“Of course you don’t. Anyone thick enough to choose the military as a career can’t be too bright, can they? Fine. I’ll spell it out for you. We did this. The pacifist group from Tau. We diverted the fleet, and we selected a different system, far enough away that the war would be long over by the time we got here. It was our greatest triumph!”
Ian suddenly jumped in, his face showing almost as much anger as Melina felt. “You call this a pacifist triumph? We’ve been fighting since we got here!”
“Two hundred and fifteen thousand years later. This fleet gave us peace for all that time. And you’re not fighting a war here. You’re just dying so that the Oneness can pacify the system. I still call it a triumph.”
And then, through the ice, the realization hit Melina. “You were part of the group that did this to us?”
Irene held her gaze. “Proudly.”
Moving too fast for the scientist’s dulled reflexes, Melina grabbed her hair and pulled her close. “You fucking bitch. You killed Nairo.”
“What?”
Melina wasn’t listening. She slammed her fist into Irene’s solar plexus and, when the scientist bent double, she hit her in the face with a knee. Then, not thinking, not capable of thought through the searing rage, she pulled the other woman, screaming, by the hair and stood her in front of the airlock.
Melina opened the door with her free hand and threw the scientist inside and closed the inner hatch.
There was a window in the hatch. Melina watched the other woman scream and beat her fists against the glass, but it had been designed to withstand much more pressure than a mere human could bring to bear. She waited a couple of minutes until the woman wore herself out and then opened the intercom.
“This is for Nairo,” she told the woman.
“Who the fuck is Nairo?” Irene screamed.
But Melina wasn’t in the mood to answer. She studied the airlock controls, and then smiled grimly to herself. She hadn’t planned it, but it was good luck that they’d found a maintenance lock. It had functions that others didn’t.
She punched a series of buttons and, suddenly, the insults that Irene was hurling at them stopped. “Wait,” she said. “What are you doing? Let me out, you maniac!”
Melina ignored her. She turned to Ian. “I’m going to walk down that hall. I’ve set this so that it will take a full five minutes for the air to vent before the outer door opens. It’s a safety feature in case the lock is damaged, but it’s a very bad way to go for anyone stuck in there. She’ll probably survive for about three minutes more, although if you take more than about one minute to let her out, she’ll have some serious medical issues afterwards. If you don’t save her, no one will. This corridor looks like no one has walked here in two hundred thousand years.”
Melina set off in the direction of their flyer. A couple of seconds later, Ian fell into step beside her.
“I would have bet anything that you were going to let her out.”
“I had a wife and daughter,” Ian replied. “My one consolation when I got volunteered for this fiasco was that I might help to buy them some time.”
“Ah. I see. Well, we’ve got marines to save. We should probably hurry.”
They redoubled their pace.
Chapter 20
“Can you keep the planet between the vampires and us?” Ian asked.
“I don’t know, but I’m sure as hell going to give it a shot.”
Melina powered the drive. Despite the full fuel load, the acceleration on a Recon flyer made the fighters she’d flown for all of her career seem anemic. These things could move.
Of course, they couldn’t turn or fight worth a damn and their armor was just about enough to stop a spitball, so it was extremely important to know where the enemy was. A wrong turn would signal the end almost immediately.
“Where are they?”
“They’re just passing the Lapland. Doesn’t look like they’re taking the bait.”
“Shit. They got here faster than I expected.”
They’d been expecting the swarm to break its stride and go after the factory ship, which had just begun to retreat. Like the flyer, it wasn’t armed well enough to be effective in combat—especially against an enemy that had already demolished the rest of the fleet.
While they were both hoping that the capital ship might be able to get out of range before it was destroyed, they knew that every minute the Lapland could buy them was one more that they had before dying. The maximum time would be gained if the factory ship stood its ground and fought to the bitter end.
Of course, they’d then have to face starvation on the surface but, who knew, maybe the trees were edible after all. Every hope rested on the fact that humanity had clearly been to the planet, or at least knew about it. Had they seeded it with food suitable for humans? Was there, perhaps, an ocean full of fish somewhere that they hadn’t found yet? Hope was better than dying with the Lapland.
Which seemed to have escaped its fate.
“The ship’s clear! The swarm flew right by them, and if they want to catch up now, they’ll take hours. The Lapland is accelerating away from the system under full thrust!” Ian was clearly rooting for the factory ship.
And why not? Melina wondered. You’d have to be a bit of a cold bastard, used to running casualty analyses in the heat of battle to be able to calmly weigh the deaths of hundreds of your fellow creatures against the possibility of maybe surviving in the most savage way for a few more days… or perhaps some additional months. You’d have to be the kind of person who’d be able to shove someone into an airlock and leave them there to die, slowly and painfully while you walked away. You’d have to be dead inside.
It seemed like Ian hadn’t quite reached the point where he was dead inside, but Melina still wondered whether either of them deserved to survive.
She decided not to think about it. There were much more pressing concerns on her mind at that moment, the most urgent of which was that the enemy fleet would be upon them much sooner than she’d been expecting. Melina flew with one eye as she watched the path of the swarm with the other.
Icy though her heart might be, it seemed that the rest of her body was still perfectly human. Sweat slickened her hands to the point where she could feel the controls slipping slightly in her grip. Not ideal for precision flying, but then, this wasn’t a hair-trigger fighter, but a speed machine which required a lot of planning before one embarked upon any maneuvers.
She pointed to an empty spot on the readout. “I think we can squeeze through here, before they begin to enter the atmosphere. After that, we can beat them to where the marines are, but I don’t think we have enough time to load everyone onto the dropships and fly out.”
“Maybe they’ll ignore us the way they ignored the Lapland.”
“You mean if we promise to surrender?”
“Do you think that’s why they flew right by?”
“I’d bet on it. And if I’m right, then the factory ship had better really run, because those wings are bad enough when they’re just killing people for the fun of it. I’d hate to be on the Lapland when they decide that running away constitutes a betrayal of their promise to surrender.”
“Why would that woman even—?”
“She’s not a problem anymore. Our problem is how to get between the swarm and the surface without burning up on reentry. Remember that the vampires don’t have human bodies, which means that they can pull more Gs than we can.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Nothing you’d approve of. Just hold on and shut up.”
She pushed the engines well into past redline, grimacing as the acceleration pushed her into the perfectly bolstered couch. These Recon boys sure have it good, she thought. Alarms blinked on her dash and she silenced them all with a single button and stayed on the gas.
“You’re coming in way too shallow.”
“I know. Hope the heat shielding is up to spec.”
As Ian clutched his seat in terr
or, the flyer did exactly what Melina wanted it to do. It skipped off the atmosphere and sent them back into space.
“What did you do that for?” he nearly yelled.
“You know as well as I do. We made it under the tip of the swarm. They were between us and the marines, and now they’ve got to chase us down. We’ll be there first.”
“Maybe. But I’m gonna need new pants.”
Melina laughed and threw the ship into a deep dive, slowing only when the drag of the atmosphere threatened to heat the hull beyond its design thresholds. “We’re coming in directly from above.”
“I did tell you that the ground crew cobbled this flyer together before we got any spare parts from the Lapland, didn’t I?”
“Not that I recall, and besides, it makes no difference. It was the only choice. If we’d tried to go around the long way, the swarm would have been ahead of us and we would have had to fight our way through. Hell, we might even have enough time to take off again and run after the Lapland.”
“I’m not sure I want to talk to that detective guy again. We killed his prisoner, after all.”
“Hmm. I don’t really think he’ll be too upset about that.”
“You think? He struck me as the kind of guy who sets a lot of store by doing things by the book.”
Melina laughed. “Are you really worried about what he’s going to say to us?”
Ian was silent for a beat. “No. Not in the least. But it keeps my mind off the big fleet of vampires that is going to land on our heads about three minutes after we get on the ground.”
“Would you rather leave the marines behind? Not even warn them what’s coming?”
The man sighed. “I guess not. This whole volunteering thing seems to be a difficult habit to break. How do you get out of it?”
“It’s not easy. I thought that signing up for a suicide mission would solve my problem pretty quickly. No such luck,” she replied. “Now shut up. I need to land this thing.”
They were approaching the ground at a very considerable clip. She wouldn’t have thought twice about making a precision touchdown in the center of the large open surface if she’d been piloting her fighter, but the Recon flyer was not as nimble, and she suspected it wasn’t going to like the landing procedure.
She was right. As she fought to spin the flyer around so that the main engine was pointing at the ground—the only way they were going to be able to scrub off enough speed to avoid getting splattered—the stick shook and shuddered in her grip as the air outside buffeted the ungainly craft, trying to keep the pointy end facing into the wind.
But, after what seemed like too long, the jets stayed down and she put everything the engine had into braking. “I hope the marines are suited up,” she said.
“I hope they don’t just shoot us on general principles,” Ian shouted back over the roar of the wind.
Once their speed was under control, she flipped the flyer into landing attitude and, with fractions of a second to spare, touched down.
“That,” Ian told her, shaking his head, “was utterly insane.”
“Thanks. Someday Recon should send its pilots over to us. We could teach them how to fly.”
“I don’t think anyone would take you up on that. Recon pilots are selected for a strong sense of self-preservation. That makes it much more likely that the data they’re supposed to be collecting will make it back to the intelligence officers who need it.”
Melina had stopped listening to him. She could see the dropships, but there was no sign of the pilots. There also wasn’t a single suit to be seen.
“Shut up a second.”
“Sorry. I guess I’m just happy to be alive.”
“You won’t be alive for long if the vampires get here. We need to know where the marines are.”
Ian looked unconcerned. He pointed to a graph on the lower corner of one of the readouts. “They’re around here somewhere. They’re chattering all over the Tacnet.”
Melina had forgotten that the ship was designed to detect any electromagnetic communications, even if they were extremely weak and distant. She could have hit him for not reminding her. “Patch them through, will you?”
A sudden babble filled the cockpit as the marine channels—all of them, command and intra-squad—suddenly came alive. “Can you give me just the command Tac?”
“One second.”
She waited impatiently as he checked the records for the right frequency and, as soon as he gave her the thumbs up, began to speak. “Cora, can you hear me?”
“Commander Coloni?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you?”
“Parked beside your dropships.”
“You might want to get the hell out of there. I think things are about to go down the crapper very quickly here.”
“We came to tell you that you’re about to have company in the form of a whole bunch of black wings with terrible tempers.”
“Yeah, yeah. We know that. Now get out!”
They knew that? But her training didn’t let her waste time with inane chatter. The marine lieutenant clearly had information she didn’t. She began to power up the engines and looked at Ian’s scanners. Her heart sank.
“I don’t think we’re going to be able to leave,” she reported.
“Why not?”
“The swarm is right on top of us. If I try to make orbit, we’re as good as dead.”
“Then get over here!”
“Where are you?”
“Under the cement in the hole the Banshee made. Get inside and I’ll guide you from there. Stand by for instructions via data transfer.”
Melina wanted to ask them what they were doing here, and what use it would be to go there if they were just going to be cut to pieces by the swarm upon its arrival but, again, her training took over and the flyer was moving before she was fully aware that she’d given the order.
The gash was several hundred meters away, and they covered it in seconds. She unceremoniously dumped the flyer on top of the headless walkers in their neat rows and popped the hatch. “Grab a handset,” she told Ian. “The lieutenant is sending us a map.”
“I heard her.”
Ian, holding the set, sprinted ahead and it was all that Melina could do to keep up in the high gravity. Soon, she was panting, lungs burning and wondering how the hell a Recon trooper could be in better shape than she was. Recon was notorious for their lax standards when it came to personnel training—spies whose main objective was to remain forever unseen didn’t need to fight; if it came to that, they’d already lost.
She decided that the problem was that the two hundred thousand years in the stasis pod. Clearly, it had damaged her body more than it had damaged Ian’s.
She wanted to tell him to slow down, but she was damned if she would.
Then, after they’d run through dozens of identical chambers full of rows of headless war machines, she heard a mechanical clanking behind her and forgot all about her suffering.
The wings were there. Somewhere. In the maze behind them.
And they were coming.
A burst of speed fuelled by adrenaline drew her level with Ian. “How much further?” she said, trying to whisper while still making herself heard.
“I don’t know. I think we’re about two-thirds of the way there. It’s hard to make an exact calculation with this thing jiggling around.”
They turned left again. Two-thirds meant that the wings, provided they didn’t run into anything in the cramped quarters, would be on top of them in moments.
So Melina ran knowing that she would only survive if the vampires took their time. She kept looking upwards, certain that, at any moment, she’d see the unmistakable bat-like contour of one of the enemy craft appear silhouetted in her helmet beam, an awful final sight.
The awful sensation of being watched, that every chamber they ran through contained dark wings silently flying overhead and watching their every move came to nothing. High-energy projectiles failed to te
ar her to shreds from the blackness.
But the clanking got louder. At first, it sounded like someone was banging on pots and pans in the distance, but gradually, it became more like the sounds of a construction site at a shipyard. The noise made the earth shake.
“What the fuck is that?” Melina screamed.
Ian shook his head as he ran. He couldn’t hear her over the echoing din.
Melina looked back and she knew. The enemy behind them wasn’t a flying wing. It was a monstrous suit of armor, clanking in slow motion, but still managing to take twenty steps for every one of theirs and closing the gap between them. It would be upon them soon.
Ian pointed to the entrance to the next chamber, and she called up an unsuspected reservoir of energy to pull through.
But she was still ten meters from the exit when the war machine jumped over them and blocked the egress. The impact from its landing knocked them off their feet.
For a fraction of an instant, Melina just watched the thing, transfixed. It was huge, three times as tall as a shock marine exoskeleton. The machine in front of her was no longer headless: a vampire had merged with the slot on its shoulders and the entire construction looked like a giant wearing a winged helmet.
A tug on her arm brought her back to her senses. Ian was pulling her in a different direction. “This way!” he shouted. Now that the echoes of the war machine had died down, she could actually hear him.
Melina was out of her element. In a dogfight, the perfect control always fell straight to hand, and her enemies seemed to melt away before her. Even during her very early days, she’d never met a pilot with more confirmed kills than she had… and only heard rumors, often hundreds of years old, of legendary fighter pilots with similar exploits in distant systems.
On the ground, it was a different story. If anyone had asked her to evaluate Ian before the engagement, she’d have grudgingly given him his due for bravely coming back to the moon and rescuing her, but that was all. She considered him negligible in a fight.
Incursion: Shock Marines Page 23