“Attah, go left. Drake, you go right. Garcia, you are with me.”
Jack headed straight for the craft and the small hatchway half-buried in the dusty soil of BP-8. The hatch appeared to be sealed. These indie craft were capable of extremely long interplanetary trips and a small crew could be sustained for weeks, even months, but this region of space had been swarming with Chitin craft only a short while ago. It was unlikely that they would have missed this one. Jack guessed the craft was abandoned, or that the occupants were dead.
Approaching the hatch with caution, he accessed the craft’s central computer with his meat suit’s remote connection. The ship still had power. Jack checked the computer for details on the passengers and crew.
Jack was stunned to discover that a four-person crew was alive inside. He sent a message to the craft’s communicator circuits.
“This is Commander Forge of the Fleet Marines. I need to clear this asteroid. Do you require assistance?”
The hatch opened. It slid upwards, a dull light spilling out and the pale dust falling away from the hatch cover as it moved. With the hatch fully open, Jack saw four figures standing inside. They wore the bright red civilian space survival suits. Their leader stepped forward, hand extended.
“Thank you, Commander,” he said. “We’ve been—”
Then the communicator cut out. Jack tried to reconnect, but he was prevented by a communication block.
The leader of the group tapped the side of his helmet. His gestures told Jack that he couldn’t hear. Jack copied the action and shrugged. He opened a channel to his team.
“Let’s get them back to the tac boat,” Jack began.
“Cancel that order. This is Agent Visser of Fleet Intelligence. Commander Forge, return to your tac boat and continue with your search. Leave these people for recovery by Fleet Intelligence. That is an order.”
Jack looked up as the engine flare of a corvette decelerating overhead caught his eye. The ship came vertically down to the surface of BP-8. At twenty meters, a hatch on the underside of the corvette slid open and eight Fleet Intelligence enforcers dropped to the surface. They were wearing their trademark black meat suits. The enforcers surrounded the indie crew. Jack looked up at the corvette as the crew of the indie craft and their captors were carried upwards by an elevator beam. The beam drew a swirling column of pale dust up with it.
As the underside hatch closed, the corvette sped off. The column of dust remained hanging in front of Jack and slowly started to collapse back to the surface.
“What was that all about?” Attah asked.
Jack knew it was pointless to ask. Fleet Intelligence had wide-ranging authority and were able to pull strings no company commander could ever hope to. Whatever was happening was far above Jack’s level of clearance.
“The crew has been rescued,” Jack said, although he knew it looked more like detention than rescue. “We still have to complete our search and move on. Copy?”
Attah, Drake, and Garcia all responded. Jack sent the drones racing across the surface of the huge asteroid and followed, his team spread out on either side.
“Let’s clear this rock,” Jack said to his team, trying to sound as if it was business as usual, but Jack had an uneasy feeling about what had just happened. He had come here to kill Chitins, but a rescue would have felt good. Fleet Intelligence probably wanted to question the civilian crew. Jack guessed they would have to explain how they had evaded the Chitins out here for so long.
A message came over Jack’s private channel. He recognized the voice immediately. It was Agent Visser.
“Commander Forge. Leave BP-8 immediately. Visser out.”
Jack stopped in his tracks. If Fleet Intelligence was ordering him off this rock, he was going to leave. Just as he was about to open a channel to his team, he received another transmission.
“Jack. Hello.”
“Captain Pretorius,” Jack said with genuine pleasure at hearing from the captain of the Scorpio, a ship Jack had come to regard as home. “It’s good to hear from you, sir.”
“No time for pleasantries, Jack. I can see you are on BP-8. Leave immediately. I have orders from Fleet Intelligence to fire on a civilian craft on the surface. Commencing fire operations in three minutes. Good luck.”
“Three minutes. That doesn’t give me much time to get my team off the surface, Captain.”
Jack waited for a response, but the channel was dead.
Jack turned and was running back to the tac boat in a fraction of a second. If Fleet Intelligence was involved, then Jack knew not to ask too many questions. He called to his team as he went.
“Fall back. Three minutes before the surface of this asteroid is molten rock.” Jack connected with the tac boat’s flight console and sent preflight checks and engine start. In the distance, he saw the engine flare and the dust rise up around the ship.
Three minutes, he could just make it. Then he heard Pretorius on a private channel.
“You’re going too slow, Jack. Don’t respond. I’ve got Fleet Intelligence agents on the command deck. I can’t hold fire. You need to move faster.”
Jack ran, breathing hard. He reached the tac boat, gasping for air. He increased the oxygen concentration in his suit’s air supply and eased his labored breathing. Drake was almost at the boat and Garcia was not far behind. Attah was falling behind. Months of shirking had left him unfit. He was probably just fit enough to pass his regular fitness checks, but he was not going to make it to his next checkup if he didn’t make it to the tac boat in the next seventy-five seconds.
Jack accessed Attah’s medical package. He accessed stimulants and prepared a dose. He opened a channel to Attah.
“You are too slow, Jon,” Jack said. “I’m going to give you a kick.”
Jack released the stim into Attah’s system. Immediately his pace quickened and Attah came running, throwing up dust behind him.
“Stand by on the door controls.” Jack pushed Drake toward the door control panel. “You, sit and strap in. Combat liftoff coming up.” Jack dashed to the flight deck and strapped in. He watched through the view screen as Attah came near.
Jack turned in his seat and watched the doorway. “Drake, you grab hold of him when he gets here. I’m taking off the second he’s onboard.”
“Copy that, sir,” Drake said.
Jack turned and watched Drake urge Attah to run faster. With only seconds to spare, Jack saw the Scorpio maneuvering into position.
“Preparing to fire,” Jack heard Pretorius say. The channel was open to the Scorpio’s command deck, the familiar sounds of the command crew going about their business reminded Jack of how isolated he was beginning to feel on this search and destroy mission.
Then he heard the voice of Agent Visser.
“Fire, Captain. Immediately.”
“Power to the high-energy laser assembly,” Pretorius said.
“Got him,” Drake shouted triumphantly.
Jack glanced over his shoulder and saw Attah slumped in Drake’s arms, exhausted. Jack hit the engine controls and took off. The G-force pulled Jack into his seat. The tac boat door was closing and holding Attah and Drake inside but only just.
The beam lanced down from the Scorpio and slammed into the grounded indie craft. The ship vaporized and burned with a brilliant incandescent flame, its fierce brightness muted by the billowing dust thrown up by the violent laser attack.
As the tac boat raced back up to the black of space, the white billowing dust cloud spread across the surface of the massive asteroid. Watching the laser finally cease fire, Jack realized how close he had come to being vaporized along with the civilian craft. He had come close to death so many times in combat with the Chitins, but he had never come so close to being killed by friendly fire, and from what he had come to regard as his own ship.
Fleet Command and Control was pushing hard and risking the lives of the Marines in the search across the asteroid belt. Jack had been told to engage a Leviathan, and now he’d been
given barely a few seconds to escape the blast zone of friendly fire. He knew that he was a combat Marine and there was always danger, but he would never give those orders, if he were in charge. Until then, he was determined to do his best to protect those that he could.
6
Jack sat in the pilot’s chair and watched the holoimage of the Scorpio moving away at high speed. It was soon lost to the limited sensor capabilities of the small tac boat. Jack wanted to know why Fleet Intelligence had swooped in to take the survivors of the civilian craft. He guessed he would never know for sure, but he had a fairly good idea of why.
The Chitins had found a way to brainwash humans. His old squad-mate Bill Harts had been one such victim. Harts had returned to the fleet along with Jack’s former commander, Finch. Both Harts and Finch had been converted by some Chitin technique and changed into Chitin spies. Harts had ended his pain by allowing himself to be blown out into space through a door on the Scorpio’s hangar deck. Finch had been taken into custody by Agent Visser.
Fleet Intelligence was in all likelihood scouring the fleet for any other Chitin spies. A group of humans left alone in Chitin-controlled space for a prolonged period were definitely potential victims of the Chitin mind control. The destruction of the crashed civilian craft was just good housekeeping as far as Fleet Intelligence was concerned. The potential loss of a tac boat and its team of Marines was of little concern.
That was all interesting reflection, but it didn’t help Jack with his current task. He was here to clear the asteroid belt. As a Marine, Jack knew he needed to focus on his task.
The ships of Task Force One continued moving through the belt in formation. The smaller asteroids only needed to be scanned by the tac boat sensors. Any cavities that might hold a Chitin soldier were studied more carefully with a surveillance drone. Only one more asteroid in Jack’s path had required him to set down and conduct a ground search. That had yielded no results. There had been no contact since the ship on BP-8. Jack forced himself to maintain his concentration. The moment it slipped would be the moment a Chitin attack would come. If an attack came and Jack was unprepared, he knew that it would lead to disaster.
The small team lounged about in the passenger section of the boat where there was some room for them to spread out. The tac boat’s primary role was as a combat landing craft for a Marine squad of twelve, and with only three remaining team members, Jack had some space. But after such a prolonged deployment, the tac boat felt cramped.
The Marines looked at every asteroid big enough to land on as a hopeful sign that they would be ordered to go on a search patrol. Jack moved around every rock hopeful of the same, but with the asteroids cleared by the sensors, there was no need to set down. They moved through the belt at a snail’s pace, checking every rock for signs of Chitin activity.
A report from a tac boat on the sunward side of the belt was the only distraction during this watch. Jack kept a channel open and listened to the squad leader of 1st squad, Will Stone, as he led his team on a sweep of BP-1, the innermost planetesimal of the belt and the first ever discovered by the Fleet during the earliest surveys of Eros System during the first days of colonization.
Jack listened to the communication traffic intently. The search took Stone a little over an hour and BP-1 was reported as clear.
Jack sat back in his chair as the final message from Stone came that the tac boat was off the surface and continuing with sweep operations.
Looking at the task force image on the holostage, Jack could see that Stone’s ship was a few kilometers behind the main task force, but one tac boat on the outer edge of the belt was a hundred kilometers ahead. Jack didn’t need to check who it was.
“Torent, what are you doing?” Jack opened a private channel to his old friend.
“Torent here. I’ve just moved out of formation to check out a sensor signal on a small asteroid. It’s only a pebble really, but it was a strong reflector. Might have been debris. Just wanted to confirm it.”
It was impossible for Jack to keep his temper. He had been cooped up for days on end with his small team, and the search was a painstaking and frustrating task. He’d even lost a Marine, and now one of his trusted squad leaders was charging ahead of the task force. Again.
“Sam, you have been ordered to remain in formation. I don’t care what you saw out there. Charging off ahead exposes you to risk. Hold formation or I will send you back to the fleet.”
“Risk?” Sam Torent spat out with a burst of hard laughter. “You talk about risk? If a kravin Leviathan shows up, what good is your little formation of tac boats going to be?”
“Stow that insolent talk, Marine,” Jack said, trying to control his anger as best he could. “One more outburst and I will have you strapped to a post on the Scorpio’s Marine deck before the day is out. Is that clear, Sam?”
“I’m moving back into formation now, Jack. What’s the big deal?”
Jack felt the heat in his suit. He increased the coolant level to take away the uncomfortable feeling of heated fury.
“The big deal,” Jack answered Torent, “is that you are not following my orders. I have a very good reason for keeping us in formation and if you find you cannot follow my orders then I will be forced to issue a formal reprimand. Hold formation. If you spot something, then report it, but you will hold formation or...”
“Or what?” Torent said with a belligerent tone that pushed Jack to boiling point.
“Or I will have you removed from the task force and report you for dereliction of duty and insubordination. Do you know what that means?”
“Yeah,” Torent said mildly.
“Do you?” Jack said. “Because I think you need reminding. They will flog you, Sam. They will take the skin off your back. Don’t put me in the position where I have to order that.”
“Jack, I’m sorry. It’s been so dull out here. I’ve had nothing to do...”
“So read a kravin book,” Jack snapped, cutting off Torent and his list of excuses.
“Sir,” came Torent’s acquiescent reply.
Jack had always relied on Torent. He was an outstanding Marine. They had become friends early, but Jack knew he couldn’t be seen to be tolerant of insubordination from anyone in his company, not even someone who was a squad leader and a friend.
He returned to watching the distant specks of starlight as the task force crept through the belt. Jack scanned an asteroid up ahead. It was just over fifty meters in length but only ten meters in width. It was an oddly elongated asteroid for the belt. Although belt asteroids were found in all shapes and sizes, they mostly tended toward the spherical. A torpedo shape was unusual.
The density readings appeared and showed there were no subsurface cavities. Jack was about to clear it, but the density reading looked unusual. It was much higher than any other asteroid in the belt.
The asteroid moved in a lazy end over end tumbling motion as it spun in its slow and lazy orbit around the system’s star, no faster or slower than any other of its neighbors.
Then a glint of light from the far tip caught Jack’s eye. The asteroid reflecting sunlight was Jack’s first thought, but he dismissed that assessment in an instant. Before he really knew what was happening, he was calling his team to order and initiating evasive maneuvers.
A Chitin Kraken lifted off the far end of the asteroid and moved to attack.
Jack fired the engines and brought them to full power. The maneuvering thrusters on the port side were burning at full capacity, flinging the tac boat sideways. The spitz cannon on the Chitin Kraken spat plasma fire toward the Marine ship. A stream of plasma spears flashing through the black. The boat moved sideways and out of the way of the first stream. The team cheered Jack’s quick thinking and rapid response.
“Man that hail cannon,” Jack shouted as he flung the tac boat into a dive toward the long, tumbling asteroid. “Fire at the Chit.”
Garcia stumbled around the passenger hold as Jack flung the small attack boat about in space. Gri
pping the short ladder up to the manual control turret, Garcia shouted out his progress to Jack.
“Entering the hail cannon firing turret now, sir.”
Jack pushed the boat to its top speed and moved toward the asteroid. The tumbling rock had moved so that it lay like a long beam, its long axis pointed away from the front of Jack’s boat. The Kraken shot past. Looking at the holostage quickly, Jack saw the Kraken was taking a position on his tail.
Pushing the tac boat into a wide spiral, Jack maneuvered underneath the asteroid. The near end of the asteroid was now moving upward and away from Jack, exposing him to fire from the Kraken holding position some five hundred meters away.
The tac boat was exposing its underside to the Kraken. The asteroid was tumbling further away. The hail cannon purred as the first fire from the boat’s weaponry ripped through space toward the Kraken. The Kraken was the most maneuverable and fastest of the Chitin craft, though. An infiltrator and fighter, it was extremely agile and extremely deadly. It easily sidestepped the incoming kinetic hail and fired another burst of spitz cannon plasma spears.
The underside of the boat was facing the near end of the tumbling asteroid, which was moving upward and away rapidly. Jack activated the landing tether harpoon. A projectile harpoon attached to the tac boat by a high tensile cable raced away. It slammed into the asteroid and fixed itself in place.
The cable pulled tight and the tac boat was jerked by the asteroid. Like a pendulum suspended from the tip of the asteroid, the tac boat swung in a wide arc.
Spitz cannon plasma spears chased the boat as it was pulled by the weight of the tumbling asteroid. Jack fired the engines and pushed further, racing ahead of the near tumbling end and positioning the tac boat on the other side of the asteroid, hidden from the Kraken.
Jack knew his shelter from the plasma spear storm would be short-lived and the Kraken would acquire its target in a few moments. Just enough time for a call. Jack opened the communication systems on a Fleet-wide channel.
“This is Commander Jack Forge. Have encountered a Chitin Kraken. Require assistance.”
Jack Forge, Fleet Marine Boxed Set (Books 1 - 9) Page 61
