The Gray Matter (Rebels and Patriots Book 3)

by A. G. Claymore

  “Spreading them out,” the helm officer advised. “No sense crashing into the same spot three times.”

  The three ships moved apart, but at their current distance and speed, the impacts would still be close enough for their areas of effect to overlap. Travelling at fourteen hundred meters per microday, more than four times the speed of sound, the three freighters thundered into the structures on the planet too fast for the naked eye to process the devastation.

  From their position on the other side of the wormhole, essentially the same as being just outside low orbit, the impacts were visible but small. To anyone on the surface, the effects would be devastating.

  Three ships of a million tons each, impacting at four times the speed of sound, made for a statement that couldn’t be ignored.

  “We are leaving Uruk as we found it,” she told the Gray home-world. “And I am declaring it off limits to Gray ships.”

  She cut the channel to the Gray world. “Sucker Punch, restore normal geometry and secure the reactor.”

  Impulse Shopping

  Paul shrugged. “They aren’t here, Dmitry. All I can tell you is that they were here in the last couple of days.”

  “Figured that out all by yourself, did you?” the squadron leader grinned, nodding at the low resolution image of the deorbiting station around Nurazhal. “I suppose you learn that kind of super-sleuthing when you work at the Eye?”

  The enormous space station, a ring circling the entire planet, had been severed and one end was continuously feeding itself into the atmosphere, drawing the rest down after it like a long ingot into an arc furnace.

  The Rope a Dope was trying to catch up with either of the two friendly forces after their slight delay at Cerberus. They had only gone there to insert a message into the station’s system but finding Kinsey had elongated their stay. He was capable of too much damage for Paul to leave him alive.

  They had spent the better part of a day drifting toward Nurazhal and now they were prepping for their next jump. Paul had no idea how far along the program Ava and Julia might be, and he decided to forgo further attempts to join the fighting of the current phase.

  They’d jump directly to the Uruk system and, if nobody had arrived yet, hide in the orbiting debris field.

  “Ohooiet!” Dmitry raised a hand to shield his eyes. “Chyort voz’mi!”

  The flash was above them and several hundred kilometers away, but it was still bright enough to outstrip the aging ship’s window shading system.

  Dmitry, currently the officer of the deck, shot an angry look at the sensor coordinator. “Ey, parshivy! Just because we’re focused on the planet doesn’t mean we don’t keep our eyes open. What just showed up in my sky?”

  “Planet killer, sir,” the red faced man replied. “Two frigates as escort. They’re sliding in very slowly and hailing the planet.”

  “Oh zhe zhen shi ge kuàilè de goucheng!” Paul exclaimed. “We might want to consider jumping right about now.”

  “Now, hang on,” Dmitry cautioned. He activated the vector traces, comparing the relative velocities. “You’d be surprised just how often we get ignored because we look like a floating pile of gavno!”

  “They could ignore us just as easily if we weren’t here,” Paul pointed out helpfully.

  “Yes, but with a little adjustment from our docking thrusters, we could be ignored from a much closer distance.” Dmitry had that glint in his eye. He had some serious mischief on his mind.

  “Right,” Paul acknowledged, the insane idea infecting him quickly. “They’ll have a self-destruct. We’re going to need Daffyd to come along.”

  A sigh. “No doubt that pastry-eating tolstak will claim all the glory.” His smile took the edge from his insult. “Let’s get him up here, we don’t have much time.”

  ***

  The holo of the interior was incomplete, to say the least. Paul, Dmitry, Daffyd and three dragoon lieutenants specialized in shipboard combat were looking at the less-than-perfect projection.

  “I was only conscious for this section.” Paul pointed to the crisper area of the internal map, showing where his rescuers had led him to freedom. “But my eyelid twitch must have kicked in while they were taking me aboard and putting me in storage over here.” He indicated the storage room where Dem and Robin had first found him, next to Julia.

  “My old Military Police CPU stored what it could and began building a Marine-standard map from the visual record.” He saw no need to let them know about the advanced CPU that really resided in his sinuses. A military standard model was more than sufficient to map the interior of an enemy ship.

  “They had to take a turn to the starboard side right here,” Daffyd mused, indicating a jog in the corridor. “Going off a rough estimate of what a gun like that would need for power, I’d say there’s a fairly large reactor right there and it would probably have to tie back to the main reactor in the engineering spaces. That would explain why there’s no cross halls in the area, just those access hatches.”

  “So where do you think the nuke will be?” Dmitry raised an eyebrow.

  Daffyd used his fingers to align a cube and he stretched it out over the engineering sections. “Somewhere in there but probably close to the main control stations. They always like to put the self-destruct in a spot that’s constantly manned.”

  “And where are the panels?” one of the boarding officers asked.

  Daffyd waved at the holo. “Somewhere in this cube,” he declared with mild annoyance. “It’s not like they took Paul on a tour of the ship so we have to do a bit of searching.”

  “This means we don’t do the usual fast-and-dirty insertion,” Paul insisted. “It works when we know where to go but, if we pop the airlock hatches, somebody on the bridge is going to figure out why a decompression alarm is going off before we can find the device and disconnect the remote link. I’ll go in first. I’ll cycle in through the air lock and clear the first compartment, then we bring everybody else in.”

  “Yes,” Daffyd agreed. “Everybody goes in through the same airlock and joins the search for the self-destruct. We only take people who know how to deactivate it.”

  “Makes sense,” Dmitry conceded. “Make sure she doesn’t go boom first, then spread out and kill the crew.”

  “We’ve got a plan!” Daffyd rubbed his hands together. “Any more detail at this point would just bog us down. How long do we have to suit up?”

  ***

  Paul was still two hundred meters away from the planet killer, but he now had to crane his head around to see anything other than the huge ship. He had to give Daffyd credit for a good idea. He’d improvised a launcher using large-diameter ventilation ducting and carbon dioxide from the weapon-rail cooling system. The boarders were being fired out the open launch bay of the old passenger liner cum combat carrier and it had put Paul on target for the cluster of ventral engineering hatches.

  Doing a shuttle catapult would certainly have been noticed and would have marked the Rope a Dope as a potential hostile, rather than as drifting garbage.

  Paul reached out and caught one of the hundreds of antennae that protruded from the planet killer’s underside. It flexed, slowing his approach until it snapped off in his hands, letting him tumble to the hull where he just barely managed to grasp the base of a sensor dish.

  He was less concerned about the noise he’d made than he was about the error message the broken antenna might have triggered. A number of warnings and messages would be cropping up on various stations around the massive ship and someone might put them together before the Humans could find the self-destruct.

  He worked his way over to one of the escape trunks and opened the hatch. A quick look over his shoulder told him the rest of the boarding party was either already on the hull or just about to land and so he slid into the trunk and activated the entry cycle.

  The inner hatch snapped open and he clambered out, grateful for the increased agility of his dragoon armor. HMA was overkill when trying to clear
a Gray ship, especially now that they had no Marines on board. Kinsey had withdrawn entirely from his association with the Grays, concentrating what few Marines he’d had left on Cerberus to build his little criminal empire.

  He brought up his Nuttall Special and fired into the head of the crewman who’d come to investigate the opening hatch. The silencer Daffyd had made for it eliminated the sound of the shot, leaving only the clacking sound of the slide as it inserted the next caseless round.

  He looked down into the trunk, seeing a helmeted Human outside, and he gave a thumbs-up. The inner hatch snapped shut and the outer opened to let him into the trunk. Similar thunking noises sounded around him as other hatches began to open. Boarders began climbing in.

  He moved past a bank of small EVA suits to check the hallway, then shut the door. Judging from the equipment in the room, it must have been designed to facilitate exterior damage control by large teams.

  They’d selected this section as their entry point precisely because of the concentration of escape trunks. Very considerate of the Grays to design a way to get large groups into their ship.

  “I’d expect more suits for an emergency DC chamber in a ship this size,” Daffyd said behind him, “but the Grays always did build for small crews. Lots of automation.”

  “What direction do you think we should go?” Paul indicated the closed hatch as well as the one on the other side that had already been closed when he’d come aboard.

  Daffyd pulled out his own pistol. “My finely honed senses tell me we should try the aft door.” He nodded at the one that had already been shut.

  “Probably just leads to the latrine,” a crewman said morosely.

  Daffyd waved a negligent hand. “If it’s their pellet hole, you can stand guard over it, Edrich.” He started toward the door but Paul stepped in the way to stop him.

  “You’re a ship’s engineer,” he explained. “I’m a cop. Right now, we need engineers more than cops. I’ll clear the way; you keep the ship from blowing up.”

  “We’re fighting Grays hand-to-hand, right?” Daffyd asked. “With dragoon armor, you can just give ‘em a good kick. Their small-caliber weapons can’t penetrate our suits.”

  “Fair enough,” Paul conceded, “but their small-caliber fingers can blow the ship if they see you stumbling around a corner and they can get their hands on a terminal.”

  He turned and stepped to the hatch, waving Daffyd and the other boarders back to where they wouldn’t be visible once the portal was opened. He pressed the button and brought his weapon up almost by the time the heavy door had snapped out of sight.

  Two Gray crewmen were standing at a control pedestal and he fired off two rounds at each, hitting them in the center of mass. No messing around with tricky headshots now. That first crewman had been less than a meter away but these two were more than fifteen meters from the open hatch and he had to prevent them from any further use of the controls they stood at.

  He moved into the large chamber, seeing and downing two more crewmen before they could think to run. There were three other exits from this room and one of the boarding officers led his team toward the first exit on the right. Paul looked back to see the other two officers gesturing at their men, getting them moving into the large chamber.

  He twisted the silencer off his pistol. It had helped, but his accuracy was suffering and the time for silence was now at an end.

  Stealth had gained them their foothold, but it would be foolish to expect their incursion to go undetected for very long. Now came the time for speed and focused aggression. The first team lined up by their door, each man tapping the helmet of the man in front to signal readiness.

  When the line was ready, they opened the hatch, tossed in a stun grenade and streamed inside the next chamber, the first two men moving to the left and right corners while the next pair took up positions inside the room to either side of the door. The lack of weapons-fire indicated an empty room and the team moved farther in to reach the next door.

  Stun grenades were even more effective against the finely tuned eyes and ears of the Gray clones. The flash and sound tended to incapacitate them for almost twice as long as they did Humans.

  The second team entered the second room after deploying a stun grenade and the firing began immediately. The man on the right shot a Gray at point-blank range, as the alien was blocking his path to the corner domination point. The other Grays were working at a large circular array of control panels and they stood in poses of shock as the soldiers cut them down with short, aimed bursts.

  Having cleared the room, they moved on down a hallway at the far side. Ten meters down, another hall led away to the right and the first two men took up positions on either corner, covering as the team moved past.

  “This looks like the kind of place we might find a self-destruct,” Daffyd declared, strolling into the chamber. He looked around at the large circle of panels. “Don’t see one, though.”

  “Maybe the monkey should push the green button?” Edrich groused, nodding at a large green touch pad on a column in the middle of the room.

  “Maybe the other monkey should shut the hells up and start looking the room over,” Daffyd snapped. “I’ll go see what our boys are finding aft.”

  Paul and Daffyd followed the team’s path, coming into a medium-sized room with banks of equipment and a few terminals. The sound of small-arms fire crackled up the hall, punctuated by the heavy thump of a flash grenade.

  “This is just Entropy Control,” Daffyd shook his head. “That last room would have to be Central Engineering. It’s how they lay out their ships.”

  “We have to find that nuke quickly,” Paul warned. “The assault is too loud to go unnoticed. Won’t be long before they realize they’re under attack.”

  “I know!” Daffyd was holding fistfuls of his own hair. “The last thing they’ll want is to have one of their precious new planet killers fall into the hands of a pack of hairless apes that…”

  He let go of his hair, turning wild eyes on Paul. “Bozhemoi!” He turned and ran back into the chamber they’d come from, shoving Edrich away from the central column. “Davai, Ed. The monkey needs to find a nuke.” He put his palm on the touchpad, causing it to blink in green.

  The column began to rise like a meter-wide periscope. A half-meter hole through the column revealed a self-destruct device. Daffyd pulled a glowing blue conduit from the top housing and the line’s color faded.

  “Help me with the triggers,” he shouted at Edrich.

  Edrich began to remove the three triggers on his side of the column. “Hard on the back, this,” he complained. “Should have built in a setting for Humans.”

  “Maybe you can suggest it to the Quorum.” Daffyd removed the final trigger and stepped back, blowing out a deep breath as the column began to lower.

  “I realized nobody’d ever seen one of these beasts until after they’d been losing ships.” He grinned. “Takes them a while to react to new situations, but they should at least have tried to make their self-destruct a little harder to find. Maybe hide it in the floor…” He waved a hand at the descending column.

  “All so simple,” he explained, “for a genius-level fella like myself.” He frowned. The column was still descending into the floor. The touchpad descended out of sight and a meter-wide hole slid down into view from above. A blue line led to a second device and a slight whine was coming from the conduit housing.

  “Oh, you dirty little shluha vokzal naja”. He looked at Paul. “Let’s hope there are only two of the damned things.”

  An Ironic Reprieve

  NGark was seething but managed to present an air of professional calm. He didn’t have to wait for the transponder codes to know who’d come to relieve him of his command. PShelt always had his eye on what was best for PShelt and he’d been quick to demand the Quorum’s second planet killer as his personal flagship.

  He would have volunteered to carry any bad news to his old commander and he had the connections needed t
o get such an assignment. NGark wished he’d given the short-telomere degenerate a strong enough punishment to break his military career but it was too late to go back and change it now.

  It had been nearly two thousand years since he’d demoted PShelt but the youngster had climbed his way back up the ladder quickly, thanks largely to his backers.

  And now he was approaching the minefield with a message and that message was almost certainly a recall order. NGark was finished.

  He tilted his head slightly. The ships should have stopped by now to request passage through the minefield but they continued, albeit slowly. It would be just like PShelt to force his former mentor into deactivating the field on his own, just to show who was calling the shots. Too proud to make the proper request of a disgraced ballista.

  Or perhaps he’d forgotten about the minefield?

  NGark gave it a moment of reflection. He wouldn’t mind at all if the fool killed himself, but his ship had taken nearly two years to build and the crew didn’t deserve death simply because of who they worked for.

  Just before he could command a hailing channel to warn the incoming ships, his vizier, first-grade, announced the incoming hail. “Central holo,” he ordered.

  Let the humiliation begin.

  PShelt’s image appeared before him. “Grand Ballista.” He oozed with politeness to the point of sarcasm. “You have suffered grave misfortune.”

  “The station was destroyed,” NGark replied simply. He wasn’t one for excuses.

  “And yet your ships have taken no damage,” PShelt said, his intonation betraying the unseemly pleasure he was taking from this conversation.

  It was pointless to explain how they had saved the station only to lose it to random small arms fire. “If you have come here to deliver a message, then do so. If you have come for resupply, you will have to move on as we are obviously experiencing technical difficulties, at the moment.”

  PShelt’s chin tilted down and inward at the odd statement, but he recovered his composure. “I have been sent to relieve you of your command. All your ships will transfer to my flag where they might see more effective use than they have here.”