by B. V. Larson
“There appears to be some kind of new alien. Are these creatures cooperating with the Macros, as the vids seem to indicate?”
It took me a second to realize she was talking about the Crustaceans. I hadn’t really wanted to give away that information, but I figured it was worth it if they would stop the killing.
“Yes, they are,” I said. “Just as we served the machines once as troops when they had us over a barrel. We’re fighting both the Macros and these new aliens.”
“How can they mount such massive fleet so quickly?” Yuki asked me. She seemed honestly alarmed.
“In my opinion, they can do so indefinitely. They produce ships constantly, and throw them at us when they feel they have enough. They will come to Earth one day if I fail. It is only a matter of time.”
“How will you hold against them?”
I gritted my teeth and forced myself to smile. “I’ll be able to do the job much more easily if you stop blowing up my relief column.”
There was a quiet moment, while no doubt the surviving captains engaged in a heated debate. Finally, Yuki came back on the line.
“We accept your terms, Colonel Riggs. We will return to Earth, if you will return to Helios. Let us call Alpha Centauri a buffer zone for now. Please do not become aggressive again, or further misunderstandings are guaranteed to occur.”
Sandra erupted, unloading a long string of profanities and suggesting Yuki should perform anatomically impossible acts. I understood her frustration. It was difficult to be lectured by an arrogant Imperial about hostility when they’d started the shooting.
“Agreed, Captain,” I said when Sandra had lowered her voice enough to allow me to unmute the channel.
Sandra still muttered obscenities behind me, but I felt the audio system probably hadn’t picked them up.
After that, our two fleets warily disengaged. The Worms had already retreated from the system by the time we’d managed to make peace and get out of range. I was left feeling empty at the pointless loss of life. When I expressed these feelings to Miklos and Sandra later, they scoffed at me.
“It wasn’t pointless,” Sandra said, “you had to do it, Kyle. They didn’t give you any choice.”
Miklos was more philosophical about it. “This clash was probably inevitable,” he said. “It was Crow that changed the rules of the game, not you. He also ordered his ships to destroy the transports as they carried away your last loyal Star Force marines. What could you do, other than declare war?”
“I’ll never forgive him for that,” I said.
I set the optical sensors to examine each destroyed transport in turn. I stared coldly at the remains of a hundred ships. At this range, I couldn’t see the frozen bodies I knew must be floating out there. There was only the silent wreckage and spinning clusters of twisted, blackened metal.
Crow had a lot to answer for.
-19-
Although they took their time about it, the Imperial cruisers finally limped away from the battlefield and retreated through the ring toward Earth. My fleet applied full thrust for nearly a day to slow down then reverse course. I had no intention of flying through the final ring and into the Solar System. I wasn’t ready to find out what Crow had waiting for me on the far side.
It was strange, being so close to home and yet turning away. Always before, returning to Earth had been a happy event. Even when we’d been chased by packs of raging enemy ships, we’d always felt a surge of excitement and well-being to know we were about to enter friendly territory. Now, it no longer felt like home.
Space is a lonely place under the best of circumstances, and being rejected by one’s homeworld isn’t an easy thing to experience. Everyone around me felt the same, I could tell. Every face was glum. Every eye stared at the screens as the last ring between us and Earth fell away behind us again and we headed back out toward deeper space and alien worlds. Would we ever return home again? Would we ever be welcome there? None of us knew the answers to these questions.
Shaking off my reverie, I quickly decided to liven things up. In truth, we had almost as much to celebrate as we did to mope about. We’d driven off the Imperials and saved a lot of loyal Star Force personnel. I had no idea how many there were, but I intended to find out.
“Marvin, open a channel to Captain Sarin’s fleet.”
“No response, Colonel. Possibly, her ship is damaged.”
“Well, keep trying.”
Sandra glanced at me, and I felt a pang of worry. Was she going to get jealous again? But no, I could see in her eyes that wasn’t her first concern. She looked worried. I signaled for her to come close and she did so.
“What if Jasmine is dead, Kyle?” Sandra asked me in a whisper.
I considered the possibility. It was a distinct one. About a third of the transports had been destroyed. Worse, the Imperials might have tracked her transmissions to the correct ship and blasted her on purpose. Didn’t every tyrant round up the rebel leaders and execute them at some point?
“Nonsense,” I said with a confident smile that was pure bullshit. “She’s fine. She’s almost as hard to kill as Sloan.”
Sandra nodded worriedly and went back to monitoring the holotank. On screen, my fleet and Sarin’s fleet were now alone. The Worms had returned home to Helios, having long since reversed course and withdrawn. Sarin’s fleet was also streaming down from every direction toward my warships, like scores of lost birds returning to the main flock after a panic.
“Anything, Marvin?”
“I’m getting reports now from various ships. They are responding in turn, listing their damages, making relief requests. Should I put them through?”
“Yes, of course. Sandra, see what you can do for them. Send a gunboat out to every ship that’s in trouble. Coordinate any necessary rescues. Marvin? Any word from the refugee leadership? Who is in charge out there?”
“They all insist Captain Sarin is their commander. But they’re unable to raise her.”
I pursed my lips tightly and nodded. The next several hours passed quickly, as we all had a lot to do. Our own ships were largely undamaged, and the damage we had suffered was automatically repaired by our nanite friends. The situation was different with the transports, however. They had a lot of wounded, and I quickly learned that most of the passengers aboard the ships weren’t Star Force people. This was significant, because they were just normal human beings. They didn’t have a built-in supply of nanites to repair their bodies. They needed medical attention. Without it, instead of self-regenerating, they died.
The refugee fleet coalesced around my warships in time. Some of them had to be towed in by the gunboats. Others were wrecks which had to be evacuated and left to drift away into the burning furnaces at the center of the star system. It was on one of these wrecks that they finally found Jasmine.
“I’ve got a command contact, sir,” Marvin said late in the evening.
“What are you talking about?” I snapped back.
I was still on the bridge, stirring some bad coffee and slumping in my armor. Star Force Marines didn’t need a lot of sleep, but we did need a little of it. I’d been denying myself such simple pleasures until the situation was under control. Unfortunately, there seemed to be no end to the rescue effort.
“A command channel contact, incoming from gunboat thirty-six. Someone aboard wants to speak with you.”
I grumbled and opened the channel. I’d avoided direct contact with every concerned captain that wanted to tell me about his problems. I had limited resources and they were all pretty much allocated. Too often, my reply had been something like: “You’re on your own, Lieutenant. Fix it.”
When I heard Jasmine’s voice, I was quite shocked. “Hello Kyle, I’m alive,” she said inside my helmet.
I took a heartbeat or two to speak. When I did, there was a grin exploding on my face and I straightened up instantly. “Jasmine?”
“Yes, it’s me.”
“I’d given up,” I said. “Not looking, I don’t
mean that. But I’d marked you down as lost. I hate to admit that.”
“It’s okay.”
“Where the hell are you?”
“My transport was taken out, but a few of us lived. I’ve almost reached your cruiser. Let me tell you about it in person.”
My heart accelerated in my chest, and I felt silly. Why did I seem to have a thing for this woman? I hadn’t seen her in months, and she’d given me no end of trouble in times past. She’d even declared loyalty to Earth and Crow.
I gave my head a shake to clear it, and looked around the bridge. Sandra had retired an hour earlier. She was probably sound asleep by now in our shared quarters. Miklos was rubbing his temples and going over damage reports on his screens. No one else seemed to have noticed my emotional reaction, and I was about to relax when I turned and saw a half-dozen camera eyes studying me closely. Marvin didn’t take breaks, naturally, and he was operating the holotank right now. But his focus was on me. He knew who was on the channel with me. In fact, he was probably eavesdropping.
“Yes, great!” I said. “Come to my conference room the minute you get aboard. You aren’t too badly hurt, are you?”
“My left leg is in a bag of nanites,” she said. “But I need to talk to you.”
We broke off the connection, and I headed into the conference room. On most spaceships, you didn’t get a lot of privacy. This cruiser was the largest Star Force vessel we’d built yet, but it still wasn’t any bigger than an old-fashioned submarine back home. It was about five hundred feet long and displaced something like fifteen thousand tons. As a result, when you moved around in the ship you had to expect to bump butts with plenty of other crewmen.
I poured myself a fresh cup of crappy coffee and stripped out of my armor. I figured I had to smell pretty bad by now. I put on a nanocloth crewman’s suit and wished I had time for a shower. When she finally arrived, I sipped at my coffee, which was already becoming lukewarm.
She paused in the doorway and we looked at each other. She was in nanocloth too, but I liked her uniform more than mine. We’d come up with black outfits, very utilitarian. They were little more than army fatigues or in some cases coveralls. Her Imperial clothes had a much more stylish cut to them. There were new insignia on her shoulders, too.
Her hair was down, and still looked long and dark. It was a little ragged, but I could tell she’d worked on it on the way over to my ship. She didn’t look like a crash victim, which surprised me. Her leg, as she’d indicated, was floating in a bag of nanites. A long red line had split open the skin, revealing the bone in spots. Nanites silvered that region, working on it.
After a second, I smiled at her, and she returned the smile. She came in then and sat down across from me. I was less than pleased to see Kwon thumping along in her wake. Without even asking, he came into the conference room and stood there at the end of the oblong table. He was so tall he had to lean his head to one side. He was still wearing armor, and it looked more banged up than Jasmine did.
“Yes, Kwon?” I asked.
“He’s here to make a report as well,” Jasmine said.
I nodded stiffly. “Excellent work out there, First Sergeant,” I said. “By all means, give me your report.”
Kwon looked at Jasmine for a second, then shuffled his feet twice. “Ah, well sir…I wanted to join you, if possible.”
I frowned slightly. “Do you have a report to make or not?”
“Sure,” he said. “Ah, the last ship has reported in and we’ve sorted out the dead from the living. We now have a total of twenty-nine thousand, three hundred and sixty-one survivors. More are being found every hour.”
My eyebrows shot up at that. “That’s good news,” I said. “What about Star Force people?”
Kwon looked at Jasmine, then back at me. “That’s not so clear, sir.”
I was frowning again. Kwon took this moment of confusion to stump into the room and begin aiming his big butt at a chair. I put up a hand.
“I need you to go make a count of all the military personnel on those transports. Maybe they aren’t calling themselves Star Force, but I want to know how many there are anyway.”
Kwon froze. His rear hovered only a foot above the chair he’d targeted. “Are you sure you’ll be okay here alone, sir?” he asked.
That was it then. I felt a surge of irritation. My own staff didn’t trust me with Sarin. Sure, we’d had a few exciting moments together. We’d made out, given one another a beating and who knew what else. But that was all in the past. I didn’t like Kwon’s mother-hen attitude.
“Even if she’s one of Crow’s assassins,” I said. “I think I can take her.”
Kwon looked comically alarmed for a moment, then he examined my grin and Jasmine’s embarrassed smile. He finally figured out I was joking, and began a halting laugh. “Ah. Ha, ha, ha! Sure-right,” he said. “But that wasn’t—”
“I know what you meant, Kwon. Now, get out of here. That’s an order.”
“Sure, sure,” he said, exiting unhappily. As the nanites closed the portal behind him, I could still hear him muttering in the hallway.
“He doesn’t trust us,” I said, turning to Jasmine.
She was clearly embarrassed and determined to pretend she didn’t know what I was talking about. “We have to talk, Colonel.”
I leaned back in my chair and offered her some coffee. “I can’t believe you’re alive and back aboard my ship.”
“I didn’t think this would happen either,” she said. “I thought I could go back to Earth and command a fleet. I thought—”
I studied her. “How bad is it? I mean back home, on the ground? How did Crow pull it off?”
She looked at me sharply. “You mean, you don’t know?”
I shook my head. I explained that we’d been cut off from transmissions from Earth for months. We’d heard things, but it wasn’t like we had the vid files and news reports.
“That figures,” she said. “Jack always told me he was keeping you advised of his every move. He told me he sent you files, and read letters where you occasionally objected. But he said you’d understood his actions and had seen the necessity of it all. I had figured he was lying of course. I knew you wouldn’t have gone along with the ultimatums, and the purges. But I thought he really was telling you things. I didn’t realize he hadn’t even bothered.”
My frown deepened. Crow was not the most honorable fellow, and I didn’t like the idea he’d used my name to rubberstamp his ambitions.
“Give me a timeline,” I said. “I’ve been out of touch, fighting on the frontier for months.”
“Of course. Where do I begin? I suppose I should start with my return to Earth. I was sent out to Eden last year to talk some sense into you.”
“You failed, but who can blame you for that?” I asked, laughing. She didn’t laugh, and soon I stopped and cleared my throat. “Go on.”
“Crow has been planning this for a long time, I think. Since the beginning, maybe. He’s been waiting for his opportunity. I think that opportunity came when you were gone from Earth for a long, long time. He wanted to kill you, but I think he knew that if he did, everyone would know it was him, and they would hate him for it. So he waited until you were stuck out here, and made his move then.”
I nodded and sipped more coffee. It was cold now, so I threw it on the floor. The nanites sucked it up and spit it out of the ship. In seconds, my boots no longer glistened with brown droplets.
“He had ships, Kyle. He had them specially built. He can design them now—he’s not as good as you are, but his designs are more devious and they look sleeker somehow. Anyway, he had built something new, what we call death ships. Little assassination ships that carry only one man, or no men at all. They flew out in the night and killed every government official in every country of note that had complained about Crow openly. He did it all in one night too—all across the globe. You remember when the Nano ships first came to Earth, that night they picked us both up?”
I
nodded. I wanted to ask questions, but I held back. I wanted to ask Sarin who had been running Star Force without challenging Crow? Who hadn’t seen this coming, and had let him get away with literal murder unchecked? But I didn’t ask these things, as I knew it was probably she who had been asleep at the switch. Deciding information was better than recriminations, I held my peace.
“The ships swept across the globe at midnight in every country, quietly plucking people from their beds with long arms. But instead of dragging them into their bellies and testing them, they just closed their black, rippling hands. They crushed ribcages, mostly. Like angry children throttling helpless dolls. They have a name now for that terrible night, when thousands died. They call it ‘The Night of the Red Hands’. Apparently, after having killed so many, witnesses said the three-fingered, metal hands were encrusted with gore. At the mere sight of them, everyone fled screaming.”
“Didn’t they fight?”
“It was hard. They don’t have nanite tech in the old capitals of the world. They have missiles, but these ships were no bigger than vans darting down streets, humming and seeking. They didn’t find everyone on their lists, of course. But those that survived got the message. They hide now, and fear the day the ships will come back for them. Crow retrieved them all, and he had the balls to apologize and claim it was all an unfortunate incident. We haven’t seen them since.”
“Didn’t the entire world declare war?” I asked. I found myself breathing hard. The injustice of it all was hard to bear.
“War on Andros Island? War on Star Force, who had saved them all from extinction?” She shook her head and pushed her long hair back away from her face. “A few did. Israel and Japan—a few others.”