‘Sorry, son. Not today. I’m sure
you can keep her alive until we get on shore. If I were fleet that is what I
would expect. Just too much happening to justify a one-person Orbital medivac.
Just keep her alive, OK?’
‘I’ll go forwards and see if I
can encourage the boss to go a little faster,’ Marko said.
‘Thanks. Staff, nice work.’
Jan nodded down at the captain
and to the admiral, who smiled wanly at her and returned the nod.
‘Boss, the CO of
Jade
is
OK but we need to get her to base as soon as possible,’ Marko informed the
captain.
‘OK. Can we wring a few more
knots out of this bus?’
‘Yeah, but only a couple above
where we’re at right now.’ Marko checked his readouts. ‘We are borderline fuel
use. Could go down and scoop up some seawater if you want. Looking at the
intake specs we could do it at one hundred twenty kilometres per hour and we
would only need six seconds of actual surface contact. It would be a dirty
cracking with all the salt but nothing that a hellish good cleaning afterwards
couldn’t fix. That way you could go as fast as you like. Yeah — just number
crunched, we would save twenty minutes’ flight time.’
By way of an answer, Marko heard
the turbines being throttled back and the attitude of the Sunfish change as the
captain and Harry started a shallow dive towards the sea surface.
‘Attention, all personnel! We’re
going to go grab some water so that we can get back to the main base faster.
The surface conditions are a bit rough so batten everything, then everyone,
down. You’ve got five minutes.’
Marko reached for his harness and
clipped it on as everyone around him — not already sitting at their crew
stations or in jump seats — had their suits find appropriate grabholds and
locked themselves on. The stretcher underneath
Jade’s
CO was already
locked onto the deck. The medical unit reached out and locked itself on when
told to by the ship’s computer.
‘Opening the ballast scoops,
boss. Whenever you’re ready.’
Marko opened the top valves on
the tanks then brought the water cracker units online and prepared them for
contaminated water.
The captain announced, ‘Hold on,
everyone, here we go.’
The Sunfish barely touched the
surface of the waves but the effect was heard throughout the ship as a banging,
shuddering, jolting roar as the vessel skipped from wave to wave, with the
water being forced into the dive tanks.
‘Full! Pull up!’ Marko’s fingers
flew across the screen, closing the intake scoops then the top valves, before
opening the internal feeder valves to the water crackers that broke the
molecular bond between the hydrogen and the oxygen. It piped the gases directly
to the turbine propulsion pods. He set them for maximum gain. The Sunfish
climbed up off the sea as the turbines were ramped up with the jet exhaust
showing a distinct orange colour.
Marko smiled and activated his
craft-wide intercom. ‘All personnel — the orange you are seeing in the jets is
the salt. Don’t stress. We’re not on fire — it just looks that way!’
Twenty-eight minutes later the
Sunfish came howling across the tarmac in a display of speed, manoeuvring
radically differently from the usually sedate flights. The rear ramp was
lowering before the craft touched the ground; a prewarned medical team was
waiting. Before the engines had wound down to a full stop
Jade’s
CO was
being rushed into an operating theatre.
Admiral Riddell waited for the
rest of the survivors to depart the Sunfish and then went and shook hands with
the engineering crew, thanking each of them for their efforts. For once Fritz
was polite, even respectful, something of a surprise to them all. Watching the
receding back of the admiral, the captain thanked them, telling them that they
were to report for a briefing at 1000 hours the next day and until then their
time was their own.
~ * ~
‘Something
seriously weird went on up there,’ the captain began at the briefing. ‘My mate,
Joe Francis, said that they had been watching the aliens and their
light-emitting displays, all except those command ships that were overseeing
the planetside operations. He said that they all thought the creatures were
very similar to cuttlefish from Old Earth, the colour changes being so rapid.
At times the aliens seemed to disappear. Everyone believed it was all harmless
— that they were confused creatures attempting to blend in with the decor to
hide. A fair bit of what happened can be sheeted home to that idiot MP
brigadier who ignored me. Stupid, arrogant woman thought it was such a pretty
display that everyone should watch, so she ordered the feeds inside the MP
frigate to be opened up to the fleet. Said that at precisely the same instant
the antimatter containment fields on every ship that had been exposed to the
aliens started to go offline.’
Everyone looked shocked as he
continued. ‘Some went down super-fast and those ships were lost. The others
went down more slowly. So the attack must have been planned to create maximum
confusion. Some ships ejected their containment cores, while most of the others
managed to get them back under control. No one can find the MP frigate. It’s
gone, and no record can be found of the jump-out point, so no one knows where
it’s gone. Stupid, stupid bastards. We warned them. Shit, what a bloody waste.
OK. Fritz, what are we looking at here, mate?’
‘Well, it’s definitely a computer
of some sort, boss. But what sort is the question. I have every available AI
working on it with me. We have cross-referenced everything and yes, it’s based
on light. So, I’m going to have a shower, a feed, a walk along the beach. No, I
mightn’t do that. Some idiot grunts are evidently going to have a squid
cook-up. That is just sick. They eat us, so we eat them? Fuck! Whose idea was
that? I hope the pricks all puke their arseholes up.’
‘Agreed, Fritz. But what are you
going to do?’
‘Nothing yet.
Gamma
Command is bringing income quality boffins to help me out. I specified who I
needed and they’re all mates of mine. Suggest you all bugger off for a couple
of days. Hey how about going back to the moon and finishing that investigation?
Nah, that’s probably a dead end. I’ll get
Gamma
to send a bunch of
drones. Yeah, I’d better set up a subroutine for that search. Um, how about you
go back to the squid city and see if you can find a few more of these computers?
With my luck we’ll crack this one open to find a shitload of housekeeping crap.’
They left Fritz to his own
devices. Walking around the base, they saw that the place was alive with
engineering robots, drones and crews brought back from the moon to help out.
The captain disappeared, having quickly found his girl, but Marko learnt that
Helena had gone — she sent word that they were holding all the pilots available
at a couple of the Orbital training facilities in case the aliens came back for
another battle. She was loving it, and was being given crash courses in the
transport aircraft. She hoped to get at least one flight in combat aircraft
before too long. They were all getting a day off at the end of the week, so
they would get together then. She asked Marko to keep the bed warm for her, and
to eat lots of steak and drink red wine.
With nothing to do, he went
across to the Sunfish that was still assigned to them and sat in his seat,
intending to work up search parameters of the alien city for more of their
computers. What he was actually doing was carefully examining the wing of the
native raptor that Jan had given him. As he was thinking about its structure he
saw through the lowered rear ramp another dropship land. The big craft had come
in with a beautiful flowing action, which was either an AI taking pleasure in
what it was doing or — much more likely — a very highly skilled human pilot.
He smiled at the skill, then
turned his attention to work. He went through the underwater areas his section
had searched with the base AI, who had returned only hours after the all clear.
Together, they started to identify possible sites of the alien computers. He
decided that she was a good stick and, after he had ensured that their line was
secure, asked about the bullshit spin that the aliens were Chromic Squids. The
AI then became more than a little formal, telling him in no uncertain terms
that it would be a very good idea to keep very quiet about what had happened.
Realising the delicate situation he was in, he readily agreed.
There was a knocking on the
bottom of the ramp and he walked towards the stern of the sub. A guy who looked
the spitting image of Captain Longbow but who was dressed in an orbital flight
suit was below, looking up at him.
‘Sergeant Marko Spitz, I presume?’
‘Sir! Yes, I’m Marko.’
‘Marko, I have an hour to spare
and a little proposal. Can I shout you a beer?’
‘Come on up, sir. I have some
here.’
The closer he got, the more the
man reminded Marko of the boss. He gestured the man to follow and pulled a
couple of old-fashioned quart bottles of beer from the galley chiller. He
opened them, pouring a couple of large glasses.
‘Sergeant, I am Captain Willie
der Boltz. Interesting-looking beer — no labels. In-house brew? Yes? Smells
good! And in actual glass. I’m impressed. Your health!’
They both took a deep pull on the
excellent dark beer and Marko motioned for the captain to be seated.
‘I am told that you have a superb
ability when it comes to life-form engineering.’ said der Boltz. ‘And that most
of your creatures are remarkable, really superb Artificially Created Entities.
I would very much like you to build an ACE for me and my squadron.
Incidentally, I am most impressed by how your section of engineers handled
themselves in the alien city. To put your mind at ease, I was Alpha for that
operation. I’d like to meet Captain Longbow too, if he’s around.’
‘I’ll text him, sir.’ Marko
paused. ‘No, sorry. I’m getting the DND back. He is fairly hot on a fellow
officer, probably grabbing some sack time with her now.’
They both grinned and Marko
decided that, in spite of his clipped accent and serious demeanour, he quite
liked the man. They quietly discussed the events of the past few days and then
got down to business. Marko had recovered his computer from its secure storage
under the partially damaged sergeants’ mess and had it on board the Sunfish
with him. He pulled across the midi remote and the unit came into the room
under its own power. Captain der Boltz whistled when he saw it.
‘Now that is a serious design
computer, sergeant. I have only seen a few like it and they were all in
research facilities. Now I am very impressed. That would have cost you a
considerable sum.’
‘Not wrong there, captain, not
wrong. So, parameters please?’
Der Boltz handed across a small,
elegant plate which Marko realised was very, very high class. He looked across
at the captain with respect. Der Boltz smiled; he too could source the ‘good
stuff’.
Marko loaded the plate into his
remote checker. After some minutes it advised him the data was OK. He then
loaded it into his machine and lifted the design files.
He looked at the files, scanning
each briefly.
‘Nice; type three, pterodactyl
style. I like it. Yeah, I see what you want to do with this. So you also want
to cross some cat type into it as well. Hmm ... can’t see too many problems
with that. Snap-out energy system? They work but I prefer the Isirius7
micropile series 12 located in the thorax. Access through the wing root for the
occasional clean out and, if you ever need one, you have a nice little bomb
sitting there waiting. Blast radius is impressive. Integrated human DNA central
nervous system with an Augmented Intelligence laid over a Fossa?
Fossa?
Hold on. Fossa, here we go. Oh, I like that! That I will have to pinch. Care to
trade on it? Get to that in a minute. Something more?’
‘Yes,’ said Captain Willie der
Boltz. ‘The skin.’
‘Hostile-environment skin system
with chameleon-ware capability?’ When the captain nodded, Marko said, ‘Hmm, sir
— you realise that they seriously suck energy, don’t you? If you really need
that much energy we might have to go to the series 13C and so increase the
overall size of the ACE by about fifteen per cent. OK. Info-gathering
capability, limited range transmitting. Right, so we basically have a winged,
four-legged dragon spy, yes? Plenty of scope for me to have fun as well. I see
all the other parameters are here. Nice. Don’t see any weapons systems, though?’