by C. G. Hatton
The voice that came from the doorway was used to being heard. “Damn right we do.”
Hones was injured and in pain but not showing it, his suit of powered body armour about all that was keeping the man upright. He had men flanking him, Thom Garrett one of them, in uniform, a pathway opening for them as people were brushed aside.
‘Ah, now the games begin…’
The colonel walked up, a hush descending fast as the Earth guys recognised their commanding officer and the Wintrans realised that the centre of power had just shifted.
NG glanced at Martinez and said quietly, “We need to get out of here.”
‘Don’t be naive. Hones knows that you took out the AI on the Expedience. You think Jameson’s lot are black ops? They’re pink and fluffy compared to these guys. Trust me, Nikolai, he wants to know what you did up there on that battle cruiser and he is not going to let you go.’ Sebastian laughed bitterly as if he’d just realised something. ‘What do you suppose he’ll do if he finds out you know their codes?’
He didn’t reply or react as they were surrounded.
Chapter 33
“This is the real danger,” she said. “It is not when politicians and powermongers rattle their sabres across the dining table. Wars start when ordinary troops face each other head to head with weapons drawn.”
The Man swirled the last of the wine in the jug. “The war had already started by then. Under the guise of misunderstandings, sanctions and defensive actions but war nonetheless.”
She slid her goblet across the table, empty. “Was it fortune or disaster that both sides had such military might in the Between when this happened?”
“They were there. It is hard to judge if that made the task harder or the outcome different from what it could have been. From what I know, our people handled themselves well.”
•
Hones was an imposing figure, not in the same physically intimidating way as Jameson, but foreboding nonetheless and used to people doing what he wanted. He demanded an update without ceremony.
The major was smart enough to concede command to a superior officer even if he was wearing a different uniform. “Just over two hundred survivors so far. Sir.”
“Major, I take it I have your cooperation,” Hones said, turning back to his men. “Send out scouts, set up a perimeter and send a goddamned signal for help. You,” he pointed to one of his staff officers, “find a civilian and secure me a private room with a table. Find me some maps and set up an ops centre.” He turned, eyes narrow, pain flaring. “And you…?” He pointed to NG. “You come with me.”
NG sat at the back of the small meeting room, perched on a bench, one knee tucked up tight, one arm hugged around his ribs, trying to ignore the pounding in his head and the chill that was seeping through into his joints.
It hadn’t taken Hones and his people long to set up their ops centre. Intel had been coming in fast, the alien ship had landed some distance out, ships were still getting shot down, pods were still crashing to the surface and survivors were still trooping in. They were up to somewhere around five hundred and fifty. From thousands.
Emotions were running high.
He didn’t want to get involved, wanted nothing more than to get out of there and get word back to the Man, but Hones had made it clear that he wasn’t going to let them go.
‘I thought you didn’t care about the Man.’
He couldn’t help but care about the Man. The Man had been right and there was an edge of guilt there over storming out so petulantly that he couldn’t shift.
‘You’re pathetic,’ Sebastian whispered malevolently. ‘For once you do something right, for you, and now you sit there and feel sorry for yourself, dwelling on it, while you let these creatures keep us captive. I might as well still be locked in a cage.’
NG glanced around. There were guards posted at the door and another two inside that had been tasked with keeping an eye on them. At least they hadn’t been disarmed, yet. Martinez was standing in front of him, desperately trying to assess exactly where any danger was going to come from.
‘Pay some attention, Nikolai, and you’d see that the only real danger to us is coming from the alien ship that is about to launch a full out assault on this godforsaken pocket of human scum. You need to get out of here.’
He knew that.
LC was on his way in. The kid had made contact, rattled off a list of parts that Elliott reckoned they’d need and asked about Hil. It hadn’t been easy to say that Hilyer was missing and he could feel, even at this distance, that LC was angry, out of character for him and it was taking Hal Duncan’s full attention to keep him in check and keep him alive out there. Elliott was with them, the Duck’s enigmatic tech guy who, according to LC, didn’t trust them to get the right parts and wanted to scavenge what he could himself. NG couldn’t tell; he couldn’t even sense the guy’s presence never mind read any emotion.
He rubbed a hand across his eyes, trying to follow them as they raced across the moorland and trying to keep track of the buzz in this room.
Hones was demanding information, numbers, details, keeping everyone busy and giving no one time to dwell on how screwed they were. The chart in the centre of the table was a contour map, coloured scribbles and circles marking in stark simplicity the distance between the facility and the enemy ship. The rough inventory of weapons they’d come up with so far was pathetically small and the count of undamaged ships was even less.
The Duck was their only chance.
Thom Garrett was the latest to push his way back into the room, breathless from running and not keen to give his report.
Hones glared round at the kid. “Well?”
Garrett shook his head, scratching at the cast on his forearm. “We hit the tower when we came down. The relay station is f…” he managed to stop himself and said carefully, “damaged, sir. There’s no way we can send a signal.”
“Can it be fixed?” Hones said with barely concealed impatience.
The kid shook his head again. “There’s nothing left. We can’t send anything long range.”
Hones turned to the only civilian in the room, a guy in dirty overalls who’d identified himself as the mine supervisor and who was talking into some kind of landline phone with a scowl on his face.
“When is this facility due to be resupplied?” he demanded.
The guy looked up. “Not for three months. We just started a new rota.” NG could tell he was pissed that he’d lost almost half his crew when the ships started crashing and pissed that he was here and had been stupid enough to sign on for another tour in this shit-hole of a facility, and with UM for fuck’s sake. They all knew the risks and the money made up for it, but, Jesus Christ, no one expected this on their watch.
“What ships do you have?”
“We haven’t got ships. We’re a mining and processing facility. We have trucks, loaders, remote mapping drones and mining bots. That’s it. The only reason we have the grid is the meteor showers. This is shitsville in case you didn’t notice.”
“What’s that you’re talking into? How come you have comms?”
“Shielded landline,” the supervisor snapped back. “Short range comms don’t work well here. Interference from the fucking rocks. Like I said, shitsville.”
Martinez turned to NG and whispered, “Sixes shouldn’t get affected by background interference. We’re getting jammed by something.”
He shrugged. Either way, they had no comms. At least the facility had some kind of redundancy system, however archaic.
Hones growled and turned back to the table. “So what are we dealing with here?”
The makeshift ops room was split six to four, Earth to Wintran.
“We all know fine well what that ship is,” a marine lieutenant grunted.
The Wintran major was standing next to Hones and he rose to the taunt. “Believe me, it’s not one of ours.”
“Not Zang?” someone sneered. “What then? UM? Yarrimer? Fucking Aries?”
Sebastian whispered, ‘Be careful – he does know about the codes.’
NG slid off the bench, muttered a quick, “Luka’s on his way in,” to Martinez. “Go meet him. Make sure he gets in here intact,” and he followed the colonel into the office.
Hones waited until the door closed. “You knew we were coming into this. You gave the Expedience the coordinates to follow us. Who are you?”
He’d been speaking with the bridge crew from the battle cruiser.
NG shook his head without a word.
Hones threw the board he was holding onto the cluttered desk. “What are we dealing with?”
“They’re NHA,” NG said simply, using JU terminology. Non-human aggressor. Not like they had a term for a non-human anything else. Earth worked on the assumption that anything sentient they could possibly encounter out in space would be an enemy. Shoot first, ask questions later. Except this time, the aliens had got the shots in first.
He placed the alien weapon on the desk. “If you have any tech guys, they need to look at this.”
Hones stared at it then looked up. “Who the hell are you?”
“Classified.”
Hones let a small smile crease the edges of his lips. “Who are you working for?”
“The JU,” NG said without hesitation and watched the comprehension creep across the colonel’s face.
A slight narrowing of the eyes was the only give away that the guy was pissed. “Prove it.”
“How? We don’t exactly carry ID.”
“Prove it.”
“Ask Matt Jameson.”
Just knowing that name did it. Hones nodded reluctantly. Garrett had already, in all innocence, reported that NG had been the one that gave him the order to send the signal.
“What’s your mission?” Hones asked, knowing fine well that NG wouldn’t say.
“You’d have to ask Jameson,” NG said carefully. Jameson was going to be even more pissed at him. At that level, rivalries were fierce and not somewhere he’d usually meddle.
The colonel was not impressed. “How the hell did you know the right code to give to Garrett?”
“Ask Jameson.”
Hones shook his head slowly, a look of disbelief in his eyes. “Are you out here alone? That’s not JU SOP. What are you doing here?”
NG opened his mouth to speak but Hones interrupted, “Yeah, classified. I get the picture. How did you take down the cruiser? Was that you or one of your little Thieves’ Guild buddies?” He leaned closer. “Did Jameson send you out here after Gallagher or after the two thieves who busted open his facility?”
He was expecting NG to be shocked that he knew. Garret must have given a full report, including LC and Hilyer.
“I’m not at liberty to say,” he said.
Hones looked even less impressed. “These NHA – you know what they are.” It was a statement not a question.
“They’re alien,” he said dryly.
Hones stared and it was easy enough to read his thoughts as he tried to recall if he’d heard any rumours of Jameson chasing aliens. Someone was always chasing aliens. Alien technology, rumours of alien life, scraps of evidence of long gone alien civilisations every time they colonised a new planet. No one else as far as he knew actually had a brief to chase rumours as a serious strategic mandate.
NG rubbed a hand over his eyes. It was getting harder to fend off the headache that was getting worse by the minute.
Hones banged his fist on the desk and said again, each word exaggerated, “What – exactly – are we dealing with here?”
‘They’re gearing up to attack. They’re launching gunships. You want to listen?’
He didn’t but Sebastian let it slip for a second and he heard a deafening cascade of chattering noise, obviously orders tumbling down the chain of command, but nothing he could comprehend.
‘How can you understand what they’re saying?’ he thought.
‘How can you not?’
“They’re aliens,” he said again, desperately trying to block it, and having to listen to Sebastian laughing disparagingly before it cut out again. “They’re here to invade. You try to fight them, you’ll get wiped out. The only chance we have is to get away.” It was surprisingly easy to stay calm. “Gallagher’s freighter is out there. Damaged. We need parts to fix it,” and that ‘we’ was suddenly everyone here, full and committed cooperation. The entire human race against an alien foe. Hones might be spec-ops but he was strategic like Jameson, not field-ops like Pen. NG knew exactly what buttons to push but it was made easier because Hones recognised the need for cooperation if anyone was going to have a chance of surviving this. “We need to regroup and bring everything we have, combined, into dealing with this.”
He said that but he had no idea how. If the Man had a plan, he’d never shared it; it was always prepare, we must be prepared.
‘I’m sure the Man never anticipated that his pathetic creation would go haring off alone to confront these invaders head on.’
Hones was listening so NG pushed it. “The freighter needs a control module and a couple of shield actuators for its Denholm – they have those in stores here – and at least two complete link capacitors for its Lewis drive. What’s the chances they could still be intact on the Tangiers?”
“She took a lot of hull damage but some of her systems are intact so they could be,” he conceded. “I’ll send a runner and get a team of engineers onto it.”
“Send Thom Garrett. He knows the freighter.”
The colonel nodded.
NG could read from his mind that he’d left crew on board. The Tangiers was badly damaged, nestled in a valley about three miles away. It still had some active weapons batteries that were keeping the Bhenykhn air attacks at bay and Hones was also thinking that the Tangiers had seven nuclear warheads that hadn’t been damaged in its crash landing.
He bit back the urge to just say, launch them, for Christ’s sake, and had to ask patiently, “What missiles do you have left?”
Hones looked at him with suspicion. “Seven nukes still in their tubes.”
“Can they be launched from the ground?”
“They can but not by remote.”
“Then we need to go get the spares and launch those missiles while we’re at it. All of them.”
“Anything else you think we should be doing?” Hones said it with a growl, but it was only part cynicism because the colonel was also thinking that it made sense.
“We have gunships incoming.”
Hones narrowed his eyes. “How do you know all this?”
“I just do.” Not his most slick comeback. “We’d better hope that defence grid is up to it. It’s designed for withstanding a shower of rocks not an armoured weapons platform.”
The colonel shook his head again and picked up the alien weapon, turning it in his hands. “What exactly do you know about these NHA?”
‘Perceptive…’
NG rubbed a hand across his eyes, pinching the top of his nose to try to relieve some of the pressure. “They’re called the Bhenykhn Lyudaed. They’re humanoid. Big. Armoured. Advanced weaponry. Some kind of energy shield that can be breached if you hit it enough times.”
Hones interjected, “And what the hell is it that you’re not telling me?”
‘Be careful what you reveal here. I can see the peasants grabbing their pitchforks already.’
He took a deep breath. “They’re telepathic.”
Chapter 34
“It is hard, is it not, to admit such an ability?”
“It is impossible,” the Man said. He poured the last of the wine, sharing it between them. “No being alive will tolerate the reality that another can listen in to their innermost thoughts. It is inconceivable. Hatred comes easily on the back of fear.”
“Yet, it is
the very factor that gives us an advantage now. An advantage we have never had before.”
“It does not change the fact that they thrive on a strategy of overwhelming force, superiority of numbers, of technology, a careless regard for the life of their troops.”
She shrugged. “You could be describing any military within this galaxy. Surely, now, we have the means to stop them. We have a chance.”
“Nikolai was our best chance.” He took a sip, drawing in the last of the rich concentrated liquid. “I worked hard to keep him safe his whole life. He chose to leave.”
•
“They have instant communication like a hive mind,” NG said.
“You can hear them.”
NG kept his expression neutral, hard with the pounding his skull was taking. It probably wasn’t worth denying at this point. He nodded.
Hones was thinking bloody hell, a telepathic enemy that could read minds, that could hear every thought and command they gave?
‘Can they?’ he asked Sebastian.
‘No.’
“They can’t read our minds,” NG said quickly, “but they can sense where we are. They can sense human life signs. It’s not just their communications giving them an advantage; they can see us a mile away.”
“So they can track us?”
He nodded again. “We need to find a way to get the spares back to the freighter. There are mining tunnels we could use. The interference from the rocks might give us some cover. I don’t know.” It sounded desperate but it was worth a try. “Talk to the supervisor.”
Hones put down the alien weapon and looked up. “I’ll take care of that. You’re not going anywhere. And trust me, if I find out that you’re keeping anything else from me, I’ll have you lynched and Jameson will not be able to do a damn thing to save you. Do you understand?”
NG didn’t nod.
The colonel leaned forward. “I want to know numbers, command structure, movements, weapons,” he said quietly. “If you’re so good, I want to know what the damned aliens intend to do before they know they intend it. I want to know if they bloody sneeze. Do you understand?”