by Rick Partlow
Velazquez stepped forward with desperate speed and shoved his borrowed weapon into the unarmored joint under the Tahni's armpit, jamming his finger against the trigger pad long enough to empty the magazine. The enemy infiltrator jerked spasmodically and blood sprayed out from the joint in the armor, splattering across Velazquez' bubble helmet and blinding him for a moment. He tried to wipe the blood away with his free hand, but the dying Tahni was collapsing right on top of him and he wasn't quick enough to get out of the way in time.
"Shit!" he blurted, feeling absurdly guilty for having cursed twice in the same day.
The floor smacked into the back of his helmet and his head impacted the inside of the polymer bubble with complementary force, sending stars across his vision, while the not inconsiderable mass of the enemy corpse fell across his chest and suddenly made it hard to breathe. Wheezing and blinking against the explosions of light clouding his sight, Velazquez thrashed desperately against the deadweight of the big Tahni trooper, dropping his pistol and using both hands to push at the armored shoulders while he tried to wiggle his legs out from beneath the alien's hips.
He managed to get his legs free and twisted around to roll out from under the massive torso and its heavy armor plating, wiping a hand across his helmet's faceplate to clear it of the blood spray. He could barely make out the details of the corridor around him through the red smear his efforts had left, just the broad outlines of the bulkhead and deck and overhead, and blurry grey shapes on the ground. He hunted around on the deck for his pistol as he glanced furtively from one side to the other, trying to get a clearer picture of what was happening.
He saw the blurred, fuzzy outline of a figure walking towards him, some sort of weapon in its hands and he bit back another curse as he scooted backwards away from the threat, sweeping his hands back and forth to try to find that damned pistol...
His fingers closed on it just as the grey figure reached him, stepping on the pistol's emitter, then leaning down and wiping the smeared blood off of his faceplate. It was Major McIntire. Velazquez let out the breath he'd been holding and slumped back to the deck, panting. Looking around, he could see that all the rest of the Tahni were down, the one he'd killed plus six more, most of them with fairly obvious laser wounds but one with his helmet---and the head inside it---twisted around backwards. One of the bodies twitched and he jumped a little, but then it went still again.
"Thanks for the help," Kara McIntire said, offering him a hand. He didn't think he detected any mockery in her tone, but he wouldn't have blamed her.
"Oh yeah," he snorted ruefully, accepting the steel-strong grip and the assistance getting to his feet. He almost slipped: there was a lot of blood on the deck. "I'm sure you couldn't have taken them without me."
"You kept your head under fire," she told him in a chiding tone, bending down to retrieve the pulse pistol and hand it back to him, butt-first, "in what I imagine was your first fight. That's not nothing."
He nodded, taking the weapon back and automatically replacing the spent magazine with a fresh one. Then he noticed the blackened and blood-stained hole in the side of the woman's EVA suit and his eyes widened.
"You're shot, ma'am!" he exclaimed, fighting an impulse to step forward as if she were about to collapse. At second glance, the wound wasn't bleeding anymore and he could see that her combat suit had resealed over the tear. What was that stuff anyway?
"No shit," she muttered, working at the yoke of her bubble helmet. She pulled it off and took a deep breath, wincing slightly. "I think I'll live, though. All else being equal, of course."
Taking a cue from her, Velazquez holstered the pistol and removed his own helmet. He was drenched with sweat and having the air from the ship's vents blowing on his face felt good, although he nearly gagged from the smell of all the blood. Tahni blood smelled different than human, but it still caused involuntary revulsion. He tucked his helmet under an arm and followed Kara back into the Engineering compartment.
Commander Holly Morai had her helmet off as well, and was working on the rest of her EVA suit, stripping it off to reveal the shifting camouflage of the armor beneath it. She was frowning, the look on her face troubled. She glanced back at the two of them then slapped a control on the console. An emergency radiation shield slammed down out of the overhead and sealed them into the compartment with a clamor of finality.
"What's the story?" Kara asked her, tossing her helmet onto the console next to Holly's and unsealing the front of her pressure suit. "Are you in?"
"No," the other woman said flatly, her palms flat on the console. "That fucker is smart: he didn't just run a software override from the command bridge, he must have had his people physically cut the optical connection from the Engineering station to the bridge. I can't take control of navigation from here."
"That doesn't leave us with much choice then," Kara said, shrugging.
"Much choice other than what?" Velazquez asked, clearing his throat to keep his voice from breaking.
"We have to cut the power to the drives," Holly replied, jerking a thumb at the main power trunk that stretched above them through a conduit in the overhead. Armor plating surrounded the superconductive cables as they took power from the fusion reactor below them out to the gravimetic drive pods that flanked the main hull.
"Are you going to flush the reactor?" Velazquez guessed.
"That's too easy for him to work around," Kara explained, shaking her head. "We'll do that first, but if we leave it at that, all he has to do is evacuate this level, wait till we run out of air, then come down here and restart it. We have to physically cut the power."
"The main power trunk?" His eyes went wide. "But if we do that..."
"We're stuck wherever we come out," Holly finished for him. "And once the auxiliary batteries run down, we're dead."
"We have to do it," Velazquez insisted, afraid for a moment that the two of them wouldn't be willing. "We can't let them use this ship against Earth."
"I fucking know we have to do it, Junior," Holly snapped at him. "That doesn't mean I'm happy about it." She sighed, back straightening. "Make yourself useful and haul these bodies into the airlock before we lose gravity. It'll be a huge fucking mess if we don't. Keep the weapons and ammo, though."
"Yes, ma'am," he said, shuddering a bit with distaste at the thought of touching the corpses, but doing it anyway.
Behind him, he heard Holly Morai speak quietly to Kara McIntire. "Sorry, sis," she said, the fondness in her voice hesitant, as if she was unused to it. "I was hoping we could get you back to Deke in one piece."
"Don't worry about me," Kara responded, and Velazquez glanced back to see the DSI agent's hand on the shorter woman's arm. "This is the job." She sighed, a sound full of regret. "Let's get it done before they get around to cutting off our air."
Chapter Twenty-Four
Reggie Nakamura gently lowered the not-inconsiderable bulk of the Marine guard to the paving tiles on the porch of the rustic, ranch-style house, then holstered the stunner at the small of his back and scanned the surrounding area again one more time. Darkness cloaked the forest surrounding them, imported human trees mixed seamlessly with the local fauna, and the only sounds were the local insects and night flyers calling to each other. He didn't detect any sensors other than the ones he'd already taken out, and he was sure this guard and the one he'd left secured a kilometer down the dirt road that was the only ground approach to the house were the only human security.
Clear, he broadcast via his neurolink, not wanting to take off his face hood even long enough to shout it out loud. There weren't any actively broadcasting sensors, but that didn't mean he wasn't being recorded by security cameras, and he really didn't feel like spending the next few decades in a Reformery.
General Murdock paced out of the tree line unhurriedly, looking incongruous in his own set of chameleon camouflage Reflex armor, a pulse pistol in his right hand hanging loosely at his side while his left held a device about the size of a 'link. He step
ped past Reggie and moved to the front door, touching the device to the palm plate there. The door slid aside, but no lights came on; Reggie knew that was by design, just as he knew that no chime would sound inside, as usually happened when an exterior door opened.
Reggie slid in front of Murdock and edged down the entrance hall, the darkness before him lit up like midday by his augments. The entrance hall and the living room beyond were decorated in an affected style from three hundred years ago, just like the house. Tapestries and faux artifacts from the Desert Southwest of the old United States hung on the walls or were displayed in cases fashioned from transplas made to look like glass, and the furniture was made from the wood of Earth trees grown in a lab at great expense. Ancient Earth designs from the 20th Century had become popular in some circles in the colonies, especially among the conspicuously wealthy. A Commonwealth Spacefleet Admiral wouldn't normally be among those, but then this was no ordinary Admiral.
The lone anachronism in the period decor was the entertainment center off in a side room adjacent to the living room, the glow of its holotank leaking through the sliding door left ajar earlier in the night. There were no thermal signatures inside the room and none anywhere else in the house, except the bedroom. No more than the usual complement of two bodyguards, no indication that the target suspected anything.
The thermal signature in the bedroom was moving.
Reggie held up a hand to halt Murdock before he entered the hallway that led to the bedrooms and bathroom, then waved the General back towards the door to the side room. Reggie stepped to the side, raising his pulse pistol as the human figure walked into the hallway and out into the faint glow of the entertainment center.
Reggie had never met Admiral Yussef O'Brien before, but he knew the man by reputation. The Chief Tactical Officer for Fleet Admiral Sato cut a broad-bodied, muscular figure that strained against his casual sleepwear and his mop of flaming red hair was even more disordered than usual from sleep. His friends, which Reggie knew now included Robert Chang, called him "Red."
Every image Reggie had ever seen of the man showed his face set in a perpetual frown, as if he'd just eaten something that didn't agree with him, but right now he was smiling.
"Don't tell me," the big man said jovially, his voice a booming Santa Claus, "let me guess." He pointed a blunt finger at the General. "Antonin Murdock." The finger moved to indicate Reggie. "And one of your pet monsters, I would suppose, but which one? Too short for Keller Savage or Deacon Conner, too skinny for Caleb Mitchell, too tall for Holly Morai...ah, it must be everyone's favorite bodyguard, Reginald Nakamura."
Seemingly unfazed, Murdock pulled off his face hood and tucked it into a belt pouch, his expression impassive. "So, you've been expecting us then."
"At some point," O'Brien replied with a shrug. "When Commander Forrester went missing, I began to wonder. When three more of us disappeared in as many days..." He chuckled. "I'm not a mathematician, but I can add."
"Yet you didn't run," Murdock said. It wasn't a question, but O'Brien answered it anyway.
"Self preservation wasn't one of the imperatives," he said. A snort of amusement. "But you should know that."
Reggie frowned, but said nothing. What the hell did that mean?
"What is the imperative then?" Murdock wondered. "If you're discovered?"
The look on the face of the thing impersonating Yussef O'Brien was colder and less human in that instant than anything Reggie had seen before.
"Mutually assured destruction."
Run, Reginald.
There was, Reggie knew, a way for a superior officer in Omega Group to phrase a command via the neurolink such that the implanted headcomp acted on it with no conscious agency. It was known as the Command Imperative, and it had never been used in the field, as far as he knew, during their whole six year tenure in the war. Murdock had used it now.
Reggie Nakamura found himself sprinting out of the ranch house at the full speed his implants, natural muscles and Reflex armor could take him; he didn't stop to open the door, just slammed his shoulder into it and felt it splinter around him in a spray of local wood. Then he was running full out into the utter darkness of the moonless night, dirt spraying up from beneath his boots on the isolated mountain road, and he couldn't even think about stopping.
He'd gone about half a kilometer when the house exploded. The shockwave hit him with enough force to send him pitching forward head over heels, tumbling through the dirt out of control for a dozen meters until he rolled off the road at a curve and slammed into a tree.
The combination of the blast and the impact were enough to break the command phrase's hold over him and he just laid there for a moment, ripping off his hood and trying to work air back into his lungs where the tree had knocked it out. A glowing mushroom cloud rose dozens of meters into the night sky above the forest, and many of the trees were knocked flat, uprooted by the blast. Others, including a few almost to the ditch where he rested, were already afire; God knew how far that would spread before it was extinguished.
Suddenly he felt a cold emptiness in the pit of his stomach. General Murdock was dead. It didn't seem possible: the Bulldog was immortal, everyone knew it. He hadn't even tried to get away; Reggie had been scanning behind him the whole time he was running. He'd stayed in the house on purpose, because he'd known that the O'Brien duplicate would have set off the bomb the second he moved. He'd sacrificed himself to let Reggie get out.
Reggie suddenly realized he was crying and shook his head, trying to pull himself together. He had to get out of here, or he'd wind up under arrest. He pulled his face hood back on, holstered the pulse pistol he hadn't realized he was still holding, then pushed himself up to his feet. It was another three kilometers down the dirt road to where they'd left the flitter, then a thirty kilometer flight back to Tartarus. It would be better if he was in his ship and off Eden before anyone came to investigate the explosion.
He sucked in a deep breath and started running.
* * *
There was a lurch that wasn't quite physical and Tyya-Khin felt his stomach float away as gravity abandoned it and the alarms began to sound. He fastened his safety restraints and tightened himself back into his acceleration couch. The lights and displays had flickered as well, and he could see from the indicators that the auxiliary batteries had taken over.
"We've dropped out of Transition Space!" G'san informed him, unnecessarily. They could all see the stars dancing by on the viewscreen, could all hear the announcement in English that echoed the alarm klaxons. There was a muttering among the bridge crew as they all secured themselves to their seats; Tyya knew they were beginning to lose confidence in him and this mission.
"Yes, I noticed," Tyya said, in a sarcastic tone that he'd learned from humans. He touched a control on his 'link. "X'tan-Fen, what is your status?" He called the squad leader of the troops who'd been sent to guard Engineering.
Nothing. X'tan was a grizzled veteran of the war, a true professional. If he wasn't responding, it was because he couldn't.
"Anyone in First Squad," he transmitted again, "respond immediately."
More silence, and faces staring at him in doubt and fear on the bridge. Damn it, that meant he was down to two squads, plus the bridge crew.
"Without the gods-cursed Security sensors working," G'san spat bitterly, "we are blind here."
"Did they flush the reactor?" Tyya asked sharply, trying to get all of his people on task. Truthfully, he felt as angry and helpless as any of them, but a leader couldn't show such things.
If the reactor had been flushed, it would be simple, if time consuming, to fix---assuming they could find and kill those damned humans.
"No, sir," G'san said and his face was fixed in a mixture of terror and despair. "They cut the main power trunk."
Tyya felt as if he'd been kicked in the belly. He wasn't an engineer, but he'd studied the details of the ship enough to know that the main power trunk would take days, perhaps weeks to repair or rep
lace.
"Where are we?" he asked the Helm officer, trying to buy time to marshal his thoughts. It would be a quick death for them if they'd wound up in a system with a Commonwealth military presence.
The male seated at the Helm station rotated a holographic display and squinted at it for a moment, translating from English.
"We've dropped into a system they call WISE J035000.32-565830.2." He made a gesture of distaste. "What a ridiculous name. It's a brown dwarf, no planets, no sign of any occupation."
Tyya let out a breath of relief, mind churning through the possibilities. There was enough food and water, and the batteries should last long enough for them to rig a workaround to get reactor power to life support. That would give them the time to replace the power trunk, though it would be slow going with untrained workers.
"What are your orders, sir?" G'san asked, and Tyya would have sworn there was resentment in the cast of his face, if not his words.
"We have to get rid of the humans now," he decided. "I'm going to have all the troops seal up and hook into the ship's internal air supply, then we'll flush the atmosphere and..."
"Tyya-Khin," a human voice came over the intercom speaker on the command chair. "This is Major Kara McIntire of the DSI. I'd like to speak to you before we're forced to kill any more of your people unnecessarily." She spoke English, but so did they all; it had been a requirement to go on the mission.
McIntire. The name seemed familiar. She was...
"The officer who came to visit my father,” he said, the knowledge suddenly coming to him. "I wonder how you came to be here, Major."
"The same way you did, Tyya-Khin," she told him. "Kah-Rint. We captured him and he gave you up."