Incursion: Shock Marines

by Gustavo Bondoni

  “So there must be some mistake. Some of the files probably got crossed.”

  “I know. But I can’t find where the errors are. I checked the backup database, and it shows the same thing. That means that either there was a mistake when they compiled the original, or the program is wonky and it’s looking up the wrong system.”

  Li thought about it in silence for a moment. Pol knew that his friend was weighing the possibilities against each other. Both were equally likely. The database held billions of stars and planets, and there were countless errors. On the other hand, every single system on the ship was working badly, so that couldn’t really be discounted either.

  Finally, he spoke. “I think it’s probably a configuration issue. The one system they would have checked before the mission launched was HR8799. That one has to be correct. So we run the deep diagnostics again.”

  “That could take another day.” They’d already done it twice, and found thousands of errors each time.

  “Even so… wait! I have an idea. This system actually had a human base here once, before the blobs came. It was a small installation and they had had to run like hell to get out alive, but there should still be an entry in the reference library, and it might have a chart. We can use that one while the system sorts out the bugs.”

  “You see, that’s why I like working with you,” Pol said. “I wouldn’t have thought of that in a million years.”

  “Next time it happens, you will.”

  As Pol searched the reference base, which was even slower than the star chart system had been because no one had bothered trying to clean it up yet, the noise in the bridge died down. The assault on the superearth was about to begin. The two carriers and one of the troop transports—they didn’t have enough functional dropships to send both—were approaching the planet. The bridge crew were idle: they no longer had anything to coordinate but were not yet receiving battle reports to analyze. Everyone watched the displays raptly.

  Pol remembered the recording they’d been shown of the battle between the unidentified alien craft that had attacked the marines during the strike on the ice giant’s moon and the planet’s defenses. The ships were still about thirty minutes out from where the moon’s defense had begun to fight back. He put his head back down and tried to search for the file he needed manually.

  After an interminable interval, he snorted in disgust. The scroll would take forever—there were just too many files. He typed in another query request and, to his surprise, the file he needed came up. Pol quickly transferred it to his own personal memory and, just to be safe, messaged it to Li as well.

  Once it was securely in a space where he was confident that he could access it whenever he wanted to without going into the deep files, he opened it up. Li had been right; there were four folders listed, and one was labeled ‘HR8799 chart.’

  Pol opened that one and stared at it, slack-jawed.

  Five seconds later, he’d gone to the command chair.

  “Not now, analyst,” the admiral growled. “I’m busy.”

  Pol held his ground. “I’m sorry, sir, but this is important.”

  “More important than a large space battle about to start?”

  “It might be. We’re in the wrong place.”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea to try to teach me about fleet tactics, analyst.”

  “No, not in the wrong place on the battlefield, sir. We’re in the wrong place altogether. This isn’t the right star system. We’re not in HR8799.”

  “What? That’s impossible.”

  “I checked and double checked. There’s no mistake. We need to pull the attack force out and figure out where we are.”

  “I’m afraid it’s a bit too late for that. They just engaged.” The admiral gave Pol a glare. “I hope to hell you’re wrong about this. Of course, I’ll toss you out of an airlock myself if you are, but I’ll be extremely relieved and happy when I do it. We’ll talk about it after the battle. Now get out of here. I have troops to command.”

  ***

  Tristan knew that the moon’s defenses were serious. Even with the fighter corps softening them up, they’d been told to expect a certain amount of fire coming their way. They’d been told that the vicious black wing that had terrorized them had only lasted about a minute under the defensive fire. It wasn’t the most comforting feeling. At least his unit hadn’t drawn the really short stick: attacking the planet; it was safe to assume that if the moon was a fortress, the planet would be a nightmare.

  All he could really do while the dropships were in orbit was look out the window—he’d been made acting platoon leader by virtue of having managed to stay alive through no merit of his own. His viewport gave him a breathtaking vista of the planet itself, which took up a good chunk of the sky. It was green almost all the way around, with white clouds arrayed in long bands around certain latitudes.

  He thought about it for a minute. A green world with clouds probably meant vegetation and abundant water. But then why were there no oceans? Could the water be trapped underground?

  Tristan had no idea. He’d never done planetary tactics training, and no one had bothered to tell the acting platoon leaders about the planet’s geography and biology. Assuming, that was, that anyone had bothered to tell the real officers. None of the officers had spoken to him about it.

  Suddenly, he wished Cora was with them. The responsibility of keeping another nine marines alive was way too big. He was just a kid from Polaris III, raised in the safe, clean corridors of the settlement. What the hell he was doing orbiting an alien world waiting for an enemy fleet to atomize him if he happened to survive long enough? It was madness.

  But Cora had always seemed to take it in stride. Even sitting up in a hospital bed with a bunch of tubes sticking out of her, she acted like the platoon under his command was her responsibility. He’d visited her the day before, ostensibly to give her the news that he was now in command of her troops.

  “Remember not to send anyone into a place where you wouldn’t go yourself,” Cora said.

  “Of course not. I’ll take the riskiest jobs.”

  “No. That’s dumb, and it’s also a great way to get your people killed. As the leader, you’re the only one who sees the whole picture, with all the Tac channels open. If you get knocked off, the unit loses capabilities.”

  “Look who’s talking.”

  “Exactly. I should have sent the scouts in. Or I should have sent you. That was a mistake, and I’m paying for it.”

  “I gotta say I’m kinda glad you didn’t send me.”

  She smiled. “Yeah, I can imagine. Well, at least you didn’t get away scot-free. They made you a platoon leader, so now you get to see what a crappy job that is. Being part of leadership is only fun if you get to watch from a situation room somewhere well away from the fighting. If not, you get to share the likelihood of getting your ass shot off with the troops and the additional fun of having to listen to them gripe.”

  “Is that how officers see us? As things that complain in between bouts of getting killed?”

  “Well, that and most of the guys in every single unit I’ve commanded spent a bunch of time staring at my ass. Quite a few of the girls, too.”

  Tristan was caught off guard and before he knew what was happening, his instincts took over. “It figures. It’s a nice ass.” Then, seeing her hard glare, he quickly backpedalled. “I’m sorry, ma’am, that was out of line.”

  Cora didn’t speak for several moments, but then suddenly laughed. “I’m teasing you. Don’t be such a baby. Guys always think we don’t see them looking. I’ve seen you looking.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I like it when some men look. Others… not so much.”

  Tristan was about to ask whether he was one of the men but stopped himself in time. He didn’t want to make a fool of himself. An even bigger fool that was. “All right. I’m a bit slow today, you definitely aren’t catching me at my best.”

  “Ah, o
f course. The perfect thing to say to a girl who’s wired into four separate life-support machines.”

  “I mean that my mind is on the mission, and you kinda caught me off guard.”

  “Good.” She seemed satisfied.

  “What do you mean, ‘good’?”

  “It means that you never had a clue what I was thinking when I was your CO, and it means that, when the blobs down there are trying to shoot your ass off, you’ll be thinking about how nice it would be to be in the nice safe troop ship with a good-looking girl. Since I can’t really do anything else right now, I think I’ll have to be satisfied with that.”

  Tristan’s time was up. He had to get to the next briefing. He was surprised at how reluctant he was to go, and even more at the impulsive peck he gave Cora on the cheek. He would have kissed her lips, but the woman had a tube in her mouth.

  “Thanks for coming to see me,” Cora said as he walked out.

  “My pleasure.”

  But she didn’t let him walk. “By the way, now that you’re a leader, you might want to ask questions at the briefing. A good one might be: ‘why are the aliens in this system fighting among themselves?’ Or: ‘who the hell are they, and how do we know which side we want to be on?’ Another good one that springs to the top of my mind is: ‘where the hell are the blobs?’”

  That had been nearly a day before, and no one at the briefing had been able to respond. In fact, the captain giving the briefing seemed pissed at him for asking. Now, he was sitting in a dropship waiting to become target practice for the lunar defenses of an enemy more than a hundred light years from his home.

  The planet suddenly lit up with tiny orange blossoms as the fighter attack commenced. He supposed the assault on the moon would be starting now as well. They were supposed to be coordinated.

  “Fighter wing deployed,” the pilot’s voice came in on the Tac channel. “Not too much longer to wait.”

  ***

  No one told us there would be this many defenders in the air, Melina thought as yet another swarm of fighters streaked past. It’s a good thing they’re not really very dangerous. She toggled her comm. “Everyone okay back there? Any damage?”

  “Nothing major. They seem to be using very small-caliber projectile weapons.”

  The rest of her team also sounded off. They’d all taken minor damage, but everyone was still in flying shape.

  “Commander,” an unexpected voice popped in over the radio. “I think I’ve pinpointed your target. It’s a bunker about seven hundred miles north-by-northwest of your current position. Not much radiation leaking outward, but right here above it, there’s a whole boatload of emission, all of it aimed straight at the planet. Not a whole lot of activity anywhere else.”

  “Ian? What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Recon. I decided to volunteer myself for something. Everyone else was doing it and I didn’t want to miss out. Can’t say I think much of it so far. There are things up here shooting at me.”

  Melina laughed. “Yeah, I noticed that. Thanks for the info. Now get out of there.”

  “Relax. Recon flyers are the fastest things out here. And we’re hard to see, too. I’ll be fine, it’s not my first furball.”

  Melina put Ian out of her mind. She had bigger fish to fry. “There’s a wing of the enemy flying at the dropships. Get behind them and take them down.”

  Her flight responded immediately and began to pick off enemy fighters one by one. Soon, there were none left.

  “That’s strange. The fight with the black flyer made these fighters look a lot tougher than they’re turning out to actually be.”

  “I’m not complaining,” one of her pilots chimed in.

  “More likely that the black flier wasn’t as badass as the marines said it was. You know those ground-pounders: always making up stories to try to look good.”

  Melina chuckled and let them talk. With full-scale assaults happening on both the moon and the planet, the enemy knew exactly where they were. No need for comm discipline now.

  She toggled a channel to dropship command. “Guys, Recon just called in a probable target zone for you. We’re going to check it out.”

  “All right, let us know.”

  With the four fighters that made up the rest of the wing, Melina peeled out of the engagement. The enemy was surprisingly weak. The rest of the fighter command was using them for target practice, and the tension of the early stages of battle had died down considerably.

  They shot across the surface of the airless moon and soon came to the coordinates that Ian had called in.

  “Mother lode,” Melina said. “The guy was right.”

  They flew slowly back and forth across the installation Ian had pointed out and studied their sensors. During the approach, the sensors would show just trace amounts of radiation, not too different from the surrounding rock. Then, about a hundred meters out, their sensors would suddenly light up with the force of the energy field around them.

  “What is it?”

  “Hell if I know,” Melina responded. “But it can’t be very healthy to fly through this stuff time and again. I’m sending the coordinates to the dropship people. Let the shock marines deal with the radiation.”

  ***

  The admiral was studying footage sent through from the moon. The surface was like so many dozens of others he’d seen before: grey, pockmarked with craters, and ground to dust by the millennia. If it hadn’t been located in the middle of his battle zone—wherever that might happen to be—he wouldn’t have given it a second glance.

  “Any news?” the admiral said.

  “No, sir,” Tina replied. “Same as before. The task force assigned to the moon is still reporting very light resistance, while the troops around the planet are just stuck there.”

  “No news on what it might be?”

  “The teams on Lapland are working on it. All they have so far is that it’s a force field of some sort. And it was strong enough to stop and destroy the two fighters that ran into it.”

  Tina shuddered as she said it. The war had been going on for ages, and in all that time, no one had perfected an energy shield effective enough to cover its generator. The rule seemed to be that the size of the clusters of machinery needed to create a force field increased exponentially with the size of the field. All the belligerents were having the same issue. It was actually one technology in which humanity believed itself to be ahead of both the Brillans and the blobs—but the tech was useless in its current form.

  A generator for a planetary shield should have been the size of a red giant.

  Her father echoed her thinking. “Impossible.” He considered for a moment. “It has to be made up of patches. Some areas are covered while others aren’t. They’re probably mobile and controlled from the surface: when we strike in one spot, the patch of shielding moves to intercept. But they can’t cover the whole planet.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “First, we need to test its capabilities. Have the ships move a little further away and hit the planet with multiple strikes, but not concentrate their fire. Make sure that each strike falls on a different part of the shield. That way, unless the planet is fully covered, some of the strikes will make it through.”

  “And if the coverage is complete?”

  “In that case, we ought to start looking for an invisible generator the size of a big star. A gravitational anomaly like that should be pretty easy to find.” He grunted. “Actually, if it’s a full shield, then what we need to do is to move the Heavy Gunship IV into a closer position and pound it. I assume that a force field is like anything else: it can only absorb a certain amount of energy before it breaks up. If the Central Cannon can’t break it, then we’ll just have to ignore the planet at least until the fleet gets here.” He looked around the bridge. “Now where’s that analyst?”

  “Which one?”

  “The one who was talking to me before this all started? The one going on about star charts.”

 
“Ah. I’ll get him.”

  Pol was duly brought into the admiral’s presence. “All right. Let’s go through this once again, slowly. You believe we’re not in the right system.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve checked very carefully.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the planetary system we’re in doesn’t fit the description of HR8799. I checked two different sources, and both show multiple gas giants here.”

  “And gas giants can’t just disappear. But how about if someone used them for fuel, or reengineered them?”

  Pol said nothing, and Tina understood him perfectly: if anyone had advanced enough for engineering on that scale, then the last thing anyone would want—Humans, Brillans, blobs, or even Uploaders—was to run into that civilization.

  “It’s not just the gas giants, sir. The star is different, too. Much whiter than it should be.”

  “Then we need to find the error. It has to be an error in our databases, because you can’t just miss a star system and land in another one. The odds against it are fantastic. We’d have been in space much longer than our ships could survive.”

  “Well, maybe the original system explorers made an error when they logged the system. Maybe the colony was somewhere else and simply jotted the wrong number beside the star when they created the record. And since no one has been here since, it just carried over.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, son. But I want you to get in touch with the scientists on Lapland—Tina can get you the names and comm IDs of the right people to talk to—and give me a definite answer. Until you do, I’m going to keep operating under the assumption that a very large, very angry blob fleet is about to land on my head.”

  “Yes, sir.”