Incursion: Shock Marines

by Gustavo Bondoni

  “Ready?” Ian asked.

  “As ready as I’m going to be. Opening the window in three. Two. One.”

  Melina closed her eyes and pressed the button and air rushed past her head, to be lost in the vastness of space. She couldn’t hear anything else and her ears popped with the pressure change. She had no way to tell whether the recon pilot had managed to maneuver his awkward burden through the opening, but she was starting to feel the cold and the wind was gone. She punched the close button.

  Air blasted back in and the pain in her ears was excruciating. After a few seconds, she allowed herself to breathe… and it felt good. Only then did Melina open her eyes.

  A ball of ice formed in her stomach when she didn’t immediately spot the suit beside her. She turned frantically around to see the yellow bag sitting in the space behind her seat. Ian had intelligently chosen to drop it where it couldn’t get caught on anything. “Remind me to kiss you when I get to your ship, Ian. I’d never have bet on it, but you actually turned out to be a decent guy.”

  “Of course I am. What did you expect?”

  “Well, you did come across as a bit of a whiner when I met you.”

  “I think most of us would have been bitter to have been sent on a suicide mission and leave behind our family without being consulted.”

  She said nothing. She had lost just as much as he had on this trip, and had mentioned it to no one. Of course, he did have a point about having had a choice. But again, it was hard for her to imagine someone in any of the services, naval, marines, or Recon, not volunteering immediately.

  “Soldier boy. I see that suit’s damaged,” Ian continued. “Can you grip the cargo bar on my flyer?”

  “Should be all right. But where are we going?”

  “I was thinking of getting us off this moon as quickly as possible.”

  “Any particular reason for that?”

  “Yeah. Long range sensors on my ship tell me that the uglies from the planet are massing nearby. I think they’re coming our way and I’d like nothing more than not being here when they arrive. Feel free to stick around and fight them if you want.”

  “Nah, I’m good. Just show me where to grab on. I’m Tristan, by the way.”

  “Nice to meet you. I assume you were in the bunker?

  “Yeah. All the way to the bottom and back.”

  “You’ll have to tell me about that sometime. Melina, you coming?”

  She finished double checking the suit and powered it up. Yellow lights became green as the diagnostics confirmed the seals. “Yes, it looks as though I am.”

  Melina popped the hatch again, this time without trepidation, and climbed out of the stricken fighter. She paused for a single second to place her hand on its skin, a ritual of thanks that she always observed when a ship brought her back from an engagement in one piece. This time, her thankfulness was tinged with sadness—this fighter would never be carrying anyone else into combat. It had given its life to save hers.

  But she didn’t permit herself more than a second’s reverie. Like Ian, Tristan, and Melina herself, the fighter had come here to be destroyed. She gained nothing by dwelling on it.

  Moments later, she climbed into the Recon ship. “I’m driving,” she said in a tone that she hoped brooked no argument. She knew that if anyone else took the controls, she wouldn’t be able to contain her nerves.

  Ian just shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He clambered into the seat behind her and fussed with his belts.

  “Cabin seal locked, pressure coming in a second. We have atmosphere. Nothing leaking, so you can go ahead and take your helmet off if you like.” She pulled off her own. Although it was much safer to fly with a helmet on—you wouldn’t die immediately if your hull was breached, for one thing—she hated it. She always felt that it impaired her peripheral vision, and she knew that things she couldn’t see in a dogfight could be just as deadly as a depressurization. The reason the fighter corps allowed them the choice was that in centuries of space war, it had been discovered that impacts that opened up the hull of a fighter were usually caused by high-energy weapons that didn’t just breach the hull, but actually pulverized the vehicle. There was no real survivability gain in wearing a suit.

  “Trooper, hold on for a second. I’m going to pull into a hover. On my signal, grab the cargo bar.”

  Now where was the button to turn one of these things on? Melina asked herself. After shoving him unceremoniously aside, she couldn’t just ask Ian to show her. She hesitated a moment, cursing the armed forces for their continued refusal to standardize cockpit layouts across small craft, and then pushed a recessed lozenge. To her relief, the ship powered up.

  Melina powered up, held the ship in place, and waited for Tristan to attach himself to the cargo bar. She lifted the craft a couple of meters and hovered a few more seconds trying to get a feel for what the heavy suit would likely do to the ship’s balance before she shrugged and took off into orbit.

  “I assume you’re an expert on the sensors,” she said to Ian.

  “Of course. Been living with these things for a couple of years.”

  “Great. Tell me which way to go, then.”

  Ian chuckled. “You see that solid black smudge over there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s not solid. It only looks that way because there are so many little dots one on top of the other. The enemy ships are swarming.”

  “Oh.”

  “So my suggestion is that you fly the other way.”

  “The other way is towards the planet, which is where they originally came from.”

  “I understand that, but right now, they’re over there.”

  “What if they left more of them on the planet?”

  “We’ll have to deal with that if it comes up. I prefer to run from the danger we know is out there.”

  “I’m with Ian,” Tristan chimed in over the Tacnet from somewhere below them. “For some reason, I don’t feel happy with the idea of this ship being shot at by anything while we’re in space. My vote is to get away from the ones we know are out there, and then see where that gets us.”

  “All right,” Melina said. There was no real option, anyway. Attempting to make a run for the rendezvous point would send them straight through the swarm, and flying in any other direction would likely as not just leave them stranded in space until the eventually got spotted.

  She set a course for the planet.

  “Holy shit!” Ian said.

  “What?” Melina instinctually checked her proximity alarms for any sign of enemy attack. When she saw that space around them was clear, she turned on Ian. “Don’t do that. You nearly made me piss myself. What is happening?”

  He pointed at the long-range display, where the solid mass of enemies had opened up to become multiple tendrils which shot out from the main mass and shot towards the moon like fingers from a giant hand.

  Graphs and charts started spiking to one side of the display. “Someone out there doesn’t like that moon very much,” Ian said.

  “They hitting it hard?” Melina inquired. By the way the graphs were jumping, it certainly seemed that way.

  Ian studied the readouts. “Yes… but not so much hard, as often. These jumps look more like something getting hit with hundreds of thousands of small projectiles. When there’s a big explosion like our marine friends set off, the charts work on a different scale.”

  “Can you show me what they’re shooting at?”

  “Sure.” He toggled to a different screen which showed a rotating moon surrounded by clouds of data. “They seem to be blasting every single artificial structure on the planet. The alien ones we’d identified and anything else. By this count, they sent forty thousand rounds into your ship. See? You wouldn’t have asphyxiated if you’d stayed.”

  Melina marveled at the ship’s sensors. Her own fighter had excellent short-range scanners but would have been hard-pressed to identify an enemy at this kind of range, much less count shots fired. Of course, Recon
flyers were much heavier and less nimble than fighters, despite being unarmed and unarmored. The weight consisted of scanners, shielding, and big, big engines.

  “How about we get away from here before they notice us?” Tristan said. “I feel a little exposed out here.”

  Melina throttled gently, to avoid putting too much strain on the cargo bar and pushed them into an orbit around the planet.

  Ian suddenly hit a switch and put a headset to his ear. “You’re not going to believe this. We have company in orbit. A bunch of marines. They’ve got four dropships, too. They say they fought through the swarm and got away.”

  “Of course they did. They’re marines. Those flying things are just fighters. It’s not even a fair fight.”

  “Shut up, Tristan, or I’ll jettison the cargo bar with you on it,” Melina said. Turning to Ian, she asked, “Can you show me where they are?”

  ***

  The hangar door shut behind him, and Yuri waited for the space to pressurize. He climbed out of the fighter, but didn’t open his face shield. He knew all about hangars that had just been open to space. They were always extremely fucking cold.

  A circumnavigation of his fighter made him wince. It was still spaceworthy, which was why he was still alive, but he knew that it was only a temporary thing. When his quartermaster saw the state of that fighter, the man would kill him.

  The door opened and two women entered the hangar. They could have been mother and daughter: both had dark hair and olive skin, but one of them was about thirty while the other looked closer to fifty-five. Of course, considering stasis sleep patterns during the war, the younger-looking one could easily have been born centuries before her counterpart. “So, can you explain why, exactly, you decided to come here? The Ismala is damaged, but it was good enough for all the other fighters, wasn’t it?”

  He shrugged. They’d told him that the Lapland would be expecting his arrival but, as usual, the fog of war seemed to have intervened. “Admiral’s orders. He said he wanted someone to analyze the ammo we were being hit with.”

  “The ammo from the flying wings? Those were shooting some kind of explosive heavy-metal slugs. Not a whole lot of science to that.”

  “I didn’t fight the wings, fortunately. I was on the moon, fighting the air defenses there. The fighters they had seemed pretty advanced, but their ammo was crap, and the admiral wants to know why. Look at my fighter. They must have hit me fifty times, but I still flew out of there with most of my systems intact. All I really lost was my targeting computer, which is too smart for itself anyway. No one ever uses those things.” He turned back to the ship. “The strange thing is that none of the impact holes are anywhere near the computer. It just probably broke the way everything does on this mission.”

  ***

  Irene hugged herself against the chill as she studied the fighter. Her heart sank even further. Her own life, and that of others who were likely dead millennia since, had been dedicated to a single cause: keeping humanity from indulging in its vilest passion: the eternal fighting of wars.

  War was the single constant keeping humans from evolving beyond what they always had been: tribal savages organized in a society where the strong ruled the weak and in which the population’s fear of being unprotected in the face of conflict kept the strong in power. Until war was abolished, there could be no true equality, not true freedom from poverty and slavery.

  The politicians said that the blobs had started the war. Of course they would say that. The problem with their arguments was that in the course of human history, all the evidence pointed to humans always throwing the first stone.

  In this one instance, for the first time that she knew of, her group had managed to execute a plan perfectly. They’d moved in and somehow managed to divert an entire task force away from a battle, sending them off into the trackless wastes of open space. The success was complete because they hadn’t just sent them randomly out to die when the equipment failed; they’d actually managed to land them in a different star system. Granted, it was far away, and granted many had died, but it hadn’t been indiscriminate murder. It had all worked out.

  But there was still a fighter sitting in the landing bay full of holes. In a supposedly empty star system thousands of light years from the fighting.

  To Irene, there could be no more powerful symbol of the hopelessness of striving for peace. In empty space across a good chunk of the galaxy from where they were supposed to be, the task force had managed to get embroiled in a three-way fight with… God only knew whom.

  It was too much to digest, so she forced the thought aside. She’d have to analyze what she thought later. In the meantime, there was a mystery to solve. The fighter in the hangar was riddled with holes, but they were extremely shallow and none seemed to have penetrated too far into the fighter.

  As they got to work, the pilot excused himself. They gave him directions to the nearest dining area and promptly forgot about him.

  Her colleague, a woman named Serena, who had much more experience than Irene did, got straight to the heart of it. She pulled a small fragment of an enemy round out of the hull and held it up in the light. It was long and thin, fragile-looking.

  “Doesn’t look like something designed to destroy armored enemies, does it?”

  “Not in the least,” Irene replied.

  “So why shoot it at our fighters?”

  Irene pulled another one out of the metal. This one had barely broken the skin, but the bullet itself was deformed. She hefted it. “They’re not particularly heavy. Light projectiles do a lot less damage. And this one is hollow.”

  Serena snapped her fingers. “And that’s our answer. It’s not a weapon in itself. The bullets are only the delivery system for the weapon. Something inside that shell was injected into this fighter and every other one that got hit.”

  “Something? You mean that it’s a biological agent? Why shoot fighters with a biological agent?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Irene was thinking. They weren’t expecting to be there, and the aliens inhabiting this system certainly wouldn’t have been expecting the sudden appearance of a large human fleet. The weapons systems, therefore, weren’t designed to stop them but some other kind of attacker. “I think it’s because they weren’t expecting us. They were expecting an attack from someone else.”

  “That’s stupid. We’ve been at war with the blobs for centuries. They know how to kill us.”

  “I’m just trying to read the evidence,” Irene said. Letting anyone know that she was aware of the fact that they were in the wrong place would invite unwanted questions. “We need to try to analyze what they injected here. But first, we have a much more pressing problem.”

  Irene walked to the hangar’s communications console and contacted security. “We have a contamination alert. Use full hazmat suits and isolate the pilot who just came in through the hangar bay. Also, anyone who came in contact with him.” She hesitated. “You’d better seal off the areas he visited, too, just in case. And lock Serena and me into this hangar. We’ll need equipment, but we’ll request that as we go. Now go grab that pilot.”

  Chapter 11

  “Two hundred and fifteen thousand years?”

  “Give or take, yeah.”

  “That’s stupid,” Cora said. The pain of walking around with half-healed injuries was much less than the pain of knowing that her entire platoon was now officially dead, and that she had not been able to do a thing about it, not even been present during the last combat mission. Tristan and Klaus had both been on the moon, and once the enemy swarm—everyone was calling them the black vampires now—had put an emphatic end to any speculation about survivors; everything artificial on the surface had been destroyed.

  “No,” the medical tech that had been performing her daily checkup disagreed. “It’s not stupid. In fact, it makes perfect sense once you look at the evidence.” He gestured at the equipment around him. “These machines are designed to work perfectly without maintenance
after any long trip. That means they should last for five thousand years, easy. So either all the machines were faulty when we left or the trip was much longer than they were designed for.”

  She’d developed an instant dislike for the guy’s knowing smile and his whiny smart-ass tone, but his argument made sense. Stasis pods were another technology that almost never failed in habitual use. They were designed to last forever, piling redundancies upon redundancies. But about forty percent of the pods on the Minstrel had failed, killing thousands of troops and crew. If the new estimates of where they were proved correct, it was lucky to have as many survivors as they did.

  “Besides,” the guy continued, “this comes straight from the admiral. He wouldn’t be saying it if it wasn’t true.”

  “The admiral told you? Wow. I didn’t know you were friends with him.”

  “Bosom buddies. All his other friends died in transit.” He studied the readout. “You’re all right. I’ll tell you the same thing the doctor probably did, though. You need to stay in bed. You’re pretty banged up and you just had surgery. Yes, the autosurgeons did their job, but you need to let your body stitch itself back together all the way. Give it a couple more days. And you can forget about strenuous action for… well, probably longer than we’ll last out here.”

  “Heard it already. Not interested.”

  She left the examination room and looked around the hall. The walls were the same luminous off-white they’d always been, but now she could see the tiny cracks in the plastic. Hairline fractures that she’d seen but never consciously noticed before. They took on much more significance now that she knew she was standing in a ship that had crossed just over fifty-three light years of space. Two hundred thousand years’ worth of travel.

  Cora ran her hands over a crack that extended two meters on the wall. It crisscrossed with dozens of others along its path. This was just one wall, an unstressed segment in a corridor that had been dormant during the entire trip. If that was the kind of damage that two hundred thousand years could impart, then it was no wonder that nothing worked the way it was supposed to.