Desolator: Book 2 (Stellar Conquest) (22 page)

“I am far too weary to put up with your bile anymore, crone,” Chirom replied stiffly. “I am only here to show you the threat is past, and to see if there are any Ryss heroes who can still fight.” Stepping past her as she choked on a reply, he began to walk down the rows of wounded.

“Are there any warriors here whose tails can stand?” he asked loudly, and a few, then several more, rolled or scrambled or dragged themselves to their feet. One lacked an eye, a simple piece of electrical tape across the socket. Others had paws tied to their sides, but most could still use at least one. Some had cuts and gashes and blood matted into their fur, but all were now upright. He counted perhaps twenty volunteers, of the hundred lying there.

“Excellent. While the aliens and the rest of our warriors attack
Desolator
’s head and claws, we will sink our teeth into its tail. Gather weapons from the females, heroes, and follow me.”

Chirom gave B’Nur an implacable look, and she acquiesced bowing, waving her sisters forward to place carbines in the warriors’ paws.

Flight Warrant Butler held still as Flight Sergeant Krebs sealed up his armor, and then helped him snap on a back-rack full of gear. Then he did the same for his flight sergeant.

While not augmented with physical cybernetics to the extent Marines were, all Aerospace Forces personnel had excellent equipment, as well as Eden Plague and combat nanites in their blood. Those enhancements allowed them to carry the weight of the battlesuits and gear, but they wouldn’t be running and jumping through the ship like Marines.

That was just fine with Butler, as he didn’t intend to go charging toward the enemy.

Their sled was wedged in to the corridor good and tight, half-turned with its nose up in a corner. Dropping the rear ramp had allowed them to squeeze out and shove aside some wreckage – enough to assemble their gear – but the vehicle was not going anywhere soon. Not unless he wanted to try blasting and melting his way out with his drive and thrusters, but that might be asking to be trapped inside like sardines in a can.

Hefting his PRG, Butler and Krebs scuttled heavily among the debris of the corridor for a hundred fifty meters or so. At that point they had to stop, because something heavy had broken through the overhead – a piece of machinery of indeterminate usage, all gears, belts and hoses. He thought it might be an air handler for the ventilation.

“Can’t get past,” Butler grumbled to Krebs. “Looks like we can climb to the next deck, though,” he said as he craned his neck upward. The battlesuit made it hard to see without actually leaning back.

“Let’s get to it, then,” Krebs stolidly replied. The man had little imagination but he was dependable. He put one foot above the other and climbed.

Once atop the pile, he reached up and chinned himself to peer onto the deck above. “Hmm,” he mumbled. “Looks okay.” Laboriously he pulled himself onto the next level, and Butler followed right behind, giving Krebs a shove the last bit. They both lay there for a moment, then scrambled to their feet and looked around.

They found themselves in a room with several of the same type of machines that had crashed through the deck. There was nothing above that would seem to have caused the collapse, until Butler realized the obvious. “The sled must have ripped into the overhead from underneath as we went by, and weakened the deck enough here that the weight of this machinery broke through.”

Krebs looked at the mess, then upward, then around, as if taking it all in. “Yeah.”

After waiting futilely for more, Butler asked, “I ever tell you what a great conversationalist you are, Krebs?”

“Ever’ chance you get, sir.” He began to walk between the dozen or so five-meter-high devices. “Ain’t none of them workin’ though.”

Butler realized that was true. Like much of this broken-down ship, this installation was derelict and possibly unusable. “Let’s look for an exit in the direction we want to go. Toward the stern.” He strolled slowly through the boxes that resembled nothing so much as cottages for robots, boxy and bangled with unknown gadgets.

“Here’s a door, boss,” Krebs said, pointing. Larger than the average human size, the portal was a sliding type, split in the middle like a lift. After a few moments they realized nothing they could do would budge it.

“Damn,” said Butler. “Is there another door?”

“How ‘bout that?” Krebs asked, pointing to where a large tube penetrated the wall above their heads. “Mebbe we can cut into there and just walk along it, crouched-over like.”

“Worth a try.” Butler reached for Krebs’ back-rack to fish out a monofilament saw. Carefully he cut a hole in the thin-walled pipe, then closed the device back up and stowed it. “Think you can get in there?”

“If’n I ain’t wearin’ this back-thingy,” Krebs replied, and turned to allow Butler to detach it, then did the same for the pilot. “Boost me up, boss.”

Butler helped shove Krebs up into the meter-and-a-half wide pipe, then handed up their back-racks and clambered up himself. Soon they walked, hunched over, through a long dark tunnel, their suit lights illuminating out to ten meters or so.

“You’d think there would be some vents in this thing,” Butler remarked.

“Mebbe it ain’t an air handler after all. Mebbe it carried water or sumpin’ else, long time ago.”

“Maybe.” After fifteen minutes of slow, uncomfortable creeping, Butler bumped into Krebs as he stopped and shut off his light.

“Sumpin’ up there, sir. Lights, movin, mebbe a vent. Let’s be quiet.” He set down his back-rack and stepped forward slowly and carefully.

Butler did the same, and soon the two men crouched next to a grilled opening that overlooked a bustle of mechanized activity.

It looked like a factory, assembly lines of robot arms and automated devices constructing some kind of bots or drones. Conveyors carried half-finished devices beneath the tube and out of their vision, so they were not able to see just what the final result looked like.

Butler activated his suitcomm and tried to reach the assault sleds, but got nothing but dead air. Switching from channel to channel, finally he reached Commander Johnstone. “Butler here. Sir, sorry to bother you, but you’re the only one I can talk to. My sergeant and I were trying to make it back to the other sleds when we ran across something funny. We’re deep in the guts of some kind of distribution tubes, and we came upon a factory that looks like it’s building machines.”

“What kind of machines?” he heard Johnstone ask sharply.

“Uh, can’t be sure. Wait one.” Retrieving the back-racks and pulling out the monofilament saw, Butler set it to its narrowest form and used it to cut a fingertip-sized peephole in the tube they occupied, opposite the grill. Putting his faceplate against the hole, he managed to maneuver his viewpoint until he could report. “Sir? It looks like war drones of some kind. Shiny little wheeled tanks with guns on them.”

“I think we’ve already seen some of those, up close,” Rick replied dryly. “I can’t get your location on my HUD. There’s some kind of interference. Where are you?”

“I think we’re about a kilometer aft and one level up from where we left our sled. Inside a big pipe.”

“I got the sled on HUD. I’ll pass this on to Major ben Tauros.”

“Sir?” Butler asked uncertainly, “What do you want us to do now?”

“Haven’t a bloody idea, Butler. If you want to be a hero, see if you can gum up their works. If not, sit tight and wait for the cavalry, or sneak away.”

“Roger that. Butler out.” He exchanged glances with Krebs. “You feel like a hero?”

The flight sergeant shook his head. “Nope. If’n I’d wanted to be a hero, I’d a joined the dang Marines like my dumbass brother.”

Butler lowered himself tiredly to a sitting position in the tube. “Guess we wait. I don’t want to move around too much and draw attention to ourselves. We did our job by reporting it.”

They sat there for a few minutes, just waiting, until finally Butler stirred and said, “Shit.”

“What?”

“I guess we should have joined the Marines after all.” The pilot reached for his back-rack and started removing gear from its many niches.

Krebs snorted, and began to do the same with his own. Soon they lined up two limpet mines and two rocket launchers with two armor-piercing rounds each, along with sixteen small fragmentation grenades and two gnat spy drones.

“What we gonna do, boss?” Krebs asked.

“Now we wait for the dumbass Marines to distract the machines. Then,” Butler made a bombing gesture with his armored hand, “death from above.”

Krebs sat down and got as comfortable as he could in their tight confines. “Good idea, sir. Thought for a minute I was gonna have ta mutiny on ya, sir. For your own good, like.”

“Shut up, Krebs.”

Bull allowed himself a feeling of cautious satisfaction as he reviewed the tactical situation on his HUD. His troops had disabled the six auxiliary reactors, as far as he knew leaving just the original three operational: one near the bow of the great ship, one in the center behind the AI’s vault, and the one halfway to the stern next to the Ryss living areas. He also assumed the ship’s fusion drive in the tail could provide auxiliary power. They would eventually have to take that one down as well.

The one far forward was his next logical target, but he was loath to extend his thinned perimeter so far. He’d been waiting for some kind of serious counterattack from Desolator for the last two hours, and he needed to maintain concentrated firepower in reserve to do that. Ditto the drive in the stern. The vessel was just too big for three hundred surviving Marines and their Ryss allies to hold, even though most of it looked like a junkyard.

Unfortunately the reactor the Ryss abutted was off limits. If it was disabled, their civilians would quickly freeze. If he had the time and personnel he could try to cut its conduits to whatever else it was powering, but that was far too tricky to consider right now.

That left the one near the center of the ship, right behind the AI’s vault. He’d stayed away from that area, as every corridor and intersection teemed with spider-drones and autoguns. Gnats had caught video of the first carrying and emplacing the second; it seemed they made an effective team. The robot cannon wasted nothing on mobility, and were relatively dispensable, while the shiny arachnids with them provided the ability to reposition and maintain a reserve, and to counterattack using their energy weapons.

Lucky for the Marines, their armor mitigated the war drones’ microwave bursts and resisted their plasma blasts, but lately it seemed they had been hit harder. Perhaps the AI was adjusting the maser wavelengths to be more effective.

Bottom line, it was time to go after the AI vault: to batter his way through the defenses and burn out the thing’s brain. After that, the Ryss had assured the humans, all opposition would cease. Bull hoped that was so.

On his HUD he saw his Marines surrounded the stronghold, keeping their distance, taking cover at intersections. Recon elements spread out on the decks above and below, to make sure the enemy did not use the third dimension to sneak over or under and counterattack.

It seemed an impasse, until one side made a move.

“Johnstone,” Bull called over his comm. “Can you get the Ryss to reinforce the decks above and below? I want to simplify my tactical problem as much as possible, and that means contain them to this one main deck. Post everything you have with the recon elements, to back them up. Our men will be the eyes and ears, and the Ryss’ job is to delay any breakout attempt until we can counter. Clear?”

“Clear, Bull. I’ll post myself on the deck above and keep the guys you gave me as a fire brigade,” he replied.

“Right. We’ll make a Marine of you yet.”

Rick snorted, but did not reply to that. “I also got a report just now from a pair of stick jocks from one of the disabled sleds. They were trying to make it back to the landing zone when they ran across some kind of factory making those mini-tanks we ran into. I thought they looked funny – so damn shiny. They must be brand new.” He marked them on Bull’s HUD.

“Damn,” Bull said. “That means the longer we wait the more enemies we face, and they’re outside our lines. We’re between the vault force and these new SOBs.” He thought for a moment and made his decision. “All right, we take out the factory before too many of them get built.”

Switching to the command channel, he said, “Captain Curtin, take charge of the recon and heavy weapons forces, and detach two line platoons to me. Bryson, take your company, minus heavy weapons and recon, and probe forward along this line.” He traced an arc on the shared HUD. “I will follow behind with the other two platoons in reserve. My intent is to assault along a wide front and then we meet resistance, you will flank and encircle while I send in the reserve where needed. Clear?”

“Clear, sir,” replied Bryson.

Two minutes later Bull strode through the ship corridors, watching with half an eye as a thin line of gnats scouted ahead. Opting to leave the recon Marines behind was a calculated risk; speed and violence would have to substitute for good intel this time.

Four minutes after that, Bryson’s troops reported contact with several of the shiny new wheeled drones. “These things are more dangerous than the spider drones,” the captain told Bull, the sound of explosions in the background. “They carry single-shot cannons that can bust through our armor with one shell. I’ve lost four men already, all dead, no wounded. The good news is they have no secondary weapons.”

“Optimized to kill us, rather than Meme, I’d say,” Bull replied. “This AI is friggin’ smart. It ginned up a whole new weapon to fight Marines. So fix them at the point of contact and advance along the flanks according to plan. I’ll send a platoon to reinforce.”

After sending off one of his two platoons to where the HUD showed the fight to be, Bull examined the tactical position. Two hundred meters wide, his forward line bowed inward, or rather, the outer flanks were wrapping forward as the Marines advanced. They curled to surround the enemy war drones, and soon he could see at least sixty Marines engaged with a dozen of the nasty armored robots.