Stellar storm, p.4
Stellar Storm, page 4
I lunged for one of the grip-bars thoughtfully embedded in the wall and held tight, then looked over to make sure Yoan had anchored himself. He lifted his thumb at me and said something I couldn’t hear.
I glanced up at the hatch. The hawser was at an even sharper angle now, and snapped taut.
“Pull him in!” I shouted at Yoan.
He mouthed something.
Then the wind stopped. It cut out abruptly, leaving my ears throbbing. The scream of the engines was low in comparison. The dome’s emergency molecular barrier had been activated, holding the atmosphere inside the dome despite the massive breach the two shuttles had created when they rammed through it.
I leapt for the hawser and the winch next to it. I wasn’t tall enough. Whose stupid idea was it to put it on the roof?
“Here,” Yoan said, and shoved a step stool toward me with one boot.
I stepped onto the stool and activated the winch. The hawser grew even tauter, then slowly wound itself back up.
“What in hell…?” Dalton breathed, from right behind me.
“Come and help me with him,” I told Dalton. “I don’t know what happened out there. Lyssa, can you reach Lyth at all?”
“No,” Lyssa said, her voice issuing from the speaker in the wall. “He’s not responding and his link isn’t live.”
I could hear something being pulled along the hull, now. Something heavy. Human heavy.
“Here, let me get him,” Dalton said, patting my hip.
I stepped down, got out of Dalton’s way and moved around so I could see the open hatch once more. Beyond it was a pale light, for there was little atmosphere up here between us and the dome itself. I could see stars through the veil, and further over, the thick glowing cluster of the hub.
Lyth appeared in the hatchway. He looked dazed, but conscious. He had enough wherewithal to pass the grenade launcher he was holding in through the hatch ahead of himself. I took it and dropped it to the floor. I wanted to kick it, but didn’t want a broken toe, for it was one of the shoulder launchers that took a strong man to operate. When I’d practiced with them in basic training, they had tossed me onto my back, every time I used them.
Dalton reached up. “Can you hear me? Swing your feet around. Drop in and I’ll catch you.”
Lyth blinked and shook his head as if he was trying to clear his thoughts. Then he laboriously swung himself around. His boots threaded through the hatch. Dalton got his arms around Lyth’s waist. “Okay, let go,” he told Lyth.
Lyth let go, and Dalton stepped down the stool to the floor and put Lyth on his feet. Then he hit his shoulder, not lightly. “What kind of an idiot stunt was that? What the hell did you think you were doing?”
Behind the two, Yoan moved over to the hatch controls and shut the hatch. The air stopped moving around me, for which I was grateful.
“And you,” Dalton added, prodding a finger against Yoan’s chest. “Why did you let him out there?”
“Me?” Yoan shot back, his voice rising.
I moved over to Lyssa’s speaker as the shouting built up behind me. “Lyssa, how big is the hole in the dome? Can you pass through it?”
“Yes, Captain. The second shuttle widened the original hole.”
Thank the stars for molecular barriers, or we would be in serious shit. Not that we weren’t already.
“Get out there now,” I told her. “Fire everything we have at the mothership. I want it wounded, so it can’t jump.”
“It has already jumped away, Captain.” Lyssa’s tone was stiff.
I held myself still, not reacting to the bad news. “Already? The shuttles docked that fast?”
“Only one of them docked, Captain.”
“What happened to the other one?”
“The array gate destroyed it, Captain.”
The three men standing in the cramped engineering compartment all stopped shouting at each other and looked at me, their mouths open.
—6—
THE ROOM WAS DIMMED TO give everyone a clear view of the details playing out in the 3D tank that had been formed in the open area inside the quadrangle of tables running around the four sides of the room.
I’d already seen the footage a dozen or more times. It had been taken by one of the freighters who had hot-footed it to the dome to help, only to be locked out when the dome’s airlock doors slammed shut. It had hovered over the dome, its captain watching and waiting to see if there was something they could do to help.
That had put them in the perfect position to watch the first armored shuttle ram its way through the dome at what experts had decided was its top speed.
The bare shuttle hadn’t waited for the first to clear the way. It had pushed through the weakened dome structure only meters away from where the first had hit, and the intervening latticework had been sucked out by the gale force winds of escaping atmosphere, to leave a huge, gaping hole in the dome.
While the molecular barrier had swiftly knit itself into a shield behind them, the two shuttles raced for the mothership, which was still a thousand kilometers away, but closing fast.
The lone freighter had come into its own at that moment. The captain fired upon the passing shuttles with her single heavy gun, causing the shuttles to deviate and take a curving path toward the mothership, which brought them skimming past the old array gate hanging silently in space.
I don’t think a single person sitting around the big square table didn’t jump when the array gate’s self-defense mechanism fired up, shooting a deadly stream of fire upon the closest shuttle, the one still wearing its disguising fake hull. The beam passed through the front end of the shuttle and emerged at the back.
The shuttle immediately slowed and drifted lifelessly.
The second leapt ahead, screaming toward the mothership, which plucked it out of deep space, zipped up and jumped away.
Silence gripped the room while the display tank dissolved and the lights came back up. Everyone blinked heavily and rubbed their eyes, for there had been over ninety minutes of stitched-together footage of the Tracia disaster to watch.
I had seen it all before and had stepped out of the conference center to find a second breakfast and the largest coffee available in this pretty commercial section of Triga’s third suburb. I’d got back only a few minutes ago.
“I thought the array was dead,” the Premier of Zillah’s World said, sounding afraid and belligerent at the same time. She was a tall woman, well over two meters, with black curly hair that defied gravity. Anderson Marlow had found Zillah’s World particularly hard to convince to sever their connection with the array, after the Shutdown.
“No, not dead, Premier,” Jai Van Veen said, from his position in the middle of one side of the square, hollow table arrangement. “We cut it off from all human activities. We isolated it so it could not harm anyone, ever again. But the gates are still operational.”
“It fought for us?” someone else asked. I couldn’t see who the man was who asked the question for they were right along the table from where I sat, and I didn’t want to draw attention to myself by leaning forward and craning my neck to peer down the table.
We’d primed Jai, so he had all the answers to hand. He shook his head. “No, Mayor Georgeson. It’s possible the array was not aware of what happened near its gate. It may still be ignorant, for it receives no news of human affairs anymore. What you saw on the footage was the gate’s proximity alarm bringing it out of a dormant state. When the shuttle got too close, the automatic defenses fired.”
“Which I, for one, am deeply thankful,” came another deep, musical voice.
I sighed, for I’d got to know that voice in the thirty minutes the conference had been running before the video had begun.
I glanced at Jonas Keskemeti, just as everyone else did. It was hard not to. He was one those types who knew how to draw the eye.
Keskemeti was of medium height, but I suspect that most people would remember him as being taller, for his presence made up for any lack in his physical dimensions.
He had a pleasant face, with pale brown hair that lay thin and flat, but was neatly trimmed and brushed over his very high forehead. His very best feature was his blue eyes, and he used them for full effect. The blue was very pale, which made them sometimes appear to be colorless, in the right light. He had a way of looking at a person with those eyes, as if he could see all their secrets.
Did I speak from experience? I could still feel where his hand had gripped mine and the fingers of the other hand rested upon my bare wrist, as if he was so glad to meet me.
I’d only barely managed to not wipe my hand on my trousers, once he had released it. The outer charm and mesmerizing gaze of the man covered a flawed interior, for Jonas Keskemeti had emerged in the last few months as the public figurehead of the Humanists.
He had waylaid me as I walked into the conference room, actually crossing in front of other people to reach me. I glanced over my shoulder as I realized who approached, to see where Lyth was, for I didn’t want this man getting anywhere close to Lyth, not even here where we were all theoretically on the same side, drawn together to tackle an issue which impacted all of us.
“Colonel Andela, I’ve so wanted to meet you in person,” Keskemeti said, holding out his hand.
I took his hand automatically, and that was when he rested his other fingers upon my flesh. “I can’t say the feeling’s mutual,” I said shortly. There was no need to be polite. I withdrew my hand.
Keskemeti smiled, as if I had told him a great joke. His eyes lit with humor and his smile was warm, showing even, white teeth. The creases at the corners of his eyes bunched together.
I resisted the natural urge to smile back at him and didn’t have to work too hard to do it, either. I just had to remind myself who he was.
The discovery that the Muradar, the upper classes of the Terrans, were picking off our ships and taking survivors as slaves, had outraged the Carinad worlds, but Keskemeti had taken it a step further. He used the Terrans as a visible and immediate threat to weld the Humanists together in a way we’d never seen before.
Until Keskemeti came along, the Humanists were a mob. A dangerous mob, it was true. Lacking organization or leadership, though, their ad hoc attacks upon Xaviens were merely dangerous irritations, as divided among themselves as they were from everyone else.
As their number one target, Lyth had prudently studied them. He and his security chief, Colton, had learned that there were two factions inside the Humanist groups.
The poorest and least educated Humanists believed in their gut that Xaviens were dangerous and would one day turn and destroy humans. Keskemeti encouraged that belief with rhetoric and twisted logic, pointing out that throughout our history, any new, intelligent species we’d ever come across, from Apes to Xaviens, had eventually forced us to destroy them when they turned upon us.
The more intelligent and thoughtful Humanists objected to Xaviens on moral grounds. They believed Xaviens should not be given human bodies, for that was robbing humans of their DNA. Keskemeti was always careful to support their beliefs, too.
He thrust the Muradar at the Humanists as an existential threat that would ignore the Xaviens and pick off the humans, instead. What was to stop the Xaviens from joining the enemy of their enemy?
And yeah, I had made myself sit through one of Keskemeti’s thundering orations to the faithful. I’d taken a long, hot shower afterwards.
So it was no surprise to me that Keskemeti applauded anything that worked against the Terrans. Only now he was glad the array was apparently still fully functional.
That was so disturbing a thought that I shuddered, as everyone waited for Keskemeti to finish his thought.
Screw that, I decided, and opened my mouth to cut him off. I’d explain to everyone here why any animation displayed by the array was a dangerous thing—yes, even if it did pick off one of our enemies.
Keskemeti got to his feet, so that everyone could see him, showing he knew how to work a crowd. “It seems to me that the array is the only sentient in the Carinad worlds who is actively working to defeat the Terrans.”
“We are not at war with the Terrans,” Jai Van Veen said, his tone sharp. “We are here to find a way to avoid a war none of us can afford.”
“We lost how many people, Colonel Van Veen?” Keskemeti asked, his tone polite. He stayed on his feet. “How many people died on Tracia? How many did the Terrans steal away upon the shuttle that was allowed to dock with its mothership?”
Everyone stirred. Heads turned to see what Van Veen’s answer to that would be. This was the point which had brought everyone here to Triga. No one wanted their city to be the next Terran target and suffer a disaster of the scale Tracia had.
Van Veen didn’t flinch or look uncomfortable. “Three hundred and two people died on the ground, including one Terran.”
Fifteen of that three hundred and two had ganged together and used tree branches and rocks to attack the Terran, get him on his back and try to remove his armor, while his Terran cohort picked them off one by one. They beat the Terran to death before they died. Snatches of their tragic victory had been caught by the Tracia security feeds and was in the 90-minute footage everyone had just watched…but not all of it. It was too heart-breaking to watch all of it.
“And how many were taken away in the shuttle?” Keskemeti demanded.
“Five,” Van Veen said, his tone flat.
A full shuttle load—if that had been a standard shuttle—was twenty-four. It was a severely limited victory for the Terrans, at least.
“That’s five too many,” Keskemeti snapped.
“I do not disagree with you on that,” Van Veen replied.
I realized that in the last few seconds, Van Veen had got to his feet without fanfare or drawing attention to his movement. He was taller than Keskemeti and, as Keskemeti’s position was just around the corner from where Van Veen sat, Keskemeti was close enough to Van Veen that everyone could see the height difference.
Not that height was an indicator of anything but gene expression, but even I smiled at the symbolism and knew Jai had stood just for this reason.
Keskemeti didn’t seem to notice, or if he had, he gave no indication of it. He bore down on his point like a hungry parawolf. “Three hundred and six people,” he intoned. Clearly, he wasn’t counting the Terran as a person and from the shifting on chairs, I could tell that others had noticed, too. “This is a disaster, Colonel. How did the Terrans know where such a vulnerable population as the Tracia resort would be?”
I could feel myself twitching on Jai’s behalf, even though he gave no sign of discomfort, for this was a sore point for everyone.
“There are two reasons they knew exactly where to hit us,” Van Veen replied, his tone smooth. “The first is that the Terrans have attacked fourteen ships that we know of, and only one of them, the Ige Ibas, managed to wipe its datacores before being boarded. The Terrans took more than just our people.”
Jai looked around the room, so we knew he was addressing all of us and not just Keskemeti. “Secondly, in the last six months, up until the incident on Tracia, the attacks had stopped. We believe that in those six months, the Terrans learned how to access our data, and were studying it.” He looked around the room. “They learned,” he finished.
“And now they know all our weaknesses!” Keskemeti cried.
He wasn’t the only one with fear in their eyes.
“I believe that Tracia was a test run,” Jai added, not allowing Keskemeti to have the last word. “It is what I would have done. An attack upon a weak point, to establish that the data was correct and that my assumptions about the enemy were correct.” He paused, letting that sink in.
“Then the five they took were what?” Mayor Georgeson demanded. “A bonus?”
“If my assumptions are accurate, then yes,” Jai replied firmly. “It is thanks to the Supreme Lythion and its captain, Colonel Andela, that they captured so few.”
I made myself sit still and not wiggle as everyone looked at me. Someone clapped a little.
Get on with it, I mentally urged Jai.
Gratianus Rosalie, the Premier of Zillah’s World, also got to her feet. In the height game, she won. “The Terrans know everything about us, but we know next to nothing about them. The Terran survivors from the Grace to the Humble that we host upon our world are still learning to cope with Carinad culture, and some of them still can’t speak Common. The data we took from the Grace to the Humble is still unreadable…is there anything we know about the Terrans that we didn’t know a year ago?”
Mayor Georgeson scrambled to his feet, too. “If these Terrans are from Earth, then what are we Carinads? Are we even human?”
I glanced at Keskemeti, to see his reaction to such an unorthodox thought. The man looked taken aback and deeply disturbed. I enjoyed a petty moment of satisfaction.
Then Jai said, his tone firm, “Of course we are human. Yes, we are from Terra—what the Terrans call Earth. We have records from when humans only lived upon Terra. And one only has to look at the Terran bodies we have recovered, and the Terran survivors we shelter, to know we are the same species.”
His confidence sent a wave of relief through the room. Even Keskemeti sank to his chair and gripped his hands together on the table before him, his brow smoothing out.
“Is that information we can give to our people?” Gratia Rosalie asked. She hesitated and said in a rush, “Depression and suicide has increased on Zillah. Positive news, even the smallest drop, will help.”
“We can give you more than a drop of good news,” Jai told her. He waved toward Mace.
Mace got to his feet, his face flushing a deep red that nearly matched his hair.
“This is Mace Badelt, one of the Carinad survivors of the Ige Ibas. Since his recovery, he has been working to interpret the symbols the Terrans use for everything. Mace?”
