“How you know that?”
Mr. Adrastus shook his head. “I work for VG, remember? Argus five zero five is a security alert password. If you use that, the ship will lock down. He’s been trained to give you that password. It changes every month.”
Is he telling me the truth? Yes, he must be.
“Wait here,” she said.
Xinmei steeled herself. She knew the alien ship meant a lot for China. She went back into the locker room and closed the door. The pilot was still dazed. She injected the fat man with the drug in the side of his arm.
That’s all I have. None left to fool Mr. Adrastus again on the voyage home, she thought.
Xinmei resumed the program. The men stiffened, then screamed.
Whatever they are feeling, it is horrible.
The screaming continued for more than a minute in intermittent, ragged bursts. Then the other man started to scream.
“Give me,” Xinmei ordered him.
“Zeus five. Capital A nine nine,” a man said.
“Zeus?”
“Z, e, u, s. With a capital Z,” the man clarified.
Xinmei had what she needed. She turned to leave again, but realized that Mr. Adrastus would learn about the drug if she didn’t make the details just right. She cut the thinner man on the back of his arm and sprinkled his blood around. She put the remains of the pilot’s pants over his groin.
Xinmei came back out. She tossed away the knife as Mr. Adrastus watched with a scared look on his face.
Good. Let him be afraid of me.
Xinmei stripped off the gear. Mr. Adrastus did the same. Then he saw her lack of real clothing. Her undersheers were clinging to her chest, drenched in sweat. She ignored him and removed the rest of the gear. She glanced at Mr. Adrastus. He stared at her breasts. She flushed under his gaze.
Sex monster.
“This way,” she said.
Mr. Adrastus dropped the last of his gear. Xinmei returned to the cockpit as she accessed the ship’s controls in her PV.
First she gave an information dispatch to the ship and told it to transmit it every half hour once they were away from the station. The dispatch would go to several innocuous-seeming destinations she knew were monitored by the Chinese.
Then she took a moment to decipher the complex control panes, and then found a destination in Europe. She changed the destination to a Chinese station called Qian Nian Men. The interface resisted her choice, but she managed to override a few safety switches and it finally accepted her destination.
Suddenly her authorization was lost. She tried to regain it, but she had been locked out. She looked over at Mr. Adrastus. His taser was pointed at her. She took a step back.
“What you do?” she asked.
“Sorry,” he said. He tried to use the taser on her, but it didn’t fire. She had programmed his weapon to be inert if used against her.
Xinmei skipped forward and kicked him between the legs. He bent over in pain, so she tried to knee him in the face. Somehow she didn’t hit him squarely, so she tried to throw him instead. He pushed her off balance, and then hit her.
Stars flew through her eyes. Sharp pain assailed her from her nose. He’d hit her twice, hard. She moaned in pain and fell back, stunned.
“The damn thing didn’t work the whole time?” he said.
Her hand came up to cover her nose. Tears rolled from her eyes.
“The cybloc. Not set to fire at you or me.” She breathed with difficulty, feeling the blood moving in her nose.
“I’m sorry, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to China! I’ve heard that company people who end up there never make it back!”
“Please … let me go there,” she said.
“I’ll think about it,” he said. “If there’s a way to get us each to our own destination then I’ll take it. Right now, to the locker room. March!” He pointed to the exit door of the cockpit. Xinmei walked back out. He forced her back into the locker room. She tried to ignore the blood seeping from her nose and the burning pain.
What can I do? I have to warn the Divine Space Force.
They entered the locker room again.
“Get into that storage locker; at least until I can figure out what’s going on.”
Xinmei tried to wipe the blood from her face but she only covered her hand in blood as well. She rolled onto all fours and crawled into the locker. Mr. Adrastus watched carefully.
“Stay in there!” he said harshly.
She refused to look at him. She sat with her back against the side wall and covered her bruised face with her hand. He slammed the door and locked it with his link.
Xinmei lay in the dark locker and held her wounds. She shuddered.
Forgive me, Feng.
Eleven
Feng lay secured in his bunk by acceleration webbing. The fleet had entered weapons range half an hour ago. He listened to the chatter on various ship’s channels. The men sounded calm, directing salvo after salvo while their own fleet altered course almost constantly.
He hated the feeling of total powerlessness. He had to wait it out and trust the men who controlled the ship-to-ship combat systems. Another maneuver sent him pressing against the wall that supported his bunk.
In his PV, the overview of the base incursion, yet to begin, sat quiescent. The battle controller interface was ready to deliver its orders: seize the base and take control of the alien ship at any cost.
Giving a computer such directives did not sit well with Feng’s instincts. But if the West learned the secrets of the spinners then China would fall behind just when they’d managed to take the lead in space. That much really was at stake, and besides, he had his orders.
With any luck, the UNSF had already destroyed any spinners on the base called Synchronicity. But Feng’s backup plans couldn’t ignore the possibility that spinners were still alive there. He prepared hunting programs for the dogs in case the battle controller was blocked out again. If that happened, they might have to engage more spinners on their own programming.
And then there was the UNSF forces. The dogs were amazing when the battle controller used them, but the West had to have its own secret weapons. Feng would have to be ready to deal with them as well, should the battle controller fail them.
The only good news was that Feng’s force had received two new Yongshans and another hundred dogs. Since they’d only lost a handful of dogs on Nibiru, the Ascending Dragon was almost back up to its full incursion force.
The fleet engagement went well. The UNSF ships were dispersed or destroyed, and the Ascending Dragon went in to deliver its battle modules. As the modules approached the station, Feng activated his orders in the battle controller. It would have the dogs at least for the initial breach; and with luck it would continue to control them thereafter.
The first module breached close to the bay where the objective was reported to be. They didn’t dare go directly into the bay itself for fear of damaging the ship, assuming it really existed. Feng didn’t know how they had obtained the information, but he wondered if it had been due to spies on the station like they’d rescued at Nibiru.
The second module would attach a third of the ring away, on the other side of the bay. They had selected a spot close to the main concourse which offered speedy travel around the entire base. If they could control the main concourse, then they’d be able to move quickly to any location and deny their enemies the same mobility. It would also afford them another direction of attack on the objective.
The battle controller arrayed the dogs around each breach point as soon as the hull had been cut and the new seal was ready. The Yongshans were deployed from the module adjacent to the bay.
Although the battle controller moved the Yongshans, Feng had assigned a human pilot to each one just in case the controller’s transmissions were blocked. And if the pilot’s control was blocked, the Yongshan would still be able to fight, although it wouldn’t cooperate in any grand strategy. At the moment, the pilots were simply waiting
and watching the feed from their machines.
Both Yongshans drove straight toward the bay. Twenty dogs marched around them.
“We’re under fire,” said a Yongshan pilot. “Dogs are dropping around me.”
Right into the fire, Feng thought.
Feng watched the Yongshans on his tactical display. The forward machine fired a cannon round. Then both of the tanks went dead. Feng cursed. He accessed the dogs’ controls to attack. But they were already surging forward, under the control of the battle computer.
“It wasn’t a spinner,” Wenbo reported. He sent Feng a pointer to footage from a dog. Feng saw the Yongshan’s assassin: a large metal quadruped. It was much larger than a dog and covered in thick armor.
The green circle of the UNSF was emblazoned on its side.
A hundred dogs moved in after the UNSF machine. Dog after dog dropped. Large caliber holes were being put into the wall as he watched, each one hitting a dog more often than missing.
That’s a lot of fire for one machine. Maybe there’s more than one?
Feng caught sight of an enemy machine again. Its leg had been damaged. Feng wondered if the Yongshan had hurt it with the single shell it had managed to fire. Dogs were stacked up at the entrance to its corridor, but more dogs were darting behind them, shooting round after round at the UNSF machine.
It took a lot of fire. Feng was reminded of the rationale against armor that the officer had given them when they had first seen the dog machines. The armor seemed to be serving it quite well, but eventually its cannons were hit and it sat immobile as dogs pushed their way toward it through the wrecks of the other dogs.
A couple of dogs delivered their contact shocks at close range. The machine had been destroyed. Feng looked at the heavily armed and armored machine. Large caliber weapons were mounted on either side of a wide, flat head. It had a bulky body. No doubt the armor was thick, and it must have carried a lot of ammunition.
Feng wondered about the cannons. Apparently the UNSF was not as concerned about depressurizing the station. The way its shots had perforated the walls and killed the dogs, he thought it might be capable of puncturing the bulkheads.
They expected armored enemies. But we have cheap dogs, and lots of them.
His tactical showed that more dogs were being killed just ahead.
“Yes. There’s more than one,” Feng thought aloud.
Some of the dogs taking fire weren’t responding to the battle controller. Feng saw that the fire was coming from another direction than the bay.
Some dogs at the vanguard had been cut off. They charged forward. Feng sifted through video feeds from the dogs. In a few seconds ten dogs were dead. Then a few more seconds and twenty had been destroyed. Feng found it before Wenbo this time: a frame containing a spinner.
We’re in the middle of a fight now, Feng thought. A spinner and the UNSF. The battle controller is programmed to go after the ship. What will it do?
The remaining dogs from the module backed up a bit and massed. Three hundred more dogs were coming in fast from the concourse where the other module had breached. Another hundred dogs had discovered a UNSF breach point and were trading light fire with human marines there. Feng figured those dogs were just trying to keep the marines holed up so they couldn’t interfere in the battle for the space ship.
Dogs kept dying over by the bay. A round flew through the walls every few seconds, taking down a dog or even two in one shot. Other dogs were dropping without any visible damage, which told Feng it was the spinner.
If the UNSF and the spinners are fighting together this is going to be bad, Feng thought. I doubt that’s what’s going on. But in any case, the battle controller can’t wait much longer. Every moment we stand here...
The battle controller must have made a similar analysis. The massed dogs charged forward. Many of them broke through damaged walls. The loss rate increased. Feng’s tactical showed a target silhouette of another UNSF machine blocking the way to the bay. On the left flank, the battle controller was reporting a spinner, though its presence was ephemeral, winking in and out as the deadly-fast alien darted about with blurring speed.
The battle controller led the dogs intermittently, getting through to more on the right flank where the UNSF machine sat.
The spinner is letting our dogs put pressure on its enemy, Feng thought. His eyes narrowed. If the objective wasn’t the ship, he wouldn’t have let it get away with that.
Reinforcements from the concourse were only seconds away. They would surround the spinner. The battle controller must have seen the same chance, as the dogs suddenly shifted toward the spinner, coming in to trap it.
Dogs were running down a corridor behind the spinner. The leaders of the charge dropped off one by one. Feng couldn’t see the enemy on the tactical or from any feed of a dog as he switched from window to window in his PV. The entire battle was happening right before him, but he couldn’t really keep up.
The dogs over by the UNSF breach had died off. Feng assumed they had been picked off by more of the armored quadrupeds. But that didn’t really matter. The battle controller was probably just delaying them, anyway. The real battle was taking place at the bay.
An explosion rocked the area. Feng couldn’t feel it from his place on the Ascending Dragon, but he could see debris flying over the dogs, and heard an amplitude-dampened version of the shockwave.
The dogs resumed. Feng realized they had more than resumed, they’d become almost frantic. He switched to a view from the lead dog. The army of dogs, over four hundred strong, converged on the bay once more.
Feng sighted the UNSF quadruped in the lead dog’s sights before the dog went offline. Then Feng switched to another dog and saw the UNSF machine go through a lock door just ahead. It was the door to the bay.
Dead people in the bulky suits littered the floor with strange rifles in their hands or lying nearby. Damage riddled the walls everywhere.
The ship. Everyone’s fighting over the ship.
Dogs shot the last door to shreds. They poured into the bay beyond like a flow of water crashing into a hole in the side of a ship.
The ship was there, and the UNSF machine stood inside the bay next to it. Dogs started to shoot at the quadruped. Their projectiles bounced off its heavy armor. Some of the dogs ran ahead to shock it.
The UNSF machine ignored the attack and started to shoot at the ship. Its main cannons shot rapidly, two, four, then six shots. Then the UNSF quadruped melted into a heap in the space of a second. Thick black smoke roiled off the burning pool of slag.
What...!
The feed died. Feng saw that every dog in they bay had gone off the network. More dogs ran into the bay, but as soon as they did, Feng saw the ship was gone. A huge hole gaped below, showing only the twinkling stars across the inky blackness of space. The dogs that had been in the bay were missing or had been reduced to more pools of smoldering liquid boiling off into space.
“The ship has left!” Feng said on the officers’ channel.
“The ship is gone!” Wenbo announced simultaneously.
Dogs ran around the edge of the new opening, anchoring themselves to the station by magnetizing their feet. Feng couldn’t catch any sign of the ship.
Admiral Huang transmitted across a wide band of channels.
“The battle controller has alerted me that the station is about to be destroyed by a nuclear blast,” he said. “The threat is real. We’re moving elements of the fleet to a safer distance.”
“A nuclear weapon? Are they insane?” Wenbo asked Feng.
They want to deny us the prize, Feng thought. Then the danger finally cut through his desire to win: Are we all about to die?
Feng felt heavy acceleration. He listened to the chatter on the ship’s channels and those of the soldiers on the base. They searched frantically for the ship that had escaped the bay, but no one had managed to detect it.
“I don’t know if we’re accelerating fast enough to make it,” Sheng said. As if someo
ne in navigation had the same thought at the same time, Feng felt his weight increase another notch. The acceleration was high enough now to break bones with a misstep.
I should be on that station, he thought. If a bomb goes off, those men are going to die.
Feng heard the enlisted men on Synchronicity asking frantic questions.
“Which direction is the bomb? Maybe we can stop it,” someone demanded.
“If I stand behind this structural strut, is it thick enough to save me?” asked another.
“Tell my wife I love her!” another one said.
The dogs near the bay stood frozen in place.
“The battle controller has given up,” Wenbo said.
“How does it know there’s a bomb, anyway?” Feng asked.
“It’s smarter than us, so who can say? Maybe it took over a system that can detect it on the base?”
Feng lost his link connection.
The deck went completely dark. For a moment he wondered if he had died. He shook off the notion and took a deep breath. He still had lungs. Then a cybloc in the wall beeped at him and the door integrity light came back on. The tiny light shone a bright green that cut through the darkness.
Feng’s link remained silent. The ponderous weight of heavy acceleration remained constant.
Shit. How are we going to survive on a space ship with massive EMP damage?
“Everyone stay calm. We’re going to have to do some damage control and see what the situation is,” he said. The other men in his officers’ quarters section got to their feet. Feng found it difficult to stand. He felt very heavy, and in the darkness, he couldn’t keep standing without holding onto the edge of the bunk.
Feng clumsily moved to the door, leaning on the wall. As he arrived at the exit he almost fell forward. He had to crouch to all fours to keep his balance for a moment. Then he opened the door manually. Some dim lighting flooded in from the outside corridor.
Another officer stomped down the hall toward them. The emergency lighting and high acceleration made him look like a drunken man staggering through a discotheque.
“We’re accelerating out of control,” he called out. “We can’t shut down the engines. Captain Lin has ordered us to abandon ship. Head for the crash pods. The longer we take to get out of here, the harder it’s going to be to find and rescue us.”
Synchronicity Trilogy Omnibus Page 44