“That’s stupid. They told us the equipment was all brand new. No way it can be dead after a four-hundred-year trip.”
“Well, we’ve only tried some exoskeletons on the lower levels, but so far, it’s all the same story. One dead suit after another. Maybe when we go higher, we’ll have more luck.”
“Somehow, I doubt it,” Cora told him.
“Yeah. The whole ship looks like it’s held together with duct tape. I hope the rest of the armada is in better shape, because if not, we’re not going to be much of a diversion.”
Tristan smirked to himself. The rumors were true: this was a suicide mission, start to finish. And a diversion at that, meant to draw attention away from more important action elsewhere.
Then he shrugged inwardly. It had never been much of a secret. He’d heard the rumors weeks before launch, while they were training with the new suits. He’d volunteered anyway. The war was going so badly that he just thought it was better to go down on his terms than in some doomed rearguard action.
And besides, how much of a secret could it be if even the platoon lieutenants had been briefed? Those guys were always the last to find out about anything. Even the newest recruits would hear about it days before it reached a single lieutenant.
“Even if the ship was in perfect shape,” the greybeard continued, “we don’t have any suits. What good is infantry without suits?”
“I’m still not sure what good infantry is in a space war against an enemy that isn’t interested in territory, so I’m not the right person to ask. Find a general. Or better yet an admiral; I’m pretty sure they don’t care how many grunts get vaped as long as their precious ships don’t get damaged. They can probably give you a thousand reasons to send people in suits against relativistic projectiles.”
“I hear you, but I’m still hoping the navy people are all right. I have no idea how to fly this thing, much less fix it if it isn’t in perfect condition. And I have a feeling it’s far from perfect.”
The 74th led the three marines deeper into the bay, and demonstrated the suits. As they’d warned, the exoskeletons were receiving power from the ship, but not holding a charge. To make things worse, the lubricant seemed to have petrified in every joint. Every time an exoskeleton moved, a cloud of dried lube flew into the air with a crack.
“Man, I sure hope the maintenance people get here soon,” Tristan said.
“Hell, I hope anyone gets here soon. Where are they?” Cora said. Then she turned to her counterpart. “What do you think? Did they wake us up too soon?”
“No. I actually thought we’d been woken too late and we’d missed the fighting. Before we made it here, my theory was that everyone had been killed and we were drifting around in a ghost ship, just waiting for the air to run out. I thought our timer had malfunctioned and the fighting was over.”
“But then the exoskeletons would be gone,” Tristan blurted.
“Exactly. Either the exoskeletons would be gone or there would be a whole shitload of marines sitting around playing cards, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t consider the twelve of us to be a shitload by any stretch of the imagination.”
A voice from the entrance hailed them and they went over to investigate. Six soldiers who’d lost their CO and three of their friends to some kind of weird stasis tube failure had one question for the group already in the exoskeleton bay.
“Where the hell is everybody?” one of them asked.
“Fucked if I know,” was the only reply they got.
Chapter 2
Melina Tau Osella thought she was out of tears. She believed that they had all been shed when the tiny mining colony gathering heavy elements in the Epsilon Canis Majoris system was suddenly, unexpectedly, overrun by an alien fleet.
Melina had been watching from the pilot’s room of a transport with fifteen other children—the only people evacuated from the settlement—as organic-looking landers swarmed over the colony’s hull and then, horribly, breached and entered through every weak point.
The terse reports soon turned to screamed descriptions of gelatinous aliens, impervious to beam weapons, consuming everyone in their path. Five minutes after the first aliens had breached the hull, the radio from the colony went silent.
Humanity had, in that distant backwater a little over four hundred light years from Earth, made its first contact with an alien species: a monumental occasion with terrible consequences. At that moment, Melina didn’t care that her race would soon be dragged into in a three- and then four-sided interstellar war. Her mind wasn’t on the billions who’d perish as a direct consequence of what she was witnessing.
All she knew was that her mother and father had been on that station. As the transport ran for its life, she cried, convinced that she would die of sadness. As gentle hands placed her in stasis, she was still crying. And when she woke, hundreds of years later, she cried for days.
Melina spent her childhood aboard a succession of transport vessels, always one step ahead of the advancing enemy. She grew up in spurts between terms in stasis: a month here, half a year there, and then they’d shut her into a tube. Always running, always crying.
She cried herself to sleep every single night until one day she simply decided that she was sixteen years old, the age at which she could legally sign up as a subcadet in the space corps. The woman who ran the recruiting office thought she looked too young, but her records were so completely muddled after dozens of decades-long space flights that they had no choice but to accept her.
She’d known exactly how old she was: thirteen and eight months. She’d counted every single day since her parents died when she was seven years and four months old. The night they assigned her a uniform and a bunk in a long barracks room was the very last time she cried.
Until now.
Tears fell, one after another, and spattered against the transparent plastic of the stasis pod. The… thing beneath the plastic was long past caring, and she couldn’t believe that the desiccated tissue, sunken eye sockets, and rictus grin had once belonged to Nairo.
It couldn’t be. Nairo was a smiling, laughing, loving man, the epitome of everything good about humanity. This dried husk couldn’t be the same person.
But her tears knew better. They fell onto the lid and rolled down the cylindrical tube and through the grating in the floor.
A hand shook her shoulder. “Come on, Melina, you need to get dressed.”
Melina nodded. She was dimly aware that she was still as naked as when she’d left the stasis tube. In the hour since she’d woken, someone had managed to get the ventilation working, and the circulating air was giving her goosebumps.
She hadn’t even noticed it. Her brain was in shock, unable to correctly process the loss. They’d volunteered for this mission together, even getting married so that they would be posted to the same ship. They both knew they wouldn’t be returning. It was an open secret that this raid was a suicide mission, and that was something they’d both accepted. They had decided to die together—the only thing that had made the fact of Nairo’s inevitable demise bearable was that he’d die beside her, probably a victim of the same attack.
In the final moment, as some unspeakable energy weapon reduced the ship to atoms, they would blend together, probably forever, in the resulting ionized cloud.
That was how it was supposed to end.
He wasn’t supposed to die before her. What possible eternal connection could she have with the mummified corpse in the stasis tube? She felt that she’d lost him in the most complete way imaginable.
“I don’t even know how long he’s been dead,” she mumbled.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?”
She turned to Laika, the woman trying to help her up. “I said, I don’t even know how long he’s been dead.”
The other woman just nodded, unsure of what to say. She had the haunted look of someone who’d given up trying to understand what was going on and was just along for the ride. “Come on. You need to dress.”<
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Melina allowed herself to be led numbly across the chamber to where her uniform hung. And then be gingerly inserted into the clothing. “You need to be careful with these. They didn’t travel well,” Laika said.
Melina nodded and let her companion lead her to the pilot room.
The buzz of voices raised in argument reached her before they arrived. The room was only half-full, but the twenty people within seemed to all be talking at once. They went quiet when Melina entered. Heads nodded in her direction. One or two people squeezed her hand as she passed.
The concern on everyone’s face broke through her daze. “What’s going on?” she asked.
Everyone spoke at once, and it was impossible to understand anything. She held up a hand, wincing slightly as pain ran up her arm. “Wait, wait. One at a time.” She selected a pilot nearby. “Xsu, you go first.”
The man straightened. “No one’s really sure, Commander. We lost about a third of our unit in the stasis room. The hangar doors are sealed shut and we haven’t been able to get in touch with the ship’s bridge crew, or even the maintenance team. All the ships comms seem to be down.”
Reflex and years of training as a fighter officer kicked in, and she set her grief aside. “Did you send someone up to talk to them?”
“We did. The compression locks are sealed tight, as if the ship suffered decompression on the far side.”
That was standard procedure on carriers, and the Ismala was no exception. The fighter bays were often breached in heavy fighting, so ships with fighter wings often had double-hulled structures with airlocks connecting them. They were always sealed in combat and in transit, but they should have opened automatically when the ship was repressurized.
“All right. What else do I need to know?” She scanned the room as no further information was forthcoming. “Where’s General Tau Tinini?”
Xsu shrugged, but a junior pilot at the rear of the crowd spoke up. “He’s dead. Never made it out of his pod.”
The face of her dead lover—no, husband, now—flashed in front of her eyes and Melina pushed it away. Not now. “Fair enough. Where are all the rest? We started out with hundreds of pilots. Are they all dead, too?”
“No. We sent the ones who made it to settle in their barracks rooms. Didn’t want them messing around in the hallways. Each flight sent a representative.”
“Good work. What was the casualty rate?”
Xsu spoke up again. “It’s hard to tell, but we’ve been comparing notes, and we think it was somewhere between twenty and thirty percent.”
One out of five pilots dead before a shot was fired… this isn’t the way we wanted this to begin, Melina thought. She made an effort to control her expression, however. All she said out loud was: “Xsu, can you get me an exact number? Go to all the birthing chambers and count the bodies. I want to know what we’ve got to work with. What about other senior officers?”
“A few in the barracks getting the troops together. They told us to report whatever info comes up back to them.”
“All right. I need a few volunteers.” Everyone tried to step forward or raise their hands at once, and she smiled. “I should have known. The reason you people volunteered for this mission, even though you knew it was a suicide job, was that you volunteer for everything. And here I thought you were all a bunch of heroes.”
This got a muted laugh. Melina decided she’d have to be content with that under the circumstances. She chose four random pilots. “Go get a laser drill and some hull discs. I want to find out who’s flying this crate.”
Hull discs were easy to find. Designed to patch small areas of depressurization, they were assigned to every unit. Anyone who spotted a small breach was to apply the disk to the hole. The patch would be held in place by the pressure differential, and it would also deform into the hole to seal it until more permanent repairs could be made. It was simple, but effective.
Finding a working laser drill, the most basic piece of technology, was another thing altogether. One after another, drills were inspected and discarded. One was dead. So was another. This one was working, but out of focus—you could use its beam to warm coffee, but you weren’t going to drill through a bulkhead with it—another one was dead. It took an hour before they found one that would serve the purpose.
“All right. Set it up here, and close that blast door.” If they suffered sudden depressurization, the blast door would hold while others sealed its edges and made it airtight.
As one of the pilots drilled a small hole in the airlock, the rest of them held themselves ready, disks in hand, expecting the air to rush out.
“I’m nearly through… there!” the man with the drill said. He quickly turned it off and moved out of the way to allow his disk-wielding companions through.
It proved an unnecessary precaution.
Melina cautiously put her finger near the hole, careful to avoid touching the hot metal. “No breeze. The other side is pressurized. Go ahead and open the airlock.” She waited impatiently while her volunteers wrestled with a large circular manual locking handle. The airlock swung open to reveal a well-lit corridor. “Looks like they’ve got power, at least. Let’s get to the bridge.”
Three corridors and a couple of staircases later, the five fighter pilots reached the main observation deck and control center, a domed enclosure at the upper front of the ship. There was another, similar space underneath the ship, but that one was farther away. And besides, naval tradition held that the captain was always in the upper bridge.
They found the area full of people in maintenance uniforms, but none in those of ship’s officers. “Hello,” Melina said. “What’s going on?”
A robust man in a ragged maintenance uniform who was giving instructions to a work crew arrayed beneath a bank of instruments glanced her way and then did a double-take as he noticed her uniform and insignia. “Commander,” he said. “Am I ever glad to see you. We thought we were the only people alive on the ship. Us and the cleaning staff.”
“What about the ship’s officers?”
“Taken out by some kind of impact. Whoever designed a ship where the people who can fly it are housed near the hull where any passing asteroid or dangerous radiation is likely to get to them should be taken out and fed to a blob.” The man used the popular term for the alien race that had killed her parents and countless billions of others.
“So what are you doing here?”
“Trying to get the instruments back online, especially the comm. Everything’s down: microwave, optical, everything. Hell, I’d settle for a radio, if only we could talk to the rest of the fleet and get some semblance of a crew on board.”
“The rest of the fleet? Do you know if they’re here?”
“I don’t know about all of them, but you can see the Lapland over there. For some reason, they have their running lights on. I’d estimate that they’re fifty klicks off, maybe more.”
“That’s stupid. We’re supposed to be running full dark and in tight formation. Fifty klicks is too much.”
He shrugged. “Tell that to them.” He handed her a pair of long binoculars.
She looked and, sure enough, the shape of their factory ship could barely be made out, silhouetted by its illumination patterns. A small fraction of the weight on her shoulders lifted. If the factory ship had made it, then basically any piece of the Ismala could be repaired, up to and including hull plates. Of course, they had to have enough time to do it. If the enemy located them and hit them first, there would be little to be done.
The thought brought her back to matters at hand. “Any sign of the blobs?”
“No. But they have to be around here somewhere. That’s the star we were aiming for.”
Kochab hung, bright and blueish, right in the center of the forward viewscreen and Melina growled to herself. Mission planners are a secretive bunch of assholes, she thought. In the briefings, they told us that we’d be approaching from above the ecliptic, but here we are, coming in from the side.
And then she chuckled. How did she know they were coming in just slightly above the ecliptic plane when there were no planets in sight? The only answer she could give was: hell if I know. I just know. And most of the pilots she knew would nod in agreement and leave it at that.
“And what happens if they suddenly appear? Do we have anything online? Weapons? Propulsion? Shields?”
“Not yet. We’ve been concentrating on getting the radio back online.”
“Screw the radio. Get me everything else. Start with the main engines, and work down from there.”
“Why? Who’s going to fly it?”
“I will if I have to. And right now, it looks like I do. And since I have to fly it, I’d like to have some ability to stop this thing before we smack into that star over there.”
“We’ve got plenty of time. I’d feel better about this if we could call the fleet and ask for a real crew, and not just a bunch of guys who fly things about a million times smaller than a carrier.”
“If anyone in the rest of the armada wants to talk to us, they’ll send someone over. In the meantime, I want this ship up and running. Unfortunately for you, this is a military mission, and this little badge on my shoulder here says you have to do what I tell you to. So get me engines…”
He gave her a sour look and turned to make it happen.
Melina paused and thought about the situation. “No. Belay that order. Get me scanners first. If I’m going to have maneuverability, I want to know what I’m steering us toward.”
She called the surly maintenance chief back to her side. “Tell me. Do you have more people? Eighteen seems like a tiny number of techs for a ship this size.”
He shrugged. “These things are completely over-engineered. They’re designed to never break. But yeah, I have another two crews resting. Fifteen and sixteen people, because something happened to our stasis pods. Normally, each crew would be twenty strong. We work in eight-hour shifts.”
“Good, get them all to work right now.”
“What about the shifts?”
Incursion: Shock Marines Page 2