Aggressor Six

by Wil McCarthy

  AGGRESSOR SIX

  by

  WIL MCCARTHY

  Produced by ReAnimus Press

  ~~~

  As an alien armada from the waist of Orion decimates one human star system after another, Marine Corporal Kenneth Jonson is one of the few who live to fight another day. Jonson's brush with the enemy gives him a startling insight into the alien strategy, and he is drafted into an elite psychological warfare unit to challenge them. But with time in short supply, it's only once this team is in action that Jonson realizes that to succeed, they may have to betray their own kind.

  REVIEWS

  Waldenbooks Book of the Week

  Locus 1994 Recommended Reading List

  “An intense and satisfying novel.”

  —Walter Jon Williams

  “Wil McCarthy brings thought and insight to the realm of fast-paced, action science fiction. AGGRESSOR SIX is a taut, vivid adventure that never rests. A splendid debut for a bright light on the SF horizon.”

  —David Brin

  “A fine novel... from a writer who's going to be around for a very long time. This one is a calling card.”

  —Daniel Keys Moran

  “I enjoyed it... Wil McCarthy is a writer to watch.”

  —Vernor Vinge

  “A neat, action-filled novel. What starts out like Heinlein ends up looking a lot more like Haldeman. AGGRESSOR SIX is a satisfying debut.”

  —Gary K. Wolfe, Locus

  “An exciting debut... an exciting start to a promising career.”

  —Fred Cleaver, The Denver Post

  “One part STARSHIP TROOPERS, one part OUTER LIMITS-style psychological suspense... McCarthy cranks up the tension effectively. Recommended.”

  —Charles DeLint, Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

  “A well-told tale that combines brisk action, intelligent conception of the aliens, and deeper characterization of the humans than is often found...”

  —Roland Green, Booklist

  “Very well done. [The] headlong pace and rousing finale... belie what must be at heart a fairly cerebral tale. McCarthy has the gift. Watch for his next.”

  —Tom Easton, Analog

  ~~~

  © 2011 by Wil McCarthy. All rights reserved.

  http://ReAnimus.com/authors/wilmccarthy

  Cover Art © 2001 by Jose C. de Braga

  Smashwords Edition License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  ~~~

  AGGRESSOR SIX

  ~~~

  For Bruce Hall and Richmond Meyer

  ~~~

  Chapter One

  The woman was heavy and tall. Her brown hair hung down just past her shoulders, framing a squarish and businesslike face. She wore an officer's uniform, three stripes on the collar. “Ah, Corporal,” she said. “Come in.”

  Ken cleared his throat, brushed a finger against his throbbing temple. “Th... Thank you, Captain...”

  “Talbott,” she said. “Marshe Talbott, Exobiology. Call me Queen, if you like. Might be a good idea to get used to it.”

  “Queen.” He tasted the word. It seemed strange, a familiar sound that had dressed itself up in new meanings.

  “I understand you haven't been briefed?”

  “Uh, no. I mean, I hope not. This is some kind of think tank? That's all they told me.”

  She nodded slowly. “Some kind of think tank. Yes. Come in, please. Once you meet the group I think things will be a lot clearer.” She ushered him in through the doorway and down a short corridor. “I've been reading your dossier. We weren't sure who they were going to send, but you seem like an appropriate... Everyone, this is Kenneth Jonson, our Marine corporal.”

  The corridor opened into what looked like the control room for a holie studio, its walls covered with screens displaying schematic diagrams, planetscapes, bright yellow lists of scrolling numbers. Lighted shapes flashed here and there on dark, gloss-black control panels. A ring of chairs faced inward, two vacant, three occupied by uniformed men who eyed Ken curiously.

  “Dog! Good dog!”

  He was startled by the sharp voice, and even more startled when its owner raced toward him on four legs, its tail wagging. It was a dog, a big black and tan one with a thick collar around its neck. “I am Shenna!” Said the animal. “Shenna is a good dog! I am Shenna!”

  “Go sit down,” said Captain Talbott. For a moment, Ken thought she was speaking to him, but then the dog hung its head and turned back toward the chairs.

  “Shenna will sit. Shenna will sit. Shenna is a good dog.”

  The captain smiled, her face turning pleasant for a moment. “Sorry. That was Shenna. Maintenance Corps.”

  Ken blinked stupidly as the dog went over and sat between two of the chairs, her tail thumping against the metal floor. Not only had the animal spoken, it had done so without moving its mouth.

  “You've never seen a Martian retriever before,” said the captain, catching his look. “They're, ah... It's all webs and voders, the talking I mean. No magic involved. Anyway, meet the crew.” She pointed at one of the seated figures, a slender man with yellow-brown skin and short, black hair that stood in tight curls. “Lieutenant Sipho Yeng, Astronomy. Born on Mars, lately of Ceres Mainstation. He's one of our Workers.”

  The man looked at Ken and nodded slightly, his face virtually free of expression.

  There was a pause. Ken's mind was crammed with the language of the Hwhh, the Waisters, but none of their words seemed to mean “Hello”. He reached back and rubbed the tender, swollen flesh at the base of his skull. The doctors had told him that the Broca web would not interfere with his conscious thought process, just as they had told him that the emplacement of it wouldn't hurt. Right.

  “There is,” He said, and stopped. Standard, he told himself. Think in Standard. It's only your native language. “Uh. I feel this urge to attack you. Crazy. I think the Waister language doesn't contain any greetings for strangers. I'm... very pleased that you're an astronomer?”

  The yellow-brown man laughed at that. “Relax, Corporal. The Broca web is strange at first, but you'll reach an accommodation with it. Its job is to advise, not to compel.”

  “After my operation I was confused for a solid week,” the captain admitted, then pointed at the next man in the circle. “This is Worker Two. Roland Hanlin, sergeant, Ceres Ordnance. And this,”—she pointed at the last man—”is Drone One.”

  “Ranes, comma, Josev T.,” said the man. “Navy lieutenant, U.A.S. Century City. Straight pleased to meet you, Corporal. I was part of your backup on the final boarding action. Of course, I was cooped up in a navigation creche at the time, but I guess we all do our part. Anyway, good show. Damn good show.”

  Show? The terminal phase of the Flyswatter operation had been many things, but the word “show” was not one Ken would have chosen. Nor was “good,” for that matter. He wondered, briefly, if he should take offense at the comment, but decided to let it pass. The roll and twang of the young man's voice were unmistakably Southimbrian, and although Lunites were not widely known as a sensitive people, they were very rarely malicious.

  “Thank you, sir,” Ken managed to say. Then, with even greater effort: “It's... nice to acquaint... to meet you. Nice to meet you. All of you.”

  The captain nudged his elbow. “Well, Corporal? Q
ueen, Dog, Worker, Worker, Drone...”

  He frowned. “I'm the other Drone? We're supposed to be Waisters?”

  “Aggressor Six,” said Josev Ranes. “They teach you much history in the M'rines? Tactical forecasting is traditionally one of the hardest jobs in warfare, even when your enemies are human. Most standing armies maintain a unit whose job is to live and think and spit like the enemy.”

  Think and spit like the enemy? Ken remembered the Waister Drones feeding their twisted, bruise-colored bodies into the wiregun abbatoir of battle, fluid drooling from their sandpaper mouths...

  What could the thoughts of the Hwhh be like? How could anyone possibly know? As a child, Ken had often thought he'd grow up to be a dramatist. He practiced, sometimes, using exercises he'd learned in class or seen on holie. I'm a tree, he'd say, stretching his arms out in what he imagined to be a treelike manner. Then, he would empty his mind as best he could and stand very still, sometimes for twenty minutes or more.

  “I see,” he said.

  “No argument,” observed Captain Talbott with a nod. “That's good. We don't need any individualists here, we need a nice six-part harmony.”

  “Yes, Ma'am.”

  “At ease, Corporal. Excessive formality is a team-buster.”

  “Should I call you Marshe?”

  She laughed. “Call me Queen. Get into the spirit of it.” She smiled for a few moments, but then a dark expression swept across her face like the shadow of a moon. “We've been monitoring the realtime holies from Lalande. The Waisters just crossed the orbit of Tenebra, which is the outermost planet. Two stations offline so far. It doesn't look good.” She gestured at an empty chair. “Sit. Watch for details. For the moment it's all we can do.”

  Ken shuffled a little. “Ma'am. Queen. Respectfully, I'm not feeling too good right now. They hustled me onto a clipper right out of post-op, and I've spent the last forty hours at three and a half gee's.”

  “Oh,” said the captain. “Well. Let me show you your quarters, then. You don't have any luggage?”

  “No, they wouldn't let me.”

  She led him across the room, through the stares of a dog and three men, to another corridor.

  “Sleep tight, chum,” said Josev Ranes as Ken passed by.

  His room proved to be first in the short hallway. The captain, the Queen, slid the door open and went inside. Ken got as far as the doorway and stopped.

  “Shit,” he said, looking into the room. The walls were purple-gray and padded, slick with clear varnish. The corners had been blocked off with triangular braces, making the room look vaguely octahedral. There were human things here: a dresser, a capsule-shaped sleeping-berth set into the wall opposite the hygiene area with its bathing and sanitary facilities. But these things, these human things, looked decidedly out of place, like palm trees on a cold, airless moon. “Shit, shit. You can't be serious.”

  “Come in, Corporal,” said Marshe Talbott.

  “Captain, I can't sleep in there. Please, I mean it.”

  “Get in here, Drone Two. That's an order.”

  Ken started to protest again, bit it back. This was like a bad dream, or a bad joke. A space-black coffin would have been more inviting than these quarters. I can't be ordered to sleep here, he thought. But he knew that wasn't true. A Waister armada was en route to Sol system, six months away at best, and if it were deemed necessary or helpful in some way, Ken could be ordered to consume his own entrails. These were not nurturing times.

  He took a breath, and stepped into the room.

  “Nothing to be afraid of in here,” the captain said, not unkindly.

  “Yes ma'am,” Ken replied tightly.

  Talbott ran a hand up and down her cheek. “You really are upset by this, aren't you? I'm sorry. They gave me a lot of trouble about the decorations, waste of war materiel and all that. I fought for it. If it helps, even a little bit... But you're just back from the boarding action. I didn't think about that. The tip of the Flyswatter. Was... Was it bad?”

  Ken looked at the soft, glistening walls around him. “Yes,” he said quietly, almost choking on the word. “Oh, yes. Very bad.”

  The captain looked hard at him for what seemed like a long time. “I'm not here to mother you,” she said, finally. Her voice was gentle but impersonal, like the anonymous comfort of a couch in a public lounge. “If you've got a problem with this, I'm sorry. I wish things were different. You've borne the brunt of this war, much more than the rest of us, but that doesn't give you the right to fold. I'm going to leave you alone now. You can cry, scream, kick the walls, whatever you want, but tomorrow morning you join the team. Are you following me?”

  “Yes ma'am,” Ken replied, machinelike. Comfort and enjoyment were wasteful luxuries when life, all life, hung in the balance. The commanders would spend his life as they saw fit.

  Talbott's probing gaze withdrew, sought out his shoes. “I really am sorry. When I was stationed here—God, it's almost four years ago now—it hit me that I'd seen my last rainstorm, my last summer day. It seemed so tragic, but now I can't even cry about it.” She cleared her throat. “Good night, Corporal. I hope you feel better.”

  Woodenly: “Thank you, ma'am.”

  When she was gone, he went over to the bunk and threw himself into it, killing the room lights with a slam of his fist. Was it bad? Was it bad? How could she ask him that?

  He trembled as the weeks-old fear curled and stretched within him, settling in for the night. But fatigue was dragging at him already, a soldier's fatigue, always there, always poised to perform its duty. Within seconds it was tugging him down, down toward the unwelcome embrace of sleep.

  Of course it had been bad. Oh, yes. Very bad.

  Chapter Two

  Firefly lights winked in the distance, each flicker marking the end of a human life as the Waister disintegration beams, themselves invisible, swept back and forth across the dappled velvet of space. Every now and again, one of the beams would touch the bright pinpoint of a human battleship, and the speck would brighten and expand like an exploding star, then fade away. More lives erased.

  In the distance, the Waister ship looked small, the size of a wine bottle, and that was bad, because Ken knew the ship was seven kilometers long. More distant still, the Milky Way cut across the view like a knife wound, its stars cold and unwinking.

  Operation Flyswatter, that was the name the officers had given to the disaster that was unfolding around him. We expect casualties, the X.O. had said, but the Navy will be covering your advance, drawing the Waisters' fire, neutralizing their weapons if possible. We have a lot of cause for optimism at this point.

  But the X.O. had known, as had Ken and everyone else, that this was polite fiction, a murmur of sweet nothings to lubricate the thighs of virgin troops. A more forthright paramour might have said, It's a swarm attack. One million men will be sown across space like seeds of corn, and we expect most of you to die. We simply hope to present the Waisters with more targets than they can respond to.

  Not that it mattered, at this point.

  Ken felt the scooter humming between his legs, much like the autocycle he'd once owned. That was back when he'd lived on Earth and had a life of his own, some measure of control over his destiny. The feeling of the sun on his face, the dusty wind in his hair, was a balm that soothed his troubles away as he raced down the ancient beltways of North America. Now, the sun was shrunken and cold behind him, and the “wind” in his face was the rebreather kicking his own exhalations back at him. The scooter was his life, he knew. He drew his air from it, through the slender rape hose that ran from his chest to the tank-rack below, but more importantly it was his only means of propulsion, his only way to catch up with the retrieval tugs.

  By slapping the wide, brightly-colored membrane patches on the top of the oxidizer tank, Ken could order the scooter to DIVE, EVADE, TRACK, or SPIRAL, all of which involved zooming in toward the Waister ship. There was no RETREAT command he could issue. That was okay, though, since his comma
nders had thoughtfully decreed that the retrieval tugs would only search for survivors who were within one kilometer of the Waister ship, after it had been boarded and pacified.

  Right now, Ken was DIVING toward the ship. Why waste time EVADING, or doing anything else but attacking the enemy? Even a mouse would bite when it knew it could not escape.

  Slowly, slowly, he approached.

  They were called Waisters because they came from the waist of Orion, and were not to be confused with Belters, who were the human inhabitants of asteroids in Sol system and the five colonies. Three, he reminded himself. There were three colonies, soon to be two if the fighting went badly at Lalande. And the fighting would go badly; Waister technology was insanely powerful, and the aliens themselves knew nothing of mercy. Even at nine tenths lightspeed, they had traveled for something like twelve hundred years for the privilege of squashing the human race like a nest of bugs.

  But they were not invincible! The ship before him, with its melted drive motors and blistering hull, was proof enough of that. Ken clutched that thought to him like a beloved pet.

  The ship was the size of a small child's sleigh, now. Lights winked around it, brighter and more yellow than the stars. New Years', he thought, remembering the way drifts of winter snow would glitter in the night while fireworks detonated above them. But that was Earth, a part of his freshly cauterized past.