by Ian Douglas
The Grdoch, Gray thought, seemed to exhibit markedly black-and-white thinking—either fight like hell or run like hell . . . with no reasonable middle ground.
Maybe it was just as well that they were willing to either fight to the death or perish alone in the cold emptiness of the system’s outer reaches. Communication—talking to those creatures—would be a real problem.
There was a final, terrible flash of radiance, and an expanding sphere of star-hot plasma.
Target Alfa, he saw, was breaking up.
Vulcan
40 Eridani A System
1527 hours, TFT
Connor’s crippled fighter had slowed to 100 kph, continuing to drop toward the unseen terrain below. The waiting was unbearable . . . a drop into darkness with no reassurance at all save for the unworded assurances passed into her consciousness by her AI. She could feel the fighter’s nose coming up slightly . . . feel morphed-out wings biting the air to slow her speed . . .
She felt the AI telling her that they were about to hit . . . and then the fighter lurched hard, shuddering as its keel dragged across hard-packed ground. The craft’s nanomatrix hull shifted and adapted to each shock, dispersing and absorbing the force of the impact, but it was still a damned rough landing. The grinding and jolting of the touch-down went on for long seconds, and then the Starhawk came to a halt, cocked at a 45 degree angle to starboard.
Connor felt a surge of panic . . . and a mental flashback to the Slan dragging her from her fighter inside the darkness of a Slan warship orbiting 36 Ophiuchi A III just four months before. “Open!” she snapped. She was not going to wait helplessly in the dark this time. “Get me out of here!”
The cockpit rippled, then flowed open, revealing the cloudless dome of a brilliant green-tinted sky filled with brilliant orange sunlight. She thoughtclicked the icons releasing her from her seat and stood up shakily, reaching out to steady herself on the side of the cockpit. The landscape surrounding her looked almost indistinguishable from the middle latitudes of Earth . . . somewhere in New York or Pennsylvania, perhaps. The gravity felt about the same as Earth’s . . . and briefing downloads had told her that the air was breathable, a rarity among the millions of worlds known to Humankind. She wasn’t going to remove her e-suit helmet, though, not just yet. There might be local pathogens against which local humans had been immunized, but for which she had no natural defense.
There were trees—odd-looking with feathery tips, but still definitely the local evolutionary equivalent of trees, with compound leaves that tended to be more orange and yellow than green. The fighter had come down in a broad, open meadow blanketed by an orange, mosslike ground cover. A broad slash through the moss stretching astern showed where her AI had guided the crippled ship in for its landing.
She heard a shout, and turned. People were approaching . . . humans . . . naked humans, quite a few of them. What the hell . . . ?
Human society long ago had embraced casual social nudity as an acceptable lifestyle, losing the age-old taboos against appearing in public without clothing save for protection against the environment, but the human urge toward self-adornment and decoration was not so easily lost. These people were filthy, ragged, and unkempt, caked with dried mud or dirt. Some wore scraps of clothing; a few wore the ragged remnants of uniforms or casual dress, but most wore nothing at all. Some carried sticks fashioned into crude clubs or spears with crudely sharpened points. None that she could see possessed any bodily adornment—animated tattoos or light-projecting jewelry or holographics.
She pulled her hand laser, thumbed the charge touch-point, and felt the reassuring vibration in the grip that told her it was fully charged and ready. The last she’d heard, the German and Latino colonists of Vulcan were the enemy . . . but there’d been scuttlebutt that the Grdoch had turned against their former allies. Looking at them, she suspected that the scuttlebutt had been entirely correct, but she wasn’t going to lower her guard until she knew. . . .
“Ayudarnos!” one man yelled to her when he saw her weapon.
“Ja!” a woman cried. “Gefallen! Helfen Sie uns!”
“Translate,” Connor told her implant. “Continuous and two-way . . .”
“Help us!”
Software residing within Connor’s in-head circuitry could translate a dozen common human languages with fair fluency. Her personal secretary could speak those languages using her e-suit’s external speakers, if the locals’ translation software wasn’t in place.
“I’m Lieutenant Connor, USNA Navy,” she told them, and she hard the closely echoed words of her secretary repeating her words both in Spanish and in German. “What the hell is going on here?”
A multilingual babble momentarily swamped her translator’s microcircuits.
“Hold it . . . hold it!” she called. “Who’s in charge here?”
The mob came to a ragged, milling halt perhaps five meters away from Connor’s ship, and a portly, pale-skinned man with a bushy mustache came a few steps closer. “Lieutenant, thank God you have come! I am Governor Immanuel Delgado. I—I suppose I am the chief. . . .”
Connor stepped out of her cockpit, but she didn’t lower her weapon, not yet. “You’re prisoners?” It was a guess, but the only guess she could think of that made sense. A planetary governor, out here? Naked and dirty and looking like he’d been through six kinds of hell?
He nodded. “The Grdoch . . . attacked us. Maybe two weeks ago. They killed . . . millions. . . .”
“Lieutenant?” a woman’s voice added, and it was in English. “I’m Commander Fuentes, of the Intrepid.”
Perhaps, she thought after the fact, she should have come to attention . . . but for the moment Connor could only stare as the woman emerged from the crowd. Slowly, she lowered her weapon, then holstered it. “My God, Commander! What have they done to you?”
“Put us on the fucking menu, Lieutenant. How badly damaged is your ship?”
“Yes!” Delgado added, excited. “Can you call in your fleet?”
“The comm took some damage,” Connor replied. “But we can at least signal through the fighter AI. It managed to get in touch with other ship AIs on the way down.”
“What’s going on up there, anyway?” Fuentes asked. “You’re USNA, so that means a task force must have arrived in-system.”
Connor nodded. “America . . . with five other carriers, including squadrons from the Russians and the North Indians.”
“A united fleet!”
“Yes, ma’am. We were engaging two Grdoch warships. One of them . . . one knocked my Starhawk out, but it was still able to get me down safely. But I was in the first wave, and I couldn’t see outside my fighter. So I don’t know who won. . . .”
The realization tore at Connor. The fog of war was always a factor in combat, though battlespace drones and advanced electronics had gone a long way to banishing that ancient battlefield curse. To be this blind, utterly unaware of which side was winning, made her feel both helpless and uncomfortably vulnerable.
A new realization occurred to her. “Wait a minute. You’re prisoners. Are you telling me I managed to land inside a POW camp?”
The coincidence of coming down by sheer chance in such a confined space with a whole planetary surface to choose from struck Connor as absurd.
But then she remembered her orders to the AI: to find a human population center outside one of the major cities, and away from any buildup of military forces. If the Vulcan cities all had been emptied by the Grdoch, or turned into heavily defended bases . . .
“It’s a large camp or holding area, yes, Lieutenant,” Delgado told her. “They grew a fence around a couple of hundred hectares . . . maybe a little more.”
Two square kilometers, more or less. “That’s pretty big for a prison camp.”
“It’s pretty small for a hunting prese
rve,” Fuentes said, bitter.
“Damn! The Grdoch hunt you in here?”
“They are . . . demons,” Delgado told her. “Monsters from the pit of hell! The horror is . . . it is indescribable.”
“Well . . . our people are on the way,” Connor told them. “Our orders were to find out what happened to the Intrepid, and we have a Marine transport with us.”
“Thank God!”
“Let me see if we can get through to somebody up there,” Connor added.
She thoughtclicked a link to her AI. “I need communications with the fleet,” she said in her mind. “Any ship. I need it now!”
She felt the artificial intelligence’s acknowledgement. She had the impression that several ships were close—within a few hundred kilometers . . . but that a battle was still going on above their heads. She felt the connection going through . . . felt her AI whispering to her in her mind.
Connor repeated what she heard to the waiting crowd of prisoners. “It sounds like our people are still establishing local space superiority,” she said. “But my AI is in touch with at least one ship . . . I think it’s the Inchon, the Marine ship I mentioned. And it says they’re on the way.”
“How long?” Delgado asked.
“I don’t know, sir. They’ll need to establish clear air-space superiority first.”
Absolutely basic to any attempt to land troops on a planet was the control of nearby space, especially low orbit. A planetary assault team was already seriously outnumbered by the presumably hostile population, and the situation became far worse if orbiting warships could take potshots at grounded ships, armored vehicles, heavy weapons, planetary fortresses, and concentrations of troops.
The literature of military tactics since the very earliest days of warfare extolled the need to take and hold the high ground. In space combat, “high ground” translated as farther up the gravity well. Troops and weapons at the bottom of that well—meaning on the planet’s surface—were at a terrible disadvantage when facing an enemy in orbit. Which, after all, was the better position in terms of energy . . . to be at the bottom of a literal well throwing rocks up . . . or standing up at the top of the shaft and dropping them?
There was a commotion across the meadow . . . people screaming and running.
“Oh, God!” Fuentes said, closing her eyes. “Not again!”
“What is it?”
“Feeding time,” Delgado said. “For the demons, not for us.”
“No,” Fuentes said, staring past the running crowd. “They’re armed this time. I think they’re coming to investigate the Lieutenant’s landing.”
Of course the fighter’s descent would have been tracked, both by ground bases and from space, and the Grdoch would have immediately pinpointed its landing coordinates.
Connor could see three of the monsters now . . . baggy spheres each over two meters across, bright scarlet in color, with three splay-clawed legs and rubbery bodies covered with appendages ranging from blunt snouts to stubby trunks, some half a meter long. The three each held a technical device of some sort in a snout, gripping it as though by suction. Were those scanners of some sort, or weapons? Connor did not intend to wait to find out.
“Scatter!” she told the others. “I’ll take care of these three!”
Moving quickly, she ducked down behind the wreck of her Starhawk. “AI! Do we have any weapons capability left?”
She felt the computer’s negative response. If she’d had a working high-energy laser or particle beam, and the means to aim it, she would have been a lot happier with her chances. As it was . . .
Crouching behind the fighter’s fuselage, she raised herself high enough to peer past the open cockpit. The three were coming straight toward her, about a hundred meters away. Bringing up her laser weapon, she braced her arms on the cockpit rim, held the weapon in a two-handed grip, and squeezed the firing stud.
The beam was invisible in the bright sunlight, but half a million Joules of energy concentrated in a spot the size of a thumb print ruptured one being’s integument and released a spray of internal fluids. The Grdoch keened, a high, warbling chitter like a bird call, and dropped the device it was carrying.
Immediately, the other two Grdoch brought their devices around, and a pair of savage explosions slammed at the other side of the fighter. Weapons, then. Connor doubted very much that they were X-ray lasers like those carried on their warships. It took a great deal of energy to generate an X-ray pulse. The earliest human experiments on those lines had required the detonation of a small nuclear device. She didn’t know what these mouth-held weapons were firing at her, but they obviously were deadly and quite powerful.
Shifting aim, Connor fired again, and a second Grdoch rolled to the side, its weapon dropping to the ground. But the first Grdoch, she saw with dawning horror, had just picked up its weapon and was rolling rapidly toward her once again.
The little xenosoph data she’d seen on the Grdoch in her most recent briefing suggested that they had massive biological redundancy, with duplicated organs and a broadly distributed nervous system. There was no way to score a head shot on these things because they quite literally did not have brains, or, rather . . . they did their thinking with their entire bodies.
Another pair of explosions roared a couple of meters in front of her, the shock slamming her backward. Gods, what were those things loaded with?
Pulling herself up once more, she thumbed her weapon to continuous beam, took aim and fired, holding the stud down to send a steady stream of coherent energy downrange. It struck one creature, and as the thing rolled forward, the beam peeled it open like the unsealing of a dress uniform jacket.
Shifting aim again, she used a steady beam on one of the others. Her Mk. VII Solbeam, she knew, wouldn’t take this kind of abuse for long. The weapons were designed to fire short pulses of coherent light, not steady beams. She would exhaust the battery in seconds if she kept using the weapon with such a profligate disregard for its design spec tolerances.
A Grdoch beam crackled just above the top of Connor’s helmet and she reflexively ducked. Close! She started to take aim again . . .
. . . and an explosion on the fighter’s dorsal surface just in front of the cockpit sent a shockwave that slapped against her head and chest, scooping out a hallow gash in the hull nanomatrix that glowed red hot for a moment until the heat dissipated.
The Grdoch, all three of them, continued to advance . . . more slowly, now, more cautiously, but they continued moving forward, closing on Connor’s position relentlessly and with a terrifying single-mindedness of purpose. One of the aliens appeared to be terribly wounded, with a deep slice girdling half its circumference leaving a trail of orange-scarlet blood behind it.
Surely, surely the thing would bleed out soon, and die!
Her Solbeam laser pistol buzzed in her grip, three quick pulses warning that the battery was failing, and connection patches in the palms of her glove sent data to her in-head. She had only a couple of seconds of beam left . . . and the pistol’s grip was so hot now she could feel it through her e-suit glove. It was overheating so badly that once it failed it would probably not be rechargeable.
But she was committed, with no way to turn back. She aimed at the nearest of the Grdoch attackers and mashed down the firing stud, holding it down as the beam carved through alien flesh . . .
. . . and the aliens wavered, as though undecided; then they started rolling backward, away from her. Damn it, she was winning! But then her weapon gave a final vibrational warning as the beam failed.
The three wounded Grdoch stopped their retreat, hesitated as though consulting with one another, and then renewed their advance, rolling directly toward Connor’s position, weapons held ready. . . .
Grdoch Huntership Swift Slayer
Vulcan Space
1550 hours, TFT
It still had enough life left, however, for one final, slashing attack. The prey fleet was entering orbit, oblivious to the threat drifting in space just a few thousand kilometers distant.
The Swarmguide gave an order. . . .
Chapter Twenty-one
13 March 2425
USNA CVS America
40 Eridani A System
1550 hours, TFT
“Colonel Engelmann, you may deploy your Marines.”
“Aye, aye, sir. We’re on the way down.”
Victor Engelmann was the commander of the Fifth Marine Planetary Assault Regiment, an old-school Marine who’d skippered his first platoon two decades before, at Arcturus Station. The 1/5—5th Regiment of the 1st Battalion, 1st USNA Marines—consisted of about nine hundred Marines and naval personnel currently embarked on board the Inchon.
On the flag-bridge display, Inchon had positioned herself with her shield cap toward the planet below, as her landing bays morphed open in her flanks and four blunt, black landing craft emerged.
They were UC-154 Choctaws, Marine shuttle transports each capable of carrying about two hundred personnel. Their 80-meter hulls dead black, each had white, red, and green navigational lights strobing at bow, sides, top, and bottom. A number of Nightshade grav-assault gunships had already deployed in a cloud about the Inchon, looking like black wasps as they began to drift past Inchon’s shield cap and toward the blue-haze curve of the planet.
