The Rifter's Covenant (14 page)

Then the Kelly’s
quote penetrated.

The trinat? It was
generally assumed that one of the secret protocols in the Kelly-Human treaties
granted the aliens the right to emplace transponders in any human system. Was
the trinat, described to him by Lochiel, the link to them? Perhaps the Kelly
Elder had always had an escort, which even their Rifter shipmates hadn’t known
about. Even the most paranoid tech wouldn’t detect spread spectrum signals
buried in the random spurts of static that emanate from any ship.

This changed
everything. “Stand down to yellow,” he said. “I’m coming up. Signal the
squadron, and my compliments to all tactical executives, meeting at 1600.”

“Ay-Kay, sir.”
Then: “Signal incoming.”

“Put it through.”

A window bloomed
with the image of a Kelly trinity.

“Captain Cameron
ban-McKenzie. You may call usthree Ish, May, and Ell.” Cameron smelled the
sharp scent again from Shtoink’s trinity. “Commander of the ***** tripod,”
continued the Kelly onscreen, whistling unintelligibly. “I suggest the use-name
Sunbird.”

“Three threes of
ships,” ZiTuto said. “Their standard tactical unit. The large one of each
third, the Intership, is the command vessel.”

Cameron nodded,
then deferred to the Elder. After a short sequence of melodious sounds, the Kelly
captain requested permission to come aboard, which Cameron granted gladly.

“Elder,” said
ZiTuto as the screen blanked, “your ships. No emergence pulse was detected.”

“That is our
gift—not that we can fit your ships with that technology here, but that you may
know of it, which we have hidden from humans for many years.”

The meliarch turned
to Cameron, his eyes wide. “The lance attack. Now it could work.”

“Only the three
Interships can grapple your lances,” said the Kelly. “We could carry more
Marines, in armor, sealed.” The head-stalks of the trinity writhed oddly. “We
fear no human could breathe our ship’s air. The atmosphere is too intense.”

“I remember,”
ZiTuto said. “We all wore breathers on the homeworld, and all of us required intensive
Kelly medical intervention against allergens. But we don’t need more than three
lances anyway, if intelligence about the Barcan weapons complex on Avasta is
accurate.”

His face now
animated, the meliarch continued. “We’ll use one standard lance to take and
hold the ship bay, and two tesla moles: one detachment for the attack on the
control room proper and one to secure the route between it and the ship bay. ”

“They’ll have
backup control,” said Cameron. “So we’ll need a detachment to sabotage the
lazplaz bearing on the engagement space once they get control back. And
sufficient ships to get the Marines off again.”

“What about the
Ogres?” asked Commander Gyisquil. He turned to ZiTuto. “I’ve every confidence
in you and your Marines, but the truth is, you’ve never trained to go up
against Ogres, have you?”

Everyone looked at
Meliarch ZiTuto. Long-standing intelligence had made it clear that the Barcans
relied on Ogres, or something like them, for anti-personnel defense at all
their installations.

He shook his head,
his expression grim again. “That’s one thing we never expected to have to do;
all of the Naval ones have self-destructs. We can be sure the Barcan ones
won’t.”

“And we don’t know
what other capabilities they’ll have, either.” Gyisquil’s tone flattened as he
struggled between civilized horror at machine intelligence and professional
curiosity about how the Barcans might exploit it.

“We can help with
the Ogres, too,” said Shtoink.

“We’ll discuss it
further at sixteen hundred,” Cameron said. “In the meantime, you can get started
on the technical details of the lance mission. For now, with your leave.” He
included the Rifters, ZiTuto, and the Kelly in his deference, indicating
military exigencies for the benefit of the Elder, and walked out, trailed by
his executives.

“I wonder how they
do it,” Commander Dawsun mused as the transtube whisked them toward the bridge.
His tone was wistful; Cameron knew that the engineering exec was itching to
dive into the Kelly engines to extract their secret.

“Regardless, it’s
an incredible sacrifice for the Kelly to make.” Kor-Mellish shook her head.

“They’ve got as
much at stake as we do,” Cameron said. “Or more. Eusabian won’t kill off the
human race, even if he gets an army of Ogres; he might the Kelly.”

“Although I warrant
we’d be better off dead than living in a Thousand Suns ruled by Dol’jharians,”
the first officer added.

“No argument
there,” Cameron agreed fervently as the transtube hatch opened to the bridge.
“So we’ll have to do whatever we can to make sure we don’t ever face that
choice.”

“Why should I
take it off?” Hreem demanded, glaring at the luckless Barcan. “They sprang the
trap right after you entered atmosphere. You were part of it.”

Standing behind the
captain’s pod, Norio shivered with sweet anguish as Hreem’s rage swelled.

Riolo attempted to
look dignified, an attempt seriously compromised by his runny nose and heavily
tearing eyes. In one of her constant acts of petty malice, Metije had snagged
his goggles as he came onto the bridge, and his eyes couldn’t deal with bright
lights.

“Would I have
returned, then?” he asked, sniffling a little and tugging at the poison collar.
There was no bravado in his voice, and, strangely, little fear. Norio tried
digging deeper, but the sexual undercurrent that was so much a part of the
little troglodyte’s emotional spectrum defeated him again. He could read only a
vague hopefulness, and no sense of betrayal.

The Barcan’s
reasonable tone tripped the trigger on Hreem’s anger. He sprang to his feet and
lunged at Riolo, knocking the smaller man to the deck. Hreem stood athwart his
body, balancing himself on one foot with the heel-claw of the other pricking
through the cloth over the Barcan’s heart. Norio shivered and sidled closer,
drinking in the melange of emotions.

Lust, anger, fear,
crowd-hunger . . . what a feast! The tang was almost too much to bear, like the
taste of blood. He stared avidly at the small red stains spreading on Riolo’s
shirt.

“The Matria will
give you all the Ogres you want, if you defeat Neyvla-khan. But they will not
risk the wrath of the Lord of Vengeance by taking sides.” Riolo’s voice was
breathy. Norio could feel his fear mounting at last.

“Captain?” Erbee’s
voice was hesitant. “I think there’s a tightbeam comin’ in.” His fingers danced
over the tabs of his scan console, teasing the signal out of noise. “It’s
Shiavona’s
code. Tag indicates they’re
inside the inner asteroid belt.”

A long pause ensued,
then Hreem pulled his foot away. He pointed his heel-claw straight at Riolo’s
face. Norio marveled at his sense of balance—he could point as effectively with
his foot as his hand, without looking foolish.

“You’re not out of
this yet.” Hreem flexed his foot, retracting the heel-claw, then his heel
impacted the deck with a decisive ring. “Somebody get the collar off him. Put Lochiel
on.”

The screen windowed
up a fractal nightmare that slowly resolved into a round, plain, motherly
female face as the computer decompressed and processed the repetitive squirt
that made up the tightbeam coming in.

Hreem sat down
heavily in his pod, irritated with the one-way communication. The light-lag was
nearly ninety minutes, but he knew that was as close as Lochiel could come
without her emergence pulse betraying her to Neyvla-khan or to the Barcan
transponders.

His irritation dissipated
as Lochiel detailed their rendezvous with a destroyer from Charterly’s fleet
that had been reported lost. Even without super-powered skipmissiles, that
would tip the balance strongly toward Hreem, especially with the element of
surprise.

“Best news is,
Ducamer managed to liberate three stealthed lances from a naval armory.
Newtech. The Panarchy was just about to deploy them!”

Norio tingled with
Hreem’s thrill, mixed with a pleasantly dissonant tang of unease. Rumors of
such a weapon tended to crop up with a regular rhythm on the RiftNet. Hreem was
doubtless thinking that they might have been used against him at Charvann to
get even closer than the oldtech ones that had almost wrecked the
Lith
.

“Our idea is, we
use ’em to take over the weapons on the outer moon,” Lochiel continued, “and
turn those against Neyvla-khan . . .”

“I like that,”
Hreem said slowly. “I like that a lot.” Though he wanted to be the one to burn
Neyvla-Khan out of space. Maybe he could make that work.

Unhearing, of
course, Lochiel went on. “ . . . If we succeed, that’ll be your signal, or a squawk
if all we can do is shut ’em down. So stay away from the inner moon.” She
laughed. “And if you play your Barcan contact right, you can blame it on the
Navy when that little blunge-sucker Barrodagh starts screaming.” Lochiel
detailed some more timing and contingencies and signed off.

“Dyasil, take her
coordinates and squirt back an acknowledgment. Carcason, plot courses that’ll
take the maximum number of ships into the shadow of Barca from the inner moon
in three-point-five hours, outside its orbit as far as you can. Dyasil, set up
the relays for an all-fleet com.”

Then Hreem settled
back in his pod, one heel-claw flexing, and looked up at the viewscreen, with
the
Scorpion
dead center.

Meliarch Refren
ZiTuto lay immobile in the confines of his yet-unpowered armor. He wished he
could have been aboard the Kelly Intership to which the
Haarscharf
was grappled, instead of lying here in the acceleration
tank. He endured another wave of jealousy, wondering what Dyarch Sussonius and
his squad were encountering in the second Kelly ship of this third. The
remaining one had taken the Elder aboard and was staying out of the fight.

But his
responsibilities put him here with his squad, and in any case, there wouldn’t
have been any way to transfer from the ship to the lance.

The countdown on
the screen his armor projected into his field of vision indicated less than
fifteen minutes to launch. The squad had begun the banter that preceded action.
ZiTuto listened to each joke as if it were orders. Better than over-thinking
the coming sprint.

“I still think the
comedian who invented the tesla mole should’ve been forced to ride one.” Dyarch
Amahiro drawled in a wiredream parody, as always trying to hide her Douloi
origins.

“Ri-i-i-ght,
Shuchi,” Dyarch Meenhyr replied sweetly. “Much safer to ride a nuclear bomb
into the hull of a starship.”

ZiTuto tried to
concentrate on the old rivalry between the two and their squads, but memory of
a full-sensory simulation from his Academy days was stronger: the flare of rock
disintegrated by the momentum conversion of the tesla effect, roaring back in
ablative fury past the lance’s hull as it bored into an asteroid. If the
lance’s engine power ran out before they penetrated to the deeply buried Barcan
installation, they’d be entombed, the only way out up a tunnel of white-hot
rock—if it didn’t close behind them.

Octo is right. I much prefer hull-punching
. The usual lance attack used a shaped
nuclear charge to penetrate the relatively thin shield and hull of a ship,
cushioning its crew from the deceleration with an engine overload. It rarely
failed, and if it did, one died too fast to know it.

ZiTuto sighed and
tried to relax; he wanted the adrenaline spurt once the sprint started, when it
would be useful. Before? It would just make him jiggle as uselessly in his
armor as an empty joybed.

A lurch shifted
him. Then a window popped up on his helmet display, framing the Kelly captain.
He echoed it to his squad, with a blip to the Kelly to notify them.

“We’ve emerged at
the edge of the resonance field. Thirteen minutes to release.”

The Intermittor Ish
bent her head-stalk in the equivalent of a smile. “Wethree have been trying to
understand how any sentient could think up such a mad weapon as a lance.”

“What did youthree
come up with?” ZiTuto asked, glad of the distraction.

“Wethree remembered
a biology chip of human reproductive habits. All was explained.”

Amahiro cackled,
her voice high with fake amazement. “But how do you explain Mynheer, who
couldn’t find his nacker with a locator stuck on it?”

“What nacker? I
thought that was a pimple,” a lower female voice from Amahiro’s squad inquired,
and the Marines hooted with laughter and rapid-fire insults.

On the screen, the trinity
twined threir head-stalks together, an expression of amusement. Then threy
straightened out as she said, “Wethree will land over the horizon from the ship
bay of Avasta Station and await your signal. The other ship will land the squad
assigned to the lazplaz tower that covers our escape route. After they release
their lances, the other two Interships will rejoin their four consorts to relay
tactical updates to Captain Cameron’s fleet.”

ZiTuto relayed
acknowledgement, interested to note that the Kelly seemed to take comfort from
rehearsing decisions as much as humans did.

“Wethree will be
ready to extract you from the ship bay. Space has been made for the full
complement of three lances.” Ish tipped her head-stalk forward and folded the ‘lips’
of her lily-like mouth inward so all three eyes peered over them at ZiTuto.
“Are you and your squad comfortable with the weapons we have furnished? There
was little time to adapt them.”

“Our computers can
handle them. Just,” ZiTuto admitted. That had been another of the Kelly secrets
now revealed at the command of the Elder: that they had developed and deployed
weapons specifically designed to disable Ogres.