by Rick Partlow
I raised my right hand, palm up. I had no idea if that signified anything to them, but it seemed like a good way to say hello. The head warrior buried his sword blade-first in the dirt, then raised his left hand likewise. He was staring at us with unabashed confusion and not a little fear, though he was doing his best to hide it, I thought. Most of the others weren't even trying: I saw more than one literally shaking with fear, despite their weapons.
"My name is Caleb," I told him, then pointed at my chest and sounded my name out carefully. "Caleb."
His eyes grew wide and he rocked back in his stance as a gasp went up from the people around him.
"Holy shit," he rumbled in English, still staring at me. "Where the hell did you guys come from?"
Chapter Eighteen
Rachel:
"Here they come," Pete said, a hint of nervousness in his voice.
She didn't blame him for being worried. The Predecessor-tech ships had torn through Gregorian's fleet in less than an hour and Cutter's forces didn't even have a cruiser to put up against them. She could see the little ships coming around the curve of the moon in the tactical display, accelerating at rates that were unheard of even with the Teller-Fox drive. They would be on Cutter's force in minutes.
"Don't fret, Mr. Mitchell," Chang said with what she thought he probably considered a reassuring tone. "We're prepared for them, unlike our late, unlamented predecessors." He snorted a giggle. "Sorry, no pun intended."
"Attack patterns are synchronized," one of Cutter's men droned from his station. "Unless they have any more surprises, this should take care of them."
Rachel wasn't quite as confident, but she kept it to herself. She merely watched and tried to keep her fists from clenching as she saw the enemy craft drawing nearer.
"We've got reach on them," the crewman tasked with operating the tactical board reasoned, half to himself she thought. "From the recordings you showed us, those weapons of theirs don't have a very long effective range. And the first of them should be in laser range in about thirty seconds."
"Wait until I give the word," Cutter told him. As an aside to Rachel, he added: "Don't want to scare off the others. They're too fast and too numerous to let them swarm over us quicker than we can shoot."
He must have thought that he was being genial, but to her it sounded condescending and creepy. She still wasn't sure she believed his version of how that man Nouri had died...
"Our lead ships will be in range of their weapons in one minute," the crewman reported and Rachel could see a red line projected in the Tactical display to show the point where it would happen.
Chang didn't reply, watching the time pass on the readout, watching the advance of the alien ships. Thirty-five seconds passed before he spoke again.
"Open fire."
It was anticlimactic, Rachel thought, for her first space battle. There was no sound, no sense of motion, no spectacular explosions. Everything was simulated in the tactical display---realistically simulated, but still somehow less real to her than a ViRdrama. Simulated lasers shot out from the simulated lighters of Cutter's fleet, connecting them for just a heartbeat with the enemy ships. And then those enemy ships disappeared in flashes of light that were quickly swallowed up in blackness.
"The lasers seem to be effective against their shielding," the tactical officer said---redundantly, she thought, but some people just talked to hear themselves talk.
Four of the enemy ships were gone now...no, five. Another exploded as she watched. And it seemed to her as if the others were hesitating now, slowing in their acceleration rather than heading at breakneck speed into the fight.
"Keep firing," Chang urged. "Take out as many as you can before they get smart."
"Are we sure we want to be making enemies this soon?" Rachel asked him, hesitantly because she really didn't like talking to him. "After all, we just got here. Maybe they think they're just defending themselves."
"Their thoughts are not nearly as pressing as their weaponry," Chang replied. "If they wish to negotiate, we will do it from a position of strength."
"Three more of them down," the tactical officer told him. "They're retreating."
"Well done, everyone," Chang said, and Rachel assumed he was broadcasting to the other ships in his group. "Defensive formation and hold up here for a moment." He turned to Rachel and Pete, loosening his safety restraints slightly. "Now, we can check the feed from the drones we left behind."
"Got the signal," the other crewman, the one who'd been on communications and navigation, announced. He was different from the man on Tactical, with a ready smile and a more normal looking face. "Bringing up the recording."
"There they are," Chang said, pointing to a computer avatar displayed in the recording from the drone. "Too far for a visual but we've got gravimetic readings."
Rachel leaned forward in her seat and peered intently at the holographic display, watching the simulated bulbous mass of the lifepod as it rocketed away from the doomed cruiser. The bigger ship was coming apart in sprays of ignited atmosphere before the pod was a kilometer away, and she found herself holding her breath and trying to use her will to force the little craft to safety.
It managed to clear the cruiser though, at least a hundred kilometers away by the time the big ship's reactor finally overloaded and blew, consuming it in a globe of white fire. It followed an arc down to the nearest body: one of the gas giant's moons.
"Which moon is that?" Pete asked, squinting at the display in confusion. "The one the ships came from or the other habitable one?"
There was a hesitation as Chang's focus shifted and she assumed he was checking via his headcomp. Then he looked back to them, smiling that constant, annoying smile again. "They landed safely on the larger continent of the smaller moon. It's the same one the interceptors came from."
"So, what do we do now?" Rachel wanted to know.
"We have to go get them!" Pete said, hands up in the air like it was obvious. Rachel shot him a quelling look, but Cutter was nodding.
"Of course," he agreed, surprising her. He must have noted the look on her face, because he went on. "Whatever you may think about my motivations, Kara is my closest and oldest friend. I won't abandon her to the things that attacked us without provocation." He hit a control. "Colter, we need a flight of assault shuttles and four platoons of ground troops ready to launch within the hour."
"I want in," Pete insisted, the intensity in his face so unlike the cool professionalism that the military had drummed into Cal.
"Me too," Rachel spoke up immediately, despite the fact that she was deeply, deeply afraid. She just knew that she couldn't count on Cutter's people to watch out for Caleb, or for Pete.
Cutter seemed to consider it for just a moment before he surprised her again. "Very well. It's your decision though. I'll have my people do my best to protect you, but in the end, you'll have to take responsibility for your own safety."
"We'll be fine," Pete insisted stubbornly. She was tempted to attribute his self-confidence to the exuberance of youth...until she realized he wasn't exactly a kid anymore.
Maybe, she reflected, it was the false feeling of immortality some people got from surviving things that had killed so many others. But that sort of luck had a bad way of running out.
* * *
Mitchell:
"You've been here how long?" Deke asked, squatting across the fire from the shaggy man who'd introduced himself as Donald Yu.
"I don't even know for sure," Yu told him, staring out at the night sky, at the glittering arc of light that was the dust ring around the gas giant. "I'd been here twenty three years, four months, six days and five hours when my personal datalink went down." He shrugged. "The lifepod from my ship was damaged in the crash. The days here, the years, they're different, but I think it's been at least six or seven since then."
I tried not to stare at him, glancing around the large bonfire at the others. There was a subtle difference between Yu and the others, something more tha
n the obvious benefits he'd accrued from civilized health care. There was a look to them of something feral and hunted. None of them had said a word to us...not that we would have understood it if they had.
"How did you wind up here?" I asked him. "Were you a military scout?"
Yu shook his head. "I was a mineral scout for the Corporate Council."
"Small world," Kara murmured.
"I got a tip from some old independent prospector," Yu said, his mouth working the words as if he wasn't used to speaking English. "He'd been on the inner rim for years and he was half crazy." He laughed a bit too loud. "Of course who am I to judge? Anyway, he told me this nutty story about an undiscovered Transition Line that led to a crazy system with inhabitable planets. But he told me it was dangerous, that there were aliens out there that would come after me."
"But you went anyway," Deke assumed, waving a hand around them.
"But I went anyway," Yu agreed. "And I've been regretting it for the last twenty-something years, believe me." He shrugged, looking over at one of the females of the group, a sturdy-looking woman with brown hair and good teeth who smiled at him unsteadily. "Well, not all of it. But I never expected to see anyone else from the Commonwealth."
"So," Kara interjected, "your ship was attacked by the same interceptors that hit us?"
"Not just you. There've been others." He sighed wistfully. "Three others, actually. But they weren't as lucky as we were. All that landed was the wreckage of their ships...once just the ashes burning up in the atmosphere."
"So," I asked, "where did all these other people come from then. I mean, they are humans, right?"
"Well, I don't exactly have a biomedical scanner handy," Yu answered ruefully. "But as far as I can tell, they're as human as me or..." He trailed off, glancing at Trint. "...you."
"You speak their language, do you not?" Trint asked.
"Better than English at this point," he replied, nodding. "But they don't know either. They just know they've been here since 'the time of their mothers' mothers.' They're a matriarchy, for the most part," he added tangentially. "But there's no evidence, no hint at all of any technology higher than forging iron, and even that takes a lot of work. So either they've been here a long damned time or whoever brought them here left them naked and then taught them to forge iron and grow crops."
"What about all this?" I asked him, pointing back at the village at the edge of the communal bonfire. The houses were made of local wood and stone, but their design and layout seemed somehow more modern than they should have been. "Was this here when you got here?"
"Not even close," he said with a chuckle and what seemed to be a glint of pride in his eyes. "They lived in wattle roundhouses with a central hearth and a smokehole. I remembered some stuff from helping out with construction on the frontier colonies when I was younger." He shrugged.
"So," Kara said, wheels turning behind her eyes, "these people were brought here by the Predecessors? Is that what we're trying to avoid saying?"
"And whoever or whatever they left behind," Deke continued her thought, "is making sure no one fucks with these people...or takes them away."
"Why the hell would they do any of that?" I wondered, sitting back on my elbows. "And how does it help us get out of here?"
"No one's getting out of here," Yu told me, snorting.
"We have a whole fleet out there," Kara assured him. "And if I know the man leading it, he won't be as easy to knock down as a few mineral scouts."
* * *
Pete:
Pete Mitchell tried to keep his stomach out of his throat as the shuttle screamed through the moon's atmosphere at over twenty times the speed of sound. He clutched at the pulse carbine strapped to his chest and concentrated on the rush of upcoming combat instead of the rush of his lunch trying to escape.
How did Rachel seem so calm, he wondered, watching her out of the corner of his eye. She sat in her acceleration couch, hands resting on her carbine, staring straight ahead impassively. She was wearing Reflex armor under her utility fatigues and her envied her the freedom of movement: he was stuffed into BiPhase Carbide and DuraWeave armor at least a generation old and he felt like it was suffocating him. He tried not to show his discomfort though---the six other men and women strapped into the seats in the back of the lander were outfitted the same way and didn't seem to mind it.
They had, he noted with a little envy, bigger guns though. They were also even more at ease than Rachel, joking and laughing through the heavy acceleration and deceleration, even though they knew the lighters in high orbit above them had to be battling the little interceptors and any second a stray shot could take them out.
Maybe they all have cloned backups, he thought with a quiet snort. Fucking weirdos.
"Two minutes," came an announcement over the compartment's speakers.
"Thank God," Pete breathed.
"You that eager to get shot at, Pete?" Rachel asked him quietly.
"Just ready to be off this flying target," he told her. "At least out there we can shoot back."
"Why aren't we getting fire from the surface?" The question came from one of Cutter's mercenaries and Pete only noticed it because the tone seemed less indifferent than the idle chatter in which they'd been indulging. "They got that tech, why aren't they using it?"
Pete looked back at the man. He was taller than Pete---but then, most people were---with multicolored dreadlocks stuffed mostly inside his helmet and cosmetic implants in his face that curled around his eyes.
"What difference does it make?" another of the mercs answered carelessly. She was shorter, broad-shouldered with what might have been muscle implants and one visibly bionic eye. "Why look a gift horse in the mouth?"
"Nothing ever goes the way it's supposed to," the dreadlocked one returned with a sour expression. "There's a huge city down there, gotta be thousands of people living there. There should be ground fire."
"One minute," the pilot announced.
"Cal's gotta be all right," Pete said softly to Rachel. "I mean, right? There's nothing that can touch him."
"I want to believe that, Pete," she said, staring into space. "But we are, as Cal likes to say, fucked up and far from home."
The roar of engines penetrated the compartment as the shuttle came in lower, and Pete's eyes were drawn to the tactical display, where he could finally see details of the city below them. He'd caught a glimpse of it during the operation briefing---and brief was the key word for it---but now he could see the whole thing.
And it seemed...wrong. Not just because it was alien; he'd expected the same sort of mind-bending lines he'd seen on the Corporate base at Petra, where they'd hoarded Predecessor technology. No, it was because it seemed broken somehow, incomplete in a way he couldn't wrap his head around. It had the alien quality too: there was something not right about the curves of the buildings, something no human mind would conceive. Just looking at them, he couldn't assign values to them by sight, the way he might have with a human city---there were no obviously shaped or placed warehouses or business districts and nothing he could even discern as a spaceport. Things moved that might have been vehicles, but that was the only familiar thing he could see, and even that wasn't totally clear.
What the hell are we facing down here?
"Go! Go! Go!"
He didn't know who was yelling, he hadn't even felt then shuttle touch down, but he reacted like he'd been kicked in the pants, yanking the quick-release on his safety restraints and bolting from his seat with Rachel right behind him. He pulled down the visor of the helmet they'd loaned him and tactical data floated over his vision, threatening to overwhelm his senses before he could process it all.
Cursing under his breath, he found a control on his wrist to switch off everything except the IFF sensors and the link to his carbine's gun sight, barely getting it adjusted before his feet hit the ramp. It was nighttime on this side of the moon, but the light-intensifying function of his helmet had a lot to work with from the arc of the ga
s giant overhead. The shuttle had landed in a cleared area that he might have thought to be a public park of some kind if it hadn't been such a puzzling mix of bare earth, what might be the evolutionary equivalent of grass and oddly shaped and seemingly useless patches of pavement. Shapes that could have been sculptures or totems or traffic signals stood up from the bare ground or sometimes the grassy patches.
And then there they were. They were the same things that the Corporate Council had passed off as Predecessors...except slightly different. The long, striated faces were the same, the swept-back and featherlike hair, and the long-torsoed bodies and the backward-bending legs. But there was something less smooth to these creatures, more rough around the edges. They wore more clothes than the cloned versions the Corporates had paraded out, and there was a feral look to their faces that he couldn't quantify.
There were three of them in the park---or whatever it was---and they seemed to be rushing toward the shuttle rather than away from it, their hands filled with what Pete was fairly certain were weapons of some sort. They wore what might have been armor if it wasn't just what the things used for clothes---but the garments seemed segmented with hard plates of some kind, so Pete pegged it as armor in his mind.
The lead of the three aliens raised the hand-weapon and Pete felt a wave of strangeness wash over him as he realized the thing had two sets of opposable thumbs. One of the lead mercenaries obviously wasn't as entranced, because the woman responded to the weapon with a round from her Gauss rifle. There was a hypersonic crack and the Predecessor alien pitched backwards with a fist-sized hole through its chest.
That seemed to be the spark that set off a barrage of gunfire and within two seconds the other two aliens were down as well. Pete wasn't squeamish about violence, not after seven years as a Constable on Canaan, but he felt a clench in his gut at the way the aliens collapsed, their oddly shaped bodies torn apart by laser pulses and projectiles.