Brink of destruction, p.23
Brink of Destruction, page 23
Baddlet was moving again, without needing either Bannon or Hern to tell him to. They continued to move along the hallway in a strange sort of dance, forced by the odd geometries to conduct a sort of bounding advance in miniature, as each element on either side of the hallway had to move forward to cover the next leg as it bent around another one of the vague honeycomb cells.
The glow intensified, taking on a vaguely purple cast. Bannon tried to remember what the light inside the ghost ship over Zhogalgan had been like, but he couldn’t recall. The advance slowed slightly, again without orders, as caution began to take hold.
It wasn’t a Corvanite thing—an assault was usually done with maximum speed and aggressiveness—but this phalanx had grown more used to reconnaissance and stealth. Caution was necessary here if they were going to get the intel they needed.
Bannon didn’t speak, but signaled another halt. The glow was spilling out of an opening ahead and around two more bends, from what he could guess.
The Corvanites stopped, weapons ready, those closest to the glow getting tighter to the walls and keeping their own rifles aimed in.
Bannon prepped an omnibanger, seeing Hern do the same. They didn’t know what they were going to face once they got through that opening, if opening it was. While they were currently unengaged, they had a moment to prep for the assault. Another series of hand and arm signals, and the stack was set and ready. They pushed toward the glow again, each man displaying the coiled-spring readiness for instant action.
The opening was on the right side of the passageway, barely visible from the latest bend in the hall. Bannon was only vaguely aware of just where they were inside the structure. His sense of direction was good, but the darkness and the strange twists and turns of the passageways had made it difficult to keep track. His helmet’s navigation systems would give him a trace to find the way out when the time came.
The whole stack collapsed on the inner wall next to the opening. Bannon waved Alexius up to cover the long axis of the hallway, while he and Hern crowded Baddlet, omnibangers in hand, and Ransjunan took up a position behind them. Bannon was about to force the Shihyanese operative farther back, but a barked voice and a flurry of movement sounded from inside the room they were about to assault, and there was no more time.
He threw his omnibanger over Baddlet’s shoulder, aiming to get it deep into the room, while Hern ducked and lobbed his just inside the threshold. They both went off with a series of titanic flashes and thunderous booms, blasting their conductive, disruptive mist into the room.
Baddlet paused just long enough for the mist to propagate and then he was going in, Hern right on his heels, Bannon behind, his muzzle high until the other two cleared the doorway, at which point it dropped level, his helmet’s active scanners managing to penetrate the mist, if poorly.
The room was larger than he’d expected, and the conductive mist hadn’t completely filled it, though the spindly aliens inside were still staggering from the effects of the omnibangers’ detonations. The Corvanites took no chances. The aliens were disoriented, but they were still armed, most of them had already been moving toward the opening, and Bannon didn’t know how effective the omnibangers would continue to be over time.
He’d already seen these aliens commit suicide rather than talk over Zhogalgan. They were dead anyway.
CR-196s barked harshly, their limited muzzle blasts still lighting up the inside of the room like fireballs in the dimness. The ghost ship aliens didn’t seem to require or need much in the way of illumination, but the glow coming from some source within the room was still almost painfully bright after the blackness of the hallways behind them.
Bannon’s target staggered as his first two six-millimeter bullets slammed into its egg-shaped thorax. He couldn’t tell whether they’d penetrated whatever armor the alien might have been wearing, and it didn’t go down or drop its bell-mouthed energy weapon, so he tracked more shots upward, putting another pair into its equally bulbous head.
That dropped it, and it collapsed as he kept moving out of the doorway, scanning and shifting his weapon for other targets. He found a second rising behind the strange projection in the center of the floor, but he shot it at almost the same time as Ransjunan’s weapon boomed, far louder than the Corvanite CR-196s, the impact striking the alien hard enough that the round head simply exploded, spraying blood and debris, colorless in the dim glow, across the room.
There was a bright flash and a thunderclap, and Castillo collapsed with a smoking hole in his hardsuit. Vasquez stepped over him, hammering rounds at the alien that had just shot his comrade, while Bannon, Baddlet, and Ford pushed farther around the projection and riddled the last defender with more six-millimeter fire.
Then the room fell silent. Muzzles continued to pivot from form to form, but none of the aliens moved where they lay sprawled in attitudes of violent death on the dark, cracked floor.
“Set security.” Bannon turned to Ransjunan. “Is this the place we’re looking for?”
The big chyotsu stalked forward, examining the humped projection in the middle of the room. Strange holos floated above the rippled black surface. “I think it may be.” He pointed with two hands. “There are two different forms of technology here. The ghost ships may have given the Garkhut most of their technology, but it appears that they have affixed more of their newer devices to whatever this was.”
Gunfire crackled outside the room. Bannon sent a quick query, and got a blurry, image-enhanced feed of some more of the spindly ghost ship aliens that had popped out of another chamber around the next bend in the hallway, trading shots with the security element near the closest opening. They were being held for the moment, but the stealth infiltration part of this mission was now officially over.
Which meant they had a limited amount of time left before they were trapped and buried in this ancient alien ruin.
“We need to get what we can and get out.” Bannon stared pointedly at Ransjunan, as the Shihyanese operative had claimed to have devices that could read the ghost ship tech.
“Understood.” Ransjunan was already at work, pulling several ovoids out of his gear. Most of what little Bannon had seen of Shihyanese tech—to include the chyotsu’s hardsuit—was sleek and smooth, a sort of iridescent green metal. These devices, by contrast, looked rough and cobbled together, with odd patches removed and disparate tendrils of wire coming out at odd places.
The alien found spots in the ghost ship tech—which, now that Bannon was closer and could see more clearly, looked almost like malignant growths latched onto the already strange pedestal display that had apparently formed the central command display for the Garkhut base—and inserted the wires while studying the chyotsu glyphs that appeared hovering above the surface of the Shihyanese devices.
The gunfire, along with the thundercrack reports of alien energy weapons, was intensifying out in the hallway. Time was getting shorter, and Bannon didn’t doubt that it was only a matter of time before more alien react forces got around behind them. They were deep inside the base, and they were going to have to fight for every step to get out.
Time dragged as Ransjunan worked. Flint appeared at Bannon’s elbow. “We’re in a bad spot, Lieutenant. Request permission to take my Sentinels out and help get us some breathing room.”
“Go.” Bannon gritted his teeth as the big Columbian, his hardsuit looking a little bulky and crude compared to the Corvanite and Shihyanese suits, turned toward the door, already barking orders that were muffled but faintly audible through his helmet.
Bannon should be out there with his men, just like Flint. But the responsibilities of leadership, right here and now, meant that his first priority was the mission—and the mission was Ransjunan’s devices, extracting any information they could get from the ghost ship tech.
An explosion boomed somewhere nearby, and he felt the tremor run through the whole structure. “We need to go soon, Ransjunan.”
“Almost finished.” The chyotsu’s hands were skimming over the controls even more quickly now, three occupied with the devices while the fourth held his weapon muzzle high. “There is still a great deal of incompatibility to get around.”
Bannon finally couldn’t stay there any longer, as the fight outside ramped up another notch. “Get outside as soon as you have it.” He turned and headed out the door and into the hallway.
The bends in the hallway provided some cover, and the Corvanites were using most of it. That kept a lot of their rifles out of the fight, but with Corporal Combs and Private Donovan leaning around the bend in a high-low position, dumping rounds at their attackers—out of sight from Bannon’s position at the moment—they were holding their own.
That probably wasn’t going to last. Bannon checked back the way they’d come, and found that Sergeant Abbott and Private Springfeather were holding it, though they weren’t shooting at the moment. If there had been an attack from that direction, they’d beaten it back.
He almost went straight to where Combs and Donovan were holding their part of the hall, even as Donovan rolled back, lifting his muzzle as he reloaded, and Rivera moved to replace him. Many of the phalanx’s men were replacements after Thuraban, but they were hardly green recruits. Rivera carried scars from half a dozen wars already. He hesitated not at all, but braced his rifle against the bend in the wall and opened fire immediately, the casings bouncing off the wall and tumbling over his head.
Something that he couldn’t quite put his finger on prompted Bannon to move to join Abbott and Springfeather. He stayed out of the center of the hallway, keeping his muzzle high as he closed in on the bend that the two warriors were holding, their weapons still leveled.
“Status?” He kept his voice relatively low, but he still needed to be heard over the crack of gunfire behind him. The walls seemed to be strangely sound-absorbent, but the rifles were still quite loud.
“They probed us a few minutes ago, sir.” Abbott didn’t turn his head, keeping his gaze on their sector, which already told Bannon a great deal. “They faded as soon as we opened fire, but they’re still back there.”
That wasn’t good. Bannon thought he saw what the plan was, alien logic or not. They would be granted an apparent escape route, only to be ambushed on the way out.
Unfortunately, he could see no other way to get out but through.
Death comes. We will go and meet it.
Ransjunan loomed in the doorway. “Finished, Lieutenant.”
Bannon simply tapped Abbott’s pauldron. “Lead out.” He stepped partway out into the hallway to clear the way for the men behind Springfeather, glancing back, his weapon still pointed at the ceiling, only a couple of feet overhead, to check on the rest.
Combs lobbed an omnibanger around the bend toward the advancing aliens that he and Donovan were still holding back. He followed it with a shredder, then stepped out around where Donovan crouched on a knee and lobbed a thirty-seven-millimeter grenade after it.
The omnibanger filled the hall with its conductive mist, and then the shredder and the thirty-seven tore the mist to tatters as they detonated, one after the other, filling the hallway with smoke and shrapnel in the aftermath of the flashes.
Abbott, Springfeather, Natan, and Aten moved back the way they’d come, guns up and searching for targets, the active scanning in their helmets penetrating the gloom as they moved away from the dim, now-flickering glow coming from the command center. Flint and his Sentinels, so far denied the chance to get into the fight due to the geometries of the halls, were right behind them.
Bannon fell in with the Sentinels, noting that Flint himself was in front. He wasn’t going to let the Columbians push ahead of him and cut him off from the sharp end of the fight.
The gunfire behind them had died down in the aftermath of Combs’s explosive assault, but that wasn’t going to last, Bannon was sure. Especially not after how hard the ghost ship aliens had fought to try to stop them from getting Ransjunan and the Columbians off this planet the first time.
He pushed up, risking stepping a little bit farther out into the hallway, to join Abbott and his forward element. His helmet projected a ghostly path on the floor ahead, marking where they had come in.
There was a risk there, using the same route out as they had on infiltration. But trying to find another way was going to take time—time they didn’t have.
A bolt of brilliant energy slammed down the hallway over Bannon’s shoulder. It had come from ahead, between the phalanx and the opening where the autogunners still held security.
CHAPTER 28
“All Zolarian forces, put your rifles on safe and place them on the ground,” Colonel Dirix said over comms. Draven was surprised both that the colonel had gotten to the ground before the starships were destroyed, and that the comms could penetrate the base.
He looked at Breck. Drass hadn’t moved, his hands at his sides, watching the Zolarians expectantly.
Even with his helmet on, Draven could sense Breck’s glare. They were not Corvanites, who would likely fight to the last man rather than surrender, but it was still galling to find themselves in this situation.
Finally, Breck laid his MA-57 on the floor. “Do as he says,” he sent over the company net. “We have our orders from the colonel.”
Reluctantly, watching Drass and the other humans in their strange black-and-gray uniforms, Draven did as he was ordered.
It wasn’t as if they had any choice in the matter. There was no help coming. If they fought and died here, it would ultimately be for nothing.
He watched Drass, noting the man’s calm and almost sympathetic demeanor as the Zolarian non-coms made sure their soldiers grounded their arms, disarming the combat lasers as well as unloading and laying down their rifles. There was something strange going on here.
Something more than just a base that looked like the ghost ship aliens had built it being staffed by humans, with at least some of them from worlds within the Zolarian sphere of influence. That was already strange enough.
Some of the other humans in the room were moving toward the Zolarians to gather up their weapons. Drass inclined his head, his hands clasped behind his back. “As unfortunate as this might seem, I assure you that this is the wisest decision. It would be a terrible waste were all your lives to be lost.” He straightened, looking around at all of them, and for a moment, Draven could see the charismatic leader that had defied New Kapar’s technocrats.
“The galaxy is changing, my friends. At least, our part of it is.” He looked toward the holo display, where a dark shape had separated from one of the ghost ships and was now descending toward the planet’s surface, only visible as it occluded stars and still-glowing wreckage, threading its way through the still-expanding debris fields of the shattered Zolarian task group. “You will see the shape of our future soon.”
He did not elaborate further, and Draven had to wait as more of the dark auxiliary craft descended toward the surface. They landed without fanfare around the outside of the Zolarian formation, and the tiny figures of spindly aliens with egg-shaped torsos and slender, too-flexible arms and legs, their faintly bulbous heads atop long, equally sinuous necks, spilled out of the black craft and began to secure the surrendered Zolarians.
In one spot, about halfway around the ring from where Able Company had made entry, one of the Zolarian units decided to refuse to surrender. Muzzle flashes flickered in silence in the airless void, answered by quick, staccato blinks of light as the aliens opened fire.
For a handful of heartbeats, Draven started to feel some hope that they might be able to reverse this. The crawlers opened fire on the auxiliary craft, cannon shells sparking against the deep black of its hull. Some of those shells struck the spindly aliens, pulping them and scattering their entrails and body parts across the landscape. Small arms fire cut down still more, even as the blinks of energy weapon bolts smashed hardsuited Zolarians off their feet.
Briefly, it mattered little that they were cut off and stranded, unknown hundreds of light years from home, with no way except capture of an alien starship they wouldn’t know how to operate to get out of the brown dwarf’s system. They were putting up a fight, and Draven looked back at Drass and his human entourage, wondering if this might be their opening.
The ghost ships were not so easily thwarted, however.
Intense bolts of plasma or particle beam fire slammed down from orbit above, immolating three crawlers in as many seconds. More of the long-necked aliens and many more of the beetle-like crawlers appeared, pouring more fire into the embattled Zolarian formation. Still more were between the rest of the Zolarian regiment and their fighting comrades, weapons leveled in case someone else tried to defy Colonel Dirix’s orders and fight.
The orbital bombardment intensified, raining a silent sheet of lightning onto the resistance on the ground.
It was all over very quickly.
While it was with some gratitude that Draven looked around to see only the blank visors of Zolarian hardsuit helmets disguising emotions, he could still feel the demoralization take hold. They had stumbled into the enemy’s den, and now thousands of their comrades were dead, and they would soon follow, if not for the mercy of their enemy.
His eyes moved to Drass, expecting that now, at least, he would see some sort of gloating, but the man was as cool and almost sorrowful as ever. He was watching the holo display, shaking his head faintly as if he had known that it was inevitable, yet mourning the result nevertheless. He turned as if feeling Draven’s eyes on him.
“Such a waste, in a futile gesture. Have you not realized your position yet? You have no escape, no recourse but the mercy of our associates. I can argue for you, try to keep you alive as potentially useful to the cause, but any further incidents and our associates might see fit to simply eliminate all of you as too much trouble.” He finally unclasped his hands from behind his back, reaching out imploringly. That was when Draven saw that he had only four fingers on each hand. His little fingers were both missing. “Please. Reach out to your commander and beg him to forestall any more resistance. It can do no one any good to have you all wiped out.”
