Retribution (The Federation Reborn Book 3) (6 page)

“Doctor, this thing is …,” Mackey said dubiously, looking at the Ssilli.

“Is breathing twice as much as all of us. Hyperventilating. I'm giving him something to stabilize his respiration and calm him down,” the doctor said. He took out a syringe, tested it, flicked it a few times to get the air bubbles out, then injected it into an IV port he'd already established. “I hope I got the right dosage. He's scared like us so his adrenaline might burn through it.”

“Doc …”

“Yeah, that's right, go to sleep now. Just take a nap. Not that it's a good idea, napping takes up more air then being awake, but …,” the doctor said quietly, stroking the beast.

“Doc, we should think about …,” Mackey persisted.

“If you're asking me to kill him, I won't. You want to answer to the captain or whoever did this?” the doctor snarled, glaring at the cargo master. The husky man shook his head. “Yeah, right, thought not. This guy is our only bargaining chip.”

:::{)(}:::

Brrfrak looked up to see cracks in the room they were in. He could see air and debris going to the cracks. The loss of air, the dark, the fear the two-legs projected, it was too much for his already traumatized mind to take. He shook and thrashed, then started to hyperventilate as if he was going to dive.

Then he saw the two-leg inject something into the tube that was attached to his side. Something soothing eased into his body, and when it got to his brain, he drifted. His eyes rolled back as he felt his overstrained hearts stop. His last conscious thought was of his former mate.

:::{)(}:::

“Doc …,” the Ssilli turned gray at the injection site then quivered. After a moment he seemed to slump and his respiration stopped. He floated, listless in the tank and started to roll slightly.

“Frack! Frack! He's flat lining and I can't …,” the doctor tried to rub the alien to stimulate him but it was too late. He scrubbed at his face, now angry and afraid.

“He's gone, Doc. Worry about the living,” Mackey said with a hand on his arm.

“Yeah, um …,” the doctor frowned and shook his head. It was getting increasingly harder to think. Not a good sign.

“We can do something. We've got water …,” Bruno said desperately. “We need power and um …,” his rushing thoughts started to slow as the air got thinner.

“We need to try to rig a setup to convert the water into air. The problem is we've got no power,” Mackey said. He glanced at the only source of light in the compartment, the dying Ssilli. “Too many of us. We're dead.” He tried to get to a pry bar, anything, but found himself sluggish.

“Hypoxia. We're …,” Doctor Coultier said something else drunkenly then slumped.

“Frack,” Bruno said, recognizing the symptoms. He cudgeled his mind to find some sort of temporary fix but nothing came to him.

:::{)(}:::

First Lieutenant Contenev,
Descartes
chief engineer and XO, had a sneaking feeling he had drawn the short straw as he led the boarding party. He took a pair of skin suited ratings to secure engineering while another pair led by the bosun from
Loch
secured the bridge and swept the ship for survivors.

It took hours to scour the dark ship—hours in failing gravity. Each hour the grav emitters and inertial dampeners weren't re-energized meant the mass shadows they emitted started to fade. He called in a report to Captain Levinson once they'd finished their initial sweep of the ship. He glanced at PO Travere. That had been all they'd gotten out of her, her name and rank. Petty Officer Third Class Kelsea Travere. The woman had clammed up after that.

“The computers have been scrubbed by the captain, sir. I'm not sure what we can pull from them; it happened before they exited hyperspace. It's not just deleted; they have been partially overwritten by new files and old. She even smashed a few of the computers on the bridge before she apparently vented the compartment killing herself and a crewman.”

The captain grimaced. Vacuum wasn't a death anyone would want to face.

“There is one reported surviving crew member, but she's traumatized.”

“Frack,” Captain Levinson muttered. So much for easy answers. He wasn't set up for an investigation, definitely not a long-term one. He didn't have the trained personnel, nor any to spare if he did. “So, no answers there I take it?”

“No, sir. We're still exploring the compartments that were locked down. We're hoping we'll find a journal or something but …”

“If we're only that lucky,” the captain muttered. “But we can't count on the Lady's blessings.”

“No, sir.”

“But keep trying anyway. She rewards hard work from time to time to make it worth the effort.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“You're sure the crew has been accounted for?”

“Yes, sir. There hasn’t been any life-sign readings, and thermal signatures are black.”

“Understood. Keep me posted. I want half-hour reports.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

:::{)(}:::

The crews of
Descartes
and
Loch
monitored the live feed from the boarders. It was a horror show some couldn't handle, but others were grimly determined to see it through to the end. A rare few had to do so; it was a part of their duty. There was lingering doubt about if the captain had made the right call. The fact that the
Marengo's
captain had chosen to suicide told them something was definitely up.

It still wasn't enough to get them out of doubting themselves and the captain's call though.

There wasn't much to secure in some cases. The plasma had wrapped around the hull to do serious damage. The freighter's small boat bay had been compromised. Plasma had torn through it like an abattoir, melting
Marengo's
shuttles into useless slag.

The ship was definitely dead. ONI was welcome to the scraps, but there was no point trying to salvage the ship for anything in his opinion. Of course, he was on the bridge, not on the ship, so he might be wrong, the captain thought idly. But he was pretty sure he wasn't.

“Captain, you need to see this.”

“What am I looking at?” Captain Levinson asked dubiously as he watched the video feed. He was still fuming internally about the diversion of his relief ships to Centennial. He wanted to get back bad, but everyone seemed against him. He shook his head and refocused on the video feed, leaning forward to get a better view.

It was dark in the compartment, only lit with the flashlights of the boarding crew. But when it passed a tank filled with green algae and something bumped the glass on the other side, he stiffened. “Back that up!”

He watched grimly as he saw the body of a Ssilli floating in the tank. It tumbled in place; belly up as decomposing flesh produced gas or whatever and filled its dive bladders to make it buoyant. He replayed the video to be sure and then ordered the crew to do a more careful inspection. They confirmed the findings.

“Damn. Poor sods or whatever,” he murmured. He turned to the comm rating. “Comm, send a signal to ansible—priority message, encryption key Baker. Copy to admiralty, intelligence and Doctor Thornby. We need to let them know what we've got our hands on … and what the hell do we do with it,” he said.

Chapter 3

Admiral Irons read the ansible report from Nightingale. The initial contact report read something like a fire mission that no naval officer wanted to read or be a part of. A naval ship being forced to fire into an unarmed freighter? Nightmarish indeed.

Then the follow-up report of the boarding. It had been instantly flagged by Sprite so he'd pulled it to mull over. And mull it over he indeed did for all of the two minutes it took to finish his bowel movement and then get cleaned up so he could issue fast orders.

Remains of a Ssilli had been found and recovered. It was a pity that the last Ssilli had died sometime before the boarding, but there was nothing they could do to change that. It was exciting news to the new federation. Monty, Captain JG Montgomery of ONI, the Office of Naval Intelligence, had been involved from the beginning of course. Questions about where the Ssilli male and female came from were buzzing the net, Irons noted, as he sent off his initial orders.

If Monty was right, they were definitely not sleepers since both had lacked cybernetics or so the initial report said. They'd had some sort of crude external interface to interact with the crew, LCD monitors taped and strapped over the male's eye stalks, and motion sensors strapped and taped to his body … even electric shock wands rigged to his torso to force compliance. Heinous.

According to the theory Monty's staff immediately put out, the poor being had been brutalized during his subjugation, most likely tortured to helm the ship in order to squeeze speed and some measure of efficiency out of him.

Captain Levinson had made the right call. Monty's people tagged the ship name in the captured Horathian war books. Funny how they hadn't provided an up-to-date copy to Levinson, the admiral thought. He'd sort that problem out later though.

It was going to be a subdued and dark report to him when ONI got around to their weekly meetings the admiral thought blackly. He preferred blunt honesty, but in this case he wouldn't mind someone glossing over the details of the poor alien's long enslavement.

The one lone surviving member of the crew of
Marengo
had refused to answer any of their questions. ONI couldn't use extreme means from where they were at. That meant the crew member had to be placed in stasis for safe keeping while a salvage and prize crew were dispatched from Pyrax to bring it back there.

In the meantime the small prize crew cloned the ship's database. The navigational database had been carefully scrubbed and overwritten in a paranoid attempt at hiding the origin of their finds. But fine pieces to the puzzle in smaller files they had missed cropped up according to the investigators. They burned a lot of ansible bandwidth for days to download the cloned database while the ship was towed to planetary orbit.

Lieutenant Vlad Contenov,
Descartes
' chief engineer, went elsewhere to find answers to the burning questions. He found clues in the engineering diagnostic files. They didn't have the location of the Ssilli, but it gave them a rough estimate of how far the ship had traveled and that estimate was reflected in each jump. The speed in hyperspace they traveled, the time in hyper …. It was a starting point, John thought.

He would have to dispatch a light cruiser to find the Ssilli world. It was imperative to his long-range plans that they do so. He made a note to OPS to kick an LC free at their earliest time period. Since ET had so much coverage and they'd already dispatched a ship, there might not be a need he reminded himself.

But it remained a possibility he thought remotely as his fingers flicked and typed at the virtual keyboard before him. He called up the ship registry and then passed on an order to
Tumuloch
to explore the nexus when they got back to port from their visit to New Dublin. When he was finished, he scanned the document once and then passed it on to his Yeoman and staff to go over to make sure he'd dotted all his I's and crossed all his T's.

:::{)(}:::

Commander Sprite read the report from
Descartes
far faster than any human. She also processed the various related reports ONI filed, including requests for clarification and more information.

Since she had a free moment, she decided to check in on Doctor Thornby and Project Resurrection. Now that the Ssilli part of the project had been moved to Antigua, they'd made far more tangible progress—progress that was very encouraging.

But she was more concerned with the Ssilli part of the project. She requested an update in case Admiral Irons asked. She scanned the last SITREP filed by the captain. They'd just had their first cloned brood success a month ago. Hundreds of eggs had hatched and entered the second larval stage or their long path to adulthood and sapiency. Antiguan oceans were not right for them though; that was obvious from the ratio of eggs laid to hatchings. Nearly a million eggs had been hatched; yet only two hundred and eighty had survived to hatch? That didn't bode well.

With the bodies of two more Ssilli, it would mean they'd have more genetic material. If the medics in Nightingale could handle the bodies properly, they would be able to harvest any reproductive material. As she watched she noted in amusement that Doctor Thornby was tapping away at that conclusion and sending out urgent requests to preserve the material carefully. She scanned and then signed off on each request. Apparently time was indeed of the essence.

:::{)(}:::

Doctor Nara Thornby sat back as she finished her latest broadside of missives—not missives, but demands. Pleading emails for help. Hopefully she'd get the answers she needed.

Not just for her though, she thought as she pursed her lips. This wasn't about credit; it wasn't about who got to the goal first. She shook her head. Angus had gotten the prize in their little competition … at least part of it. She frowned.