The Rifter's Covenant (16 page)

“Carcason. Reverse
course, head out of Barca’s shadow from Shimosa. Make it look good.”

“Captain?”

Carcason’s doubtful
tone infuriated Hreem. “Just do it, piss-weasel. But not too fast, see? Don’t
get outside the penumbra.”

A short time after
the navigator complied, Dyasil spoke up nervously, the rasping sound as he
rubbed his chin irritating Hreem. Why didn’t the stupid blit either grow a
beard or depilate? “Signal from
Scorpion
.
Two-second delay.”

Hreem dismissed the
irritations and moved up to the edge of his pod. “Put him on.”

He didn’t wait for
the screen to clear before he began speaking. “The damn nicks are mixing in
now. I think it’s time to blow the resonance field and get the hell out of
here.”

On the screen,
Neyvla-khan shrugged, his thin, pale face scornful. “You are a fool, Hreem the
Useless. A tempath’s puppet, expecting me to believe such mewling nonsense. You
are in this treachery with the Barcans.” He spat elaborately. “Lances. Pah!”

Hreem fought back
his anger. “You chatzing moron. Is that why they just sent Riolo back in
pieces? Yeah, I tried to cut a deal, but they aren’t having any of it.”

He saw the impact
of his lie in the narrowing of Neyvla-Khan’s eyes
.

“I don’t know what
Barrodagh is up to,” he went on, “but I don’t trust him any more than you do.
Maybe it’s not nicks, maybe it’s Dol’jharians. Maybe Barrodagh was stalling us
so they can get it all themselves.”

He saw doubt
lengthen his enemy’s long face, and pressed his advantage. “You know how many
armories’ve been looted. Maybe they found some of those stealth lances the
RiftNet is always talking about. Next thing you know, they’ll be shutting down
our power.” Norio squeezed his arm, his fingers moving in the simple muscle
code they used:
Clever.

Then the image tore
across, flickered out, and returned fuzzily.

“Gee-mine!” Metije
shrilled, her console lighting up amber and red.

Hreem slapped the
Lith
’s shields up full.

“Looted armories!”
Neyvla-khan hissed, showing all his teeth.

His face dwindled
to a point and vanished a moment before the
Lith
shuddered to a missile strike. Several screens filled with garbage.

“Pili! Take out the
resonance generator! And trigger those chatzing sneak-missiles. Erbee, find the
ones Neyvla-khan’s got aimed at us.”

“Not in position
yet, Captain,” Pili replied, his high voice squeaking with strain. “Ten minutes
or so.”

“No traces here.”
Erbee’s scrawny body knotted with tension.

“Chatz! Carcason,
get us out of here!” Hreem grabbed his head and tried to think. “Where’d that
gee-mine come from?”

Norio whispered,
“Are the Barcans betraying us all?”

The
Lith
raced back into the shadow, fleeing
the inner edge of the penumbra of the Shimosa weapons. Hreem’s gut heaved and
churned as if the gravs were failing.

Things were
suddenly very complicated.

Solarch Topanar’s
scuttler found the first live Barcans. It and several others of the little
mechs from his and the other squads had relayed views of pathetic huddles of
dead ones, burned or suffocated by the sun-hot gases sweeping through the
corridors when the lance teslas overloaded.

But several hundred
meters down one corridor, around a corner, here was a group of five, cowering
in another of the recessed, doorless rooms that were apparently their posts
during an emergency. There were no controls, just a comm.

The light enhancers
and infrareds pulled detail out of the murky Barcan gloom, giving the figures
in front of him a faintly solarized look. ZiTuto confronted the one whose
clothing indicated the highest rank.

“Where is the main
control room?”

The man gobbled a
reply, which the Marine’s suit computer rendered into Uni. “I don’t know.” The
Barcan’s heart rate increased above the level terror had imposed; the infrared
imager overlaid an increased glow on his cheeks and forehead while the suit’s
chemonark detected increased perspiration and pheromonal activity. He was
lying.

ZiTuto stepped
forward, knowing how menacing his armor made the movement. He pointed at the
man with his right index finger, made massive by his suit gauntlet. “I will
kill you if no one tells me in five seconds.” He started counting.

The man shook his
head, his face set stubbornly. Well, your oath against mine
,
thought the meliarch as he reached “five.” He clenched the fourth
and fifth fingers of his right hand and a thread of brilliance shot forth,
impacting the man’s chest. The Barcan burped noisily as the blood in his lungs
vaporized; a reddish mist shot forth as his mouth gaped in an agonized rictus
and he fell backward in limp disarray.

ZiTuto swallowed
his distaste and turned to the lowest ranking Barcan, on whose codpiece a stain
was rapidly spreading. “Where is the control center?”

To the Marine’s
relief, the answer tumbled out as fast as the man could speak.

Then he noticed the
tags around their necks. He queried the squad.

“Probably not much
use, Meliarch,” Dryden said. “They’re probably in here ’cause the tags aren’t
any good in the corridors during an emergency.” She paused. “But combined with
the data from the scuttlers, maybe they’ll get me into the system.”

She stooped and
took the tag off the dead man, pressing it against a rough patch on her armor.
Then she extruded a probe from her left gauntlet and tapped into the com
console.

A minute later she
reported, “Viral agents released; some phages found a match, too. We can use
the tags, but they’ll only—maybe—slow down the Ogres, unless we’re in one of
these emergency stations. Further on I may be able to snag a station layout, or
maybe one of the other squads will come up with something.”

ZiTuto had deployed
the other four squads on slightly diverging courses to multiply the chances of
finding the right way to the control room; they all carried sufficient shaped
charges to blow their way through intervening walls to join forces if needed.
He noted that Amahiro’s and Mynheer’s squads were slightly closer if the Barcan
had told the truth.

“Right,” ZiTuto said.
“Each of you, grab a tag.” He windowed the full tac overlay up and relayed the
info to the other squads; none of them had yet found any living enemy.

The Barcans howled
with terror as they were stripped of the tags, but to no avail, and the sound
of their misery followed the Marines down the corridor.

Then, just as it
had almost faded away, the image from the scuttler they’d left behind flared
and died. The cries rose to screams. ZiTuto triggered his enhancers. Was that
crunching he heard?

Before he could
query any of his squad, a shout came through the comm from Dyarch Amahiro,
whose squad was slightly closer to the command center, like “Ogres! Efreem, get
the chatzing triskels back here!”

ZiTuto could hear
weapons fire over the comm from Amahiro as he deployed his squad against
whatever might be following from the way they’d come and began moving in what
he now was sure was the direction of the control room. He pulled up the tac
overlay again as he commanded, “Dryden, get a scuttler down there and throw in
the triskels.” Nine of the little Kelly machines danced past them from behind,
toward the now silent safety room. “Takai, Sorensin, get the armor-piercing
wasps up.”

The tactical
situation deteriorated rapidly as Mynheer’s squad came under attack as well. ZiTuto
deployed this other squads toward the two under attack; he could feel the floor
slap at his feet as they blew their way through rock in a frantic effort to
support their comrades.

But it came to late
for Amahiro and her squad. Her voice rose to a scream distorted by the sheering
noise of rending armor, then a shattering explosion that cut off. Horror—gained
from sims of how Ogres were designed to fight Shiidra—jacked his adrenaline as
he shouted an order over the general tac channel: “Don’t let them close with
you!”

Later replay showed
it took only twenty minutes before the remaining Marines from
Haarscharf
finally reached the hatch to
the control room. By then, they knew the value of the triskels, and deployed
accordingly.

“They’ve doubtless
got Class One tags,” said ZiTuto hoarsely as they set up. “Grab ’em; if you
take a hand or head with ‘em, too bad. They might help, but don’t count on it,”
he said as two Marines set up charges against the hatch.

In the command
center, despite how the Servant gargled weirdly and fell silent, Cuonn was
unprepared for the suddenness with which the enemy appeared. One moment, the quiet
control room crackled with tension, the next, the hatch exploded inward.

Several small
cylindrical devices flew through the ruined hatch with a threatening buzz-hum,
their pointed noses seeking from side to side. A wave of little scuttling
machines followed, spreading out to clamber up onto the consoles and plunge
sharp probes into them, while bizarre three-legged devices that moved in complex
triple patterns of threes of threes followed, freezing in threatening positions
around the perimeter.

Then the room
filled with bulky figures chillingly reminiscent of the Black Ones. Many of
them had streaks of weapons fire across their armor, or even dents. Cuonn
stared, all his calculations overturned. These were not Rifters, but Arkadic
Marines.

Many of the Marines
took up stations around the room, their massive jacs at the ready. Cuonn could
see at least one still outside the hatch. Other Marines approached each of the
monitors at their consoles and yanked their tags off; several monitors screamed
in pain or terror. One Marine approached him and did the same; Cuonn suppressed
his yelp of pain as the chain sawed briefly at his neck before parting.

Cuonn looked at him
defiantly; he could see the Marine’s face clearly. He wondered how clearly the
weak-eyed Panarchist could see him. There was no give in the man’s features.
Cuonn resigned himself to death.

And death came.
Niches dilated in the wall and the Black Ones glided out with feral suddenness.
The Marine triggered his jac and the answering blare of flame consumed Cuonn in
mercifully-swift agony.

ZiTuto could hear
his coolant systems whining near overload as the last of the Ogres fell heavily
to the deck, sparking furiously as the monothread tangled about them by the
three-legged Kelly triskels cut deep into their armor. One Ogre discharged its
chest-cannon mindlessly into the ceiling, bringing down a shower of molten rock
on the hapless Barcans. Most of them were beyond feeling it.

He looked down at
the blackened corpse of the commanding officer with grim satisfaction, thinking
bleakly that they’d just got a sip of what Amahiro and the others had drunk to
the fullest.

He glared at the
nearest Ogre, still twisting spastically on the deck as its servos discharged,
and shuddered. The humanoid shape was bad enough, but far worse were their
faces: nonfunctional fright masks, originally calculated to make the Shiidra
fear humans by exaggerating the features most noticeable to the dog-like
aliens. They looked like a cross between a primitive ritual mask and a wildly
grinning mental defective. More than ever now he was viscerally convinced that
the Ogres were a horrifying trespass on the Ban, despite what Navy higher-ups
said.

Even the little
triskels made him nervous, the more so because Dryden had insisted, despite
Kelly assurances, that there was more implied by the computer links to them
than she cared for. They seemed too sentient.

But they had worked.

Interrogation of
the remaining Barcans soon revealed good news. It appeared the Barcans had
decided to throw in with Hreem: all the weapons of Avasta were trained on
Neyvla-khan’s fleet. But then came the bad news: the
Scorpion
was in the second target group of the sequence.

“It’d take longer
to reprogram than to fire twice,” Dryden said in response to his query.
“There’s only two minutes to full control.”

Time crawled. He
remembered Soaba’s face, her smile, the touch of her hands. Then the console in
front of him lit.

“All yours,
Meliarch.”

He brought his
finger down on the firing stud with controlled gentleness, mindful of his
amplified strength, so all the violence of the motion was expressed in his
vengeful shout.

“For Soaba!”

Dyarch Sussonius
reviewed their situation with quiet satisfaction. As expected, the lazplaz
tower was unoccupied—and no wonder, he thought, bringing up the spy-eye view of
the thick, rippled crater of glass that surrounded the installation. He glanced
nervously at the ridge that hid them from line-of-sight with the tower—it seemed
little enough to shield them from the fury of its discharge.

“We’ve got
activity, Dyarch,” reported Solarch Byrd, who was monitoring the quantum clamp
on the fiberlink that carried the commands of Avasta Station to the weapon.

“Massdriver warming
up.”

Sussonius checked
the spy-eye again. Sure enough, a wavering beam of ghostly light now emanated
from the mouth of the hundred-kilometer massdriver, as it cleared itself of
lunar outgassing in preparation for the blast of near-lightspeed plasma it
would momentarily deliver to the tesla deflector in the tower.

He withdrew the
spy-eye. Overhead, a sliver of Barca gleamed. The part of its surface in
sunshadow gloomed in light reflected from Shimosa, invisible over the horizon.

“Prepare for
discharge,” he said. The squad hunkered down. He spared a glance for the higher
ridge a few hundred meters farther out, beyond which the Kelly ship waited.

“Here we go,” Byrd
said.