“Like swatting flies,” Sanchez said. “If they lock on, I’ll give them a taste of our cannon.”
“Jump or raise our shields?” Lassea asked.
Babcock rubbed his chin and considered their options. “Neither. We’re not registered to the Commonwealth. Let’s play the role of the naïve space traveler and see what they can tell us.”
“When they attacked my orbital—”
“The Axis isn’t in the business of killing civilians,” Babcock replied. “Unless it hurts CW interests. Lassea, prepare to move in a moment’s notice, but for now, we’re on a mission to find an ancient relic.”
“What kind of relic?” Nigel asked.
“It doesn’t exist. We’re pretending.”
Nigel stared at Babcock for a moment before returning to his work.
Both ships appeared on the main viewscreen and thrust to either side of the Intrepid. Neither activated their lasers, probably aware the small scout ships were no match in a firefight. But they must have been confident about their position to get this close, which meant a larger force probably lurked out of the scanner’s range.
“They’re hailing us on a shipping frequency,” Lassea said.
“Establish an unsecure connection,” Babcock replied. “We don’t want to show a single sign of caution.”
“You got it.”
Nigel finished his checks and activated an auto-tracking system on the laser console. The central target on his display followed the starboard scout ship. Babcock hadn’t seen Tulula use this feature before. It also got Sanchez’s attention. He moved over to the vestan gunner and held a hushed conversation.
The image of a horan appeared on the main viewscreen. Babcock took a deep breath. The sight of the purple lizard-like creatures, with their flaming red eyes always put him on edge. It was the same for most veterans of the Century War. The younger generation was more accepting, but he had a feeling that was about to change.
“Human,” the horan said, “what is your business?”
“We’re searching for a relic,” Babcock replied. “It’s a freelance job for a private collector.”
“A Salus Sphere collector?”
“No. A dionian,” Babcock lied, thinking on his feet. Dionians were a neutral species with powerful defenses and deep culture. They despised horan violence and wouldn’t respond to a cross-check. “The planet appears in ancient texts. We don’t know if it’s a myth. Dark space seemed a good place to start.”
The horan hissed and leaned toward its screen. “Do you know of any Commonwealth ships in the area?”
Babcock shook his head. “Not seen any since we left Summanus.”
“Are you escaped prisoners?”
The thought occurred to Babcock that these two scout ships were independent to the fleet. Likely bounty hunters or pirates chancing their arm to catch large prey. “We dropped off a prisoner and collected our reward. I’d like to know your business?”
“Wait.” The horan spoke through another channel in his native tongue, paused for a few moments, no doubt receiving a reply in its chrome earpiece and focused back on the camera. “You need to accompany me back to my fleet for authentication. We have intelligence that spies are in the area.”
“I’m sorry, that’s not possible.”
“If you don’t, ten destroyers will hunt you down. Running is a sign of guilt and will not be tolerated.”
Sanchez’s hand twitched on the cannon’s controls. Babcock hit the mute button on the arm of the captain’s chair. “Keep your cool, guys, I know what I’m doing.”
Lassea turned and gave him a wide-eyed look of disbelief.
“What did you say?” the horan said.
Babcock reactivated the speaker. “We’ve nothing to hide. Lead the way and we’ll stay close behind.”
“Very well. We’ll be watching you.”
The horan flashed off the screen. Babcock took a handkerchief out of his breast pocket and dabbed beads of sweat from his brow.
“What the hell are you doing?” Sanchez said.
“Why search for the grand fleet when the horans take us straight to it?”
“Are you crazy? You know what their interrogation involves, right?”
Babcock was fully aware the horans used ancient tools to extract information. It was one area the species felt they didn’t need any technological advancement. “It won’t get to that. We’ll gain all the information we need before getting too close.”
“Sounds pretty risky to me.”
“What’s the plan?” Lassea added.
“The same as before. Hack the navigation systems and jump before they attack. Intrepid will outrun any of their fleet.”
Both horan scout ships turned and headed back in the direction they appeared. Lassea spun back to the holocontrols and thrust forward.
Babcock knew they were upping the danger level significantly by following directly toward the grand fleet, but knowing its final destination and passing that information on could be vital to the survival of the Commonwealth. It was worth the risk.
Chapter 14
Mach’s heart beat furiously. He clambered through the hole in the wall and ran as fast as he could in the environmental suit down a narrow alley.
The suit’s fabric caught against his thighs and hips, slowing him down. His body’s upgraded adrenal system was being wasted, the energy fighting against the constriction of the suit rather than being turned into velocity of motion.
Adira kept pace with him, her elegant fidian shape not as restricted by the suit as his bulky human form. “Where’d he go?” she said, casting her head around. The alley was short, and they had already reached its end.
Either side of them, peculiar architecture stretched high above them, the surface texture resembling a network of stone veins and arteries. Dark, black-green vines clung to the sides, entwined with the stone, creating a weird mix of urban and jungle.
Mach noticed that the jungle part was denser here. The vines and other creepers were no longer dying, but thriving, claiming the city’s old remnants.
Once beyond the edge of the alley, Mach looked right then left down the only two options. There was no movement from either end. He switched on his helmet light and fought to calm himself and be methodical. Panicking and running off in the wrong direction wouldn’t save Beringer.
He scanned the ground. Flat-leafed purple weeds grew up between the cracks in the flagstones and through the boulder-constructed walls. More of the dark-green vines hung over the tops of the walls to loop down to the ground, the thick branch lying slack among the weeds.
“There,” Adira said, looking over his shoulder and pointing a few meters in front of them. Among the foliage were signs of disturbance: crushed leaves and a part of the vine split down its length.
“Come on,” Mach said. He set off, running north through the narrow passage. They were making their way toward the rear of the temple on the outside of the courtyard. When they reached the edge of the passage, it opened up into a wider street that ran alongside a frozen canal. An arched bridge crossed the ten-meter-wide stretch of ice. The bridge itself was yet more of the sand-colored stone. Its bricks were neatly cut and on the outside featured still more of the vein-like detail. It rose up in a perfect hemisphere. Green and purple flora was in the process of colonizing its right side, as though they were dragging it down, infinitely slowly, into the canal.
“The fucker’s right there,” Adira said, pointing her rifle at a dark shape standing on the edge of the bridge. It held Beringer around the neck with a long, muscular limb. Beringer’s legs kicked wildly over the side of the bridge.
Mach raised his rifle too, sighting down the scopes. He caught a quick glimpse of the thing before it jumped over the side of the bridge and plunged through the ice with a shattering crash, dragging Beringer with him. Mach’s trigger finger twitched, sending a laser blast toward the froth of white water and fragmented ice, but it was too late, the creature had got away.
“Cover me,” Mach said, lowering his rifle and running toward the edge of the canal. Without stopping to think, he jumped off the bank and onto the ice. It didn’t break. He skidded, his legs slipping out from beneath him. He crashed hard onto the thick ice, banging his head against the side of his helmet.
“Motherfucker!” he said between gritted teeth.
Adira’s arm hooked under his, lifting him up. “That wasn’t smart. You ready to move?”
Mach shook his head, cleared the splotches of multicolored ink from his vision and grunted and affirmation. The two of them helped each other toward the break in the ice. “Kortas, did you see all this?” Mach asked.
The static was still there but not as strong. The vestan guardian’s voice came through reasonably clear and determined sounding. “Your colleague is still alive,” he said. “The suit is protecting him from the cold. He’ll have enough air for thirty standard minutes. I would advise you follow.”
“For him, or for Afron’s brain?” Mach said, regretting the bitterness in his voice immediately.
“Both,” Kortas said. “Be quick, Carson Mach. They’re heading west.”
Mach switched his laser off. Adira followed his lead, and then the two of them dove into the water through the gap the creature and Beringer had made. Mach’s prosthetic eye registered the temperature below the ice at 176 Kelvins—strictly impossible if this was water, which froze at 273. Whatever this liquid was, it certainly wasn’t regular old H20.
“Kortas? You hear us under here… what is this liquid? Will the suits withstand it?” Mach was already feeling the chill enter through the suit, prickling at his skin like the cold winds did at the north pole of Fides Gamma. A place his fellow soldiers abandoned him during an attack on an enemy fortification. That’s how he lost most of the muscle in his right arm and most of his hand. It took three years for the prosthetic growth medium to return his limb to a normal state. He didn’t want to go through all that again.
“You will be reasonably safe for now,” Kortas said. “The suit’s HUD will warn you of any impending catastrophic breaches.”
The vestan cut off into a sea of static again, leaving Mach and Adira floating beneath a thick cap of ice. The water—or whatever it was—made it difficult to see more than a few meters ahead. Even with their helmet lights on, the dense liquid reflected most of it back at them with billions of floating particulate obscuring their vision.
“Thrusters,” Adira said. “They’ll be quicker than trying to swim through this damned soup.”
“They’ll use the majority of our fuel,” Mach said. The implication being that they wouldn’t have much left to power their heating and air systems.
“Then we better hurry and get him, right?”
“Right,” Mach said. “Just wanted to make sure you knew the risks.”
“Fuck the risks, Beringer’s one of us.”
“Glad to hear it,” Mach said. “After three…”
He knew there’d be no countdown. Adira was always ready. The two of them secured their rifles to the holsters on their belts, stretched their arms out in front of them, and engaged their boot thrusters. The force propelled them forward through the dense, murky miasma, their lights barely showing them what was coming.
The curtain of sediment and particulate broke away from them as they pierced through the water, using almost half of their fuel to swim just a few hundred meters. And yet there was still no sign of Beringer. Kortas’ voice came through to his comms unit, the static crackling intermittently but not enough to obscure the guardian’s words.
“Stop,” he said. “Turn ninety degrees to your left and head in that direction for a further fifty-seven meters. You’ll come to a bank. I’ve tracked your colleague to a position there. He’s stationary now.”
The Guardian updated Mach’s HUD with a crude map. It was enough, however, to give Mach the motivation and direction he needed. Using another quarter of their remaining fuel, they propelled themselves through the canal until they reached the bank.
Mach cracked his hands against the hard surface, the momentum too fast for him to pull away before striking the stone bank. He scrambled up, pulling himself through a gap in the ice that was no doubt the work of the proto-vestan creature.
“You okay?” Adira said.
“Fine, come on, he’s up here.” Mach dragged himself up and dropped a hand to help Adira up onto the surface of the bank. Mach looked around to get his bearings. They were on the far side of the city now, where he had seen the row of flat-roofed buildings. He took the rifle from his holster and checked that it was still operational—which it was. Mach didn’t have any doubt; it was vestan tech after all, as were the suits.
Despite a slight chill, the suit had kept him remarkably comfortable. Even now, the elements entwined in the interior fabric were heating up, equalizing the temperature to a more suitable level.
“All good?” Mach asked Adira.
She looked away for a moment, checking her HUD, and nodded her head. “Let’s move. There’s footprints all over here, but look, there’s a trail of wet prints and drag marks.”
The blue light filtering through the icy cap over the city bathed the scene in a cool blanket, giving everything a monochromatic feel. The ground, an uneven area of rock, was the color of blue steel.
The wet footprints reflected the ice dome with a silvery-cyan hue.
Even the buildings themselves were vastly different to other areas of the city. Gone were the ornate, elegant columns and lintels, to be replaced with structures made of advanced polymers molded into complicated geometry and metallic formations creating various beams and supports that resembled the framework of a geodesic dome.
Mach and Adira sped toward this starkly futuristic structure, following the prints as they went. They entered through an open doorway into the central part of the building. Mach looked up at the dark eyes-as-windows as he went, but saw no movement. Beringer’s location disappeared off his HUD, the holographic display flickering until it disappeared altogether.
“You lost your HUD too?” Mach asked Adira.
“Yeah,” she said. “We’ll do it the old-fashioned way: sweep and clear each room.”
“Sounds good to me.”
He made sure the laser was ready to fire if needed and stepped slowly into the dark room that lay ahead of him. Adira was behind him, sweeping their six and making sure they weren’t being flanked.
They stepped into a bare room that resembled a reception. A single round table stood to one side with a hole in the middle. It reminded Mach of the old vestan meeting rooms he’d seen once on an unofficial trip to one of the vestan worlds. He pushed through a set of double doors. They swung open easily, their electronics long since ripped out, wires hanging loosely like quartered entrails.
The room on the other side had white walls and white floors, all of which were stained with dark brown and yellow marks. The vines created a thick maze of foliage on the far wall, having breached through the ceiling. A breeze blew through a hole in the wall to their left.
“This place looks like a lab,” Mach said. He pushed his way past a tumbled cabinet of some kind. A steel bench ran around the perimeter of the room, a mix of vestan instrumentation littering the surface. “Kortas, what is this?” Mach said, waving the manacle slowly around. “Anything we should be worried about?”
Adira stepped forward, sweeping her rifle, inspecting each corner. While Mach waited for a reply, she gave him the thumbs-up sign and nodded to indicate another door to their right.
Somewhere in the distance there was a clang, followed by a muffled noise. Was it Beringer? “You heard that, right?” Mach said to Adira.
“Yeah, it’s him.”
Mach vaulted over another toppled cabinet and pressed his body against the doorway. Adira took the other side, and then Mach swept in, going low into a crouch so Adira could fire over him if required.
Nothing was there, apart from a huge hole in the roof. Metal and polymers splintered inwar
d. Mach traced the trajectory down to the floor and saw a crater a few meters wide in the tiled surface. There was no sign of what might have caused it, though.
The light from the dome bled in through the gap, pushing the shadows to the far corners of the room. It was about half the size of the science lab and Mach thought it had once served as an office, given the single desk console on the right-hand wall.
Seeing nothing else in there, they moved through the other door into a hallway. The muffled noises echoed down into the space. Mach sped up, jogging toward the end. When he got there, it split into a T-junction.
“Kortas?” Mach snapped. “Come in if you can hear this.”
No response.
Adira stepped up beside Mach. “We go left,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
Mach looked at the floor; there were no more footprints or marks to indicate where the alien had dragged Beringer. Either the alien had got wise or had an alternative means of escape. Or… he looked up and saw that the low metal ceiling had a hatch. He reached up and pushed it open with the rifle. It swung open easily and clattered with a loud clang as it fell completely open.
He jumped up and used his elbows to lever himself into the space. It was warmer up here. His eye reading told him they were now heading again toward the direction of the heat source.
“This way,” he said. “I think we’re getting closer to this thing’s home. Or lair…”
“Good,” Adira said. “I can’t wait to kill the fucker.” She joined Mach in the tight space. Mach had to arch his back almost seventy degrees as he walked, but thankfully, the low ceiling rose higher as they moved further in.
The light was much darker here, and he had to flick on his helmet light to show the way.
Broken vines and some thick, wet brown substance littered the floor. “I think the thing’s been crapping in here,” Mach said, his feet squelching through the paste-like substance.
“Just great,” Adira said. “Why do these damn things never have any manners? It has enough smarts and tech to thaw the ice on an ice planet and kill a Guardian, but not enough sense to shit in a hole.”
The Terminal War: A Carson Mach Space Opera Page 12
