Deathstalker Rebellion (14 page)

“It’s coming,” said Cross. “I have it in my sensors. Its speed is incredible.”

“Put it on the viewscreen,” said Silence.

The scene on the viewscreen changed to show the great glowing curve of Golgotha, and the darkness and the stars beyond. One of the stars was moving rapidly toward them, jumping in size as Cross increased magnification. The alien ship finally sprang into view, and Silence leaned forward in his command chair. The alien craft appeared to be a huge ball of sickly white webbing, tied and tangled together. It reminded Silence of a wasp’s nest or a cocoon. Insect imagery. The ball had no details of shape or structure and no identifiable technology.

“How big is it?” Silence said finally.

“About two miles in diameter,” said Cross. “I’m listening on all channels, but I’m not picking up anything from the alien craft.”

“Sensors indicate mainly organic material,” said Frost. “Presumably protected by some kind of force shield, but the few energy readings I’m picking up make no sense at all. No identifiable drive, or weapons, or … anything, really.”

“Try talking to them,” said Stelmach. “Maybe we can negotiate.”

“Unlikely,” said Frost. “Even the best computer translators take months to produce a working language. Besides, I’d say they’ve already made their intentions clear.”

“Damn right,” said Silence. “I don’t negotiate with butchers. Anything else on the sensors?”

“Getting some high-energy readings as we get closer, nothing familiar. Wait a minute. Something’s happening. The energy readings are building …”

Flaring energy leapt out from the alien ship, crossing
the intervening miles in a moment, and crackled across the
Dauntless
’s force shields. It seethed and hissed all over the shields, testing, searching for weak spots. Alarms went off all over the
Dauntless
as slowly, inexorably, the crackling energy tore through the force shields, seeped through the outer hull, and burst into the ship’s interior. Blazing light leapt out of workstations on that side of the ship, incinerating crew members where they stood. More alarms sounded every minute, and fires burned unattended in a chaos of screams and shouted orders. Emergency systems were bypassed, and the energy spread.

“Evacuate that section!” said Silence. “Get out as many as you can, and then isolate the section and seal it off. Set up a series of force shields in the corridors. See if you can slow it down at least. Frost, talk to me. What is that stuff? What is it doing to my ship?”

“Sensors indicate pure energy, Captain,” said Frost calmly. “But it also has definite physical properties. Possibly some form of plasma energy in suspension, but don’t quote me. It’s ignoring everything we throw at it. And if these readings are to be believed, the energy has begun to infiltrate our instrumentation in that section, subverting it and taking it over.”

“We just lost sectors H through K,” said Cross. “They’re no longer responding to central control, or auxiliary backups. Life-support systems are shutting down in those sectors.”

“Is everyone out?” said Silence.

“Most of them,” said Cross. “Those that didn’t get out won’t last long.”

“Evacuate the adjoining sectors,” said Silence. “Seal them off with as many interior force shields as we can generate. Any injured are to get themselves to the Infirmary. Everyone else is to stay at their posts. Investigator, any recommendations?”

“Our shields won’t hold back the energy for long, Captain. Defensive measures are strictly temporary. This would seem to indicate the need to take the offensive. If the alien ship has any force shields, my sensors can’t find them. It’s looking more and more like our best bet is to hit them with everything we’ve got and see what happens.”

“I was hoping we’d have something else we could try first,” said Silence. “I don’t like playing our main hand this
early. But needs must prevail when the devil drives. Gunnery Officer, target the alien ship. Hit it till its shields go down and we start inflicting actual damage, and then break off and stand by for new orders.”

The
Dauntless
’s disrupter cannon opened fire in sequence, one after another, maintaining a constant barrage of destructive power. Strange energy fields suddenly flared into being around the alien ship, shimmering fiercely. The disrupter cannon pounded away at them, but they held firm. Within the
Dauntless
, the strange crackling energy spread slowly but inexorably from one section to the next, infiltrating and subverting essential systems as it went. Life support was going down sector by sector. Crew members died at their posts, or running for their lives.

A workstation on the bridge exploded suddenly, throwing its operator lifeless to the floor, his clothes and hair burning fiercely. Strange energies danced on the bridge air like heat lightning. Silence yelled for people to back away from the blazing workstation, but for everyone else to hold their posts. Fires licked along one wall, hot and blazing.

The disrupter cannon fired and fired, and suddenly the alien ship’s fields went down. Chunks of the sickly white webbing were blown away into space. And as suddenly as that, the strange energies infesting the
Dauntless
disappeared. Workstations returned to normal, emergency systems began taking care of fires, life support was reestablished, and the attack was over. Silence ordered the disrupter cannon to break off firing, but to stand ready to resume the attack as necessary. The fires went out, the injured were helped, and the dead were dragged away. When the last alarm went off, it was eerily quiet on the bridge.

“All right,” said Stelmach. “What do we do now?”

“We board the alien ship,” said Frost. “We’ve done them some damage, but we have no way of telling how much, or how long it’ll take them to make repairs. So we’d better strike now while they’re still weakened.”

“Agreed,” said Silence. “I want that ship taken intact, so our people can take it apart and see what makes it tick. Especially, the shields and the weapons. We might have to face them again. But even so, given the state of the
Dauntless
, I can’t authorize more than a small boarding party. You, Investigator, myself, and a dozen marines.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Frost.

“You can’t leave the ship now, Captain,” said Stelmach. “There are damage reports coming in from all over.”

“Then, you deal with them. I’m needed on the boarding party. If only because I’m one of the few people here to have faced aliens and lived to tell of it. Cross, you work with the Security Officer. See he has all the support he needs.”

“Yes, Captain,” said Cross. “But I do feel I should point out that Regulations clearly state …”

“All right, you’ve pointed it out. Now, forget it. With all the trouble I’m in, a few more broken Regs are the least of my worries. You don’t need me, Cross. This ship is dead in the water. Just watch over her, and don’t let Stelmach get too carried away with his new responsibilities. Anyone calls, you know where to find me. Let’s go, Investigator. I want a close-up look at the kind of ship that can trash an entire city and starport and almost took out an Imperial starcruiser.”

“Right,” said Frost. “And with a bit of luck, we’ll get to kill some aliens, too.”

“There’s always the chance they’re playing possum,” said Stelmach.

“Then, they’ll soon be dead possums,” said Silence.

The
Dauntless
maneuvered carefully with the little power she had left to set herself alongside the alien craft, which made no move to acknowledge her presence. Sensors picked up no energy readings or life signs. Silence lay quietly in his hard suit inside the torpedo tube, listening to the reports over his comm implant. He didn’t place too much reliance in the sensors. He had a strong feeling the alien ship was still perfectly capable of keeping its secrets to itself. He stirred uncomfortably, as best he could. He was lying facedown in one of his own torpedo tubes, the shoulders of his hard suit brushing against the steel walls, and he barely had room to twitch his fingers, never mind attend to the itch that was building with slow malevolent intensity between his shoulder blades. Normally, he’d only have to wear a hard suit maybe half a dozen times in a year, and this was the second time in one mission. He sighed deeply and ran through his suit’s built-in diagnostics again. Anything to keep his mind occupied. As soon as the
Dauntless
got close enough, he was going to be fired out of the torpedo tube toward the alien ship, and he wasn’t looking forward to it one bit. Even if it was his idea. There was no entry port he could fly a pin
nace to, and blowing a hole in the alien craft big enough to dock a pinnace might have all kinds of unpleasant consequences. That just left climbing into a hard suit and knocking on the door the hard way.

Silence sighed again and wished he’d made time to visit the toilet first. The suit’s facilities were efficient but primitive. The inside of his helmet had nothing to show him but the inside of the torpedo tube, and whatever displays he felt like calling up. It felt like he’d been stuck in the tube for hours, but the suit’s timer, blinking officiously low on his left, insisted it had been barely twenty minutes. Silence wondered idly if this was what the inside of a coffin looked like, and then rather wished he hadn’t.

“Captain,
Dauntless
is in position,” said the Second in Command’s voice suddenly in his ear. “Launching now.”

Silence had an almost overpowering urge to say
No, stop, I’ve changed my mind
, and then pressure exploded around him, and he was shot out of the torpedo tube and into space. It was very dark, but the stars were very bright. They whirled around him in dizzy arcs, and then settled down as the hard suit orientated itself and its built-in computers locked onto the alien ship. The rocket pack on his back kicked in and nudged him toward the alien craft with a series of carefully considered bursts. The huge white ball hung silently before him, blank and ominous. This close, the tangled strands of webbing looked more like thick twisting cables. It also looked disturbingly organic. Alive. And quite possibly not nearly as damaged as it was pretending to be.

He could see the damaged areas increasingly clearly as he drifted closer. They were deep, ragged pits in the sickly white surface, sinking deeper than even his suit’s augmented vision could follow. The ragged edges of the broken cables hung limply, unmoving. Silence frowned and studied them closely. He kept thinking he saw some of them twitching just on the edge of his vision, but when he looked at them straight, they were still.

He could see Frost, coming into view beside him, and his sensors told him the dozen marines were spread out around him in a narrow curve. Their presence was immediately reassuring, and he began to breathe a little more easily. He hadn’t spent much time in actual space since his cadet days at the Academy, and he’d forgotten how cold and lonely it could be. Golgotha lay below him, great and golden and giv
ing him at least a sense of up and down, but the sheer size of space was horribly intimidating. And lovely though the stars were, they were a hell of a long way off. It was also a hell of a long way down, but he was trying very hard not to think about that. If anything were to go wrong with his suit, he could end up dying in a variety of really unpleasant ways. But nothing was going to go wrong. The suit’s diagnostics were fine, and its computers would get him to the alien ship far more safely than he could have managed on his own. At which point he would no doubt encounter some really disgusting alien life forms, more than ready to kill him in even worse ways. Join the Imperial Navy and see the universe. He smiled despite himself. He’d still rather be here than stuck helplessly back on the bridge, worrying about what Frost and the marines were getting into.

He concentrated on the alien ship growing steadily larger all the time. It filled space before him, expanding like a small planet as he drifted toward its surface. The white cables were now thicker than a landing craft, impossibly long as they stretched away in each direction, and pocked with small and large holes, as though something had been gnawing on them. Silence found that thought disturbing. What the hell could the alien craft have encountered in its long travels through the Darkvoid that had actually tried to eat it? He put the thought out of his mind and concentrated on his landing.

Silence and the Investigator and the marines drifted down onto the surface of the alien ship, like so many settling seeds on a forest floor, and collected on the edge of one of the holes the
Dauntless
had blasted in the outer surface of the ship. It was a good thirty feet across and went down at least a hundred feet. There was no telling how much deeper it went. The hard suits’ sensors couldn’t follow that far. Even though they should have been able to, Silence checked his other instruments. No ambient heat from the hole, no radioactivity, no magnetic fields, and only low traces of gravity. Maybe one-tenth human level. Whatever secrets the alien ship had left, it was keeping them jealously to itself. Silence activated his comm implant.

“
Dauntless
, this is the Captain. Do you hear me?”

“Loud and clear, Captain,” said Cross immediately. “Sensors are locked on your position, and we have full telemetry on your hard suits. Wherever you go once you’re inside the
alien craft, we’ll be able to follow your movements and advise you.”

“I feel safer already,” said Frost. “Keep your guns trained, Cross. Whatever happens, this ship is not to be allowed to escape. You will prevent such an escape with all means necessary, whatever the cost. Is that clear?”

“Captain?” said Cross uncertainly.

“Do as the Investigator says,” Silence said flatly. “She’s the expert here. If it comes down to the bottom line, we’re all expendable. The Investigator and I perhaps a little more so than others. We’re going in now. Let’s all stick together, people. And whatever we find inside this ship, don’t get distracted. I want information, not dead heroes. Investigator, if you’d care to lead the way, we can get this show on the road.”

“Of course, Captain.”

Frost stepped off the edge of the pit and began to fall slowly down into the great hole the
Dauntless
had made, helped on her way by short bursts from her backpack. Silence followed her, and one by one the marines came after him, in a long line of slowly falling bodies. The shoulder lights on their hard suits pushed back the darkness as they fell, but there wasn’t much to see. The inside walls of the pit were composed of the same thick white cables, pressed and twisted together. The controlled fall seemed to go on for ages, and then the floor of the pit loomed suddenly up beneath them. Frost touched down first, got her balance in a moment, and looked quickly about her, built-in weapons at the ready. Silence joined her a moment later. The massive cables beneath his feet didn’t give at all, bulging around him like waves in a frozen sea. The marines drifted down around him, dropping out of the gloom into the light like great silver snowflakes. They landed easily, with casual skill, and moved out to form a defensive circle around Silence and the Investigator, who was thoughtfully studying the floor of the pit.