Desolator: Book 2 (Stellar Conquest) (11 page)

“You’re right,
sir
.” Bull’s voice dripped sarcasm. “I
would
rather have your wife here. She’s smart enough to respect the concept of unity of command.”

Rick’s tone hardened. “Take it up with the admiral, Major,” he snapped. “Are you the professional everyone says you are, or just a cowboy out for glory?”

Bull gnashed his teeth inside his cocoon, but held his tongue.

“We are warriors,” Chirom shouted above the chanting. “We were not made to skulk and hide inside a ship of space. We need a home, with skies above and prey in the fields. If we do not have that, we are no longer Ryss.” He shook his claws above his head. “We must be prepared to fight!”

“Fight against who?” cried Vusk.

“When the time comes, we fight the machines. But we must choose the moment. Soon
Desolator
will land on the ice moon. I believe it intends to raid an alien facility there, and refuel. Perhaps the creatures will defend themselves. Perhaps their ships will attack. No matter. When Desolator is busiest, we will break in to the armory and seize our weapons.”

“And then what?” Vusk unwittingly fed Chirom his next line.

“And then we retake control of
our ship
.”

“But how?”

“I know where the Vault of its brain-device is. Perhaps we can break in, when it is distracted.”

“How do you know this?” one young Ryss yelled.

“I am this ship’s Recorder-Historian, and I learned many things in my work, before Desolator murdered Captain Juriss and the senior officers. Your elders already know this.”

A grizzled veteran stepped forward on unsteady feet. “Not all of them do. What do you mean, murdered? They died fighting.”

Chirom spread paws, sheathing his claws once more. “I know you would like to believe that, Bhligg, but I can show you the visual records – and I can show you the undamaged Control Chamber. Desolator turned off the gravity field inside, before engaging the photonic drive. Juriss and the bridge officers died instantly as the rest of the ship accelerated while they did not.”

“You are the bearer of many horrors, Elder Chirom,” Bhligg said. “I wish I had not lived to see this day.” Slowly he slid to a seat.

“I have long been the bearer of horrors inside myself. Today, you Ryss, perhaps all that are free and left of our race, must take up the burden with me. Today, we all must be strong. Today, we must fight.”

“
Today, we must fight
,” echoed the Ryss, as one.

“Chirom!” From the doorway, Technologist Finnar called excitedly. “We are descending rapidly. Desolator will land on the moon in just a few smallspans.” Without waiting for an answer, he turned and ran back toward the tap-room.

“Then we must make ready. Those too old, and females, stay in this room. Warriors, organize by clan. When I give the word, you who are Rell,” – Chirom’s clan – “will come with me through the main corridor. Renn, east passageway. Rall, west. Rurr, up one deck, and Rovv, down one, and we will all converge on the armory. Right now, disperse and collect tools, anything you have. If Desolator asks, tell him you are preparing to help with the defense. Once you have done that, all return here. We must not move too soon and alert Desolator to our plans.”

As the warriors scattered to find their improvised implements of war, Trissk approached. Chirom leaped lightly down from the divan and began cleaning the blood off his face, saying, “What is it?”

At the same moment Klis padded up, to slip an arm into the crook of Trissk’s. “We females want to help,” she said firmly. “We are technologists, and plant-tenders, and healers. We are preparers of food and repairers of devices. Do not ask us to sit idly by while the males do everything.”

“She’s right,” insisted Trissk, slipping his paw into hers. “As you said, Chirom, females must be allowed to be more than breeders of warriors.”

Chirom smiled. “I did say that, didn’t I? What better time.” He turned to look for Elder B’nur, saying, “You should take charge of the females. Prepare the surgery. Many will die this day, but fewer if our honored sisters and mothers care for us. Also harvest and wrap as much food as you can, in case we must escape rapidly.”

B’nur, old but still with steel in her spine, nodded and clapped her paws together. “Sisters! Come to me, and I will explain what we must do.”

“Your choice,” Ezekiel said apologetically. “You can go into the VR cocoon and share the virtuality, or you can hang out here for a couple of days. Hope you’re not claustrophobic.” He gestured at the small chamber that held three sarcophagi.

“Nothing to worry about, Jill,” Spooky assured her. “Just like the coldsleep boxes.”

“That’s what worries me. I might never wake up.”

Spooky shrugged. “Life is full of risk. As for me…see you on the inside.” He stripped naked and climbed into one cocoon. Ezekiel followed suit, and soon Jill stared at two sealed bio-boxes and one open.

“Oh, bloody hell,” she mumbled, and took off her skinsuit.

Moments later she found herself stepping into something out of Jules Verne – Captain Nemo’s Nautilus, perhaps. Brass rails, riveted iron, and polished wood abounded. Circular flat glass portholes showed ocean views stretching impossibly far, as if the water were clear and telescopic. Sea creatures such as were never seen on Earth swam, crawled, floated and jetted through the bluish space.

“This feels a bit unreal,” Jill remarked, “not at all like when I took a ride in a StormCrow.”

“It’s deliberate,” Ezekiel assured her, stepping up next to her in front of the large forward porthole. He wore a high-collared outfit reminiscent of a naval uniform. “One way to fight VR confusion is to ensure the virtuality is a bit imperfect.”

Jill checked her own body, finding herself clothed in Marine utilities. “So, how is this all generated, anyway? I mean, if your ship is this mentally capable and focused, it would be fully sentient. I understood it was nearer animal intelligence, like a dog.”

“That’s a reasonable analogy. However, this virtuality is generated by an implanted cybernetic package only accessible when I am here. Without me linked in, nothing will work and
Roger
isn’t going anywhere. Meme ships are very loyal; they’re bred and designed that way.”

“So other Meme ships can’t do this?” Jill ran her hand around the rubber seal at the edge of the glass, feeling the chill of the waters and the contrasting warmth of the wood burl next to it.

“Older ones can sustain a virtual environment. I didn’t want to wait fifty years for him to grow up, so, like many of us, he’s cybernetically augmented.”

Jill grunted noncommittally. Everything here appeared so different from her life – either of her lives: mother or warrior. This seemed a world of shadows and smoke, lacking substance. She’d heard of VR confusion, addiction and even psychosis, and she could understand. It made the old sci-fi concept of the secret matrixed virtuality seem less like a fantasy, more of an eventual certainty. “I’ll be happy when we’re done with it. How long will that be?”

“Two days if there are no glitches, but you can sleep for as long as you want. Just tell me and I’ll have the system put you under and then wake you up. There are also books, movies, games, courses…and I can slow or speed up your time sense.”

Jill wondered about the limits of his power inside the VR environment. Whether he could order her body to turn itself off, for example, or cause her to see and believe things that could not be distinguished from reality. She suppressed a shiver. “Impressive.”

“Thanks,” he replied offhandedly, then walked over to sit down in a leather-upholstered pedestal chair in front of a control board. “Here we go.”

Reaching for levers with polished spherical knobs on the ends, he advanced them like throttles with one hand while holding onto a half-wheel with the other. The view from the front suddenly shot toward them as they sped up, though she felt minimal acceleration. An overlay on the window, a rather anachronistic HUD, marked objects with carets and symbols that were too far away to see, giving Ezekiel plenty of time to steer. “Would you like to try?” Ezekiel asked, waving her into the chair.

She sat, eagerly, and placed her hands on the simple controls. Soon, she had the hang of it. “This is just like flying,” Jill breathed delightedly as they swooped above the ocean floor. “Better, though, since we can’t fall.”

“Yes, it is pleasant,” said Spooky from behind them. “I’ve been going over what information I have, and I’d like to brief you when you are ready.”

“Give it a rest, boss,” Ezekiel said good-naturedly, and for a moment Jill caught the echo of his mother Rae Denham, half of whom had been the Meme Raphael. It had defected from the Empire to Blend with a young human woman, creating a goddess of incredible wisdom.

But the goddess had fallen in love with a man, the grim warrior Alan “Skull” Denham. He’d given his life in the fight against the Meme, but not before fathering Ezekiel and four other hybrid humans.

“Of course. Take your time.” Spooky took a position of parade rest, staring out a side porthole, and Jill could see he wore a simple set of black clothing something like pajamas with soft-soled canvas shoes. She racked her brain for where she had seen such an ensemble before, then thought of videos of the Vietnam conflict, and the insurgent forces involved.
Viet Cong. Apropos.

“You know he’ll just stand there like a vulture until we listen to his briefing,” Ezekiel remarked quietly.

Jill glanced sharply at Spooky, who did not appear to have heard.

“This is my virtuality, Jill. He can’t hear if I don’t want him to.” Ezekiel raised an eyebrow with a smirk even as he kept his eyes on his piloting.

“You’re a god inside here, eh?” she asked half-seriously.

“We’re all gods inside our own heads, Jill. But if you’re uneasy about how much power I have right now, remember the rest of us see the other side of that every day we are near people like you.”

“People like me?” Jill’s face showed genuine confusion.

“Cyborgs. Any one of you Marines could kill an ordinary human being with a twitch. Anyone within arm’s reach is completely within your power, unless they are equally enhanced. We trust you. Why don’t you trust me?”

Jill took a deep breath. “Trust isn’t an all-or-nothing thing. I can’t help feeling uncomfortable, but…point taken.”

“Would it help if I told you that you could break out of your sarcophagus if you really wanted to? Any strong emotion, any severe shock to the system, will cause the virtuality to break down. It’s a safety measure. Does that make you feel better?”

“Yes, actually it does.” She looked over at Spooky, who was now smoking a cigar, his elbow braced against the glass and his hand on his head, leaning. “What about food and drink…or smoking?”

“You can have whatever you want. Just ask. Spooky has his own tricks, like that cigar. He’s spent a lot of time in VR.”

“I’d like a beer and a double ice cream sundae, in that order. No calories, guilt-free, right?”

“Right.”

“Bull,” Johnstone said on a private channel.

“Yeah?” His tone was combative.

Still pissed, I see
. “Just reminding you that we
are
trying to make contact here. Nobody fires at anything alive unless we get fired upon. Drones and unmanned weapons emplacements are fair game.”

“I got it. Sir.” He changed channels to address all the troops. “Just remember your training and don’t get twitchy. Shoot the machines but not the organics. We have to sort the friendlies from the hostiles on this one.”

Launch interrupted the conversation, G forces bleeding over the minimal gravplates and into the crash cocoons, but everything, including the Marines themselves, was built to take it – and
built
was an accurate word. Every trooper had full cybernetic implants with laminated bones, polymer muscle enhancers and hardwired nerves, plus supercharging combat nanobots in the blood for gross body repair. Underlying it all was the Eden Plague virus, which kept all of their merely human cells in perfect running order.

Bull called up the pilots’ feeds on his HUD, a prerogative of his command suit. Launched from two million klicks away, the sleds seemed to crawl toward their objective, the ice moon Reta in orbit around New Jove. Approaching from the side opposite the base, in theory the bogey could not see them coming.

He could see
Conquest
and sixty StormCrows shepherding the forty sleds in, and knew they would cover the landing as the Marines came in nap-of-the-earth to disembark on target. Estimated time of arrival on his HUD said two hours, five minutes.

Now he started getting an intel feed, which was also routed to all of the troops. A voiceover spoke as shaky video ran, showing the enormous wall of the alien ship set next to the fuel processor on the moon’s surface. “Lieutenant Fleede, from Intel here. All right, the bogey has set down on the ice, with its waist right next to the depot and these wing-like structures surrounding it on three sides. Now you see a bunch of spider drones disembarking, there, there, and over there. Now on this video you will see them enter the base and explore, then they hook up and drain the bulk tanks – liquid oxygen and hydrogen mostly, then they start dismantling the fittings, taking hoses, valves, electrical cabling, everything of value, and carting it back to their ship.”

Shifting and bouncing, the video cut to an interior view. “Here we see them approaching the main processing controls. One of the spider drones inserts a probe into a universal data port and…that’s it.” The video went blank. “We surmise they took control of the facility with a cyber-virus. Now all we have is some long-range video from surveillance drones holding position in view of the facility. From those it looks like the bogey is dismantling the plant and taking just about everything.” The video ended.

“Intel, this is Major ben Tauros. Have any of the organic aliens been seen?”