“I don’t think they’ll have any trouble staying focused on that, Lieutenant,” the platoon sergeant remarked. He looked around, the motions a little jerky. “Let’s get this done and get off this ship.”
“They’re not real, Sergeant,” the lieutenant said in a voice that sounded as if she was trying to convince herself as well as him. “Remember, all of you,” she added, “don’t touch any equipment. It’s Kick gear.”
“No problem, Lieutenant,” a corporal said with his own nervous looks around. “Last thing I want is to make ’em madder.”
“Ten seconds, people!”
The combat engineers had pulled themselves back down to the deck and were holding the tape detonators while counting off the last seconds. “Fire in the hole,” one announced, then punched a detonator while the other engineer did the same.
Brilliant light flared where the breaching tape lay, almost instantly cutting through the deck. In gravity, the severed section would have dropped down to the next deck, but at zero g, it stayed in place until the entire platoon of Marines pushed off hard from the overhead, their armored boots slamming into the loose deck section so that they and the severed deck piece dropped through fast into the compartment beneath them.
Shots were blazing on all sides as the Marines faced outward and pumped out rounds at any indication of enemies. The deck section they were on was tilted up on one side, where it rested on a Syndic whose armor’s stealth features had failed when the mass of deck and a platoon of Marines in combat armor had landed on it.
“Got us a prisoner!” one of the Marines shouted, placing a rifle barrel against the helmet of the helpless Syndic.
Geary stared at the bolts of energy blazing through the compartment, through the hatches and through the compartments next to this one, wondering how anyone could remain standing in the blizzard of fire as Marines came in shooting from all sides. Then he saw the lieutenant’s weapon sight blink red as she tried to fire a shot and realized the Marine armor’s friendly-fire inhibitors were preventing anyone from shooting where another Marine was or would be.
The action lasted less than a minute as the Marines stormed into the compartments in overwhelming numbers. “Is there a nuke? Find the nuke!” someone ordered.
“Cease fire! Everyone cease fire! They’re all down.”
“Any left alive?”
“Just one. He’s not talking.”
Another shot went off. “I said cease fire, dammit!”
“I thought I saw— It’s those ghosts, Sarge—”
“Safe your weapons! Does anybody see a nuke?”
“Compartment alpha clear. No nuke.”
“Compartment bravo clear. No nuke.”
“Compartment cable clear. No nuke.”
“Compartment delta clear. No nuke.”
“Compartment echo clear. No nuke.”
Geary slumped in relief, taking a deep breath. The Syndic commander had been bluffing.
Somewhere inside those five compartments, that Syndic lay dead along with the rest of those who had followed her into Invincible. Had Rione still been talking to the Syndic commander when Marine firepower had put an end to the commander and the negotiations? The alien warship had picked up more scars and more internal damage, but in every way that counted, Invincible was still intact.
Your attack failed, Geary thought, imagining he was speaking to the Syndic CEOs. How many times do we have to beat you before you stop trying?
—
THERE were still two captured Syndic nuclear munitions to dispose of. Geary looked at his display of Marine icons, choosing Corporal Maksomovic again.
Someone had vacuumed up a lot of the dust in the air created by the bounce grenades. Without that housecleaning, the dust would have drifted indefinitely like a slow-moving sandstorm through the compartments and passageways without working life support and made Invincible’s interior even more inhospitable.
Geary couldn’t see Maksomovic’s face, but he could sense the unhappiness of the corporal as he hung in midair right next to the Syndic nuke. How long had Corporal Maksomovic been babysitting the infernal device?
“Corporal.” Captain Smythe had linked in, too, and was speaking to Maksomovic. “Commander Plant is here. She’ll walk you through disarming the Syndic nuke. Do you recognize the munition, Commander?”
“Oh, yes,” Commander Plant said cheerfully, “I recognize it. A standard Syndic Mark Five Fusion munition. Mod . . . three. Exactly like the other one that we just disarmed while everyone else was busy wiping out the last Syndics. A really nice piece of weaponeering. The Syndics can do some good work.”
“Can we render it safe, Commander?” Admiral Lagemann asked as he joined the conversation.
“Yes. Of course. Mostly safe, anyway.”
“Mostly safe?” Corporal Maksomovic asked hesitantly. The corporal had to be intently aware that not only was he floating beside a nuclear weapon but that an entire bevy of senior officers had come to watch and listen to him.
“Absolutely,” Commander Plant said. “Do you see an access panel with eight fastenings near the top? There? That one.”
“This one?” The Marine corporal’s hand reached toward the indicated access.
“Yes. Don’t touch that one.”
Geary watched the corporal’s hand jerk back as if a cobra’s head had just emerged from the bomb casing.
“Try to find an oval access with five fittings. It should be about midway up the casing. That’s it!”
“Am I supposed to touch this one?” Corporal Maksomovic asked.
“Yes. Pull the fittings. Don’t worry. The Syndics hardly ever booby-trap those.”
The corporal’s armored hand, which seemed to be trembling slightly, pried open the fittings.
“Now,” Commander Plant continued, “pry open the access. Not the top! Bottom first!”
Corporal Maksomovic’s hand jerked back again. He was mumbling something inaudible as he reached for the bottom of the panel and popped it up. A mass of wires was visible inside, reaching from above the access and leading down to separate locations below its rim.
“All right,” Plant said, “reach in, grab as many wires as you can, and pull them out.”
The corporal’s hand froze in midmotion. “Excuse me, ma’am?”
“Reach in, grab as many as you can, and pull them out. One yank.”
“Uh, ma’am, I was sort of expecting some directions that were a little more detailed. You know, like find this one wire labeled this way that’s this color and carefully snip it without damaging anything else.”
“Oh, no, no, no. That would be way too risky,” Commander Plant insisted. “It’s much safer to just yank them all out at once. It won’t explode if you do that. Well, it might explode. But not very much.”
“Ma’am, with all due respect, this conversation is not doing my morale any good at all.”
“Trust me! I’m telling you to do exactly what I would do if I were there. The first one we disarmed didn’t explode, did it?”
Despite the commander’s last statement, the corporal didn’t seem eager to follow the instructions.
“Corporal Maksomovic, do as she says,” Major Dietz instructed.
“Yes, sir,” the corporal replied in the fatalistic tones of a man ordered to jump off a high cliff by someone holding a gun on him.
Geary watched the corporal’s armored fist reach into the access and gather a thick cord of wires in its grasp.
“I just yank ’em out?” Maksomovic asked.
“Yes,” Commander Plant said. “All at once. Give it a good, hard yank and pull as many as you can out of there.”
Geary noticed in the periphery of the corporal’s view that his companions were edging gingerly away, as if an extra meter of distance would offer some sort of critical defense against a fusion bomb going off this close to them.
“Here goes nothing,” Corporal Maksomovic said, then tensed for his pull. The augmented strength of the Marine combat armor
allowed the corporal to give a very powerful yank. A rat’s nest of wires came completely free in his armored fist, leaving broken ends and connectors inside the bomb.
A single spark flared among the torn components visible inside the access. Geary realized his breathing had stopped the moment that spark snapped. But when nothing else followed, he managed to draw a deep breath.
The Marine corporal sounded as if he hadn’t been breathing, either. “Now what, ma’am?”
“Recycle the wires,” Plant replied, as if she had been directing the repair of nothing more hazardous than a balky bicycle. “I’d recommend putting the munition on a lifter and tossing it out the nearest air lock. You might still get a little explosion out of it, and there’s no sense risking that.”
“A little explosion?” Admiral Lagemann asked, clearly wondering what level of violence the munitions engineer would classify as “little.” But if he meant to ask, he changed his mind. “Do you need it for any kind of study or exploitation?”
“No, thank you, Admiral. We’ve captured a few of these. I doubt there’s anything we could learn from this one.”
“There aren’t any technical issues we could glean from it,” Captain Smythe corrected, “but we should still examine both nuclear munitions for any serial numbers or other data that might link them to a particular Syndic source. If you don’t object, Admiral Geary, I’ll have a shuttle sent over from Tanuki to collect both disarmed munitions.”
“Admiral Lagemann?” Geary asked.
“I think I speak for everyone aboard Invincible when I say we can’t get rid of those nukes any too soon,” Lagemann replied. “Captain Smythe is welcome to them.”
“Good work, Corporal,” Major Dietz said to Maksomovic.
“Thank you, sir. I’ve gotta confess, I would have been pretty nervous if the timer had been counting down while I was working on that thing,” Maksomovic admitted, as if he hadn’t actually been nervous as it was.
“The timer?” Commander Plant asked, surprised. “Oh, you wouldn’t have to worry about that. The timers on these Syndic munitions are fakes. As soon as you arm the weapon and activate the timer, the weapon goes off immediately.”
A long pause followed her words.
“Really?” Admiral Lagemann finally asked. “I’d heard rumors about that, but . . .”
“The rumors are true. Think about it, Admiral. You’ve got a target important enough to smuggle a nuke into it. Are you really going to risk having someone come along and deactivate the weapon while its timer is running?”
“What happens to whoever set the weapon and activated the timer?”
Commander Plant sounded puzzled by the question. “They’re standing next to a fusion event, Admiral. They don’t even have time to know what hit them before they’re gone. And I do mean gone. There’s nothing left. Plasma, maybe. Some charged particles. That’s it.”
“But . . .” Corporal Maksomovic said slowly, “we’ve got munitions like this.”
This time the pause was even longer and more awkward.
“We’re not the Syndics!” Captain Smythe declared with what seemed an excessive amount of jovial nonchalance. “Let’s stop all this chatter and get that disarmed weapon out of there, shall we?”
Recalling the old saying about not asking questions that you don’t really want to know the answers to, Geary exited the link and looked at Desjani. “All right. The situation is completely secure aboard Invincible. Let’s get back into a regular formation and head for the jump point for Simur. What kind of route to the jump point did you work up?”
She grinned as she sent his display the planned maneuver.
Geary looked at it, looked again, then nodded appreciatively. “Instead of cutting across the edge of the star system, you want to dive toward the star, then loop back up to the jump exit?”
“It adds about a light-hour to the trip, but there’s no way they’ll have any surprises along that path,” Desjani predicted.
“You’re right. I wouldn’t have gone that far off the optimal trajectory, which might have given the Syndics here a chance to adjust another attack. We’ll go with this. There’s one more thing I have to check before we head out, though.”
He called Captain Smythe again. “We’re getting ready to leave this area. Have your engineers completed their inspection of the hypernet gate?”
Smythe sighed heavily. “Yes, Admiral, and I regret to say that the gate was damaged extensively. Oddly enough, the damage could only be detected by a very close examination, but it is serious enough and extensive enough that the hypernet gate will begin to collapse . . . thirty-seven minutes and twenty seconds from now.”
“That’s a remarkably precise estimate,” Geary said.
“I’m a remarkably precise engineer, Admiral. I have a report you can pass on to the Syndics here. I made sure to emphasize that debris from Orion and from some of the courier ships was responsible for the damage. And don’t worry about the Syndics analyzing our report and reaching erroneous conclusions about the cause of the gate’s collapse. I had Lieutenant Jamenson prepare the report using her skills to the best of her ability.”
“Thank you, Captain Smythe.” Lieutenant Jamenson, the officer whose gift was to confuse things so that they were technically accurate yet also effectively indecipherable. The Syndics would never be able to produce any meaningful evidence from a report she had put effort into. “I’ll get the fleet moving.”
Roughly thirty-seven minutes later, with the fleet’s warships still taking up their new positions in the formation and the entire force accelerating back up to point one light speed, Geary watched the hypernet gate collapse behind them. The devices called tethers, which held the linked energy matrix in check, failed one at a time or in groups, the entire process occurring in a complex sequence that would prevent that energy matrix from erupting in a burst that could sweep all life from this star system. The ebb and flow of vast forces inside the collapsing gate as the failure sequence balanced and canceled out the contending waves of energy produced distortions in space itself that could be seen with the naked eye.
He had felt those forces, close up, while trying to keep the hypernet gate at Sancere from annihilating that star system. He had no wish to ever be that close to a collapsing gate again. Even now, from this distance, the vision created a queasy sense of viewing something humans were never meant to see. It was one thing to know the science that said how tenuous “reality” was, how bizarre the shape of what lay behind the physical universe, and another thing to actually see the strangeness and instability behind the curtain.
But for all that, there was still a great satisfaction in watching this gate die. It would not bring back Orion, but it would put a price on her loss that the Syndics could ill afford.
The final death throes of the hypernet gate were peaking. The size of the distortion in space shrank rapidly even as the energy levels in it grew frighteningly intense, then the last bursts of energy collided, waves canceling each other, and abruptly nothing remained but a few scattered pieces of equipment drifting through space.
SEVEN
“THE senior Syndic CEO in this star system expressed his sorrow at our loss,” Rione reported in a flat voice. “He also claimed to have no idea of the identity of the courier ships, saying the Syndic government had sold all of the ones which attacked us. If I press him for the identity of who the government sold them to, the answer will surely be a shocked avowal that the corporation which bought the ships has turned out to be a shell controlled by unknown parties.”
“No surprises there,” Geary said, trying to keep his own voice emotionless. They were in the conference room at her request for a private conversation. “How soon after the attack did that message get sent to us?”
“They transmitted it twenty minutes after they would have seen the attack end,” Rione said. “Enough time lag to ensure it wasn’t obvious they knew the attack would occur as soon as we arrived. They haven’t yet denied any involvement in the
attack on Invincible.”
“Aside from the destruction of the stealth shuttles, there weren’t external signs of that attack,” Geary pointed out. “If they denied being involved in something that they could not have seen, it would look suspicious.”
“What shall we tell them about it?” Rione asked, sitting down opposite him and leaning one elbow on the table.
He looked at the star display floating between them, where the star Sobek occupied the center and the track of the First Fleet formed a graceful arc leading toward that star. Light-hours from the fleet, the primary inhabited world in this star system orbited Sobek. The world where the CEOs were located who had at the very least known of, and possibly assisted in, the attacks that had claimed Orion as well as some Alliance Marines aboard Invincible.
“Nothing,” Geary finally said. “Let them wonder what happened.”
She pursed her mouth and shook her head. “We could tell them that we have some prisoners who we are taking back to Alliance space as evidence.”
“Evidence of what? Those prisoners won’t say a thing to confirm any official Syndic involvement. Our doctors say if we try hard enough to force them, it will kill the prisoners.”
“We know that,” Rione said. “The Syndics do not. They know what they did to those soldiers. They don’t know whether or not we have developed new techniques for dealing with mental conditioning.”
“Hmmm.” That could make some Syndic CEOs very nervous indeed. And perhaps spare some future soldiers being given the same conditioning if the Syndics believed the conditioning wouldn’t stop them from talking. “If you can imply something like that, go ahead. But don’t offer any details about the attack on Invincible.”
“Do you think I’m an amateur, Admiral?” She glanced at the star display. “We should also tell them that we were unable to save their hypernet gate despite our best efforts.”
The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian Page 16