Desolator: Book 2 (Stellar Conquest) (16 page)

Rick lowered his eyes. “Frankly, no. All right. Let’s give these, ah, warriors a task. Is there something we could do that would help us, and hinder Desolator?”

Trissk thought for a moment, then nodded. “Yes there is. Follow me.”

He watched as Corporal Bannon cleared corners, releasing tiny gnat drones from a slot on his back-rack. Special suits and training made Recon Marines the best at what they did, and he wondered what possessed him to have tried walking point himself.
Probably stupid enthusiasm after nothing but training for the last three years,
he thought.
Well those autoguns almost got me, and the aliens’ maser weapons gave me some nasty burns. Maybe Jehovah is trying to tell me to quit sticking my dick out quite so far.

Splitting his attention between the here and now and the virtual HUD overlay, he watched carefully as his section approached the rear of the two score Marines of First Platoon, Alpha Company. “Captain Bryson,” he called to the company commander on the top channel, “keep a good three-sixty lookout, three dimensions. The enemy’s resistance has been scattered, but the Ryss aliens say the Desolator AI is crazy. We don’t know what it will do.”

Bull switched his net one level down, in order to include the understrength battalion’s senior NCOs. “Coming up behind, Swede,” he called, watching as Bannon sent a drone around another corner. “You should see my point man’s gnat momentarily.”

“Got it, sir,” Master Sergeant Lars “Swede” Gunderson replied. “Come on in. First Platoon will keep you snug and safe as a baby in his mother’s arms.”

“Bad metaphor, Swede, since all the mothers are back on Afrana, but I appreciate the sentiment.” Bull waved his men forward rather than switch channels again, though the gunner in charge of the semi-portable should have heard the exchange anyway.

A moment later they jogged by First Platoon’s outer troops and into the large intersection that was their meeting place.

From the portside corridor, another Recon Marine showed himself, and then led others forward. Third platoon, Bull saw on his HUD. Fourth was off to the starboard side and Heavy Weapon Section Two moved up behind them. He now had most of Alpha Company here, minus only Second Platoon spread out guarding the sleds, almost half his command.

Sergeant Major Charlie McCoy waved a greeting as he joined Bull from Fourth.

“General channel, all hands. First, Alpha Company,” he said. “Objective One is this fusion reactor,” throwing it up on their HUDs. “It’s forward of us and on the port side. My intent is to move forward cautiously and in force to Objective One and use the semis to disable it. My goal is to deny power to the enemy. The enemy is an AI the aliens call Desolator, and the machines it controls. All of those are fair game.”

“The aliens are big catlike people,” he went on, “and they don’t have sealed armor the way we do, but their weapons are high-tech and effective. Do not engage them unless you absolutely must. They are supposed to be passing the word over their comms to avoid engaging us too, but you never know.”

“All right, Third Platoon you are on the port side flank up these parallel corridors, with your limit the usable edge of the ship. Fourth here to starboard, with your limit the central corridor. First platoon, right up the middle toward the reactor, with semis One and Two in trail. Third and Fourth, detail one squad each to cover my ass, and remember everyone, they could come from the levels above or below. Any questions?”

None came, so Bull ordered, “Alpha, move out. Break break, Bravo Company this is Objective Two here,” HUD-marking a fusion reactor on the starboard side of the ship. “Captain Curtin, take that objective with all deliberate speed, keeping the rules of engagement in mind. The aliens are our allies, but new and twitchy ones from what I have seen. When you disable that generator, move on to the next one forward. Ben Tauros out.”

Curtin was a good man; Bull knew he’d get the job done.

Walking forward, he kept watching the HUD for any sign of resistance, but it didn’t come right away. Instead a sudden heavy feeling staggered him, and he saw the section carrying the semi-portable suddenly and clumsily set it down. “Gravity is increasing,” an unknown voice reported, then the whole company was shoved to the deck as the Gs went up to at least five. Bull crawled forward, his implanted cybernetics powering his limbs, but the sixty kilos of armor, suit and weapons that normally seemed so light now weighed at least three hundred.

“Alpha Company, is anyone experiencing less than five Gs?” The pull was not dangerous in itself, but they had lost all mobility and some of their combat capability too.

“I am, sir, about two,” Corporal Bannon called. The other two platoon Recon Marines on point reported the same.

“Gravplates take a lot of power, people, and that’s one thing this ship is short of – that’s why it pirated our fuel and why it’s only now putting these reactors on line. It’s also why we need to take them down. I’m guessing it has sensors and is gravving as many of us as it can, but it can’t do all of us, so everyone start crawling outward from the center of the company. See if you can find zones of less gravity, but be careful about standing up.”

Acknowledgements filled the suitcomm and Bull saw the company slowly spreading out. He noticed Bannon and a few other Recons moving fast enough to be on their feet, then the icons suddenly reversed course and blinked with the shorthand for
enemy contact.

“Bannon here; war drones coming.” A shaky video feed from a gnat flashed briefly on the company’s HUDs, showing a jumble of nightmare machinery with far too many arms and legs for comfort before whiting out. “They got the gnat, though it took a few shots. First it tried some kind of EM weapon, maybe a maser, then it fired that blue plasma discharge.”

“The aliens had masers too. I think both sides are armed with weapons optimized against Meme,” Bull quickly called over the general net. “If they hit you they will cause burns. Seal up all faceplates and go to instruments only, or you may lose your eyes. Use the new anti-armor rockets and Hippo plasma rifles, and fall back toward the semis if that doesn’t stop them. Fire from doorways and crawl back into rooms if you have to. You know the drill.” He hoped they did: they may have trained too much against anti-Meme scenarios. He’d have to correct that later.

Bull watched the icons representing the enemy advance up the three corridors against Alpha Company, wondering if the AI would really be this unsubtle. Perhaps it was used to fighting nonsentient Meme boarders who used no technique, just brute force and numbers.

“Set up ambushes at the intersections, then fall back, delaying tactics,” he ordered. “Recon elements, get me some more video, I want to see what we’re up against.”

Bursts of static came though his suitcomm, quickly suppressed by the software. Microwaves were, after all, a kind of EM radio wave, and apparently were causing interference with the Marines’ ultra-wideband system.

Seems all right so far,
Bull thought.
We can handle five Gs if we have to, from on the deck, but retreating will be a hell of a thing
. “Sections, get those semis set up to cover these corridors.” The teams grunted and dragged the heavy machines inch by inch into positions where they could fire down two of the most likely avenues, and the operators crawled up wearily to sit in the gunners seats.

Looks like maybe we waited too long to attack these reactors. Now we’re stuck like bugs in glue. We can fight, but we can’t move. We might all die in place here. Have to change the game.
Already he heard terse orders and cursing as his lead elements ambushed the advancing war drones.

Dialing up the senior Flight Warrant on the assault sled channel, Bull said, “Sled command, this is Bull. Butler, we’re pinned down by heavy gravplates and being attacked. Is there any way you can take the sleds outside the hull and come back in through a damaged area, give us some fire support?” The idea was crazy, but then again, so were flyboys.

“Negative, sir…there’s no outside to go to. I can’t even describe what I’m seeing, but we are not traveling normally through space. Everything to the front and rear just turned black. There’s a white-and-rainbow vertical band precisely perpendicular to our axis of travel, and the radiation meters in the outermost sleds has gone off the charts. We had to move them inward to get behind more shielding. Whatever is out there…we can’t survive in it.”

Bull swallowed a few choice epithets. “All right, can you fly the sleds through the main corridors? It looks like most of them run five meters square.”

“Five by five? We’ll barely scrape through. Do a lot of damage to the sleds and corridors both, and everything will get torn up by fusion drive and thrusters. Sleds might not be flyable after all that.” Flight Warrant Butler sounded very doubtful.

“I don’t care. We’ve already lost enough men that we can spare some sleds, and we can always pack more in them, and we need fire support,
now
.” Watching the icons, he saw a dozen of his men already showed as dead, and two dozen more wounded as enemy warbots drove his Marines back toward his laser cannon.

Bull went on, “Get volunteers and send one sled up these four corridors on this center level. Look at your HUD feed, the whole situation is there. Use the breaching weapons to blast your way through along our flanks, engage any war drones you see, and if you can, put a couple of missiles into the Objective One reactor. That may get rid of the heavy gravity, and then you can come around behind the enemy and take them in the rear.”

“If I wanted to do that I’d have joined the Navy instead of Aerospace,” Butler quipped. “Aye aye, sir; we’ll get the job done.”

Trissk and Rick jogged side by side, the other Ryss leading and the Marines in staggered trail.

The Human had put his helmet back on but opened his faceplate, and this seemed to help the warriors to ignore the strangeness of his ape-like visage. Trissk thought,
perhaps if they don’t have to look at Rick’s bizarrely-shaped head, they can imagine he’s just a Ryss of another clan, in armor.

“We go to the Armory. The weapons there are supposed to be only issued in case of Meme boarding, but we decided to break the regulations this once.” Trissk smiled at the Human, then realized that the creature probably had no idea how to interpret such facial expressions.

Rick seemed to understand the irony, though, and replied, “Our people have a saying: rules are made to be broken. You just have to know when.”

“That seems like a good saying for times like these.”

“So what will we do at the Armory that has not already been done?”

Trissk flicked his ears and glanced at the funny-smelling being. “I was hoping you could tell me. We are called warriors but we are neither trained soldiers nor ship crew. Perhaps with your, ah, advantages,” he went on, tapping his own head, “you might be able to do things we cannot. You are intelligent, it is clear, and you may smell with a fresh nose.”

“Frankly I can’t smell anything but metal and Ryss right now,” Rick said quietly, and Trissk found himself surprised yet again.
Of course, we would smell different to them as well. I have much to learn about treating with aliens
.

“Perhaps we should just see past the smells, then. I hope our vision is similar.”

“I’ll leave that to the biologists. I’m just a communications officer, though a damned good one if I do say so myself.”

“Then,” Trissk replied, slowing his pace, “perhaps you can communicate with some of these.” Rounding a corner, they followed the Ryss into the Armory they had so recently looted of small arms. Then, he had been frightened, but now, with these armored aliens, he found himself clearheaded and fearless.

With a sweeping gesture he indicated a line of bizarre wheeled vehicles parked neatly on one side of the huge room. Their strangeness came from the abnormal arrangement of wheels – twenty of them, all angled so that their treads rolled perpendicular to the center of each. If a car was an elongated cube, the wheels would be mounted on the eight corners and in the middle of every one of twelve edges, turned in twenty different directions in gimbals, so that they could lose several and still move.

Rick could see the advantage of it right away. No matter what, enough wheels would be in contact with a wall or floor. It could tip over and still roll. Gravity could shift, or even reverse, and after some bumping and bruising, it should just keep going.

Walking toward the machines, he could see movable, gimbaled cages for each driver inside with simple-looking manual controls. Armored in front and rear, but open on the sides, stubby cannon poked from the nose of each: some kind of conventional gun from the look of it. Rick reached out to touch the weapon, turning to look at Trissk inquisitively.

“It is a compressed-gas gun, throwing low-velocity exploding charges designed to do maximum damage –”

“– to Meme, right?” Rick interrupted. “I’m starting to think we’re all getting too specialized. We Humans fought against Blends, not Meme, with our war machines to conquer this star system, and our weapons could have been more effective.”

Trissk replied, “We never expected to fight Desolator or its war drones. After all, we made them – or we made the machines to make them. These weapons are designed to minimize damage to ship structures. At least they are optimized for movement within the ship, to fit through all the corridors and up and down the main ramps.”

“I understand
your
excuse,” Rick said, “but we humans should have planned better.”

Trissk twitched his ears, then looked into the cramped cockpit of the weird corridor-car. “I have no idea how to use one of these, nor whether they have power. I am a self-taught technologist, though, so I should be able to figure it out, given time.”