“They’re still coming, Captain,” Callaway said.
“Lock weapons on their hull,” Elton ordered. He had permission to open fire without warning if he believed his ship and her charges were under threat. “Prepare to engage ...”
“Energy spike,” Callaway snapped. “They’re firing!”
The display blazed with red icons. “Standard missile load,” Biscoe said. He sounded relieved. “Nothing new, Captain.”
“Return fire,” Elton snapped. The enemy ships were launching a second barrage, trying to overwhelm his defences. They were in for a surprise. “Point defence, engage!”
He allowed himself a cold smile as his ship opened fire, phaser bursts lashing out towards the incoming targets with a rapidity that had to horrify her opponents. They didn't even have the latest Tokomak missiles, let alone some of humanity’s more interesting designs. Elton doubted that even one of their missiles would get close to his shields. They had to be pirates, then. No respectable government would risk an engagement when they were so badly outmatched.
Odyssey quivered as the two smaller enemy ships altered course, swooping in to engage her with energy weapons. Callaway fired back, blasting one of the enemy ships into an expanding cloud of gas and damaging the other one. Elton was morbidly impressed that the pirates managed to keep their ship intact, even though they were bleeding plasma into interplanetary space. But they didn't have a hope of escape, unless their bigger brother managed to evade Odyssey or overwhelm her ...
“The enemy ship is altering course,” Callaway reported. “Captain, she’s trying to escape.”
Elton didn't blame the enemy CO. He’d thought he was picking on a sheep, but instead he’d caught hold of a lion. Odyssey’s missiles were fast, fast enough to make interception almost impossible. The enemy ship’s shields were already failing. Clearly, the enemy hadn't bothered to power up their stardrive. They’d have escaped already if they’d bothered to take that simple precaution.
Idiots, Elton thought, darkly.
“Take out her drives,” he ordered. “I want her intact.”
“Aye, Captain,” Callaway said.
Odyssey quivered as she unleashed another spread of missiles. The enemy ship fought back desperately, but simply lacked the point defence to stop them. Elton watched, feeling cold, as the missiles slammed into the rear of the enemy ship, destroying her drive section. The heavy cruiser went dark a second later, venting atmosphere and plasma as she spun out of control ...
“Captain,” Callaway said. “The enemy ship has been disabled.”
Elton nodded. He’d half-expected the alien ship to explode. “Dispatch a boarding party,” he ordered, curtly. “And ready quarters for any prisoners, if we find them.”
“Aye, Captain,” Callaway said.
Biscoe spoke, very quietly. “Captain, they could be waiting for us to send over the marines before hitting the self-destruct.”
Elton nodded, grimly. Sending the marines was a calculated risk. On one hand, he could ill afford to lose them; on the other, he needed to know who had attacked them and why. Piracy was a growing problem as the Tokomak retreated from the sector, abandoning control to those with the will and power to take it, but the pirates might have been encouraged to attack the convoy. The Tokomak had every reason to want to challenge his ship, if they caught wind of the deployment. Hell, the only reason to doubt their involvement was that they would have had to move quickly and they weren't good at moving quickly.
“I know the dangers,” he said. “But we don’t have a choice.”
“Aye, Captain,” Biscoe said.
***
Lieutenant Levi Dennis closed her eyes and accessed the neural link as the marines were launched out of the assault shuttle and blasted directly towards the giant alien ship. It was small, she supposed, compared to some of the other starships she’d seen, but she was smaller than an ant on such a scale. Her combat suit oriented itself automatically as it closed in on the ship, spinning around to present a slightly harder target. If the aliens had chosen to open fire ...
Nothing happened. She landed on the alien hull, glancing from side to side as the remainder of the platoon landed on either side of her. Their formation was ragged - she’d seen more ordered formation from kids just entering Boot Camp - but the marines had learnt from bitter experience that a ragged formation was far harder to counter. Her sensors swept the hull quickly, picking up traces of energy from where missiles and phaser fire had bitten into the metal. There were no signs that the enemy crewmen were just biding their time before opening fire.
Which proves nothing, Levi thought, as she started to hurry towards the nearest gash in the hull. They might know how to hide.
“Deploy stealth nanoprobes,” she ordered. “Platoon One, with me; Platoon Two, go through the upper airlock.”
She reached the gash and jumped inside, hastily searching for targets. Nothing moved. The ship looked like a honeycomb, a melted and twisted structure trapped in hard vacuum. Her suit picked up traces of atmosphere - the crew, whoever they were, had breathed something akin to humanity’s ideal oxygen mix - but nowhere near enough to support anyone without heavy cybernetic enhancement. She had the full spectrum of marine augmentation and even she would have hesitated to try breathing vacuum unless the alternative was certain death.
“The probes are building up a picture of the interior,” Sergeant Kath reported. “Intel matches the design ...”
Levi nodded as the plans popped up in her HUD. “We’ll go straight for the bridge,” she said, picking her way down towards the right deck. “Keep spreading the probes through the ship.”
She tensed as she pushed her way down the corridor, but nothing jumped out at her. The gravity was completely gone, leaving pieces of debris floating in the air. She kept glancing into side compartments as she moved, more troubled than she cared to admit by the lack of bodies. A standard heavy cruiser, if she recalled correctly, had over a thousand crewmen. She wasn't sure if that was true for alien-designed ships too, but she couldn't imagine the ship being completely unmanned.
An AI could operate a ship, she mused, as she forced her way through a jammed hatch. But the Tokomak refused to create true AIs ...
She stopped, dead, as she saw the bodies. Her mind rebelled, just for a second. It didn't want to believe what it was seeing. Dozens of bodies, utterly inhuman ... their mangled remains strikingly unfamiliar. They looked like giant grasshoppers. She shivered as she pushed her way through the bodies, probing on towards the bridge. The aliens were dead, but her imagination kept insisting that they were moving, their giant insectoid eyes following her every move.
“I have a match,” Major Rhodan said. “They’re Skirats.”
“Never heard of them, sir,” Kath said.
Levi nodded, curtly. There were more bodies now, drifting helplessly in the vacuum. Some of the aliens had clearly been armed, others seemed unarmed ... she wondered, as she forced her way down to the bridge, if they had been slaves or if she was misunderstanding what she was seeing. Aliens weren't human, whatever the cultural relativists insisted. The Skirats might just be utterly beyond human comprehension.
“They’re native to this sector,” Lieutenant Alleyway said. The intelligence officer sounded fascinated. “They actually have five genders and ...”
Rhodan snorted. “Is this actually important? Or relevant?”
“Sir, I’ve found the bridge hatch,” Levi said, quickly. “It looks as though the safety measures failed. The bridge is open to the vacuum. Nanoprobes report no trace of survivors.”
She reached out with her armoured hands and pulled the hatch open. It came off, allowing her to glide into the giant compartment. A dozen aliens were seated at consoles, all dead; three more drifted in the air, one carrying something her suit insisted was a heavily-modified plasma rifle. She checked it automatically as she swept the chamber, but found nothing threatening. The entire ship was dead.
“Weird,” Kath observed, as he foll
owed her into the bridge. “The safety systems are usually the last things to go.”
“Perhaps they skipped basic maintenance,” Levi said. She pulled a standard remote access processor from her belt and placed it by the nearest console. It was unlikely the techs would be able to pull anything from the starship’s computers without removing the datacores and powering them up somewhere safe, but it was worth a try. “Or perhaps someone sabotaged the ship.”
She was more perplexed than she cared to admit, she decided, as they checked the nearest sections. The entire ship was open to vacuum. None of the nanoprobes reported anything beyond faint traces of atmosphere. The aliens would have found it impossible to wear human or Tokomak spacesuits, she thought, but they should have been able to design something that matched their physiology. It wouldn't have been that difficult.
“This place reminds me of a horror movie,” Rifleman Jones said, over the communications link. “Everyone is dead ...”
“And not going to come to life,” Levi said, crossly. She’d seen those movies too. She had never really been able to decide if they were meant to be comedies or bloodstained gore-flicks. The marines in those movies had acted more like trigger-happy punks than professional warriors. “Just in case, don’t push down on your trigger and lock it in place.”
“No, LT,” Jones said.
“Got something for you,” Corporal Rollins put in, from the bridge. He sounded deeply shocked. “Someone deliberately fucked the emergency lockdown system.”
Rhodan coughed. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, sir,” Rollins said. “I'm looking at the hatch. Someone deliberately undermined the safety functions - it snapped closed, but it didn't lock. They’re normally designed to be hard to open and remain airtight even if unlocked ... here, someone buggered the system so it actually started to open again while the ship was venting. I haven’t seen anything like this outside very bad movies. They meant to literally kill the entire crew while leaving the ship relatively intact.”
“Fucking A,” Jones muttered.
Levi sucked in her breath. Sabotage on this sort of scale ... it was unthinkable, outside bad movies. She would sooner believe incompetent maintenance work than ... she shook her head, dismissing the thought. There would be time to consider it later, back when they were safely back on their mothership.
“Major, the computer cores are completely depowered,” she said, curtly. “If there are any surprises left onboard this hulk, we’re not going to find them short of a full sweep. There’s certainly no reason to believe that anyone is still alive. I would like to remove the cores, then abandon the ship.”
There was a long pause. She had a feeling she knew what was going through her superior’s head. The heavy cruiser was a valuable prize, even if she was literally decades out of date. The Solar Navy would pay a bounty for her. Perhaps not as much as they would pay for a top-of-the-line Tokomak battleship or a ship from a completely unknown alien race, but enough to buy each member of the squad a luxury holiday somewhere hot and sunny. Or a few thousand beers, if they wished. But, on the other hand, the ship was potentially dangerous. Without shields, without any internal force fields, a mere nuke would be enough to shatter the hull and kill the boarding party.
“Do so,” Rhodan ordered. “Recover two of the bodies as well.”
Levi allowed herself a moment of relief. “Aye, sir,” she said. She switched back to the local channel. “Back to work, all of you.”
“I’d like to sweep the cabins too,” Sergeant Kath said. “One of the crew might have recorded something useful, if they’re anything like us.”
“True,” Levi agreed. The spacers and marines had been cautioned, time and time again, against keeping personal records in places where they could be stolen by enemy forces. But there had been incidents where marines had been reprimanded - or worse - for doing it anyway. It was possible, vaguely possible, that the aliens had done the same thing. “But don’t take too long.”
“I won’t,” Kath said. “I feel naked in here.”
“You are naked in your suit, Sergeant,” Rollins put in.
“Just for that, you can help me,” Kath said. “The sooner it’s done, the sooner we can get out of here.”
And hope that we can recover something that tells us what’s actually going on, Levi thought, wryly. No one wants to come back here.
Chapter Five
Ideally, no one would require a helping hand - from anyone. And yes, there is something to be said for solving your own problems. But let’s face it - not everyone can solve their own problems. Do we not have the moral responsibility to provide help? Indeed, do we not already help those who are oppressed by fallen cantons?
-Solar Datanet, Political Forum (Grand Alliance Thoughts).
Rebecca had never been a racist. Classical racism was almost unknown in the Solar Union, while anti-alien sentiment was very limited. And yet, looking down at the two dead aliens, she couldn't help feeling that they were just too alien. Merely looking at their insectoid bodies sent shivers down her spine. She couldn't escape the sense that they were looking back at her, even though they were very definitely dead. The bodies were completely inert.
“Death by vacuum,” Doctor Rhonda Carr said, as she studied the live feed from the nanoprobes she’d injected into the first corpse. “There’s no trace of any other factor, as far as I can tell.”
Captain Yasser looked displeased. “No Trojan Horses? No enemy nanotech?”
“Not unless they’ve stumbled on something completely new,” Rhonda said. She tapped the computer display. “There’s no trace of any augmentation or genetic enhancement. I didn't even find any standard nanities in their bloodstreams.”
“Odd,” the captain mused.
“Maybe not,” Rebecca said. “There are quite a few people who dislike the idea of tiny machines in their blood.”
“It’s a very unusual attitude for a spacer,” the captain pointed out. “They’d need nanities for protection.”
He glanced at Chief Engineer Daniel Wolf. “Did your team pull anything out of the ship records?”
“I can confirm that the ship’s life support and safety systems were deliberately buggered,” Wolf said. His voice was very grim. Rebecca knew how he felt. Tampering with the life support systems was an automatic death sentence in the Solar Union. “If the ship took a crippling level of damage, the hatches would spring open and the internal force fields would collapse. The entire ship would be vented at terrifying speed. I suspect the crew were deliberately encouraged not to use spacesuits to ensure a clean sweep.”
Rebecca shook her head in disbelief. “If they can do that,” she asked, “why not just blow up the entire ship?”
“They might have hoped to recover the hulk at a later date,” Wolf said. He snorted in droll amusement. “Frankly, it would be cheaper to build a whole new ship than repair her.”
“Probably,” the captain agreed. “Did you pull anything from the datacores?”
“Very little,” Wolf admitted. “The AIs are trying to dissect the cores now, but it looks as though the crew were careful not to write anything down. The automated systems did keep updating the logs, which will let us trace the ship’s movements back in time ...”
He shrugged. “From an engineering standpoint, I’d say they were pirates,” he added. “They didn't have the experience or knowledge to check their ship for unpleasant surprises.”
“Keep me updated,” the captain ordered. “Madam Ambassador?”
Rebecca looked up. “There’s no one to talk to here, is there?”
“I don’t think so,” the captain said. “The enemy crews are dead.”
“True,” Rebecca agreed. “How do you intend to proceed?”
“We’ll set out again once we’ve finished scouring their datacores for anything useful,” the captain told her. “I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by trying to hunt their base down, unless we get a solid lead. We’ll pass what we’ve learned on to the loc
al authorities and let them worry about the pirates.”
“If they are pirates,” Rebecca said. “They might have been something akin to the Hordesmen instead.”
“Perhaps,” the captain agreed. “They certainly didn't know how to handle their ships.”
Rebecca nodded. The Hordesmen hadn't known how to handle their ships either. They hadn't even developed the wheel when they’d been forcibly introduced to galactic society and put to work as mercenaries. They’d obtained starships, eventually, but they’d never understood how their technology actually worked. Their sheer lack of awareness had eventually cost the group that had stumbled across Earth a starship ...
... And unleashed humanity upon the universe.
The Long Road Home (A Learning Experience Book 4) Page 5
