by A. D. Bloom
"We'll fit."
"Suit yourself, Lucy. But just so you know, I'm piloting the longboat."
"In that case I'll have to ask my Marines for volunteers."
It was spacious in the airlock with all that room for just him and Lucy. On the other side of the hatch the crew of the Doxy stood lined up down the 12-meter longboat in front of the open bay doors. Where their worn exosuits hadn't been patched, radiation had bleached them from navy to sky blue. These were independent operators and they'd clearly put what money they made into their ship.
Narrowed eyes, hard-held mouths, and the flaring nostrils he saw told him before he stepped out of the airlock that the Doxy's crew didn't appreciate what the Shediri had done to their ship. "And you thought you didn't need any security..." said Lucy.
Three steps out the airlock doors and Captain Foet's voice filled Ram's helmet over local comms. "Commodore Devlin, I'd like to register with you our extreme displeasure and resentment at what you've done to our ship." Captain Garlan Foet was shorter than Ram thought he'd be.
"Resentment?"
"That's the word for it."
Garlan's XO next to him looked like he provided the muscle. The rest of them were a mixed lot in every way. Foet even had a powder monkey on his crew along with a spacer that looked old enough to have shipped out with the Doxy on her first run back in 2141.
"And on a legal note..." Captain Foet wasn't done griping at him. "Dana Sellis didn't say anything about modifications to our ship when we signed on. That contract is null and void and don't give me that 'only if you've got the money to fight it' bullshit because after seeing what you did to our ship, any court of arbitration would agr-"
"You're right. You and your crew are the legal majority owners of the Doxy. What we did stealing your ship like that was illegal. I apologize for commandeering her, Captain Fo-et."
"Not Fo-et." The Captain winced in his helmet. "Say it like 'foot'. 'Captain Foot'. And you didn't commandeer our ship, you stole it."
"I'd have offered to buy all of you out instead, but that would have generated a lot of noise within computer financial networks that we can assume to be insecure with regards to Ortani Imperium surveillance. In short, our operational security requirements forced us to steal your ship and bring you in late in the process. I apologize." It seemed Foet hadn't been anticipating that. "Allow me to introduce Colonel Lucy Elan of the Staas Company Marines. She's coming with us to the Doxy."
"You're about to get your ship back, Captain Foet," she said. "You should smile; it isn't every day a man actually gets what he wants." Lucy didn't wink at him, but Ram thought he heard and extra bit of husk in her voice and it put what she'd said into an additional, sexual context. Captain Foet must have heard it because he smiled like she'd told him to.
The Doxy's crew piled into the rear seats of the longboat with Lucy. He invited Foet to take the second pilots' seat, next to him. "I'll fly," Foet said as he strapped into the chair.
"I've got it," Ram said.
"It's not a problem. I mean I don't mind. I like t-"
"Did someone tell you to take the stick from me?"
Foet didn't answer as he went through the flight systems quick checklist procedure for a Staas Co. longboat, stabbing at the console in front of him with his index finger and missing several important steps.
"I asked you a question," Ram said.
"Uh-huh."
It had to be Dana, of course, who'd told Foet not to let him fly, but Ram was happy the Doxy's captain didn't give her up under casual interrogation. That was a good sign. He thumbed tower comms. "Hardway AT, this is longboat six in Bay One requesting clearance."
The response came back with a measure of audible trepidation in Hassan's voice. She said, "Clearance granted, keep it tight, longboat six."
Ram rode the maneuvering thrusters straight up out of the bay while the command tower and the lights of the observation deck and the bridge passed to starboard. In the half-second's pause before the longboat threaded the ring of waiting Sky Jacks, he swore he heard Hassan muttering on the channel. The cheer in the background as she wished him a good trip told him there had been bets down on whether he'd clip one of the fighters or not.
The Sky Jacks spread out above and below and all around them, mostly coasting on little bursts from their thrusters. The junk flared its nacelles once for a half second to get going. Then it coasted, too.
You can hide imprecise flying if you're always correcting for mistakes with vectored thrust, but since Ram was coasting now, that wasn't an option. He fought the urge to correct their course even as the one he'd chosen when he made his first burn was threatening to intersect with the path of the junk. That was Dice's junk. Ram silently thanked him and Lippmann for rotating their nacelles and giving a deceleration burst a couple of seconds early to avoid collision with his longboat.
Ram was just congratulating himself on achieving a good and viable approach towards the Doxy's bay doors when he realized he was the only one in the longboat not fixated on the alien construction that now loomed high above and below. Close up, the curve of the queer flight decks that fringed the superstructure in five levels looked more pronounced. The raiders not on the CAP were mostly on the decks, but a dozen, war-painted Shediri flew across their line of travel. Seeing them up close made Foet's eyes widen in his helmet.
Ram said, "They use a kind of modified field coil for propulsion...those cylinders set between the curving things like stub wings. They contract space on one side of the craft. Low heat sig. Very stealthy."
After they'd flown from view, Foet stared again at the alien superstructure encasing his ship and shook his head. "The hell did they do to our ship? What is that stuff all over it?"
"A kind of chitin," Ram said. "The Shediri build with chitin. Like beetle shell or lobster shell. But it forms with magnetite layers. We repaired Hardway's bulkheads, bays, and armor with panels of it the Shediri give us. It holds up better than our original armor under the Ekkai beam fire." He thumbed comms. "Doxy, Doxy. Hardway longboat six requests permission to dock."
The bay set on the nose of the ship's blue-painted turtle head of a command module opened like a mouth. "Granted, six. Welcome aboard." The voice sounded like Tig Meester.
Ram set the boat down in Doxy's small bay with only a little bump and bounce. He forgot to be embarrassed about the landing when he noticed the other longboat was missing.
"Daddy's home, honey," Carnaby said.
"Don't listen to him," said Annie. She whispered, "Momma's here."
"Looks normal enough in the bay..." Bix said.
"They didn't change everything inside, just built around our ship," said Carnaby. "Right?"
"And through it some, I'm afraid," Ram said. "Through holds 3, 4, 7 and 8." He heard a groan from more than one of them. As he and Lucy and the Doxy's crew spilled out of the boat, Ram gestured up a comms line from his suit to the bridge. "This is Devlin. Who's in the chair?"
"Chief Tig Meester, in command."
"Why are you in command, Meester? And where's the Doxy's other longboat?"
"They all left, Mr. Devlin."
"Whom?"
"All of them. Every last one of the whole Staas team that's been working here. Just after you set out from Hardway, Cyning called the company exolinguists and the tactical communications liaisons over to his yacht. The UN team, too. They said they weren't coming back. Didn't you see them leave on your way over?"
"No. Why didn't they didn't call in? And why didn't you call?"
"Cyning ordered them not to. I would have, but you were already bringing a crew in a longboat just four minutes out."
"Hold the bridge, Meester. We're coming up."
Once they were through the airlocks, they popped their helmets and started up the stairs. "Captain Foet, I need your crew to go to stations immediately. Send your XO to the bridge; I need you elsewhere."
"I like Carnaby back in engineering."
"But he's your XO."
"And my #1 systems man."
"Fine. It's your ship. Have someone else take the bridge for now. You're coming with me. We're going into the Shediri section."
"Now?"
"Right now. There's no time to waste. Our task force will steam for the inner system to begin the counterattack any time. The sooner I introduce you to the big bug, the better."
4
SCS Doxy
Being led through his own ship didn't feel right. Garlan passed Devlin a few strides down the ship's mainsway. That passage led from the command deck all the way down the Doxy's length to her engineering section, her massive pinch coils, reactors, and the HLV6 Pushers that propelled her. "Where's my railcar?" It was missing from its track down the center. It's almost 400 meters to engineering."
"We had to remove it. We'll put it back now that construction is done on the entryway into the Shediri section of the carrier. It's set close to the command deck," Devlin said to the back of Garlan's head. "Fifty meters down... There." The last time Garlan had seen her, the view down the length of that 10-meter wide passage had been clear and not occluded in any way. Now, chitin grew out the side of the bulkheads.
Garlan unconsciously quickened his pace. The curving addition partially blocking the mainsway looked like it was made of domed pieces of dark, iridescent bone. Close up, the refracted reflections off the surface actually tricked his eye, and when he reached out to touch it, his glove made contact a moment earlier than he'd expected. It was smooth to the touch with a light pebbling. It gave no indication of being hollow when he knocked on it.
The alien architecture only protruded into his ship's main passage some two-meters at the most, but the mass of curving shapes looked so wrong in the right-angled world of the Doxy's interior that it gave him a wave of nausea to see it.
"Don't be nervous," Devin said.
"I'm not."
The Commodore stood roughly in the center of the alien mass and looked up at a smaller sphere the size of a man's head that protruded from the mass of larger ones. The face of it opened like an iris and what Garlan saw inside had the cells of an insect's compound eye. "The Shediri are watching. Wave to them." Garlan brought his hand up and waved at the camera like Devlin did.
"Is waving a Shediri thing?"
"No. It was a mistake. One of my redsuits started doing it when he saw them and now, they expect it from friendly humans. They can read our suit transponders, but make sure you wave if you want in."
"Really?"
"If you don't do it, they might not believe you're with us."
"Who else would we be with?" Garlan waited, but the Commodore didn't answer his question.
Devlin nodded to the wall of chitin in front of them. "The door is going to open now. They like .22 gees instead our our standard artificial .3 gees, so be ready for it."
He jumped at the sudden hissing when the chitin directly before him seemed to crack down the middle in a jagged line and withdrew from two sides. The shell rotated around another layer like an inner hull made of what looked to be almost the same, dark, shiny chitin but this inner layer was perceptibly shinier and smooth as a beetle's shell. The section in front of them stood out for being flat and he saw the lines in it where the six pieces of the door met. As they cracked open, Garlan swung his helmet up over his head, brought it down and sealed it.
"Won't be needing that," Devlin said. "We don't wear them anymore. Neon, nitrogen, and oxygen in there. 23% oxygen."
"We can breathe neon?"
"It's inert like the nitrogen," Devlin said, stepping inside. "Doctor Ibora claims there's no alien pathogens to worry about."
"And you believe him?"
Inside the five-meter alien airlock that had been revealed to them, he could see nothing but the curving bottom of the chamber and the cracks of the door leading into the Shediri section. It smelled like socks and chillies and old suit liners in there and the lighting from the rounded panel above was all wrong. It was red and so deep and dim, that when the hatch closed behind him, he couldn't hardly see a thing.
The lock opened onto a chamber large enough that the first thing Garlan thought was how they must have cut through the bulkheads to make it. It had to be 30 meters to the curving outer walls. Passages like walkways crossed overhead and disappeared into open hatches leading into other chambers. On a walkway below, Garlan saw his first Shediri.
The exoskeleton was pinkish like pictures of lobsters, but it had what looked like skin in places that looked tough and swollen with fluids. Four legs twitched in fast motion under its long, earwig like lower body. The midsection curved upwards and the torso leaned back a little.
Its head had too many eyes on too many sides. Though the bug was looking up at them from below, it was easy to see that had they been face to face, he'd have been looking up at it. It had four arms, smaller than the legs. One extended from the others folded across its torso and moved the queer, over-sized grabbing appendage it had back and forth in an arc between them.
"Wave back," Devlin said as he stepped out of the airlock and onto a walkway that curved right and disappeared into the dim of another chamber. "Now, follow me."
After they entered the next section and stepped to the curving deck, he realized the bugs were everywhere. At first, Garlan had only noticed the big ones, but between them, smaller bugs not more than a meter long scuttled. They only had six legs and they didn't stand up. What he could only image to be a toolbox of some kind had been mounted on the backs of at least two of them. They crawled about between a dozen 2.5-meter worker bugs that swayed their upper bodies and hissed and click-clacked at each other as they labored over some kind or power conduits. Garlan got the impression that's what they were because they made the neon in the atmo glow. By that light he saw that the bulkheads literally crawled with things like whip-tailed horseshoe crabs.
"They clean the air," Devlin said.
The alien atmo suddenly made his throat and then his whole chest convulse. He coughed and hacked without being able to stop for several seconds. When he looked up again, the aliens nearby were all waving their torsos left and right and angling their heads at him to view him from different angles with all their compound eyes. Devlin suddenly crossed his arms over his chest like theirs and spoke in pidgin grammar. "Captain Foet. First time," the Commodore said and then, the alien hiss and clack erupted from the audio transducers set in the chest plate of Devlin's suit.
"Hello?" Garlan said as he waved at them. He nearly jumped out of his own exosuit when the speakers set in the chest hissed and clicked in translation. The bugs twitched arms their arms at him. Garlan took it for a wave.
"Very important feature," said Devlin "Listen up...Press here and hold to not translate what you say. The Commodore pressed a button they both shared on a Staas exosuit comms rig.
"What the hell did you do?"
"When you arrived, Hardway's mainframe updated your suitcomp's software with the Human - Shediri conceptual language matrix and a translation daemon. Yours has Ekkai, too. Push this button next to it to toggle it on and off. I triggered your daemon this time. You're on your own with it now. I won't use my command codes to update your gear again without telling you."
"I didn't even know you could do that."
"If it's Staas gear and your command codes are high enough, you can do almost anything remotely. Unless certain links have been pulled from the hardware."
"Really?"
"Trust me. This way to the War Consul," Devlin said.
"Wait. Consul? That's not right," he said as he walked beside Devlin out of that chamber and through a series of intersecting spheres that had been padded heavily with some kind of puffy silk. It gave underneath his boots like he was walking on marshmallow. "War Consul? Doesn't 'consul' mean diplomat?"
"Literally translated, the Shediri words mean 'Diplomat to War' as if war was a place or a kingdom."
"That doesn't make sense," he said. The padded deck gave so much beneath him that he almost fell sideways.
"Nope. Get used to it." The path curved and ended in another of what he could now recognize as a hatch. Above it, another Shediri eyeball opened and watched them briefly as they waved. "Do what I do," Devlin said. "Don't speak unless spoken to. Speak simply when you do."
There was no time for all of Garlan's hundreds of questions. The hatch in front of them opened onto a chamber that was brighter than the others. War painted, armored soldier bugs stood guard around the entire circumference of the circular bottom level of that next chamber. The held something like a short spear in two of their crossed arms. The jabbing spearhead blade at the top of it was the length of his arm.
The bugs beat the chests of their exoskeletons with the empty-handed arms together in what quickly became a frightening din. Then, they all tilted their heads back and exposed vertical mouthparts. When they opened them, it sounded like they hissed steam out between their clacking, serrated jaws.
"I am Devlin," the Commodore shouted into the drumming. After the translation clacked out the Commodore's suit speakers, Devlin turned to him. "Say your name."
"I am Foet." The vibrations from his suit speaker tickled his chest when it clatter-clacked and hissed his name in Shediri. What happened then, Garlan didn't understand. The bugs all froze. All the war-painted bugs in armor around the perimeter of the chamber froze and then, began to keen together making the kind of sound you get when you blow air through a blade of grass. "What did I say?"
"I think they're laughing at your name."
"They do that?"
"What...laugh? Sort of. They wait until it looks like they all 'get it' - whatever's significant. Then they all do that thing they're doing together."
"What the hell was the joke?"
"Your name must have translated into something." Devlin gestured in front of his chestplate, and the manual translation interface was projected for him. "Apparently your name is a phoneme - sounds like "little rock thrower" in Shediri."
