No wonder it had been so hard to get a decent picture of the alien base. Its very death had cloaked it in a veil of destruction.
“Where is the activity?” Kris asked.
“In the extreme forward section of the cylinder,” Professor Labao said. “The area farthest from a vented reactor.”
Nelly highlighted that section. It was well away from the self-destruction of the reactors. While the other end of the station appeared to be completed and done with, this end still showed where construction had been going on.
Had some low-caste workers there chosen life over death? The odds were long against it. But a mother and father had chosen life for themselves and their two babies once in Kris’s experience. Only the babies had survived, but still, of the almost hundred billion aliens Kris had slaughtered, at least two had chosen life.
“Captain Drago, I believe the Wasp has the best armor left after the last fight.”
“Yes, we’re at eighty-five percent,” Captain Drago reported. “Why?”
“Let’s leave the rest of the squadron at this distance. Set the strongest Condition Zed you can on the Wasp and nose in there. If I were you, I’d keep my engines away from them for the first pass,” Kris said, “but what do I know? I’m just the admiral.”
“And the bloody Longknife,” Drago muttered under his breath. Almost.
Kris didn’t hear him. Very carefully, she didn’t hear.
The squadron swung wide of the moon while the Wasp crept closer, if a ship traveling at a hundred thousand klicks an hour relative to the huge gas giant looming over them all could be said to creep.
They were fifty thousand klicks out when the aliens made their move.
55
“We’ve been pinged! Radar!”
Bridge personnel are supposed to be very informative, but circumspect, in their reports. They are never supposed to shout their reports. Sad to say, old Chief Beni failed to follow proper decorum at that moment.
He was definitely shouting.
“There’s also communication from the station to the warship wrecks!”
There was no need to order battle stations. Everyone was already there. The Wasp even had an admiral at the Weapons station. There was also no need to order a flip of the ship. The frigate was on a nose-forward course, anyway.
NELLY, JINK.
I’M DOING IT, KRIS, BUT WE’VE ONLY GOT THRUSTERS TO PLAY WITH. THERE’S NOT MUCH I CAN DO.
Nevertheless, in her high-gee egg, Kris felt the side movement as Nelly slid to the left, then dropped the ship down.
On her board, Kris held the lasers ready, but she had no target.
Nothing moved.
Captain Drago had arranged his approach so that only one of the warships was over the horizon of the alien station. Kris searched it for a target.
“Enemy lasers are powering up and coming to bear,” Nelly reported.
“Kill them,” Kris ordered.
Laser 1 on the Wasp’s bow shot out a stuttering blast of light. On the hulk, a section of hull exploded.
But there was more movement visible on the dinged, seared, and dented hull. Faster than human thought, Nelly popped one, then another, then four. Finally, she used all seven lasers.
A missile tried to launch from the dead ship. Nelly nailed it before it cleared its launcher. The explosion wrecked several other launchers.
Kris was fighting a zombie. It shambled and shook and tried to kill her with every twitch. The Wasp fought back with the clear, intelligent intent of every human and computer aboard her who loved life and intended to keep living.
Almost as suddenly as it had started, it was over. In what seemed like an eternity but couldn’t have been more than a blink, the dead ship was truly dead.
The bridge crew took a second to recover their breath.
“What do we do with the other ship?” Captain Drago asked.
“I’d love to send a couple of antimatter missiles its way,” Kris said, still working on catching her breath, “but we only have a limited supply of them. Order the Royal to scrounge up some rocks and send them at it fast.”
“I’ve sent the order,” Nelly reported.
“And what do you want to do with that spark of life we see on the station?” Jack asked from his egg parked beside Kris’s.
“Mount up your Marines and see what you find,” Kris said. “If there’s anyone over there alive, I want a word with them. Clearly, they need to understand what a white flag means.”
“Kris, I didn’t notice any white flag,” Jack said. Kris could almost see the grimace on his face. “They set a trap, and we tripped it. It wasn’t a very good trap, and we tripped it with our usual Longknife sledgehammer, but . . .” He left the conclusion to Kris.
“Yeah,” she said with a sigh, “I’ve got to quit expecting these folks to be decent and open to negotiations. Foolish of me to even think so.”
“I’ll mount up both Marine companies,” Jack said. “Captain Drago, can we borrow the Wasp’s pinnace?”
“Take all the longboats, too. Better you see what lies over there than me.”
It would prove regrettable that anyone had to see it.
56
A longboat went in first. It headed not for any particular hatch but for one of the vents that had been seared in the side of the station by a reactor’s hot breath.
They expected a lot of death and destruction; still, what they found was a shock even for battle-hardened Marines.
“Damn, there are bodies all over the place,” Gunny Brown reported to them as soon as he and a squad of Marines were inside.
“Was it explosive decompression when the reactors got dumped?” Kris asked.
“The bodies don’t look like they died of that, ma’am,” Gunny reported. “I got a forensic team right behind me. The sergeant heading it up thinks they were dead before space got to them.”
“Any idea what killed them?”
“There’s a lot of paper cups floating around here. Droplets of liquid. They captured some of it and they’re doing a field analysis. Give us a minute or two, Admiral.”
Kris settled back into her chair in flag plot, tightened her belt, and prepared to wait. The Wasp had gone to Condition Charlie after tossing a few large chunks of rubble over the horizon of the station at the derelict warship.
It hadn’t reacted to any of them.
The Royal was headed this way with a couple of good-size rocks and ice hunks from the giant’s ring. Next orbit, they’d see if there was any fight left in the wreck.
Show it or smash it.
Kris no longer cared which.
She was starting to develop a very negative attitude toward her enemy.
“We got the results from those droplets and the cups. There was some kind of alcoholic drink in them. Alcohol and cyanide, we think.”
Kris turned to where Amanda and Jacques sat at her conference table. Amanda was rapidly going pale. Beside her, Penny’s mouth was falling open.
It was Jacques, the anthropologist, who gave voice to what the others were struggling to get their minds around. “They poisoned themselves on their communion wine,” he said.
On the huge base ship they’d shot up, they’d discovered a memorial garden where the ashes of the dead were scattered. There they grew a grain and a fruit that seemed readily converted to alcohol. Bread and Wine.
Sacraments, they’d concluded at the time.
Now, with their chances to continue the fight slim and the option of surrender seemingly the only one any rational person would consider, the enemy had taken their own lives with their sacrament.
“Again, the aliens have chosen death before surrender,” Kris muttered to herself. Or maybe she spoke aloud.
“But to make mass suicide a religious experience. Dear God,” was, no doubt, truly intended as a prayer from Penny.
“My general tells me to tell you that we had a nation very much like that among us not all that long ago,” Zarra said from the corner where the feli
ne observers sat.
“What became of them?” Kris asked.
“They learned different. That life is more important than a hollow death,” Zarra answered without consulting her officers. Then she had to turn and tell them what she’d said.
“They agree with what I said,” she quickly added.
“We have had groups like that also,” Jacques said. “They have also learned differently. These aliens we fight are slow learners.”
“The general says maybe they are not meant to learn. Only to die.”
“I wouldn’t mind that so much,” Kris said, and was surprised by the words as they came out of her mouth, “but they take a lot of good Sailors and Marines with them.”
“My admiral says that is always sad.”
“Yes,” Kris agreed, dryly.
“What are we going to do?” Penny asked.
“Find out who’s still alive in the aft section,” Kris said, and tapped her commlink. “Jack, have you been following this?”
“Loud and painfully clear,” he reported.
“You about to go in?”
“The pinnace is clamped onto the hull a good hundred meters short of the end. We’re about to cut our way into it.”
“Jack, be careful,” Kris said.
“Wife, I always am.”
Kris took a deep breath and gave the order. “Marines, land the landing force.”
57
General Juan Montoya did one final check of his lead platoon. All were as ready as they ever would be.
The battle-armored space suits were primed and ready. Their weapons were locked and loaded.
Jack signaled the Sailor, herself in an unarmored space suit, and the hull of the pinnace opened up a hole in it the size of a double door, which sealed to the aliens’ hull. A Marine applied a laser torch to the revealed metal. In less than a minute, a huge chunk of plate drifted off where it was pushed.
Another Marine combat engineer put tape on the sharp edges of the cut. The battle suits were tough, but there was no reason to ding them unnecessarily.
Jack motioned, and a sergeant led the first fire team through the hole. As the last trooper of that four shot aboard the station, a second team followed.
Jack had promised Kris that he would not lead from the front. With eight Marines of his battalion aboard the station, he figured he would no longer be in the front, and slipped himself into line as the third fire team of the squad went in.
It was strange how a man trained to be a Secret Service Agent changed his idea of a man’s job when he spent all his time with combat Marines.
Well, them and a certain Longknife.
Jack forced his head back into the game and faced what he knew would be waiting for him.
Gunny’s warning was hardly enough for what he faced.
Bodies drifted, thick as seaweed on a kelp bed he’d swum in as a kid. There were men and women, elders, kids, and infants.
So many of the bodies were tiny.
Most stared at him with eyes frozen in some hard stare that the poison had brought. A few of the kids almost seemed asleep.
Jack wanted to puke.
Instead, he did his best to ignore what he saw and ordered a follow-up fire team to sling weapons and shove bodies forward.
What they were after was aft.
“Up here, sir. I think I’ve found what we’re looking for.”
Jack found a purchase and shoved himself off for the aftward bulkhead. It stretched far around, showing clearly that the station’s outer wall had been the floor when it spun. The bulkhead went high up for these people, a good fifteen meters.
Possibly they would have put in an extra deck as their population regrew. Apparently, they’d built large, expecting a lot of kids.
From the proportion of the dead, they’d had a population boom in the year since Kris had clobbered them.
Again, Jack had to force his mind to focus on what he had been sent here for.
Ahead of him was a hatch. A hatch with a wheel lock and a window that let you look in.
Jack peered in, shining a light to help him see all there was to see. It wasn’t much. Some two meters away was another hatch with a lock and window.
“Kris, I’ve found an air lock. I think they intended to keep this place airtight. It looks like hurried work.”
“Does that sound as much like a trap to you as it does to me?” came in the form of a question, but Jack doubted that Kris as an admiral or as a Longknife intended it to be taken as such. Certainly not Kris as a wife.
“I’m ordering up the air lock we brought along,” he said.
Did he hear a whispered “thank you,” in response?
Four Sailors came up, their suits equipped with jet packs. Each handled the corner of a large room equipped with airtight hatches. A combat-engineering type had been taking soundings of the bulkhead. He signaled the Sailors, and they adjusted their drift.
The temporary air lock settled into place, and the Marine with the welder quickly locked it down against the wall. As he did that, the Sailors expanded out the lock, tripling its size.
Two squads began filing into the lock. Jack included himself.
Only when the aft lock was sealed down did one of the sailors open up the Smart MetalTM of the forward bulkhead and turn aside for a Marine to put a long, thin bead of explosives along the station bulkhead. He covered it with armored cloth.
“Get ready to shout folks. I’m using the smallest explosion I think I can use, and the cloth should direct the force inward, but if your ears are precious to you, shout on three.”
The count was quick. All had taken themselves off net as Jack had. With the armored space suits, the overpressure was merely annoying, although Jack distinctly felt kicked where he preferred Kris to fondle.
The wall blew in, and the first rank of Marines rolled through the newly created hole.
Jack was in the second rank.
He joined the rest of his Marines, standing there, dumbfounded.
“Are you getting this?” he said, then remembered he’d killed his sound and video feed before the explosion.
“Kris, are you getting this?” he repeated after clicking himself back onto the net.
“My God, Jack,” Kris breathed.
The scene was enough to make even a Longknife resort to prayer.
In front of Jack, an old, gray-haired woman stood. She held a knife to her throat as if ready to drive it up into her skull.
Behind her, over a dozen children, ranging in age from maybe twelve to at least three, stood. Each of them held a knife at his or her throat, just like the woman.
Some of the bigger kids helped the smaller kids hold their knives.
There were tears running down the cheeks of the kids.
There were no tears in the old woman’s eyes. The face she presented Jack overflowed with rage and vicious hatred.
~Vermin will never touch us,~ she spat in a dialect that was just barely understandable.
Jack struggled to remember what Kris had said. What she’d say in this situation.
He signaled his Marines to hold their ground, chinned his mic to the speaker in the suit and thought. SAL, YOU AND YOUR MOM BETTER HELP ME GET THIS RIGHT.
WE’RE ALL ON IT.
WE ARE NOT VERMIN, Jack began thinking and Sal translated and spoke. WE ARE TALKING TO YOU. WHAT VERMIN CAN USE YOUR OWN WORDS?
The woman actually seemed surprised, but that did not stop her rage. ~Vermin may mouth the enlightened words of the people, but it is still an animal,~ she spat.
YOU HAVE FOUGHT US IN NUMBERS FAR MORE THAN WE EVER HAD, BUT IT IS YOU WHO HIDE HERE, LICKING YOUR WOUNDS.
The woman’s eyes grew wider, but the knife never wavered from its place at her throat.
“This is getting us nowhere,” Kris whispered softly on net. “Marines, prepare to fire sleepy darts on my word. Keep going, General.”
IT IS WE WHO HAVE COME TO SEEK YOU OUT. IS THAT THE PATH THAT VERMIN WALK?
“F
ire,” Kris ordered.
Jack felt the pressure from the volley of sleepy darts. Maybe some of the soft pop did come up through the soles of his feet.
Now the old woman showed shock. She tried to drive the knife up into her skull, but her arms would not obey her.
Obey her full will.
When the knife tumbled from her grasp, there was blood on the tip.
One or two of the older children tried to follow their elder, but they were less ready to kill themselves, or maybe less enthusiastic at the prospects. All of them collapsed on the floor, with no blood on their knives.
“Kris, we need a doctor here. Doc Meade, how fast can you get in here?”
“I’m on the outside waiting,” came the woman’s soft voice. “Can I use this hatch?”
“Have a combat engineer check it for booby traps.”
A minute later, the doctor was in the room, checking one patient after another. She extracted the sleepy darts from the youngest children. Marines had already policed up the sharp stuff and bound the hands and feet of the older kids and the old woman.
The children were evacuated, youngest to oldest, in survival packs that looked like nothing less than an oversize beach ball, one Marine towing a pack.
Doc Meade came to the elderly woman last. She checked her vitals, then left the darts in her and checked her bindings. “This one is very vexed, even under sedation. Keep an eye on her.”
“They will all be on suicide watch,” Jack said.
“If we can, try to get some of the youngest kids off to another ship. We don’t want them running into any of the older ones. The big kids might kill the little ones.”
“You think it’s that bad?” Jack said.
“I think she had a lot more she wanted to spit at you,” the doc said. “I think you interrupted her grand exit. I suspect she and these kids were intended to send us a message that you interrupted. By the way, I guess our grasp of their language is as good as we thought.”
Kris Longknife: Tenacious (Kris Longknife novellas Book 12) Page 33
