Battlegroup (StarFight Series Book 2) (9 page)

Richard rose to his knees, one eye checking his infrared tracker while his other eye looked for movement. “Clear.”

Mentally he noted his helmet’s counter said there were 21 corpses scattered across the room. A different tracker showed the glows of his four Marines. Their hard shells all reported operational. Jerry’s orange Alert glow had gone to yellow Cautionary.

“Auggie! Wayne! Watch out for armed wasps! They’ve got some kind of tube that shoots lightning bolts!”

“Righto,” called Auggie over the comlink.

“Thanks,” said Wayne. “We’re entering some place that looks like a park.”

Richard rose up slowly, swinging his arms to cover the space before him even as his fellow Marines did the same. He looked back the way they’d come. The wall behind them glowed red in two spots where the bolts had hit. The red glows were shoulder high. If his people had been standing, someone would have gotten it in the helmet. Which would have either cut through the visor and killed that person, or would have killed all power in their suit.

“Jane! Tim! Jack! Didier! Grab whatever wall-mounted tech you can find. Whatever this room is, it’s got to have speakers in it. No way does a crowd this size do whatever they were doing without some kind of com tech.”

“I think they were eating,” called Didier from the right as the Frenchman moved to one end of the room, aiming for a square block mounted on the wall.

Richard saw his other Marines heading for similar wall-mounted blocks. He noted one side of the room had archways that led into a room filled with large tubes that glowed red in infrared. Some kind of alien kitchen? There would be tech in there too.

“Jack, go check out that kitchen place. See if there’s any tech in there.”

“Right.”

His chin-level vidscreens showed a 360 view of the room. He noted Jane heading back to the large hole blasted through the circular hatch by the mag bomb. She moved carefully, avoiding a full-on exposure. Richard liked that about the gunnery sergeant. The woman never assumed any location was safe. She always had her guns up and ready for any surprise. Which was why she had been first to fire her napalm rocket at the two armed wasps.

Richard moved back to help her cover the entry hole while his three Marines worked on dislodging the square tech blocks from the walls. He nodded at her black visor.

“Good aim.”

“Thanks,” came her raspy soprano. “We also gotta watch out for the stingers on the tails of these buggers.”

“Yup.”

Richard stuck his helmet out into the tubeway and scanned with his sensors. No lifeforms showed in either direction. He pulled an echo-sounder from his waist and dropped it on the floor of the room. One of his vidscreens lit up with orange spaces crisscrossed by black lines. “Jane, there are at least three decks below us. Whatcha think?”

“I think the wasps expect us to continue along this tubeway. I say let’s blow a hole and drop down to the deck below,” she said, her words coming fast. “Might complicate their defense efforts.”

“Agreed. Put one of your mag mines on the floor.” He stepped back. “Marines! Fire in the hole by the entry. We’re heading down!”

♦   ♦   ♦

Seven’s gut writhed with anger as the perception imager showed the death of every Swarmer in the Nourishment Chamber. Nearly four six-groups had died, including two Fighters who had risen with their lightning rods and fired on the Soft Skins. Who avoided the beams and fired back with a ball of exploding flame. Watcher units covered every chamber and every tubeway in his nest. The one that now fed him the view within the food chamber showed three of the five Soft Skins ripping pheromone signalers from the walls of the chamber. Why would Soft Skins remove something so common? If he were a Soft Skin he would aim for the Flight Chamber, where devices held the secret routes back home to Nest and to the other colony worlds occupied by his fellow Swarmers. Or he would try to remove the Pull Down device controller, if his nest were a Colony nest like the one commanded by Hunter One. While deadly, these Soft Skins seemed to have no sense of where things lay inside his nest. Even now the head entry group of Soft Skins entered the Practice Chamber, where no Swarmer flew due to it being night rest for some of his people. Time to change that.

“Servant!” he scent cast to the Swarmer in charge of within nest communications. “Awaken the resting Swarmers! Alert them to the entry of Soft Skins!” He looked to the Fighter Leader. “Fighter! Send your Swarmers to where a Soft Skin craft entered our tail end. Those Soft Skins could damage our weapons ring! Hunt them! Hunt their craft!”

“Awakening those Swarmers,” responded the first Servant in a mix of signal and territorial pheromones.

“Sending Fighters to the tail of our nest,” called the Fighter Leader in a strong flow of excitement, defense and alarm pheromones. “Other Fighters are heading for the Nourishment hall and for the invaders near our front energy node.”

Seven watched the imagers on all walls of the Flight Chamber. Much was happening as some Swarmers awakened, while others gathered in caste groups and flew off to hunt for the Soft Skin intruders. Frustration filled him as he saw one group of Soft Skins, those who had killed his Workers as they fed in the Nourishment Chamber, create a hole in the floor of the chamber and drop down to another level of his nest. How much deeper might they go? He tilted his antennae at that perception imager.

“Fighter Leader! Send your best Fighters against that group of five Soft Skins in Nourishment! We must stop them before they reach the inner tubeways of our nest!”

“Sending new Fighters after those Soft Skins!” cried the Swarmer in a harsh flow of anger, trail and home pheromones.

Seven flapped his wings, lifting his abdomen off the bench below him. He held position in the air, his presence dominating all who worked within the globular chamber. He flapped his wings faster on one side to tilt over and view one group of imagers, then flapped faster on his other side to view a new group of imagers. Seven studied the many perception imagers as they revealed the movements of the three groups of Soft Skin ground crawlers. At least these invaders could not fly. Which meant they could not quickly retreat from his Fighters. His gut felt warm as his hearts filled his body with the energy to dominate all who served him. Soon, soon enough, he would dominate the Soft Skins!

CHAPTER FIVE

Jacob watched the front wallscreen as the three groups of Marines moved through tubeways inside the wasp ship. Each group’s first sergeant wore a shoulder vidcam that relayed what was happening. Every hard shell suit carried such a vidcam, but the Dart pilots who were transmitting the imagery to his ship limited the neutrino transmissions to just the leader from their ship. Below him Daisy and Aaron had stayed quiet as everyone on the Bridge watched the forced entries. The initial fire fights by the teams from Darts One and Two had cleared the way for them to advance. Now, Richard’s team was preparing to enter a room with an extra large door.

“Blow it!” called the chief warrant officer.

“
Kabooom
!”

Yellow flame and black smoke gradually cleared enough for him to see that Richard and his four Marines were already inside a large room filled with wasps gathered at a dozen or more pillars that had tubes sticking out from them. Some wasps had their mandibles clamped onto the tube ends, while most of the red and black-striped wasps were on the room floor, knocked there by the blast shockwave.

“Kill ‘em all!” yelled Richard.

Yellow streams of flaming napalm reached out to envelope the closer wasps, while the booms of four shotguns sent solid shot to either side and ahead. Most wasps were hit by either flame or shot, and some got both. At the far end of the room, the vidcam image showed two wasps rising up. Each held a long tube in their chest arms. Their large wings flapped so fast he could hardly see them.

“Scatter!” boomed Richard’s deep voice.

Two yellow lightning bolts streaked through the room, just missing the Marines. All were on the floor, their arms with the flame thrower and shotgun attachments briefly silent as they rolled in every direction. But one Marine’s hard shell was still. From its backpack erupted a black rocket. Which shot toward the two wasps.

“Oh!” said Daisy as the rocket became a ball of yellow napalm fire that reached out in all directions.

A few wasps not hit by the initial attack now staggered about with yellow patches of flame adhering to their backs, wings and even a few heads. They quickly fell to the room floor and became still. In a few seconds the entire room became quiet, with a good twenty wasp bodies lying in contorted positions. Slowly the Marines stood up, their outstretched arms aiming their shotgun and flame thrower attachments in whatever direction their arms pointed.

“A good take-down,” Aaron said, his tone tense.

“Chief O’Connor is a fine leader,” Jacob said, meaning what he said.

Up front on the left side of the arc of function stations filled by his nine Bridge crewpersons, one turned toward him. Rosemary of Tactical looked very sober. “Captain, that team has not yet captured any wasps. Nor have the other teams.”

He nodded. “You all heard what O’Connor said. They’re moving to capture tech stuff now. Once they have all the tech they can carry, they will take captives on the way back to their Darts. He’s in charge. They’re doing what needs to be done and I support him, totally.”

Silence resumed on the Bridge as everyone watched the live action vidcam images that filled most of the front wallscreen. While some crewpersons on every ship in the battle group had live fire, live combat experiences, still, watching one-on-one deadly fighting was new to many of his people. Including himself and Daisy. Watching spaceships explode in space, or become flaming clouds of plasma as they were hit by an antimatter beam, did not hold the immediacy of what they all now saw. Jacob did not enjoy seeing living bodies filled with red-bleeding holes, or flame turning black the colorful bodies of the wasps. But these aliens had been the first to attack his people, beginning with the sneak attack on the meeting site. Now, they were on the receiving end of human vengeance. That, he felt good about.

♦   ♦   ♦

Richard scanned the room they had dropped into. No live wasps, according to both his eyes and his infrared tracker. He stayed in a squat, his arms outstretched, as Jane gestured the rest of the team to head for the two circular doors that lay at either end of the long rectangular room. The five of them had landed in a central open space. In all directions were low benches or elevated rods. White-yellow light shone down from the ceiling five meters above. The drop had not been hard, thanks to the half gee gravity in the room. He noticed there were several black rectangles affixed to the room walls. One of them held a colorful image of a landscape from some world. In it wasps flew about, dodging purple and green trees, a few dropping to sip water in a small pond fed by a woodland creek. Other wasps wore straps about their chests and abdomen that carried silvery metal tubes, blocks and whatever. The vidscreen imagery seemed to show some kind of landscape survey. For what he had no idea.

“Chief,” called Jane. “There are square blocks here too,” she said, gesturing at the space above each circular door. “The black rectangles look to be vidscreens. Grab some?”

“Yes,” Richard said as he stood, then moved to join Jane where she stood to one side of an exit door, both arms aimed at it. At the far end, Tim did the same. He noticed small open trays lay next to each of the benches or elevated rods. Metallic things lay in most of them. He pointed with his shotgun hand. “Team, grab everything in those trays. Whatever it is, it’s metallic and might be tech.”

“Chief, could this be a dorm room? Wasp style?”

The gunnery sergeant had always been observant about her surroundings, both in simulations and while roaming the cafes at the Earth orbital station. “Could be. They’re flying critters. Birds like limb perches. These rods could be such perches. The benches, well, they might be beds. Or chairs. Or whatever the wasps rest on whenever they’re not flying about.” He recalled an image from the meeting site video. The wasps lined up inside the glass dome had each rested their long abdomens on narrow benches, while facing the senior officers with upright thoraxes and heads. “Yeah, these benches are seats or beds. The meeting site video showed similar stuff.”

“We’re done,” called Didier as he attached a black carrybag to his waist belt.

The bags were just some of the many items carried on or attached to the hard shell of each trooper. Richard had his own bag in his left hand. He reached down and grabbed three metallic thingies from a nearby tray, then stuffed them into his carrybag. “Gunny, the room above us. The food place. What’s the direction to the circular door we blew through?”

Jane looked his way. Her black visor kept him from seeing her brown face, which had a hummingbird tattooed onto her right cheek. She’d passed on the arm and leg tattoos favored by most Marines and had chosen the bird. He felt certain there was a story behind that choice. Maybe when they returned to the
Philippine Sea
he could prod her into sharing it.