The silver fleet the com.., p.51
The Silver Fleet: The Complete Series, page 51
“I sent him an e-mail. I’m just hoping he checks his alerts.”
LaCruz watched the mercenaries twenty meters away on the grass. They were going through a weapons check. There was no way of knowing for sure but it looked as if they were getting ready to spring their ambush.
Two rows of explosives had been planted along either side of the main walkway. Grimes’ best guess was that Markham and his men would be given some story to draw them out and back towards the main gate. And then, once they’d been flushed out, the mercs would waste no time springing their trap and detonating their explosives.
“Have you nearly finished?” she said.
Grimes looked back at her, dazzling her with his headlight. “You should never rush a master craftsman. Not unless you want him to make a major mistake.”
“I don’t see what the point of this is anyway,” she motioned at the pile of explosives he was currently attaching detonators to. “Those mercs are going to be too far away for any of this to make any impact.”
“And that’s why you’ll always only ever be a grunt, Jackson. You don’t have any strategic awareness.”
“I’ve got plenty of strategic awareness and it’s telling me right now we need to get the hell out of here.”
Sticking her head out of the van she watched as three figures detached themselves from the rest of the group and started moving over in their direction.
“Someone’s coming,” she whispered as she gently closed the door and slipped around the back of the van.
She reckoned that if their intention was to enter the enclosure then they’d have to come around to the side entrance. It was the only way in or out. She took out her pistol, the Pisani, and checked how many rounds she had.
Twelve. That should be enough. Standing with her back to the van she was in deep shadow up to her chest, the only light spilling over from a set of floodlights strung over the centre of the yard. If they decided to come this way she should have long enough to pick her targets. There might be three of them, two men and a woman, but she’d have the element of surprise. After the first shot it would all come down to how well-trained they were.
They walked around the outer fence in single file until they reached a point and the lead guy stopped and turned to confront the others. All of them were armed. LaCruz ignored him and drew a bead on the guy in the middle. He was carrying a semi-automatic rifle. You could do a lot of damage with something like that and she didn’t want to give him the opportunity.
A simple head shot should do it.
But she hesitated.
They were talking about something, looking back in the direction they’d just come from. The guy with the semi-automatic held it at waist level and was indicating that they should get back but the other two were insistent.
The one on the far right broke away then from the others and ran around to the front of the main gate. There was a series of over-head light there so she got a good look at him. Dark, curly hair and a big Zapata moustache. He was one of the mercs from earlier. She remembered him being loaded into one of the security vans.
That confirmed it - these were the same guys.
Mr Moustache took a couple of seconds trying to locate the lock on the gate before realising that there wasn’t one. The gate squealed as he forced it back on its hinges, then he was off across the yard, heading straight beneath the big arc floodlights. She tracked him with her pistol as he ran. Apart from the fact that he was moving, she couldn’t have had a better target. But still she held off. He was heading towards a big semi parked in the far corner so, for the time being, he posed no immediate threat.
But what about the others?
She switched her aim back to the two figures standing on the outside. She could take these two out first and still have enough time to deal with Mr Moustache.
It would, of course, be easier with Grimes backing her up but she couldn’t easily alert him without giving away their position.
She picked her target. The guy on the right. There was a carelessness about the way he handled his weapon which unsettled her. Unpredictable.
She steadied herself by letting out a controlled breath.
Took careful aim.
The silence was shattered by the sounds of automatic fire coming from over in the direction of the terminal building. This seemed to give the two mercenaries a new resolve. They jogged over to the gate and then ran inside just as the truck came to life, its headlights raking through the shadows.
Things were getting complicated now. She should have taken the shot when she’d had the chance.
The other two ran over to where the truck was parked. They went round to the passenger side from where they climbed up into the cab.
They’re running away, she realised, intending to use the ambush as an excuse to slip away unnoticed.
They had no interest in her or Grimes, they were simply out to save their own skins. They’d clashed with the Marines once before and had learned first-hand how costly that could be.
As the truck wheeled around, heading for the gate, she saw the driver’s eyes sweep the yard, looking for potential problems. Suddenly he braked hard, bringing the whole rig to a dead halt.
The next thing he was looking across the yard, directly at her.
He leaned across to say something to the others and that was when she shot him.
One shot to the temple, killing him instantly. The others in the cab shrank back as the windscreen exploded, covering them with glass.
She stepped up against the van in front of her, using it to for maximum cover while keeping her pistol raised.
The truck had stalled but the headlights were still on.
After a pause, the driver’s door was thrown open only for his body to slide out and hit the ground. LaCruz tried to get a look inside the cab but the angle was all wrong and the headlights were destroying what little night vision she had.
A random burst of automatic fire from the cab made her flinch but she resisted the urge to duck as the shots flew wildly into the air. It was a diversionary tactic and a poor one at that.
Her persistence was rewarded when the female merc slid down out of the truck, using the door to shield her upper body while she fiddled with her weapon.
LaCruz didn’t hesitate.
She shot her once in the hip and then, as she collapsed, twice in the upper body.
Common sense should have told LaCruz to stay where she was and make the most of her cover but she was mindful of the fact that she didn’t have a clear view of the passenger door. If he wanted to, the third merc could slip away unnoticed and go and hide amongst the other vehicles. If he had any sense, armed as he was, he should be able to turn such a situation to his advantage. But LaCruz wouldn’t allow that to happen.
Avoiding the rookie mistake of running straight at the truck, she instead dropped down to her left and scrambled across into the open. It was her way of assuring that she had a clean shot. Her decision was justified when a spray of automatic rounds struck the side of the van she’d been using for cover. The gunman obviously hadn’t seen her move. This was confirmed when he fired a second more focused burst.
Caught out in the open like that, she had no option but to go on the offensive. She brought her foot around to stabilise herself in the kneeling position and just was levelling off her pistol when the crown of the man’s head appeared over the dashboard. He was obviously anxious to see if he’d hit anything.
It was only a partial target but it was better than nothing.
Whether she hit him or not, she couldn’t say, but she certainly got his attention. The next thing, he was leaning forward, straining to get the kill shot.
She fired twice just as he came upright. The first bullet took him in the neck, the second in the chest.
He gave her a puzzled look, as if trying to remember what had brought him here in the first place. Then he slumped forward onto the dashboard and lay still.
A door flew open over to her right and she brought the pistol round to line up on Grimes. He was stumbling out of the back of the armoured truck, pistol in hand.
“Grimes!” she said, holding a hand aloft. “Over here.”
He looked at her and then over at the truck. “Looks like someone’s been busy.”
“Don’t worry about that. It’s time to go.”
*
“Any news from the Serrayu?” Faulkner said. He’d held back from asking that question as long as he could.
“Nothing so far, sir. Do you want me to continue trying?”
“Yes. Keep at it.”
They were fast running out of time. Blackthorn’s defences, though formidable, were set up for something much slower than Tom Thumb: a hijacked tanker or a badly damaged cruiser on a collision course. As a result, they had some serious stopping power. What they weren’t equipped for was something fast and highly mobile. Also their personnel weren’t military trained and so were unprepared for the unique pressures involved in a direct assault and the speed of their decision making was clearly being challenged by the aggressiveness of the oncoming vessel.
“Mr Bertran, are those missiles ready for loading?”
“Missiles ready, aye, sir.”
He’d put off this moment for as long as he could. The very act of loading them would be provocation enough for Captain Mahbarat. Bertran and his team had come up with an interesting cocktail of weaponry to deal with the oncoming threat, if it should become necessary to do so. An enormous S-311 which was less a missile in the conventional sense and more of a mini launch station in its own right. This was to be backed up by three Cadenza missiles or ‘ball breakers’ as they were commonly referred to. These were proximity armaments designed to undermine engine system activity. They might not be able to destroy Tom Thumb but they had a fair chance of crippling it.
Still, Faulkner hesitated, acutely aware that he was pushing his luck here.
His chain of thought was broken by the appearance of Surgeon Captain Elsbeth Morton.
Faulkner didn’t turn to acknowledge her, keeping his attention fixed on the screen in front. This showed a view of the drone ship as well as displaying a countdown which showed that they had a little over fourteen minutes before the ship drew level with Blackthorn. The chance of it crashing directly into the space station was small. At close range, Blackthorn’s armaments would prevail. Their major concern was how much damage it would inflict on the station’s defences in the meantime.
“I’ll go,” Morton said. “I can see you’re busy.”
Faulkner indicated for her to stay. “It’s okay. I imagine you came up here for a reason?”
Morton adjusted the medication band on her wrist.
“We had an appointment, that’s all.”
He remembered making it, but that all seemed like a long time ago now.
“I have to apologise,” he gave a mirthless laugh. “My psych evaluation.”
“The very same. Look, I can see you’re busy, I’ll go.”
But still she didn’t move.
“Our window of opportunity is about to close,” Bertran said.
“The psych evaluation,” Faulkner stepped closer to Morton. “Isn’t that the one where you confront me with a series of moral dilemmas, each one more insidious than the last?”
She lowered her voice. “You know very well it is.”
“It’s designed to measure how reckless I might have become. Isn’t that right? Whether I’d pose a threat to myself or the rest of the crew?”
“It doesn’t just check for that,” she barely whispering now. “It also highlights other psychological factors like whether you’re harbouring any self-destructive thoughts. A death wish for example.”
“Captain Faulkner?” Bertran was standing at his station. “Something’s happening with the drone ship. She seems to be breaking up, sir. Disintegrating.”
Faulkner exchanged a glance with Morton. Perhaps their luck was changing, at last.
“Let’s take a closer look at that,” he said.
There was a disorienting shift in the screen’s magnification before they were given a clearer view of what was happening. The drone ship had split apart, reducing itself to a hollow shell, out of which thousands of smaller shapes were issuing forth.
The crew watched silently as each of what appeared to be tiny craft broke off to pursue their own unique trajectory.
But then, almost at a prearranged signal, the ships seemed to flex and converge until they appeared to be moving with one consciousness.
“That’s ridiculous,” Yamada said. “Thousands of tiny craft all flying in tight formation. Who’s controlling all this?”
Faulkner stepped closer to the screen, as if this would give him a clearer insight into what he was seeing. But he had to agree with his Head of Communications. What they were looking at was unprecedented. As far as he was concerned, what the ships were doing – moving at insane speeds without once crashing into one another – was virtually impossible. But that was what they were doing.
*
The swarm might have split into thousands of separate entities but they still maintained one clearly defined consciousness. And that consciousness focussed on its one goal which had not changed in millennia: the destruction of their enemies.
The minds which had fashioned the swarm had been forced to choose between a dedicated force capable of targeting one particular opponent or a multiplicity. The strength of the swarm as an attack force had always been in the application of overwhelming force. While it had initially been tempting for the scientists who had bio-engineered it to attack a single target, they quickly acknowledged that to do so would be to waste their key advantages of speed and surprise.
This had been the case with the swarm’s first iteration when it had been employed by its inventors, the Serezin, against their oncoming aggressors: the Anjharan Da’al. The Serezin were both shrewd and resourceful and had fought hard to defend themselves. They engineered an impressive array of bioweapons to deploy against the Da’al and, at first, it had appeared that the Serezin might prevail but the Da’al, though less advanced technologically, employed a level of ruthlessness and cunning – not to mention an almost suicidal willingness to sacrifice themselves – which eventually ensured that it was they who triumphed.
The Serezin were too principled to prosper.
Shocked that they had come so close to defeat, the Da’al had set about eradicating the Serezin as a race. Their victory had been achieved by such a small margin that they feared that a second conflict might easily see their two roles reversed. So effective were the Da’al in this regard and so dedicated were they in the pursuit of their enemy that they all but purged the Serezin from the face of the universe. Indeed, the only members of the Serezin race allowed to live, were the weapons scientists the Da’al now saw as an asset. For the Da’al, though ruthless, were not blind to the fact that the weapons which had so very nearly defeated them, could now be utilised against their other enemies.
The second stage of the swarm’s development came about directly as a result of the Da’al’s having been on the receiving end of such destructive power. They had learned how to minimise the swarm’s effectiveness through the callous way that they were willing to sacrifice the weaker members of their own species. The swarm, they realised, though hugely destructive, was not inexhaustible. They then worked with their few remaining Serezin prisoners to help develop an even more effective version of this all conquering super weapon, one which would transform it from a blunt hammer into the brightest of sharp scalpels.
Hundreds of thousands of hours were expended in programming the swarm’s new targeting profiles. The first phase, though extremely effective, suffered as a direct result of its own ruthless efficiency. Once having acquired its target the Swarm would calmly set about destroying it. Indeed, many of the Da’al’s military leaders, having had first-hand experience of this themselves, remembered the feeling of sheer relief when the swarm by-passed them in order to better target their neighbours.
What had most terrified them at the time was the idea of a weapon which could take out multiple targets and still keep going. And so that is what the Severin scientists were tasked with developing next.
The solution had not come quickly. The last estimate was that it had taken over twenty generations for the scientists to finally perfect its swarm. By that time, the short-sightedness of the Da’al in only preserving such a limited cross section of the Serezin genetic pool had started to work against them. They found that with each new generation, the Serezin became slightly less effective at fulfilling their task. They were being schooled in the ways of their forefathers but without full access to the breadth of their people’s collected learning. This was slightly off set by the zeal with which each subsequent generation went about their work. They knew little of their own history, of their species’ near extermination and nor did they ask, kept compliant through a series of chemical processes, administered in the womb, which guaranteed their loyalty to their masters. As a result, they worked tirelessly to provide the Da’al with that which they most desired: a weapon which could be used to effectively neutralise the defences of any opponent.
Even now twenty generations on, the tinkering had not stopped with the surviving Serezin working tirelessly in the hope of outstripping the achievements of their ancestors. The problem was that with such a limited seed bed, the chance of them producing something truly innovative diminished with every subsequent generation.
The swarm moved now with an admirably elegant sense of purpose. A sentinel buoy out on the edge of Blackthorn space had effectively signed its own death warrant when it had opened fire on the drone mother ship while it had still been some way out. This gave the buoy the dubious distinction of being the first line of human defence to fall in the face of the swarm. It would not be the last.
The swarm moved with the sinuous grace of a snake as it realigned itself with the buoy. While its major advantage was one of speed, this could sometimes prove to be a marked disadvantage as the swarm’s decision-making progress often necessitated viable targets being disregarded simply because their own momentum carried them beyond it.
