Desolator: Book 2 (Stellar Conquest) (14 page)

“Good point. The Marines will just have to get there and shut them down before they can do anything with that power. Pass all this information to the assault force.”

“On it, sir,” Khalid said. “Latest SITREP says still no encounter with the organics, nineteen Marine casualties due to automated defensive systems.”

“Tanaka, what’s that power spike look like now?” Absen asked.

“Still climbing, sir. Hard to say since we don’t have the specs but it looks like the reactors are running very hot. Either that or they didn’t have much shielding in the first place; getting lots of rad.”

“But still no weapons powering?”

“No, sir. Uh…yes, sir, now their forward portside particle cannon is powering up.”

“What’s its target?” Captain Mirza snapped.

“Not us…it’s the
Krugh
, sir!”

“Tell them to evade and pull back!” Absen ordered.

“Target that array and fire!” Mirza said simultaneously, then: “Oh, shit.”

In the near-vacuum of the moon’s faint atmosphere the enemy particle beam sparked ghostly in a meter-wide track, reaching straight toward the allied ship. At the same time
Conquest
’s own new primary projector, the adapted Hippo particle cannon, slammed its electromagnetic discharge downward and struck the offending weapon, creating a spectacular electrical display as it melted to slag.

Mirza ordered, “Ford, fry all their primary weapons that are not near Marines,” then waited for Absen to countermand, but he did not.

“
Krugh
is non-responsive,” Khalid reported.

“They’ve been hit hard,” Tanaka spoke from the Sensor station. “I show a loss of attitude control and main power.”

“Perhaps they –” Absen stopped and turned. “What’s wrong with the holotank?”

The rest of the bridge crew turned to look, seeing the icy surface of the moon depicted in exquisite detail, and a deep depression in its surface alongside remnants of the looted fuel-cracking plant.

“The holotank is working fine, sir…” Tanaka said in a shaky voice. “According to sensors, the bogey is gone.”

Trissk clutched at the door frame as gravity strengthened to normal under him, causing his knees to flex. Forgetting about the aliens for the moment, he turned back to the other Ryss with a puzzled look. “Desolator has turned on the gravitics again.”

At that moment he spied an alien figure standing in the corridor, obliquely in his view, where the rest could not see. This creature was smaller, which was to say, of ordinary size, unlike the large one that had shown itself first. It seemed unarmed, and raised its empty paws slowly as if in an ancestral blessing.

Trissk shook that thought from his head.
Their gestures are bound to mean things different from ours
, he thought,
but it’s still not a hostile motion.
He let go of the door frame and stepped fully into the doorway, hoping it would not be his last living act, and raised his hands also, a mirror of the armored biped in front of him.

Reaching higher, the creature released clasps at its neck and slowly lifted its helmet off. It paused and manipulated something at the back of its head before it completed the motion. He caught a glimpse of thin cables before they retracted.

It wasn’t so much the sight of the thing that he noticed at first, but the
smell
. Unfamiliar, musky, like at a bio-research facility he had visited once with cages crowded full of primates. Its face was apelike too, furless with pink skin, a fleshy nose and pale lips. Trissk’s instincts screamed
prey
. He forced those feelings down, glad that the others could not see it.

Removing its gloves, the thing held out its hands as if to inspect.
Four digits and only one thumb, rudimentary claws on their tips.
Instinctively, Trissk held his out as well, showing his own paws with their two opposing thumbs, one on each side of the three central digits; then he flexed his claws briefly out and back in again.

The creature raised its eyebrows as if in wonder, and slowly reached to touch, then to grasp paw to paw, as if to pull him forward. Instead, he lifted Trissk’s extremity firmly once, then lowered it, then released. Perhaps it was a ritual. Opening its mouth, what came out was almost intelligible.

“Yoo iss Rizz,” the alien said.

Gabble broke out behind Trissk, so he extended a quieting arm behind himself, waving them to silence. Breathing deeply to slow his hammering heart, rifling through his memory for the proper transliteration from the alien message, Trissk replied carefully and slowly. “Yes, we are Ryss. You are
Human
?”

The Human nodded, an affirmative gesture apparently shared by both races. “We arr Hoomun.” Sounds came from the helmet it carried and it – he? He
must
be a warrior –
he
held it awkwardly up to his fleshy ear to listen, then replied in his own speech. Changing back to the primitive Ryssan, he said, “Urr folk fight. Fight must stop. We not urr unemee.” He tapped his helmet, then made a fluttering motion into the air, as of insects escaping. “Tell urr folk stop fight. We tell orr folk stop fight.”

Grasping the Human’s meaning, Trissk stepped back to wave at the mass of nervous warriors. “They are trying to make a truce with us. Give me Chirom’s comm unit, quickly!” One of the younger ones sidled cautiously along the inner wall to hand him the device.

Stepping back into the doorway he held up the comm so the Humans could see, and then spoke into it. “All Ryss, this is Trissk, listen. I have made contact with the aliens that are called
Human
. They are apelike beings and are not our enemies. They want a truce. Everyone must cease attacks on them and pull back. Remember, it is Desolator that is our problem, and Meme are the only true enemy.” He had to repeat the gist of this message several times, but eventually it seemed most agreed to comply.

Addressing the Human again he said, “I have told all Ryss, but I am not in command. Please show restraint.”

At that moment a subsonic thrum went through the ship and Trissk looked up in alarm.
Primary weapons fire.
The last time he had heard that sound he had been a much younger Ryss, when
Desolator
had encountered a Meme patrol craft and destroyed it. The Humans did not react, and he wondered if their hearing might not reach into those low frequencies.

Immediately afterward, a more familiar noise and sensation manifested: the sound and feel of transition to photonic drive. “Wat iss it?” asked the Human. He had obviously noticed.

Trissk struggled to simplify his answer. “
Desolator
– this vessel – has engaged its main drive, to travel at maximum speed. It will outrun your ships.”

After a moment of almost comical concentration the Human asked simply, “Where to?”

“I do not know. The artificial intelligence in charge of this vessel is not sane, and is not under our control.”

Human and Ryss stared at one another for a long moment of shared consternation.

“All right, here is what I know.” Spooky gestured at the screen on the wall that illustrated his words with photographs. “The island has only about three hundred inhabitants. Most of them are fishers, with some tourism. Most live in this one village, Omio. Their tech level is what we would call late twentieth-century, a bit behind the major cities. Telephones, radios, televisions, and one satellite uplink that handles everything. It was this facility that was used to send the signal.”

“So what do we do?” asked Jill. “Sneak in, grab the station boss, question him?”

“No, it’s easier than that. We hack their computer.”

Jill stared at Spooky. “So what do you need me for? You’re far sneakier than I am. You could have just gone in and done that without me.”

Spooky’s lips curled up and his eyes crinkled in amusement. “Two reasons. One, it’s a bio-computer. Ezekiel is the only one of us who can access it – and there’s no guarantee that even he can.” He plucked a cigar out of the air and drew in a mouthful of smoke, savoring it.

Jill asked, “And two?”

“What I told you at your flat. You needed to get out. Do something.”

“That’s it?” She glared at him in disbelief.

“Oh, I didn’t mention the third thing, did I?”

“No,” her voice dripped sarcasm, “you didn’t.”

“You’re going to provide what they call in the business, a ‘diversion’. You’ve heard of those?”

“I have a faint recollection,” Jill replied dryly, “but I’m still suspicious that reason number two is what decided things.”

“I could have chosen anyone,” Spooky snapped. “We needed a third. Why not you?”

“Why not Shades?” Jill snapped back. “He took the last mission.”

“He’s on Enoi,” he replied, naming Koio’s moon. “Besides, he didn’t accompany me on seventeen separate ops back on Earth.”

“That was different. We were liberating people from prison camps.”

“No difference,” Spooky denied. “An op is an op. If it needs to be done, we do it: isn’t that what we used to say?”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “We also said that we hand-pick the best team for every op, which contradicts what you said about why I’m here.”

Spooky shook his head slowly. “No, Jill. You were always my first choice. I just knew you’d need more reason than that. And as hard as you might find this to believe…that hurts.”

Jill furrowed her brow, then reached to pluck the glowing cigar from his mouth and take a drag. “Bull. Shit. Bullshit.”

A grin broke onto Spooky’s face. “Yeah, but it was pretty good bullshit, don’t you think?”

“I never know with you. That’s the problem.” She flicked the cigar away and it vanished into the air.

Ezekiel cleared his throat from where he had been sitting patiently, arms crossed. “Tran, you’re getting off track. Mission?”

Spooky glanced sharply at Ezekiel, then stepped back and straightened his tunic. “Right. Here’s the gist. We come up to within two meters of the surface just after midnight, here.” He indicated a spot three kilometers up the coast from the village, past where a line of fishing shacks ended. “We surface and swim to shore, then split up. Ezekiel and I head here, to the center of the island, which is its highest point and the location of the uplink station. Jill, you will go here,” he pointed at a large building on the edge of the village, “and start a fire in their fish processing facility.”

“You want me to destroy some peoples’ livelihoods?”

“Better than having to kill some of them, don’t you think? We haven’t been able to perfect a nonlethal for Hippos, you know.”

“I know,” Jill grumbled. “These people are our allies, and most of them are just peasants.”

“I thought you might say something like that, so I brought this.” Spooky held out a small cloth bag. When Jill took it, he said, “Open it, look inside, but do not touch.”

She did. Inside she saw couple of dozen octagonal disks. “Obols. Hippo coins, high denomination.”

“Just scatter them around, or if you can, arrange for someone with lots of yellow to find them. Best we can do.”

“Spooky,” Jill said with some surprise, “that’s almost…compassionate. And foolish too. It will compromise the op. Any Hippo Yellow will be able to taste the coins and know humans handled them.”

Ezekiel laughed. “Have some faith, Jill. The obols and the inside of the bag is coated with the calling card bio-signature of a pro-Meme insurgent group. They will assume someone dropped them during their raid. Just you make sure you keep the bag, or burn it in the fire.”

“Pro-Meme insurgent group? What? I thought the Hippos were all with us! How come we don’t hear about this?”

Ezekiel replied, “No race is monolithic, probably not even the Meme. Politics and opposition flourish within any society. If you’d been paying closer attention to the Hippo media you might have picked up on that.”

“Hey, motherhood is a full time job,” Jill said defensively. She mumbled, “Damn, Spooky. I was wrong, you were right. I did need to get out, get sharp again.”

The Vietnamese shrugged and smiled. “Let’s go over the details.”

“Trying to track it, sir,” said Tanaka.

“General Kullorg on the comm,” Khalid called.

“What’s their status?” Absen asked.

“More than fifty percent casualties, and
Krugh
is crippled, with no drive function.”

“Get the
Booker
and
Temasek
over there with those engineers and do what they can to help. Other than that, tell him we don’t know anything yet,” Absen said. “Any idea why they hit
Krugh
and not us?”

“They took one cheap shot and left…” Ford muttered. “Maybe they thought
Krugh
was faster, or an easier target…” He shook his head, bereft of possibilities.

No one else on the bridge seemed to have any ideas either.

Absen waved his hand in the air as if to dispel the confusion. “Move on, but let me know if anything occurs to anyone; I have a feeling it means something. Tanaka, how about that analysis?”

Tanaka replied, “Been scanning with everything I’ve got, sir…fired a lidar pulse at the bogey’s last position… nothing. Magnetometers, gravitometers, radar – it’s just gone.”

“Could it be some kind of stealth technology? A cloaking device?”

“If so, it’s perfect. There’s no heat trace, no damage to the surface, no sign of fusion engines or thrusters…”

“Launch a sensor drone at it. Control it manually if you have to, just so something physical passes through where it was. I want to be sure,” Captain Mirza ordered.

“Aye, sir,” Tanaka replied. “Launching…now.”

Everyone watched tensely as the tiny robotic missile descended toward the surface, hammering the area with active radar and lidar, its sensors wide open. More than a minute later, it smashed itself to nothingness in the indentation where the unknown ship used to be.

“I have something, sir,” Tanaka said tentatively. “I’ll show you…” The holotank changed colors, brightening then dimming, eventually showing the same scene but with a ghostly streak about the size of the ship leading away from its former position. “This is recorded from immediately after the thing disappeared. It’s an enhanced display of ionized and fused trace gases in the moon’s minimal atmosphere. That might as well be vacuum for most purposes, though it’s slightly more dense than interplanetary space.”