Annihilation (Star Force Series) (7 page)

Marvin appeared disappointed. His tentacles drooped and stopped thrashing. “Yes, there’s a localized point where the leak is occurring.”

“You know where the leak is?” I asked.

“Yes—at least I have it down to a one hundred square mile region of the southern oceans.”

I nodded. With languid slowness, I reached out and tapped at the screen. I knew I couldn’t afford to appear eager. I opened the file but didn’t bother to flip to the appropriate screen. Instead, I paused to sip my coffee.

Algae-based coffee tastes pretty bad to begin with. But with sugar in it, the flavor had moved from sewery to sugary-sewery. I winced, but tried to hide my disgust.

Marvin studied me and finally couldn’t handle it anymore. He reached up with two tentacles and touched the screen, making spreading motions and spinning the globe of Yale to the correct angle. I smiled slightly. It was kind of fun to make him impatient for once.

His tentacles rattled and scratched on the touchscreen until he had the correct view displayed. By this time, several staffers had taken note of our conversation and stepped up to watch. I ignored them and pretended to be enjoying my coffee. It was a good thing, I figured, that Marvin had no sense of smell. If he had, he’d have known right away I was faking.

On the screen, he’d displayed a region known as “Light Blue” on the moon’s surface. For the most part, Yale had no real features. It had clouds and a little scrim of polar ice at the top and bottom of the world, but no land. With only an endless ocean encircling the core of the world, there wasn’t much to see.

But, in spots like Light Blue, the ocean floor had heaved up closer to the surface. In this region the color of the surface changed. Most of the world was so thickly covered in deep water it was almost black, even when the bright light of Thor shined down directly upon it. But Light Blue was different, it looked like one of Earth’s oceans.

“The shallow area?” I said. “Isn’t that the highest underwater mountain range on Yale?”

“Yes, it’s also one of the most thickly inhabited regions. The Crustaceans can’t survive in the deepest oceans, which have an estimated depth of two hundred thousand feet.”

I studied the imagery. It didn’t look right to me. “Is that a whirlpool?” I asked incredulously.

“Yes,” Marvin said. “It’s so large, I believed it to be a storm at first. But now I know the truth. The water is circling, draining away.”

“What could be down there?” I asked. “What could possibly swallow such a fantastic volume of liquid?”

Marvin was perking up. He sensed my interest, and I’d given him urgent questions which could be evaded. I knew instantly what he was thinking: soon, he might manage to gain a hold over me.

I smiled, because I knew his game. And for once I was one jump ahead of the sneaky robot. I’d figured out the answer to my own question before I’d asked it.

I snapped my fingers as if getting a sudden flash of insight. “I know!” I said. “It’s a ring! It’s got to be. A ring at the bottom of the sea, draining the water away to nowhere. What else could it be?”

Marvin looked stunned. For a full second, none of his numerous limbs or input devices moved. When they moved again, they were deflated, like a dozen wilting flowers on a hot August day.

“That matches my assessment,” he said.

“Somehow,” I said, “a ring has opened up at the bottom of their ocean. What an ingenious form of attack.”

“You think this is an attack?”

I nodded. “Either that, or the Crustaceans were experimenting. Maybe they tried to open up a pathway from their homeworld to another star system. Maybe the attempt backfired horribly.”

I proceeded to disseminate Marvin’s data to the command staff and the entire fleet. I made sure it was transmitted back to Eden as well. While this went on, Marvin studied me and the data. I knew he was horribly disappointed. He’d given up his data without getting anything for it.

When I managed to slip out of his sight, I dumped the ghastly coffee on the deck of the conference chamber and watched the ship’s nanite hull absorb it. Moments later it was released outside the hull as the waste it truly was. The ship knew garbage when it encountered it.

But Marvin wasn’t quite done yet. He came to me less than an hour later. “I have a new theory, Colonel. Would you like to hear it?”

“If you think it’s absolutely necessary,” I said. “I’m very busy.”

“It concerns Yale’s ocean—I believe I know the cause for the rise in temperature.”

“Oh, that. Never mind then.”

Marvin appeared to be stunned again.

“You don’t have any interest in this critical detail?” he asked.

“I’m interested all right. But I’ve already figured it out. As the oceans recede, the deep, deep hot-ice is being exposed. The rapid lowering of the sea is causing the hot ice to break down and heat up the water. Does that match your theories, Marvin?”

“Yes,” he said. Crushed again, he wandered away a few minutes later.

Since my conversation with Marvin, I’d been poring over science texts. I’d learned about the changed state of water at great depths, and the hot-ice phenomenon. It had been difficult, but the look on Marvin’s structure was worth it all now.

I grinned after him and whispered to myself: “We’ll chalk that one up for the dumbass human.”

-6-

When we were about half an hour out from Yale, all hell broke loose. At the time, I was in the ship’s head relieving myself. The ship was under heavy deceleration—but when you have to go, you have to go.

Operating a ship’s elimination system when under several Gs of force can be a difficult operation by itself, as anyone who’s done it can tell you. Things went from bad to worse, however, when the ship’s klaxons went off and the vessel heeled-over, engaging its automatic evasion routines. I cursed and found myself sliding on my back across the chamber. Fortunately, spilled wastes were quickly removed by the smart metal floor.

When I managed to get out of the head, I struggled up the corridor to the bridge. I was slammed from one side to the other as the ship rocked and lurched. The inertial stabilizers were off-line due to power requirements. The engines were burning at full throttle to keep us from crashing into those deep, blue oceans, and the rest of the power went to the weapons systems.

I crawled into the command center and found a crash seat to strap into. It wasn’t the one I was assigned to, but that was just too bad for whatever staffer I’d displaced. I managed to connect to the Fleet command channel and listened to the chatter long enough to figure out what was going on. We were under attack.

“This is Riggs,” I said, trying to sound calm. “Give me counts and ranges. What have we got incoming right now?”

“Missiles sir. No ships, just missiles. About two thousand of them.”

My mind glazed over. I didn’t have to do the math. We were at close range, and we didn’t have enough time to lock-on and shoot down that many missiles—not if Crustacean missiles were as good as Macro missiles at finding their targets. They were going to hurt us, and hurt us badly.

“It was all a trick, Kyle,” Sandra said on a private line to my helmet. “Those bastards. We’ll lose half the fleet. Fire everything we have back at them. We can at least hurt them this time.”

My mind had come out of shock and was now racing. I couldn’t believe it. These vicious Lobsters had done it twice in a row. I’d not underestimate them again—if I ever got another opportunity.

“Stop decelerating!” I roared. “I want every pilot to plot an individual course. Bring your noses around and accelerate toward Yale, but do it at an angle. I want you all to miss the moon, naturally. But slowing down will just make us easier targets. We need to do a fly-by as fast as we can, giving them as little opportunity to shoot us down as possible.”

Within twenty seconds, the pilot of
Lazaro
had followed my orders. The results were gut-wrenching. A normal human without nanite-hardened organs would have passed out, or quite possibly died. For us marines, however, there was no such simple relief. We lived, remained conscious, and suffered. It felt as if someone had a firm grip on my intestines and was hell-bent on unraveling them.

The point-defense systems were firing now, on full automatic.

“Vacc-suits, everyone!” I shouted over the command channel. “Assume your vessel will lose pressure before this is over. I want zero casualties from decompression.”

It was all up to a few thousand brainboxes now. The missiles would be hitting their first targets within eight minutes. I’d been watching the counters displayed on the big wall-screens. I’d learned to count again by this time. We weren’t going to get them all. Some of my ships were about to be destroyed. The only question was whether or not any of us would make it home.

As I got over my initial shock, the emotion that followed wasn’t fear, it was rage. None of this made any sense. Why would the Crustaceans do something like this? Sure, they didn’t like us. But going to the trouble of draining their own world, of damaging their own habitat, just to make this ruse convincing? I couldn’t fathom that kind of dedication to deceit.

I tried to think, but it was difficult to do anything other than keep my guts in place and watch the ticking numbers on the displays.

Red slivers were arcing closer every second. Occasionally, one of them blinked out. But the rate of defensive hits was far too slow. My hopes that the majority of their missiles would be shot down faded. They were quality weapons. Probably, they were spinning and coated with reflective polymers to deflect our lasers. Maybe they even had aerogel mists enveloping them, technology we’d only recently mastered ourselves.

I slammed my fist down on the arm of my stolen chair. Even as I did so, a confused looking lieutenant came into view. She was crawling toward me. I frowned at her, then saw her look up at me in shock. I realized then she must be trying to make it to the chair I was in—her chair.

I waved her away. She turned and crawled out of my sight. My mind wanted to feel bad for her, wanted to wonder if she would survive the next…
six minutes
, the displays reported…but I didn’t feel bad for her. I didn’t have time.

I had to think. I sucked in a breath and contacted Marvin.

“Marvin!” I shouted.

“Yes, Colonel?”

“Are you aboard this ship?” I demanded.

“What ship, sir?”

“No games, Marvin. Are you on the same ship I am right now?”

“Yes sir, at the moment.”

I felt relief. In general, when Marvin knew or even suspected an attack was coming, he tended to bug out early. Sometimes,
very
early, before anyone else even knew what was going to happen. The fact that he was still aboard was encouraging. It meant he was just as surprised as I was.

“Marvin, I need you to translate for me. Open a channel to these treacherous Lobsters.”

“They’ve never responded, sir.”

“I don’t care! I know they’ve been listening. Probably, whatever I say will amuse them greatly. But I don’t care about that, either. Open the channel and translate.”

“Channel open.”

I paused to suck in some air, and then I let loose: “To the people of the water-moon under the shadows of my ships, you’re the least honorable of any species I’ve ever encountered. You are cheaters. You are ignorant, and savage. I am a professor among my people. I hereby give you all a failing grade!”

There was no response for several seconds. I’d hoped to elicit some kind of defensive response out of them with my verbal attack. After all, they had no reason to stay quiet now. Their trap had been sprung, and staying quiet no longer benefited them. I also knew they were an arrogant, talkative race that valued academic achievement. Talk of failing grades should sting.

But they didn’t respond. I narrowed my eyes, squinting at the readouts. Less than four minutes left now until their missiles were among us. Four minutes from now, crews would die because I’d screwed up and believed these Lobsters again.

My anger deepened. My next thought was a dark one: I considered bombing their cities. They hadn’t given us any ships to shoot at, but their civilian populations were vulnerable. We knew where they lived in their shallow reefs and deep grottoes. We knew some of them were still alive.

I lifted a fateful hand to press the transmission button again. The crews were waiting for my order to fire. I could feel it in my bones.

But about a second before I gave the order to commit a billion intelligent beings to death, I had another thought.

“Scan those missiles!” I roared. “Has anyone done that? Are there Macros flying those things?”

My thought was simple and horrible. What if the Lobsters themselves, god love the son-a-bitches, weren’t actually attacking us? What if the Macros were behind it all?

I knew the Lobsters weren’t easy to get along with, but I also knew they weren’t suicidal. They must know what we could do to their populations. They would have done the math long ago. I could understand an ambush, but why would they let us get in so close before launching their surprise attack?

Perhaps they hadn’t. If Macros held their underwater cities, and were the ones firing the missiles, perhaps it was their math I was witnessing in its perfection.