Deathtrap

by Craig Alanson

  A Ruhar team clearing asteroids the previous week had inadvertently triggered a hidden missile that had launched itself and targeted the team’s Whale dropship. With teams on and around the asteroid, flying from and back to the ship, the Proximity Defense System of the Whale had been disabled to prevent the PDS cannons from blasting the away team by mistake. A last-second maser shot from a nearby Ruhar starship had exploded the missile almost by pure luck, but pieces of the missile peppered the Whale with shrapnel and other pieces struck a soldier outside. Two deaths had taught the crews a lesson that really should not have been learned the hard way, as similar incidents had happened many times before when clearing alien facilities in star systems the Ruhar had taken by force, or by negotiation. Two other soldiers of that away team had suffered injuries, their lives saved by the hard-shell armor of their spacesuits which deflected most of the deadly missile fragments.

  After that incident, dropships had to pull back from their target asteroid and take cover, while away teams went out in spacesuits and jetpacks, to inspect facilities surrendered by the Kristang who had controlled the Tunanbey star system until the Ruhar fleet arrived. The worst thing about the missile incident was the Kristang would not pay any significant price for their duplicity, because the word ‘The’ rarely applied to that squabbling species. There was no one person or group with authority to enforce agreements within Kristang society, usually each clan needed a separate negotiation and agreement. Even signed agreements with leaders of a clan sometimes failed to persuade aggressive subclans to follow the major clan’s lead, and major clans too often looked the other way while subclan members violated signed treaties. The tolerance of clan leaders for bad behavior depended mostly on who the subclans directed their violence at, and how stupidly obvious the subclans were about ignoring orders from above. If the subclan lashed out in a way that hurt the major clan’s enemies, that could be ignored, but if the subclan disobeyed orders in a way that made the major clan’s leaders too look weak to enforce their own orders, swift and severe punishment followed.

  The treaty to surrender control of that star system included provisions in which the Kristang were responsible for surrendering all their weapons and disarming remote devices that might be hostile or dangerous. The missile which killed two Ruhar soldiers had certainly been hostile and dangerous, and the Ruhar would have been within their rights to retaliate with proportionate force. The trouble was, the Ruhar could not be certain which clan of Kristang had been responsible for planting that missile in the first place, then failing to transmit a signal for the missile to disarm itself. At the time the Ruhar fleet arrived, the Swift Arrow clan had been in nominal control of the Tunanbey system, but three other clans occupied parts of the one habitable planet, or various space stations, moons and asteroids. The civil war had battered all four clans in the system, so while the Swift Arrows had signed the surrender treaty under pressure from the Thuranin, they truly only had the power to enforce the treaty’s provisions on their own warriors. The three rival clans initially had refused to sign the treaty, mostly because they were waiting to smash the Swift Arrows after the powerful clan turned in their weapons to the arriving Ruhar. The Ruhar fleet had spent more time and energy in protecting Swift Arrow personnel and facilities, than in occupying the territory the Ruhar federal government wanted.

  That situation could not be allowed to continue, so the local Ruhar admiral had waited for an opportunity to demonstrate the wisdom of the other three clans signing the disarmament treaty. When an unknown clan attacked a disarmed Swift Arrow transport ship and damaged the Ruhar fighter escort, the admiral had selected one of the three stubborn clans almost at random and ordered her fleet pound one of their asteroid bases to dust. The fleet then moved on to a space station controlled by a second clan, where use of weapons was not necessary, because all three clans offered to negotiate immediately.

  Admiral Bondon had replied that the time for negotiations was over; the clans could sign the treaty under the same terms accepted by the Swift Arrows, or her fleet could continue to use Kristang facilities in the Tunanbey system for target practice. She also hinted that continued lopsided violence was her preference.

  The appropriate signatures were placed on three documents, the other three clans officially surrendered their weapons, and violence between clans was kept to a minimum. Unofficially, all four clans cheated as much as they could get away with, and Admiral Bondon knew she could not relax her guard for a moment, until the star system had been scrubbed clean of hidden weapons caches and stealthed ships.

  The prize in the star system was not the single habitable planet, for that cold and dry world had an oxygen-poor atmosphere and was not worth the long and expensive process of modifying the biosphere. No, what the Ruhar fleet wanted in that system were the two gas giant planets with their fuel-extraction platforms in low orbit, and the asteroid belt that was rich in rare elements vital to the war effort. As far as the Ruhar admiral in command of the occupation task force was concerned, the lizards on the surface of the desolate planet all could kill each other, and the admiral would not lose any sleep over the violence. Her government, however, was eager to keep the fighting between Kristang to a minimum, so in the future Kristang occupying a Ruhar planet did not have an excuse to violate the basic inter-species treaties that governed interstellar warfare and the treatment of civilians. More worrisome were hints of stealthed capital-class warships drifting out in the star system’s Oort cloud. Even a ship wrapped in a stealth field left a trail of gasses leaking from worn-out seals, of mildly-radioactive elements not captured by reactor radiators, and of thermal energy that had to be vented regularly to avoid cooking the ship. Even the presence of the ship created a disturbance in the solar wind, and a maneuvering ship left a detectable wake in the dust and ice particles of the Oort cloud. Admiral Bondon wanted a couple more ships, so she could assign a small task force to recon the outer system for hidden enemy ships, but fleet headquarters had declared no additional ships were available, and the threat was considered minimal.

  The Ruhar Fleet Intelligence Office had declared that, in their opinion, there was very little chance of the Kristang fighting to keep that star system. The lizards were far too busy killing each other in their vicious civil war, they did not have warships to spare for tangling with the Ruhar, especially not capital ships. The intel office acknowledged that sensor data did indeed indicate there were likely four, possibly more, undeclared stealthed ships lurking outside the system. However, those ships were probably no more than frigates assigned to keep watch on the first deployment of the newly-formed Alien Legion experiment, not to risk interfering with the powerful Ruhar fleet presence there.

  Bondon reflected with disgust that the intel office was not there with her, instead they issued their assessments from the comfort and safety of fleet headquarters, and they would not need to deal with the consequences if a hidden battlegroup jumped to the inner system to put a violent end to the Alien Legion experiment.

  Accordingly, Admiral Bondon had been forced to keep three heavy cruisers in orbit around the planet, using their maser cannons and railguns to stomp out the fires any time fighting erupted on the surface. Those powerful battlewagons were sorely needed elsewhere, and the admiral was tempted to allow the three heavies to cut loose with a demonstration of power aimed at destroying any known caches of weapons on or under the surface, but her political advisor had so far restrained her. She argued that knocking back the enemy’s striking power would allow her to cover the planet with destroyers or even frigates, freeing the heavy battlewagons for action elsewhere, in places where the surprise combined Bosphuraq-Thuranin offensive threatened Ruhar worlds.

  The admiral thus had an itchy trigger-finger, and she looked for an excuse to overrule her political advisor and pound the shit out some assholes who were begging for it. Unfortunately, a single undeclared missile in the asteroid belt was not enough of a provocation. After the incident, the Swift Arrows had protested strongly th
at missile had not belonged to them, and charts of the system confirmed their claim that territory had been disputed between two other clans. The irritating fact was, that missile might have been planted hundreds of years ago, long before the Swift Arrows established a presence in the area. The poor performance of the missile lent credence to the claim that it was old, very old, and therefore whoever had put it there might be long gone from the system.

  It was a very frustrating situation, but Bondon knew it was no more frustrating than any operation to take any star system held by the Kristang. Even when the Gehtanu system, which humans disrespectfully called ‘Paradise’, had been taken from the Black Tree clan without a shot being fired initially, there had been incidents that had resulted in over two hundred Ruhar dead and the loss of a frigate. The admiral knew she was lucky by comparison with her colleagues in command of other task forces.

  The admiral did not feel lucky.

  Colonel Perkins took over the comm system from Shauna. “Czajka, Colter, secure your gear in place and return to the ship. I don’t want you getting sloppy out there.”

  “Ma’am, we’re fine,” Jesse protested, looking to his friend for help. He knew Dave had more influence with their commanding officer. Although, the nature of Dave’s relationship with Perkins meant she was less likely to allow that former soldier to risk his life.

  “Colonel,” Dave began with a look into Jesse’s visor to meet that man’s eyes. “We need a five-minute break, that’s all.”

  “Czajka, if you lose focus out there, something could go ‘boom’,” Perkins replied.

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Dave was careful to stick to the facts. “If we come all the way back to the ship, rest there and come back, we will lose,” he checked the display on his wrist. “Eighty minutes off the schedule. We can rest here instead. We just need a mental break, we’re not tired.”

  Perkins did not reply immediately. How much was her judgment affected by affection for her team, particularly one member of the team? As the commander of the Mavericks, she had to give the mission priority, keeping safety in mind. If she could not emotionally handle the risks involved in the mission, she needed to tell that to the Ruhar. “Colter, you agree?”

  Jesse swallowed to suppress a yawn before he spoke. “Yes, Ma’am. It’s Groundhog Day out here.”

  Perkins wasn’t sure she understood the reference. “Colter, say again?”

  “You know, Ma’am. Like the movie. Same shit one day after the next, like when we went on patrols in Nigeria. This is tedious, it’s not hard. Give us five minutes like Dave said, we’ll be focused again.”

  “Ten. Take ten minutes, that’s an order. You are professionals, I expect each of you to tell me if your mind wanders again, you copy that?”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Jesse assured their CO. “I sure as hell don’t want to get blowed up out here over some floating piece of rock.”

  Perkins forced herself to look away from the display showing the vital signs of the away team, telling herself she needed to focus on the task at hand rather than worrying about two men who had to be trusted to take care of themselves, and each other. Dave Czajka certainly would not want Emily Perkins worrying about him, he knew she had enough weighing on her mind during this very first mission of the Alien Legion.

  When she proposed to the Burgermeister the idea of an Alien Legion, composed of humans and Verd-Kris to supplement the strained manpower of the Ruhar Army, she had been expecting a frustrating wait of six months at least, more likely over a year while the wheels of bureaucracy slowly turned within the Ruhar federal government. She also had been prepared for the idea to be rejected at first. Instead, to the shock of herself and the Burgermeister, the proposal met a receptive audience in the Federal Army, and Emily had to scramble to slap together a formal structure for the multi-species organization. The Alien Legion would nominally be commanded overall by Ruhar Army officers, with the UNEF and Verd-Kris contingents having their own commanders and staff. She was relieved to learn that, while the idea had been hers and the fame of her Mavericks team is why the Ruhar entertained the proposal, she was not expected to command all of the humans assigned to the mercenary outfit. UNEF HQ would assign a general to lead the humans offworld, with Perkins remaining in command of her own, semi-autonomous team. Even if she wanted the headaches involved, she did not have time to set up all the logistics for getting ten thousand humans off the surface of Paradise. Within two weeks of the Ruhar Army declaring they were intrigued by the idea of an alien support force, the Mavericks found themselves being whisked away to a distant star system, where they were assigned the shit job of clearing former Kristang sites in the system’s asteroid belt. That was a job nobody wanted, a thankless task with no chance for recognition but all too much chance of violent death.

  Her team understood right away they had gotten the crappiest job in the system, they also understood that all eyes were on them. The future of the Alien Legion, and of UNEF-Paradise overall, might depend on how well the Mavericks executed their assignment. Three other groups of humans were scheduled to arrive within ten days, along with six teams of Verd-Kris, and Perkins knew those teams were being requested to participate mostly because her little group of humans had proven to be dedicated, competent and most importantly, careful. The Ruhar Army realized once the Mavericks arrived that it would be very bad publicity for the Army, the Fleet and the entire federal government if the famous Mavericks got themselves killed while performing a crappy job the Army was responsible for. The local admiral had come close to pulling the Mavericks off the front line to avoid an unfortunate incident, but Perkins had intervened, demanding an opportunity for her team to prove themselves. She had recorded a video statement taking full responsibility for any injuries or deaths, praising the hamster military for their outstanding support, and adding whatever bullshit words she thought the hamsters in charge wanted to hear.

  Now she and the Mavericks were stuck with the thankless, hazardous and tedious task of clearing their assigned section of the asteroid field, one massive rock at a time. Be careful what you ask for, she told herself, it just might fall out of the sky onto your head.

  “Jarrett, let’s get the drones in place now, so the away team doesn’t have to waste time positioning assets.”

  “Yes,” Shauna replied without looking up from her console. Her fingers were already flying over the controls, and she texted a message of ‘Repositioning drones for you’ to Jesse and Dave. “I think we can go one better than that. There are too many drones out there to fit into the passageways in each section. We can divide them in half and pre-position in the next two sections, Charlie and Delta. When Charlie is clear, I’ll move that group of drones to Echo section.”

  “Good idea, Jarrett,” Perkins approved, and pushed off to float over to the console where Captain Derek Bonsu was working. “Bonsu, have you been able to build a baseline for this rock?” She pointed to the display, which was displaying a schematic of the asteroid designated 87-171ADX. The ugly, lumpy gray rock did not actually have that alphanumeric designation from the Ruhar, as their alphabet was totally different from the ABCs used by UNEF, but 87-171ADX was the rough translation.

  “No,” he flipped a single finger at the display. “The lizards chose their rocks partly because the composition confuses these hamster sensors.” He felt free to use the slang ‘hamster’ although he knew the flight recorder was capturing his words, the Ruhar had gotten used to humans referring to them as small, helpless rodents kept as pets. In turn, the Ruhar had several nicknames for humans, of various levels of insult, and Derek ignored those. “It’s like this asteroid was formed from the collision of three rocks, they are all smooshed together, and the minerals are distributed so unevenly that everything looks like an anomaly on sensors. I think the lizards deliberately carved out areas on the surface, and planted dense clumps of iron to create an uneven magnetic field. Plus, they still have equipment active in there, and it is giving off energy that skews the readings. If we could tur
n off the power, or unplug all the gear buried inside that rock, we might have a decent chance to make sense of what’s in there.”

  Perkins twirled her short pony tail around a finger, the hair flopping back and forth lazily in the zero gravity.

  “Maybe we try that with the next rock?” Derek suggested while his CO was thinking. “Get the drones to kill the power, see if we can get a baseline before we send people in?”

  “Might be worth a try,” Perkins called up their next target on the display, a slightly larger asteroid that had been the base for a Kristang rare-element mining and refining operation. The Ruhar wanted that very valuable facility taken intact, which made her fear the lizards had almost certainly rigged it to explode. “Problem is, if the lizards had anything really valuable inside one of these rocks, I can pretty much guarantee it’s hidden in a stealth field. Our sensors won’t be worth shit.”

  “That’s not completely true, Ma’am,” Derek was careful to throw in a Ma’am whenever he disagreed with his commanding officer. “A couple hamsters on the cruiser that brought us here showed me how to identify a Kristang stealth field. In deep space, their stealth is decent enough,” he shrugged, because the Ruhar had been openly contemptuous of Kristang stealth technology. “Inside any significant mass,” he tapped the asteroid symbol on the display, “it’s a different story. The gravitic distortion warps the stealth field in a way the Ruhar are able to detect, sometimes. I’d like to give it a shot.”

  Perkins considered. Sending the drones in first to cut off power within an asteroid facility was an extra step that would throw them behind schedule, unless by cutting power the remote sensors controlled by the dropship were able to get an accurate scan of the interior. If they could do that, they might be able to speed up the process and get ahead of the assigned schedule. That was worth the risk, certainly as the risk would only be to time and drones the Ruhar could easily replace. “All right, what the hell, let’s give it a shot. Anything has got to be better than what we’ve been doing. This is like mowing a lawn with a pair of scissors.”