car shafts until they reached the shuttlebay. It was firmly closed, the hatch secured and bolted. The entire system was manual. They’d even managed to disconnect the override.

  “Blow the door down,” Edward snapped.

  Two marines stepped forward and attached shaped charges to the hatch, detonating them a second later. The massive chunk of metal shuddered, then fell to the deck in chilling slow motion. Behind it, he saw a pair of aliens in spacesuits levelling weapons at the marines. They opened fire as soon as they had a clear shot, firing so wildly that Edward was sure they didn’t have any formal training. Plasma blasts streaked through the air and splashed angrily against bulkhead. The marines returned fire, switching their weapons to the lethal setting as it became clear the spacesuits provided a certain degree of protection. Stun bolts were dangerously unreliable. Even a simple layer of cloth could keep someone from being stunned, if the bolt didn’t touch their bare skin.

  A shuttle hovered off the deck and rotated, a pair of improvised weapons hanging from its wings and coming to bear on the marines. Edward was almost impressed. The Tokomak had improvised a defence that might just work. He didn’t have time to admire it. He unhooked a grenade from his belt and hurled it at the shuttle, sending the detonation command as soon as it touched the shuttle’s hull. The explosion shook the entire shuttlebay, sending the shuttle staggering to one side and then crashing to the deck in a shower of angry sparks. Edward told himself he should be grateful the enemy hadn’t had time to rig a self-destruct system. They might have managed to do a great deal of damage if they’d deactivated the safety interlocks and powered up a drive field inside the shuttlebay.

  The outer airlock exploded into utter darkness. Edward’s suit activated its magnetic boots automatically as the chamber decompressed, hundreds of pieces of debris - and alien bodies - being yanked out into open space. He shuddered as he glanced back, just in time to see emergency hatches slamming closed. The Tokomak obsession with safety had served them well, for once. If the hatches had failed, the entire station would have decompressed in short order. He waited for the outrush of air to come to an end, then snapped orders to his men to search the compartment. Two Tokomak in spacesuits surrendered, when they were found, but the remainder were dead. They’d practically killed themselves.

  They must have been hoping to get the shuttle out, he thought, as they checked the remaining shuttles and powered them down. Someone might have noticed if they’d started lasing the planet with emergency signals.

  He shook his head as he stepped back through the airlock and into the pressurised compartment. The reinforcements were arriving, taking control of the giant fortress and transporting the prisoners to the captured alien wars
hip. No doubt they’d find it a more comfortable environment than a standard POW camp, although he doubted they’d be left there indefinitely. The prisoner count now stood at four hundred, and they couldn’t all fit on the warship without pushing the life support to the limits. They’d have to be shipped elsewhere or dropped on the planet or something ...

  An alien lay on the deck, stunned. “For you,” Edward said, “the war is over.”

  He keyed his communicator as he made his way back to the command core. “Did we get away with it?”

  “They didn’t manage to get a formal message off,” Hendry reported. “There’s no hint they managed to get a laser or microburst signal off either. Long-range sensors might have spotted the decompression, but it’s quite a jump from a decompression to a captured fortress ...”

  “Perhaps.” Edward had heard a story, once, about a cloaked ship that had suffered an emergency decompression when it snuck through an enemy picket line. It had been jumped and destroyed. “I take it we haven’t received any demands for answers from the planet?”