Defiance: (The Spiral Wars Book 4)

by Joel Shepherd

  “Bastards are using sard as patsies,” said Kono. “And sard are too stupid to figure it.” If there was retaliation from the parren, he meant, it would be against the sard — not deepynines or alo.

  “Don’t underestimate sard,” said Zhi. “I think they know exactly what’s going on. But they like being patsies. They follow, it’s what bugs do.” For simple intellect, Zhi was probably the smartest of Trace’s platoon commanders, and he had the rare and alarming habit, among marines, of reading lots of difficult books and enjoying them. Before Phoenix had gone renegade, he’d been destined for either high command, or a teaching job in either the Academy or some civilian school — he hadn’t decided which. Events had put those choices on the far back burner, as with all of Phoenix’s crew, and he was now Stan Romki’s go-to guy on any matter of Spiral military history, those being far more Zhi’s expertise than the Professor’s.

  “Major, the advance drone shows good visuals on the top docking entry,” Lieutenant Hausler reported from the cockpit. “It looks clear, we are on our way in, ETA six minutes. PH-4, how do you read?”

  “PH-4 copy,” came Tif’s calm drawl. With Skah in Medbay, Trace hadn’t been sure Tif should come. But Operations had told her that Tif would be scandalised if overlooked, and since Lieutenant Jersey had had the biggest workload on the last job, that meant the lead this time would be Hausler and Tif. Besides, Medbay insisted Skah was fine… not that anyone ever believed Medbay.

  “Okay,” said Trace, “we will deploy at the rim and make our own way in, I want us spread wide for cover, let’s watch those docked ships for any sign of movement. I want Delta and Echo top and bottom, Command Squad will be rear. Main cargo airlocks are large, we’ll enter without force if we can, then Delta will hold the exit while Echo progresses to station bridge and systems core. Let’s be fast and neat, the neighbourhood’s not friendly and we can’t leave Phoenix waiting. If there’s an ambush we might have to leave in a hurry, so keep your exit lanes clear and watch your spacing, we don’t want to be tripping over each other as we leave.”

  God knew what would happen to a human marine platoon left behind in parren space, she thought. Even if the sard/deepynines didn’t return to try and finish them, there was every chance that Phoenix would not be able to get back to them. In which case they’d be at the mercy of the local parren government forces, when they finally showed up… which was a whole can of worms she couldn’t even begin to think about.

  “Nothing,” said Shilu, gazing at his screens in trepidation. “Not a peep from station. If there’s anyone alive in there, they must have seen us coming, Styx indicates most of the internal systems are still working.”

  Erik glanced at the visual feed from Trace’s own suit, appearing on his far-right screen. She was out of the shuttle now, jetting forward within the asteroid station’s end-cap docking cone. The cone was truly more of a giant tube, a kilometre wide and open to space, within which many smaller, insystem ships were docked. The asteroid was nearly eight kilometres in diameter, its rotation creating the usual point eight-nine of a human gravity that was parren-preferred standard. The one kilometre rotation at the cap end produced only a fraction that much gravity, as the docking cone’s rim spun only slowly, ships ensconced in docking gantries slowly moving by Trace’s marines as they jetted forward. It was nerve-wracking to watch, as the marines were not in true cover — difficult when constantly getting sideswiped by spacecraft and docking arms. But presumably, if anything were about to open fire on them from in front, they’d get warning first.

  On the screen alongside, Erik had a feed from Operations, the viewpoint of the drone they’d launched at the crippled parren starship. There was a lot of tumbling wreckage in proximity, and to inspect the gaping wounds in the crew cylinder, the drone was going to have to manoeuvre hard in a constant barrel roll to follow the spinning ship. The more Erik saw of it, the less likely it appeared that there might be survivors. And why hadn’t station sent anyone to check? There were all these little insystem ships in the docking cone, plus any number of local station drones. A station this size must have had at least fifty thousand people aboard. There was a refinery dock on the asteroid’s other end, lots of well protected processing plant within the rock, ships running endlessly to and fro, delivering raw materials for the refinery, taking away the processed end product, distributing the consumables brought in by the bigger starships from further out. And now, nothing.

  The inevitable, nasty thought was that the deepynines had killed them all… but the station was big, and there appeared to have been just one ship in this assault. Besides, Styx’s scans were retrieving only images of sard warriors in the assault. It made sense that the deepynines would expose themselves rarely, their survival in the galaxy still being a somewhat closely guarded secret, though less closely guarded by the day. Sard simply weren’t coordinated enough, in those numbers, to have killed most of the station in the one hour and fifteen minutes Styx informed them the assault had lasted.

  And now, something else was gnawing at him. In the three thousand years since the alo had announced themselves to the Spiral, appearing from a little-explored region of space, in the galactic zenith to humans and chah’nas, and with an extraordinary level of advanced technology for a species so new in space, they’d been incredibly good at keeping secret their alliance with surviving remnants of the deepynine race. Three thousand years, and no one appeared to have figured it out, until Phoenix. Only no, that wasn’t true — their too-brief encounter with Supreme Commander Chankow in barabo space, before his own Fleet had killed him, suggested strongly that human Fleet did know, or had at least suspected. They’d decided it to be the lesser of two evils, and that alliance with the alo against the tavalai was the more pressing human need of the age. No doubt all that alo technology, in the form of ships like Phoenix, had been extremely tempting.

  Probably that meant the chah’nas knew as well, having been the first to contact the alo, and ally with them — knowing the chah’nas, Erik thought, probably after trying to subdue them first, and getting a nasty beating for it. Possibly the chah’nas had even told human Fleet what they were getting into all that time ago, when chah’nas were funding the human resistance against the krim, and the krim’s reluctant allies the tavalai. And then the alo started funnelling weapons and technology through the chah’nas to the humans, and humanity, in its desperate straits at the time, hadn’t cared a jot where the original technology had come from, or what such a then-informal alliance might cost everyone in another thousand years…

  And yet, despite the leaderships of both human and chah’nas peoples being aware of the alo’s shadowy source of power, the secret had survived, because those leaderships judged it in no one’s best interest to divulge the truth to their own people, let alone to anyone else’s. Until now, when ships even more powerful than the ones that had nearly killed Phoenix in barabo space were unleashed on civilian parren systems, attacking civilian parren stations, and evidently killing quite a lot of innocent parren citizens.

  Yes, the alo and deepynines were using the sard to do it, as the visible face of the attacks. If anyone was blamed, it would be the sard. And yet, surely they did not think the parren so stupid as to believe the sard had built these ships themselves? The whole Spiral knew that however intelligent the sard in some respects, advanced starships were not their technological strength. Phoenix knew where the starships had come from, and perhaps that added some incentive to these efforts to hunt and destroy her. But to make that whole mess worse by attacking new parren centres with those starships didn’t make any sense. Besides which, tavalai and barabo also knew where the starships had come from, and that news was now surely spreading. On this, the alo/deepynine allies had surely let the cat out of the bag, and there was no stuffing it back in.

  They wanted Styx, that was obvious. She was the last drysine queen, and now, armed with her people’s greatest remaining store of civilisational data, she possessed all she needed to rebuild the dry
sine race. The drysines were responsible for the previous extermination — or near extermination — of the deepynines, and so it followed that the deepynines would fear that potential more than anything.

  And yet, the sheer brazenness of this particular move was breathtaking. Erik had heard it suggested, in top-secret Fleet intelligence briefings, that the parren remained in totality the most powerful species in the Spiral, now that tavalai territory had been shrunk to half its original size. From what he’d seen so far, Erik was starting to believe it might be true. Their technology was superb, and their culture martial and disciplined. Their problem, of course, was the endless division that made them far more interested in fighting each other than anyone else. But now, to threaten them with the resurrection of the greatest and most terrible ancient enemy of all, attacking their stations and killing their civilians… if anything had the potential to unite the parren Houses in the face of a common enemy, this would be it.

  And now the deepynines went to all these lengths just to kill Styx and her data-core — an enemy of great potential, to be sure, but as yet just one queen, with one lonely, renegade human vessel for an ally? Were they that terrified of her, that they would risk all these other threats just to destroy her? And if so, why?

  He opened a private channel to Trace, where it would blink on her visor display until she had a spare moment to answer it. She opened immediately. “Yes Erik?”

  “Trace, I don’t like this. We interrupted them halfway through their raid. There’s no way they’re just going to leave this station here as evidence of what they’ve done. I think it’s likely they were going to blow it, they just haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

  “Well this rock doesn’t have a reactor large enough to blow, and the radiation sensors would have sensed a nuke by now, the rock’s filtration system blows enough radiation particles out that we’d smell it. They’d have to do a high-V run, that way it would remain something of a mystery.”

  “Which means they’re coming back,” Erik said grimly. “I think they probably guessed we were coming this way, despite us having about ten different options from that ambush. Which means we’re dealing with one very smart cookie, because we didn’t even know they’d hit this station, we had no special reason to choose it.”

  “It’s like they’re reading our minds,” Trace observed. “You think their queen is here?”

  “It’s not likely — to chase us they’d have to spread their forces. I think there’s only a few ships here because they’ve had to spread out so much. We didn’t see anyone else leave to send a message, but maybe it’s already been arranged for others to come here. I’m thinking that we just don’t know how alo and deepynines have evolved together, and how much Styx knew about the deepynines is still relevant today. Even if there’s no queen here, we could be dealing with an alo commander. That’s smart enough.”

  Alo had fought only sparingly in the Triumvirate War. Mostly they’d supplied the weapons, but on a few occasions they’d joined in personally, in rearguard roles. Fleet Intel briefings Erik had seen concluded that those alo ships had been acting primarily to observe human and chah’nas movements and tactics, and see how they were using their new weapons… like a toy manufacturer watching children at play to see how their product was being used in the field. On several occasions these observation missions had run into direct action, where the alo ships had had to fight or risk destruction. Their tactics then had been flawless, and most of the tavalai, kaal or sard who attacked them had regretted it, if they survived. Erik only hoped that this above average performance rating of alo captains was due to them only putting their best captains into combat, and was not a universal command standard for the species.

  “Delta,” Trace told her marines, “we’re taking all three airlocks on the left quarter. Watch those gantry accessways, we don’t know for sure they’re clear.” And back to Erik, “I’m not seeing any movement at all. None of these ships is moving, not even minor systems. Everything’s dead, but no sign of damage.”

  “The main strike was on the far side, that caused the debris, plus the starship. Be real careful, Major. Get in, get the data, get out, expect nothing good.”

  The airlocks were designed for cargo, moving on vacuum-exposed runners along the inner tube of the docking cone between ship and station. Getting them open was a simple matter of running software overrides over coms that Phoenix’s computers could probably have handled on their own, but with Styx aboard became child’s play.

  Delta’s Third Squad went in first, secured the inside, then all the rest went through together. Within were big, square, very-low-gravity passages, with railings to run cargo containers, and side passages to admit personnel for repair and other access. Through passages toward the zero-G centre of rotation, the station internal bay could be seen through wide pressure windows — a half-kilometre wide hangar, its sides lined with more ships, shuttles, docking grapples and umbilical connections.

  Delta Platoon separated into squads, then sections, leaving teams of four marines floating gently against low-G walls at intersections and other strategic points. Echo pressed on, with Trace and Command Squad at their rear, fanning now into a wide cargo warehouse, low-G pressure crates stacked in lines both vertical and horizontal. Marines leaped and bounded around them, a light push of manoeuvring thrusters enough to leap clear of directional-G, weapons swinging to cover the lanes between crates.

  “Nothing,” said Sergeant Kunoz, clearly a little spooked. “Not a damn thing moving.”

  “Second and Third, get those two starboard airlocks open,” Lieutenant Zhi told them. “Simultaneous handball then move by numbers. Remember, low-G formations, maximum firepower forward, manoeuvre will not save you here. If ambushed, blast it.”

  Trace held back, feet gently resting on a crate in the zero-point-zero-six-Gs, as Command Squad took up protective position around her, and Echo’s Heavy Squad deployed wide across their rear. With Command Squad along, Heavy would stay back as rear-guard, ready to be supported by the lighter mobility of Command Squad if they were bounced from behind, or to move up and lay down firepower if the forward elements made contact. Trace considered the station schematic once more — it was not precise, as Styx had said the station’s networks were a mess, making an accurate survey impossible. But the layouts of these facilities followed a predictability dictated by their function, and these entry sections adjoining the docking cone were all cargo, repair, engineering, fuelling, and other ship-related functions.

  Ahead were personnel levels, as people were also integral to ship-function — where passenger and crew transport through the engineering levels arrived at customs, or whatever the parren equivalent under parren laws of entry and transit. Beyond that, on this side of the asteroid’s rotating bulk, were command levels, offices, and the bridge. Beyond the bridge, the secure station core, containing direct access to the most sensitive parts of the facility — the reactor core, and central computer systems. The secure station logs would be only accessible from there, disconnected from all wider network systems, given how hacksaws were not the only things in the Spiral that could hack networks remotely.

  Staff Sergeant Ong’s Third Squad got the twin access doors open, and tossed directional handballs through the openings, their relayed feed immediately updating tacnet as to what lay on the far side. Twin passages diverged, so Ong took Third into one while Kunoz took Second Squad through the other, twelve marines each in three four-man sections, moving in short, coordinated bursts of thrust, rifles swinging to cover where needed, without needing to be told.

  Zhi took the upper access with First Squad, Trace the lower with Command, Heavy Squad dividing equally behind them. These were halls for cargo-handling staff on station, access lines running along the walls, side doors leading to workshop bays and other facilities. Some of the doors were open, and marines peered in, weapons ready and not wishing to bypass an ambush along their line of advance. Out of Trace’s sight ahead, Private Long gave a terse cal
l.

  “Body. One parren, looks dead.” Trace switched to Long’s helmet-cam, and saw the dead parren on the floor by Long’s boots, the Private’s armoured glove extending to search for a pulse. Marine gloves had sensors for that, and other lifesign data. “Yeah, confirm he’s dead. Medical, you got this feed?”

  “I copy that Private,” came Corpsman Rashni’s voice from back on Phoenix. She sounded a little puzzled. “Private, can you see any obvious external wounds?” Sergeant Ong gave Third Squad a brief hold, followed by Zhi ordering the same for the whole platoon, least one line of advance get ahead of the other.

  “Can’t see any,” said Long. “Whatever killed him, it wasn’t gunfire.” On Trace’s visor visual, the parren’s eyes, already proportionally larger than a human’s, were wide, bulging and bloodshot. The face was contorted in horror, a most unpleasant sight. His uniform was the dark blue of a utilitarian station worker, with safety harness, equipment pouches and oxygen mask. “The air’s good in here, we could breathe it.”

  “Yeah, we got more of that,” Lance Corporal Bunali’s voice in Second Section. And Trace switched visual to find Bunali’s feed, and caught the indistinct, first-person view of an equipment room, lined with EVA suits and gear lockers. Several parren lay dead on the floor, while another, stuck in the lower half of an EVA suit hung on the wall, was bent double from the waist, slim arms hanging down to his toes. The Lance Corporal’s camera panned about, revealing more bodies, several also struggling with suits. “Looks like they were trying to suit up. Parker, check those sealed suits to make sure there isn’t a survivor inside.”

  “Yo Corporal.”

  “Major Thakur,” came a new voice from Phoenix, “this is Doc Suelo. I’d recommend you keep your filtration systems on maximum, and do not open your visors for anything.”