Incursion: Shock Marines

by Gustavo Bondoni

  As Tina led him away, she watched her father out of the corner of her eye and decided to avoid him for a couple of hours. He looked unhappy enough to go through with one of his ever-present threats to throw people out of airlocks.

  In order to find something to keep her both busy and far from the admiral, she sat down with Pol to talk to the Lapland.

  “I think it would be better if I call them,” she told the analyst. “A lot of the people on board still resent that they have to be here, and might give you the runaround.”

  She commed the captain of the factory ship, who, like all the military personnel except for the enigmatic Ian, had volunteered for the mission. “Hello, Maria,” she said.

  “Hi, Tina, what’s up?”

  “Need your advice. Who should we get in touch with on the Lapland to solve a mystery involving star charts?”

  “No one, is what I’d say. The support team hasn’t been able to get our Nav system up and running. Bloody annoying way to fly a factory ship, especially when we turn the thing around to try to get back home. Am I supposed to find Sol by blind reckoning? It’s stupid.”

  “All right, we can probably beam you the info we want to analyze. Who would be your best bet?”

  “I would say anyone in the astrophysics department. Maybe Hetter or Humahuaca. But I wouldn’t call them right away. They seem to have lost a couple of scientists.”

  “Lost?”

  “Yeah, as in can’t find them anywhere on the ship. What they did find was human DNA in one of the factory intake chutes. We’re treating it as a murder. Or rather, they are. I couldn’t care less if they all bumped each other off. Would make for a much quieter trip back.”

  “All right. We’ll call Hetter. Thanks.”

  Chapter 7

  Irene sat on her bunk. Her room, like that of everyone else on board, was stark and Spartan. White plastic walls, contoured into the organic forms that had been in vogue when humanity was still building factory ships held no decoration other than the wear that had accumulated over centuries of part-time use.

  The other three bunks in the tiny room were vacant. Between the fact that factory ships always went into combat with the bare minimum of crew on board and that a good portion of that crew had died in transit there were plenty of rooms to go around.

  That was a good thing. Solitude was exactly what she needed.

  Sandrina’s death had been unfortunate. Completely necessary but unfortunate. She’d caught the woman in a deserted hallway and had barely had time to clean up the mess and dispose of the body before being discovered.

  It was little wonder that her handiwork had been found out almost immediately. In her role as admin, Irene could order the nanofactories not to notice human remains, but the cleaning and maintenance systems were fully automated, and the computers that controlled them were buried behind closed access doors that she didn’t have the keys to. Getting them might not be too hard to do, but it would definitely call attention to her.

  She wasn’t worried about the murder investigation. Everything that pointed to her had been deleted from the records, especially all video from the security systems. The scientists were running the investigation like a bad novel anyway, constantly getting in the way of Hemery, the man the navy crew had assigned to finding out what was happening, and the only competent person on the job. The committee would be extremely unlikely to catch her even if she put up neon signs proclaiming her guilt.

  Though it had come as a bit of a shock, the star charts the admiral’s people had beamed to the Lapland, and which Hetter had taken five minutes to study before proclaiming that they were, indeed, in the wrong place weren’t what was troubling her either. She’d never expected the scientists to be kept in the dark eternally, just as long as possible.

  No. What she wanted to come to terms with was the mission itself. More specifically, whether the mission was worth pursuing.

  Sure, the original goal was a noble one: peace in the galaxy by any means possible. If that meant that humanity had to abandon its current colonies and go into hiding to avoid the war, then that was acceptable. If it meant that humanity was destined to go extinct, then that, though sad, was also acceptable. In fact, it might be the only acceptable solution: the war was a genocidal one in which there could only be one winner. Humanity had shown a historical tendency to go to war with itself, and therefore was a bad candidate to rule over a peaceful galaxy.

  For this mission, her assignment had been simple: do anything necessary to keep the fleet from being able to take the fight to the blobs.

  Her initial plan had been to feed defective designs into the nanofactories. Her handlers had furnished her with everything from gyroscope plans that caused fighters to crash to marine rifles that jammed.

  The star chart data had caused her to change her plans. That discovery meant that the most important task at first was to keep the fleet in the dark regarding where they were. She’d expected them to waste weeks flying around an empty planetary system wondering where the enemy fleet was. A lost task force couldn’t get into a fight.

  And yet it had. She’d initially dismissed the reports of the marines encountering resistance on the moon of the ice giant as simple and not-very-subtle propaganda, but there was no doubting the fact that the fighter corps and marines were now involved in a major engagement on and around the superearth even as she sat there. The crew had been watching the live feed on a big screen in the mess hall, and she had a feed on her personal screen in the room. The human fighters seemed to be doing remarkably well against the defenses.

  The problem was that the defenses shouldn’t be there. The only explanation for the fleet not being in the HR8799 system was that her colleagues had been successful in changing the launch parameters.

  That had been a major sabotage operation which everyone in the movement had been skeptical of. The depth of infiltration and precise coordination needed made it seem like a pipe dream. If it worked, of course, it would be the pacifist ideal: send a heavily armed fleet off into the cosmos for a long time, long enough that when they returned, the war would be a distant memory.

  But her initial optimism that it had worked was waning. If the fleet had been sent on a random course, how come there were enemies here to fight? The system, like almost all others, should have been empty save for some old probes. The probability of finding an armored system by chance was negligible.

  Something else was going on. But what?

  The first idea that crossed her mind was that the pacifist operation had been discovered and that the false star charts had been put into the database intentionally, trying to confuse and flush out any sleeper cells that the movement might have infiltrated as a backup plan.

  If that was the intention, it had worked like a charm in her particular case.

  On the other hand, if that was the plan, then why were the powers-that-be acting confused about where they were? Was it part of the same scheme? Did the admiral know exactly what he was doing?

  The explanation might be as simple as the fact that some upper-level intelligence operative—the guy who knew what was going on— hadn’t survived the crossing. Or it could be as twisted as the fact that they knew there were sleeper agents in the fleet and were going to milk the charade until the very end.

  The final option was the most frightening: that they had indeed been diverted, and that, by chance, they’d stumbled into a war that wasn’t theirs after a journey of two hundred and fifteen thousand years.

  In any case, peace demanded that she get to work. Soon, the factory would be getting orders to replace battle losses. Among them would be requests for gyroscopes and rifles.

  Irene stood up. She had her orders.

  ***

  “This is starting to get annoying,” Melina growled as another wave of enemy fighters appeared on her screen.

  “It’s no worse than training simulations.”

  “Yeah, except we’re infinitely more likely to die if we happen to crash into one.”


  She could almost see the shrug on the other end. “That’s what we came here to do,” the pilot said. “Might as well take a few of them with us.”

  “What worries me is that it just doesn’t make sense. They’ve surely figured out by now that the weapons they’re using are completely useless against us.”

  “They’ve taken down a few of our fighters.”

  “To balance against the entire wings they’ve lost? Unless they have millions, they won’t be able to do much against us.”

  “Maybe they do.”

  “Still doesn’t make sense. Why would anyone arm planetary defenses with light-caliber weapons? Are they expecting to be attacked by pigeons? You need to be able to take down a fighter.”

  The chatter died down as her wing engaged the defenders. Even against weak weaponry, it was better not to get hit, so she circled around to see if she could get behind the enemy.

  Once in position, Melina toggled her guns and watched with satisfaction as the defender’s fighters began to disintegrate under the barrage.

  “Heads up, wing leaders,” the Tacnet said. “We’ve decided that the moon’s defenses aren’t a threat to the dropships, so the marines are headed your way.”

  She toggled the acknowledgement button and turned her nose to space. Her flight was one of the ones that were tasked with escorting them down.

  “Look alive, people. If the defenders decide the dropships are a real threat, they might throw heavier ordnance at us.”

  It didn’t happen. Her crew escorted the first wave of five troop carriers safely to the ground and turned back to pick up some more.

  Suddenly, the fighter directly to her right veered right into her path, clipping her wing and taking a decent chunk of her fighter’s nose with it. It then spiraled off in an uncontrolled descent and slammed into the moon below.

  The crash shouldn’t have been a problem. Fighters were streamlined and equipped with wings for atmospheric work, not vacuum operations, which meant that losing cosmetic pieces was a minor concern. Unfortunately, the impact must have broken something, because the machine began to lose power.

  “Guys, I’m out of this one.”

  “Roger that, need an escort?”

  “No. I think I can make it back all right.”

  “Okay.”

  She pulled back on the control stick, aimed the nose at the nearest capital ship, and throttled hard. If she made it into orbit, she knew they’d eventually get around to picking her up.

  Instead of the acceleration she expected, the fighter shuddered and stalled, falling backwards towards the surface.

  Melina reacted immediately. Without an atmosphere, she couldn’t maneuver the ship unless some of her attitude jets worked. She tried them one by one and discovered that she basically only had control of the landing attitude adjusters.

  All right. She’d take what she could get. In the moon’s tiny gravity, those little jets might be the difference between a solid thud and a fatal crash. Timing would be everything, and she still wasn’t close enough to the ground to feel comfortable with setting them off. Those rockets had a limited burn time, and she couldn’t waste it.

  Away to her right, the marines were massing in front of the installation they’d identified. Great, she thought. Whatever that radiation is, I’m about to land right on top of it. I wonder if I’ll develop any interesting mutations. At least the marines are close enough to defend me if the ground defenses are more formidable than the ones in the air.

  And then there was no more time to think. Melina hit the control of the attitude jets and felt the fighter slow before impact. She hoped it would be enough.

  ***

  Tristan watched the fighter go down just about three hundred meters away, behind the rim of a crater. He braced for the impact, but didn’t feel any tremors, so maybe the pilot had managed to get it under control. He sent the guy his best vibes, but there was nothing more he could do.

  He had bigger problems.

  Unlike the facility they’d raided on the moon of the ice giant, the enemy installation here didn’t have a huge open hangar door. It had one of the small horizontal sliding doors that they’d already seen leading into the elevator shafts back in the outer reaches of the planetary system.

  Unfortunately, the entrance was covered by four swiveling guns like the one that had nearly killed Cora. They’d appear out of holes on the upper wall and strafe anyone who got too close. What made them hard to stake down was that you could never tell which one was going to appear; they came out randomly. So you might be aiming at one and get caught off guard by another. A couple of his men had already been caught in the crossfire trying to get in.

  At first, they’d blasted the wall around the hole, but that was well armored. Tristan had no idea what material it was constructed from, but the big slugs they used barely dented it.

  Then they’d tried lobbing grenades into the holes, but they’d bounced away as if there was an invisible sheet of plastic over the opening.

  “All right, men, here’s what we’ll do.” He pointed to four of his troops. “You four are going to start firing at the holes. You’ll take the first, you the second, you get the third, and you’ll take the one on the far left. What I need for you to do is to start firing at full automatic at your assigned hole. Don’t stop until I tell you to, even if it means depleting your magazine badly, do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir!” The answer came through from all four of them and he grimaced. They shouldn’t have been calling him ‘sir.’ He wasn’t an officer and didn’t want to be.

  “Perfect. Wait for my signal.” He left the cover of a shallow crater and began to make his way towards the door. He’d marked the spot where the guns activated so, well before he reached it he said: “fire!”

  He saw the sparks flying off the armor around the gun holes. As soon as he’d seen enough to know that they were all being fired on, he advanced. A gun came out of the one closest to his position, center right. Before it could fire, however, it was cut apart by the covering fire.

  Good, this is working.

  In fact, it worked better than he had any right to expect. The remaining three guns attacked him in succession, and each in turn was destroyed. “All right, men, hold your fire.”

  He stood still for a moment. The automated defenses were just idiotic. Any of the simulations on the ship would have adapted its response to the marines’ tactics. Both what he’d seen of the air defenses and the reactions of these guns was puzzling. Why were the automatic responses so basic?

  Basic or not, he’d lost two marines to the guns, mostly because of overconfidence. He’d ordered the men to scout the doors, never imagining that the defenses would start right there.

  He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  “Get a scan suit up here. I want to know if the door is booby trapped.”

  The scan suit was an unwieldy concoction, but invaluable. Its combination of scanner technologies could look through fifty meters of rock or detect a microwave cooker a thousand kilometers away. It should be able to see through the door without much difficulty.

  “Sorry, sir,” the operator told him. “All I can really say for sure is that the door itself is pretty thin, but no chance to say what’s behind it. The problem is the radiation coming out of the ground. It throws everything off.”

  “All right,” Tristan said. “Back off.”

  Once the bulky suit was out of the way, he planted a magnetic charge on the door and cursed as it slid off. Non-ferrous metals were a bitch.

  He shot the door, set the timer, and wedged the charge into the bullet hole, thankful that the door wasn’t made of the same material as the armored gun ports.

  Tristan loped back to where his remaining men were positioned and then turned back to the charge.

  It blew the door completely off its hinges.

  “All right, people. Fire into that hole.”

  The marines did so with gusto and nothing fired back. Slugs t
ore chips from the façade, and grenades detonated inside the building.

  “Enough. Let’s go have a look.”

  The hangar-like interior was pretty torn up, but looked to be identical to the one they’d already encountered in their earlier assault. There was a wall at the back which Tristan was certain led to an elevator shaft.

  “Watch the roof, people. Last time we got caught by one of those cannons mounted in the ceiling.”

  The roof failed to hold any surprises, but the motion-activated red lighting nearly gave Tristan a heart attack when it activated. It caught him off guard even though he was expecting it.

  There were nervous moments in any military operation, but eventually, even under fire, soldiers settled down—or their training took over—and did their jobs. But on this jaunt, Tristan was jumpier than ever. He wondered why; the only explanation he could find was that he wasn’t worried for himself, but for the seven other men he still had.

  The two he’d lost were probably weighing down his conscience as well, but he couldn’t really analyze his feelings about them now.

  He also wondered why they’d sent his platoon in first. He was the most junior platoon leader in the first wave. Maybe they thought his troops were the most expendable? In light of how he was already feeling, he decided not to overanalyze it. He toggled the Tacnet. “Top floor secure. We’re blowing the door to the shaft and heading down.”

  “Gotcha. We’ll be right behind you.”

  The shaft was booby-trapped. As soon as they opened a hole into the metal of the door, a barrage of gunfire exploded it outward. A grenade dealt with the offending guns, but the damage had been done. Another of his troops lay on his back, dented suit doing its best to keep his battered body alive. Soon enough, he’d been placed in a medical coma to await evac.

  “Going down the shaft. We’ll start from the bottom level this time.” Tristan informed the other squads. He motioned for two men to enter. “Be careful.”

  They encountered no further problems on the way down. The door at the bottom was soon open and they emerged into a huge dark area dotted with wide pillars every few meters.