B009NFP2OW EBOK (17 page)

“Please stand clear,” the tool told her, and she took a step back. The door gave a faint, high-pitched click, then dropped on hidden rails into the deck.

Pocketing the tool, she stepped out into the passageway.

The passageway outside was no higher than the door, and she had to stoop to move. There was no light, of course, but her suit light illuminated her way. She relied on her in-head navigational system, which now projected a small map in a mental window. She didn’t want to go back to the control center where Old Captain Two-Heads had buzzed and clicked at her, and she especially didn’t want to return to what she’d thought was likely a lab. Her arm still hurt from that needle, and for hours since then, Connor had been shaking with the dread that they would take her back there and try to remove her suit.

Ah. By cutting through
this
way, she should avoid both lab and control room, and just might be able to go straight to the hangar bay where they’d brought her fighter on board. The fighter was an inert hulk, but there might be one trick left in it, if she could get on board.

Abruptly, there was a wet, squelching sound ahead, and one of the Slan emerged from a side passageway, directly in front of her.

The sound, she realized, was very faint now. Her suit showed her that the atmosphere was rapidly thinning—down to half a standard atmosphere now, and still falling. Didn’t these monsters have automatically sealing hulls, in case of a hull breach?

The Slan crossed the passageway in front of her . . . and collided with the bulkhead. For a moment, it lashed about with its tentacles, feeling along the wet bulkheads, its sonar organs questing in all directions, its side flaps extended wide open . . . and Connor realized that the Slan was the equivalent of
blind
.

They relied on their atmosphere to transmit sonar pulses, and as the air thinned toward hard vacuum, they were going deaf. She stepped aside, letting the bulky creature blunder past her and down the corridor in the direction from which she’d just come.

With hardening resolve, she began hurrying ahead, following the map displayed for her in her mind.

As she moved, though, she wondered how a being that imaged its surroundings with sound could possibly see the stars. . . .

TC/USNA CVS
America

In transit

Approaching Arianrhod

1409 hours, TFT

The sky surrounding the USNA battlegroup had slowly expanded back to its original, undistorted form, and the two suns of 36 Ophiuchi and the tiny crescent of Arianrhod were clearly visible to unaided eyes and scanners.

They were beginning to pick up signs of the battle that had swept through the region over the past hour. At 1319 hours, the fighters launched that morning had reached Arianrhod, their AIs firing at targets within range as they passed. After one pass, they would have slowed to planetary speeds and begun engaging targets of opportunity.

At 1407 hours, the rest of the Confederation fleet, still travelling at 0.997
c
, had passed through the same volume of space. Gray didn’t know if they had engaged the enemy or not. By now, though, they were twenty-two light minutes ahead, still receding at near-
c
.

Assuming, of course, that they’d survived the passage, and assuming that Delattre hadn’t changed his mind at the last moment and decelerated. There were no signs of the Confederation ships, however, so presumably they were farther up ahead, moving unreachably fast.

Myriad colored shapes—squares, triangles, circles—drifted against the backdrop of suns and planet, marking targets—red for Slan, green for human, yellow for unidentified, while squares were vessels under acceleration, triangles were drifting free, circles were dead. Blocks of text scrolled through the projection, giving vector information, mass, and status.

It took Gray several moments to sort out what he was seeing, even with the ship AI’s help. Local battlespace was filled with red triangles and circles; the fighter swarm had managed to hit the Slan, and hit them
hard
. But there were still plenty of red squares, and the vector data displayed by each showed that they were closing on the incoming human warships.

“A lot of those Slan ships are leaking atmosphere,” Commander Laurie Taggart observed. “Looks like they’re drifting free, out of commission.”

“So I see,” Gray replied. “A lot of them . . . a lot of them don’t look too badly hit. But they appear to be out of commission.”

As they drew closer, and
America
’s scanners began showing close-ups of the drifting, brightly colored hulks, he saw the telltale damage from AMSO rounds—hull sections scoured away as if sandblasted, atmosphere leaking from hundreds of minute punctures and freezing as it hit vacuum, random and isolated patches of damage scattered across large areas of armor.

Twenty years before, Gray had acquired the nickname “Sandy” for his innovative use of AMSO rounds, throwing sand at Sh’daar warships at close to the speed of light and letting physics do the rest. The technique was a standard maneuver now, though it was only effective if the launching ships were moving at near-
c
when they released the sand clouds, imparting their velocity to the individual grains of matter-compressed lead.

But the fighter swarm had used it to good effect here as they’d swept past the enemy ships. The fighters had come through and pulverized them, and Gray allowed the tiniest bit of relief to seep through into his consciousness.

They had a chance, a small one. . . .

“Enemy coming into range, Captain.”

“Commence firing.”

America
and her consorts began slamming round after round into the approaching Slan ships. Again, the enemy’s point defenses proved superb as they wiped missiles and kinetic-kill rounds from the sky, but some of those rounds were getting through. An alien Ballista staggered as rounds shredded the forward portion of its hull; a pair of Sabers vanished in a nuclear fireball as a salvo of shipkillers from the
Henderson
detonated between them.

But the incoming fire from the Slan warships was devastatingly accurate. The destroyer
Bradley
and the heavy cruiser
Alvarez
both took direct hits that left them broken and helpless, and a second destroyer, the
Cumberland
, was crippled.
America
staggered as three rounds slammed into and through her forward shield cap. Ice vapor sprayed into space, mingled with fragments of hull metal.

In-head, Gray scanned the lengthening list of damage reports from within the ship, then shifted his full concentration back to the battle. The shield cap’s interior was sectioned off by pie-wedge barriers that prevented all the ship’s water stores from venting into space. The automatic damage-control systems were staying ahead of the smaller-scale problems so far, though the damage inflicted earlier on the carrier was not yet fully repaired.
America
was hurt, but still in the fight.

They were moving fast enough that the crescent of Arianrhod visibly swelled second by second until it swept past the carrier to port, filling that half of the sky as
America
pounded at Slan targets in all directions.
America
was still decelerating, dropping into a long, shallow curve around to the planet’s day-lit side, but was still traveling at twenty-five kilometers per second, considerably faster than Arianrhod’s escape velocity. The undamaged Slan vessels matched course and speed effortlessly, merging with the USNA battlegroup and closing to point-blank range.

The six surviving CAP fighters of VFA-96, however, had matched the battlegroup’s deceleration, and were still moving in formation, positioning themselves to intercept Slan warships threatening the carrier. They were out of expendable munitions, according to the feed from their tactical net, but could still firefight with beam weapons and lasers. They were also attempting to use the new tactic, one evolved as a desperation measure by Lieutenant Gregory . . . getting in close enough to use their drive singularities as knife-fight weapons.

As he watched, one fighter slipped in close to a looming Slan Ballista by mimicking a tumbling scrap of wreckage, then straightened suddenly, its singularity flickering to life. . . .

But the Slan were learning as well. The fighter was struck point-blank by an anti-proton beam and vaporized before it was closer than 20 kilometers from its target.

“CAG?” Gray said over the CIC link. “Pass the word to the Demons. No more knife-fighting. I don’t want them playing kamikaze out there.”

“Right, Captain,” Captain Fletcher replied. “I concur. Interesting improvised weapon, though.”

“We’ll have the Engineering Department take a look at it,” he replied. “
After
the battle . . .”

Assuming
, he thought with grim determination,
we survive it. . . .

Lieutenant Donald Gregory

VFA-96, Black Demons

Arianrhod Space

1410 hours, TFT

Gregory guided his Starhawk toward the Slan ship . . . a different design from anything he’d seen so far. It was big, nearly 300 meters long—bigger than a Ballista, bigger even than a Trebuchet, and it was in close orbit around Arianrhod. It appeared to have been damaged earlier, probably during the fighter swarm’s close passage. Vapor froze as it emerged from the dozens of tiny holes that riddled the massive hull, and one entire side had been ripped open, exposing interior struts, beams, and bulkheads. The color scheme, Gregory thought, once had been black and green, in broad, jagged stripes, but much of the ship’s outer surface had been sandblasted down to bare armor. The ship’s unique size alone suggested that it might be something special in the Slan fleet—a command ship, perhaps.

Whatever it might be, the Slan ship didn’t appear to have noticed him as he drifted toward it, angling to pass over the quarter of the vessel that had already been ripped open by multiple AMSO rounds. He was still getting power readings from the ship; weapons and drive were on-line. “Demons, Demon Nine!” he called, identifying himself. “Got a big target, here, not in the warbook. Designating it as Tango-two-four. Taking a shot . . .”

His Starhawk’s primary beam weapon was a “pee-beep,” a StellarDyne Blue Lightning PBP-2 particle beam projector firing high-energy protons accelerated by a fierce projected magnetic field. He waited until he had a clear shot into the damaged enemy warship’s interior, then triggered multiple rapid-fire bursts. White light flared within the ship’s interior as the proton bolts hit home.

And then he was past, accelerating and jinking as the enemy’s defenses opened up, seeking him. . . .

His AI pointed out the anomaly.

“Hey . . . Skipper?” he called.

“What is it, Nungie?”

“I’ve got a radio signal coming from the Slan I just toasted. Tight beam, highly directional.”

“Are they surrendering?”

“No, sir. It’s a distress call, Code Red-Alpha. Shit, sir, it’s one of
ours
!”

“I’ve got the signal,” Mackey replied. “IDs as VFA-140.”

“What the fuck, sir? They’re not on the fleet roster!” He was wondering if the Slan were sending a spoof, a fake message.

“No, but they’re listed as planetary defense out of Caer Arianrhod. Sounds like the Slans might have a POW.”

“Black Demons, CIC,” another voice said over the tactical channel. “We’ve been monitoring your chatter. Break off your attack on Tango-two-four, and stand by to offer close assault support.”

“Copy that, CIC,” Mackey said. “What’s going down?”

“We think there’s one or more human prisoners on that Slan ship,” CIC replied. “So we’re sending in the Marines.”

Chapter Fourteen

12 November 2424

Slan warship

Low Orbit, 36 Ophiuchi AIII

1427 hours, TFT

Megan Connor crouched inside the ruin of her captured fighter, still in darkness, still weighed down by twice Earth-normal gravity, wondering how long it would be before
they
came for her.

There were two distinct values for “they”—humans and Slan. She was praying for humans . . . but knew how slim that chance actually was.

Her fighter’s main systems were down, singularity generator dead, weapons off-line, life support gone, AI fried. All that was working was the crash kit, a pod containing emergency supplies against the possibility of a crash on a hostile world. There was a battery, a nanomedic kit better than what was built into her suit; recharge nano for her suit’s air, food, and water cyclers; and an emergency radio transmitter smart enough to locate nearby friendlies and ping them with a tight-beam data burst.

There
had
to be human ships out there. If the Slan vessel had been hit, the attackers must be human, right? But she had to assume that the Slan would pick up any radio message beamed from the bowels of their ship . . . and nearby human ships might be too distant, now, or moving too swiftly to receive her SOS. Or the Slan warship’s structure or defensive fields might block any radio signal, or . . . or . . . or . . .

All she could do was stay here, crouching in the darkness, waiting for someone—human or Slan—to show up.

If it was Slan, she didn’t have many options. When she’d reached her fighter, she had at least been able to get at the emergency survival pod behind the seat. Now she had a weapon—a Solbeam Mk. VII hand laser. She’d not been able to get at it when they’d come for her before to drag her out of the wreckage. She held it now, though, feeling its heft in the darkness. It was
something
, at least, and comforting in her gloved hand . . . but the weapon had an output of only half a megajoule, with ten expendable battery caps for ten shots. That was plenty for dealing with most predators on a planetary surface, but if the target had any armor at all the thing was little better than a toy.

A
comforting
toy, to be sure, but a toy nonetheless . . .

Her suit’s environmental readout was worrying. The surrounding air pressure, she noticed, had ceased its fall toward hard vacuum, and now was slowly rising once more. That meant either that the Slan were overpressurizing a still-leaking interior, or that their repair systems had sealed the leaks. Either way, the pressure now was at eight tenths of an atmosphere, and rising. At some point, the Slan would again be able to “see” their surroundings, would no longer be effectively blind.

A big part of the question lay in how sensitive Slan hearing was. That one she’d encountered in the passageway a few moments ago had been blind in half an atmosphere. Their sonar sense had evolved in an environment with about five Earth standard atmospheres; sound traveled faster, farther, and more clearly at higher pressures. What was their threshold? Humans could certainly still hear sounds at half an atmosphere or less, and it wasn’t until you got pretty close to hard vacuum that all sound vanished. Perhaps Slan evolution had settled for a “good enough” lower threshold of two or three atmospheres. She wished she knew. It would be nice to know how long she had before they came looking for her.

Megan Connor only recently had become a USNA citizen. She’d been born and raised on Atlantica, one of the larger seasteads, a free-floating city slowly circling the North Atlantic outside of the territorial waters of any land-based nation. Her mother had been a North American while her father had been from Ireland, and she’d received from them both a strong appreciation for freedom coupled with an almost libertarian mistrust of big government. When the Confederation had stepped in and taken over all of the Atlantic seasteads, claiming sovereignty over the Earth’s dying oceans, Connor’s family had fled west, moving first to New New York, then to the nation’s capital at Columbus. They’d applied for citizenship and been refused; relations between North America and the rest of the Confederation—especially Pan-Europe—had been deteriorating for some time, and there was talk of deporting Ewan Connor back to Great Britain.

Megan had stopped the deportation order by volunteering to join the USNA military. By doing so, she’d been granted citizenship—and with that she could formally request citizenship for her parents and younger brother as well. She’d gone through the training downloads at Oceana, and a year ago she’d been posted to VFA-140; she’d not expected her first deployment to be to the ass end of creation, though. The Confederation’s Dylan Research Station at Arianrhod was small, cramped, and had nothing like the amenities of larger and more civilized colonies. The handful of military personnel at the base had been fully integrated into Caer Arianrhod’s general population. Most of the personnel stationed there had been Pan-Europeans, too, and that had put her at the center of a lot of unwanted attention . . . especially after she’d gotten into a knock-down, drag-out with Corrado Passeretti and nearly gotten herself arrested. She’d forgotten about the Confederation’s damned White Covenant laws—no public discussions of religion, and
no
attempts at proselytizing. She’d made the mistake of asking the planetary environmentalist how he reconciled his Catholic dogma with his Randomist beliefs concerning the evolution of life, she’d been ordered to keep her libertarian filth to herself, and things had gone downhill from there.

The civilians at the base had called her “Rebel” after that, and the nickname had stuck. Her seven months at Arianrhod had rapidly devolved into nightmare. The other members of her squadron had been okay, since they all were USNA Navy; hell, most of them hated the Confederation almost as much as she did, but with Dylan Base integrated into the larger facility it had been all but impossible to avoid the locals.

She wondered if the base was still there, if any of the people who’d been stationed there with her for the past half year were still alive.

Bad, bad thoughts to be having while waiting in the darkness for the monsters to come . . .

She spent some time considering opening her helmet . . . but the atmosphere, she guessed, would take some time to kill her. The carbon dioxide might put her to sleep, but the effects might be countered by the high levels of oxygen.

She didn’t know the chemistry well enough to predict what would happen, and she feared lying in the darkness, strangling on poison that might take long minutes to kill her. The laser . . . yeah, she could use it, a single, quick bolt through her brain . . .

She wasn’t quite that desperate however, she found, not when there was even the slimmest of chances that Confederation forces were engaging the Slan ship. The emergency pod was transmitting. They might be coming.

No, she could hold on a little longer. . . .

Marine Assault One-one

Slan warship

Low Orbit, 36 Ophiuchi AIII

1510 hours, TFT

Marine Gunnery Sergeant Andrew Clegg watched the objective expand in his in-head, a ship larger than a USNA cruiser, its side torn and gashed by high-velocity AMSO rounds. He was encapsulated within an Apache Tear, a sleek, black teardrop of nanomatrix fired moments ago from the belly of the Marine transport
Inchon
, one of some 650 identical teardrops in the first wave—the bulk of 1st Battalion, 3rd Regiment, 1st Marine Division. MAPP-2 personal assault pods were designed to get a large number of Marines across distances of up to a few hundred kilometers in a hurry, to get them there and put them down, with their equipment, as quickly as possible, and with a minimum of casualties. The light-drinking qualities of the pod’s nanomatrix made them all but invisible, even at close range, and the dedicated AIs residing within the shape-shifting hulls could fly the pods through a sharp and random series of maneuvers to throw off enemy point defense weapons.

Even so, this assault had been expensive already. The Slan had seen them coming and opened up with antiproton beams, slashing wildly at the sky. The battalion was down to fewer than four hundred by the time they gravdecelled in for the docking.

Exactly how the Slan had “seen” them was still unknown. Data provided by the Agletsch suggested that the species used sonar to perceive their surroundings. Judging from the electromagnetic fields surrounding their ships, they used magnetism, radar, and lidar to see in a vacuum, with the return signals converted to audio displays by their sensor suites, but how these were perceived by the beings was a mystery. Getting inside an alien mind, knowing how they thought or how they saw the universe around them was still all but impossible.

No matter. If the Marines could see them, the Marines could kill them. Clegg’s black teardrop slipped past a tangle of torn and half-melted structural supports well inside the target vessel’s hull and slammed into a bulkhead. The leading surface of nanomatrix switched its programming, becoming a nanodisassembler surface that melted through the unyielding polycarbolaminate bulkhead in seconds, then opening into the ship once it hit gas instead of solid.

His pod gave him the specifics of the atmosphere inside the alien ship: nitrogen 41%, oxygen 28%, ammonia 6.3%, carbon dioxide 5.6% . . . a hot, wet, rather nastily poisonous soup with an overall pressure just a bit higher than that at sea level on Earth. Didn’t matter; he was wearing assault armor, a bulky suit as ink-black as the Apache Tear’s hull. He dropped through the opening into the alien ship, twisting as he felt the tug of internal gravity and landing heavily on his feet.

The ship’s interior was lightless, hot, and wet, the supersaturated air steaming in the cone of light from his helmet. His suit told him the gravity here was about twice Earth’s—1.94 Gs. Non-spin generated, too, which meant the Slan had a pretty advanced technology, compared to Earth’s. Human ships still needed to rotate hab modules around a central axis in order to mimic gravity enough to keep the crews healthy.

Turning, he glimpsed movement in the darkness, shadows jittering on wet, black walls. His armor’s light showed something big and flat and rubbery-looking, a squashed bell-shape with a couple of weaving tentacles up top bearing massive, fleshy spindles. He triggered his Mk. 17 laser, sending an invisible ten-megajoule bolt into the target. The thing came apart in a messily wet explosion of liquid and partially burned flesh.

More movement ahead . . . but this resolved itself into another armored Marine. The tactical net in Clegg’s head identified the Marine as PFC Carol Owens. “With me, Owens,” he snapped.

“Right, Gunny,” she replied. “Which way?”

He gestured past her, farther up the lightless passageway. “Signal’s coming from
that
way.”

On his in-head, Clegg saw the green blips representing others of the assault group winking on as they entered the alien ship. Tactical data feeds from all of the Marines began building up a picture, a map, of their surroundings.

The passageways were wide and low, only about a meter and a half from deck to overhead, and Clegg and Owens both had to stoop forward to navigate the lightless path. Their suit lights gleamed off black, dripping-wet walls that looked unpleasantly organic. Clegg tried hard not to think about intestines. . . .

The mission of the USNA Marines—originally the United States Marine Corps—had changed a great deal over the past six and a half centuries. They’d started as shipboard soldiers and sharpshooters, firing down onto the decks of enemy ships from the rigging, then added amphibious landings to their repertoire, storming ashore on enemy-held coastlines to secure beachheads for the troops to follow. For a long time, they’d served as a kind of elite but generalist special forces, and more than one U.S. president or Congress had tried to eliminate them as redundant.

As Humankind began its diaspora to the stars, it had taken its wars with it . . . and the Marines had followed. They still served in the ancient roles of shipboard police, of landing forces, of elite special operations personnel, but in addition they’d gone back to their earliest roots, serving as close-assault troops tasked with boarding enemy ships, usually for purposes of intelligence gathering, but also for the purpose of rescuing POWs. The Marines off the
Inchon
had been tasked with both objectives. Emergency radio transmissions from inside the disabled Slan ship proved that there were human captives on board . . . or at least a captured Stardragon fighter. But the fact that the ship was a larger, different design than other Slan vessels encountered so far suggested that it was some sort of command vessel. That was logical, too, if they’d taken a human captive aboard. Presumably, the Slan were as curious about humans as the humans were about them. It was tough fighting a foe whose very natures—both biological and psychological—were largely unknown.

“S-2, Assault,” a voice said over the tactical net. “Good job! We’re into the system.”

S-2 was Lieutenant Commander Villanova, the intelligence officer on board the
Inchon
. A number of the Marines were cross-trained in xenointelligence work, with special AIs riding in nanoinfiltration pods that melted into bulkheads, tracked electronic circuits, and followed them into the local equivalent of a computer network. Those AIs would go to work attempting to crack both the alien language and their computer operating systems. The data would at the very least reveal how the Slan ships worked, possibly reveal their weaknesses.

And at best, it might permit the USNA fleet to communicate directly with the beings.

In any case, half of Clegg’s mission was now complete, since the AI insertions were autonomous and would complete their tasks automatically. The other half was to rescue any human POWs on board.

Clegg didn’t think about the second, unspoken part of those orders. If he couldn’t rescue the human captives, he was to make sure the Slan couldn’t take them back to their homeworld, or learn anything more from them.