Foxx marched through into the bay, which was filled with ranks of Phantom fighters all being swarmed upon by technicians and service personnel, the bay filled with the sound of machinery and whining engines and the smell of burning electrical devices and smoke as damaged vessels were turned around by the laboring crews.
‘About time!’ Betty chortled as they walked. ‘Are we getting the hell out of here or what?’
‘Let’s go!’
Foxx sprinted across to the shuttle with the tail number 517, which detected Betty’s approach and automatically opened its side access door. Foxx dashed up the ramp and into the cockpit as Vasquez closed the door manually and Betty joined her to take the captain’s seat.
Betty started the shuttle’s systems and then began running the engines up as she called for departure clearance from the signals officer. Moments later, Foxx saw the launch bay doors thunder closed as two more Phantoms landed nearby, an entire squadron using the adjoining bay to recover aboard Titan as quickly as possible.
‘They’re cutting us off!’ Vasquez cried as he pointed out of the windshield at the huge blast doors rumbling downward.
Foxx heard the reply from the landing signal’s officer to Betty’s request.
‘Negative, clearance denied, all vessels to remain aboard Titan until further…’
Betty tutted and hit the magnetic landing clamp switch and the shuttle lifted off as she kicked in a boot of right rudder. The shuttle swung sharply around as Betty shoved the throttles wide open and the shuttle lurched not toward the launch bay exit, but directly toward the landing bay entrance.
‘Holy mother of crap!’ Vasquez uttered as he gripped his seat.
Foxx winced as she saw technicians and other service personnel waving frantically at the shuttle as it broke every launch protocol in the book and soared over their heads toward the rapidly closing doors.
‘This is gonna be close!’ Betty hooted as the shuttle roared toward the sliver of space remaining beneath the solid doors.
‘We’re not gonna make it!’ Foxx yelped as the shuttle roared through the bay, technicians leaping aside to avoid the ship as it rocketed along barely a meter above the deck.
Foxx winced and threw her hands up uselessly as the huge doors slid down before them, and then Betty deliberately pushed forward on the control column and the shuttle’s belly slammed into Titan’s deck. The hull shuddered and Foxx heard a screech of metal on metal as through the side windows she saw a vibrant plume of orange sparks flare either side of the craft as it slid along the deck at full throttle and then the huge bay doors flashed past above them with scant inches to spare and the shuttle shot out of the bay and out into space.
‘Like a glove!’ Betty chortled as she hauled the control column to the right with a whoop of laughter and the shuttle rolled gamely, as though it too were enjoying itself for the first time in its career. Foxx peered through hands still up in front of her face as she saw Titan’s huge hull loom before them and beyond it the tremendous arc of Saturn and its glorious rings.
Foxx got her breathing under control, her heart hammering in her chest as she leaned forward and saw the distant glow of the gaol in orbit around the vast disc of Saturn’s rings.
‘Can you make it there?’ she asked Betty.
The pilot looked at Foxx with a disapproving gaze.
‘You may be a lieutenant young lady, but I’ve been on the job for thirty two years. Do I tell you how to do your job?’
Foxx raised an eyebrow but said nothing as Betty turned back to her controls and the shuttle soared over Titan’s broad stern.
‘Incoming, point two oh five,’ Vasquez said as he pointed out a pair of alien fighters sweeping in from their left.
Betty nodded as she spotted them, and to Foxx’s dismay she turned the shuttle toward the incoming fighters.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked. ‘We’re not armed!’
‘You don’t have to be armed to defend yourself,’ Betty shot back. ‘Detective, the grappling lines if you will?’
Vasquez stared at Betty in amazement. ‘Are you kidding me?’
‘Grappling lines, now!!’
Vasquez was propelled back into his seat as he scrambled to obey and he deployed all eight lines as ordered. Used to dock with ships that may be in distress and without power, the grappling lines allowed a rescue vessel like a shuttle to anchor itself to a hull and access the vessel from the outside.
‘Those fighters are filled with some kind of alien species,’ Foxx warned. ‘If we attach ourselves to them, we’ll be infected.’
‘Watch and learn, lieutenant,’ Betty said without taking her eyes off the two fighters rushing toward them. ‘Detective, prepare to detach the cables on my mark.’
Vasquez’s fingers hovered over the relevant switches on the panel as the shuttle closed head–to–head with the onrushing fighters. Foxx resisted the temptation to throw her hands in front of her face again as Betty charged fearlessly at their enemy.
‘They’re gonna fire!’ Vasquez gasped in a high pitched tone.
Betty grabbed the control column and suddenly she threw the shuttle into a tight roll as she slammed the engines into reverse thrust, the star field spinning before them as she yelled at Vasquez.
‘Detach now!’
Vasquez hit the switch and Foxx saw the eight cables detach from the shuttle, spinning in a wide arc as the shuttle slowed and the eight cables continued on their way. A blaze of gunfire rocketed toward the shuttle as Betty pushed forward and the shuttle dived down beneath the salvo, and all at once Foxx saw the two alien craft fly straight into the spinning mess of grappling lines.
The heavy lines were designed to hold tremendous loads and the grappling hooks were big, talon–like devices that weighed hundreds of kilograms each. The cables tore into the fighters and slewed them sideways as the center of gravity of each craft was shifted by the sudden extra burdens. In a flash the two craft were caught in the same mesh of lines and suddenly they slammed together and exploded in a bright burst of flame and burning gases that shimmered out amid the bitter vacuum of space as the shuttle shot past beneath the fading fireball.
Foxx looked back out of her window at the shattered hulks of the two fighters as they receded swiftly behind the shuttle, and then at Betty.
‘That was…,’ Vasquez began.
‘Amazing,’ Foxx finished the sentence.
‘I know,’ Betty replied as though it were obvious.
Titan’s hull rushed past beneath the shuttle, her massive plating edged with clouds of escaping gases and debris, slivers of orange glowing between them from fires within.
‘She’s beat up pretty bad already,’ Vasquez said.
As if in reply, a crackling communication broke across the radio frequency.
‘Delta Compa.., request immediate…, release, Deck Four, zero–five…,charlie!’
‘You hear that?’ Vasquez said. ‘That’s a Marine company inside the ship somewhere.’
***
XXXIV
CSS Titan
Gunnery Sergeant Jenson Agry crouched in a corridor on Titan’s port hull and checked over his shoulder to see the twenty Marines under his command taking up positions either side of the corridor behind bulkheads, their rifles trained ahead, Corporal Hodgson leading them. Every man was encased in heavy black body armor and mask, a “zero–zero” battle suit optimized for combat in zero gravity and temperatures.
A single bulkhead separated the troop from the breach in Titan’s hull beyond, wrought by the attack from the alien vessel and where the alien drones had penetrated the ship’s interior. Agry was not a man who was easily shaken, having survived two full tours in the Ayleena Wars, but now he knew he was facing something for which no human being could be completely prepared, and it was the lack of knowledge that bothered him. The briefing he’d been given by the admiral was precisely that: brief.
‘All in position,’ came the report from his corporal in his implanted microphone and ear
piece relay.
Agry watched the bulkhead for a moment longer, checked the magazine on his plasma rifle one last time, and then waved his men forward.
Two Marines hurried past him, one covering the other as he placed a small device over the bulkhead’s locking mechanism. Designed not to destroy but simply to override, the device would open the bulkhead and let the Marines get a good look at whatever had infiltrated the flagship of the fleet.
The Marines scurried back to their positions and Agry heard the sapper’s voice in his ear.
‘Doors open in three, two, one…’
A moment of silence passed and then the doors clanged heavily as the massive braces and latches disengaged. With agonizing slowness, the doors began to creep upward as a billowing cloud of super cold air was drawn into the vacuum beyond the doors, the atmosphere vanishing in a whirling vortex of vapor and ice crystals as Agry and his men peered into the shattered hull beyond.
Agry saw what looked like huge steel girders and braces that had been bent by the force of the impacts of the colliding fighters, signs of molten metal frozen by the vacuum of space into bizarre sculptures like gigantic metal trees and flowers. Through the metallic forest sparkled clouds of debris all turning and shifting at once like a million tiny stars glistening before them in the darkness.
‘It’s in there somewhere,’ Agry murmured. ‘Stay on your guard.’
Slowly, he crept toward the gaping maw of the hull, noted the faint glimmer of light coming from Saturn’s glow outside the ship and heard the groan and thump of plasma fire raining down on the ship’s hull to reverberate through the superstructure.
The shifting whorls of vapor faded away into clouds of ice crystals, further obscuring the damaged section of the hull as Agry reached the bulkhead and peered into the darkness. The hull breach was twenty or more meters in width, and he could see all three layers of Titan’s thick hull plating blasted inward one after the other by the repeated impacts of the enemy drones, like a gigantic metallic flower embedded in the side of the ship. Beyond was deep space, Saturn’s pale glow cast through the cavity to dimly illuminate the interior of the ship.
Agry waved his men cautiously forward and they crept into the cavity, moving silently from cover to cover as they advanced. Agry pointed at two Marines and gestured for them to stand guard at the bulkhead as the rest of the team advanced. The two Marines instantly engaged a ray shield over the bulkhead to replace the blast doors and prevent any of the alien material from entering the ship proper.
Agry eased himself up onto a shattered gantry and crouched in silence as he watched his men disperse, their movements causing the clouds of tiny pieces of debris to coil in whorls around them like flotsam in a dark ocean. As he crouched watching for the slightest movement ahead of his men in the darkness, so his eye caught upon a discrepancy in the debris around him. Titan’s massive hull braces lined the interior of the hull like the ribs of some unspeakably large creature, but as Agry’s eyes cast across them so he noticed what looked like an extra one poking out of the shattered plating above them, its jagged tip glinting like metal and yet looking almost like ice as the light from Saturn beamed through the hull. Admiral Marshall’s briefing shot through his mind and two words blazed through his awareness like plasma blasts.
Shape shifter.
‘Enemy, high! Fall back!’
Agry’s cry had barely broken out of his throat when the immense brace suddenly shifted position, coiled up like a snake and then lashed out with terrific speed toward the Marines. Agry swung his rifle around as the jagged form shot across the hull, stretching out like some angular arm of ice, and he fired a single shot that slammed into the brace’s mid–section amid a burst of plasma that flared like lightning in the gloom.
The brace shattered in two but it kept moving as the Marines below Agry all opened fire at once upon the bizarre projectile. The form broke up further amid the blasts but then several of the sections landed near the Marines and split up, rolling and writhing and crawling and moving in ways that Agry could barely discern in the brief seconds it took them to swarm in among his men. Like liquid metal droplets running down a window they lurched across the girders and gantries toward the Marines.
Then the screams started.
Agry fired again as he saw the objects splinter into millions of tiny forms, like clouds of razor blades that flickered and flashed and scythed their way through the soldiers’ armor in a blurred frenzy of motion. The armored suits of several Marines were scythed open and escaping blasts of pressurized air burst in clouds of vapor into the vacuum as the Marines trapped within their coffin–like suits were sliced to pieces by the lethal clouds.
‘Fall back!’ Agry yelled again.
The Marines all began backing up toward the bulkhead from which they had entered the breach, firing as they went at the clouds of lethal splinters all travelling under their own momentum toward the Marine’s positions.
Agry saw four of his men reach the bulkhead and cry out for the ray–shielding to be opened.
‘Hold the line!’ Agry yelled. ‘Maintain fire!’
The soldiers turned and began firing wildly again, but their plasma blasts simply broke the clouds of splinters up into smaller groups that kept moving toward them.
Agry knew that the devices must eventually become too small to power themselves, but he could not think of a means to break them down sufficiently to render them useless except by continuously blasting them.
He turned his rifle on the nearest cloud of particles and fired, saw the searing plasma blast crash through it and leave a trail of what looked like thousands of glowing embers as the entity was scorched and incinerated, but the rest of the cloud burst aside from the shot and then closed in behind it like a school of fish avoiding a predator.
‘There’s too many of them!’ Corporal Hodgson yelled as he fired shot after shot into the clouds of debris now swarming toward their position in front of the doors. ‘We can’t shoot them all!’
Agry looked over his shoulder at the ray–shielding and he knew that he could not afford to open the barrier and have the bizarre life form follow them through. He looked at the whirling clouds of particles now bearing down upon them and he knew that there was nowhere else to run.
His mind churned with desperation as he sought some means of evading this bizarre yet lethal predator, and then he recalled Doctor Schmidt’s words from the sick bay. The organism in the main quarantine cubicle will be aware that a sample of its being has been taken, but this much smaller sample will no longer be aware of what or where it is.
‘Down!’ he yelled. ‘Head down into the ship and take them with us! We keep running, we can keep breaking them up until they lose cohesion and awareness!’
The Marines broke from their positions and leaped out into the void, firing in pairs at the writhing coils of material pursuing and reaching out for them like gnarled fingers of fluid that seethed within themselves as though made from boiling metallic water. Agry pushed off from his position and plunged down with them to land heavily on a ledge of shattered deck plating, his weight drawing him down fast enough toward Titan’s Higgs generator to escape the pursuing horde.
‘This way!’
Agry yelled at the remaining Marines to follow him as he jumped downward from shattered deck to shattered deck, putting more and more distance between them and their pursuers. The clouds of writhing entities wound their way through the shattered decks above them, plunging through the beams of light cast by Saturn as Agry hit the lowest deck exposed to the vacuum of space and saw that there was nowhere else left to run.
He whirled and saw against the interior walls of the hull a bulkhead hatch still sealed against the damage.
His Marines landed all around him, their plasma rifles firing in absolute silence in the vacuum but the light from the blasts illuminating the cold black metal around Agry as though he were standing below a thunderstorm raging through the darkness of the night. He dashed across to the fire hatch and ke
yed his communicator.
‘Delta Company, request immediate hatch release, Deck Four, zero–five–one–four–charlie!’
The communicator crackled in response and Agry turned, his back to the hatch in case it opened as he fired up at the advancing clouds of tiny beings threatening to consume them alive.
‘Communicators are down!’ Corporal Hodgson yelled. ‘We can’t get the hatch open from here!’
Agry fired again at the cloud of particles raining down toward them, and he knew that there was nothing else that they could do.
‘Take as many of them with us as we can!’ he roared.
*
Foxx peered out of the windshield of the shuttle at Titan’s vast hull as she heard the request crackle again across the communications channel.
‘Delta Compa.., request immediate…, release, Deck Four, zero–five…,charlie!’
‘That’s a Marine company,’ Vasquez said. ‘Sounds like they’re in trouble.’
‘Deck Four,’ Betty said as she surveyed the vast hull. ‘You know where that is?’
Vasquez pointed down at one of the huge gashes in Titan’s surface, a black maw filled with spiralling clouds of debris.
‘There, right there! They must be inside! We’re close enough that their transmission is breaking through all the interference.’
The shuttle turned, Betty guiding the craft into the ragged chamber forged into Titan’s hull by the aliens’ attack. The shuttle descended into the gloom, and almost at once the spacecraft’s running lights illuminated a roiling cloud of particles below them that looked like some kind of typhoon or tornado that swirled as though alive over a small platoon of Marines trapped in the lower decks.
‘They’re cut off!’ Vasquez said as he saw the Marines.
‘And we don’t have any weapons,’ Foxx pointed out as the whirling funnel of beings twisted away from the shuttle’s lights.
Although there was no discernable form to the funnel before them, somehow Foxx instinctively knew that it had detected their presence and had turned to face them. Its shape suddenly mutated once again, folding in upon itself as it suddenly formed a smaller, shuttle–like shape complete with shadowy markings similar to the one in which Foxx, Vasquez and Betty sat.
Titan (Old Ironsides Book 2) Page 25
