by Ian Douglas
The warning had been shouted by his battlesuit’s AI; there was no way to hear an incoming round before it struck, since high-velocity impactors typically traveled at forty or fifty times the speed of sound. His suit’s radar could give him a second or so of warning if it picked the round up fifteen to twenty kilometers away.
Rising carefully, he looked back toward the colony. Laser fire, impactors, and plasma bolts continued to slam into the gravfield dome, which was shimmering and flickering like a pale, transparent ghost under the barrage. He’d made it safely out underneath the shield and screen projectors and was now in the rubble that, until fifty-four hours ago, had been the city of New Egypt’s Nuit Starport, five kilometers outside of town. Thank God the bombardment hadn’t turned the ground surrounding the city into molten lava yet. That would come later, if the bombardment continued.
It was possible, of course, that the enemy wanted to capture the colony more or less intact, rather than scrape it off the surface of the planet. Ground troops—the hulking, vaguely humanoid giants identified as Nungiirtok—had been sighted in the blasted ruins outside the central city, and that suggested that the bad guys wanted to take and hold the planet rather than sterilize it.
A trio of tactical nukes went off against the city’s shields, dazzling flares of raw, white light, followed seconds later by the sound of the detonations and the shrieks of the shock waves. Well, maybe they didn’t want the city after all. . . .
Quinton lay flat in his hole and let the storm-fury rage overhead. As the noise subsided, he crawled up and over the crater’s lip. Three mushroom clouds boiled into the overcast sky on the horizon now, bracketing the colony’s defensive shield dome.
Osiris—70 Ophiuchi AII—had been a garden world until the Turusch and their Nungiirtok allies arrived. That had been three short, local days ago.
Osiris, along with Chiron, New Earth, and Kore, was one of the handful of worlds among the near stars enough like Earth that humans could live there without elaborate environmental protection, where they could even breathe the air without filter masks or helmets. The primary was a double star—a K0 yellow-orange sun circled by a slightly smaller, cooler K4 star. Seventy-A was mildly variable—the star was a BY Draconis type, with heavy starspot activity—and that drove the planet’s often-stormy weather.
New Egypt was the colony’s capital, with a few outlying cities—Luxor, Dendara, Sais, and others—on the same southern continent. There was a thriving native ecology biochemically similar to its terrestrial counterpart, and even a native species that might well prove to be sentient—the atechnic marine cuttlewyrms.
Quinton’s motion detector picked up a mass fifty meters to his right, and he went to ground once more. There was something out there, probably on the other side of that tumbledown mass of wreckage that was all that was left of a spacecraft hangar. He could hear it, now . . . a crunch-crunch-crunch of heavy limbs moving through piles of broken ferrocrete. He brought his linac rifle up, pressed the power-up, and waited.
The Nungiirtok appeared around the corner of the collapsed hangar seconds later, a three-meter headless mecha, stooped far forward on digitigrade legs, massively armored, and carrying a plasma weapon of alien design in three-fingered gauntlets. The towering threat looked like a machine . . . but it was the Nungiirtok equivalent of Marine combat armor. At its feet, a dozen armored Kobolds thrashed forward, each on three armored tentacles. No one knew if they were robotic machines under the Nungiirtok’s control or another organic species. They only appeared with the big Nungiirtok, however, apparently in the role of combat scouts.
There could be no doubt that the enemy had already spotted Quinton. It lumbered around the corner with its plasma weapon held high, loosing the first bolts as soon as the weapon was clear of the building. Quinton, flat on the ground, rolled to his left as the white-hot packets of incandescence hissed past him, missing his suit’s backpack by scant centimeters and sending a shrieking hiss of static over his com link.
Quinton triggered his linac as he rolled, using his in-head display to keep the weapon’s targeting cursor centered on the armored giant in front of him. The linear accelerator rifle was considered to be a sniper’s weapon, but with a fully charged battery pack, it had a two-per-second fire/recovery rate that could slam off thirty-gram depleted uranium slivers almost as fast as he could press the trigger button.
At a range of just forty-five meters, Quinton put three rounds into the monster’s center of mass, each magnetically accelerated to nearly 800 kps. The impacts punched through the armor as jets of white-hot molten carbon-fiber-laminate, with explosions like the detonation of thermal grenades. The three-meter giant staggered as it took two rounds in the chest area and a third close by the left shoulder. Shrapnel hurtled from the impacts as the arm tore away, spinning off into the rubble nearby. Quinton stopped his roll as the Nungiirtok dropped the plasma weapon, drawing a careful bead now on the deeply recessed sensor cluster that seemed to serve the Nungies in place of heads and loosing a fourth KK round. The giant lurched backward, then fell, trailing a stream of smoke from its smashed-open visor.
As fast as he could, Quinton began popping the swarming Kobolds as they surged toward his position. Each round was powerful enough to shatter one of the armored little horrors like a bullet-struck eggshell. He smashed five of them before the others began scattering, scuttling off into the rubble.
They would be bringing in more Nungiirtok giants, though, and quickly. Quinton didn’t have much time.
Rising to his feet, but staying bent over and low to the ground, he began running, making his way toward something that looked like a concrete-walled casement with an opening the size of a large garage. The faded and shrapnel-gouged letters CMS showed on one side. Please, God, let the launch tube be open. . . .
A round caught him in the side, slamming him hard. Spinning and dropping, he saw the Kobolds advancing once more.
His linac rifle had a twenty-round magazine, and he’d already expended nine. Coming up to one knee, he brought the heavy rifle to his shoulder and calmly began squeezing off shots. The rifle’s acceleration compensators took care of most of the recoil, but enough leaked through to pound against his armored pauldron, like a hard slam from a baseball bat with each round.
One target . . . one shot . . . one kill . . . but more and more of the dog-sized horrors were boiling out of the ruins. Either there’d been more than a dozen Kobolds with that Nungie, or a second Nungiirtok was close by and moving in. His rifle beeped a warning over his implant at three rounds left . . . and again for two . . . and finally for one. Automatically, he palmed the rifle’s slagger, turning its mechanism into molten metal as he flung it away.
He killed the last three Kobolds with his service-issue handgun as they scrabbled over the last pile of debris, just three meters away.
Hurrying ahead, pistol clenched in his glove, he jogged the last ten meters to the packet launch tube. His side hurt. The Kobold shot had not penetrated his armor, but enough force had been transmitted through the shock-absorbing laminates to bruise him, and just possibly to fracture a rib.
Please let the damned tube be open. . . .
It was. The aboveground opening gave access to a long, ruler-straight tube descending at a slight angle into the ground beneath the starport tarmac, a tube over two hundred meters long. By the time he was halfway down, the opening—the only source of light within the tunnel—was so tiny that he was moving through almost total darkness. Switching to IR, he could see the heated elements of the launch structure ahead, and the dull glow of the HG packet resting on its cradle.
Somehow, he made it up the access ladder. Normally, the packet was reached through a personnel accessway leading from the starport tower, but that structure had been among the first vaporized by Turusch KK rounds fired from orbit. He just hoped the power systems were still intact.
On the gantry at last, he took time to strip off
his armor. He wouldn’t need it now, and there was no room for it inside the form-fitting cockpit. He heard a clang, followed by scrabbling noises coming down the tunnel, and the faint light here was momentarily obscured.
Shit. A Nungie was coming down after him.
Stripped to his utility skinsuit, Quinton palmed open the hatch and squeezed inside. To his immense relief, the packet began powering up around him.
He’d been maintaining radio contact once he’d left the city, but there was no need of stealth now, not with the eight-hundred-ton mail packet beginning to power up. Right now, every Trash and Nungie detector in the system must be lighting up, screaming out his intent. He had only seconds now.
“New Egypt Flight Control, I’m aboard the packet and powering up. Everything looks good on this end.” Power was already at 70 percent, and climbing. He could hear the low whine spooling higher behind his cockpit as the power tap engaged.
“Copy that, Lieutenant.” The voice of Colonel Sandowski came over his implant. “We’re tracking a couple of Nungies near the entrance to your tube. Better light that thing and clear out.”
“Aye, aye, Colonel. I . . .”
He stopped, swallowed hard. There were twelve hundred USNA Marines stationed at New Egypt, and every fiber of his being, every instinct born of training and experience, demanded that he stay, that he not run.
But he’d volunteered for this mission, and there was no backing out now.
“I wish I could stay. . . .” he managed to say at last.
“Stow, it Lieutenant,” Sandowski replied. “They need to know what’s going down out here, back home. You can come back with the relief force.”
“Yes, sir.” He did a fast mental calculation. Three days to Earth . . . nine days back. “See you in two weeks.”
He heard the hesitation in Sandowski’s voice. “Roger that, Marine. Two weeks!”
“Semper fi!” Quinton yelled, and he brought his hand down on the control contact pad. He felt movement, then gathering acceleration, pressing him back against the embrace of the seat. He overrode the safeties with a thought command already downloaded into his implant by the chief programmer at the colony. Instantly, the gravs engaged, dropping him into weightlessness as the tiny ship hurtled forward.
Engaging the gravitic drive while he was still underground was not standard practice . . . but no one was expecting to use the launch system again anytime soon. At over three hundred gravities, the mail packet flashed out of the launch tube, the tube structure collapsing in a rippling pulse of twisted space as he exited the tube mouth.
If there’d been any Nungies in the tube, he didn’t feel the impact. If there’d been any there, or any close by the mouth of the launch tube, he doubted that they’d felt a thing either . . . unfortunately.
Trailing his own sonic boom, Quinton flashed through the overcast, emerging in the bright yellow-orange light of Seventy-A, the green-tinted sky fading to ultramarine, then to black emptiness in seconds.
Sensors recorded ships in orbit, lots of them, but his launch time had been deliberately chosen to correspond to the time when the majority of the Turusch fleet was on Osiris’s night side. The nearest ships were firing at him, but he was already outpacing everything they were throwing at him save light, and he was far enough from the nearest of the enemy vessels that they couldn’t accurately track him.
The HAMP–20 Sleipnir-class mail packet was the smallest human-made vessel capable of interstellar travel, and the fastest. The boat could accelerate to over a thousand gravities, and during FTL flight, where most fleet ships had a maximum Alcubierre rate of 1.7 to 1.9 light years per day, the mail packet could manage 5.33.
Earth, sixteen light years distant, was a nine-day flight for the fleet, but only three days for the mail packet.
But it was going to be a hell of a long three days. . . .
Chapter Eleven
4 January 2405
Sarnelli’s
Earth Synchorbit, Sol System
0035 hours, EST
Half an hour later, the five of them were at a bar called Sarnelli’s, located in the same hab but five decks down. It didn’t have the Overlook’s view, but erotic dancers writhed and twisted on the elevated stage to free-form AI music, and cozy alcoves grew themselves around the patrons, creating the illusion of privacy despite the crowds.
“You risk much by intervening in this, yes-no?” Gru’mulkisch was saying. “With your fellow humans? With the human-in-authority at the place of feeding?”
“Nah,” Gray replied. “That guy doesn’t mean anything. I just wanted to get you two out of there before the damned Authorities showed up.”
“Does that kind of prejudice bother you two?” Tucker asked. “I mean . . . being treated that way . . .”
“Treated in what way?” Dra’ethde asked.
“Being turned away like that. Being told humans didn’t want to eat with you.”
“As we explained,” Dra’ethde said, “we do not eat in public as you do. It would be, what is the word . . . taboo? Impolite?”
“A breaking of proper etiquette,” Gru’mulkisch suggested.
“We are learning Human social customs,” Dra’ethde added. “For us to violate accepted taboo would be expected. Yes-no?”
Gray shook his head. The two Agletsch seemed remarkably friendly, open, and sociable. It was difficult to guess what they were really thinking or feeling, however, because no emotion came across with their translated speech. The movements of their upper-manipulator leg-arms, the way they moved and shifted their eyestalks, and even the way they held their bodies might all have been clues to what they were actually feeling, but the humans simply couldn’t read them.
Going by the translated words alone, however, they weren’t at all upset by the rudeness of the Overlook’s maître d’, and Gray was having some trouble understanding that. He’d been refused service more than once when some officious twit had scanned his id and realized from his place of birth that he was a Prim, or that he didn’t have the rights of a full citizen.
At least Sarnelli’s didn’t seem to be as stuffy as the Overlook. A number of people had looked at them oddly when they’d walked in with their two alien friends, but no one had said anything. Service was strictly electronic, with no human waitstaff, and if some of the patrons didn’t like it, they could leave.
Two of the other Navy people who’d left the Overlook had joined them. Lieutenant Carstairs was another pilot, from VFA–31, the Impactors, and Lieutenant Ryan was a newbie, just arrived from Oceana with VFA–96, the Night Demons. “So what was that jerk’s problem with these two?” Ryan asked. “Just that they’re nonhuman?”
“I think he must have heard how Agletsch eat,” Tucker said. “It would upset humans nearby trying to enjoy their own food.” She glanced at the two Agletsch. “Uh . . . no offense.”
Neither of the beings responded. Perhaps they hadn’t understood her disclaimer as having been directed at them.
Curious, Gray pulled down an encyclopedia entry on Agletsch physiology, opening the download window in his mind. The spidery beings were actually similar to houseflies in one respect: they regurgitated their upper stomach contents onto their food before ingesting it again. That could be a pretty serious business in a creature over a meter long and massing forty kilos.
He wondered if Gru’mulkisch’s statement about Agletsch only eating in private had been a polite lie to reassure the humans. In the century or so that humans and Agletsch had interacted with one another, perhaps they’d learned that humans reacted strangely to them when they sat down together for a meal.
How the hell did you know when an alien was lying?
“I hate seeing anyone discriminated against,” Ryan told Tucker. “Calling the fucking Authorities. I don’t care how these two eat!”
Gray looked at Shay Ryan, intrigued. Her id said she was f
rom Maryland, on the USNA East Coast. Her accent, though, as well as her attitude, suggested that she might be from the Periphery. She was attractive in a hard-edged way, wearing her uniform instead of civvies like the rest of them.
“Same here,” he said. “I don’t like to see people pushed around, even if they do have more legs than us. Where are you from, anyway?”
“Bethesda. What business is it of yours, Lieutenant?”
He shrugged. “Just wondering. I’m from—”
He felt her ping his id, and her eyes widened. “Manhattan, huh?” she said. Her attitude seemed to soften a bit. “My family is in Bethesda . . . but we started out in D.C.”
“Thought I recognized the accent.”
“Old home week for you two, huh?” Donovan said.
“Not exactly pleasant memories,” Ryan said. She looked hard at Gray. “What’s wrong with the way I talk?”
“Not a thing. But growing up peri-free, without being linked into the Nets . . . the way we say some words tends to drift a bit. And the way you said Authorities, like it left a bad taste in your mouth. . . .”
“Please,” Dra’ethde said. “What . . . bleep . . . weak about old home?” She placed a small data disk on the table’s ordering contact panel, transmitting a credit exchange and an order to the bar’s AI.
Whatever their dining preferences, the Agletsch had no problem drinking with humans. After a moment, a glass filled with vinegar rose from the table’s dispenser, and Dra’ethde grasped it with all four upper leg-arms and placed it carefully on the floor.
Agletsch anatomy didn’t permit them to use human chairs, of course; to drink, they squatted above the glass and unfolded a kind of pouch in their lower abdomen from which a fleshy, black organ disturbingly like a tongue emerged, filling the glass and sopping up the liquid. Acetic acid, Gru’mulkisch had explained earlier, was a mild euphoric to Agletsch physiology, acting something like alcohol in humans. Gru’mulkisch had already ordered four glasses of vinegar, and Dra’ethde five. Their translators appeared to be struggling now with the language—perhaps as their belchings of words became less and less distinct. The programs were having trouble with both English syntax and grammar, and occasionally a word that simply could not be translated emerged as a sharp electronic bleep.
