“I’ve never known about them. I was too young to learn anything but battle.” She paused. “And by the time I found out about everything else, and about love, it was too late for me. I was committed to the course.” She laughed bitterly. “I thought I was so lucky when I finally met someone who felt the way I did. We would live fast and die young… well, we wouldn’t die old. I should have known it would end like everything else: him dead and me perfectly unscathed.”
Ian didn’t know what to say, so he kept silent.
“And yeah, I did kind of look down on you for not volunteering to be here. I will never understand the thinking behind that. I wasn’t afraid to die—what’s one person compared to so many millions? But at least I guess you did the right thing in the end. In answer to your question, dying doesn’t concern me in the least. The problem is that I wasn’t expecting to have to face my death alone.”
“Well, there’s a bunch of marines and a recon guy who’ll probably die with you if it comes to that, I guess.”
Melina didn’t reply, and turned away from him to gaze out of the forward viewport.
Ian decided to leave her to her thoughts and, ignoring the discomfort of high gravity, walked into the warm night. One of the marines was standing guard beside the forest and he walked to where the man was peering into the woods. As the hulking exoskeleton came into view in the dim greenish light from the moon, he realized that it was missing one hand: Tristan.
“Can you see anything?”
“No. But even weirder is the fact that I can’t hear anything.”
Ian listened. The marine was right, the night was completely still. He grunted his agreement.
“I’ve been on jungle worlds before,” the trooper continued. “They’re always hell on wheels. Hot, humid and sticky. But that’s not the worst part. The bugs are the worst part. There are always insects, flying around everywhere, buzzing in the night. You get used to them gradually, and then, after a while, you learn to rely on them. No one can sneak up on you at night in a jungle. You can always tell that they’re coming a mile away just because half of the jungle’s insects go quiet all of a sudden.”
Ian listened harder. The silence was eerie. Only by listening hard did he manage to discern any sound at all: the soft whisper of leaves in the wind. “Melina thinks that the trees must have evolved so that they don’t need any pollinizers. They are either asexual or self-contained.”
“I didn’t know she was a botanist.”
“I don’t think she is. She says she never knew what to do with her downtime when she was in ships, so she would read whatever she could find in ship databases. One of them had a bunch of biological textbooks and nothing else, so she read those.”
“You getting close to her?”
“Hell, no. I think if she could, she’d toss me out an airlock for failing to volunteer for this insanity. She’s really intense. Besides, I’m married. Or at least I was when we left.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“It seems like a couple of weeks ago to me, trooper.”
“Yeah, I guess it does. I’m sorry.”
“I had a kid, too. A little girl. You should have seen her. Blonde and adorable and completely perfect in every way. I can’t understand why anyone would volunteer and leave their kids behind.”
“Not sure too many people did. I certainly didn’t. I came because it was just another mission, and I swore to defend humanity to my last breath when I signed up. I didn’t have anyone to leave behind—my folks died of old age while I was asleep in transit before my first mission. Everything I own is on the Minstrel, in one bag inside a locker.”
“No special someone?”
“Lots of ‘em. Most of them were marines from one platoon or another. Some were navy, although they always get weepy when you ship off on another carrier.”
Ian laughed. “I don’t know why I bother talking to you combat types. You’re all nuts. Ground troops or fighter pilots, makes no difference.”
“I guess the probability of getting yourself killed every time you suit up does that to you.”
Ian sobered immediately. “Yeah. I can see that. Don’t mind me. I always get bitter when I remember that my baby girl has probably been dead of old age for three hundred years.”
They stared into the silent jungle, barely visible as a dark smudge in the moonlight. Tristan finally broke the silence. “I know you don’t want to be here. Hell, I wouldn’t in your place. But I’m sure glad you were still on the battlefield after the fight on the moon. I’d be dead now if it wasn’t for you. So would the commander over there.”
“That might have made her day.”
“Could be. But it wouldn’t have made mine. I don’t care if you volunteered or not. You’re all right in my book. Thank you.”
Ian didn’t reply. He stood behind the marine as the man looked out into the night. They listened for crickets, but there weren’t any in those woods.
Chapter 14
A mass of melted black casing, wires and circuits thudded to the floor beside her.
“Be careful with that!” Irene said.
“Sorry,” the forklift operator replied. “I was trying to lay it down as gently as possible, but something failed in the controls.” He looked critically at the wreckage he’d delivered. “At least I probably didn’t damage it any more than it already was.”
Irene had to concede the point. The mangled remains of the vampire were unlikely to yield much in the way of useful data, but it was the only one they had to work with. It had collided with the Heavy Gunship IV during the last battle and become lodged in a protuberance. The admiral’s men had retrieved it and sent it to the Lapland for analysis, where it had literally landed at Irene’s feet.
She sighed. No one seemed to realize that anyone with a slight grounding in nanotech and computers could have successfully solved the riddle of the defender’s bullets, which meant that she’d effectively been promoted to the position of go-to person for anything the admiral wanted answered by the Lapland. Irene had handed most of what was requested off to others, but this time it seemed the problem actually did involve her own area of expertise.
Then again, she thought, studying the wreckage critically, this one might be beyond anyone’s know-how.
There was no use in complaining. She’d been trained to take large problems a single step at a time, and the first step on this one was to try to get an idea of how the small pieces on her floor had once fit together. There was no chance of rebuilding it completely, but there should be enough parts to get a feel for it and fill in the gaps with educated guesses.
She picked up the nearest piece, some kind of circuit board, and placed it on a random place on the bench. She would build the rest of the machine up around that part.
Irene worked in silence, picking up pieces and making her best guess at where they might belong. As she moved through the pile, her mind wandered.
She remembered the impassioned meetings with her fellow pacifists. They were a secret organization in name only, since they congregated openly and most of their members made no effort to disguise where their sympathies lay. There was no real reason to hide. Most people in human space would have preferred a sudden outbreak of peace, but most thought they had no choice in the matter.
The difference was that Irene and her friends believed that everyone had a choice, even if that choice meant making sacrifices.
Her biggest frustration was with how people reacted to the war. The attitudes were split just about evenly into two camps: those who were angry at the blobs and wanted to push them back into whatever interstellar hole they’d crawled out of and those who bemoaned their fate and seemed to be waiting for the hammer to fall.
Irene knew that the best way to fight the war was not to fight it at all. Run, hide, leave behind the people who couldn’t be placed onto ships. War, she reasoned, could only breed more war. Why couldn’t people see that? All of human history was sending the message loud and clear.
/> But no one she knew would accept it. Every single person in the colony except for the few who attended the weekly meetings thought that it was some kind of imperative that they fight back. Running from the fight wasn’t just something they saw as impractical; they actually believed it was impossible. Literally impossible. As in that even if they attempted it, the war would find them anyway. And humanity would be exterminated.
That was ridiculous. It was a huge galaxy, and the blobs only controlled a tiny fraction of it.
So Irene had dedicated her life to doing things that could make fighting the war more and more difficult for the government. At first, they were ridiculously little things like sleeping with a marine on the night before he was supposed to ship out and drugging his drink so that he missed his transport, but gradually the group allowed her into slightly more interesting missions.
They stole paperwork and re-filed it so that ships were sent to stars far from the fighting. They infected an entire batch of shipboard food with slow-acting bacteria, causing a carrier to return to base two weeks after launch.
Finally, they decided to try to interfere with the task force.
Irene had been asked to volunteer for the mission. Her qualifications in nanotechnology and electronics would make her a valuable addition to the factory ship team.
And then they trained her. They taught her how to hack into protected systems and how to kill people with weapons and her bare hands. When she commented that she’d joined the movement to prevent violence, not instigate it, the answer was that they were just giving her tools, and that the situation might come up where one death could prevent hundreds, thousands, or millions. Even, if she was unlucky and her comrades failed, an instance of combat.
She’d promised herself that she wouldn’t let it come to that but, as soon as she was awake on the Lapland, it took her a short time to realize that her promise was in vain. She’d had to kill two people who had realized that something had gone very, very wrong with the navigation, and that would have caused the fleet to turn around and go back.
Irene hoped that the delay she’d caused could justify taking two lives. It was hard to tell how many lives might have been saved.
She didn’t regret a thing. The cause of peace was important enough that no sacrifice was too big, not even the sacrifice of having to use violence.
Then, she asked herself, why was she doing her very best to further the war effort—whichever war they were currently involved in—by analyzing the fragments of the black fighter?
She had no answer to that. All she knew is that the same sixth sense that told her that two of her fellow scientists had to die in order to keep her mission alive was telling her that there was something extremely evident that she was missing with regards to the vampire flyer. The feeling of being on the verge of a huge discovery drove her on.
The pile of rubble on the workbench had grown, and the parts were arranged in such a way that the outline of the fighting machine could be made out. She shuddered as she studied it. Even in its dilapidated state, the shape of the flyer exuded menace. It wasn’t a machine that could possibly be confused for anything other than what it was: a predatory form pulled from the nameless fears of primeval man.
And that was it. That was what had seemed wrong to her: the shape was too perfect. The vampires actually looked like things that would haunt your nightmares.
Like everyone who had ever been part of a military expedition, Irene had been trained in everything about both the alien species that humanity had encountered. The blobs and the Brillans were undoubtedly horrific, but had you not known what they were, had you encountered one on a far-flung planet, it wouldn’t have set off any alarm bells. These flying machines, on the other hand, almost seemed intentionally designed to frighten human beings.
In a galaxy the size of the Milky Way, of course, it was possible that something like that would happen coincidentally. Delta-winged shapes were very maneuverable, and many species would use them. Black was a good color to paint things if your enemy happened to see using the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. There were countless logical reasons for the machines to look the way they did.
But that didn’t account for her feeling. She just couldn’t shake the sensation that the design was specifically aimed at humans. All logic pointed against that conclusion… but it was still there, in the back of her mind.
She called in two tech specialists. “Hi, guys,” she said when they arrived. “Thanks for coming.”
“You’re welcome. What’s up?”
“I’m trying to do an analysis of the computer that was flying this fighter. There’s quite a bit of exotic circuitry in there. Enough that I’m concerned that they might have a certain limited amount of artificial intelligence.”
“How can you tell? If it was our tech, I could see it, but with alien stuff…” the man shrugged.
“Let’s assume it’s equivalent to ours, but a bit more advanced. If we find anything to the contrary we’ll modify the assumption, but let’s work off that base for now.”
“Works as well as any other, I guess. What’s the plan?”
“I just want to see if we can identify from this mess what might be memory and what might be processors. Once we have that, we can regroup. There’s too much for me to evaluate alone. Just be sure to scan at low power. If we can find anything that might be working, I want to see if we can make it sing for us.”
One of the techs gave her an incredulous look. “You want to make this stuff run?”
“Sure, why not? It’s damaged, but some of it must be in working order. We just need to identify which parts.”
“But we don’t even know what it’s designed to run on.”
“I have a hunch that these are binary circuits.”
“That might make sense, they’re the easiest to design after all. But that still wouldn’t allow us to talk to it or read the memory. We have no clue what the base software might be.”
Irene smiled. “I have some ideas about that, too. Let’s start by sorting the bits, and we’ll go from there.”
And another little voice asked: and how, exactly will this advance the cause of peace? She ignored it.
***
Cora fumed at the man, but she did so in silence. Major Tau Rodchenko had a reputation for being timid: a brilliant desk jockey and not such a good field commander, which probably explained why he was still alive when everyone else with any rank at all had gotten themselves first killed and then blown up in the attack on the moon installation. The fact that he was now in command of all the ground troops on the Minstrel was a major disaster… pun intended.
“One of our guys is down there,” she said. “Not to mention every single marine who survived the attack on the Bard. We can’t just leave them down there to die.”
“We don’t know that they’re dying. The planet is supposed to be an ideal place for life to take hold. Besides, even if I wanted to do this, I’d still have to clear it with the general and we’d both need to get the admiral to sign up for a rescue mission. We only run the soldiers; the ships belong to the navy.”
“That’s all I’m asking. I know how the chain of command works for something this big.”
“I don’t think we can elevate this one, Lieutenant. It’s too risky.”
It was the third time he’d said the same thing. “All right, sir,” she said, standing. “Thanks for your time.”
She walked away and immediately strode towards her room. She’d only found out that the man who’d survived the moon installation assault was Tristan the day before, and since then had been completely unable to think about anything else. A sleepless night of ideating and discarding one plan after another had left her exhausted, but armed with what she believed was a workable scheme.
There was no way that she would take the major’s overcautious stance on this issue lying down.
In a breach of pretty much everything that had been drilled into her at officer school, she put in a d
irect call to the senior officer of a different service—a man who had more to think about than anyone else in the fleet.
Cora chuckled to herself as she waited for the connection to go live. People who volunteered for suicide missions weren’t particularly concerned with court martials. It was a wonder that discipline had held out for as long as it had.
“Yes,” a strong voice assaulted her as the image resolved into the familiar features of the admiral. “What is it?” He looked down at the information on the bottom of his screen, “Lieutenant Sirius Almir.”
“Hello, sir. I’m sorry to disturb you, but I’ve created a plan to rescue the marines stranded on the planet.”
He gave her a look that had all the warmth of the cold vacuum of space. “And why isn’t this coming to me from the general?”
“Because Major Tau Rodchenko has flatly refused to consider the idea, sir.”
“I assume he has technical reasons for turning you down. Why come to me?”
“With all due respect, sir,” she said, hoping her tone and face showed exactly how much respect she had for the major. “I suspect his reasons are political rather than technical.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“No. But it’s difficult to have technical objections when he didn’t listen to the plan.”
The admiral sighed. “I should really cut you off right now and have someone escort you to the brig. But I won’t, because everyone from the fighter jockey flying the Ismala to my own daughter has been pestering me to send a mission out to get them. But no one has any idea how to pull it off, so if you have a semi-workable plan, I might not bust you back to private for insubordination and spectacular disregard for the chain of command.”
“Yes, sir. I propose we take the Banshee in. She’s designed to avoid detection and fast enough that we can take a long route in a short amount of time.”
The admiral gave her a look that made his earlier expression seem warm and fuzzy. “I hope this is a joke, Lieutenant. The Banshee isn’t rated for atmosphere operations.”
Incursion: Shock Marines Page 16