“Not dead straight. Turning is possible but the angular velocity must be minimal to avoid shearing forces ripping off the harness. It is likely that at their destination, waiting ships will need to match vectors and detach the pod array in stages before the vessels are able to turn sharply enough to achieve planetary orbit.”
“I’d say essential. But if Khallini is still in the hands of the Legion when our three ships arrive, that shouldn’t be a problem.” She forced a smile and found it came surprisingly easily. “You’ve done well, Leading Spacer Magnetizer. One last thing. Is there anything more I could be doing to secure the success of the retrieval of the sleeping legion?”
Tizer narrowed his eyes, the outward sign of him squeezing the maximum from his brain.
A comm ping sounded in Nhlappo’s head.
Nhlappo growled at the interruption, the warning sound in her throat softening slightly when she realized it was her adopted son, Romulus.
“This had better be worth it,” she snapped.
“It’s Janna.”
Nhlappo’s growl returned, fiercer than ever.
The first chance she got, that Wolf girl was going into cryo storage and not coming out until Romulus’s roving eye had settled onto another object of affection.
Which shouldn’t take long given his past record. Nhlappo had raised her boys in real time during the voyage here. They hadn’t slept along the way, while her Wolves had slept most of the voyage, though there had always been some awake for training and interrogation. Now 21 years of age, Romulus and Remus had grown up as Wolves, and the irregular soldiers had adopted them as their own. To the Wolves, her boys were titans. Demi gods. No, it wouldn’t take him long to get over his Wolf girl.
“What about Janna?” asked Nhlappo when she’d finished chewing over her anger.
“She’s riding the elevator. Says she found a problem. A big one. She knew you wouldn’t respond to a direct call—”
“And you’re her backchannel. I get it, Rom. Put her through.”
While Romulus established the comm link, Nhlappo waved Tizer back to their waiting shuttle. They were both done here.
“Chief, it’s Corporal Janna.”
“I know who you are. It’s why you think you’re so frakking important that I fail to understand.”
“Chief, the upload of icer pods has stopped.”
“Okay…” Nhlappo prompted.
“No, no it isn’t okay.”
The colonel sighed. Getting sense out of a Wolf could be hard work. Give her a proper Marine any day. She was proud that the Wolves called her ‘Chief’, because they had many exceptional qualities, but they couldn’t give a situation report if their lives depended on it. Their minds were hard-wired for action. It was inevitable, she supposed, given that they had been raised as brutalized slaves, bred as a terror weapon. The Wolves were supremely cunning, but it was a disorganized intelligence of instinct and intuition, the opposite of Tizer’s rational brain.
“Let’s start again, Janna. Has the elevator car stopped?”
“Yes, Chief. I’m in it now. Thirty-eight thousand klicks high.”
“Why has it stopped?”
“On my instructions.”
“Why did you stop the cargo of pods?”
“Because of what they found on those Hardits. The commando raid that broke into the pod warehouse at New Detroit yesterday morning.”
How ten Hardits had managed to penetrate the tightest security on the planet was a matter of urgent enquiry, but the raiders had been shot dead by a patrolling Marine without difficulty. “But, Janna, we didn’t find anything on the Hardits. There were no traces of explosives. They carried nothing more destructive than scatterguns and they didn’t even penetrate the armor of the Marine.”
“Exactly.” Janna sounded pleased with herself. “Why go to that trouble of launching that raid and accomplish nothing? It wasn’t a test – Hardits don’t probe and test, we know that. They accumulate their advantages and then attack without holding back, counting on their superiority to prevail over us filthy aliens. I had a hunch there must have been more to the raid, so I stopped the shipment.”
A chill crept over Nhlappo’s back. “You may have a point, Janna.” She ran through the day’s reports from Logistics Division. Janna had stopped the first shipment stored in the warehouse penetrated by the Hardits. If Janna was right, she’d made her move just in time. “I’ll fly some cryo engineers over to rendezvous with your car.”
“Chief, I realize that any delay to the pod embarkation program must be minimized, which is why I already thought to bring engineers with me. They’ve just confirmed that the Hardits have infected the pods with a cyber virus.”
Infected? The Hardits hadn’t made any serious attacks for six months, not since they burrowed their way into New Detroit’s upper levels in their armored tunnel borers. Maybe this was why.
“Toxins are being slowly released into the sleepers,” said Janna. “But the pod status continues to report full health for the inhabitant.”
“Are they dead?”
“They’re okay for now, but must be revived soon. Not onboard ship, though. They must not be placed in proximity to uninfected pods.”
“How many are infected on the ground?”
“We need to confirm that, but… the engineers estimate thousands already infected. Maybe more. This is why I contacted you via your son.”
“You have done well, Janna.”
“Thank you, Chief.”
The Wolf girl’s voice buzzed with pride. Nhlappo had to admit that she deserved to feel good. She was still absorbing what the Wolf girl had told her when the link filled briefly with white noise.
Nhlappo’s AI reported that the link to Janna had dropped out. Then it corrected its assessment. The link had been deliberately blocked in an unknown manner.
Before she could assimilate the chilling implications of that, reports started flooding in from elsewhere – whatever the problem with the link might be, it was specific or localized. Explosions. Multiple targets, soft targets being hit everywhere: communications infrastructure, personal transport, munition dumps, even the sports hall and the bars of New Detroit’s surface level.
That skangat Tawfiq! She had underestimated the Hardit and this was payback.
Then came the worst news of all. The Hardits had planted their largest bomb at the most heavily guarded location on the planet: the Baylshore orbital elevator. They’d hit the one thing that made it possible to lift millions of cryo pods into orbit in a matter of a few years rather than decades.
All comm links failed. A battle was underway and Nhlappo was cut off from her command.
Still maneuvering toward the waiting shuttle, Nhlappo turned and zoomed her visor onto the elevator car. She expected the car to be screaming through the upper atmosphere, but it was stable. The tether connecting it to the ground hadn’t snapped. Not yet.
You lose, Tawfiq, she said to herself. This is going to be all right. Despite the defiant thought, Nhlappo didn’t believe it, not for one moment.
As she reached the shuttle hatch she turned and yelled at Tizer along a tight beam comm link. He was still twenty meters away. “Shift your ass, Spacer. And then place your butt in the pilot’s chair. This ain’t over, not by a long shot!”
— Chapter 30 —
A few seconds after the comms console went blank, a far more ominous form of communication came up from the ground: a deep rumble growling up all the 38,000 klicks of tether, rattling the car and shaking Janna’s spine before carrying on up the tether to the captured asteroid out in space that acted as the counterweight.
Janna bit her lip to stop it trembling. But that did little to quell the shimmer of panic that threatened to explode out of her belly, so she backed into the cryopod cargo, flinging her arms wide to take comfort from the curved solidity of the pods.
Thirteen layers of twelve pods. God knew how much weight that was but she could feel the feint hum of power keeping all those s
leeping people alive and took comfort that everything remained well.
She calmed enough to realize her eyes were tightly shut. She opened them to see that Shinzo and Tennyson, the two Marine Engineers, were looking down at her from the floor. They looked smug, hanging upside-down in their battlesuits, strapped into their acceleration stations.
Give her solid ground every day, or even stinking mud, not the craziness of this stupid cable car. When they’d shot up from the ground like a missile, ‘down’ had been toward the floor and the acceleration had been so fierce that she’d felt her spine compress despite her acceleration chair. Then, after reaching cruising speed, gravity had steadily lessened, until a few thousand klicks ago they’d passed the geo point and gravity had flipped so that ‘down’ was currently pressing her feet toward the ceiling. Crazy!
“Welcome back,” sneered Shinzo. “Now your funk’s over, get your scrawny butt into your thrust station.”
“My funk?” she shot back. “If the cable snaps, do you retarded dongwits think a harness and a little seat padding will make the slightest frakking difference?”
Jana grinned when the two Marines shot an uncertain glance at each other. She was probably about to die, but at least she’d go knowing she’d finally grasped this bastard descendent of English enough to curse at a Marine and win.
Then Janna’s stomach flipped over. The entire universe flipped over. Janna whirled her arms, fighting to keep her balance, and the contents of her stomach where they belonged. She felt a bump but thought nothing of it because she was too busy retching. Then another bump and a fierce wrench in her guts as gravity shifted unnaturally.
She landed next to her acceleration chair. She had fallen onto the floor. She looked up through the transparent material of the car at the apparently endless tether disappearing into the void of space. Except it wasn’t endless. Six thousand klicks away was the captured asteroid used as a counterweight to the planet’s gravitational pull. It was too small to see from the car but it was there. Only it wasn’t a counterweight any longer. Gravity had flipped over. She was no engineer but even she understood what falling onto the floor meant. The tether had snapped and the asteroid was flying off into space, twirling them around on the end of a 6,000 klick rope as it went.
— Chapter 31 —
“Re-entry in two minutes, Colonel.”
“Comm status.”
Beside her in the pilot’s seat, Tizer’s hands froze over the flight controls. He closed his eyes but Nhlappo could see his eyeballs rolling under his lids.
“Data network outage stabilizing at 90%,” he reported. His eyes opened and he returned to flying the shuttle down to the battlezone. “Contact with the squadron will be intermittent during re-entry.”
Nhlappo’s mind cleared. She’d made her decision. All that remained was to enact it.
She raised Beowulf. Captain Lubricant’s face appeared instantly on the inside of her helmet visor.
“Colonel?”
“Captain, your squadron will leave orbit immediately and at maximum acceleration. You are to proceed directly to Khallini System, where you will place your ships and their cargo at the disposal of the Legion commander there.”
“But, Colonel. The cargo rigging is neither complete nor tested. I have several hundred personnel out on EVA loading the pods.”
“Don’t waste time telling me your difficulties, Captain. Find solutions and fast. I know Hardits. They accumulate every advantage and won’t move until they are absolutely certain of success. You are to leave orbit immediately. Do not look back.”
“What about the Hardit rebellion on Antilles before the civil war?” countered Lubricant. Her voice sounded vague, distant, a minor sub-process of a multiprocessing Navy mind that Nhlappo guessed was largely engaged with planning to depart. “McEwan and a few squads of cadets stopped the Antilles insurrection in its tracks.”
“We got lucky that time,” replied Nhlappo, herself largely engaged in assessing reports coming up from the ground. “The Hardits panicked and moved too soon. Do they look like they’re panicking now?”
The starship captain hesitated, but only for a moment. “Acknowledged,” she said with conviction. Her eyes closed briefly as she accessed whatever freakish machinery passed for her brain. “Ah, Colonel… Your shuttle is heading for the surface. Do you need retrieval?”
“Negative. There’s a million soldiers still on the surface sleeping in their pods. God knows how many are infected. McEwan left them behind once. I’ve no intention of doing so again. I won’t abandon anyone!”
Nhlappo’s lips trembled even harder than Tizer’s had earlier. They both knew she was abandoning someone. Two someones. The only two people she cared for in the galaxy.
Lubricant nodded. “Good luck on the surface, Colonel. I’ll see our passengers safely to Khallini System. Your boys too. Lubricant out.”
White noise corrupted the transmission. Then it cut out altogether. No matter, she was seeing functioning comm links to the planet’s surface.
The external video feed showed they were slicing through the gossamer white clouds of the upper stratosphere. Nhlappo took a last moment of calm before losing herself to the unrolling situation, knowing she might never emerge. “Major Spartika, acknowledge!”
“Here, Colonel.”
“I’m coming down. Where are the enemy pressing hardest?”
“Nowhere, Colonel. They’re feinting and probing everywhere along the perimeter.”
“Everywhere? The defensive line is over a thousand klicks long.”
“Everywhere, ma’am.”
The shuttle slammed into turbulence so violent that it shook the breath from Nhlappo. She took a second to recover, leaving the risks of the flight entirely to Tizer. Just so long as she could speak.
“Order a mass revival of the sleeper pods,” she instructed Spartika.
“How many?”
Nhlappo laughed. “I don’t think you’ve grasped the seriousness of the situation, Major. I want you to revive all of them.”
— Chapter 32 —
Janna couldn’t take it anymore. “For God’s sake, will you two quit whining? You’re crapping yourselves over nothing. Grow a pair, already.”
Tennyson pretended he couldn’t hear, but Shinzo had kept his cool enough to answer. “The data network has been severely compromised. We’re low priority which is why we’ve lost comms altogether.”
“So? We get a little peace and quiet. We’ve got several days’ emergency air. They’ll pick us up. Anyway, I’m the one who should be whining. You’re in Marine battlesuits with butt tubes and dick suckers to keep you heroes clean. My emergency pressure suit hasn’t any of that fancy plumbing. When I need to go–”
“Yeah, we get it,” said Shinzo waving his hand dismissively as if he could delete her with a simple hand gesture. “The point is not that we keep losing comms, but that the Hardits are trying to disrupt our command and control. That should worry you more that your frakking hygiene concerns.”
Janna bared her teeth at the Marine idiot, and turned away before she punched him – not a good idea considering his battle armor. Of course she realized they were in deep shit. But rather than let her distract them from their worries, they chose to regard her as an imbecile.
After all, she was only a Wolf.
Fuckers.
The screen on Janna’s wrist lit up. Relief flowed through her like a honeyed balm when she glanced down and recognized Romulus’s face grinning up at her. The deep brown of his eyes twinkled against the lighter tan and russet swirls of his parasite-hardened skin.
She touched the hard swirl of infected skin on her own cheek… and then felt such a moron because her helmet was in the way.
“I’ll kiss your beauty patch later, honey,” laughed Romulus. “Promise. But there’s a bit of a flap going on. We’re heading out.”
“Out? Out system?” Panic prickled at Janna’s skin. Shinzo and Tennyson stopped what they were doing and looked up at her, tryin
g to eavesdrop.
“Yeah. We’re packing up and leaving. Look, I gotta hang up. Things to do. Just wanted to let you know it’s more than just me who’s thinking of you. A shuttle will come pick you up soon.”
Why were the ships leaving? What the hell was going on?
So many questions tugged at her but she needed to let her lover go do his job. “I’ll see you back at the ranch, Rom. Janna out.”
Romulus could take an age to say goodbye. She reached for the wrist unit of her suit to cut him off.
“Don’t go!”
She stayed her hand. Romulus’s face shifted one side to make space for another caller, his brother Remus. Romulus’s face reminded her of the beautiful bivalve shells that washed onto the islands of Littoran. His brother’s face pattern was dappled shades of violet and indigo, perfect camouflage for the woods of Tranquility where the she-wolf, the mother ginquin, had briefly fostered Romulus and Remus when babies.
“Hello, Janna.”
“Butt out, brother,” yelled Romulus. “This is a private conversation with my girlfriend.”
“Shut your dumb mouth and listen. Both of you. I’m sending a projection of the elevator’s course. The captain’s working on a response now, but I felt it right you should know.”
“What is it?” asked Tennyson. “What’s happening?”
“Deep shit,” Janna answered as she watched the projection play out on the little wrist screen.
The tether was big. Janna usually coped with the impossible height of the elevator by sliding her mind away from the view outside. The projection rammed home the inconceivable length of the tether. At 44,000 klicks, it was over three times Tranquility’s diameter. She watched as the virtual tether tumbled slowly around the planet in a highly elliptical orbit that brought them near to their initial position in ten hours, and the ships nearby. At which time the tether had twisted so much that there would be no escape for the squadron from its lethal lash.
The Hardits had turned the orbital elevator into a weapon, and aimed it straight at the Legion ships.
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