Predator - Incursion (5 page)

Once fallen, it had risen to prominence again and taken full control of the Colonial Marines, so that they were sometimes nicknamed the Corporate Marines. This made it not only the oldest and most powerful company in human history, but the most powerful entity, governments included. Since its troubled resurgence, its expenditure of time and money into experimental space-travel technology had multiplied a hundred times.

The Arrow class sat at the pinnacle of what was currently possible. While the Fiennes ships of the twenty-second century—great exploration vessels named after the first astronaut to venture beyond the Sol System—relied on light-travel technology, later ships such as the Titan drophole-builders could travel at small factors of FTL speed. Most Titan ships could reach five-times light speed. Some of the more powerful corporate vessels owned by the Company sometimes reached six or even seven-times.

Arrow ships could travel at fifteen-times the speed of light. The science involved was way beyond Mains, and even Faulkner suggested that there were probably only a handful of humans in the Sphere who even came close to understanding the concept and the mechanics. Fueled by refined and concentrated trimonite, it took several hundred tons of that ultra-rare mineral to provide fuel for a ship’s average year’s travel. The cost to build an Arrow ship was staggering. The cost of fueling it—the dangerous mining, transport, refining, and containment that went into production of the trimonite—was horrific.

There were more than three hundred Arrow ships currently in service, patrolling beyond the furthest extent of a Human Sphere whose outer area was now something like three million square light years. At full speed it would take an Arrow more than two hundred years to circumnavigate the Sphere, during which time it would require almost a million tons of trimonite. Only just over half a million tons had ever been mined. It was postulated that there were almost limitless reserves buried on asteroids and planets, but the great irony was that ships, equipment, and people had to reach these places to mine it.

Humanity had still only ventured across one percent of the Milky Way galaxy. At unimaginable speeds, still the scales of cosmic travel were staggering.

That’s where the dropholes came in. While FTL travel still entailed actual movement through space—albeit on planes and levels of existence beyond most people’s ken—the dropholes worked on a very different basis. The science had been mooted since the late twentieth century, so long ago, but the reality and the ability to harness the science and put it to work hadn’t occurred until a little over a century before. The dropholes weren’t exactly holes, but more like the ends of an infinitely long, yet instantaneously traveled tube. They were folds in space, meaning that a ship could enter one end and emerge at the other at exactly the same moment.

To Mains, that sounded easy. But the dropholes needed to be built using methods way beyond his understanding involving particle accelerators, anti-matter generators, and other tech he wouldn’t even recognize if it landed on him. The holes themselves were contained within vast circular structures, necessitating huge amounts of materials and years of construction.

Even after all this time, only about one in three drophole initiation attempts worked, and around one in fifty resulted in cataclysmic explosions, the first couple of which had taken out thousands of people and dozens of ships. Since then, the moment of implementation was performed remotely. Dropholes only worked one way. In one hole, out of the other, with no return journey. Matching holes were attuned to the same frequency, and the in-holes all required different activation codes. Thus, they provided rapid jumping points around the Sphere, but there were also huge distances to travel between locations, because two holes could not be created close together. As Titan ships pushed the Outer Rim of the Human Sphere ever further, so they paused to build new dropholes.

Over time, communities had built up around these ports. Some were official, manned research and maintenance stations commissioned by Weyland-Yutani and funded by the Company. Many more were unofficial, congregations of people, ships, and space stations, some of them charging for use of a hole, some protecting them.

The dropholes became the oases of space. They became home to roving travelers and explorers looking for a place to rest in the company of others—pirates and mercenaries, haulage vessels, and military convoys.

Though they used the dropholes, the Excursionists never hung around afterward. They preferred their own company.

* * *

Once resupplied from a W-Y Darkstar vessel, the
Ochse
powered up and headed back out. After all systems were set, Mains and the rest of the crew retired to their suspension pods while Frodo did all the work.

Mains didn’t like being in suspension. The pods’ concept was similar to cryo-pods in that they essentially paused their user’s biological clock, holding them at a moment in time while vast distances could be traversed. One vital difference was that an Arrow’s suspension pods had to buffer the users against physical and temporal forces so extreme that they were barely understood. There were stories, perhaps apocryphal, of the first test pilots who had edged past ten-times light speed, deciding not to immerse in their suspension pods until too late. At journey’s end the two test pilots, still conscious and barely breathing, were raving, insane, and estimated to have a brain-age of over seventeen thousand years. Unable to move, unable to do anything for the seventeen real-time days of travel, they had lived one hundred and seventy centuries of nothing.

A cautionary tale which Mains didn’t care to think about too much. But he still didn’t like the pods. The sensation when they were flooded with gel was akin to drowning, and he’d never been able to breathe in the compound until he was almost passed out from holding his breath.

It was always a great relief, then, when the diamond-glass lid slid aside and he puked his guts up.

He leaned over the side of the pod and coughed, bringing up more of the gel from his gut and lungs. On contact with the air it dissolved to nothing, enabling his first couple of breaths to clear his lungs, but the part-digested remnants of his last meal before suspension remained. McVicar had cooked them a great jambalaya, and he watched chewed prawns and peppers shifting in and out of focus as he caught his breath.

“Hey, L-T, you really need to get another job.”

Mains looked up, snot dribbling from his nose.

“Lieder, how are you always up and about first? Why do you always look so… fresh.”

“Eww,” his pilot said, pulling on her underwear. “Brown snot. That’s not an image I’ll sleep on.”

“You’ll sleep on whatever I fucking order you to.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She turned the other way. “Hey, Corp, my superior officer is making what I believe to be lewd and improper suggestions toward me!”

Cotronis was just slipping from her own pod. She was renowned as being the worst sleeper of them all, and the grumpiest upon waking.

“Eat me out, Lieder,” she said.

Lieder laughed, Snowdon hurled, and the suspension bay echoed to the sounds of banter and puking, groaning and shuffling feet, and then the crew slowly getting dressed. None of it was forced, but the chatter was more ebullient than usual, and they all knew that they were making more noise to make up for the two of their comrades who were missing.

“Okay, let’s get ourselves back up to speed,” Mains said. “Disengage artificial grav. Systems check, weapons check, silent running. You know the drill.”

“Please, no zero grav until I’ve finished here,” Cotronis groaned, then puked.

Lieder leaned back against the wall.

“Bunch of pussies.”

* * *

Ten minutes later, slowly spinning in the zero-G shower, Mains looked up when Lieder hauled herself in through the sealed entrance. She eyed him up and down, frowning.

“You’re putting on weight.”

“McVicar’s cooking.” He turned off the shower and passed his hand over the dryer, choosing medium heat. He deserved a bit of comfort. “What’ve you got?”

“Flight time was ninety-eight days, distance three point nine light years. We’ve wound down to sub-light speed and we’re sixteen billion miles from the habitat. Frodo engaged our cloak seventeen minutes ago—we’re an asteroid again. No sign we’ve been seen.”

“And the SpaceSurfers?”

“The hunt took seven days. They neutralized the two Yautja, but lost their corporal. Golden took a spear through the shoulder and carried on fighting. Finished the Yautja one-on-one.”

“Hard bastard.”

“Strange there were two contacts at the same time, though.”

“Yeah.”

Mains nodded and started dressing. His flight suit had come adrift from the velcro wall fasteners and got wet. He cursed inwardly, then shook his head. A wet flight suit. It would dry in a few minutes. It wasn’t as if he was dead.

“You okay, Johnny?” All the quips aside, Lieder’s concern was obvious. The affection between them was deep, and try as he had to veer away from it, Mains found himself being drawn in. He thought Lieder did, too. It wasn’t something either of them could discuss. The generally accepted rule—the
essential position
—was to have fun but keep your distance. But they’d progressed from energetic fucking to passionate lovemaking, and sometimes afterward they wrapped themselves in a silence so loaded, so heavy with unsaid things, that it felt suffocating.

“I’m fine,” he said, pulling on his clothes. He pushed across the small shower room and bounced slowly from the wall.

“Sure?”

“I’m as fine as the rest of you,” he amended, then he grabbed the wall and held himself steady, pushing softly so that he drifted toward Lieder. She remained where she was, halfway through the entrance skin, and he pressed his forehead against hers. A soft kiss, a silent moment.

“Clean your teeth, L-T,” she said, smiling as she pushed back through the doorway.

Mains waited a moment before following her through.

The rest of the crew were on the flight deck. Lieder lowered herself into the pilot’s seat, Faulkner sat at the main weapons array, the others were strapped into their relevant seats around the cramped area. The empty seats were painfully obvious.

“So what have we got, Frodo?” he asked.

The cool, welcoming voice of the ship’s computer filled the flight deck.

“Nice to see you, L-T. There’s no sign of any change in the Yautja habitat. Its course and orbit remain the same as before, I detect no drive trails in the vicinity, but until we get closer I won’t be able to view the habitat itself.”

“That’s fine. What about chatter?”

“The usual Yautja communications. Sparse, short bursts. I’m running through the most up-to-date translation programs I have, but the dialects are barely recognizable. Only one anomaly I think you should know about, a repeating signal that feels out of place.”

“What sort of signal?”

“The best I can make out, it sounds like a countdown.”

“To what?”

“Sorry, L-T, I really can’t tell. It’s a complex self-repeating symbolic system I’ve never seen from them before.”

“How do you know it’s a countdown?”

“Just a hunch,” the computer said.

“Thanks, Frodo. Is all this on the mainframe?”

“Of course.”

Mains took his seat behind and to the left of Lieder. “Snowdon?”

“Already on it,” she said. Snowdon was their self-professed Yautja expert. She’d been fascinated with the species since she was a kid, and claimed it was their martial society that encouraged her to sign up to the Colonial Marines. She not only kept up to date with intelligence, but spent some time forming theories and opinions of her own.

They ran silently for a while. Mains looked around the flight deck at his crew, his family, and his eyes lingered only for a moment on Reynolds’ and Willis’s seats. Their unscheduled excursion, the huge distances traveled for brief, shatteringly violent moments of combat, seemed to have energized them all.

The deck buzzed with excitement.

“Enough fucking around,” he said. “Let’s move in closer.”

Love Grove Base, Research Station, LV-1529
May 2692
AD

Isa Palant needed the violence, the brutality, the fierce atmospherics, and violent electrical storms of LV-1529, to remind her of where she really was.

In truth, there was no need for her to be out here at all. Terraforming was a slow, dangerous process, and no planet wanted to accept its forced change. She could be safe and sound in Love Grove Base, enjoying the comfortable levels of life support, ensconced in her lab with her antique coffee machine, specially imported roasted coffee beans from Weaver’s World, and a cot so that she could sleep with her work.

Her work was everything to her, as it had been to her parents. It took up every waking moment and most of her dreams, and that was precisely why it was good to get away.

“Bit of a bumpy ride coming up,” Rogers said.

“I have every confidence in your driving skills.”

“Me, too. It’s this piece of shit rover I’m not sure about.”