Not that Fontaine saw a need; there weren’t enough people on those lifeless rocks to sustain their level of technology. Eventually, they would suffocate as aging scrubbers gave out one by one, if they didn’t first die of hunger or thirst.
He and Al-Harthi ignored attempts to hail them—or rather, they were rendered incapable of communicating by virtue of their implants—and continued. After that, they traveled cloaked and slipped through a series of systems, some under attack, others unscathed. For now.
“A brief reprieve,” Fontaine said as they left one of these systems. “We’ll be back to wake their leviathan soon enough.”
“Start at the home system and spread the chaos out from there.” Al-Harthi was no longer skeptical of his theory. “It won’t work—not entirely. Humans are resourceful. Once they catch wind of what is happening, refugee fleets will flee the sector. Some will escape the holocaust and start fresh.”
He’d already thought of that. “I’m sure the ghouls are counting on that possibility. They’re patient. It might be a hundred years or a thousand, but they’ll show up with their fleets and reduce those worlds, too. If we can’t stop them now, while we’re at our strongest, we won’t do it then, either.”
They were deep in the heart of the old Merchanting Federation systems, and only about three weeks from Al-Harthi’s homeworld of Tunis. She was tense and nervous when the subject came up. The charts had them going through, and it was clear to Fontaine that they’d arrive to find the planet fully reduced.
But as they approached the next jump, passing through a supposedly uninhabited system, scans from a cloaked fleet lit them up. Warships swooped in from two different locations to intercept. Instincts kicked in, and they fled for the next jump point, spurred on by panic inspired by their implants.
“There’s help on the other side,” he told Al-Harthi.
“I know. I don’t know how I know, but I do. We’re too far for direct transmissions. Must be the Cavlee feeding it to us. They’re holding knowledge we don’t have.”
Either way, he knew they were supposed to emerge from the jump point and execute a sharp maneuver down on the Z-axis as soon as they came out of the concussion. That’s where the help would be found.
But it soon became clear that they wouldn’t escape. One of the attacking ships was drawing closer, soon to overtake them well short of the jump, and was already within attack range. That it hadn’t yet done so indicated a desire to seize the ship.
Deep in Fontaine’s brain was a kernel of his true will, and it rejoiced in this news. They would be captured, the device taken from them, and none of the leviathans would come to life.
Who were they? Terran forces, hopefully, or Merchanters still active as they defended a handful of surviving systems. But surely humans—no other possibility entered his mind.
So it was a shock when three ships dropped their cloaks to fire disabling blows at the freighter’s engines. They were not human warships at all. They were Adjudicator dragoons.
#
Fontaine returned to consciousness and found himself strapped onto the hospital bed. His head throbbed, and there was a pressure, just short of pain, as Dr. Willis and her nurses drew the wire out of his skull. The ghostly images of his recalled memories lingered like dreams. The medical procedure had ended just as he and Al-Harthi were captured.
“I was so close. Why did you stop?”
“We pushed you hard this time,” Willis said. She stepped back and peeled off her gloves to let the nurses finish the work. One of them wiped away the gel with cotton gauze, while the second prepared a bandage.
“My head hurt worse last time. I could take more. I almost gave you the answers. I could have . . .”
He stopped, surprised that he’d been able to say as much as he had. Any more, and his tongue would seize up again, and then he wouldn’t even be able to talk around the edges of what he knew.
Brockett spoke up from where he was working at a bank of monitors. “That’s all settled now.” He propped his glasses on top of his head. “Go ahead and release him,” he told one of the nurses.
“Wait, really?” the woman asked. She glanced at Dr. Willis, who looked confused, but gave a shrug. The nurse moved to comply.
“Hold on there!” a sharp voice said.
Fontaine craned his neck to see a man standing at the door that he hadn’t spotted before. In fact, he was sure nobody had been there earlier. The man carried a rifle and wore a single-piece gray uniform with golden rampant lions on the shoulder. Ship security, apparently, or perhaps one of the marines he’d heard about.
They must have brought in a sentry to keep an eye on Fontaine while his brain was being tapped, in case there was a booby trap built in down there, the sort of thing that made the patient go berserk and try to kill medical personnel.
“Go on,” Brockett told the nurse. “Unstrap the poor guy, let him stand up. He’s a free man.”
“I have orders,” the guard said. He sounded uncertain.
“And now you have new ones,” Brockett said.
“I need to speak to Vargus first and make sure the captain confirms.”
Brockett gave a dismissive shake of the head. “I’m not usually one for military protocol, but I’m the ranking officer here, and I’m ordering him unstrapped. If Vargus has a problem with it, she can chew me out later.”
The guard looked at Dr. Willis, who shrugged. She gestured for the nurses to comply with Brockett’s orders. One of them unstrapped Fontaine’s wrists, and the other his ankles. When they’d released him, he swung his legs over the edge and sat up slowly. His back ached, and his head throbbed. He rubbed his wrists.
“I don’t understand,” Fontaine said. “I mean, I do—I was never going to betray you. But how do you know?” He touched his skull where Willis had inserted the wire. “Something feels different. You did something.”
Brockett smiled. “It was nothing but a switch, a tiny blockage. The doctor had her wires in your head, and it was easy enough to burn it out once I’d identified the obstruction.” He sounded pleased with himself. “Did you hear what I said? You’re a free man.”
The full implications of it struck Fontaine. “I have to talk to Vargus.”
The science officer’s expression darkened. “Yes, well. I’m sure she’ll want to talk to you, too . . . assuming we survive the battle.”
As if to confirm his words, the floor shuddered, and lights dimmed overhead. Somewhere in the distance, an alarm chimed.
Chapter Nineteen
The giant grub emerged from beneath the skin of the star leviathan, squirming and biting and flailing. Svensen had just blasted off the surface with his rocket pack flaming and looked down to see a flat, eyeless head that glowed red with some sort of bioluminescence. It twisted its body and snapped at a raider that tried to rocket past its head, grabbed the man’s leg, and pulled it in with biting mouth parts chomping away.
The spiny fins on its back were quivering and had turned translucent, with lights glimmering below the surface. Two marines flew past, and the quiver intensified. The grub twisted again. This time, a tongue shot out and snared one of the men and hauled him in. His partner, panicking, rocketed skyward. Too far; the leviathan was turning toward the flashing lights of what could only be Alliance warships, and the marine blew past Svensen and the others and was quickly left behind as he vanished into space.
The other raiders and marines continued their flight and came in against the leviathan’s microgravity at the base of what had been the ridge, but was now a gaping wound where the grub had torn itself free. Svensen caught a glimpse of what lay below the skin even as weaving threads began to pull it back together. It looked like flesh and machinery fused together, and there were thousands of the mite-like creatures tugging and stitching at the threads.
All fascinating stuff, but he had no time to wonder about the internal working of the star leviathan, as the grub came shambling after them. It snared another with its tongue, and two more wit
h its mouth, catching humans and munching them down like so many marshmallows. From the other side, the decimators laid down a murderous fire that picked his forces out of the sky.
“I’ve made contact with the reinforcements,” Helsingor said over the com. “We’re shooting this worm in the butt, but it’s not paying us much attention. How we gonna get out of here?”
“I’m going to lead the maggot into the enemy,” Svensen said. “May as well let them in on the fun.”
He tried two different channels before he found Kelly, whom he’d lost track of in the chaos. She was in a collection of raiders and marines being chased by the grub. He told her his plan, and she was soon heading toward the decimators with more than a dozen mech units in tow. Svensen took a second group forward, and Helsingor brought another large force. Other marines and raiders, scattered by the erupting ridge beneath their feet, charged forward in ones and twos.
They soon had a couple of hundred mechanized units blasting into the heart of the Adjudicator formation. The enemy forces had taken advantage of the chaos to form ranks, and the first wave of humans shattered against their concentrated gunfire before they could get over the top of the shields.
But by the time the second wave struck, the giant grub came shambling through and blasted apart the enemy ranks on its own, crumpling Adjudicator shields like they were made of wet tissue paper. Some of the fatter spines exploded and scattered a thick, tarry substance across the surface, and it glommed onto humans and Adjudicators alike.
The creature settled in to pick at the wealth of victims, with no apparent discrimination between human and alien, only an insatiable appetite. Svensen found two raiders with attachments that spewed a burning gel and oxidizer, and they set about freeing their companions from the tar-like substance.
The creature burst more of its spines, and a slimy rope slammed him backward, where he found himself gummed to a decimator. The alien reached around with its third arm, grabbed his head, and tried to wrench it off.
Svensen twitched his thumb and activated an electric pulse. It slammed into his enemy, forcing it to release its grasp. While it was still twitching, he cranked his powered suit to max and slammed a fist into its faceplate. The helmet cracked, and gas spurted out.
The enemy regained use of its limbs. It grabbed Svensen’s wrist with two hands and resumed its attempt to twist off the raider’s helmet with the third. A warning light flashed across Svensen’s screen that the joints were about to lose their integrity.
Something wrenched the decimator off him. He stared upward in disbelief to see the giant grub with the alien in its jaws. The mandibles were still munching away when it came down to grab for Svensen, whose legs were still gummed to the surface of the leviathan.
Suddenly, the worm writhed and flailed and spit out the half-eaten decimator. Fire blasted its underbelly. The worm exploded its spines, which sent more trails of goop exploding across the battlefield. Another one of them struck Svensen and pinned him down just when he’d been on the verge of freeing himself.
He was able to move his head, and turned to see an Albion striker craft hovering a few hundred feet above the ground. The falcon flared its engines to keep it apace of the leviathan’s maneuvers, even while directing pulse cannon fire at the giant worm. The fire tore a hole in the creature to reveal a squirming, glowing, sparking mass of innards.
The worm made one more lunge, but couldn’t get high enough to reach the falcon, which methodically blasted it apart. A few more shots of pulse fire and the worm drifted down under the leviathan’s microgravity, twitching as it died.
The falcon rotated on its axis and gunned at a small cluster of decimator units. It picked off a handful of isolated enemies, then raced back into the sky. The last Svensen spotted it, the falcon was chasing an enemy transport and firing its missiles.
Someone grabbed his arm. It was Kelly. A second marine burned at the sticky substance holding him down. They soon had him freed. All around, humans and aliens alike were fighting to free their companions from the substance or to haul them out from beneath the dead creature, even while they continued to shoot at each other.
As it turned out, the humans were quicker to free themselves, thanks to roving packs of marines armed with flamethrowers and hand cannons to fight away the ghouls while they worked. And thanks in part to the falcon, who’d taken out numerous decimators in addition to the giant worm, the humans held a numerical superiority.
Once freed, Svensen formed an ad hoc platoon of mech units, roughly two dozen in number, and they fought their way across the battlefield, which was littered with dead humans and aliens, huge, bubbling piles of worm guts, and the withered remains of the earlier macrophage attack. He spotted the implant being guarded by a determined knot of decimators armed with two heavy guns.
The enemy quickly laid down one of their portable shields, and the first human attack did little to weaken them.
“We need to send a force over the top,” he told Kelly.
“Better not be me—I’m down to fifty percent already.”
“Fifty? I told you to stay above sixty-five.”
“If I’d done that, I’d be worm food. Anyway, it should be enough to get out of here.”
Svensen checked his own levels. “I’m at seventy-six. Stay by my side, do you understand? I’ll drag your sorry hide out of here myself if I have to.”
“How romantic.”
“Where’s your colonel?”
“Dead. Worm food. I’m in command of the marines, now.”
“Find me ten marines with enough propellant to mount an attack. I’ll find ten raiders.”
In the end, there were only seventeen total who had enough fuel and weren’t still caught in fighting to the rear. He sent them hooking across the back of the leviathan for forty or fifty yards, then rocketed them skyward. One man never got off the ground, as some parasite, predator, or natural defense of the leviathan caught him and dragged him into a pit.
The rest came down from above, where the enemy shield was weakest. While they were still battering their way through, Svensen ordered a general charge of everyone who was left. The decimators yielded no ground, and he lost several more his troops as they overran the enemy position.
But shortly he was in their midst, where he joined the final struggle. The implant gleamed a few yards away, unharmed by any of the explosions or gunfire. A thick tyrillium casing rendered it impervious to energy and kinetic fire alike. They had to get at it with the plasma torches.
The fighting was still raging when Kelly brought up two marines with sparking nozzles. Svensen found the weakened part of the implant and told them to start cutting. A woman cut from one side, while her companion began his work opposite her.
Kelly touched a smooth part of the implant. “Look at this.”
He peered over her shoulder to see a mark scored in the surface. He’d seen its like before, left by crews cutting tyrillium plate to repair Boghammer.
“Someone tested the setting on his fluxor before he started cutting.”
“That may be so, but do you recognize the mark? It’s a Hroom logogram.”
“A what? You mean one of their letters?”
“Yes, it’s their written language. You know what that means? It was a Hroom who did this. A Hroom who damaged the implant enough to let us attack the leviathan.”
Svensen tried to picture it. The Adjudicators had raised the monster in the Heaven’s Gate System, where a planet sat in the path of the massive radiation bursts coming out of a dying sun and the neutron star tearing it apart. He’d assumed the enemy had driven the creature to the surface and paralyzed it long enough to insert implants into each of its nerve clusters. But maybe they’d stashed it down there earlier and sent their slaves to uncover it. One of them must have been a rogue Hroom.
“Whoever did it is a hero,” he said.
He imagined someone, or maybe multiple someones, who’d found a way to break free from their slavery. They must have seen, must ha
ve known. The only way to stop the leviathan would be to cripple its implants. Their work had been interrupted—that much was obvious—but they’d succeeded in damaging one of them before they were stopped. He hoped they’d died with some hope, and not in despair. Either way, their work was now bearing fruit.
Svensen had no more time to contemplate this small mystery. There were still decimators fighting on, trying to regroup and charge the implant to disrupt his work, and there were so many flashing lights and explosions overhead that he guessed the enemy would try to slip more shuttles through to the surface.
By now the ghouls would have an excellent guess what Tolvern’s fleet was up to, and be desperate to stop it. And while the star fortresses themselves couldn’t shoot at the surface without falling under attack from the leviathan, who would happily gobble them down as easily as the giant maggot had eaten mech units, the Adjudicators might try to bring other forces through. If dragoons could break the Alliance cordon, the enemy might sacrifice them to stop the ground assault.
To make matters worse, another row of creeping macrophages was approaching from the dark side of the leviathan, farthest away from Persia’s reflected light. Helsingor was down there, his pink balloon helmet visible from Svensen’s position even without amplification, and his forces did battle with the tree-like creatures, but with predictable results.
In a reversal of Svensen’s earlier impression that only minutes had passed, he now had the sense that he’d been down here an endless amount of time. He couldn’t easily check, either; the ghoul who’d been tearing off his head had damaged the time display reading. But hours had passed, surely.
So much had happened: the landing, the hike up the ridge, the initial charge at the implant, followed by the retreat and a frustrating struggle against the macrophages in the middle of it. A lengthy battle at distance from the ridge while waiting for reinforcements had been followed by the waking of the grub-like creature, followed by another desperate fight around the implant. How much time had all of that taken?
The Alliance Trilogy Page 69
