by Smith, Glenn
“Surface gun emplacements are all damaged or destroyed, Captain,” Bellinger reported. “Looks like the main gun is dead, too.”
“Torpedoes?”
“Aft tubes are open, banks completely exhausted. We’ll have to swing around her bow to get a reading on the forward banks.”
“Helm.”
“I’m on it, sir,” the woman responded.
“There are numerous hull breaches in the aft compartments and along the length of her keel,” Bellinger continued. “As best I can tell, approximately thirty-five percent of her interior has lost atmosphere.”
“Radiation levels?”
“Within safety limits as far inside as our scanners can penetrate, but not by much. And all the internal power appears to be shut down.” As the bow of the Tor’Kana vessel swung into view, he reported, “Forward tubes have been blown open, Captain. The banks are all empty. They must have fired their torpedoes right through the closed ports.”
“Good thing they don’t arm right away,” Erickson commented.
“Yes, sir.” Bellinger made a quick adjustment, presumably to his scanners, hesitated for a moment, then turned in his chair to face his commanding officer. With a grim look on his face, he said, “Captain, the escape pods are all still in place, and there’s the wreckage of at least nine shuttles inside what’s left of the hanger bay.”
Erickson rose to his feet and took a few steps toward the screen. “Are you reading any life signs onboard?”
Bellinger turned back to his instruments, made some more adjustments, then answered, “I think so, sir, but these readings are awfully weak. It may just be the radiation interfering with our scanners, but...”
“Any sign of enemy presence onboard?” Erickson asked with sudden urgency. “Life signs? Tics on the hull? Anything?”
“No tics, sir, but unknown as far as life signs,” Bellinger answered, shaking his head. “I can’t get specific enough readings.”
“What about other vessels in the area?”
“Long range sensors aren’t picking anything up, sir, but you know how that goes.”
“Yeah, don’t we all, Lieutenant. Mister O’Connor,” Erickson called as he turned and stepped back to his chair, “sound standby alert.”
“Standby alert, aye, sir,” O’Connor, presumably one of the communications specialists, responded from out of the picture.
Erickson sat down, then thumbed a pad on his command console, which seemed to grow out of his chair’s right arm. “Captain Erickson to Security.”
“Security. Lieutenant Colonel Zucker here, sir.”
“We’ve found another Tor’Kana vessel, Colonel, but it’s in pretty bad shape. Go to Medbay, grab as many field medics with training in Tor’Kana biology as your boarding craft can carry, suit up, and get over there. As it stands right now, this should be a non-combat rescue and recovery mission, but go with standard hostile zone protocols all the same. We don’t want any surprises.”
“You got it, sir.”
The image of what appeared to be the inside of some sort of airlock suddenly replaced that of the Rapier’s bridge. Except for the single low-intensity spotlight slowly playing over the bare, metal-looking walls, the area was pitch dark. A line of data at the bottom of the screen indicated that the slightly grainy, green-tinted monochrome image was coming from Lieutenant Colonel Zucker’s helmet-cam. According to the chronometer in the far right corner, only twenty-three minutes had elapsed since Captain Erickson had given the order to board the vessel. They’d done so much more quickly than Hansen would have thought possible. Very efficient.
Zucker’s spotlight momentarily came to rest on a small black panel labeled with yellow-green Tor’Kana script—Hansen was right, it was an airlock—but the helmet-cam had been designed to mimic the user’s eye movements with perfect precision, so Zucker’s was constantly shifting from side to side. Its light drifted over the bare bulkhead to his right, then passed across the identification panel again and fell upon the space suited figures of the other members of the boarding party’s Security Forces troops. Their faces were hidden in the dark behind their helmet shields, but the seriousness with which they were treating the operation was clearly evident in the individual weapons they were carrying—the sleek, easy to handle VK-19 recoilless laser-pulse rifle, which served as the standard zero-G combat weapon fleet-wide, an HS-21 squad assault weapon, even a pair of HE-100 35mm grenade launchers. In short, they were armed to the teeth.
Back in the days when he served in combat, Hansen had never liked the laser-pulse rifles. He’d understood why they needed them, of course. After all, firing a non-recoilless weapon in a zero-G fight meant floating backwards, out of control and away from whatever protective cover and concealment you might have been using, and that was never a good thing for a soldier. But laser pulses, while extremely painful as they burned through a target’s flesh, had a nasty habit of cauterizing the wounds they inflicted, which prevented excessive bleeding, so it almost always took multiple hits to bring a stalwart target down.
And the Veshtonn were nothing if not stalwart.
“Take your positions, everyone,” Zucker ordered as he and his camera looked back at the inner airlock door in front of him.
The cramped space seemed to rotate 180 degrees to the right as Zucker turned around and backed himself up against the bulkhead, putting the inner door to his immediate right. Hansen caught a brief glimpse of the outer doors—closed now, no doubt to protect against the loss of any atmosphere that might remain inside—but Zucker quickly looked back to his right, at the inner door again.
“Let’s do it, T-J,” Zucker said.
“You got it, boss.”
One of the troops, most likely the ‘T.J.’ whom Zucker had just spoken to, stepped away, moving out of the picture. Moments leter the inner door rose up into the high ceiling, out of sight, and Zucker’s light beam fell against the far left wall of the otherwise pitch black inner room. Zucker waited for a few seconds, then leaned forward and peered inside the vessel—it was pretty dark in there—but he quickly backed off again before Hansen was able to focus on anything in particular.
“Activate HUDs,” Zucker said. A second later a series of green lines and odd shapes appeared on the wall screen—on the inside surface of Zucker’s face shield, Hansen reminded himself—artificially diagramming those portions of his surroundings that weren’t illuminated sufficiently to see with the naked eye. The trooper directly across from him on the other side of the door appeared as a red figure with a small point of blue light flashing in the center of his chest—a ‘friend-or-foe’ indicator, identifying him as a friendly.
Hansen had never liked them, either. Two hundred years after their first introduction to the battlefield, they still couldn’t be completely counted on not to fail. Nor should they ever be, in his opinion. How many good soldiers had they lost over the decades, killed by friendly fire because their indicators had malfunctioned? Soldiers had become far too dependent on them for their own good.
“Point of view, weapon,” Zucker commanded.
The image switched to one seen from a lower angle and flowed across the screen from right to left as Zucker raised his rifle and aimed it around the corner to get a look inside without exposing himself to any dangers that might be waiting for them there. His HUD reconstructed the room and outlined everything in it. A large, dim red mass lay motionless on the floor several meters ahead of his weapon, indicating the presence of organic material. There was only one thing it could have been.
“Oh my God,” Hansen muttered.
Zucker trained his weapon’s sights on the body and squeezed the trigger halfway to acquire a target lock. A set of cross-hairs appeared and remained centered on the unmoving red mass, even as the image wavered slightly when Zucker’s arms moved. “Identify and analyze tactical,” he said.
There was a very slight pause as his computer pack took a series of scanner readings through the rifle’s target acquisition unit and extrapolat
ed the data, but the response came as close to instantaneously as was possible under the circumstances. “Species: Tor’Kana,” the artificial voice reported. “Gender: male. Status: deceased. Analysis: Negative armaments and explosives. Threat: none apparent.”
Lieutenant Johnson’s image suddenly appeared in a small, unobtrusive window near the upper right corner of the wall screen. “They found the same thing all over the ship, Admiral,” he said as the video footage continued, its audio temporarily muted. “Some were found alive, but the vast majority were dead. Here’s the main part I wanted you to see.”
The scene jumped ahead roughly forty-three minutes as Johnson’s small window winked off. There was no way for Hansen to know for sure exactly where Zucker and his team were at that point, but the apparent lack of consoles and equipment in the area served as a fair indication that they were probably somewhere in the lower decks—possibly in the maintenance corridors or the cargo holds.
“I think I’ve got it, sir,” one of the troopers said.
“Everyone ready?” Zucker asked as he stepped to the side of the large door in front of him and backed up against the bulkhead in the same manner as before. Several affirmative responses were voiced, then, “All right, T-J. Open her up. And let’s hope there are some more live ones in there.”
The loud hiss of a heavy blast door rising into the ceiling immediately followed his order. So it was a cargo hold. Either that or a small craft hanger deck.
“Jesus Christ,” someone said.
“Holy mother of...”
“If you boys are done calling for help, Ripper, I’d appreciate an ‘all clear,’” Zucker said.
“Uh, yeah. All clear, sir. Sorry, Colonel.”
Zucker stepped away from the bulkhead and turned to look inside. The entire lower third of his HUD glowed with that same dull red aura. Bodies were strewn across the deck as far as Hansen could see. Zucker chose one, seemingly at random, aimed his rifle, and half squeezed the trigger again.
“Identify and analyze tactical.”
His computer pack took its readings, extrapolated its data, and reported, “Species: Tor’Kana. Gender: female. Status: deceased. Analysis: Negative armaments and explosives. Threat: none apparent.”
Female? “Well I’ll be damned,” Hansen said as he sat forward and rested his arms on his desk. They had more females!
“Hey, Colonel?” one of the troopers called.
“Stand by a second,” Zucker told him. He selected another body. “Identify and analyze tactical.”
“Species: Tor’Kana. Gender: female. Status: deceased. Analysis: Negative armaments and explosives. Threat: none apparent.”
Another dead female. How many more? Johnson had mentioned that some Tor’Kana had been found alive. Hansen could only hope that some of those survivors were female as well.
Zucker acquired one more target. “Identify and analyze tactical.”
“Species: Tor’Kana. Gender: female. Status: deceased. Analysis: Negative armaments and explosives. Threat: none apparent.”
“Are you men all finding dead Tor’Kana females, too?” Zucker asked.
Without exception, his men responded that they were. He reset his TAC-unit to scan the entire room. “Scan for alien life signs.”
“Scanning. Negative alien life signs within range.”
Hansen heard Zucker’s disheartened sigh, even over his own.
“Are all the bodies Tor’Kana females?” Zucker asked.
“Biological identification is not possible on wide scan setting.”
“Medics,” Zucker called, rather than resetting his TAC-unit again. “I want to know what killed these...uh...people.”
“You got it, sir,” someone responded.
“Let’s light it up for them, boys. And make sure your TAC-units are set to wide scan. I don’t want anyone sneaking in here behind us.”
Zucker’s HUD winked off and the room before him grew brighter as the other troopers dispersed and added their spotlights to his own.
Despite the relatively limited field of vision that Zucker’s continuously moving camera provided—the colonel must have been making his way back and forth, from one end of the room to the other—it didn’t take very long for Hansen to realize that the troopers had been faced with a most gruesome task. There looked to be at least two hundred bodies scattered throughout the cavernous room, and from the looks of things most of them had died a horrible death. Many of them had four empty sockets where their multifaceted black eyes had been, and a light colored, semi-liquid substance, doubtless the yellow-white syrupy fluid that was Tor’Kana blood, seemed to be splattered everywhere.
Hansen’s gaze fell to the surface of his desk as he bowed his head in mourning for the dead.
Several recorded minutes passed in silent fast-forward mode while the medics examined the bodies, one at a time. Then, finally, the recording slowed to real time again as one of them reported their conclusions.
Hansen listened without looking up.
“We’ve got exactly one hundred and sixty-one dead Tor’Kana females here, Colonel,” one of the medics said. “Cause of death in one hundred nineteen cases appears to be massive tissue damage associated with sudden decompression. As you can see, the evidence is pretty obvious.”
“If you’re talking about their eyes exploding out of their heads, Sergeant, that’s only a myth,” Zucker said. “Sudden decompression doesn’t really do that.”
“Sudden decompression doesn’t really do that to us, maybe, but it does it to them, sir,” the medic clarified. “They have small sacks of air behind their eyes, and the tendons and muscles holding their eyes in place aren’t nearly as strong as ours. As for the others, the cause of death appears to be asphyxiation due to inhalation of an improperly balanced atmosphere, but our doctors back on the ship are going to have to examine them more thoroughly to be sure.”
One hundred and sixty-one. Hansen looked up just as the image of the medic talking to Zucker froze, as if the recording had suddenly malfunctioned. He understood now why Johnson had tagged this report the way he had, and he agreed wholeheartedly with the young agent’s assessment. Not many Tor’Kana females had escaped the invasion of their home system. Maybe a few thousand at best, including those that Zucker’s team had found, plus any more that might have been aboard that ship. The slaughter of so many of them was truly devastating.
Johnson’s image reappeared in full-screen. “Turns out that medic was right, Admiral. The autopsies are still ongoing, but I’m told the results so far do indicate that several victims were breathing an atmosphere with improperly balanced gasses. In all there were seven-hundred ninety Tor’Kana found dead onboard, including all four-hundred seventy-seven females they were transporting. There were also one-hundred thirty-eight severely wounded, most of them mortally. Only about eleven are expected to survive. That’s eleven out of nine hundred twenty-eight souls, Admiral, in case you weren’t counting.
“Examination of the damage to the ship’s hull confirms they were attacked by the Veshtonn. We’re assuming for the time being that the Veshtonn somehow tapped into the ship’s computer and adjusted the atmospheric mix enough to kill the female passengers, though why they didn’t just kill the whole crew that way instead of boarding the ship and slaughtering them remains a big question.”
Hansen could guess the answer to that question. He’d lived through it once, long ago.
“One more thing, Admiral. That ship has been positively identified as one of the seven Tor’Kana military vessels we know to have escaped from their home system last month. And as you know, only three of the five that have been recovered were carrying females. If there really is only one more out there somewhere...
“It doesn’t look good, Admiral. I’ll keep you posted. Lieutenant Johnson out.”
The wall screen went dark. Hansen took a deep breath and bowed his head again as he exhaled. Four hundred and seventy-seven more Tor’Kana females dead. No, it didn’t look good. It didn’t look g
ood at all, and things were getting worse every day.
And he still had one more report to review.
Chapter 19
It had taken just under another hour to make it back to the base. Once the Marines had finally put the mountain range and foothills behind them and reached the local town’s hard paved roads, where the APC’s rough-terrain tracks were retracted in favor of its more road-friendly all-tire configuration, the ride had become a whole lot smoother and quieter. So much so in fact that Dylan had almost fallen asleep by the time they reached the base’s main gate. Frieburger had managed to hold down that meal, though just barely, and the FTX had been declared officially completed.
Having finally made it downstairs to the locker room after sitting through a seemingly endless mission debriefing—talk about struggling to stay awake—Dylan maneuvered past the few other stragglers who hadn’t managed to get away yet and practically collapsed with exhaustion onto the long wooden plank that served as a bench in front of his locker. He leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, and hung his weary head. For a 28 year old man in good physical condition, he sure felt awfully old.
With more effort than it should have required he pulled off his combat boots and heavy socks and dropped them none too gently to the floor in front of him, then drew a deep, relaxing breath and stood up with a groan. Sounded old, too. He punched his code into the locker door panel and released the latch, but paused before opening it to steal a sidelong glance at Marissa, whose locker stood at the end of that same row.
As an unmarried Marine eligible for promotion to the rank of sergeant E-5, she’d been assigned her own single-person room in the barracks and didn’t need that locker. She could just as easily have gone upstairs to shower in the privacy of her own bathroom. But she was strongly attracted to Dylan, a fact that she’d never tried to hide from him, or from anyone else for that matter, and she enjoyed teasing him a little bit whenever she got the chance. Exactly why she was attracted to him, Dylan didn’t have a clue. God knew she could have had any guy she wanted. Damn near all of them wanted her. But for whatever reason, she’d chosen to focus her attention on him.
