“So, what’s up?” asked Havernash.
“Sensors report that there’s something moving on the hull, we’re going to go outside and look around,” Alice replied.
“Alice, what are you doing?” Stephanie asked her over her communicator.
“Checking some sensor readings,” Alice said as she entered the airlock with two of her best. “The Edxi corvette that made a close pass on us right at the end probably dropped a few people off. No way of knowing what they’re doing for sure unless we get out there; the sensors are too damaged in that section to see anything.”
“Wait until we’re out of the wormhole,” Stephanie said.
“I bet that’s what they’re waiting for, too,” Alice said. “Besides, it’s not your call. You’re not aboard, and you left me in charge of counter-incursion.” She placed her hand on the hull plating above her and waited for her command and control unit to start updating the state of the Warlord’s damaged section.
“As first officer, it’s my call,” Stephanie protested.
“If you just put me on counter-incursion because you didn’t think anything would happen on the Warlord and you wanted to make me feel better, then you’re in for a surprise. I take this job seriously, and I’m going to make sure nothing happens to the Warlord. If Frost had any concerns about who was left in charge of internal security, then he wouldn’t sleep so soundly. Remmy already sent him a notice.” Alice checked the results of her more detailed scan and saw that there were vibrations and hull stress that could only indicate one thing. “Okay, my suit’s picking up something from direct contact with the hull. Our uninvited passengers are starting to cut into the sections of the hull where we’re sensor dead. There are already three cuts where a good kick will make a hole big enough for entry. Still think we can wait for another day?”
To Alice’s surprise, Stephanie said, “You’re right. They must have serious camouflage tech if we’re not seeing what their tools are doing. Be careful, take as many approaches as you can.”
Alice highlighted a number of working airlocks and sent her people off in pairs using her tactical system. They left right away, moving at a run. “I plan on coming out all at once, full cloaking systems on.”
“Good. Watch your crossfire,” Stephanie said. “I’ll watch from here, not much else I can do.”
“Thank you, Ma’am, I’ll have them scraped off in no time.”
“What do you think we’ll find out there?” asked Havernash, who she had assigned as her partner for the excursion.
“Expect the worst,” Alice replied. “But remember to move away from our airlock as soon as we come out. They’re going to fire on what they can see, and this airlock will be it. You ready?”
“Hell yeah, let’s scrape these hijackers,” he replied.
Alice made sure her whole team was in position and started a countdown from three on her command and control unit. She got into position beneath the hatch, making adjustments so the tip of her loaner rifle didn’t catch on the edge. She turned her shielding and cloaking systems all the way up; the system wouldn’t be able to maintain that power level for more than fourteen minutes, but she hoped they wouldn’t need that long.
Five airlocks popped open all at once, and Alice was through hers in a rush, leaping out and diving to one side. As predicted, the enemy concentrated fire on all but one of the hatches. Several of her people took massive shield damage, but they all managed to make it out onto the hull.
The surface of the warped hull plating was illuminated by ghostly blue and yellow light, focused by the compression barrier of the wormhole four hundred metres above. White light flashed behind them intermittently as the Sunny Shifter’s thrusters fired to match the pace of the Warlord’s deceleration. To her right and left, Alice could see the Warlord’s thruster pylons, massive rotary thrusters, pulsing to slow the ship down. Ahead loomed the first craft to enter the wormhole – the destroyer, and she wished the defensive gun turrets at the rear of that ship could help, but they didn’t have the crew aboard to operate them.
Light flashed to her right, illuminating her peripheral. Her tactical system indicated that it was analysing a new type of weapon and that it was also trying to look up the race of five different types of beings walking on the damaged section of the hull. There were nine enemies altogether, and two were already firing.
Alice ducked a fraction of a second before a self-propelled weapon passed just overhead. An image of it appeared on her heads-up display as the analysis of the weapon completed. It was an explosive disc with small thrusters and beam emitters surrounding its core that projected some kind of cutter beams. “They haven’t seen us yet, get into position,” said Alice’s second in command.
“These are Edxi,” said another. The tension in her voice grated on Alice.
All of her people were firmly affixed to the hull and were moving towards their nearest targets, taking aim. Alice was surprised that the creatures didn’t continue to fire on the open airlocks. Instead, they sent up several of their seeker discs and returned to work, slowly cutting circular shapes into the hull of the Warlord. Alice started closing the distance between her and the nearest Edxian, a three metre tall thing in carapace-like armour with six upper arms. The ones at the top had three main sections with long, sharp digits at the end, while the other arms were smaller, with only two sections each. It walked on four spider-like legs, unlike any Edxian Alice had known. “Take aim,” Alice said, slowly unslinging her borrowed heavy rifle and kneeling only five metres away from the legs of the strange alien in front of her. Her partner did the same.
“Oh, God,” breathed one of Alice’s soldiers. “It’s looking right at me.”
“Shoot the legs!” Alice said a second too late as the Edxian facing one of the soldiers well behind her fired one of the discs, which flared violently at her squad member, slicing at his shields with super-heated beams then exploding violently when it was within a metre of him. He was flung off the hull of the Warlord towards the compression wall of the wormhole, and he managed to fire a tether line before he was destroyed crossing the energy barrier. The Edxian used the line to find its target and opened fire with a weapon that sent a barrage of exploding projectiles at Timmerman. His shields and armour only lasted seconds, and Alice’s tactical system confirmed what she already knew – he was dead.
Alice fired on her own target. To her surprise, it took several concussive shots to blast her Edxian’s legs to pieces and send it spiralling towards the thruster wash, where it was incinerated.
She whirled toward the Edxian who killed Timmerman and opened fire. The rest of her troops followed her example, opening up on all the Edxians scrambling along the hull. Her shields took several hits from the seeker discs, and she let her tracking system guide her aim towards one. It was on its way towards her when the secondary beam weapon on her rifle cut through it. She barely dodged before it struck the hull and exploded.
Her teams’ excursion onto the hull had turned into a full-on shooting match. She opened fire on the next Edxian as it blasted roughly in her direction. If she hadn’t already been moving, she’d be missing limbs or worse. Her rifle tore the Edxian to pieces, but not before it landed a few hits of its own, reducing her shielding down to three percent and scarring her armour with what her tactical system identified as super-heated microparticles.
Another strike caught her in the back, doing severe damage to her outer armour, but Havernash gunned her assailant down using heavy explosive rounds. She felt several ice-cold pinpricks on her skin, indicating that her armour had been breached. The inner layer of her armour repaired itself in seconds, re-sealing her from the vacuum of space. By then her rifle was trained on one of the two remaining Edxians, and she fired at what she thought was a head, a rough protrusion from the middle of its torso. “Kill him! Kill him!” shouted Nesh Samo as she fired at the Edxian, several discs closing in on her position.
“Stop firing and move! Those things can’t track you if your cloakin
g systems get a chance to work!” Alice shouted, only too late. The discs closed in, firing white-hot beams at the soldier then exploding all around her.
Seconds later, the battle was over. Two Edxian corpses were still attached to the hull, the rest were confirmed dead and had either drifted towards the compression wall and torn apart or were somewhere ahead of the ships. The corpses would be ripped apart as they reached the forward edge of the wormhole where space was being compressed by the Warlord’s systems.
She took a good look at one of the largest black-clad attackers. There were no life signs, and the main body of its armour was open to space. The shape of their armour brought back the memory of delivering stolen Edxian eggs to Zarrix. She could recall his corpulent form, scarred exoskeletal bone and leathery flesh, joints that didn’t seem to bend the right way, and long, weapon-like appendages. The armour these creatures wore hid much of that detail, but they were still almost three metres tall, hunched down, with similar limbs.
Alice recalled recorded images of the other Edxians that were on the hull and lined them up at the top of her heads-up display. Some of them had two long arms, others had multiples of varying lengths, and with those multiple arms came a multitude of unfamiliar tools and weapons. They used some kind of thin black material to create three bubbles against the hull, shielding them from intense external scans while they did their work. There was a lot of new information to process, and they didn’t have time.
“Okay, we have to do a detailed scan of the hull from the outside so Finn can have a clear picture of the damage,” Alice said. “Then we get these corpses inside.”
“Inside? Are you kidding?”
“Yes, inside. Their tech is inert, they’re dead, and we have a lot to learn. These things took more than one shot from our weapons on their highest setting and killed two of us. We need to be ready for war with them.”
“What the hell are you talking about? We’re not at war with the Edxians, these guys must be some kind of Order supporters. No one’s reporting any other Edxi attacks.”
Alice touched the dead Edxian towering over her. The black outer armour was highly flexible, but her sensors read that it was almost as dense as her own armour. There were new, unknown materials at work. “The captain just told everyone what’s really going on aboard that destroyer. We’re only fighting the Order because they’re in the way of the real war. There’s an invasion coming, maybe it’s already started. We’ll be seeing more of these.”
CHAPTER 54
The Loathing Of Beasts
The mines of Coba were endless. It was easy to see why the rebels in the Pionero System would dig into the caves. Clark Patterson didn’t enjoy his Beast persona often, but when he was surrounded by brainwashed Order of Eden soldiers, he enjoyed how they made every effort to avoid his gaze and stay out of his way. They were all around him as he moved through the large cavern. He could feel the gravel crunch underfoot, but the sound was drowned out by the noise of firing rifles. He left the Order Knights behind, and brought one of their heavy rifles for himself instead.
The soldiers around him in their dark green armour believed that it was a privilege to be chosen for the excursion. In truth, Clark couldn’t stand any of them. He chose them because they were the least intelligent, the most easily brainwashed, and the most firm believers. To them, he was the hell-spawned master on a mission to punish those who would resist the authority of the Order. They fought well and Clark understood how useful they could be, but he couldn’t stand a mindless zealot.
The ground vibrated for a moment as the heavily armoured shuttles behind them finished landing around his vanguard ship. There were another eight hundred well-equipped, trained soldiers in those ships, and they would finish clearing the tunnels or die. He wouldn’t be sending another wave, not to these caves.
The large central chamber had makeshift tents crammed with cots, a kitchen made from parts of a crashed ship’s galley and scavenged things from across the nearly uninhabitable surface. The cavern’s top was somewhere far up in the darkness above, the broad shafts made for working transports were their only convenient way out. Clark hoped the Order Knights he’d left to defend the openings would succeed in keeping the rebels from collapsing the entrance. Tunnels led outward from there in all directions. Capturing or killing every group of rebels would take weeks – perhaps months – without using powerful explosives. It was an option, no one would blame him, and absolutely no one would question him if he cratered a large percentage of Planet Coba, but he wasn’t interested in resorting to the same murderous tactics as the governors he just replaced. Besides, there were so many different types of precious dense metals in the ground at their feet, destroying that section of the mine would come at a high cost.
A group of rebels revealed themselves momentarily, firing bursts at the soldiers deploying behind them from one of the upper cave entrances. Several detonations from repurposed explosive charges erupted amongst the troops. “They’ve made some kind of rocket bombs out of the charges left behind by the miners!” shouted one of the sergeants.
Clark fired his rifle towards the small cave opening, super heating the stone and driving the rebels back. “Use seeker rounds,” you idiots, he thought, but refrained from adding. This wouldn’t go well; Clark had the distinct feeling that he was wasting his time. “The rebels still think they have a chance. Some of them are close enough to the central caverns that we have a chance to catch them. The rest are escaping further into the caves. Break up into squads, send sensor repeaters so you can scan as much of the cave network as possible, and figure out how many of them there are. Chase after the closest. Now, go.”
His communicator indicated that the message he was waiting for had arrived, and Clark Patterson mentally activated the hatch to his personal drop ship and walked towards it, pushing his way through the crowd of soldiers moving around him. He couldn’t help but curse himself for handling the minutia himself. He wanted a distraction, and though taking direct command of a platoon seemed like a good idea at first, he found himself becoming more irritated by the second.
He needed something to do while he waited to hear the fate of the Fallen Star, however. The signal from Shozo had come through; she’d somehow managed to make a workable deal for her people.
Clark gave his heavy rifle to an awaiting service bot as he stepped onto the platform that would lift him into the passenger section of the shuttle. “You are ordered to pursue and capture rebels if possible,” he told the lieutenant in charge of the cave skirmish through his communicator. “Kill them only if you are left with no other choice.”
“What do we do with the prisoners?” asked the lieutenant in a surprisingly appealing female voice.
“Put them in stasis and load them onto the next transport to Upello. They’ll find plenty to fight there,” Clark replied, knowing that Upello was the next to be used as an Edxian brood world. In less than a month, it would be swarming with their hatched young, mindless hunters who would be hungry for the better part of three decades.
“Understood, Sir.”
“One more thing, Lieutenant Turney. You will not receive any further reinforcements for this operation. If you lose over eighty percent of your forces, you are to retreat. I will not allow this operation to become a protracted engagement.” He closed the channel and stepped into his private chamber as the lift platform sealed to the centre of the deck. His personal communications and command system sent information to the circular chamber so it could display everything he wanted to pay attention to. The chamber filled to his chest with water as his ship began rising up out of the cavern.
He looked around the room at all the holographic projections. It was as though all aspects of the Eden War were around him, even more so since he was closer to the Iron Head Nebula, closer to many hidden hypertransmitter nodes. A new transmission addressed to all Order Of Eden personnel appeared. It was marked by Eve as mandatory viewing. He looked at the details and discovered that it was recorded while
she was on her way to the Sogarian System on an extended recruiting mission. It was central to the opposite side of the Iron Head Nebula, had over six billion people – many of whom were starving – and it was the perfect place for her to feed her saviour complex. That was the notification his comm sent him, not news from the Fallen Star.
Clark checked on the status of his tall, spike-shaped landing craft and saw that his pilots were guiding it back to the Overlord as expected, then he activated Eve’s speech. The chamber’s walls disappeared behind a holographic projection of an amphitheatre decorated with wood, gold, and crystal chandeliers in the twenty-first century Earth fashion. He knew this was a place she‘d had built aboard the Liberator, her own command carrier. The ship had finished crossing the Iron Head Nebula and was in its deceleration cycle. The large domed windows overhead shed a ghostly blue light on the two thousand attendees.
Dressed in a long gown that flared out at the bottom and the top, she gracefully walked to the centre of the stage. The mix of light and dark greens on her dress reflected against her face and the skin exposed by the slit down the front of her outfit, giving her a strange colouring. All the jitters she suffered from when she first started appearing publicly were gone, as evidenced by her easy smile and how her gaze swept from the front rows to the back and across the audience.
“It is known that the fate of the Order of Eden is set, to join together and evolve past the rest of humanity. It is also known that it takes individual sacrifice and service to elevate to the exalted ranks and receive the gift of immortality. So many of you are on your way; I am so proud of the growth I’ve seen since terrorists killed our Child Prophet.”
Clark couldn’t help but scoff at that lie. Five months before, Eve and he agreed that it was time for the Child Prophet to be retired, and they leaked fake footage of him being killed in a bombing during a small rally. They treated it like a tragedy and allowed the Order of Eden to mourn with Eve appearing often to console them. After a week, they turned his death into a rallying cry for more Order of Eden followers to abandon the pacifist path and join the military. Enlistment surged past capacity, and there was a waiting list of volunteers ever since.
Randolph Lalonde - Spinward Fringe Broadcast 08 - Renegades Page 43
