Battlestations

by S. M. Stirling

  We are breeding, he thought. Of course; they were Ichtons. This world is no longer fit to support us. Equally obvious; the people would not have abandoned it, if it was. Abandoned Fighter, in a recuperative coma from a training accident . . . Few had been left behind, but the absolute numbers had been quite large. Fifty billion of the people had inhabited Abanjul in its prime, a few generations after the native sapients had been exterminated. Most of those judged not worthy of evacuation—in coma sleep, packed into the transports like cargo—had suicided when they found themselves left, or starved. Ichtons had had a technological civilization for a very long time, and they were not good at surviving on their own with no reason to live.

  Fighter had not. Fighter had found others, built this little base, scrounged and improvised. Now they were breeding, and that had solved most of the morale problems. Any male of the people knew there was work worth doing when eggs and hatchlings were about. The others were content, but the data tormented him. In only twenty generations the atmosphere would be incapable of supporting life. Their descendants would be thousands by then, and they would have to establish a self-sufficient sealed environment. Could they? And their numbers would be growing exponentially, doubling every decade, on a planet stripped bare. Impossible to construct ships and escape . . .

  He let his nictitating membranes dim his vision, the warm incubators blurring into a heat-source glimmer. Several of the eggs had been sired by him.

  If the ship is not Ichton, we will take it, he decided. We will not follow the people. The thought was heretical enough to make him stir in the sleeping niche, the hard chitinous surfaces of his body scraping at the padding. Why? They have already judged us unfit. We will take the non-Ichton ship—some of the crew, if necessary—and we will find a habitable planet.

  A wild dream. Stumbling across an ecology that would not kill them would be difficult, the more so as they would not dare seek one pretamed by a sapient race. They would have to take an uninhabited planet, or one with pretechnological sapients that could be exterminated piecemeal. Ichtons did not need energy weapons to fight, and they bred very fast.

  Fighter glanced back at the eggs. Anything necessary, he would do.

  “Nothing. Absofuckolutelydamly nada,” the sensor operator said.

  Ber Togren rocked back on her heels and looked around. They were on the roof of a complex of buildings; Stensini and the others said they had been electronics-heavy administrative headquarters of some sort. Now they tumbled in ruin almost to the horizon, except where they ran along the edge of a green-acid sea. The . . . buildings, she supposed . . . had been made of concrete. Concrete with single-crystal silica fibers and silica fumes added, which gave it roughly the consistency and tensile strength of medium carbon steel. The Alliance hadn’t used either for a very long time, but she supposed it was cheap and effective and the Ichtons didn’t waste resources on fancywork. Evidently they hadn’t wasted time getting the machinery out of it, either; from the looks, they’d just used a plasma gun wherever the walls were inconvenient.

  Despite herself, Ber Togren was starting to like the Ichtons a little.

  “There were heavy-duty superconductors in the structure,” the tech went on. “Cermet stuff. And dick-all I can get below, but it all goes down deep.”

  “No more of the—” Ber Togren stopped herself; if there had been any more of the modulated discharges, the technician would have told her. He was a Marine, she didn’t have to draw a picture for him.

  Sodding hell, she thought, going to as close to the beveled edge of the rooftop as she could and flipping up her visor so that she could pop a hard candy into her mouth. They had spent two months looking at traces that turned out to be bits of equipment giving up the ghost, and seen a lot of ruins.

  This was a waste of time and personnel. The corvette was off looking at the rest of the system; the Ichtons had used the other planets and asteroid belt rather intensively. But for Abanjul, just the landing party. There were a lot of people on the Stephen Hawking but not all that many Marines. Not nearly enough to look for a couple of dozen bugs who didn’t want to be found, on an entire world.

  “Either Anton Brand is a complete fuckup, in which case we’re all doomed, or—”

  The technician swore mildly. “Now, that was a surge,” he said. Then he frowned. “Captain, I can’t tell you right off, but either it faded in and out, or it got closer and then farther.”

  “I—”

  Anhelo Stensini looked at the odd angular script on the tunnel wall and swept the reader’s pickup over it; the light of the jury-rigged lantern was dim and red but more than enough for light-enhancement equipment. The acid smell of the Abanjul-now atmosphere was a little less down here, but the readouts said there was a worrying concentration of heavy metals, particularly mercury. They would all need a course of chelating drugs before lift-off.

  Fascinating, he thought. There had been plenty of bodies, and from the tissue samples, the Ichtons had had time to adapt to large-scale industrial pollution, plus radiation levels that would fry a rat’s genes. Not engineered, it was too messy for that. Just good old-fashioned Darwin.

  The reader beeped. All broodcare technicians will assemble evacuees at the third landing below, it said.

  Behind him the two Weasel hired killers were chittering to each other. The Alliance gunsel with them was fiddling with her communicator. He ignored the noise, continuing a slow, careful scan of the corridor. It was twenty meters in diameter, a pure cylinder with walls of fused rock, slanting down almost imperceptibly to the west, under the dead sea. Armored doors spotted the walls at patterned intervals, flush with the surface.

  “Hey, Yerti, we’re out of touch,” the human Marine called.

  The chittering stopped. Stensini felt a tug at his elbow, and turned to see a Weasel face peering up at him from shoulder height. It was encased in the long-snouted helmet, with the muzzle-protection wings folded back, and the teeth showed wet and pink as the thin carnivore lips curled back. Academically he knew it was the equivalent of a nervous frown, but he jerked his arm back. He might have pushed, if the Weasel had not been carrying a long curved knife in one paw and a short bulky-looking slug thrower in the other. His stomach lurched and spat acid into the back of his throat; it had been behind him with that, all the time. Usually he could make himself forget, but it had had to remind him, the treacherous little vermin were always looking for an opportunity to—

  “Gum dis wey, nu, nu, nu,” it chittered and barked at him. “Toksiik, Anna, gover me me me.” Then it thrust past him, glancing down at a display woven into the soft armor. “Zummmthing is—”

  A door swung open down the corridor with noiseless speed. Stensini only saw the beginning of it, because something struck him very hard in the stomach and he fell down, just in time for something else to hit him on the back.

  The first blow had been Yertiik’s, kicking back and using him as a jump-off point in his leap. The second had been the other Weasel bouncing off his shoulder blades because they were under his feet. A thing was in the doorway, whipping at Yertiik with a long bar held in its forward pair of limbs. The Weasel twisted in midair and landed where the upright part of the—the Ichton’s—body met the horizontal portion, and his hand was stabbing with the knife so rapidly that the arm blurred and there were the crisp pockpockpock sounds of density-enhanced steel crunching through exoskeleton. That was lost in the long crakkks as Yertiik fired his machine pistol in bursts through the open door and the rounds exploded off whatever lay behind. Toksiik somersaulted past the fight, flinging in a stick of bouncer grenades as he did. More doors were opening, flooding low-level light into the corridor, and a dry rustling sound.

  Anna Steenkap’s hand fastened on his collar and dragged him ruthlessly backward. She was firing bursts from her assault rifle one-handed over his head, the muzzle blasts slapping at his head, and shouting into her pickups. Anhelo Stensini was looking over her shoulder when the door behind them began to open. Steenkap could no
t possibly have been able to hear it, but she still managed to drop the civilian and turn herself and the muzzle of her rifle three quarters of the distance before the Ichton in the doorway fired his weapon. Most of her upper torso disappeared into a blood mist with a quiet chuffing sound. Something thin and very cold sliced into his legs.

  Captain Ber Togren threw herself down and to the side without breaking stride, landing on her shoulder blades and firing. Half a dozen assault rifles tore into the Ichton before it was halfway through the ceiling hatch; bits of body and gobbets of body fluid dropped down on the Marines.

  “Report, Beta Platoon,” she said, backflipping herself onto her feet.

  “Found Toksiik,” the voice said. “And what’s left of Anna. No sight of Yertiik or the civvie. Shiva, watch it—” A blast of static, most likely from the aura of a plasma discharge. “Shiva and Vishnu, Captain, we can’t hold this. It’s like a fuckin’ cheese.”

  She nodded bleakly. The Ichtons didn’t seem to have much weaponry; half of them didn’t have real weapons at all, just tools like welding lasers and the equivalent of staple guns. Most of them weren’t very quick on the uptake, either. On the other hand, they were completely willing to die, and they knew this heap of tunnel-spaghetti like it was home. Which it was. There seemed to be a fair number of them, too.

  “Pull back,” she said. Pushing farther was just going to lose more of her people. Too bad about Steenkap, and Toksiik had been efficient for a . . . Khalian. Losing Stensini was going to put her in very bad odor with the brass, but she would worry about that when the time came.

  “Captain.” The home-base push. “We gotta anomaly here.”

  She froze, motioning her escort to guard positions.

  “Exactly what?”

  “Sonic reading. Sort of like frying bacon—”

  She blinked. “That’s . . . Get out! Get out now, get out of there!”

  “Captain, we—”

  Silence.

  “Ma’am?” One of the platoon leaders. “What happened?”

  “I think we all died,” Ber Togren said. Then her voice snapped out: “All right, consolidate on the roof. Move it!”

  Anhelo Stensini cringed against the cold stone at the whistling shriek from the nearby . . . cell? Compartment?

  “Die, die, please die and stop doing that,” he mumbled. The Weasel had lasted . . . there was no way to tell how long. It was completely dark here, and there was usually little noise. He was very hungry and thirsty when the dry rustling of the Ichtons came for the feeding. Water that tasted like poison and was, rations from the Fleet stocks. Very occasionally one came with a light, dim and ruddy, and chalk. Then it sketched and he gave it words, and it never forgot and never made a mistake twice. When it went away the darkness closed in again. How long? Days, many days; weeks, maybe months . . . sensory deprivation destroyed your sense of duration first of all.

  Another long whistling scream. “Die!” Stensini screamed. “Die and shut up. Die!”

  A long bubbling moan. The worst of it was he thought the Weasel probably would die, if only he could.

  “I am uncertain as to my interpretation,” the bioanalyst hummed uncertainly.

  Of course you are, Fighter thought. You were not worthy of evacuation with the people. He felt his forelimbs quivering with long-held tension, his membranes were slow and sticky as they wetted his eyes. The muscles at the base of his forelimbs ached sharply where they spread over the thickened area of exoskeleton. Several of the trainee fighters with him had folded into limb-wrapped lumps of exhaustion in the corners, aestivating.

  Aloud he hummed confidently: “Your logic train seems sound. The small, more heavily furred species is utilized by the taller?”

  “Yes.” They both flexed fingers and nictitated in puzzlement. The Ichtons sometimes utilized sapients prior to their extermination; as sources for biocircuits, for research, sometimes for casual labor in their own disposal. Utilizing such a species for high-risk functions such as warfare seemed inefficient. . . . A scritching sound brought Fighter and several of his aides around, manipulators darting for their bladecasters, but it was only a pair of hatchlings playing tag up the walls and over the ceiling. Fighter scooped them down and handed them to the brood mother, who carried them away with a sharp chirr of reproach.

  “Perhaps the smaller are biological constructs?” Fighter hummed, returning to the business at band. There had been theoretical studies on developing such from wild sapients, but in the end it had always seemed non-cost-effective to waste habitat on constructs that could rarely perform more efficiently than Ichtons. Bioanalyst ground his mandibles. “They seem entirely wild—unless a methodology unfamiliar to our concepts was used in their construction.”

  “Yet they show equal geneloyalty!” Fighter hummed, with a tock-tock-tock click of his mandibles to indicate extreme puzzlement. All Ichtons were of the same genotype, and had been since the time of legends. Ichton loyalty was faultless; that of other races dubious, accordingly. Here there were bonds without any sharing of genes at all, which was madness and chaos.

  Think, think, Fighter told himself. This was not his training. He was an instructor of surface troops, no more. You will do this because you must.

  “First, we must determine the balance of power,” he said. “There are time constraints. We do not know when the alien vessel will return.”

  “Here the poor bastards come again,” the technician said.

  Ber Togren nodded soundlessly. They were all wearing improvised sound-boots cut out of the insulation and scanty padding of the two transports left. Not much fuel left for either; not much food or ammunition, much of anything. They had enough water but a declining supply of filters. . . .

  The area they were on looked fairly good, solid red sandstone cut into gullies hundreds of meters deep. There were cirrus clouds high above, and a cold wind flicked grit into their faces. Here and there a patch of lichen—something like lichen—struggled to grow. They had a good triangulation on the spot now, although whatever the Ichtons used to cut rock was incredibly quiet.

  You have to avoid the cities, she thought. It had cost them, to learn that. Not easy, most of this continent had been built over. But in the cities there was too much cover, and the tunnels were too numerous and close to the surface, the Ickies could come up under you with virtually no warning. It looked like the Ickies spent a lot of their time underground anyway; they’d found bits and pieces of hydroponic tunnel farms that must have been thousands of kilometers long when Abanjul was a going concern. Yeah, the cities are bad. Out in the open country all you had to worry about were the deep transport tunnels that laced the whole planet. They’d been sealed and vacuum evacuated originally, but the Ickie holdouts could still use them and still burrow up. You could hear them, though.

  Unless there was a maintenance shaft near. That was pretty bad, too.

  “Ready,” a radio voice whispered in her ear. Lying pressed to the gritty pink surface of the rock slab she felt a vibration, then for an instant she could actually hear the Ickies boring up.

  “Wait for it,” she said softly. “Nobody jump the gun.”

  Nobody did. The circle of rock in the center of the mesa began to tremble; it was a feeling like fear through the soft armor between her stomach and the stone, shaking gut against bone.

  “Now,” she whispered.

  Pdamp. The explosion wasn’t very loud. The string of cord around the Ickies’ drillhead was thinner than thread, but the explosive propagated at near light speed. You were safe enough a few meters away in open air. Closer, rock shattered into powder and burned white because it didn’t have time to move away fast enough. A flash of white light ran around a circle, and within it sandstone collapsed downward in chunks and blocks. Rock hit her again, an angry blow this time, then trembled beneath her like a lover. Something huge and metallic swayed through the air in the maelstrom of churning blocks. Then a plasma lance cut across it like a bar of orange-red light, and it blew up. That was
loud. Her face shield and earphones cut it to protect her senses, as the center of the drill zone collapsed downward.

  Figures dashed forward, and the satchel charges dropped into the hole. More explosions, and the technician relayed the sound of things falling far down in the rock. Everyone else stayed ready, and when the lone Ickie crawled out someone put a neat four-round burst of prefrags through its central exoskeleton. They had learned. You didn’t waste ammunition when no more was coming, and apart from a risky head shot the central body mass was the best place to get them. There was an internal skeleton—sort of an extension of the exoskeleton and an internal frame for the limbs—but the Ickies were still squishy inside and real vulnerable to hydrostatic shock. The problem was that the Ickies showed plenty of ability to learn as well; faster than humans or Khalia in some ways, slower in others.

  Pordiik came up beside her, pushing back the wings of his muzzle guard. “Gat was haff haff herd,” he barked; her ear translated automatically. His pelt was looking a little mangy; patches of her own hair were loose. Too many trace elements in the air and water, no drugs. They were all tired most of the time, too, and nothing healed quite right.

  “Yeah, pretty half-hard,” she replied.

  “Why tey bodder wittt us us us?”

  That was a difficult question. The Ickies held more than half the expedition, captured when the base camp was overrun—assuming they haven’t just eaten them or whatever—and more than half its equipment. Including the main transponders, which meant that nobody here could communicate with the corvette until it went into low orbit, if then. Properly handled the main transponder could be used to jam the weaker signals from the transports and helmet coms; nobody had thought to bring along a tightbeam light sender.

  “I think I’ve figured that out,” Ber Togren said. “Look, these Ickies are the rejects, right? The ones the others couldn’t be bothered taking off.”

  Pordiik laughed, snapping several times, his tusked jaws clumping. “Not good good to be here before tey leff leff.”