Fleet ops box set, p.15
Fleet Ops Box Set, page 15
Then it pulled back, a long string of wet saliva connecting its appendage to his face. The limb shot forward, connecting with his exposed neck with a wet thud. It was like being punched, except Husher felt something puncture his flesh. The pain and shock made his mouth gape open.
In that moment, a tube shot out of the alien and fired down his throat, gagging him. He tried to spit it out, but he could feel it questing deeper and deeper as he struggled, tunneling into him. He could feel his organs shifting and moving in his body, trying to accommodate this strange intruder.
When he tried to scream, a gargle came instead, spittle blowing past the edges of the tube.
Then he felt something warm and wet sliding down the sides of his chest. It was pooling on both sides of him, slowly dripping off the dais.
He glanced down and realized it was blood. Thick, pooling blood.
His blood.
His panic grew, as he realized he was watching the aliens flay him open. He saw his organs pulled out of him. His spleen. His appendix. A portion of his intestines pulled aside and considered thoughtfully by an alien as one of his friends began tugging at the bottom of what he presumed was his lung.
He heard a crack and realized it was his sternum. They had popped him open almost effortlessly.
His last thought as he passed out was of his double. The weak man who believed he was better than him, the man who swore that his principles and oaths to some higher calling made it OK for him to kill everyone Husher knew.
What about this, you sanctimonious bastard? Look what it did to me. Look what you’ve done.
Blackness edged his vision, closing in.
Look what you’ve done.
The curtain of blackness fell, and he felt nothing at all.
Chapter 32
Combat Information Center
UHC Providence, Battle Group Flagship
Admiral Iver glanced over to Captain Daniels as the aliens began to pull away. The Brood, as they knew to call them now, were leaving.
“They were true to their word,” Iver said.
“Were we true to ours?” Husher replied over the com.
With a zoomed-in visual, Iver had watched the shuttle take both Hushers near the Stomach, and then expel one of them. He hadn’t known Captain Husher had been aboard too until it had departed the Relentless, and by then it was too late to try to talk the man out of it.
He has a strange sense of honor. But at least he has one. Unlike that monster we just sent to hell.
The moment the shuttle had returned to Relentless, the entire battle group had pulled back, anxious to see if the Brood would follow them. So far, they hadn’t.
“In a manner of speaking,” said Iver. “They wanted Husher. That’s really Husher, and you’re really Husher. So are all the other Hushers, in however many other universes contain them.”
“Do you think there are other Hushers in this universe?”
“Maybe. But there’s something fundamentally wrong with this universe. The smart kids in the lab coats are telling me they don’t think this universe was always like this.”
“How was it different? One moment.” Husher had returned to his own CIC, and he paused to give an order to his Nav officer, as part of the joint retreat across the sector.
“Even the brainiacs don’t know for sure,” Iver said when he was finished. “But they’ve been speculating about the way the aliens are able to jump back and forth in space.”
“And show up out of nowhere, when it comes to the Stomachs.” Shota delivered his earnest input from his position standing next to his captain.
Iver did his best to conceal his frustration with the young XO. He seemed to want to inject himself into every conversation.
He’d been the one to recommend Shota for the position aboard Husher’s command. No one knew that, and Iver intended to keep it that way. He’d thought Husher might be just the thing that the bold, impetuous XO needed, but Iver was afraid he’d misjudged. If anything, they were feeding off each other.
“Yes, and that,” he said. “My people think some form of interdimensional travel is most likely.”
Husher frowned. “We can’t travel interdimensionally. Why would they be able to?”
Iver shrugged. “It’s just a theory. Whatever the truth is, it must have something to do with the physical structure of this universe. That seems obvious.”
“So we can’t jump out of here thanks to the structure of this pocket universe, but they can jump in and out of space with impunity because of it?” Shota shook his head. “I wouldn’t exactly call that a breakthrough.”
Had the man forgotten that he was addressing an admiral? It was one thing for Husher to eschew proper forms of address, in private—Iver invited that kind of open, honest communication from him—but he drew the line at some uppity commander still wet behind the ears.
“I wasn’t asking you to characterize the information for me, Commander. In fact, I was informing you. That’s the typical relationship between admirals and commanders. I inform, you obey.”
Shota frowned, but seemed otherwise unfazed.
Husher seemed to ignore the exchange entirely. “So we’ve still made no progress toward returning home. We’re still trapped.”
Iver nodded. “Seems that way.”
“Where are we going, then?”
“Damned if I know,” Iver said. “As far as we can get from these things.”
“But you just said they can jump through space to find us. Sure, we can keep warping from system to system to evade them, but eventually our capacitors will be depleted. They’ll have us cornered, then.”
“True…except, there’s something we haven’t discussed yet.”
Husher raised his eyebrows.
Iver’s smile widened. “It looks like we got that ally we were looking for.” He looked up from his console, which displayed Husher’s and Shota’s likenesses, at the CIC’s main viewscreen, where a number of yellow neutral icons were following the green friendlies. In the last few minutes, the distance between the two groups had been closing. It seemed their new alien friends were deciding they could trust humans enough to come a little closer.
“Have they communicated with us yet?” Husher asked.
“Yes, but we still can’t understand their language very well. We are making progress—enough that we have a name for them, at least: Scions. Even so, we don’t yet know enough to have a normal conversation. We’ve given them the coordinates we’re jumping to, in mathematical format. All we can do is hope they can process them.”
Husher fell silent, his eyes narrowed in thought.
“How are you doing, Husher? With what we just did?”
As he so often did, the man instantly grasped what Iver was talking about. “I did it, sir. Sending that bastard in my place was my idea.”
“It was on my watch. And it was ultimately my call.”
Husher’s shoulders fell almost imperceptibly. “Let’s hope it was the right one.”
“It was. His hands weren’t just red with blood. They were soaked in it. He bathed in that blood. There’s no reason for us to feel sorry for him.”
“Even so. We turned a prisoner under our watch over to his death.”
“We don’t know that for sure.” Iver decided not to share that the remote link with the bastard’s pressure suit had gone dead, which didn’t suggest good things about his survival prospects.
Iver worried about Husher. The events in the Progenitor system had hardened him, but Iver sensed there was a fragility underneath—something waiting to break. The shock of what his double had done, and then of what he’d done to stop him: those things were weighing on his mind. They could even be affecting his judgment.
Iver had ordered the doctor on the Relentless to investigate that question, but so far he’d been unable to get Husher to commit to a session. Perhaps it was time to tell Guzman to stop being so nice about it. He didn’t need him to carry out a full psych evaluation; he just needed to know his best man was still his best.
“You didn’t answer my question, Husher. How are you doing with sending that monster over?”
“If I’m being honest with myself, I have a bad feeling about it.”
That made Iver blink, as he strove to maintain a neutral expression. Despite his words, he shared Husher’s foreboding. He couldn’t quite pin it down, but there it was.
Chapter 33
Medical Services Bay
UHC Relentless
“That wasn’t as terrible as I thought it would be,” Fesky said.
Husher grinned. “I’ll pass your ringing endorsement on to Doctor Guzman.”
“What did you think of it?” Fesky gave him a sideways glance. The Winger’s feathers made a soft hiss as they walked down the corridor of the Relentless toward the lift at the far end of the level.
“It wasn’t the worst way to spend an hour.”
Fesky snorted. “Sounds like we both have nothing but fine things to say about the doc.”
The two of them had just had their first joint session with Doctor Guzman. The doctor had said the session wouldn’t delve into anything too deeply, and Fesky had made sure of that. Husher wondered how the doc could ever come to change his mind if she didn’t open up. It was hard to make a psych evaluation on someone who didn’t speak.”
“You weren’t terribly forthcoming.”
Fesky shrugged. “You don’t really think he’s going to clear me to fly based on anything I say in there, do you?”
He raised an eyebrow. “I think that’s the whole point of these sessions, Fesky. If you want to get back in the cockpit of a Python, you need to convince Guzman to clear you for duty.”
Fesky didn’t say anything for several seconds. “It’s hard, Captain.” She didn’t look at him as she said it, just stared straight ahead down the empty corridor. “You don’t understand what happened out there.”
Husher nodded, but said nothing, not wanting to break whatever spell Fesky was under out here. This was more than she’d said in the last hour, in front of the doc. Maybe he could pass along some of this to Guzman. Husher desperately wanted his friend to be well enough to fly. It would be good for her.
And better for the Relentless.
She clacked her beak as she took in a ragged breath. “It’s not just what the Progenitors did to me. Not even what your…twin…did to me.”
Husher didn’t like the way she said ‘twin.’ She made it sound like he and that evil bastard from the Progenitor universe were just two sides of the same coin. But he let it pass.
“You know how Wingers evolved on Spire?” she asked.
Husher was taken aback by the abrupt change in topic. Spire was the homeworld of the Wingers, or had been, before it was destroyed by the Gok in the Second Galactic War. “I can’t say that I know the details, no. Unless there’s something specifically to do—”
“The Fins. We evolved with them. They were our sister species, in every sense of the word. We grew dependent on them, which probably sounds funny to you. Humans have nothing like it in their history. Hell, I can’t think of another species that does And on top of that, for a bird species and a fish species to be so intertwined in their evolution is…strange.”
Husher shrugged. “Evolution is often strange.”
She continued like he hadn’t said anything. “It was bad enough to lose Spire and the Fins. But after what—” Her voice broke. “—after what happened with your twin, I…I.…” She stopped walking.
Husher stopped beside her, unsure of what he should say, if anything. He chose to say nothing.
“It wasn’t just the torture. It’s that afterward, I lost touch with Ek.”
Husher frowned. This was the first he’d heard of that. Ek and Fesky had once been inseparable, intertwined by friendship as much as evolution, at least as far as Husher could tell.
“I don’t know why, but I just couldn’t look at her again after all that. She tried. She came to visit when she could, but she had her own family to care for. We lived so far apart. The systems aren’t as easy to travel now as they were before the war.”
“How long has it been?”
Fesky shook her head. Again, she drew a ragged breath. “Years. It’s been years since I saw her, and somehow that makes my memories of the torture that much worse. I can barely stand it.”
Husher understood now. Fesky had been dealing with all of this on her own. She’d been trying to hold it together, trying to come to terms with what had happened to her, but the one creature in the universe that she needed to be with, the one creature who could fill the void after that experience, wasn’t there. And the impact was so much the worse for it.
“It’s not your fault,” Husher said. “None of it. Not the torture. Not the pain. Not the separation from Ek. None of that is your fault.”
Fesky nodded and started moving forward again, like Husher had said exactly what she’d expected. He couldn’t help but feel it had also been exactly the wrong thing to say.
“I was always filling that void before by fighting enemies in my fighter,” she said as they finally reached the lift.
“I’m not sure that’s the healthiest reason for you to be in a starfighter. But for the record, I do want you back in one. We need you out there fighting these things as much as you need to be doing it.”
Fesky nodded. “But?”
“But we need to get you cleared by Doctor Guzman.” The conversation had come full circle, in a frustrating way. He had more information, but precious little he could do with it.
“That’s a bit of a catch-22, isn’t it?”
He took a deep breath. “We’ll keep trying.”
The lift doors slid aside, and Fesky stepped in. She reached across the doorway, blocking Husher as she reached for the control pad. “I don’t think we’re going the same way, Captain.”
Before he could think of anything to say, the doors closed.
Chapter 34
Combat Information Center
UHC Relentless
“Down transit in five…four...three...two…one.”
The CIC viewscreen snapped to life, full of stars. A pair of planets forming a tight orbit around a small gas giant took up a portion of the viewscreen. Like the rest of this universe, and the galaxy that seemed to define the edges of it, this system seemed inordinately tight. He could almost feel the entire battle group experiencing claustrophobia as the ships arrived around the Relentless one by one, dropping out of warp.
“Nearspace contacts,” Winterton reported, his voice clipped but clear. “It’s our new allies, sir. The Scions.”
Husher felt his heart rate drop just a tad. “And our other out-of-town friends?”
“No sign of the Brood.”
Husher glanced at his XO. “Gotta have something go our way.”
“Do we?” Shota asked.
“Good point.”
“We’re getting a transmission,” said the Coms officer.
“From the Scion?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How long until the admiral’s ship transits out of warp?”
“The Providence should be here in two minutes,” Fontaine said.
“Very well. Patch the Scion message through.”
“It’s repeating,” Long said.
The sound that greeted them wasn’t words. It was a series of sounds of different lengths and pitches that repeated in a pattern.
“What are we listening to, Lieutenant?” But Husher realized the answer even before he’d finished talking. “It’s a pattern. That’s numerical.”
Shota nodded. “Math seems to be a language we can all agree on.” Shota said.
Fontaine had a pure math background, and she was already using her console to manipulate the computer’s transcription of the message. “Sir, these are coordinates.”
“How do you know?”
“The main message is a star map. But the map is encoded in the message. The sounds we’re hearing are the coordinates. Except, there are two overlapping sets of coordinates. One points to our current location, and the other to another location on the star map.”
Husher glanced at Shota. “Pretty efficient.”
The XO nodded. “I’m guessing the other coordinates point to where they’d like us to go.”
“Winterton, what are sensors telling us about that Scion group?”
“They’re moving away from us, sir.”
“Overlay the coordinates that Fontaine has extracted. See if their current path will take them near that other location.”
Husher was pretty sure he knew the answer, but he waited patiently for his officers to work. Just as Winterton confirmed that the Scion were heading toward the coordinates, the Coms officer swiveled in his chair.
“Sir,” Long said. “Transmission from the Providence. She just dropped out of warp.”
“The admiral’s not going to like this,” Shota said.
“You never know. Long, brief the admiral on the message, then patch him through to the main viewscreen.”
“Aye, sir.”
“So they just want us to follow them?” Iver said once he was up to speed. “And we don’t know anything about where they want to go?”
“To be fair,” Husher said, “there aren’t many locations they could direct us to in this universe that we would know anything about.”
Iver shook his head. “I don’t like it one damn bit.”
“I’m with you, sir. Unfortunately, I’m struggling to see a better course of action.”
“Are you? Because not following them seems like a better course of action to me.”
Husher shook his head, again surprised by Iver’s short-sightedness. Had he simply been spending too much time pushing pencils? Had he forgotten how to properly evaluate risk?
Of course this was risky But there were good risk and bad risks. Trying to save the Scion to make friends was a good risk. Attacking the Brood without knowing anything about them was a bad risk. And yet in both scenarios, Iver had been on exactly the wrong side of the equation.
