by Steve Perry
“Yeah? How long you figure before you trip over one of those regs and wind up feeding the general’s little pets?” Wilks asked her. “You know some of the people webbed in there, don’t you?” He waved at the reinforced wall to his left. The queen’s chamber was on the other side.
He could see them weighing it. If Spears came back and assumed command, they would be in deep shit if they played along with this. He was not a forgiving man. On the other hand, if Powell was the new honcho in charge, he wouldn’t give them to the aliens. A smart marine would sit tight and wait to see which way the current flowed.
Then again, Wilks thought, a smart marine would have figured out that it was only a matter of time before they all went into the chambers as protein supplies for Spears’s new and improved troops. Like the three who deserted and ran, only to find themselves out of the intake and into the combustion chamber. And it wasn’t as though Colonial Marine line troopers were galaxy-renowned for their high intelligence.
Then again, he had the gun. Even a stupid marine usually figured that possibly dying in the future was better than for sure dying right now.
“Looks like it’s your show, Sarge,” one of them said.
“That it is. Let’s take a little stroll to assembly, what say?”
The lights blinked out, followed by the sound of pressure doors dropping into place. That would be Bueller. The emergency lighting popped on almost immediately. Half a second, no more. Unfortunately, that half a second was enough time for the largest of the troopers to think he could take advantage of the darkness. He jumped at Wilks.
Wilks’s first reaction was to shoot the sucker. He was big, but slow, and he had plenty of time to cap one off into the man. But blowing away marines, however misguided their sense of duty, didn’t appeal much to somebody who’d spent most of his life in the corps. He’d done it before, he hadn’t liked it.
Wilks sidestepped to his left, swung his foot up in a spring kick, caught the charging man high in the belly. Stole his wind just long enough for the second kick, this one to the man’s right leg, next to his knee. The attacker’s leg buckled, the ligaments and cartilage torn, and he collapsed onto the deck, cursing.
The Powell-loyal trooper brought his weapon to eye level and prepared to fire on the other captured troops.
“Negative!” Wilks yelled. “Don’t shoot! There’s no need.”
The armed man glanced at Wilks.
“My men are in control of life support,” Wilks said, making it up as he went along. “If anything happens to me, you lose heat and air, you’re bottled up here without the exit codes. Anybody want to choke to death, taking me out is the way to do it.” To prove he wasn’t worried, he lowered his own weapon.
The four troopers still standing looked at each other uneasily. It was one thing to catch a round in battle and go fast, another to lie on a floor sucking air that had gone foul with CO2. Not a pleasant way to die.
“Nobody is gonna do nothin’, Sarge. You call it.”
“That’s good. Help bimboboy up and let’s move.”
The four moved to help the wounded marine.
Well. So far, so good. He hoped it would all go so easy.
* * *
Wilks seemed to have things well planned and under control, Billie saw. As they moved through the station, Wilks used a magnetic card and a keypad code to open the pressure doors. Once, there were three men waiting on the other side of a door, but Wilks herded some of the captives through first, their hands raised, to advise the marines of the situation. The threat was simple: Surrender your weapons or freeze in the dark trying to breathe. He must have forgotten that he was going to give Billie a gun, because she hadn’t collected one yet. Not that there were many guns around. A couple of carbines, some pistols from various guards. Apparently Spears didn’t like his men running around the base armed. Probably a good idea, it would have been too tempting to take a shot at him.
By now they had collected about thirty people, about half of them loyal to Spears, according to Wilks, who seemed to know how to tell the difference with some kind of electronic device he carried. Interesting.
“Where are we going?” Billie asked him.
“Central Assembly,” he said. “Gotta sort these guys out as to ours and his. Powell says there are a hundred seventy-five marines, forty-eight scientists and medicos, a couple of androids, and fifteen workbots here. Spears has a short platoon, twenty-five men, with him. We can’t have anybody running around loose who might short-circuit things.”
“A lot of people to find,” she said. “Couple hundred and then some.”
“Used to be more. Powell says there were almost five hundred marines assigned to this base. Want to guess where the other half of them went?”
Billie swallowed, her throat suddenly dry.
“Between them and the colonists, Spears has given the aliens more than four hundred people.”
“God.”
“More like the Devil, I’d say, if I were inclined to believe in such things, kid.”
Billie blinked and thought about somebody who would give that many of his fellow humans up to such a horrible death. He had to be crazy.
“Yeah, he’s that,” Wilks said.
She hadn’t realized she’d spoken it aloud.
“But don’t worry about it. We’re going to shut it down. Powell says the medicos on his side know how to put the corraled aliens down fast; we can shut them off like lights”—he snapped his fingers—“that quick. Soon as we get Spears’s loyalists locked up, we turn this place into an alien graveyard. The air processing plant is a little harder, but we can work something out, worst comes to worst, we’ll just nuke the whole place.”
One of the captured marines overheard this. “You can’t do that!” she said. “The air plant is worth billions! And we need the oxy!”
“Sister, this planetoid is a wash. Even if we cook the plant crispy, some of those things might be dug in. They can survive a long time without food, without water, even without air. They could hibernate for years, just waiting for some fool to come along and be dinner. The best we can do is kill all those we can spot and then bail out. On sterile ships, too.”
“You would let the Earth be overrun by these things and destroy the only means of combating them?”
Wilks looked at the woman as if she had grown fangs. “You buy that shit?” he said. “You think Spears is gonna drop down and clean up the whole fucking planet with a couple of hundred tame monsters?”
“He knows what he’s doing,” she said.
Wilks just shook his head. “Move, sister. You believe that, you’re as crazy as he is.”
* * *
Spears had learned over the years that circumstances often dictated events in a way that was beyond human control. Since the magnetic storm had caught them, there was no help for it, save to make the best of the enforced grounding. He’d worked computer scenarios, painted new trooper IDs, and now stood in a makeshift shooting range, provided by an unused corridor with a soakplate at the end as a backstop. It wasn’t state of the art, no holographic attackers who would crumple and fall realistically when hit by computer-tuned and augmented weaponry; still, it would serve. A trooper stood out of sight through an open doorway ten meters down the corridor from where Spears was. With his pistol holstered, Spears called out, “Throw!” and went for his weapon.
The hidden trooper tossed an industrial-sized food can into the corridor so it entered at eye level and climbed in a lazy arc toward the high ceiling. The can was bright red plastic, as big as a small wastebasket, and it rose slowly in the reduced gravity of the corridor—micromanagement of gee was possible if you had a good programmer working the generators and plenty of time on his hands to route the flux lines.
Spears fired. The caseless round punched into the can as it reached its apex. In the lowered gravity, the impact of the starfish round as it expanded and tripled in caliber size was enough to knock the can noticeably away from the general. He punched the
can twice more as it tumbled away and downward. The faint odor of canned fruit reached him as syrup and fruit cocktail spewed from the holes in the plastic. The booms of the pistol filled the corridors, but Spears’s hearing was protected by in-canal wolf ears, electronic suppressors that allowed normal sounds in but stopped anything over eighty decibels.
“Good shooting, sir,” the unseen marine said.
Spears chuckled. Catshit. A half-blind soldier should be able to hit a target that big at this range. “Use the smaller one next time. Ready… throw!”
More booms lapped against the walls as his shots found the next target, a head-sized can of yellow plastic. Spam, it looked like. Now that wasn’t bad shooting.
* * *
In the Main Assembly area, Powell came to join Wilks and Billie and the others.
“Major?”
“We’ve got all of Spears’s men here except for those he’s got with him,” Powell said.
“You’ve lost it, Major,” a top kick said. “The general will wipe the floor up with you and your mutineers when he gets back.”
“Maybe, Top, but I’ll risk that. I’m going to give you all a choice,” he said. “Those of you who wish to remain loyal to General Spears and his demented vision, move over to the left there. Those of you who will obey my orders until we can contact SekCom and get an official review of the situation, assemble on the right, by the aft wall.”
The docks and ship bays were much larger, but this room was the biggest space normally used for general assemblies. The two hundred or so people rumbled, a disorganized crowd walla, as they spoke to each other and to nobody:
“Powell’s lost his fucking mind—”
“I don’t wanna wind up feeding the bastards—”
“What’s the legal scat here, Sarge—?”
“We’re fucked either way—”
“Ah, hell, I’ll go with the major—”
Wilks watched as the men, women, and androids chose sides. The bots didn’t count, they weren’t AI grade; the androids had no choice, really, they were programmed to obey the ranking officer and since Spears was gone, that was Powell. The human group gradually divided into roughly equal numbers moving toward each side of the room. Most of the scientists went with Powell—maybe their exposure to the aliens had taught them something. More enlisted troops went to the aft wall, too, while the line officers, a couple of captains and lieutenants, and most of the NCOs went to the Spears group. That figured. Sergeants mostly ran the day-to-day operations of any military organization and they trusted more in the military process than did the grunts. Officers usually stuck together because they were officers.
“I can’t believe so many would still follow him,” Powell said softly.
“Hell, I can’t believe you got so many,” Wilks said. “What will we do with them?”
“Put them in detention. It’ll be a little crowded but they’ll just have to make do.”
“What about the crossovers?”
“We’ll keep them supervised,” Powell said. “Outside of you and a few others, there aren’t any of them I would trust with a weapon just yet.”
Wilks nodded. “I hear that.”
“All right. You men and women on the aft wall, return to your normal stations. You’ll be reassigned shortly, keep your coms open, you’ll get a computer log telling you where to report. We’ll be a little thin but we can keep things running.”
Billie said, “What about the general?”
“Yeah,” Wilks put in, “do you have any antiskycraft weaponry mounted in the base?”
“Negative,” Powell said. “We didn’t expect attack from that quarter. Some of the crawlers and hoppers carry light machine guns, 20mm EU slug cannons.”
“Enough to bring down a small troop carrier,” Wilks said. “Better get somebody you trust who can shoot suited up and into battery, PDQ. The best way to stop Spears is to knock him down before he knows he’s in trouble.”
“I would prefer to capture him,” Powell said.
“With all due respect, Major, as long as Spears is alive he’s dangerous. If he gets back here, into the base, he’s got an army the same size as yours, plus he’s got personal control of the aliens, isn’t that right? You said the queens recognize him, didn’t you?”
Powell took a deep breath. “That’s correct.”
“I don’t like taking out marines; I’ve had to do it in the past and I would rather not, but this is what you hired me for, isn’t it? The hot work?”
Powell closed his eyes, nodded, resigned. “Yes.”
“Fine. You run your base, Major. I’ll take care of Spears.”
The man nodded again, and Wilks turned away. He wouldn’t order anybody to shoot the general but he would stand aside and let Wilks do it. Fine. Whatever it took.
“Come on, Billie. I’d feel better if you stuck with me.”
“What about Bueller?”
“He’s okay. He’s standing by the life-support controls until we’re sure what’s what.”
“Where are we going?”
“To give Spears a welcome home party. Once he’s gone, we’re gonna put all his pet monsters to sleep.”
Billie shook her head. “Thank God.”
“Whoever. Let’s go.”
16
“Sir, the storm has passed. We can lift whenever you are ready.”
Spears nodded, pointed one finger at the trooper in a kind of salute. “Load ’em up.”
The men hustled toward the hopper, eager to get out of the place. The air plant belonged to the aliens now, and his human troops were afraid to be here. They didn’t have anything to worry about, as long as Spears had a use for them. Soon they would, but not right now. A good general didn’t waste matériel until he could see suitable replacement for it on the horizon.
Spears climbed into the trooper carrier and moved to the control cabin. The pilot had all systems online, doubtless had had them ready for some time. Spears grinned. “Lift it,” Spears commanded.
The hopper rumbled with power and then surged up a hair, enough to clear the landing area floor. It began to move forward slowly. Once it was clear of the plant, the little ship would become like an arrow shot at a distant target, would hang a lazy parabola, decelerating against the faint gravity for the last portion of the flight. POC—piece of cake.
“I don’t hear the beacon,” Spears said.
“Probably some residual crosspole flurries, sir. Flux whirlpools causing interference. It’s not uncommon after a big storm.”
“Is our com working?”
“All systems are green, yes, sir.”
“Call Third Base. Coded squirt, advising them of our status.”
“Sir.”
The pilot slid one finger across a motion-sensitive contact bar, then touched a keypad next to it.
The general watched. Waited.
“There’s the response, sir,” the pilot said. “Ackno, confirm, green and green.”
Spears rubbed at his chin with his thumb. Missed a spot with the depil last time he’d wiped the whiskers off. Just a couple of hairs, but that was sloppy. Sloppy was bad. Sloppy could get you dead.
“Call ’em back. Punch in code 096-9011-D, that’s delta.”
“Sir? I don’t recognize the code—”
“You aren’t supposed to, son. Just do what you’re told.”
“Yessir.”
The pilot tapped in the numbers.
The hopper had full holoprojics. After a moment the screen area over the console blossomed, swirled for a moment, then remained a pale and featureless blue. A clear signal.
“Well, well,” Spears said. “We’ve got trouble at home.”
“Sir? There’s nothing there.”
“Exactly.”
The pilot looked puzzled. Spears said, “You don’t know the story of the barking dog, do you, son?”
The pilot shook his head.
“Back on Earth, long time ago, there was a famous investigator working on a crime.
While listing the clues, he said, ‘And of course, there’s the matter of the dog barking in the night.’ His assistant, who had been compiling the evidence, said, ‘But the dog did not bark.’ ‘Precisely,’ the detective said.”
The pilot might as well have been in suspended animation, midpoint in a fifty-year sleep. Spears shook his head. “The signal is not supposed to be clear,” the general said. “That it is means there is a problem.”
“Ah. I see.”
Whether he did or not didn’t matter. Spears was not so inept that he would leave his base without stringing a few noisemakers. Time to try another one. There was always a chance that the magnetic storm had damaged some electronics.
“Put the ship back down where it was,” Spears said.
“Sir?”
“A little detour. Don’t worry about it.”
* * *
Wilks pushed the helmet back on the E-suit. The heaters in the crawler had the somewhat stale air warm enough to breathe and keep his ears from freezing. Billie sat in the cooperator’s chair, waiting for him to tell her what he wanted.
“Okay, we have to assume that his hopper has got firepower equal to ours, so we have to shoot first. The weaponry here is like that on the APC we flew on the aliens’ homeworld. Robot guns, computer-operated, 20mm expended uranium armor-piercing slugs. All we have to do is plug the target in, like so…” He tapped in the specs for a light military hopper. “Light the system, here…” He lifted a protective cover, pressed a button. The fire control screen flicked on. “Security code, courtesy of Major Powell, thus…” The screen flashed. ARMED, it said. SYSTEM READY.
“That’s it. Everything is automatic from here on. The ship gets into range, our system hoses it.”
“He’s got twenty-five troopers with him,” Billie said. “You ever hear the expression ‘burning down the barn to get rid of the rats’?”
“Depends on how nasty the rats are, kid. The guys with him are on his side. You can’t think about them or their families or anything like that.”
“That’s cold, Wilks.”
“War is ugly, Billie. People die. Sometimes the choice comes down to you or them. If Spears gets back here and rallies the troops who might be loyal to him, the rest of us are going to wind up feeding mama bug and the little ones. In a perfect universe there wouldn’t be any need for soldiers or marines. In this one, there is.”
