Marshall saw in his mind’s eye Ayleea, so totally overwhelmed that it had lost its entire fleet and then its entire population, and now he knew how. Utter, complete and total destruction of the defense and command infrastructure from within. He looked at the display screen and saw the enemy capital ships cruising at a leisurely pace past the battle toward earth as the CSS vessels broke up in disarray around them.
‘Pegasus is firing on us!’
‘Return fire!’ Olsen yelled. ‘All batteries open up on…’
‘Belay that order!’ Marshall snapped, knowing that Pegasus had been on Rim patrol until recently and could not have fallen prey to the same infiltration as Travis Harper. ‘That ship’s been taken over but the crew are still with us!’
Olsen stared at Marshall in horror as what had transpired overcame him too. Not only were their ships firing on each other, they could not fire back without killing their own people.
Titan rocked as Victory’s barrage smashed into her hull and the shields went down as the bridge was plunged into a blackness broken only by the showers of flaming wreckage crashing down around Marshall. The main display screen flickered out as the links were severed and he turned to the tactical display nearby to see the enemy Marauders slowly turning to engage them.
The final blow.
They would hit the CSS vessels hard now, starting with those not under their control like Titan. Marshall gripped his seat for support as the massive ship shuddered and trembled beneath the plasma blows raining down upon her from Pegasus.
‘Tactical?!’
‘We’ve got nothing, captain! Shields are at seventeen percent, hull integrity is collapsing, hull breaches on four decks and we’ve lost contact with the engine room!’
Marshall glanced at the displays still working nearby and saw the Phantom fighters waiting on the catapults.
‘Launch the fighters, all of them!’ Marshall called. ‘Maybe they can take out the Marauders’ gun emplacements!’
‘Aye, cap’n!’
Marshall saw wave after wave of Phantom fighters rocket out of the launch bays as the main display screen flickered back into life. His heart sank as he saw the star fields now strewn with debris from a battle where the enemy had yet to fire a single shot. Allied frigates, corvettes and capital ships fired upon their own in a raging storm of plasma that zipped and rocketed back and forth between them as a vast cloud of ionized gas and debris grew in the light of the distant sun’s glow.
‘Fog of war!’ Olsen called out. ‘Captain, we have to retreat!’
‘We stay and we fight!’
‘We’re only fighting our own people! We’ll lose the battle no matter what we do now! We have to fall back and try to protect earth!’
Marshall agonized as he saw several Marauders turning toward them, their huge plasma cannons lining up to deliver the fatal blasts that would annihilate the CSS fleet in a single action, one ship after another.
***
XL
Polaris Station
Nathan felt a surge and his vision blurred as the shuttle decelerated out of super luminal cruise and the vast baleful eye of Saturn loomed out of the darkness before them. Her rings filled his field of vision as he sat in the rear of the cockpit, Betty at the controls and Foxx seated next to her.
‘They’re not going to want us here,’ Betty said. ‘Arianna Coburn handed control of the military to O’Hara and he’s closed down any means of warning the fleet. All communications channels are shut off.’
‘We have to get aboard,’ Nathan said. ‘There must be somebody out here who will listen to us.’
Betty shrugged, her head wound hastily bandaged. ‘It’s out of my hands, I’ve never served in CSS and neither have any of my family.’
‘What about Admiral Marshall?’ Nathan asked Foxx.
‘He’ll be aboard Titan,’ Foxx replied. ‘Our only hope now is Doctor Schmidt.’
Nathan turned to see the holographic form of Schmidt sitting alongside Allen and Vasquez in the shuttle’s main cabin, although whether a holosap actually needed to “sit” was debatable. Commodore Hawker had succeeded in “reviving” the good doctor before they had left CSS Headquarters using source codes stored in the building.
‘Can you get us in there?’ Nathan asked.
Schmidt nodded, his entire existence currently reliant upon the power from the shuttle’s engines.
‘I can get you aboard, but as soon as I access the appropriate communications channels I will no longer be isolated aboard this shuttle and Admiral O’Hara will be alerted to my presence.’
Foxx turned to Admiral Hawker, who was sitting alongside Schmidt in the rear of the shuttle.
‘You can get us close,’ she said. ‘O’Hara doesn’t know you’re wise to what he’s been doing. They’ll let you aboard if they think you’re still on side.’
‘The fleet is in terrible danger,’ Hawker protested. ‘I should be at my command and he’ll know that.’
‘So tell as much of the truth as possible,’ Nathan replied. ‘Tell him that the fleet is in danger and you wish to serve there, even if it means accepting defeat. You think that Polaris Station should be evacuated and as many human lives saved from the invasion as possible.’
‘He’ll see through it,’ Hawker baulked. ‘If O’Hara’s been an infiltrator for so long, he’ll not take any chances.’
‘It’s common sense and it’s believable,’ Vasquez pressed, ‘given the circumstances. Once we’re inside Polaris, we cut Schmidt loose and hopefully he can override O’Hara’s shut down protocols and get the fleet back on line.’
‘How long will you need?’ Nathan asked Schmidt.
‘Moments,’ he replied, ‘but Admiral O’Hara’s infiltrator will likely have converted the codes he’s used into physical form, something that cannot be traced using computers in order to prevent him from being remotely bypassed as we are trying to do. The only way we can pin him down will be to literally take them from him, and in that I cannot help you.’
Foxx watched as Betty guided the shuttle toward Polaris Station.
‘We need to land close to O’Hara.’
‘The station shields are down,’ she said in surprise. ‘O’Hara must have shut everything down to hasten the invasion and the fleet’s defeat.’
‘Including the fleet’s defenses and probably earth’s too,’ Hawker spat in fury.
Vasquez pointed to the uppermost tip of the vast station.
‘That’s the control and conference rooms,’ he said. ‘The highest point of any military structure is where you’ll likely find the top dogs.’
‘If we try and land there O’Hara will likely see us coming and have us blasted into shrapnel,’ Allen pointed out.
‘Then we’re gonna have to be quick about it,’ Foxx said and glanced at the pilot. ‘Betty?’
‘I’m on it,’ she replied as she guided the shuttle in. ‘We’re cleared to land in Delta Bay Fourteen, but I’ll pull up at the last moment and put us in Alpha Three. That’s as close as I can get you to the conference rooms.’
Foxx nodded and checked her pistol.
‘We don’t know how many of these infiltrators there are aboard the station, and those that are not infiltrators will likely think that we are once the shots start flying. This needs to be fast, understood?’
‘I get it,’ Allen said, ‘but we can’t just start shooting. We don’t know who we need to hit.’
‘That’s where I come in,’ Schmidt said. ‘I cannot alter O’Hara’s physical codes, but I can broadcast the ocular implant update I coded as soon as we get aboard, based on body temperature. From Polaris Station the update will reach all implants almost instantaneously across the system and within an hour or so on the colonies. Everybody will know the difference between friend and foe because they’ll light up like Christmas trees.’
Nathan pulled his pistol out as Betty slowed for a landing, the vast mushroom shaped form of Polaris Station filling the screen before them.
‘I want O’Hara,’ he said to Foxx in a low voice.
‘Don’t make this personal,’ she replied. ‘O’Hara is dead. The thing in his place probably wouldn’t understand revenge even if you do manage to kill it.’
‘I saw the look on that thing’s face when I sent it out of that airlock on New Washington,’ Nathan insisted. ‘They fear death, just like we do.’
Foxx closed her eyes before she replied.
‘I’ve been here before, Nathan, when I lost my parents,’ she said softly, ‘and trust me, no matter what you do or what you achieve, that hole inside you will never, ever be filled. Sula’s gone, Nathan. All we can do is try to prevent others from suffering the same fate.’
Nathan gripped his pistol tighter but said nothing as Betty lined up for landing.
‘Here we go,’ she warned them.
At the last moment she opened the throttles and pitched the shuttle steeply up, climbing clear of the delta deck bay and up to the alpha decks. Almost immediately an alarm blared as officers inside the control towers bellowed at her.
‘Be prepared for a frosty reception!’ she chortled.
The shuttle landed inside the alpha bay just before the blast doors crashed down to seal it and Foxx hit the emergency open button on the main exit. The doors hissed open and she jumped out with Nathan, Allen and Vasquez right behind them.
‘You there!’
Nathan saw four armed CSS guards dash into the landing bay.
‘Gentlemen!’ Commodore Hawker called to them. ‘The station has been compromised and we’re here to…’
The guards opened fire as Foxx yanked the commodore into cover behind the shuttle’s fuselage as a stream of plasma shots rocketed past and burst against the shuttle’s hull.
‘Damnably rude of them!’ Hawker blustered.
‘Damnably,’ Foxx agreed as she fired a couple of shots over the shuttle’s nose to keep the guards occupied. ‘We can’t kill these guys. Where’s Schmidt?’
Nathan looked up and saw the doctor’s glowing blue form materialize in an office alongside the landing bay.
‘He’s live and in the system,’ he replied.
Schmidt’s ephemeral form began accessing the station’s data streams as Nathan ducked down, a salvo of plasma fire spraying searing hot globules across the landing bay deck nearby.
Vasquez and Allen fired back, their shots going high as Commodore Hawker yelled out again.
‘Stand down! We’re here to identify the infiltrators!’
‘You’re the infiltrators!’ came the reply. ‘Admiral O’Hara has already identified you and you landed illegally!’
‘Admiral O’Hara is the enemy!’ Hawker yelled back above the gunfire.
‘This is getting old real fast!’ Foxx snapped as she fired again. ‘Schmidt, you done yet?!’
Nathan glanced across at the office and saw that the holographic form had vanished already.
‘He’s not there!’
‘Damn it!’ Vasquez snapped. ‘They must have shut him down already!’
Nathan was about to ask what the hell they were going to do next when a ferocious barrage of plasma fire showered down around them. Nathan ducked down and away from the lethal blasts and heard the drumming of countless boots on the deck. Before he or Foxx could respond, an entire platoon of Marines rushed around the sides of the shuttle, weapons aimed at them.
‘Put your weapons down!’
Nathan knew that they couldn’t hope to shoot faster than the troops now surrounding them and he immediately set his pistol down.
‘We’re here from New Washington,’ he said quickly. ‘We have a way of identifying the infiltrators.’
‘Sure you do,’ the Marine lieutenant snapped. ‘Face down on the deck, all of you!’
‘He’s telling the damned truth!’ Hawker snapped. ‘Don’t you know who I am?’
The Marine sneered at Hawker.
‘Right now I don’t know who anybody is, so get on your face or I’ll blow it off right here and now!’
Hawker blanched and lay flat on his chest as the Marines scowled down at them.
‘What do we do with them?’
The lieutenant appeared to weigh up whether to imprison them when a hologram shimmered into life and Rear Admiral Vincent O’Hara stood before them, his hands behind his back.
‘Good work,’ he said as he saw the Marines standing over Hawker and his companions. ‘Have them detained immediately before they can do any more damage. Ensure that they are kept inside a hard light quarantine unit so that they cannot infect anybody else.’
‘You’re the infection!’ Hawker snapped. ‘Why have you shut off the defensive shields to our entire fleet and this station?’
‘I have done no such thing,’ O’Hara replied. ‘I am trying to reinstate the power as we speak, and no doubt you were hoping to stop me.’
Nathan looked up at O’Hara from where he lay on the deck with a Marine’s boot between his shoulder blades.
‘We know what you’ve done, but we’re one step ahead of you!’
‘It doesn’t look that way to me, detective.’
‘Then reinstate the holosaps,’ Nathan snapped. ‘They’re our only defense against the infiltrators because they cannot be mimicked.’
Admiral O’Hara shook his head
‘Until the communications channels are secure we cannot afford the risk.’
‘They were never breached,’ Foxx replied. ‘You shut them down to prevent us from broadcasting a fix to ocular implants that would identify infiltrators to everybody!’
O’Hara frowned. ‘I would have done no such thing.’
‘Then reinstate the holosaps,’ Nathan repeated. ‘If you are who you say you are, we can identify infiltrators immediately before the fleet is destroyed.’
The Marines glanced at O’Hara, who shook his head in pity.
‘Nice try, but I won’t compromise the security of our military channels until I’m sure every last infiltrator is safely under lock and key. You’ll just use the channels to further doom our fleet. Take them away!’
O’Hara’s hologram vanished and Nathan looked at the Marine lieutenant.
‘Reinstate the holosaps,’ he said. ‘They’re our only hope. Don’t take my word for it or O’Hara’s. Just do it and you’ll see!’
The Marine’s eyes narrowed as he considered the request. He glanced at his corporal, who shrugged uncertainly. ‘The admiral will string you up by the balls if you disobey a direct order.’
‘So will I if you don’t,’ Commodore Hawker growled. ‘Do it, you have nothing to lose. If we’re infiltrators, why would we ask you to do the one thing that will expose us? Use your damned head, man!’
The Marine watched them for a moment longer and then turned to his corporal.
‘Do it,’ he said, ‘quietly.’
The corporal hurried away to the nearby office and descended the steps. Nathan watched him walk inside and move across to a control panel. Moments later, Doctor Schmidt’s hologram flickered back into life.
‘I’d better not regret this,’ the Marine growled at Foxx as he watched her down the barrel of his rifle.
‘You won’t,’ she replied. ‘Just watch.’
Nathan saw Doctor Schmidt gesture to the Marine corporal and then suddenly Nathan’s ocular implant flashed and he saw an update bar rapidly flicker before him. Moments later, he looked up at the Marines and saw one of them with an angry bright red border flashing around his body.
‘Enemy!’
Nathan saw the Marines recoil from the soldier in their midst, who whirled and aimed at the lieutenant. The soldier was cut down in a hail of plasma fire before he could pull the trigger and Nathan saw his body collapsing amid a cloud of swirling embers and hissing material that was clearly anything but flesh and bone.
‘Holy mother of…’ The Marine lieutenant stared at the smoldering pile of molten slag now starting to crawl across the landing bay deck away from them. ‘Fry that thing, right now!’
The Marines encircled the remains and opened fire, plasma rounds decimating the remaining material into a lifeless stream of molten cells. Nathan got to his feet as the Marine lieutenant saw Commodore Hawker stand up.
‘Commodore!’ he snapped to attention. ‘You have to realize that we had no idea that…’
‘Silence!’ Hawker snapped. ‘I am more than aware of the dilemma you faced. Right now the important thing is to locate Admiral O’Hara. He is one of them, an infiltrator, and he must be stopped!’
Doctor Schmidt materialized before them, his features creased with anxiety.
‘The fleet is in danger of being defeated and O’Hara has disappeared. As expected, I cannot find the codes.’
***
XLI
Nathan set off at a run with Foxx and the Marines alongside him. Already he could hear across the station the sound of plasma fire as infiltrators were identified among the staff and gunned down with extreme prejudice.
Nathan reached an elevator shaft and leaped inside, the doors closing as two Marines joined him with Foxx. The elevator climbed away as Vasquez, Allen and Commodore Hawker waited for another elevator to become available.
Nathan flinched in surprise as Doctor Schmidt shimmered into existence alongside them.
‘The fleet’s ships are being controlled from here, Polaris Station,’ he informed Nathan. ‘Roughly one third of our vessels are engaging their own allies and the enemy is moving into position to finish the job. CSS Victory appears to be entirely controlled by infiltrators.’
Nathan gripped his plasma pistol more tightly as he willed the elevator to travel faster.
‘Can we get word to the rest of the station that Admiral O’Hara is the source?’
‘I fear that it would do little good,’ Schmidt replied. ‘The admiral is dead and I don’t think that our intruder will maintain his likeness for long now that the secret is out.’
The elevator’s hard light doors opened and Nathan rushed out onto a long corridor that led to the main conference room where O’Hara had been holding court. Already he could see that the doors had been sealed shut from the inside, red beacons signalling that they were locked.
Predator (Old Ironsides Book 3) Page 31
