by Dan Davis
“I was just making conversation. Please don’t tell anyone I was getting metaphysical,” Sheila said. “Anyway, you seem to be feeling down, Kat. Why don’t you try taking some drugs?”
***
Later, Kat went into the passenger compartment to check on Ram and Stirling. The sergeant was snoring and sleeping so soundly that Kat had to rat-a-tat-tat her knuckles on the face plate of his helmet.
“Open up, fellas. I’m a few minutes from initiating our main burn. After the engines cut off, you both remember to be quiet, okay? Don’t send me messages, don’t broadcast to me, not even short range needlecast, right?” They nodded. She looked at Ram. “How’s your little friend downstairs?”
“Last I spoke, he said he was looking forward to killing the guys on the ship. I think that’s what he was saying. He doesn’t exactly use proper syntax, you know? He’s got his vocabulary down pretty well, though, I’ll give him that.”
Kat felt certain that the alien would betray them but there was no point in her bringing it up again. “You both clear on the plan? On where you need to be, by when?”
Stirling raised a hand. “When we’re inside the ship, you will light the red light at the rear, release the cargo ramp. The bomb sled will be pushed down the ramp rails where it will fix itself to the enemy deck. My weapons system will follow to the top of the ramp where I will provide cover.”
Kat looked at the giant. Ram’s face was grim.
“I will push the device clear and then proceed into the ship, following Red for the routes but also using my locator to find the prisoners by their signals and I’ll bring them back to the ship.”
Kat clapped her gloved hands together. “Couldn’t be simpler, could it? Any questions? Anything you want to do or change? Okay. Sit tight, gents.”
The engine burn went off without a hitch, swinging them around the planet and up into a course that would intersect with the Wildfire, assuming the alien vessel made no major course changes until then. Assuming it would follow the same pattern of engagement as when it destroyed the Victory. It would no doubt begin to dart about when the Sentinel was in range and Kat would need to be inside when that happened. She wished she could see out of the window. See the beautiful image of Arcadia with her own eyes. But her shuttle was encased in the stealth cladding and all she had was data from the pinprick size sensor windows they had threaded through the external shield.
When the engine burn ended, the farings released, revealing the captured drone to the Wildfire as the shuttle came out of the shadow of the planet.
It was in the AI’s hands now. All Kat could do was sit back and wait. Like a passenger. Sit back and wait to be blown into pieces. Sit back and pray to Jesus, whether he was really listening or not.
Kat laughed to herself, recalling Sheila asking obliquely about religion.
Oh shit, was she thinking of her own mortality?
Maybe I should try to follow those AI regs a bit closer, after all.
The approach was agonizing. The only way she knew that the plan was working was by her continued existence. On and on the time stretched. Her ERANs reacted to her anxiety and so she dosed herself a little, to relax. It made her tired so she topped up with a hit of stims. Boredom, really. Habit. Addiction.
Sheila adjusted their approach. Kat silently watched the rigged thrusters sputtering, making adjustments in the same fashion that the real drones had done. How accurate were the wheeler sensors? How thorough were their analytical processes? Were the aliens sitting on the bridge of the Wildfire, trying to work out why the approaching drone was making such strange movements? Or was no one paying attention?
They got closer and closer, the numbers on her control panel shrinking and shrinking. They had placed so much trust in the garbled words from an enemy species, words translated by an untested device with an enormous margin of error inherent in the design due to the complex nature of language itself and the interactions between two systems that had never integrated before.
Madness.
The sense of unreality was almost overwhelming as they closed to the hull of the Wildfire. All of them had trusted the alien’s assertion that the Wildfire’s drone entrance system and shuttle bay hangar was large enough to accommodate the dimensions of the human shuttle. Kat shook her head as the thrusters worked hard to maneuver the enormous mass of the shuttle into the open hangar door in the outer hull of the massive space ship.
They were inside.
Her control panel lit up. DEVICE ARMED.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Weightless, Ram dragged himself to the cargo ramp as it opened. He slipped his feet into the bracing points, bent his knees and readied his weapon. Even with the anti-recoil system, he needed to be ready.
Beside him, Red crouched, all legs coiled and with both plasma pistols out and ready. Behind, Stirling stood strapped into the quad-minigun weapon emplacement.
The cargo ramp slammed down, hard, revealing darkness beyond. His suit adapted automatically, going low-light and feeding in IR and other radiation information to build an image for his AugHud.
No aliens waited for them.
Atmosphere in the alien drone hangar was close to vacuum.
Ram grabbed the handles on the enormous device and heaved his weight against it. Even though there was no gravity, the device was attached to the rails beneath and it still required him to brace himself against the deck. After a long moment overcoming its inertia, he forced it to trundle forward and slide down the ramp.
When it came off the end of the rails, it bounced onto the deck of the alien vessel with an almighty bang and the skids beneath scraped on the hard floor, screeching like the wailing of a banshee until some combination of the electromagnets on the bottom, claw clamps and the explosive downward-firing harpoons fixed it to the alien deck.
Behind the device, Stirling, injured though he was, heaved his emplacement forward on the rails, the massive thing jerking to a stop and locking in position at the top of the ramp, the barrels of his weapon system jutting. He had four Gatling gun-style weapons, each with six rotating barrels. Each gun could be operated separately or together. The targeting and operation would be handled by a smart computer system but considering the wheeler ability to knock out electronics, Stirling was there to pull the triggers and swing the guns around on their gimbals. The feeding and firing of those types of weapon had always been powered by electric motors but the designers on the Sentinel had come up with a mechanical system operated by compressed air that the aliens would not be able to render inoperable.
But there were still no aliens in the drone hanger. At least, nothing moved. Nothing fired at them.
“I’m not getting any readings on their geolocators,” Ram said, scanning again and again. “No signals at all.”
“Wheeler interference,” Stirling reasoned. “Got to get closer to them.”
Red crawled forward, its massive feet clanging against the bracing points all the way down the ramp.
Ram and Stirling exchanged a nod and Ram moved forward. He knew how to move. He’d done zero-g combat in Avar games years before and they told him he had trained for it during his Marine career. Memory of the events forgotten, the skills themselves retained. When he reached the edge of the ramp, his suit pinged.
SEALED ORDERS.
What the hell?
The text floated on his AugHud.
Origin. Col. Mathieson, Division Command. Lt. Seti, our intel on human prisoners was a fabrication. Zero human prisoners on Wildfire. Return to shuttle for immediate evac.
“What the fuck?” Ram turned to Stirling, up on the ramp behind him. “I just got sealed orders.”
“I got them too,” the sergeant shouted. “Let’s go.”
“A fabrication? Does this mean what I think it means?” Ram said, a deep rage surging up.
Stirling looked angry. “Why would they do this?”
“Milena’s dead,” Ram said, almost to himself. “She was always dead. A fabrication?”
/> He barely realized that he had pulled his rifle to his shoulder.
“Be angry when we get back,” Stirling said. “Hey, where’s it going?”
Ram watched as Red moved away from them, as if it had a purpose.
“Hey, Red,” Ram shouted at the alien. It did not respond, just crawled across the alien deck to the wall. “Red, get back here. We need to get the bay doors open. Hey.”
Kat’s voice crackled in his ear. “Seti, Stirling, I just got sealed orders.”
“Yeah, so did we.”
“I’m going to murder that fucking colonel,” she said. “It was him, I bet you. To get us here. Him and all of them, they bullshitted us. They knew I would never risk my life unless there was a chance—”
“The orders were sealed,” Ram snarled. “Timed to be triggered when the bomb was armed. So they knew before we left the Sentinel. I’m going to kill them all.”
Stirling laughed, bitterly. “Can you open the doors, Lieutenant? Get us out of here?”
Kat was quiet for a moment. “The AI says she doesn’t know how. They opened to the approach of the drone but…”
Ram looked around the alien room but it was dark and he could see nothing that might be a door release or control panel.
“Use the shaped charges,” Ram said. “Blow the doors out.”
“I’ll get them in place,” Kat said. “But I can’t see how they won’t damage the shuttle. And I doubt they’re going be strong enough to blow open the outer hull of this thing.”
“We’ll have to do it anyway or else we—”
Stirling’s voice cut in. “Hey. Red’s found a door. Stop him, sir.”
Across the hangar, Red was pulling itself through an opening. A wide, wheeler doorway. Ram slung his rifle, braced his feet on the edge of the ramp, took aim and launched himself across the room. For a moment, he felt like a bird swooping low across a dark sea at night.
But he was too fast. And not exactly on target.
Ram smashed into the wall beside the door, his weapons and armor clanging against a cluster of hard-edged metal surfaces.
It hurt.
He grabbed hold of something and held on while his feet and lower body swung back out behind him. Hand over hand, he pulled himself along the wall.
“Red,” Ram said, as the creature disappeared through the doorway. “Red, you piece of shit, come back.”
Someone tried speaking to him but even so close to the Lepus the signal was so degraded he wasn’t even sure whether it was Stirling or Kat.
Most likely they were telling him to get back to the shuttle. To forget the alien.
Instead, he pulled himself through the door into a corridor. It was an oval with a flat floor and ceiling. The light was still very low but he could see it running straight and empty down one way until it bent out of sight. The other way, he watched Red bouncing its way between floor and ceiling in the wheel configuration. It was going fast.
Why am I going after it?
“Come back,” Ram shouted, unslinging his rifle.
Because I want to kill.
He knew it was true. The Colonel had lied to him, the officers and men of the Sentinel had lied to him that Milena was alive and on the Wildfire. He had dared to hope to be reunited with her but she had died on the planet after all. Died underground, in a shower of blood. Murdered by these disgusting alien animals.
I want to kill. Kill them all.
Red stopped. Without turning, it bounced back to Ram, who wanted to shoot it. Just blast the fucking thing to pieces.
But Ram did not.
The alien hovered right there in front of him, as if listening. It shoved its pistols into its leg holsters.
“Okay,” Ram said. “There’s no humans. Understand? Negative humans. No humans on ship. We go. Er. Shuttle. Red, Rama, shuttle.” It did not move. Did not speak. “Understand? Shuttle. Doors. Ship doors. Open. Ah, fuck sake, come on. We need the fucking doors open, Red, so we can all get away before that fucking bomb explodes and kills us all, do you understand?”
Red held itself in front of Ram, unmoving.
“Door. Open. Understand.”
It barreled at Ram. He bounced his back on the wall and rebounded, then chased after Red as best he could. Grooves in the floor and ceiling provided grip.
Before setting out, the exobiologists on the Sentinel had confirmed that Red was indeed assuring them that the Wildfire had only a skeleton crew and most of the troops were now on the surface or on the other planet across the system. Ram had difficulty believing the scientists were able to glean that much detail from the translation device. Nevertheless, the remnants of the alien crew had to be somewhere on board, surely and even a single one of them could be deadly.
It was idiotic to get so far from the shuttle. Every stride took him closer to certain death, mindlessly repeating a mantra in time to his loping gait.
What am I doing? Going to kill. What am I doing? Going to kill.
Without warning, Ram’s guts lurched and he flew up into the corridor ceiling, banging his head and staying there, pressed into the surface above.
No. He reoriented himself. Gravity from the Wildfire’s sudden change in velocity had pushed him against the floor. He twisted and got to his feet and ran after Red. The ship’s steady vibration increased in intensity to a hard juddering.
It had begun hard course corrections. It must be closing to its engagement range for the battle with the Sentinel.
They should just blow the bomb now. That would be the dutiful thing to do. Sacrifice three human lives to save hundreds on the Sentinel. After all, that was the point, wasn’t it? Why they risked them, their prisoner, and the Lepus?
They lied to me. Fuck them.
Up ahead, Red stopped by an alcove. Perhaps it had found the shuttle bay door controls at last.
“You bastard,” Ram shouted as he stalked closer, the gravity going greater than 1 g, then lower again by the next step. “Get back to the shuttle. Now.”
Ram drew next to the alien, close enough to reach out a hand and touch it.
There was no obvious control mechanism inside the alcove.
The alien paused, looking back at him, maybe. It drew both pistols from the leg holsters, braced itself and crouched low.
“What are you going to—”
It kicked the wall, hard. Rearing back and thumping with its leading leg. The powerful blow flung open a large metal door to reveal a vast internal space. A long room with a high ceiling lost in darkness.
Inside that room, a dozen wheelhunters or more. Each of the creatures was busy with some device or other, clawed hands working at controls. The atmosphere seemed smoky, drifting with particles diffusing disparate low-level light sources coming from here and there. Hard to see, hard to understand.
In the center.
A giant.
An enormous great creature standing taller than the wheelers around it, twice the height of them but not the same as them. A new kind of alien, one he had never seen before.
Four legs supported a bulbous lower section, with a narrow waist and a thorax on top. From the upper section, two long arms with multiple joints ended in long-fingered hands that held a flat device, some sort of alien technology that it was busy running its fingertips over.
Maybe it’s flying the ship.
There was no head. No eyes, no face. Five or six meters tall, maybe more. As tall as a house, at any rate. It had two, smaller arms on the upper thorax. The room was too dimly lit to see colors but the monstrous great creature wore a tight garment over most of its body and it seemed to be a bright white material. It felt like it was the boss, like it was an alien admiral or the chief.
Fucking hive queen.
All he had was an impression, a fleeting moment to take it in before the room erupted in violence.
Beside him, Red opened up with both plasma pistols.
Shooting straight at the giant chief alien, the first four rounds hitting it in the center of the upper thorax be
fore the creature leapt back, legs and arms flailing, smoking holes blasted into its body. The monstrous giant was hurt, and it stayed down, the strange legs kicking the air and drumming on the deck with enormous power. Red’s rate of fire did not slow and he turned his aim on the surrounding wheelers.
The blasts smashing into the nearest of them, the close-range power of those weapons blowing the huge creatures apart in showers of searing plasma and smoking blood. Some of them fled, others ducked low or charged.
Ram braced himself against the wall and brought his own weapon to bear and began firing. His massive rifle ripped into them. It felt good to see them die. They were murderers, inhuman. Insects underfoot. He almost laughed as he killed them. Still, they came at him, crawling and leaping through the hail of bullets and fire from Red’s pistols. Every one that died was replaced by another climbing through the bodies of the ones before.
The ship’s gravity weakened and Ram, unprepared, lost his footing and drifted away. He stopped shooting as he drifted a few meters.
Gravity returned with twice the force and he crashed down into the floor, buckling his legs under him and he fell, clutching his weapon to stop it sliding away.
While Ram was down, Red kept firing over his head but the wheelers kept coming despite the high gravity, dragging themselves forward and returning fire.
Their pistol blasts crashed and burst around him. They were on him and Red, spilling out of the door in a whirlwind of claws and stamping feet. It was all Ram could do to get to one knee, draw his sword and bring it to bear. As the ship finished its maneuver, the gravity dropped again to nothing and Red sank its claws into Ram’s back.
It’s betrayed me.
Ram tried to run it through but Red, its claws hooked into Ram’s armor, threw him down the corridor. Away from danger. He tumbled and rotated in time to see Red surrounded by the attacking wheelers. The Wildfire initiated another course change and Ram fell into the side wall, then onto the ceiling.
