Hell's Reach (Galactic Liberation Series Book 6)

by B. V. Larson

  “Dammit. That thing’s intelligent. Return to evasion course!”

  “Aye aye, ma’am.”

  “Explain,” Straker said.

  Salishan scowled. “If that thing was a dumb natural phenomenon, it would chase, always moving directly toward our known position. Only intelligent things aim ahead and try to intercept.”

  “Like a sniper leading his target.”

  “Or a shipkiller’s software. It might not be fully sentient, but it’s definitely smart.”

  “How big is the wormhole?”

  “Bigger than the ship.” Salishan turned to Straker. “What are you thinking, sir?”

  He glanced at the damage control board. No yellow lights yet, but other readouts showed rapidly dropping capacitor reserves. Soon, they’d have to reduce speed, shields, or reinforcement—or begin losing fittings on the hull. Armored weapon emplacements would survive a long time, but sensors, antennas, heat exchangers and similar equipment would be ripped away by the detritus they plowed through.

  “I’m thinking we’re the butterfly and that thing’s the net. If it is intelligent—or its controller is—and wants to destroy us, it doesn’t need the wormhole. The singularity would tear us apart. The wormhole is sized nicely to envelop us. It’s stable, and it’s on an intercept course.”

  “Makes sense. Weapons, can we disrupt it?”

  “Ma’am... I don’t know.”

  “Zaxby,” Straker comlinked, making the feed public so the crew could hear. “Will our weapons affect the thing?”

  “Possibly. Properly placed at close range, our spinal primary beam plus a thermonuclear detonation might collapse the wormhole. Given the energies involved, it should take the singularity several minutes to generate a new wormhole—assuming it can.”

  “Close range, you say. So this is a last-ditch tactic.”

  “First ditch, last ditch, it’s our only ditch, Derek Straker. We can but try.”

  “What about the grav-blocker?”

  “That will have no effect on the wormhole. It will protect us from gravitic effects, no more.”

  “What if the wormhole swallows us?”

  “Then we go to its other end. That’s how wormholes work. They are tunnels joining two places.”

  “It won’t damage us in and of itself?” Straker asked

  “Normally, no. Experiments show no damage to probes transiting a wormhole.”

  “Why aren’t wormholes used more often for travel?”

  Zaxby’s tone turned condescending. “Energy costs, for one thing. Power levels of that magnitude can only be generated by stars or their equivalents—such as singularities. Also, wormhole travel is at lightspeed, no more, as far as we know. If any known civilization bothered to create one for the purpose of transportation, it would only be useful at interplanetary distances, within curved space—compared to sidespace travel and its efficiency. It could be done, but seems the most inefficient method imaginable. It’s using a sledgehammer to smash ants.”

  “Unless you have enormous raw power and don’t care about efficiency—and a sledgehammer is what’s handy. So... what does your big brain think about why we’re being stalked?”

  “I concur with your assessment—whoever is behind the wormhole doesn’t desire our immediate destruction. Yet, submitting to capture is not in our nature as War Males—not to mention the delay to our mission. We must try to disrupt the wormhole and escape. I am already formulating possible courses of action if we are faced with capture. Perhaps the intelligence behind the phenomenon is not inimical, merely curious. It might be amenable to reason or persuasion. It might even provide help.”

  “In Hell’s Reach?”

  “I take your point... but we are in the realm of wide possibilities. I choose to hope, and prepare for as many of them as I can. I suggest you do the same, Derek Straker. Zaxby out.”

  Straker checked the holotank. The annotation showed intercept in eight minutes. “Captain Salishan, coordinate with Zaxby for specific weapons deployment and make ready for... whatever’s about to happen. If we can pop that bubble we’ll do it, but if we can’t, we might be taking an unwanted trip.”

  “With who-knows-what at the other end. Aye aye, sir.” She raised her voice. “Sound General Quarters. Go to Alert One and battle stations. Lay in weapons deployment per Zaxby’s instructions. Shields off until we launch weapons—conserve power and recharge capacitors.” She turned to Straker. “General, you should get into your suit.”

  “Good idea. I’ll tell the others too.” Straker strode off the bridge and jogged down passageways full of crew hustling to their stations, many yanked from their bunks by the all-hands nature of General Quarters. By the time he reached his mechsuit and stepped into its mechanical embrace, two minutes remained until intercept. Hetson and the other mechsuiters were already in theirs.

  Straker’s brainlink gave him a godlike view of the situation, processed through the SAI and drawing from all the sensors the ship possessed. Behind the ship a globe of blackness swelled, big enough to swallow her even if she turned sideways. Farther behind that globe a bright pinpoint shone—the singularity. While normally a black hole was invisible, capturing all light, Straker knew radiation was generated at its event horizon as it swallowed dust and gas, radiation which revealed its position. There was also a gravitational lensing effect which could be seen against a bright background such as the nebula. These two things, plus gravity detectors, allowed the ship’s sensors to pinpoint the “invisible” black hole, and show it to him in the VR construct of his brainlink as a shining spot.

  “Zaxby, how is this singularity different from the ones generated by the Crystals?”

  “With the Crystals, it was clear what generated them. Here, I can’t tell what’s creating or sustaining this one. Roentgen has detected a control beam, however, emanating from the wormhole.”

  “The wormhole’s controlling the singularity?”

  “Something on the other side of the wormhole is.”

  “Can that beam be disrupted?”

  “Never fear, Derek Straker. I’m far ahead of you. I’ve taken that possibility into consideration, of course, and have modified my weapons deployment instructions. We will simultaneously attempt to collapse the wormhole, and also cut the control beam. Excuse me, General, but I’m needed. Zaxby out.”

  “Zaxby—dammit,” Straker said to an empty channel. He switched to the mechsuit channel. “Lieutenant Hetson.”

  “Here, sir.”

  “You ready?”

  “Ready, sir.” A data push from Hetson showed the status of his four suits, all perfectly green. “We gonna see some action?”

  “I have no idea. If we can’t avoid it, we’ll be taking a trip through the wormhole. No idea what’s at the other end either, but we’ll be ready. In fact... Stand by.” He widened his channel to include the battlesuiters. “Lieutenant Bronke?”

  “Here, sir,” the man’s voice replied. “Alpha Company ready.”

  “Good. As I was telling Hetson, I have no idea what’s going to happen in the next minutes, but we’re suited up to be ready. What’s your deployment?”

  “We’re augmenting ship’s marines in counter-boarding positions.”

  “Good. Be ready to go on the attack at my order.”

  “Roger wilco, sir.”

  Anti-collision klaxons shrieked, in realspace and within the VR networks both. Straker shifted his attention to the ship and saw her prow turn to point astern. Her massive spinal particle cannon aimed at the edge of the following wormhole while two shipkillers leaped from their launch tubes and curved toward precise positions—one near the opposite rim of the black circle, the other into its heart.

  Chapter 24

  Hell’s Reach, aboard Cassiel.

  Relieved that the barracuda threat had been neutralized, Loco stuck his head up the tube leading to the cramped tail gun. “Great job, Raj.”

  “Thanks, boss, but it was the rocks that saved us.”

  “I
know,” Loco said. “Ain’t it a hoot?”

  “I don’t know that idiom.”

  “It means, isn’t it weird and amusing?”

  “It sure is, boss.”

  In the cargo bay he briefed the Breakers on what he and Chiara knew. Brock and Belinda joined them, with Raj on the comlink still on overwatch on the tail gun.

  Loco had the Breakers rig up a comms connection there for communication with the Lithoids. “The rocks saved us, and they might save us again, so we need to keep them friendly. It would also be good to help them understand what not to do. Some of them have already come closer than the captain’s comfortable with. Chief, choose someone to chat with them. Keep them happy, give them a good impression of who we are, and see if they’ll escort us along our path—or at least let us go in peace. We can’t become some kind of pet for aliens. We lost a good man today. We have to justify that price by getting our people back.”

  The Breakers all nodded, voicing their affirmation with low grunts and mutters of aye aye, sir. Loco tried to spot any hint of dissent or undue fear, but all he saw was determination. Amazing, he thought, how men would continue into deadly danger to rescue comrades—or women, of course. The biological compulsion to protect women might not be the primary among reasons, but it certainly reinforced them.

  Or maybe it was primary. It was surely primal.

  “I’ll keep you updated as I can.” Loco waved for Sylvester to join him in the passageway for a modicum of privacy, and spoke quietly. “Chief, I trust you to handle everything you can. I also trust you to bring me anything you can’t—and to be smart enough to know the difference. I’m not gonna bust your balls. Open door policy, right?”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. I’ll do my best.”

  Loco clapped his shoulder. “You’ll do better than that, Jon. Carry on.”

  Returning to the cockpit, he saw Chiara had fixed her face and now had her usual insouciant expression. The transformation was like day from night. Defenses against a cruel world, he wondered, not so different from his own? Or was it something more? He resisted the urge to try to get past those defenses again. Now wasn’t the time. The mission came first, and with it came compartmentalization and professionalism. Captain and First Lieutenant, not lovers and friends.

  Right, Loco. Derek was right, was always right. Fraternization messed with your head.

  So he said flatly, “Okay, we’re in as good shape as we can be. Time to get moving toward the next waypoint... right?”

  Without reply Chiara bumped the throttles forward slightly, and the ship began to accelerate along her projected course. The screen showed the thirteen Lithoid groups surrounding them on all sides—englobing them, moving with them, not approaching, giving them space.

  “Hell of an escort,” Loco remarked, trying not to make his words sound like an I-told-you-so.

  “Yeah, yeah…” she said. “Three more waypoints, then the final approach. Ten to twelve more hours of travel, according to our intel.”

  “Final approach to what?” Loco asked.

  Chiara shrugged. “You know we’ve been wondering that the whole trip. The info didn’t tell us. Some kind of base.”

  “I wonder if the Lithoids will defend us if we attack somebody and draw a response.”

  “That’s the million-credit question, isn’t it? And... ”

  “What?” Loco asked.

  “The rocks are people too,” she said. “If they can speak, they’re sentient. Is it fair to ask them to fight our battles for us?”

  It was Loco’s turn to shrug. “If they’re thinking beings, they can make their own choices. I’m not ordering them to do anything. Besides, if we’re risking ourselves, they can too if they choose. We’re doing it for a good cause—and even more than rescuing our people, there’s the bigger issue of what the hell the Predators are doing out here? I mean, it must be something really nasty that they need to do it in a place this secret and dangerous. Otherwise, they’d do it in their home systems.”

  “I’m sure their home systems are riddled with Conglomerate spies.”

  “Exactly. But if Lutan is one of the least nasty Korven, I can hardly imagine what the rest of them are like.”

  Chiara looked bleak. “Completely ruthless, utterly alien. They don’t give half a shit about anything but themselves. They’re a pestilence, and they should be wiped out—if not as a species than at least as a power. The Arattak are hardly better, but they do have some limits. The Dicon, Crocs and Vulps are more comprehensible—aggressive, though not beyond the pale—but they’re part of the Axis and so they need to be defeated.”

  “That means the stakes are high enough we’ll take any allies we get.”

  “Even if they don’t know what they’re getting into?” she asked.

  “Does an eighteen-year-old soldier know what he’s getting into?” Loco responded.

  Chiara shrugged.

  Loco eyed her critically. “You need some rest. I’ll take the next watch and call you when we’re approaching the next waypoint.”

  “Okay.” She stood, and then leaned over to kiss him fiercely and search his eyes. “Thanks.”

  “Uh… for what?”

  She departed without giving him a reply.

  He shrugged. Women.

  An hour and a half later he buzzed the cabin’s intercom. “Time to get up and eat something.”

  “Be right there.”

  When Chiara dropped herself into the pilot’s seat a few minutes later, Loco stood. “Gimme five minutes to piss and run through the checklist.”

  “Do it.”

  Loco checked that the crew was alert and ready for the next waypoint. Belinda had played a lot of games with Brock in the badger cabin, by the look of the table and the used scoresheets, cards, and other objects scattered there. She jumped up, kissed him on the cheek and wanted to talk, to chatter about nothing. Obviously, his orders to keep her interactions with the Breakers to a minimum were hard on her, but it was only temporary.

  It was a relief to join the guys in the hold, with its all-male military environment and raunchy jokes. “Hey, sir, you got a little... ” The crewman—Richards, that was his name, the one talking to the rocks—rubbed his own mouth with a grin, and Loco realized he must have Chiara’s lipstick smeared on his face.

  Better to play the alpha cock than to apologize for being the only one getting laid, he knew. “Yeah,” he said, “women can’t get enough of me. No worries, though—next port of call, you can take your accumulated pay to the dive bars and find your own.”

  That brought cheers and uproarious laughter, far more than the joke warranted. Letting off steam, covering their fear, dealing with the close quarters—the same old story throughout the centuries, from the days of “wooden ships and iron men” until now. It seemed strange to civilians, but the lower enlisted especially really did accept “Rank Has Its Privileges” without resentment, most of the time.

  “Or maybe a few of our Breaker ladies will be grateful when they get rescued,” Loco continued with a wink. “Carla Straker is off limits, though.” That brought more laughter, and he got a sense that they were coping.

  Just another day and it would be over, one way or another.

  “How’s the rock chat going?”

  Richards nodded at his keyboard and screen. “Fine, sir. They’re actually pretty cool people. About as smart as your average elementary school kid, I’d say, and they’re learning more as we talk to them. They say they got lost and stuck in here too and have been trying to find their way out for years—maybe centuries, it’s hard to tell. They’ve hailed other ships but nobody ever talked to them. Some fired lasers at them—I think that was the Arattak—but they don’t seem to hold it against us. They did save our asses.”

  “Yes, they did. Good work. Carry on.”

  Back in the cockpit Chiara pointed. “Waypoint, ten minutes. This one’s some kind of giant exoplanet, not even in orbit around anything. I’m not sure how it stays fixed in place, with n
o companion body or star and all these currents and influences, but there’s some weird shit out here and I’m no brainiac.”

  “Never thought I’d say this, but I’m missing our brainiacs just now. I’m sure Zaxby could explain it.”

  “I don’t care. Let’s get past it and to the next one.”

  “I’m with you.”

  Eight minutes later a giant rocky world loomed, almost as large as one of the smaller gas giants. “High gravity, about 3.5 G,” Loco said, checking his instruments. “Far denser than a gas planet. Has a thick atmosphere, with water vapor. Warm, too—averages about 45 C. And... life signs.” He turned to face Chiara. “How the hell can there be life on a sunless planet with gravity that strong?”

  Chiara gripped her controls and bumped up the throttles as if to put an end to his question. “How can there be giant floating plankton, barracudas and intelligent rocks out here, either? I don’t know, and I don’t care. We’re making our slingshot turn and moving on.”

  “Okay, okay,” Loco said, “I was just making conversation.”

  She didn’t say anything. She was like Derek or Carla, when they got focused.

  Loco talked more under stress, but most people talked less. He was used to it.

  The rocks followed them in a tight curve around the exoplanet, skimming just outside the atmosphere. Maybe someday, if the Breakers developed a full-fledged economy, they could send a scientific expedition to this place to study the life here. It must be unique.

  “There’s something ahead...” Loco reported, “an orbital meteor storm looks like. There are several thousand dense objects in our path.”

  “Ready the shield.”

  “Ready. Wait... ” As the rocks and gravel approached, the Lithoids moved ahead to shove them out of the way with electromagnetic blasts, or... “I think they’re picking up a few rocks, taking them into their groupings. They also appear to be absorbing energy from the planet’s magnetosphere.”

  “I’m happy you were right about them.” She said it less grudgingly this time.

  “Me too.”