The Orion Plague (34 page)

Not much frightened Stallers, but he was as
close to fear as possible right now – not because of the thought of
assaulting the enemy ship, but because of the sheer vulnerability
of his Guard Marines. Forty-seven remaining men, his eggs all in
one basket. It went against his instincts – he wanted to spread
out, so that one enemy missile couldn’t burn them all without ever
coming to grips.

He fervently wished that Earth had had time
to develop some kind of powered assault suit, so that they could
fly individually through space to the enemy ship. Even the assault
sleds were better than this, holding only a dozen men on each. But
the Colonel had said that they couldn’t afford to leave the pinnace
out of the fight and that the Guard Marines, with the full commando
nano, had the best chance of making it even if they did get
hit.

MacAdam was right, of course. If they got
close enough, his Guards could shoot across by jumping or on suit
thrusters, and like all the Marines, they had magnetic boots and
gloves. If that didn’t work, they had sticky-pads they could
activate, adhesive that was supposed to work in vacuum and on
anything.

His men cradled their XM-33s, a hybrid
weapon more like an automatic shotgun than any other terrestrial
firearm. The Marines had taken to calling them “blasters.” They
fired low-velocity exploding rounds, and vented the gas from their
caseless cartridges backward past the wielder’s firing arm to
reduce recoil. They’d test-fired them in low-G exercises inside the
launch bay and found it still took a lot of practice and skill to
keep from being knocked around in low gravity.

Stallers felt the pinnace shift, then its
magnetic launch rails shoved them gently outward, aided by the
ship’s spin. Now he was glad to be able to see out as he watched
the walls slide by and give way to open space, and then
weightlessness came. The view swung, and suddenly they were flying
next to a massive cylinder, with rents and broken fixtures reaching
outward as if to claw at them as they passed. Thrusters fired and a
moment later they were away, on their short, fraught trip to the
enemy frigate.

“Put your comms on the suit channel,”
Stallers said to the pilots. A moment later chatter filled their
helmets, clipped sounds of sled jockeys and the controllers back at
the Marine’s combat direction center. Now he strained to see
forward, trying to glimpse the cockpit sensor screens. Frustrated,
he activated his magnetic boots and went to stand behind the
pinnace drivers and try to make sense of what they saw.

The brutalized but still potent enemy
frigate sat in the center of one screen. As far as he could tell,
range was now six klicks and falling fast. Five. Four. Three. He
could see the thing now out the front window, a white sliver
directly off the nose. Two. One.

Nose thrusters fired, forcing Stallers to
grab onto the pilots’ seats or fall. His eyes remained fixed out
the cockpit windows, staring at a sight new to the eyes of men.

The truncated length of the frigate lit with
bright flashes where lasers impacted. Dark spots spewed bits of
debris and showed holes that disappeared after a moment. Stallers
could see sleds to the left and right, small and far but closing in
rapidly, converging on the enemy.

Abruptly hundreds of lights flared all
around them in the darkness and Stallers’ heart leaped into his
throat.
Some kind of alien defensive weapon?

***

The Captain watched the reddish flashes and
the black line on the frigate disappear, but the white pops did
not. Several larger red-orange blossoms followed. Absen winced and
Scoggins let out an audible moan as the bridge realized what those
represented: dying sleds, twelve brave Marines in each, snuffed out
in an eyeblink. They all watched for a bigger explosion, of the
larger pinnace and its fifty troops inside, but thankfully it did
not come.

It’s a price we all willingly pay
,
Absen thought, clamping down on his grief.
To lead well, you
must love your command, and to command well, you must kill what you
love.

Then the white blooms ended. The assault
troops were down.

If I was their captain
, he thought,
I would have spun my ship violently, making it impossible to
land. Am I smarter, more flexible in my thinking, or are they just
overconfident? Are they unused to real combat? What must it be like
to cruise through interstellar space for tens or hundreds of years?
Do Meme get rusty? In any case, now we have a chance.

***

As Stallers followed the flares toward the
frigate he realized they must be something launched by
Orion
. That surmise was confirmed as he watched white fusion
fires erupt from points around the periphery of the enemy ship, and
the human weapons were rapidly picked out of the sky, with stunning
precision.

Dozens burst and disappeared each second,
then one – two – three sleds exploded with sickening suddenness.
Stallers knew a dozen brave men and women were snuffed out with
each flash, then saw the lead sleds fire their automatic
retro-thrusters and launch their grapples. If those three were all
they lost, then twenty-eight sleds had made it onto the skin of
enemy ship.

Each sled sank its ferrocrystal-tipped
grapples deep into the alien, and in one of the serendipitous
happenings of war, the enemy frigate did not resist their grasping
claws. Its semi-intelligent skin that adapted to any attack made a
mistake. Thinking the familiar ferrocrystal was somehow friendly,
the integument allowed the grapples in, then closed over them as it
detected foreign material.

Winches reeled the sleds down and spinning
ferrocrystal saws cut holes where they pressed to the enemy hull.
In moments the Marines were in.

Stallers realized the frigate was truly
looming large in the front windows of the pinnace, a section well
away from the Marines in the sleds. He watched the pilots reach
forward and flip red covers upward, exposing switches that they
rapidly toggled. “Breaching missiles armed,” he heard the lead
driver say, then, “Launch.” The man mashed a button and he heard a
half-dozen clunks and thunks.

Stubby missiles streaked forward, struck the
enemy, and exploded. Their hot shaped charges burned holes in the
biomechanical skin, but the pits immediately started to fill –
to heal
, Stallers thought. The lead pilot slapped his
throttles and the pinnace leaped forward, lined up on the ring of
explosion points. “Brace for impact!” yelled the copilot and
Stallers rapidly strode the five steps to his crash couch, his
boots snapping on and off the deck. He had just clicked the harness
on when he felt the shock.

The nose of the pinnace punched through the
outer layer of alien biomachine, and its own healing action sealed
it tight in place. The copilot hit a large red slap-button and the
whole cockpit split, hinging apart in four pieces with a hydraulic
whine. A cross-shaped exit appeared, leading directly into the
enemy ship.

“Up and at ‘em, lads,” Stallers called over
the Guards channel, and his armor-suited men leaped up and clumsily
ran across the deck to the nose and into the throat of the
dragon.

The world morphed into an unearthly gauntlet
of heaving organic shapes. The first man in was thrown upward to
ricochet off the ceiling, then to float spinning through the air.
The next fired downward into the undulating floor, causing it to
draw back and away. The third yelled, “Use grenades!” and those
behind did so.

Each Marine carried a full suite of bomblets
in an armored box attached to his front. There were the standard
straight high explosives, shrapnel, and thermite. They also carried
some of the deadliest chemical weapons mankind had ever produced:
the most advanced nerve gas, blood and blister agent.

“HE first,” Stallers called as his men
pushed into the room, firing at the pulsing walls, ceiling and
floor. A dozen high explosives flew forward to blow chunks out of
the landscape. But the stuff closed up almost as fast as they could
damage it, organic healing like its own Eden Plague.
Too bad
their version doesn’t make them feel guilty about genocide
,
Stallers thought.

“Thermite!” he ordered next, and the
hot-burning devices arced into the room. With their external
pickups the Guard Marines heard hissing as of roasting meat, and
the living material pulled away from the hot sunlets until they
drifted weightless in a larger, less-crowded space.

“Bring up the flamethrowers,” Stallers
ordered as his men continued to pump explosive rounds into their
surroundings, driving back the walls of alien flesh. As soon as the
four men with the devices got there, he directed, “Hit the
thermites, force them against the walls.”

The four did as ordered, streams of flaming
napalm shoving the still-burning thermite grenades deeper into the
interior like carnival squirt guns on bobbing balloons. As the
interior filled with fire, the stuff of the ship drew back further
and further, until all of his command was inside the frigate in a
space the size of a volleyball court.

Stallers called to the pilots, “Pinnace,
this is Alpha One. Prepare to launch another round of breaching
missiles straight into the interior on my mark. I don’t want this
thing recovering. And use the forward thrusters to burn it if you
have to.”

“Roger Alpha One,” came the laconic reply.
“
By Land, By Sea, By Space
.”

“Bloody well right. Flamethrowers, cease
fire. First and third squad, keep up a suppressing fire. Second and
fourth, set breaching charges as soon as the fire goes out.” The
flame liquid contained its own oxidant, as no one had known for
sure what the atmosphere would be like inside the enemy ship.

Just then openings like sphincters rent the
walls, the ceiling, and the floors. In fact, weightless as they
were, there were really no walls or ceiling or floor. Through these
holes poured things like octopi, ropy soft-looking white spiders
that nevertheless caught the nearest men setting the charges and
tore limbs off.

“Flamethrowers!” Stallers yelled. “Their
armor is proof, danger close, do it!” The flame wielders sprayed
their napalm back and forth, until the octopuspiders twitched
crisping in flame. He tried not to think about the men whose suits
had already been breached by the attackers, and the fire that even
now licked at their flesh.
The nano will heal them
, he
thought.

He hoped.

Stallers switched channels while they
finished setting the charges. “Colonel, Stallers here, do you
copy?”

“Here, what is it, Major?”

“Sir, we’re in off the pinnace. We’ve been
hit by spidery things and I have several casualties; am placing
breaching charges now. Flame seems to be the most effective thing
we’ve found.”

“Use the chems when you run out of flame,
Major,” Colonel MacAdam replied.

“Aye, sir, will do. Stallers out.” He waved
an arm. “Get those men back in the pinnace.” His two medics
maneuvered the broken bodies of his casualties back toward the
relative safety of the boat. If there was life left in them, they
might recover.

“Fall back! Fire in the hole!” Fourth squad
leader called, and as soon as his troops had gotten some distance
the massive breaching charges detonated. Gobbets of flesh flew and
a greenish mist filled the atmosphere, making Stallers glad he was
breathing suit air. Holes gaped now in the perimeter, and Stallers
ordered his men forward. “Quarter and search by squads, just like
the plan,” he called, watching his men exit the room through the
new doors.

He scrambled back into the pinnace until he
could get his mag-boots on the floor, then checked his fallen. Four
bodies lay lined up and two others sat in crash couches attended by
the medics.
Six down, forty-one left
. “You two, catch up
with your squads. I’ll do what I can here.” The medics bounded off.
He heard them using suit thrusters as soon as they crossed into the
interiors.
Why didn’t I think of that?

Stallers got the two live ones bottles of
proto-nutrient drink to provide their nano with fuel and told them
to help hold the pinnace against any counterattack. Then he clomped
over to the edge of the floor where it met the interior of the
alien ship.

He opened the fitted box on the front of his
torso and selected a nerve agent grenade. “Pinnace, close the nose
and pressurize, clean up your air.” As the hydraulics whined he
stepped to the edge, keeping his magnetic boots attached long
enough to walk onto the outer skin of the boat as it closed. Then
he pulled the pin and tossed the chemical grenade.

These weapons were not actually in gas form
– rather, they were liquids that would rapidly aerosolize. The
grenade flew lazily across the room to explode against the
quivering wall.

Immediately the area turned black and began
to shrivel. The process proceeded and the blotch widened and
travelled, to eventually slough off a chunk of flesh the size of
several beef steers.
Not very efficient here, where there’s so
much flesh, but should be good in enclosed spaces.

He told the pinnace pilots over his link,
“Give me one minute, then fire off that set of breaching missiles,
and like I said, give them shots of hot thrusters now and again to
keep this area from healing. If you have to, pull out. No reason to
lose the pinnace. If we don’t win, we’re all dead anyway.”

***

Skull groaned as he came to. The back of his
head throbbed as if someone had whacked it with a baseball bat. His
entire body ached and his skin felt as if it had been stretched and
split.
Must have been acceleration
, he thought.
How many
gravities? Ten, twenty, more? Enough to kill an unaugmented man,
for sure. Hooray for nano.