Battle On The Marathon

by John Thornton

There were additional sounds I will never forget, no matter how hard I try. In my helmet came the cries of the men and women of my unit who had not been properly secured down as the explosions happened. Several of them were ejected out with the brown gunk. From the anguished cries, I knew some of them were dying from the pressures exerted on their bodies as they were forced through the breaches. Major Gonzales was giving them instructions on using the combat armor as spacesuits, but I wondered if that was just a sort-of offering for those of us who were secured in. The limited maneuvering thrusters the combat armor had, would hardly be able to overcome the sheer force of the explosive decompression as my people were expelled into space. I really hope none of them survived passing out through the breaches. Better to die in a quick smash, then to die hurling through space waiting for your energy, supplies, or air recyclers to fail.

  “Message from MC0001. Colonel Gehlen reports that the Jellie ship is secured,” a mechanical voice came through my helmet.

  “This is Major Gonzales, the Jellie ship is NOT secured! The attack is underway!”

  My displays showed that the breaches were still open in several places of the Jellie ship, and I could use my optics to see, since the brown gunk was gone. I switched my strobes to a steady beam of light. The wall next to me was hard, and my anchor bolt was stuck fast into the wall. The carapaces were bouncing about and rolling in that cargo hold, except for the seven trojan-horses which had been restrained.

  “Move! Now punch holes through at these locations!” Major Gonzales commanded, and the displays showed interior walls which seemed to have compartments behind them. “We will drain this whole accursed place, and see how Jellie like it without their watery sludge!”

  I moved to the nearest indicated location and set the vibration drill on it.

  “Ready to drill!” I yelled.

  “Go Kalju!” Major Gonzales ordered. “Varbama and Pinnate have already made other exit holes. Do not wait. Push as deep into this ship as possible! Charge ahead, and drain everything!”

  I activated the vibration drill and it punctured into that chamber beyond. When that happened, the brown gunk came shooting out of that hole, spraying around in the vacuum. The alien ship’s gravity was still working, but that only meant that the gunk spit out quickly and then pooled at my feet.

  A tentacle from a carapace slapped down hard on my shoulder as I moved to drill into another spot. I turned and there was a brightly glowing Jellie, tentacles extended and fighting mad. I jumped to the side, as another powered tentacle slapped down on me. My combat armor absorbed most of that, but it still hurt. I drew out my enpol and fired right at the Jellie.

  A tentacle wrapped around my arm, and I lost the energy weapon. In my other hand, I still had the vibration drill and I slammed that into the Jellie’s main body.

  A hole burst open, and some brown fluids drained out, but the hole sealed over quickly. I pulled the trigger on the vibration drill again, and another hole was punched through the carapace of the Jellie. Again, a small burst of brown gunk came out, but that hole too sealed quickly over. A tentacle slapped me hard, and I was knocked back and away.

  Jorgenson fired her own enpol at the Jellie, and this time the energy burst struck home. An orange glow appeared at the impact site, and then a tentacle from the Jellie wrapped around Jorgenson’s leg.

  I heard her scream as the Jellie’s enhanced strength constructed in on her leg. The combat armor was fighting it, but the pain in her voice was incredible. Leaping over toward her I activated the built-in vibration saws in my gloves and cut into that tentacle. It split open, and fell away.

  Just then another energy bolt struck that same orange spot on the Jellie. This one ripped into the inside, and the brown gunk gushed out into the vacuum. The inhabitant of that Jellie suit, the organic Jellie, came out with it. Its tentacles, tendrils, and spiked stem were flapping about, but the vacuum cured that in just a moment. I wish it had taken longer and a been more tortuous death.

  “Scratch that one off,” Stridell commented as he headed away.

  “Thanks!” Jorgenson said.

  “Jorgenson, how bad is it?” I asked.

  “Hurts really terrible, Sergeant! The combat armor sealed off that leg, but I can still feel it. Running the medical program now,” Jorgenson answered. “I will deal with me. You go kill these abominations! Kill them for me!”

  My command functions confirmed that Jorgenson’s combat armor was running medical treatments. Her leg was broken in a couple places, but she would not lose it. The injury was being stabilized and she was getting analgesics, but she was mostly out of the fight.

  “Jorgenson, keep this cargo hold secure. Most all of our gear is in the trojan-horses. Guard this!”

  “Yes, Sergeant! I am on it,” her voice was weak, but the commitment behind it was fierce.

  So, I rushed away. I looked for any other functioning Jellies in the cargo area, but could not find any. I hoped Jorgenson would be safe.

  “Keep draining this ship! I want the whole thing opened to space as soon as possible! Move!” Major Gonzales barked.

  I moved ahead, and saw that several openings were now revealed which had not been there before. Somehow the Jellie equivalent of doors were being opened. As I stepped through, I saw several more organic Jellies at various points, all dead and now a sickly tan color. That is what happens to a purplish-blue alien when it is in vacuum. It turns tan and dies. I hope it is a very painful death.

  Checking my display, I saw that there were only thirteen of us who were operational, and Jorgenson’s signal was flashing with a warning indicating her injuries.

  We moved as fast as we could, drilling holes into any compartment which showed on the displays as still having liquid behind it. As I closed in on the center of that Jellie ship, I realized its deck plan was oblong rings inside rings. At the center was an oblong ring that was still filled with fluids, and had no other rings within it.

  Major Gonzales was there as I approached.

  There was an unexpected flipping and shifting of everything around me. My orientation of up and down went crazy, and I was extremely dizzy. I nearly vomited inside my helmet.

  “Message from MC001. Jellie ship is moving and has detached from the Marathon.”

  “Commence Operation Peanut Butter! Immediately! Command override General Adams 16TJ48, execute!”

  I recognized that voice, and thought of the dog Marie. Adams had ordered something.

  “Message from MC001. Operation Peanut Butter initiated, despite IAM Lenore’s objections,” the mechanical voice said.

  “Just do it now!” General Adams yelled. I tried to envision his face, but I could only think of Marie.

  Much more vigorous jostling and twirling happened all around us. The floor lurched, bucked, and then seemed to drop. The world around me was spinning and flipping and I had no idea what exactly was happening.

  A calm settled in, and the ship was stable again.

  “Major Gonzales, I have isolated this central section,” Samuels called out. “It is like a lifeboat or something, and there are twelve Jellies inside it. I have them isolated from the rest of this Jellie ship. They are trapped here.”

  “Well done Samuels!” Major Gonzales congratulated. “You sure they cannot do anything from in there?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I think so. There are no areas around it with any of their liquid gunk, and without that lubricant, their technology is pretty worthless.”

  “I am tempted to just drain this place as well, but prisoners can give us information, if those oceanographers were right about that translation device. Pinnate and Nasula, go get those translation devices. Everyone else, start securing the rest of this ship.” There was some undertone in the Major’s voice which concerned me.

  “Major Gonzales? What is Operation Peanut Butter? Some kind of morbid joke or failed humor?” I asked.

  “Sergeant Kalju, I have not heard of it before, but I will find out.” She paused for a moment. Then I heard he
r calling on the command channels. “General Adams? Colonel Gehlen? Colonel Caldwell?”

  There was no response.

  Major Gonzales then said, “We need connections to the Marathon. All the command channels are unlinked. Samuels? Can you network up those central memory cores we brought? I am only getting interference now. Maybe being this deep inside the Jellie ship is playing havoc with our equipment?”

  “Yes, ma’am, but I do not think the Jellie ship would block our new signals. It was not doing that a few moments ago, anyway. Are all the command channels down?”

  “Mine all are. Sergeant Kalju, what about yours?” Major Gonzales asked.

  “None working. Last thing I got was that order from Adams. What does this mean?”

  “We will find out as fast as we can,” Major Gonzales replied. “But I have a very bad feeling about this.”

  9

  Operation Peanut Butter

  Well Ryan, I am back to this log again. We had another setback on the big jump. We thought we were ready, but then the destination coordinates slipped from the system, so that mean redoing the computations. So, I have a bit more time to keep this record going. Last time I explained how we captured the Jellie ship, but as I reviewed my record I see I did not explain much about what actually happened. Of course, at the time I did not know what had happened, so I will try to lay it out as best I remember. It was chaos for a while.

  We did trap twelve Jellies in their own version of a lifeboat, or saferoom, or bunker, whatever you want to call it. They were cut off from the rest of their ship, and Samuels, bless her brilliant mind, had also prevented them from ejecting that escape pod.

  By carefully drilling a hole almost all the way into that chamber, we were able to insert a sealed probe which we could use with the translation device. All it needed at the end of that probe was a transducer to pick up the vibrations and waves in the brown Jellie fluids. Also on that probe’s tip was another instrument by which we could send out signals on corresponding waves and vibrations. I helped in getting that set up, connected into MC87, and we began listening to what the Jellies were saying to each other.

  At the same time, Samuels and Major Gonzales were establishing our small network of MC generation AIs. It was only three, so I hesitate to call it a lattice, but that was its purpose—to allow an interconnection between the systems and make a new committee of compeers.

  I had been unable to access anything via the communications links or couplings, outside of the thirteen remaining Bilokos. We had no visual observations beyond those weird walls of that Jellie ship. I felt trapped, isolated, and set apart. Had I been alone in that Jellie ship, it would have been horrifically dreadful. With the others, I tolerated what was happening, knowing we would soon link up again and get some signals from the Marathon.

  As Samuels worked to set up that MC AI network, I listened to the Jellies we had captured. Their language consisted of strange squeaks, clicks, and other bizarre sounds. It was not like any language or animal sounds I have ever heard before. I recalled the way dolphins and orcas sounded, and the Jellies were not like them. The Jellies were truly alien, and my appreciation for what Earle and Sylvia had done increased dramatically, but then I remembered it really was the orcas who had figured out the Jellie’s language.

  Those eerie Jellie sounds came through the probe and were heard inside my helmet via the speakers linked into that conservation slate. That is, until I altered that speaker system and turned down the sounds which it relayed. I could not stand to hear the actual Jellie’s language, and so I set the slate to just analyze the language, and then scroll out the translation on my helmet’s internal display screen. I did not want to even hear imitation speech. I needed insulation from the Jellies, and by reading their conveyances, I was able to maintain some protection. Of our twelve captives, five conversed with each other.

  It took several hours for the translation device to achieve more than an occasional word, and then some fragments.

  “The gas breathers…escape….have us….trapped,” the Jellie I named Number One conveyed.

  “Study continues…space going…” another, which I called Number Two replied.

  “…weapons…dead…dying…kill…” Number Three interjected. Number Three was always very difficult to translate in those early days.

  “Escape…gas breathers not thinking…nothing…no…reverse,” Number Four conveyed.

  “Food…eat…consume…excrete…study specimens and then kill.” Number Five related.

  That went on for a while, and I was not getting much of a picture of what was happening or what the aliens were about. I knew we needed information, but I did not want to give away the fact that we were listening in.

  Major Gonzales came into that room, and as she walked in, I knew something had happened. With her combat armor in place, I could not see any facial expressions, but something about her movements and demeanor spoke volumes.

  “Sergeant Kalju, I have reestablished contact with the Marathon. IAM Lenore is linked in with MC12, MC87, and MC223. I thought I should tell you first.”

  “That is good news, right?” I tried to be hopeful, but her words were loaded with emotions. “We can set them to the task of translation, and that will speed this up. Even with all that the oceanographers did, it is a slow and tedious process.”

  She grabbed my shoulder, and even though we were both in our combat armor, speaking through a private channel, I somehow felt her hand’s presence on me. Maybe I imagined it.

  “Kalju, Styx and Foreigner are gone,” Major Gonzales stated flatly. “Here is the latest visual feed I could find. It is from an aperture outside an external repair station on Chicago.”

  The video showed up on my display. At first I thought it was some ancient movie from the twentieth century when there was a craze for disaster films and end-of-the-world entertainment venues—something I never did understand, being that the Great Event was only a few decades later. But then I examined the visual scan and knew it was genuine live feed.

  Stubs of constituent joints jutted up from the needle ship. They were twisted, bent, broken, and frayed. A massive sense of loss settled in on me as my mind reconstructed where the two aquatic habitats should have been. The near one would have been Styx, and Foreigner should have been mostly hidden behind that, as it connected into the needle ship from a different angle than how Styx connected. Floating debris was scattered about, but less than would account for the mass of those giant cylinders which contained the shells and biological habitats.

  “How did the Jellies do that?” I muttered.

  “They did not.”

  “What?”

  “It was Operation Peanut Butter,” Major Gonzales replied. Now emotions were surging into her words. “We were docked on Foreigner, remember? The Jellie ship was stuck to Foreigner’s hull. The Jellies had been going in and out of Foreigner from this Jellie ship.”

  “Right, and we flew across from Journey,” I thought of Lacey, her beautiful face and bouncing hair were foremost in my mind, but then fuzzy images of my parents and other sisters also zipped into my thoughts. “Kansas?”

  “IAM Lenore, display for Sergeant Kalju and me the mission objective for Operation Peanut Butter.”

  “As ranking officer, I remind you that I did not support Operation Peanut Butter,” the artificial intelligence system Lenore responded. Its voice had a sort-of nasal twang. “Operation Peanut Butter mission objective are as follows. Primary objective: destruction of the Jellie deep-space research vessel. Major objective: destruction of habitats commonly known as Styx and Foreigner. All other considerations suspended.”

  “Who ordered this?” I sputtered. “We were on Foreigner! Attached to its hull.”

  “May I respond to Sergeant Kalju’s inquiry,” IAM Lenore asked.

  “Yes, I order you to grant all clearances to Sergeant Kalju. He is my second in command,” Major Gonzales barked out. “No more secrets. Reveal it all to him.”

  “Yes, C
aptain. Operation Peanut Butter was designed and implemented on the direct command of General Adams,” IAM Lenore replied.

  “I again instruct you that I am to be addressed as Major Gonzales, even though I accept that I am now Acting Captain of the Marathon, what is left of her.”

  Mister Fisher’s training from so long ago kicked in and I just asked, “Give me battlefield assessment of Operation Peanut Butter.”

  IAM Lenore replied, “Operation Peanut Butter failed to meet its primary objective. The Jellie ship has been captured, and the unit known as the Bilokos has occupied it. Secondary objective of destruction of Styx and Foreigner were achieved by causing an overload of each biome’s solar mimicry reactors along with simultaneously setting off thermonuclear weapons at each end of each habitat, while locking bulkhead doors open, and disabling Emergency Containment Curtains.”