by Ian Douglas
Himmel-Paradisio Camp
Vulcan
40 Eridani A System
1556 hours, TFT
Connor fired the alien weapon again, holding it in a two-handed stance to steady its unfamiliar weight. The fleeing Grdoch twisted, shuddered, then slumped. Fifty more POWs swarmed toward it, picking up the weapon it had dropped, pinning it to the earth with sharpened poles.
The prisoners were streaming in from all over the compound, a few armed, most not, but the sudden battle had loosed a storm of emotion among some thousands of humans who, until that moment, had been beaten down and helpless. They were releasing that emotion now on the bodies of the Grdoch, and within a few moments, all three had literally been torn to shreds.
Connor was at Maria Fuentes’s side. “Commander! Are you okay? . . .”
“It . . . hurts . . .”
Fuentes was bleeding, bleeding badly, a deep incision slicing her from throat to stomach. Connor tried to stop the bleeding, but she had nothing with which to work, no nanohemostatin, no skin sealant, not even something she could use as a bandage. In moments, Fuentes was gone.
Delgado was beside her. “We tried attacking them before,” he said. He was panting, his eyes wild, and both of his arms were slick with scarlet blood. “Always, they were too tough, their hides too tough, for us to get anywhere. But you injured them enough . . .”
“Not soon enough, Governor. Not soon enough for her.”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry for your friend.”
In fact, Connor had never known Maria Fuentes, a woman who, after all, was the exec of a different ship. But finding her here, on a hostile world, had been like finding a long-lost friend, a sister. . . .
And now that sister was lost again.
“I’m just glad we were able to bring them down together,” Connor said. Standing again, she hefted the captured weapon in one hand. She wasn’t sure what kind of weapon it was, but strongly suspected that it was some kind of maser, a laser using microwaves that could cook a target at a distance. Heat something fast enough and it would explode, like the chunks out of the fuselage of her Starhawk. Aim it at flesh and it cooked. Nasty . . .
What kind of power supply did it have? She had neither the tools nor the time to find out . . . and the weapon was far more valuable to them now intact than it would be in pieces.
“We need to get out of here,” she told Delgado. “Out of this . . . this prison.”
“I agree. But how?”
“Follow me. Get everyone together, everyone, and follow me. . . .”
Chapter Twenty-two
13 March 2425
USNA CVS America
40 Eridani A System
1557 hours, TFT
The second shock was savage and violent, strong enough to convince Gray that America had just been shot a second time. He tried several channels, looking for an open comm line, but there was nothing . . . nothing. . . .
Knocked from his command chair, Gray was floundering about in midair, almost weightless and lost in complete and absolute darkness. Clearly, America’s power plants had been knocked out, and the damage was pretty bad because the automatic backups hadn’t immediately come on-line. He couldn’t reach the ship’s AI, either, or get in touch with any of the other parts of the ship.
“Who else is in here?” he called into the darkness. “Is everyone okay?”
Ten men and women had been with him on the flag bridge when the lights went out—Dean Mallory, Roger Hadley, Harriman Vonnegut, Gary Kepner, and six enlisted technicians. Swiftly, people began calling out their names and status.
“Vogel! Okay!”
“Hadley! I’m okay!”
“Shapiro. I . . . I think my arm is broken . . .”
“Mallory. Okay. . . .”
“Newton. No problems.”
Like hell, no problems, Gray thought, but he didn’t interrupt the roll call. The eleven of them were okay, save for bumps and bruises—and that one possible broken arm. Gray didn’t think about the one obvious health threat they all faced. He’d felt the tingling burn that meant the flag bridge, despite heavy shielding, had been bathed in hard radiation. If they got out of this, if they could get medical attention, get anti-rad nano injections—maybe even complete blood replacement—they had a good chance.
If not, they all were likely to get extremely ill over the next few hours and—depending on the dosage they’d just received—they would then die, hours or at most a few days after that.
“Anyone here cross-trained as a corpsman?”
“I’ve had advanced first aid, Admiral,” a male voice said in the darkness.
“Who’s that?”
“Kelly, sir.”
“See if you can help . . . Shapiro, was it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Light would help. Anyone have a light?”
There was an awkward silence, then a female voice spoke up. “Admiral, Nav Tech Second Class Anderson here.”
“Go ahead, Anderson.”
“I have liquid light full-body tattoos that will help. Permission to switch them on, sir?”
“Granted. Do it.”
Historically, as society had moved more and more away from the classic taboos against nudity, body adornment—tattoos and dermal nanimations had become both more and more popular and technologically elaborate. In the old wet navies of the world, of course, many sailors had sported tattoos—the heavily tattooed sailor had become something of a stereotype, in fact—but body art now was frowned on by the military on the grounds that it was distracting and tended to interfere with uniformity in ranks. Body art was tolerated if it was hidden by the uniform . . . and nowadays the implanted inks of most tattoos were powered by either body heat or by a tiny electrical charge pulled from the body itself, and could be switched on and off easily.
Liquid light images were more complex and used more power, but they were essentially the same—luminous dyes injected into the skin that drew power from the body’s own heat, which could be switched on or off, and which, when activated, radiated anything from a dull glow to a brilliant haze of luminescence.
Light flared in the dark compartment, dazzling to dark-adapted eyes. NT2 Anderson appeared in the center of the light, which grew steadily brighter as she peeled off her shipboard utilities, exposing more and more of her body. Gray had seen the fashion before on Earth—people, especially women—who at fancy-dress occasions “wore” nothing but shoes and a translucent sheath of light. Such “lightgowns” had long been favorite items of fashion for women in Europe and the Americas.
Distracting indeed. No wonder Navy regs specified that you kept the stuff switched off when you were on duty.
Nude, now, Anderson drifted in the center of the compartment, her body aflame and throwing weirdly shifting shadows across the bulkheads, the dead overhead display, and the instrumentation. Able to see now, at least dimly, Gray oriented himself, then glanced forward. America’s command bridge was located just forward of and a few steps down from the flag bridge, but the opening between the two had been sealed off by a sliding panel when the ship had entered combat. Captain Gutierrez, Commander Taggart, and a number of other ship’s officers were on the far side of that six-centimeter-thick wall of beryllialumisteel.
Gray looked about the flag bridge in frustration. Damn it, they needed power, and they needed it now. He didn’t know how bad the damage to the carrier was—he had to assume it was extremely bad—but until internal communications were restored, at the very least, damage assessment and control were virtually impossible.
He found himself wishing that they could plug a power lead into Anderson and charge up the external displays, or at least a radio. He wanted to know what was going on outside almost as much as he wanted to know the extent of damage to the ship.
The battle would continue without his input
, of course. There was a chain of command within every task force and carrier battlegroup; in the case of Task Force Eridani, command would have transferred immediately and automatically to Captain Wade Harmon of the Constitution—America’s sister ship—as soon as communications with America had been cut off. Harmon was a good officer, sharp and experienced. He would see things through.
But Gray’s view on the cosmos had suddenly been narrowed to a single sealed and darkened shipboard compartment . . . and survival, he knew, was going to be a bit of a problem.
He was not, he noted, in complete zero gravity. Some moments after the lights went out, his back had bumped up against a bulkhead. The ship, he realized, must be slowly spinning, generating enough centrifugal force to create a very slight illusion of gravity. America’s bridge and flag bridge, together, were located in a squat tower extending out from the ship’s spine 40 meters aft of the belly of the shield cap, and therefore quite close to the vessel’s center of gravity. The farther out on the rotating ship’s spine, the stronger the spin-gravity. The faster the spin, the stronger the spin-gravity. Gray estimated that the ship was rotating about a point up inside the shield cap at a rate of once every four or five minutes . . . a slow and stately spin, and one yielding an approximation of the surface gravity of a fair-sized asteroid. A thousandth of a G? Something like that.
With Anderson as a light source, Kelly had found an emergency first-aid kit in a bulkhead storage compartment and was immobilizing Shapiro’s left arm. The gauze he was wrapping around Shapiro’s limb would go rigid when he touched it and transmitted a thoughtclick, serving as a splint. They would worry about setting the bone later.
If there was a later.
Some of the ship’s basic functions ought to still be working, so long as they weren’t drawing solely from the main power plants. Emergency airtight doors, for instance. You needed to be able to operate them—either close them or open them—in an emergency, and so they were powered by small batteries imbedded in the bulkhead. Gray pushed off, drifting across the compartment until he bounced up against the sliding panel separating flag bridge from ship’s bridge. Grasping a handhold, he searched up the frame of the door until he found the touchpad.
He didn’t open it immediately, though. Instead, he placed the palm of his hand on a datanet pad. There might be a raging fire on the other side of the door . . . or hard vacuum. He needed to know before he opened anything.
Again, powered by emergency batteries, the pad fed him the information he needed: no fires, an atmosphere at standard temperature and pressure, no poisonous gases. Only then did he transmit a thoughtclick to open the door.
It slid aside, and the first thing Gray saw was Laurie Taggart, floating upside down relative to Gray on the other side of the doorway. “Sandy!” she exclaimed. “Thank God!”
He managed to refrain from embracing her, as much as he wanted to. “Are you okay, Commander?”
She nodded. “Everyone in here is fine. What the hell happened to us?”
Captain Gutierrez materialized out of the darkness and clung to a bulkhead handhold. “No power, obviously,” she said.
“We got hit at close range by a Grdoch X-ray laser,” he said. “I don’t know how bad the damage is. I suspect, though, that we’ve lost containment aft, and the singularities have gone rogue, probably with a vacuum-energy cascade to feed them.”
Gutierrez nodded. “The radiation. Yes, we felt it. That makes sense.”
“We’ll be okay if we can get off the ship,” Gray said.
“You . . . you’re ordering us to abandon her, Admiral?” Gutierrez sounded combative, like she didn’t approve and was about to give him an argument.
And Gray knew how she felt. He’d been captain of the America under Rear Admiral Jason Steiger . . . and there was no way to describe how possessive a captain felt about his ship even long after he’d moved on.
He was also aware, as she was, that it was the captain’s responsibility to give the order to abandon ship, and no one else’s . . . not even the admiral’s.
“Not yet, Captain,” he replied. “That’s your decision, of course . . . but I hope you’ll indulge me by not giving the order until it becomes absolutely necessary.”
“What the hell else has to happen for it to be necessary?” Taggart asked.
“We need to give the rest of the crew a chance.”
Large capital ships like the America had a kind of built-in escape pod: the entire bridge tower, containing both flag and command bridges and the CIC could be jettisoned. The hab modules, too, rotating about the ship’s spine aft of the tower could be released, the centrifugal force of their rotation carrying them clear of the ship. Finally, Prifly—the carrier’s Primary Flight Control—was located in a sponson aft of the hab modules, where it could oversee fighter launches and traps, and that could be jettisoned into space as well.
But there were other shipboard sections—especially engineering—located within the spine, and for America that meant almost a thousand men and women whose only possible escape was in the life pods mounted at the ends of escape passageways in the hull. Until emergency intraship communications could be re-established, allowing the order to reach everyone through their in-heads, neither Gray nor Gutierrez was going to be anxious to order a bug-out.
Of course, it might be necessary for every member of the crew to make their own decisions, if things got bad enough and communications could not be restored.
A deep-voiced, booming rumble sounded through the bridge, followed by a drawn-out grating squeal and a metallic clatter.
It was the sound, Gray knew, of a starship in extremis, stressed beyond all reasonable design limits and beginning to break up. “We need to get the IC working,” he told the others. “Now.”
Himmel-Paradisio Camp
Vulcan
40 Eridani A System
1615 hours, TFT
The crowd, numbering now in the hundreds—quite possibly the thousands—reached the northern perimeter of the prison compound, surging across the open meadow like a huge and living amoebic creature. Connor was in the lead, making for one of the perimeter towers.
Delgado had explained them to her. When the Grdoch had taken over on Vulcan, they’d relied on nanotechnology to create a quick and dirty fence. Floaters, alien vehicles drifting just above the ground, had circled the perimeter, planting rice-sized seeds that had immediately begun converting dirt and rock into a wall. Once the wall was fully grown, smooth-sided and sloping like the interior of an immense bowl, they’d cut a five-meter gap in one section and installed the gate.
There’d been no need for watch towers or guards. The curving wall reached varying heights around the circle, but nowhere was lower than seven meters, and the nanufactured surface of the barrier was so smooth that it looked like polished stone. There was simply no way that the prisoners, naked and without tools or weapons of any kind, were going to get up that.
But now they had weapons—three of them. Connor called Delgado and another man, Siegfried Koch, to her side. Koch appeared older—perhaps in his sixties, though with anagathic treatments, nowadays, it was impossible to accurately judge anyone’s true age. He’d picked up the third Grdoch weapon moments ago and been unwilling to relinquish it. “I have experience,” he’d told her.
“Tell your people to move well back,” she told them. “If the wall explodes, we don’t want people getting hit by hot gravel flying at high speed. Now . . . you see how these things work?”
“Point . . . and squeeze here,” Koch said. “Seems simple enough. A maser?”
“I think so. Whatever it shoots, it focuses intense heat on or in the target. I suggest we fire together from a prone position.”
As the crowd edged back, the three of them lay down in the yellow moss, aimed at a single point in the wall half a meter above the ground, and fired. The resultant explosion was sudden, sharp, a
nd remarkably satisfying: a flash and a crack of shattering material that did indeed send fragments of stone hurtling above their bodies.
Two more shots were necessary to widen the gap enough, and then Delgado shouted “adelante,” and the crowd surged forward.
“Watch the sides!” Connor yelled as they passed. “Don’t touch them! They’re hot!”
She, Delgado, and Koch waited as the crowd streamed through the opening. A runner arrived, breathless, to tell them that Grdoch, a lot of Grdoch, were entering the compound now at the gate in the east.
“How many, Peter?” he asked in German.
The boy shook his head, answering in the same language. “I don’t know, Governor! But many! Many! And with weapons!”
“Responding to a call for help from those three, do you think?” Connor asked. “Or did we trigger an alarm when we blew the wall?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Koch said. He was staring toward the southeast, looking for some sign of the approaching threat. “They’re coming . . . and we can’t hold them off, just the three of us.”
“No,” Delgado agreed. He raised his voice, addressing the fleeing civilians. “Faster, people, faster!”
A tall and muscular man separated from the crowd and approached them. “How can I help?” He was holding a crudely fashioned spear.
“You are . . .?” Connor asked.
“Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Weirton, ma’am. USNS Intrepid.”
“Governor?” Connor said. “How about you giving your gun to this man, and you get the hell out of here.”
Delgado hesitated, then shook his head. “No, ma’am. I am responsible for their safety. I will stay.”