Rebellion Ebook Full

by B. V. Larson

  “This has to be Alpha Centauri,” I told Sandra. “Everything about these stars looks right. It feels oddly good to know we are relatively close to home—only four short lightyears away.”

  “One more jump and we reach Earth,” she said wistfully. “Home is so near, and yet so far.”

  I was momentarily encouraged, because this was the first thing she’d said since awakening that didn’t sound furious. My relief was short-lived, however, as we ran out of time about then.

  It started with a brilliant flash off to my left—it came from underneath the prow of the cruiser. The ship had run her nose smack into something. I didn’t know what it was at the time. Fortunately, the charge wasn’t very large. Less than one of our tiny mines, in fact. Another two flashes went off, and all around me men were turning, hunkering down. For some of them it was already too late. The blast and bits of debris blew a good fifty marines off the hull.

  A hand hit my back and forced me to crash face down onto the hull. I went down hard, and all the air was driven from my lungs. I turned to curse at Kwon—but he wasn’t there. Only Sandra crouched over me. Her hand was on my back, pressing me down. My knife was in her other hand. I blinked at her. Could she have done that?

  My next assumption, when I could think, was that the Macros had finally made their move. They’d gotten tired of having us out here, crawling around on the skin of their ship. They’d come out to remove us by force. I screamed into my helmet for everyone to take cover. The command was absurd, but automatic. There wasn’t any cover.

  At any moment, I expected Macro marines to come boiling up onto the hull, but they didn’t. Vapor and bits of floating metal, quickly cooling from white-hot to smoking dull gray went by my helmet.

  “Captain Kwon?” I called. “Get our marines moving. If the enemy is sallying out onto the hull, I don’t want them to get a foothold while we huddle out here.”

  Kwon roared, and soon a few hundred marines were advancing, crawling over the hull. Sandra helped me up. She lifted me with one arm and set me on my feet. I stared at her for a second in shock. Was this Marvin or some other robot in a vacc suit? It couldn’t be. I recognized her by her small suit and the knife that glittered in her hand. Everyone else out here had a gun. I knew then that Sandra wasn’t just pissed off; she had gained in strength somehow. The microbes had done something to her when they’d fixed her brain. They’d kept on fixing things, improving them.

  I didn’t have time to worry about all that right now, however. I advanced with the vanguard of marines, crawling forward over the hull to recon the situation. When we got to the smoking impact points, and looking into the craters, we could see the exposed tubes of the cruiser.

  “Mines,” Kwon said, thinking faster than the rest of us for once. “The ship must have run into a few.”

  I thought of the Worms then, and what I’d said about their ability to send objects or ships through to the other side from the surface of their planet. There were many possibilities, of course. The Worms had deployed mines here before. This was the same ring and it was very close to their homeworld Helios. Maybe they’d put a missile up or a mine-layer for the next intrusion into their system. The interesting thing was the mines were laid on the far side of the ring, the Alpha Centauri side. If the Worms had placed these, they were definitely being tricky. The cruiser had glided right into them without time to react. I thought to myself that whoever had put these here, they were game-changers. I wasn’t the only one who was employing this extremely effective tactic. Maybe the days of sailing serenely through rings at high speed were gone for every side now that this trick was seeing regular use.

  “Advance!” I shouted, ordering my men into the smoking breach. Whatever its cause, we had an opportunity to invade the cruiser, and anything was better than sitting on the hull waiting to die.

  We rushed inside, not knowing what to expect. Marines were all around me, charging forward. We moved forward employing leapfrogging maneuvers, one team crouching and aiming down a corridor while the next advanced quickly to a new spot providing some kind of cover. We’d made it a few hundred paces before we met with resistance. A pair of Macros caught us, showing up at each end of a long tubeway. Everyone fired at once. The light flared up, darkening my visor. I was in the middle of the pack, I aimed my pistol but didn’t fire as there were marines between me and the enemy, blocking my shot.

  Sandra pushed me down again then. I heaved back up, snarling. “Stop doing that!”

  She pointed upward mutely. A hot glow had appeared overhead. The Macros were burning down to us from an upper deck. The two at either end of the hall were firing, and then drawing back as our beams spat return fire at them. Two marines were hit, but not dead. They howled and cursed in my headset.

  “Let’s pull back,” I shouted. “This is a trap.”

  Hot beads of molten metal dripped onto my suit and sizzled there. Sandra and I looked up just as the ceiling opened. A piece of metal like a manhole cover clanged down between us. A Macro nosed through. It had a short-ranged weapon attached to its head section. I’d seen the type before. They normally did ship-repairs and were more akin to welders than warriors.

  I fired at it, and it withdrew with a scarred thorax.

  “Is it alone?” Sandra asked.

  “I think so,” I said.

  Sandra did an unexpected and impressive thing then. She sprang up through the hole over our heads. Now, we are all nanotized with strength superior to that of normal humans. We could do things no one back on Earth could manage, such as ten foot leaps up into holes. We would not normally perform this action, however, with an unknown number of enemy waiting on the other side of said hole.

  “Wait!” I shouted after her, but she was already gone. I saw her heel for a second, and then nothing. I wondered in horror if I was going to be treated to watching a Macro tear her apart after going through hell to keep her breathing this long. I didn’t hesitate, but I did curse as I sprang after her. I couldn’t let her face whatever was up there alone.

  By the time I struggled through the hole and fired my hand beamer into the Macro’s face. After a second, I took my finger off the firing stud. The Macro was already dead. I looked around wildly, but it was the only one up here.

  Sandra was on its back, grinning. She had slashed open the thing’s back and used the fantastically sharp edge to sever the wires that connected the cpu in its thorax to the rest of its body. This combat technique was in our manual and our training discussions, but I couldn’t recall having ever seen anyone do it before.

  “Stop worrying,” she said.

  I stared at her for a second. “You’ll get yourself killed going off by yourself.”

  She made her lips pout. “I doubt it,” she said.

  I shook my head and jumped down into the corridor again. I had to call up to her twice to get her to join us.

  “Let me go off and scout,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not going lose you the same day I got you back. Do you have any idea how hard I worked to get you out of that coma?”

  “For all I know you kept me sleeping and worked on lining up my replacement,” she said.

  I stalked away from her angrily. While we’d been occupied with the Macro in the ceiling, my men had taken out the other two. We pressed ahead toward the engine room. Overall, resistance was light. The ship had no marines, as they had apparently all been used in the invasion attempt against us. We were up against the equivalent of mechanics and gunner’s mates. The crew fought tenaciously, but there were only about thirty of them and they hadn’t been built for personal combat. After less than an hour, the ship was ours.

  -38-

  All in all, this cruiser was in better shape than the last one had been when we managed to capture it. The belly turret was still intact. The left side underneath the nose had a hole in it, but it wasn’t as big as the last gaping breach had been. Jolly Rodger had yawned open, having lost the entire front section of the hull. There was less i
nternal damage as well, as the Macro crew hadn’t been able to put up as stiff of a fight.

  I wished I could say the same for my marines. We were down to less than ten percent of the number we’d left Earth with. They celebrated in desperate relief when we took the ship, but it was almost a maniacal sort of celebration. They had no booze, but they leapt into the air, whooped and slapped at one another, the nanotized equivalent of a hard high-five. For a few minutes, they bounced off the walls like ping pong balls. This exuberance quickly passed and most of them slumped down on the deck plates, exhausted by so many long days of fear and stress. I knew they needed some time off, but I wasn’t sure I could give it to them.

  I gathered my bridge crew in the engine room, as we had done aboard Jolly Rodger. Everyone was there except for Major Sarin, who was still recovering from Sandra’s love-tap, and Major Welter who had stayed at his post and piloted Jolly Rodger to the end. I put his name down for a posthumous commendation—if any of us survived long enough to give it to his family.

  “We are in the home stretch now, people,” I told my crewmen.

  They smiled wanly. Even Sandra seemed more relaxed now. Killing that Macro with a knife had really settled her down. I made a mental note to try not to piss her off in the future. I didn’t have much hope in that regard, however.

  “I need a volunteer to work the control console on this engine. At least, I need someone to turn on the brakes.”

  Gorski looked doubtful. “That won’t be easy, sir,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “There isn’t just a simple on-off switch on this thing. You have to work all the controls at once. It is more like landing a helicopter. I think the Macros built the interface with their group-mind as a basic assumption. They expect a half-dozen interface points to be touched at once most of the time and any operation takes input from all of them in combination. They simply didn’t automate the process.”

  “I know something about automation,” I said. “Explain this to me.”

  “Well, the Macros aren’t humans, sir,”

  “I’m well aware of that, Captain.”

  “They are very inhuman. We build our interfaces for our own physiology. Eyes that focus on a single point of the screen. Hands that can touch two areas, plus separate fingers that are only capable of reaching so far. The Macro interface was built for creatures with a dozen eyes and hands, essentially. They seem complex to us, but to them it probably seemed quite simple.”

  I shook my head, walking up to the screen. It wasn’t flat the way our touchscreens tended to be. It had slightly convex curvature to it. I reached my hand toward it, but hesitated. Right now, it was in a locked setting, which was blasting us along on a preset course. We didn’t know where that course would take us, but we had to have direct control.

  “How did you figure out these details, Gorski?” I asked.

  “I spent days in Jolly Rodger’s identical engine room while Major Welter poked around with the system. We both studied the autopilot with interest. What we really need is a new autopilot to fly this thing.”

  “Captain,” I said, “we have to have control over this ship. We don’t even know where it’s going, and I want to turn around and pick up whoever we can back in the Helios system.”

  Gorski became pale. “Back through the ring?” he asked. “That will be a lot harder than just putting on the brakes.”

  “I know that. How long will it take you to figure it out?” I asked.

  “Pardon me, sir?”

  I looked at him squarely. “You have nominated yourself to figure out this interface and fly this thing. I’ll assist you.”

  “Colonel?” Gorski sputtered. “Let’s just set up a new autopilot.”

  “No can do. We lost our factories. I don’t have spare brainboxes floating around.”

  Gorski’s shock changed on his face to an expression of near panic. “Major Welter was a gifted pilot. I flunked my first driver’s test in high school.”

  “You are also the only one who watched him do it. And you understand machines.”

  “But sir—”

  “I bet you were a gamer back in college, before all this shit started, weren’t you?”

  “Uh, yes sir, but—”

  “You’ve played flight sims. You’ve figured out a hundred interfaces. This isn’t much worse than flying a helicopter, Gorski. We are in space, man! There’s nothing out here to hit, really. Besides, I’ll be helping you.”

  Gorski nodded slowly. He looked terrified. I clapped him on the back and forced him to smile weakly. “Great sir,” he said.

  “Good,” I said, “and thanks for volunteering. What do we tap first to get it to stop and turn around?”

  Gorski and I worked on the screen for the next ten minutes. I decided at last we just had to go for it. We pressed a half-dozen surfaces at once. I had to wonder how Welter had managed to get anywhere alone. The man must have had his knees up to touch this screen. Gorski explained he had seen him working on multi-contact programs built into the interface.

  “You mean it has configurable hot-keys?” I asked. “Can we set up our own?”

  “It’s not that simple,” Gorski said. “We don’t even know the sequences. We have to get them down first before we can encode them.”

  “Right,” I said. “Let’s do this.”

  “I really am not sure this is the correct sequence.”

  “I’m not going to sue you if you frig this up,” I assured him. “The firing squad is more my style.”

  “Thanks a lot, sir.”

  “Now, go!” I said. We reached out with both hands each and put them on the board. The ship lurched sickeningly under my feet.

  “I think we are accelerating,” Gorski said. “The red disk sir—”

  “I’m pressing the red disk!”

  “No, press the bottom portion, along the rim.”

  I moved my hand, and stumbled forward, almost putting my face into the control board. A hand snapped out and grabbed each of us from behind. I glanced back. It was Sandra. I would have stared in disbelief if I had had the time, but I didn’t. I thought to myself that if I ever got her back into the sack it was going to be—daunting.

  The ship was braking now. A low, whirring sound came from the engines, which were thrumming with power. This ship seemed in better shape than the last one. I recalled we’d done some damage to the power systems in the last ship and had never gotten her up to full speed—which was one of the reasons the enemy cruisers had caught up with us.

  “Should we try a turn?” I asked.

  Gorski shook his head. His eyes were wide, and he strained with effort to keep his fingers pressing the big board in exactly the right configuration. “You can’t really turn in space, you can just curve. Let’s get her stopped, do a slow one-eighty and fly back. We might be able to hit the ring that way without having to replot our course. I don’t understand the course-setting controls yet. I only know how to aim the ship and apply thrust.”

  I grunted unhappily at this news. I decided braking was taking too long. We stopped applying the forward brake-jets and instead managed to turn the ship around. This was a harsh moment, as it took us two full revolutions before we had ourselves aiming back the way we had come. I was heeling over, struggling to keep on my feet as we spun. I recalled doing things like this back in high school parking lots as a kid.

  Finally, we got the ship’s main engines headed in the direction we wanted. We were able to apply maximum thrust and use the primary engines for braking. Every hour that passed, more of my marines were running out of air and heat back in the Helios system. I wanted to save every last man I could.

  After braking for more than an hour, we began slowly heading the other way.

  “How long do we have before we reach the ring?” I asked.

  “At this acceleration rate,” said a female voice behind me, “I’d estimate we have just over ninety minutes to go, Colonel.”

  I chanced a glance over my shoulder
in surprise. There was Major Sarin. I recognized her voice, but hadn’t believed it for a moment. I saw she was glaring at me. Sandra was still there—she was glaring too.

  “The magic of nanites!” I said, with a slightly nervous laugh. “Good to see you back on duty, Major.” I turned my back upon these two women only because I had to. I returned my attention to the impossible Macro control systems. I felt like I was playing twister while pissed off people stood behind me and contemplated kicking me in the rear.

  “Good to be here,” Sarin said in a sour voice.

  “Let’s lock this thing and take a break from the controls, Gorski,” I said.

  He gave me a dirty grin. “Got somewhere else to be, Colonel?” he asked.

  I knew right then that everyone on the ship knew the whole story. How could they not? They knew about the kiss—and the thumping Sandra had given Jasmine after the kiss—the whole thing. I felt a hot, embarrassed flush coming up my neck. Soon, my cheeks were burning. I’d never been in the middle of a scandal before. I didn’t like the sensation.

  -39-

  After we had the controls locked and had verified we were on course for the ring back to Helios, I had a quick strategy session with Gorski. The two women watched us closely. They both had their arms crossed and refused to look at each other. I didn’t know much about women, but I knew this was a bad sign. Instead of eyeing one another they were both eyeing me with venom. I found myself desperately wishing we hadn’t wiped out the last of our booze supplies long ago.

  “We can’t just blast our way through the ring again,” Gorski was saying. “We have to assume there are explosives there, waiting for us.”

  It took me a second to tear my eyes away from the two tail-lashing women and turn my attention back to Gorski. “Yeah,” I said. “There may be more mines.”