by Peter Nealen
Scalas glanced at the display as he felt the slightest pull toward the overhead. The rest of Century XXXII’s dropships were anchored to the enemy ship’s hull, and its slow tumble was creating a faint echo of spin gravity. Rokoff’s Century XLIV dropships, identical to Scalas’s except for their markings, were holding station just beyond the remains of the Unity ship’s severed drive section.
The lights blinked red, and the air inside the dropship began to hiss away, being diverted into the storage tanks beneath the troop compartment’s deck. Sound faded quickly, until the only thing Scalas could hear was the faint comms chatter on the secondary channels and his own breath rasping in his helmet.
The interior pressure reduced to a vacuum, the outer doors folded open silently.
The view outside was breathtaking and disorienting at the same time. The accretion disc seemed to be slowly rotating under them, while the dropships appeared to be standing on extended cables from the stricken hull beneath them. There wasn’t enough centrifugal force from the tumble to switch Scalas’s perception from the dropship’s deck being “down.”
With faint bursts of propellant gasses, he pushed himself out of the dropship, Kahane and his squad spreading out to his flanks as he did so. Cobb’s squad was coming in from his left and Kunn’s from the right.
“First Squad on point to secure the entry,” Scalas said over their encrypted comms. “Who has the emergency lock pod?”
“I do, Centurion,” Granzow announced. “Dravot and Torgan have the spare cylinders.”
“Renagen and Lank have two more spare air cylinders as well, Centurion,” Bruhnan announced. He and his squad were coming in from behind Scalas and Kahane. Cobb made a similar announcement.
The emergency lock was a mission essential piece of gear. The Caractacan Brothers themselves didn’t need it; their armor was proof against adverse pressures, all the way from vacuum to about twenty atmospheres. But Maruks and Rehenek wanted prisoners, if at all possible. And that meant taking every step possible to keep the crew on the other side of that sealed airtight hatch alive.
Of course, Scalas mused as he jetted toward the opening where the maintenance shaft had been blasted open to space, that was presuming that they didn’t have a nuclear self-destruct aboard, already counting down. Given what he’d seen on Valdek, he wouldn’t have put it past them.
He breathed a short prayer as he approached. If they did detonate a nuke, he’d never even know what had happened. He didn’t want to die unprepared.
He reached the jagged end of the maintenance tube and triggered his magnetic boots. They clamped him to the hull, and he felt a faint quiver of vibration as Kahane and Fillegron touched down next to him, though at different angles. From his perspective, Kahane was on the “wall” to his right, and Fillegron was on the overhead.
Granzow was pulling in the emergency lock, even as the three of them kept their weapons trained on the closed hatch ahead. Kahane and Scalas had kept their powerguns, but Harris had switched his out for a VK-40 assault shotgun. It presented some problems in zero-G; it was impossible to completely compensate for the recoil. But it was a savage close-quarters weapon.
The maintenance corridor was barely wide enough for Granzow to squeeze past the three of them and start setting the emergency lock up. It was little more than a polymer bubble with an overlapping “hatch” at one end that could be sealed while pressure was equalized. The other end was sealed to the bulkhead, and the tiny air compressor and tank were attached next to the seal.
“Ready, Centurion,” Granzow said, stepping back from the lock, his own VK-40 now in his hands.
Kahane clumped forward, with Fillegron beside him. Both sort of bulled their way ahead of Scalas, and he had to keep from shaking his head. Kahane had argued with him before that there were times when he needed to let one of the others make first entry, so that he could still coordinate and lead the Century as a whole. He didn’t necessarily agree. Every Centurion was taught to lead more than command. They were Caractacan Brothers. They didn’t need a micromanaging coordinator. He’d seen enough of that sort of officer as a Vitorian Commando. But it seemed that Kahane was determined to get aboard first this time.
He stopped, just as Granzow joined Kahane and Fillegron inside the lock. Something was wrong. He almost told them to stop, before he realized just what it was he’d noticed.
The only vibrations through the metal under his boots were the other Brothers’ footsteps. There was no hum of machinery, no throb of power. It was as if the ship was completely dead.
Granzow sealed the lock pod behind them, and the bubble began to inflate. Scalas flexed his hands around his powergun as he waited.
With the pressure equalized, it didn’t take long to get through the airtight hatch. Shrouded in shadows, the three Brothers pushed through into the darkened shaft beyond. The light enhancement in their helmets took the place of hand lamps or weapon lights.
They did not seal the hatch behind them immediately, though Scalas was all but quivering with impatience, knowing that there was little he could do on that side of the lock. But there was no storm of weapons fire greeting them out of the dark, no charging swarm of clones. The shaft appeared empty, lined with tubes, pipes, and conduits, surrounding a narrow ladder.
“It looks like we’re secure for the moment, Centurion,” Kahane reported, now the clipped soul of professional brevity. “We’ll seal the hatch so that you can cycle through.”
Without waiting for an acknowledgement, Fillegron proceeded to secure the airtight hatch behind them, cutting off Scalas’s view of the shaft.
It took only moments to cycle through with Harris and Fel, though it felt longer. Then he was inside, as Granzow and Kahane pushed up the maintenance tube.
There was another hatch in the wall only a few meters ahead. “Hold up by that hatch until we get a few more in here,” Scalas said, as Harris secured the outer hatch behind them. “I don’t want to pop out into a clone ambush with only this handful of men.”
“Centurion?” Fillegron ventured. The man was experienced enough that Kahane often made him acting squad leader, and was the squad sergeant’s right hand in most things, but he had always had a deferential, almost hesitant manner. “I just noticed something. There’s no sound in here except the noises we’re making.”
“I noticed that too, Fillegron,” Scalas replied. “It feels like the ship’s dead. No power at all.”
“What are the odds that the crew’s still alive?” Harris asked ominously.
“There’s still atmosphere,” Granzow pointed out. “And it hasn’t been dead long enough for the carbon dioxide buildup from the air scrubbers being down to kill anyone. They might not be in good shape, but they should still be alive.”
“I’d rather face a lot of sick crewmen than healthy, brainwashed clones,” Kahane grunted as the hatch opened again behind them, spilling Dravot, Torgan, and Schiller into the shaft. “It might explain why we haven’t encountered any resistance though. It would be hard to pinpoint a boarding spot when you have no power to internal sensors or cameras.”
“All right,” Scalas said as the lock cycled again. Most of First Squad was now in the shaft. “It’s getting crowded in here. Time to press on.” He keyed his comm. “Cobb, Scalas,” he called. “I’m taking First Squad up toward where we think the command deck is. Take your squad and move on what’s left of the power deck. Bruhnan, you and your squad have crew quarters. Kunn and Solanus, spread out through the main communications shafts as you find them. I don’t want us getting cut off halfway up the hull.”
He got acknowledgements. There was a lot of metal around them, but the Brotherhood’s comms were powerful enough to punch through it with some ease. At full power, it made it impossible not to locate them just by tracking signal strength alone, but it would take a quantum computer to crack Brotherhood encryption without the keys.
He looked at Kahane and pointed up the shaft. The squad sergeant nodded, and started moving, walking with hi
s mag boots up the walls. Pulling themselves along by the ladder would have been faster in zero-G, but walking by magnetic anchors provided a more stable shooting platform and allowed them to spread out around the walls of the tube, putting more guns in the fight in the event that a swarm of clones popped out of a hatch.
It wasn’t a long march, but in the dark of that dead ship, it certainly felt like it. Scalas scanned every vent, every hatch, every opening, and his disquiet grew as they proceeded.
He wasn’t alone either. “They have to have figured something out by now,” Granzow muttered over the comm. “They can’t be completely unaware that we’ve boarded. It’s been too long.”
“They might just be preparing something nastier for us higher up,” Scalas said quietly. “Just be ready.”
Fillegron stopped just short of a hatch, looking up and down the tube. He seemed a little uncertain. “What do you think, Squad Sergeant?” he asked. “Is this about the place?”
“I think so, Fillegron,” Kahane replied. “We don’t exactly have deck plans for these ships. We’ll breach here and move in. If we’re not on the command deck, we’ll continue up or down until we find it.”
Fillegron nodded, tucked the buttstock of his BR-18 under his elbow, and bent to open the hatch, keeping the powergun’s shrouded muzzle pointed at the hatchway, just in case.
The hatch creaked open in the silence of the tube. Like most Unity tech that they’d seen on Valdek, it didn’t seem quite that well oiled or well fitted. There was something vaguely shoddy about most of what they’d seen the Unity using, which stood to some reason if it was all mass-produced as quickly as possible to equip the Galactic Unity’s staggering masses of clones.
The hatch opened on more darkness. No cone-bore rounds, no laser beams, no powergun bolts flashed through the opening. There was only darkness and silence. Fillegron eased out behind his powergun, scanning through the hatchway. “Clear,” he said. But there was a catch in his voice as he said it. He’d seen something.
He led the way through the hatch, his powergun muzzle lowered as if he wasn’t expecting a threat anymore. And as Scalas followed him through, he saw why.
They had not come out on the command deck, but on what appeared to be the crew mess. Tables were tightly packed together, with stools and foothold loops attached to the deck around them. It wasn’t a spacious mess hall, nor did it appear especially comfortable.
It was also packed with corpses.
Nearly fifty men were sitting at the stools, their feet secured by the foothold loops, their hands and arms floating bizarrely in front of them in microgravity. They were all visibly dead, their eyes glassy, some with bulging tongues protruding from their mouths, others still trailing flecks of foam through the air. They had not died well.
“Check the atmosphere composition,” Scalas said, as the Brothers spread out around the mess. But he was already looking at it himself, and there were no toxins present that would account for this mass death. He was afraid that he knew just what had happened, and it was making his stomach twist.
“It wasn’t anything in the air, Centurion,” Harris said, his voice hoarse and haunted. He was halfway around the compartment, and was holding a small case in one hand. He held it up for Scalas to see. The markings were unfamiliar, but the open lid revealed a grid of tiny compartments, all empty. It was a pill box. “They took poison. All of them.”
There was a moment’s silence. “What kind of hold does Vakolo have over these people?” Kahane wondered.
“They would have chosen the most fanatical and dedicated for a mission like this,” Scalas pointed out. “So far from Sparat, they needed the most thoroughly conditioned operatives to stay on-mission.” He stared at the blue-faced corpses, grotesquely upright in the dark, and tried to shake off the horror. “That’s interesting,” he murmured, as he moved closer and started to study each of the bodies.
“What?” Kahane asked. The stocky squad sergeant still had his weapon at the ready, almost as if he thought that one of the corpses might come alive. It was a thoroughly unnerving scene.
“They aren’t clones,” Scalas said. “Look at them. Every one of them is unique. These are normal people. True believers, obviously, but not clones.”
It fit with what they had seen during their brief reconnaissance of the Sparat system. The Unity couldn’t be made up entirely of clones, but from the constant propaganda broadcasts in its home system, the indoctrination hadn’t been limited to the clone armies. And here was more proof. However Vakolo had conceived of the “Galactic Unity” and seized power, there were plenty of his own people backing him.
He crossed himself, trying to block out the gibbering horror at the back of his mind at what had been done to these people. Or what they had submitted to. There was still a mission to be completed. “Stay alert; we can’t be entirely sure that everyone aboard killed themselves.” He looked around and upward toward the overhead. “If this is the mess, then I would expect the command deck to be above us. Let’s keep moving up.”
The command deck proved to be two decks up. It wasn’t that different from the command deck of the Dauntless, if slightly more utilitarian, with some of the same sort of vaguely shoddy construction that Scalas had already noted elsewhere on the ship. The holo tank was dark, as were the consoles. The ship was dead.
So was the captain, identifiable by his white uniform. He was strapped into his acceleration couch in front of the holo tank. The laser pistol he had used to burn a hole through one eye and his brain was still clenched in his hand, floating directly in front of his face.
As he looked around the command deck, Scalas fought a growing sense of failure. They hadn’t moved quickly enough, and it looked like the Unity soldiers had denied them the intelligence they so desperately needed. Even though he knew it was probably futile, he pointed to one of the consoles. “Get a portable power cell up here and let’s see if we can read anything off their ship’s computers,” he said heavily. “They probably wiped them before committing suicide, but we have to check, anyway.”
“They might not have,” Granzow pointed out. “If the Challenger’s strike knocked out the power hard enough, they might not have had the chance.”
“We can hope,” Scalas replied. “Though I expect they had enough of a backup power supply to at least make certain of it. Still, we have to be sure.”
An hour later, Granzow looked up from the console. It had lit up when they’d spliced the portable power supply in, but the interface hadn’t looked promising. It looked like a bare-bones shell system, devoid of much actual information.
“Well?” Scalas asked. The rest of the squads had finished their search of the ship shortly before, confirming that there were no survivors. That computer was their only hope of salvaging this.
“There’s data there,” Granzow said. “I just can’t make any sense of it. I think it’s encrypted, and I might generally know my way around a computer system, but I’m no code-slicer.”
Behind his visor, Scalas’s lips thinned. “It’s better than nothing,” he said. “I’m sure that Rehenek has some data retrieval people in his ‘Alliance.’” He took a deep breath. “Pull the drives if you can, and we’ll take them back with us.”
He glanced around the darkened command deck. It was a windowless cave, made even more sinister by the captain’s corpse still looming in his acceleration couch. They could still take extensive scans of the ship; that might be useful later on. But as far as Scalas was concerned, it was a tomb that they needed to get out of as soon as possible.
Granzow was already getting to work. It shouldn’t take long.
Scalas glanced up at the overhead, even though he had no way of being sure that the ship’s nose was currently pointed back toward Ktatra. He hoped that Rehenek was having better luck.
Chapter Thirteen
Rehenek was waiting in his command center aboard the Pride of Valdek when Maruks and his Centurions came aboard, Horvaset standing beside him. Rather closely besid
e him, Scalas noticed. Both of them were in casual shipboard attire, and Rehenek was leaning against the table, or appearing to. Where the dreadnaught floated in orbit around the infant star, two light-seconds above the accretion disc, there was no gravity to make it possible to lean. He looked up, his eyes scanning the armored Brothers, their helmets clasped under their arms. His lips thinned, but he straightened and waved them over to the holo tank he’d had set up.
The entire command center was something of an ad hoc affair. The holo tank appeared to be a Fortunian design, wired to data processors and power supplies that had been bolted to the deck. The Pride of Valdek hadn’t started its life as a human ship; it had been built by the pseudo-canine triamic, before that race had all but annihilated itself when the Triamic Hegemony tore itself apart. Scalas hadn’t spent a lot of time aboard her—or him; the Valdekans tended to refer to their ships as male—but he’d seen enough to know that triamic design logic did not always square with human. The ship’s deck plan didn’t always make sense, and useful displays or controls weren’t always where they should be to a human. Add in the difference in average size, and it was somewhat surprising that Rehenek had decided to maintain the Pride as his flagship. He had to have been able to find a human-designed ship that would fit him and his crews better.
But Scalas knew that he wouldn’t. There was a stubborn streak in the younger man, the same stubborn streak that had almost persuaded him to reject the Caractacan Brothers’ assistance and to stay on Valdek, to fight to the last. The Pride of Valdek was the last commissioned starship in the Valdekan fleet, and so he’d keep it until it was shot out from under him.