Desolator: Book 2 (Stellar Conquest) (12 page)

“Ah, no sir, just the robot drones or telefactors, whatever they are.”

“Did you see any weapons on those drones?”

“Nothing except cutting lasers and other power tools, sir.”

“Right. Thanks.” He cut the comm. “Bloody pirates,” Bull muttered.

“It might be a matter of survival,” Johnstone interjected mildly on the private channel.

“They could have just asked. No, this is not some friendly aliens saying a nice hello. Not after that first cyber-attack and what those Ryss guys said. There’s something very wrong going on in there.”

“I agree. But the admiral, and General Kullorg too, agree it’s worth some of our lives to find out, and maybe acquire technologies that we haven’t even dreamed of – things that will help us or our children beat the Meme when they grow up. Remember the real enemy here.”

Bull’s simmering anger at the situation suddenly cooled as he was reminded of his two baby boys at home.
I’ve been so wrapped up I forgot the bigger picture,
he realized.
Pull your head out of your ass, Bull, and start acting like a Marine. Give Repeth’s husband some credit. There must be a reason she married the guy.
“Understood, Commander. Me and my Marines have your back; just tell us what you need us to do.”

“Thanks, Bull. I’ll tell you when I know myself.”

Three hundred Ryss warriors flooded the warm-room and spilled into the corridors, milling about with tools in their hands. Some had power wrenches but most had only manual implements. Trissk wondered if that would be enough to break open the armory.

A shudder and a thump flowed through the ship’s structure, then a long grinding, as the great vessel settled onto the ice. Several Ryss leaped into the air as gravity dropped to a fraction of normal.

“
Desolator
has landed and shut off the gravitic fields,” Chirom said. “Make ready.”

At the largest doorway a commotion called his attention. A scream and sounds of a struggle followed, then a young Ryss warrior stumbled bleeding through the entrance, followed by a crowd of youths carrying a broken maintainer bot. “We killed it!” they cried, and Chirom shook his head.

“Too soon, my friends, but now the bird is out of the net. Clans, disperse and meet at the armory. Destroy any armed drones but remember,” he raised his voice to a shout as they started to scatter, “leave the harmless ones alone! We may need them ourselves.” His voice was drowned out in the roar of enthusiastic warriors.

Trissk grabbed Chirom’s wrist and shook it. “Elder, we must follow. If they get weapons, the eager unblooded will start to shoot anything that moves. Perhaps each other as well.”

“You are right. Let us go quickly.”

The two trailed the mass of Rell through the main corridor, Trissk with just one backward glance at Klis, who was tearing their meager stock of blankets into bandages. She bobbed her head in farewell, her paws too busy to do otherwise.

Sirens suddenly whooped in the corridors, causing the younger Ryss to look around fearfully at the unfamiliar sound. Desolator’s voice broke in and said, in its resonant tones, “Four maintenance drones have been damaged by Ryss personnel. The perpetrators must be apprehended and confined pending punishment.” Then the noise resumed.

“Ignore it!” called Chirom from the rear of the sixty or so Rell clan warriors. “Continue to the armory!” The mass stumbled forward, awkward in the low gravity, many scrambling on all fours like beasts. Some threw off their flapping warm-clothes, as nudity was of little import to a fur-clad race, though a few had donned their work coveralls or even old vacuum suits.

The elder passed a smashed maintenance bot, evidence that his words went unheeded.
When does a revolution become a mob?
he wondered, and was grateful within himself that their targets were mere machines.

Except for Desolator. Insane or not, it was more than just a device…but how much more? Chirom had not even himself decided what the morality of the situation required, only that the dictator must be overthrown. Ryss had built Desolator, and somehow Ryss had failed to ensure that it was sane and cooperative; but at some point the AI, if it truly was sentient, must take responsibility for its own crimes.

Covering more than a thousand strides, the mass finally reached the armory. It took only a few smallspans to cut through the doors; they were never intended to do more than secure against casual appropriation.

A large room filled with tough mesh enclosures, it contained thousands of maser carbines, neutron grenades, and hotblades, all optimized to kill Meme bio-constructs, along with pieces of standard unpowered combat armor.

“Use your tools to open the cages,” Chirom cried, but the Rell were already doing so with enthusiasm. From other entrances to the large room poured the other clan warriors, many dragging pieces of drones as trophies.

Chirom raised his voice. “Remember, do not destroy maintenance bots! Do not destroy machinery we may need to live!” His words were lost in the uproar as the metal barriers fell and the weapons were handed out. Some fool fired a maser, its marker flash and humming sound preceding a cry of pain as the microwave bolt bounced off a metal surface and burned a Ryss.

Someone passed him a hotblade and he strapped its belt across his chest, but did not take it out. When withdrawn its crystalline length could be activated to heat a glowing white, the better to slice easily through enemy protoplasm. But today, the foe was not flesh and blood, but metal and ceramic and plastic.

Trissk pushed through the mass with two carbines and two grenades, a hotblade already strapped around him. “Elder, you must give them a target or you will lose control.”

Chirom glanced sharply at the youngling, wondering how Trissk recognized this before he himself had. “Agreed.” Unsheathing his blade with its powered function off, he raised the shining crystal above his head. “Follow me to Desolator’s vault!”

Trissk took up the cry and soon they were leading the mass toward the center of the massive vessel.

As they reached an intersection a maintenance drone passed in front of them, a knee-high device with some sort of spare part clutched in its manipulators. From behind masers fired, their marker flashes lighting its dull surfaces. It veered to the right and slammed into a wall and with a howl a dozen Ryss jumped on it, many with naked glowing hotblades. In a moment the thing was dismembered even as Chirom and Trissk futilely pleaded with them to stop.

When the thing was done and the mob drew back, a young warrior lay propped against the wall among the debris, staring at the stump where his arm used to be. Perfectly cauterized, the wound did not bleed, but the severed limb twitched on the floor and a sudden silence fell.

“Now see what has happened,” said Trissk in loud reproof. “The elder said to leave the maintenance bots alone, but you disobeyed him and now you have maimed a fellow warrior.” He really did not feel much sympathy, as the amputee was one of the fools doing the hacking. “Are we Ryss warriors or are we moor-cats?”

Those in the front hung their heads in shame.

Taking his cue, Chirom stepped forward. “You younglings and yearsmanes, you must listen to your clan elders. Do not attack without consent of your elders, who have fought the Meme before. I say again, maintenance bots and machinery are not our enemies – only the armed drones and the AI itself. You, you,” he pointed at the two he judged most at fault, “help this fallen one back to our mothers and sisters in the warm-room, so that he may live to fight another day. The rest, follow me.”

More calmly now, Chirom led the Ryss deeper into the ship. After another thousand strides they came to a great sealed door. “We must break this open. Desolator is inside.”

Five thousand meters was point blank range for the maser that ran through the spine of his fifty-meter-long fighter craft, but he was less than sanguine about its effect on a mechanical target. Microwave lasers were excellent for killing living Meme ships, but they had highly variable effects on inorganic materials. It all depended on the wavelength employed; he had his set for best effect against ferrous metals, but who really knew?

Sixty Crows flew in a loose formation in full view of the massive grounded ship.
We’re bait,
he realized.
If that thing fires, some of us will die in a heartbeat. Absen is a coldblooded one. Let’s hope he’s right in thinking it’s not going to initiate an attack against overwhelming odds. Now that it’s on the ground, there’s no way it can win, but it can still hurt us badly.

High above the fighter cover,
Conquest
cruised inverted, like an upside-down chocolate kiss. Every primary weapon on her teardrop shape pointed straight at the unknown vessel, and every eye on her bridge stared at the holotank that now in exquisite detail presented the events unfolding down below.

They watched as the skimming sleds approached from the direction of the scavenged base, keeping below the painfully near horizon on the tiny moon, until the very last moment. Telemetry showed that the lead pilots had dropped to less than one meter above the ice, risking impact with upthrust pieces of rock-hard frozen surface.

In the center rear of the assault formation, Bull’s HUD filled with the overhead view fed by a recon drone. The formation looked picture-perfect, all of the pilots combat veterans. His testicles pulled up inside him as the first sled crossed the horizon’s demarcation line, and he waited with roiling guts for the shot that would cut a swath through his men.

It did not come.

Seconds later they decelerated brutally, approaching the massive ship. Glad in a way that he could not see it with his own eyes, Bull kept his HUD on overhead look-down mode, the better to give orders. It appeared as some complex virtual wargame to him, despite the fact that he was present inside of it.

Without opposition, the pilots followed their operational plans and flew their sleds straight into the rents in the structure of the alien ship. By so doing, the theory went, any point-defense weapons would only get the one chance to shoot before the Marines were actually inside their arcs of fire. After that it would be man to man in the corridors – a Marine specialty.

With the crash deceleration, Bull slammed hard into the inside of his shell. Despite biogel cushioning he felt as if he’d been run over by a truck. Nanites and Eden Plague kicked into high gear, healing his contusions and keeping him conscious, while his suit autodoc pumped nutrient solution and stims into his veins. By the time the sled came to rest he felt like he could lift a tank.

“Up and at ‘em, boys!” he yelled as the vertical clamshell popped open, and immediately grabbed his plasma rifle. Stepping out, he made the automatic turn to the ramp that every Marine could perform in his sleep. Eight of his nine men reached down as one to unbolt and hoist the semi-portable laser cannon from the deck and, like manic armored pallbearers, carried it rapidly out the gaping hatch and into the alien ship.

In front of him, Bull could see out over the ice moon through the ripped-away hull into which they’d just flown. Fusion flares far above showed where the fighter jocks hovered, but it appeared that was all for nothing.

As usual, all the hard work gets done by Marines,
he thought
.
“Let’s go, let’s go. Secure your objectives, kill anything that shoots but try to capture the organics if you can. Remember, the bipeds may be friendly, and the drones may be neutral.”

Noise and confusion broke into the channel, then the voice of Sergeant Major McCoy spoke in his ear. “Sorry to disappoint you, sir, but we’ve already come under fire from combat drones. Three men are down. The semis and plasma rifles look good to go against these things, though. They aren’t as tough as the Purelings’ war drones were.”

“All right, battalion, if you didn’t hear the sergeant major, shoot any armed drones or bots on sight at your discretion.”

“Bull.” Johnstone stepped up at ben Tauros’ elbow. “Let’s get going to the warm area. If the Ryss are there, I need to contact them as quickly as possible.”

“As soon as we can. Right now we got a smidgen of
tactical
stuff to do.”

“Just remember, the Ryss may be able to help us, and that may save lives – of your men, too.”

“Yes, mommy. I’ll be good,” Bull said sarcastically. He slapped the semi gunner on the shoulder and led the way inward toward the chosen fusion reactor, the laser cannon swaying between his men as they followed.

“Bull,” Johnstone said from behind, “I’m getting intel that six more fusion generators are coming online. Whatever that means, it can’t be good.”

“Right. Better and better.” Bull stopped at a corner and sent out an active scanning pulse from his motion detector, seeing nothing moving. Stepping out into the corridor, he realized he’d screwed up as he saw two squat autoguns pointing his way, utterly still. Without thinking, he leaped upward in the low gravity and hooked hands and toes onto a pipe in the ceiling above. Just in time: the weapons woke up and erupted with jolting fire.

Silent in vacuum, he could nevertheless feel the vibrations of shells exploding behind and below him.
Got to get them before they target me up here
… Hanging by one hand and his toes, he pointed his plasma rifle one-fisted and pulled the trigger. A wash of green melted one gun to slag. It exploded a moment later as its ammo cooked off, knocking the other weapon off its pedestal.

Still connected by thick cable, the live gun leaped about like a mad snake, firing in all directions. One shell knocked Bull’s rifle out of his hand, and another ricocheted off the ceiling and exploded against his arm, numbing it to the shoulder while cracking the armor. Suit systems pumped sealant into the damage, and he dropped slowly to the floor while a flood of Marines ran past him firing. In a moment the enemy weapon lay silent.