Armada

by Paul Teague

  “That one,” said Kearney, pointing at an Unborn, “and that one, then we run. On my move.” The two Unborn she had chosen were between Hunter and the door. Kill them both, and they’d have a chance to escape.

  “Go,” she said, launching herself at one of the targets.

  Hunter yelled as he thrust his knife into the head of the nearest Unborn. There was less resistance than he’d expected, and the powerful blow dropped the beast to the floor even as Mason stabbed it from behind.

  Vernon and Kearney fell upon their target, slashing at its chest and head. The creature let out a deathly roar, and began to thrash and snap its teeth, wrenching around to snap at its attackers.

  And then the whole bunch of them was moving. The wounded beast thrashed as if demented, its movements even more unpredictable than the others. Kearney was struck by a flailing limb and catapulted across the room. Mason slashed at another Unborn as he was thrown to the floor and trampled by two of the beasts, his armour creaking under their weight.

  Vernon slashed and stabbed, screaming unheard abuse at the Unborn, his injured arm held tight across his chest. Hunter heaved Mason back to his feet.

  “It’s all gone to shit,” Hunter yelled. “These things are too strong for knives to kill them.”

  “Move,” shouted Mason as Vernon was struck by an Unborn as it raced past, mouth slobbering. The commander was knocked to his knees, momentarily dazed as his knife skittered away across the floor.

  “Get to the doors,” Hunter shouted, pushing past a corpse to look at the stunned commander. “Get to the doors. Mason, grenades!”

  “Yeah, right,” said Mason, snatching a pair of grenades from his pack and tossing them to Hunter. “You reckon they’ll sense these as well?”

  “I fucking hope so,” said Hunter as he activated the grenades and threw them into the open space at the far end of the bay.

  The grenades clattered and bounced across the bay’s deck, and the Unborn ran after them like a pack of wolves falling on their prey.

  “It’s now or never,” shouted Hunter, heaving the still-dazed Vernon to his feet and dragging him towards the door in a stumbling run. Behind them, the grenades went off one after another, blasting blood and muck across the bay.

  “Wilkins, open the door,” yelled Mason as he ran.

  “Roger,” said the tech. Moments later the door slid open, revealing Wilkins and Leman in full power armour with weapons raised.

  “No,” shouted Kearney as she ran, “stand down.”

  But the Marines weren’t focussed on Kearney. They were watching the horror unfolding in the bay as the Unborn milled around in search of their prey.

  Wilkins sighted down the rifle and fired, a short, controlled burst at the nearest Unborn. It fell back, stung by the bullets, then let rip a scream of primal hatred. It turned to face Wilkins as the Marine fired again; then it charged forward, terrifyingly fast.

  “Run,” Kearney shouted across the bay as Leman and Wilkins fired again and again.

  Vernon, still unsteady on his feet, stumbled into a run with Hunter at his side. Mason followed, putting his armoured bulk between the commander and the Unborn. Kearney dashed after them, stealing glances over her shoulder as she ran.

  The Unborn were following, all of them. Their mouths were wide open, displaying razor-sharp teeth ready to tear through human flesh.

  Leman stood to one side as Vernon and Hunter reached the door, slipping on the pile of guts that Mason had left behind as he’d cut himself free of the monsters. They charged through, and Mason quickly followed.

  Leman fired again, taking a step back to ease himself out of the room. Wilkins slapped a fresh magazine into his rifle and emptied it into the nearest Unborn as Kearney skidded through the doorway.

  “Shut it, shut it,” she screamed as she slid across the deck on her back, scrabbling to regain her footing.

  The Unborn screamed. The doors squealed through the blood, and then they clicked closed.

  Moments later there were two dull bangs as the chasing Unborn hammered into the doors. In the corridor, Charlie Team and the Marines stood listening to the shrieks of the hideous creatures as they battered at the doors.

  “They’re locked, right?” said Kearney from her spot on the floor. She’d decided that standing up was too much effort.

  “Right,” said Wilkins, his rifle smoking gently at his side as he checked his data slate. “Yeah, locked.”

  “Thank fuck for that,” whispered Kearney, laying her head back on the floor and closing her eyes.

  “And the other doors?” said Vernon. Wilkins stared at him from within his helmet. “The other doors, Marine,” hissed the commander, “at the other end of the bay.”

  There was a moment of appalled silence; then Wilkins stabbed at his slate, flicking through the other door controls.

  “Closed and locked, sir,” said Wilkins, holding up the slate as evidence.

  “Did we get them all?” demanded Mason, his helmet off and his cool slipping away. “Are they all in there?”

  Wilkins flicked again at his slate, searching for the camera feeds from inside the bay.

  Then a shriek echoed down the corridor from a long way off, a terrible noise that reverberated through the ship and pulled at the nerves of the waiting Marines.

  “I don’t think they are,” said Wilkins in a small voice. “The other doors were open, a few may have left.”

  “Fuck,” said Hunter angrily, shaking his head.

  Vernon stabbed a finger at the wall-mounted comms device. “Security teams, we have Unborn on the loose. Do not – repeat – do not fire your weapons at them. Let them pass.”

  Kearney’s HUD, still set to public mode, suddenly came alive.

  “Vernon?” Stansfield’s voice. “Vernon, are you there?”

  “Ay, sir, we’re all here, but we’ve got Unborn loose in the ship. We’re going to track them down and kill them before they do any more damage.”

  “Let Charlie Team handle that,” said Stansfield, his voice unusually strained. “I need you on the bridge immediately. We have an armada of alien ships heading directly for us.”

  10

  By the time Commander Vernon reached the bridge, it was completely silent. For a moment he wondered what had made things so unnaturally quiet, but then he saw what was on the screen.

  The images were blurred by the vast distance and the impaired abilities of Vengeance’s ancient sensors, but even so it was clear that they were facing a huge number of ships, far too many to count by eye.

  “What the hell?” whispered Vernon, unable to pull his eyes from the main screen, where the ships appeared to hang in space. “Are they ours?” he asked, although he already knew the answer.

  “No,” said Stansfield bitterly, “they’re not ours. Human, almost certainly, but not ours. Not Deathless either.”

  “Another hostile faction?” breathed Vernon. “What are the odds?”

  The ships weren’t of Sol origin; that much was obvious. Thin though the information from Vengeance’s degraded sensors might be, it was enough to run a comparison against the records in the database. No matches.

  “Can we make that clearer?” asked Vernon. Yau nodded, and a few moments later a blown-up image of one of the leading ships appeared on another screen.

  “A battleship,” said Stansfield. “Larger than Vengeance, much larger. And they have many such ships.” He glanced at Vernon and frowned. The man was bruised, shaken and covered in the gore of the Unborn, but he was still on his feet, and in Stansfield’s book, that was enough, particularly when facing an enemy as formidable as this one.

  And there was no room for debate: the ship was definitely a warship. Heavily armoured, it had multiple gun turrets and what looked like powerful forward-facing torpedo banks.

  “An offensive fleet, then,” said Vernon. “Whoever they are, they’re not here for exploration and trade.”

  “Full analysis, Lieutenant?” Stansfield asked after giving a nod to V
ernon.

  “They’re not being stealthy,” said Yau slowly as he thought through the implications. “We probably wouldn’t have seen them if they weren’t actively scanning us. As it is, we’ve no way of knowing how long they’ve been there.”

  “And from a military perspective,” said Stansfield, a tremor of impatience in his tone. “What can you tell me that might be militarily interesting?”

  There was a pause as Yau looked again at his screens. “They’re not hiding, so they don’t fear us. That suggests familiarity, maybe contempt.”

  Stansfield snorted.

  “They’re coming to this point. We can see at least forty-seven battleships,” Yau went on, “and another eighty-three ships of other types, probably a mix of supply ships, smaller warships, medical and cloning vessels, fuel transports and troop carriers.”

  “A hundred and thirty ships?” hissed Stansfield, slightly awed despite his long experience.

  “That we can see, sir,” said Yau. Stansfield gave him a sharp glare. “If they’re travelling in single file, or there’re other fleets that aren’t scanning us, or–”

  “Okay, I get it,” snapped Stansfield.

  “That’s a serious battle fleet,” said Vernon. “They’ve got a lot of support ships with them. Wherever they’re heading, they mean to be taken seriously.”

  “We know where they’re heading,” Stansfield said quietly to his second-in-command. “The only question is, will the Admiralty listen?”

  Vernon frowned, but Stansfield had moved on to the next problem. “How long till they arrive?”

  “If they mean to stop here,” said Yau, “then about forty-eight hours. If not, maybe thirty hours or less.”

  “And they’re heading for this location?” Vernon queried.

  “Yes, sir, this precise point in space.”

  “They’re heading for the portal,” said Stansfield, giving voice to the obvious conclusion.

  The bridge was silent once again. The crew tried to take in the enormity of the onrushing armada. The images peered down at them from the main viewing screen, taunting them with its dominance.

  Stansfield roused himself. There was little point wasting time gawping at the bully in front of them. They needed to decide how and where to aim the punch to take him down.

  “That gives us two days to prepare a greeting. How long till Orion joins us?”

  “They’ll arrive on the far side of the portal in less than an hour, sir,” said Yau.

  “Instruct them not to enter without my order,” said Stansfield. “We don’t want a repeat of last time. Do we have the Sphere team on the comms?”

  “Patching you through now, sir,” said Midshipman Khan, his fingers rushing over his console to link the admiral to Charlie Team.

  “Conway, I need some results from the sphere. Either we incorporate it into our defensive capability, or we destroy it so it can’t blast Orion out of space when she joins us on this side of the portal.”

  “Understood,” said Conway. “We’re making our way to the central control room, sir, and we’ll let you know if we can turn this ship into anything useful.”

  “Keep me apprised,” said Stansfield.

  “What about us, sir?” said Kearney.

  “Deal with the Unborn roaming our corridors and the OctoBots crowding our core,” said Stansfield. “Until that job’s done, everything else is at risk. I want drone cameras in the core so we know what they’re doing there.”

  “Roger,” said Kearney.

  “Is there anything else you need?”

  “No, sir, only time,” said Kearney.

  “Then snap to it. We have only forty-eight hours, and I want Vengeance to be fully battle-ready well before then. You have your orders, let’s make it happen!”

  Deep within the sphere, Davies was still jittery about OctoBots. Every creak, every movement within the structure put him on edge.

  “It’s all very well Stansfield issuing the orders,” he griped, “but I’m struggling to get my head round this tech. It’s almost human, but not quite Sol. It’s like they’ve taken human tech and evolved it, but not in the way our tech has evolved. It’s way more sophisticated than ours.”

  “Down,” shouted Conway.

  “Am I boring you?” asked Davies, absorbed by his examination of a console they’d found in a side room.

  “OctoBot to your rear!”

  Davies ducked into hiding as Conway fired. The bullets shot away five of the creature’s legs, and the OctoBot was knocked off its perch on a bank of screens, narrowly missing Davies as it fell to the floor. Upside down, its remaining legs scrabbled at the deck as it tried to flip itself over.

  Conway prepared to fire again.

  “Whoa, steady,” said Davies. “Let’s take it alive.”

  “You sure?”

  “Research,” said Davies. “Need something to poke at if we’re going to learn what makes it tick.”

  “Right,” said Conway doubtfully, holstering her pistol. “But let’s lose the legs,” she went on, drawing her knife.

  She sprang forward, pinning the OctoBot to the deck with one armoured fist while her other hand flashed, blade hacking quickly through the other limbs. Conway picked up the legless creature and peered at it. “Ugly little critter,” she said. Then she tossed it across the room to Davies.

  “Nice work!” Davies complemented. “Look, the brain’s still active, only we’ve paralysed the little blighter. I’m going to see if I can interface with it in some way. If we can hack one of these things, it might give us some clues.”

  “It’s all a bit geeky for me,” said Conway as she sheathed her knife and unslung her rifle. “You need anything shooting, you call me, okay? The tech I’ll leave to you.”

  “Vengeance, this is Davies, requesting permission for access to the ship’s data files. Can you hop a link through my HUD, Lieutenant?”

  “What’s your thinking, Davies?” Stansfield interrupted.

  “This thing has a human brain, sir, it’s no alien. I want to know if I can identify it from its DNA. To do that, I have to access all Sol records. We might also be able to set up an interface to the Sphere; it’s the only way we’ll be able to make any sense of them.”

  “I advise deploying a local firewall, sir,” said Yau, “and running everything in a locked-down sandbox. Then we can sever the link if anything untoward happens. I also recommend separate links, in a to-fro config. That way both links are isolated, and we can monitor activity on each line. If something tries to hijack one of the feeds, we’ll know immediately and we can quarantine accordingly.”

  “Agreed. You’ll have your feeds, Davies, as soon as Lieutenant Yau has configured the links. Work fast,” said the Admiral, “because there’s an enemy fleet inbound to our position.”

  “Thank you, sir, I’ll be as quick as I can,” said Davies. “Better get to work,” he muttered. He muted the channel and stood back to look afresh at the part-disassembled console. Then, still muttering under his breath, he began to pull out cables.

  Conway stood guard as Davies unpacked his hacking kit and wormed his way into the Sphere’s systems. It was like watching a master sculptor at work as he hacked beauty from a plain lump of marble, and it felt to Conway as if it might take almost as long.

  “How long is this going to take?” she asked after about ten minutes.

  “Almost done,” said Davies. “Some of these cables use Sol-standard connectors. Look,” he said, holding one up.

  Conway pretended to inspect it, then grunted.

  “The colour coding is new, and the layouts are unusual, but with this little beauty we should be able to open the backdoor.” Davies plugged the cable into a slim metal box he’d brought from Vengeance. “Helps that Vengeance is as old as time, to be honest.”

  There was a little more fiddling, then Davies sat back.

  “I’m in,” he said as a display lit up on the console. “Hacked and cracked, with a wireless link to my HUD. You want to know how
many Mechs are still in storage?”

  The display flashed, and what looked suspiciously like a management dashboard appeared.

  “Looks like two thousand and forty-eight pods in total, with all but a hundred and twenty-eight deployed. Hmm, not good. Could be nasty if they all woke up. Let’s post a monitor on those pods to notify us if anything changes.”

  Conway watched in awed silence as Davies fiddled with the Sphere’s controls, progressively locking things down.

  “Davies,” said Yau suddenly, “we have your links. Connection details coming to you now.”

  A package of information appeared in Davies’s HUD, and he unmuted the channel. “Thank you, sir, patching in now.” He muted the channel again and opened the file. He hummed as he worked, feeding the settings into the hacking box.

  “Et voilà,” he said. “It lives.” On the display, a new screen of information appeared, this time in the familiar colours and layout of the Royal Navy.

  “So, Conway, what do you want to know about Vengeance? We can see pretty much everything with this level of access.”

  “How old is Stansfield?” she asked, not even having to think about it. “Can you pull up his files?”

  “Nah, the Admiral’s files are locked,” said Davies. “Personnel files are still restricted, but there should be a hidden area in here somewhere, if Vengeance adheres to tech protocols.”

  Davies resumed his humming as he delved into Vengeance’s files. Then he splashed a new page of information onto the screen and stood back.

  “Well fuck me, look at this,” he said, staring in astonishment.

  “Yeah, it’s a screen with lots of code on it. I’ve had more exciting days, Davies.”

  “It’s only a bloody Tombstone!”

  “Again, Davies, my face is blank. What does that mean?”

  “It’s like a ship’s black box. It records everything that happens on Vengeance, all the commands and events. The protocol originated in the Twentieth Century in aeroplane technology, and it’s one of those things that never changed. This is fascinating.”