The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian

by Jack Campbell

  “Got it, sir. Squad, we’ll use bounce grenades to flush them out and neutralize their stealth. Fire teams one and two, ready grenades. Set them on dust.”

  “Dust, Sarge? Not shrapnel?”

  “You heard me. You guys need another look?”

  “Yeah, Sarge.”

  The sergeant poked out his finger again, letting the image linger on the helmet displays of his squad.

  What’s a bounce grenade? Geary looked to one side of the Marine display and spotted a list of weaponry. He highlighted the bounce-grenade icon and got a description and an image. A grenade inside some sort of extremely bouncy coating, thick enough to let the explosive act like a superball toy.

  “Got it?” the Sergeant said as he pulled back his finger camera.

  “Yeah, Sarge. Looks easy. I done harder bounces in my sleep.”

  “Don’t screw it up. When I give the word, fire in sequence in the following order. Denny, Lesperance, Gurganus, Taitano, Caya, Kilcullen. Got it?”

  Six Marines answered up.

  “The rest of you apes get ready to go. Stand by,” Sergeant Cortez said. “Ready. Fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, fire.”

  Each designated Marine fired a grenade as the command reached their place in the firing sequence. Geary watched as the grenades bounced off the opposite bulkhead at a high angle, bounced again against the bulkhead opposite that as they went down the other passageway, then rebounded yet again through the open hatch to the decoy main engineering control compartment. He realized now why the shots had been slightly spaced, to prevent two or more grenades from glancing off each other and spoiling their bounces. As it was, there were six perfect double–bank shots, each grenade detonating after it entered the compartment.

  “Go!” Sergeant Cortez yelled to his squad.

  Geary watched the Marines hurling themselves around the corner and toward the open hatch, from which clouds of dust were now billowing.

  Vague outlines appeared in the dust gushing from the compartment, the wavering shapes of humans in combat armor, the dust revealing the figures despite the stealth features in the armor. Realizing they were partially visible, the sentries opened fire, hitting one Marine, before a dozen answering shots tore into them.

  The Marines kicked off hard on every possible projection, changing direction and bursting into the compartment, which was unrecognizable to Geary despite his previous visit because of the dust filling it. He realized why the grenades had been set to turn their coating into fine powder: that nullified the advantages of the Syndic stealth gear. Figures appeared in the swirling clouds as shots tore through it. The image from the Sergeant’s armor jerked wildly as the Marine took a hit, ending up tilted and drifting along one side of the compartment.

  Geary hastily switched Marines, picking up the corporal who was now the squad leader. Two more shots resounded in the compartment, then it was silent as the Marines combed it for any remaining foes.

  “Sarge is down! Looks bad.”

  “See what you can do,” Corporal Maksomovic ordered. “What about Tsing?”

  “Dead.”

  “Damn. Any Syndics left alive?”

  “If they are, not for much longer—”

  “Dammit, Caya, if you and the others find a Syndic still breathing, you keep them breathing! We got orders to get prisoners for interrogation, and you will damn well obey those orders!”

  “All right, all right, Mack. Hey, this one’s still— Never mind.”

  Geary could see Corporal Maksomovic floating beside a figure in Syndic armor on which all stealth features had failed. “Can we do a revive and recover?”

  “Not with a hole that big in her. I don’t know how she lasted as long as she did.”

  “Hey, Mack, I found that nuke we was looking for!”

  “Don’t touch it, Uulina!” The image moved hastily, focusing on a squat cylinder anchored in one corner of the compartment. On the corporal’s helmet display, his combat system automatically identified the enemy weapon and popped up critical information. “Major, we got a confirmed nuke munition. Fusion pack.”

  Major Dietz sounded both relieved and worried. “Is it armed?”

  “Uh. Arming switch.” Corporal Maksomovic’s helmet display highlighted part of the weapon he was gazing at, providing a schematic with on and off positions for the arming switch helpfully shown. “No, sir. Arming switch has not been thrown.”

  “What about the timer?”

  “No, sir. Timer is not running.”

  “Good job. Guard that thing yourself while we get a weapons engineer on the line to tell you how to deactivate it. And watch out for any Syndics trying to regain possession.”

  “Yes, sir. Major, we got a casualty—”

  “We saw. There’s another squad on the way with two fleet medics. Don’t let the Syndics regain possession of that nuke.”

  “Thank you, sir. Understand; we guard the nuke at all costs. All right, you apes,” the corporal said. “Even-numbered fire teams guard the open hatch, odd-numbered fire teams guard the closed one. Don’t bunch up and make killing you all easy for them! Spread out! Kilcullen, see what you can do for the sergeant until those medics get here.”

  “Where you going, Mack?”

  “I gotta stay next to madam-nuke-your-butt. You watch for more Syndics, and I’ll watch it.”

  Another voice came on, Geary realizing that he was hearing the Marine senior-command circuit. “How’s it going, Vili?” General Carabali asked.

  “I’ve got it in hand,” Major Dietz replied. “Command area secure and counterattack under way. We have decoy main engineering control and are preparing to retake the decoy bridge.”

  “I saw. All right, everybody. Major Dietz remains the on-scene commander. Take your orders from him as you board Invincible.”

  A chorus of replies came from the captains and lieutenants commanding the companies and platoons being fed into Invincible from Typhoon. Major Dietz began calling out orders, sending units to different decks and passageways to form a cordon that would sweep through Invincible. “Unit of maneuver is squads,” Dietz said. “Nothing smaller is to operate independently.”

  “Squads?” a captain questioned in a startled voice.

  “You’ll understand why as you get deeper into the ship,” Major Dietz said. “Maintain a full platoon at the air lock the Syndics used to enter the ship and be ready for some of them to come out.”

  “Come out? To what? There were some shuttles hanging around, but the space squids are blowing them away.”

  “You’ll understand when you get inside the ship,” Major Dietz repeated. “The Syndics are going to be wanting to get out. Be prepared for them to hit you and be prepared for them to attack all out as they try to reach the air lock.”

  “Major, we got the decoy bridge!” a lieutenant reported in. “There’s another nuke here, but no Syndics.”

  “Say again? No Syndics?”

  “No, sir. I formed my people into a deck-to-overhead wall and moved them from one side of the compartment to the other. There are no Syndics hiding here.”

  “They abandoned a nuke?” a captain asked, astonished. “They, um, what the hell? What’s that? What’s there?”

  Geary checked the captain’s position, seeing that he was well within Invincible’s hull.

  “Major, what else is in here with us?” a very worried voice demanded.

  “Nothing that can hurt you,” Dietz replied. “Stay in squad-strength formations. General, the new troops aren’t acclimated to the environment inside Invincible. That may be a bigger problem than we anticipated.”

  “Merge them,” Carabali commanded. “Make your smallest unit of maneuver platoons and keep the Marines in each platoon in physical contact with each other.”

  Admiral Lagemann spoke to Geary. “War in a haunted house. I didn’t think war could be any worse, but we found a way. The first nuke, in decoy engineering control, had a force of six Syndics with it. If the other group had that same number, it wou
ld have been too small to handle the mental pressure of the Kick ghosts, or whatever the phenomenon is.”

  “You think they just bolted?”

  “I think it’s likely. Look what’s happening to the new Marines coming aboard, and they were in squad strength everywhere, about twice as large a group as the one the Syndics probably left with that second bomb.”

  Alerts popped to life in several places. In some, Marines were battling Syndic infiltrators. In others, the Syndics must have been firing at ghosts and giving away their locations to the Marines hunting for them.

  The Marines who had charged aboard Invincible from Typhoon moved much more cautiously now, pivoting often to check all about them as they pulled themselves through the deserted, dark passageways of the captured alien warship, and occasionally letting off their own bursts of fire at possible enemies who turned out to be nonexistent.

  “We got alerts!” someone was calling.

  Geary shifted views again, seeing through the helmet of the Marine lieutenant whose platoon was guarding the air lock. One of the lieutenant’s Marines was gesturing frantically. “Three or four of them from the movement! They’re coming so fast the gear can pick them up kicking off the walls.”

  “Smoke that passageway,” the lieutenant ordered.

  Smoke in this case meant more dust, the grenades going off in a series of bangs that briefly illuminated the dark passageway leading to the air lock before the dust blocked any light from penetrating it. Seconds later, the dust swirled as figures came flying through it.

  The Marines opened fire, killing three Syndics, whose bodies were knocked aside to drift lifelessly.

  “What the hell?” the platoon sergeant asked the lieutenant. “They didn’t even try to shoot. Just flew at us.”

  “Got more coming! Same passageway!”

  “They’re retracing their route in,” Major Dietz cautioned.

  Shots tore through the dust, a wild volley, followed by several more Syndics, who fired in all directions as they erupted into view. The Marines fired back, hitting all of them and killing all but one. The last Syndic special-forces soldier, wounded but still alive, reached the edge of the air lock and locked armored hands on it, facing outward as if fearing he would be pulled back inside Invincible.

  A Marine slapped a tap onto the Syndic, allowing comms with him. “Stand down now, man! Deactivate your systems!”

  “No!” Geary could hear the Syndic’s answering howl. “They’ll get me! Just let me go! Out there, where it’s safe!”

  “There’s nothing out there! We already blew away your shuttles!”

  The Syndic continued to grip the air lock edge, ignoring other attempts to get him to surrender.

  “Crash his armor’s systems and sedate him,” the platoon sergeant ordered.

  “If we hard crash his armor’s systems, we might kill him,” the lieutenant objected. “Our orders are to try to get some prisoners.”

  “Sir, if we don’t crash his armor and knock him out, he’ll kill himself. You can see the hits he took. We treat him, or he dies.”

  “We’ve got an exploitation team on the way,” General Carabali broke in. “Wait until they get there and can question the Syndic. They’ll have a medical team with them.”

  “Who cares whether another Syndic dies?” someone muttered.

  Carabali answered, her voice cold. “We care, Private Lud, because we need to know how many Syndics came aboard that ship and how many nukes they brought with them. Understand?”

  “Y-yes, General,” the unfortunate Private Lud stammered, doubtless anticipating further pointed conversations with his sergeant and lieutenant once the general had finished.

  Marines were flooding into Invincible. Given the ship’s size, and the need to keep the new arrivals into platoon-sized units, they couldn’t cover anything like most of the ship, but they could cordon off and begin sweeping the decks near the air lock and the areas around the decoy engineering control and bridge compartments. “I think we’ve just about got Invincible secured,” Geary said to Desjani.

  As if the living stars had been waiting for his statement to punish his pride, Admiral Lagemann’s urgent voice came on the heels of Geary’s words.

  “Admiral Geary, we just received a communication from a woman claiming to be the commander of the boarding force. She says she has a nuke and demands we halt operations and evacuate Invincible, or she’ll detonate the munition.”

  SIX

  “WHAT did you say?” Desjani asked. “Something about Invincible?”

  “Never mind.” Geary had to pause to control his voice before he replied to Lagemann. “Where is she? Do we know where this commander and her nuke are?”

  Major Dietz answered, sounding grim. “Our best guess is in this area,” he said, indicating a spot aft of amidships and near the centerline of Invincible. “You can see the blocking forces we have stopping any movement along these lines, and as our patrols confirm areas are clear, the blocking forces establish new positions. We’re not encountering any more Syndics moving alone or in small groups, so it’s a reasonable guess that their commander figured out that the only way to prevent them from panicking was to pull her force together.”

  Dietz highlighted a grouping of compartments. “We think they’re here. That’s about where the transmission originated, and this block of five compartments offers a compact defensive position with limited access from above and below.”

  “How long until we know?” Geary asked.

  “I’ve instructed the patrols to move faster and converge toward the suspected Syndic location. Once we have them localized, I can send in some look-sees to get a better idea of how many and whether there’s actually a nuke in there with them.”

  “Ten minutes?” Geary pressed.

  “Half an hour,” Major Dietz said, visibly bracing himself as he delivered the information.

  Geary took a long, slow breath as he considered his options. “Get Emissary Rione and Emissary Charban on the line with that Syndic commander. Their instructions are to spin out negotiations and discussions as long as possible.” Technically, he didn’t have the right to order around either Rione or Charban since as representatives of the Alliance government, they were outside his command authority, but neither of them had made an issue of that lately. He doubted they would in this situation, either. “Let that Syndic commander think we’re right on the verge of agreeing to her demands while you figure out exactly where she is, get forces into position around her, and try to determine whether she’s bluffing about having a third nuke.”

  He mentally pulled back from the situation aboard Invincible, rubbing his eyes tiredly. “Tanya? What’s the big picture look like?”

  “Nothing new happening that we can tell,” she replied. “Eleven stealth shuttles have been spotted and destroyed. There hasn’t been a new detection for some time, so we might have gotten them all. What happened on Invincible?”

  “We’ve got two nukes, but there might be a third, and the Syndic commander is threatening to use it.” He shifted back to General Carabali. “Eleven Syndic shuttles have been confirmed and destroyed so far. Does that help estimate how many Syndics came aboard?”

  “It gives us an upper limit,” Carabali said. “The shuttles might not have been full. An operation like this usually has some excess lift capability in case some of the shuttles develop problems. Unfortunately, it tells us nothing about how many nukes they might have brought aboard.”

  “Do you think they would really detonate a nuke, if they still have one, when they’re also in the blast zone?”

  General Carabali frowned. “Admiral, these are Syndic special forces. Not fanatics from the Syndic security service.”

  “Major Dietz thought they might be fanatics.”

  “It was a reasonable guess, but from what I’ve seen of their equipment and tactics, they’re soldiers. Syndic special forces are highly trained and reliable, but I can’t think of any cases where they conducted deliberate suicide attac
ks during the war.”

  “You don’t think their commander will carry through with her threat?”

  “I don’t know, Admiral. It’s not typical of the Syndic special forces, but it’s not impossible. The Syndics seem to be falling back on suicide attacks out of desperation. An additional factor is that the, uh, atmosphere aboard Invincible is extremely unsettling. What impact that might have on the Syndics’ decisions even in a larger group I can’t say.”

  “Make sure we keep offering to let them surrender.”

  Carabali nodded, but she did not look hopeful. “They can’t assume if they do surrender that we’ll treat them as prisoners of war, Admiral.”

  “I have never authorized—”

  “That’s true, Admiral. But those were prisoners who were unquestionably Syndic military personnel. They had uniforms, they were part of units, they carried all the necessary official identifiers. In this case, the woman we’re talking to who claims to be the commander of this group isn’t giving a rank for herself. The Syndics we’ve killed, and in a couple of cases captured, have no military insignia or identification on them. They’re equipped with Syndic special-forces gear, but the equipment has had all identifying information scrubbed out and filed off. Even the implanted chips that contain medical and other information have been removed from their bodies. There’s nothing tying them to being part of the Syndic military and nothing giving them any official status at all.”

  Geary stared at Carabali. “Are they trying to claim they’re pirates or something?”

  “Private individuals,” Carabali said in a flat voice, “on a private venture. That’s all we’ve gotten out of the one prisoner who is able to talk.”

  “Do you think they’ll stick with that even if it means they face death for terrorist actions?” Geary demanded.

  “It’s hard to tell, Admiral. We’re in unexplored territory when it comes to that. Before, they’d be Syndics, and we were at war, so we’d treat them all as combatants. For better or worse. Now that we’re officially at peace, technically the official Syndics have protections as prisoners that freelancers do not. However, they don’t seem to have anything on them that would prove any claim they made to official status, if they tried to make one, and I think it’s a reasonable assumption that the Syndic CEOs here will deny any knowledge of them and their actions, which means that no matter what they said, we could legally, officially, and with honor execute them all.”