“We’re so close,” she whispered angrily through her teeth. “Are they still headed for that nebular formation?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Captain Hezerah replied uneasily. “Right for it.” In all his years in the service, he had seen nothing quite like it. Like a giant fog bank in space, or some gigantic ball of wispy cotton, it hung before the racing ships like a siren’s lair on the seas of old. Much sensor probing and more discussion had not given them any more understanding of it than that it appeared to exist; it was real. He dearly would like to chalk up the remaining cruiser to the squadron’s score, but there was something unsettling about the cloud toward which they were heading, something unnatural that sent a shiver up his spine. He silently wished that Marchand would call an end to the chase. He did not want to take Furious in there.
In the main viewer there was a sudden flare where the Kreelan ship – otherwise invisible to direct observation – raced in front of them.
“Captain!” shouted the chief gunnery officer. “Looks like they had a core breach! She’s losing way!”
“Thank the Lord of All,” Hezerah breathed. “How long till she comes in range?”
“If their projected deceleration curve holds up, thirteen minutes, sir,” the navigator replied.
“Will she have reached the nebula?” Marchand asked quickly, her eyes fixed on the little red icon in the holo display that was now ever so slowly losing ground to her own pursuing hounds.
“On the current velocity curve, she’ll come within about three-hundred thousand kilometers of it by the time we’re in range.”
“Close,” Hezerah muttered.
“Order the destroyers to flank her at their best speed,” Marchand ordered her operations officer. The destroyers could make slightly better speed than the larger cruiser, and Marchand felt it worth the risk of pushing their drives past their already strained limits. “They are not to get within range, just keep her penned in. I don’t want her to get away from us now. Captain,” she said to Hezerah, “you are to commence firing as soon as we are in range.”
“Aye, aye, commodore,” he said. Anything to keep from having to go into that so-called nebula, he thought.
The minutes crept by as the human squadron, the destroyers now pulling ahead and slightly to the side, gained on the fleeing Kreelan ship. The human sensors recorded the debris the enemy cruiser left behind, silent mementos of the explosion that destroyed enough of her drive capacity to leave her far too slow to escape, to make it into the looming mist. It reminded the humans of how easily they could become marooned in this strange area of space.
Marchand watched with barely contained impatience as the main battery range rings on the holo display slowly converged on the enemy ship. At last they overtook the fleeing prey, flashing a set of gunnery data that was echoed throughout the ship’s weapons stations.
“In range, captain,” reported the gunnery officer.
“Commence firing!”
The lights on the bridge dimmed to combat red as the energy buffers of the main guns siphoned off all available power that was not used by either the ship’s drives or her shields. Seconds later, the energy was discharged into space in the form of a dozen crimson blasts from the cruiser’s main forward batteries, stabbing out toward the ever-slowing enemy ship.
“Three direct hits,” the gunnery spotter reported. She need not have; the extra long range and precise resolution of her special instruments were not required in this case. The Kreelan ship had long since come into view on the main screen at a medium magnification, and the hits were plainly visible.
“Fire!”
Again the main batteries fired, and it was obvious that the gunnery section had found the Kreelan cruiser’s range. Every crimson lance hit home, flaying the enemy ship’s vulnerable stern into flaming wreckage. The stricken ship began to yaw off course, a secondary explosion setting her tumbling about her long axis. A sudden flurry of shooting erupted from turrets along her battered hull as the human ships came into their line of fire, but the firing was erratic, poorly aimed. She posed no threat.
“Fire!”
The third salvo blasted the cruiser amidships, breaking her back. The stern section, two of the six drives still burning bright with power, broke free of the shattered midsection to drift uncontrollably until it exploded in a fierce fireball. The sleek bow section, still resplendent with the runes with which all Kreelan ships were decorated, tumbled end over end, trailing incandescent streamers that were the ship’s burning entrails.
Captain Hezerah was about to order the coup de grace when the chief gunnery officer spoke up. “New contact! Looks like a small cutter or lifeboat separating from the bow section.”
“What the devil?” Marchand asked, watching on the viewer as the tiny ship separated from the twisted wreckage of the cruiser. It wasted no time, heading straight toward the nebula at flank speed.
“Commodore?” Hezerah asked, waiting for her instructions. The guns were trained on the cruiser, waiting to finish her off. The escaping cutter was another matter. Unless they took it under fire right away, it had every chance of making it into the nebula.
Marchand had no time to consider. Something strange was afoot, and she was determined to get to the bottom of it. “Captain, you may finish off the cruiser,” she told Hezerah shortly. Turning to her operations officer, she ordered, “Have Zulu intercept the lifeboat, or whatever it is. She is not, repeat not, to open fire on it. I want it – and whoever might be on board – in one piece if at all possible.”
“Aye, ma’am.” The man turned away and quickly relayed her orders. Like a greyhound on the scent of a rabbit, the destroyer Zulu hauled her bows away from the dying cruiser to pursue the much smaller prey.
But as the Furious quickly finished off the remains of the Kreelan ship, it became clear that Zulu would not be able to get close enough to the escaping lifeboat to fix her with a tractor beam.
“Dammit,” Marchand hissed Nothing could ever be easy, she thought acidly, or even just difficult but straightforward. More and more, she wanted that ship, and whoever or whatever was on it.
It suddenly had become an imperative for her, an obsession. It was a hope for explaining the strange twists of fate that had brought them farther than any humans had ever been into this sector.
To the flag operations officer she said, “Tell Zulu to maintain contact and continue to close, if possible.”
“They’re to proceed into the nebula, ma’am?” he asked, his eyebrows raised. Their sensors had not been able to penetrate the milky whiteness, the likes of which no one had ever seen before. They would be running blind.
“Negative,” Marchand sighed. She was well aware of the dangers, and was not about to risk one of her ships in there. She had another idea. “She is to proceed to the mist’s edge only. And have the other destroyers patrol around the nebula. I don’t want us to be surprised from the far side. Captain Hezerah.”
“Ma’am?”
“Take your ship to the mist’s edge,” she told him. “And have the Marine detachment commander report to me immediately in my ready room. I have some work for them to do.”
As he carried out her orders, Hezerah silently thanked the gods that he would not have to go in there.
He also said a silent prayer for the Marines who would.
* * *
“This stinks,” Eustus muttered as he stared at the unbroken whiteness that was all either he or the pilots of the ship’s cutter could see. He’d never seen or heard of anything like it in space. It wasn’t a nebula, which was a lot denser than normal space, but nothing remotely like this. It was like flying through a cloud in atmosphere, with noticeable resistance against the vessel’s screens and hull.
“Tell me about it, Top,” the pilot in command, an ensign on his first tour, replied. “Talk about flying by the seat of your pants.” None of the instruments that were normally keyed to the universe beyond the small hull were showing anything, the mist effectively isolating them
from any points of reference except what the ship carried on board. The pilot knew only his relative velocity, distance, and bearing from Furious since the time they had launched. And if there were a gravity well in here – a planet or dwarf star, for instance – even the ship’s inertial readings would be rendered useless and they could find themselves completely lost. After they had entered the mist in pursuit of the Kreelan boat, they had quickly lost all contact with the Furious and the destroyers. He had no idea at all what was in the space around them except where they had just passed, which by definition was empty, relatively speaking. “There could be a frigging planet hiding in here and we wouldn’t know until we hit it.”
“Yeah, well, maybe that’s the idea, ensign,” Eustus replied. “And maybe there is a planet in here somewhere.”
“That makes me feel a whole lot better,” the ensign answered nervously. He was a good pilot, but this was the first time in his short career that he had piloted a boat entirely on manual. For once, he was happy that the cutter had such a big forward viewport, for all the other times he had complained about it being too much of a distraction. “At least I don’t have to do anything more than play taxi driver,” he went on. “You jarheads are the ones who get to play touchy-feely if we find something. Providing, of course, that we don’t smash ourselves into whatever it is first.”
Eustus grunted agreement, thinking back over the turn of events that had landed him here. Three months after they had returned from Erlang, Eustus had been ordered back to fleet duty, never having seen Reza recover from his coma. Assigned to another of the Red Legion’s battalions, his company had been parceled out to Marchand’s “Roving Raiders” as they were sometimes known, and he had been sitting aboard the Furious with the rest of his troops for the last few months, waiting for action that never seemed to come.
Until now, he mused silently. And not only was this one of the most hare-brained and dangerous schemes he had ever been part of, but he had the dubious honor of having to take charge of it. Captain Dittmer, the company commander, had been seriously injured four days before when her pistol discharged while she was cleaning it. While Eustus had never had anything against Dittmer and had gotten along well with the woman, her level of tactical proficiency had never been demonstrated until then, and Eustus and the others who had seen combat had not exactly been impressed. While technically Eustus was outranked by the four platoon leaders (the company did not have an executive officer replacement yet), all of them were “ninety-day wonders” straight from Officer Candidate School, and none had any combat experience. In light of those facts, Commodore Marchand had made him a brevet captain and put him in charge of the company for this grand, suicidal tour.
Without thinking, he touched the locket that Enya had given him, that now hung around his neck. As wearing any kind of jewelry while in duty uniform was completely against regulations, he kept it hidden just below the neckline of his tunic, taped to his dog tags. At least she’s safe at home, he thought. She had returned to Erlang to help her people rebuild, and had promised to wait for him, to have a home ready for the two of them. If Reza’s word were true, as Eustus had always believed it would be, the Kreelans would never again bother Erlang.
He turned to look down the length of the cutter’s passenger compartment, now in its modified configuration as a troopship. Since the commodore was only willing (thankfully, Eustus thought) to risk one cutter on this mission, Eustus had been forced to leave half his company behind. Worse, the two platoons now crammed into the cutter had hard vacuum gear but none of the powerful space armor like Eustus and Reza had trained with at Quantico so many years ago. He bit the inside of his lip as his eyes swept across the anxious faces of his people. If they ran into anything bigger than a bunch of rock-throwing, blue-skinned female neanderthals, he thought, they were in big, big trouble.
“Tai,” said the copilot, a female petty officer, to the pilot, “check this out.”
Not able to keep himself from butting in, Eustus said, “What is it?”
The pilot shook his head. “Don’t know. Looks like a partial signal return from somewhere ahead.”
“The lifeboat?”
“No,” the copilot said decisively as she studied the signal. “The signal’s too scattered. If it’s hitting anything, it’s got to be pretty big.”
“Like how big?” Eustus asked, peering at the multicolored lines wiggling across her sensor display, unable to make sense of it.
“Like that big,” the pilot said quietly.
As if they were emerging from an ocean fog bank, the clinging white tendrils that had surrounded the cutter for the last few hours suddenly dissipated: before them lay a planet, basking in the radiance of the surrounding globe of mist.
The pilot’s eyebrows shot up at what the sensors were telling him. “This thing has an atmosphere that looks like it should be breathable,” he said wonderingly. “One point two standard gees, oceans, cloud formations, the whole nine yards. All that, and no sun to warm the place. Maybe the mist does it somehow.”
“Jesus,” Eustus whispered, wondering if somehow the Kreelans had engineered this. “How could this be?”
“Beats me,” the copilot said shortly, “but there’s our friend.” The lifeboat was clearly visible on the sensor display, which now was functioning normally within the confines of the hollowed out sphere within the mist. “Looks like they suffered some damage clearing their ship,” she went on as she worked the instruments. “Scorch marks and some dents along her hull. Stabilizers look like they’ve been smashed up pretty good.”
“Can we catch them?”
The pilot shook his head as he took in the information that was now flooding onto the viewscreen, which was really a massive head-up display showing flight and combat information provided by the ship’s computer. “They’ll make the surface first, but we’ll be right behind them. From the size of the boat, there can’t be more than a few blues aboard.”
That was the least of Eustus’s worries. “What about on the planet? Can you read anything?”
The copilot shook her head, frowning. “Nothing in orbit, no ships or satellites at all, anywhere in here. On the surface, I can make out what looks like non-natural structures. But there aren’t any indications of habitation: no hot spots, no movement. Nothing. Looks like a damned ghost planet.”
“Then why the hell were they so intent on getting here?” Eustus asked himself aloud. “What could they have hoped to gain?”
The pilot shrugged. “Maybe it wasn’t always this way,” he said, speculating. “Maybe they thought there would be some help here.”
“And everybody just vanished?” the copilot snorted. “Come on, this is the Kreelans we’re talking about here.”
“True,” Eustus said, “but something really weird’s going on, been going on. Think about it: first, three heavy cruisers act like destroyer bait. Then they launch a lifeboat under fire – something I’ve never heard of, even in the tall tales you hear in the bars. And then they – whoever they are – head for what looks like a completely abandoned planet in the middle of whatever the hell this white stuff is.” He shook his head. “As much as I hate being in here, I think the commodore may be right. There’s something, or someone, in that boat that we need to know about.”
“Well,” the pilot said, “in about four and a half minutes you’re going to get a chance to do exactly that.” He glanced up at Eustus. “Better strap in, Top.”
“Roger,” Eustus said, quickly taking his seat – a flimsy affair compared to what the Marines’ regular dropships had – and buckling in. A minute later, he and his troops all had their helmets on, weapons checked, and were ready to go.
“Stand by,” the pilot announced over the intercom channel. “One minute.”
Eustus could feel the slight perturbations in the ship’s gravity controls as they balanced the internal artificial gravity against the rapidly increasing natural gravity of the planet. The scientists said that it was impossible to feel anyth
ing like that, because the equipment was so sensitive and sophisticated that it damped out the tiniest flutter. But Eustus could feel it, no matter what the scientists said.
“The enemy boat’s down,” the copilot reported. “I’ve got two targets moving away from it toward one of the structures, looks like an opening to a subterranean tunnel… Damn, lost them. Looks like you get to play hide and seek.”
“Gee, thanks,” Eustus replied sarcastically over their private channel. He did not need his troops to hear the very real fear in his voice. Following Kreelans into a tunnel on what looked like the only indigenous Kreelan world humans had ever discovered, knowing nothing about this place or whom they were chasing, was not Eustus’s idea of fun, even without the creepy mist they’d flown through.
“Ten seconds,” announced the pilot tensely as he guided the cutter as close as he dared to the yawning archway through which the escaping Kreelans had disappeared. “Ready… we’re down! Disembark!”
The cargo doors on each side of the cutter hissed open, and Marines poured from the ship to take up a security perimeter. Eustus leaped from the forward passenger door, a tight squeeze with his armor and weapons, but landed lightly for someone so heavily loaded with gear.
As the last Marine jumped from the hold, the doors slid shut and the ship pulled away from the ground with a bone-tingling thrum. A few seconds later it was circling overhead, its two twin pulse guns snuffling the air and ground for targets.
Eustus quickly surveyed his surroundings. They had landed in what looked like a huge, open plaza. It was not earth under his feet, but intricately sculpted tiles that seemed soft and pliant, not at all like the stone they appeared to be. All around them was what looked like a great terrace, climbing in massive steps to reach dozens of meters into the sky. Each level was decorated with runes and symbols that meant nothing to him, but that – had he had the time to marvel – he could not but help find intrinsically beautiful. Above them, strangely, the sky had a slight magenta hue, and well hid the featureless white of the strange mist that surrounded the planet and mysteriously gave it light and warmth.
In Her Name Page 76