Drysine Legacy (The Spiral Wars Book 2)

by Joel Shepherd

  Abruptly the queen spun, a flurry of white thrust as her defenders kept fighting, oblivious. Even at this range, Trace could swear the queen’s tri-partite eyes were fixed upon her, and only a fool would question how she could spot the more distant humans when so much was happening close-by. It was tempting to consider a shot, but Trace knew the drones would shield their queen with their bodies, and so long as she did not fire, the deepynines would expend their ammunition only on those directly threatening them.

  Instead, Trace raised an armoured hand, and gave a small salute. The deepynine queen stared back. Knowing, perhaps, that this was the enemy that had destroyed Tartarus, and brought this new sard alliance to a crashing halt… temporarily, at least. Surely there were plans beyond this one, and the alliance was not just limited to Tartarus. Surely there were queens beyond this one, too. Who did they answer to? Who did she? Whatever it was, it was at the very top of all alo civilisation — humanity’s ally in the Triumvirate War, now double-dealing with humanity’s enemies. And now the secret was out.

  The queen turned and again and thrusted toward the alo ship, her defenders in support. And Trace saw that Makimakala’s strike was four minutes forty away, and she was completely out of time.

  “Chase them!” she said. “It’s our only way out.” And left cover to jet after the alo ship, which was already leaving with a glare of thrust. Most of it missed the marines as they held to the passage sides and burned… and past the glare, Trace could swear she saw the queen simply latch to the vessel’s underside without bothering to board, herself and drones grasping those alo who had nothing else to hold onto, refusing to leave even lowly soldiers behind.

  “Hello Phoenix,” Trace called on that channel. “Have you been reading my visual feed? If not, stand by to receive, I’m not sure if we can get out of here in time…”

  “Najor, behind!” a voice cut through the static. “You get, board fast!”

  And Trace shot a glance down past her feet even as she accelerated by the debris of recent combat and tumbling steel bodies that could smash her off-course… and saw a Phoenix combat shuttle, coming at her sideways in a huge corrective slide, and now straightening for approach.

  “Tif’s here!” Kono yelled with relief. “That’s PH-4, combat boarding, spread it wide!”

  “Where’s PH-3?” asked Rael. “I can’t see Lieutenant Jersey…” As a second shuttle skidded sideways into the framework passage, corrective thrust burning and Delta Platoon marines blazing fire out the back from their hull anchorpoints, evidence of a fast and desperate retreat.

  “This is Jersey, I’m full up, get on PH-4!” As PH-4 crashed through recent debris, and ducked beneath the torn and drifting hulk of the ruined deepynine ship.

  Ahead the passage made a turn, the alo ship already past it and burning harder. Suddenly PH-4 was paralleling the marines, braking with nose thrust as Rael, Terez and Kumar changed directions and dove for it. There were ten positions on a combat shuttle’s hull that could pass for anchor points in an emergency, and marines frequently practised reaching them. Trace saw all three marines hit the shuttle’s broad back, forward of the upper aft thrust, and magnetise. But now the tunnel corner was arriving, and she turned, calculating her apex just past the inner bend, and fired thrust.

  Trace missed the inner apex by a few meters only, then drifted wide and gritted her teeth in hope she wouldn’t need to brake before hitting the far wall… only for her armoured feet to hit something unseen. She glanced down in astonishment, and found PH-4 directly beneath her as it went around the corner sideways, now using its own mass to correct Trace’s course, balancing her small, armoured figure upon its nose. Behind the heavily armoured canopy, Trace caught a glimpse of Ensign Lee in the front seat, and realised that the awed tales of the Operations techs who’d watched Tif fly simulator missions were probably true.

  Trace stepped off the nose, cut thrust and ‘fell’ past the canopy to an unsecured anchor point, grabbed it and magnetised. PH-4’s thrust burned hard, hauling Trace down at a force rarely felt within an armour suit, then a rapid spin, and a blurred glance showed that Tif had gathered another marine, similarly latched by the shoulder nacelle. Another fast spin, then the hard thrust returned, and Trace had no way of checking that all her marines were aboard, with tacnet gone to hell and static on her visor display, but she had to trust that Tif knew.

  Now thrust cut back in, and the passage opened into another of those huge, Tartarus internal spaces. This one was filled with tumbling, drifting debris — whatever ships or structures had been here were now smashed and broken. Trace could hear pilot chatter on coms, but now she was a total passenger, and could only hope Tif recalled that even small impacts on her ship’s hull would make direct strikes on her marines.

  One visor function was still working clearly, counting down the seconds to Makimakala’s strike. One minute fifty and counting.

  * * *

  “One minute forty!” said Shahaim, fingers racing as she locked in possible escape trajectories, and calculated outward runs to jump. “I’m projecting an explosion terminal radius of at least five hundred K!”

  “Everyone is leaving!” Geish added. On Erik’s tactical feed, sublighters and FTL vessels were departing Tartarus as fast as they could burn. Even now several exchanged fire, exposed beyond cover but with no choice if they were going to escape the blast radius in time.

  All of Erik’s attention was fixed on two emergent points, where tactical showed AT-7 leaving Tartarus amid a cloud of drysine drones and at least one captured sublight ship, and another point thirty degrees around the Tartarus perimeter where latest projections showed PH-3 and PH-4 should emerge. Might emerge.

  The picket vessels had scattered again at Makimakala’s arrival — a number had evidently been damaged in their exchanges with the fire stations Styx had assumed control of, and now Makimakala’s high-V ordinance was incoming on them as well. Makimakala was following a little behind her own ordinance, unloading new fire even now, filling space between herself and evasive pickets with a huge spread of guided destruction. It made staying close to Tartarus a deadly proposition for those defending ships, and gave Phoenix and her shuttles a chance.

  “Helm I want a cover intercept on our shuttles,” said Erik. “They’re going to build V fast as they leave, we’re going to match between them.”

  There was a picket vessel out that way, and at least two more beyond who could theoretically target them if they weren’t currently concerned with Makimakala. Amidst the ships fleeing Tartarus in that vicinity were various small shuttles, some sublighters and a whole bunch of low-V drones who were likely going far too slow to get clear in time.

  “I can’t raise Styx or AT-7,” Shilu said tersely. “The jamming out there is too intense, I think there’s something big in their vicinity.”

  “Fifty seconds!”

  Going to be tight, Erik thought, his brain in overload trying to predict all those overlapping possibilities. But then, it was always tight.

  At forty-six seconds he hit thrust hard, and Phoenix accelerated at 8-G across Tartarus’s curving surface. “Target mark one priority,” he formulated as the Gs made speech impossible, and armscomp fixed the near picket with a priority red. “Full firepower.”

  “Mark one priority aye!” said Karle, and let fly as soon as that target appeared past the horizon.

  “Incoming full spread!” Harris added, as mark one fired back, and Erik kicked them into a defensive corkscrew that also gave Harris’s defensive emplacements a good look. They hit something with a loud bang, then multiple detonations as incoming fire was intercepted, and a red light flashed on Erik’s screen.

  “Something departed our second emergence point!” called Jiri from Scan Two. “Too big to be our shuttles, it’s burning hard! Fourteen-Gs!”

  Fourteen-Gs was far too hard to be a human vessel of any sort. Thirty seconds. Directly behind that blazingly fast alien ship, two more familiar dots appeared, and scan showed them acceleratin
g at 5-Gs — right on the mark for a Phoenix combat shuttle. Erik just knew, and spun them to thrust hard for position even before Jiri could confirm it was them.

  “Phoenix to shuttles, crash grapple!” he yelled at them, as thrust dropped enough to talk. “Crash grapple, line up! We’re coming in hot!”

  Both continued burning at near maximum, but now they were drifting astern into the position of Phoenix’s combat grapples. Velocity built fast with constant thrust, but if five hundred K was minimum safe distance, the shuttles weren’t going to make a hundred before the detonation wave hit them. Nearby at a thirty-degree offset, AT-7 and company were much further ahead, and much faster. But Erik couldn’t do anything to help them now.

  He spun Phoenix around to approach tail-first, burning hard to decelerate. More incoming detonations, then a massive smack sideways as something big hit them, and the red light on his screen had quintuplets as Karle snarled triumph — the picket vessel catching far worse. Harris blasted several small, fleeing deepynine ships nearby, then Erik cut thrust to spin once more on approach as Shahaim’s fine-tuning helped him line up the angle of impact just right…

  And his display countdown reached zero. Rear-facing cameras blanked white, unable to handle the glare. Large asteroids could kill planets, and while Makimakala’s missiles and magfire contained only a tiny fraction of that mass, they carried monstrous multiples of that velocity. For the briefest instant, Erik’s visuals showed the Tartarus globe spitted through the middle, as though by a spear, and a huge, white-hot plume of molten energy spewing out behind in the direction of V. Then the whole lot came apart.

  Erik saw his twin targets match, the grapple system aligning on its own autos to crash and grasp both shuttles in a grip designed to paralyse much larger warships, if necessary. Then he aligned upon Shahaim’s escape trajectory, and pulsed as his stomach dropped out from under him…

  …and emerged racing massively faster, streaking away across the gas giant’s gravity slope. Behind, Tartarus remained invisible through a glare of white. Two more picket vessels had similarly disappeared, victims of Makimakala’s fire. And here came Makimakala herself, streaking at ridiculous velocity just beyond the expanding blast-zone of Tartarus’s destruction, far too fast for the naked eye and a thousand kilometres distant before you could blink. Several picket vessels pulsed up after her, and Erik spun Phoenix about, burning hard to slow them. Already the shockwave was far behind, though scan showed clouds of high-V debris were approaching fast, ready to kill anything in their path.

  “Scan, I want AT-7’s location,” Erik demanded. “Operations, status on our shuttles?”

  “Hi LC, it’s Jersey,” came the reply before Operations could respond. “I got a bit crushed by the grapples, but I think we’re good.”

  “LC, marines are all good,” came Trace’s voice, and Erik’s heart leaped in relief. “Go get Hausler.”

  37

  They found AT-7 tumbling and damaged, accompanied by a sublight freight hauler that drysines had hijacked to get clear. A grappling nudge straightened the shuttle, followed by dock, and then a moment of crazy indecision as Styx insisted that all the drysine drones from the freight hauler should be brought along. The hauler was just small enough that Phoenix could hyperspace with it attached, so Erik grappled it, burned to get clear of the expanding debris field, and jumped.

  Despite the latest damage, Phoenix held together beautifully through the first jump, and then through the second, which brought them to the rendezvous point where Makimakala was waiting for them. They made for deep space rendezvous, well away from sunlight or gravity wells, and soon had two, then three more FTL vessels coming to join them, all transmitting drysine codes and in apparently friendly conversation with Styx, and the freighter grasped in Phoenix’s talons. Each had been appropriated, Erik gathered, during the Tartarus uprising. Exactly how many drones had piled into each before departure, Styx would not say. Erik guessed many hundreds, possibly more than a thousand in total. Most drysines had died in the uprising, but this many had escaped. Now they had ships, and a queen. And Makimakala, whose solemn task was to destroy all hacksaws they found, now found herself party to unleashing this new spread of once-dormant drysines into the galaxy.

  With Makimakala still twenty minutes ahead, two of the drysine ships came into formation with Phoenix on approach. It made the gunners nervous, but Erik assured Karle and Harris that there was unlikely to be any threat so long as Styx was aboard. And told them to keep a close watch on their new friends anyway. Probably the drysines knew exactly what Makimakala was, and thought it best to confront her with overwhelming odds before rendezvous. That they now considered Phoenix one of their own where those odds were concerned, was more disturbing than flattering.

  At first opportunity Erik changed shifts to let Draper and Dufresne take command and headed to the kitchen for some food, then to Engineering 3C which was currently used only for storage, and was often converted into a rec room most usually frequented by Operations crew. There amidst the secure shelving racks he found various first-shifters on the low-mass folding plastic chairs that were all the unsecured furniture crew were allowed, drinking and eating.

  In one especially exclusive circle were the shuttle crews — pilots Hausler, Jersey and Tif, plus co-pilots Yun, Singh and Lee. Lisbeth was also here, having ridden out the entire thing in PH-1 — Hausler’s usual ride — with Dufresne in the pilot’s seat in case they’d been needed. And Erik realised with astonishment that he hadn’t agonised over that fact much at all, during the fight. Perhaps he was finally getting used to Lisbeth being in danger… or perhaps he’d simply become fatalistic. Either way, he wasn’t sure he liked it.

  He took a seat and ate with them, exhausted as they all were, and the shuttle crews still damp from recent sweat. “Tif, where’s Skah?” he asked.

  “Sreeping,” said Tif, half-sprawled as she tore at the cold meat her species preferred. Her big ears held an unnatural upward curve from having been bound in their scarf beneath her helmet for too long. “Conbat ops very tiring for baby. Poor Skah.”

  Her fellow pilots grinned. One of Tif’s hands jumped and twitched as she ate, completely beyond her to control. Tif saw Erik looking, and grimaced, flexing the hand. But the twitching continued.

  “You should have seen her just after we got out,” said Lee, seeing Erik looking. “Kuhsi adrenal overload.” He made a face, teeth bared, fingers curled like some crazy animal. “Couldn’t touch her, she was jumping at loud noises.”

  “You stiw awive,” Tif complained. “I no kiw, you shut up.” Lee grinned and nudged her shoulder. Tif twitched again, and this time her finger claws came halfway out. She flicked an ear at her co-pilot in irritation.

  “This girl,” Jersey said to Erik, pointing at Tif. “Impossible. I’ve never said this of any pilot in the Fleet, but I can’t do that.”

  “Not even him?” Erik asked, pointing at Hausler. Apparently the least ruffled of them all, Hausler ate calmly.

  “Not even him,” said Jersey. “That last run to pick up the Major, I just followed Tif. I thought she’d gotten us both killed a dozen times, flown us into something, but each time we missed it by a few meters. Any human doing that would have died. And if we hadn’t gone that fast… well.”

  “Phoenix,” Tif said to Jersey, by way of explanation.

  Jersey nodded, and gulped her drink. “Phoenix,” she agreed.

  “Phoenix,” the others echoed.

  “You had guns,” Hausler complained. “I wish I’d had guns.” Being stuck in that situation, unarmed, hadn’t been something he enjoyed.

  Erik’s next visit was to Medbay Two, where wounded marines were being treated. Incredibly there were only four, and none of the injuries were serious. Even more incredibly, there had been no fatalities. None of the four marines could believe it.

  “They just weren’t shooting at us, LC,” said Private Arime from Command Squad, who was hooked up to tubes with a breathing mask as precaution against mil
d hypoxia. “Deepynines just wanted to kill drysines. If they’d been shooting at us, we’d have lost about half. If Styx hadn’t been jamming their damn missiles, way more than half. It was nuts.”

  “And Styx?” Erik asked.

  “Completely screwed without her,” Arime said with clear-eyed honesty. “She didn’t try to screw us that I could see. Maybe the Major saw differently.”

  Next was Sergeant Lai from Delta First Squad, who was having some small fragments removed from his lower leg. Seated on a bunk, a scanner-brace about his calf, he looked mostly unbothered as a corpsman tweezered the bits out under anaesthetic, AR glasses showing her exactly where the fragments were.

  “Pretty crazy entry,” Lai admitted, sipping a doctor-approved fruit juice. “Place was a maze, but the sard weren’t real organised defending it. No one else there but prisoners and guards, not hard to keep the two apart. Had to shoot a bunch of sard, you know.” He shrugged. “They’re not great up close and outgunned.”

  “And how was Crozier?” It wasn’t really Erik’s place to ask, but sending her had been his call, and he felt entitled to an answer.

  “She’s not back sir, if that’s what you mean,” Lai said with a protective stare. “She never left. Best LT in the company.”

  All the marines said that about their own particular lieutenant. Erik patted Lai on the shoulder. “I know, Sergeant. No argument here.”

  His next visit was Medbay One. Here were the prisoners — all eighteen of them. Seven were off Europa, some crew, some passengers. Another eight were from Grappler, of all the unexpected things. The last three were tavalai, and no one knew which ship they’d been taken from. Probably there had been other prisoners of various species dispersed elsewhere in Tartarus, taken off other ships that sard had intercepted over the last months and years. Erik regretted that desperately, but there just hadn’t been any time to do more.