by B. V. Larson
“No, but he spoke to our people long ago. He told us he was a representative of the Ancients.”
“What a grand-standing frigger,” I muttered.
Soon after that, I scrubbed off quickly and got out of the water.
“Hurry up, people,” I told the rest. “We have work to do. Get cleaned up and get your suits back on. The enemy could arrive at any time.”
They seemed annoyed that I was rushing them, but they complied. I could tell these aliens liked to soak in warm baths. A few of them even drank the bathwater. I winced at that, but made no comment.
When we returned to the command center, I told Kwon to rotate himself and the Raptors through the baths. I started reviewing his preparations for the assault, squinting nearsightedly at the console of my HUD. My eyes were working pretty well by this time.
Once I’d made some notes, I used the base’s sensors to check out the external situation for myself. The screens were rudimentary. I missed my holotank, but I wasn’t ready to allow the Elladans to access their systems directly, even if it gave me a better view of the outside. It wasn’t as if I could affect much out there anyway.
Fifty-seven Demon ships now occupied the area around the Elladan planet and moon. Each of a dozen beat-up fortresses had an assault carrier parked beside it, and I had to assume they were being boarded and cleaned out. The enemy had to know they were going to get hit in two days by a force at least four times their strength, so they were either going to try to get some of the orbitals’ weapons repaired, or they were going to take prisoners and flee.
Either way, we had to hold out.
I marked twenty-two fortresses still intact, including ours, so it wouldn’t be long before they came to call.
Half the remaining battleships and cruisers appeared to be picking up debris, presumably for reprocessing. They must have some version of a factory, though the schematics provided by the Whales had not been that specific, only detailing weaponry, armor and the like.
Factories…thinking about them brought new thoughts bubbling to the surface. I’d been wondering about the similarities between some of the Demon tech and ours. They had tentacles within their ships, brainboxes to automate things, smart metal…all technologies we’d gotten from the Nanos.
Had the Nanos visited Tartarus at some point? Maybe a scout that had gotten captured by the Demons? That would explain it and also might explain why they’d become more effective recently.
The other half of the Demon remnants patrolled, firing here and there at derelict Elladan ships, or sometimes at the surface of the planet or the moon. Valiant and Stalker hovered far out in space, beyond weapons range. Greyhound had disappeared again. Marvin must have turned off his transponder and used all his tricks to become stealthy. I thought about calling him, but I was too busy and could not afford the distraction.
Kwon returned from the baths with a smile on his face. “That was good, boss. Now all we need is some beer.”
“We have fermented liquids,” Galen spoke up.
“Good, go get us some,” Kwon replied.
“Forget it,” I snapped. “Nobody’s drinking until this is over.”
Kwon and I could handle it, but I had no idea how the Elladans or the Raptors would react, and I needed everyone sharp.
“Kwon,” I said, “we have to step up the re-fortification of this station. To do that, we need to put the Elladans to work manning their stations. I want as much high-quality intel on the inside of this station as possible. Galen, can I trust you?”
“We understand what’s at stake, Captain. Your fate is our fate.”
“Good,” I said. “To give you a little extra incentive, I’m going to rig a suicide fusion bomb to kill us all if we can’t hold out. Don’t think you can cut some kind of deal with the Demons.”
Galen cocked his head. “In that case…we’d better hold out.”
I pointed my finger and mimed shooting him. “You’ve got it now.”
I was beginning to like this guy, despite his trickery. I’m sure if my old man had told me to backstab some aliens, I’d probably have done it just because of who was doing the ordering, even if I didn’t feel right about it. We did what we thought we had to in war, so I could hardly blame him.
Mentally, I amended my thinking. Before I’d fallen through the ring long ago I would have done what my father said without second-guessing it. But so much had happened since then…I figured that today, I was my own man. If it came to a difference of opinion, I’d have no problem standing up to Kyle Riggs now.
Funny how a year in hell changes you.
“Get to work, Elladans. I want screens showing the interior of this station and any automated weaponry that still works. Find us anything that will help defend the station—blast doors we can close, fuel stocks we can use as improvised explosives, extra weapons and ammo that weren’t destroyed.”
The five natives immediately began bringing up their systems. I was torn between trying to watch them all closely and concentrating on creating the most effective gauntlet of deathtraps I could. Eventually I decided that I’d have to trust Galen. Besides, without weapons, and facing the threat of death, I thought the chance of betrayal vanishingly small. He should stick to my side at least until we’d survived the coming battle.
Despite my reasoning, I didn’t trust them completely. I moved the Star Force console to the middle of the chamber. I stayed in my armor, and I watched everything going on around me.
The station was divided into six sectors that corresponded to the six Elladan consoles around me. Unfortunately, Kwon had blown the head off of one man, so I set a Raptor in that last position, the one the birds’ senior noncom claimed had the best technical aptitude.
“I could instruct this creature more easily if I were allowed to make physical contact with it,” Cybele suggested to me in her sweetest voice.
“Forget it,” I replied.
“But he’s slow to learn our systems.”
“Then give him the sector with the least to do.”
The six sectors of the station were arranged like a six-sided cube, rounded to become a lumpy sphere. It was easiest to think of them as the four points of the compass plus a top and a bottom, with the “level” sectors in the plane of the planetary ecliptic. Cybele moved the Raptor to the “bottom” sector, which had already seen the heaviest fighting.
“When the enemy comes,” I heard her say, “close all the blast doors by inputting this sequence.”
“Open up all the doors inside the station, but allow them to be shut manually with a simple input,” I said. “Make that input foolproof—like a big red button to close and a big green one to open again. Kwon, get your people out there setting up mines and booby traps. Vary them as many ways as you can think of. Make some blow when the Demons open a door, some when it gets closed, some by movement, some by radio frequency, and as many by secondary command detonation as you can.”
“Right, boss,” Kwon said.
“Also, hide a grenade right outside every obvious airlock with my command code and yours. I want to hurt them bad before they even get in here.”
“Okay.”
“And also—”
“One thing at a time, okay, boss?”
I nodded. “Sure, Kwon. Set the grenades first and work inward. When you’ve got all the Raptors working, come back. I have a couple more ideas.”
Kwon grinned. “You always got too damned many good ideas, don’t you? Just like your old man.”
“Shut up and get moving.”
Ten minutes later, Kwon reported that the grenades were in place. I could see Raptors setting directional mines aimed at intersections, hidden with quick sprays of smart metal, debris or paint.
I got the Elladans to bring up a schematic of remaining fuels, volatiles and ammo packs. “Why are there so few?” I asked.
“The Demons ate much of the ready chemical fuels,” Galen replied.
“Why didn’t you detonate them in place when you were goi
ng to lose them?”
Galen shrugged. “That’s not our way. We do not destroy things we might need later.”
I snorted derisively. “You’ve never lost a big battle and had territory occupied, have you?”
“No, Captain.”
“Then you’d better learn the meaning of ‘scorched earth.’ This isn’t some ancient duel between honorable enemies where the losers get to walk off the field and the winner has a party. This is a fight to the death.”
“Only because you’re making it so, Captain. We could always surrender if we are at the point of defeat. In two days we will be rescued.”
“Star Force doesn’t surrender, Galen.”
That wasn’t exactly true—my father had surrendered to the Macros so he could set the terms as an alternative to being annihilated—but such nuances wouldn’t improve morale for my troops, the Elladans included. These guys were taking the concept of “spineless” to a new level.
“Suit,” I said, addressing the brainbox in my armor, “update protocol as follows: If Kwon and I are both confirmed dead, you will detonate all explosives to which you have access, using my command override codes. Confirm.”
“Updated protocol confirmed,” my suit said, its voice audible through my open faceplate.
“Now it’s official,” I told Galen. “If we go, you go too.”
“How did your species become so grim and cynical?” Galen asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe from millennia of warring, backstabbing and murdering each other.”
“Still, it seems sad. How can art or culture grow in such an environment?”
“You might be surprised. Maybe I’ll have a chance to show you around the Louvre, or the Pyramids, or Angkor Wat. We’ve done all right. Besides, as you’ve finally found out, art and culture don’t mean shit without a military strong enough to defend them, and that means warriors willing to put their lives on the line.”
“I understand the honor of the soldier, Captain.”
“In your head, maybe.” I turned back to my console. “In the next couple of days, you’re going to feel it in your blood. Now get back to work.”
-21-
Four hours later, the Demons came to kill us.
“I have an assault carrier approaching from spinward,” Cybele said. She was the female Elladan who manned the control consoles.
On my screens, I watched as the ship approached. It looked like a black pill surrounded by a gray shell. The dark surfaces had to be the rocky armor on the hull, covering everything inside except for the bright flare of the fusion drive, rich with quantum effects.
The fortress shuddered as the enemy blasted installations on the surface with their small suite of medium lasers, probably destroying any weapons that looked like they might be functional. I heard one of the Elladans curse as she lost a sensor and then another.
We still had video, so we watched as the Demon ship loomed near.
“They’re parking over sector four,” I said. We watched tensely, hoping the vessel would come close enough to get caught in the blast from one of our surface-mounted grenades.
The Demon ship drifted closer, and then an opening appeared in its broadside, as if someone was sliding a curved door into a recess. Out of it poured hundreds of creatures. The beetles and scorpions were recognizable as gray shapes while the infantry looked like humanoid monsters with ink-black heads.
Immediately, they jetted for the surface by some method I couldn’t see. They must have maneuver packs or harnesses. I tried to estimate when I could catch the greatest number of them in the explosion.
“Close all blast doors in sector four. Kwon, prepare to detonate that grenade. Ready…now.”
The mini-nuke rattled the fortress, but as it was buried on the surface, most of the blast went outward, shoving a spray of vaporized debris thousands of meters up in a hemisphere of death. It inflated so fast I couldn’t follow it. Half of the enemy troops vanished instantly, blown to bits by the violence. The rest flew off in all directions and vanished from sight.
Unfortunately, the blast wave was attenuated by the time it touched the Demon ship, and the hull took little damage. I dared to hope all of their assault forces had been neutralized.
“Kwon, have a Raptor run another grenade to the end of that airlock shaft and plant it on the hull, as far forward as possible. Sector four, open a route. Hustle!”
Kwon said, “I’ll do it.”
“No. You can follow behind, but I don’t want you exposed. That’s not your role. That’s a grunt private’s job.”
“Aw.”
Kwon and the Raptor picked their way forward with a couple of other troops to cover their backs. As they approached the end of the tunnel, they had to cut away twisted metal and shove broken rock out into space.
“Turn off the grav-plates where they’re working,” I told the controllers, and soon the work went more quickly. Kwon simply grabbed boulders and flung them out into the void until the Raptor could get through.
The private with the grenade leaped forward, up into the crater formed by the first blast. “Pull it back a bit,” I told Kwon. “Have him plant it inside the shaft, not in the crater.”
“Why do you think they’ll come this way?” he asked. “They already got booby-trapped.”
“What would you do if you were them? You’d assume all the airlocks were mined, right? So it makes sense to go to the same place rather than a new one.”
“Okay,” he said doubtfully, but he did as I told him.
“Get back. More Demons are on the way. Sector four, close the blast doors as they return.”
This time there were three vessels—an assault cruiser, a cruiser and a battleship. The two capital ships systematically blasted the surface all over sector four until it was a bubbling mass of melted rock and metal. Undoubtedly they were trying to destroy any more grenades, which was why I’d had the Raptor plant the new one a little way back in the shaft. No lasers reached down there.
Next, the big ships began boring their way in with massed beam fire on two axes and at angles to the access tunnels.
“Crap,” I said. “They’re going to try to bypass our defenses. Sector four, extrapolate the courses of the shafts they’re drilling and display.”
I watched the Elladan screens. The two shafts would come in roughly parallel to the access passage, and if they could be bored deep enough, would eventually rip their way into our command center. The only reason they could cut their way in like this was because there was absolutely nothing to interfere with their warships.
“How long?” I asked.
“Approximately six hours,” Galen said. “It will become progressively more difficult as they go deeper, of course, because the gasses have to vent back up the drill-hole, interfering with the lasers.”
“Is there anything we can do?” I asked. “Ideas?”
“Sneak out and hit them from the side?” Kwon suggested. “We could use our surfboards to land with grenades on their hulls.”
I eyed him. “When you’re a hammer-man, everything looks like a nail, right?”
Kwon looked confused. “What?”
“Never mind. Good idea, but it’s a last resort.” I looked around at the rest of them. “Anything else that’s got a better chance of succeeding? Anything at all?”
Cybele spoke up. “Can your two ships launch a missile strike or otherwise delay them?”
I mulled that over. “I’ll keep it in mind.” Having Valiant and Stalker move in would delay their repairs and expose them to risk unless they simply launched missiles, which would probably expend valuable munitions for little effect. I examined the whole station again, looking around the room at all the displays. “Can this base move?”
“Normally, yes,” Galen said. “It has repellers to change its orientation. It also has a fusion engine to push it to alternate orbits, but that has been destroyed.”
“All the repellers are down?”
“Yes, though number six has merely l
ost its associated generator.”
“You mean if we got power to it, it would function?”
“Theoretically.”
I stood up. “That’s what we have to do. Galen, get that repeller working. Put your two best technicians on it. Kwon, you take over here. Assign me a squad for security, but I don’t think they’ll be landing any more troops until they’ve drilled as far as they can.”
“Okay, boss, but we’re blind outside of sector four. Nobody here in the command center can see the ships if they do something else. You sure you don’t want me to escort the technicians instead?”
I knew Kwon would rather take the mission, but there was a distinct possibility that my own technical knowhow would be needed to get the repeller working, something Kwon would be useless at. “Sorry Kwon, not this time. I need you here. All right, squad. Let’s go.”
I sealed up my suit and led the two Elladans and the Raptor squad through the corridors, using my HUD for reference. Those blast doors still intact opened in front of us, showing that our little command staff was on the job.
“Cybele,” I said conversationally as we walked, “how many marines did you have to defend this station?”
“Marines?”
“I mean soldiers—close-combat warriors.”
“Forty-eight, divided into eight squads of six.”
“That’s about what I have, yet your people didn’t seem to put up much of a fight.”
“The lower orders must be compelled to risk their lives. It’s a difficult task to force them to fight.”
I stopped short, causing the others to do the same. “You mean your soldiers don’t want to defend their homes? I would think that even your ‘lower orders’ would be motivated, at least to avoid being eaten or killed.”
“They didn’t believe we could lose. In fact, I didn’t believe it myself.” Her ridiculously perfect face twitched. “It’s terribly inconvenient.”
I guffawed. “Inconvenient? You need to get a grip on reality, girl.”
She leveled a stare as patrician as any Adrienne had ever given me. “I’d rather die with my composure firmly in place than run around uselessly like some hysterical plebian work-wench.”
