It was obviously something that had been built, not birthed. The lines were industrial, chiseled, sculpted from angles and straight lines. The confusion came when watching them fly around. They didn’t look like robots, didn’t move like them. They swarmed like something alive and reacted with unpredictability and intelligence. Tom had watched them box five marines into a dead end by attacking them from the side and then, once the marines were established behind cover, suddenly change tactics and hit them from above. All that remained of the troops was the memory of their screams over the Tacnet.
And it was impossible to watch a damaged enemy attempt to get back into the air and escape its tormentors without understanding that the thing had a consciousness that it wanted to preserve.
But whether they were alive or some kind of drone wasn’t the issue at hand. What Tom’s platoon needed to do was to clear the staging area of attackers as soon as possible. To do that, they needed to seal the blast doors. Maybe if they secured an area, someone would take command and lead a counter attack.
He tried not to think about what such a strike might hope to achieve. The Bard’s interior was in vacuum, thanks to multiple holes in the hull. Unless part of the navy crew had managed to lock themselves in a space where they still had air, only shock marines in exoskeletons and those pilots who’d made it to their dropships before depressurization had survived.
Even if some of the naval guys had pockets of air, there was still the question of not being blown to bits by these attackers.
All of which made him suspect that managing to take the ship might only be worthwhile in order to keep the bodies of the dead from serving as food for the enemy.
That was good enough for Tom. He hadn’t signed up to watch his shipmates get consumed by the blobs for protein.
He watched a flight of enemy craft race by and, timing it as best he could, he stepped out from behind cover, took a quick shot at the rearmost craft and ran towards the door controls. To his relief, they were undamaged, so he hit the emergency blast door seal button. He had to break through its error-proofing cover to do so, but that was child’s play in the powered exoskeleton.
The huge door crashed down, shaking the staging bay. Tom felt the vibrations through his suit.
Almost as soon as the armored panel slid into place, he felt new vibrations coming from it as the enemy began shooting at the door. It wouldn’t hold indefinitely, but unless they had something bigger than the guns he’d seen already, the thick armor would take them a bit of time to bore through.
Sealing the door meant that the marines could take the initiative. They carved into the flying enemy with enthusiasm, knowing that the huge metallic kites couldn’t run out of the staging hangar, and that they also couldn’t be reinforced by the numberless cloud of enemies outside.
Unfortunately, the lack of escape and reinforcement didn’t seem to dull the bad guys’ fighting ability in the least. They still gave as good as they got, and the highly mobile wings were difficult to hit.
Tom exulted as one he’d shot at veered off course and slammed into a column, disintegrating into small pieces in a shower of sparks.
He glanced back at the door to ensure that the enemy wasn’t close to breaking through, and then took a bead on another. By the time the remaining flyers had been dealt with, Tom had two more kills to his credit, and he’d never even been in any real danger; his position far from the main marine lines ensured that he could snipe without drawing undue attention to himself.
“All right, crew, any of those fuckers left?” an authoritative voice over the Tacnet inquired.
“I think we got them all.”
“OK. You and you,” the voice spoke to people Tom couldn’t see, “look around the hangar. If you see anything moving that isn’t wearing a suit, blow it apart.” There was a pause. The commander, whoever he was, must have been on one of the non-public channels. “All right. It looks like we have four dropships left. That means that forty of us can get out of this crate.”
“Where would we go?”
“If we use the all the onboard fuel to power the ships, we might be able to get clear of the battle. Then we’ll need to wait for pickup.”
“Did anyone survive?”
“Situation is still fluid, but I hear that the Centauri’s Courage is badly damaged. Well, and the Bard of course.”
“Lucky us.”
“Yeah, did you think you were signing up for a picnic?” Another pause. “I just did a quick head count and there are twenty-five marines in here. We can all get the hell out of Dodge.”
“But what about the crew? Shouldn’t we at least try to figure out if anyone survived?” Tom, to his horror, realized that the voice was his.
“Look, soldier, if you want to try to fight your way through the swarm behind the door to rescue a bunch of popsicles, I won’t stand in your way. In fact, I’ll drink to your bravery to the end of my days. But my responsibility is to the war effort, and I won’t throw away any more marines than we’ve already lost. So whoever is coming, get your ass on a dropship. Those doors won’t hold much longer.”
To his surprise, Tom actually hesitated, thinking of a particularly interesting bridge aide he’d struck up a friendship with since they’d been thawed, but then he turned back and ran towards the rest of the marines. He’d face the fact that she was dead, and probably some blob’s lunch, later. Right then, he needed to concentrate on not joining her.
The dropships were quickly loaded and the outer hangar door blown open using explosive charges. The intention was that the huge, very solid piece of steel could help clear a path for them through the swarm of enemy attackers and increase their chances of getting away.
They needn’t have bothered. The side of the ship they emerged on was devoid of enemy presence, and they sped away unmolested.
Tom craned his neck around. The ship he was on had been the last to leave, and he’d instinctively chosen the window seat. Dropship action made him feel helpless enough without also forcing him to blindly accept his fate.
Hanging in space behind them, the hulk of the Bard drifted aimlessly. Tom wasn’t a starship engineer, but even he could tell that the carrier would never be of further use to anyone. Riddled with holes punched into the hull and still venting gasses which became briefly visible as they froze and then disappeared from sight as they dispersed, it was clearly a dead ship. All human children had downloaded vids of ghost ships drifting through the space lanes with unholy memories on board, and this one fit the bill perfectly.
The enemy flyers—presumably excluding the ones still inside—had abandoned the area. The swarm they’d seen on every situation display before the battle was nowhere to be found. There was no way to tell where they might have gone: finding black fighters against a black star field was a fool’s errand.
He briefly thought of the crew of the ship, both marines and naval personnel. There had been thousands. Twenty-five marines and four dropship pilots were all that remained.
Tom reached out to the pilot over the Tacnet. “Any news on a possible pickup?”
“None. Area is way too hot for anyone to fly in. It would be suicide.”
“Maybe so, but we need extraction.”
“Buddy, just calm down. While we’re still alive, there’s hope. Plus, you’ve got much more air in that suit than I do in this cabin. Relax.”
“Where are we going?”
“Nowhere in particular. We can’t fight those things, so we’ve decided to put the planet between them and us. As long as they’re on one side and we’re on the other, we’re reasonably safe.”
Safe, Tom knew, was a very relative condition. They were supposed to be safe inside the troopship, a well-armed and armored capital vessel. That hadn’t worked out so well.
And now their safety depended on a tiny flight of inadequately armed dropships in orbit.
Looking down at the planet, Tom wondered if he’d ever make it off his ship, and wondered how the rest of the fleet was doing. He t
ried to find the Centauri’s Courage, but the ship was not in his field of view.
***
“Admiral,” an aide on the bridge of the Heavy Gunship IV said.
“Yes?”
“It looks like the enemy is pulling away, sir.”
“Pulling away?”
“Yes, sir. They seem to be focusing their attack on the moon. Both the Minstrel and the Ismala report that the enemy has broken off their pursuit. And our forward guns haven’t gotten a target in over three minutes.”
The HGIV had taken a beating, but this was exactly the kind of action the ship was designed for. It was more a mobile battle station, armed and armored to the hilt, and unlike the carriers and troopships, it had done well against the portion of the swarm that had come their way.
“Where are they going?”
“Our sensors have tracked them to the planet’s moon, and we’re seeing energy release in various sites across the surface. The sites map to the ones where we’d seen installations on our reconnaissance runs.”
“So they’re blowing up their own installations? Why would they do that?”
The aide shrugged. “Maybe they just want to keep the buildings out of our hands.”
Tina spoke up. Her father, as usual, was thinking along strict military lines. The admiral could only see two divisions when he was in action: us and them, blue and red dots. “Maybe they aren’t the guys who built those facilities.”
“That’s ridiculous. Who else would have built facilities around their planet?”
“Someone who wanted to keep them locked up, maybe.” She looked around the bridge. “Think about it. The shield thing, whatever it was, went down immediately after our marines blew up the installation that was emitting all the radiation, right?”
“Yes,” her father said, but she could see that he’d already grasped the rest of what she was going to say. He was hidebound, but he wasn’t dumb. The only reason he let her continue and didn’t blurt out her conclusion for her was that he wasn’t the kind of man to steal a subordinate’s thunder, even if he was kicking himself for not having thought of it first.
“So what if that energy shield wasn’t meant to keep us out, but actually meant to keep that black cloud of vampire fighters in?”
Silence reigned as everyone considered the implications of what she’d said. The admiral shook his head. “I’ll need to think about that a little later. First, I need to understand what we have left. Fleet status, please.”
“Yes, sir,” a lieutenant to the right of the admiral replied. “The Banshee and the Lapland weren’t involved in the fighting, and are already at the rendezvous point. The Minstrel and the Ismala survived, but both are still assessing damage. The good news is that they’re moving to the meeting place under their own power. The bad news is that the Ismala had to abandon a whole bunch of fighters, and of course, all the marines on the moon got left behind. We don’t know if any survived.”
The admiral massaged the bridge of his nose with two fingers, a gesture that Tina had seen countless times when she was growing up. It looked like a harmless gesture showing that her father was tired, but to her, it represented the times when he’d punished her for misbehaving; especially on those occasions where he knew the punishment would hurt her.
What he was thinking was clear as day. He wanted to return to the scene of the battle and look for survivors, and to save as many lives as he could. He wanted it more than anything in the universe.
The admiral straightened. “Full retreat. Set a course for the rendezvous point. Tell the captains of the Ismala and the Minstrel that I want to see them on the bridge as soon as they arrive.”
The bitter pill swallowed, her father straightened. “Analyst… Pol, isn’t it?”
“Yessir,” the analyst replied, obviously expecting the call, but still nervous about being addressed by the admiral.
“Everything I’ve seen so far, combined with what you told me about this system not being HR8799, makes me conclude that there isn’t a blob fleet in this sector and there probably won’t ever be. Hell, I’m pretty sure the battle we just fought isn’t even part of the same war.” He gave the man a long look. “What I really want to know is who just attacked us and whose installations we just blew to pieces. But I’ll settle for knowing where the hell we are.”
“We’re working on that, sir.”
“So you don’t know?”
“What we’re seeing out there doesn’t match anything in the star charts, so we’re working by elimination. We started at the Tau Ceti base and are working our way outwards. We’re looking at the records for all the similar stars that we have on file against this system. We’ve gone out quite a way and still don’t have a match.”
“How much is quite a way?”
“I can definitely state that this system isn’t within fifteen thousand light years of where we started from.”
Chapter 10
Melina listened in dismay as the battle around the planet evolved from a surprise attack to a rout and finally to a massacre. She held her breath as the command Tac brought her news of the retreat. Both of the ships around the moon were recalled.
She knew the order was logical, a necessary withdrawal that would save the greatest number of lives and the greatest amount of material, but someone on the bridge must have been against it because the last transmission they sent before flying away was: “If there’s anyone in orbit, or anyone down on the moon, hang tight. I’ll get this ship back here somehow.”
And then the ships moved out of Tacnet range and there was silence on the airwaves.
“We’re screwed, aren’t we?” the shock marine said.
“Probably. I am, at least. I thought I could fly out of here, but I’m getting all kinds of error messages. There’s no way I’m getting off the ground, so unless the ships can get back here in a day or so, I’ll be out of air. I vented quite a bit, I’m afraid. And you might want to think about telling your suit to put you into a coma right away. I suppose you can save some of your oxygen like that.”
“Crap.”
“Tell me about it.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes before an unexpected voice reached her over the Tacnet. “There you are! I’ve been looking all over for you.”
“Ian? What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you. I already told you that.”
“I meant, why didn’t you retreat with the ships? You’ll be stuck out here.”
“I’ve got a Recon flyer, so I can survive quite a few weeks out on my own. Plus, I can hide from most stuff and run from anything that manages to see me. That’s the beauty of Recon, we don’t have to be brave.”
“Well, I hope you came to say goodbye, because I’ve got a few hours of air and no power to the engines.”
“So hop on my flyer.”
“How? Don’t have a suit, either.”
She could see the flyer now, coming in to land in their crater, following a spiral descent path. Braking jets stirred up a huge dust cloud and the marine raised his guns in the direction of the ship.
“Down, boy. That’s a friend of ours, and he just might be your ticket out of here.”
“That’s not one of our fighters.”
“I know. It’s a Recon flyer. Trust me on this, he’s one of the good guys.”
The man stood down.
“Nice to meet you, soldier,” Ian’s voice came over the open Tacnet. “Name’s Ian. Sorry to sneak up like that, but I didn’t know Melina had company. Thought she’d have enough sense to ditch further from the fighting.”
“Not my choice. I barely had time to keep the thing upright, much less choose where to fall. I thought I might be able to fly home, but the secondary explosion pelted me with rocks… and I don’t think this fighter is going anywhere.”
“Not a problem. I’ll take you out with me. I’ve got a spare suit. Might be a bit big on you, but I still think it’s better than asphyxiating.”
Melina suddenly felt nervou
s. She’d been so sure she was going to die that fatalism had essentially overcome her, probably made stronger by listening to the destruction of two capital ships and the death of their crews over the Tacnet.
Now, however, the risk of getting an extra suit into a sealed fighter without killing herself made her take interest in the world and feel a sense of dread. She knew there was a procedure for that operation, a way to ensure that she would be exposed to the vacuum the least amount of time possible, sealing the fighter again with minimum air loss, but she’d probably been dozing in class when her instructor had walked them through it all those years before.
If she didn’t get the suit, she would die. So if she died trying, at least she wouldn’t have to wait around for it.
“All right,” she said, punching buttons on her console. Her display was still working and she still had power to the canopy mechanism. That was good. “Once you get to the fighter, I’m going to pump as much of my cabin oxygen back into the tanks as I can without fainting. That way, I’ll lose very little if something goes wrong, and we can try again. Then I’m going to close my eyes and pop the canopy. I’ll leave it open for two seconds before closing it again, so make sure you’re ready to throw the suit in. If all goes well, I should survive.”
“Got it,” Ian replied. “Start your pumps. I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”
Melina did. She brought her cabin pressure down to fifty kilopascals, ignoring the alarms that went off. She should be fine at that pressure, especially since the air inside her fighter was pure oxygen.
She flipped open the acrylic covering that protected the canopy opening switch from accidental activation. She put one hand on top of the button and the other on the one that closed it in and re-pressurized the cabin in emergencies. Both hands were trembling.
Ian walked up to the fighter. The suit he was carrying was bulky enough that Melina decided to leave the canopy open as long as she dared.
Incursion: Shock Marines Page 11