Concussion or not, Morgan was very capable of recognizing the sound of plasma fire when the hatch opened. It was close and she only heard a handful of shots before things fell silent.
“It’s secure. Move quickly; we’ve lost too many Children today,” a voice shouted, her translator calmly turning it into English for her. “The Mother demands the death of the Captain and the archeologist. Finish it.”
She could check the language that was being spoken, but that would have required movement and checking her communicator screen. Neither was feeling overly possible as more nausea overcame her.
“Need to stay in here,” she told Dunst. “There’s… there’s…”
“I heard them too,” he told her, maneuvering her with delicate hands to lean against the heavy metal wall. “Wait here.”
“What are you doing?” She had enough control to grab the scientist before he charged out of the pod. “We both wait here.”
“They’re…”
“Marines,” she hissed. “Coming.”
Footsteps were approaching and Morgan steadied herself against the wall and gestured to Dunst. He wasn’t the best man for the job, but he was the only one of them able to fight.
He flattened himself against the wall, holding the plasma pistol in both hands and taking heavy breaths as the footsteps grew nearer.
“Captain Casimir, we’re here to get you to safety,” a voice said in accented English. “You and Dr. Dunst are in danger here, and we need to move you off-station ASAP.”
Dunst looked over at Morgan and she shook her head. She didn’t recognize the voice and she knew perfectly well that the people after them would want them to come out where they could be more easily shot.
She had not expected Dunst to step around the side and shoot the speaker. The plasma pistol cracked three times in rapid succession before the doctor cleared the door. Several blasts of plasma answered his shots, hammering into the back of the pod and potentially accelerating the leak.
“Black cloaks, face masks, definitely not friendlies,” Dunst told her aloud. “Try that again, idiots!” he shouted out the door.
Several more plasma shots answered, and Morgan was glad that whatever explosives and grenades their enemies possessed appeared to have gone with the underwater team.
In answer, Dunst stuck the gun around the corner and randomly fired several times. With the dispersion cone, he might have even hit someone, but Morgan’s concussion-addled brain only told her that the gun had limited ammo.
She wasn’t sure she’d know how many shots it got in her default mode normally, but the headache was making it hard to think.
“There’s at least five of them,” Dunst whispered. “If they rush, I’m not sure what I can—”
A Marine’s power-armor-carried heavy plasma gun had a very distinct sound from other plasma weapons, an echoing CRACK-hiss that Morgan had rarely heard outside a training range. At least half a dozen guns fired repeatedly for several seconds, and then another strange voice shouted down the hall.
“Captain Casimir, this is Lance Baudelio Seppänen,” shouted a voice with a faint Scandinavian accent on the standard enunciation taught to Earth-trained officers. “We have secured the hallway. I can provide identification if you wish, but I think the situation is sufficiently in hand for us to wait for someone you recognize, sir, before you enter the station.”
“Captain Casimir is injured, Lance Seppänen,” Dunst replied. “Sooner is better, and I’m not sure she’d recognize Duchess Bond at the moment. What have you got for that ID, son?”
“Dr. Dunst?” the young NCO asked. “We shared a meal in the general mess for three of the days you were on Defiance. You liked our lasagna but hated the spaghetti, said the cooks did something incomprehensible with the spices. I believe you may have used the phrase ‘what Lovecraftian monstrosity did they make this out of?!’”
Morgan hadn’t been there for that meal, but the phrase certainly sounded like Dunst—and his chuckle suggested that he did remember that exact conversation.
She had enough time to reflect that that was a good thing before she slumped farther down the wall into blackness.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Are you all right, Dr. Dunst?”
It took Rin several long seconds to process that Battalion Commander Vichy had arrived, let alone that the dark-haired Marine was talking to him. The archeologist’s attention was very much focused on Morgan Casimir, watching in near-shock as the medics loaded her onto a stretcher.
“Commander,” he greeted the Marine, playing for time to regain his mental equilibrium. The swing from Morgan agreeing to go on a date to sudden violence and death had been harsh.
He coughed and shook his head.
“I’m uninjured,” he finally said. “I remain uninured to violence, though. This…this was unexpected.”
“It shouldn’t have happened,” Vichy told him. The Marine appeared to be removing fins of some kind? Apparently, the Marine CO had been in the water while Rin had been sitting in a dark bubble with an unconscious woman.
That was going to go down as one of the most unpleasant experiences of his life.
“Best guess is they used a multipart explosive whose individual components didn’t flag our scanners,” the Marine continued. “We’ll never know, unfortunately. The water flow in the reservoir will already have wiped away any residue we could analyze.”
“I’m sorry; I should have been able to protect her,” Rin whispered.
The Marine laughed. It wasn’t an entirely pleasant or happy sound.
“Captain Casimir was armed and is trained in the use of her sidearm,” Vichy pointed out. “She would have expected to protect you, Dr. Dunst, not the other way around. Ce n’est pas de votre faute. Blame the Children, not yourself.”
“We’re sure it’s them?” Rin asked. “That seems…”
“Unlikely?” Vichy finished his sentence. “I would agree, but they had the same anti-stunner gear.”
“I heard…something about the Children and the Mother, I think?” Rin offered. “It wasn’t clear; they were far enough that they didn’t think we could hear.”
“They shot four Marines assigned to Station Security to try and ambush you here,” Vichy told him. “We took one alive, but…”
“But what?” Rin demanded.
“I’m not sure how much of this you’re cleared for, Dr. Dunst,” the Marine admitted.
“Then check your records,” Rin snapped. “I have a higher security clearance than you do, Battalion Commander. I don’t care to delve into why, but I am cleared for this mess.”
“Suicide device,” the younger man said flatly. “Listen to this.”
The Marine CO tapped at several keys on a holographic keyboard Rin could only vaguely see, starting an audio recording.
“You have the right to legal representation. I am not that representation and anything you say to me will be recorded and can be used against you in a court of law.”
The Imperium didn’t have the same legal requirement as many Earth polities still did—that a prisoner had to be informed of their rights—but the prisoners still had those rights, and old traditions ran deep.
“The Mother is watching,” a voice slurred. “She sees everything. She will come for you. She will consume your worlds, your suns, and birth a shining new era from the sustenance of your eternities. All will be darkness beyond Her light.”
There was a sharp cracking sound and Vichy waved the recording to silence.
“Self-initiated cortical explosive,” the Marine explained. “He killed himself to prevent questioning but felt the need to dramatically threaten us all. What do you make of it?”
“I don’t know,” Rin admitted. “But we’re definitely starting to get a feel for something at the center of the Children’s world. An entity of some kind, potentially…”
He looked at the Marines around them. Vichy was cleared for Lost Dragon, which was probably enough for this conversation. The re
st of the armored humans around them…not so much.
“Potentially, this is a conversation we should have in a secured space, once Captain Casimir is back with us,” he murmured. “I’m suddenly concerned about the ship I know Echelon Lord Davor sent out.”
“If Kosha Station is penetrated enough for them to send a strike team after you and the Captain, they know Serene Guidance is coming,” Vichy confirmed. “And with her in hyperspace for three more cycles, we can’t warn her.”
The silence that followed was interrupted by Rin’s and Vichy’s communicators chiming at the same time. Looking at the Marine questioningly, Rin pulled out his own.
“Echelon Lord Davor wants to see us,” Vichy said aloud while the scientist was still staring at the message. “Come on, Doctor. You’re not going anywhere without Marines now.”
“What? You can’t be serious,” Rin said.
“Category Two Asset, Dr. Dunst,” the Marine replied. “We shouldn’t have let you leave the naval base on your own as it was.”
Rin swore under his breath. No one had told him nearly enough about the downsides of becoming one of the Imperium’s top experts on a godlike dead race.
Rin had known that he’d spent most of his time in the military portion of Kosha Station—that was, he suspected now, most of how he’d avoided picking up a Marine escort—but this was the first time he’d seen the Imperium lock that base down.
The accesses to the naval base had been guarded but open when he’d left. Now, he learned that every access to the Imperial section of the base was a full armored airlock. There were guards outside the airlock who validated their IDs before they opened the outer doors. They were cycled through efficiently enough, but the extra security was blatant.
“Does…does the base have its own life support?” Rin asked as Vichy grimly lead the way.
“Oui,” the Marine confirmed, obviously falling further back into French as the situation calmed. “The only connection for the atmospheric systems is the transit passageways. The power systems and a few others are linked but severable, is my understanding. It’s not a completely separate station, but it’s capable of functioning separately from the civilian station.”
A separate station might have been easier to build, Rin reflected, but there was a value to the convenience, he supposed.
Vichy either had some kind of guiding beacon Rin couldn’t see or knew his way through the base already. The Marine led the way to Davor’s office without slowing or hesitating.
They hit a second layer of security at their destination, armored four-armed Tosumi Marines who checked their IDs with extreme thoroughness.
“The Echelon Lord is waiting for you,” the noncom in charge finally told them. “Go in.”
There was a harried-looking Yin officer on the other side of the door, smoothing down his blue feathers as they entered.
“The Echelon Lord is waiting for you,” he echoed the noncom outside. “Corridor on the left, doors at the end.”
Even Vichy had waited for the instructions. Rin wasn’t sure if that was respect for the authority of the desk or the junior officer behind it, or that the Marine didn’t know where the flag officer’s office was.
The left corridor led to double doors that opened into a large office with either a viewscreen covering the entire far wall or an actual window out over Blue Heart.
The massive desk at the center of the room appeared to be carved from stone, a rock so dark red as to be nearly black. It was the only visible furnishing in the room, though Rin recognized the patterns in the metal walls that suggested additional furniture could be summoned if the occupant wanted it.
Two chairs had been placed in front of the desk and Davor stood behind it, studying the two humans as they came in.
“Sit,” she ordered.
Rin obeyed without hesitation. Glancing to the side, he saw that his Marine companion hesitated for several seconds.
“Captain Casimir is in the base hospital,” Davor told them. “Her prognosis is good.”
Morgan had been standing when the dining room was detached from its mountings and sent into an uncontrollable spin. Rin had seen her fly across the thankfully tiny room and smash her head into the wall. He’d been unspeakably relieved just to see her wake up.
“Which now leads us to darker waters,” the Echelon Lord continued. “Such as, what in black depths happened?”
There were few creatures in the world more clearly designed for a barely habitable desert than Ivida. The usual aphorisms and curses of an Imperial Race sounded strange coming from one of them.
“The Children of the Stars is the organization that attacked the Lost Dragon dig site,” Rin said instantly. “They appear to have had more of a presence here on Kosha Station than any of us anticipated.”
“My guess is that they had both Dr. Dunst and Captain Casimir on a list for targets of opportunity, and the two of them leaving the base for a meal together was an irresistible target,” Vichy said bluntly. “The attack showed every sign of being a contingency plan activated on short notice. If they’d been more prepared, they’d have secured the retrieval mechanism for the pod before activating the bomb.”
“How did they get a bomb past the Captain’s escort?” Davor asked.
“I take full responsibility, sir,” Vichy replied. “We were not expecting or prepared for high-sophistication bombing activities. Captain Casimir’s detail was operating under standard security protocols.
“We had not increased our threat level to account for potential attack on Kosha Station. That failure is mine.”
“In this particular, yes,” the Echelon Lord agreed. “But it was a failure shared by many of us. We were treating this organization as a religiously motivated pirate squadron. No one, Battalion Commander, considered the possibility that the cult would have operatives on this station.
“In the passing of the waves, it becomes clear that they would have positioned resources at the closest source of Imperial power. We are fortunate, in some ways, that they targeted Captain Casimir and Dr. Dunst. Similar resources could have caused serious harm in the base.”
Rin had no response to that, and from the silence, neither did Vichy.
“Your response was rapid and appropriate, Commander Vichy,” the flag officer finally told them. “Station Security’s armorers took over three times as long to reequip any suits for underwater deployment. We expected to have more warning. Your technical team’s speed and competence are commendable.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Now. Dr. Dunst. You are one of our top experts on the Precursors and have spent more time looking at these Children than anyone else. Is there a weight to the current they follow?”
It took Rin a moment to parse the translated idiom.
“There might be,” he admitted. “Lost Dragon is specifically about what appears to be a rogue faction of the Alava that was researching deeply into biotech like what we saw at Arjtal. The presence of biological starships built on the same basic architecture as the cloner suggests that something is making them.
“It’s possible that there is a self-supporting population of these bioships out here somewhere. A detailed-enough dissection to confirm whether the creatures are capable of reproduction will take experts we don’t have and time we haven’t taken.”
“Reproduction,” Davor echoed. “You think these ships are breeding somewhere?”
“It’s one of two possibilities, yes,” Rin confirmed. “I’m no biologist, though. Based on my studies of the Alava, I can’t see them creating anything that self-replicates. The cloner at Arjtal, for example, could duplicate almost any organic creature that entered it so long as it had been fed sufficient biomass but could not reproduce.
“If anything was going to be able to create a duplicate of itself, the cloner would be a good candidate. So far as we can tell from the few records the Taljzi found, it was intentionally designed to never be able to.
“The Alava did not trust anything th
ey could not control,” he told the Echelon Lord. “That, to me, suggests a possibility that lines up disturbingly well with the Children’s rhetoric: there is a single source. An Alavan artifact of some kind that the Children have managed to activate that is producing these bioships.
“Probably, it is another biotech construct, as those are the most likely to have survived the Alava’s fall intact.”
“An organic shipyard, basically,” Davor concluded. “We will know soon enough, I suppose. Commander Isk will arrive at the other system we know the Children operate out of within a few cycles. He will almost certainly be outgunned from the sounds of it, but he knows not to fight.”
Rin had nothing to say to that. He didn’t know Commander Isk, so he had to trust the Echelon Lord’s opinion.
“If Kosha is compromised, the Children may know Isk is coming,” Vichy suggested.
“I had followed the same currents, Battalion Commander,” Davor admitted. “But we cannot contact Serene Guidance by hyperfold until she exits hyperspace, and none of my ships are large enough to mount starcom receivers.”
“Sir, if we are looking at a large-scale Precursor artifact, should we be requesting heavier firepower?” the Marine asked. “My understanding is we’re expecting reinforcements, but…not capital ships.”
The office was silent and Rin looked down, carefully studying the stone of the desk. Unless he was mistaken, it was true Ivaran bloodstone. Common enough on Ivara, the Ivida homeworld, but to have it shipped all this way would have been insanely expensive.
No wonder Davor didn’t have anything else in her office. The stone desk the Ivida carried with her was probably most of even a flag officer’s mass allowance. A reminder of a home Davor clearly didn’t expect to see again soon.
“No one is officially telling me there are no ships to spare, but I can see the undercurrents,” Davor admitted. “A fleet remains at Arjtal, guarding the Taljzi. Multiple fleets stand watch over the Kanzi border in case their civil war spills our way. Another set of fleets has been moved to cover the Wendira, with the largest force positioned on their border with the Laians.”
Relics of Eternity (Duchy of Terra Book 7) Page 14
