Desolator: Book 2 (Stellar Conquest) (10 page)

“Yes, sir,” Johnstone said as he relayed the instructions. “Why –”

“Just a hunch, Rick. Just a hunch. By the way, shouldn’t someone be relieving you about now?”

“Yes, sir. Lieutenant Khalid can take over for now.” Rick nodded to the assistant CyberComms officer at the next console, whose eyes got suddenly larger. “Good luck, Jimmar.” Johnstone slapped the junior man on the shoulder, pulled out his link and left the bridge with a nod to Captain Mirza.

That worthy turned to Admiral Absen with a questioning look.

“Sorry, Mirza, I didn’t tell you in the press of things. Johnstone is going in with the Marines as my liaison and first-contact specialist.”

The captain did not look happy but said nothing, turning to his assistant CyberComm officer. “Khalid, just do your best, and pass the word for the next CyberComm officer in rotation. I want a full bridge crew.”

“Bogey is in high Reta orbit now, sir,” Tanaka called. “It’s decelerating again, dropping lower.”

“Keep an eye out, everyone. Whatever is going to happen, I get a feeling is going to happen soon.”

“What is happening?” Chirom asked Finnar, the old technologist on duty. Others of the Ryss lined the corridor outside, asking the same question but not allowed inside.

Undersized and even stringier than usual for the Ryss population aboard, Finnar spoke precisely as he prodded nearsightedly at claw-keys. “Desolator is de-spinning, Elder. We are approaching a small icy moon around a gas giant. There is an installation of some sort on the surface of the moon. There is also increased maintenance drone activity aboard.”

Chirom waited for him to go on, then prompted when he did not. “And? Why?”

Finnar folded his paws over his paunchy belly, one that never seemed to go away no matter how little food was available. “If you insist I speculate…there is only one reason to take the spin off the ship, and that is to interact with a spatial body.”

“Speak plainly please. You think it is preparing to land on the moon?”

“I do.”

“Why?”

Finnar sighed, glancing past Chirom to the crowd of faces at the door. At that moment Elder B’nur pushed through and spoke. “Yes, why?” she snapped.

“Again, it is only speculation, but…” He went on hastily as Chirom bared his teeth in frustration. “Fuel, Elder, and air. The alien installation seems to be a processing plant for cracking water into hydrogen and oxygen, and I am sure there are other compounds and isotopes there – methane, deuterium, tritium, the water itself – that we need to survive. With resupply, more fusion plants can be run, more food can be grown, more heat provided, more maintenance devices have power to make more repairs – and the photonic drive capacitors can be recharged.”

“And if they are,” Chirom’s voice rose, “we are back to wandering in interstellar space. Twenty years and a hundred systems later, and several of them held habitable worlds, but Desolator refused to let us colonize, claiming that the Meme would just find us and destroy the Ryss forever. Now we have found a system with non-Meme aliens in it, and Desolator is about to make us thieves and pirates, and create more enemies. We must find a way to stop this endless sojourn.”

“Chirom!” scolded B’nur. “This is a matter for the Council.”

Chirom looked at the faces in the doorway, and listened to the silence in the corridor as dozens, if not hundreds of Ryss strained to hear.
Time to cast the gambling-sticks, he thought
. “Finnar,” he said, leaning close, “are you sure Desolator has no surveillance devices in the warm-room?”

Finnar nodded. “Not for some span. I check it myself daily.”

Chirom straightened and turned to the waiting crowd. “Then it is time for all Ryss to hear. Follow me and I will tell you more.” Striding out of the tap-room, the sea of bodies parted for him, then followed.

In the large, comfortable warm-room, he made his way to the center, to stand on a divan so all could see and hear. As he did, Eldest Mother Kirst’aa’s wavery voice rose from the front rank where she sat with her young females and crones. “You have no right to speak for the Council, Chirom. Step down from there and wait for the next meeting.”

“I do not speak for the Council, Eldest Mother, and not even for my clan. I only speak with the right of any other Ryss. But I am a clan elder, and I am the Records Historian for
Desolator
. Some of you may have forgotten that, but it is true. I study the past, ancient and recent, and remind you now of the state we are in. Once there were over one thousand three hundred Ryss on this ship, remnants of those who did not make it to the lifeships. Those of my age and older know why we are now only some five hundred.”

Hissing and grumbling arose from the elders among the Ryss, with shouts of
no
and
silence
and
do not speak
. A group of grizzled males moved toward him as if to stop him by force, until the yearsmane Vusk and his group of young toughs blocked them. “Go back to your places, decrepit ones. We real warriors want to hear what Elder Chirom has to say.”

Help comes from unexpected quarters
, Chirom thought, bemused. Again he spoke loudly. “All must hear, and decide for themselves.” Sweeping the crowd with his eyes, he realized that almost every Ryss aboard was now in the warm-room listening, save only Finnar in the tap-room and a few on meat-plant duty.

“The time has come to tell everyone of the price we paid for survival. Once you understand the cost, you will see why the time has come to use what we bought.”

“What is it? Tell us,” came a young voice from the back.

“I tell you now.” Chirom settled his robe closer around his shoulders. “One ship year after the Meme drove us off our homeworld, this ship’s Council met in secret. We reviewed data that showed disaster for us. Desolator had already scouted and rejected five star systems, one of which might have sustained us, in favor of further wandering. In one case it chose to seek out and kill a Meme Destroyer, taking further damage to itself and throwing away the lives of nineteen Ryss.”

“At that time there were almost three hundred dams of fertile age, and birth-suppression drugs were running out. Within a year or two, we would see a thousand or more kits open their eyes…and food supplies were already dwindling. Something had to be done.”

“Why did we not hear of this before?” asked one adult male.

“You were a child then, Lennd. When would have been a good time to tell you of this tragedy? Every time the Council discussed revealing the story, it was deemed too explosive a truth. All your elders were sworn to secrecy. There was simply no good that could come of telling, until now.”

“Why now, then?” Kirst’aa snarled. “What good can a tragic story do but stir up dissension?”

Chirom shot back firmly, “Because now we have a chance – perhaps our last chance – for the Ryss to live again.”

At that moment the room seemed to shift slightly, and the crowd swayed. “You see? The spin is off the ship, and Desolator has engaged artificial gravity. It is using the last of its fuel and stored power to land on an alien base and steal what it believes it needs to survive. But what point is surviving if we waste away aboard this wreck, with an unstable device in control?”

“What is the truth?” Vusk asked loudly, turning to Chirom. “Tell the story, and we will decide what to do.” Around him his gang nodded and slapped their flanks in approval.

He’s enjoying the spotlight, and thinks he can gain status from this,
Chirom thought.
No matter, the sticks are cast
. “I will tell the tale now. When it became clear that Desolator would not let us leave, and overpopulation would rapidly destroy us, the Council proposed to temporarily sterilize all dams of kit-bearing age.”

Murmuring began among the crowd: some shocked, some angry, and spitting disputes arose before Chirom raised his paws and called for calm again. “It was the only way to keep us from a population explosion that would doom us all. The rest of the adults agreed…but the fertile dams did not.”

“We told them the truth – that the procedure could be reversed with a fair chance of success. It was just to delay until we could somehow find a way out of the dilemma, but still they did not agree. One among them, Selaa,” Chirom said, naming Trissk’s dam, “stood up first and refused, and convinced many others to refuse the sterilization. When she was told that she would be forced…” he cast his eyes down in sorrow, “Selaa took her own life in protest. And the lives of
my
litter within her.”

Unable to help himself, Chirom reached up with claws extended to shred the tips of his ears in agonized grief, grief that even now ripped at his gut. Reverent silence hung over the assembly as the blood dripped down to run in slow streams across his face and onto his whiskers. “But that was only the beginning of sorrow, for Selaa was held in great regard by her sisters. Before they could be stopped, more than two hundred young females, many with kits inside them, followed her example. They murdered themselves and the lives they held.”

A great wave of wailing swelled, and hundreds of paws rose as one to shred their ears. Many fell on all fours or curled up on the deck in agony, as if to avoid the images of desecration and abomination inside their heads. Even Vusk and his toughs stumbled about as if drunk, twitching convulsively even to contemplate the unthinkable loss of so many dams. It was all Chirom could do to stand and look out over the scene before him, and not join them.

Chirom met Trissk’s eyes where he stood at the back.
He’s already done his mourning
, he thought,
and now he’s strong enough to get past it.

As if reading his mind, the younger male nodded solemnly.

After some smallspans the commotion died down, and Chirom judged the time right to continue in a ringing voice: “We Ryss are a strong race. We Ryss mourn with passion. We Ryss fight with strength and honor. We Ryss endure even the unendurable. But now our few daughters, who were but kits when this horror overtook us, will soon come of age to bear new litters; but we have no food to feed them. Will we starve our children? Will we sterilize the dams too? Will we drive them to self-murder?” Raising his naked claws above his head, the elder shouted, “I say NO!”

NO, NO, NO,
chanted the crowd, and Trissk wondered how in his pompous childishness he ever could have thought Chirom did not understand politics.

“All the sleds are filled, sir,” Sergeant Major Charlie McCoy reported over suitcomm to his commander. “I still think we should bring the tanks.”

“I know you do, Smaj, but the moon’s surface is far from stable and that ship has weapons that will blow through a heavy tank in a heartbeat. And if we did get them onto the ship, they would be useless in the close confines within. No, our tactics must rely on speed and boarding. Then we just have to face whatever is inside.” Bull hefted his big, awkward Hippo-built plasma rifle. He’d fallen in love with the thing when he’d first seen it used against the Marines’ moon assault landing, and this one, with modified grips for his human hands, was his own deadly baby. He’d pushed for every Marine squad to have one to round out their kit.

“Aye aye, sir,” McCoy said resignedly. “Cocooning in now.”

“Right.” Bull racked his weapon, then slid his huge frame into the oversize crash-cocoon, one of ten sarcophagi jammed into the tiny assault sled. Pilot and gunner made twelve, and were protected only by crash chairs and gravplates.
Those guys are the real crazy ones,
he thought.

This sled also carried one of the semi-portable laser cannons that made up half of the company’s heavy weapons section, and therefore would hang back a little in the wave assault. That grated on him but he knew that the semi, and he himself as the ground commander, had to be given the best chance to get down intact.
After that…lock and load.

“Any word?” Bull asked his senior sled driver, Flight Warrant Officer Butler.

“No, sir. The bogey is descending. It may be making a landing at the Reta base, is what they say.”

“That’s where we’ll hit them, then. Hell of a lot easier to assault something on the ground than in space.” Bull tried to relax, knowing full well that
hurry up and wait
was the order of the day. They might launch in five minutes or five hours.

“Sir, we got company.” Butler opened his link to Bull’s HUD and fed him the interior of the sled. A man in unmarked combat armor stood awkwardly in the open loading hatch. Gingerly he stepped inside, and the sled’s copilot/gunner, Flight Sergeant Krebs, unbuckled and then pulled down an evac harness from the wall. This was just a piece of high-impact webbing with a frame around it, for cramming extra personnel or casualties into the sled.

A moment later the unknown new man was webbed in and immobilized.

“Here you go,” Bull heard Butler say, then his HUD lit up with the contact information. “Johnstone? Commander Johnstone?”

Rick chuckled. “The one and only, Bull. I’m sure you’d rather it was Jill here but sorry, I’m all you’ve got. And – is this channel private? Okay…I have to tell you that I’ve been put in political command.”

“Political command? What the hell does that mean? This is a combat mission. There’s only one commander.”

Rick grunted noncommittally. “I guess it means Admiral Absen thinks it’s primarily a first contact mission, not a combat mission. He said I’m in overall command. He also said you have command of everything tactical. Sorry if that steps on your toes.”