Croma Venture: (The Spiral Wars Book Five)

by Joel Shepherd

  “Styx, give me a preliminary theory on how the reeh are blocking you. Organic species should not be able to do that, correct?”

  “Yes Captain. What little contact I can establish indicates an AI-level sophistication in communications technology at least, and likely thus the computing power that underlies it. In all my years of observation, organic brains are incapable of sufficiently grasping the concepts involved to evolve them indigenously. My supposition — we know that the alo have joined forces with the deepynines, we know that drysines joined forces with parren and others during and after the Drysine/Deepynine War. We also know that the reeh incorporate other organic species by absorbing and manipulating their genetic structure. Perhaps the reeh have previously absorbed an AI race, perhaps survivors from one of the Spiral’s other AI wars. There were many, the Drysine/Deepynine War was just the last.”

  “Well that’s just great,” Erik muttered. “Lucky they never acquired drysine-level ship propulsion or they’d have occupied all the Spiral by now.”

  Surely this, unknown to most of the Spiral, was the most dangerous species in the galaxy. And now Phoenix, on behalf of all humanity, had just picked a fight with it.

  21

  “Cocky, get back to the entry point and see if you can get lasercom on a shuttle,” Trace told Corporal Rael by her suit lasercom, fixed on Rael’s faceplate by automatic. “Take Second Section, no one moves alone in here.”

  “Aye Major,” said Rael, running back the way they’d come. It had to be lasercom here even face-to-face, Command Squad’s hallway was still vacuum so raising the faceplate to yell at someone wasn’t an option. Zale and Rolonde joined him, rifles unslung and watching cross-corridors warily as they passed. An advantage of operating in an airless station segment was that any uninvited guests transitioning from a pressurised segment would announce their presence by blasting their own region to vacuum, sending a brief gust of air rushing down the halls. Trace’s instruments hadn’t seen it yet, but no one was taking any chances.

  “We’ll get the bridge without coms,” Kono said confidently from his cover position up the corridor, lasercom on her with his back turned. “We’ve done it before.”

  “We’re getting out,” Trace decided. “This thing’s got trap written all over it. The others will send marines to observation points, we’ll contact the shuttles and use them to move the message.”

  It was going to take a whole lot of time, though. Another person might have ground her teeth. Kono was right — everyone knew how to operate without coms. It happened only rarely on assaults that defenders would jam everyone so badly that they couldn’t talk — jamming affected everyone, attackers and defenders, and defenders usually needed to talk most since they were the only ones who didn’t know what the gameplan was, and had to react and coordinate to events on the spot.

  But sometimes tavalai had dug in and defended in fixed sectors, abandoning the mobility that was never their strongpoint anyway, and jammed with white fury that turned every transmission to static. Marines were trained to coordinate in small groups and improvise, with autonomy given to noncoms and even privates that tavalai, with their preferences for large formations, did not share. On those occasions, jamming had made little difference to the final outcome. Somehow, to Trace, this felt quite different.

  “You don’t want to at least make a try for the bridge?” Kono pressed. Trace heard the uncertainty in the big Staff Sergeant’s voice. They’d come a long way to do this. The stakes back home were impossibly large. They’d all sworn to risk everything if it meant finding a counter to the biotech threat.

  “We’re all humanity’s got out here, Giddy,” she told him. “If we go down, that’s it. Never force a bad position — back out, regroup and find another…”

  Something hit her. It wasn’t physical, it wasn’t anything her brain could find a way to process. Awareness dimmed, reality turned dreamlike, like that time she’d been knocked unconscious in Kulina training and awoken on the gym mats blinking at the ceiling and dimly recalling that she’d been doing something else just now…

  Wake up. Focus. Breathe, calm the racing heart, find your bearings. Her vision strained clear, visor pressed against a steel wall. She was on one knee, fallen forward against the wall, and she strained to get her legs moving under her. That triggered her muscles and her heart rate, followed by a wave of nausea and splitting head pain, then blackness.

  But she knew that feeling, it was the suit’s meds pumping sedative through the inhaler, reading nausea levels and calculating that she was about to throw up. Throwing up in suits was dangerous, particularly when on the verge of unconsciousness — suit automated systems were a marvel of technology, as advanced as anything that flung warships through hyperspace, but they were not great at keeping airways clear and preventing a marine from choking in her own vomit. Sedative kicked in first, mostly to stop the nausea, with unconsciousness a frequent side effect…

  Trace had once been waterboarded in Kulina training, lain on her back with a wet cloth over her face, and had water poured over it. Breathing had become a desperate effort, creating the sensation of drowning, leading to panic and that thing which was the enemy of Kulina above all else — the loss of self-control. Most trainees hadn’t lasted more than a few minutes and had sat up soon enough, being free to do that whenever they chose. Trace had held for twenty minutes, and the session had only stopped because the instructor feared she might have passed out, having slowed her heart so low through meditation that her requirement for oxygen dropped to negligible. Every other trainee had sworn they were going to do that too, but somewhere between doing it in theory, and doing it in practice, panic had interceded.

  She reached for that control now, focusing inward, spreading her attention to every limb, directing awareness away from the suffocating blanket of nausea and consciousness disfunction that had descended. Thought returned, and she was still leaning face-first against the wall. Moving again would only trigger nausea and more suit sedative, not wanting her throwing up while borderline conscious.

  She needed a trigger, something to cut through the gloom. Something real, to distract the brain’s focus from whatever was happening to it. Like telling a wounded marine to focus on the pain for the simple reason that it would keep him from drifting toward the deadly comfort of sleep. ‘Pain is your friend!’ the drill instructors would roar at them in the Academy, while officer candidates had slithered through mud and wire on bruised limbs and aching muscles. ‘Pain tells you that you’re not dead yet!’

  Pain. She changed her vision’s focus, and blinked on coms. Feedback screeches were not hard to arrange — marines had them programmed into coms so that someone could send a burst if she were too badly injured to talk, helping tacnet to find her location from that burst. Trace blinked the screech wide to all channels, amped the volume to max and sent.

  It sounded awful, an eardrum blast at a nasty pitch, but even as one ear went partially deaf, consciousness returned hard, giving her the time to extend the blast and put onto permanent loop despite her visor system’s protests.

  “Phoenix Company!” she managed to yell hoarsely over that network-wide transmission. “Status report NOW!”

  She levered herself to her feet, hand-walking up the wall until she achieved something approaching upright. Kono was still standing, but suits did that, locked out so the occupant could sit on the saddle and save his legs, even asleep. His arm moved now, involuntarily to his face as a man might reach for his forehead after waking from a hard night out.

  “Major I’m here!” Visor com told her it was Jalawi talking, barely audible over the horrid screech. “I was… I was out, I don’t know…”

  “Everyone fucking listen!” Trace shouted, and her stomach nearly lurched. She couldn’t lose it now… but she was more awake, and the suit didn’t mind her losing her lunch while conscious. “It’s some kind of attack, it’s a mind-weapon, it knocks you unconscious! Pain works against it, so hurt yourself and focus on that!”


  But of course they were all in armour, so inflicting physical pain was impossible past the suit, and opening the suit in a vacuum was fatal.

  “We are full withdrawal now!” she continued. “Everyone get the fuck out, pull back to your entry points and cover the extraction! We’re not being jammed any longer, whatever this thing is it doesn’t work with jamming so at least we can talk! And watch for ambush, if I were them I’d hit us real fucking hard right about now, so blast everything that isn’t us and take no chances!”

  She flipped channels, tacnet reestablishing in a flurry of blue dots and station schematics, showing her Charlie, Alpha, Garudan, Delta… “Major, is that you?”

  It sounded like Ensign Blunt on Operations, but either the signal remained unclear, or the fragmented mess that remained of her hearing was giving out, like someone standing too close to the big speakers at a rock concert. “Blunt, this is the Major! Blunt?”

  “Hello Major,” cut in Styx’s voice. “There is still some directional jamming, but I can make modulations that Phoenix crew cannot. I understand the reeh are deploying a mind control weapon?”

  Something else was exploding on coms, Charlie Platoon shooting at something, red dots appearing where previously tacnet showed her only blue. “Jalawi, report!”

  “Under attack Major,” said Jalawi, each syllable extra agony on her ears. “Can’t say what… sorry, can’t talk, gotta move.” Everyone was struggling with nausea and dizziness. For her Lieutenants, so accustomed to effortless multi-tasking, basic things like talking and moving at the same time became a struggle.

  “Fighting withdrawal, people!” Trace called on the main channel, having no doubt the attacks would now spread. No coms light from Makimakala, and no tacnet feed either, just silence. Another flip. “Styx, can you reach Djojana Naki?”

  “I will try. Major, Phoenix is on approach, I am informing the Captain of your status.”

  There was shooting now from Garudan Platoon, Karajin on Command Channel calmly telling his tavalai to maintain formation and back out firing. Then Bravo Platoon joined in, barely fifty metres ahead of her current position. Then Alpha, and now she could hear Dale bellowing, “I am UF Marine Corps and I love the pain! Come and get some pain, fuckers!” In the background, the heavy thudthudthud! of Koshaims blowing holes in things.

  “Major,” said Styx, her voice eerily calm against that blood curdling racket. “I have established relayed coms with Makimakala’s Company. It’s not good.”

  Coms switched, to what tacnet told her was Djojana Naki’s link. “Djojana Naki? Naki, can you hear me?” For a moment, there was static. Then the static flickered, fading in and out, like ground glimpsed from an airplane through holes in the passing cloud. The flickers grew, and in the gaps in between the static, Trace could hear screaming. And sobbing. She’d rarely heard such a thing from human marines. She’d never known tavalai were capable. “Naki! Naki, it’s Thakur, situation?”

  What came back was untranslated Togiri, static-broken and faded. It was Naki, and he was crying. Trace recalled the tavalai man, stoic and powerful, unflinching and biologically incapable of panic as humans understood it. And now her blood ran cold.

  “Naki!” she barked, in her best command voice to hide the growing desperation. “Karasai Commander, get a fucking grip and report!”

  In the background, more shooting, this time coming from Naki’s coms. More screaming, and cries for help. Like they were all dying over there.

  “Styx, inform Makimakala that…” Boom, she felt the shockwave more than heard it, Kono’s rifle firing directly alongside her at something down the corridor. Trace threw herself rolling against the opposite wall, the best cover from anything in that spot Kono was shooting at. Something hit the wall above them, a blast and shower of shrapnel, then fire hit Kono’s aimpoint from the reverse side, ripping that corner to spinning metal chunks. That was Zale and Rolonde coming back, Trace saw from tacnet, and now advancing on the spot they’d plastered while Kono shouted for them to watch their flanks.

  “Inform Makimakala,” Trace resumed her previous instruction, “that their karasai are in terminal trouble and must be extracted immediately!”

  “I have already done so, Major.”

  We came in here with no reserves, Trace thought desperately. There was no one to extract the committed units with. Everyone currently in had to get out on their own.

  She’d changed facing without even thinking, guarding Kono’s back while he faced their previous target. Her visor saw movement before she did, a flash of yellow on the screen where something was not static, and did not match tacnet’s known locations for her marines. She fired just as it did, and rolled as something blew up on top of her, adding a short-termination grenade to more Koshaim fire, exploding ten metres down the corridor like a giant shotgun blast. Smoke filled the corridor, thick white like a wall and certainly about to be used to cover more movement. Trace abandoned subtlety to turn sideways and put a backrack missile into the corridor wall.

  The blast was big enough to rattle her even at this range, white smoke whipped away by the blast, revealing an entire four metres of wall peeled like a banana, fires burning and liquids spurting, thankfully not flammable.

  “Major!” Kono said with alarm, struggling to follow as she advanced on the wrecked corridor, and the dark figure sprawled on the intersection floor. She took the right wall to give Kono the left, edged the corner and received no fire, then crossed to look down at the fallen armour.

  There were three of them, one here, two back in the corridor. The near one dripped. Not blood, it dripped with external fluids, like ooze. The blast had shredded it, limbs askew, bones showing. The faceplate was half gone, long like a snout. Within the exposed half was a mess, but enough remained intact to reveal lipless teeth, bared in a permanent snarl. Where the eye had been, synthetics shone like broken glass, embedded in the torn flesh and bone.

  “Reeh?” Kono wondered.

  Nothing in this place is what it was, Trace thought. Nor remains what it is. Reeh changed everything, a species in permanent, self-inflicted phase. “I don’t think so,” she forced herself to say above the pounding in her head and ears. “Something else. Garudan found cylinders filled with ooze.” Indicating the wet armour. “Some kind of suspended animation, left here to ambush anyone who came along. One of the reeh’s slave-species, maybe.” Conditioned, like the poor bloody animals in the corbi’s lab, to sacrifice their lives like mindless drones upon the sayso of their masters. Twisted and augmented into something barely recognisable from what they’d once been. “I didn’t read any local decompressions, these must have already been in here with us.”

  “There will be more,” said Kono, and Trace’s sensors spiked, a warning rush of oxygen and nitrogen.

  “Breach ahead!” she announced. “Guard this passage, I’ve got the next one.” She ran forward, seeing Zale running up behind, tacnet now informing her that Bravo’s first fallbacks were approaching entry point beneath her.

  “Major, we’re pulling back,” said Jalawi. “Got numbers going past us, heading for your up-spin flank.”

  “Copy Skeeta,” said Trace, extending a view-probe from the suit’s shoulder to peer around the L-junction corner ahead, back to the wall. Running, black-armoured figures loped up the corridor like alien hunting dogs. Processing that, tacnet added three new red dots for all to see. “I got dots.”

  “Got your dots, Major,” said Kono. “Jess, with me, we’re pushing.” Trace withdrew the probe, stepping back from the edge in anticipation that the slight movement might draw fire. It did, and she covered as everything around her blew up… but marine armour required more than concussion and shrapnel to take serious damage, and she stepped back into the obscuring mess of smoke and torn corridor walls, and picked targets. She fired, and a single round took the first enemy’s head in a spray of armour and brains. The others dove and covered, but her second round caught the next in the shoulder, removing an arm and spinning him like
a top. The third returned fire, and she stepped back just enough as rapid rounds hammered around her, one glancing her arm. The long burst paused — all machineguns short of the big shuttle-mounted monsters needed a cool-down, one reason she preferred rifles. She stepped back out, aligned for his firing position against the near wall, and blew him four metres down the hall. The other reason marines preferred rifles.

  “Major,” came Alomaim’s voice from somewhere on the levels beneath her, “we are two minutes from full extraction. Several casualties, we see two types of enemy, one light recon, one heavy, most of the casualties have been to heavies.”

  “Copy Bravo,” said Trace. “Command has your top flank, get out and we’ll be right behind you.” These she’d killed would be the light recon enemies. God knew what the heavies looked like.

  “Multiple contacts!” Geish announced with the hard calm of a Scan Officer who’d done this many times before. “Fifty-five by one-sixty, energy high, Scan reads five contacts and more emerging! No IDs, direction and energy signature suggests croma! Increase last estimate to seven contacts, more coming!”

  “Alright, here we go,” Erik said calmly. This time the calm was no pretence. Real combat scenarios required so much concentration that they shut down the emotional part of his brain almost entirely. Right now, that was welcome. “My guess is that they knew Croma’Dokran would send us this way, they’ll have been watching us since we visited Do’Ran and talked to Sho’mo’ra and Dega. Kaspo, get me an ETA.”

  “Captain,” said Kaspowitz, furiously juggling figures and trajectories, “they’re on the far side of the planet but they’re carrying serious combat V… based on projected deceleration profiles I’m estimating thirteen minutes.”