Beretta grinned at Heaton and nodded. “Yes. Get us out of sight. These Marine tac boats have dark and silent running capability. Can you work out how to activate that?”
“Don’t think I have the brain power for that. You are the brains, boss. I’m sure you could do it, better than me at least,” Titch said, shaking his head.
“Yes,” Beretta said brightly. “I think I probably could.” He turned his back on Heaton and walked to the flight deck, dropping into the pilot seat. He turned to Titch and spoke quietly. “You think we can use Tears back there?”
“He could be handy when it comes to getting around the destroyer. You sure you want to steal one of the fleet ships?”
Beretta shrugged. “It’s an opportunity. We might as well give it a shot. If it all goes wrong, we can always just steal a bunch of guns and ammo and get out of there.”
“And if it does go wrong…” Titch said. He jerked his head toward the back of the tac boat and Heaton strapped to his seat. “What about him?”
“He isn’t anything. If he wants to turn traitor on his people, I’m happy to make the most of the opportunity. But if he’ll turn traitor on them, I don’t see why we should trust him. We can make the most of him and then finish him off when he’s done his job.”
Titch and Beretta turned and looked back at Heaton. Heaton was looking at them with tear tracks dried on his cheeks. Beretta grinned and nodded. Titch smiled and pointed a finger and clicked his cheek, giving Heaton a wink. Heaton smiled back and wriggled in his restraints.
“Do you think I could get out of this seat now?”
“No, you relax there now, Tears. We will have plenty for you to do soon enough.”
Beretta turned back to the flight console and worked the system to send the boat into dark running mode. Then he set course for the orange gas giant and the Scorpio.
7
The Skalidion swarm charged across the wide, dark stellar void. The fighters formed a huge teardrop shape, the huge bulbous end leading the way. Buried in the tail of the million-strong swarm came the nest asteroid—a huge, recycled rock secreted by the Skalidion builder drones using matter harvested from fallen enemies.
And in the center of the nest asteroid sat the swarm queen, Skoldra. She urged the swarm onwards.
Skoldra snatched a frozen human corpse floating across the huge inner nest chamber. The feeder drones brought fresh human corpses regularly to satisfy the queen’s appetite. She rasped at the frozen body and felt the thrill of the taste ripple through her.
The human larder was running low. Skoldra had gathered the dead that had been found floating in space, lost from a human starship and found by Skoldra. It was an addictive taste, and she had left her vast territory on the edge of the Skalidion Empire to pursue the humans across the void into unknown space beyond so she could capture more humans, live humans, and finally satisfy her hunger, her thirst, her desire.
Skoldra looked out of the large, dark eyes of the observer drones on the leading edge of the fighter swarm. She could see the faint signs of a distant star, a fresh starfield on the far side. The familiar stars of her own territory were left long behind. No swarm queen would give up her territory and hope to return; the neighboring swarm queens would move in as soon as her pheromone field faded. Usually, a fading pheromone field suggested a swarm queen was failing, so the neighbors would move in, destroy and consume the weak swarm queen, and take control of the swarm, expanding their territory and their power.
But Skoldra had not left any drones behind. They were all with her, her massed swarm, the product of intensive spawning and conquest. She was powerful and moving into a region ripe for conquest. A new empire would be born, with Skoldra as empress. Soon she would spawn a pair of sub-queens and expand into the new territory. But first, she would feed. First, she would drink. First, she would locate and conquer the human fleet and take them for her food.
Skoldra was mad with desire for human flesh, but a small part of her calculated and thought forward. She knew she would soon be without her most desired drug—human flesh—if she simply consumed every last human. She would have to sustain a live population to maintain a supply, to grow her larder. If she was to provide herself with an unending bounty of human flesh, she would have to preserve some stock and make sure they created new spawn. No swarm queen had managed a conquered population, but no swarm queen had tasted human and fallen for its taste as Skoldra had.
She would be the first empress of this new region and would become a farmer of human flesh.
The signal picked up by the forward observer drones fed back to Skoldra. She dropped the half-eaten corpse from her monstrously long, spindly fingers, the limbs detached from the body and floated freely through the nest chamber. A builder drone cautiously snatched the discarded debris and extracted all matter from the remains, ready to lay it down on the outer wall of the nest asteroid.
The observers informed Skoldra that they had spotted the edge of the stellar void and a starship, unpowered and adrift.
A human craft.
Skoldra sent a signal through the pheromone field to the front edge of the swarm. A pair of fighters and an observer drone raced ahead to close in on the human starship. A dark, mid-sized craft.
The observers fell behind the two fighters as they came near the craft. Adrift and tumbling gently, heading in the direction of the edge of the void. Skoldra watched in hope and expectation. Humans rarely abandoned their own, but the fleet was so huge that some had been lost and left behind. This was the third such craft Skoldra had encountered during her pursuit of the human fleet. Both had contained fresh corpses. Maybe this time, she would be lucky and find a live survivor.
They would not be alive for long. They would be taken to Skoldra, to her nest and the inner chamber, where few were ever allowed to tread, but a fresh, live human would be brought forward. The last thing they would see would be Skoldra’s rasping mouth, salivating with the digestive enzymes pouring from her mouth parts before they were torn to shreds.
The thought made her quiver.
The fighters detached from their craft and landed on the outer hull of the tumbling human vessel. The fighters were small, but powerful and armed with the long green fire weapons. They scuttled over the hull, looking for an entry point.
Skoldra watched her two fighters. They flushed with pheromone reply as they found the ship’s hatch.
Skoldra instructed her observer to move in closer.
Then the human ship opened fire.
A stream of pulses poured out from a laser assembly lying flush to the hull. The stream lit up the ship’s hull with a strobe effect. The weapon fire slammed into the observer drone, destroying it.
Loss of the forward observer drone meant Skoldra was blind. But she knew now that the humans in that ship were alive. And the taste of a living human was a prize worth fighting for.
Skoldra sent a small detachment of fighters away from the swarm along with a number of observers. The fighters on the hull reported that they were being attacked with an energy discharge, throwing them away from the hull and out into space. Their crafts moved in automatically to scoop them up. With the fighters back aboard their craft, they kept their distance, evading the fire from the human ship and waiting for Skoldra’s instructions.
Skoldra waited until her fresh observers moved in close enough give her a view. Again, the human ship’s weapons fired at the observers.
The humans were trying to remain hidden from her sight. But the observers, alert now to the danger posed by the craft, evaded the streams of laser pulses and watched the craft that was still tumbling, drifting, and floating in the vast empty black of the void.
As Skoldra’s massed swarm came closer to the floating human craft, Skoldra could see the craft in detail from her hundreds of observers still within the massed swarm. A flicker of blue at the drive assembly suggested the humans were attempting to run, but the drive was malfunctioning. If it was active, they would be running by now. They would not stay here, alone and
at the mercy of the million-strong Skalidion swarm of Swarm Queen Skoldra.
“Destroy the ship’s drive systems. Destroy the ship’s weapons systems,” Skoldra sent the pheromone message to the fighter swarm detachment around the human ship. She watched as the Skalidion fighters’ green fire burned over the human ship. The drive spluttered and failed, going dark. The gouts of green fire burned over the hull and melted the laser emitters to a fizzing mass, cooling in the void.
Skoldra scuttled around inside her nest chamber, excited at the prospect of taking a live human, or maybe even a group. A tasty snack to keep her going until she reached the rest of the human fleet. She was following their drive turbulence trail left on the fabric of space-time. She would be on top of them, amongst them, and capturing them soon.
Then, as Skoldra cleaned her rasping mouth ready to receive the tasty human flesh, the tumbling craft exploded.
The flash from the explosion blinded her forward observer drones. The massed drones watched from a distance. Skoldra thrashed in fury. Had one of her fighters destroyed the ship? But then as the data streamed back along her pheromone field, she realized the humans, alive within the stranded ship, had destroyed themselves, choosing death instead of capture.
Skoldra tensed, her long limbs drawn back to her massive body. She thrashed out at the walls of her chamber, scraping chunks of material away. She continued to spawn larvae. A nurse drone scuttled along her spawn tube to collect the latest pod. Skoldra grabbed the nurse with one of her grasping hands and crushed the tiny drone. The nurse struggled as it was crushed, and then finally ruptured, the white and green innards spilling out and floating in a long, thick river of guts and slime.
Skoldra threw the nurse’s shattered remains at the wall and let out a blast of pheromone frustration. The frustration rippled through the million-strong swarm in waves. All the drones, from fighter to nurse, responded with a quivering that rippled back to the nest chamber, a quivering that was meant to pacify the angry queen, a quivering that was a reaction to the fear of their queen and her temper.
The swarm settled. Skoldra settled.
“Bring me another human corpse,” Skoldra said.
A nurse drone came in carrying a frozen human from the dead she had previously gathered. She rasped at the frozen body, the taste calming her. She relaxed and settled, her long limbs relaxed, flexing lightly.
The human fleet was not far away. Soon, she would have humans. She would destroy all who resisted her and take the remaining humans for her larder, for her farm.
She would feed on humans for as long as she would reign as the swarm queen of the new Skalidion Empire of the new stellar region.
8
Beretta maneuvered the tac boat alongside the maintenance barge that was headed to the orange gas giant in the outer system. The barge slowed to docking speeds. The boat touched down on the barge’s upper hull, directly over the transfer hatch.
Climbing out of his seat, Beretta crossed to the middle of the tac boat cabin. He deployed the lower docking tunnel and waited for the tell-tale sound of the soft docking. Beretta looked over at Heaton, still strapped in his seat, immobile and totally vulnerable, and gave the Marine a wink.
“Your time to shine is nearly here, Tears.”
“Whatever you say, boss,” Heaton said. He jutted out his chin in an attempted show of confidence and self-belief.
The floor hatch slid aside, and Beretta looked down into the maintenance barge. Looking up was a familiar face from Beretta’s mob, a low-ranking associate, a small rat-like man with a wispy beard covering his dirty face.
“Hey, boss,” the rat said. “The boys are ready.”
Beretta grinned and dropped through the docking tunnel to the barge’s deck. He landed lightly in the low gravity field of the docking tunnel and then stepped out into the standard gravity of the barge. A gang of men dressed in maintenance overalls looked at Beretta, some smoking cigars or mechanical pipes. The stench of smoke and dirt was gross.
Beretta walked into the group. They nodded in turn as Beretta passed by, each man a hardened criminal and a brutal gang member, specially selected to infiltrate a fleet destroyer.
“Looking good, guys,” Beretta said. “You look just like a bunch of grease monkeys. Anyone would think you really are a maintenance crew. Let’s keep them thinking that for as long as possible.”
The group answered as one, calling out ‘yes, boss’ as Beretta surveyed the gang. He recognized many of them, muscle from around his criminal network.
Beretta stopped in front of one with a bloodstain on the front of his overalls. Beretta grabbed the material at the stain and pulled at it. He discovered a cut in the material, a small slit in the center of the stain. Beretta gave the thug a stare.
“The maintenance man wearing it didn’t want to give it to me, so I gave this to him.” The thug held up a short black blade with a twin edge.
Beretta nodded. “Okay. Cover it up. It looks suspicious.”
The thug nodded. Beretta moved off and continued to press through the crowd—his gang of thugs all prepared to take over the Scorpio.
Beretta stopped after checking all the gang. The rat came up next to him.
“Where are the real maintenance crew?” Beretta said.
Rat tapped the deck plate with his foot. “We packed them in the under-deck equipment storage space.”
“Breathing?” Beretta asked.
“No. Did you want them alive?”
Beretta shrugged.
The pilot called back that the barge was approaching the Scorpio.
Beretta clapped his hands together and rubbed them vigorously.
“We know the ship has no Marine guard. We know she’s undermanned. Kill anything that moves and move toward the command deck. A bonus to the man who captures the captain. Don’t kill the captain. We need him alive, for a time.”
The barge entered the Scorpio’s hangar deck and touched down. The rear boarding ramp began to open out and then touched down, scraping across the deck. Beretta pulled out his pulse pistol and walked down the boarding ramp at the rear of the barge. He stepped onto the Scorpio’s deck and saw a maintenance chief waiting.
“Hi, I’m the Scorpio’s maintenance chief. Call me Slim.”
“Hi there, Slim,” Beretta said. He raised his pulse pistol and fired a single shot into the maintenance chief, burning a hole through the man’s chest and flinging him back across the deck. Beretta stepped over the fallen body as his gang rushed out of the barge and into the destroyer.
9
Jack approached the smoldering crater. Twisted and partially-melted composite, along with the shattered parts from various systems, showed Jack clearly that this had once been a spacecraft, but most certainly not a tac boat. Rather, it looked like this ship had been destroyed by a tac boat, but Jack was not about to jump to conclusions. He picked up a twisted piece of conduit and examined it. There was nothing here to identify it as being from any particular craft. He dropped it to the ground and dusted his hands off.
Lane approached Jack. “We found three still alive, sir,” Lane said, his voice low and quiet.
“Gather the dead, Squad Leader,” Jack said. He stepped forward and picked up another twisted piece of machinery. “Gather up all weapons and equipment and bring them to the boat.”
Jack turned the twisted bit of material over on his hands. He recognized the part as coming from a thruster assembly. The diameter of the thruster injector conduit leading from the piece was too small to be part of a tac boat. Also, the conduit was oval, and although that might have been deformation from the explosion that destroyed the craft, Jack also knew that oval conduits of this type were regularly used on civilian craft.
Jack drew his pulse pistol and activated the small electron blade on the muzzle. He sliced through the piece of machinery in his hand and created a fresh surface. The material this item was constructed from was not military-grade composite. This was clearly civilian. This had not come from the fleet.
Jack dropped the part to the ground and walked down the crater toward the final remains of the twisted craft. He cut away with his electron blade and removed a section of hull. It was from the lower section, and Jack found a serial number.
Now Jack could have no doubt as to its origins. Even though only the first part of the serial number was visible, the prefix was civilian.
Jack clambered back up the sides of the crater onto the plain and marched across to the tac boat. The Marines from third squad were laying the dead in neat rows next to the Marine craft. A stack of pulse rifles also lay there.
Jack reduced the local gravity on his tactical suit’s grav field and jumped up onto the upper hull of Tac Boat Three. He looked around the area. The light scorch marks toward the perimeter he had set around Tac Boat One showed him where the Marines had leapt forward using their tactical suits’ thruster packs. The pattern of fire had left scorch marks on the plain.
It all became clear to Jack now. A ship had touched down here, and a group had fought off the Marines and captured the tac boat. The weapon marks on the Marines’ suits showed only small arms had been used, but the civilian craft had been destroyed by a blast from the Fleet Marine ship.
Jack looked up into the blue sky. Somewhere out there was Tac Boat One, stolen, and under the command of a murdering group of renegades, strong and certain enough to take down two squads of well-armed and fully-equipped Marines. Although those Marines were poorly trained and fresh from that training, it still was shocking to Jack that they could have been overwhelmed so easily.
Three Marines sitting in the shade of the boat looked up at Jack as he dropped down.
“These are the three wounded men,” Lane said as Jack landed on the plain.
“What can you tell me about the men who came here?” Jack said.
One Marine coughed and spluttered, blood spurting out and his mouth as he tried to speak. Jack knelt next to the man and laid him on the ground.
Last Stand Boxed Set Page 16