by Eric Flint
The sparks bit back! Mhurban-Zchtbir roiled . . .
It wasn't the blackness of night—no—it was the blackness of the End Time, come to eat them all. Bhutir Salama threw herself at the cold stone street and prayed, to what she knew not. Not the earth-gods of her childhood, for the crops had failed and her family starved. Not the temple-gods of her youth, for the slavers had whipped her and whipped her until she died a young death despite all her prayers.
Bhutir didn't know how she'd come back to life, only that the priests had treated her as impersonally as if she were a cold, dead thing. It was the funny-face man who, despite all his anxiety and hurry, had been warm and kind to her. It was the huge one-eyed man who had tried to save her instead of escaping himself. Now the two of them huddled under the falling sky, a little cat-headed goddess posed around them as if to hold off leviathan on her slender little arms. Suddenly, Bhutir knew to whom she must pray. She threw herself on the ground, arms flung forward. As the two men had given themselves for her, she gave herself to the goddess. Save them. Save the ones who found a way to be kind even in the most evil of times. Save them, Goddess, and I am yours forever.
"—there!" came the gabble of word-sounds she did not understand, "between the third and the fourth eye!"
There was a sudden light. There was a thundercrack that wasn't a thundercrack. Bhutir cracked open an eye and snuck a peek.
Blackness. Utter horror. An utterly ab-natural perversion of all that is life and goodness. And around it, a rather nice frame of oiled cherrywood.
"That," said Walter Hittenmiller, "is the ugliest trophy head I've ever seen in my entire life."
"I know," Eagleton grinned, "but it sure beats that ratty old Raven all to hell. Speaking of which, given that my wife worships your wife, I thought it would be politic to ask—Amazon expedition, this spring, photographing butterflies, orchids, and gods. You in?"
Walter smiled and touched the reliquary of powdered bone that hung around his neck. A cat's snickering laugh echoed through his mind.
"Yeah," he said. "We're in."
* * *
Second Banana
Written by Way Jeng
Illustrated by Nathan Carlisle
I have two rules. First, never get mixed up with a girl who wants you to call her a guy's name. Second, always know what you're getting yourself into. It figured that breaking the first would lead to breaking the second.
"Benny, we have a problem," I said once I switched my monitor to the outboard cameras and zoomed in on the target.
"What's the what?" Benny's high-pitched voice came back. God, she's annoying.
I looked over my shoulder and saw Benny humming and tapping away at the command console. Her long blond pigtails swayed side-to-side in time with her bobbing head. She looked as happy as ever, without a care in the world.
"The target . . ."
"Yup?"
I hesitated for a moment and searched for exactly the right words. "Benny, have you looked up the target's registry?"
"File says it's a Whiting-class cargo ship. You just get in, plant some explosives, sneak out, and Bob's your uncle. Total cakewalk."
"Are you sure about that? Did you check the registry?"
Benny didn't say anything right away, but she raised a finger to her mouth and tried one of her more cute and bewildered looks. I attempted to rub my temples, but my helmet robbed the action of any soothing qualities.
"Benny, did you check the registry?"
"Well, no."
I suppressed the urge to moan. One look at the ship told the whole story. Coming up on the broad side I could see it all. Two forward torpedo tubes, one aft. Six batteries of anti-fighter particle cannons. Two large-bore rail guns running along the hull. Take that and multiply by two for the other side. I'd seen photos, datasheets, and a lot of apocryphal nonsense that nobody believed but made for good talk over a beer. Except I stared at the proof on my viewscreen.
"Benny, switch to the forward camera view and tell me what you see."
"No way! They don't call it active stealth for nothing! I've gotta keep updating the interference matrix or they'll—"
"Humor me and read what they wrote on the side. It'll only take a second."
A brief moment passed, then Benny said, "Huh. Would you look at that? G.S. Implacable."
"It's a Hekatonkheires-class destroyer!" I whipped around in my seat. "You knew, didn't you? You knew all along! Don't lie to me, Benny."
Benny shrugged. The faux confusion melted away. "I could've asked for permission or forgiveness. This was the only way to get you to come."
"It's a warship!" I said. "A warship, do you hear me? A ship of war! You said this is a job from Assertive Solutions, a freighter sabotage job!"
"It is. Kinda. It carries cargo, doesn't it? Guns and stuff?" Benny said in that sticky-sweet voice she has. "Okay, fine. You want to split hairs? It's a sub-contract from the Azat Navy. But it'll be fine. Contract says we just have to disable it. Take out the engines, bring down the power plant . . . Whatever we want, as long as it's dead in space long enough for the Federal Army to land on some planet."
"That's not what we talked about."
"Hey, a ship's a ship. In for a dime, in for a dollar. Am I right?"
"Easy to say when you're not the one who has to do the job."
"Easy to do the job when you have legs that work."
Benny stared back at me with the same cheerful expression as always. I couldn't help but look at her legs. It was easy to forget her disability when we had hardly enough room in the boat to stand up, much less walk about. The fact that she kept her legs in tip-top shape via daily electro-stim treatments made it even easier to forget. All that made me feel even worse that I did forget every now and then.
The ship loomed large in my viewscreen, larger than any other ship I'd seen in years. Nightboats aren't big vessels. Ours was barely big enough for two people, or three if they didn't mind getting to know each other well. The Implacable could have swallowed our tiny boat dozens of times over without even trying. I watched it grow larger as we approached, and eventually it filled the entire screen.
"Do you want the money or not?" Benny asked. "We can definitely, certainly, no question about it, pay off our markers if we just did this one little job. I promise."
No doubt Benny had already signed the contracts. No doubt she'd already collected the advance. No doubt she'd blame it all on me if anything went wrong.
"You're always saying we should do our part in the war," Benny said. "You know, there is one going on, if you forgot."
As if I could ever forget the war.
"I am going to teach you a whole new meaning of pain when I get back," I muttered as I turned around and sat down.
Benny set the boat to scan for viable entry points. "Looking forward to it, Chief," she said.
"I'm not any kind of petty officer anymore," I reminded her, not that it ever stopped her. It always reminded me of how much everything had changed since I left the Navy. At least it beat "Mr. Hyuen" and "Hey You."
I checked our range to the gigantic ship before me and saw we'd make contact in a few minutes. Radiation emissions from the Implacable were still well inside normal parameters. Between that and the fact that they hadn't reduced us to space dust, I felt pretty good about Benny's ability to keep us hidden. She might be a thief, a swindler, and a pain in my neck, but her knack for electronic warfare never disappointed.
The boat automatically engaged my seat restraints and powered down the non-critical systems as we approached the Implacable. First the gravity disappeared, then my monitors went down, and finally the lights dimmed. I took the moment of down time to switch on my suit's entanglement-com microphone.
The boat entered the Implacable's artificial gravity just before a sudden jerk and the buzz of the hullcutters announced that we'd reached the mission area. I stood up and patted my stealthsuit down one last time. Feeling the contour of each weapon, spare magazine, grenade, and piece of equi
pment helped me focus. Finally, I slung an Akagi particle sub-machinegun over my shoulder and declared myself good to go. A veritable eternity passed, then the boat chimed to signal it was done cutting an entry point. The hatch opened to reveal the Implacable's darker hull.
"Status on the hull sensors?" I checked the seam between the boat and the Implacable. The two appeared perfectly fused, almost as though the engineers had designed the ship with our parasitic invader in mind.
"Spoofed," Benny answered. I glanced up at her seat, and she gave me a thumbs-up. "Perfect pressure integrity. Get shakin', bacon."
I nodded and attached a pair of fusion grips to the hull cutout. It's the part I hate the most. The ship looks for an entry point with minimal heat and EM, but I never know what I'll open up into. I took one grip in each hand, pulled, and set the slab of metal down at my feet as fast as I could without making a sound.
The hatch opened into darkness, but I whipped the SMG to my shoulder and scanned for the enemy regardless. I held my breath, listening for a voice, footfall, or clink of metal.
Nothing.
I flicked my helmet's light amp filter on and once again readied my weapon, but I saw nothing except the dim outline of cargo slabs. I tossed my vest through the half-meter aperture before climbing in myself.
"Back in a bit," I said. Strapping the vest back on came next. Then I stuffed the punched-out piece of hull back in the hole and surveyed my surroundings.
The cargo bay measured around ten meters tall and close to twenty meters on each side. Stacks of cargo slabs took up the vast majority of the floor space, though two-meter avenues cut between the piles at regular intervals. My HUD showed clean atmosphere, so I switched to outside air and took a deep breath. The dank, slightly stagnant smell of rarely used rooms and active seal indicators on the cargo slabs made me feel a little better. At least we probably wouldn't get caught by some lucky fool tripping over us.
"Do we have a map?"
"Yup. Scored one from Vidao. Would I leave something that important to chance?"
"Vidao?" I asked. He was the logical choice, of course, but the idea of going even further into his debt made my stomach churn. "How much did it cost?"
"Where else was I supposed to get one? Did you want the map or not?"
I swallowed down the first three answers that came to mind and made my way to the blast door leading out of the cargo bay. "I'm at eight, three, six," I read off the green stencil letters at the top of the door. "Where's the engine room, and how do I get there?"
"Uh, okay. That's deck eight, block three, frame six . . ."
"Come on, Benny. Pick it up." I stared at the eldritch letters and wished I could read more Gwendish, but that was one of the languages I could never get the hang of at the Naval Defense Language Institute.
"Okay, okay, I got it. You go forward to frame two, up a deck, aft to frame nine, then . . ." Benny paused and sighed. "You're not gonna like this. It's like a maze down there."
"That's because it's not a freighter," I said. "The crew lives around the ship, not the other way around. But can you get me somewhere directly over the engine room?"
"Yes." Cool, confident, and classic Benny.
"All right, then." I extended my arm and held the com near the door's locking mechanism.
A mass of hair-thin filaments extended out of the device and pierced the lock's casing. I pressed the release once I heard the locking pins disengage and stepped through.
The connecting corridor outside the cargo bay extended in both directions. Conduits and pipes ran along the sides of the walls and practically plated the ceiling with tubes. Bulkheads broke up the smooth floor every few meters, but stepping over them had become second nature to me.
Let me make it clear right upfront that I hate sneaking through ships. Yeah, it's important. Yeah, I spent years learning how to make my way across the grilles, up the stairs, and through the hatches without being seen or heard. I'm practically a ghost in a stealthsuit. But it's nerve-wracking work, constantly looking around for the slightest sign of movement and straining your ears for the hint of life. It's not so bad on a cargo ship, because they rely on the computers so much that a few guys can run the whole show. Warships, on the other hand, run a much higher crew density. I wouldn't have been surprised to learn the Implacable boasted four or five crewmen per deck.
But a job's a job, so I went through the whole miserable deal; I glanced around corners before moving, watched for the crew, held my weapon at the ready, followed Benny's directions through the maze, the whole shebang. I went forward two frames, up two decks, aft four frames, down one deck, over to the next block . . .
"Coming up on a room," Benny said. "Take a stroll through and turn a left coming out the other side. There's a staircase you can take to deck eleven."
I paused by the side of the hatch to the compartment Benny advised me to cross through. "What's inside?" I asked.
"Laundry storage."
I'm not much for taking shortcuts, but I didn't mind one if it took me out of potentially inhabited corridors and put me in a room full of empty uniforms. I sidled up to the hatch, extended my arm, and watched as the door opened before the lock pick could do its thing.
The guy who came out wasn't too tall, for a Gwendin, but even so I only came up to his shoulder. He had the bulbous eyes, the bald, vein-ridden skull, and everything. It's hard to believe they were ever human, but you know what they say about aggressive gene-modding.
He screamed something in that awful gurgling the Gwendin pass off as a language. I screamed something along the lines of, "Benny, I'm gonna kill you."
I stepped away from the wall and saw three more Gwendin sitting at a bench on the far side of the room with steaming trays of food lying on the table before them. Then I really felt the need to scream.
One of the other Gwendin ratings cried out. I fired my weapon, raking the Gwendin standing before me with deadly fire, but by the time he fell his crewmates had already triggered the alarm. The lights went from a soft white to red, and klaxons sounded all around me.
I took off faster than a hummingbird on go-juice and pitched myself over the railing of the first staircase I came to. I fell a few decks—a bit farther than it sounds because the Gwendin give themselves so much headroom—hit the ground, and rolled to my feet.
"What's the panic?" Benny asked.
"It's a mess hall!" I said. "Laundry my ass! It's a frickin' mess!"
I turned the first corner I came to. I had to lose myself, not go anywhere they might expect me, and definitely avoid going anywhere near the boat. A couple hatches blocked my way, and using the lock pick cost me precious seconds.
"Relax, Chief. You'll be fine," Benny said in her most soothing voice. It only scared me more.
I stopped at a T-intersection and paused to catch my breath. I couldn't hear any signs of the Gwendin around me, but that didn't mean a lot in the din of the klaxons. Writing on the floor and walls offered information about how to get to my destination, but I had no idea what they said or how to interpret them.
"Benny, the next time I ask you for directions, you'd better know where I'm going."
"I misread the blueprints, okay? How many times do I have to say I'm sorry?"
"Once would be good enough for me. How do I get to the engine room from deck twelve, block two, frame four?"
"From where you are now, head port to block seven. At frame six you'll find—"
The rhythmic clang of boots on metal interrupted Benny's directions. I brought my SMG to bear on the sound and fired off a quick burst. Sparks flew off the wall and pipes. I dove for cover around one of the hatches just in time for a crewman to return fire. I peeked my head out and fired off a few more bursts, but I couldn't tell how many Gwendin were onto me.
"I've got company," I informed Benny. How did they arm themselves so fast? It didn't matter. For all I knew they had hidden small arms lockers throughout the ship. They had enough places to hide them amongst the panels, displays, wire junc
tions, and conduit patches.
The crew and I played cat and mouse for almost a minute. First I'd peek my head out and hose off a few bursts, then they'd return the favor. We blew holes in a few of the pipes. A clear liquid shot out of one and some kind of viscous green goop oozed out of another, but a glance at my environmental hazard indicators showed it didn't pose any danger other than making the battlefield more annoying.
Instincts honed over years of service in the Navy told me to stay on the move. My stealthsuit would keep the ship's internal sensors from pinpointing my exact location, but the longer they knew where to find me the greater the chances that they'd overwhelm or trap me.