Of course, that wasn’t her biggest problem. Worse still was that, eventually, another scientist would find himself thinking along the same lines, and then a third. She might be able to keep the genie in the bottle for a few more days, considering that everyone seemed to be more focused on getting the factories to produce again than investigating more general issues, even if these last made no sense. Perhaps she’d even have a couple of weeks, but after that, the truth would emerge, and she would have to take drastic action if she was to keep the people in charge of the fleet from realizing what was going on and taking remedial action.
She’d initially feared that the previous day’s successful attack on the alien installation on the ice giant’s moon would seem too easy and arouse suspicion, but the presence of an unidentified enemy unit which had attacked the marines and then escaped and made its way towards inner planetary system had confirmed that there was an effective alien military presence within the sector.
It would all be moot when the blob’s fleet failed to show up over the next few days. The admiral was well aware that he had a window of less than ten days when he launched. It was only a matter of time before he understood that there was something very unusual going on.
Irene glanced back at the printouts. There were a lot of zeros in that analysis, more than she was expecting. One number jumped out at her: two hundred and fifteen thousand. Clearly, her comrades had somehow succeeded against all odds.
What, exactly, they’d succeeded in doing, she still wasn’t certain.
She walked out of the lab, confident that her handiwork wouldn’t be discovered before she had a chance to return and take care of the body. The nice thing about being on a nanofactory ship like the Lapland was that disposing of organics was child’s play. All you had to do was to feed anything you wanted to make disappear into the raw materials chute for one of the machines. If you happened to be the system admin with access that allowed you to turn off the alarms meant to keep people from disposing of murder victims in the machines, that was even better.
But she couldn’t afford to rest on her laurels. There were dozens of extremely smart people on that ship. Granted, most were working to get the factories back at full production—they hadn’t been immune to the general failure suffered by the fleet—but that wouldn’t keep them from trying to understand things at a more fundamental level.
Irene returned to her assigned workspace to find that two of the more insistent had sent her personal messages through the project management system.
One scientist showed his utter lack of people skills. His message was curt and to the point:
Have you got the navigation charts up and running yet? It’s been three days. Shouldn’t take that long, don’t you think?
Another was more diplomatic, but said essentially the same thing:
Hi, Irene! Just following up on the Nav charts. I’d love to know if you have any idea when they’ll be running again. I think we might need them for some important research pretty soon.
She responded to both messages with a response explaining how the code had, inexplicably, become corrupted at a very basic level. It was utter nonsense, but with the way things had been going with every piece of technology in the fleet, it would buy her more than enough time.
In reality, the Navigation charts, the standard software system in which every star position was listed and simulated in three dimensions was working perfectly. Or it would have been, had Irene not gone into its interface ports and swapped around some permissions that made it impossible to run.
Of course, she was only able to affect the ones on the Lapland. Eventually, someone on one of the other ships was going to get around to doing some more strategic thinking about fleet elements scattered in other places, and they were going to realize that something, somewhere was very, very wrong.
When that happened, things would get extremely interesting.
***
Like the rest of the Minstrel, the infirmary was cobbled together with parts dragged in from all over the ship. A motley assortment of machines painted in different colors—even various colors on the same piece of equipment where working bits had been combined to form a functioning whole—whirred and pinged to themselves.
They were arrayed around a small bed which held an even smaller figure lost in the sheets and tubes. She turned to study him as he approached.
“You look like shit, Lieutenant,” Tristan said.
Cora gave him a weak smile. “I probably look a hell of a lot better than I feel, soldier. I should have died, the first battle casualty in this glorious defense of humanity, but instead here I am, broken in pieces and suffering. And they tell me I have you to thank for that.”
He hesitated, not sure what to say. She laughed and went on. “I’m just teasing. I’m really grateful to you for pulling me out. The doc here says it was a close thing, that any more damage would have needed nanobots to heal, and we don’t have nanobots. I wish we did, though. Normal medicine hurts like hell.”
“I’m just happy you’re going to be all right, Lieutenant.”
“Will you please stop calling me that? We’re two of the only three survivors from our unit, and you just saved my ass down there. I think we’ve gotten to the point where you can refer to me as Cora when we’re not on duty, don’t you think?”
“I suppose so, ma’am.” Then as he realized what he’d done and that he was about to catch hell for calling her ‘ma’am,’ he quickly amended. “Oops, sorry. Old habits. What I meant to say was I suppose so, Cora.”
“There, doesn’t that feel much better?”
It didn’t. It made him feel vaguely uncomfortable. Like every other shock marine, he’d had the importance and sanctity of the chain of command beaten into him. It had been explained, time and again, that he would sometimes have to take orders from green junior officers, and the reason that was so was that, just as they’d had soldiering driven into them by the best system humanity had been able to devise, their officers had been taught what they needed to know in order to make the right battlefield decisions. Even under fire for the first time, an officer was expected to fall back on his training, to react by instinct, and to do what was best for the unit and the war effort. It was the uniform that mattered, not the individual.
Even worse was the fact that he had a vivid memory of seeing Cora naked and unconscious in the stasis chamber room. Even after waking under the worst conditions, the woman had looked fantastic. She was lithe and muscular, as all marines were, but still managing to keep the hint of an hourglass form worthy of any soldier’s dream. The fact that her face was prettier than the ones in most of his dreams just made it worse.
He could forget about all of that and respect her as a CO, but if she wanted to be friends… that wasn’t going to be easy.
But this wasn’t the time or place for that kind of thinking. He was at the bedside of a fellow marine, one that had taken a serious beating in a role that might otherwise have been his.
“I guess,” he said. “Other than badly, how are you feeling?”
“Frustrated. They won’t tell me anything. What happened out there?”
Tristan glanced at the doctor, which was a mistake.
“No, no. He’s one of the ones who won’t talk. If you know what’s good for you, you’d better start telling me what I’m asking.”
He hesitated again and the doctor broke in. “Go ahead. She’s going to live, so anything she does now to get agitated or whatnot will only make her convalescence longer. It should be pretty painful, too. She’s got a couple of muscle tears that we can’t quite immobilize.”
Cora glared at him, but the twinkle in her eye told Tristan that she wasn’t really angry.
“All right. It was pretty much a cakewalk.”
“You call that a cakewalk? I very nearly bought it out there!”
“I know. And a guy from one of the other units actually did get snuffed. But it still wasn’t what we were expecting. There didn’t seem to be a
ny organized resistance other than automated stuff like what you found and the strange flying thing.”
“What strange flying thing?”
“Nobody’s sure, or if they are, they haven’t shared it with the grunts. Something. About man-sized but shaped like a flying wing. The advance team released it from a containment field and it went berserk.”
“It attacked them?”
“It attacked everything. Some good weapons on it, too. Blew one of the guys to bits, suit and all. But it did most of its damage to the existing infrastructure.”
“Some kind of robot drone?”
“I barely saw it. They ran into it when I was busy pulling you out. It shot past and out into space like it had never heard of the concept of gravity. But the guys say it didn’t act like a drone.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“They say it seemed like the thing was angry as hell. There was something alive in there somewhere.”
“Any idea where it went?”
“The sensor people here on the ship say they managed to track it as far as the orbit of the inner gas giant before losing it. They told me that maybe the sensor array on the Heavy Gunship might be able to pick it up, but good luck trying to get them to tell us anything we don’t need to know.”
Cora nodded. “And I suppose there’s no sign of the enemy fleet?”
“Not yet. We’ve been lucky. I hear the admiral’s trying to guess where they’ll enter the system so he can lay an ambush. The word is also that command is confused about where the support infrastructure is. The fleet we’re expecting has about seventy-five ships, and a lot of them are big bastards. We haven’t seen anything that resembles even a small orbital shipyard, much less something that could deal with the kind of volume coming this way. It’s hard to cloak a facility that size. The blobs certainly couldn’t do it.”
“They’ve had four hundred years to improve their technology,” Cora reminded him.
That was something they always drilled into every soldier fighting for humanity: be prepared to exit the stasis chamber into a galaxy that bore no resemblance to the one you’d left. While you were in transit, there were people sitting still who had time to tinker with stuff. And that stuff could get you killed.
“I think it’s more likely they had time for the Brillans or someone to beat us to the system and blow them out of the sky,” Tristan said. “But that doesn’t make any sense either. We’d be able to pick up the residue of the energy weapons; there would be evidence on the planet. And the little installation we blew up didn’t seem like something that had been built over the ruins of another facility. It was a perfectly neat little setup.”
Cora shrugged. He could tell that she was getting tired. He stood and patted her hand. “Whatever the reason, they’re not paying us to think about it.”
“Hate to be the one to break it to you, but they’re not paying us at all.”
“Get some rest. You’ll be up and about in no time.”
“It doesn’t feel like it. Will you come visit me?” Again, Tristan felt uncomfortable, this time at the vulnerable, needy tone of her voice. Cora had been a tough customer, an officer he was happy to follow. But getting wounded seemed to have changed something inside her, broken the steel of her personality, made her a human being, not an officer.
He knew what would happen if she let it, and he’d been hurt before. Shock marines didn’t have long shelf lives—and officers weren’t necessarily assigned to the same unit after they finished a mission.
Of course, none of that really mattered. It would be the ultimate folly to fall for a girl during a suicide mission—especially one who’d shown a tendency to charge into danger without taking elementary precautions. One of them would be killed, and in his experience with other couples in similar situations, the other wouldn’t last much longer.
“I’ll definitely come if I can. They’re talking about hitting the surface of the superearth further in the system.”
“When?”
“Within the next two days or so. They’ve got the Lapland pumping out parts for dropships and fighters as fast as they can. They don’t want to give the enemy any working facilities.”
“Damn. Looks like I’m going to have to sit that one out.”
As if there had ever been any doubt about that, Tristan thought. You’re going to sit the whole campaign out, and probably die right here in the infirmary when the blob fleet finally gets here and overruns us.
***
“Let me guess, you volunteered me, too.” Melina couldn’t tell if Ian was livid or simply resigned to his fate. The man kept a poker face as she told him about the Ismala’s role in the following battle.
“Actually, no,” she replied. “You’re free to go to the rearguard. In fact, since you didn’t volunteer for any of this, I can issue a recommendation to put you on the Lapland when she evacuates.”
“The Lapland is leaving?”
“If they can, yes. The rest of us volunteered for this mission. We knew what we were getting into. But the factory ship had to come. So while our orders are to fight until either we are crushed or the enemy is defeated, the Lapland has orders to run as soon as they think that they won’t be able to get us any more material.”
“Plus, factory ships are too valuable to sacrifice?”
“I see you’re a cynic.”
“I had some great teachers,” Ian replied sourly. He looked her in the eye. “All right. I’ll take you at your word and run when you go in, but I still don’t understand why you volunteered the Ismala. You should have asked to stay in orbit and let the Dart do the close support for the moon assault. You don’t even have a real crew. All you have is a bunch of fighter pilots.”
“For this mission, I actually prefer a fighter crew. They’ll understand how the battle is evolving better than a naval crew would. And considering the fact that I’m going to be down there, I want my support team to know exactly what they’re doing.”
“You think it’s going to be a battle?”
“Yes. Have a look.”
She waved her hand over the console and a holographic schematic appeared showing the superearth in green, about a meter across and one small red dot which approached the orb at a shallow angle which became first an orbital trajectory and then a dive. “That dot is the thing that the marines saw.”
The planet came alive all of a sudden. Lines came up off the surface and blue dots materialized. Everything converged on the red interloper, which held for a few moments, even causing some of the blue dots to wink out, before finally being destroyed.
“We picked up the presence of both missile defenses and ground-based fighter units. No energy weapons as far as we can tell, but even without them, that reaction from the planet means that we’re heading for a serious furball down there. We need to clear out some of the defenses or the marines are toast.”
“Better you than me,” Ian said. “Were you serious about getting me reassigned?”
“Yeah, although we could use your Recon experience and your flyer.”
“I’m pretty sure you can find someone to fly it, can’t you? Someone with more experience in combat situations. He’d know where to point the sensors.”
Melina didn’t know whether Ian was being ironic or not. He was extremely hard to read. “I could, but the thing about Recon flyers, so I understand, is that the hard part isn’t guiding the ship, but actually using the instruments. For that, you’d be invaluable. Don’t forget that you seem to have become the most senior of the Recon people on this particular mission.”
“I’ll think about it,” Ian said. “And thanks for understanding about me not being a volunteer.”
Melina watched him go. He seemed a little less bitter, but she was damned if she could read the man. But she thought about what he’d said.
When she volunteered the Ismala for close combat support, her team had cheered and she’d believed that the decision had been a popular one. The problem was that she’d seen a lot
less enthusiasm among the maintenance teams and support staff. It was then that she remembered that, though they were all volunteers, her own crew would mostly either be flying the Ismala or flying their fighters while the rest of the people on board would be at the mercy of a less experienced flight team. Being in control of your destiny was very different from being in someone else’s hands.
This made her wonder why she’d done it. As Ian had said, the logical thing would have been for the Ismala to hold in orbit and to let a navy crew who knew all about flying carriers in combat situations take the Dart into battle. It would have made no difference to her: she was going to be leading a fighter wing.
Maybe she was doing it for the memory of Nairo. By throwing everything under her command into the face of the enemy, she felt she was matching his sacrifice, even though she knew full well that, had he survived the trip, he would have told her to do exactly the opposite of what she was doing.
It was too late to change anything, though. What was done was done.
Chapter 6
Pol was an analyst, the lowest-ranking member of the enormous bridge crew of the Heavy Gunship IV. He was so low on the totem pole that while his peers buzzed with the excitement of the raid that was about to begin, his own task hadn’t changed: get the star chart and Nav system up and running.
While lieutenants relayed orders and aides reported troop status, he tried to concentrate in the din. The numbers made no sense; there had to be a mistake. He must have somehow installed the modules incorrectly and crossed references somewhere. The problem was that he didn’t know where, and in theory, it shouldn’t have been possible anyway.
He tapped his neighbor’s shoulder. Li was barely senior to him, but had a better understanding of the ship’s systems.
“What’s up?” the man asked in his soft voice.
“I really don’t know. Look, we’re in the HR8799 system, right?”
“Of course.”
“All right, so when I bring up that system on the simulation, it tells me that yes, there’s a superearth in the system, but there are also six giants and another couple of smaller rocky planets closer to the star. We don’t have any of that in this system. It’s also telling me that the brightest stars that should be visible are here, here and here, but none of those is on our readouts.”
Incursion: Shock Marines Page 6