The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Invincible

by Campbell, Jack

  He didn’t intend talking to her, distracting her when she needed to be commanding her troops. He didn’t intend talking to any of the Marines and carefully moved his other hand away from the comm controls so he wouldn’t accidentally do so. He needed to know what was happening. He needed to learn more about Marine operations. He didn’t need to micromanage people who knew their jobs far better than he ever would.

  A smaller window to one side briefly puzzled Geary, then he realized it offered views from the shuttles rapidly closing in on the hull of the superbattleship. He tapped one, getting a large view of the alien ship, its newly pitted armor looming on all sides as if the shuttle were flying toward a massive, slightly curving wall. Was that a large hatch sealed tight? It looked like a cargo hatch. Nearby was what seemed to be a personnel access, far smaller and not even as big as one intended for humans. Could a Marine in combat armor get through something that size?

  The shuttle glided to a halt as its bow thrusters fired, hovering just short of the superbattleship. So close Geary could see the scars of impacts, could spot the place where what had probably been a shield generator had been before it had been blasted to ruin by fire from the battleships.

  It all lay silent, as if the superbattleship were lifeless inside as well as out, a derelict crewed only by the dead.

  That was possible. The defensive fire they had seen could have been the work of weapons set to fire automatically under control of computerized systems.

  Geary didn’t believe that, though. Neither, obviously, did the Marines.

  He wondered how it would look, how it would feel, if the superbattleship self-destructed, while he was viewing it virtually from so close-up. The thought put a chill through him, and Geary looked for something to distract him from a possibility that he could do nothing about now.

  Spotting thumbnails where activity seemed to be going on, he brought those to the fore, seeing views from the combat armor of Marines actually on the superbattleship’s hull. The tags on the views identified them as combat engineers, and as Geary watched he saw them placing breaching charges to blow open one of the big hatches like the one he had seen earlier.

  The view shifted rapidly as the Marines huddled by the hull, then shook as directional charges went off, blowing out portions of the hatch, the shock of the explosions transmitting through the hull to rattle the Marines clinging to it.

  The view swayed again dizzily as the combat engineers swung back to the hatch, followed by curses over the comm circuits. “We didn’t get through!” “How thick is this stuff?”

  Then came orders from Carabali, sounding in every combat engineer’s battle armor. “Double up the breaching charges.”

  The Marine engineers moved quickly, not really needing the “Move it!” encouragement from their squad leaders as they rigged breaching charges in tandem to get through the armor protecting the superbattleship. The delay had thrown off the shuttles, which were clustering near the superbattleship without anyplace to drop off their Marines. Views jumped again as the combat engineers put distance between themselves and the breaching charges. “Fire in the hole!”

  How old was that warning, and what had it originally referred to? Geary wondered. Maybe it had once meant someone had physically lit a fuse with an open flame. Now it just warned of an explosion soon to come.

  The view shook again, prolonged this time. Marines moved with cries of triumph to holes spearing through the armored hatch. “Five more! Here and here! That’ll break this section free. Go!”

  Geary scanned the other windows, seeing similar activity under way at every point where the Marines were trying to blast their way inside the superbattleship. One by one, the breaching teams were creating holes large enough for Marines to pull themselves inside.

  He called up a different window, this one showing the view from a Marine who had made it inside a similar cargo-hatch area. There were no lights, just a dark void. “No gravity inside. It’s broke, or they shut it off.” Moving cautiously, the Marine moved to one side as more Marines entered, their infrared-beam lights providing ghostly images of a large compartment that bore some resemblance to that on a human ship. But then, why wouldn’t it? The requirements for moving cargo were the same no matter what creature was doing the job.

  “No internal gravity?” Geary heard General Charban comment behind him. “Marines train for that, don’t they?”

  “That’s right,” Desjani replied. “They prefer to fight with a gravity field, but they can handle zero g.” She sounded proud of that, that the Marines could deal with something ground forces weren’t trained to handle. Geary had heard her bemoan Marine behavior and mind-sets more than once among fleet officers, but when it came to outsiders like ground forces and aerospace defense, the fleet and the Marines suddenly became brothers and sisters in arms.

  The Marines whom Geary had focused on were moving quickly but cautiously to check out the compartment, their heads-up displays highlighting anything that looked unusual or suspicious. In this case, surrounded on the bulkheads and overhead by alien devices of strange design even if they probably fulfilled familiar functions, the heads-ups were keying on almost everything that wasn’t flat bulkhead. In some cases, even seemingly unadorned sections of the walls, overhead, and deck had something about them that made the sensors in the Marine combat armor unhappy.

  “Pressure switches?” one of the Marines in the unit Geary was zoomed in on speculated.

  “Maybe,” his sergeant replied. “Maybe just cargo-tracking stuff. But maybe not. Keep off ’em.”

  “What the hell is this?”

  “If you don’t know, don’t touch it! Stop playing tourists and find the air locks and their controls!”

  Geary shifted from unit to unit, seeing pretty much the same thing everywhere. Units inside the compartments the combat engineers had breached, moving in zero g as they tried to find all of the hatches leading farther into the enemy ship. “Found one,” a Marine cried. “Are these the controls? They’re set real low, almost on the deck.”

  “Duh, brain-dead. These guys are short, remember?”

  “Shut up,” their corporal said. “Hey, Sarge, this looks like it. Some sort of knife switch instead of a button, though.”

  “Lieutenant?”

  “Wait. Okay, Sergeant. The captain says open it up, but be ready for them to be on the other side. Weapons free.”

  “Got it. Cover the hatch, you slugs. Flip the switch, Kezar.”

  Geary waited, watching, as Corporal Kezar swung the knife switch upward.

  And waited.

  “Nothing’s happening, Sarge.”

  “I can see that. Lieutenant?”

  “None of the switches are opening hatches, Sergeant. Get your hacker to work.”

  “Cortez! Get that thing open.”

  Another Marine huddled by the switch, popping the cover with some difficulty and peering inside. Geary quickly changed views to see what Private Cortez saw, but he couldn’t make out what he was seeing.

  The lieutenant’s voice came on again. “What’s the word? Can you override the controls?”

  “I can’t even identify the controls!” Private Cortez protested. “This box looks like it oughta be them . . .”

  “Then find the input, find some wires—”

  “Lieutenant, there ain’t no input that I can see except this swing switch, and there ain’t no wires in this thing. There’s just some kind of mesh in . . . what is that gunk? Gel or something.”

  “You can’t— What’s—” The lieutenant must also have been viewing what Cortez and Geary were both looking at. “How the hell does that stuff work?”

  “I don’t know, Lieutenant! All I do know is I can’t hack something that doesn’t work like anything we’ve got!”

  Similar conversations were happening in Marine units at every penetration. “Captain, we’re going to have to blow the air locks,” the lieutenant reported after huddling with his sergeant.

  “Are the outer hull penetra
tions blocked?”

  “Sir, I don’t know, but we can operate in vacuum fine—”

  “Our orders are to take everything inside this ship as intact as possible, and there are a lot of things that don’t handle vacuum as well as our combat armor,” the captain said. “Hold on. Colonel, we need to know if the hull penetrations in this area have been sealed.”

  “Yuhas! We need a green light to blow the locks!”

  Almost a minute passed as more and more Marines called up the chain of command for approval to blow open pathways into the ship.

  “Colonel Yuhas reports his combat engineers say we’re good to go,” the relieved word finally came down the chain of command. “Blow the bulkheads, not the air locks. We don’t know how they’re sealed or locked. That’s from brigade command. Everybody blow your way inside but avoid going straight through air locks. We’re way behind on movement. Get inside that thing.”

  “What’s going on?” Desjani asked.

  “They’re blowing internal bulkheads now to get inside,” Geary told her.

  “That’s why I saw them plugging holes and rigging emergency air locks on the outside of the hull? Have they seen any Kicks yet?”

  “No.” He watched a hundred thumbnail views at once as Marines blasted their way through bulkheads and into passageways and other compartments. “Empty.”

  Everywhere the Marines were entering, the superbattleship seemed to be vacant of any crew. The Marines moved in rushes down passageways that weren’t as wide or tall as those on human ships but were still large enough to manage a couple of Marines abreast. Smaller cross-corridors intersected the large passageways in what seemed to be a regular enough grid arrangement, similar to those used by humans. As in human ships, conduits holding wiring and ducts carrying air festooned the overhead, offering grips to the Marines as they pulled themselves along, swimming through zero g. As they advanced, the Marines spread out, penetrating deeper into the ship as well as to each side and up and down through the decks.

  “Keep your eyes out for control compartments, power core compartments, a bridge, that sort of thing,” a major reminded his unit.

  “It all looks the same,” a frustrated captain replied. “There are markings all over the place, but they’re nothing like the markings on our ships or the ones the Syndics use. They could mean anything.”

  “No ventilation,” another one of the Marine officers reported. “The air seems okay. Breathable by humans, even though the pressure is lower than we’re comfortable with. But they’ve shut down the ventilation systems.”

  “There are supposed to be thousands of ’em aboard this thing,” another Marine muttered, her weapon seeking targets in another empty passageway. “Where the hell are they?”

  On the thumbnails spread in front of Geary, bedlam suddenly erupted as Marines in scores of locations suddenly found the answer.

  NINE

  THE Marines had penetrated about a third of the way into the superbattleship when the bear-cows suddenly appeared before them in dozens of locations at once. The once-eerily-deserted passageways filled with noise and the thunder of weapons as Marines traded shots with masses of Kicks filling the spaces from overhead to deck.

  “They’re in armor!”

  “Look out! On the right!”

  “Durien is down!”

  “Keep shooting!”

  “There are too damn many of them!”

  “Accesses overhead! They’re shooting down through them!”

  “My grenade clip is empty!”

  “Somebody pick up Sierra! She’s still alive!”

  “Eat this, you bastards!”

  Gradually, the sergeants and corporals started to regain comm discipline, the initial ambushes settling into Marines holding their positions and pouring fire from every weapon they could bring to bear down the passageways where the bear-cows kept pressing forward behind weapons that combined assault rifles with rectangular shields.

  “We’re running low on energy and ammo.”

  “Fall back. Everyone fall back.”

  “The Kicks are using the bodies of their dead as shields!” a Marine yelled. “Pushing their dead ahead of them! Our shots can’t get through to the live ones!”

  “Fall back,” the order came down again. “Don’t do a staged withdrawal by fire teams. Get everyone back fast. We’re feeding in the reserves and establishing defensive positions closer to the outer hull. Get back now.”

  Geary stared at the battle scenes, watching one where what seemed to be a solid plug of dead bear-cows whose armor had been ravaged by Marine fire was being pushed down a passageway. The muzzles of weapons stuck out from the bodies of the dead, carried by the living bear-cows behind, spraying fire at the Marines who were falling back toward the outer hull.

  He pulled out of the close-up views, trying to grasp what General Carabali was doing. The image of the superbattleship on his display had gradually filled with more details as the Marines went into the ship, and now Geary could see the symbols marking Marine units heading back everywhere.

  Why was Carabali ordering her units back so far, so fast? She was giving up precious gains, which might be very hard to retake if the bear-cows set up more defenses and ambushes.

  Geary’s hand hovered over his comm controls. Has Carabali lost her nerve? I need to ask why she’s reacting this way, why—

  His eye caught activity on a cluster of views in one area of the superbattleship. The Marines there had fallen back past a defensive barrier, which, after a furious burst of fire that tore apart the protective barrier of the dead and riddled the front ranks of the bear-cows, was itself falling back, toward where yet another defensive line was setting up heavy weapons. Similar activity was occurring all over the superbattleship, but Geary’s attention focused on this spot as the retreating Marines were suddenly hit by Kicks who had infiltrated above, below, and to the sides of them, moving through the many side corridors and accesses too small for the Marines.

  A minute later, and that platoon of Marines would have been cut off and swamped, but they were far enough back and close enough to the Marines behind them that a flurry of defensive fire and some vicious hand-to-hand fighting got the platoon through the danger.

  Geary let his hand fall. She knew. General Carabali realized what the bear-cows could do on their own ground with the superior numbers they have. Instead of standing firm while her strongpoints are surrounded, she’s pulling them back faster than the Kicks can envelop them, taking a heavy toll of the attackers every step of the way.

  “Admiral? Are your comms working properly?” Desjani asked in a voice that promised serious repercussions for her comm officer.

  “My comms are fine,” Geary said. “The problem was with me. I almost forgot that General Carabali knows her job a lot better than I know her job.”

  As the Marines fell back toward the outer hull, the volume of space they had to defend grew larger as the diameter of the superbattleship’s hull grew. But Carabali was feeding in reinforcements and pulling her forces together into hedgehogs at intersections of the largest passageways, able to fire to all sides with heavy weapons as the bear-cows kept pressing onward. Under the concentrated fire of those heavy weapons, augmented by the fire of the Marine hand and shoulder-fired weapons, the tight ranks of the Kicks dissolved as they tried to drive into contact with the human invaders.

  “How many of them are there?” a Marine yelled.

  Some of the bear-cows had pushed through to the compartments where the initial penetrations had occurred, rushing the combat engineers defending the bridgeheads there. The combat engineers lacked the heavy weapons of the line Marines, but they made up for that with demolitions and other tools of their trade. Geary winced as he watched the havoc wrought by the engineers as they wiped out the Kicks coming against them. Those portions of the enemy ship would yield little of use to those seeking to learn more about the bear-cows and their technology.

  Geary, appalled by the carnage, couldn’t take his ey
es off the screens where the bear-cows pitted their numbers and their hand weapons against the concentrated firepower of the Marines. In some places, the Kicks actually managed to reach the hedgehogs, hurling themselves at the perimeters in solid ranks that threatened to submerge the Marines. Geary saw Marines being knocked down despite the superior strength of their combat armor, some of the Marine lines wavering as the hedgehogs were compressed on all sides. Packed in ever tighter inside their defensive perimeters, the Marines were unable to move, unable to do anything but keep firing with weapons glowing from waste heat.

  Carabali had been watching, though. More Marine reinforcements had been arriving, leaping from shuttles into the improvised air locks on the outer hull, being brought inside the hull as fast as possible. Those Marines were formed into shock teams, who now stormed into the passageways leading to the most heavily beleaguered hedgehogs, catching the attacking Kicks from behind.

  One by one, the hedgehogs under the heaviest pressure were relieved, the Marines pushing out to form wider defensive positions and keep the bear-cows from being able to concentrate against isolated strongpoints.

  The assaults against the Marine positions faltered here, then there, then at each point where the Kicks had surged ahead. The attacks paused, leaving a sense of a foe taking breaths and trying to regain enough strength to continue the fight. Before that pause could extend, Carabali issued new orders, and everywhere the Marines moved out of their hedgehogs and defensive lines, blowing holes through bulkheads to bypass passageways choked with dead bear-cows.

  “Tough bastards,” a Marine said as he skirted a solid wall of unmoving bear-cows, their armor torn, blobs of purplish blood filling the air in the absence of gravity.