“See!” Haugen said. “Aliens!”
“That’s a Hroom, you idiot,” Kelly said.
“Hroom are aliens.” Haugen sounded put out. He killed one of the humans, but the rest of the attackers escaped up the street, dodging and weaving to avoid gunfire.
“Hroom are Hroom,” she said. “We thought you meant aliens, you know, an unknown species. Next time lead with specific detail. Svensen, stop this fight.”
Svensen snorted. “How do you expect me to do that? Put down our weapons and let them shoot at us?”
Kelly turned the prisoner around. The woman was still struggling in the grip of the mech suit, even as bullets kicked up dirt around them, exposing her to more risk than any of them.
“Tell your people to surrender and we’ll stop shooting,” she told the woman.
Svensen laughed. “If only she was on the com and spoke Scandian.”
This only prompted Kelly to pop off her helmet—dumb move, that—and repeat her instructions in English. The captive gaped as she took in Kelly’s face. She broke free and jumped to her feet and Svensen thought he was going to have to shoot her, but she wasn’t running.
Instead she moved into the open and waved her arms, shouting. Miraculously, neither side gunned her down while she stood there exposed, but there were enough bullets flying by that it was only a matter of seconds.
Svensen took a chance. “All units stand down. Repeat. Stand down!”
That brought open grumbling on the com, the old Scandian insubordination playing out, but the gunfire eased off, then died altogether as the other side stopped shooting as well. An eerie silence descended on the street. Dust hung in the air, turning the sun a hazy orange, and fire licked the already decrepit buildings on both sides of the street.
Kelly and the woman were talking. Not in the same language, but they seemed to be communicating something. Gesturing, pointing.
The lieutenant turned toward Svensen. “I think she wants us to follow.”
He let skepticism into his voice. “Yeah? Where? Right into an ambush?”
“Don’t be a coward. We took two casualties in thirty minutes of combat. We’re at no risk.”
“More like twenty minutes, but yeah. Assuming you put your blasted helmet back on. You’re a head shot waiting to happen.”
“How many of their side did we kill? Fifty, sixty? Maybe more. Shot them, burned them alive. We landed in their city and have already knocked down buildings and set a couple of blocks on fire. Aren’t they the ones who should be worried?”
“I’m not being a coward, I’m being prudent. We’ve got a hundred raiders here, on a hostile world that seems have seen its share of warfare. For all I know, they’ve got an inbound airstrike on its way.”
“Take a look at this woman,” Kelly said. “Use your brain for once, instead of your muscles.”
Svensen studied the captive, now standing free, and half-looking like she wanted to bolt. She was lean, wiry. Maybe forty years old, though it was hard to say for sure, because these planet-side people always took a lot of sun exposure. Calloused hands, a scar on her neck from a wound that had never seen a medic. The kind some raiders wore, like a tattoo of battle, instead of getting a proper skin graft.
Not a regular soldier, for sure; that wasn’t a uniform she was wearing. In fact, the trousers looked homemade, and the shirt had a rough, homespun look to it, too. A thick leather belt, hand stamped with patterns. A trio of grenades hung from homemade loops—little ceramic pots with primitive fuses. Boots looked rough, too, laced with leather thongs.
There was nothing on her that seemed factory made except the rifle, but guns, properly cared for, lasted generations. And any self-respecting civilization stored a cache of ammo to last a hundred years after a collapse.
Which this civilization had apparently done.
More people approached warily, emerging from the ruined buildings on either side of the street. Mostly human, but there were a handful of Hroom, too, standing out with their purple skin, bald heads, and long limbs. The tallest had to be over eight feet. They stared with their large eyes, mouths drawn tight, humming through nose slits. The human Kelly had captured stopped about twenty feet away and gestured at Svensen. More of that strange language. Sounded like English, but it wasn’t.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to have one of those Singapore translators around?” he said. “If only Wang hadn’t departed under mysterious circumstances.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Kelly said loudly. “I think they want a look at your mug.”
Haugen brayed his laughter. “What, you trying to scare them off again?”
Svensen took off his helmet. The air smelled of cordite and burning plastic. It was warm outside, several degrees above ship-side temperatures. But tolerable.
The gathering humans and Hroom chattered excitedly when they saw his face. Several dozen had gathered by now, with more moving back and forth across the street behind them, and others—these ones unarmed—trying to get around the raiders and back up the street.
Svensen leaned toward Haugen, who still wore his helmet, which would muffle incoming sound. “They’re going for their wounded, I’ll wager. Pull our raiders back so they don’t look so threatening. Oh, and call Icefall. I don’t want Helsingor deciding that now is when we need his help. The last thing we need is him shooting at us from orbit.”
As Haugen and Jörvak drew the raiders along the opposite side of the street to let the locals get by, their former prisoner gestured at Svensen and said something in an urgent tone.
“You realize we can’t understand a cursed word you say, right?” Svensen turned to Kelly. “Don’t you have any Old Church English or something?”
“I can recite the Lord’s Prayer. Wanna hear?”
“Sure, let’s all pray to our various gods and ancestors. Come on, Kelly. Help me out here. What’s going on?”
“Maybe try that Mercian accent of yours. It’s a primitive enough dialect.”
“They seem awfully friendly, given that we just ripped them a new one.”
“I think they’re desperate to show us something. Just you and me, following them. I think we should trust them.”
“And I think that’s nuts. But fine, we’ll follow. I’m putting my helmet back on, though.”
“Go right ahead. I’m keeping mine off, but I don’t blame you if you’re scared.”
Her words hit his pride, and he couldn’t resist matching her foolhardy behavior. “Fine, I’ll keep mine off, too. But if it’s an ambush, I swear I’ll take a few of these idiots down first.”
“It’s not going to be an ambush. I think we both know what’s going on here.”
“If by ‘both,’ you mean you alone, and by ‘know,’ you mean you’ve got a wild, crazy guess, then sure. I guess we both know.”
#
Svensen and Kelly tromped away from the rest of the raiders, heads bare and carrying their helmets. Their former prisoner, who seemed to be named Ellen—a reasonable name, albeit pronounced with a weirdly swallowed “L”—led them up the street. Four other locals, including a pair of Hroom, followed.
“How do you think the Hroom made it out this far?” Kelly asked.
“The empire used to be a lot bigger from what I understand.”
“Yeah, toward the outer frontier. No record of Hroom in this direction. Nearest Hroom settlements are twenty jumps away.”
“Don’t ask me,” Svensen said. “We never had any dealings with them until Albion stirred everyone up.”
After traveling for several blocks, Ellen and the other locals led them into an old transport station, with rusting ground buses and a derailed train tipped onto its side where it emerged from a tunnel. Inside, the roof had been peeled back or burned, and a few of the strange, leathery birds roosted on a rusting catwalk overhead in a corner still shaded from the elements. Ellen and her companions pulled out pieces of metal that looked like trumpet mouthpieces and began buzzing madly. The creatures shrieked and lifted into the a
ir, flying away with flaps of their huge wings.
Ellen nodded. “Eagle noise.”
“Hey, I understood that,” Svensen said.
“Congratulations,” Kelly said. “You’ve got a working two-word vocabulary in the local dialect.”
“Is that what they call those flying wolf-head things, eagles?”
“Maybe eagles are the predator of the wolf-heads,” she said. “What eats them, what scares them off. Come on, we’re getting left behind.”
Deeper inside the transport station, they approached a dank stairway that descended into the darkness. Ellen pantomimed lighting a torch and shrugged.
“Hold on,” Svensen said. “I got a light right here.”
He put on his helmet and clamped down one of the seals to make a connection with the in-suit computer. His helmet light illuminated the gloom, and the locals made awed sounds, like they’d just seen an angel descend from the heavens.
“Your ancestors flew the stars,” he said. “Have a little dignity, will you?”
“So you do know what this is about,” Kelly said as they started down the stairs.
“I know that these miserable people make their own clothes and live in the ruins built by their ancestors. I have no blasted idea why they’re leading us to their underground lair.”
She sighed. “And here I thought you were showing some imagination.”
“Quit your bluffing. You don’t know what’s going on either.”
They descended two flights and came onto an underground rail platform. This one was empty and gaunt-looking, a tunnel vanishing into the darkness. Giant roaches the size of dinner plates scattered from the light, skittering like rats. Some other chitinous creature scurried up Svensen’s leg, and he flicked it off with a shudder, then squashed it beneath his boot with a satisfying crunch.
The locals chuckled at this, and Ellen said something whose tone sounded something like she was saying, it ain’t the bugs you need to worry about down here.
She led them to the end of the platform, near the tunnel where the trains would come in and out of the metro stops, and gestured for him to illuminate one corner. He turned his helmet light where she was pointing.
Several dozen suits of mech armor lay stacked in rows against the wall. Some of the armor was missing legs or heads, and they all showed scars from explosions and heavy-caliber guns.
“Looks like they know Scandian raiders already,” he said. “Slim pickings on this gods-forsaken lump of rock. Far from home, too. Must have been broken down and desperate.”
Lieutenant Kelly moved over for a closer look. “Guess again.”
He came up behind her and peered down to see what she was talking about. The armor was all wrong. Too broad at the shoulders, the seals and joints strange. Helmets misshapen, longer and narrower than they should be. Some mech suits had built-in weapons, pulse rifles and the like, but nothing he’d seen before. One of the suits had a third limb, equipped with some sort of energy beam tool. How would you control that? Direct neural interface?
“Let’s see what we’re talking about,” Kelly said.
They worked to pry off the helmet of one of the more intact suits, but it resisted. There had to be latches or seals of some kind, but where? They’d have to do it by brute force. The suit was covered in dust and the dried excretions of some creature, which made it hard to get a grip.
“Any of you people object if I crack this sucker like a lobster?” he asked. “Good.”
“Hold on, now,” Kelly said. “This is valuable alien tech.”
“Naturally.”
Svensen found a weak joint at the shoulder, pinned the suit with his boot, and twisted the thing’s arm. It cracked and groaned, but didn’t come loose. Ignoring Kelly’s continuing protests, he flipped the mech suit over, bent the arm behind its back, and wrenched at it. His own suit complained of excessive pressure on the servos, but it was still within tolerances. More cracking, and finally the joint broke free. He tossed the arm aside.
There was a body inside, all right. Gray flesh with congealed orange blood. He pulled and pried at the shoulder until it popped open, and that broke the seals on the helmet. And then off came the helmet, and he got his first look at the dead occupant’s face. Ugly sucker. Like a shriveled up ghoul. No wonder the locals started shooting as soon as they saw mech suits.
Kelly leaned over his shoulder and made a sound deep in her throat. “And now things get interesting.”
Chapter Ten
Tolvern stood over the bed as Science Officer Brockett and a marine medic brought the patient out of a half-century long slumber. The man was about thirty. Dark brown skin and green eyes, which was a combination that she’d never seen before.
The man blinked groggily. Closed his eyes, opened them again slowly, and took in the lights, the tubes and hoses, and the beeping, humming equipment. He glanced around at the human faces around him. Still looked sluggish, not understanding. That would be the aftereffect of stasis combined with the neural inhibitors they’d given him against the pain of his amputations.
He reached up a hand to pull away his oxygen mask, and took in the missing ends of his fingers. His hands had been hanging at his sides and the fingertips had died, along with everything else from the mid-thigh down after the gel in his stasis chamber stopped circulating.
“We’ll replace those fingers with prosthetics,” Tolvern said. “The legs will be trickier, I’m afraid.”
The man blinked. “What?”
She was surprised by his response. “He speaks English.”
“Probably not,” Ping Hao said. Tolvern had brought the defense grid specialist into the room for the language chip he carried in his head. “It’s a fairly close dialect—there will be some overlap. But based on the words written on the stasis chamber you hauled over, it’s not the same language. What is your name, sir?”
The man shook his head. He looked from person to person, the look of confusion spreading. He stared at his missing fingertips, then looked down at his legs, or rather, the flat part of the bed beneath the blanket, where his legs would have been. He didn’t seem alarmed. Not yet.
Brockett studied one of the machines and consulted with the medic. “He’s not at full consciousness,” Brockett said. “I’ll bring him up a little more, but he’ll start to feel pain.”
“Gradually,” Tolvern said as Brockett depressed a button for a couple of seconds until it beeped. She tapped her chest. “My name is Captain Tolvern. Who are you?”
The man swung his gaze around once more, and his eyes fixed on her. “Aya Joneson, civilman militus transfer. Vessel naming how passage forther type?”
Or something like that. It was muddled, like he had cotton stuffed in his cheeks and was swallowing some letters and emphasizing others. And saying things that almost sounded like real words, but not quite.
“An interesting language development,” Ping said. “I wonder if they had contact with the Russian colonies back along the main trade routes.”
“Quit showing off and talk to him,” Tolvern said.
“No, you first. I’ll pick it up as you go.”
“Listen, Aya Johnson,” Tolvern said. “That’s your name, right?”
Ping chuckled. “Aya just means ‘I am.’ You don’t have to be a linguist to figure that out. And you’re butchering his last name.”
“Aya Joneson,” the man repeated, emphasizing his pronunciation.
“Joneson, Johnson—pretty sure they’re the same name, if you hadn’t forgotten how to pronounce it. What were you doing out there? Were you in stasis already when they attacked you?”
Joneson only stared. She turned to Brockett, who shrugged and said that the man was fully awake. To confirm the science officer’s statement, Joneson winced and seemed to notice his missing legs for the first time. He shuffled his maimed hands at the blanket and lifted it up. His eyes widened in horror. The marine medic pulled the blanket down and tucked it tightly around the man’s waist.
Tolve
rn tapped her chest and spoke deliberately. “Friends. Allies. We help.” She pointed to him. “You talk.” She pointed to Ping. “He translate.”
The man said something else. Another question. Tolvern gestured for him to go on. He repeated the question, something about others from his ship, she thought. She prodded with a question of her own about numbers. This got him talking a little, but then he trailed off again.
Ping repeated what Joneson had just said, his accent a perfect mimic of the man’s, but with a slight inflection at the end, making it into a question. Joneson exclaimed his surprise, then babbled off something that seemed far too rapid-fire for anyone to understand, but Ping managed a short question in response.
The man kept talking, and Ping kept responding, little by little adding depth to his own vocabulary. Tolvern knew it was artificial, that she was witnessing a brain implant storing every sound out of the man’s head, comparing it to modern and Old Church English, and then inferring rules, predicting sound changes. Gaining new vocabulary every time the man said something. Machine learning, combined with the human brain’s own remarkable properties.
But it was still amazing to watch, and made Ping look like a genius.
At last Ping stopped the man and spoke to Tolvern. “He’s a civilian contractor. On board an outgoing military frigate. He doesn’t seem to know that his ship was attacked, let alone that it was gutted and left to drift.”
The man said something else. Ping asked a clarifying question.
“He thinks I’m a refugee from his home world,” Ping said. “They apparently had a small colony of Chinese traders from the home systems—I think that means Earth and its neighbors. That would explain why I speak his language.”
Tolvern spoke to the man directly. “Refugee? Does that mean your homeland was destroyed?”
Ping translated, got an answer back. “It wasn’t destroyed. It was reduced.”
“Reduced?”
“That’s what he said, sir. I know what the word means, just not in this context.” Ping listened, nodding, as the man added some more stuff. “He wants to know who you are and how I ended up with you. Also, he keeps asking what happened to his legs and fingers. He’s figured out that it was a malfunction with the stasis chamber, but he clearly has no idea what happened to his ship or that he’s the only survivor. I could string him along for a while, but he’s going to get suspicious.”
The Alliance Trilogy Page 10
