“Doesn’t make sense,” Ewing muttered, refining the view while telling himself that this was alien architecture not bound by human engineering. “What was this? One long line of connected buildings? And why would they do that?”
His facile mind quickly developed and rejected a collection of explanations every bit as useless as the musings of the intelligence staff. Shaking off those inadequate ideas, Ewing called up the dimensions of the rocks themselves. The resulting data set his head tilting to one side in pensive confusion, until he shifted the view to a different city and saw the same result.
The foundation stones were rectangular slabs hundreds of yards long and wide. The overall sizes varied, but every one of them was fifty yards in depth. The readout said they were all cut from the same kind of indigenous rock, and the material glowed with energy soaked up from solar radiation. The filter swept over the images, revealing a second, muted store of energy directly beneath each of the slabs. It pulsed as if alive, stirring up a sickening sensation in his stomach. Checking his findings against three more of the cities, his fingers shaking as they flew across the keyboard, Ewing finally sat back in shock.
“How did we miss this?” he said to the air, before typing out the commands to download the results and then running out the hatch.
With a single command, the region of space surrounding Omega changed dramatically. Force warships burst into existence in a choreographed pattern that quickly surrounded the gray sphere from every direction. The distant security cordon didn’t move at all, but its systems immediately linked in with the scanners and recon ’bots of the invasion ships. Advance warning was the key to preventing the escape of any alien vessel, and once that mechanism was fully established, the assault commenced.
With all pretense of stealth abandoned, a thick cloud of surveillance craft burned through the atmosphere and took up patrol routes. Thousands more of the recon robots plummeted through the clouds, taking over the sectors originally covered by their more secretive predecessors. With this low-level screen in place, the personnel shuttles launched in a seemingly random dance that saw them separate into twos and threes and then into ones in order to confuse any concealed devices that might track them from inside the craters.
The frenetic flights resolved into something that made sense once they were closer to the surface. Aping the cordon out in space, a far-flung perimeter made up of widely scattered Banshee squads took up positions surrounding each crater. Gunships, both drone and manned, raced back and forth above them to cover the wide gaps in territory. The suited warriors quickly deployed the ground sensors, established observation posts, and reported their general impressions in this, their first visit to the enemy home world.
As soon as the security rings were in place, a different cloud of flying robots descended. Focused on the five craters to be first examined, they performed a complex, surface-level ballet that saw some of them circling the apertures while others flew directly across. The data went straight to the fleet, showing nothing unexpected. Three of the five craters provided no indications of any unnatural activity at all; their rims were covered in vegetation, and their walls were riven with cracks and fissures that could have been centuries old. The remaining two, one of which had seen the launch of the Sim transport, showed stretches of denuded rock where the vines and plants had been blown down by the violence of the blastoff.
“Deep surveillance entering craters. Full alert.” A mechanical voice warned the Banshees on the ground that the flying robots were about to dive below the surface. Although they’d heard the command hundreds of times in rehearsal, it still elicited sarcasm.
“Full alert. Did you hear that?” Dellmore called to the others. She and Ayliss were covering their portion of the perimeter from atop a small knob of large rocks and sparse trees. “Not half-assed alert. Full alert.”
“Glad they cleared that up,” Bullhead commented from a mile away. “I wasn’t planning to give a hundred percent for at least another hour. But now I’m good. Alert, you might say.”
“Hey Tin,” Zuteck called. “You think the folks in orbit are on full alert? Or maybe getting another cup of coffee?”
“They can have all the coffee they want, as long as they’re watching the ground we can’t,” the squad leader answered lightly. “I bet they’re all sitting in the galley, though, writing medal citations for each other.”
Broken up into pairs spotted along their portion of the extended perimeter, the squad members laughed. The overhead feed in their helmets was extremely good, combining the footage from the flying ’bots, surveillance drones, gunships, and the vessels in orbit. Their sectors had been chosen with care, allowing them to observe great stretches of largely open ground. From what they were seeing through their scopes and with the aid of the eyes above them, no threat was yet evident.
Minutes slowly passed, minutes where they all knew the surveillance robots were descending inside the gigantic shafts. Despite their forced insouciance, the desire to know what the craters contained was almost maddening.
“Tin, how come they aren’t showing us the feed as they get it?” Lightfoot asked. “It’s not like we could run off, if it was bad.”
“You know the answer. If the bigwigs let us see it at the same time they do, we might get the dangerous idea that we don’t need them.”
“Wait.” Ayliss spoke without meaning to, excited to see a small rectangle of new imagery in a corner of her display. “I think they’re sending it now.”
The view was far below the surface, the robots using night vision to record their findings. Enlarging the image, Ayliss felt a momentary stab of vertigo. The surveillance ’bots were flying back and forth inside one of the undisturbed shafts, the transmissions from their cameras blending to provide a single view. The combined vista gave her the impression of being slowly lowered down the center of the crater, and Ayliss marveled at the sights. Hundreds of yards to either side the rock walls were cracked and crenellated, with intermittent clumps of vegetation that grew less frequent as the robots moved away from the sunlight.
Lowering her chin allowed Ayliss to look down the vertical tunnel, its walls green in the night vision and the bottom nothing but a dark circle an unknowable distance below. All she could determine so far was that nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
Another rectangle appeared on her display, this one blinking, so she switched to it. The robots were much deeper in this shaft, which she quickly identified as the site of the launch. The dark walls were bare, and appeared to be crosshatched with countless scratches.
“What do you think caused that?” Zuteck asked. “The launch?”
“I’m guessing it was more of those caterpillar things,” Tin mused. “Look at the gouges. Some are small, some must be yards wide.”
“Intel did suggest the worms come in all sizes.” Legacy offered.
“You getting all that from a bunch of cracks?” Dellmore scoffed. “The thrust to push that transport into space had to be enormous. They’re lucky they didn’t collapse those walls.”
“Those aren’t cracks.” Tin spoke, and then paused when a line of precisely rounded holes appeared in the wall. “They had to build that entire ship—or at least assemble it—inside the crater. Something like a gantry had to hold it up, and they’d have to attach it to the rock.”
“That’s human thinking,” Ayliss warned. “Remember what Varick said about that. The only thing that had to obey our way of doing things was the ship itself. Who knows how they made it, or launched it?”
“Careful, Rig,” Cusbarina joked. “You start talking like that, you’ll end up like Varick. Trapped in the staff world. They wouldn’t even let her come with us.”
The conversation ended when the footage reached the bottom of the shaft. The scattered Banshees studied the green-lit imagery, utterly baffled.
“There’s nothing there.”
“Look at the way the ground tilts. Shouldn’t it be flat?”
“Can’t tell if there ar
e burn marks or not. That whole floor should have been scorched.”
“Where’s the launch pad? Where are the supports? Why aren’t there great big holes in the rock for the fuel lines?”
“Wait.” Legacy spoke. “They’re focusing in.”
The horde of flying robots had detected an anomaly in the inky blackness at the bottom of the chute. The view shifted around, revealing an extremely large fissure that formed an arch in the wall.
“Tunnel entrance,” Lightfoot suggested, and then corrected herself when a similarly blocked aperture appeared on the other side. “Entrances. They didn’t finish camouflaging them, but I bet that’s what they are. They launched that ship, and then cleaned out the crater completely.”
“Empty?” Reena stared at the footage across an entire wall of screens. “How can it be empty? They launched a faster-than-light ship, loaded with sleeping Sims, from that crater just a few days ago.”
“Intelligence believes this is confirmation that the caterpillar creature was one of many underground workers the shapeshifters control,” Merkit answered. “It was big enough to perform a task like blocking off the tunnels leading out of the crater.”
“Buy why would they do that? Did they realize they were being watched?”
“That’s unlikely. If they spotted our surveillance—which was quite distant at the time—they would have stopped the launch. If they detected our recon after the blastoff, why waste time sanitizing the site? I would have expected them to initiate whatever contingency plans they’ve got in place, in case we ever found them.”
“What if this is their contingency plan?”
“Hunker down and hope for the best, when they know we can blow this planet to bits?”
“I suppose not.” Reena sagged in her chair, feeling the tension in her muscles. “So what caused them to empty out that crater and block it off?”
“To me, it sounds like a procedure they’ve been performing for decades. Think about it. Nothing on Omega’s surface suggests anything is there. They know we’ve got the technology to send reconnaissance all over this planet, and every planet in this system, if we detected anything suspicious. So why leave something for the ’bots to find? They do a launch, and then they strip the place down. Nothing to see, nothing to report.”
“They know we’re here now, and that we’re more than a few probes working the system. So why haven’t they tried to run off?”
“I think the question is bigger than that. Why didn’t the shapeshifters abandon this place, and even this part of the galaxy, when they first encountered humanity? Just using the DNA and the technology they captured from those earlier ships, they built an entire race of mutated humans to challenge us when we returned. They even gave them the tools to make more ships and weapons on their own.”
Merkit paused for a breath. “So why didn’t they use all that tech to make a fleet that could take them out of our way? Why didn’t they go live somewhere else?”
“I’m assuming you have an answer for this.”
“A guess, at best.” Merkit’s face went slack in thought. “I think they stayed here, and threw the Sims at us, because they couldn’t leave. I have no idea what nailed them to this spot, but that’s my conclusion. Why else would they go to so much trouble to fend us off, if they could have just left?”
“Hostility? Territoriality?”
“If that were the case, I would have expected to be under heavy attack as soon as we revealed ourselves here. With their intelligence and ingenuity, they should be hitting us with weapons we haven’t yet dreamed of. And yet they’re doing nothing.”
“So what does it mean?”
“I’m offering another guess. I think this place is so crucial to their existence, or so sacred to them, that they wouldn’t risk it in a battle. They can’t abandon it, and they can’t see it destroyed.”
“They’re going to see it destroyed, if we don’t get some answers on the ground.”
“We can shift to five more craters. See what they hold.”
“No. Leave the Banshees in place. Send the demolition ’bots into that crater and blow those tunnel openings clear. Have the Spartacans ready to go in right after that. That’s why we brought them along.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Merkit rose, and started moving toward one of the consoles.
“General, let’s stop screwing around here. Send recon ’bots into every one of the craters.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Merkit leaned in and began giving instructions to a communications technician.
“Madame Chairwoman?” Ulbridge’s voice rose up from the arm of Reena’s chair.
“What is it?”
“I’m talking to a very agitated commo man who’s been showing me some interesting data from the planet surface. Specifically, the city ruins.”
“Why is he talking to you? Doesn’t he have a chain of command?”
“He says his chain of command is Dom Blocker, ma’am. It’s Ewing, the man who killed Vroma Rittle.”
“He met Ayliss on Quad Seven. Some kind of savant. So what’s he telling you about the ruins?”
“He believes they’re not ruins, ma’am. He believes they’re incubators. Incubators for the next generation of shapeshifters.”
Chapter 17
Jander Mortas awoke to darkness and pain. His mouth was gummed up with coagulating blood, and his entire body was soaking wet. His feet were numb, and his legs were stuck between what felt like two rocks. His head was throbbing with a steady beat, and at that moment he was racked with a coughing fit that seemed to come from his very core. Somewhere in the middle of that he realized his helmet was gone.
A distant surf was pounding an irregularly shaped shore, but the thunder came to him as a muffled murmur. His mind refused to engage its gears, but the blackness was intolerable and he felt his hands reaching for his eyes. The familiar lenses of his goggles met the tips of his fingers, and he remembered the devices shorting out when his dart hit the roof of the Ministry. Shock and fear surged through him, and he tore at the goggles. The strap holding the frames against his cheeks parted, and he blinked in the sunlight entering through the open observation window several feet away.
He was covered with transparent jellyfish that turned out to be exploded bags of water, and his legs were jammed between the two breaching charges. Mortas marveled that the explosives hadn’t gone off, but then the sound of gunfire and explosions entered the tube. He couldn’t determine how close they were, and looked at the opening to see a sky-blue sheet flapping against it. Puzzled, he reached up gingerly and caught hold of the harness that was still attached to the wall. His chest argued with him as he pulled himself toward the window, and then he was coughing again, uncontrollably, until a wet wad of blood and mucus finally caught in his throat and he spat it out.
The latch was in front of his eyes now, and he tugged at it with little hope. The hatch was dented badly, and it refused to budge. Now pulling with his arms and pushing with his legs, watching the mysterious blue fabric slapping the dart through the window and desperately wanting to be outside with it. Looking down at his torso armor with its pouches full of magazines and grenades, and recognizing he wouldn’t fit through the opening.
Explosions getting closer, and then a loud burst of gunfire. Fear and frustration taking over as he raised his right leg and began kicking at the hatch release. Squirming up a little more, now able to look through the window, seeing that the dart was on its side next to the gray walls of the Ministry. The blue sheet dropped away, revealing the six stories above decorated with a series of enormous blue drapes that hung from the roof almost to the ground. Torn in many places, tangled in a web of stout cords, a confusing jumble until his brain finally started working again.
“Parachutes. The chutes activated when I hit,” he mumbled at the miraculous event. “Didn’t know they were even there.”
Kicking the latch once more, relief washing over his sodden form when it swung away with a screech and the damaged hatch popped o
pen an inch. Looking for his Scorpion, and then seeing it at the nose, its butt fractured and its barrel bent. He placed his hand on the door, pondering whether to open it slightly or to get out in a hurry, when a shower of stones rattled across it and something heavy hit the dart near its tail. An angry clang punched into his ears, and he shoved the curved hatch open just to stop it.
Shielding his face when another shower of rocks fell into the dart, looking up at the roof where the railing was gone and the pointed noses of two darts jutted out into space. Seeing them both shift, pushed by something large and unseen, and then struggling to free himself and get away. His left foot tangled on a strap, fighting him, trapping him there, and then it came loose and he was rolling over the side. Emerging into air that smelled like smoke, hearing the booms of explosions many blocks away, and rifle fire much closer. Feeling a thump on his leg, and looking over to see that one of the breaching charges had come with him, its straps wrapped around his ankle. Scooping up the bomb, crouching, looking left and right to see where to go.
The survey of his surroundings froze Mortas in place. The street between the Ministry and a nearby building was strewn with dead bodies, most of them civilians. Two of Asterlit’s green suiters were lying there as well, seeming to have been hacked to death. The other corpses were almost as bloody, having been hit by numerous bullets. The one closest to him was a woman in rags, slumped over an outdated rifle and wearing two bandannas in an effort to hide her face. Despite the disguise, it was obvious that her skin was orange.
Two of the other civilians bore the same coloring, and several more showed dark tracks on their faces that could only be birds. The Flock. The puzzle pieces came together, the answer to the question of what had happened to the Orange. They’d infiltrated the city, somehow avoiding detection, and the Orphans’ attack had brought them out of hiding.
Mortas had no time to ponder this because his eyes found a second dart, on its side across the street in a pile of broken masonry. Its hatch was shut, and he slung the breaching charge across his shoulders before scrambling over to it. Crawling over the rock pile, seeing that the dart’s nose was crushed and knowing it had followed his over the side. Unable to get the hatch open, tumbling fragments of carved stone out of the way, and finding that the observation window on this one was open to the air just like his own.
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