Rebellion Ebook Full (10 page)

I nodded thoughtfully. Maybe we’d invaded their outer farm regions. If their plants operated as ours did via photosynthesis, they would need to be near the surface to collect energy from their star. Possibly, that was why we’d seen such a geyser of vapor. Water, air, relative heat and pressure—it all added up to a blast of steamy air.

“Move, everyone!” I shouted. “Get in there before they blow this section of their station back into space!”

My men surged, and soon it was my turn into the breach. I was very glad my suit was tough and impregnated with a self-repairing nanite layer. The breach was like a hot blade. We got through it, however, and one-by-one we floated inside. I had everyone leave their skateboards magnetically tethered to the external skin of the station. Whoever made it back out could use them to escape. Behind me, more and more marines kept pouring in. We’d only managed four breaches, and two or three hundred marines were going into each one.

“Sir?” boomed a familiar voice.

I turned and saw Kwon. I wasn’t surprised to see him, it was one out of four he’d end up here, and I knew he’d try to follow me if he could. I was surprised however, to see who he had with him.

“Lieutenant Marquis?” I asked.

“Yes sir. Glad to be here, sir,” she said. The woman was of normal height, but she looked like a kid standing next to Kwon. A shapely kid.

“You thought Joelle was dead, didn’t you?” asked Kwon. “I caught her.”

“You
caught
her?” I asked.

“Pretty much,” Lieutenant Marquis confirmed.

“I had one of those two-man skateboards,” Kwon said. “You know, the ones made for carrying heavier equipment. Anyway, I saw the ship blow up, and I knew she didn’t have time to get onto a dish, if she had lived. So, I watched for her and caught her when she went by.”

I stared. We’d built a slightly larger unit for some marines, most of them were used by medics to help carry their extra loads. In Kwon’s case, he was an extra load all by himself. I narrowed my eyes, finding a flaw in his story. “She should have been thrown out at an angle, or at least be heading toward the station at a lower velocity than you were.”

Kwon shrugged. “Yeah. I braked some and found her.”

“Risky, Kwon,” I said. I looked at Lieutenant Marquis. “Sounds like you owe him a drink.”

She nodded. “It’s a date.”

I turned away, shaking my head. “Well, you’re both alive in any case. Pull out your pistol, Lieutenant. You are assigned to scout duty.”

Kwon didn’t complain, and neither did Lieutenant Marquis. I directed her into a corridor. There were at least twenty tubes leading out of this hydroponic garden, and I wanted all of them explored before we moved. So far, we hadn’t made contact with any enemy aliens.

But that was about to change.

-10-

For me, it was something of a shock when the first charge came. I’d fought with this enemy before, but it had been a long, long time.

The aliens stood about four feet tall and had four hooves. They had hands after a fashion, each with three opposing digits. Their hands looked like tripods of thumbs. On top of their heads they had blade-shaped horns that thrust up like a set of antlers.

Unlike the Centaurs I’d fought aboard the Alamos when I’d first been taken prisoner so very long ago, these aliens were not caught in their bare, cinnamon-brown fur. They had suits on and they carried guns.

Four of them came galloping after one of my scouts out of a high flying tube and chased him into our midst. The aliens gunned my scout down, reducing his legs to smoking stumps. Their weapons appeared to be beam-based, similar to our own. I saw with shock of alarm they were
very much
like our own. They had backpacks that obviously contained reactors and beam projectors in their stubby hands. Thick cables ran back to the packs, just as our projectors were connected to our own packs. After they burned my scout down, they hardly had time to look up before my own men opened up on them and returned the favor.

“Well, there won’t be any questioning that group,” I said sourly. I couldn’t be too upset, however. After watching them murder one of our marines, I couldn’t expect my people to be full of mercy and waving flags of truce.

“They have our weapons, sir,” Kwon said, marveling at the steaming carcasses.

“Yeah. Because the Nanos gave them the same tech they gave us.”

Kwon didn’t reply. I suspected he was confused by all this. I gave him my surefire cure for confusion: I ordered him to mount an advance through the tunnel these Centaurs had come from to secure it.

“Don’t shoot everything you see, men,” I said. “We’re not here to exterminate them, as far as I know.”

That brought me to the next, unpleasant task. I needed to talk to Macro Command. As far as I was concerned, we’d achieved our objectives. We had penetrated the enemy structure as promised. Calling it
captured
might be a stretch, but maybe the Macros wouldn’t know any better.

I took up one of the communications boxes I’d loaded on each assault ship and connected it to a strand of nanites that led to the surface of the station. “Macro Command, this is Kyle Riggs reporting.”

Dead air. It was nice to be appreciated.

“Macro Command, we have achieved our objectives. We will now move back to our ships.”

“Mission Incomplete.”

“We’ve penetrated the enemy satellite. We’ve killed all the defenders that have attacked us. Our mission is complete.”

“Mission Incomplete.”

“Define requirements to complete this mission,” I asked, hoping against hope they didn’t want us to slaughter a million-odd Centaur civilians. I wasn’t even sure we could do it, given that their weaponry was as good as ours.

“Capture the enemy structure.”

I figured maybe we had another of our little ‘misunderstandings’ going. “What part of the structure would mark this structure as captured?” I asked.

“Interrogatives are not permitted—”

“Ignore that request, damn it,” I said, realizing I’d accidentally asked a question. From down the tube where I’d sent my marines, I could see flashes of light and shouts over the com-link channels. We’d engaged with another patrol, I suspected. It looked like these troops were firing back.

“Give me a destination point which I must reach to capture this structure,” I said in a commanding tone.

There was a hesitation.
“There are several such points.”

“Specify the nearest.”

“Drive propulsion centers for orbital suspension are located less than one mile inside the central cavity.”

I blinked. The engines for orbital suspension?

“Give me another destination point,” I asked, but I was already beginning to get a funny feeling….

“The thinnest point of the hull which would allow the venting of the central cavity into space is six miles distant, on the portion of the structure closest to the planetary surface.”

I had it then. I didn’t need a third hint. Option A was to destroy the engines that kept this station from falling down onto the planet. Option B was to blow a hole in the central area and depressurize the whole thing.

They didn’t want me to
capture
this place. They didn’t want me to kill all the armed defenders and force a surrender. They wanted me to
destroy
it. To kill everyone aboard. Maybe, for the Macros, the concepts of
capture
and
destroy
were synonymous.

Thinking hard, I ordered my men to stop their advance. I had to figure out what to do next.

“Colonel Riggs?” came a shout from the com-link a minute or so later. “Colonel Riggs, sir?”

“Here,” I said. It was Lieutenant Marquis. “Go ahead, Lieutenant.”

“I’m down here standing on some kind of grate. I think you should come see this, sir.”

“I’m a little busy. What is it, Lieutenant?”

Silence.

I stood up, thinking of Kwon and his drink. I didn’t want to disappoint him. “Lieutenant Marquis? Joelle?”

“It’s huge, sir…” she said.

I followed her signal down a tube that ran through the floor of the facility. Kwon loomed behind me. Did he seem nervous?

“You must really want that drink, Kwon,” I said.

“Yes sir.”

We found her at the bottom of the tube, sitting on a grate. Each hexagonal hole in the grate was nearly a foot across. I thought she might be thin enough to wriggle through, if she worked at it.

All three of us looked down into what could only be the ‘central cavity’ the Macros had identified. It was like looking down into a miniature planet. In this case, however, the planet was inside out, with the land curving up the walls. Wispy clouds moved in criss-crossed patterns. There was even air traffic, strange vehicles that glided through the skies. Further down, there were growths and structures everywhere.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it, sir?” Lieutenant Marquis asked me.

“This whole thing is hollow,” Kwon said. “The tubes and stuff on the outside, they feed it. The structure is like an inside-out planet.”

There were fields down there. Fields and forests and hills. It was like looking down upon a rural county back home, except they hadn’t cut everything into squares the way humans tended to do. They had a lot of curves to their paths and waterways. Really, it was quite entrancing.

“There must be millions of aliens living inside this thing,” I said at last. “And I’m not interested in killing them all.”

They both looked at me in surprise, tearing their eyes from the amazing sight below.

“Come on,” I said. “We’ve got a mission to perform.”

-11-

The whole story was much clearer to me now. These were the Centaurs—or the ‘goat people’ as Crow had preferred to call them. The Nanos had come here and attempted to save them, but they had failed. What was it
Alamo
had said? These people had lost to the Macros, because they had lost their planet. Well apparently they had lost more than their planet—they’d lost
all
their natural planets. But they still survived in these artificial worlds floating in space above them. How had they stopped the Macros? Most likely by cutting a deal with the machines. I knew from experience that the Macros were willing to deal, if they thought it was in their interest to do so.

I also could now better see how we fit into this grand equation. My offer of troops let them kill several birds with one stone. They could kill my troops by letting them fight against other difficult races, allowing us to eradicate one another. For all I knew, the Macros had had a truce with the Worms too, before they landed and let us out to ravage their world.

I began to get angry then. It was a deep-seated thing. My old anger against the Centaurs was slowly being replaced by a fresh hatred for the Macros. These machines had coldly played the biotic species off against one another from the start. They’d used us callously—as one should expect from machines. We were variables in their calculations, nothing more. Round-off errors. Bits of dust and meat best used to rip each other apart.

Sure, Centaurs had killed my kids that fateful night. And I had killed them in righteous revenge. But who had engineered the whole thing? Who had armed both sides, and sent them into a deadly embrace? Machines.

“There has to be a way to talk to these people,” I said to Kwon.

Kwon shrugged. “Must be. The Nanos did it. The Macros did it.”

I walked over to the communications box. First I ordered all my marines at each of the four breach points to look for a way down to the floor of the central cavity. I could tell now that we had all penetrated the outer skin of this habitat, and we were inside the structure, but the real battle would be waged inside the sphere-like interior underneath us. The ‘floor’ of the central chamber was parallel with the surface of the planet we orbited. I would have expected the entire structure to be rotating to produce gravity via centrifugal force, but instead the gravity was being generated artificially. Our sensor boxes indicated the tug of a gravity field would be felt once we got into the central cavity of the station, and although it was much less than Earth’s gravity, more like the Moon’s, we would be able to walk down there, if we moved out onto that artificial planetary surface.

After a bit more scouting, Kwon walked back to me excitedly. “There’s a lift system, sir. Several tubes that run all the way down to the floor of the main chamber. They are big, and should hold twenty or more men each.”

“How’d you find them?” I asked.

“We just followed the corridors. The Centaurs who came at us used the lifts to get up here.”

“Let’s go then, before they blow them up.”

We didn’t make it all the way down. I wasn’t really surprised. Some Centaur engineer was on the ball, and he shut off the lifts before we reached the floor of the big chamber. Occasionally, there were openings in the tube that showed us glimpses of the central cavity. We’d made it about half-way down, but most of our troops hadn’t even gotten into the tubes.

I had Kwon and Lieutenant Marquis with me. I used my com-link to contact the rest who were up above, at our breach point. “Go back and get your skateboards,” I told them. “Blow the grates and ride them down to the bottom of the tubes. Secure them and we’ll meet you there.”