“It’s not nothing. Whatever it is, we can’t let it jump out of here. We’ve got to investigate.”
“No problem,” Björnman said. “We’ll cut it off before it escapes. Knock it out and be on our way.”
“Something that small, probably alien . . . we should catch it, not kill it.”
“We’ll lose time—a day or two, probably. No way around it.”
Björnman was right. The problem was not in the catching; the small unidentified ship would very nearly cross their path. But they’d have to decelerate, board it, and then reaccelerate to jump speed.
“Where did it come from?” Olafsen asked. “Where are the jump points behind it?”
“I can’t run those calculations,” Björnman said. “We’d need a full pilot for that, and I only rate subpilot.”
“Eyeballing it, I’d say back from the inner frontier. I’ll bet you anything that it’s part of this same jailbreak from Persia. Bet that harvester threw it off before it jumped toward Xerxes, and whatever it is wants to escape this way.”
“You don’t suppose there’s another Apex base out there, and they’ve sent a ship to get help?”
“Doubtful. We’d have found it by now. But whatever it wants, we can’t let it happen.” Olafsen rubbed at the thick, ropey scar that ran down his forehead, bypassed his eye, and reemerged on his cheek. “Give orders to the other blackfish—we’re going after it.”
#
Olafsen brought his ships in alongside the small, unknown craft a few hours later. It was egg-shaped, roughly twenty-five feet long and fifteen feet wide in the middle. Reading the reports of the Albion battle at Singapore, it reminded him of the small craft spit out by one of the harvester ships, except this one had jump capabilities.
Olafsen suited up and waited in the hold with ten other raiders, including Björnman. Star wolves typically harpooned enemy craft and sent over boarding rockets, but the blackfish had the ability to affix themselves to an enemy craft, smash through the hull, and offload raiders directly, much as they’d done when assaulting the Apex base.
He kept the raiders harnessed in case the small ship made a violent evasive maneuver at the last minute, but the enemy made no such attempt. The blackfish bumped the hull of the smaller ship, and a metallic screech indicated they were tearing their way through the other ship’s hull and making an air seal for safe transit from one ship to the next.
Word came from the bridge that the enemy hadn’t fired, hadn’t made even the most basic attempts at evasion. Someone at the tech console thought maybe it was on a preprogrammed course toward an unknown location. Maybe it didn’t even have a crew, but was carrying something else of value.
The other men were getting the same information, and he sensed them relaxing around him.
“Stay alert if you want to keep your guts inside you,” he growled.
An airlock dilated on the side of the bay, and suddenly he was looking into the dark, steamy interior of the enemy ship. He unharnessed and clomped forward, with a dozen other raiders following behind.
He fought a strange swimming sensation as he crossed the threshold and opposing anti-grav systems tugged him in opposite directions. He was upside down suddenly, then, staggering forward with the suit trying to stabilize him, right-side up again. They were in a round room, so warm that moisture began to condense on his faceplate and drizzle down as if he’d stepped into a jungle. Sickly yellow lights blinked slowly on opposite sides of the room, but they weren’t enough to cut the gloom and illuminate the interior.
Lights flared from his left and right. One came from the helmet of his old friend, Demon Grin, and the others from Bug, with his glossy green helmet shining twin lights that turned independently to illuminate the edges of the small chamber.
Five large drones sat in a tight cluster in the center of the room. Their feathers were drab, and they wore no weapon harnesses. The birds kept their heads down, and didn’t look up even when the lights illuminated their eyes and beaks.
Björnman joined Olafsen. He was several inches taller than the marauder captain, and had to stand in a wide stance to stay low enough not to scrape his head on the low ceiling.
“What the devil is this?”
“Damned if I know,” Olafsen said.
The huddled drones had drawn Olafsen’s attention, but maybe a more careful inspection of the chamber would turn up answers. Nozzles and hoses emerged from the walls in several places around the room, and a grill ringed the edge, where it appeared the aliens washed their waste to keep the room relatively clean. Relatively being the operative word. Bird droppings lay on the floor, mingled with broken eggshells and scraps of rotting meat.
“Look at that,” Bug said. “Bones.”
“Human bones,” Demon Grin said.
Femurs, ribs, a pair of skulls. Strips of bloody clothing. A severed hand, most of the flesh still attached, with the fingers clutching the drainage grill.
Olafsen pictured the horrifying vision of a man thrown to the floor trying to drag himself away from the birds tearing flesh from his back. They’d devoured him alive right here in this room.
The same realization seemed to hit the other men. There were shouts and curses. Bug clomped forward with his armored hand forming a fist to pulverize the knot of drones still huddled in the middle of the room. Demon Grin sparked his flamethrower.
It was the spark of flame that snapped Olafsen out of his own red fury.
“Stop, you fool!”
He shoved past Bug and Björnman and knocked down Demon Grin’s arm as he let loose with his flamethrower. The fire hit the floor and ignited a stream of flammable filth, which flared up, illuminating the room. Firelight reflected off Bug’s gleaming faceplate, and the others staggered back.
Olafsen stomped the fire, afraid the whole room would go up in flames, but it was already dying down on its own. He turned on Demon Grin.
“You idiot, can’t you smell the methane through your blasted filter? You could have blown us all up.” He turned about. “As for the rest of you, move back. Anyone touches those birds and they answer to me.”
“They ate those people alive,” Björnman said, voice grim. “They deserve to die.”
“And they will die. All of them. We’re going to wipe out every last queen, princess, commander, and drone before they do the same to us. But these ones are no immediate threat.” He swept his arm at the birds, who, if not for the occasional flicker of feathers, may as well have been dead. “I’m still trying to decide if we’ll kill them here or haul them to the ship and put them in stasis. Maybe the Albion science officers can figure out something.
“Take a look around, see if you spot anything else that can be pried or chiseled off. Just remember, anything you take needs to be sterilized before it enters the ship—it might be contaminated.”
Björnman led several men to the far wall to investigate, while Olafsen remained to keep an eye on the five drones in case they received orders from some unknown source and flew into a murderous rage.
He was puzzled. What was this small ship doing out here in the middle of nowhere? The thing was too small to be a warship, so he’d supposed a mission to enlist help from a hidden Apex force. Yet if that were the case, there would be more than five helpless drones. All drab—not a bright feather among them.
“Hey, boss,” Björnman said. “What do you suppose this does?”
He took hold of a hook with a tiny yellow light on the end. Like a knob or lever, but built to be pulled by a beak.
Lights suddenly gleamed on panels on the wall. No, behind the panels, illuminating another chamber on the other side. Björnman released a blistering salvo of curses and took two steps back. Olafsen approached, eyes widening as he realized what he was looking at. There, floating in stasis behind the wall, was a naked tumble of men and women.
“By the gods,” someone said. “It’s their bloody larder.”
Something good would come of the mission. These people—Persians, no doubt—wo
uld be surprised to find themselves waking not as an Apex meal, but to a miraculous rescue. Olafsen pushed forward, searching the wall for a way to empty the stasis chamber.
I’m a reformed man, he thought with a grin. I won’t even sell them as thralls in the Viborg slave markets.
He cast his eyes back to the panel and recoiled in horror. A woman pressed up to the transparent surface. Her face was in tatters, one eye torn out and the other dangling. Her hands were frozen in an outstretched position, as if she’d been fighting attackers when they put her under.
Other men and women had kept their faces, which were clenched in pain, but were torn open at the belly or groin. Buzzards had shredded one man’s pectoral muscles, and a woman clutched an arm with its bones poking out.
“I don’t understand,” Björnman said. “Why mutilate them before putting them in stasis?”
“Tenderizing the meat.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know that Albion scientist on Void Queen? What’s his name—Brockett? He has this theory about how they raise a drone to battle status, then convert princesses to be fertile and command starships.”
“But what does that have to do with these poor fools in stasis?” Björnman asked.
A groan and disgusted-sounding noises drew Olafsen’s attention before he could answer. Bug had popped loose his helmet and taken it off. He spat on the ground.
“By the gods, that will make your eyes water.”
“What are you doing?” Olafsen snapped. “Put that back on.”
“You said to look around and figure stuff out. I’m gonna sniff for the fresh air intake. Gotta be in here somewhere.”
“Didn’t you hear what I said? We have to decontaminate everything we bring back, and now we have to decontaminate you, too.”
“I didn’t think of that.”
“Oh, gods. Can you possibly be serious? Hope you enjoy quarantine. Now stay back from those drones!”
Still grumbling, Olafsen turned back to his chief mate.
“They get status by feeding on the pain and fear of their victims,” he said. “It brightens their plumage and makes them fertile. I think you’ve got to start with a princess already—wouldn’t work on a drone. They come from the gray eggs.”
“So there is another Apex force out here,” Björnman said.
“They must be carrying victims to a princess so she can lay eggs. This is a delivery pod, and these drones are technicians needed to haul the shipment through to the other side.”
Something about the scene was still bugging Olafsen, something he was missing, but he’d seen enough. His disgust was too much to ignore.
“Let’s kill these drones and get out of here,” he said.
“What about hauling them back for study?” Björnman asked.
“I’ve changed my mind. We don’t study vermin. We’ll kill them and blow up the ship and all the filth on it. As for these poor people,” he said with a glance at the transparent panel, “there’s no saving them. If we wake them, they’ll only suffer and then die anyway, and we don’t have the stasis chambers to haul them out of here so they can see Albion surgeons.”
His calm words belied his mood. Inside, he was churning with righteous anger, with hatred, with a stew of ugly emotions. What a fool he’d been all these years, raiding and slaving and smuggling, thinking other Scandians were his enemies.
This here, this was the enemy. Not Scandians, not Albionish, not Hroom, but Apex. Their entire existence was an abomination. An alien malice so deep, so poisonous, so genocidal that there could be no compromise.
He approached the drones with his gun aimed. “You think you are the apex predator of this sector? You’re nothing but filthy parasites.”
The drones didn’t move until he shot the first one. Then the survivors launched into the air, screaming and flapping and pecking. Gunfire exploded in the enclosed space. One of the drones spotted Bug, still standing with his helmet under his arm, head exposed, and launched itself at him. He screamed as it clamped its beak on his face and tore away a huge chunk of flesh.
Olafsen couldn’t shoot for fear of hitting the man, and so went in with his rifle butt swinging. It struck a wing with a satisfying crunch. The drone fell flapping to the floor, where he crushed its bones under his boots.
Soon the slaughter was over. Bug sat clutching his face, moaning, and when someone pulled his hands away, a lip and half his cheek were missing, a bloody mess left behind.
“Get him back to the ship,” Olafsen ordered, then remembered that the man had been exposed to the atmosphere of the alien ship. He cursed. They’d have to bring a medic into quarantine.
“Boss!” someone shouted.
There, amid the carnage, was another bird. Smaller than the drones, it must have hidden in the midst of the others all that time, undetected. Its feathers were a mixture of red and gold and green, unlike the drab plumage of the others. Like a four-foot-tall parrot. Some of the feathers were still downy, and there was something immature about its posture.
A young bird, still a chick. Nothing immature in the malice of its gaze, though, as it cocked its head and looked at Bug, who was still bleeding copiously, as if it wanted to eat him.
“Now I understand,” Olafsen said. He kicked at the eggshells and bones he’d ignored earlier. “It’s a seed ship, with an egg that hatched into a chick, and slaves to feed and care for it. If this had landed somewhere hidden and secure, it would have started all over again.”
“Is this the only one?” Björnman asked. “Or are there more of these things out here?”
“If there are more, we’d better find them. I’ll message ahead to McGowan and see if he can spare a few ships to help us look.”
He groaned internally, thinking of the ramifications. So much for getting back to Vargus and reclaiming Bloodaxe. Reclaiming his star wolf fleet. It would fall on his brother to seize any glory from the upcoming fight with the harvester ship.
“Meanwhile, we’ve got a young princess,” Björnman said. “That definitely has value for the scientists.”
But Olafsen had changed his mind entirely about the scientific value of this find. He no longer cared, and was repulsed by the whole thing. He turned toward the opening back into the blackfish, anxious to get out of this ugly place and begin the search.
“Kill it,” he said.
Chapter Nine
Tech Officer Smythe located the escaped harvester four hours after Catarina’s fleet arrived in the system. The enemy ship was cruising across Xerxes, accompanied by a pair of hunter-killer packs, and had dropped cloaks to allow smaller craft to crawl over its hull like crabs, doing repair or maintenance of some kind.
In spite of the ongoing work, this harvester appeared fully intact, and with its escort of lances and spears, any hope of repeating the easy victory of the Zoroaster System faded.
Catarina hadn’t been keen on joining forces with McGowan, who would no doubt start ordering her around, but was relieved to see his fleet on the opposite side of the system, on a course to intercept the alien ships from the other direction.
Nyb Pim ran calculations and announced that Void Queen and her fleet could cut off the enemy well short of its target jump point. Once engaged with the enemy, they’d need to face it alone for eight to ten hours before McGowan’s reinforcements arrived.
As for McGowan’s fleet, it numbered forty-seven ships, including his flagship. HMS Peerless was a Punisher-class cruiser. It was weaker than an Ironside-class battle cruiser like Void Queen or Blackbeard, but boasted plenty of firepower, multiplied by the seven additional cruisers in McGowan’s fleet. An assortment of thirty-nine other warships made up the rest of the fleet, including a dozen Hroom sloops of war, led by General Mose Dryz.
Catarina gave it some thought and told Smythe she’d send McGowan a video message. She stood, straightened her uniform, and told him to start the recording.
“Captain McGowan,” she said with a nod. “As you’ve heard, we have already d
estroyed a harvester in the Zoroaster System. I expect our outcome in Xerxes to be equally successful. The enemy is no doubt listening, so I will be brief. I am going to slow my acceleration to delay intercepting the enemy as long as possible.
“When I do engage, I intend to hold the enemy in place while you bring up reinforcements from the rear. By the time you arrive, we should have destroyed the hunter-killer packs and disabled the harvester. I will give you further instructions when you are three hours from the battlefield. Godspeed, and God save the king.”
She stopped the recording.
Capp raised an eyebrow. “God save the king? That’s a little patriotic for you, ain’t it, Cap’n?”
“Exactly right. It tells McGowan not to take everything I say literally. Assuming he’s not an idiot, which is not a given.”
“So we ain’t gonna do all that stuff you said?”
“We’ll do enough of it.”
“That piss nozzle’s gonna argue,” Capp said. “He’ll tell us to follow him or to attack the harvester head-on, or something.”
“Naturally. Something that will give him maximum glory at minimum risk.” Catarina settled back into the captain’s chair. “It’s not McGowan’s call, though, is it? That’s for us to decide. I’ll gather a battle council before we engage the enemy and come up with our tactics then.” Catarina turned to Smythe. “Send the message.”
McGowan was out near a gas giant on the far side of the sun, and it would take time to cross that distance.
“How long until we can expect a response?”
“About two hours,” Smythe said.
“Good. I’m taking supper in my quarters. I’ll sketch out a plan and come back with something to show the battle council. Capp, you have the helm.”
Catarina set out for the lift. There was no rush, and so nearly three hours passed by the time she returned to the bridge. A message had gone out for those she was inviting to the war council, and their away pods were in transit already.
“Play McGowan’s message,” Catarina said as she took her seat.
“No response yet, sir,” Smythe said. “We got a subspace from Olafsen, though. Looks like he snagged an attempted runaway.”
Sun King (The Void Queen Trilogy Book 3) Page 8
