* * *
It was a bit like playing Whack-A-Mole.
Lisbeth Zhang had never seen the old version of the game, the one played with actual mallets and wood and plastic boards, but electronic versions had been available since long before she was born. The principle was the same, of course. Smack the elusive moles whenever they popped up.
Finding and killing the Snowflakes had been just as frustrating.
The Mind-Killer was a tricky beast. Lisbeth had handled dozens of weapon systems during her two careers in the armed forces, from the ubiquitous Infantry Weapon she’d wielded as an acne-ridden teenager during Basic to the 20-inch grav cannon that ran the entire length of the War Eagle warp fighter. But this was the first death-dealing piece of equipment that relied on freaking intuition. Or darkest sorcery; one term was as good as the other. She was sitting in the cockpit of the Corpse-Ship, and using her supernatural senses to search the habitat for any signs of the ninety-two Tah-Leen living there. Finding the Monitor had been much easier, mostly because its location was public knowledge. The others’ brain-jars were hidden from all sensor systems and their defenses were strong enough to withstand anti-ship weaponry. She could only find them by mentally sifting through the billions of cubic kilometers in the station, until a tell-tale tingle told her she’d found a Snowflake.
It took her a good three minutes to locate her second victim. Even most annoying, it was nobody of importance. This particular Tah-Leen had been very low on the totem pole, a sycophant who earned its keep by kissing every ass in reach, often literally, since whenever the Tah-Leen weren’t fucking their captives they were busy fucking each other, in every sense of the word. She got all of this through the mind-link she had to build with her quarry in order to engage it. The process was like a setting up a ship-to-ship targeting solution. Once it was done all she had to do was open a microscopic warp aperture and expose the poor bastard to what lay on the other side. The Tah-Leen couldn’t withstand exposure to the Starless Path: the shock was automatically fatal. Killing the Monitor had been rough, but taking out a fully conscious Tah-Leen was much worse. She had the privilege of hearing the terrified psychic screams of her victim as it went insane and died shortly thereafter.
Lisbeth found and destroyed one alien brain-jar after another. The process soon acquired an awful sameness. Her targets first felt surprise at the unexpected contact, followed by terror and useless attempts to resist. They had no defenses against her, however. She might as well be slaughtering penned sheep, unable to escape or fight, forced to watch in horror as their killer approached. Each time, she experienced a little of bit of the lives she snuffed, becoming both confessor and executioner for her victims.
Fifteen down. Even though this wasn’t a fight but a series of executions, each kill took a lot out of her. After her bout of insanity had finally passed, Lisbeth had eaten the last of the food the Scholar had left her, hydrated herself and ran a bio-scan. She was doing better, but she still needed a break every few minutes, a little time to let her body recover from the unfamiliar stresses she was putting it through. She lay back and closed her eyes.
Heather’s voice interrupted her rest less than a minute later.
“The Scholar’s moving towards you! I locked him out but he’s using energy weapons to blast through the airlocks!”
“Holy shitty indeedy,” Lisbeth mumbled. She was feeling a bit crazy again. She’d better whack this mole, or he’d do some whacking of his own.
There Scholar had nineteen active embodiments, including the one in the Pappy Boyington costume, and all of them were headed her way. Not good. The only way to take them all out was to find his brain-jar, but finding it would take time she didn’t have. She zeroed in on the nearest body and used the Mind-Killer on it. Pappy Boyington dropped dead, much to her delight. Problem was, there were eighteen more of him, and killing a single persona did diddly to the rest.
Lisbeth took two more aliens out, and each time she almost took herself out along the way. Killing the Tah-Leen’s extensions was as exhausting as destroying their Cores, and for a lot less bang for the buck. She’d drop long before she got through all of them. The surviving Scholars arrived to the Corpse-Ship’s storage room. Heather had locked the door and they couldn’t bypass her codes, but they didn’t have to. They had graviton pistols, something Lisbeth hadn’t known was even possible to build, given the power requirements. They used them against the armored door and its defensive shields. She had maybe ten seconds before they broke through and turned her into shredded beef.
So far, she’d been able to access only small amounts of energy, just enough to power the Mind-Killer and the sensors that she’d used to find her prey. She tried to draw more power into the ship. It was like trying to lift a shuttle with her bare hands. Lisbeth didn’t have it in her. Maybe if she wasn’t so tired from all the mole-whacking.
No. Not even on my best day, Lisbeth thought. She might have rewired her brain, but she still didn’t have the mental bandwidth for the task. She wasn’t a Fifth Circle Master. After all her hard-work and near-death experiences, she might qualify for the First Circle. Maybe the Second, if she applied herself. Which was a roundabout way of saying she was shit out of luck.
“I might be able to help,” the Pathfinder whispered in her ear.
The dead alien had gone silent since Lisbeth had rewired her brain, and hadn’t responded to her attempts to contact it again. She’d given up after a few tries; time was running out and she figured maybe the poor ghost had finally moved on or whatever. But there it was again. Unless she’d gone completely bonkers and this was a figment of her imagination.
“Help me,” she said. Figment or not, it was all she had.
“One last push.”
“What do you mean?” she asked just before everything went dark.
Lisbeth and the ghost became one. The Pathfinder’s consciousness melded with her own, and she no longer was Lisbeth Juliette Zhang of Eureka, North California. She was Atu, born on the edge of a black hole’s event horizon. Atu, whose real name was two-hundred syllables long, at least the parts that human hearing might perceive. Atu’s true name was a reflection of what it had been and done, growing in length as new chapters were added to the story of its life. Several thousand years of alien memories flooded her mind.
Atu had been born in an exoplanetary habitat not unlike the one she was in. The young Pathfinder, bred for zero gravity, had undergone additional procedures to optimize its capabilities: hormones to increase its growth to gargantuan levels; nanotech conversions that infused its skeletal structure with near-indestructible composite materials; subtler bio-engineering that shaped its brain to better perceive and access the Starless Path. As it grew, it was schooled in the philosophy of balance, and upon reaching adolescence was taken into the Path, where it met a Mentor, an angelic entity that became its best friend, confidant and guide.
There was much more, a kaleidoscope of events detailing a life lived for exploration and trade. They included journeys to the further reaches of the known galaxy and encounters with beings that might have been the Elders themselves; an ambitious attempt to reach the Galactic Core that had ended in tragedy; and finally, a great schism that had ended with the Transcendence of most Pathfinders, and a cold exile for the rest. Atu had been among those left behind. Those remnants of its species had been hunted down by other Starfarers. Wounded and near death, a few hundred survivors fled to a remote star and entered a vegetative state, hoping to outlast their tormentors and eventually follow their siblings. Something had gone wrong, however, and Atu and its kind had become living fossils, a mere spark of consciousness trapped within their petrified bodies. Eons later, their resting place had been discovered by the Marauders, at which point Atu’s story ended and the Corpse-Ship’s began.
Lisbeth/Atu felt the door to the chamber break apart just as their combined consciousness opened a link to the Starless path and poured power into the ship. The Scholars rushed in and opened fire, but no
t before shields had sprung around their target. Beams that had torn apart bulkheads and regular force fields did no damage against the shimmering yellow-pink aura protecting the undead vessel.
They couldn’t hurt the hybrid entity she’d become, but she could hurt them. A thought was all it took: the energy shield expanded suddenly, producing enough pressure to transform the display room into a hollow sphere a hundred yards wide. The sixteen remaining Scholars became a thin film of organic matter that evenly coated the sphere’s surface. The live Corpse-Ship floated in the center of the sphere until Lisbeth ordered it to descend to the curved floor.
Atu regretted the violence. Lisbeth exulted in it.
“I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree,” she told her new soulmate. She was herself once again, more or less.
A psychic sigh was the only response. She felt the alien’s presence fade away, and hoped that was temporary.
Time to get back to her game of whack-a-mole.
* * *
Suckass had the honor of making first contact with the enemy.
He and the rest of the fireteam were on point, moving through a bunch of corridors that had next to no distinguishing features. You’d think that the aliens who’d built the colorful outer shell would have spent some time prettying up the interior, but you’d be wrong. If it wasn’t for the Skipper feeding them directions every few minutes, they could wander around the innards of this oversized space station for years without finding a way out. Not that they would have lasted years; they had maybe a couple days’ worth of rations, and everyone’s twin power packs were at fifteen percent or less. Most of the tunnels had no atmo in them, either, which meant that as soon as their power and their reserve oxygen was out, it was all over.
They stopped at an intersection. PFC Barton took a peek on the left side; Howard checked the right – and spotted a tango less than thirty feet away heading towards them. This particular Snowflake looked like a crab and a multi-tool had babies together. Six legs around a seven-foot-long carapace that sprouted a couple dozen upper limbs, everything from tentacles to scrubbers to sensor antennas. It could be a robot, cyborg or just a funky-looking alien in a combat or utility suit. Only way to find out was to open it up and take a look at its insides.
“Tango!” he shouted and charged the critter, machete in hand.
Well, technically the heavy blade was called a Standard Clearing Tool, but now that he’d used it to dismember several Lampreys, both alive and undead, he just thought of it as a machete. The alien or robot or whatever skittered to a stop, but its momentum kept it going forward long enough for Howard’s rush to close the distance. A tentacle and a multi-jointed arm with a pneumatic hammer instead of a hand reached for him. He slashed at them with his machete. Metal sparked on metal; the impact numbed his arm to the elbow, but the severed hammer-hand went flying.
The tentacle clobbered him good, though.
Howard managed to block the blow with his left arm. Didn’t help. He got slammed against a wall, bounced off it and faceplanted. From his prone position, he saw several booted feet rushing past him and heard more metallic hammering sounds, along with assorted shouts, everything from ‘Oorah’ to that old standby, ‘Fuck you, motherfucker!’ Someone cried out in pain, and Suckass redoubled his efforts to get back to his feet.
“You okay, man?” PFC Barton asked him, helping him sit up. “Don’t try to move. You got a broken arm.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Just hold still.”
Suckass looked at his left arm. Yep, it was bent the wrong way and his suit had gotten torn up; air was leaking through it. Seeing the wound triggered a wave of pain that made him dry-heave. Thankfully, he didn’t quite throw up inside his helmet. The suit would vacuum most of the vomit out of his way, but it would still leave some puke on his face, and removing his helmet to wipe it off wasn’t a good option in the airless corridor.
Barton sprayed some quick-set gel on the wounded arm to seal off the tear in the suit before he lost all his atmo. Howard gritted his teeth, knowing what was coming next.
“Sorry, brah,” Barton said, and pushed the broken arm the way it was supposed to go. That sent a new burst of pain through it, enough to make him black out of a second. When he opened his eyes again, he looked past his buddy and saw the tango was resting in pieces. It had been an alien in a suit; some of the pieces were definitely meat and bone of some kind. A spreading pool of assorted fluids, both artificial and organic, had reached his boots. More shit to clean up after this was over.
“That sucked ass,” he said.
“Embrace the suck,” Staff Sergeant Weiner replied. “How’s Ramirez?”
“Out cold. Concussion. And Suckass got a broken arm.”
“Get them moving. Can’t leave nobody behind here.”
“Come on, man,” Barton said, helping Howard to his feet. The pain was fading away, but his imp notified him he was running low on nano-meds. He hadn’t been hurt badly until now, but a bunch of small injuries along the way had steadily depleted his reserves, and they were out of spares. He checked his suit power packs: thirteen and fourteen percent, respectively.
Could be worse. He looked at Ramirez, who was struggling to his feet after someone gave him a double-shot of stims that got him moving, concussion or not. Suckass knew the poor bastard would be nursing the mother of all headaches for hours even after the pain meds kicked in. Howard wouldn’t have traded his broken arm for that.
The important thing was, his right arm was fine, which meant he still could kill.
“Let’s roll.”
* * *
Nature abhors a vacuum.
The Monitor’s death had left a huge gap in the highly complex network running the Habitat for Unique Diversity. While most systems kept working normally after the brief outage that marked the demise of their administrator, problems would eventually start to crop up as entropy began its patient work, miniscule errors compounding gradually until they eventually snowballed and became critical. Someone needed to take charge, and soon.
Heather and June were doing their damnedest to claim that honor. Their combined efforts had tricked the Tah-Leen system, now being run by mindless ‘AI’ machines, into providing them with provisional IDs that granted them access to the Master Conduit. They were now inside the system, although they still didn’t have the full access that the Monitor had been granted. Getting there wasn’t going to be easy. For one, the Seeker, the Priestess and the Hierophant were also going for the brass ring. If the aliens had worked together, they would have won the race. Fortunately, the Priestess and the Seeker had decided to seize the chance to become the indisputable leader of their species, and they were spending as much energy keeping the Hierophant – and each other – out as they were on the upstart Americans.
The five-sided struggle was fought virtually, but was no less deadly than any other war. The two CIA operatives were able to survive those first frenzied minutes thanks to their special implants. The t-wave devices let them spy on their enemies without being detected, allowing them to anticipate their moves.
The Priestess released several software constructs, hunter-killer agents programmed to shut her out of the system and send a lethal pulse through her implants. She countered by unleashing a hundred Puppy-designed cyber-worms, little virtual engines of destruction that started overloading vital systems by sending millions of fake messages to their connection nodes. The hunter-killers had to stop chasing her and divert their attention to the worms before they broke something important.
That would only buy her a few minutes, however. Lisbeth was still killing the Tah-Leen one by one as fast as she could find their Cores, but getting them all would take too long, and getting the important targets would be a matter of pure luck.
There wasn’t a single control center, now that the Monitor was gone. Each major hub could serve as a secondary one, however; the system was evenly distributed. The Hierophant took over of one of them, but June was ready for him. Playing
with the local power distribution system, she sent an energy surge through the physical server, burning it out and temporarily stunning the alien. The move revealed June’s virtual presence in the system, however, and the hunter-killers surrounded her and struck.
Heather was too busy fighting for her own life to see what happened. In the real world, June Gillespie shuddered and went limp, blood running down her nose and ears. In cyberspace, the analyst’s last message informed Lisbeth Zhang of the Priestess’ Core location. A moment later, the co-leader of the Especially Unique was gone as well.
That left the Seeker. The spy had a dozen bodies working in concert, a team of counter-hackers who could try multiple approaches at once. Their combined efforts were about to seize control over another node, hammering through the blocks Heather had left in their path. When he/they did, it would be all over.
She had one card left to play, however. Time to bring a little real war to the cyber-battle.
* * *
“New marching orders, Marines,” Fromm called out after acknowledging Heather’s message. He fed a new route through the corridors to their imps.
They’d incurred a handful more casualties as they ventured deeper into the station, none of them fatal. The Snowflakes had no idea of where the company was, but they’d run into a few aliens along the way, mostly alone or in small groups. None of the Tah-Leen had been geared for combat; their personal shields made them invulnerable to most ranged attacks, but not to knives and spears. Of course, that advantage would vanish as soon as the enemy engaged them with energy weapons.
They didn’t have to detour very far. Led by Third Platoon, the company reached their destination after a few minutes’ jog. Their target was on the other side of an interior bulkhead. Unfortunately, there were no access hatches nearby; the nearest one was over a hundred meters away, and using it would spoil the surprise.
Advance to Contact (Warp Marine Corps Book 3) Page 26