by B. V. Larson
Miklos nodded sagely. “I’m not terribly surprised.”
* * *
Alpha Centauri was a fairly empty system. The stars had a few dull worlds circling them, but they didn’t have much in the way of atmospheres or life. It was a stark contrast with the Eden System which overflowed with life, boasting seven organic worlds.
When we’d first encountered the Eden system, I’d been enthralled by its natural beauty. Rather than planets enshrouded in vicious gasses, six of the twenty-one planets were livable for humans. The seventh world to harbor life, we’d figured out over time, was Eden-11, the homeworld of the Blues.
Despite its emptiness, I felt a growing tension as we crossed into the star system. This was the last leg of the journey before we reached home.
Earth. It had been so long since I’d seen her! Years had passed. I could scarcely believe I’d spent so much time exiled in space.
I felt a strange mixture of emotions with every passing hour as we headed for the last ring. What was waiting for us on the far side? Are we bringing death and destruction, or freedom and peace? I didn’t really know. At lot of it depended on how Crow reacted, and if he could beat Phobos.
I spent much of my time studying the mammoth ship and the records of the attacks. We had a lot of data to crunch on now. From detailed vids and measurements, we were able to construct a good working model of its capabilities. Ranges, power outputs, acceleration—we knew it all now. Phobos was no longer a total mystery.
What we didn’t know was what the Imperials had built to face her. That represented my biggest dilemma. If I let Phobos plow into Crow’s fleet, was I doing the right thing? I had options. I could tell the Imperials how to fight the monster ship, sharing the intel we’d learned. That was a safer play as far as Earth was concerned. But would that make things too easy for Crow?
We’d worked out an independent attack plan for Phobos. Essentially, it required sustained waves to get to the ship and do damage. The first waves would be missiles, followed by fighters, then maybe assault ships. Every wave that came in could be taken out at once, but with a ten minute window of recharging time in between.
Attacking in waves meant Tolerance was going to have to make some hard choices. Did he ride out the missiles, then obliterate the ships? Or the other way around? Sending in small, targeted barrages was our best plan. We’d dig a hole with missiles pounding at the same point, if we had to. Eventually, there had to be a soft center in that big bastard somewhere, and I meant to dig until I found it.
But the Imperials didn’t know any of this yet. They were going to encounter something beyond their experience. I wanted it to damage them, but I didn’t want everyone to die.
My hand formed into a fist and flexed on the table. I was wracking my brain. What was the best way to play this? After a while, I knew the answer: I would have to play it by ear. There were simply too many unknowns. I was going to have to go in without a clear plan and make changes on the fly.
It was just the sort of non-strategy that drove Miklos crazy. For once, I didn’t blame him.
-15-
“Colonel? Colonel Riggs?”
I opened my eyes and shut them again. I was lying on my back on my bunk, half-dreaming. Being aboard a modern space craft wasn’t exactly an exercise in privacy. When you were command personnel, you were lucky if you didn’t have to take calls in the shower.
“What is it?”
“Something unusual, sir. On the surface—uh, I mean the ‘hull’ of Phobos.”
I recognized the voice now. It was none other than Captain Sarin herself, my newly appointed lead on ops. I vaulted myself off the bunk and groaned.
“On my way.”
I skipped a shower and headed up two decks, taking the tubes. Our tube system was a primitive way of moving around on a large ship that worked better than we’d expected. We didn’t have many elevators in our modern carriers. Using a tube was easier and more reliable, especially in battle. They were simply empty shafts with grav plates at the bottom. If you got into the one with the big arrow pointing up, it propelled you up. If you got into the other, you went shooting down.
They were a bit tricky to get used to. Getting off at the right floor required shooting out an arm and catching the edge of the opening when you passed it. Really, it was more like controlled falling than a proper elevator system. Without nanotized strength and speed, it would have been quite dangerous.
When I got to the top of the ship, I must have been blinking. Maybe I was napping, just for a fraction of a second. I rammed my head into a cushion at the top of the shaft and a red light came on, warning me I’d gone too far.
I hand-over-handed it back to the opening and crawled out onto the deck.
“Sleepy, sir?” Jasmine asked.
She was standing over me, smiling. I got to my feet, but couldn’t quite bring myself to smile back.
“I need coffee,” I said.
She didn’t hand me a cup—not that I’d expected her to.
“I’ll have a mug brought to the command table,” she said. She turned and walked that way.
I followed, rubbing at my eyes and sighing. I grabbed the coffee when it came and downed it. The stuff was too cold and tasted faintly of plastic.
“What have you got?” I asked when I could focus both my eyes at once.
“See this? At the north pole?”
“Dust? You got me out of my bunk after three and half hours for a puff of dust? It’s probably just a meteor strike. The thing is as big as a moon.”
“Let me back up the recorded vid, sir.”
She did so by gliding her finger over a slide bar on a virtual control panel. I was glad she was doing it. I had a hard time nudging those things just the way they liked it. Sometimes, I missed actual physical knobs and buttons.
I watched as the vid played forward again. Instead of a single puff, a dozen of them showed up in sequence.
“Not just one meteor, but a shower? How long has this been going on?”
“For about an hour. We thought it was some kind of shower too, but now we’re pretty sure it isn’t. Here’s why.”
She fast forwarded to something from a few minutes ago. Instead of an impact—it seemed like an explosion. An explosion on the surface of the ship.
I grinned. “I like the look of that. What is it? External venting? Maybe all that firepower did break something inside.”
“We just don’t know. But you left orders to alert you in case the situation changed.”
I took a hit off my coffee and winced. Then I nodded. “You did good, Sarin. Let’s keep a close eye on—”
Thud.
That was the only way I can describe the sound we all heard then. It was a thud, and it came from our hull. Everyone on the command deck looked around, frowning.
“External cameras!” I shouted, my mind leaping to conclusions I didn’t like. Not at all.
“Switching, sir.”
In sequence, the cameras came up and gave me a one second shot of the hull outside from a dozen different angles.
“Put them all up at once. And sound general quarters.”
Jasmine selected mosaic mode. Then she tapped a big red triangle near her hand. The lighting changed on the command deck and various noise-making devices began going off up and down the decks.
We didn’t even talk, nor did we answer the queries of baffled staffers who came to circle around. Jasmine and I both stared at each of those external views in turn.
“There it is, on camera fourteen. Select and expand.”
The image leapt up into full view. What had been an odd shadow became a much more sinister image. Our visual equipment was excellent, even in starlight.
“What the hell is that thing?” Miklos said.
I glanced at him, then back at the thing crawling over our hull. I felt like telling him he was away from his new post again, but I didn’t have the heart and I didn’t really care.
“That, Nicolai, is something new. It remi
nds me of the crawling marines the Macros made to attack our ships once. But it’s not Macro tech. It’s too humanoid.”
We watched it as we talked. It wasn’t like flesh, but it wasn’t like machine, either. I got the feeling it was some kind of hybrid. A man with robotic parts, maybe. Or a robot with long fingers and dark, ropy arms.
Whatever it was, it didn’t have a head. Instead, stalks pointed out from the ribcage—if it had a ribcage—and directed what looked like spherical optical pickups in every direction.
“Hmm,” I said, watching it still. I never took my eye off it for a second. “See how its prying at all the hatches? It’s looking for a way in.”
“Could there be some kind of alien race here in the Alpha Centauri System?” Miklos asked. “I don’t get it. We should have known if there was something here. We’ve been traveling through for years.”
“There are lots of possibilities, and pretty much none of them are good,” I said.
“Give me a few, Colonel.”
“It could be from Phobos. The Blues might have made themselves a new type of robot. When those puffs fired up, maybe they were launching these.”
“Disturbing, but unlikely. I’ve been reviewing the data. It looks like something was landing there, not taking off.”
“Right. Theory two: they’re Macros. They’ve gotten into this area—maybe they’ve wiped Earth, or are preparing to. This beast is something new they’ve only recently built to infiltrate our ships.”
“I guess it’s possible, but not without the appearance of another ring we don’t know about.”
“What is your third theory, Colonel?” Jasmine asked.
We glanced up at her. I realized I’d fallen into my old habit of talking things over with Miklos and leaving out everyone else. Maybe that bothered Jasmine, but it was hard to tell. She usually kept her face neutral. You had to guess what she was feeling unless she was really upset. Her style was very different from Sandra’s—I’d always known what that girl was thinking. She’d always made her feelings extremely clear.
“The third possibility is that this is from the Empire itself.”
Miklos scoffed at that. “I would be very surprised. It seems advanced and subtle. Neither term fits the Imperial forces I’ve seen so far.”
“Granted,” I said. “But we’re now passing on a direct route between the Helios ring and the ring to the Solar System. This is where I would lay a trap or a drone scout, if I had one. Note the timing. First, Phobos runs into a series of strange falling objects. Now, we’re encountering them.”
Miklos’ eyes widened. Jasmine’s fingers flew.
“The timing is about right, sir,” she said. “We are at about the same point in space that Phobos was when the bombardment began.”
I nodded. Theory number three was looking stronger all the time.
“Alert all the other ships. Everyone is to do a sweep of their hulls, looking for intruders.”
“Should we destroy them, sir?”
I had to think about that. “Yeah. Fire first and dissect later. I’m going down to the sally port to suit up.”
Jasmine opened her mouth as if to object. I knew she didn’t want me to personally take part in any dangerous missions. But instead of listing reasons I shouldn’t go, she stopped herself and relayed my warning to the rest of the fleet. That was something else I’d never seen Sandra manage to do. If Sandra didn’t like what you were doing, you were going to hear about it whether you wanted to or not. Come to think of it, Miklos had been the same way lately. I was glad to have Sarin back on tactical ops, and I thought to myself privately that it might be awhile before she got another command.
I headed back to the tubes. I’d already switched my smart-cloth suit into under-armor mode. That changed the formation, removing rank insignia, pleats and cuffs. The clothing needed to slide easily into the armor shell, like a pair of silk pajamas.
The truth was I was looking forward to taking a couple of marines with me out onto the hull and blasting whatever spy-bot we’d spotted out there. I hadn’t seen real action in quite a while.
I made it down two decks and was halfway to the third, the one where the sally ports were located, when something flickered just beyond my range of vision. I turned around, looking back up the tube behind me.
A nightmare glided silently toward me. I knew in an instant what it was—what it had to be. It was one of those things, the things I’d seen on the outside of Defiant. Only now, it was inside the hull and coming at me with pincher-like foreclaws fully extended.
I forgot about everything else when I saw the little monster. I didn’t worry about how it had gotten from outside the ship to inside, or what it could do to me with those snapping claws. All that was in my mind was turning around so I could grasp it hand-to-hand.
The tube was only about three feet across, which made it virtually impossible to turn around quickly. I gave it a try anyway. I formed a ball and did a summersault. All this happened in a split-second while the intruder and I fell toward the lower decks in tandem.
As I flipped around to face the thing, I realized I had a few options. With less than a second to go, you have to make what could be your last choices on this plane of existence count for something.
I could have gone for my com-link, summoning help with a touch. That would have been all I did, however. I chose instead to draw my beamer. I didn’t want to be dead in the tube with a few tsking emergency people scraping out what was left an hour from now. Fight first, sound the alarm second—that was my motto.
I brought the beamer up, but the invader was right in my face by that time. Damn, it was ugly. Up close, I saw a smooth black carapace with a metallic sheen. It was veiny and ridged in seemingly random patterns. I could see the optical stalks coming out of the torso, swiveling and tracking me. The two foreclaws extended with fantastic speed, opening wide like jaws. Inside those serrated claws I saw metal. Slivery-bright, like surgical steel. There were spines too, all over the thing. I winced even before we made contact; this was going to hurt.
I didn’t have time to fire before we were in close combat. There just wasn’t time to get the weapon up, aim and press the firing stud. The fact I didn’t have time to do whatever I wanted spoke to the monster’s speed. It was, if I had to judge, as fast as Sandra herself. That’s saying something, because she had been the fastest human I’d ever met.
As we closed, I reached up my left hand to grab one of those foreclaws. The alien—or whatever the hell it was—tried to snip off my hand but missed. I clamped down on what passed for its wrist, and felt an explosion of blood in my hand. I held on, but I’d just grabbed a load of spines that shot through my palm and out the back of my hand in six places.
My right hand, the one with the hand beamer, I played differently. I shoved the gun forward touching the spot where the head ought to be if it had had one. I squeezed the trigger instantly—but nothing happened.
I realized I’d heard a metallic crunch just as I applied pressure to the trigger. The thing had put its second claw around the gun and cut it in half. I guess I should have been glad that it hadn’t managed to cut my hand off at the wrist instead, but I knew the night was still young and this dance wasn’t over with yet.
What now? That was the thought I had, but my hands were way ahead of my cortex this time. I grabbed the claw that had just chopped my gun in half and shoved it toward the other claw, which was snapping at my face like a springtime turtle.
The move was a crazy one and it cost me another half-dozen puncture wounds, but it was all I had. I was fighting on instinct now. I think my strength surprised the critter. I heard metal squeal, as if ball-joints had been bent in directions planners had never foreseen.
One claw went into the other, and snap, there was a spark as something fell off. Fortunately, it was a piece of my dance partner rather than a finger.
It went into a frenzy then. It was as if I’d pained it, which I’d started thinking was impossible. Eye-stalks rolled
and the remaining claw thrashed in my grip. I was forced to use both hands to control the one claw, and the monster began bludgeoning me with its stump. I saw stars that had no names each time it connected with my scalp.
Roaring and using my legs against the walls of the tube for leverage, I bent back the second claw. Back and back it went, all the way over into the zone with the eyestalks. It snapped off two of these, and shuddered in what I was sure now was agony.
Then the second arm broke at the shoulder. With a shout of victory, I wrenched it loose, pulling it right out of the socket.
I stared at what came with it. Bones. Metal bones. That’s the only way I can describe what I saw. I’d not really known what to expect, but I hadn’t expected this eclectic mix of red meat, tendons and shaped-steel bone.
The monster went limp in my arms. I let it go, and it fell all the way to the bottom of the tube system, tumbling and clattering as it went.
I took a few seconds to stare and frown down after it.
“What the fuck was that thing?” I asked no one, breathing hard.
Blood poured from my hands and my scalp. I barely noticed or cared. I tapped my com link with numbed fingers.
“Kwon?” I asked, “could you come to tube eight.”
“I’m already at the sally port, sir.”
“Really? Is everything all right there?”
“Um, not exactly sir. When I got here, the port was open. Most strange.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I think I know why. Come to tube eight.”
“Right away, Colonel.”
I let myself drift down toward the monster which lay limp at the lowest deck level, the entrance to the hold. I moved warily. One never knew what a newly contacted life form was capable of.
When I got close, I became fairly certain it was dead. That presumed, of course, that it had been alive in the first place.
