The Dotari Salvation (Terran Strike Marines Book 1)

by Richard Fox

  Max shook his head after the second attempt. “Out of line of sight. Won’t hear anything from them until the corvette relocates.”

  Hoffman turned to Garrison. “Get it open.”

  “Thought you’d never ask,” Garrison said, breaking out his breacher kit. With slick professionalism, he pulled out a roll of burn cord and searched for hinges or other weak points. He stopped and looked around at his feet.

  “What the hell are you doing now?” Duke asked.

  Garrison shrugged. “Access points are a good place to look for loose bolts, ball bearings, and other junk. Sometimes you can even find tools left by careless maintenance workers.”

  “Why would you need cast-off tools?” Duke asked.

  “You ever seen what an IED made from wrenches and ball bearings can do to an enemy?”

  Duke stared at him.

  “Me neither,” Garrison said. He faced the door again and held up a clump of denethrite next to a hinge.

  “This ship is an important relic to my people. You can’t just break it,” Lo’thar said.

  Garrison looked over his shoulder. “You haven’t been around Marines much, have you? Killing people and breaking things is most of what we do.”

  Lo’thar frowned inside his helmet. “What is the rest?”

  “Not getting annoyed with useless questions.” Garrison tapped his fist against the doors. “She pressurized?”

  “Shouldn’t be,” Lo’thar grumbled. “But there must necessarily be some baseline atmosphere.”

  Garrison removed a compact device from his pack. “This here is a hydraulic spreader. Some call it the ‘jaws of life.’ I like to think of it as an eviction notice. Should barely tear up this relic. Maybe a little.”

  Grav liners on his boots gripped on each side of the centerline. The nose of what looked like two steel chisel tips pushed slowly into the seam where the doors met.

  Hoffman felt an increasing vibration as the door spreader pushed deeper and deeper.

  Garrison grunted as he leaned on the device. “Oh, I’m getting in this…”

  “Language,” Adams said from her position on the tight perimeter.

  “What was he going to say about my people’s ship?” Lo’thar asked.

  “Breachers have lots of technical terms,” Hoffman said, not waiting for a response as he studied Garrison’s work.

  Garrison pulled his weight off the door spreader, then slowly leaned on it again. His effort this time was more controlled. “I’m trying to pop it open so we can shut it after we’re through. You can all thank…” he grunted with such force his voice gave out, “…me later.”

  The door popped open a finger’s width and air escaped in a rush for a split second. “There we are. Another job done to perfection.”

  Hoffman tensed.

  “That wasn’t so bad,” Garrison said as he widened the opening. “I mean…if there wasn’t an inner air lock and the whole ship was pressurized, I could have been blasted halfway to the Breitenfeld. But I’m a professional.”

  “Was that a lot of air?” Lo’thar asked.

  Garrison shrugged. “Consistent with an air lock. Glad the Dotari have some sensible ship construction.”

  Hoffman stepped forward and stuck the muzzle of his gauss rifle into the door as Garrison stepped aside. When the camera on his primary weapon revealed an empty air lock, he went in smooth and fast. Once the team and Lo’thar were inside, he directed the Dotari to what looked like a control panel.

  Max ran IR strips, bending the thin material expertly into place. Made to be unobtrusive, the strips looked like thin, flexible film that allowed IR transmissions to relay around corners and bypass closed doors.

  Lo’thar nodded several times and muttered something in Dotari under his breath. “The inner door is working correctly. Please close the outer air-lock door before I open this one.”

  Hoffman looked at Max.

  “Comms are set. Close it or leave it open. Doesn’t matter to me,” Max said.

  Hoffman smiled nervously. “I’d rather not have air rushing out. Suffocating our hosts isn’t a good way to make a first impression.”

  Hoffman pointed to Garrison and Adams, then at the door.

  With Adams standing overwatch, Garrison slipped a metal wedge into the base of one side of the double exterior doors he had opened, retrieved his device, and hopped sideways a step as the door slammed halfway closed. Once he folded the spreader and repacked it in his kit, he pulled the wedge and slid it into a utility pouch on his leg armor as the second half of the door boomed shut. Adams took a small spray can off her belt and ran the tip along the door seams. Foam filled the cracks and expanded for a moment before hardening. Garrison ran a second line on top of Adams’, then rapped his knuckles against the door.

  “Glued tighter than Duke’s budget before payday,” Garrison said.

  “Very subtle,” Duke said into the total darkness of their new environment.

  “Too dark,” Opal said. “Don’t like.”

  Emergency ship lighting—equally unsatisfying in all ships, Hoffman thought—came on.

  Lo’thar opened the inner door and air rushed around them.

  Hoffman moved in with Garrison and Adams, practically at the same time, and the junior team members went through the room-clearance drill automatically. Booker came next, despite his aversion to placing the medic too far forward in the stack. King and the rest of the team brought Lo’thar in. Duke held the rear.

  The dimly lit passageway gave them plenty of room to set up. “Don’t overextend,” Hoffman said. “Booker, how’s the atmo?”

  “Breathable. Little light on pressure. Suggest a breath of O2 every half hour until we acclimatize,” she said.

  “Adams,” King said. “Pop your visor.”

  Adams complied and drew a quick breath, then exhaled as she spoke. Fog blew out with her words. “How long do I have to remain the new guy?”

  The team watched her for a few seconds.

  “It’s like watching the Super Bowl,” Garrison said.

  “Why? Because it’s something you bet on? Will she die? Will she live? Will her face melt with alien space poison?” Adams asked. “Jerk.” She gave Hoffman a thumbs-up. “Smells like team spirit.”

  “All right, team. Go on shipboard atmo. Save the drain on our batteries and tanks.” Hoffman lifted his visor and felt a chill bite his exposed skin. The air smelled stale, laden with ozone. “Pleasant.”

  “Smells like home,” Lo’thar said.

  “Give me a link, Max,” Hoffman said.

  “You got it. Ready to transmit to the Barca,” Max said.

  “Hoffman to Barca actual, we’re in. No contact.”

  “Acknowledged,” came the scratchy reply. “We’re moving to relay position.”

  Lo’thar stared at the control panel. “I have no contact with the Kid’ran’s Gift’s systems. Got through controls integral to the air lock, not the rest of the ship.”

  “Someone forgot to pay the bills,” said Duke.

  “Is this normal?” Hoffman asked the Dotari.

  “These are sleeper ships,” Lo’thar said. “My ancestors traveled on generation ships. The systems would be different. But an air-lock entry would get attention from one of my ancestor’s ships. A lot of attention. Atmosphere containment was a major concern, naturally.”

  “Some welcome.” Hoffman peered down the dead corridors where a light rime of frost clung to exposed metal. The Dotari architecture favored more angles than Terran ships, enough to give him a sense of being out of place.

  Hoffman looked down the corridor, studied the layout for a moment, then signaled his team to move forward.

  ****

  Vibrations groaned through the floor, walls, and ceiling, creating a sound right at the edge of Hoffman’s hearing. He felt more than heard it. Fresh from an intense deceleration burn and a grav-boot insertion to the alien ship, his mind was playing tricks with his perception. He understood the hallway was not twisting but
couldn’t get the thought out of his head. Uncertain lighting forced his optics to adjust. A thin patina of frost—nearly invisible in the gloom—covered everything.

  Adams whispered through her helmet comms. “Boooooo…hahahaha…We’re the ghouls of the Kid’ran’s Gift.”

  “Unnecessary!” Booker said. “The whispering, I mean.”

  “What is a ghoul? Is that a great honor to my people and their ship?” Lo’thar asked, looking around nervously. “What is that horrible sound?”

  Adams continued in her whispering stage voice. “Loooo’thaaaar…It’s your soul slipping into the darkness…”

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Lo’thar said, the ends of his quills twitching visibly inside his helmet visor.

  Adams started again, but her voice lost conviction as she peered into a dark side hallway.

  “Watch your zones,” Hoffman said, bracing for an attack from the frigid darkness until the moment passed. “Max, do your thing.”

  “Watch my back, Lo’thar,” Max said as he kneeled to apply IR strips to the bulkhead the team had just passed.

  “Your back?” Lo’thar asked.

  “Protect him. Watch for threats,” King snapped a second before Hoffman could do the same thing.

  “Sorry. ‘Watch your six.’ That’s what Gall taught us to say. This is different from void combat. You have nothing to fear from my people. Just let me do the talking.” Lo’thar crowded Max, who muttered as he finished his work.

  “Team move.” Hoffman signaled his team forward just as the ship shuddered again.

  “I didn’t like that,” Adams said.

  “Keep moving and watch your zone,” King said on the IR comlink. “Maybe next mission, you’ll think twice before making ghoul jokes.”

  Garrison and Adams slipped forward to a rounded bulkhead and stopped, each taking a knee to aim their weapons. Their grav boots left footprints in the frost-covered decking.

  Adams adjusted her position a few inches out from the wall to get a better angle on her zone—a reverse wedge shape that included the area immediately in front of Garrison and the hallway beyond. “Set.”

  Garrison cross-covered anything that might pop up immediately in front of Adams just as she was doing for him. None of them could see what might be around the lip of the bulkhead—an unseen door or passage or an alien pod creature hanging in the shadows that wasn’t mentioned in the briefing. “Set.” Garrison’s voice rumbled low and gravelly.

  “Report,” Hoffman said.

  “Nothing seen,” Garrison said.

  Duke, situated near the back of the formation, covered the long hallway and said nothing. Max and Lo’thar brought up the rear.

  King came to his feet and glided forward, knees slightly bent, shooting platform perfect despite his fast pace. “Moving.”

  Booker moved a half second later, slightly behind him and to his left, covering his non-shooting side and looking for doors or other openings that weren’t obvious from where they had been stopped before the bounding overwatch. On this team, she was a medic and an operator first, then a sergeant. By doctrine, everyone on the team was cross-trained to do each other’s duties, but no one could replace Booker’s medical expertise. She was the last person any of them wanted to see injured.

  Hoffman glanced at the metal tracks on the ceiling, then checked the exact location of each Strike Marine. The long silence of the ship made him long for the nervous shit talk from his Marines. That was the difference between training and actually clearing a ghost ship. With such a small team, it seemed paranoid to do regular headcounts, except now it seemed more important than ever.

  “Lo’thar, what are those rails on the ceiling?”

  Lo’thar’s fists shook like a child’s about to open a Christmas present. Hoffman wondered if it was nerves or some sort of psychological defense mechanism for the bad vibe every member of the team seemed to be getting.

  “Those are cargo rails. Very useful in zero gravity. Dotari never developed the miniaturized grav plating Terrans utilize. My ancestors didn’t want heavy cargo drifting around smashing people, did they?”

  “Your ancestors sound brilliant,” King muttered.

  “Has anyone else considered the importance of this?” Lo’thar asked.

  “Trying not to, Lo’thar old buddy,” Adams said.

  “I am meeting my ancestors. These Dotari walked on our world over a thousand years ago. They built the Golden Fleets that saved our species. It’s like meeting your Moses or Napoleon the pig.”

  “Napoleon?” Duke asked.

  “The leader from your children’s book about animals on a farm. The leader that took his people to a great place,” Lo’thar said.

  “I don’t think you got the right message from Orwell,” Duke said.

  Lo’thar clacked his beak. “I bet the crew of this ship will be excited about the technological improvements we will bring to them. Grav plating is a good example. Our new ships are much improved…”

  “Do you always talk this much?” Duke asked.

  Hoffman checked his team. When he came back to Lo’thar and Max, the Dotari fighter pilot was standing in the middle of the hallway, holding his weapon in a relaxed position as he talked.

  “Lo’thar,” he said. “Keep your eyes open for a computer node. You don’t need to talk while you’re doing that. Team move.”

  King acknowledged the order, then gave hand signals as needed and made eye contact with Hoffman every five or ten meters.

  “Let’s hold here,” Hoffman said.

  “Ooo, look at that!” Lo’thar rushed ahead of Garrison and Adams, who watched in stunned horror as he passed in front of their weapons.

  “Damn it, get back in the stack!” King shouted.

  “Lo’thar, stay close to your partner,” Hoffman said.

  Opal growled.

  “What the hell was that sound?” Duke asked.

  “He’s frustrated. Watch the long angle. I don’t want anyone getting sniped from an opening farther down the hallway.”

  “No shit,” Duke muttered.

  “King, I’m taking charge of our principal for a minute. You have the team. Opal, stay with Gunney,” Hoffman said as he advanced, weapon ready, to Lo’thar’s side. When he was there, he turned in a tight circle, gun tight to his body and pointed down but ready to swing up for a shot without drawing his sights across any of his divided team.

  Lo’thar wiped frost off a panel that was slightly raised from a bulkhead.

  Hoffman grabbed the collar of his suit and yanked him back, shoved him into the crevasse on the friendly side of the bulkhead, and stood between him and anything that might attack. He quick-peeked the corner high, then dropped to one knee to do the same thing from a different position. Sticking his rifle barrel around the corner to use the camera was an option, but that risked an unseen enemy just around the corner snatching his rifle away.

  Satisfied for the moment, he stood to keep Lo’thar trapped in the bulkhead corner. “All right, Gunney.”

  “Team move,” King said with a corresponding hand signal.

  The rest of the Strike Marines executed a perfect, if accelerated, bounding overwatch to secure the area around Lo’thar and Hoffman.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Hoffman asked.

  “It’s a deck marker.” Lo’thar seemed embarrassed as he watched the Strike Marines guarding him. “An original deck marker. All the ones on Takeni were worn away during the transit from Dotari. It’s like we’re in a museum.”

  “If that deck marker can tell us where we are, now’s the time to read it. In the future, don’t get ahead of the team.”

  “He’s clear to come up,” King said.

  “Don’t sound so enthused,” Adams said.

  King made an unhappy sound low in his throat. “Watch your zone.”

  Hoffman tapped Max on the shoulder as the communications specialist rejoined Lo’thar.

  “Sorry, boss.”

  “You may have to clip
on to his utility gear to hold him back at some point,” Hoffman said and went back to his position in the stack, reminding himself Lo’thar was a hero of the Ember War who had destroyed more Xaros drones than most.

  Lo’thar ran his hands down the side of the marker until a glass panel flickered to reveal Dotari writing. The exotic script looked three-dimensional but wasn’t. Max moved closer and peeked over Lo’thar’s shoulder.

  “Do you read our language?”

  The Dotari script flickered and changed, then blinked several times on the faux holo panel.

  “I taught myself a little back when I thought it might help me get selected for the Strike Marines.” He squinted as he considered the writing, mouthing the words as though sounding them out. “These words don’t make sense.”

  Near enough to hear the exchange, Hoffman listened as he checked his zones, then looked back at the Dotari marker.

  Lo’thar pressed his fingertips against the screen, then twisted his hands in a deliberate pattern. The movement looked like it had meaning, perhaps an unconscious Dotari ritual. The screen filled with text.

  “The language is off,” Lo’thar said. “Syntax issues…”

  “Your language would have changed a bit in the thousand years since you left Dotari,” Hoffman said.

  “The code base from our ships never changed. They should all be the same.” He crowded the panel so that Hoffman couldn’t see what he was doing. “I sent a reboot command that should clear it up.”

  Max gave a short laugh. “Turn it off and turn it back on again to make it work. Glad some tech tips are universal.”

  The screen snapped off. Deathly silence held the ship.

  Hoffman swept his eyes over the situation. As each member of his team held their positions, he felt their impatience and respected their discipline to resist it.

  King cleared his throat.

  Lo’thar and Max stared at the blank screen, oblivious to anything else around them. Lo’thar slammed the heel of his hand against the bulkhead. Hoffman gritted his teeth. The entire team flinched at the poor noise discipline.

  “It appears to be broken,” Lo’thar said. “But I did see the marker’s metadata code. If this ship follows the same layout as the Canticle of Reason—and it should, we built these ships on an assembly line—there’s a communication nexus two air locks that way.” He pointed down the hall. “And one level up.”