Claws That Catch votsb-4

by John Ringo

  Dreen sentient units did not get angry. They were created without true emotions. They could, however, get frustrated. The presence of Organism 8139 would mean that the entire station would have to be laboriously swept to eliminate them before any analysis of the station could be performed. Even leaving one of the little rat-bastards on-board meant the possibility of the entire station force becoming infested. And as for Species 27264, they had caused more damage to Dreen main worlds than any four species that had been assimilated over the last ten thousand years. Finding their home planets and wiping the pestiferous race from the face of the galaxy was a Dreen priority right up there with finding the last space spider in the galaxy and crunching it underfoot.

  Sonic anomalies?

  Even a dispassionate Dreen intelligence could place first priority on something annoying rather than vital.

  ‹Projections from station. Unable to intercept short of capturing station and halting projection.›

  Order all ground combat units to assault positions of Species 27264. Ship units return and rendezvous with fleet to load ground combat units. Primary mission: Eliminate sonic anomaly.

  And make a mistake when it got too annoyed by those damned kids and their caterwauling.

  The space spider, Organism 8139, a biological combat unit crafted by the long defeated Nitch specifically to attack and eliminate Dreen, had been happy enough to just find the body of a dead dog-demon. The metal suit locked in final throes with the Dreen was less appealing. Only with Dreen did the space spider live to eat, only with Dreen metabolics did it get the space spider equivalent of a sugar rush. Everything else, even from Biology Four, was just survival sustenance and the organism was genetically programmed to avoid consuming anything but Dreen organics in all but starvation environments. However, when its young burst out of the creature, they found a veritable smorgasbord.

  The dog-demon, per standard procedure, had been carried back to the troop carrier for processing. Its organics would eventually be used to create still more of the living combat robots.

  Which meant that over a thousand units of Organism 8139 had just infected the Dreen troop carrier, a semi-sentient Dreen organism itself, from the point-of-view of a baby space spider just chock full of juicy goodness.

  “Rotator gun nine down,” Gunnery Sergeant Juda reported. “Dreen at final junction two. First Platoon falling back to third positions. Multiple casualties.”

  The problem with the corridors was that they had exactly no cover. The Marines had been soaking up fire in direct line of sight to the Dreen. Without the ability to stack and overwelm the aliens in the corridors, they’d also been soaking up casualties. Total Dreen numbers were unclear; they’d been destroying the sensor boxes as soon as they found them. But it was upwards of three hundred and that was just too many for the Marines to hold.

  “This is where we draw the line,” Berg said over the platoon frequency. “They do not pass us, Second.”

  “Dreen!” Sergeant Bae called. And then all hell broke loose.

  Second, unlike the other platoons, did have cover. They had the low wall the platoon had sheltered behind on the assault on this same room. So they could pour fire into the mass of Dreen with minimal risk.

  Minimal did not mean none. The Dreen were leading with thorn-throwers, dispensing with the dog-demons who had no long-ranged weapon. They also were throwing themselves into the Marine fire profligately, but that was working. Mass has a quality of its own, and the Dreen were using that quality to simply overwelm the fire of the Marines.

  Berg’s indicators showed Wyverns dropping off the screen one by one, each one a soldier it was his duty to love, cherish and in the end use as a human shield if necessary.

  “Gunny, bring up Alpha team,” Berg said calmly. The threesome had been held in reserve. It was often said that the last person to use his reserve won the battle. Berg knew damned well that he’d just lost this one. “Captain Zanella, I have three KIA, two suit-kills. I have sent in my reserve.”

  “I’m on the line,” First Sergeant Powell said. “They’re not going anywhere, Two-Gun.”

  As if in answer, there was a bellowing roar from down the corridor.

  “These guys again,” Berg muttered.

  The bellow could only have come from a rhino-tank — a rhinoceros sized and generally shaped organic tank capable of firing a plasma blast that could destroy a main battle tank. Its frontal armor was proof against any portable weapon the Marines had at their disposal and there were very few ways to get around that.

  “Lieutenant,” the first sergeant said, “if you’d like a suggestion on how to take one out…”

  “Been there, done that, First Sergeant,” Berg snarled. “This is not the time!”

  Rhino-tanks were invulnerable on their front; even their eyes were deep-set in armored sockets smaller than the diameter of most bullets. But just after they fired their plasma balls, they tended to roar in what sounded to human ears like triumph.

  If a suit could survive the plasma, a rare situation, a Marine could get one shot at the rhino. If he could recover fast enough from being in the near blast radius of the plasma. If he could effectively target a still small spot with all the damage his armor was going to have taken, including overload of all systems from EMP at the very least. If he wasn’t baked to a crisp.

  Berg had done it. Once. But it had taken using pistols, since his machine-gun ammunition had chain-exploded from the heat of the plasma. And it had very nearly killed him. And he didn’t have his pistols.

  But there were a couple of other ways to kill one. None of them particularly safe, mind you, but…

  “Slap a limpet on?” Berg asked.

  The rhino’s primary armoring was to the front. If a Marine could get a sufficiently powerful explosive onto the rear of its abdomen, it would take one out.

  The problem was getting to the rear of its abdomen.

  “Can we get somebody up to the door?” Powell asked seriously. Clearly the junior officer was not in the mood for humor. “Get it as it comes through?”

  “Maybe,” Berg said, looking at the layout of the remaining platoon. As he watched, Dupras’s suit went offline. “If I’ve got anybody left!”

  “Lurch, Corwin, on me,” the first sergeant said. “You keep their heads down, Lieutenant. I’ll take care of that rhino. My turn, Two-Gun.”

  “Good luck, Top.”

  The fire from the thorn-throwers had started to slack off. That wasn’t a good sign. It meant they were getting out of the way for the rhino-tank.

  “For what we are about to receive,” Berg muttered over the platoon freq.

  “Say again, sir?” Staff Sergeant Carr asked.

  “An old prayer, Staff Sergeant,” the lieutenant replied as the snout of the tank came around the last corner. It wasn’t moving fast. The term that came to mind was “ominous.” “An old prayer, the Marine’s Prayer. You’ve never heard it?”

  “No, sir,” the senior NCO said. He had many more years than Bergstresser in the Corps, despite Berg being prior service, so he was a little surprised the most junior lieutenant knew a Marine prayer he didn’t.

  “It’s pretty simple, really,” Berg said, staying on the platoon frequency as the rhino-tank got lined up, spotted the enemy and started to charge its plasma horns. “It goes: For what we are about to receive, may we truly be thankful. Platoon, DOWN!”

  The plasma blast filled the compartment with overwelming sound and heat. The wall had an opening, the same width as the corridor leading to it, directly in front of the corridor. The rhino-tank had targeted the starboard corner of the wall, where it had detected enemies sheltering.

  Normally, the powerful plasma bolt would have blasted a wall to smithereens and destroyed anything behind it or around it.

  In this case, the plasma released its titanic energy mostly in the immediate area, the wall effortlessly resisting its immense thermal and quantum power and shrugging off the blast.

  That didn’t mean the M
arines were safe. The plasma bolt was simply too powerful for that. Staff Sergeant Carr and Sergeant Bae were holding down the two corners of the wall. The plasma opened up Staff Sergeant Carr’s armor like a firecracker in a tin can, vaporizing the Marine senior NCO’s body. The blast only penetrated Bae’s armor, but the rush of stripped atoms turned him to a blackened hulk in a bare nanosecond.

  Even Marines farther away weren’t safe. Ducksworth’s interior temperature rose to an astonishing two thousand degrees, giving the lance corporal just enough time to howl in agony before he began burning to death in his own personal crematorium. Lance Corporal Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho, Dancer, Prancer, Donder or Vixen, take your pick, was struck by the machine-gun from Sergeant Bae’s suit, which punched through his armor, fortunately killing him before the heat could really register.

  Lieutenant Bergstresser shook his head to clear it and immediately checked his readouts. His suit was functional, incredibly enough.

  But he no longer had a platoon.

  The only suits reading as functional were Eakins’s and Gunnery Sergeant Juda’s. Eakins’s vitals indicated that he was out; unconscious, in a coma, it wasn’t clear.

  “Gunny?” Berg croaked.

  “Here,” Juda replied. “Here, sir. Grapp.”

  “Well, you know the Blade motto,” Berg said. “ ‘It’s just us.’ ”

  “Yes, sir,” Gunny Juda said, more forcefully. “Two items: Third Platoon now reports a rhino on the other corridor. And ours is advancing. Orders?”

  “Yeah,” Berg croaked. “Keep your head down and hope Top can take it out.”

  First Sergeant Powell had positioned his team well clear of the door. They’d been outside the blast radius of the plasma ball, but their armor was still hot as Hades.

  “When it emerges, we’re going to have to move like lightning,” Powell said. “You can stop these things from moving with a couple of Wyverns if you give it your all. You two make sure it can’t turn this way. I’ll slap on the limpet.”

  He waited for the beast to emerge, sure in his heart that they were all going to die. But the noncombat personnel were sheltering at the far end of the compartment, the same place the Nitch commander had made his last stand. If the rhino-tanks got through, there was no way in hell that they’d survive. And the entire battle would be for nothing.

  He waited, patiently, then impatiently, then in annoyance.

  “Top?” Lurch asked. “You’d usually hear them by now.”

  “I know,” the first sergeant said. “Damnit. Where is the damned thing?”

  “Third Platoon reports their’s has stopped,” Corwin said. “It just sat down.”

  “That doesn’t sound right…”

  Eric was tired of waiting, too. He didn’t want to give the rhino-tank another target, but he also was wondering what the Dreen were up to.

  He finally popped up a sensor to get a look. Hopefully the rhino wouldn’t even notice the hair-thin wand.

  The tank was stopped halfway between the last fork and compartment. It was trying to drag itself forward with its front claws, but since its rear was down it wasn’t getting very far. It tried to fire its plasma-horns again but the green glow faded and then popped out of existence.

  As Berg watched, wondering what could have happened to it, it lay down completely and rolled over on its side.

  Then he could see the malfunction; the rear of the rhino was a mass of purple spiders.

  The spiders had found an opening where humans hadn’t, one that virtually every major organism possessed, and infested the body of the tank. Berg shook his head as the massive fighting-machine shuddered in agony and blood began pouring out of its beaklike maw. Finally, the thing gave a heaving sigh and was still. Mostly still. The body continued to ripple as the space-spiders fought over every last edible scrap.

  In the end, a wave of spiders spilled out, hunting back down the passage and leaving only the less palatable armor draped over a skeleton.

  “Turns out there were more than two rhino-tanks,” Captain Zanella reported. “The smart mines killed some, or at least wounded them enough that they were easy meat for the spiders. We don’t have a hard count, but there were over forty.”

  “That’s an ugly number,” Bill said. He’d fought rhino-tanks before.

  “Yes, sir,” Zanella replied. “But corridors are clear all the way back to the dock at this point. Well, they will be once we clear up the skeletons and all the new spiders. You can’t walk for stepping on them. Places you can’t walk for stepping on Dreen skeletons, either. And some of them are places we didn’t even hit them.”

  “The Dreen ships?” Weaver asked.

  “Gone,” the Marine reported. “Don’t know if they were fleeing us or the spiders or heading back for reinforcements. But they’re gone.”

  “Casualties?” Bill asked, wincing.

  “Eighteen KIA, four WIA,” the captain said tonelessly. “And thank you for not saying something like ‘butcher’s bill,’ sir.”

  “You’re welcome,” Bill replied. “But that’s not many Marines left to hold off the Dreen.”

  “The increase in spiders may make that moot, sir,” Captain Zanella pointed out. “As I reported, they’re now packing most of the corridors from bulkhead to bulkhead.”

  “We have to assume that the Dreen fleet has a way of eliminating them,” Bill said. “They might have been surprised by this incident, but when the main fleet arrives, they’re going to clear the corridors. And with your handful of Marines, I don’t see a way to stop them.”

  “Then the fleet has to be stopped, sir,” Zanella said. “And that would be up to you.”

  “Oh, thanks so much,” Weaver replied. “Now everybody likes my guitar playing! Damnit, where in the hell is the Blade?”

  “Damnit, we could have been back there two days ago,” Captain Prael swore. “I want to know what’s happening back at the anomaly!”

  “The Hexosehr were adamant that we wait, sir,” the TACO pointed out unnecessarily.

  “We could have picked up a group of scientists and been there by now,” the CO said. “Another six hours. The hell with this. Head for the Tree. Who knows what could be happening with Weaver in charge…”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “ I’m a freee-eee bird, yeah!” Weaver sang, then started in on the seemingly unending guitar solo.

  “Sir,” Carpenter said, setting down his drumsticks. “Sir, it’s not working!”

  The thing about harmonics is that they aren’t nearly as easy as some people make them out to be. Otherwise stadiums would fall down every time there was a rock concert. The harmonic of one material is not the same as the harmonic of another material. Two materials in juncture tend to damp the harmonic effect unless there is a chord that has the destructive harmonic for both. With more materials, the harmonics become more complex.

  Shattering a wineglass is easy. Shattering a wooden bridge given a small unit of marchers isn’t that tough. Shattering a space ship, especially an organic one, is much, much harder.

  “This station has so much power, there has to be a way to stop these bastards,” Weaver shouted, tearing off his guitar and preparing to sling it across the room.

  “Maybe we’re going at this the wrong way,” Miriam said, holding up her hand placatingly. “If you promise to never subject me to ‘Freebird’ again, I’ll explain.”

  “Go ahead,” Bill replied. “But after four straight hours of that Goth and heavy metal chither, I needed some real music.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  “I should make you add the entire repertoire of Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Allman Brothers, The Doobie Brothers, .38 Special and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, most of whom I had never heard of before today and hope to never hear of again,” Miriam said. “But I’ll hold it at ‘Freebird.’ ”

  “Is there a point to all of this?” Weaver asked.

  “Do you really think that somebody went to all the trouble of making somethi
ng that could fluoresce gas giants and that’s all it does?” Miriam asked, waving at the window. The space beyond was now a mass of gaseous particles that could hardly be called vacuum. Oh, even if a being breathed hydrogen, argon or methane it wasn’t going to be breathable. But it was thick enough to see without the fluorescence and stretched vertically across five degrees of view. “There are over a thousand points on this Tree. The dragonflies reported that the power was coming from the points. So you think it only fires at the gas giants and only from four of them? Chosen at random?”

  “Chosen from whichever is pointed at the Jovians,” Weaver said. “But go on.”

  “There’s a wall of gas out there,” Miriam said. “If you could hit it with other beams, it’s going to improve the show, yes or no?”

  “Yes,” Weaver said. “But the only beams…”

  “Because we haven’t figured out how to get the rest to fire,” Miriam interrupted.

  “That Dreen fleet is headed this way while you’re talking,” Bill said, waving at the transparent walls and the icons of the Dreen ships. “Could you get to the point?”

  “That’s the point,” Miriam said. “There has to be a way to get the other beams to work.”

  “They could have used any control method, ma’am,” PO Carpenter pointed out. “If somebody from, say, 1950 tried to use most of the stuff in my apartment they wouldn’t be able to. They’d need the implant stuck in my head or one like it.”

  “Implants are a transitional technology,” Miriam said. “Do you use an implant to run a grav-board? Do the Cheerick use an implant to fly their dragonflies?”

  “You’re saying this thing could work by telepathy?” Bill asked. “Why would it work for us? We’re not the race that built it.”

  “We’re not the race that built the boards,” Miriam pointed out. “I frankly doubt that only one race used this system. It’s worth a shot.”