"I'll take her," Decker said with a sigh that threatened to turn into a groan. "I mean, it's my duty, right? Keep an eye on the alien lifeform." He stomped over to the bench and scooped up Granny, to put her on his shoulder. She nuzzled him behind his ear and Decker turned bright red.
"Think he's trying to put in a good word to get his own?" Genys muttered, when she, M'kar, Tahl, and Anyette were in the first lift car on their way to the bridge.
"He's proving how brave he is. Believe me, you do not want to cross Granny. When she chews your ear off, she literally does." M'kar shuddered. Barroo gave out a little trill like a giggle.
"How are we going to explain all this to Fleet?" Tahl asked.
"Save that for after we get the Hivers off our tails," Genys said. The lift door opened, and they hurried out onto the bridge.
"How?" M'kar followed close enough on her heels to nearly step on the trailing edge of her robe.
Genys shook her head and headed for the door to her ready room. Then she stopped and looked around the bridge. Everyone was looking at her, big-eyed, some of them giving Battleaxe leery looks, others openly envious. The lift door closed.
"We can't let them bring more Hivers here, much less spread the coordinates for that Chute. They look like they've been through the wringer and down a couple dozen Damnation Falls." Genys' eyes narrowed and her smile turned thin and nastily crooked. "I must finally be waking up … What do you think, Axe?"
The black drac twisted around and climbed out of the neck of her robe to perch on her shoulder. She looked around the bridge and extended her long, elegant neck to give out a fierce hiss. Genys laughed, just as the lift opened again. Maora and Treinna and several other command crew officers stepped onto the bridge. Treinna had Genys' uniform. She circled the bridge from the other side, heading for the ready room.
"That's what I was hoping you'd say." Genys reached up to scratch her drac's jaw.
"Ah, Captain?" Veylen stepped away from the command chair, which he had been occupying when the four of them stepped on the bridge. "Would you mind letting the rest of us in on the plan?"
"How do we get the Hivers off our tail?" Genys reached out one hand, making the door to her ready room hiss open. "We get them to chase our tail. Right into the Chute. Before they're ready."
"Ah." His smile turned just as thin and nasty.
"Get their attention, Exo."
"With pleasure, Ma'am." He waited until Genys stepped into her ready room. Treinna followed.
"You two, in here," Genys added, when M'kar and Tahl were about to head to their usual seats, when they had reason to be on the bridge.
They followed and settled down in the main seating area of the ready room. Genys handed Battleaxe over to M'kar to hold while she used the small head to wash and change. All three dracs were having a conversation, or a highly reasonable facsimile, when she came out. Other than dark smears under her eyes, she looked like she had come through the whole experience better than M'kar and Tahl. Treinna volunteered to get breakfast for the four of them, and they laughed as all three dracs perked up and let out trills at the mention of food. Their eyes took on a nearly uniform orangey sparkle.
"Clear enough in any language. Breakfast for seven," Treinna said.
"Better make it ten," Tahl said.
As the three compared notes about their experiences and the timing of the hatchings, they concluded that Battleaxe had hatched first. M'kar had the worst of the experience, because Granny had taken advantage of their psionic "familiarity" to impress what could only be called a care and feeding manual for newborn dracs into her head. Tahl got the biological information. The gist of the short, intense message impressed into Genys' head was that the future of the drac race depended on her ship.
"I keep flashing to an image of a pile of drac eggs, all different stages of growth," she concluded.
"Me, too," M'kar said. "In the hatching cavern, with all these streamers of light coming down from gaps in the ceiling, or these stones that seem to reflect energy of some kind. Maybe the dracs have an understanding of geo-thermal energy, and they can harvest or direct it or -- what?" She didn't like the way Genys slowly shook her head, frowning.
"The pile I see is in a garden. Lots of blue-tinted vines and a stretch of freshly turned soil."
M'kar got that chill down her back that warned things were going to get a whole lot more complicated pretty soon. That garden sounded dangerously familiar.
Veylen called from the bridge, asking the captain to join them.
The Hivers continued to go in zigs and zags. While they swept sensor beams at the Defender whenever the ship lobbed explosives toward them, they didn't react beyond that. They just kept wandering up and down in orbit.
"Think we confused them?" Decker asked from the station next to Communications. "Taking away everything that could be sensed and lead them to the camp."
Sh'hari sat in the Security station while he had the auxiliary chair, and cuddled Granny.
M'kar wondered, just for a moment, if Granny preferred to be held rather than sitting on his shoulder, or that was Decker's choice.
"Think they've guessed we want them to chase us?" Norgon asked from his post at sensors. "Maybe they're trying to find something on the planet, figuring we must be trying to lead them away from it?"
"Makes sense to me," Genys said. "The problem is that these are Humans who have allied with bugs."
"Maybe not, as Decker theorized," Veylen said. He stepped away from where he had been looking over Sh'hari's shoulder and looked around the bridge. "What happens if you've got a computer that's been taken over by another computer, maybe not more powerful, but with better programming? What happens if the subordinate computer gets used to being operated from outside, and not using its own software? Either that software gets put into hibernation, or it gets overwritten. Then what happens if the dominant software is cut off or shut down or removed?"
"They don't just look stupid and confused," Norgon said, turning halfway around in his chair. "They are. Stupid and confused."
"So stupid they don't understand when we fire a challenge across their bow," Genys said, her tone soft and thoughtful. "We can't let them go. Or more likely wander off. What if the dymcrait aren't dead or haven't lost control of their slaves, they're just stunned for a while?"
"We need to wipe them off the face of the galaxy before they regain control or wake up or whatever." Tahl reached up and stroked Ha'ess' neck. "I know I shouldn't be advocating destruction of any sentient race or species, but it isn't the whole race. Not like they're trying to do to the dracs. This is one ship, the one that knows the way to the Chute to the drac world. The bottom line is that the fate of an entire race is caught in the balance. You'd think that dragons that can breathe fire and shred you with poisonous claws and teleport can defend themselves, but they're not ready for war on a planetwide scale. It's up to us."
"You're not talking as a new mommy, are you?" Veylen said without a twitch of a smile or a bit of laughter in voice or eyes.
"If she isn't, I am," Genys said. "Maybe that compromises me …" She sighed and slumped a little. "I'll stand behind the decision we make today before all the inquiry panels, because you can't bond with something the mental and emotional equivalent of a two-year-old and waffle on whether they're sentient. They are. We need action now, not philosophy. How do we get the attention of those indiferps out there so they chase us, before something snaps them out of their blue funk and they start lobbing bombs at the planet?"
"Speak to them in a language they understand?" Treinna offered. She stood behind her replacement at Communications, watching the data streaming across several screens.
"Heck with that," Decker said. "Speak to them in a language they hate." He lifted Granny a little. "We didn't strap the broadcast gear from the boobytrap on the outside of the shuttle, did we?" He grinned, teeth bared, and Granny let out a happy little warble.
Twenty minutes later, JM had retrieved the Corona's broadcast equip
ment from the shuttle. He took it directly to Jasper and his team of slightly unbalanced engineering geniuses. Within minutes, the original broadcast equipment had been attached to a probe, along with several different kinds of more explosive booby-traps, and slid into a launching tube. The recording of the drac shrieks had been downloaded into the ship's memory, and as soon as Treinna signaled that she had accessed the file, Genys gave the word. The probe erupted in drac shrieks, on every known frequency. Everyone on the bridge held their breaths. Waiting. Watching the various readouts that tracked the Hiver ship on its wibble-wobble course up and down through the atmosphere of the drac world. Visual. Energy emissions. Resonances. Disturbances in the solar current.
M'kar compared the moment when the Hivers reacted to a scene in an old-style video drama, where the hero walked into the villain's parlor, picked up the arm of the audio-platter player, and dragged the needle across the old polymer disc, creating a horrific screeching-scratching sound. The Hiver ship pivoted on its axis and spun around to point its forward blaster ports at the invisible blip in space where the probe shrieked with the tongues of dracs.
"Second volley ready?" Genys said. Jasper confirmed. "On my mark."
"Hiver ship shifting weaponry out of standby mode," Norgon reported.
"That was not what we wanted," M'kar muttered. Barroo made a sound distinctly like raspberries. She and Tahl muffled chuckles, and a moment later, Ha'ess echoed her hatching-sibling.
The central screen giving a visual, real-time view of the Hiver ship lit up as the enemy blasted the probe.
Chapter Sixteen
"Mark," Genys said. Jasper confirmed the launching of the second probe. "Parys."
"Aye, Captain." She ran her fingers over the helm controls. "Aiming for the Chute opening."
"Vary the course by five to fifteen degrees at uneven intervals. We don't want these indiferps guessing where we're going or the right approach vectors. Get them to smash into the sidewalls of the Chute on their way through."
Perched on Genys' shoulder now, Battleaxe stretched her neck high and erupted with a gleeful little chortle. Genys' fierce expression fractured into laughter, just for a moment.
The second probe let out its chorus of drac shrieks when it had flown only a few seconds away from the Defender. The Hiver ship jerked visibly and pulled out of its descent back into its previous meandering. The Defender approached the Chute entrance. When the Hiver ship shot the second probe, a third launched. It sounded off even closer to the Defender than the second probe had.
After the third probe died, the Defender let out its own long blast of drac song. The three little dracs on the bridge chittered and flapped their wings, hitting their new parents in the backs of their heads, before settling down onto their shoulder perches again.
"Come and get us," Genys whispered as the Hiver ship turned over twice, like meat on a spit, before aiming at them. "Helm …"
"Yes, Ma'am." Parys glanced over her shoulder, met her gaze, exchanged nods, then hunched over her controls, waiting. Everyone on the bridge held their breaths as the Hivers drew closer, several hundred meters every second.
"Y'know," M'kar muttered, "the universe doesn't need two Captain Shrynes."
Battleaxe blew raspberries at her. Genys snorted, then bared her teeth as she watched the numbers scroll downward on the main viewscreen, giving the distance between the two ships.
"Punch it!"
Everyone gripped their stations or the sides of their seats, even though inertial dampeners were working just fine. The numbers for the distance between the two ships scrolled upward again.
"Come on, you fudu-for-brains, take the bait," Decker snarled under his breath. Granny made a hissing sound and extended her long neck toward the Hiver ship on the screen. "You tell 'em."
The distance numbers steadied. And held.
"Approaching Chute in fifteen," Parys announced.
As she counted down, the sensors adjusted to display the spatial phenomenon ahead of them as swirling splashes of colors, translating all the variations of energy and frequencies into data that couldn't be read entirely as numbers. Barroo made a little moaning croon that approximated what always struck M'kar's stomach at times like this. There was a reason why she preferred being at her duty station during a Chute transition, rather than watching it gulp them down. Only part of it had to do with avoiding cleaning up after herself. Her mother was the one with the iron constitution in the family. She brought her drac down from her shoulder, to cuddle him and distract herself.
Granny let out a querulous chirp. When no one answered, she let out another. Then leaped up from Decker's arms. He swore. She let out a trumpet blast from lungs that belonged in a creature five times her size. The baby dracs rose up and darted to join her in the air. Half the bridge crew turned to look as the three popped out of sight.
"Aw … heck." Genys turned to M'kar. "Tell me I didn't see what I think I saw in Axe's mind."
"What?" Veylen said.
"Later." She gripped the armrests of the command chair and turned back to the data streaming across the forward viewscreen, just as Parys reached "one."
M'kar closed her eyes and didn't care if anyone saw.
We're all dead meat, once Command gets hold of us.
The Defender braced to buck upwards, then dropped half a meter at the most. M'kar gripped the edges of her seat, knowing that was the calm before the storm.
And waited.
A slight shift to the right. Another drop, then a jolt upwards.
And waited.
"Okay, what happened?" Genys blurted.
M'kar opened her eyes and looked around the bridge. Everyone else was busy at their stations, trying to watch multiple panels of flashing lights, reading data scrolling up screens, and responding to requests for information from other stations throughout the ship. That seemed entirely normal for just having passed through a Chute.
If they had gone through a Chute.
"Why didn't we go through?" Tahl said.
"Exactly." Genys looked around the bridge, and both turned to M'kar.
"What? I didn't do anything." M'kar pried her fingers from the sides of her seat and stood.
"What do you mean?" Veylen didn’t look up from his station. His voice sounded like he had tried to swallow sand.
"Why didn't we go through the Chute?" Genys enunciated with a little extra care.
"We did."
"No, we didn't." She turned to M'kar and Tahl, who both nodded.
"Ah … yes, Captain, we did." Veylen gestured around the bridge, where everyone was scrambling to keep up with their equipment and dozens of voices were now reporting on ship's status to their various supervisors and section leaders.
"Oh, boy," Treinna whispered. She tried to smile, but she looked a little green.
That was a definite sign the ship had gone through the Chute. So why hadn't M'kar, Genys and Tahl experienced … anything? What set them apart from the rest of the crew?
"Dracs," M'kar said.
"Dracs." Genys nodded, her mouth settling into grim lines. "Find them."
"Dracs," Tahl said, and headed toward the auxiliary medical station with a guilty little start. She was ship's doctor, after all. There was all the biological rebellion that resulted from Chute travel to be dealt with.
"Dracs." M'kar headed for the lift doors. She had the feeling that would become the new curse of the day, maybe the dec or lun, or year.
She held back her grin until the lift deposited her two decks down and she followed the mental emissions trail left by the four dracs. Chalk one up for big benefits to being in a bond with the adorable, frustrating critters. If she never again had to endure the metaphysical and dimensional twisting and turning and scrambling associated with a Chute, that was entirely fine with her.
The alert lights shifted from orange back to red before she had gone more than ten steps. Groaning, pretty sure what she would find out, she changed direction. By the time she got to the life sciences lab, wh
ere the rest of her team was verifying how the wide variety of critters had come through the Chute transition, the data appeared on her station screen. M'kar didn't sit down until she read the important part: debris from the Hiver ship had ejected from the Chute in sufficient quantity to indicate no survivors. There were no communication transmissions, no signals, and no spoilsport boxes. Essentially, transmitters with power packs and information chips, to send vital information if the ship destructed. The rest of the Hivers weren't going to get the information on the drac world.
However, there was the problem of where the Hiver ship had been and what it had done from the time it or its sister attacked the Corona and put all its crew in cocoons. Had they sent information on the drac world to their mother ship, or hive mothers, or whatever/whoever was actually running everything? M'kar thought of all the stories she had heard about the dymcrait in Le'ankan legend. She couldn't remember any tales about who controlled the brain-sucking race. Not that she wanted to spend much time, if any, thinking about them.
If the first Hiver ship had managed to send the Chute coordinates before they came back for a second round of attacks, then something had to be done now, preferably two decs ago. Before the Hivers figured out how to get to the drac world and wipe all life from its surface.
"Mooki, are you still dating that engineer?" M'kar said, as one of the ensigns came in to take the lid off the hoochikoo bin.
"Depends which engineer you're talking about." Mooki managed a smirk, despite the green tint around her throat and eyes.
"The one who did time for figuring out how to broadcast to an entire planet by getting around all the block options in the planetary newsfeed."
"Uh, yeah. And not because I'm afraid of what'll happen if I dump him. Why?"
"Can you link me through to him?"
"Right here, Lieutenant," a raspy baritone responded from the speaker grill next to Mooki's station. "What can I do for you? And not just because I want to be next on the list for a dragon, which would be so cool --"
"Be careful what you wish for." M'kar mentally crossed her fingers as she thought of that pile of shimmering drac eggs she had glimpsed in Granny’s thoughts. Some were too jewel-like for her peace of mind. "What's your name?"
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