Of Fire and Night (20 page)

48

GENERAL KURT LANYAN

A
fter the demolitions techs blew open the launching bay, the
Goliath
gaped open to vacuum. General Lanyan’s first group of armored trainees used maneuvering packs to swoop through the cargo doors. Time to get to work.

“Think of it as a pest-control mission, everyone. We’re going in to clean out an infestation.” The patter of responses in his helmet sounded uneasy, but professional. These kleebs had signed up for military service in time of war. In their bunks at the EDF training base, they had dreamed of seeing real combat. Now they were going to get it, in spades.

Even before the assault group had anchored themselves against the recoil, they unleashed covering fire against any compy resistance. Once the trainees locked magnetic boots onto the deck and stabilized themselves inside, they methodically completed the sweep with projectile guns.

The remaining Soldier compies in the bay didn’t have a chance. Metal and polymer shrapnel drifted out into space.

A voice clicked in Lanyan’s helmet. “We are secure.”

While EDF guards were stationed at all access points leading from the large bay deeper into the ship, Lanyan launched the second phase of the recovery operation. Hundreds of armed trainees in reinforced suits disembarked from the cavalry ships into the Juggernaut’s empty bay and set up their beachhead.

Lanyan needed to get these unseasoned soldiers ready for the hard task ahead of them, but he didn’t intend to give them an overly realistic scenario. These newbie commandos would get weak knees.

“Bear in mind that just because we’ve killed the engines doesn’t mean we’ve won,” he transmitted through his helmet comm. “This Juggernaut is crawling with Soldier compies, and you can bet your asses they still mean to hijack these ships. According to our database, two hundred and forty-two clankers were placed in service aboard the
Goliath
. The crew probably managed to take out a good number of them, but there’ll be plenty left for us.”

He strode into the bay, still talking. “In addition to the guillotine command that shut down their engines, I’ve already input a command string in the Juggernaut’s computer to lock down all lifts. That means the remaining compies are bottled up on individual decks.”

“General, can they overhear this chatter?”

Lanyan scowled at the cadet. “Not unless you’re dumb enough to be on an open channel, soldier.”

“No, sir, that would be against regulations.”

He gestured with a gloved hand. “We’re going to clear this whole bottom level and use it as our staging area. We’ll show the damned machines what it means to be methodical. Once we scrape the launching deck clean, I propose a direct assault on the bridge. We can’t let the compies keep working on the systems or we might lose the whole ship again. Once we capture the bridge, then
I’m
in control, and it’s all over except for the bookkeeping. We can clean up the rest of the walking scrap metal at our leisure.”

He reminded his trainees to check their weapons, prepare spare rounds of ammunition, and adjust charge packs so they could swap out depleted components in half a second. By the book. When a chorus of shouts announced that the primary sweeper teams were ready, Lanyan instructed them to reanchor themselves to the deck. “When we open the door, there’s going to be an outrush of air. You don’t want it to bowl you over.”

Simultaneously, point men cracked open the access hatches that led from the bay to the interior of the ship. An invisible storm swept past them and spurted into space as the entire bottom deck emptied of atmosphere. Air was easily replaceable. Human soldiers were much more difficult to come by.

A dozen or so Soldier compies had crowded against each hatch, preparing to fight, but the sudden decompression gust took them by surprise. Many lost their balance; some were sucked out through the open hangar doors. A barrage of projectile fire blasted the rest back.

“Take them out of the defensive equation,” Lanyan lectured. “Just like in your lessons back at base.”

Now that the deck was open to space, wispy steam curled from beneath closed cabin doors. Splatters of blood froze to iron-hard paint on the walls as the remaining moisture boiled out of the crimson smears.

The sweeper teams split up according to the mission plan. Before suiting up, all of Lanyan’s people had studied engineering diagrams of the
Goliath
. Any recruit whose memory was faulty, or who simply couldn’t think straight in a panic, could call up projected diagrams on a backlit display within their helmets.

Now the pumped-up kleebs ran forward, yelling into comm lines at the top of their lungs. Unaffected by the vacuum, Soldier compies emerged into the line of fire. Lanyan felt a satisfying recoil against his shoulder armor as he fired his projectile rifle. A depleted-uranium slug drove the nearest clanker backward with enough force to topple two of its companions. Normally, no sane soldier would fire such powerful projectiles inside a spaceship: Superdense slugs could easily puncture a hull or shatter a porthole. Right now, though, Lanyan didn’t give a damn about a few pinholes or cosmetic damage to the Juggernaut. Those things could be fixed.

Lanyan’s trainees continued to fire. Destroyed compies clattered aside while others emerged to take their places. “They keep coming, General!”

“So keep shooting. The reason the damned clankers succeeded in the first place was that they took our people by surprise. This time there’s no excuse.”

Lanyan barked at them to stay in formation as he moved down the corridor door by door, opening each chamber, destroying Soldier compies hiding inside bunk rooms. This mission reminded him of his younger days, when he had trained for urban warfare, prepping EDF soldiers to raid rebellious colony towns that had thumbed their noses at the Hansa Charter. But fanatic rebels were a lot softer than compies. . . .

Human bodies lay strewn on the floor or stuffed into closets and storage chambers. When the greenhorn soldiers looked at their dead comrades, Lanyan knew they were ready to puke into their faceplates. He had to turn that emotion into vengeance. “Compy butchers! Are we going to let them get away with it?”

“Hell no, sir!” One of the recruits next to him opened fire with a yell, knocking down three compies coming down the corridor.

Lanyan’s team reached the end of the hall after purging each sector. It took the better part of two hours before he declared the
Goliath
’s lower deck secure. Seven trainees had been killed in the methodical assault. Acceptable losses.

The General stood in front of the closed lifts at the end of the hall and addressed the breathless commandos. “This is going to be tight. The only bridge access is by these two lifts, one on each side. That creates a strategic bottleneck, since we can only get a small group of you in at a time. No telling how many compies have holed up on the bridge.”

He swung his gaze around through his faceplate’s limited field of view. “I’m going to lead one charge myself. Ensign Childress will take a group up the second shaft. Childress, pick fifteen of your coolest sharpshooters and crowd them into the elevator car. I’ll do the same here, and reactivate both lifts. On my mark, hit the bridge selector so that both groups arrive at the same time.”

“Agreed, General!” Childress’s voice was husky and eager. “May I suggest, sir, that we limit our weapons to energy dischargers? D-U slugs will make macaroni of the bridge control boards, and I assume you want to fly the
Goliath
out of here at the end of the day?”

“Good point, Ensign. So ordered. Switch to energy scramblers.” Lanyan swapped his projectile weapon for a soldier’s stun-pulser. Having watched his fighters clear the lower decks, he tapped the ones who had been the most proficient. Together, they waited at the lift door. His kleebs were acting like a real team, real soldiers. They were getting the hang of this.

When Lanyan used his command codes to restore power to the lifts, the sealed elevator doors slid open—releasing a Soldier compy like a spring-loaded jack-in-the-box. The reeling compy knocked Lanyan over. Two trainees immediately fired a scrambler burst, and the ruined machine jittered and fell heavily on top of the General. “Get this clanker off of me!”

The soldiers lifted the hulk away and helped Lanyan to his feet. Two of the servo systems inside his armored suit had been knocked offline, so he delayed the bridge-assault teams just long enough to reset his suit controls. When all the lights blinked green, Lanyan transmitted to Childress, “Let’s go.”

He and his chosen group crowded into the first lift. It reminded him of an academy stunt—how many EDF troopers could fit into a ship’s elevator?—but there was nothing fun about this operation. At his signal, the two lifts shot upward, arriving in unison at opposite sides of the captive bridge. The doors slid open, and the sweeper teams boiled out.

Energy weapons crackled around Lanyan. Circuitry-numbing bolts played across the first two trainees as they emerged onto the bridge, freezing their suit servos and turning the kleebs into statues.

“Watch who you’re hitting, Childress!” Lanyan bellowed, assuming that the opposite team was firing.

“It’s not us, sir. The clankers have their own weapons. Must’ve seized them from the
Goliath
’s armory.”

Lanyan ducked out of the way as the firing continued. Static discharges ricocheted like lightning in a bottle. This pitched battle was the compies’ last stand. The military robots advanced with the sheer weight of numbers. Lanyan froze a clanker in front of him, then kicked the energy weapon out of its metal hands. Even he hadn’t expected so much resistance. “Why the hell are so many of them up here?”

Then he noticed that the bridge’s command modules had been pried open, circuitry boards removed, systems wired up to bypasses. After the guillotine command had shut down the Juggernaut engines, the compies had indeed tried to reconfigure all systems to restore control, as expected.
I’ll be damned if they wouldn’t have succeeded in another hour or two
.

Right now, the compies must be doing the same thing aboard all the other paralyzed ships. A ball of ice formed in his stomach. They had to hurry.

Realizing he had stopped shooting, Lanyan blasted another military robot that came up behind one of his trainees. Three members of Childress’s team already lay motionless on the deck. Lanyan didn’t count the time, didn’t count the number of targets, simply focused on any machine that was still moving.

When the mutinous robots had been eliminated, the sudden calm felt eerie. Childress shot three more blasts into a clanker already sprawled on the deck.

Unable to believe it was over, Lanyan looked at his forearm display, checked the external pressure, and saw that the air was still breathable. He cracked open his faceplate and took a deep breath. The bridge smelled like smoke, ozone, burned circuitry, and spilled blood. Even so, it was better than the inside of his helmet.

The
Goliath
’s bridge crew lay dead, mangled human bodies discarded under the control stations. The captain and bridge officers had put up a decent fight, but were overwhelmed.

Lanyan studied the exposed circuitry modules on the captain’s chair. “We’ve got some housekeeping to do. Get our best computer specialists up here so we can reactivate this Juggernaut’s systems while other cleanup crews go deck by deck and clear out the rest of the clankers. And I want an inventory of all the robot bodies you find, so we can keep a halfway accurate tally.”

“Some of them are in too many pieces,” Childress pointed out.

“And some of them might be still hiding out in the air ducts,” Lanyan said. “I’d rather not get an unpleasant surprise.”

Though he tried to make his voice stern, he could not prevent a grin from creeping onto his face. All around in the open gulf of space, the rest of the hijacked Grid 0 battle group waited for him. But this Juggernaut was his again. A good start.

“We’ve got one of our ships back. I’m proud of you all, but it’s going to be a long day yet.”

49

BENETO

B
eneto watched the hundreds of towering verdani seedships preparing for war. With their thorn branches outthrust, he could sense the pulsing drive, the anger toward their mortal enemies. Gathered now, these organic battleships were ready to destroy the hydrogues after the holocaust ten thousand years ago.

But it wasn’t the only war. The worldforest thrummed with the last cries of green priests trapped on EDF vessels as berserk Soldier compies slaughtered every human they found. Desperate telink reports splattered like hot blood across the verdani mind. The seeds of this current treachery had been planted long ago. Through worldforest memories, Beneto knew how Klikiss robots had used that previous war to set up a betrayal that exterminated their creator race. Now it seemed that Soldier compies had done something similar to humanity, taking advantage of the greater conflict. And there was nothing he or the worldtrees could do to assist the EDF.

Knowing the inevitability of the upcoming clash with the hydrogues, and aware of his special responsibility, Beneto stood before the nearest landed treeship, which thrust up to the sky like a many-tipped spear. He had been created as an avatar of the worldforest, a link between the tree mind and the human race. He had to understand these incalculably old organic battleships.

A part of him knew that he had to go inside. The gnarled trunk was covered with golden plates thicker than the bark of a normal worldtree, as impenetrable as a dragon’s armor. Beneto pressed his wood-grain palms against the overlapping bark scales, and a vertical perforation appeared down the trunk, parting for him like a wooden mouth. He entered the giant treeship, and the wooden portal closed behind him.

The winding interconnected passages were smooth, as if made by a giant burrowing beetle. Beneto went deeper into the core, trailing his artificial fingertips along the walls and
feeling
where he should go.

The vessels had taken flight ten millennia ago, drifting on the cosmic winds. They had traveled far from where hydrogues had once fought the worldforest, where wentals and faeros had clashed, flying away like sparks from a windblown fire. But they had been summoned back.

He reached the immense tree’s nerve center, a vaulted chamber akin to a warship’s command bridge. Wooden pillars dripped like stalactites fused into a support framework. At the center of the chamber sat a half-dissolved creature overgrown by cellulose drapings.
The pilot
.

Beneto could make out the elongated head, angular chin, and upswept cheekbones. The close-set birdlike eyes seemed to be little more than knots of wood. This creature was not meant to appear human, had never been human. An unknown alien species.

The pilot turned its nearly fused head, and Beneto faced it. He could hear whispered history through the immensely complex library of worldforest memories.

Long before humanity had begun to build cities on Earth, some other race—now lost to all records, hidden even in the folds of the verdani mind—had served as green priests in the first war with the hydrogues. After so much time aboard the verdani battleship, little more than a wisp of the original life form remained, just this tiny sculptured afterimage. But it was still aware, still serving the worldforest.

Fused into the soft, pulsing heartwood, the overgrown face lifted so that its birdlike eyes met Beneto’s. The two of them shared a destiny, and both accepted their fates. Without words, Beneto received a flood of the pilot’s experiences and knowledge, warnings and joys.

The alien brain was like a pattern of permanent stains on the battleship’s wood. Beneto absorbed the breadth of the long journey out of the Spiral Arm and into unknown reaches of the Galaxy. A cascade of centuries filled his mind, giving him a poignant understanding of endless time. Until now, Beneto had never had any concept of what
ten thousand years
felt like.

Now he knew what was to become of him.

The verdani requested the same commitment from Beneto to find other volunteers among the green priests, and the same sacrifice of life and time.

Then they asked him to help them create more giant organic vessels to throw against the hydrogues.
Many more
. And for that he needed to call on the assistance of the wentals.