“The Independence hasn’t been attacked yet,” Dan said.
“Yes. Your ship hasn’t done anything that should be construed as hostile,” Majel said. “The aliens might not view you as a threat.”
The Satori would probably be attacked if she went anywhere near the alien planetoid again. But Dan’s ship? The Inde might be their best shot at getting Beth out of there.
“We’Il give it a shot. Stand by in case we need assistance,” Dan told her. “But once you’ve verified that the Independence can safely approach the planetoid, I want you to take the Satori back to check on our surface teams.”
Dan hadn’t wanted to leave the forces on the ground without air support, but he hadn’t seen any choice at the time. Now that he had a better understanding of the threat the alien mega-ship represented, Dan was even more concerned about the people left behind on the planet’s surface.
“Understood. Dan, be careful,” Majel said. “This ship isn’t like anything else we’ve come across so far. It’s wildly different. The power it’s generating is enormous.”
“What’s it doing with all that power, though?” Dan asked. To him, it looked like it was just sitting there.
“Nothing,” Majel replied. “That’s what worries me. It’s like a sleeping giant right now, and it’s already causing us this much trouble.”
“So what happens if it wakes up?” Dan asked. A rhetorical question. There was no way the AI could know for sure.
“Precisely,” Majel replied.
She was right; that was a frightening thought. The alien construct was the most massive manufactured object Dan had ever seen. It was difficult for him to imagine the scope of the work that had gone into building it. If it was a sleeping giant, it wasn’t one he wanted waking up while he was nearby!
If Beth hadn’t been stuck over there, Dan figured it would probably have been time to pack it in and head for home. They certainly couldn’t set up a colony with the planetoid looming so close. But she was over there, and he’d be damned if he would leave her behind.
Mind made up - like there was ever any question, he thought with a self-deprecating chuckle - Dan turned to his helmsman. “Take us in. No overtly hostile moves, but I want to see if we can slip in as close as the Satori did.”
“Aye, sir,” Ensign Scott replied.
Dan heard the tension in the young officer’s tone. It would be hard to handle a ship the size of the Inde in such tight quarters. Dan pursed his lips, knowing he could take over and manage the subtle control required. But he wanted to show trust in his officers, too. If he took over at the first sign of real difficulty, then how would they grow?
“Keep a steady hand, Lieutenant,” Dan said. “You’ve got this.”
“Thanks, sir,” Scott said.
The Independence picked up velocity, jetting ever-more-swiftly away from the Satori on his screen. Dan watched the screen impatiently as the minutes ticked away. There was no response at all from the planetoid as his ship shot closer, still building velocity.
Dan reached out to Majel once more while they were still near enough to overcome the planetoids’ jamming. He’d made a decision. They were poking a sleeping bear by hanging about in this system. It was time to get out of there, head for home. Maybe they could come back later and investigate the planetoid more cautiously, but taking the time to plan it out in advance would be safest.
“Satori here,” Majel responded to his call.
“We’re inside the range where they should have reacted if they were going to. Head out to the planet,” Dan said. “I want you to mobilize our people there and get ready to leave. We weren’t prepared to run into something of this nature, and I won’t lose lives needlessly. As soon as we get Beth and her team out of there, we’ll join you and return to Earth.”
“Understood,” Majel replied. “Preparing to jump now. Good luck, Dan.”
A few moments later, the Satori winked out on his screen as she flashed away to the nearby planet. That allowed Dan to apply all his concentration to the primary problem at hand: how to get Beth out of that thing. He didn’t have a lot of time to figure it out, either. They’d be there in less than thirty minutes.
Twenty-Eight
A sharp pinging sound filled Charline’s cockpit. She saw bits of robot spider fly past her viewscreen. They were getting sneakier. If it hadn’t been for the Marines picking off the smaller ones, her Armor would’ve been taken down long since.
“Thanks, guys,” Charline said.
“Not worried about the scratches on your paint?” Martelle replied.
“No, I figure I’ll bill you for the damages later,” Charline replied with a laugh.
“You just keep dealing with the big boys,” Martelle grunted. “Leave the little ones to us.”
That was their strategy, and so far it was working. The Marines didn’t have anything heavy enough to take the giant robots out, but the Armor did. The tiny spiders were too fast for the Armors’ weapons to track well, though. Given a chance, they could carve right through the armored protection around their suits. With the Marines focused on taking down the smaller robots before they could inflict injury on the Armor, the ground forces were holding their own. For the moment, anyway.
Charline looked up at the battlefield around her, taking advantage of a brief pause in the action. There didn’t seem to be any end to the attackers. Or maybe it was just that they were repairing themselves almost as fast as they were taken down. Which didn’t really matter, because it didn’t take much mental math to calculate that they were going to run out of ammunition long before they ran out of enemy combatants.
They’d already circled the wagons, so to speak. Their defensive perimeter surrounded the lab building and their shuttles. There was nowhere they could run to and no way to cut a path through the robot army even if they wanted to try escaping. Trapped, they dug in and held on, fighting for each foot of ground.
Two of the monstrously large spiders advanced on her position. Charline checked her ammunition stores. She was running out faster than she’d like, but conserving ammo wasn’t an option. Not if she wanted to keep breathing.
A tone inside her helmet alerted Charline to a private channel request incoming from Martelle. She flicked it on as she advanced to meet the nearest giant spider, raising her railgun and taking aim.
“This isn’t a winning strategy,” Martelle said. He sounded out of breath.
The iron slug from her weapon tore into her target’s torso, opening a massive tear. But as she watched, it was already beginning to repair itself. Before more than a couple of seconds passed, another round slammed home. That would be Tessa, firing the railgun for her from her Armor off to Charline’s left. Their target staggered under the double impact, but it still didn’t go down. Charline watched the energy gauge on her gun as it charged up for her next shot. As soon as it was full, she’d trigger another blast and hopefully take the thing down for good.
“I’m aware of that. You have any brilliant plans?” Charline asked.
“I was hoping you did,” Martelle said. “Right now, it’s all I can do to keep these little monsters away from us.”
A red light flashed on Charline’s console. Another armor unit was down. They weren’t dropping like flies — yet. But each loss opened more holes in their line and made every survivor more vulnerable. At this point it was just a matter of time before the line faltered completely somewhere, and the spiders came pouring through.
In her heart, Charline had always figured she would wind up in a situation like this. Well, ever since she and the rest of the original Satori crew had first run into the Naga, anyway. It just felt inevitable. The odds were so stacked against humanity that dying on some alien planet surrounded by enemies seemed more likely than not. It was something she’d made peace with when she accepted command of the Armor unit.
But now that she was faced with imminent death, she wanted nothing to do with it. Charline fired her railgun again. The blast dug a deep hole in h
er target’s side, and it crashed to the ground. While she was still breathing, there was still a chance. She’d keep fighting as long as she could.
Charline marched her mech forward, blazing a path through the smaller robots with her heavy machine gun as she closed on the other giant spider. Maybe she was running out of railgun rounds, but there was still the blade mounted under her arm, bayonet style. It would have to do.
“Foster, you trying to get killed?” Martelle asked.
“No, sir. I’ve got a plan,” Charline replied.
“This doesn’t feel like a really great plan,” Martelle snapped. But Charline could hear him ordering his Marines to cover her. Their gunfire joined hers, cutting a swath through the smaller robots and opening a path for her to engage the big one.
The robot sprang forward to meet her, its speed uncanny. Charline swerved in her approach to avoid its charge. She dodged most of its mass, but one leg tapped her on the shoulder almost hard enough to throw her to the ground. It pivoted and reared back, preparing to crush her.
“Not today!” Charline cried out. She stabbed upward with her blade, cutting a mighty gash into the robot’s underbelly.
It fell sideways, trying to get away from her, but Charline continued on, relentless. She triggered a shot from her railgun into the gap her knife had made, opening the hole even wider. Then she used that gap as a target for her heavy machine gun. Hundreds of rounds poured past the robot’s external armor into its more delicate internal mechanisms.
The damage was more than it could handle. Secondary explosions went off inside the robot’s body, rocking the armored shell. A leg blew off, then another blast blew a new hole in its torso. It collapsed backward in a heap and stopped moving.
“Another one down,” Charline said.
“Up for doing that a few more times?” Tessa asked. “Because here they come!”
Charline glanced up and saw four more of the giant spiders bearing down on her. She checked her ammunition. Just two railgun rounds and a little over five hundred bullets for the machine gun remained. It wasn’t enough, not nearly.
“I’m almost dry,” Charline said.
“Me, too,” Tessa replied. “Still got four more shots with my railgun, though.”
“Make them count,” Charline said.
Some of the Marines were already fighting the spider bots hand-to-hand, using their rifles as clubs. She admired the effort, but they’d be overwhelmed in seconds. Charline fired a short burst of rounds to clear away some of their attackers and buy them a little more time.
Then a massive boom shook everything. It was loud enough to be audible even through her Armor. Charline looked around but couldn’t find the source of the noise. “What the hell was that?”
The Satori shot by overhead at an astonishingly low altitude. She must have jumped in via wormhole practically on top of them! The sound had been the sonic boom caused by their sudden arrival.
“Attention ground forces,” Majel’s voice came over Charline’s radio. The AI was broadcasting to everyone at once, she realized. “Prepare for danger-close artillery fire. Take cover.”
The Satori had swept a short distance away and was already banking back around. Charline took a step back, then another. There wasn’t much cover out there for her, but the bigger problem was Martelle’s Marines. They were a hell of a lot squishier.
“Armor, cover our small friends. I think the Satori is about to unleash some hell,” Charline said.
“Who are you calling small?” Martelle joked. “Taking cover now. This is gonna be good.”
Charline hunched her Armor down, covering the torso area where her body was with her arms. She’d be able to watch the show via external cameras, anyway. Better to hunker down.
The Satori screamed in toward the enemy line. The spider robots had halted in place when the ship appeared. Now the larger ones were shifting, the shape of their carapaces changing, and cannons slowly rising from their backs. They were adapting to deal with the aerial threat!
But they weren’t quick enough.
Once, the Satori had been armed with only a pair of railguns. When the ship was rebuilt, the larger size allowed her to accommodate many more of the weapons. As she unleashed her full fury on the robot battle-line it was like the ground had opened up and spewed fire thirty meters into the air. The railgun rounds impacted with enough velocity to annihilate anything in their path and destroy whatever else was nearby.
The ship came overhead in an arcing path that carried her in a full circle around the camp. She hammered the robot army, turning a twenty-meter perimeter around Charline’s forces into a dead zone. Debris, both dirt and bits of broken robot, rained down over her Armor as the Satori swept past her position, but she sustained no real damage.
Thank god. Charline heaved a sigh of relief. “You were just in time, Satori.”
“You’re welcome. But this isn’t over yet. We’ve got more incoming,” Majel said.
Charline saw she was right. If anything, there were more spider robots than there had been before. How was it even possible? They’d destroyed so damned many of the things!
“It’s time to go, Charline. I’m setting the Satori down. Have your people get aboard,” Majel said.
“Gladly,” Charline replied, passing the orders along. A ride off this dust ball of a planet was the best offer she’d had all day.
Twenty-Nine
It was another half kilometer before Beth’s team finally reached something different. Rather than passages, the tunnel they followed dumped them out into a massive room. It was full of columns, stretching from one end to the other. Beth struggled to orient herself. What she was seeing was difficult to comprehend.
Where the upper layers of the planetoid’s ‘crust’ had all been filled with twisting strings of conduit and tunnel, the innermost layer looked like it was one large room. One truly massive room, the size of a planet, wrapping around the entire bottom of the crust. Here and there, a column reached out to hold the inner layer in place.
The innermost layer of the hull was some transparent material. She could see through it clear to the other side of the planetoid’s core. At the precise center of the planetoid’s hollow core was something dark. It was hard to tell precisely what it might be. Some sort of power generator, maybe? The ship’s drive? Whatever it was seemed to not be functioning anymore. But that didn’t make sense; the ship’s engine was the only way it could be hurtling through space at the speed it was. It had to be active!
“Well, that’s something you don’t see every day,” Ayala said.
Beth realized he wasn’t talking about the engineering of the room. His eyes were locked on that darkness in the center. “What is it?”
He glanced over at her. “I’m not one-hundred percent sure, mind you. It’s not like I’ve seen one before.”
“But…?” Beth asked.
“But I think that’s a singularity,” Ayala replied.
Beth opened her mouth to protest. That was impossible. The gravity of the planetoid was nowhere near strong enough for even a tiny black hole to be nestled in its center. Besides, with the crust so close to the singularity, it would never be able to stay intact. It would be swept inside and crushed. Unless the singularity had somehow been captured, its gravity held in check?
“You’re suggesting whoever built this contained a singularity?” Beth asked. The idea stunned her. She couldn’t even begin to imagine how such a feat would be accomplished.
“Science fiction has talked about the possibility for ages,” Ayala replied. “In theory, a singularity could be used as a power source with enormous potential.”
“You could be right,” Beth said, staring at the blank area. There was no reflection in that space. Nor could she see through it to the other side. It was unnerving, looking at it for too long.
Movement outside caught her eye. At first she thought they planetoid was beginning to heal itself. The motion was from the gaping hole. Then Beth realized the movement wa
sn’t the planetoid at all. It was a ship, flying in through the opening. She couldn’t quite make it out at this distance, but it was definitely too big to be the Satori, so that had to be the Independence. Dan was flying his big-ass ship through the hole, which meant he was coming for her. Coming to help her out of this mess. The thought warmed her heart.
Ayala squinted at the ship, reaching the same conclusion she had. “I think that’s the Inde.”
“Yup,” Beth replied.
He glanced over at her. “You two are lucky to have each other.”
“Yeah, I know,” Beth smiled. A moment later, a chill overtook her heart. “He doesn’t know about the singularity. We need to warn him!”
Beth clicked her radio on, trying to reach out to the Independence. “Satori away team to Independence. You’re flying into dangerous space. Please respond.”
There was no answer. Beth looked hopefully at Ayala, but he shook his head. “Nothing here, either. I think whatever is causing the jamming must be stronger this close to the center.”
He looked pointedly at the black splotch squatting in the middle of the planetoid. Beth cursed under her breath. How close could the Independence get to a contained black hole before the ship was adversely affected? It sounded like a question from an exam parody. One of those things for which there was no answer because the data was incomplete. She couldn’t even guess. By all rights, the ship, the planetoid, and everything else nearby should already have been sucked in.
“We have to try to get through to them,” Beth said. “Ayala, take Jacobs and Kahale, get as close as you can and continue trying to broadcast. See if there’s anything you can do to punch through the interference.”
“Evans, DeCosta, you’re with me. Pull security while I do a sweep around the area. The robots channeled us down here for a reason,” Beth said. “There must be something useful or important nearby.”
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